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NUCLEAR
Low-cost alternative sought for trapping Hanford wastes in glass
Chernobyl Study Reveals First Direct Evidence
Blair's health 'is a ticking nuclear time-bomb'
UK-U.S. Set to Extend Nuclear Pact
Secret UK nuclear dumping exposed
Second phase of Ling'ao nuclear power plant starts construction
China says won't help North Korea with nuclear power
China to rev up nuclear power construction in next 15 years
Let a Thousand Reactors Bloom
Vieques out, N.C. in?
Evidence on Iran Called Unclear
Iran Said to Be Nearing Enrichment of Uranium
Iraqi Nuclear Materials Secured
School fears helo crash contaminated soil
Russian Nuclear Scientists Take Aim at Internet
Russia Sends Troops to Guard Nuclear Sites
Can Bush or Kerry Prevent Nuclear Terrorism?
Bush Shifts Fissile Material Ban Policy
Trust, but Don't Verify
ElBaradei Appoints Fuel Cycle Group
Oppenheimer - A Puzzle of a Man
Energy Department Must Produce More Yucca Mountain Documents
DOE Denies Charges About Rocky Flats Cleanup
Ameren's chief nuclear officer to retire Dec. 31
GOP backs nuclear repository
GOP backs nuclear repository
Peach Bottom must submit plan to NRC
MILITARY
U.S.: Militants, Not Villagers, Hit in Afghan Raid
Afghanistan through the eyes of a governor
5 Afghans Die in Strike Laid to U.S. Force
U.N. Urges Quick Increase in Troops for Sudan
India plans joint production of long-range missile with Israel
Ex-PM Thatcher pays son's bail
Three Mossad agents among eight killed in Iraq
12 Nepalese Hostages Are Slain In Iraq
Interim Iraqi Government Convenes for First Time
Talks to Disarm Rebel Shiites Collapses in Iraq
Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia
Israeli Intelligence Faulted for Failure to Halt Hamas
Suicide Bombings Kill 18 in Israel
U.S. Pushes Landmine Initiatives
Finland rules out applying for NATO membership
New NATO commander in Kosovo to step up efforts to avoid fresh conflicts
Hostage Crisis Unfolds in Russia as Guerrillas Seize School
Suicide Bomber Kills 9 at Moscow Subway Station
Suicide Bombing Kills 10 Outside Moscow
Axis Of Spies
F.B.I. Interviews 2 Suspected of Passing Secrets to Israel
Spy Probe Scans Neocon-Israel Ties
Traitorous 'Conservatives'
Abuse Inquiry Cites 26 Soldiers
Decision Awaited on Trial for Pfc. England
Defense Department Actions in Union Talks Are Criticized
Reservist Faces Charges in 2 Afghan Deaths
Assault Study Finds Problem Is Widespread in Air Force
Ripples From the Schlesinger Report
After Delays, Milosevic Opens Defense
Milosevic Opens His Defense Case by Going on the Offensive
Everyone to blame but me, says Milosevic
Bosnian Serb Acquitted of Genocide
Mexico's Leader to Pursue Genocide Case
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Justice Dept. Assails Way It Won Key Terror Case
U.S. to Seek Dismissal Of Terrorism Convictions
Kerry Would Drop Detainee Commissions
Banned in America
Suit Seeks Tighter Security at the Empire State Building
Barricades Help Officers Keep Crowds Controlled
Police Stifle Protests Across N.Y.
POLITICS
The Lobbyists Industry Advocates Play Key Convention Roles
On the Campaign Trail Bush Backtracks on Terrorism
Bush's Leadership Against Terror Hailed
Themes 9/11 Referenced as a Defining Moment
Text of Cheney Speech
OTHER
EarthTalk: Do urban trees really help reduce pollution and clean the air?
ACTIVISTS
Egypt's Activists Test the Waters
Thousands Form Symbolic Unemployment Line in N.Y.
At Least 900 Arrested in City as Protesters Clash With Police
Cops weave webs with nets
NY police arrest over 900 in anti-Bush protests
Things getting sticky for owner of sticker
-------- NUCLEAR
Low-cost alternative sought for trapping Hanford wastes in glass
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Wednesday, September 1, 2004
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/aplocal_story.asp?category=6420&slug=WA%20Bulk%20Vitrification
RICHLAND, Wash. -- The government is spending nearly $6 billion to build a plant that will use glass to trap radioactive wastes from the Hanford nuclear reservation.
But even when the waste-vitrification system is operational, it will be unable to treat as much as half of the 53 million gallons of wastes now stored in 177 underground tanks by a 2028 deadline.
So Hanford officials are looking into a process called bulk vitrification as a less expensive way to immobilize 10 million to 26 million gallons of radioactive wastes in glass for permanent disposal.
Scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory are exploring ways to make a glass product to store wastes generated by 50 years of plutonium production for nuclear weapons.
The bulk-vitrification project is estimated to cost $1.4 billion. It is hoped the technology will produce glass at a cost 35 percent less than the vitrification plant's low-level waste-treatment system.
AMEC Earth and Environmental Inc. has been awarded a contract to build a demonstration project in the central portion of the nuclear reservation. The deal could be worth as much as $63 million
Simulated nonradioactive waste is now being used to test the vitrification process at a plant AMEC has built near the Richland landfill. Full-scale tests will use actual radioactive and chemical wastes.
By the end of 2006, Hanford officials should know how much waste can be made into bulk glass and what kinds can best be treated that way. The wastes in Hanford's underground tanks vary and some types liekly will be better suited than others for bulk vitrification.
For that process, waste would be dried, mixed with silica-rich dirt and packed into insulated boxes up to 24 feet long. Electrodes inserted into the mixture would 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 doubled from preliminary estimates two years ago, to $102 million from $45 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. Other cost increases are for additional tests to make sure the glass is comparable to that made at the vitrification plant.
The tests have turned up a few surprises.
AMEC has come up with a process cuts the volume of waste produced in tests by nearly half, meaning less waste to be buried.
The London-based company also has found that radioactive iodine is held better in glass than was expected.
And the glass is performing better than was anticipated, containing more waste and proving more durable, AMEC officials said.
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 one crucible at a time, producing about as much glass as a coffee mug would hold.
The state Department of Ecology is considering an application for the bulk vitrification project to proceed using real wastes.
Information from: Tri-City Herald, http://www.tri-cityherald.com
-------- accidents and safety
PRN: Chernobyl Study Reveals First Direct Evidence That Risk of Thyroid Cancer Rises With Increasing Radiation Dose
Sept. 1
PRNewswire
http://www.fhcrc.org
The risk of thyroid cancer rises with increasing radiation dose, according to the most thorough risk analysis for thyroid cancer to date among people who grew up in the shadow of the 1986 Chernobyl power-plant disaster.
The incidence of thyroid cancer was 45 times greater among those who received the highest radiation dose as compared to those in the lowest-dose group, according to a team of American and Russian researchers led by Scott Davis, Ph.D., and colleagues at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. They report their findings in the September issue of Radiation Research.
"This is the first study of its kind to establish a dose-response relationship between radiation dose from Chernobyl and thyroid cancer," said Davis, referring to the observation that as radiation doses increase, so does the risk of thyroid cancer. "We found a significant increased risk of thyroid cancer among people exposed as children to radiation from Chernobyl, and that the risk increased as a function of radiation dose."
Having such information in hand, Davis said, may help officials better predict what long-term health effects to expect in the event of a similar nuclear accident or terrorist attack.
"Another potential benefit of the findings is that it allows officials to more accurately understand and document the magnitude of the thyroid-cancer burden that has resulted from Chernobyl. This information will be important in designing and maintaining programs targeted toward the victims of the disaster."
While about 30 people were killed immediately from the blast, which remains the worst accident of its kind in history, an estimated 5 million people were exposed to the resulting radiation.
"Prior to Chernobyl, thyroid cancer in children was practically nonexistent. Today we see dozens and dozens of cases a year in the regions contaminated by the disaster, and the incidence continues to rise," Davis said. "This provides some evidence that there's an excess of thyroid cancer in children and in people who were children at the time of the accident. However until now nobody had taken the next step to find out just how much a risk there is and whether it rises along with radiation dose."
While previous Chernobyl studies have relied on broad-stroke estimates of radiation exposure based on such factors as ground contamination, geographic proximity to the northern Ukraine plant or other surrogate measures of exposure, this study is the first of its kind to factor into the equation individualized estimates of radiation dose based on in-person interviews about diet and other lifestyle factors, said Davis, a member of Fred Hutchinson's Public Health Sciences Division.
"After all these years, many efforts have been made by various research groups around the world to study the health effects of Chernobyl, and hundreds of scientific papers have been published. But ours is the first report that provides quantitative estimates of thyroid-cancer risk in relation to individual estimates of radiation dose," said Davis, also chairman of the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Washington School of Public Health and Community Medicine in Seattle.
Kenneth Kopecky, Ph.D., a biostatistician in Fred Hutchinson's Public Health Sciences Division, was the study's co-investigator and directed the data analysis. Public Health Sciences Division staff managed and coordinated all aspects of the project. They included Theresa Taggart (project manager), Lynn Onstad (statistician), Teri Kopp (administration) and Laurie Shields (research coordinator).
The Fred Hutchinson team organized a collaborative effort with a dozen scientists at four Russian institutions to conduct this research: the Medical Radiological Research Center (in Obninsk), the Byransk Diagnostic Center and the Bryansk Institute of Pathology (both in Bryansk), and the National Center of Hematology (in Moscow). All investigators were members of the International Consortium for Research on the Health Effects of Radiation funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research.
The researchers focused their efforts on western part of the Bryansk Oblast of Russia. This region, located about 66 miles northeast of Chernobyl, is the most heavily contaminated area in the Russian Federation. This was the first study of this type among residents of the Russian Federation exposed to Chernobyl radiation.
Working through a local cancer registry, the researchers identified 26 people with thyroid cancer who were less than 20 years old when the Chernobyl accident occurred; the majority were under 16 when their thyroid cancers were diagnosed. They then identified 52 healthy control subjects from the generalpopulation for comparison purposes. The controls and cancer cases were matched by age and place of residence at the time of the accident.
The researchers then set about collecting information from these individuals and their mothers or fathers that would allow them to estimate each person's radiation dose using computer models. Interviews took place in the home and were conducted by Russian physicians.
Individual doses depended largely on the ingestion patterns of food contaminated with radioactive iodine-131 (I-131), which concentrates in the thyroid gland. The primary source of food-based I-131 was milk from cows that grazed on contaminated pastures. Radiation doses to the thyroid increased along with the amount of milk and dairy products consumed. External, airborne radiation and contamination of other foods also contributed somewhat to the overall dose, depending on the person's proximity to the plant at the time of the accident. These doses were all received within the first few months after the accident, before the I-131 in the environment decayed into non-radioactive elements. While other radioactive contaminants remain in the area, they do not cause appreciable doses of radiation to the thyroid.
In addition to the study's ability to estimate individual radiation doses based on personal interviews, other strengths of the study included the fact that all cases of thyroid cancer were confirmed independently by a panel of expert pathologists, and the study focused on people exposed as young children and adolescents, a group that is likely to be most susceptible to the effects of radiation exposure to the thyroid gland. Limitations of the study included its small sample size and its reliance on individual recall for reporting factors such as milk-consumption patterns that were used to estimate radiation dose.
Efforts are under way to investigate a larger population in a similar fashion to see if these findings can be replicated, Davis said.
For his contributions to the field, earlier this year Davis became the first foreign epidemiologist elected to the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences. The group's status in that country is on a par with the esteemed National Academy of Sciences in the United States. In May he received an honorary diploma in Moscow.
Davis and colleagues have extended their cancer-risk studies to older Chernobyl survivors and are investigating how the damage caused to DNA by radiation influences the risk of developing thyroid cancer.
This work is part of Fred Hutchinson's Global Health Initiative, which focuses on international collaboration to understand and solve some of the most widespread health problems in the world, including cancer and infectious diseases.
SIDEBAR
IT ALL STARTED WITH A RUSSIAN HELICOPTER PILOT WHO WAS TREATED FOR LEUKEMIA AT FRED HUTCHINSON
Providing some long-awaited answers to Chernobyl survivors has been a rewarding research endeavor for Scott Davis, Ph.D., and colleagues at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, but it hasn't been a straightforward one.
Some of the team's greatest achievements were simply establishing the working relationships and infrastructure to get the studies off the ground.
"Within the first year of the 1986 accident, we were very interested in seeing if we could get involved and participate in long-term studies of health effects," Davis said. "But at the time of the accident, our government and that of the former Soviet Union were not so friendly, so establishing connections through that route didn't work."
But in 1990, an opportunity surfaced when a Russian helicopter pilot involved in the initial efforts to contain the Chernobyl radiation developed leukemia and came to Fred Hutchinson for a bone-marrow transplant. After his treatment, an informal exchange program began between Fred Hutchinson and the National Center for Hematology in Moscow, whose director approached the center for assistance in developing a research and treatment institute for victims of the accident. Davis and colleague Kenneth Kopecky, Ph.D., made their first trip to Moscow that year.
Then, in 1992, the Soviet Union collapsed. "We were back to square one in terms of negotiations," Davis said.
But, thanks to efforts by Fred Hutchinson's then-president and director, Robert W. Day, M.D., and by the late Adm. Elmo Zumwalt, a former center trustee and former chief of naval operations for the U.S. Navy, new relationships were established. In 1992, a research consortium consisting of three international teams working in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine was created to study long-term health effects of the radiation released at Chernobyl.
"Our initial work in Russia was simply to conduct small pilot studies to establish in concrete terms whether we could carry out all phases of an epidemiological study," Davis said. "There was no history of doing this kind of research in Russia or the other two countries. We had to set it all up from scratch."
Challenges included purchasing Russian vehicles for the field teams using federal dollars -- an unprecedented bureaucratic challenge for the researchers -- importing all laboratory equipment and supplies, and then figuring out a way to maintain them without the standard resources that one takes for granted in the United States.
"It's been a long haul and an enormous amount of time and work," Davis said, whose 30-plus trips to the former Soviet Union include walking the grounds of the evacuated plant and surveying the desolated 30-kilometer evacuation zone.
Once the team established the capability to do the research, the group began its studies of thyroid cancer, a disease linked to radiation exposure. By the early 1990s, many new cases of the disease, particularly among young children, were diagnosed in regions near the blast. Since then, reports show several hundred cases of thyroid cancer in young children in the three countries contaminated by Chernobyl, a trend that appears to be continuing.
Despite the lack of resources available to initiate these studies, Davis said that scientists and citizens of the three countries were eager for the research from the start. "Our collaborators in Russia have been terrific colleagues," he said. "We now have very close ties with our partner institutions."
He also credited the strong encouragement and support from Fred Hutchinson's senior administration for helping him establish stable working relationships with their overseas colleagues.
"The incredible support and flexibility of the center, especially in the early stages, really made this happen. That can't be overstated," Davis said.
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, home of two Nobel laureates, is an independent, nonprofit research institution dedicated to the development and advancement of biomedical technology to eliminate cancer and other potentially fatal diseases. Fred Hutchinson receives more funding from the National Institutes of Health than any other independent U.S. research center. Recognized internationally for its pioneering work in bone-marrow transplantation, the center's four scientific divisions collaborate to form a unique environment for conducting basic and applied science. Fred Hutchinson, in collaboration with its clinical and research partners, the University of Washington Academic Medical Center and Children's Hospital and Regional Medical Center, is the only National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer center in the Pacific Northwest and is one of 38 nationwide. For more information, visit the center's Web site at http://www.fhcrc.org.
Advancing Knowledge, Saving Lives CONTACT: Kristen Woodward +1-206-667-5095 kwoodwar@fhcrc.org SOURCE Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center Web Site: http://www.fhcrc.org
-------- australia
Blair's health 'is a ticking nuclear time-bomb'
ALISON HARDIE,
Wed 1 Sep 2004
The Scotsman
http://news.scotsman.com/politics.cfm?id=1024682004
SPECULATION over Tony Blair's health was stirred again yesterday by a doctor who claimed controversially that childhood exposure to radioactive fallout could have adversely affected the Prime Minister.
Mr Blair lived with his family as a child in Adelaide, the South Australia state capital, during the period when Britain was permitted to test atomic devices in the desert outback.
Although the tests, which have left a legacy of claims and lawsuits against the Australian government, were conducted 350 miles to the north of Mr Blair's family home, it is thought an unanticipated wind change blew the radioactive cloud toward Adelaide.
Mr Blair has been at the centre of two health scares, including one which saw him require a cardioversion, which involves an injection of chemicals or electro-shock therapy to stabilise the heartbeat.
The heart scare occurred in October last year and was followed weeks later by a further incident which led to a doctor being ferried at speed on a motorbike to give Mr Blair a health check.
The image of the youthful Prime Minister struck down by a heart condition sent shock waves through the government. The impression of a man burdened by health worries was further underlined when Saga magazine this year asked if genetic links had made him concerned for his health after his mother's death from cancer. Mr Blair admitted: "Yes, I suppose so."
Mr Blair was three when the British detonated their third atomic device in the Maralinga desert region 350 miles to the north on 11 October, 1956, according to The Bulletin magazine. An unanticipated wind change blew the radioactive cloud toward Adelaide.
British medical researcher and toxicologist Dick van Steenis told the news magazine that the death of Mr Blair's mother from thyroid cancer could have been caused by the family's exposure to the radioactive fallout. He said: "Adelaide in South Australia was plastered with radioactive fallout from 11 to 16 October, 1956.
"As a youngster in Adelaide drinking local milk, Tony Blair is very likely to be at risk of bone cancer himself."
However, last night a spokeswoman for Mr Blair poured cold water on the latest theory about the state of the Prime Minister's health. She said: "It sounds like the silly season's been going on a little bit longer than we thought. The Prime Minister's perfectly fine."
Mr Blair's mother, Hazel Blair, died 19 years after the blast following a long battle with thyroid cancer.
Mr Van Steenis said the Prime Minister would not acknowledge the impact of the bomb testing on his family because his government could be sued by former servicemen involved in the nuclear tests.
He said: "He has never denied that radioactive fallout in Australia was ultimately the cause of his mother's death.
"But he won't acknowledge it because to do so would strengthen the legal case against his government for the compensation entitlements of British and Australian servicemen involved in the British atomic testing programme."
The magazine report did not say whether current Adelaide residents have reported suffering abnormally high rates of illnesses linked to radiation exposure.
South Australian Cancer Registry director Wayne Clapton explained cancer monitoring of the state's population only began in 1977, the magazine said.
Britain began to develop a programme of atomic bomb testing at the beginning of the Cold War era. In 1949, Britain made its first approaches to the Australian government regarding the possibility of testing nuclear bombs in the country.
The Australian government agreed, and the first British atomic bomb was exploded aboard the decommissioned warship HMS Plym on 3 October, 1952, at a site in the Monte Bello Islands, off the coast of Western Australia.
Naval testing was too difficult and a land-based site was sought. The first site was at Emu Fields along the centre-line of the Woomera Rocket Range in South Australia.
However, the site was remote, so the programme was moved to a more suitable site about 120 miles south to Maralinga. This was to have been a permanent atomic weapons test range, but with the advent of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, atmospheric tests were banned, and since the geology of Maralinga was not suitable for underground tests, the site was abandoned in the 1960s.
-------- britain
UK-U.S. Set to Extend Nuclear Pact
Kerry Boyd-Anderson,
September 2004
Arms Control Today
http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2004_09/Nuclear_Pact.asp
U.S. and British officials decided in June to extend an agreement that allows the exchange of nuclear weapons information between the two countries. Some critics are concerned, however, that the agreement undermines nonproliferation efforts and could lead to the development of new nuclear weapons.
On June 14, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control Stephen Rademaker and his British counterpart, F. R. Baker, signed an amendment to extend the 1958 Mutual Defense Agreement (MDA) for another 10 years.
Under the Atomic Energy Act, Congress has 60 legislative days to raise any objection to the agreement. To date, no such objections have yet been registered. A Senate Foreign Relations Committee spokesperson said Aug. 16 that no hearings on the matter have been scheduled.
The amendment also was sent to the British Parliament for consideration over a 21-day period, but the Parliament decided not to raise any objections or hold any inquiries, despite a request by several members of Parliament for an open debate. The British government said that it will consider the agreement ratified if the United States does. The agreement will expire Dec. 31 unless ratified by both countries.
The MDA, formally known as the 1958 Agreement between the United Kingdom and the United States for Co-operation on the Uses of Atomic Energy for Mutual Defense Purposes, allows the two countries to exchange information on nuclear weapons, including their design, and to transfer materials and equipment related to nuclear weapons and their delivery systems. The MDA also permits the transfer of plutonium and highly enriched uranium. It does not allow the two countries to transfer actual nuclear weapons to each other, which is prohibited under Article I of the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
In 1958 the leaders of both countries touted the agreement as a way to improve the capabilities of their nuclear weapons programs. The British Atomic Weapons Establishment has called the MDA "a cornerstone of life for the British nuclear weapon community." The agreement has played a particularly important role in maintaining the British nuclear arsenal. In a June 14 message to Congress, President George W. Bush highlighted continued close Anglo-American cooperation and the United Kingdom's participation in NATO as reasons for extending the agreement.
Some critics, however, say the two countries should not automatically extend the agreement. British critics have expressed concern that the Bush administration has plans to develop new nuclear weapons, such as low-yield nuclear weapons and robust nuclear earth penetrators. They say that the British agreement to extend the MDA without seriously considering its potential implications would imply British support for U.S. efforts to design new nuclear weapons and might also lead the United Kingdom to participate in research and development of new weapons. The British government has said that it is not involved in research and development of "low yield" and "bunker-buster" nuclear weapons.
----
Secret UK nuclear dumping exposed
September 1, 2004
Sydney Morning Herald
By Paul Brown and Rob Evans in London
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/08/31/1093938924797.html?oneclick=true
http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/holnus/001200409010302.htm
Nuclear waste from overseas power stations has been sealed in concrete and buried in Britain in several kilometres of trenches in breach of official government policy, an investigation by The Guardian has revealed.
Cabinet ministers have repeatedly promised that nuclear waste from abroad will not be buried in British soil to make good a pledge that the nation will not become a nuclear waste dump for countries such as Japan, Germany, Italy and Switzerland.
But it has emerged that more than 10,000 cubic metres of foreign nuclear waste is buried at Drigg, in Cumbria, because it is too expensive to take it back to the countries that produced it.
It is part of an ever-increasing mountain of waste stored at more than 20 nuclear sites in Britain. Government advisers have warned that there is no way of disposing of nearly all of it.
Department of Trade and Industry documents indicate that Britain is about to announce a change in its official policy and start charging foreign governments for storing their waste and subsequently disposing of it in concrete bunkers. Advertisement Advertisement
Until now, the Government has insisted that all the waste should be sent back, but it now sees retaining foreign nuclear detritus as profitable.
Allowing Britain to become a dump for foreign waste would also remove another problem - the threat of terrorists hijacking the nuclear material while it is 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 reprocessing contracts with the state-owned British Nuclear Fuels.
Two of the company's plants dissolve the fuel in acid and extract plutonium and uranium for storage or re-use.
. Libya has offered conflicting information on 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.
In a report released on Monday,
the agency's 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 a finger at Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, Pakistan's top nuclear scientist.
The Guardian, The Washington Post
-------- china
Second phase of Ling'ao nuclear power plant starts construction
September 01, 2004
People's Daily
http://english.people.com.cn/200409/01/eng20040901_155593.html
Chinese workers began construction of the nuclear island for the second phase of Ling'ao Nuclear Power Plant in Shenzhen, south China's Guangdong Province, Tuesday.
Two pressurized water reactors, each with a generating capacity of 1 million kw, will be installed in the second phase construction. Concrete pouring will begin in December 2005, said sources from Guangdong Nuclear Power Group, the developer of the nuclear plant.
Information from China Guangdong Nuclear Power Engineering Co. Ltd., the builder of the project, said that the two generating
units would begin operation respectively in December 2010 and August 2011.
The Ling'ao Nuclear Power Plant already has two operational generators. Additional two nuclear generators are in operation in its nearby Daya Bay Nuclear Power Plant.
On completion of the second phase, the Daya Bay region will be able to produce a total of 6 million kw, capable of generating 40 billion kw/hours of electricity a year.
Nuclear power development plays an important role in alleviating power shortages in the Pearl River Delta, one of China's economic powerhouses, said a spokesman for Guangdong Nuclear Power Group.
China will generate 36 million kw of nuclear electricity in 2020, accounting for over 4 percent of its total installed power generating capacity, according to Zhang Huazhu, vice-minister in charge of the Commission of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense.
----
China says won't help North Korea with nuclear power
Wed Sep 1, 2004
By John Ruwitch
(Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=CNB3RK21JGFFACRBAELCFFA?type=topNews&storyID=6122641
BEIJING - China's top nuclear official said on Wednesday Beijing cannot contemplate cooperating with North Korea in the field of atomic energy because of the crisis over North Korea's nuclear arms programmes.
"We will not consider it because we are in favour of the peace and stability of the Korean peninsula and take into consideration the denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula," said Zhang Huazhu, chairman of the China Atomic Energy Authority.
"To realise this goal, China must play an active part, so there is no discussion of cooperating with North Korea now," said Zhang, also vice minister of the Commission of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence.
The comments offered a glimpse at the limits of China's friendship with its isolated communist neighbour and showed one of the areas outside of diplomacy in which Beijing is applying pressure on Pyongyang to keep it from developing nuclear weapons.
Zhang said "any country's right to peaceful uses of nuclear energy cannot be deprived", but later added that China had never cooperated with North Korea in the field.
China had itself embarked on an ambitious plan to add two to three nuclear power plants each year for roughly the next 15 years so that nuclear power will account for about four percent of China's power mix by 2020, he said.
North Korea's power situation is dire and blackouts are common, even in its showcase capital, Pyongyang.
As part of the 1994 Agreed Framework, North Korea pledged to freeze its nuclear arms programmes in exchange for heating fuel and two light water nuclear reactors from the United States and its allies.
Little progress was made on the reactors and the deal began to break down in October 2002 when U.S. diplomats said North Korean officials admitted to pursuing a covert uranium enrichment programme, kicking off the latest row.
China has played a key role as mediator in the latest nuclear spat and hosted several rounds of multi-party talks aimed at ending the crisis.
Beijing has said it does not subscribe to pressure tactics or coercion to try to influence other countries, but reports emerged that in 2003 it cut the flow of oil into North Korea for three days to force it to stay engaged in nuclear talks.
China is uniquely positioned to engage in subtle strong-arming of North Korea as provider of 70 percent of its food and fuel oil imports.
A fourth round of nuclear talks involving North Korea, the United States, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia was expected to take place this month, but not dates have been fixed.
----
China to rev up nuclear power construction in next 15 years
Xinhua News Agency
2004-09-01
http://news3.xinhuanet.com/english/2004-09/01/content_1936396.htm
BEIJING, Sept. 1 (Xinhuanet) -- China will greatly speed up its nuclear power construction in the next 15 years to achieve a total nuclear power capacity of 36 million kilowatts by 2020, almost four times the current one, a senior Chinese atomic energy official said here Wednesday.
Zhang Huazhu, head of the China Atomic Energy Authority, said at a press conference that two or three nuclear power plants at the million-kw level will be established per year until 2020 in order to achieve the goal.
"All new nuclear power projects will be constructed in the principle of putting security and quality first," Zhang said.
After 20 years of practice in the nuclear power filed, China has developed its own management system and cultivated a group of talented professionals with high ability to design and build equipment independently, he said.
"All this experience and technological progress has built a good basis for future faster development of China's nuclear power industry," Zhang said.
Although the concrete nuclear power development program is being discussed, the Chinese government has decided to make nuclear power a major part of its power industry.
The nuclear power plants under construction or on the drawing table are mainly distributed in relatively developed coastal provinces, such as Guangdong, Zhejiang and Jiangsu, where energy is in great demand, Zhang said.
Qinshan Nuclear Power Plant, the first of its kind in China, started operation in Zhejiang in 1991. Currently China has nine generating units in operation, with a total installed capacity of 7.01 million kw. The total capacity is expected to reach 9.13 million kw by 2005 when Tianwan Nuclear Power Plant goes into operation in Jiangsu.
As an important shift in the country's energy development strategy, China is taking steps to increase the proportion of nuclear power in its overall energy supply and make it an important element of energy development in the future, said Zhang.
The Chinese government has endorsed the expansion of two nuclear power plants, one in Shanmen of Zhejiang and the other in Ling'ao of Guangdong. Another two nuclear power projects are beingapproved.
According to statistics, nuclear plants, which makes up 1.7 percent of the total installed capacity of power-generating facilities in China, produced 43.8 billion kwh of electricity lastyear, accounting for 2.29 percent of the country's total power output.
In coastal Zhejiang and Guangdong provinces, nuclear electricity exceeded 13 percent of their respective total power output and became an important pillar in the electricity mix.
China's total nuclear power installed capacity is expected to reach 36 million kilowatts by 2020, which requires the construction of 27 million-kw-level nuclear power plants in the next 15 years, according to researchers.
The new nuclear power plants will sharply reduce the use of 120million tons of raw coal, which will ease the pressure on fuel transportation and environmental protection.
----
Let a Thousand Reactors Bloom
Explosive growth has made the People's Republic of China the most power-hungry nation on earth. Get ready for the mass-produced, meltdown-proof future of nuclear energy.
By Spencer Reiss
WIRED Magazine - Issue 12.09
September 2004
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/china.html
China is staring at the dark side of double-digit growth. Blackouts roll and factory lights flicker, the grid sucked dry by a decade of breakneck industrialization. Oil and natural gas are running low, and belching power plants are burning through coal faster than creaky old railroads can deliver it. Global warming? The most populous nation on earth ranks number two in the world - at least the Kyoto treaty isn't binding in developing countries. Air pollution? The World Bank says the People's Republic is home to 16 of the planet's 20 worst cities. Wind, solar, biomass - the country is grasping at every energy alternative within reach, even flooding a million people out of their ancestral homes with the world's biggest hydroelectric project. Meanwhile, the government's plan for holding onto power boils down to a car for every bicycle and air-conditioning for a billion-odd potential dissidents.
What's an energy-starved autocracy to do?
Go nuclear.
While the West frets about how to keep its sushi cool, hot tubs warm, and Hummers humming without poisoning the planet, the cold-eyed bureaucrats running the People's Republic of China have launched a nuclear binge right out of That '70s Show. Late last year, China announced plans to build 30 new reactors - enough to generate twice the capacity of the gargantuan Three Gorges Dam - by 2020. And even that won't be enough. The Future of Nuclear Power, a 2003 study by a blue-ribbon commission headed by former CIA director John Deutch, concludes that by 2050 the PRC could require the equivalent of 200 full-scale nuke plants. A team of Chinese scientists advising the Beijing leadership puts the figure even higher: 300 gigawatts of nuclear output, not much less than the 350 gigawatts produced worldwide today.
To meet that growing demand, China's leaders are pursuing two strategies. They're turning to established nuke plant makers like AECL, Framatome, Mitsubishi, and Westinghouse, which supplied key technology for China's nine existing atomic power facilities. But they're also pursuing a second, more audacious course. Physicists and engineers at Beijing's Tsinghua University have made the first great leap forward in a quarter century, building a new nuclear power facility that promises to be a better way to harness the atom: a pebble-bed reactor. A reactor small enough to be assembled from mass-produced parts and cheap enough for customers without billion-dollar bank accounts. A reactor whose safety is a matter of physics, not operator skill or reinforced concrete. And, for a bona fide fairy-tale ending, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is labeled hydrogen.
A soft-spoken scientist named Qian Jihui has no doubt about what the smaller, safer, hydrogen-friendly design means for the future of nuclear power, in China and elsewhere. Qian is a former deputy director general with the International Atomic Energy Agency and an honorary president of the Nuclear Power Institute of China. He's a 67-year-old survivor of more than one revolution, which means he doesn't take the notion of upheaval lightly.
"Nobody in the mainstream likes novel ideas," Qian says. "But in the international nuclear community, a lot of people believe this is the future. Eventually, these new reactors will compete strategically, and in the end they will win. When that happens, it will leave traditional nuclear power in ruins."
Now we're talking revolution, comrade.
Known as China's MIT, Tsinghua University sprawls across a Qing-dynasty imperial garden, just outside the rampart of mirrored Blade Runner towers that line Beijing's North Fourth Ring Road. Wang Dazhong came here in the mid-1950s as a member of China's first-ever class of homegrown nuclear engineers. Now he's director emeritus of Tsinghua's Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technology, aka INET, and a key member of Beijing's energy policy team. On a bright morning dimmed by Beijing's ever-present photochemical haze, Wang sits in a spartan conference room lit by energy-efficient compact fluorescent bulbs.
"If you're going to have 300 gigawatts of nuclear power in China - 50 times what we have today - you can't afford a Three Mile Island or Chernobyl," Wang says. "You need a new kind of reactor."
That's exactly what you can see 40 minutes away, behind a glass-enclosed guardhouse flanked by military police. Nestled against a brown mountainside stands a five-story white cube whose spare design screams, "Here be engineers!" Beneath its cavernous main room are the 100 tons of steel, graphite, and hydraulic gear known as HTR-10 (i.e., high-temperature reactor, 10 megawatt). The plant's output is underwhelming; at full power - first achieved in January - it would barely fulfill the needs of a town of 4,000 people. But what's inside HTR-10, which until now has never been visited by a Western journalist, makes it the most interesting reactor in the world.
In the air-conditioned chill of the visitors' area, a grad student runs through the basics. Instead of the white-hot fuel rods that fire the heart of a conventional reactor, HTR-10 is powered by 27,000 billiards-sized graphite balls packed with tiny flecks of uranium. Instead of superhot water - intensely corrosive and highly radioactive - the core is bathed in inert helium. The gas can reach much higher temperatures without bursting pipes, which means a third more energy pushing the turbine. No water means no nasty steam, and no billion-dollar pressure dome to contain it in the event of a leak. And with the fuel sealed inside layers of graphite and impermeable silicon carbide - designed to last 1 million years - there's no steaming pool for spent fuel rods. Depleted balls can go straight into lead-lined steel bins in the basement.
Wearing disposable blue paper gowns and booties, the grad student leads the way to a windowless control room that houses three industry-standard PC workstations and the inevitable electronic schematic, all valves, pressure lines, and color-coded readouts. In a conventional reactor's control room, there would be far more to look at - control panels for emergency core cooling, containment-area sprinklers, pressurized water tanks. None of that is here. The usual layers of what the industry calls engineered safety are superfluous. Suppose a coolant pipe blows, a pressure valve sticks, terrorists knock the top off the reactor vessel, an operator goes postal and yanks the control rods that regulate the nuclear chain reaction - no radioactive nightmare. This reactor is meltdown-proof.
Zhang Zuoyi, the project's 42-year-old director, explains why. The key trick is a phenomenon known as Doppler broadening - the hotter atoms get, the more they spread apart, making it harder for an incoming neutron to strike a nucleus. In the dense core of a conventional reactor, the effect is marginal. But HTR-10's carefully designed geometry, low fuel density, and small size make for a very different story. In the event of a catastrophic cooling-system failure, instead of skyrocketing into a bad movie plot, the core temperature climbs to only about 1,600 degrees Celsius - comfortably below the balls' 2,000-plus-degree melting point - and then falls. This temperature ceiling makes HTR-10 what engineers privately call walk-away safe. As in, you can walk away from any situation and go have a pizza.
"In a conventional reactor emergency, you have only seconds to make the right decision," Zhang notes. "With HTR-10, it's days, even weeks - as much time as we could ever need to fix a problem."
This unusual margin of safety isn't merely theoretical. INET's engineers have already done what would be unthinkable in a conventional reactor: switched off HTR-10's helium coolant and let the reactor cool down all by itself. Indeed, Zhang plans a show-stopping repeat performance at an international conference of reactor physicists in Beijing in September. "We think our kind of test may be required in the market someday," he adds.
Today's nuclear power plants are the fruits of a decision tree rooted in the earliest days of the atomic age. In 1943, a Manhattan Project team led by Enrico Fermi sustained the first man-made nuclear chain reaction in a pile of uranium blocks at the University of Chicago's Metallurgical Lab. A chemist named Farrington Daniels joined the effort a short time later. But Daniels wasn't interested in bombs. His focus was on a notion that had been circulating among physicists since the late 1930s: harnessing atomic power for cheap, clean electricity. He proposed a reactor containing enriched uranium "pebbles" - a term borrowed from chemistry - and using gaseous helium to transfer energy to a generator.
The Daniels pile, as the concept was called, was taken seriously enough that Oak Ridge National Laboratory commissioned Monsanto to design a working version in 1945. Before it could be built, though, a bright Annapolis graduate named Hyman Rickover "sailed in with the Navy," as Daniels later put it, and the competing idea of building a rod-fueled, water-cooled reactor to power submarines. With US Navy money backing the new design, the pebble bed fell by the wayside, and Daniels returned to the University of Wisconsin. By the time of his death in 1972, he was known as a pioneer of - irony alert - solar power. Indeed, the International Solar Energy Society's biennial award bears his name.
By the mid-1950s, with President Eisenhower preaching "atoms for peace" before the United Nations, civilian nuclear power was squarely on the table. The newly created General Atomics division of General Dynamics assembled 40 top nuclear scientists to spend the summer of 1956 brainstorming reactor designs. The leading light was Edward Teller, godfather of the H-bomb, and his message to the group was prophetic. For people to accept nuclear power, he argued, reactors must be "inherently safe." He even proposed a practical test: If you couldn't pull out every control rod without causing a meltdown, the design was inadequate.
But Teller's advice was ignored in the rush to beat the Russians to meter-free electricity. Instead of pursuing inherent safety, the nascent civilian nuclear industry followed Rickover into fuel rods, water cooling, and ever more layers of protection against the hazards of radioactive steam emissions and runaway chain reaction. To try to amortize the cost of all that backup, plants ballooned, tripling in average size in less than a decade and contributing to a crippling financial crunch in the mid-'70s. Finally, partial meltdowns at Three Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986 pulled the plug on reactor construction in most of the world.
Even where the pebble-bed concept took root, the industry's woes conspired against it. In Germany, a charismatic physicist named Rudolf Schulten picked up the idea and by 1985 a full-scale prototype was online - too large, in fact, to meet Teller's inherent safety test. Barely a year later, with Chernobyl's fallout raining over Europe, a minor malfunction at the German reactor set off nightmare headlines. Before long, the plant was mothballed.
The twin disasters in Pennsylvania and Ukraine proved Teller's point and inverted his hopeful formulation: The Union of Concerned Scientists pronounced nuclear power "inherently dangerous." The industry, already staggered by overbuilding and runaway budgets, ground to a halt. The newest of the 104 reactors operating in the US today was greenlighted in 1979. And there our story might have ended, except
Even as the nuclear establishment was putting all its efforts into avoiding the klieg lights, scientists in two faraway places were carrying the torch for a better reactor. One was South Africa, where in the mid-1990s the national utility company quietly licensed Germany's cast-off pebble-bed design and set about trying to raise the necessary funds. The other was China, where the Tsinghua team pursued a Nike strategy: Just do it.
Frank Wu's glass-walled ninth-floor office at Innovation Plaza offers a commanding view of Tsinghua University's leafy campus. That's no accident: The university co-owns this complex of gleaming silver towers, designed as a magnet for high tech startups. Likewise Wu's company, Chinergy, is a 50-50 joint venture between Tsinghua's Institute for Nuclear and New Energy Technology and the state-owned China Nuclear Engineering Group.
"I just had a call from a mayor in one of the provinces," says Wu, who came on board as CEO after a decade spent running financial services companies in the US (where he adopted the English first name). "He asked me, 'How much do we have to pay to get one of those things here?'"
If Wu's pebble-bed "thing" is, well, hot, it's because Chinergy's product is tailor-made for the world's fastest-growing energy market: a modular design that snaps together like Legos. Despite some attempts at standardization, the latest generation of big nukes are still custom-built onsite. By contrast, production versions of INET's reactor will be barely a fifth their size and power, and built from standardized components that can be mass-produced, shipped by road or rail, and assembled quickly. Moreover, multiple reactors can be daisy-chained around one or more turbines, all monitored from a single control room. In other words, Tsinghua's power plants can do the two things that matter most amid China's explosive growth: get where they're needed and get big, fast.
Wu and his backers aim to have a full-scale 200-megawatt version of HTR-10 by the end of the decade. They've already persuaded Huaneng Power International - one of China's five big privatized utilities, listed on the NYSE and chaired by the son of former premier Li Peng - to pick up half of the estimated $300 million tab. Concrete is scheduled to be poured in spring 2007.
By the usual glacial standards, that timeline is nuts for a reactor still on the drawing board. South Africa's pebble-bed group has been working on plans for a demonstration unit near Cape Town since 1993. But with an estimated $1 billion budget and local environmentalists on the warpath, the project remains stuck where it's been for nearly a decade: five to 10 years from completion.
Five to 10 years ago, a lot of today's China was little more than blueprints. And Wu, who likes to tell visiting Americans how one of his previous companies beat Sun Microsystems for the contract to wire West Point, has distinct advantages. The INET team, some of whose members studied with Schulten in Germany, has been prototyping pebble-bed designs since the mid-1980s. Also courtesy of the Germans, they have the best equipment in the world for what is probably the stickiest technical problem: fabrication of fuel balls in quantities that could quickly grow to millions.
By the time Chinergy's pilot plant is up and running, it's likely that the 30 reactors the government has planned for 2020 will already be under way. By then, however, China's grid is expected to be market-driven, and companies like Huaneng will have a free hand to put plants where they're needed and charge whatever the market will bear. Chinergy's strategy is tailored for this new environment. Power companies operating in regions making the transition from rural to industrial to urban will need to start small, but may suddenly find themselves struggling to meet unexpected demand. That's where the modular concept comes into play: Wu plans to sell power modules - 200-megawatt reactors plus ancillary gear - one at a time, if necessary. Growing utilities will be able to add modules as needed, ultimately reaching the gigawatt range where conventional reactors now reign. Such installations will be affordable to start - and they'll become cheaper to operate as they grow, thanks to economies of scale in everything from security and technicians to fuel supply.
Too good to be true? Not according to Andrew Kadak, who teaches nuclear engineering at MIT (including a course titled "Colossal Failures in Engineering"). Kadak is a big-nuke guy by background. From 1989 to 1997, he was CEO of Yankee Atomic Electric, which ran - and ultimately closed - the '60s-vintage plant in Rowe, Massachusetts. Now he's helping INET refine its fuel ball technology and working with the US Department of Energy to build a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Research Lab.
"The industry has been focused on water-cooled reactors that require complicated safety systems," Kadak says. "The Chinese aren't constrained by that history. They're showing that there's another way that's simpler and safer. The big question is whether the economics will pay off."
In May, British eminence green James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia hypothesis that Earth is a single self-regulating organism, published an impassioned plea to phase out fossil fuels in London's The Independent. Nuclear power, he argued, is the last, best hope for averting climatic catastrophe:
"Opposition to nuclear energy is based on irrational fear fed by Hollywood-style fiction, the Green lobbies, and the media. ... Even if they were right about its dangers - and they are not - its worldwide use as our main source of energy would pose an insignificant threat compared with the dangers of intolerable and lethal heat waves and sea levels rising to drown every coastal city of the world. We have no time to experiment with visionary energy sources; civilization is in imminent danger and has to use nuclear, the one safe, available energy source, now, or suffer the pain soon to be inflicted by our outraged planet."
Coming to terms with nuclear energy is only a first step. To power a billion cars, there's no practical alternative to hydrogen. But it will take huge quantities of energy to extract hydrogen from water and hydrocarbons, and the best ways scientists have found to do that require high temperatures, up to 1,000 degrees Celsius. In other words, there's another way of looking at INET's high-temperature reactor and its potential offspring: They're hydrogen machines.
For exactly that reason, the DOE, along with similar agencies in Japan and Europe, is looking intently at high-temperature reactor designs. Tsinghua's researchers are in contact with the major players, but they're also starting their own project, focused on what many believe is the most promising means of generating hydrogen: thermochemical water splitting. Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories believe efficiency could top 60 percent - twice that of low-temperature methods. INET plans to begin researching hydrogen production by 2006.
In that way, China's nuclear renaissance could feed the hydrogen revolution, enabling the country to leapfrog the fossil-fueled West into a new age of clean energy. Why worry about foreign fuel supplies when you can have safe nukes rolling off your own assembly lines? Why invoke costly international antipollution protocols when you can have motor vehicles that spout only water vapor from their tail pipes? Why debate least-bad alternatives when you have the political and economic muscle to engineer the dream?
The scale is vast, but so are China's ambitions. Gentlemen, start your reactors.
Contributing editor Spencer Reiss (spencer@upperroad.net) interviewed Bjørn Lomborg in Wired 12.06.
-------- depleted uranium
Vieques out, N.C. in?
By BILL SANDIFER, Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 1, 2004
http://www.wdnweb.com/articles/2004/08/29/news/news01.txt
Eastern North Carolina has long played host to -- and generally welcomed -- all manner of military bases and operations. As a result, the state boasts the third-largest military presence in the nation, according to news reports, trailing only California and Texas.
But a troubled economy and renewed efforts to expand military use of the state's land and air appear to be at odds, troubling many who wonder what's coming next.
Add to that mix the overwhelming amount of information -- and misinformation -- available through the World Wide Web, and it's understandable that many local activists now scour distant databanks as avidly as ancients consulted the Oracle at Delphi.
Those searches have, indeed, brought to light a number of documents, including Navy material, Navy studies contracted to civilian firms and information from a number of federal agencies that appear to point to a heightened military interest in dropping more bombs on Eastern North Carolina.
Is there a basis for concern, or are contract planning studies merely the bread and butter of the military-industrial complex?
Via condios, Vieques
One thing is clear: The Navy in the late '90s realized Vieques Island off the coast of Puerto Rico would not be politically or practically suitable as a bombing range for many more years. So military memos were written, and civilian contract studies conducted to arrange for alternative training facilities.
A December 2002 memo from the chief of Naval operations to the Navy secretary discusses "(t)he expansion of East and Gulf coast range capabilities proposed by Commander, Fleet Forces Command." The expansion, states the memo, is necessary to fill in the gap left when Vieques is closed.
In a January 2003 letter, Navy Secretary Gordon England writes, "I hereby certify that one or more alternate training facilities exist that, individually or collectively, provide an equivalent or superior level of training for units of the Navy and Marine Corps stationed or deployed in the eastern United States. The Department of the Navy will provide the resources and will address the environmental issues such that alternative facilities are available and fully capable of supporting such Navy and Marine Corps training immediately upon cessation of training on Vieques. ... Training on Vieques will cease no later than May 1, 2003; at which time the alternative facilities will be ready."
And, right on schedule, Vieques was shut down in May 2003. But before leaving Puerto Rico, according to a December 2002 memo -- before the decision to close Vieques was made -- the Navy had already:
# "Conducted an Environmental Baseline Survey to document property conditions at turnover."
# "Completed a 'Vieques Transfer' Environmental Assessment (EA) with a finding of no significant impact (FONSI)."
However, the Environmental Protection Agency apparently failed to accept the EA contract study upon which the Navy based its FONSI. Little more than two weeks ago, on Aug. 13, EPA made a disturbing announcement:
"The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) today proposed to add certain areas on and around the islands of Vieques and Culebra, in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, to the National Priorities List (NPL) of the country's most contaminated hazardous waste sites. The Commonwealth identified these areas collectively as the Atlantic Fleet Weapons Training Area."
Preceding EPA's announcement, international news agencies had begun reporting on conditions that flew in the face of the Navy's environmental findings.
"Now that the U.S. Navy is gone," reported the Inter Press Service news agency in December 2003, "residents of the Puerto Rican island-town of Vieques must deal with the daunting question of what to do about the toxic mess caused by decades of military activity. Weapons tested in the firing range included highly polluting depleted uranium ammunition. ...
"In what many observers consider a bizarre twist, this wilderness refuge is simultaneously a toxic disaster area. Earlier this month the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recommended that the lands and marine areas polluted by the Navy be declared a Superfund site."
Hello, North Carolina?
So what does this mean for Eastern North Carolina? Understandably, Daily News' readers who researched these documents fear bombing could also make a mess of portions of North Carolina's coast.
Navy and Marine officials have minced no words in stating the need for facilities to replace Vieques. Questions to Atlantic Fleet Command Navy spokesman Lt. Jim Hoeft brought an array of answers on alternative facilities now in use.
"Since the closure of Vieques in (May) 2003," writes Hoeft, "these exercises were moved to the Atlantic Coast and Gulf of Mexico using a variety of (Department of Defense) range complexes and operation areas. ... (N)o decisions have been made to date to change the network of ranges currently in use by the U.S. Atlantic Fleet."
According to Hoeft, that network includes:
# Pax River, Md. -- Air-dropped mine exercises.
# Cherry Point -- Surface, air and subsurface training operations including missile shoots; gunfire and air-to-ground munitions training (nonexplosive ordnance).
# Dare County -- Air-to-ground munitions and electronic warfare training (nonexplosive ordnance).
# Camp Lejeune -- Limited air-to-ground/close air-support (nonexplosive), USMC spotter training, ship-to-shore and ground maneuver operations.
# Townsend, Ga. -- Air-to-ground munitions training (nonexplosive ordnance).
# Pinecastle, Fla. -- Air-to-ground munitions training (explosive and nonexplosive ordnance).
# Avon Park, Fla. -- Air-to-ground munitions training (currently nonexplosive ordnance only).
# Key West, Fla. -- All levels of training, support surface, air and subsurface training operations including missile shoots and gunfire.
# Eglin AFB, Fla. -- Air-to-ground (explosive and nonexplosive ordnance) and electronic warfare.
# Bahamas -- Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center: supports air, surface and subsurface-instrumented underwater range training.
Unlike Vieques, for the present, live rounds will not be fired from ships, says Hoeft.
"With respect to training conducted in North Carolina," he noted, "all ranges use nonexplosive (inert) rounds."
Although no live rounds are slated to be fired in the region, Hoeft confirmed shelling across the Intracoastal Waterway has resumed.
"The G-10 impact area," writes Hoeft, "can only be used for USMC spotter training. The environmental studies and agreements to conduct this training are in place and, since 2001, 32 missions have been conducted with over 2,000 total nonexplosive rounds expended incident-free. The Intracoastal Waterway, roads and airspace in the vicinity of G-10 are closed during the event."
The G-10 area is a roughly 1-square-mile patch of ground about 2.5 miles north of the Intracoastal Waterway at Brown's Inlet. The area is within restricted airspace and is accessible only by 4-wheel-drive vehicles and helicopters, according to Marine Corps information. Targets consist of truck bodies, tanks and improvised targets, say Navy documents.
And the future?
The Navy explains
A 2000 Navy study looks at the nagging issue of limits on firing live ammo.
"One unresolved issue is the firing of high-explosive ordnance across the Intracoastal Waterway. The Marine Corps routinely closes the waterway for brief periods to fire inert ordnance (e.g., 155 mm artillery) from the beach towards inland targets, but at some point, the Navy agreed not to fire live ordnance across the waterway. If Navy ships are to use the G-10 impact area for live-ordnance training, that agreement will have to be revisited."
Whatever the Navy has in mind, it will apparently not happen overnight. Several Navy studies point out the time-consuming steps necessary before major range realignments can occur. The following is a familiar litany to anyone following the Navy outlying landing field controversy.
"(T)he Navy has to follow procedures described in the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) that involve studying alternatives and their consequences, and developing a proposal, which is then made available for public comment. We have been told that this second step should take approximately five years against normal opposition if no serious problems arise. NEPA requires an environmental impact statement (EIS), which takes about two years to prepare. It then takes roughly another three years to defend the proposal against a court challenge and subsequent appeals. If there are problems (e.g., a significant issue is not addressed in the EIS) the process can take considerably longer or the Navy can be enjoined from proceeding. ...
"(M)ost of the East is already heavily developed, especially near the coast. If a coastal area has not been developed, it is probably because that land was set aside as a park or a recreation area or an ecologically sensitive zone where development is deemed inappropriate. The second problem is convincing the local populace that a training range is the best and highest use for that land."
'The goodliest land'
Logistics aside, just how attractive is Eastern North Carolina?
Of seven national and international bombing ranges studied, Camp Lejeune received the highest marks as a ship-to-shore firing range.
As an amphibious assault exercise facility, Camp Lejeune racked up straight As.
"Camp Lejeune is the most promising SACEX candidate and the only one that is a serious alternative to Vieques," states one study. "The Supporting Arms Coordination Exercise is an event driven, live fire exercise designed to test communications and fire support coordination capabilities. It is the only training event in which forces preparing to deploy can exercise their most complex capability -- the employment of combined arms to support a Marine amphibious assault."
Based upon the 2000 study, the Navy appears hopeful that the 2001 resumption of shelling across the ICW may eventually be expanded to include live rounds.
"Camp Lejeune is actually a very good site for a SACEX, and many such exercises have been conducted there in the past. The main advantage that Vieques has over Camp Lejeune is the ability to include live-fire NSFS in the exercise, but it appears that could be done at Camp Lejeune as well."
Other Navy studies also give Camp Lejeune high marks as one of the replacement sites for Vieques.
"We examined existing U.S. ranges as potential alternatives to Vieques and found two promising candidates. ... The leading candidate is a collection of ranges accessible from the Virginia Capes operating area (VACAPES) that includes Camp Lejeune, the Dare County and Cherry Point ranges, and also Fort Bragg. The use of Fort Bragg for live bombing has yet to be negotiated, but it seems to be the final piece of the puzzle."
Anther piece of the puzzle recommended to fill in the gap left by Vieques doesn't involve North Carolina land but water.
"Develop an east-coast water-impact NSFS range, preferably in the vicinity of Camp Lejeune."
Both Navy and Marine spokesman have indicated a willingness to provide more information. See future editions of the Daily News for more information.
-------- iran
Evidence on Iran Called Unclear
IAEA Report on Nuclear Program Is Not Conclusive, Officials Say
By Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 1, 2004; Page A11
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50493-2004Aug31.html
U.N. inspectors have not uncovered definitive evidence that Iran has a clandestine nuclear weapons program, but they have been unable to clear up a series of suspicions and unanswered questions surrounding Tehran's activities, according to U.S. and Western diplomats who have been briefed on an upcoming International Atomic Energy Agency report.
The United States, which believes Iran could be three to five years away from completing a bomb in secret, shared intelligence tips with the IAEA in June, according to the diplomats, who agreed to discuss the classified information on the condition of anonymity.
Some of that information, including communications intercepts and satellite imagery, was followed up on by IAEA inspectors but did not lead to any discoveries. Several tips have yet to be fully explored and others were considered too vague, the diplomats said.
The IAEA's mixed report, which officials said will note improved cooperation from the Iranians in recent months, comes as the Bush administration is trying to make a case for stepping up pressure on the Islamic republic. Experts said the report's findings -- which could be made public as early as today -- will be a critical factor in that effort.
The United States lacks enough support from the IAEA's other 34 members to send the issue to the U.N. Security Council, which can assess international sanctions against Iran. But U.S. officials said they would continue to push for such an outcome.
Iran insists its program is peaceful and aimed at producing a stable energy source and has said it wants to avoid a showdown at the United Nations. Both sides are hoping the report will help sway board opinions.
"The report doesn't exonerate Iran, but it's not going to help get Iran to the Security Council, either," said David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, which recently revealed satellite photos of suspect sites that Iran leveled this year.
The IAEA is investigating those sites and other lines of inquiry, including Iran's relationship to a Pakistani scientist who ran a nuclear black market that was exposed last year.
Information regarding Abdul Qadeer Khan's shadowy network is expected to feature prominently in the IAEA's report. Inspectors recently determined that some samples of uranium found in Iran were brought in on contaminated equipment Tehran bought from the network. That finding help support Iran's earlier contention that the presence of uranium was caused by the tainted equipment, not by a secret program to enrich uranium for a bomb.
Among the areas still being pursued are questions related to Iran's potential nuclear weaponization activities, an inventory of equipment and materials purchases Iran made on the black market and the possibility that it could have obtained weapons designs similar to the ones Libya bought from the same network.
U.S. officials said they will emphasize those issues when it presses the IAEA board at a Sept. 13 meeting in Vienna to increase pressure on Tehran by referring the matter to the Security Council.
But they said much will depend on the position taken by Europe's three main powers -- France, Britain and Germany. Officials there have become deeply frustrated with Iran but are reluctant to take the matter to the council, a move Iran would perceive as a threat.
The three countries offered Iran incentives to give up suspicious aspects of its nuclear program. A deal was reached but fell apart in June after the IAEA reported that Iran wasn't fully cooperating with its inspectors.
Iran responded to the report and an angry rebuke by the IAEA's board by restarting the work it had suspended, including the construction of centrifuge equipment that could be used to enrich uranium.
The reaction was unexpected and hurt relations between Europe and Iran. Analysts said the tone of the next report will affect the possibility of talks between the two sides.
"If the IAEA says Iran is cooperating, then there is still an opening for the Europeans and others to work with them," said Shireen T. Hunter, an Iran specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "But if the report is critical and comes up with examples of poor cooperation or secret work, then obviously pressure will mount to send this to the United Nations."
Flynt Leverett, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution's Saban Center and a former staff member of the National Security Council in the Bush administration, said he doubts that Iran will be referred to the United Nations at this point.
"The administration's Iran policy right now on the nuclear issue is to get the Europeans fired up enough to go the council," Leverett said. "But short of a sighting of a mushroom cloud, I don't think there is anything in this report that can get the board to vote for a Security Council referral. I just don't think that's where the Europeans or the other people on the board are right now."
----
Iran Said to Be Nearing Enrichment of Uranium
September 1, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-UN-Nuclear-Agency-Iran.html
http://ap.washingtontimes.com/dynamic/stories/U/UN_NUCLEAR_AGENCY_IRAN?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- Iran plans to process tons of raw uranium and restart its centrifuges -- two activities that could be used to make nuclear warheads, the U.N. atomic watchdog agency and diplomats said Wednesday. Experts said the amount was enough for four or five warheads.
The United States, which accuses the Tehran regime of running a weapons program in violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, said the revelations provided further evidence that Iran's activities pose ``a threat to international peace and security.''
Diplomats said the report was based on information provided by Iran's government, and an Iranian official said that showed his government is cooperating fully with U.N. officials and is running an open nuclear program devoted to the peaceful generation of electricity.
The confidential report by the International Atomic Energy Agency said it had been informed that Iran planned to process more than 40 tons of uranium into uranium hexafluoride.
Uranium hexafluoride is spun in centrifuges to produce enriched uranium, which can be used to generate electricity or make nuclear warheads, depending on the degree of enrichment.
A senior diplomat familiar with the agency declined to say how much hexafluoride could be obtained from 40 tons of raw uranium, also known as yellowcake, beyond saying it was a ``substantial amount.''
Former nuclear weapons inspector David Albright, who now heads the Institute for Science and International Security, said it could theoretically yield more than 200 pounds of weapons-grade highly enriched uranium. ``Hypothetically, that's enough to make five crude nuclear weapons,'' he said.
In Washington, a Bush administration official, speaking off the record, estimated it would be enough for four warheads.
The report, obtained by The Associated Press, was circulated to diplomats ahead of the agency's next board meeting, which starts Sept. 13. It did not specify what plans Iran had for the uranium hexafluoride.
But two other diplomats, speaking separately, told AP that Iran had also informed the agency it planned to introduce a ``substance'' into its 64-cascade centrifuge facility at Natanz as early as next month. Iran appeared to be alluding to uranium hexafluoride, they said.
Uranium hexafluoride is normally put in such centrifuges and spun repeatedly and at varying lengths of time depending on the degree of enrichment sought. Uranium enriched above 90 percent is considered weapons grade.
The senior diplomat said any uranium hexafluoride Iran produced ``could be the feed stock for Natanz.''
The issue of enrichment is extremely sensitive as the international community tries to determine if Iran is using its nuclear program for peaceful purposes or trying to make weapons.
U.S. officials are spearheading an effort at the Sept. 13 IAEA board meeting to have Iran declared in violation of its treaty obligations, a move that could force the U.N. Security Council to take action against Iran.
U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton said the U.N. report bolstered Washington's case and was ``further strong evidence of the compelling need to take Iran's nuclear program to the Security Council.''
``The United States will continue to urge other members of the IAEA board of governors to join us in this effort, to deal with the Iranian threat to international peace and security,'' he said in an e-mail to AP.
In Tehran, Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Asefi insisted Iran's release of the information proved its good intentions.
``The farther we proceed with the IAEA on our file at the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the more it becomes clear that Iran's nuclear projects are totally aimed at peaceful purposes, and that Iran has never breached any of the articles of the international laws, or deviated from abiding by any of its commitments,'' he said.
Iran agreed to suspend its enrichment program last year in an effort to build international trust. But that commitment eroded over the subsequent months, and Iran confirmed in July that it had resumed building nuclear centrifuges.
That led to increased accusations from the United States and European nations that Iran had reneged on its pledge. Iran denied that, arguing it was not actually producing enriched uranium, while reserving the right to do so.
With revelations Wednesday of its plans to produce uranium hexafluoride, and the reports by diplomats it would start up some centrifuges at Natanz, Iran appeared to be moving toward breaching that final threshold as well.
On other issues, the report suggested it was possible some traces of enriched uranium found inside Iran were not domestically manufactured but came in on equipment obtained on the black market.
Iran says that was the case for most of the traces. But the report stopped short of absolving Iran on the issue, saying it and related concerns ``continue to be investigated.'' The senior diplomat said the origins of other traces still needed to be established.
The report also said more investigation was needed into Iran's claim that it did not conduct enrichment experiments with its advanced P-2 centrifuge between 1995, when it illicitly bought them, and 2002, when its clandestine activities came to light.
While listing a series of other concerns, the 11-page report credited Iran with providing information and access that allowed IAEA investigators to clarify some issues and make progress on others. But it urged faster and better cooperation.
On the Net:
International Atomic Energy Agency: www.iaea.org
-------- iraq / inspections
Iraqi Nuclear Materials Secured
Paul Kerr,
September 2004
Arms Control Today
http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2004_09/Iraqi_Nuclear_Materials.asp
Fifteen months after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the United States has removed nuclear material from the country that posed a potential proliferation threat, Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham announced July 6.
Department of Energy experts packaged 1.77 metric tons of low-enriched uranium (LEU), as well as approximately "1,000 highly radioactive sources," according to a press release. The Department of Defense then airlifted the material, which had been stored at the Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center, to the United States on June 23.
The material could "potentially [have been] used in a radiological dispersal device or diverted to support a nuclear weapons program," according to an Energy Department press release. A radiological weapon uses conventional explosives to disperse radioactive material but is not nearly as powerful as a nuclear weapon. LEU can be used in civilian nuclear reactors but also can be further enriched for use as the explosive material in nuclear weapons.
The Tuwaitha facility has long been declared to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and subject to agency safeguards. The United States informed the IAEA June 30 that it had removed the material, IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei wrote in a July 6 letter to the UN Security Council.
National Nuclear Security Administration spokesperson Bryan Wilkes told Arms Control Today Aug. 19 that the United States consulted senior IAEA officials and received no objections to the transaction. The United States first notified the agency of its intention to remove the material in June 2003, ElBaradei's letter said.
Meanwhile, the IAEA conducted its annual inventory of Iraq's nuclear material at Tuwaitha, the agency announced Aug. 7. Such inspections are separate from those the IAEA conducted to enforce UN Security Council resolutions requiring Iraq to dismantle its suspected nuclear weapons program. The IAEA last visited Tuwaitha in June 2003, following reports that nuclear material had been looted from the facility after the U.S.-led invasion of the country in March 2003. (See ACT, July/August 2003.)
IAEA spokesperson Melissa Fleming stated that no nuclear material had been diverted from Tuwaitha since that inspection, Reuters reported Aug. 7. The remaining material, which mostly consists of natural uranium, depleted uranium, and LEU waste, "is not sensitive from a proliferation perspective," according to an Aug. 7 IAEA press release.
ElBaradei said that this inspection was "a good first step" and expressed hope that the IAEA and the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) would be able to complete their UN-mandated missions. However, UN and U.S. officials told Arms Control Today that there is no indication that either UNMOVIC or the IAEA will resume their intrusive inspections work anytime soon, particularly in light of the unstable security situation in Iraq.
-------- japan
School fears helo crash contaminated soil
By David Allen and Chiyomi Sumida,
Stars and Stripes Pacific edition,
Wednesday, September 1, 2004
http://www.estripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=23277&archive=true
GINOWAN, Okinawa - When students return for Okinawa International University's fall semester, they'll find some major changes.
The administration building will be closed while repairs to the cement structure are made after the Aug. 13 crash of a Marine CH-53D Sea Stallion heavy lift helicopter. The building's southern end remains blackened by the ensuing fire; the outer walls still bear the gouges left where rotor blades clipped them before the helicopter came to rest near the building.
The craft exploded into flames shortly after Marines had climbed two barbed-wire fences separating the school from Futenma Marine Corps Air Station to rescue the three crew members.
No civilian injuries were reported. The school was on summer break; hundreds of people were on campus instead of the 6,000 expected when classes resume Oct. 2. Just 22 people were in the administration building when the crash occurred, officials said.
Outside the building, the wreckage has been cleared; trees were cut down or trimmed to enable the removal of the aircraft's twisted hulk; the top few inches of soil were scooped up and replaced.
Hitoshi Nakasone, a school spokesman, said the soil bothers him the most, and he's confused about why U.S. military and national and prefectural government officials asked the school to take part in an environmental survey of the crash site soil.
For now, the university has rejected the request, demanding the military first disclose to it what was in the dirt it hauled away.
"The military already has samples of the soil," said Nakasone. "When they removed the wreckage, they scraped soil from the campus and loaded it onto a truck. Wasn't that for an environmental test?
"We want the military to first release their findings," he said, adding that the school also wants a detailed report concerning how the accident occurred.
No damage estimate has been made for the school, where interior furnishings, including furniture, files and computers, also were damaged extensively, Nakasone said.
The Marine Corps has released a report on its initial findings. It states that the crash appears to have been caused by a small retaining device missing in a tail rotor assembly subcomponent, leading to a loss of control of the tail rotor. Witnesses said they saw the helicopter struggle to keep aloft.
U.S. military officials, reacting to rumors circulating on Okinawa, said the helicopter was not carrying depleted uranium and that no substances taken from the wreckage site subsequently were dumped into the sea.
Nakasone said school officials want to see documentation to that effect. "We believe it is our right to demand these findings, as it is our duty to ensure the safety of our students, faculty and the general public visiting our university," he said.
In a Marine Corps statement released Monday in response to Nakasone's comments, 2nd Lt. Antony Andrious said the Corps "wants to conduct a soil survey because there may be a potential contamination with the soil at the CH-53D accident site. The potential contamination includes JP-5, hydraulic fluid, and various motor and gear oils. In order to determine the contamination, a detailed environmental assessment should be conducted."
Andrious said the Marine Corps initially wanted to conduct a joint assessment with the Japanese and Okinawa prefectural authorities and Ginowan City. However, after learning of the requirements of the Japanese Soil Contamination Countermeasures law, the Marine Corps immediately began contracting for an environmental assessment with a certified Japanese company.
"The Marine Corps has awarded a contract with a certified Japanese company in accordance with the Japanese Soil Contamination Countermeasures law," Andrious said. "Upon completion of this assessment, the Marine Corps will continue to work with Japanese and Okinawa prefectural authorities in soil remediation, site restoration, and compensation for property damages as a result of the accident.
"We, in the Marine Corps, are proud of our working relationship with the Okinawan people," he stated.
The function of the university's administration building was paralyzed by the crash, Nakasone said. "To continue the university's administrative work, the offices have been moved to different buildings on the campus, wherever there is available space."
He said the crash traumatized some of those who happened to be on campus when the crash occurred. "Although it was during summer break, it does not mean there were no students on the campus," he said. "There were some intensive courses going on, 22 employees were in the administration building and there were citizens in the library; we keep it open to the community."
He said he was inside the administration building when the helicopter struck.
"I ran out of the building immediately after I heard a big explosive noise," he said. "I saw the helicopter crash onto the ground, about 15 to 20 meters (about 50 to 66 feet) away from where I was standing. At that instant, a fire occurred in the cockpit and I heard voices calling for help.
"But all I could do was to stop people from going near the helicopter," he said.
Nakasone said the crew members' cries for help and the agony etched on their faces as they were rescued from the wreckage are burned into his memory.
"I know there are many people who witnessed the crash who now suffer from mental trauma," he said. "At times I find it difficult, myself, to control my tears and I am sometimes overwhelmed with sadness.
"Although I am getting a little better, there are others who still have frequent nightmares about the accident and have difficulties in sleeping," he said, adding that the university is providing counseling for those who suffer from psychological problems.
When discussing the nearby air station, Nakasone appeared angry. "We don't want the air station to be here any longer," he said, noting that in 1996 the U.S. and Japan agreed Futenma MCAS should be closed within seven years and moved to an alternate location on Okinawa, far from the island's urban center. A site has been selected for a new base in the waters off the island's northeast shore. But opponents, citing environmental concerns, have hobbled its progress; construction has yet to begin.
-------- russia
Russian Nuclear Scientists Take Aim at Internet
Wed Sep 1, 2004
(Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=internetNews&storyID=6123780
LONDON - Russian scientists once dedicated to destroying the west through nuclear warfare are turning their deadly talents instead to designing games for the Internet in the name of world peace.
Software designers and programmers from the once-closed nuclear cities of Sarov, Snezhinsk and Zheleznogorsk are part of a British government-funded project to prevent nuclear proliferation by finding the scientists alternative employment.
The initial results of the four-year UK-Russia Closed Nuclear Cities Partnership -- started in 2002 -- are on show at the "European Games Network" exhibition in London until Friday.
"Games software designers today are looking for increasingly sophisticated programmers with backgrounds in physics," trade minister Nigel Griffiths said. "These are exactly the skills that these former nuclear weapons scientists have."
And the need is pressing.
Changes in Russian defense policy are expected to put 15,000 nuclear scientists on the job market over the next five years with an array of specialized skills for which there is no obvious alternative outlet.
----
Russia Sends Troops to Guard Nuclear Sites
By REUTERS
September 1, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-security-nuclear-russia.html?pagewanted=print&position=
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia deployed extra troops to guard dozens of nuclear facilities across the country on Wednesday after militants seized a school in the south and a suicide bomb attack in Moscow, the nuclear authority said.
Russia, the world's No.2 atomic power after the United States, has come under international pressure to do more to protect its Soviet-era nuclear facilities against attack.
``After the latest terrorist attacks security services decided to send more interior ministry troops to all nuclear sites across the country,'' a Russian Atomic Energy Agency spokesman said.
He would not say how many additional troops were sent.
He said the government extended the order right after militants seized a school near rebel Chechnya, taking up to 150 people hostage, and a Tuesday suicide bomb attack in central Moscow which killed at least nine people.
Russia runs dozens of atomic reactors, uranium enrichment facilities and nuclear research reactors -- some in the far-flung corners of Siberia and which are poorly guarded.
Reactors are also attractive to militants because atomic fuel stored at many sites can be used in nuclear bombs.
-------- terrorism
Can Bush or Kerry Prevent Nuclear Terrorism?
Charles D. Ferguson,
September 2004
Arms Control Today
http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2004_09/Ferguson.asp
If there is any issue on which leaders from all sides of the political spectrum agree, it is the importance of preventing nuclear terrorism. As the independent commission that investigated the September 11 terrorist attacks recently stated, "The greatest danger of another catastrophic attack in the United States will occur if the world's most dangerous terrorists acquire the world's most dangerous weapons."
In their rhetoric and in their actions, both President George W. Bush and his Democratic challenger, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, have demonstrated the seriousness with which they treat the issue, calling the possibility of terrorists armed with nuclear weapons the "gravest danger"[1] and "greatest threat"[2] confronting the United States. Both have taken significant steps to curb the threat: Bush has rolled out a number of new programs since the September 11 attacks, and Kerry has offered a detailed and innovative policy blueprint of what he would like to do if elected.
Yet, the differences between the candidates' perception of the problem and their proposed solutions are profound. Further, neither candidate has given sufficient emphasis to what should be the next president's top priority: preventing terrorists from getting their hands on highly enriched uranium (HEU), the essential building block for producing the simplest nuclear weapons.
Defining Nuclear Terrorism
Terrorists have essentially four mechanisms by which they can exploit military and civilian nuclear assets around the world to serve their destructive ends:
The seizure and detonation of an intact nuclear weapon.
The theft or purchase of HEU or plutonium, leading to the fabrication and detonation of a crude nuclear weapon, or an improvised nuclear device (IND).
Attacks against and sabotage of nuclear facilities, such as nuclear power plants, to try to cause the release of large amounts of radioactivity.
The unauthorized acquisition of radioactive materials contributing to the construction and detonation of a radiological dispersion device, popularly known as a "dirty bomb," or a radiation emission device.[3]
The greatest risk in terms of severity of consequences combined with the likelihood of an attack is that a well-funded and well-organized terrorist organization could seize enough HEU to build and detonate the simplest nuclear bomb, a gun-type weapon. Like a gun, this device shoots a piece of HEU down a gun barrel to combine with another piece of HEU. The two pieces form a supercritical mass needed to sustain an explosive chain reaction. For example, the Hiroshima bomb. used the gun assembly method, and it required no nuclear testing because of the design's simplicity. Most physicists and nuclear weapons analysts agree that building such a device would pose few technological challenges to reasonably technically competent terrorists. The main barrier remains acquiring a sufficient amount of HEU.
Of course, HEU is not the only material that can fuel a nuclear bomb; plutonium can also be used. Plutonium cannot power a high-yield, gun-type weapon, however, because this method does not allow efficient use of this fissile material. Plutonium would have to employ the more technically challenging implosion-assembly method, which uses conventional explosives to squeeze plutonium into a supercritical mass. If the implosion, or squeezing, of the fissile material does not occur smoothly, the bomb would probably result in a dud or an explosion with a much lower yield thanexpected from a properly designed weapon. Moreover, unlike a gun-type device, an implosion bomb requires high-speed electronics and high-explosive lenses, complex technologies that terrorists would have substantial difficulty acquiring. Because of the relative ease of use of HEU and the large stockpiles of weapons-usable HEU throughout the world, the United States should adopt an HEU-first strategy emphasizing securing; consolidating; and, as much as possible, eliminating HEU.
The Candidates' Stance
Kerry seems to have a stronger plan than Bush for dealing with this threat. In his policy announcements, the longtime member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has been quite explicit in targeting nuclear terrorism, while Bush has talked more generally of the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction, a term that can also encompass biological and chemical weapons and missiles or other means of delivery.[4] Both leaders have proposed to secure nuclear materials, but the Bush campaign's rhetoric has emphasized the terrorists as the threat, while Kerry has pointed to the materials themselves: "Remember, no material, no bomb, no nuclear terrorism."[5] Kerry has pledged to appoint a badly needed presidential coordinator to counter nuclear terrorism and oversee efforts to secure nuclear materials.[6] He has also promised to ramp up spending on securing former Soviet nuclear weapons and materials so that such programs would be completed within four years rather than the administration's current pace of more than a decade.[7]
The Bush administration, however, has already taken some steps to do what Kerry proposes. The Bush campaign also doubts Kerry's ability to carry out his ambitious plans, no matter how much money he is willing to allot to it.
Richard Falkenrath, a former top Bush administration official working for the president's re-election campaign, derided Kerry's plan as "hollow promises and empty rhetoric." He elaborated that "it's simply a preposterous claim for anyone to be able to say that the American government could compel the Russian government to transfer its nuclear materials from one facility to another-no amount of bribery or coercion or arm-twisting could ensure that....We're making progress where progress is possible."[8]
On Kerry's pledge to work immediately with Russia "to develop a strategic plan to secure all these weapons and materials," some like Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) have said that Russian resistance will be one of many major obstacles.[9] Additional impediments include bureaucratic inertia, Russian fears of U.S. intelligence collection, Russian resentment of NATO nuclear weapons deployed in Europe, and U.S. concerns that "Russia will rise again as the nuclear enemy of the West" and that helping to secure their nuclear forces today will create "a nuclear threat tomorrow."[10]
But the administration seems to be paying attention to Kerry's proposal. Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham vowed on July 17, 2004-one month after the publication of the Kerry plan-that his department will finish securing 600 metric tons of weapons-usable material in Russia by 2008, "two years ahead of the schedule we inherited."[11]
Laudably, the Department of Energy has also stepped up efforts with Russia to secure Soviet-origin fresh and spent nuclear fuel containing HEU residing in more than 20 research facilities in 17 countries. On May 26, 2004, Abraham launched the Global Threat Reduction Initiative, a $450 million program that aims to repatriate all fresh HEU fuel to Russia by the end of 2005. The initiative also calls for returning to Russia all the spent fuel by 2010.
Just as Kerry's plan might be faulted as too grandiose, however, these goals will remain overly ambitious unless the U.S. government learns from the difficulties encountered in past repatriation operations. Each operation was a complex undertaking, which usually required many months, sometimes years, of planning and generated much controversy among responsible agencies in the U.S. and other governments. Moreover, technical setbacks in developing low-enriched nuclear fuel not usable in weapons, and a paucity of economic and political incentives for HEU research reactors to convert to these fuels will continue to delay achievement of these goals unless the U.S. government places a higher priority on this endeavor.[12]
In addition, Kerry would like to expand the decade-old Cooperative Threat Reduction program "where necessary for countries to meet" an international standard for "the safe custody of nuclear weapons and materials."[13] Such an expansion should urgently target Pakistan, a nation where a volatile mix of al Qaeda and Taliban operatives co-exists with a nascent nuclear command and control system. Consistent with the requirements of the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the United States should share unclassified technology to help Pakistan secure its nuclear weapons and materials. The Bush administration has reportedly provided some assistance along these lines,[14] but it should also develop contingency plans, if it has not already done so, involving the use of nuclear recovery teams or specialized military forces to recover Pakistani nuclear assets soon after diversion is detected.
The administration also deserves credit for forming the Group of Eight (G-8) Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction, even if this 2002 initiative is still about $3 billion short of achieving its pledge goal of $20 billion and much of the pledged money has not yet been directed toward accomplishing projects. By the same token, though, Kerry is right to point to a fairly simple step the Bush administration has failed to take that might have aided efforts to halt nuclear terrorism. Bilateral U.S. and Russian presidential summits have come and gone without Bush making a high-priority push to President Vladimir Putin to accelerate securing potentially vulnerable nuclear weapons and materials.
Moreover, in negotiating the 2002 Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT) with Russia, also known as the Moscow Treaty, the Bush administration left a loophole that terrorists might be able to exploit. Although fewer strategic nuclear warheads will be deployed and therefore transported under the treaty, there is no requirement to dismantle any warheads. Each side is permitted to keep as many nondeployed warheads in storage as it wants, thereby potentially increasing the risk of terrorist acquisition of portable strategic warheads kept in reserve. Although the Bush administration appears reluctant to press for verifiable and irreversible nuclear arms reductions, the Kerry strategy proposes to "work with the Russians to accelerate the timetable of planned and agreed consolidation and reductions in U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals."[15]
Putting HEU First
Despite important strides, neither candidate can be said to have given sufficient emphasis to what should be their most important priority: securing HEU. The Bush administration has moved to protect fissile materials abroad, but it has not explicitly recognized the unique dangers of HEU. It still spends considerable political capital on ginning up a plutonium disposition program in which the United States and Russia have each pledged to dispose of 34 metric tons of weapons-grade plutonium. That program remains mired in disputes over liability coverage and in finding enough donor support to pay for the Russian part of the program. Moreover, over the next four years, the United States intends to place 25 tons of plutonium retrieved from disarmed Russian weapons in the recently opened Mayak Fissile Material Storage Facility. This facility was originally designed to accept HEU, however, and a better allocation of resources would be to place 200 tons of weapons-usable HEU into this high-security facility.
The Kerry strategy calls for substantially accelerating the down-blending of HEU to non-weapons-usable low-enriched form. One way to assuage concerns over Kerry's apparently ambitious nuclear security schedule could be by ensuring that the elimination of HEU receives the first crack at any resources, so that any cuts would affect less urgent plutonium disposition.
Whether Bush is re-elected or Kerry becomes president, either man will have to quicken efforts to secure nuclear weapons and materials before terrorists seize them. Shrugging off bureaucratic inertia will require mobilizing a bipartisan coalition within Congress and sustaining a multinational partnership to accomplish the most urgent nuclear security tasks confronting the United States and the world community. Both men should build on the cooperative endeavor launched by Lugar and former Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) 13 years ago. As Nunn is fond of saying, "We are in a race between cooperation and catastrophe." A primary way to gain a competitive and cooperative advantage in that race is to concentrate first on denying weapons-usable HEU to terrorists.
ENDNOTES
1. The National Security Strategy of the United States, White House, September 2002.
2. Kerry campaign "Fact Sheet: New Strategies to Defeat New Threats," August 2004.
3. Charles D. Ferguson and William C. Potter, with Amy Sands, Leonard S. Spector, and Fred L. Wehling, The Four Faces of Nuclear Terrorism (Monterey, CA: Institute of International Studies and the Nuclear Threat Initiative, 2004), p. 3.
4. A search, conducted on July 16, 2004, of the Bush campaign's Web site for "nuclear terrorism" found no instances of this exact expression. More significantly, this site does not include any policy document that is solely focused on nuclear terrorism prevention. In contrast, a similar search of the Kerry campaign's Web site found six policy documents containing this phrase.
5. Jodi Wilgren, "Kerry Promises Speedier Efforts to Secure Nuclear Arms," The New York Times, June 2, 2004, p. A17.
6. For an earlier recommendation for such a coordinator, see Matthew Bunn and Anthony Wier, "Keeping Nukes Out of Terrorist Hands," The Boston Globe, September 3, 2002.
7. Although the Kerry campaign has not published an official cost estimate of its proposal, Graham Allison, a campaign adviser, director of the Belfer Center at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, and author of the recently published Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe, has estimated that accelerating efforts to secure nuclear materials under Kerry's plan could cost $5-6 billion annually. In contrast, the United States presently spends about $1 billion a year on efforts to safeguard or eliminate dangerous materials and weapons abroad.
8. Wilgren, The New York Times.
9. Senator Richard G. Lugar, "Eliminating the Obstacles to Nunn-Lugar," Arms Control Today, March 2004, p. 3.
10. Harold P. Smith Jr., "Consolidating Threat Reduction," Arms Control Today, November 2003, pp. 19-20.
11. Spencer Abraham, "How to Stop Nuclear Terror," The Washington Post, July 17, 2004, p. A19.
12. U.S. Government Accountability Office, "Nuclear Nonproliferation: DOE Needs to Take Action to Further Reduce the Use of Weapons-Usable Uranium in Civilian Research Reactors," GAO-04-807, July 2004.
13. Kerry Fact Sheet.
14. NBC Nightly News, NBC, February 6, 2004; Carol Giacomo, "U.S. Helps Pakistan Safeguard Nuclear Material," Reuters, February 6, 2004.
15. Kerry Fact Sheet.
While drafting this article, Charles D. Ferguson was a scientist-in-residence at the Monterey Institute's Center for Nonproliferation Studies. He is presently the science and technology fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He also co-authored The Four Faces of Nuclear Terrorism (Monterey Institute of International Studies and the Nuclear Threat Initiative, 2004), which among other threats examines the catastrophic danger of nuclear terrorism resulting from terrorists obtaining highly enriched uranium.
-------- treaties
Bush Shifts Fissile Material Ban Policy
Wade Boese,
September 2004
Arms Control Today
http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2004_09/FMCT.asp
Following an internal policy review lasting well over a year, the Bush administration has reaffirmed past U.S. policy to negotiate a treaty ending the production of two key materials for nuclear arms. But it has added a new twist: it does not believe the agreement can be crafted to protect against cheating. The change in tack puts Washington at odds with some of its closest allies and raises questions about whether the new U.S. approach will jump-start or further bog down the long-stalled treaty talks.
Speaking July 29 to the 65-member Conference on Disarmament (CD), Ambassador Jackie W. Sanders announced the United States would pursue negotiations on a fissile material cutoff treaty (FMCT), which would outlaw production of highly enriched uranium and plutonium for weapons purposes. A nuclear weapon cannot be made without one or the other.
Sanders said the administration's recently concluded FMCT policy review "raised serious concerns that realistic, effective verification of an FMCT is not achievable." Since 1995 the United States and others had been urging the CD to begin negotiations on an FMCT that would be "effectively verifiable"-this phrase was part of a broader negotiating mandate for the treaty brokered by Ambassador Gerald Shannon, who served as the Canadian representative to the conference at that time.
A verifiable treaty is typically understood to have mechanisms and procedures, such as on-site inspections, to detect violations.
At a January 1999 conference in Washington, D.C., Michael Guhin, a U.S. arms control official, outlined the then-U.S. government position on verifying an FMCT. "We think that a strong regime of routine monitoring of all [fissile] production facilities and all newly produced material and a regime for nonroutine or so-called challenge inspections would give us enough building blocks to build an effective verification regime," he said. Guhin is now the Department of State's point man on fissile material issues.
An administration official interviewed Aug. 13 by Arms Control Today said the United States "does not have a draft treaty in its pocket" and is not ruling out verification provisions as a possibility. The U.S. position, the official explained, is that, regardless of the verification measures agreed to, an FMCT is not able to be "effectively verifiable." Hence, the United States wants to remove that language from the 1995 Shannon mandate.
The official declined to comment on what would constitute "effectively verifiable" or why the U.S. government assessment about the proposed pact's verifiability has changed.
Another administration official interviewed Aug. 20 emphasized that the U.S. approach is motivated by wanting to establish a prohibition against the production of fissile material for weapons sooner rather than later. The concern is that negotiating a verification regime would prolong the talks by years, allowing countries currently producing fissile material without any restraints to continue to do so until a final agreement is reached.
India and Pakistan are believed still to be churning out fissile material for arms, while the status of Israel's production activities is unclear. France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States have all declared that they no longer produce fissile material for weapons purposes. China has reportedly ceased as well. In her speech, Sanders encouraged all states to pledge publicly not to make any more fissile material for bombs.
A July 29 statement released by the Bush administration also shed some light on the thinking behind the policy shift. "Effective verification of an FMCT would require an inspection regime so extensive that it could compromise key signatories' core national security interests and so costly that many countries will be hesitant to accept it," the statement noted.
For instance, the United States and other countries are opposed to providing access to facilities involved in providing nuclear fuel for their naval propulsion reactors.
Israel, which shrouds its nuclear activities in secrecy, made well known its concerns about an FMCT in 1998 when it decided not to block the conference from initiating negotiations on the accord. The talks disbanded after a few weeks without any progress. (See ACT, August/September 1998.)
Intrusive or expensive verification measures also are understood to be of concern to China, France, and Pakistan, although all have previously endorsed the goal of a verifiable FMCT.
This is not the first time the Bush administration has shied away from verification provisions. It elected not to seek a verification regime for its May 2002 Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty with Russia and sank international efforts to add one to the Biological Weapons Convention the year before.
Some conference members, including key U.S. allies, swiftly made clear they do not share the U.S. perspective. Canada and Japan reiterated their long-standing support for the Shannon mandate and Australian Ambassador Michael Smith argued Aug. 12 that, "to be credible and effective, the FMCT should include appropriate verification arrangements." British officials also have indicated that they favor verification measures.
Washington expects other capitals to try and persuade it that the agreement can be verified. A team of U.S. experts is traveling to the conference Sept. 1-2 to present the opposite case.
Although Sanders also spoke of the U.S. desire to ban exports of landmines lacking self-destruct and self-deactivation mechanisms (see below), the near-term priority is getting the CD to focus on an FMCT, according to U.S. officials.
The U.S. position runs counter to CD efforts extending back to last year to formulate a compromise package of issues, including an FMCT, the prevention of an arms race in outer space, and nuclear disarmament, to all be dealt with at the same time. China and Russia submitted Aug. 26 two informal working papers on the outer space issue and made clear that they opposed the conference working solely on an FMCT. Russia described the outer space issue as its "clear priority," while China called for adopting a "comprehensive program of work."
However, time is short for any CD negotiations to begin this year. The conference concludes its current session Sept. 10 and will not reconvene until January 2005. CD rules hold that talks started one year do not automatically carry over to the next.
This practice, coupled with the requirement that no work can begin if a single CD member objects, has helped deadlock the conference since 1996 when it wrapped up the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
In May 2000, the then-187 states-parties to the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) called upon the CD to complete an FMCT within five years. The NPT states-parties are gathering again this coming May, and the lack of progress on an FMCT is likely to be cited by many non-nuclear-weapon states as evidence that nuclear-armed countries are not living up to their NPT commitment to work toward disarmament.
----
Trust, but Don't Verify
Daryl G. Kimball,
September 2004
Arms Control Today
http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2004_09/Focus.asp
The dangers posed by today's non-conventional weapons necessitate prompt and vigorous action to dismantle arsenals and block the transfer, stockpiling, and production of highly enriched uranium and plutonium-the fissile material needed to build nuclear weapons. U.S. leaders have long recognized that such arms control efforts must be reinforced with effective means to monitor compliance. As President Ronald Reagan told the Soviets, "Trust, but verify."
Fittingly, the negotiation of a global, verifiable fissile material cutoff treaty (FMCT) has been a major U.S. nonproliferation priority at the Conference on Disarmament (CD) for more than a decade. But not any more.
Following a lengthy policy review, the Bush administration has adopted a new and counterproductive "trust, but don't verify" FMCT position. Although the administration says it supports negotiations for a treaty to end the production of fissile material for weapons purposes, it has indicated it will oppose negotiations on an "effectively verifiable" treaty.
The goal in past years has been to negotiate a global treaty with an effective verification regime focused on facilities that are capable of uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing. This could provide high confidence that no country is secretly producing bomb-grade nuclear material for weapons.
The FMCT would reinforce the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and lock in the halt on production of fissile material for weapons currently observed by the five established nuclear-weapon states: China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Perhaps more significantly, a verifiable FMCT would cap the supply of bomb material available to NPT holdouts India; its nuclear rival, Pakistan; and Israel.
The U.S. policy shift is a body blow to the long-delayed FMCT talks, however. The United States wants the 65 member states at the CD to reach consensus on a new mandate for negotiations, an exceedingly difficult task that will further postpone the start of FMCT talks. The new U.S. policy is yet another shameful rejection of key disarmament commitments made at the 1995 and 2000 Review Conferences of the NPT.
According to the Bush review, an FMCT inspection program would be "so extensive that it could compromise key signatories' core national security interests and so costly that many countries will be hesitant to accept it." No verification system is 100 percent effective, nor is it free. But as major U.S. allies still insist, verifying such a treaty is technically feasible and politically possible, and it is in everyone's core interests to make the treaty more than a symbolic gesture.
The additional financial cost of expanding the scope of current nuclear inspections to cap the size of the world's arsenals is well worth the price. As recent events in Iraq, Iran, and North Korea show, when international arms inspectors have the political and legal authority to visit relevant sites and investigate suspicious findings, they can detect and deter cheating and, if necessary, help mobilize international action against violators. In many cases, the IAEA can visit and take measurements at sites and facilities about which national intelligence agencies can only raise suspicions.
So, what is really behind the reluctance to negotiate an effectively verifiable FMCT? The policy is yet another symptom of this administration's strong allergy to multilateral arms control. It also reflects the Bush administration's insufficient regard for the effect of Israel's and Pakistan's unregulated nuclear weapons programs on regional security and nonproliferation objectives. Pressing forward with a verifiable FMCT would help bring those states, along with India, into the nonproliferation mainstream and enhance efforts to ensure that other states comply with their treaty obligations.
The Pentagon has resisted FMCT negotiations altogether. Officials there fret about protecting information related to Navy programs that supply enriched uranium fuel for nuclear-powered ships, despite the fact that the FMCT would not prohibit production for such purposes.
This is not the first time the Bush administration has torpedoed verification provisions designed to improve compliance with arms control treaties. In 2001 the Bush administration blocked approval of a verification regime for the Biological Weapons Convention. In 2002 it declined to seek additional monitoring and inspection measures as part of its Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty with Russia. Absent better verification, illicit national bioweapons programs may continue, and our knowledge about the size and security of Russia's nuclear arsenal will be far less certain.
President George W. Bush said in February that he is committed to stopping weapons of mass destruction "at the source." The United States cannot achieve this objective by itself or without more new and verifiable initiatives such as the FMCT. Tragically, the Bush approach on the FMCT and other nonproliferation agreements denies our nation and the international community the chance to more effectively monitor and enforce compliance with the global nonproliferation standards essential to our security.
-------- u.n.
ElBaradei Appoints Fuel Cycle Group
Miles A. Pomper,
September 2004
Arms Control Today
http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2004_09/ElBaradei.asp
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei has tapped a Swiss arms control expert to lead a 23-member expert panel that will examine alternative ways to provide and dispose of key civilian nuclear materials in order to prevent nuclear proliferation.
The appointment of Bruno Pellaud, a former IAEA deputy director-general, to chair the experts group comes in the wake of alleged efforts by Iran and North Korea to use civilian nuclear plants as a cover for producing the highly enriched uranium and plutonium needed to fuel nuclear weapons.
To limit the possibility of such diversion, ElBaradei has been encouraging states voluntarily to cede their rights under the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) to certain technologies that can have both civilian and military applications. (See ACT, November 2003.)
In particular, ElBaradei has suggested that spent fuel repositories as well as facilities for enriching uranium or reprocessing spent nuclear fuel to extract plutonium might be placed under international control. He is now also suggesting that countries agree to abide by a five-year moratorium on the construction of facilities of this kind.
At the request of ElBaradei, key IAEA member states named other members of the panel, who include both technical and policy specialists. In addition to Pellaud, ElBaradei appointed two outside advisers: Lawrence Scheinman, who served as assistant director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency during the Clinton administration, and former Euratom safeguards director Wilhelm Gmelin.
The panel, whose formation ElBaradei announced in June (see ACT, July/August 2004), is set to meet four times before March 2005, when it is expected to provide a report to the IAEA's Board of Governors.
The board could then decide to forward its recommendations to the 2005 NPT Review Conference, which meets once every five years and brings together representatives of the treaty's 189 states-parties.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
Oppenheimer - A Puzzle of a Man
S. S. Schweber,
September-October
American Scientist
http://www.americanscientist.org/template/BookReviewTypeDetail/assetid/35492;jsessionid=aaa9y8GHx_a9uX
Oppenheimer: Portrait of an Enigma. Jeremy Bernstein. xii + 223 pp. Ivan R. Dee, 2004. $25.
Jeremy Bernstein is an accomplished physicist and a talented writer. In the afterword to The Life It Brings, his 1987 account of his upbringing and career as a physicist, he commented that once he began to write professionally, his pieces "became a kind of running autobiography." The scientific and literary components of his life have complemented each other, resulting in informative and insightful scientific profiles enriched by autobiographical elements.
We learn from the preface to Oppenheimer: Portrait of an Enigma that Bernstein had wanted to write a profile of J. Robert Oppenheimer for The New Yorker in the 1960s but felt unable to do so, being in a sense too close to his subject. Bernstein explains that the space of four decades has now given him the distance he needs. This book, like the profiles he did write for that magazine, is a succinct, revealing and very readable account of a scientist's life and accomplishments; it is not meant, he says, to be a "definitive" biography.
The book has only about 200 pages of text, and more than a third of them are devoted to the 1954 "trial" that revoked Oppenheimer's security clearance. His family background and upbringing, his education at the Ethical Culture School, Harvard, Cambridge and Göttingen, and his postdoctoral fellowships with Paul Ehrenfest in Leyden and Wolfgang Pauli in Zurich are all concisely presented, and this material is enriched by insightful observations and new information. For example, Bernstein believes that Oppenheimer's proclivity for making acerbic remarks during seminars stemmed from his emulation of Pauli, who was famous for his sarcasm.
Bernstein draws on the poet Edith Jenkins's book Against a Field Sinister for a better understanding of both Oppenheimer and Jean Tatlock, with whom Oppenheimer was intimate. Oppenheimer almost married Tatlock in the mid-1930s. She was a member of the Communist Party (as was Jenkins) and introduced him to leftist circles. A nighttime visit with her when she was deeply depressed and he was involved in atomic weaponry was held against Oppenheimer during his trial.
Bernstein conveys Oppenheimer's importance as a physicist during the 1930s by indicating the significance of the outstanding school of theoretical physics he created at the University of California, Berkeley, and by analyzing his research-in particular, his papers on general relativity dealing with the collapse of heavy stars, which established the possibility of the creation of black holes. The chapter on Los Alamos highlights Oppenheimer's remarkable directorship of the laboratory there, which made possible the design and production of the uranium and plutonium bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The chapter on the unjust trial incisively analyzes the events that brought about the revocation of Oppenheimer's clearance. Bernstein introduces us to the cast of characters who, obsessed with the dangers of the Soviet Union and of communism, considered Oppenheimer a security risk: William Borden (who was executive director of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy), FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Senator Joseph McCarthy, fellow atomic physicist Edward Teller and Air Force Major General Roscoe Taylor. Bernstein also presents the flaws in Oppenheimer's character that led Lewis Strauss, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and the éminence grise in the security hearings, to hate him. Those flaws also shattered the lives of some of Oppenheimer's students-David Bohm, Joseph Weinberg and Bernard Peters-and of his friend Haakon Chevalier. In this chapter Bernstein indicates what he knows of the mechanism of fusion bombs (having already explained the workings of fission bombs in the chapter on Los Alamos). Unfortunately, he does not refer the reader to Richard Rhodes's Dark Sun, which details both the Ulam-Teller and the Soviet implementations of hydrogen bombs.
A brief chapter on the Institute for Advanced Study and Oppenheimer's tenure there as director consists chiefly of Bernstein's reminiscences about his own experiences as a fellow at the Institute. In the even briefer epilogue, Bernstein recalls attending Oppenheimer's memorial service.
Without question, this effective portrait of Oppenheimer benefits greatly from Bernstein having had dealings with the man and having seen him in action. In addition, Bernstein has known and written about people close to Oppenheimer, including Isador Rabi, Hans Bethe and Philip Morrison. But the judgment of these physicists, particularly that of Rabi, somewhat polarizes Bernstein's assessment of Oppenheimer. Certainly Rabi's observations are quite valuable, as when he recalls an important meeting of the General Advisory Committee to the AEC that Oppenheimer chaired late in October of 1949, at which all members present decided against a crash program to build a hydrogen bomb. Other comments might be questioned, because Rabi-who was always comfortable being a Jew, who lived in New York and moved in Jewish circles of emancipated intellectuals-perhaps could not fully appreciate the sense of community that was afforded to Oppenheimer by Berkeley leftist groups that actively opposed fascism, supported the Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War and assisted in the unionization of West Coast workers.
The Berkeley faculty discussion group in which Oppenheimer actively participated in the late 1930s-in which everyone except Oppenheimer was a Communist Party member-did operate pretty much like a party cell. It is thus not surprising that Chevalier would write to him in 1964 that an important part of the memoirs Chevalier was about to publish concerned "your and my membership in the same unit of the CP from 1938 to 1942." But, in fact, Oppenheimer never became a party member. He made it a point not to pay party dues, the international criterion for membership, even though he contributed abundantly to various party causes.
As sociologist Nathan Glazer has insightfully pointed out (in The Social Basis of American Communism [1961]), Oppenheimer, by wholeheartedly committing himself to the activities of the left, became a member of "a community based on a faith in which all were equal." It allowed him to "shed the limitations" of his social world and to
join in a fraternity that transcended the divisions of the world. This was the attraction of Communism to many Jews who no longer thought of themselves in any way as Jewish. And for many, faith remained stronger than interest.
Perhaps Chevalier was right when he observed in Oppenheimer: The Story of a Friendship (1965) that
The fervor that Opje displayed in all his political activity, the importance that he attached to it, were, I think we all felt-those of us who were "on the inside"-a projection of an exceptional, almost anguished concern with the fate of man, both individually and in the large. . . . This was the "Hebrew prophet" side of his nature (which co-existed with, and never quite obliterated the . . . sophisticated, worldly side).
But the fact that Oppenheimer, unlike Rabi, was not comfortable being a Jew is not the only point of contrast between their situations, something that becomes clear on reading the fine portrait that Bernstein painted of Rabi in The New Yorker. Rabi's experience at the Radiation Lab at MIT was that he was the equal of the officers in the Army, Air Force and Navy who were asking for novel radar devices. The Rad Lab and the Armed Forces were partners in the development of this new weaponry. In fact, the civilians were the motive force in this not only by virtue of expertise, but also because that development was funded by the National Research Development Committee, a civilian agency.
But this was never the case after October 1941 for atomic weapons. It had by then become clear through the work of Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls in England that practical atomic weapons could be assembled. When Roosevelt gave the go-ahead to Vannevar Bush and James Conant to develop the bomb, they signed an agreement that delegated all authority on atomic policy to the president or his delegated officers. Roosevelt named Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, General George Marshall, and Bush and Conant as his delegates, and they constituted the General Policy Group that was to make decisions. This transformed the A-bomb effort from a civilian to a military project, under the command of the Military Policy Committee (composed of Bush, Conant, a representative from the Army and one from the Navy), which was empowered to issue orders to military commanders.
click for full image and caption
Oppenheimer was aware of this agreement and accepted its scope. The Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago and the facilities at Los Alamos, Oak Ridge and Hanford were de facto military establishments. The scientists working in those places were technicians. It was General Leslie Groves and General Kenneth Nichols who were responsible for the scientific decisions. As Groves was to assert at Oppenheimer's trial, "Dr. Oppenheimer was used by me as my adviser . . ., not to tell me what to do, but to confirm my opinion."
Oppenheimer indeed recognized that the role he played as director of Los Alamos during the war was carried out serving under orders from the president, as commander in chief. And Oppenheimer never regretted his role in the development of atomic bombs, as is clear from an exchange that took place following a lecture he gave in Geneva in 1964:
van Camp: If you had foreseen the present situation in the world, would you have dared start the researches that led to the atomic bomb?
JRO: My role was very much more modest. . . . My role was to preside over an effort, to make, as soon as possible, something practical. But I would do it again. . . .
Victor Weisskopf: I would like to address Mr. Oppenheimer in a different fashion. Given what has happened these past twenty years, would you in the position you were in 1942, would you again accept to develop the bomb?
JRO: To this I have answered yes. . . .
An assistant: Even after Hiroshima?
JRO: Yes.
Unquestionably, Oppenheimer was an enigmatic figure-but in some respects he is less of an enigma than one might infer from all that has been written about him. The aura of mystery has been lifted somewhat with Bernstein's new book, although he does not try to piece together this puzzle of a man. Reviewer Information
S. S. Schweber is professor of physics and Richard Koret Professor in the History of Ideas, emeritus, at Brandeis University and Senior Research Associate at the Dibner Institute at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of In the Shadow of the Bomb: Bethe, Oppenheimer, and the Moral Responsibility of the Scientist (reviewed in the July-August 2000 issue http://www.americanscientist.org/BookReviewTypeDetail/assetid/25926).
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
Energy Department Must Produce More Yucca Mountain Documents
September 1, 2004
ROCKVILLE, Maryland, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/sep2004/2004-09-01-09.asp#anchor1
The Department of Energy (DOE) must make more documents available to the public before the agency can apply for a license to build and operate the nation's only geologic repository for high-level nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, Nevada.
The DOE's certification that it made available to the public all of its documentary material on the proposed Yucca Mountain repository has failed to meet Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) regulations.
An NRC Atomic Safety and Licensing Board unanimously ruled Tuesday that the June 30 certification failed to make publically available "substantial quantities" of documentary material in DOE's possession at the time of certification, and that the manner in which DOE made the material publicly available on its own internet web site "failed to satisfy the regulations."
But the DOE could correct the problem soon, the Board said. "It does not appear that it will take DOE a significant amount of time to complete its processing of the outstanding documents prior to being able to make a recertification."
The ruling was in response to a July 12 motion to the Licensing Board from the state of Nevada in connection with the DOE's expected application to build the repository.
The motion challenged DOE's certification of the availability of its documentary material regarding the application. The Licensing Board heard oral arguments on the motion, from Nevada, from the DOE and from the NRC staff, on July 27 at the NRC's Rockville, Maryland headquarters.
To provide for efficient discovery in reviewing the Yucca Mountain application, NRC regulations require that all potential participants in the proceeding make their documents available to other potential participants online through the Licensing Support Network (LSN). The LSN is available for anyone to access documents, at http://www.lsnnet.gov.
Under the regulations, DOE must certify, six months before submitting its license application, that its documents are electronically available. DOE made that certification on June 30, 2004.
Soon after, the NRC chief administrative judge appointed a three person Licensing Board to serve as the Pre-License Application Presiding Officer (PAPO) to decide disputes brought by parties or potential parties regarding documentary materials submitted to the LSN.
The PAPO Licensing Board is headed by Chairman Judge Thomas S. Moore, who has been an NRC administrative judge for years, Judge Alex S. Karlin, a former corporate, nonprofit and EPA attorney; and nuclear law expert Judge Alan S. Rosenthal.
Thirty days after the DOE certification, on July 30, the NRC certified that its own documents were electronically available.
The Board ruled that Nevada and other potential participants are not required to make their documents available until 90 days after DOE recertifies that it has made all of its documents available on the central LSN site.
A copy of the decision will be available from the NRC's web site by entering http://hlwehd.nrc.gov/Public_HLW-EHD/home.asp and following the directions on the screen. Help in accessing information on the web is available from the NRC Public Document Room at 1-800-397-4209 or 301-415-4737.
-------- colorado
DOE Denies Charges About Rocky Flats Cleanup
Group Claims $7 Billion Cleanup Did Not Include Crucial Sites
Associated Press
September 1, 2004
http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/3700391/detail.html
http://www.coloradodaily.com/articles/2004/09/02/news/news03.txt
DENVER -- A report alleging dangerous gaps in cleanup plans for the former Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant is unsubstantiated and contains nothing new, the Department of Energy said Wednesday after reviewing the paper.
The Department of Energy on Wednesday flatly denied charges that cleanup plans for the former Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant are dangerously incomplete.
An advocacy group said last month the $7 billion cleanup did not include sites where radioactive waste was buried or dumped illegally.
"The DOE has determined there is no validity to the issues raised," said Joseph A. Legare, cleanup manager for the Energy Department, which oversees the site.
Caron Balkany, a member of the "Ambushed Grand Jury Citizens Investigation" advocacy group, disputed Legare's findings. She said that, for example, Legare insists there was only one pond at Rocky Flats. Balkany said there were two, and plutonium was secretly dumped in the second pond.
"It is fascinating to me that throughout their 11-page reply to us they never once refuted our claim that they falsified data."
Rocky Flats, about 10 miles west of Denver, made plutonium triggers for nuclear weapons until production was shut down after a 1989 raid. The Energy Department plans to convert the site into a wildlife refuge when the cleanup is completed in two years.
The "Ambushed Grand Jury Citizens' Investigation" issued a report on Aug. 18 saying employees had surreptitiously buried radioactive waste on the ground and dumped it in the pond, and that those sites were not part of the cleanup.
Legare rebutted the report in a letter Wednesday to the federal Environmental Protection Agency.
"Every area identified in the paper has previously been investigated and incorporated into site cleanup plans," he wrote.
Jon Lipsky, an FBI agent who led the 1989 raid on the plant, has said the citizens' group report was correct. Lipsky said he was ordered by superiors not to discuss the specifics of his investigation.
After the advocacy group released its report, the Department of Energy, the EPA and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment said they wanted to see the secret files of a federal grand jury that investigated alleged environmental crimes at Rocky Flats.
The panel wanted to issue indictments, but the U.S. attorney's office decided to negotiate a settlement that included an $18.5 million fine against Rockwell International, the plant operator at the time.
EPA officials planned to meet with the U.S. attorney's office on Thursday about obtaining the files, said spokesman Terry Anderson.
-------- missouri
Ameren's chief nuclear officer to retire Dec. 31
September 1, 2004
St. Louis MO Business Journal,
http://stlouis.bizjournals.com/stlouis/stories/2004/08/30/daily52.html
Garry Randolph, senior vice president and chief nuclear officer at Ameren Corp., will retire Dec. 31, the company said today.
Randolph, 55, will serve as a consultant to the company in 2005.
Charles Naslund, 51, has been named vice president, nuclear operations. He succeeds Ronald Affolter, who resigned to pursue other opportunities.
St. Louis-based Ameren Corp. (NYSE: AEE) provides electricity and natural gas to customers in eastern Missouri and Illinois.
-------- nevada
GOP backs nuclear repository
Plank divides Nevada Republican delegation
CORRECTIONS -- 9/1/04
Las Vegas Review-Journal
http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2004/Aug-31-Tue-2004/news/24659012.html
Shirley Blair, the sister of Gov. Kenny Guinn and a delegate to the Republican National Convention, was misidentified in a Tuesday story on the GOP supporting the Yucca Mountain Project.
NEW YORK -- Though it doesn't mention the Yucca Mountain Project by name, the platform approved Monday by the Republican Party probably won't help the GOP much in Nevada.
In a plank pledging support for nuclear energy's role in alleviating dependence on foreign oil, the platform hits upon the key issue of burying the nation's high level nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
"President Bush supports construction of new nuclear power plants through the Nuclear Power 2010 initiative and continues to move forward on creating an environmentally sound nuclear waste repository," the platform states.
The platform was approved by a voice vote early Monday afternoon without delegates even seeing the document.
The energy plank also pledges support for renewable sources such as solar and wind power.
Environmental groups lashed out at the overall energy planks, but some Nevada delegates were particularly pleased with the language referring to the repository, which was approved by Bush in 2002.
"We've gotten denied a lot benefits," said Paul Willis of Pahrump, a staunch repository supporter. "In my 50 years as a resident of Nevada, I've never seen the federal government denied anything.
"The real losers will be the state of Nevada and Nye County for not negotiating for benefits," said Willis, who wore a pin that identified him as "Paul Willis -- Chairman Nye County -- Home of Yucca Mountain."
Willis said the pin was to remind the rest of the Nevada delegation how a majority of the members feel about Yucca.
About a dozen of the 33 delegates support Yucca Mountain and think the state should negotiate for benefits, according to a survey of delegates by the Associated Press.
A Reno Gazette-Journal, KRNV-Channel 4 poll of statewide voters this month found that 53 percent consider Yucca Mountain an important factor in deciding which presidential candidate they will back. Among Democrats, 67 percent said Yucca Mountain is important, compared with 38 percent of Republicans.
But the delegation includes Republican statewide officials that have fought hard against the repository. Attorney General Brian Sandoval, who sued the Bush administration, is a delegate along with Rep. Jim Gibbons, who voted against the repository in Congress.
Gov. Kenny Guinn's wife, Dema, and his sister, Shirley Barber, are also delegates. Guinn vetoed Bush's designation of Yucca Mountain in 2002, triggering a congressional vote on the issue.
The divide within the Republican Party on the repository has already opened the door to criticism by the Democrats.
Kerry Nevada spokesman Sean Smith scoffed at the language about an "environmentally-sound nuclear waste repository."
"If they found one of those, I'd like to know where it is," Smith said.
He also said the platform can play a role in Nevada's presidential election because "it's consistent with Bush's record for the past four years and it reinforces the notion that he's pushed forward on this."
The national Democratic platform, approved by delegates in Boston last month, includes a plank opposing efforts to store nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain that are not based on sound science.
Presidential nominee John Kerry pledged to kill the project if elected, and in a television commercial running now in Reno and Las Vegas, he tells voters: "It's wrong. It's dangerous and I won't let it happen."
During a trip to Las Vegas two weeks ago, Bush said his decision was based on science and that he would stand by any ruling by a court or the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
"This is something you've heard the president address himself," said White House spokesman Ken Lisiaus. "And Spencer Abraham has also addressed it. He (Bush) is strongly committed to making sure this moves forward on sound scientific principals and that the people of Nevada are safe."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
--------
GOP backs nuclear repository
Plank divides Nevada Republican delegation
9/1/04
By ERIN NEFF LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL
http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2004/Aug-31-Tue-2004/news/24659012.html
[Shirley Blair, the sister of Gov. Kenny Guinn and a delegate to the Republican National Convention, was misidentified in a Tuesday story on the GOP supporting the Yucca Mountain Project.]
NEW YORK -- Though it doesn't mention the Yucca Mountain Project by name, the platform approved Monday by the Republican Party probably won't help the GOP much in Nevada.
In a plank pledging support for nuclear energy's role in alleviating dependence on foreign oil, the platform hits upon the key issue of burying the nation's high level nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
"President Bush supports construction of new nuclear power plants through the Nuclear Power 2010 initiative and continues to move forward on creating an environmentally sound nuclear waste repository," the platform states.
The platform was approved by a voice vote early Monday afternoon without delegates even seeing the document.
The energy plank also pledges support for renewable sources such as solar and wind power.
Environmental groups lashed out at the overall energy planks, but some Nevada delegates were particularly pleased with the language referring to the repository, which was approved by Bush in 2002.
"We've gotten denied a lot benefits," said Paul Willis of Pahrump, a staunch repository supporter. "In my 50 years as a resident of Nevada, I've never seen the federal government denied anything.
"The real losers will be the state of Nevada and Nye County for not negotiating for benefits," said Willis, who wore a pin that identified him as "Paul Willis -- Chairman Nye County -- Home of Yucca Mountain."
Willis said the pin was to remind the rest of the Nevada delegation how a majority of the members feel about Yucca.
About a dozen of the 33 delegates support Yucca Mountain and think the state should negotiate for benefits, according to a survey of delegates by the Associated Press.
A Reno Gazette-Journal, KRNV-Channel 4 poll of statewide voters this month found that 53 percent consider Yucca Mountain an important factor in deciding which presidential candidate they will back. Among Democrats, 67 percent said Yucca Mountain is important, compared with 38 percent of Republicans.
But the delegation includes Republican statewide officials that have fought hard against the repository. Attorney General Brian Sandoval, who sued the Bush administration, is a delegate along with Rep. Jim Gibbons, who voted against the repository in Congress.
Gov. Kenny Guinn's wife, Dema, and his sister, Shirley Barber, are also delegates. Guinn vetoed Bush's designation of Yucca Mountain in 2002, triggering a congressional vote on the issue.
The divide within the Republican Party on the repository has already opened the door to criticism by the Democrats.
Kerry Nevada spokesman Sean Smith scoffed at the language about an "environmentally-sound nuclear waste repository."
"If they found one of those, I'd like to know where it is," Smith said.
He also said the platform can play a role in Nevada's presidential election because "it's consistent with Bush's record for the past four years and it reinforces the notion that he's pushed forward on this."
The national Democratic platform, approved by delegates in Boston last month, includes a plank opposing efforts to store nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain that are not based on sound science.
Presidential nominee John Kerry pledged to kill the project if elected, and in a television commercial running now in Reno and Las Vegas, he tells voters: "It's wrong. It's dangerous and I won't let it happen."
During a trip to Las Vegas two weeks ago, Bush said his decision was based on science and that he would stand by any ruling by a court or the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
"This is something you've heard the president address himself," said White House spokesman Ken Lisiaus. "And Spencer Abraham has also addressed it. He (Bush) is strongly committed to making sure this moves forward on sound scientific principals and that the people of Nevada are safe."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
-------- pennsylvania
Peach Bottom must submit plan to NRC
Plant officials must detail corrective actions to be taken at Unit 2
By SEAN ADKINS
York Daily Record/Sunday News
Wednesday, September 1, 2004
http://ydr.com/story/business/39128/
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has requested that officials at Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station Unit 2 submit in writing plans to address inadequate corrective actions for known equipment problems.
The cross-cutting issue includes two "green" violations of very low safety significance listed within the commission's mid-cycle performance review and inspection plan of the power station.
That review stretched from July 1, 2003, to June 30. The NRC released the review Monday.
Next month, a team from the NRC will travel to the plant to run an additional inspection on Unit 2 to determine how Exelon has responded to "white" performance indicators found in the third quarter of 2003 and the first quarter of 2004.
Exelon co-owns and operates Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station.
The power station's Unit 3 performance requires no additional NRC oversight. That unit will follow a normal inspection schedule through March 31, 2006.
The supplemental inspection will investigate the reason behind Unit 2's four unplanned shutdowns per 7,000 critical hours, or roughly a year of operation.
The unscheduled shutdowns occurred between the fourth quarter of 2002 and the fourth quarter of 2003.
One of the unplanned shutdowns included the failure of one of the plant's four emergency diesel generators.
Following the shutdown, a commission inspection team found that deficient procedures were run during the 1992 installation of generator adapter gaskets.
Gas leaked into the equipment's jacket water cooling system - a problem that led to the automatic tripping of the generator.
The NRC determined that the problem warranted a "white" finding, or a violation of low to moderate safety significance.
Earlier this year, the plant formed a root-cause analysis team from the power station's maintenance and engineering divisions to deal with the failed diesel generator, said Dana Melia, an Exelon spokeswoman.
The plant put its self-critical analysis into action in June and further modified its plan last month, she said.
The actions focused on the maintenance of the generator and other reliability conditions, Melia said.
The NRC will look at all the plant's actions during its September inspection.
Power station officials are now forming a second root-cause team to deal with the plant's ongoing problems with cross-cutting issues, Melia said.
Cross-cutting issues are events that affects many different areas of plant performance, said Neil Sheehan of the NRC.
"The substantive cross-cutting issue was based on several inspection findings in which corrective action for a known equipment problem was either insufficient or delayed for implementation," according to the mid-cycle review.
The most recent findings deal with problems related to Unit 2's high-pressure coolant injection oil system and high-pressure service water valves, Sheehan said.
Both problems resulted in green violations.
The high-pressure coolant injection oil system is a reserve safety operation put into play to shut down the plant quickly, Sheehan said.
The oil is used to lubricate the system that injects coolant into the reactor vessel to keep the fuel cool at times of emergency, he said.
In June, plant officials found that oil flow to a part of the system had been interrupted.
As a result, damage to the turbine bearing and rotor rendered the machine inoperable. The plant had to replace the bearing and rotor. The system was unavailable.
The second green violation dealt with corrective actions of high-pressure service water valves that pull water from the Susquehanna River that is used to cool down various plant components, Sheehan said.
How the plant will respond to the violations will be part of the letter sent to the NRC in October, Melia said.
Reach Sean Adkins at 771-2047 or sadkins@ydr.com.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
U.S.: Militants, Not Villagers, Hit in Afghan Raid
Police Say Up to 8 Civilians Among Dead in Anti-Taliban Assault Near Pakistan Border
Reuters
Wednesday, September 1, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50505-2004Aug31.html
KABUL, Afghanistan, Aug. 31 -- The U.S. military said its forces killed more than 20 Islamic fighters on Tuesday in eastern Afghanistan but denied reports it had killed up to eight villagers in the same operation.
Local police and aid workers said that between six and eight villagers were killed and nine wounded by U.S. bombing in Weradesh, in Konar province's Manogi district. They said several houses were also destroyed.
But Maj. Scott Nelson, a U.S. military spokesman in the capital, Kabul, said: "We didn't fire on these people."
He said the U.S.-led forces saw a "precision-guided bomb" strike its target, which he described as a vehicle with a weapons system, probably a mortar, mounted on it. The bomb killed more than 20 combatants, Nelson added.
Forces belonging to the Taliban and their ally, renegade commander Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, are active in the area some 125 miles east of Kabul in a mountainous region close to the border with Pakistan.
Local police and aid workers gave a grim account of casualties among the villagers.
"As a result of the bombing by American planes, six civilians have lost their lives, nine more have been injured and eight houses have been demolished," said Mohammad Arif Nizami, Konar's deputy police chief, speaking from Asadabad, the provincial capital. Nizami said the bombing occurred at about 2 a.m.
An Afghan who worked in the village for a foreign relief agency was also reported wounded.
"According to the information from our local staff, eight villagers were killed in the bombing. One of our Afghan staff was wounded, too, but I was told he is in a stable condition," said Gorm Pederson, of the Danish Committee for Aid to Afghan Refugees.
Nelson said casualties among the villagers were more likely caused by inaccurate rocket and mortar fire from Islamic fighters.
U.S.-led forces along with Afghan troops engaged the militants after one of their installations came under attack.
Nelson said ground forces moved through the village after the bombing and cornered one fighter who blew himself up with a grenade, wounding seven children.
A U.S. military statement said one child was badly hurt but the rest were in stable condition.
One coalition soldier was wounded, along with two Afghan troops.
About 18,000 U.S.-led foreign troops and the newly formed Afghan army are pursuing the Taliban and its allies, including members of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.
Afghans say several thousand civilians have been killed mainly in the south and east of Afghanistan since the United States began its war against the Taliban and al Qaeda in late 2001.
Last December, about 15 civilians, including children, were killed by U.S. bombs in southeastern Afghanistan.
Nearly 1,000 people have been killed in the country in the past year as government opponents have stepped up attacks to disrupt an Oct. 9 presidential election.
----
Afghanistan through the eyes of a governor
By Tanya Goudsouzian
September 2, 2004,
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
http://atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/FI02Ag01.html
Haji Din Mohammad, a former mujahideen fighter from the Khales faction of the Hezb-i-Islami, became governor of the eastern province of Nangarhar after the assassination of his brother, Haji Abdul Qadir, in July 2002. He is also the brother of slain commander Abdul Haq. In an exclusive interview with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) in Kabul on August 27, he talked about "Afghan-style" democracy and the need to start rehabilitating opium farmers before they sow seeds for the next season. Afghanistan is due to hold presidential elections on October 9 and parliamentary elections next April.
RFE/RL: Do you believe democracy will work in Afghanistan?
Mohammad: It will be democracy "Afghan style". The shape that it takes will depend on Afghan culture, the prevailing circumstances, and the mentality of the people. The process will be slow, and it may not take hold 100%.
RFE/RL: How do you gauge the voter-registration process so far? Has the turnout in the south been satisfactory?
Mohammad: In Nangarhar, more than 41% of women and 45% of men have registered. If these numbers are low, then it is the fault of UNAMA [the United National Assistance Mission in Afghanistan] because they have been slow in our area. [The UN said at the weekend that over 9.9 million Afghans had registered to vote in the upcoming elections.]
RFE/RL: Are people enthusiastic about the elections?
Mohammad: Yes, it seems the people are keen to participate. For the presidential elections, it's simple enough, because there are only 18 candidates. It's not so bad. But it's going to be very difficult during the parliamentary elections with more people running and more people trying to show their importance. I expect there will be pandemonium.
RFE/RL: Are warlords impeding the electoral process?
Mohammad: I think it is inevitable. There will be some interference from their side, but the majority of average Afghans want to see peace in Afghanistan. They want to live without fighting, and they want to vote. There will be some interference, they will try to impede the process, especially in certain provinces, but they will not be 100% successful.
RFE/RL: Is Afghan transitional administration chairman Hamid Karzai the right man for the job?
Mohammad: He has support everywhere. For the prevailing situation, he is best suited.
RFE/RL: What is the situation with the neo-Taliban?
Mohammad: There is a problem in the [southeast and] south, mostly in Paktia, Paktika, and Kandahar [provinces]. They are trying to disrupt the peace and to make difficulties during the elections. They have tried to impede the voter-registration process.
RFE/RL: Do these neo-Taliban elements have a presence in Nangarhar?
Mohammad: No, they have no presence in Nangarhar. Yes, there have been efforts to sabotage the peace, and the electoral work, but they are no longer an organized group. They don't have the capacity to take over a district or even a village. They are not in such a position.
RFE/RL: But they were responsible for the assassination of Ajab Khan, military commander of Jalalabad, on June 1.
Mohammad: No, from the investigations, it was not clear who was responsible. All that can be said is that the perpetrators were enemies of peace.
RFE/RL: The cultivation of opium poppy has hit record highs since the current administration took office, and Nangarhar is one of the top producers. Why is nothing being done to curb the trade?
Mohammad: The problem is endemic in the country - not just in Nangarhar. We are trying to solve this problem, and we are in contact with specialized international agencies. We are pushing them to come in and to make a rehabilitation program for us, but until now, we have seen nothing concrete. We ask that they devise viable policies to rehabilitate the farmers; to find alternative crops for them to cultivate. We hope that this year something will be done before the cultivation begins. October is when they start sowing the seeds, and April is when they start to reap. The program must start before October. Now is the time to start.
RFE/RL: So you think the international agencies are not doing enough?
Mohammad: Some groups have come to Jalalabad to talk to me about the problem. I tell them, it's not enough to talk to me; they must talk to the farmers and see what they have to say. They need to find a way to solve the problems of the farmers. The farmers have a lot of difficulties. They have a shortage of water. There can find no alternative employment. We need to solve these problems for them first. We have to find replacement crops, give them the seeds, fertilizer, and enough water. If these problems are solved and they still do not stop farming the poppy, only then do we have the moral right to enforce the law - to use the police to stop them.
RFE/RL: But how did the Taliban manage to significantly reduce the cultivation of opium poppy?
Mohammad: The Taliban managed to do so only for a year [2001]. The cultivation of opium poppy has been going on for decades in this country, mostly in three provinces: Helmand [in the south], Nangarhar [in the east], and Badakhshan [in the northwest]. But in Badakhshan and Nimroz, the problem is compounded by the fact that they also consume the poppies, by smoking or eating. In Nangarhar, no one consumes the poppies; they are just for export. Except maybe a few individuals who come from Peshawar [Pakistan], they may smoke it.
RFE/RL: What is the state of security in Nangarhar?
Mohammad: Well, at one point, the kidnapping of young children was a problem. They would abduct the children for their kidneys or eyes, for the black-market trade of human organs. But in recent months we have worked hard to raise awareness across the province so that now people here are very vigilant. If they see someone talking to a child in a suspicious manner, they would act. Of course, this has resulted in some rather comical incidents ... Someone may want to affectionately tease a child on the street and bystanders have misinterpreted it as an attempt to abduct the child. But all in all the campaign has been successful and such kidnappings have been reduced.
RFE/RL: Do you plan to run for the parliamentary elections?
Mohammad: There's some time to go for that. Let's now prepare for the presidential elections.
----
5 Afghans Die in Strike Laid to U.S. Force
September 1, 2004
New York Times
By AMY WALDMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/01/international/asia/01afghan.html?pagewanted=all
KABUL, Afghanistan, Aug. 31 - At least five civilians were killed, including two children, and eight were wounded by American airstrikes in northeastern Afghanistan on Monday night, the local governor said Tuesday in a telephone interview.
But the American-led coalition said in a statement that it was unaware of any civilian deaths, and that the only civilian injuries had occurred when a militant detonated a hand grenade in a village as he tried to flee coalition forces.
Both accounts agreed that insurgents had attacked a base used by the coalition with rockets, missiles and heavy weapons on Monday night.
Coalition soldiers called in air support, and "they bombarded the surrounding area where the enemy was hiding," the governor of Konar Province, Sayed Fazil Akbar, said. That area included villages where the attackers had hidden, he said. Homes and shops were also damaged, though he could not say how many.
A coalition soldier and an Afghan soldier were wounded, and 12 insurgents killed, the governor said. The dead civilians were one woman, two men, and two children.
The governor said the damage suffered by civilians was "the responsibility of enemy Al Qaeda and Taliban."
"They are using the villages as the bunkers," he said. "Because of this the civilians are suffering. We request the civilian and tribal elders to not let the opposition use their area."
In Kabul, a memorial service was held for the victims of a bomb attack on Sunday. Three Americans employed by DynCorp Inc. under an American government contract to train the Afghan police and advise its ministries died in the attack, which was aimed at their office. One Nepalese employee is also believed to have died, although company officials said they had not definitively identified his remains. At least seven Afghans were killed as well, including a 7-year-old girl who was playing in the street. Three bodies were still unclaimed on Tuesday at the city's military hospital, and they are unrecognizable, said the hospital's chief doctor, Gen. Latiq Shamim.
H. J. Lloyd, a retired brigadier general who is DynCorp's vice president for operations in Afghanistan, and who was slightly injured on Sunday, said the number of deaths could have been much higher. Ordinarily about 40 DynCorp employees would have been gathered in the house for dinner at around 5:45 p.m., when the bomb went off, but most had left to eat elsewhere because the kitchen was under renovation, he said. Only eight people were in the house, and those killed were outside.
"We could have lost 30 people," he said. "We feel we were most fortunate."
Warnings of further attacks continue, Afghan officials said Tuesday night, and they arrested three men on the outskirts of Kabul with about 1,300 pounds of explosives. No further details were available.
-------- africa
U.N. Urges Quick Increase in Troops for Sudan
September 1, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-UN-Sudan.html?pagewanted=all
UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Wednesday that Sudan's government has not stopped attacks on ``terrorized and traumatized'' civilians in its Darfur region and urged the speedy deployment of an expanded international peacekeeping force.
Annan did not say how large a force he wanted, but U.N. diplomats said a U.N. plan presented to the African Union called for about 3,000 peacekeepers. The 53-nation African organization now has about 80 military observers in Darfur, protected by just over 300 soldiers, monitoring a rarely observed cease-fire signed in April.
Annan's report was called for in a Security Council resolution that was adopted July 30 giving Sudan 30 days to demonstrate it was curbing nomadic Arab tribes accused of killing thousands in attacks on African farm villages and also improving access for aid groups. The resolution threatened punitive economic and diplomatic measures if Sudan didn't move quickly.
The secretary-general didn't mention or recommend sanctions, which many council members oppose at this point. His call for an expanded international force, by contrast, was likely to get strong support, especially from the United States.
The 15 Security Council members are to be briefed Thursday by Annan's top envoy to Sudan, Jan Pronk, whose observations form the basis of the report's conclusions and recommendations.
The report criticized the Sudanese government for failing to meet its key obligations under agreements with the United Nations to rein in the Arab militias, which are accused of killing up to 30,000 people and forcing 1.5 million to flee their homes in the vast and arid Darfur region.
Stemming from long-standing disputes over scarce water and arable land, the conflict erupted when two African groups rebelled last year accusing Sudan's Arab-dominated government of siding with the Arab herders. Aid groups have accused the government of encouraging and supporting the militia attacks, a charge Sudanese leaders deny.
``The most critical commitment that has yet to be implemented relates to the armed militias which continue to pose a serious threat to the civilian population,'' Annan's report said. ``Attacks against civilians are continuing and the vast majority of armed militias has not been disarmed.''
On the positive side, Annan cited ``some progress'' by the government in improving security in newly designated havens for refugees, the deployment of additional police, the beginning of disarmament, and the lifting of restrictions to aid shipments. He also noted the government kept its promise to resume peace talks with the rebels.
But his report made clear much more needed to be done.
``The displaced have been terrorized and traumatized, and have lost confidence in the authorities,'' Annan said. They don't trust the police and the situation is exacerbated by an ``increasing level of animosity between different communities and tribes in Darfur'' and ``a breakdown of traditional mechanisms to resolve differences.''
To help provide security, he told the council ``a substantially increased international presence in Darfur is required as quickly as possible.'' He said an expanded force could decrease the level of violence and enhance the protection of civilians, particularly refugees, providing a respite that would allow the people of Darfur to start reconciliation.
Last month, the African Union proposed sending nearly 2,000 peacekeepers to Darfur, a move strongly backed by the United States but rejected by the Sudanese government. The organization is expected to make its recommendation on an expanded international presence in the coming days, the U.N. diplomats said.
In an interview last week, U.S. Ambassador John Danforth warned that if Sudan resisted an expanded international presence, ``then in my view the United States will have been given no choice but to support sanctions.''
While the report appeared more negative than positive, Sudan's U.N. Ambassador Elfatih Mohamed Erwa said ``If it's read objectively I think it's balanced.''
Erwa told reporters Sudan has no objection to increasing the cease-fire monitoring force -- ``whether it is 300 or 3,000, if it helps, that's fine.'' But Sudan would oppose an international force with another mandate, for example to disarm militias or other groups because that could lead to military confrontations, he said.
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, who visited Darfur last week, said Wednesday that the U.N. report confirmed ``the modest improvements'' he saw, which he said were the result of international pressure.
``But we need to do much more,'' Straw said. ``A culture of impunity continues, with no evidence that the perpetrators of these appalling attacks are being brought to justice.''
The Sudanese foreign minister, Mustafa Osman Ismail, sent a letter to Security Council members outlining what Sudan has done to comply with the resolution. It also reiterated his government's ``readiness and dedication'' to abide by the U.N. resolution and to reach a political settlement.
But, he added, ``practical difficulties are encountering the implementation.''
He appealed for humanitarian aid, support for the 10,000 police officers deployed to Darfur, and rehabilitation of Sudan's railway, including spare parts for its U.S.-built locomotives.
Ismail said the government had stopped ``all military offensive acts,'' was setting up safe areas for refugees, and had instructed militia leaders to abide by U.N. agreements.
``The disarmament process will gain full swing in tandem with the collection of arms from the rebels and other irregular armed ground,'' he said.
-------- arms
India plans joint production of long-range missile with Israel
The News International
September 01, 2004
http://jang.com.pk/thenews/sep2004-daily/01-09-2004/main/main12.htm
NEW DELHI: India is holding talks with Israel about joint production of a long-range missile, a top scientist said 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," scientist Dr VK Atre told reporters in Hyderabad. He did not elaborate about the system, which India hopes to build jointly with Israel but said talks were being held between the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and its state-owned Israeli counterpart.
Atre denied Israel was already helping India in building guided missiles, saying defence tie-up was confined to research and the development of sensors and fibre-optic gyroscopes for the military.
India has started deploying both the short range 700 km Agni I as well as intermediate range 2,000 km-plus Agni-II surface-to-surface missiles, capable of carrying nuclear warheads with scientists training the army missile group on their launch techniques.
"We have completely developed systems for these two missiles and a certain number of them have been delivered to the army," Atre said, indicating that after the success with these missiles, they would "soon go in for the launch of the longer range 3,000 km version of the missile Agni-III".
"The technique for longer range missiles exists. We are in the process of putting it together," Atre said. He said Indian scientists were also working on developing an anti-missile defence system as well as airborne early warning system. Atre said the defence scientists were training the army on the technique of firing, mounting warheads and other technical parameters of surface-to-surface missiles.
-------- britain
Ex-PM Thatcher pays son's bail
Sep. 1, 2004
Toronto Star
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1094034430766&call_pageid=968332188854&col=968350060724
LONDON (AP) - Former prime minister Margaret Thatcher has posted bail for her son Mark, who is accused of involvement in a coup plot in Equatorial Guinea, a source close to Thatcher said today.
Lord Bell, Thatcher's spokesperson, declined to confirm or deny the report, which first appeared in the Times (of London) newspaper.
However, a source close to the former prime minister confirmed to The Associated Press that she had provided the bail money.
Sir Mark Thatcher was under house arrest at his residence in Cape Town, South Africa, pending the posting of a bond set at two million rand ($395,000 Cdn).
Equatorial Guinea wants to question him and his alleged co-conspirators on charges of plotting to overthrow Teodoro Obiang, the president of the tiny but oil-rich nation.
Thatcher's lawyer says he's innocent and will co-operate with investigators.
-------- iraq
Three Mossad agents among eight killed in Iraq
The News International
September 01, 2004
http://jang.com.pk/thenews/sep2004-daily/01-09-2004/main/main9.htm
TIKRIT: At least eight people were killed in continued violence across Iraq on Tuesday. An Iraqi insurgent group claimed that it had killed three "Mossad agents" in Iraq and holding another hostage along with a Turkish truck driver accused of working for US-led forces. The claim was included in a statement plastered on walls in Tikrit city and signed by the "Horror Brigades", a previously unknown division of the Secret Islamic Army, which is holding three Indians, three Kenyans and an Egyptian.
"A group from our brigade killed three infidel Zionist Mossad agents after kidnapping them and burning their car on Monday on the road between Tikrit and Mosul," the statement read. "We are still holding a fourth Zionist as evidence to condemn the United States of infidels and their dirty plot to destroy Islam and Iraq through Zionist methods," it said.
"The criminal (hostage) confessed that they came to Iraq after reaching a deal with the infidel occupiers in order to train US forces in guerrilla warfare, under the cover of working for a private security company," the statement said. "He also confirmed that, along with 100 others, he had interrogated detainees inside infidel US prisons, even women, in collaboration with US intelligence." The statement mentioned no ransom. "This is not the time for negotiation. He is on a journey to meet his death," it said.
The statement also said the group had abducted a Turkish truck driver in the area. "The criminal confessed that he had carried about 40 loads of ammunition to the US forces in Balad military base" south of Tikrit, it added. "Our brigade will implement the order of God."
Elsewhere, gunmen shot dead the head of Kirkuk city's education department, police said. Ibrahim Ismael was killed in a drive-by shooting as he drove to work, said police Col. Sarhat Qadir. Three of Ismael's bodyguards were also wounded and were being treated at a local hospital.
Three Iraqi women working on a US military base were killed in a drive-by shooting in Mosul, police and medical sources said. "Four women and a male driver were driving in the Al-Karama neighbourhood in eastern Mosul when unknown assailants opened fire," said Zeid Issam Sabri, who heads the police station based inside the Arrazi hospital compound in Mosul. He said three of the women had died and the fourth had sustained serious injuries.
Assailants attacked a US patrol in Mosul, prompting a gunbattle that left at least one civilian dead, the Army said. The attackers detonated a roadside bomb and fired a rocket-propelled grenade at the patrol. US troops returned fire, wounding one of the assailants, said US Capt Angela Bowman. One passer-by was killed during the skirmish, apparently caught in the crossfire, said Lt Col Paul Hastings.
Meanwhile, Moqtada al-Sadr's top aide said Sadr will field candidates in Iraq's first elections and campaign on a platform calling for the withdrawal of US forces after moving away from violent opposition to their presence.
"The full political programme will be unveiled soon. The Sadr movement has academic elements and experts who will be coming more to the forefront and support its role in a free, independent, democratic Iraq," Sadr's political aide Ali al-Yassiri told Reuters.
--------
12 Nepalese Hostages Are Slain In Iraq
First Mass Killing Displayed on Web
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, September 1, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A48832-2004Aug31?language=printer
BAGHDAD, Aug. 31 -- Islamic radicals in Iraq killed 12 Nepalese hostages, placing video images of the deaths on a Web site Tuesday, in the first mass slaying of foreign prisoners in the spate of kidnappings that insurgents began in April.
The video shows a masked man in military fatigues beheading a hostage who is lying blindfolded on dusty, gray soil. Eleven more prisoners are then killed by single shots to the back of the head as they lie facedown in a row.
"Despite our efforts, this unfortunate incident has taken place," Nepal's ambassador to Qatar, Shyamananda Suman, told the Associated Press. "It is sad."
The men, kidnapped in August while traveling overland from Jordan to jobs in Iraq, were described by their Jordanian employer as cooks and cleaners. Nepal has no troops in Iraq, but the kidnappers had demanded that it stop sending contract workers to the country, according to the BBC. The executions appeared intended to frighten off the many foreigners who come to Iraq to work for U.S.-led forces.
"We have carried out the sentence of God against 12 Nepalis who came from their country to fight the Muslims and to serve the Jews and the Christians . . . believing in Buddha as their God," said a statement posted on the Web site by the Army of Ansar al-Sunna.
The group has claimed several terrorist strikes in northern and western Iraq. Experts believe it to be an outgrowth of Ansar al-Islam, a fundamentalist militia associated with al Qaeda that held a corner of northern Iraq until being driven out in April 2003 by U.S. Special Forces and Kurdish militias.
The killings more than doubled the number of hostages killed in Iraq since April, when the abduction of foreigners, the display of their images on the Internet or television and, in 11 previous cases, their executions emerged as a prime tactic of some insurgents in Iraq.
It also underscored the peril facing two French journalists who have been threatened with death by their captors.
France's foreign minister, Michel Barnier, traveled to Jordan from Egypt on Tuesday, then returned to Egypt in an urgent effort to win support for the release of Georges Malbrunot, 41, and Christian Chesnot, 37. The two were kidnapped on a chronically dangerous road south of Baghdad while heading toward Najaf in mid-August.
Their captors, who call themselves the Islamic Army in Iraq, have threatened to kill the men unless France repeals a ban on Islamic head scarves and other religious apparel in its public schools. The group released a video of the men pleading for the repeal.
French officials refused to change the law but have marshaled a wide variety of Arab and Muslim groups to condemn the use of kidnapping to pursue political goals.
Muslim groups in France that oppose the law joined with the country's secular establishment in calling for the journalists' immediate release. The Islamic group Hamas joined Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and various religious leaders in issuing a public statement of protest, as well.
"It is not in the interests of our cause," Muhammad Bashar Faydi of Iraq's Muslim Scholars Committee, a leading group from the Sunni branch of Islam that vehemently opposes the presence of U.S. forces in Iraq, said of the kidnappings. "We can understand your rage over the French law that bans head scarves," Faydi said on the satellite network al-Arabiya, addressing the kidnappers. "But we have a bigger cause, which is the occupation of Iraq."
Many advocates pointed out that France opposed the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and has a history of sympathy for Arab causes. French officials saw a glimmer of hope late Monday when the original 48-hour deadline for repeal was extended by 24 hours.
"I am renewing my solemn call for their release," French President Jacques Chirac said Tuesday in Russia, where he was attending a previously scheduled meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, two other opponents of the U.S.-led war. "Everything will be done to secure their release."
Meanwhile, a political aide to Moqtada Sadr said the rebellious Shiite Muslim cleric was serious about renouncing armed insurrection in favor of joining Iraq's nascent political process.
"Now, we concentrate on the necessity of political action," Ali Yassiri said in a telephone interview, referring to elections set for January. "The Sadr movement has many intellectuals and academics and educated elements. The main objective is to make the U.S. occupation withdraw and to cooperate with the other movements and any other side that adopts a political project."
For the second time in two days, Yassiri indicated that Sadr would convert his militia, the Mahdi Army, to peaceful purposes. He was speaking less than a week after the end of a three-week battle with U.S. forces in the southern city of Najaf that killed hundreds of the militia's fighters.
It remained unclear whether Yassiri spoke for Sadr, a mercurial and lately reclusive figure whose many aides sometimes contradict one another.
U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, offered conflicting assessments of Sadr's intentions. One said intelligence suggested that despite the peace rhetoric and a cease-fire in Sadr City, a vast Shiite slum in Baghdad, the militia was re-arming.
But another American, a diplomat in Baghdad, said Sadr had shown signs of being serious about turning to politics: "It's better than being chased all over the place. It's the only logical place for him to be." The diplomat declined to be identified on grounds that Iraqi officials were in sensitive negotiations with the Sadr camp.
In a bid to make peace more attractive, a group of senior Iraqi officials spent much of the day with tribal leaders of Sadr City, promising hundreds of millions of dollars in investment if the area was calm enough to ensure workers' safety.
Iraq's interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, said the government had allocated $115 million for rebuilding and improving the slum, where boulevards are piled with trash and open sewers turn dusty streets to green mud. In addition, "we have requested from the donating countries and the United States $150 million," Allawi told the gathering of about 100 Sadr City sheiks.
Ministers of health, housing, public works and education also promised improvements, provided the fighting ends. "We want to hire a lot of people, but they cannot go into the city," said Baghdad Mayor Alaa Mahmood Tamimi, who referred to an $85 million sewer project. "We can hire 30,000 contract workers if the security situation improves."
The sheiks appeared generally receptive to the plan, according a pool reporter who attended the meeting.
"After suffering and tyranny, it is time to start a new white page that is based on frankness," said Muhsin Mousawi, a local sheik, reading from a letter he said represented the opinions all of the tribal leaders. "What has happened is the overuse of violence without any legal basis. We did not come here to say to you our conditions, but to give our opinions and suggestions so we can participate in the construction of Sadr City."
"We need to employ the young men in order to fill their spare time, which the saboteurs could make use of," Mousawi said.
Correspondent Rajiv Chandrasekaran and special correspondent Bassam Sebti contributed to this report.
--------
Interim Iraqi Government Convenes for First Time
September 1, 2004
By ALEX BERENSON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/01/international/middleeast/01CND-IRAQ.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sep. 1 - The interim Iraqi national assembly convened for the first time today as Iraq took a small and tentative step toward representative government.
Meanwhile, kidnappers released seven Indian, Kenyan and Egyptian workers, one day after another group posted video showing the execution of 12 Nepalese hostages. Two French journalists taken hostage last month remained in captivity, as French and Iraqi officials and clerics pleaded for their release.
Baghdad and Iraq were mostly quiet today, despite the collapse of peace talks between the interim Iraqi government and negotiators for the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, who fiercely opposes both the government and the American presence in Iraq. On Tuesday, the government rejected a tentative deal that would have barred American forces from the streets of Sadr City, a huge Shiite slum in Baghdad that is a stronghold of Mr. Sadr. In return, insurgents loyal to Mr. Sadr would have disarmed.
But the two sides discussed resuming negotiations, and Sadr City remained quiet even as American patrols continued.
Coalition forces did not report any American or coalition soldiers killed. More than 1,100 American and coalition soldiers have been killed since the war began, including 978 United States troops, according to icasualties.org, which compiles casualty counts. An additional 6,500 American soldiers have been injured. In August, 64 soldiers died, the most since May.
In the two-hour inaugural session that the assembly held today, representatives took an oath promising to work to make Iraq safer and more prosperous, then departed. Three more days of meetings are scheduled between now and Sunday.
At least some delegates did not bother to attend the conference. The assembly's powers are limited, as is its lifespan. Its most important task is to draw up the rules that will govern national elections scheduled to take place in January 2005. The assembly also has the power to oversee Iraq's budget.
Because of the security crisis in Iraq, the meeting took place under heavy security at a convention center in downtown Baghdad that is protected by American forces. Insurgents targeted the session, firing several mortars at the convention center, including two that struck nearby while the assembly was meeting. One person outside the center was injured.
Still, delegates said they were pleased with the meeting.
"The national conference is very important," said Ahmed Chalabi, a delegate who was the favorite of the United States to run Iraq before losing support this year. "We support the government."
Gunmen targeted a convoy in which Mr. Chalabi was riding south of Baghdad this morning, wounding two of his bodyguards, including one seriously. Mr. Chalabi said that he did not know whether he had been specifically targeted in the attack, which occurred in an area where vehicle convoys are regularly attacked.
"Terror is going on, and we have to as soon as possible put an end to it," he said.
Meanwhile, the release of the seven foreign hostages, who worked for a Kuwaiti company that does business in Iraq, led to optimism that two French journalists might be released unharmed more than a week after being taken captive.
The kidnappers of the French hostages, a shadowy group called the Islamic Army in Iraq, have demanded that France remove its ban on headscarves for Muslim girls in school. France has refused, but Muslim clerics in France and worldwide have asked that the men be released.
"We know that France didn't take part in the last war and didn't send any troops," said Hisham Ad-Dulaimi, a mediator who has helped win hostage releases before. "We will, by God, will reach positive results."
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INSURGENTS
Talks to Disarm Rebel Shiites Collapses in Iraq
September 1, 2004
By DEXTER FILKINS and ERIK ECKHOLM
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/01/international/middleeast/01shiite.html?pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 31 - Talks to disarm hundreds of insurgents in the roiling Sadr City ghetto in Baghdad collapsed Tuesday, after a tentative peace pact was abruptly canceled by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi.
Leaders of the Mahdi Army, the rebel force led by the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, and two well-placed Iraqi sources said an agreement had been reached late Monday that called for the disarming of the rebel force and a halt in American military operations in Sadr City.
Mahdi Army commanders and other Iraqi sources said Tuesday that Dr. Allawi backed out of the agreement on Tuesday morning.
The failure of negotiations raised the prospect of more violence from Mr. Sadr's Shiite insurgency, meaning the Iraqi government may not be able to direct its full political and military resources to quelling the continuing Sunni insurgency in other parts of the country.
Also on Tuesday, a militant Islamic group announced a mass killing in Iraq, showing pictures of 12 dead Nepalese laborers for a Jordanian company. [Page A9.]
The agreement on Monday on Sadr City, reached after several days of negotiations, had come on the heels of the withdrawal of Mr. Sadr's forces from Najaf last week after the intervention of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country's most powerful religious leader.
"Last night there was a deal," said Yusef al-Nasiri, the leader of the Mahdi Army in Sadr City. "This morning there was supposed to be a press conference. But then Allawi surprised us, and he has taken us back to zero."
Simultaneous news conferences scheduled by Dr. Allawi and the Mahdi Army to announce their earlier deal were called off.
Mr. Nasiri said he had been told by one of the government's negotiators, Qassim Daoud, the minister of state, that Dr. Allawi had objected to the restrictions placed on Americans soldiers operating in the area. Under the agreement, the Americans would be limited to performing reconstruction work; anything more aggressive than that would require the permission of the Iraqi government.
Dr. Allawi could not be reached for comment.
An American diplomat, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said American officials were unaware of such an agreement between the Iraqi government and Mr. Sadr. The diplomat said the Americans would likely have been informed of such a deal, because the role of American soldiers would be central to any agreement on Sadr City.
But an Iraqi source said Dr. Allawi had decided to take a harsher approach toward Mr. Sadr and the Mahdi Army, possibly including the use of military force. The source said Dr. Allawi appeared to be motivated by disappointment with the agreement in Najaf, which ended the bloodshed there but left the Mahdi Army intact and made Mr. Sadr stronger than ever, in the eyes of many Iraqis.
In addition, the Iraqi source said, Dr. Allawi had recently come under intense pressure from Shiite political parties that fear that the entry of Mr. Sadr into the political mainstream could diminish their own potential success at the polls. Those groups would prefer that Mr. Sadr be eliminated, the Iraqi source said.
The groups include the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which was long based in Iran and which has close ties to Ayatollah Sistani, and Dawa, a prominent religious movement. Such established organizations tend to see Mr. Sadr as an upstart.
The Iraqi source said it was possible that Dr. Allawi's intention was to kill or capture Mr. Sadr, in hopes of striking a death blow to his increasingly popular movement, which has the support of many poor Shiites and of 150 imams around the country. He wants to humiliate Moktada," the source said of Dr. Allawi. "He needs a victory."
Another Iraqi political leader echoed those remarks, saying that the prime minister appeared to be reverting to his roots as a former member of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, where political dissent was often silenced with the gun.
It was the second time this month that Dr. Allawi had backed out of a tentative peace deal struck by his negotiators, who are led by his national security adviser, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a Shiite political leader who is close to Ayatollah Sistani. Earlier this month, with the fighting raging in Najaf, Dr. Rubaie announced that he had struck a deal with Mr. Sadr, only to see Dr. Allawi renounce it.
Indeed, the abrupt cancellation of the agreement seemed to reveal a split within Iraq's Shiite political leadership, and even inside Dr. Allawi's government, over how to deal with the threat posed by Mr. Sadr and his legions of armed men. Several Iraqi newspapers reported this week that Dr. Rubaie intends to resign over differences with Dr. Allawi, who is a Shiite as well. Both Dr. Rubaie and Dr. Allawi have denied the strains.
The differences between the two are reflected in the larger Shiite community, which has been divided on the issue of dealing with the challenge posed by the Mahdi Army. Mr. Sadr, a 30-year-old street cleric, is disliked by Iraq's Shiite religious establishment, which has felt increasingly threatened by his growing popularity.
Some Iraqi leaders, especially the Shiite ones, have quietly raised the prospect of killing or arresting Mr. Sadr as a way of eliminating him as a threat.
Other Shiite leaders advocate a more diplomatic approach to Mr. Sadr, based on the notion that aggressive action would only inflame his large following.
"Were someone to try to kill Moktada, it would disturb the peace," said Adnan Ali, a leader of the Dawa Party, one of the largest Shiite parties. "Moktada has a lot of sympathizers in Iraq, and it would be incorrect to ignore them."
Some Shiite leaders say a debate has been raging inside Mr. Sadr's movement in recent weeks about the possibility of ending the armed struggle and entering democratic politics. Mr. Nasiri, the Mahdi Army leader, echoed that Tuesday.
"We have a clear political plan," Mr. Nasiri said, "for a new Iraq, for democracy, for human rights."
In the past, though, such declarations by Mr. Sadr and his lieutenants have proved empty. Mr. Sadr has promised repeatedly to lay down his weapons and stop fighting, but he has repeatedly broken that promise.
One of the unanswered questions in the negotiations has been the role of the American government, which has provided most of the armed forces deployed against Mr. Sadr. American diplomats have said that in confrontations like the one in Najaf, they would follow Dr. Allawi's lead.
A Western diplomat expressed skepticism about Mr. Sadr's latest promises to renounce violence, suggesting that they were no more sincere than those that came before. "He has given no indication that he would give up his weapons," the diplomat said, speaking of Mr. Sadr.
The diplomat suggested that Mr. Sadr, who has not taken part in the negotiations himself, is probably trying to buy time as he replenishes his ranks, which were badly depleted by the Americans during the fighting in Najaf. The appropriate response, the diplomat suggested, was to keep up the pressure.
"We have seen no evidence that Moktada is prepared to forswear violence and enter the political process," the diplomat said. "The movement has suffered damage and wants a timeout. We can't figure out why that is in our interest."
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BAGHDAD YEAR ZERO
Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia
By Naomi Klein
September 2004
Harper's Magazine
Naomi Klein is the author of No Logo and writer/producer of The Take, a new documentary on Argentina's occupied factories.
"IRAQ WAS MEANT TO BE A GLEAMING SHOWROOM FOR LAISSEZ-FAIRE ECONOMICS, A UTOPIA SUCH AS THE WORLD HAD NEVER SEEN"
"INTERNATIONAL LAW PROHIBITS OCCUPIERS FROM SELLING STATE ASSETS BUT DOESN'T SAY ANYTHING ABOUT PUPPET GOVERNMENTS"
"MANY OF THE BUSINESSMEN WHOSE COMPANIES ARE THREATENED BY BREMER'S INVESTMENT LAWS HAVE MADE INVESTMENTS IN THE RESISTANCE"
"IF EVER THERE WAS A MOMENT WHEN IRAQIS WERE TOO DISORIENTED TO RESIST SHOCK THERAPY, THAT MOMENT HAS DEFINITELY PASSED"
It was only after I had been in Baghdad for a month that I found what I was looking for. I had traveled to Iraq a year after the war began, at the height of what should have been a construction boom, but after weeks of searching I had not seen a single piece of heavy machinery apart from tanks and humvees. Then I saw it: a construction crane. It was big and yellow and impressive, and when I caught a glimpse of it around a corner in a busy shopping district I thought that I was finally about to witness some of the reconstruction I had heard so much about. But as I got closer I noticed that the crane was not actually rebuilding anything - not one of the bombed out government buildings that still lay in rubble all over the city, nor one of the many power lines that remained in twisted heaps even as the heat of summer was starting to bear down. No, the crane was hoisting a giant billboard to the top of a three-story building. SUNBULAH: HONEY, 100% Natural, Made In Saudi Arabia.
Seeing the sign, I couldn't help but think about something Senator John McCain had said back in October. Iraq, he said, is "a huge pot of honey that's attracting a lot of flies." The flies McCain was referring to were the Halliburtons and Bechtels, as well as the venture capitalists who flocked to Iraq in the path cleared by Bradley Fighting Vehicles and laser-guided bombs. The honey that drew them was not just no-bid contracts and Iraq's famed oil wealth, but the myriad investment opportunities offered by a country that had just been cracked wide open after decades of being sealed off, first by the nationalist economic Policies of Saddam Hussein, then by asphyxiating United Nations sanctions.
Looking at the honey billboard, I was also reminded of the most common explanation for what has gone wrong in Iraq, a complaint echoed by every one from John Kerry to Pat Buchanan: Iraq is mired in blood and deprivation because George W. Bush didn't have "a postwar plan." The only problem with this theory is that it isn't true. The Bush Administration did have a plan for what it would do after the war; put simply, it was to lay out as much honey as possible, then sit back and wait for the flies.
The honey theory of Iraqi reconstruction stems from the most cherished belief of the war's ideological architects: that greed is good. Not good just for them and their friends but good for humanity, and certainly good for Iraqis. Greed creates profit, which creates growth, which creates jobs and products and services and everything else anyone could possibly need or want. The role of good government, then, is to create the optimal conditions for corporations to pursue their bottomless greed, so that they in turn can meet the needs of the society. The problem is that governments, even neo-conservative governments, rarely get the chance to prove their sacred theory right: despite their enormous ideological advances, even George Bush's Republicans are, in their own minds, perennially sabotaged by meddling Democrats, intractable unions, and alarmist environmentalists.
Iraq was going to change all that. In one place on Earth, the theory would finally be put into practice in its most perfect and un-compromised form. A country of 25 million would not be rebuilt as it was before the war; it would be erased, disappeared. In its place would spring forth a gleaming showroom for laissez-faire economics, a utopia such as the world had never seen. Every policy that liberates multinational corporations to pursue their quest for profit would be put into place: a shrunken state, a flexible workforce, open borders, minimal taxes, no tariffs, no ownership restrictions. The people of Iraq would, of course, have to endure some short-term pain: assets, previously owned by the state, would have to be given up to create new opportunities for growth and investment. Jobs would have to be lost and, as foreign products flooded across the border, local businesses and family farms would, unfortunately, be unable to compete. But to the authors of this plan, these would be small prices to pay for the economic boom that would surely explode once the proper conditions were in place, a boom so powerful the country would practically rebuild itself.
The fact that the boom never came and Iraq continues to tremble under explosions of a very different sort should never be blamed on the absence of a plan. Rather, the blame rests with the plan itself, and the extraordinarily violent ideology upon which it is based.
Torturers believe that when electrical shocks are applied to various parts of the body simultaneously subjects are rendered so confused about where the pain is coming from that they become incapable of resistance. A declassified CIA "Counterintelligence Interrogation" manual from 1963 describes how a trauma inflicted on prisoners opens up "an interval-which may be extremely brief-of suspended animation, a kind of psychological shock or paralysis. . . . [A]t this moment the source is far more open to suggestion, far likelier to comply." A similar theory applies to economic shock therapy, or "shock treatment," the ugly term used to describe the rapid implementation of free-market reforms imposed on Chile in the wake of General Augusto Pinochet's coup. The theory is that if painful economic "adjustments" are brought in rapidly and in the aftermath of a seismic social disruption like a war, a coup, or a government collapse, the population will be so stunned, and so preoccupied with the daily pressures of survival, that it too will go into suspended animation, unable to resist. As Pinochet's finance minister, Admiral Lorenzo Gotuzzo, declared, "The dog's tail must be cut off in one chop."
That, in essence, was the working thesis in Iraq, and in keeping with the belief that private companies are more suited than governments for virtually every task, the White House decided to privatize the task of privatizing Iraq's state-dominated economy. Two months before the war began, USAID began drafting a work order, to be handed out to a private company, to oversee Iraq's "transition to a sustainable market-driven economic system." The document states that the winning company (which turned out to be the KPMG offshoot Bearing Point) will take "appropriate advantage of the unique opportunity for rapid progress in this area presented by the current configuration of political circumstances." Which is precisely what happened. L. Paul Bremer, who led the U.S. occupation of Iraq from May 2, 2003, until he caught an early flight out of Baghdad on June 28, {2004,} admits that when he arrived, "Baghdad was on fire, literally, as I drove in from the airport." But before the fires from the "shock and awe" military onslaught were even extinguished, Bremer unleashed his shock therapy, pushing through more wrenching changes in one sweltering summer than the International Monetary Fund has managed to enact over three decades in Latin America. Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate and former chief economist at the World Bank, describes Bremer's reforms as "an even more radical form of shock therapy than pursued in the former Soviet world."
The tone of Bremer's tenure was set with his first major act on the job: he fired 500,000 state workers, most of them soldiers, but also doctors, nurses, teachers, publishers, and printers. Next, he flung open the country's borders to absolutely unrestricted imports: no tariffs, no duties, no inspections, and no taxes. Iraq, Bremer declared two weeks after he arrived, was "open for business."
One month later, Bremer unveiled the centerpiece of his reforms. Before the invasion, Iraq's non-oil-related economy had been dominated by 200 state-owned companies, which produced everything from cement to paper to washing machines. In June, Bremer flew to an economic summit in Jordan and announced that these firms would be privatized immediately. "Getting inefficient state enterprises into private hands," he said, "is essential for Iraq's economic recovery." It would be the largest state liquidation sale since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
But Bremer's economic engineering had only just begun. In September, to entice foreign investors to come to Iraq, he enacted a radical set of laws unprecedented in their generosity to multinational corporations. There was Order 37, which lowered Iraq's corporate tax rate from roughly 40 percent to a flat 15 percent. There was Order 39, which allowed foreign companies to own 100 percent of Iraqi assets outside of the natural-resource sector. Even better, investors could take 100 percent of the profits they made in Iraq out of the country; they would not be required to reinvest and they would not be taxed. Under Order 39, they could sign leases and contracts that would last for forty years. Order 40 welcomed foreign banks to Iraq under the same favorable terms. All that remained of Saddam Hussein's economic policies was a law restricting trade unions and collective bargaining.
If these policies sound familiar, it's because they are the same ones multinationals around the world lobby for from national governments and in international trade agreements. But while these reforms are only ever enacted in part, or in fits and starts, Bremer delivered them all, all at once. Overnight, Iraq went from being the most isolated country in the world to being, on paper, its widest-open market.
At first, the shock-therapy theory seemed to hold: Iraqis, reeling from violence both military and economic, were far too busy staying alive to mount a political response to Bremer's campaign. Worrying about the privatization of the sewage system was an unimaginable luxury with half the population lacking access to clean drinking water; the debate over the flat tax would have to wait until the lights were back on. Even in the international press, Bremer's new laws, though radical, were easily upstaged by more dramatic news of political chaos and rising crime.
Some people were paying attention, of course. That autumn was awash in "rebuilding Iraq" trade shows, in Washington, London, Madrid, and Amman. The Economist described Iraq under Bremer as "a capitalist dream," and a flurry of new consulting firms were launched promising to help companies get access to the Iraqi market, their boards of directors stacked with well-connected Republicans. The most prominent was New Bridge Strategies, started by Joe Allbaugh, former Bush-Cheney campaign manager. "Getting the rights to distribute Procter & Gamble products can be a gold mine," one of the company's partners enthused. "One well-stocked 7-Eleven could knock out thirty Iraqi stores; a Wal-Mart could take over the country."
Soon there were rumors that a McDonald's would be opening up in downtown Baghdad, funding was almost in place for a Starwood luxury hotel, and General Motors was planning to build an auto plant. On the financial side, HSBC would have branches all over the country, Citigroup was preparing to offer substantial loans, guaranteed against future sales of Iraqi oil, and the bell was going to ring on a New York-style stock exchange in Baghdad any day.
In only a few months, the postwar plan to turn Iraq into a laboratory for the neocons had been realized. Leo Strauss may have provided the intellectual framework for invading Iraq preemptively, but it was that other University of Chicago professor, Milton Friedman, author of the anti-government manifesto Capitalism and Freedom, who supplied the manual for what to do once the country was safely in America's hands. This represented an enormous victory for the most ideological wing of the Bush Administration. But it was also something more: the culmination of two interlinked power struggles, one among Iraqi exiles advising the White House on its postwar strategy, the other within the White House itself.
As the British historian Dilip Hiro has shown, in Secrets and Lies: Operation 'Iraqi Freedom' and After, the Iraqi exiles pushing for the invasion were divided, broadly, into two camps. On one side were "the pragmatists," who favored getting rid of Saddam and his immediate entourage, securing access to oil, and slowly introducing free-market reforms. Many of these exiles were part of the State Department's Future of Iraq Project, which generated a thirteen-volume report on how to restore basic services and transition to democracy after the war. On the other side was the "Year Zero" camp, those who believed that Iraq was so contaminated that it needed to be rubbed out and remade from scratch. The prime advocate of the pragmatic approach was Iyad Allawi, a former high-level Baathist who fell out with Saddam and started working for the CIA. The prime advocate of the Year Zero approach was Ahmad Chalabi, whose hatred of the Iraqi state for expropriating his family's assets during the 1958 revolution ran so deep he longed to see the entire country burned to the ground-everything, that is, but the Oil Ministry, which would be the nucleus of the new Iraq, the cluster of wells from which an entire nation would grow. He called this process "de-Baathification."
A parallel battle between pragmatists and true believers was being waged within the Bush Administration. The pragmatists were men like Secretary of State Colin Powell and General Jay Garner, the first U.S. envoy to postwar Iraq. General Garner's plan was straightforward enough: fix the infrastructure, hold quick and dirty elections, leave the shock therapy to the International Monetary Fund, and concentrate on securing U.S. military bases on the model of the Philippines. "I think we should look right now at Iraq as our coaling station in the Middle East," he told the BBC. He also paraphrased T. E. Lawrence, saying, "It's better for them to do it imperfectly, than for us to do it for them perfectly." On the other side was the usual cast of neo-conservatives: Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (who lauded Bremer's "sweeping reforms" as "some of the most enlightened, and inviting, tax and investment laws in the free world"), Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and perhaps most centrally, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith. Whereas the State Department had its Future of Iraq report, the neocons had USAID's contract with Bearing Point to remake Iraq's economy: in 108 pages, "privatization" was mentioned no fewer than fifty-one times. To the true believers in the White House, General Garner's plans for postwar Iraq seemed hopelessly un-ambitious. Why settle for a mere coaling station, when you can have a model free market? Why settle for the Philippines, when you can have a beacon unto the world?
The Iraqi Year Zeroists made natural allies for the White House neo conservatives: Chalabi's seething hatred of the Baathist state fit nicely with the neocons' hatred of the state in general, and the two agendas effortlessly merged. Together, they came to imagine the invasion of Iraq as a kind of Rapture: where the rest of the world saw death, they saw birth-a country redeemed through violence, cleansed by fire. Iraq wasn't being destroyed by cruise missiles, cluster bombs, chaos, and looting; it was being born again. April 9, 2003, the day Baghdad fell, was Day One of Year Zero.
While the war was being waged, it still wasn't clear whether the pragmatists or the Year Zeroists would be handed control over occupied Iraq. But the speed with which the nation was conquered dramatically increased the neocons' political capital, since they had been predicting a "cakewalk" all along. Eight days after George Bush landed on that aircraft carrier under a banner that said MISSION ACCOMPLISHED, the President publicly signed on to the neocons' vision for Iraq to become a model corporate state that would open up the entire region. On May 9, Bush proposed the "establishment of a U.S.-Middle East free trade area within a decade"; three days later, Bush sent Paul Bremer to Baghdad to replace Jay Garner, who had been on the job for only three weeks. The message was unequivocal: the pragmatists had lost; Iraq would belong to the believers.
A Reagan-era diplomat turned entrepreneur, Bremer had recently proven his ability to transform rubble into gold by waiting exactly one month after the September 11 attacks to launch Crisis Consulting Practice, a security company selling "terrorism risk insurance" to multinationals. Bremer had two lieutenants on the economic front: Thomas Foley and Michael Fleischer, the heads of "private sector development" for the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). Foley is a Greenwich, Connecticut, multimillionaire, a longtime friend of the Bush family and a Bush-Cheney campaign "pioneer" who has described Iraq as a modern California "gold rush." Fleischer, a venture capitalist, is the brother of former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer. Neither man had any high-level diplomatic experience and both use the term corporate "turnaround" specialist to describe what they do. According to Foley, this uniquely qualified them to manage Iraq's economy because it was "the mother of all turnarounds."
Many of the other CPA postings were equally ideological. The Green Zone, the city within a city that houses the occupation headquarters in Saddam's former palace, was filled with Young Republicans straight out of the Heritage Foundation, all of them given responsibility they could never have dreamed of receiving at home. Jay Hallen, a twenty-four-year-old who had applied for a job at the White House, was put in charge of launching Baghdad's new stock exchange. Scott Erwin, a twenty-one-year-old former intern to Dick Cheney, reported in an email home that "I am assisting Iraqis in the management of finances and budgeting for the domestic security forces." The college senior's favorite job, before this one? "My time as an ice-cream truck driver." In those early days, the Green Zone felt a bit like the Peace Corps, for people who think the Peace Corps is a communist plot. It was a chance to sleep on cots, wear army boots, and cry "incoming"-all while being guarded around the clock by real soldiers.
The teams of KPMG accountants, investment bankers, think-tank lifers, and Young Republicans that populate the Green Zone have much in common with the IMF missions that rearrange the economies of developing countries from the presidential suites of Sheraton hotels the world over. Except for one rather significant difference: in Iraq they were not negotiating with the government to accept their "structural adjustments" in exchange for a loan; they were the government.
Some small steps were taken, however, to bring Iraq's U.S.-appointed politicians inside. Yegor Gaidar, the mastermind of Russia's mid-nineties privatization auction that gave away the country's assets to the reigning oligarchs, was invited to share his wisdom at a conference in Baghdad. Marek Belka, who as finance minister oversaw the same process in Poland, was brought in as well. The Iraqis who proved most gifted at mouthing the neocon lines were selected to act as what USAID calls local "policy champions"-men like Ahmad al Mukhtar, who told me of his countrymen, "They are lazy. The Iraqis by nature, they are very dependent.... They will have to depend on themselves, it is the only way to survive in the world today." Although he has no economics background and his last job was reading the English-language news on television, al Mukhtar was appointed director of foreign relations in the Ministry of Trade and is leading the charge for Iraq to join the World Trade Organization.
I had been following the economic front of the war for almost a year before I decided to go to Iraq. I attended the "Rebuilding Iraq" trade shows, studied Bremer's tax and investment laws, met with contractors at their home offices in the United States, interviewed the government officials in Washington who are making the policies. But as I prepared to travel to Iraq in March to see this experiment in free-market utopianism up close, it was becoming increasingly clear that all was not going according to plan. Bremer had been working on the theory that if you build a corporate utopia the corporations will come-but where were they? American multinationals were happy to accept U.S. taxpayer dollars to reconstruct the phone or electricity systems, but they weren't sinking their own money into Iraq. There was, as yet, no McDonald's or Wal-Mart in Baghdad, and even the sales of state factories, announced so confidently nine months earlier, had not materialized.
Some of the holdup had to do with the physical risks of doing business in Iraq. But there were other more significant risks as well. When Paul Bremer shredded Iraq's Baathist constitution and replaced it with what The Economist greeted approvingly as "the wish list of foreign investors," there was one small detail he failed to mention: it was all completely illegal. The CPA derived its legal authority from United Nations Security Council Resolution 1483, passed in May 2003, which recognized the United States and Britain as Iraq's legitimate occupiers. It was this resolution that empowered Bremer to unilaterally make laws in Iraq. But the resolution also stated that the U.S. and Britain must "comply fully with their obligations under international law including in particular the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the Hague Regulations of 1907." Both conventions were born as an attempt to curtail the unfortunate historical tendency among occupying powers to rewrite the rules so that they can economically strip the nations they control. With this in mind, the conventions stipulate that an occupier must abide by a country's existing laws unless "absolutely prevented" from doing so. They also state that an occupier does not own the "public buildings, real estate, forests and agricultural assets" of the country it is occupying but is rather their "administrator" and custodian, keeping them secure until sovereignty is reestablished. This was the true threat to the Year Zero plan: since America didn't own Iraq's assets, it could not legally sell them, which meant that after the occupation ended, an Iraqi government could come to power and decide that it wanted to keep the state companies in public hands, or, as is the norm in the Gulf region, to bar foreign firms from owning 100 percent of national assets. If that happened, investments made under Bremer's rules could be expropriated, leaving firms with no recourse because their investments had violated international law from the outset. By November, trade lawyers started to advise their corporate clients not to go into Iraq just yet, that it would be better to wait until after the transition. Insurance companies were so spooked that not a single one of the big firms would insure investors for "political risk," that high-stakes area of insurance law that protects companies against foreign governments turning nationalist or socialist and expropriating their investments.
Even the U.S.-appointed Iraqi politicians, up to now so obedient, were getting nervous about their own political futures if they went along with the privatization plans. Communications Minister Haider al-Abadi told me about his first meeting with Bremer. "I said, 'Look, we don't have the mandate to sell any of this. Privatization is a big thing. We have to wait until there is an Iraqi government.'" Minister of Industry Mohamad Tofiq was even more direct: "I am not going to do something that is not legal, so that's it."
Both al-Abadi and Tofiq told me about a meeting-never reported in the press-that took place in late October 2003. At that gathering the twenty-five members of Iraq's Governing Council as well as the twenty-five interim ministers decided unanimously that they would not participate in the privatization of Iraq's state-owned companies or of its publicly owned infrastructure. But Bremer didn't give up. International law prohibits occupiers from selling state assets themselves, but it doesn't say anything about the puppet governments they appoint. Originally, Bremer had pledged to hand over power to a directly elected Iraqi government, but in early November he went to Washington for a private meeting with President Bush and came back with a Plan B. On June 30 the occupation would officially end-but not really. It would be replaced by an appointed government, chosen by Washington. This government would not be bound by the international laws preventing occupiers from selling off state assets, but it would be bound by an "interim constitution," a document that would protect Bremer's investment and privatization laws.
The plan was risky. Bremer's June 30 deadline was awfully close, and it was chosen for a less than ideal reason: so that President Bush could trumpet the end of Iraq's occupation on the campaign trail. If everything went according to plan, Bremer would succeed in forcing a "sovereign" Iraqi government to carry out his illegal reforms. But if something went wrong, he would have to go ahead with the June 30 handover anyway because by then Karl Rove, and not Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld, would be calling the shots. And if it came down to a choice between ideology in Iraq and the electability of George W. Bush, everyone knew which would win.
At first, Plan B seemed to be right on track. Bremer persuaded the Iraqi Governing Council to agree to everything: the new timetable, the interim government, and the interim constitution. He even managed to slip into the constitution a completely overlooked clause, Article 26. It stated that for the duration of the interim government, "The laws, regulations, orders and directives issued by the Coalition Provisional Authority . . . shall remain in force" and could only be changed after general elections are held.
Bremer had found his legal loophole: There would be a window- seven months-when the occupation was officially over but before general elections were scheduled to take place. Within this window, the Hague and Geneva Conventions' bans on privatization would no longer apply, but Bremer's own laws, thanks to Article 26, would stand. During these seven months, foreign investors could come to Iraq and sign forty-year contracts to buy up Iraqi assets. If a future elected Iraqi government decided to change the rules, investors could sue for compensation.
But Bremer had a formidable opponent: Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani, the most senior Shia cleric in Iraq. al Sistani tried to block Bremer's plan at every turn, calling for immediate direct elections and for the constitution to be written after those elections, not before. Both demands, if met, would have closed Bremer's privatization window. Then, on March 2, with the Shia members of the Governing Council refusing to sign the interim constitution, five bombs exploded in front of mosques in Karbala and Baghdad, killing close to 200 worshipers. General John Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, warned that the country was on the verge of civil war. Frightened by this prospect, al Sistani backed down, and the Shia politicians signed the interim constitution. It was a familiar story: the shock of a violent attack paved the way for more shock therapy.
When I arrived in Iraq a week later, the economic project seemed to be back on track. All that remained for Bremer was to get his interim constitution ratified by a Security Council resolution, then the nervous lawyers and insurance brokers could relax and the sell-off of Iraq could finally begin. The CPA, meanwhile, had launched a major new P.R. offensive designed to reassure investors that Iraq was still a safe and exciting place to do business. The centerpiece of the campaign was Destination Baghdad Exposition, a massive trade show for potential investors to be held in early April at the Baghdad International Fairgrounds. It was the first such event inside Iraq, and the organizers had branded the trade fair "DBX," as if it were some sort of Mountain Dew-sponsored dirt-bike race. In keeping with the extreme-sports theme, Thomas Foley traveled to Washington to tell a gathering of executives that the risks in Iraq are akin "to skydiving or riding a motor cycle, which are, to many, very acceptable risks."
But three hours after my arrival in Baghdad, I was finding these reassurances extremely hard to believe. I had not yet unpacked when my hotel room was filled with debris and the windows in the lobby were shattered. Down the street, the Mount Lebanon Hotel had just been bombed, at that point the largest attack of its kind since the official end of the war. The next day, another hotel was bombed in Basra, then two Finnish businessmen were murdered on their way to a meeting in Baghdad. Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt finally admitted that there was a pattern at work: "the extremists have started shifting away from the hard targets... [and] are now going out of their way to specifically target softer targets." The next day, the State Department updated its travel advisory: U.S. citizens were "strongly warned against travel to Iraq."
The physical risks of doing business in Iraq seemed to be spiraling out of control. This, once again, was not part of the original plan. When Bremer first arrived in Baghdad, the armed resistance was so low that he was able to walk the streets with a minimal security entourage. During his first four months on the job, 109 U.S. soldiers were killed and 570 were wounded. In the following four months, when Bremer's shock therapy had taken effect, the number of U.S. casualties almost doubled, with 195 soldiers killed and 1,633 wounded. There are many in Iraq who argue that these events are connected-that Bremer's reforms were the single largest factor leading to the rise of armed resistance.
Take, for instance, Bremer's first casualties. The soldiers and workers he laid off without pensions or severance pay didn't all disappear quietly. Many of them went straight into the mujahedeen, forming the backbone of the armed resistance. "Half a million people are now worse off, and, there you have the water tap that keeps the insurgency going. It's alternative employment," says Hussain Kubba, head of the prominent Iraqi business group Kubba Consulting. Some of Bremer's other economic casualties also have failed to go quietly. It turns out that many of the businessmen whose companies are threatened by Bremer's investment laws have decided to make investments of their own-in the resistance. It is partly their money that keeps fighters in Kalashnikovs and RPGs.
These developments present a challenge to the basic logic of shock therapy: the neocons were convinced that if they brought in their reforms quickly and ruthlessly, Iraqis would be too stunned to resist. But the shock appears to have had the opposite effect; rather than the predicted paralysis, it jolted many Iraqis into action, much of it extreme. Haider al-Abadi, Iraq's minister of communication, puts it this way: "We know that there are terrorists in the country, but previously they were not successful, they were isolated. Now because the whole country is unhappy, and a lot of people don't have jobs . . . these terrorists are finding listening ears." Bremer was now at odds not only with the Iraqis who opposed his plans but with U.S military commanders charged with putting down the insurgency his policies were feeding. Heretical questions began to be raised: instead of laying people off, what if the CPA actually created jobs for Iraqis? And instead of rushing to sell off Iraq's 200 state-owned firms, how about putting them back to work?
From the start, the neocons running Iraq had shown nothing but disdain for Iraq's state-owned companies. In keeping with their Year Zero apocalyptic glee, when looters descended on the factories during the war, U.S. forces did nothing. Sabah Asaad, managing director of a refrigerator factory outside Baghdad, told me that while the looting was going on, he went to a nearby U.S. Army base and begged for help. "I asked one of the officers to send two soldiers and a vehicle to help me kick out the looters. I was crying. The officer said, 'Sorry, we can't do anything, we need an order from President Bush.'" Back in Washington, Donald Rumsfeld shrugged. "Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things."
To see the remains of Asaad's football-field-size warehouse is to understand why Frank Gehry had an artistic crisis after September 11 and was briefly unable to design structures resembling the rubble of modern buildings. Asaad's looted and burned factory looks remarkably like a heavy-metal version of Gehry's Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, with waves of steel, buckled by fire, lying in terrifyingly beautiful golden heaps. Yet all was not lost. "The looters were good-hearted," one of Asaad's painters told me, explaining that they left the tools and machines behind, "so we could work again." Because the machines are still there, many factory managers in Iraq say that it would take little for them to return to full production. They need emergency generators to cope with daily black outs, and they need capital for parts and raw materials. If that happened, it would have tremendous implications for Iraq's stalled reconstruction, because it would mean that many of the key materials needed to rebuild-cement and steel, bricks and furniture-could be produced inside the country.
But it hasn't happened. Immediately after the nominal end of the war, Congress appropriated $2.5 billion for the reconstruction of Iraq, followed by an additional $18.4 billion in October. Yet as of July 2004, Iraq's state-owned factories had been pointedly excluded from the reconstruction contracts. Instead, the billions have all gone to Western companies, with most of the materials for the reconstruction imported at great expense from abroad.
With unemployment as high as 67 percent, the imported products and foreign workers flooding across the borders have become a source of tremendous resentment in Iraq and yet another open tap fueling the insurgency. And Iraqis don't have to look far for reminders of this injustice; it's on display in the most ubiquitous symbol of the occupation: the blast wall. The ten-foot-high slabs of reinforced concrete are everywhere in Iraq, separating the protected-the people in upscale hotels, luxury homes, military bases, and, of course, the Green Zone-from the unprotected and exposed. If that wasn't injury enough, all the blast walls are imported, from Kurdistan, Turkey, or even farther afield, this despite the fact that Iraq was once a major manufacturer of cement, and could easily be again. There are seventeen state-owned cement factories across the country, but most are idle or working at only half capacity. According to the Ministry of Industry, not one of these factories has received a single contract to help with the reconstruction, even though they could produce the walls and meet other needs for cement at a greatly reduced cost. The CPA pays up to $1,000 per imported blast wall; local manufacturers say they could make them for $100. Minister Tofiq says there is a simple reason why the Americans refuse to help get Iraq's cement factories running again: among those making the decisions, "no one believes in the public sector."
This kind of ideological blindness has turned Iraq's occupiers into prisoners of their own policies, hiding behind walls that, by their very existence, fuel the rage at the U.S. presence, thereby feeding the need for more walls. In Baghdad the concrete barriers have been given a popular nickname: Bremer Walls.
Tofiq did say that several U.S. companies had expressed strong interest in buying the state-owned cement factories. This supports a widely held belief in Iraq that there is a deliberate strategy to neglect the state firms so that they can be sold more cheaply-a practice known as "starve then sell."
As the insurgency grew, it soon became clear that if Bremer went ahead with his plans to sell off the state companies, it could worsen the violence. There was no question that privatization would require layoffs: the Ministry of Industry estimates that roughly 145,000 workers would have to be fired to make the firms desirable to investors, with each of those workers supporting, on average, five family members. For Iraq's besieged occupiers the question was: Would these shock-therapy casualties accept their fate or would they rebel?
The answer arrived, in rather dramatic fashion, at one of the largest state-owned companies, the General Company for Vegetable Oils. The complex of six factories in a Baghdad industrial zone produces cooking oil, hand soap, laundry detergent, shaving cream, and shampoo. At least that is what I was told by a receptionist who gave me glossy brochures and calendars boasting of "modern instruments" and "the latest and most up to date developments in the field of industry." But when I approached the soap factory, I discovered a group of workers sleeping outside a darkened building. Our guide rushed ahead, shouting something to a woman in a white lab coat, and suddenly the factory scrambled into activity: lights switched on, motors revved up, and workers-still blinking off sleep-began filling two-liter plastic bottles with pale blue Zahi brand dishwashing liquid.
I asked Nada Ahmed, the woman in the white coat, why the factory wasn't working a few minutes before. She explained that they have only enough electricity and materials to run the machines for a couple of hours a day, but when guests arrive-would-be investors, ministry officials, journalists-they get them going. "For show," she explained. Behind us, a dozen bulky machines sat idle, covered in sheets of dusty plastic and secured with duct tape.
In one dark corner of the plant, we came across an old man hunched over a sack filled with white plastic caps. With a thin metal blade lodged in a wedge of wax, he carefully whittled down the edges of each cap, leaving a pile of shavings at his feet. "We don't have the spare part for the proper mold, so we have to cut them by hand," his supervisor explained apologetically. "We haven't received any parts from Germany since the sanctions began." I noticed that even on the assembly lines that were nominally working there was almost no mechanization: bottles were held under spouts by hand because conveyor belts don't convey, lids once snapped on by machines were being hammered in place with wooden mallets. Even the water for the factory was drawn from an outdoor well, hoisted by hand, and carried inside.
The solution proposed by the U.S. occupiers was not to fix the plant but to sell it, and so when Bremer announced the privatization auction back in June 2003 this was among the first companies mentioned. Yet when I visited the factory in March, nobody wanted to talk about the privatization plan; the mere mention of the word inside the plant inspired awkward silences and meaningful glances. This seemed an unnatural amount of sub-text for a soap factory, and I tried to get to the bottom of it when I interviewed the assistant manager. But the interview itself was equally odd: I had spent half a week setting it up, submitting written questions for approval, getting a signed letter of permission from the minister of industry, being questioned and searched several times. But when I finally began the interview, the assistant manager refused to tell me his name or let me record the conversation. "Any manager mentioned in the press is attacked afterwards," he said. And when I asked whether the company was being sold, he gave this oblique response: "If the decision was up to the workers, they are against privatization; but if it's up to the high-ranking officials and government, then privatization is an order and orders must be followed."
I left the plant feeling that I knew less than when I'd arrived. But on the way out of the gates, a young security guard handed my translator a note. He wanted us to meet him after work at a nearby restaurant, "to find out what is really going on with privatization." His name was Mahmud, and he was a twenty-five-year-old with a neat beard and big black eyes. (For his safety, I have omitted his last name.) His story began in July, a few weeks after Bremer's privatization announcement. The company's manager, on his way to work, was shot to death. Press reports speculated that the manager was murdered because he was in favor of privatizing the plant, but Mahmud was convinced that he was killed because he opposed the plan. "He would never have sold the factories like the Americans want. That's why they killed him."
The dead man was replaced by a new manager, Mudhfar Ja'far. Shortly after taking over, Ja'far called a meeting with ministry officials to discuss selling off the soap factory, which would involve laying off two thirds of its employees. Guarding that meeting were several security officers from the plant. They listened closely to Ja'far's plans and promptly reported the alarming news to their coworkers. "We were shocked," Mahmud recalled. "If the private sector buys our company, the first thing they would do is reduce the staff to make more money. And we will be forced into a very hard destiny, because the factory is our only way of living."
Frightened by this prospect, a group of seventeen workers, including Mahmud, marched into Ja'far's office to confront him on what they had heard. "Unfortunately, he wasn't there, only the assistant manager, the one you met," Mahmud told me. A fight broke out: one worker struck the assistant manager, and a bodyguard fired three shots at the workers. The crowd then attacked the bodyguard, took his gun, and, Mahmud said, "stabbed him with a knife in the back three times. He spent a month in the hospital." In January there was even more violence. On their way to work, Ja'far, the manager, and his son were shot and badly injured. Mahmud told me he had no idea who was behind the attack, but I was starting to understand why factory managers in Iraq try to keep a low profile.
At the end of our meeting, I asked Mahmud what would happen if the plant was sold despite the workers' objections. "There are two choices," he said, looking me in the eye and smiling kindly. "Either we will set the factory on fire and let the flames devour it to the ground, or we will blow ourselves up inside of it. But it will not be privatized."
If there ever was a moment when Iraqis were too disoriented to resist shock therapy, that moment has definitely passed. Labor relations, like everything else in Iraq, has become a blood sport. The violence on the streets howls at the gates of the factories, threatening to engulf them. Workers fear job loss as a death sentence, and managers, in turn, fear their workers, a fact that makes privatization distinctly, more complicated than the neocons foresaw.
It is in Basra where the connections between economic reforms and the rise of the resistance was put in starkest terms. In December the union representing oil workers was negotiating with the Oil Ministry for a salary increase. Getting nowhere, the workers offered the ministry a simple choice: increase their paltry salaries or they would all join the armed resistance. They received a substantial raise.
As I left the meeting with Mahmud, I got word that there was a major demonstration outside the CPA headquarters. Supporters of the radical young cleric Moqtada al Sadr were protesting the closing of their news paper, al Hawza, by military police. The CPA accused al Hawza of publishing "false articles" that could "pose the real threat of violence." As an example, it cited an article that claimed Bremer "is pursuing a policy of starving the Iraqi people to make them preoccupied with procuring their daily bread so they do not have the chance to demand their political and individual freedoms." To me it sounded less like hate literature than a concise summary of Milton Friedman's recipe for shock therapy.
A few days before the newspaper was shut down, I had gone to Kufa during Friday prayers to listen to al Sadr at his mosque. He had launched into a tirade against Bremer's newly signed interim constitution, calling it "an unjust, terrorist document." The message of the sermon was clear: Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani may have backed down on the constitution, but al Sadr and his supporters were still determined to fight it-and if they succeeded they would sabotage the neocons' careful plan to saddle Iraq's next government with their "wish list" of laws. With the closing of the newspaper, Bremer was giving al Sadr his response: he wasn't negotiating with this young upstart; he'd rather take him out with force.
When I arrived at the demonstration, the streets were filled with men dressed in black, the soon-to-be legendary Mahdi Army. It struck me that if Mahmud lost his security guard job at the soap factory, he could be one of them. That's who al Sadr's foot soldiers are: the young men who have been shut out of the neocons' grand plans for Iraq, who see no possibilities for work, and whose neighborhoods have seen none of the promised reconstruction. Bremer has failed these young men, and everywhere that he has failed, Moqtada al Sadr has cannily set out to succeed. In Shia slums from Baghdad to Basra, a network of Sadr Centers coordinate a kind of shadow reconstruction. Funded through donations, the centers dispatch electricians to fix power and phone lines, organize local garbage collection, set up emergency generators, run blood drives, direct traffic where the streetlights don't work. And yes, they organize militias too. Al Sadr took Bremer's economic casualties, dressed them in black, and gave them rusty Kalashnikovs. His militiamen protected the mosques and the state-factories when the occupation authorities did not, but in some areas they also went further, zealously enforcing Islamic law by torching liquor stores and terrorizing women without the veil. Indeed, the astronomical rise of the brand of religious fundamentalism that al Sadr represents is another kind of blowback from Bremer's shock therapy: if the reconstruction had provided jobs, security, and services to Iraqis, al Sadr would have been deprived of both his mission and many of his newfound followers.
At the same time as al Sadr's followers were shouting "Down with America" outside the Green Zone, something was happening in another part of the country that would change everything. Four American mercenary soldiers were killed in Fallujah, their charred and dismembered bodies hung like trophies over the Euphrates. The attacks would prove a devastating blow for the neocons, one from which they would never recover. With these images, investing in Iraq suddenly didn't look anything like a capitalist dream; it looked like a macabre nightmare made real.
The day I left Baghdad was the worst yet. Fallujah was under siege and Brig. Gen. Kimmitt was threatening to "destroy the al-Mahdi Army." By the end, roughly 2,000 Iraqis were killed in these twin campaigns. I was dropped off at a security checkpoint several miles from the airport, then loaded onto a bus jammed with contractors lugging hastily packed bags. Although no one was calling it one, this was an evacuation: over the next week 1,500 contractors left Iraq, and some governments began airlifting their citizens out of the country. On the bus no one spoke; we all just listened to the mortar fire, craning our necks to see the red glow. A guy carrying a KPMG briefcase decided to lighten things up. "So is there business class on this flight?" he asked the silent bus. From the back, somebody called out, "Not yet."
Indeed, it may be quite a while before business class truly arrives in Iraq. When we landed in Amman, we learned that we had gotten out just in time. That morning three Japanese civilians were kidnapped and their captors were threatening to burn them alive. Two days later Nicholas Berg went missing and was not seen again until the snuff film surfaced of his beheading, an even more terrifying message for U.S. contractors than the charred bodies in Fallujah. These were the start of a wave of kidnappings and killings of foreigners, most of them businesspeople, from a rainbow of nations: South Korea, Italy, China, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Turkey. By the end of June more than ninety contractors were reported dead in Iraq. When seven Turkish contractors were kidnapped in June, their captors asked the "company to cancel all contracts and pull out employees from Iraq." Many insurance companies stopped selling life insurance to contractors, and others began to charge premiums as high as $10,000 a week for a single Western executive-the same price some insurgents reportedly pay for a dead American.
For their part, the organizers of DBX, the historic Baghdad trade fair, decided to relocate to the lovely tourist city of Diyarbakir in Turkey, "just 250 km from the Iraqi border." An Iraqi landscape, only without those frightening Iraqis. Three weeks later just fifteen people showed up for a Commerce Department conference in Lansing, Michigan, on investing in Iraq. Its host, Republican Congressman Mike Rogers, tried to reassure his skeptical audience by saying that Iraq is "like a rough neighborhood anywhere in America." The foreign investors, the ones who were offered every imaginable free-market enticement, are clearly not convinced; there is still no sign of them. Keith Crane, a senior economist at the Rand Corporation who has worked for the CPA, put it bluntly: "I don't believe the board of a multinational company could approve a major investment in this environment. If people are shooting at each other, it's just difficult to do business." Hamid Jassim Khamis, the manager of the largest soft-drink bottling plant in the region, told me he can't find any investors, even though he landed the exclusive rights to produce Pepsi in central Iraq. "A lot of people have approached us to invest in the factory, but people are really hesitating now." Khamis said he couldn't blame them; in five months he has survived an attempted assassination, a carjacking, two bombs planted at the entrance of his factory, and the kidnapping of his son.
Despite having been granted the first license for a foreign bank to operate in Iraq in forty years, HSBC still hasn't opened any branches, a decision that may mean losing the coveted license altogether. Procter & Gamble has put its joint venture on hold, and so has General Motors. The U.S. financial backers of the Starwood luxury hotel and multiplex have gotten cold feet, and Siemens AG has pulled most staff from Iraq. The bell hasn't rung yet at the Baghdad Stock Exchange-in fact you can't even use credit cards in Iraq's cash-only economy. New Bridge Strategies, the company that had gushed back in October about how "a Wal-Mart could take over the country," is sounding distinctly humbled. "McDonald's is not opening anytime soon," company partner Ed Rogers told the Washington Post. Neither is Wal-Mart. The Financial Times has declared Iraq "the most dangerous place in the world in which to do business." It's quite an accomplishment: in trying to design the best place in the world to do business, the neocons have managed to create the worst, the most eloquent indictment yet of the guiding logic behind deregulated free markets.
The violence has not just kept investors out; it also forced Bremer, before he left, to abandon many of his central economic policies. Privatization of the state companies is off the table; instead, several of the state companies have been offered up for lease, but only if the investor agrees not to lay off a single employee. Thousands of the state workers that Bremer fired have been rehired, and significant raises have been handed out in the public sector as a whole. Plans to do away with the food-ration program have also been scrapped-it just doesn't seem like a good time to deny millions of Iraqis the only nutrition on which they can depend.
The final blow to the neocon dream, came in the weeks before the handover. The White House and the CPA were rushing to get the U.N. Security Council to pass a resolution endorsing their handover plan. They had twisted arms to give the top job to former CIA agent Iyad Allawi, a move that will ensure that Iraq becomes, at the very least, the coaling station for U.S. troops that Jay Garner originally envisioned. But if major corporate investors were going to come to Iraq in the future, they would need a stronger guarantee that Bremer's economic laws would stick. There was only one way of doing that: the Security Council resolution had to ratify the interim constitution, which locked in Bremer's laws for the duration of the interim government. But al Sistani once again objected, this time unequivocally, saying that the constitution has been "rejected by the majority of the Iraqi people." On June 8 the Security Council unanimously passed a resolution that endorsed the handover plan but made absolutely no reference to the constitution. In the face of this far-reaching defeat, George W. Bush celebrated the resolution as a historic victory, one that came just in time for an election trail photo op at theG-8 Summit in Georgia.
With Bremer's laws in limbo, Iraqi ministers are already talking openly about breaking contracts signed by the CPA. Citigroups' loan scheme has been rejected as a misuse of Iraq's oil revenues. Iraq's communication minister is threatening to renegotiate contracts with the three communications firms providing the country with its disastrously poor cell phone service. And the Lebanese and U.S. companies hired to run the state television network have been informed that they could lose their licenses because they are not Iraqi. "We will see if we can change the contract," Hamid al-Kifaey, spokesperson for the Governing Council, said in May. "They have no idea about Iraq." For most investors, this complete lack of legal certainty simply makes Iraq too great a risk.
But while the Iraqi resistance has managed to scare off the first wave of corporate raiders, there's little doubt that they will return. Whatever form the next Iraqi government takes- nationalist, Islamist, or free market-it will inherit a shattered nation with a crushing $120 billion debt. Then, as in all poor countries around the world, men in dark blue suits from the IMF will appear at the door, bearing loans and promises of economic boom, provided that certain structural adjustments are made, which will, of course, be rather painful at first but well worth the sacrifice in the end. In fact, the process has already begun: the IMF is poised to approve loans worth $2.5 - $4.25 billion, pending agreement on the conditions. After an endless succession of courageous last stands and far too many lost lives, Iraq will become a poor nation like any other, with politicians determined to introduce policies rejected by the vast majority of the population, and all the imperfect compromises that will entail. The free market will no doubt come to Iraq, but the neoconservative dream of transforming the country into a free-market utopia has already died, a casualty of a greater dream-a second term for George W. Bush.
The great historical irony of the catastrophe unfolding in Iraq is that the shock-therapy reforms that were supposed to create an economic boom that would rebuild the country have instead fueled a resistance that ultimately made reconstruction impossible. Bremer's reforms unleashed forces that the neocons neither predicted nor could hope to control, from armed insurrections inside factories to tens of thousands of unemployed young men arming themselves. These forces have transformed Year Zero in Iraq into the mirror opposite of what the neocons envisioned: not a corporate utopia but a ghoulish dystopia, where going to a simple business meeting can get you lynched, burned alive, or beheaded. These dangers are so great that in Iraq global capitalism has retreated, at least for now. For the neocons, this must be a shocking development: their ideological belief in greed turns out to be stronger than greed itself.
Iraq was to the neocons what Afghanistan was to the Taliban: the one place on Earth where they could force everyone to live by the most literal, unyielding interpretation of their sacred texts. One would think that the bloody results of this experiment would inspire a crisis of faith: in the country where they had absolute free reign, where there was no local government to blame, where economic reforms were introduced at their most shocking and most perfect, they created, instead of a model free market, a failed state no right-thinking investor would touch. And yet the Green Zone neocons and their masters in Washington are no more likely to reexamine their core beliefs than the Taliban mullahs were inclined to search their souls when their Islamic state slid into a debauched Hades of opium and sex slavery. When facts threaten true believers, they simply close their eyes and pray harder.
Which is precisely what Thomas Foley has been doing. The former head of "private sector development" has left Iraq, a country he had described as "the mother of all turnarounds," and has accepted another turnaround job, as co-chair of George Bush's reelection committee in Connecticut. On April 30 in Washington he addressed a crowd of entrepreneurs about business prospects in Baghdad. It was a tough day to be giving an upbeat speech: that morning the first photographs had appeared out of Abu Ghraib, including one of a hooded prisoner with electrical wires attached to his hands. This was another kind of shock therapy, far more literal than the one Foley had helped to administer, but not entirely unconnected. "Whatever you're seeing, it's not as bad as it appears," Foley told the crowd. "You just need to accept that on faith."
-------- israel / palestine
Israeli Intelligence Faulted for Failure to Halt Hamas
September 1, 2004
By STEVEN ERLANGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/01/international/middleeast/01CND-MIDE.html?pagewanted=all&position=
JERUSALEM, Sept. 1 - Israeli intelligence came under careful criticism today for its failure to crack the Hamas cell in Hebron that carried out the twin suicide bombings in Beersheba on Tuesday in which 16 people died and more than 100 were wounded.
The Hamas cell, led by Imad Qawasme, has been responsible for the deaths of more than 80 Israelis, and its internal security has been so disciplined that neither Israeli army intelligence nor the Shin Beth has been able to crack it.
The army was concerned that Hamas was preparing an operation from Hebron because of an unusual period of quiet, officials said today, but there was no specific warning on which to act.
The Hebron cell is strictly compartmentalized and makes little use of the telephone, Israeli security officials say, and after successful attacks, the leadership normally goes underground.
On July 11, the cell infiltrated a suicide bomber into Jerusalem, but he lost his nerve and threw off his explosive belt near the Café Caffit, which he was supposed to attack. While he was later killed by the army, his infiltration is considered another success of the Hamas cell, said Amir Rappaport of the Maariv newspaper.
The suicide bombings "demonstrated the ability of the Hama infrastructure in Hebron to rehabilitate itself," Mr. Rappaport wrote.
Alex Fishman, writing in Yediot Aharonot, said that the primary lesson of Beersheba, where the dead were buried today, was not about Israel's security barrier but about intelligence. "The security establishment has a lacuna in Hebron, a large `black hole' of information," he wrote. Despite the military's efforts there, he said, "when there is no intelligence, successes are a bingo game."
Mr. Qawasme, part of a large Hebron family, has been on Israel's most-wanted list since the beginning of 2003, and he is considered to be the heir of the cell's founders, Abdullah Qawasme and Ahmed Badr, who were assassinated by the army last year.
Mr. Qawasme's cousin, Ahmed, was one of the suicide bombers on Tuesday in Beersheba.
In October 2003, more than 100 members of the Qawasme clan and others were arrested to try to break up Hamas in Hebron, but to no avail, and the night before the attacks, on Monday, there was a large army operation to try to arrest Hamas members in Hebron.
In part to deflect attention from Hamas in Hebron, Israeli officials accused Syria of harboring Hamas commanders and allowing terrorist training camps in Syria and in southern Lebanon, where Hezbollah is based.
Ranaan Gissin, an adviser to Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, argued today that Israel's success in attacking Hamas leaders in the West Bank and Gaza meant that the organization's leaders have now moved to Damascus. "Orders and support for terrorist actions come from neighboring countries that support terrorism, like Syria and Iran," he said.
Israel is not about to attack Syria, Mr. Gissin said. But he warned the Hamas political leader in Damascus, Khaled Mashal, not to believe that "he has immunity because he sits in Damascus."
In 1997, Israel tried to assassinate Mr. Mashal in Jordan by injecting him with a poison, but two Israeli agents carrying Canadian passports were captured there. The United States forced the then-prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to provide Mr. Mashal the antidote, and later, the Mossad agents were returned at the price of releasing Hamas's founder, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, from prison. Last year, Israel assassinated him in Gaza by firing a rocket that blew him out of his wheelchair, but Mr. Mashal is apparently back in Israel's sights.
The army commander, Gen. Moshe Yaalon, told a parliamentary committee: "Whoever is responsible for using terror against us won't sleep quietly." Israel must "deal with those who support terrorism, whether it be elements of the Palestinian Authority, elements from Hizbollah in Lebanon or terror command posts in Damascus with Syrian approval," General Yaalon said.
Politicians filled the airwaves to press for the rapid completion of the controversial separation barrier, about a third finished, that has made it harder for suicide bombers to infiltrate Israel. There is no barrier yet in the south, between Hebron and Beersheba, because the north, where most Israelis live, was considered a priority.
But mayors of southern towns, like Beersheba's Yaacov Turner, urged the government to immediately start construction in the south, rather than wait until the northern part is completed.
Mr. Turner was among a group of mayors who wrote last December to the defense minister, Shaul Mofaz, complaining that "our area is wide open to the free passage of Palestinian terrorists from Judea, and for a long time we have also suffered from thefts and crime from the Palestinian population." The mayors said that they "fear that the moment the building of the security fence in the Samaria area and Jerusalem envelope is completed while the southern seam line is open, there will be a massive strengthening of Palestinian terror in our area."
But Mr. Gissin argued that the government had already decided in early June to accelerate the construction of the barrier wherever there were no pending petitions about its route before the Israeli Supreme Court.
Another Sharon adviser, Zalman Shoval, a former ambassador to the United States, said that the Beersheba bombings might influence the court - "not in the nature of their decisions, but in the speed with which they deal with pending cases." He said the carnage in Beersheba might also aid Israel "in international forums when the face comes up, as it will," Mr. Shoval said.
As Israeli forces continued to move through Hebron this evening, they also kept the Erez crossing between Gaza and Israel shut after a would-be bomber was captured there early Tuesday morning with explosives sewn into his underwear. But surprisingly, the Israelis today also prevented the most senior executive of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, Peter Hansen, from leaving the Gaza Strip through Erez.
Mr. Hansen, commissioner general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees carries a diplomatic passport. "It is unheard of for the executive head of U.N. agency to have his freedom of movement flagrantly curtailed by a member state of the U.N. in this way," the agency said in a statement, and it made a formal protest to Israel.
Mr. Hansen said: "I fail to see any rational reason - and we have not been offered any - for this unacceptable disrespect for international law and just common decency. The agency's ability to carry out its essential humanitarian operations is being seriously undermined."
--------
Suicide Bombings Kill 18 in Israel
Attacks on Two Buses Shatter a Five-Month Respite
By John Ward Anderson and Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, September 1, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A48690-2004Aug31?language=printer
BEERSHEBA, Israel, Aug. 31 -- Nearly simultaneous explosions tore through two buses in the heart of this southern Israeli city Tuesday afternoon, killing at least 16 passengers along with the two Palestinian suicide bombers and wounding dozens of people in blasts that shattered a five-month respite from major attacks inside Israel.
Israeli police said two Palestinian suicide bombers detonated their explosives within 20 seconds of each other on two buses about 100 yards apart near city hall, shredding bodies and spewing clothes, groceries and schoolbooks through the shattered windows.
"There were burned bodies on the windows and at the entrances of the bus," said Gershon Kalimi, chief of the fire brigades who said he reached the first bus to explode five minutes after the blast. "Then we went to the other bus and we saw the same horrible images: burned bodies, burning bus, trapped people, people lying on the ground, people calling for help."
Beersheba, a Negev desert city 55 miles south of Tel Aviv, had not been hit by suicide bombers during the four years of the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But officials said militants had been drawn southward because Israel's construction of a massive barrier and relentless military operations in the northern West Bank have blocked attacks there.
"They went into the soft belly of Israel where the fence has not been erected," said Gideon Meir, a senior Israeli Foreign Ministry official. "The ultimate truth for the necessity of the fence was given today: Wherever there's no fence, it's easy to penetrate into Israel."
The Islamic Resistance Movement, known as Hamas, claimed responsibility for the attacks in announcements from mosques in the West Bank town of Hebron and the Gaza Strip, saying they were retribution for Israel's assassinations of top Hamas leaders in Gaza last spring and the poor treatment of Palestinians in Israeli jails, hundreds of whom are in the second week of a hunger strike.
Palestinian sources identified the bombers as Ahmed Kawasma and Nassim Jabri, who were neighbors in Hebron, about 28 miles northeast of Beersheba. On Tuesday night, Israeli military forces surrounded the houses of both men and ordered their families to evacuate, according to footage aired by the al-Jazeera television network. The Israeli military usually destroys the homes of bombers soon after an attack.
"We went into Hebron this evening following intelligence that the suicide bombers who carried out the attacks today came from a terror network in Hebron," said Maj. Sharon Feingold, a spokeswoman for the Israeli army. She said military forces were expected to increase operations in Hebron in the coming days.
"The fight against terror will continue with full strength," Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said as he prepared to meet with senior security officials Tuesday night to plan a response to the bombings. Sharon said he would also push forward with his plan to withdraw Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip, a proposal that has been opposed vociferously by hawkish members of his Likud Party.
Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia, who was in Egypt on Tuesday, told the Reuters news agency, "Killing civilians, whether from the Palestinian side or from the Israeli side, will achieve nothing except hatred and more enmity, and therefore we condemn that strongly."
The most recent Palestinian suicide attack was on March 14 in the southern port city of Ashdod, where two bombers from the Gaza Strip killed 10 people. Since then, the lull in violence in hard-hit Jerusalem and other cities had brought an unusually placid summer and rejuvenated nightlife that had disappeared in the early months of the Palestinian uprising, which began in September 2000.
Beersheba, a city of 183,000 people, serves as a commercial and service hub for the southern Negev desert region of Israel. There had been one previous attack here, in February 2002, when two Hamas militants killed a pair of Israeli soldiers in a drive-by shooting at the entrance of a military base.
At about 2:45 p.m. Tuesday, the No. 12 and No. 6 Metro Dan buses pulled out of this sprawling city's main bus station. Each made two stops as they headed north, according to Dudi Cohen, chief of police for Israel's southern district. He said police had not determined whether the bombers boarded the buses at the main terminal or at one of the stops.
The No. 12 drove through a main intersection, with the No. 6 about half a block behind, police said. At 2:55 p.m., a blast tore through the No. 12 bus.
"I saw the first explosion and I didn't imagine that it would also happen to my bus," said Yakov Cohen, 43, the No. 6 driver, who said he slammed on his brakes to distance his bus from the explosion ahead and opened the bus's doors to allow his passengers to flee. "The explosion on my bus was 20 seconds later."
Nissin Vakanin, 65, a barber on his way home from work, was standing near the center of the No. 6 bus when the blast roared through the chassis. Minutes earlier he had given up his front-row seat to a middle-aged woman. As he lurched through the charred and smoldering interior of the bus, he glanced at the seat he had given up.
"I saw her dead," said Vakanin, whose peach-colored shirt was splattered with blood and bits of flesh. "I saw the body of the guy next to her and it was all ripped up. Then I realized he was the suicide bomber.
"My conscience is not quiet," continued Vakanin, who was lightly wounded. "I feel guilty that she died and not me."
An hour after the explosion, a head lay in the aisle of the bus about four feet behind the driver's seat. The torso of a victim slumped on the floor nearby. Body parts were scattered across the blackened interior. Fruits and vegetables and diapers from passengers' shopping trips were flung across the bus and out the windows. A pink sandal lay on the top of the step inside the bus.
Ninety-seven survivors were admitted to the Soroka Medical Center, about half a mile from the site of the explosions, according to the center's deputy director, Arnon Wiznitzer. About two dozen people were in serious condition with burns and internal injuries, he said. Dozens more were lightly wounded and at least 15 were suffering psychological trauma.
The construction of the barrier complex of fences and walls, which encompasses sections of the West Bank, has been the focus of criticism by European governments and human rights organizations that say its path is based more on politics than security. Israel's Supreme Court recently ruled that some segments of the barrier impose undue hardship on Palestinians and should be rerouted.
But Israeli officials say the expanding fence line and military operations have brought about the decline in suicide bombings inside Israel. Nine bombing missions have been carried out so far this year, killing 50 people, compared with 23 suicide operations that killed 139 people last year. At the height of the conflict, in 2002, 228 people died in suicide bombings.
Researchers Samuel Sockol and Hillary Claussen in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
-------- landmines
U.S. Pushes Landmine Initiatives
Wade Boese,
September 2004
Arms Control Today
http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2004_09/FMCT.asp
A U.S. landmine initiative announced July 29 received a cool reception from other countries. The proposal, put forward by U.S. Ambassador Jackie W. Sanders at the UN Conference on Disarmament (CD), calls for an international ban on the sale or transfer of all landmines without self-destruct and self-deactivation devices.
Canada and some of the other 142 states-parties to the Ottawa Convention, which bans anti-personnel landmines (APLs), including those with self-destruct and self-deactivation devices, rejected the initiative out of hand. Canadian Ambassador Paul Meyer explained, "Clearly and simply put, [Ottawa Convention] states will not be in a position to enter negotiations on a lesser ban aimed at arresting trade in one category of [APLs] alone but implying the acceptability of trade in other categories of these weapons." Because the CD requires consensus for starting negotiations and 42 of the conference's 65 members are Ottawa Convention states-parties, the U.S. proposal's prospects are bleak.
The United States announced in February that it would cease using any type of landmine lacking self-destruct and self-deactivation measures. Washington also declared it would not join the Ottawa Convention, an option it suggested in 1998. (See ACT, March 2004.)
The United States is having better luck with another international landmine initiative. Support is growing for a U.S. proposal to restrict the use of anti-vehicle mines, which are not prohibited by the Ottawa Convention.
At a July 5-16 meeting in Geneva, states-parties to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) inched closer toward adopting an anti-vehicle mines measure, which has been debated for years. A U.S. government official said Washington is aiming to complete the negotiation early next year so that it does not drag on indefinitely.
Now endorsed by 29 other countries, the proposal would require that any anti-vehicle mines deployed in the future be detectable. In addition, it would obligate countries to equip anti-vehicle mines delivered by aircraft or artillery systems with self-destruct and self-deactivation devices. The CCW already mandates that APLs have such mechanisms.
The 30 co-sponsors are now weighing whether to amend their proposal to demand that any anti-vehicle mines lacking features to neutralize themselves after a short period be restricted to deployment in marked areas.
A CCW measure can only be approved by consensus, and China, Russia, and Pakistan currently oppose adopting the proposal. Their objections vary from assertions that nondetectable mines are needed for border protection to the costs of altering mines to comply with the proposal.
Proponents say they are making headway, however, in arguing that the proposal will not be as costly as some fear because it will apply only to mines deployed in the future, not to those already in the ground or that remain stockpiled. The U.S. official voiced confidence that it is only a matter of time until the proposal prevails.
-------- nato
Finland rules out applying for NATO membership
HELSINKI (AFP)
Sep 01, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040901201704.i3d7dm3m.html
Finnish Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen said on Wednesday his non-aligned country would not apply for NATO membership, but left open the possibility of a future application.
"In Finland we are closing our preparations of the next security and defence report to the parliament, and there we will say that the question of NATO membership for Finland is an open possibility, as it has been also in the past," Vanhanen told a news conference.
"But we are not going to ask for membership now," he added, giving no further details.
Political observers have commented that it would be political suicide for any Finnish government to apply for membership in NATO, since polls show that nearly two-thirds of the Finns are against joining the US-dominated alliance.
Finnish defence forces are however fully compatible with NATO standards, and technically the country could therefore apply and become a member of the defence bloc quite quickly if needed, according to security experts.
-----
New NATO commander in Kosovo to step up efforts to avoid fresh conflicts
PRISTINA, Serbia-Montenegro (AFP)
Sep 01, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040901185514.4ilrddw3.html
The new French commander of NATO-led peacekeepers in Kosovo (KFOR) on Wednesday vowed to step up contacts with the province's authorities in order to avoid a repeat of Serb-Albanian clashes in March that claimed 19 lives.
"The situation has remained fragile, so it is undoubtedly necessary to change the ways how the force acts, to be more mobile, more reactive and to improve intelligence," French General Yves de Kermabon said.
He was speaking at a ceremony passing control of the 18,000-strong force to him from German General Holger Kammerhoff.
French Defence Minister Michele Alliot-Marie arrived in Kosovo on earlier Wednesday to accept French command of the multi-national NATO-led peacekeeping force in the southern Serbian province.
"My intention is to work here with the Kosovars, multiply contacts with all Kosovo authorities, both Serb and Albanian, politicians, militaries, religious or security ones, because everything is done for them and with them," Kermabon said.
He said that the clashes in March had sent out a "red signal" and gave "the chance to become aware that the situation has remained fragile and that a lot of progress has yet to be made.
"The first effort is the reinforcement of security," the general said.
Nineteen people were killed in Kosovo in March when ethnic Albanian mobs rampaged against ethnic Serb villages in what NATO commanders described as an organised campaign of "ethnic cleansing".
It was the worst ethnic violence since the end of the 1998-99 war in the UN-administered province, but NATO forces were unable to protect Serb villages as homes and religious buildings were torched.
Meanwhile, Alliot-Marie met with the chief of the UN mission in Kosovo, Soeren Jessen-Petersen.
"Kosovo is probably one of the places in the Balkans where the situation is still fragile and the events in March have shown that the slightest incident can inflame the situation."
She also warned that, ahead of the elections in Kosovo, due to be held on October 23, "the electoral processes are always periods of tensions and maximum risk."
Kosovo President Ibrahim Rugova said that "KFOR has proved its capacities and maturity.
"I have promised my support as well as the support of people of Kosovo," Rugova said.
After Kosovo, French Defence minister Alliot-Marie will travel to Kabul to visit French forces deployed in Afghanistan.
-------- russia / chechnya
Hostage Crisis Unfolds in Russia as Guerrillas Seize School
September 1, 2004
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/01/international/europe/01CND-RUSS.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
MOSCOW, Sept. 1 - Heavily armed insurgents, some with explosives strapped to their bodies, seized a school in southern Russia today, herded scores of schoolchildren, parents and teachers into its gymnasium and threatened to kill them.
More than a dozen guerrillas, both men and women, stormed Middle School No. 1 in the town Beslan in North Ossetia, not far from Chechnya on Russia's southern border with Georgia, just moments after the opening of the new school year, according to officials there and news reports.
Gunfire erupted in the seizure and afterward. At least two police officers died in the initial raid, while an unknown number of others might have died inside the school, Oleg Sagolov, a spokesman for the region's president, said in an interview. At least 11 others were reported wounded.
Local police, as well as special forces and soldiers from Russia's 58th Army surrounded the school, creating a nervous stand off that continued deep into the night.
The exact number of hostages remained unclear - estimates ranged from 132 to nearly 400 - reflecting a scene of confusion and fear as parents gathered in anxious vigil, sometimes having to be restrained for trying to approach the school. A handful of other students earlier managed to escape, apparently after hiding in a boiler room, officials said. Earlier Rossiya, a state television network, showed a camouflaged soldier racing a young girl, dressed in a light lavender skirt, to safety, followed by an elderly woman.
A man who answered the telephone at the school and identified himself as a spokesman for the fighters said they wanted talks with the leaders of North Ossetia and neighboring Ingushetia, as well as with a pediatrician who participated in negotiations with insurgents who seized a Moscow theater in October 2002.
"Wipe your sniffles," the man said, speaking crudely in Russian with a Chechen accent, when asked what they hoped to discuss with the officials. He then hung up.
Russia's defense minister, Sergei B. Ivanov, speaking in Moscow even as the hostage crisis unfolded in the south, said the attacks scourging the country amounted to a state of war.
"War has been declared on us, where the enemy is unseen and there is no front," Mr. Ivanov said. "This is regrettably not the first and I fear not the last terrorist act."
The school's seizure occurred the morning after a suicide bomber set off an explosion outside a subway station in Moscow, killing at least 10 others and wounding 50 in the latest convulsion of terrorist violence that has struck fear into Russians. Because of the nature of the explosives, officials said today, the Moscow attack appeared to be linked to the bombings of two passenger airliners, which crashed simultaneously on Aug. 24, killing 90.
President Vladimir V. Putin, for the second time in eight days, disrupted his working vacation in the Black Sea resort Sochi and returned to Moscow, as he did the day after the two airliners crashed. He did not immediately discuss the unfolding hostage crisis, but in an interview with Turkish journalists on the eve of a state visit to Turkey, Mr. Putin said Russia would never negotiate with terrorists or separatists in Chechnya, who have been fighting Russian forces in the republic with little interruption since 1994.
"We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them," Mr. Putin said, according to Interfax.
With scores of hostages inside the school, officials in North Ossetia said they were trying to open talks with the guerrillas in hopes of ending the siege peacefully. With the school in their control and evidently wired with mines and explosives, the guerrillas sent two notes and a videocassette. The cassette was blank, Mr. Sagolov said. One of the notes included a mobile telephone number, the other a simple message, "Wait."
By tonight, negotiators had established contact with the guerrillas inside, but it was not clear what the discussions involved.
Mr. Putin's adviser on Chechen affairs, Alsanbek Alakhanov, told Interfax that the rebels were demanding a withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya and the release of insurgents jailed after a series of rebel raids in Ingushetia in June that killed nearly 100 people, most of them local police officials.
The guerrillas threatened to destroy the school if any attempt were made to free the hostages and vowed to kill 50 schoolchildren for each guerilla killed, North Ossetia's interior minister, Kazbek Dzantiyev, told reporters in Beslan, according to Russian news reports. At one point children appeared in the school's windows, apparently being used as human shields.
Middle School No. 1 in Beslan has nearly 900 students, ages 6 to 16, and some 60 teachers, according to officials. It was not immediately clear how many guerrillas were involved, though several officials said there appeared to be 15 to 17 fighters, at least two of them women. Wearing camouflage and belts of ammunition, they apparently stormed the school using a hijacked police car and a truck, officials said.
The raid occurred only moments after an opening-day ceremony attended by students, their parents and teachers. The first day of school here is known as Day of Knowledge and is one of the most festive days for Russian families, with children and parents dressing up and carrying flowers to greet their new teachers.
"I was standing near the gates," one student, Zarubek Tsumartov, said in a television interview shown on Rossiya. "Music was playing. When I saw three people running with guns, I thought it was a joke at first. Then they fired in the air. And we ran away."
The man who answered the phone at the school said he represented the Second Group of Salakhin Riadus Shakhidi, a rebel contingent believed to be headed by Chechnya's most notorious rebel commander, Shamil Basayev.
Mr. Basayev has previously been involved or claimed responsibility for some of the worst attacks in Russia stemming from the long conflict in Chechnya. They include a raid in 1995 into Budyonnovsk, a town near Chechnya in Stavropol region, in the first war there. In that attack, Mr. Basayev's fighters killed 147 people and then held more than 1,000 people hostage in a hospital. That raid ended when they loaded hundreds of hostages on buses and drove to Chechnya. He also claimed responsibility for the wave of rebel attacks in Ingushetia in June that appeared to be at the center of the guerrillas' demands today.
The siege in Beslan had portentous echoes of one of the most notorious terrorist acts in recent Russian history: the hostage crisis at a Moscow theater in October 2002. A band of insurgents, also including women wrapped in explosives, seized the theater during a performance of a popular musical, "Nord-Ost," and held more than 700 hostages for 57 hours before commandoes stormed the building. At least 41 rebels died in the raid, but so did at least 129 hostages, most from the effects of a nerve gas that had been pumped into the theater.
Russia's second war in Chechnya began in 1999 and shows few signs of ending even though Russian soldiers and security officers control most of the rugged, mountainous republic. Although the rebels have been unable to mount significant offensive operations in recent years, they continue to strike with partisan-like attacks that kill Russians virtually every day.
The raid in Ingushetia in June, and a similar one in Chechnya's capital, Grozny, on Aug. 21, which killed as many as 50, demonstrated the rebels' ability to stage larger operations. The latest - as well as the attacks against two airliners last week and outside a Moscow subway station on Tuesday night - coincided with a presidential election in Chechnya on Sunday to replace Akhmad Kadyrov, a former rebel turned Kremlin loyalist who was assassinated in Grozny in May, apparently by Chechen separatists.
Chechnya's separatist leader, Aslan Maskhadov, who served as president during the republic's de facto independence from 1996 to 1999 before fleeing in the second war, denied involvement in the terrorist attacks and in today's siege. His representative, Akhmed Zakayev, told the radio station Ekho Moskvi that the siege was a "monstrous action" that had no justification.
All of North Ossetia and its capital, Vladikavkaz, were in a state of siege. All schools closed, as did the region's airport, not far from Beslan. The authorities announced they had closed the region's already heavily guarded borders with Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria and Stavropol, as well as the international border with Georgia.
Russia's military campaign in Chechnya has faced fierce international criticism because its forces have been accused of killings and other abuses in their pursuit of separatist rebels. But the wake of the last week's attacks, political leaders from NATO, the Council of Europe and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe expressed common cause today with Russia, if not all of Mr. Putin's policies, in its struggle against terrorism.
--------
Suicide Bomber Kills 9 at Moscow Subway Station
September 1, 2004
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/01/international/europe/01moscow.html?pagewanted=all&position=
MOSCOW, Wednesday, Sept. 1 - A woman blew herself up outside a subway station in Moscow on Tuesday evening, killing at least 9 other people and wounding more than 50, officials said. The suicide bombing came exactly a week after bombs destroyed two passenger airliners over Russia.
The woman's bomb, packed with bolts or other bits of metal, exploded after 8 p.m. in a parking lot bustling with commuters and shoppers outside the Rizhskaya subway, two and a half miles north of the Kremlin.
Moscow's mayor, Yuri M. Luzhkov, said the bomber's target might have been the subway itself, because witnesses told investigators that the woman had approached the entrance only to turn away because two police officers were checking documents and bags. In February, a woman carrying a bomb destroyed a subway car here, killing at least 41.
"She got scared," Mr. Luzhkov said at the scene. "She turned back into the crowd and blew herself up. It was a very powerful explosion."
The attack was the latest in a series of bombings across Russia - from the heart of the capital to the ruins of Grozny - stemming from the separatist conflict in Chechnya.
On Wednesday morning, a group calling itself the Islambouli Brigades of Al Qaeda, the same group that said it was responsible for the twin air bombings last week, claimed responsibility for the blast in Moscow in a posting on an Arabic-language Web site, and it tied the attack to the Chechnya conflict.
The bombing occurred only hours after President Vladimir V. Putin declared for the first time that last week's twin air disasters, which killed 90 people, were acts of terrorism and vowed that Russia would not bow to terrorist demands. Those attacks also appear to have been carried out by female bombers.
"We have fought, and are fighting, and will continue to fight these forces," Mr. Putin said after meeting with President Jacques Chirac of France and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany in Sochi, a resort on the Black Sea.
Outside the station, situated on Prospekt Mira, Russians once again faced the grim and increasingly familiar aftermath of terrorism. The blast set two cars on fire, pocked walls and shattered windows in the circular building above the subway entrance and in a shopping center across the parking lot. An hour after the attack, wrenched bodies still lay where they fell. One young woman, inconsolable, searched the stunned crowds, shouting "Pasha!" over and over.
"Something flew past my head - I don't know what it was," said Aleksei Borodin, 29, who was walking with his mother when they felt the concussive shock of the explosion. "I saw hands and feet."
Despite an increased security effort, suicide bombings, mostly by women, have struck with deadly frequency over the last two years, unnerving Russians. The women, whom the news media here call "black widows," are said to be avenging the deaths of husbands, sons, fathers and brothers who have died in the grueling conflict in Chechnya, though in many cases little is known about the women's lives.
In Moscow alone, such bombers have struck at an outdoor music festival in July 2003, outside the National Hotel in the city's heart in December, and in the subway in February.
On Tuesday, the Federal Security Service confirmed that the investigation into last week's air disasters now focused on two women thought to be Chechens: Satsita Dzhbirkhanova and Amanat Nagayeva.
Sibir Airlines Flight 1047, a Tupolev-154 headed to Sochi, where Mr. Putin spent most of August, and Volga AviaExpress Flight 1303, a Tupolev-134 to Volgograd, crashed nearly simultaneously last Tuesday night after bombs exploded inside them, near the rear of each aircraft. According to investigators cited in Russian news reports, the women may have assembled and detonated the bombs in the rear bathrooms. Investigators found traces of an explosive, hexogen, in the wreckage of both, as well as evidence of an explosion in damage to seats and tray tables.
The women's bodies, still not positively identified, are the only ones of the victims that have not been claimed by relatives. Sergei N. Ignatchenko, the service's chief spokesman, emphasized in an interview that it was possible that the women's passports could have been stolen and used by the bombers.
In the days after the airliners crashed, officials publicly played down the possibility of terrorism. By contrast, there was little hesitation after Tuesday's bombing.
Even before it happened, evidence emerged suggesting that whoever was behind the attacks may have been plotting a series of them, including more bombings still to come.
The Federal Security Service announced that an explosion at a bus stop in Moscow on the night the airliners crashed was a terrorist act, possibly related to the airline bombings, and not hooliganism as first reported. That bomb, hanging in a plastic bag on a lamppost, wounded four people on the highway leading to Domodedovo International Airport, where the two passenger planes departed roughly two hours later.
On Friday, a Web posting from the Islambouli Brigades of Al Qaeda said its fighters had hijacked the two airliners to avenge the deaths of Muslims at the hands of Russian forces in Chechnya and elsewhere.
Russian officials say there is no evidence of a hijacking on board, and the group's statement has not been independently confirmed. In August, the group claimed to have carried out an attempt to assassinate Shaukat Aziz, then Pakistan's prime minister-designate; the attack killed eight people but left Mr. Aziz unhurt.
The bombings have occurred on either end of Sunday's presidential election in Chechnya, which has proved to be another ambiguous milestone in the war. It was held to replace Akhmad Kadyrov, who was assassinated in May when a bomb exploded under a stadium grandstand in Grozny. The Kremlin's favored candidate, Maj. Gen. Alu Alkhanov, easily won the election, but American and European officials, as well as rights groups here, criticized the vote as not meeting international standards for fairness. On Election Day in Chechnya, there were also clear signs of ballot manipulation.
Chechnyan separatist leaders like Aslan Maskhadov, in hiding or in exile, have distanced themselves from attacks on civilians. His representative abroad, Akhmed Zakayev, denounced General Alkhanov's victory as a fraud and, while denouncing terrorist attacks, said Russia's policies in Chechnya were responsible.
In Sochi, Mr. Putin said the claim of responsibility for the twin air attacks, if confirmed, would prove that the conflict spilling out of Chechnya was being fueled by international terrorist groups linked with or inspired by Al Qaeda.
"If one of the terrorist organizations has claimed responsibility for this and it is linked to Al Qaeda, that is a fact that confirms the link between certain forces operating on the territory of Chechnya and international terrorism," he said.
Mr. Putin, Mr. Chirac and Mr. Schröder, who last year were allied in opposition to the American-led war in Iraq, found themselves meeting again, this time in the shadow of terrorism.
Mr. Chirac had delayed his arrival in Sochi by a day because of the kidnapping of two French journalists in Iraq. With Mr. Putin expressing support, Mr. Chirac said France was doing everything it could to win their release. He declined to comment on the kidnappers' principal demand, that France revoke a ban on Muslim head scarves in schools.
On the street near Tuesday's blast, people expressed fear and, worse, the uncertainty of where terrorism would arise next. Tatyana Pavlova, 19, was selling books in a small canopy only 100 feet from where the bomb went off. Still stunned an hour after the attack, she described smoke and fire and the jarring scenes of the wounded rushing by her.
"It is the first time I have seen it so close," she said. "Before, we only heard it on the news. You take the Metro, and sometimes you think something could happen. We simply pray to God each time that nothing happens to you."
Erin E. Arvedlund and Sophia Kishkovsky contributed reporting for this article.
--------
Suicide Bombing Kills 10 Outside Moscow
Subway Attack by Woman Follows Sabotage Of Two Jetliners
By Peter Baker
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, September 1, 2004; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49376-2004Aug31.html
MOSCOW, Aug. 31 -- A female suicide bomber set off a powerful homemade explosive device outside a Moscow subway station Tuesday, shooting shrapnel through a crowd of commuters and killing at least 10 people and injuring 51, authorities said.
The explosion transformed a mild late-summer evening in northern Moscow into a bloody scene of screaming bystanders, burning cars and rescue squads. Some bodies were found dozens of yards from the explosion, authorities said.
The bombing occurred exactly a week after explosives downed two Russian passenger jets almost simultaneously, killing 90 people in one of the deadliest attacks on civilian targets in Russia in years. Russian authorities have been investigating two female passengers with Chechen surnames who boarded the planes on last-minute tickets.
An Islamic extremist group with apparent ties to al Qaeda that claimed responsibility for the plane crashes asserted that it carried out the Tuesday night bombing, as well. "We in the Islambouli Brigades announce our responsibility for this operation . . . which comes in support of Muslims of Chechnya," it said in a statement, according to news agency reports from the Middle East.
Even before the subway station bombing, Russian news media reported that two other Chechen women accompanied the suspected plane bombers to Moscow in the days before the crashes and were still at large in the capital. Anticipating further attacks, authorities had stepped up security across the city, and initial reports Tuesday night suggested that the suicide bomber turned away from the subway station after seeing police officers checking documents at the entrance.
"She got scared of them, turned around and decided to blow herself up among the people," Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov told reporters after rushing to the scene. "There were many people there. The explosion was very powerful."
The Moscow subway system was bustling Tuesday with returning vacationers on the last day of summer vacation before the opening of schools. The Rizhskaya station is situated just off Prospekt Mira, or Boulevard of Peace, one of the city's major thoroughfares.
The bomb contained about two pounds of TNT along with iron bolts and metal fragments, officials said. The explosion, at about 8:15 p.m., set two cars on fire and pelted passersby with metal shards. The blazing automobiles sent plumes of dark smoke into the air. At first, witnesses thought a car bomb had exploded, but then it became clear that a woman had blown herself up.
Images broadcast on Russian television showed residents staggering in apparent shock, some with their faces or clothes covered in blood. Nearby shop windows were shattered. Rescue workers loaded bodies onto blue tarps and hauled them away. Seven people, including the bomber, were killed instantly, and others later died of injuries, officials said. Three children were reported among the wounded.
Another bomb loaded with metal fragments injured four people at a bus stop on the road to Moscow's Domodedovo Airport last week shortly before the doomed planes took off. It was unclear whether that blast was related to the later attacks.
The Tuesday bombing was the second to target the Moscow subway in six months. In February, a blast inside a subway car killed more than 40 people. Altogether, more than 600 people have died in terrorist attacks in Russia in the past two years. Most of the attacks have been related to the war in the separatist republic of Chechnya, where Russian troops are battling guerrillas fighting for independence.
The subway attack Tuesday came hours after President Vladimir Putin made his first public comments about the plane crashes since authorities said that they were the result of terrorism.
At a televised news conference in the resort city of Sochi alongside visiting French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, Putin tied the attacks to al Qaeda, relying on an Internet claim made by a group calling itself the Islambouli Brigades.
While noting that the claim had not yet been authenticated, Putin said it proved his long-standing argument that Chechen rebels have been aided by international terrorist organizations. "If one of the terrorist organizations has assumed responsibility for this and it is linked to al Qaeda, that is a fact that confirms the link between certain forces operating on the territory of Chechnya and international terrorism."
Putin also defended the legitimacy of Sunday's election for president of Chechnya, a vote widely criticized by human rights groups and U.S. and European officials as having been manipulated to install a Kremlin ally, Alu Alkhanov.
"It is impossible to drag people out of their homes by the scruffs of their necks or by their hair," Putin said, scoffing at allegations of fraud and ballot-box stuffing. "If a person doesn't want to go to the polls, he won't. This is called voting with one's feet."
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Axis Of Spies
September 01, 2004
TomPaine.com
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/axis_of_spies.php
Here's the axis we should be worried about: The Axis of Spies made up by the American Enterprise Institute, AIPAC and the Embassy of Israel.If the FBI weren't so busy trying to catch nonexistent Al Qaeda suspects, they might consider devoting a few more resources to tracking down this expanding Israeli nest of spies. (Oh, and The New Republic is very quiet on the Larry Franklin spy scandal so far. Very quiet. Too quiet.)
The Jerusalem Post reports, at least, the FBI has seized computer files from AIPAC's Steve Rosen, a good start:
FBI agents on Friday copied the computer hard drive of a senior staffer at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee who has been questioned in relation to the case of a Pentagon official suspected of turning over a classified document either directly to Israel, or via the pro-Israel lobby group.
That same article, which you can read here , notes that members of Congress are rallying (predictably) around AIPAC. Welcome to the nest of spies, Congressman Hoyer.
Haaretz reports that Abraham Foxman of the ADL is huffing and puffing, demanding that a special commission be appointed to investigate the person who leaked the probe. That's dangerous, Mr. Foxman, because the person who leaked it did so, it is now obvious, in order to stop the investigation, since Franklin was cooperating with the FBI to help them get deeper into the nest of spies. So if we find out who leaked it in the first place, it won't make Foxman happy. Anyway, here's what he says :
"The one clear fact that can be agreed upon is that there was a malicious and targeted leak that is more damaging than the actual allegations of Israeli spying - allegations that in all likelihood are baseless," said Abraham Foxman, the national director of the ADL, in an exclusive interview to Haaretz.
"The ADL will demand appointing a commission of inquiry to make every effort in identifying which official or officials are behind the leak," said Foxman, who is known to have close relationships with administration officials and the White House.
"A leak directed against a friendly country like Israel causes grave damage, and the current suspicions of spying damaged Israel, the local Jewish community, and relations between the two countries," Foxman said.
Foxman maintains that an official within the administration is responsible for the leak.
"Someone in the hierarchy is trying to ruin relations between Israel and the administration and between Israel and the Jewish community," he said
Both Steve Rosen, and another AIPAC spy (okay, alleged spy) Keith Weissman, are named as part of the FBI's investigation, according to the Jewish Telegraph Agency and the Los Angeles Times. Neither Rosen nor Weissman have emerged to defend themselves. "You mean us? Spies?" According to the New York Times, both have been interviewed by the FBI, and are being defended by (who else?) Abbe Lowell. The Times also quotes the Israeli ambassador, Danny Ayalon, saying that the investigation is "fizzling out because there's nothing there." Besides, we shredded all that.
Meanwhile Jim Lobe, bane of neocons, writing for Inter Press Service, has a wonderful piece reminding us that Larry Franklin, the hapless Pentagon apparatchik and official Stooge of Feith, who wandered into an AIPAC-Israeli embassy meeting that was being monitored by the FBI, is just the tip of the iceberg. As Lobe points out, many of the principals in the U.S. Israeli lobby have been caught up in spy probes going back 25 years, including Steve Bryen and Doug Feith himself. Also under investigation have been Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen and Paul Wolfowitz, as Lobe reports, citing a book by Stephen Green, Taking Sides: America's Secret Relations with a Militant Israel:
Perle, Ledeen, and Wolfowitz have also been the subject of FBI inquiries, according to Green's account. In 1970, one year after he was hired by Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, an FBI wiretap authorized for the Israeli Embassy picked up Perle discussing classified information with an embassy official, while Wolfowitz was investigated in 1978 for providing a classified document on the proposed sale of a U.S. weapons system to an Arab government to an Israeli official via an AIPAC staffer.
See also Counterpunch's reprint of Sam Husseini's compilation of Israeli spy stories in the United States, with a dozen or more examples, mostly sources from major Western press outlets, and a lot of it having to with Israeli attempts to acquire U.S. military technology. Read it here .
There's also a great summary of the story so far, citing worldwide media accounts, by the Christian Science Monitor. Among many items, the CSM cites the Boston Globe account from a few days ago reporting on investigations of the Office of Special Plans, where Franklin worked, for covert operations targeting Iran and Syria.
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F.B.I. Interviews 2 Suspected of Passing Secrets to Israel
September 1, 2004
New York Times
By DAVID JOHNSTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/01/national/01inquire.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Aug. 31 - Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation have conducted interviews with two officials at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee who are suspected of passing classified information from a Pentagon analyst to Israeli intelligence, government officials and a lawyer for the committee said on Tuesday.
On Friday, F.B.I. agents visited the two officials of the group, Steven Rosen, the organization's director of foreign policy issues, and Keith Weissman, one of its experts on Iran, said Nathan Lewin, a lawyer for the pro-Israel lobbying group, known as Aipac.
The interviews took place about the same time that news organizations began reporting the existence of the F.B.I. counterintelligence investigation, officials said. The F.B.I. interviews were halted when each of the men asked to be represented by a lawyer before answering more questions.
A Washington defense lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said he had been hired to represent the employees, but would not discuss the case. Aipac has said in a statement that the organization is cooperating with investigators but that the accusations against its employees are baseless.
The F.B.I. interviews with Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman were confirmed by American government officials who have been briefed about the case. Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman were first identified in Israeli press accounts.
The authorities said that Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman knew Lawrence A. Franklin, the Defense Department analyst who is suspected of giving them classified information related to American policy toward Iran. Mr. Franklin is a lower-level analyst who works on Iranian issues in the office of Douglas J. Feith, under secretary of defense for policy.
Mr. Rosen, Aipac's director of foreign policy issues, is a longtime employee of the organization. Associates said he was regarded as brilliant, energetic and one of the group's most influential employees, with wide-ranging contacts within the Bush administration and overseas. Mr. Weissman is not as senior as Mr. Rosen. He is known within the organization as a solid, capable policy analyst intimately familiar with the Middle East.
Investigators believe that the Aipac officials turned Mr. Franklin's information over to the Israelis, although the exact nature of their contacts with Israel remains unclear and it is uncertain whether Mr. Franklin knew of their discussions with Israel.
Associates of Mr. Franklin said he had provided information about policy deliberations concerning Iran to the Aipac officials, not to provide information to Israel, but in hope that it might be used to somehow influence the Bush administration to formulate a policy toward Iran.
It is not illegal for employees of Aipac to meet with Pentagon officials or representatives of the Israeli government, which has a wide-ranging information-sharing relationship with the United States. But knowingly passing classified materials to a foreign power could be a crime under American espionage statutes.
In recent weeks, Mr. Franklin has been cooperating with the authorities, according to the government officials, but his legal status is uncertain. Efforts to contact him have been unsuccessful. His friends have said that he did not engage in any wrongdoing.
The F.B.I. interviews with Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman are to resume shortly, but it appears unlikely that either man will be accused of any wrongdoing, at least pending the completion of the interviews and further investigation. Neither Mr. Rosen nor Mr. Weissman has been advised that he is a target of the investigation, and government officials said that the men's legal status remained uncertain.
In his first public comments on the case, the Israeli ambassador to the United States, Daniel Ayalon, said on Tuesday that the intelligence investigation was a "nonissue," adding: "I can tell you here, very authoritatively, very categorically, Israel does not spy on the United States. We do not gather information on our best friend and ally." Interviewed on CNN, Mr. Ayalon said that since Jonathan Jay Pollard, the naval intelligence analyst sentenced to life in prison as a spy for Israel in 1987, "we made a strategic decision to make sure that there is no such thing even in a remote way."
"There's nothing there," the ambassador said of the intelligence case. "We keep our contacts on a regular day with the administration and everybody watching - we keep doing it today. We have not heard anything from anybody, except this news in the media, which, as I mentioned, already are fizzling out because there's nothing there."
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Spy Probe Scans Neocon-Israel Ties
(Inter Press Service)
by Jim Lobe
September 1, 2004
http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=3478
The burgeoning scandal over claims that a Pentagon official passed highly classified secrets to a Zionist lobby group appears to be part of a much broader set of FBI and Pentagon investigations of close collaboration between prominent U.S. neoconservatives and Israel dating back some 30 years.
According to knowledgeable sources, who asked to not be identified, the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) has been intensively reviewing a series of past counter-intelligence probes that were started against several high-profile neocons but never followed up with prosecutions, to the great frustration of counterintelligence officers, in some cases.
Some of these past investigations involve top current officials, including Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz; Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, whose office appears to be the focus of the most recently disclosed inquiry; and Richard Perle, who resigned as Defense Policy Board (DPB) chairman last year.
All three were the subject of a lengthy investigative story by Stephen Green published by Counterpunch.org in February. Green is the author of two books on U.S.-Israeli relations, including Taking Sides: America's Secret Relations with a Militant Israel, which relies heavily on interviews with former Pentagon and counterintelligence officials.
At the same time, another Pentagon office concerned with the transfer of sensitive military and dual-use technologies has been examining the acquisition, modification and sales of key hi-tech military equipment by Israel obtained from the United States, in some cases with the help of prominent neoconservatives who were then serving in the government.
Some of that equipment has been sold by Israel - which in the last 20 years has become a top exporter of the world's most sophisticated hi-tech information and weapons technology - or by Israeli middlemen, to Russia, China and other potential U.S. strategic rivals. Some of it has also found its way onto the black market, where terrorist groups - possibly including al-Qaeda - obtained bootlegged copies, according to these sources.
Of particular interest in that connection are derivatives of a powerful case-management software called PROMIS that was produced by INSLAW Inc. in the early 1980s and acquired by Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, which then sold its own versions to other foreign intelligence agencies in the Middle East, Asia and Eastern Europe.
But these versions were modified with a "trap door" that permitted the seller to spy on the buyers' own intelligence files, according to a number of published reports.
A modified version of the software, which is used to monitor and track files on a multitude of databases, is believed to have been acquired by al-Qaeda on the black market in the late 1990s, possibly facilitating the group's global banking and money-laundering schemes, according to a Washington Times story of June 2001.
According to one source, Pentagon investigators believe it possible that al-Qaeda used the software to spy on various U.S. agencies that could have detected or foiled the Sept. 11, 2001 attack.
The FBI is reportedly also involved in the Pentagon's investigation, which is overseen by Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for International Technology Security John A. "Jack" Shaw with the explicit support of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
The latest incident is based on allegations that a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) career officer, Larry Franklin - who was assigned in 2001 to work in a special office dealing with Iraq and Iran under Feith - provided highly classified information, including a draft on U.S. policy towards Iran, to two staff members of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), one of Washington's most powerful lobby groups. One or both of the recipients allegedly passed the material to the Israeli embassy.
Franklin has not commented on the allegation, and Israel and AIPAC have strongly denied any involvement and say they are cooperating fully with FBI investigators.
The office in which Franklin has worked since 2001 is dominated by staunch neoconservatives, including Feith himself. Headed by William Luti, a retired Navy officer who worked for DPB member Newt Gingrich when he was speaker of the House of Representatives, it played a central role in building the case for war in Iraq.
Part of the office's strategy included working closely with the Iraqi National Congress (INC) led by now-disgraced exile Ahmed Chalabi, and the DPB members in developing and selectively leaking intelligence analyses that supported the now-discredited thesis that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had close ties to al-Qaeda.
Feith's office enjoyed especially close links with Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, to whom it "stovepiped" its analyses without having them vetted by professional intelligence analysts in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the DIA, or the State Department Bureau for Intelligence of Research (INR).
Since the Iraq war, Feith's office has also lobbied hard within the U.S. government for a confrontational posture vis-à-vis Iran and Syria, including actions aimed at destabilizing both governments - policies which, in addition to the ousting of Hussein, have been strongly and publicly urged by prominent, hard-line neoconservatives, such as Perle, Feith and Perle's associate at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Michael Ledeen, among others.
Despite his status as a career officer, Franklin, who is an Iran specialist, is considered both personally and ideologically close to several other prominent neoconservatives, who have also acted in various consultancy roles at the Pentagon, including Ledeen and Harold Rhode, who once described himself as Deputy Secretary of State Paul Wolfowitz's chief adviser on Islam.
In Dec. 2001, Rhode and Franklin met in Europe with a shadowy Iranian arms dealer, Manucher Ghorbanifar, who, along with Ledeen, played a central role in the arms-for-hostages deal involving the Reagan administration, Israel and Iran in the mid-1980s that became known as the "Iran-Contra Affair."
Ledeen set up the more recent meetings that apparently triggered the FBI to launch its investigation, which has intensified in recent months amid reports that Chalabi's INC, which has long been championed by the neoconservatives, has been passing sensitive intelligence to Iran.
Feith has long been an outspoken supporter of Israel's Likud Party, and his former law partner Marc Zell has served as a spokesman in Israel for the Jewish settler movement on the occupied West Bank.
He, Perle and several other like-minded hardliners participated in a task force that called for then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to work for the installation of a friendly government in Baghdad as a means of permanently altering the balance of power in the Middle East in Israel's favor, permitting it to abandon the Oslo peace process, which Feith had publicly opposed.
Previously, Feith served as a Middle East analyst in the National Security Council in the administration of former President Ronald Reagan (1981-89), but was summarily removed from that position in March 1982 because he had been the object of a FBI inquiry into whether he had provided classified material to an official of the Israeli embassy in Washington, according to Green's account.
But Perle, who was then serving as assistant secretary of defense for international security policy (ISP), which, among other responsibilities, had an important say in approving or denying licenses to export sensitive military or dual-use technology abroad, hired him as his "special counsel" and later as his deputy, where he served until 1986, when he left for his law practice with Zell, who had by then moved to Israel.
Also serving under Perle during these years was Stephen Bryen, a former staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the subject of a major FBI investigation in the late 1970s for offering classified documents to an Israeli intelligence officer in the presence of AIPAC's director, according to Green's account, which is backed up by some 500 pages of investigation documents released under a Freedom of Information request some 15 years ago.
Although political appointees decided against prosecution, Bryen was reportedly asked to leave the committee and, until his appointment by Perle in 1981, served as head of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), a group dedicated to promoting strategic ties between the United States and Israel and one in which Perle, Feith and Ledeen have long been active.
In his position as Perle's deputy, Bryen created the Defense Technology Security Administration (DTSA) which enforced regulations regarding technology transfer to foreign countries.
During his tenure, according to one source with personal knowledge of Bryen's work, "the U.S. shut down transfers to western Europe and Japan [which were depicted as too ready to sell them to Moscow] and opened up a back door to Israel" - a pattern that became embarrassingly evident after Perle left office and the current deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage, took over in 1987.
Soon, Armitage was raising serious questions about Bryen's approval of sensitive exports to Israel without appropriate vetting by other agencies.
"It is in the interest of U.S. and Israel to remove needless impediments to technological cooperation between them," Feith wrote in Commentary in 1992. "Technologies in the hands of responsible, friendly countries facing military threats, countries like Israel, serve to deter aggression, enhance regional stability and promote peace thereby."
Perle, Ledeen, and Wolfowitz have also been the subject of FBI inquiries, according to Green's account. In 1970, one year after he was hired by Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, an FBI wiretap authorized for the Israeli Embassy picked up Perle discussing classified information with an embassy official, while Wolfowitz was investigated in 1978 for providing a classified document on the proposed sale of a U.S. weapons system to an Arab government to an Israeli official via an AIPAC staffer.
In 1992, when he was serving as undersecretary of defense for policy, Pentagon officials looking into the unauthorized export of classified technology to China, found that Wolfowitz's office was promoting Israel's export of advanced air-to-air missiles to Beijing in violation of a written agreement with Washington on arms re-sales.
The FBI and the Pentagon are reportedly taking a new look at all of these incidents and others to, in the words of a New York Times story Sunday, "get a better understanding of the relationships among conservative officials with strong ties to Israel."
It would be a mistake to see Franklin as the chief target of the current investigation, according to sources, but rather he should be viewed as one piece of a much broader puzzle.
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Traitorous 'Conservatives'
Israeli spies in Pentagon are heroes to the neocons
Antiwar.com
by Justin Raimondo
September 1, 2004
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=3479
"A lobby is like a night flower," wrote Steven Rosen, a top official of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). "It thrives in the dark and dies in the sun." With the light of day shining brightly on AIPAC's spy mission for Israel in the Pentagon, will one of the most powerful lobbying groups in Washington just curl up and blow away?
If only.
Even as the headlines were proclaiming their treason, AIPAC officials were feting Republicans at the GOP convention, braying that the charges are "outrageous." But what's outrageous is that so many prominent Republicans were openly consorting with an organization suspected of espionage, a claque of known fifth columnists who put the interests of a foreign country - Israel - above those of their own.
First identified in the Jersusalem Post as one of two AIPAC officials interviewed by the feds in connection with this case, Rosen is the "research director" for what is widely seen as a formidable presence among Washington lobbyists, and is "considered one of the most influential people in the organization." But he may have been a little too vigorous in pursuing one particular "research" project, which reportedly had him acting as a conduit for classified documents secreted from the Pentagon by Larry Franklin, a "mid-level" official and neoconservative ideologue working in Douglas Feith's Pentagon policy shop. Franklin is also reported to have met with an Israeli diplomat, Naor Gilon, who was apparently being watched by the authorities, according to this Newsweek report.
As FBI counterintelligence chief Dave Szady homed in on his prey, and "behind the scenes" government lawyers prepared to make the first arrests by issuing a criminal complaint against one or more figures in the case," Israel's amen corner went into hyper-drive, blowing more smoke than a NORML convention. My favorite was the line, gloatingly repeated by Israeli government officials, that they didn't need to spy on the U.S., because they already know all our secrets worth knowing - and the rest they can have by just asking. Aside from being untrue - they sure didn't know that their mole, Franklin, had been busted and turned into an informant, at least not until Lesley Stahl broke the story - this is hardly reassuring.
The U.S. and Israel are, after all, separate countries, and, as much as America's Likudniks don't like to acknowledge it, the two nations have separate and often conflicting interests, no matter how many times Congress votes to kiss Ariel Sharon's butt while stuffing another few million into his g-string. Jonathan Pollard stole the crown jewels of the American intelligence community and Israel sold them to the Soviet Union in exchange for an influx of Soviet Jews - who are now being supported with American tax dollars in the form of $3 billion in annual tribute to Tel Aviv.
Oh, but we've learned our lesson, they cry and we'll never ever do it again.
In the post-9/11 world, can we afford to take that chance? Especially when Pollard is still revered in Israel and honored by the Israeli government, which has several times demanded his release?
We aren't just talking about somebody showing the Israelis some policy papers, but an investigation that has been going on since 2002, involving extensive electronic and telephonic intercepts, photographs, and other evidence gathered by methods that required the approval of a special counterintelligence court presided over by a judge. Attempts by AIPAC, and the Israeli government (or do I repeat myself?) to minimize both Franklin's importance and the extent of the damage done to our national security are being blown out of the water as the scandal expands at a seemingly exponential rate. In addition to the theft of classified documents, including a draft presidential directive, the Israeli spy ring in the Pentagon has other tentacles, reaching into:
- The Niger uranium forgeries, which inferentially found their way into the President's 2003 State of the Union address. Former CIA agent Larry Johnson, interviewed on MSNBC the other night, had this to say:
"What I've been told is that there's a strong belief that the forgery was carried out by Israel in an effort to help build up the evidence to allow the United States to justify going to war. So, this whole thing that started with the outing of Valerie Plame, the CIA officer, started growing and expanding when they saw that there's this forged memo and then people linked to the office of - in the office of Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith at the Department of Defense were seen as having some very close contacts and sharing information with the Israeli intelligence sources."
- The Franklin Affair is connected to a bigger tentacle, "a broader probe" which, the Boston Globe reports, "is trying to determine whether Defense Department officials went outside normal channels to gather intelligence on Iraq or overstepped their legal mandate by meeting with dissidents to plot against Iran and Syria, according to Bush administration and congressional officials."
- Franklin, who - like some others under investigation - is "singing like a canary," as one wag put it, is thought to have knowledge of the nixed deal between the Iranians and the U.S., in which Tehran agreed to hand over al-Qaeda leaders, including a son of bin Laden's, in exchange for the Mujahideen e Khalq, an Iranian Marxist terrorist group. As the Jerusalem Post reports:
"The FBI's investigation of Larry Franklin began not long after it was leaked that the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans sent two Defense officials, one of them Franklin, to Paris to meet with a dissident Iranian arms trader.
The latter, Manucher Ghorbanifar, played a central role in the Iran-Contra affair - in which Israel had a major involvement - in the mid 1980's.
"The purpose of the meeting with Ghorbanifar was to undermine a pending deal that the White House had been negotiating with the Iranian government. At the time, Iran had considered turning over five al-Qaida operatives in exchange for Washington dropping its support for Mujahadeen Khalq, an Iraq-based rebel Iranian group listed as a terrorist organization by the State Department."
The Franklin-Ghorbanifar meetings, also involving policy analyst Harold Rhode and neocon guru Michael Ledeen, throw the spotlight on the activities of a pro-Israel cabal in the highest reaches of the U.S. government. As a piece by Joshua Marshall, Laura Rozen, and Paul Glastris in The Washington Monthly put it,
"The DoD-Ghorbanifar meetings suggest the possibility that a rogue faction at the Pentagon was trying to work outside normal US foreign policy channels to advance a 'regime change' agenda not approved by the president's foreign policy principals or even the president himself."
Now that Steve Rosen has had his computer seized, and top Pentagon officials are being interviewed - including Franklin's bosses, Feith and Paul Wolfowitz - and it looks like the case is going forward full speed ahead - so is Israel's fifth column in the U.S., which is going on the offensive with a spirited defense of their spy nest.
David Frum, the fired White House speech writer who co-authored the infamous "axis of evil" jeremiad, writes in National Review that the whole incident is a "triumph of media manipulation," and "a non-story": whatever transactions occurred between Franklin and the Israelis were just an exchange of "personal opinion," and did not involve classified documents. So move along, there's nothing to see here.
Yeah, but why has the FBI been watching the Israelis and their co-conspirators in the U.S., utilizing sophisticated surveillance techniques requiring an order from a special court, for at least two years? Frum's answer:
"There are figures inside the US government who want to see Israel treated, not as the ally it is by law and treaty (Israel like Japan, Australia, and New Zealand is designated a 'major non-NATO ally' for intelligence- and technology-sharing purposes) but as the source of all the trouble in the Middle East and the world. They have injected their own hysterical agenda into the reporting of what would otherwise be a story of an FBI investigation that found nothing much."
Frum's apologia for the Israeli spy nest is headlined "Jewish Conspiracies in the Pentagon?" But Frum, as we can see, is the conspiracy theorist here. According to him, the whole thing is part of a Vast Anti-Semitic Conspiracy entrenched in the highest reaches of the Justice Department and other agencies of the U.S. government. Aside from being silly on the face of it, the big problem with Frum's wacky theory is that Franklin isn't even Jewish - he's an ideologue who's drunk enough of the neocons' Kool-Aid to reconcile his political views with his devout Catholicism.
The contours of the neocons' defense are already taking an all-too-familiar shape: as Michael Ledeen put it,
"We're dealing with incompetence or McCarthyism. In either case, it's disgusting."
It is extremely odd to be reading this sort of rhetoric in the pages of National Review, because it was the founder of that magazine, William F. Buckley, Jr., who was a principal supporter of McCarthy. Buckley wrote a book, McCarthy and His Enemies, defending the anti-Communist senator from Wisconsin as being essentially correct about the extent of Communist infiltration of the U.S. government under FDR and Truman. Furthermore, as the Venona transcripts revealed, McCarthy had sorely underestimated the extent to which the Soviets had penetrated U.S. government institutions. He was not only right: he was righter than he knew.
If the FBI's investigation into Israel's spy nest in the Pentagon is an example of "McCarthyism" in action, then perhaps we can assume that the cabal's influence reaches far higher than investigators presently believe.
The Pentagon spy scandal is proof that Israel, seeking to manipulate us at every turn, utilized its agents - paid and unpaid - in the U.S., operating at the highest levels of government, to influence and even make policy to suit Israeli rather than American interests. Ruthless in their tactics - and careless, perhaps due to their increasing desperation - the American Likudniks resorted to clumsily illegal means: outing CIA agent Valerie Plame, introducing forgeries and other phony "evidence" of Iraqi WMD into the American intelligence stream, and passing classified documents to Israel, until they were finally tripped up by their own hubris and sense of inviolability. After all, the Bush administration wouldn't dare prosecute, for fear of alienating their vehemently pro-Israel Christian fundie base - would they?
Apparently they would. Franklin, having turned state's evidence weeks ago, has been telling federal prosecutors in Virginia what he knows, and that is probably plenty. Franklin is the crowbar that law enforcement officials are using to unearth Israel's pod people in the Pentagon.
It is beyond belief that top Republican and Democratic members of Congress, notably Reps. Roy Blunt of Missouri, a Republican leader in the House of Representatives, and Steny Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland, are openly warning law enforcement to back off from doing their job: We "will want to look carefully at any allegations that might endanger our national security," avers Blunt. So, according to the Honorable Mr. Blunt, it's the allegations, and not the possibility that there might be something to them, that "endanger our national security."
I'll tell you what endangers our national security: politicians, lobbyists, and "activists" who put the interests of a foreign country above those of their native - or adopted - land. And don't hand me that malarkey about how Israeli and American interests are identical, especially since 9/11: the interests of all nations diverge on account of their separateness. Israel, in spite of its pretensions, is not the 51st state: the objectives of Israeli policy naturally deviate from our own, given their geography and our need to win over Arab and Muslim allies in the campaign to stamp out al-Qaeda.
If you want to understand the post-9/11 rampage that fairly describes our foreign policy since the twin towers fell, just think of the campaign of lies, scare-mongering, and secret manipulations of "intelligence" as an Israeli covert action. Before they invaded Kurdistan, they had already penetrated Washington and taken over key centers of power: and, when they didn't have the formal authority, they simply went off on their own, as with the Ledeen-Franklin-Ghorbanifar meetings or "Operation Copper Green," the Pentagon's secret army of torturers.
Let the neocons scream "McCarthyism!" all they want. Because McCarthy was right - and so are those of us who have been pointing to Israeli subversion of U.S. national security since November of 2001. AIPAC must come clean, or be disbanded. Don't they know there's a war on? Oh, but Israel is our great friend, our closest ally - they're on our side.
Are they? The lesson of the Franklin affair is that they aren't. And what about their "American" amen corner? The neocons, for all their "patriotic" bluster, seem unnaturally defensive and militant in their denials that Israel could ever be involved in espionage against the U.S., well before all the evidence is in. Espionage charges against any other nation on earth would not evoke such a passionate defense, and it's ironic that the alleged super-patriots over at National Review and David Horowitz's propaganda mill would so readily man the barricades on behalf of accused spies and foreign agents.
This brings to mind an interview with Tom Clancy, best-selling author of spy thrillers, in which he had the following exchange with Deborah Norville on MSNBC:
NORVILLE: And Paul Wolfowitz.
CLANCY: Is he really on our side?
NORVILLE: You genuinely ask that question? Is he on our side?
CLANCY: I sat in on - I was in the Pentagon in '01 for a red team operation and he came in and briefed us. And after the brief, I just thought, is he really on our side? Sorry.
Clancy sure got that one right - and that pretty well sums up what the Franklin Affair is all about. Writing in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, Ze'ev Schiff relates the following story:
"Before former U.S. Central Intelligence Agency head George Tenet retired, he made stinging comments on various occasions to Israeli officials in the intelligence community, especially the Mossad, saying Israel had a spy in America. The accusation was rejected out of hand - Tenet was even loudly challenged to catch any such agent and expose him publicly."
Tenet, it seems, has taken up the challenge. And more power to him. So let's hear no more whining from the peanut gallery, no complaints of "McCarthyism" from our fake "conservatives." The Israelis are getting just what they asked for.
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Abuse Inquiry Cites 26 Soldiers
2 Deaths in Afghanistan Led to Army Probe
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 1, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A50474-2004Aug31?language=printer
Army investigators have recommended bringing abuse-related charges against 26 soldiers stemming from a probe into the deaths of two detainees in Afghanistan in December 2002, Pentagon officials said yesterday.
The cases, involving the two deaths and other incidents at the big U.S. base in Bagram, Afghanistan, represent an attempt to assign criminal responsibility for abuse of detainees that occurred well before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and the subsequent scandal over the maltreatment of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad.
The Afghanistan charges recommended by Army investigators and prosecutors, after an investigation that took well over a year, range from negligent homicide to less serious offenses such as dereliction of duty and failure to report an offense, two Army officers familiar with the case said. One sergeant has already been charged, officials said.
"The CID is about to wrap this up," said one officer, referring to the Army's Criminal Investigation Division. The next step, officials said, is for Army commanders to decide whether to follow the recommendations on charges. They are expected to move quickly, the officials said.
The results of the investigation raise the possibility that the number of soldiers facing charges for abuse in Afghanistan could approach that of soldiers ultimately charged with maltreatment of prisoners in Iraq.
Seven military police soldiers have been charged in the scandal at Abu Ghraib. Last week, Army investigators concluded that an additional 30 soldiers and contractors had participated in the abuse there, and 11 others faced possible charges or discipline for not reporting what they saw. Decisions on charges for any of those people have not been made.
Still, military officials said they don't expect the Afghan cases to have as powerful a public impact as the investigations of abuse in Iraq. That is in part because the alleged offenses occurred two years ago and appear to be fairly limited in number, but also because no photographs of abuse have been found by investigators.
Most of the soldiers facing charges are from the Fort Bragg, N.C.-based 519th Military Intelligence Battalion and the 377th Military Police Company, an Army Reserve unit based in Cincinnati. It is possible that some Special Operations troops might be charged, said one officer.
The 519th intelligence unit is rapidly becoming one of the more notorious units in the Army. After serving at Bagram, the main U.S. base in Afghanistan, in 2002, some of its members were deployed to Iraq a year later and were posted to Abu Ghraib. There, members of the unit were implicated in abuse of prisoners in the fall and early winter of 2003.
Army investigators have found that soldiers in the unit brought to Iraq some techniques they had employed in Afghanistan, such as the use of dogs to intimidate prisoners. It is possible that some of the 519th soldiers will be charged with offenses in both countries, one Pentagon official said.
Last week, an Army report on Abu Ghraib said that military intelligence (MI) soldiers at the prison bore significant responsibility for mistreatment of prisoners. It found that MI soldiers "allegedly requested, encouraged, condoned or solicited" abuse by MPs in 16 of 44 incidents at Abu Ghraib that were investigated.
The Army expects to begin filing charges against soldiers in the Afghanistan allegations in two to three weeks. Last month, officials brought charges against one member of the 377th, Sgt. James P. Boland, who was accused of assault, maltreatment and dereliction of duty. It could not be determined why that case was brought earlier. Boland could not be reached to comment, and a person answering the telephone at his house said he was at Fort Knox, Ky.
The charges result from an unusually lengthy investigation into the two previously publicized deaths at Bagram, about 35 miles north of the Afghan capital of Kabul. Both cases were ruled homicides by a military coroner.
Mullah Habibullah, 30, died of a pulmonary embolism caused by blunt-force injuries to the legs, according to an autopsy report released in May. The other prisoner, known by officials only as Dilawar, 22, died from blunt-force injuries to his lower extremities complicating coronary artery disease.
At one point, Army investigators told superiors that their findings were inconclusive, said an Army officer who served in Afghanistan -- one of several officials who discussed the case on the condition of anonymity because the investigation's results haven't been officially released. The investigators were then ordered to re-open the inquiry, he said, and led investigators to uncover other suspected incidents of mistreatment unrelated to the deaths.
Should charges be filed, he said, it will be "good news" for the Army because it will demonstrate that the investigative process, while prolonged, produces results, he said.
Another Army officer briefed on some aspects of the case, however, said the Afghanistan findings will raise new questions about the Army's uniformed and civilian leadership. Foremost in his mind, he said, was that the Army had so few military intelligence units available that the 519th was deployed twice in two years.
"Why are we so short that the same unit had to be moved from Afghanistan to Iraq?" he asked.
The charges being contemplated are not related to a case in which a former Army Special Forces soldier working as a contractor for the CIA was charged with assault in the death of an Afghan prisoner in June 2003. David A. Passaro was charged in June with beating a detainee held at a small base at Asadabad, near the Pakistani border.
Nor are the charges being prepared as the result of a review of U.S. military detention practices in Afghanistan being carried out by Army Brig. Gen. Charles H. Jacoby Jr., the deputy U.S. commander there. But that inquiry -- one of 11 formal Pentagon studies of military detention initiated since the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in the spring -- is expected to be released at about the same time the charges are brought against the soldiers in the Bagram homicide case, officials said.
"It was not an investigation," said one Pentagon official who has read the current draft of the Jacoby report. "It's more a review of where things are in Afghanistan today."
Yet another review, looking into whether Special Operations troops abused detainees in or near Iraq, also is expected to be released in about two weeks, Pentagon officials said.
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Decision Awaited on Trial for Pfc. England
Soldier Accused of Prisoner Abuse Is Likely to Face Court-Martial, Her Attorneys Say
By Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 1, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50504-2004Aug31.html
FORT BRAGG, N.C., Aug. 31 -- An Army investigating officer will now decide whether Pfc. Lynndie R. England should face a full-blown military trial on as many as 20 charges of abusing detainees and sexual misconduct, after hearing several days of testimony here about the soldier's alleged crimes at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Army prosecutors at the base here Tuesday added a blanket charge of maltreatment and cruelty against the 21-year-old military police administrative clerk, who was captured last fall in several digital photographs apparently humiliating and abusing naked detainees. Col. Denise J. Arn, who presided over England's pretrial hearing, said she will consider all the charges over the next week and will then make a recommendation to a commanding officer.
A three-star general here then will decide whether England will face a court-martial that could send her to prison for nearly 40 years if she is convicted. England's attorneys said Tuesday afternoon that they believe England will certainly appear in a court-martial but again said that she has become a scapegoat for what has turned into a sprawling abuse scandal involving dozens of soldiers.
The hearing -- delayed multiple times and spread out over seven days of testimony and argument -- centered on England's role in a series of abusive acts, such as her appearing in a photograph holding a leash around a naked detainee's neck and her pointing at naked detainees as they were forced to masturbate. Witnesses testified that the abuse went unreported and that England appeared to enjoy the activities.
"She was having fun," said Capt. Crystal Jennings, one of three prosecutors on the case, emphasizing that England was an administrative clerk who had no official business on Tier 1A of the prison, where the most serious abuse occurred. "There's no indication she was there for a military purpose. . . . There were no orders. There's no evidence that Pfc. England was given any order to do these things."
But defense attorneys also tried to expose recent revelations that England and six other military police soldiers might have been acting in concert with military intelligence personnel to humiliate detainees as part of a sanctioned interrogation strategy. Two official Pentagon reports issued last week blamed widespread leadership failures in Iraq and the actions of nearly 50 soldiers linked to the abuse.
"Obviously, Pfc. England was not acting alone," said Richard A. Hernandez, her lead civilian defense attorney.
Jennings countered that the photographs of England speak for themselves. In statements to criminal investigators, England admitted taking part in the acts.
England also appears in a number of sexually explicit photographs -- some of which show her having sex with another soldier -- offenses that alone could result in significant prison time. It is unclear when England would face trial, though a decision could be made within weeks or months.
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Defense Department Actions in Union Talks Are Criticized
Agreement on Civilian Personnel Rules May Face Delay
By Christopher Lee
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 1, 2004; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50685-2004Aug31.html
Talks between federal employee unions and the Bush administration over the development of a new personnel system for the Defense Department appeared to be on the verge of breaking down this week, two weeks after similar discussions stalled at the Department of Homeland Security.
Leaders of a coalition of three dozen unions say officials from the Pentagon and the Office of Personnel Management have refused to provide details of their plans or give serious consideration to ideas and questions from the unions. Congress paved the way for a new system last year when it gave Pentagon officials the authority to rewrite personnel rules affecting nearly 750,000 civilian employees. Defense is expected to release a detailed proposal by the end of the year and to begin implementing the new system in late 2005.
"We're just talking to people who are sitting there. I don't know if they are listening," said John Gage, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal employee union. ". . . Our people are very frustrated because we're ready to provide meaningful input and to really see if we can get a personnel system that both sides can live with."
Gage and other union leaders are scheduled to discuss their complaints today in a news conference at the Capital Hilton. The session comes less than two weeks after Gage and another prominent union leader told their members that Homeland Security officials had walked out of talks on new personnel rules at that department.
Pentagon officials said they believe the development of the National Security Personnel System is going well but there are no details yet, only concepts. Employees have provided feedback through town hall meetings, an interactive Web site and meetings between top officials and union leaders, they said.
"The union session we held last week met our goals and expectations," Lt. Col. Joseph Richard, a DOD spokesman, wrote in an e-mailed response to questions. "We had meaningful dialogue, talked about substance, shared concerns and exchanged ideas that will guide us as we continue to explore options."
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said that managers need more freedom over how workers are paid, promoted, deployed and disciplined to better fight the war on terrorism. The administration won similar authority to rewrite personnel rules as part of legislation creating the Department of Homeland Security in 2002. The final systems in both departments could serve as templates for civil service changes across the government, experts say.
While the unions have little power to block such changes, Congress has made it clear that employees and their representatives should have a collaborative role in shaping the new personnel systems.
In February, Pentagon officials issued a 13-page memo outlining labor relations "concepts" that union leaders said would end meaningful collective bargaining over work rules and eliminate third-party review of labor disputes. Not long afterward, Rumsfeld named Navy Secretary Gordon R. England to oversee development of the system at a slower pace.
The two sides have met four times since June, including twice last week. Another meeting is set for Sept. 10.
Administration officials distributed a 12-page outline last week of management's concerns with the current labor relations and employee appeals systems, as well as options for change. The document suggests limiting union rights to bargain over workplace policy changes to matters that have a "significant impact" on employees, and then only after the changes have been implemented. Bargaining can take months under the current system, and changes can be implemented only when talks are complete, the document says.
In response, the unions submitted a 10-page document challenging officials' right to make many of the changes and asking management to provide specific examples of how the current system has hurt national security.
Greg Junemann, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, said union officials agree the current system has flaws. But Pentagon and OPM officials are not willing to make good-faith efforts to reach a compromise, he said.
"The reason they are meeting with us right now is because Congress told them to," he said.
R. Thomas Buffenbarger, president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, said: "It's becoming more and more transparent by the day that it is a form of union-busting. . . . There's another agenda operating behind the warm and fuzzy facade that's out there. And that agenda is the one that's going to cut the legs out from under the civil service system."
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Reservist Faces Charges in 2 Afghan Deaths
September 1, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Afghan-Prisoner-Abuse.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Army charged a military police reservist with assault and dereliction of duty in connection with the deaths of two Afghans in U.S. military control in Afghanistan, and investigators have implicated about two dozen other soldiers, Army officials said Wednesday.
Two officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the investigation is not complete and that it is uncertain how many soldiers eventually will face criminal charges. The deaths, on Dec. 3 and Dec. 10, 2002, were ruled homicides by U.S. military medical examiners.
In the first case, Mullah Habibullah, believed to be about 28, died of ``pulmonary embolism due to blunt force injuries to the legs,'' according to doctors. He was in detention at Bagram, Afghanistan.
One week later, an Afghan identified only as Dilawar, 22, died in U.S. custody at Bagram. Doctors blamed his death on ``blunt force injuries to lower extremities complicating coronary artery disease.''
Criminal charges were filed Aug. 23 by Army Forces Command at Fort McPherson, Ga., against Sgt. James P. Boland of the Army Reserve's 377th Military Policy Company, based in Cincinnati.
Others who are expected to face charges are from the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion from Fort Bragg, N.C. Some members of the 519th went from Afghanistan to Iraq in 2003 and are among those accused by Army investigators of abusing Iraqi detainees in the fall of 2003.
The Boland charge sheet released Wednesday lists one count of dereliction of duty in connection with Habibullah's death.
The sheet says Boland, who was a guard at the Bagram prison, was derelict ``in that he negligently, willfully or through culpable inefficiency'' failed to take corrective action against another soldier who struck Habibullah while he was restrained. The name of the other soldier was blacked out for privacy reasons; his rank was specialist.
The other charges are in connection with Dilawar's death. Boland is accused of dereliction of duty for failing to seek medical treatment for the prisoner, ``who was visibly in need of medical care and later died,'' according to the charge sheet issued by Army Forces Command.
Boland also is charged with maltreating Dilawar ``by shackling him in a standing position with hands suspended above shoulder level for a prolonged period of time.'' An alternate charge of assault is listed, citing the same description of a prolonged shackling of Dilawar.
Calls on Wednesday to Boland's unit were not immediately returned.
It falls to Gen. Dan K. McNeill, commander of Army Forces Command, to designate a military officer to act on the charges recommended against those who have been implicated.
By coincidence, McNeill was commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan at the time of the alleged homicides, and he initiated an internal review of conditions at the Bagram detention facility.
An initial Army criminal investigation, the results of which were briefed to McNeill while he still was in charge in Afghanistan, did not recommend any criminal charges, according to a senior Army official who discussed the matter on condition of anonymity. For reasons that have not been made public, the investigation was reopened after McNeill left his post in Afghanistan.
The Washington Post reported Wednesday that the Army is expected to levels charges against 26 soldiers, including negligent homicide.
Army officials told The Associated Press on Wednesday that about two dozen soldiers have been implicated in the investigation by the Army's Criminal Investigation Division but the exact number who will face charges is unclear.
Christopher Grey, spokesman for the Army's Criminal Investigation Command at Fort Belvoir, Va., would not say whether any soldiers have been implicated or what units are under investigation. He said the investigation was nearing completion.
In Afghanistan, a spokeswoman for the military said it ``welcomes investigation into alleged criminal acts with the goal of determining justice.''
``Of course, the accused are innocent until proven guilty,'' Lt. Col. Susan Meisner said in an e-mail. She did not address the detail of the Post's report.
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Assault Study Finds Problem Is Widespread in Air Force
September 1, 2004
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/01/national/01rape.html?pagewanted=all
FORT WORTH, Aug. 31 (AP) - The sexual assault problem in the Air Force is more widespread than officials first thought, and combating it will require changes in Air Force culture, according to a report released on Monday.
After a four-month study of 85 installations in the United States and overseas, Air Force teams reported that many rapes had not been reported because victims feared that they would be disciplined and that response programs for victims were inadequate.
The Air Force also lacks a formal sexual assault policy, and prevention training has been sporadic and focused more on sexual harassment than rape, the assessment found.
The report recommends major changes, including developing a sexual assault prevention and response policy; integrating databases to report and track rapes; and requiring assault response training.
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Ripples From the Schlesinger Report
Antiwar.com
by Colonel Daniel Smith, USA (Ret.)
September 1, 2004
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/dsmith.php?articleid=3475
First: The "Who." Initially seven, then 28, were charged or under investigation. Now at least two more may be charged and as many as 53 have been implicated. An additional five have been singled out by name as bearing responsibility. More may eventually be charged or be in some way held responsible.
Second: The "What." Although some of the 11 investigations of detainee abuse are still in progress, there were at least 300 reported instances of abusive - sometimes fatally abusive - treatment of prisoners according to the Aug. 24, 2004 report [.pdf] by the Schlesinger panel. Of these 300 incidents, a number that triples the previously acknowledged total, the Schlesinger panel found 66 had been substantiated so far, with eight of the latter occurring at Guantanamo, three in Afghanistan, and 55 at Abu Ghraib. (An Army report [.pdf] released Aug. 25 documented 44 cases of abuse at Abu Ghraib.)
Third: The "How." Former Congresswoman Tillie Fowler, one of the four members of the Schlesinger panel, declared, "The warning signs were there, but went unnoticed or were ignored. Time and again we found examples of leaders failing to exercise the judgment, awareness and resourcefulness necessary to realize the magnitude of the problem."
"Leadership" - rather, the absence of leadership - was also singled out in other reports by Major General Antonio Taguba (U.S. Central Command) in February and Lieutenant General Paul Mikolashek (Army Inspector General) in July. The Aug. 25 Army report by Major General George Fay and Lieutenant General Anthony Jones, which focuses on the role of military intelligence personnel and civilian interrogators and translators, cites inadequate oversight and inconsistent, unclear guidance from senior officers - both failures in meeting the responsibilities of leaders.
Fourth: The Fallout Here the "ripple rule" applies: the further one is from the epicenter ( Iraq and Abu Ghraib specifically), the less severe the impact of the scandal.
Clearly, those who committed the abuses are directly at fault for their acts. Equally accountable are any, either in the chain-of-command or senior in rank to the abusers, who might have ordered or encouraged abuse or, knowing about it, condoned it. Given the military's hierarchical structure, an argument for reduced culpability can be made for those who knew what was happening but were of lesser rank than the abusers.
Similarly, those in direct command of a unit are directly responsible for what is done and what is not done within their command. Here a basic rule, practiced by every successful noncommissioned and commissioned officer, comes into play: what the boss checks is what gets done. The Schlesinger panel describes the Abu Ghraib prison at night, when the sexual humiliations and the worst intimidation (dogs) occurred, as an "Animal House." Significantly, there is no indication that officers in the chain-of-command made unannounced visits to Abu Ghraib "after hours" to see what happened during the night shift.
The new Army report essentially looked at the direct chain-of-command from brigade down, a limitation that did not apply to the Schlesinger report. Yet above the direct commanders, the ripples from the Schlesinger panel's findings are muted. Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez and his deputy are both admonished for not pouring more resources into the prison, where the ratio of prisoners to guards was as great as 75 to 1. But then the panel backs off, attributing the failure to comprehend what was happening to the gross understaffing of Sanchez's own headquarters (less than one-third of its authorized strength) as well as to the proverbial "fog of war." Commanders of U.S. Central Command are admonished (along with Sanchez) for failing to react in a timely way to the insurgency that flared in early summer, both in terms of asking for more coalition fighters and more military police, interrogators, and translators to handle the influx of detainees. Again, the "distraction" of war-fighting is invoked as mitigation.
Finally, at the Pentagon itself, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the joint staff itself, and the "Office of the Secretary of Defense" are admonished for failing to anticipate what could (and did) happen after Saddam's fall and for being unprepared to rapidly respond to changed circumstances on the ground. Here the leadership failure lay in the mindset of top officials who envisioned only one, smooth, relatively benign scenario: transition from war to peace. It is a classic case of believing one's own propaganda.
An Ethical Atmosphere That Enabled Abuse These failings of leadership turn on the practical and pragmatic. There is, however, another dimension for which the greatest culpability for failure lies at the highest levels, not the lowest. This is the ethical atmosphere, both the actions encouraged or tolerated and those forbidden.
As the Schlesinger panel acknowledges, combat places great psychological stress on troops at the same time that actions normally forbidden - killing others - are sanctioned by the state in its defense. The pressures to succumb to "operational necessity" at the expense of individual ethics can be daunting, and success in resisting these pressures may turn on a combination of a solid ethical foundation reinforced by the unambiguous commitment of and emphasis by leaders and commanders at all levels to high moral conduct. Considering this latter element, constraints against mistreating detainees that should have been in play were missing because of unclear policies, exceptions to and expansion of permitted "techniques," and the unintended but predictable migration of these techniques from one venue (Guantanamo Bay) to another (Abu Ghraib).
Unfortunately, the Schlesinger report itself tends to undercut standards for ethical treatment of detainees. It asserts that (and implicitly rejects) conforming to the International Committee of the Red Cross' (ICRC) interpretation of the Geneva Conventions would mean that "interrogation operations would not be allowed." The panel bases this conclusion on the fact that the ICRC recognizes only two classes of detainees - civilians who must be charged with and tried for a crime and enemy combatants subject to release when hostilities end - while the U.S. insists there is a third class, "unlawful combatants," for those who do not fit into either of the Geneva categories.
Now enemy combatants, as prisoners-of-war, are required to give only basic personal information under interrogation, but there is no prohibition against repeated interrogation sessions in accordance with applicable conventions and customary law. The real problem - and why the U.S. feels it needs to create a new category of detainee, lies in thinking of and designating the struggle against terror as a "war." If "terrorism" is viewed as a "war crime" or "crime against humanity," then its non-military practitioners - the U.S.-designated unlawful combatants - would fall into the first Geneva category in which they can be interrogated as criminals. (Military personnel suspected of committing one of these offenses would not be released until cleared of suspicion.) And considering the time spent by international tribunals in preparing war crimes cases, U.S. interrogators would have ample opportunity to question such "civilian detainees."
The ethical question at hand is really the old one of whether the ends justify the means - in this case, whether, with only limited time to gain information that would save the lives of comrades, inhumane treatment during interrogation is justified. Although it does not say so, the Schlesinger panel suggests that in this scenario, treatment that does not cause permanent harm - or inflicting pain to "teach a lesson" or when it becomes clear that information will not be divulged - is permitted under a "minimum harm rule."
Such ambiguity begs the question of how and where to draw the line for "minimum" or "allowable" harm beyond which interrogation will not proceed. The psychologies of power, friendship, nationality, and hatred, all of which come into play in interrogations, can best be constrained by clear lines between allowed and prohibited actions. And the drawing of those lines should not be left to any single country or be attempted during hostilities when passions can warp judgment.
All of which points to the observation of the great Roman philosopher-general-emperor, Marcus Aurelius: "If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it."
-------- war crimes
After Delays, Milosevic Opens Defense
Former Yugoslav Leader Shifts Blame for Atrocities
By Toby Sterling
Associated Press
Wednesday, September 1, 2004; Page A11
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50492-2004Aug31.html
THE HAGUE, Aug. 31 -- Former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic launched on Tuesday a defiant defense of his conduct during the Balkan wars, accusing his enemies of conspiracies against the Serbs and insisting that his countrymen acted in self-defense.
Beginning the long-delayed defense phase of his war crimes trial, Milosevic sought to shift blame for atrocities and portray the U.N. tribunal as part of a U.S.-supported plot to violently break up Yugoslavia in fighting that left more than 200,000 people dead.
Seated alone at the defense table, Milosevic spoke with his customary swagger and sarcasm. But at times his face reddened as he rushed to complete his statement in the allotted time, leaving interpreters breathless as they tried to keep up with his rapid Serbian.
"Accusations leveled against me are an unscrupulous lie and also a tireless distortion of history. Everything has been presented in a lopsided manner in order to protect those who are truly responsible," asserted Milosevic, a trained lawyer who is acting as his own defense counsel.
It was the first time he was allowed to speak without interruption since his trial began 2 1/2 years ago, and he signaled that he would mount a highly political rather than a legal defense.
He unleashed a stream of invective against those he held responsible for Serbia's torment: Croatia, which he accused of genocide against its Serb minority; the United States and Europe, which he said sought Yugoslavia's destruction; Muslim "terrorists" in Bosnia and Kosovo; and the Vatican, which he said sought supremacy in the Balkans over the Orthodox Church.
"They call themselves the 'international community,' but in the territory of Yugoslavia -- Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo -- they supported a totalitarian, chauvinist elite, terrorists, Islamic fundamentalists, neo-Nazis, whose objective was an ethnically pure state. That is to say, a state without any Serbs," he said.
He maintained that in the 1991 war in Croatia he came to the aid of ethnic Serbs who were under threat from an armed rebellion against Yugoslavia. Later in Bosnia, Muslim fighters came from Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Morocco "to support the first Islamic state in Europe," Milosevic said. He said some of the foreign fighters bore arms supplied by the CIA for the war in Afghanistan.
Milosevic was extradited to U.N. authorities in The Hague by Serbia in June 2001. He faces 66 counts of war crimes allegedly committed in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo during the 1990s. He could be imprisoned for life if convicted on any charge.
Prosecutors accuse Milosevic of orchestrating or condoning murder, the destruction of towns and places of worship and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of people in an effort to create an ethnically pure "greater Serbia."
Milosevic spent only a few minutes addressing the accusations against him. Instead, he aired his version of the wars.
Milosevic was to have opened his defense following the conclusion of the prosecution's case in February. But it was postponed five times as doctors warned that stress was raising his blood pressure to dangerous levels. "He is in a good mood because he has waited for more than three years for this moment," said Zdenko Tomanovic, one of Milosevic's legal aides.
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Milosevic Opens His Defense Case by Going on the Offensive
September 1, 2004
New York Times
By MARLISE SIMONS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/01/international/europe/01milosevic.html?pagewanted=all
THE HAGUE, Aug. 31 - Now it was Slobodan Milosevic's turn to explain himself. After hearing the prosecution case for 24 months, the former Serbian leader began his defense on Tuesday against an extensive array of war crimes charges, including genocide, stemming from the Balkan conflicts of the 1990's.
He entered the courtroom at 9 a.m., a United Nations guard beside him, and his first concern as he settled into the dock seemed to be to reassure himself that a large audience awaited. It did. The visitors' gallery, separated from the court by bulletproof glass, was packed.
But instead of a defense, Mr. Milosevic, who is representing himself, delivered a meandering history lesson that lasted four hours. Its thesis was that the wars that led to the destruction of Yugoslavia and cost the lives of tens of thousands were driven by a conspiracy of the Western powers - he cited Germany, the United States and the Vatican as the chief culprits. The main victims were the Serbs, who were only defending themselves, he said.
The opening day of his defense, postponed half a dozen times for reasons of health, also enabled him to attack NATO, neo-Nazis, Islamist fighters and the war crimes tribunal here.
Remarkably, Mr. Milosevic never mentioned his own role in the lengthy narrative. Looking rested after a six-month break and reading forcefully from typed and handwritten notes, he dismissed the charges against him as "unscrupulous lies'' and a "distortion of history.''
It was vintage Milosevic. He even began his address by demanding more than his allotted four hours.
Judge Patrick Robinson reminded Mr. Milosevic that he had already taken eight hours to give his version of events at the opening of his trial in 2002 and another three and a half hours when the second part of his indictment began.
"This is your third bite at the proverbial cherry,'' the judge said, ordering him to proceed. Nonetheless, Mr. Milosevic was granted 90 minutes to speak on Wednesday.
It was a concession he took for granted. "Thank you" is not in Mr. Milosevic's courtroom vocabulary.
The 63-year old former strongman, who was ousted from the Yugoslav presidency in October 2000 by his own angry people, at no time addressed the specific charges made by the United Nations prosecutors. Instead he delivered a political defense, evidently intended for the Serbian public back home and his place in history.
"He's feeling well and he is in a very good mood,'' said Zdenko Tomanovic, a Belgrade lawyer and member of a team that is helping Mr. Milosevic outside the courtroom. "He has waited more than three years for this moment, to tell his story.''
Mr. Milosevic did much finger-pointing against Western governments, German politicians, Bill Clinton and Pope John Paul II, who had supported Slovenia's and Croatia's independence from Yugoslavia, moves that precipitated the conflicts.
But there was barely a place in his discourse for the 200,000 people who lost their lives or the several million who became refugees in the Balkans wars. Referring to events of 1991, as Yugoslavia began to tear apart, he said, "One mistake followed the other, and the price was in human lives.''
Later, he repeatedly emphasized a contemporary theme - terrorism - as practiced by rebels in Bosnia and Kosovo. He said that in the early 1990's, Islamic fighters flooded into Bosnia from Afghanistan, Lebanon, Morocco and Saudi Arabia "to support the first Islamic state in Europe.''
The Afghans, he said, came "armed with weapons supplied by the C.I.A.'' brought from Pakistan. Early in the war, he said, a group of 400 Hezbollah fighters went to Sarajevo as instructors to the foreign Islamists.
After the session, one prosecutor said he had heard ''a few interesting new details,'' but added that he was disappointed that the four-hour speech was not a coherent set of arguments, but a rambling account laced with quotes from historians, generals and reporters. There was no mention of the large-scale ethnic cleansing of Bosnia or mass killings.
Instead, Mr. Milosevic said the West had created a smokescreen to hide its own misdeeds, including NATO'S bombing of Serbia during the Kosovo crisis of 1999. He also repeated a favorite theme, that the war crimes tribunal, which was created by the United Nations Security Council, is not a legitimate forum but rather a "propaganda instrument of NATO.''
Liljana Smajlovic, a political commentator for the Serbian weekly Nin who has followed the proceedings, said a Serbian audience would recognize Mr. Milosevic's version of history, but, she said, "It is skewed, just the way the prosecution version of history was skewed."
----
Everyone to blame but me, says Milosevic
Ian Traynor in the Hague
Wednesday September 1, 2004
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/yugo/article/0,2763,1294655,00.html
Slobodan Milosevic yesterday launched his defence as the first European head of state accused of genocide by blaming everyone but the Serbs and himself for the bloodbath of Yugoslavia's disintegration.
In a four-hour speech at the international war crimes tribunal in the Hague 30 months into his trial on 66 counts of war crimes, Mr Milosevic turned the tribunal dock into a soapbox as he raced through more than 100 years of Serbian history, a narrative that consistently had the Germans and the Vatican in the starring roles as the bad guys in the unending plots to destroy the Serbs.
"The Serb people, the Serb leadership and I personally made every attempt to preserve the Yugoslav community. We were on the side of the law," the former Yugoslav and Serbian president asserted in a vigorous performance that betrayed little signs of the ill-health that caused yesterday's defence statement to be repeatedly postponed.
Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright, Tony Blair, Helmut Kohl, the mullahs of Iran, the Hizbullah of Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, fascists, neo-Nazis, the Vatican, and the European Union were all blamed for acting in concert with "Albanian terrorists", "Bosnian Islamic fundamentalists", and "Croatian [fascist] Ustashe" to destroy Yugoslavia.
For the four wars that Mr Milosevic fought and lost, leaving more than two million homeless and more than 200,000 dead through the 1990s, the Serbs and their leader were utterly blameless.
"Yugoslavia didn't simply disappear into thin air. It was destroyed violently by a plan and by a war that is still being waged," he declared, stabbing his fingers at the bench of three judges, shuffling his papers, and using his spectacles as a theatrical prop. "The war in Yugoslavia was not started by Serbs or in Serbia. It was started by Ustashe, neo-Nazis, Islamic fundamentalists, and Albanian terrorists. It is not hard to prove."
He added that Nato used depleted uranium shells in the air war against Serbia in 1999 to destroy Serbia's prospects of developing a thriving organic farming sector.
Halfway through Mr Milosevic's opening statement, Judge Patrick Robinson interrupted to warn him that his potted history of Serbdom was irrelevant to the business at hand. "You must discipline yourself," the judge told him. "It's questionable whether a lot of what you are saying is relevant to your case."
Much of the speech was inadmissible as evidence, the judge warned.
Mr Milosevic has 150 days in court to attempt to rebut the 66 charges of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against hu manity in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo between 1991 and 1999. But while the prosecution has pressed criminal charges against a single individual in order to avoid stigmatising any of the peoples of former Yugoslavia as collectively guilty of war crimes, Mr Milosevic's tactics are clearly to distance himself from personal involvement and portray the tribunal as an anti-Serbian plot.
"This is aimed at the audience back home," said Nenad Stefanovic, a Serbian commentator. "Many people will believe it."
Mr Milosevic, devoting a large tranche of his statement to attacks on the legitimacy of the tribunal, which he refuses to recognise, said: "This tribunal is an instrument of war, not of justice." Rising last as the panel of three judges entered the courtroom yesterday morning, Mr Milosevic stood blowing his nose before sitting down and addressing the judge as "Mr Robinson".
Halfway through his statement, Carla del Ponte, the chief prosecutor, appeared to be dozing off. She was flanked by Geoffrey Nice, the British lawyer who has spent more than two years building a detailed picture of Mr Milosevic's alleged crimes.
Mr Milosevic complained he was not being given long enough for his statement. Judge Robinson told him he was having his "second bite at the cherry" but later ruled that Mr Milosevic could continue his statement this morning.
The judges are examining at least three confidential statements from heart specialists who have examined Mr Milosevic since the trial was adjourned at the beginning of July because of the accused's heart condition and high blood pressure. One of the medical experts has concluded that Mr Milosevic is not fit to defend himself, although he refuses to accept defence lawyers.
The judges are expected to decide later this week whether to impose a defence team on Mr Milosevic. He is scheduled to call his first witness, "a very important expert" on former Yugoslavia, next week.
----
Bosnian Serb Acquitted of Genocide
September 1, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-War-Crimes-Milosevic.html?pagewanted=all
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) -- A Yugoslav war crimes tribunal acquitted a Bosnian Serb leader of genocide on Wednesday, while former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic told a separate panel the charges he himself faces are ``empty words'' and a ``mutilation of justice.''
The verdict in the five-year trial of Radislav Brdjanin, wartime leader of the autonomous Krajina region of Bosnia, should encourage Milosevic, who launched his defense this week against charges of genocide and more than 60 other counts of war crimes.
Brdjanin, 56, a powerful Serb figure at the start of the Bosnian war in 1992, was convicted on eight of 12 charges and sentenced to 32 years imprisonment -- a surprisingly lengthy term in view of the acquittals on the most serious charges related to genocide and extermination.
Despite a Serb campaign of mass murder, torture and deportations of non-Serbs, the court said the brutality fell short of genocide, which requires stringent proof the sole intent was to wipe out the Muslim and Croat communities.
The acquittal was a setback for prosecutors who placed genocide at the center of Milosevic's indictment. He is accused of responsibility for the deaths of more than 7,500 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in the U.N.-protected enclave of Srebrenica in 1995.
The tribunal has set a high bar for a genocide conviction. Of more than a dozen Serbs charged with genocide, only one, Gen. Radislav Krstic, has been convicted -- and the charge was reduced on appeal to aiding and abetting genocide.
On Wednesday, Milosevic concluded a 5 1/2-hour opening statement, denouncing his trial as ``a farce, pure and simple.''
``This indictment represents a sum of unscrupulous manipulation, lies, crippling of the law, and an unjust presentation of the history,'' he said. The charges are a ``sheer mutilation of justice. Nothing else. What it says there are empty words.''
Milosevic failed to address the specific charges he faces, instead arguing the Serbs faced a conspiracy of persecution by Croats, Islamic fundamentalists, the United States, NATO and the Vatican.
``What the Serbs did was only making up for what the Muslims and the Croats took away from them,'' he said.
The court said it would announce Thursday whether it will impose defense counsel on Milosevic, who has insisted on defending himself despite repeated bouts of ill health that have delayed the trial by months.
Prosecutors suggested Milosevic ask one of his Belgrade legal assistants to represent him in the courtroom. Judge O-Gon Kwon told him he could continue speaking in court even if another attorney was leading the defense, but Milosevic has refused.
``I really cannot accept at all that you do not give me the right, the opportunity to voice the truth,'' Milosevic said.
Prosecutors cited medical reports from last week that Milosevic was unfit to represent himself and was refusing to take prescribed drugs to control his high blood pressure in order to delay the proceedings.
``He has been manipulating this tribunal,'' said prosecutor Geoffrey Nice. Milosevic responded that the drugs made him too drowsy to work on his case.
The indictment accuses Milosevic of orchestrating or condoning murder, the destruction of towns and places of worship and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of people in an effort to create an ethnically pure ``greater Serbia'' by funding and arming Serbian uprisings in Croatia and Bosnia.
``We did assist the Serbs, of course we did. We would have been the scum of the earth if we had not helped them when their lives were in peril,'' he said.
In the Brdjanin decision, the court found the Bosnian Serb leader complicit in the deaths of at least 1,669 Muslims and Croats. It also held him criminally responsible for routine brutality, sexual abuse and torture in detention camps.
In a complex ruling, the court said the number of deaths was high enough to constitute the crime of extermination. But it said Brdjanin was unaware of the massive scale of murders and acquitted him of the charge.
While reading a nearly two-hour summary of the verdict, presiding Judge Carmel Agius said Brdjanin helped execute a plan to create an ethnically pure Serbian nation in the strategic northwest area of Bosnia.
``The ethnic cleansing was not a byproduct of the criminal activity, it was its very aim,'' Agius said. ``By August 1992, the consistent application of such a discriminatory policy was completely clear to objective observers on the ground.''
--------
Mexico's Leader to Pursue Genocide Case
September 1, 2004
By GINGER THOMPSON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/01/international/americas/01mexico.html?pagewanted=all
MEXICO CITY, Aug. 31 - President Vicente Fox said in an interview on Tuesday that if Mexico's Supreme Court would not hear the genocide charges his government had filed against former President Luis Echeverría, he would call for the creation of a truth commission to investigate abuses committed by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which used fraud and corruption to rule the country for more than seven decades.
In July, a special prosecutor appointed by Mr. Fox made history in asking a court to order the arrest of Mr. Echeverría, two of Mr. Echeverría's former aides and three military generals for the killings of student protesters in 1971. It was the first time such a case had been brought against a former president in Mexico, and was considered a test of Mr. Fox's resolve to punish those responsible for the old government's worst abuses and to establish the rule of law.
The court threw out the charges the next day, and with them threw one of Mr. Fox's most important political projects into disarray. The government then sent the case for review by the Supreme Court.
"I expect that the opinion of the court will establish who is responsible and determine whether the statute of limitations has passed,'' said Mr. Fox, the first president elected from an opposition party. "If the court does not get to the bottom of the matter, I will convene those civic groups working with the special prosecutor, who have a full understanding of the case, to issue their own verdict, a historic verdict in the form of a truth commission.''
He added, "It would not be a judicial body, but a citizen's group that would conduct a trial and make clear for history who was responsible.''
Mr. Fox spoke on the eve of his annual state of the union address, which symbolically marks the end of the fourth year of his six-year term. His stunning election in July 2000, ending the PRI's hold on the presidency, was fueled by a national tidal wave of optimism and hope for broad changes. Since then, however, political and economic forces have hit hard against him. A recession in the United States cost Mexico hundreds of thousands of jobs. A bitterly divided Congress, led by the PRI, rejected important tax and energy reforms.
His critics charge that the Fox government has failed to dismantle the political system that robbed and repressed this country for most of the last century. Rather than change, they say, it has delivered more of the same.
Optimism has turned to scathing disappointment. Some 50,000 union members and farmers marched against Mr. Fox on Tuesday. Organizers said that on Wednesday demonstrators plan to block roads and border crossings, walk off their jobs and march on Congress, where Mr. Fox is scheduled to give his speech.
With the press and political classes focused on 2006, there are many who see Mr. Fox as a lame duck struggling to secure his legacy.
In the interview on Tuesday, President Fox rejected that image, with upbeat, at times defiant, responses.
"Certainly there is a disparity between the perceptions of the people, the expectations they have of change and the progress we have made,'' Mr. Fox said. Asked if there was anything that had disappointed him, he replied: "No. Absolutely nothing.''
"If anyone understands clearly what can be accomplished in six years, it is me,'' he said. "There is no gap between my expectations and achievements. I am at peace and very satisfied.''
President Fox said that in his address on Wednesday he would tell Mexico that times had been hard, but there was reason to be optimistic. He said that the once stagnant economy would grow by 4 percent this year and that the country had begun to recover lost jobs. He said that in the last two years the number of people living in poverty had begun to decline and that the government had built about 1.4 million houses for low-income families.
Mr. Fox said he still hoped to get some kind of tax and energy reforms through Congress. But he said the priorities for his last two years in office would be to maintain economic growth, expand basic medical insurance to all Mexicans and install blackboards and computers in all fifth- and sixth-grade classrooms.
"I believe that would be a real education revolution,'' he said.
Four years ago, however, Mr. Fox helped set this country's sights much higher and Mexicans say they want more from him than new roads and houses.
Voters had expected that the Fox government would tear apart Mexico's corrupt and authoritarian political system and rebuild it from scratch, said Peter Hakim of the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington. "He got over the hurdle of getting into office on the presumption that there would be no backsliding, that the old system was dead and gone, that he had slain the dragon,'' Mr. Hakim said. "But he did not establish the ways and mechanisms of managing a democratic society.''
Meanwhile, the PRI seems headed toward a political comeback. In addition to the Congress, the party controls 17 of the country's 32 states. The PRI removed Mr. Fox's National Action Party, or PAN, from power in its former strongholds in the states of Nuevo León and Chihuahua. And it won important mayoral victories in the cities of Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez.
Offering a rebuttal of Mr. Fox's speech Wednesday night will be a PRI congressman, Manlio Fabio Beltrones, a former governor of Sonora whom American officials once accused of having links to drug-trafficking.
In the 40-minute interview Tuesday, Mr. Fox discussed his decision to invite the PRI to join him in a so-called "joint transition.'' It is a strategy, critics charge, that helped revive the PRI, rather than weaken it.
"I did not contemplate in this joint transition the destruction of anyone, much less attacks against political parties, but the start of a process of change toward a new democratic culture,'' Mr. Fox said.
The president said that his was a minority government and that he had little choice but to work with his adversaries to win support for reforms. Clearly that strategy failed. The PRI has used its seats in Congress to regain national power. Mr. Fox did not disagree. Nor did he apologize.
"There are many people in Mexico and in the world that still long for, or feel nostalgia, for authoritarian government,'' he said. Referring to the Aztecs, he said, "Mexico, in particular, that was the culture - the culture of the Tlatoani, the culture of authoritarian acts.''
Breaking with those traditions, Mr. Fox said, "is exactly the cause I lead.''
When asked why he had forced no changes in the leadership of the nation's largest unions, which uphold the PRI's vast systems of patronage, he said: "That is not my responsibility. They will have to look inside their own organizations and determine their own process of change and democratization.''
Lorenzo Meyer, a historian, lamented in an interview that Mr. Fox will probably go down in history as the man who defeated one of the world's longest ruling political parties, then helped it return to power.
Again, no apologies from the president.
"The people will elect those who they believe should be the president of the republic, and there is no reason to make predictions,'' he said. "The election will be democratic and Mexicans will chose who they want to continue governing the country.''
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts / tribunals
Justice Dept. Assails Way It Won Key Terror Case
September 1, 2004
By DANNY HAKIM
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/01/national/01CND-TERR.html?hp
DETROIT, Sept. 1 - The Justice Department assailed its own legal strategy today in the case that brought its first courtroom victory in the war on terror.
In a 60-page filing, federal prosecutors presented a wealth of previously undisclosed evidence that they conceded undermines their terror case against what they once called a "sleeper operational combat cell" based in the Detroit area. They also sharply rebuked the conduct of the prosecutor who led the case, suggesting that he knowingly withheld a multitude of evidence that he was obligated to share with defense attorneys.
The developments marked a sharp reversal in a case once hailed by Attorney General John Ashcroft as a major victory in the war on terror.
In June 2003, two Moroccan men, Abdel-Ilah Elmardoudi, 38, and Karim Koubriti, 26, were convicted on terror and document fraud charges. A third Moroccan man, Ahmed Hannan, 36, was convicted of document fraud and an Algerian, Farouk Ali-Haimoud, 24, was acquitted.
The men were never sentenced because of escalating problems and controversies surrounding the case.
In a filing released today, the government concurred with a defense motion for a new trial, but only on document fraud. Prosecutors have asked a federal judge to drop a material support of terrorism charge, ending their pursuit of a terror case.
"In its best light, the record would show that the prosecution committed a pattern of mistakes and oversights that deprived the defendants of discoverable evidence," federal prosecutors said in their filing.
They conceded that evidence uncovered in a nine-month review ordered by the presiding federal judge undermined every major aspect of their terror case. They also said prosecutors "created a record filled with misleading inferences that such material did not exist."
The filing was largely a rebuke of Richard G. Convertino, the federal prosecutor who led the case. Shortly after the government won convictions last June, Mr. Convertino was removed and is now being investigated by the Justice Department for misconduct.
He has sued the Justice Department and contended that he was being retaliated against because he agreed to testify about terrorism before the Senate Finance Committee, whose chairman, Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican, is a persistent critic of the department.
"Much of the evidence claimed to have been wrongfully withheld by Rick was evidence he wasn't aware of," said Mr. Convertino's lawyer, William Sullivan. "Even if he had been, it was not material to the defense and it would not have led to a different result at the trial."
Mr. Convertino remains on the Justice Department's payroll but is detailed to the Senate Caucus on International Narcotic Control, run by Senator Grassley, who has in the past characterized Mr. Convertino as a whistle-blower. His office declined to comment today.
--------
U.S. to Seek Dismissal Of Terrorism Convictions
By Allan Lengel and Susan Schmidt
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, September 1, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50698-2004Aug31.html
The Justice Department will ask a federal judge in Detroit to dismiss the convictions of three men in a high-profile terrorism case last year, saying it has uncovered serious prosecutorial misconduct in the case.
Department lawyers have told U.S. District Judge Gerald Rosen and defense attorneys that the convictions should be thrown out because prosecutors failed to share potentially exculpatory evidence with the defense during last year's trial, legal sources said last night.
The convictions of two Moroccan immigrants for conspiracy to provide material support for terrorism and of a third man on document fraud charges represented one of the government's most significant victories in the war on terrorism in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The move to vacate the convictions comes in the midst of the Republican National Convention, where President Bush is highlighting his success in the war on terrorism as the centerpiece of his reelection campaign.
Rosen and the Justice Department have been investigating allegations that two assistant U.S. attorneys withheld information from the defense. The department is continuing an investigation of one of the prosecutors, Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Convertino, who has responded by suing the government. He alleges that Justice undermined the prosecution and sought to make him the scapegoat.
William Sullivan, Convertino's attorney, declined to comment yesterday, citing a gag order in the case. Other lawyers in the case also cited the order.
A filing from the Justice Department is expected as early as today seeking to have the convictions overturned and detailing the alleged misconduct. The department is expected to say that it will not seek reinstatement of the terrorism-related charges against defendants Karim Koubriti and Abdel-Ilah Elmardoudi but will seek to retry them and a third man, Ahmed Hannan, on document fraud charges.
Details of the government's request to vacate the convictions were first reported on U.S. News & World Report's Web site last night.
In the first terrorism-related trial since the Sept. 11 attacks, Elmardoudi, 37, of Minneapolis, and Koubriti, 26, of Detroit, were convicted in June 2003 of conspiring to provide material support to terrorists and document fraud. Hannan, 35, of Detroit was convicted of document fraud, and Farouk Ali-Haimoud, 22, of Detroit was cleared of all charges.
Justice Department officials, including Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, asserted the men were in a sleeper cell associated with al Qaeda and had plans to secure weapons and attack targets in the United States and abroad. Authorities stumbled on some of the men when they raided a Detroit apartment shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks in a search for Nabil al-Marabh, who was on a terrorist watch list. They later termed the apprehension one of the most significant in the United States in the war against terrorism.
Throughout the trial, defense attorneys accused the prosecution of withholding key information and witnesses. Convertino admitted that prosecutors should have turned over information earlier but said it was not relevant. Rosen chastised Convertino in open court and said that was not his decision.
Rosen ordered a full review of the information available to the government. Last September, then-Detroit U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Collins removed Convertino and another assistant U.S. attorney, Keith Corbett, from the case, asking the Justice Department to investigate their handling of it.
Rosen also issued a rare rebuke of Ashcroft for exhibiting "a distressing lack of care" in public statements about the case.
In February, Ashcroft took the rare step of appointing a "special attorney," Craig S. Morford, to investigate the prosecutors' conduct. The same month, Convertino filed a lawsuit against Ashcroft and the Justice Department, alleging that he was the target of a smear campaign that resulted in the unmasking of a valuable informant.
Convertino alleged that the terrorism cases were undermined by "gross mismanagement" and a "lack of support and cooperation, lack of effective assistance, lack of resources and intradepartmental infighting."
A legal source familiar with the case said yesterday that the government also failed to turn over a photo it had of the route to a facility overseas that it considered the target of a potential terrorism attack. The source said the photo did not match a sketch it had introduced at trial.
The source said the government also withheld from the defense an interview with a retired CIA agent whose testimony was not as strong as the government had hoped.
One piece of information withheld from the defense was a December 2001 letter, obtained by prosecutors, from a convicted drug dealer who wrote that a key prosecution witness, Youssef Hmimssa, told him while they were in jail together "how he lied to the FBI, how he fool'd the Secret Service agent on his case."
Equally significant, one defense lawyer said, was an FBI interview with a former roommate of two defendants who said the men never talked about religion, were lazy, and often drank and smoked. That was in direct contrast to the picture painted by Convertino, who said they were devout Muslims.
--------
Kerry Would Drop Detainee Commissions
Edwards Calls Court-Martial a Model
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 1, 2004; Page A07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50491-2004Aug31.html
Democratic vice presidential nominee John Edwards said yesterday that a John F. Kerry administration would scrap the military commissions created by President Bush to try suspected al Qaeda and Taliban fighters detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and would instead establish a new system modeled on military courts-martial.
"The Bush administration has ignored the model of the military courts-martial. We will use that model as a basis for future trials of detainees," Edwards said in a statement e-mailed in response to a question posed to him over the weekend. "We will ensure that this process, from the quality of translators to the treatment of evidence to the selection of judges, is handled with the seriousness and competence that is essential for such sensitive national security cases."
Although the Pentagon would still run the system, the Kerry campaign said that using the template of a long-established process would put it on firmer legal ground.
Kerry's approach would mark a break with procedures established by Bush nearly three years ago to prosecute some of the hundreds of men seized after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and held in the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay. The administration said the commissions, last used to try Nazi saboteurs nearly 60 years ago, would allow the government to use a blend of secret and public hearings.
Critics have charged that the commission rules favor the government, and that, among other things, they allow hearsay evidence and permit exculpatory evidence to remain secret from defendants. Last week, when the commissions formally began for four defendants, defense lawyers -- many of whom are military officers -- repeatedly challenged the legitimacy of the commissions, their rules and procedures, and the fitness of the judges.
The lengthy detentions of suspects have also riled U.S. allies. The administration denied suspects access to lawyers or U.S. courts, but the Supreme Court ruled in June that Guantanamo Bay prisoners have the right to challenge their detentions in U.S. courts.
"In dealing with detainees, our first question should always be a simple one: 'What should we do to keep America safe?' " Edwards said. "The Bush administration unfortunately has asked a different question, 'How much power can we possibly exercise?' They tried to set up Guantanamo Bay as a legal black hole, subject to neither courts nor laws."
Under Bush's system, appeals will go to a panel selected by the same government official who helped establish the commissions -- Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. By shifting to a court-martial approach, Kerry would have appeals handled by a court of appeals for the armed forces, which is independent of prosecutors and the Defense Department. The appeals process, like most other procedures in a military trial, is almost identical to that of a civilian trial.
"After nearly three years of unnecessary and harmful controversy, the Bush administration is scrambling to provide hearings for detainees, and in a few instances, trials by military commission," Edwards said. "But the military's own lawyers have harshly criticized these ad hoc commissions for violating the principles that our great system of military justice has long honored."
Terry Holt, a Bush campaign spokesman, responded that "politics won't dictate what happens at Guantanamo. John Kerry should not play politics with the system of justice in place to deal with terrorist suspects."
Edwards, calling the Bush approach "self-defeating and self-destructive," pledged that Kerry would hold a "comprehensive review" of the Guantanamo detentions upon taking office. "We will establish these clear rules quickly," he said, adding that Kerry would also "engage Congress as much as possible."
------- homeland security / national intelligence
Banned in America
By John Tirman,
AlterNet
September 1, 2004
http://www.alternet.org/rights/19741/
Tariq Ramadan of Switzerland, one of the world's most important Muslim scholars, was invited to teach at the University of Notre Dame. Then he ran right into the USA Patriot Act.
At the end of July, the U.S. Government revoked a work visa for Tariq Ramadan, one of the world's most important Muslim scholars, on the grounds that he is a terrorist threat. Ramadan, Swiss-born of a prominent Egyptian family, was offered a prestigious chair at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. The case illustrates, sadly, both the hyper-sensitive tendencies of the government - possibly, in this case, responding to anti-Muslim groups - and the kind of action that alienates America's five million Muslims and millions more around the world.
For the 42-year-old Tariq Ramadan looks like a dream come true - a brilliant philosopher of Islam and its evolving place in the world, particularly in Europe and the United States, who argues for a modernized Islam that favors pluralism, tolerance, feminism, and educational achievement. His work is rooted in Islamic traditions, but fully aware of the demands, challenges, and opportunities presented by the contemporary Western world. For those of us that are alarmed by the Bush administration's rough treatment of Muslims at home and abroad, but troubled by anti-modern tendencies among some Muslims, Dr. Ramadan is a measure of hope. It is hope vested not only by his eloquence, but his enormous following among Muslim youth.
So what happened with the visa? The Department of Homeland Security, apparently acting under provisions of the USA Patriot Act, requested the State Department to reverse an earlier decision to grant the visa. This is done to those who have used a "position of prominence within any country to endorse or espouse terrorist activity." There is virtually no evidence that is public suggesting that Ramadan has ever espoused terrorism. As immigration expert Paul Donnelly wrote in the Washington Post a few days after the imbroglio erupted, "Notre Dame officials insist that they have reviewed every charge against the Swiss scholar and agree with the likes of Scotland Yard and Swiss intelligence, which have found them to be groundless."
The controversy around Ramadan came from a statement on French intellectuals - that some, like Bernard Kouchner and Bernard-Henri Lévy - were adopting "communitarian" rather than "universalist" perspectives in viewing the Arab-Israeli conflict and the war in Iraq. Translated, this means Jewish intellectuals were siding with Israel and against Muslim concerns. This point-of-view, while perhaps indiscreet, hardly qualifies as anti-Semitism, and Ramadan has been outspoken among European intellectuals in his condemnation of the rising tide of attacks against Jews in Europe, a position that has earned him plaudits in the Israeli press, including an approving interview in Haaretz.
But this is not enough for the attack dogs of the right. And here it gets interesting, because it is widely rumored that Ramadan's appointment to a major American university, one strongly associated with serious theological study, would not have been challenged if not for the intervention of anti-Muslim groups. Graham Fuller, a Mideast expert who is a senior RAND analyst and former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, told the Chicago Tribune, "pro-Likud organizations want to block people who can speak articulately and present the Muslim dilemma in a way that might be understandable and sympathetic to Americans. They succeed by presenting this as a security matter. There is no way Homeland Security would initiate this on its own."
The usual suspects on the extreme right, such as Daniel Pipes and his small industry of Web site organizations, have been tarnishing Ramadan with a cascade of innuendo. Ramadan's grandfather was a founder of the Muslim Brotherhood; his father might have had Osama bin Laden as a student; "intelligence agencies suspect" him of coordinating a meeting of al Qaeda leaders, etc. The list goes on without proof, relevance, or in many cases plausibility.
In an eloquent piece yesterday in the Chicago Tribune, Ramadan himself responded to the charges made by Pipes and others, forcefully refuting each allegation by laying out the facts. Then he added this, by way of explaining himself to readers:
"Anyone who has read any of my 20 books, 700 articles or listened to any of my 170 audio-taped lectures will discern a consistent message: The very moment Muslims and their fellow citizens realize that being a Muslim and being American or European are not mutually exclusive, they will enrich their societies...
The American public ought to know a few other facts about me. I take pride in my faith as a Muslim and the West as my home and birthplace and I make no apologies for taking a critical look at Islam and the West. In doing so I am being true to my faith and the ethics of my citizenship. Instead of mere theoretical criticism, I propose practical solutions to the challenges the world faces. I not only speak to ordinary citizens of many faiths, religious leaders and academics but also to politicians, world leaders and organizations."
Nevertheless, the drumbeat of paranoia - there is no other word for it - has many variations. It does not always name Muslims, as is the case with Professor Ramadan, but the tactics and effects are similar. The frightening "other" is posited to have secret cabals, networks, and plots; wily ways to undermine Western civilization; spies and traitors among the good people of America. These are tropes that go back a millennium, to the bloody crusade launched by Pope Urban II in 1095, and the supposed clash of Christian civility with Islamic villainy has not ceased since. Like most villains, Muslims are imbued in this depiction with special powers of deceit and subterfuge. So, true to form, the news media reported the early August scare about the alleged threat from al Qaeda to financial buildings in tones that evoked a gripping conspiracy relying on domestic "cells" of al Qaeda casing the buildings and providing sustenance to the operatives. Despite these widely published intimations, never once were the domestic cells or co-conspirators actually described or definitively said to exist. But the impression of danger lingers.
This brand of discrimination has long beset Muslims in America, and the large number of Christian Arab-Americans as well. Their loyalties and basic rights have been questioned repeatedly since the 9/11 atrocities, and the verifiable numbers are stunning: 200,000 interviews by law-enforcement agents, thousands of detentions and deportations; more than 300 indictments for "terrorism related" crimes (virtually none of which actually describe a conspiracy of political violence against the United States); "special registration" for men from sixteen Muslim countries; restricted immigration, and so on. Social institutions and charities have been targeted; whole communities are under surveillance. The ways that this "anti-terrorism" campaign has affected these diverse communities remains unknown, but research suggests growing isolation, disillusionment, and fear.
As a result, Ramadan's case is especially disheartening. Here is a kind of philosophical hero, a European phenomenon to be sure, but one who was going to Notre Dame as a tenured professor, near to the large Muslim populations of Chicago and Detroit, on what appeared to be a long-term commitment. Here is someone who can speak to the individual's need for spiritual guidance in a modern context, who stands up for Arab rights in the Levant or Persian Gulf but does so within the tradition of non-violent action, who castigates his brethren who deny the horridness of 9/11 or the Holocaust, and who speaks with unadorned passion of our obligations to serve our communities selflessly. This may not be everyone's cup of tea, but it is surely electrifying and even visionary.
In this light, then, the Department of Homeland Security owes us - all of us - an explanation. Is there substantial evidence that Tariq Ramadan has been aiding and abetting terrorist organizations? Does he represent a national security threat, and how? If they cannot articulate a believable account of the danger he represents, then they are engaging in character assassination, pure and simple. (There is also the matter of academic freedom, or just freedom, and Notre Dame's right to bring in whomever it pleases.) That they may be doing so at the behest of certain interest groups in this country or abroad would be all the more troubling. DHS is a young bureaucracy, borne of Democrats' insistence on upgrading the U.S. war on terrorism from a White House whim to a full-scale government institution. Nothing could be more damaging to its credibility (compounding all the suspiciously timed orange code alerts) than to be the henchmen of extreme Likudniks.
But that's what it looks like today. In its response thus far to questions about its action in the Ramadan case, DHS is predictably hiding behind the USA Patriot Act and the iron curtain of secrecy that now shrouds much of the anti-terror effort.
Most troubling of all, perhaps, is the message this controversy sends around the country and the world: America is now closed to outside ideas, even those that try to solve its most pressing security problems. Scott Appleby, the director of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at Notre Dame, that was to host Ramadan, put it well, if with unwarranted optimism: "Tariq Ramadan is a strong but moderate voice in a world plagued by extremism. He addresses issues that evoke strong feelings because they touch the heart of personal and communal identity. We have known from the start that he is controversial. But controversy cannot and should not be avoided in a place that examines the challenges to international peace. The University of Notre Dame is such a place. We look forward to having him here."
John Tirman is coauthor and editor of The Maze of Fear: Security and Migration After 9/11 (The New Press). He is program director at the Social Science Research Council in Washington, D.C.
----
Suit Seeks Tighter Security at the Empire State Building
September 1, 2004
New York Times
By SUSAN SAULNY
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/01/nyregion/01empire.html?pagewanted=all
Two partners in a law firm in the Empire State Building have sued the building's operators, claiming that security is too lax at the 102-story Midtown landmark and that tenants are exposed to the "clear and present danger" of a terrorist attack.
According to the lawsuit, filed yesterday by Aaron J. Broder and Jonathan C. Reiter of the firm Broder & Reiter against the Empire State Building Company, the building's operators recently reduced the level of security they had instituted after Sept. 11 by removing scanners, screening devices and security personnel from the building's lobby. Mr. Broder and Mr. Reiter claim that the changes were made despite their vehement protests.
In the suit, filed in State Supreme Court, the plaintiffs cite reports that terrorist groups like Al Qaeda have conducted surveillance in the city and desire to attack symbolic buildings. The Empire State Building, the suit states, would be a prime target.
"The intentional, reckless, knowing and negligent conduct of E.S.B. poses a clear and present danger and substantial risk of grievous bodily harm and death to persons lawfully on the premises of the Empire State Building," the court papers said.
A spokesman for the Empire State Building, Howard J. Rubenstein, issued a statement yesterday denying the charge of recklessness and saying the building's security practices were based upon industry standards.
"The Empire State Building continues to provide a safe and secure environment for all of its tenants, visitors and the general public, alike," Mr. Rubenstein said. "We review our safety and security policies and procedures on a regular basis and work closely with the federal and local law enforcement agencies charged with public safety."
Mr. Broder, a veteran trial lawyer, said in an interview yesterday that he was not seeking money in the suit. He said he wanted safety and peace of mind. Mr. Broder said he also felt that the building had limited security so as not to anger its retail tenants, whose customers enjoy easy access. A receptionist at Mr. Rubenstein's office said he would not address the issue of security at the entrances to the building, or whether the conditions have to do with making shopping convenient.
Mr. Broder said he became unnerved on Aug. 1, the day the government raised the color-coded threat level to orange, or high, when he noticed a woman with seven suitcases in the lobby. He said that he approached her and that she told him she was waiting for her daughter, who was visiting the observatory.
Mr. Broder said he could not get the attention of any of the security workers who perform checks at the base of the elevator banks. He said he notified one of the building's employees, who arranged to have a bomb-sniffing dog come to the scene. The woman, Mr. Broder said, passed the test.
-------- police
THE POLICE
Barricades Help Officers Keep Crowds Controlled
September 1, 2004
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM and MICHAEL WILSON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/01/politics/campaign/01police.html?pagewanted=all
The Police Department faced its biggest test of the Republican National Convention yesterday, confronting a series of large, unannounced and sometimes unruly demonstrations with a massive show of force. The police arrested more than 900 people and mobilized to block roving groups from massing and moving toward Madison Square Garden.
As of late last night, the department's strategy seemed largely successful. The police appeared to focus mostly on protesters blocking traffic or otherwise breaking the law, letting alone those who chanted and jeered, including hundreds who formed a raucous and profane gantlet on West 33rd Street where Broadway and Avenue of the Americas intersect, heckling delegates as they were escorted to Madison Square Garden.
But about 200 members of one group, which sought to march without a permit from ground zero to Union Square and then to Madison Square Garden, were arrested despite abiding by a last-minute agreement they had worked out with the police to remain on the sidewalk.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, speaking at a news conference at Shea Stadium, said that the city welcomed those who wanted to express themselves but that no one would be permitted to do so at the cost of other people's liberties. "And anybody else that thinks that they're going to get a free ride here in New York City in breaking the law, they are sadly mistaken. We are going to enforce the law," he said. "And I would just advise anybody that thinks they're going to use any part of today to cause disruption, and to cause chaos, they should think again. They're going to be arrested instantly."
The department's most effective tool, aside from deploying massive numbers of officers, seemed to be the reactive use of barricades, both the linked metal barriers used to form stationary pens and the orange webbing stretched around people who were to be arrested.
Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said yesterday at a news conference that the department's ability to arrest the most unruly demonstrators also had an impact.
"I also want to note that many of those arrested are from out of town and are veterans of other demonstrations in cities with much smaller police departments," Mr. Kelly said. "In the past, a few got arrested and most got away after breaking laws. Here, they are being surprised by the fact that the opposite holds true."
The police also responded quickly to prevent small disruptions from growing. "I think the idea is to try to keep illegal marchers of the street and keep them contained, and if they want to chant that's fine, but if they take the street they'll arrested," said Paul J. Browne, the department's deputy commissioner for public information.
A spokeswoman for Manhattan District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau, whose office is prosecuting those arrested during convention-related protests, said that of the more than 500 arrests it had evaluated as of yesterday morning, the office had declined to prosecute in only one case. Those figures, however, did not include the arrests made at ground zero and elsewhere last night.
--------
Police Stifle Protests Across N.Y.
Officers Fend Off Demonstrators in City's Broadest Avenues, Arresting 560
Washington Post
By Michelle Garcia and Mary Fitzgerald
September 1, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A50658-2004Aug31?language=printer
NEW YORK, Aug. 31 -- Police repulsed anarchists, gay activists and other protesters across Midtown Manhattan on Tuesday, arresting 560 people as they tried to block traffic and many as they simply walked on sidewalks. The action prevented what was to have been a major show of civil disobedience outside Madison Square Garden on the second night of the Republican convention.
About 200 arrests came as the War Resisters League, a pacifist group, marched about 1,000 strong from Ground Zero toward Madison Square Garden. And police arrested about 150 people who were standing on sidewalks about four blocks from the Garden and refused police orders to disperse. Scores of riot police surrounded Union Square late Tuesday as about 1,000 protesters gathered on the periphery, then dispersed without incident.
Confrontations sometimes turned physical, as undercover police officers tackled bands of anarchists marching down the middle of the city's broadest avenues.
"It appears that some of the hard-core groups are still trying to get to the Garden," said Paul Browne, deputy police commissioner for public information. "But we're not letting them through."
Most of the protests were carried out by a loosely organized anarchists' collective calling itself A31, for August 31, with a goal of calling attention to what Raquel Lavina, a Bay Area organizer, termed "Bush's foreign terror and war at home." Protesters assembled outside office buildings housing military contractors, hotels where Republican delegates were staying and the Midtown offices of Fox News.
Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly commended officers' restraint in the face of what he called "relentless provocation."
But New York Civil Liberties Union associate legal director Chris Dunn accused police of improperly arresting the 200 War Resisters League protesters after agreeing to let them walk north on a sidewalk from Ground Zero to the area around Madison Square Garden. Dunn said the protesters never left the sidewalk, but police moved in anyway after they had walked one block, surrounding them with orange netting and arresting them.
About 800 other members of the group dispersed rather than be arrested.
"When you are the cops, you can apparently arrest people anywhere you want. They've got the guns," Dunn said.
Police also arrested dozens of people walking toward the Garden near Union Square and late Tuesday arrested 150 walking on 35th Street, about four blocks from the Garden. "I was just walking down the street. I was just following everybody," a man who identified himself as Michael Costanzo of New Jersey called out to a reporter. Later, Michael Collins, a high-ranking police official, told reporters in the area: "These people were told to disperse. They were given a warning. If they don't disperse, then they get arrested."
In an unrelated incident, Yale student Thomas Frampton, 21, was arrested after entering a restricted area near Vice President Cheney's booth at the convention. Frampton, a Sidwell Friends graduate and former housing activist in the District, came within 10 feet of Cheney and shouted antiwar and anti-Bush statements. Authorities said Cheney was never in danger. Frampton was charged with assaulting federal officers and impeding the operation of the Secret Service.
Throughout the day, small groups of protesters showed up at sites designated on the Web site of A31 as protest targets: Fox News, the Westin Hotel housing the Missouri delegation and buildings housing the Carlyle Group, Rand Corp. and Lockheed Martin Corp. But at most of these places, there were more police officers and reporters than protesters. Police arrested small groups of protesters trying to disrupt traffic in the financial district or loitering on subway platforms uptown, Kelly said.
Hundreds of demonstrators rallied outside the Fox News studios in Midtown Manhattan, yelling, "Shut the Fox up," their voices echoing off the windowed skyscrapers.
Fox employees streamed into the courtyard to watch as protesters hurled their criticism at a television network they see as an unwavering supporter of the Bush administration.
"It's propaganda," said Deborah Ben-Elizer, 34, a New Yorker wearing glasses with swirled lenses to represent what she called a zombie public that has fallen under the spell of Fox. "They're in bed with [the Bush administration]. They're sleeping together," she said.
Police built a double barricade four blocks from Madison Square Garden in all directions, and at one point, Fox reporter John Deutzman was interviewing protesters there when several realized he was from Fox and surrounded him, yelling, "Liar! Liar!" About 50 protesters joined in until police opened the barricade and gave Deutzman a haven inside.
Also Tuesday, Riverside Church in Harlem hosted a gathering of 3,000 New Yorkers to "call attention to the real moral, social and economic issues of this election," the Rev. James A. Forbes said. Afterward, churches throughout the city rang their bells "to demonstrate that faith does not belong to one party," as Forbes put it.
-------- POLITICS
-------- corruption
The Lobbyists Industry Advocates Play Key Convention Roles
Republican Party Grants Unusual Access
By Thomas B. Edsall and Jeffrey H. Birnbaum
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, September 1, 2004; Page A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50839-2004Aug31.html
NEW YORK, Aug. 31 -- When Juan Jose Perez, an Ohio delegate, formally placed George W. Bush's name in nomination for president Monday, two men stood by to make sure there were no mistakes.
One was high-profile lobbyist Mark Isakowitz, whose clients include Intel Corp., Mutual of Omaha Insurance Co. and the Recording Industry Association of America. The other was Bruce A. Gates, who has represented pharmaceutical and insurance companies and banking interests.
This week, Isakowitz and Gates are focused on only two clients: President Bush and the Republican Party. And they are not alone: From top to bottom, Washington lobbyists are playing key roles in running the Republican National Convention here.
The convention chief executive officer, Bill Harris, last year registered to lobby on behalf of Quest Software Inc. and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform. The chairman of the convention's arrangements committee, David A. Norcross, has lobbied for a variety of defense contractors, including Raytheon Corp. and Boeing Co. Lobbyist Bryce L. "Larry" Harlow, who is in charge of "official proceedings," represents Visa, insurance interests, Budweiser and drug companies.
Lobbyists have played a time-honored role of assisting both parties in staging their quadrennial national conventions. But rarely has one party granted industry advocates so central a part in nominating a presidential and vice presidential candidate, a development that has drawn criticism from some watchdog groups.
"Lobbyists are there to serve the interests of their clients," said Larry Noble, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. "By putting them in important roles in the convention, they are bringing the corporate interests they represent further into the party. . . . That gives them an extra inside track that other people don't have."
For many Washington lobbying firms, convention work is crucial to maintaining close ties to elected and appointed Republican officials who have advanced an aggressively pro-business agenda during the past decade. The Bush administration's policies have been especially beneficial to many of the lobbyists' corporate and trade association clients, including the pharmaceutical, financial and energy industries.
Lobbyists have also found that maintaining a strong and visible presence at the convention is useful in impressing their clients, many of whom, at the behest of their lobbyists, are here throwing parties for Senate and House members, governors, party officials and Capitol Hill staffers.
While more prominent lobbyists such as Isakowitz and Gates have been given high-profile assignments at the GOP convention, about 100 others are doing the grunt work. These men and women make sure speakers get on and off the podium on schedule. They escort elected officials and their families to the convention floor. They run the floor whip operation, directing delegates through all their duties, from waving placards to attending platform committee meetings. They also served as senior staffers for the committee that wrote the party platform.
Anne Phelps, for example, is executive director of the Platform Committee. Her lobbying clients include the Ho-Chunk Nation Indian tribe of Wisconsin and FMC Technology Inc. In a news release that made no mention of Phelps's lobbying work, Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie said: "We are fortunate to have such talented people join us as the 2004 Platform Committee works to craft a proposal that reflects the president's goals and the beliefs of our party."
Gillespie, who was a lobbyist until he assumed the RNC chairmanship 13 months ago, defended lobbyists at the convention.
"A lot of these people have expertise and have worked on the Hill and have worked at conventions for a long time," Gillespie said Tuesday during a meeting with Washington Post editors and reporters. Asked whether the party had become dependent on registered lobbyists, Gillespie replied: "I don't know that we are dependent on them. I do know that they volunteer and they help out and, you know, they do as they are directed to."
Some of the lobbyists-officials were hard to miss on the convention floor. Walter F. Buchholtz, a lobbyist for Exxon Mobil Corp., wore the yellow baseball cap assigned to all members of the "whip" organization as he assisted delegates from Louisiana and Kentucky. "We just make sure everything runs smoothly," he said.
Nearby, Stan Anderson, executive vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, wearing a RNC staff identity badge, said he was working with the Committee on Operations. He said he helps "with all the little details" that keep a convention going.
To be sure, many lobbyists and lawyers volunteered to work at the Democratic National Convention last month in Boston. But there were far fewer lobbyists directly involved in floor and podium proceedings. GOP convention officials assigned virtually all their top jobs to registered federal lobbyists.
This difference partly stems from an aggressive effort by Republican congressional leaders to force Washington's major lobby firms and trade associations to hire GOP operatives for top posts. This project, run by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) and Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform, is called "the K Street Project," for the street where many lobbyists have downtown offices.
The reliance on lobbyists has historical roots. After the 1980 election, Republican political consultants Charles R. Black Jr., Roger Stone and Paul Manafort broke ground by going "double-breasted." They ran electoral campaigns for senators and House members, and, after the elections, would lobby the men and women they put in office on behalf of high-paying corporations and associations. They effectively pierced the wall that had separated political operatives from registered lobbyists.
Black, who has worked on every Republican presidential campaign since 1980, modestly describes himself as "a third-string spokesman" at the convention. In fact, he is part of an elite convention "media team" that represents Bush and the GOP on talk shows on cable networks
Other team members include Kenneth M. Duberstein, whose Duberstein Group represents America's Health Insurance Plans and Time Warner Inc.; and Ed Rogers, of Barbour, Griffith & Rogers, LLC, which represents Pfizer Inc., the Lorillard Tobacco Co. and Raytheon Co. On television, they are identified as campaign spokesmen or Republican strategists, and rarely, if ever, as lobbyists.
Duberstein's firm has long specialized in sending its top lobbyists to both the nominating conventions: Duberstein to the GOP's and his partner, Michael S. Berman, a former top aide to Vice President Walter F. Mondale, to the Democrats, where he has run the podium operation. "Every four years we devote two weeks, which is great," Duberstein said.
While Black, Isakowitz and others are open about their roles here, party and convention officials are not. "We do not give out the names of any of our volunteers," said Alyssa McCoenning, deputy press secretary for the Republican convention. Convention officials have, for example, released the names of 155 youths working as pages here.
In a telephone conversation lasting about 45 seconds, Harlow said, "I just can't [talk] at this time; I have too many other things to do. Thank you for calling."
Typically, this is how the volunteer lobbyists work: Patti Coons, a delegate from Indiana, wanted to know when her delegation would be called on Monday afternoon to vote to nominate Bush. She consulted with Isakowitz, who opened a manila folder and read from a minute-by-minute schedule. "Very organized," Coons said approvingly as she walked back toward her seat.
Coons knew to ask Isakowitz because he was wearing a Secret Service-like earpiece and a telltale red hat.
The red hats are for those working under Harlow at official proceedings. Whenever delegates grabbed a microphone and cast a vote or spoke from the floor, red hats hovered close by. Such was the case when Wyoming nominated Vice President Cheney for a second term and when Alaska delegates voted for Bush.
In addition, the GOP convention's "government affairs" operation boasts an additional 50 or so people, most of them Washington lobbyists.
Their job is to look after members of Congress and other government officials. Lobbyists and congressional staffers are favored for this because they easily recognize elected officials and rescue them if need be.
At the Democratic convention, very few lobbyists worked as whips or in the official proceedings operation; they were concentrated in the government affairs operation, working directly with elected officials.
"Our job was to make sure the members [of Congress] get in; we have our people stationed at the doors to make sure they get right in," said Tim Keating, the top lobbyist for Honeywell Corp., who ran the Democrats' government affairs program. "We allowed them to move freely through the halls and to get in even when the fire marshals shut down the hall."
Researcher Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.
-------- propaganda wars
On the Campaign Trail Bush Backtracks on Terrorism
Remark Seeking to Reverse His Assertion That War Can't Be Won, President Says: 'We Will Win'
By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 1, 2004; Page A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49035-2004Aug31.html
NASHVILLE, Aug. 31 -- President Bush rushed Tuesday to reverse his assertion that the war on terrorism cannot be won, as his campaign sought to limit the damage from a statement that Democrats had used to paint the commander in chief as defeatist.
"Make no mistake about it: We are winning and we will win," Bush told the 86th annual convention of the American Legion as he continued his journey toward the Republican National Convention for his acceptance speech Thursday night. He said that "in this different kind of war, we may never sit down at a peace table."
"We will win by staying on the offensive," he told the nation's largest veterans organization. "We will win by spreading liberty. We believe that liberty can transform nations from tyranny into peaceful nations." Earlier in the speech, he said, "We meet today at a time of war for our country, a war we did not start, yet one that we will win."
In tone and substance, the remarks differed sharply from the more contemplative words he offered in an interview aired by NBC's "Today" show Monday. Asked about "this war on terror" during that interview, Bush said: "I don't think you can win it. 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 statement Monday was at odds with his own assertions about having a plan to defeat terrorism, and ran counter to his campaign's strategy of portraying the president as optimistic and resolute. It invited an immediate attack from Democrats, who have been on the defensive in recent weeks over attacks on presidential nominee John F. Kerry's Vietnam War record and position on Iraq.
Kerry's campaign gleefully responded to Bush's American Legion speech Tuesday with a news release headlined, "Bush Flip-Flops on Winning the War on Terror," then tried to top that a few moments later with another echo of a Republican attack on the Massachusetts senator, "Bush: Against Winning the War on Terror Before He Was for It."
"A president of the United States should be unflinching in his resolve toward the war on terror," Kerry's running mate, John Edwards, said in a statement Tuesday. "Saying we can't win one day and flipping around the next day sends exactly the wrong message to the American people, to the world -- and most importantly -- to the terrorists who seek to harm us."
Some officials in both parties said Bush's original comment was a more introspective and candid response than the stark pronouncements he often makes on the stump. Bush told NBC's Matt Lauer that he has a two-pronged strategy for coping with terrorists. "On the one hand is to find them before they hurt us. And that's necessary," he said. "The long-term strategy is to spread freedom and liberty. . . . I believe that democracy can take hold in parts of the world that are now nondemocratic, and I think it's necessary in order to defeat the ideologies of hate."
But advisers determined that in the super-heated homestretch of the campaign, the answer could not stand. Bush's campaign has kept Kerry off-balance for many months by using his own words to mock him in ads and during presidential events. Several strategists close to Kerry asserted that despite Bush's revision, the quote would become a standard talking point for Democrats, who contend the president has twisted the senator's words repeatedly.
After speaking in Nashville, Bush flew to Alleman, Iowa, to speak at a rally staged by his campaign adjacent to the Farm Progress Show, a machinery and equipment exposition, and told conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh in a telephone interview from there that he "probably needed to be a little more articulate."
"Listen, I should have made my point more clear about what I meant," Bush told Limbaugh. "What I meant was that this is not a conventional war. It is a different kind of war. We're fighting people who have got a dark ideology, who use terrorists, terrorism, as a tool. They're trying to shake our conscience. . . . And in a conventional war, there would be a peace treaty or there would be a moment where somebody would sit on the side and say, 'We quit.' That's not the kind of war we're in, and that's what I was saying."
Bush had said in the past that he has "a clear vision and a strategy to win the war on terror" and that the nation is "going to win the war on terror." He finished last Saturday's radio address about the U.S. response to terrorist threats by saying, "We will prevail."
The president appeared onstage Tuesday with a fellow American Legion member, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who spoke at the Republican convention the night before and traveled with Bush the rest of the day. Veterans have been a traditionally Republican constituency but are considered up for grabs this year because Kerry is a decorated Vietnam War hero and U.S. casualties in Iraq continue to mount. Democrats fear, however, that Kerry's claim on veterans has been badly hurt by advertisements from Swift Boat Veterans for Truth attacking his service in Vietnam.
The "Today" comment was the second time since August that Bush's remarks had indicated he was thinking about terrorism more deeply than his regular sound bites might indicate. "We actually misnamed the war on terror," he told the Unity: Journalists of Color convention. "It ought to be the struggle against ideological extremists who do not believe in free societies who happen to use terror as a weapon to try to shake the conscience of the free world."
--------
Bush's Leadership Against Terror Hailed
First Lady, Schwarzenegger Address Delegates
By David S. Broder
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 1, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49661-2004Aug31.html
NEW YORK, Aug. 31 -- The Republican National Convention spent a second night celebrating President Bush's leadership in the struggle against terrorism, praising him for putting "all his heart and soul" into the fight against America's enemies.
With first lady Laura Bush and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger delivering emotional and highly personal speeches Tuesday night at Madison Square Garden, what had been billed by the convention planners as an evening devoted to Bush's 2000 theme of "compassionate conservatism" was preempted by the campaign's determination to keep the focus on Bush as commander in chief of the war against terrorism.
In an address that was lengthier and more revealing than any she had previously given, Laura Bush told a national television audience that "my husband didn't want to go to war, but he knew the safety and security of the world depended on it."
"I remember sitting in the window of the White House," she said, "watching as my husband walked on the lawn below . . . wrestling with those agonizing decisions that would have such profound consequences for so many lives and for the future of our world."
Schwarzenegger, the Austrian-born bodybuilder-turned-actor-turned-politician, called Bush "a man of perseverance, a man of inner strength, a leader who doesn't flinch, doesn't waver, does not back down."
The session opened as Bush tried to extricate himself from an incautious comment that the war on terrorism cannot be won. The president, who made the remark in a weekend interview with NBC, sought to cut off Democratic criticism of his statement by telling the American Legion convention in Nashville that while there may never be a peace treaty or surrender, "we are winning and will win."
The speeches by Laura Bush and Schwarzenegger far overshadowed those by Education Secretary Roderick R. Paige and Sens. Bill Frist (Tenn.) and Elizabeth Dole (N.C.). Those officials came forward to argue that Bush had fulfilled the compassionate conservatism promise of the last campaign by sponsoring major school and health care reforms -- and would do more in those areas if reelected.
A day of demonstrations called by anarchists and other activists ended with 600 arrests, as police chased protesters across Midtown Manhattan for more than five hours last night.
Picking up on the theme of Monday night's speakers, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) and former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, Laura Bush said, "George's work to protect our country and defeat terror" is "the issue that I believe is most important for my own daughters, for all our families and for our future."
She credited her husband with making it possible for "50 million more men, women and children to live in freedom," praising especially the advances for some in Afghanistan and Iraq. Laura Bush said that Americans have learned in the past four years what she has learned as the president's wife. "He'll always tell you what he really thinks. You can count on him, especially in a crisis. His friends don't change -- and neither do his values. He has boundless energy and enthusiasm for his job and for life itself. He treats every person he meets with dignity and respect, the same dignity and respect he has for the office he holds.
"And he is a loving man, with a big heart. I've seen tears as he has hugged families who've lost loved ones. I've seen him return the salute of soldiers wounded in battle. And then, being George, he invites them to come visit us at the White House. And they've come, bringing an infectious spirit of uniquely American confidence that we are doing the right thing and that our future will be better because of our actions today."
The first lady was introduced on the stage by twin daughters Barbara and Jenna, who joked about life in the Bush family fishbowl. The president appeared via closed circuit from a campaign stop in Pennsylvania to say that the United States "would be fortunate to have her in the White House for four more years."
Schwarzenegger spoke to fellow immigrants, telling them they are "welcome in this party. We Republicans admire your ambition. We encourage your dreams. We believe in your future."
The governor became the first prominent convention speaker to directly address the economic issues that Democrats count as Bush's biggest political liabilities. Reprising a phrase he used -- controversially -- to describe California legislators, Schwarzenegger said: "To those critics who are so pessimistic about our economy, I say: Don't be economic girlie men." The delegates roared with approval.
"The U.S. economy remains the envy of the world," he said, adding that it is "moving ahead despite a recession they inherited and in spite of the attack on our homeland."
Without naming him, Schwarzenegger rebutted Sen. John Edwards's favorite line that there are "two Americas," one for the wealthy and one for everyone else. The Democratic vice presidential candidate uses it as shorthand for economic divisions, but Schwarzenegger said that the troops he has visited "do not believe there are two Americas. They believe we are one America and they are fighting for it. We are one America -- and President Bush is defending it with all his heart and soul."
Until Schwarzenegger spoke, the Republicans had used their prime-time access to a national TV audience without directly addressing the economic issues that voters say are as worrisome to them as the threat of terrorism.
Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie said in an interview that Vice President Cheney will speak on both the economy and terrorism on Wednesday night and Bush will defend his economic record on Thursday night -- along with his second-term plans to recoup the lost jobs and declining incomes that have marred his first term.
Edwards said in a statement that Republicans are avoiding economic issues "because they don't have a plan to create jobs, to fix health care or win the war on terror. And they certainly don't want to bring up the big elephant in the room -- 1.8 million jobs gone, more than 5 million people who have lost their health insurance, more than 4 million people who have fallen into poverty and American families who keep seeing their incomes drop year by year."
Last night, the Kerry-Edwards campaign announced a $45 million ad buy in 20 states -- the first stage in a media war that will begin after Labor Day.
Before the evening's speeches began, the convention completed the formality of nominating Bush for a second term, with Pennsylvania, a battleground state that went Democratic in 2000, given the honor of putting him over the top.
Dole and Sen. Sam Brownback (Kan.) combined their praise for Bush's efforts to combat AIDS and promote other social programs with the most explicit messages opposing abortion and same-sex marriage heard yet at the convention.
"Marriage is important," Dole said, "not because it is a convenient invention or the latest reality show. Marriage is important because it is the cornerstone of civilization, and the foundation of the family. Marriage between a man and a woman isn't something Republicans invented, but it is something Republicans will defend." The GOP platform calls for amending the Constitution to bar same-sex marriage.
Dole said that the same thing is true of "the right to worship God," adding that her party believes that Americans "are free to worship without discrimination, without intervention and even without activist judges trying to strip the name of God from the Pledge of Allegiance, from the money in our pockets, and from the walls of our courthouses."
Brownback said that because of "the mettle of George Bush," the United States is "leading the world in the heroic rescue of human life. This is the essence of compassionate conservatism," adding that "from the child in the womb to the mother carrying her, this nation and this president will fight for you."
Paige, a former Houston school superintendent, said Bush has "always had a compassionate vision for education: students challenged by high standards, teachers armed with proper resources, parents empowered with information and choices."
Rebutting Democratic criticism that the landmark No Child Left Behind Act passed by Congress in 2002 has been crippled by a lack of funding, Paige insisted the program is working. "All across America, test scores are rising, students are learning, the achievement gap is closing, teachers and principals are beaming with pride."
Paige was backed by George P. Bush, the president's nephew, who said the program opens the promise of the United States to every child, whether "new to our country or born in the heartland." Other speakers highlighted Bush's support for breast cancer research, adoption, faith-based and community service programs.
Frist, a physician as well as Senate majority leader, celebrated the passage of a Medicare prescription-drug benefit and criticized Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry for offering a health care plan that boils down to "take a handful of tax increases and 'Don't call me in the morning.' " Frist was particularly critical of Kerry and Edwards for opposing Republican legislation to limit awards for medical malpractice.
Before the evening session began, independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader was admitted to Madison Square Garden for a TV interview. The Associated Press quoted him as saying, "I like to observe corporate orgies."
Researcher Brian Faler contributed to this report.
--------
Themes 9/11 Referenced as a Defining Moment
Some New Yorkers Question Whether Drawing Links to Attack Is Sound Strategy
By Michael Powell
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 1, 2004; Page A22
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50688-2004Aug31.html
NEW YORK, Aug. 31 -- Ben Wilson sat in his living room in Harlem late Monday and listened as former mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani talked of Sept. 11, 2001, and why the events of that day all but demanded that Americans vote for President Bush.
Wilson listened -- and clicked off his television. He had watched the first airplane crash into the World Trade Center. His son serves in Iraq with the Marines.
"Listen to me: A lot of us suffered that day," said Wilson, who is African American. "You tell me what Bush has done that gives him the right to come here and milk that attack for votes? Man, the Republicans annoy me."
In the first days of the Republican National Convention, speakers have talked of Sept. 11 and of Bush's leadership in the days and months that followed, when his national popularity was at an all-time high. On a darkened convention stage Monday under a sign reading "September 11, 2001," three women who lost relatives in the attacks spoke of their pain, followed by a baritone who intoned "Amazing Grace." Bush's national poll ratings, particularly on homeland security issues, have risen steadily in recent days.
But in New York, local polls and conversations with residents reveal unease, sometimes edged with disdain, for this politicization of the attacks and their aftermath. Many New Yorkers said they are worried that their vastly Democratic city has become a Republican prop. (In one sense, at least, this is true, as the backdrop at the podium in Madison Square Garden is of a moonlit skyline of New York.)
Andrew Rice lost his brother, David, in the attacks on the World Trade Center. He has become an antiwar activist and watched the convention speeches with alarm, particularly as he listened to the words of the relatives of the dead.
"I know their pain very deeply, but this is just a strategy to overwhelm people emotionally," Rice said Tuesday. "The idea is to get people back to the way they felt on September 11th, and subconsciously attach that to President Bush."
A Zogby poll released Monday said that 49 percent of New York City residents believed that national leaders "knew in advance that attacks were planned . . . and that they consciously failed to act." An even larger proportion of minority New Yorkers take this view. Sixty-three percent of black New Yorkers and 60 percent of Hispanics believe that officials had warnings, the poll said.
By no means do all New Yorkers believe this. Nearly 400,000 New Yorkers (out of 2 million in the city who voted) chose Bush in 2000, and many of them believe strongly that the president deserves credit for shielding the city from further attacks. (The Democrats, too, invited a relative of Sept. 11 victims to speak at their convention and played "Amazing Grace" afterward.)
Christy Ferer lives in Manhattan with her two daughters. She lost her husband, Neil D. Levin, executive director of the Port Authority, in the attacks. For her, Bush's talk of Sept. 11 is not simply justified but central to his appeal as a candidate.
"Anyone who prioritizes homeland security votes for George Bush -- it's that simple," she said. "The fact of the matter is that we haven't had a single attack on our soil since 9/11. He's entitled to the linkage with his reelection campaign."
Senior Bush officials have consistently warned in congressional testimony that another attack in the United States is probable, and they have listed New York and Washington as likely targets. In particular, in the weeks leading to the Republican convention, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge pointed to New York City as a possible target, although there have been few reports of terrorist "chatter" this week.
Many New Yorkers wonder about Giuliani's decision to place his considerable political capital at Bush's disposal. As a personality, New York's former mayor is a strong cup of coffee -- New Yorkers loved and loathed him in equal measure. But even most critics credit him with strong personal leadership after Sept. 11, a time during which he seemed to personify his city.
In his speech Monday, Giuliani spoke of seeing bodies falling and the "flames of hell." And he said -- though he had never said this before -- that he gripped the arm of his police commissioner and said: "Thank God George Bush is our president."
This conflation of disaster, personal bravery and Bush did not sit well with several New Yorkers interviewed Tuesday. Rob Snyder is a historian at Rutgers University in Newark, a Manhattan resident and a man who narrowly dodged the collapsing towers as he walked out of the PATH train station in Lower Manhattan nearly three years ago.
"The genius of Rudy's conduct after September 11th was his ability to rise above partisan identity and to reflect and inspire the courage of ordinary people," Snyder said. "But by supporting Bush, and attacking Kerry, he's quickly reverted to type."
-------- us politics
Text of Cheney Speech
Text of Vice President Dick Cheney's speech as prepared for delivery Wednesday at the Republican National Convention.
September 1, 2004
Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/2004/la-090104cheneytext_wr,1,4907388.story?coll=la-home-headlines
Mr. Chairman, delegates, distinguished guests, and fellow Americans: I accept your nomination for vice president of the United States.
I am honored by your confidence. And tonight I make this pledge: I will give this campaign all that I have, and together we will make George W. Bush president for another four years.
Tonight I will talk about this good man and his fine record leading our country. And I may say a word or two about his opponent. I am also mindful that I have an opponent of my own. People tell me that Senator Edwards got picked for his good looks, his sex appeal, and his great hair. I say to them, "How do you think I got the job?"
On this night, as we celebrate the opportunities that America offers, I am filled with gratitude to a nation that has been good to me, and I remember the people who set me on my way in life. My grandfather noted that the day I was born was also the birthday of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And so he told my parents they should send President Roosevelt an announcement of my birth. Now my grandfather didn't have a chance to go to high school. For many years he worked as a cook on the Union Pacific Railroad, and he and my grandmother lived in a railroad car. But the modesty of his circumstances didn't stop him from thinking that President Roosevelt should know about my arrival. My grandfather believed deeply in the promise of America, and had the highest hopes for his family. And I don't think it would surprise him much that a grandchild of his stands before you tonight as vice president of the United States.
It is the story of this country that people have been able to dream big dreams with confidence they would come true, if not for themselves, then for their children and grandchildren. And that sense of boundless opportunity is a gift that we must pass on to all who come after us.
From kindergarten to graduation, I went to public schools, and I know that they are a key to being sure that every child has a chance to succeed and to rise in the world. When the president and I took office, our schools were shuffling too many children from grade to grade without giving them the skills and knowledge they need. So President Bush reached across the aisle and brought both parties together to pass the most significant education reform in 40 years. With higher standards and new resources, America's schools are now on an upward path to excellence and not for just a few children, but for every child.
Opportunity also depends on a vibrant, growing economy. As President Bush and I were sworn into office, our nation was sliding into recession, and American workers were overburdened with federal taxes. Then came the events of Sept. 11th, which hit our economy very hard. So President Bush delivered the greatest tax reduction in a generation, and the results are clear to see. Businesses are creating jobs. People are returning to work. Mortgage rates are low, and home ownership in this country is at an all-time high. The Bush tax cuts are working.
Our nation has the best health care in the world, and President Bush is making it more affordable and accessible to all Americans. And there is more to do. Under this president's leadership, we will reform medical liability so the system serves patients and good doctors, not personal injury lawyers.
These have been years of achievement, and we are eager for the work ahead. And in all that we do, we will never lose sight of the greatest challenge of our time: preserving the freedom and security of this nation against determined enemies.
Since I last spoke to our national convention, Lynne and I have had the joy of seeing our family grow. We now have a grandson to go along with our three wonderful granddaughters, and the deepest wish of my heart and the object of all my determination is that they, and all of America's children, will have lives filled with opportunity and that they will inherit a world in which they can live in freedom, in safety, and in peace.
Four years ago, some said the world had grown calm, and many assumed that the United States was invulnerable to danger. That thought might have been comforting; it was also false. Like other generations of Americans, we soon discovered that history had great and unexpected duties in store for us.
Sept. 11th, 2001, made clear the challenges we face. On that day we saw the harm that could be done by 19 men armed with knives and boarding passes. America also awakened to a possibility even more lethal: this enemy, whose hatred of us is limitless, armed with chemical, biological, or even nuclear weapons.
Just as surely as the Nazis during World War Two and the Soviet communists during the Cold War, the enemy we face today is bent on our destruction. As in other times, we are in a war we did not start, and have no choice but to win. Firm in our resolve, focused on our mission, and led by a superb commander in chief, we will prevail.
The fanatics who killed some 3,000 of our fellow Americans may have thought they could attack us with impunity because terrorists had done so previously. But if the killers of Sept. 11 thought we had lost the will to defend our freedom, they did not know America and they did not know George W. Bush.
From the beginning, the president made clear that the terrorists would be dealt with and that anyone who supports, protects, or harbors them would be held to account. In a campaign that has reached around the world, we have captured or killed hundreds of al-Qaida. In Afghanistan, the camps where terrorists trained to kill Americans have been shut down, and the Taliban driven from power. In Iraq, we dealt with a gathering threat, and removed the regime of Saddam Hussein. Seventeen months ago, he controlled the lives and fortunes of 25 million people. Tonight he sits in jail.
President Bush does not deal in empty threats and half measures, and his determination has sent a clear message. Just five days after Saddam was captured, the government of Libya agreed to abandon its nuclear weapons program and turn the materials over to the United States. Tonight, uranium, centrifuges, and plans for nuclear weapons that were once hidden in Libya are locked up and stored away in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, never again to be a danger to Americans.
The biggest threat we face today is having nuclear weapons fall into the hands of terrorists. The president is working with many countries in a global effort to end the trade and transfer of these deadly technologies. The most important result thus far and it is a very important one is that the black-market network that supplied nuclear weapons technology to Libya, as well as to Iran and North Korea, has been shut down. The world's worst source of nuclear weapons proliferation is out of business and we are safer as a result.
In the global war we are fighting, we owe a mighty debt to the men and women of the United States armed forces. They have fought the enemy with courage and reached out to civilians with compassion, rebuilding schools and hospitals and roads. They have won stunning victories. They have faced hard duty and long deployments. And they have lost comrades, more than 1,100 brave Americans, whose memory this nation will honor forever. The men and women who wear the uniform of the United States represent the very best of America. They have the thanks of our nation. And they have the confidence, the loyalty, and the respect of their commander in chief.
In this election, we will decide who leads our country for the next four years. Yet there is more in the balance than that. Moments come along in history when leaders must make fundamental decisions about how to confront a long term challenge abroad and how best to keep the American people secure. We faced such a moment after World War Two, when we put in place the policies that defended America throughout the Cold War. Those policies containing communism, deterring attack by the Soviet Union, and promoting the rise of democracy were carried out by Democratic and Republican presidents in the decades that followed.
This nation has reached another of those defining moments. Under President Bush we have put in place new policies and created new institutions to defend America, to stop terrorist violence at its source, and to help move the Middle East away from old hatreds and resentments and toward the lasting peace that only freedom can bring. This is the work not of months, but of years and keeping these commitments is essential to our future security. For that reason, ladies and gentlemen, the election of 2004 is one of the most important, not just in our lives but in our history.
And so it is time to set the alternatives squarely before the American people.
The President's opponent is an experienced senator. He speaks often of his service in Vietnam, and we honor him for it. But there is also a record of more than three decades since. And on the question of America's role in the world, the differences between Senator Kerry and President Bush are the sharpest, and the stakes for the country are the highest. History has shown that a strong and purposeful America is vital to preserving freedom and keeping us safe yet time and again Senator Kerry has made the wrong call on national security. Senator Kerry began his political career by saying he would like to see our troops deployed "only at the directive of the United Nations." During the 1980s, Senator Kerry opposed Ronald Reagan's major defense initiatives that brought victory in the Cold War. In 1991, when Saddam Hussein occupied Kuwait and stood poised to dominate the Persian Gulf, Senator Kerry voted against Operation Desert Storm.
Even in this post-9/11 period, Senator Kerry doesn't appear to understand how the world has changed. He talks about leading a "more sensitive war on terror," as though al-Qaida will be impressed with our softer side. He declared at the Democratic Convention that he will forcefully defend America after we have been attacked. My fellow Americans, we have already been attacked, and faced with an enemy who seeks the deadliest of weapons to use against us, we cannot wait for the next attack. We must do everything we can to prevent it and that includes the use of military force.
Senator Kerry denounces American action when other countries don't approve as if the whole object of our foreign policy were to please a few persistent critics. In fact, in the global war on terror, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, President Bush has brought many allies to our side. But as the President has made very clear, there is a difference between leading a coalition of many, and submitting to the objections of a few. George W. Bush will never seek a permission slip to defend the American people.
Senator Kerry also takes a different view when it comes to supporting our military. Although he voted to authorize force against Saddam Hussein, he then decided he was opposed to the war, and voted against funding for our men and women in the field. He voted against body armor, ammunition, fuel, spare parts, armored vehicles, extra pay for hardship duty, and support for military families. Senator Kerry is campaigning for the position of commander in chief. Yet he does not seem to understand the first obligation of a commander in chief and that is to support American troops in combat.
In his years in Washington, John Kerry has been one of a hundred votes in the United States Senate and very fortunately on matters of national security, his views rarely prevailed. But the presidency is an entirely different proposition. A senator can be wrong for 20 years, without consequence to the nation. But a president, a president always casts the deciding vote. And in this time of challenge, America needs and America has a president we can count on to get it right.
On Iraq, Senator Kerry has disagreed with many of his fellow Democrats. But Senator Kerry's liveliest disagreement is with himself. His back-and-forth reflects a habit of indecision, and sends a message of confusion. And it is all part of a pattern. He has, in the last several years, been for the No Child Left Behind Act and against it. He has spoken in favor of the North American Free Trade Agreement and against it. He is for the Patriot Act and against it. Senator Kerry says he sees two Americas. It makes the whole thing mutual - America sees two John Kerrys.
The other candidate in this race is a man our nation has come to know, and one I've come to admire very much. I watch him at work every day. I have seen him face some of the hardest decisions that can come to the Oval Office and make those decisions with the wisdom and humility Americans expect in their president. George W. Bush is a man who speaks plainly and means what he says. He is a person of loyalty and kindness and he brings out these qualities in those around him. He is a man of great personal strength and more than that, a man with a heart for the weak, and the vulnerable, and the afflicted. We all remember that terrible morning when, in the space of just 102 minutes, more Americans were killed than we lost at Pearl Harbor. We remember the President who came to New York City and pledged that the terrorists would soon hear from all of us. George W. Bush saw this country through grief and tragedy. He has acted with patience, and calm, and a moral seriousness that calls evil by its name. In the great divide of our time, he has put this nation where America always belongs: against the tyrants of this world, and on the side of every soul on earth who yearns to live in freedom.
Fellow citizens, our nation is reaching the hour of decision, and the choice is clear. President Bush and I will wage this effort with complete confidence in the judgment of the American people. The signs are good even in Massachusetts. According to a news account last month, people leaving the Democratic National Convention asked a Boston policeman for directions. He replied, "Leave here and go vote Republican."
President Bush and I are honored to have the support of that police officer, and of Democrats, Republicans, and independents from every calling in American life. We are so fortunate, each and every one of us, to be citizens of this great nation and to take part in the defining event of our democracy: Choosing who will lead us.
The historian Bernard DeVoto once wrote that when America was created, the stars must have danced in the sky. Our president understands the miracle of this great country. He knows the hope that drives it and shares the optimism that has long been so important a part of our national character. He gets up each and every day determined to keep our great nation safe so that generations to come will know the freedom and opportunities we have known and more.
When this convention concludes tomorrow night, we will go forth with confidence in our cause, and in the man who leads it. By leaving no doubt where we stand, and asking all Americans to join us, we will see our cause to victory.
Thank you very much.
-------- OTHER
-------- environment
EarthTalk: Do urban trees really help reduce pollution and clean the air?
Tuesday, August 31, 2004
From the editors of E/The Environmental Magazine
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-08-31/s_26621.asp
Dear EarthTalk: Do urban trees really help reduce pollution and clean the air?
- John Alderman, Washington, D.C.
Back in 1872 Frederick Law Olmsted, the granddaddy of American landscape architecture and the designer of New York's Central Park, proclaimed that trees were the "lungs of the city."
While Olmsted's statement may have been more philosophical than scientific, researchers have since found that city trees do indeed perform important environmental functions like soaking up ground-level pollutants and storing carbon dioxide, which helps offset global warming.
Each year in Chicago, for example, the windy city's urban tree canopy removes 15 metric tons of carbon monoxide, 84 metric tons of sulfur dioxide, 89 metric tons of nitrogen dioxide, 191 metric tons of ozone and 212 metric tons of particulates, according to David Nowak, project leader of the U.S. Forest Service's Urban Forest Ecosystem Research Unit.
Trees absorb these gaseous pollutants via the tiny pores in their leaves and break them down into less harmful molecules during photosynthesis.
In Sacramento, California, a public-private partnership called Sacramento Shade spearheaded the planting of more than 200,000 trees around the city in the mid-1990s. In a study assessing Sacramento's bolstered tree cover, Greg McPherson of the Western Center for Urban Forest Research found that the region's urban forest removes more than 200,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year, saving taxpayers as much as $3 million annually in pollution cleanup costs.
Meanwhile, the tree cover in New York City helps remove enough airborne toxins to save taxpayers as much as $10 million a year in pollution mitigation costs, according to Nowak. The Big Apple's five boroughs are home to more than 5 million trees, covering nearly 17 percent of its public and private land, he added.
Gary Moll, a vice president at the nonprofit group American Forests, asserts that trees are the "ultimate urban multi-taskers," absorbing carbon dioxide and acting as filters, sponges, humidifiers, heat shields, and wind blockers. Under Moll's supervision, American Forests is assessing the costs and benefits of city tree cover across the country. The group uses a combination of satellite data, field surveys, and computer modeling technology to measure regional tree canopy and calculate its dollar value.
All told, Olmsted was right in his assessment of the importance of city trees. Indeed, planting trees in urban environments may be one of the best medicines available to help restore our ailing cities.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Egypt's Activists Test the Waters
New Groups Bubbling to Surface In Anticipation of Political Reform
By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, September 1, 2004; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A50503-2004Aug31?language=printer
CAIRO -- Like a collection of hieroglyphs, portraits of old-time communist heroes lined the walls in a hall where left-wing Egyptian activists met one recent day. Marx wore his beard; Lenin read Pravda. On one wall, a new red banner bore an up-to-date message that not long ago authorities would not have tolerated: "Down With Tyranny in Egypt."
The activists, several of whom had spent years in jail, got down to work on strategies designed to end the 23-year rule of President Hosni Mubarak.
"I think this statement is too soft," said one. "We need to get to the point, and that is Mubarak."
"No, we should stay away from mentioning personalities," countered another.
Operating out of dingy offices in Cairo's decayed downtown of art deco palaces, activists of all stripes -- left, right and Islamic -- are testing the limits of political activity as they prepare strategies in anticipation of major reform in Egypt. The capital has become an arena of political effervescence.
Mubarak's government tolerates officially registered opposition groups, but many unofficial organizations have begun operating since a cautious liberalization of laws on association in the late 1990s.
It is far from certain that Mubarak will initiate or tolerate major reforms, but that seems to have dampened no one's enthusiasm. "Why wait?" said Kamal Khalil, a leader of the banned Revolutionary Socialist Party. "It is time for us to show we are steadfast and ready for Mubarak's downfall."
Still, fear of a crackdown is often evident when opposition groups meet. At the left-wing gathering, for instance, delegates refused to have their pictures taken.
For now, Mubarak and his large security services maintain a tight hold on power. Many political analysts think that despite fragile health, the 76-year-old president will seek a fifth term next year, through an unopposed referendum. Barring that, he would designate his son Gamal to lead.
The United States has pressed Mubarak to undertake a transition to democracy. But he has said that foreigners ought to stay out of Arab politics and that easing up could bring parties to the surface that want to convert Egypt into an Islamic republic.
Parties seeking legal status need the approval of a government-sanctioned committee headed by Safwat Sharif, who is also secretary general of Mubarak's ruling National Democratic Party.
In the past 25 years, the committee has rejected 50 requests for the creation of new parties. At present, 17 have official recognition.
By all accounts, Egypt's most influential opposition group is the Muslim Brotherhood, the granddaddy of Middle Eastern Islamic political movements. It is banned from politics, but some of its loyalists are members of parliament, and others operate openly in Cairo and other cities.
A spectrum of other opposition forces resents the notion that Egypt's only choice lies between Mubarak and militant Islam. "The Islamic threat is used by the government as a boogeyman," said Abdul-Ala Maddi, director of the International Studies Center, a front for developing a new Islamic party called Wasat.
Leftist ideology reached its peak in the 1950s and '60s under the rule of Gamal Abdul Nasser and then declined in influence in the 1970s and thereafter. Recently, leftists have spearheaded a series of street demonstrations against U.S. policies in the Palestinian territories and Iraq -- both topics on which most Egyptians are critical of Washington.
Increasingly, the protests have focused on Mubarak. "We are not cattle that can be passed from one owner to another," said Khalil, whose party is banned. He wants to make Mubarak's possible downfall a main subject of future demonstrations.
Leftists have also been the focus of an increase in human rights monitoring. The government suspects that some human rights groups are covers for political activities.
In June, Health Ministry inspectors raided the offices of the Nadim Center for the Psychological Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence, an anti-torture watchdog organization. The center runs a clinic where victims come for checkups and to get medical and legal referrals. The inspectors suggested that the clinic had too few stethoscopes and too much leftist literature and threatened to close it down.
"There is no question we are not just a clinic," said Suzanne Fayyad, a Nadim Center official. "But we have to link up with lawyers and human rights monitors. The government just wants us to measure blood pressure."
The Hisham Mubarak Law Center, another organization that battles torture, has refused to register with the government on the grounds that registration would open the way for interference. Instead, the center operates as a private law firm, even though its activities are overtly political.
"We want to challenge the right of government to control civil society," said Ahmed Seif, head of the center. "If our focus is torture, how can we ask permission from the government that practices torture?" The law center frequently hosts political strategy meetings among leftists grouped under the 20th March Movement for Change, an offshoot of March 2003 protests against the Iraq war.
"At first, Palestine and Iraq were the center of the protests. Now there is a consensus that domestic issues must take center stage," Seif said.
Parties on the right -- in Egyptian terms, this includes support for decentralized power and a market economy -- are also militating for an end to Mubarak's rule but are more cautious about taking to the streets. Ayman Nour, head of the Tomorrow Party, has published a 600-page program of proposed reforms that include multiparty democracy, a reduction of presidential powers and the elimination of socialist references in the constitution. He doubts that Mubarak will soon give up any real power. "The reality is bitter," he said. "We don't expect anything but cosmetic changes. Still, we must prepare ourselves for the right moment."
Nour, who is a member of parliament, broke from an officially recognized right-of-center group, but the government has so far refused to register Tomorrow. No matter: One recent day, he held what was effectively a campaign rally in downtown Cairo. He was carried into the hall by dancing supporters as pop music blared from loudspeakers. Politics was not a topic that night -- Nour told the group he had made lengthy speeches on reform the week before and the crowd had tired quickly of it. Instead, Nour invited a leading pop singer to perform. "This night is for fun," he told the gathering of about 2,000 people.
Although the status of Tomorrow is in limbo, Nour is recruiting members. He has also opened a Web site to present the party platform and is trying to organize a Web radio station to get around a ban that prevents him from publishing.
Even a new Islamic party has budded in Cairo's political greenhouse, and it is trying to challenge the Muslim Brotherhood. Wasat, made up of former Brotherhood members, wants to "incorporate Islamists into Egypt's political scene," Maddi said.
Like the Tomorrow Party, Wasat has been denied official registration. Maddi said the government considers Wasat a front for the Muslim Brotherhood. "This official attitude is counterproductive. Look at the results: The so-called underground Muslim Brotherhood operates the most successfully. If you abide by the law, you are weak and denied your rights."
Maddi said Wasat also finds ways to get around its lack of official sanction. It holds meetings ostensibly about the campaign for official recognition. "Of course, that includes recruitment and talking about subjects important to the public," he said. "We take our effort to form a party very seriously."
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Thousands Form Symbolic Unemployment Line in N.Y.
September 1, 2004
By CHRISTINE HAUSER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/01/nyregion/01CND-PROT.html?hp
Demonstrations against the Bush administration and its policies continued into the third day of the Republican National Convention, with thousands of demonstrators forming a symbolic unemployment line in Manhattan and a small group of protesters infiltrating the convention floor despite heavy security at its Midtown venue.
In contrast to Tuesday, a day of planned civil disobedience when more than 900 protesters were arrested, today's demonstrations appeared to result in fewer arrests and less violence, judging by various reports through late afternoon.
Earlier in the day, the police said that more than 1,500 people had been taken into custody in convention-related arrests since last Thursday, mostly on misdemeanor charges. At least six people were known to have been arrested today on charges of trespassing, unlawfully hanging a banner and disorderly conduct.
Thousands of demonstrators stood silently along the sidewalk today in a column that stretched for miles to protest what they called the high rate of joblessness during the term of President Bush.
Holding up pink slips of paper symbolizing job terminations, the line of demonstrators went from Wall Street, in downtown Manhattan, north about three miles to the Midtown area where the Republican National Convention is being held in Madison Square Garden.
"The Next Pink Slip Might Be Yours!" the fliers read.
"I've been unemployed before," Gary Goff, 57, a data processor, told an Associated Press reporter. "I'm concerned that unemployment is going up so drastically under the Bush administration. I think Bush is a disaster for working people."
The demonstration was organized by People for the American Way, a liberal advocacy group based in Washington; the Imagine Festival of Arts, Issues & Ideas and the New York State AFL-CIO, a press statement said.
People for the American Way said in a statement today that 5,000 people had participated in what it called "The World's Longest Unemployment Line" representing "the 1.2 million jobs lost over all since March 2001 and the more than 8 million Americans who are currently unemployed."
This morning on the convention floor, 10 AIDS activists rose from amid the ranks of Republican youths. They blew whistles and chanted "Bush kills!" as the White House chief of staff, Andrew Card, spoke, The A.P. said. A scuffle broke out between the protesters and participants, and the police removed the demonstrators.
The New York City Central Labor Council held a rally to protest Mr. Bush's "antiworker policies," and about 30 students from Stuyvesant High School held a march against what they called the convention's exploitation of the 9/11 attacks for political gain, according to a Web site that tracks convention-related protests, www.indymedia.org.
The students participating in the march, called We Were There, had to flee from the terror attacks on that day.
On Tuesday, a wave of confrontations - which included a brawl with the police at the New York Public Library, marauding crowds cursing at delegates in Midtown and the detention of hundreds of protesters near ground zero - sowed disorder in a convention week that included sustained protests against the Bush administration and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Hundreds of thousands of protesters and groups have converged on and organized themselves in New York City to bring their agendas to the doorstep of the Republican convention, which continues tonight with a speech by Vice President Dick Cheney and ends tomorrow with President Bush's appearance to accept nomination for a second term.
With most demonstrators unable to fulfill their goal of reaching the heavily patrolled Garden, the disturbances have seeped into other Manhattan neighborhoods used as staging grounds, like Lower Manhattan and Union Square.
Once arrested, the protesters are taken to a pier on the Hudson River on Manhattan's West Side that has been outfitted as a temporary detention center.
Today, demonstrators at the pier protested the conditions under which the detainees are held there, said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. "Unfortunately, we still have no satisfactory response from the city about the conditions at Pier 57," she said. Protesters have complained about being 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. Some complain they have no access to their lawyers.
Det. Eric Crisafi said today that the police had no estimates for the number of people in the holding center at any one time. "We process everyone in a timely manner," he said. "Obviously, the system is overloaded."
Many fear that the intensity and frequency of the clashes may escalate, and have questioned police tactics.
"We have made oral complaints to the Police Department at the highest levels about indiscriminate arrests," Ms. Lieberman said. "Our hope is that notwithstanding the arrival of the vice president and then the president, that the Police Department will take a hard look at what it has been doing with regard to the unpermitted protests and focus on arresting only those people who are engaged in unlawful activities.
"I can't say that I am optimistic," Ms. Lieberman said.
But she made a distinction about illegal activity. "As with anything else, individuals who break the law should be treated accordingly," she said.
The police, in cars and vans or on bikes and scooters, have said their aggressive actions and arrests have pre-empted more widespread disruptions.
"Today a number of anti-R.N.C. activities failed to materialize, including a takeover of the lobby of the Warwick Hotel, perhaps because of the police presence there," Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly told reporters at a news conference on Tuesday evening.
Randal C. Archibold, Michael Wilson, Mary Spicuzza, William K. Rashbaum and Colin Moynihan contributed reporting for this article.
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DEMONSTRATIONS
At Least 900 Arrested in City as Protesters Clash With Police
September 1, 2004
By DIANE CARDWELL and MARC SANTORA
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/01/politics/campaign/01protest.html?pagewanted=all&position=
A series of demonstrations rippled across Manhattan last night when protesters tried to converge on the Republican National Convention, as a day of planned civil disobedience erupted into clashes with police officers and led to the arrest of more than 900 people.
The wave of confrontations - which included a brawl with the police at the New York Public Library, marauding crowds cursing at delegates in Midtown and the detention of hundreds of protesters near ground zero - created a day of disorder in a convention week already marked by sustained protests against the Bush administration and the war in Iraq.
Yesterday's incidents stood in contrast to the enormous, mostly orderly antiwar march that drew hundreds of thousands of people to Manhattan on Sunday. Many of those protesting yesterday had purposefully avoided seeking permits for their rallies but had publicized their plans well in advance, leading hordes of police officers in cars, bikes, scooters and vans to flood various parts of the city primed to pre-empt disorder before it could occur. The day's arrests brought the convention-related total to more than 1,460.
The protesters gathered at various locations, many with the goal of descending on the convention site at Madison Square Garden. But at the various staging areas - near ground zero, in Union Square, in Herald Square near Macy's, and outside the New York Public Library - the police began making arrests, sending the crowds into a frenzy. These confrontations followed several other events, some of which went off without incident, and the police said their aggressive actions prevented even more widespread disruptions.
"Today a number of anti-R.N.C. activities failed to materialize, including a takeover of the lobby of the Warwick Hotel, perhaps because of the police presence there," Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly told reporters at an early evening news conference.
Protesters and civil liberties lawyers expressed concerns over what they said had been unfair and overzealous tactics in dealing with demonstrators who may not have had permits but were not violent.
"It's an example of the police suckering the protesters," said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, referring to the arrest of some 200 protesters who said they thought they were abiding by an agreement they had negotiated with the police as they marched from ground zero on Fulton Street.
"It was a bait-and-switch tactic," she added, "where they approved a demonstration and the protesters kept up their end of the bargain. They undermined people's confidence in the police, and that's a serious problem as we go forward."
The day, loosely organized by an anarchist collective called the A31 Action Coalition, began slowly, with highly anticipated events proving less than fractious. Indeed, the cat-and-mouse between the protesters and the police started early.
Responding to word that anarchists planned to somehow disrupt the morning's trading, hundreds of police officers flooded the blocks surrounding the New York Stock Exchange before 8 a.m.
Roughly an hour later, dozens of officers responded to an obscure corner near the exchange at South William Street and Mill Lane, where protesters had stretched a ball of yarn across the street.
Within minutes, 14 young people sat handcuffed and seated with their backs to a wall near the short pedestrian mall, surrounded by three or four times as many police officers. Several balls of red and yellow yarn were strewn about the street, and a boom box sat nearby with a sign on a bedsheet reading "Celebrate the Power of Money." One of the protesters wore a pinstriped suit and a beret.
Paul J. Browne, a police spokesman, said of the protesters, "A lot of them are from out of town, and I think it was reflected in the choice of intersections."
But the protests gained intensity throughout the day, and by late afternoon, the tenor had clearly changed as the police appeared to adjust their tactics to deal with the spontaneous eruptions throughout the city and the crowds of demonstrators grew increasingly volatile as the arrests mounted.
Indeed, the turning point appeared to come as several hundred protesters with the War Resisters League tried to begin a march up Fulton Street that organizers had negotiated with police, although they did not have a permit.
Ed Hedemann, one of the organizers, said their understanding was that if they stayed on the sidewalk and did not block foot traffic or vehicles, they could proceed toward Madison Square Garden.
But within minutes, the protesters were confronted by a line of police officers who told demonstrators they were blocking the sidewalk and would be arrested, although they did not appear to be blocking pedestrian traffic at that point.
A commanding officer, telling the crowd of about 200 "you're all under arrest," ordered other officers to bring the "prison van" and the "orange netting" with which to enmesh the protesters.
"We don't know why we are being arrested, we were just crossing the street," said Lambert Rochfort, who was among the protesters. "We were told if we don't do anything illegal we would be allowed to march on the sidewalk and we did just that. Then they arrested us for no apparent reason."
Later in the afternoon, a clash erupted on the steps of the New York Public Library after two women tried to hang a protest banner over one of the lions atop the library steps. After the police pinned the women to the ground, a crowd of protesters struggled with police, answering requests to move with chants of "Oink, oink, oink."
People coming off the subways were thrown to the ground and the steps of the library were left littered with chairs and debris.
As protesters converged on Herald Square in the evening, the police tried to contain the increasingly raucous crowds. Hundreds of protesters seemed to get too close to the buses of delegates and the crowd became unruly as the police moved in metal barricades and used scooters to try to push the crowd back.
Those who would not move were arrested, and each time the police moved in to make an arrest, they were swarmed by protesters.
The demonstrators at Herald Square, frustrated by their lack of ability to move closer to Madison Square Garden, began breaking off in clusters of hundreds or so and storming the streets and avenues in Midtown, throwing cones and other objects at cars and windows as they ran.
As police drew close, they tried to scatter. Police tackled them in streets, corners and in front of stores. Innocent bystanders were also caught up in the maelstrom.
In one instance, about 200 people broke away from the larger group in a chase that went all the way from 33rd Street and Broadway to 27th Street and Park Avenue, before being tackled by police. At 27th Street and Madison Avenue, protesters set fire to a large pile of trash near the Carlton Hotel as delegates and other guests made their way to the convention.
Reporting for this article was contributed by Randal C. Archibold , Michael Wilson, Mary Spicuzza, William K. Rashbaum and Colin Moynihan.
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Cops weave webs with nets
Tougher tactics baffle city rights group
September 1, 2004
BY BARBARA ROSS and GREG B. SMITH
NY DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS
With Tamer El-Ghobashy and Nancy Dillon and Jonathan Lemire
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/story/227797p-195634c.html
Carol Norris of the Code Pink organization protests yesterday in front of the Hilton Hotel on Sixth Ave. and W. 54th St., where officials of the Halliburton Co. and RNC delegates were gathered for breakfast. In their zeal to keep protesters in line, the NYPD has added some unlikely weapons to its arsenal: plastic netting and scores of undercover cops on scooters.
The nets have been used to trap numerous people at demonstrations, including tourists, journalists and legal observers - arrests that have confounded protest organizers and civil rights lawyers.
Donna Lieberman of the New York Civil Liberties Union said police tactics have grown more aggressive as the convention progresses.
The nets were seen first on Sunday, during the massive anti-war march, and again yesterday in lower Manhattan.
Rosaleen Johnson, 64, from Massachusetts got netted with her son, Robert, 29, and his friends, while standing in Times Square Sunday.
"They were charged with disorderly conduct, which was incredible. We were just standing there doing nothing." She was released but Robert spent 36 hours in custody before being released.
At a protest on Fulton and Church Sts. near Ground Zero yesterday, the NYPD net snagged a handful of tourists and some journalists.
Dan, 22, got caught coming out of the subway: "I'm just a tourist. I have no idea what's going on. I have tickets to 'The Producers' tonight."
Cops claimed they had warned marchers before bringing out the net, but a Daily News reporter who also got caught in the net heard no such warning.
Demonstrators also complained about the use of plainclothes cops on scooters during a Monday protest on Eighth Ave. Video shot by legal observers shows several scooters driving directly into the crowd and running into people.
A detective on one of the scooters was pulled off and badly beaten.
Last night, cops on bicycles plowed into demonstrators at W. 28th St. and Broadway, and at Herald Square, hitting people as they went. A News reporter was jabbed in the ribs with a handlebar at Herald Square. The officers then used the bikes as barricades.
Mayor Bloomberg defended the aggressive tactics yesterday.
"This isn't something like it's supposed to be a fair fight. We have laws," he fumed. "You break the law [and] you're going to find yourself arrested. Period. End of story."
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NY police arrest over 900 in anti-Bush protests
01 Sep 2004
Reuters
By Grant McCool
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N01308969.htm
NEW YORK, Sept 1 (Reuters) - New York Police arrested more than 900 people late on Tuesday as anti-Bush activists blocked traffic, staged anti-war protests and harassed Republican delegates on the second day of a convention to nominate President George W. Bush to a second term.
A day-long wave of civil disobedience raised tensions between police and protesters as activists opposed to the U.S.-led war in Iraq and other Bush administration policies attempted to seize the spotlight.
Republicans formally nominated the president on Tuesday to face Democratic Sen. John Kerry in the Nov. 2 elections.
Police said in a statement more than 900 had been arrested, bringing to over 1,400 the total number of arrests in demonstrations since last Thursday.
Two hundred people were placed in plastic handcuffs and led to police vans after the War Resisters League began an afternoon march from the World Trade Center, which was destroyed in the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, to a planned "die-in" near the Madison Square Garden convention site.
In the early evening, thousands converged around the streets in Herald Square in central Manhattan, many chanting anti-Bush statements as hundreds of police in riot gear formed long lines in front of them and put up metal barriers.
Several activists ran through barriers to try to block buses used for convention delegates. About 50 were taken into custody in a "die-in" of protesters lying down in the street.
About half a dozen arrests were made near the main New York Public Library in an early evening protest. Hundreds more were arrested in scattered protests across Manhattan, police and activists said.
CONFRONTING DELEGATES
Protesters yelled at delegates attending a Texas Republican breakfast at a midtown hotel and shouted "go home" to delegates from Tennessee going into an event hosted by Sotheby's auction house.
Political activists and police had expected a day of confrontations. The A31 Action Coalition had vowed to stage a day of nonviolent civil disobedience to confront corporations and Republican delegates.
"The delegates were forced to listen to their critics despite the bubble the city and police put around them," said spokesman Eric Laursen.
New York's 37,000-strong police department is out in force on foot, horses, bicycles and in helicopters to monitor protests and to guard the city following government warnings of a possible terrorist attack during the election season.
At the scene of the World Trade Center protests, several demonstrators said they followed police instructions to walk two by two on the sidewalk and were surprised to be detained.
One protester, Jim MacDonald of the DC Anti-War Network, said in an interview by mobile phone that the group did not have a permit to march and police "surrounded us when we started to walk."
"Why are we being arrested? Why are you people doing this?" some protesters shouted at police.
One man was arrested by about 10 officers after he climbed a tree to obtain a better view of a rally by fellow immigration activists outside U.S. government offices, witnesses said.
Most of the demonstrations in the last six days have been peaceful, including an anti-war march on Sunday by several hundred thousand people past Madison Square Garden. It was one of the biggest rallies seen in New York in decades. (Additional reporting by Larry Fine, Mark McSherry and Christine Kearney)
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Things getting sticky for owner of sticker
By Matthew D. LaPlante <mlaplante@sltrib.com>
The Salt Lake Tribune
http://www.sltrib.com/utah/ci_2406167
Derek Kjar is not the president's biggest fan.
But the 19-year-old Salt Lake County man says he does not intend to harm President Bush with anything more than a vote for John Kerry come November.
Just to be sure, though, agents from the Secret Service recently paid Kjar a visit, telling him that his neighbors had alerted them to a potentially threatening bumper sticker on his car.
The sticker, which can be found on a number of Web sites, features a black-and-white likeness of Bush, a crown tilted slightly on his head. Under the image are the words "KING GEORGE - OFF WITH HIS HEAD."
Glen Passey, agent in charge of the Secret Service's Salt Lake City office, would not confirm that agents visited Kjar.
But Passey said his office investigates all threats against the president.
"Oh, please," said David Hudson, a research attorney who works for the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University. "It's political hyperbole. However distasteful you might think it is, it's pure political speech."
Hudson said the message would never qualify as a true threat under the law.
But Kjar didn't know that. He said the agent he contacted in response to a cryptic message left on his voice mail would not even say why he wanted to talk - only that he wanted to meet Thursday morning.
That's when Kjar began to cry. "I didn't know what the hell was going on," he said. "It made me so nervous."
Kjar said two agents visited him at his job at a dry cleaning service, where they asked him about whether he had any ties to terrorist groups or enjoyed reading histori