Archive By Date | Today's Links to Search By
Activists' News | Nuclear | Depleted Uranium | Military | Police
Alternative Energy Etc. | From Subscribers
NUCLEAR
Until all nuclear nations disarm, others will lust after same power
Plutonium waste missing from Hanford
South Africa seizes uranium enrichment materials
Meacher rails at 'biased' cancer report
Ontario names adviser to mull nuclear unit restarts
Depleted uranium's deadly poison Making of a health disaster in Iraq
Memory of late Nuha al-Radi lives on through her art
India, Pakistan push ahead with CBMs despite Kashmir
What India, Pakistan Won't Talk About
Iran confirms new nuclear offer
Iran Wants Dialogue to Resolve Nuclear Standoff
Iran faces 'nuclear ultimatum'
Iran Negotiates Deal to Curtail Nuclear Work
Sharon: World Needs to Stop Iran Nukes
North Korea Nuclear Plant Suspended Again - Report
S Korea admits failure to report uranium test
S. Korean Official Attempts to Ease Nuclear Concerns
Russia Wakes Up to a Nuclear Threat
U.N. nuclear agency asleep at the switch
State sues over Yucca rail line
Group Says Terror Attack on Indian Point Would Be Apocalyptic
MILITARY
A Taboo Issue in Afghan Campaign
U.S. Report Finds Sudan Promoted Killings
French connection armed Saddam
Army to Rebid Part of Iraq Contract
Halliburton Weighs Options as Iraq Work Changes
Bogotá Says Army Killed Union Chiefs
7 U.S. Soldiers Killed in Iraq
U.S. Conceding Rebels Control Regions of Iraq
U.S. Planes Hit Rebel Stronghold in Falluja; 6 Reported Killed
Battles in Baghdad Slum Leave 40 Iraqis and a G.I. Dead
Military deaths pass 1,000
Israeli Officials Free Scores of Palestinians
Australian official clouds support for U.S.
Forget terrorism, Chechnya is Putin's war
Russia prepared for pre-emptive strikes on 'terror bases' worldwide
AIPAC Says U.S.-Israel Ties Are Under Attack
U.S. Toll in Iraq Crosses 1,000
Milosevic Loses Director Role in His Own Courtroom Drama
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Intelligence Retooling on Agenda as Congress Returns
Bipartisan Bill Offered on 9/11 Panel's Proposals
Final Tally Awaits the Police and Protesters
POLITICS
$2.3 Trillion in New Debt Expected by 2014
Bush Backs Budget Authority for New Intelligence Post
Inquiry Proposes Penalties for Hiding Medicare Data
Truth and its neo-consequences
Spy-scandal lobby blitz
Senator Accuses Bush of Cover-Up
At Site Bush Used to Make Case for Iraq War, Kerry Lists Costs
OTHER
Hurricane spilled 41 million gallons of acidic waste in Tampa
Study Finds Lack of Data on Health Effects of 9/11 Dust
ACTIVISTS
Filmmakers Examining the 'What Ifs' of Nuclear Power
Protesters may try to get last word, in court
Thousands rally behind Putin
What Democracy Looks Like Do protests matter?
-------- NUCLEAR
Until all nuclear nations disarm, others will lust after same power
Seattle Times
8 Sept 20004
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2002029162_plate08.html
LOS ANGELES - Fundamentally, as they tend to say in particle physics, the big brouhaha over the secret South Korean uranium enrichment experiment is an absurdity.
After all, the amount of fissionable material produced at the national laboratory - as currently reported - was trivial: It was about as big-time weapons-grade in the sense of a paper airplane requesting 747 landing rights at Kimpo Airport. The whole flap is curious in the extreme.
Seoul voluntarily reported the unauthorized experiment to international authorities, and that should be the end of it. But all sorts of unhelpful parties in the region may want to use the errant experiment for their own purposes. North Koreans may say that the clandestine South Korean program puts both Koreas in a plane of moral equivalency. It doesn't: South Korea is a far more transparent society, and thus the North Korean nuclear program is far more worrisome.
Some Japanese circles may want to point to the Seoul admission as further evidence that the Land of the Rising Sun needs to get cracking and develop its own nuclear-weapons program. That would be the worst development imaginable for peace and security.
And China, rightly pushing its Six-Party Talks aimed at denuclearizing the Korean peninsula, may point to the revelation as reason for more urgent diplomacy; but nothing substantive will happen until after the U.S. elections.
How did the flap start? At the end of the day, the origins of the illicit experiment will probably be traceable to South Korean nuclear scientists who did a bit of lab toying-around on their own. Such amoral conduct would easily track with that of other scientists elsewhere who tend to take matters into their own hands and act as if they are above the law. Basically, brilliant scientists tend to believe they are really not like you and me, that a special set of rules governs them, and that they can do as they please. It's called the God complex. But this above-the-law attitude creates problems for national governments and new international tensions that need to be smoothed away.
The revelation also reminds us that any state that has the steel will to want a nuclear capability (whether subterranean or otherwise) will proceed apace, no matter what anyone else says. South Korea appears not to be in that category, but then there is the question of Iran and Pakistan. It is U.S. policy - as well as the policy of the other four permanent members of the U.N. Security Council - to seek to stymie the increase in the number of nuclear powers, on the entirely plausible ground that fewer is better. But, then again, as India might put it, it is easy to take this line when one already possesses such weapons than when one is on the outside looking in at the comfy nuclear club luxuriating in its high moral line.
The ideal number of nuclear powers would be zero, of course. But until and unless the United States - along with China, Russia, France and Great Britain - agrees to stuff the nuclear genie back in the bottle by advancing nuclear disarmament by leadership example, others will continually be tempted to lust after nuclear potency, too.
Even so, the danger the world faces is not so much from direct nuclear exchange between nuclear states that are in control of their militaries as well as their mental facilities. Rather, as famed theoretical physicist Norman Dombey puts it in the current London Review of Books, "It follows that the international community should focus on the weak link in the non-proliferation regime: that's to say, states which possess nuclear weapons and are not fully in control of their territory or of their citizens." Seen from this analytical perspective, therefore, nothing on the Korean peninsula - north or south - is anything as worrisome as Pakistan, against which since 9/11 the U.S. has had to snuggle up ally-style.
The U.S. - the only nation-state to have used such weapons in combat - thus is somewhat responsible for developments there, and it is also morally culpable for relying on nuclear weapons as a core part of its military arsenal. "We call upon the citizens of the United States to look squarely at the reality of the tragedies that have unfolded in the wake of the atomic bombings 59 years ago," wrote Iccho Itoh, mayor of Nagasaki, in the Nagasaki Peace Declaration for the 59th anniversary of the atomic destruction of his city. "So long as the world's leading superpower fails to change its posture of dependence on nuclear weapons, it is clear that the tide of nuclear proliferation cannot be stemmed."
Nagasaki's mayor is right. This is the bottom line on nuclear proliferation. We need a world free from nuclear weapons; and so we need a re-moralized United States to take the lead and bequeath planet Earth a fate free of nuclear holocaust. Some kind of future nuclear tragedy would seem probable in the absence of transcendent American renunciation.
UCLA professor Tom Plate, a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy, is the founder of the Asia Pacific Media Network (www.asiamedia.ucla.edu). His column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times.
-------- accidents and safety
Plutonium waste missing from Hanford
By NICHOLAS K. GERANIOS
Associated Press writer
Wednesday, September 8, 2004
http://www.gazettetimes.com/articles/2004/09/09/news/the_west/thuwst00.txt
Equivalent of 50 nuclear weapons could be made from missing materials
SPOKANE, Wash. - Vast quantities of radioactive waste have been lost across the sprawling Hanford nuclear reservation since the 1940s, and the U.S. Department of Energy is ignoring the problem, a watchdog group contended Wednesday.
The waste contains enough plutonium to make dozens of nuclear weapons, according to Heart of America Northwest, which is pushing an initiative to ban additional shipments of radioactive wastes to the south-central Washington reservation.
"Enough plutonium to make more than 50 nuclear weapons appears to have been lost and abandoned by U.S. DOE in Hanford's soil, with no intention of cleaning up the spreading contamination,'' said the report authored by Gerald Pollett, director of Heart of America Northwest.
Colleen French, a DOE spokeswoman in Richland, disputed the allegations. She said the Energy Department is well aware of the volume of nuclear waste at Hanford and is making plans to deal with all of it.
It has been widely reported in the past that some of the plutonium made at Hanford during its weapons production days cannot be accounted for. The plutonium, a key ingredient in nuclear weapons, is believed to be inside pipes at the site's many processing plants, and mixed among the radioactive wastes, French said.
"We know we have plutonium-contaminated wastes,'' French said. "That's why we are cleaning up.''
Heart of America Northwest, based in Seattle, is pushing Initiative 297 on Washington's November ballot. The measure would require cleanup of existing contamination at Hanford before more waste from other nuclear weapons plants could be brought to the 560-square-mile site near Richland.
Hanford, which contains the nation's largest volume of radioactive wastes, was created by the Manhattan Project in the 1940s.
Heart of America Northwest contends that under DOE plans, 18 times more transuranic waste would be abandoned on the site than cleaned up. The new report said the Energy Department plans to abandon 152,800 cubic meters of plutonium and transuranic wastes, leaving contamination that could spread to the Columbia River.
Transuranic wastes are contaminated with plutonium and remain radioactive for tens of thousands of years.
But French said Heart of America Northwest is focusing only on DOE's plan to clean up all the wastes produced since 1970, as required by Congress.
The plan to clean up wastes generated before 1970 falls under a different federal law, and the environmental impact statement for that work is being developed now, French said. That plan should be completed by 2008.
Heart of America Northwest also contended the amount of plutonium-contaminated wastes at Hanford would nearly fill the nation's only operating repository for such wastes in New Mexico. French said the Energy Department believes that repository can handle wastes from Hanford and many other contaminated weapons production sites.
On the Net: www.heartofamericanorthwest.org
-------- africa
South Africa seizes uranium enrichment materials
Wednesday, September 08, 2004
By Manoah Esipisu,
Reuters
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-09-08/s_26947.asp
JOHANNESBURG - South Africa seized 11 shipping containers of uranium enrichment materials in a raid on a firm run by a man it has charged under laws forbidding nuclear proliferation, a government agency said on Tuesday.
The South African Council for the Non-Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction said the containers were now stored at a safe location and had been sealed by both South African police and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the two agencies would maintain control.
"IAEA inspectors will visit South Africa on a regular basis to inspect nuclear material and related equipment," the council said in a statement.
It was the first detailed description of the raid last week by police and other investigators on a small engineering firm that led to charges against 53-year-old Johan Andries Muller Meyer for manufacturing nuclear-related material and exporting goods that could be used to develop nuclear weapons.
"At the premises of Tradefin Engineering, 11 shipping containers were found containing components of a centrifuge uranium enrichment plant as well as related documentation," the council said. "Investigations are still ongoing."
Meyer was remanded in custody until Wednesday when his bail hearing will be heard.
Last week the United States embassy in Pretoria issued a statement linking him to Libya's nuclear program, which the north African country disclosed in December 2003 before agreeing earlier this year to a disarmament process.
Libya began its quest for nuclear arms in 1980 and decided in 1997 to seek centrifuge equipment via the atomic black market, established in the 1980s by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb.
Meyer was accused of offences between 2000 and 2001 relating to the import and export of a flow-forming lathe without necessary permits. He was also charged with possessing and producing certain components of a centrifuge enrichment plant without authorization from the minerals and energy minister.
In court papers, Meyer was also accused of "unlawfully and wilfully possessing and manufacturing nuclear-related equipment and material" between 2002 and 2004.
"These items do not constitute a weapons of mass destruction, but they are essential components in the process to enrich uranium," the council said. Meyer denies the charges, which could result in anything from a fine to a 15-year jail sentence.
Government officials have said they knew of no link between the inquiry and al Qaeda or international terrorism.
South Africa voluntarily dismantled its nuclear arms before apartheid ended in 1994 - the only nuclear-armed state to do so - and has been eager to show support for international efforts to limit nuclear know-how with a series of new laws since 1993.
Khan's network spanned the globe and included suppliers, often unwitting, from Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.
U.N. atomic weapons experts say more than 20 countries were involved, though it is trying to grasp the full extent of what IAEA calls a global supermarket for countries interesting in acquiring nuclear weapons.
-------- britain
Meacher rails at 'biased' cancer report
Paul Brown, environment correspondent
Wednesday September 8, 2004
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1299369,00.html
The former Labour environment minister Michael Meacher yesterday accused a government committee he set up to assess the health effects of low-level radiation of suppressing a report on the possible cause of childhood leukaemia.
He called the alleged suppression "criminally irresponsible", saying he had formed the committee so as to reflect all opinion on the contentious issue and so that a report could be published putting all the facts before the public.
Instead the final report gave a one-sided establishment opinion, he said, which did not "accommodate a full and fair representation of all views".
Mr Meacher was speaking at the launch of a minority report of the expert committee which says that radiation doses to children across Europe who developed leukaemia could have been up to 100 times larger than suggested by official estimates.
The report says that inhaled, man-made, radioactive particles such as Strontium 90 or plutonium from Chernobyl or Sellafield can lodge in the body or foetus and bombard and damage cells. This, particularly in the unborn, would be enough for children to develop leukaemia or other cancers.
The National Radiological Protection Board has always measured a tiny dose received by an individual as if it affected the entire body evenly - so the result was a dilution that appeared to do little harm. The possibility that the dose would lodge near a bone or in the brain and emit radiation inflicting localised damage leading to cancer had not been not accepted.
Mr Meacher said: "It is very worrying, for it is hard to conjecture that if the [child] leukaemia peak in Europe was real, anything other than radiation from Chernobyl could have caused it."
The main report of the expert committee is believed to say that the risks from radiation for leukaemia could be up to 10 times the current estimate. But it failed to mention the theories of the committee members Richard Bramhall and Chris Busby, who examined cancer clusters and concluded that radiation from Sellafield and other nuclear plants could be responsible.
Even before the row over the report one nuclear scientist, Marion Hill, who spent 30 years in radiological protection and was part of the committee's secretariat, had resigned alleging establishment bias and exclusion from making reports. She said the regulatory bodies were unable to offer impartial advice to the government on radiation dangers and should be disbanded.
Dr Busby said dissenters had not been allowed to defend their views. "The point is that if we are right then the issue of leukaemia in children caused by radiation is as important as... lead in water pipes and petrol. This should be examined especially if we are about to consider whether a new generation of nuclear power stations is to be built."
Mr Meacher said: "The idea was to examine all the questions, and where there was disagreement to recommend further research. It is criminally irresponsible not to allow all the evidence to come out so there can be a properly organised, informed public debate."
Dudley Goodhead, the committee's chairman, said he was unable to discuss the issue yesterday but would do so at a later date.
-------- canada
Ontario names adviser to mull nuclear unit restarts
Wed Sep 8, 2004
(Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=6185311
TORONTO, Sept 8 - Electricity-thirsty Ontario has appointed an investment industry adviser to examine the multimillion-dollar return to service of two nuclear units on the shore of Lake Huron, the government said on Wednesday.
The government of Ontario, facing tight power supplies, said it hired David Santangeli, managing director of Energy Fundamentals Group, which specializes in energy infrastructure, to look at restarting Bruce A units 1 and 2.
The reactors were built in the 1970s and have not operated in nearly five years because they need costly upgrades.
They could add 1,540 megawatts of badly needed power to the grid in the province of 12 million people, Canada's biggest power market.
Santangeli is charged with negotiating the restart with the Bruce Power partnership, which operates the complex in a lease agreement with Ontario.
There are 8 nuclear reactors at the facility. All four Bruce B units are operating and Bruce A units 3 and 4 were returned to service late last year.
Bruce Power is conducting its own feasibility study to determine if the refurbishment, which could cost hundreds of millions of dollars, makes economic sense.
The decision depends, in part, on changes the Liberal government of Dalton McGuinty makes to energy sector regulations. The electricity sector had suffered through years of capricious regulation policies, which kept private-sector players from investing in new generation.
"The potential restart of Units 1 and 2 is a major decision for Bruce Power and our partners. As such, we're pleased the government has acknowledged our need to discuss this further and look forward to working with Mr. Santangeli," Bruce Power chief executive Duncan Hawthorne said in a statement.
Bruce Power's partners are Cameco Corp. (CCO.TO: Quote, Profile, Research) with 31.6 percent, TransCanada Corp. (TRP.TO: Quote, Profile, Research) with 31.6 percent, the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System's BPC Generation Infrastructure Trust with 31.6 percent, the Power Workers' Union with 4 percent, and Society of Energy Professionals with 1.2 percent.
-------- depleted uranium
Depleted uranium's deadly poison Making of a health disaster in Iraq
Ron Chepesiuk
Wed. September 08, 2004
Bangladesh Daily Star
http://www.thedailystar.net/2004/09/08/d409081502118.htm
Members of the 442nd Military Police Company of the New York National Guard remember the place in Iraq where they were stationed as a hellhole. "The place was filthy; most of the windows were broken; dirt, grease and bird droppings were everywhere," Sergeant Agustin Matos, a member of the Guard Unit, later recalled. "I wouldn't house a city prisoner in that place."
And there were frequent sandstorms. The dust would blow right into area where Matos and his fellow company members were based. Sergeant Hector Vega, a retired postal worker from the Bronx, who had served in the National Guard for 27 years, recalled that the smoke 'was so thick, you could see it.'
Both Matos and Vega, survived the Iraq War and returned to the US But all has not been well since then. They and other members of their company now suffer from a variety of illnesses: nausea, dizziness, shortness of breath, fatigue, joint pain and excessive urination, for starters.
The soldiers repeatedly asked the army to test them, but the army refused. So the soldiers went public and contacted the New York Daily News with their story. Early this year, the newspaper asked Dr. Asaf Durakovic, a former army doctor and medical expert, to conduct laboratory tests on the soldiers. The New York Daily News reported Durakovic's conclusion: "four soldiers 'almost certainly' inhaled radioactive dust from exploded American shells manufactured with depleted uranium."
The newspaper's investigation caught the attention of Senator Hilary Clinton (D-New York), who chastised the US Defence Depart-ment for not screening soldiers returning from duty in Iraq, "We can't have people coming back with undiagnosed illnesses," Senator Clinton said. "We have to have before and after testing progra-mmes for the soldiers." Under fire, the Pentagon reversed its decision and began to test some of the soldiers from the 42nd who had returned to the US.
But the testing may come too late not just for the soldiers of the 42nd but for other military personnel as well, both from the U.S. and other countries, who have served in wars where depleted uranium has been used indiscriminately.
Depleted Uranium (DU) refers to the uranium that's left after enriched uranium is separated from natural uranium so fuel can be produced for nuclear reactors. DU is an extremely dense metal that's used in armour penetrating shells and to strengthen tank armour. Military contractors like to use DU because it's so cheap. Indeed, governments will often make it available for free.
Those who defend the use of DU claim that most of the element's radioactive qualities have been removed before use. A growing number of critics charge, however, that mounting evidence suggests DU can pose serious health risks. CADU (The Campaign Against Depleted Uranium) reports that fifteen countries have used DU as part of their military arsenal. In addition to the US they include the United Kingdom, France, Greece, Israel, Turkey, Russia, Egypt, Bahrain, Thailand, Iraq, Pakistan, Taiwan, Kuwait and Israel. The US has had DU ammunition since the 1950s, but it's believed that Uncle Sam didn't use it until the Gulf War. DU has since been used in Bosnia in 1975, in the Balkan War of 1999 and, in Iraq last year.
This past July (2004), RAI, Italy's national television station, reported that 27-year old Luca Sepe, an Italian veteran of the Balkan War, was the "27th Italian victim" of the DU used in bombings over the Balkans. It's estimated another 267 Balkan veterans from Italy are currently sick with cancer. It hasn't been proven yet that the Italian soldiers died for exposure to DU, but, as is the case with the governments of the US and other countries using DU, the Italian government has stonewalled any investigation of the illnesses and death.
The International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons (ICBUW) noted in a report about what it label's as today's "Balkan Syn-drome," that the " Italian Minister of Defence, refuses to give compensation to their families (the Italian soldiers), let alone to admit that depleted uranium has played a role in these cases. Hardly any information is given to soldiers currently on missions abroad about the risks they are facing, and whoever complains is treated as a traitor and marginalised...."
In the 1991 Gulf War, DU was mainly used against Iraqi forces in the desert. In the Iraq War, the Pentagon used its radioactive arsenal in Iraq's suburban areas. According to Pentagon and United Nations statistics, the US used between 1,100 and 2,200 tons of shells containing DU during the Iraq War in March and April, 2003.
Today in Iraq, parts of spent DU shells and DU-contaminated debris have been found strewn on the streets of urban areas. Contaminated sites have been marked for cleanup, but at this late date, many of the contaminated sites have yet to be cleaned up. This has created a potential health hazard for many Iraqis.
The ICBUW reports that " to minimise the risk of exposure, foreign troops have been instructed to stay away from potentially contaminated areas as much as possible, or, at least, to wear respiratory protection and gloves when it is necessary to enter such sites.'
In May 2003, Scott Peterson, an Iraq-based staff writer for the Christian Science Monitor, took Geiger counter readings at several sites in Baghdad. Peterson found that the readings in some places registered more than a 1000 times the normal radiation levels. Three months later, the Seattle Post Intelligencer newspaper reported elevated radiation levels at six sites located between Basra and Baghdad.
Soon after the Iraq War, the World Health Organisation and other leading scientific organisations began to warn that children who come into contact with DU-contaminated shells faced health risks. Their warnings were based on expert analysis. "Children playing with soil may be identified as the critical population group, with inhalation and/or ingestion of contaminated soil as the critical pathway," the scholarly peer-reviewed Journal of Environmental Radioactivity reported in February 2003.
Since the Gulf War, the US military has denied that DU poses any health risks and has even tried to suppress the growing evidence that DU is a toxic killer that should be banned. As Ed Ericson, wrote in the May-June 2003 issue of E: The Environmental Magazine, the Pentagon, "has cashiered or attempted to discredit its own experts, ignored their advice, impeached scientific research into DU's health effects and assembled a disinformation campaign to confuse the issue."
The stonewalling began after the 1991 Gulf War, in which the US and British military forces fired about 350 tons of DSU at Iraqi tanks and other targets. After the war, Iraqi doctors began reporting shrapnel increases in cancer and birth defects in southern Iraq. The suspicion has been that DU may have caused the problems, but the Pentagon has claimed that the charge is unsubstantiated. During Saddam Hussein's regime, Iraqi medical researchers wanted to present their findings at international conferences but were prevented by the economic embargo of Iraq.
The US military insists that studies from the Gulf War have shown no long term problems from DU, It claims that its studies show that only soldiers who had shrapnel wounds from DU or who were inside tanks shot by DU shells and accidentally breathed radioactive dust were at risk. This would exclude any of the soldiers from the 42nd who have gotten sick after their Iraq tour.
But independent organisations say studies show DU can pose a health risk. In April, 2003, the Royal Society, Britain's leading scientific organisation, said that some soldiers could suffer from "kidney damage and an increased risk of lung cancer," depending on level of exposure.
The problem is no real studies of DU's long-term effects have been done. Scientists, in effect, have just begun to measure how much uranium is actually released when uranium-tipped ammunition hits its targets. Without these studies, no way can it be determined how much uranium dust soldiers are exposed to.
Until these studies are done and the findings released, it's outrageous that the US and Britain have not moved to de-contaminate the DU affected areas in Iraq and to implement a moratorium on the military use of DU. So far, we've seen a few modest steps in the right direction. In April 2003, Congre-ssman Jim McDermott (D-Washing-ton) introduced the Depleted Uranium (DU) Munitions Study Act of 2003 to the U.S. House of Representatives. The bill calls for studies of DU's health effects, requires the Environmental Protection Agency to identify sites in the US where DU munitions have been used in test firing and recommends study of the water/vegeta-tion/soil at these sites for possible DU contamination. The bill also requires the cleanup of contaminated sites.
In May of this year, another bill cited as the Depleted Uranium Screening and Testing Act of 2004 was introduced in the House. It would require the Pentagon to identify those members of the US armed forces who have been exposed during military service to DU and to test their health.
Meanwhile, the US General Accounting Office has undertaken a study of the health of DU exposure in veterans of the 1991 Gulf War, as well as the policies of the Department of Defence and the Department of Veteran Affairs in identifying and medically treating veterans exposed to DU.
Ironically, Germany, one of the strongest critics of the Iraq War, is sending a team of environmental experts to Iraq under the auspices of the UN. The team will evaluate the policies of Saddam Hussein, the UN embargo and the impact of the two invasions on Iraq's natural resources. The US and British governments have given their blessing to the mission. "That is significant because they will also face some critical questions, such as the impact of using depleted uranium munitions." Juergen Trittin, Germany's environmental minister, told the press.
These developments, however, fall far short of what needs to be done to deal with the DU issue. Meanwhile, soldiers and civilians will continue to die from the element's radioactive poison in the wars of the 21st century. This raises a pertinent question: Does this policy constitute a war crime?
Ron Chepesiuk, a South Carolina based journalist, is a Visiting Professor of Journalism at Chittagong University and a Research Associate with National Defence College.
--------
Memory of late Nuha al-Radi lives on through her art
Iraqi artist's work shown throughout Arab world, West, including the British Museum
By Julie Flint
The Daily Star
Wednesday, September 08, 2004
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=4&article_id=8146
BEIRUT: "I must say that as occupiers the U.S. are a most inefficient lot," the Iraqi artist and diarist Nuha al-Radi wrote early last year. "Since we are to learn the American way of life, and suing is a 100 percent of it, we should start suing the U.S. and the coalition for making war under false pretences ... I don't think the Americans have a clue about this country or what to do with it."
More recently, Nuha also talked, semi-seriously, of suing for the leukaemia with which she was diagnosed at year-end. She thought it might be linked to the hundreds of tons of depleted uranium the allies fired at Iraqi tanks during the 1991 Gulf war. In making an issue of it, she felt she would be acting for all Iraqis who thought they had been damaged by the contamination released into their environment - and from there, she felt sure, into the water table and food chain.
It was not to be. Nuha died in Beirut, the place where she was happiest, on Aug. 31. She was buried lying in a bed of jasmine, with flowers in her hair. She was 63.
One of the most trenchant, yet often hilarious, critics of the "liberation" of Iraq, which she saw as humiliation, Nuha was born in Baghdad but spent most of her childhood in India, where her father, Mohammed Selim al-Radi, was ambassador. When the Iraqi monarchy was overthrown in 1958, her father retired and the family returned to Baghdad. Soon after, Nuha moved to London to study ceramics at the Byam Shaw School of Art. When her parents moved to Beirut in 1969 after the Baath Party seized power in Iraq, she enrolled in liberal arts at the American University of Beirut and, after graduating, taught art there.
In 1975 civil war erupted in Lebanon and Nuha returned to Baghdad. It was the beginning of 30 years spent shuttling hither and thither, battling for entry permits, exit permits and residence permits - all the while "trying to avoid coups and wars."
Beirut was, for Nuha, "the perfect place for political exiles," a place where "the right to grumble" had not been banned. She loved the mix of people and the ease of life. Friendship was one of her greatest gifts and her house was seldom empty. Gardening was a passion: when she felt aggressive, she cut and pruned; when she felt hopeful, she planted. But even she could not make flowers bloom on her windy, sea-facing balcony - a barren strip so different from her "beautiful" palm orchard in Baghdad.
As an artist, Nuha was incredibly versatile. Over the years, her ceramics, sculptures and paintings were shown throughout the Arab world and in the West and exhibited in collections including the British Museum. But it was as a critic of sanctions, war and occupation that she found unexpected celebrity, publishing her Baghdad Diary of the first Gulf war in the British magazine Granta in 1992 and a book, Baghdad Diaries, in 1998.
Nuha didn't think her writing was up to much, but she had a wonderful way with words (if not, it has to be said, with computers). Her cast of characters - among them her mother, "Ma", her aunt "Needles" and her dog, "Salvador Dali" - made Baghdad real to people who had never been there and who from newspapers and television would have thought that everyday life had been abolished. There's Ma mistaking the growling of a guest's stomach for an air raid; Needles stepping on cakes that Ma squishes back into shape; and Salvi, one of the great dogs of literary history, womanizing whenever he's not terrorizing guests caught fertilizing the orchard. And, on every page, Nuha, who didn't think the war would happen.
"Perhaps I simply couldn't believe that in this day and age leaders could be so childish and/or plain stupid as to think that war could resolve any issue," she wrote. "Man's follies have no limits." Typically, however, she soon made the best of it: "Day four. Made a dynamic punch tonight with Aquavit, vodka and fresh orange juice."
Ian Jack, the editor of Granta, said the magazine didn't hesitate for a moment in publishing Nuha's manuscript. "Her diaries were direct, witty, humane, so that you saw large things like wars and occupations intimately," he said. "Good diarists are rarer than many people imagine. The temptation for the diarist is to inflate himself or herself, to over-write, to have "Big Thoughts." Nuha persuaded you by her matter-of-factness."
Whatever medium she was using, Nuha drew on the people, events and materials around her. She depicted moods and events - in clear, crisp colours in her artworks and often devastating detail in her diaries. She inclined instinctively to the personal rather than the political, and to humor rather than ranting - although she could rant with the best of them when the mood took her. Not only about the Allies. Also about "the muddled East" and the "disgraceful Arabs, who have never learned the meaning of 'unity' or 'initiative.'"
Nuha was utterly original and could be quietly subversive. When intellectuals began driving Mercedes after Saddam Hussein decreed that graduates could import cars duty-free, she exhibited, in Baghdad, sculpture that had only two components - cars and brains. Model Mercedes had brains oozing from their windows; brains flew Mercedes flags. When the invasion of Iraq began, she exhibited dozens of statues made from recycled wood, painted and decked out in feathers and other defiant finery.
"They look as if they are demonstrating," she said. "I am calling them: 'We, the people.' Hopefully we will recycle ourselves and survive. "
Despite her anger at occupation, Nuha never blamed ordinary Westerners for the ways of their governments - not that it was always easy to do, as she admitted to a British friend as sanctions killed Iraqis but left Saddam ("Suds," to Nuha) in rude health. As Iraq descended into chaos, she fretted about American foot-soldiers "boiling away in the sun."
"When Britain occupied India they invented the bush shirt as a uniform to cope with the weather," she wrote. "The US must invent something for these poor soldiers. I asked a marine yesterday whether there was a cooling substance in his helmet. 'No,' he said. 'It's hot.'"
Long before she knew she had leukaemia, Nuha was concerned by the sudden ubiquity, or so it seemed to her, of cancer in Iraq. Although the absence of serious, systematic research means that evidence is largely anecdotal, doctors in southern Iraq especially have reported a marked increase in cancers - and suspicion has grown that they are caused by depleted uranium contamination from tank battles on farmland west of Basra.
"Everyone seems to be dying of cancer," Nuha wrote in November 1994. She was worried, too, by changes in the natural world. May 1995: "Killed a hunchback cockroach today. If the cockroaches are becoming malformed, what could be happening to us?" June 1995: "Isabel said it is the bad environment that is making the oranges fall off the tree; a result of bombs (with barium) dropped during the war ... What about us, will we die too?"
Nuha's main concern was depleted uranium (DU), a by-product of uranium enrichment which is both radioactive and toxic. Although scientific opinion is divided over the effects of DU, some researchers are beginning to suspect that radiological and chemical damage might reinforce each other in subtle, unforeseen ways, making DU more carcinogenic than initially thought.
Nuha may have been a victim of DU. She may not have been. We shall never know. But even probability is impossible to assess while those who could finance a proper investigation refuse to admit that there might, just might, be something to worry about.
-------- india / pakistan
India, Pakistan push ahead with CBMs despite Kashmir
By Indo-Asian News Service
Wednesday September 8, 2004
http://in.news.yahoo.com/040908/43/2fyfi.html
New Delhi, Sept 8 (IANS) Their differences over Kashmir notwithstanding, India and Pakistan Wednesday announced 13 far-reaching confidence building measures (CBMs) that could redefine their bilateral ties.
The new CBMs covered areas as diverse as conventional and nuclear fields to discussions on de-escalation of tension on Siachen, the Himalayan glacier dubbed as the world's highest battlefield, enhanced people-to-people contact through promotion of tourism to a bus service between the divided parts of Kashmir and a rail link between India's Gujarat state and Pakistan's Sindh province.
The CBMs were announced in a joint statement on the talks between External Affairs Minister K. Natwar Singh and his Pakistani counterpart Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri who met here for two days from Sunday and reviewed the progress of the composite dialogue that the two countries initiated early this year to normalise relations.
"The foreign ministers expressed satisfaction at the progress made so far, and positively assessed the developments in bilateral relations over the past year," the statement said.
It said they agreed that the two foreign secretaries would meet in December to discuss overall progress of the eight-point composite dialogue, including "Peace and Security including CBMs, and Jammu and Kashmir."
"They would also work out the schedule of meetings on the other six subjects, ranging from Siachen to a dispute over navigation in Wullar lake in Jammu and Kashmir and Sir Creek to terrorism and drug trafficking and economic and commercial cooperation.
Though differences remained over Kashmir and both sides forcefully reiterated their respective positions on the issue during the talks, it was clear from the joint statement that they would not allow that to hamstrung progress in other areas.
While the joint statement did not make any specific reference to Jammu and Kashmir, it said both sides "reiterated their commitment to the principles and purposes of the Charter of the United Nations, and their determination to implement the Simla Agreement in letter and spirit."
"Recalling the reassurance contained in the Joint Press Statement of January 6, 2004, they exchanged views on carrying the (composite dialogue) process forward in an atmosphere free from terrorism and violence," it added.
It said the ministers held detailed and substantive discussions and reiterated the confidence that the composite dialogue will lead to peaceful settlement of all bilateral issues, including Jammu and Kashmir, to the satisfaction of both sides.
"They agreed to continue with the serious and sustained dialogue to find a peaceful negotiated final settlement. They expressed their determination to take the process forward," it added.
The statement noted that the Pakistan foreign minister called on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and met National Security Adviser J.N. Dixit and said the two sides agreed to continue high level meetings and visits.
It noted that Manmohan Singh and Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf would meet on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in September and that Pakistan Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz would visit India in November in his capacity as the chairperson of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC).
Manmohan Singh and Musharraf would again meet in Dhaka in January on the sidelines of the SAARC Summit.
Significantly, the two sides "recognized the importance of availability and access to energy resources in the region around South Asia," a reference to possible cooperation in a gas pipeline project to transport Iranian natural gas to India through Pakistan.
The statement said the petroleum and natural gas ministers could meet to discuss the issue in its "multifarious dimensions."
The following were nine CBMs announced in the joint statement:
-- Expert level meetings on conventional and nuclear CBMs, including discussions on a draft agreement on advance notification of missile tests;
-- Meeting between railway authorities for establishing a rail link between Munnabao in Rajasthan and Khokhrapar in Sindh.
-- Biannual meeting between Indian Border Security Force (BSF) and Pakistan Rangers in October.
-- Meeting between narcotics control authorities, including for finalisation of an MoU in October-November;
-- Meeting between the Indian Coast Guards and the Pakistan Maritime Security Agency in November to, among others, discuss the MoU for establishing communication link between them;
-- Establishment of a committee of experts to consider issues related to trade;
-- Implementation of the agreement reached between the defence secretaries in their talks in August to discuss "modalities for disengagement and redeployment" on Siachen, the Himalayan glacier that is the highest battlefield in the world;
-- Joint survey of the boundary pillars in the horizontal segment (blue dotted line) of the international boundary in the Sir Creek area, a muddy estuary that separates Gujarat from Sindh
-- Meeting on all issues related to commencement of a bus service between Srinagar, summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir and Muzaffarabad, capital of Pakistan-administered part of Kashmir.
-- Add a new category of tourist visa in the visa regime between the two countries, and to promote group tourism;
-- Set up a mechanism to deal with the issue of civilian prisoners and fishermen, effectively and speedily;
--Measures for facilitation of visits to religious shrines, and upkeep of historical sites; and
-- Enhanced interaction and exchanges among the respective foreign offices, including study tours of young diplomats/probationers to each other's country.
----
What India, Pakistan Won't Talk About
By J. Sri Raman truthout | Perspective
Wednesday 15 September 2004
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/091504I.shtml
You cannot really describe them as talks to end talks. A dialogue to dodge the most important issues - that would better sum up the series of India-Pakistan parleys since the beginning of the year.
The talks go on. The series have moved rapidly through official-level rounds to talks in New Delhi on September 5-6 between the two External Affairs Ministers, India's K. Natwar Singh and Pakistan's Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri. The process is to culminate in a meeting of India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh with Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly session later this month.
Marked by polite smiles and prolonged handshakes, the process continues without making the least progress on the two life-and-death issues for the sub-continent's people.
The more frightening and fundamental of the issues has, in fact, been forgotten, with both side tacitly agreeing to leave it untouched. The ministers have not wasted time over the minor problem of nuclear weapons. Their officials had disposed of it before, while discussing nuclear "confidence-building measures" (CBMs). These "measures" - like notification of each other before tests of nuclear-capable missiles - were somehow supposed to create confidence that the people of the two countries were safe even when such missiles stayed in military deployment and on hair-trigger alert.
General Musharraf has added his own reassurance in this regard. Addressing officers and soldiers at a garrison in Quetta on September 11, he reiterated his regime's resolve never ever to roll back its nuclear-weapon program. He added: "My government has spent more money in the last three years on enhancing Pakistan's nuclear capability than (spent for this purpose) in the previous 30 years."
The Indian government has not been forthcoming with a similar figure. There is little doubt, however, that it swells with the same pride over its own misuse of taxpayers' money to build mass-murder weapons. Or that it is as sternly resolved not to reverse its own program against South Asian peace. Remember, the joint document on CBMs desisted from mentioning regional nuclear disarmament even as a distant goal. Instead, it recorded the joint resolve of New Delhi and Islamabad to seek parity with the nuclear powers - or to join the 'nuclear club'.
Within months of India and Pakistan's nuclear-weapon tests in May 1998, then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee surprised many with a bus ride to Lahore to meet with his Pakistani counterpart, Nawaz Sharif. The peace mission turned out to be a public relations exercise. The aim was to convince the international community that India and Pakistan could be counted upon to conduct themselves as 'responsible' nuclear-weapon states. The CBMs, too, it would seem, were meant to serve the same purpose.
The talks have run an almost identical course on the other issue, which both sides recognize as important and intractable.
An immediately striking parallel is President Musharraf's equally ringing statement on this issue in the same speech. "We will not give up Kashmir," he told the soldiers. "We have fought wars over it. Pakistan will have to ensure the interest of the Kashmiris." No such statement has emanated from New Delhi thus far. No doubt, however, that Natwar Singh was as uncompromising on India's 'national interest' as Kasuri was on Pakistan's. And it appeared incompatible with the interests of regional peace, in either case.
The ministers ended their meeting with emphatic assertions of irreconcilable stands on the issue. Singh identified the Kashmir problem with "cross-border terrorism" and Kasuri with human rights violations. They made no progress on the one proposal on people-to-people relations in Kashmir. India and Pakistan had restored a rail link between Attari and Lahore and a bus route between Amritsar and Lahore. But neither of these passed through disputed territory. Political constraints acted as a brake on the plan for a bus link between Srinagar and Muzaffarabad, capitals of India-administered State of Jammu and Kashmir and Pakistan-controlled Azad Kashmir.
Differences on the required travel document proved an insuperable roadblock. India's idea of passports as such documents was unacceptable to Pakistan, This, Kasuri and colleagues feared, would legitimize the Line of Control (LoC) as an international border. The LoC was a result of the Bangladesh war of 1971 and, therefore, a painful reminder of Pakistan's dismemberment and rout by India.
Clearly, the talks on Kashmir, on which neither side was ready to compromise, were also targeted at an international audience. Days after the ministers' meeting, both sides widely publicized a "secret" session of talks in Amritsar between the National Security Advisers of India and Pakistan. They were to discuss a document on Kashmir by UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, and it is anybody's guess if the paper reflected the views of only the Tony Blair regime.
The talks will go on. The participants, however, cannot hear the voice of the vast millions who want them to make genuine efforts for peace in South Asia.
A freelance journalist and a peace activist of India, J. Sri Raman is the author of Flashpoint (Common Courage Press, USA). He is a regular contributor to truthout.
-------- iran
Iran confirms new nuclear offer
Tehran is accused of covertly seeking to build a nuclear bomb
AFP
Wednesday 08 September 2004,
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/872E9D73-3BBE-4929-B4C1-94A74CB3DD7F.htm
Iran has confirmed it has offered new concessions on its controversial nuclear programme in talks with the European Union.
However, the Islamic Republic also warned of a "response" if the Europeans and the UN's atomic watchdog again took a tough line against the Islamic republic.
"If the Europeans do not respect their commitments or present an illogical or harsh resolution, Iran has already decided its response," said top national security official Hassan Rowhani on Wednesday.
Rowhani confirmed Iran was in talks with the EU ahead of a 13 September meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), with one concession on the table being a renewed suspension on the assembly of centrifuges used to enrich uranium.
Civilian purposes
In high-level talks with the current EU presidenct the Netherlands, Rowhani denied that Iran was seeking nuclear weapons, but said it would not abandon its programme to develop nuclear power for civilian purposes.
On Tuesday, diplomats at the IAEA headquarters in Vienna said Iran was ready again to suspend its efforts to assemble centrifuges in order to avoid being brought before the UN Security Council.
Britain, Germany and France have been negotiating with the aim of getting Iran to "fully suspend any uranium enrichment activities, including making any components for centrifuges", said a Western diplomat in Vienna.
Fuel
Enriched uranium can be used to provide fuel for reactors working to produce electric energy, as well as nuclear warheads.
"If the Europeans do not respect their commitments or present an illogical or harsh resolution, Iran has already decided its response"
Iran recently resumed production of centrifuges, in reaction to a critical resolution adopted by the IAEA board of governors after its last review of the Iran dossier in June.
At the beginning of September, Tehran also announced that it planned to convert 37 tonnes of "yellow cake" uranium into uranium hexafluoride gas, an element necessary for the enrichment of uranium.
Nuclear experts have said that such a large amount could in theory be used to make one or more nuclear warheads.
The United States accuses Iran of covertly trying to develop a nuclear bomb and has sought to have the IAEA refer Tehran to the Security Council for possible sanctions.
Tehran maintains that it is merely trying to meet increasing domestic energy demands and free up its vast oil and gas reserves for export.
----
Iran Wants Dialogue to Resolve Nuclear Standoff
REUTERS IRAN:
September 8, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/26999/story.htm
TEHRAN - Iran's top nuclear negotiator said on Monday talks, not threats, would resolve a standoff over a nuclear program Washington says is a cover for developing atomic weapons.
Iran was ready to remove concerns over its nuclear ambitions by fully cooperating with the IAEA United Nations nuclear watchdog, head of Iran's Supreme National Security Council Hassan Rohani told Iran's state television.
"The only way to resolve Iran's nuclear problem is steady dialogue, not putting pressure or threatening us," Rohani told Iran's state television on a visit to the Netherlands, which currently holds the rotating EU chairmanship.
The United States accuses Iran of secretly working on an atomic bomb and has been pushing for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to report Iran's case to the U.N. Security Council for possible economic sanctions.
Tehran rejects the charge and says its ambitions are limited to generating electricity from nuclear reactors.
"Iran has never pursued nuclear arms but we are serious about having peaceful nuclear technology," Rohani said.
EU foreign ministers last week criticized Iran for not fully cooperating with the IAEA.
Foreign Minister of France, Germany and Britain last year convinced Iran to suspend its uranium enrichment-related activities.
But Tehran in June ended the deal with the EU trio by resuming the production and testing of nuclear centrifuges, which can enrich uranium to the arms-grade level needed for use in nuclear warheads.
"We assure the world that our enrichment-related activities are for peaceful purposes," Rohani said.
The EU trio will draft a resolution to be presented to the IAEA's 35-member Board of Governors which will meet on Sept. 13 to discuss Iran's nuclear case.
Iran believes the IAEA would give its nuclear program a clean bill of health in its September report as Iran has removed the agency's major ambiguities over Tehran's nuclear activities.
----
Iran faces 'nuclear ultimatum'
Iran denies it wants to build nuclear weapons
By Paul Reynolds
BBC News Online world affairs correspondent
Wednesday, 8 September, 2004
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3639132.stm
Iran is likely to be given an ultimatum that it must suspend all uranium enrichment activities or face being reported to the United Nations Security Council, according to senior British officials.
Speaking in advance of a board meeting of UN nuclear watchdog the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna on 13 September, the officials said: "At its last meeting in June, the IAEA laid out what Iran had to do and it has done only part of that."
"Iran has to give the international community the assurances we need and only a full suspension will do that."
However, any decision on going to the UN Security Council would not be taken at this meeting but at the following one scheduled for November.
The officials strongly implied that Britain would support reporting Iran to the council if it did not comply.
"It is a serious option which we would consider seriously," they said.
Iran's 'offer' dismissed
The US would prefer an immediate decision to go to the Security Council. But Britain, France and Germany, which have been acting together over Iran, believe that unity in the IAEA requires that Iran be given a final chance.
We don't want Iran to develop any part of the fuel process Senior British officials Iran previously agreed with the three European governments to suspend enrichment but has since said that this no longer applies.
The British officials dismissed reported Iranian offers this week to return to a policy of suspension.
"This kind of thing should not come days before an IAEA meeting," they said.
The officials also said Britain wanted to go beyond suspension and was demanding that Iran give up any ambitions to make fuel for a nuclear reactor.
This is also a position taken by the US and, the British officials suggested, was supported by France and Germany as well.
Western mistrust
The reason for this is that once a country knows how to enrich uranium to make fuel, it could go on to enrich it further to make a nuclear bomb.
"We don't want Iran to develop any part of the fuel process," was the comment.
Such a demand goes beyond what is covered in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). This does not ban a country from making fuel but says that it has to be under inspection.
The problem is that Iran has evaded inspections in the past and western governments now do not trust it.
The US has said publicly that it believes that Iran wants to make a nuclear bomb.
To get round the NPT Treaty, western governments would look to the UN Security Council to demand that Iran give up fuel enrichment as the only way to restore confidence in its peaceful intentions.
Iran has stated that it intends to develop fuel enrichment because it cannot rely on outside suppliers. It says that it has no intention of making a nuclear weapon.
--------
Iran Negotiates Deal to Curtail Nuclear Work
U.S. Sees Offer as Bid to Stall Sanctions
By Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 8, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3588-2004Sep7.html
A series of secret weekend meetings in Vienna between Iranian and European diplomats led to a promise from Tehran yesterday to suspend some nuclear activities in exchange for improved trade with Britain, France and Germany, according to U.S and European diplomats.
But the offer, just days ahead of a meeting on Iran at the International Atomic Energy Agency, does not include work in a key area of uranium conversion, a process that could accelerate Iran's chances of developing a nuclear weapon, if it chooses to do so.
France, Britain and Germany are still mulling over the offer, officials said, giving the Bush administration less than a week to try to convince them that the time for incentives and deals is over. U.S. officials, who saw the Iranian offer as a stalling tactic, still acknowledged a tough week ahead and said Group of Eight meetings in Geneva tomorrow and Friday would be critical.
As of yesterday, the Bush administration and the European trio had drawn up separate and competing resolutions to be presented to the IAEA board when it meets next week in Vienna, according to officials involved in both sides of the negotiations.
The U.S. resolution would find Iran in noncompliance of its obligations under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and would refer the matter to the U.N. Security Council, which has the power to impose sanctions or oil embargoes.
The European plan, which is favored by a majority of the IAEA's 35-member board, would call for a full suspension of Iran's suspect nuclear program but delay the possibility of Security Council action until late November, when the board is to meet again. The European proposal would call on the IAEA to complete a full review of Iran's nuclear efforts, which the board would judge in November.
So far, the United States has received indications from Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan that they would support the U.S. position if the Europeans could be brought on board. U.S. officials, who would discuss tactics only on the condition of anonymity, said that would be their goal. Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton, the administration's point man on nonproliferation issues, is meeting his G-8 counterparts in Geneva tomorrow and Friday, and Iran is expected to feature prominently in the discussions.
If the United States is successful, it will take the unusual step of calling for a vote at next week's IAEA board meeting. The board traditionally operates by consensus, but if opinion could be more evenly divided, a vote could achieve the administration's goal of getting the matter to the Security Council.
As an incentive, U.S. diplomats have been quietly promising they would not seek sanctions or other punitive resolutions inside the council. Instead, they are looking for a unified statement of support for continued IAEA inspections in Iran. The softer approach is meant to ease concerns by other countries worried that the Bush administration may be using the council as a steppingstone toward military action against Tehran.
Iran, rich in oil and natural gas, insists that its nuclear program is peaceful and aimed at securing a stable energy source. The nuclear work it has been conducting is allowable under the nuclear NPT, but the United States and others believe Iran is using the treaty as a cover for clandestine work.
Over the past 18 months, IAEA inspectors have found inconsistencies and unanswered questions in Iran's account of its program and intentions. But last week, the agency reported that Iran had improved cooperation and that inspectors had found plausible answers for some of the suspicious activity.
Still, the IAEA will not give Iran a clean bill of health. The board, which passed a resolution in June calling on Iran to halt all nuclear work that could be used in a weapons program, is to review the latest IAEA report and Iran's current offer when it meets next week.
On Monday evening, after two days of negotiations with European diplomats, the Iranians told IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei that they would halt all work related to centrifuges, the equipment that can enrich uranium for weapons. In response, ElBaradei dispatched a new team of inspectors to inventory Iran's centrifuge parts and equipment.
State Department spokesman Richard A. Boucher dismissed Iran's latest promise as a ploy it had tried in the past.
"You don't have to look back too far to find Iranian officials saying that they were going to suspend production of centrifuge and use of centrifuges, and then to find them saying that, no, they were going to go ahead anyway," Boucher said.
Last year, Iran cut a deal with the Europeans ahead of an IAEA meeting that prevented the board from taking any tough action against Tehran. But the deal eventually fell apart, and Iran announced in June that it had restarted programs it promised to suspend.
-------- israel
Sharon: World Needs to Stop Iran Nukes
(AP)
Wednesday September 8, 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-4480506,00.html
JERUSALEM - Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said in an interview published Wednesday that the world is not doing enough to stop Iran from developing atomic weapons and that Israel is taking its own measures to protect itself.
Sharon said to The Jerusalem Post that ``there is no doubt'' that Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons, and that ``they are doing it by deception and subterfuge.''
Global efforts to halt Iran's nuclear advancement, including inspections by the U.N. nuclear watchdog and threats by the United States to seek international sanctions, are not enough, Sharon said.
``I don't see that the activity against them (the Iranians) is enough to stop them from obtaining nuclear weapons,'' Sharon said.
Israel feels especially threatened because Iran has already successfully tested a long-range missile that can reach Israel, Sharon said, adding that even moderates in Iran have called for the destruction of Israel.
Israel, Sharon was quoted as saying, ``is taking its own measures to defend itself.'' He did not elaborate.
In 1981, Israel bombed Iraq's nuclear reactor before it began operating.
On Monday, the launch of Israel's latest spy satellite, Ofek-6, failed. The satellite was meant to monitor, among other things, Iranian nuclear activities. The rocket that thrusts the satellite into outerspace failed.
-------- korea
North Korea Nuclear Plant Suspended Again - Report
REUTERS JAPAN:
September 8, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/27000/story.htm
TOKYO - The United States, South Korea and Japan have agreed to suspend work on the construction of nuclear reactors in North Korea for a second year but stopped short of scrapping the project, a Japanese newspaper said.
The decision, which the Yomiuri Shimbun daily said was likely to be formalized at a meeting of the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO) in New York on Oct. 13, comes as Washington and its allies try to get Pyongyang to hold another round of talks this month on its nuclear arms programs.
The three countries, along with the European Union, formed the power consortium KEDO as a reward for North Korea's pledge in 1994 to freeze its nuclear development programs. The United States had agreed to provide fuel oil as part of the deal.
Quoting unidentified Japanese government sources, the Yomiuri said the United States had wanted to scrap the project entirely, but gave in to persuasion from South Korea and Japan to leave room to resume construction.
South Korea and Japan have covered 90 percent of the $1.5 billion construction costs so far.
More than 100 workers are still maintaining the site of the two partially built reactors.
KEDO suspended construction work on the light-water reactors for an initial one year last December, after the United States said in October 2002 that North Korea had admitted working on a secret uranium-enrichment project.
An attempt by North Korea to have the project restarted was rejected by KEDO's board in May.
Six-way talks between North and South Korea, the United States, Japan, China and Russia aimed at solving the nuclear stand-off have so far failed to make significant progress.
Washington has called for Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear program in a complete, verifiable and irreversible manner.
----
S Korea admits failure to report uranium test
SEOUL (AFP)
Sep 08, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040908040200.lrlvn2kq.html
South Korea will admit Wednesday that it should have reported an unauthorized experiment to enrich uranium four years ago to international arms control officials, Yonhap news agency reported.
The experiment conducted in January 2000 at the country's state-run nuclear research center produced a miniscule amount of enriched uranium.
Until now, the government has argued that it saw no wrongdoing despite its failure to report the experiment that produced 0.2 grams (0.007 ounces) of uranium to the UN's nuclear watchdog.
The government is now stepping back from that position, an official told Yonhap.
"The 0.2 grams of extracted uranium should have been reported although the experiment itself and facility had not to be reported," the unnamed official was quoted as saying ahead of a briefing to journalists later in the day.
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) staff inspected the research center in South Korea last week where the experiment took place and returned to Vienna with a sample of the enriched uranium.
South Korea will dispatch a team of officials to Vienna to attend a four-day board meeting of the IAEA starting Monday that will consider the case.
They will argue vigorously that the experiment was conducted for purely academic purposes and was in no way linked to nuclear weapons ambitions.
"The government has maintained transparency and reliability in its non-proliferation policy by voluntarily declaring it and fully cooperating with the IAEA inspection," South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-Moon said in a weekly briefing.
Ban said he expected "the IAEA to handle the case in a factually-correct and balanced manner" at its board meeting.
Revelations that scientists in South Korea engaged in clandestine uranium enrichment embarrassed officials here at a time when Seoul is playing a leading role in efforts to end North Korea's nuclear weapons programme.
However, the government until now has rejected charges it violated its international obligations, claiming that there was no stipulation at the time under the nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to report the enrichment activities.
Seoul argued it was only obliged to report the enrichment activities after new, tougher safeguards came into force under an additional protocol to the treaty that came into force in February.
In any case, the government said that it was not told about the experiment at the time and was only informed in August by scientists at the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute in Daejeon, 160 kilometers (100 miles) south of the capital.
The experiment using laser isotope separation technology was a "one-off" case and South Korea has no interest in running a nuclear weapons programme, the government maintained.
----
S. Korean Official Attempts to Ease Nuclear Concerns
By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, September 8, 2004; Page A20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3571-2004Sep7.html
TAEJON, South Korea, Sept. 8 -- South Korea's top nuclear energy official on Tuesday denied claims that scientists in his country had produced near-bomb-grade uranium, seeking to ease concern that the previously undisclosed experiments were in apparent violation of international law.
"Yes, we did enrich uranium, but an amount so small it was almost invisible and to levels that were not close" to weapons grade, Chang In Soon, president of the government Korean Atomic Energy Research Institute, said in an interview. "This was an academic exercise, nothing more. We have no ambition beyond science. Any suggestion to the contrary is wrong."
His description of the experiments appeared to be at odds with testimony that South Korean officials are said to have provided last week to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Diplomats familiar with the testimony said the South Korean officials had reported that they enriched uranium to levels of almost 80 percent -- close to those used in nuclear weapons and far above the single-digit levels typically used in nuclear energy production.
Chang, however, insisted there had been a "misunderstanding." He said the three tests had yielded an average enrichment level of only 10 percent -- with the highest levels not exceeding the average by a large amount. Diplomats familiar with the case, however, said they preferred to await the results of IAEA testing.
Chang said he personally authorized the experiments -- a costly procedure that employs a laser to isolate certain uranium isotopes -- in January and February of 2000. The Seoul government reported the experiments to the IAEA last week.
The nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty requires that signatories report any uranium-enrichment activities to the IAEA immediately. Not doing so is considered a serious violation. The IAEA, which is based in Vienna, dispatched a team to South Korea last week. Investigators collected half of the uranium that had been enriched -- about 100 milligrams -- and the IAEA said complete analysis was expected to take at least a month.
Several pounds of highly enriched uranium are required to build a bomb, according to experts. "If we had wanted to do it, we could have done it in another, more efficient way," Chang said. "But that wasn't our goal."
Even if South Korea is found to have enriched uranium to relatively low levels, the Seoul government may still face problems.
"On the surface, it appears to be a violation no matter what the enrichment level was," said a Vienna-based diplomat familiar with the matter. "But the consequences have a range, depending on what is found."
Officials at South Korea's Foreign Ministry said other high-ranking government officials were informed of the experiments in February by Chang, adding that the tests were not "government-sanctioned." But they deferred to Chang on the details of the experiments, which they reiterated had been quickly halted. Neither Chang nor the researchers involved had been disciplined, the officials said.
Chang said he chose to inform his superiors after reviewing an IAEA protocol adopted by the Seoul government this year that, according to his interpretation, had called for a higher level of accountability at South Korean nuclear facilities.
Chang said he authorized the tests after five South Korean scientists -- all of whom received their doctorates in the United States and who worked at the sprawling campus here 110 miles south of Seoul -- approached him for permission to enrich uranium. They were interested, he said, in "seeing what they could as scientists" with the institute's high-tech lasers and related equipment, all of which Chang said was about to scrapped. "As a scientist myself, I could not say no to them," he said.
"And I did not think this was a violation," he said. "This was such a small amount."
The case could complicate six-party negotiations over North Korean nuclear plans, as well as U.S. demands that the Iranian government disclose hidden portions of its nuclear programs.
The public and news media in South Korea, an important U.S. ally, have largely rallied around their scientists, with most newspapers condemning what was being portrayed here as an overreaction to the South Korean experiments. The country gets 40 percent of its power from nuclear energy but so far has refrained from enriching uranium itself, instead importing enriched uranium from the United States, Russia and elsewhere to feed its 19 nuclear power plants.
-------- russia
Russia Wakes Up to a Nuclear Threat
By MARTIN SCHRAM
Sep 8, 2004,
Scripps Howard News
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_5205.shtml
As fears of new terrorist attacks jolted Russia, President Vladimir Putin last week issued a first-time-ever order that should have been front page news everywhere.
Especially here in the United States. For it told as much about the security gap in America's homeland security as it did about Russia's. But no U.S. newspaper or television network put the news anywhere where you'd see it.
Belated News Flash: Putin has just dispatched Russian military troops to guard all of his country's far-flung, frighteningly under-secured nuclear weapons facilities. Yes, the same facilities his government always insisted were perfectly secure. Putin was forced to drop his government's Potemkin-false-front assurance because the latest Chechnyan terrorism in Russia (schoolhouse slaughter, subway bombing, two airline crashes) proved terrorists were capable of buying or stealing Russia's vulnerable nuclear weapons and materials - and launching a nuclear terror attack inside Russia.
That gut-check reality apparently demanded a new level of truth-telling far beyond what was acceptable back when Russia's vulnerable nukes were seen as just potential weapons for terrorists targeting Americans.
Putin's order is powerful confirmation of what some of us have been warning for years: Russia's so-called loose nukes pose a security threat for the entire planet. That warning has been sounded for more than a decade by a few bold political leaders such as former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn and his colleague Sen. Dick Lugar, as well by a number of smart nuclear-weapons experts and a handful of nuclear-concerned journalists (that's where I fit in, in a bit role).
In 2002, in Moscow, I interviewed Minister of Atomic Energy Aleksandr Rumyantsev about Russia's under-secured nuclear facilities (while researching my recent book, "Avoiding Armageddon" and serving as managing editor for the PBS series of the same name). I'd gathered stories of two Russian nuclear thieves, a civilian and a Navy captain, who'd stolen nuclear fuel and were caught only after bungling efforts to sell it on the nuclear black market.
"I can guarantee you total security of those materials and the sites of its storage today," said Rumyantsev. I asked about a member of Russia's Duma (parliament) who'd just entered a Russian nuclear site by sneaking through some unguarded barbed-wire. No big deal, Rumyantsev dead-panned, the barbed wire was only intended to keep out "stray people and stray animals who might approach the facility."
Putin's rushed troop deployment says otherwise. It is the boldest effort to address the problem since the Soviet Union's collapse left its arsenals unsecured _ leading Democrat Nunn and Republican Lugar to forge the historic Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Act, providing U.S. funding to destroy much of Russia's nuclear arsenal and secure the rest of it.
Bizarrely, after 9/11, when al Qaeda was clearly seeking weapons of mass destruction to use against us, President Bush froze all Nunn-Lugar funding for a year over a technicality. At the present rate, Russia's vulnerable nuclear arsenals won't be secured until well into the next decade. Which means that, while Russia's new nuclear troops are on guard, America's homeland is still at risk.
What now? In separate interviews, Nunn and Lugar, being clear-eyed visionaries, offered next-step solutions. While Putin has recognized the "extreme vulnerability" of many Russian nuclear facilities, Nunn said, both countries must respond to terrorist threats with new urgency: "We need to secure all materials."
Lugar noted that in recent months, Russia's Duma has been the party that has dragged its heels by delaying a ratification vote of an agreement to facilitate new funding by the world's industrialized nations to secure Russian weapons of mass destruction. "Russia's Duma and the Russian hierarchy felt this (effort to secure vulnerable arsenals) was interesting but not very essential," Lugar said. "Perhaps now they should ... act with urgency."
Nunn focused upon the now crucial need to safeguard the homelands of both Russia and the United States by safeguarding small nuclear weapons _ "weapons that one man can carry that can wipe out a good part of a major city." Neither country has been keen on sharing info with the other about these weapons, but Nunn said that must change in light of the new terrorist threats. "Both countries should have transparency to assure that small weapons that can be transported easily are secured," he said.
Nunn proposed one more common-sense solution. Russia's nuclear arsenal is spread over its vast land that spans 11 time zones. Dispersal was once a security precaution, assuring some survival of a U.S. attack; today it is a security problem, since some arsenal somewhere will surely be vulnerable to terrorists.
"We should offer to help Russia consolidate their nuclear weapons in a few areas," Nunn said. "And then guard the heck out of them."
(Martin Schram writes political analysis for Scripps Howard News Service.)
-------- u.n.
U.N. nuclear agency asleep at the switch
September 10, 2004
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20040909-115659-4549r.htm
The United States stood by for years as supposed allies helped its enemies obtain the world's most dangerous weapons, reveals Bill Gertz, defense and national security reporter for The Washington Times, in the new book "Treachery" (Crown Forum).
Last of three excerpts
Hoshyar Zebari, Iraq's new foreign minister, delivered a memorable address to the United Nations Security Council in New York on Dec. 16, 2003.
Zebari, an Iraqi Kurd, began his remarks by noting the historic capture, three days earlier, of Saddam Hussein. Then, after laying out a plan for Iraq to become a democracy, the foreign minister lowered the boom on the assembled diplomats.
"One year ago," Zebari said, "this Security Council was divided between those who wanted to appease Saddam Hussein and those who wantedto hold him accountable. The United Nations as an organization failed to help rescue the Iraqi people from a murderous tyranny that lasted over 35 years, and today, we are unearthing thousands of victims in horrifying testament to that failure.
"The United Nations must not fail the Iraqi people again," he said.
It was clear to whom Zebari was referring: France, Germany, Russia and China, among others in the world body, fought U.S.-led efforts to end Saddam's bloody dictatorship.
But the organization's failure was far more significant than failing the Iraqi people. The United Nations had failed in its founding purpose: to preserve peace and international security.
It appeased Saddam for years before the United States called for decisive action.
And Saddam's Iraq is just one of many rogue regimes that the United Nations has failed to keep in check. Again and again, dangerous states have built up their militaries and weapons programs right under the world body's nose, despite sanctions and anti-proliferation agreements.
Sleeping watchdog
Three times, the United Nations' nuclear watchdog agency missed the covert nuclear-arms programs of rogue regimes, allowing those states to build deadly weapons capability under the guise of generating nuclear power.
Disclosures of the nuclear progress of North Korea, Libya and Iran came in rapid succession, within the space of about a year. If the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) did not detect these programs, one must wonder what purpose the U.N. branch serves.
The United Nations established the IAEA in 1957 to help countries build nuclear facilities for generating electricity. Its initial program, Atoms for Peace, quickly became "Atoms for Bombs." And not much has changed in the past five decades, except the size of the program.
Today, the IAEA has about 2,200 staff members at its headquarters in Vienna, Austria, and at four regional offices in Geneva, New York, Toronto and Tokyo. Its budget for 2004 was $268.5 million.
The IAEA's statutory purpose is to assist in transferring expertise and equipment for the "peaceful" use of nuclear power. The international agency also is charged with making sure that nations do not divert equipment or material for nuclear-energy development into weapons programs.
Specifically, Section 5 of the empowering statute directs the IAEA to "establish and administer safeguards designed to ensure that special fissionable and other materials, services, equipment, facilities and information made available by the agency or at its request or under its supervision or control are not used in such a way as to further any military purpose."
But the IAEA has not administered appropriate safeguards. And as a result, it has been fooled again and again by states such as North Korea, Iran, Libya, Syria and Iraq.
The centerpiece of the IAEA's work has been the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, or NPT, which went into effect on March 5, 1970.
Korean threat
Rogue states generally sign international agreements only if doing so is expedient. Nothing better illustrates this point than North Korea.
The NPT provided cover for North Korea's secret nuclear-weapons programs, allowing Pyongyang to purchase equipment, train technicians and build reactors.
North Korea was one of the agreement's 188 signatories when, in the fall of 2002, the communist regime of Kim Jong-il revealed that it secretly had been developing nuclear weapons.
The IAEA failed to anticipate or uncover North Korea's nuclear-weapons program. The agency admitted as much last year, when it reported: "The agency has never had the complete picture regarding [North Korean] nuclear activities."
Pyongyang froze plutonium production as part of a 1994 pact with the United States known as the Agreed Framework. But the CIA noted in 1995, in a classified Special National Intelligence Estimate: "Based on North Korea's past behavior, the [intelligence] community agrees it would dismantle its known program [only] if it had covertly developed another source of fissile material."
Sure enough, North Korea's disclosure in October 2002 of its uranium-enrichment activity confirmed that Pyongyang was trying to build nuclear bombs. In essence, Kim and the North Koreans were announcing that membership in the NPT had been a ruse all along.
Still, the IAEA did not take a hard line with Kim. It responded to the disclosure by sending faxes requesting "clarification." The North Koreans ignored the request.
Saber-rattling
The IAEA adopted a resolution calling on Pyongyang to cooperate. The North Koreans responded with a letter saying that they rejected the U.N. agency's unfair and unilateral approach.
The director of North Korea's nuclear program, Ri Je-son, stated in a letter dated Dec. 4, 2002, that Pyongyang would resume nuclear work if the United States did not resume oil shipments to North Korea.
Then, on Jan. 10, 2003, North Korea unceremoniously abandoned its partners in the NPT. In a broadcast on Kim's state radio, government commentator Jong Pong-kil said the decision to pull out was a defensive measure:
"The United States trampled on the NPT and the [North Korean]-U.S. Agreed Framework and is trying to crush us by all means," Jong declared. "By even mobilizing the IAEA, the United States is compelling us to give up the right of self-defense. Under such conditions, it is clear to everyone that we cannot let the country's security and the nation's dignity be infringed upon by remaining in the NPT treaty."
Jong then added a threat: "If the U.S. imperialists and their following forces challenge our republic's withdrawal from the NPT with new pressure and sanctions, we will respond with a stronger self-defensive measure."
In other words, the North Koreans, who already had shown that their membership in the NPT was a ruse, were announcing that they would keep building nuclear arms.
The IAEA's response to Jong's announcement was tantamount to appeasement. Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei, an Egyptian, said North Korea must return to the NPT.
Then, during a meeting with U.S. senators, ElBaradei said: "If North Korea were to show good behavior, they need to get some assurance as to what to expect in return for good behavior, and I think that's very important in articulation of what to expect in case of compliance."
It did not matter that the North Koreans openly admitted defying the IAEA for years; ElBaradei sent the message that the international arms-control agency would impose no penalty.
The matter was sent to the U.N. Security Council, but that body did little more than express "deep concern" for the violations. The United States picked up its diplomatic approach, which produced no results. North Korea continues its drive for nuclear arms.
Iran and Libya
The United Nations also failed to confront the nuclear threat from Iran, which, like North Korea, used the NPT to acquire equipment and materials to make nuclear bombs.
When Iran's weapons work was discovered, showing that the Iranians knowingly ignored obligations to their treaty partners, the IAEA essentially ignored the violations. The agency sought only an additional "protocol" from Iran as a new safeguard.
"This is a good day for peace, multilateralism and nonproliferation," ElBaradei declared after Iran signed the protocol. "A good day for peace because the [IAEA] board decided to continue to make every effort to use verification and diplomacy to resolve questions about Iran's nuclear program."
But "verification and diplomacy" failed to stop Iran from developing nuclear arms in the first place. Despite pressure from security officials within the Bush administration, ElBaradei refused to cite Iran for breaking its obligations.
Moreover, the IAEA did not keep careful watch over Libya's nuclear-weapons program, which was further along than both U.S. intelligence or the U.N. agency had known.
When Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi publicly disclosed his weapons program in December 2003, the IAEA knew nothing about it. The agency said Libya should have reported its activities to the IAEA.
The IAEA was happy to report Tripoli's decision to eliminate "materials, equipment and programs which lead to the production of internationally proscribed weapons."
But the agency tried to minimize its failure to discover the program. It noted that a Libyan official characterized his nation's uranium-enrichment program as "at an early stage of development" and that "no industrial-scale facility had been built, nor any enriched uranium produced."
Algeria long since had launched its own nuclear-arms program in response to the military buildup by neighbor Libya, with which it had tense relations, reflecting how weapons proliferation only breeds further proliferation.
U.S. intelligence agencies in the spring of 1991 detected the first signs that Algeria was developing nuclear weapons with the assistance of China.
'New urgency'
The ultimate threat to peace is nuclear weapons in the hands of international terrorists.
There is a real danger that terrorists could use nuclear materials in radiological attacks, or "dirty bombs." Worse, terrorists would use them in a nuclear blast that could kill thousands or even hundreds of thousands.
To his credit, the IAEA's ElBaradei has begun to worry about this threat.
"[Nuclear] source security has taken on a new urgency since 9/11," the U.N. arms agency's director general said in a speech last year. "There are millions of radiological sources used throughout the world. Most are very weak. What we are focusing on is preventing the theft or loss of control of the powerful radiological sources."
The fact is, al Qaeda and the world's other most lethal terrorist organizations are trying to acquire nuclear arms.
The United Nations' record of failure to detect and halt nuclear threats posed by rogue states, however, casts doubt on its ability to grapple with such arms in the grip of shadowy terrorist groups.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- nevada
State sues over Yucca rail line
By Suzanne Struglinski <suzanne@lasvegassun.com>
LAS VEGAS SUN WASHINGTON BUREAU
September 08, 2004
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/text/2004/sep/08/517475800.html
WASHINGTON -- Nevada sued the Energy Department once again today, this time over its plan to build a new rail line in the state to move spent nuclear fuel to Yucca Mountain.
Attorney General Brian Sandoval claims the department did not follow federal environmental policy and other laws when it proposed the 319-mile railroad through through Lincoln County and it is shutting out important outside regulators on the project. It filed the suit in the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, the same court that last month threw out the nuclear waste storage project's 10,000-year radiation standard.
The department announced its intention in April to use the its " Caliente Corridor" route to move nuclear waste to Yucca, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Caliente was one of five routes proposed for a railroad because no rail line exists in the state to move waste containers to the mountain. The department said last December it preferred the mostly rail option over the mostly truck alternative for shipping the waste to Yucca.
Several public meetings took place throughout the state earlier this year to help the department gather information on what it should include in a draft environmental study to be completed next year on the Caliente route but Nevada claims the whole process was done out of order.
"The whole point of environmental review is to study the impacts before you make the decision, not after," Sandoval said.
In the suit, Nevada claims the department violated the National Environmental Policy Act, a federal law that requires an environmental analysis of federal projects before they are finalized.
Sandoval said the department did not contact land owners in advance to let them know their land would be used in the construction project, even though the department asked the Bureau of Land Management for more than 300,000 acres to study. He said the department proclaimed the route, applied for the land but only now is evaluating the environmental impacts.
Nevada also claims the department moved ahead with the largest railroad construction project in 80 years without consulting the Surface Transportation Board, the federal agency that oversees rail projects.
"Given DOE's track record at building anything, the Board is a far better agency than DOE to run a project of this magnitude," Sandoval said in a statement. "It is also far less biased."
The state also complains the department intends to use truck casks on rail cars to move the waste, a method which has not been analyzed for safety. The department has only evaluated using trucks casks on truck or rail cars using stronger containers specifically made to be used on trains.
"The proposed railroad through Caliente is a billion dollar boondoggle," said Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev. "Rather than follow regulations to protect Nevada's environment, the White House is barreling down the tracks with absolute disregard for the law and the people of Nevada."
Energy Department spokesman Joe Davis was not aware of the lawsuit this morning, so he declined comment on it. The department generally does not discuss pending litigation anyway.
-------- new york
Group Says Terror Attack on Indian Point Would Be Apocalyptic
September 8, 2004
By MATTHEW L. WALD
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/08/nyregion/08nuke.html
WASHINGTON, Sept. 7 - A group campaigning to shut the Indian Point nuclear plant is firing new broadsides against the reactors, releasing a report on Wednesday that asserts that a successful terrorist attack could cause apocalyptic damage.
The group, Riverkeeper, is also appearing in a documentary to be broadcast on HBO on Thursday that makes the same arguments.
The report claims that a terrorist attack on the reactors, in Buchanan, N.Y., 35 miles north of Midtown Manhattan, could kill 44,000 people in a few days, at a range of up to 60 miles, and 500,000 more over decades through cancer, and cost $2.1 trillion.
The report discusses several possibilities, including a kamikaze jet attack that weakens the containment dome and damages enough equipment to interfere with cooling at the same time as the emergency diesel generators are disabled and the plant is disconnected from the electric grid.
But the Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff said that the Riverkeeper report misused commission studies on radiation transport and that a significant radiation release, especially one that spread contamination more than a few miles, required multiple failures that were highly unlikely to occur.
Eliot Brenner, a spokesman for the commission, said: "We think that there are some serious flaws in the logic and analysis of the Riverkeeper study. Even the title sort of suggests this is intended for sensationalism, not sound science." The Riverkeeper report is titled "Chernobyl on the Hudson?" A spokesman for Entergy, which owns the two operating reactors at Indian Point, also dismissed the report.
The report is a more detailed statement of a case presented in a documentary that is scheduled to be broadcast by HBO at 8 p.m. on Thursday, "Indian Point: Imagining the Unthinkable." The documentary was produced by Rory Kennedy, whose brother, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is a lawyer who works for Riverkeeper. It was written by Edwin S. Lyman, a nuclear expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, who appears in the documentary.
A spokesman for the group said that Mr. Kennedy had planned to send a light plane over the plant on Tuesday to demonstrate its vulnerability to air attack but had to settle for releasing about 30 rubber ducks from a boat near the cooling water intake on the Hudson because of bad weather. They were meant to show that the plant is a "sitting duck."
The report says radiation doses could be reduced if the commission broadened its plans for evacuating or sheltering the public to a distance of 50 miles, up from the 10 miles in the current plan. That distance increases the population to be evacuated to about 20 million, compared with about 300,000 in the current plans.
But Alex Matthiessen, the executive director of Riverkeeper, said that expanding the evacuation area was not the real goal. "Evacuating an area with 17 to 20 million people in it seems fairly hopeless to me," he said. "It begs the question, why do we still have a nuclear power plant 24 miles from New York City, given this new terrorist era?"
The commission bases its requirements for planning for evacuation and sheltering within 10 miles in part on the low probability of a mechanical failure or error, but Mr. Lyman's report dismisses this basis.
"N.R.C. can no longer shy away from confronting the worst-case consequences of terrorist attacks on nuclear power plants," he writes. "And perhaps the most attractive target in the country, where the consequences are likely to be the greatest, is Indian Point."
In an interview, Mr. Lyman said that emergency planning for evacuation and shelter had been limited to 10 miles because of the commission's "fear that going any further would turn public acceptance or toleration of Indian Point against them." He said that after the attacks of 9/11, that attitude was dangerous.
But Dan Dorman, the commission's deputy director of nuclear reactor security, said that the high radiation doses postulated in the study depended upon an unusual weather pattern at the time of release from the plant, and that to have the release in the first place, no matter what the weather, required "what-if, upon what-if, upon what-if."
He and others on the commission staff said that Mr. Lyman's worst-case sequence of events would require clouds and rain to deliver extremely high doses of radiation that was released from the plant. But clear weather would be needed for a plane to find the plant, and to prevent the radioactive material from being washed out of the air until it reached more densely populated places. They also said that physical security at the plant had improved, and that terrorists were unlikely to be able to hijack another big jet.
A key part of the Riverkeeper argument is that a major radiation release during an accident would require multiple failures that are unlikely to be simultaneous, but that a well-organized terrorist attack would seek to disable back-up systems.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
A Taboo Issue in Afghan Campaign
As Millions of Women Prepare to Vote, Debate on Their Other Rights Is Dampened
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, September 8, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A3566-2004Sep7?language=printer
KABUL, Afghanistan, Sept. 7 -- When Latif Pedram, a left-leaning writer who wears casual Western clothes under a silk Afghan cape, recently returned home from France to run for president, he introduced a volatile topic to the country's new experiment with campaigning: marital politics.
Is it fair that Afghan men may divorce their wives on the spot, while Afghan women must obtain their husband's permission for a divorce and risk losing their children if they leave? Is it right for a man to marry four women at once? And can he possibly make all of them happy?
Last week, Pedram suggested at a women's forum that the issue of divorce "ought to be debated" and said that it was "impossible" for a husband to treat four wives equitably.
Pedram's comments, taped and then aired on state television, touched on issues that are culturally taboo in traditional Muslim society and politically explosive in a country just emerging from a decade of violent rule by Islamic militias. Accordingly, they raised a furor among some conservative Islamic scholars in the capital.
The chief justice of the Supreme Court, an elderly religious cleric, sent a letter to the government election commission, as well as to the U.N. political mission here, demanding that Pedram, 41, be expelled from the race. The court's chief clerk, Waheed Mojhda, explained that the justices had "received many calls from people saying a candidate was speaking against Islam.
"There was an urgent meeting, and the justices watched those parts of the tape 15 times. They decided he had questioned the Koran and spoken against [Islamic law], and therefore he should be prosecuted and struck from the list of candidates."
Several official sources said that the court's letter had no legal validity and that the issue might be solved informally. So far, neither the election commission nor the prosecutor's office has taken any formal action against Pedram. As of Monday, he was still one of 17 candidates registered to challenge Hamid Karzai, the interim president, in Afghanistan's first national election, set for Oct. 9.
"What I said was not against religion or Islamic law," Pedram said. "I was just expressing an opinion about women's rights. This is only happening because the fundamentalists want to sabotage my campaign."
Whatever its legal outcome, the contretemps has demonstrated how volatile the issue of women's personal rights remains in Afghanistan, even as women are being officially urged to participate in national politics on an unprecedented scale. More than 4 million have registered to vote in October, and hundreds are expected to run for parliament in the spring.
No prominent Afghan women have come to Pedram's defense. Even liberal professional women expressed shock and disapproval this week at his comments, suggesting he had crossed a line dividing acceptable social debate from religious heresy.
"We do not want to touch such issues. We are all Afghans and Muslims, and we know the sensitivity of it," said Safia Siddiqui, a political activist and member of the professional women's group that sponsored the forum. "These are our Islamic values, and society will accept us only if we respect those values."
Masooda Jalal, a physician and the only woman among the presidential candidates, also declined to discuss the issue of marital rights in Islam or Afghan culture. She preferred, she said, to focus on "practical rights" for Afghan women, such as access to education and health care.
Jalal, 44, who chooses her words carefully and campaigns in a tight head scarf and voluminous coat, has tried to strike a balance between traditional and progressive ideas in her campaign. Her running mate is a turbaned tribal elder from a conservative southern province whose six daughters all have graduate degrees and live abroad.
On Monday, Jalal spoke to a group of destitute widows at a nonprofit bakery, telling them, "Your dignity is my dignity," and promising, if elected, to improve their lot. The women all said they had registered to vote but that their primary concerns were obtaining adequate food and shelter for their children.
"I believe I can do a lot to support women, to bring them into leadership roles and raise their concerns," said Jalal, a mother of three. "The Afghan constitution says men and women are equal before the law, and I intend to implement the constitution." But any discussion of women's rights under Islam, she said firmly, "should be left to scholars."
In Afghan culture, a strictly traditional view is taken of women's marital rights under Islam. Marriages are arranged, and engaged couples do not meet alone. Girls live with their parents until marriage and then immediately go to live with their husband's parents. Men often have two wives and sometimes up to four, as Islam allows in some cases.
Divorce is not common, but it is far easier for a man to obtain one than it is for a woman. Married women face strong pressure from relatives and judges to remain with their husbands -- even an abusive one. If a woman insists on a divorce, courts generally award the children to the husband. In dividing inheritances, male heirs receive double the property female heirs do.
Over the past two decades, moreover, Afghan society has become more conservative, not less. Movements to embrace modernization and communism in the 1970s led to a decade-long occupation of the country by the Soviet Union and eventual civil war among Islamic factions, culminating in the repressive rule of the extremist Taliban movement between 1996 and late 2001.
"We are coming out of mujaheddin and Taliban culture, and conservative tradition has become the norm," said Jawad Luddin, Karzai's chief spokesman. He said the president had tried to be respectful of all views and suggested that Pedram should have been more circumspect. "This has always been a bombshell issue, and a good politician has to suppress himself," he said.
"Women should not be abused, but we should not ignore our traditions either," said Hafiz Mansour, a conservative presidential candidate who spoke at the women's forum. "In the West, women are used to sell lipstick and shampoo. We want them to become educated, to become professionals, but not to be used as a thing and thrown out."
He also said that Islam allowed women more marital rights than critics might think. For example, men may marry several wives but only under limited conditions, such as when one wife is chronically ill or cannot bear a son, and even then only if the husband is able to treat all of them fairly. Islam also allows a woman to sue for divorce if her husband abuses her, fails to support her or forces her to be involved in crime.
"Marriage does not make a woman hostage for life," Mansour said. "What Pedram said is already in the Koran."
While no one is rushing to endorse Pedram's statements, other candidates are scrambling to develop reasonable-sounding policies on women's rights. But, as Jalal points out, Afghan women are just beginning to discover and exercise their political voice -- and they have far more urgent priorities than the right to divorce.
"Women need better health care, better education, better jobs. If a woman has no education, how can she defend her rights?" Jalal said. "The fact that I am a candidate at all is a revolution. If we can get women into office to serve other women, then we can start to bring real change."
-------- africa
U.S. Report Finds Sudan Promoted Killings
Use of Term 'Genocide' Debated Ahead of Powell Testimony on Darfur Atrocities
By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, September 8, 2004; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A3568-2004Sep7?language=printer
A State Department report detailing atrocities in the Darfur region of western Sudan concludes that the Sudanese government has promoted systematic killings based on race and ethnic origin, but officials said Tuesday that there was strong debate over whether Secretary of State Colin L. Powell should classify the violence as genocide.
State Department lawyers reviewing the report, based on 1,136 interviews collected in 19 refugee camps in neighboring Chad last month, said the evidence of rape, killing of male babies, use of racial epithets, burning of villages and displacement could easily meet the legal definition of genocide. Powell visited Darfur in June and requested the investigation.
A draft of the report, which was obtained by The Post and which will be issued in its final form Thursday, says the Sudanese government in coordination with the Arab militia known as the Janjaweed sought victims who were non-Arabs. Assailants often shouted racial and ethnic epithets such as "Kill the slaves" and "We have orders to kill all blacks."
Use of the word genocide is "a political question now," a high-ranking State Department source said. "Not a legal one."
On one side of the debate, some human rights officials contend a declaration of genocide would be a powerful statement that would draw world attention to Darfur and promote efforts to halt mass killings there. However, some in the U.S. government argue that the explicit use of the word might alienate the Sudanese government and limit the United States' ability to pressure its leaders to halt marauding Arab militias, who have killed, raped and tortured black African refugees in the region.
The "primary cleavage is ethnic: Arabs against Africans," according to the eight-page report, which will be released as Powell testifies before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Powell said Tuesday he was focusing on efforts to enhance relief operations in Darfur. "We've seen improvement with respect to humanitarian access," Powell said at a State Department briefing. "The security situation isn't as improved as we would like it to be."
But "with respect to the issue of what to call it -- genocide or not," he said, "it doesn't open any new doors that are not available to us now."
The 1948 U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defined the act as a calculated effort to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group in whole or in part. The convention calls on signatories, including the United States, to prevent and punish genocide.
Earlier this year, Congress urged the Bush administration to call the situation in Sudan genocide. Organizations such as Physicians for Human Rights have also called it genocide.
The European Union and Amnesty International, among other groups, have said they do not have enough information to determine if the situation in Darfur meets the definition of genocide.
The office of the U.N. Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Sudan said that the expulsion of 1.2 million mainly African ethnic groups from their homes was deliberate and systematically carried out by the Sudanese government, according to a recent briefing paper on the Darfur crisis.
Tens of thousands of civilians face disease and death in squalid government camps; thousands more lack shelter and aid in hard-to-reach rebel-held areas.
As attacks continue in Darfur, the emotional debate over using the word genocide has evoked memories of inaction during previous episodes of violence.
In Rwanda a decade ago, Hutu extremists slaughtered an estimated 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus as various factions argued over the use of the word.
"We all had the Rwanda experience, and we all have to live with ourselves," said Charles Snyder, the State Department's senior representative on Sudan and the former acting assistant secretary of state for African affairs.
Meanwhile, analysts have said the United States is reluctant to antagonize Sudan because the Bush administration does not want to jeopardize a U.S.-backed peace deal to end a separate civil war with rebels in southern Sudan. In addition, Sudan, which once harbored Osama bin Laden, now plays a role in the war on terrorism.
High-ranking Sudanese officials, including the head of National Intelligence Security Services and the former external affairs intelligence chief, are among the key figures ordering and coordinating the violence in Darfur, State Department sources said.
"Senior Bush administration officials appear reluctant to publicly identify senior officials involved in the atrocities in Darfur, including First Vice President Osman Taha and NISS chief Salah Abdala Gosh, because these officials are also in charge of the counterterrorism efforts and have been cooperating with U.S. officials," said Ted Dagne of the U.S. Congressional Research Service. "Targeting these officials could end cooperation on counterterrorism."
Human rights analysts said that describing killings in Darfur as genocide does not prescribe a specific U.S. course of action.
"Just calling it a genocide does not open a magic book," said Jerry Fowler, staff director on the Committee on Conscience at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. "But it raises the moral and political stakes. You can't just say it's genocide and then not get involved."
Members of the State Department who contributed to the new report also worked in Kosovo and Bosnia. After touring the camps, they likened their experiences there to their experiences in Sudan and discussed the need for additional international pressure to end the violence in Darfur.
"If you have women without their men, that changes the face of the future society," said Jan Pfundheller, a retired police officer from Brewster, Wash.
"I was shocked by the scope of the tragedy," said Pfundheller, an expert on sexual violence. "What happened in Kosovo was evil. This is more vast and equally as evil."
-------- arms sales
French connection armed Saddam
September 08, 2004
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20040908-123000-1796r.htm
The United States stood by for years as supposed allies helped its enemies obtain the world's most dangerous weapons, reveals Bill Gertz, defense and national security reporter for The Washington Times, in the new book "Treachery" (Crown Forum). In this excerpt, he details France's persistence in arming Saddam Hussein.
New intelligence revealing how long France continued to supply and arm Saddam Hussein's regime infuriated U.S. officials as the nation prepared for military action against Iraq.
The intelligence reports showing French assistance to Saddam ongoing in the late winter of 2002 helped explain why France refused to deal harshly with Iraq and blocked U.S. moves at the United Nations.
"No wonder the French are opposing us," one U.S. intelligence official remarked after illegal sales to Iraq of military and dual-use parts, originating in France, were discovered early last year before the war began.
That official was careful to stipulate that intelligence reports did not indicate whether the French government had sanctioned or knew about the parts transfers. The French company at the beginning of the pipeline remained unidentified in the reports. France's government tightly controls its aerospace and defense firms, however, so it would be difficult to believe that the illegal transfers of equipment parts took place without the knowledge of at least some government officials.
Iraq's Mirage F-1 fighter jets were made by France's Dassault Aviation. Its Gazelle attack helicopters were made by Aerospatiale, which became part of a consortium of European defense companies.
"It is well-known that the Iraqis use front companies to try to obtain a number of prohibited items," a senior Bush administration official said before the war, refusing to discuss Iraq's purchase of French warplane and helicopter parts.
The State Department confirmed intelligence indicating the French had given support to Iraq's military.
"U.N. sanctions prohibit the transfer to Iraq of arms and materiel of all types, including military aircraft and spare parts," State Department spokeswoman Jo-Anne Prokopowicz said. "We take illicit transfers to Iraq very seriously and work closely with our allies to prevent Iraq from acquiring sensitive equipment."
Sen. Ted Stevens, Alaska Republican and chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, declared that France's selling of military equipment to Iraq was "international treason" as well as a violation of a U.N. resolution.
"As a pilot and a former war pilot, this disturbs me greatly that the French would allow in any way parts for the Mirage to be exported so the Iraqis could continue to use those planes," Stevens said.
"The French, unfortunately, are becoming less trustworthy than the Russians," said Rep. Curt Weldon, Pennsylvania Republican and vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. "It's outrageous they would allow technology to support the jets of Saddam Hussein to be transferred."
The U.S. military was about to go to war with Iraq, and thanks to the French, the Iraqi air force had become more dangerous.
The pipeline
French aid to Iraq goes back decades and includes transfers of advanced conventional arms and components for weapons of mass destruction.
The central figure in these weapons ties is French President Jacques Chirac. His relationship with Saddam dates to 1975, when, as prime minister, the French politician rolled out the red carpet when the Iraqi strongman visited Paris.
"I welcome you as my personal friend," Chirac told Saddam, then vice president of Iraq.
The French put Saddam up at the Hotel Marigny, an annex to the presidential palace, and gave him the trappings of a head of state. The French wanted Iraqi oil, and by establishing this friendship, Chirac would help France replace the Soviet Union as Iraq's leading supplier of weapons and military goods.
In fact, Chirac helped sell Saddam the two nuclear reactors that started Baghdad on the path to nuclear weapons capability.
France's corrupt dealings with Saddam flourished throughout the 1990s, despite the strict arms embargo against Iraq imposed by the United Nations after the Persian Gulf war.
By 2000, France had become Iraq's largest supplier of military and dual-use equipment, according to a senior member of Congress who declined to be identified.
Saddam developed networks for illegal supplies to get around the U.N. arms embargo and achieve a military buildup in the years before U.S. forces launched a second assault on Iraq.
One spare-parts pipeline flowed from a French company to Al Tamoor Trading Co. in the United Arab Emirates. Tamoor then sent the parts by truck through Turkey, and into Iraq. The Iraqis obtained spare parts for their French-made Mirage F-1 jets and Gazelle attack helicopters through this pipeline.
A huge debt
U.S. intelligence would not discover the pipeline until the eve of war last year; sensitive intelligence indicated that parts had been smuggled to Iraq as recently as that January.
"A thriving gray-arms market and porous borders have allowed Baghdad to acquire smaller arms and components for larger arms, such as spare parts for aircraft, air-defense systems and armored vehicles," the CIA said in a report to Congress made public that month.
U.S. intelligence agencies later came under fire over questions about prewar estimates of Iraq's stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. But intelligence on Iraq's hidden procurement networks was confirmed.
An initial accounting by the Pentagon in the months after the fall of Baghdad revealed that Saddam covertly acquired between 650,000 and 1 million tons of conventional weapons from foreign sources. The main suppliers were Russia, China and France.
By contrast, the U.S. arsenal is between 1.6 million and 1.8 million tons.
As of last year, Iraq owed France an estimated $4 billion for arms and infrastructure projects, according to French government estimates. U.S. officials thought this massive debt was one reason France opposed a military operation to oust Saddam.
The fact that illegal deals continued even as war loomed indicated France viewed Saddam's regime as a future source of income.
Telltale chemical
Just days before U.S. and coalition forces launched their military campaign against Iraq, more evidence of French treachery emerged.
In mid-March 2003, U.S. intelligence and defense officials confirmed that exporters in France had conspired with China to provide Iraq with chemicals used in making solid fuel for long-range missiles. The sanctions-busting operation occurred in August 2002, the U.S. National Security Agency discovered through electronic intercepts.
The chemical transferred to Iraq was a transparent liquid rubber called hydroxy terminated polybutadiene, or HTPB, according to intelligence reports.
U.S. intelligence traced the sale to China's Qilu Chemicals, "the largest manufacturer of HTPB in China," one official says.
A French company, CIS Paris, helped broker the sale of 20 tons of HTPB, a controlled export that was shipped from China to the Syrian port of Tartus. The chemical solution was sent by truck from Syria into Iraq, to a missile-manufacturing plant. The Iraqi company that purchased the shipment was in charge of making solid fuel for long-range missiles.
HTPB technically is a dual-use chemical, because it also can be used for commercial purposes such as space launches. However, Iraq often disguised military purchases as commercial ones, as documents found later in Iraq would confirm.
In a report to Congress, the CIA said Iraq had constructed two "mixing" buildings for solid-propellant fuels at a plant known as al-Mamoun. The facility originally was built to produce the Badr-2000, a solid-propellant missile also known as the Condor.
The new buildings "appear especially suited to house large, U.N.-prohibited mixers of the type acquired for the Badr-2000 program," the CIA report stated.
French denials
Despite controversy over prewar intelligence on Iraq, the CIA said its estimates of Iraqi missiles were on target.
Representatives of the French and Chinese governments went on the attack when The Washington Times asked about the chemical sale.
Chinese Embassy spokesman Xie Feng did not address the specifics, but said "irresponsible accusations" about China's exports had been made in the past.
"These accusations are devoid of all foundation," French Foreign Ministry spokesman Francois Rivasseau declared. "In line with the rules currently in force, France has neither delivered, nor authorized, the delivery of such materials, either directly or indirectly."
By that point, many in the U.S. government were fed up with French denials.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz called in the French ambassador to the United States, Jean-David Levitte, to complain about France's covert and overt support for Saddam's regime.
"Twelve years of waiting was too costly in terms of the growing threat from Baghdad," Wolfowitz told the ambassador, according to a U.S. official who was present.
Made in France
The war in Iraq, which began March 19, 2003, provided disturbing evidence that France's treacherous dealings come at a steep cost to the United States.
On April 8 came the downing of Air Force Maj. Jim Ewald's A-10 Thunderbolt fighter over Baghdad and the discovery that it was a French-made Roland missile that brought down the American pilot and destroyed a $13 million aircraft. Ewald, one of the first U.S. pilots shot down in the war, was rescued by members of the Army's 54th Engineer Battalion who saw him parachute to earth not far from the wreckage.
Army intelligence concluded that the French had sold the missile to the Iraqis within the past year, despite French denials.
A week after Ewald's A-10 was downed, an Army team searching Iraqi weapons depots at the Baghdad airport discovered caches of French-made missiles. One anti-aircraft missile, among a cache of 51 Roland-2s from a French-German manufacturing partnership, bore a label indicating that the batch was produced just months earlier.
In May, Army intelligence found a stack of blank French passports in an Iraqi ministry, confirming what U.S. intelligence already had determined: The French had helped Iraqi war criminals escape from coalition forces - and therefore justice.
Then, there were French-made trucks and radios and the deadly grenade launchers, known as RPGs, with French-made night sights. Saddam loyalists used them to kill American soldiers long after the toppling of the dictator's regime.
The intelligence team sent to find Iraqi weapons also discovered documents outlining covert Iraqi weapons procurement leading up to the war. The CIA, however, refused to make public the documents on assistance provided by France or by other so-called allies of the United States.
The clandestine arms-procurement network, disclosed late last year by the Los Angeles Times, put a Syrian trading company in a pivotal role. Documents showed the company, SES International Corp., was the conduit for millions of dollars' worth of weapons purchased internationally, including from France. Al Bashair Trading Co. in Baghdad was the major front used by Saddam to buy arms abroad.
A Defense Department-sponsored report produced in February identified France as one of the top three suppliers of Iraq's conventional arms, after Russia and China. The report revealed that France supplied 12 types of armaments and a total of 115,005 pieces.
A major reason Iraqi militants posed a threat to U.S. forces for so many months was that they had access to weapons that Saddam stockpiled in violation of U.N. resolutions.
A close call
One of the most frightening examples of how the militants put French weapons to use against the Americans came Oct. 26, 2003. That morning, at about 6 o'clock, they bombarded the Rashid Hotel in Baghdad with French missiles.
The French rockets nearly killed Wolfowitz, whom Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has called "the brains" of the Pentagon.
The deputy defense secretary had just gotten dressed in his room that Sunday morning when a car stopped several hundred yards from the hotel. It dropped off what appeared to be one of the blue electrical generators that were common in the power-starved Iraqi capital. The driver stayed just long enough to open a panel on the end of the metal box that was pointing upward toward the hotel.
The car sped off. Minutes later, a pod of 40 artillery rockets set off by remote control began firing at the hotel, their trails leaving sparks as they flew. The rockets hit one floor below where Wolfowitz and about a dozen aides and reporters were staying.
One rocket slammed into the room of Army Lt. Col. Charles H. Buehring, a public-affairs officer. The explosion hit Buehring, 40, in the head. A reporter discovered him and tried to help, but the Fayetteville, N.C., resident died a short time later.
In all, between eight and 10 missiles hit the hotel. The casualties might have been higher, and included Wolfowitz, if the improvised rocket launcher had fired all the missiles.
Because of a malfunction, 11 failed to go off.
Playing defense
Half the missiles fired at Wolfowitz's hotel were French-made Matra SNEB 68-millimeter rockets, with a range of two to three miles. The others were Russian in origin.
The French missiles were "pristine," Navy SEAL commandos reported.
"They were either new or kept in very good condition," said one SEAL who inspected the rocket tubes.
The rockets were thought to have been taken from Iraq's French-made Alouette or Gazelle attack helicopters.
The fact that new French missiles were showing up in the hands of Saddam loyalists months after the fall of Baghdad made Wolfowitz and his close aides livid. Still, others in the U.S. government worked to defend the French.
The CIA, to avoid upsetting ties with French intelligence, played down the French role in helping Saddam. The agency had a weak human intelligence?gathering capability, and France, because of its history of ties to Iraq, was much better at penetrating Saddam's regime.
The State Department's response was not surprising. Asked about French support for Iraq while on a fence-mending mission to Paris in May 2003, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell had said: "We're not going to paper over it and pretend it didn't occur. It did occur. But we're going to work through that."
Powell, the retired four-star general and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was too inexperienced in the ways of diplomacy. As a result, he largely had turned over control of State Department policy-making to the Foreign Service.
The problem with the Foreign Service is its culture. It trains diplomats to "get along" with the foreign governments they are sent to work with. Not insignificantly, Paris is among the most coveted postings in the world.
Backing down
Pentagon hard-liners on France, led by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, carried the day early in the war, but accommodationists within the upper councils of the Bush administration took control as the conflict went on.
Among those who took a softer position on France was National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, the former Stanford provost who surrounded herself with State Department officials and Foreign Service officers.
Rumsfeld drew a great deal of attention on Jan. 22, 2003 - and created a backlash within the State Department - when he let fly a verbal salvo against France and Germany for not siding with the United States, describing them as "old Europe" during a meeting with foreign reporters.
Rumsfeld also criticized French and German political leaders for making policy based not on "their honest conviction as to what their country ought to do" but on opinion polls that reflected ever-shifting public sentiments.
As the accommodationists in the Bush administration gained the upper hand, Rumsfeld and others were ordered to tone down the anti-Europe rhetoric. By late last year, the defense secretary's critics within the Foreign Service were crowing that Rumsfeld had been "tamed."
Just a day after the Iraqi attack on Wolfowitz's hotel in Baghdad, in an interview with The Washington Times, Rumsfeld took an even softer approach toward the French.
"People tend to look at what's taking place today and opine that it is something distinctive," Rumsfeld said of the turbulence in Franco-American relations. "I don't find it distinctive. I find it an old record that gets replayed about every five or seven years."
The public soft-policy line was, in many ways, a great victory for France. Even as new evidence poured in that the French had betrayed the United States and cost the lives of American troops, the government backed down from a confrontation with its erstwhile ally.
-------- business
Army to Rebid Part of Iraq Contract
Competitive Process Planned for Some of Halliburton's Work
By Robert O'Harrow Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 8, 2004; Page E03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3733-2004Sep7.html
The U.S. Army is moving ahead with plans to rebid portions of the giant logistical contract with Halliburton Co. for food, housing and other troop support in Iraq, officials said yesterday.
In a memo last month, Deputy Assistant Secretary Tina Ballard urged the Army Field Support Command to begin planning for a shift from one massive wartime agreement to several contracts for the long run, possibly with several different companies, Army officials said yesterday. Some details of the memo were reported Tuesday by the Wall Street Journal.
Maj. Gen. Wade H. McManus Jr., commanding general of the Joint Munitions Command, which is helping to oversee the Iraq contract, said in an interview in March that the Army was considering letting other companies compete for some of the work. He said then that laundry, trash removal, power generation, dining facilities, sanitation and non-tactical vehicle support would be areas likely to be opened to competition.
Plans for the change follow months of questions about the performance by Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root Inc., which won the logistical contract through a competitive bidding process in 2001. KBR has been paid about $4.5 billion for troop support in Iraq and Kuwait so far.
The Army is considering withholding 15 percent of future payments to KBR because the company has not adequately justified some $1.8 billion in pending bills. The company has come under fire from Democrats, who claim it has received special treatment because Dick Cheney served as Halliburton's chief executive before his election as vice president.
Yesterday, Army officials said there was no connection between their frustration with some of KBR's work and the decision to consider rebidding portions of the support work. Officials said that rebidding is part of the process of striving for competitive efficiencies. The final decision of when to rebid rests with battlefield commanders.
"The transition from contingency to sustainment contracting is a normal process," said Daniel Carlson, a spokesman for the Army Field Support Command. "We're in the early stage of transition." The Pentagon followed a similar procedure in the Balkans.
Halliburton officials stressed they were not being punished. "This is not about problems or penalties," spokeswoman Wendy Hall said.
Halliburton chief executive David Lesar sounded ambivalent about whether the company would bid for more government work, especially if it was broken into several different contracts. "I'm not sure that we're going to rebid," Lesar told investors at an energy conference in New York sponsored by Lehman Brothers Inc.
--------
Halliburton Weighs Options as Iraq Work Changes
September 8, 2004
By SIMON ROMERO
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/08/business/08halliburton.html
HOUSTON, Sept. 7 - The Halliburton Company signaled on Tuesday that it might try to reduce its role as the largest private contractor in Iraq after learning that the Army planned to break apart its largest contract in the country to attract other companies to bid for the work.
The Army's decision, described in an internal memorandum from late August, would effectively divide more than $12 billion of work in Iraq among several companies instead of one. Halliburton has come under criticism for its handling of the contract, including accusations that it overcharged the Department of Defense for some of its services.
Halliburton, the nation's largest military- and oil-services company, sought on Tuesday to portray the Army's decision as an opportunity for the company to gain more profit from work it chooses to bid for again. Many of Halliburton's operations in Iraq, which include providing food and laundry services and collecting trash for American soldiers, have been criticized by investors as financial drags on the rest of the company.
"If we do choose to rebid, we're going to jack the margins up significantly," David J. Lesar, the chief executive of Halliburton, said Tuesday in comments to investors at a conference in New York. "I'm not sure we're going to rebid if it's hacked into too many pieces in Iraq."
Halliburton also said the Army's decision had been expected, as the company tried to alleviate concern over the potential loss or renegotiation of the contract on the company's finances. Nevertheless, shares in Halliburton fell 65 cents on Tuesday, or more than 2 percent, closing at $29.47. An Army official who declined to be identified confirmed the service's intention to break up the contract and seek bids on the work. A senior Army spokesman said the Army was preparing a statement on the decision but was unable to complete it on Tuesday.
The Army memo, whose contents were disclosed on Tuesday by The Wall Street Journal, recommended that the United States Army Field Support Command should immediately start to find ways to open the contract to other companies.
Wendy Hall, a spokeswoman for Halliburton, said the Army's decision was not related to a pending determination by the Defense Department on whether to withhold certain payments to the company because of accounting questions related to its work in Iraq.
"This is not about problems or a penalty," Ms. Hall said.
The Army's move comes at a crucial juncture for Halliburton, which is trying to pull the unit responsible for its largest Iraq contract, KBR, out of bankruptcy proceedings that resulted largely from asbestos lawsuits. Halliburton is grappling with several other problems, some dating from the period in the 1990's when Vice President Dick Cheney was the company's chief executive. Mr. Cheney stepped down from that position in August 2000 after nearly five years.
One of Halliburton's main challenges is the scrutiny it has come under for its involvement in a $5 billion venture to build a natural gas complex in Nigeria in the 1990's. The company disclosed last week that it had uncovered a plan conceived by the venture to pay bribes to win contracts in Nigeria. The Securities and Exchange Commission began an investigation in June into the venture.
Halliburton severed ties over the summer with the former chairman of KBR, Albert J. Stanley, after investigations showed that Mr. Stanley might have secretly channeled money from the Nigerian payments plan to a Swiss bank account. In a further distraction from its oil-services work, Halliburton is the subject of another S.E.C. investigation, this one into accounting of cost overruns on large construction projects.
Last month, Halliburton agreed to pay a $7.5 million penalty to settle that investigation, opening Mr. Cheney's tenure at the company to greater scrutiny. Halliburton altered its accounting policies on such projects while Mr. Cheney was the company's highest-ranking executive.
Still, it is the large Iraq contract, the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program, or Logcap, that has been a major source of criticism of Halliburton since the start of the war in Iraq. The company's political critics have accused it of profiting from the war even though the contract generated relatively lower earnings for Halliburton than its lucrative activities in the energy industry. The company is also carrying out repairs to Iraq's oil infrastructure, work that would not be affected by the Army's decision to break up Logcap.
Profit margins on the main Iraq contract generally are 1 to 2 percent, compared with margins as high as 10 percent on ventures to build liquid natural gas terminals; Halliburton can also earn bonuses from its performance in carrying out the Iraq work, one of the main incentives for pursuing the contract in the first place.
"I wouldn't care if they lose every Iraq contract they have," said Gary Russell, an analyst in Denver with Stifel Nicolaus, a brokerage firm in Denver. "I'd rather see them focus almost entirely on oilfield services." Halliburton's work in Iraq has also taken a toll on the company in other ways. At least 45 employees or contractors have died in Iraq since Halliburton began operating in the country last year with the onset of the war.
In recent months, the company's presence in Iraq has rapidly expanded. Halliburton has about 36,000 employees and contractors in Iraq, 8,000 more than it had six months ago.
-------- colombia
Bogotá Says Army Killed Union Chiefs
September 8, 2004
By JUAN FORERO
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/08/international/americas/08colombia.html
BOGOTÁ, Colombia, Sept. 7 - The attorney general's office said late Monday that Colombian soldiers assassinated three union leaders last month, an account that contrasts sharply with the army's earlier contention that the three men were Marxist rebels killed in a firefight.
The attorney general's human rights unit on Monday ordered the arrest of an army officer, two soldiers and a civilian who took part in the killings of Jorge Eduardo Prieto, Leonel Goyeneche and Héctor Alirio Martínez on Aug. 5 in Saravena, a town long besieged by leftist rebels. Since 2002, American military trainers have been instructing Colombian soldiers there in counterguerrilla techniques, though it is unclear if the Americans trained the unit accused of killing the union leaders.
"The evidence shows that a homicide was committed," Luis Alberto Santana, the deputy attorney general, said at a news conference on Monday. "We have ruled out that there was combat."
The attorney general's announcement vindicated union leaders in Colombia and Europe who said the army had killed three defenseless union activists and then tried to cover the matter up.
"It's clear that we were never wrong, saying that they were assassinated by members of the Colombian Army," said Domingo Tovar, who coordinates human rights activities for the Central Workers Union, largest Colombian labor confederation.
The attorney general's announcement came days after Secretary of State Colin L. Powell warned the Colombian government that it must curtail rights abuses or risk losing aid. On Tuesday, Vice President Francisco Santos acknowledged that the government had erred in its initial characterization of the killings, saying, "Yes, we were wrong."
Colombia is by far the world's most dangerous country for union members, with 94 killed last year and 47 slain by Aug. 25 this year, according to the National Union School, a research and educational center in Medellín. Most of those killings were by right-wing paramilitary leaders linked to rogue army units. Worldwide, 123 union members were slain last year, according to the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, a Brussels-based group.
The number of killings of union members has dropped in Colombia, from a high of 222 in 1996. But union leaders, foreign diplomats and political analysts say the government has done little to improve safety - underscored by the fact that the union leaders killed in Saravena had asked the government for better security.
Paramilitary organizations, which use death squads to erode support for rebel groups, have accused unions of working with guerrillas. Rebel groups have, to be sure, drawn some members from unions.
But union leaders have also made enemies of powerful forces in Colombia's highly stratified society, both for their leftist declarations and their harsh criticism of fiscally conservative governments bent on privatizing industries and holding down labor costs.
-------- iraq
7 U.S. Soldiers Killed in Iraq
Attacks in Baghdad Raise Two-Day Death Toll to 14
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, September 8, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1654-2004Sep7?language=printer
BAGHDAD, Sept. 7 -- Sunni Muslim insurgents and Shiite Muslim militiamen mounted attacks on U.S. soldiers across Baghdad on Monday night and Tuesday morning that raised the U.S. military's two-day death toll to 14 and illustrated the dangers that continue to confront American forces in the Iraqi capital.
Three soldiers were killed in separate assaults here Tuesday, the U.S. military command said. The military also reported that four soldiers were killed in different attacks Monday in or near Baghdad, in addition to the seven Marines killed in a car bomb attack near the restive city of Fallujah. A total of 998 uniformed U.S. service members and three civilian employees of the Defense Department have been killed since military operations began in Iraq in March 2003, according to Pentagon figures.
The most significant attack occurred in Baghdad's Sadr City slum, where militiamen loyal to Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr ambushed U.S. Army patrols early Tuesday, sparking battles in which two U.S. soldiers and an estimated 33 Iraqis were killed, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials. The clashes shattered a nine-day lull in violence in the neighborhood and threw into doubt pledges by Sadr's aides that the cleric wants to renounce militancy and participate in the country's nascent political process.
Tuesday's violence in Baghdad was not restricted to the U.S. military. In the central part of the capital, gunmen barged into the offices of an Italian humanitarian aid organization and kidnapped two Italian women and two Iraqi staff members. Elsewhere in the city, a roadside bomb struck a motorcade ferrying Baghdad's governor, killing two people but leaving him uninjured, according to the Interior Ministry.
On Tuesday evening, U.S. Marine units pounded targets in Fallujah with tank rounds, artillery shells and bombs after Marines and Iraqi security forces operating just outside the city were fired on. The 1st Marine Expeditionary Force estimated that as many as 100 insurgents may have been killed in the counterattack, but the account could not be independently verified.
The fighting in Sadr City began shortly after midnight when Army patrols were hit with rocket-propelled grenades and roadside bombs, military officials said. Soldiers returned fire with small arms and large-caliber machine guns before summoning tanks, attack helicopters and fighter jets for additional firepower.
"We just kept coming under fire," said Army Capt. Brian O'Malley.
At 9:30 a.m., a group of soldiers waiting for an explosive-ordnance disposal team to defuse a roadside bomb was attacked with a rocket-propelled grenade. One soldier was killed and two others were wounded. Another soldier was killed at noon in a separate attack in the same area.
A spokesman for the Health Ministry said at least 33 Iraqis were killed and 145 were wounded in the clashes in Sadr City, which raged almost continuously for more than 12 hours, finally subsiding in the early afternoon.
As evening approached, Bradley Fighting Vehicles and other armored personnel carriers from the Army's 1st Cavalry Division occupied key intersections in the vast slum, which is home to about 2 million people. Militiamen, who had strutted around with rocket launchers and assault rifles in the morning, retreated into alleys and apartment buildings.
The violence was the first major battle between U.S. forces and Sadr's Mahdi Army militia since both sides stepped away from a confrontation in the holy city of Najaf late last month under a cease-fire brokered by Iraq's most influential Shiite religious leader. A few days later, on Aug. 30, Sadr announced through aides that he was planning to participate in politics and ordered his militia to suspend attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces.
But Tuesday's clashes dashed hopes among Iraqi and U.S. officials that Sadr would live up to those commitments. "It's not his promises but his actions that we have to focus on," said a senior Iraqi government official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "Up until now, we haven't seen any signs that they are serious about peace."
A senior U.S. official in Iraq said recent intelligence reports have shown that Mahdi Army militiamen in Sadr City have been reorganizing and rearming since the compromise in Najaf.
A top Sadr aide, Ali Yassiri, accused U.S. forces of sparking the fight by violating an informal cease-fire in Sadr City while Sadr's representatives tried to negotiate a peace deal with Iraq's interim government. Although the talks have not broken off, they remained stalled over Sadr's demands that his supporters be allowed to retain their weapons and that U.S. forces be barred from entering Sadr City, requests to which the government has been unwilling to accede.
"The occupation forces are trying to incite us," Yassiri said. "We received orders that the negotiations should continue, but the occupation forces are trying to make these negotiations fail and start another battle."
The kidnapping of the two Italians and two Iraqis was one of the boldest assaults on foreign civilians in the capital. Witnesses said as many as 20 men armed with AK-47 assault rifles and pistols stormed into the aid group's house, located near a busy commercial district, and hustled out their captives at gunpoint.
Officials with the organization Bridge to Baghdad, which has operated in Iraq since the 1991 Persian Gulf War, identified the women as Simona Torretta and Simona Pari, both 29. The women were involved in a project to boost school attendance in Sadr City and the southern port city of Basra, said Jean-Dominique Bunel, the director of a group that coordinates the work of nongovernmental organizations in Iraq.
Bunel said his group had been in contact with religious authorities for assistance in getting the hostages released, although it was not clear which of the many shadowy kidnapping outfits operating in Iraq carried out the abduction. "We will all work for their release," he said.
More than 100 foreigners and Iraqis have been kidnapped this year, but most of the abductions have taken place outside Baghdad. Two other Italians taken hostage have been killed by their captors: journalist Enzo Baldoni, who was captured last month as he traveled to Najaf, and security guard Fabrizio Quattrocchi, who was seized in April in western Iraq.
Italy has about 2,700 troops in Iraq, the third-largest contingent of soldiers in the country after those of the United States and Britain.
The other U.S. soldier killed Tuesday was hit with small-arms fire in western Baghdad. The soldier, with the 89th Military Police Brigade, was guarding a convoy of fuel tankers that had been attacked by insurgents a few hours earlier when he was shot by a sniper atop a nearby school, witnesses said.
Three of the four soldiers killed in or near Baghdad on Monday were attacked with roadside bombs, the military said. The cause of death of the fourth soldier was not released.
Correspondent Daniel Williams in Rome and special correspondents Luma Mousawi, Khalid Saffar and Bassam Sebti in Baghdad contributed to this report.
--------
CONFRONTING INSURGENTS
U.S. Conceding Rebels Control Regions of Iraq
September 8, 2004
By ERIC SCHMITT and STEVEN R. WEISMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/08/politics/08policy.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Sept. 7 - As American military deaths in Iraq operations surpassed the 1,000 mark, top Pentagon officials said Tuesday that insurgents controlled important parts of central Iraq and that it was unclear when American and Iraqi forces would be able to secure those areas.
As of late Tuesday night, the Pentagon's accounting showed that 998 service members and three Defense Department civilians had been killed in Iraq operations.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a news conference that the American strategy in retaking rebel-held strongholds hinged on training and equipping Iraqi forces to take the lead.
Mr. Rumsfeld said Iraqi officials understood they must regain control of the insurgent safe havens. "They get it, and will find a way over time to deal with it,'' he said.
But General Myers said the Iraqi forces would probably not be ready to confront insurgents in those areas until the end of this year.
Their comments, which came after a two-day spike in violence in Iraq led to a surge in American military deaths, represented an acknowledgment that the Americans had failed to end an increasingly sophisticated insurgency in important Sunni-dominated areas and in certain Shiite enclaves. Fighting raged on Tuesday in Sadr City, in Baghdad, as Shiite militiamen loyal to Moktada al-Sadr ended a self-declared cease-fire. [Page A14.]
The officials' assessment also underscored the difficulty of pacifying Iraq in time for elections scheduled for January. The cities of greatest rebel control are Ramadi, Falluja, Baquba and Samarra, in the so-called Sunni triangle, west and north of Baghdad, where Saddam Hussein remains popular and many forces loyal to him have gathered strength.
There is increasing concern in the administration over plans for the election, with some officials saying that if significant parts of the Sunni areas cannot be secured by January, it may be impossible to hold a nationwide balloting that would be seen as legitimate. Putting off the elections, though, would infuriate Iraq's Shiite majority. The elections are for an assembly that is to write a new constitution next year. Mr. Rumsfeld warned that the violence would intensify as elections approached.
Mr. Rumsfeld said that Prime Minister Ayad Allawi recognized that his government could not continue to allow rebel control in crucial areas of the country, but that it would take time for him to determine how to proceed.
"The prime minister and his team fully understand that it is important that there not be areas in that country that are controlled by terrorists," he said, adding that Dr. Allawi would deal with the problem by "negotiation and discussion" in some cases and by force in others.
Other administration officials, amplifying the secretary's comments, said the administration had decided to let Dr. Allawi try to persuade rebel leaders to join the process of reconstructing Iraq, or suffer the consequences if they did not.
"Allawi's strategy is to try to find people on the sidelines and wean the moderates away, to give them courage and a hope of reward for themselves," said an administration official. "He's telling them: 'I'm giving you an opportunity to meet your local concerns. You're going to be my guy, and together we'll try to isolate the extremists.' "
Administration officials say no decision has been made yet for American forces to attack those strongholds. The preference is for Iraqi forces to do the job, as they were said to have been poised to do last month in Najaf, the Shiite holy city.
But the record of the Iraqi security forces has not been inspiring, although some Iraqi forces fought well in Najaf, American officials said. While 95,000 soldiers have been trained and equipped up to American commanders' satisfaction, General Myers said, they will not be ready until the end of the year to join American forces in any assault against insurgent strongholds and then keep the peace afterward.
"While U.S. forces or coalition forces can do just about anything we want to do, it makes a lot more sense that it be a sustained operation, one that can be sustained by Iraqi security forces," General Myers said. "By December, we're going to have a substantial number of Iraqi security forces equipped, trained and led to conduct the kind of operations I was talking about.''
A senior American official said force would be tried by the Iraqi government only after a couple of months' discussions with rebels.
"Force is the ultimate sanction, but let's exhaust the other ones first," he added.
A two-month hiatus before major force is applied to rebel areas would also mean a delay until after the American presidential election, but senior officials insist there is no domestic political calculus in the decision to wait - only a conviction that time is needed for negotiation and for Iraqi forces to gain strength.
"This is ultimately about building an Iraqi government which works for all of Iraq," said the official. "To the degree that we can wait a couple months and let Iraqi politics work, so much the better."
In describing the Iraqi forces, one American general in Iraq said in an e-mail message that their "capabilities are still uneven, but they're improving as we arm and equip them better, improve their infrastructure, give them additional training, and help them weed out the weak leaders." Mr. Rumsfeld added that Iraqis had recently conducted effective counterterrorism operations.
To buy time, General Myers said, Gen. George Casey, the top American commander in Iraq, is working with the Iraqi government to develop a strategy to retake the cities. General Myers said that strategy included trying to "isolate certain communities," hampering the insurgents' ability to rearm and resupply, and curtailing attacks against American forces. He said the strategy would also try "to set the conditions for the successful use of force later,'' military wording for preparing the battlefield by bombing safe houses and weapons caches, and encouraging residents to provide fresh intelligence on the location of insurgents.
Over the weekend, Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, the land commander in Iraq, told The Associated Press that an American assault is likely in the next four months. "I do have about four months where I want to get to local control,'' General Metz said. "And then I've got the rest of January to help the Iraqis to put the mechanisms in place."
Maj. Gen. John R. Batiste, the commander of the Army's First Infantry Division, whose area north of Baghdad includes Tikrit and Samarra, disputed reports that the United States had given up in Samarra.
"Samarra is a city where Iraqis are taking charge to throw out anti-Iraqi forces," he said in an e-mail message on Tuesday. "No one has ceded the city to insurgents and there is no cordon. What we have in Samarra is the good people of Iraq, led by far-sighted provincial and city leadership, senior sheiks, and clerics, standing up to the enemy."
Residents, however, say insurgents effectively control Samarra.
General Batiste and other commanders gave an upbeat assessment, noting that "the messages at Friday Prayer are becoming more and more moderate" and that American forces "keep continuous pressure on the enemy" while they help Iraqis with reconstruction. In an unusual step for a Pentagon that tends to avoid citing body counts as a measure of success, Mr. Rumsfeld said American and allied forces had probably killed 1,500 to 2,500 insurgents last month.
But other American officials are more pessimistic about the prospects for regaining control of those areas. One noted, for example, that attacks on American forces rose to 2,700 in August, from 700 in March.
General Myers conceded that American forces faced a tough, adaptive foe. "The enemy is becoming more sophisticated in his efforts to destabilize the country," he said.
Opening U.S. to Iraqi Goods
By The New York Times
WASHINGTON, Sept. 7 - In a proclamation on Tuesday, President Bush gave Iraq the right to export thousands of goods duty free to the United States.
But because of the continued poor state of its economy, Iraq will be unable to take immediate advantage of its new designation as a beneficiary of the Generalized System of Preferences, which grants preferential treatment to certain products from more than 140 developing countries and territories.
Petroleum, Iraq's only major export commodity, is not given duty free status under the system.
--------
U.S. Planes Hit Rebel Stronghold in Falluja; 6 Reported Killed
September 8, 2004
By DEXTER FILKINS and TERENCE NEILAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/08/international/middleeast/08CND-IRAQ.html?pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 8 - American planes struck a militant stronghold that has recently been coordinating attacks against coalition forces near the Sunni city of Falluja, the United States military in Baghdad said today.
"Multiple sources of intelligence considered to be highly reliable were used to confirm the presence of the enemy forces," the military said in a statement.
It said that an initial assessment showed that there were no civilian casualties and that enemy casualties "could not be confirmed at this time."
News agency reports, quoting hospital officials in Falluja, said at least 6 people had been killed and 11 wounded since the strikes began late Tuesday, but it was not clear if they were militants or non-combatants.
On Tuesday a United States military statement said up to 100 insurgents had been killed in the Falluja attacks.
The violence in Falluja, 35 miles west of Baghdad, followed the deadliest attack on American forces in four months, when seven marines were killed Monday in a car bombing.
In other violence today, two more American soldiers were killed, both by roadside bombs. One soldier died in eastern Baghdad at around 5:30 a.m., and the other was killed near the town of Balad, north of the capital, the United States military said. Three soldiers were wounded in the attacks.
The deaths today bring the official Pentagon toll to at least 1,003 Americans killed since the start of the Iraq war last year: 1,000 service members and three Defense Department civilians.
A weeklong calm that had taken hold of the Shiite ghetto of Sadr City and raised hopes for a peaceful settlement of the armed standoff there dissolved into gun battles Monday night and Tuesday, leaving at least 40 Iraqis and one American soldier dead and 202 people wounded.
The fighting in Sadr City ended a unilateral cease-fire declared by the Mahdi Army, the militia led by the rebel cleric Moktada al-Sadr, who has challenged the American presence in the sprawling Baghdad slum. Mr. Sadr, whose men were routed from the Shiite holy city of Najaf late last month, declared the cease-fire on Aug. 30. At the time, his aides said he was making plans to enter politics.
The new combat began when American forces, trying to assert control of the area, came under attack by insurgents using rocket-propelled grenades, homemade bombs and heavy machine guns. Fighters of the Mahdi Army said they had been responding to an American raid carried out Sunday morning on the Jawadain Mosque, where they said seven Iraqis were arrested during morning prayers.
A statement released by the the First Cavalry Division of the United States Army, whose troops are operating in the area, listed 11 attacks by the Mahdi Army on Tuesday alone. Among those was an ambush of a team of American soldiers who had been trying to defuse one of the homemade bombs that are hidden in alleys and intersections throughout the area. One American soldier was killed and two were wounded in that attack, which was carried out by a rocket-propelled grenade.
"All night long there was fighting," Abu Abdullah al-Hur, a bleary-eyed Mahdi gunman, said in an afternoon lull. "The Americans went into the mosques. They starting arresting people, arresting women. At that point, we decided to shoot back."
It was impossible to verify Mr. Hur's account. On some streets, militiamen like Mr. Hur roamed freely, setting up barricades and stopping cars. At others, the Americans held sway, with soldiers scanning the streets through the sights of their machine guns. On the streets that were still contested, the fighting went on.
The outbreak of violence here illustrated the seemingly unbridgeable differences between American forces and Mr. Sadr, a 30-year-old cleric who has built a large following in Iraq's downtrodden neighborhoods. Badly bloodied by the American assault on his forces last month in Najaf, where the Mahdi Army had seized the Shrine of Ali, he declared himself willing to negotiate, if not to surrender his guns.
In the last week, aides to Mr. Sadr engaged in on-again-off-again talks with the Iraqi prime minister, Ayad Allawi. At one point, the two sides appeared to reach a deal that would have required the Mahdi Army to surrender its heavy weapons and the Americans to suspend military operations. But the talks collapsed when Dr. Allawi balked at restrictions on American forces.
American commanders, for their part, appear to believe that they have caught Mr. Sadr at a vulnerable moment, and they are insisting that his troops surrender their large weapons - rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine guns - before talks even begin.
At the same time, by necessity and by design, the Iraqi government has withdrawn many essential city services from the area, including police protection and garbage pickup. As a result, on block after block, the streets are covered in refuse and rotting food, some of it knee-deep, some of it on fire, its putrid smoke lingering in the air. There are no policemen anywhere.
"There are no negotiations," said Col. Robert B. Abrams, the commander of the First Brigade of the First Cavalry Division. "Sadr needs to disband and disarm, and then we can talk."
"If they don't disarm," Colonel Abrams said of the Mahdi Army, "we will be back at this every month, forever."
He and other American commanders said a majority of Iraqis inside Sadr City supported their presence here, and were particularly eager to benefit from the tens of millions of dollars in reconstruction money they control. The Americans added that they believed that Mr. Sadr and his men, by intimidating the local residents, appeared to be far stronger than they really were.
"Ninety-five percent of the people just want a better life for their family," Colonel Abrams said. "The people are tired of Mr. Sadr's antics."
Still, the evidence on the streets of Sadr City suggests that the Americans might be underestimating the support that Mr. Sadr has, or overestimating their own. By many accounts, the armed incursions by American forces appear to be deeply unpopular, serving mainly to strengthen the cleric and his otherwise unloved band of followers.
"Of course the violence is the fault of the Americans; they entered the city," said Haitham Assi, 32, seated on a street corner with a group of his friends. "Just imagine if I came into your home, arrested and killed members of your family. You would protect yourself."
Mr. Assi, one of the area's legion of unemployed, did not count himself a supporter of Mr. Sadr, nor did his friend, Mohanid Abdul Muttalib, seated next to him. But both said they much preferred Mr. Sadr to American soldiers with their guns.
"Even if the people don't support Moktada, they will join him if the Americans come into the city," Mr. Muttalib said.
The fighting of the last 48 hours demonstrated anew the Mahdi Army's ability to spread mayhem at the time and place of its choosing. Colonel Abrams said the Iraqi government had told the Americans that they could neither detain nor kill Mr. Sadr. In Najaf, the peace deal there allowed Mr. Sadr and all of his surviving fighters to leave with their guns. Some of them went home to Sadr City.
Sitting around a room here, five Mahdi Army fighters, most of them young, most of them barefoot, talked about days past and days ahead. They predicted more fighting, but reveled in self-made tales of their exploits.
"We attacked three tanks, and we have a film of it," said Muhammad Abu Sajal. "We film everything. Last night, we shot an Apache helicopter, and we have a piece of it."
Mr. Sajal spoke quickly, and his eyes looked beyond his visitor.
"Please, make it quick," Mr. Sajal said to an American reporter. "The fighting is going to start very soon."
Meanwhile on Tuesday, the United States military said three other American soldiers were killed in separate attacks in or near Baghdad, Reuters reported.
Also on Tuesday, insurgents ambushed the convoy of Baghdad's governor, opening fire and then detonating a roadside bomb as the cars passed, Reuters reported. He was not hurt, but an Iraqi in another car was killed.
The son of the governor of the northern city of Mosul was shot dead by guerrillas on Tuesday, Reuters also reported.
Terence Neilan contributed reporting for this article from New York.
--------
SADR CITY
Battles in Baghdad Slum Leave 40 Iraqis and a G.I. Dead
September 8, 2004
By DEXTER FILKINS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/08/international/middleeast/08iraq.html?pagewanted=all
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 7 - A weeklong calm that had taken hold of the Shiite ghetto of Sadr City and raised hopes for a peaceful settlement of the armed standoff there dissolved into gun battles Monday night and Tuesday, leaving at least 40 Iraqis and 1 American soldier dead and 202 people wounded.
The fighting ended a unilateral cease-fire declared by the Mahdi Army, the militia led by the rebel cleric Moktada al-Sadr, who has challenged the American presence in the sprawling Baghdad slum. Mr. Sadr, whose men were routed from the Shiite holy city of Najaf late last month, declared the cease-fire on Aug. 30. At the time, his aides said he was making plans to enter politics.
The new combat began when American forces, trying to assert control of the area, came under attack by insurgents using rocket-propelled grenades, homemade bombs and heavy machine guns. Fighters of the Mahdi Army said they had been responding to an American raid carried out Sunday morning on the Jawadain Mosque, where they said seven Iraqis were arrested during morning prayers.
A statement released by the First Cavalry Division of the United States Army, whose troops are operating in the area, listed 11 attacks by the Mahdi Army on Tuesday alone. Among those was an ambush of a team of American soldiers who had been trying to defuse one of the homemade bombs that are hidden in alleys and intersections throughout the area. One American soldier was killed and two were wounded in that attack, which was carried out by a rocket-propelled grenade.
"All night long there was fighting," Abu Abdullah al-Hur, a bleary-eyed Mahdi gunman, said during an afternoon lull. "The Americans went into the mosques. They starting arresting people, arresting women. At that point, we decided to shoot back."
It was impossible to verify Mr. Hur's account. On some streets, militiamen like Mr. Hur roamed freely, setting up barricades and stopping cars. At others, the Americans held sway, with soldiers scanning the streets through the sights of their machine guns. On the streets that were still contested, the fighting went on.
The outbreak of violence here illustrated the seemingly unbridgeable differences between American forces and Mr. Sadr, a 30-year-old cleric who has built a large following in Iraq's downtrodden neighborhoods. Badly bloodied by the American assault on his forces last month in Najaf, where the Mahdi Army had seized the Shrine of Ali, he declared himself willing to negotiate, if not to surrender his guns.
In the last week, aides to Mr. Sadr engaged in on-again-off-again talks with the Iraqi prime minister, Ayad Allawi. At one point, the two sides appeared to reach a deal that would have required the Mahdi Army to surrender its heavy weapons and the Americans to suspend military operations. But the talks collapsed when Dr. Allawi balked at restrictions on American forces.
American commanders, for their part, appear to believe that they have caught Mr. Sadr at a vulnerable moment, and they are insisting that his troops surrender their large weapons - rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine guns - before talks even begin.
At the same time, by necessity and by design, the Iraqi government has withdrawn many essential city services from the area, including police protection and garbage pickup. As a result, on block after block, the streets are covered in refuse and rotting food, some of it knee-deep, some of it on fire, its putrid smoke lingering in the air. There are no policemen anywhere.
"There are no negotiations," said Col. Robert B. Abrams, the commander of the First Brigade of the First Cavalry Division. "Sadr needs to disband and disarm, and then we can talk."
"If they don't disarm," Colonel Abrams said of the Mahdi Army, "we will be back at this every month, forever."
He and other American commanders said a majority of Iraqis inside Sadr City supported their presence here, and were particularly eager to benefit from the tens of millions of dollars in reconstruction money they control. The Americans added that they believed that Mr. Sadr and his men, by intimidating the local residents, appeared to be far stronger than they really were.
"Ninety-five percent of the people just want a better life for their family," Colonel Abrams said. "The people are tired of Mr. Sadr's antics."
Still, the evidence on the streets of Sadr City suggests that the Americans might be underestimating the support that Mr. Sadr has, or overestimating their own. By many accounts, the armed incursions by American forces appear to be deeply unpopular, serving mainly to strengthen the cleric and his otherwise unloved band of followers.
"Of course the violence is the fault of the Americans; they entered the city," said Haitham Assi, 32, seated on a street corner with a group of his friends. "Just imagine if I came into your home, arrested and killed members of your family. You would protect yourself."
Mr. Assi, one of the area's legion of unemployed, did not count himself a supporter of Mr. Sadr, nor did his friend, Mohanid Abdul Muttalib, seated next to him. But both said they much preferred Mr. Sadr to American soldiers with their guns.
"Even if the people don't support Moktada, they will join him if the Americans come into the city," Mr. Muttalib said.
The fighting of the last 48 hours demonstrated anew the Mahdi Army's ability to spread mayhem at the time and place of its choosing. Colonel Abrams said the Iraqi government had told the Americans that they could neither detain nor kill Mr. Sadr. In Najaf, the peace deal there allowed Mr. Sadr and all of his surviving fighters to leave with their guns. Some of them went home to Sadr City.
Sitting around a room here, five Mahdi Army fighters, most of them young, most of them barefoot, talked about days past and days ahead. They predicted more fighting, but reveled in self-made tales of their exploits.
"We attacked three tanks, and we have a film of it," said Muhammad Abu Sajal. "We film everything. Last night, we shot an Apache helicopter, and we have a piece of it."
Mr. Sajal spoke quickly, and his eyes looked beyond his visitor.
"Please, make it quick," Mr. Sajal said to an American reporter. "The fighting is going to start very soon."
Meanwhile on Tuesday, the United States military said three other American soldiers were killed in separate attacks in or near Baghdad, Reuters reported.
American warplanes attacked the militant-controlled city of Falluja, 35 miles west of Baghdad, and witnesses and hospital officials said at least four people, including an 8-year-old child, had been killed, Reuters reported. The United States military statement said up to 100 insurgents had been killed.
The violence in Falluja followed the deadliest attack on American forces in four months, when seven marines were killed Monday in a car bombing.
Also on Tuesday, insurgents ambushed the convoy of Baghdad's governor, opening fire and then detonating a roadside bomb as the cars passed, Reuters reported. He was not hurt, but an Iraqi in another car was killed.
The son of the governor of the northern city of Mosul was shot dead by guerrillas on Tuesday, Reuters also reported.
--------
Military deaths pass 1,000
ASSOCIATED PRESS
By Hamza Hendawi
September 08, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040907-103137-5475r.htm
BAGHDAD - Fighting with Sunni and Shi'ite insurgents yesterday killed seven more Americans in the Baghdad area, pushing the number of U.S. military deaths in the Iraq campaign past 1,000, an Associated Press tally showed.
The official Pentagon count - which sometimes is a day or more late in reporting fatalities - remained at 994 dead. The AP tally of 1,001 was based on Pentagon records, AP reports from Iraq and reports from soldiers' families, and includes three civilian contractors killed while working for the Pentagon.
Heavy fighting took place in the Baghdad slum of Sadr City, where U.S. forces engaged guerrillas loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, breaking a 12-day-old cease-fire negotiated in the Shi'ite shrine city of Najaf. A Health Ministry official said 35 persons were killed and 203 injured.
Both sides claim the other broke the truce.
U.S. warplanes also struck targets in Fallujah after the military said insurgents had attacked American positions outside the city. A U.S. Marine spokesman said up to 100 insurgents had been killed, and a spokesman at Fallujah General Hospital said at least nine Iraqis had been wounded.
The past two days have been particularly bloody for U.S. forces with 14 killed, including seven Marines slain on Monday by a suicide bombing north of Fallujah. A group linked to Jordanian-born militant Abu Musab Zarqawi claimed responsibility in a Web statement yesterday.
Two more American soldiers were killed in yesterday's fighting in Sadr City and another five died in separate attacks, mostly in the Baghdad area, to bring the AP death tally to 1,001.
The number includes deaths from hostile and nonhostile causes since President Bush began a campaign in March 2003 to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein. A few deaths occurred in neighboring Kuwait.
During a press conference at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld anticipated that the tally soon would surpass 1,000, and sought to play down the significance. "When combined with U.S. losses in other theaters in the global war on terror, we have lost well more than a thousand already," he said.
The fighting in Sadr City was the most serious with followers of Sheik al-Sadr since the negotiation of a cease-fire in Najaf on Aug. 26.
U.S. tanks moved into the mainly Shi'ite neighborhood, and armored personnel carriers and Bradley fighting vehicles were deployed at key intersections as ambulances rushed the wounded to hospitals. Warplanes fired flares to avoid being hit by anti-aircraft missiles.
U.S. forces appeared to be carrying out most - if not all - of the fighting. No Iraqi security forces were seen during the clashes, though U.S. spokesmen talked of "multinational forces" involved in the operations, a term that sometimes includes Iraqi troops.
The battles erupted when militants attacked U.S. forces carrying out routine patrols, killing one American, said U.S. Army Capt. Brian O'Malley.
An al-Sadr spokesman in Baghdad, Sheik Raed al-Kadhimi, blamed what he called intrusive American incursions into Sadr City and attempts to arrest the cleric's followers.
"Our fighters have no choice but to return fire and to face the U.S. forces and helicopters pounding our houses," Mr. al-Kadhimi said.
The renewed fighting came after a period of calm in the neighborhood after Sheik al-Sadr called on his followers last week to observe a cease-fire and announced he was going into politics.
But al-Sadr aides later said peace talks with interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's government had stalled, with the government refusing militants' demands for U.S. troops to keep out of the district.
-------- israel / palestine
Israeli Officials Free Scores of Palestinians
September 8, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/08/international/middleeast/08mideast.html?pagewanted=all
JERUSALEM, Sept. 7 - Israel began freeing 161 Palestinian prisoners from its jails on Tuesday in the largest mass release in more than seven months, Israeli security officials said.
The Palestinian Authority called the move meaningless, and Israeli officials said it was meant not as a good will gesture but as a way to ease conditions in prisons overflowing with Palestinians rounded up during nearly four years of conflict.
The release came less than a week after Palestinian inmates halted an 18-day hunger strike called to protest prison conditions. It was not known whether any of those released had been among the 3,000 who had taken part in the strike at its peak.
Israel's plan called for the release of 137 Palestinians on Tuesday and another 24 on Wednesday, all nearing the end of their jail terms and most convicted of minor offenses like stone-throwing or illegal entry into the country, security officials said.
The officials said none of the freed detainees had been involved in attacks on Israelis. "These are prisoners without blood on their hands," a member of the military said.
Many of Israel's 7,000 Palestinian prisoners were arrested for alleged militant activity and have been held in "administrative detention" without charge or trial, conditions that have drawn censure from international human rights groups.
The release on Tuesday was the largest since January, when Israel freed 400 Palestinian inmates as part of a prisoner exchange deal with the Lebanese guerrilla group Hezbollah.
The daily Haaretz quoted sources in the Israeli military as saying it was increasingly worried by prison overcrowding.
More than 2,500 Palestinians have been detained in the West Bank this year, prompting security commanders to order forces to carry out only urgent arrests, the newspaper reported. The hunger strike that came to an end on Thursday added to the strain on the prison system.
Palestinian officials said Israel had met the strikers' demands, which included ending strip searches, allowing more frequent family visits, improving sanitation and allowing access to public phones.
Israeli officials denied making any concessions and dismissed the strike as a ploy by prisoners to secure easier communication with militant groups that they belonged to.
-------- pacific
Australian official clouds support for U.S.
September 08, 2004
By Janaki Kremmer
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040907-103137-7434r.htm
SYDNEY, Australia - Australia's obligations under its defense alliance with the United States have been thrown into question since a mid-August visit to Beijing by Foreign Minister Alexander Downer.
After meeting with senior Chinese leaders, Mr. Downer said it should not be taken for granted that Australia would side with the United States in the event of a conflict with China across the Taiwan Strait.
That came as a surprise to U.S. officials, who had thought they could count on Australian support in such a conflict under the 1951 ANZUS treaty that committed Australia, New Zealand and the United States to one another's defense. New Zealand was dropped from the alliance in 1985 when it stopped allowing port calls by U.S. nuclear warships.
Especially under conservative Prime Minister John Howard, Australia has been a staunch ally of the United States. The Canberra government invoked the ANZUS treaty for the first time in response to the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington and has been one of the strongest supporters of the war effort in Iraq.
But at a press conference in Beijing, Mr. Downer said the ANZUS obligations could be invoked only in the event of a direct attack on the United States or Australia. "So some other activity elsewhere in the world ... doesn't invoke it," he said.
U.S. Ambassador to Australia Tom Schieffer took issue with the foreign minister when asked about the remarks at a press conference two days later.
"We are to come to the aid of each other in the event of either of our territories being attacked, or if either of our interests are attacked, our home territories, or if either of our interests are attacked in the Pacific," he said.
The United States had long been ambiguous about what it would do if China were to attack Taiwan, which it considers a renegade province. But President Bush said in 2001 that America would do "whatever it takes" to help Taiwan defend itself.
Mr. Schieffer said in responding to Mr. Downer's remarks in Beijing: "Obviously the U.S. has a relationship and a commitment to defend Taiwan in the event of an attack by the Chinese and we would be prepared to honor that commitment."
Hugh White, the director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in Canberra, said Mr. Downer's remarks indicated a shift in the government's thinking since 1996, when it supported the dispatch of two U.S. carrier groups to the Taiwan Strait in response to Chinese missile tests near Taiwan's shores.
"I do believe, that this is the first time that such a policy has been articulated by Australia, and it does indicate that the government's internal thinking has moved on since 1996," he said.
In the Australian newspaper, Foreign Editor Greg Sheridan wrote that Mr. Downer was being "a bit disingenuous and a bit too cute," because a joint intelligence-gathering facility at Pine Gap in Australia's desert would play an important role in pinpointing targets during any conflict involving the United States.
However, Australia has important commercial reasons not to want to upset Beijing.
China recently agreed after intensive lobbying to a $25 billion deal for the purchase of liquid natural gas from Australia over the next 25 years - the richest trade deal in Australian history.
Australian giant BHP Billiton, the world's largest mining company, said in August that profits were up nearly 80 percent with much of the growth coming from demand by Chinese steel mills making girders to build more skyscrapers in China.
"There is no doubt that one of the aims of [Mr. Downer's] trip was to send a message to China that the balance is shifting in its favor," wrote Beijing correspondent Catherine Armitage in the Australian.
Increasingly, Australia sees itself an important contributor to regional stability. Mr. Downer recently visited North Korea to discuss that country's nuclear program and strategic relations with Prime Minister Wen Jiabao.
There was a "recognition from the Chinese leadership of the significant role Australia plays in the [Asia-Pacific] region and the value for both of us ... of working more closely together on political and security issues in the region," Mr. Downer said after the Beijing talks.
-------- russia / chechnya
Forget terrorism, Chechnya is Putin's war
September 8, 2004
The Age (Australia)
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/09/07/1094530608641.html?oneclick=tru
We will never overcome terrorism if we ignore the context of even the most horrendous terrorist acts, writes Gwynne Dyer.
What would we do without Richard Perle, everybody's favourite American neo-conservative? It was he who came up some years ago with the notion that we must "decontextualise terrorism": that is, we must stop trying to understand the reasons that some groups turn to terrorism, and simply condemn and kill them. No grievance, no injury, no cause is great enough to justify the use of terrorism.
This would be an excellent principle if only we could apply it to all uses of violence for political ends - including the violence carried out by legal governments using far more lethal weapons than terrorists have access to, causing far more deaths.
I'd be quite happy, for instance, to "decontextualise" nuclear weapons, agreeing that there are no circumstances that could possibly justify their use, and if you want to start decontextualising things such as cluster bombs and napalm, that would be all right with me, too. But that was not what Perle meant at all. Advertisement Advertisement
Perle was speaking specifically about Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israel, and the point of "decontextualising" them was to make it unacceptable for people to point out that there is a connection between Palestinian terrorism and the fact that the Palestinians have lived under Israeli military occupation for the past 37 years and lost much of their land to Jewish settlements.
Since the Palestinians have no regular armed forces, if we all agree that any resort by them to irregular violence is completely unpardonable and without justification, then there is absolutely nothing they can legitimately do to oppose overwhelming Israeli military force.
"Decontextualising terrorism" would neatly solve Israel's problem with the Palestinians - and it would also solve Russia's problem with the Chechen resistance, which is why Russian President Vladimir Putin was so quick to describe the rash of terrorist attacks in recent weeks, and above all the school massacre in Beslan last Friday, as "a direct intervention against Russia by international terrorism".
Not by Chechen terrorism, because that would focus attention on Russian behaviour in Chechnya, where Russia's main human rights organisation, Memorial, estimates that 3000 innocent people have been "disappeared" by the Russian occupation forces since 1999. No, this was an act of international terrorism (by crazy, fanatical Muslims who just hate everybody else), and nothing to do with Russian policies in Chechnya.
Indeed, the Russian security services quickly let it be known that 10 of the 20 militants killed in the school siege in Beslan were "citizens of the Arab world" and that the attack was the work of al-Qaeda.
And how did they know this, since it's unlikely that the dead attackers were carrying genuine identity documents on them? It turns out Russian security "experts" surmised it from the "facial structure" of the dead terrorists. (You know, that unique facial structure that always lets you pick out the Arabs in a crowd.) But that was where Putin wanted the finger to point.
Ever since September 11, countries such as Russia and Israel that face serious challenges from Muslims living under their rule have been trying to rebrand their local struggles as part of the "global war on terrorism". For those that succeed, the rewards can be great: a flood of money and weapons from Washington, plus an end to Western criticism over the methods they use to suppress their Muslim rebels.
Without September 11, Israel would never have got away with building its "security fence" so deep inside Palestinian territory, and Russia would face constant Western criticism over the atrocities committed by its troops in Chechnya.
Chechnya was a thorn in Russia's side - and the Russians were an almost unlimited curse for the Chechens - long before anybody had heard of Osama bin Laden.
The Chechens, less than a million strong even today, were the last of the Muslim peoples of the Caucasus to be conquered by the Russian empire in the 19th century, holding out for an entire generation.
When German troops neared the Caucasus in 1943, Stalin deported the entire Chechen population to camps in Central Asia, fearing they would collaborate with the invaders - and half the Chechens died there before they were allowed to return home after the war. When the old Soviet Union broke up in 1991, Chechnya immediately declared independence, and successfully fought off a Russian attempt to reconquer it in 1994-96, although the fighting left tens of thousands dead and Grozny, the capital, in ruins.
That should have been the end of it, but Vladimir Putin launched a second war against Chechnya in 1999, just after Boris Yeltsin chose him as his successor. (The deal was that Putin could be Russia's president if he promised to protect Yeltsin from corruption charges after his retirement.) But the practically unknown Putin still had to persuade the Russians to vote for him in a more or less honest election, so he restarted the war in Chechnya to build his image as a strong man with Russian voters.
Five years later, Chechnya is a war-torn landscape patrolled by about 100,000 Russian soldiers, many thousands are dead, and the Chechen resistance is carrying out terrorist attacks in Russians cities.
There may be a few foreign volunteers from other Muslim countries involved in the struggle, but this is not part of some international terrorist conspiracy. It is not even a Russian-Chechen war, really. It is Putin's war, and you can't "decontextualise" that.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based international affairs commentator.
----
Russia prepared for pre-emptive strikes on 'terror bases' worldwide
AFP
Wednesday September 8, 2004
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/040908/1/3mzlv.html
Russia is prepared to make pre-emptive strikes on "terrorist bases" anywhere in the world, the Interfax news agency cited the country's chief of staff as saying.
"With regard to preventive strikes on terrorist bases, we will take any action to eliminate terrorist bases in any region of the world. But this does not mean we will carry out nuclear strikes," General Yuri Baluyevsky said Wednesday.
Baluyevsky added that Russia's choice of action "will be determined by the concrete situation where ever it may be in the world.
"Military action is the last resort in the fight agaisnt terrorism."
-------- spies
AIPAC Says U.S.-Israel Ties Are Under Attack
Group Denies Wrongdoing Amid Probe
By Robin Wright and Thomas B. Edsall
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, September 8, 2004; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3677-2004Sep7.html
In a lengthy letter to supporters and allies, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee charged yesterday that the "very essence" of relations between the United States and Israel is under assault as a result of reports that the FBI is investigating whether AIPAC officials passed classified information to Israel.
The e-mail, AIPAC's first detailed comment about the FBI's counterintelligence investigation, strongly denies involvement in criminal activity or receipt of secret intelligence information by the organization or its employees, calling the allegations "false and baseless."
It also appeals to supporters for a "special contribution" to combat the publicity, including a recent full-page ad in the Washington Times that alleges that the United States has turned a blind eye to Israel's violations of international law.
The AIPAC letter comes amid charges from some American Jews that enemies of Israel and of AIPAC are capitalizing on the controversy created by reports of the probe. Some have said their goal is to undermine relations with Israel. Others are concerned about an anti-Semitic undercurrent because many of the U.S. officials that the FBI has mentioned in interviews are Jews in the Pentagon and Vice President Cheney's office.
Others say the probe is rooted in political and ideological conflict.
"There's a political component to this. What we've had is the criminalization of the foreign policy debate. There are accusations being floated around more often based on policy disagreement rather than fact," said Michael Rubin, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Iran and Iraq specialist in the Pentagon's policy office. The FBI has declined to comment on the counterintelligence investigation, which differs from a criminal probe in that it may not result in criminal charges. Its scope and specifics are largely unknown, though sources familiar with the case have said it began more than two years ago.
A criminal investigation is also underway into whether Lawrence A. Franklin, a Pentagon policy analyst, provided a draft presidential directive on Iran to AIPAC, and whether AIPAC passed the information to Israel, according to sources who have been interviewed in the case.
Over the weekend, Israeli Ambassador Daniel Ayalon said on "John McLaughlin's One on One" that the investigation was the result of either malicious intent or "some incompetence of not understanding reality," a reference to long-standing U.S.-Israeli cooperation.
Administration officials, people interviewed in the probe and Jewish groups are anxious for the probe to conclude. "Everyone is waiting to see if there is a reality to this: Are people going to start to get arrested or indicted? We don't know what is going on behind the curtain," said one person who was interviewed by authorities. "In the not-too-distant future, there's going to have to be something more definitive."
In the letter, AIPAC President Bernice Manocherian and Executive Director Howard Kohr said the group will not "abide any suggestion that American citizens should be perceived as being involved in illegal activities simply for seeking to participate in the decisions of their elected leaders or officials who work for them."
It also charged that the ad in the Washington Times, sponsored by the Council for the National Interest, was an attempt to convince policymakers that AIPAC "is doing something wrong." The ad criticized Israel for conducting espionage and covert operations against the United States, erecting an "apartheid wall" to separate Israel from Palestinians and building illegal settlements.
An AIPAC official said yesterday that public response to the e-mail, which includes statements of support from congressional leaders, had been "exceptional." Heavy traffic briefly overwhelmed AIPAC's Web site.
The letter also seeks to shift the public focus. "We would prefer to be talking about Israel's disengagement plan, that Iran may be mere months away from nuclear weapons, the injustices toward Israel in the United Nations, but our institution and the very essence of the United States-Israel relationship is under assault," said Josh Block, AIPAC spokesman.
-------- us
U.S. Toll in Iraq Crosses 1,000
Milestone Pentagon Expects Continued Violence
By Josh White and Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, September 8, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A2721-2004Sep7?language=printer
The number of soldiers and Pentagon civilians who have died in Iraq topped the 1,000 mark yesterday, and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld declared that the insurgency is likely to turn even more violent in coming months as the fledgling nation heads toward democratic elections.
By last night, military officials said, the death tally included 998 troops and three civilian employees of the Defense Department. The milestone came after a spate of deadly attacks over the past week by insurgents.
At a Pentagon news conference, Rumsfeld and Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said suicide bombings and coordinated attacks were claiming more lives and displaying the insurgency's ability to frustrate the coalition with increasingly sophisticated tactics.
While offering that sober assessment, Rumsfeld was resolute when asked about reaching the 1,000-casualty mark, emphasizing the need to continue the fight against terrorism despite the sacrifices.
"When combined with U.S. losses in other theaters in the global war on terror, we have lost well more than a thousand already," Rumsfeld said. "And we certainly honor the courage and sacrifice of every man and woman in uniform who has served in Iraq and who is currently serving there."
The attacks over the past week reflect a determined opposition to U.S. and coalition forces that threatens to extend a war that U.S. officials once estimated would long be over by now. As U.S. forces work to build Iraqi security forces and support a new government, they find themselves still targets of an elusive and adaptive enemy.
"The enemy is becoming more sophisticated in its efforts to destabilize the country," Myers said.
Rumsfeld took the unusual step yesterday of saying that U.S. and coalition forces "probably" had killed between 1,500 and 2,500 former regime elements, criminals and terrorists last month. Pentagon officials generally have not been revealing enemy body counts, only occasionally offering estimates of enemy dead in specific incidents.
Rumsfeld's decision yesterday to provide an estimate for a full month was interpreted by some military analysts as a Bush administration effort to try to offset recent bad news from Iraq.
"They're grasping for good news," said Michael E. O'Hanlon, an expert on military affairs with the Brookings Institution. "They're in the situation where they needed something positive to say."
One reason Pentagon officials had avoided announcing body counts was concern that the figures were not reliable. They also have worried that people would focus on the numbers and compare them to estimates U.S. military authorities have given of insurgent forces. Last November, Gen. John P. Abizaid, who as head of the U.S. Central Command oversees American forces in the Persian Gulf region, pegged the size of the insurgency at about 5,000 fighters.
"The real issue is the fact that this enemy we have out there has the capacity to regenerate itself," said retired Army Gen. John Keane, who stepped down last year as the Army's vice chief of staff and recently visited Iraq. "It's doing so because of the disenfranchisement of a certain number of Muslims, the despair they feel in lack of quality of life improvement, and the sense of nationalism they also feel."
"The military can only provide a partial answer to that," Keane added. "The other answer has to be economic development and jobs."
According to the Pentagon's official tally, the 1,001 military and civilian casualties included 755 who were killed in action and 246 who died in such "non-hostile" situations as accidents and suicides. The number of wounded has totaled 6,916, including 3,076 who returned to duty.
After months of a steadily rising U.S. casualty count, crossing the 1,000 threshold has perhaps more symbolic significance at home than strategic impact on the battlefield. It drew immediate political response yesterday, and some predicted it would draw the American public's attention back to an Iraqi war that seemed sometimes overshadowed in the summer by political conventions and hurricanes.
"The 1,000-killed milestone will to lead an intensification of the focus on Iraq here at home," O'Hanlon said. "And that matters both for the fall election and also for Americans' willingness to stay the course."
Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), on the presidential campaign trail in the Midwest yesterday, called the 1,000 deaths in Iraq a "tragic milestone" for which the nation mourns.
"We must never forget the price they have paid," Kerry said. "And we must meet our sacred obligations to all our troops to do all we can to make the right decisions in Iraq so that we can bring them home as soon as possible."
Despite the rising death toll, Pentagon leaders made it clear yesterday that they do not intend to send U.S. troops to take over such embattled cities as Fallujah and Samarra, where it is believed extremists and terrorists are holed up and strengthening. While the U.S. forces have been engaging the enemy when attacked and hitting selected targets with airstrikes, they generally have stayed out of the strongholds.
Myers said yesterday that coalition forces plan to delay offensive moves in such cities until a full complement of Iraqi forces are trained and ready to defend their nation, something he said he believes can be accomplished by December. He said the "strategy for the cities" being developed by Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr. relies on working with the Iraqi government to send in joint forces.
"Part of that strategy is that Iraqi forces must be properly equipped, trained and led to participate in these security operations, and then once it's over, can sustain the peace in a given city," Myers said. "And while U.S. forces or coalition forces on their own can do just about anything they want to do, it makes a lot more sense that it be a sustained operation, one that can be sustained by Iraqi security forces."
This approach appears dictated by Iraqi political considerations.
"As I understand it, the reason why the U.S. has not gone in there to do anything more is because that's what the Iraqis want," Keane said. "There's no doubt that the Marines and the Army have the capacity to stop it. But the Iraqi leadership feels that the price may be too high, and what they really need is an Iraqi solution."
With national elections due in Iraq early next year, Keane said Iraqi authorities will need to go after the insurgent strongholds by then.
"I think you really have to clean things out before the elections and show the Iraqi people that you're not going to tolerate it -- so that they'll have some confidence in their government to protect them," he said.
Myers and Rumsfeld significantly scaled down the progress made in that direction, however, saying that 95,000 Iraqi forces are equipped and trained -- less than half the 200,000 forces U.S. officials had said they had already trained. They said they hope to reach 200,000 trained domestic soldiers in Iraq by mid-2005.
-------- war crimes
Milosevic Loses Director Role in His Own Courtroom Drama
September 8, 2004
By MARLISE SIMONS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/08/international/europe/08hague.html
THE HAGUE, Sept. 7 - The ghosts that have long haunted Slobodan Milosevic have finally appeared in court, and they have fundamentally altered the war crimes trial of the former Yugoslav president.
He saw them as he was escorted into the courtroom on Tuesday, two bewigged British lawyers, now occupying the chairs for the defense that had stood empty for the past 30 months.
The lawyers, Steven Kay and Gillian Higgins, had taken up their posts on orders of the United Nations judges after doctors reported that the 63-year-old former leader had become too unhealthy to defend himself.
As the new defense team began its work, it quickly became clear that under the new rules the often outspoken and obstinate former Serbian leader had been virtually removed from the driver's seat.
"This morning we will begin hearing witnesses in the defense case of Mr. Milosevic," said Patrick Robinson, the presiding judge, immediately instructing Steven Kay, the lawyer, to turn to the first witness.
Mmmm, Mr. Kay began, Mr. Milosevic would like to be the first to question this witness and all subsequent witnesses. No, said Judge Robinson, adding that possibly the accused might be allowed to say something at the end.
It was a remarkable turnabout in a trial where Mr. Milosevic, acting as his own lawyer, had seemed to set the pace of the trial - sometimes through filibustering, other times by defiance and complaining and frequent bouts of illness.
The imposition of defense counsel on Mr. Milosevic, experts here agree, is the most far-reaching decision the court has taken since the start of the proceedings, the first modern war-crimes trial of a former head of state.
It is expected to impede Mr. Milosevic's strategy of conducting a political defense, which he has often announced and already started last week. In its place, the court hopes, the trial will turn into regular criminal proceedings in which lawyers on both sides will argue over charges stemming from the 1990's Balkan wars - 66 charges in all, including war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.
Experts inside and outside the court in recent weeks have had intense debates about the legality of imposing lawyers on an articulate and skillful accused who clearly has been adamant about defending himself. The rules of this United Nations tribunal, dealing only with the former Yugoslavia, permit self-representation, but the court can take away that right and assign legal assistance "where the interests of justice so require."
Tiphaine Dickson, a Canadian lawyer attending the hearings, was one of 95 lawyers who signed a recent letter arguing that Mr. Milosevic had an absolute right to defend himself under international law. "What is going on is unseemly," she said.
Oddly, Mr. Kay, the new defense lawyer had only recently vigorously defended Mr. Milosevic's right to act as his own counsel. Until last week, Mr. Kay and Ms. Higgins were part of the team assigned by the judges as "friends of the court" to watch out for Mr. Milosevic's interests and assure a fair trial. In this role they became intimately familiar with the Milosevic case.
Last week, the panel of three judges decided to assign defense lawyers because, they said, two cardiologists had warned in recent reports that Mr. Milosevic's life might be at risk if he continued bearing the stress of representing himself.
But while Mr. Milosevic's high blood pressure was presented as the official reason, some court officials said the judges' decision was also influenced by evidence that Mr. Milosevic was using his health improperly to delay the proceedings when he needed more time.
Hearings in the past year have been suspended regularly because of Mr. Milosevic's high blood pressure and heart condition, and the start of his defense, which had been scheduled to begin in June, was postponed five times.
Recent medical reports read out in court last week said that Mr. Milosevic was not taking his prescribed medicines regularly and that instead blood tests had shown that he had been taking other, inadequate medicines that had not been prescribed.
There has been much speculation about whether Mr. Milosevic will cooperate with his new laywers. Previously, he had turned down the court's offer to choose his own lawyers.
Mr. Milosevic, for now, has provided his own answer. On Monday, he refused to see Mr. Kay, who called on him in jail to discuss the first witness, Smilja Avramov, a retired international law professor from Belgrade and a former teacher of Mr. Milosevic.
In an angry outburst in court this morning, he told the judges that Mr. Kay "does not represent me, he represents you." His court-appointed defense was "a legal fiction," he said.
Judge Robinson cut him off. "I don't want to hear the same tired refrain," the judge said.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- homeland security / national intelligence
Intelligence Retooling on Agenda as Congress Returns
By Helen Dewar and Charles Babington
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, September 8, 2004; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2932-2004Sep7.html
Congress returned yesterday for a frantic preelection push to reorganize intelligence agencies and grapple with a huge stack of unfinished business on issues including taxes and energy -- a task complicated by battles for control of the White House and both houses of Congress.
With only a month remaining before Congress's planned Oct. 8 adjournment, prospects for passage of major legislation appear bleak, with the possible exception of the intelligence reorganization, which many lawmakers are pressing to pass, at least in part, before the Nov. 2 elections.
President Bush is expected to lay out his plans for the intelligence legislation at a meeting today with senior lawmakers.
The first order of business, however, is hurricane relief for Florida, a pivotal state for the presidential race. Both the House and the Senate plan quick approval of a $2 billion aid package, with hints of more to come. The Senate approved the measure yesterday, contingent on the House also acting this week.
Both houses also plan early action on their backlog of spending bills for next year: homeland security for the Senate, and education, health and social services for the House. Congress has passed only one of 13 bills needed to fund the government next year, a $417 billion bill to fund military operations. Most of the other bills are likely to be rolled together into an "omnibus" spending measure at some point, possibly in a post-election session.
During this week's work on spending bills, Senate Democrats are expected to push for more homeland security funding in critical areas, and House leaders expect debates on amendments dealing with overtime rules, Roman Catholic hospitals that refuse to perform abortions, and public schools that distribute "morning-after" pills to sexually active girls.
In addition, Republicans scheduled votes in both houses this month that are designed to please conservative supporters and give Democrats political heartburn. The House will vote on a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, which was defeated earlier by the Senate. The Senate plans to vote on amending the Constitution to bar desecration of the American flag, which has failed before in that chamber.
In the Senate, Democrats tried to seize the initiative on intelligence by challenging Congress to act, before it leaves, on all 41 recommendations of the national commission that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, including but not limited to its recommendation for a powerful new national intelligence director.
"Every day that Congress spends not doing the 9/11 recommendations is a day we ignore the threat and neglect our solemn duty as leaders," said Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.).
A bill to approve all the commission's proposals was introduced in the Senate by John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), and a similar bill is scheduled for introduction in the House.
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) also gave high priority to the intelligence initiative and called for the swift confirmation of Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) as CIA director -- but he did not go as far as Daschle did in demanding action on all the commission's proposals. Frist spokeswoman Amy Call said the Senate will consider all 41 recommendations but not necessarily act on all of them.
In the House, GOP leaders dismissed the McCain-Lieberman bill as a "rubber stamp" of the commission that leaves little room for congressional ideas. They said a "leadership bill" will be introduced by the end of the month, probably by Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.).
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) told reporters after a GOP leadership meeting that the eventual House bill will address all the major issues raised by the commission but will not adopt all its recommendations. Asked if there is a consensus on giving a new intelligence director broad budgetary powers, DeLay replied: "Not even close. We're going to do it right."
At a meeting of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence yesterday, the commission's vice chairman, Lee H. Hamilton, said he withdrew the panel's proposal that the new national intelligence director be part of the executive office of the president, citing opposition from both the White House and Congress. But he and commission Chairman Thomas H. Kean said they hope Congress will take some action on a "framework" for reorganization during the current session.
Most other legislation left hanging when Congress began its six-week summer recess remains in limbo, including a long-stalled measure to address the nation's energy needs and billions of dollars for highway, bridge and transit projects.
House and Senate Republicans have narrowed their differences over funding for transportation projects, but the Bush administration has refused to budge from a spending limit that is regarded as too low by some key Republicans in both houses.
The energy bill has gotten snarled in a dispute over proposed liability protections for producers of MTBE, a fuel additive found to have contaminated groundwater. A compromise has been suggested to use gasoline tax revenue to compensate communities that have been contaminated, but it is not clear whether the proposal has enough support to break the energy deadlock.
Lawmakers will also attempt to resolve differences over tax legislation, including a corporate tax package as well as a bill to extend several "middle class" tax breaks, including relief for married couples and an increase in the tax credit for families with children.
The corporate tax measure includes a proposed tobacco compromise that would compensate growers for abandoning Depression-era production allocations while authorizing the Food and Drug Administration to regulate tobacco products.
Staff writer Walter Pincus contributed to this report.
--------
Bipartisan Bill Offered on 9/11 Panel's Proposals
September 8, 2004
By PHILIP SHENON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/08/politics/08panel.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Sept. 7 - An influential bipartisan group of members of Congress, backed by leaders of the Sept. 11 commission, said on Tuesday that they were offering a bill in the House and Senate to enact virtually all the commission's recommendations, including its call for a national intelligence director to oversee all of the government's spy agencies.
The sweeping legislation was immediately embraced by the commission's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, who appeared at a Capitol Hill news conference to announce the bill's introduction. Mr. Kean described the legislation as "our dream" and said the bill, which would also restructure Congressional oversight of intelligence issues, could "make the American people genuinely safer."
The bill is being offered in the Senate by John McCain, an Arizona Republican, and Joseph I. Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat; bipartisan sponsors said they would introduce an identical bill in the House. Other Senate sponsors included Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the Democratic leader, and Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who is a member of the Armed Services Committee.
The bill's introduction on the first day Congress was back from summer vacation - and four days ahead of the third anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks - demonstrated the momentum on Capitol Hill and at the White House to move quickly on legislation to respond to the commission and restructure the way the nation gathers and shares intelligence.
Senators McCain and Lieberman were the main sponsors of the legislation that created the Sept. 11 panel in late 2002 over the initial opposition of the Bush administration.
Congressional leaders, under what some acknowledge is intense election-year pressure to act on the commission's unanimous recommendations, have vowed to pass some sort of legislation before Congress recesses before the general election in November. They ordered House and Senate committees to return to Washington in August to meet during the traditional summer holiday to consider the commission's findings.
Still, many lawmakers warned that there were many ways the legislative package could be derailed, especially if there was opposition from the White House or Congressional committee chairmen eager to protect their turf on intelligence issues.
The White House had no immediate comment on the specifics of the McCain-Lieberman bill, though a spokeswoman, Erin Healy, said President Bush signed an executive order last month and had taken other action that together had accomplished much of what the commission recommended.
"We've already moved forward in one way or another on 36 of the 41 recommendations," Ms. Healy said. "We look forward to studying the legislation closely and continuing to work with Congress."
The White House is expected to be eager to cooperate with Mr. McCain, who is popular with many Democrats and independent voters and has proved himself a strong advocate for the Bush campaign.
The McCain-Lieberman bill would create both an office called the National Intelligence Authority and a new "national intelligence director" in it, who would oversee the work of the Central Intelligence Agency and the government's 14 other spy agencies. It is one of several proposals being considered in Congress in response to the commission's final report. A matching bill is being offered in the House by Representatives Christopher Shays, Republican of Connecticut, and Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York.
In its final report in July, the Sept. 11 commission cited a dangerous lack of coordination among intelligence agencies and urged that a single high-level post be created in the executive branch with power over the budgets of all intelligence agencies, including the C.I.A., and the hiring and firing of their managers.
A radical proposal offered last month by Senator Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who is chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, would dismantle the C.I.A., dividing its responsibilities among three newly created spy agencies, and remove other spy agencies from the Pentagon's control.
The Roberts proposal has met with fierce opposition from the C.I.A., from Pentagon leaders and from some of Mr. Roberts's senior Republican colleagues in the Senate, and it may offer Senators McCain and Lieberman a useful counterpoint.
They could portray their bill as a compromise that allows the C.I.A. to remain intact - though subordinate to a new national intelligence director - and permits the Pentagon to retain day-to-day control over intelligence agencies that now reside within the Defense Department.
"It is our responsibility to take action on the commission's recommendations regardless of party or jurisdictional turf," Mr. McCain said at the news conference, flanked by Mr. Lieberman, Mr. Kean and the commission's vice chairman, Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic House member from Indiana. "The bill includes a fundamental restructuring or our intelligence community."
Mr. Lieberman noted that the debate over the legislation would take place "in the middle of a presidential and Congressional election campaign and there are going to be differences of opinion about these proposals."
But he predicted that partisan differences would give way to legislation that would "enable us to say to the American people, especially those who lost loved ones on Sept. 11, that we have done everything we possibly could to prevent another terrorist attack like Sept. 11."
Mr. Kean said of the bill, "This is a dream that all of us had on the commission as we were meeting and talking with each other - five Republicans and five Democrats." Mr. Hamilton, a former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, praised the bill's authors, saying that "the heavy lifting has to be done by the legislators" in response to the commission's findings.
The bill is an endorsement of virtually all the commission's recommendations, including its call for Congress to reorganize itself as a watchdog over intelligence agencies. The panel found that Congressional oversight on intelligence was dysfunctional and fraught with turf battles.
The bill would require Congress to choose between two formulas proposed by the commission: either create a single powerful joint House-Senate committee on intelligence or greatly expand the authority of the individual House and Senate Intelligence Committees to give them direct appropriations powers over the spy agencies.
The bill did not endorse a handful of the commission's other findings, however - perhaps most importantly its recommendation that the C.I.A. cede all control over paramilitary operations to the Pentagon. Under the bill, the C.I.A. could continue to direct some covert paramilitary operations.
In executive orders last month, President Bush enhanced the powers of the director of central intelligence, who has had day-to-day control only over the C.I.A., to direct the work of other intelligence agencies - creating a de facto national intelligence director with powers resembling those the Sept. 11 panel recommends.
But the White House said that Congress would need to enact legislation to establish the kind of strong national intelligence director proposed by the commission.
In testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton on Tuesday praised President Bush's moves but said Congress would need to do more.
"I think the executive orders of the president have been a constructive step forward," Mr. Hamilton said.
Mr. Kean said that "President Bush has come a long way" but that White House actions so far were only "interim measures" and required Congress to act to make permanent changes in the structure of the intelligence community.
-------- police
Final Tally Awaits the Police and Protesters
September 8, 2004
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/08/nyregion/08detain.html
The Republicans left town before Labor Day, and most of those who came to protest them and were arrested have been released.
But the story of exactly what came to pass between the New York Police Department and the nearly 2,000 people who were arrested last week continues to unfold, and the resulting narrative may affect history's view of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's performance during the Republican National Convention.
A judge is expected to announce how much he will fine the city for failing to comply with his order to release hundreds of protesters who were detained for more than a day. Scores of those arrested have complained of lengthy detentions under repugnant conditions at a Hudson River pier.
Dozens of lawsuits seem all but inevitable, and the City Council plans to hold a hearing to examine the treatment of protesters. Councilwoman Margarita Lopez, a Democrat from Manhattan, said she asked the Civilian Complaint Review Board to review the case, and the Health Department to investigate the conditions at the pier.
"This constitutes police brutality," Ms. Lopez said yesterday during a news conference at City Hall, raising questions about whether the Bloomberg administration had planned to keep protesters locked up until President Bush's aircraft left Kennedy Airport on Thursday night.
Many of those arrested and their families, including many people who said they were not protesting at all but simply stumbled into a police net, say they were held for at least 24 hours, often with little food and no access to lawyers, confined in a pier with a dirty floor greased with chemicals.
Scores of protesters and their lawyers have relayed stories about people being separated from their medications, contracting rashes from the dirty floor and other maladies that they said went unaddressed for hours.
"I'm furious about it," said Susan Treiman, who said her 20-year-old daughter, Griffin Epstein, was locked up for two days with very little food and no chance to see a lawyer. "I absolutely plan to join a class-action suit. My opinion of this mayor has totally changed."
Mr. Bloomberg and the Police Department vehemently deny that protesters were ill-treated in any way, and say that the lengthy lock-up times were the result of an overwhelmed legal system. They also point out that there were very few arrests during the largest protest, the Sunday march, but that as the convention went on and hard-edged groups announced their intention to disrupt the convention, the police had to hold the line.
The most damaging act of violence, in fact, appeared to occur against a police officer, who was kicked as he lay on the ground. In addition, there were the demonstrators who consistently and at times aggressively badgered delegates, telling them in unprintable words that they ought to leave Manhattan post haste.
"Allegations that the post-arrest screening site at Pier 57 was unhealthy or unsafe, or that prisoners were denied food or water, are untrue," Paul J. Browne, a spokesman for Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, said in an e-mail message. He added that "there is no evidence that the Police Department purposely held demonstrators any longer than necessary."
All told, the police say they arrested 1,821 people, the most at any political convention. Of those, 56 were for felonies, 282 were for misdemeanors, 1,480 were for violations and 3 were juvenile arrests.
Few people, including those who were held for long periods, suggested yesterday that the police used excessive physical force, but many complained bitterly of their treatment once they were locked up.
Wendy Stefanelli, 35, who works as a stylist for "Sex and the City" and other shows, said that she was arrested when she tried to stop a police officer from beating a protester, but that she was not demonstrating herself. She spent several hours with other arrested people on a bus, where one man with Crohn's disease suffered from a burst colostomy bag.
"He was throwing up all over the back of the bus," she said in an e-mail message. "The entire bus begged the officers present to please get medical attention to this man. They completely ignored us."
Ms. Lopez said she visited the Manhattan district attorney's office, where things appeared quiet as many protesters entered the system. "We know that at least 450 people were being detained," Ms. Lopez said. "Therefore, the office of the D.A. shouldn't have been empty when I visited him."
Mr. Bloomberg has consistently denied that the conditions at the pier were poor, adding that it was clean and that people were provided food inside. "It's not Club Med, don't make any mistake about it, and it's not supposed to be Club Med," he said last week. "And I don't think there's anyone in the city that wants to make it Club Med. Which I used to go to all the time and I always found great! This is not supposed to be great."
Norman Seabrook, president of the Correction Officers' Benevolent Association, said that he thought the pier was better than some jails he has seen, and that he would be the first to complain if his officers were working in a poorly maintained facility. "They would not be happy going through Rikers Island," he said, speaking of the protesters. "The rats, the roaches, the mice, the alleged rapes and sodomies. They should count their blessings. Many of the protesters were not from New York City, and they should just go on their way."
-------- POLITICS
-------- budget
$2.3 Trillion in New Debt Expected by 2014
Economic Growth Will Not Ease Strain on U.S., Budget Office Director Warns
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 8, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A2229-2004Sep7?language=printer
This year's federal budget deficit will reach a record $422 billion, and the government is now expected to accumulate $2.3 trillion in new debt over the next 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office reported yesterday.
The expected deficit for the current fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, is $56 billion less than the CBO predicted in March, as a recovering economy added to tax receipts. But it is $46 billion more than last year's record shortfall, with even more red ink possible, the nonpartisan agency reported: The expected total 10-year deficit would climb from $2.3 trillion to $3.6 trillion if President Bush is able to extend the tax cuts he enacted. They are currently set to expire in 2011.
"This is a fiscal situation in which we cannot rely on economic growth to cause deficits to disappear," warned CBO Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former economist for the Bush White House. "The budgetary outlook will be dictated by policy choices."
About half of the projected 10-year deficit is based on an assumption that conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan will continue. The CBO policy requires that deficit projections be based on current conditions.
The budget office expects that the total federal debt held by the public -- the amount borrowed through the sale of Treasury bonds to finance overspending -- will balloon 58 percent over the next decade, from $4.3 trillion this year to nearly $6.8 trillion in 2014.
The CBO's findings may refocus some political attention on the fiscal health of a federal government that, between recession, war and tax cuts, has swung from record surpluses to record deficits since Bush took office.
Both political parties seized on the CBO's findings, with Republicans stressing the $56 billion improvement over the CBO's March estimate, and Democrats focusing on the longer-term forecast.
The new estimate is "a sign of the economic growth that is a result of President Bush's leadership on tax relief," said Tim Adams, policy director for the Bush campaign.
Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry retorted, "Only George W. Bush could celebrate over a record budget deficit of $422 billion."
Budget analysts said the report should not be seen as good news to either side inasmuch as neither has a detailed plan to tackle the deficit.
"It's another one of those unwelcome reminders to the candidates that they've got some serious problems that they don't want to face," said Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a budget watchdog group. Bush has pledged to halve the deficit over the next five years. But absent sharp policy shifts, the CBO does not expect the president to meet that goal. The CBO estimated the annual deficit for 2009 to be $312 billion, short of the president's target. Compared with the size of the economy, the deficit in five years would fall to 2.1 percent of gross domestic product from its current 3.6 percent, a substantial improvement but not half of the 2004 level.
Chad Kolton, a spokesman for the White House Office of Management and Budget, said the CBO figures are deceptive because they include far too much money for continued fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The CBO assumed both conflicts will continue for the next 10 years, at a cost of $1.1 trillion.
"The bottom line is, the president is committed to cutting the deficit in half in five years," he said.
The CBO report drew the policy choices facing the nation in sharp relief. The $2.3 trillion in projected deficits over the next decade assumes that all of Bush's 2001 tax cuts expire as scheduled in 2011 and rates rise to the levels that existed before. If the president and congressional Republicans are successful in extending the tax cuts, deficits would surge to $3.6 trillion through 2014, the CBO report said. In 2014 alone, a relatively modest annual deficit of $65 billion would leap to $440 billion if all the tax cuts are kept.
The alternative minimum tax, which was created to ensure the wealthy pay income taxes but which will increasingly ensnare the middle class, presents another fiscal strain. Reforming the law to exclude more middle-class taxpayers -- which both parties say is a priority -- would cost the government at least an additional $425 billion over the next 10 years, and possibly as much as $602 billion, the CBO said.
By then, the cost of the retiring baby-boom generation will have hit the government hard. Social Security and Medicare, currently $789 billion, or 34 percent of federal spending, will swell to $1.5 trillion, or 42 percent of the budget.
Neither Bush nor Kerry has detailed how he would tackle the deficit. Both candidates have made campaign pledges that probably would worsen the government's fiscal position, although the candidates have been careful to avoid a detailed accounting.
In Bush's acceptance speech in Madison Square Garden on Thursday night, he reiterated a call to allow younger workers to invest some of their Social Security payroll taxes in stocks and bonds through personal investment accounts. Because virtually all Social Security taxes are used to pay the benefits of current retirees, any diversion of those taxes would have to be made up through more government borrowing. Even a small diversion of, say, 2 percent of payroll taxes, could cost the government as much as $2 trillion in the first 10 years, according to the Social Security Administration's actuary.
Bush has also called for new Lifetime Savings Accounts, which would effectively end the taxation of capital gains, dividends and interest for all but the richest Americans. Individuals could shield from taxation the investment gains of as much as $7,500 of savings a year, and those savings could be withdrawn at any time for any reason. The cost of the proposal would be minimal in the first decade but could swell to $50 billion a year in later decades, according to the Congressional Research Service.
Kerry has pledged to roll back some of the tax cuts passed in 2001 and 2003, including income tax, capital gains and dividend cuts that have benefited households with incomes of more than $200,000. But the savings from those tax increases would be consumed by a $653 billion expansion of health care coverage, a $200 billion education program and other promises.
"Neither one of them is focused on deficit reduction, and neither one of them is focused on hard choices," Bixby said. "And the message of today's report is that tough choices are needed."
Staff writer Mike Allen contributed to this report.
--------
Bush Backs Budget Authority for New Intelligence Post
September 8, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Congress-Intelligence.html?hp
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush told members of Congress on Wednesday he supports giving a new national intelligence director strong budgetary authority over much of the nation's intelligence community, a key provision in the Sept. 11 commission's recommendations.
Bush, in a White House meeting with congressional leaders from both parties, also said the administration would submit its own suggestions to Congress on how to change the nation's intelligence agencies to make them work better.
This comes as the Senate prepares to vote later this month on how it wants to change the intelligence community to address criticisms from the 9/11 commission that the nation's 15 different intelligence agencies did not work together properly to stop the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington.
Most members of the Senate seem to be behind creating a national intelligence director to oversee nonmilitary intelligence, and many have echoed the 9/11 commission's call for that person to have the ability to hire and fire leaders of the intelligence agencies and to control the money Congress provides those agencies.
The White House had not previously openly endorsed that aspect of the commission's recommendations.
``The administration will support strong budgetary authority for the national intelligence director, certainly over what is called the national foreign intelligence program, which constitutes well over half, in fact well beyond that, of the intelligence budget of our government. That is a very significant step,'' said Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., the ranking Democrat on the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee.
That committee is writing the legislation the Senate will consider.
Besides budgetary control, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., wants Congress to transfer the nation's major intelligence gathering from the CIA and the Pentagon to control by a new national intelligence director.
FBI Director Robert Mueller and acting CIA Director John McLaughlin will get to weigh in on possible changes to the nation's intelligence agencies at a Senate Governmental Affairs hearing Wednesday.
Some people have opposed the idea, with Roberts saying Tuesday his plan ``has been deemed by some as radical and others as bold -- not as many 'bold' as 'radical.'''
But former Rep. Lee Hamilton, the vice chairman of the Sept. 11 commission, did not reject the idea when asked about it at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, calling the idea ``a very bold move. It's a lot bolder than we made.''
The commission wanted ``achievable and pragmatic'' goals, and didn't consider change on the scope that Roberts did, Hamilton said Tuesday.
``We just didn't look at it that boldly,'' Hamilton said. ``What we said was the NID needs to control the budget of these groups and we thought that was sufficient. And we did not recommend pulling these agencies out of the DoD because we thought that was too much of a change.''
Some lawmakers started a push Tuesday for Congress to adopt all the Sept. 11 commission's recommendations for revamping the intelligence community.
``This bill would enact bold and comprehensive reform that changes the status quo, because the status quo in intelligence and diplomacy has failed us,'' said Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., who introduced the 280-page bill along with Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana and Republican Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania.
Reps. Chris Shays, R-Conn., and Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., will introduce a House version.
Congress is working on several different bills inspired by the Sept. 11 commission, making it unlikely that it will just accept legislation based strictly on the commission report.
Senate Governmental Affairs Chair Susan Collins, R-Maine, and her committee are drafting legislation that Lieberman, the committee's ranking Democrat, predicted would be ready for a committee vote in two weeks.
The House also has broken up the Sept. 11 commission recommendations into different parts, with several committees working on their own legislation.
-------- investigations
Inquiry Proposes Penalties for Hiding Medicare Data
September 8, 2004
By ROBERT PEAR
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/08/politics/08medicare.html
WASHINGTON, Sept. 7 - The Bush administration illegally withheld data from Congress on the cost of the new Medicare law, and as a penalty, the former head of the Medicare agency, Thomas A. Scully, should repay seven months of his salary to the government, federal investigators said Tuesday.
The investigators, from the Government Accountability Office, said Mr. Scully had threatened to fire the chief Medicare actuary, in violation of an explicit provision of federal appropriations law.
Accordingly, they said, federal money could not be used to pay Mr. Scully's salary after he began making the threats to the actuary in May 2003.
The conclusion came in a formal legal opinion by the accountability office, an investigative arm of Congress formerly known as the General Accounting Office. The agency applied its interpretation of the law to factual findings previously made by the inspector general at the Department of Health and Human Services.
The Bush administration did not quarrel with those facts, but said on Tuesday that it was unconstitutional for Congress to compel the disclosure of data over objections from the executive branch.
Mr. Scully's salary in 2003 was $145,600, the department said. He would owe the government $84,933 under the legal opinion issued on Tuesday.
Asked in an interview if he would repay the money, Mr. Scully said: "No. I'm not required to. It's a matter of principle. I never did anything wrong, and I am proud of every minute of my three years at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.''
Mr. Scully, who now works for a law firm and a private investment firm, has registered as a lobbyist for Abbott Laboratories, Aventis Pharmaceuticals, Caremark Rx and other health care companies, but says his actions in government were motivated solely by a desire to help Medicare beneficiaries and taxpayers.
The White House had no immediate comment. William A. Pierce, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said the department would not try to recover the money because Mr. Scully had "acted within his legal authority.''
But Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, cited the report as evidence that "the Bush administration broke the law by covering up the true cost of their phony Medicare bill.''
Senator Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey, one of 18 Democratic senators who requested the legal opinion, said the administration had purposely hidden information about "its flawed Medicare plan,'' and he asserted, "This was a corruption of the process at the highest levels.''
President Bush signed the Medicare law, widely seen as one of his major domestic achievements, on Dec. 8. Less than two months later, the White House said the law would cost much more than Congress had assumed - $534 billion over 10 years, as against $400 billion.
Lawmakers of both parties said the law would not have passed in its current form if Congress had known of the higher cost estimates, prepared by the chief actuary, Richard S. Foster, a career civil servant who has worked for the government since 1973 and received an award for outstanding service in 2001.
The law under which Mr. Scully could be penalized says that no federal money can be used to pay the salary of any federal employee who "prohibits or prevents, or attempts or threatens to prohibit or prevent, any other officer or employee of the federal government'' from communicating with Congress.
Similar laws have been on the books since 1912, when Senator Robert M. La Follette, a progressive Republican from Wisconsin, inveighed against "gag rules'' imposed by Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.
Laura Kopelson, a spokeswoman for the Government Accountability Office, said lawyers there were "not aware of any similar case'' in which a federal official was found to have violated the law. "This is the first time we have been asked to rule on this point of law,'' she said.
The finding is the latest development raising questions about the new statute, which offers drug benefits to all 41 million Medicare recipients and gives private insurers a huge new role in the program. The changes represent the biggest expansion of Medicare since its creation in 1965.
The Government Accountability Office said the Department of Health and Human Services should try to recover the money, just as it would try to secure payment of any debt owed to the department.
The department itself found that Mr. Scully had threatened to dismiss the actuary if he provided information and estimates sought by Congress last year in the heat of debate over Medicare.
But lawyers at the health department and the Justice Department said the law requiring the disclosure of information to Congress violated "executive privilege,'' the constitutional separation of powers and the president's right to control communications with Congress.
The Government Accountability Office rejected that argument. No court has ever held the law unconstitutional, it said, and the cost estimates were neither classified nor privileged. Indeed, it said, Mr. Scully's threats to the actuary were "a prime example of what Congress was attempting to prohibit'' when it outlawed "gag rules."
"Midlevel employees provide much of the information Congress needs to evaluate programs'' and legislation, the Senate said when it adopted the language of the 1912 law as part of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. Similar language was included in spending bills for 2003 and 2004.
Anthony H. Gamboa, general counsel of the Government Accountability Office, said the administration was "prohibited from paying Mr. Scully's salary after he barred Mr. Foster from communicating with Congress.'' The money appropriated by Congress was simply "unavailable for the payment of his salary,'' Mr. Gamboa wrote.
-------- propaganda wars
Truth and its neo-consequences
'Bush Unplugged' is straight-shooting, right-leaning critique of Dubya
Sean Gonsalves
Cape Cod Times
09.08.04
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=17620
Coming from where I'm from, a "straight-talker" is someone who isn't necessarily articulate but one who is up-front and honest in speech and actions, even if what he is doing, or what he has done, offends the moral and aesthetic sensibilities of those who disagree.
So you can imagine my response to a president who before the Iraq invasion talked incessantly about WMDs, but who is now making his central theme: "We are staying on the offensive -- striking terrorists abroad -- so we do not have to face them at home." Why didn't you say that from Jump Street?
Coming from where I'm from, a person who isn't physically taking part in a fight but who tells his enemies to "bring it on" -- knowing full well that those actual warriors doing his bidding are the only ones in harm's way -- is called something that rhymes with plunk. Take the word plunk, remove the 'L' and you'll catch my drift.
Or to put it another way, I'm talking about someone who writes checks with his mouth that his behind can't cash. And that's why I think this "character" debate being played out on the presidential election campaign stage is ridiculous to the point of being absurd. I'm not the only one.
Of course, you expect that coming from an "anti-Christian, un-American, Marxist, Commie, left-wing, terrorist-sympathizer" like me, right?
But it goes deeper than that. Sure, you might expect Bush administration criticism from someone coming from where I'm from. But what you might not expect is a thorough critic, or better yet, a more thorough unveiling of the Bush administration from an avid fisherman and hunter who has been an NRA member for the past 30 years -- someone like Marc Umile.
In case you haven't heard, allow me to introduce you to him. Umile is a 45-year-old registered Independent. "I'm part of what they call the hook and bullet crowd," he told me the other day.
"And I've always supported moderate Republicans like (former Pennsylvania governor) Dick Thornberg and even Tom Ridge," said the Philadelphia native, who is now a freelance writer and documentary filmmaker.
His most recent project was to author the book "Bush Unplugged: The True Patriot's Guide to George W. Bush," published by True Patriots' Press.
Umile is also a longtime listener of the Rush Limbaugh radio talk show. So he decided to take Rush's advice to heart.
"When listening to Rush during the Clinton years, whether he was talking about Whitewater, Travelgate, Troopergate, this gate, that gate or even the Vince Foster suicide episode, Rush was always quick to tell his listeners, 'if you ever want to get to the bottom of any political intrigue, my friends, follow the money! Follow the money trail.'"
And so he did. "Bush Unplugged" is the result. It's a straight-talking exploration of the man "W" and the myth.
"While writing the book," he told me, "I would email chapters to conservative friends of mine and it freaked them out. What happens is when you learn the whole story and you're a conservative you get caught flat-footed. And then you're outraged that you've been duped and betrayed (by Bush).
"What we're dealing with here is an information gap," he said, adding that if conservatives took Rush's advice seriously and followed the money trail, they would realize they are the victims of the biggest neo-con in American political history.
He begins the book with a quote from an unknown patriot. "Patriotism is supporting your country all of the time, and your government when it deserves it." Then, in Chapter 1, he covers Bush's Vietnam years and follows the money trail through Texas oil dealings on down to the president's forays into Major League Baseball.
"Love him or hate him, the overwhelming majority of us have formed rigid opinions about Mr. Bush based solely on what we've learned about him from mainstream (media)... Beyond that the man's professional, political and personal history remains a complete mystery to the vast majority of our fellow citizens -- and for good reason," he writes in the book's introduction.
The narrow-minded true believers probably won't bother to read Umile's book, but if you're looking for an honest, thoughtful and Republican-leaning assessment about President Bush, or you're someone with their eyes open trying to open the eyes of others, this book is for you.
-------- us politics
Spy-scandal lobby blitz
AIPAC secures wide backing after secrets charges
By Hans Nichols,
September 8, 2004
The Hill
http://www.thehill.com/news/090804/spy.aspx
Lobbyists for an influential pro-Israel group launched into congressional overdrive when trails of a Pentagon spy scandal led to their Washington office.
Soon after media outlets reported on the scandal late last month, American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) lobbyists and their political liaisons across the country asked Democratic and Republican lawmakers to issue public statements in support of America's premier pro-Israel group. That intense and frantic lobbying effort, which began on the eve of the GOP convention and continued unabated in New York, led dozens of lawmakers of both parties to testify to AIPAC's integrity before they had been briefed by the FBI investigators on the details of the case. Some lawmakers, however, stressed that they rose to AIPAC's defense without any prompting from the group.
The FBI is reportedly investigating whether Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin passed sensitive intelligence to Israel and the role of two AIPAC employees in the matter.
AIPAC had deployed bipartisan statements in a successful campaign to quell the potentially disastrous flow of negative articles in the first cycle of an espionage scandal that FBI investigators say is expanding.
That bipartisan support has also immunized AIPAC from political attacks that question the pro-Israel group's patriotism and has shielded it from the crossfire of a presidential campaign.
"As much as we've reached out to members of Congress, they are reaching out to us," said Josh Block, a spokesman for AIPAC.
"Clearly, expressions of support from leaders of both parties in both chambers are extremely important and reflect the deep and abiding relationship between the U.S. and Israel, and the strong relationship between AIPAC and members of Congress," Block said.
Dozens of key lawmakers from both parties have been briefed by AIPAC Executive Director Howard Kohr, say numerous congressional aides. In addition, prominent Jewish community leaders across the country - many of whom are serious donors - have been phoning their friends on Capitol Hill, denouncing the allegation that a Pentagon mole slipped classified documents to AIPAC as the scurrilous work of an FBI zealot.
The briefings from the Washington office have been limited to a detailed rebuttal of AIPAC's alleged role in receiving classified material from Franklin, followed by a pitch for statements of support, say aides.
AIPAC's Washington briefers have shied away from addressing the broader charges against Franklin, or any other possible allegation about the Pentagon leaking drafts of its Iran policy.
But Kohr has made himself very clear that a public statement about AIPAC's integrity would be appreciated, while a more forceful, if less tactful, play for congressional support has come in phone calls from Jewish political leaders across the country, say congressional aides for members contacted by AIPAC.
In many cases, AIPAC lobbyists have been very specific about how they wanted the lawmakers' statements to be phrased. But in other instances, requests have been made in general terms, asking only for a public expression of support.
AIPAC, which does not give political donations but spends roughly $1 million a year on lobbying, has received supportive statements from nearly every key congressional leader.
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), said, "I know AIPAC. I know the AIPAC leadership. It is an outstanding organization."
Those comments were similar to Sen. Arlen Specter's (R-Pa.) words: "I know AIPAC. I know its integrity. It's a smear."
Democrats were no less effusive in their backing of the embattled group. Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) said, "For more than five decades, America as a country and Americans as individuals have stood by Israel. AIPAC and its members have tirelessly led that effort, and America is better and stronger for it. It is vital work - work I know AIPAC will continue to lead effectively."
Over on the House side, Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) offered a general statement of support. "AIPAC has played a pivotal role in ensuring the strength of the special relationship between the United States and Israel," she said. "AIPAC is a dedicated advocate for Israel, educating our nation's leaders about opportunities to assist our democratic ally in the Middle East. I am proud to have worked closely with AIPAC and its leaders to support Israel as it works to defeat terrorism and strives toward a just and lasting peace."
Most of lawmakers' statements avoided the specific charges. Rather, they framed their support for AIPAC in general terms.
House Majority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) was one of the few Republican lawmakers to mention the charges. "While the House will want to look carefully at any allegations that might endanger our national security, it will begin that look with a record of great confidence in our relationship with AIPAC and our strongest ally and the only democracy in the Middle East, Israel," Blunt said.
But Rep. John Conyers (Mich.), the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, gave an indication of how the FBI probe might be politicized on Capitol Hill. In a letter to Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), chairman of the committee, Conyers asked for a formal congressional investigation.
"It now appears that these allegations may be only the tip of the iceberg of a broader effort of the Pentagon employees working in the office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas Feith, to conduct unauthorized covert activities, without the knowledge of the Central Intelligence Agency," Conyers wrote.
Republicans, however, cautioned that Democrats would suffer political consequences if they sought to demonize or slur AIPAC, especially in conjunction with the Iraq war.
--------
Senator Accuses Bush of Cover-Up
September 8, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/08/politics/08graham.html
WASHINGTON, Sept. 7 (AP) - Senator Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who is a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, accused the White House on Tuesday of covering up evidence that might have linked Saudi Arabia to the Sept. 11 hijackers.
Mr. Graham made the accusation in a new book and repeated it at a news conference Tuesday arranged by Senator John Kerry's presidential campaign. Republicans called the accusations "bizarre conspiracy theories," and the Saudis said they were unsubstantiated and reckless.
The accusation stems from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's refusal to allow investigators for a Congressional inquiry and the independent Sept. 11 commission to interview an informant, Abdussattar Shaikh, who had been the landlord in San Diego of two Sept. 11 hijackers.
In his book "Intelligence Matters," Mr. Graham, the co-chairman of the Congressional inquiry with Representative Porter J. Goss, Republican of Florida, said an F.B.I. official wrote them in November 2002 and said "the administration would not sanction a staff interview with the source.'' On Tuesday, Mr. Graham called the letter "a smoking gun" and said, "The reason for this cover-up goes right to the White House."
The report added to suspicions about a Saudi role in the hijacking plot.
--------
At Site Bush Used to Make Case for Iraq War, Kerry Lists Costs
September 8, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Kerry.html?hp
CINCINNATI (AP) -- Democratic Sen. John Kerry, at a site where President Bush made his case that Iraq was a threat to the United States, argued on Wednesday that the president left a trail of broken promises on the path to war and has squandered money that could be put to better use for health care, education and jobs.
``George W. Bush's wrong choices have led America in the wrong direction on Iraq and left America without the resources we need here at home,'' the presidential candidate said. ``The cost of the president's go-it-alone policy in Iraq is now $200 billion and counting.''
Kerry said the ``hard reality'' is that Bush's choices have led to ``spreading violence, growing extremism, havens for terrorists that weren't there before.''
``I call this course a catastrophic choice that has cost us $200 billion because we went it alone, and we've paid an even more unbearable price in young American lives.''
The speech showed Kerry shifting from a defensive stance fending off charges of inconsistencies on the war to an aggressive challenge of Bush's decisions in the run-up and aftermath of the U.S. invasion.
Linking the choice to go to war with budgetary consequences, Kerry sought to tie Iraq to health care, education, jobs and other areas where he says the administration followed a misguided path.
``$200 billion for Iraq, but they tell us we can't afford after-school programs for our children; $200 billion in Iraq, but they tell us we can't afford health care for our veterans; $200 billion for Iraq, but they tell us we can't afford to keep the 100,000 police officers we put on the street,'' Kerry said.
``He doesn't believe that America can be strong in the world while we also make progress here at home. He believes we have to choose one or the other. That's a false choice, and I reject it.''
In a speech at the Cincinnati Museum Center in 2002, Bush made a case for removing Saddam Hussein from power. He called the Iraqi leader a ``murderous tyrant'' who may be plotting to attack the United States with biological and chemical weapons.
The address opened debate in Congress that eventually led to a vote authorizing the president to use force against Iraq, a resolution that Kerry supported.
U.S. military deaths in the Iraq fighting passed 1,000 on Tuesday.
A protester stood at the beginning of Kerry's speech on Wednesday and started to yell, but a man sitting next to him wearing a T-shirt from the Sheet Metal Workers union grabbed him and put him in a headlock. Two other men sitting nearby joined the fray and pushed him to the ground.
Secret Service agents escorted the man outside the building. Reporters who tried to talk to the man were ordered to return inside. Officials said he was complaining that he was assaulted and they were investigating.
The Kerry campaign said Bush's argument for war was laced with assertions later ignored or proved untrue.
Bush said he would pursue diplomatic solutions in Iraq; Kerry says he rushed to war. Bush said he would build a coalition of allies; Kerry says the United States bears virtually all the war's cost, in lives lost and dollars spent.
Bush said Iraq was developing nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, but U.S. forces have not found stockpiled weapons of mass destruction. Bush said Iraq supported al-Qaida's designs against the United States, but the Sept. 11 commission found no active collaboration.
On the other hand, the Bush-Cheney campaign said Kerry has taken multiple, inconsistent positions on the war.
``John Kerry voted for the war but voted against funding for combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan,'' said spokesman Steve Schmidt. ``This is another example of John Kerry's indecision, vacillation and political gamesmanship.''
Kerry marked the 1,000th death in Iraq on Tuesday as a ``tragic milestone,'' saying the soldiers gave their lives on behalf of country, freedom and ``the war on terror.'' Kerry has previously not linked the Iraq war to the fight against terrorists. Spokesman David Wade said Kerry was referring to U.S. soldiers fighting in parts of Iraq that have now become a breeding ground for terrorists.
In conjunction with the speech, Kerry was unveiling an ad that accuses Bush of squandering $200 billion on Iraq while the United States suffers ``lost jobs'' and ``rising health care costs.'' The commercial claims, ``George Bush's wrong choices have weakened us here at home.''
On the Net:
Kerry campaign: http://www.johnkerry.com
Bush campaign: http://www.georgewbush.com
-------- OTHER
-------- environment
Hurricane spilled 41 million gallons of acidic waste in Tampa-area waterway
Wednesday, September 08, 2004
By Associated Press
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-09-08/s_26940.asp
TAMPA, Florida - Hurricane Frances carved a huge gap in the wall of a fertilizer company reservoir, spilling 41 million gallons of acidic waste that posed a threat to aquatic life in a bay near Tampa.
It could be days or weeks before a solid assessment of the environmental effect is available, said Rick Garrity, director of Hillsborough County's Environmental Protection Commission.
"If we find significant impact, we'll keep following up," Garrity said.
The breach in a berm surrounding the reservoir happened during the storm Sunday, starting as a 6-foot-wide gap created by storm-driven waves in the reservoir, then growing quickly to 30 feet across and finally to 50 feet, said officials of Cargill Crop Nutrition, a unit of Cargill Inc.
An overflow ditch couldn't handle the spill, and for a while the company ran out of a caustic solution used to buffer acid in the escaping wastewater. Then the storm prevented crews from beginning repairs.
It wasn't until midday Monday that the company announced that the wastewater had stopped flowing into a creek that feeds Hillsborough Bay, on the northeast side of Tampa Bay.
"It's a serious spill," company Vice President Gray Gordon said. "We're very upset about this, very concerned."
The spill threatens fish and other wildlife, not people, pets, or livestock, officials said.
The wastewater from phosphate production is high in nitrogen and phosphorus, which promote the growth of algae that can reduce the amount of oxygen in the water.
Garrity said his agency and the state Department of Environmental Protection had warned Cargill about the levels of wastewater being stored on the property.
There could be fines, and regulators also could make the company pay for environmental damage and change its water retention design, Gordon said.
-------- health
Study Finds Lack of Data on Health Effects of 9/11 Dust
September 8, 2004
By MARC SANTORA
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/08/nyregion/08airstudy.html
Days before the third anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Center, federal agencies have yet to make a coordinated and comprehensive effort to study the health effects of the debris that filled the air in the weeks after the attack, according to a draft copy of a government study to be presented to Congress today. The study also shows that there is still no federal treatment program for those suffering from related problems.
As a result, the ability to ever fully answer even the most basic questions about the health impact of that day on the public may have been seriously compromised.
While there has been a growing consensus since the attack that thousands of people may have grown ill because of the toxic mix of dust, debris, smoke and chemicals that were released when the towers collapsed, there is still no definitive answer to what exactly was in the dust or to how many people suffered because of their exposure.
Moreover, there is no system in place that adequately tracks people's health with physical examinations, provides treatment and can make authoritative determinations about the impact.
According to a continuing study by the Government Accountability Office, the various monitoring programs set up to address health concerns related to the trade center disaster "vary in their methods for identifying those who may require treatment," and "none of those programs are funded to provide treatment."
A copy of the study was provided to The New York Times by a government official who believes that the federal government has not done enough.
The issue of the air quality in and around the area of the World Trade Center has been the subject of intense debate since the first days after the attack, when the Environmental Protection Agency declared that it was safe to return to the area.
Critics contend that in their eagerness to get the city moving again, and, in particular, to reopen the New York Stock Exchange, officials underestimated the possible impact of the contaminants that first billowed into the air and later settled in offices and homes throughout downtown.
While limited monitoring programs have been set up to identify problems among emergency personnel, construction workers and volunteers who spent day after day in the rubble, little has been done to identify and assist others who may have been exposed to the dust, according to politicians and health care experts in the New York region.
"No one is in charge," said Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, a Manhattan Democrat. Representatives Maloney and Christopher Shays, a Connecticut Republican, are leading the hearing today. Both have lobbied aggressively for more money.
The government study finds that 250,000 to 400,000 people who were visiting Lower Manhattan; working, living or attending school there; or responding to the attack were exposed to the dust.
The largest program set up to try to establish who might have been exposed is the World Trade Center Health Registry, created two years after the attack. Many labor unions and other groups discouraged people from signing up, expressing concern about how the data would be used. One year after the registry was created, only 55,226 people had been enrolled, according to the government study. The registry does not provide physical examinations or formal treatment.
The most extensive health-related program set up to date is run by the Mount Sinai Center for Occupational and Environmental Medicine, which received federal grant money to provide physical examinations for police officers, firefighters and other emergency workers. Again, this program does not involve treatment. And it has enough money for only about 12,000 screenings, according to an official at the center.
The official, Dr. Stephen M. Levin, co-director of the screening program, said so many people showed up that the program did not have the resources to examine all of them.
"We are finding high rates of persistent respiratory problems," Dr. Levin said. He noted that while medical experts have a sense of the health impact on volunteers and workers at ground zero, little has been done to understand the wider health impact because of a lack of federal money.
While some people have been able to rely on their own insurance to deal with health problems, and many workers who suffered serious respiratory illnesses received workers' compensation to help them deal with the costs, many others have run into resistance from insurers.
There are a handful of other monitoring programs, including some for firefighters and state workers, but none are scheduled to run beyond 2009, the government study said.
"The duration of the monitoring programs may not be long enough to fully capture critical information on health effects," the study found.
Dr. Levin and others worry that some health consequences, like cancer, may take years to develop.
Still, many of the effects were recognized immediately. Within 48 hours of the attack, the study says, the Fire Department found that about 90 percent of its 10,116 firefighters and other emergency workers reported an acute cough. "Almost all F.D.N.Y. firefighters, 9,914, who had responded to the attack developed respiratory effects, and hundreds, about 380, had to end their firefighting careers due to W.T.C.-related respiratory illness," the study reports.
It also cites other research that shows how screenings across a wide swath of those who were in the downtown area in the days after the attack - including carpenters, police officers and truck drivers - show similar respiratory problems.
The Environmental Protection Agency, in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, warned people working directly on the rubble to wear protective masks. But the agency maintained that the dust that settled over a wider area included only low levels of asbestos and generally was not harmful, a position that a spokeswoman said the agency continues to hold.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Filmmakers Examining the 'What Ifs' of Nuclear Power
By NANCY RAMSEY
September 8, 2004
NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/08/arts/television/08lunc.html?pagewanted=print&position=
Cesium-137 is not your usual topic for a Midtown Manhattan lunch. But if you sit down with Maryann De Leo and Rory Kennedy, who have completed documentaries on the effects on children of the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986 (Ms. De Leo) and the Indian Point power plant in Buchanan, N.Y. (Ms. Kennedy), it is not long before the subject comes up. (Cesium-137 is radioactive waste, an isotope produced when uranium or plutonium undergoes fission.)
The women, who had not met before, quickly dispensed with the social niceties. Ms. Kennedy complimented Ms. De Leo on her film, which she said she found heartbreaking, then took 15 seconds to show a photo of her second daughter, born six weeks earlier. Ms. De Leo invited Ms. Kennedy to a reception her brother Dominic was organizing in honor of the films, which will be broadcast back-to-back by HBO tomorrow night.
Ms. De Leo said she too had proposed films to HBO about Indian Point and AIDS, a subject Ms. Kennedy tackled with "Pandemic: Facing AIDS," a five-part series for HBO last year. But Ms. Kennedy, being a Kennedy - she is Robert F. Kennedy's youngest daughter, born after his death - was able to secure outside funds more readily.
Menus in hand, the women quickly and nearly simultaneously dismissed tuna as a possible choice: "Mercury, " they said.
Ms. De Leo's film "Chernobyl Heart," which won the 2003 Academy Award for best documentary short, is not easy to talk about or watch. It takes the viewer into children's hospitals in Belarus and Ukraine and into the 30-kilometer exclusion zone around the reactor. According to the United Nations, birth defects in Belarus have increased 250 percent since the accident, and the lives of the children in the film are tragic.
One girl, Julia, was born with her brain outside her skull; another child, 4, is the size of a 4-month-old.
"I had to show enough of the kids with deformities, but if I showed too many, nobody would want to watch," Ms. De Leo said.
Ms. Kennedy's "Indian Point: Imagining the Unimaginable" takes a less emotional approach. It features interviews with the plant's detractors (including her brother Robert F. Kennedy Jr., chief prosecutor for Riverkeeper, an environmental- protection group) and a few defenders. Ms. Kennedy, who narrates the film, begins with questions: what if American Airlines Flight 11, navigating along the Hudson valley on Sept. 11, had banked left and hit Indian Point, rather than continuing south to the World Trade Center? Is enough being done to protect Americans from terrorists at home?
Both women offered a quick and categorical no when asked if they considered their films anti-nuclear power.
"I don't believe in making didactic films," said Ms. De Leo, born in Brooklyn, one of six children of a sanitation worker. Her television documentary work has taken her to Vietnam, El Salvador, Cuba, Afghanistan, Angola, Korea and Iraq.
The idea for "Chernobyl Heart" was planted when a friend visiting from Spain suggested that Ms. De Leo see a United Nations photography exhibition about the children of Chernobyl. "It was the most shocking thing he'd ever seen," she said. "I had really forgotten about Chernobyl. I hadn't thought about birth defects there, and at the time I was working on a film about Bellevue," the Manhattan hospital.
But in 2002 Ms. De Leo went to Belarus. She would return two more times, at one point requiring treatment for cesium poisoning herself.
"Indian Point has much more cesium than Chernobyl had," Ms. Kennedy interjected. "Being in New York City on 9/11, and in the aftermath, there was a lot of concern about where the next terrorist attack would be - Indian Point, bridges and tunnels, waterways, chemical plants. There was a disproportionate amount of fear, some of it grounded, some not. I went into this project with the question, is Indian Point something we need to fear?"
Ms. De Leo asked her about Indian Point's safety record ("horrible," Ms. Kennedy said); both agreed on the impossibility of evacuating millions in the event of an accident. Ms. Kennedy talked about the inability of guards to protect the plant adequately because of the stress and long hours detailed in the film. Located on the Hudson, the "exterior is screaming 'hit me,' " she said. "It's extremely vulnerable by water."
In the film Mr. Kennedy contends that the pools of water holding spent fuel rods, which contain more than 1,400 tons of spent nuclear fuel, are most vulnerable. His claims are followed by an interview with a scientist from the Union of Concerned Scientists, who details a potential terrorist attack, beginning with an explosive charge interfering with the rods' coolants and ending with the release of cesium-137 into the air.
In the film such criticisms are countered by representatives of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a federal agency, and the Nuclear Energy Institute, a trade association, who describe the robust structures housing the reactors, the stepped-up security after 9/11 and the extreme unlikelihood of an attack of the magnitude Ms. Kennedy suggests.
Jim Steets, a spokesman for Entergy Nuclear Northeast, which owns the two plants at Indian Point, is not interviewed in the film but defended the business in a phone interview. "There has never been an event at Indian Point causing dangerous releases of radioactivity," he said. "The plants are heavily regulated by the N.R.C." Since 9/11, he added, the commission has limited the number of hours a guard is allowed to work, and Entergy "has spent well over $30 million on enhancing security at Indian Point."
Those outside the industry also propose nuclear energy as a viable power source, given the environmental hazards of burning fossil fuels and the political ramifications of relying on Middle East oil. A recent interdisciplinary study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology concluded that "the nuclear option should be retained precisely because it is an important carbon-free source of power."
Spencer R. Weart, a historian at the American Institute of Physics and author of "Nuclear Fear: A History of Images" (Harvard University Press, 1988) offers a context for examining the nuclear option - and, perhaps, for watching these films.
"All industrial systems are liable to accidents, and we have to ask ourselves, where is the most likely damage over the long term?" he said in a telephone interview. "Every energy source has its problems. Bangladesh has been in the news because of the terrible flooding there. This is what will happen increasingly with global warming. The longtime consequences of burning fossil fuels are more severe than nuclear power. Let's say I'm less a proponent of nuclear power than an opponent of coal and oil."
Listening to such arguments, Ms. Kennedy nodded and said, "I would have said that before I made this film."
Scientists also have strong views about the fairness of comparing the Chernobyl disaster to what could happen in this country "Chernobyl was a terrible tragedy," Robert A. Bari, a physicist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., said in a phone conversation. "It happened because they operated the reactor out of its specifications. And Indian Point has a very, very different design than the Chernobyl reactor."
For Ms. Kennedy and Ms. De Leo, who are passionate about their subjects, such arguments have little resonance. Ms. De Leo recalled a warning a Russian scientist made to Americans, imploring them to shut down nuclear plants.
Ms. Kennedy said, "You can't throw numbers and statistics at children born with brains outside their heads." Such debates would not be resolved at a two-and-a-half-hour lunch. Running late for a 3 p.m. meeting, she added, "I don't think there is another side to the conversation."
----
Protesters may try to get last word, in court
Civil rights groups consider suing to test whether New York police went too far in arresting activists during GOP conclave.
The Christian Science Monitor
By Alexandra Marks
September 08, 2004
NEW YORK - In the wake of the Republican National Convention, Mayor Michael Bloomberg gives the police department an "A+" for keeping calm in the Big Apple even as hundreds of thousands of demonstrators descended to voice their opposition to the Bush administration. But activists and civil libertarians say the most the most the police deserve is a "B." While order was kept, they contend, the use of orange plastic nets to corral large numbers of people for arrests, some innocent bystanders, and the extended detentions of protesters violated the most basic constitutional freedoms.
They also say some of the most spirited protests were thwarted under the guise of the threat of terrorism. Several groups are considering bringing civil rights litigation against the city. Legal scholars believe some boundaries were crossed and feel it's important for the courts to assess the tactics and set clear parameters for the future. Local authorities say they were simply doing their best under extraordinary circumstances.
"The problem is not what happened in New York. That's over and it was not bad," says Alan Dershowitz, a legal scholar at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. "The problem is how this precedent could be used in the future by other police forces to control the content of speech."
In all, more than 1,800 people were arrested - a record number for a convention - as the GOP partied at Madison Square Garden behind an unprecedented wall of security. In the largest demonstration, on the Sunday before the RNC's formal opening, some 400,000 protesters jammed the city's avenues chanting, singing hymns, and carrying flag-draped coffins to honor those who died in Iraq.
There were just over 200 arrests that day, and most were for disorderly conduct. Both the police and protesters were lauded for their restraint.
Most of the arrests occurred on two other occasions, and it's the police tactics used in those cases, as well as the length of the detentions at an old bus garage called Pier 57, that have alarmed activists and First Amendment advocates.
On the Friday night before the RNC, a monthly bicycle protest called "critical mass" swelled to more than 300 people. The riders said they'd conferred with police, who initially allowed them to pedal through the streets. Then suddenly, when they reached the East Village, authorities rolled out nets and began arresting people. "They gave us no warning whatsoever," says one rider who was detained.
Police say they did give plenty of warning when it became clear the ride was getting out of hand. And people arrested that night said the police were polite as they handcuffed and led them away. But many of those arrested are upset about the length of their detention in what they called a "grimy garage," as well as the number of innocent bystanders caught up in the police dragnet. "There were Chinese food delivery men, German tourists, people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time," says Mike Epstein, an amateur photographer who was held for almost 30 hours before being charged with disorderly conduct.
Critics point out that police need probable cause to make an arrest. Some also think authorities should have obtained a warrant before using a net to subdue crowds. "If you're a peaceful protester holding up a sign that says the Republicans or the Democrats are leading us down the wrong path, you have a right to do that without being swept up," says Mr. Dershowitz. "There's something unseemly about using a net."
Police usually get wide latitude
But others say the courts have given police wide latitude in how they control demonstrations, as long as they don't interfere with the content of what's being said. "There are common-sense limitations that courts will give government some rope on," says Martin Redish, a First Amendment expert at Northwestern Law School in Chicago.
In the 1960s, for instance, Congress passed a law banning the burning of draft cards. It was challenged as a violation of the First Amendment on the grounds that the act was a symbol of opposition to the Vietnam War. But the courts upheld the law, accepting the government's argument that it had a legitimate reason to want people to keep their draft cards. Mr. Redish, who believes the courts went too far in this case, says it illustrates how difficult it can be to distinguish between free speech and the government's genuine needs.
Many of the protesters charge that the police use of extended detentions - some were held as long as 66 hours - crossed that line. It was "a blatant attempt to keep people off the streets and from protesting against Bush," says Mr. Epstein. On Thursday night, a judge was so incensed about the city's inability to process the demonstrators quickly, he ordered the city to release them or pay $1,000 for each person kept beyond a certain time. It's estimated the city is facing $560,000 in fines.
There were just too many to process
But Police Commissioner Ray Kelly calls the charge that the NYPD purposely slowed the processing "patently false." Mr. Bloomberg says the NYPD arrests on average 300 people a day and it takes 24 hours to process them. "We had to process 1,200 people in one day rather than our normal 300 people," he says. "The judge says it's unreasonable to take more than 24 hours. I don't know what we could have done."
On the issue of conditions, some protesters have saved the clothing they wore at the Pier 57 holding center, which they say was stained with oil and grease from the filthy conditions. Many plan to have it chemically analyzed for any lawsuit. The city's response: "We didn't try to make this Club Med, but it was safe and clean," says Mr. Bloomberg. "We even served soy sandwiches for vegetarians."
------
Thousands rally behind Putin
ASSOCIATED PRESS
By Maria Danilova
September 08, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040907-113831-5978r.htm
MOSCOW - Tens of thousands of people rallied outside the Kremlin yesterday in a show of solidarity against terrorism, nearly a week after militants seized a school in southern Russia in a standoff that claimed at least 350 lives, many of them children.
Mourners in the grief-stricken city of Beslan lowered caskets into the damp earth in a third day of burials of victims of the siege, which officials have blamed on Chechens and Islamist militants.
The Moscow crowd of about 130,000 people - some bearing banners saying, "We won't give Russia to terrorists" - observed a moment of silence at 5 p.m. on the cobblestones near St. Basil's Cathedral, adjacent to the Kremlin.
The hourlong demonstration, which was organized by a pro-government trade union, echoed President Vladimir Putin's call for unity in vast, multiethnic Russia and sought to rally its people against enemies the president says receive aid from abroad.
"I have been crying for so many days and I came here to feel that we are actually together," said Vera Danilina.
In Beslan, gravediggers have opened up two new tracts in the past three days at the city's muddy cemetery.
Yesterday, relatives opened the tiny coffin of 8-year-old Vasily Reshetnyak, touched his forehead and kissed him goodbye. A favorite toy - a red car - was placed alongside his body.
Although some in Beslan have criticized Mr. Putin for not meeting with survivors, the president has avoided the brunt of the anger over the attacks.
"Of course I support him, and it's necessary to be even more harsh with terrorists," said Galina Kiselyova, a history teacher who was at the Moscow rally. "We cannot let go of Chechnya - the Caucasus is ours."
"Putin, we're with you," read a banner at the rally.
The demonstration was heavily advertised on state-controlled television, with prominent actors appealing to citizens to turn out. Banners bore the white, blue and red of Russia's flag, and speakers echoed Mr. Putin's statements that terrorists must be crushed.
"We came here to show that we are not indifferent to the series of terrorist acts that have taken place," said Alexander, a student at a Moscow technical college who did not give his surname.
However, the 18-year-old criticized Russian authorities' handling of the hostage crisis, and noted the rally was organized by authorities who "told us where and when to come" and was not spontaneous.
In footage broadcast yesterday on NTV television, hundreds of hostages were shown seated in the school's cramped gym. Many of them had their hands behind their heads. A thick streak of blood stained the wood floor.
Football-sized bundles of explosives were attached to wires and strings hanging from the two basketball hoops. One attacker in camouflage and a black hood stood amid the hostages with a boot on what NTV said was a book rigged with a detonator.
----
What Democracy Looks Like Do protests matter?
Reason Julian Sanchez
September 8, 2004
http://www.reason.com/links/links090804.shtml
As I arrived at Foley Square last week to watch the gradual release of activists, anarchists, and not a few innocent bystanders who'd been picked up during the week's many protests, I found National Lawyers Guild attorney Daniel Meyers propounding a theory to a small cluster of scribbling reporters: "I think the order came from the Republican Party to sterilize the city. Anybody who didn't look like a Republican delegate had no right to walk the streets. The preemptive use of arrests-mass arrests and detentions-were meant to achieve that goal."
As conspiracy theories go, this was not, on its face, a particularly implausible one. As Meyers noted, bringing the protesters down to be detained in filthy pens at Pier 57 all but guaranteed delays, as the equipment required to process them was located at precinct stations, not the facility many activists had taken to calling "Gitmo on the Hudson." When a judge finally ordered the release of some 500 protesters detained well beyond the 24 hour legal limit, he told city officials that he could "no longer accept your statement that you are trying to comply."
Yet the very arbitrariness of which so many complained-bunches of protesters would be rounded up in orange netting seemingly at random from larger groups, or one group would be told by police to use the route another had just marched, then arrested for "disorderly conduct"-made it a poor deterrent. Not only were protesters-the vast peaceful majority, anyway-confused about what was likely to get them arrested; there was little apparent effort to target organizers, who are at any rate in short supply among anarchists. With crowds for the Sunday march estimated at somewhere between 200,000 and half a million, even the 1,700-plus arrests over the course of the week represent the kind of "sterilization" that would shame even Dr. Nick Riviera My own conversations with beat cops working the protests suggest that, in accord with Hanlon's Razor, confusion more than conspiracy dominated Manhattan's precinct houses.
Perhaps the more important question to ask, though, is whether it would have been in the GOP's interest to attempt the sort of dissent-crushing of which they were accused. The New York Times reported a week before the convention that "Republicans said they would seek to turn any disruptions to their advantage, by portraying protests by even independent activists as Democratic-sanctioned displays of disrespect for a sitting president." And that tactic certainly seems to have been in play: Republican National Committee Chariman Ed Gillespie told Knight-Ridder reporters that delegates would be "joined here by thousands of Democrats and Senator Kerry's supporters, and to please recognize their right to express themselves because they are free to do so," adding the caveat: "I didn't say they are linked to the Kerry campaign, but they are supporters of Senator Kerry."
The New Republic's Ryan Lizza noted the same phrase-"supporters of John Kerry"-popping up in a lunchtime conversation with Gillespie. Republican strategists appear to all but embrace protesters, so long as they can manage to identify them with Democrats. That's not wholly accurate, of course: Many of the most active and visible protesters are radicals who eschew more conventional politicking precisely because they view the major parties as indistinguishable. I watched one agitator for the Trotskyite Spartacist League inveigh briefly against Bush before launching into a long and venomous harangue against John Kerry and the Democratic Party, which was (she averred) sapping support for a truly revolutionary workers' party.
In light of public attitudes toward protesters, that may be a sound strategy. In March of last year, the American Enterprise Institute's Karlyn Bowman did a roundup of national surveys on Americans' attitudes toward protesters. An ABC News/Washington Post poll found 71 percent unmoved by antiwar protests-perhaps not all that surprising, since debates over war and peace turn on arguments too complex to fit on a placard. Among those who were influenced, however, three times as many said that the protests made them more likely to support the war in Iraq than oppose it.
Ohio State political scientist John Mueller is a provocative opponent of a cherished notion of Boomer radicals: That protests and street-activism ultimately helped to turn the American public against the war in Vietnam. Instead, in an epater l'avant garde piece for the History News Network, he posits that the "chief political achievement of the Vietnam antiwar movement was to help get Richard Nixon elected in 1968," and suggests that their descendants may do the same for George W. Bush. Polls suggest that, then, attitudes toward protesters remained strongly negative even as doubts about our adventures in Indochina grew.
The problem is this: In a highly polarized election year, the only part of the electorate still in play-those coveted swing voters-is the part that isn't paying attention. They will tend, more or less by definition, to be fairly moderate and to make their decision in a rough and impressionistic way. They'll pay attention less to policy differences, which are clear enough, than to who seems trustworthy, who seems like "one of us." They're apt to be equally repelled by the most extreme left- and right-wing supporters or opponents of either candidate. But the most extreme opponents of Kerry do not, as a rule, gather in groups of hundreds of thousands to march through the streets.
That doesn't characterize all the marchers, of course. Among those I spoke with during the march were a bright-seeming research assistant at a neurology lab and Jim Murphy, 50, of Vietnam Veterans Against the War who grumbled to a friend, "God, I hate parades."
And there's the trouble. Just as, in comic books, you need superheroes to fight mutant villains, in contemporary politics it seems that veterans are uniquely free to criticize other veterans. Someone like Murphy can get away with dismissing, say, John O'Neill of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth as someone who has "made a living at this shit," which is to say, being an attack dog for the right. But he doesn't much enjoy this kind of activism, and at any rate, the cameras are less apt to focus on him and his band than on colorfully attired hippies and black-clad anarchists burning giant dragon floats. Those most successful at garnering press attention are those who see an arrest as an opportunity to add another credibility-enhancing story to their radical repertoire-like the activist who sent a message to the protesters' text message network reading: "200 here @ boathouse [in Central Park where RNC delegates had been spotted], lots of pigs, no arrests yet, need more people." In light of the conditions at Pier 57, one can be forgiven for regarding New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg as a touch disingenuous when he said of the protesters in the days before the Republican convention: "I hope they all enjoy themselves." That may, however, be the most they can hope to achieve.
Julian Sanchez is Reason's Assistant Editor. He lives in Washington, D.C.
-------
------- OneList (submissions from subscribers)
------- Depleted Uranium Keeps On Killing!
-----------
Posted
without profit or payment for research and educational
purposes only,
in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107.