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NUCLEAR
Nuclear firms lack safety culture
N. Korea rules out talks with South unless nuclear experiments probed
U.N. Nuke Chief ElBaradei Heads to S.Korea, Japan
MILITARY
Sudan Agrees to Allow 3,500 African Union Troops Into Darfur
Thought police
Former Boeing official in prison
Ex-Air Force Official Gets Prison Time
Ex-Pentagon Official Gets 9 Months for Conspiring to Favor Boeing
Inquiry Stymied on Company With Air Force Ties
Troops Battle to Control Samarra
Aided by Iraqis, U.S. Seizes Part of Rebel Town
Rumsfeld Foresees Violence in Iraq Up to Election
Israel's new Gaza security zone echoes southern Lebanon
10 More Palestinians Killed in Gaza
Israeli Tanks and Bulldozers in Assault on Gaza Town
Ariel Sharon Calls for Expansion of Army's Gaza Raid
Syria Is Defying U.N., Annan Says
Annan Presses Syria To Pull Out of Lebanon
A former Russian soldier tells of his war in Chechnya
Putin Close to Winning New Power Over Judiciary
NASA Delays Shuttle Flight Set for Spring
MP Questions Iraqi Woman's Conference Speech
C.I.A.-White House Tensions Are Being Made Public to Rare Degree
Bush tempers argument for pre-emptive strikes
Pinochet Faces Tax Charges in Chile
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Homeland Security: A Bad Joke
DHS Blamed for Failure To Combine Watch Lists
Top U.S. Cyber-Security Official Resigns
Staten Island Phone Let U.S. Eavesdrop on Global Militants
Disarray Thwarts Terrorist List, Inquiry Finds
Police Lab's Troubles Grow
Guantanamo letter alleges torture
New Qaeda Audiotape Urges Muslims to 'Carry On the Fight'
No. 2 Al Qaeda Leader Urges Attacks Against U.S. and Allies
POLITICS
Analysts Consider DeLay's Rebukes
Congress Moves to Protect Federal Whistleblowers
Bush Aides Gave One - Sided View of Iraqi Data
As an Issue, War Is Risky for Both Sides
OTHER
A 'Small' Eruption At Mount St. Helens Repeat of 1980 Not Expected
U.S. Warns of Big Mount St. Helens Blast
ACTIVISTS
Demonstrators oppose Canada's involvement in US missile defense shield
Greenpeace on lookout for US nuclear waste shipment heading to France
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- japan
Nuclear firms lack safety culture
October 2, 2004
Yomiuri Shimbun
Toshiaki Sato, Tatsuo Nakajima and Isaku Kodera,
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/newse/20041002wo36.htm
Five years have passed since Japan's first nuclear criticality accident took place, but lessons do not seem to have been learned.
In the five-year period since the Sept. 30, 1999, chain reaction accident at a nuclear fuel-processing plant in Tokaimura, Ibaraki Prefecture, a number of nuclear energy-related scandals and accidents have occurred.
The accident at the Tokaimura plant of JCO, a subsidiary of Sumitomo Metal Mining Co., caused the death of two workers and exposed at least 660 residents in the plant's vicinity to radioactivity, due to JCO's failure to adhere to government-approved procedures for handling uranium compounds.
Because of the mishandling of uranium solution--resulting from JCO workers' lack of rudimentary knowledge of nuclear safety--the uranium solution reached what is known as criticality, when a nuclear fission chain reaction becomes self-sustaining, releasing a massive amount of radiation over about 20 hours.
Following the accident, the government stiffened regulations ensuring safety at nuclear energy utilities, but many nuclear energy-related accidents and irregularities have continued to be brought to light.
One major factor behind the situation is a gap between government regulators and private sector nuclear energy firms' awareness of the need for continuous safety reviews and measures.
Village split over JCO plant
With its nuclear fuel processing operations banned by the government after the accident, the number of JCO employees at the plant has been reduced by half to 90, most engaged in jobs such as processing low-level radioactive waste.
The plant's uranium conversion building, where the accident occurred, still continues to emit radioactivity, albeit only a minute quantity not considered harmful to humans.
After the accident, JCO decided to dismantle the conversion building and related facilities, including the building's uranium solution precipitation tank.
In autumn last year, Tokaimura mayor Tatsuya Murakami asked JCO and the central government to preserve the building and related equipment for display to the public.
"The conservation of the building and equipment is key to having the JCO accident serve as a lesson for preventing another nuclear accident," Murakami said.
Views of the village residents, however, have been sharply split over whether to support the conservation plan proposed by the mayor.
A recent opinion poll showed that 42 percent of residents surveyed were for dismantling the plant, 26 percent supported the planned preservation, and 15 percent wanted the plant to be displayed after being moved elsewhere.
The village assembly, for its part, passed a resolution in July, calling for the village government to pay "due consideration to the ongoing stress of residents exposed to radiation in the accident."
The resolution demanded that the JCO plant be dismantled and supported a central government idea of making a miniature model of the scene of the accident for public display.
Preparations are being made for dismantling the plant, but the village mayor is set against the plan, coming out with a compromise proposal for dismantling it so it can be reassembled as a memorial.
Safety culture nonexistent
"People operating nuclear energy-related businesses are still far from paying sufficient attention to safety," a senior official of the government's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said.
The official was a member of the NISA team that last week released an interim report on the fatal accident at Kansai Electric Power Co.'s Mihama nuclear power plant in Fukui Prefecture. In the Aug. 9 accident, steam and hot water gushed from a fractured pipe, killing five people.
"The nation's nuclear energy programs have no future if they do not regain the trust of the people, especially residents of communities where nuclear facilities are located," the official said.
"Many in charge of running businesses relating to nuclear energy have failed to understand this self-evident principle," he said on condition of anonymity.
Negligence in dealing with nuclear safety among electric power companies and other nuclear energy-related businesses has been pointed out many times since the JCO criticality accident, which was due to the company's profit-first policy that disregarded safety standards set by the government.
Many power company executives, however, refused to acknowledge the need to review safety arrangements, claiming that the JCO accident was at a minor nuclear fuel-processing plant with safety standards far inferior to those at their nuclear reactors.
However, such incidents as Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s cover-up of problems with its nuclear reactors that was brought to light in summer 2003, and the August accident at Kansai Electric Power's Mihama nuclear power plant revealed the propensity of power companies to treat safety issues lightly.
Just as JCO arbitrarily altered the procedures for uranium-processing operations to save costs, KEPCO was equally negligent. The pipe had eroded due to internal steam pressure from 10 millimeters thick to about one millimeter at the point of rupture. The company admitted to interpreting the government-set safety standards on piping "in our own way," and to failing to perform safety inspections on that section in 28 years of operations.
TEPCO, the nation's largest power company, tampered with data on cracks found in devices within some of its reactors, continuing to operate them without any qualms.
As a former executive of a power company put it: "Power companies have continued placing priority on keeping operation rates of reactors as high as possible, so they tend to think it's OK to be a bit sloppy about safety," adding, "This culture of mismanagement is too deeply ingrained to change."
Govt regulations not cure-all
The government tightened regulations in the wake of the JCO accident stipulating the following measures:
-- A statutory system of government inspections of nuclear energy-related companies to ensure compliance with safety standards set on a company-by-company basis.
-- Introduction of a whistle-blower system for each company.
The newly established inspection system has allowed the government to check the safety of not only nuclear facilities themselves, but also the software and documentation of safety arrangements.
Under the system, NISA officials conduct safety inspections of nuclear facilities and scrutinize documents concerning operations four times a year.
It is a near impossibility, however, for officials to inspect all the nation's nuclear facilities.
Given this, nuclear energy-related businesses must be forced to enhance their safety measures. From this point of view, the government has made it obligatory for the businesses to establish an in-house safety surveillance team with wide-ranging powers to ensure that safety regulations are observed.
Related to this, electric power companies have asked the government to study the introduction of what are called incentive provisions in regulations governing nuclear facilities in the United States.
Under the system, nuclear power plants are classified into four safety management categories based on the voluntary submission of relevant data to the authorities by power companies.
Those power companies displaying a high degree of safety under the system are allowed to have the frequency and range of government inspections lessened, thereby raising reactor operation rates, as long as they are successful in reducing accidents.
However, the system is workable only when operators of nuclear reactors conduct honest self-evaluations of their safety systems.
A NISA official said, "Such a system could be studied only after the newly introduced safety standards in this country prove truly effective in ensuring nuclear safety."
Both the government and nuclear energy-related businesses should start afresh and resolve to ensure safe operation of nuclear facilities. Without such action, regaining public confidence lost because of accidents and irregularities will prove impossible.
-------- korea
N. Korea rules out talks with South unless nuclear experiments probed
SEOUL (AFP)
Oct 02, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041002153719.64hlwrv8.html
North Korea Saturday ruled out any progress in inter-Korean relations unless the South's secret nuclear experiments are thoroughly investigated.
Relations between the two Koreas have been strained over Seoul's shock revelations that South Korean scientists carried out clandestine nuclear experiments and a mass defection by North Korean refugees to the South in July.
"It will be impossible to expect any development of the inter-Korean relations unless the truth about South Korea's secret nuclear experiments is probed," the North's official Korean Central News Agency quoted a spokesman of the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland saying in a statement.
The committee is Pyongyang's counterpart of the South's Unification Ministry which handles official contacts with the North.
Last month, South Korea admitted that its scientists extracted a small amount of plutonium -- a key ingredient for making nuclear bombs -- in secret research in the early 1980s and had also conducted unauthorised experiments to enrich uranium, also used to build nuclear weapons.
Seoul has said the experiments were not linked to an atomic weapons program but the clandestine activity has embarrassed the United States and ally South Korea at a time when they are trying, through six-party talks, to pressure Stalinist North Korea to end its nuclear weapons drive.
Pyongyang however said Seoul's nuclear revelations were only "the tip of the iceberg".
"The cases of secret nuclear experiments disclosed one after another in South Korea recently are all but a tip of the iceberg of the serious nuclear development activities that the South Korean authorities have so far conducted in a premeditated manner," the North Korean statement said.
"The clandestine nuclear development pursued for over 20 years helped South Korea acquire basic criteria for nuclear armament such as extraction of nuclear substance, production of nukes, access to means for nuclear delivery and preparations for a nuclear war and put all this under a perfect system.
"This is a serious case as it seriously affects the situation on the Korean peninsula and the relations between the North and the South."
Pyongyang has also refused to take part in a fourth round of multilateral talks on its nuclear weapons program which had been scheduled for September, blaming both US "hostile" policy and secret nuclear experiments in South Korea.
The nuclear stand-off intensified in October 2002 when the United States accused North Korea of operating a nuclear weapons programme based on enriched uranium in violation of a 1994 agreement.
Pyongyang has denied running the uranium-based program but has restarted its plutonium program.
-------- u.n.
U.N. Nuke Chief ElBaradei Heads to S.Korea, Japan
October 2, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nuclear-elbaradei.html
VIENNA (Reuters) - The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog, Mohamed ElBaradei, flies to South Korea Saturday to discuss revelations about Seoul's undeclared atomic research and to launch his campaign for a third term at the agency.
After completing talks with South Korean officials, the 61-year-old head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) departs for Tokyo Wednesday, an IAEA spokeswoman said.
``He'll be in Tokyo when the Nobel Peace Prize is announced Friday,'' IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said. Nominated jointly, ElBaradei and the IAEA are one of the favorites for the prize.
South Korea recently acknowledged that scientists enriched a small amount of uranium in 2000 and separated plutonium in 1982 without government knowledge or approval. Diplomats have said that some of the uranium was close to the purity needed for an atom bomb. Plutonium can also be used in a bomb.
ElBaradei will be discussing the IAEA's preliminary findings in Seoul. Agency inspectors, who were in South Korea last week to take environmental samples and interview scientists, will submit a report to the IAEA board of governors next month, after which South Korea hopes the case will be closed.
Some diplomats on the board have said South Korea's failure to report the experiments was a violation of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and should be reported to the U.N. Security Council.
ElBaradei's visit to Asia is his first official trip since he announced his desire to remain at the helm of the U.N. agency for a third term. The United States is against his candidacy, but diplomats in Vienna said ElBaradei hoped to confirm the support of Seoul and Tokyo during the trip.
ELBARADEI WAS IMPLORED TO STAY
``Many member countries implored me to continue and complete several pending issues such as the Iranian nuclear file and those of Iraq and North Korea ... (and) build a more effective system to combat the nuclear black market,'' the Egyptian diplomat told the Arabic newspaper Asharq al-Awsat.
ElBaradei, a lawyer who has been at the IAEA for two decades and has headed it since 1997, said he would have preferred not to seek another term as the IAEA's director general.
``I would like to bring all these issues to a close. But from a personal point of view, I would be a lot more relaxed if I left. I would be more comfortable physically, mentally and financially, and I see my continuation as a form a sacrifice.''
ElBaradei has the backing of a majority of the IAEA's member states, but he will face strong opposition from Washington. Officially the United States says it opposes any official remaining at the head of a U.N. agency beyond a second term. Unofficially, Washington is unhappy with his performance and wants him out, diplomats in Vienna say.
U.S. Under Secretary of State for arms control and international security John Bolton made it clear last week that U.S. frustration with the U.N., which has been unable to contain the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs, runs deep.
``There is ... enormous frustration on many occasions within the American body politic about the ineffectiveness and inefficiency of U.N. agencies,'' Bolton said in a speech.
Bolton, who has repeatedly criticized the IAEA for not reporting Iran to the Security Council for concealing its uranium enrichment program for 18 years, has told the IAEA that Washington opposes a new term for ElBaradei, diplomats say.
-------- MILITARY
-------- africa
Sudan Agrees to Allow 3,500 African Union Troops Into Darfur
October 2, 2004
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/02/international/africa/02sudan.html?pagewanted=all
KHARTOUM, Sudan, Oct. 1 - Sudan has agreed to allow 3,500 African Union troops into war-ravaged western Darfur as a means of building confidence among civilians who, United Nations officials have repeatedly said, no longer trust their own government. Among other things, the African Union monitors will be allowed to police the Sudanese police.
The agreement represents the largest step taken by this government to comply with the demands of the United Nations Security Council. It is already under biting international pressure, most notably the threat of sanctions, should it fail to act to restore security in Darfur.
The war in the west has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced nearly 1.5 million, mostly black Africans, from their homes. It began in early 2003 with a rebel uprising that demanded greater political and economic rights for the long-marginalized west. The Arab-led government cracked down, using its own military and arming private Arab militias.
The United States has called the government's actions genocide. The United Nations Security Council, in a resolution passed in September, ordered an inquiry commission to determine whether the violence in Darfur met the criteria for genocide.
The government's decision comes as the Security Council prepares to review a report next week on Sudan's progress made by the secretary general's special representative on Sudan, Jan Pronk. The swift expansion of African Union troops and the broadening of their mandate has been among his crucial demands. "We need many thousands of African Union troops with a broad mandate, quick deployment, big numbers," Mr. Pronk said in an interview last week.
Until now, Sudan has resolutely opposed any foreign intervention in security matters and allowed only a handful of African Union soldiers to monitor a cease-fire agreement; in the western region roughly the size of France, there are 68 unarmed monitors and 308 armed troops to protect them.
In a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York on Friday, the Sudanese foreign minister, Mustafa Osman Ismail, said his government had asked the African Union to work with its security forces in Darfur "so that we will make sure that there is no violation of human rights, there is no killing, there is building of confidence."
"We need to expand their mandate and to give them more mandates, for protection, mandate for checking, mandate for investigating, and yes, they need such mandates," he added.
Adam Thiam, the spokesman for the chairman of the African Union Commission in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, said in a telephone interview on Friday evening that deployment would begin as soon as possible. Both Nigeria and Rwanda have committed the necessary number of troops, but logistical support like trucks and helicopters remain an obstacle.
Mr. Pronk's spokeswoman, Radhia Achour, welcomed the government's move as a "major step forward."
"We do believe it will help a great deal in restoring the confidence between the population of Darfur and the government of Sudan and between Sudan and the international community," she said in an interview here. "We would call on the government of Sudan to maintain this spirit of cooperation and to sustain this level of cooperation once this mission is deployed."
The broadened mandate of the African Union would include monitoring the Sudanese police, but would fall significantly short of authorization to protect civilians. That kind of mandate, under Chapter 7 of the United Nations Charter, has not been discussed and is unlikely to be accepted by Sudan, United Nations officials have said.
-------- britain
Thought police
The Spectator.co.uk
2 October 2004
http://www.antiwar.com/spectator/spec398.html
Paul Robinson says the Tories are so frightened of challenging Blair on the war that their favourite think-tank will not tolerate dissent When the remaining flotsam of 20 or so Conservative MPs wash up on dry land after the next general election, they may do well to consider why it was that during this Parliament, every time the credibility of Prime Minister Tony Blair sank further into the depths, the credibility of their own party sank with it.
If Tony Blair is George W. Bush's poodle, the Conservative party is the poodle's poodle or, as Jonathan Swift might have put it, the flea's flea: 'Naturalists observe, a flea/hath smaller fleas that on him prey,' he wrote, 'And these have smaller fleas to bite 'em,/and so proceed ad infinitum.' Blair's genius has been to make his political opponents complicit in his own crimes, so that when he suffers for them, so do they. In fact they suffer for them even more than his own party does, since the general public sees that many within the Labour party dislike the Prime Minister rather more than most Conservatives do. In the run-up to the war in Iraq, the Labour party at least had the virtue of a sizeable rebellion in its ranks. The Conservative party had no such thing. As a result, it cannot capitalise on the war scandals which have been revealed, and is taking much of the blame.
Oppositions are meant to oppose. Instead we have the creepy spectacle of Tory MP John Bercow writing crawling letters to Tony Blair saying, 'Congratulations on your superb speech in the Iraq debate. On this subject, as on many other foreign affairs issues, you have provided outstanding statemanship.' Not to be outsmarmed, the newly endorsed Conservative parliamentary candidate Michael Gove cries, 'I can't hold it back any more; I love Tony!'
The subservience extends beyond lip service. Take David Blunkett's endless efforts to revoke every civil liberty all the way back to Magna Carta. Where is the outrage on the Conservative benches? If the Tories came into power, can anyone imagine that they would abolish Blunkett's obnoxious identity cards with their gratuitous fee, end the practice of imprisoning people indefinitely without trial, or revoke extradition treaties which oblige this country to put British citizens into the hands of foreigners without the latter having to produce any evidence against those citizens? Obviously not. The Tories are (with some noble exceptions) as enamoured of authoritarianism as our Home Secretary.
The voter has not been impressed. In Leicester and Birmingham, the Conservatives could at least kid themselves that they took such a battering because there were a large number of Muslims in those constituencies. When they come fourth behind the Respect coalition in the Hartlepool by-election, there will be no such excuse. The Conservative party is drowning, not waving.
The fatal shipwreck was the Conservative policy towards Iraq and matters of defence and security in general. Opinion polls regularly showed that Conservatives were much more likely to be anti-war than Labour voters. Yet instead of seizing the helm, the Conservatives nervously bleated along behind Tony Blair. In consequence, Britain now finds that it went to war on what have proved to be false premises, and the official opposition is incapable of landing a single blow on the person responsible. It is hardly surprising that people are abandoning the Conservatives in droves.
There is a way forward. That is for the Conservative party to stop bailing out its doomed policy, admit that it was taken in by the deceptions, and make a fresh start.
Sadly, there seems not the slightest chance of such a thing happening. Conservatives seem incapable of seeing the iceberg sticking up through the broken shards of their dogmas on defence and security. Their hysterical reaction to the statement on defence capabilities was typical. They remembered to shout 'betrayal' on cue, like pantomime villains, but left their pocket calculators at home. Spending more money on new equipment while firing people is not cuts, but restructuring. Geoff Hoon, for once, is quite right. We are sacking infantrymen not because we are spending too little, but because we are using up all the money on aircraft carriers and fancy new electronic gadgets so that we can sail off to invade other people. It isn't the size of the budget which is wrong. It is the priorities.
The Conservatives are not just uninformed about defence matters, but determined not to learn. One of Britain's most respected soldiers, General Sir Michael Rose, recently wrote in the International Herald Tribune: 'It is all too clear that the present American [and to this we may add British] strategy, which is based on military intervention, is not working - and that a radically different approach to global security is needed.' But try getting the Conservative establishment in this country even to consider what that might mean in practice, and in a flash you see a row of duck tails sticking up, heads deep in the water.
Not long ago I had an experience which demonstrated the problem all too clearly. Earlier this summer a conservative organisation, the Centre for Policy Studies, invited me to write an original pamphlet on defence policy. (I almost called this body a think-tank, but I fear that although they certainly believe in armoured warfare, there is no think in their tank.) The pamphlet (whose outline the CPS approved) laid out a conservative-minded thesis arguing against the doctrines of military intervention and expeditionary warfare which have characterised defence policy under the Blair government. I concluded, as agreed, by offering some controversial, and hopefully thought-provoking, recommendations.
The CPS reviewed the pamphlet and told me that the 'analysis was very good' and the ideas 'extremely well expressed'. However, they also had to cringingly inform me that a member of the organisation's management board (no doubt a senior Tory) had 'thrown a fit' without even reading the pamphlet. The pamphlet was thus vetoed; as a matter of policy, the CPS would not, under any circumstances, countenance any opinions which did not coincide with that particular member's own ideas of what defence should be. This is not so much the 'Centre for Policy Studies' as the 'Centre for Pre-determined Policies'. It was precisely this problem of deciding the answer first, and then working out how to get it, that led us into so much trouble over Iraqi WMD, but it appears that the lesson has not been learnt.
Alone among the conservative press, The Spectator has done a sterling job in representing the anti-war sentiment of most conservative-minded people in this country. It has given voice to Matthew Parris, Simon Jenkins, Correlli Barnett, and others. In return it has faced the inevitable accusations of 'appeasement'. Sadly, it is the latter who are ruling the roost. The Conservative party and its hangers-on in the world of the Daily Telegraph, the Times and so-called think-tanks like the CPS are clearly determined to veto any 'radically different approach' of the sort demanded by General Rose, preferably without even understanding it first. They are determined not to examine or reconsider policies which have proved disastrous for both themselves and the country.
The Conservatives will pay for their folly at the polls. Mr Gove may find that his safe seat proves not to be so safe after all, and that a year or so from now he isn't among that rump mournfully looking on at the spectacle of Charles Kennedy, leader of Her Majesty's loyal opposition.
-------- business
Former Boeing official in prison
October 02, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/business/20041001-102225-4713r.htm
A former Air Force official was sentenced to nine months in prison yesterday after admitting that she helped Boeing Co. obtain a lucrative contract in hopes of landing an executive job at the company.
Darleen Druyun offered a tearful apology "to my nation, to my Air Force."
"I deeply regret any damage I have done," she said.
Druyun pleaded guilty in April to conspiring to violate conflict-of-interest rules by negotiating with Boeing for a job while overseeing Pentagon consideration of a $23 billion deal to provide 100 refueling-tanker planes. She was hired by Boeing and then fired 10 months later for what the company called unethical conduct.
"She did this as a parting gift to Boeing and to ingratiate herself into Boeing," said federal prosecutor Robert Wiechering.
Even after her guilty plea, Druyun had maintained that her crime was merely a technical violation and that she had upheld the government's interests during the contract process.
But she later failed a lie-detector test and conceded that her conflict produced substantive benefits for Boeing, prosecutors said. She also admitted altered journals to cover up her story.
Judge T.S. Ellis III in U.S. District Court in Alexandria sentenced Druyun to nine months in prison and seven months in a halfway house, less than the 16 months of prison time sought by prosecutors.
Druyun's attorney, John Dowd, said he was pleased with the sentence.
He acknowledged to the judge that Druyun had lied at first about the scope of her wrongdoing. "She had difficulty coming to grips with some matters," Mr. Dowd said. "But she did. She finally did."
The Defense Department is reviewing the refueling-tanker deal.
Prosecutors said former Boeing Chief Financial Officer Michael Sears improperly contacted Druyun about a potential top-level company job in 2002, when she still was with the Air Force and playing a key role in deciding whether Boeing should get the tanker contract.
----
Ex-Air Force Official Gets Prison Time
Boeing Received Special Treatment in Procurement
By Renae Merle and Jerry Markon
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, October 2, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A64968-2004Oct1?language=printer
A former high-ranking Air Force procurement official was sentenced to nine months in federal prison yesterday after admitting that she approved excessive prices on contracts awarded to Boeing Co. to enhance her job prospects with the company.
Conceding that she lied to prosecutors, Darleen A. Druyun, 56, revealed that she committed the Air Force to buy 100 airplanes from Boeing at an inflated price of about $20 billion as a "parting gift" before her Pentagon retirement to ingratiate herself with her future employer. She also slipped to Boeing proprietary pricing information from a rival European bidder on the aircraft contract. Druyun awarded Boeing an unrelated $4 billion contract because she felt in debt to the company for hiring her daughter and future son-in-law, according to court documents. An "objective selection" process, she said, may not have picked Boeing from the four competitors.
In a quivering voice, Druyun apologized before U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III in Alexandria, telling the court she felt "shame and remorse" that her 30-year tenure as a government employee "has been tarnished. . . . I understand that this was wrong and I regret any damage my conduct may have caused to the Air Force."
Druyun's case is the highest-profile defense procurement scandal since the Operation Ill Wind investigation, which resulted in more than 60 convictions starting in the late 1980s. It is expected to ripple throughout the industry, renewing concern about the potential pitfalls of the revolving door between government and the defense industry. Chicago-based Boeing, the Pentagon's second-largest contractor, will likely face fresh questions about several of its contracts, and the procurement system that allowed Druyun to favor one company over another will come under sharper scrutiny.
The Air Force said it has already taken steps to ensure Druyun's conduct is not repeated, saying her long tenure allowed her to gain more power than was proper. "This was a case of an individual who engaged in personal misconduct and does not reflect the high levels of integrity and accountability within the Air Force acquisition community," said Col. Jay DeFrank, Air Force spokesman.
Druyun, a civilian, was at the grade of a lieutenant general when she retired and became vice president in charge of Boeing's missile defense systems in January 2003. Druyun's Boeing salary -- $250,000 plus a $50,000 signing bonus -- was nearly double the top Pentagon pay for her position.
Officials said Druyun admitted the extent of her deceptions only after being subjected to a polygraph test. She acknowledged altering her personal journal before turning it over to prosecutors. "She did great harm to the government, and that harm is continuing now," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert W. Wiechering.
In addition to nine months in prison, Ellis ordered Druyun to serve seven months in a community facility, which could include a halfway house or home confinement. She also received three years of probation. Prosecutors had asked for 16 months in prison. Before prosecutors uncovered her deceptions, Druyun was eligible for up to six months in prison or just probation.
Boeing said Druyun's admissions of years of preferential treatment to the company came as a surprise. "Our reputation is being tested once again," Harry C. Stonecipher, Boeing president and chief executive, said in a message to the company's 157,000 employees. "We don't know how this will come out; but whatever we find, we have the will and a process to deal with it."
"It's going to take time, but we'll get through this," Stonecipher said.
Boeing fired Druyun and its chief financial officer, Michael M. Sears, in November for illegally negotiating Druyun's employment with the company while she was overseeing several Boeing contracts. Sears was scheduled to plead guilty last month, but the hearing was postponed while investigators untangled Druyun's conflicting statements, a law enforcement source said.
Druyun oversaw thousands of contracts in her Air Force tenure, but the most controversial was the deal to lease then buy the 100 refueling aircraft from Boeing. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a chief critic of the deal, has complained that the Air Force acted as a advocate for Boeing and not taxpayers.
During the negotiations, Druyun contacted an unidentified senior Boeing official involved in the talks to discuss her daughter's job in the company's St. Louis office. Her daughter, Heather McKee, feared being fired over performance issues, according to court documents. After Druyun intervened, McKee was transferred to another position and the senior official continued to update Druyun on her daughter's performance, including informing her about a pay raise, the documents said.
McKee left Boeing voluntarily more than a month ago, but Druyun's son-in-law is still employed at the company, a Boeing spokesman said.
Druyun's misdeeds dated back to 2000, when she was seeking employment for her future son-in-law, according to court documents. At the time, Druyun was negotiating a price adjustment on Boeing's C-17 aircraft contract, which would reflect changes in labor or material costs. Druyun awarded Boeing a $412 million payment. She told prosecutors her decision was influenced by Boeing's assistance to her son-in-law.
Druyun's admissions will force Boeing to seek again to regain trust within the Pentagon and industry. A suspension of Boeing's space unit for unrelated misdeeds was expected to be lifted soon, but that is now unlikely, analysts said. "It's not like that company wasn't already under microscope; now it's an electro-microscope," said John A. Howell, a government contracts expert.
Boeing's 767 line, which would be boosted by the tanker deal, is back in jeopardy. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was expected to make a decision on the tanker lease after the election, but an advisory group Rumsfeld asked to study the issue, the Defense Science Board, agreed during a March meeting that tanker modernization could be postponed for up to 10 years, according to documents read to The Washington Post by sources familiar with the matter.
Investigations continue into the 100-aircraft deal. The Department of Defense inspector general is withholding from the Senate Armed Services Committee more than 100 e-mails from Marvin R. Sambur, the Air Force's acquisition chief, because they are "law enforcement sensitive" and have been referred to the U.S. attorney's office, sources said. A Defense Department spokesman could not be reached late yesterday for comment.
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Ex-Pentagon Official Gets 9 Months for Conspiring to Favor Boeing
October 2, 2004
New York Times
By LESLIE WAYNE
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/02/business/02boeing.html
ALEXANDRIA, Va., Oct. 1. - A former top Air Force official was sentenced to nine months in prison on Friday after acknowledging that she had favored the Boeing Company in multibillion-dollar Pentagon contracts while seeking jobs at the company for herself and family.
The official, Darleen A. Druyun, pleaded guilty in April to one count of conspiracy for negotiating a job with Boeing overseeing its business with the Pentagon. On Friday, at a sentencing hearing in Federal District Court here, details emerged on the extent of her favoritism toward Boeing as well as the difficult negotiations during which she admitted to misleading government investigators.
Ms. Druyun said that Boeing would not have been selected for some military projects or would have received lower payments if not for her efforts to obtain jobs for herself, her daughter and her son-in-law.
The hope of obtaining the jobs, she said, led her to favor Boeing in the selection and pricing of several major projects, including a $20 billion leasing agreement for 100 airborne tankers, a 2002 reworking of a NATO early warning system, a $4 billion upgrading of the C-130 aircraft and a $412 million payment on a C-17 contract.
The new facts, and an admission by Ms. Druyun that she had also misled investigators after pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy last April, resulted in Ms. Druyun's having her sentence increased. The information came out in an amended statement made public at the hearing and elicited gasps when read by the assistant United States attorney, Robert W. Wiechering.
"I am truly sorry for my actions," said Ms. Druyun, 56, who left her job as one of the top procurement officers at the Air Force in late 2002 after 30 years to accept a $250,000 executive position at Boeing.
In a statement accompanied by tears, she spoke of feeling "deep shame" and apologized to "my nation, my Air Force, my family and the courts for what I did."
When Ms. Druyun pleaded guilty in April, she was eligible for a prison term of up to six months under sentencing guidelines. As a result of having lied to investigators after entering her plea, the guidelines require a prison term of 10 to 16 months.
Ms. Druyun was fired from Boeing in November along with the former chief financial officer, Michael M. Sears, who negotiated Ms. Druyun's employment contract and who has agreed to plead guilty to similar charges. In addition, Boeing's former chief executive, Philip M. Condit, resigned shortly after the firings. Ms. Druyun's daughter recently resigned from Boeing, but her son-in-law still works there.
Additional investigations are also being conducted by the Department of Justice and the Pentagon.
After pleading guilty in April, Ms. Druyun told government investigators that her job discussions with Boeing had not influenced her actions at the Pentagon or harmed the government. Only after failing a lie detector test did Ms. Druyun admit that her decisions as an Air Force official were shaped by a desire to curry favor with Boeing.
Specifically, Ms. Druyun agreed to a higher price for Boeing aerial refueling tankers than she thought appropriate and gave proprietary pricing data to Boeing "as a 'parting gift to Boeing' and because of her desire to ingratiate herself with Boeing, her future employer," according to court papers signed by Ms. Druyun and the government. That deal is currently suspended.
In addition, Ms. Druyun admitted to selecting Boeing over four others for a $4 billion program to upgrade C-130 avionics out of gratitude to Boeing for having hired her daughter and son-in-law. Ms. Druyun now thinks that an objective analysis would not have given Boeing the contract, court papers said.
A $100 million payment to Boeing for a NATO early warning system was also cited in the court papers, in which Ms. Druyun admitted that she felt a lower settlement amount was more appropriate. That payment is being renegotiated by the Air Force.
At the moment, the Department of Defense Inspector General's office is investigating all deals negotiated by Ms. Druyun, once one of the highest-ranking women at the Pentagon.
"We view this as a case of an individual who engaged in personal misconduct," said Col. Dewey Ford, an Air Force spokesman. "Independent of this issue, our Air Force senior leadership has implemented changes within our acquisition community that will reduce the likelihood that this will ever happen again."
Harry C. Stonecipher, Boeing's president and chief executive, said: "I have the highest confidence in the integrity and systems of the Boeing Company, and we will exert all energy to address any inadequacies that need to be corrected. Whatever we find, we have the will and a process to deal with it."
In handing down the sentence, Judge T. S. Ellis III said that "you stand convicted of a very serious crime" and added that "we are at war and your position was all the more important."
Ms. Druyun will serve nine months in prison, followed by seven months of community confinement in South Carolina. She also must pay a $5,000 fine and is required to speak to high school and college students on ethical issues as part of a required 150 hours of community service.
The United States attorney, Paul McNulty, called the sentence "fair" and said that "Darleen Druyun owed her primary allegiance to the American taxpayer.''
"Instead she put her own personal interests ahead of the United States Air Force."
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Inquiry Stymied on Company With Air Force Ties
October 2, 2004
New York Times
By DIANA B. HENRIQUES
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/02/business/02ties.html?pagewanted=all&position=
If you're a military officer, you can't miss First Command Financial Planning of Fort Worth.
It sells life insurance and investments to young officers serving around the world. Many of its executives and most of its agents were officers once themselves, and they let you know it. A parade of retired generals and admirals serve on its advisory boards. With more than 300,000 customers, virtually all of them current or former officers, the company depends on the military for its very existence.
And in a smaller way the military relies on First Command. The company, like others in this market, has long sponsored popular events like the Marine Corps Marathon and the Air Force talent show, Tops in Blue.
So First Command was not happy a year ago when it discovered that a legal office at Air Force headquarters had put out a notice asking military lawyers in the field for feedback on "reports of possible unethical or overly aggressive" sales practices by the company's agents. The notice also raised questions about the suitability of the company's core product, an archaic and expensive type of mutual fund with sales fees that eat up half of an investor's first-year contributions.
First Command fought back: it complained to the second- most-powerful general in the Air Force. And it was heard.
The New York Times has found that within three weeks of the legal office's posting, the Air Force issued a retraction, which it had allowed the company to edit. It gave the company a letter of exoneration, signed by the Air Force's top legal officer, after letting the company edit that, too. The Air Force legal staff stopped cooperating with a securities industry investigation into the company's practices and products. And the Air Force effectively abandoned a broad inquiry of its own, letting local base authorities handle complaints.
One complaint was about a First Command agent who had made veiled threats against a young officer in Charleston, S.C., suggesting he could be court-martialed or sued for criticizing the company in an e-mail message.
First Command's success in its face-off with Air Force lawyers was a stark illustration of how a company with strong military connections can influence the very people who are supposed to monitor its sales activities on bases.
One of those who felt that influence was Thomas L. Farmer, who, from his Pentagon office, worked on the First Command inquiry for the Judge Advocate General's Corps, which oversees the administration of justice and ethics for the Air Force. Mr. Farmer, who was a major at the time but has since left the service, said that neither the Air Force nor the company has acknowledged the chilling impact that the episode, especially the company-edited retraction, has had in the ranks.
"Most JAG officers would take it as an endorsement of First Command," Mr. Farmer said of the retraction. "Our being rebuked sends a message out to the field that 'well, they're not going to be able to help us' when it comes to this company." He added, "When we tried to tackle it, First Command could contact a four-star general and stop us, to the point where First Command is helping to write official Air Force material."
Mercer Bullard, president of Fund Democracy, an advocacy group for mutual fund shareholders' interests, said the episode underscored the danger of relying on the military to police the sale of financial products on bases.
"The JAG Corps is the most independent, most likely agency in the military to stand up to these companies," said Professor Bullard, who teaches law at the University of Mississippi. "If the JAG Corps can't do it, no one else in the military will be able to."
First Command maintains that in appealing to the top ranks of the Air Force, it was seeking fair treatment, not special treatment.
"What was put in that posting was inaccurate and unfair and harmed our company," said Lanny J. Davis, a Washington lawyer and former special counsel to the Clinton administration who represents the company. "Because we were concerned with getting a correction quickly, we couldn't afford the luxury of going up the chain of command to get a remedy. So we went as high as we could, to get it immediately."
The company went as high as Gen. T. Michael Moseley, the Air Force vice chief of staff. An Air Force spokesman, Col. Gary Halbert, said the general's role was "fairly routine," intended only to ensure that the company got a prompt and appropriate response. General Moseley, the colonel said, did not intend to discourage the Judge Advocate General's Corps from enforcing the rules that govern the sale of insurance and investments on military bases.
General Moseley himself said in a written statement: "Fighting and winning the global war on terrorism and providing support for our airmen are my top priorities. We have made and will continue to make every effort to protect our airmen from unscrupulous salespeople and fraudulent products."
Straight to the Generals
Three events prompted Mr. Farmer's office, the legal assistance and preventive law division, to send out the notice inquiring about First Command. The first was an e-mail message in early July 2003 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California complaining that some First Command agents were using a senior officer's name without permission to get clerks to give them the telephone numbers of officer trainees.
A few weeks later, a brigadier general in the Air National Guard sent Mr. Farmer's unit a copy of an article from Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine that criticized the expensive kind of mutual fund sold by First Command. Then the office received a request for information from NASD, the securities industry regulatory group, which had opened an inquiry into First Command.
The newsletter item, which also told field offices how to forward complaints to NASD, ran on Aug. 20, 2003, in the Judge Advocate General's Corps internal electronic newsletter, The On-Line News. And it caught the attention of the Air Force unit in San Antonio that oversees Tops in Blue, the touring Air Force talent show. Two days later, the program office asked First Command about the item. This was apparently the first the company had heard of it.
A spokesman for the judge advocate general, Lt. Col. Doug Murdock, said the item should never have gone beyond the JAG Corps. "Unfortunately," he said, "the article was interpreted as an indictment of First Command's business practices."
Lamar C. Smith, First Command's chairman and chief executive, was quick to respond. In an electronic memorandum titled "Thoughts," he acknowledged that the agent's threatening call to the young officer in Charleston "was an error and I will apologize for it." But he also expressed his anger, adding, "we have a real grievance" against the officer.
"Shall we pursue our own remedies?" Mr. Smith wrote. "If we do it will get harsh and expensive for the officer in a hurry."
The memo was sent to the Air Force by a senior vice president, Kurt B. Anderson, a retired Air Force general. A copy was obtained by The Times, as were copies of other documents for this article, including e-mail messages and handwritten notes of telephone conversations. Both the Air Force and First Command verified the authenticity of the documents.
Mr. Davis, the company's lawyer, said Mr. Smith's "Thoughts" had been written in the heat of the moment. But he acknowledged that Mr. Smith had been "upset and frustrated" with the Air Force and conveyed those feelings to senior officers.
One of them, the company said, was an old friend of Mr. Smith, Gen. Richard Brown 3rd, now retired, who was the acting assistant vice chief of staff. Mr. Smith then sent a letter of outrage to General Moseley, who had just become vice chief of staff. The letter, dated Aug. 28, cited the company's long support for Tops in Blue, condemned the Kiplinger's article and complained that the JAG item's author was "inviting others to join his war on First Command by filing complaints with regulators."
What the JAG staff should have done, Mr. Smith said, was report the Vandenberg complaint and any others to First Command.
The company would then have taken "instant and withering" action to discipline any agent involved, Mr. Smith wrote. He demanded that the JAG office run a "crystal clear retraction" and advise officers in the field that the item "should be disregarded."
The Order Is Retracted
A week later, the company said, another senior First Command executive, Rich Giles, a former Air Force captain, telephoned General Moseley, whom he had known for 30 years. And on Sept. 5, Mr. Smith followed up with a second letter to General Moseley warning that the company faced "the early stages of a 'wild fire.' ''
Mr. Smith's complaint moved down the chain of command from General Moseley to the judge advocate general, Thomas J. Fiscus. Two days later, General Fiscus called a staff member at home and loudly upbraided him for his staff's handling of the First Command inquiry, notes in the JAG files show. He cited the letters and calls to General Moseley and warned of possible litigation.
Colonel Murdock, the JAG spokesman, said the general was "reacting to his discovery that there were very limited complaints" behind the office's original inquiry.
The staff was now directed to draft a retraction for the newsletter. But its language did not satisfy General Anderson, the First Command executive, who was allowed to edit the item. His version, published almost verbatim on Sept. 10, 2003, said that "virtually no negative information about First Command has been received" as a result of the original item.
First Command was allowed to edit the retraction because the Air Force believed that was appropriate "to resolve the unfair impact" of the item, Colonel Murdock said.
On Sept. 18, First Command got the letter of exoneration it had demanded. The letter, too, was edited by the company, Colonel Murdock said. One change, though small, was significant. The Air Force's draft said the original item had been prompted by "complaints." First Command proposed changing that to "a single complaint." Lt. Col. Timothy Guiden, Mr. Farmer's boss, opposed the change, noting that four problems had been reported. He was overruled, the documents show.
The letter "tried to correct the record for their customers, undo any harm that had been done and level the playing field," Colonel Murdock said. But military documents confirm that complaints continued to arrive, both in writing and made orally to General Fiscus. (He temporarily stepped down last week pending the outcome of an unrelated Air Force investigation.) In each complaint, agents appeared to be trying to use "command influence," the power of senior leaders to sway junior officers, on First Command's behalf.
Only the incidents at Vandenberg and Charleston were ever reported to First Command, the company said. Its only disciplinary response was to counsel the agent in Charleston, said Mr. Davis, the company's lawyer. The Air Force said that none of the other complaints had revealed any systemic problem and that all had been resolved at the local base level. None were passed along to NASD, either.
"After we got slapped down in such a public manner, continued cooperation with the NASD was off the table," Mr. Farmer said.
NASD has nevertheless pursued its inquiry, which has been joined by the Securities and Exchange Commission and should be concluded soon, Congressional aides say.
Since The Times first examined First Command's practices in a two-part series in July, the company has come under scrutiny in Congress. Lawmakers are considering legislation to abolish the type of mutual funds the company sells and require the military to coordinate more closely with civilian regulators.
There was one small coda. In January, First Command notified the Air Force that it would no longer provide $150,000 a year to sponsor Tops in Blue. The company said the decision was based on "marketing considerations." But one Air Force executive attributed the loss directly to the JAG office's initial newsletter query about First Command. In an e-mail message to General Fiscus last Jan. 30, the executive wrote: "This is 'water under the bridge' but wanted you to know the consequences of the article."
-------- iraq
Troops Battle to Control Samarra
With Americans Leading Way, Iraqi Forces Secure Key Religious Sites
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, October 2, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1571-2004Oct1?language=printer
BAGHDAD, Oct. 1 -- A heavily armored force of 3,000 U.S. troops, followed by 2,000 Iraqi soldiers, police officers, commandos and National Guardsmen, swept into Samarra on Friday to confront insurgents in what a senior Iraqi official said had become an "outlaw city."
The offensive in the city about 65 miles north of Baghdad largely overwhelmed the rebel force during a night and day of occasionally intense fighting. One U.S. soldier was killed, according to military officials, who estimated insurgent fatalities at more than 100. Hospital officials said they had received the bodies of dozens of Iraqis, including women and children, the Reuters news agency reported.
The assault, which began at dusk Thursday, was intended to bring a decisive conclusion to a long-running dispute over who actually runs Samarra, which has a population of 250,000. The police department and city council were co-opted months ago by an insurgency dominated by former members of ousted president Saddam Hussein's government, officials said.
With U.S. armor leading the way for Iraqi forces that secured a sensitive religious shrine and a renowned spiral minaret, the operation was described by Iraqi officials as a model for planned joint operations aimed at putting the interim government in control of several central Iraq cities before national elections promised for January.
"We will spare no effort to clean all Iraqi cities of these criminal gangs," said Qasim Dawood, the government's state minister and national security adviser. "Through these operations, we will open the way not only to reconstruction but also to prepare the general elections to be held as scheduled."
Iraqi and U.S. officials also have vowed to wrest control from insurgents in the Sunni Triangle cities of Fallujah and Ramadi, as well as in Sadr City, the large Shiite Muslim slum on Baghdad's east side. Iraq's deputy prime minister promised this week that, after weeks of largely futile efforts to negotiate political settlements, the trouble spots would be the target of military operations during October.
Senior U.S. commanders had privately predicted such operations would come in November or December because of chronic delays in training and equipping new Iraqi troops, who would follow U.S. forces into each city and assert civil order.
But Dawood offered the massive strike on Samarra as evidence of the interim government's determination to move sooner.
"Our forces are in the process of growing," Dawood said at a news conference. "If this week we are not able to do three or four operations in the same time, probably next week or the week after or after a certain time, you may see that we are going to engage many terrorist locations at the same time.
"This is an indication that our forces are growing fast, well trained and in a very responsible way."
In Fallujah, where news of the military threat was announced from mosques, fighters scrambled to take up defensive positions on the outskirts of the city and plant mines on bridges.
In Samarra, attacks on U.S. patrols have been common. In early July, a car bomb and mortar attack on an Iraqi National Guard station killed five U.S. soldiers and wounded 20. The insurgents, estimated by a U.S. commander to include perhaps three dozen foreign fighters, enforced a strict Islamic code, upbraiding young men for wearing tight jeans and punishing women who eschewed the veil.
Thousands of residents fled Samarra to shelter with relatives in Baghdad and elsewhere. American forces eventually blocked the main bridge over the Tigris River into Samarra, effectively cutting off the city from the country's main north-south highway.
"We recognized some time ago the police chief, the city council and the mayor were ineffective," said Maj. Neal O'Brien, spokesman for the Army's 1st Infantry Division.
Efforts were made to negotiate a political settlement through tribal channels, and on Sept. 9, U.S. and Iraqi forces entered the city to re-seat the city council. But negotiations deteriorated, and on Tuesday, scores of insurgents marched defiantly through central Samarra, some waving the black banner of a group headed by Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian who has taken credit for many of the car bombings and killings of foreign hostages in Iraq.
The parade was answered by Thursday's offensive. "We call that a target," a senior U.S. military official said the day after the demonstration.
American troops crossing the bridge into the city at 6 p.m. first encountered insurgents unloading ammunition from speedboats on the river below. In the ensuing firefight, four boats were destroyed.
U.S. warplanes and AH-1 Cobra helicopter gunships provided air support as the infantry pushed into the city, skirmishing with insurgents firing assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, the military said.
Along the way, 1st Infantry soldiers rescued Yahlin Kaya, a Turk who had been held hostage by insurgents and had been photographed surrounded by masked men in front of a black banner.
The Americans' main military objectives were the city hall and other public buildings that symbolize political control. But Samarra's most famous structures are religious -- and, as such, deemed off-limits to U.S. troops by their commanders.
The green-domed shrine housing the remains of two Shiite imams, Ali Hadi and Hassan Askari, was stormed at midday by commandos of Iraq's 36th Battalion, which had trained to do the same last month at the shrine of Imam Ali in the southern city of Najaf. The Samarra raid caused little damage to the structure but resulted in the capture of about 25 suspected insurgents, the military said.
O'Brien said a unit of special police secured a second sensitive site, the distinctive spiral minaret that rises above the city's Great Mosque. The tower, known as Malwiyya, dates to 848 and is the symbol of Samarra.
Three other Iraqi units rolled into the city behind the Americans, including the 202nd Iraqi National Guard, a battalion that the 1st Infantry has trained with since early August. The Iraqi army's 7th Battalion rounded out what O'Brien called "a good-sized Iraqi force."
"The important thing to remember is the Iraqi interim government asked us to do this mission," O'Brien said in a telephone interview. "There's more work to do in Samarra," he added, mostly involving restoring order so that reconstruction contracts can go forward, employing local residents and developing a city he said was often neglected by the Hussein government.
Dawood, in turn, emphasized that the Iraqi government was urged into Samarra by its tribal elders and other community leaders -- "responsible people," he said, who gathered in the home of the interim interior minister on Sept. 26.
"Those people represent most of the families and tribes of Samarra," Dawood said. "Most of them expressed concern about the security of the city and the torture and intimidation they suffered from the terrorists. They mentioned it frankly.
"So our answer came as: Here we are."
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MILITARY
Aided by Iraqis, U.S. Seizes Part of Rebel Town
October 2, 2004
The New York Times
By RICK LYMAN and DEXTER FILKINS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/02/international/middleeast/02iraq.html?pagewanted=all
SAMARRA, Iraq, Oct. 1 - American and Iraqi forces battled their way into the center of this insurgent-ridden city on Friday, claiming that they had taken control of more than half the town and that they had killed more than 100 guerrillas, in what is shaping up to be one of the largest military operations since the war began.
More than 5,000 troops, including 3,000 Americans, attacked the city from three sides early on Friday, seizing the main government buildings and a pharmaceutical factory on the city's northwest end. Iraqi forces also took control of the Golden Mosque, a Shiite holy site visited annually by thousands of pilgrims, thereby staving off a repeat of the siege of Najaf, where insurgents commandeered the Imam Ali Shrine to draw out the fighting there.
The assault here represented the first major effort by American and Iraqi forces to reclaim a series of regions that have fallen into the hands of insurgents before the nationwide elections that are scheduled to take place in January. American officials have said they plan to retake the regions in time to allow the Iraqis to vote, and that their toughest challenges still lie ahead in places like Falluja and Ramadi.
In Samarra, American commanders decided to move in three weeks after a deal that had allowed Iraqi government officials to reassert control in the city fell apart before insurgent attacks. At the time of the deal, announced Sept. 9, and even more recently, Bush administration officials in Washington were citing it as a success story for their Iraq policy.
The new assault came after growing concern among American intelligence officers that the insurgents in Samarra had begun to cooperate with their comrades in Falluja, the heart of the Iraqi insurgency where Reuters reported a strike by an American warplane on Friday night killed at least three people, including a child. The news agency said 12 others were wounded.
In Samarra, the American military said that one soldier, a member of the First Infantry Division, had been killed in the fighting on Friday and that four others had been wounded. In addition to the 100 Iraqis the Americans said they had killed, 37 others were taken prisoner, they said.
American and Iraqi officials said they planned to flush the insurgents from the city, which had fallen under their control in recent months, re-establish government authority and then pull the American troops back once calm returned. Iraqi troops and police would then be charged with maintaining control.
In an appearance in Baghdad, Qassim Daoud, the Iraqi national security adviser, struck a combative chord, promising more military operations in the Sunni Triangle. "We will spare no effort to clean all the Iraqi lands and cities from these criminals, and we will pave the way through these operations not only for reconstruction but also for the general election," Mr. Daoud said.
He said the operation followed a meeting on Sunday in Baghdad of about 110 of Samarra's sheiks and city leaders, who, he said, had asked the government to get rid of the insurgents. He conceded that plans for the military operation were under way by the time of the meeting. "Even if the citizens did not ask us, we would have gone in to clean it," he said.
The fight for Samarra marks the largest operation in which American forces have gone into battle alongside Iraqi soldiers. The strategy represents something of a risk both for the American military and the Iraqi government. In April, the Iraqi security forces largely disintegrated before uprisings in central and southern Iraq. From an American standpoint, the Iraqi soldiers, even if they do not do the bulk of the fighting, provide critical political cover that allows the operations to go forward.
The benefits of the joint strategy were instantly apparent, when a group of Iraqi soldiers took control of the Golden Mosque, a place where the presence of American soldiers would be sure to cause consternation among the locals. Iraqi soldiers searched at least one other mosque in the town.
As the operation unfolded, the Americans sealed off the roads leading into the city, cut the telephone lines and at least some of the electricity. That made it impossible, at least for now, to judge the reaction of Iraqis inside Samarra to the attack. The house-to-house searching resulted in a few hasty skirmishes, and uncovered a few small arms caches - including several mortar rounds that were detonated. Explosions and bursts of gunfire echoed throughout the city for much of the day. But there appeared to be few pitched battles, as the insurgents seemed to melt away before the superior force.
Some of the American officers who led patrols through the city on Friday seemed to sense that the guerrillas would return. "The bad guys are just pulling back to see what we're going to do," said Lt. Jonathan Martin, the executive officer of one of the companies conducting the house-to-house search. "Our guess is, this battle is going to get pretty rough and will probably last a long time."
One by one, the houses in the Jebera neighborhood in the southeastern edge of the city were kicked open - and sometimes shotgunned open - at one point revealing a bewildered wedding party that had not noticed that American forces were overrunning the neighborhood. Mostly, though, the houses were empty, and showed signs of a hasty departure.
In one home, a group of American soldiers made a surprising discovery: Yaltchin Kaya, a Turkish truck driver kidnapped about two weeks ago by insurgents. The Americans found him when they snapped the padlock on a stifling room. He had worked for KBR, the American military contractor. "Chalk one up for the good guys," said Specialist Jess Escamillas of the Army.
In the effort to meld American and Iraqi units together, some irritations appear to have developed. As an American platoon led a line of Iraqi soldiers through a Samarra neighborhood on Friday morning, clinging to the outside walls of the homes to thwart potential snipers, one Iraqi soldier blithely strolled down the middle of the street. "Hey, dummy, get out of the road," a sergeant shouted from a passing Humvee.
As two Iraqi soldiers played duelists with a pair of swords they had found in one of the abandoned houses, a lieutenant quietly berated their commander for the looting and for the potentially dangerous tomfoolery: "You better tell those boys to cut down on the swordplay."
A Humvee carrying Specialist Escamillas - whose platoon nickname is Skull - also carried Lieutenant Martin through the city. Riding in the machine-gun turret was Sgt. Travis Glass, whom the lieutenant called Sunglasses, while Pvt. Gregory Echevarria of Brooklyn sat in the back, inevitably nicknamed Big Apple.
Skull pulled on an icy bottle of Gatorade, but it was doing little to cut the fierce heat, stifling and miserable at well over 100 degrees by 10 a.m. and unrelenting until well after sunset, when the temperature plummeted to the high 60's. "This heat, man, you can't get away from it," Skull said. "Your uniform always looks like you just pulled it out of the washer, sopping wet."
Up in the turret, Sunglasses wheeled around and shouted that he had spotted a man in one of the upstairs windows of the houses. He shouted to a soldier guarding the house whether he knew about the man. "Yeah, yeah, take it easy," the soldier shouted back. "You can't shoot 'em all, you know."
Up one street and down the other, the Humvee picked its slow, deliberate way through the neighborhood, following the infantry as they kicked down doors. In one empty lot, a forlorn mule munched disconsolately on debris. A disabled big-rig truck sat at curbside, its windshield pocked with automatic-weapons fire. Blossoms of black smoke rose in thick plumes above the distant rooflines to the occasional thud, thud, thud of mortar fire and tank rounds and the chattering of gunfire.
"Did you hear that?" Big Apple asked about something that had just squawked over the radio. "They got a mortar mounted on the back of a pickup truck."
Skull shook his head. "They are a resourceful people," he said.
"And sometimes crazy," Sunglasses added.
"A very crazy country," the lieutenant concurred.
An old man opened the gate to his compound and led about a dozen dusty goats out onto the road. Suddenly, up ahead, two infantrymen stopped a car and demanded that the occupants get out to be searched. A dozen people emerged from the front seat, back seat and trunk, all raising their hands to be patted down.
Suddenly, one of the infantrymen fired two long bursts at a distant car that was not heeding warnings to slow down. The car stopped, turned and left the area as the old shepherd, startled by the gunfire, raised his staff, turned his herd and led them back into the cool of his hidden compound.
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Rumsfeld Foresees Violence in Iraq Up to Election
October 2, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-iraq-rumsfeld.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The risk in Iraq is not of civil war but that the country will end up under the control of extremists who ``run around chopping off people's heads,'' Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in remarks broadcast on Saturday.
Rumsfeld, in an interview with Fox News Channel, said he had not expected that the anti-U.S. resistance in Iraq would be as intense as it is and predicted the level of violence would remain high at least until the election scheduled for January.
He said the United States would not necessarily wait until Iraq was ``perfectly peaceful'' before withdrawing its forces, but could do so once an Iraqi government had ``developed the ability to manage their situation from a security standpoint.''
Asked about recent U.S. intelligence estimates warning of possible civil war in Iraq, Rumsfeld said:
``No one sees any sign of civil war in that country at the present time ... The risk is that the terrorists, and the extremists, and the people who are running around chopping off people's heads and killing innocent men, women and children will take over that country.
``Imagine a country ruled by people who go around chopping off people's heads. That's a dark future.''
Asked if had anticipated the insurgency would be as bad as it is, Rumsfeld replied: ``No. Because no one has a perfect view into the future.''
He said that in the last month or two U.S.-led forces seeking to achieve more stability ahead of the election had ``probably'' killed 1,500 Iraqi insurgents and ``a reasonable fraction of Zarqawi's senior people.''
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant who is Washington's most-wanted man in Iraq, is believed to have close links to al Qaeda. His group has kidnapped and beheaded several Westerners.
Asked why U.S. forces had not been able to find Zarqawi, Rumsfeld said it was ``like finding a needle in a haystack.''
``It's very hard to do. The United States military wasn't organized, trained and equipped to go out and do manhunts. That's an FBI job.''
-------- israel / palestine
Israel's new Gaza security zone echoes southern Lebanon
JERUSALEM (AFP)
Oct 02, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041002142810.uje9zyc7.html
The Israeli army, slated to pull out of the Gaza Strip altogether next year along with Jewish settlers living there, is now expanding its presence in the territory, creating a "security zone" to stop militants firing rockets.
The new buffer zone, six to nine kilometres wide (four to six miles), is part of a massive Israeli incursion into the Gaza Strip begun Tuesday and sharply escalated Wednesday after two Israeli toddlers were killed by Palestinian rocket fire in the town of Sderot.
At least 53 Palestinians have been killed since the beginning of the operation, along with two Israeli soldiers and a settler.
But Israeli commentators now see echoes of that country's debacle in southern Lebanon, where a similar security zone was set up before the Israeli army withdrew under fire in 2000, ending 22 years of occupation.
"We are levelling the terrain and taking control of it to stop those launching rockets on our towns from operating," a security aide to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told AFP.
He said that the conflict "looks more and more like a guerrilla (war) and in certain respects evokes the situation in (southern) Lebanon."
And while most Israeli officials are reluctant to talk about a "Lebanisation" of the situation in Gaza, the spectre of a retreat being portrayed as an Israeli defeat, as happened in southern Lebanon four years ago, has been raised.
Under the terms of Sharon's controversial disengagement plan, Israel intends to dismantle all 21 Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip and another four in the northern West Bank by the end of 2005, as well as implement a complete military withdrawal.
The Lebanese security zone was also aimed at preventing rocket attacks, then from Katyusha rockets launched by Shiite militant group Hezbollah on towns in northern Israel.
Now, Hezbollah has reportedly been helping Palestinian militant group Hamas to refine their Qassam rocket.
And while Sharon is determined to press ahead with his plan, Hamas is equally determined to portray it as a pullout under fire.
"This operation will take some time," said Israeli Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz, after more than 100 Israeli tanks rolled into Gaza on Friday.
As defence minister, Sharon was responsible for setting up the Lebanese security zone, and it was his prime ministerial predecessor Ehud Barak who ultimately ordered Israeli troops to withdraw in May 2000.
The Lebanese buffer zone drew not only condemnation from the international community but also from within Israel, as rocket attacks continued throughout the occupation.
Saturday morning, the Israeli army said they had completely surrounded Beit Hanun in the northern Gaza Strip and controlled the area from where Qassam rockets could be launched.
A Hamas leader then said his group was prepared to stop firing rockets on Israel if Israeli forces ended their campaign in the northern Gaza Strip.
Ismail Haniyeh spoke only hours after Hamas militants held a press conference in the nearby Jabaliya refugee camp saying they would continue firing rockets at Israel and that they would target the port city of Ashkelon.
"Our sons will stop the firing of Qassam rockets as a means of defence if the Israeli occupier ceases its aggressive incursion and its occupation in the north of the Gaza Strip," said a statement by Haniyeh.
But the Gaza security zone may not be enough. On August 28, Hamas fired a Qassam rocket from northern Gaza into an industrial zone of Ashkelon, which lies on the Mediterranean coast just a little over 10 kilometres (six miles) north of the Gaza Strip.
No one was hurt by the rocket, but it was the first improvised device to penetrate so far into Israel.
----
10 More Palestinians Killed in Gaza
Blitz Assault Targets Missile Attacks, Israeli Officials Say
By Molly Moore and John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, October 2, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A64519-2004Oct1?language=printer
JERUSALEM, Oct. 2 -- Israeli military forces killed eight Palestinians on Friday and two more early Saturday in the northern Gaza Strip in an expanding operation mounted to prevent rocket attacks. Senior Israeli officials said the assault was partly designed to persuade Palestinian civilians to pressure armed groups to stop firing rockets at Israeli towns and Jewish settlements.
The operation, in which 38 Palestinians and two Israeli soldiers have been killed over the past four days, according to local hospital officials, has been the largest and most intense assault by the Israeli military in more than two years. Three brigades with more than 100 tanks and armored personnel carriers are cordoning off the northern Gaza Strip, said Israeli officials, who indicated the attacks could continue for days.
"This operation will go for as long as it takes to stop the firing of the missiles," said Gideon Meir, an Israeli deputy foreign minister. "If we have to go deeper, we will go deeper. . . . If we have to go more forcefully, we will go more forcefully."
The incursion intensified the level of violence in a Palestinian enclave already buffeted by armed clashes and civil tension as Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, seeks to evacuate Jewish settlements in the strip. Sharon has weathered harsh attacks from members of his Likud Party and Jewish settlers over his proposed pullout, while rival Palestinian groups are maneuvering to assume positions of power.
Israeli forces launched the operation -- code-named Days of Reckoning -- late Tuesday night in an effort to prevent Palestinian guerrillas from firing Qassam rockets, crude projectiles with a range of about five miles, into Jewish settlements inside Gaza and Israeli towns near the border. But on Wednesday evening, while Israeli tanks and helicopters were conducting attacks and surveillance operations, Palestinians fired three rockets at the Israeli town of Sderot, about two miles outside Gaza, killing two small children and prompting Sharon to order a much larger military operation.
One goal of the intensified effort is to create "a big threat to the civilian, noncombatant population," said a senior Israeli official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the political sensitivity of the tactic, "to tell them they are going to pay a price for cooperating with terrorist organizations and to create an environment where there starts to be pressure from within the Palestinians on terror organizations to stop it."
The official said that the Israeli military might destroy houses used to launch the Qassam rockets, adding of the Palestinians, "There's no question they are using their own civilian population" to give cover to guerrilla activities.
A second senior official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, concurred, saying, "This is our objective, and we're not going to be able to leave Gaza unless we can create such a deterrent."
Since the current conflict between Israel and the Palestinians erupted four years ago, Israeli officials have never openly declared a strategy of using military operations to divide Palestinian society by turning civilians against militant organizations. In the past year, Palestinians in the northern Gaza Strip have conducted a few small protests against militants who use their fields and olive groves as missile-launching sites.
Palestinians described scenes of panic and chaos Friday as residents of the sprawling Jabalya refugee camp who ventured into the streets were repeatedly sent diving for cover when 60-ton Merkava tanks fired rounds into the camp from their main cannons. Overhead, AH-64 Apache helicopter gunships fired missiles along the outskirts of the camp, witnesses said. More than 100,000 Palestinians live in the dense labyrinth of narrow alleys sandwiched between concrete-block apartments.
At the same time, Palestinian guerrillas in black ski masks roamed the camp, laying mines and explosives at major intersections and street entrances. Fighters and residents also piled mounds of sand in the streets in an effort to stop Israeli tanks and armored personnel carriers from entering residential areas.
Israeli officials closed the only crossing between the northern Gaza Strip and Israel before the operation began, barring all nonmilitary personnel from entering or leaving Gaza.
The Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qureia, called the Israeli offensive "state terror that deliberately targets civilians" and called for international intervention. Foreign Minister Bernard Bot of the Netherlands, which currently holds the European Union's rotating presidency, condemned the Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel but also accused Israel of a "disproportionate" reaction.
A statement by the human rights group Amnesty International said, "Israel is obliged to ensure that any measures taken to protect the lives of Israeli civilians are consistent with its obligations to respect human rights and international humanitarian law."
White House press secretary Scott McClellan told reporters traveling with President Bush in Pennsylvania that Israel had "the right to defend itself" but also urged "all parties to refocus again on moving forward on the 'road map,' " a U.S.-sponsored peace plan that has been dead for more than a year.
Other Palestinians said they believed Sharon's incursion into Gaza was politically motivated, aimed at discrediting critics who accuse him of giving in to Palestinian militants by proposing to move the approximately 8,200 Israeli settlers out of the area.
Jamil Majdalawi, the Gaza head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, asserted in a telephone interview that Sharon wanted to sow as much destruction as possible before pulling out of Gaza.
The Israeli leader, Majdalawi said, was using the rocket attacks as "an excuse. In the past four years all the rockets launched together are not equal to 10 percent of what he does one night in Jabalya."
Palestinian militants have fired about 470 Qassams and other rockets at Israeli towns and Jewish settlements in the past four years, according to Shin Bet, the Israeli intelligence agency. Those projectiles have killed four people, all in the past three months.
Three days of fighting have provided several examples of abuses of the local population by combatants on both sides.
The military gave Israeli television stations video footage from a remotely piloted aircraft that it said showed a vehicle marked "U.N." being used to transport Qassam rockets. Meir, the Foreign Ministry official, called the use of a such a vehicle attacks "horrendous."
Peter Hansen, who heads the Gaza offices of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, which administers Palestinian refugee camps, said he had not seen the film and had "grave difficulty" believing his agency's workers had helped transport rockets.
Hansen said he had received reports from the Jabalya camp that Israeli forces took over three schools run by his agency. When the soldiers withdrew from the schools, he said, residents reported that Palestinian guerrillas took their places. Hansen said both sides' abuse of the schools was "equally serious."
Special correspondent Islam Abdulkarim contributed to this report from the Jabalya refugee camp.
--------
Israeli Tanks and Bulldozers in Assault on Gaza Town
October 2, 2004
By STEVEN ERLANGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/02/international/middleeast/02mideast.html
JERUSALEM, Oct. 1 - Israel sent more tanks and armored vehicles on Friday into the crowded Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza City, trying to push back Palestinian militants who have been firing homemade rockets into Sederot, a nearby Israeli town.
At least 100 tanks, armored personnel carriers and armored bulldozers, which can be used to blow up land mines, moved into Gaza, along with hundreds of Israeli regular soldiers, some of them from the West Bank, to reinforce hundreds of other Israeli troops. Late Thursday night the Israeli cabinet, under political pressure to stop the rockets after one killed two children in Sederot, approved a larger military operation.
During daylight hours on Friday, at least 8 Palestinians were killed and 17 wounded in two missile strikes in Jabaliya, which is more like a large, overcrowded urban neighborhood than a camp. Home mostly to those who fled Israel in 1948 and to their descendants, its narrow streets make it a difficult place to maneuver armored vehicles, and dangerous for infantry. In the past, the Israelis have largely left it alone.
The army said the missiles were fired at Palestinians planting explosives and another group setting up a rocket launcher. On Friday night, a helicopter fired rockets into a refrigerator factory that the Israelis said was being used to make rockets.
Another Palestinian was killed and seven were captured as they tried to storm the Erez border crossing between northern Gaza and Israel, the military said. They were armed and carrying a bomb with 88 pounds of explosives, the military said. Four were Palestinian police officers, and three others were dressed as police officers, the army said. The effort was jointly claimed by Hamas and Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, a militant group linked to Yasir Arafat's Fatah movement.
Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said the troops would "exact a price" from the militants after a rocket fired Wednesday by Hamas, which fires most of them, killed Dorit Anisso, a 2-year-old girl, and Yuval Anisso, a 4-year-old boy, children of immigrants from Ethiopia. Since then, at least 48 Palestinians have been killed in fighting and more than 200 wounded. At least 3 Israelis have died.
Israeli troops suffered at least two casualties when a bulldozer was hit by an explosive; one soldier was evacuated by helicopter.
Israeli military officials say they must sharply diminish the number of Qassam rockets that fall on Sederot, the Israeli town closest to the fence bordering Gaza, and to discover and dismantle arms caches and rocket workshops. Two of the highly inaccurate rockets reached Sederot on Friday, but did no damage. By pushing into Jabaliya, the army is trying to establish a temporary buffer zone of four to five miles that would make Sederot harder to hit. Adir, 18, an Israeli soldier who would not give his last name, spoke just inside Gaza. He said he had just arrived directly from Jenin, without even fresh underwear. "We have to finish with them once and for all," he said of the militants firing the rockets. "We have to put an end to it."
Mkhaimar Abu Sada, a Gazan who teaches at Al Azhar University there, said this Israeli incursion, like others before it, "won't stop the rockets."
There is a cycle of violence, Mr. Abu Sada said. "And there is no central Palestinian government where you can go and tell them, stop the rockets," he said. "We have a number of different militia groups operating on their own, all competing to see how many rockets they can shoot, to prove to the Palestinian people that they are fighting the Israelis more than the others."
Setting up and firing the simple homemade Qassam rockets, which have a range of about five miles, can be done in minutes, and attackers can flee quickly.
"Thank God the holy warriors have designed these rockets; they are shaking the Jewish people," said Motea al-Sharafi, whose brother was killed during clashes on Wednesday. "This is the way we will take revenge."
Thousands of Palestinians marched in the streets for the funerals; in Sederot, the Anisso children were also buried Friday.
Dr. Manar al-Fara, head of Al Awda hospital in Gaza, said she had removed antipersonnel fléchettes from some of the dead and wounded. "The shell was full of needles," she said. "That's why their bodies are torn.''
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees, which provides aid in Gaza, also accused the army of taking over three schools while pupils were still in class and using them as firing positions, a spokesman, Matthias Burchard, in Geneva.
Tahgreed el-Khodary contributed reporting from Gaza for this article.
--------
Ariel Sharon Calls for Expansion of Army's Gaza Raid
October 2, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-mideast-sharon-gaza.html
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Saturday that Israel should expand its massive raid of northern Gaza, the army's biggest and deadliest offensive in more than four years of conflict with the Palestinians.
The army says the incursion, which began Tuesday and has killed 47 Palestinians, is aimed at rooting out militants who fire rockets at Israeli targets.
``We must expand the areas of operation to ward off the (militant) launchers from the areas within the firing range of the rockets into Jewish towns over the border,'' Sharon told Israel Radio in his first public comments on the raid.
Sharon and his security cabinet had ordered the army to carve out a ``buffer zone'' to halt rocket strikes that have fueled right-wing criticism of his plan to pull out all soldiers and Jewish settlers from Gaza by the end of 2005.
``We must operate in Gaza in a way that will prevent attacks on settlements now and during the withdrawal,'' he said.
``It's necessary to change the situation in Gaza, to hit the militants and the heads of terror groups and those who create weapons that target us.''
Nearly 200 tanks and armored vehicles have been operating around three refugee camps in the area in a massive offensive mounted after a Hamas rocket attack killed two Israeli toddlers in a border town Wednesday.
-------- mideast
Syria Is Defying U.N., Annan Says
October 2, 2004
By WARREN HOGE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/02/international/middleeast/02syria.html?pagewanted=all
UNITED NATIONS, Oct. 1 - Syria has not complied with a Security Council demand to pull its troops out of Lebanon and says it is unable to give any indication of when it might do so, Secretary General Kofi Annan said Friday.
In a report to the Security Council, which passed a resolution last month calling on Damascus to withdraw its forces from Lebanon, Mr. Annan said both the Syrians and Lebanese had argued that Syrian troops were in Lebanon at Beirut's invitation and that their presence "is therefore by mutual agreement."
The resolution - sponsored by the United States and France and passed Sept. 2 with nine votes in favor, the minimum needed to pass, and six abstentions - did not mention Syria by name, but instead referred to foreign troops. Apart from United Nations soldiers, Mr. Annan said, the only foreign troops in Lebanon are Syrian.
The resolution was passed on the eve of Syrian-inspired action in the Lebanese Parliament to change the language in Lebanon's Constitution to let President Émile Lahoud stay in office beyond the end of his term on Nov. 24.
Mr. Lahoud is favored by Syria, which exercises extensive control over politics in Lebanon and until recently kept 20,000 troops there despite the 1990 accord ending the 15-year Lebanese civil war that called for the eventual departure of all foreign forces.
Earlier Friday in Beirut, there was a car bomb attack on Marwan Hamadeh, 65, who recently resigned as minister of economy to protest the constitutional change. An explosives-laden vehicle was detonated near his home, wounding Mr. Hamadeh and his driver and killing his bodyguard.
--------
Annan Presses Syria To Pull Out of Lebanon
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 2, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1437-2004Oct1.html
UNITED NATIONS, Oct. 1 -- U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan pressed Syria on Friday to withdraw its forces from Lebanon and criticized Lebanon's Syrian-backed president, Emile Lahoud, for seeking to extend his term beyond the constitutionally set limit of six years. Annan also urged Lebanon to disarm the Palestinian militants and Syrian-and-Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia that hold sway in southern Lebanon.
The U.N. chief's remarks were in a 17-page report asserting that Syria has failed to comply with a U.S.-and-French-sponsored Security Council resolution calling for free elections in Lebanon next month, the disarmament of armed militias, and the withdrawal of all foreign forces from the former French colony. "I cannot certify that these requirements have been met," Annan wrote. "The Syrian military and intelligence apparatus in Lebanon has not been withdrawn as of 30 September, 2004."
Syria maintains that it has redeployed 3,000 troops from camps south of Beirut to a Syrian stronghold in the Bekaa Valley, and that some have returned to Syria. Last month, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell confirmed after a meeting in New York with Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Charaa that Syrian troops had abandoned the camps, saying it "was a positive step."
But Annan said that the United Nations was not able to verify Syria's claims that its troops or intelligence agents have left the country. Annan also criticized Lahoud's efforts to extend his rule, saying, "It has long been my strong belief . . . that governments and leaders should not hold on to office beyond prescribed term limits."
The report's release coincided with an assassination attempt in Beirut on a prominent Lebanese opposition figure, Marwan Hamadeh, who resigned as Lebanon's minister of trade and the economy last month to protest Lahoud's decision to seek to extend his term by three years. While it remained unclear whether the remote-control bombing of Hamadeh's vehicle was related to his dissent, one Security Council diplomat said, "We think it's linked." State Department spokesman J. Adam Ereli, meanwhile, called on Lebanon to investigate the attack, which wounded Hamadeh. "To the extent that that concerns other countries," he added, the "same message would apply."
The Syrian government, which has more than 20,000 troops in Lebanon, has maintained political control over the former French colony since 1976, when it intervened at Lebanon's invitation to quell a civil war. The United States and France have accused Syria of pressuring Lebanon's political elites, sometimes with threats of violence, to rewrite Lebanon's constitution to ensure that Lahoud could serve an additional three years. The Lebanese cabinet and parliament formally amended the constitution to allow the continuation of Lahoud's rule.
Annan suggested that the chaos that preceded Syria's intervention has long passed and that Syria's military presence is no longer required. He also challenged claims by Syria and Lebanon that Israeli forces continue to occupy the small Shabaa Farms enclave in Lebanon, providing a justification for the presence of anti-Israeli Hezbollah guerrillas in southern Lebanon. Annan maintains that Israel has withdrawn all its forces from Lebanon and that Shabaa Farms is part of Syria.
-------- russia / chechnya
A former Russian soldier tells of his war in Chechnya
MOSCOW (AFP)
Oct 02, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041002031449.vkgq0rot.html
Dmitry does not fit the traditional image of a Russian special forces soldier -- he is slender and his young face has delicate features.
But unlike most of his fellow students at a Moscow university, the 23-year-old economics major spent a year taking part in the Russian army's notorious "mopping up" operations in war-shattered Chechnya.
As he recounts his part in a war that has killed thousands of soldiers and tens of thousands of civilians, his voice quivers at times.
After studying for three years to become a special force combatant, he was sent to Chechnya in 2000, nine months after the beginning of the second war that Moscow has waged against separatists in a decade.
There, he joined the "Volkodavi" brigade, named after dogs "trained to kill wolves" -- the symbol of Chechen separatists.
Before being sent to Chechnya he and his comrades were made to watch videos of Russian soldiers being tortured by rebels -- "to make us vicious so that we would not feel any pity."
Asked about what he did in Chechnya, Dmitry answers simply: "mopping up operations," much like another student would say he was studying botany.
The phrase strikes dread into the heart of Chechens -- Russian troops have been accused of kidnappings, murder and looting during the operations, after which many civilians have simply disappeared.
But Dmitry regarded them as a job, and an interesting one at that.
With 19 other combatants, he carried out attacks on rebel mountain hideouts in the mountainous south of the Caucasus republic where he was sent by helicopter with one clear instruction: "eliminate the enemy."
"This is the principle of hunters -- the enemy's location is determined and we are sent there," he said in a trembling voice.
Together with other Russian units, Dmitry also took part in mopping up raids in villages, arresting Chechen men identified by the Russian army as rebel fighters.
Dmitry dismisses personal responsibility on charges of human rights violations that have directed at Russian forces by rights groups.
"It is not our problem if the commanders have incorrectly defined the target. It is their problem if they choose the wrong objective, we only carry out orders."
He is quite critical of the leadership in the Russian army, accusing it of all kinds of trafficking, including in soldiers. He said some officers had "sold" their subordinates to the rebels -- the targeted person would be set up for capture during an operation, with the officer pocketing an unspecified sum.
"We were tools, cannon fodder," he said.
Dmitry himself was captured by rebels during fighting in the summer of 2001 and held for three months in an area of Grozny before a Russian rights group, the Soldiers's Mothers committee, located him.
His father managed to buy him back for an unspecified sum from the rebels -- which has earned him the status of deserter from Russian army.
"I was lucky, I was well treated, they fed me," said Dmitry.
The only conversation that he had with a Chechen during his captivity was when one of his captors told him of his wife and child had died in shelling by the Russian army.
After his liberation, Dmitry spent six months in a psychiatric hospital, and says he is now "more or less on his feet again."
Today, he is studying economics in Moscow and sees no way out of the war deadlock in Chechnya.
He has no regrets about his army service, apart from having been "caught," and says that if he could, he would gladly trade his schoolbooks for his former uniform if it were not for the deserter mark against him.
Russian authorities say some 5,300 Russian soldiers have died in Chechnya since 1999. The Soldiers's Mothers committee puts this figure at over 13,000.
----
Putin Close to Winning New Power Over Judiciary
By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, October 2, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1438-2004Oct1.html
MOSCOW, Oct. 1 -- Russia's upper house of parliament has approved a measure that would give President Vladimir Putin effective control over the body that approves candidates for the country's higher courts and also disciplines and dismisses senior judges. The plan has drawn fresh criticism that the Kremlin's centralization of power is undermining, if not eradicating, all potential checks on the executive branch.
Under the measure, which was approved Wednesday by a vote of 175 to 2, the composition of the Supreme Qualification Collegium, which appoints members of the country's federal courts, including the Supreme Court, would be changed. The measure also needs to be approved by the lower house of parliament, the State Duma, which is controlled by pro-Kremlin parties.
Putin would control the body that approves judicial candidates.
At present, 18 of the body's 29 members are elected by secret ballot by other judges who are members of the All-Russia Congress of Judges. Ten members representing the public are appointed by the upper house of parliament, the Federation Council. Putin has the right to appoint one representative.
The new structure would trim the body to 21 members. Putin would have the right to nominate 10 judges, who would be subject to the approval of the Federation Council, which generally endorses his initiatives. The speaker of the Federation Council, currently a Putin loyalist, would appoint the 10 public members. And Putin would continue to directly appoint one representative.
"This is part of the process of building a vertical power structure, and it's spreading that process over to the judiciary," said Sergei Pashin, a former federal judge who has advocated comprehensive legal reforms. "The Kremlin's influence on the judiciary is becoming absolute."
The action follows a recent Kremlin push to abolish elections for regional governors and to change the electoral process for the Duma to make it harder for independent candidates to secure seats.
Those measures and others have drawn criticism from other countries that Putin is damaging Russia's democratic institutions. This week, 115 U.S. and European political and cultural leaders, including Sens. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Vaclav Havel, former president of the Czech Republic, signed an open letter charging that the Kremlin has "systematically undercut the freedom and independence of the press, destroyed the checks and balances in the Russian federal system, arbitrarily imprisoned both real and imagined political rivals, removed legitimate candidates from electoral ballots, harassed and arrested NGO leaders and weakened Russia's political parties."
Putin has not commented on the letter, which was sent to the leaders of European Union and NATO countries.
The judiciary measure's sponsor, the chairman of the Federation Council, Sergei Mironov, said the proposal would help root out corruption in the justice system, which he said had weakened Russia's response to terrorism. The same rationale was given for the bill to end the election of governors.
"These measures will improve the effectiveness of the judicial system," Mironov said.
Putin would also have the right to dismiss any judge he had appointed, with the support of a majority of the collegium, and the Federation Council could fire the public representatives. Putin already has the right to nominate members of the Constitutional Court, the country's highest judicial body.
The collegium's chairman, Valentin Kuznetsov, said he learned of the measure only when a Russian newspaper reporter contacted him. "It collides with the constitution," he told the newspaper Gazeta, saying it violates a 1998 European charter signed by Russia that stipulates that 50 percent of the membership of bodies that appoint judges should come from elections among judges themselves.
"The initiative is very stupid, but unfortunately it's in the spirit of the times," Yuri Sidorenko, the chairman of the Council of Judges, told Gazeta. "It is clear those actions will be aimed at limiting the independence of courts and judges."
-------- space
NASA Delays Shuttle Flight Set for Spring
Associated Press
Saturday, October 2, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1933-2004Oct1.html
HOUSTON, Oct. 1 -- NASA decided Friday to delay the spring 2005 launch of the first shuttle flight since Columbia disintegrated, citing hurricane damage and more work needed to implement safety recommendations.
NASA's spaceflight leadership council said a shuttle launch in March or April is "no longer achievable." The group asked shuttle program officials to analyze whether a May or July date is more feasible for launch and to report back to the council later this month, NASA spokesman Allard Beutel said.
The shuttle fleet has been grounded since Columbia fell apart on reentry in February 2003, killing all seven astronauts aboard. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board issued 15 recommendations that NASA is working to implement before resuming shuttle flights. The agency has acted on five of the recommendations so far, Beutel said.
James Kennedy, director of Florida's Kennedy Space Center, said recent hurricanes cost workers three weeks of shuttle-processing time.
In Florida, Charley and Frances damaged the launch site and Jeanne damaged the Vehicle Assembly Building, and in New Orleans, the threat of Ivan delayed work on a redesigned fuel tank.
-------- spies
MP Questions Iraqi Woman's Conference Speech
PA News
By Chris Moncrieff
2 Oct 2004
http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=3574429
The weeping Iraqi woman who begged Labour conference delegates not to vote to withdraw British troops from the country has "strong connections" with the CIA, Britain's most senior back bench MP claimed today.
Labour's Tam Dalyell, a persistent critic of the Iraqi war and Father of the House of Commons asked: "Have we been duped yet again?"
In her speech, Shanaz Rashid appealed to the conference in Brighton: "Please, please, do not desert us in our hour of need."
Now, Mr Dalyell, MP for Linlithgow, has written to the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, asking how it came about that Rashid was given centre stage at the conference when she was not even a delegate.
In his letter, Mr Dalyell said: "Her screeching of 'Freedom! Freedom!' was carried on every TV channel to the exclusion of contributions from many others who, unlike Rashid, were actually delegates to the conference.
"Therefore can I ask you, is it true or untrue that you and foreign office ministers - I am told that diplomats declined to be involved - were instrumental in persuading the conference chair, with the acquiescence of Conference Arrangements Committee, to have Rashid called?
"Was it known to you that Rashid has strong connections with the CIA and with those exiled Iraqis who did so much to persuade Washington to go to war? "
Mr Dalyell said that if Mr Straw was to indicate that her appearance was the work of 10 Downing Street and not himself, he would not be astonished.
"At all events, Rashid's performance is reminiscent of the performance of the so called nurse at the Kuwait hospital telling US coast to coast TV that babies had been thrown out of incubators by Iraqi troops during the first Gulf war.
"The nurse subsequently turned out to be the actress daughter of the then Kuwait ambassador in Washington and had never been near the hospital."
Mr Dalyell: "I would be grateful if you would give Parliament and the party the facts and the circumstances in which Rashid was given centre stage at Brighton. Have we been duped yet again?"
A Foreign Office spokeswoman said they could not comment without first seeing the document.
But she added that they would respond to the MP's concerns upon receiving his letter.
She said: "If Mr Dalyell is writing to the Foreign Secretary his concerns will be addressed.
"We have not seen the letter and do not know what is in it so there is nothing further we can say today."
----
INTELLIGENCE
C.I.A.-White House Tensions Are Being Made Public to Rare Degree
October 2, 2004
New York Times
By DOUGLAS JEHL
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/02/politics/02intel.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Oct. 1 - James L. Pavitt spent 31 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, the last five as head of the clandestine service, before retiring in August. But never, Mr. Pavitt said Friday, does he recall anything like "the viciousness and vindictiveness" now playing out in a battle between the White House and the C.I.A.
The tensions have simmered for years, mostly over intelligence about Iraq, including whether Iraq posed a threat. But in the last few weeks, they have surged into the open in a remarkable way, in a struggle in which both sides believe they have much at stake.
Already, the contents of classified intelligence estimates about Iraq have been leaked by people sympathetic to the C.I.A., to the considerable embarrassment of the White House. In response, the White House associated the documents' authors with "pessimists and naysayers," and President Bush initially dismissed one particularly damaging forecast as nothing more than a guess. And in newspaper columns in recent days, Republican partisans have variously described what is now afoot as part of an insurgency or vendetta being waged by the C.I.A. against the White House.
"Wars bring things out in people that sometimes other disputes don't," said R. James Woolsey, a former director of central intelligence. "But even with the passions of war, I think you ought to keep it within channels." A third former intelligence official was more critical of the C.I.A. "The agency's role is to tell the administration what it thinks, not to criticize its policies," the official said.
Of course, the most urgent threat to the agency lies in the effort now under way in Congress to restructure American intelligence agencies under the command of a new national intelligence director. Those efforts were recommended by the Sept. 11 commission, but the agency's now infamous prewar misjudgments on Iraq and its illicit weapons were an important factor in prompting the calls for change.
In defense, the agency's allies have clearly been trying, as they see it, to set the record straight, by calling attention to what they regard as the more prescient judgments by the C.I.A. that the Bush administration dismissed. In an election year that is very much about the war in Iraq, the overlapping streams of self-preservation and politics have elevated the intelligence agencies to unusual prominence.
"My opponent looked at the same intelligence I looked at," President Bush said several times in his debate with Senator John Kerry on Thursday night, alluding to the C.I.A.'s prewar blunder in asserting that Iraq possessed illicit weapons. But Mr. Kerry replied that it was the White House, not the C.I.A., that sent the country to war in Iraq.
In a telephone conversation on Friday, Mr. Pavitt made an argument that echoed that others have sounded in recent weeks. "There was nothing in the intelligence that was a casus belli," Mr. Pavitt said. The C.I.A. may have been wrong about Iraq and its weapons, he acknowledged, but it was on the mark in issuing prewar warnings about the obstacles that an American occupying force would face in postwar Iraq.
Mr. Pavitt's career whose spanned the Church Committee revelations, in the mid-1970s, of C.I.A. improprieties, the sharp downsizing of the C.I.A. under President Jimmy Carter, the Iran-Contra scandal, and the repeated intelligence failures of recent years, including those related to the Sept. 11 attacks.
As deputy director of operations, Mr. Pavitt headed human spying operations, and was the day-to-day tactical commander of the clandestine war on terrorism. He worked closely with the White House, and said he has no sympathy with those in the government who may have leaked the contents of classified documents to make a political point. "The agency is not out to undermine this president," Mr. Pavitt said.
At the C.I.A. and the White House, officials dismissed the idea that the institutions were at odds. An intelligence official said the notion of an institutional battle between the White House and the C.I.A. was "simply not the case."
Sean McCormack, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said that the White House believed "that the men and women of our intelligence community and the C.I.A. are doing a terrific job in helping to defend the country, and are working tirelessly day and night."
But Mr. Pavitt was not alone among former intelligence officials in describing what is now unfolding as extraordinary. In interviews, several other former high-ranking officials, including those from the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies, said that while C.I.A. and White House were continuing to work closely and professionally together, they had rarely seen tensions so high among their allies and other partisans on both sides.
As for what may lie ahead, the shape and fate of any intelligence overhaul still remains far from certain. The terms of possible legislation are still being debated by the House and Senate, and it is unclear whether new legislation will be passed before Election Day. But all of the changes under consideration threaten to strip the C.I.A. from the position of preeminence among American intelligence agencies that it has enjoyed for more than 50 years.
"I think this has much more to do with intelligence reform than with Iraq," said the former senior C.I.A. official. "People are just very angry and worried and on the defensive about what they think might happen to the agency." (Like most others interviewed for this story, the former official would not allow his name to be used, saying that to do so would jeopardize his professional and business relationships.)
Whatever the motivation, the steps taken by people sympathetic to the C.I.A. allies to call attention to intelligence successes on Iraq have been notable. They included the disclosure in mid-September by government officials to The New York Times of details of a classified National Intelligence Estimate prepared for President Bush in July 2004 and distributed in late August. Its gloomy assessment of the challenges facing Iraq said that an environment of tenuous stability was the best-case outcome the country could expect through the end of 2005.
Other disclosures by government officials early this week have included specific new details contained in two other classified documents, prewar assessments on Iraq that were issued by the National Intelligence Council in January 2003. As described by the government officials, the postwar challenges identified in the documents included a surge in anti-Americanism in the Muslim world and the possibility of an anti-American insurgency in Iraq. The intelligence warnings appeared to have been much sharper than was acknowledged in the more upbeat forecasts provided before the war by Mr. Bush and top deputies including Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary.
From some conservative voices, including the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, the response has been furious. An editorial published by the Journal on Wednesday under the heading of "The C.I.A.'s Insurgency" said that Mr. Bush "now has two insurgencies to defeat: the one that the C.I.A. is struggling to help put down in Iraq, and the other inside Langley against the Bush administration."
"Rather than keep this dispute in-house," it said, "the dissenters have taken their objections to the public, albeit usually through calculated and anonymous leaks that are always spun to make the agency look good and the Bush administration look bad."
An op-ed article published on Friday in the Washington Times by John B. Roberts II, a conservative commentator on national security affairs, reiterated that message. "When the president cannot trust his own C.IA.," it warned, "the nation faces dire consequences."
Mr. Pavitt, the recently retired C.I.A. official, said such a suggestion was offensive. "This President has been served extremely well by intelligence," he said.
-------- us
Bush tempers argument for pre-emptive strikes
Experts say Iraq war precludes similar future engagements
San Francisco Chronicle
James Sterngold
October 2, 2004
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/10/02/MNGKC92M9R1.DTL
George Bush has insisted repeatedly on the campaign trail that his presidency has been characterized by unwavering policies based on core convictions. But a key component of his security and military strategy -- a willingness to wage war "pre-emptively" against perceived enemies -- lies largely in tatters, say experts and policy-makers.
These experts, from both sides of the political spectrum, say the brutal experience in Iraq has eroded many elements of what has come to be called the "Bush doctrine," leaving the United States with less flexibility in the war on terror.
President Bush himself appeared to dial back on the doctrine during Thursday night's debate when asked whether he would launch future pre-emptive strikes in the wake of the Iraq war. Bush replied, somewhat unenthusiastically, that "a president must always be willing to use troops," but only "as a last resort."
That is a far cry from the bold policy the president articulated in 2002, which rejected the traditional focus on containing threats or responding only after an enemy had staged a clear act of aggression.
In fact, say policy experts, the violent insurgency in Iraq, which has tied down 140,000 U.S. troops, has all but removed Americans' stomach for a similar pre-emptive engagement against an enemy who has not actually launched or prepared an imminent attack on the United States.
Iraq "will leave a long and damaging legacy," said Fred Ikle, a senior government arms control expert for decades who has argued that the United States must be more willing to use military might to achieve its goals. "It will inhibit us more than is good for our future. We fumbled."
Ikle was one of the founders of the Project for the New American Century, a neoconservative group that has long pressed for a more muscular American military posture, and includes Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz -- key architects of the Iraq war -- among its members.
Ikle's views are echoed by other prominent neoconservative thinkers.
"The appetite for this kind of action in the country is pretty low at the moment," said Max Boot, a senior fellow in national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Boot, an early supporter of the Iraq war, said that the United States is likely to launch small-scale pre-emptive strikes as needed in the future, much as Israel does against its enemies, but not the kind of large-scale attacks that were at the center of the Bush doctrine's aim of pressuring enemies to change or risk being destroyed.
"If, by some miracle, Iraq looks better in a few years, maybe there will be greater interest in the idea," said Boot.
The Bush administration continues to insist that the doctrine remains U.S. policy. It has a number of elements, including an insistence that any state that supports terrorists will be considered an enemy, that the United States has the right to attack such countries pre-emptively -- even, as in the case of Iraq, before an enemy has mounted a challenge or the president feels there is an imminent threat of an attack.
Under the doctrine, the United States would also act to prevent any country from even attempting to match American military might. Most of these elements were outlined in speeches in 2002 and then codified in September 2002, in a 33-page document called "The National Security Strategy of the United States." It stated that terrorism presented a new kind of danger and needed a new kind of response.
"As a matter of common sense and self-defense, America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed," the document said.
Bush went further and targeted three countries in his famous "axis of evil" State of the Union speech in 2002, hinting that Iran and North Korea, as well as Iraq, might be attacked pre-emptively if they were perceived as threatening the United States.
But many experts say that the first broad pre-emptive invasion might be the last, at least for now, because of the expense of Iraq, the apparently poor planning for the occupation, the violent backlash and the lack of resources or troops for another such venture.
Rather than be cowed by President Bush's earlier hints, or by the U.S. invasion of Iraq, both Iran and North Korea have defied international demands, and both appear to be developing nuclear weapons, without any indication that the president might seek to resort to a pre-emptive attack. In the presidential debate Thursday night, President Bush emphasized multilateral talks, involving China, to resolve the North Korea crisis, and Bush has looked primarily to European negotiators to deal with Iran.
"Pre-emption is valid only if you have a situation where you are about to be attacked," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., a critic of Bush's policies. "In my view, it is not useful in the war on terror."
The administration said that its aim in invading Iraq was, in part, to send a message to other hostile governments, as well as removing Saddam Hussein from power. Officials suggested that it was intended to let countries like Syria, Iran and even North Korea know that the United States had the capability and the will to launch rapid pre-emptive attacks to eliminate any challenges. It was also said to be an effort to spread democratic reforms throughout the Middle East, creating a kind of bandwagon effect, beginning with the democratization of Iraq.
John Mearsheimer, a political science professor at the University of Chicago and the author of "The Tragedy of Great Power Politics," said the persuasive power behind Bush's policy depended on great U.S. military flexibility, which has since been lost.
"The problem is that if you get bogged down in Iraq, you can't reload the shotgun quickly and put Iran or Syria in the crosshairs," said Mearsheimer. "So you can't influence their behavior the way you wanted to. The policy failed."
He added that the administration has undermined its credibility with Americans by arguing that Iraq was an imminent threat and that it was armed with weapons of mass destruction. That has not been borne out, eliminating at least some of the potential for popular support of future pre-emptive strikes.
"It's a failed doctrine now because it has failed militarily on the ground and because it caused the administration to be deceitful to the American people," said Mearsheimer.
Historians point out that pre-emptive attacks have been tools of American policy from the nation's earliest years, and many presidents have launched or contemplated such strikes, from the early 19th century to the present.
For instance, President John F. Kennedy threatened a pre-emptive attack during the Cuban missile crisis, and President Bill Clinton launched pre- emptive bombing strikes against suspected al Qaeda targets in Sudan.
What is new is that, in response to the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush administration articulated a strategy in which the United States, anticipating possible future terrorist attacks, would strike long before they could be mounted. The era of containment and quiet diplomacy was over, the new strategy suggested.
Vice President Dick Cheney was one of the first to call this the "Bush doctrine" and to repeat his support for its many elements in a number of speeches.
Many experts say that they still support the idea of some kinds of pre- emptive strikes, but only if the threat is unequivocally clear and imminent.
"The president always has the right and always has had the right for pre- emptive strike," Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., said in the televised debate with President Bush on Thursday night.
"It remains an important option," added Ashton Carter, a Defense Department official in the Clinton administration and now a senior Kerry campaign adviser. "It has to be an option."
Anthony Cordesman, a former Pentagon official and national security adviser to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said pre-emption should be seen as one possible tool, not part of an overarching "doctrine."
"When an administration reacts to something, it's always case-specific, not based on a doctrine," said Cordesman, now a national security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Cordesman blamed the problems in Iraq on poor planning, not the basic concept of a pre-emptive strike. "What was wrong was all of our assumptions used to go in," he said.
-------- war crimes
Pinochet Faces Tax Charges in Chile
By Terence O'Hara
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 2, 2004; Page E01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1443-2004Oct1.html
Chile's Internal Tax Service filed a criminal complaint against former ruler Augusto Pinochet after an investigation of his accounts at Riggs Bank in Washington. Riggs, which was not a subject of the complaint, is facing multiple probes into its compliance with laws designed to prevent money laundering.
In a statement released yesterday, the tax agency said it forwarded the complaint to Judge Sergio Muńoz, the magistrate investigating possible corruption by Pinochet. The complaint was not made public, but several sources yesterday said it relates to Pinochet's failure to report millions of dollars in investment accounts at Riggs between 1996 and 2002. Muńoz will decide whether to prosecute the 88-year-old former general, who is undergoing psychiatric tests to determine his ability to stand trial on human rights abuses.
Augusto Pinochet had Riggs accounts.
Also named in the complaint is Oscar Aitken Lavanchy, a lawyer who is Pinochet's longtime business manager. Aitken could not be reached for comment. He has declined comment in the past, though he gave an interview to El Mercurio newspaper in Santiago in September in which he alleged Riggs was responsible for managing Pinochet's money and should take the blame if any laws were broken. Pinochet lawyer Jose Maria Eyzaguirre could not be reached for comment yesterday.
Mark N. Hendrix, a Riggs spokesman, yesterday declined to comment on the Muńoz investigation.
Chilean officials began investigating Pinochet's finances after the Senate permanent subcommittee on investigations released a report in July about Riggs's dealings with Pinochet. The report found that Riggs helped Pinochet hide accounts with balances of $4 million to $8 million. Riggs actively managed large sums of money for Pinochet, the report said, and took steps that appeared designed to disguise Pinochet as beneficiary of the funds.
The Department of Justice is investigating possible violations of money-laundering laws by Riggs employees, according to several sources with knowledge of the matter who asked to remain anonymous because the investigation is in its early stages. Riggs has made formal referrals to the Justice Department detailing what it believes are crimes in its handling of Pinochet's money. It was unclear whether Riggs might be required to produce records or whether bank officials might be deposed in the Chilean probe. As yet, Chilean officials have not asked Riggs for any information, according to two sources.
Riggs was fined $25 million in May for failing to follow money-laundering regulations in its dealings with the West African country of Equatorial Guinea and the Embassy of Saudi Arabia. The fine led to later revelations about Pinochet and pushed Riggs to pursue a merger with PNC Financial Services Group Inc. Riggs's $766 million sale to PNC is scheduled to close in the first quarter of 2005.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- homeland security / national intelligence
Homeland Security: A Bad Joke
antiwar.com
by Charley Reese
October 2, 2004
http://www.antiwar.com/reese/?articleid=3693
Any doubt that the Department of Homeland Security is a joke should be put to rest by its recent detainment and deportation of the pop singer Cat Stevens, who now calls himself Yusuf Islam.
The entertainer has mysteriously made it to one of the watch lists that the government so famously failed to consult prior to the attack of Sept. 11, 2001. Nevertheless, he was allowed to board a plane with his daughter in London for a trip to Washington, D.C.
When our sterling bureaucratic protectors discovered the singer's presence about mid-Atlantic, they diverted the airplane and all of its passengers and crew, of course, to Bangor, Maine, where one of the world's most famous peace advocates was taken away by the FBI and interrogated for about six hours. He was separated from his daughter and naturally never told why he was on a watch list. Then he was put on another plane back to England, where he is a citizen.
This shabby treatment of a man known around the world not only for his music but for his charitable endeavors, advocacy of peace and forthright denunciations of terrorism is stupid and an embarrassment for the United States. Even the British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, protested.
How stupid? Well, within the recent past, Yusuf Islam has made two trips to the United States to meet with high-ranking government officials, including officials from the Bush White House concerning charitable projects. After the attacks against the United States, the singer not only condemned them, but forked over a good amount of money for the survivors. And at about the same time that our bureaucratic protectors were focusing on an innocent man, a report comes out that guns and explosives are still easily being smuggled past the U.S. security people at airports. Maybe their priorities are messed up.
More importantly to Americans, this incident shows you the danger of government lists. To this day, the singer does not know why he was put on the list, and the only thing the U.S. bureaucrats will say is, "Yusuf Islam has been placed on the watch lists because of activities that could potentially be related to terrorism."
Now, let's decode this bureaucratese. What activities? If you are going to publicly embarrass a person, you should say frankly what activities you are talking about. And who says he's engaged in them? And what in the heck does it mean that they could "potentially be related to terrorism"? Notice they do not say these mysterious activities are related to terrorism. They say they "could potentially be" related. Our government so loves guilt by association that these activities could be nothing more than donating to a legal charity that uses a bank somebody thinks is owned by a terrorist organization. That's guilt by association twice removed.
I make charitable donations, small ones, and I have no idea which banks the Boy Scouts and the Salvation Army use, much less who owns the banks. I kid you not that in this present state of hysteria and semi-police-state tactics administered by morons, good people's reputations have been smeared by just such a ridiculous claim.
The government should not be allowed to put anybody's name on a terrorist watch list without notifying that person, presenting its evidence before a judicial officer and giving the person a chance to rebut it. As it is now, anybody can end up being called a terrorist and never know why. As Sen. Ted Kennedy has pointed out, he's been stopped numerous times for additional searches because apparently some name is similar to his on one of these dumb watch lists.
Computerized lists can be dangerous. In my city, an innocent businessman, asleep in his car, was shot to death by a police officer because the man's car had been mistakenly listed as stolen.
What this administration has done is revive McCarthyism, something that has no place in a free society. As for Yusuf Islam, I'm sorry, from a personally selfish point of view, that he converted to Islam. I greatly miss Cat Stevens' music.
----
DHS Blamed for Failure To Combine Watch Lists
By John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 2, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1359-2004Oct1.html
The government's effort to consolidate federal agencies' 12 terrorist watch lists into one has all but failed, partly because the Department of Homeland Security has abandoned its responsibility to take the lead on the project, according to a report released yesterday by the department's internal watchdog.
The report by the department's inspector general, Clark Kent Ervin, said the government's botching of the assignment follows a disturbing pattern in the effort to protect the nation from terrorism.
"In the years since the September 11 terrorist attacks, just as in the past, the government has continued to implement solutions in an uncoordinated manner," the report said. "The manner through which the watch list consolidation has unfolded has not helped the nation break from its pattern."
President Bush, Congress and many terrorism experts have for years considered the integration of the watch lists a crucial priority in the effort to identify terrorists as they try to enter the country, board airplanes and open bank accounts, and when they are pulled over for traffic stops.
The inspector general was blunt in accusing his own department of refusing to take responsibility for the job of combining the 12 watch lists, an assignment that he said belonged to the department under the law that established it two years ago.
"DHS has not fulfilled its leadership responsibility," Ervin wrote in the report. " 'Connecting the dots' and ensuring better communications (among agencies) . . . is a large part of why DHS was created. If DHS . . . does not assume this interagency coordination responsibility, the question remains, who will?"
Homeland Security officials reject the assertion, which has also been made for years by members of Congress, that the department has been too passive in staking out its congressionally mandated role to take the lead in a number of intelligence analysis tasks such as merging watch lists.
Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse pointed out that last year President Bush gave the FBI and the Justice Department, not the Department of Homeland Security, the job of establishing and running the Terrorist Screening Center, to blend the various watch lists.
"We disagree with the report's premise that says DHS has the lead in the government for consolidating watch lists," Roehrkasse said. "The department is playing a strong partnership role with the FBI to consolidate watch lists."
Juliette Kayyem, executive director of Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, pinned responsibility for the failure to combine watch lists on the Bush White House, saying it undercut Homeland Security's ability to play the central role in counterterrorism intelligence that Congress intended.
"This is an administration that didn't want a homeland security department, and has insured it's as dysfunctional as this report suggests," she said. "[Homeland Security Secretary] Tom Ridge has to play the weak hand he's been dealt."
The 10-month-old Terrorist Screening Center handles requests round the clock from employees of numerous agencies, including immigration officers at U.S. airports, State Department consular officers who issue visas at overseas embassies and local law enforcement officers.
The combined database is designed to include names compiled by nine agencies, including the CIA, the FBI, various components of Homeland Security and the State Department, which has a huge database called Tipoff.
The screening center has enjoyed modest success in combining the various watch lists, the report said, by beginning the arduous job of filtering various lists so they can be shared with other agencies that have access to the screening center's 100,000-name database.
But Ervin said many problems have cropped up. The screening center has had trouble hiring enough analysts with high security clearances. As of a few months ago it had only about half its assigned complement of 160 staff members, he said.
The databases are vastly different. The Justice Department's National Crime Information Center can handle names of up to 30 characters, a stumbling block in integrating it with other lists. It uses relatively unsophisticated software that allows street cops to access it immediately, while the State Department's lists, for example, allow for more laborious searches of names using different spellings in Russian, Chinese, Spanish and Arabic.
--------
Top U.S. Cyber-Security Official Resigns
Yoran Was Third Chief in Past Two Years;
Experts Say Issue Lacks Attention
By Robert O'Harrow Jr. and Ellen McCarthy
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, October 2, 2004; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64915-2004Oct1.html
The nation's top cyber-security official resigned unexpectedly on Thursday, raising new questions about the progress of efforts to protect the nation's vast computer networks from terror attacks, electronic viruses and other threats, government and industry officials said yesterday.
Amit Yoran, a security industry entrepreneur, stepped down one year after he was hired by homeland security officials with a broad mandate to reinvigorate Bush administration efforts to improve the way government and industry address computer security.
Amit Yoran gave one day's notice when he quit as director of the National Cyber Security Division. (Bill O'leary -- The Washington Post)
Yoran is the third cyber-security chief to leave in less than two years. He declined yesterday to say why he left his post after giving just one day's notice. But industry officials said he had been disappointed that he was not given as much authority as he was promised to attack the problem.
"Cyber-security has fallen down on that totem pole," said Paul Kurtz, executive director of the Cyber Security Industry Alliance, who previously worked on security issues in the White House. Kurtz said Yoran's resignation underscores a concern in the private sector that government is not taking the issue seriously enough: "It's kind of symptomatic of the frustration all around."
"I think it's a significant loss," said Douglas J. Goodall, chief executive of RedSiren, a Pittsburgh network security company. "The fear that I would have is that momentum he was building would go away."
Yoran made a name for himself as co-founder and chief executive of Riptech Inc., an Alexandria network security firm acquired by Symantec Corp. in July 2002 for $145 million.
He was appointed director of the National Cyber Security Division in September 2003, at a time when industry officials were complaining about the government's failure to give the issue more prominence.
Yoran succeeded Howard A. Schmidt, the White House adviser on cyber-security who resigned in April 2003, and the first director, Richard A. Clarke, who stepped down three months earlier. Upon their departures, both of Yoran's predecessors warned about the importance of stepping up efforts to combat computer and network attacks.
When the office was folded into the Department of Homeland Security, industry officials pushed for the director to be an assistant-secretary-level position with direct access to Secretary Tom Ridge. Instead it was placed several steps down, in a job that answers to Robert P. Liscouski, assistant secretary for infrastructure protection. The division has a staff of 60 and a $69 million budget this year.
Legislation was offered in the House last month to create an assistant secretary position, but it has made no headway.
One of Yoran's main tasks was to implement recommendations in President Bush's "National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace," initiatives that relied heavily on the private sector. He was also responsible for beginning the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team to coordinate national and global initiatives to thwart computer network attacks.
In an interview, Yoran praised the president's plan. He said Ridge understands the importance of cyber-security. But he stopped short when asked to explain his abrupt departure. "I resigned because I filled my obligation and accomplished the core requirement," he said.
Kevin Poulsen, a cyber-security specialist, said Yoran has been in a difficult position for some time. There has been progress in cyber-security, he said, but it has come much more slowly than most specialists had hoped because the government efforts have not gained traction.
"There was a sense it was essentially a powerless position," said Poulsen, news editor at SecurityFocus.com. "In an age of physical terrorism and real-world threat, they're not giving cyber-security much attention."
--------
Staten Island Phone Let U.S. Eavesdrop on Global Militants
October 2, 2004
By JULIA PRESTON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/02/nyregion/02sheik.html?pagewanted=all&position=
For the last three months, the defendant who has drawn the most attention in a terror trial under way in Manhattan federal court is Lynne F. Stewart, who made a name as a defense lawyer for suspects accused of terrorism. But as the prosecutors' case has unfolded, most of the evidence about the international conspiracy they hope to prove has centered on a defendant who sits silently beside her, Ahmed Abdel Sattar.
A Staten Island postal worker and a Muslim, Mr. Sattar served as a paralegal aide for Ms. Stewart in the 1995 trial of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the elderly blind Islamic cleric who is serving a life sentence in a United States prison for plotting terrorist attacks in New York.
In the years after that trial, the evidence reveals, Mr. Sattar made hundreds of phone calls from his cramped apartment to fundamentalist followers of the sheik across the globe, from Britain to Egypt to Afghanistan. Through conference calls he arranged, Mr. Sattar became a gatekeeper for communications between far-flung Islamic militants, eventually joining their debates about using violence.
Mr. Sattar faces the most serious charges in this trial, including one count of conspiracy to kill and kidnap people in a foreign country, which carries a maximum life sentence. Kenneth A. Paul, one of his lawyers, said in an opening statement on June 23 that Mr. Sattar was "politically frustrated" but never intended to plan or incite violence.
For her part, Ms. Stewart is accused of helping Mr. Abdel Rahman communicate a call to war against Egypt's government from a federal prison cell where he was supposed to be incommunicado. She faces charges that carry a maximum of 10 years, as does a third defendant, Mohamed Yousry, a translator of Arabic.
Along with Ms. Stewart, Mr. Sattar was one of a handful of people permitted to communicate directly with the sheik in prison. But the prosecutors' evidence has indicated that he went a step further. After he was eagerly sought out by followers of the sheik in the Gamaa Islamiya - the Islamic Group, a militant organization in Egypt - he became a participant in their deliberations about war and peace.
Records of Mr. Sattar's phone calls, which were wiretapped, show that his calling quickened in the fall of 2000, when the group's leaders were embroiled in a fierce dispute over whether to continue a cease-fire in their long war against the Egyptian government or return to terror attacks. Although Mr. Sattar was not a member of the group, he favored - at least in statements in the government's transcripts - those who wanted to abandon the truce.
In a moment of rage over political clashes in Israel, Mr. Sattar helped an Islamic Group leader who was in Afghanistan compose a religious edict and release it under the sheik's name without asking the sheik. It summoned young Muslims to fight Jews "by all possible means of jihad, either by killing them as individuals or by targeting their interests and their advocates, as much as they can."
Mr. Sattar's lawyers declined to comment in detail before he testifies in his own defense in the next few weeks. But they said they would fill in the context of his phone calls to show that he was trying to help men he regarded as Muslim brothers, not to participate in a plan for violence. "It clearly was never his intent for anyone to be killed," Mr. Paul said.
In court, Mr. Sattar is being confronted with his own words. The prosecutors' evidence consists overwhelmingly of transcripts of wiretap recordings that were among some 90,000 intercepted conversations on his home phone made between March 1995 and March 2002, as part of a federal foreign intelligence investigation.
Now the man who talked so much sits silent day after day, watching the prosecutors re-enact his phone calls, reading out English transcripts of the Arabic dialogue. With the jury as their audience, the prosecutors take turns reading, in flat voices, the words of Mr. Sattar, Ms. Stewart, the sheik and others.
The defense lawyers have sought to bar some transcripts, but in general they have not challenged the authenticity of the calls. The transcripts show that Mr. Sattar spoke regularly with men identified by the American authorities as terrorists. The prosecutors are trying to convince the jury that the phone calls - Mr. Sattar's words - added up to a conspiracy to kill.
Mr. Sattar, 45, was born in Cairo and raised in Egypt, serving two years in his country's army before coming to the United States as a tourist in 1982. He stayed, married an American citizen and in 1989 became a naturalized American. His wife, Lisa Sattar, a Catholic, converted to Islam; they have four children. He went to work in 1988 in the main post office branch in Staten Island.
He was drawn to Mr. Abdel Rahman, a fellow Egyptian, after the cleric came to the United States in 1990 and began preaching in mosques in Brooklyn and New Jersey. In sermons full of fury, the sheik railed against the Egyptian government, calling for it to be overthrown and replaced with an Islamic state.
Certified as a paralegal aide in the sheik's terrorism trial, Mr. Sattar was deeply disappointed when Mr. Abdel Rahman was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, Mr. Paul, his defense lawyer, said. He continued to support the sheik, even starting a diaper and baby goods business from his home to raise money for him in prison.
The transcripts show it pained Mr. Sattar that the sheik, held in solitary confinement in a federal penitentiary in Minnesota, was barred by special restrictions from speaking with anyone outside the prison but his legal team and his closest family, and could not participate in communal Friday prayers.
"There is not a prisoner in the United States who suffers like he does," Mr. Sattar said in one phone call to the sheik's son, Mohammed, who was in Afghanistan.
The sheik has signed a power of attorney for Mr. Sattar. "I trust him with everything I have," the sheik said in one statement he sent out of prison through Ms. Stewart. "I testify that he does not speak anything but the truth."
Mr. Sattar's phone calls offer a glimpse inside the hidden network of Islamic Group militants in the midst of a clash between two leaders. On one side is Sheik Salah Hashim, the group's leader in Egypt, an outspoken proponent of the cease-fire.
His adversary is Rifai Ahmed Taha, an associate of Osama bin Laden who was named by Washington in a 1998 executive order as a "specially designated terrorist." Mr. Taha is accused of conspiring in the 1997 attack at the ancient Egyptian ruins in Luxor, where 58 foreign tourists were killed. Public outrage over those killings led the Islamic Group to announce the cease-fire later that year.
Also on the line with Mr. Sattar were Mustafa Hamza, another exiled Islamic Group leader, and Montasser al-Zayat, a lawyer representing its members who were in Egypt's jails. Both favored continuing the peace. Mr. Sattar also spoke with Yasir al-Sirri, an Egyptian exile who was a one-man clearinghouse in London for information about radical fundamentalists.
In the conversations before 2000, Mr. Sattar seemed to stay aloof from the group's internal feuds, simply connecting phone calls among its members. But he began to change in June of that year after Mr. Abdel Rahman issued a statement, relayed to the international press by Ms. Stewart in defiance of the prison rules, withdrawing his support for the cease-fire.
The transcripts indicate that Mr. Sattar helped sharpen the language that the sheik dictated in prison to Ms. Stewart and her translator, then rushed the news of the cleric's new position in a flurry of calls to Islamic Group members overseas. Mr. Hamza, who prosecutors said was in Afghanistan, protested the sheik's shift and pleaded with Mr. Sattar not to release it to the press.
"I can try to control it," Mr. Sattar says, starting to assert new influence as an intermediary.
In the following weeks, Mr. Sattar set up conference calls and then remained on the line while Mr. Hashim and Mr. Taha argued angrily. Mr. Taha said the Egyptian government of President Hosni Mubarak "must be removed, and will not be removed except by using armed force."
"We are in a difficult stage; we can't use force at all," Mr. Hashim insisted, as Mr. Sattar listened.
At the time of these exchanges, Mr. Taha appeared with Mr. bin Laden on a videotape, apparently made in Afghanistan, which was broadcast on Sept. 21, 2000, by Al Jazeera, the Arab language television network. Together they call for violent worldwide jihad, or religious struggle, to free Mr. Abdel Rahman from jail.
Two days later Mr. Taha called Mr. Sattar to get his reaction. "The words caused such an impact," Mr. Sattar cheered.
A turning point for Mr. Sattar came in late September 2000, during an upsurge of violence between Israelis and Palestinians. Coming home from the post office each day, the transcripts show, he immediately goes to monitor Arab news Web sites and television. The images all look to him like Israeli attacks on innocent Palestinian civilians, according to the transcripts.
"Animals, animals, I swear by God the Almighty," Mr. Sattar said, referring to the Israelis, his slight stutter accentuated by his agitation. When Mr. Taha called, Mr. Sattar urged him to compose a religious decree that they could attribute to the sheik. Later he edited Mr. Taha's draft.
"Kill the Jews wherever they are found," it says.
Their taped conversations suggest that Mr. Sattar removed words that explicitly threatened the United States. Instead, he said he believed it was up to the Arab nations surrounding Israel "to wage the jihad."
Several days later, when Mr. Abdel Rahman was informed of the religious decree during a prison phone call, he approved its message.
Mr. Sattar's nights became sleepless as he started receiving calls at all hours. He was contacted by an Islamic Group militant, Alaa Atia, who was in hiding in southern Egypt. While Mr. Taha tried to persuade Mr. Atia to organize an armed attack, Mr. Sattar worked to arrange to send him money to escape from Egypt.
Then he received news that Mr. Atia had been killed by the Egyptian police. In agonized calls, Mr. Sattar was heard worrying that he may have inadvertently helped the police locate him.
"The Lord Almighty knows how I feel," Mr. Sattar said. "I feel guilty, guilty. I am telling you I suspect it is 90 percent my phone." At the same time he more plainly promoted Mr. Taha within the group. "The man has a worthwhile viewpoint; the least to do is to hear it," he said. Mr. Sattar was arrested in April 2002. No evidence has been presented that he was involved in a specific act of violence. None of the charges in the case involve plans for attacks in the United States. The government expects to rest its case next week.
Ms. Stewart's lawyers have repeatedly asked to have her trial separated from Mr. Sattar's. She has said she was not aware of his extensive phone communications with the Islamic Group.
"This is really a case about words," said the defense lawyer, Mr. Paul, a case in which Mr. Sattar is accused of causing terrorism by speaking about it. Mr. Sattar "is no enemy of the United States," Mr. Paul said. "He is certainly not a terrorist."
--------
Disarray Thwarts Terrorist List, Inquiry Finds
October 2, 2004
The New York Times
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and JOHN SCHWARTZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/02/politics/02watch.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Oct. 1 - Efforts to create a master terrorist "watch list," a priority for the Bush administration, are lagging badly because of a lack of leadership at the Department of Homeland Security and other bureaucratic problems, the department's inspector general said in a report released Friday.
The highly critical report found that the effort, which seeks to combine 10 watch lists now in use by agencies across the federal government, suffers from poor coordination, staffing problems and technical hurdles. The problems reflect a "pattern of ad hoc approaches to counterterrorism" throughout the government, it said.
It was the second government report in less than a week that found serious cracks in what are seen as cornerstones in the administration's efforts to bolster counterterrorism operations and domestic defense.
In a separate report issued on Monday, the Justice Department's inspector general faulted the Federal Bureau of Investigation for continuing problems in its ability to translate terrorism-related material, with a backlog of more than 120,000 hours of audio material. Computer storage problems may have also led the F.B.I. to systematically erase some recordings in investigating Al Qaeda, the department said.
Like the F.B.I.'s translation efforts, the project to consolidate the government's terror watch list has been a critical priority for the administration. In his report on Friday, Clark Kent Ervin, the inspector general for homeland security, called the process "one critical means of protecting the homeland."
Agencies across the government maintain a myriad of watch lists that track airplane passengers, visa applicants, border-crossers, criminal suspects and others against lists of suspected terrorists. But sharing the information among agencies has often proven unwieldy, and civil liberties advocates and others have criticized the way the lists are generated and used.
Several prominent members of Congress said in recent weeks that their names were mistakenly put on "no fly" lists and that they had difficulty being removed.
Mr. Ervin found in his report that the Homeland Security Department "has not fulfilled its leadership responsibility" for consolidating the watch lists, deferring instead to the Justice Department and the F.B.I. to take the lead in operating what is known as the Terrorist Screening Center, which was set up to consolidate the lists.
A master list is supposed to be done by the end of the year, and government officials said Friday that despite the coordination problems, they expected to meet that deadline. But even after the release of the report Friday, there was disagreement over who is supposed to be in charge of the master list project.
Brian Rohrkasse, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, said of the inspector general's criticisms, "We disagree with the premise of the report, which states that D.H.S. has the lead responsibility." He said that while homeland security was a "strong partner" in the project, the F.B.I. had the lead.
But an F.B.I. official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the dissension over the issue, said ultimate responsibility for developing a master watch list "is a D.H.S. function," adding: "We're doing it now because they didn't have a process to set it up, but it's a D.H.S. function. It's supposed to be D.H.S., and they should take a more active role."
Domestic security officials told the inspector general that they "lacked the internal resources and infrastructure to carry out the effort" at a time when the department faced the "enormous task" of merging 22 agencies into a new Department of Homeland Security.
While the terrorist screening center was supposed to have 160 employees in place by this June, it had only about half that total because of management problems and difficulties finding people with the expertise and clearance levels, the report said.
Nor has there been enough attention paid to ensuring that the watch lists do not impede on privacy rights, the report said. It found that some agencies using watch lists had conducted data mining operations without needed oversight, a practice that it said carried the "potential for greater civil liberties violations and law enforcement errors."
A domestic security official told the inspector general that the terrorist screening center "was created so quickly that the necessary privacy impact review was not conducted," the report said.
Meanwhile, in another potential blow to the department, the head of the administration's efforts to make cyberspace more secure abruptly resigned on Thursday after a year on the job. The official, Amit Yoran, a former computer security entrepreneur, told department officials on Thursday that he was leaving his post as director of the National Cyber Security Division.
High-tech industry officials have long been frustrated with the low profile of cyber security efforts within the administration. Some industry officials said Mr. Yoran had chafed at the slow pace of change in government.
Mr. Yoran said he had not been frustrated in the job, and he expressed support for the administration's efforts in cyberspace.
-------- police
Police Lab's Troubles Grow
Problems in Houston Lead to Moratorium on Executions
By Sylvia Moreno
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 2, 2004; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1638-2004Oct1.html
HOUSTON -- Two years ago, the problems at Houston's police crime lab appeared serious but not catastrophic: a leaky roof, insufficient ventilation, a backup in the processing of rape kits and possible water contamination of evidence.
Those were the issues that City Council member Carol Alvarado raised to her colleagues in summer 2002, after taking a half-day tour of the facility at the urging of a concerned lab employee.
What the council and other city officials quickly came to realize was that shabby lab conditions presaged a much more serious problem. "There was a long history of inefficiencies," Alvarado said. "Could that have someone sitting in jail that could be innocent?"
Multiple and continuing investigations since then have proved just that.
So far, one Houston man convicted of rape, and imprisoned 4 1/2 years, has been released after the crime lab's DNA tests were discredited by new tests. Josiah Sutton subsequently was pardoned in May by Gov. Rick Perry (R).
On Thursday, Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal announced that another Houston man, incarcerated for 17 years on kidnapping and rape charges, was convicted on "scientifically unfounded and inaccurate" trial testimony by a former crime lab supervisor. But Rosenthal said he will retry the inmate, George Rodriguez. Rodriguez is expected to be released on bond soon and his attorneys will seek to overturn his conviction, which brought him a 60-year sentence.
Even Houston's top police official this week called for a moratorium on executions of death row inmates convicted on evidence handled or analyzed by the crime lab. Of the 454 inmates on Texas's death row, more than a quarter are from Harris County. One of those Houston men, Edward Green III, 30, is scheduled to die by injection Tuesday.
"I think it would be very prudent for us as a system, that is, a criminal justice system, to delay further executions until we've had an opportunity to reexamine evidence that played a particular role in the conviction of an individual that was sentenced to death," Chief Harold L. Hurtt said at a news briefing at police headquarters Thursday.
"We are talking about life-and-death situations," he said. "We need to do what is right."
The task of sorting out the problems has been made even more difficult with the recent revelation by Hurtt that an internal investigation discovered 280 abandoned and mislabeled boxes of evidence that included a fetus and body parts, along with guns and other weapons, in a police property room. The boxes hold evidence from 8,000 cases, including open and closed murder cases, dating from about 1979 to 1991, Hurtt said. The boxes had been sent to the police property room by the crime lab and predate DNA testing, which began in 1992.
DNA testing by the crime lab was halted in December 2002 after an independent audit disclosed possible evidence contamination and improper analysis. Rosenthal's office then ordered retesting of DNA evidence processed by the lab and used to obtain criminal convictions. That retesting allowed Sutton to be released from prison.
In the summer of 2003, the Houston Chronicle reported that lab analysts had complained about lab conditions several years ago to then-Police Chief C.O. Bradford. The DNA lab chief and an assistant chief in charge of the crime lab subsequently retired, as did Bradford. Shortly afterward, a Harris County grand jury investigated the issues involving the crime lab, but did not return any indictments.
Last fall, city officials tried to make improvements at the lab by hiring a new director, but almost concurrently the lab's toxicology division was forced to close for four months when a supervisor failed a competency test. Even now, outside labs are used for DNA testing.
About the same time in August that Hurtt announced the discovery of the 280 abandoned boxes of evidence, attorneys for the convicted rapist, Rodriguez, released a report by six forensic experts who concluded the crime lab's analysis of DNA in his case to be "scientifically unsound." Though Rodriguez was convicted in 1987, before the use of DNA testing, a judge had ordered in 2002 that the city's police lab conduct DNA testing on any remaining evidence in his case.
Then this week, the district attorney's office announced that a new, independent analysis of chemical testing used to convict Rodriguez found the testing was inaccurate.
"This shows there is absolutely nothing reliable about the forensic science taking place in the crime lab," said Vanessa Potkin, a staff attorney for the New York City-based Innocence Project, which has been representing Rodriguez since 2000.
"It didn't start with DNA testing. The problem is prevalent, widespread and serious. It was prevalent in typical serology science," she said. "Nothing can be considered reliable out of that lab."
For much of this year, the police department has been working to get the crime lab accredited for the first time in its history. Hurtt also authorized the hiring of a "project leader" to head a team of outside experts and local residents to review crime lab records and look into questions pertaining to evidence processing. When DNA testing will be resumed is not clear.
"What we want to do is bring credibility back to the crime lab," said Executive Assistant Chief Martha Montalvo.
-------- prisons / prisoners
Guantanamo letter alleges torture
Moazzam Begg said he witnessed the deaths of two detainees
AFP
Saturday 02 October 2004
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/2AF1EBEA-C189-49C0-B617-B707342E4972.htm
One of four British detainees still held by the United States at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba says he has been subjected to vindictive torture and death threats.
In a hand-written letter released by his lawyers on Friday, Moazzam Begg, from Birmingham in the English Midlands, also says he has witnessed the deaths of two fellow detainees "at the hands of US military personnel".
It is not known how the letter made it past US military censors.
Begg, 36, who has been detained for more than two years now, insisted he was a law-abiding British citizen, that he had never met Usama bin Ladin, and was not a member of al-Qaida or any other paramilitary organisation.
His four-page letter marked the first time that any communication from a serving Guantanamo detainee has been made public, the attorneys said.
Pernicious threats
"During several interviews, particularly - though unexclusively - in Afghanistan, I was subjected to pernicious threats of torture, actual vindictive torture and death threats - amongst other coercively employed interrogation techniques," Begg wrote.
"In this atmosphere of severe antipathy towards detainees was the compounded use of racially and religiously prejudiced taunts.
"This culminated, in my opinion, with the deaths of two fellow detainees at the hands of US military personnel, to which I myself was partially witness," he added.
Begg, who was arrested in Pakistan in February 2002, was among nine British citizens known to have been detained at Guantanamo.
Four were released last March, then freed without charge upon their arrival in Britain.
Three of them have since alleged in a dossier published in July that they had been abused while in US captivity.
The remaining four - Begg; Feroz Abbasi, 23; Martin Mubanga, 29; and Richard Belmar, 23, all from London - face trial by military tribunals for alleged involvement in "global terrorism".
Legal demand
Begg's letter, dated 12 July 2004, was addressed "to whom it may concern" at the US Forces Administration at Guantanamo Bay. It was signed with his name and his prisoner number, 00558.
He requested at the end of the letter that copies be sent to the home secretary, the US Supreme Court, the European Court of Human Rights, Amnesty International, and the International Committee of the Red Cross.
"What do we do when Mr Begg's captors are in fact a state, a rogue state, acting wholly illegally?" Gareth Pierce, civil liberties lawyer
Begg's US counsel, Clive Stafford Smith, said he would file a legal demand next Monday to immediately end his client's "inhuman treatment" and for the US Government to publish detailed evidence of Begg's alleged torture.
Civil liberties lawyer Gareth Pierce, meanwhile, called upon the British government to take Begg's letter to the United Nations as evidence of torture, with the demand that the US be held responsible.
"But most importantly in the case of Mr Begg that he is repatriated immediately," he said.
"What do we do when Mr Begg's captors are in fact a state, a rogue state, acting wholly illegally?"
-------- terrorism
New Qaeda Audiotape Urges Muslims to 'Carry On the Fight'
October 2, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/02/international/middleeast/02tape.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Oct. 1 - A new audiotaped message made by Al Qaeda's second-ranking leader and broadcast Friday calls on young Muslims around the world to "carry on the fight" even if the group's leaders are killed or captured.
The message by the leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was broadcast on the Arab satellite television channel Al Jazeera, and intelligence officials in Washington said a review by the Central Intelligence Agency had concluded that it was authentic.
The new message from Dr. Zawahiri was his second in less than a month, and it was the latest in a continuing flow of exhortations from fugitive leaders of the terrorist network.
Dr. Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden, the top Qaeda leader, are among those who have evaded American capture since the Sept. 11 attacks, and government officials said there had been no indication that any of the senior leaders had died.
The audiotape was broadcast only hours after President Bush, in his debate on Thursday night with Senator John Kerry, emphasized American successes in what he described as the capture of 75 percent of "known Al Qaeda leaders," a reference to those known to American authorities at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Dr. Zawahiri spoke in Arabic on the tape, but an English-language translation of the message by CNN was posted on CNN.com.
The message called on young Muslims to resist what Dr. Zawahiri described as the "crusader campaign," a reference to the United States and its allies.
The message included references to countries that have contributed troops to the American-led forces in Iraq.
"We shouldn't wait for the American, English, French, Jewish, Hungarian, Polish and South Korean forces to invade Egypt, the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen and Algeria and then start the resistance after the occupier had already invaded us," Dr. Zawahiri said in the message. "We should start now.
"The interests of America, Britain, Australia, France, Norway, Poland, South Korea and Japan are everywhere. All of them participated in the invasion of Afghanistan, Iraq and Chechnya."
Dr. Zawahiri, an Egyptian physician, was last heard in a videotape broadcast by Al Jazeera, the Arabic-language satellite channel based in Qatar, on Sept. 9, when he forecast an American defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan.
That broadcast included references to recent events, but the tape broadcast on Friday gave no clear clue as to when it might have been made.
--------
No. 2 Al Qaeda Leader Urges Attacks Against U.S. and Allies
By Dan Eggen and Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, October 2, 2004; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64879-2004Oct1.html
An audiotape attributed to al Qaeda's second-in-command, Ayman Zawahiri, emerged yesterday, calling for preemptive attacks against the United States and its allies, and urging followers to continue fighting "if we die or are arrested."
The tape, broadcast on the al- Jazeera satellite network, is the second message in less than a month to be attributed to Zawahiri, who is believed to be directing limited al Qaeda operations from hideouts along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
"Let us start resisting now," Ayman Zawahiri says on new tape.
The recording stoked fears among some U.S. and European intelligence officials that the terrorist network is preparing a significant strike before the Nov. 2 presidential election. The FBI and other agencies this week launched an aggressive campaign of interviews and arrests aimed at thwarting such an attack.
The tape contains no specific clues indicating when it might have been recorded, and is notably downbeat compared with previous triumphal messages from al Qaeda. It bemoaned a lack of action against "the Americans and the crusaders" and called on "Muslim youth" to form a new leadership to fight Western powers.
"Let us start resisting now," the speaker says on the tape, according to a Reuters translation. "We can't wait any longer, or we will be eaten up country by country, just as they occupied us in the last two centuries. . . . The Muslim world has entered a new age of occupation and dividing into sphere of influence."
In one passage, Zawahiri also mentions the possibility of dying or being captured, presumably referring to himself and other fugitive al Qaeda figures. The network's leader, Osama bin Laden, has not been heard from since the release of an audiotape in May.
State-run Pakistani television reported yesterday that security forces had killed about 100 suspected al Qaeda terrorists during a recent military operation in tribal areas near Afghanistan, according to the Associated Press. The broadcasts quoted Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf.
Intelligence analysts have "high confidence" that the voice on yesterday's audiotape belongs to Zawahiri, based on a preliminary technical analysis, one U.S. official said.
Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the emergence of such tapes from bin Laden and other al Qaeda figures has prompted concern among intelligence officials and terrorism experts, who say they often presage terrorist attacks by a month or two.
A government official with access to daily terrorism intelligence reports said: "There is a concern among people that today's warning seems similar to the warning that preceded the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Africa and other calls to arms that came to forecast attacks. It seems to be a green light to attack," as opposed to attacking in a more limited way.
"Given past patterns, this tape validates all the concerns we've had about the period leading up to the elections," said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert who heads Rand Corp.'s Washington office. "This ratchets up one's sense of alert to expect something somewhere."
Several terrorism experts also said there is a note of desperation to the message, as well as an apparent acknowledgment that U.S. and Russian military actions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya and elsewhere are affecting the organization. Zawahiri explicitly calls for the creation of "a leadership for the resistance to combat the crusaders."
European security officials said yesterday that they were still assessing the tape to determine whether the speaker is Zawahiri. He cited Britain, France, Norway and Poland as European nations that deserve to be targeted for attacks because of their support for Israel or the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
In an interview before the tape was made public, a senior German intelligence official said he was "convinced" that Zawahiri and bin Laden are in hiding along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, where U.S. and Pakistani forces have concentrated an unsuccessful search for nearly three years. Although the Bush administration has said it has captured or killed much of al Qaeda's leadership since the attacks, the German official said the network can still plan attacks or give orders from its base in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
"Of course, they've suffered heavy losses," the official said, "but we have seen that they have always managed to replace these top people with younger people. These people may not be as experienced, but they are still effective."
Zawahiri's broadcast comes as the FBI and other U.S. agencies embark on an aggressive campaign aimed at thwarting any plans for an attack before or during the November elections. The FBI has also interviewed more than 13,000 immigrants this year as part of a broader effort to gather information about suspected terrorist groups, law enforcement officials said.
Department of Homeland Security officials said yesterday they are stepping up efforts to arrest visa violators who may pose a threat to the country.
Dean Boyd, a spokesman for the department's Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau, said a special ICE unit had arrested 359 foreign nationals on visa violations between June 2003 and August 2004. Those arrests resulted from nearly 5,200 field investigations carried out by the Compliance Enforcement Unit, which tracks foreign students and other visitors who violate their immigration status.
Boyd said that "some" of those arrested were linked to cases involving national security, but he did not have a number.
Correspondent Craig Whitlock in Berlin and staff writer Mary Beth Sheridan and researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.
-------- POLITICS
-------- corruption
Analysts Consider DeLay's Rebukes
Third Strike Could Weaken Lawmaker
By Charles Babington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 2, 2004; Page A05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1572-2004Oct1?language=printer
With House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) now involved directly or tangentially in a handful of ethics cases and investigations, some analysts say that another setback could substantially weaken the lawmaker's ability to champion Republican causes and candidates.
DeLay's bare-knuckle tactics have sparked controversy and Democratic ire for years, but Thursday's 62-page report by the House ethics committee highlighted DeLay's questionable arm-twisting of GOP members when crucial votes are at stake. The panel admonished him for offering a political favor in exchange for Rep. Nick Smith's support of a major Medicare prescription drug bill late last year. The Michigan Republican was moved nearly to tears, but DeLay told investigators he made a quick exit so he would not get "stuck" talking with the loquacious and unpredictable lawmaker on the House floor.
The report's conclusion marked the second time in five years that the ethics committee has chastised DeLay. A third setback, which conceivably could come from a pending complaint, would fuel critics' claims that DeLay has crossed an ethical threshold, several analysts said yesterday.
House Republicans still support their majority leader, party members said. But they are warily eyeing the pending complaint, along with a Texas grand jury's recent indictment of three of DeLay's political associates on fundraising charges. It does not help, some say, that Senate hearings into the lobbying practices of a former DeLay spokesman and a political associate are generating searing attacks on the two men's political tactics and influence-peddling.
DeLay, an energetic partisan admired by many colleagues and loathed by Democrats, says he has done nothing improper or unethical. House Republicans "feel this is nothing but a political witch hunt and an attempt to tear down Tom DeLay through personal attacks and destructive tactics when they just can't beat him legislatively," said Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.).
Some Democrats and watchdog groups, however, say such explanations are wearing thin, especially in light of two rebukes -- one in 1999, one this week -- from an ethics panel evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats.
"A lot of members on Capitol Hill believe in the concept of 'three strikes, you're out,' " said Fred Wertheimer, a longtime advocate of public ethics and president of Democracy 21. "And Mr. DeLay has two strikes and a third case pending."
Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, who often writes about congressional ethics, said, "I think the drip, drip, drip may create a problem for him now."
Because the Texas indictments stem from allegations central to the pending complaint, Ornstein said, the ethics panel, known as the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, will be under political and public pressure to at least launch a formal investigation before Congress adjourns for the elections.
That could be enough to trigger a new round of attacks on DeLay that -- even if the investigation eventually proves fruitless -- and would give the impression his ethical problems have reached critical mass, some Democrats and liberal groups said. They tried yesterday to help build that impression.
"The rebuke of Tom DeLay by the ethics committee is yet another ethical cloud hanging over the Capitol," said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
The liberal Campaign for America's Future called on Republicans to oust DeLay from this leadership post, and several groups -- including Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington -- demanded that the ethics committee aggressively pursue the pending complaint, filed in June by Rep. Chris Bell (D-Tex.).
Some Democrats say DeLay's ethics battles already are making him less potent on the campaign trail. A recent New Orleans Times-Picayune article on GOP House candidate Billy Tauzin III was headlined "DeLay's stumping for Tauzin is scaled back after scandal." DeLay staffers denied the suggestion and said he is campaigning for Republican House nominees this year at least as much as he did in 2002.
Nonetheless, said George Washington University public affairs professor Stephen Hess, the accumulation of accusations should trouble DeLay's friends because "the history of these things is that eventually it does wear down" a politician's support. DeLay has survived past storms, Hess said, partly because he "has been a shrewd enough leader to have many if not most of his legislative constituents beholden to him."
It was just that strategy that led to this week's admonishment.
On Nov. 21, 2003, DeLay and other GOP leaders keenly wanted to pass a Medicare prescription drug bill, a White House priority opposed by some House Republicans and most Democrats. Smith was a key target for arm-twisting. He had announced his retirement and wanted his son, Brad, to be elected to replace him in the 2004 elections.
According to the ethics panel's report: Smith received a phone call from former staffer Jason Roe, who "told him that there could be substantial support for Brad Smith's campaign if Representative Smith voted in favor of the Medicare bill and that he understood from a source close to . . . DeLay's office that Brad Smith could get a National Republican Congressional Committee endorsement" if the father voted aye. Roe denied alluding to DeLay's office.
DeLay deputy chief of staff Dan Flynn called Roe on that same day, "seeking information" on Brad Smith's primary race.
As midnight approached, the elder Smith told investigators, DeLay approached him on the House floor "and told him that he would personally endorse Representative Smith's son in the Republican primary" if Smith "voted in favor of the Medicare legislation." DeLay called it "my last offer," and Smith "teared up." DeLay corroborated the conversation with Smith.
DeLay's remarks caused Smith "to lend more credence to the comments [Roe] had made" on the phone. Smith told investigators "that based on the combination of his interaction with [DeLay] and his conversations with [Roe], he came to believe his son's candidacy could be significantly impacted by his vote." Smith, however, ultimately voted against the bill, and his son lost the August primary. The bill narrowly passed in the predawn hours of Nov. 22.
Nick Smith would make an assertion -- later retracted -- that unnamed sources had offered as much as $100,000 for his son's campaign in exchange for an aye vote on Medicare. Thursday's report admonished Smith for making allegations that appeared to stem from "speculation or exaggeration."
In admonishing DeLay, the ethics panel said: "It is improper for a member to offer or link support for the personal interests of another member as part of a quid pro quo to achieve a legislative goal."
--------
Congress Moves to Protect Federal Whistleblowers
October 3, 2004
By ROBERT PEAR
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/03/politics/03whistle.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Oct. 2 - Over strenuous objections from the Bush administration, Congress is moving to increase protections for federal employees who expose fraud, waste and wrongdoing inside the government.
Lawmakers of both parties say the measures are needed to prevent retaliation against such whistleblowers, who reveal threats to public health, safety and security.
But the administration says the bill unconstitutionally interferes with the president's ability to control and manage the government.
On Wednesday, a House committee approved a whistleblower protection bill. In July, a Senate committee approved a similar measure offering more extensive protections to whistleblowers.
Representative Todd R. Platts, Republican of Pennsylvania, the sponsor of the House bill, said: "We need to protect public servants who expose fraud and intentional misconduct. Court decisions in the last 10 years have eroded whistleblower protections, so that if you're a federal employee, you're often risking your job - and the wrath of your superiors - if you come forward with evidence of wrongdoing.''
The Senate bill gained momentum when Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, chairwoman of the Committee on Governmental Affairs, joined Senator Daniel K. Akaka, Democrat of Hawaii, in pushing it.
"The campaign for this legislation went from dormant to active when Senator Collins embraced the bill a few months ago,'' said Thomas M. Devine, legal director of the Government Accountability Project, a watchdog group that works with whistleblowers. "That was the turning point.''
While the legislation has broad support and a compromise appears to be within reach, it is impossible to know whether the measure will become law. As evidence of a need for legislation, lawmakers cited dozens of cases, including these:
¶Federal investigators found that two Border Patrol agents, Mark Hall and Robert Lindemann, were disciplined after they disclosed weaknesses in security along the Canadian border.
¶Teresa C. Chambers was dismissed from her job as chief of the United States Park Police after she said the agency did not have enough money or personnel to protect parks and monuments in the Washington area.
¶The nation's top Medicare official threatened to fire Richard S. Foster, the chief Medicare actuary, if he provided data to Congress showing the cost of the new Medicare law, which exceeded White House estimates.
Airport baggage screeners say they have been penalized for raising concerns about aviation security. But in August, an independent federal agency, the Merit Systems Protection Board, ruled that they had none of the whistleblower rights available to other federal employees. The government, it said, can "hire, discipline and terminate screeners without regard to any other law.''
The United States Office of Special Counsel, which investigates complaints of reprisal before they go to the board, has a large backlog of whistleblower cases, including many pending more than a year.
The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, have made the government more secretive, but have also prompted whistleblowers to come forward in greater numbers. "They feel they can no longer stand by knowing that people's lives are at risk,'' said Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, another watchdog group.
Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, said he knew of several instances in which federal agencies had retaliated against whistleblowers by revoking their security clearances. Because they can no longer do their jobs, Mr. Grassley said, "the pulling of a security clearance effectively fires employees.''
Administration officials gave several reasons for opposing the bills. Peter D. Keisler, an assistant attorney general, said the legislation would encourage frivolous complaints by disgruntled employees, crippling the ability of senior officials to manage the federal work force.
"The bill would convert every federal employee into a potential whistleblower and every minor workplace dispute with a supervisor into a potential whistleblower case,'' Mr. Keisler said.
Mr. Akaka said the objections came as no surprise. "The Justice Department has an institutional conflict of interest'' because it is responsible for defending agencies accused of retaliating against whistleblowers, he said.
Congress has repeatedly tried to protect conscientious civil servants, under laws adopted in 1978, 1989 and 1994. But lawmakers said these efforts had been frustrated by the court that hears appeals from aggrieved federal employees, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.
The court often assumes that a federal agency acted properly unless an employee offers "irrefragable proof to the contrary.''
The Senate committee cited this as one of many issues on which the court had misinterpreted the law and the intent of Congress. "By definition,'' it said, "irrefragable means impossible to refute. This imposes an impossible burden on whistleblowers.''
By contrast, the House and Senate bills would protect the disclosure of any information that a whistleblower "reasonably believes'' to be evidence of government illegality or misconduct.
The legislation would also clarify the right of federal employees, like Mr. Foster, the Medicare actuary, to provide information to Congress, free of threats or reprisals.
-------- propaganda wars
Bush Aides Gave One - Sided View of Iraqi Data - - NYT
October 2, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-iraq-bush-tubes.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Bush administration officials, in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, gave a one-sided view of the case for believing Saddam Hussein had a nuclear arms program that ignored the doubts of their own experts, the New York Times said on Saturday.
The newspaper made the charge in an article about thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes ordered by Iraq that leading administration officials said were intended for use in uranium centrifuges.
``As the only physical evidence the United States could brandish of (Saddam's) revived nuclear ambitions, they gave credibility to the apocalyptic imagery invoked by President Bush and his advisers,'' said the article on the newspaper's Web site.
It referred to remarks by national security adviser Condoleezza Rice in September 2002 in which she said the tubes, a shipment of which were intercepted in Jordan in June 2001, were ``only really suited for nuclear weapons programs.''
The paper said that before she made the remarks, ``she was aware that the government's foremost nuclear experts had concluded that the tubes were most likely not for nuclear weapons at all.''
It said the Energy Department experts believed the tubes were probably intended for small artillery rockets, as Iraq itself maintained.
``Senior administration officials repeatedly failed to fully disclose the contrary views of America's leading nuclear scientists,'' the Times said, citing Rice, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell by name.
``They sometimes overstated even the most dire intelligence assessments of the tubes, yet minimized or rejected the strong doubts of their own experts. They worried privately that the nuclear case was weak, but expressed sober certitude in public.
``The result was a largely one-sided presentation to the public that did not convey the depth of evidence and argument against the administration's most tangible proof of a revived nuclear weapons program in Iraq,'' the paper said.
A White House spokeswoman had no immediate comment.
But the campaign of Democratic presidential contender John Kerry jumped on the report, issuing an ad that said: ``Here's something new about George Bush -- newspapers report he withheld key intelligence information from the American public so he could overstate the threat Iraq posed. Bush rushed to war. We're paying the price. It's time for a fresh start.''
The times story said the theory that the tubes were intended for a centrifuge was largely promoted by one analyst at the CIA, a relatively junior staffer who had a background in mechanical engineering and operating U.S. centrifuges.
President Bush has cited Iraq's purported cache of weapons of mass destruction as the reason for deposing Saddam. No weapons have been found.
-------- us politics
As an Issue, War Is Risky for Both Sides
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 2, 2004; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1575-2004Oct1?language=printer
Not since the Vietnam War more than three decades ago has the United States found itself waging a bloody conflict abroad as a fierce political argument has broken out at home over the reasons for getting into the fight in the first place and the ways of getting out.
Thursday's presidential debate crystallized the current argument. Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) portrayed the decision to invade Iraq as misguided and criticized the war's conduct. President Bush vigorously defended the mission as a necessary component of his broader anti-terrorism campaign and insisted that his battle plan will succeed.
But the exchange also highlighted the risks -- both for the candidates and for the U.S. troops deeply entangled in combat 7,000 miles away -- of having the war emerge as a hotly disputed political issue.
For Kerry, several analysts said yesterday, the challenge is to level his criticisms without sounding antiwar. Otherwise, they said, he runs the danger of contributing to a demoralization of U.S. military forces and, if elected, limiting his options for keeping troops in Iraq.
For Bush, the trick is to portray his military efforts as working without sounding Pollyannaish. Too upbeat a message could damage his credibility if conditions in Iraq deteriorate further.
"Bush needs to look like he's not being too optimistic, while Kerry has to avoid appearing too pessimistic," said Peter D. Feaver, a political science professor at Duke University.
The result so far has been a sharpened debate between the candidates about the past -- that is, how the United States reached this point in the Iraqi conflict. Less clarity has emerged over which candidate might have the better idea -- or even a different idea -- for what to do next.
The question of whether the United States should have invaded Iraq drew some of the starkest differences in Thursday's exchange between the candidates. Kerry challenged Bush's portrayal of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein as a threat who could be dealt with no other way.
Calling the decision to go to war "a colossal error in judgment," Kerry said Bush had failed to "exhaust the remedies" of U.N. weapons inspections and had rushed into Iraq without assembling a "true alliance" of forces or devising a postwar plan.
"Saddam Hussein was a threat," Kerry acknowledged, but added: "There was a right way to disarm him, and a wrong way. And the president chose the wrong way."
Bush countered that he had pursued U.N. options as far as possible. Continued U.N. inspections, he said, would have done little good, given Hussein's notorious history of systematic deception and disregard for U.N. resolutions.
"That's kind of a pre-September 10 mentality, to hope that somehow resolutions and failed inspections would make this world a more peaceful place," Bush said.
Central to the dispute is the issue of U.S. military priorities.
The invasion of Iraq, Kerry said, diverted U.S. forces from what he called the more important mission of finding Osama bin Laden and defeating remnants of al Qaeda's terrorist network in Afghanistan.
"Iraq is not even the center of the focus of the war on terror," Kerry said. "The center is Afghanistan."
But Bush described Iraq as "a central part of the war on terror." He insisted that the United States had the forces to go after both Hussein and bin Laden.
The notion that the war on terrorism should have only one focus, Bush said, is a misunderstanding of its nature. He maintained that the ouster of Hussein marked a major achievement.
"The world is better off without Saddam Hussein," he said.
Kerry countered that the U.S. military campaign in Iraq has turned that country into a magnet for extremists, aggravating the larger effort to combat terrorism worldwide.
"Iraq was not even close to the center of the war on terror before the president invaded it," Kerry said.
But Kerry, for all his assault on Bush's approach, stopped short of suggesting that he would withdraw U.S. forces. To the contrary, he seemed in agreement with Bush that the United States, having gotten into Iraq, cannot afford to pull out before the job is done.
"We have to succeed," Kerry said. "We can't leave a failed Iraq."
This commitment to military victory will make it hard for Bush to label Kerry as an antiwar candidate. It distinguishes his clash with Bush from George McGovern's failed attempt in 1972 to unseat another Republican president, Richard M. Nixon, by promising a quick withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam.
Bush warned that Kerry's criticism of the Iraq war would undermine the senator's ability to command U.S. troops or rally the world.
"I don't see how you can lead this country to succeed in Iraq if you say wrong war, wrong time, wrong place," Bush said. "What message does that send our troops? What message does that send to our allies? What message does that send the Iraqis?"
But Kerry appeared mindful of the potential impact of his criticisms on the U.S. military. He promised to keep U.S. troops well-equipped, saying they "deserve better than what" they have received under Bush. In an allusion to the Vietnam era, when protest of the war led to poor treatment of U.S. troops, Kerry made clear he wanted to avoid any such spillover.
"It is vital for us not to confuse the war, ever, with the warriors," he said. "That happened before."
How Kerry would proceed differently than Bush to ensure peace in Iraq remained unclear, however. The strategies of both candidates hinge on strengthening Iraqi security forces to supplant U.S. forces. Kerry said he would make a renewed effort to enlist the support of countries that up to now have been reluctant to get involved. He argued that he would bring greater credibility to the effort.
-------- OTHER
-------- environment
A 'Small' Eruption At Mount St. Helens Repeat of 1980 Not Expected
By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 2, 2004; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A558-2004Oct1.html
SEATTLE, Oct. 1 -- After a week of steadily increasing seismic rumbling, Mount St. Helens on Friday burped a tall column of steam and ash that officials said was probably not a precursor to a large, sustained eruption from the most active volcano on the West Coast.
The volcano is being closely monitored, in part because of its cataclysmic explosion in 1980. That explosion killed 57 people, triggered the largest landslide in recorded history and blew 520 million tons of ash eastward across the United States.
The plume from Friday's 24-minute noontime eruption rose 10,000 feet before drifting away in light winds on a spectacularly clear autumn day. No injuries or damage to property were reported.
When the eruption ended, government monitoring instruments showed a sharp decrease in the seismic activity that in recent days had been registering as many as four small earthquakes per minute on the mountain, which is in a sparsely populated area of southwest Washington.
"This was a relatively small eruption," said John Major, a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. He said USGS observers near the volcano reported that no molten rock flowed from the point in the mountain's lava dome where the steam vented.
At a news conference, Major said the eruption appeared to have punched a hole about 100 feet in diameter in the glacial ice that covers part of the mountain's horseshoe-shaped dome. He said there was a small increase in melting ice and snow off the volcano, but no reported mudflows, or lahars, which historically have been damaging consequences of volcanic eruptions in the Cascade Range.
After the 1980 eruption, a lahar traveled 50 miles from Mount St. Helens, ripping out bridges and destroying homes.
In comparison, Friday's eruption was a "hiccup," Tom Pierson, a USGS geologist, told reporters.
"This is exactly the kind of event we have been talking about and anticipating," Major said. He noted that there is no evidence that a major flow of gas-rich molten rock, which could trigger a sustained eruption, has ascended from its known location seven miles underground to the top of the mountain.
Absent such a flow of molten rock, USGS scientists have said it is unlikely that recent increases in seismic activity on Mount St. Helens will result in a significant eruption that could endanger people or property outside the immediate vicinity of the mountain.
Major compared Friday's "small explosive eruption" to the activity that came to be regarded as normal in the six years after the 1980 eruption.
In those years after Mount St. Helens literally blew its head off, more than a dozen lava eruptions built a rock dome inside the mountain's crater. That dome is now partially covered by a glacier, which is growing because the edges of the mountain crater shade snow and ice from summertime sun.
Major said that USGS scientists will be watching their instruments closely, and that if seismic activity levels off for several consecutive days, they may be able to conclude that the threat of more eruptions has passed.
--------
U.S. Warns of Big Mount St. Helens Blast
October 2, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Mount-St-Helens.html?pagewanted=all
SEATTLE (AP) -- Government scientists raised the alert level Saturday for Mount St. Helens after its second steam eruption in two days was followed by a powerful tremor. They said the next eruption was imminent or in progress, and could threaten life and property in the remote area near the volcano.
Hundreds of visitors at the building closest to the volcano -- Johnston Ridge Observatory five miles away -- were asked to leave. They went quickly to their cars and drove away, with some relocating several miles north to Coldwater Ridge Visitors Center, which officials said was safe.
The volcano alert of Mount St. Helens was raised to Level 3, which ``indicates we feel an eruption is imminent, or is in progress,'' said U.S. Geological Survey geologist Tom Pierson from the observatory. He said Saturday afternoon that an explosion probably would happen within the next 24 hours.
Pierson said the volcano had released more energy in about a week of seismic activity than it had at any point since its devastating May 18, 1980, eruption, which killed 57 people and coated much of the Northwest with ash. But scientists expect the impending eruption to be much smaller than the 1980 blast.
The growing consensus among scientists is that new magma is probably entering the volcano's upper levels, possibly bringing with it volatile gases that could lead to eruptions, said Bill Steele at the University of Washington's seismic laboratory in Seattle.
Explosions from the crater could occur without warning, possibly throwing rock onto the flanks of the volcano, the USGS said in a news release. Still, scientists said the evacuation of the observatory was primarily a precaution in case of heavy ash discharge, which could make it difficult to drive.
``We still feel the risk is confined to this area,'' Pierson said.
No communities are near Mount St. Helens; the closest, Toutle, is 30 miles west.
A day after the volcano spewed a plume of steam and ash thousands of feet into the air, there was a very brief steam release Saturday -- a puff of white cloud, followed by a dust-raising landslide in the crater. A volcanic tremor signal that came next was what prompted the heightened alert level.
The signal ``was far stronger after today's steam eruption'' than the tremor that followed Friday's blast, Steele said. ``We were picking it up throughout western Washington and into central Oregon. Yesterday we had a very weak tremor signal.''
A tremor -- a steady vibration -- indicates movement of gases or fluid within the volcano,'' Steele said, while individual earthquakes indicate ``a pounding and breaking of rock.''
Saturday's tremor lasted about an hour and was followed by a series of earthquakes -- one or two a minute, some greater than magnitude 2, said Tom Yelin, a USGS seismologist in Seattle.
More steam explosions are likely, and possibly an extrusion of lava.
``This is the most intense seismic activity we've seen since the May 18th eruption,'' said geologist Dan Dzurisin at the U.S. Geological Survey's Cascades Volcanic Observatory in Vancouver, Wash., about 50 miles south.
The 1980 blast obliterated the top 1,300 feet of the volcano, devastated miles of forest and buried the North Fork of the Toutle River in debris and ash as much as 600 feet deep.
The intensity ``probably just reflects the fact that more rock needs to be broken for magma to reach the surface,'' Dzurisin said. The 1980 eruption reamed open the route to the surface, and for six years smaller eruptions piled lava into a dome that is now 1,000 feet tall and marks the main conduit for magma.
Friday's relatively small eruption, which generated a plume of ash and smoke 16,000 feet high, was the first since a 1986 dome-building event at the volcano.
Scientists believe the flurry of shallow earthquakes that began Sept. 23 may reflect movement of magma that came up the volcano's pipe during a 1998 swarm of quakes.
Air sampling has detected only tiny amounts of volcanic gases, which could mean the activity only involves the 1998 magma, which has been ``degassed'' over time -- or that there is fresh magma but the gases are sealed inside the system, Dzurisin said.
Few people live near the mountain, the centerpiece of the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest about 100 miles south of Seattle. The closest structure is the observatory, five miles away.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Demonstrators oppose Canada's involvement in US missile defense shield
MONTREAL (AFP)
Oct 02, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041002192145.ggperg7h.html
Protesters marched Saturday in several Canadian cities against Canada's participation in the US missile defense shield.
Organizers said the protests were designed the influence the government of Prime Minister Paul Martin, which is considering whether to participate in the system, scheduled to become operational at the end of the year.
Canada and the United States have joint air defenses under the North American Aerospace Defense Command, and recently agreed to extend the command's warning function to support missile defense
--------
Greenpeace on lookout for US nuclear waste shipment heading to France
LONDON (AFP)
Oct 02, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041002195855.h8bjxkix.html
The environmental group Greenpeace stationed a ship Saturday off the English coast on the lookout for two vessels carrying weapons-grade plutonium from the United States to France, the group said.
Greenpeace spokesman Shaun Burnie said his group would be able to identify the two vessels as French environmental groups prepared protests, including road blockades, to prevent the loads being transported to processing plants.
He said the two ships carrying nuclear waste were originally expected to arrive late Saturday at the French port of Cherbourg but said it was unclear exactly when they were due to dock.
The Greenpeace ship MV Esperanza was anchored south of Weymouth, Dorset.
The environmental protection charity also has members at Cherbourg ready for the ships's arrival.
"The ships were expected to arrive tonight (Saturday) but they obviously have their own plans and whether they are trying to evade us we don't know," Burnie said.
Greenpeace spokeswoman Louise Edge said: "There is a flotilla being organised for when the ships arrive."
The plutonium carriers could pass around 16 miles off the Cornish coast and Greenpeace was waiting between Guernsey and Start Point.
The US government has said the plutonium was being transported by sea as a one-off exercise. The British-registered vessels Pacific Pintail and Pacific Teal were carrying the material for the US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
The plutonium is being carried by vessels operated by the PNTL shipping company, whose main shareholder is British Nuclear Fuels ltd.
The shipment of 140 kilogrammes (308 pounds) of plutonium from US weapons arsenals left the North Carolina port of Charleston on September 20.
It is to be taken to the French nuclear reconditioning station at La Hague, then sent to a facility in southern France to be transformed into mixed-oxide, or MOX, fuel for civilian nuclear reactors and eventually returned to the United States.
Greenpeace said the long distances of road transport involved constituted "considerable" risk, not least because the cargo's containers could easily be opened by shoulder-launched rockets.
Cogema, the French state nuclear company, rejected the accusations in a statement, saying the transport of plutonium is carried out with "all safety guarantees" and the truck convoy would be unmarked to avoid attracting attention.
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