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NUCLEAR
Pu Accident in France to Impact US Shipment?
Experts: Iran Able to Make Nuclear Bomb
US gives up on getting Iran to UN Security Council
Europe Compromises with U.S. on Iran Nuke Deadline
Mihama reactor's B pipes breached rules
Radioactive leak at Tokaimura plant caused by worn-out valves
Despite economic decline, N. Korea puts its military first
DPRK says to link S. Korean experiments to nuclear talks
N. Korea Says to Link South Atomic News to Talks
North Korea Won't Abandon Nuclear Programs
British, Chinese teams in NKorea as Pyongyang hints at nuclear talks delay
IAEA Considers Action on Countries' Failure to Report Nuclear Activities
INDIAN POINT: IMAGINING THE UNIMAGINABLE
Nuclear Cleanup Further Postponed
MILITARY
Taliban Head Told U.S. Official Clinton Should Be Ousted
Afghan Ruler Again Says No to Coalition Government
Briton Jailed for Arms Dealings
Zimbabwe Sentences Briton to 7 Years in Jail on Arms Charge
'Coup' chief sentenced on arms deal
Local Firms Join in $9 Billion
Judge Finds Halliburton Settlement Unacceptable
Thousands Gather To Support Sadr
U.S. Aircraft Strike Insurgents in Falluja;
U.S. Expects More Violence as Iraq Vote Draws Near
'Holy Warriors' in Samarra Reject Accord With Americans
Israelis Attack Again in Gaza, Killing 3 Palestinians
Israeli Troops Pull Out of Northern Gaza
Rumsfeld Says Terror Outweighs Jail Abuse
U.S. must learn from Russia
Sen. Rockefeller Presses CIA on Book's Disclosures
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
9/11: Pork-barrel security
Bush's Plan Limits Intelligence Chief
TSA Widens Airline Passenger Searches
U.S. Acts to Notify Foreigners of Tougher Rules for Visits
Suit targets travel-ID mandate
3 Years Later, Deliverance Elusive
POLITICS
We should not have allowed 19 murderers to change our world
Rather Defends CBS Over Memos on Bush
Powell Thinks Bin Laden Alive, on the Run
Kerry Faults Bush for Lapse In Ban on Assault Weapons
Kennedy Says Bush Hurt U.S. And Its Security
ACTIVISTS
Plutonium to be moved this Wednesday, September 15!!!
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Pu Accident in France to Impact US Shipment?
Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2004
From: tom.clements@wdc.greenpeace.org
Plutonium Accident in France May Impact Plans for Weapons Plutonium Shipment via Charleston
Charleston, September 10, 2004 - In response to Thursday's revelation of an accident at the French Cadarache nuclear plant (1), which has contaminated two workers, the Nuclear-Free Atlantic Flotilla and Greenpeace have called for the immediate cancellation of next week's plans to send US weapons grade plutonium to the facility.
According to a statement by the French nuclear regulator, CEA, two workers were contaminated on Monday when radioactive plutonium and uranium leaked from a container. The workers are now undergoing urgent health checks. The CEA said the accident was due to a 'violation of procedures'.
"In addition to exposing the workers to danger, this accident exposes risks of producing plutonium MOX fuel. It is one more reason why the United States should not send its plutonium to Cadarache next week," said Merrill Chapman, Charleston resident and coordinator of the Nuclear-Free Atlantic Flotilla-Charleston.
Nuclear state company AREVA/Cogema that operates the facility has a long history of leaks and accidents at this plant.
"There is no justification for this transport as the whole policy of using weapons plutonium in reactors is dangerously misguided. After September 11th terrorist attack, the risk to international security by shipping plutonium across the ocean should be avoided," said Tom Clements of Greenpeace International. "DOE must immediately call off plans for this plutonium shipment." If the plutonium shipment proceeds, the US material could possibly be stranded at the French facility and have to be shipped back to the US, thus multiplying environmental and proliferation risks.
Two armed British ships are expected to arrive in Charleston in the middle of September, to pick up a cargo of weapons grade plutonium. Citizens of the Southeastern coast, have formed a flotilla to bare witness to the shipment. The flotilla, consisting of yachts and kayaks, are taking to the water in front of Waterfront Park on Wednesday, September 15, at 5:00pm. Spectators are expected to gather at the park, off of East Bay Street, at 5:00pm, to mark the ships departure.
For further information please contact: Merrill Chapman, Nuclear Free Atlantic Flotilla, USA Organizer, (843) 881-9352, cell (843) 200-1977 Tom Clements - Greenpeace International, Senior Adviser, in Charleston, cell (202) 415-6158
Notes to Editor: The accident occurred at the 'AtPu' plutonium fuel (MOX) manufacturing plant at the Cadarache nuclear complex. CEA news release can be found at: http://www.cea.fr/fr/actualites/articles.asp?orig=actu&id=569
The AtPu will be used for three months to manufacture MOX fuel before shipping it back to the United States. A detailed report on ATPu can be found at: http://www.stop-plutonium.org in a report for Greenpeace International in July 2003 "LTA Briefing" commissioned from independent consultancy WISE-Paris.
Photos and background information on nuclear transport ships and plutonium in France available at http://www.stop-plutonium.org
For organizing against the plutonium shipment in Charleston, see: http://www.noplutonium.org
-------- iran
Experts: Iran Able to Make Nuclear Bomb
September 11, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iran-and-The-Bomb.html?pagewanted=all&position=
VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- It's a nightmare scenario for the West -- a hostile Muslim state develops nuclear weapons, throwing the Middle East and the world into turmoil. American officials warn that fear could soon turn into reality with Iran.
In Tehran, government authorities deride such concerns and threats as U.S. propaganda. Pointing to faulty U.S. intelligence that prompted the invasion of Iraq to save the world from apparently nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, Iran insists it doesn't want nuclear arms -- and doesn't have the means to make them.
It's difficult to measure Iran's intentions and test its assertions that it's only interested in the atom to generate electricity. But weapons experts agree that nearly two decades of covert activities have given the Islamic Republic the knowledge and technology to make nuclear bombs -- activities that have mostly come to light in the past two years.
If Iran translates those skills into action, the Middle East could become the stage for a nuclear confrontation. After running its own secret program for decades, Israel -- Iran's declared mortal enemy -- is thought to have as many as 100 nuclear warheads.
Sounding the latest alarm, Secretary of State Colin Powell urged Iran this past week to renounce uranium enrichment, which he said ``in our judgment, leads to a nuclear weapons,'' or face moves to have it hauled before the U.N. Security Council. Britain delivered the same message, while German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder called Iran's activities ``highly alarming.''
Ahead of an International Atomic Energy Agency board of governors meeting opening Monday on Iran, the view that Tehran can make nuclear arms -- including mastering complex tasks like warhead designs -- is shared even by those willing to give Tehran the benefit of the doubt about its intentions.
Austrian physics professor Friedrich Steinhaeusler, a former U.N. nuclear safety expert, criticizes the ``distrust and discrediting of Iran.'' But he acknowledges ``there is no lack of knowledge'' or resources that would prevent Tehran from making nuclear weapons.
Estimates vary on a time frame.
U.S. officials have cited intelligence reports as estimating the first Iranian nuclear weapon could be ready by the end of the decade. Former U.N nuclear inspector David Albright says in three or four years, or even sooner ``if they are pressed.''
Alireza Jafarzadeh, a former spokesman of the exiled opposition National Council of Resistance, says Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ordered Iran's nuclear establishment this June to put finishing touches on a weapons program by mid 2005.
Jafarzadeh's exile organization played a major role two years ago in revealing to the world what the IAEA had just learned -- that Iran was running a secret uranium enrichment program. He said his latest information came from the same sources that leaked the news on Iran's enrichment activities.
Among concerns are plans for a heavy water reactor at the central city of Arak that will produce plutonium, which can be used for nuclear fuel -- but more commonly for nuclear weapons.
Even before Iran revealed its plans for Arak, an IAEA report last year -- one of six to date on the status of an agency probe into Iran's nuclear activities -- said that Iran had extracted small amounts of plutonium in the laboratory as part of its covert activities. While finding ``no evidence'' that Tehran tried to make atomic arms, it said such efforts cannot be ruled out.
The agency has revealed a series of other experiments that could be linked to attempts to make nuclear weapons. But most worrying is Iran's advanced state of efforts to enrich uranium -- a process that also can be used to generate low grade fuel for power or material enriched to 90 percent or above for nuclear warheads.
Enrichment does not violate the terms of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which Iran has accepted. But -- with world suspicions high in the wake of 18 years of nuclear secrecy on the part of Tehran -- the IAEA and most of its member nations want Iran to scrap enrichment plans as a confidence building measure, something Tehran says it is not prepared to do.
Tehran plans to run 50,000 centrifuges to enrich uranium in the central city of Natanz. Iran says the Natanz facility is meant to meet the fuel requirements of a nuclear reactor being built with Russian help that is expected to be finished next year.
For now, it is far short of that goal, possessing less than 1,000 centrifuges, most of them bought secretly through the black market network of Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Kahn, the rest made domestically.
But Albright says Iran is not far away from being able to make the 20 kilograms -- or nearly 45 pounds -- of highly enriched uranium needed for one crude weapon.
``If you have 1,500 centrifuges ... they can make enough highly enriched uranium for about a bomb a year,'' says Albright, now the head of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington. He described any weapon Iran would be able to produce as packing about one-fifth the punch that hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Feed stock for the centrifuges is not a problem. Iran has huge reserves of raw uranium and last week announced plans to extract more than 40 tons a year.
Converted to uranium hexafluoride and repeatedly spun in centrifuges, that amount could theoretically yield about 100 kilograms -- or more than 200 pounds -- of weapons-grade highly enriched uranium -- ``hypothetically enough to make five crude nuclear weapons,'' says Albright.
But making enough weapons-grade uranium is only part of the equation. The bomb -- or warhead -- must also be fabricated using detailed blueprints.
Plans for such devices are available on the black market -- Libya bought engineers' drawings of a Chinese-made bomb through the Khan network as part of its covert nuclear program that it renounced last year.
Iran says it does not have such drawings, and no evidence has been found to dispute that claim. Still, Albright says that it is possible that Iran already possesses a copy. And while having such blueprints would be ``immensely helpful'' to Iranian scientists, they are expert enough to draw them themselves, if necessary, says Albright.
He described the Chinese design Libya owed up to having as something ``that would not take a lot of modifying'' to fit it on Iran's successfully tested Shahab-3 ballistic missile.
Equipped with a nuclear warhead, such a missile could add a huge dose of volatility in the Middle East. It has a range of about 810 miles -- enough to reach Israel, which would be likely to respond in kind.
On the Net:
Institute for Science and International Security: http://www.isis-online.org
International Atomic Energy Agency: http://www.iaea.org
----
US gives up on getting Iran to UN Security Council in September: US official
Saturday September 11, 2004
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/040910/1/3n1zj.html
The United States now realizes that it does not have the majority it needs at the UN nuclear watchdog to bring Iran before the UN Security Council over Tehran's alleged atomic weapons program, a US official told AFP.
"We recognize we are not going to get majority support for a non-compliance finding (to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) in September" at the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) 35-nation board of governors meeting in Vienna that begins Monday, a US state department official told AFP by phone from Washington.
The official said US Under Secretary of State for arms control and international security John Bolton was now talking in Geneva with European diplomats "about a trigger mechanism" to effectively set a deadline for Iran ahead of the following IAEA board meeting in November.
The trigger could be "to require that Iran suspend immediately and fully all uranium enrichment-related work" or "for Iran to grant complete, immediate, unrestricted access to whatever locations the IAEA deems necessary" or for Iran to provide by a certain date, such as October 31, "full information on all imported materials and components relevant to the P1 and P2 centrifuge program," the official said.
Uranium can be enriched through centrifuges into a highly refined form that can be used as fuel for civilian reactors or to make an atomic bomb.
Europe's three main countries -- Britain, France and Germany -- are against taking Iran to the Security Council as they stress cooperating with Tehran to get it to come clean about its program.
But diplomats said the three countries were now backing the US call for Iran to fully suspend enrichment, including the first step of converting mineral uranium yellowcake into the gas that is the feedstock for making the enriched uranium that can be used in bombs.
A "tactical gap" between Washington and the European countries was narrowing but "we have a ways to go," Bolton told a news conference in Geneva, following a US-hosted meeting with his counterparts from the other Group of Eight (G8) industrialized countries.
"The objective that the United States has been pursuing has been to ensure that Iran does not acquire a nuclear weapons capability and that is an objective shared by all of the G-8 countries," Bolton said.
"There is no disagreement on our broad objective. What we have tried to do here today and yesterday was to close the tactical gap that has existed between the United States and ... Britain France and Germany," he said.
"We made progress in that regard here ... I think discussions will continue over the weekend and into next week and we will see what we are able to do."
The US envoy declined, however, to say exactly what advances had been made.
"I do not want to really get into the specifics because the questions of closing the tactical gap I think are best addressed in private consultations," he said, adding that emails and telephone calls would follow Friday's talks.
The United States and the Euro 3 are separately preparing resolutions for Monday's IAEA meeting in Vienna.
Iran's controversial bid to generate nuclear power at its Bushehr plant is seen by arch-enemies Israel and the United States as a cover for nuclear weapons development, allegations that Iran denies.
Government officials from the G8 countries -- Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States -- as well as other nations met in Geneva on Thursday to discuss non-proliferation issues.
----
Europe Compromises with U.S. on Iran Nuke Deadline
September 11, 2004
REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-nuclear-iran.html
VIENNA (Reuters) - France, Britain and Germany have met a key U.S. demand by drafting a U.N. nuclear resolution that sets a November deadline for Iran to dispel worries it has a covert atom bomb program, diplomats said on Saturday.
But the draft does not order Tehran to be automatically reported to the U.N. Security Council if it does not meet the date, as Washington would have wished.
A Western diplomat who follows the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) read parts of the draft text, which will be revised before being formally submitted to the IAEA board of governors, to Reuters over the telephone.
``The resolution calls upon the IAEA to make some kind of final assessment in November'' on whether it is sufficiently convinced that Tehran is not secretly diverting nuclear resources to a weapons program, the diplomat said.
The IAEA has been investigating Tehran's nuclear program ever since a group of Iranian exiles reported in August 2002 that Tehran was hiding a uranium enrichment plant and a heavy water facility from the U.N.
Washington accuses Iran of developing nuclear weapons under cover of an atomic energy program, a charge Iran vehemently denies. The IAEA has found many previously concealed nuclear activities in Iran but no ``smoking gun'' backing the U.S. view.
The United States had originally hoped that the IAEA board would report Iran next week to the U.N. Security Council, which has the power to impose sanctions, for violating the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) by concealing potentially weapons-related activities for nearly two decades.
U.S. officials had been pushing the European Union's big three states to give up their strategy of trying to persuade Iran to abandon uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing and get tough with Iran. But diplomats in Vienna said Washington has few supporters of an immediate Security Council report.
Washington wanted the Europeans to include a ``trigger mechanism'' in the text. The diplomat said the draft did not have an overt ``trigger mechanism'' that would automatically require the IAEA board to report Iran to the Security Council in November.
Instead, he said, it calls for the board to consider whether ``further steps'' are needed, but in no way requires it to report Tehran to the Security Council, something the Europeans believe would be counterproductive at the present time.
A FLEXIBLE ``TRIGGER''
``It's something that allows the U.S. to say it has a trigger without locking the Europeans into any course of action in the event the IAEA is unable to report in November it is satisfied Iran doesn't have a weapons program,'' a diplomat said.
The draft makes no mention of the Security Council at all.
The European and U.S. compromise came out of meetings between U.S. Under Secretary of State John Bolton and his counterparts from France, Britain and Germany on the sidelines of a G8 meeting in Geneva, Switzerland.
It was unclear what Tehran's position on the draft text was. Iran's ambassador to the U.N. in Vienna was not immediately available for comment on it.
It was also unclear whether Iran would agree to a European demand to fully suspend its nuclear fuel cycle activities, something it promised in October 2003 but has never fully implemented.
The draft resolution says the IAEA board views Iran's failure to suspend with ``serious concern,'' a diplomat said.
-------- japan
Mihama reactor's B pipes breached rules
Yomiuri Shimbun
September 11, 2004
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/newse/20040907wo24.htm
The walls of the second pipe system's B system pipes at the No. 3 reactor of Mihama Nuclear Power Plant in Mihamacho, Fukui Prefecture, have been found to be thinner than allowed under government standards, according to an inspection by a government nuclear safety agency.
The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, which is under the wing of the Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry, announced the results of its inspection Monday.
The second system pipes consist of A and B system pipes, the former of which caused the fatal Aug. 9 steam blowout at the reactor in which five workers were killed and six injured. Both pipe systems have been found to be in breach of government thickness standards.
The agency said there was a possibility that a similar accident could occur in the B system pipes, saying the thinnest walls were only 1.8-millimeters thick and the pipes were at high risk.
Monday's announcement at an inspection committee meeting held the same day in Fukui revealed the poor safety management of the nuclear power plant's operator, Kansai Electric Power Co.
KEPCO did not inspect the A or B system pipes during the 28 years or so in which they were in use.
Fukui prefectural police investigated the two systems to compare the thickness of the walls and discovered erosion of the pipe walls in the B system in the lower reaches of a device that measures the flow of cooling water.
At their thinnest, the pipe walls were only 1.8-millimeters thick--less than half the minimum 4.7 millimeters specified under government regulations.
----
Radioactive leak at Tokaimura plant caused by worn-out valves
Saturday, September 11, 2004
(Kyodo News)
http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=news&cat=1&id=311806
MITO, Japan - A radioactive leak that occurred at a nuclear fuel-reprocessing plant in Tokaimura, Ibaraki Prefecture, in June was caused by worn-out valves that had not been replaced for about 30 years, the plant's operator said Friday.
The Japan Nuclear Cycle Development Institute said in a report that it found worn-out components in four valves attached to pipes for liquid nitric acid, from which the radioactive leak occurred. The material contains plutonium and uranium.
-------- korea
Despite economic decline, N. Korea puts its military first
By Joseph Giordono,
Stars and Stripes Pacific edition,
Saturday, September 11, 2004
http://stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=23460&archive=true
USFK commander Gen. Leon J. LaPorte says $1.1 billion in high-tech upgrades will bolster security despite a drawdown in troops.
SEOUL - The top U.S. military commander in South Korea said Thursday that he has not seen a downgrade in North Korea's conventional military capabilities despite years of economic decline.
Speaking to 70 journalists at the Seoul Foreign Correspondents Club, U.S. Forces Korea commander Gen. Leon J. LaPorte said there was no sign widespread food shortages and years of economic isolation have downgraded the North's military capability.
"I haven't seen any significant change in the North Korean military in the past two years," LaPorte said.
"If they're suffering economic demise, then it's the North Korean people that are suffering, because they continue to have a military-first policy where they provide economic support to their military."
In a wide-ranging speech and question-and-answer session, LaPorte commented on topics ranging from the 2-year-old Good Neighbor Program to U.S. forces' reduction and realignment plans in South Korea.
LaPorte was optimistic that an agreement soon could be reached on the timetable for removing 12,500 U.S. personnel from South Korea. Originally, U.S. officials wanted the reduction complete by the end of next year, but South Korean negotiators want at least another year.
"I'm confident that the consultations will continue in that vein and that in very short time, we will come to a mutually agreed-upon solution. ... But there are many factors that must be considered relative to that decision. I can tell you confidently, they are all being considered and discussed. That's why the process is taking so long," LaPorte said.
The proposal drew concern in South Korea, with many fearing a "security vacuum" in the midst of the nuclear standoff with North Korea. LaPorte rejected that notion Thursday.
"As the combat commander here in Korea, I am very confident in the decisions we've made and in the fact that we've not created a security vacuum - that capabilities rather than a numerical number is what's important," he said, listing some of the $11 billion in high-tech upgrades planned for the next three years.
The 150 technological and performance areas targeted, LaPorte said, include "enhanced precision munitions, combat aircraft upgrades, enhanced aviation lift capabilities, significant advancements in the command and control communications, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance equipment, air defense enhancements and pre-positioned stocks of military equipment."
LaPorte also said initiatives such as the Good Neighbor Program - which emphasize bringing U.S. servicemembers and Korean citizens together in cultural and educational settings - have helped quell some of the anti-American sentiments mainly found in younger South Koreans.
"I would be less than honest if I did not say that expressions of anti-American sentiment have an impact on young U.S. servicemembers serving overseas. But I will tell you that impact on morale has been very minimal," LaPorte said.
"And I credit that first of all to the maturity of the young men and women who serve in the U.S. military, and their dedication - regardless of where they're stationed and what conditions they face - to execute their mission."
----
DPRK says to link S. Korean experiments to nuclear talks
2004-09-11
(Xinhuanet)
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2004-09/11/content_1969316.htm
SEOUL, Sept. 11 -- Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) said on Saturday that it would link the South Korea's secret nuclear experiments to a new round of six-party talks, South Korea's Yonhap news agency quotes DPRK's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) as saying.
DPRK's Foreign Ministry spokesman told the official KCNA that the country cannot help linking the South Korea's nuclear experiments to a new round of six-party talks scheduled to be held before the end of the month.
"We strongly doubt that South Korea's nuclear experiments were conducted for a military purpose. The United States might have orchestrated it (the experiments)," the spokesman was quoted by the KCNA.
South Korea acknowledged over the past week that its scientists conducted experiments on a small amount of uranium in 2000 and extracted a small amount of plutonium in 1982, two important ingredients for producing nuclear weapons.
----
N. Korea Says to Link South Atomic News to Talks
September 11, 2004
REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-nuclear-korea-north.html
SEOUL, South Korea (Reuters) - North Korea said Saturday it would link South Korea's disclosure of unauthorized nuclear experiments by government scientists to efforts to restart multiparty talks on the North's nuclear arms ambitions.
South Korea said in back-to-back admissions this month that state-affiliated scientists had enriched uranium in 2000 and extracted plutonium in 1982.
``We cannot but help linking this news with holding six-party talks,'' the North's Foreign Ministry spokesman told the official KCNA news agency in a statement that also accused Washington of orchestrating the South's atomic experiments.
South Korea and the United States, along with China, Russia and Japan, are trying to restart the stalled six-party discussions with North Korea to resolve a nuclear security crisis gripping the divided peninsula and the region.
The United States, Japan and South Korea agreed on Friday to try to arrange a fresh round of North Korea talks this month despite growing concerns it might be tough to do so.
``The South is under the U.S. nuclear umbrella and we can't give up our nuclear plan at all under such circumstances,'' said the KCNA report. ``This should be investigated in a thorough and transparent manner and appropriate steps need to be taken.''
North Korea's statement did not say it would boycott talks.
Seoul had been aiming for a Sept. 22 resumption of the discussions. But the recent revelations of unsanctioned South Korean nuclear experiments could put that at risk, and the North may see little incentive to budge before November's U.S. presidential election, analysts have said.
Washington's top U.S. envoy on North Korea, James Kelly, professed to be optimistic on Friday, saying he still hoped the talks would take place this month.
``We're very much interested in having the six-party talks by the end of September as consensus in June had determined, and we're talking about how to do that,'' he said in Tokyo after meeting his Japanese and South Korean counterparts.
The nuclear crisis erupted in October 2002 when U.S. diplomats said Pyongyang had admitted pursuing a covert uranium enrichment program, in addition to a plutonium program that was suspended as part of a 1994 accord.
North Korea has since denied the existence of the uranium program but has unfrozen its plutonium program. U.S. officials say it may have enough nuclear material for eight bombs.
Pyongyang's Saturday statement repeated that denial and accused Washington of applying double standards on the peninsula. ``The U.S. is applying double standard as it overlooks nuclear activities by its ally while tries to force us to stop peaceful nuclear activities based on groundless information,'' it said.
U.S. officials have said they believe that North Korea's nuclear activities are primarily focused on weapons.
South Korean officials were expected to travel to Vienna next week to explain the uranium and plutonium cases at a board meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog.
Seoul insists it has no wish to produce nuclear weapons.
South Korean officials said that nuclear researchers had acted without government permission when they enriched trace amounts of uranium in 2000 and extracted a tiny quantity of plutonium in 1982.
--------
North Korea Won't Abandon Nuclear Programs
September 11, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Koreas-Nuclear.html
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- North Korea said Saturday that South Korea's secret nuclear experiments involving uranium and plutonium make the communist state more determined to pursue its own nuclear programs, a news report said.
A spokesman for North Korea's Foreign Ministry condemned the South Korean nuclear experiments, conducted in 1982 and 2000, as ``clearly of military nature,'' according to Pyongyang's official news agency KCNA, monitored by South Korea's national news agency Yonhap.
Officials had feared the recent revelations of those experiments would affect the prospects for six-nation talks aimed at persuading North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons programs, the unnamed North Korean spokesman was quoted as saying.
``We strongly suspect that the United States may have masterminded the experiments that were clearly of military nature,'' he was quoted as saying. ``We cannot but link these developments with the issue of holding six-party talks.''
South Korea said Thursday that it extracted a tiny amount of plutonium, a key element for making atomic bombs, in a nuclear experiment in 1982. That revelation followed an acknowledgment last week that it enriched a small amount of uranium -- another element that could be used to make a bomb -- in 2000.
The controversy over South Korea's experiments has threatened to further disrupt troubled efforts to persuade North Korea to dismantle its suspected nuclear weapons programs.
``Under these circumstances, it is only natural that we should never give up our nuclear program,'' the North Korean spokesman said.
The North Korean threat, which follows a pattern of issuing hard-line statements in times of crucial negotiations, came as a delegation of top Chinese government and Communist Party leaders are visiting Pyongyang to discuss issues including the North's nuclear programs.
China, North Korea's key ally, has been host to three rounds of six-nation talks on ending North Korea's nuclear ambitions, but those talks ended without breakthroughs. The talks involve the United States, the two Koreas, China, Japan and Russia.
In a meeting in Tokyo, diplomats from Japan, South Korea and the United States reconfirmed Friday that the next round of six-nation talks must be held later this month as scheduled.
North Korea's reluctance to participate has stalled efforts to restart the talks, while South Korea's recent acknowledgment it had conducted nuclear experiments threatened to further complicate the negotiations.
South Korea denies any nuclear weapons ambitions, calling those experiments purely ``scientific research activities.'' It says it has been cooperating fully with U.N. nuclear inspectors to ensure transparency.
In an interview Friday with The Associated Press, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said Powell attached minimal importance to the recent disclosures that South Korea had engaged in a uranium enrichment experiment four years ago and a plutonium-based nuclear experiment two decades ago.
``It's quite clear that these were not intended other than for academic, experimental purposes, and it's over with and I think that's, frankly, the end of the matter,'' Powell said.
``I don't see any great significance to them, but the North Koreans always like to seize on anything to make their point.''
In its first reaction to the South Korean experiments, however, a North Korean envoy to the United Nations in New York warned Wednesday that the South Korean nuclear activities could trigger a nuclear arms race in Northeast Asia.
--------
British, Chinese teams in NKorea as Pyongyang hints at nuclear talks delay
SEOUL (AFP)
Sep 11, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040911114336.rsllj6tm.html
British and Chinese officials were in Pyongyang on Saturday as North Korea said it may boycott or delay multilateral talks on its nuclear drive after the revelations of South Korea's atomic experiments.
Foreign office minister Bill Rammell Saturday become the first British minister to visit North Korea as part of the international drive to persuade Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear weapons program.
Before leaving London, Rammell told reporters "this is the start of a very, very long haul to try to edge North Korea back from complete isolation."
Playing down chances of quick results, Rammell said he would ask North Korea to follow the example of Libya, which announced it was abandoning its program for weapons of mass destruction after secret talks with Britain and the United States.
In July Pyongyang rejected a US demand that it follow Tripoli's example.
Ramell's visit coincides with that of a top-ranking Chinese delegation led by Li Changchun, a member of the Communist Party's powerful nine-strong standing committee.
North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said Kim Yong-Nam, president of Pyongyang's equivalent to a parliament, held talks with Li.
It said the two leaders had a "friendly talk," accompanied by other senior officials including Chinese vice foreign minister Wu Dawei and his North Korean counterpart Kim Yong-Il.
Li, who arrived in Pyongyang on Friday, is expected to meet North Korea's supreme leader Kim Jong-Il.
The flurry of diplomatic activity by Britain and Pyongyang's Chinese ally is seen as a last-ditch bid to encourage North Korea back to faltering six-way talks over its nuclear weapons program.
Pyongyang however hinted that the next round of talks due this month, between the two Koreas, Japan, China, Russia and the United States, could be jeopardised by Seoul's admission that South Korean scientists carried out nuclear experiments.
"We cannot but link these cases to the issue of resuming the six-party talks," a North Korean foreign ministry spokesman was quoted as telling KCNA.
"The US has applied double standards as regards the nuclear issue. It has transferred nuclear technology to its 'allies' and connived at their nuclear weapon-related activities and possession of nukes," he said.
"What matters is whether the United States intends to overlook South Korea's development of nuclear weapons as it did that of Israel."
"South Korea is under US nuclear umbrella. It is self-evident that the DPRK (North Korea) can never abandon its nuclear program under such situation," he added.
He indicated that Pyongyang might not attend the six-nation talks until the South clears its name before the international community over the nuclear experiments.
South Korea admitted over the past week that its scientists produced a microscopic amount of enriched uranium in a lab experiment in 2000 and also extracted a tiny amount of plutonium in 1982.
Both can be used for atomic bombs but Seoul said the experiments were purely for academic purposes and denied it had any weapons programmes.
Seoul's admission prompted North Korea to accuse the US of double standards and warn of an arms race in Northeast Asia.
The stand-off over North Korea flared in October 2002 when the United States accused Pyongyang of operating a nuclear weapons program based on enriched uranium, violating a 1994 agreement.
Pyongyang has denied running the uranium-based program but has restarted its plutonium program.
-------- u.n.
IAEA Considers Action on Countries' Failure to Report Nuclear Activities
Marlene Smith Vienna
11 Sep 2004,
http://www.voanews.com/article.cfm?objectID=323A9930-A0F0-4406-AD9FE9E0BB1B5676&title=IAEA%20Considers%20Action%20on%20Countries'%20Failure%20to%20Report%20Nuclear%20Activities&catOID=45C9C78B-88AD-11D4-A57200A0CC5EE46C&categoryname=Asia%20Pacific
The International Atomic Energy Agency board of governors meets behind closed doors Monday to discuss whether failures by Iran and South Korea to fully declare nuclear experiments should go to the United Nations Security Council.
It was only last year that the IAEA learned of Iran's ambitious nuclear program, which had been kept secret from the world for almost two decades.
Since then, the U.N. nuclear watchdog has struggled to assess whether Tehran's nuclear capability is part of a concerted plan to build nuclear weapons.
A resolution passed by the IAEA board in June complained that Iran had not declared equipment for a nuclear research reactor that could produce bomb grade plutonium.
The IAEA says there are indications that plutonium already produced by Iran is more recent than Tehran claims.
The IAEA says that in some cases, despite repeated requests, information was provided by Tehran too late to be analyzed for next week's meeting.
An internal IAEA report mentions one site that was considered relevant to Tehran's nuclear activities that was razed to the ground by Iranian authorities.
The IAEA says Iran refused to give the agency a list of equipment used at the center, citing security reasons. In June, Iran removed IAEA seals on sensitive equipment with the knowledge of, but in the absence of, international inspectors. Iran returned the seals to the IAEA and announced it would restart the manufacture, testing and assembly of nuclear equipment that can be used in a civilian or a military program.
For the United States and other countries such as Canada and Australia the failure to report activities in accordance with international treaty obligations should be reported to the United Nations Security Council.
But the 35-nation IAEA board includes allies of Iran from the Non-Aligned countries and Europeans who prefer bargaining over confrontation with Tehran.
The IAEA will also hear an initial report on South Korea's recent admission that it had produced plutonium in the 1980s and carried on uranium enrichment without the knowledge of the agency.
Shahram Chubin, Director of Research at the Geneva Center for Security Policy says this issue poses a problem.
"I think there is a real danger this thing is getting out of hand because when the South Koreans turn round and say that they feel that this whole question of enrichment, enriched uranium coming from abroad is rather oppressive and expensive for them and they'd like to be able to do it themselves, well that's the sort of thing that is particularly worrisome because the U.S. is trying to cut off enrichment to any country that doesn't have it yet"," he said.
The United States has said there can be no double standards and the South Korean case should be reported to the U.N. Security Council.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- new york
INDIAN POINT: IMAGINING THE UNIMAGINABLE
September 11, 2004
HBO
http://www.hbo.com/docs/programs/indianpoint/synopsis.html
On the banks of the Hudson River, just 35 miles north of midtown Manhattan, sits the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant. Approximately 20 million people live within a 50-mile radius of Indian Point -- the highest population density surrounding any nuclear power plant in the nation.
Once touted as a dependable source of cheap, clean energy, nuclear power plants have become flashpoints for debate in the wake of 9/11. With the "9/11 Commission Report" revealing that terrorist groups have included U.S. nuclear power plants in their plans, the possibility of a terrorist attack on such a facility has become alarming.
INDIAN POINT: IMAGINING THE UNIMAGINABLE investigates why Indian Point has become such a lightning rod following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Although the plant is 40 years old, its current owner, New Orleans-based Entergy Corporation, maintains that Indian Point is "safe, secure and vital." Opponents argue otherwise, believing its location makes it a particularly attractive terrorist target, and are fighting for its shutdown.
The risk of a radioactive release is a grave concern. Many fear that Indian Point is vulnerable to an air strike because of the lack of a "no-fly zone" over the plant. In addition, some have maintained the plant's security is ill-prepared to defend against a terrorist attack. Furthermore, Indian Point has been cited for a series of safety violations over the years.
INDIAN POINT: IMAGINING THE UNIMAGINABLE assesses the real risk of keeping the plant open in the face of post-9/11 security concerns. The documentary questions the condition of the facility, the fitness of the security force and the diligence of our government's oversight. Exploring the viewpoints of advocates committed to shutting down the plant, as well as the plant's supporters, who assert that Indian Point is sufficiently safe, the film features interviews with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., chief prosecuting attorney for Riverkeeper, an environmental conservation group, and representatives from the Nuclear Energy Institute and FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency).
The documentary also includes interviews with Alex Matthiessen, executive director of Riverkeeper; Edward McGaffigan, Jr. commissioner of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission; Rep. Edward Markey of Massachusetts; author Al Franken; Marvin Fertel, senior vice president of the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI); James Lee Witt, former director of FEMA; and Helen Caldicott, M.D., founder and president of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute.
INDIAN POINT: IMAGINING THE UNIMAGINABLE is produced, directed and narrated for Moxie Firecracker Films by Rory Kennedy; produced by Liz Garbus; producer and writer, Jack Youngelson; editor, David Zieff. For HBO: supervising producer, Nancy Abraham; executive producer, Sheila Nevins.
-------- ohio
Nuclear Cleanup Further Postponed
September 11, 2004
Associated Press
http://www.onnnews.com/Global/story.asp?S=2262139&nav=LQlCQb9w
The U-S Department of Energy says the contractor responsible for cleaning up nuclear sludge sitting in silos near Cincinnati is unprepared to start the job.
The department said in an August report that its contractor, Fluor Fernald Incorporated, failed to identify and correct significant deficiencies prior to declaring readiness. The contractor had said it was ready to begin moving radioactive sludge from two silos into temporary holding tanks at the former Fernald nuclear weapons plant in northwest Hamilton County.
Fluor Fernald officials say the criticism was warranted, but is not indicative of where the project is now.
Federal officials hope to complete the more than $4 billion cleanup in 2006. The site will eventually be a wildlife area.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Taliban Head Told U.S. Official Clinton Should Be Ousted
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 11, 2004; Page A09
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12717-2004Sep10.html
Two days after U.S. missiles struck Afghanistan in retaliation for al Qaeda's bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998, the head of that country's Taliban government told a State Department official that Congress should force then President Bill Clinton to resign "in order to rebuild U.S. popularity in the Islamic world," according to documents released yesterday.
The suggestion is contained in a newly declassified State Department cable recounting the first and only direct communication between the U.S. government and Mohammad Omar, the reclusive Taliban leader who was reaching out in the wake of the U.S. strikes on alleged al Qaeda facilities in his country and Sudan.
The Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, said Congress should force President Bill Clinton to resign, a 1998 State Department cable reported.
The cable was among more than a dozen Taliban-related documents released late yesterday by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, which obtained the records through a Freedom of Information Act request and posted them on its Web site, www.nsarchive.org.
In the Aug. 22, 1998, telephone conversation with U.S. diplomat Michael E. Malinowski, Omar "parroted" many of the hard-line views of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who had been given sanctuary in Afghanistan by the Taliban. Omar said he "was aware of no evidence that bin Laden had engaged in or planned terrorist acts while on Afghan soil" and warned that the missile strikes "could spark more, not less, terrorist attacks," according to the cable.
Omar also offered a political suggestion to Malinowski, who then was head of the State Department's Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh desk. "He said that in order to rebuild U.S. popularity in the Islamic world and because of his current domestic political difficulties Congress should force President Clinton to resign," according to the cable.
Clinton at the time was the target of an investigation by independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr in connection with the Monica S. Lewinsky affair and would soon face impeachment in the House. Some Republican leaders had openly suggested that Clinton had ordered the strikes on Afghanistan and Sudan to divert attention from his troubles, an allegation that the Sept. 11 commission recently declared an unfounded "slur."
Although the phone conversation had been described previously, the release of the Omar cable and others provides the most detailed accounting to date of U.S. efforts to pressure the Taliban into denying bin Laden safe haven. State Department spokesman Kurtis A. Cooper said the conversation with Malinowski is the only one that occurred between Omar and the U.S. government.
The other records released yesterday include a September 1998 cable recounting the comments of Abdul Hakim Mujahid, the Taliban envoy to the United Nations, who told a U.S. official that Omar "is the primary reason" that bin Laden continued to enjoy sanctuary in Afghanistan. The envoy was reported as saying that "80% of Taliban officials oppose this [sanctuary] policy."
--------
Afghan Ruler Again Says No to Coalition Government
September 11, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-afghan-election-karzai.html
KABUL, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Frustrated by his dealings with regional rivals, Afghan President Hamid Karzai reiterated Saturday that he would not form a coalition government if he won the country's first direct presidential election on Oct. 9.
Karzai, unveiling a sparse manifesto four days after the official start of campaigning, said he would crack down on factional fighting between warlords and commanders and make national security a priority if elected.
``I will be working on the following issues in the coming five years,'' Karzai said, ``a law abiding, based on national partnership, non-coalition government for strengthening stability and security.''
Karzai's speech -- to an audience of several hundred at the state television center -- contained little that hasn't been said before and focused on continuity, stability and security.
But his rivals have also offered little new in the way of initiative in a low key start to the October poll. The election seems sure to be fought on personality rather than policy.
Karzai, named interim president after the overthrow of the Taliban regime late in 2001, said he would press to disarm factional forces who, along with the growing insurgency by Taliban remnants and their Islamic allies, are seen to be threatening his government.
CHIEF RIVAL
Former education minister Yunus Qanuni is regarded as his chief rival among 17, after deciding to contest the election when Karzai dumped the current first vice president and powerful Defense Minister Mohammad Qasim Fahim as running mate.
Both Qanuni and Fahim are key members of the Northern Alliance that helped U.S.-led troops in oust the Taliban, but the group has gradually lost cohesion.
The poll is seen as a crucial test of Washington's nation-building efforts ahead of President Bush's own bid for re-election in November.
The vote has twice been delayed -- partly due to growing insecurity in Afghanistan where more than 1,000 people, including aid workers, militants, civilians Afghan and foreign troops, have been killed in the past year.
The violence is the bloodiest since the U.S.-led military invaded Afghanistan and helped overthrew the Taliban for refusing to hand over al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, who Washington says masterminded Sept.11 on the United States.
More than 10.5 million people among a population of between 25 million and 28 million have registered to vote, far surpassing earlier expectations but provoking accusations of multiple registrations.
Victory requires 51 percent of the vote, otherwise a run-off will be called, which could delay results until November.
-------- africa
Briton Jailed for Arms Dealings
Zimbabwe Case Linked to Coup Plot in Equatorial Guinea
By Stella Mapenzauswa
Reuters
Saturday, September 11, 2004; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13104-2004Sep10.html
HARARE, Zimbabwe, Sept. 10 -- A Zimbabwean court jailed a former British special services officer for seven years Friday in a case prosecutors linked to a foiled coup attempt in the oil-rich country of Equatorial Guinea.
Simon Mann, 51, had pleaded guilty to attempting to buy weapons from Zimbabwe's state arms manufacturer, but he has insisted that the arms were to be used for guarding mining operations in eastern Congo.
State prosecutors had sought to connect Mann with 14 mercenaries on trial in Equatorial Guinea on charges of trying to oust Teodoro Obiang Nguema, the longtime president of the tiny West African country.
The Zimbabwean court also jailed 65 suspected mercenaries, all South African citizens, for 12 months on related charges. The two pilots of a plane carrying the suspected mercenaries that was seized at the Harare airport in March were sentenced to 16 months.
Magistrate Mishrod Guvamombe made no reference to the coup plot when passing sentence.
Defense attorneys said they would not appeal.
Mark Thatcher, son of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, was arrested last month in South Africa on suspicion of helping bankroll the plot.
Guvamombe said Mann would serve four years for trying to buy weapons that included antitank missiles, hand grenades and assault rifles as well as three years for trying to buy them without a license.
"Both offenses in my view are serious. Both offenses were well planned and well executed, and that must be reflected in the sentence," he said.
Mann founded two security firms that became bywords for mercenary activity across Africa in the 1990s, using the expertise he had gained as an officer in Britain's Special Air Service. He is expected to serve his sentence in the crowded, high-security Chikurubi prison, where the trial was held.
Distraught relatives of the men wept outside the makeshift courtroom after the ruling was handed down.
"I am devastated. I can't believe it. They have already done six months, and with this sentence, it is now 18 months," said a weeping Marge Pain, whose husband was on the plane.
The trial of the 14 suspected mercenaries underway in Equatorial Guinea, sub-Saharan Africa's third-biggest oil producer, is due to resume Oct. 1, after investigators visit South Africa to observe Mark Thatcher's trial. The court will question Thatcher, who was freed on $300,000 bail, on Sept. 22.
Thatcher has denied involvement in any coup plot.
--------
Zimbabwe Sentences Briton to 7 Years in Jail on Arms Charge
September 11, 2004
By MICHAEL WINES
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/11/international/africa/11africa.html?pagewanted=all
JOHANNESBURG, Sept. 10 - Simon Mann, the British soldier of fortune accused of masterminding a botched coup attempt in March against Equatorial Guinea's ruler, was sentenced Friday to seven years in prison for illegally trying to buy weapons in Zimbabwe.
A Zimbabwean magistrate sentenced 67 others to terms ranging from one year to 16 months for violations of immigration law.
Most of the men were seized after their northbound jet landed at the main airport in Harare, Zimbabwe, in March, apparently to pick up the weapons Mr. Mann had contracted to buy.
News agencies reported that the jail sentences stunned many in the courtrooms, including some wives and children of the accused who burst into tears. Many outsiders had predicted that Mr. Mann and the others would escape with little more than stiff fines for their convictions, which did not directly pertain to their involvement in the coup attempt.
"I'm devastated. My husband is not a mercenary," Marge Payne, the wife of a flight engineer, Ken Payne, was quoted by Agence France-Presse as saying after he had been given a one-year prison sentence. "I thought he was going to get a fine. I can't believe this is happening."
But the magistrate, Mishrod Guvamombe, said he intended to "send a clear message to others who harbor similar intentions" to break the nation's weapons laws.
The court also seized a $170,000 down payment that Mr. Mann had made on the weapons and the Boeing 727 jet the men had flown into Zimbabwe.
The punishments were the first to be handed down in the coup scandal. An additional 19 accused plotters are on trial in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea's capital, where they could face far more severe penalties.
During the six-week trial, Mr. Mann admitted that he and his associates had sought to buy weapons from Zimbabwe's state arms industry. But he insisted that they were not meant to overthrow Equatorial Guinea's president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, but to guard a diamond mine in Congo.
Prosecutors rejected that argument, saying that documents from the plane and the nature of the arms - antitank weapons, grenade launchers and other offensive matériel - made it clear that they were to be used in a military operation.
Mr. Mann, a 51-year-old veteran of the British special forces, is a friend and neighbor of Mark Thatcher, the son of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain. Mr. Thatcher has been accused by South African prosecutors of helping finance the coup attempt.
Mr. Thatcher, who lives in Cape Town, has denied any role in the coup, but has said he invested in an air-ambulance project involving Mr. Mann.
-------- arms
'Coup' chief sentenced on arms deal
September 11, 2004
By Angus Shaw
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040910-104816-8900r.htm
HARARE, Zimbabwe - Former British special forces soldier Simon Mann, the purported leader of a foiled coup plot in oil-rich Equatorial Guinea, was sentenced yesterday to seven years in prison for trying to buy weapons from Zimbabwe's state arms manufacturer.
Magistrate Mishrod Guvamombe handed down the sentences in a makeshift courthouse inside the Chikurubi maximum-security prison near Harare, where Mann and other accused mercenaries have been detained since their March 7 arrest.
Most were taken into custody after their Boeing 727 landed at Harare International Airport during what prosecutors say was a plot to stage a coup in the west African nation of Equatorial Guinea - a scandal that also has implicated Mark Thatcher, the son of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
Mr. Thatcher, a neighbor of Mann's in an upscale suburb of Cape Town, South Africa, is accused of helping to finance the plot.
Yesterday, Magistrate Guvamombe made no reference to the coup plot.
Two flight crew members were sentenced to 16 months in prison, and 66 other suspected mercenaries received 12-month jail terms on minor immigration and aviation violations.
Nineteen others, including Europeans and Africans, are being tried in Equatorial Guinea in the suspected plot. Another defendant, a German, died shortly after his arrest in March after Amnesty International said he appeared to have been tortured.
Mann, 51, showed no emotion at his sentencing. At earlier hearings, he admitted trying to order assault rifles, grenades, anti-tank rocket launchers and other weapons from the Zimbabwe Defense Industries - an offense punishable by a maximum sentence of 10 years.
But he insisted the weapons were to be used for guarding mining operations in the eastern Congo and that he and the others were headed to security jobs there.
Zimbabwe prosecutors say Equatorial Guinea's Spain-based rebel leader, Severo Moto, offered the group $1.8 million and oil rights to overthrow President Teodoro Obiang Nguema. Mr. Obiang has presided for 25 years over what is widely considered one of the world's most corrupt and oppressive regimes.
Mann, the son of former England cricket captain George Mann and heir to the Watley Ale brewing fortune, graduated from Britain's elite Eton College and Sandhurst military academy.
The father of six went on to a distinguished military career, which reportedly included service in Cyprus, Central America, Germany and Northern Ireland. He left the military in the 1980s, returning only briefly to work with British commander Gen. Peter de la Billiere during the 1991 Persian Gulf war.
-------- business
Local Firms Join in $9 Billion
Contract Companies to Develop Air Force Communications System
By Michael Rosenwald
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 11, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13103-2004Sep10.html
The Air Force named a series of companies yesterday to share in as much as $9 billion in contracts for its next-generation communications system.
Lockheed Martin Corp. of Bethesda said a team of companies it leads was among those chosen for the Air Force's Network Centric Solutions program. In a statement, Lockheed Vice President Peter Rogers said the Air Force needs "information dominance for rapid mobility, global reach and power."
Among other contractors named by the Air Force to help provide the network "backbone" for the new system were Washington area companies General Dynamics Corp. of Falls Church; Northrop Grumman Information Technology of Herndon; Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. of McLean; Centech Group Inc. of Arlington; Multimax Inc. of Largo; NCI Information Systems Inc. of Reston; and Telos Corp. of Ashburn.
The five-year contract is only part of the Air Force's effort to provide real-time information on everything from troop movements to weapons supplies. Air Force briefing papers said the goal is to give U.S. forces an edge in warfare by connecting "sensors, decision-makers" and "shooters."
Lockheed said its team on the contract will include 10 other companies, including Lucent Technologies Inc., SBC Communications Inc. and IBM Global Services.
Thomas R. Temin, editor-in-chief of Government Computer News, contributed to this report.
--------
Judge Finds Halliburton Settlement Unacceptable
Challenge by Some Shareholders Upheld
By Robert O'Harrow Jr. and Carrie Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, September 11, 2004; Page E02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13102-2004Sep10.html
A federal judge in Dallas yesterday rejected a $6 million settlement in a shareholder suit that alleged Halliburton Co. engaged in accounting fraud, saying the lead plaintiffs' lawyer mishandled the case and may have settled for too little money.
The decision by U.S. District Judge Barbara M.G. Lynn followed a challenge of the proposed settlement by lawyers for some of the 800,000 shareholders. She found that the lead lawyer for the stockholders held secret meetings with Halliburton lawyers and reached the settlement agreement in June without the knowledge of other lead plaintiffs or their lawyers.
The lawsuit, filed in 2002, alleges that the company failed to disclose a change in accounting that enabled it to report higher earnings in 1998 and 1999, at a time when Dick Cheney served as chief executive. The ruling comes one month after the Houston oil services company agreed to pay $7.5 million to settle Securities and Exchange Commission charges that the company and two executives misled investors by the way it reported revenue from construction contracts.
Lynn said a quarter of the $6 million settlement went to lawyers' fees, and a shareholder with 100 affected shares could recover as little as 62 cents from the arrangement. "The Court does not have evidence this settlement was the product of fraud," she wrote. "However, the Court is not satisfied that the way in which the settlement negotiations were conducted assured a fair, reasonable, and adequate recovery to the class."
Neil Rothstein, an attorney for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee Supporting Fund, which challenged the proposed settlement, praised Lynn's decision. He called the proposal "completely inadequate."
"It conferred no benefit on anyone but the lawyers," Rothstein said, adding that his clients "stood up and said, 'We're not going to become poster children of a ridiculous settlement.' "
Halliburton officials said the settlement was fair and the judge's decision was wrong. "We believe that we offered a fair amount of money to settle claims that, in our opinion, have no merit," said spokeswoman Wendy Hall.
The case is unusual because serious rifts among plaintiff lawyers in large class-action cases are relatively rare. "The majority of these cases never have that situation arise," said Stanford University law professor Joseph A. Grundfest, who tracks class-action cases around the nation.
Richard Schiffrin, the lead shareholders' attorney the judge criticized, did not return a telephone call.
Lynn ordered Schiffrin's firm and Halliburton to make available "any and all documents and depositions" by Sept. 28 and said all the lead plaintiffs will meet to mediate the case by Nov. 1.
-------- iraq
Thousands Gather To Support Sadr
Two Killed as Iraqi Troops Fire on Crowd
By Steve Fainaru
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 11, 2004; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10991-2004Sep10.html
BAGHDAD, Sept. 10 -- Tens of thousands of people massed Friday in Baghdad to pray and chant slogans in support of the rebellious cleric Moqtada Sadr. U.S. forces, meanwhile, continued attacks in two Iraqi cities that insurgents control.
Religious and community leaders assembled crowds to walk from Sadr City, the Baghdad slum named after the cleric's slain father, to Imam Khadhimain mosque. The crowd, turning out on a Shiite holiday marking the death of a 9th-century imam, was large enough that thousands of worshipers laid carpets across the asphalt on the streets outside and prayed there.
The Reuters news agency reported that violence broke out as people were leaving the mosque. Iraqi police fired into the crowd, killing two people and injuring five; Sadr aides said the people were not armed.
The violence occurred as uncertainty mounted about Sadr's location and intentions. He and militiamen from his Mahdi Army abandoned a shrine in the city of Najaf under a negotiated settlement to end three weeks of fighting against U.S. and Iraqi forces late last month. Officials of Iraq's interim government have been trying to persuade Sadr to disarm the militia and turn it into a political organization, but no deal has been reached.
On Friday, men loyal to the cleric kidnapped four Iraqi policemen in Najaf and threatened to kill them unless Iraqi security forces stopped pursuing Sadr and his supporters, according to a video aired on the Arab television network al-Jazeera. The kidnapping came a day after Najaf police raided and searched Sadr's office.
Sadr had accepted a cease-fire under the Najaf agreement. With exceptions such as Friday's kidnapping, the Mahdi Army has been largely quiet in Najaf, but it has continued to fight U.S. forces in Sadr City.
On Friday, the thousands of people gathered at the Baghdad mosque heard Hazim Araji, a local sheik and an aide to Sadr, threaten more bloodshed if U.S. and Iraqi forces continued what Araji said were violations of the Najaf truce.
Araji mentioned attacks this week in Fallujah, 35 miles west of Baghdad, and Tall Afar, a city near the Syrian border that U.S. forces have bombed and encircled in an effort to drive out what the military has described as a "large terrorist element."
One Iraqi man was killed in bombing Friday in Fallujah, according to the Associated Press, quoting a physician there. The U.S. military said it has been trying to kill supporters of Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian linked to al Qaeda who is thought to be using Fallujah as a base of operations. But Arab television has shown repeated images of civilians, including young children, who it reported were killed or injured in the strikes.
In Tall Afar, an estimated 67 insurgents have been killed since the operation began Thursday, according to Lt. Col. Paul Hastings, a spokesman for the Army's 2nd Infantry Division, which has taken part in the fighting. There have been no American casualties, he said.
Hastings said most of the casualties resulted from three airstrikes against insurgents who had driven out the local U.S.-installed government and launched attacks against U.S. and Iraqi forces in recent weeks. Hastings said the U.S. military intervened after receiving a request from the provincial government in Ninevah.
Hastings said U.S. commanders believe 250 to 300 insurgents remain in Tall Afar, including some foreigners who may have come there from Fallujah. He said the insurgents appeared to have rocket-propelled grenades, small arms and mortars.
Hastings said that the insurgents had left local government ineffective and that the operation would not end until it had been reinstalled.
U.S. forces had set up checkpoints to monitor movements in and out of the city, Hastings said. In addition, the Iraqi Red Crescent was assisting hundreds of people who have been displaced by the fighting.
"This isn't over," he said. "The people of Tall Afar want a legitimate government."
Special correspondent Khalid Saffar contributed to this report.
--------
U.S. Aircraft Strike Insurgents in Falluja;
Kidnappers Want Iraqi Women Out of Jail
September 11, 2004
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/11/international/middleeast/11iraq.html?pagewanted=all
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 10 - American aircraft fired on insurgent positions in the city of Falluja for a fourth straight day on Friday, as the United States military tried to reassert control over the unruly city, which lies at the heart of the insurgency.
Meanwhile, Islamic militants holding two Italian aid workers and two Iraqis hostage demanded that Muslim female prisoners in Iraq be released within 24 hours or "Italian people will never discover the fate of the Italian women hostages," Agence France-Presse reported, citing a statement on a Web site used by Islamic groups.
At a briefing earlier this week, Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the head of the American detention system in Iraq, said only two Iraqi women were being held in American custody. Both were members of the government of Saddam Hussein.
The previously unknown group, which calls itself the Zawahiri Loyalists, apparently after Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian doctor who is believed to be the second in command of Al Qaeda, said it would "give a little information about the Italian female hostages," if its demand was met. But Iraq's interim president, Ghazi al-Yawar, expressed some doubts about the credibility of the group's claim, according to a statement from the office of the Italian prime minister, who met with Mr. Yawar in Rome today, The Associated Press reported.
A potential link surfaced between this week's kidnapping of the Italians - Simona Pari and Simona Torretta - and Islamic militants in Falluja, a city 35 miles west of Baghdad that has been out of the control of American and Iraqi government forces for months. Falluja residents said they saw leaflets posted on walls around the city offering information about the Italians, who were taken from their office in Baghdad by more than a dozen armed men on Tuesday.
American marines battled militants in Falluja this spring, but were ordered to withdraw before they could control the city. The Falluja Brigade, an American-assembled Iraqi force that was supposed to fill the security vacuum, has since collapsed. Now, Islamic militants have imposed a rigid, religious regime, complete with courts that administer justice based on teachings from the Koran, much like the former Taliban government in Afghanistan.
Friday's strikes in Falluja began at 11:50 a.m., military officials said, and were aimed at storehouses of equipment that they said was to be used in fighting American forces. "Insurgents within the city have begun to militarize buildings and restrict daily activity in the city," the American military said in a statement. Military officials said no one was killed in the attacks, although The Associated Press quoted Falluja hospital officials as saying one person died.
In airstrikes this week, American commanders say they have been bombing hideouts of foreign Arab fighters, including Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant believed by American officials to be Al Qaeda's most senior leader in Iraq.
An unconfirmed report on Friday night indicated that the American bombing campaign might have killed a much-wanted guerrilla leader. Turkish television broadcast a video from militants saying a suspected leader of a Turkish Qaeda cell had been killed by American airstrikes in Iraq, The Associated Press reported from Ankara.
The network said the video was prepared by the Unity and Jihad militant group, which is believed to be run by Mr. Zarqawi, and recently claimed responsibility for the execution of three Turkish hostages in Iraq. In the video, originally obtained by a Turkish news agency in Baghdad, a man was heard saying that the militant, Habib Akdas, was killed in a bombing raid this week in Anbar, a province that includes Falluja.
Mr. Akdas was identified in an indictment as one of the leaders in a series of bombings that killed 62 people in Turkey in November.
In Baghdad, a car bomb exploded just outside a Seventh-day Adventist Church late on Friday, shattering the windows and igniting a fire near a rear entrance to the building. There were no injuries. Witnesses said a driver parked a car near the church and sped away in another vehicle. The incident recalled the bombing of four Christian churches in August.
Earlier on Friday, two Lebanese citizens were shot and killed in their home by armed men dressed as police officers, said Sabah Khadim, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry. Mr. Khadim identified the two, a husband and wife, as Karim Khoury and Evlyn Abu-Daib.
In other violence, three Shiite worshipers were killed, apparently by Iraqi forces, as they marched in a large crowd toward a shrine on a religious holiday in Baghdad. Witnesses said Iraqi Army and Iraqi National Guard forces opened fire at about 2 p.m., just as the crowd began to cross a bridge to the Kadhimiya neighborhood. Five people were wounded, said Dr. Musab al-Athami, a doctor at Noman Hospital, where the injured were being treated.
"We were shocked," said Muhammad Jasim, 17, who was standing at the bedside of his cousin, whose shoulder was torn from a bullet during the shooting. "We are just pilgrims. We were not armed."
Mr. Khadim said he had no information about the alleged shooting. The Ministry of Defense, responsible for army and national guard forces, could not be reached for comment.
American military operations in the northern city of Tal Afar on Thursday, which killed more than 50 fighters, according to American commanders, drew criticism from a Shiite leader and from the Turkish government on Friday. Local hospital officials said Thursday that most of those killed had been civilians.
Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, a leading Shiite cleric here, criticized the American strikes in Tal Afar, near the Syrian border, saying Americans had caused "catastrophes," The Associated Press reported. Turkey also called on the American military to end the attacks, saying they had caused casualties among ethnic Turks in the area, The Associated Press said.
--------
THE MILITARY
U.S. Expects More Violence as Iraq Vote Draws Near
September 11, 2004
By ERIC SCHMITT and DAVID E. SANGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/11/international/middleeast/11rumsfeld.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Sept. 10 - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Friday that violence would intensify in Iraq as elections scheduled there for January approach and insurgents try to derail the country's nascent political process. But he and President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said the United States was determined to ensure that voting takes place as planned.
"There's no question but between now and the end of the year, the terrorists are determined to try to prevent the elections from taking place, and from taking place on time," Mr. Rumsfeld said in response to questions after a speech at the National Press Club.
"They're going to be going after coalition countries; they're going to be looking for weak spots; they're going to be going after people who are running for office."
In an interview on Friday, Ms. Rice said the militants had no alternative to offer but violence. "I do not think we are going to see a delay in the election," she said.
"The important thing is that the insurgents don't have a political program," she said, apart from creating chaos and causing death.
Mr. Rumsfeld and Ms. Rice both asserted that Iraqi and American forces would regain control of several important parts of central Iraq, like Falluja and Ramadi, that militants have seized in recent weeks. But neither official offered any specific details or timing.
"Nobody has ceded any area," Ms. Rice said, adding that the strategy in Iraq for the next few months is "straight ahead, keep the political process on track, keep the insurgents at bay. We've been doing a lot of damage to the safe houses of the terrorists and will do more."
In some cases, like in the recent clash in Najaf with forces loyal to the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, the Iraqi government would eventually regain control through negotiations, Mr. Rumsfeld said. But he said other places might require force.
"We know what will take place in Falluja, and that is that it will be restored as something under the control of the Iraqi government eventually," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "What we don't know is whether it will be done peacefully or by force. But one way or another, it will happen." The comments by two of Mr. Bush's senior national security aides, at the end of a week when the number of American military deaths in Iraq passed 1,000, seemed intended to try to quell growing concern among some lawmakers here and commanders in Iraq that the United States was ceding safe havens to militants until Iraqi security forces were sufficiently trained and equipped, or until after the American elections on Nov. 2.
Mr. Rumsfeld defended as "reasonable" the possibility of delaying any assault on the insurgent strongholds until the end of the year, when some 145,000 Iraqis are sufficiently trained and equipped.
Even if the Iraqi elections move forward on schedule, Mr. Rumsfeld said it was "unknowable" when security would be stable enough to withdraw the 136,000 American forces now in Iraq. "I have not said when we'll be out of Iraq because I don't know," Mr. Rumsfeld said in response to questions. "We don't want to be there. What we want to do is to help that country get on its feet."
Mr. Rumsfeld's speech, on the eve of the third anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, sought to firmly wrap the military actions in Iraq as part of the administration's campaign against terror, a characterization that Democrats immediately denounced.
"The war has been a catastrophe for our soldiers, who were foolishly sent to war with no plan to win the peace," Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, said in a blistering speech on the Senate floor.
Mark Kitchens, a spokesman for Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, said in a statement, "Secretary Rumsfeld's progress report is just not based in reality."
--------
INSURGENCY
'Holy Warriors' in Samarra Reject Accord With Americans
September 11, 2004
By DEXTER FILKINS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/11/international/middleeast/11town.html?pagewanted=all
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 10 - A group claiming to speak for insurgents in the contested city of Samarra said Friday that it had rejected an agreement that allowed American forces and the Iraqi government to re-enter the city, and the group pledged to continue fighting.
In the statement, the group also claimed to be joining forces with a similar organization in Falluja, raising the prospect of a troubling new cooperation among Sunni insurgents.
The declaration came a day after American forces and Iraqi police officers entered the city for the first time in months and reconvened the local government. Since July, insurgents have had the run of Samarra, much as they have in cities across the so-called Sunni Triangle, including Falluja, Ramadi and Tal Afar.
On Friday, the Muslim day of prayer, American soldiers stayed out of the city, according to witnesses, who said insurgents roamed the streets freely, in plain view of the police. The mayor's office, the only building the Americans occupied during their foray for a few hours on Thursday, remained closed.
"Today it is all quiet in Samarra," Maj. Neal O'Brien of the First Infantry Division wrote in an e-mail message.
The statement, by a group calling itself the Mujahedeen Shura, or Council of Holy Warriors, disavowed any connection with the agreement, and it insisted that city leaders who had negotiated with the Americans did not speak for the insurgents. The insurgents said any Iraqis who took part in the negotiations with the Americans would be considered apostates, who in Islam can be punished by death.
"Anyone who supports the agreement will be considered a defector from Islam," according to the statement, which was read over the telephone to The New York Times.
The rebel who read the statement claimed that the group represented all the insurgents fighting in Samarra, but that seemed doubtful. Ahmed Abdul Ghafour, a senior cleric in the city, said the insurgency appeared to be split over the question of the negotiations. Some favored them, he said, and others did not.
Sheik Abdul Karim Albu Baz, one of the leaders in Samarra who took part in the negotiations with the Americans, said leaders intended to appoint a new 120-person city council, of which 20 members would be insurgents. That suggested that at least some rebels might be willing to stop fighting for a time.
"The Iraqi government agreed to all the conditions set by the holy warriors," Mr. Baz said.
Mujahedeen Shura said it intended to fight the Americans in Samarra in the same way that insurgents did in Falluja, where Americans pulled back in April and allowed a similar council to govern the city. The insurgents regularly attack American convoys that patrol near Falluja.
The Samarra group's statement said its fighters had agreed to merge with the Mujahedeen Shura in Falluja. The group in Samarra said it would take its orders from Abdullah al-Janabi, the head of the Falluja council, which has set up a Taliban-like government in the city.
The declaration by the guerrillas in Samarra that they were joining with their comrades in Falluja could mark a significant development in the 17-month-old insurgency. American commanders have long held that the insurgency is composed of disparate groups across the country without a unified chain of command.
Two Iraqi employees of The New York Times contributed reporting from Baghdad and Falluja for this article.
-------- israel / palestine
Israelis Attack Again in Gaza, Killing 3 Palestinians
September 11, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/11/international/middleeast/11mideast.html?pagewanted=all
GAZA, Sept. 10 (Reuters) - The Israeli Army kept up pressure on Friday in the northern Gaza Strip, killing three Palestinians in the Jabalya refugee camp as soldiers sealed off the Palestinian territories for the Jewish holiday season.
The deaths raised to eight the number of Palestinians killed in Jabalya since Israeli tanks entered the camp late Wednesday in what the army called an operation against militants. Five of those killed were civilians, and Palestinian medics say that more than 100 Palestinians have been wounded during the raid.
The Israeli operation, its largest in the area in months, is the latest chapter in military reprisals for two suicide bombings last week in Israel that killed 16 people.
The holiday travel restrictions come on top of already tight limits on Palestinian movement, including within the territories, which are riddled with army checkpoints and roadblocks.
Military officials said restrictions would cover the three-day Jewish New Year holiday, which starts Wednesday evening, and could be extended through the Yom Kippur fast 10 days later and the weeklong Sukkot festival, which begins Sept. 29.
Tensions have been heightened by the army's move in northern Gaza, an operation it says is intended to stop militants from firing makeshift Qassam rockets into southern Israel. Two such rockets landed in Israel on Friday.
Over the past three days, Israeli forces have surrounded two towns and thrust into the first line of houses in Jabalya, Gaza's most populous camp, with 100,000 inhabitants.
Three Palestinians, including a militant and a teenager, were killed in Jabalya on Friday by tank fire. Military sources said troops were shooting at gunmen who were firing antitank rockets.
The militant group Hamas confirmed that one of its fighters in the area had tried to fire an antitank rocket before he was shot and killed.
The army killed 14 Hamas fighters at a Gaza training camp on Tuesday in its deadliest strike against the group. That led Hamas, which carried out the double suicide bombing on Aug. 31 in Beersheba, in southern Israel, to vow revenge.
--------
Israeli Troops Pull Out of Northern Gaza
Associated Press Writer
By IBRAHIM BARZAK
September 11, 2004
http://ap.washingtontimes.com/dynamic/stories/I/ISRAEL_PALESTINIANS?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
BEIT LAHIYA, Gaza Strip (AP) -- Israeli troops moved out of the northern Gaza Strip on Saturday, after a four-day operation that left eight Palestinians dead and tens of thousands without electricity or running water.
At daybreak, tanks drove away from the towns of Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun and the outskirts of the sprawling Jebaliya refugee camp, from where Palestinian militants frequently fire rockets at Jewish settlements and Israeli border towns.
Even during the raid, some rocket and mortar fire at Israeli towns continued. It was not clear why the army withdrew Saturday. Troops have frequently raided northern Gaza communities to stop the rocket fire, largely to no avail.
Heavy tank traffic cut up the main road in northern Gaza, as well as several side roads linking major neighborhoods, making them impassable in some sections.
Some water pipes, electricity poles and telephone lines in the area were also destroyed, leaving about 130,000 residents without basic services, said Adel Hammoudeh, the mayor of Beit Lahiya.
Municipal officials said that 22 homes, 10 shops and five factories were destroyed in the two towns and the refugee camp. Several public buildings, including the Beit Lahiya police station, the fire department and a rehabilitation center for the handicapped, were also razed, the mayor said.
Beit Lahiya resident Salem Mustafa, 40, a taxi driver, lost a new one-story home he had moved into two weeks ago, along with his parents, wife and six children, ages 1 to 14.
He said he was at home with his family on Friday, trapped by intense gunfire, when the walls began shaking. "And then, out of nowhere, one of the walls of the house collapsed, the kitchen wall started to collapse," he said.
He said the family fled under fire, and that within minutes an army bulldozer had demolished the house. Mustafa said soldiers had told him at the beginning of the raid that they might have to destroy the house, located at the entrance to Beit Lahiya, for security reasons.
The Israeli military had no comment on the scope of destruction.
In all, eight Palestinians were killed and 110 wounded in the four-day raid, hospital officials said. Among the eight dead were four gunmen and four civilians, including a 9-year-old boy.
Children and teens often run into the streets during Israeli raids, throwing stones at tanks, and adults rarely send them home despite the grave danger.
Thirty-five of the wounded were 16 and younger, most of them suffering from bullet wounds, said Dr. Manar al-Farra, director of the Al Awda Hospital in Beit Lahiya.
The Israeli military has intensified raids against militants in Gaza in the runup to a planned withdrawal in 2005. In Israel, opposition to the withdrawal is becoming more vociferous, with settler leaders warning it could lead to civil war.
However, Sharon is undeterred, saying he will go ahead with his plan to remove soldiers and settlers from Gaza and four small West Bank settlements.
Settler leaders charged Friday that Sharon does not have a mandate to carry out the withdrawal and said one consequence would be widespread refusal by soldiers to carry out orders for the mass eviction of settlers. Under Sharon's plan, about 8,500 settlers would be removed from their homes.
"The other (likely outcome) is definitely a type of civil war," Eliezer Hasdai, head of a regional settlement council, told Israel Radio.
Another prominent settler said Sharon's actions were Nazi-like, in an echo of slurs against Premier Yitzhak Rabin in the weeks before his 1995 assassination by an ultranationalist Jew.
"In the last century, the only ones who expelled Jews because they were Jews were the Nazis," Haggai Ben-Artzi, brother-in-law of finance minister and former premier Benjamin Netanyahu, told the radio. "To any one who does this I say this is a Nazi, anti-Semitic act."
Sharon, however, vowed that he would not be deterred.
"This plan will go ahead regardless, period," Sharon told The Jerusalem Post in an interview published Friday.
Sharon also said Israel can continue building in large West Bank settlement blocs without U.S. opposition if it does so quietly.
While the U.S.-backed "road map" peace plan calls for a settlement freeze, Israel believes it has tacit American approval for building within these blocs which it wants to keep in any future peace deal.
U.S. diplomats say publicly that Washington remains committed to the road map. However, Israel's announcement last month that it would build 1,000 new homes in settlements near Jerusalem drew just a muted U.S. response.
"Yes, we can continue building in the large blocs," Sharon said when asked whether he had a quiet understanding with the United States on limited settlement construction.
The issue of Jewish settlement construction is a major irritant in the complex relations among Israel, the United States and the Palestinians, who seek all of the West Bank and Gaza for their state and demand that all settlements be removed.
-------- prisoners of war
Rumsfeld Says Terror Outweighs Jail Abuse
Associated Press
Saturday, September 11, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11930-2004Sep10.html
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, responding to allegations that he fostered a climate that led to the prisoner-abuse scandal, said yesterday that the military's mistreatment of detainees was not as bad as what terrorists have done.
"Does it rank up there with chopping someone's head off on television?" he asked. "It doesn't."
Rumsfeld acknowledged once again that he had approved harsher interrogation methods for suspects captured in the global war on terrorism but said the rules were meant only for the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, facility for terrorist suspects and had nothing to do with Iraq, where the prison scandal emerged.
Critics have said for months that fault may ultimately rest with White House and Pentagon leaders for creating confusion when they decided in early 2002 that terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay did not fall under the rules of the Geneva Conventions and then sought to redefine longtime rules of detention, interrogation and trials to suit the war against terrorism.
Asked at a National Press Club appearance whether he contributed to a climate that led to abuse, Rumsfeld said he had approved new techniques for Guantanamo but then rescinded them and gathered lawyers to study the subject after military officers questioned them.
He said the procedures "were not torture" and were approved for use on only two people.
But Pentagon investigations in recent months have said there have been about 300 allegations of prisoners killed, raped, beaten and subjected to other mistreatment at military prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay since the start of the war on terror.
Rumsfeld read from a long list of statistics he had brought with him, saying there have been 11 investigations into the abuse, 950 people interviewed, 45 referred for court-martial and 23 soldiers administratively separated from the service.
"The people who've done something wrong are being prosecuted, the investigations are still underway . . . and corrective steps have been taken," Rumsfeld said, adding that it does not compare to televised executions in recent weeks in which terrorists have beheaded hostages taken in Iraq.
-------- russia / chechnya
U.S. must learn from Russia
09/11/2004
By Jon Sawyer
Post-Dispatch Washington Bureau Chief
http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/newswatch/story/4C3A9178FAD3936E86256F0C00399262?OpenDocument&Headline=U.S.+must+learn+from+Russia++
WASHINGTON - The third anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks passed with assurances from President George W. Bush and top administration officials that America today is safer by far.
But those assurances came against a disturbing drumbeat of ominous developments - Thursday's car-bomb at the Australian embassy in Indonesia, a videotape released the same day from Osama bin Laden's top deputy threatening new attacks, the seizure of a school in southern Russia that ended with at least 350 dead.
The Indonesian attack came just days before that country's Sept. 20 presidential elections - a reminder, like the election-eve terrorist attack last March in Spain, that terrorists might attempt a similar attack in advance of the U.S. elections Nov. 2.
Among outside specialists on terrorism, what prompted greatest concern was the attack on the school in Beslan - because of its horrific targeting of children, because of the gaps it exposed in Russia's internal security procedures, and because of America's continued vulnerability to the same sort of attack.
"We will strike the terrorists abroad so we do not have to face them here at home," Bush told rallies last week in Missouri. That line has become a standing one in his stump speech, as has the confident assertion that "our strategy is succeeding."
Yet U.S. borders, especially with Mexico, remain porous. Fewer than half of American cities have received the first-responder aid that had been anticipated after 9/11, surveys show, and in virtually no cities do police and fire departments have the capacity for direct radio communication during crises.
Russia, meanwhile, remains the repository for 90 percent of the nuclear bomb-grade material not located within the United States. Funding for the purchase or destruction of such material remains virtually unchanged since before 9/11. Bureaucratic snags have stymied action further, including the destruction of some 4,000 potential plutonium weapons that Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin had pledged to eliminate in early 2002.
Risk reminder
Graham Allison is an assistant secretary of defense under President Bill Clinton and a professor at Harvard University and author of the new book, "Nuclear Terrorism." He said that to him Beslan was a dramatic demonstration of how vulnerable Americans are.
"Immediately after the school was seized the Russian government dispatched troops to secure nuclear facilities all over Russia," he said. "The Russian government took the message of this very sophisticated seizure of students as a reminder that whatever the security at these facilities was the day before was inadequate the day after.
"It's a reminder to us, as well - that there are lots of nuclear facilities in Russia, at which there are weapons and material from which weapons can be made, and that would be plausible targets for action by the same sort of groups who seized that school."
Putin was quick to associate the Beslan attack with international terrorism and announced that he was moving toward a Bush-style response - from color-coded threat alerts to assertions that Russia was prepared to move "pre-emptively" against terrorists anywhere in the world. The U.S. response has been ambiguous, with expressions of sympathy and solidarity mixed with statements linking Russia's recent wave of terrorist attacks to Putin's often brutal suppression of the separatist movement in Chechnya, the mostly Muslim region not far from Beslan.
Wesley Clark, a former Democratic presidential candidate now supporting John Kerry, said at a Washington forum Thursday that Chechnya is at the heart of Russia's battle with terrorists.
"Unlike the people who attacked us on 9/11, those fighting the Russians in Chechnya really do have political demands," said Clark, a retired Army general. "They've asked for their freedom. That's what they want. There's a fundamental difference between that and the international terrorists al-Qaida whom we are struggling against."
That's not the view of Putin himself, as expressed during a meeting last Monday at his official residence with a small group of western academics and journalists.
"He insists that this is not about Chechnya only," said Nikolai Zlobin, a Russia specialist at the Washington-based Center for Defense Information who attended the meeting, "but about the entire north Caucasus," a region that includes Christian areas like North Ossetia, where Beslan is located, and the mostly Muslim region of Ingushetia that lies between North Ossetia and Chechnya.
Zlobin said that Putin had described the region as "a big time bomb that can explode at any moment." Zlobin said he concurred with that assessment and also with two other Putin views - that al-Qaida is deeply involved in the region and that it looms as a major front in a global struggle.
"What Americans don't understand is that this will probably be the most difficult front to fight with al-Qaida," Zlobin said. "The north Caucasus is much more difficult, much more complicated than Iraq - ethnically, religiously, culturally. If the northern Caucasus explodes then Iraq will be like a kindergarten."
Focusing abroad
The al-Qaida videotape released on Thursday featured bin Laden deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri. There was no reference to the Beslan attack, at least in the initial excerpts released by the al-Jazeera news channel, but there were taunts about alleged U.S. setbacks in Afghanistan and Iraq and the threat of additional attacks to come.
"Bush, reinforce your security measures," the statement read. "The Islamic nation which sent you the New York and Washington brigades has taken the firm decision to send you successive brigades to sow death and aspire to paradise."
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, addressing the Beslan attack during a speech Friday at the National Press Club, acknowledged the possibility of a similar strike here.
"I don't suppose there is a mother or father in America - or anywhere - who dropped a child off for the first day of school who did not wonder, could that happen to them?" he said. "The answer is it could, which is why it is so important to win the global war on terrorism. We recognize that we have to fight this battle where the terrorists are, rather than waiting for them to force us to fight, God forbid, in our own schools."
Critics say the administration has been so insistent on taking the battle abroad, to places like Afghanistan and Iraq, that it hasn't done enough at home - from the protection of borders, ports and critical infrastructure to improvements in communications among local and state law enforcement and emergency agencies.
A survey of 192 cities last June by the U.S. Conference of Mayors said 46 percent had received the first-responder aid promised as part of the post-9/11 homeland-security funds. Even in most big cities the "inter-operability" capability of the communications equipment of police, fire and EMT services is limited at best.
Gene Stilp, a Pennsylvania volunteer firefighter and a coordinator of First Response Coalition, a group pressing for federal help on the communications issue, said a Beslan-type crisis would be beyond the emergency-response capacity of all but the largest American cities.
"Very few jurisdictions in America would be able to respond to anything like that," he said. "We certainly aren't. If we had to provide medical assistance, fire, EMT and police at the same time, that inter-operability capacity just doesn't exist."
John Pike, a nuclear weapons specialist at globalsecurity.org, a Washington-based think tank, said Beslan was a reminder that an attack on a similar "soft target" here - a school in a smaller town - "would not be that hard to do."
Such an assault, should it come before November, would not necessarily be intended to tilt the election result, he said. "You're not doing it to throw the election one way or the other. You're doing it for sheer consternation - to abate the pride of the Great Satan."
That sort of logic "is why one might be apprehensive that Beslan is just a curtain-raiser," Pike said, "a premonition of things to come."
Washington Bureau Chief Jon Sawyer writes about national politics and foreign policy for the Post-Dispatch.
Reporter Jon Sawyer E-mail: jsawyer@post-dispatch.com Phone: 202-298-6880
-------- spies
Sen. Rockefeller Presses CIA on Book's Disclosures
By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 11, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12759-2004Sep10.html
The vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has sent a second letter to the CIA asking why the agency did not launch an investigation into the disclosure of classified information appearing in the best-selling book "Bush at War," by Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward.
In March, Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) wrote the CIA to ask why it had not made a formal criminal referral to the Justice Department regarding the possible unauthorized disclosure of classified information contained in the book. Rockefeller cited 20 passages that he said contained highly classified information.
The CIA's congressional affairs director, Stanley Moskowitz, replied in a June letter that no referral was made because George J. Tenet, who was then director of central intelligence, "authorized a number of CIA officers to meet with Mr. Woodward. They were under instructions not to discuss any classified material with Mr. Woodward. It is my understanding that the Administration had authorized additional personnel to talk to Mr. Woodward." Disclosure of classified information without authorization can be a criminal offense.
In his second letter, dated Sept. 1, Rockefeller called Moskowitz's response "completely unacceptable" and asked for a list of CIA officials who met with Woodward and the names of any officials outside the CIA who were authorized to meet with him. He also asked, "Were these officials authorized to disclose classified information, and, if so, by whom?"
Rockefeller, along with some Senate colleagues, has complained that the Bush administration has selectively declassified intelligence that supports its political goals. They argue that the administration refused to declassify parts of its Iraq assessment that would have cast doubt on its case for war there before the conflict began. The Justice Department has aggressively investigated other instances of classified information appearing in print.
Woodward said yesterday that it would be inaccurate to conclude that most of the sensitive material in his book came from an official decision by the administration to disclose information to him. Rather, he said, the book "is a compilation of confidential sources and people at all sorts of levels providing bits of information or lots of information. There's no Daniel Ellsberg who comes in with a grocery cart of documents."
Although some of the information in the book was classified, Woodward said, "no one has seriously suggested to me that there is information in the book that has harmed U.S. national security. That's the real test."
But Rockefeller, in his most recent letter to Moskowitz, wrote: "Regardless of who was authorized to meet with the author, it is undeniable that extremely sensitive information was disclosed in Bush at War that, in my view, has damaged the security of our nation."
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- homeland security / national intelligence
9/11: Pork-barrel security
Kevin Diaz,
Washington Bureau Correspondent
September 11, 2004
Minneapolis Star Tribune
http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news2/star-trib8.htm
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- With help from a federal homeland security grant, Grand Forks, N.D., now has more biochemical suits and gas masks than police officers to wear them.
Mason County, Wash., used money from the same program to buy a $63,000 decontamination unit for hazardous materials, even though it has no hazmat team.
In Big Horn County, Wyo., officials received $546,000 in federal counterterrorism grants last year, just $237,000 less than Louisville, Ky., which has 60 times the population.
These examples are cited in a congressional report that questions whether federal homeland security money is going to where it's needed the most. The funding system favors rural states by guaranteeing that they receive antiterrorism grants regardless of their population or the terrorism threat.
Now, Congress has begun to ask whether the federal formulas that spread terrorism-preparedness dollars throughout America are shortchanging the nation's most threatened population centers. The debate could have ramifications for Minnesota and the rest of the Upper Midwest.
This issue already has hit home in New York City, which has fewer police officers than it did on Sept. 11, 2001. This year, New York state was given $5.42 per person in federal homeland security grants, the third-lowest amount in the nation. In all, the state received $103 million. The city received some additional federal money to fight terrorism, but the amount wasn't enough to significantly boost the state's rank.
The funding system guarantees even sparsely populated states such as Alaska, Wyoming and North Dakota at least $14.5 million each this year in federal anti-terrorism funds -- without considering whether they face more or less risk than other states. Rep. Christopher Cox, R-Calif., who heads the Select Committee on Homeland Security that investigated the grants this year, is one of many legislators who say that such expenditures are out of sync with national intelligence estimates of threat and risk.
"We are actually slipping over the last couple of years in terms of the funds that we are sending out to meet the needs in the communities that are our greatest threat," said Cox, a St. Paul native.
The committee, in a report issued in April, faulted Congress for failing to ensure that $7.8 billion in federal homeland security money over the past two years didn't go to projects of marginal benefit. The report quoted an official in Outagamie County, Wis., describing the array of available purchases as "a Christmas list ... from a mail-order catalog."
Formulas questioned
While 9/11 appeared to change everything, it didn't seem to change Congress' penchant for spreading around government largesse for maximum political benefit -- a practice often called pork-barrel spending.
The national 9/11 commission, in its final report in July, criticized the formulas for distributing homeland security money, warning that members of Congress should look beyond the interests of their home states. "Congress should not use this money as a pork barrel," the report said.
Under the 2001 Patriot Act, every state is guaranteed 0.75 percent of total state grants, accounting for nearly 40 percent of the spending. The rest is parceled out according to state population. Some urban areas also are eligible for additional security grants.
North Dakota, with a population of about 634,000, got more than $19.4 million in federal counterterrorism grants this year. That works out to $30.59 per person, third highest in the nation.
Minnesota, with a population more than 5 million, got $39.2 million this year. That's double North Dakota's allotment, but it has to cover almost eight times as many people. The Twin Cities did receive an additional $20 million for homeland security.
Such disparities have not gone over well back east, where they're even more pronounced.
"This is pork-barrel politics at its worst," New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg told the 9/11 commission this spring. "It's the kind of shortsighted 'me first' nonsense that gives Washington a bad name."
The Bush administration proposed a shift in how it awards homeland security grants starting in 2005 -- steering more money to areas based on population, density, vulnerability and critical facilities.
But a White House request to double outlays for "high threat" urban areas -- a program that includes Minneapolis and St. Paul -- has encountered stiff resistance on Capitol Hill.
Cox also has been pressing for legislation to put homeland defense spending on a new footing, matching it more closely to national estimates of threat and vulnerability. At the moment, the bill remains snagged on a tangle of jurisdictional disputes in Congress.
"It will be a bit of a hard sell," said Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., a member of the Armed Services Committee. He said he generally favors a funding system based on threat. He was one of a few Midwesterners, including Minnesota Republicans Jim Ramstad and Mark Kennedy, who supported an unsuccessful attempt to redirect $450 million in state anti-terrorism grants to large cities such as New York.
Ken Johnson, a spokesman for Cox, said negotiations are underway to craft a bill that combines risk-based allocations with minimum state funding levels. "It's all risk analysis, but there will be enough state minimums to assure its passage," he said.
Infinite targets
Rural legislators argue that their constituents are just as entitled to feel safe as people in big cities, and that there is no guarantee that terrorists won't strike where they're least expected.
"What if a catastrophe occurs on a barge carrying fertilizers or other dangerous chemicals through the Upper Mississippi River?" said Rep. Jo Ann Emerson, R-Mo. "What if a truck carrying a payload of toxic materials is hijacked on the thousands of miles of our nation's rural highways?"
In Grand Forks, officials point to their proximity to the Canadian border, a nearby Air Force base and a variety of vulnerable hazardous materials facilities. "We have all the same hazards anyone on the East or West Coast has," said Grand Forks County Emergency Manager Jim Campbell. "If we didn't think we had a threat, we wouldn't have a terrorism response plan."
Other officials in rural states point to the 9/11 hijackers' interest in crop-duster planes. They cite the Oklahoma City bombing as an example of how not all terrorism is coastal or perpetrated by Islamic radicals.
"Terrorism can happen anywhere," said Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, whose state could lose more than $11 million if the current state minimum grant was eliminated. "That's why we must be prepared everywhere."
But some say that's unrealistic.
An independent task force chaired by former New Hampshire Sen. Warren Rudman found that U.S. vulnerabilities could easily justify a fivefold increase in emergency responder funding nationwide. But a homeland security spending bill that passed the House in June cuts such funding by $440 million next year.
"We do not have enough money to fortify the whole country," said Rep. Mark Kirk, R-Ill. "We must be guided by intelligence."
The problem is devising an objective assessment of terrorism risk.
"I don't know how you make a science out of it," said Minnesota Rep. Martin Sabo, the ranking Democrat on the Homeland Security Appropriations subcommittee. "The real target [on 9/11] was not the World Trade towers, but the psyche of the entire country. How you judge that sort of thing in advance, I don't know."
Some attempts have started to get attention in the private sector, particularly since 2002, when Congress required commercial property and casualty insurers to cover losses from terrorist strikes in the United States.
The 9/11 attacks caused more than $30 billion in insured losses, according to Jack Seaquist, a senior manager at AIR Worldwide, a Boston company that has developed a probability-based model to calculate potential losses from terrorist attacks.
The company's "landmark database" consists of more than 300,000 potential targets around the nation, including commercial, industrial, medical and government facilities -- as well as "trophy targets" that carry a higher probability of attack. Examples include the Mall of America, the Empire State Building, the Washington Monument and the Space Needle in Seattle.
Seaquist said that no computer model can predict where the next attack will take place. But he said it can analyze trends and patterns.
"It's the same kind of thing that's been going on in the military for a long time," he said. "You try to assess the capabilities and preferences of your adversary."
New Yorkers say any rational assessment of terrorists' preferences puts the city squarely at ground zero.
"The terrorists continue to want to strike centers of power and population, just as they did on 9/11," said Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y, whose state would gain $32 million under risk-based funding. "Their goal is to kill as many as possible, send as big a message as possible, and disrupt American institutions as much as possible."
As much as some Midwestern representatives might agree in principle, hardly anybody believes Congress will make a major realignment of its homeland security spending that will dramatically cut funding to rural states.
"You can argue about how you structure a formula," said Sabo. "But at some level you're going to end up with a state minimum around here." Minnesota would lose $1 million in aid this year without the minimums.
In the meantime, all sides also seem to agree that terrorist preparedness is likely to remain a guessing game.
"The advantage of a terrorist is that they can pick an infinite number of targets," said Rep. Randy Cunningham, R-Calif.
Staff Writer Ron Nixon contributed to this article. Kevin Diaz is at kdiaz@mcclatchydc.com.
----
Bush's Plan Limits Intelligence Chief
Others Would Carry Out Operations
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 11, 2004; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12824-2004Sep10.html
President Bush's plan for reforming the intelligence community would make the new national intelligence director responsible for clandestine operations at home and abroad but would allow less direct control over those activities than the CIA director has now in the dual role as director of central intelligence, according to past and present senior intelligence officials.
Bush's plan, which aides say is still being refined, would make the national intelligence director (NID) and staff an independent agency inside the executive branch but not within the office of the president. Although the director would have immediate authority over the budget for foreign intelligence activities -- about 70 percent of the $40 billion intelligence community budget -- the director would not personally run any operational agency as the director of central intelligence (DCI) does today, since that person also is CIA director.
For example, under Bush's plan, the intelligence director would "task" and "supervise" operations throughout the 15 agencies of the intelligence community. But the heads of the CIA, FBI and Pentagon would have the responsibility to carry out clandestine actions.
In counterterrorism, the NID's direct control would be even more diffuse. The director of the new national counterterrorism center (NCTC), who would report to the intelligence director, would plan domestic and foreign clandestine activities, but operations would be carried out by FBI, CIA or Pentagon personnel.
As acting CIA Director John E. McLaughlin said on Wednesday to the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, the NCTC, which the national intelligence director would manage, "would be a kind of clearinghouse of what needs to be done, and then the doing would be passed on to those who must do it."
McLaughlin described to the committee how he exercises direct control over operations by heading a daily 5 p.m. meeting in his capacity as DCI. The meeting is attended by representatives of the CIA, FBI and Pentagon. McLaughlin said it is "an operational meeting" where "we review and act on information that arrives in real time."
When Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) asked McLaughlin and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III whether the intelligence director should have the power to direct clandestine operations, Mueller said no. McLaughlin said that only under one condition should the intelligence director be able to "task" operations, and that is when "the CIA director worked for that NID directly. . . . That person would certainly have something to say about operations."
Former CIA director Robert M. Gates, now the president of Texas A&M University, recently described the president's proposal as it exists today as creating "a new layer of bureaucracy" in the intelligence community. Gates's suggestion was to make the CIA director a deputy to the intelligence director. That way, he said in a presentation last month to Congress, "a deputy NID for CIA would relieve the NID of routine management responsibility for CIA, while allowing him better to oversee its activities and draw upon its support."
Gates referred to his own history as "practitioner and observer of Washington's bureaucratic black arts." He said he believes "the NID position, without direct control of a single line agency or organization, will eventually have its authorities eroded, eventually becoming not an intelligence czar, but eunuch."
The exact roles of the CIA director and that agency are still being sorted out under the president's plan, a senior administration official said. For example, the national intelligence director would be Bush's principal intelligence adviser, probably attending the briefing in the Oval Office each morning.
But, as Gates pointed out, if the intelligence director is not controlling the CIA and other agencies "running covert operations and high risk human collection operations . . . [that individual] would end up spending a disproportionate time trying to stay on top of what they were doing" so he could keep the president informed.
From a more practical point of view, Gates said, the director would have to rely on some of the CIA's resources. "In practice," he said, "CIA will inevitably provide the NID with support from personal security to communications, airplanes, a desk and everything else."
Under Bush's current plan, the CIA apparently would be independent -- or, as Gates termed it, "orphaned." Its director may or may not be present at the president's morning briefing, a White House official said yesterday. "That would depend on the president," he said, adding, "It is not worked out yet."
Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.) noted that problem last week during a hearing before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Saying he wants to strengthen the position of CIA director, Warner, who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he would look into guaranteeing the CIA chief access to the president under any new arrangement, "so to be another voice in here that the president can hear if for some reason he wants to use other than the NID."
Although the intelligence director so far has not been linked to the CIA, the person holding that position will have more than the NCTC to manage directly. The president's plan calls for transfer of the Intelligence Community Management Staff of less than 150 who support the CIA director in the DCI role. In addition, the National Intelligence Council (NIC) -- senior officers who supervise production of national intelligence estimates -- would be made part of the director's staff.
Finally, the president has proposed that the director have a Cabinet-level advisory group, called the Joint Intelligence Community Council (JICC). Made up of the secretaries of defense, state, Treasury, energy and homeland security as well as the attorney general, it would advise the director on setting requirements, financial management and evaluation of intelligence.
The president's choice as CIA director and DCI in this interim period, Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), in the past opposed creation of an NID. Goss, a former CIA case officer and former chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, earlier this year introduced legislation that would give the DCI about the same kind of budgetary authority over the rest of the intelligence community that is proposed for the intelligence director.
At his scheduled confirmation hearing Tuesday, members of the Senate intelligence panel plan to question Goss on his views of Bush's reorganization plan and to get his thoughts on the future role of the CIA. At a hearing last month before his old committee, he cautioned Congress against taking hasty action.
--------
TSA Widens Airline Passenger Searches
Pat-Downs to Be More Thorough
By Sara Kehaulani Goo
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 11, 2004; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13150-2004Sep10.html
Airport security screeners will begin more thorough pat-downs of some passengers later this month in an effort to prevent terrorists from sneaking aboard commercial aircraft with explosives under their clothing.
The Transportation Security Administration announced yesterday that checkpoint screeners will begin training next week for the stepped-up searches that will take effect at all U.S. airports by Sept. 20. Screeners will be permitted to pat down passengers who appear suspicious because of bulky clothing -- not just those who set off the metal detector.
As part of the new procedures, screeners will also be allowed to use the inside of their hands to conduct the searches. Current policy allows screeners to touch passengers only with the back of the hand. Both the new and old policy call for female screeners to conduct searches of female passengers.
The changes are necessary "to respond to the existing threat, based on what we have seen in terms of the Russian planes and our intelligence streams," Transportation Security Administration spokesman Mark Hatfield said. "This is a prudent move to take appropriate adjustments to our procedures."
Investigators in Russia have not determined exactly how terrorists brought down two domestic commercial planes last month, killing 90 people on board. The high explosive hexogen, also known as RDX, was found at both crash sites and investigators focused on a Chechen woman on each plane. It is still unclear whether the women hid explosives in their clothing or placed bombs in suitcases or somewhere else.
Homeland Security officials last week called for more thorough passenger and luggage searches on Delta Air Lines and Aeroflot Russian Airlines' U.S.-bound flights from Moscow.
The new U.S. security procedures are the latest in a series of steps taken by the TSA to strengthen the nation's defense against the possible smuggling of explosives aboard airliners. The TSA has deployed walk-through portals that can detect explosive residue on passengers' bodies at five airports and this week began testing document scanners at Reagan National Airport that examine boarding passes for explosives.
Screening passengers and carry-on luggage for explosives was one of the 9/11 Commission's top air security recommendations. But consumer groups said more intensive personal searches might prompt angry responses from travelers, especially from female passengers who may not appreciate a closer touch from security screeners. The new procedures brought back memories of some inappropriate searches that female passengers and flight attendants complained about after the terrorist attacks in 2001, before the TSA took over screening.
"There have been concerns, mostly from young women but even older women and men, who complained that this discretion isn't the best," said James Plummer, policy analyst at Consumer Alert, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group. "Open-handed searches in close quarters and more discretion on the part of screeners really does open up the door for more complaints of that type."
The TSA said that the new procedures would be respectful. "I think there is a really broad understanding among the flying public of the reason and necessity for all our screening procedures," Hatfield said.
Frequent flier and Arlington resident Soo Cho said the extra searches are now a part of flying. "Some people say it's so invasive, but we don't want what happened [on Sept. 11, 2001] to happen again," Cho said.
-------- immigration / refugees
U.S. Acts to Notify Foreigners of Tougher Rules for Visits
September 11, 2004
By RACHEL L. SWARNS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/11/politics/11travel.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Sept. 10 - Only three weeks before sweeping policy shifts begin affecting foreign visitors at American airports, officials say they are intensifying their efforts to inform travelers from more than 20 industrialized nations to prepare for tough new entry requirements.
By the end of September, tourists from 27 nations, including Britain, Germany, Japan and Australia, will for the first time be photographed and fingerprinted on arrival. And beginning at the end of October, passengers from 22 countries, mostly in Europe, must carry machine-readable passports in order to visit without visas.
Officials at the Department of Homeland Security plan to start advertising in newspapers in Britain and Australia later this month, informing travelers from those countries that airport inspectors here will start collecting digital fingerprints and photographs from them on Sept. 30. The officials, who have highlighted the new requirement in meetings with trade groups and journalists in London and Germany in recent months, also plan to attend a trade show in Hong Kong in coming weeks.
On Wednesday, the State Department sent a cable to its consulates and embassies in the affected nations, encouraging consular officials to expand their efforts to inform travelers about the need to have machine-readable passports by Oct. 26. Consular officials have already been posting advisories on their Web sites and meeting with chambers of commerce, travel groups and news organizations, the department says.
Tourists from Europe and other industrialized countries are not typically required to apply for visas to visit the United States, but they will have to do so if they do not have machine-readable passports by the Oct. 26 deadline. Officials at the Travel Industry Association of America, which represents the nation's largest airlines, hotels, cruise lines and car rental companies, say some people in Spain, Italy, France and Switzerland still lack such passports.
Travel industry officials commend Homeland Security for its efforts but say the State Department is doing too little to inform travelers about the machine-readable policy.
Rick Webster, director of government relations for the Travel Industry Association, said that without a concerted publicity campaign, some travelers might arrive at American airports without either the required passport or a visa.
Starting next week, the industry group says, it will send hundreds of e-mail messages to travel associations, foreign journalists and others to advise them of the changes.
Angela Aggeler, a spokeswoman for the State Department, said officials had been using various means, among them getting articles published in European newspapers, to spread word.
The new policy that requires tourists from 27 industrialized nations to be fingerprinted and photographed affects travelers from 22 European countries and Brunei, Singapore, Japan, Australia and New Zealand who can currently travel to the United States for up to 90 days without a visa. Because students and other visitors from those nations who stay for more than three months are required to carry visas, they have already been subjected to these new security measures, which took effect for all visa carriers in January regardless of country of origin.
The policy that requires travelers to carry machine-readable passports will now affect 22 of those 27 nations. The remaining five - Andorra, Belgium, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg and San Marino - adopted the American standard in 2003.
-------- justice
Suit targets travel-ID mandate
September 10, 2004
By Audrey Hudson
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040909-111010-4336r.htm
John Gilmore doesn't want to be identified.
Whether it's at the airport check-in counter, railway station or bus depot, Mr. Gilmore will not show identification, and he wants the federal government to produce the "secret law" that requires travelers to do so or be barred from commercial travel.
Mr. Gilmore says travelling without identification is what distinguishes a free country from totalitarianism, pointing out that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were sticklers for travel documents.
The Justice Department says it will identify the law in a court case brought against it and the Homeland Security Department by Mr. Gilmore, but only if the secret reasons for its top-secret status remain under a court seal.
"The government would also file and serve a redacted, unsealed version of the brief as well. That procedure will adequately safeguard any sensitive security information [SSI] while permitting this court's independent review of the merits of plaintiffs' claim," said the request filed by the Justice Department on Sept. 3.
A spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration said he could not comment on the ongoing litigation, but said "knowing who gets on an airplane is an important layer in our aviation security."
Mr. Gilmore's attorneys called Justice's request an "extreme cry for secrecy" that is "disturbing and illustrates the dangers of secret law," and, in a brief filed Tuesday in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, said Justice does not cite legal authority for such handling of the law.
The case was originally filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco but dismissed. In that case, the government did not produce any law or regulation requiring the identification of passengers.
"Our judicial system is based on the deeply felt principle that each side must have the opportunity to be fully and fairly heard," the motion said.
"If [TSA Administrator David Stone] is not willing to make public this law, then he should not be permitted to secretly use it as evidence of its constitutionality," the motion said.
Mr. Gilmore, an entrepreneur in the computer industry based in San Francisco, says his no-ID stance has made it difficult for him to do his job.
"I've flown internationally, and I'm willing to show my passport to leave the country, but I'm not willing to show a passport to travel in my country," said Mr. Gilmore, who also works for companies in Minneapolis and upstate New York.
He has on occasion been able to talk his way onto an aircraft without showing identification.
"The hardest question to answer is 'show me the law, the regulation, and the rule that requires this,' and none of them could, and never have," Mr. Gilmore said.
The government maintains that there is a law prohibiting the disclosure of SSI, and administration officials have the power to prohibit the disclosure of any information that would "harm transportation security."
One administration official said the rules vary from airline to airline, and that if someone forgot to bring identification they may just get additional screening and be allowed to board.
Mr. Gilmore said he doubts a law exists.
"If we want to keep our country free, maybe we should have a debate about that, rather than have it deposed in secret," he said.
-------- terrorism
3 Years Later, Deliverance Elusive
Pentagon Survivors and Rescuers Endure Daily Reminders of Trauma
By Susan Levine and Carol Morello
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, September 11, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A12652-2004Sep10?language=printer
Valecia "Chee Chee" Parker remains a shadow of the woman she was on Sept. 11, 2001 -- a civilian employee in Army personnel management, a buff, competitive bodybuilder.
She was on the phone in her Pentagon office when the world exploded that flawless morning three years ago, she was buried under a jumble of desks in her Pentagon office. A co-worker heard her pleading, "Jesus, help me! Help me, Jesus!" searched through the rubble and dragged her out.
Parker was soaked with jet fuel that made her legs feel on fire. Her skin eventually healed without grafts. Yet her other injuries -- neck, back, shoulder, head -- proved more tenacious. They left her with significant memory lapses. She had to relearn how to use her keyboard. She stumbled through the steps of forwarding a telephone call.
When it became apparent that she could not resume her job, Parker was reassigned to a Pentagon office where she folded boxes and was told to keep the place tidy. She left after overhearing another employee complain that she made things messier and had to be treated like a child.
Perhaps much of the country has moved on. But for people such as Parker, moving on is still a daily, heart-aching effort. On the third anniversary of the terrorist attacks, their healing is far from over.
This they share not only with the families of the 184 men, women and children who died at the Pentagon, but also with many of the others left behind -- co-workers who escaped through the flames, as well as the firefighters and paramedics who helped save them.
Even some rescuers' families struggle. One firefighter's daughter routinely cries when her father gets ready for his shift.
"I know there are people out there suffering," said Capt. Mike Staples of the Arlington County Fire Department.
Everyday things can trigger their memories. The scream of sirens. A plane low overhead. The fusty odor of wet drywall. And suddenly, said April Gallop, "it's like you're there all over again."
Trapped again in a collapsed office in the Pentagon, choking on the thick, roiling blackness, searching desperately for a way out.
"You walk away," she explained, "but you become the walking wounded."
Though the aftermath of 9/11 has repeatedly revealed human resilience, fault lines have become more apparent. Some employees have not come back because their bodies and psyches were so badly damaged. Others tried but ultimately had to surrender to their new reality.
Parker now gets by on half her former salary through worker's compensation. She sees a speech therapist, a neurologist, an ophthalmologist and a psychiatrist. She downs four medications a day. A survivors fund bought her a gym membership and paid for her to train as an exercise instructor. She has not had the strength to start.
Her Landover townhouse reveals the limits of her reconfigured life. Along one wall are boxes of Avon products that she has tried to sell to her neighbors. Parker opens the door to a hall closet-turned-pantry. It is stacked with jars of baby food, dried fruit and other food that needs no cooking.
At 52, she can handle shopping in a convenience store, but she cannot stand the rigors of walking and choosing from the vast selection at a supermarket. Migraines overtake her every afternoon.
"I used to have a beautiful home, lots of friends, the ability to think fast on my feet and a good memory," she said. "I know that because my mom and dad told me."
Even among those whose workday lives appear to have returned to normal, there are lingering undercurrents of depression and trauma. Some are civilians, some military. And some are the men and women of the Arlington fire department.
For the Arlington firefighters who for nearly two grueling weeks led the rescue and recovery efforts at the Pentagon, the world after Sept. 11 will never really be the same. They may not have lost any of their own that day, but the 334 New York firefighters who perished in the World Trade Center weigh heavily on their minds. They know what could have happened here. It tested them in ways few could have imagined.
"9/11 was a plane crash, a building collapse, a fire and a terrorist attack all in one," said Dodie Gill, who runs the county's highly praised employee assistance program and has worked closely with its firefighters since Day One.
A few have paid a heavy price for what they did and saw -- haunted especially by the images of severed body parts, of faces literally peeled away like masks by an intensity of heat that even veterans had not felt before.
"We deal with death and destruction all the time, but this was a different thing," Staples said.
So was the degree of deeply strained or severed marriages, panic that twice sent one firefighter into heart afibrillation, an attempted suicide and, at last count, a dozen early retirements provoked by the emotional aftershocks.
Only days ago, Staples, who wears dual hats as safety officer and union leader, put forward claims for stress-related disabilities for additional co-workers. He confesses to worrying about several more individuals he wishes would seek help, as does the boss, Chief James Schwartz.
"We're trying to get some of this stuff out in the open," Schwartz said. Especially before another terrorist act, which the chief is certain his department will face. "There are a number of things that keep me up at night," he said. "Where we are in the world and what that means for this organization is foremost among them."
The firefighters also wonder what other problems may be on the horizon.
They think about the possible parallels to New York, where the label of "World Trade Center cough" refers to a cluster of major respiratory problems afflicting hundreds of firefighters since 2001. Crews labored inside and outside the Pentagon in a stew of burning fuel, decaying human remains, dust, asbestos and silicon particles and no one knows what else.
Mike Beall might be the miner's canary. The 45-year-old firefighter soon will see a pulmonologist for a persistent, phlegmy cough that he began noticing not long before the first Pentagon anniversary. Right here, he motions on his chest. "Like I've got water on my lungs."
It's not gotten that much worse, but it's not gone away either. It's been followed by wheezing, then a touch of bronchitis, and of late Beall has been coughing up gunk that looks like white cotton candy.
"This stupid thing I got," Beall calls the cough for now. "I'm not trying to make a big deal of it," he said, though he remembers the hours he spent hauling shoring material into the debris-littered Pentagon. He wore protective gear, but in between many shifts he often was within 200 feet of the building, with whatever exposure that meant.
His mind already has turned over such words as emphysema, chronic pulmonary disease and cancer. "I'm anxious to find out what it is," he said.
Given worries that some health issues could take years to surface, the department hopes to push a bill in the Virginia legislature next year that would extend workers' statute of limitations for 9/11-related claims. "We're just concerned about the long-term effects," Staples said.
April Gallop looks only to the here and now.
In January 2003, she left the Army. She lives with her son, Elisha, who survived with head injuries that have caused developmental delays. She walks with a cane because of a spinal misalignment, but her third-floor Woodbridge apartment cannot be retrofitted for a mechanized lift. Every step, she said, is slow and painful. At 33, she takes cortisone shots and swallows up to 10 tablets a day.
But no drug wards off her flashbacks, when she sees herself at her Pentagon desk three years ago, on her first day back from maternity leave.
Little Elisha was in the stroller beside her. Gallop had just pushed the button to start her computer when the hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the Pentagon, blowing her across the room.
For a moment, Gallop said, she thought she had died and gone to hell. Then she heard her son crying. She couldn't imagine babies condemned to hell, so she realized they were alive.
When Elisha cries these days the same way he did when he was trapped under the debris, it all comes back. If she drives past an airport and smells jet fuel, it all comes back. She hears her injured co-workers calling for help. She sees the shards of metal, the broken furniture and shattered lights jutting dangerously every which way. It feels . . . so real.
"You live with it, almost every day," Gallop said. "You carry it with you."
-------- POLITICS
-------- propaganda wars
We should not have allowed 19 murderers to change our world
By Robert Fisk Independent Digital (UK)
11 September 2004
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=560541
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0911-09.htm
So, three years after the international crimes against humanity in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania we were bombing Fallujah. Come again? Hands up those who knew the name of Fallujah on 11 September 2001. Or Samarra. Or Ramadi. Or Anbar province. Or Amarah. Or Tel Afar, the latest target in our "war on terror'' although most of us would find it hard to locate on a map (look at northern Iraq, find Mosul and go one inch to the left). Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.
Three years ago, it was all about Osama bin Laden and al-Qa'ida; then, at about the time of the Enron scandal and I have a New York professor to thank for spotting the switching point it was Saddam and weapons of mass destruction and 45 minutes and human rights abuses in Iraq and, well, the rest is history. And now, at last, the Americans admit that vast areas of Iraq are outside government control. We are going to have to "liberate" them, all over again.
Like we reliberated Najaf and Kufa, "to kill or capture Muqtada Sadr'', according to Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, and like we lay siege to Fallujah back in April when we claimed, or at least the US Marines did, that we were going to eliminate "terrorism'' in the city. In fact, its local military commander has since had his head chopped off by the insurgents and Fallujah, save for an occasional bloody air raid, remains outside all government control.
These past two weeks, I've been learning a lot about the hatred Iraqis feel towards us. Troweling back through my reporter's notebooks of the 1990s, I've found page after page of my hand-written evidence of Iraqi anger; fury at the sanctions which killed half a million children, indignation by doctors at our use of depleted uranium shells in the 1991 Gulf War (we used them again last year, but let's take these things one rage at a time) and deep, abiding resentment towards us, the West. One article I wrote for The Independent in 1998 asked why Iraqis do not tear us limb from limb, which is what some Iraqis did to the American mercenaries they killed in Fallujah last April.
But we expected to be loved, welcomed, greeted, fêted, embraced by these people. First, we bombarded Stone Age Afghanistan and proclaimed it "liberated", then we invaded Iraq to "liberate" Iraqis too. Wouldn't the Shia love us? Didn't we get rid of Saddam Hussein? Well, history tells a different story. We dumped the Sunni Muslim King Feisal on the Shia Muslims in the 1920s. Then we encouraged them to rise against Saddam in 1991, and left them to die in Saddam's torture chambers. And now, we reassemble Saddam's old rascals, their torturers, and put them back in power to "fight terror'', and we lay siege to Muqtada Sadr in Najaf.
We all have our memories of 11 September 2001. I was on a plane heading for America. And I remember, as the foreign desk at The Independent told me over the aircraft's satellite phone of each new massacre in the United States, how I told the captain, and how the crew and I prowled the plane to look for possible suicide pilots. I think I found about 13; alas, of course, they were all Arabs and completely innocent. But it told me of the new world in which I was supposed to live. "Them'' and "Us''.
In my airline seat, I started to write my story for that night's paper. Then I stopped and asked the foreign desk in London by this time the aircraft was dumping its fuel off Ireland before returning to Europe to connect me to the newspaper's copytaker, because only by "talking" my story to her, rather than writing it, could I find the words I needed. And so I "talked" my report, of folly and betrayal and lies in the Middle East, of injustice and cruelty and war, so it had come to this.
And in the days to come I learnt, too, what this meant. Merely to ask why the murderers of 11 September had done their bloody deeds was to befriend "terrorism". Merely to ask what had been in the minds of the killers was to give them support. Any cop, confronted by any crime, looks for a motive. But confronted by an international crime against humanity, we were not to be allowed to seek the motive. America's relations with the Middle East, especially the nature of its relationship with Israel, was to remain an unspoken and unquestioned subject.
I've come to understand, in the three years since, what this means. Don't ask questions. Even when I was almost killed by a crowd of Afghans in December 2001 furious that their relatives had been killed in B-52 strikes The Wall Street Journal announced in a headline that I had "got my due" because I was a "multiculturalist". I still get letters telling me that my mother, Peggy, was Adolf Eichmann's daughter.
Peggy was in the RAF in 1940, repairing radios on damaged Spitfires, as I recalled at her funeral in 1998. But I also remember, at the service in the chancel of the little stone Kentish church, that I angrily suggested that if President Bill Clinton had spent as much money on research into Parkinson's disease as he had just spent in firing cruise missiles into Afghanistan at Osama bin Laden (and it must have been the first time Bin Laden's name was uttered in the precincts of the Church of England) then my mother would not have been in the wooden box beside me.
She missed 11 September 2001 by three years and a day. But there was one thing she would, I feel sure, have agreed with me: That we should not allow 19 murderers to change our world. George Bush and Tony Blair are doing their best to make sure the murderers DO change our world. And that is why we are in Iraq.
----
Rather Defends CBS Over Memos on Bush
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 11, 2004; Page A07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A12809-2004Sep10?language=printer
Dan Rather vigorously defended his "60 Minutes" story on President Bush's National Guard service yesterday, saying the 30-year-old memos he disclosed on the show this week "were and remain authentic," despite questions raised by some handwriting and document experts.
"Until someone shows me definitive proof that they are not, I don't see any reason to carry on a conversation with the professional rumor mill," the CBS anchor said. "My colleagues and I at '60 Minutes' made great efforts to authenticate these documents and to corroborate the story as best we could. . . . I think the public is smart enough to see from whom some of this criticism is coming and draw judgments about what the motivations are."
The memos, described as having been written by Bush's squadron commander, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, indicate that Bush got special treatment as a pilot in the Texas Air National Guard and failed to carry out a superior's order to undergo a physical exam. Several experts consulted by news organizations say the memos contain typographical and formatting features that suggest they were written on a computer or word processor rather than on an early 1970s government typewriter.
Rather said that CBS's lead expert was Marcel Matley of San Francisco, a member of the National Association of Document Examiners who has taught, lectured and written about his field, testified in numerous trials, and consulted for government agencies. Matley said last night that a "60 Minutes" executive had asked him not to give interviews.
The Dallas Morning News cast fresh doubt on the documents by reporting last night that the officer named in one memo as exerting pressure to "sugarcoat" Bush's military record was discharged a year and a half before the memo was written. The paper cited a military record showing that Col. Walter "Buck" Staudt was honorably discharged on March 1, 1972, while the memo cited by CBS as showing that Staudt was interfering with evaluations of Bush was dated Aug. 18, 1973.
The White House is raising doubts for the first time about the documents' authenticity. "I think there's a big question mark, like major news organizations are suggesting," communications director Dan Bartlett said last night. "Obviously, we see the same things that other people are pointing out now. But at the time, I had every reason to believe that a major news organization had authentic documents."
Killian's widow and son have also questioned whether the documents are real.
CBS News President Andrew Heyward staunchly defended the piece. "I have full confidence in our reporting on this story and in every reporter on both sides of the camera," he said last night. "This is going to hold up. This was thoroughly vetted."
Conservatives hammered Rather and CBS yesterday on talk radio and Internet sites. "I predict . . . that it's only a matter of time before CBS admits it was deceived," wrote Weekly Standard Managing Editor Richard Starr.
In an interview, Rather stressed that CBS had talked to two people who worked with Killian in the Texas Guard -- his superior, retired Maj. Gen. Bobby Hodges, and his administrative assistant, Robert Strong -- and both described the memos as consistent with what they knew of Killian. Hodges, who told CBS he was "familiar" with the documents, is an avid Bush supporter, and "it took a lot for him to speak the truth," Rather said.
Before airing Wednesday's segment, he said, CBS "vetted" the confidential source who provided the memos and concluded that "he did have the ability to get access to these documents and he was being truthful." Beyond that, Rather said, CBS consulted with military experts about Killian's language and the documents' format and compared them to other Bush service records previously released by the White House. "We decided there was a preponderance of evidence that they are what they purport to be," he said.
Asked if he was troubled by the handwriting and document analysts who say some of the typography and spacing did not exist in the early 1970s, Rather said he could not rule out the possibility of a hoax but sees no need for an internal inquiry.
Some CBS employees, who asked not to be identified while questioning their bosses' actions, expressed concern that the network had issued only a terse statement Thursday, when the authenticity of the documents was first questioned and until yesterday had refused to name any of the experts it had consulted or provide an on-the-record spokesman. One staff member, who has examined the documents but did not work on the "60 Minutes" piece, saw potential problems with them: "There's a lot of sentiment that we should do an internal investigation."
"The first rule of public relations is to get all the bad news out right away," said Tobe Berkovitz, associate dean of Boston University's College of Communication. "It looks like CBS News has made some serious errors here, and if so, they should plead nolo contendere and not do the perp walk later."
Others at the network noted that the producer on the Texas Air National Guard segment was the highly regarded Mary Mapes, who helped "60 Minutes" break the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq.
"It's hard to separate legitimate concern from political blowback and propaganda," Heyward said.
On last night's "CBS Evening News," Rather defended the piece against what he called the "counterattack." He interviewed Matley, who said he concluded after comparing Killian's signature on the memos to other undisputed documents that "yes, it's the same person."
Rather noted the critics' claim that typewriters in the Vietnam War era could not produce a raised superscript, such as the letters "th," but he maintained: "Some models did." As for contentions that the memos were written in a more modern font called Times New Roman, Rather said: "The company that distributes this typeface says it has been available since 1931."
Other experts have told The Washington Post that the spacing between letters is suspicious for documents of that era. But Rather cautioned that the memos become less clear as they are downloaded and photocopied.
In the interview, Rather said the controversy should not detract from these questions raised by the program: "Did a wealthy oilman who was a friend of the Bush family come to the speaker of the Texas House and ask for preferential treatment for George Bush, and did he get it? Did or did not then-Lieutenant Bush refuse to obey a direct order from a military superior?"
In 1999, "60 Minutes" apologized, as part of a legal settlement with a Customs Service official, for reporting on a memo that was later found to be fake.
Matley, who told Rather last night that he knew the Bush documents would be professional "dynamite," has been involved in high-profile cases, including a 1997 controversy over purported John F. Kennedy documents. After "60 Minutes" cast doubt on those documents, the man who unearthed them, Lawrence Cusack III, retained Matley in a suit against CBS that was rejected in court. Matley could not vouch for the documents' authenticity.
Staff writer Mike Allen contributed to this report.
--------
Powell Thinks Bin Laden Alive, on the Run
September 11, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Powell-Interview.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Three years after the Sept. 11 attacks, Secretary of State Colin Powell said Friday he believes Osama bin Laden is still alive -- although he has no proof -- and thinks his al-Qaida terror group remains a threat.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Powell said al-Qaida still has the capacity to rebuild itself and thus remains a threat, although he asserted it has been decimated by the detentions and killings of key leaders.
Of bin Laden -- whose No. 2 deputy released a new videotape Thursday threatening the United States -- Powell said: ``We believe he is still alive. I can't prove that. But he clearly is hiding as best he can. He is on the run. He is not popping up on television and he is not showing himself in a way that he could be captured.''
Shortly after Powell spoke, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said in a speech in Washington that bin Laden, ``if he's alive, is spending a whale of a lot of time trying to not get caught.''
In a wide-ranging interview, Powell also spoke of his own future -- holding out more chance than he has previously that he might remain as secretary of state if President Bush wins a second term. Powell has deflected past questions about his future by saying he serves at ``the pleasure of the president'' -- a phrase he repeated Friday.
But Bush, in a little noticed comment recently in Pennsylvania, said he would be happy to have Powell remain beyond Jan. 20 if he is re-elected.
Asked about the comment Friday, Powell smiled and said: ``Time will tell. We will see.''
He added that he was pleased by Bush's comment. And he described his relationship with the president as ``very strong, solid.''
Powell said he would not serve in a John Kerry administration if the Democrat were to win and ask him.
Until now, the main reason Powell has been seen as a one-term secretary of state is that he often does not see eye to eye on key issues with Vice President Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld, among others.
Asked Friday about differences with colleagues, Powell said: ``I have been given many labels in the course of my career and over the past four years. The only label that really sticks and is important is that I serve this nation and I serve the President.''
On the eve of the Sept. 11 anniversary, Powell said the absence of a follow-up attack on U.S. soil since then is a positive sign.
``The last three years have been an indication that we are safer,'' Powell said. ``But we are still in a threatening environment.''
Bin Laden is believed to have been hiding out in untamed lands along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border since the Sept. 11 attacks. If bin Laden were to be killed or captured, Powell said he believes ``it would be a very, very serious blow against al-Qaida.''
The tape released Thursday by bin Laden deputy Ayman Al-Zawahri marks the third year in a row that al-Qaida has released a Sept. 11 anniversary videotape. However, in previous years, the message has come from bin Laden.
An intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said bin Laden may not appear for a number of reasons, but declined to speculate. Current and former officials have said al-Qaida's concerns about bin Laden's security may top the list.
Pakistani Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said Friday that bin Laden's absence may mean he's dead. ``It is just my political guess that Osama bin Laden is nowhere because we have not heard anything from him for a long time,'' he said.
On Korea, Powell attached minimal importance to recent disclosures that South Korea had engaged in a uranium enrichment experiment four years ago and a plutonium-based nuclear experiment two decades ago.
Plutonium and enriched uranium are two key ingredients of nuclear weapons.
``It's quite clear that these were not intended other than for academic, experimental purposes, and it's over with and I think that's, frankly, the end of the matter,'' Powell said.
``I don't see any great significance to them, but the North Koreans always like to seize on anything to make their point.''
The remarks came as the United States and four Asian countries are attempting to persuade North Korea to dismantle its nuclear weapons programs. North Korea has said that the South Korean nuclear activities could trigger a nuclear arms race on the peninsula.
In comments after the formal interview was over, Powell said he was pleased by the increased pace of reconstruction in Iraq.
``We've almost tripled the money spent since the total when Ambassador (John) Negroponte opened our embassy,'' he said. He added that he expects the trend will continue, so long as the security situation permits.
State Department figures show that obligated reconstruction money has increased from $400 million before the Baghdad Embassy opened to $1.13 billion as of Wednesday.
-------- us politics
Kerry Faults Bush for Lapse In Ban on Assault Weapons
By Jim VandeHei and Paul Farhi
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, September 11, 2004; Page A06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12825-2004Sep10.html
John F. Kerry accused President Bush yesterday of making it easier for terrorists to get dangerous weapons by allowing a ban on some semiautomatic firearms to lapse, as he waded deeper into the issue many Democrats believe cost Al Gore the election in 2000: gun control.
"In the al Qaeda manual on terror, they were telling people to go out and buy assault weapons, to come to America and buy assault weapons," Kerry told supporters in St. Louis. "Every law enforcement officer in America doesn't want us selling assault weapons in the streets of America. But George Bush, he says, 'Well, I'm for that.' "
Bush supports the federal ban on the importation of 19 types of semiautomatic weapons that is set to expire Monday, but the president has not pressured the Republican Congress to extend it. Kerry charged in Missouri that Bush has not pushed for an extension because he "caved in" to pressure from the National Rifle Association, a lobbying group that represents gun owners.
"America's streets will not be safe because of a choice George Bush is making," Kerry said. The Democratic nominee will attend an event in Washington on Monday with police officers and families to criticize Bush for refusing to act.
Kerry, who talks often of owning a gun and hunting, especially when speaking to rural voters, is calculating most gun owners will not vote against him for pushing for a ban on semiautomatic firearms, aides say. Kerry's advisers cite polling showing two of three voters support the ban as evidence that swing voters, especially suburban moms, might turn on Bush for failing to fight for the ban's extension.
"The more Kerry opens his mouth the more he reveals what he is: a Massachusetts gun-banner who in every single vote over the past 20 years has been on the wrong side of the Second Amendment," said Wayne LaPierre, NRA executive vice president. In the Senate, Kerry cast numerous votes contrary to NRA positions, including on legislation to ban guns, to impose waiting periods on gun buyers and to punish some gun manufacturers.
As for the ban, LaPierre said there are numerous firearms that are legal today that are as powerful as the ones outlawed by the ban. The ban does not apply to the sale or possession of those same weapons if they were legally held before the ban took effect in 1994.
As a presidential candidate, Kerry has veered away from the gun issue. Many Democrats believe Gore's support for gun-control proposals, such as clamping down on handgun sales, contributed to -- or caused -- his defeat in West Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas and Ohio. In Iowa, union officials told Democratic leaders after the election that hundreds of Democrats from union households opposed Gore because they were convinced by the NRA that Gore would take away their guns.
After leading the charge for the original ban in 1994, many Democrats have distanced themselves from the cause in recent years. The reason: Democrats lost the House that year as many members from rural areas, including then-Speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.), were tossed from office, in part, by angry gun owners. In this year's Democratic primaries, the candidates fell largely silent on gun control. Dozens of congressional Democrats oppose the ban today.
A new poll by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication suggests the tide may be turning in the gun debate. The survey found that 68 percent of Americans favor extending the ban on versions of Uzis, Tec-9s and the other firearms covered by the ban. Americans for Gun Safety, which counsels Democrats on gun issues, has tutored Kerry and others on ways to fight for the ban without offending staunch Second Amendment advocates.
Yet many political strategists believe it could be risky for Kerry to be seen as leading the movement for a gun ban, even a popular one. The NRA is planning to spend $400,000 a week until the election condemning Kerry's votes for gun control. LaPierre says the NRA will spend $20 million assisting Bush, Republicans and a few Democrats in this election -- and pointing out what he says are 59 anti-gun votes cast by the Massachusetts senator over the past 20 years.
"This has always been a political football, but this is a situation where this is very real issue for society" said Mary Beth Cahill, Kerry's campaign manager. The NRA "is going to do what they are going to do anyway."
Fear of the NRA is partly motivating Republicans, GOP officials say. Bush and the Republican Congress are counting on the NRA, which exerts influence not only through ads but by prodding its members on how to vote through direct-mail and newsletters, to help maximize the GOP turnout this fall, Republicans said. It is unlikely the NRA would actively oppose Republican leaders, but it might not work as hard for the party if Bush were to sign the ban 50 days before the election.
Democrats said the challenge for Kerry is to convince voters that his support of the ban is not indicative of a broader anti-gun agenda. At a Labor Day rally in Racine, W.Va., Kerry was presented with a union-made Remington shotgun, which he inspected and proudly held aloft, one of several photo ops his campaign has staged to highlight his support of guns for sportsmen.
Yesterday in Missouri, a swing state where Kerry is running well behind Bush, Kerry told the crowd: "I'm a hunter, and I respect it. I respect the Second Amendment. But I never thought about going hunting with an AK-47. . . . I mean, heavens to Betsy, folks, we've had that law on the books for the last 10 years, and there's not a gun owner in America who can stand up and say, 'They tried to take my guns away.' "
Farhi reported from St. Louis.
--------
Kennedy Says Bush Hurt U.S. And Its Security
By Helen Dewar
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 11, 2004; Page A06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12707-2004Sep10.html
In a scathing attack on President Bush's handling of Iraq, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) yesterday accused the administration of "arrogant ideological incompetence" and said no president has "done more damage to our country and our security" than Bush.
Kennedy's speech to the Senate -- the latest in a series of attacks on Bush's Iraq policy -- came a day after the Senate Armed Services Committee heard testimony about the abuse of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison, which he described as "just one part of a much larger failure" by the administration.
"Because of the Bush administration's arrogant ideological incompetence and its bizarre 'mission accomplished' mentality, our troops and our intelligence officers and our diplomats had neither the resources nor the guidance needed to deal with the worsening conditions that steadily began to overwhelm them and continue to do so," Kennedy said.
"It is preposterous for the administration to pretend that the war in Iraq has made America safer," he added. "No president in America's history has done more damage to our country and our security than George W. Bush."
Kennedy said the administration sent too few troops to Iraq, with insufficient training or body armor, to carry out their occupation duties and underestimated the extent of the anti-occupation insurgency. "Simply put, the civilians at the Pentagon did not anticipate or prepare for the insurgent fighting that occurred, despite the pre-war warnings from military leaders," he said.
Kennedy, a member of the Armed Services Committee, said reports on the Abu Ghraib scandal demonstrated serious leadership failures that are not being pursued. Instead, he said, the administration "continued to pour out statements that were completely at odds with the facts," including claims that only a few members of the U.S. military were involved in the abuses.
He accused Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld of misleading Congress and the public "when he said that the leadership had acted swiftly to address the abuses, when in fact they allowed abuses to continue and allowed the situation to fester."
-------- ACTIVISTS
Plutonium to be moved this Wednesday, September 15!!!
Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2004
From: Merrill Chapman <thinkingpeople@comcast.net>
We have met with the Coast Guard and gotten the latest ETA from watchers and France, and have a revised and final plan.
The ships are expected to arrive on the high tide of Wednesday, 9:00am. The arrival should be somewhat quiet. Loading the ship is believed to take nearly 8 hours, giving the ships a departure time on Wednesday close to 8:00pm. With that known, we need to move our event time to 5:00pm-8:00pm. Kayaks will join in from 5:00-7:00pm. Our permitted gathering place is close to Waterfront park. The large flagpole is a good visual target. There will be an "admiral" to guide all boats into position.
The Coast Guard is expecting us and has has no problem with our action. There will be a security zone that moves along with the ships and will be announced on Wednesday on Channel 16.
Landlubbers are expected to gather at Waterfront park at 5:00pm. A drum circle has been called. Coastal Expeditions is offering a guided kayak tour to and from event for $12.00 a kayak. Reservations are a must- 884-7684.
Please call or email me with any issues you may have. There is a place for everyone to participate in this historic event.
See you Wednesday on the Charleston harbor for a safe and exciting protest 5:00-8:00pm Water side of Waterfront park
Merrill Chapman Nuclear-Free Atlantic Flotilla 1131 Harborgate Drive Mount Pleasant, S.C. 29464 (H) 843.881.9352 (C) 843.200.1977
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