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NUCLEAR
Low-Level Radiation Is Released at Post Office
Ex - Hospital Safety Official Pleads Guilty
Uranium Mine in Australian Park Closed for Contamination
Nuclear waste languishes in Kazakhstan as talks with United States stall
Ranger mine owners urged to overhaul safety standards
UK Ministers break promises over nuclear waste
China's military chief Jiang Zemin urges modernisation of weapons arsenal
Depleted Uranium,
India plans to build long-range missiles with Israel: official
Iran says several people arrested for nuclear spying
Key Dates in U.S. - Iran Relations
Iran Says It Has Arrested Several Nuclear Spies
Putin says Iran must not become nuclear power
Bush hopes for diplomatic solution to nuclear tensions with Iran
IAEA Questions Libya's Nuclear Program Report Says
Japanese military wants fatter budget for missile defence, intelligence
The real plutonium risk
White House in Fight Over Weapons Workers
Oyster Creek plant couldn't withstand hit from terrorist aircraft
Vermont eyes Yankee safety margin
Bulk vitrification testing under way
Scare tactics at Yucca
MILITARY
Darfur Conditions Said Worse, Talks Resume
Oil prices plummet despite Iraq attacks
Military buildup benefits Anteon
Sadr Reportedly Forgoing Attacks For Political Role
Rebel Shiite Cleric's Aides Hint He May Enter Politics
Twin Bus Bombings in Israel Kill at Least 15 and Wound Dozens
Putin Says Link Probed Between Al Qaeda, Chechens
FBI Interviews Senior Defense Officials in Probe of Analyst
F.B.I. Is Said to Brief Pentagon Bosses on Spy Case; Charges Are Possible
Sonar Used Before Whales Hit Shore
MP's Attorneys Cite Government Probes
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Talks Continue in Hamdi Case
When Checked Bags Are Checked by Thieves
Rights expressed in New York, repressed in D.C.
Iraqi Charged With Lying on Petition For U.S. Citizenship
Census Bureau Revises Sensitive Data Policy - NYT
POLITICS
On the Campaign Trail Bush Tones Down Talk of Winning Terror War
The Delegates Publication of Personal Information Probed
A Swift Shift in Stories
Gilligan slams BBC over Kelly affair 'panic'
In N.Y., GOP Hails Its Chief McCain, Giuliani Open Convention
On the Campaign Trail
Bush Cites Doubt America Can Win War on Terror
ENERGY
Politics, Oil and 9/11
Interior Official Touts Bush Support for Geothermal Energy
California Inches Forward on Solar Power
OTHER
Computers Add Sophistication, but Don't Resolve Climate Debate
Bush Orders New 'Cooperative' Environmental Policy
Even Modest Climate Change Means More and Larger Fires
Lowering the Environmental Costs of Home Building
ACTIVISTS
RNC: Demonstrations
Nearly 1,000 protesters arrested
At Midnight, Protesters Turn Poets and Dreamers
Demonstrators Held at Pier 57 Complain of Conditions and Long Waits
Protesters' Encounters With Delegates on the Town Turn Ugly
Streets of Rage
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Low-Level Radiation Is Released at Post Office
August 31, 2004
New York Times
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/31/nyregion/31xray.html
A sophisticated imaging machine contaminated a Midtown Manhattan post office with low-level radiation on Sunday and yesterday, exposing a handful of people, forcing the closing of surrounding streets and disrupting mail delivery, city and postal officials said yesterday.
The source of the radiation was a radiography camera, a device somewhat like an X-ray machine, that a contractor was using to find out what was behind walls and ceilings as part of a renovation in the building, which houses the Franklin D. Roosevelt Station on Third Avenue near 55th Street.
A hole in the machine - which works much like a shutter of a standard camera - is supposed to open briefly to create each image, emitting a burst of radiation from a supply of cobalt-60.
But on Sunday afternoon, in the building's basement, the machine became stuck in the open position and remained that way last night as officials prepared to remove it.
Workers were aware of the problem immediately but were unable to close the shutter, said the city health commissioner, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden.
It was not clear, officials said, whether the accident was the result of equipment failure, operator error or some external cause.
"From what we know, there were about seven people who had any level of exposure beyond any passer-by," Dr. Frieden said. The amount of radiation, he said, appeared to be no higher than what someone would receive from a mammogram.
The seven people exposed include employees of the contractor, Testwell Laboratories of Ossining, N.Y., and of the Postal Service. People passing by on the sidewalks before they were cordoned off would have also been exposed, but at a much lower level.
Even for those with the highest exposure, Dr. Frieden said, "no medical follow-up is likely to be necessary."
Still, in a city on high alert during the Republican National Convention, with memories of the World Trade Center attack, anthrax mailings, smallpox vaccinations and numerous terror warnings, the post office incident added to an already serious case of jitters.
Some neighbors said they were unsettled by what they said was a lack of information from city agencies, as they traded rumors that included some kind of explosion.
"It's kind of scary when you see the tape up, the block closed down, and all these police around, but no information coming out," said Louis Carrilla, 45, resident manager of the Brevard, an apartment building at 245 East 54th Street.
The City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene began distributing fliers in the neighborhood late yesterday. Dr. Frieden said the delay in doing so was part of an effort to avoid giving people inaccurate information.
The Police Department closed a block each of Third Avenue, 54th Street and 55th Street to traffic, and rerouted pedestrians who did not live in the area. Postal employees were not allowed into the building yesterday and were sent to other post offices.
"Because the carriers couldn't get into that building, they didn't have access to all the keys they need to deliver mail in some buildings," said a spokeswoman for the Postal Service, Pat McGovern. "It's not clear when we're going to be able to get back into that building."
The service is already coping with a temporary eviction from its main building on Eighth Avenue during the convention.
Dr. Frieden said that the most radiation a pedestrian would have absorbed on Sunday was 5 to 10 millirems, a small fraction of the 300 millirems a person is typically exposed to in a year.
Workers from the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, wearing protective gear, worked through Sunday night and much of yesterday installing lead shields around the radiography camera.
The shields absorbed most of the radiation spilling from the device, but department officials patrolling the area with Geiger counters were still able to detect slightly elevated levels outside the building.
Once the shields were in place, Dr. Frieden said, "the levels were so low that if you were to walk down the street there, it would be less than one-twelfth of the exposure of flying from New York to California."
Representatives of the camera's maker, the Source Production and Equipment Company of Louisiana, arrived yesterday to help remove the equipment from the building. Officials said they did not know how long that would take.
----
Ex - Hospital Safety Official Pleads Guilty
August 31, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Radiation-Officer.html
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (AP) -- A former hospital safety inspector accused of faking his credentials, falsifying radiation tests and miscalibrating mammography equipment at dozens of East Coast hospitals pleaded guilty Tuesday to federal fraud charges.
Perry Beale, of Fredericksburg, worked as a private consultant for more than 50 facilities in West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia.
Food and Drug Administration officials said people who used diagnostic equipment that Beale inspected or calibrated should not be alarmed because FDA inspectors and an accreditation body usually follow safety inspections with their own check.
Prosecutors said Beale began working in 1988 as an apprentice to a medical physicist and radiation safety officer in Maryland. After his mentor died two years later, Beale continued working on his own by falsifying his resume and transcripts.
Three years ago, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission started investigating his work after noticing problems.
Beale was charged with 38 counts of mail fraud because he received paychecks through the mail. Sentencing is set for Dec. 3; prosecutors did not immediately return a call seeking information on possible terms.
Defense lawyer Richard Milnor did not immediately return a call seeking comment.
---
Uranium Mine in Australian Park Closed for Contamination
August 31, 2004
CANBERRA, Australia, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2004/2004-08-31-03.asp
The Ranger uranium mine in Australia's largest national park was shut down today because of water contamination. In March, workers at Ranger drank and showered in water contaminated with uranium levels 400 times greater than the maximum Australian safety standard. Twenty-eight workers became ill as a result.
The contamination was detailed in two reports by the Office of the Supervising Scientist tabled in the Senate on Monday.
Energy Resources of Australia Ltd. (ERA) today temporarily suspended operations on a valuntary basis to make improvements in mine safety. ERA Chief Executive Harry Kenyon-Slaney said the company has been implementing improvements over the last four months to address issues raised by the water incident.
Kenyon-Slaney said, "The closure I have ordered will give management and employees the time to implement the necessary changes."
Ranger in Kakadu National Park is operated by ERA and majority owned by mining giant Rio Tinto. The mine has a troubled history with 120 leaks, spills and operating breaches since it opened in 1981.
Federal Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane expressed concern about recent environment and safety incidents at the six square kilometer mine in the Northern Territory.
"I met with representatives from Energy Resources of Australia (ERA) today and told them that I believed a culture of complacency had developed in several areas of the mine's operations," said Macfarlane.
The first report by the Supervising Scientist covers radiation clearance procedures for vehicles, which has allowed earthmoving equipment to leave the mine while contaminated with uranium ore.
The other report concerns the March 2004 water contamination at the mine during which "contaminated potable water from a holding tank adjacent to Jabiru Airport had discharged to the environment."
This Supervising Scientist's investigation concluded that the primary cause of the contamination of the drinking water system at the Ranger mine was that on March 23 an operator opened a valve connecting the water manifold at the Fine Ore Bin Scrubber to a one inch hose.
"At the time of this connection, the manifold was also connected to the process water system, wrote the Supervising Scientist. "Unknown to this operator, the other end of the one inch hose was connected to the potable water system and the valve at that end of the hose was open. The higher pressure in the process water system caused water to flow from the process water system into the potable water supply system."
Investigators have not been able to determine when, or by whom, the valve at the potable water end of the hose was opened or has it been possible to determine precisely when the hose was connected to the potable water system but it occurred some time between March 20 and March 23. Workers suffered headaches, nausea, vomiting and skin irritations as a result of the incident.
"To the credit of the company it has responded immediately to my concerns and has already put in place its own processes to address the concerns raised by the Supervising Scientist," said Macfarlane, but the minister warned that if improved safety procedures are not implemented, the mine could remain on suspension.
"I will be ensuring, through independent audits, that in relation to both radiation clearance procedures and the water contamination incident the appropriate actions have been taken, and are being monitored. "Any failure to meet these standards will cause me to suspend any further operation of the mine," said Macfarlane.
The Green Party and the country's largest environmental group, the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF), welcomed the mine closure.
Greens Senator Kerry Nettle of New South Wales today called on Industry Minister MacFarlane to revoke the operating and export licence for the Ranger mine.
"This is just the latest in a list of over 120 publicly documented leaks, contaminations and operating breaches at Ranger," she said. "The Greens believe the Minister should close this mine for good. The environmental threats and the health threats its continuing operations pose are too great to ignore."
"The report tells us that the workers who were affected by the contamination need ongoing health checks as a result of their exposure, this fact alone should move the Minister to take the strongest possible action against ERA," said Nettle.
The Greens policy calls for an end to "inherently damaging" uranium mining and closure of Australia's only nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights in Sydney.
The ACF called the closure "overdue" and called for prosecution of the mining company, Energy Resources Australia, for "persistent breaches of its operating license."
"It is welcome news that some attention is finally being paid to Ranger, but a short term shutdown is not the full answer to a long term failing," said ACF nuclear campaigner Dave Sweeney.
"Ranger has serious systemic problems and these are getting worse as the mine gets older. As the pipes get rustier, the risks get greater. ERA has growing problems with water and waste management and this mine poses a real threat to the health of workers, local communities and Kakadu National Park."
"Australia's largest national park is no place for one of the world's most toxic industrial practices," he said, calling on all parties to "rule out a nuclear dump in the Northern Territory and for a halt to construction of the proposed new reactor in Sydney."
The uranium sold by ERA is used only for the generation of nuclear electricity, not for the production of nuclear weapons, the company says.
ERA wants to expand its operations to the proposed Jabiluka site near the Ranger mine. The company says uranium mining "does not pose a serious environmental threat to the surrounding Kakadu National Park nor to its natural values."
The company's future rests on the Jabiluka development going ahead, ERA says, as its only other operation is the Ranger mine, and "its life is finite and due for completion around the end of this decade."
The Supervising Scientist's Reports are available online at:
http://www.deh.gov.au/ssd/publications/ssr/184.html
http://www.deh.gov.au/ssd/publications/ssr/185.html
-------- asia
Nuclear waste languishes in Kazakhstan as talks with United States stall
Tuesday, August 31, 2004
By Burt Herman,
Associated Press
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-08-31/s_26789.asp
MANGYSTAU, Kazakhstan - In a storage pool at a mothballed nuclear power plant on the shores of the Caspian Sea rests a key ingredient for anyone seeking to build a nuclear weapon: containers of spent atomic fuel with enough plutonium to make dozens of bombs.
Despite international concern about the waste at the Mangyshlak nuclear power plant, plans to transport it away from the Caspian shore have stalled in a dispute between Kazakhstan and the United States over just where and how it should be removed.
Kazakhstan has earned much international good will for unilaterally disarming after the 1991 Soviet collapse and handing over its nuclear arsenal to Russia under watch of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Still, the nation's atomic legacy as a testing ground for the Soviet nuclear program has left it with numerous waste sites as well as the remnants of an active atomic power program.
The Mangyshlak Atomic Energy Complex is one of those places, lying in a decrepit industrial area outside the city of Aktau in the moonlike desolation of western Kazakhstan. The reactor was shut down in 2003 for economic reasons, having worked a decade beyond its intended 20-year lifetime.
It lies behind two series of walls and radiation detectors, past a security checkpoint featuring metal detectors and X-ray machines, then gates opened by electronic badges and a numeric code. The sealed canisters of radioactive materials lie in a pool under metal floors welded together with seals from the IAEA. Video cameras with satellite feeds to the IAEA monitor the room, and IAEA experts visit once a month.
The 300 metric tons (330 short tons) of spent nuclear fuel contain nearly three metric tons (3.3 short tons) of plutonium enriched to more than 90 percent. That's better than usual weapons-grade but would require extensive processing to be made into bombs.
The fuel has been cooling for so long and was so lightly irradiated to begin with that it is no longer radioactive enough to be "self-protecting" against theft, according to the Washington-based Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), an antiproliferation organization.
"Thieves could load it into a boat and take it away without necessarily receiving radiation doses that would immediately be incapacitating," the NTI wrote on its Web site. Kazakhstan is one of five countries that share the Caspian Sea with Iran, which is suspected of seeking nuclear weapons. Iranian cargo ships sail by regularly, and the NTI notes that Tehran has shown interest in Aktau and has talked of opening a consulate there.
The United States has provided military assistance bolster Kazakhstan's shore defenses and plans to give some US$20 million (euro16.6 million) for new radars and intercept boats.
The Kazakhs want U.S. help in a US$40 million (euro33.3 million) project to move the spent fuel to a safer site, but those efforts are deadlocked. The Kazakhs want to take the fuel to Semipalatinsk, the former nuclear weapons test site in eastern Kazakhstan. The United States wants it shipped to Russia, where other radioactive materials were sent.
The Kazakhs planned to build single-use casks to transport the waste and then store it in reinforced underground bunkers. But the United States persuaded them to use dual-use casks in which the fuel can be both transported and stored.
However, work on the dual-use casks is on hold, and the Kazakhs continue to work on single-use casks.
"No work is being done on the dual-use casks because no funding is coming from the United States. And we cannot understand why," said Irina Tajibayeva, executive director of the Kazakhstan government's Center for the Safety of Nuclear Technologies. "This is not an example of good cooperation," she said.
The U.S. Embassy in Kazakhstan has declined several requests for comment made in recent weeks.
IAEA Spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said, "We are fully aware of the status of the discussion between Kazakhstan and the United States, and materials are currently properly under IAEA safeguards."
The plant's director, Gennady Pugachev, insists that "fears that our nuclear fuel could get into the wrong hands are groundless."
"We are not North Korea, where there is no government will to make (nuclear materials) safe," said Viktor Martyshkin, the reactor's information security chief. "Our government wants to make sure these materials do not get into some mad, criminal hands."
With the security at the plant, any potential theft would likely have to be at least partly an inside job. Pugachev notes employees' salaries are minuscule; he says he himself makes 20 times less than a guard at a U.S. nuclear facility would earn.
Pugachev is also well aware of the risks of loose nuclear materials, such as from a "dirty bomb" - a device that combines conventional explosives with radioactive material. "I know how to do it," he said.
A Western diplomat familiar with the IAEA said similar or larger quantities of spent fuel exist in dozens of countries and always represent a risk if they aren't secured.
Some Russian facilities are well-equipped, others aren't, the diplomat said, speaking on condition of anonymity. And negotiations about transferring such material can be difficult and lengthy because many parties are involved, each with its own legal and regulatory requirements, and all want to be protected against liability and compensated for what they are being asked to do, the diplomat said.
-------- australia
Ranger mine owners urged to overhaul safety standards
Tuesday, August 31, 2004
Australia Broadcasting
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200408/s1188928.htm
Traditional owners say the operator of the Ranger uranium mine in the Northern Territory should be stripped of its export licence unless it immediately overhauls its safety and environmental management.
The mine has shut down for several days to address issues raised in new contamination reports.
In March, workers at the mine fell ill after drinking and showering in water found to contain 400 times the legal limit of uranium.
Two Commonwealth contamination reports have prompted Energy Resources of Australia (ERA) to close the mine for safety improvements.
ERA's Harry Kenyon Slaney says they are taking the matter seriously.
"We have a wide range of regulatory requirements at ERA and frankly, you know, this is our licence to operate," he said.
The Gundjehmi Aboriginal Corporation's Justin O'Brien says the reports are a serious indictment against the mining company.
"If the company fails to immediately lift its game the Commonwealth Government should revoke its uranium export licence."
The Northern Territory Government had been waiting for the Commonwealth reports before making a final decision on possible penalties.
Meanwhile, the Greens have called for the Federal Government to shut down the mine.
Greens Senator Kerry Nettle says it is time the Government acted.
"[The] Senate report that came out last year putting in suggestions, changes to the safety procedures, another report that came out yesterday saying let's have at least Australian standards put in place for the safety operations of this mine, not appropriate for it continue to operate," she said.
The Greens are saying the minister needs to use his power to stop the operating licence, revoke the export licence that exists for Ranger uranium mine.
-------- britain
UK Ministers break promises over nuclear waste
Paul Brown and Rob Evans
Tuesday August 31, 2004
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1293974,00.html
Nuclear waste from overseas power stations has been sealed in concrete and buried in several miles of trenches in breach of official government policy, the Guardian can reveal.
Ministers have repeatedly promised that nuclear waste from abroad will not be buried in British soil to make good a pledge that Britain will not become a nuclear waste dump for countries such as Japan, Germany, Italy and Switzerland.
But it has now emerged that more than 10,000 cubic metres of foreign nuclear waste is buried at Drigg in Cumbria because it is too expensive to transport it back to the countries that produced it. If the waste was buried side by side the trench would stretch for more than 10 kilometres.
It is part of an ever-increasing mountain of waste stored at more than 20 nuclear sites in Britain. Government advisers have warned that up to 20 million cubic metres of this waste will pile up in the coming years - and there is no way of disposing of nearly all of it. The government is currently spending £1.3bn and is planning to increase this to £2bn a year for the next 40 years to try to solve the mounting problems.
The Guardian has learned from Department of Trade and Industry consultation documents and key advisers that the government is to announce a change in its official policy and start charging foreign governments for the service of storing their waste and subsequently disposing of it in concrete bunkers.
Until now, the government has insisted that all the waste would be sent back but it now sees retaining foreign nuclear detritus as a money-spinning venture.
Allowing Britain to become a dump for foreign waste would also remove another problem - the threat of terrorists hijacking the nuclear material while it was being transported from Britain to other countries.
For decades, thousands of tonnes of spent fuel, containing plutonium and uranium, have been imported into Britain from nine countries which have contracts with the state-owned British Nuclear Fuels Ltd to have it reprocessed.
Two BNFL plants at Sellafield in Cumbria dissolve the fuel in acid and extract the plutonium and uranium so that it can be returned to those countries either for storage or reuse in nuclear stations.
In practice not even this has happened and the plutonium and uranium remain at Sellafield under guard.
In addition there is 405 cubic metres of high level waste and 3,383 cubic metres of intermediate level waste belonging to foreign countries stored at Sellafield.
The UK has more than 10,000 cubic metres of high level waste of its own and another 250,000 tonnes of intermediate level waste. Once packaged into containers suitable for disposal the waste can be 10 times as bulky.
Britain's own waste is in a series of deteriorating buildings at Sellafield and at least 19 other sites around the UK.
Norman Baker, the Liberal Democrat spokesman for the environment, said of the Guardian revelations: "This is a disgrace. We have enough dangerous nuclear waste of our own without scooping in other countries' waste.
"The Treasury and Depart ment of Trade and Industry do not mind endangering the environment as they attempt to reduce the horrendous amount of taxpayer's money that the nuclear industry generates. This government cannot be trusted to tell the truth, look after the environment or deal with the nuclear industry in any sort of sensible way."
Blake Lee-Harwood, campaigns director of Greenpeace, said: "It is absolutely shocking that the government is reneging on one of its key promises [that nuclear waste] would all be returned to its country of origin.
"This bodes ill for the future imports of spent fuel and the planned return of other wastes."
The government set up an expert committee of radioactive waste management to advise on what to do about the problem of nuclear waste.
Due to report by 2006, the committee has been first try ing to discover exactly how much waste there is in Britain and will then consider how to get rid of the plutonium and uranium that has been produced from reprocessing.
The committee chairman, Gordon MacKerron, admitted: "It has always seemed to me unlikely that all the foreign wastes would be returned."
Laurence Williams, the chief health and safety inspector of Britain's nuclear sites, said his task was making sure the existing wastes stored round Britain were kept in a safe state.
"The mind boggles that scientists and technicians who did all these complex tasks like building nine nuclear power stations in 11 years, and ... built hydrogen bombs and reprocessing plants, could at the same time have chucked highly active waste into silos with no thought how to get it out," he said.
"This is what we now have to do, and it is no easy task."
The Guardian has applied under the "open government" code for details of contracts between the British and Italian governments, but the DTI, which is responsible for BNFL, has refused to release anything.
The DTI claims that disclosure of the "sensitive" information would embarrass the Italian government and create diplomatic tension between London and Rome.
Nuclear waste is divided into three categories - high level, intermediate level and low level based on the level and type of radioactivity.
Of most concern is the high level waste. It is so radioactive that it produces heat and has been kept in liquid form in tanks for up to 50 years at Sellafield before being turned into glass blocks for storage. The government admits that a quarter of this type of waste belongs to foreign governments.
Intermediate level waste is not heat-producing and can be packaged in concrete for safety. Both these types need to be isolated from human contact for up to 200,000 years.
The low level waste is by far the greatest volume and includes everything from gloves and overalls to large pieces of equipment and concrete. The only place to store this in Britain is Drigg, which will be full by 2050.
Government advisers estimate that there will be enough low-level waste produced in the next 50 years to fill 15 Drigg dumps.
The DTI was unable to comment on the disposal of foreign waste yesterday.
-------- china
China's military chief Jiang Zemin urges modernisation of weapons arsenal
BEIJING (AFP)
Aug 31, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040831030858.9znj45l3.html
Military strongman Jiang Zemin has called for further modernisation and improvement of China's weapons arsenal to meet the "challenges of new military changes in the world," state media said Tuesday.
"Building up military equipment is an urgent task of military combat preparations and is an important strategic task for the country's peace and stability," Jiang was quoted as saying by the People's Daily.
Jiang, chairman of the Central Military Commission, told a high level meeting that included President Hu Jintao that it was a priority to improve the overall combat capability of the military and its weapons.
According to the Pentagon, China is more than doubling its budgeted defense spending this year as part of an aggressive military modernization strategy.
China's official defense budget in 2004 is more than 25 billion dollars.
But when off-budget funding for foreign weapons system imports is included, total defense-related expenditures should soar to between 50 and 70 billion dollars, US deputy undersecretary of defence Richard Lawless said earlier this year.
This would rank China third in defense spending after the United States and Russia.
Jiang's comments came as China reportedly cancelled a military exercise on Dongshan Island near to Taiwan, withdrawing some 3,000 troops.
China has been escalating its rhetoric against Taiwan, which it considers part of its territory, warning last month that it may attack the island before 2008 if Taiwan pushes its pro-independence timetable too hard.
China has some 600 short-range ballistic missiles aimed at Taiwan and has cautioned Taipei against engaging in military build-up through purchases of advanced weapons from the United States.
-------- depleted uranium
Depleted Uranium,
by Dennis Kyne
From: davey garland <thunderelf@yahoo.co.uk>
Date: Tue Aug 31, 2004 0:27pm
In May of 2004 I attended my first Barter Faire ever, in Curlew, Washington. Sponsored by the Veterans for Peace, I arrived as far north as I had ever been in America. I came to tell the people of Eastern Washington that depleted uranium needs to be dealt with. I had a wonderful visit, met wonderful people, and made wonderful friends. Thank you, Eastern Washington, for receiving me so nicely.
A year prior to my visit, in its May issue, Environmental Magazine informed the world that, "Since the U.S. military's widespread use of DU (Depleted Uranium, U238) in the Gulf became known in 1991, the Pentagon has struggled to suppress mounting evidence that DU munitions are simply too toxic to use. It has cashiered or attempted to discredit its own experts, ignored their advice, impeded scientific research into DU's health effects and assembled a disinformation campaign to confuse the issue." Two months later the Seattle Post Intelligencer stated, "The Pentagon and the United Nations estimate that the U.S. and Britain used 1,100 to 2,200 tons of armor piercing shells made of depleted uranium during attacks on Iraq in March and April [2003] ú far more than the 375 tons used in the 1991 Gulf War." On February 2 of this year, Sara Flounders and John Catalinotto of Swan's Commentary explained to America, "By now half of all the 697,000 U.S. soldiers involved in the 1991 war have reported serious illnesses. According to the American Gulf War Veterans Association, more than 30 percent of these soldiers are chronically ill and are receiving disability benefits from the Veterans Administration." So, if they have used far more DU than was used in 1991, we should expect far more disabilities, death and chronic pain. That is the truth.
In October of 2003, Leuren Moret, an expert on depleted uranium, informed us at the World Uranium Conference in Hamburg, Germany, about Strontium-90 levels in baby teeth from children with cancer. Moret states very clearly, "Since 1975, national rates for children with leukemia have increased by 44% and for children with brain cancer by 50%." In Moret's most recent work, The Trojan Horse of Nuclear War, published in the Hamburg Conference conclusions, she adds that, "There was never any doubt about the great biological hazard of massive nuclear fallout even before testing started. But there was little concern about the global low level fallout from atmospheric contamination by very small particles which remain suspended until nucleating agents such as rain, snow and pollution remove them from the air and deposit them in the environment, exposing the global population to chronic low level radiation."
In addition to Moret, J. Gould's The Enemy Within illustrates high-risk counties within 100 miles of nuclear reactors using a map that plots breast cancer deaths that are reported annually by counties to the CDC. In the western part of the U.S., the locations of nuclear weapons labs and a few nuclear power plants are indicated by the highest breast cancer deaths. These are the newest victims of exposure to radiation. We know very well that the mining of the uranium for decades has unduly harmed the Native Americans who mined the ore. We know that the government has used troops as guinea pigs in the proliferation of nuclear weapons programs. Now as we accept our newest victims, women and children of every race and class, it is imperative that we recognize these radioactive weapons are omnicidal. That is the truth.
In 1991, I served with the 24th Infantry Division, the most criminally negligent division in Operation Desert Shield/Storm. As a medic, I watched as soldiers walked into the carnage that 45 days of bombing had left in the southern part of Iraq and in Kuwait. The signs and symptoms of the exposure appeared quickly with countless troops vomiting and getting pale. Upon return I experienced joint pains, extreme itching that would have me shredding skin, and a feeling that resembled rubbing alcohol burning a cut in the bottom of my stomach. There are countless accounts of birth deformities and miscarriages in returning soldiers. And women have often complained of pain after having sex with returning front line soldiers.
In 1995, four years after I filed my complaint about my recurring health problems with the Veterans Affairs, I was finally tested for ionizing radiation, twice. Having never been able to get my hands on the results, I am not sure what my true uranium exposure was. However, since 1995 the VA has compensated me for "undiagnosed illnesses." Funny, the VA will admit I am sick, but they will only diagnose me as undiagnosed. I am a VA statistic, which means I am on record as a casualty. However, my stepbrother is not a VA statistic. He has the same signs and symptoms I display, but is not one of the casualties. My brother-in-law who served farther forward than I did is often called an AIDS patient or cancer victim; he is a casualty who is compensated at 100%. Sadly it took over a decade for the VA to recognize his disability. Even sadder, they say he is not a depleted uranium victim and will not test for ionizing radiation. Three of my family members are sick, from the same war, the same battlefield, and the same nuclear waste that is being hurled at Iraq and Afghanistan currently. That is the truth.
How? Why? Is this some sort of Joke? No. Depleted uranium is not new. What is new is the disposal mechanism. In the 80's then-President Reagan made a deal with Russia to stop developing nuclear weapons. We know how short-lived that was. We know that every treaty has been violated and nuclear proliferation is on a rise again. What we didn't know, though, was the answer to the question the environmentalists asked Reagan in the late 80's. "Mr. President, what are you going to do with the waste of the nuclear reactors?"
The President informed his citizens that he planned on sending it to the moon or the bottom of the ocean. That is what they had been doing for years; Reagan was the only person whoever felt smart enough to tell anyone. Americans, who would have nothing to do with this environmental desecration, put a stop to it. In 1997, Dan Fahey, cited in Metal of Dishonor, tells us that, "As a result of 50 years of enriching uranium for use in nuclear weapons and reactors, the U.S. has in excess of 1.1 billion pounds of DU waste material." Of this incredible surplus of radioactive waste, some has been buried in isolated spots and a load of it has been used by the Department of Defense in its weapons programs. The military uses this weapon because it is armor piercing. If this weapon is intended for use against armor, and we destroyed most of the Iraqi's armor in 1991, why have we increased the use of it in Iraq from 375 tons to some ambiguous amount? Why is it being dropped all over Afghanistan where there is not one tank verified to be driven by the Taliban or al Quaeda?
Dennis Kyne is a fifteen-year veteran of the United States Army. His book Support the Truth is available at The Book Depot in Colville, and at his Web site: www.denniskyne.com. It is dedicated to the half million homeless veterans and depleted uranium victims.
-------- india / pakistan
India plans to build long-range missiles with Israel: official
NEW DELHI (AFP)
Aug 31, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040831140451.6ji49w5p.html
India, which tested an indigenously-built ballistic missile on Sunday, is holding talks with Israel about joint production of a long-range missile, the country's chief military scientist announced on Tuesday.
"Wherever they have strengths, we want to jointly develop the missiles so that both countries can benefit and share designs, costs and risks," V.K. Atre told reporters in Hyderabad, the hub of India's missile-building facilities.
Atre did not elaborate about the system which India hopes to build jointly with Israel. He said talks are being held between India's Defence Research and Development Organisation and its state-owned Israeli counterpart.
Atre denied that Israel was already helping India to build guided missiles and said defence cooperation was confined to research and the development of sensors and fibre-optic gyroscopes for the military.
India, which treated Israel like a pariah for decades, hass in recent years forged close military links. It is acquiring two Phalcon Airborne Early Warning Systems from the Jewish state at a cost of a billion dollars.
On Sunday India successfully tested its medium-range Agni-II (Fire) missile, which has a maximum range of 2,500 kilometres (1,560 miles) and can carry a one-tonne nuclear warhead.
India is also planning to test its Agni-III missile which has a range exceeding 3,000 kilometres but has not announced a date, reportedly due to pressure from the United States to delay the test.
The Indian army has already armed itself with Agni-I missiles, which have a range of 700 kilometres.
India and Pakistan held nuclear tests within two weeks of each other in 1998. Since then they twice came close to war in their dispute over Kashmir but relations beeen recently been improving.
-------- iran
Iran says several people arrested for nuclear spying
TEHRAN (AFP)
Aug 31, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040831115342.wnmobpbi.html
Iran's Intelligence Minister Ali Yunessi said Tuesday that "several people" have been arrested for spying on the country's nuclear programme, the official news agency IRNA reported Tuesday.
The minister said those arrested "were sending information on Iran's nuclear activities abroad", but did not say when the arrests took place.
"The Monafeqin (hypocrites) played the main role in transferring the information," he said, referring to the People's Mujahedeen, Iran's main armed opposition group that is based in Iraq.
The Mujahedeen first began disclosing information on the clerical regime's nuclear activities in mid-2002, before the launch of a major probe by the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Yunessi was speaking to reporters during "government week", when ministers habitually give a run-down of their performance in office.
"The department of counter-espionage in the intelligence ministry possesses the most modern technology and controls the infiltration of foreign spying services," he said, adding that in total "tens of spies in all domains" had been picked up.
----
Key Dates in U.S. - Iran Relations
August 31, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-US-Iran-Chronology.html
Important dates in U.S.-Iranian relations:
-- Jan. 16, 1979: U.S.-backed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi flees Iran after mass demonstrations and strikes.
-- Feb. 1, 1979: Ayatollah Khomeini returns from exile.
-- Nov. 4, 1979: Iranian students seize 63 hostages at the U.S. embassy in Tehran.
-- April 25, 1980: A secret U.S. military mission to rescue hostages ends in disaster in a sandstorm in a central Iranian desert.
-- July 27, 1980: Pahlavi dies of cancer in Egypt.
-- Sept. 22, 1980: Iraq declares war against Iran.
-- Jan. 20, 1981: As President Reagan is inaugurated, Iran releases the remaining 52 American hostages after 444 days of detention.
-- Jan. 20, 1984: The United States declares Iran a sponsor of international terrorism, making Iran ineligible for various forms of U.S. foreign assistance.
-- 1985-1986: Washington and Tehran engage in a complex scheme to finance assistance to Nicaraguan rebels through proceeds of U.S. weapons sales to Iran.
-- August 1986: The United States prohibits Iran from receiving U.S. arms under the U.S. Arms Export Control Act.
-- 1987-1988: Hostilities between Tehran and Baghdad draw in neighbors and international shippers. The United States and Iran engage in open and direct conflict in the ``tanker war.''
-- Oct. 29, 1987: Reagan signs an executive order banning Iranian imports, including crude oil, because of Iran's support for terrorism and its threat to maritime traffic in the Persian Gulf.
-- July 3, 1988: The USS Vincennes shoots down an Iran Air A300 Airbus over the Persian Gulf, killing 290 people. The U.S. military says it misidentified the plane as an Iranian fighter, an account disputed by Iran.
-- July 20, 1988: Iran formally accepts a U.N. resolution calling for a cease-fire between Iran and Iraq, ending its war with Iraq.
-- June 3, 1989: Khomeini dies. Ali Khamenei is appointed supreme leader. Hashemi Rafsanjani is sworn in as Iran's president two months later.
-- 1990-1991: Iran remains neutral in U.S.-led Operation Desert Storm to push Iraq out of Kuwait.
-- May 6, 1995: President Clinton issues an executive order banning U.S. trade and investment in Iran.
-- May 23, 1997: Mohammad Khatami wins Iran's presidential election.
-- June 17, 1998: Secretary of State Madeleine Albright gives a major policy address on Iran, proposing the two countries construct a ``road map'' for better relations.
-- April 28, 1999: The Clinton administration loosens sanctions to permit sales of food and medicine to Iran.
-- July 1999: Major protests erupt in many Iranian cities; the United States criticizes the repression of student demonstrators.
-- Feb. 18, 2000: Iranian reformists win a landslide victory in a general election.
-- April 14, 2000: The United States announces sanctions on four Iranian entities, including the Defense Ministry, for missile proliferation.
-- September 2001: After the Sept. 11 attacks, Friday prayers in Tehran omit ``Death to America'' chants for the first time in recent history; Iranians mourn U.S. deaths.
-- Oct. 9, 2001: Khatami calls for an ``immediate end'' to U.S. military strikes on the Taliban.
-- Nov. 12, 2001: Secretary of State Colin Powell and the Iranian foreign minister meet at an international session on Afghanistan and shake hands in an unprecedented diplomatic overture.
-- Jan. 29, 2002: In his first State of the Union address, President Bush includes Iran in his ``axis of evil'' along with Iraq and North Korea.
-- Feb. 11, 2002: Iran commemorates its revolution's anniversary with the largest anti-U.S. protests in years.
-- Feb. 13, 2002: The United States and Israel block Iran's application to the World Trade Organization.
-- December, 2002: The United States accuses Iran of seeking to develop a secret nuclear weapons program.
-- August, 2003: The International Atomic Energy Agency confirms finding weapons-grade uranium at the Iranian nuclear facility in Natanz.
-- Oct. 21, 2003: Iran agrees to suspend its uranium-enrichment program.
-- December 2003: Washington sends humanitarian aid to Iran after an earthquake in Bam kills up to 26,000 people.
-- March 13, 2004: Iran indefinitely bars inspections of its nuclear program, but relents two days later.
--July 31: Iran confirms it has resumed building nuclear centrifuges. Washington continues lobbying IAEA to refer Iran to U.N. Security Council.
----
Iran Says It Has Arrested Several Nuclear Spies
August 31, 2004
REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-nuclear-iran-arrests.html
TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran has arrested dozens of spies, including several who passed secrets about its nuclear program to its enemies, Intelligence Minister Ali Yunesi said on Tuesday.
The United States accuses Iran of using its atomic program as a smokescreen for building nuclear weapons, but Tehran insists the program is solely dedicated to meeting booming domestic demand for electricity.
``The Intelligence Ministry has arrested a number of spies that transferred Iran's nuclear intelligence (abroad),'' Yunesi was quoted as saying by the official IRNA news agency.
Yunesi said most of those arrested were linked to the Iraq-based Iranian opposition group the People's Mujahideen Organization (MKO).
The MKO's political wing, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), made public several undeclared nuclear facilities in Iran in 2002.
But the council denied that any NCRI or MOK informers had been arrested.
Former NCRI spokesman, Alireza Jafarzadeh, who broke the news about the nuclear sites, also said his sources were still at large.
Yunesi did not say when the arrests took place, but his remarks came after Iran's ``government week'' in which ministries catalog their achievements over a broad timeframe.
``The hypocrites (MKO) had the lead role and they have boasted before about spying against Iran in a press conference in America,'' he added. ``We have identified and arrested dozens of spies on various grounds.''
Iranian officials label the MKO hypocrites for losing faith in the 1979 Islamic revolution and the government says the group has killed several prominent politicians since the revolution. Washington lists it as a terrorist group.
The NCRI, now labeled a terrorist organization by Washington, has been the source of much reliable information about Iran's atomic program in recent years, as subsequently proven by U.N. inspections.
INFORMERS STILL AT LARGE
The NCRI's spokesman in Paris, Shahin Gobadi, said in an emailed statement: ``The individuals who have been arrested have had nothing to do with the disclosures made by the Iranian Resistance on the mullahs' secret nuclear weapons program.
``The clerical regime's objective is to terrorize and intimidate the personnel of nuclear facilities and prevent them from cooperating with the resistance. These arrests are part of a new wave of crackdowns in Iran in recent weeks.''
In August 2002, the NCRI broke the news of two undeclared sites in Iran -- a heavy water production facility at Arak and a massive underground uranium enrichment complex at Natanz that the NCRI and Washington say was intended to produce highly-enriched uranium for weapons.
Tehran later declared these sites to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog, but insists they are not linked to a weapons program.
The IAEA Board of Governors meets next month to discuss Iran's nuclear program and a progress report on the agency's inspections, which began shortly after the NCRI's 2002 report.
Jafarzadeh, who lives in Washington, said the arrests were a ``hollow show of force right before the upcoming meeting of the IAEA Board of Governors and (are) intended to overshadow the illegal efforts of the Iranian regime to acquire nuclear weapons.''
Iran's intelligence ministry said it had nothing to add to the IRNA report.
----
Putin says Iran must not become nuclear power
SOCHI, Russia (AFP)
Aug 31, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040831104031.qmv6tyc2.html
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that Iran must not be allowed to become one of the group of countries who have nuclear weapons.
"Russia has cooperated with Iran and we will continue to do so, but like our European colleagues France, Germany, Britain, and the US, we are concerned by the fact that questions are being raised about Iran's nuclear programme," Putin said.
"We are categorically against an enlargement of the club of nuclear powers, and that includes Iran," Putin said after talks with the German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and French President Jacques Chirac.
"We are in negotiations with our Iranian partners. We are going to try to obtain certain guarantees from them, including in the form of agreements. This problem can and must be examined by the international community, at this stage in the framework of the IAEA (the UN atomic agency)."
Russia is contructing Iran's first nuclear power plant in the southern city of Bushehr despite international protest, but negotiations over price and logistics are holding up the launch.
----
Bush hopes for diplomatic solution to nuclear tensions with Iran
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Aug 31, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040831143735.va50hjlo.html
US President George W. Bush expressed hope in an interview broadcast Tuesday that Iran can be persuaded through diplomatic means to abandon its nuclear ambitions.
"We hope we can solve it diplomatically," Bush told NBC television's "Today" show.
"We've had a long policy of sanctions. We can't sanction them anymore. But we can work with others to continue sending a message: We expect them to give up their nuclear ambitions."
Asked whether the country -- which Bush labeled as part of an "axis of evil," along with Iraq and North Korea -- was indeed "evil," the president replied: "I think a country that suppresses their people is not good, and they do.
"They are not listening to the demands of their people. And we are deeply concerned about a country ... that is developing a nuclear weapon, that has supported terrorist groups.
"And we've made our position very clear and are working with others, and that's what we always must do, is always try to work with others to solve a problem before it becomes acute," Bush said.
The US president's administration opposes the activation of Iran's power plant in the Gulf port of Bushehr, which Tehran says is being built exclusively for civilian purposes.
Washington believes Iran, one of the world's largest oil suppliers, has no need for nuclear energy and accuses Tehran of hiding a nuclear weapons development program under the guise of a civilian atomic energy program.
-------- libya
IAEA Questions Libya's Nuclear Program Report Says
Country Has Given Conflicting Statements on Source of Uranium
By Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 31, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47259-2004Aug30.html
Libya has offered conflicting information about whether North Korea or Pakistan supplied uranium for its nuclear weapons program and has been unable to account for some equipment that could be used to make a bomb, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which released a report yesterday on its investigation of Libya and the nuclear black market that supplied it.
IAEA inspectors said efforts to resolve one of the biggest mysteries about Libya's program were complicated by statements from one Libyan, who said the uranium came from North Korea, and from another who pointed the finger at Abdul Qadeer Khan, Pakistan's top nuclear scientist. Khan supplied much of Libya's nuclear infrastructure.
The IAEA report made it clear that some countries are cooperating with its investigation. But the report reflects the difficulty its inspectors are having as they try to unravel the Pakistani black market that supplied Libya and Iran, and to understand the extent of international trafficking in nuclear materials.
"We've had conflicting reports and we can't nail it down," one IAEA official said, referring to the competing claims about Libyan suppliers. "But if North Korea is another player in the black market, then things are much worse than we know." The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter's sensitivity.
In Washington, a Bush administration official familiar with the report said the source for the North Korea claim was credible, but there was nothing else to corroborate the story.
North Korea is not believed to have the capability to supply the type of uranium found in Libya, and there has been no firm evidence that it provides nuclear materials to other countries.
Throughout the IAEA report, which was written ahead of the agency's Sept. 13 board meeting, Libya is praised for providing inspectors with access to facilities and responses to inquiries. But the report notes that Libya has failed to account for sophisticated enrichment technology that could have been stolen, hidden or lost, and also notes that some of Libya's responses have not been borne out by test results and soil samples.
Despite Libya's commitment to the United States and Britain to come clean about its weapons programs, "there are gaping holes in this investigation," another IAEA official said.
"Much of what the Libyans have told us appears to be consistent with our findings, but the black market is still murky enough that we're not closing any doors right now," the official said. Libya is hoping that the IAEA's board will agree next month that the country no longer requires special inspections.
The IAEA has been active in Libya since the country's leader, Moammar Gaddafi, agreed to give up his biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs in December 2003. That concession was part of a deal that ended years of sanctions against the country for its role in the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am jet that killed 270 people in Lockerbie, Scotland.
The White House often cites Libya's decision as evidence of progress in its efforts to keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of terrorists. On Monday, President Bush said while campaigning that Gaddafi had "heard a clear message and voluntarily got rid of his weapons of mass destruction program."
Libya's decision exposed Khan, and the IAEA believes that he and a network of middlemen in 20 countries supplied Libya and Iran with equipment and technology for enriching uranium.
Khan also is expected to feature prominently in an IAEA report due this week on Iran, which maintains that its equipment is for use in a program designed to produce energy, not weapons. Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear program, is considered a national hero at home. Despite his activities, he was pardoned by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and lives under government protection.
The agency is conducting forensic analysis of warhead designs Khan gave Libya, in an effort to determine whether the drawings were copied or shared with other countries. The designs were Chinese in origin, obtained by Pakistan and then sold by Khan.
The report also expressed frustration with the level of cooperation by Pakistan. In a veiled reference to Khan and Pakistan, the agency wrote that its ability "to derive a credible assessment . . . would benefit greatly from the provision of additional information, including from the provider of the weapons design."
The agency also noted that Pakistan has refused to allow inspectors to take samples at Pakistani laboratories that could help confirm where Libya and Iran got their nuclear materials. The Pakistanis have insisted on conducting their own tests, without outside observers, and then sharing data with the IAEA.
"This investigation is continuing but can only be completed if the agency is permitted to take independent swipe samples at locations where the enriched uranium contamination may have originated," the IAEA wrote.
-------- missile defense
Japanese military wants fatter budget for missile defence, intelligence
TOKYO (AFP)
Aug 31, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040831110700.g7janegs.html
Japan's military pressed Tuesday for a 35 percent jump in spending on missile defence and intelligence systems for the next financial year to cope with new risks such as guerrilla attacks.
The request is part an overall budget demand by Japan's defence agency for 4.93 trillion yen for the fiscal year starting in April 2005, a rise of 1.2 percent from this year.
If approved by the government, it would mark the fastest rate of increase in military spending in eight years since a 1.98 percent jump in fiscal 1997.
Highlighting the military budget proposal is a call for 144.2 billion yen (1.3 billion dollars) to build up Japan's US-developed ballistic missile defence (BMD) systems, a leap of 35.0 percent from this fiscal year.
"We aim to enhance our capabilities to cope with new threats and various emergencies such as ballistic missile strikes, guerrilla attacks, spy ships ... and nuclear, biological or chemical weapons," the agency said in a statement.
The money would be used mainly to buy seaborne Standard Missilemissiles, upgrade land-based Patriot Advanced Capability-3anti-missile systems and remodel Aegis destroyers, a defence agency official said.
SM-3s intercept ballistic missiles when they reach their highest point outside of the atmosphere and then PAC-3 missiles are used to finish off the missiles that have escaped SM-3 attacks.
The use of ballistic missile defence systems symbolizes a shift in Japan's defence policy with North Korea posing a renewed threat and the higher occurrence of militant acts, especially in Asia.
The Japanese navy plans to conduct the first SM-3 missile tests in Hawaii by March 2008 to prepare for operation of the ballistic missile defence systems.
The agency is also seeking a 46.5 percent increase for anti-guerrilla strategies to 38.1 billion yen.
In addition, the military wants to upgrade telecommunications networks and intelligence systems for better integration of command lines, database sharing and information gathering and analysis. To fund this improvement, the agency is seeking a 64.4 percent increase to 247.9 billion yen.
But to offset the higher spending in such areas as missile defence and intelligence, the army and air force will cut back on the number of conventional tanks and fighter jets while the navy will not ask for the purchase of escort vessels for the first time since the end of World War Two.
Faced by increasing suicides among service people, the defence agency is also seeking a 41.9 percent rise in spending to improve mental health to 44 million yen.
Some 31 members of Japan's military, called the Self-Defence Forces, killed themselves between April and July this year, compared with 75 for the entire year to March 2004 and a record 78 for the year to March 2003.
Tuesday was the deadline for all government agencies to submit their budget requests. The cabinet will now compile a state budget proposal by year end and send it to parliament in January for approval.
-------- terrorism / transportation
[ To reply - http://archives.charleston.net/Feedback/ ]
The real plutonium risk
Tuesday, August 31, 2004
Charleston Post & Courier (SC)
http://www.charleston.net/stories/083104/edi_31edit1.shtml
The security concerns expressed by several congressmen over the shipment of plutonium from Charleston to France should be allayed by the assurances of the Department of Energy. Rep. Jim Turner, D-Texas, for example, acknowledged in a letter to DOE, quoted by The Associated Press: "It is clear that extraordinary security is planned for the shipment."
Nevertheless, Rep. Turner and some of his colleagues continue to question elements of the highly classified shipment plan, including security in France, where the weapons material will be transformed into mixed-oxide fuel (MOX), which can be used in commercial reactors. The MOX fuel will be shipped back to South Carolina, and used by Duke Power.
No question, the security arrangements should be tight every step of the way. It is difficult to imagine any slackness in view of potential terrorist threats.
The DOE has reported that the 300-pound shipment will be transported to France by two British ships guarded by British troops and accompanied by the Coast Guard while in U.S. waters.
While critics, including Greenpeace, speculate about the short-term security arrangements for the shipment, the long-term security value of the program should not be overlooked. Transforming plutonium into commercially usable fuel is of great importance for global security.
It is the centerpiece of an agreement with Russia to sharply reduce weapons-grade nuclear material. Russia possesses large stockpiles of plutonium. Much of it, as columnist George Will observes on this page today, is insufficiently guarded. Great danger lies in the acquisition of that material by terrorists. The fuel program will reduce the hazards from Cold War weapons programs.
The plutonium is being shipped to France because the United States doesn't yet have a plutonium-to-fuel facility, though one is planned, and has been partially funded, for Savannah River Site. Congressmen who are concerned about security for this plutonium shipment should take the long view and work for adequate funding to the SRS facility and aid to the Russian program, as planned.
The Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, of which the plutonium-to-fuel initiative is part, is vitally important to national security. Timely completion of mixed-oxide fuel plants in the U.S. and Russia will diminish a serious long-term threat.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
White House in Fight Over Weapons Workers
August 31, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Weapons-Workers.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration is locked in a rare election-year fight with fellow Republicans in the Senate over a troubled program for tens of thousands of weapons plant workers who got sick building nuclear bombs.
The lawmakers say they don't understand why the administration is blocking a Senate-passed amendment to the defense bill that would overhaul a compensation program bogged down by delays and other problems.
``I can't fully understand what their resistance is,'' said Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who is in a tough re-election battle in Alaska. ``We've been hammered by our constituents.''
Many of the workers are from battleground states in the upcoming presidential election, including Colorado, Iowa, New Mexico, Ohio and Washington state.
``These people are sick and dying,'' said Terrie Barrie of Craig, Colo., whose husband was sickened while working at the former Rocky Flats plant near Denver. ``The administration, the Department of Energy, is just refusing to listen.''
The Senate proposal would streamline the compensation process by having the government pay claims directly rather than having Energy Department contractors do it and later reimbursing them. It also would move the program from the Energy Department to the Labor Department and require the government to perform environmental studies of plants.
The lawmakers complain the Energy Department has squandered much of the $95 million it received since Congress created the program. As of the end of July, the agency has paid only 31 claims out of about 25,000 filed. The $700,000 in paid claims amounts to an average benefit of roughly $22,500.
Administration officials declined to comment on their opposition to the Senate measure, except to point to a statement by the White House budget office citing concerns that a change would create an ``unworkable process,'' cause more delays, increase costs and expand the program's scope.
Senators say their bill does not add new benefits, but would ensure that more workers eligible for compensation get it.
House members appear to be siding with the administration.
Rep. Zach Wamp, R-Tenn., said changing who runs the program would cause more delays. He also expressed concern about GOP members in Congress feuding with a Republican administration during a presidential election year.
Harry Williams, a former worker at the Energy Department's Oak Ridge, Tenn., facility, said he is a Republican who doesn't plan to vote for Bush this November as long as the administration continues to oppose the changes workers want.
``I voted for him last time, but this time around I don't think I will,'' Williams said. ``As it comes to dealing with the working guy, his administration doesn't have a feel for it.''
Democrats in Congress generally have watched the dispute from the sidelines. However, their presidential candidate, Sen. John Kerry, issued a statement Tuesday calling it ``wrong for George Bush to block deserved health benefits to workers who became ill because of service to their country,''
The tension between GOP lawmakers and the administration was highlighted a month ago when the White House announced the recess appointment of Susan Grant as the Energy Department's chief financial officer.
Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., had been blocking her nomination to protest the department's handling of the compensation program. President Bush made the appointment while Congress was in recess, skirting the need for Senate confirmation.
The workers were exposed to toxic substances such as radiation, heavy metals, asbestos and harsh solvents and acids while employed by Energy Department contractors. They often were not told what they were working with and did not have adequate protections.
``These are our Cold War veterans,'' said Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn. ``They were working in an environment that they thought was safe. It wasn't safe.''
Other influential Republican senators who support the overhaul include Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, Energy Committee Chairman Pete Domenici of New Mexico, Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens of Alaska and Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley of Iowa.
The proposal to help the workers is part of a defense bill passed by the Senate, but it is not included in a House-passed version. GOP senators are trying to persuade House members to include the changes in the final bill, but their efforts have been opposed by the Bush administration.
Congress passed a law four years ago directing the Energy Department to help the workers file claims for lost wages and medical benefits under state worker compensation systems. That reversed a decades-old practice in which the government helped contractors fight the workers' claims.
On the Net:
Energy Department program: http://www.eh.doe.gov/advocacy/prog--stats/
Congress: http://thomas.loc.gov/
-------- new jersey
Oyster Creek plant couldn't withstand hit from terrorist aircraft
8/31/04
Asbury Park Press
By STEPHEN M. LAZORCHAK
http://www.app.com/app/oystercreek/
From: Edith <gbur1@comcast.net>
Our political leaders need to resolve a serious predicament. A Nuclear Regulatory Commission regulation allows power plants like the Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station in Lacey to operate in a post-9/11 environment, although the plant's reactor building is structurally inadequate to protect used nuclear fuel rods from a terrorist attack.
Oyster Creek is neither structurally robust nor designed to resist an aircraft impact. This concern may also be present in 22 nuclear sites, some with more than one reactor building.
The Nuclear Security Coalition, a consortium of independent nuclear watchdog groups, petitioned the NRC earlier this month to address structural vulnerabilities at plants with building designs similar to Oyster Creek's. The magnitude of this issue and its implications for national security require congressional oversight; it should not be left only to the NRC review process.
To the best of my knowledge, the current design-basis-threat orders issued by the NRC do not include a requirement to protect against an aircraft attack. In addition, the most recent evacuation plan for Oyster Creek does not consider an evacuation based on a suicide aircraft attack that can result in a Chernobyl-type event.
The evacuation plan assumes an orderly egress from towns around the power plant, ignoring any road congestion resulting from panic outside the 10-mile plant radius. At last month's public hearing on Oyster Creek's evacuation plan, which estimated it would take seven to 10 hours to evacuate a 10-mile radius around the plant, someone asked how slow the response would have to be in order for the pl an to be deemed unacceptable. The panel's response: There is no time limit. This is unacceptable.
The impact of a large aircraft into the reactor building's concrete floor near the spent fuel pool would cause catastrophic building failure. It would allow burning fuel to leak onto the floors below, damaging vital wiring and equipment needed to shut down the reactor. An aircraft impact would severely damage the spent fuel pool, causing a water leak that would uncover tons of radioactive fuel r ods. The result of a terrorist attack on Oyster Creek's reactor building would exceed a Chernobyl meltdown event because there is more fuel in Oyster Creek's fuel pool than there was in Chernobyl's reactor.
The impact from only one 1,000-pound object traveling at 300 mph and hitting the floor at an angle of 30 degrees above horizontal exceeds the strongest floor beam capacity by more than 500 percent. Impact on the weakest floor beam exceeds the beam's capacity by 8,000 percent. The order of magnitude of these values clearly demonstrates Oyster Creek's reactor building is an unacceptable safety ris k.
There are other important reasons the Oyster Creek plant should be shut down:
"The federal government is not yet prepared to identify and prevent every terrorist plot, and the level of expertise required to stop terrorism may not occur for many years. Exelon, the owner of Oyster Creek, stated in public information newsletters that it relies on our president, the Armed Forces, the FBI and intelligence agencies to protect the plant from attack outside the fence of the plant . That isn't good enough.
"As described in the 9/11 Commission report, al-Qaida terrorists are meticulous in their planning and they are patient. The longer Oyster Creek is allowed to operate, the longer it is a target of opportunity.
To succeed, they need only one aircraft, flying from an overseas airport, to disappear from FAA radar screens 15 minutes before impacting Oyster Creek's reactor building. Timelines supplied by the 9/11 Commission report show our military fighters cannot take off, intercept and shoot down a plane within 15 minutes after terrorist actions are recognized by FAA personnel.
"If Oyster Creek were shut down today, all fuel in the reactor vessel must be transferred to the spent fuel pool to "cool" a minimum of five years before it can be removed from the reactor building. Before any used radioactive fuel can be taken out of the reactor building's fuel pool, Exelon must order, build and install additional dry storage vaults to store the material somewhere on site.
"The longer Oyster Creek operates without an exact closing date, the more the work culture at the plant will degrade because of fear of losing a job. Exelon management will postpone equipment upgrades or choose "cheap fixes" if there is no assurance the company will recoup its investment for any plant repair or upgrade.
I urge residents to support the immediate shutdown of Oyster Creek, to lobby town leaders to pass resolutions demanding the plant's closure and to lobby congressional representatives to pass laws eliminating NRC regulations that place the interest of private companies over public safety.
Stephen M. Lazorchak, Dover Township, is a consulting structural engineer and a former Oyster Creek employee.
-------- vermont
Vermont eyes Yankee safety margin
By David Gram,
Associated Press
August 31, 2004
http://www.boston.com/news/local/vermont/articles/2004/08/31/vt_eyes_yankee_safety_margin/
MONTPELIER -- The state is asking the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a hearing on a safety issue connected with the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant's request to increase its power output.
At issue is the plant's request to take credit for a safety margin it believes would come into play in the event of extreme accident conditions at the plant.
Also at issue is how well the plant has estimated safety margins under the higher temperatures and pressures Vermont Yankee would be operating at if it is granted permission to increase its power level by 20 percent.
The NRC is expected to rule by January on whether Vermont Yankee's owners, Entergy Nuclear, will be allowed to boost the 32-year-old reactor's output from its current 540 megawatts to 650 megawatts of capacity.
Plant officials believe high pressures that would exist in the containment structure around the reactor in an accident would cause cooling water pumps, which might otherwise begin to fail, to keep operating normally.
The state Department of Public Service said it was not convinced that the plant should be given credit for that extra margin of safety. ''We are asking the NRC to allow us to get those questions answered before a decision is reached on approval of the uprate," said DPS commissioner, David O'Brien.
''The state does not want to see the principle of `defense in depth' eroded in any way," O'Brien said. ''This principle -- that multiple safety systems are critical to protecting the public -- is really what is at stake here."
The department first raised its concern about the so-called ''containment overpressure" issue in a letter to the NRC in December.
Neil Sheehan, a spokesman for the NRC's Northeast regional office, said yesterday that the agency already had approved efforts by 26 other reactors around the country that had sought to take credit for containment overpressure when calculating their safety margins.
''They would only get to the situation where they would have to use this pressure under extreme accident conditions," Sheehan said. ''It's an additional factor that would help them mitigate the results of a severe accident."
Entergy spokesman Robert Williams said the plant's engineers spent 10 months preparing before making their request for permission to boost power. One of the questions they examined related to containment overpressure.
He said they determined that under accident conditions, ''the pressure would maintain the acceptable performance of the pumps. What you want is a certain amount of water flowing back to the reactor. The pressure would prevent boiling in the water on the way to the pump. . . . We're confident that it's within the NRC required safety margins," Williams said.
-------- washington
Bulk vitrification testing under way
Tuesday, August 31st, 2004
By Annette Cary,
Tri-City Herald staff writer
http://www.tri-cityherald.com/tch/local/story/5491281p-5429506c.html
In a north Richland lab, chemist Dong-Sang Kim is making glass out of mock Hanford waste, a cupful at a time.
He and other Pacific Northwest National Laboratory scientists are mixing up different recipes for immobilizing Hanford waste and then cooking it to near 2,500 degrees. It's an effort to determine how best to make a glass product to hold millions of gallons of radioactive wastes for thousands of years.
The goal is to make a product that's "good as glass" -- the glass that will be made at Hanford's $5.7 billion waste vitrification plant under construction at Hanford.
As planned, however, the vit plant only will be able to treat possibly half to two-thirds of the 53 million gallons of radioactive wastes now stored in 177 underground tanks at Hanford by a 2028 deadline. The radioactive and chemical wastes are left from 50 years of production of plutonium for the nation's nuclear weapons program.
Hanford officials are looking at bulk vitrification as an alternate, and less expensive, way to immobilize 10 million to 26 million gallons of low-activity radioactive wastes for permanent disposal.
In bulk vitrification, waste would be dried, mixed with silica-rich dirt and packed into insulated boxes up to 24 feet long. Electrodes would be inserted into the mixture to heat it and melt it into a huge brick of glass to be permanently buried, container and all.
The cost of demonstrating the alternate technology has more than doubled from preliminary estimates. But Hanford officials believe the overall project still could treat waste at less cost than similar waste can be turned into glass logs at the vitrification plant.
The cost to demonstrate the alternate technology of bulk vitrification has increased from a preliminary estimate of $45 million two years ago to $102 million.
"As we matured the design, we found the estimate artificially low," said Howard Gnann, senior technical adviser for DOE's Office of River Protection.
The price increase includes a $9 million system to retrieve waste from a tank targeted for the demonstration project. But DOE would have to pay for the system eventually anyway.
Other cost increases are for more tests to make sure the glass is comparable to that made at the vitrification plant. In addition, the bulk vit demonstration plant to be built at Hanford will cost about twice the projected amount of $30 million. That cost was estimated for an alternative technology before bulk vitrification had been selected as the most promising.
Gnann pointed out the demonstration is a one-time cost. Testing of the low-activity melters for the vitrification plant cost nearly twice as much.
"The beauty of this is it will actually immobilize 200,000 gallons of real waste" during testing, Gnann said.
The bulk vitrification project is still expected to finish within $30 million to $60 million of its estimated $1.4 billion cost, he said.
And if the technology works as hoped, it should produce glass for 35 percent less than the vitrification plant's low-level waste treatment system.
Test are under way to prove it can.
AMEC Earth and Environmental Inc., based in London, has been awarded a contract that could reach $63 million to build a demonstration project in central Hanford. It would test the process at full scale with radioactive and chemical wastes from one of the underground tanks.
By the end of 2006, Hanford officials should know how much waste can be loaded into glass and what kind of waste can best be treated. The wastes vary among Hanford's underground tanks and different types are expected to be better suited for either bulk vitrification or treatment at the bulk vitrification plant.
Simulated, nonradioactive waste now is being used to test the vitrification process at a plant AMEC has built adjacent to the Richland landfill. Both one-sixth scale engineering tests and full-scale tests using 20-foot-long shipping containers holding simulated waste are being done.
The tests have turned up a few surprises, both good and bad.
AMEC has come up with a process that nearly halves the volume of waste produced from earlier tests. That would mean less waste to be buried.
AMEC also has been pleased to learn that one of the radioactive constituents of the waste, iodine, is being held within the glass better than expected. Radioactive iodine that escapes into the off-gases would require further treatment.
The latest design of the bulk vitrification system uses a layer of refractory concrete material closest to the waste to keep the heat in the melt.
"It doesn't even burn the paint on the outside" of the container, said Don Fraser, director of the AMEC GeoMelt Test Facility.
However, the waste has tended to migrate into the refractory layer during testing. Engineering scale tests are being done to find a glaze that will keep the waste from migrating into the refractory layer.
The best surprise so far is that the glass is performing better than hoped, containing more waste and proving more durable.
The glass is about as durable as a Coke bottle, said Dennis Hamilton, supplemental treatment project manager for DOE contractor CH2M Hill Hanford Group.
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is experimenting with formulas for making the most durable glass possible by adding zirconia and boron oxide to different types of simulated waste and soil rich in silica. Mixtures are tested a crucible at a time, producing about as much glass as a coffee mug would hold.
The bulk vitrification project will need regulatory approval to go forward.
Today the Washington State Department of Ecology will hear public comments on whether it should issue a permit for the test project that would turn real Hanford waste into glass at the proposed AMEC test project on the Hanford site.
It will be held at 6:30 p.m. at the Ecology office, 3100 Port of Benton Blvd., Richland.
-------- us nuc waste
[To reply - mailto:letters@washingtontimes.com ]
Scare tactics at Yucca
August 31, 2004
Washington Times
Letters to the Editor
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20040830-081247-7650r.htm
James K. Glassman's commentary ("Nuclear waste backfilling," Thursday) apparently intends to persuade us that moving nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain is a good idea. Unfortunately, he uses the industry's argument that nuclear materials are just too dangerous to leave them where they have been sitting for the past 40 years, hurting no one.
Mr. Glassman tells us these materials are now "exposed to terrorism, corrosion and just plain accidents...The waste will start leaking into drinking-water supplies." The material can't leak anywhere because its ceramic pellets, clad in corrosion-resistant metal, inside stainless steel casks.
As reported in the authoritative journal Science, there's nothing a terrorist could do to these casks that could cause a significant public hazard.
It's probably useful to have one or more places to store this "spent fuel" until we're ready a few decades hence to recover the valuable materials it contains. Yucca Mountain is better than most places for it. But in its hurry to get the material off its hands, the industry has agreed to ridiculous specifications and scared us into believing they are necessary.
Radioactive materials stay toxic for a long time, but get less toxic every day. Non-radioactive poisons - selenium, mercury, arsenic, lead - stay toxic forever, never diminishing.
The only waste at Yucca Mountain is misspent money.
THEODORE ROCKWELL
Chevy Chase
-------- MILITARY
-------- africa
Darfur Conditions Said Worse, Talks Resume
August 31, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-sudan.html
KHARTOUM (Reuters) - Conditions are worsening for refugees in Darfur, U.N. agencies said on Tuesday, as the Sudanese government and rebels struggled to make headway in talks aiming to ease the conflict in the Darfur region.
The U.N. agencies said the Darfuri refugees were facing violent attacks and disease was spreading, while heavy rains were wreaking havoc with aid convoys.
The reports came a day after the expiry of a deadline set by the U.N. Security Council for Sudan to prove it can protect the refugees in Darfur or face possible sanctions.
``The humanitarian situation in Darfur continues to worsen, with ongoing violations and the rainy season at its peak which is hampering and disrupting the flow of international aid very often,'' Simon Pluess, spokesman for the U.N. World Food Program (WFP), told a news briefing in Geneva.
The U.N. Security Council is due to receive a report on Darfur from U.N. special envoy Jan Pronk, who is scheduled to address the 15-member body on Thursday.
Russia cut dead speculation over whether a negative report from Pronk would produce the Security Council votes needed to impose sanctions on Sudan, by saying Moscow opposed sanctions.
``In this particular situation, I can say, in my national capacity, according to information that we got from the ground, and we expect it to be in the report, there are some signs that the situation starts to change,'' Andrei Denisov told reporters on his last day as U.N. Security Council rotating president.
The comments reflected a majority view against threatened sanctions at this time, council members said. Russia wields the power of veto as one of five permanent members of the Council.
The World Health Organization also reported on Tuesday a near doubling in hepatitis cases in Darfur in the past month due to insufficient clean water and poor sanitary conditions.
The United Nations estimates up to 50,000 have died since the conflict began in February 2003. More than a million have fled their homes for fear of attack by Arab militia, known as Janjaweed, who rebels say are supported by the government.
Khartoum admits arming some militias to fight the uprising, but denies any links with the Janjaweed, saying they are outlaws.
The Sudanese government and rebel groups have been holding peace talks for more than a week now seeking to find ways to ease the plight of refugees in Darfur, in western Sudan.
The talks, in the Nigerian capital Abuja, have been bogged down by accusations of cease-fire violations on both sides.
On Tuesday, delegates to the talks said the two sides were still at the stage of trying to hammer out a basic starting point for discussions, by narrowing their differences on quite how bad the situation was in Darfur.
Talks were adjourned until Wednesday 5 a.m. EDT to allow African Union mediators to fine tune a proposed framework for an agreement between both parties on addressing the humanitarian situation in Darfur.
Former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Richard Holbrooke, on a tour in Darfur, told reporters the humanitarian crisis would continue without a political solution.
``The core of this is a political problem and this humanitarian crisis will go on as long as the political issues are not resolved,'' he said in El Fasher, the capital of Northern Darfur state.
``I don't think that anyone who has seen the action on the ground would think that anyone involved including the Sudanese government, the international community (and) my own country, is yet doing enough,'' he added. ``Everyone needs to do more.''
AID WORKERS KIDNAPPED
Underlining the problems in Darfur, Sudanese officials said on Tuesday that rebels had kidnapped 22 volunteers who had joined a program to vaccinate people affected by the fighting.
The head of Sudan's vaccination program and emergency operations office, Hassan Idriss, said rebels from the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) abducted the volunteers on Sunday.
JEM officials were not immediately available to comment.
The U.N. has not specified what sanctions it could take on Sudan, a relatively small oil producer exporting about 200,000 barrels a day from its fields in the south of the country.
Unilateral U.S. sanctions already bar American companies investing in Sudan's oil sector.
Pressure from human rights groups saw commercial companies Talisman of Canada and Austria's OMV sell their stakes. Foreign concessions now are limited to Indian state Oil and Natural Gas Corp (ONGC), Malaysian state Petronas and China National Petroleum Corp and small Swedish concern Lundin Petroleum.
-------- business
Oil prices plummet despite Iraq attacks
ASSOCIATED PRESS
August 31, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/business/20040830-093537-4547r.htm
Oil prices dropped sharply yesterday, falling to less than $42 a barrel, as last week's sell-off continued despite sabotage of Iraqi oil infrastructure that curbed exports.
"It just goes to show you that when the psychology turns, it turns," said Tom Bentz, a trader at BNP Paribas Futures in New York.
There also were signs out of Iraq yesterday that a peace deal reached in Najaf last week could spread to other parts of the country. An aide to Sheik Muqtada al-Sadr said the rebel Shi'ite cleric called for his followers across Iraq to end fighting against U.S. and Iraqi forces and that he is planning to join the political process in the coming days.
Light sweet crude for October delivery plunged by $1.21 to $41.97 in afternoon trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. At that level, crude futures were trading roughly 14 percent below the record settlement high of $48.70 on Aug. 19.
Oil markets have been extremely volatile this summer because traders fret there is inadequate excess supply globally in the event of a prolonged output disruption in Iraq, Russia or Venezuela.
But with the exception of sporadic drop-offs in Iraqi oil exports because of attacks on industry infrastructure, none of these fears have materialized.
Oil-price speculation by institutional investors magnified the surge in prices this summer, as well as the latest retreat, traders said.
Yesterday, senior officials at Iraq's state-run oil company said oil exports had come to a halt after a rash of insurgent attacks on the country's petroleum infrastructure. The officials of the South Oil Co., speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the lines were not likely to resume operations for at least a week.
Other reports, however, suggested that the damage was less severe, and traders said they were operating on the assumption that exports had fallen by a third.
Regardless of how severely the oil flow has been hindered, "two weeks ago, with that news, we would have been up more than a dollar," Mr. Bentz said. "The tide has definitely turned."
Also yesterday, OPEC's president said the cartel was "doing everything it can to restore and stabilize oil prices."
Paradoxically, that also might have contributed to higher prices earlier in the month, because many market participants think the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries has very little excess- production capacity with which to calm jittery markets.
Yesterday, traders just "brushed it off," said Mario Chavez, vice president of global energy futures at ABN AMRO in New York.
Mr. Chavez said the sharp move downward also was magnified by thin trading volume.
----
Military buildup benefits Anteon
August 31, 2004
By Tim Lemke
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/business/20040830-093538-8297r.htm
The federal government has become Anteon International Corporation's best friend.
The Fairfax company, which provides information technology and engineering services to government agencies, is riding a wave of new defense and security spending, posting double-digit earnings growth and steady increases in its share price.
A 35 percent increase in spending by the Pentagon and a more than 250 percent increase in spending on homeland security since September 11 has been a boon for many government contractors.
But few have seen the contract awards and revenue boost experienced by Anteon this year.
The company reported second-quarter net income of $14.7 million (39 cents per share) compared with $10.3 million (28 cents) in the comparable period in 2003. Revenue during the same period rose to $304.2 million, from $254.1 million.
Shares of Anteon fell 79 cents to close at $32.61 yesterday on the New York Stock Exchange. They have risen more than 20 percent since hitting a 52-week low in March.
Analysts said Anteon has capitalized on a sector that is stable, and where money is currently being spent.
"The federal government has embraced outsourcing due to the shortage of qualified [information technology] people at the many federal agencies and the need for continuity on multiyear projects," said Randall Scherago, a principal with BlueMatrix, a financial research firm in New York.
Anteon's recent contract successes include a four-year deal to help manage programs with the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command in San Diego, worth up to $320 million. It also won a $45 million contract to support the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense Program, and a 10-year contract worth as much as $348 million to help modernize the Navy's combat ships.
Anteon earned $465 million in new orders during the second quarter, and has a backlog of business worth $5.9 billion, a record-high for the company.
Analysts said they like Anteon's ability to increase revenue from its own businesses, while also looking to expand outward.
The company on Aug. 11 said it paid $29 million for Integrated Management Services Inc., a provider of security services to the government. And on July 27 it paid $15 million for Simulation Technologies Inc., a maker of model and simulation software.
A sluggish economy could reverse some government spending trends, particularly if the federal budget deficit continues to grow. But, analysts said the defense and security programs involving Anteon will likely remain intact.
Still, some analysts warned investors that now may not be the best time to buy Anteon shares.
Legg Mason analyst William Loomis lowered his rating on Anteon from "buy" to "hold" last week, on the grounds that any good feelings about the company were already valued into the company's stock price.
"While we believe Anteon is one of the best positioned companies in the industry and the company has historically posted very strong results ... we believe most of the upside potential is currently priced in the shares," Mr. Loomis said in a research note.
-------- iraq
Sadr Reportedly Forgoing Attacks For Political Role
Truce Holds as Peace Talks Continue
By Robin Shulman
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, August 31, 2004; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47268-2004Aug30.html
BAGHDAD, Aug. 30 -- Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr has ordered his militiamen to suspend attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces and intends to participate in politics instead of pursuing an armed rebellion, his aides said Monday.
A shift by Sadr and his supporters away from violence could resolve a significant threat to Iraq's stability and provide a boost to the country's interim government, which has urged the cleric to dissolve his Mahdi Army militia and join the political process. Sadr, a rebellious young religious leader who wants U.S. forces to leave Iraq, has sparked unrest across central and southern parts of the country since April.
Cleric Moqtada Sadr agreed to a peace deal Friday after three weeks of fighting U.S. forces in Najaf. (File Photo)
"Moqtada Sadr called on the Mahdi Army to cease fire in all of Iraq until the Sadr office announces its plans to participate in the political process," one of Sadr's representatives, Ali Yassiri, said in a telephone interview.
The order brought about immediate changes in Sadr's strongholds, particularly in Sadr City, a Baghdad slum named after Sadr's revered father, where fighting between the Mahdi Army and U.S. soldiers has raged for almost a month. In a break from the bedlam of previous days, no significant clashes were reported in Sadr City on Monday.
Sadr's representatives held a second day of talks with U.S. and Iraqi officials aimed at brokering a broad peace deal. On Friday, Sadr agreed to remove his militiamen from the cities of Najaf and Kufa. The deal ended a three week standoff around a Shiite shrine that involved intense fighting between U.S. forces and Sadr's militiamen.
The talks on Monday appeared to involve more senior U.S. and Iraqi officials than Sunday's discussions. Instead of continuing in Sadr City, talks were held inside the high-security International Zone. U.S. diplomats and officials with Iraq's interim government have insisted they are not negotiating, only articulating their demands and working out details of how a peace deal would be implemented.
Sadr's aides have characterized the talks as negotiations. One of their chief demands, according to Ali Smeisim, a Sadr deputy, is for U.S. forces to withdraw from the center of Iraqi cities. Although Iraq's interim government agreed to such a condition in Najaf and Kufa, which are considered Shiite holy cities, it is questionable whether officials would accede to that demand elsewhere.
There also have been disagreements about what Mahdi Army members should do with their weapons. The Iraqi government and the U.S. military want the weapons to be handed over to the police, but Sadr's representatives have insisted that the militiamen be able to take their guns home for personal protection.
After Sunday's meeting, which was attended by representatives from the Iraqi police force, Iraq's interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, suggested that his office deal directly with Sadr's representatives, a senior police official said. Allawi is also meeting directly with resistance fighters to persuade them to accept a government amnesty offer in an attempt to quell insurgent attacks in Sunni Muslim areas.
Yassiri suggested that an agreement had been reached late Monday after lengthy discussions. "The negotiations were fruitful, and all sides accepted the points of the agreement," he said. "All sides went out satisfied with the results."
He said details of the agreement would be announced Tuesday. Other Sadr aides and Iraqi government officials who participated in the discussions could not be reached for comment.
A spokesman for the U.S. Army's 1st Cavalry Division, which patrols Baghdad, said a peace deal had not been reached. "There has been no cease-fire agreement and there is no move to withdraw multinational forces from Sadr City," the spokesman, Lt. Col. James Hutton, said.
There were conflicting reports Monday about whether Iraq's oil exports had halted after the repeated sabotage of oil pipelines in the south. The Associated Press quoted the governor of the southern port city of Basra, Hassan Rashid, as saying that exports from the south had stopped completely. But an unnamed official with the state-run South Oil Co. said the oil flow in the south continued unabated.
The confusion over the oil flow illustrated the degree of chaos in the Iraqi oil industry, which has suffered from frequent attacks and fluctuations in production.
"There are rumors that it's been turned off. What we know is that it's been disrupted, and that's the point," said Walid Khadduri, an oil expert who is editor of the Cyprus-based Middle East Economic Survey.
Iraq earns $60 million to $70 million a day from exports at current market prices, Khadduri said. He also said that oil exports have been falling for days because of attacks.
Five feeder pipelines in the southern Rumaila oil fields were attacked Sunday, immediately shutting down a pumping station in the town of Zubair and forcing officials to use reserves from storage tanks, said former Oil Minister Ibrahim Bahr Uloum.
Bahr Uloum said he believed the southern refineries were stopped and likely to suspend their exports for at least a week to repair the pipelines after attacks. "We are losing a fortune because of this sabotage," he said.
In other developments, one U.S. solider was killed and two were injured late Sunday after a homemade bomb stuck a convoy near the northern city of Mosul, the U.S. military said in a statement.
Special correspondent Omar Fekeiki contributed to this report.
--------
INSURGENTS
Rebel Shiite Cleric's Aides Hint He May Enter Politics
August 31, 2004
By ERIK ECKHOLM
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/31/international/middleeast/31iraq.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 30 - The rebel Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr is considering a future in politics rather than warfare, one of his top aides said Monday, as the American-backed Iraqi government and Mr. Sadr's representatives continued talks on the future of his militia.
Talks between government officials and Mr. Sadr's aides continued late in the night Monday, and the focus was a peace plan for the vast, explosive Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City. If achieved, a settlement for the district would set an important precedent and might open Mr. Sadr's way to electoral politics.
At the same time, a top assistant to Mr. Sadr said that the cleric was developing a political program and that he had instructed his fighters around the country to hold their fire for now.
"We call on all members of the Mahdi Army to cease fire except in self-defense, and to be patient until the political program which Sadr's followers are planning is revealed," Reuters quoted the aide, Sheik Ali Smeisim, as telling a Lebanese television station.
Three weeks of ferocious combat between Mr. Sadr's supporters and American troops in Najaf ended last week when Mr. Sadr agreed that his fighters would leave that holy city. But a central remaining question facing Iraq, and the country's divided Shiite majority, is whether Mr. Sadr will now join in the nation's emerging electoral politics or keep fighting the Americans and the interim government with his ragtag army of militant and well-armed followers.
The cleric's cease-fire order appeared to be holding in Sadr City on Monday despite an intrusion by American soldiers. After a day's respite, a force from the First Cavalry Division pushed back into the district, with an Abrams tank and four Bradley fighting vehicles sat ominously on the central avenue as dozens of Army marksmen peered from adjacent rooftops.
But the streets still bustled, and the militias did not fire rocket-propelled grenades or detonate roadside bombs, as they often have. Young men who said they were occasional fighters instead spent the day directing traffic. They had been instructed by leaders not to attack the Americans, despite what they regarded as a severe provocation.
Mr. Sadr's ability to forge a new path may well depend on the outcome of the talks that began here on Sunday, centering on the disposition of Mahdi Army fighters and weapons in Sadr City, which is home to 2.5 million Shiite Muslims and has been a scene of frequent deadly clashes.
"All the Iraqi people are waiting to see what will happen in these talks," said Sheik Kareem al-Bakhabi, who heads the tribal leaders of Sadr City and is negotiating with the government alongside Mr. Sadr's personal envoy.
The sticking point, Sheik Bakhabi and others said, was the demand by the government and the American military that the militias hand in their weapons, especially rocket-propelled grenades and potential bombs, like old artillery shells, with which they have repeatedly attacked American patrols.
The government's main negotiator has been the national security adviser, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, but Prime Minister Ayad Allawi has been closely involved, officials said. After spending hours with Mr. Sadr's agents on Sunday, American commanders said they had stayed out of the talks, clearly hoping to portray any agreement as among Iraqis.
Mr. Sadr's aides say it is unreasonable to expect fighters to give up their rifles because these are privately owned. "Don't most families in America keep a weapon?" Sheik Bakhabi asked.
It appeared that the government might relent on collecting all rifles, but serious disagreement continued Monday night over the heavier weapons held by the militias.
Sheik Bakhabi declined to describe the two sides' positions but said, "If we gave our rocket-propelled grenades to the government, but then they broke their promises, we couldn't get them back again."
In Sadr City on Monday, armed fighters were seldom visible on the streets, but there was little doubt who was in control. When a stranger shows up, a neighborhood captain of the Sadr organization quickly offers a challenge. A signed note from a militia official or a local tribal leader is usually enough to pass muster. Posters everywhere depict Mr. Sadr.
In talks with a foreigner on Monday, several traditional tribal leaders in Sadr City - men whose influence may have been undercut by Mr. Sadr and his fighters - were reluctant to criticize him. They expressed the wish above all that the Americans would clear out and let Iraqis solve their own problems.
"The Americans come in here shooting, and it has made the people want revenge," said Sheik Jadoa Abdul al-Masary, a clan leader in the northeast corner of Sadr City.
"My basic advice to the Americans is to leave this area," he said, furiously fingering a string of plastic beads. "There's no oil, no gold, just poor families. What's the reason for coming in here and making trouble?"
Sheik Jowad Maawi al-Maham, the elderly tribal head of a nearby neighborhood, said: "Our people were happy to see Saddam go. But after they entered Iraq, the Americans changed the deal."
"They used excessive force and called the Iraqi people terrorists," he said. "We haven't seen security or democracy or reconstruction."
He fully understood, he said, why young men from his neighborhood rushed to Najaf in recent weeks to fight the invaders and defend Mr. Sadr.
But as the sheik walked foreign visitors to their car, a telling exchange occurred, perhaps a hint of power-jostling to come in Sadr City and other Shiite parts of Iraq.
A young Sadr captain rushed up and peremptorily asked the visitors what they were doing here. The sheik angrily shoved the man away, shouting, "Leave them alone; these are my guests!"
-------- israel / palestine
Twin Bus Bombings in Israel Kill at Least 15 and Wound Dozens
August 31, 2004
By STEVEN ERLANGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/31/international/middleeast/31CND-MIDE.html?pagewanted=all&position=
BEERSHEBA, Israel, Aug. 31 - Six months of relative quiet in Israel were exploded in dramatic fashion today, as two suicide bombers blew up two buses 100 yards apart in this southern town, killing at least 16 people, including a 4-year-old, and wounding more than 100 others.
Sixteen of the wounded were school-age children; 18 people remained hospitalized, three in critical condition and five in serious condition, Israeli hospital officials said.
A trip to market on the last day before the school year starts ended with shattered families, the main street of Beersheba dotted with glass, pencils, schoolbooks, groceries, bank cards, purses and body parts. A book in Russian lay on the tarmac; a plastic bottle of laundry detergent was holed by shrapnel, leaking on the cloth covering one of the victims.
The two suicide bombers were also dead, the head of one lying on the bloody floor of bus No. 6, next to a mound of human limbs, onions, grapes and shreds of clothing, while forensic experts and Orthodox medical workers who collect human remains for burial stepped carefully around it.
Three medics carefully took the body of a young woman through the empty window of a bus, her head tilted backward, long black hair covering her scorched face and neck.
The last successful bombing in Israel was in July, when an off-duty soldier died at a Tel Aviv bus stop. But today's bombing, claimed by the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, was the worst in Israel in nearly a year; a suicide bomb attack on a restaurant in Haifa in October 2003 killed 21 people. In March of this year, another double suicide bombing in Ashdod killed 10 workers in the city's port.
Hamas said that today's attack, believed by the Israelis to have been initiated from the nearby West Bank city of Hebron, was in retaliation for the Israeli assassinations in Gaza of two of its leaders, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, its founder, and his successor, Abdel Aziz Rantisi.
In Hebron, Hamas put out a leaflet, saying: "If you thought that the martyrdom of our leaders would weaken our missions and discourage us from Jihad, then you are dreaming." In Gaza, praise for the "heroic operation" was heard from the loudspeakers of some mosques.
In Israel, the attack produced an expected measure of indignation, resolution and fear, with calls for the government to ignore the rulings of the Israeli Supreme Court and continue to build the separation barrier between Israelis and Palestinians without regard to anything but security.
Retaliation was likely, and there were reports tonight that Israeli forces have surrounded the house of the two suspected suicide bombers, whose names were said by Israeli radio to be Ahmed Qawasmeh and Nasim Muhammad Ali Jaabari. Israel, like the British in Palestine and Malaysia, has a policy of demolishing the houses of those who attack it.
The Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, met tonight with his security cabinet, pledged that Israel "will continue fighting terror with all its might" and said the bombings would have no effect on his plan for unilateral withdrawal from Gaza.
Both buses, No. 6 and No. 12, left the central bus station at nearly the same time, 2:55 p.m., full of people who had been to the central market. When bus No. 6, an older model, exploded, Yaacov Cohen, driving bus No. 12, had the presence of mind to open the doors of his bus and tell people to get out. Some did in the half a minute before the bomber on Mr. Cohen's bus blew himself up.
Mr. Cohen told Israeli radio: "I saw the blast and I knew this must be a terrorist for sure! I don't know what prompted me to do this, but I opened the bus doors and people began to get off the bus, then I heard a huge blast, I couldn't believe it, it was amazing; I didn't realize it was on my bus. I looked at myself and saw I was all right, but when I looked back at the passengers I saw such painful sights."
Leonid, who was on bus No. 12, told Israel radio that he stayed to watch, but was only wounded slightly. "I saw four people lying on the floor," he said. "But I hadn't seen anything suspicious."
At the scene, the Israeli public security minister, Tzahi Hanegbi, said the attacks in the south proved that Israel's controversial security barrier was working where it has been completed in the north. "There is a reduction of 50 percent in terrorist attacks," he said. "The fence is already making a difference. It's not a secret. Where there's a fence there is little or no terrorism, and where there is no fence we hope to fix it."
Yuval Steinitz, the Likud chairman of the parliament's foreign and defense committee, said: "It's stupid to build half a fence with many holes," and he criticized the Israeli Supreme Court for urging the military to take into consideration the impact on Palestinian lives and land before continuing with parts of the barrier. "The court decision was unreasonable and irresponsible," he said, saying that Palestinians "could always be compensated later, after the fence is built, saving lives."
The Gaza disengagement issue was irrelevant, Mr. Steinitz said. "We had terrorism before, and unfortunately we'll have terrorism afterward. Don't forget that the Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in 1964, three years before we occupied the territories."
The new police chief, Moshe Karadi, said, "The work on the fence has come to a halt as a result of appeals made to the Supreme Court."
Court or no court, the area between Hebron and Beersheba was considered less vulnerable to terrorism, army officials said tonight, and the barrier there was never scheduled to be begun until 2005, once the area around Jerusalem was complete. There are likely to be more attempts to strike Israel in the south, one official said, "because it's easier."
Palestinian militants will continue to try to retaliate against Israel, and to circumvent the new, tight restrictions on movement that the barrier represents. Early this morning, a Palestinian was arrested trying to enter Israel from Gaza through the Erez checkpoint. The man was found to have explosives sewn into his brown boxer shorts.
Leaders of the Palestinian Authority condemned the suicide bombings and called for a resumption of peace talks. "The Palestinian interest requires a stop to harming all civilians so as not to give Israel a pretext to continue its aggression against our people," Yasir Arafat said in a statement. The Israeli government generally considers Mr. Arafat's condemnations of terrorism to be half-hearted and insincere, and blames him for refusing to negotiate seriously when the last Labor government and the Clinton administration were in power.
At the scene, Doug Moke, 20, an American studying public policy at Ben Gurion University here, said he was in shock. Speaking near an impromptu memorial to the dead - a scrawled sign and 12 candles, protected from the wind by halves of a cardboard box, Mr. Moke said, "It's one thing to read about it in the newspaper, but it's another thing to see them actually scrape the body parts off the street."
-------- russia / chechnya
Putin Says Link Probed Between Al Qaeda, Chechens
August 31, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-russia.html
SOCHI, Russia (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday investigators were probing a possible link between al Qaeda and Chechen rebels widely believed to have downed two Russian passenger planes a week ago.
At a meeting with the leaders of France and Germany, Putin also defended Sunday's election in the turbulent Chechnya region, which was denounced by rights groups as stage-managed, and by Washington and the European Union as seriously flawed.
Chechens had voted ``with their feet'' to stay in the Russian fold and finally find peace, Putin said.
An al Qaeda-linked group had claimed responsibility for the near-simultaneous attacks that killed 90 people, Putin told a news conference after talks with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and French President Jacques Chirac.
``This (claim) must still be proved by our security forces. But it is a fact that explosions occurred aboard two Russian airliners and if a terrorist organization linked to al Qaeda has claimed responsibility for this it confirms the link between specific forces in Chechnya and international terrorism.''
But in a Turkish television interview due to be aired on Wednesday, Putin appeared to confirm the al Qaeda link.
``Two civilian aircraft were brought down by terrorist organizations with links to al Qaeda,'' an advance transcript of the interview with CNN Turk quoted Putin as saying. ``There are links with international terror.''
Last week an Islamist group calling itself Islambouli made an Internet claim its followers brought down the two planes on August 24 to avenge Russia's killing of Muslims in Chechnya.
Moderate Chechen separatists accused Russia's special forces of spreading misinformation and denied any link to the group.
Khaled Islambouli was an Egyptian army officer who assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981. He was a member of the Jihad group, part of which integrated into al Qaeda in the 1990s under Ayman al-Zawahri, the top aide to Saudi-born leader Osama bin Laden.
RUSSIAN UNITY
Putin, who sent Russian troops back to Chechnya in 1999 to cement his image as a strong leader ahead of his own election, has repeatedly said ``foreign terrorists'' were driving a rebel insurgence in the region on Russia's southern rim.
He told Chirac and Schroeder he would never allow Russia to splinter and its territorial integrity was beyond question.
``What is important is that Russia's position has been expressed clearly by Mr. Putin. A political solution is necessary and that is what Russia wants,'' Chirac said.
Both foreign leaders voiced support for the election where Putin's man, Alu Alkhanov won a landslide victory, thanks largely to a one-sided publicity campaign.
But the EU executive Commission condemned the poll.
``We were not ourselves observing in these elections but we have noticed persistent reports that the day before yesterday the presidential elections were neither free nor fair,'' spokeswoman Emma Udwin said Tuesday.
``And we will now press for early parliamentary elections in Chechnya, and for those elections to be held in a way that can be regarded as free and fair,'' she told a briefing in Brussels.
Human rights groups said the election amounted to an appointment from Moscow.
In his trademark brusque style, Putin cut off a French journalist who asked whether the election was fair.
Later he mounted a lengthy defense: ``It is clear to us all that you cannot drag voters by force to a polling station ... When people don't want to vote they stay away. This is of course is known as voting with one's feet,'' he said.
``Turnout in Chechnya was high, about 80 percent. The vast majority of voters backed one candidate, Mr. Alkhanov ... this tells us simply that the Chechen people have made their choice.''
-------- spies
FBI Interviews Senior Defense Officials in Probe of Analyst
Investigators Looking At Contacts With Israelis
By Bradley Graham and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, August 31, 2004; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A47521-2004Aug30?language=printer
The FBI has interviewed several senior Pentagon officials in recent days in connection with an investigation of a Defense Department analyst who is suspected of providing classified documents to Israel but has been cooperating with investigators for several weeks, government officials said yesterday.
Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary for policy, and Peter Rodman, assistant secretary for international security affairs, are among those who met with FBI agents on Sunday and Monday about the case, which has focused on contacts between a lower-level Pentagon analyst, Lawrence A. Franklin, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), officials said.
Higher-ranking government officials have also been briefed about the FBI investigation in recent days, including Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Powell was briefed over the weekend during a telephone call by James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, and told his senior aides at a meeting yesterday to "cooperate in any way with any requests that might come from the investigators."
U.S. government officials familiar with the Pentagon interviews, who declined to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the case, characterized them as an attempt by FBI investigators to determine whether Franklin received authorization from any superior to engage in the actions that investigators are probing. The FBI has been forced to accelerate its investigation since the case broke into public view through media reports Friday.
Franklin is suspected of having passed classified information -- including a draft presidential directive on U.S. policy toward Iran -- to AIPAC, the major Israeli lobbying group in Washington, which in turn may have passed it to Israel. AIPAC and Israel have denied the allegations.
Law enforcement officials said yesterday that federal prosecutors in Alexandria were closer to filing charges in the case and that Franklin -- who has been cooperating with FBI agents from the Washington field office -- could be among those arrested. It was not clear whether Franklin would agree -- or be allowed -- to plead guilty to a lesser charge in exchange for cooperation.
"It appears they're wrapping this thing up, and so they were checking with the chain of command to make sure no one had authorized him to do any of this," said one official, who spoke on the condition he not be identified further.
Franklin, who has not responded to repeated requests for comment at his office and home, first came to the attention of the FBI more than a year ago, when he showed up at a lunch between an Israeli diplomat and an AIPAC official that was being monitored by FBI counterintelligence agents, two law enforcement officials said yesterday.
Law enforcement and defense officials have declined to say what that original investigation was about, and whether it continues apart from the Franklin probe or has been abandoned. One law enforcement official who has been briefed on the Franklin case said it is part of a broader FBI inquiry, but the official declined to elaborate.
Defense officials familiar with the case emphasized yesterday that the number of those at the Pentagon approached by the FBI should not be taken as a sign that the investigation was widening. They characterized the meetings as part interview, part briefing session, used by FBI authorities not only to gain information for their probe but also to brief senior defense officials about the status of the case, which came as a surprise to many at the Pentagon.
The list of those interviewed over the past several days runs from William J. Luti, who heads the section on Near East and South Asian affairs where Franklin is assigned as a desk officer on Iran, through Rodman and Feith. All told the FBI that they did not give Franklin permission to give AIPAC or the Israelis any of the material at issue, officials said.
At the Pentagon, before Friday's disclosure, only Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz and department lawyers had been informed of the investigation, which has been underway for more than a year, officials said.
"The FBI is focused on one suspect," one official said. "The briefings and interviews that they're doing have been a routine part of their probe -- not a broadening of the list of suspects."
At the same time, several defense officials said the FBI has not told them everything that investigators have learned in the course of the probe, making it difficult to be certain of the outcome.
The premature disclosure has caused problems for investigators, according to numerous law enforcement officials speaking on the condition of anonymity because the probe is ongoing.
"This has severely hampered their investigation," one law enforcement official said. "It's impossible to tell what might have been lost because of all this."
An Israeli official in Washington said the embassy has not received any formal notice from U.S. authorities that there is an investigation of the Franklin case. He also said reports of the case were growing increasingly exaggerated.
"Given the level of dialogue between the United States and Israel, this makes little sense," the official said. "We basically pick up the phone and call when we want to discuss policy. We have formal and transparent and open discussions on all these issues. It's not like there are differences on these subjects."
Naor Gilon, the embassy's top political diplomat, who has been identified in several media accounts as having met with Franklin, said in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Maariv published yesterday, "My hands are clean."
"All my activities are well within the parameters of accepted diplomatic norms and procedures," he said, adding that he was concerned the scandal will affect his work in Washington: "Everyone would think twice now before talking to me."
In Jerusalem yesterday, Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom told members of the Israeli cabinet that there was no truth to allegations of spying and said the embassy "never deviated either from diplomatic norms or from the good and open dialogue between Israel and the U.S.," according to an official account of his statements.
An American not in government who was interviewed by the FBI last week described the line of questioning as a "fishing expedition" that did not include any mention of Franklin or Iran.
The FBI appeared more concerned about people this person knows who were looking for access to intelligence or classified information.
"I was left startled that in a town of award-winning journalists, law enforcement officials were asking if anyone I knew might be interested in classified information," the person said. "It was a fishing expedition. It was an extremely odd conversation."
Staff writers Molly Moore in Jerusalem and Robin Wright and Jerry Markon in Washington contributed to this report.
--------
F.B.I. Is Said to Brief Pentagon Bosses on Spy Case; Charges Are Possible
August 31, 2004
By DAVID JOHNSTON and ERIC SCHMITT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/31/politics/campaign/31inquire.html
WASHINGTON, Aug. 30 - F.B.I. agents met in recent days with two high-level Pentagon officials to discuss the case of a Defense Department analyst who is suspected of turning over a classified policy document to Israel, a senior official in the department said on Monday.
The two officials, Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, and Douglas J. Feith, the under secretary for policy, were briefed on the case of the analyst, Lawrence A. Franklin, who was a lower-level employee in Mr. Feith's office who specialized in Iranian issues.
The official said that meetings with Mr. Wolfowitz and Mr. Feith were briefings rather than interviews. It remained somewhat unclear whether either man was asked any questions during the meetings about his knowledge of Mr. Franklin's activities.
Mr. Feith met with agents at his home on Sunday, the official said. It was not clear exactly when and where the agents met with Mr. Wolfowitz. The meetings were first reported on Monday by the Associated Press.
Pentagon officials said in a statement on Friday that no one at the Defense Department beyond Mr. Franklin was suspected of any wrongdoing. Neither Mr. Wolfowitz nor Mr. Feith is regarded as having any involvement in the matter other than as potential witnesses because of their familiarity with Mr. Franklin's work.
So far, no charges in the case have been brought, but behind the scenes government lawyers prepared to make the first arrests by issuing a criminal complaint against one or more figures in the case, government officials said on Monday.
A complaint is a relatively quick method of charging someone with a crime. The use of that approach suggested that the government has decided to move quickly to resolve the legal questions in the yearlong national security case rather than wait for indictments after a grand jury investigation.
Mr. Franklin's legal status is unclear. The authorities believe that Mr. Franklin gave a draft policy directive on Iran to officials from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or Aipac, who then provided the information to Israeli intelligence.
Aipac and Israel have denied that they engaged in any wrongdoing. Efforts to contact Mr. Franklin have been unsuccessful, but friends and associates have said he was a highly ethical government employee with little access to senior policy makers who would never have violated the law.
Mr. Franklin has been cooperating with the federal authorities and is thought to be negotiating a deal with the government that could result in leniency in the form of reduced charges in exchange for his information about other people in the case. It is not clear when or even whether he will be charged in the case.
The case has been assigned to the federal prosecutors in Alexandria, Va., in an office that has long experience in prosecuting espionage cases. The office is headed by Paul McNulty, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. A spokesman for Mr. McNulty would not comment on the matter.
Along with Mr. Franklin, two unidentified officials of Aipac suspected of passing information to the Israelis are also under investigation. Their legal status could depend on what information Mr. Franklin has supplied about their activities along with evidence already obtained by physical and electronic surveillance.
Some Justice Department lawyers are said to have expressed reservations about the proposal to make quick decisions about bringing charges, fearing that such a move would force the government to show its hand, disclosing evidence in a case in which investigators have already been forced to move more quickly than they had hoped because news organizations became aware of the inquiry.
Some officials suspect that the case will never reach the level of an espionage matter. Investigators do not fully understand the motivations of two Aipac officials who they believe were in contact with Mr. Franklin. Moreover, investigators have given up their hope of determining whether Israel regarded Mr. Franklin as an asset in a formal intelligence collection operation or as informal source.
Mr. Franklin worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency for most of his government career until he transferred to the Pentagon policy office in the summer of 2001 to deal with Iranian issues. In his current job, he is one of two Iran desk officers who work in the policy office's Northern Gulf directorate. Mr. Franklin is one of about 1,500 employees who work under Mr. Feith in the policy office.
Mr. Franklin is also a colonel in the Air Force Reserve who spent at least one of his annual tours on active duty working in the defense attaché's office in the United States Embassy in Tel Aviv in the late 1990's, defense officials said.
-------- us
Sonar Used Before Whales Hit Shore
Navy Changes Story but Still Denies Responsibility
By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 31, 2004; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47256-2004Aug30.html
The Navy has acknowledged that vessels on maneuver off Hawaii last month used their sonar periodically in the 20 hours before a large pod of melon-headed whales unexpectedly came to shore in the area. The acknowledgment added to an already contentious debate over whether the sound from sonar has been causing marine mammals to strand.
Navy officials said that a review of the July 3 incident indicates that two ships turned on their sonar between 6:45 and 7:10 a.m., by most accounts just before the unusual movement of almost 200 deep-water whales to the shoreline of a Kauai bay. The Navy had said earlier that no sonar was used until more than 90 minutes later, well after the animals came ashore.
Lt. Cmdr. Greg Geisen, the Navy spokesman responsible for information about the maneuver, said a Navy review of the incident still concluded that the ships were either too far from the whales or were using the sonar at the wrong time to cause the mass movement.
"There is no evidence of a relationship here between the sonar use and the whale behavior," he said.
But the newly released information from Geisen and other Navy officials -- that the ships were testing their sonar in preparation for the maneuver on the day before the whales came ashore, and early on the morning of the near-stranding -- has caused some observers to question that conclusion.
"Every time the Navy changes its story, it reduces its credibility on this issue," said Cara Horowitz, a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council, which has sued the Navy over a related sonar issue. "The Navy would be better off spending more time developing commonsense ways to protect whales from sonar and less time denying a connection that is unfortunately been repeatedly shown."
Officials at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which is looking into the incident, said it remains uncertain what caused the near-stranding.
"At this point, we still know very little about what might have made those whales behave so unusually," said Donna Wieting, chief of the Marine Mammal Conservation Division of NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service.
"But saying that sonar played no role might be a premature determination," she said. "Even if we can't establish a clear cause and effect, we're having these coincidences [of unusual and sometimes deadly] marine mammal behavior around sonar, and we have to ask why."
Some marine mammals come to shore naturally, because they are following a sick lead animal or trying to avoid predators and such natural occurrences as potentially harmful red tides. Melon-headed whales are relatively small and highly social animals that normally live in deep waters, at least 15 miles from shore. Wildlife officials said it is highly unusual for such a large number of them to come to shore as they did on July 3, although there is one report of a similar mass movement in the 1850s.
The new Navy information about when the sonar was used off Hawaii was first made public in late July, at a meeting of the federal Marine Mammal Commission focused on how to limit the effects of ocean noise on whales and other sea creatures. Rear Adm. Steven Tomaszeski updated the information then, and said the Navy had concluded there was no connection between the sonar use and the unusual whale behavior.
He and Geisen said the July 2 sonar use could not have caused the whales to head into Hanalei Bay because the ships -- four Japanese and two American -- were too far away when the equipment was used. Geisen also said the Navy first learned of the stranding from the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) at 5:30 a.m. on July 3, and not between 7 and 7:30 a.m., as earlier reported, making it impossible for the 6:45 to 7:10 a.m. sonar usage to have harmed the whales.
Wieting of NMFS said, however, that her office has received no reports of a 5:30 sighting, and still believes the whales were first seen after 7 a.m.
Navy officials are adamant about the need for sonar training. They say there is a substantial and growing threat from "quiet" diesel submarines that could menace the United States from coastal waters, and that only active sonar use can detect them. The Navy is planning a sonar training ground in the Atlantic Ocean, off the Carolinas.
Residents and government officials worked throughout July 3 to steer the whales back to open water, and all made it except one newborn calf that died of starvation. Officials say that some of the animals may have died at sea without a trace.
The Hawaii incident is the third significant one involving sonar and marine mammal strandings near the United States since 2000. The stranding of 17 whales of various kinds off the Bahamas in 2000, which resulted in the death of at least six of them, occurred during a major Navy maneuver. Navy officials at first said there was no connection between their exercise and the stranding, but later acknowledged that the loud sound from the sonar had caused the animals to flee ashore.
Another incident occurred off the coast of Washington state last year, where harbor porpoises unexpectedly came ashore after a sonar exercise. The Navy concluded that there was no connection between the two, but NOAA is still reviewing the incident.
The International Whaling Commission said in a report last month that there is "compelling evidence" that Navy sonar is harming some species of whales, but Navy officials dismissed the conclusion as "unscientific."
-------
MP's Attorneys Cite Government Probes
By Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 31, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47258-2004Aug30.html
FORT BRAGG, N.C., Aug. 30 -- Defense attorneys for a military police soldier charged with detainee abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq argued in court Monday that their client was a pawn in a widespread policy of abusive military intelligence procedures, citing two extensive Pentagon investigative reports released last week as evidence that the soldier was following orders.
The argument, on behalf of Pfc. Lynndie R. England, 21, was the first opportunity for lawyers representing seven low-ranking MPs to use the government's own investigations to defend soldiers charged in the abuse case. The two investigations -- one led by a former defense secretary and the other by three Army generals -- identified nearly 50 soldiers who either were involved in abuse at Abu Ghraib or did not report it. Both reports also criticized top commanders in Iraq for leadership failures, and the Army's report found that military intelligence interrogators asked MPs for help using harsh -- and in some cases illegal -- tactics against detainees.
That conclusion contradicted early Pentagon statements that the MPs were acting alone when they sexually humiliated and beat detainees amid the chaos at the prison outside Baghdad. It also bolstered England's contention that the acts shown in a series of shocking digital photographs -- in which she is posing cheerily next to naked detainees or holding one detainee at the end of a leash -- were not her idea.
"This was not a rogue band of soldiers," said Richard A. Hernandez, England's lead civilian attorney, arguing that the reports show the techniques were widespread. "This is clearly something that went beyond this individual and beyond these accused."
Later in the hearing, Hernandez was more direct: "She was working under military intelligence interrogation procedures," he said.
Military prosecutors immediately fired back, the first time they have argued publicly that the focus should be on the individuals who abused detainees and their allegedly illegal actions, not on the environment that led them to do it. Capt. John Benson called the defense's line of argument "completely ridiculous" and said the court is "consistently being fed these ridiculous lies."
Benson said that England's alleged wrongdoing is the only thing that should be on the table, and that her actions were clearly illegal. He said that even if military intelligence had given her an order to abuse, she had a duty to disobey the unlawful orders.
"The defense wants to pull us very far afield from the charges in this case," said Benson, one of three prosecutors presenting the case. "If 44 other people were included in this conduct, then 44 people should be brought to justice."
England's proceeding -- called an Article 32 hearing -- is designed to investigate the 19 charges against her, similar to a civilian grand jury. England, who is nearly eight months pregnant, could face 38 years in prison if convicted of all charges, which include appearing in sexually explicit photos with Spec. Charles A. Graner Jr., whom officials have called a ringleader in the abuse.
In brief testimony on Monday, a soldier from England's unit who has pleaded guilty to abuse charges said that Graner and Staff Sgt. Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick had told him that military intelligence soldiers instructed them to "soften up" detainees.
Spec. Jeremy C. Sivits, who is serving a one-year sentence at Camp Lejeune, N.C., testified by telephone that he took photographs of some of the abuse one night because he did not want the other soldiers to dislike him. He said Graner ordered him not to talk about what he saw, adding that he believed the soldiers had received orders to break the detainees.
"They had never lied to me about anything before, so I figured that's what they were told to do," Sivits said. Last week, Frederick's lawyer said his client would plead guilty in the case, and the Associated Press quoted his lawyer Monday as saying those charges would be assault, maltreating Iraqi detainees and committing an indecent act.
Another soldier at the prison, Kenneth Davis, who held the rank of sergeant until he left the military in July, testified Monday that he witnessed some abuse at the hands of military intelligence (MI) personnel, including one episode in which MI soldiers told Graner to strip a detainee. He said he reported the abuse to an MP lieutenant, who told him to stay out of MI's way as they did their job.
Davis also said he received an e-mail from Graner a few weeks ago that included a document from a superior praising Graner's work. The letter said that Graner was "doing a fine job" and that he was receiving "many accolades from MI, specifically from Lt. Col. [Steve L.] Jordan" -- the second-highest-ranking MI officer at the prison. Davis also said that Graner at one point told him that he was uncomfortable following MI orders to yell at detainees and do things that he considered morally or ethically wrong.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts / tribunals
Talks Continue in Hamdi Case
Ruling Means Combatant May Soon Be Released
By Jerry Markon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 31, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47265-2004Aug30.html
A federal appeals court yesterday cleared the way for negotiations to continue over the release of Yaser Esam Hamdi, making it likely that the man captured in Afghanistan will not appear in an open federal courtroom before he is sent home to Saudi Arabia.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit ruled that a federal judge in Norfolk lacks jurisdiction for several more weeks to hear the case of Hamdi, who has been held in Navy brigs since he was captured in Afghanistan in 2001. The order led to the cancellation of a federal court hearing that the judge had scheduled for today.
The possibility of a court appearance by Hamdi has hung over the case since the Supreme Court ruled in June that as a citizen of the United States, he must have access to the U.S. legal system. It would have been a highly symbolic moment in the war on terrorism, because neither Hamdi nor a second U.S. citizen held as an enemy combatant -- Jose Padilla, who is accused of plotting to set off a radiological bomb in the United States -- has been seen publicly since being detained.
Negotiations over Hamdi's release are continuing, and the two sides have until Sept. 27, the date that U.S. District Judge Robert G. Doumar in Norfolk will take over the case. But Hamdi's release is likely to come sooner, people familiar with the negotiations said yesterday.
Hamdi was captured with pro-Taliban forces on the battlefield in northern Afghanistan in November 2001. He was brought to the Navy brig in Norfolk and then the Navy jail at Charleston, S.C., after it was learned that he was born in Baton Rouge, La. Hamdi has spent most of his life in Saudi Arabia and his family lives there.
The military designated Hamdi an enemy combatant and held him incommunicado, but his case entered the legal system after federal public defender Frank W. Dunham Jr. read about his confinement in news accounts.
Prosecutors and Hamdi's attorneys revealed this month that they were nearing a deal and that Hamdi's release was "imminent." The government said in court papers filed with the 4th Circuit on Friday that the "outlines of an agreement . . . are in place with only the details remaining for final resolution." The papers said the agreement calls for Hamdi to be released and transported to Saudi Arabia; for him to renounce any claim to U.S. citizenship; and for him to agree to some travel restrictions, including a ban on travel to the United States.
In the papers, the government was seeking to overturn a series of orders by Doumar in which the judge set the court hearing. He also ordered prosecutors to provide documents justifying Hamdi's detention and instructed the head of the South Carolina naval brig where Hamdi is being held to explain why he still is in solitary confinement.
The judge's actions "improperly infringe upon Executive Branch functions" and would lead to an open court hearing for someone designated an enemy combatant during wartime for the first time "perhaps in our nation's history,'' the papers said.
Doumar, in an order issued earlier Friday, had said that the government was violating Hamdi's constitutional rights by holding him in solitary confinement without an adequate explanation.
But in its order yesterday, the 4th Circuit accepted the argument of prosecutors that Doumar would not have jurisdiction to hear the case until Sept. 27.
Hamdi's case evolved into a major test in the war on terrorism, with the Bush administration refusing to allow Hamdi to challenge his detention and holding him for much of the past two years without access to a lawyer.
A series of lower court decisions led to the Supreme Court ruling, in which all the justices except Clarence Thomas rejected the Bush administration's contention that the federal courts could exercise no supervision over such a case.
-------- homeland security / national intelligence
ON THE ROAD
When Checked Bags Are Checked by Thieves
August 31, 2004
By JOE SHARKEY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/31/business/31road.html
Since broaching the subject of baggage thefts two weeks ago, I've heard from about 200 airline passengers who reported that belongings like designer sweaters, expensive dress shirts, silk underwear, watches and shoes have been stolen from their checked bags.
I've also had nearly a dozen e-mail messages from passengers saying that knives - in particular Swiss Army penknives - have disappeared from checked bags.
Yikes! Not only are the airport thieves well dressed, now they're armed, too!
By the way, it seems that people become attached to their Swiss Army knives. Mary Ruth Holder of Austin, Tex., said that she and her husband, Phillip, had their cherished Swiss Army knife stolen from a checked bag last year on a trip to Sacramento, Calif. "This was not just any Swiss Army knife, but one my husband and I purchased in Switzerland on our big trip to Europe just after we got married," she said.
"That knife went with us on every trip we made over the next 30-plus years," she wrote. "We were heartbroken to have it stolen like that."
Some readers have suggested that items stolen from passengers' checked bags were probably being sold on eBay. Several pointed out with suspicion that used Swiss Army knives are readily available on eBay, where one regular seller advertises a selection of knives as having been "confiscated from airline passengers."
What's up with that? If you believe the dealer, nothing. "I buy this stuff legally," that dealer replied by e-mail to a query about where he gets the knives. In fact, most airports hold auctions to sell prohibited items confiscated from carry-on bags - more than 11 million items so far, including more than 3 million knives, according to the Transportation Security Administration.
As noted here, just since June more than 20 T.S.A. baggage screeners at three major airports have been charged with stealing from checked bags. T.S.A. screeners routinely open and inspect a certain percentage of checked bags each day, looking for possible explosives.
What's being done? Not a lot, it seems. Few airports have adequate theft-prevention surveillance systems in place. In fact, some airports have recently eliminated video surveillance systems in baggage-handling areas because of costs.
Late last year, the T.S.A. announced a program that would allow passengers to lock checked bags with special locks, available through retail shops. These locks supposedly can be opened by an inspector using a code or a special tool, and then relocked as the bag continues into the hands of airline baggage handlers. But problems have dogged the program. Many passengers have complained that T.S.A. inspectors, unable to open the locks under the prescribed system, simply break them to get access. And of course the locks have no value if some T.S.A. screeners are doing the stealing.
The airlines and the T.S.A. have not yet been able to agree on a formula for assessing liability for claims, since checked bags pass through the hands of employees from both.
"There was a period of about a year where the T.S.A. and airlines were involved in very serious negotiations" to work out a formula for calculating liability, said Diana Cronin, a spokeswoman for the Air Transport Association. "But the talks really didn't go anywhere," she added. Now, the T.S.A. is trying to work out agreements with individual airlines rather than the industry as a whole, she said.
Both the T.S.A. and the airlines accept claims from passengers. But while some readers told me they've had their claims settled to their satisfaction, usually by airlines, many more said they have gotten a bureaucratic runaround, with some claims languishing for a year or more.
Any hopeful signs? Nope. In fact, the liability issue may become even cloudier because airports will soon be able to replace T.S.A. screeners with screeners employed by private security companies working under contracts financed by the federal government.
Federal officials insist that replacing federal employees with workers from private enterprise doesn't portend a return to the bad old days at airport checkpoints when, as a recent T.S.A. study said, "employee background checks were inadequate; training was minimal, as were wages; and screener turnover rates were high."
Starting in mid-November, airports can apply to opt out of federal security screening and instead select a private security company whose workers would receive the same training as T.S.A. screeners and who would be supervised at each airport by a federal security director. The T.S.A. says transitions from federal screeners to privately employed ones will begin about mid-2005.
Since November 2002, five airports (the largest is San Francisco International) have employed private screeners in a two-year pilot program. A study of that program, released recently by the T.S.A., found little difference in performance between the private screeners at the five airports and the federal screeners at the rest of the nation's 440 airports.
"There is no evidence that any of the five privately screened airports performed below the average level of the federal airports," said the study, which also found that costs for using private workers "were not significantly different" from those at airports with federal screeners.
Not everybody was impressed, though. "They performed about the same, which is to say equally poorly," Clark Kent Ervin, the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, said in testimony before the House aviation subcommittee in April.
Several readers pointed out, meanwhile, that thefts from baggage raise questions larger than losing a shirt or a knife. Kathleen Mock was among them. If thieves are managing to get stolen goods out of checked bags and out of baggage handling areas with such apparent ease, doesn't that describe a broken system that might "just as easily allow someone to place dangerous items in a checked bag?" she asked.
On the Road appears each Tuesday. E-mail: jsharkey@nytimes.com
-------- human rights
Rights expressed in New York, repressed in D.C.
August 31, 2004
Washington Times
By Adrienne Washington
http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20040830-105429-2871r.htm
Can you name the five freedoms in the First Amendment?
That tricky question was posed to a National Press Club audience last week during a panel discussion on "The State of the First Amendment" hosted by the Newseum and the First Amendment Center and shown on C-SPAN.
I proudly blurted the answer without reference: The freedoms are religion, speech, press, peaceable assembly and petition the government for redress of grievances. (I had better be able to rattle off the answer since I base the curriculum of my introduction to journalism class at Catholic University around the principal freedoms guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution.)
All you have to do is look to New York City this week during the Republican National Convention to see a whole lot of folks exercising their First Amendment rights in and around Madison Square Garden.
Lost in the political protesting and posturing, however, will be a small contingent of residents from the capital of the free world. Why? They do not have the most precious and basic of democratic freedoms - the right to full voting representation.
Yes, D.C. residents can now vote for president of the United States. Yes, they can vote for local legislators, too. Yes, they have limited sway in the judiciary since local crimes are the jurisdiction of federal prosecutors. But D.C. residents have no vote whatsoever in either chamber of Congress.
Any congressional representative or senator, not elected by the overburdened taxpayers of the District, reserves the right to reject or accept all local legislation. Congress also can force any legislation it wishes upon D.C. taxpayers regardless of how those residents feel about it. Worst of all, Congress can determine how local taxpayer dollars are spent, and they can hold up dollars to the District by attaching unpopular, politically explosive riders to the city's budget, which must be approved by these overlords.
This week you're guaranteed to hear a whole lot of speeches about fighting for and preserving "American freedom and democracy," except for the District of Columbia.
Amid all the "holleration, hateration in the danceree," as singer Mary J. Blige characterizes foul folks, who act out at parties and ruin everybody's fun, the American people will not hear a peep about the hypocrisy that permeates the lack of voting rights in the District during the GOP's convention.
That's because the 34-member local Republican delegation was not able to get the voting rights issue placed in the national Republican platform.
Last week, the national party rejected a bid to include language that supports congressional representation in the House only. Still, as a consolation prize, the platform endorses legal and budget autonomy for the District and the possibility of electing its own attorney general.
D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton yesterday issued a statement criticizing the Republican platform committee's omission at the same time she thanked the local party delegation, especially D.C. Republican Party Chairman Betsy Werronen, for attempting to have the voting rights language included.
Mrs. Norton, who spoke on the enfranchisement issue during the Democratic convention in Boston in July, said the Republicans "missed an opportunity to reinforce their claim that their foreign policy, particularly the invasion of Iraq, is motivated by concern for democracy."
"The claim to promote democracy worldwide loses its credibility when taxpaying residents, men and women who have served in all the nation's wars, and other D.C. citizens are denied democratic rights at home," she said.
Take note, getting voting rights for the District is a part of the Democratic platform. But don't forget that while the Democrats were in control of Congress for years after the home rule charter was adopted in the 1970s, they didn't remedy the D.C. disenfranchisement fiasco either.
In December, Tim Cooper, who heads up D.C.-based Worldright (an international human rights advocacy organization) finally succeeded in getting the International American Commission on Human Rights to rule on Case No. 11.204, Statehood Solidarity Committee v. the United States. It found the U.S. government in violation of internationally recognized human rights standards by denying the residents of the District representation in their own national legislature through duly elected representatives on general terms of equality.
I repeat: The birthright of all Americans is to be bestowed with the unalienable freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, which includes the right to vote - except if those Americans happen to call the nation's capital, the District of Columbia, home.
Sadly, I bet if the Americans freely protesting, picketing, parading and partying for one cause or another in New York this week were asked a tricky trivia question about voting rights in the nation's capital, most would be at a loss to readily rattle off an appropriate answer.
-------- immigration / refugees
Iraqi Charged With Lying on Petition For U.S. Citizenship
By Mary Fitzgerald
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 31, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47263-2004Aug30.html
An Iraqi-born man was arrested yesterday for allegedly lying on his application to become a naturalized U.S. citizen and failing to disclose that he was a member of the former Iraqi intelligence service.
Sami Khoshaba Latchin, 57, pleaded not guilty in U.S. District Court in Chicago to making false statements to immigration officials in July 1999.
The charges relate to his application for citizenship, on which he failed to include Saddam Hussein's Baath Party when asked to list organizations to which he belonged, according to the indictment.
He also did not disclose that he had been a member of the Iraqi intelligence service, the Mukhabarat, for five years before July 22, 1999, and he told immigration authorities that three overseas trips he made between 1994 and 1997 were vacations. The indictment alleges that he took the trips abroad to meet his handler and receive payment for his services.
Latchin, who was born in Dohuk, Iraq, and has lived in the United States for about 11 years, is not alleged to have compromised national security, U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald said in a statement.
He was "an Iraqi intelligence spy sent to this country to be a sleeper agent," with instructions to "assimilate himself into our culture," Assistant U.S. Attorney James M. Conway said after the hearing, the Associated Press reported.
Randall Samborn, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office in Chicago, declined to discuss why Latchin was being arrested five years after making the alleged false statements. But he said shared intelligence had led to the arrest.
"A root of this investigation was the sharing of intelligence files with criminal law enforcement agents and prosecutors based on FBI directives that agents should review intelligence files," Samborn said.
Latchin faces as long as 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine if convicted. A federal judge ordered him detained until a bond hearing Sept. 7.
-------- police
Census Bureau Revises Sensitive Data Policy - NYT
August 31, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-security-census.html
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. Census Bureau has said it will no longer assist law enforcement and intelligence agencies with special tabulations on ethnic groups and other ``sensitive populations'' without first getting senior bureau officials' approval, the New York Times reported on Tuesday.
The shift comes a month after the newspaper said the bureau had provided population data on Arab-Americans to the Department of Homeland Security, including their ancestry and the cities and postal areas in which they live.
While such data sharing is legal so long as the data do not identify individuals, civil liberties and Arab-American groups called it a breach of public trust and improper use of Census Bureau power to aid law enforcement. They likened it to steps taken against Japanese-Americans in World War II.
The Times said the bureau already had rules requiring senior-level approval for special tabulation requests for which the bureau is paid.
The new procedure, effective immediately, extends that rule to informal, unreimbursed requests from government agencies, private organizations and individuals, and covers many demographic groups including racial and ethnic minorities, the disabled and non-U.S. citizens, the newspaper said.
``We recognize that simply making sure we obey the law may not always be enough to ensure that people trust us,'' C. Louis Kincannon, the census director, told the newspaper. ``Perception also affects how people view and cooperate with the census. This is an interim step to restore trust.''
``Overall, the policy change is welcomed as a positive step,'' Helen Halab Samhan, executive director of the Arab American Institute Foundation, told the newspaper.
A month ago, the Times said Homeland Security's Customs and Border Protection division received census data that, among other things, provided ZIP code breakdowns and sorted Arab-Americans by country of origin.
-------- POLITICS
-------- propaganda wars
On the Campaign Trail Bush Tones Down Talk of Winning Terror War
In Tour of Swing States on Way to GOP Convention, President Elaborates on Goal of Fighting
By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 31, 2004; Page A06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47707-2004Aug30.html
TAYLOR, Mich., Aug. 30 -- President Bush said in an interview broadcast Monday that the war on terrorism cannot be won in the traditional sense of victory, one in a series of statements he has made in the past few days to lower public expectations and mitigate political problems before he reintroduces himself to the nation Thursday night.
Bush has given a spate of interviews in the run-up to this week's Republican National Convention in New York, and he was asked by Matt Lauer of NBC's "Today" show, in an interview taped Saturday in Ohio and shown on the convention's opening day, if the war on terrorism can be won.
"I don't think you can win it," Bush said. "But I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world. Let's put it that way."
The president said he would accomplish this goal with a two-pronged strategy, which he said is to find terrorists "before they hurt us" and to "spread freedom and liberty."
Bush has made optimism a major theme of his campaign, and Democrats pounced on the remark to label him defeatist. Bush aides said the president was simply being realistic about what the United States and its allies can achieve in going after terrorist groups. But the president was far more audacious in the past in pledging to lead the war on terrorism.
Last month in Pennsylvania, he said he had "a clear vision and a strategy to win the war on terror." In February, he said, "We're going to win the war on terror." During his now-famous speech aboard an aircraft carrier declaring the end of major combat operations in Iraq, Bush said: "The war on terror is not over, yet it is not endless."
But as he prepares for what is certain to be a bruising fall campaign against Democratic challenger John F. Kerry, Bush is amending or recasting some of his most important policy positions and has begun to acknowledge for the first time that he made some mistakes.
Bush said at a news conference in April that he could not think of a single mistake he had made in confronting Iraq, yet he said in an interview with the New York Times last week that he made a "miscalculation of what the conditions would be" in postwar Iraq. In this week's issue of Time magazine, he said he asks more questions about intelligence to "make sure that the analyst who came up with that information has gotten additional input."
In explaining Bush's latest comments on whether the war on terrorism is winnable, White House press secretary Scott McClellan told reporters on Air Force One that Bush was trying to make the point that it may not be possible to win the war "in the conventional sense."
"I don't think you can expect that there will ever be a formal surrender or a treaty signed, like we have in wars past," McClellan said.
Kerry's running mate, Sen. John Edwards (N.C.), issued a strong response to Bush: "This is no time to declare defeat."
Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee and a Kerry supporter, said in a conference call that he hoped Bush had misspoken. Biden said the war "is winnable -- it needs a strategy."
"To suggest that the war on terror is not winnable is absolutely, totally, thoroughly unacceptable," Biden said.
Bush answered questions for 90 minutes at a roundtable staged by his campaign in Nashua, N.H., twice the length of many of his events. Then he spent the night on the road -- a rarity for this homebody president -- in Michigan as he continued a tour of swing states en route to the convention.
In keeping with efforts at the convention to portray a softer side of Bush, he told the crowd in New Hampshire that no administration "has empowered more women in positions of power than the Bush administration has done." Asked about negative perceptions of him, Bush told WMUR-TV in Manchester, "Perhaps it's because I've made some hard decisions."
Bush continued rehearsing and polishing his acceptance speech, in which he plans to promise a better and more hopeful America through improvements to education, health care and retirement, and to bill himself as a transformational leader intent on reforming government at home and spreading liberty abroad.
Road-testing themes from the address, Bush reformulated a line from his speeches in the 2000 campaign when he challenged the notion that some pupils cannot learn and should simply be moved through the system. "That's not good enough for a better America," he said. "That's not good enough for a hopeful America."
As prominent Republicans continued to gossip about rumors -- flatly denied by the White House -- that Vice President Cheney would be replaced on the ticket at the last minute, Bush said he had talked to Cheney in the morning. "He's getting ready to crank it up," Bush said. Then he added a standard line about Cheney that is designed to denigrate Edwards: "I admit it, he's not the prettiest face on the ticket. I didn't pick him for his looks. I picked him because of his experience, his judgment and because he can get the job done."
In an accusation immediately denied by the Kerry campaign, Bush said in Nashua, "What I'm telling you is we're not going to nationalize health care under George W., and my opponent is, see. That's the difference. My opponent will; we won't."
Opponents rarely get called on at the carefully screened "Ask President Bush" events, but the president was asked to defend his assertion in 2002 that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is "a man of peace." Bush said Sharon "is defending his country against terrorist attacks, just like we will."
----
The Delegates Publication of Personal Information Probed
Web Site May Have Violated Law Prohibiting Voter Intimidation, Subpoena Says
By Susan Schmidt
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 31, 2004; Page A08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47761-2004Aug30.html
The Secret Service is investigating the publication of personal information about GOP convention delegates on a Web site, prompting complaints from the American Civil Liberties Union that the government is infringing upon the free-speech rights of political dissidents.
Federal authorities have subpoenaed Calyx Internet Access seeking to learn the Internet address of the person who posted a spreadsheet on Aug. 18 containing the names of about 1,600 delegates, along with their home addresses, phone numbers and e-mail addresses and the hotels at which they are staying in New York City.
The probe is directed at possible criminal violations of the law that prohibits voter intimidation, according to a subpoena to the Internet service provider dated Aug. 19. ACLU officials said Calyx has provided the government with names of four administrative contacts who run nyc.indymedia.org, the Web site that published the delegate information.
Matt Toups, a systems administrator for the site, said the Secret Service and the U.S. attorney's office, which requested the grand jury subpoena, are trying "to put heat on people who are involved in dissent." He said the activists who write in to his Web site and who have thronged protest marches in New York "should know more about who the delegates are so they can engage in picketing or letter writing."
Neither the U.S. attorney's office in New York nor the Secret Service would comment on the investigation.
The Aug. 18 posting said that "as a small contribution to the anti-RNC efforts, today we are releasing a list of delegates to the 2004 Republican National Convention. Our objectives are to: Supply anti-RNC groups with data on the delegates to use in whatever way they see fit."
Numerous postings on the nyc.indymedia.org site yesterday lauded protesters' efforts to target delegates. "Wherever they went, across the breadth of Manhattan island, RNC delegates were taunted, mocked, and generally harassed by activists and ordinary New Yorkers alike," one posting on the site said.
The ACLU publicized the subpoena on its Web site yesterday under the headline "Secret Service Investigation Aims To Chill Speech and Intimidate Protesters." Attorney Ann Beeson said that while the Web list was posted anonymously, it was derived from information that is publicly available.
Beeson said she knows of no security threat created by publication of the information about delegates. "Taunting them and mocking them is a time-honored form of political protest," she said.
The Aug. 18 Web article said the list information was gathered "from a variety of sources." It encouraged readers to e-mail additions to the list, promising that "contributed info will remain anonymous of course," and added that "we encourage the use of encryption."
--------
A Swift Shift in Stories
By Dana Milbank
Tuesday, August 31, 2004; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47542-2004Aug30.html
This is a story about Swift boats and FastShip.
Four days ago, retired naval Rear Adm. William L. Schachte Jr. seconded accusations made by the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth seeking to discredit Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry's record in Vietnam. But since then, Democrats have discovered that Schachte is also a long-standing supporter of President Bush and a lobbyist whose client FastShip Inc. recently won a $40 million grant from the federal government.
On Aug. 27, Schachte issued a statement saying that after he "avoided talking to media" for months, he was reluctantly stepping forward to challenge Kerry's award of one of his Purple Hearts on Dec. 2, 1968. "Kerry had himself in charge of the operation, and I was not mentioned at all," he said. "He also claimed that he was wounded by hostile fire. None of this is accurate. I know, because I was not only in the boat, but I was in command of the mission."
Kerry has said Schachte was not on the boat that night, adding another mystery to the disputed events of 36 years ago. But other events are not in dispute. According to a March 18 legal filing by Schachte's firm, Blank Rome, Schachte was one of the lobbyists working for FastShip on issues such as the effort to win funding for a new marine cargo terminal. On Feb. 2, Philadelphia-based FastShip announced that it would receive $40 million in federal funding for the project.
In addition, David Norcross, Schachte's colleague in the Washington office of Blank Rome, is chairman of this week's Republican convention in New York. Records also show that Schachte gave $1,000 to Bush's 2000 and 2004 campaigns.
The Kerry campaign alleges foul play. "It's amazing what a $40 million government contract can do for your memory," Kerry spokesman Chad Clanton said, noting that Schachte did not challenge Kerry's Purple Heart while describing the incident in an interview last year. Schachte is listed as "of counsel" on Blank Rome's Web site, but a receptionist at the firm said he is retired, and messages left for him and a firm spokesman were not returned.
At least they didn't sing and dance.
The daughters of both President Bush and John F. Kerry were unexpectedly greeted with boos along with the expected cheers Sunday night at the MTV Video Music Awards in Miami. But the Bush daughters, Barbara and Jenna, got the better of the exchange because their remarks had been videotaped in advance, and MTV turned down the audience noise while broadcasting their remarks. Alexandra and Vanessa Kerry were not so lucky. Startled and angered by the boos, the Kerry daughters "scowlingly delivered their please-vote talking points," according to the Village Voice. The Kerrys were less provocatively dressed, the magazine reported (it used a naughty word to describe the Bush twins' appearance), but all the women were jeered, "apparently because they weren't LL Cool J."
Freud would undoubtedly have much to say about recent pronouncements coming from the White House.
A White House transcript of Bush's remarks at a rally in Perrysburg, Ohio, on Sunday shows the president giving a strange excuse for his tardiness. "I'm sorry we were running a little late, there was a slight weapons condition," the White House transcript says. Those in attendance believe Bush said "weather condition," but it is possible that Bush still has Saddam Hussein's elusive WMDs on his mind.
Then there was Vice President Cheney's speech in Pennsylvania on Aug. 25, when he appeared to confuse Kerry with the other Massachusetts senator, arch-liberal Edward M. Kennedy. "I listened to what Senator Kennedy had to -- excuse me, I get them confused sometimes," Cheney said to laughter, "I listened to what Senator Kerry had to say in Boston . . ."
But the Web site Spinsanity.com notes that Cheney made the very same "mistake" on Aug. 14 in Nevada while discussing votes on intelligence. "Not even Senator Kerry -- excuse me -- not even Senator Kennedy would vote for it. Sometimes I get them confused." Spinsanity wondered if Cheney is "intentionally confusing the names of two people to blur the distinctions between them."
Unfriendly skies continue for the White House press corps. After learning two weeks ago that the company flying the media charter, Primaris Airlines, is a two-month-old outfit with one plane and some dubious history, reporters were given a new thrill taking off from Andrews Air Force Base yesterday morning. Edwin Chen of the Los Angeles Times described a "gut-wrenching evasive maneuver -- a hard right, followed by a quick dip, then a sharp ascent." The pilot said the excitement, all within moments of takeoff, was ordered by air-traffic control. Either that or the co-pilot was tickling him.
--------
Gilligan slams BBC over Kelly affair 'panic'
scotsman.com
ANITA SINGH
31st August 2004
http://news.scotsman.com/uk.cfm?id=1013002004
JOURNALIST Andrew Gilligan last night launched a wide-ranging attack on the BBC governors over their handling of the Dr David Kelly affair.
The former reporter for Radio 4's Today programme said the governors' weakness in the face of pressure from the government had "turned a crisis into a disaster".
BBC news journalism in general, and the Today programme in particular, have suffered as a result of their capitulation to the government and Alastair Campbell, he said.
Since quitting his job in the wake of the Hutton Report, Gilligan has reserved most of his criticism for the government, but this time the governors were his target.
In a lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival, Gilligan admitted he had made mistakes in his Today programme report on the "sexed up" Iraq dossier. "Now, of course, I don't deny my part in the crisis. But a far greater part was played by the lethal combination of Lord Hutton's utterly unbalanced judgment and the overreaction of the BBC governors," he said.
"To put it bluntly, the governors panicked. By sacking Greg Dyke they turned a crisis into a disaster. But unlike the rest of us, who've been held to account for our failings, the governors are still here.
"The official policy of the BBC is, and remains, that the governors can do no wrong. I think we've seen a slightly worrying attempt since Hutton for the BBC to try to rationalise what the governors did and find reasons to justify the error they made."
The new BBC complaints system, brought in as a result of Hutton's findings, is a worrying development, Gilligan said.
"To make your new guiding principle a presumption that the complainant is right, as the BBC intends to, is pretty dangerous," he said. "It's a gold-embroidered welcome mat for any government or corporate bully."
Of the Today programme, he added: "I can't say I've noticed any diminution in the robustness of the interviewing, but the programme seems to have lost at least half of its reporters and there seems to be a trend of moving story-breaking journalism off daily news programmes and into less watched or heard programmes in current affairs. This strikes me as a pity."
Gilligan also attacked the government over the Iraq dossier, accusing it of "45-carat shamelessness". And he described Lord Hutton's report as "a landmark of judicial incompetence and bias".
-------- us politics
In N.Y., GOP Hails Its Chief McCain, Giuliani Open Convention
By Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 31, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46362-2004Aug30.html
NEW YORK, Aug. 30 -- Led by former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and Arizona Sen. John McCain, Republicans opened their national convention here Monday night with an invocation of President Bush's leadership after the terrorist attacks, a powerful defense of his decision to invade Iraq, and sharp criticism of Democrat John F. Kerry as an indecisive and unreliable leader.
Meeting less than three miles from Ground Zero, where terrorists destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, the Republicans used their opening-night program to recall the powerful mix of emotions that galvanized the nation in the hours and days after the attacks. The speakers portrayed Bush as steady and unwavering, a president who, in Giuliani's words, would have the United States "lead, rather than follow" in the global war to defeat terrorists.
The theme of Monday evening's session was the "courage of a nation," and it featured tributes to Medal of Honor winners and a salute to armed forces personnel. But the thread that tied it together was Sept. 11, and near the end of the evening, three relatives of victims of the attacks offered moving reminiscences of those who were killed. They were followed by a poignant rendition of "Amazing Grace."
As Bush campaigned his way toward New York, the first Republican national political convention in the city's history bore all the earmarks of how those attacks have transformed the country. There was an unprecedented show of police force on the streets, and the area around Madison Square Garden was heavily fortified with barriers and checkpoints -- to guard against possible terrorism and to keep at bay the protests that formed part of the backdrop for the week's official events.
Ever since the Republicans selected New York as their convention site, Democrats have challenged them not to exploit the tragedies of Sept. 11 for political gain. Republicans have said that they were not exploiting the attacks, but that the events of that day changed the nation and Bush's presidency, and it would be irresponsible not to talk about them.
Giuliani, who guided New York through the chaos of Sept. 11, invoked his own memories of that searing experience, including the sight of a man jumping out of one of the top floors of the burning World Trade Center, to praise Bush as a "rock solid" president no matter how much he is demonized by critics or the media. "Some call it stubbornness," Giuliani said of Bush's leadership. "I call it principled leadership. President Bush has the courage of his convictions."
McCain, Bush's rival from the 2000 primaries, has become one of his staunchest allies in the reelection campaign. He praised Bush's decision to depose former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, saying the war was "necessary, achievable and noble," even though no weapons of mass destruction have been found, because Hussein was determined to acquire them eventually.
"Our choice wasn't between a benign status quo and the bloodshed of war," he said. "It was between war and a graver threat. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Not our political opponents. And certainly not a disingenuous filmmaker who would have us believe that Saddam's Iraq was an oasis of peace when in fact it was a place of indescribable cruelty, torture chambers, mass graves and prisons that destroyed the lives of the small children held inside their walls."
McCain was referring to filmmaker Michael Moore, whose anti-Bush polemic "Fahrenheit 9/11" has earned tens of millions of dollars since its release earlier in the summer and who has been toasted by Democrats for helping to energize opposition to the president. When McCain referred to Moore, who was in the hall at the time, the delegates interrupted the speech, first with boos and jeers and then chants of "Four more years." A smiling McCain quipped, "That line was so good, I'll use it again" as he went on to complete the quotation.
Giuliani also painted an unflattering portrait of Kerry as a politician with no clear or consistent vision, saying Kerry "has made it the rule to change his position, rather than the exception."
Recounting Kerry's opposition to the resolution authorizing the Persian Gulf War in 1991, his 2002 vote authorizing Bush to invade Iraq and his later vote against an $87 billion authorization for military and reconstruction spending in Iraq and Afghanistan, Giuliani brought a roar of laughter from the convention floor when he said, "Maybe this explains John Edwards's need for two Americas -- one is where John Kerry can vote for something and another where he can vote against exactly the same thing."
As Republicans opened their convention, Bush stirred up fresh criticism of his leadership when he said in an interview on NBC's "Today" show that he doubted that the United States could actually win the war against terrorism. "I don't think you can win it," he said. "But I think you can create the conditions that those who used terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world."
Bush's comment drew a swift reply from the Kerry campaign, with Edwards, the vice presidential candidate, accusing Bush of declaring defeat, saying the Democrats have a plan to win that war. White House officials moved just as quickly to explain that the president meant that the war on terrorism is unconventional and will produce no surrender ceremonies or treaties and that the United States must be prepared for a generation of vigilance.
The GOP convention opened a day after a huge group of protesters had snaked through the streets of Manhattan denouncing Bush's leadership and the war in Iraq. But the city was relatively quiet as delegates arrived for the first session of the day Monday morning.
The delegates quickly ratified the party's conservative platform, which devoted considerable space to the war on terrorism and Bush's leadership, reaffirmed the party's opposition to abortion and ratified Bush's call for a constitutional amendment to prohibit same-sex marriage.
The platform provided sustenance to party conservatives, whose energy and support in November remain crucial to Bush's prospects for reelection. But the prime-time lineup the first two nights, which also includes California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, put the spotlight on prominent Republicans who disagree with Bush and the conservatives on many social issues.
Their role in the carefully orchestrated convention program underscored the importance of reaching beyond the conservative base to undecided and swing voters.
Bush's advisers believe that those voters, many of whom disapprove of the GOP's conservatism on social issues, can be wooed and won by highlighting the president's leadership on terrorism and contrasting him with Kerry.
McCain and Giuliani brought unique credentials to that task Monday night. McCain, who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, commands respect across the political spectrum. He has freely criticized the president on domestic and foreign policy, but has been solid in support of Bush on terrorism and Iraq.
Giuliani broke with his party in 1994 and endorsed then-Democratic Gov. Mario Cuomo over George E. Pataki. Giuliani earned universal praise for his calm and steady leadership on Sept. 11, and in the weeks after as New York grappled with the devastation.
The two argued that the terrorism aimed at New York and the Pentagon forced the country to confront the reality of terrorist activities and provided an unavoidable test for this generation of Americans. "There is no avoiding this war," McCain said. "We tried that and our reluctance cost us dearly."
McCain said Bush and Vice President Cheney deserve a second term because of the resolve they showed not only after Sept. 11, when the world supported trying to destroy the al Qaeda terrorist network by invading Afghanistan, but also when much of the world opposed the invasion of Iraq.
"We need a leader with the experience to make the tough decisions and the resolve to stick with them, a leader who will keep us moving forward even if it is easier to rest," McCain told the delegates at Madison Square Garden. Later he said of Bush, "He has been tested and has risen to the most important challenge of our time, and I salute him. . . . He has not wavered. He has not flinched from the hard choices. He will not yield and neither will we."
McCain, who calls Kerry a friend, did not mention the Democratic nominee by name and urged Republicans to see Democrats not as enemies "but comrades in a war against a real enemy."
But Giuliani repeatedly criticized Kerry in his speech, saying the senator from Massachusetts had shifted positions repeatedly on critical foreign policy issues. "I respect him for his service to our nation," Giuliani said. "But it is important to see the contrast in approach between the two men: President Bush, a leader who is willing to stick with difficult decisions even as public opinion shifts and goes back and forth, and John Kerry, whose record in elected office suggests a man who changes his position often even on important issues."
He called Bush a president who will aggressively attack terrorists at the source and thereby reduce the risk of terrorism at home. "John Kerry's record of inconsistent positions on combating terrorism gives us no confidence that he'll pursue such a determined difficult course," he said.
Giuliani was preceded by Deena Burnett, whose husband, Thomas E. Burnett Jr., was aboard United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania after the passengers thwarted the hijackers; Debra Burlingame, whose brother Charles Burlingame III served as captain of American Airlines 77, which crashed into the Pentagon, and Tara Stackpole, whose husband, Timmy, a firefighter, was killed at the World Trade Center.
Burlingame said when she saw the gigantic American flag hanging from the crash site at the Pentagon a few days later, "my heart fell into a million pieces and it brought back the sweet memory of my brother as a 9-year-old Cub Scout selling American flags door to door."
With the major broadcast networks providing limited coverage, convention organizers staged the evening as their own TV show, complete with roving reporters who were interspersed with the main speeches and who interviewed upbeat delegates who praised the president and hailed the service of U.S. troops abroad.
Following a system first used four years ago, the Republicans began the process Monday of nominating Bush and Cheney for a second term, beginning a roll call of the states that will continue through the week until all states have been recorded.
Researcher Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.
--------
On the Campaign Trail
Edwards Cites Failed Foreign Policy
By Vanessa Williams
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 31, 2004; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47532-2004Aug30.html
WILMINGTON, N.C., Aug. 30 -- Sen. John Edwards charged Monday that President Bush had badly mishandled the war in Iraq and practically abandoned Afghanistan as part of a foreign policy that has alienated many U.S. allies and increased the threat from terrorists.
In his first major speech on foreign policy and national security since becoming the Democratic vice presidential nominee, Edwards accused Bush of a "failure of leadership" and said that only a new administration headed by Sen. John F. Kerry could repair the damage to those countries and improve the U.S. image abroad.
"Because of this administration's failures, Iraq is a mess today. . . . And we need new leadership to fix it," Edwards told a receptive home-state crowd of about 1,000 at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.
"We have seen what this administration's approach does to our standing in the world," Edwards said in a speech that coincided with the opening of the Republican National Convention in New York. "It isolates us. It costs us respect from our allies. It means we must face these new challenges alone." Edwards noted that Bush acknowledged in an interview this week that he had miscalculated the postwar insurgency in Iraq. "He believes that he may have won the war too quickly," Edward said, prompting chuckles from the audience.
He also complained that the Bush administration had failed to heed the warnings of the commission that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists attacks. He said the administration is "standing on the sidelines" while North Korea and Iran advance their nuclear programs.
The North Carolina Democrat said he and Kerry would create a "nuclear whistleblower initiative" that would offer protection to scientists who expose illegal weapons programs. He said a Kerry administration would lobby for more NATO assistance in Afghanistan, where he said the Taliban and drug lords were beginning to reassert control in the war-devastated country.
He also called for a national intelligence director and additional resources to help the United States protect its ports, airports and borders and provide better equipment for local communities to respond to terrorist attacks. Edwards said that three years after the Sept. 11 attacks, "New York still has too many unmet needs."
He cited inadequate equipment for communications, unpreparedness for biological or chemical attacks and lax security at the region's ports.
Edwards, who usually engages audiences with a friendly smile and folksy speaking style, adopted a more serious tone. Republicans have often challenged the one-term senator's credentials on national security and foreign policy. "When it comes to our place in the world, we have been led right down a hole. . . . And the only way out of this hole is with a new president and a new approach," he said.
Edwards added, "It matters who stands at the helm of our nation. . . . The hard truth is that the world does not look up to our president this way anymore."
Edwards was introduced by a rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark.
Clark acknowledged about 60 veterans seated on the stage and asked veterans in the audience to stand. One of those who rose was Martha Clayton, 81, of Wilmington, who served in the Navy during World War II. Afterward, she said Edwards's speech was "very well done. He's a dynamic person."
Vietnam veteran Herman Rozycki also said he thought Bush was misguided in invading Iraq and should have remained focused on Afghanistan.
"I was so devastated by 9/11, I tried to reenlist," said Rozycki, 61, of Wilmington, who said he wanted to go to Afghanistan to help bring al Qaeda to justice. "But not Iraq, because there was really no imminent danger" of weapons of mass destruction there, he said. "If they would have let the United Nations stay there for another six months or more, they wouldn't have found anything -- which is what's been proven."
Rozycki said he voted for Bush in 2000 but changed his registration to Democrat about a month ago. On Monday he wore a Veterans for Kerry button on his shirt.
--------
THE PRESIDENT
Bush Cites Doubt America Can Win War on Terror
August 31, 2004
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/31/politics/campaign/31bush.html?pagewanted=all&position=
NASHUA, N.H., Aug. 30 - President Bush, in an interview broadcast on Monday, said he did not think America could win the war on terror but that it could make terrorism less acceptable around the world, a departure from his previous optimistic statements that the United States would eventually prevail.
In the interview with Matt Lauer of the NBC News program "Today," conducted on Saturday but shown on the opening day of the Republican National Convention, Mr. Bush was asked if the United States could win the war against terrorism, which he has made the focus of his administration and the central thrust of his re-election campaign.
"I don't think you can win it," Mr. Bush replied. "But I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world."
As recently as July 14, Mr. Bush had drawn a far sunnier picture. "I have a clear vision and a strategy to win the war on terror," he said.
At a prime-time news conference in the East Room of the White House on April 13, Mr. Bush said: "One of the interesting things people ask me, now that we are asking questions, is, 'Can you ever win the war on terror?' Of course you can."
It was unclear if Mr. Bush had meant to make the remark to Mr. Lauer, or if he misspoke. But White House officials said the president was not signaling a change in policy, and they sought to explain his statement by saying he was emphasizing the long-term nature of the struggle.
Taken at face value, however, Mr. Bush's words would put him closer to the positions of the United States' European allies, who have considered Mr. Bush's talk of victory simplistic and unhelpful.
Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Air Force One that Mr. Bush was speaking about winning the war "in the conventional sense" and that his comments underscored the reality that ridding the world of terrorists would take decades.
"I don't think you can expect that there will ever be a formal surrender or a treaty signed like we have in wars past," Mr. McClellan said. "That's what he was talking about. It requires a generational commitment to win this war on terrorism."
Mr. Bush's comment came only a few days after an interview with The New York Times in which he acknowledged a "miscalculation'' about the evolution of the insurgency in Iraq, saying no one could have anticipated that a swift military victory would allow forces loyal to Saddam Hussein and others to melt into the cities and attack American forces.
But Democrats clearly saw those comments, and the one broadcast Monday, as missteps they could exploit, much as Mr. Bush has attacked Mr. Kerry's remark that he would have authorized the president to invade Iraq if he had known then what he knows now about Iraq's weapons.
"After months of listening to the Republicans base their campaign on their singular ability to win the war on terror, the president now says we can't win the war on terrorism," Senator John Edwards, Mr. Kerry's running mate, said in a statement. "This is no time to declare defeat. It won't be easy and it won't be quick, but we have a comprehensive longterm plan to make America safer. And that's a difference."
Mr. Edwards elaborated on his criticism in an interview Monday with the ABC program "Nightline.'' Mr. Edwards said the battle against terrorism was "absolutely winnable" with the right leadership.
"Now, in order to win it," Mr. Edwards said, "we have to do the right thing, which includes some of the things that I spoke about today: reform our intelligence operations, more human intelligence inside these terrorist cells, being more aggressive about the developing nuclear threats in North Korea and Iran, and different plans - a more effective plan in Iraq, a more effective plan in Afghanistan.''
Mr. Kerry, who has limited his campaigning this week, was asked at his vacation home in Nantucket whether the war on terror could be won. He replied, "Absolutely."
Analysts said Mr. Bush's comment reflected both foreign policy and political realities, and appeared intended in part to emphasize that even a striking breakthrough, like the capture of Osama bin Laden, would not by itself assure the nation's security.
"From the start it's been clear that we're dealing with an ideological struggle that affects a region, and not just a single movement or group," said Anthony Cordesman, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
With Mr. Kerry having trouble getting across how his approach would have been different from Mr. Bush's approach to Iraq, Mr. Bush can show some flexibility in his thinking, Mr. Cordesman said. "Bush can afford to move to a more nuanced ground precisely because Kerry has been unable to occupy it," he said.
Former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York sounded more optimistic about overcoming terrorism when he addressed the convention Monday evening. "We'll see an end to global terrorism,'' he said. "It may seem very difficult and a long way off. It may even seem idealistic to say that. But it may not be as far away and as idealistic as it seems.''
Mr. Bush's comment was broadcast as he campaigned in Michigan and New Hampshire on his record on fighting terrorism, part of a leadup to his acceptance speech at the Republican convention in New York on Thursday night. In a part of the NBC interview that was broadcast during the weekend, he also commented on his National Guard service in the Vietnam War and the Navy service of Mr. Kerry, a decorated combat veteran. "I think him going to Vietnam was more heroic than my flying fighter jets,'' Mr. Bush said. "On the other hand, I served my country. Had my unit been called up, I would have gone.''
In New Hampshire, Mr. Bush got an unusually tough question at an "Ask President Bush" event at Nashua High School North, forcing him to detour from his message of the day and defend Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel.
"How can Ariel Sharon be a man of peace, as you've said, if he causes death and torture among innocent Palestinians?" demanded a young woman who said she had recently spent two weeks in Libya.
"That's a great question," Mr. Bush responded. "First of all, Ariel Sharon is defending his country against terrorist attacks, just like we will." Mr. Bush then blamed the Palestinians for holding up progress in the Middle East. "Ariel Sharon is a duly elected official in a democracy," the president said. "We would hope that the Palestinians would have that same kind of democracy."
Richard W. Stevenson contributed reporting from New York for this article.
-------- ENERGY
Politics, Oil and 9/11
Address of Michael C. Ruppert for the Commonwealth Club - San Francisco
Tuesday August 31, 2004
From The Wilderness
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/PDF/Commonwealth.pdf
Thank you for that gracious introduction.
Let me begin by thanking Pat Lambkin for inviting me to be here today and for her efforts to arrange - what is certainly for me - a historic landmark in my 26 years of work to bring to light information - vitally important, life and death, information - which has been virtually ignored by the mainstream media. This information has also remained completely unaddressed or even publicly acknowledged by those elites in both America and the world that determine and shape public policy and direct the course of human events.
I say this with the full and complete awareness that I am tonight standing partially in the midst of those elites and that those elites are listening.
I have long been aware of the stature and prestige of the Commonwealth Club, for its ability to attract some of the world's most influential speakers; also for its reputation for bi-partisanship; and perhaps most importantly for its willingness to present conflicting or opposing viewpoints.
My appearance here tonight no doubt marks a departure for the Club even from that inspiring record.
With today's remarks I intend to establish a whole new definition of "conflicting viewpoint."
I applaud the Club's record and am mindful that, had it not been for the dangerous and epochal historical events taking place around us, I would never have been afforded such an opportunity as this. Because clearly, my writing and public speaking have demonstrated that where we are today is exactly where I said we would be if something fundamental was not changed about how we both view the world, and how we interact with it.
Before preparing this speech, of course, I did some research to see who had spoken here before.
I was happy to see that I follow on the heels of such notables as former CIA director James Woolsey and two members of the Kean Commission on 9/11: Slade Gorton and Richard Ben-Veniste. These are not people who I would call "kindred spirits." I also saw the name of Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. These are also leaders of whom I have been sharply critical in the past and will be sharply critical of in the future.
I also saw names like John Kerry, John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich, Joe Lieberman and Madeleine Albright.
My record as a journalist and lecturer shows that I have not embraced, and have indeed been fiercely critical of, most of these opinion makers. While I am more inclined to find kinship with Dennis Kucinich, I also state categorically that no political leader who does not address the real causes of the problems facing us will ever be considered by me as a true kindred soul - or as a political champion for the future.
Such praise and endorsement I offer only to the likes of my good friend, the honorable Cynthia McKinney of Georgia, and to former assistant Secretary of Housing Catherine Austin Fitts. I heartily recommend them to the Club as potential speakers for future events.
I also saw the names of spiritual leaders and independent or international voices like Al Franken, Jane Goodall, Arianna Huffington, the Rabbi Michael Lerner, Norman Mailer, Ted Turner, Hans Blix and King Abudullah II.
In looking at this long list of prestigious speakers I was very aware that the life's work of Michael Ruppert did not place me in any category that fit with these people. For the most part - I have long considered them to be part of a serious problem rather than pathfinders to its solution.
That realization brought to mind what was perhaps the single most memorable line from the 1992 Vice-Presidential debates in which Ross Perot's running mate, retired Navy Admiral James Stockdale - a Medal of Honor winner and Vietnam POW - asked, "who am I?" And "why am I here?"
I am not prone to over-analyzing such opportunities. I have always said that, if given the chance, I would walk into the lion's den or the devil's bedroom to make my case and that is what I intend to do today. This is as close as I have come thus far to either. For here, I can see tonight parts of the elite whose consciousness and attitudes must be changed if humanity is to even partially meet the challenges that are "in our faces."
For any of you who might be either lions or devils I hope that you have had a good meal recently and also that you have checked your pitchforks at the door. I also implore that your ears be open and your minds accessible.
For those of you who realize that a global crisis is casting its shadow across the entire planet, and who wish better to understand its dynamics, I am here to offer some of my experience and learning as a "mapmaker" who has no allegiance to partisan politics or any desire except to tell you the truth, no matter how disquieting it may be, or how divergent it may be from whatever cherished beliefs you may hold; from whatever cosmological principles you may believe in; or from whatever economic or other personal interests you may have.
A spiritual teacher once told me that my problem was not that I thought highly of myself; not that I thought lowly of myself; but that I thought constantly of myself. In that vein, let us all tonight try to think of issues larger than ourselves, our personal interests, our wants, or our fears.
Viewed from almost any perspective; be it geopolitics, economics, climate, spreading warfare that threatens to unleash a global orgy of bloodletting, rising energy prices, documented energy shortages, fresh water shortages, biological warfare, the repression of civil liberties at home and abroad, or any of a dozen other issues; planet Earth and all of its inhabitants are in great danger. This is not a time to think of national security. It is a time to think of planetary security - indeed, of planetary survival.
And I must recognize also that I would never have been afforded this incredible opportunity to speak to you today, had it not been for the consistent support and generosity, the research and activism, the courage and disenfranchisement, and above all the loyalty of all those people who have helped my newsletter, "From The Wilderness", grow in just six years from 68 to more than 15,000 monthly readers worldwide. Today our web site at http://www.fromthewilderness.com averages more than 12,000 visitors a day.
These include members of Congress, business and economic leaders, professors at more than 30 universities, respected journalists, and political leaders in many countries.
If anything had an impact on my thinking as I prepared these remarks it was my awareness that these loyal supporters are the people on whose behalf I presume to speak. It is their voice and their commitment which has given rise to my voice. I could not and would not be here were it not for them.
But I also, if I may be that bold, presume to speak for all mankind, regardless of religion, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual preference, bank account or any other artificial distinction.
This is no time to be shy.
This is not a time when men and women of good conscience can afford to be politically correct or be guided by anything except a willingness to discard every "cherished" belief or opinion which stands in the way of an accurate and fearless appraisal of the world around us.
As I have said so many times in the last three years while delivering more than 40 lectures on the truth and lies of 9/11 and peak oil, in eight countries: the events in the five years following the attacks of September 11th will determine the course of human history for the next 500 years or more.
I can only assume that the record of my lectures and writings, wherein I have come to be known as a man who backs up everything he says and presents it to his audiences for verification, had something to do with how the board of governors reached its decision to extend this invitation.
For many years now not a single fact, citation or piece of evidence, presented in my lectures, or in my best-selling video, "The Truth and Lies of 9/11" has been proved inaccurate.
I am known as a man who does not expect people to take his word on faith but who asks and even expects people to challenge his research, evaluate it, and reach their own conclusions.
Operating under the assumption that the past credibility of my research has produced a record which got me in the door at the Commonwealth Club, I am today, in the interest of time and for maximum impact, going to dispense with my customary slide presentation. I fully expect that anyone who challenges or disagrees with my assertions will go out and do some checking for him or her self.
Almost everything I present to you today will be fully documented - by means of approximately 1,000 endnotes - in my soon to be released book, "Crossing the Rubicon: the decline of the American Empire at the end of the Age of Oil." The book, published by New Society Publishers, should be available for sale from the FTW web site within 2-3 weeks and it will go on sale nationally, through all major outlets, by mid-October.
September 11th
Both here in the United States and around the world I am not alone in believing that the attacks of September 11th were facilitated, orchestrated and executed by the United States government. However, there is a great deal of misunderstanding and conclusion jumping about these assessments that is not supported by the evidence. I was trained as a police officer and detective, and for many years now I have been an effective investigative journalist because I have adhered to strict evidentiary and investigative standards.
The 9/11 attacks were the result of deliberate planning and orchestrated efforts by identifiable leaders within the U.S.
Government, and the energy and financial sectors, to see a Pearl Harbor-like attack which would provide the American empire with a pretext for war, invasion and the sequential confiscation of oil and natural gas reserves, or the key transportation routes through which they pass. 9-11 was a premeditated murder and in my book, and here tonight, I will name some of the suspects who committed the crime. In my book I will show you overwhelming evidence of their guilt which I would be proud and confident to place either before a district attorney or a jury.
Historically, the assertion that the United States government would orchestrate an attack upon American interests has ample precedent. Former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski described the need for such an event in several places in his 1997 book "The Grand Chessboard." It was I who first brought this book to world attention in late 2001. The Project for a New American Century made reference to the need for such an attack in its 2000 report "Rebuilding America's Defenses." Declassified top secret documents disclosed by author James Bamford in his book, "Body of Secrets" tell us that in 1962 the Joint Chiefs had approved a plan called "Operation Northwoods" which was a covert operation that would shoot down American aircraft and stage attacks on American military facilities with the intent of blaming those attacks on Fidel Castro and prompting the subsequent US invasion and occupation of Cuba.
The declassified Northwoods documents can be seen and downloaded from the FTW web site. But once viewed, they cannot be ignored.
Therefore it cannot be said that such a thing has never been conceived of or carried out by American political leaders.
From the sinking of the battleship Maine, to the Gulf of Tonkin, and indeed, even to Pearl Harbor itself, history today provides us with abundant documentation of US government complicity in varying degrees in similar attacks. The book "Day of Deceit" and other records from the National Archives have shown us that the Roosevelt Administration had broken the Japanese codes well before December 7th, and that a conscious decision was made to allow the attack on Pearl Harbor to take place. This was intended to provide the necessary impetus for US entry into the second world war at a time when Great Britain was buckling under the military blitzkrieg, aerial bombing and u-boat warfare of the Third Reich.
Crossing the Rubicon is a detective story that gets to the innermost core of the 9/11 attacks. It places 9/11 at the center of a desperate new America, created by specific, named individuals in preparation for peak oil: an economic crisis like nothing the world has ever seen.
Simply defined, peak oil is that moment in time when global oil - and natural gas - production begins an irreversible and permanent decline which will not yield or give way regardless of how much money and effort is spent trying to change it.
With demand still accelerating rapidly in both the US and the industrialized and developing world, the arrival of peak oil literally describes a point of overshoot in which economic and ecological stasis - let alone growth - becomes unsustainable. Over the course of the last three years, "From The Wilderness" has pioneered the investigation and documentation of this crisis. With the invaluable research and writing of FTW's energy editor Dale Allen Pfeiffer, a geologist, and through my own travels and research in the US, France and Germany, we have drawn upon the expertise of those with decades of experience in the oil industry (many of whom have left it), independent scientists and academics having no connection to the energy industry, business and financial leaders, international bodies such as the international energy agency, and actual world events to draw attention to what is the single most serious threat facing mankind in its entire history.
It is my belief, as I speak to you tonight that planet Earth is - plus or minus one year - at the all time peak of hydrocarbon energy production. Simply put, we have used half of all the oil God placed on this planet, and every drop, every barrel extracted from the ground from now on will become progressively more expensive, of lesser quality, and much harder to obtain. We have picked the low hanging fruit. As all experts agree, peak is something we will only know of a certainty as we view it in our rear view mirrors.
The attacks of September 11th, 2001 were the pretext for the American, and to a lesser extent, the British and Israeli empires to begin seizing, by force, those energy supplies needed to sustain their power, hegemony (whether regional or global) and their teetering economies.
The attacks of 9/11 were accomplished through an amazing orchestration of logistics and personnel. Former National Security Aide and counter-terror advisor Richard Clarke has postulated that such a conspiracy could never be kept a secret. Too many people would have been involved, he said.
On this point I disagree with Clarke completely and point to the fact that the Manhattan Project, which developed the atom bomb and the Stealth fighter project, were both successfully kept secret. The numbers of people involved in both of those projects far exceeded the numbers of people within the United States government required to execute 9/11.
However, I must express a deep debt of gratitude to Clarke.
For in his book "Against All Enemies" he left a compelling trail of bread crumbs, contradictions to the sworn testimony of our highest leaders, and hard evidence which provided me with much of the information needed to say that not only can I name some of the US government officials who perpetrated those attacks, I can also identify the prime suspect - or Mr. Big - who played the command role in executing them. Mr. Clarke is not a stupid man and I can only conclude that he left those crumbs for others to find.
All of this of course stands in stark contrast to the report of the so-called independent Commission which investigated those attacks. Before I start naming names, let me first take a look at why absolutely nothing presented by the Kean Commission can, or should, be accepted without challenge.
The Kean Commission
A recent story in the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported on how one US Senator, Mark Dayton of Minnesota, found some egregious inconsistencies in the final report of the Kean Commission. The story said that during a recent hearing evaluating the Kean Report:
"Dayton told leaders of the Sept. 11 Commission that, based on the Commission's report, a NORAD chronology made public a week after the attacks was grossly misleading. The chronology said the FAA notified the military's emergency air command of three of the hijackings while those jetliners were still airborne. Dayton cited Commission findings that the FAA failed to inform NORAD about three of the planes until after they had crashed.
"And, he said, a squadron of NORAD fighter planes that was scrambled was sent east over the Atlantic ocean and was 150 miles from Washington, D.C., when the third plane struck the Pentagon - 'farther than they were before they took off.'
"Dayton said NORAD officials 'lied to the American people, they lied to Congress and they lied to your 9/11 Commission to create a false impression of competence, communication and protection of the American people.' He told Kean and Hamilton that if the Commission's report is correct, President Bush 'should fire whoever at FAA, at NORAD ... Betrayed their public trust by not telling us the truth.'"
What Senator Dayton did not fully focus on was that, just a few short weeks before releasing its final report, the Kean Commission unilaterally changed the times of certain key events, negating and overruling testimony and evidence presented under oath, without having received a single new piece of evidence - either formally or informally - that contradicted or changed the evidence already received.
I'm sure that there are some attorneys in the room tonight. I wonder how many of you would acquiesce to the judge in a criminal trial submitting and ruling on evidence that neither the defense nor prosecution had presented during trial, but which the judge had somehow produced, without explanation, from his or her chambers. How would you react if the judge then ruled on the basis of that evidence, making no attempt to reconcile the evidence presented by either side?
What would you say to the jury?
While Senator Dayton was astute enough to note some glaring inconsistencies and contradictions in a highly manipulated and frequently altered evidentiary record, he missed, or chose to ignore, other elephants sitting comfortably in the living room of one of the most shameless pieces of dishonest public accounting in American history.
These include the fact that the Commission inexplicably introduced, at the last minute, a completely new timeline of events surrounding the responses of the FAA, NORAD and the Pentagon on 9/11 in direct contradiction to previously sworn testimony and exhibits from these commands. In most cases this evidence was presented by the same men who actually made key decisions that day.
Why?
In its mere constitution, the Kean Commission's members would never have been allowed to even approach the bar of judicial impartiality in an American courtroom to decide such an important case. They - every one of them, including your two recent speakers - would and should have been immediately disqualified from providing, as was mandated by law, "a full accounting" of the events of September 11th.
In describing to you some of these conflicts of interest, I would like to express my thanks to independent journalist Jim Rarey who did a magnificent job of cataloguing the histories of the wolves and the foxes who managed the hen house of September 11th's historical record.
The following is only a partial description of some of the more obvious conflicts within the Kean Commission.
Thomas Kean (Chairman)
Thomas Kean is a director (and shareholder) of Amerada Hess Corporation, which is involved in the Hess-Delta joint venture with Delta Oil of Saudi Arabia, owned by the [Khalid] bin Mahfouz and al-Amoudi clans. This company was involved in the initial planning for a trans-Afghan oil pipeline just prior to September 11th. Khalid bin Mahfouz, once a senior executive with the legendary organized crime bank BCCI, is Saudi Arabia's largest banker and his clients include both the Saudi royal family and the Saudi bin Ladin group of companies.
Coincidentally, the former governor of New Jersey is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, together with another prominent member of the board of directors of Amerada Hess, former Secretary of the Treasury Nicholas Brady.
It is also worth mentioning that Thomas Kean also sits as Co-Chairman of the Homeland Security Project (HSP) under the auspices of the Century Foundation. In this capacity, Kean has played a key role in the draft recommendations of the Century Foundation, which partially laid the groundwork of the Department of Homeland Security legislation.
Journalist Wayne Madsen has shown with ample documentation that George W. Bush also had business relations with Khalid bin Mahfouz, when he was in the Texas oil business. Both George W. Bush and Khalid bin-Mahfouz were also implicated in the BCCI scandal closely tied to the Iran-Contra and savings and loan scandals.
Other links between Bush and Mahfouz can be found through investments in the Carlyle Group, an American investment firm managed by a board on which former President George H.W. Bush himself once sat. The younger Bush personally held shares in one of Carlyle's owned companies, Cater Air, between 1990-94.
Lee Hamilton (Vice Chair)
In 1987, House Speaker Jim Wright (who later resigned in disgrace) appointed Hamilton to chair a committee investigating the Iran/Contra affair.
When a question was raised about CIA/Contra drug smuggling, the response was release by Hamilton of a cursory review that concluded there was no truth to the charges. The CIA released a report in October of 1998 (Volume II of the CIA Inspector General's Report on Iran Contra drug trafficking), that received almost no publicity yet admitted the drug connection and direct CIA involvement in the transshipment of thousands of kilos of cocaine.
Hamilton played a key role in the so-called October surprise of 1980-81 in which it was charged that the Reagan-Bush campaign team was reported to have secretly negotiated with Iran's revolutionary government to delay release of the American hostages held at the US embassy in Tehran. The deal was that the hostages would be released after the Presidential election so that Jimmy Carter could not benefit from their emancipation during the campaign. In this progenitor of the Iran-Contra scandal military weapons were promised to the Iranian government in exchange for its cooperation. The evidence was serious enough to warrant Congressional hearings which were ultimately chaired by then Congressman Hamilton.
As most of us who are old enough recall, the hostages were not released until the very day of Ronald Reagan's first inauguration in January of 1981. This was one of history's great coincidences.
For more than four decades, veteran Washington journalist Sarah McClendon was the grand dame of the White House press corps. Until her January 2003 death (at 92) she was a revered and active journalist known for her feisty confrontations with Presidents and the powerful dating to the Truman administration. In her later years she had a great habit of appearing to be asleep in her wheelchair until the moment when she would wake up and pounce on her prey with incisive questions that revealed she hadn't missed a word of what had been said. Once, on national television and in the middle of a live White House press conference, she even dared to question President Bill Clinton about the abundantly documented record of CIA and Arkansas state government involvement in drug smuggling operations at Arkansas' Mena Regional Intermountain Airport during the 1980s.
In 1994 and 1995, while living in Washington, I was a regular attendee at McClendon's weekly study group at the National Press Club and later at her residence on Connecticut Avenue. After she passed, the National Press Club renamed one of its conference rooms as "the McClendon Room." In 1992 McClendon offered her observations on Hamilton's behavior as the chief "fact-finder" and chair of the October Surprise and Iran-Contra committees.
"I declined to withdraw the report I made that Congressman Hyde elicited and obtained a promise from Chairman Lee Hamilton, D., Ind. of the House task force on October Surprise, that the group would clear President George Bush of going to Paris to cinch a deal of weapons for Iran in exchange for retaining American hostages to be delivered to President Ronald Reagan and not to outgoing President Jimmy Carter. Hyde says he made no such a deal and I must remember that Hamilton is a Democrat. That makes no difference. Hamilton held a press conference to clear Bush before the investigation into the deal between the Reagan-Bush candidates for Presidential office and the Iranians had even started. Hamilton then admitted he had not interrogated witnesses or talked with his special attorney hired to investigate the matter." Iran-Contra, in all its horrific corruption, was effectively "managed" by Lee Hamilton in the House and John Kerry (among others) in the Senate throughout the late 1980s to conceal 19 the greatest crimes of the era; crimes committed by a litany of well-known government operatives. At the time, Hamilton was the chairman of the House permanent select committee on intelligence.
While many activists regard 2004 Democratic Presidential candidate Kerry as something of a hero for bringing many details of Iran-Contra drug activities to light (and into the public record), others, more deeply versed in the evidentiary record, suspect that he also did a masterful job of keeping some of the most damaging Iran-Contra secrets - especially records of CIA proprietary company operations - hidden. I am among the latter group.
Many figures who came under criminal and investigative scrutiny in Iran-Contra, like John Poindexter, Elliot Abrams, Richard Armitage, Dick Cheney, Otto Reich, Colin Powell and John Negroponte, returned (with little or no Congressional opposition) to serve in the current Bush administration after the 2000 (so-called) election.
Veteran AP journalist Bob Parry, who broke the first major story linking drug smuggling to Contra support activities, only to later lose his job, offered some additional observations on Lee Hamilton in his independent web newsletter consortium news.
"One of the key Congressional Republicans fighting this rear-guard action was Rep. Dick Cheney of Wyoming, who became the ranking House Republican on the Iran-Contra investigation. Cheney already enjoyed a favorable reputation in Washington as a steady conservative hand.
"Cheney smartly exploited his relationship with Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., who was chairman of the Iran-Contra panel. Hamilton cared deeply about his reputation for bipartisanship and the Republicans quickly exploited this fact."
Not only did Hamilton fail to find any wrongdoing by top officials in either investigation, he was even "satisfied" with the performance of Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North in the Iran-Contra hearings. As one commentator connected to the national security archives observed: "North appears before the House select committee on intelligence to answer questions about his role in a Contra resupply operation. He lies convincingly: he has 'not in any way, at any time violate[d] the principles or legal requirements of the Boland Amendment,' which bans federal support for the Nicaraguan counterrevolutionaries. Committee chairman Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., pronounces himself satisfied with North's 'good faith.' When North's superior, John Poindexter, is told of his successful deception of Congress, Poindexter e-mails Ollie: 'well done.'"
Philip Zelikow (Executive Director)
Perhaps no more glaring conflict of interest attracted opposition from victim families and 9/11 activists than that of the Commission's executive director Philip Zelikow. Concerns were raised when it was disclosed that only two Commission members and Zelikow might be allowed to see certain classified Presidential records, including the much ballyhooed and publicly debated Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) of August 6, 2001.
Personally, I viewed the August 6th PDB as a red herring and a hubristic pretext over which the Commission could make a show of "battling" the White House for information. The PDB, titled, "Bin Laden determined to strike in US" was eventually released in a one and a half page version that was presented to the world as "complete." Nothing could have been further from the truth. The respected German paper Die Zeit published a story in October of 2002, well before the PDB became an issue, stating that the PDB was actually eleven and one half pages long. Since I had documented so many other clear, direct and credible and apparently more detailed warnings of the 9/11 attacks, the Aug 6 PDB was a non-issue for me. In "Crossing the Rubicon" I will document more than a dozen specific warnings which foretold hijacked airliners being crashed into the world trade center during the week of September 9th. Other warnings, such as massive insider trading on financial markets from Hong Kong to Tokyo, to Chicago, to New York, to London and Berlin told those who were watching that the airlines involved would be United and American.
The insider trading, acknowledged and documented by the likes of CBS News, Bloomberg, and respected financial commentators was given the complete brush off by the Kean Commission in its final report. All it said was that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda did not make the trades. In my book I will give you an idea of who did.
The controversy arising from the public debate over Zelikow forced even the New York Times to comment on some of his more obvious conflicts of interest.
"Advocates for the families said they were alarmed by the Commission's disclosure on Thursday that only one of the 10 Commissioners would have access to a wide range of the briefings, and that the only person from the Commission with similar access would be its staff director, Philip Zelikow, who has close ties to Condoleezza Rice and other senior officials in the Bush administration.
"The Commission has previously rejected a request from victims' families to limit Mr. Zelikow's responsibilities sharply in light of potential conflict of interests involving the White House. "The families' advocates said the decision to have Mr. Zelikow be one of only two Commission officials with wide access to the highly classified documents - the other is Jamie S. Gorelick, a Democratic Commission member who was Deputy Attorney General in the Clinton Administration - raised new questions about the investigation's impartiality..." Mr. Zelikow, who wrote a book with Ms. Rice in 1995, was on the Bush Administration's transition team for the national security council and has acknowledged having contacts earlier this year with Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political adviser, about Mr. Zelikow's scholarly work at the University of Virginia.
What's more, Zelikow had been serving as a member of President Bush's foreign intelligence advisory board (PFIAB) since 2001 and he also made a September 2002 public statement saying that US military action against Iraq would be based upon a desire to protect Israeli interests rather than any real threat from Iraq.
Perhaps the worst conflict of interest was the fact that Zelikow had advised the incoming Bush Administration on terror-related intelligence matters and had several discussions about bin Laden and Al Qaeda in 2000-2001 with Richard Clarke. By rights, he should have been a witness testifying under oath before the Commission instead of its executive director. When many of the victim families learned of this they were justifiably outraged at an arrangement that would have never been permitted in a court of law.
In spite of all the controversy, and calls from many for his resignation, Zelikow remains securely in place at the Kean Commission to this day.
Jamie Gorelick
Freelance journalist Jim Rarey writes: "Considered one of the fifty most powerful women in the country, CFR member Jamie Gorelick is currently Vice-chair of the giant mortgage lender and insurer Fannie Mae. From March 1994 until she joined Fannie Mae in may 1997 she was deputy attorney general, the number two spot in Janet Reno's Department of Justice.
"In May 1995, the intelligence community law enforcement policy board was established to meet quarterly and discuss mutual concerns of the Attorney General and Director of Central Intelligence. The board was co-chaired by Gorelick and DCI George Tenet. Other members included all of the law enforcement agencies, the Assistant Secretary of State for intelligence and research and the Defense Department General Counsel.
"This is the same time frame (spring of 1995) in which the Philippine government apprised the FBI, CIA and State Department of 'Project Bojinka' an Islamic terrorist plot which included hijacking commercial airliners and flying them into the Pentagon, world trade center towers and, several other buildings.
"The BCCI scandal involved a number of powerful individuals. Clark Clifford and Robert Altman were the top two officers in First American, the new name given Financial General Bankshares when it was taken over by BCCI (known as the bank of crooks and criminals international in the corridors of Washington) with the help of the Jackson Stephens/Lippo Worthen Bank and the Rose law firm.
"First American is said to have been using the notorious Promis software." I will have a great deal to say about this legendary "spyware" in "Crossing the Rubicon."
Back to Jim Rarey: "When BCCI and First American were exposed, the legal defense team for Clark Clifford and Robert Altman attracted a bevy of well-known names including Robert Fiske (later the first "Independent Counsel" investigating Whitewater and Vince Foster's "suicide"), Robert Bennett (later attorney for Bill Clinton), and Jamie Gorelick... In 1998, while at Fannie Mae, Gorelick served on Clinton's Central Intelligence National Security Advisory [anel as well as the President's Review of Intelligence." At one point in the Kean Commission hearings, a brief stir was caused when Republican partisans charged that Gorelick bore some personal blame for the attacks by virtue of having created an "intelligence wall" between the FBI and the CIA.
There was no wall. A 2001 Rand Corporation study, which I quote in my book, offered great praise for the working relationships between the FBI and the CIA. It documents a number of instances where successful cooperation and information sharing between the Bureau and the CIA actually prevented a number of Al Qaeda and other terrorist attacks against US interests.
There is also no wall between the Kean Commission and the government it has been charged with investigating.
Gorelick also has oil connections. Mrs Gorelick sits on the board of the world's premier oil drilling firm, Schlumberger.
Gorelick was one of four Commission members allowed to review Presidential intelligence records and make notes before reporting to the Commission. It appears that the White House had very little to worry about.
Let's take a look at your recent guests who came here promoting the final 9/11 report. Jim Rarey tells us:
Richard Ben-Veniste
Ben-Veniste is a high-visibility Washington attorney and Democratic power broker. He was Democrat counsel to the Senate Whitewater investigation where he blocked inquiries about Webster Hubbell's hiring by the Lippo Group and others administered by Truman Arnold.
According to investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker, Ben-Veniste then turned around and defended Arnold (the man he was supposed to be investigating) before Ken Starr's Whitewater grand jury, for which he was roundly criticized.
Hopsicker also reveals that Arnold had furnished a $2 million airplane to his friend Wally Hilliard for $1.
Hilliard, Hopsicker says, owned the flight school in Venice, Florida where (according to official accounts) four of the Islamic terrorist pilots were trained that flew the suicide missions on 9/11.
Another of Ben-Veniste's clients was Barry Seal, the drug running CIA asset of Iran/Contra and Mena, Arkansas notoriety. In fact, Hopsicker relates Ben-Veniste told the Wall Street Journal, "I did my part by launching him (Seal) into the arms of Vice President Bush who embraced him as an undercover operative."
Slade Gorton
Slade Gorton is a former Senator from the state of Washington. After he lost his reelection bid in 2000, he joined the Seattle law firm of Preston, Gates & Ellis, which specializes in environmental issues.
If jury selection rules were being used, Gorton would probably be dismissed from consideration for the Commission for cause [a technical term for conflict of interest]. Two days after the 9/11 attacks he told a public-television audience there was nothing government intelligence officials could have done to thwart the attack, according to the Seattle Times. The Times quotes Gorton as saying, "I doubt we can expect to get too much inside information no matter what we do." Gorton served two years on the Senate Intelligence Committee. He says that experience and his personal friendship with Trent Lott were responsible for his appointment by Lott.
Every Commission member has deep conflicts of interest with respect to 9/11 and its investigation of the government agencies charged with protecting the American people that day. I will discuss all of them in my book. One, apparently, who did not, is former Georgia Senator max cleland, who at one point called the Commission a sham. Cleland resigned from the Commission before its investigation was complete.
What happened on 9/11?
While these attacks were arguably one of the most serious homicides ever committed, the investigation and "prosecution" of that case by means other than Dick Cheney's "war that will not end in our lifetimes" has never even approached the legal and logical standards governing all such investigations. No real case has ever been made that would pass first muster of even a junior assistant district attorney.
Without such a court process, we are forced to employ analogies and metaphors. But there remains to us the most successful, fundamental strategy for the prosecution of criminal behavior: demonstrating that a suspect (or suspects) did, or did not, possess the means, motive, and opportunity to commit the crime.
To date, the case that 9/11 was perpetrated solely by Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda has never been proved, even to the most rudimentary standards. In fact, some 35 months after the attacks there has not been a single successful 9/11 prosecution anywhere in the world. The only conviction that had been secured, a German prosecution against Mounir el Motassadeq, charged with aiding the so called Hamburg Cell of Mohammed Atta, was overturned in 2004 because the US government refused to produce key witnesses such as Khalid Shaikh Muhammad or Ramzi bin Al-Shibh and other evidence relevant to the charges. Every defendant in a western criminal case has the right to examine the evidence used against him and to cross-examine witnesses.
To the general public as well as to the 9/11 research community, the mysterious and inexplicable failure of the nation's air defenses that day remains the most glaring and gaping hole in the Kean Commission's account and in the government's version of events. Scrambling fighter aircraft was a routine occurrence for years before 9/11.
The Associated Press has told us that fighter aircraft were scrambled and flying beside errant commercial and private air traffic within minutes of the slightest deviation some 67 times in the calendar year preceding June 1 2001. This is one of many areas where the Kean Commission not only failed to look but actually altered evidence in the preparation of its final report.
For me, the pivotal evidence absolutely demonstrating direct government complicity in, and management of, the attacks was found in a number of undisputed, yet virtually unaddressed wargames that I will show were being conducted, coordinated and/or controlled by Vice President Dick Cheney or his immediate staff on the morning of September 11th. The names of those wargames are known to include: Vigilant Guardian, Vigilant Warrior, Northern Guardian, Northern Vigilance, and Tripod II. All have been reported on by major press organizations relying on undisputed quotes from participating military personnel.
They have also been confirmed by NORAD press releases. All, except for Northern Vigilance and Tripod II had to do with hijacked airliners inside the continental United States, specifically within the Northeast air defense sector where all four 9/11 hijackings occurred.
According to a clear record some of these exercises involved commercial airline hijackings. In some cases false blips were deliberately inserted onto FAA and military radar screens and they were present during (at least) the first attacks. This effectively paralyzed fighter response because, with only eight fighters available in the region, there were as many as 22 possible hijackings taking place.
Other exercises, specifically Northern Vigilance, had pulled significant fighter resources away from the Northeast U.S. - just before 9/11 - into Northern Canada and Alaska. In addition, a close reading of key news stories published in the spring of 2004 revealed for the first time that some of these drills were "live-fly" exercises where actual aircraft, likely flown by remote control - were simulating the behavior of hijacked airliners in real life. All of this as the real attacks began. The fact that these exercises had never been systematically and thoroughly explored in the mainstream press, or publicly by Congress, or at least publicly in any detail by the so-called independent 9/11 Commission made me think that they might be the holy grail of 9/11.
That's exactly what they turned out to be.
Only one wargame exercise, Vigilant Guardian, was mentioned in a footnote to the Kean Commission report and then it was deliberately mislabeled as an exercise intended to intercept Russian bombers instead of a hijack exercise in the Northeast sector. Even then, a deliberate lie was told to the American people as NORAD commander Ralph Eberhart testified to the Commission that the exercise actually expedited US air force response during the attacks.
When Michael Kane, a brilliant young New York activist and budding investigative reporter approached General Eberhart on an FTW assignment at the conclusion of the Commission's last public hearing and asked for information on the other exercises, Eberhart's only response was, "no comment."
And an additional non-military biowarfare exercise called Tripod II, being "set up" in Manhattan on September 11th, was under the direct coordination of FEMA and - by White House directive - the immediate control of the Vice President. The set up for that exercise conveniently placed a fully staffed FEMA, New York city and department of justice command post on Manhattan's pier 29 in time for it to be conveniently used as the command post after the twin towers had collapsed.
There are many, many areas where the official account and the findings of the Kean Commission are contradicted by hard evidence, official records, mainstream news investigations and even sworn testimony. Both the los angeles times and the New York Times have noted some of the lesser, but no less glaring, inconsistencies. In my book I will provide you with many more.
In my book I will make several key points:
1. I will name Richard Cheney as the prime suspect in the mass murders of 9/11 and will establish that, not only was he a planner in the attacks, but also that on the day of the attacks he was running a completely separate command, control and communications system which was superceding any orders being issued by the nmcc, or the White House situation room. To accomplish that end he relied on a redundant and superior communications system maintained by the US Secret Service in or near the Presidential emergency operations center - the bunker to which he and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice were reportedly "rushed" after Flight 175 struck the WTC's South Tower. I will demonstrate that the Secret Service possessed radar screens which gave them, and the Vice President, whose side they never left, with real-time information as good as or better than that available to the Pentagon.
2. I will demonstrate that in what are called national special security events the US Secret Service is the supreme US agency for operational control with complete authority over the military and all civilian agencies.
3. I will establish conclusively that in May of 2001, by Presidential order, Richard Cheney was put in direct command and control of all wargame and field exercise training and scheduling through several agencies, especially FEMA. This also extended to all of the conflicting and overlapping NORAD drills on that day.
4. I will also demonstrate that the Tripod II exercise being set up on Sept. 10th in Manhattan was directly connected to Cheney's role in number 3 above.
5. I will also prove conclusively that a number of public officials, at the national and New York city levels, including then Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, were aware that Flight 175 was en route to lower Manhattan for 20 minutes and did nothing - absolutely nothing - to order the evacuation of or warn the occupants of the World Trade Center. One military officer was forced to leave his post in the middle of the attacks and place a private call to his brother - who worked at the WTC - warning him to get out. That was apparently an act of desperation because no other part of the system was taking action.
6. I will also show that the Israeli and British governments acted as partners with the highest levels of the American government to help in the preparation and, very possibly, the actual execution of the attacks."
Israel
I must now digress to say a few words about Israel.
Israel is a country. Judaism is a religion.
It is no more proper to say that the actions of the Israeli government are above criticism than it is to say that criticism of the American government is a criticism of all Americans.
There are many direct connections between Israeli intelligence activities and the events of 9/11 including a report from the Drug Enforcement Administration, showing that more than 100 Israeli covert operatives were functioning inside the United States just before and during the attacks. Some of these operatives were placed in extremely close proximity to four of the 9/11 hijackers in South Florida and San Diego. Israeli companies such as Amdocs, Comverse and Odigo had direct connections to the events of 9/11. A "former" Israeli anti-terror operative was on board American Flight 11.
To say that Israel played a criminal role in the attacks is not the same thing as saying that Israel perpetrated the attacks. A key question asked by any homicide investigator is cui bono? Who benefits? And on this account we can find only three countries, the US, Britain and Israel, that have never wavered in their support of everything that has happened since 9/11.
Tonight, even as I speak, an Israeli spy scandal is spreading through the highest levels of the Pentagon and revelations from breaking news stories strongly suggest that the information being provided to the Israeli government carried with it the sanction of some of the same people I have charged in "Crossing the Rubicon" with perpetrating the attacks of September 11th. Tonight I predict that the current scandal will overlap and connect with the recent arrest by South African authorities of Sir Mark Thatcher, son of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, for his role in sponsoring an aborted coup in the West African nation of Equatorial Guinea. The motive: British commercial acquisition of oil rights in a region that - as I have been writing for two years now - is destined to become the next regional zone of confrontation.
West African nations from sub-Saharan africa, to Nigeria, to Sierra Leone, to Sao Tome and Principe, to Chad, to Cameroon to Angola are all feverish oil-rush boom towns where nations, money, military might, covert operations and intrigue are converging with lightning speed to control oil reserves. Although much smaller than the reserves of the middle east, these african reserves are critical swing and lesser suppliers of oil in a world where - as we too well know - the removal of just a million barrels a day from global supply can wreak economic havoc. Africa's priceless energy takes only about two weeks to reach an American gas tank as opposed to the six week journey required for oil from the middle east.
Last spring, just after the US occupation of Iraq, it was disclosed that the Israeli government had entered negotiations with US representatives to explore the possibility of rebuilding a demolished pipeline from Northern Iraq to the Israeli port of Haifa.
To level a charge of anti-semitism at me or anyone else who dares to criticize Israeli government actions is to argue that Israel and all of Judaism is a monolithic structure, sharing only one viewpoint. It is to say that being a Jew means being a Likudnik. It is to overlook the enormous dissent within Israel of groups like Women In Black, Not In Our Names, and the almost 700 commissioned and noncommissioned officers from the Israeli Defense Forces who have refused to serve in the occupied territories. It is to ignore the fact that the nephew of Benjamin Netanyahu has refused compulsory military service and risks jail for that decision.
I look in the back of the room and I see my dear friend, agent and publicist Ken Levine. Last spring I was privileged to participate in a Seder at the home of his incredible 92 year old mother.
I stop and give thanks for Jamey Hecht, Ph.d., a poet, English literature professor, great friend and American Jew who edited "Crossing the Rubicon." In the same breath I also think of and thank my dear friend Dr. Faiz Khan, a Muslim Imam and emergency room physician who left his post at Jewish Hospital in Brooklyn and rushed to the World Trade Center to render aid on September 11th.
He was one of the first doctors on the scene and he was one of the last to leave.
There is no room for stereotypical thinking in a time of crisis. As Faiz Khan said to me once, a paradigm is what you think about something before you think about it. It is these traps which we must all avoid.
I will say one more thing before leaving the subject of 9/11 tonight. I, like many Americans and many people around the world, have serious lingering questions about the collapse of the twin towers, what it was that actually struck the Pentagon and what - in the name of God - it was that caused the collapse of WTC 7, a building that had not even been struck during the attacks.
Unfortunately, the physical evidence was quickly destroyed and scientific analysis is not available to us to answer these important questions. In order to make the strongest legal case possible I have avoided discussions of physical evidence - open to acrimonious debate and scientific challenge - and chosen to do what any good police officer must do; keep my eye on the suspects. It does not take a scientist to prove that George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condi Rice, General Ralph Eberhart, General Richard Myers, FBI Director Robert Mueller, John Ashcroft and George Tenet lied to the American people.
There is a record that proves this and that is the record I will present to you in "Crossing the Rubicon." But on the subject of WTC 7 I will, in my book, explain why that particular building had to be destroyed. And although I cannot prove to you how the twin towers were collapsed, I will show you who performed the requisite studies that would have been essential to pull off that feat.
Peak oil
I turn now to the motive for the murders. Peak oil is no secret. Its chief opponent is something called denial - which is not a river in Egypt.
Dick Cheney knew about it. I will show you that in my book.
His national energy policy development group - you know, the one that refused to release its records sparking a constitutional crisis and a supreme court ruling - knew about it. I will show you that in my book too.
Oil and natural gas are indispensable to our way of life. The world consumes ten calories of hydrocarbon energy for every calorie of food that is eaten. All commercial fertilizers are made from natural gas. All pesticides are made from petroleum. All irrigation, plowing, harvesting and transport is accomplished by either oil powered machinery or oil or natural gas generated electricity.
There are between 600 and 700 million internal combustion powered vehicles on the planet and the demand for them is exploding exponentially, especially in China where GM's sales rose 300% in one year alone. According to the National Geographic this last June there are seven gallons of oil in every tire. Want to suddenly build 600 million new vehicles that run on something else, hydrogen perhaps? How much oil will be required to do that? To mine and melt the ore? To transport it to factories that don't exist, using electricity that isn't there? To make the paints, solvents and all of the plastic needed? All plastic is made from oil.
Hydrogen is a cruel joke that creates false hope. A recent study from EV Magazine reported that the average life expectancy of a very expensive fuel cell engine was just 200 hours. Commercial hydrogen is now made from natural gas.
We're nearly out of that too.
China's economic growth has seen it replace Japan as the world's second largest importer of oil and China is now coming into direct economic and political competition with the US for what oil remains.
I have attended two international conferences on the subject of peak oil and its implications for civilization; one in Paris in 2003 and one in Berlin this year. For almost the entire year between the Paris and Berlin conferences the icons of the mainstream press - the ones known and employed to mold public and business perception - have been acknowledging peak oil's reality, sometimes reluctantly, sometimes less than directly, but also sometimes very boldly. CNN, the BBC, the New York Times, the Economist; dozens of media giants had begun to respond, like a giant ship turning slowly in the water. The ship has clearly changed course, but was it enough? Was it in time? I have saved close to 200 of these stories.
Looking at just a few of them makes the point well enough.
o "The end of cheap oil" - National Geographic (cover story) - June 2004.
o "What to use when the oil runs out" - BBC - April 22, 2004
o "Adios cheap oil" - Interpress News Agency - April 27, 2004
o "G7: oil price threatens world economy" - Moscow Times - 4/26/04
o "World oil crisis looms" - Jane's -- 4/21/04
o "US procuring the world's oil" - Foreign Policy In Focus - January 2004
o "Are we running out of oil? Scientist warns of looming crisis" - ABC News.com - 2/11/04
o "Blood, money, and oil" - US News - 8/18/03
o "Soaring global demand for oil strains production capacity" - Wall Street Journal - 3/22/04
o "Check that oil" - Washington post - 11/14/03
o "China's demand for foreign oil rises at breakneck pace" - Knight Ridder -1/26/04
o 'World oil and gas running out' - CNN - 10/02/03
o "Debate rages on oil output by Saudis in future" - the New York Times - 2/25/04
o "Fossil-fuel dependency: do oil reserves foretell bleak future?" - San Francisco Chronicle - 4/02/04
o "The end of the oil age: ways to break the tyranny of oil are coming into view. Governments need to promote them" - The Economist - 10/23/03
The subject of peak oil is one which requires a little study to get your brain around. It does not, however, require much science except for basic arithmetic.
Discoveries of large oil deposits have been in steep decline since 1962. Demand, on the other hand, has been soaring.
To quote my energy editor Dale Allen Pfeiffer, a geologist: it appears that the year 2007 will be important. A new study published in Petroleum Review suggests that production might not be able to keep up with demand by 2007. The study is a survey of mega projects (those with reserves of over 500 million barrels) and the potential to produce over 100,000 barrels per day of oil). Mega projects are important not only because they provide the bulk of world oil production, but also because they have a better net energy profile than smaller projects, and they provide a more substantial profit than smaller projects.
Bear in mind that the planet consumes a billion barrels of oil (or two mega fields) every eleven and one half days.
The discovery rate for mega projects has dwindled to almost nothing. This can be seen in the data for the last few years. In 2000, there were 16 discoveries of over 500 mb; in 2001 there were only 8 new discoveries, and in 2002 there were only 3 such discoveries. From first discovery to first production generally takes about 6 years. If the new project can make use of existing infrastructure, then the start up time might be cut to 4 years.
In 2003 seven new mega projects were brought on stream.
2004 expects to see another 11 projects start producing.
2005 will be the peak year for bringing new projects on stream, with 18 new projects expected to be brought on stream in that year. In 2006, the pace drops back to 11 new projects. But in 2007 there are only 3 new projects scheduled to begin production, followed by 3 more in 2008.
There are no new projects on track for 2009 or 2010. And any new mega project sanctioned now could not possibly come on stream any sooner than 2008.
The study points out that currently about a third of the world's oil production comes from declining fields, with a likely overall decline rate of about 4%. As a result, global production capacity is contracting by over 1 million barrels per day every year. New production is the only thing offsetting this decline.
Of course recent events have clearly demonstrated the fragility of a global production system that is operating at full tilt. Sabotage an Iraqi pipeline one day the price goes up. Announce that Vladimir Putin is easing up on Russian oil giant Yukos and the price drops. Announce that Putin is moving to sell of its assets and confiscate its cash, the price soars. Worry that Hugo Chavez of Venezuela might be ousted in a violent coup and the price jumps. Watch Chavez - who is despised by the Bush administration - win his seventh election in as many years and the price drops.
By the way, that is seven more elections than George Bush has won.
In spite of repeated assurances from the Saudi government that they can and are increasing production, the evidence is growing that they cannot. FTW was the first to report, a year before the New York Times did, that Saudi Arabia may have actually peaked. New studies are reporting that Saudi wells in the mother of all oil fields Ghawar are showing 55% water cut. That means that 55% of what is pumped out every day is the same seawater that was pumped in to push the oil up. Experience has shown that when the water cut gets to between 70 and 80% the field collapses.
The rush to produce more oil is hastening the destruction of fields that could last longer otherwise.
Events then seem to confirm these worries about Saudi Arabia. Saudi reassurances are now being chuckled at by major financial commentators, and Saudi pledges to increase production are having less and less effect on the markets.
Ghawar, the super giant of all fields was discovered more than 60 years ago. It had estimated reserves of almost 100 billion barrels of oil. Professor Michael Klare has told us that, in order to keep pace with accelerating oil demand, the world will have to discover three new Ghawars in the next 10 to 15 years just to meet demand. There was only one Ghawar. There hasn't been another one since.
So when we look at the paltry and rapidly diminishing rate of discovery for the so-called mega fields, the prospects become just a bit more chilling. In the year 2003, for the first time since the 1920s according to a leading petroleum consulting firm, not a single so-called mega field - 500 million barrels or more - was discovered.
By 2007, production capacity will have declined by 3-4mn b/d.
Yet this decline will be offset by 8mn b/d of new capacity drawn from the many new projects expected to come on stream over the next few years. This leaves a surplus of 4mn b/d in spare capacity. Yet global demand is growing by over 1 mbpd each year. So 3 years of demand growth will reduce our spare capacity to 1mn b/d by the start of 2007. As very little new capacity is set to come on stream in 2007, that remaining 1 mbpd spare capacity will likely disappear before 2008.
In the short term oil prices are governed by market forces rather than geology which will tell us, as opposed to investment and economics, how much oil we can ultimately extract. The irony is that when three new mega fields come online all at once the prices may actually drop. That will not change the outcome. Speculation at present is not a big a factor as it could be. I wholeheartedly agree with investment banker Matthew Simmons that a margin requirement of 50% should be placed on all oil futures trading worldwide.
The upshot of all this is that the oil supply appears sustainable, barring major wars or destruction on infrastructure until 2007. With so much new production coming on stream, there may even be periods of price weakness. However, it is likely that we will begin suffering oil shortages after 2007, especially if anything happens to disrupt a portion of the production. If new projects are not found, and online by 2008, then by the end of that year we are certain to see severe shortages without any cause other than rising demand.
But there is another factor to this oil calculus. So many complaints are being voiced that a major part of the problem with current oil prices has to do with a lack of refineries. People point out that there are 18 different grades of gasoline in this country matching various state laws. Why, they demand, are no more refineries being built.
The answer is simple and it is a direct and irrefutable confirmation of peak oil. The return on investment - as Matthew Simmons says - is uncertain. According to Simmons it takes 5-7 years and about $150 million to bring a complex refinery online. The cost of the refinery is paid for by the sale of the oil.
The refineries are not being built and massive expensive exploration projects are not being undertaken because the oil companies understand that there is very little oil left to find.
Finding 10 new North Sea fields... somewhere
By 2015, global oil demand is expected to increase by over two-thirds, that is 60 mbpd beyond current global consumption of between 75 and 80 mbpd. To meet that demand we will have to find the equivalent of 10 new North Sea oil fields within a decade. In the meantime Britain's North Sea, just like Alaska's North Slope did a decade ago, is running dry. Rigs are shutting down and employees are being laid off. Yet we are hard pressed now to discover even another mega-sized field.
To quote former British environmental minister Michael Meacher, we are facing, "the sharpest and perhaps the most violent dislocation (of society) in recent history." I should add that Meacher, along with former German cabinet minister and former Parliamentary Secretary Andreas Von Buelow has stated publicly and in writing that the attacks of September 11th were perpetrated by the US government.
There are many out there who just refuse to believe that oil and natural gas are running out. Some insist that oil is created automatically and infinitely by the earth's core, disputing all known science showing otherwise. There are those who insist that alternative energies can be snapped into place immediately to allow for infinite economic and population growth.
Aside from looking at the events since 9/11 and seeing that they match a world of diminishing energy let's take a look at some recent developments around the world and see what they tell us.
Britain's largest electricity provider has announced that prices will soar as much as 40% next year. Wholesale energy prices have doubled in the last year as Bloomberg has announced that the decline in North Sea production is creating a trade gap which is now threatening to cause widespread unemployment.
In March Reuters reported that Argentina, facing its worst energy crisis in 15 years, is becoming unstable to the point of threatening the security of the entire region. It has cut its natural gas exports to Chile by 15%, which is threatening Chilean power generation. Argentina is now moving into the world oil market in search of oil for power generation and transportation as its own domestic supplies have dwindled.
The BBC reported recently that high oil prices are threatening many Asian economies.
Just two weeks ago the Australian government ordered an emergency fuel review in anticipation of future crises. In June it conducted a test to see how the government and country would respond to a "disruption" in oil supplies.
On August 25th it was reported that Brazil was opening negotiations with Ecuador to replace diminishing oil supplies.
China, in the midst of rapidly diminishing harvests, a growing economy and expanding population is fearing a major food crisis. This, even as Hong Kong, Hangzhou, and Shanghai are facing mandatory blackouts which are disrupting manufacturing, trade and retail activity. Chinese oil imports have increased by 15% in just the first quarter of 2004 alone.
Germany has moved to institute home energy passports, and undertaken serious and well planned efforts to reduce energy consumption. Chancellor Schroeder, in the wake of recent revelations that Shell - which downwardly revised its reserve estimates four times in one year - called upon the G8 nations to move to mandate total and verifiable transparency in all oil reserve figures.
India, whose oil imports jumped 23% in one month, has moved to create a strategic petroleum reserve.
Indonesia, a member of OPEC, has announced that its oil production will drop significantly by 2008.
Japan, ignoring stiff opposition from Washington, has signed a major oil contract with Iran, at the same time that it is feuding with China, Vietnam and the Philippines over relatively small oil and gas deposits in the Spratly Islands of the South China Sea. In anticipation of pending military conflict in the region China has decided to build a pipeline through Burma to the Indian Ocean so that tankers supplying China's growing thirst will not have to travel through a region that is becoming increasingly dangerous.
Three bills have been introduced in the Japanese Parliament that would suspend its non-violent constitution and permit a full scale rearmament.
Russia, having recently admitted that its oil reserves were finite and that production might start to decline sharply within the next five years has announced that it will build a pipeline from its Siberian fields to the Pacific ports of Vladivostok and Sakhalin thus agreeing to sell its oil to Japan, Korea and the Philippines. Russia's other choice was to have the pipeline terminate in central China.
This week in Petroleum, an industry journal has reported that non OECD countries have begun to hoard petroleum and are buying all they can even at what some analysts call "inflated" prices.
In Thailand, mandatory evening curfews have been imposed two nights a week requiring all businesses to shut down in order to conserve energy.
On August 24th Britain's oil depletion analysis center confirmed, citing data from Petroleum Review, that daily oil depletion is now exceeding one million barrels per day. In other words, every day, the world is producing 1.14 million barrels per day less than it did the day before. By analyzing data from the 18 largest oil producing nations Petroleum Review calculated that production from these countries peaked in 1997 at 24.7 million barrels per day and that by 2003 it had fallen to 22.1 million barrels per day.
On August 21 the Houston Chronicle posed a great question.
If oil prices are soaring and there's insatiable demand, why isn't there a boom in hiring and corporate expansion? The Chronicle, paying due heed to the financial markets, offered the dubious explanation that the oil companies just didn't want to overdo things and look greedy. In fact, all over the world oil companies are downsizing, selling off assets, laying off employees and merging. Just last week it was announced that French giant Total was considering a tender offer to purchase Royal Dutch Shell.
And here in the United States, rising oil prices have forced major airlines like United to consider raiding corporate pension funds in order to offset rising oil costs as an alternative to bankruptcy.
In the meantime, in the West African country of Liberia, there are reports of 10 year-old mercenaries being recruited to fight in guerilla conflicts in neighboring countries and there is no shortage of recruits. I wonder if Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska will see any of them. He just left on an energy "safari" to scout West African prospects, just about a year after NATO announced it was shifting its focus to West Africa and the US delivered six obsolete warships to the Nigerian navy.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is just the beginning. And neither Presidential candidate has even remotely addressed the real issues or dared to tell the American people the worst.
The one overriding concern I have seen expressed everywhere is "Oh, no. We can't do that. It will crash the markets." Is that the sum total of human expression and achievement? The markets?
To close this presentation tonight I would like to offer you quotes from two distinguished gentlemen whose names might carry a bit more weight in this room than Michael Ruppert.
The first is from Sir Charles Galton Darwin who in 1952, just one year after I was born, wrote:
"The fifth revolution will come when we have spent the stores of coal and oil that have been accumulating in the earth during hundreds of millions of years. . . . It is to be hoped that before then other sources of energy will have been developed . . . But without considering the detail [here] it is obvious that there will be a very great difference in ways of life. . . . Whether a convenient substitute for the present fuels is found or not, there can be no doubt that there will have to be a great change in ways of life. This change may justly be called a revolution, but it differs from all the preceding ones in that there is no likelihood of its leading to increases of population, but even perhaps to the reverse."
I have insisted for many years now that any fundamental change in the current human paradigm, a change that will really make a difference, is impossible until we, collectively and as a species, change the way money works.
In "Crossing the Rubicon" I will explain just how and why the world's current economic system is hastening and worsening a calamity of unimagined proportions. This all began for me some 27 years ago when, as a young policeman, I discovered that the CIA was deeply involved in the drug trade. The purpose of that involvement led me to discover, and prove using US Senate hearing records and documents from the CIA itself that an essential ingredient - perhaps the essential ingredient - in US economic supremacy was the maintenance of a flow of as much as $600 billion a year in drug profits through US financial markets and institutions.
What we are witnessing now is a collision: a collision of a financial system relying on fractional reserve banking, debt-financed growth, and a fiat currency system with a planet and energy resources that are finite, limited, and running out. Infinite growth is battling with finite energy.
One is not possible without the other and I have absolutely no doubt as to which side will win.
In November 2002 James Kenneth Galbraith wrote an article titled "The Unbearable Costs of Empire."
None of these problems will be cured so long as war remains our dominant political theme. But serious though they are, they pale in comparison with the larger problem of the international trade-and-financial order under conditions of permanent war.
It is a straightforward fact that if global oil production starts to decline but U.S. consumption does not, everyone else will be required to cut purchases and uses of oil. But how can oil prices be held stable for Americans yet be made to rise for everyone else? Only by a policy of continuing depreciation in everyone else's currency. Such a policy of dollar hegemony amid worldwide financial instability, of crushing debt burdens and deflation throughout the developing world, is perverse. It will make our trading partners' exports cheap, render their imports dear and keep their real wages low. It will price American goods out of world markets and lead to unsustainable dependence on foreign capital. It will be a policy, in short, of beggar-all-of-our-neighbors while we live alone, in increasing idleness and inside the dollar bubble.
This is the policy that Bush and Cheney are actually imposing on the rest of the world. But they cannot make it last. It will make lives miserable elsewhere, generating ever more resistance, terrorism and military engagement. Meanwhile, we will not experience even gradual exposure to the changing energy balance; we will therefore never make the investments required to adjust, even eventually, to a world of scarce and expensive oil. In the end, therefore, that world will arrive much more abruptly than it otherwise would, shaking the fragile edifice of our oil economy to its foundations.
And we will someday face a double explosion: of anger against our arrogance and of actual shortage and collapsing living standards, when the confidence of investors in the dollar finally gives way.
Compared with this future, a new commitment to collective security, to a new world financial structure, to a rational energy and transportation policy, and to spending to meet our actual domestic needs would be a bargain.
At the end of the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin was asked what type of government the Framers had given our new country. He famously replied, "a republic, if you can keep it."
In 49 BC Julius Caesar, fresh from a battlefield victory in central Italy ordered his legions to cross a small creek called the Rubicon. Under the laws of the Roman Republic, the army was not allowed to enter the capital city.
As Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, the Roman Republic died and the Roman Empire was born.
Our task, if we and much of human civilization are to survive, is not to keep our republic, but to take it back.
Thank you.
-------- alternative energy
Interior Official Touts Bush Support for Geothermal Energy
August 31, 2004
INDIAN WELLS, California, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2004/2004-08-31-09.asp#anchor2
The Bush administration is keen to enhance supplies of renewable energy, in particular geothermal energy, Interior Assistant Secretary Rebecca Watson said Monday.
Geothermal energy technologies use the heat of the Earth for direct use applications, geothermal heat pumps, and electrical power production.
President George W. Bush "has given geothermal energy production a tremendous jumpstart since he took office," Watson said in a speech at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the Geothermal Resources Council.
"[The President's] National Energy Policy urged us to reduce geothermal lease backlogs and examine opportunities for increased geothermal development on public lands, which we are doing," Watson said. "In the past three and a half years, this administration has issued more than 200 geothermal leases, compared to fewer than 20 issued in the last four years of the prior administration."
Watson touted a 2003 report by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) that identified the best places on federal land for geothermal, wind, solar and biomass energy production.
The Interior Department issued a subsequent report focusing on the top 35 places with the potential for geothermal energy production, Watson said.
Currently, lands managed by the Interior Department provide more than 48 percent of the United States geothermal power.
The BLM has entered into more than 400 geothermal leases on the lands it manages and says 55 of those leases are capable of producing a total of 1,275 megawatts of electricity, enough to power more than 1.2 million homes.
Thirty-four geothermal power plants are currently producing electricity on BLM lands in three states.
"We realize that even 'green' energy has environmental impacts," Watson said. "As part of the leasing process, we put every proposed geothermal project through legally required environmental and cultural analyses before issuing an energy lease or power plant license."
But despite the administration's enthusiasm for geothermal energy, the preliminary "Renewable Energy Trends 2003" report by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) finds geothermal generation fell 9 percent between 2002 and 2003.
The report notes that most of the nation's geothermal generation comes from 21 plants at The Geysers Field in California and production has been falling in recent years due to decreasing underground pressure.
The EIA says renewable energy accounts for some six percent of the nation's energy supply, with geothermal accounting for only five percent of the renewable energy total. The vast majority of the nation's renewable energy comes from hydroelectric and biomass energy, 45 percent and 47 percent respectively; wind accounts for only two percent of the nation's renewable energy and solar one percent, according to the EIA.
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California Inches Forward on Solar Power
August 31, 2004
SACRAMENTO, California, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2004/2004-08-31-09.asp#anchor3
In a blow to environmentalists, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's bid to boost solar power was defeated in the California Assembly Utilities Committee on Friday.
But the state legislature did pass a bill that should keep funds flowing to the increasing number of homeowners interested in solar power.
"More and more Californians are becoming interested in solar power," said Bernadette Del Chiaro, clean energy advocate for Environment California, a nonprofit organization working to increase solar power in California. "The bill passed Friday night simply helps meet this growing demand over the next six to seven months."
Earlier this month Schwarzenegger threw his weight behind legislation authored by California Senator Kevin Murray, a Democrat from Los Angeles, that aimed to encourage the construction of one million homes with installed solar panels by 2017.
The "solar homes" proposal would require all builders to offer solar power systems buyers by 2008 and would create a fund of some $230 million for rebates on solar installations. Despite Schwarzenegger's support, the bill drew the ire of some consumer advocates who opposed the rate increases included in the legislation.
The measure approved Friday uses money already paid by consumers as an incentive for homeowners to install solar panels.
The bill gives the Energy Commission permission to spend $60 million, to be collected between 2007 and 2012, for small solar system rebates.
The commission would otherwise not have access to the money until 2007 - leaving a two year gap in rebates.
"California has a tremendous opportunity to put the sun to work for energy, our economy and our environment," said Del Chiaro. "Given the governor's vision and commitment of legislators such as Senator Murray, California's solar market is sure to grow in the months ahead."
-------- OTHER
-------- environment
Computers Add Sophistication, but Don't Resolve Climate Debate
August 31, 2004
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/31/science/earth/21clim.html
When the Bush administration issued an update last week on federal climate research, it was criticized with equal vigor by environmentalists and by industry-backed groups.
The update featured new computer simulations showing that the sharp rise in global temperatures since 1970 could only be explained by human influences, mainly rising levels of greenhouse gases.
The administration had never quite crossed that line before, always insisting that uncertainty prevailed. Now it wrote of the "robustness" of the findings.
Environmentalists complained that while the White House seemed to be accepting the growing evidence pointing to harms from human-caused warming, the administration still refused to require cuts in emissions. The industry-backed groups, opposed to such mandates, said the models were flawed and should not have been cited.
White House officials quickly said the update (at www.climatescience.gov) was never intended as the final word.
The episode illustrates how advances in research on climate change do not guarantee that a consensus will soon be reached on what to do about it.
Computer models of climate, particularly, have become a lightning rod in the climate debate, and are likely to remain so for years to come. Run on the world's most powerful computers, they are essentially best-guess re-creations of the way the climate system works, using thousands of equations to simulate the flows of energy, water, air, clouds and pollution in the atmosphere.
The models provide one of the only tools for unraveling the causes and consequences of climate change, given that it is impossible to run an experiment with the real Earth other than the one that is already under way as greenhouse gases build. They have thus become a cornerstone of calls to limit warming. But they remain rough sketches of reality.
A few climate scientists contend that the modelers are engaged in a circular exercise with little meaning, building complex simulations of an even more complex real world that contains many features - at scales ranging from ocean currents to cloud droplets - that shape climate while still defying scientific understanding.
But most of the scientists conducting such modeling studies say the field has seen concrete advances.
As far back as 2001, based substantially on models, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the leading body assessing such research, had already concluded that "most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities." A panel convened by the National Academy of Sciences generally concurred.
Since then, the models have grown in power and sophistication, mirroring ever more facets of the real atmosphere and oceans, said Dr. Gerald A. Meehl of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., who is the lead author of the paper featured in the administration's research review. The study is one of many aimed at finding which forces determined how global temperatures changed over the 20th century - warming until 1940, then cooling until the 1970's, then warming again.
The modeling study by Dr. Meehl and his colleagues included both natural influences on climate - volcanic plumes that block sunlight and variations in the sun's output - and human ones, including ozone and dustlike aerosol pollution as well as building emissions of greenhouse gases.
The exercise showed, with more detail than ever, that the warming in the first half of the century was almost certainly natural, while the rising temperatures in the last half were only possible when human activity was included.
It is just one of a host of new modeling studies that will be used by the international panel for its next climate review, to be issued in 2007.
Those working in the field agree that the models need refinement. Most important, they say, is improving understanding of the aerosols spewed by smokestacks, unfiltered tailpipes and volcanoes. They were once presumed only to have a cooling influence. Now, however, aerosols are known to cause both cooling and warming, depending on their color and composition and how they affect clouds. Those properties are slowly being incorporated in the simulations.
But several experts on aerosols published a paper in the journal Science last year warning that such particles were so poorly understood that there was no way to incorporate them into models without adding greatly to uncertainty in the results.
Given the uncertainties, the authors, led by Dr. Theodore L. Anderson of the University of Washington, said the one-degree warming in the last century could just as easily have been caused by inherent variability in the climate system as by greenhouse gases.
Dr. Richard S. Lindzen, an M.I.T. meteorologist and longtime critic of climate models, said the designers essentially chose values that produced the desired result: significant future warming trends.
Model designers defend their work, saying there is no way to choose values for the forces affecting climate that produce a desired curve.
Ronald J. Stouffer, a modeler at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J., noted that many competing simulations had been created by independent teams using different methods - and they all showed warming.
"It is the sum of all the papers and analysis that convinces me" that humans are altering the climate, Mr. Stouffer said.
But, he and other experts conceded, persuading elected officials to move from accepting the science to curtailing emissions remains a much bigger challenge.
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Bush Orders New 'Cooperative' Environmental Policy
Story by David Morgan
REUTERS USA:
August 31, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/26840/story.htm
WASHINGTON - President Bush ordered five federal agencies last week to give state, local and tribal governments, private institutions and individuals more of a say in environmental policy.
In what some environmentalists rejected as a campaign ploy, Bush signed an executive order instituting a policy of "cooperative conservation" between the federal government and local parties on the broad issues of environmental protection and use of natural resources.
The order directed the departments of the Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, and Defense, and the Environmental Protection Agency to "properly accommodate" local participation in decision-making and take private landowner interests into account while pursuing programs, projects and activities.
Accompanying the order was a presidential statement that sought to compare the new cooperative policy with grass-roots environmental movements that ushered in the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act a generation ago.
"Over the last three decades, we have made remarkable progress, working together to meet our conservation goals and improve the quality of our air and water," Bush said in the statement.
The White House issued the executive order and statement as Bush traveled through New Mexico on a campaign swing.
Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope, one of Bush's environmental critics, dismissed the measure as an election-year stunt.
"This executive order, issued at a campaign appearance in a battleground state, will do about as much for conservation as George Bush's 'compassionate conservatism' has done for compassion," Pope said.
Bush, a Republican, built his 2000 presidential campaign around "compassionate conservatism," promising to address social issues like education that had been largely Democratic agenda items, but critics say Bush has not followed through.
Other environmentalists expressed concern that Thursday's ordered changes would weaken environmental protections and give private interest a new hand in writing land-use policy.
"It seems like another way to allow unfettered access to lands by private industries," Rob Perks, spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Bush's order also requires agency heads to provide an annual progress report to the chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. The order also directed the council to host a White House Conference on Cooperative Conservation within a year.
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Even Modest Climate Change Means More and Larger Fires
August 31, 2004
SEATTLE, Washington, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2004/2004-08-31-04.asp
The area burned by wildfires in 11 Western states could double by the end of the century if summer climate warms by slightly more than a degree and a half, say researchers with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service and Pacific Northwest Climate Impacts Group at the University of Washington.
Montana, Wyoming and New Mexico appear acutely sensitive, especially to temperature changes, and fire seasons there may respond more dramatically to global warming than in states such as California and Nevada.
Researchers have developed statistical relationships between observed climate and an 85 year record of fire extent during the 20th century and used them in conjunction with existing state-of-the-art global climate models.
"Models linking area burned in the Western states with fire season temperature predict that global warming will bring significant increases in fire extent," said Donald McKenzie of the USDA Forest Service's Pacific Wildland Fire Science Lab.
"Such increases could have consequences for threatened and endangered species in ecosystems that experience increased fire because many such species are already restricted to specialized and fragmented habitat," he warned.
McKenzie is lead author of "Climatic Change, Wildfire and Conservation," in the August issue of "Conservation Biology." His co-authors are Ze'ev Gedalof of the University of Guelph in Ontario, David Peterson of the USDA Forest Service, and Philip Mote, University of Washington climate scientist and Washington state climatologist.
All are members of the University of Washington's Pacific Northwest Climate Impacts Group.
Today, the forecast is for high pressure that will continue to build into the western states, allowing hot and dry conditions to persist through the day. The National Interagency Fire Center reports very high to extreme fire indices in Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Nebraska, Nevada, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming.
The authors' analysis of past climate and fire histories showed that the most important variable is hot summer temperatures, more important than precipitation in most cases.
Using what is considered a low end climate change scenario - a 1.6 degree Celsius increase in summer temperatures between 2070 and 2100 compared to temperatures from 1970 to 2000 - the area burned will increase by 1.4 to five times in western states except California and Nevada, where the increase is not so great.
Fire in California and Nevada appears to be relatively insensitive to changes in summer climate and the total area burned in these states may not respond strongly to changed climate.
Parts of Northern California where warmer climate could affect the number and extent of fires, for example, are offset by areas in Southern California where fires are almost all caused by human activities and the combination of high temperatures and dry air associated with the Santa Ana winds, not temperature by itself, McKenzie says.
At the other extreme are Montana, Wyoming and New Mexico. Montana is the most sensitive, with the models predicting a five-fold increase in mean area burned over the observed range in climate, the authors write.
In Washington and Oregon, the effects will be intermediate because precipitation and temperature are both associated with fire extent in these states, rather than temperature alone.
More frequent, more extensive fires in forest ecosystems will likely reduce the number and size of patches of older forests, the authors say. Corridors of wild areas between forests, through which species might migrate if their home territory goes up in flames, also could be affected, possibly eliminated.
"The winners after fires in these cases are the weedy, adaptive, quickly reproducing species," McKenzie says. "The losers are the ones needing more stable environments."
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Lowering the Environmental Costs of Home Building
August 31, 2004
SEATTLE, Washington, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2004/2004-08-31-09.asp#anchor6
Most of the energy that goes into building U.S. homes is consumed - not by the power tools, welding and trucking during construction - but during the manufacture of the building materials, according to a new study by the Consortium for Research on Renewable Industrial Materials.
The consortium is a research group started by 15 universities and research institutes. Their report considers the energy required to produce building materials, construct, maintain and demolish a house on a time period of 75 years.
A 2,100 square foot house designed for the cold Minneapolis climate was used to compare wood frame with steel frame construction while a 2,200 square foot house was designed for the hot and humid Atlanta climate was used to compare wood frame with concrete frame construction.
The designs in both cases were typical of homes in those regions.
In this case researchers determined that the construction of the hypothetical Minneapolis steel frame home used 17 percent more energy than the matching wood frame home.
Constructing the study's hypothetical Atlanta concrete frame home used 16 percent more energy than a matching wood frame house.
The energy tallied for the study included not just electricity but also such things as diesel and fuel oil to extract and haul materials, natural gas to generate steam in lumber mills and electricity for steel mills.
"Everything kind of flows from energy consumption," said coauthor Bruce Lippke, a University of Washington professor of forest resources. "If you are using energy, you are polluting water, polluting air and kicking out carbon dioxide emissions."
The carbon emissions associated with energy use represented one of the more important environmental impacts, the report says.
The researchers considered the impact of the carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide emissions generated during the life cycles of the homes to determine the global warming potential of different construction materials.
They estimate the global warming potential of the steel frame home to be 26 percent higher than the wood frame, and the concrete frame home was 31 percent higher than the comparable wood frame.
-------- ACTIVISTS
RNC: Demonstrations
20,000 Keep Anti-GOP Rallies Going
Marchers Protest Growing Ranks of Poverty-Stricken Under Bush
By Michael Powell and Michelle Garcia
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, August 31, 2004; Page A09
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47480-2004Aug30.html
NEW YORK, Aug. 30 -- An additional 20,000 or so demonstrators took to the streets of the city Monday, using drums and horns and chants to raise a ruckus about the Republicans who have come to town for the week.
In the first march, at midday, more than 15,000 tenants, homeless families, migrant workers, and organizers for immigrants and poor people snaked one mile from Union Square -- that century-old wellspring of protest -- to Madison Square Garden, site of the Republican National Convention. Met at the Garden by the pulsating Puerto Rican music known as bomba, the marchers presented themselves as the face of those left behind -- the rising number of Americans, many of them from communities of color, who fell into poverty over the past three years.
"It's about concrete issues today, poor people have suffered," said Monami Maulik, 29, a member of the Still We Rise/Racial Justice 911 coalition, which organized the march. "There's a demand for comprehensive commitment for education, jobs and health care."
As was true Sunday, when more than 200,000 people flowed through Midtown to protest President Bush's policies, the marchers Monday were cheered by New Yorkers leaning out windows with noisemakers and signs. Jonathan Rivas, 35, from Queens, watched the demonstrators while dressed in his white kitchen uniform.
"They represent us and what we can't say," Rivas said. "We have to work. We can't take the day off."
Just before evening, a march led by the Kensington Welfare Rights Union moved from a plaza outside the United Nations to Madison Square Garden. The protesters had no permit, but police let them pass.
"There's a war against the poor, a war against our right to health care . . . all under the name of national security," said Ajamu Baraka, a human rights activist in Atlanta.
For several days now, protests have seemed to spring up in every corner of Manhattan, from political theater in Central Park to protesters rappelling down the face of the Plaza Hotel. Relatively little violence has accompanied the demonstrations, but police have made 531 arrests, the vast majority on misdemeanor charges, according to the Manhattan district attorney.
The largest number of arrests, 260, came Friday evening, when police moved in on Critical Mass, a group of bikers who cycle around Manhattan and temporarily block intersections. The riders have taken these unofficial trips around the city for years.
On Sunday, police arrested a different group of protesters who were loudly protesting Republicans on the streets of the theater district. The police detained some bystanders and legal observers in that action, reporters on the scene said.
"Our sense is that most of the arrests are not justified," said Chris Dunn, associate legal director for the New York Civil Liberties Union.
Attorneys with the National Lawyers Guild say that a number of these demonstrators, even those nabbed on misdemeanor charges, spent more than 20 hours in police wagons, precincts and holding cells before being released with what are known as "desk appearance tickets."
Paul Brown, a senior police official, insisted that no protester had waited more than 12 hours before being released. Officers had been "restrained and professional throughout," he said.
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Nearly 1,000 protesters arrested
8/31/2004
Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/nation/president/2004-08-31-protesters_x.htm
NEW YORK (AP) - Nearly 1,000 protesters were arrested across Manhattan on Tuesday as swarms of activists massed in the streets for marches to the site of the Republican convention - by far the biggest day of arrests since the demonstrations began last week.
There were no immediate reports of violence, but police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said officers showed "great restraint in the face of relentless provocation" by the protesters.
Police official Michael Collins said there were more than 970 arrests at various protests around the city. More than 1,300 people have been taken into custody in convention-related protest activity since late last week.
Heightened security against the protests has turned Manhattan into a crazy-quilt of barriers, heavily armed police and street-corner activists. One of those arrested late Tuesday at a demonstration was a 19-year-old man who was seen on a videotape assaulting a detective a day earlier, police said.
Outside the New York Public Library, in the streets near the famed Herald Square and at the site of the fallen World Trade Center, demonstrators pointed themselves toward Madison Square Garden and promised to get their message across that they want President Bush out of office.
"People are trying to question the policies of a corrupt government. They take to the streets and don't ask permission," said protester Gan Golan, 30, a graduate student from Boston who was arrested after he sat in the street and refused to get up.
On the library's stone steps, hundreds of protesters gathered for the march. Verbal confrontations erupted as police moved them away from the library's front door and wrapped the block in orange netting, and about 75 people were taken into custody before the crowd thinned out.
Near Ground Zero, officers also encircled scores of demonstrators with orange netting during a protest before the march. Detained protesters were loaded onto an off-duty city bus, and police put the count at about 200. The demonstrators insisted they were following police orders.
An Associated Press photographer was detained briefly in the cordon before being released; a photo messenger working with the photographer was arrested and taken into custody.
Near Herald Square, a bus carrying Louisiana delegates was blocked by protesters until police arrived. About 150 people were arrested, police said.
Outside the Fox News Channel studios in midtown Manhattan, police in riot gear used barricades to contain around 1,000 demonstrators staging a "shut-up-athon" to denounce what they called the network's right-wing slant. One woman held up a sign that read: "Republicans are really stupid. They watch Fox News and believe it."
Police also announced the arrest of a 21-year-old Yale student after he entered a restricted area near Vice President Dick Cheney's booth at the convention Monday night, coming within 10 feet of him and shouting anti-war and anti-Bush statements. Cheney was never in any danger, and no weapon was found on the man, authorities said.
Outside the midtown hotel where Texas delegates are staying, about two dozen protesters, depicting employees of "Hallibacon," grunted through plastic pig snouts Tuesday and wallowed in stacks of fake $100 bills bearing the images of Bush and Cheney.
The protesters accused Cheney and Halliburton, the company he once led, of profiting from the war in Iraq and its aftermath. They chanted: "We love money. We love war. We love Cheney even more."
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NIGHT LIFE
At Midnight, Protesters Turn Poets and Dreamers
August 31, 2004
By JULIE SALAMON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/31/politics/campaign/31night.html
On a tropical summer night with a big moon hanging low, New York can look like a landscape meant for poets and dreamers. At least that is how it seemed in the late hours after Sunday's big protest, even with clusters of police officers gathered at street corners and helicopters buzzing overhead.
The Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade didn't want the day to end. So toward midnight, tired and sunburned from marching and hanging out in Central Park, about 65 of its members gathered in a borrowed Chinatown space to eat and entertain themselves with what they referred to as a "talent show," which lasted until nearly 2 a.m.
"We think people even in the most intense time need to be involved in artistic endeavors," explained Sunsara Taylor, a slight, intense woman who is a poet, office worker and spokeswoman for the Youth Brigade.
Ms. Taylor and the rest of her group - Marxist-Leninist-Maoist followers of Bob Avakian, chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party - are young, mostly in their late teens and 20's, which may explain their casual mixture of summer camp and radical rhetoric (they believe in the inevitability of armed revolution) and their stamina. When Ms. Taylor's turn before the audience arrived, close to 1:30 a.m., she delivered two fiery poems in a voice hoarse from shouting during hours of protest.
New York is always a 24-hour town, but with the Republican convention here, the alternative cultural scene has gone into overtime. The Bowery Poetry Club, an East Village nightclub on the Bowery between Bleecker and Houston Streets, is remaining open all night this week for restless souls and insomniacs looking for political conversation and pageantry and yoga. The Tank, a space on West 42nd Street that is normally a venue for performing and visual arts, has become a counterculture way station as well, providing entertainment at night and daytime tourism aid for protesters, including doughnuts and coffee in the mornings - also offered to police officers, if any happen by.
On its Web site, imagine04.org, the Imagine Festival, the umbrella for scores of politically minded arts events this week, advertises several all-night venues, including the Freedom of Expression National Monument, a giant red megaphone aimed at the sculptures of Law, Truth and Equity arrayed on the New York County Courthouse in Foley Square. There were no visitors there at 2:30 a.m. Monday. Some police officers across the street with a big dog - the only life around - said there probably wouldn't be any speakers for another seven or eight hours.
Likewise, "True Story Project: Being," a video installation in a storefront at 217 East 42nd Street advertised as an all-night happening, had no audience in the middle of the night, mainly because there weren't any pedestrians. The situation was worse at "The War Room,'' an installation at 208 West 37th Street described as "poignant paintings of the war and its aftermath," but impossible to see behind locked gates covering the windows.
A spokeswoman for Billionaires for Bush, the street-performance parody group, urged protesters not to partake of after hours events, artistic or otherwise. In an e-mail message, she advised: "It is very important that all protesters realize beforehand, that protesting zaps a lot of energy, and requires people to be in good health, well rested and hydrated.''
For some counterculture visitors to New York, the protests merely provide an excuse for poetry. At close to 4 a.m. on Monday, C. C. Arshagra was sitting at the bar of the Bowery Poetry Club explaining how he and some poet friends managed not to find the half-million or so people marching in Sunday's big protest.
"I know I'm going to look like an idiot, but the truth is the truth," said Mr. Arshagra, a slender 46-year-old man dressed, poetically, all in black, with his long graying hair pulled back into a pony tail. "We gave up. We were hungry."
Further explanation was offered by his fellow poet Jamie Mclaughlin, 24, who was wearing a dress she'd made out of a shawl. "We were with a woman walking really slowly and smoking cigarettes," said Ms. Mclaughlin, a street musician and artist's model.
Mr. Arshagra, who works as a livery driver in Boston, said he really didn't mind. After coming to New York with some fellow poets for the Howl festival, which concluded last Tuesday, he said, he decided to hang around for the Republican convention. His goal was to recite poetry where and when he could - he got a gig at the FusionArts Museum on the Lower East Side - while remaining receptive to serendipitous encounters.
He missed the march but found lots of serendipity. There was free vegetarian food at Tompkins Square (potato stir-fry and vegan corn chowder -"delicious," pronounced Mr. Arshagra) and Israeli-Arabic influenced music he liked at St. Mark's Church on East 10th Street early Sunday evening. Then he and Ms. Mclaughlin found their way to a concert at the Tank, leaving at around 1:30 a.m. to head for the Bowery.
As part of this impromptu cultural tour, the Boston poets earlier in the day also visited the 6BC Botanical Garden, a flowering green space tucked midblock on Sixth Street between Avenues B and C. They chatted with a nice woman sitting on a stoop near St. Mark's Church, a potter who told them how gentrification had caused rents to skyrocket in the East Village in the last 25 years. They ate another free vegetarian meal at St. Mark's, for which Mr. Arshagra washed dishes for half an hour in gratitude. After that a woman named Jeanette gave them a ride from St. Mark's to the Tank.
At the Bowery Poetry Club, almost everyone of the dozen or so people on hand at 4 a.m. went onstage to read or recite a poem. Teli Cardaci, a performance artist who moved to New York from Maryland three weeks ago, changed into cowboy gear and jumped through lassos he kept spinning wildly. "I'm here representing cowboys against war," he said.
The political spectrum was varied. The young communists officially denounce both candidates. Ms. McLaughlin is voting for the Green Party slate, while Mr. Arshagra said he planned to vote for Senator John Kerry.
Mr. Arshagra said he had to go soon. Dawn was approaching. His car was parked at a meter and his time was about up.
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ARRESTS
Demonstrators Held at Pier 57 Complain of Conditions and Long Waits
August 31, 2004
By PATRICK HEALY and SUSAN SAULNY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/31/politics/campaign/31arrests.html
Pier 57 was once just another dingy hulk on the Hudson River, a three-story parking garage for New York City Transit buses. But this week, the pier near West 14th Street has been outfitted with benches, portable toilets and chain-link fences to hold its new freight: protesters.
People who are arrested protesting the Republican National Convention are handcuffed and taken to the pier to be held and processed before they are sent to Manhattan Criminal Court. As the city's temporary detention center for demonstrators, the pistachio-colored building jutting 700 feet into the river has become one of the more contentious emblems of security during the convention.
As of last night, 560 people had been arrested since Thursday, the vast majority for misdemeanors, and many who cycled through the system complained that they had been held for as long as 30 hours in miserable conditions before being arraigned or receiving a desk appearance ticket. Several said they had contracted rashes from sleeping on the pier's floor, had gone hours without food and were given a Dixie cup to use to drink water.
Describing their treatment, several protesters who had been arrested referred to Pier 57 as Guantánamo on the Hudson.
"I felt safe from physical harm, but we were definitely not taken care of,'' said Aubryn Sidle, 22, who was released yesterday afternoon, about 24 hours after she was arrested during the huge protest march on Sunday in Manhattan.
But Paul J. Browne, the Police Department's chief spokesman, disputed the protesters' complaints, saying that police crews had thoroughly cleaned the building. He said protesters were held at the pier only until they could be taken to court.
"Nobody stays there," Mr. Browne said. "You're there temporarily, until the next step in the system."
Lawyers for the National Lawyers Guild, who are representing many protesters, said that next step had taken too long to reach.
One guild lawyer, Margaret Ratner Kunstler, said at least 18 people who were arrested Friday night during a bicycle demonstration had remained in custody for more than 24 hours. Ms. Kunstler said legal precedent in New York required that anyone arrested be brought before a judge within 24 hours.
Another lawyer for the protesters, Colin Starger, said demonstrators had also been held 18 to 24 hours before receiving desk appearance tickets, a process that takes about two hours because a defendant does not have to appear before a judge.
"Eighteen hours for a desk appearance ticket is outrageous," Mr. Starger said. "It certainly has the effect of deterring people from protesting, tiring them out. Whether that's their intent, it depends on how paranoid you are."
Several lawyers also said they had not been allowed to visit demonstrators at the pier or at holding cells at Manhattan Criminal Court at 100 Centre Street.
One demonstrator, Andrew Mahoney, 22, said police officers laughed when he asked to make a phone call. In a statement, Mr. Browne said those held at Pier 57 were being allowed to make calls.
As exhausted demonstrators trickled out of the court building yesterday afternoon, Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, made a rare appearance at some of the arraignments. He walked into two courtrooms on the first floor and shook hands with employees.
"It's going the way everybody expected," Mr. Morgenthau said. On a typical day, court officials said, 175 arraignments are held in Manhattan Criminal Court.
Across the street from the courthouse, about two dozen protesters ate burritos provided by their friends and recounted the hours they had spent at Pier 57. Several said they had been taken by bus to Pier 57, where men and women were separated, searched and put into one of several holding pens.
The protesters described the building as a cavernous structure with corrugated metal walls, fluorescent lights and cracking walls. Each holding pen was made of chain-link fence topped with razor wire and equipped with two portable toilets and a few benches, protesters said.
Wajid Jenkins, 33, who was arrested early Sunday afternoon, said he had to wait 10 hours before he was allowed to use the bathroom.
Mr. Mahoney, who said he spent 30 hours in custody after being arrested around 9 p.m. Friday, said 30 to 50 protesters were kept in each holding pen, and most of them sat or lay on the floor during the night.
Mr. Mahoney said he contracted a rash similar to a severe sunburn from lying on the floor. Every few hours, Mr. Mahoney said, protesters were moved from one holding pen to another until they were finally loaded onto vans and taken to court.
Ben Moren, 19, who said he was arrested around 5:45 p.m. Sunday in Times Square and was released at 3 p.m. yesterday, said, "It was really dirty and kind of creepy, but I guess they needed a place to put all the kids."
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CONFRONTATIONS
Protesters' Encounters With Delegates on the Town Turn Ugly
August 31, 2004
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/31/politics/campaign/31protest.html?pagewanted=all&position=
Outside a hotel in Times Square, delegates to the Republican National Convention were swarmed by protesters dressed in black and swearing at them. Blocks away, delegates engaged in shoving matches with protesters seeking to spoil their night at the theater. And outside "The Lion King" on 42nd Street, a delegate was punched by a protester who ran by.
Although the organized protests yesterday and Sunday have been largely peaceful, there has been a starkly different tone to smaller incidents in Midtown and elsewhere: angry encounters and planned harassment of convention delegates as they go out on the town.
Sometimes the delegates answer back in toe-to-toe, finger-pointing shouting matches. Other times the police, who are guarding delegate gatherings, have dispersed protesters, who move on to other locations to taunt other delegates.
The harassment of delegates came as organized protests continued to draw thousands of people. The Still We Rise march by advocates for social issues was peaceful, and a Poor People's March, a column several blocks long, proceeded from the United Nations to the Madison Square Garden yesterday after the police decided to let it go ahead without a permit.
When marchers approached the Garden, a police detective was knocked off his scooter. He was then repeatedly kicked and punched in the head by at least one male demonstrator, the police said.
The detective, William Sample, was listed in serious condition at St. Vincent's Manhattan Hospital, where Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly both visited him, the police said. There was no immediate word of an arrest in the assault, but as of 9 p.m., the police said there had been 11 protest-related arrests.
The heavy police presence at the Garden apparently inspired the coordinated plan by anarchists and other radicals to strike out at the delegates at their hotels, breakfasts, parties, and on the streets.
The incidents are the result of months of planning by opposition groups, who report that they have obtained copies of plans and addresses for delegates' parties, caucuses and other gatherings outside the Garden.
Their efforts are aided by a support network that uses cellphone text messaging. Text message was also used extensively in a bike protest on Friday night and during demonstrations in Times Square on Sunday.
"CT delegation breakfast everyday @ Maison (7th ave & 53rd) from 7-8:30. Can we get some dissenters?" said one text message yesterday, apparently referring to the Connecticut delegation's plan to gather at a Midtown restaurant. "Maison has outdoor buffet. It would be direct contact with delegates."
One Internet discussion list used by protesters posted an advisory about where some delegate buses would be idling in Midtown every morning. Another message included phone numbers and e-mail addresses for convention officials and advised that delegate hotels would be busiest in the morning and evening.
The police are bracing for another round of unsanctioned demonstrations today, which protesters have designated a day of "nonviolent civil disobedience and direct action." Among the parties expected to be a target is the Tennessee delegation's gathering at Sotheby's. A group calling itself the Man in Black Bloc plans to protest it, saying it is angered that the convention intends to honor the late country singer Johnny Cash.
Yesterday, Jamie Moran, who lives in Brooklyn and describes himself as an anarchist and helps direct the rncnotwelcome.org Web site, was roaming Times Square with a band of protesters shouting at delegates. "These people are in a bubble," he said. "This is absolutely better than standing outside the Garden and shouting to let them know they are not welcome here."
As delegate buses arrived at the Garden yesterday afternoon, protesters who had gathered for a demonstration screamed obscenities and gestured rudely at them. When the police spotted Pete Coors, a Republican candidate for Senate from Colorado, walking near the group, they swiftly steered him away.
Clearly, the protesters were not deterred by entreaties by former Mayor Edward I. Koch that New Yorkers be nice and an offer by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to give peaceful protesters buttons and shopping discounts.
Adam Chase, 23, who said he came from Michigan for the protests, said that while he believed demonstrators should not be violent, "I think it is quite unfair for the R.N.C. and the delegates to tell us we should not be telling them we think they are exploiting the fears of the people."
Mindful that delegates are targets, police officers guard their hotels and ride aboard their chartered buses around town, and several receive police escorts to various events.
"New York City is a fortress, and I love it," Joseph Kyrillos, the New Jersey state Republican chairman, said yesterday at a delegate breakfast. "We need to thank the New York police for all the protection."
Leonardo Alcivar, a spokesman for the convention, said officials recommended that delegates not respond to heckling and taunts, which he said have been "few and far between."
Still, he said, "Our delegates understand the old adage, do unto others as they do unto you."
The tensest encounters between delegates and protesters so far occurred Sunday evening when large groups of demonstrators moved through the theater district while delegates were attending shows under arrangements prepared by convention planners. Several protesters were arrested for trying to block hotel and theater entrances, and face-to-face standoffs abounded.
Outside "Bombay Dreams" demonstrators shouted at and videotaped people standing outside for intermission.
At "Aida," a group of protesters unfurled a banner and hurled invective at delegates leaving the show. Some looked nervous, but a few shouted back, "You're sick, sick."
Delegates lined up to see "Phantom of the Opera" ended up in a sing-song, tit-for-tat with protesters. One protester shouted, "The phantom dies at the end."
Flora Rohrs, a delegate from Colorado, burst into song, "This is my country," with bits of "God Bless America" thrown in. She said, "What is going on here is we are still going to get George Bush re-elected."
For some, there was no escape even at dinner.
"A person came by and used an explicative and stuck his finger in our face," said Deb Etcheson, an alternate delegate from Iowa. "But I don't blame that on New Yorkers. I just love this city."
Some delegates seemed perplexed, even hurt, not because they did not expect protesters to be here, but because they did not expect them to get personal. "They were using foul language, getting real ugly," said Kim Kirkwood, a delegate from Amarillo, Tex. Her husband, Jim, said he could not understand it. "I have friends who are Democrats in Texas, and we talk about things, agree to disagree."
Reporting for this article was contributed by Anthony Ramirez, Marc Santora, Mary Spicuzza and Jennifer Steinhauer.
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Streets of Rage
How George Bush and his Republicans mobilized half a million people
by Tom Robbins & Jennifer Gonnerman
August 31st, 2004
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0435/robbins.php
All week in the host city, his name was a curse on the lips of hundreds of thousands.
It was the first word of the opening act in a week of protests, chanted singsong by 80 marchers who had trooped 250 miles from the Democratic convention in Boston to New York, arriving Thursday night. "Yo-ho, yo-ho, Bush has got to go-oh!" they cried, as they strode down Broadway under a luminous three-quarter moon and the piercing searchlight of a police helicopter.
Five thousand free-spirited bike riders flung his name into the night on Friday, screaming "No more Bush!" at the midtown canyons as they madly tried to outpedal the cops. In Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, an encampment of poor people from Philadelphia, a delegation without credentials here to present its grievances, set up its tents in a vacant lot off Nostrand Avenue and dubbed it "Bushville."
In Williamsburg on Saturday, diners at Fabiane's Café on Bedford Avenue stood and applauded 50 weary souls, many of whom had walked from Long Island's East End chanting "Drop Bush, not bombs." That evening, at the still-gaping open wound that was the World Trade Center, hundreds of people rang bells, saying they wanted to heal the pain of 9-11 and drown out the echoes of his administration's bombs.
Sunday, in the largest protest march seen here in 20 years, thousands of placards and banners brandished his name, as half a million people angrily denounced him. His image was depicted goateed and swathed in head scarves, dubbed "The Real Terrorist." A half-dozen presidential imitators walked the streets, one dressed in a "Mission Accomplished" flight suit, another with silver duct tape wound around him, holding this sign: "Protect America with duct tape." His face leered out of a thousand posters reading, "He Lied. They Died."
Some were more personal. "Bush lied, my son died," said the sign carried by Al Zappala, 64, of Philadelphia, who this spring buried his adopted son, Sherwood, a National Guardsman killed in Iraq.
During the week, protesters hung the president's name off the Plaza Hotel, floated it with balloons into the starry ceiling of Grand Central Terminal, and draped it across Brooklyn rooftops so that sightseeing conventioneers couldn't escape the near-universal outrage he has engendered in this, the host city. As the first contingent of Sunday's marchers neared the convention site at heavily guarded Madison Square Garden, a burst of pink taffeta, shaped into a giant woman's slip, emerged from the roof of a 20-story building. "Bush lied, fire him," it read, as demonstrators cheered and waved.
Scores of cardboard coffins draped in American flags and carried shoulder-high by marchers were backed up in the throng along Seventh Avenue. A pair of Brooklyn men, film animator Michael de Seve and designer John Lake, had created the coffins after deciding that something needed to be done.
"This is the picture they tried to suppress," said de Seve, 41, whose work includes the Beavis and Butt-head film. "People haven't been able to see the cost of this war. Here is the invoice."
The arrival of George Bush and his Republicans in New York churned the city into a frenzy of events, some zany, some dangerous, some solemn. A few, like Sunday's long-contested march organized by the coalition group United for Peace and Justice, represented an unprecedented, massive display of Bush condemnation.
All week, people have invoked his name in anger and ridicule in documentaries, art shows, poetry readings, even die-ins, all part of the convulsion of creative dissent that his presidency has unintentionally unleashed.
As George W. Bush steps forward on the red, white, and blue stage at the Garden this week to accept his party's nomination, he will claim many accomplishments for his first term in office. There is one, however, he will never mention: that fear and hatred of his regime have managed to turn even ordinary Americans into full-fledged activists committed to his ouster, while at the same time regalvanizing a progressive movement in American politics that had sputtered along for years without clear direction.
You didn't have to go far to see how he has changed people. It was right there in the East Village, at Fourth Avenue and 12th Street, in the windows of Gary Orioli's florist shop. For 15 years, Orioli, from Greenpoint, Brooklyn, the son of a construction worker with cousins on the police force, managed to run a successful business while reviling the prevailing political climate around him.
"When 9-11 happened and there were all these kids up there at Union Square singing 'Give Peace a Chance' and lighting candles, I was so furious at them. I said, 'Look at these punks, they don't even know what's going on.' I thought it was so anti-American, I wanted to get in my van and just drive over them. My first reaction after the attacks was just, 'Let's nuke whoever did this. Just blow them all up.' "
Today, every inch of Orioli's corner shop windows is taken up by news clippings of Bush misdeeds and anti-administration stickers. The table out front where he lays his fresh roses is decorated with ads for protest marches. A color photo of Bush under the headline "Wanted for Crimes Against Humanity" occupies the center of the table. Orioli's only hesitation about joining this week's protests was his twin seven-year-old daughters, who worried he would be arrested or injured.
"When I started to find out what was going on, I was just amazed," he told a visitor last week. "I mean, I watched Colin Powell testify on TV at the United Nations. I loved Colin Powell. I thought he was going to be our first black president. There he was, saying, 'Look at these pictures, here are the tractor trailers with the weapons. If we don't strike soon, they are going to be moved, and we won't be able to get them.' I assumed he was telling the truth. Then, when I found out there were no weapons, that all that stuff he was saying had been hyped up, I was so mad. How could they do that to us?"
The impact of George W. Bush on America was even more striking in the presence of Michael Hoffman, 25, from the faded steel town of Allentown, Pennsylvania, marching in Sunday's heat in one of his old Marine jackets with a contingent of the one-month-old group Iraq Veterans Against the War. Hoffman's story is fodder for the films of Michael Moore, who marched at the head of Sunday's procession. His father was one of the last workers at the now demolished Bethlehem Steel plant; his mother, a Teamster, is a janitor at a local school.
"I bounced around for about a year and a half after high school doing odd jobs," he explained at one of many press conferences he attended last week. "The last one was as an assistant manager at a toy store. I made about $15,000 a year, your basic poverty-level job. I had a good friend who was joining up, and he kind of talked me into it. I thought that the military represented a lot of good things, was a good opportunity. When I joined in February 1999, the war in the Balkans was a big deal. I thought we were doing the right thing there, and I wanted to be a part of that."
His four-year hitch in the Marines was up when news came that the Pentagon had imposed "stop-loss orders" preventing all discharges. Instead of mustering out, he and his artillery unit were dispatched to Kuwait. "We crossed over into Iraq and pushed north up to Baghdad. We were firing 155-millimeter howitzers." About a day south of the capital, he said, he drove past a town they had blasted. "It was just entirely in flames. The people were wandering around, like in a daze."
Discharged a year ago, he found himself talking with other vets haunted by what they'd seen, along with families who had lost loved ones in the conflict. "I'm just opposed to what we are doing there; this [protesting the war] is all I'm doing now."
The war has seemed like little more than the cruelest of tricks to Fernando Suárez del Solar, who carried a photo of his son, Jesús, handsome in his lance corporal's Marine uniform, along Sunday's parade route. Originally from Tijuana, Mexico, Suárez's family had moved to Escondido, California, in 1997. Military recruiters had persuaded Jesús, who aspired to be a firefighter, that if he signed up he would obtain both a green card and valuable experience. But there wasn't time.
On March 27, 2003, Suárez learned that his son had been killed in Iraq. It wasn't even hostile fire that took his son's life. He had stepped on an unexploded U.S. cluster bomb and died from his injuries. "I paid the highest price for free speech," he told a roomful of reporters at a pre-march press conference last week. "My son."
The president's invasion also turned around the life of 26-year-old Kelly Dougherty, of Colorado Springs, who spent a year in Iraq with the National Guard, part of the 220th Military Police Company. For Sunday's march she wore an Iraq Veterans Against the War T-shirt and brown camouflage shorts, with a black armband that read, "Support Our Troops, Bring Them Home Now." On Friday night, she had shyly addressed the audience at a fundraising event in a hot and crowded Soho loft. Patrolling the broiling streets around Nasiriya after its capture, she said, she had seen local citizens turn from friend to foe. "When we first got there, the people would smile when they saw us, but as time went on, they started averting their eyes and scowling," she said. "I felt like we treated them like trespassers in their own country."
As an MP, part of her job was to respond to accidents, and she had seen a grisly one in which a U.S. truck had inadvertently run down a seven-year-old boy who had been trying to cross a desert highway with his donkey. Under standing orders, the truck driver had kept right on going, reporting it later. "I couldn't blame the Iraqis for their hostility," she said.
Marching alongside Hoffman and Dougherty was Michael McPhearson, who spent 11 years in the Army, long enough to serve in the 1991 Gulf War, and to later have severe doubts about U.S. actions in Iraq. The son of a schoolteacher and a railroad worker, McPhearson, 40, grew up in Fayetteville, North Carolina, next door to Fort Bragg. He had a pair of uncles and a grandfather who were veterans of the world wars, and he joined the Army the first chance he got, at the age of 17.
He was in a mechanized infantry division that took part in the invasion of Iraq. His unit fired armor-piercing shells composed of depleted uranium. When he returned to Iraq last December as part of a peace delegation, he visited hospitals filled with children suffering from cancer. "They believe it is from those shells we fired," he said last week. "That affected me very strongly. In Iraq, people asked me, 'If American citizens were treated the way we are being treated, would they stand for it?' I had to say, 'No, they wouldn't stand for it.' "
The war has become even more personal for McPhearson, since his own son, who is 19 and in the Navy, is expected to be deployed there soon. "I understand what soldiers there are going through," he said. "They are young, they don't speak the language, and people are shooting at you. And you're scared. But I met fathers of children who had been killed by our soldiers-not on purpose, they had just been in the line of fire. All I could do was apologize. And I said I would come back here and do whatever I could."
As they marched on Sunday, Vietnam veteran George McAnanama led them in cadence:
Bush and Cheney talk that talk
But we know they're chicken hawks.
If they think they're so damn right
Let these rich boys go and fight.
A block or two behind the vets marched a contingent decked out in pink costumes and carrying pink signs. The group calling itself Code Pink is another Bush-spurred creation, its name intended as a feminist counterpoint to the yellow, orange, and red terror alerts. In the days leading up to the convention, Code Pink's cadre provided a steady, humorous chiding to the convention's pro-war organizers. They donned Statue of Liberty crowns and draped themselves in pink gowns, standing in front of the public library on 42nd Street, holding letters spelling out "Give Bush a Pink Slip."
They were there when Mayor Bloomberg tried to take the media's focus off of his refusal to allow demonstrators to use Central Park, handing out "Peaceful Protester" buttons. The Code Pink activists unfurled a 40-foot-long banner from a nearby hotel, calling on him to yield. Bloomberg didn't appreciate the joke, and four members were arrested.
Still, the color-coded protests attracted the attention of 14-year-old Citalic Jeffers, of Queens, who found the group on the Internet and, despite her mother's worries, started participating in its events. "So many issues are bigger than 'who's sleeping with who,' " the teenager explained as she took part in her first demonstration on Thursday in Foley Square across from State Supreme Court.
There was another rookie protester in the square that afternoon, also wearing a paper pink crown. But Ann Wright had to quit her job to participate. Wright, 58, a 17-year diplomat, provided one of the early speed bumps to the president on the way to invading Iraq when she publicly resigned her position in the State Department in protest of Bush's war plans.
She gave her reasons in a letter to her boss, Secretary of State Powell. "I believe the administration's policies are making the world a more dangerous, not a safer place," she wrote.
A former Army colonel who served in Grenada and elsewhere, Wright got a law degree and a master's in national security affairs and joined the foreign service in 1987. She held postings in Afghanistan, Somalia, Nicaragua, and Uzbekistan.
"When Bush refused to pursue diplomatic means of conflict resolution and didn't pay attention to the weapons inspectors, that was my tipping point," she explained at the protest. She flew from her home in Honolulu to give her rap to delegates at the Democratic convention, and she came here to take part in the demonstrations. In a way, she was making up for lost time since she'd long been prohibited from participating in protests. Sunday, she marched the entire 2.2-mile-long route under the broiling sun, in a Veterans for Peace T-shirt. At the end, a reporter asked if she was tired. "I'm ready to march another 30 miles," she said.
When Karl Rove and Bush's other brains decided to hold the Republican National Convention in New York City, they must have hoped not only that the event would showcase their tough-guy president against a backdrop of terrorist atrocity, but that just maybe it would also inspire a Chicago '68-style maelstrom. Such a riot would hopefully be captured on national television and inextricably linked to the campaign of Democrat John Kerry.
They may still get their wish. In the days leading up to the convention, there was plenty of hot rhetoric. "There's one group that always shows up at demonstrations, committing acts of violence," shouted Dustin Langley, a member of ANSWER-Act Now to Stop War and End Racism-at one of dozens of press conferences held on the steps of City Hall last week. "There's one right now," he said, pointing a finger at a cop strolling the plaza. "The NYPD. Let's identify the real thugs, the real terrorists!" he shouted, to the applause of supporters on the stairs.
The mainstream media had already highlighted a handful of alleged anarchists in town to spark mayhem, and they appeared hungry for more. The cameras were pulled, magnet-like, to scenes like the fiery papier-mâché dragon that briefly marred Sunday's march, allegedly torched by an anarchist group. But the bigger news story for a nation in the midst of a bitter electoral battle may have been the overwhelming number of events in New York, sparked by a righteous anger at Bush's administration.
On Saturday morning, 25,000 people streamed across the Brooklyn Bridge as part of a march organized by women's groups to protest Bush's anti-abortion policies. The protesters brought a sense of fashion-pink tank tops, pink feather earrings, even hot-pink fishnet stockings-and a sense of history. Brooklyn residents Sherryann Simon and Juliet Wilson walked alongside their five- and seven-year-old nieces, Tatyana and Kayan. "I don't know if they're old enough to understand this now," said Simon, "but in the future, we might have a conversation with them about women's rights and say, 'Remember walking over the Brooklyn Bridge that hot day?' "
That afternoon, another group of people marched elsewhere in Brooklyn. A cluster of tired walkers from Long Island arrived at McCarren Park in Greenpoint, then headed to Continental Army Plaza in Williamsburg. This march had started August 20 in Montauk and would go on for 120 miles. Marcher Dan Steiger, 55, of Sag Harbor, described a lifetime of marching for causes. He had burned his draft card to protest the Vietnam War, and served 30 days in jail in Puerto Rico after being arrested in a demonstration against U.S. Navy bombings of Vieques. Now, he'd marched nine days in his leather gardening boots to demonstrate once more.
On Saturday night, at St. Mary's Church on 126th Street in Harlem, a 1,400-pound granite tombstone rested on a wagon outside. The stone had been hauled by hand from Boston, by a group calling itself September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, made up of 130 people who lost loved ones on 9-11. The tombstone, which stopped at many churches on the way to its ultimate resting place at the Church of the Holy Apostles in Chelsea, honors the civilians who have been killed in Iraq.
That sort of creative nonviolent protest is also the hallmark of the 81-year-old War Resisters League and one of its leaders, Frida Berrigan. Her father was the late radical ex-priest Philip Berrigan, who, along with his brother Daniel, became a full-time FBI surveillance project in the 1960s because of their unceasing acts of civil disobedience. At a press conference last week, Frida, 40, vowed to be arrested along with some 50 others who plan to lie down in the streets outside the Garden.
The Bush administration has also become a full-time target for Matthew Roth, 27, who was raised on a communal farm in northeastern Nevada. Roth moved to New York five years ago and helped start a group called Time's Up. The group promotes bicycle use and takes part in late night ride-ins in which hundreds of bicyclists gleefully take over the streets on the last Friday of the month, pedaling en masse through bridges and tunnels and intersections. Such events have been going on for years here, drawing crowds of 100 or more, many of them simply bike lovers thrilled to have the streets largely to themselves.
At the anti-globalization protests in Miami last November, Roth said he was shot five times in the back with rubber bullets, some of them laced with pepper spray that ground its way into his skin. Video footage of the clashes shows people shot directly in the face, even though regulations prohibit shooters from aiming above the waist. Roth calls the video "protest porn" and shows it often to the young activists who gather at the East Houston Street storefront that is his group's temporary headquarters.
Spurred by Bush's impending arrival, the group upped the ante last Friday, tying its event to the Republican convention. It moved its starting time up several hours to increase the turnout. No police permits are ever sought or issued for the rides, but everyone understood that this one, widely advertised to the anti-Bush protesters, would be taken by the police as a challenge to the public order.
By 7 p.m., thousands of bicyclists had crammed into Union Square, many of them pointing to the police helicopters and Fuji blimp-used by the NYPD for surveillance-circling overhead. The crowd whooped and roared several times before taking off down the east side of the park. It took several minutes for the lead contingent to break through the traffic on 14th Street, but then they were off, pedaling down Broadway, whistling and hooting, the most daring ones thrusting both arms in the air as they rode.
Red lights were ignored, as lead bikers placed themselves in front of cars at the intersections, preventing them from moving forward, a practice known as "corking." Some drivers waited patiently, while others leaned on their horns. A few tried to charge forward into the street, nearly striking bicyclists who were pedaling along and ignoring traffic signals.
The riders swung west on Houston Street to Sixth Avenue and rode up to midtown. They traded chants back and forth as they rode. "More Bikes, Less Bush," they shouted, and a favorite, "Whose Streets? Our Streets!" In front of Radio City Music Hall, tourists stared in uncomprehending silence. A cab sat in the street, immobilized, as the cyclists swarmed around it like a school of fish. At the park, the mass turned west and then south, past the Garden and the giant electronic bulletin board welcoming the delegates. The crowd roared, "Fuck you, RNC!"
Police officers were invisible for most of the ride. But at West 13th Street they appeared in riot gear, standing 10 abreast, preventing riders from cycling the wrong way down the side streets. The ride continued, many still shouting ebulliently into the night. A post-ride party had been planned at St. Mark's Church, and the lead bikers headed in that direction around 9:30 p.m. But at Second Avenue, everything ground to a halt. A helicopter, its rotors pulsing overhead, threw its searchlight onto the riders. Police began moving in on foot, arresting dozens of people unlucky enough to be blocked in the street. A water bottle sailed toward the cops, flung by someone standing on the sidelines. "Fuck the police," the crowd chanted. "Let them go!"
Some 260 cyclists were arrested, most becoming the first occupants at Pier 57 on West Street at West 14th Street, which was set aside for mass arrests during the convention. There, men and women were separated, and they were kept in holding pens made of high chain-link fences capped with razor wire. They were held overnight in pens with 30 to 40 others, with nothing to sleep on.
In the morning there was a tiny box of cereal and a small container of milk for the prisoners. They were carted across town to central booking to be fingerprinted, photographed, and late in the afternoon, arraigned at criminal court on Centre Street. Most were charged with disorderly conduct and obstructing government administration. "It was a power trip," said Jessica Shiller, 32, after her release at 4 p.m. Saturday. "They're trying to show who's boss."
George W. Bush's signature moment, the one he hopes is enshrined in the memories of voters, was the moment when he stood atop a heap of ruble at ground zero, gripping the shoulder of a firefighter and shouting through a bullhorn. The ones who did this will be heard from, he vowed.
And yet, shortly after Osama bin Laden disappeared into the mountains of Afghanistan, evading American troops, little was heard about him from the Bush White House. Instead, the generic term of terrorist, along with the country's military might and attention, was shifted to Saddam Hussein and Iraq.
Megan Bartlett, an emergency medical technician who worked at ground zero, recalled Bush's visit that terrible week. "I remember Bush coming down and vowing he would avenge on our behalf," said Bartlett, who now coordinates a group called Ground Zero for Peace that took part in the protests this week. "My hope for this week is that I'd really like someone in government to know that there are people from ground zero that don't want to be seen in a campaign ad behind President Bush. Even three years later, we are still a community in grieving."
With special reporting by Danial Adkison, Douglas Gillison, Anya Kamenetz, Christine Lagorio, and Laura Sinagra
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