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NUCLEAR
Significant nuclear-related news items in perspective
Re: Lost nuclear bomb possibly found
Eric Voice volunteered to ingest plutonium
A Sign From Beijing? Hong Kong Chief Shelves the Security Law
Edwards pledges to keep jobs of workers at uranium plant
Tell truth on nuclear weapons, US tells Iran
IAEA says no sign of nuclear activity at suspect Iranian site
Iran May Extend Partial Nuke Enrichment Freeze
U.S. Weapons Inspector: Iraq Had No WMD
Iraq Study Finds Desire for Arms, but Not Capacity
Radioactivity gets fast-forward
Ottawa seeks answers from Seoul
Diplomat: Nukes Not Cause of Korea Blast
S.Korea Says There Was No Big Blast in N.Korea
An Invitation to Terrorists?
Annan Urges Prompt Action on Sudan Draft
A couple of PDFs of nuke studies ...
INEEL moves forward on Pit 4 waste removal
Nuclear waste at Yucca
Los Alamos to Remove Weapons - Grade Nukes
Aging Nukes
MILITARY
Rocket Fired at Karzai's Helicopter
Afghan Leader's Helicopter Is Attacked, Aborting a Campaign Rally
New Charges Raise Questions on Abuse at Afghan Prisons
Iraq's arms
Army Taps Titan, Company Linked to Scandal
2 Americans, Briton Seized By Gunmen In Baghdad
Iraq Report: Intentions, Not Arms
U.S. Airstrikes Said to Kill at Least 44 in Iraq
U.S. Says 60 Killed in Strike in Iraq
Musharraf May Keep Army Post
Pakistan Army Pounds Militants' Mountain Hideouts
Yeltsin Speaks Out In Behalf Of Putin
Chechen Rebel Takes Credit for Recent Attacks in Russia
Arrest Shocks Former State Department Colleagues
Bush Shows Congress Plan for Spy Czar
CIA Officer: al - Qaida Efforts Still Lag
Germany Arrests U.S. Translator on Spying Charges
Tehran may turn to World Court over IAEA nuclear deadline
UN draft on weapons leaves leeway to Iran
UN nuclear inspectors heading for South Korea
Compromise resolution on Iran submitted at UN atomic agency
U.S., Allies Dispute Annan on Iraq War
Navy to Shut Down Sub Radio Transmitters
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Putin attack suspect 'badly beaten'
Guantanamo Charges Dropped
Judge Rebuffs Reporter in Leak Probe
As Leaks Dry Up in FBI Investigation, Activists Still Fear Jury Probe
Abu Ghraib 'Immensely' Improved, Iraqi Official Says
2 Indicted On Charges Related to Terrorism
POLITICS
Suspected CBS Source Is Well-Regarded Texan
GOP Mailing Warns Liberals Will Ban Bibles
Political Group's Antiwar Ad Draws Ire of the Bush Campaign
Kerry's defense outlook 'alarming'
Kerry Finds Ammunition in Intelligence Estimate
Kerry dismisses progress in Iraq, talks of 'chaos'
ENERGY
The Winds of China Could Solve Climate Dilemma
California Fuel Cell Partnership Road Rally Takes Off
-------- NUCLEAR
Significant nuclear-related news items in perspective
World Nuclear Association Weekly Digest
17 September 2004
http://www.world-nuclear.org/news/2004/wd_sep17.htm
Fourth new-generation reactor design approved in USA
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has given final design approval with safety evaluation to the AP1000 nuclear power reactor design. This is the fourth 3rd generation reactor to gain such approval, and the first of the generation 3+ designs. It will give Westinghouse a distinct boost in marketing the reactor in China and Europe as well as the USA. Final US design certification is likely late 2005, following public comment. The 1100 MWe AP1000 has passive safety systems, a 60 year operating life and is scaled up from the already approved AP600. It represents the culmination of a 1300 man-years and a $440 million design and testing program. Capital costs are projected at $1200 per kilowatt and modular design will reduce construction time to 36 months. - Platts 13/9/04, Ux Weekly 13/9/04.
UK government regaining nuclear spine?
A series of speeches and announcements seems to herald a belated and low-profile change of course by the UK government on nuclear energy. The Prime Minister said that global warming was in fact the gravest challenge facing the planet and that he intended to push it to the top of the international agenda in the G-8 context, targeting the USA and Russia, both of which - unlike UK - are doing all they can to increase the role of nuclear energy. Then Professor Ian Fells, Chairman of the New & Renewable Energy Centre, called for greater realism concerning nuclear power and said that politicians' hopes that renewables would "save the day" were simply "wishful thinking". "It is foolish to set renewables against nuclear power as though they are alternative strategies. It is time to make some painful decisions .É. we should be embarking on building new power stations now," he said.
The Department of Trade & Industry told ministers that nuclear energy would need to provide half of Britain's electricity by 2050 if the country was to have any hope of meeting its 60% greenhouse gas reduction target, though it is by no means abandoning renewables. The Times pointed out that the main logical implication of the Prime Minister's speech was building nuclear power plants and even being prepared to subsidise them if necessary, given that wind turbines are subsidised by £300 million per year - "the most senseless investment ever approved by Treasury". If global warming is a real threat, then nuclear power is the "one technology currently available to hold it at bay .... all else is hypocrisy." - Times 11, 14 & 15/9/04.
Russia cancels new reactor
It appears that Russia's Rosatom has aborted construction of Kursk-5, a new RBMK reactor which was due to come on line in 2006. This would mean that two further planned RBMK plants will be replaced by other designs. The decision is economic, on the basis that a new RBMK unit would be the only one of its kind left when the present ones - 11 at three sites - are retired by about 2015. WNA Symposium, Nucleonics Week 16/9/04.
Honeymoon developments
After a drilling campaign with neutron logging of the Yarramba palaeochannel immediately NW of Australia's Honeymoon deposit, Southern Cross Resources (SXR) announced that no further reserves had been confirmed and the exploration program was being shifted to Gould's Dam on the Billeroo palaeochannel, further away but more prospective. Sedimentary Holdings, which acquired the Honeymoon lease in 1997 and organised the capital raising by SXR, has now sold its final 7% share. SXR 8/9/04, Mining News 16/9/04.
Briefing/information papers updated:
Advanced nuclear power reactors - http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf08.htm
Small nuclear power reactors - http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf33.htm
Nuclear power reactors - http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf32.htm
Plans for new reactors - http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf17.htm
-------- accidents and safety
Re: Lost nuclear bomb possibly found
From: ASlater <aslater@gracelinks.org>
Date: Fri Sep 17, 2004
Hi Friends,
During the nuclear testing moratorium debate in the Congress, in 1992, where the labs were arguing for more tests to test the "safety and reliability" of the arsenal, there was entered in the Congressional Record a series of 38 "incidents" where planes crashed carrying nuclear weapons. Luckily, none of the bombs exploded. Only two accidents, in Thule, Greenland, and Altomares, Spain, actually resulted in the spewing of radioactive material that had to be cleaned up. The Georgia accident was listed and described the weapons as missing and unrecoverable. Glad to see one has turned up!! What are these guys thinking of anyway?!? When General Lee Butler took over the SAC, he grounded all the airplanes that were flying 24/7 with their lethal payloads, ready to go. That really contributed to genuine safety!! Alice Slater [Abolition 2000]
-------- britain
Eric Voice volunteered to ingest plutonium
17/09/2004
UK Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/09/17/db1703.xml&sSheet=/portal/2004/09/17/ixportal.html
Eric Voice, who has died aged 80, volunteered to ingest plutonium in order to measure the effects of radioactivity on the body and to try to remove public misconceptions about the dangers of nuclear technology; he suffered no ill effects and died of motor neurone disease.
Though he had been a founder member of CND with Bertrand Russell, Voice had always been a strong advocate of civil nuclear power and became a nuclear physicist.
He was scathing about the current Government's policy of promoting "renewables" such as wind and tidal energy as the answer to global warming, regarding the strategy as irresponsible.
Safe nuclear technology, he believed, offered the only answer; fears about the health risks of plutonium he dismissed as "largely media hype".
His career as "the most radioactive man on the planet" began in 1992 when he volunteered to be a guinea pig in EU-funded research carried out at AEA Technology's biomedical research laboratory at Harwell.
The aim was to track the movement of plutonium through the blood, bone and organs. He and another volunteer were each injected with 20,000 becquerels of plutonium 237 in the form of a citrate.
The results of the trials showed that, in males, plutonium injected into the bloodstream accumulates in the liver but does not lodge in bone or reproductive organs, as widely claimed.
In subsequent experiments Voice was one of a dozen guinea pigs who inhaled trace amounts of plutonium isotopes of the sort found in nuclear reactors. Measurements were then made tracking the progress of the substances through the body. The study was designed to find out how to treat people in the event of a nuclear accident.
The experiments involved some personal inconvenience. Voice's excreta had to be removed daily for analysis and, when visiting friends, he had to bring a bag full of bottles. "People assume I've brought them a gift," he said. "When I explain I can't use their facilities, their expressions are extremely comical."
In 1999, the Atomic Energy Authority announced that everyone involved in the tests remained healthy. Supporters hailed the results as vindicating their view that nuclear power is safe.
The son of a bank clerk, Eric Voice was born in London on June 2 1924 and educated at Goudhurst School, Kent. After leaving school at 15, he became a research chemist with Boots in Nottingham.
As a young man, Voice was excited by the possibilities of nuclear technology, but horrified by Hiroshima - not just because of the loss of life: "The most momentous discovery and what had man done?
He'd used it for aggressive purposes and sealed its fate for generations. I swore that from then on I'd work towards utilising this wonderful source of energy for the benefit of mankind."
After the war, he joined the UK Atomic Energy Authority at Harwell as a research biochemist and, in 1956, moved to Scotland, becoming one of the first scientists on the Dounreay site.
He worked in a Nissen hut while the nuclear complex was being constructed. Five years later he joined the team of European scientists at Winfrith in Dorset, carrying out research into the fast breeder reactor. He returned to Dounreay in 1976.
By this time Voice had taken a degree and doctorate in Physics at the Open University. In the 1980s he took a further degree in English and did so well, the OU even invited him to teach the subject. He declined.
Voice was one of the first western scientists to visit Chernobyl after the nuclear explosion in 1986. He made several visits to the Ukraine, researching the effects of the accident on plant and animal life; his conclusions are to be published shortly by the Royal Society.
Despite the alarming stories circulating in the wake of Chernobyl, Voice remained unshakeable in his belief that no one had ever been harmed by absorbing plutonium. So strong was his conviction that he put his own life on the line to prove it.
In retirement, Voice worked as an energy consultant and lecturer, travelled widely and was involved in giving evidence to parliamentary select committees on energy policy and global warming.
A wiry man with steel-blue eyes, Voice was an active member of heritage societies in Caithness and the north of Scotland. He died at the weekend.
Eric Voice married, in 1950, Joan Lane, who survives him with their daughter and two sons.
-------- china
A Sign From Beijing? Hong Kong Chief Shelves the Security Law
September 17, 2004
New York Times
By KEITH BRADSHER
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/17/international/asia/17hong.html?pagewanted=all
HONG KONG, Sept. 16 - Hong Kong's chief executive, Tung Chee-hwa, ruled out on Thursday trying to pass internal security legislation any time soon, a strong sign that his backers in Beijing have decided to take a conciliatory stance after legislative elections here last Sunday.
In July 2003, Mr. Tung had tried to push stringent security laws through the legislature, but retreated after that plan set off huge street protests. At the time, he reserved the right to reintroduce the proposal someday.
The controversy that summer, along with Beijing's more recent efforts last April to limit future moves here toward greater democracy, had been expected to hurt Beijing's defenders in the elections last Sunday.
But pro-Beijing candidates did better than expected, capturing two-fifths of the vote and retaining a narrow majority of the seats in the legislature, a combination possible because of a complex voting system set up to limit support for democracy advocates.
Emboldened by the outcome, the two largest pro-Beijing parties said on Wednesday afternoon and Thursday morning that they would support legislation against sedition, subversion, treason, the unauthorized disclosure of state secrets and other offenses if Mr. Tung reintroduced it.
With the issue suddenly before the public again, Mr. Tung took the rare step at midday on Thursday of unexpectedly coming downstairs at government headquarters and telling a hastily gathered group of local reporters about his opposition to any action on the issue in the near future.
"We have no plans for the time being and will not seek to start afresh the process for legislating" on the security laws, Mr. Tung said, according to an official transcript of his remarks. "We will consider the matter only after the community has reached a basic consensus on this question and after we have satisfactorily dealt with economic recovery, economic restructuring and constitutional arrangements. We will not consider the question now."
Under Hong Kong's miniconstitution, the Basic Law, only the chief executive can introduce the security legislation. So Mr. Tung's opposition would appear to halt any movement on the issue, unless Beijing asks him later to change his mind.
A Beijing official also said last spring that if civil disorder emerges in Hong Kong, the mainland would be able to impose its security laws here.
Jean-Philippe Béja, a China specialist at the Center for International Studies and Research in Paris who has been here for the past week to observe the elections, said that it was surprising that Beijing was not using Mr. Tung to push through the laws.
"As Tung Chee-hwa is quite unpopular, you'd better use him to pass all the unpopular measures," instead of running the risk that the same issue might ruin his successor's popularity, Mr. Béja said.
Mr. Tung is not expected to run for re-election when his second, five-year term expires in 2007.
Handling Hong Kong is tricky for the Chinese government because of the broad attention recent events here have drawn on the mainland, Mr. Béja said. "People have been watching developments in Hong Kong as a possible model for China," he said.
Beijing has become no less critical of other countries that take an interest in Hong Kong's affairs. A front-page article on Wednesday in the official China Daily denounced the United States House of Representatives for having "intervened in China's domestic affairs."
On Monday, the House passed a resolution condemning China for having not followed through on pledges of greater democracy set down in the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984, which paved the way for Britain's return of Hong Kong to China in 1997.
-------- depleted uranium
[If anybody in the military tries to tell you that depleted uranium isn't radioactive, quote from this article: "a new defluorination plant is [to be] constructed [in Ohio] to remove fluorine from thousands of tons of depleted uranium to make it marketable for fuel at nuclear power plants". If d.u. can be made into fuel, then it's certainly still hot. et]
Edwards pledges to keep jobs of workers at uranium plant
Piketon workers show their support
By JIM PROVANCE,
Friday, September 17, 2004
TOLEDO BLADE COLUMBUS BUREAU
http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040917/NEWS09/409170419/-1/NEWS
PORTSMOUTH, OHIO - Vice presidential candidate John Edwards promised workers at a southern Ohio uranium enrichment plant that their jobs would be safe under a John Kerry presidency.
"John Kerry and I will make sure the Piketon plant stays open [and] that the new Piketon plant is built and built on schedule," the Democratic North Carolina senator told about 75 union members outside their hall as he toured economically struggling Appalachian counties in Ohio and West Virginia yesterday.
"Not only that, we're also going to make sure that the workers who've been sick get the help that they need," he said.
The stop came less than a week after President Bush visited the region and met with four Piketon workers, demonstrating that, while Ohio is considered the national battleground, southeastern Ohio is the state's battleground.
The plant, which once employed about 2,500, was scheduled to close several years ago, but it was placed on standby after George W. Bush was elected. The plant employs about 1,200 today while a new defluorination plant is constructed to remove fluorine from thousands of tons of depleted uranium to make it marketable for fuel at nuclear power plants.
"Bush made a promise in 2000 as governor of Texas, and he honored that promise..." said Chuck Wiltshire, of the Triangle of Prevention Program, a safety program with the Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy Workers International Union. Despite that promise, he supports Mr. Kerry.
"We're not sure about the future for one thing," he said. "We haven't gotten a letter of support from President Bush, and it isn't because we haven't asked."
Bush spokesman Kevin Madden said it was hypocritical for the Democratic ticket to talk up nuclear jobs in southern Ohio while opposing federal plans to store nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
"The Piketon plant was hemorrhaging jobs under the previous administration," he said. "Because of President Bush, Piketon is creating jobs in the Portsmouth area, which is important to southern Ohio. The President is cognizant that Piketon is vital to the nation's energy. The President is committed to the plant."
Ohio and West Virginia went with Mr. Bush in 2000 over Al Gore by margins of 3.5 and 6 percent respectively. But the Kerry-Edwards ticket is banking that it can deny Mr. Bush the two states' total of 25 electoral votes in 2004 by focusing on regions that have missed the economic turnaround touted by the President.
Ohio's and West Virginia's unemployment rates for July, the latest figures available, were 5.9 and 5.1 percent respectively, compared to an August national average of 5.4 percent.
In Scioto County, Ohio, where Mr. Edwards rallied yesterday, voters opted for Mr. Bush by 4 percentage points in 2000. The county's jobless rate is 8.5 percent.
"One out of every five jobs lost in America was lost right here in Ohio," Mr. Edwards said during a rally in the center of Portsmouth on the Ohio River. "Why in the world would people in Ohio rehire a man to be their president who lost them 230,000 jobs?"
Contact Jim Provance at: jprovance@theblade.com or 614-221-0496.
-------- iran
Tell truth on nuclear weapons, US tells Iran
17/09/2004
telegraph.co.uk
By Anton La Guardia
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;sessionid=JURD3MD34EYKRQFIQMFSM5WAVCBQ0JVC?xml=/news/2004/09/17/wiran17.xml&sSheet=/portal/2004/09/17/ixportal.html
America seized on satellite pictures of a possible Iranian nuclear weapons testing site yesterday to demand that Teheran be given an ultimatum to come clean or face United Nations sanctions. Financial Services
"This clearly shows the intention to develop weapons," said a senior United States official after a Washington think-tank released its analysis of images of an isolated explosives testing facility at Parchin, about 20 miles from Teheran.
But Iran dismissed the claim as "another lie" and some US officials privately distanced themselves from the accusation. British officials were also sceptical.
The International Atomic Energy Agency rejected American accusations that it had gone soft on Iran and that it was deliberately keeping quiet about Teheran's alleged refusal to admit nuclear inspectors to Parchin.
An IAEA spokesman said a report issued two weeks ago "is objective and contains all the facts in our possession".
He added that inspectors were "discussing with Iran dual use items and equipment" - implying that the IAEA is interested in visiting Parchin.
Any proof that Iran has built a facility to test parts of a nuclear weapon would amount to "smoking gun" evidence in America's campaign to prove to the world that Teheran is seeking to develop an atomic bomb.
Other Iranian nuclear facilities, such as its uranium enrichment centrifuges, are at most "dual use" - ostensibly designed as part of a civil nuclear programme but potentially military in nature.
In an analysis published on its website on Thursday, the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security said Parchin was "a logical candidate for a nuclear weapons-related site".
It identified a number of sites that could be useful in testing explosives for "implosion-type" nuclear bombs - devices in which explosives are detonated to compress a core of fissile material and start a nuclear chain reaction.
The authors said one building, identified as a high explosive testing "bunker", had parallels with a bunker once designed by Iraq to test a mock-up of a nuclear bomb.
The authors were careful to say the satellite images were "ambiguous", not least because Parchin is well known as a site for research and production of ammunition, missiles, high explosives and perhaps also chemical weapons.
The ISIS also ruled out claims by some experts that the site contained a full-blown underground nuclear testing site.
The claims about Parchin have deepened the mutual suspicion in Vienna, where the IAEA's governing board is debating how to deal with the Iranian nuclear crisis.
One diplomat close to the IAEA said: "Every time there is a board meeting there are breathless allegations of a new nuclear site. It's easy to name names, but the agency needs actionable evidence.
"Remember that in Iraq inspectors were sent on many wild goose chases."
America has demanded that the IAEA issue a clear ultimatum for Iran to halt its uranium enrichment programme and answer all outstanding questions about its nuclear programme by Oct 31.
If not, Washington wants Iran referred to the Security Council for sanctions.
But European countries have tried to tone down its resolution in the hope of winning Third World support.
A compromise being discussed last night suggested only an implicit November deadline with no clear "trigger".
The draft would ask the IAEA to produce an all-encompassing report on Iran's nuclear programme, rather than quarterly updates.
America and Britain hope this will remind the board of a catalogue of Iranian lies and violations over 18 years.
-----
IAEA says no sign of nuclear activity at suspect Iranian site
VIENNA (AFP)
Sep 17, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040917163425.ohd9s7ce.html
UN nuclear watchdog chief Mohamed ElBaradei said Friday there was no sign of nuclear activity at the Parchin military site in Iran which US officials say should be investigated.
"We do not have any indication that this site has any nuclear-related activities," ElBaradei said.
"We are aware of this new site," he added however at a press conference at an IAEA board of governors meeting.
Iran denied Thursday that it had carried out any nuclear-related work at Parchin, a huge military complex 30 kilometres (19 miles) southeast of Tehran.
A senior US official has told AFP the United States was concerned about high-explosives testing in Parchin that may "amount to (nuclear) weapons intent".
Iranian official Hossein Mousavian said in Vienna that the IAEA had not asked to visit Parchin as part of its investigation of Iran's nuclear program.
He said that "if this is requested by the IAEA, we are fully ready to cooperate."
Mousavian said the IAEA had asked Iran "four weeks ago about reports from open sources of explosive testing but they did not mention Parchin."
Diplomats have told AFP, however, that the IAEA had asked to visit Parchin and that the Iranians have not agreed to the visit.
Parchin is a site for a variety of defense projects, including Defense Industries Organization (DIO) work in chemical explosives.
Iran maintains that its nuclear program is strictly civilian and peaceful and that it is not developing atomic weapons.
A diplomat close to the IAEA confirmed that the agency had asked to send inspectors to Parchin but said this was not included in an IAEA report on Iran published September 1 since "whenever you are in the negotiating process, you should not mention what you are negotiating.
ElBaradei defended himself against charges of hiding information on Parchin.
He said the report contained "all the facts that we think should be brought to the attention of the (IAEA) board (of governors) at this stage.
"The report is comprehensive," he said.
He said the IAEA did not like "other people second-guessing our conclusions nor are we planning to outsource our investigation," a clear reference to the United States.
ElBaradei said the IAEA was "in full control" of its investigation and will continue to do it "with our traditional fairness and objectivity."
"Should there be any new information now or in the future, I can assure you it will be brought immediately before the board," ElBaradei said.
A US official had told AFP last week that the IAEA had, according to verbal accounts, dropped the mention of Parchin in its September 1 report on Iran, as well as a reference to concern about Iran's work with beryllium.
Beryllium has civilian applications but can also be used in combination with polonium to make a neutron initiator that is effectively a trigger for a nuclear bomb.
The official said the concern about Parchin was that the Iranians may be working on testing "high-explosive shaped charges with an inert core of depleted uranium" as a sort of dry test for how a bomb with fissile material would work.
--------
Iran May Extend Partial Nuke Enrichment Freeze
September 17, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nuclear-iran-mousavian.html
VIENNA (Reuters) - Iran's policymakers may decide to extend its partial freeze on uranium enrichment, a process that can make fuel for nuclear power plants or weapons, a senior Iranian official said on Friday.
``I don't reject the possibility of reconsidering the possibility of continuing the suspension for an additional one or two months, but this will be decided by the policymakers,'' Hossein Mousavian, Iran's chief delegate to the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) told Reuters.
A Western diplomat earlier told Reuters that the United States, Canada and Australia had agreed on the text of a draft IAEA resolution that calls on Tehran to suspend immediately all activities connected to its uranium enrichment program.
Earlier this week Mousavian said Iran would begin enriching uranium very soon.
Tehran has not enriched any uranium since agreeing with Britain, Germany and France to freeze enrichment activities last year.
Iran did not appear to be prepared to expand the scope of activities considered to be enrichment, as called for by the draft resolution, which diplomats said would likely be adopted later on Friday.
``The key element of enrichment, the enrichment of uranium, is already suspended,'' Mousavian said.
The EU trio has called on Iran to suspend all activities that could enable it to develop bomb-grade uranium, including the production and testing of centrifuges used in enrichment, as well as the production of feed material for centrifuges. But Tehran has refused to expand the scope of the freeze.
-------- iraq / inspections
U.S. Weapons Inspector: Iraq Had No WMD
Sep 17, 2004
Associated Press
By KATHERINE PFLEGER SHRADER
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040917/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/iraq_weapons&cid=542&ncid=716
WASHINGTON - Fallen Iraqi President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) did not have stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, but left signs that he had idle programs he someday hoped to revive, the top U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq (news - web sites) concludes in a draft report due out soon.
According to people familiar with the 1,500-page report, the head of the Iraq Survey Group, Charles Duelfer, will find that Saddam was importing banned materials, working on unmanned aerial vehicles in violation of U.N. agreements and maintaining a dual-use industrial sector that could produce weapons.
Duelfer also says Iraq only had small research and development programs for chemical and biological weapons.
As Duelfer puts the finishing touches on his report, he concludes Saddam had intentions of restarting weapons programs at some point, after suspicion and inspections from the international community waned.
After a year and a half in Iraq, however, the United States has found no weapons of mass destruction - its chief argument for going to war and overthrowing the regime.
An intelligence official said Duelfer could wrap up the report as soon as this month, but noted it may take time to declassify it. Those who discussed the report inside and outside the government did so Thursday on the condition of anonymity because it contains classified material and is not yet completed.
If the report is released publicly before the Nov. 2 elections, Democrats are likely to seize on the document as another opportunity to criticize the Bush administration's leading argument for war in Iraq and the deteriorating security situation there.
Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry (news - web sites) has criticized the president's handling of the war, but also has said he still would have voted to authorize the invasion even if he had known no weapons of mass destruction would be found there.
Duelfer's report is expected to be similar to findings reported by his predecessor, David Kay, who presented an interim report to Congress in October. Kay left the post in January, saying, "We were almost all wrong" about Saddam's weapons programs.
The new analysis, however, is expected to fall between the position of the Bush administration before the war - portraying Saddam as a grave threat - and the declarative statements Kay made after he resigned.
It will also add more evidence and flesh out Kay's October findings. At that time, Kay said the Iraq Survey Group had only uncovered limited evidence of secret chemical and biological weapons programs, but he found substantial evidence of an Iraqi push to boost the range of its ballistic missiles beyond prohibited ranges.
He also said there was almost no sign that a significant nuclear weapons project was under way.
Duelfer's report doesn't reach firm conclusions in all areas. For instance, U.S. officials are still investigating whether Saddam's fallen regime may have sent chemical weapons equipment and several billion dollars over the border to Syria. That has not been confirmed, but remains an area of interest to the U.S. government.
The Duelfer report will come months after the Senate Intelligence Committee released a scathing assessment of the prewar intelligence on Iraq.
After a yearlong inquiry, the Republican-led committee said in July the CIA (news - web sites) kept key information from its own and other agencies' analysts, engaged in "group think" by failing to challenge the assumption that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and allowed President Bush (news - web sites) and Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites) to make false statements.
The Iraq Survey Group has been working since the summer of 2003 to find Saddam's weapons and better understand his prohibited programs. More than a thousand civilian and military weapons specialists, translators and other experts have been devoted to the effort.
------
WEAPONS INSPECTORS
Iraq Study Finds Desire for Arms, but Not Capacity
September 17, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/17/politics/17intel.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Sept. 16 - A new report on Iraq's illicit weapons program is expected to conclude that Saddam Hussein's government had a clear intent to produce nuclear, chemical and biological weapons if United Nations sanctions were lifted, government officials said Thursday. But, like earlier reports, it finds no evidence that Iraq had begun any large-scale program for weapons production by the time of the American invasion last year, the officials said.
The most specific evidence of an illicit weapons program, the officials said, has been uncovered in clandestine labs operated by the Iraqi Intelligence Service, which could have produced small quantities of lethal chemical and biological agents, though probably for use in assassinations, not to inflict mass casualties.
A draft report of nearly 1,500 pages that is circulating within the government essentially reaffirms the findings of an interim review completed 11 months ago, the officials said. But they said it added considerable detail, particularly on the question of Iraq's intention to produce weapons if United Nations penalties were weakened or lifted, a judgment they said was based on documents signed by senior leaders and the debriefings of former Iraqi scientists and top officials, as well as other records.
The officials said the report would portray a more complicated and detailed picture, based on a far more extensive examination of suspected Iraqi weapons sites and records, as well as the debriefings. They said new information in the draft report based on on-site inspections of clandestine labs described the possibility that they were intended to provide small quantities of poisons.
A final version of the report, by Charles A. Duelfer, the top American weapons inspector in Iraq, is expected to be made public within the next several weeks.
In its current form, the report reaffirms previous interim findings that there is no evidence that Iraq possessed stockpiles of illicit weapons at the time of the American invasion in March 2003, the officials said. Prewar intelligence estimates that said Iraq actually possessed chemical and biological arsenals and was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program were cited by the Bush administration as the major rationale for war.
With the presidential election campaign in its final weeks, Republicans and Democrats are likely to seize on separate aspects of the report in an effort to score political points.
President Bush, who has said Iraq posed a threat to the world whether or not it possessed illicit weapons, will probably draw attention to the conclusion that Mr. Hussein sought to acquire illicit weapons. His political opponent, Senator John Kerry, who has accused Mr. Bush of misleading the country into war, will probably highlight the conclusion that Iraq had not begun a large-scale production program.
The separate disclosure on Wednesday that a classified National Intelligence Estimate completed in July portrayed a gloomier prognosis for Iraq than Mr. Bush has acknowledged was already fueling fresh debate about Iraq on the campaign trail.
The report on Iraq's weapons is the result of some 15 months of work by the Iraq Survey Group, a military and intelligence team of more than 1,200 people that has inspected scores of sites, interviewed hundreds of former Iraqi scientists and officials and reviewed thousands of documents to try to reach a final judgment.
As described by the government officials, the findings of Mr. Duelfer's report, in its current draft, are broadly consistent with the interim judgments, including the report issued in October 2003 by David A. Kay, the first top American inspector. When he stepped down in January, Mr. Kay said that "we were all wrong, probably" about whether Iraq had stockpiles of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons of mass destruction. But he also said there was evidence that Iraq was developing "test amounts" of chemical weapons and researching how to produce ricin for use in weapons, and that it had made little progress toward restarting its nuclear program.
In trying to untangle the mystery of why no illicit weapons have been found in Iraq, Mr. Duelfer's report is expected to look more closely at the issue of Iraq's intentions. The document will stop short of offering a final judgment about Iraq's weapons program, the officials said, and will not completely close the door on some possibilities, including the still unsubstantiated theory that illicit weapons may have been moved to other countries.
It will say that a vast cache of additional documents, including a recent find of 10,000 boxes, still needs to be translated and studied before any definitive conclusions can be reached about Iraq's capabilities and intentions. The Iraq Survey Group will continue its work, the officials said, and may issue additional reports.
Meetings are scheduled next week to discuss what portions of the new report should be made public. A meeting led by Mr. Duelfer early this month in London presented versions of the draft to about two dozen British, Australian and American experts, the officials said. The final draft of the report remains to be completed, they added.
Some contents of the documents were described by government officials from several agencies who have seen all or part of the draft or been briefed on it. The officials spoke on condition that they not be identified by name, agency or, in some cases, by nationality, because the document remains classified and because its contents remain in draft form. The officials included some who said Iraq posed a threat that justified the American invasion, and some who said it did not.
On nuclear weapons, earlier American reports have described no evidence that Iraq had begun an active effort to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program that it was forced to abandon after the Persian Gulf war of 1991. The officials who described the draft report declined to provide details about its findings on nuclear issues.
Mr. Duelfer is still in Baghdad, and through a spokesman, he declined a request to be interviewed. In an interview late last month with The Los Angeles Times, Mr. Duelfer declined to discuss any findings in detail, but said his report would document the evidence collected to date and attempt to explain "the evolution and decision process" regarding Iraq's illicit weapons program through 2003. Mr. Duelfer said in that interview that questions involving Iraq's pursuit of so-called weapons of mass destruction "deserve something more than just a simple-minded archaeological exam of the W.M.D. program."
On Thursday, an intelligence official said the internal review under way was intended "to make as much of the document available to the public as possible, consistent with intelligence sources and methods." The official added, "That does take time."
Mr. Kay's report last October cited "a clandestine network of laboratories and safe houses within the Iraqi Intelligence Service" that contained material suitable for research into chemical and biological weapons. Mr. Duelfer's report, based on inspections of clandestine labs, will say the Iraqis were capable of using the labs to produce small quantities of lethal agents or to conduct very primitive research as a very early step toward broader weapons production.
Mr. Duelfer, who took over as the chief weapons inspector in January, said in testimony to Congress in March that Iraq did have dual-use facilities that could have produced biological or chemical weapons on short notice. He also noted that Iraq was working until March 2003 to build new facilities for the production of chemicals.
But officials who have seen Mr. Duelfer's report say it describes no conclusive evidence that any effort was under way to use these facilities for weapons production.
Mr. Bush, who warned before the war that Iraq's illicit weapons posed an urgent threat to the United States, now generally describes Iraq as having been a "gathering threat," a phrase he has used at least 11 times since Aug. 12. In a Sept. 9 campaign speech, Mr. Bush told voters in Ohio: "Remember, Saddam Hussein had the capability of making weapons; he could have passed that capability on to the enemy."
Mr. Kerry, by contrast, has focused on the fact that the illicit weapons have not been found in Iraq as evidence that Mr. Bush's assertions lack credibility. "Everybody knows that just saying that there are weapons of mass destruction didn't make them so," Mr. Kerry said in an Aug. 2 television interview.
-------- japan
Radioactivity gets fast-forward
A radioactive element's rate of decay has been speeded up.
Could we neutralize radioactive waste more quickly?
Published online: 17 September 2004; | doi:10.1038/news040913-24 Philip Ball
http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040913/full/040913-24.html
Scientists in Japan have persuaded a radioactive material to decay significantly faster than normal.
The rate of decay of radioactive atoms is often regarded as something preordained and beyond our power to manipulate. It has been known for some time that that is not really the case, but this change, almost 1%, is by far the most dramatic effect achieved so far. It decreased the half-life of beryllium-7 by about half a day.
In principle, the result suggests that we might be able to neutralize nuclear waste faster. The researchers admit, however, that the possibility of magnifying the effect enough to significantly speed up this process remains "somewhat remote".
Electron grab
Atoms of beryllium-7 decay by grabbing electrons from their surroundings. The electron is absorbed into the nucleus, where it combines with a proton to make a neutron, transforming the atom into a different element, lithium-7.
The rate of this kind of decay depends on the chance of an electron straying into the nucleus and getting absorbed. So increasing the density of electrons surrounding the atomic nucleus can speed up the decay. The reverse is true for the types of decay that involve expelling a neutron: increasing the electron density around that type of atom slows the process down.
At least, that is the idea. But the changes seen previously have been tiny. Now Tsutomu Ohtsuki of Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, and colleagues have boosted the effect by trapping beryllium-7 atoms in molecular cages. They report their results in Physical Review Letters1.
The researchers induced a nuclear reaction to produce beryllium-7 atoms with a lot of energy, which were able to bash their way through the walls of cage-like carbon molecules called buckminsterfullerenes.
Once the beryllium atoms are trapped, the carbon cage surrounds them with a dense cloud of electrons. This makes it more likely for an electron to get into the trapped atom's nucleus and induce decay. The researchers found that beryllium-7 encased in buckminsterfullerene has a half-life of about 52.5 days, compared with 53 days for pure beryllium-7. The half-life is the time it takes for half of the initial amount of material to decay.
Waste disposal
Speeding up decay by less than 1% will not help much in disposing of radioactive waste with half-lives of thousands or millions of years. So could the effect be made much bigger?
Peter Möller, a physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, says that if you could recreate conditions such as those found in the interior of a hot star, changes in nuclear decay rates could be much more dramatic.
"People don't know how to engineer such an environment," he admits. But squeezing a radioactive substance to very high pressures might enhance the effect that Ohtsuki and colleagues have seen.
1. Ohtsuki T., Yuki H., Muto M., Kasagi J. & Ohno K. Physical Review Letters, 93. (2004). | Article http://dx.doi.org/10.1103%2FPhysRevLett.93.112501
Full text: http://scitation.aip.org/getpdf/servlet/GetPDFServlet?filetype=pdf&id=PRLTAO000093000011112501000001&idtype=cvips
-------- korea
Ottawa seeks answers from Seoul
Canada wants to know if reactor sales are connected to S. Korea's secret testing
By PAUL KORING
Friday, September 17, 2004
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20040917/SKOREA17/TPInternational/TopStories
WASHINGTON -- Canada is pressing South Korea to determine whether a decades-old, corruption-clouded sale of a Candu nuclear reactor may have fuelled Seoul's secretive experiments with weapons-grade materials in the early 1980s.
"We've asked whether Canadian fuel or facilities were involved," Foreign Affairs Department spokesman Rodney Moore said. "We've raised our concerns; so far, they haven't responded."
South Korea has belatedly admitted conducting the covert and illegal experiments involving plutonium and the enrichment of uranium -- apparently under pressure of being exposed by international nuclear investigators. The UN International Atomic Energy Agency has voiced grave concerns over the belated admissions, which others fear could start a nuclear arms race on the tense Korean peninsula.
North Korea, which is under intense pressure from the United States to scrap its nuclear-weapons and long-range missile efforts, has accused U.S. President George W. Bush of ignoring South Korea's nuclear ambitions.
"We view South Korea's uranium-enrichment program as part of [an] armament race in the Northeast Asian region," Han Song-Ryol, deputy chief of North Korea's mission to the United Nations, said after Seoul's first revelations. There have been more serious admissions since then about work on plutonium and uranium enrichment in the early 1980s.
It remains unclear whether the scope and duration of South Korea's previously undisclosed nuclear programs have been divulged completely. At least three secret test facilities have been identified.
"It is a matter of serious concern that the conversion and enrichment of uranium and the separation of plutonium were not reported, IAEA director-general Mohamed ElBaradei said when he reported the South Korean disclosure to his organization's board.
If the proliferation trail leads back to Ottawa, as it did three decades ago in India, it will be a huge embarrassment for a country whose efforts to advocate international nuclear non-proliferation have often seemed at odds with its efforts to market reactors to anyone who can be persuaded to take them.
Given Canada's unhappy nuclear export history, Ottawa is still waiting for official word from Seoul. But there are factors working against a Canadian connection.
Yesterday, a Vienna-based diplomat familiar with the IAEA file said Canadian fuel and the Candu reactor don't appear to have been involved. A small, obscure research reactor known by the acronym Triga could be the culprit, the diplomat said.
Plutonium can be obtained from the spent fuel in Candus, but the timing of the extraction experiments in question also seems to rule this out. The Canadian reactor didn't begin producing at full power until March of 1983 -- after the dates given by the South Koreans in their latest accounting of illicit experiments.
Ian Dovey, spokesman for Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., said officials "just don't know" what was the culprit in Seoul. South Korea bought four Canadian reactors starting in 1976. Those sales began barely two years after India exploded its own "peaceful nuclear device" using Canadian technology provided under aid programs designed to promote reactor sales.
Mr. Dovey said the sales agreement with Seoul carried tougher safeguards against misuse than the deal with India, and until recently there had never been a hint that South Korea had engaged in clandestine projects that could lead to weapons development.
One of the South Korean sales gained notoriety at the time for the unexplained payment of $18-million to AECL agent Shaul Eisenberg, who was later fingered as a broker in secret Israeli arms sales to China and Iran. AECL's failure to answer for those payments resulted in the government-owned company being called "unco-operative, misleading and evasive" by the Auditor-General.
Several other Candu projects gained notoriety as well. The sales to India and Pakistan were scrapped after the nuclear arms race broke out in South Asia, and a deal with Romania was sullied by poor construction and slave labour.
----
Diplomat: Nukes Not Cause of Korea Blast
September 17, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Koreas-Explosion.html?pagewanted=all
BEIJING (AP) -- Video footage of the area where North Korea said a huge explosion occurred showed dozens of workers swarming around a dusty construction site resembling a large dam project, while a foreign diplomat who visited the site said Friday he found no sign the blast was nuclear.
South Korea, meanwhile, said a mushroom-shaped plume thought to be from the Sept. 9 blast was 60 miles away from the site where North Korea said it occurred and may have been a natural cloud formation.
Diplomats from seven countries were flown by the secretive communist state to its remote northeast, near the border with China, on Thursday to verify claims that the explosion was part of work on a hydroelectric dam -- not a test of its contentious nuclear program.
``One thing is entirely clear: This was not a nuclear explosion that happened at this site,'' Sweden's Ambassador to North Korea, Paul Beijer, said by phone from North Korea's capital, Pyongyang. ``This is a site where thousands of people are working on dam building.''
Concern was sparked when South Korea reported days after the blast that a mushroom cloud more than two miles wide had been spotted on satellite.
Independent video of the construction site was obtained by Associated Press Television News in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, hours after the ambassadors returned from their visit.
The video, apparently shot from a point high above the valley floor, showed a building complex intact near a place where rock had been blasted away, with scores of workers moving around.
A deep excavation with large pools of water and wooden shelters could be seen across the valley, apparently where the dam is intended to rise, and a North Korean official was shown pointing out a big billboard illustrating the completed project.
The size of the cloud and the timing of the blast, which coincided with the 56th anniversary of North Korea's founding fed speculation by South Korean media that it was a nuclear test.
But a South Korean official said Friday that the site that North Korea opened to the foreign diplomats was about 60 miles from the area South Korean officials had initially pinpointed as a site for the mushroom cloud.
``We believe that there was no explosion in the place where intelligence authorities had previously suspected that there were signs of an explosion,'' Deputy Unification Minister Lee Bong-jo told reporters in Seoul.
Lee suggested that Seoul concurred with the North's claims.
``We believe that the explosion described by North Korea ... has to do with a hydroelectric project,'' he said.
South Korea's main intelligence agency also said Wednesday that the mushroom-shaped cloud might have been ``an unusual form of natural cloud, given the weather conditions there at the time, besides the possibility of blasting to build a hydroelectric power plant.''
The incident came during efforts to arrange a new round of six-nation talks on demands for the North to give up its nuclear ambitions. The talks involve the two Koreas, the United States, China, Russia and Japan.
Experts say they don't believe the North would conduct a nuclear test near its border with China, a major ally and aid donor to the isolated, impoverished country.
British Foreign Office Minister Bill Rammell, who visited Pyongyang this week, said the North's foreign minister told him the blast was part of demolition work for a hydroelectric project.
Beijer said North Korean officials at the construction site told the diplomats two unusually large blasts occurred there on the night of Sept. 8 and early Sept. 9. He said they explained how much explosive was used.
The delegation was led by Britain's ambassador to North Korea, David Slinn, and included diplomats from the Pyongyang embassies of Russia, Poland, Mongolia, Germany, Sweden and the Czech Republic.
Slinn declined to comment, but the British Foreign Office issued a statement in London saying the group visited the construction site of a hydroelectric project.
The diplomats reached the site in Samsu county after a 1 1/2 hour flight followed by a three-hour drive in an off-road vehicle, Beijer said.
They spent about 90 minutes taking photos, talking to officials at the site and gathering information that they sent back to their governments for analysis, the ambassador said. He didn't say whether delegates carried Geiger counters or took soil samples at the site.
--------
S.Korea Says There Was No Big Blast in N.Korea
September 17, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-korea-north-blast.html
SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea's latest assessment of a widely reported explosion in North Korea last week is that there was no blast at all at the suspected site, a vice minister said on Friday.
Seismic signals and strange cloud formations picked up last week were not from an explosion, vice minister of unification, Rhee Bong-jo, told reporters.
A security analyst said a week of speculation and confusion over reports of a blast was likely the result of what amounted to an intelligence failure. Initial reports even suggested a nuclear test could have been carried out.
International talks have been held on North Korea's nuclear programs but they have made little progress.
Foreign diplomats who visited on Thursday what they were told was the site of the mysterious explosion said it was a hydroelectric project under construction. But South Korea said they had been taken to the wrong place.
South Korea said the diplomats had been about 100 km (60 miles) away from the suspected location in remote Kimhyungjik county on the Chinese border. But the story became even more convoluted when Rhee said there had been no blast at all.
``There is no information to support an explosion in the area where there were indications of an explosion,'' Rhee said.
``It is likely the peculiar cloud was natural cloud,'' Rhee said, referring to initial reports of a mushroom cloud. He said seismic activity had probably been from around Mount Paektu, on the Chinese border, even further from Kimhyungjik county.
Yun Duk-min of South Korea's Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security said a failure of intelligence and the suspicion with which secretive North Korea is viewed contributed to the confusion.
``This appears to have been an intelligence failure as we looked into a very closed society,'' Yun told Reuters.
``The heightened level of alert in the way the international community looks at North Korea likely bred this incident,'' he said. ``It looks like we fell into a trap.''
North Korea says the explosion was demolition work for a power plant. Rhee said that was probably a reference to work in Samsu county, where the diplomats went.
Western diplomats said the group had been flown and taken by road to a large construction site in Samsu on Thursday.
German Ambassador to North Korea Doris Hertrampf said from Pyongyang that the group of diplomats had been told blasts on Sept. 8 and 9 were larger than usual to speed up work on a dam.
``I saw there was a huge hole in the ground, and a huge amount of earth moving going on. I'd guess it must have been a blast,'' she said by telephone.
DIPLOMATS AWAIT FINDINGS
So far none of the diplomats on the tour has expressed doubts about the location. Britain said it needed to await the findings.
The diplomats inspected the site in Samsu for 90 minutes and were allowed to take photographs, British Foreign Office minister Bill Rammell said in a statement.
``The information they gathered will be reported back to technical experts in capitals. We now need to await their findings,'' Rammell said.
The group was told the blasts were conducted last Wednesday and Thursday, not just on one day as initially reported by foreign media, a Western diplomat said.
North Korean Foreign Minister Paek Nam-sun told Rammell on Monday the reported explosion was part of work to remove a mountain to make way for a hydroelectric project.
Secretary of State Colin Powell told Reuters on Tuesday North Korea's explanation squared with Washington's view.
Polish Ambassador Wojciech Kaluza said the North Korean project manager said there were 50,000 workers at the site and he gave figures for the amount of explosives used and the amount of soil to be removed, Japan's Kyodo news agency reported.
It quoted Germany's envoy as saying more blasts were planned.
The United States, North Korea, South Korea, Japan, Russia and China have been holding talks with the North on its suspected nuclear weapons programs. They have made little progress.
Another round of talks was to have been held in Beijing before the end of September, but this is now seen as unlikely.
-------- terrorism / transportation
An Invitation to Terrorists?
U.S. To Ship Over 300 Pounds of Weapons-Grade Plutonium Across Atlantic
Friday, September 17th, 2004
Democracy Now
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/17/1348245
Greenpeace has launched a campaign to stop a controversial shipment that contains enough plutonium to make up to 50 nuclear weapons. While the government hasn't done a threat or environmental assessment of the trip, the Department of Homeland Security has admitted it has conducted assessments of protest groups opposed to the shipment. We go to South Carolina for a story that has received almost no attention by the national media. It involves the Department of Homeland Security. Our nation's ports. Nuclear weapons. And the environment.
In an unprecedented trip, two British ships are preparing to carry some 300 pounds of pure weapons-grade plutonium from Charleston South Carolina across the Atlantic to France.
The U.S. government claims the trip is necessary in the name of national security. The plutonium is being sent to France where it will be made into mixide oxide or MOX fuel and then returned to the United States. The process will turn uranium into a fuel usable in nuclear power plants. A spokesperson for the Department of Energy said the whole purpose of the MOX program is to get rid of nuclear weapons.
But Greenpeace and local environmental groups are warning the trip far is too risky.
Texas Congressman Jim Turner recently warned that the theft of the plutonium would be "catastrophic". Enough plutonium is being shipped to make up to 50 nuclear weapons.
And the Department of Homeland Security has admitted it has conducted neither an Environmental Impact Statement nor a formal threat assessment on the shipment.
But the Department has revealed that it has been keeping close watch on environmental groups opposed to the trip.
In a letter to Congressman Ed Markey of Massachusetts, a Department of Homeland Security official admitted the agency had conducted a "field intelligence report concerning environmental activist groups and their potential to impact this shipment." [Read Letter (PDF)]
Although this story has been ignored by the national media, protests have been occurring in Charleston South Carolina and in France. Yesterday French police arrested 11 Greenpeace activists after they entered the military arsenal in Normandy. In South Carolina, activists have been camped out along the Charleston shore awaiting the arrivial of the two British ships, the Pacific Pintail and the Pacific Teal.
We go to Charleston South Carolina to speak with Tom Clements, senior adviser to Greenpeace International's Nuclear Campaign.
We contacted the Department of Homeland Security and the National Nuclear Security Administration to invite them on the program but they did not return our calls.
-------- u.n.
Annan Urges Prompt Action on Sudan Draft
September 17, 2004
By WARREN HOGE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/17/international/africa/17sudan.html?pagewanted=all
UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 16 - Intervening in a Security Council debate, Secretary General Kofi Annan urged the panel on Thursday to act quickly on a new resolution to curb the violence in Darfur, in western Sudan. He said he was eager to set up a commission called for in the measure to determine whether ethnic violence there had reached the level of genocide.
"It is urgent to take action now," he said, referring to a draft that the United States circulated Thursday in a third revision aimed at overcoming objections from several countries.
Mr. Annan noted that it was the first time that the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide had been invoked and that he found it "inconceivable" that the Council would not respond. Arab militias loyal to the government have been attacking non-Arab communities throughout Darfur.
Mr. Annan said that he had started to identify people who might serve on the commission and that he was sending Louise Arbour, the high commissioner for human rights, and Juan Mendez, the newly named special adviser on the prevention of genocide, to Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. They are to arrive Saturday.
The resolution also threatens Sudan's leaders and the country's oil industry with penalties if they do not end the violence, which has killed 50,000 people and displaced 1.2 million others.
As debate on the resolution adjourned Thursday evening, John C. Danforth, the American ambassador, said Mr. Annan's statement had contributed "very positively to a sense of urgency." He predicted a vote on Saturday.
A European diplomat on the Council said he thought the Secretary General's intervention would make it impossible for China to carry through on an earlier threat to veto the measure.
China and Pakistan abstained from voting on an earlier, less focused Sudan resolution, which passed the 15-member Council 13 to 0 on July 30.
Both countries had objected to the new measure's threat of penalties if Sudan's government did not comply with the resolution. Mr. Danforth said the United States would not agree to drop the language on penalties.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
A couple of PDFs of nuke studies ...
From: "lwplwp" <lwplwp@netzero.net>
Date: Fri Sep 17, 2004 10:16am
DEFENDING AGAINST CLANDESTINE NUCLEAR ATTACK (DSB)
A recently completed Defense Science Board study calls for a new defense initiative to confront the threat of clandestine nuclear attack.
"The [DSB] Task Force addresses the threat of nuclear or radiological attack, by anyone for any purpose in any scenario, against the United States or U.S. military operations, delivered by any means other than missiles or aircraft. In effect, this means hidden/smuggled nuclear weapons, devices, or materials," according to the cover memo from DSB Chairman William Schneider Jr.
"The Task Force finds that this threat is serious enough, and that there are sufficient indications that effective means of preventing successful attack might be developed over the long term, to warrant starting a DoD effort to develop comprehensive capabilities in DoD's areas of responsibility."
Defense against such attacks "should warrant national and DoD attention that is as serious as that devoted to missile defense," the DSB said.
A copy of the Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Preventing and Defending Against Clandestine Nuclear Attack, dated June 2004, is now available here:
http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/dod/dsb/attack.pdf
NONSTRATEGIC NUCLEAR WEAPONS (CRS)
The issues raised by the continued deployment of thousands of nonstrategic nuclear weapons by the United States and Russia are the subject of a new report from the Congressional Research Service.
It is CRS policy to deny direct public access to such reports. But a copy of "Nonstrategic Nuclear Weapons," September 9, 2004, may be found here:
http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/crs/RL32572.pdf
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- idaho
INEEL moves forward on Pit 4 waste removal
Friday, September 17, 2004
By Michelle Dunlop
Magic Valley Times-News writer
http://www.magicvalley.com/news/localstate/index.asp?StoryID=11998
IDAHO FALLS -- What's being called the first modern large-scale excavation of radioactive waste buried above the regional aquifer is scheduled to get under way this October at the Idaho Engineering and Environmental Laboratory, the U.S. Department of Energy announced Thursday.
Earlier this year, after a decade of efforts, the Energy Department completed its waste removal test pilot at INEEL's Pit 9. That program facilitated its latest endeavor -- excavating a half acre section of Pit 4, located in the same Radioactive Waste Management Complex as Pit 9.
"The bottom line is we think this is a good step forward in waste retrieval and removal," said Kathleen Trever, the Department of Environmental Quality's INEEL oversight administrator.
During a 30-day comment period held this spring by the Energy Department in conjunction with the state of Idaho and the Environmental Protection Agency, the public had the opportunity to offer opinion on the Pit 4 plan in one of two ways: by participating in any one of five public meetings held throughout the region or by sending written comments.
"Generally speaking, the public was generally in favor of this proposed action," said Bruce Byram, a spokesperson for INEEL.
What is at Pit 4?
From January 1963 to September 1967, Pit 4 received Cold War-era nuclear weapons production waste, which was shipped from the Rocky Flats weapons lab near Denver.
Pit 4 contains what officials at INEEL feel is a high concentration of transuranic waste including plutonium, beryllium and americium. Uranium and volatile organic compounds can also be found in the dig area. Other waste items include solid stabilized slabs that don't contain transuranic waste, contaminated garbage such as paper, gloves and glass.
Much of the waste was originally stored in drums, carton and boxes. In Pit 9, workers found many of the drums had degraded, Byram said. However, plastic bags, which held much of the waste inside the drums, held up.
"The vast majority of those drums are not intact," Byram said.
Byram expects to find similar conditions in Pit 4.
Although there is no liner under Pit 4, Trever said, there is groundwater monitoring around the Subsurface Disposal Area within the waste management complex.
What will happen at Pit 4?
The Energy Department has already constructed an enclosed structure above the retrieval and removal site at Pit 4. The Energy Department will target certain wastes for removal at the site.
"It reduces a significant amount of transuranic waste and volatile organic compounds," Byram said. "The VOCs are known to be mobile, meaning they could move toward the aquifer."
However, Byram said, the volatile organic compounds wouldn't pose a risk for hundreds of years.
The transuranic waste, Byram said, will be tested. If that waste meets waste acceptance criteria, he said, it will be sent to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.
According to Trever, the Pit 9 excavation provided useful information that will be applied at Pit 4.
"What we learned from our excavation at Pit 9 is that transuranic waste is concentrated in a few waste streams," she said.
"We're concentrating on retrieving certain types of wastes," Trever continued. "What we're going after would look like a piece of concrete."
After taking public comments into consideration, Byram said, a sampling process was added to the retrieval and removal plan. Workers will take 68 samples of nontargeted waste -- meaning waste that does not appear to be transuranic waste or volatile organic compounds, Byram said.
"The main change we discussed was people asking, 'How do you know what you're leaving behind?'" Trever said.
The nontarged waste will be tested in order to give workers and the public a better understanding of what types of waste will be left behind.
This nontargeted waste is of particular concern to Beatrice Brailsford, of the Snake River Alliance.
"You never know how they're going to pick and choose what's going to go," she said. "We have a very strong bias that all the waste should be removed."
In total, approximately 20 percent of the total volume of waste will be removed from Pit 4 which has a surface area of 107,082 square feet. The retrieval and removal will take place an a half acre section in the eastern portion of Pit 4.
"The Alliance is very supportive of removing waste above our aquifer," Brailsford said.
However, Brailsford said, the organization questions whether the Energy Department and INEEL have made arrangements with the Waste Isolation Pilot Program in New Mexico -- the location where transuranic waste excavated from Pit 4 is supposed to be shipped.
"It's easy for someplace like INEEL to say 'we're going to ship all this somewhere,'" Brailsford said. The more difficult part is finding a facility that will take the waste, she said.
A final decision on how to handle all of the waste within the Radioactive Waste Management Complex won't occur until 2008, Byram said. However, the Department of Energy is moving ahead with its plan for Pit 4 in an effort to protect the Snake River Plain Aquifer, he said.
"This type of large scale excavation has never been done at the Subsurface Disposal Area," Byram said.
Times-News writer Michelle Dunlop can be reached at 735-3229 or by e-mail at mdunlop@magicvalley.com.
- Last we knew: The U.S. Department of Energy ended its 30-day public comment period on the removal of buried waste at Pit 4 of INEEL's Radioactive Waste Management Complex.
- The latest: The Energy Department announced it will go ahead with waste removal and incorporate suggestions derived from public comments into its plan.
- What's next: Excavation will begin in October and will take approximately a year to complete.
Pit 4 Cleanup Information
# Project Basics
- Work commences in October.
- Excavation will take place on a half acre area of Pit 4 with an approximate depth of 10 to 13 feet of waste.
- Estimated cost of project: $173 million
- Time to complete: one year
# What will be removed?
- Transuranic waste -- including plutonium, beryllium and americium
- Volatile organic compounds -- including chemicals used as solvents and degreasers in weapons production.
- Uranium
- Nearly 3,600 barrels, boxes and cartons worth of waste, an estimated 2,000 cubic meters of waste.
# Sampling of waste that won't be removed
- Workers will take 68 random samples of waste that wasn't initially targeted for removal.
- The sampling process was added to the cleanup plan after members of the public questioned what waste would be left behind.
-------- nevada
Nuclear waste at Yucca
September 17, 2004
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20040916-085026-5091r.htm
Contrary to Ed Feulner's assertions ("Wasting a good solution," Commentary, Sept. 6), Yucca Mountain would not be a solution to the country's high-level-waste problems.
Mr. Feulner is wrong about the geology at Yucca Mountain; the site cannot be accurately described as stable, dry or contained. Nevada is the third-most-earthquake-prone state in the United States. Since 1976, more than 600 seismic events of a magnitude greater than 2.5 have occurred within a 50-mile radius of Yucca Mountain, according to the Southern Great Basin Seismic Network.
Further, radioactive particles from bomb tests on the federal government's Nevada nuclear test site, which is Yucca's neighbor, have found their way through the rock to repository depth after just 50 years, not the thousands of years predicted. This indicates that the site is far less watertight than first thought.
The most pervasive myth surrounding the Yucca Mountain project is that it will result in the consolidation of our nation's waste so that it will no longer be in anyone's "back yard." Yet all nuclear waste must sit at each site for at least five years before being moved anywhere because it is too hot. The average nuclear plant creates 40,000 to 60,000 pounds of high-level waste per year, meaning that every nuclear plant will always have at least 200,000 pounds of waste on site.
We agree that much political wrangling has occurred around Yucca, but science speaks for itself.
WENONAH HAUTER Director, Critical Mass Energy and Environment Program Public Citizen Washington
-------- new mexico
Los Alamos to Remove Weapons - Grade Nukes
September 17, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Los-Alamos-Nuclear-Material.html http://kobtv.com/index.cfm?viewer=storyviewer&id=13769&cat=HOME
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) -- Los Alamos National Laboratory plans within a year to remove all weapons-grade nuclear material from a part of the lab that has raised security concerns, according to an internal federal document.
The National Nuclear Security Administration document said the highly enriched uranium and plutonium in Technical Area 18 would be moved to a facility at the Nevada Test Site starting this month.
The Aug. 20 document was obtained by the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight.
Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham has said he is committed to moving the nuclear materials out of the research center because the area is difficult to defend and vulnerable to terrorist attack.
NNSA spokesman Bryan Wilkes said the agency does not comment on draft documents, but said the agency has maintained that it's on schedule to move the material.
``My comment is the same thing I've been saying -- that we're going to move the material and that we're on track,'' he said.
The lab, operated by the University of California under contract with the Energy Department, has recently suffered a string of embarrassing management failures. In June, the keys to Technical Area 18 were missing for 16 hours before a security guard noticed. An investigation determined that no security breach occurred before the keys to the area were found in a security vehicle, a lab spokesman has said.
Other problems include reports of financial abuse by employees, two misplaced computer hard drives with secret nuclear-related material and the firing of two lab investigators who raised concerns about management.
Pete Stockton, a senior investigator for Project on Government Oversight, said it is the first time that the NNSA has committed to moving all the weapons-grade material from Technical Area 18 by a certain date.
``We're still cautiously optimistic that this will happen,'' said Stockton, a former special security assistant to former Energy Secretary Bill Richardson. ``The problem is we've heard these things before and the proof is in the move.''
The document said the move would be complete by September 2005.
On the Net:
NNSA document: http://www.pogo.org/p/x/2004nuclearweapons.html
-------- vermont
Aging Nukes
09-17-04
LIVING ON EARTH RADIO
http://www.loe.org/ETS/organizations.php3?action=printContentItem&orgid;=33&typeID;=18&itemID;=222&User;_Session=55e966610d67e359d93a077a50db0dc4#feature2
CURWOOD: The owners of 90 nuclear power plants across the United States are asking the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for permission to increase the amount of power their plants can generate. The move would also boost their profits.
One of the plant operators seeking this change is the Entergy Corporation, which owns Vermont Yankee, one of the nation's oldest nuclear plants. Entergy wants a 20 percent power increase, or uprate, as it's called, for Vermont Yankee, but the bid has attracted protests because of the plant's age and safety problems.
Joining me now is Eesha Williams who covers the nuclear power industry - and Vermont Yankee - for the Valley Advocate newspaper in western Massachusetts. Using Vermont Yankee as a starting point, he's here to talk about the controversy over this latest trend in the nuclear power business. Hello, Eesha. Thanks for joining me.
WILLIAMS: Thanks, it's good to be here.
CURWOOD: Why is Entergy seeking to increase the power there?
WILLIAMS: They will generate 20 percent more power. They can sell that, make 20 percent more profits without major investments in the plant. They're in business to make money and they see this as a good way to do it.
CURWOOD: So how well has the plant performed? I mean, how reliable is it? And what kind of problems has it had?
WILLIAMS: Vermont Yankee, by and large, has been a very reliable source of energy. It's only in recent years, as the plant has aged, that it's had a few problems. This year, cracks were discovered in a critical component at the plant. Actually, 20 cracks. There was a fire in a non-radioactive part of the plant that required the plant to be shut down for almost three weeks.
CURWOOD: What about the question of compromising safety by increasing the power output? The companies - what do they tell you is the margin of safety that'll happen even if this plant were to go up by 20 percent in power generation. They must be presenting convincing evidence to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that they can do that safely. What is that evidence?
WILLIAMS: Well, Steve, that's an excellent question, and to be perfectly honest, it does increase risk. There is an increase. You run this power plant 20 percent harder, hotter, faster than its ever been run before at a time when it's developing cracks, it's over 30 years old. It's been running 24 hours a day almost seven days a week for 32 years. This does increase risk.
What is Entergy's say? They say this plant was over-designed when it was designed back in 1967, the engineers incorporated extra protections - just like when they build a bridge, they design it for the worst possible hurricane times ten. Vermont Yankee was built to withstand more than the worst possible accident that could happen. But ultimately, the safety margins are reduced.
The federal government has estimated that 7,000 people would die within a year of a serious accident at Vermont Yankee. And, in fact, just early September this year, Vermont, for the first time of any state in the country - any one of the so-called uprates, or power increases - the state of Vermont has intervened, has petitioned the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for the right to have a hearing to express its concerns about just this issue, about safety.
CURWOOD: Now what's the public response been to Entergy's request to increase the power at Vermont Yankee?
WILLIAMS: Well there's only been one hearing so far in the area around Vermont Yankee. The town is called Vernon, a town of about 2,000, where Vermont Yankee is based. And the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission sent of a group of high-ranking officials from its headquarters in Washington to come out to Vernon. And they held the hearing at the elementary school, which is right across the street from the nuclear power plant, and I think they were surprised. I think it's fair to say they were surprised by the turnout. Over 500 people turned out. I was at the hearing. It lasted far beyond when it was supposed to end - it started at seven o'clock at night and went I think about till midnight. And I think it's fair to say that 99 percent of the speakers were adamantly opposed to the uprate, to the power increase at Vermont Yankee.
CURWOOD: And why did they say they were opposed?
WILLIAMS: People are concerned about the waste. There was never a deal between Vermont Yankee's owners and the people in the towns around it that there'd be a permanent nuclear waste dump in their town for 10,000 years. They were given assurances that this waste would be shipped to Nevada to the desert to be buried under Yucca Mountain. And now that is very much in doubt. In fact, John Kerry has said that if he's elected he will not let Yucca Mountain open.
CURWOOD: So where will Vermont Yankee's waste go, if not to Yucca Mountain?
WILLIAMS: Vermont Yankee's waste - 500 tons - is now sitting in what they call a spent fuel pool. It's like a giant swimming pool, it's 40 feet deep and it's seven stories high, in this tall building on the side of the Connecticut River. That pool has been what they call "re-racked." Basically they've re-arranged it so they can fit more waste in it than it was intended to hold. The way that pool works is that - and the reason nuclear power plants are always by a large body of water, a river, an ocean - is that they need huge amounts of water. Tens of thousands of gallons every hour to cool down this waste. If that water ever stops flowing around that waste a nuclear fire would take place, and that would cause terrible consequences.
CURWOOD: So, what does the Nuclear Regulatory Commission look at when it considers whether or not a power plant, a nuclear power plant, can increase its power?
WILLIAMS: Well, that's a good question, and that's much in the news these days. Maine Yankee, which was another nuclear power plant similar to Vermont Yankee - that was closed in 1997 following an investigation, an independent safety assessment which was demanded by the public, by the communities around the plant and by then-governor Angus King of Maine. And due to this real rigorous public pressure the NRC appointed independent observers and conducted a very rigorous inspection. Thousands of hours of engineers were crawling over this plant. They found so many safety problems at Maine Yankee that the owners found it cheaper to just close the plant than to fix all the problems. Now with Vermont Yankee, critics say the NRC is being much less rigorous.
CURWOOD: So what do you think the odds are that the NRC is going to approve a power increase for Vermont Yankee?
WILLIAMS: Well that's the big question in Vermont. The NRC has said it will issue a decision by January. There's never been this kind of public opposition. A state has never asked to intervene with the NRC regarding an uprate application, or power increase application. The Congressional delegation for a state has never intervened in this way and requested a Congressional investigation. So, at this point it's anybody's guess. But if you were a bookie in Las Vegas, you'd look at the NRC's history. And it's 90-plus "yes's," zero "no." So, that would make it seem that the odds are pretty good that Entergy will get at least some uprate. Maybe not 20 percent, but at least some amount of power increase for Vermont Yankee.
CURWOOD: Eesha Williams covers the nuclear power industry for the Valley Advocate newspaper in Massachusetts. In 2003 he won Vermont's top award for investigative journalism from the Vermont Press Association. Thanks for taking this time with me today.
WILLIAMS: Thanks Steve.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Rocket Fired at Karzai's Helicopter
Taliban Asserts Responsibility;
Afghan President Was Making Campaign Stop
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, September 17, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26084-2004Sep16.html
KABUL, Afghanistan, Sept. 16 -- Afghan President Hamid Karzai escaped an apparent assassination attempt Thursday when a rocket was fired at his helicopter as he was about to land in a provincial capital. The attack caused no injuries or damage, but forced Karzai to cancel his first trip outside Kabul since he began campaigning for presidential elections to be held Oct. 9.
Officials and witnesses said the rocket flew over a crowd of several hundred people waiting to greet Karzai near the town of Gardez, about 80 miles south of Kabul. The president's helicopter was about to land, but instead immediately returned to Kabul without touching the ground.
"We couldn't see it, but we heard the sound as it went over," said Rafiullah Mojadeddi, an aide to Karzai who had already landed in a separate helicopter. "There was no danger to the president."
Karzai played down the incident after his return to the capital, telling journalists he wished he could have landed anyway and continued with the school-opening ceremony he was scheduled to attend. A spokesman also said Karzai was "a little upset" that his security team insisted he cancel his trip.
But the attack, for which the revived Taliban Islamic militia that was ousted from power in 2001 asserted responsibility, seemed likely to further constrain Karzai's ability to campaign outside the capital as he would like.
Security around Karzai, 46, has been extremely tight since he survived an assassination attempt just over two years ago while visiting the southern city of Kandahar. In that incident, a uniformed gunman jumped in front of his vehicle and opened fire, wounding several passengers before being shot by Karzai's security agents.
After that attack, Karzai's Afghan bodyguards were replaced by a U.S. security detail at the Bush administration's insistence, and he has remained largely confined to his heavily guarded palace compound in Kabul. Karzai, who was named head of the interim government in December 2001 under a U.N. plan, has received strong backing from Washington.
Karzai was traveling in a U.S. military helicopter for Thursday's trip. A U.S. military spokesman here, Maj. Mark McCann, declined to discuss Karzai's means of transportation, but he confirmed that a rocket had been fired at the president's helicopter and had missed, landing several hundred yards from the school Karzai was to visit.
The pre-election period has been marred by repeated attacks against voter registration workers and facilities, mostly carried out by Taliban forces. The Taliban has vowed to sabotage the election -- the first national poll in Afghanistan in three decades of war and turmoil, and the country's first-ever presidential election.
A purported Taliban spokesman told news agencies in Kabul by telephone that the group had fired the rocket at Karzai. Officials in Gardez, the capital of Paktia province, said Thursday night that they had located the launching site in an abandoned house and arrested several suspects.
"Security has been a concern during the voter registration period, and it will be a continuing concern during the campaign, on voting day and during ballot counting," Manoel de Almeida e Silva, the U.N. spokesman here, said Thursday night. "But just as those who want to spoil the election see this as a target period, the security forces are prepared to deal with these threats."
A dozen election workers have been killed in attacks in the past several months, and more than 1,000 people have been killed in violence during the last year, including security troops, Islamic guerrillas, and foreign and Afghan aid workers. The French aid group Doctors Without Borders withdrew from Afghanistan on July 28, after five of its aid workers were killed in a June 2 ambush. The group, which had operated in the country for more than two decades, criticized the government for being unable or unwilling to make arrests in the killings.
On Aug. 29, a powerful car bomb exploded in the heart of downtown Kabul, killing at least seven people including two Americans, and injuring several dozen. The blast occurred just outside the office of a U.S. company that provides security for a variety of government and private agencies here.
More than 4,000 international peacekeepers patrol the capital, and NATO officials have pledged to send more troops to protect the election. In addition, about 15,000 American troops are based in Afghanistan, where U.S. forces have been hunting for Taliban and al Qaeda fighters since early 2002, mostly along the rugged border with Pakistan.
The rocket attack in Gardez occurred on the same day that eight of Karzai's 17 rivals for the presidency called for a one-month delay in the voting, saying there was not enough time to campaign because of poor roads, communications and security in much of the country. The new Afghan constitution allows 30 days for the campaign, which began last week.
"One month is not enough. You cannot travel to 34 provinces under these conditions," said Sayed Homayoun Shah Assefy, 64, a lawyer and presidential candidate. He said that the government was supposed to provide security for all candidates but that "so far they have done nothing." He said he plans to campaign in both western and eastern Afghanistan in any case.
Karzai had already said that he did not plan to campaign extensively outside Kabul but that his two vice presidential running mates, Ahmed Zia Massoud and Karim Khalili, would travel widely throughout the country in his place.
--------
KABUL
Afghan Leader's Helicopter Is Attacked, Aborting a Campaign Rally
September 17, 2004
By CARLOTTA GALL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/17/international/asia/17karzai.html?pagewanted=all
KABUL, Afghanistan, Sept. 16 - President Hamid Karzai had to abort a rare campaign rally on Thursday in Gardez, southeast of the capital, when a rocket was fired over his helicopter as it came in to land.
The helicopter, an American Chinook, swerved violently and soared away back to Kabul, swirling dust over hundreds of schoolchildren, tribal elders and government dignitaries lined up to greet the president.
The rocket, or rocket-propelled grenade, whistled over their heads and landed with a loud bang 300 yards away. The Afghans barely blinked, so accustomed are they to explosives, and many believed the governor when he announced over the public address system that the explosion was celebratory.
But American coalition and Afghan troops on the ground were taking no risks. Gunfire had been directed at an American vehicle simultaneously, and the president's visit was abandoned. "Such a shame, just one guy can ruin the day for everyone," said one American security official.
The incident was the closest attack on Mr. Karzai since he escaped an assassination attempt in Kandahar on Sept. 5, 2002. Another visit he made to Kandahar in April 2004 was marred by rocket and grenade attacks before his arrival.
Three people were reported to have been arrested by the Afghan police in Gardez in connection with the attack, Kabul Television reported later. A woman in Gardez told the police that she had seen three men with motorbikes and rocket-propelled grenades hiding in a neighbor's house.
Back at the presidential palace in Kabul and clearly frustrated, Mr. Karzai made light of the rocket attack and chided his American and Afghan security officials for being overly cautious. "I think really our guys are taking a lot of precautions for no reason," he said.
He said he had asked to land after the rocket was fired, but the security men on board had refused. Once back in Kabul, he called the governor of Paktia, who was still on the ground waiting for him to arrive.
"I said, "What was going on?' and he said, 'Nothing, there was just one rocket that came and landed two kilometers away, and the people are still here,' " Mr. Karzai recounted to journalists later in the afternoon. He immediately asked to return to Gardez, but security officials ruled it out.
"So I am thinking of that now, that on a trip like that I should take my own measures," he said. Or, he joked, he would start making secret visits to provinces, without the knowledge of his security detail.
Campaigning in private, as it were, would present a quandary for the president, who is still a target of diehard elements of the Taliban and Al Qaeda intent on attacking the American-backed government and trying to disrupt Afghanistan's first democratic elections for a head of state on Oct. 9.
Mr. Karzai rarely moves out of the Arg, the former royal palace compound where he has both his office and residence, and apart from one speech in Kabul to open his election campaign last week, he has yet to do any campaigning. And the incident in Gardez revealed how little the president is in charge. He clearly had no control over his return to Kabul.
As the incumbent, he remains supremely confident. He said he did not think his failure to land at Gardez would cost him votes and said he was sure he could still obtain the necessary 51 percent to win in the first round of the election.
"I don't think it will go to a second round, that's my judgment," he said. "But even if it goes to a second round, it doesn't matter. We are entering a new era of voting and democracy."
Mr. Karzai knows he can rely on the votes of the Pashtun, his own ethnic group and the largest ethnic group in the country, estimated at 40 percent of the population. Paktia is predominantly Pashtun.
Despite continuing support for the Taliban in some districts, and complaints from others against Mr. Karzai for his close relationship with Washington and his concessions to the ethnic Tajiks in the government, when it comes to voting for a national leader, the Pashtuns will vote for one of their own, foreign and Afghan officials here said.
In opening his campaign, Mr. Karzai promised to continue his policies of democracy and stability for Afghanistan, but he acknowledged some shortcomings and said he would concentrate more closely on security, the economy and social services.
He pleased international aid donors by saying he would pursue disarmament, combat narcotics and corruption, and find jobs for demobilized fighters and alternatives for farmers who give up growing opium. He also promised to raise the average monthly wage to $500, from $200, within five years.
--------
THE PRISONS
New Charges Raise Questions on Abuse at Afghan Prisons
September 17, 2004
By CARLOTTA GALL and DAVID ROHDE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/17/international/asia/17afghan.html?pagewanted=all
KABUL, Afghanistan, Sept. 16 - Sgt. James P. Boland, a reserve military police soldier from Cincinnati, watched as a subordinate beat an Afghan prisoner, Mullah Habibullah, 30, the brother of a former Taliban commander, according to a military charge sheet released recently.
The report also said that Sergeant Boland shackled an Afghan named Dilawar, chaining his hands above his shoulders, and denied medical care to the man, a 22-year-old taxi driver, whose family said he had never spent a night away from his mother and father before being taken to the American air base at Bagram, 40 miles north of Kabul. The two detainees died there within a week of each other in December 2002.
Now, 21 months later, the Army has charged Sergeant Boland with assault and other crimes and investigators are recommending that two dozen other American soldiers face criminal charges, including negligent homicide, or other punishments for abuses that occurred more than a year before the scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Far from settling the cases, the charges raise new questions about who authorized the harsh interrogation methods used in Afghanistan and about the contradictory statements made by American military officials who, when questioned shortly after the men's deaths, said they had died of natural causes.
The military's findings now support accounts by former Afghan prisoners who said they were subjected to abuses that, while just as harrowing as any in Iraq, have drawn far less attention or official scrutiny lacking the kinds of photographs that so shocked the world from Abu Ghraib this spring.
Pentagon and other American officials have said the harsh interrogation methods described by the Afghans and outlined in the Army's charges were not authorized for use at Bagram.
A classified portion of an Army report into the Abu Ghraib scandal, recently obtained by The New York Times, shows that on Dec. 2, 2002, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had approved such methods for use only at the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
"Interrogation techniques intended only for Guantánamo came to be used in Afghanistan and Iraq,'' a separate report by an independent panel, appointed by Mr. Rumsfeld and headed by James R. Schlesinger, a former defense secretary, found in August. "In Afghanistan, techniques included removal of clothing, isolating people for long periods of time, use of stress positions, exploiting fear of dogs, and sleep and light deprivation.''
Mr. Habibullah and Mr. Dilawar died at Bagram after enduring at least some of those interrogation methods. A pending report by the naval inspector general, due to be released in the next few weeks, is expected to examine how and why those methods were being used here. Military and government officials have yet to answer those questions.
In addition, recent revelations that the Central Intelligence Agency kept the names of dozens of detainees at Abu Ghraib and other facilities in Iraq off official rosters, to hide them from Red Cross inspectors, have raised fresh concerns over the possibility of similar practices here.
Lt. Gen. Daniel K. McNeill, the commander of American forces in Afghanistan in 2002 and 2003, said in an e-mail response to questions this week that in previous interviews he had always given the best information available to him. Sergeant Boland could not be reached for comment.
In a February 2003 interview, General McNeill acknowledged an investigation into Mr. Dilawar's death. But neither he nor other officials disclosed that military pathologists had described both deaths as homicides caused by beatings.
At the time, General McNeill and other military officials said in interviews that both Afghan prisoners had died of natural causes. "We haven't found anything that requires us to take extraordinary action," General McNeill said at the time. "We are going to let this investigation run its course."
He described Mr. Dilawar as having an advanced heart condition and said his coronary arteries were 85 percent blocked.
When General McNeill was asked at the time whether either prisoner had suffered injuries in custody, something described on both death certificates, he replied, "Presently, I have no indication of that." In a later interview, he said the men had suffered injuries before their arrival at Bagram.
Asked if prisoners' hands were being chained to ceilings, he denied it. "We are not chaining people to the ceilings," he said. "I think you asked me that question before."
A military pathologist's finding on Mr. Dilawar's death certificate was revealed only when a journalist from The New York Times visited his family in their isolated village in the province of Khost and read the form, which was written in English, a language they could not understand.
The spokesman for the American-led force in Afghanistan, Col. Roger King, then confirmed the authenticity of the death certificate, but played down the pathologist's findings.
Afterward, the investigation moved slowly, and the troubled military intelligence unit that ran the Bagram detention center was transferred to Iraq. Members of that unit - the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, based at Fort Bragg, N.C. - have now been implicated in the deaths of the two Afghans as well as in the abuses at Abu Ghraib.
After the Abu Ghraib scandal, administration and military officials portrayed the use of the harsh interrogation methods approved by Mr. Rumsfeld as selective, limited only to prisoners considered to be of high-intelligence value.
Those 17 methods also included yelling at detainees, hooding them, shaving their heads and beards, the use of minimal physical contact like poking or grabbing, and 20-hour interrogations, according to the classified portions of the Army report provided by a senior military official who said full disclosure would help explain the causes behind the Abu Ghraib scandal.
Though it is not clear whether Mr. Rumsfeld was informed of the deaths of the two Afghan prisoners, a month later he rescinded his list of interrogation methods. In April, he approved a revised list, authorizing seven more aggressive interrogation techniques beyond the 17 listed in the Army's field manual.
Defense officials interviewed this year said that the more aggressive methods had been used only on two prisoners at Guantánamo Bay.
But in interviews in early 2003 and in May 2004, five former Afghan prisoners, all of whom were later released after the military decided they posed no threat, described detentions and interrogations under extremely harsh conditions.
Before being released, three of the men were sent from Afghanistan to Guantánamo Bay. All said they were treated far worse in Afghanistan and that Guantánamo was more orderly and had more rules. In all, they spent 14 months in American detention.
Three of those interviewed said they were arrested with Mr. Dilawar after a broken walkie-talkie and an electric stabilizer were found in his taxi several hours after rockets were fired at an American base.
In interviews in May 2004, the three men said they were hooded and had their arms raised and chained to the ceiling for hours and days at a time at Bagram.
All the prisoners said they were first held in second-floor isolation cells, for periods ranging from 5 to 16 days. Later, they said, they and other prisoners were moved to the ground floor where they were held in large chain-link cages and barred from conversing.
One of the three men, Zakim Shah, a 20-year-old farmer, said he was kept awake by soldiers blaring music and shouting at him. He said he grew so exhausted at one point that he vomited.
Another, Parkhudin, a 26-year-old farmer and former soldier, said his hands were chained to the ceiling for 8 of his 10 days in isolation and that he was hooded for hours at a time.
"They were putting a mask over our heads, they were beating us in Bagram," he said. "I think Dilawar died because he couldn't breathe. For me, it was very difficult to breathe."
Mr. Parkhudin said he was forced to lie on his stomach and that a soldier then jumped on his back. He said he believed that the Afghan in an adjoining isolation cell was Mr. Dilawar because the prisoner cried out for his mother and father.
The third man, Abdur Rahim, a 26-year-old baker, said that he was hooded and that his hands were chained to the ceiling for "seven or eight days" and turned black.
American interrogators forced him to crouch and hold his hands out in front of him for long periods, causing intense pain in his shoulders. When he tried to sit up, he said, "they were coming and hitting me and saying 'Don't move!' "
Two other men, interviewed in February 2003, Abdul Jabar, a 35-year-old taxi driver, and Hakkim Shah, a 32-year-old farmer, were held at the same time as Mr. Dilawar and described similar treatment.
Mr. Shah said he spent 16 days in upstairs rooms naked, hooded and shackled to the ceiling for 10 days until his legs became so swollen that the shackles cut off the blood flow and he could no longer stand. Doctors eventually removed the shackles and allowed him to sit.
Beyond Bagram, the Central Intelligence Agency maintains a large compound, based in the Ariana, a hotel in central Kabul, just 200 yards from the presidential palace.
Privately, the C.I.A. has been much criticized by Red Cross officials for providing no information about its detainees in Afghanistan. The street where its compound stands is blocked. The walls are covered with barbed wire. The Red Cross says it has been denied access to the detainees held there.
A detainee from the compound, a former Taliban commander named Mullah Rocketi, who gave himself up to American officials, said in an interview after his release last year that he had spent eight months there. He described the compound as reasonably comfortable and said he was not mistreated. But he said he never saw the Red Cross. He said he was released after making a deal with American officials, but would not provide details.
Another former Afghan commander taken there was Jan Baz Khan, who worked for the C.I.A. and then came under suspicion of being behind rocket attacks on an American base, according to a United States military commander who did not want to be named. He said the prisoner was taken there in January.
There has been no word of his release. No one knows how many other people are held there still.
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington for this article.
-------- arms
Iraq's arms
September 17, 2004
Washington Times
Inside the Ring
http://www.washtimes.com/national/inring.htm
A Pentagon report on weapons found in Iraq after the war revealed a staggering amount of armaments, almost all foreign-made.
The report, first disclosed in a new book by one of this column's writers, Bill Gertz, reached this stark conclusion: "Foreign munitions were used against coalition forces during the war and continue to be a potential source of explosives for improvised explosive devices still being used to kill U.S. soldiers."
According to the report cited in "Treachery: How America's Friends and Foes are Secretly Arming Our Enemies," 24 nations supplied armaments to Saddam Hussein. The total amount was between 650,000 tons and 1 million tons. By contrast, the entire U.S. military arsenal is between 1.6 million and 1.8 million tons.
The big three arms suppliers were Russia (and the Soviet Union), China and France: Russia supplied 122 different types of arms and a total of nearly 13 million items; China had provided 19 different types of arms and almost 380,000 items; France had supplied 12 different armaments and more than 115,000 items.
The report was produced by the office of deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, John Shaw.
It found that Russia had violated U.N. sanctions on Iraq by selling Saddam Hussein Kornet-E antitank guided weapons. The report said that in March 2003, Kornet missiles, first developed in 1994, were fired at two U.S. Army M-1A1 Abrams tanks near Najaf, disabling them.
The report also stated that Syria purchased 500 to 1,000 Kornets from Ukraine "on behalf of Iraq"; the transfers took place in early 2003, the report said. The Ukrainians had bought the missiles from Russian manufacturers. The report concluded, "Possession of the Kornet-E violates U.N. Security Council Resolution 687," which barred arms sales to Iraq.
-------- business
Army Taps Titan, Company Linked to Scandal
September 17, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Iraq-Translator-Contract.html
SAN DIEGO (AP) -- Defense contractor Titan Corp. will continue to provide translators and interpreters in Iraq, where at least two employees were implicated in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, the Army announced Friday.
Titan employs more than 4,500 people worldwide under the translator contract, with many assisting U.S. forces in Iraq, according to the Army.
The six-month contract, with an option for six more, has a potential value of up to $400 million. It is the San Diego-based defense contractor's largest single source of revenue.
The Army translator contract was due to expire Sept. 30. The Army halted the process of re-awarding the contract when a small Delaware company protested. The Army's Intelligence and Security Command then decided to award Titan a shorter ``bridging contract'' to ensure work continued, Army spokeswoman Deborah Parker said.
``This was the option we chose to exercise to ensure that the mission, which was very essential to the Department of Defense, continue,'' Parker said.
A recently released investigation by Army Maj. Gen. George Fay found two Titan civilian translators, who were not named, contributed to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.
One female employee allegedly failed to report detainee abuse. A male employee allegedly beat and may have raped a detainee. The Fay report recommends the information be forwarded for possible criminal prosecution and that ``appropriate contractual action'' be taken.
Titan spokesman Wil Williams said he did not know the identities of the two employees or whether they were still worked for the company or its subsidiaries.
``It's beyond our imagination and it violates our corporate policy for any employee to stand by silently or to participate in events such as those that went on in Abu Ghraib,'' Williams said.
Titan recently fired an Arabic translator at Abu Ghraib. Adel L. Nakhla told Army investigators he was present during some of the abuses at the prison, including having naked, hooded detainees formed into a human pyramid. An Army investigation named Nakhla as a suspect.
Titan is also one of two defense contractors named in a federal racketeering lawsuit filed here in June that accuses the companies of conspiring to torture, rape and kill Iraqi prisoners. Titan has called the lawsuit ``frivolous.''
-------- iraq
2 Americans, Briton Seized By Gunmen In Baghdad
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, September 17, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A25322-2004Sep16?language=printer
BAGHDAD, Sept. 16 -- Masked gunmen kidnapped two Americans and a Briton from their Baghdad residence Thursday in an attack that appeared to herald a new level of danger for foreign civilians in Iraq.
The abduction of the three private contractors, which occurred in one of the capital's most affluent neighborhoods, was the latest in a string of kidnappings by insurgents seeking to evict U.S. military forces and topple Iraq's interim government. In an assault similar to the kidnapping of two Italian aid workers from their offices last week, as many as 10 gunmen in a minivan pulled up in front of the contractors' two-story house, barged inside the gated compound and snatched the three Westerners without firing a shot, according to neighbors.
The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad identified the two American contractors as Jack Hensley and Eugene "Jack" Armstrong but did not provide their ages or home towns. The British Foreign Office did not identify the captured Briton. All three worked for Gulf Supplies and Commercial Services, a private contractor based in the United Arab Emirates that is working on reconstruction projects in Iraq, said Khaled Abbas, a company spokesman.
No group asserted immediate responsibility for the kidnapping, but the U.S.-led military command in Baghdad said its forces launched airstrikes on two facilities used by members of an insurgent organization led by Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born militant believed to be responsible for numerous kidnappings, car bombings and other attacks.
The first strike targeted a house in the restive city of Fallujah, 35 miles west of Baghdad, where Zarqawi followers had stashed weapons, the military said.
The second, larger strike was aimed at a "terrorist meeting site" southwest of Fallujah and killed 60 non-Iraqi fighters who had gathered "to plan attacks against the Iraqi people, Iraqi security forces and multinational forces," the military said in a statement. Approximately 90 foreign fighters had assembled at the site, a compound surrounded by fields near the town of Qaryat Rufush, the military said.
The 9:45 p.m. airstrike destroyed three buildings, the military said in the statement. When survivors fled into the town, "multinational forces discontinued the engagement of those terrorists in order to protect the civilian populace and minimize collateral damage to the town," the military said.
The attack appeared to be one of the largest and most successful efforts to target foreign fighters who have been drawn to Fallujah, a city that, until April, was patrolled by U.S. Marines but now is firmly in the control of insurgents. U.S. military officials say they believe the foreign fighters have been using Fallujah as a base to stage attacks in Baghdad.
Although U.S. ground forces remain on the city's fringe, warplanes have been striking targets in Fallujah associated with Zarqawi's network during the past two weeks in an attempt to weaken the group's hold over the city. The strikes have been directed at safe houses and weapons caches, but few have killed major concentrations of fighters, who eschew gathering in large groups to avoid detection by reconnaissance aircraft.
There was no independent confirmation of the deaths from Thursday's airstrike and no immediate reports from the scene. The attack on the weapons cache in Fallujah was conducted, the military said in a statement, after "sources reported the presence of terrorists, foreign fighters, and weapons systems that were intended for use" against Iraqi and U.S.-led forces.
In Ramadi, a city west of Fallujah that also has been racked by insurgent violence, U.S. Marines and soldiers launched an offensive against a little-known group with ties to Zarqawi's organization, the military said. The offensive, dubbed Operation Hurricane, "was designed to discover and remove illegal weapons and ammunition caches and to disrupt the Daham terrorist network," the military said.
The U.S. Marine command, which is responsible for Fallujah, Ramadi and the rest of Iraq's vast western province of Anbar, reported that three Marines were killed Thursday. The command also reported Thursday that a fourth Marine died of wounds sustained Wednesday. The Marines did not provide details of where or how the four were killed, citing operational security concerns.
The Associated Press reported that Iraqi police found the corpse of a man they believe to be a foreigner north of Baghdad. The body, which had blond hair and Western features, was pulled from the Tigris River near the village of Yethrib, Capt. Hakim Azawi, head of security at the teaching hospital in the city of Tikrit, told the AP. The man, who was described as tall, was shot in the back of the head, according to the AP.
In Baghdad's Mansour district, where the three contractors were kidnapped, neighbors said as many as 10 gunmen pulled up to the house shortly after dawn as one of the occupants opened the large metal gate to the driveway to turn on a generator in front of the compound. Several armed men, their faces shrouded in red-and-white scarves, forced their way in, the neighbors said. Within a few minutes, the three Westerners were forced into their own Nissan sedan and driven away by the captors, the neighbors said.
One of the neighbors, who identified herself as Um Ibrahim, said she heard the kidnappers tell the contractors to "walk quickly" and then to "get in the car."
Another neighbor, Ziyad Tariq, said he saw one of the captors dragging a hostage by the collar and pushing him into a car parked outside the house.
Tariq said that the contractors had two guards but that neither was on duty at the time of the kidnapping. Abbas, the company spokesman, said the house was supposed to be protected by armed guards 24 hours a day.
The contractors had tried to blend into the upscale neighborhood of large, walled-off homes. There were no concrete barriers or other indications that Westerners were living inside. Neighbors described the contractors as polite, discreet men who had lived there for eight months.
"They came to help the Iraqis," Ibrahim said. "Why do they want to hurt them? This is not fair."
Thursday's incident, like the kidnapping of the Italian aid workers, suggested that foreigners' attempts to blend into the community by not having conspicuous armed guards and other security measures have not fooled insurgents. The Italians, both women, were captured with two Iraqi employees inside their office, which was not guarded.
Other foreigners believed to be in the hands of insurgents include two French journalists and an Iraqi American businessman.
Special correspondent Bassam Sebti contributed to this report.
--------
Iraq Report: Intentions, Not Arms
Associated Press
Friday, September 17, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27981-2004Sep17.html
Drafts of a report from the top U.S. inspector in Iraq conclude that there were no weapons stockpiles but say there are signs that Saddam Hussein had dormant programs that he hoped to revive, according to people familiar with the findings.
In a 1,500-page report, the head of the Iraq Survey Group, Charles A. Duelfer, will say that the Iraqi president was importing banned materials, was working on unmanned aerial vehicles in violation of U.N. agreements and was maintaining a dual-use industrial sector that could produce weapons.
Duelfer will also say that Iraq had only small research-and-development programs for chemical and biological weapons.
He will conclude that Hussein had intentions of restarting his weapons programs at some point, after suspicions and inspections from the international community had waned.
After a year and a half in Iraq, however, U.S. forces have found no weapons of mass destruction -- the chief U.S. reason for overthrowing Hussein's government.
An intelligence official said that Duelfer could wrap up the report as soon as this month but noted that it may take time to declassify it.
Those who discussed the report inside and outside the government did so on the condition of anonymity because it contains classified material and has not yet been completed.
Duelfer's report is expected to offer findings similar to those reported by his predecessor, David Kay.
Kay presented an interim report to Congress in October. He left the inspector's post in January, saying "we were almost all wrong" about Hussein's weapons programs.
The new analysis, however, is expected to fall between the position of the Bush administration before the war -- which portrayed Hussein as a grave threat -- and the declarative statements Kay made after he resigned.
--------
U.S. Airstrikes Said to Kill at Least 44 in Iraq
September 17, 2004
By EDWARD WONG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/17/international/middleeast/17CND-IRAQ.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 17 - Iraqi health officials said American airstrikes that demolished homes late today in a village south of the volatile city of Falluja killed at least 44 people and wounded 27, including women and children.
Witnesses said the strikes began at around 10 p.m. at Zobaa, a village about 18 miles south of Falluja, and lasted for three hours. The bombardment destroyed almost a dozen homes, they said, and left scores of people buried beneath piles of rubble. Rescue efforts continued throughout the day.
The American military said its planes were aiming at insurgent strongholds, and that it might have killed as many as 60 fighters.
The Health Ministry said that of the people who were wounded, 17 were children and 8 were women. Two doctors at the main hospital in Falluja, Dr. Muthana Khodaiyar and Dr. Bilel Jasim, put the death toll at 56 and the number of wounded at 44.
The American military said it conducted a second strike in Falluja at 9:30 p.m. aimed at a meeting of 10 insurgents belonging to the guerrilla network of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian fugitive. The meeting took place near a mosque and a school, the military said. It did not say how many people were killed in the strike.
The American military has been relying on airstrikes to chip away at insurgent forces around Falluja, which has become a "no-go" zone for the occupiers because of the rampant hostility there. But American officials say more intense offensives may be necessary to quell the resistance in such areas if general elections scheduled for January have any hope of being credible. Even then, there are serious doubts whether many residents of the so-called Sunni triangle area, where resistance to the Americans has been fiercest, will take part in elections or regard them as legitimate.
In the evening, combat erupted in the southern city of Basra between British forces and the Mahdi Army, a militia led by Moktada al-Sadr, a virulently anti-American cleric, whose fighters waged a fierce campaign against American marines last month.
A relentless spate of violence continued in central Baghdad, as a suicide bomber rammed a blue sedan packed with explosives into a police checkpoint on bustling Rashid Street. The blast killed at least 3 people and wounded at least 37, the Health Ministry said. It took place in the old city of Baghdad, an area thronged with thousands of shoppers at street markets on Friday, the Muslim day of rest.
The Iraqi police had parked seven squad cars by Shuhada Bridge, or Martyrs' Bridge, to check every vehicle going west across the Tigris River to the Haifa Street area, where American soldiers and Iraqi security forces were conducting raids on suspected insurgent hideouts.
At 12:20 p.m., the blue sedan sped down Rashid Street from the north, past a venerable book market, and swerved to the west, toward the bridge, police officers and other witnesses said. Police officers at the checkpoint yelled at the car to stop, but it kept going. It detonated at a traffic circle right before the bridge and in front of stores selling leather bags.
"I saw the guy," said Saleh al-Marwan, who was in the area shopping. "The police tried to stop him, and he didn't listen. When he got close to the checkpoint, he detonated himself."
Nouri Nahma, 38, a minibus driver, had just dropped off some stage actors at the Baghdad Folklore Museum by the bridge and was buying a prayer rug when the bomb exploded.
"As I was walking, I turned and saw a blue car swerving between the other cars," he said. "When the explosion happened, flesh went flying through the air and the car engine fell next to me, right beside the museum. We even found pieces of flesh inside the museum."
"Some of the cars were ablaze and some ambulances came to the scene and evacuated the wounded," he added.
The explosion incinerated or damaged the seven police cars parked at the checkpoint. An hour after the blast, glass and metal debris lay scattered across the area, and merchants had shut their shops. American soldiers in Humvees and Iraqi police officers pushed journalists back to a gold-painted statue of Mahrouf Abdul Gani Rusafi, a famous Iraqi poet.
The attack was the latest round in a bloody offensive begun on Sunday by insurgents that has left hundreds of Iraqis dead. Iraqi police officers and potential recruits appear to be the most vulnerable targets, their stations and posts the targets of car bombs, their families threatened. On Tuesday, insurgents attacked the very heart of the Iraqi police - their headquarters in Baghdad - by detonating a suicide car bomb right outside the fortified compound, killing at least 47 people, most of them young men seeking jobs.
"We only feel afraid of the terrorists," said Riad Haroub, a 34-year-old police officer standing in Medical City Hospital with a blood-splattered blue uniform. "They're the only threat to us."
Foreign civilians are just as at risk: a Briton and two Americans, all engineers, were kidnapped from their residence on Thursday, and nothing has been heard of their condition or whereabouts.
The British Foreign Office and family members of the abducted Briton identified him today as Kenneth John Bigley, born in 1942, married and the father of one. As the Americans do, Jack Hensley and Eugene Armstrong, Mr. Bigley works for GSCS Inc., or Gulf Supplies and Commercial Services, which has construction contracts with the United States government for projects Iraq and elsewhere in the Persian Gulf region.
"It's hard to understand why Ken would be targeted in this way, but we would appeal to those who have taken him to please return him safely to us," Mr. Bigley's family said in a statement. "Our thoughts and prayers are with the families of his two work colleagues too, who must share our distress."
In Baghdad, Mr. Nahma, the minibus driver, said the violence was "indescribable."
"We can't find anyone who can provide us with security," he said. "We can't kick the occupation out of the country right now. We need them for security. These people who are calling themselves holy warriors or resistance, they're not."
But a bookseller and former Iraqi Army officer, Ziad Tarik, blamed the failures of the occupation for the ongoing bloodbath.
"Dissolving the Iraqi army is responsible for what happened today; I accuse Bremer," he said, referring to L. Paul Bremer III, who was the top American administrator in Iraq before the transfer of sovereignty in late June. "What happened today will happen every day."
In Basra, fighting flared between British troops and the Mahdi Army in the Toisaa neighborhood, where the organization of Mr. Sadr, the firebrand cleric, has an office.
An Iraqi reporter for The New York Times observed at least seven armored vehicles moving in to surround the office. As they did so, members of the Mahdi Army fired at them with rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and machine guns, and moved through the streets to try flanking the British vehicles. No Iraqi police forces appeared to be involved.
The British opened fire, and explosions shook the office.
Sheikh Assad al-Basri, a representative of Mr. Sadr's in Basra, said the Mahdi Army had attacked because British soldiers had violated an agreement not to use the streets in front of the office.
"They are starting to use it again, and we consider that agitation,' Sheikh Basri said.
The British military could not be reached tonight for comment.
About four ambulances raced to the scene hours after the fighting began. It was unclear how many people had been wounded or killed.
--------
U.S. Says 60 Killed in Strike in Iraq
September 17, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iraq.html
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A suicide car bomber killed at least eight people in an attack on a police checkpoint in Baghdad Friday, after a night of U.S. air strikes around the rebel-held city of Falluja that killed scores.
A government spokesman said the bomb had detonated beside a line of police vehicles set up to seal off routes to nearby Haifa Street, where U.S. troops were pressing on with the battles they have been fighting all week to dislodge insurgents.
The Interior Ministry said five police had been killed and the Health Ministry said at least three civilians were also dead, and the toll could rise. Earlier, a government spokesman had put the death toll at 13.
A large crater was gouged into the road and several police cars were set ablaze, sending thick smoke into the sky.
Tuesday, a suicide car bomb attack on a police station killed 47 people, the deadliest attack in Baghdad in six months.
The U.S. military is fighting to regain control of guerrilla strongholds and restore security so that elections can be held in January as planned. But there are growing doubts over the polls and Secretary of State Colin Powell conceded they could not be held under current security conditions.
The U.S. military said an air strike Thursday night near Falluja had killed around 60 foreign fighters loyal to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian with a $25 million price on his head.
Early Friday, U.S. warplanes destroyed a compound in south central Falluja that the U.S. military said was also used by Zarqawi's militants.
Iraq's Health Ministry said at least 45 civilians had been killed in the air strikes. Reuters television images showed bloodied bodies, including women and children, on hospital beds.
Friday evening, U.S. aircraft again attacked targets in Falluja, destroying four houses, residents said. Doctors at Falluja's hospital said at least six people were killed.
In the southern city of Basra, British troops raided an office used by supporters of rebel cleric Moqtada al Sadr, whose militiamen launched two bloody uprisings this year in the holy city of Najaf. The soldiers seized a large quantity of weapons and explosives, a military spokesman said.
The raid involving around 100 troops followed an ambush on a British patrol in Basra Friday in which one soldier was wounded, Major Charlie Mayo told Britain's Sky News from Iraq.
ELECTION DELAY?
More than 200 Iraqis have been killed over the past few days alone in bombings and other violence.
Powell said U.S. diplomats and military commanders recognized the vote could not go ahead nationwide under the current security conditions, and that areas in rebel hands had to be brought back under government control.
But he told the Washington Times, in an interview published Friday, that ``we don't expect the security situation as it exists now on the 16th of September to be the security situation'' on the day Iraqis vote.
Friday's violence in Baghdad began before dawn around Haifa Street. The U.S. military said its troops had fired on a car packed with explosives that was driving toward a checkpoint, killing two men in the vehicle. Later, blasts and gunfire echoed from Haifa Street as U.S. troops moved in.
Iraqi police said they had arrested 63 militants, including Syrians, Egyptians and Sudanese, in a sweep in Haifa Street.
NEW DISPUTES
International divisions over the Iraq war have reopened, with France and Belgium stalling plans Friday for NATO to launch a training academy for senior military officers in Iraq.
A report by the top U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq was unlikely to reduce France's long-standing skepticism about the U.S.-led war in Iraq, which Washington justified in part by saying there was a threat from weapons of mass destruction.
A still-to-be-finalized draft by Charles Duelfer says no stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons have been found, although there is evidence that Saddam Hussein intended to resurrect such programs, U.S. government sources told Reuters.
In the latest kidnapping of foreigners, three Turkish truck drivers were seized by gunmen on a road north of Baghdad, the Iraqi National Guard said.
More than 100 foreigners from dozens of countries have been snatched in the last six months, and at least 30 have been killed. Many hostages have been truck drivers from impoverished countries, but at least seven Westerners are being held.
Thursday, gunmen abducted two Americans and a Briton from a house in an affluent neighborhood of central Baghdad. Two male French journalists and two Italian female aid workers have also been taken hostage in the past few weeks.
Police said they had found the body of a man believed to be a Westerner, apparently shot in the head and dead for some time, late Thursday near Samarra, north of Baghdad. The man was in civilian clothes and had his hands tied behind his back. Police were trying to identify him.
Australia has been investigating an unverified claim that two of its citizens were kidnapped in the area.
-------- pakistan / india
Musharraf May Keep Army Post
In Interview, Pakistani Leader Cites Public Support Despite Earlier Deal
By John Lancaster
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, September 17, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26472-2004Sep16.html
RAWALPINDI, Pakistan, Sept. 16 -- Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's president, said Thursday that he may renege on his pledge to step down as army chief of staff because "the vast majority" of the Pakistani people "want me in uniform" and fear that he would be weakened without it.
Musharraf said conditions in the country have changed since he promised in a nationally televised address last Dec. 24 to leave the army as part of a deal with opposition lawmakers that would allow him to remain president through 2007.
"It's primarily the security of Pakistan, the internal conditions," he said in an interview. "There's too much happening around," he continued, citing terrorist threats and potentially divisive battles over the sharing of limited water resources.
A decision by Musharraf to stay on as army chief of staff could provoke an angry political backlash in Pakistan, where Musharraf has promised repeatedly to create "sustainable democracy" since the 1999 army coup that brought him to power. It also could prove awkward for the Bush administration, which has embraced Musharraf as a key ally in the war on terrorism while calling for greater democracy in the Muslim world. Pakistan has been ruled by military governments for much of its 57-year history.
But Musharraf, 61, said that whether he stays in uniform has "nothing to do with democracy," adding, "It's only the Western media, which is attaching, linking my uniform with democracy."
Wearing pleated khakis, black loafers and a striped button-down shirt, a relaxed-looking Musharraf spoke for more than an hour in a reception room of Army House, the colonial-era mansion that serves as his primary residence in the city of Rawalpindi, about a half-hour drive from the capital, Islamabad. He departs this weekend for New York, where he is scheduled to meet with President Bush on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly. He will also hold his first meeting with Manmohan Singh, India's new prime minister, to discuss the progress of peace negotiations that began between the two governments in February.
Besides his comments on his army status, Musharraf, who narrowly escaped two assassination attempts last December, offered insights into the terrorist threat against him and his government. He described it as an alliance of foreign al Qaeda "masterminds" hiding in the mountainous tribal region near Afghanistan, and Pakistani "planners" recruited from homegrown extremist groups.
At the same time, Musharraf speculated that it was unlikely Osama bin Laden was still hiding in the area because of the large military presence in the tribal region and the success of security forces in rounding up al Qaeda members elsewhere in the country. "Pakistan is no more a safe haven for them," he said.
Musharraf added that intelligence gleaned from computers and disks seized in a series of high-profile arrests this summer suggested that al Qaeda leaders -- although not bin Laden specifically -- may be looking for refuge in Somalia, among other places. "It was an indication they are under great pressure here," Musharraf said.
Musharraf said military operations in the tribal area of Waziristan -- sometimes conducted with intelligence from U.S. satellites -- had killed scores of foreign al Qaeda fighters in recent weeks. But he acknowledged that security forces were facing pockets of stiff resistance from local tribesmen.
Musharraf denied assertions by U.S. and Indian officials that Pakistan has yet to fully dismantle training camps used by Pakistani extremist groups battling Indian forces in the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir.
"There are no militant camps," Musharraf said, although he added that "no amount of effort" can completely seal the cease-fire line dividing Indian and Pakistani forces in Kashmir.
Assessing the prospects for peace negotiations, Musharraf said he had been encouraged by discussions this month between the Indian and Pakistani foreign ministers in New Delhi, although he emphatically rejected the idea -- favored by India -- that the two sides put off substantive discussions on a final settlement of the Kashmir dispute in favor of short-term confidence-building measures.
"This is not possible," he said. "Status quo is not the answer. We have to catch the bull by the horns and we have to deal on the dispute. . . . We are looking for a final resolution."
Musharraf said he had not made a final decision about whether to stay on as army chief of staff. He said he was "still looking at the pulse of the people" and noted that he has until the end of the year to make up his mind. Musharraf pledged to give up his military post as part of a deal late last year with an alliance of Muslim fundamentalist parties, the Muttahida Majlis Amal, to secure their backing for constitutional changes that would effectively legitimize his presidency through 2007.
For the last several months, Musharraf has dropped hints that he is reconsidering his pledge, and other senior officials have started to prepare public opinion for a reversal that foreign diplomats and Pakistani analysts regard as all but inevitable. Earlier this week, the legislative assembly in Punjab, one of Pakistan's four provinces, passed a resolution calling on Musharraf to keep his uniform, a plea that has since been repeated by cabinet ministers as well as by Shaukat Aziz, Pakistan's new prime minister.
In the interview, Musharraf bristled when asked whether he was reluctant to step down as army chief -- and name a replacement -- for fear that in doing so he would effectively create a new rival. "I know that the army follows me," he said. "I know they are with me, and the next chief of army staff will be appointed by me. And he'll be a person who is most loyal to me, obviously, so I don't see this issue of the army being a center of power or being some kind of a competition or a tussle between me and the army."
The real issue, Musharraf said, was "more in the realm of the perception of the people of Pakistan. The people of Pakistan think that the strength of a president is much more than the strength of a president out of uniform. . . . I know that the vast majority of the people, from all the mail that I've seen and all the telephone calls, do want me in uniform. . . . If their perceptions change that I have been weakened, maybe it won't be good for Pakistan."
Political opponents have vowed to challenge Musharraf if he goes back on his word. In an interview Thursday night, Raza Rabbani, a leader of the Pakistan People's Party, the country's largest political party, disputed the president's claim that public opinion favored his remaining in uniform.
"There has been no credible public opinion poll that has shown that the majority of people want him to keep the uniform," Rabbani said. "I think he feels he can get away with it at this time because the response that has come from Washington is not strong enough to deter him."
--------
Pakistan Army Pounds Militants' Mountain Hideouts
September 17, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-security-pakistan-fighting.html
WANA, Pakistan (Reuters) - The Pakistani army fired mortar bombs and artillery shells at suspected mountain hideouts of al Qaeda-linked militants in a remote tribal region on Friday, but there were no details of casualties, witnesses said.
Militants fired two rockets at a camp used by security forces early on Friday near Wana, 250 miles southwest of the capital Islamabad, they said. But the missiles landed near the camp's perimeter and caused no damage.
Pakistani forces retaliated with heavy artillery and mortar fire at nearby mountains, one resident said. Two civilians sustained minor injuries, he added.
Military spokesman Major-General Shaukat Sultan said the militants, who have been locked in a standoff with security forces since March, had taken a soldier hostage, but he declined to provide further details.
Pakistan says hundreds of foreign militants, most of them Uzbeks, Chechens and Arabs, are hiding in South Waziristan close to the border with Afghanistan.
The militants enjoy a committed following among local tribesmen, who are supporting them despite a major crackdown by security forces.
U.S. military officials believe al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, may be hiding somewhere along the rugged Afghan-Pakistan frontier.
Pakistan says it has killed more than 150 militants in the last year, and arrested many more.
Last week, at least 50 militants, most of them foreigners, were killed when Pakistani jet fighters and helicopter gunships bombed a suspected terrorist training camp in the region.
Another 10 fighters were killed in clashes the same day in one of the bloodiest assaults on al Qaeda-linked militants since Pakistan sent tens of thousands of troops into lawless tribal areas last year.
Sultan said security forces had found a large cache of arms and ammunition including rockets and rocket launchers as well as trenches and bunkers at the house of a tribal cleric, Mohammad Shafeeq Mahsud, which had been used by militants as a hideout.
Mahsud's house was demolished by troops on Tuesday after a firefight with militants in Makeen, about 30 miles north of Wana.
Soldiers had also suffered ``certain'' casualties in the latest fighting, Sultan said, adding ``they are not in double digits.''
-------- russia / chechnya
Yeltsin Speaks Out In Behalf Of Putin
By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, September 17, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26625-2004Sep16.html
MOSCOW, Sept. 16 -- Following broad criticism that President Vladimir Putin is exploiting the Beslan school massacre to enhance his powers, the Kremlin on Thursday mobilized a number of surrogates, including former president Boris Yeltsin, to rebut charges that proposed political changes would undermine Russian democracy.
"The authorities must act in a tough and speedy manner" to meet "the bloody challenges thrown at us by the new enemy," Yeltsin said in a rare interview Thursday with the paper Moscow News. "But at the same time, I firmly believe that the measures that the country's leadership will undertake after Beslan will lie within the framework of the democratic freedoms that have become some of Russia's most valuable achievements over the last decade."
Under his plan, Putin would abolish the election of governors in Russia's 89 regions and instead appoint them himself to create what he calls a "single chain of command." He also proposed ending the election of parliament members from individual constituencies and having Russians vote for political parties, which would decide who sits in parliament.
Also on Thursday, a key Putin adviser on Chechnya defended the government's tactics during the school siege and said Putin had been prepared to release as many as 30 jailed Chechen and other guerrillas to secure the safety of the Beslan hostages. In the past, Putin has repeatedly rebuffed any suggestion of negotiation with Chechen fighters.
"The president was prepared to free them," said Aslanbek Aslakhanov, adding that the Kremlin was debating the ratio of prisoners to hostages it would accept when explosions and gunfire swept the school, killing 338 people by official count, nearly half of them children. Aslakhanov said he had met with Putin on the second day of the crisis and was preparing to enter the school to talk to the hostage takers when an accidental explosion triggered the massacre.
At a news conference in Moscow, Aslakhanov said that in three phone calls with the hostage takers, he had tried to impress on them that their demand that the Russian army leave Chechnya in two days was unacceptable and logistically impossible but that the Kremlin was willing to free guerrillas involved in a June assault in Ingushetia that killed about 90 people.
Aslakhanov also said the government had had no immediate plans to storm the school when violence erupted Sept. 3, although it had been evaluating all options, including persuading Chechens previously spurned by the Kremlin to act as negotiators.
The speaker of the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, said Thursday that the elected body would begin its own investigation of the Beslan crisis. Putin at first ruled out an inquiry and then agreed to one by the nonelected Federation Council, the upper house of parliament. The announcement of a second inquiry was another sign that the government is anxious about addressing public resentment over its handling of the crisis.
Four political analysts with close ties to the Kremlin argued at a news conference that Putin's plan would foster democracy by speeding modernization and galvanizing popular participation in politics through a new body, the Public Chamber, which would draw members from trade unions, nongovernmental organizations and other grass-roots groups.
"This is a gesture that has been pulled out in response to the criticism," Lilia Shevtsova, a senior associate at the Carnegie Moscow Center, said in a separate interview. "If you want to galvanize public opinion, why do you need a new institution when you have a parliament?"
At the news conference, some of the analysts noted what they called democratic failings in the United States and European Union. "We are not going to pass exams set by European and American teachers," said Sergei Markov, director of the Institute for Political Research. "Look at George Bush. An archaic political system has allowed a man who received less votes than his opponent to become the president of the United States."
Putin's plan has "been discussed for a long time by the expert community," said Konstantin Simonov, head of the Center for the Analysis of the Russian Political Situation. "The growing terrorist threat hasn't changed the country's agenda but proved that the course toward the resolute reorganization of the state is right."
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Chechen Rebel Takes Credit for Recent Attacks in Russia
September 17, 2004
By C. J. CHIVERS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/17/international/europe/17CND-RUSS.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
MOSCOW, Sept. 17 - Shamil Basayev, the one-footed and elusive Chechen guerrilla commander who has become Russia's most-wanted man, has taken responsibility for planning acts of terror that killed more than 440 people since August, and he is threatening more attacks, a separatist Web site said today.
In a letter posted on the Internet early today, Mr. Basayev said his group, the Riyadus-Salakhin Reconnaissance and Sabotage Battalion of Chechen Martyrs, "had carried out a number of successful combat operations on the territory of Russia."
He then listed the acts that have unnerved the nation since they began on Aug. 24: two bombs in Moscow, the in-flight destruction of two passenger jets and the siege of a public school in Beslan, in which hundreds of children were wounded or killed.
Mr. Basayev's statement was defiant and mostly unrepentant, describing in detail elements of the planning for the terror acts, rebutting portions of official accounts of them, and vowing that violence will continue, no matter the impression that Chechens leave on the world.
He briefly expressed regret at the deaths of children - "We are sorry for what happened," the statement said at one point - but insisted his followers had not shot children or used them for cover. And rather than blame the captors who held children at gunpoint amid a network of bombs, he placed fault for the ensuing death toll on Russian forces, which he accused of staging a botched assault.
His tone was unrepentant at the end. "The fight against us continues without any rules with the connivance of the entire world, so we are not bound by any obligations with anyone and we shall fight the way we find comfortable and beneficial," the statement said.
"We do not have any options," it continued. "We are offered a war and we shall continue waging it to the victory, whatever is said about us or whatever labels are stuck on us."
Mr. Basayev's statement circulated on a day that President Vladimir V. Putin intimated that the use of force against the Chechen group might be imminent. "We in Russia are engaged in serious preparations at the moment to act against terrorists in a preventive manner," he said at a conference of mayors here.
Since the siege in Beslan, Mr. Putin has acted in ways similar to President Bush after the attacks in the United States in 2001, saying Russia would conduct military operations on foreign soil if necessary to thwart terror attacks. His remarks today left open the possibility of a strike anywhere.
"The front line of this war that has been imposed on us can transit every street and every house," he said, according to Interfax. "This war has no rear and neutral zones, and terrorists set up their bases and coordinating centers in areas where they are not rebuffed."
The letter attributed to Mr. Basayev was posted in Russian on the Web site www.kavkazcenter.com. Although its authenticity could not be confirmed today, in the past the site, operated in part from Lithuania, has carried exclusive material from Mr. Basayev. The posting provoked a stinging reaction today from Russian and other officials, who treated it as if it were real.
Lithuania announced that it would move to shut the Web site down, and in an appearance in Warsaw, Richard L. Armitage, the United States deputy secretary of state, called Mr. Basayev "inhuman" and "not worthy of existence," according to wire reports.
The letter also evoked dismay among Chechens. One of Mr. Basayev's former staff members, who worked for him when he held government office in Chechnya in 1998, said the war he wages is counterproductive, making life more difficult for the people he claims to defend.
"There are consequences for this for Chechens, and not only those who live in Chechnya, but those in Moscow or other parts of Russia, even those who live in Europe," said the former staff member, who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing fears for her safety.
Several Russian officials blasted Mr. Basayev as well, saying that while they believed he was responsible for the attacks he was not trustworthy on details, among them his claim that he is not collaborating with international terror groups.
Mr. Basayev, 39, once a celebrated nationalist fighter who evolved during more than a decade of war into an underground leader who mixes Chechen separatism with militant Islam, insisted in the statement that he had planned and paid for the attacks without international help. His claim seemed intended to counter allegations by the Kremlin and Russian security services that he had been doing the bidding of Al Qaeda.
"I am not acquainted with bin Laden," he wrote. He said he had "personally prepared this group for 10 days in the forest" and had underwritten all the attacks for slightly more than $20,000, using weapons, vehicles and explosives looted during previous raids.
He also said 33 militants had seized Middle School No. 1, including two Arabs. An official from the Federal Security Service had said after the final battle that 10 Arabs were among the corpses, but evidence of them has not materialized publicly to date, and Russian officials have been backing away from that claim.
There were marks of Mr. Basayev's sarcastic style in the statement today. The letter used the slang "Rusnya" for "Russia," a sneering form he has used in the past. In a fashion also characteristic of Mr. Basayev, the screed included Islamic references but was overwhelmingly focused on regional and national concerns. "Chechens fight only against Rusnya for their freedom and independence," it said.
And in the macabre humor typical of Mr. Basayev, the statement claimed that bombs in the planes and in Moscow were "our early voting for Alkhanov" a reference to Alu Alkhanov, a Kremlin loyalist who won the Chechen presidency in Aug. 29 in an election regarded as rigged.
Dmitri Peskov, a spokesman for President Putin, said the accusations against the Kremlin and Russia's security services did not merit a reply.
"We feel it is completely unnecessary to respond to any statement made by a terrorist, a terrorist who accepts responsibility for murdering children," he said.
He then said that two elements of the statement were false. First, Mr. Peskov said, no matter the statement's claim, Mr. Basayev must raise his money either through crime or international donors. "When he is talking about his money, it is black money," he said.
He also said Russian authorities had not planned to assault the school, but rushed the gymnasium only after bombs had exploded inside - a description witnesses have generally confirmed. "Those who were there in Beslan saw this with their own eyes," Mr. Peskov said.
Russia has put a $10.3 million bounty on Mr. Basayev. Maj. Gen. Ilya Shabalkin, spokesman for counterterrorism forces in the North Caucasus, said in a telephone interview today that tips were coming in. "I think we will catch him and try him," he said. He added that the search was proving difficult thus far.
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Arrest Shocks Former State Department Colleagues
Highly Regarded Expert on Asia Is Accused of Passing Documents and Taking Secret Trip to Taiwan
By Carol Morello
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 17, 2004; Page A08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A27143-2004Sep16?language=printer
Donald W. Keyser developed a reputation as a brilliant and erudite expert on Asia in a career than has spanned more than three decades in the State Department.
According to his former colleagues, Keyser was a fluent speaker of Mandarin who, during his three tours at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, returned from meetings with Chinese officials, sat down and batted out well-organized cables reporting the gist of the talks -- all without notes, the awed colleagues said. When making public speeches, he delivered extemporaneous remarks in lucid and concise prose.
Now Keyser, 61 and on the cusp of retirement, is accused of passing documents to Taiwanese intelligence agents and making a secret, unauthorized trip to the island. FBI agents who tailed Keyser to an Alexandria restaurant twice this summer said they watched him pass documents to two Taiwanese agents, according to an affidavit filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Alexandria.
Keyser, who has lived in Fairfax County since 1988, was released on $500,000 bond on a charge of lying about the trip to Taiwan on an official government document. The affidavit and a senior administration official said that Keyser made the unsanctioned trip after official visits to China and Japan and that he met one of the Taiwanese agents, a 33-year-old woman, in Taipei. The court documents show he spent $570 at a Christian Dior store during the trip. He later met the same female agent and her supervisor and passed the documents in the Washington region, according to an FBI affidavit.
People who worked alongside Keyser over the past several years were astonished yesterday at the news. They described a pragmatic man who was evenhanded in his dealings with China and Taiwan, despite the cross-strait tensions. One former colleague described Keyser, whose wife is a CIA officer, as the quintessential "straight arrow." Friends and colleagues noted the irony that Keyser, who never needed reference notes himself, is accused of having handed over papers captioned in the charging documents as "discussion points."
"He is intellectually without peer," said Jeff Bader, a former senior State Department and National Security Council official who worked closely with Keyser for 22 years. "He knew more about the U.S.-China-Taiwan relationship and how to navigate it than anybody I know. I never heard a syllable out of him in 22 years that suggested anything other than absolute loyalty and patriotism to the United States. I can't accept the notion that he has done anything of the sort that's implied."
The United States shifted its diplomatic recognition to Beijing from Taiwan in 1979, yet remains Taiwan's biggest ally and arms supplier. The Taiwan issue is at the center of the U.S.-China relationship. China claims sovereignty over Taiwan and has threatened to seize the island by force. Taiwan claims to be an independent country. In recent months, U.S. officials have expressed concern about rising tensions across the Taiwan Strait and the risk of U.S. forces being dragged into a conflict there.
Keyser was "extremely balanced and judicious in his understanding of the China issues," said David Shambaugh, director of the China policy program at George Washington University. "He was no sympathizer with either part of the cross-Straits standoff."
In the eyes of some diplomats, it is not necessarily alarming to know that Keyser handed the Taiwanese agents "discussion points."
"That is a common practice when you have discussions with foreign officials," said one former State Department official, adding, "I would take the talking points for use with the foreign officials, put them on non-letterhead paper and leave them behind after the meeting so that the officials had a precise account of what the U.S. position was."
Neither Keyser nor his attorney, Robert Litt, returned phone calls yesterday. No one answered the door at Keyser's Fairfax Station home. At a State Department briefing, spokesman Richard A. Boucher said that officials there had been aware of the FBI investigation for months and that they were cooperating.
He said that since stepping down in July as principal deputy assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs -- the No. 2 job in the bureau -- Keyser had been assigned to the Foreign Service Institute in Arlington. The institute is effectively a way station for retiring foreign service officers.
Keyser is a Baltimore native who graduated from the University of Maryland in 1965. He attended the Stanford Inter-University Center in Taiwan for two years and worked toward a doctorate at George Washington University.
He joined the State Department in 1972, the court documents say. Over the years, in addition to serving three times in Beijing and twice in Tokyo, he was the department's director of Chinese and Mongolian affairs. During the Clinton administration, he was named ambassador as a special negotiator for conflicts in Nagorno-Karabakh and the New Independent States that were formerly Soviet republics.
"The hardest thing to understand is that the word 'integrity' comes to mind when I think of Don Keyser," said Chas Freeman, who worked alongside Keyser at the embassy in Beijing. "There is a long history of Taiwanese espionage against the United States, that is not in doubt. What is most peculiar and hard to believe is that Don Keyser would have been recruitable."
Shambaugh said Keyser typically works long days, often 15 hours, and has little time for hobbies.
"The man is in at 6:30 every morning and does not leave until 10 at night," he said. "He will not leave the building until [Secretary of State] Colin Powell leaves the building."
Bader spoke of Keyser's ability to write trenchant, analytical cables from memory. In 1982, when Bader was a political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing working under Keyser, the ruling Chinese Communist Party held a party congress. Typically, four or five political officers would have been assigned to analyze it, he said. But most were on leave.
"Don said he would cover [it] by himself," Bader recalled. "He churned out an endless series of perfectly composed analyses over the course of the party congress. In the pre-word processing era, I saw him sit down and type flawless 25-paragraph cables in perfect sentences, without notes, completely from memory. He was the awe of everyone."
Now, diplomats and academics accustomed to deciphering the arcana of foreign countries are wondering whether they missed something close to home.
"We're all just collectively stunned and asking each other what to make of this," Shambaugh said.
Staff writers Lena H. Sun, Glenn Kessler, Walter Pincus and Peter Whoriskey and researcher Bobbye Pratt contributed to this report.
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THE 9/11 COMMISSION
Bush Shows Congress Plan for Spy Czar
September 17, 2004
By PHILIP SHENON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/17/politics/17panel.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Sept. 16 - The White House submitted to Congress on Thursday its proposed version of legislation to establish the job of a powerful national intelligence director, calling for the spy czar to have somewhat less power than some lawmakers and members of the independent Sept. 11 commission had hoped.
The draft bill, which has been eagerly awaited by members of Congress as they debate a legislative response to the recommendations of the commission, details how the administration wants the national intelligence director to oversee the collection and sharing of intelligence by the Central Intelligence Agency and other agencies.
The densely worded, highly technical 23-page White House proposal drew a mixed reaction from lawmakers involved in the legislative debate created by the final report of the commission, which called for an overhaul of the government's intelligence and counterterrorism agencies, as well as appointment of a national intelligence director.
The Republican chairman and ranking Democrat on the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, who are overseeing the Senate's response to the commission, said in a statement: "Although we are still reviewing the administration's draft, we are pleased that the president has endorsed needed reforms, such as the creation of a national intelligence director with budget authority."
The Republican, Susan Collins of Maine, and the Democrat, Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, said the White House proposal would help "maintain momentum towards getting comprehensive intelligence reform," although they added that "the administration's bill is not as comprehensive as the proposal we have already announced."
They did not specify how the White House proposal differed from theirs. But Congressional aides, speaking on condition of anonymity, said an initial reading of the White House proposal suggested that President Bush wanted to limit the ability of the intelligence director to be involved in military intelligence operations.
And the White House proposal drew immediate criticism from Representative Carolyn B. Maloney of New York, the chief Democratic sponsor in the House of a bill that would enact virtually all recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission.
Ms. Maloney said she was disappointed that the White House bill had not addressed many of the other specific recommendations made by the commission. "This is several years late and several dollars short of the full range of reforms the commission proposed," she said in a statement.
The White House bill, which House Republican leaders are expected to incorporate into their own, is one of several proposals circulating through Capitol Hill in response to the commission's final report.
The White House bill calls for the creation of a national intelligence director who would "serve as head of the United States intelligence community" and would "act as the principal adviser to the president, the National Security Council and the Homeland Security Council for intelligence matters relating to the national security."
Under the bill, the national intelligence director would "manage and be responsible for appropriations" of the so-called national foreign intelligence budget, the part of the intelligence budget dealing with the collecting and sharing of foreign intelligence.
White House officials have estimated in recent days that Mr. Bush's proposal would give the new intelligence director control over as much as 75 percent of the estimated $40 billion that the government spends each year on intelligence, with the Pentagon controlling the remaining 25 percent.
The bill makes it explicit, however, that the Office of Management and Budget, which is within the White House, would continue to exercise an important role in dividing up the intelligence budget.
The White House bill would also establish a cabinet-level intelligence advisory panel, the Joint Intelligence Community Council, to provide counsel to national intelligence director; the commission did not recommend creation of such a panel. In Congressional testimony this week, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell suggested that the council might help rein in a national intelligence director if the director "is moving in the wrong direction."
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CIA Officer: al - Qaida Efforts Still Lag
September 17, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-CIA-Critic.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A senior CIA officer says bad decisions, understaffing and infighting among intelligence agencies stifled efforts to stop Osama bin Laden and his network. More than three years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the agency remains short-staffed, he says.
In an unusually critical campaign for a government employee, Mike Scheuer has spent much of the last three months publicly criticizing his agency. Most government officials wait until they retire, as former National Security Council aide Richard Clarke did.
In July, Scheuer, head of the CIA's bin Laden unit until 1999, published his best-selling book ``Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror.'' Then, he was only identified as ``Anonymous.''
Last week, Scheuer sent the Senate Intelligence Committee a six-page letter accusing senior career civil servants of failing to ensure the ``optimal performance'' of the U.S. intelligence community and of missing opportunities to stop bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorist group and prevent the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Scheuer lists 10 management and leadership problems in the letter, delivered just before the confirmation hearing of President Bush's nominee to run the CIA, Rep. Porter Goss, R-Fla. A congressional source provided a copy to The Associated Press this week.
``There has been no systematic effort to groom al-Qaida expertise among Directorate of Operations officers since 11 September,'' Scheuer writes, referring to the CIA's most famous division, its clandestine service. ``Today, the unit is greatly understaffed because of a 'hiring freeze' and the rotation of large numbers of officers in and out of the unit every 60 to 90 days.''
He says experienced officers do less work and become trainers for officers who leave before they are qualified for the mission. Senior CIA managers running operations against al-Qaida have made pleas for more officers, Scheuer says.
The CIA declined to comment on Scheuer's statements.
An intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Scheuer met numerous times with a commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks and made the criticisms found in his letter. The official said the clandestine service has more officers working against al-Qaida at headquarters and overseas than before the Sept. 11 attacks, and also has more expertise on al-Qaida.
At his confirmation hearing, Goss said he reached conclusions similar to Scheuer's and sees a need to improve the CIA's human intelligence capabilities: ``They are our best bet for dealing with the war on terrorism,'' Goss said.
In his letter, Scheuer details past intelligence woes. He says the CIA initially suppressed a 1996 report about al-Qaida's unsuccessful efforts to acquire a nuclear weapon, and that an abbreviated version was circulated within the intelligence community following internal protests.
He also describes disputes between the CIA and another intelligence agency over access to al-Qaida communications intercepts.
Scheuer complains that the bin Laden unit was ordered to disband in spring 1998, leading many there to look for jobs just before the East Africa embassy bombings in August. Then-CIA Director George Tenet intervened and kept the unit open.
Scheuer says intelligence officers were transferred at critical times, and the military wouldn't provide U.S. special-operations experts to help plan actions against al-Qaida.
When Scheuer wrote his book, he was initially only allowed to be identified as ``Anonymous.'' He did a series of television interviews with his face darkened and print interviews on the condition he not be identified. Gradually, his identity has come out.
In an AP interview in June, speaking anonymously, the author said he saw a ``denigration in my responsibilities'' over the last five years. This week, his editor, Christina Davidson of Brassey's Inc., said he is considering leaving the agency.
``The anonymous author of Imperial Hubris is very close to resignation for a number of reasons, including denial of interviews,'' said Davidson, who is still bound by an agreement with the CIA not to identify Scheuer.
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Germany Arrests U.S. Translator on Spying Charges
September 17, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-germany-espionage.html
BERLIN (Reuters) - A U.S. translator suspected of trying to sell military documents to a non-NATO country was arrested when visiting her parents in Germany, officials said on Friday.
The 43-year-old, originally a German citizen, was arrested earlier this week in central west Germany on espionage charges.
The Federal Prosecutor's Office said the woman, whose name was given only as Michaela T., tried in October to sell military documents she was supposed to translate for a German company.
The transaction, planned in Canada, was prevented. It could have posed a major threat to Germany's security, the office's statement said. It gave no more details.
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Tehran may turn to World Court over IAEA nuclear deadline
By Reuters
September 17, 2004
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/478567.html
TEHRAN - Iran will take the UN nuclear watchdog to the international court of justice if it sets a deadline for the Islamic state to commit to a new freeze on uranium enrichment activities, a top Iranian cleric said on Friday. Influential former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani told worshippers at Friday prayers at Tehran University that Iran would lodge a complaint at the Hague tribunal against the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for acting outside its powers.
"If it sets a deadline to halt some of our nuclear activities we have the right to go to the Hague court," Rafsanjani said.
"Passing such an unjust resolution with a deadline is a violation of the law."
Washington accuses Iran of pursuing nuclear arms under cover of a civilian atomic program. Iran denies this, saying it only wants to generate electricity.
The United States had been lobbying an IAEA meeting in Vienna to set an October 31 deadline for Iran to halt its enrichment program or face UN Security Council economic sanctions.
But a diplomat said on Thursday that Washington had reached a compromise with France, Britain and Germany with a resolution calling for an immediate halt to the enrichment program, but not setting a deadline.
The text still has to be approved by most of the 35 nations on the IAEA governing board.
In remarks broadcast live on state radio, Rafsanjani called the debate a "scandal,? saying the IAEA was obliged to offer technological assistance to Iran based on the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT.)
As a signatory to the NPT, Iran is allowed to enrich uranium - a process that can be used both for nuclear power plants and atomic weapons.
Rafsanjani, a key adviser to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's most powerful figure, said Iran would not yield to mounting international pressure to abandon its nuclear program.
"We have never surrendered to pressures and threats," he said.
The IAEA, which has been investigating Iran for two years, says it has uncovered undeclared nuclear activities, but nothing to prove Washington's allegations.
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UN draft on weapons leaves leeway to Iran
The Associated Press
September 17, 2004
http://www.iht.com/bin/print.php?file=539343.html
VIENNA U.S. and European negotiators at a key meeting of the UN atomic monitoring agency agreed Friday on a draft resolution meant to deprive Iran of technology that could be used to make nuclear weapons and setting an indirect deadline on Tehran to meet their conditions.
But ambiguities in the draft left open the possibility of new confrontation between Iran and the United States when the meeting - a board of governors' conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency - reconvenes in November.
The text demanded that Iran suspend all uranium enrichment activities - but also recognized the right of countries to the peaceful use of nuclear energy, a phrase that leaves Tehran plenty of wiggle room.
Iran says it is already honoring a pledge to freeze enrichment, and Tehran's chief delegate to the meeting suggested his country would keep that suspension in effect at least until the November deadline set by the draft resolution.
But Iran says it is interested in enrichment only to generate power, denying accusations by the United States that it wants to produce weapons-grade uranium for nuclear warheads.
Hossein Mousavian, the chief delegate to the International Atomic Energy Agency's board of governors' meeting, suggested recognition of countries' right to nuclear technology for nonmilitary use meant Iran had the right to enrich, whenever it decided to end its partial freeze.
"For us, two or three months" of continued suspension "is not the issue," he said. "For us, the recognition of the right to Iran" to possess technology for nonmilitary use "is the most important issue." He said the "decision makers in Tehran" would soon decide whether to extend Iran's present freeze on enrichment. But he said any extension would be restricted to the suspension now in effect on actual production of enriched uranium and not include related activities.
That would run counter to the demand in the draft that calls on Iran to "immediately suspend all enrichment-related activities," including making, assembling and testing centrifuges and the production of uranium hexafluoride, which when spun, turns into enriched uranium.
The draft also expressed alarm at Iranian plans to process more than 40 tons of raw uranium into uranium hexafluoride feed stock for enrichment.
Iran is not prohibited from enrichment under its obligations to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty but faces growing international pressure to suspend such activities as a good-faith gesture.
The text said the November board meeting would decide "whether or not further steps are required." Diplomats familiar with the text defined that phrase as shorthand for possible referral of Iran to the UN Security Council if it defies the conditions set in the resolution.
By giving the Iranians room to maneuver on enrichment the text appeared to fall far short of what the Americans had wanted. Washington had pushed to drop mention of countries' right to peaceful nuclear technology and fought for an Oct. 31 deadline, with the understanding that if Iran failed to comply with the resolution's demands, the board would then automatically begin deliberations on Security Council referral.
A European diplomat familiar with the negotiations leading to the draft said, however, that Washington had to give in to united European opposition.
"I have seldom heard as many 'nos' as when Oct. 31 was mentioned," said the diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The Russians, Chinese and nonaligned nations were opposed to striking the right of countries to peaceful use of nuclear energy, he said.
The United States has for months sought to have Iran hauled before the Security Council, alleging that it continues to hide a secret nuclear weapons program. While European nations also share concerns about Iran's activities, the draft reflected their efforts to give Tehran more time to comply before turning to the Security Council, which has the power to impose economic and political sanctions.
"I don't see any reason for going to the Security Council," Mousavian said, arguing that enrichment was not prohibited by any agreement Tehran had with the monitoring agency.
A senior diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the text still needed "a final go round" Friday among delegations to the board of governors meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency before being formally submitted to the meeting later in the day.
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UN nuclear inspectors heading for South Korea
VIENNA (AFP)
Sep 17, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040917184855.9td43c3r.html
UN atomic agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei confirmed Friday the body was embarking on a new round of inspections in South Korea into the secret manufacture of small amounts of potentially bomb-grade enriched uranium and plutonium.
"We are getting very active and good cooperation on the part of the Republic of Korea," ElBaradei told reporters at a meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency's 35-nation board of governors.
He said the IAEA was "sending a team of inspectors to the Republic of Korea tomorrow (Saturday)."
The IAEA hope by November to "be able to provide a comprehensive report and provide assurances to the... international community" that South Korea is not a nuclear weapons threat.
ElBaradei said he "would be going to the Republic of Korea early in October and I will have the opportunity to discuss this with the government and other officials in Korea."
In Seoul, Foreign Minister Ban Ki-Moon told a parliamentary hearing Wednesday that the IAEA inspectors were expected to visit two state nuclear centers where South Korean scientists extracted a small amount of plutonium in 1982 and conducted research to enrich uranium in 2000.
"We have nothing to hide. We are ready to cooperate with their transparent inspection," a government official told AFP.
The UN watchdog sent inspectors to South Korea two weeks ago to look into the experiments.
Yonhap news agency said the new five-member team will conduct a six-day inspection as a follow-up to the initial visit.
ElBaradei said Monday that 150 kilograms (330 pounds) of uranium metal was produced in undeclared conversion activities in the early 1980s and a small amount of this was used in 2000 to produce the enriched uranium.
ElBaradei expressed "serious concern" about the activities.
In Seoul, the science ministry said scientists produced about 150 kilograms of uranium metal in 1982 from phosphate ore at three undeclared facilities. Uranium metal can be used as nuclear fuel or as a radiation shield.
The facilities were dismantled after scientists used 3.5 kilograms of the uranium metal in 2000, it said, adding South Korea still keeps 134 kilograms in storage.
The ministry attributed the loss of the remaining 12.5 kilograms to natural wastage.
It asserted the experiments were purely for academic research but did not clarify why the production of uranium metal was undeclared.
In Vienna, South Korea's ambassador to the IAEA Cho Changbeom told the IAEA board Friday that Korea "remains firmly committed to the peaceful uses of nuclear energy and nuclear non-proliferation."
South Korea is a member of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and has ratified the Additional Protocol to the NPT that allows for wider IAEA inspections.
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Compromise resolution on Iran submitted at UN atomic agency
VIENNA (AFP)
Sep 17, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040917173918.hilqk3sy.html
Europe's three main nations submitted a compromise resolution at the International Atomic Energy Agency seen as a key step towards setting a deadline for a review of Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program, an IAEA spokesman said.
"The resolution has been tabled," Mark Gwozdecky said, with the IAEA's 35-nation board of governors set to meet in a special session Saturday.
A European diplomat told AFP that Britain, France and Germany had gone ahead and submitted the draft resolution even though there were still objections to it from non-aligned countries.
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U.S., Allies Dispute Annan on Iraq War
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 17, 2004; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25685-2004Sep16.html
UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 16 -- The United States and its military allies Thursday challenged U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan's statement that last year's invasion of Iraq was an illegal act that violated the U.N. charter, and they defended their decision to topple Saddam Hussein's government.
Annan made his comments Wednesday when a reporter for the BBC questioned him about the war's legality, saying, "From our point of view and the U.N. charter point of view, it was illegal." The U.N. chief previously voiced his opposition to the invasion on the grounds that it lacked Security Council approval, which he says is required by the U.N. charter, and has challenged White House claims that the war has made the world safer from international terrorists.
"It was illegal," Kofi Annan told a BBC reporter.
In Wednesday's interview, Annan also warned that the United Nations may not be able to effectively oversee Iraq's elections next January if security does not improve. "You cannot have credible elections if the security conditions continue as they are now," he said.
The remarks about the war's legality provoked swift reaction from U.S., British and Australian officials, who said their government's legal advisers had determined that the war was justified by Iraq's failure to comply with Security Council resolutions. U.S. officials criticized the timing of the remarks, which came just days before President Bush is to address the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday.
"If I had been his adviser, which I wasn't, I would have advised him not to say it at all -- and if he was going to say it at all not to say it now. But he did, and there's a difference of opinion," said John C. Danforth, the U.S. ambassador the United Nations. "In our view the enforcement of the 16 or 17 Security Council resolutions is clearly lawful. In fact, if Security Council resolution are not enforced, then it seems to me that there is a real shaking of the foundation of the rule of law."
U.N. officials in New York sought to play down the significance of Annan's remarks, noting that he had previously said the U.S.-led war was not "in conformity with the U.N. charter." They noted that he was prodded three times by the BBC reporter before acknowledging his position. "The secretary general was quite reluctant to use that word," said Annan's chief spokesman, Fred Eckhard.
The legality of the war has been the subject of debate among governments and international-law experts. At the outset of the war, the United States, Britain and Australia maintained in letters to the Security Council that the legal basis for the invasion lay in Iraq's violation of the terms of cease-fire agreements that ended the 1991 Persian Gulf War. But critics of the war, including Annan's top legal advisers, argued that only the Security Council possessed the authority to authorize a military invasion of a U.N. member state.
Although political leaders in Washington have scarcely questioned the war's legality, opposition leaders in Britain and Australia continue to challenge the war's legal basis. To contain political fallout from Annan's remarks, Prime Minister Tony Blair's office reaffirmed the war's legitimacy, citing a finding by Britain's attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, that Britain acted lawfully.
"There had been a series of Security Council resolutions and the advice we had [was] that it was entirely legal," Australia's prime minister, John Howard, told the Australian radio station 6PR.
France, China and other council members that opposed the war sought to stay out of the fray. "I think that all of us have views on the Iraqi war," said China's U.N. ambassador, Wang Guangya. "I think that what is important now is to help achieve peace and stability in that country."
"You know our position," French Foreign Ministry spokesman Herve Ladsous said. "We had the opportunity at the time to express ourselves very clearly."
Bush, meanwhile, stepped up his defense of U.S. action in Iraq at a campaign rally in St. Cloud, Minn., saying, "It wasn't all that long ago that Saddam Hussein was in power with his torture chambers and mass graves, and today this country is headed towards elections."
Bush said that he had gone to the United Nations to rally international support for tough action against Iraq but that Hussein continued to flout the will of the international body.
"So I have a choice to make at this time. Diplomacy isn't working. Do I forget the lessons of September the 11th and trust a madman, or do I take action to defend this country?" he said.
-------- us
Navy to Shut Down Sub Radio Transmitters
September 17, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Submarine-Communications.html
CLAM LAKE, Wis. (AP) -- The Navy said Friday it will dismantle two huge radio transmitters in northern Wisconsin and Michigan used for submarine communications, including one that has been the site of repeated demonstrations by anti-nuclear weapons activists.
The $400 million submarine communications system, which has been in use since 1989, is outdated and no longer needed, the Navy said.
Radio transmissions from the sites, in the Chequamegon National Forest near Clam Lake and in Michigan's Escanaba State Forest near Republic, will cease Sept. 30.
It could take the Navy up to three years to close down the sites permanently, said Steven Davis, a spokesman for the Navy's Space and Navy Warfare Systems Command in San Diego. Each transmitter consists of an antenna strung on 600 40-foot poles across dozens of miles of forest.
The Navy has used the ``extremely low frequency'' transmitters to maintain secure communications with submarines at sea, but now will use 12 ``very low frequency'' transmitters located worldwide, Davis said.
Before the sites became operational, there were two decades of protests over the construction of the system at Clam Lake, a quiet tourist wayside in northern Wisconsin.
Critics contended the low-frequency radio waves could cause health and environmental problems, and that the system was for use during a first-strike nuclear attack.
Some claimed the system became obsolete with the Cold War's end, although the Navy argued that it was a vital communications link.
Barb Kass of Luck, a member of Nukewatch, was elated by Friday's announcement but questioned why it took so long.
``Why today and not 20 years ago?'' asked Kass, who was arrested three times for trespassing at the site in acts of civil disobedience and attended her first protest at the transmitter site in 1984.
The project was scaled down considerably from the original 1960s plan, which included a grid of 6,200 miles of buried cable and 100 transmitters that would withstand a nuclear war.
Plans for the system, which cost $13 million a year to operate, were nearly killed in the late 1970s but revived by former President Ronald Reagan.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Putin attack suspect 'badly beaten'
The Observer
Nick Paton Walsh in Moscow
September 26, 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/russia/article/0,2763,1312904,00.html
The man arrested last week for allegedly trying to kill President Vladimir Putin with a car bomb was interrogated by 150 police officers before he died.
Police said he died of a heart attack. The Observer can reveal that the body of Alexander Pumane, 38, from St Petersburg, was so badly beaten that his relatives were unable to identify him.
Pumane was arrested at 1am last Saturday after he parked a Lada near the foreign ministry. Police found explosives, two anti-personnel mines and a container of unidentified liquid in the car.
Pumane, whom officials insisted was under the influence of drugs, was questioned for three hours.
The Izvestiya newspaper said he was interrogated by up to 150 people. Pumane said he had been paid $1,000 (£550) - but refused to say by whom - to drive two cars to Kutuzovsky Prospekt, a road used daily by the presidential limousine.
After hours in custody, Pumane was rushed to hospital, and by 8.30am he was dead.
His ex-wife Natalia said: 'I was told about his death on Saturday and then invited to the prosecutor's office in St Petersburg. They told me Alexander was brought to hospital in a state of drug intoxication and with bruising over all the body.'
-------- courts / tribunals
Guantanamo Charges Dropped
Colonel Among Suspects in Alleged Security Breaches
Reuters
Friday, September 17, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26778-2004Sep16.html
The Army has dropped all charges against a colonel who had served as an intelligence officer at the Guantanamo prison and had been accused of trying to take classified material from the base, officials said yesterday.
Army Reserve Col. Jackie Duane Farr was the highest ranking of three U.S. service members charged in 2003 in connection with suspected security breaches at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the United States is holding about 585 foreign terrorism suspects.
All charges have now been dropped against Farr and Army Capt. James Yee, a Muslim chaplain who ministered to prisoners, while the prosecution case against Air Force Senior Airman Ahmad Halabi, an Arabic language translator, has run into trouble.
The Army dropped the charges against Farr of disobeying an order by transporting classified material without the proper security container and of making a false statement during an investigation, said Army Maj. Hank McIntire, a spokesman at the Guantanamo base.
Instead, Army Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, commander of the Guantanamo prison, imposed a "nonjudicial punishment" in an administrative proceeding on Aug. 27, McIntire said.
The charges were dropped "to more quickly resolve the matter to serve the best interests of the military and Colonel Farr," McIntire said. He added that there will be no further action taken against Farr.
McIntire declined to reveal the nature of the punishment given to Farr. "Because of the Privacy Act, we can't give the specifics of anything that was imposed. We can just say it was resolved nonjudicially," McIntire said.
Farr, who had directed the intelligence-gathering operation of U.S. personnel who interrogated Guantanamo prisoners, could have faced as many as seven years in prison had he been convicted.
The Army has approved Yee's resignation from the military effective in January and will grant him an honorable discharge, said Eugene Fidell, Yee's lawyer. Yee is stationed at Fort Lewis in Washington state.
Fidell said the U.S. military owes Yee an apology.
"He -- an officer and a chaplain -- was subjected to 76 days of pretrial confinement that was completely unjustified," Fidell said.
"The government's position is that it seemed like the right thing at the time. Even if that position were well founded, once you realized that it wasn't the right thing, then you have the obligation to say, 'We're sorry.' "
In March, the Army dropped all criminal charges against Yee, abandoning an espionage case that once included accusations of spying, mutiny, sedition and aiding the enemy.
Yee's exoneration was completed in April when the head of the U.S. Southern Command dismissed Yee's noncriminal convictions on charges of adultery and of storing pornographic images on a government computer.
Military prosecutors have already dropped 14 of the 30 charges brought against Halabi. Hearings on motions before his planned court-martial at Travis Air Force Base in California had been scheduled for this past Tuesday and then for yesterday. They have been rescheduled for Monday.
--------
Judge Rebuffs Reporter in Leak Probe
By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 17, 2004; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27180-2004Sep16.html
A federal judge, in an order released yesterday, ruled that New York Times reporter Judith Miller cannot avoid a subpoena to testify about her private conversations with news sources before a grand jury investigating whether senior administration officials leaked the identity of a covert CIA officer to the media.
In his Sept. 9 order denying Miller's request to quash the subpoena, U.S. District Chief Judge Thomas F. Hogan said that the reporter's discussions with anonymous sources are not protected, either by the First Amendment or by common- law privilege. Miller's attorney, Floyd Abrams, said the Times would appeal the decision.
Miller is the fifth reporter who has been directed by the court to talk with special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald about conversations they had with administration sources in the summer of 2003. Fitzgerald is investigating whether a government official knowingly disclosed to the media the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame, who is also the wife of former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV.
Senior White House officials have acknowledged they were trying to raise concerns with reporters at that time about Wilson. The former ambassador had gone to Niger to investigate whether Iraq was seeking weapons of mass destruction and that summer criticized Bush for relying on what Wilson alleged was flimsy evidence in going to war in Iraq.
Miller contemplated writing an article about Wilson and Plame and "spoke with one or more confidential sources" about a July 6, 2003, article that Wilson wrote for the Times titled 'What I Didn't Find in Africa," according to Hogan's order.
Fitzgerald's probe was prompted by a July 14, 2003, column by syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak, in which he reported that two administration officials had named Plame as the person who suggested that Wilson undertake the trip to Niger. Novak and his attorney have refused to comment on whether he has been subpoenaed.
-------- police
As Leaks Dry Up in FBI Investigation, Activists Still Fear Jury Probe
The Forward
By Ori Nir
September 17, 2004
http://www.forward.com/main/article.php?ref=nir200409151143
Washington - Even as a lull in government leaks appears to be short-circuiting the media frenzy over the FBI's investigation of the pro-Israel lobby, sources with access to the Justice Department say the probe is moving forward.
Sources told the Forward that a federal grand jury is expected to begin interviewing people in connection to the investigation, which is believed to center on a Pentagon official suspected of passing on classified documents on to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Investigators reportedly suspect that Aipac officials passed on the information to Israel.
Jewish activists say that so far they know of no one who has been subpoenaed to testify in front of the grand jury. But according to one source, "there is a lot of nonsubpoena-level talking" between investigators and people they think might know of suspected wrongdoing.
The investigation could end up weakening the country's most influential pro-Israel lobbying group significantly and, in turn, cause damage to the American-Israeli relationship. Now, however, reporters with mainstream national news organizations say, it has become almost impossible to obtain any new information from law-enforcement sources on the investigation.
"They are as tight as a drum," said one reporter, who has been following the story on a daily basis.
According to Washington insiders, the goal of the recent torrent of unnamed government leaks was to undermine neoconservative Pentagon
analysts who backed the Iraq war, in particular the undersecretary of defense for policy, Douglas Feith, the third-highest ranking civilian in the Pentagon.
"It's clear to me that people are trying to point all the signs to Feith's shop," said a reporter with a major daily newspaper, who has been covering the story.
The criticism of Feith, sources say, has little to do with his being Jewish or his advocating positions identified with Israel's right-wing Likud party. It also has little to do with his role in shaping the administration's policy on Iran, a policy that according to press reports was the subject of documents inappropriately transferred by Lawrence Franklin, the Pentagon specialist on Iran who is allegedly suspected of sharing secret documents with Israeli diplomats and with staffers at Aipac, to Israel or to Aipac.
Feith is the most obvious target for critics in the intelligence community and the State Department, as well as members of the Pentagon's senior brass, over the formation and execution of American policy in post-war Iraq. He is perceived by many as personifying the administration's alleged manipulation of prewar intelligence to create a compelling case for war. He is also perceived as being responsible for a series of mistakes in the ongoing effort to pacify Iraq after the military campaign to depose Saddam Hussein's rule had ended.
Criticism of Feith and the policies he represents "is of course legitimate," a Jewish activist in Washington said. "Our concern, though, is that this criticism, coupled with still-unsubstantiated allegations and innuendo of inappropriate conduct by one of his staffers, legitimizes conspiracy theories."
Feith was the subject of two unflattering profiles in the mainstream media over the weekend. In an interview with National Public Radio, Feith said, addressing his policy on Iraq: "I don't mean to claim that no mistakes were made. There were mistakes, but I think that some of the critics are unduly harsh and unrealistic."
He refused to comment to NPR on FBI investigations focusing on members of his staff.
Meanwhile, in the face of a rising wave of criticism from lawmakers, Jewish organizations and neoconservative pundits, the leaks regarding the FBI probe have stopped.
The reasons for the lull are not clear, but journalists and Jewish communal officials were floating several theories this week, including the notion that the sudden silence came in response to the condemnations from Jewish organizations and Capitol Hill.
"I sure hope that this is the case and that there was a directive" issued to stop leaking, said Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League. Last week Foxman sent a letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller and to Attorney General John Ashcroft asking that they investigate who leaked the information and why.
"Maybe the clamp is on because [the leakers] made [law-enforcement agencies] look bad in the whole process," said Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.
"It may be that this has run its course," Hoenlein said, sounding a bit skeptical as he struggled to strike an optimistic chord. "People have used it as an opportunity to make a little trouble, and now that's over." Foxman was quick to reject any talk of a fading controversy, saying: "I think we have a long ways to go" before the affair is over.
Other officials with major Jewish organizations seemed to agree.
"We don't know anything. Nobody is telling us anything," said a veteran Jewish activist in Washington. "Someone seems to have put the kibosh on [the leaks], but we don't see anything to indicate that this is the end of the story. It will cause more embarrassment as it unfolds."
The only new tidbit of information on the investigation to emerge this week came from an interview in Time magazine with an unidentified ex- member of the Iraqi National Congress, the group headed by Ahmed Chalabi. The former INC member told Time that Franklin asked him several probing questions. The man said that Franklin questioned him only about possible leaks of secret American information to the INC.
The Time report seemed to confirm earlier accounts that Franklin is in fact cooperating with the FBI, and is trying to help investigators with another suspected espionage scandal in the Pentagon.
Law enforcement agencies reportedly suspect that a Pentagon official told Chalabi or one of his INC colleagues that the United States had obtained secret Iranian communications codes. Chalabi is allegedly suspected of disclosing that intelligence clue to the Iranian government.
-------- prisons / prisoners
Abu Ghraib 'Immensely' Improved, Iraqi Official Says
By Jackie Spinner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 17, 2004; Page A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27234-2004Sep16.html
ABU GHRAIB, Iraq, Sept. 16 -- Prisoners still sometimes grumble about the food, but Bakhtyar Amin, Iraq's human rights minister, said Thursday that conditions at the U.S.-run detention facility here have turned around since reports of prisoner abuse sparked a global scandal five months ago.
During a visit to the prison, where he met with some of the 425 detainees scheduled to be freed this week, Amin said he was more than pleased with the changes. These include putting air conditioning in the tents where detainees are housed, lengthening shower times and allowing regular family visits.
"Health care has improved immensely," Amin said as he toured the prison's new $26 million hospital. "We have one of the best hospitals in Iraq. The food has improved immensely. Their hygiene has improved. So the environment has improved enormously."
Amin said detainees had made few complaints during his recent visits to Abu Ghraib. More frequent, he said, are claims of innocence -- like the ones shouted at him Thursday by a crowd of detainees trying to get his attention from behind barbed wire.
"They all say they are innocent," he said. "I haven't met a single one who has not. . . . Once you get into the details, you find the reality."
"Please, minister," a man in a maroon polo shirt and dusty gray pants shouted, his brown, creased hands shaking. "I am injured. My whole family is killed. Just me and my mother are alive. Minister, I have just God and you."
Amin told an aide standing next to him to take notes, then turned to address the rest of the detainees, some of whom held up their identification bracelets for him to see.
"I don't want to see any Iraqi in prison," Amin told the men. "There are many innocent people who get killed. Don't let your families suffer because you are in jail. Don't be with the bad people, because the only thing they want is to destroy this beautiful country."
Amin, a former exile who ran a human rights organization in France, has been monitoring Abu Ghraib since May and working with U.S. authorities to improve conditions at the prison.
When he first visited the prison in May, he said, detainees were living in dirty, crowded tent compounds guarded by an understaffed military police force. At its peak, Abu Ghraib held more than 7,000 detainees. The population is now down to about 2,500, with about 700 detainees scheduled to be released by the middle of October, in time for the start of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting.
A nine-member review board, made up of six Iraqis and three representatives of the international military force here, meets three times a week to decide which detainees should be freed at Abu Ghraib and the other major U.S.-run detention facility in Iraq, Camp Bucca, near the southern port city of Umm Qasr.
One of the board members, who like the others was not identified by the military for security reasons, came to Abu Ghraib with Amin on Thursday to watch a release.
As she approached Camp Liberty, a new tent compound for detainees scheduled to be freed, the young lawyer shook her head. "I can't believe we've released all these people," she said. "I'm not quite sure we should. I see the crimes on their faces."
Asked why these detainees had been recommended for release, she said the board had no choice. "The problem is that the people are not threatening the general security of Iraq," she said. "We have to release them. Some of the people are 50-50. The others are teenagers caught up with their fathers or families."
As the freed detainees were allowed to leave, a soldier handed each man $25. Amin grabbed each detainee's hand and held it.
"Congratulations," he told a young man dressed in a new button-down shirt that the U.S. military had given him. "I don't want to see you next time. You're still young and your country needs you."
Special correspondent Luma Mousawi contributed to this report.
-------- terrorism
2 Indicted On Charges Related to Terrorism
Financial Support Of Al Qaeda Alleged
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 17, 2004; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26314-2004Sep16.html
Two men were indicted in Florida yesterday for allegedly providing financial support and recruitment for al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, including helping "dirty bomb" suspect Jose Padilla attend terrorist training camps in Afghanistan, according to court records and law enforcement officials.
Adham Amin Hassoun and Mohamed Hesham Youssef were each charged with two counts of providing material support to terrorists as part of a grand jury indictment handed up in U.S. District Court in Miami. Hassoun, a Palestinian who has been in U.S. custody since June 2002, also faces eight previously filed charges, including unlawful possession of a firearm and perjury. Youssef is serving a sentence in Egypt on other terrorism charges.
Attorney General John D. Ashcroft said in a news conference in Washington that while "enjoying all the freedoms that our society has to offer," Hassoun was "secretly plotting to support murder and terror by violent jihadists overseas."
The indictment alleges that Hassoun and Youssef helped recruit volunteers and provide money to terrorist groups fighting in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Kosovo and Somalia.
One of the allegations highlighted by Ashcroft involved a telephone conversation between Hassoun and Youssef in September 2000 in which they allegedly discussed aiding a U.S. citizen attempting to reach a terrorist training camp. Several U.S. law enforcement officials, who declined to be identified because of grand jury secrecy rules, said that citizen was Padilla, who is being held by the U.S. military as an enemy combatant.
A convert to Islam and a former Chicago gang member, Padilla was arrested on suspicion of planning to set off a radiological "dirty bomb" in the United States, but authorities have said more recently that he was focused on a plot to blow up U.S. apartment buildings with natural gas. From September to October 2000, he allegedly attended the al Farouq training camp run by Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.
Law enforcement authorities have said that the Bush administration is still debating the fate of Padilla. His attorney, Donna R. Newman, said yesterday that she does not know whether her client will face criminal charges and that she was unaware that he is alluded to in Hassoun's indictment.
"They haven't informed us of anything, and it's unlikely they will inform us," said Newman, who has complained about the extraordinary secrecy surrounding the case. "All we hear is rumors."
Justice Department prosecutors are negotiating an agreement for the release of another alleged enemy combatant, Yaser Esam Hamdi. Prosecutors told a judge last month that Hamdi's release was imminent, but officials said this week that a final agreement has not yet been signed by both sides.
The indictment announced yesterday identifies more than two dozen checks, totaling $53,000, that were written by Hassoun from 1994 to 2001 and were allegedly aimed at supporting terrorist activities and groups. Many of the checks were written to charities such as the Holy Land Foundation and the Global Relief Foundation, which have been targets of U.S. counterterrorism investigations or prosecutions.
The charges also recount detailed conversations, apparently recorded through wiretaps, between Hassoun and Youssef in which they allegedly discussed jihad, primarily through code words. For example, in 1996 Youssef allegedly told Hassoun that he was "ready for trade immediately."
Hassoun allegedly responded that "there is now trade in Somalia" and urged Youssef to "get yourself ready to go down there and see." Hassoun added that "there is jihad" in Somalia, the indictment says.
-------- POLITICS
-------- propaganda wars
Suspected CBS Source Is Well-Regarded Texan
Democrat Lives Among GOP Voters
By Sylvia Moreno
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 17, 2004; Page A05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27239-2004Sep16.html
BAIRD, Tex., Sept. 16 -- For half a dozen years, Bill Burkett has lived a pretty uneventful life in this tiny West Texas town. He and his wife are regulars at the Whistle Stop Cafe, ordering bacon cheeseburgers with jalapenos and fries or the pork chop special on Mondays. He "visits," as people like to say in these parts, with other ranchers over coffee at the Callahan County Farmer's Co-Op. And like other polite locals, he drops in on the local elected officials to introduce himself.
He is, by most accounts, a nice man who, in an overwhelmingly Republican-voting area, might be seen as somewhat eccentric for his Democratic bias.
"I've made comments to him like, 'I think there's only two Democrats left in Callahan County, and I'm both of them,' " said Pete Mendez, 65, a retired federal firefighter who has lived in the county all his life. " 'It's three of us, if that's the way you look at it' is kind of what he's said."
Despite several requests, Burkett has said nothing publicly since Wednesday, after he was named in news reports as a possible source of the disputed documents CBS News's "60 Minutes" used in a Sept. 8 broadcast that said President Bush received preferential treatment while he was in the Texas Air National Guard.
In adjacent Taylor County, which includes the city of Abilene, Burkett is viewed as an intelligent activist or statesman of sorts by Democratic officials -- the crusading voice against what is wrong with the Republican Party in general and with Bush in particular.
"He's very bright; he's not a hayseed," said Royse Kerr, chairman of the Taylor County Democratic Club, which last spring invited Burkett to speak to the members about the "state of politics in America."
Burkett, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Texas National Guard, mentioned then what he had told several reporters last winter -- that he believes Bush aides ordered the destruction of portions of the president's National Guard record because they might have been politically embarrassing. But that was "tangential" to "the framing of his thesis," Kerr said. "What we heard was to demand more honesty of our politicians."
The authenticity of the "60 Minutes" documents has been hotly disputed since the report bringing them to light was aired. After Burkett was named as a possible source of the papers, The Washington Post reported on Thursday that the documents faxed to CBS bore markings indicating that they had been faxed from a Kinko's in Abilene, 21 miles east of here. The day after, no one who knew Burkett here would comment about whether he could have been the source.
"I have no idea; I have no individual knowledge about that," said David Haigler, chairman of the Taylor County Democratic Party. "All I know is that I trust Bill Burkett. He's been a citizen soldier who decided to stand up and say what is on his mind, and he's got nothing but grief for it."
Haigler said Burkett had received several death threats since his name surfaced as a possible source for "60 Minutes." "There's just a lot of crazies out here, but Bill Burkett is not one of them. And if the issue is whether Bill Burkett concocted a bunch of records, that makes me want to throw up," Haigler said.
Kerr also called Burkett a person of integrity who, he believed, would not fabricate information.
"I describe Colonel Burkett as a person I would trust with my life or my wife," Kerr said. "The people that know him would pretty much agree with that assessment. He's a very devout Christian and a preacher's son."
Burkett has frequently posted notes to an Internet message group for Texas Democrats, urging other members to work harder to defeat Bush in the election, but also lambasting Democratic nominee John F. Kerry for "one of the worst run campaigns I've seen in my lifetime."
"Many of us have risked everything on this election," Burkett said in a message posted on Aug. 31. "The disappointment is deep and difficult to manage. But we fight on, in spite of incompetence at the top."
Staff writer Michael Dobbs and researcher Alice Crites in Washington contributed to this report.
--------
GOP Mailing Warns Liberals Will Ban Bibles
September 17, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Campaign-Mail.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Campaign mail with a return address of the Republican National Committee warns West Virginia voters that the Bible will be prohibited and men will marry men if liberals win in November.
The literature shows a Bible with the word ``BANNED'' across it and a photo of a man, on his knees, placing a ring on the hand of another man with the word ``ALLOWED.'' The mailing tells West Virginians to ``vote Republican to protect our families'' and defeat the ``liberal agenda.''
Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie said Friday that he wasn't aware of the mailing, but said it could be the work of the RNC. ``It wouldn't surprise me if we were mailing voters on the issue of same-sex marriage,'' Gillespie said.
The flier says Republicans have passed laws protecting life, support defining marriage as between a man and a woman and will nominate conservative judges who will ``interpret the law and not legislate from the bench.''
``The liberal agenda includes removing `under God' from the Pledge of Allegiance,'' it says.
It does not mention the names of the presidential candidates.
Jim Jordan, a spokesman for America Coming Together, described the mailing as ``standard-issue Republican hate-mongering.''
Gillespie said same-sex marriage is a legitimate issue in the election. President Bush has proposed amending the Constitution to ban gay marriage. Democratic Sen. John Kerry also opposes gay marriage but said a constitutional amendment is going too far.
The RNC also is running radio ads in several states urging people to register to vote.
``There is a line drawn in America today,'' one ad says. ``On one side are the radicals trying to uproot our traditional values and our culture. They're fighting to hijack the institution of marriage, plotting to legalize partial birth abortion, and working to take God out of the pledge of allegiance and force the worst of Hollywood on the rest of America.''
``Are you on their side of the line?'' the ad asks before making the plea to ``support conservative Republican candidates.''
--------
Political Group's Antiwar Ad Draws Ire of the Bush Campaign
By GLEN JUSTICE
September 17, 2004
NY TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/17/politics/campaign/17ad.html
WASHINGTON, Sept. 16 - Bush campaign officials on Thursday sharply criticized a television commercial attacking the president's policy on Iraq that shows an American soldier sinking chest-deep into desert sand as he tries to keep his rifle above his head.
The advertisement, which was run by the Democratic-leaning MoveOn PAC, noted that more than 1,000 soldiers had been killed and that billions had been spent on the war before saying: "George Bush got us into this quagmire. It will take a new president to get us out.''
Bush campaign officials immediately sought to paint the image in the advertisement as a soldier surrendering and called upon Senator John Kerry to denounce the advertisement even though it was created and run by a third-party advocacy group.
"He should apologize for the actions of his surrogates and demand that they take down their ad depicting a defeated American soldier,'' Marc Racicot, chairman of the Bush-Cheney campaign, said.
Former Senator Bob Dole, chairman of the Bush campaign's veterans coalition, went farther, saying, "It's one thing to debate whether we should take the fight to the terrorists, but depicting an American soldier in effect surrendering in the battle against the terrorists is beyond the pale.''
Officials at MoveOn said the advertisement was not intended to depict a soldier as defeated or surrendering. Rather, they said it was intended to call attention to the situation in Iraq and to criticize the administration's policy. "Clearly, things in Iraq are heading in a very bad direction,'' said Eli Pariser, executive director of the MoveOn PAC. "It is irresponsible for the president to keep whitewashing the situation. People are dying there. That was our purpose, to call him out on that.''
Mr. Pariser said that the group acted independently and that Mr. Kerry had nothing to do with the spot.
Stephanie Cutter, a Kerry spokeswoman, said she had not seen the advertisement and could not comment on it. She said the Bush campaign did not similarly criticize advertisements run by Republican groups against Mr. Kerry. "President Bush can't have it both ways,'' she said.
The advertisement went up in Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin on Thursday and will run through Tuesday, Mr. Pariser said.
The commercial opens with a soldier running toward the viewer as an announcer says: "George Bush misled us into war with Iraq, sending poorly equipped soldiers into battle. He said 'Mission Accomplished,' yet almost every day more soldiers die.''
Superimposed text says "over 1,000 U.S. soldiers killed,'' and the announcer says, "Going it alone, George Bush has spent $150 billion, money we need for schools and health care.'' As the soldier sinks, the voice says, "Now, facing a growing insurgency, he has no real plan to end the war.''
Bush campaign officials sought to turn the advertisement against Mr. Kerry. "John Kerry's continually shifting positions on Iraq and his sinking rhetoric of a defeated America send a signal to our allies and our enemies that America is not willing to finish the job,'' Mr. Racicot said. Mr. Pariser said the Bush campaign was trying to shift attention from its own policies. "The reality is very grim, and the president doesn't have a plan to deal with it,'' Mr. Pariser said. "Our analysis is that he hopes to mislead people about what is going on there until the election is over.''
-------- us politics
Kerry's defense outlook 'alarming'
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Sharon Behn
September 17, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040916-102059-5149r.htm
Taiwan's top official on China said yesterday that Taipei is unnerved by Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry's recent statements on China-Taiwan relations.
Comments made by Mr. Kerry on the sensitive issue of Taiwan "were a little bit alarming to us," said Joseph Wu, chairman of Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council.
He was particularly concerned by Mr. Kerry's statement during the Democratic primary race that Taiwan might have to accept a one-country/two-system policy similar to that applied to Hong Kong.
In addition, Mr. Wu told editors and reporters at The Washington Times, there appeared to be no reference to the Taiwan Relations Act - which commits the United States to help Taiwan defend itself - in the Democratic Party platform.
"We feel we ought to understand more of [Mr. Kerry's] foreign policy," Mr. Wu said.
He recalled that under President Clinton, the Democratic administration's policy toward Taiwan seemed to change over time, "zigging and zagging" between active support for Taipei and engagement with Beijing.
President Bush's administration, Mr. Wu said, also had zig-zagged "a little bit."
But, overall, U.S. foreign policy always falls between opposing China's threat of use of force against Taiwan and opposing Taiwan's bid for independence, he said.
In April 2001, Mr. Bush authorized the sale to Taiwan of a package of advanced defense weapons systems, including submarines. After considerable debate, Mr. Wu said, the Taiwan legislature is ready to approve a budget of roughly $15 billion to buy the weapons.
"It's one of the urgent bills that needs to be passed," he said. "We expect it to be passed in October."
Mr. Wu noted the huge discrepancy between China's extensive modern military systems, including a "tremendous missile threat" and "huge stockpile of nuclear weapons," and Taiwan's aging weaponry.
Actual delivery of the systems will take up to 10 years for the submarines, six to eight years for the P-3C airplanes, and four to six years for the Patriot missiles, he said.
Mr. Wu said that "American friends" recently had assured Taiwan that one of the major questions surrounding the deal - where the submarines were to be built - would be resolved.
He did not indicate where they would be constructed, but said it might not be in the United States.
Taiwan considers itself a de facto independent state. China opposes any diplomatic recognition of Taiwan, as well as any weapons sales to the island, which it considers part of its territory.
Chen Shui-bian, president of the Republic of China (Taiwan), on Wednesday criticized Beijing's policy as a form of "political apartheid" and called on the United Nations to recognize Taipei.
"Taiwan's absence in the United Nations has left its 23 million people without an internationally acknowledged identity, has turned them into international vagabonds and victims of political apartheid," Mr. Chen said in video news conference in New York.
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Kerry Finds Ammunition in Intelligence Estimate
By Dana Priest and Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, September 17, 2004; Page A20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A27270-2004Sep16?language=printer
Citing a new classified intelligence report predicting serious troubles ahead for Iraq, John F. Kerry yesterday accused President Bush of living in a "fantasy world of spin" and refusing to speak honestly about mounting casualties, indiscriminate killings and chaos in Iraq. "Stability and security seem further and further away," Kerry said.
The White House, which had planned a vigorous election-season defense of its Iraq strategy next week, was forced into the debate yesterday. White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the intelligence assessment "states the obvious," and he dismissed skeptics of the Iraq policy as "pessimists and naysayers." Bush, at a campaign stop, repeated his generally upbeat assessment of Iraq: "Freedom is on the march."
The National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, representing the consensus view of the U.S. intelligence community and written in July, said Iraq's prospects for stability and self-governance over the next 18 months were, at best, "tenuous," according to U.S. government officials who have read it.
The 60-page document produced by the National Intelligence Council set out three possible scenarios for the next year and a half in Iraq, the worst of which portrayed the country as descending into civil war. The assessment, which analyzed political, economic and security trends, blamed the mounting problems on Iraq's having no institutions and traditions upon which to build representative government and on resilient opponents, including Shiite militias, Sunni insurgents, foreign terrorists and common criminals.
Revelation of the report's existence came on a day when Kerry used some of the toughest language of the campaign to paint a markedly different portrait of Iraq than the one Bush offers audiences.
The president, whom polls show a majority of Americans trust more than Kerry to handle Iraq, talks frequently of how the United States is "making progress" stabilizing the war-torn nation and setting the stage for its first democratic elections in January. Democrats point out that Bush rarely, if ever, talks about casualties, the spread of terrorism, kidnappings and beheadings, and the strength of anti-American insurgents in and around Baghdad. Instead, Bush focuses on steady resolve and the broader war on terrorism.
Bush did not mention the intelligence estimate -- first reported Wednesday by the New York Times -- as he made three campaign appearances in Minnesota yesterday. But he again emphasized progress. "There's a lot of violence in Iraq -- I understand that," he told a rally in Rochester. "But Iraq now has a strong prime minister, national council, and national elections are scheduled in January. The world is becoming more free."
Kerry, speaking to thousands of National Guardsmen in Las Vegas two days after Bush addressed the same group, said the administration's strategy in Iraq is failing and that the White House is trying to hide that reality from the American people.
"The president stood right here where I am standing and did not even acknowledge that more than 1,000 men and women have lost their lives in Iraq," Kerry said. "He did not tell that you with each passing day, we're seeing more chaos, more violence, indiscriminate killing. He did not tell you that with each passing week, our enemies are getting bolder -- that Pentagon officials report that entire regions of Iraq are now in the hands of terrorists and extremists."
Kerry has been trying to turn Iraq into a referendum on Bush's honesty overall. Bush has "failed the fundamental test of leadership: he failed to tell you the truth," Kerry said. "The hard truth -- and it is a hard truth -- is that our president has made serious mistakes in taking us to war."
Sen. Chuck Hagel (Neb.) joined a small, but growing, chorus of GOP voices sounding grave concerns about Iraq, comments that tend to support Kerry's view. "We've got to be honest with ourselves," Hagel said. "The worst thing we can do is hold ourselves hostage to some grand illusion we're winning. Right now, we are not winning. Things are getting worse."
Despite the deteriorating situation in Iraq, Kerry has had a difficult time gaining a political foothold on the issue, which divides Americans like few others. A new poll by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press found that Bush enjoys a 52 to 40 percent edge on Iraq. "Unfortunately for Kerry, he's been unable to tap into that unhappiness, especially on Iraq," director Andrew Kohut said.
The 3,500 National Guardsmen at the conference in Las Vegas gave Bush seven standing ovations, but Kerry received polite -- but only occasionally enthusiastic -- applause. Kerry's biggest applause lines occurred when he talked about new benefits for those who serve in the National Guard.
Kerry has run into two problems of his own making, Democrats say: He voted to authorize the war in 2002; and he has yet to detail a markedly different strategy than Bush's for ending the conflict.
Yesterday, Vice President Cheney used Kerry's Senate record against him. "Today, while speaking to the National Guard Association, John Kerry said that our troops deserve no less than the best," Cheney said in a campaign stop in Reno, Nev. "But I am stunned by the audacity of his statement -- Senator Kerry voted to send our troops into combat, and then denied them the support they needed once they were at war. We need a president who will back our troops 100 percent, and that's exactly what we've got in George W. Bush."
A White House spokesman yesterday declined to release the July National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, citing its classification.
Government officials, however, said the report identified serious problems in recruiting and training an effective Iraqi army and police force, establishing a competent central government and rebuilding significant Iraqi infrastructure. The report states in its "key judgments" section that the majority of Iraqis support self-governance -- without U.S. involvement.
Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of the Senate intelligence panel, released a statement yesterday saying he had reviewed the estimate, calling it "a fair, well-written piece. Any honest assessment would recognize that the next couple of years will be very challenging for the Iraqi government and for the U.S."
White House spokesmen and other administration officials yesterday said the document did not offer any new insights. "Iraqi leaders and the Iraqi people have proven the pessimists wrong every step of the way," McClellan said. "There are areas where difficulties remain, and there are ongoing security threats . . . but the Iraqi people are determined to build a free and peaceful future."
Administration officials plan to use next week's U.S. visit by Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi as the centerpiece of an effort to showcase progress toward democracy.
The new NIE is the same type of broad intelligence assessment conducted in October 2002 that concluded Saddam Hussein's government possessed weapons of mass destruction, a finding presented by the administration as one of the main justifications for war.
No such weapons have been found, and the 2002 NIE has in the past year been at the center of calls for revamping and improving U.S. intelligence.
More recent intelligence assessments on Iraq after Hussein appear to be more perceptive.
In January 2003, three months before the war began, for example, the CIA predicted that Iraq would likely split along ethnic and religious lines and that creating a representative democracy would be "long-term, difficult and problematic."
Agency officials told the White House that there would be three to four months of goodwill toward U.S. troops before the Iraqi population turned hostile toward what it would see as an occupying force, according to a senior intelligence official who took part in the discussion.
VandeHei reported from Las Vegas. Staff writers Mike Allen, traveling with Bush, and Lisa Rein, traveling with Cheney, contributed to this report.
--------
Kerry dismisses progress in Iraq, talks of 'chaos'
September 17, 2004
By Stephen Dinan
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040917-120801-2061r.htm
LAS VEGAS - Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry told the National Guard Association yesterday that President Bush is in "a fantasy world of spin" as he continues to mislead the nation about the war in Iraq.
Contrary to Mr. Bush's frequent assertion that progress is being made, Mr. Kerry said the situation has deteriorated and accused Mr. Bush of hiding that fact from this audience when the president spoke here on Tuesday.
"He didn't tell you that with each passing day, we're seeing more chaos, more violence, indiscriminate killings," Mr. Kerry said. "He didn't tell you that with each passing week, our enemies are actually getting bolder."
Mr. Kerry, who was a lieutenant in the Navy during the Vietnam War, also criticized the president for not preparing the National Guard for duty in Iraq. "When they're facing the same dangers and coming home in the same wheelchairs, the same stretchers and flag-draped coffins, how can we refuse to give them the same resources and respect we give our regular troops?" he said.
That line met with a smattering of applause. Mr. Kerry received more enthusiastic ovations when he promised to lower the retirement age for National Guard service to 55 and allow guard members to enroll in Tricare, the health-insurance program available to active-duty military members. That latter promise brought a standing ovation.
But during his criticism of the administration's calculations on Iraq - which usually draw roars of approval at rallies with his supporters - yesterday's audience was silent.
One officer from the Missouri Air National Guard said the response was because Guard members took the criticism of the president as an insult of them, too.
"The thing that was frustrating to me sitting here listening to him is every time he would say, 'We didn't do this, we didn't do that,' it was a slap in my face," said the officer, who asked not to be named.
By contrast, that officer said, Mr. Bush "couldn't say six words without everyone standing up and clapping."
Others agreed with that evaluation yesterday.
"The Guard just seemed to have screamed out loud for President Bush. By comparison, what Senator Kerry got was like a polite applause," said Lt. Col. Clay W. Congill, a member of the California Air National Guard.
Still, he gave Mr. Kerry credit for showing up, particularly after the reception that Mr. Bush got: "It probably took a bit of courage for him to come here."
Asked by a local television reporter about the crowd, Mr. Kerry said he thought they "listened very, very attentively."
"I know there were some people in there who didn't agree with me before I went in there, and therefore, I'm even more respectful of that," he said. "But there were a lot of people who do agree with me."
Mr. Kerry acknowledged Mr. Bush's appearance here, telling members that he understood they had "a special, natural affection and a sense of duty" to their commander in chief.
Mr. Kerry seems to be getting a better reception from voters across the nation. The latest Harris Pew Research Center polls show that Mr. Bush has slipped from his post-convention lead back into a virtual tie with Mr. Kerry.
Among likely voters, the Pew poll found Mr. Bush's 15-point post-convention lead has slipped to one percentage point.
Mr. Kerry, who in October 2002 voted to authorize the war in Iraq, now says that knowing what he knows, he doesn't think there was a reason to go to war, though he also stands by his vote.
Republicans have criticized him for what they say are myriad nuances and positions, and the Republican National Committee yesterday suspended its normal Web site to run continuously a video showing a series of clips of Mr. Kerry taking seemingly different stances.
Speaking in Reno, Nev., yesterday, Vice President Dick Cheney said Mr. Kerry has continued to add to the confusion, using as an example the appearance by the senator on the Don Imus radio show on Wednesday.
"He was absolutely incoherent. I went back and read the transcript and thought, 'What'd he say?' " Mr. Cheney said, according to prepared remarks.
Mr. Cheney also criticized Mr. Kerry for saying the administration hasn't equipped troops properly, particularly because Mr. Kerry voted against the $87 billion package that included more funding for operations in Iraq.
"I am stunned by the audacity of his statement," Mr. Cheney said.
Mr. Kerry said the administration is continuing to hide the ongoing problems. He pointed to a New York Times story in yesterday's editions that reported that the administration in July received a new National Intelligence Estimate for Iraq that ranges from the best case of continued economic and political uncertainty to a worst case of civil war.
Mr. Kerry's campaign distributed the transcript of a press conference from Sen. Chuck Hagel, Nebraska Republican and a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who said the situation in Iraq is deteriorating.
"We've got to be honest with our evaluation here, and I think this national intelligence assessment was very honest about it," Mr. Hagel said. "Right now, we're not winning. Things are getting worse."
-------- ENERGY
-------- alternative energy
The Winds of China Could Solve Climate Dilemma
September 17, 2004
BEIJING, China, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/sep2004/2004-09-17-02.asp
During four days of discussions this week in Beijing, Greenpeace, the European Wind Energy Association and the Chinese Renewable Energy Industry Association formed a new partnership, committing themselves to ensuring that wind power plays a key role in China's energy future.
China is the world's most populous country, with a rapidly growing economy. And China is the second largest energy consumer, after the United States. Chinese production and consumption of coal, the country's dominant fuel, is the highest in the world.
Burning this fossil fuel emits greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, forcing increased global warming, which will create problems for China as well as the rest of the world. It is this destructive cycle that the three new partners aim to avert with wind power.
"Soaring oil imports, wild fluctuations in international oil prices, the mounting costs of extreme weather events and heightened concern over energy security mean that China's commitment to renewables at this time is crucial," said Yu Jie of Greenpeace China.
But this is not a problem for China alone, the whole world has a vested interest in helping China meet its development needs without further destabilising the climate," Yu said.
Increased global temperatures threaten to reduce the country's rice production, and more than 60 percent of Chinese glaciers are anticipated to disappear by 2050, threatening the fresh water supply for more than 250 million Chinese.
The partners believe that the only long term sustainable solution to China's energy crisis is through the adoption of renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, micro-hydro, modern biomass and geothermal power, which not only provide clean energy but can create local industries and millions of jobs.
China needs clean power most urgently. According to a report by the World Health Organization, seven of the world's 10 most polluted cities are in China. The country's heavy use of unwashed coal leads to large emissions of sulfur dioxide and particulate matter.
China also is important to any effort to curb global emissions of greenhouse gases, as it is projected to experience the largest absolute growth in carbon dioxide emissions between now and the year 2020.
China is a non-Annex I country under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, meaning that it has not agreed to binding targets for reduction of carbon dioxide emissions under the Kyoto Protocol. This is one reason given by U.S. President George W. Bush in 2001 for rejecting U.S. ratification of the protocol as he decided not to bind the United States to limitations that the developing countries such as China were not bound to.
But now the Chinese government has set a target to meet 12 percent of its power generation capacity from renewables by 2020. A portion of this new capacity will come from wind.
At their Beijing meeting, the three groups pledged to assist China to "meet, if not exceed, the new Renewable Energy targets" the government announced in June.
"The development of China's new renewable energy law, which is expected to be finalized early next year, has generated great interest internationally. China's anticipated entry into the global renewable energy market is expected to have a profound impact on the global industry," said Li Junfeng, secretary general of the Chinese Renewable Energy Industry Association.
"We have spent a lot of time and energy learning from the successes and failures of our partners in Europe and around the world," said Li. "We believe that this law can start a renewable energy revolution in China."
In May, the three groups launched the report "Wind Force 12 - China," an industry scenario which showed that by 2020 China is capable of installing 170 gigawatts of wind power, delivering annual savings of 325 million metric tons of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide and creating hundreds of thousands of jobs.
The report shows how to create an industrial manufacturing capacity for wind turbines and outlines the policy frameworks necessary to unlock these opportunities with a combination of public, private and citizen inputs.
"European experience has shown that with the right policy framework wind energy can play a major role in China's energy future," said Corin Millais, executive director of the European Wind Energy Association.
"We believe there is a real potential for China to become a major player in the global wind power industry," he said, "and anticipate greater cooperation with our Chinese partners."
----
California Fuel Cell Partnership Road Rally Takes Off
September 17, 2004
SACRAMENTO, California, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/sep2004/2004-09-17-09.asp#anchor8
Starting today, thousands of Southern Californians will be able to see and test drive zero emission, hydrogen powered fuel cell vehicles during the California Fuel Cell Partnership's (CaFCP) third annual road rally.
The starter's flag launched the rally at the South Coast Air Management District's new hydrogen fuel station in Diamond Bar on Thursday.
The Cruisin' Southern Cal road rally will cover several hundred miles through three counties through Sunday. Public ride and drives will be held at the Long Beach Convention Center, the Orange County Fairgrounds in Costa Mesa, and in downtown San Diego.
All eight of CaFCP's automakers will provide fuel cell vehicles, while energy members will oversee hydrogen refueling and other members will support the events with educational and technical displays.
In addition to the public ride and drives, whistle-stop events will be held in communities along the Pacific Coast Highway, offering local residents an opportunity to get a close look at the fuel cell vehicles
"Hydrogen powered fuel cell technology offers the potential for zero tailpipe emissions, zero greenhouse gas emissions, and greater energy diversity, including increased use of domestically produced renewable fuels," says Catherine Dunwoody, executive director of CaFCP.
"The California Fuel Cell Partnership is dedicated to placing fuel cell vehicles on the road in very visible demonstrations, including these road rallies, to help develop the kind of public acceptance needed to realize a hydrogen economy and make fuel cell vehicles commercially viable," Dunwoody said.
Fuel cell vehicles run on hydrogen - the most abundant element found in the universe - which, when combined with oxygen from air, generates the electricity needed to drive the vehicle. The only tailpipe emissions are water and heat.
Hydrogen can be obtained from fossil fuels and from renewable sources of energy, a fact that Dunwoody says can provide "fuel diversity for our transportation system and a viable option for a sustainable energy supply in the future."
The California Fuel Cell Partnership is a voluntary, industry-government collaboration to advance a new vehicle and fueling technology that could move the world toward practical and affordable environmental solutions.
CaFCP members are demonstrating fuel cell-powered electric vehicles under real day-to-day driving conditions; testing alternative fuels and demonstrating the viability of an alternative fuel infrastructure technology; facilitating the path to commercialization; and increasing public awareness of fuel cell electric vehicles.
The CaFCP is working to facilitate placement of up to 300 fuel cell passenger cars and buses on the road by the end of 2007.
The California Fuel Cell Partnership started in April 1999. It includes auto manufacturers DaimlerChrysler, Ford, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Nissan, Toyota and Volkswagen; and energy providers Air Products, BP, ChevronTexaco, ExxonMobil, Methanex, Pacific Gas and Electric Company, Praxair, Proton Energy Systems, Shell Hydrogen, Stuart Energy, and Ztek.
Technology companies Ballard Power Systems and UTC Fuel Cells participate together with government agencies the California Air Resources Board, California Energy Commission, South Coast Air Qality Management District, U.S. Energy Department, U.S. Department of Transportation and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Davis; and bus transit agencies AC Transit, Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority, and SunLine Transit Agency. Rally dates are:
- Sept. 17 - Long Beach Convention Center: Public ride-and-drive in conjunction with the League of California Cities annual convention, 12:30 pm - 4:00 pm
- Sept. 18 - Orange County Marketplace, at Orange County Fair Grounds, Costa Mesa: Public ride-and-drive, 8:00 am - 2:00 pm
- Sept. 19 - County Administration Building, 1600 Pacific Ave., San Diego: Public ride-and-drive and live entertainment, 12:00 noon - 4:00 pm
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