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NUCLEAR
A World of Nuclear Dangers
Congressional race heats up: Wright more than ready for a fight
U.S. Is Said to Lift India Nuclear Curbs
IAEA Orders Iran to Cease Activities
Iran Rejects U.N. Call to Freeze Nuclear Enrichment
US spy agencies believe strikes on Iran wouldn't work: report
Atomic Agency Votes to Censure Iran Over Its Nuclear Program
Iran continues freeze on nuke enrichment
Iran rejects UN nuclear call
Iran Denounces Nuclear Demands As Illegal
US spy agencies believe strikes on Iran wouldn't work: report
Analysis: Iran's nuclear bluff
Iran nuclear issue a hard nut to crack
Newsview: U.S. Reports No Weapons in Iraq
Atomic Watchdog Unsure on N. Korea Blast
Embarrassing find
IAEA Inspectors in S. Korea for 2nd Investigation
IAEA Chief Says Cannot Rule Out Korea Nuke Blast
US and Russia host conference on securing nuclear materials
MILITARY
Paper: Blair Was Warned About Chaos in Iraq
Senior Leader Resigns in China, Leaving President in Full Control
Jiang Resigns As China Military Leader
China's Hu inherits awesome military machine
'American Army Place' Faces Uncertain Fate
2 Soldiers Among 21 Killed in Iraq
After Recapturing N. Iraqi City, Rebuilding Starts From Scratch
Baghdad's Strong Man Struggles to Keep His Grip
U.S. Plans Year-End Drive to Take Iraqi Rebel Areas
Israeli Missile Kills Top Militant in Gaza Strip
India's 'PATRIOT Act' Repealed
U.N. Puts Sudan Sanctions Into Play
Authority Is Approved for Sanctions Against Sudan
Strains Felt By Guard Unit on Eve Of War Duty
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
2 to Face Courts-Martial in Iraqi's Alleged Drowning
35 Pakistanis Held in Cuba Return Home
POLITICS
Divergent Views of Iraq Defining Election
White House Gives the Pentagon a Wring
Democrats Reassess Prospects to Win House
Senators Urge Bush to Rethink Iraq Policy
How Would They End the War?
Utah Voices: For ignoring constitutional war powers we reap the whirlwind
Not-so-innocent abroad
ACTIVISTS
Fury as bomb-grade plutonium sets sail for France from US
British aided Mossad kidnap, says Vanunu
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
A World of Nuclear Dangers
CAMPAIGN 2004: THE BIG ISSUES
September 19, 2004
NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/19/opinion/dunukeissues915.html
The cold war generation grew up worrying about the bomb, the Russians and World War III. Today's nuclear nightmares are more varied, but no less scary. The list of nuclear-armed states is lengthening alarmingly, and each new entry increases the chances that some nasty regional war could turn nuclear. Nuclear terrorism has emerged as a terrifying new threat. Russia has huge, poorly guarded stockpiles of nuclear bomb fuel and there is a small but increasing possibility that its decaying early warning system could trigger an accidental launch.
President Bush often says he means to halt the nuclear arms programs of North Korea and Iran, although he has yet to produce any workable plans for doing so. In February, he rightly called for tighter controls over nuclear fuel processing, used by several countries to produce bomb ingredients.
As a senator and a candidate, John Kerry has offered constructive proposals addressing almost every aspect of current nuclear dangers. While Mr. Bush has tended to focus narrowly on rogue states like North Korea and Iran, Mr. Kerry wisely favors a more comprehensive approach that would combine crisis diplomacy on these two priority cases with accelerated efforts to protect Russian stockpiles. The North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs are at the top of the nation's agenda. But it is disingenuous to ignore the fact that 95 percent of the nuclear bombs and most of the nuclear weapons fuel are in the hands of Russia and the United States.
Mr. Kerry would also break with Bush policies that unintentionally encourage nuclear proliferation, like the Strangelovian plans for research on unneeded new nuclear weapons. •
India and Pakistan tested their first nuclear bombs in 1998. North Korea is close, if not already there. Iran is not very far behind. In the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and the Korean peninsula, an escalation of conventional conflict into nuclear war has to be treated as a realistic possibility.
The steady spread of these weapons also increases the risks of backdoor sales of nuclear technology, as the worldwide arms bazaar run by A. Q. Khan of Pakistan so chillingly demonstrated. This creeping proliferation has meant the dispersal of nuclear bomb ingredients like highly enriched uranium and plutonium into countries with poor governance, uncertain stability and corrupt officials. That makes it easier for terrorists to acquire such material and try to fashion usable nuclear bombs.
Mr. Bush once lumped Iraq, Iran and North Korea together as an "axis of evil." But his decision to invade Iraq limited the diplomatic and military tools left available to influence North Korea and Iran - which were undoubtedly taught by the Iraq experience that the best protection against a pre-emptive strike is a nuclear arsenal.
In both cases, precious time has been lost while the administration has followed largely unproductive diplomatic strategies. Mr. Bush now wants to ask the United Nations Security Council to impose sanctions on Iran. But many Council members, including major European allies, are not ready to do so. On North Korea, the administration has insisted on discussions including Russia, China, Japan and South Korea as well as North Korea and the United States. These have made no discernible progress, in part because Washington waited until this summer to put its first serious negotiating proposal on the table. With the talks stalled, North Korea has all the time it needs to reprocess its plutonium into several nuclear bombs.
Mr. Kerry would try to jump-start the North Korea talks with a comprehensive new American proposal. He would, like Mr. Bush, insist that Iran renounce all domestic processing of nuclear fuel while promising that it could count on access to reliable imported supplies of civilian reactor fuel in return. Any distinction between the two candidates on Iran rests on Mr. Kerry's contention that he could better line up European support.
If there is still time to dissuade these two countries from going nuclear, there isn't much. North Korea may already have assembled test devices. Iran may soon have all the technology and raw materials needed to proceed. Still, the international community should explore every avenue to persuade both countries that it is not in their best interest to build nuclear weapons. In exchange for a verifiable dismantling of their nuclear programs, Washington and other governments ought to be willing to offer substantial economic, diplomatic and security concessions. If that fails to produce results, international pressure will have to be substantially ratcheted up. Further months of stalemate while nuclear fuel processing work continues is not an acceptable option. •
There is nothing secret anymore about how to process uranium or plutonium to the purity needed for bomb-making, nor is it all that hard to acquire the raw ingredients. And every nuclear wannabe has now learned how to disguise the early phases of a nuclear weapons effort as part of a civilian nuclear energy program, a trick pioneered decades ago by India and most recently employed by Iran. Unfortunately, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty was explicitly intended to encourage such power programs, making it much harder to fend off the emergence of new nuclear weapons states. Obviously, the treaty needs to be toughened.
Mr. Bush has rightly called on other countries to deny nuclear-related exports to any nation that refuses to forgo such fuel processing plants. He should accelerate the process by calling on the four other main nuclear exporting countries to join Washington in an immediate ban.
It is also vital to extend the reach of the nonproliferation treaty with a proposed new fissile materials agreement. Senator Kerry strongly supports this and President Bush says he supports it too, but his administration recently undermined the treaty talks by announcing, perversely, that Washington would insist that the agreement contain no provisions for verification or inspections. •
Although the United States and Russia have deactivated thousands of nuclear warheads since the end of the cold war, tens of thousands remain activated or sitting in stockpiles where they can be quickly reassembled. The arms reduction agreement signed by President Bush and President Vladimir Putin in 2002 calls for most of these warheads to be deactivated by 2012, but no reductions are required sooner than that and many of the deactivated warheads will still be retained in stockpiles. America's stored and deactivated weapons are well secured, but many of Russia's are not. In addition, Russia's poorly maintained launch command and early warning systems may be dangerously degrading. At some point, they might conceivably become vulnerable to terrorists. Well over a thousand warheads on each side remain on hair-trigger alert.
Washington is helping Russia upgrade its storage security, but at such a slow rate that hundreds of tons of highly enriched uranium and plutonium will be lying around for many years. Every ton of highly enriched uranium can be used to make more than 100 nuclear bombs. A ton of plutonium can go even further.
The answer is to sharply increase funding for the broad range of American programs intended to secure this material and reduce or eliminate other threats from cold war weapons. This is the most cost-effective defense spending in the federal budget. A bipartisan commission in 2001 recommended tripling spending for these programs, but the Bush administration has failed to follow through. Senator Kerry proposes a significant increase aimed at securing all of Russia's loose bomb fuel in four years. •
While Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry seem to agree on many nuclear proliferation issues, the difference lies in their approach to international problems. Voters will have to decide whether Mr. Kerry's emphasis on diplomacy and international cooperation is the best way to keep a lid on these nuclear threats, or whether Mr. Bush's more unilateral approach to foreign affairs is better. There is no graver subject for their consideration this election year.
Campaign 2004: The Big Issues: Editorials in this series remain online at nytimes.com/issues.
-------- china
Congressional race heats up: Wright more than ready for a fight
By Royal M. Hopper III
The Orange (Texas) Leader
http://www.orangeleader.com/articles/2004/09/19/news/news2.txt
As he sat in his truck in the Hardin County courthouse, congressional candidate Jim Wright said he looks forward to a foot-stomping, hard-fought debate with his Republican opponent Kevin Brady.
"There are so many things I could correct if I was congressman," Wright said as he prepared to speak at a political event in the city of Kountze.
Wright said places like Hardin County are a perfect example of why he wants to run for Congress. With oil and lumber as its chief source of income, the county would be under-represented in a congressional district controlled by urban interests of places like Montgomery County near Houston, he said.
"How many counties of this size have a health clinic, a community center to hold community events in and how many can afford it?" he asked.
Wright, 66, is a former union member and Brown & Root Inc. trouble shooter, foreman and millwright instructor. He's also the former owner of a trucking company who believes this year's congressional race is one of the most important in the country's history.
Philosophy
Wright sees the freedoms Americans have fought and died for during two centuries slipping away in an atmosphere of fear brought on by the war on terrorism and Republican-led budget cuts.
Brady and Wright are contending for the District 8 U.S. House of Representatives seat created last year when Texas congressional district lines were redrawn in the state legislature. The new boundaries took Orange County away from veteran Democrat Jim Turner's district and placed it in one with Brady's home base, The Woodlands.
Wright grew up in Kentucky and is an Air Force veteran who moved back to Texas in 1966. Wright's grandmother - like him, a lifelong Democrat - served on the Democratic National Committee. He has three children with his wife of 28 years, Ann, and several stepchildren.
He describes himself as a pro-Constitution candidate who strongly supports the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. He opposes the Patriot Act sponsored by President Bush and supported by Brady.
Wright called the act an infringement of constitutional rights that is not supported by the vast majority of citizens in the country.
The act suspends the need for "just cause" before law enforcement agencies review personal financial records - and allows it to be done without judicial review, he said.
As an act of economic justice, he favors doing away with the Internal Revenue Service and the federal income tax and replacing them with an excise tax on the use of money.
He said a 10 percent tax on the movement of money of more than $10,000 in value from one institution to another would fund the government and create a more equitable form of taxation.
"Transforming the tax system to give everyone a fair share is not socialism as it has been inferred, it's simply fair," Wright said.
Veterans aid
The closing of seven Veterans Administration Hospitals across the country and a reduction of $87 million in the department's budget is also an issue that must be addressed, Wright said.
Veterans of the first Gulf War came back with numerous health problems from exposure to depleted uranium rounds used in the war and other causes, Wright said, adding that those issues are not being addressed.
He said the stream of wounded veterans coming back from Iraq will need help and cutting the VA's budget would not do anything to help matters.
Wright said he would establish an 800-number to be more accessible to people in far corners of the district.
Wright sees himself as an advocate of all the constituents of the 8th District, especially those that have little power of their own. As a former businessman and a worker, he has experienced the consequences of the political influence of the wealthy and powerful first-hand.
It's not something he wants people in his district to experience at all. He is dedicated to serving the public and its interests, not the special interests that seem to run things, he said. He is a man of the people, and the records of his opponent show that he is not, Wright said.
"There is a saying that goes: I have a quarter for the jukebox," he said. "It means that I made my own record and can dance to its tune. Can you dance to the tune of your own music?"
-------- india / pakistan
U.S. Is Said to Lift India Nuclear Curbs
September 19, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/19/international/asia/19india.html?pagewanted=all
NEW DELHI, Sept. 18 (Reuters) - The United States has lifted decades-old export restrictions on equipment for India's commercial space program and nuclear power plants, India said Saturday, in a sign of the increasingly close ties between the two nations.
American firms have not been allowed to sell sophisticated equipment or technology to India as part of a ban in place for decades to prevent their use for military purposes. India was long seen by Washington as a cold war ally of the Soviet Union.
But the Indian Foreign Ministry said Saturday that the Bush administration had eased the export restrictions after India addressed concerns about weapons proliferation under the so-called Next Steps in Strategic Partnership plan set up in January.
A State Department spokesman, Adam Ereli said, the two countries could now take cooperation a step further. "They agreed to expand cooperation in three areas: civilian nuclear activities, civilian space programs and high-technology trade,'' he said. "In addition, we agreed to expand our dialogue on missile defense. I think this shows a growing relationship.''
-------- iran
IAEA Orders Iran to Cease Activities
By Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 19, 2004; Page A34
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32694-2004Sep19.html
VIENNA, Sept. 18 -- After two years of difficult investigations and increased suspicions, the International Atomic Energy Agency demanded Saturday that Iran cease all nuclear activities that could provide a cover for a secret weapons program.
In a resolution that took six days and dozens of meetings to negotiate, the 35-member board sent a strong message to Tehran but fell short of including key demands that the Bush administration was seeking in order to move the issue into the U.N. Security Council in the coming weeks. The final text said the board would decide what follow-up steps to take when it reconvenes on Nov. 25.
U.S. negotiators said they would insist then that the board move the issue into the council, which has the authority to impose sanctions or an oil embargo if it chooses. European negotiations refused to predetermine the outcome of November's meeting, hoping IAEA inspectors will complete their investigation by then and Iran will have met the board's terms.
"This resolution sends an unmistakable signal to Iran that continuing its nuclear weapons program will bring it inevitably before the Security Council," said Ambassador Jackie W. Sanders, who led the U.S. delegation.
The resolution, which went through a series of last-minute changes after a week of contentious debate, calls on Iran to immediately end its uranium enrichment program. But it also notes the rights of states to carry out such activities in the pursuit of peaceful nuclear energy.
----
Iran Rejects U.N. Call to Freeze Nuclear Enrichment
September 19, 2004
New York Times
By NAZILA FATHI
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/19/international/middleeast/19CND-TEHR.html?hp
TEHRAN, Sept. 19 - Iran rejected today a call by the United Nations nuclear monitoring agency to freeze all its uranium enrichment programs and warned that it would drop out of the Nonproliferation Treaty if its case is sent to the Security Council.
Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, Hassan Rowhani, said in a news conference that Iran would not accept any outside limitation on its uranium enrichment programs and that "no international body can force Iran to do so."
The response came a day after the International Atomic Energy Agency adopted a resolution calling on Iran to suspend all its enrichment-related activities before the body's next meeting in November. The agency has expressed alarm at Iran's plans to enrich nearly 40 tons of uranium. Experts say that would be enough to provide Iran with the material for several nuclear bombs. The Iranian government, meanwhile, insists that its nuclear program is for electricity production only.
The resolution passed on Saturday said the agency would decide whether to take "further steps" to penalize Iran. The United States has been pushing for Security Council sanctions against the country.
Mr. Rowhani, however, strenuously objected to the order to end enrichment.
"They cannot force Iran to suspend enrichment through the resolution," Mr. Rowhani said. "The Europeans also know that if there is a way, that way is through negotiations."
He added a threat, saying, "I believe that Iran will stop implementing the additional protocol if its case is sent to the Security Council, and Parliament will probably demand from the government to drop out of the Nonproliferation Treaty," he went on as saying.
Iran's Parliament said today that as a result of the resolution, it would not ratify the additional protocol to the Nonproliferation Treaty, which would allow more intrusive inspections of the country's nuclear facilities.
----
US spy agencies believe strikes on Iran wouldn't work: report
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Sep 19, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040919183609.n8hh2ef4.html
US spy agencies have played out "war games" to consider possible pre-emptive strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, and concluded that strikes would not resolve Washington's standoff with Tehran, Newsweek magazine reported Sunday.
"The war games were unsuccessful at preventing the conflict from escalating," an unnamed Air Force source told the magazine in its latest issue.
The Central Intelligence and the Defense Intelligence Agency played out the possible results US strikes, the magazine reported.
Hawks within President George W. Bush's administration haev advocated for regime change in Tehran -- through covert operations or force if needed, Newsweek said.
But with US-led forces facing almost daily attacks in Iraq, no one in Bush's cabinet has taken up the cause, the report said.
The United States believes Iran is using a civlian nuclear program to mask a weapons development effort.
Iran insists its nuclear programme is strictly aimed at generating electricity, despite suspicions it is seeking to develop the capability to build nuclear weapons.
Uranium is enriched through centrifuges to make what can be fuel for civilian nuclear reactors but also the explosive material for atomic bombs.
----
Atomic Agency Votes to Censure Iran Over Its Nuclear Program
September 19, 2004
New York Times
By CRAIG S. SMITH
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/19/international/middleeast/19nuke.html
PARIS, Sept. 18 - The International Atomic Energy Agency's 35-nation board of governors passed a resolution on Saturday criticizing Iran for a lack of candor over its nuclear program and calling for the country to suspend all uranium enrichment activities that could contribute to producing fuel for a nuclear bomb.
The resolution, which was delayed by haggling over wording about the suspension, said the agency "considers it necessary" that Iran halt all of its uranium enrichment programs and meet all of the agency's demands before its Nov. 25 meeting.
It said the board would then "decide whether or not further steps are appropriate." The United States wants Iran's past breaches of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty referred to the United Nations Security Council, which could decide to impose sanctions against the country.
Uranium enrichment, in which uranium is converted into a gas and spun in centrifuges to concentrate more fissile isotopes, is used to produce fuel for nuclear reactors, but it can also produce uranium suitable for nuclear weapons.
Signatories to the treaty are allowed to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes, as long as they keep the I.A.E.A. informed, but the activity can bring countries to within months of being able to produce a bomb.
Iran last year agreed to suspend uranium enrichment after it was found to have concealed an extensive enrichment program, a breach of its treaty obligations. But it almost immediately began quibbling over what activities that included.
In July, Iran resumed the manufacture of centrifuge parts and the assembly of centrifuge units, though it has upheld its suspension on using those centrifuges to enrich uranium.
The resolution passed on Saturday calls for Iran to stop all enrichment-related activities, including the manufacture and assembly of centrifuge parts, centrifuge testing and the conversion of uranium into gas.
The nuclear agency's chief, Mohamed ElBaradei, speaking after the resolution passed, said Iran needed to suspend its enrichment activities "in order to restore confidence" in its peaceful intentions, Agence France-Presse reported.
While Iran insists that its nuclear program is designed for power generation and other peaceful purposes, the country's sluggish response to the nuclear agency's requests for information and the program's own inconsistencies have convinced the United States and some other countries that Iran is hiding efforts to build a nuclear bomb.
Besides working on a light-water nuclear reactor near the Iranian port of Bushehr, for example, Iran had secretly begun work on a heavy-water reactor. It is easier to extract bomb-grade plutonium from the spent fuel of heavy-water reactors.
The nuclear agency has asked Iran to explain why it is building the heavy-water reactor and, in June, called for it to halt work on the program. Iran has not complied.
Washington also suspects that a partially buried bunker at a munitions plant in Parchin, 20 miles southwest of Tehran, could be used to test the kind of high-intensity explosives that surround a core of highly enriched uranium or plutonium in a nuclear implosion bomb.
Hossein Mousavian, the head of the foreign policy committee of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, said Friday that Iran would grant the nuclear agency access to the site. "We have never rejected an I.A.E.A. inspection," he said.
The country has continued to convert small amounts of uranium into the gas used in enrichment centrifuges, despite the nuclear agency's calls for it to stop. Earlier this month, Iran said it planned to convert more than 40 tons of uranium into gas soon. Experts say that will produce enough uranium hexafluoride gas to yield enriched uranium for several bombs.
Iran also insists that its moratorium on enriching uranium is temporary. "Suspension is not cessation," Mr. Mousavian said Friday.
Objections from many so-called nonaligned countries delayed the final passage of the resolution, which was drafted by Britain, France and Germany and later amended by the United States. Those countries wanted it made explicit that enrichment activities are allowed to all signatories of the nonproliferation treaty, and that any suspension by Iran would be made voluntarily to build international confidence.
The United States spent the morning meeting with several reticent board members that have enrichment programs of their own, searching for wording that would allow the draft resolution to pass without having to submit it to a vote. While resolutions can be passed by vote, the agency prefers working by consensus to avoid politicizing its actions.
----
Iran continues freeze on nuke enrichment
September 19, 2004
(UPI)
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20040919-101900-8652r.htm
Tehran, Iran, Sep. 19 -- Iran said Sunday it has decided to continue its suspension of its uranium enrichment program, but only on a "voluntary basis."
The head of the Iran's Supreme National Security Council, Hassan Rohani, said if Iran's nuclear program issue was referred to the U.N. Security Council -- or if sanctions were imposed on his country -- "our position may change and we could take different measures."
Speaking during a news conference he said Saturday's resolution byf the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which called on Tehran to suspend its uranium enrichment, was not "binding, and the Islamic Republic is not committed to any suspension. It is voluntary."
Rohani added Iran rejects any binding resolution, insisting, "no institution can forbid us from our rights."
However, he left the door open for solutions on Iran's nuclear program, saying, "they might ask Iran for suspension within the framework of dialogue, nothing else."
----
Iran rejects UN nuclear call
Rowhani: The IAEA has no right to make such a suspension
Sunday 19 September 2004
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/96121492-20CD-4E1A-8C5F-FCE50A45BC64.htm
Iran has rejected a resolution from the UN nuclear watchdog demanding it should freeze uranium enrichment, calling the demands "illegal".
Tehran threatened to end spot checks of atomic facilities on Sunday if its case was sent to the UN Security Council.
The UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on Saturday unanimously adopted a resolution calling on Iran to suspend all uranium enrichment related activities.
"We are committed to the suspension of actual enrichment but we have no decision to expand the suspension," chief nuclear negotiator Hassan Rowhani said.
"This demand is illegal and does not put any obligation on Iran. The IAEA board of governors has no right to make such a suspension obligatory for any country," he added.
No justification
He said Iran would stop allowing UN inspectors to make short-notice visits to its atomic facilities if the Islamic Republic's dossier was sent to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions.
"There is no justification to refer Iran's nuclear dossier to the Security Council," Rowhani said.
"If one day they refer Iran's nuclear dossier to the UN Security Council, that day ... Iran will stop implementing the additional protocol and will limit its cooperation with the IAEA."
The additional protocol to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty allows snap nuclear checks. Iran is implementing its terms although parliament has not ratified it.
US officials are insisting the 35-member board must refer Iran to the UN Security Council when it meets again on 25 November if Tehran does not comply.
Iran rejects US accusations it wants nuclear weapons, saying its activities are only in pursuit of energy.
----
Iran Denounces Nuclear Demands As Illegal
By ALI AKBAR DAREINI
Associated Press Writer
Sep 19, 2004
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAN_NUCLEAR?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran on Sunday denounced as "illegal" demands from the U.N. atomic watchdog agency that it freeze all work on uranium enrichment - technology that can be used for nuclear weapons. Hasan Rowhani, Iran's top nuclear negotiator, also said his country would limit its cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency if the watchdog refers Iran to the U.N Security Council for possible sanctions.
Rowhani spoke a day after the agency's governing board demanded Iran freeze all work on uranium enrichment and said it would judge Tehran's compliance in two months.
"This demand is not legal and does not put any obligation on Iran. The IAEA board of governors has no right to make such a suspension obligatory for any country," he said at a news conference.
The Iranian official said his country would nonetheless continue with its voluntary suspension of what he described as "actual enrichment" - the injection of uranium gas into centrifuges.
But he indicated that related activities, such as production, assembly and testing of centrifuges, were likely to continue.
"We are committed to the suspension of actual enrichment but we have no decision to expand the suspension," he said.
Iran is not prohibited from enrichment under its obligations to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. But it has for months faced international pressure to suspend such activities as a good-faith gesture.
The United States insists the 35-member board must refer Iran to the Security Council when it meets again on Nov. 25 if Tehran doesn't comply. Iran rejects U.S. accusations it wants nuclear weapons, saying its activities are only in pursuit of energy.
"There is no justification to refer Iran's nuclear dossier to the Security Council," Rowhani said. "If one day they refer Iran's nuclear dossier to the U.N. Security Council, that day ... Iran will stop implementing the additional protocol and will limit its cooperation with the IAEA ...."
Iran has agreed to unfettered inspections of its nuclear facilities under an addition to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
The IAEA board unanimously approved a toughly worded resolution Saturday saying it "considers it necessary" that Iran suspend all uranium enrichment and related programs. It expressed alarm at Iranian plans to convert more than 40 tons of raw uranium into uranium hexafluoride - the gas that when spun in centrifuges turns into enriched uranium.
It also said the board "strongly urges" Iran to meet all demands by the agency in its investigation of the country's nearly two decades of clandestine nuclear activity, including unrestricted access to sites, information and personnel that can shed light on still-unanswered questions on whether Tehran was interested in the atom for nuclear weapons.
It called on the IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei to provide a review of the findings of the investigation of Iran's nuclear activities.
Suggesting that Iran could have to answer to the Security Council if it defies the demands, the resolution said the next board meeting in November "will decide whether or not further steps are appropriate" in ensuring Iran complies.
The last board resolution, in June, had been less insistent on the issue of suspension. Still, Saturday's text appeared to fall far short of what the Americans had wanted when the meeting opened Monday.
Washington had pushed to drop mention of countries' rights to peaceful nuclear technology and fought for an Oct. 31 deadline, with the understanding that if Iran failed to comply, the board would automatically begin deliberations on Security Council referral.
The phrasing accepted instead left it up to the board to debate what action - if any - to take when it reconvenes Nov. 25 if Iran is found to have ignored the demand to freeze enrichment or other conditions.
Approval of the resolution followed days of backdoor negotiations and resistance by nonaligned countries that saw their own right to enrichment for peaceful use threatened.
----
US spy agencies believe strikes on Iran wouldn't work: report
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Sep 19, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040919183609.4c1exyea.html
US spy agencies have played out "war games" to consider possible pre-emptive strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, and concluded that strikes would not resolve Washington's standoff with Tehran, Newsweek magazine reported Sunday.
"The war games were unsuccessful at preventing the conflict from escalating," an unnamed Air Force source told the magazine in its latest issue.
The Central Intelligence and the Defense Intelligence Agency played out the possible results US strikes, the magazine reported.
Hawks within President George W. Bush's administration haev advocated for regime change in Tehran -- through covert operations or force if needed, Newsweek said.
But with US-led forces facing almost daily attacks in Iraq, no one in Bush's cabinet has taken up the cause, the report said.
The United States believes Iran is using a civlian nuclear program to mask a weapons development effort.
Iran insists its nuclear programme is strictly aimed at generating electricity, despite suspicions it is seeking to develop the capability to build nuclear weapons.
Uranium is enriched through centrifuges to make what can be fuel for civilian nuclear reactors but also the explosive material for atomic bombs.
----
Analysis: Iran's nuclear bluff
Saturday, 18 September, 2004
By Frances Harrison
BBC correspondent in Tehran
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3669530.stm
Iran's angry reaction to calls for a sweeping halt to all its enrichment activities may be born partially of a sense of injustice.
Iran argues it has abided by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and allowed spot inspections sometimes at two hours' notice in order to show the intention behind its nuclear programme is peaceful.
Iranian officials repeatedly stress their country has a legal right to nuclear power - and in particular to securing their own source of fuel for power stations rather than being dependent on outsiders.
The international community is mistrustful though - fearing Iran plans to convert fuel into highly enriched uranium for weapons.
Under pressure
By taking a tough stance against the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) resolution, Iran hopes to show the world it will not give in to what it calls international bullying by making concessions outside the framework of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
The government is also under pressure from hardliners who dominate the parliament.
More than 200 deputies urged the government to defy the international community and go ahead and enrich uranium. The door was however left ajar for compromise when Iran said any further suspension of enrichment activities was a matter for negotiations
There have been calls in hard-line newspapers for Iran to pull out of the NPT altogether - and certainly it is possible if Iran is referred to the UN Security Council for sanctions.
For the meantime Iran has said it will continue and even extend its co-operation with IAEA inspectors in the hope that it can resolve all outstanding issues by the next meeting in November.
Spot inspections will continue under an agreement known as the Additional Protocol signed last year though parliamentarians have issued a statement saying they will not ratify it.
Disturbing progress
The door was, however, left ajar for compromise when Iran said any further suspension of enrichment activities was a matter for negotiations and could not be achieved by passing resolutions.
What is disturbing for the international community is quite how advanced Iran's nuclear programme already is.
Iran's top nuclear negotiator, Hassan Rohani, said Iran was already producing uranium hexafluoride gas out of yellow cake in Isfahan and had reached the last stage of uranium enrichment at a site in Natanz.
The latest IAEA resolution called on Iran to reconsider its decision to start building a heavy-water research reactor in Arak - but Mr Rohani told journalists it was almost finished.
He said Iran already had enrichment capability and could complete the fuel cycle any day it wanted.
IAEA Iran resolution: Full text
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3669530.stm
----
Iran nuclear issue a hard nut to crack
2004-09-19
(Xinhuanet)
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2004-09/19/content_1995103.htm
VIENNA, Sept. 18 -- The UN nuclear watchdog approved a resolution Saturday, saying it will take further measures on Iran's nuclear program at its next board meeting in November based on how Iran has complied with this resolution.
But analysts said as conditions for resolving Iran's nuclear issue can not mature in such a short time, the next board meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is unlikely to reach a consensus on the issue.
Although the IAEA board of governors have passed several resolutions over the issue since June 2003, debates among its members have been more intense. At Saturday's meeting, the purposeof Iran's nuclear program became the focus of a diplomatic confrontation between the United States and Iran.
Before the meeting, the Untied States tried to push the European Union countries to submit Iran's nuclear issue to the UN Security Council, accusing Iran of secretly developing nuclear weapons and violating the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Teaty (NPT).
But Iran refused to yield to the US pressure by insisting on its right to peaceful use of nuclear energy and its active cooperation with the IAEA. Iran's stand was backed by the non-aligned movement states in the board of governors.
Out of their own considerations, Germany, France and Britain held talks with the United States, pressing the latter to ultimately agree not to include the Oct. 31 deadline for compliance into the document.
With regard to the resolution passed at the meeting, some non-aligned countries said it lacks balance because it fails to distinguish Iran's obligations to international treaties from its self-imposed suspension of uranium enrichment.
The position of these countries laid the foundation for them tooppose bringing Iran's nuclear issue to the UN Security Council atthe next board meeting.
However, the United States said the resolution sends an unmistakable signal to Iran that the next board meeting will decide whether the issue will be submitted to the Security Council.
The Chinese representative insisted that Iran's nuclear issue be resolved through dialogue within the framework of the IAEA.
The IAEA has been investigating Iran's nuclear program for two years, but it has not found any evidence that Iran has been developing nuclear weapons. According to the resolution, the IAEA only has two months to complete the evaluation of Iran's nuclear program. Without positive evidence, the IAEA will have no justification to report Iran to the Security Council.
IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei said in his report that the IAEA had made some progress in its probe into Iran's nuclear program. If the issue is brought to the Security Council, the efforts already made by the international community to peacefully solve itwill end in vain.
In fact, most board members, except the United States and a fewother countries, support Iran to continue to fully cooperate with the IAEA, fulfill its obligations and clarify the pending issues.
-------- iraq / inspections
Newsview: U.S. Reports No Weapons in Iraq
September 19, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-No-WMD.html
In Washington, in the tense months before war in Iraq, Charles Duelfer was confident. ``Of course he is developing his weapons of mass destruction,'' the American arms expert wrote of Saddam Hussein.
In Baghdad, however, Hans Blix was much less convinced. The U.N. weapons inspector, on the eve of the conflict, remarked sadly on the likelihood that armies would be ``waging the war at a tremendous cost, and in the end find there was very little.''
In the end, as a hurricane distracted Americans, as terrorist car bombings and U.S. air strikes bloodied Iraq, the findings of a Duelfer-led investigation were quietly leaked in Washington. And after 16 months of trying, what his teams have found is less than little.
In fact, the only unconventional weapon turned up in Iraq wasn't turned up by the Americans at all, but by the other side, Iraq's shadowy resistance. In May, in an incident causing no serious injuries, insurgent fighters in Baghdad rigged an old artillery shell as a roadside bomb, apparently unaware it was loaded with sarin nerve agent.
Otherwise, two or three stray shells have been discovered with traces of degraded agent -- far short of the 100-500 tons of usable chemical weapons that Colin Powell warned of on Feb. 5, 2003, as he sought a U.N. blessing for the U.S.-British invasion.
``Leaving Saddam Hussein in possession of weapons of mass destruction for a few more months or years is not an option,'' the U.S. secretary of state declared that day to the U.N. Security Council.
President Bush's rationale for war -- that Iraq's alleged doomsday arms posed an imminent threat -- faded steadily in the months after the March 2003 invasion, as official U.S. rhetoric switched from ``stockpiles'' of weapons to ``programs'' to make them.
By Thursday, as Duelfer's upcoming report was broadly outlined to reporters in Washington, the focus had switched again, to Iraqi ``intent'' before the invasion -- to what were described as hopes among Iraqi leaders during the Saddam regime of someday reviving Iraqi weapons-making.
Duelfer's Iraq Survey Group, some 1,200 military and intelligence specialists and support staff, had focused much of its effort on Iraq's ``dual-use'' chemical and biological industries -- factories and laboratories whose equipment and products might be converted quickly to making weapons.
In March, in an interim report to U.S. senators, Duelfer gave an example: An agricultural center south of Baghdad that was researching bacteria potentially useful in developing anthrax weapons. But he offered no evidence of plans to use the material for anything but its standard commercial purpose, as a pesticide.
As for chemical weapons, every industrial nation, rich or developing, has plants producing chlorine, phenol and other compounds with myriad commercial uses that also could help make sulfur mustard, sarin or other poison gases.
An international watchdog agency, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, counts 4,000-5,000 such dual-use plants in scores of countries. Again, no evidence has emerged that the Iraqis planned to make weapons in theirs.
Even if they did, it would not have been easy.
Since 2002, official U.S. statements have consistently obscured the fact that the Iraqis would have remained under close, on-scene monitoring for years to come, if Blix's U.N. inspection regime had not been short-circuited by the American invasion.
Once U.N. inspectors certified that Baghdad's weapons work had ceased, U.N. economic sanctions against Iraq would have been lifted. But then the Security Council would have imposed an open-ended verification regime, whose free-ranging inspectors would have kept watch on Iraq's military-industrial complex, aided by air and water sampling technology, satellite and aerial surveillance, and monitoring of imports.
But war did intervene, and now it is Duelfer's work that looks open-ended.
The U.S. group's final report originally had been expected last March. On Thursday, reporters were told that even this new 1,500-word document may not be final, and there is no guarantee it will be released in much detail before the Nov. 2 presidential election.
In 700 inspections across Iraq, beginning in November 2002, Blix's U.N. experts also had turned up nothing. He hoped their work might stave off a costly war. In the end, in official American eyes, it counted for little.
``There was a very consistent creation of a virtual reality,'' he now says of the U.S. attitude. ``And eventually it collided with our old-fashioned, ordinary reality.''
EDITOR'S NOTE -- Charles J. Hanley has covered the hunt for weapons and the Iraq crisis since 2002.
-------- korea
Atomic Watchdog Unsure on N. Korea Blast
(AP)
Sep 19, 2004
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/K/KOREAS_EXPLOSION?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
WASHINGTON -- The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said Sunday he does not believe North Korea set off a nuclear blast earlier this month, but is not "100 percent sure."
He said reports from other agencies with devices that monitor explosions suggest "that it doesn't look like a nuclear explosion," IAEA Director Mohammed ElBaradei said on CNN's "Late Edition."
"I am leaving the door open," he said. "I think I would like to go there. ... If North Korea would like to exclude that possibility completely, they would be well advised to allow us and other experts to go and inspect that. As long as we are not there, I cannot exclude that possibility 100 percent."
His remarks came three days after diplomats from seven countries were flown by North Korea to a remote site near the border with China on Thursday to verify claims that the Sept. 9 explosion was part of work on a hydroelectric dam there - 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 Friday by telephone phone from North Korea's capital, Pyongyang. "This is a site where thousands of people are working on dam building."
Video footage of the area showed dozens of workers swarming around a dusty construction site resembling a large dam project.
South Korea, meanwhile, has said a huge 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.
"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.
-----
Embarrassing find
By Eric Margolis -- Contributing Foreign Editor
Toronto Sun,
September 19, 2004
http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Columnists/Toronto/Eric_Margolis/2004/09/19/634925.html
Here comes another huge nuclear embarrassment for Washington.
UN nuclear inspectors just caught close U.S. ally South Korea enriching small amounts of plutonium and uranium to weapons grade.
This revelation comes when the Bush administration's neocon hawks are clamouring for war against Iran over its unproven nuclear weapons program. These are the same hawks who raised a hue and cry over Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction.
South Korea's six-year-old program was far ahead of Iran's; various deceptions were used to conceal it from UN inspectors. North Korea, to no surprise, has been crowing over this embarrassing revelation, claiming its nuclear program has been justified.
This is the second time South Korea has been found secretly working on nuclear weapons. In the early 1970s, under the rule of strongman Park Chung Hee, the CIA discovered a covert South Korean weapons program. Washington forced Gen. Park to shut it down.
Covert program
This column has reported for a decade that South Korea had continued a covert nuclear program. Japan, according to my Asian intelligence sources, also developed a covert program capable of producing nuclear weapons in under three months. North Korea has 2-9 nuclear warheads and missiles to deliver them over all Japan and as far as Hawaii and the U.S. I also believe Taiwan likely has an advanced, secret nuclear weapons program.
Heightening tensions, there was a mammoth explosion in the far north of North Korea that reportedly produced a giant mushroom cloud with a 4-km diameter. The explosion coincided with the 56th anniversary of the founding of Stalinist North Korea and recent reports of heightened activities around that nation's nuclear installations. Could it have been a gigantic "happy birthday" bang for Beloved Leader, Kim Jong-il? North Korea claimed the explosion was part of dam construction. There are persistent rumours North Korea soon plans a nuclear test.
Nerves rattled
The U.S. and South Korea were quick to deny the explosion was a nuclear test, suggesting an accident in a missile base or munitions depot. But nerves in North Asia were clearly rattled, most of all in Japan, whose long-discussed anti-missile system is still only in the planning stage.
The mysterious mushroom cloud comes soon after worrying intelligence reports North Korea is deploying two new ballistic missiles: A road-mobile missile with a 2,500-4,000-km range, and a ship or submarine-mounted version with a 2,500-km range. Both are based on the Soviet R-27 (SS-N-6) submarine launched missile that carries a 200-kiloton nuclear warhead.
North Korea is reportedly working on ships and a submarine design to bring the nuclear-armed R-27 missile within range of the continental U.S. and all U.S. bases in Asia. North Korea's 1-3 Taepo-dong ICBMs can already reach North America, according to the CIA.
Reports that South Korea enriched uranium four times higher than Iran and violated the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty were dismissed by Washington, which accepted Seoul's response that the extractions were only harmless laboratory tests.
George Bush's born-again cold warriors apparently have two standards for covert nuclear states. If they're U.S. allies, like Israel, India, Japan, Pakistan or South Korea, exposure of nuclear hanky-panky incurs only a few tut-tuts.
If the culprit is in Washington's black book, like Iraq or Iran, any accusations of nuclear delinquency are enough, as we have seen, to bring invasion or threats of war.
This would also apply to North Korea, except the tough northerners already have nuclear weapons that could be fired at South Korea, Japan, Okinawa, Guam and Hawaii, where some 100,000 U.S. military personnel are based.
Exposure of Seoul's nuclear ambitions undermines Washington's efforts to mobilize its Asian allies, China and Russia, to compel North Korea to end its nuclear development -- and reinforces the Beloved Leader's determination to keep making nukes.
This raises a fundamental question. Why shouldn't South Korea have the right to nuclear weapons? Its neighbours -- North Korea, China, and Russia -- are nuclear powers. After all, nuclear weapons, as North Korea has shown, are the best guarantee against attack by superpowers.
If Washington winks at Israel's large nuclear arsenal, what right does it have to deny them to South Korea, Japan, or Taiwan?
----
IAEA Inspectors in S. Korea for 2nd Investigation
September 19, 2004
REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-korea-nuclear.html
SEOUL (Reuters) - Inspectors from the U.N. nuclear watchdog arrived in Seoul on Sunday to conduct a second inspection of South Korea's nuclear experiments, a day after the South said it had no plans to develop or possess nuclear weapons.
The five-member delegation is to scrutinize the main nuclear laboratory in the central city of Taejon on Monday and to take a second look at 294 pounds of natural uranium metal, Yonhap news agency and officials have said.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) first tested the material this month.
The issue prompted North Korea on Saturday to say it would never dismantle its nuclear arsenal and would not resume talks on its atomic programs unless the United States dropped its ``hostile'' policy, the North's official KCNA news agency said.
In a rare commentary that carries considerable weight, KCNA said disclosures about unsanctioned nuclear experiments in South Korea in 2000 and 1982 showed Washington applied double standards, criticizing the North but understanding the South.
South Korea recently said scientists had enriched a small amount of uranium in 2000 and separated plutonium in 1982 without government knowledge or approval. Diplomats have said some of the uranium was close to the purity needed for an atom bomb.
The IAEA is investigating whether all parts of South Korea's nuclear program have been declared to the agency and is due to present a report on its findings when the IAEA board of governors meets again in November.
Upon arrival at the airport, the inspectors declined to comment, referring all questions to their Vienna headquarters.
During an eight-day visit, they are expected to interview scientists who have been involved in the nuclear experiments, Yonhap said.
The government held a National Security Council meeting on Saturday after the governing member countries of the IAEA noted ``serious concern'' expressed by the U.N. agency's head and deferred until November judgment on South Korea's previously undisclosed nuclear tests.
Seoul says the enrichment was conducted by ambitious scientists unaware of the political implications of their action. But the revelations may complicate tortuous attempts to persuade communist North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons program.
On Saturday, Seoul said it had no plans to develop or possess nuclear weapons, but would pursue scientific atomic research transparently in cooperation with the N.N. nuclear watchdog.
South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon told Reuters on Thursday his country was confident it would be vindicated by the IAEA of any suspicion of clandestine nuclear activities.
But on the same day, North Korea said South Korea's atomic experiments had to be fully explained before the North would join a new round of six-party talks on its nuclear programs.
----
IAEA Chief Says Cannot Rule Out Korea Nuke Blast
Sun Sep 19, 2004
(Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=6273529 WASHINGTON - The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said on Sunday that an explosion detected early this month over North Korea was probably not a nuclear blast but it could not be ruled out.
"I think it's unlikely, but we are not there and we cannot validate this conclusion for sure," said IAEA director general Mohamed ElBaradei in an interview with CNN, when asked whether he thought the explosion was caused by a nuclear weapons test.
U.S. and South Korean officials have also said the explosion was unlikely to have been a nuclear weapons test despite the appearance of a "peculiar cloud" over the area.
North Korea is believed to be developing nuclear weapons and a nuclear test would radically alter the stakes in North Korea's standoff with Washington over Pyongyang's atomic ambitions.
Pressed on whether he really believed North Korea might have conducted a nuclear test, ElBaradei said: "I am leaving the door open. I would like to go there (to North Korea). Our experts would go there. If North Korea would like to exclude that possibility completely they would be well advised to allow us and other experts to go and inspect that.
"As long as we are not there, I cannot exclude that possibility 100 percent," he added.
ElBaradei said North Korea had the plutonium needed to produce nuclear weapons and pointed out they had not allowed any inspections for the past two years.
"I do not exclude at all that they have assembled a nuclear weapon or more than one nuclear weapon. That would not surprise me," he said.
"Whether they need to go for a test or a computer simulation, the fact remains that they are a nuclear capable country," he added.
On Saturday, North Korea's official KCNA news agency said the country would never dismantle its nuclear arsenal and would not resume talks on its atomic programs unless the United States dropped its "hostile" policy.
The United States, South Korea, China, Japan and Russia have been seeking at so far fruitless six-party talks to persuade North Korea to give up its atomic ambitions completely in exchange for security guarantees and energy aid.
-------- terrorism
US and Russia host conference on securing nuclear materials from terrorists
VIENNA (AFP)
Sep 19, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040919150127.dr8v882t.html
US Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham and Russian atomic chief Alexander Rumyantsev wrapped up in Vienna on Sunday a two-day conference on a global initiative to keep highly radioactive materials out of the reach of terrorists.
Rumyantsev, head of Russia's Federal Atomic Energy Agency, told reporters the conference of 136 countries had sought "to organize international support for national problems of detection, security, safety and disposition of nuclear and other radioactive materials which represent a potential threat to the international community."
In May, Abraham said the United States was giving 450 million dollarsmillion euros) to the initiative, which tries to prevent nuclear materials stored around the world from falling into the hands of terrorists who could use them to make a "dirty" bomb or even a full-fledged atomic device.
The US plan includes working with Russia to repatriate all Russian-origin fresh HEU (highly enriched uranium) nuclear fuel by the end of 2005.
Abraham said Sunday that the United States was not asking other nations to do things it would not do itself as it was also repatriating nuclear fuel and recycling reactors when possible to use low enriched uranium instead of highly enriched uranium (HEU).
"We recognize there is a world in which terrorists are attempting to gain access to either weapons or materials and we intend to stop them. This initiative will make a major contribution to the effort to stop terrorists from acquiring such materials or weapons," Abraham said.
Rumyantsev said that "out of 17 countries that possess highly enriched uranium at research reactors, 13" had agreed to use enriched uranium "at no more than 20 percent," well below bomb-grade levels.
He said the four which had not agreed to this had research reactors which need to use highly enriched uranium of up to 95 percent due to their construction and the experiments they are doing.
The US-Russian initiative is being carried out in coordination with the UN nuclear watchdog, the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
The IAEA earlier this year oversaw the removal of HEU from a reactor in Libya and its shipment to Russia, which is to return it as low enriched uranium, which cannot be used in a bomb.
The IAEA begins Monday a week-long general conference in Vienna at which it will review its programs and overall aims.
It comes after an IAEA board of governors meeting last week which set a deadline on Iran, which the United States suspects of secretly developing nuclear weapons, to suspend all uranium enrichment activities.
-------- MILITARY
-------- britain
Paper: Blair Was Warned About Chaos in Iraq
By Kate Holton
Reuters
Sunday, September 19, 2004; Page A32
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32045-2004Sep18.html
LONDON, Sept 18 -- Britain's foreign secretary and other senior officials warned Prime Minister Tony Blair a year before the invasion of Iraq that chaos could follow the toppling of President Saddam Hussein, a newspaper reported on Saturday.
The Daily Telegraph said that Foreign Secretary Jack Straw sent a letter marked "secret and personal" to Blair in March 2002 warning that there were no preparations for what might happen after an invasion.
Foreign Secretary Straw's letter cited poor planning.
The Foreign Office declined to comment directly on the report but said in a statement that Iraq was moving toward a democratic future for the first time.
Disclosure of the letter, at a time of escalating violence in Iraq, could prove to be damaging to Blair politically, with elections in Britain likely next year. It also illustrates the depth of concern in Blair's government over joining the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.
"No one has satisfactorily answered how there can be any certainty that the replacement regime will be any better," Straw wrote, according to the newspaper.
Blair defended his position at a news conference on Saturday.
"The idea that we did not have a plan for afterwards is simply not correct," he said.
"We did, and indeed we have unfolded that plan, but there are people in Iraq, outsiders as well as former regime elements, who are determined to stop us. That's why it is all the more important that we carry on until we win it, and we will."
The opposition Conservative Party said the document revealed a lack of a comprehensive reconstruction plan for Iraq. The Conservatives backed Blair on the war but later said their support had been based on bogus intelligence information.
"The assurances given to us by both the prime minister and Jack Straw that such a plan was in hand were clearly misleading," Michael Ancram, the Conservative Party foreign affairs spokesman, said on Saturday.
The Telegraph also reported that senior ministerial advisers warned in a "Secret UK Eyes Only" paper that success would only be achieved if the United States and others committed to "nation building for many years."
"The greater investment of Western forces, the greater our control over Iraq's future, but the greater the cost and the longer we would need to stay," the paper reportedly stated.
Blair built his case for war on the basis that Iraq possessed banned weapons of mass destruction (WMD), although no such weapons have been found since Hussein was overthrown.
The Daily Telegraph reported that British officials believed that President Bush instigated the war because he wanted to complete his father's "unfinished business."
"Even the best survey of Iraq's WMD program will not show much advance in recent years," a Foreign Office policy director said, according to the newspaper.
Bush's father, former president George H. W. Bush, oversaw the 1991 Persian Gulf War, when a U.S.-led military coalition forced occupying Iraqi forces out of neighboring Kuwait, but did not then drive Hussein from power.
-------- china
Senior Leader Resigns in China, Leaving President in Full Control
September 19, 2004
By JOSEPH KAHN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/19/international/asia/19CND-CHIN.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
BEIJING, Sept. 19 - President Hu Jintao of China replaced Jiang Zemin as the country's military chief and de facto top leader today, state media announced, completing the first orderly transfer of power in Communist Party history.
Mr. Hu, who became Communist Party chief in 2002 and president in 2003, now commands the state, the military and the ruling party. He will set both foreign and domestic policy in the world's most populous country, which now has the world's seventh-largest economy and is rapidly emerging as a great power.
The transition marks a significant victory for Mr. Hu, a relatively unknown product of the Communist Party machine. He has solidified control of China's most powerful posts at a younger age - he is now 61 - than any Chinese leader since Mao Zedong, and is now likely to be able govern relatively unimpeded by powerful elders.
Mr. Jiang's resignation, which came as a surprise to many party officials who expected the tenacious elder leader to cling to power for several more years, came after tensions between Mr. Jiang and Mr. Hu began to affect policy making in the one-party state, some officials and political analysts said.
Mr. Jiang, 78, may be suffering from health problems, several people informed about leadership debates said. But he has appeared robust in recent public appearances and was widely described as determined to keep his job - and even expand his authority - until he submitted a letter of resignation earlier this month.
The leadership transition was announced today in a terse dispatch by the New China News Agency followed by a 45-minute broadcast on China Central Television. Mr. Jiang and Mr. Hu appeared side-by-side, smiling, shaking hands and praising each other profusely before applauding members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, which formally accepted Mr. Jiang's resignation and Mr. Hu's promotion at the conclusion of its four-day annual session.
Mr. Jiang's offer to retire, which was first reported by The New York Times earlier this month, was given no advance publicity in state media. China Central Television read the text of Mr. Jiang's resignation letter on its evening broadcast, stressing that his resignation was voluntary. The letter was dated Sept. 1.
"In consideration of the long-term development of the party's and people's collective endeavors, I have always looked forward to fully retiring from all leadership posts," Mr. Jiang wrote, according to an official transcript of his letter. He says Mr. Hu "is fully qualified to take up this position."
Even by the strict standards of secrecy within the party, the decision about Mr. Jiang's fate was closely held. For the vast majority of the 70 million party members, not to mention the general public, there had been no indication that Mr. Jiang was planning to retire, and his abrupt departure seems likely to increase the sense that the most important personnel decisions are made without broad consultation.
Since the Communists defeated the Nationalists in a civil war and took control of China in 1949, the party has repeatedly failed to execute orderly successions. All three of the men chosen by Mao Zedong to succeed him were purged before they could consolidate power, two of them by Mao himself and the third by Deng Xiaoping after Mao's death in 1976.
Deng also anointed and then cashiered two successors in the aftermath of the bloody crackdown on dissent in 1989 elevating Mr. Jiang from the middling rank of Shanghai party chief to China's highest posts.
The most recent transition looked similarly compromised when Mr. Jiang maneuvered to keep control of the military in 2002. Party officials said Mr. Hu had been slated to inherit full power at that time and that his failure to control the military forced him to operate in Mr. Jiang's shadow.
But Mr. Jiang's retirement suggests that the party now operates more according to the consensus of its elite members rather than the whims of its most senior leader.
Moreover, Mr. Jiang did not appear to have extracted any special concessions as the price of his retirement. Notably, he failed to arrange for Vice President Zeng Qinghong to be elevated to the Central Military Commission. Party officials had said that they expected Mr. Zeng, a longtime protégé and ally of Mr. Jiang, to become either a regular member or a vice chairman of the commission.
Xu Caihou, a military officer in charge of propaganda work, was promoted today to replace Mr. Hu as a vice chairman of the commission. He will serve along with Cao Gangchuan, the defense minister, and Gen. Guo Boxiong.
The number of regular members of the commission was expanded to seven from four, adding representatives from the navy, air force and the unit in charge of China's nuclear arsenal.
Mr. Hu, a poker-faced bureaucrat who served most of his career in inland provinces and rarely if ever traveled outside China before he rose to the most senior ranks in the late 1990's, has sent mixed signals about how he intends to rule.
He deftly handled the first big crisis of his leadership in the spring of 2003, when China faced the SARS epidemic that top health officials had initially covered up. Mr. Hu sacked two senior officials and ordered a broad mobilization to combat the disease, which was controlled within weeks.
He has sought to draw a contrast with Mr. Jiang's aristocratic image, making trips to China's poorest areas and shunning some conspicuous perks. He pledged to raise the incomes of workers and peasants and redirect more state spending to areas left behind in China's long economic boom.
"Use power for the people, show concern for the people and seek benefit for the people," Mr. Hu said in remarks early in his term as party chief. He has allowed state media to refer to him as a populist, though his rise through the ranks has not depended on popular support.
Little is known about Mr. Hu personally beyond a few random facts offered by the propaganda machine, including his enthusiasm for ping-pong and what is described as his photographic memory. In official settings, he is a much less colorful figure than Mr. Jiang, who crooned "Love Me Tender" at an Asian diplomatic gathering and was fond of quoting Jefferson and reciting the "Gettysburg Address" to visiting Americans.
It seems highly unlikely that Mr. Hu is a closet liberal. Editors and journalists say he has tightened media controls. He has presided over a crackdown on online discussion by jailing people who express anti-government views on the Internet.
"My general impression is that Hu is a Communist of the old mode," said Alfred Chan, professor of politics at Huron College in Canada who is conducting a study of the new leadership. "His career has been totally shaped by the Communist system. I think many expectations of him are exaggerated because he works under the constraints of party discipline."
In a speech delivered last week, he referred to Western-style democracy as a "blind alley" for China. He has a plan for political reform, but it mostly involves injecting some transparency and competitiveness within the single-party system to make officials police themselves better.
In foreign affairs, Mr. Hu deferred largely to Mr. Jiang. Mr. Jiang relished his role as a statesman and was proud of having built a nonconfrontational, sometimes even cordial relationship with the United States.
Mr. Hu is not expected to alter course substantially. But party officials say that he has tended to emphasize relations with China's neighbors and with Europe over ties with the United States and Japan.
He faces two major foreign policy tests that Mr. Jiang leaves unresolved. One involves North Korea, China's longtime ally, which American officials say is on the verge of becoming a full-scale nuclear power. Chinese officials worry that if Pyongyang formally goes nuclear other Asian countries, notably Japan, could follow.
China is also deeply worried about how to handle Taiwan under President Chen Shui-bian, who many here believe intends to move the island, which China claims as its sovereign territory, toward independence.
Mr. Jiang steered China toward a tougher rhetorical and military posture toward Taiwan, even as the Bush administration expanded military aid to the island. Mr. Hu has not shown any signs of changing course, but some analysts believe he may experiment with a more flexible approach if he does not have to worry about having his nationalist credentials second-guessed by Mr. Jiang.
Mr. Hu and Mr. Jiang did not publicly spar. But there were signs that their relationship had become strained. Mr. Jiang rejected a framework for China's emergence as a great power that Mr. Hu supported. The policy framework, known by the slogan "peaceful rise," was dismissed by Mr. Jiang as too soft at a time when China was threatening Taiwan with military force.
Mr. Hu and his prime minister, Wen Jiabao, have also had to battle internally to curtail wasteful state spending and cool the overheated economy. Some regional leaders are thought to have looked to Mr. Jiang as a counterweight to Mr. Hu because they see the elder leader as a champion of fast economic growth supported by heavy state investment.
"It may be that Hu will no longer have to worry that Jiang will contest his decisions, and that could make decision-making smoother," said Frederick Teiwes, an expert on elite politics at the University of Sydney.
Some people who have visited Mr. Jiang or spoken with his relatives say he has suffered health problems lately, offering one possible explanation for his unexpected retirement.
But Mr. Jiang is also thought to have come under heavy pressure within the party, and even within the military, to follow the example of Deng and withdraw from public life before health problems force him to do so. Mr. Hu also made a veiled call for Mr. Jiang to step aside when he lavished praise on Mr. Deng's decision to retire early during ceremonies to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the late leader's birth in August.
Chris Buckley contributed reporting for this article.
--------
Jiang Resigns As China Military Leader
By AUDRA ANG
Associated Press Writer
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/C/CHINA_POLITICS?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
BEIJING (AP) -- Former President Jiang Zemin turned over his last major post as chairman of the commission that runs China's military to his successor, Hu Jintao, the government said Sunday, completing the country's first peaceful leadership transition since its 1949 revolution.
Jiang, whose term was to have run until 2007, handed in his resignation during a meeting of the ruling Communist Party's Central Committee, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
The committee "approved Hu to take over the (Central Military Commission) chairmanship after accepting Jiang's resignation," Xinhua said.
The Central Committee agreed that the handover is conducive to upholding "the party's absolute leadership over the military, and is also conducive to the strengthening of the military's revolutionization, modernization and regularization," Xinhua said.
Jiang's retirement ensures Hu's status as China's paramount leader by removing Jiang from the last post he had clung to, maintaining his influence even after stepping down from the party leader position he had held for 13 years.
Hu, 61, took over as party leader in 2002 and became president early the following year in a long-planned handover to younger leaders. All other leaders of Jiang's generation gave up their official posts by early 2003, but Jiang's continued grip on the military post had been awkward for Hu and Premier Wen Jiabao.
It was "displeasing to most members of the Chinese leadership including the military, because it created 'two headquarters'," said Andrew Nathan, a specialist on Chinese politics at Columbia University.
"It was a potential problem and a situation that, under People's Republic of China traditions, is not normal," Nathan said. "Sooner or later it had to be done away with."
Party leaders have been eager to have an untroubled transfer of power as they wrestle with economic and social problems including rural property, corruption and relations with rival Taiwan.
"This transfer of power is now complete," said Sin-Ming Shaw, a China analyst and a fellow at Oxford University's Oriel College in England.
Xu Caihou, 61, will replace Hu as deputy chairman of the military commission, Xinhua said. Xu was one of four members of the military commission and is a director in the People's Liberation Army, China's massive military.
The news agency gave no reasons why Jiang chose to leave before his term was up, but praised him as having made "outstanding contributions to the party, the state and the people."
The meeting of the 198-member Central Committee began behind closed doors on Thursday and ended Sunday, with its official agenda focusing on ways to improve party governance.
But media reports that Jiang would step down began circulating days before the meeting began.
Recent media reports have noted signs of tension between Hu and Jiang, but given China's closed and secretive political system, the speculation is virtually impossible to prove.
State television devoted its entire evening newscast to the handover, extending the program by almost 15 minutes.
An anchor read from Jiang's resignation letter, which was dated Sept. 1, saying that he had "always looked forward to complete retirement from leading positions for the good of the long-term development of the cause of the party and the people."
Jiang said he had made his decision after "meticulous consideration," adding that Hu was "absolutely qualified for this post."
Hu and Jiang were shown walking side-by-side in the cavernous Great Hall of the People and greeted by thunderous applause from the 198-member Central Committee. Dressed in a dark suit and red tie, Jiang shook hands and waved to the officials.
"I am so happy to see all of you today," Jiang said in a brief speech. "I will say three sentences. Firstly, I sincerely thank the Central Committee for accepting my resignation. Secondly, I thank you comrades for your support in my work all these years. Thirdly, I hope that everyone will work hard and keep advancing under the leadership of the party Central Committee with Comrade Hu Jintao."
Jiang, a former Shanghai mayor, was plucked from obscurity by then-supreme leader Deng Xiaoping to lead te party in 1989 after pro-democracy protests and an internal power struggle threatened to tear it apart. Deng nominated Hu as Jiang's successor in the early 1990s, setting in motion a succession that was just completed.
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China's Hu inherits awesome military machine
BEIJING (AFP)
Sep 19, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040919122428.zydy61z8.html
President Hu Jintao's appointment as head of China's military puts him in charge of awesome nuclear-capable armed forces which the United States says are improving their offensive capability.
Hu inherited the role of chairman of the Central Military Commission -- arguably China' most powerful position -- when former president Jiang Zemin, 78, resigned Sunday.
It puts him in charge of the 2.5 million strong People's Liberation Army and a powerful nuclear deterrent.
The commission also includes military stalwarts Guo Boxiong, Cao Gangchuan, and newly appointed Xu Caihou as vice chairmen, and seven other members.
In another apparent victory for Hu, Vice President Zeng Qinghong, a protege of Jiang, failed to be named as a commission vice chairman or as a member as had been widely expected.
China's military is an aberration of modern day politics. It is not administered by a civilian government but by the ruling Communist Party which still follows the famous diktat of revolutionary Mao Zedong that "political power comes from the barrel of the gun".
According to military analysts, China is slowly modernizing its strategic nuclear forces but still has the least advanced nuclear arsenal of the declared nuclear states.
China currently has the capability to strike US cities with a force of approximately 20 long-range Dong Feng-5 missiles, each armed with a single 4- to 5-megaton warhead, they say.
It also has some 80 to 100 other missiles that could strike targets in Europe and Asia.
China's air strike ability is also significant.
In its annual report to Congress on Chinese military power, the United States this year said China had nearly 3,400 aircraft, and its share of fourth-generation planes, mainly Su-27 and Su-30 fighter-bombers purchased from Russia, was increasing steadily,
Military-based websites say China has some 14,000 tanks, 14,500 artillery pieces and 453 military helicopters, along with 63 submarines, 18 destroyers and 35 frigates.
While China has sought to dispel the concerns of the United States and its neighbours about its military build-up, countries like Japan are becoming increasingly concerned.
Tokyo is actively seeking to build a ballistic missile defense that is partially seen as a response to Beijing's increasingly capable ballistic missile force.
The United States routinely expresses concern over a missile build-up on China's southeastern coast facing Taiwan which could be used as a first-strike force in the eventual reunification of the disputed island territory.
Beijing's arsenal arrayed against Taiwan includes approximately 500 short-range ballistic missiles, according to US estimates.
The annual report to Congress said Beijing was annually adding 75 short-range missiles across from Taiwan and was acquiring or developing weapons and tactics aimed at countering technologically superior US forces.
In one of his last orders before stepping down Jiang last month urged the further modernisation of China's weapons arsenal.
"Building up military equipment is an urgent task of military combat preparations and is an important strategic task for the country's peace and stability," he was quoted as saying by the People's Daily last month.
China boosted its military spending by 11.6 percent this year to 25 billion dollars as part if its efforts to modernize and outfit its military with high-tech weaponry.
But when off-budget funding for foreign weapons systems imports is included, total defense-related expenditures should soar to between 50 and 70 billion dollars annually, US deputy undersecretary of defence Richard Lawless said earlier this year.
This would rank China third in defense spending after the United States and Russia.
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'American Army Place' Faces Uncertain Fate
Germans Fear Town Will Die If Troops Depart
By Craig Whitlock
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, September 19, 2004; Page A28
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A32040-2004Sep18?language=printer
BAUMHOLDER, Germany -- At Ulrich Jung's hair salon, rumors are flying about the future of this small town in the rolling hills of southwestern Germany. One customer with a buzz cut has heard that all the U.S. troops will leave by 2007. Someone else has information that they will be gone sooner, perhaps within a year.
Under either scenario, the town is in big trouble. There are more Americans in Baumholder than there are Germans; about 12,000 U.S. soldiers and their family members live here, compared with about 5,000 local residents. Other than the military, there is no other industry or major employer to speak of. If the U.S. Army leaves, many Germans say they might as well pack up and abandon the place, too.
"We're standing with our backs against the wall," said Jung, whose family has cut the hair of American soldiers since the first of them arrived in 1951. "We feel like everything is out of our control." Added Bruno Braun, a leather merchant whose store has catered to the U.S. military for a half-century: "Baumholder is an American Army place, and that is it. There's nothing else."
Last month, the Bush administration announced that it was planning to withdraw up to half of the 71,000 U.S. troops in Germany as part of a broad post-Cold War restructuring. A top candidate for redeployment is the 1st Armored Division, whose units are stationed at Baumholder and several other small and medium-sized towns in western Germany.
On a national scale, the Americans' packing-up will have a serious impact on an economy that in the post-World War II era has come to take military dollars for granted. Thousands of Germans work on U.S. bases; the U.S. military estimates that it adds more than $1 billion annually to the economy just in the southwestern Germany's Kaiserslautern region, which includes five major Air Force installations and 10 Army bases, including Baumholder.
By other estimates, military dollars account for about 20 percent of the economy of Baumholder and the area around it.
It remains unclear where the Americans will go. But the U.S. European Command has been considering opening bases in Poland, Romania and Bulgaria, whose governments are lobbying hard to attract the forces.
During the height of the Cold War, more than 500 towns and cities in West Germany hosted American soldiers, who helped rebuild the country after World War II and stayed around to deter an invasion from the east. But the United States has been reducing its footprint in Germany for 15 years, ever since the Iron Curtain that divided the European continent came down.
While small towns such as Baumholder are lobbying against the U.S. withdrawal, it has been greeted with general acceptance by many Germans, who say the moves are inevitable and perhaps even overdue. It's hard to justify so many foreign tank and infantry units when the only country on Germany's border that does not belong to NATO these days is Switzerland, which is not exactly a threat.
"People say, Why do we need so many soldiers in Germany when we are in the middle of Europe?" said Winfried Hermann, a member of the German Parliament from the Green Party. "It's a kind of peace dividend that people expect." In fact, the security calculus in the world has changed so much in recent years that some Germans fret the Americans could present more of a target than a deterrent.
Hermann told of a recent visit to Heidelberg, where residents told him that they were worried that the city's U.S. Army post might become a bull's-eye for Islamic radicals. "People nowadays fear that the American Army or American military installations could be the target of a terrorist attack," he said.
While polls show that a large majority of Germans are opposed to the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, and anti-Americanism has become more pronounced, there has been little public objection to the continuing presence of U.S. troops, many of whom have rotated in and out of Iraq since last year's invasion.
Rather, many Germans say they will always appreciate what the U.S. armed forces did to rebuild their country and open the way for reunification.
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, whose government has opposed the U.S.-led war in Iraq, said last week in a speech commemorating the 10th anniversary of the U.S. military's departure from Berlin that many Germans perceived the withdrawal of Allied troops as a loss.
"It was not about protection anymore, but about human beings to whom one would not be as close any more," he said.
Some German cities that served as longtime hosts for U.S. forces have reinvented their economies. In Hahn, for instance, a small town west of Frankfurt, local leaders converted the old U.S. air base into a civilian airport that is bustling these days with business from low-fare airlines.
Leaders in other former military towns say it can take years to recover economically, but that it can work out for the better in the end. In Bad Kreuznach, a city of about 44,000 people that is about an hour's drive from Frankfurt, local officials predict that it will cost as much as $500 million over 15 years to clean up and redevelop about 405 acres of land that the U.S. Army used for a half century before departing in 2001.
More than 400 civilians in Bad Kreuznach were thrown out of work when the U.S. military pulled out, but Mayor Andreas Ludwig hopes that a new industrial park and other businesses will eventually provide more than 2,000 jobs. In an interview in his office, Ludwig pulled out a giant map to show off the plans for the former military sites: the old heliport is being turned into a giant supermarket; the officers' club is now a Chinese restaurant and the school for the children of U.S. soldiers now educates German students.
"In the long run, we hope to have many more jobs," he said. "Generally, the economy is coming back. This size city could deal with it."
Ludwig, however, is less optimistic about the fates of smaller military towns in more remote locations, such as Baumholder. "For Baumholder, it will be an apocalypse," he said with a shrug.
Indeed, the mayor of Baumholder, Peter Lang, threw up his hands when asked what the town will do if the U.S. Army departs. He acknowledged that other businesses or industries are unlikely to come here to fill the void. He said it would be up to the German government to step in and come up with a solution to keep Baumholder from withering away.
"If the U.S. troops were to leave completely, this would be a task that would be too big for us to handle by ourselves," said Lang, a Baumholder native who is a military man himself, serving as a lieutenant colonel in the German army. "The main problem is that this area has been too focused on the military for 50 years."
Until a final decision is made about which troops in Germany will leave, residents of Baumholder said there was little they could do. But they figure a little goodwill can't hurt. Businesses all over town have posted banners and posters with intertwined U.S. and German flags, proclaiming in English: "Baumholder -- We Belong Together!"
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2 Soldiers Among 21 Killed in Iraq
Blasts New Video Purports To Show U.S. Hostages
By Steve Fainaru
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 19, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A30881-2004Sep18?language=printer
BAGHDAD, Sept. 18 -- Insurgents killed 19 Iraqis and two U.S. soldiers Saturday in bombings across Baghdad and in northern Iraq, and kidnappers threatened to kill two Americans and a Briton within 48 hours if their demand was not met.
The deadliest attack occurred in the northern city of Kirkuk, where witnesses said a young man driving a gray Opel sedan sped down a dirt road leading to the back of an Iraqi National Guard building then blew up the vehicle near a crowd of recruits, killing 19 people and wounding 63.
Two U.S. soldiers were killed and 11 wounded in two car bombings on the road leading to the Baghdad International Airport.
In the first attack Saturday afternoon, a suicide bomber drove up beside a convoy near a checkpoint outside the airport and detonated the vehicle, wounding three soldiers, according to Master Sgt. David Larsen of the 1st Cavalry Division.
Another convoy on its way to assist the first was also hit by a car bomb, Larsen said. That attack killed two soldiers and destroyed two Humvees and a Bradley Fighting Vehicle in which some of the troops were riding.
A security alert had been issued before the attacks for travel on the airport road and U.S. Embassy personnel were temporarily prohibited from using it.
Around 10:30 p.m., U.S. forces launched an airstrike near the restive city of Fallujah on "an armed checkpoint" linked to Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian-born militant, according to a military statement. "Informants linked the checkpoint to kidnappings and executions in the Fallujah area," the statement said. "Evidence indicates Iraqi citizens have been kidnapped at such checkpoints, taken to outlying areas where they were forced to dig their own graves and then executed."
U.S. forces have bombed Fallujah almost daily for nearly two weeks. Officials have said they believe that Zarqawi, who has been linked to car bombings, kidnappings and other violence, uses the Sunni Muslim city as a base for his operations.
Kidnappers purporting to belong to Monotheism and Jihad, an organization linked to Zarqawi, threatened to kill the three hostages within 48 hours unless all Muslim women detained at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad and in another prison in the southern city of Umm Qasr were released.
The hostages, two American contractors, Jack Hensley and Eugene "Jack" Armstrong, and a British engineer, Kenneth Bigley, were kidnapped Thursday at their residence in the capital. A video first broadcast on al-Jazeera television showed three blindfolded men seated before a gunman dressed in black, his face covered by a black scarf. On the video, the hostages state their names and jobs.
Armstrong's cousin, Minnta Davis, said she recognized him in the video, which was rebroadcast on U.S. television. "We only know what they're showing on television," Davis told the Associated Press. "We don't really know anything. . . . We just know there are just a lot of prayers for him."
U.S. officials have said the only women held by coalition forces in Iraq were biologists allegedly connected to a weapons program under former president Saddam Hussein. The women, Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash and Rihab Taha, are both being held at Camp Cropper near the Baghdad airport, U.S. officials have said.
The Islam Memo Web site reported it had received a message from a group holding two French journalists saying that the two hostages had been released, according to the Reuters news agency. A spokesman for the French government, which has been working to gain their freedom, told Reuters it was "premature to say whether or not this statement is authentic. We are analyzing it."
The two French journalists were kidnapped on a road south of Baghdad on Aug. 19. Two Italian aid workers kidnapped on Sept. 7 in the capital are also being held.
Meanwhile, another group said it had seized 10 hostages working for an American-Turkish company, according to a tape broadcast by al-Jazeera, the AP reported. The previously unknown group, calling itself the Salafist Brigades of Abu Bakr al-Siddiq, said it would kill the hostages in three days if the company did not leave Iraq, the network reported.
Al-Jazeera said it had received a copy of the tape but did not say how. The group said the company was an American-Turkish firm operating in Iraq but did not identify it by name.
In addition to the attacks against U.S. forces on the airport road, a roadside bomb that apparently targeted a vehicle carrying U.S. officials or contractors exploded Saturday morning in central Baghdad. The bomb missed the vehicle but hit another car carrying passengers, possibly bodyguards, witnesses said. Wissam Fawsi, 30, an iron metal worker who rushed to the scene, said one of the men was seriously injured and another was severely burned. A third ran off, Fawsi said.
For the second straight day, Iraqi security forces launched raids on Haifa Street, the scene of intense fighting last week between insurgents and U.S. forces. Witnesses said Iraqi National Guardsmen, sometimes backed by U.S. troops, made several arrests in the area Saturday.
Qasim Dawood, state minister for the interim Iraqi government, said Iraqi forces arrested 26 people whom he called "foreign terrorists" during the raids and recovered 60 rockets and large amounts of TNT and ammunition.
The bombing in Kirkuk was similar to an attack on a police headquarters in central Baghdad on Tuesday in which at least 47 people were killed and 114 were injured, many while lining up to apply for jobs. At least 69 police officers, National Guardsmen and potential recruits have been killed and another 177 wounded in the wave of violence that began Tuesday.
Dozens of potential recruits were lined up near the back entrance to the National Guard station Saturday morning. Maj. Gen. Anwar Hamad Ameen said the area was normally blocked off to traffic but had been opened to give drivers access to an adjacent gas station during a fuel crisis.
"We had plans to prevent such an attack, but the suicide bomber took the chance that the back entrance was open for the cars to get fuel, " Ameen said.
Special correspondents Khalid Saffar, Bassam Sebti and Luma Mousawi contributed to this report.
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After Recapturing N. Iraqi City, Rebuilding Starts From Scratch
By Steve Fainaru
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 19, 2004; Page A32
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A31377-2004Sep18?language=printer
TALL AFAR, Iraq -- A three-foot-high coil of razor wire, 21-ton armored vehicles and American soldiers with black M-4 assault rifles stood between tens of thousands of people and their homes last week.
At Checkpoint 301 on Tall Afar's eastern edge, cars packed with families and their belongings stretched back five miles. Hundreds of Iraqi men pushed toward a slim opening in the razor-wire fence, where two U.S. soldiers waited to frisk them before they reentered the city.
"Back off!" one of the soldiers shouted into the restless crowd. "Back! Off!"
The repopulation of Tall Afar, a city the size of Louisville, is only part of the U.S. military's task here after putting down an insurgency that had taken control of the local government. Like other U.S. units scattered across Iraq, the Americans here are trying to meet the needs of people desperate to see their city return to normal, while simultaneously battling armed insurgents who want to drive the U.S. troops from the country.
Fighting between U.S. forces and insurgents this month killed an estimated 180 guerrillas and no Americans in this city, according to U.S. military officials. Hakki M. Majdal, deputy director of Tall Afar General Hospital, said 55 Iraqis were killed and 157 injured; many were civilians, including seven women and seven children, Majdal said, holding a list of the casualties. Far more numerous than the dead and wounded, however, were the people who fled the fighting in this hilly agricultural city of 250,000 people about 60 miles from the Syrian border. U.S. officers estimated that 150,000 residents were displaced, leaving Tall Afar a virtual ghost town when U.S. forces regained control of the city last Sunday. When Brig. Gen. Carter F. Ham, the commander of U.S. forces in northern Iraq, traveled into the city Thursday to meet the new local government, many shops remained closed. Scattered pedestrians walked the narrow streets in the blast-furnace heat as people trickled back into the city.
"I think Tall Afar will once again be a great city," Ham told the new mayor, Mohammed Rashid Hamid, as the two walked down the street, surrounded by armed U.S. troops and Iraqi police. "And I don't think it will take very long."
But the fighting has pushed reconstruction in Tall Afar back to square one. In a meeting Wednesday at the Army's Forward Operating Base Sykes, near Tall Afar, Maj. Tom O'Steen told Hamid: "I'd just like to start the meeting by asking the new mayor if we could confirm his name."
Ham said he had requested $3 million in emergency funding to rebuild Tall Afar's infrastructure. A team of civil affairs officers is working with Iraqi officials to restore basic services, including water and electricity, which U.S. forces had turned off for at least three days during the fighting.
A U.S. Army colonel handed out $200 bonuses -- the equivalent of about a month's salary -- to the 83 Tall Afar police officers who fought with the Americans; 517 others either deserted or joined the insurgents, U.S. military officers said. The Iraqis who switched sides included the police chief and his deputy, both of whom were detained by U.S. forces.
"We have to start from the beginning," the new police chief, Col. Ishmael Mohammed Shuaub, said Wednesday in a meeting with U.S. officers at their base near Tall Afar. "We must forget history now."
The insurgents' takeover here "wasn't something we expected," Ham acknowledged. U.S. intelligence officers and commanders said it grew out of an informal alliance of Sunni Muslim extremists connected to Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian believed to be linked to al Qaeda; Shiite Muslim followers of rebellious cleric Moqtada Sadr; holdovers from Saddam Hussein's ousted Baath Party; other disaffected Iraqis; and foreign fighters.
Commanders and soldiers from the U.S. Army's 5th Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, said they noticed a spike in attacks against U.S. forces in Tall Afar soon after Sadr and his followers left the southern city of Najaf in late August, following three weeks of intense fighting.
Lt. Col. Karl Reed, the battalion's commander, said that shortly after the Najaf agreement, fighters began to appear in Tall Afar wearing the black clothing associated with the Mahdi Army, Sadr's militia.
"This was the first time we really saw an organized insurgency inside the city," Reed said. "They began to outfit with all black and black masks and almost became more organized and militant. I don't know if it's related, but it seems like a couple days before that is when they all left Najaf."
Reed said he believed that "there is an element in the country that moves to whatever location best supports their operations. . . . I think it's being coordinated, for sure."
However, Majdal, the hospital official, said the insurgency grew primarily out of a combination of desperate economic conditions and mounting frustration with the American occupation. "There are no jobs, and if you are hungry, anyone can use you," said Majdal, a neurologist who sits on the committee that met with U.S. civil affairs officers to plan the reconstruction.
"The citizens are frustrated; everyone is frustrated," he said. "My house, for example, has been searched three times, and the last time they were very aggressive. They broke down my door. I was asleep in my house with my children, and suddenly [a soldier] was standing in front of me. I said, 'I am a doctor.' He said, '[Expletive] you.' "
Ham said the Americans' efforts have been complicated by the way Iraq's ethnic, tribal and religious groups are woven into Tall Afar's population. Though Iraq is predominantly an Arab country, the majority of Tall Afar's residents are ethnic Turkmen. And although northern Iraq is largely Sunni-populated, the city is mostly Shiite.
"I tell you frankly, having done this for nine months, that I didn't understand the complexity of this operation," Ham said.
"I didn't understand the complexity of the tribal nature of the Iraqi society and the extraordinary influence that tribal leaders play in all aspects of life here," he said.
Staff Sgt. Patrick Bloomer, who participated in the fighting, said he was frustrated that U.S. forces did not provide food, water or other assistance to people fleeing the city. "It seemed like the military part of the operation was sound, but if we're over here to help the people, we should at least try to do something," he said.
"For the last few days it's been bugging the crap out of me," Bloomer said. "You had pregnant women and children, and we have all this food and water stockpiled. We could have easily gotten it to them.
"I don't mind coming over here and doing my job, but it's not just conflict and combat. You've got to help people out just a little."
U.S. military officials said they are now trying to do just that. On Thursday, nine U.S. officers met across a table in the base mess hall with Hamid, the new mayor, and seven of his civilian aides to discuss the restoration of services in Tall Afar. But the meeting revealed more about the differences that the fighting has left.
Jabbing his left hand for emphasis as he spoke through an interpreter, Hamid told the Americans that the slow pace at which returning residents were being searched had paralyzed the city. He complained that women and children were being searched and said U.S. forces searching for remaining insurgents were relying on inaccurate information to detain people.
"About 40 percent of the information you have about the people of Tall Afar is wrong," he told the officers.
Maj. O'Steen responded that U.S. forces were frisking only military-age men reentering the city and were preparing to release about 40 detainees picked up the day before.
"We are caught in the middle between two fires," Hamid told the Americans. "On the one side, we have the terrorists, and on the other side, we have the coalition forces."
"As you know, this is a very important time for Tall Afar," responded Lt. Col. Kevin Hyneman, the deputy commanding officer for the 2nd Infantry Division's 3rd Brigade. "I don't want to rebuild it like an American would. I want to rebuild it based on your own priorities."
"But the most important thing is security," Hyneman said. "We don't want to have to go and do all of this again months from now or a year from now. I understand you are in a very difficult position here. You have the terrorists on one side and the coalition forces on the other. I hope by now you can trust the coalition forces. I know you cannot trust the terrorists."
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LIFE IN THE BULL'S EYE
Baghdad's Strong Man Struggles to Keep His Grip
September 19, 2004
By JOHN F. BURNS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/19/weekinreview/19burn.html?pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Ayad Allawi will have his right wrist in a cast when he arrives in the United States this week for his first visit as Iraq's interim prime minister, and it will provide the 59-year-old neurosurgeon with a powerful talking point. Asked about the wrist in an interview here as he prepared to leave for London, New York and Washington, Dr. Allawi joshed: "I've been shooting people, didn't you know?"
Shortly after he took office in June, stories circulated of Dr. Allawi visiting a detention center in the Baghdad suburb and shooting several detained insurgents dead. The story quickly faded, with American officials saying they had no information to confirm it, and Dr. Allawi dismissing it as a "ridiculous" fiction. But a curious thing happened: many Iraqis who heard the story told friends they would not be unhappy if it were true, because it would show that Iraq finally had a strongman at its helm again, one who might restore order.
In the interview on Thursday at his heavily guarded residence in the Green Zone compound in Baghdad, Dr. Allawi went on to give another explanation. What really happened, he said, was that he lost his temper at his Iraqi aides and pounded the table so hard that a bone snapped. "I was angry," he said.
The issue, aides said later, was that Iraqi government spokesmen had reported that a man arrested by American and Iraqi troops in Tikrit was Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, Saddam Hussein's second-in-command, but a DNA test proved them wrong. An embarrassed Dr. Allawi seems to have concluded that, for that moment, he had been made to look less like a square-jawed sheriff than a bungler.
Now, as he makes his first trip to the United States as America's chief partner in Iraq, Dr. Allawi finds himself at a tipping point.
Twelve weeks after Americans transferred sovereignty to Iraqis, he is more endangered than ever. If Dr. Allawi was popular among moderate Iraqis in the first weeks after his interim government took over in June, it is plain now that his grace period has expired.
In the suicide bombings and attacks on American military vehicles in the last week in Baghdad, at least 75 Iraqi civilians, policemen and police recruits were killed. One constant was the fury that survivors turned on the Allawi government, accused of being the creation of the American troops who brought miseries to Iraq, and of failing so far to stem the growing violence.
Visiting Dr. Allawi at his sprawling residence is a short course in just how bad the situation has become for anybody associated with the American purpose in Iraq. To reach the house is to navigate a fantastical obstacle course of checkpoints, with Iraqi police cars and Humvees parked athwart a zigzag course through relays of concrete barriers. An hour or more is taken up with body searches and sniffing by dogs, while American soldiers man turreted machine guns. A boxlike infrared imaging device can detect the body heat of anybody approaching through a neighboring playground. The final security ring is manned by C.I.A.-trained guards from Iraqi Kurdistan. If Dr. Allawi were Ian Fleming's Dr. No, no more elaborate defenses could be conceived.
This is the man who has been chosen to lead Iraq to the haven of a democratic future, but he is sealed off about as completely as he could be from ordinary Iraqis, in the virtual certainty that insurgents will kill him if they ever get a clear shot.
Even his opponents would not contest that Dr. Allawi is brave. He flies aboard American helicopters to the most dangerous cities in Iraq: Najaf, last month, at the height of the insurrection there; Samarra, more recently, to negotiate with tribal chiefs.
Yet it is increasingly hard to see how he can avoid becoming an Iraqi Kerensky, an interim figure fated to be overwhelmed by forces that seem, increasingly, to be beyond the power of any reasoned effort to contain them. Much of his effort is now dedicated to creating the conditions for elections in January to choose an assembly that will frame a permanent constitution.
The United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, has said he finds it hard to see how an election could be held under current conditions, but Dr. Allawi, in the interview, said he remains unwaveringly committed to the January vote. So are American officials.
The immutable fact, acknowledged by all, is that much blood will have to be spilled in American-led offensives if any election is to be possible. The plan that American commanders and Dr. Allawi have laid out is to regain control of predominantly Sunni Muslim cities - Falluja, Ramadi, Samarra, Baquba, among others - and to do so with Iraq's newly retrained security forces acting as the point of the spear. Simultaneously, they aim to root out the potential for recurrent uprisings in the Shiite population centers that lurks in the shape of the Mahdi Army of the rebel cleric Moktada al-Sadr.
In post-occupation Iraq, the Americans now advising Dr. Allawi have begun speaking not of insisting on a Jeffersonian democracy but of creating a "working democracy" that excludes rabble-rousers like Mr. Sadr, of building Iraqi forces who can help crush the cleric and other enemies, and of getting out.
For these purposes, Dr. Allawi - the man who waved that gun about the Baghdad campus 35 years ago, the man who pounds his desk when aides embarrass him - is considered a safe pair of hands. His favorite undertaking is to travel with American commanders to review the new Iraqi battalions that will soon be asked to march into the rebels' guns and to exult in what they, together with American soldiers, may accomplish.
In recent days, Dr. Allawi toured a base near the Baghdad airport with Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the American officer now charged with righting the mess that had been made of training Iraq's new fighting units, many of which mutinied or disintegrated the moment they were asked to go up against rebels in the spring battles at Falluja and Najaf.
American officers concede that the true mettle of the thousands of Iraqis now pouring out of the training camps will not be known until they are asked to fight for real, but Dr. Allawi, watching recruits attacking mock terrorist safe houses and staging helicopter-borne assaults, could hardly contain his enthusiasm. As smoke cleared from a mock attack, he turned to his new security adviser, Qassim Daoud, and asked, "Qassim, Why do you keep telling me we don't have anything?"
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U.S. Plans Year-End Drive to Take Iraqi Rebel Areas
September 19, 2004
By DEXTER FILKINS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/19/international/middleeast/19strategy.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 18 - Faced with a growing insurgency and a January deadline for national elections, American commanders in Iraq say they are preparing operations to open up rebel-held areas, especially Falluja, the restive city west of Baghdad now under control of insurgents and Islamist groups.
A senior American commander said the military intended to take back Falluja and other rebel areas by year's end. The commander did not set a date for an offensive but said that much would depend on the availability of Iraqi military and police units, which would be sent to occupy the city once the Americans took it. The American commander suggested that operations in Falluja could begin as early as November or December, the deadline the Americans have given themselves for restoring Iraqi government control across the country.
"We need to make a decision on when the cancer of Falluja is going to be cut out," the American commander said. "We would like to end December at local control across the country."
"Falluja will be tough," he said.
At a minimum, the American commander said, local conditions would have to be secure for voting to take place in the country's 18 provincial capitals for the election to be considered legitimate. American forces have lost control over at least one provincial capital, Ramadi, in Al Anbar Province, and have only a tenuous grip over a second, Baquba, the capital of Diyala Province northeast of Baghdad. Other large cities in the region, like Samarra, are largely in the hands of insurgents.
Senior officials at the United Nations are concerned that legitimate elections might not be possible unless the security conditions here change. Violence against American forces surged last month to its highest level since the war began last year, with an average of 87 attacks per day. A string of deadly attacks in the past month continued Saturday, with a car bombing that killed at least 19 people in the northern city of Kirkuk. [Page 6.]
At the same time, the Americans and the Iraqi interim government appear to be giving negotiations to disarm the rebels a final chance. Members of the Mujahedeen Shura, the eight-member council in control of Falluja, said they were planning to come to Baghdad on Sunday to meet with Iraqi officials to talk about disarming the rebels and opening the city to Iraqi government control.
"Although the Americans have lied many times, we are ready to start negotiations with the Iraqi government," said Hajji Qasim Muhammad Abdul Sattar, a member of the shura.
Dr. Ahmed Hardan, a Falluja doctor who will take part in the negotiations, said that at least some members on the council might be willing to strike a deal with the Americans.
Under the proposal to be discussed, Dr. Hardan said, the guerrillas would turn over their heavy weapons and allow a military force gathered from around Al Anbar Province to enter the city. That unit would replace the Falluja Brigade, the local militia set up after the fighting in April and which was composed almost entirely of insurgents and former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party. It was routed by the insurgents, and the Iraqi government disbanded it this month.
The Iraqi government will also demand that the insurgents turn over their heavy weapons and that foreign fighters leave the city.
Similar negotiations, also at the threat of force, appear to have borne some fruit in the city of Samarra. American military forces entered the town last week for the first time in months and are hoping they can ultimately restore Iraqi government control there before the elections.
Preparations for the Vote
The driving force behind the coming military operations is concern that under the current security conditions, voting will not be possible in much of the so-called Sunni triangle, the area generally north and west of Baghdad that has generated most of the violence against the American enterprise here.
Still, Iraqi and United Nations officials here say they have begun preparations to hold the elections across the country despite the chaotic security environment.
The Independent Iraqi Electoral Commission, set up here after the transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis on June 28, has begun preparing for the mammoth task of registering an estimated 12 million Iraqi voters, beginning Nov. 1 in about 600 offices around the country, officials said.
Iraqi officials say it will be necessary to keep those offices open for at least six weeks while the registrations are gathered, requiring thousands of police officers and possibly troops to protect them. Those plans have not yet been completed, but American and British officials said the primary responsibility for providing ballot security will fall to the Iraqi police, whose record against the insurgents in southern and central Iraq has been spotty at best.
Iraqi and United Nations officials say they are banking that enthusiasm for the elections among ordinary Iraqis will help persuade insurgents and other skeptical Iraqis to allow election workers into most areas of the Sunni triangle.
The initial signs have not been encouraging. For example, the Association of Muslim Scholars, the country's largest group of Sunni clerics, said last week that it had decided against taking part in the elections.
"As long as we are under military occupation, honest elections are impossible," said Sheik Abdul Satar Abdul Jabbar, a member of the association, which represents about 3,000 Sunni mosques in the region.
"People will not come out to vote in this environment," Sheik Jabbar said. "If the election goes forward anyway, the body that will be elected will not represent the country."
Indeed, the violence in Iraq is giving rise to concerns that voting held under the present conditions, with a possible large-scale boycott by the Sunni Arabs, will render the results of such an election suspect in the eyes of many Iraqis. If that happens, some Iraqis say, the stage could be set for even more violence.
"Bad elections will open wounds rather than heal them," said Ghassan al-Atiyyah, the director of the Iraqi Foundation for Development and Democracy, an independent governance group here. "If the Sunnis do not vote, then you could end up with a polarized Parliament that could lead to civil war."
The senior American military official suggested that Falluja, believed to be a haven for insurgents and terrorists, was in a category all its own, and that while securing other cities like Ramadi and Samarra might be achieved with relatively little violence, Falluja could require a major military assault.
The exact timing of an assault on the city would probably depend on whether there were sufficient numbers of Iraqi soldiers who could join in the attack and, more important, take over the city after the Americans fought their way in.
Training for an Assault
Thousands of Iraqi police officers and soldiers are taking part in a huge American-led training effort, supported by an $800 million project to build bases and training camps. At the moment, American officials say there are about 40,000 soldiers in the Iraqi National Guard, the force most likely be deployed for action in Falluja.
Many of those soldiers do not have adequate equipment, and they have little or no combat experience. American commanders are concerned that the experience of April not be repeated, when the Iraqi security forces largely disintegrated in the face of Shiite and Sunni uprisings.
With preparations for the elections under way, American forces have recently been stepping up military operations in areas where they had ceded control to insurgents. American aircraft have repeatedly struck targets in Falluja in recent weeks. Usually, commanders have said the airstrikes were aimed at hide-outs used by the network of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant who has claimed responsibility for several of the deadliest car bombings here.
On Friday, American forces started an operation in Ramadi, another city in insurgent control.
An offensive on Falluja and in other cities in the Sunni triangle that have slipped out of the grip of American forces would undoubtedly test the political will of the interim government and of its prime minister, Ayad Allawi. An initial assault by American marines on Falluja was halted in April as Iraqi anger grew at the death of as many as 600 Iraqis in the fighting.
At the time, Marine commanders said that they were perhaps two days away from gaining control of the interior of the city, and that they were ordered to halt by the political leadership in Washington.
A second assault on Falluja could be expected to be at least as deadly as the first one. Witnesses from inside the city say the mujahedeen groups are preparing for a big fight, in part by burying large bombs along the main routes into the city.
But the American commander said he felt confident that things would be different this time, largely because now, unlike in April, there was a sovereign Iraqi government, and one that seemed willing to absorb the political storm that such an assault was likely to set off.
"I am rather confident we are not going to take on something as focused and important as Falluja without the endorsement and full understanding of what we are going to get ourselves into and the support of the Iraqi interim government," the American official said.
The American commander said cities like Ramadi and Samarra had been allowed to slip into insurgents' hands largely by default, as the Americans began to concentrate their limited resources on other areas, like protecting the new government and critical pieces of infrastructure.
"Offensive operations based on intelligence were a lower priority," the commander said.
Counting on Elections
For all of their worries, Iraqi and United Nations workers say they are pushing ahead with plans to hold voting across the country in January. To help the Iraqis with the job, the United Nations has dispatched a team led by Carlos Valenzuela, who has overseen 15 elections in places including Liberia, Haiti, Angola and Cambodia.
Mr. Valenzuela said he was worried about the Iraqi elections, especially if the violence prevents candidates from campaigning and voters from registering. But he said in other violence-plagued countries, a wide array of people usually want to vote, largely because almost most everyone is unhappy with the status quo.
"People realize that they are stuck in a situation and that they have to move on to something else," Mr. Valenzuela said. "Elections can help achieve that."
Some Iraqis, too, believe that the prospect of elections could help transform the security environment here, as people begin to realize that the elections are inevitable and that they will be honest and fair.
One of them is Abdul Hussein Hindawi, the chairman of the Iraqi election commission. Mr. Hindawi believes that even the Sunni Arabs, who thrived under Saddam Hussein but who now find themselves a minority in the government, may finally decide that an election is something they do not want to miss.
"They look to their interests, first of all," Mr. Hindawi said.
An Iraqi employee of The New York Times contributed reporting from Falluja for this article.
-------- israel / palestine
Israeli Missile Kills Top Militant in Gaza Strip
September 19, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-mideast-blast.html
GAZA (Reuters) - A senior leader of Hamas's military wing was killed in an Israeli missile strike on his car as it drove through a Hamas stronghold in the Gaza Strip on Sunday, witnesses said.
The missile, which witnesses said was fired by an airforce drone, ripped through a car carrying a senior field commander of Hamas's Izz el-Deen al-Qassam brigades, Khaled Abu Selniya, 33. He was killed and six passersby were wounded.
Hamas vowed to avenge the death of Selniya, whom it described as a senior field commander of the group's armed wing, which has been behind scores of suicide bombings and other attacks against Israel over the past decade.
``It was a clear assassination of one of our mujahideen (Muslim fighter) ... Hamas will be able and capable of teaching the enemy a painful lesson,'' said Mushir al-Masri, a Hamas spokesman.
The Israeli army said in a statement that Selniya was targeted by the airforce because he played a central role in the manufacture and development of Qassam rockets which Hamas militants have fired at the nearby Israeli city of Sderot.
Selniya's mangled body was taken to a local hospital. Charred wreckage from the car was strewn across the street and windows were shattered in nearby shops.
The strike took place shortly after Hamas militants celebrated in the streets at the release of another leader of the group by Palestinian security forces.
The leader had been arrested earlier in the day and Selniya was apparently returning after visiting the man in his home in Gaza City's Sheikh Radwan neighborhood.
``There was an airforce strike on a senior Hamas terrorist who was traveling in a car,'' an army spokeswoman said.
Witnesses said an Israeli military drone was flying overhead when the car burst into flames. Several witnesses reported seeing a flash of light in the sky before the explosion.
``Your blood will not be in vain. We will get revenge,'' Hamas activists shouted over loudspeakers in the Gaza Strip.
Israel has killed scores of Palestinian militants in air strikes since a four-year-old Palestinian uprising began.
Israel's policy of targeting militants has been condemned by human rights groups and many members of the international community.
Israel says it is the only way of reaching militants who hide in civilian areas without causing heavy civilian casualties.
Tension has escalated in Gaza since Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced his plan to withdraw troops and settlers by the end of next year from the narrow coastal strip captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war.
Islamic militants hope to make the army withdraw under fire, while the military is determined to crush Hamas and other militant groups opposed to its existence to ensure that the pullout will not be seen as a victory.
-------- pakistan / india
India's 'PATRIOT Act' Repealed
by Ranjit Devraj,
September 19, 2004
Antiwar.com
http://www.antiwar.com/ips/devraj.php?articleid=3608
NEW DELHI - After snaring thousands of politicians, teenagers, politicians, journalists, members of minority communities but few terrorists, India, this week, repealed its "PATRIOT Act" introduced in response to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
A government statement said the cabinet headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had at a meeting Friday decided to replace the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) with a new law.
"It is important to note the intention of the government is to protect the rights of people vis-à-vis the misuse of POTA," the statement said.
The unpopularity of POTA contributed to the electoral debacle of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government in May by the communist-backed, Congress-led, United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
Indeed, the Congress Party and its allies had made misuse of POTA a major election issue and vowed to make its repeal a priority, ignoring dire warnings from BJP leaders, including former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, that this would be an invitation to increased incidents of bombings and suicide attacks.
The Congress Party and its allies had opposed the introduction of POTA in Parliament on the grounds that it would be used by a pro-Hindu government to victimize members of the minority Muslim community. But Congress did not have the numbers to prevent passage of the bill on Mar. 26, 2002.
Impetus for the introduction of POTA picked up after a suicide squad stormed Parliament House on Dec. 13, 2001 but failed to blow up the monumental red sandstone building only because the car bomb that was used did not detonate owing to faulty wiring.
The then Vajpayee government blamed neighboring Pakistan for the incident and made preparations for an armed confrontation with Islamabad.
Friday's repeal, subject to the formality of presidential approval, came by bureaucratic fiat because the government was denied a chance to gain Parliamentary approval after BJP legislators recorded their objections by disrupting all business during the just-concluded budget session.
"The government has been concerned with the manner in which the POTA has been misused in the past two years," Union Home Minister Shivraj Patil told reporters after the release of the government statement.
Patil dismissed charges made by BJP leaders that the repeal compromised India's fight against terrorism, saying that the government would soon strengthen the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act passed in 1967.
According to Patil, the older law would, on amendment, include such POTA features as the banning of terrorist organizations and their support systems, including funding. In fact, he said, all 32 militant organizations banned under POTA would continue to be declared illegal.
Importantly, the onus of proving the guilt of the accused once again shifts back to the prosecution and provisions in POTA that allow the arrest, interrogation and detention of suspects for 30 days before production in a court of law have been done away with.
Under POTA, confessions made to security forces can be used as evidence, as can communications secretly intercepted and recorded.
The Congress Party's prediction that the BJP government would use POTA to victimize members of the Muslim community seemed to come true in western Gujarat, where all 287 cases brought before the courts after the anti-Muslim pogrom in the state in 2002 were from the minority community.
Fifty-eight people were killed when a train carrying Hindu activists was allegedly set ablaze by a Muslim mob near the town of Godhra in western Gujarat. More than 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, died in riots following the attack.
Gross misuse of POTA in Gujarat has come under criticism by India's National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) - a statutory body - and by the London-based human rights watchdog Amnesty International.
"Over the past two years POTA has been used mostly against juveniles, old people, members of dalit [ritually low caste Hindus groups], adviasis [aborigines], women, political opponents and those struggling for their socioeconomic rights," Colin Gonsalves, a well-known lawyer and human rights activist told IPS.
Gonsalves organized hearings by "People's Tribunals" of testimonies by victims of POTA, which were widely publicized and were greatly influential in its eventual repeal.
Ram Jethmalani, who was Union Law Minister at the time POTA was passed, told the media later that he deeply regretted it afterwards. "I supported it only because it was done in obedience to United Nations Security Council resolutions," he said.
The law has also been a subject of debate for its alleged use or abuse by several provincial governments against political rivals.
One such controversy relates to a regional leader in Tamil Nadu, Vaiko, who was imprisoned for more than a year under POTA for his alleged support of the banned Sri Lankan rebel group the Tamil Tigers.
Vaiko's party, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), was among those who had approved POTA in parliament. But he and his southern allies later pulled out of the BJP government.
Meanwhile, human rights groups were guarded in welcoming the withdrawal.
"We are happy at the repeal of POTA," said Ravi Nair, director of the South Asian Human Rights Documentation Center, an affiliate partner of the Bangkok-based regional rights body Forum Asia.
"But we would like to see what the government intends to do by bringing amendments to some of the laws for handling terrorism," Nair told IPS.
(Inter Press Service)
-------- un
U.N. Puts Sudan Sanctions Into Play
Security Council Adopts Resolution
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 19, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31635-2004Sep18.html
UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 18 -- The U.N. Security Council adopted a resolution Saturday threatening possible sanctions against Sudan and establishing a U.N. commission of inquiry to investigate atrocities in Darfur, Sudan, and to determine whether Sudanese authorities and militias are responsible for committing genocide there.
The U.S.-drafted resolution passed in the 15-nation council by a vote of 11 to 0, with China, Russia, Algeria and Pakistan abstaining. The resolution's adoption came after the United States agreed to water down language that explicitly threatened sanctions against Sudanese officials or the country's oil industry if Khartoum fails to comply.
Saturday's vote comes more than a week after Secretary of State Colin L. Powell declared that Sudan and government-backed militia in Darfur have committed genocide. John C. Danforth, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said that the aim of Saturday's resolution is to increase pressure on the government to rein in the militias and to allow thousands of African Union monitors into Darfur to see and discourage atrocities.
"If the government of Sudan continues to persecute its people or does not cooperate fully with the African Union, the council will indeed have to consider sanctions against it and individuals responsible for the disaster," Danforth said after the vote. Danforth, meanwhile, noted that President Bush had phoned him Friday and "asked me to convey his strong support for what we are doing this afternoon."
The resolution's passage ended weeks of tense talks, particularly between the United States and China, which had threatened to cast its veto to block the resolution. China withdrew its threat after U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan declared his support Thursday for the commission and urged the council to move swiftly to pass the resolution.
"This resolution is not a good resolution," China's U.N. ambassador, Wang Guangya, said Saturday. But he said he refrained from vetoing it because his government supported some of the text, including a provision that supported an African Union initiative to send thousands of additional troops to Darfur to monitor a cease-fire between Khartoum and the rebels. "As far as China is concerned, we don't like the idea of sanctions . . . but I think that we don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water."
But it also faced intense resistance from Russia and the council's Islamic governments, Pakistan and Algeria, who argued that the threat of sanctions was unwarranted in light of Annan's recent conclusion that Sudan had "made progress" in resolving the crisis. "We should not again threaten Sudan with sanctions," Algeria's Ambassador Abdallah Baali said before the vote. "We should be more cooperative with Sudan to ensure their full cooperation. It is not by threats that we can get such cooperation."
Ambassador Elfatih Erwa of Sudan cited the abstentions as evidence of a deeply divided panel. But in a letter to the group, Erwa said that "my government will welcome an agreement with the African Union on any numbers of monitors and their protection forces as the African Union deems necessary." The Sudanese government, however, will remain in charge of protecting civilians.
After the vote, Erwa declined to say whether Khartoum will allow members of a U.N. commission of inquiry into Darfur to investigate genocide. But he said that in principle, Sudan "is not against an inquiry -- it's not scared of any inquiry."
The latest violence in Darfur began in February 2003, when the Sudanese Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement took up arms against the government, citing discrimination of the region's black African tribes. In response, the government recruited and organized Arab militias and supported them as they killed tens of thousands of villagers and drove more than 1.2 million people from their homes.
The Security Council threatened to impose sanctions on the government on July 30 if it failed to rein in the Janjaweed within 30 days. Although Khartoum failed to restrain the militia, the case for immediate sanctions was undercut when Annan and his special envoy, Jan Pronk, highlighted Sudan's cooperation in expanding access to humanitarian aid workers.
Sudan, however, continues to face a worsening situation. The World Health Organization reported this week that 6,000 to 10,000 people are dying from disease and violence in Darfur each month.
In Saturday's resolution, the council acknowledges some cooperation from Khartoum but concludes that it "has not fully met its obligations" to crack down on the militia. It also asked Annan to "rapidly establish an international commission of inquiry" to probe atrocities, determine whether they amount to genocide, and ensure "those responsible are held accountable."
The resolution says it "shall consider" sanctions on Sudan's government and the country's oil industry if it fails to rein in the militia and refuses to accept an enlarged African Union observer mission.
The issue of whether the violence in Darfur amounts to genocide has been the subject of intense disagreement. While Congress and Powell have accused Khartoum and the militias of genocide, the African Union and the Arab League have dismissed suggestions that genocide is occurring in Darfur.
The European Union and advocacy groups, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, have shied away from using the term. The European Union said its fact-finding mission in August had not turned up adequate evidence for a declaration of genocide.
"No matter how the crimes that are being committed against civilians in Darfur are characterized or legally defined, it is urgent to take action now," Annan said last week. "Civilians are still being attacked and fleeing their villages even as we speak, many months after the government committed itself to bring the militias under control."
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Authority Is Approved for Sanctions Against Sudan
September 19, 2004
By WARREN HOGE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/19/international/africa/19sudan.html
UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 18 - The Security Council passed a resolution on Sudan on Saturday holding out the threat of sanctions on the country's leaders and its oil industry if the government fails to curb ethnic violence and setting up an inquiry into whether that violence constitutes genocide.
The vote on the 15-member panel was 11 to 0, with Algeria, China, Pakistan and Russia abstaining.
The measure calls upon Secretary General Kofi Annan to create an international commission to determine if the campaign by marauding Arab militias against the villagers of Darfur, in western Sudan, has reached the level of genocide.
The militias, known as Janjaweed and equipped by the government, are accused of killing up to 50,000 residents of Darfur raping women and girls, destroying crops and polluting water supplies and forcing 1.2 million people off their lands.
In an unaccustomed intervention into a Security Council debate, Mr. Annan on Thursday said he had already thought of names to recommend to the commission that will explore genocide.
The United States last week officially labeled the violence in Darfur genocide, and the resolution passed Saturday represents the first time the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide has been formally invoked.
The resolution also reinforces the role of the 53-member African Union in taking the lead in calming the situation in Darfur and calls on other nations and the government of Sudan to help it expand its presence there. Jan Pronk, the United Nations representative in Sudan, has said he believes a force of monitors and troops totaling 5,000 is necessary.
In four revisions over the last 10 days, the American drafters addressed objections from individual countries by making the threatened imposition of sanctions more conditional and less automatic and by adding language acknowledging steps the Sudanese government had taken to ease restrictions on relief workers and broaden cooperation with United Nations aid workers.
As passed, the resolution says the Security Council "shall consider" action rather than immediately take action on sanctions, and it "welcomes" steps by Sudan to remove earlier administrative obstructions preventing aid workers and equipment from reaching Darfur.
John C. Danforth, the United States ambassador, told the Council that the United States had adjusted the language to reflect the feelings of some delegations that Sudan had met some of its commitments but had not abandoned its own belief that strong measures were imperative.
"No one should be under the slightest illusion as to why the government of Sudan has met even this commitment," he said. "It did so because of the intense pressure from the international community and it did so with great reluctance and with long delays that thwarted an early effective humanitarian response."
Speaking after the vote, the ambassadors of the four abstaining countries said they had withheld support from the resolution because they feared that imposing sanctions could provoke the Sudanese government to withdraw the cooperation it had offered thus far.
Elfatih Mohamed Ahmed Erwa, the Sudanese ambassador, dismissed the resolution as "the worst form of injustice and indignity," and he said its sponsor, the United States, was the country that should answer for killing Afghan, Iraqi and Palestinian women and children.
-------- us
Strains Felt By Guard Unit on Eve Of War Duty
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 19, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A31689-2004Sep18?language=printer
FORT DIX, N.J. -- The 635 soldiers of a battalion of the South Carolina National Guard scheduled to depart Sunday for a year or more in Iraq have spent their off-duty hours under a disciplinary lockdown in their barracks for the past two weeks.
The trouble began Labor Day weekend, when 13 members of the 1st Battalion of the 178th Field Artillery Regiment went AWOL, mainly to see their families again before shipping out. Then there was an ugly confrontation between members of the battalion's Alpha and Charlie batteries -- the term artillery units use instead of "companies" -- that threatened to turn into a brawl involving three dozen soldiers, and required the base police to intervene.
That prompted a barracks inspection that uncovered alcohol, resulting in the lockdown that kept soldiers in their rooms except for drills, barred even from stepping outside for a smoke, a restriction that continued with some exceptions until Sunday's scheduled deployment.
The battalion's rough-and-tumble experience at a base just off the New Jersey Turnpike reflects many of the biggest challenges, strains and stresses confronting the Guard and Reserve soldiers increasingly relied on to fight a war 7,000 miles away.
This Guard unit was put on an accelerated training schedule -- giving the soldiers about 36 hours of leave over the past two months -- because the Army needs to get fresh troops to Iraq, and there are not enough active-duty or "regular" troops to go around. Preparation has been especially intense because the Army is short-handed on military police units, so these artillerymen are being quickly re-trained to provide desperately needed security for convoys. And to fully man the unit, scores of soldiers were pulled in from different Guard outfits, some voluntarily, some on orders.
As members of the unit looked toward their tour, some said they were angry, or reluctant to go, or both. Many more are bone-tired. Overall, some of them fear, the unit lacks strong cohesion -- the glue that holds units together in combat.
"Our morale isn't high enough for us to be away for 18 months," said Pfc. Joshua Garman, 20, who, in civilian life, works in a National Guard recruiting office. "I think a lot of guys will break down in Iraq." Asked if he is happy that he volunteered for the deployment, Garman said, "Negative. No time off? I definitely would not have volunteered."
A series of high-level decisions at the Pentagon has come together to make life tough for soldiers and commanders in this battalion and others. The decisions include the Bush administration's reluctance to sharply increase the size of the U.S. Army. Instead, the Pentagon is relying on the National Guard and Reserves, which provide 40 percent of the 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. Also, the top brass has concluded that more military police are needed as security deteriorates and the violent insurgency flares in ways that were not predicted by Pentagon planners.
These soldiers will be based in northern Kuwait and will escort supply convoys into Iraq. That is some of the toughest duty on this mission, with every trip through the hot desert bringing the possibility of being hit by roadside bombs, rocket-propelled grenades and sniper fire.
The drilling to prepare this artillery unit for that new role has been intense. Except for a brief spell during Labor Day weekend, soldiers have been confined to post and prevented from wearing civilian clothes when off duty. The lockdown was loosened to allow soldiers out of the barracks in off hours to go to the PX, the gym and a few other places, if they sign out and move in groups.
"There's a federal prison at Fort Dix, and a lot of us feel the people in there have more rights than we do," said Spec. Michael Chapman, 31, a construction worker from near Greenville, S.C.
Some complaints heard during interviews with the soldiers here last week centered on long hours and the disciplinary measures -- both of which the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Van McCarty, said were necessary to get the unit into shape before combat.
Sgt. Kelvin Richardson, 38, a machinist from Summerville, S.C., volunteered for this mission but says he now wishes he had not and has misgivings about the unit's readiness. Richardson is a veteran of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, in which he served with the 1st Cavalry Division, an active-duty "regular" unit. This battalion "doesn't come close" to that division, he said. "Active-duty, they take care of the soldiers."
Pfc. Kevin Archbald, 20, a construction worker from Fort Mill, S.C., who was transferred from another South Carolina Guard unit, also worries about his cobbled-together outfit's cohesion. "My last unit, we had a lot of people who knew each other. We were pretty close." He said he does not feel that in the 178th. Here, he said, "I think there's just a lot of frustration."
The daily headlines of surging violence in Iraq -- where U.S. forces crossed the 1,000-killed threshold last month -- were also part of the stress heard in soldiers' comments.
"I think before we deploy we should be allowed to go home and see our families for five days, because some of us might not come back," said Spec. Wendell McLeod, 40, a steelworker from Cheraw, S.C. "Morale is pretty low. . . . It's leading to fights and stuff. That's really all I got to say."
McCarty, the commander, disagrees with those assessments. Overall, he said, the unit's morale is not poor. "The soldiers all have their issues to deal with, and some have dealt with it better than others," he said in an interview in his temporary office.
The problem, he said, is that he has to play the hand dealt him -- of assembling a new unit and getting it to work together while following a training schedule that has kept them going from dawn to long after dark, seven days a week, since mid-July.
"We are not here for annual training and then go home" -- that is, the typical schedule for National Guard units in the past -- said McCarty, assistant deputy director of law enforcement for the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources in civilian life. "We are here to prepare to go into a combat zone."
Some military leaders like to say that the best quality of life is having one -- a view to which McCarty appears to subscribe. "It is not my objective to win a popularity contest with my soldiers," he said. "My objective is to take them out and back home safely to their families."
As for the barracks lockdown, he said, "I am not going to apologize. . . . I did what I felt was necessary."
In the past, McCarty noted, members of Guard units usually had years of service together. That has enabled Guard units to compensate somewhat, using unit cohesion -- that is, mutual understanding and trust -- to make up for having less training time together than do active-duty units. But that was not the case with this battalion. "We didn't have that degree of stabilization to start with," he said.
He also contends that his case is hardly unusual nowadays. "Other units have similar problems," he said. "Ours just make more headlines." The disciplinary measures were covered by some soldiers' hometown newspapers, perhaps because it is one of the largest mobilizations of the South Carolina Guard since Sept. 11, 2001.
Sgt. Maj. Clarence Gamble, who as the top noncommissioned officer for the battalion keeps a close eye on morale and discipline, said he does not see any big problems. "I get out and see troops every day," he said. "From my talking to the troops, morale is good right now."
Indeed, some members of the unit agree with this view. "Overall, morale's good," said Sgt. John Mahaffey. "But of course you're going to have some who, no matter if you gave them their food on a gold platter, they'd still . . . whine." A car salesman from Spartanburg, S.C., Mahaffey, 41, said he volunteered to go to Iraq and is glad he did. "I'm looking forward to it," he said. The unit is essentially ready to go, he said. "If you wait till everything's perfect, you'll never get anything accomplished."
Gamble defended the lockdown that followed the fighting. "I think that what we did at the time was something that we needed to do to make sure that we had command and control of the battalion," he said. He added, "I don't think it was a detriment to morale, because it was short-lived."
He also says that unit cohesion is developing. "We knew it was going to take some time to develop the chemistry. And it's working."
As for volunteers who say they now regret it, "I think when our deployment is over, people will have different opinions."
Gamble, who at age 51 is a 33-year veteran of the Guard, said he is not worried about putting an already stressed unit into the cauldron of Iraq duty. "I haven't ever been deployed before, myself," he said. But, he concluded, "I feel like this unit will handle this well. Once we get in-country and get into missions, I think the stress will level off."
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts / tribunals
2 to Face Courts-Martial in Iraqi's Alleged Drowning
Associated Press
Sunday, September 19, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32047-2004Sep18.html
FORT CARSON, Colo., Sept. 18 -- Two soldiers face courts-martial over the alleged drowning of an Iraqi civilian forced to jump off a bridge.
1st Lt. Jack Saville and Sgt. 1st Class Tracy Perkins will be tried in a military court on charges of manslaughter, assault, conspiracy, making false official statements and obstruction of justice.
Saville and Perkins, both based at Fort Carson, would face 5 1/2 years to 26 1/2 years in prison if convicted. No dates have been set for the courts-martial, ordered Friday by Major Gen. James D. Thurman, the commanding officer.
Capt. Robert Ayers, who presided over Perkins's hearings on the charges, recommended that the manslaughter charge be dropped because there was no proof the Iraqi drowned. Ayers recommended the other charges go to court-martial.
The Army and family members of Zaidoun Hassoun, 19, contend Hassoun drowned Jan. 3 near Samarra when he and his cousin were forced to jump in a river. The soldiers maintain that both Iraqis, who were stopped for breaking curfew, made it safely to shore.
Defense lawyers have disputed that Hassoun was killed. They said investigators bungled the case by not doing an autopsy.
Investigators admitted they never saw the body, saying they relied on the word of relatives and a videotape made by the man's family that shows a corpse in a coffin.
Two other soldiers facing charges in the case were given "nonjudicial" punishment, the Army's out-of-court disciplinary system. Both were reportedly demoted one rank.
-------- prisons / prisoners
35 Pakistanis Held in Cuba Return Home
Associated Press
Sunday, September 19, 2004; Page A31
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32043-2004Sep18.html
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Sept. 18 -- Thirty-five Pakistani men released from the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, returned home Saturday, a senior interior ministry official said.
Pakistani authorities detained the men for questioning after they arrived at a Pakistani air base near the capital, Islamabad, and said the men would be freed and allowed to go home after the interrogations.
The U.S. Defense Department said the 35 Pakistanis were among 191 prisoners to be released from Guantanamo Bay.
A large number of Pakistanis who had gone to Afghanistan to fight alongside the Taliban were killed or returned home after the ruling Taliban militia fell in late 2001. Some were caught by U.S. forces and sent to Guantanamo for alleged ties to the Taliban and al Qaeda.
Brig. Javed Iqbal Cheema, an Interior Ministry official, led a Pakistani delegation to Washington in May to secure the release of Pakistani citizens detained at the military prison.
Cheema said in May that the group had told U.S. officials that the detainees had gone to Afghanistan only in response to appeals by Islamic leaders and were not members of al Qaeda.
-------- POLITICS
-------- propaganda wars
Divergent Views of Iraq Defining Election
Despite the Pitfalls for Bush and Kerry, Candidates Stay on Topic
By Dan Balz and Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, September 19, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A31726-2004Sep18?language=printer
Democratic challenger John F. Kerry plans an aggressive attack on President Bush and his policies in Iraq, seeking to put the president on the defensive over an issue that has plagued Kerry's candidacy for months.
Bush has tried to emphasize Iraq's progress toward democracy, but events there have undermined that message in a week that has included car bombs, kidnappings and more U.S. casualties. Kerry advisers said they have concluded that they must engage directly on the issue of Iraq, despite their hopes of shifting attention to the economy, health care and other domestic issues, and say that renewed concerns among the American public about the situation in Iraq provide a fresh opening to challenge Bush more directly.
Kerry began the attack Thursday, charging that Bush continues to mislead the country on Iraq, and will escalate that criticism in the coming week. "He has led us into a situation that is more dangerous and destabilizing with each passing day, whether the president is willing to admit that or not," said Kerry senior adviser Joe Lockhart.
With some Kerry advisers convinced he cannot win a debate over whether the United States should have gone to war, given Bush's relentless attacks on Kerry for shifting his positions on the war, the Massachusetts senator has settled on a two-phase plan to refocus the debate. Aides say he will first challenge the president's optimistic assessment of conditions in Iraq and then draw a sharp contrast with Bush over getting the United States out of the country within four years.
The president's advisers say Bush maintains the public's confidence on Iraq and the war on terrorism, in large part because they say Kerry has yet to provide a clear explanation of why he voted to authorize the war in the fall of 2002 but later opposed $87 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan. Kerry has been urged by some advisers to say his initial vote was wrong, given what Bush did with that authority, but he has resisted.
White House communications director Dan Bartlett said that when the public compares Bush and Kerry on Iraq, they consistently put their faith in the president. As such, Bartlett said, the White House welcomes any attacks Kerry plans to launch. "We believe each day that we're debating the war and debating Iraq, it's an advantage to us," he said.
Iraq has shaped the presidential debate through the year and will assume center stage again this week, with Bush addressing the United Nations on Tuesday and welcoming Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi at the White House on Thursday. Kerry will be in New York on Monday and Tuesday, and advisers were working this weekend on plans for a retooled message that will accuse Bush of failure since the initial invasion of Iraq ended in the spring of 2003.
Bartlett said Bush would use his U.N. speech to deliver "a very passionate case about the need for democracy to take root in a very troubled part of the world" and use the Allawi visit Thursday to highlight the new leadership in Iraq. "He will talk about the fact that at difficult moments, this is one where it's all the more important for us to keep our resolve," Bartlett added.
The president's strategy of emphasizing progress toward stability and democratic elections early next year hit a wall last week, not only because of increased violence in Iraq, but also from reports of a classified July national intelligence estimate that painted a gloomy picture of the long-term outlook in Iraq. In addition, the administration came under fire from senior Democratic and Republican senators on the Foreign Relations Committee.
Bush used his radio address yesterday to argue that his policies are working and to address concerns about Iraq and Afghanistan, warning that violence is likely to increase in both countries as elections near. "Terrorist enemies are trying to stop the progress of both those countries, and their violent, merciless attacks may increase as elections draw near," he said.
Bush's effort will come at a moment when there is plenty of dissonance that threatens to undercut his message. A car bomb that exploded Saturday in Kirkuk, killing at least 20 people, was the latest attack to underscore the challenges facing U.S. forces in their effort to stabilize the country. The classified national intelligence estimate revealed last week said a worst-case scenario would have Iraq plunged into civil war, with hopes for stability tenuous under the most optimistic scenario, leading Kerry to charge that Bush lives in "a fantasy world of spin" in his descriptions of progress in Iraq.
Two Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Richard G. Lugar (Ind.) and Chuck Hagel (Neb.), added their voices to those critical of the administration. Lugar assailed the "dancing-in-the-street crowd" within the administration for offering misleading predictions of progress on reconstruction. Hagel said the United States is "in a lot of trouble" in Iraq, adding that the administration has "got to be honest with our evaluation there."
Those kinds of comments have emboldened Kerry advisers, who believe it is time to make the Iraq debate one that looks forward. "Iraq is the defining issue of the Bush administration, and their attempt to make Kerry answer questions obscures the fact that it's they who should answer questions," said Kerry adviser Richard C. Holbrooke.
Holbrooke said Bush has gotten a free ride on Iraq for months and called the national intelligence estimate "a smoking gun" that could refocus the debate. "It shows two things," he said. "One is that the situation in Iraq is as bad as the more pessimistic observers have said. Two, that the president was aware of these assessments back in June and has been misleading the public ever since by concealing his own intelligence estimates."
Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) said Kerry must "stop litigating what has been their [the Bush campaign's] deftness in taking advantage of a complicated issue," a reference to Kerry's struggle to explain his positions on Iraq.
"Start focusing on what's the plan, Stan," Biden said. "This administration wants to be judged on what they say is the central front of the war on terror which is Iraq. The president says we're doing well in Iraq. The president misunderstood, misjudged and misled the American people on Iraq consistently, since the fall of the statue of Saddam Hussein."
Kerry has run into two problems of his own making, aides say: He voted to authorize the war in 2002, says today the war is wrong but will not take back his vote; and he has yet to detail a markedly different strategy than Bush's for ending the conflict. This has allowed the president to argue -- with great success, Democrats say -- that Kerry and Bush basically agreed on the need to go to war and see eye to eye on how to get out.
Bush boxed Kerry into a situation where the Democratic nominee was "running in the same circles on the same questions," said Michael McCurry, the former White House spokesman under President Bill Clinton who was brought aboard this past week to sharpen Kerry's message. Moreover, polls show the president has convinced a large number of voters that Kerry is a flip-flopper whose word cannot be trusted.
McCurry admitted that this will be difficult to undo. Bush "paid a lot of money to drive up Kerry's negatives," he said. "Once you wear those negatives they put on you, it is hard to get them off."
The goal of Kerry's advisers is to change the dynamics of the debate. Kerry has reworked his stump speech with a new toughly worded indictment of the conditions in Iraq: the increasing number of deaths, the spread of terrorists and extremists, the growing clout of anti-American insurgents, and what some say are fading hopes for the country's first-ever democratic elections in January.
He also is punctuating the speeches by accusing Bush of misleading the nation about these problems. "He misled America step after step about what this is about and what is at stake," Kerry said Friday at town hall forum in Aurora, Colo. "We deserve a president who tells America the truth." It is not uncommon for Kerry to use some variation of "dishonesty" more than a dozen times in a 30-minute appearance now.
Amid daily reports of deaths in Iraq, Kerry is trying to portray Bush as disconnected from voters and reality when he offers optimistic assessments. "With all due respect to the president, has he turned on the evening news lately?" Kerry said Friday in Albuquerque. "Does he read the newspapers? Does he really know what's happening? Is he talking about the same war that the rest of us are talking about?"
Kerry advisers vow not to cede any ground to Bush as he performs his presidential duties this week at the United Nations and the White House with Allawi, but the president's advisers believe that, even amid concerns rising about Iraq, they can hold the high ground in the debate. "The reason the debate has served to strengthen the president's position and hurt Kerry's position is President Bush shows strength and resolve and Senator Kerry shows weakness and vacillation," Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman said.
Bush used the Republican National Convention in New York to refocus public attention on the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as much as on the war in Iraq, hoping to solidify public confidence in his leadership in the war on terrorism. That day has an emotional hold on voters, and the Bush campaign effectively evoked the memories from the convention through the memorial services of last weekend.
"Now we're seeing something slightly different: all the problems in Iraq," Democratic pollster Peter Hart said. "No matter how we tote it, things are not going well in Iraq. I've always believed the number of days Iraq is on the front pages of the newspaper has direct impact on Bush's reelection."
--------
White House Gives the Pentagon a Wring
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post
Sunday, September 19, 2004; Page A05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32134-2004Sep18.html
That drip, drip, drip on 16th Street has nothing to do with the remnants of Hurricane Ivan.
It is the sound of the White House releasing newly discovered documents from President Bush's service in the National Guard during the Vietnam War.
The latest document dump came on -- when else? -- Friday night. The release of undesirable news late on a Friday had been a cliché even before the Bush administration, but now it's downright tired and hackneyed.
The latest documents -- the third of Bush Guard files since the White House said in February that all had been released -- shed little light on the question of Bush's service. But they may not be the last of the documents to surface.
Though it sounds to some like stonewalling, the routine appearance of supposedly nonexistent documents is more likely the result of a less-than-enthusiastic search by Defense Department officials under orders from White House officials who are less than eager to have new documents discovered.
In his briefing Wednesday, White House press secretary Scott McClellan expressed some irritation with the Pentagon, saying that "they didn't do as comprehensive a search as we had requested" for files related to Bush's Air National Guard service.
McClellan has stopped guaranteeing that the document flow has stopped. The Department of Defense "has told us they believe this is everything," he said yesterday.
-------- us politics
Democrats Reassess Prospects to Win House
As Kerry's Momentum Lags, Hopes of Regaining Majority of Seats Dim, Analysts Say
By Charles Babington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 19, 2004; Page A09
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32029-2004Sep18.html
Democrats' hopes of regaining the House majority this fall -- never bright at best -- appear increasingly dim, in part because of Sen. John F. Kerry's lackluster campaign performance over the past six weeks, numerous analysts say.
In late July, as upbeat Democrats held their convention in Boston, party leaders said they had capable, well-financed House candidates poised in several states to exploit a nationwide trend that seemed just around the corner. "Democrats can win the House back if this breeze, this movement for a change, continues," said Rep. Robert T. Matsui (Calif.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Since then, however, Republicans conducted a sharp-edged convention in New York, Kerry was slow to respond to attacks on his character and policies, and many of the Democrats' most promising House challengers seemed frozen in place.
When the Massachusetts senator appeared to gain momentum entering and exiting the Boston convention, "the theory was it would all seep down to the House races," said Amy Walter, who tracks House contests for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. "But it hasn't happened." Among top Democrats, she said, "you just don't hear that same level of enthusiasm you did a month ago."
Democrats say there is still time for their nominees to catch fire in House campaigns, which typically start much later than presidential and Senate races. Even their biggest cheerleaders, however, acknowledge that the coveted midsummer breeze never came, and the clock is ticking down on a possible Democratic surge.
"It would be less than candid to say there was a great wind out there at this point in time. There is not," House Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) told reporters last week. But "I do expect it to develop in the next eight weeks."
Many GOP leaders say that their House majority is safe, and that it might even expand on Nov. 2. They point to statistics suggesting that the Democratic goal is extremely difficult. Republicans control 229 House seats, while Democrats have 206 (including a friendly independent). With Democrats failing to contest a reconfigured Texas district they now hold, they will have to pick up 13 seats in November to gain a bare majority. (Two Democratic gains in special elections this year -- in Kentucky and South Dakota -- were offset when lawmakers elected as Democrats in Texas and Louisiana switched to the GOP.)
Analysts say there are fewer than 35 competitive House races this fall, with each party defending 15 to 17 at-risk seats. For Democrats to regain the majority they lost a decade ago, "they would have to win everything in the open seats and hold all their own," said Rep. Thomas M. Reynolds (R-N.Y.), chairman of the GOP's House campaign committee. They do not need a breeze, he said, "they need a monsoon."
The Democrats' task is more daunting than Reynolds suggested. They could win all eight of the competitive open seats (Republicans now hold five of those), and reelect each of their endangered incumbents, and still fall well short of the majority. To control the House, Democrats must do all of that, plus topple several GOP incumbents.
Political insiders and local reporters do not see that happening -- for now, at least -- in part because there is no national mood remotely resembling the anti-Democratic fervor of the 1994 elections or the deeply anti-Republican sentiments that sprang from the Watergate scandal in 1974.
A prime target is first-term Rep. Rick Renzi (R-Ariz.), who won a three-way race in 2002 with less than 50 percent of the vote. Democrats crowed this year when they recruited Paul Babbitt, brother of former interior secretary Bruce Babbitt. But a new poll by the Social Research Laboratory of Northern Arizona University shows Renzi still leading Babbitt by 11 percentage points, virtually identical to an April poll's findings. A new Babbitt campaign poll shows Renzi with a smaller lead, 41 percent to 34 percent.
Democrats are more hopeful in Kentucky, where a recent poll showed Tony Miller leading four-term Rep. Anne M. Northup (R). But GOP campaign spokesman Carl Forti said Northup is a proven political survivor, adding, "We're not worried."
Even if a Democratic breeze starts blowing, Republicans say they will stop in on the Texas plains.
Thanks to aggressive GOP-led redistricting there last year, five Democratic lawmakers from Texas are fighting for survival in districts redrawn to favor Republicans. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (Tex.), the plan's chief engineer, told reporters last week that Republicans are ahead in all five of those races, an assertion Democrats dispute.
"We will gain seats in this election," DeLay said.
Top Democrats including Hoyer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) are traveling to battleground districts to help their nominees raise money and attract voters. "We proved the pundits wrong when they said we could not win in Kentucky or South Dakota, and we'll prove them wrong again if they say we can't win the House," Pelosi said last week. "We have the candidates. We have the issues. We are ready to go."
----
Senators Urge Bush to Rethink Iraq Policy
September 19, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Iraq.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Senators from both parties urged the Bush administration on Sunday to make a realistic assessment of the situation in Iraq and adjust its policies aimed at pacifying the country. But Bush readied a firm defense of his Iraq policy -- and a sharp new attack on rival John Kerry's stance -- for a speech Monday.
``The fact is a crisp, sharp analysis of our policies is required. We didn't do that in Vietnam, and we saw 11 years of casualties mount to the point where we finally lost,'' said Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Vietnam War veteran who is co-chairman of President Bush's re-election committee in Nebraska.
``We can't lose this. It is too important,'' Hagel, R-Neb., said on CBS' ``Face the Nation.''
A major problem, said leaders of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was incompetence by the administration in reconstructing the country's shattered infrastructure.
The chairman, Sen. Richard Lugar, noted that Congress appropriated $18.4 billion a year ago this week for reconstruction. No more than $1 billion has been spent. ``This is the incompetence in the administration,'' Lugar, R-Ind., said on ABC's ``This Week.''
``Exactly right,'' interjected Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden, the committee's top Democrat. He said later: ``This has been incompetence so far. Five percent of the $18.4 billion that George Bush keeps ... beating the other candidate up and about the head for how he voted and didn't vote, and he's released 5 percent.''
Sen. John McCain, who has campaigned often with the president, said mistakes in Iraq generally can be attributed to inadequate manpower. McCain, R-Ariz., said problems began arising shortly after the dash through the desert to take Baghdad, the capital, in April 2003.
``We made serious mistakes right after the initial successes by not having enough troops on the ground, by allowing the looting, by not securing the borders,'' McCain said.
``Airstrikes don't do it; artillery doesn't do it. Boots on the ground do it,'' McCain told ``Fox News Sunday.''
Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., said Bush had pointed out from the beginning that the risks of combat in Iraq.
``I find it shocking that some people are surprised by the fact that it is a long and difficult conflict,'' Kyl said.
``What's important is that you have a leader who recognizes that there are difficulties, but who is committed to prevailing; who has a firm idea of what he wants to accomplish, confidence in his commanders in the field, and who doesn't send mixed messages to the troops or to our allies, or most importantly, to our enemies,'' Kyl said.
Bush planned to use that line of attack against Kerry on Monday, seeking to counter increasingly hard-hitting language the Massachusetts senator has been using on Bush's Iraq policy.
In a speech in New Hampshire, Bush ``will step up his critique of John Kerry's policy on Iraq of retreat and defeat,'' said Bush campaign spokesman Scott Stanzel. ``Our troops deserve better than to hear Kerry's campaign pushing pessimism and lack of faith in the mission.''
Kerry too was ratcheting up his attacks on Bush and Iraq, in a speech to be delivered at New York University. The Democrat ``will lay out his plan for cleaning up the mess George Bush has made in Iraq,'' said campaign spokesman Phil Singer.
Bush's campaign also was airing a new TV commercial promoting his broader anti-terror efforts.
``President Bush and our leaders in Congress have a plan,'' an announcer says. Among the items listed on the ad are beefing up border and port security, reorganizing the intelligence services, renewing the Patriot Act, and giving the military ``all it needs.''
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., acknowledged that the situation may deteriorate further before it gets better as antidemocratic forces try to prevent democracy from taking hold.
``So this is not a civil war. This is a part of the war on terror, where the terrorists have gone to Iraq, and we need to fight back or we'll lose the region,'' Graham told CNN's ``Late Edition.''
McCain was asked about a report in Sunday's New York Times that U.S. commanders were planning a drive in November or December to retake areas where insurgents have won control. Such a timetable would place the operations after the Nov. 2 election for the White House.
McCain said Bush was not being ``as straight as we would want him to be'' about the situation. ``The longer we delay with these sanctuaries, the more difficult the challenge is going to be and the more casualties we will incur and the Iraqi people will suffer because they will be able to operate out of these sanctuaries obviously now with somewhat of impunity,'' McCain said.
----
How Would They End the War?
By JAMES BENNET
September 19, 2004
NY TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/19/weekinreview/19benn.html?ei=1&en=6f15dc23e78a1616&ex=1096633433&pagewanted=print&position=
WASHINGTON - President Bush told voters in Minnesota on Thursday that "there's ongoing acts of violence" in Iraq but "this country's headed toward democracy."
Senator John Kerry told the National Guard Association, meeting in Las Vegas, that Mr. Bush lived in "a fantasy world of spin," and that "with each passing day, we're seeing more chaos, more violence, more indiscriminate killings" in Iraq.
As usual, neither man had much to say about what might seem a weighty, connected challenge: How to bring the conflict in Iraq to a close.
This presidential campaign has a passion for the fine print, from the precise service records of the candidates to the exact positions they have taken, and adjusted, over the years.
But when it comes to a paramount foreign policy test the next president will face, Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry have said little more than that each will end the war the right way and his opponent will not.
In terms of presidential politics, the blurriness of the debate has so far worked to Mr. Bush's advantage, political strategists say. He has succeeded in framing the Iraq war as part of a larger war on terror, while Mr. Kerry faces limits imposed by his own past decisions, including his vote to give the president authority to use force in Iraq at the outset.
But in terms of public debate, a chance to clarify the means and aims of an American war may be going by the wayside.
The vagueness stems partly from the military and diplomatic realities, the elusiveness of any quick fix. And it stems partly from the obstacles that would face any challenger trying to find a campaign issue in a foreign crisis.
"It's a very tough thing to talk about for both, for different reasons," said Matt Bennett, a Democratic consultant. "For Bush, because it's a liability, and for Kerry, because it's hard to figure out what to say."
He said that Mr. Kerry was "boxed in by the reality that you don't want to prejudge a situation for which you don't have the intelligence, or you could get beaten up" by the press.
Scott Reed, a Republican strategist, said that by transferring sovereignty to the Iraqis in June and by looking ahead now to some form of elections in January, Mr. Bush distanced himself from the conflict. "I think that's been a clever strategy to keep them once removed," he said. "While the steady stream of bad news from Iraq is wearing people down, it seems like Iraqi problems."
In envisioning a way out of Iraq, each candidate offers less a detailed road map than an arrow in the sand. As he often does, Mr. Bush fused the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan on Thursday, telling his audience in St. Cloud, Minn., "We'll help them get their elections, we'll get them on the path to stability and democracy as quickly as possible, and then our troops will return home with the honor they have earned."
On Wednesday, in a rare development, one candidate was pressed for specifics. The radio host Don Imus asked Mr. Kerry how he would meet his stated goal of leaving Iraq in a first term. Mr. Kerry said, "The plan gets more complicated every single day" because of the mayhem there.
He said he would "immediately call a summit meeting of the European community," seek more help from allies and speed training of Iraqi troops. Questioned further, Mr. Kerry said: "What everybody in America ought to be doing today is not asking me. They ought to be asking the president, 'What is your plan?' "
Mr. Imus said, "We're asking you because you want to be president."
Mr. Kerry replied, "I can't tell you what I'm going to find on the ground on Jan. 20."
During presidential races in two previous wars in 1952, during the Korean war, and in 1968, during the Vietnam War the debate also stayed blurry. "That's a straight line from '52 through '68 to today," said Douglas. C. Foyle, a political scientist at Wesleyan University who is writing a book about the effect of campaigns on foreign policy. "Nobody has an answer and nobody's being very specific."
Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower won in 1952 after offering only the fuzziest of alternatives. Just before the election, he promised that, if elected, he would "concentrate on the job of ending the Korean war" and added, "I shall go to Korea." He left wide open the question of what he might do there.
In 1968, Richard Nixon promised "to end the war and win the peace." He offered few specifics beyond one that has an echo in Mr. Kerry's campaign today - a pledge to speed the training of the local American allies, South Vietnamese troops.
"He was very cagey about it," said Kenneth L. Khachigian, a longtime Republican strategist who, at 23, was a researcher for Nixon in 1968. "He didn't want to restrict his options." Mr. Khachigian noted that Nixon had a significant advantage over Mr. Kerry - he could sit back and let Democratic opponents of the war attack it and his rival, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey.
Mr. Kerry's advisers say that he plans to present soon a more detailed proposal for ending the conflict. To be credible, he must address voters' worries about the war, they say, though they believe domestic issues like health care are more politically effective for him.
Mr. Kerry's critics say his caution fuels a perception that he is being evasive. But he has real "incentives to obfuscate," said Peter Feaver, a political scientist at Duke University, including concerns that a new attack in the United States or a sudden change in Iraq could make committing to a specific proposal now seem misguided later.
The bulk of Mr. Bush's supporters on the Iraq conflict have similar reasons for backing it, while his critics differ on fundamental questions like whether it is a good war fought poorly or a mistaken venture from the start. "His statements on Iraq, if he's precise, end up offending one or the other wing," Professor Feaver said of Mr. Kerry.
Mr. Kerry is also hobbled by his vote authorizing the president to go to war and his agreement with Mr. Bush that walking away now would embolden enemies of the United States. So he is trying to challenge Mr. Bush on his management of the war and his honesty in talking about it.
Mr. Kerry presents himself as better able to extricate the United States. He is pressing distinctions not of broad strategy but of tactics, which might not provide the sharp contrast he wants.
Even Mr. Kerry's talk of recruiting more allies has exposed him to an implicit attack from Mr. Bush, who routinely says, as he did in St. Cloud, "I will never turn over America's national security decisions to leaders of other countries."
Mr. Kerry is also caught in a larger box - his essential agreement with Mr. Bush's vision of the worldwide terrorist threat.
Now, Mr. Kerry would like to isolate Iraq from Afghanistan and the larger struggle against terrorism, while Mr. Bush wants to connect them. Mr. Kerry would like to connect the war in Iraq to problems within the United States -"It's wrong to be opening firehouses in Baghdad and closing them down in the United States of America,'' he says - while Mr. Bush wants to keep them apart.
Mr. Bush's campaign task has been easier because of the politics that accompany a struggle against terrorism, in which the threat seems as real and close as the next trip downtown but the enemy is spectral.
Mr. Bush consistently merges the Iraq war with the wider struggle. "You're fighting terrorist enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan and across the globe so we do not have to face them here at home," he told the National Guard convention on Tuesday.
David Axelrod, a Democratic strategist based in Chicago, said that by morphing the conflicts in Iraq and against terror, the Republicans were making attacks on the Iraq policy "a sign of weakness in the war on terrorism."
"By putting it in that context they try to put the protective shield around themselves and use the negative energy against you," he said, adding that the Iraq war may actually have emboldened terrorists. He said that the Republican strategy may yet be "sorely tested" because "the situation in Iraq seems to be worsening."
Mr. Kerry is trying to convince voters that, because of the costs of the Iraq war, Mr. Bush has forced them to sacrifice without explicitly asking them to, spending an estimated $200 billion on a foreign adventure rather than on needs at home.
For that message to stick, voters must first accept his premise that, his own vote notwithstanding, the war in Iraq was a mistake.
That explains why Mr. Bush and his surrogates spend far more time justifying the entrance to the war than pointing to an exit.
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Utah Voices: For ignoring constitutional war powers we reap the whirlwind
The Salt Lake Tribune
By Bruce S. Jenkins
09/19/2004
http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/ci_2417005
As a child I was taught to take the Constitution seriously. Some in my community asserted that it was a divinely inspired document which should be respected, revered and followed. After all, the creators of that document were persons of experience, learning and wisdom who had thought deeply about how government should be structured and how power should be divided.
As a U.S. district judge, I have admired and cherished their history-tested insights. I speak here, however, as a citizen and only for myself. The framers, with their bitter experience of colonial status, their natural mistrust of undue power in the hands of one man, deliberately fractured governmental power into three great departments - legislative, executive and judicial - each to balance or check the power of the other. Miraculously, that fundamental structure has endured for more than 200 years.
In the allocation of governmental power, the founders placed the power to declare war in the legislative branch. The words of the Constitution are plain. Section 8 of Article 1 says, "Congress shall have the power . . . to declare war . . . ." They did this deliberately and with full appreciation of the hard lessons of history, particularly British, French, Roman and Greek history.
The design was to limit the power of one man to take the nation into war. They taught that the decision to start a war, and the inevitable cost in lives and treasure, foreseen and unforeseen, required that the nation make such a critical decision through its representatives in Congress, and to announce such group decision by a declaration. The president has no power to declare war. The judiciary has no power to declare war. The legislative branch, and it alone, has the power to declare war.
To date, the Congress has not declared war against anyone, including Iraq. Yet the president calls himself a wartime president. The Congress has funded a war, off budget, that has yet to be declared. The failure to declare implicates international treaties and agreements, including how we treat prisoners. Nowhere in that hallowed document, the Constitution, do we find that the president may declare war. In 2002, the Congress passed a resolution which in effect delegated to the president the power to make war:
"3. (a) AUTHORIZATION. - The president is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to - (1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq . . . ." Nowhere in the venerable document do we find the power of the Congress to delegate its responsibility to another, president or not.
The Congress cannot amend the Constitution by legislation or resolution. One of the reasons for removing such a critical decision from one man was to slow the process down, to enable those charged with the responsibility for decision to examine with care the reasons, the facts supporting such a decision, and to make sure that the facts that drive the conclusion to start a war are real, not illusory. By delegating the decision to the president and thus avoiding its responsibility, the Congress skipped that careful process and relied upon others to make an examination of the underlying facts and reasons - which now appear, with belated, after-the-fact examination, to be thin, flawed, or nonexistent.
It is elementary that the power to conduct a war, which is the responsibility of the president as the commander in chief, is different than the power to start a war, which under the Constitution is the responsibility of the Congress. Some may point to "precedent" that in the past some presidents have indeed acted contrary to the Constitution and the Congress let them get away with it. On occasion the members of Congress have been complicit in abdicating their responsibilities under the Constitution. But their historic actions in no way obliterate the words and the wisdom of the document.
The people are owed "due process" in a different sense than usually employed; that is to say, a congressional process which carefully and completely examines the factual footing for making a momentous and far-reaching decision on whether we should or should not initiate a war. And if Congress decides we should, the Congress must have the courage to declare that decision to all the world with a specified and named foreign state in mind. The Congress should then be prepared to defend such a decision and be answerable therefore, including the consequences which flow therefrom, including the cost in lives and public treasure.
Absent that, the people are shortchanged by their congressional representatives and as a result appear to have been victimized by an executive process which, at this point, seems to have been wanting in care and in depth. I have long wondered about the failure of the press and other media to examine the war power clause in any depth within the context of our current state of affairs.
I have long lamented that the avowed "strict constructionists" are leading the charge of those who would ignore the plain language of the Constitution. The founders were long on brains and experience. An imperial presidency was dangerous and they knew it. That's the very reason they built in a constitutional check to guard against it. To our sorrow it goes ignored. We reap the whirlwind.
U.S. Senior District Judge Bruce S. Jenkins has served 26 years on the federal bench in Salt Lake City.
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Not-so-innocent abroad
Journalist Seymour Hersh tears into the Bush team's foreign policy
nydailynews.com
BY BILL BELL
September 19, 2004
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/story/233244p-200330c.html
CHAIN OF COMMAND
By Seymour M. Hersh
HarperCollins, $25.95
This is a perp walk for the Bush administration.
George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and the rest of the gang aren't cuffed, but here they are, defiantly swaggering past the pop, pop, pop of photographers' flashbulbs.
Their defenders will call the charges a bum rap, but the case against them has been made by Seymour Hersh, a relentless, resourceful investigative reporter, and he sounds like he's got the goods.
His charges, many first filed in investigative reports in the New Yorker magazine, where he has worked since 1998, include dereliction of duty, conspiracy, conflict of interest, perjury, torture and war crimes. Other charges, not punishable in court, include wishful thinking.
Hersh hammers home point after point after point in a dispassionate style, producing a scathing critique of the Bush administration's handling not only of Iraq but of Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey and, above all, Pakistan, which sold nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea, Libya and other countries as the White House, relying on Pakistan in its war on terror, looked the other way.
One diplomat in Vienna, who, like many of Hersh's most sensitive sources, is not identified by name, sums it up. "Iraq is laughable in comparison with this issue [the globalization of technology to produce nuclear weapons]," he told Hersh. "The Bush administration was hunting the shadows instead of the prey."
Rumsfeld is a major figure in the case against the administration, and not only for disregarding the Constitution, the Geneva Convention and other safeguards against unlawful behavior. He also is faulted for a dangerous arrogance and his inability to anticipate the fallout from his actions.
But, in the revelations that most shocked Americans and the world, Hersh writes, Rumsfeld was far from alone. The Abu Ghraib prison scandal, Hersh says, was not rooted in the criminal inclinations of a handful of Army Reservists but in the secrecy, coercion and twisted legal justifications concocted by Bush, White House lawyers, high-ranking military officers and senior advisers.
Bush relies heavily on advisers, which is no secret, but Hersh makes an interesting point about the way they measure their influence.
For example, Wolfowitz and several other key conservatives driving the Bush foreign-policy agenda are admirers of Leo Strauss, a University of Chicago political philosopher who taught that statesmen must rely on an inner circle. By this thinking, according to a Strauss critic, "The person who whispers in the ear of the king is more important than the king."
There were good guys. Several military lawyers went public with claims that the administration endorsed torture, and many intelligence and diplomatic analysts warned the Iraq adventure was doomed to failure - it was called "a Bay of Goats" by Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni. In the end, they were outnumbered or outflanked.
Still, the gang Hersh so skillfully and unsparingly indicts may well beat the rap; its fate is in the hands of a jury that will render a verdict Nov. 2.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Fury as bomb-grade plutonium sets sail for France from US
Exclusive: By Rob Edwards, Environment Editor
19 September 2004
UK Herald
http://www.sundayherald.com/44923
WEAPONS-grade plutonium, sufficient to make up to 40 nuclear warheads, is expected to be loaded onto two armed British ships in the US this week and then carried across the Atlantic to France.
The US plan to send 140 kilograms of bomb-grade plutonium for processing in France will be the most controversial nuclear shipment for years. Throughout its two-week voyage, the plutonium will be protected by British military forces. When it arrives at the port of Cherbourg it is expected to be greeted by protesters.
On September 3 the Pacific Teal and the Pacific Pintail, two armed nuclear transport ships run by the state-owned, British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL), left the port of Barrow in northwest England. This weekend they are believed to be somewhere off the US naval base at Charleston in South Carolina.
In the next few days they will dock, take on board heavy casks of plutonium oxide, and head back across the Atlantic. After they arrive at Cherbourg, the plutonium will be taken by road to a fuel fabrication plant run by the French firm, Cogema, at Cadarache, north of Marseilles.
The US and French governments argue that the aim of the shipment is to get rid of "surplus" weapons plutonium by making it into a fuel for nuclear power stations. This is part of an agreement between the US and Russia that both countries will get rid of 34 tonnes of plutonium from "excess" nuclear warheads.
The plan is to make the plutonium into fuel rods, then transport them to another facility at Marcoule, north of Avignon, to assemble them. Sometime at the beginning of 2005, they will be returned to the US to try out in a reactor.
The US government is keen to demonstrate that the fuel, known as MOX, will work. It then plans to commission Cogema and others to help build and operate a MOX fuel fabrication plant at Savannah River in South Carolina.
The US plan has provoked fierce criticisms. "Unless it is carried out in a manner as safe and secure as possible, the cure may end up worse than the disease," said Dr Edwin Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington DC.
"It would be a disaster if plutonium were to be diverted or stolen by terrorists because of inadequate security during the stages of the disposition process. Yet if this programme continues along its current path, such a theft may well be inevitable."
But such criticisms are rebuffed by the US, French and British authorities involved in the shipment. "It will proceed just fine with no safety or security problems," said Bryan Wilkes, a spokesman for the US National Nuclear Security Administration.
He says he cannot describe the security measures that are being taken, but he is confident that they will be sufficient. He accuses opponents of the shipment of helping terrorists by publicising the planned route and timings.
Henry-Jacques Neau, head of transport with Cogema, said the shipment will have "the highest level of security" from British defence forces. BNFL points out that that its ships have an excellent safety record. "During more than 20 years of transports there has never been an incident resulting in the release of radioactivity," said a company spokesman.
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British aided Mossad kidnap, says Vanunu
sundayherald
By Stephen Naysmith
19 September 2004
http://www.sundayherald.com/44913
ISRAELI nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu risked legal retribution during a telephone interview at a human rights festival yesterday, as he claimed that British, French, Italian, and US security services had co-operated in his 1986 kidnapping by Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency.
Vanunu, 49, who completed an 18-year jail sentence in Israel in April, is barred from leaving the country and from talking to foreign nationals or foreign media under release terms.
The former nuclear technician, convicted of espionage and treason after revealing Israel's secret nuclear weapons programme, defied the ban to call for the elimination of nuclear weapons, including the UK's Trident submarines.
His interview took place at the International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival, using a live phone link between a Glasgow cinema and St George's Cathedral in Jerusalem.
After a brief film of Vanunu reading a poem entitled I Am Your Spy, which he wrote in 1987 while in jail, the man who is an icon to many anti-nuclear campaigners and a traitor to many Israelis said he would not accede to the conditions imposed on him, but hoped they would not be enforced.
"Nothing happened when I gave an interview to the BBC. All I am doing is repeating the same message I did 18 years ago and speaking out about human rights. I think the Israel government is realising these restrictions are not acceptable," he said.
Asked about the honeytrap operation in which a US-based Mossad agent, known only as Cindy, lured him to Rome in 1986, he claimed agents from many security services had been involved. He said: "Eighteen years ago in London, the Sunday Times was ready to publish the information I had given them but, before they could, Israeli spies sent a woman from the US who talked me back to Rome.
"Mossad spies kidnapped me and drugged me, but it was a cohort of spies, from France, England, Israel, Italy, the US and others. They wanted to silence me."
Vanunu said he had kept his spirits up during his 18-year sentence, 11 of which were spent in solitary, through sheer determination to be free and by keeping mentally active. "I exercised every day, reading, training and listening to opera, watching TV and reading letters from many friends."
He called for the abolition of nuclear weapons, saying: "I know very well that Scottish people are acting and working against nuclear weapons. I want to send them my encouragement. Scotland should reject Trident submarines. There is no justification for nuclear submarines, England does not have any enemies to justify possessing them."
He also criticised Israeli president Ariel Sharon and the security barrier being built around the occupied territories. "Israel is still very dangerous. The intifada operated by Sharon is proving Israel doesn't want peace and is not interested in solving the Palestinian problem.
"The walls are a symbol that Israel doesn't want peace. There is no future hope of peace for Palestinians who are imprisoned by this wall without committing any crime.
"The world should wake up and should press Israel to destroy these walls," he said.
He called for people to support him, saying: "I hope you can do all that you can by raising my case in the UK parliament, to raise my case with [Prime Minister] Tony Blair and [Foreign Secretary] Jack Straw and to demand Israel respects my human rights as a human being to move, to leave the country and to write and speak to foreigners."
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