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NUCLEAR
Candidates point to nuclear danger. Will they rein it in?
Dalai Lama says China dumping A-waste in Tibet
Sweden to shut down second nuclear reactor next year
Father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb punished through humiliation
Iran Hard - Liners Drafting Uranium Bill
Iran, Pakistan and nukes
Tokyo urged to 'reshape' defence capabilities
UN Nuclear Chief Wins S. Korean Cooperation Pledge
S.Korean Conservatives Stage Big Anti - North Rally
Military readying missile defense
PSEG, Exelon To Swap Nuclear Managers, Share Practices
Air Force pursuing antimatter weapons
Nuclear fuel missing from power plant
MILITARY
As Afghan Vote Nears, Taliban Isn't Only Worry
Afghans Studying the Art of Voting
Official: Darfur Deaths May Reach 300,000
A Pouchful of Protection for Scary Times in the Sahel
African conference debates strategy on arms control to check conflicts
UK's Top Court to Rule on 'Britain's Guantanamo'
Going for a Halliburton
Contracts Awarded
Rumsfeld: No 'Hard Evidence' of Iraq-Al Qaeda Link
Three Car Bombs Explode Across Iraq, Killing at Least 26
After 3-Day Fight, U.S. and Iraqi Forces Retake Samarra
Palestinians Deny Israeli Gaza Talks Claim
Sharon Vows to Stay in Gaza Until Threat to Israel Is Ended
Israeli Attacks Kill 11 Palestinian
Israel Kills Militant in 6th Day of Mass Gaza Raid
USAF Counterspace Operation Doctrine
U.N. calls emergency meeting on Israel
UNRWA demands Israel apologize over Qassam accusation
Air Force Looks at New Microwave Weapon
Two US F-15 fighters touch each other in mid-air; no injuries
Guarding the Empire
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Supreme Court won't rule on Saddam case
New Initiative Planned to Get Marijuana Curbs Eased
Italy Sending Immigrants Back to Africa
Putting A Price on Innocents' Lost Years
U.S. may be too quick to blame al-Zarqawi
Alleged Leader of ETA Is Captured in France
France Joins Spain to Catch Pair Suspected of Terrorism
POLITICS
Debt Ceiling Could Be Hit This Month
U.S. Is Ordered to Tell Indians Before Selling Trust Property
Rice Defends Going to War Despite Dispute About Iraqi Weapons
Kerry's nuclear nonsense
MICHAEL MOORE ON KILLIAN MEMOS:
Voice of Doubt Won't Go Away
The State Department's extreme makeover
Bush's Backward Nuclear Policy
Robertson: If Bush 'touches' Jerusalem, we'll form 3rd party
OTHER
Mount St. Helens Draws Crowd of Curious Revelers
Mount St. Helens Belches Massive Clouds
Kerry promotes expanded federal research using stem cells
D.C. as Host of IMF, World Bank Talks Raises Questions
With Few Protests, Main Action Is Inside for Monetary Fund
ACTIVISTS
A Brutal Sexual Assault Galvanizes Swazi Women
S. Koreans Protest Security Law Change
Howard Government Offered Oil Firm Millions to Sue Greenpeace
Activists await US nuclear shipment to France
We'll put to sea again, say protesters
Two held in French anti-nuclear protest
-------- NUCLEAR
Candidates point to nuclear danger. Will they rein it in?
USATODAY.com
Oct 4, 2004
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/usatoday/20041004/cm_usatoday/candidatespointtonucleardangerwilltheyreinitin
The year: 2054 or thereabouts. At a gleaming new "Nuclear History" museum on Washington's National Mall, an exhibit traces America's attitudes toward nuclear weapons.
Naturally, last Thursday's presidential debate features prominently. President Bush and John Kerry identified the No. 1 threat facing the nation as "nuclear proliferation" - a surprise to voters focused on the economy and the war in Iraq.
But move forward in that future nuclear exhibit. Will it show crude nuclear devices incinerating major U.S. cities?
That's the real question, and it, too, shouldn't be a surprise. Though Bush and Kerry didn't clearly define the threat - which has many parts - the dominant worry is that terrorists will get so-called loose nukes. They've been poorly tracked since the Soviet Union disintegrated. Or build their own from pilfered material. Difficult, but not, say nearly all experts in the field, impossible. Osama bin Laden has said he'd use such a weapon - a big difference from the nuclear standoff of the Cold War. Worries center on:
Russia. The Soviet Union's once tight control of its nuclear arsenal is long gone. Material for thousands of weapons remains vulnerable. Problems include poor accounting for nuclear material and lazy or corrupt guards. In 2003, for instance, a businessman was caught trying to steal weapons-grade plutonium. Terrorists have cased facilities.
Research reactors. Enough highly enriched uranium for hundreds of nuclear weapons provides fuel for more than 130 research reactors in more than 40 countries. Many have as little security as a chain-link fence. The fuel elements can fit in a backpack, and published literature shows how to extract highly enriched uranium.
Pakistan. The country has few nuclear weapons. But the man who developed Pakistan's program was caught selling parts and know-how to Libya, North Korea and elsewhere. The country is al-Qaeda and Taliban central. Insiders could help terrorists.
The danger is magnified because programs to secure loose nukes, have been running out of steam. Russian corruption and lack of cooperation is one reason; U.S. bureaucratic problems another. Harvard's Project on Managing the Atom, cited by Kerry, says more material was secured in the two years before 9/11 than in the two following.
Kerry and Bush have spoken little about their plans, but the starting point for any president is the existing but flagging U.S. and international initiatives to secure loose nukes by paying for their destruction.
Kerry says he would appoint a high-level official to energize that and other anti-proliferation efforts. He also says he'd shut down Bush's program to improve nuclear weapons because it makes anti-proliferation efforts look hypocritical.
Bush sees a need to develop new nuclear weapons that might be used to penetrate underground bunkers protecting terrorist or rogue state facilities that threaten the U.S. He cites the termination of Libya's nuclear program and the rolling up of Pakistan's rogue network as successes.
The first step to any meaningful improvement: documenting and securing nuclear materials, particularly in Russia.
With both candidates now saying the issue is their top foreign priority, perhaps that finally will get the high-profile attention it needs to succeed.
-------- china
Dalai Lama says China dumping A-waste in Tibet
Associated Press
Oct. 4, 2004
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1004dalailama04.html
MEXICO CITY - Birds and other animals born with birth defects in remote corners of Tibet are evidence that China is dumping nuclear waste there, the Dalai Lama said Sunday.
"Logically, if we use common sense, in China proper, (it is) so densely populated that the only suitable area where this nuclear waste could go is Tibet," the 14th Dalai Lama said during a news conference kicking off his four-day visit to Mexico City.
The Buddhist leader, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, has called for greater autonomy and religious freedom in Tibet but acknowledges that it is part of China. He has lived in exile in India since a failed Tibetan uprising against the Chinese government in 1959.
In recent years, the Dalai Lama's supporters in Tibet have charged that China has damaged the environment by dumping nuclear waste and carelessly exploiting oil, water and timber resources.
They have also suggested China stores nuclear missiles underground in Tibetan territory, but the Dalai Lama distanced himself from those claims Sunday.
"We have no clear information about . . . setting up nuclear weapons in Tibet," he said.
The Mexico trip for the Dalai Lama, 69, wraps up a tour of the Americas that also took him to Miami, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, El Salvador and Guatemala.
Mexico has been quick to say it is welcoming the Dalai Lama as a religious leader, not a political one. The issue is sensitive for Mexico, which has a long tradition of not taking sides in international conflicts and is trying to expand political and economic relations with China.
The Dalai Lama met with the presidents of Costa Rica, El Salvador and Guatemala, but a visit with President Vicente Fox won't be on the Mexico City itinerary.
-------- europe
Sweden to shut down second nuclear reactor next year
AFP
Oct 4, 2004
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20041004/sc_afp/sweden_nuclear_041004174250
STOCKHOLM (AFP) - Sweden will shut down its Barsebaeck 2 nuclear reactor next year, the second reactor to be taken out of service since 1999, the government said.
Sweden plans to phase out nuclear power, which still accounts for nearly half of the Scandinavian country's energy supply, over the next 30 to 40 years.
The first reactor at Barsebaeck was shut down in 1999 and the second was due for closure in 2003, but the government delayed the shutdown while it looked for alternative energy sources.
The country voted in a non-binding referendum in 1980 to phase out Sweden's 12 nuclear reactors by 2010, but that target was abandoned in 1997 after officials acknowledged that there would not be sufficient alternative energy sources to replace the nuclear output.
On Monday, the minority Social Democratic government said it had clinched a deal on the Barsebaeck 2 reactor in southern Sweden with the formerly agrarian Center Party and the Left Party.
"Our vision is that Sweden in the long term will base its entire energy supply on renewable energy," the three parties wrote in a statement.
The government will promote the use of wind power, biofuels, solar energy and hydro power to replace the lost nuclear energy, as consumers will be obliged to buy a pre-determined amount of electricity produced from these so-called "clean" sources.
Natural gas will also be used during a transition period.
The three parties said preparations to close Barsebaeck 2 would be undertaken immediately. After a few years they will begin to look at the oldest reactors to determine which should be shut down next.
Sweden's 11 nuclear reactors, located at four separate plants, currently make up about half of the country's electricity production. Experts say nuclear production is likely to fall to 44 percent by 2010, or 31 percent of total energy consumption.
In June 2002, parliament endorsed a government plan to phase out nuclear power over the next 30 to 40 years.
Modelled on Germany's plans to phase out nuclear energy, the programme says existing plants should continue running as long as they "contribute economically", which means, in effect, until the end of their normal operating lives.
A majority of Sweden's conservative and liberal opposition parties are favourable to nuclear energy.
-------- india / pakistan
Father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb punished through humiliation
(AFP)
Oct 4, 2004
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20041004/wl_sthasia_afp/us_vote_pakistan_nuclear_041004080653
WASHINGTON - Disgraced Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan has been punished by being nationally humiliated, US national security couselor Condoleezza Rice said.
Rice was asked on CNN to clarify President George W. Bush's statement during his debate late Thursday with Senator John Kerry that "the A.Q. Khan network has been brought to justice."
Khan, the father of his country's nuclear bomb, publicly confessed in February to leaking nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea.
But Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, who insisted the proliferation was carried out by a handful of scientists without government involvement, has given Khan a conditional pardon.
And Pakistan officials have refused agents with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN's atomic watchdog agency, access to interview Khan to discuss the international black market he used to run.
Khan is "a particular kind of figure in Pakistani lore, a national hero, and Musharraf has dealt with what is a very difficult situation" by "making certain that he's out of business," Rice said on Sunday.
Khan has lost privileges "to travel and the like," said Rice, and "a number of countries are pursuing prosecutions" of network members, she added, mentioning South Africa and at least one unnamed European country.
"A.Q. Khan, in a sense, has been brought to justice because he is out of the business that he loved most," said Rice. "And if you don't think that his national humiliation is justice for what he did, I think it is. He's nationally humiliated.
-------- iran
Iran Hard - Liners Drafting Uranium Bill
October 4, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iran-Nuclear.html
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran's conservative-dominated parliament is drafting a bill that would force the reformist government to resume uranium enrichment -- a necessary step toward producing nuclear fuel or nuclear weapons -- over the objections of the international community.
The legislation, if approved as expected, would deepen an international dispute as the U.N. nuclear watchdog tries to persuade Iran to limit, not expand, nuclear activities that Washington says are aimed at producing an atomic bomb.
Iran, which insists its nuclear program is peaceful and aimed at generating electricity, already has rejected a resolution of the International Atomic Energy Agency last month demanding Iran freeze all uranium enrichment activities by late November.
If Iran fails to meet the demand, the IAEA could refer the situation to the U.N. Security Council, which could impose sanctions. The IAEA will meet Nov. 25 to judge Iran's compliance.
But in Iran, the nuclear program is a matter of national pride. It is one of few issues where the conservative parliament and reformist government of President Mohammad Khatami see eye to eye.
Vice President Gholamreza Aghazadeh, who heads the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, addressed a closed meeting of parliament Monday to brief lawmakers on Iran's technical nuclear capabilities and the progress of its nuclear program, one lawmaker said.
The meeting of parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Committee took place as lawmakers are drafting the bill, committee member Hamid Reza Haji Babaei told The Associated Press. He refused to discuss details of the meeting.
Aghazadeh said last month that Iran has started converting raw uranium into hexaflouride gas, the feed stock for enrichment.
``The bill will require the government to resume actual uranium enrichment,'' he said. ``One thing is definite: Iran will enrich uranium under any circumstances.''
The measure would provide political cover to Khatami's government and reinforce the argument it has been making to the IAEA that more pressure on Iran will only strengthen the hand of the hard-liners.
Iran is not prohibited from enrichment under its obligations to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, but faces growing international pressure to suspend such activities as a good-faith gesture.
Iran last year suspended actual uranium enrichment -- injecting uranium gas into centrifuges. However, Tehran has rejected demands that it stop all other activities related to uranium enrichment, such as building centrifuges used to enrich uranium and converting raw uranium.
Senior conservative lawmaker Alaeddin Boroujerdi, a former deputy foreign minister and head of the committee, said an unprecedented 238 legislators already have signed a draft of the bill in a gesture of support for the expansion of Iran's nuclear activities.
Boroujerdi said his committee will discuss details of the bill Tuesday before putting it to a vote in the 290-seat chamber.
``We are unhappy with the Europeans for helping impose the IAEA resolution on us,'' he said. ``Pressure won't make us give in to demands to stop uranium activities. On the contrary, it will only push us to adopt a tougher line.''
Boroujerdi said Iran already has the technology to carry out all activities from mining uranium to enriching it and the world should recognize Iran as a member of the nuclear club rather than trying to isolate the nation.
Uranium enrichment is considered crucial because uranium enriched to a low level can be used as fuel to generate electricity, then enriched again to manufacture bombs.
Countries that can enrich uranium are generally assumed to be at the level of technology to make bombs.
``What does the world want to take from us? We have the technology and knowledge to master the fuel cycle. Is the world going to take our knowledge away from us?'' Babaei asked. ``That's impossible.''
--------
Iran, Pakistan and nukes
October 04, 2004
Washington Times
By Wilson John
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20041004-015707-2087r.htm
The International AtomicEnergy Agency (IAEA) is currently investigating Iran's nuclear program, especially the possibility that Pakistan helped it with substantial transfers of technology and materials in the past. There has been no conclusive evidence so far, except for a piece of evidence that Pakistan had supplied designs for an advanced centrifuge called P-2 to Iran in 1995. There is a reason why the IAEA is finding it difficult to discover the nuclear trail in Iran. The agency is not looking in the right places, for instance in Pakistan. What it needs to do is not complicated, either: It has to begin by questioning A.Q. Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist who has been persuaded to go into hiding by Islamabad following disclosures early this year that he was the kingpin in a worldwide network of nuclear smugglers.
Mr. Khan has been actively involved in transferring nuclear technology and material to Iran since the early 1990s. Although the proliferation activities were clandestine, there is substantial evidence that the Pakistani establishment - especially its external intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence - not only knew of the activities but assisted in the smuggling. Lt. Gen. Asad Durrani, the ISI chief in the early 1990s, was aware of Mr. Khan's travels to Iran in 1991 and 1992. Iran was quite willing to pay heavily for a nuclear gateway with Pakistan. Tehran had offered $3.2 billion to finance Pakistan's nuclear-weapons program in exchange for the transfer of nuclear technology, as reported in the Pakistan daily newspaper Dawn on Dec. 20, 1994.
The Pakistan-Iran nuclear connection existed since the time of Gen. Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, who had approved unpublicized cooperation between the two nations in the nuclear field in 1987. The cooperation was specifically limited to nonmilitary spheres. A respected Pakistani English-language daily published in Islamabad, the News, quoted a retired nuclear scientist: "Just before his death in 1988 when I told Zia about Iran's growing interest in non-peaceful nuclear matters, he asked me to play around but not to yield anything substantial at any cost." In fact, many believe that not only Gen. Durrani but his superior, Gen. Aslam Beg, then the army chief of staff, were also deeply involved in the clandestine nuclear deals with Iran.
Gen. Beg, according to a former Pakistan cabinet minister, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, had negotiated with Iran for a nuclear deal. Gen. Beg bragged that "Iran is willing to give whatever it takes, $6 billion, $10 billion. We can sell the bomb to Iran at any price." A former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Robert Oakley, has also referred to a conversation with Gen. Beg during which the latter said he was discussing nuclear cooperation with Iran's Revolutionary Guards.
Officially Pakistan has always denied having any cooperation with Iran in the nuclear weapons program. But large sums of unaccounted money were deposited in the personal accounts of at least two Pakistani scientists for clandestine deals with Iran. One of them was Muhammad Farooq, a centrifuge expert, who traveled to Iran and Libya on behalf of Mr. Khan, and was ironically the key source of information against Mr. Khan when U.S. and Pakistani intelligence officials debriefed him in November. One of the startling disclosures made by Mr. Farooq was about Mr. Khan's financial skullduggery.
Investigations have since revealed that the scientists maintained secret bank accounts in Dubai where millions of dollars were deposited. Noman Shah, Mr. Khan's estranged son-in-law, operated one of the main Dubai-based front companies used by the Khan network. It was Mr. Shah who set up a supplier firm for Mr. Khan in Dubai and worked closely with his father-in-law until he divorced Mr. Khan's daughter Dina after four years of marriage in 1994. Several nuclear and missile deals signed by the Khan Research Laboratory (KRL), including transactions with Iran, were routed through Mr. Shah.
More evidence of Mr. Khan's Iran link is an Islamabad businessman named Aizaz Jaffri. In December, Mr. Jaffri reportedly flew to Iran after three employees of the KRL were detained for questioning following the disclosures about Mr. Khan. Officials suspect that Mr. Jaffri's responsibility on the Iran trip was to find out how much the Iranians had told the IAEA officials about Pakistan's involvement in their nuclear-weapons program. Mr. Jaffri was an intermediary between Mr. Khan and his network. The former used to work for Pakistan's National Development Corporation, a state enterprise, before he joined Mr. Khan's network and began acting as a front man for dozens of businesses established by him.
An intriguing fact is Mr. Jaffri's reported association with the state-owned China North Industries Corporation, or Norinco, which is collaborating with Pakistan on missile and weapons development and production. One link that has emerged in the recent investigations was that Norinco and Mr. Khan's brother Qayuum have a stake in a Chinese restaurant in Islamabad partly owned by Mr. Jaffri two years ago. Is there a Chinese connection to nuclear collaboration between Iran and Pakistan?
Wilson John is a senior fellow with Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi, India.
-------- japan
Tokyo urged to 'reshape' defence capabilities
By David Pilling in Tokyo
October 4 2004
Financial Times
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/b52344b8-15f8-11d9-b835-00000e2511c8.html
Japan should reshape its defence capabilities in the face of the changing nature of threats to its security, including the possible acquisition of technology to mount pre-emptive strikes against foreign missile bases, a top-level panel recommended on Monday. ADVERTISEMENT
The panel, which sent its report to Junichiro Koizumi, the prime minister, said Japan might also need to redefine its security alliance with the US, the postwar foundation of Japan's defence.
It stopped short of calling China a military threat, despite leaks from panel members suggesting it might, and reiterated Japan's commitment to remaining a non-nuclear power. However, it said a previous commitment to possessing only the minimum defence capabilities necessary to repel attack should be dropped.
In an addendum to the report, the defence panel, chaired by Hiroshi Araki, an adviser to Tokyo Electric Power, added its voice to calls for an urgent review of the pacifist constitution. New defence needs required study of clauses banning collective self-defence, it said.
The panel's recommendations, which also covered a possible realignment of Self Defence Forces, Japan's equivalent of armed forces, will form the basis of a sweeping defence review to be completed by the end of this year.
That could see Tokyo scale back its defences against a conventional invasion in favour of enhanced capabilities against terrorism, biological or missile attack, experts said.
Lance Gatling, a defence consultant in Tokyo, described many of the panel's recommendations as logical. He said the US-Japan mutual security treaty, signed in 1960, might well need redefining given the changing nature of possible threat.
"The likelihood of conventional attack is much less than in 1960," he said. "But the probability of an indirect attack against Japan's sea lanes for energy procurement or access to export markets, or an unconventional attack, whether nuclear, biological or terrorist, has increased considerably."
The panel said Japan should consider acquiring the capability of attacking foreign missile bases pre-emptively, largely a reflection of growing nervousness about the possible threat posed by North Korea. Because Tokyo would have to react to any missile attack within minutes, it also recommended a simplification of the chain of command for responding to such an event.
On the role of the SDF, the panel said Japan should consider a permanent law enabling participation in international peacekeeping efforts.
Mr Koizumi's administration sent 550 ground troops to Iraq in the biggest such deployment since the second world war, a decision that opposition members said contravened the constitution.
Monday's report also recommended scaling back conventional weapons, such as tanks, destroyers and fighter jets, though stopped short of providing details.
Many of the panel's recommendations have been foreshadowed by actual policy implementation.
The cabinet has already decided in principle to develop missile defence in conjunction with the US, while this year's defence budget is the first since 1954 to a request for a new destroyer. A debate on amending the constitution, written for Japan by the US, is also well advanced.
-------- korea
UN Nuclear Chief Wins S. Korean Cooperation Pledge
October 4, 2004
REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nuclear-korea.html
SEOUL (Reuters) - Top international nuclear regulator Mohamed ElBaradei won a pledge from South Korea on Monday to cooperate with the U.N. watchdog in the run-up to a report that Seoul hopes will lift suspicions of clandestine atomic activities.
ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), met Prime Minister Lee Hae-chan, who explained the government's commitment to nuclear nonproliferation and peaceful use of nuclear energy, said a foreign policy aide to Lee.
South Korea revealed last month that its scientists conducted, without government approval or knowledge, tests to enrich uranium four years ago and to separate plutonium in 1982.
A third group of IAEA inspectors is scheduled to visit South Korea later this month for additional work before the agency reports to its board of governors in November.
``Director General ElBaradei said there was failure to report some tests conducted in the past, but the actions taken by the South Korean government since were correct,'' a senior South Korean Foreign Ministry official said about the IAEA head's discussions in Seoul.
``He also expressed appreciation for the South Korean government's cooperation,'' he said.
ElBaradei said in September that the unreported experiments were ``of serious concern'' and that the agency would investigate all aspects of the activities in South Korea.
But he also said South Korea was actively cooperating and forthcoming with IAEA inspections.
This cooperation made South Korea fundamentally different from its neighbor North Korea and from Iran -- two countries suspected of building nuclear weapons programs, Seoul officials have stressed repeatedly.
``There is no government effort to develop a nuclear weapons program, systematic or not,'' the foreign ministry official said.
Iran has rejected the Vienna-based IAEA's call to scrap a uranium enrichment program, which Tehran said was intended for power generation.
Communist North Korea is also suspected of developing a uranium-based nuclear program but has denied it.
Pyongyang has accused the South of arming itself with nuclear weapons and said the recently disclosed experiments were just a small part of a government-run program.
North Korea has said it would not cooperate in six-country nuclear disarmament talks with South Korea, the United States, Japan, China and Russia until the South's atomic experiments were fully dealt with.
ElBaradei is scheduled to attend this week's meeting in Seoul of the Pugwash Conference on science and world affairs, a private group of experts and officials discussing disarmament.
Prime Minister Lee asked ElBaradei about reports that he was among the finalists for the Nobel Peace Prize to be announced later this week.
``I take that as appreciation for the work of my organization,'' ElBaradei told Lee.
--------
S.Korean Conservatives Stage Big Anti - North Rally
October 4, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-korea-protest.html
SEOUL (Reuters) - About 100,000 South Koreans staged an anti-communist rally on Monday, burning North Korean flags to press their calls for the downfall of the Pyongyang government and an end of its suspected nuclear weapons programs.
The rally at Seoul's City Hall plaza in the heart of the capital drew mostly elderly people, including Korean War veterans and Christians -- conservative groups critical of the conciliatory North Korea policies of President Roh Moo-hyun.
``Kim Jong-il has nuclear weapons and is threatening the international community. The free world must cooperate to get rid of this terror and anti-state regime,'' said protest leader Park Chan-sung. Kim is the leader of reclusive North Korea.
The protest comes amid uncertainty over the fate of talks to end a stand-off over North Korea's nuclear ambitions and efforts by the South's ruling center-left Uri Party to scrap decades-old legislation banning contact with the communist North.
Following Christian prayers, protesters burned North Korean flags and carried a mock plastic missile to denounce the North's nuclear program. Marchers carried placards saying ``Down with Kim Jong-il!'' and ``Support North Korean Human Rights.''
The crowd, which police said reached 100,000 people, also took aim at Roh's government and his Uri Party, accusing them of being soft on North Korea.
``Preserve the National Security Law to the death,'' protesters chanted in an attack on the Uri Party's attempts to scrap an anti-communist law.
Roh's backers say the law is a relic of the country's 1970s and 1980s military dictatorships.
The National Security Law uses sweeping provisions to jail those who work for enemies of the state, notably North Korea, and their sympathizers. It technically bans the kind of contacts with the North that have become commonplace in recent years.
``TRAINED HACKERS''
Human rights critics say former leaders used the law to quell dissent and it is redundant. Uri Party members, many former dissidents, suffered under the law in previous decades.
The debate in parliament over scrapping or revising the law has taken on a bitter ideological tone because North Korea has consistently demanded the repeal of the legislation.
Conservative lawmakers argue that the security law is still needed because North Korea has never renounced its goal of overthrowing the South by force -- as Pyongyang tried to do when it invaded in 1950 sparking the three-year Korean War.
North and South Korea are still technically at war since their conflict ended in armed truce without a peace treaty.
South Korea's defense ministry said in a report to parliament on Monday that North Korea has trained as many as 600 computer hackers to penetrate computer systems of South Korea, the United States and Japan to launch cyber attacks or gather intelligence.
South Korea Unification Minister Chung Dong-young told parliament the Roh government still hoped to promote a second inter-Korean summit, following an historic June 2000 meeting in Pyongyang.
Seoul sends significant economic and food aid to the impoverished North. But ties are constrained by a two-year-old crisis over the North's pursuit of nuclear weapons that has put it at odds with the international community.
Six-party talks involving North and South Korea, China, Japan, Russia and the United States, aimed at ending the North's nuclear programs, have made little headway.
-------- missile defense
Military readying missile defense
ASSOCIATED PRESS
October 04, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20041004-123844-5435r.htm
The military is in the final stages of readying its national ballistic missile defense system, with officials predicting it will be activated before year's end. But several questions remain, including how well the experimental missile interceptors work.
The Pentagon maintains that any defense against intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) is better than none. Critics contend that the Bush administration is overselling an expensive, unproven defense system.
There has been an expectation that the administration will declare shortly that the missile defense system is operational and on alert.
Military officials said they know of no specific plans for such an announcement, which would have political and strategic value for the administration.
Activating the system would fulfill a pledge by President Bush to have an operational missile defense system by the end of the year.
Such an announcement would have greater value if it came before the Nov. 2 elections.
Mr. Bush has promoted the system while campaigning for re-election.
"We want to continue to perfect this system, so we say to those tyrants who believe they can blackmail America and the free world: You fire, we're going to shoot it down," he said in a stop at Ridley Park, Pa., on Aug. 17.
Military officials are less sanguine, stressing that the initial system will be modest and limited in capability, but will improve over time.
Critics of the system, such as Philip Coyle, the Pentagon's former chief of testing, say Mr. Bush is wrong.
"Of course we don't have any capability to do that," he said. "For the president to sort of dare them [to fire missiles] is really misleading and even reckless."
Estimates vary widely on how much the program will cost over its lifetime, with some reaching $100 billion or more. In 2004 and 2005, the Missile Defense Agency expects to spend a total of more than $10 billion.
Many of the doubts about the system, initially designed to protect the United States from an ICBM attack from North Korea and other possible threats in the western Pacific, arose from problems during high-profile tests.
In testing, which critics deride as highly scripted, the interceptors have gone five-for-eight when launched at target missiles.
Two tests scheduled for this year were delayed, owing to recently discovered technical problems. The next test is set for late November or early December.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
PSEG, Exelon To Swap Nuclear Managers, Share Practices
Dow Jones Newswires
October 4, 2004
http://money.iwon.com/jsp/nw/nwdt_rt.jsp?cat=USMARKET&src=704&feed=dji§ion=news&news_id=dji-00071920041004&date=20041004&alias=/alias/money/cm/nw
NEW YORK (Dow Jones)--About 10 managers from the nuclear subsidiaries of Exelon Corp. (EXC) and Public Service Enterprise Group Inc. (PEG) will swap jobs this fall, in an effort to learn from each other, according to representatives from both companies.
The exchanges, which are expected to last about 18 months, come amid concerns over PSEG's commitment to safety at its Salem and Hope Creek nuclear plants in southern New Jersey.
Exelon, the biggest nuclear operator in the U.S., owns 43% of Salem and shares ownership with PSEG of the Peach Bottom plant in Pennsylvania. PSEG operates both Salem and Hope Creek, and Exelon operates Peach Bottom.
"These are people who have expertise in specific technical and business areas that are unique to nuclear power," Exelon Nuclear Spokesman Craig Nesbit said of the participating employees.
For example, Exelon experts will share their experience in planning and managing refueling outages, he said.
Six Exelon employees are to begin working at Salem and Hope Creek, which are located at the same site, on Oct. 11, Nesbit said.
Several PSEG employees will start their rotations at Exelon later this fall, after a scheduled refueling outage at Hope Creek, according to PSEG Spokesman Skip Sindoni.
The companies could rejigger the number of participants and the duration of the exchange as it progresses, both representatives said.
PSEG could improve its nuclear performance and cut costs if it adopts some of Exelon's well-regarded operating practices, said Shawn Burke, senior vice president for corporate bond research at HSBC Securities Inc.
But the company is unlikely to see any improvement on its balance sheet before 2005, and it's unclear whether an upturn could even occur next year.
"Anything that can help turn around its nuclear operations may not manifest itself until the last half of an 18-month stay by any of these key people," he said.
A U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission review into the safety culture at Salem and Hope Creek contributed to longer-than-expected outages at two of the three units at those sites. That, in turn, led to higher purchased power costs, which ate into PSEG's earnings during the second quarter of this year.
The NRC took the unusual step in late August of boosting oversight at those two reactors because it said PSEG hadn't made safety its primary concern.
PSEG has developed a plan for correcting its recurring problems and is expected to discuss its progress with the NRC later this year.
-By Kristen McNamara, Dow Jones Newswires; 201-938-2061; kristen.mcnamara@ dowjones.com
-----
Air Force pursuing antimatter weapons
Program was touted publicly, then came official gag order
Keay Davidson,
San Francisco Chronicle Science Writer
Monday, October 4, 2004
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/10/04/MNGM393GPK1.DTL
The U.S. Air Force is quietly spending millions of dollars investigating ways to use a radical power source -- antimatter, the eerie "mirror" of ordinary matter -- in future weapons.
The most powerful potential energy source presently thought to be available to humanity, antimatter is a term normally heard in science-fiction films and TV shows, whose heroes fly "antimatter-powered spaceships" and do battle with "antimatter guns."
But antimatter itself isn't fiction; it actually exists and has been intensively studied by physicists since the 1930s. In a sense, matter and antimatter are the yin and yang of reality: Every type of subatomic particle has its antimatter counterpart. But when matter and antimatter collide, they annihilate each other in an immense burst of energy.
During the Cold War, the Air Force funded numerous scientific studies of the basic physics of antimatter. With the knowledge gained, some Air Force insiders are beginning to think seriously about potential military uses -- for example, antimatter bombs small enough to hold in one's hand, and antimatter engines for 24/7 surveillance aircraft.
More cataclysmic possible uses include a new generation of super weapons -- either pure antimatter bombs or antimatter-triggered nuclear weapons; the former wouldn't emit radioactive fallout. Another possibility is antimatter- powered "electromagnetic pulse" weapons that could fry an enemy's electric power grid and communications networks, leaving him literally in the dark and unable to operate his society and armed forces.
Following an initial inquiry from The Chronicle this summer, the Air Force forbade its employees from publicly discussing the antimatter research program. Still, details on the program appear in numerous Air Force documents distributed over the Internet prior to the ban.
These include an outline of a March 2004 speech by an Air Force official who, in effect, spilled the beans about the Air Force's high hopes for antimatter weapons. On March 24, Kenneth Edwards, director of the "revolutionary munitions" team at the Munitions Directorate at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida was keynote speaker at the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) conference in Arlington, Va.
In that talk, Edwards discussed the potential uses of a type of antimatter called positrons.
Physicists have known about positrons or "antielectrons" since the early 1930s, when Caltech scientist Carl Anderson discovered a positron flying through a detector in his laboratory. That discovery, and the later discovery of "antiprotons" by Berkeley scientists in the 1950s, upheld a 1920s theory of antimatter proposed by physicist Paul Dirac.
In 1929, Dirac suggested that the building blocks of atoms -- electrons (negatively charged particles) and protons (positively charged particles) -- have antimatter counterparts: antielectrons and antiprotons. One fundamental difference between matter and antimatter is that their subatomic building blocks carry opposite electric charges. Thus, while an ordinary electron is negatively charged, an antielectron is positively charged (hence the term positrons, which means "positive electrons"); and while an ordinary proton is positively charged, an antiproton is negative.
The real excitement, though, is this: If electrons or protons collide with their antimatter counterparts, they annihilate each other. In so doing, they unleash more energy than any other known energy source, even thermonuclear bombs.
The energy from colliding positrons and antielectrons "is 10 billion times ... that of high explosive," Edwards explained in his March speech. Moreover, 1 gram of antimatter, about 1/25th of an ounce, would equal "23 space shuttle fuel tanks of energy." Thus "positron energy conversion," as he called it, would be a "revolutionary energy source" of interest to those who wage war.
It almost defies belief, the amount of explosive force available in a speck of antimatter -- even a speck that is too small to see. For example: One millionth of a gram of positrons contain as much energy as 37.8 kilograms (83 pounds) of TNT, according to Edwards' March speech. A simple calculation, then, shows that about 50-millionths of a gram could generate a blast equal to the explosion (roughly 4,000 pounds of TNT, according to the FBI) at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.
Unlike regular nuclear bombs, positron bombs wouldn't eject plumes of radioactive debris. When large numbers of positrons and antielectrons collide, the primary product is an invisible but extremely dangerous burst of gamma radiation. Thus, in principle, a positron bomb could be a step toward one of the military's dreams from the early Cold War: a so-called "clean" superbomb that could kill large numbers of soldiers without ejecting radioactive contaminants over the countryside.
A copy of Edwards' speech onNIAC's Web site emphasizes this advantage of positron weapons in bright red letters: "No Nuclear Residue."
But talk of "clean" superbombs worries critics. " 'Clean' nuclear weapons are more dangerous than dirty ones because they are more likely to be used," said an e-mail from science historian George Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., author of "Project Orion," a 2002 study on a Cold War-era attempt to design a nuclear spaceship. Still, Dyson adds, antimatter weapons are "a long, long way off."
Why so far off? One reason is that at present, there's no fast way to mass produce large amounts of antimatter from particle accelerators. With present techniques, the price tag for 100-billionths of a gram of antimatter would be $6 billion, according to an estimate by scientists at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and elsewhere, who hope to launch antimatter-fueled spaceships.
Another problem is the terribly unruly behavior of positrons whenever physicists try to corral them into a special container. Inside these containers, known as Penning traps, magnetic fields prevent the antiparticles from contacting the material wall of the container -- lest they annihilate on contact. Unfortunately, because like-charged particles repel each other, the positrons push each other apart and quickly squirt out of the trap.
If positrons can't be stored for long periods, they're as useless to the military as an armored personnel carrier without a gas tank. So Edwards is funding investigations of ways to make positrons last longer in storage.
Edwards' point man in that effort is Gerald Smith, former chairman of physics and Antimatter Project leader at Pennsylvania State University. Smith now operates a small firm, Positronics Research LLC, in Santa Fe, N.M. So far, the Air Force has given Smith and his colleagues $3.7 million for positron research, Smith told The Chronicle in August.
Smith is looking to store positrons in a quasi-stable form called positronium. A positronium "atom" (as physicists dub it) consists of an electron and antielectron, orbiting each other. Normally these two particles would quickly collide and self-annihilate within a fraction of a second -- but by manipulating electrical and magnetic fields in their vicinity, Smith hopes to make positronium atoms last much longer.
Smith's storage effort is the "world's first attempt to store large quantities of positronium atoms in a laboratory experiment," Edwards noted in his March speech. "If successful, this approach will open the door to storing militarily significant quantities of positronium atoms."
Officials at Eglin Air Force Base initially agreed enthusiastically to try to arrange an interview with Edwards. "We're all very excited about this technology," spokesman Rex Swenson at Eglin's Munitions Directorate told The Chronicle in late July. But Swenson backed out in August after he was overruled by higher officials in the Air Force and Pentagon.
Reached by phone in late September, Edwards repeatedly declined to be interviewed. His superiors gave him "strict instructions not to give any interviews personally. I'm sorry about that -- this (antimatter) project is sort of my grandchild. ...
"(But) I agree with them (that) we're just not at the point where we need to be doing any public interviews."
Air Force spokesman Douglas Karas at the Pentagon also declined to comment last week.
In the meantime, the Air Force has been investigating the possibility of making use of a powerful positron-generating accelerator under development at Washington State University in Pullman, Wash. One goal: to see if positrons generated by the accelerator can be stored for long periods inside a new type of "antimatter trap" proposed by scientists, including Washington State physicist Kelvin Lynn, head of the school's Center for Materials Research.
A new generation of military explosives is worth developing, and antimatter might fill the bill, Lynn told The Chronicle: "If we spend another $10 billion (using ordinary chemical techniques), we're going to get better high explosives, but the gains are incremental because we're getting near the theoretical limits of chemical energy."
Besides, Lynn is enthusiastic about antimatter because he believes it could propel futuristic space rockets.
"I think," he said, "we need to get off this planet, because I'm afraid we're going to destroy it."
E-mail Keay Davidson at kdavidson@sfchronicle.com.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- california
Nuclear fuel missing from power plant
(AP)
Oct. 04, 2004
http://www.montereyherald.com/mld/montereyherald/news/9831640.htm
EUREKA - Utility officials have yet to locate four pounds of missing radioactive nuclear fuel at a shuttered nuclear power plant, but federal regulators insisted the search must continue.
''You have to exhaust all avenues to find it, and we expect you to continue searching for it,'' Bruce Mallet of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission told Pacific, Gas & Electric Co. officials at a public meeting Wednesday.
Three pieces of a nuclear fuel rod were discovered missing during an inventory in June at the Humboldt Bay Power Plant, and may be among hundreds placed in a deep storage pool before the plant closed in 1976. So far, a search has yielded 40 fuel fragments that are being analyzed to see if they match the missing pieces.
Gregory Reuger, PG&E's chief nuclear officer at the plant, said documents give conflicting clues.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
As Afghan Vote Nears, Taliban Isn't Only Worry
Many Cite Intimidation By Local Militia Leaders
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, October 4, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A4388-2004Oct3?language=printer
QALAT, Afghanistan -- Malik Ali Mahmad and his small security team were on high alert last Tuesday night. They had recently been sent to establish a government outpost in an isolated, Taliban-plagued district, Khaki Afghan, and there were rumors that the Islamic militia was planning a retaliatory raid.
"I heard they had issued orders to kill me," Mahmad said Friday. "At 11:30 p.m. they attacked. There were hundreds of them. They had heavy weapons and rockets and Kalashnikovs and grenades. The fight lasted 4 1/2 hours. I killed their commander, but I lost two of my sons and my best friend."
The beefy, turbaned man spoke tersely, his eyes red with grief but his voice brittle with contempt. He had returned to Qalat, the capital of the southeastern province of Zabol 50 miles to the south, to bury his sons. A circle of men sat around him in a carpeted mud hut, silently paying their respects.
"How do I feel? I am a brave man, but I cannot answer you properly," Mahmad said, staring at the carpet. Then he looked up sharply. "I lost two sons, but I have two more. We will not let the Taliban control that district. We will not let them stop the elections. We will not let them destroy our tribes and our country."
The attack on Khaki Afghan, in which officials said three security men and seven Taliban fighters had died, was just one skirmish in the accelerating war between Afghan and anti-government forces, whose struggle for control of the rugged rural region bordering Pakistan has intensified with the approach of presidential elections set for Oct. 9.
The Taliban, an extremist Islamic militia that ruled most of Afghanistan from 1996 until it was ousted in November 2001 by a U.S.-led invasion, has vowed to sabotage the elections, which it decries as a sham exercise orchestrated by "infidel" Western interests. In recent weeks, Taliban fighters have asserted responsibility for numerous attacks on Afghan civilian officials and facilities, as well as Afghan and U.S. military posts and convoys.
At the same time, however, many Afghans say they are more worried about a different source of abuse and intimidation during the elections: pressure from local militia commanders to vote for certain candidates, which in turn would preserve the post-election grip on power that men with guns now wield in many areas of the country.
Two recent international reports on security and the Afghan elections found that repression by local gunmen and militia factions was a far more widespread concern than Taliban-related violence, even in southern border provinces such as Kandahar, just south of Zabol, where Taliban threats and attacks have been frequent.
"While many observers . . . continue to focus on the Taliban as the main threat to human rights and political development, in most parts of the country Afghans . . . are primarily afraid of the local factional leaders and military commanders," Human Rights Watch said in a report released last week. "Far from a Taliban problem, most Afghans tell us their main fear is of jangsalaran," the Afghan word for warlord.
In a survey conducted by the Human Rights Research and Advocacy Consortium in June and July, 88 percent of Afghan respondents said the government needed to do more to reduce the power of militias and 60 percent wanted both Afghan and foreign forces to protect them. In Kandahar, 93 percent wanted more official action to curb warlordism, and nearly half thought elections should be postponed until there was more progress on militia disarmament.
An ambitious program to demobilize tens of thousands of militiamen before the election has been accelerated in recent weeks after making painfully slow progress for the past year. To date only about 18,000 men have turned in their weapons, although the U.S. ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, told reporters last week that "we are breaking the backbone of the warlords."
Pressure From Commanders
In a few cases documented by human rights groups, militia and tribal commanders have applied blunt pressure to potential voters. Leaders of one tribe in southern Khost province threatened to burn down the houses of anyone who did not vote for President Hamid Karzai, while militiamen in Jowzjan province forced people to swear on copies of the Koran that they would support Gen. Abdurrashid Dostom, a militia leader in Mazar-e Sharif who still commands thousands of troops and has been widely accused of human rights abuses.
But usually, pressure by commanders is a subtle business in a society where most people act as their community elders dictate. Often it is a matter of knowing who is in power and prudently following his lead. Actions by the Taliban, in contrast, are far more dramatic and easier to identify as a challenge to Afghanistan's nascent democracy.
Last month, a rocket was fired at a helicopter carrying Karzai, an explosive device was detonated under a convoy carrying a vice president, and several dozen armed attacks were staged against government buildings, Afghan security vehicles and posts, and convoys of U.S.-led troops. In a single day, U.S. military officials reported eight separate attacks; in most cases Taliban spokesmen asserted responsibility.
Afghan and U.N. officials who are supervising the election have warned repeatedly that they expect more violence on election day. Even with additional contingents of U.S. and international peacekeeping troops on hand, and national army and police forces planning to expand their presence across the country, many observers say it will be physically impossible to secure more than 5,000 polling places nationwide.
For the most part, however, Taliban assaults have been confined to remote locations such as Khaki Afghan, where there is little central government presence and groups of mobile fighters can sneak up at night, fire at an Afghan police post or a U.S. base and slip away into the rugged hills. Officials say the guerrillas, estimated to number 1,000 to 2,000, are less likely to risk entering large towns or cities where most of the voters are expected to cast their ballots.
"I'm not worried about election day. We have men, ammunition and we have made a very strong security plan," said Lt. Gen. Amir Mohammed Noori, the police chief for Zabol province. He said his force of 1,500 men would be augmented by 500 national army troops that day, and no one else carrying weapons will be allowed to travel the roads.
"I can assure you that all 10 districts in Zabol will vote," he said. Like many other Afghans in the volatile border region, Noori blamed Pakistan for the revived Taliban threat, accusing its government of sheltering, financing and rearming the once-defeated movement in an effort to destabilize Afghanistan.
"The Pakistanis say they are our friends, they tell President Bush they are America's friends, but behind the curtain they are doing their best to disturb our peace and destroy our elections," he said. "They tell religious people we are occupied by Americans and get them excited about coming here to fight the foreigners. If they die, they believe they go to paradise."
Doubts About U.S. Strategy
Various Afghan officials and residents also expressed skepticism about the ability of U.S. forces to successfully beat back the Taliban guerrilla campaign, even though about 20,000 U.S. troops are now stationed in Afghanistan and have established a number of bases throughout the southern border area, from which they conduct ongoing raids and search operations.
"The Americans are doing nothing," one frustrated security officer in Zabol complained. "Their forces don't know who is a Talib and who is an innocent citizen. We Afghans know the difference, but the Americans don't ask us. They need to take us along on their operations. If they would just ask me, I can recognize every single one."
In neighboring Kandahar province, which has a 200-mile border with Pakistan and is considered the religious birthplace of the Taliban, tribal elders from several districts last week described finding at their doorsteps what they called night letters from purported Taliban forces, warning people not to vote or face dire consequences.
Elders from the Argestan district said a man named Ehsan Mahmad was gunned down by Taliban fighters last December as punishment for participating in a constitutional assembly in Kabul, the capital. Now that elections are nearing, they said, people are receiving threats of meeting a similar fate if they vote in the elections. "I have received many such night letters, and all the members of our shura," or district council, "have received them," said Khodai Dad Khan, 32, a landowner who was visiting the city of Kandahar to pledge his community's support for Karzai in the elections. "This is our country and we have the right to vote," he said. "With the support of the tribes, no one will be able to disrupt the election."
The Taliban Threat
In Kandahar, a shabby but bustling postwar city where once-decrepit alleys now glow with neon-lit boutiques after dark, sales clerks and shoppers said they felt relatively secure about voting in the city and that they viewed successful elections as an important step toward ensuring their region's continued commercial and social rebirth.
Two clerks at a wedding decoration shop were so busy taping bunting and paper flowers to a row of cars parked outside on Thursday night that they could barely pause to chat. A young customer popped in the door, grinning broadly. He said he had a new bride and a job at a bank, and was planning to vote for Karzai.
"People are a lot happier here now than before, and they are moving toward a modern life," said the groom, Ghulab Shah, 26. "The Taliban? Where are they? They don't exist here. Maybe they are a problem the Americans have created so they can solve it."
But several officials and residents said fanatical Taliban fighters had infiltrated the city, doffing their telltale black turbans and long beards to blend in with urban crowds. On Wednesday night, a nondescript man in a market detonated explosives hidden on his bicycle when he was stopped by police for questioning. He was arrested and hospitalized with serious injuries.
In Zabol, though, residents said they felt surrounded by the threat of violence. Last week, after Taliban forces staged attacks in three districts, killing at least a dozen Afghan security forces, residents and police officials warned visiting journalists not to visit rural areas.
"Even here in Qalat, the Taliban have come and torn up people's voting cards and torn down candidates' posters," said Bismillah Khan, a shopkeeper. "We are not too worried for ourselves, but just [four miles] from the city, people will not be free to vote, and in some more distant places the voter registration people never went there at all. It is dangerous everywhere."
--------
Afghans Studying the Art of Voting
October 4, 2004
The New York Times
By DAVID ROHDE and CARLOTTA GALL
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/04/international/asia/04afghan.html?pagewanted=all&position=
GHULAM ALI, Afghanistan, Sept. 28 - In front of Ed Morgan's eyes, democracy appeared to take root in Afghanistan.
Mr. Morgan, 64, an American election expert, stood in a classroom in this small town just north of Kabul and watched an Afghan staff member teach 50 men how to vote in the country's first-ever presidential election, to be held on Oct. 9.
The Afghan instructor asked the men, who seemed enthralled by the idea of being able to actually choose their own leader, if it was legal to vote for two candidates.
"No," the men replied.
"Choosing them all?"
"No," they answered resolutely.
But when the trainer asked for questions, the complexity of the ambitious American experiment to spread democracy to Afghanistan and other Muslim countries emerged.
One man asked what would prevent election workers from casting leftover ballots for their candidate of choice. Others said they heard on the radio that whoever won the election, President Bush would enforce American, not Islamic, law. Another said he had heard that the Americans had fixed the election in favor of the incumbent, Hamid Karzai.
The scene, from the rudimentary nature of the democracy class to the shrewdness of the Afghan questions, is typical of the American effort to introduce democracy in Afghanistan, according to Western election experts. After 23 years of conflict, many Afghans appear to be enthusiastically supporting the simple concept of resolving political differences through peaceful democratic elections. Western experts, as well as average Afghans, say the presidential election is a positive first step in a long process.
But illiteracy, ignorance and the remoteness of many communities all mean that many Afghans do not understand the process and will stick to tradition and vote along ethnic and tribal lines. And while the United States has pushed hard to ensure that the elections appear to be a success, Western elections experts say too little has been invested in political parties and nonpartisan government institutions that are the bedrock of stable democratic systems.
"Too much attention has been focused on just the election," said a Kabul-based Western election expert who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "Not enough attention has been given to the much longer-term process of democratic development, the role of political parties, government institutions."
Also, the registration process was so flawed - with potentially large numbers of duplicate or underage registrations, and with some local totals exceeding estimates of the number of eligible voters - that much of it may have to be repeated before parliamentary elections next year. The number of people who registered exceeded estimates in 13 of 34 provinces - in 4 of them by more than 140 percent.
Only about 230 foreigners have come as observers or "special guests," according to United Nations officials. The United States is financing only about a dozen elections experts who have moved to Afghanistan to help develop democracy. Many aid groups and United Nations agencies have actually urged their staff members to leave the country for the election because of the security threat, and they are doing so en masse.
As a result of security problems, international observers will be largely confined to the country's eight largest cities, where ballots will be counted. But over 70 percent of Afghans live in rural areas where much of the expected intimidation, violence and irregularities could occur.
With so few international observers involved, 120,000 Afghans are being trained to run 5,000 polling centers on election day. Of 16,000 domestic observers, 12,000 will be political party agents, raising the potential for intimidation or fraud.
In concept and execution, the Oct. 9 election in this deeply tribal, deeply traditional Islamic society is likely to produce a uniquely Afghan democratic mélange. Tribal elders, warlords and clerics may instruct their followers how to vote. Men are likely to instruct their wives and children. Some candidates are reportedly handing out money and expect votes in return.
But the decisive factor in the success of the election will probably be the secret ballot. Much will depend on just how much ordinary people come to understand - and trust - the privacy of the ballot, this wholly new concept in a country where for generations agreements have been brokered between big men in private, or by public communal gatherings.
After an earlier voter education class, Mr. Morgan was visibly pleased when a group of female Afghan teachers and students refused to tell a reporter which candidate they would support.
"There were some men from the village," he explained later, referring to a group of men inside the school. "I don't know what the repercussions would be."
Two hundred miles north of Kabul, the village of Ghundan illustrates the type of conditions that could make the vote unfair. Situated in Balkh Province, Ghundan is populated by ethnic Pashtun, the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan but a minority in the north, which is dominated by the Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara tribes.
Accused of siding with the Taliban, which was a largely Pashtun movement, the Pashtun villages here suffered extortion, robbery and rape at the hands of the various local militia groups during the past three years and are prime targets for intimidation or violence to keep them from voting.
One Monday, old men, laborers with soiled hands, and students sat cross-legged in the village's small mud-plastered mosque, clutching information posters and listening carefully to the visiting election worker. No one seemed to remember the last election held in Afghanistan - a parliamentary vote in 1969 in which only 7 percent of the population took part.
"Suppose you are faced with a commander or very rich person and he wants you to vote for the person he wants," Muhammad Eklil, a civic educator, tells them. "You can tell him 'O.K.,' but when you go to vote, no one can see what you do, and when you come out, he will not know who you voted for. Secret voting and democracy, this is it."
The villagers then watched a fellow villager mime voting behind a screen, folding the ballot and putting it in a cardboard box.
"If it is as he explained, it will be secret," said Muhammad Zaman, 65, a farmer. He said that although the villagers had not experienced any intimidation so far, he did not rule out threatening visits from militiamen on the day of the vote.
Across parts of Afghanistan, male and female teams have arrived in villages with mock ballots and boxes and a poster showing the photographs and symbols of all the 18 presidential candidates. They make the villagers act out the voting procedure, telling them that illiterate people can hold the marker pen in their fist and make any mark in the box of their choice. Relatives can help the blind and old people. Women will vote in women-only enclosures and so should familiarize themselves with the candidates' pictures. There is only one day of voting, and they can vote only once, they say.
In all the wealth of detail, the secret ballot seems to resonate most with the villagers, who have traditionally chosen leaders by public show of hands in tribal councils of elders. Now in the villages and towns, caught up in the often brutal fighting between different militia groups and ruled by military commanders for two decades, they see a chance to choose for themselves.
"In the old tribal system, sometimes people did not agree and created problems," said Ghulam Nabi, an elder of another northern village. "No one will argue with this result."
But the provincial police chief in Balkh, Muhammad Akram Khakrezwal, said the failure of international efforts to disarm militias could lead to intimidation in isolated rural areas.
"Fifty percent of the people are confident they are free," he said, referring to residents of cities and towns. "But in the far districts, the gunmen still have the power to put pressure on the people."
In the end, the success of the election will depend on how much Afghans, ordinary people and powerful people, understand and respect the rules of the process, Western election officials said. Villagers who had come into Balkh for market day did not exude confidence. "We have our registration cards, but the main problem is we don't know the candidates; we do not know who they are," said Mirza Muhammad, an old farmer sitting at a teahouse where election posters were stuck on the windows.
Without modern communications, villagers like Mr. Muhammad do not recognize the candidates they are supposed to vote for. So for the many voters who are both illiterate and do not recognize the faces of candidates, voting is a real problem. Mr. Muhammad said he knew none of the faces.
"As long as the weapons exist, who will change the government?" asked a village teacher, Muhammad Ayub, who was listening in. "You cannot change the government by vote."
David Rohde reported from Ghulam Ali for this article, and Carlotta Gall from Ghundan and other parts of northern Afghanistan.
-------- africa
Official: Darfur Deaths May Reach 300,000
October 4, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-UN-Darfur.html
GENEVA (AP) -- The death toll in Sudan's conflict-ravaged Darfur region could rise six-fold by the end of the year -- hitting 300,000 -- because of worsening food shortages among refugees, a senior U.S. aid official said Monday.
The conflict already has killed at least 50,000 people and displaced 1.4 million villagers from their homes. More than 200,000 have crossed to neighboring Chad, where tensions have risen because of scarce resources for refugees, who are crammed into temporary camps.
``The crisis in Darfur has not yet peaked,'' said William J. Garvelink, deputy assistant administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development. ``We have not yet seen the worst.''
Earlier this year, USAID predicted that between 80,000 and 300,000 people could die if the situation failed to improve in Darfur. ``We're now coming to the high side of that range,'' Garvelink told reporters.
The United Nations and aid groups have dubbed Darfur the world's worst humanitarian crisis.
Sudan's Arab-dominated government is accused of mobilizing an Arab militia known as the Janjaweed for attacks on Darfur's non-Arab villagers in retaliation for uprisings launched by two rebel movements in February 2003. Arab herdsmen have long competed for resources with Darfur's non-Arab population.
The government has denied the claims, although it acknowledges there is a ``tribal conflict'' in the western region.
The U.N. Security Council is investigating allegations leveled by the United States and some humanitarian groups that the government and the Janjaweed are guilty of genocide. Sudan also faces the threat of U.N. sanctions.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Monday urged the Sudanese government and rebels to end a separate, 21-year civil war in southern Sudan, saying a peace accord could spur an end to the crisis in Darfur.
In a report to the Security Council, Annan said the decision of the government and the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Movement to resume negotiations on Thursday ``restores much of the optimism that has been dissipating in recent months.''
Negotiations in Naivasa, Kenya, broke off in July after failing to reach agreement on a permanent cease-fire to the conflict in southern and eastern Sudan.
``I urge the parties to seize the opportunity ... and use it to ensure that a comprehensive and lasting peace can take hold throughout Sudan,'' Annan said.
Annan also said in the report that the humanitarian situation in Sudan ``remains dire'' and he urged international donors to provide desperately needed funds.
The United States provided nearly $62 million to help some 185,000 refugees who fled into neighboring Chad from Darfur, the State Department reported Monday. In a statement, the department also said refugees were in urgent need and appealed to other countries to contribute.
After months of relying on scarce food handouts -- when aid agencies have been able to reach refugee settlements -- more than a million people in Darfur face severe malnutrition, Garvelink told reporters.
The harvest will provide temporary respite, but will only be a ``blip'' because many farmers have been unable to cultivate their fields, he said. When refugees stray out of their camps to forage for food, the men often face death and the women risk rape at the hands of the militias.
``We're going to see a tipping point in December, January or February,'' said Garvelink, who was in Geneva for a meeting of the U.N. refugee agency.
In another development, Iranian President Mohammad Khatami traveled to Sudan Monday for a three-day state visit that Sudanese officials said marked a landmark in the relationship between the two countries Washington accuses of sponsoring terrorism.
``We think this visit will bring a great leap in the relationship between the two countries,'' Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail said. Ismail said Sudanese leaders and Khatami would discuss the troubles in Darfur, as well as the violence in Iraq and the Palestinian territories.
--------
WEST DARFUR JOURNAL
A Pouchful of Protection for Scary Times in the Sahel
October 4, 2004
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/04/international/africa/04amulet.html?pagewanted=all
IN THE DESERT IN WEST DARFUR, Sudan - Every war has its profiteers. Why would Darfur be an exception?
The war that has inflamed Africa's largest country for more than 18 months and has come to represent the ugly divide between Sudan's Arab-led government and the communities of Darfur has also revved up business for the makers of hijabs, leather-pouch amulets believed to ward off harm that are worn widely across the parched Muslim region of the Sahel.
The hijab makers here cater to all sides of the conflict. The rebels fighting the Sudanese government hang hijabs in heavy garlands around their necks. The pro-government Arab militias, the janjaweed, favor hijabs as well. Civilians seeking refuge from the fighting clutch their own hijabs.
Buoyed by a thriving wartime market, the hijab makers cart their wares across borders, crisscross the desert on donkeys and trucks and venture into government territory and rebel land alike. The war may have cut life-and-death divides in this part of the country. But those distinctions seem to matter little for those seeking otherworldly protection, nor for the charm-peddlers to whom they turn.
Of his customers, Ibrahim Muhammad, 22, a Muslim cleric and a hijab maker, said: "Of course, all of them are Muslims. Many, many people, even the soldiers of the government, come and buy hijabs."
The attachment to the hijab, while a marker of the grave dangers of the war in Darfur, also testifies to the shared culture in this part of the country.
Indeed, as Mr. Muhammad observed, the people who now increasingly identify themselves as either African or Arab have all practiced Islam for centuries. But more than that, their paths have crossed over the centuries, some of their children have married, and as their penchant for the hijab shows, some of their cosmologies have merged.
The hijab's roots can be traced to West African Islam, a belief system that distinguishes itself from the stricter, more rigid forms of Islam by maintaining strong ties to the African spirit world. In part of the Middle East, for instance, some interpreters of Islam would eschew the hijab as superstition barred by the Koran. But across the Muslim Sahel, from as far west as Senegal all the way east to Chad and Sudan, the belief in these objects of protection endures.
Each hijab, an engraved pouch of goatskin or cowhide, contains verses from the Koran. Hijab makers are loathe to describe to strangers any details of which verses they choose, except to say different hijabs contain different verses for different kinds of protection. Traditionally, hijabs in the desert protect against scorpions, or guard a child against an evil eye. Today, in wartime, there is a new line.
Sitting in the shade of his open-air atelier the other day, Mr. Muhammad displayed a selection of his most popular offerings. One, he said, would guard against knife wounds, another against guns, yet another against the Antonov bombings that have become synonymous with Sudanese government assaults against civilian villages. Rocket-propelled grenades, he explained, were covered by the anti-gun hijabs. He pointed to one with a lock around it. That, he explained with a smile, can render the bearer invisible.
Deep inside rebel-held Darfur, in a village called Shigekaro, a man approached a foreign visitor to demonstrate the strength of his anti-scorpion hijab. From a cigarette box, he took out a pet scorpion and held it, calmly, in his right palm. His anti-scorpion protection, he said, had protected him for four years.
Some of the rebels, for their part, collect hijabs as young boys elsewhere collect stamps. They strap them around their skinny arms, drape them around their waists, hang them around their necks. Some of them are as large as heavily stuffed billfolds.
Even those who dismiss the Muslim ritual of prayer five times a day keep their hijabs close by.
The price of a hijab varies widely, from 50 cents to 100 times that amount. The most valuable are said to have been product-tested. Some anti-gunfire hijabs, for example, are said to have been hung on the neck of a goat that was then shot at.
-------- arms
African conference debates strategy on arms control to check conflicts
KAMPALA (AFP)
Oct 04, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041004125801.1j5q3qd6.html
Uganda on Monday called on African governments to make a more concerted effort to control small firearms, saying they had caused havoc and ravaged the continent.
"Africa has been ravaged by many conflicts, most of them conflicts fought primarily by small arms and light weapons," Ugandan Interior Minister Ruhakana Rugunda told the opening session of a five-day conference in Kampala on small arms proliferation.
"These weapons pose one of the greatest challenges of our time, particularly in Africa," Rugunda said, urging African states "to change and improve the way they export, procure, distribute, control, use and store small arms and light weapons."
The conference is attended by around 100 delegates from 39 African countries and brings together key civil society, security and military officials, as well as international experts.
"Comprehensive strategies involving governments and the civil society at national and international levels are required in order to find a sustainable solution," Rugunda said.
"Small arms have destroyed countless lives and property and continue to cause casualties and suffering to civilian populations," he said, warning that in sub-Saharan Africa alone, more then 20 percent of the region's population was directly impacted by civil wars during the 1990s.
Sources at the conference said that conflicts in Angola, Burundi, Guinea-Bissau, Demoratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan and in Uganda had claimed millions of innocent civilian lives and destroyed livelihoods of tens of millions more across in the continent.
The conference is sponsored by the US-based Africa Centre for Strategic Studies.
-------- britain
UK's Top Court to Rule on 'Britain's Guantanamo'
October 4, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-security-britain-laws.html?oref=login
LONDON (Reuters) - Nine foreign terror suspects held indefinitely without charge in what critics have dubbed ``Britain's Guantanamo'' began a legal challenge against their detention at the UK's highest court on Monday.
The nine are among 11 men held under British emergency laws rushed through after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States which allow police to hold foreigners without trial if they suspect they are involved in terrorism.
To enact the legislation, Prime Minister Tony Blair's government had to declare an emergency and suspend parts of the European Convention on Human Rights, the only country to do so.
Civil rights campaigners accuse both Britain and the U.S. of trampling over the rule of law as they seek to combat the threat of terror attacks.
Hundreds of demonstrators staged a protest on Sunday outside the top security Belmarsh jail in south London where some of the detainees are held.
Lawyer Ben Emmerson, representing seven detainees, told a rare sitting of nine law lords -- the greatest number of senior judges that can hear a case -- that the powers were illegal and Britain was in breach of international law.
``We say in a democracy it is unacceptable to lock up potentially innocent people without trial or any indication when, if ever, they are going to be released,'' he said.
``We say it is doubly unacceptable for a democracy committed to the principles of equality and anti-discrimination to single out foreign nationals when it is not prepared to apply the same measures to its own nationals.''
TERROR TRAP FOR DEMOCRACY
Emmerson said there was a danger of ``falling into the trap which terrorism set for democracy and the rule of law.''
``There is an inevitable temptation for governments to fight fire with fire and set aside the legal safeguards which exist in a democratic state,'' he said.
The British government -- whose top lawyer, Attorney General Lord Goldsmith, is arguing its case -- says the emergency laws are vital and called the al Qaeda Sept. 11 attacks an ``unprecedented form of terrorism.''
``The UK raised its profile as an enemy of al Qaeda by joining in the military intervention in Afghanistan. That in turn underlined the importance of the government taking effective measures to safeguard the British population against terrorist attacks,'' Goldmsith said in written submissions.
Civil rights campaigners have long argued the powers are being used disproportionately against Muslims.
They liken the detainees' situation to those at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where more than 600 people have been held without charge or access to lawyers, some for more than two years, amid accusations of torture and abuse.
Under the emergency laws, the authorities must show only that they have ``reasonable grounds to suspect'' the detainees have links to terrorism, a standard far below the ``proof beyond reasonable doubt'' needed to convict them of an actual crime.
The hearing is set to last four days and no verdict is likely for at least a month.
-------- business
Going for a Halliburton
Having a former boss as US vice-president is turning out to be more trouble than it is worth for Dick Cheney's old company
David Teather
guardian.co.uk
October 4, 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,1319367,00.html
It must have seemed like a terrific stroke of luck: Dick Cheney, the man who for the past five years had been the chief executive of Halliburton, became the vice-president in 2000. The oil services and engineering company was given a direct line to the White House.
But Halliburton's relationship with the Bush administration is beginning to prove more problematic than it is worth.
The company admitted 10 days ago that it was considering selling Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR), the division carrying out billions of dollars worth of work for the US government in Iraq, in a desperate attempt to get out of the spotlight. It is considering a sale, spin-off or a separate listing for the business on the stock exchange.
The company's shares have fallen from $50 (£28) when Mr Cheney first took office in the White House to the low $30s.
Halliburton's business with the federal government has grown considerably since the current administration took office. According to the New York Times, the business went from being the 22nd biggest military contractor in 2000 to the seventh largest in 2003.
Prior to the invasion of Iraq, without being asked to tender, Halliburton was handed a contract worth up to $7bn to repair the nation's oilfields. It was also given a contract to provide logistical support to US troops, handling everything from food to transport and laundry services. That deal, awarded under an existing long-term contract to provide emergency services, was worth a potential $13bn.
When the first secretive contract came to light, shortly after the March 2003 invasion, Democrats rounded on the company, arguing that it was evidence of an old boy network in the White House. Mr Cheney, who walked away from Halliburton with a $36m package, continued to receive deferred income from the firm.
The oilfields contract was eventually put out to tender, with KBR retaining part of the business. The higher profile of Halliburton has ensured that the company has remained on the front pages throughout a series of controversies that might otherwise have gone unreported.
This year the firm agreed to pay $7.5m to settle allegations that it failed to disclose a key accounting change in 1998 that allowed it to inflate profits and meet Wall Street targets while Mr Cheney was still in charge.
The accounting change, concerning the booking of disputed cost overruns on projects, allowed it to increase its profits by more than $200m. A class action lawsuit brought on behalf of shareholders has accused the firm of systemic accounting fraud - allegations the company denies.
Investigations are still under way into claims that a consortium KBR now leads paid bribes to Nigerian officials to secure the contract to build a natural gas plant. The company has admitted uncovering discussions of bribes, though it has no evidence they were actually paid. A treasury department inquiry has also been reopened into dealings the company may have had with Iran.
Military officials, meanwhile, have accused KBR of routinely overcharging for work carried out as part of its logistics contract in Iraq and threatened to withhold payment on 15% of bills.
A Pentagon auditors' report said the company had failed to account for at least $1.8bn worth of work done. In a little-covered development the defence contract management agency said last month that the company's billing methods were adequate but that had no effect on the other investigations and audits still pending.
The Pentagon is now considering breaking the contract up into six pieces and inviting new tenders. Tired of the onslaught of invective, Halliburton has said it is not certain if it will bid for any of the smaller pieces.
In a meeting with investors in Houston toward the end of September, Halliburton's chief executive, David Lesar, said the company had become the target of a "vicious campaign" of political attacks ahead of the presidential election. The company's workers, he added, "don't deserve to have their jobs threatened for political gain". Another reason for wanting to quit Iraq is that 45 of the company's workers have died there.
As the presidential election has heated up, so has the temperature surrounding Halliburton. The company has become a useful piece of shorthand for the newly aggressive democratic nominee, John Kerry.
He told an audience in Albuquerque on a campaign trip last month: "Dick Cheney's old company, Halliburton, has profited from the mess in Iraq at the expense of American troops and taxpayers. While Halliburton has been engaging in massive overcharging and wasteful practices under this no-bid contract, Dick Cheney has continued to receive compensation from his former company."
In last week's presidential debate, the Democratic nominee assailed Halliburton again on national television. He said the administration had deliberately limited overseas participation in Iraqi reconstruction to save the "spoils of war" for the company.
Mr Cheney, it turns out, may have been of little real help to Halliburton at all: KBR filed for bankruptcy earlier this year, weighed down by asbestos litigation it inherited from an acquisition the vice-president made while he was still running the firm.
-----
Contracts Awarded
Washington Technology
Monday, October 4, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A3021-2004Oct2?language=printer
Amsec LLC of Virginia Beach, Anteon International Corp. of Fairfax, Tecnico Corp. of Chesapeake, Va., Titan Corp. of San Diego, QED Systems Inc. of Virginia Beach, VSE Corp. of Alexandria and Milcom Systems Corp. of Virginia Beach won the right to compete for about $7 billion in work over five years providing engineering and technical services for Navy maintenance and modernization programs.
Future Technologies Inc. of Fairfax won a five-year, $21.3 million contract from the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Dahlgren, Va., to support the Aegis weapons system, the Integrated Warfare System Laboratory, and Combat System and Computer Center.
Lockheed Martin Corp. of Bethesda won a $3.3 billion contract to build the Navy's narrowband satellite communications system. Tier Technologies Inc. of Reston won a five-year contract from the New York Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance to manage a data-match program used to locate people who are delinquent on child-support payments. The company declined to give the contract's value.
Orbimage Inc. of Dulles won a four-year, $500 million contract from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to supply tools for gathering high-resolution images from commercial satellites.
Raytheon Technical Services Company LLC of Reston won a five-year, $13 million contract from the Air Force to upgrade mobile ground radar systems for Hill Air Force Base in Utah.
Bearing Point of Landover won a $175.7 million contract from the Naval Sea Systems Command for work on the converged Navy Enterprise Resource Planning system, including financial management, program management, intermediate level maintenance, workforce management and plant level supply.
Planning Consultants Inc. of Virginia Beach won a $55.1 million contract from the Naval Surface Warfare Center for engineering services in support of the introduction of advanced combat system technology and modernization of combat systems for surface ship combatants.
Lockheed Martin Corp., Maritime Systems and Sensors of Manassas won a $13.7 million contract from the Naval Sea Systems Command for upgrading ship sensor processing on submarines.
Eagle Systems Inc. of California, Md., won a $9.9 million contract for technical and engineering support services for the Naval Air Systems Command aircraft division, electromagnetic environment effects division, Atlantic range and facilities department.
Anteon Corp. of Fairfax won a $5.8 million contract from the Naval Surface Warfare Center for continuing technical and administrative support for Surface Combat System Configuration Management for surface combatant ships.
Wexford Group of Vienna won a $16.9 million contract from the Army Space and Missile Defense Command for improvised explosive device task force augmentation.
Northrop Grumman Systems Corp., Sperry Marine of Charlottesville, Va., won a $65.3 million contract from the Naval Inventory Control Point for logistics support of weapon systems.
Northrop Grumman Information Technology of McLean won an $8.1 million contract from the Air Force Research Laboratory for the Logistics Readiness Branch of the Human Effectiveness Directorate, Warfighter Readiness Division for research seeking to enhance the scientific value and technological power of its foundational research and advanced development projects.
Johns Hopkins University, Applied Physics Laboratory of Laurel won a $2 million contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to facilitate, coordinate, and, if necessary, complete the development of the Joint Unmanned Combat Air Systems enterprise architecture and integration of the Common Operating System, working with the program's air vehicle primes as well as a consortium of other technology contributors.
ITT Industries Inc. of Roanoke won a $40.3 million contract from the Air Force's Headquarters Warner Robins Air Logistics Center to provide night vision goggles.
LB&B Associates Inc. of Columbia won a $9.8 million contract from the Army Contracting Agency for services, materials, supplies, plant supervision, labor and equipment at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo.
Lear Siegler Services Inc. of Gaithersburg won a $5 million contract from the Army Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command for the Palletized Loading System Reconstitution.
Robbins-Gioia Inc. of Alexandria won a $1.9 million contract from the Army Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command for sustainment and support services.
Alutiiq Security & Technology LLC of Chesapeake, Va., won a $12 million construction contract from the Naval Facilities Engineering Command contracts office for the critical power system service department of the naval facilities engineering service center at Port Hueneme, Calif.
W. M. Schlosser Co. Inc. of Hyattsville won a $5.9 million contract from the Naval Facilities Engineering Command for construction of a two-story steel-framed mission support facility for the Naval Special Warfare Development Group at Naval Air Station Oceana, Dam Neck Annex.
Fibertek Inc. of Herndon won an $80 million contract from the Air Force Research Laboratory to provide research and development in high-power fiber lasers, moderate-power military systems lasers and remote sensing of chemicals and biologic agents.
Northrop Grumman Information Technology Inc. of McLean won a $49.8 million contract from the Air Force's Headquarters Electronic Systems Center to provide sustainment and upgrade efforts for the reliability and maintainability information system.
RS Information Systems of McLean won a $10.9 million contract from the 50th Contracting Squadron to provide services to operate, maintain, and support the Space Warfare Center at Schriever Air Force Base, Colo.
Sodexho Management Inc. of Gaithersburg won two contracts to manage and operate Marine Corps mess halls: a $69.33 million contract for the eastern region of the nation and a $59.93 million contract for the western region.
ITT Night Vision Industries of Roanoke won a $15.9 million contract from the Naval Surface Warfare Center for monocular night vision goggles and associated items.
Total Resource Management of Alexandria won a $8.4 million contract from the Naval Facilities Engineering Command contracts office for computer software work at various Navy installations worldwide.
National Technologies Association Inc. of Alexandria won a $7.9 million contract from the Naval Air Systems Command Aircraft Division to provide warehouse and material control operation services for the Naval Air Depot, Jacksonville, Fla.
Raytheon Technical Services Co. LLC of Reston won a $7.6 million contract from the Fleet and Industrial Supply Center, Norfolk Detachment, for operation and maintenance services in support of the surveillance support center's radar system.
AMSC LLC of Virginia Beach won a $6.3 million contract from the Naval Undersea Warfare Center for professional software engineering development and programming support services in support of the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Keyport, Wash.
Applied Ordnance Technology Inc. of Waldorf won a $11.7 million contract from the Naval Sea Systems Command for engineering services.
Rolls Royce of California, Md., won a $1.5 million contract from the Naval Air Systems Command for engineering and technical services.
Lear Siegler Services Inc. of Gaithersburg won a $4 million research and development contract from the Army Materiel Command's U.S. Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command.
Clark Construction Group LLC of Bethesda won a $16.1 million contract from the National Guard Bureau for site improvement and utilities and relocation of a control tower.
Aarcher Inc. of Annapolis won a $6.7 million contract from the Environmental Protection Agency.
Shinkuro Inc. of Bethesda won a $3.8 million research and development contract from the Air Force for deployment coordination.
National Opinion Research Center of Washington won a $3.7 million contract from the Health and Human Services Department for the patient safety research coordinating center.
Anteon Corp. of Fairfax and Unisys Corp. of Reston each won a $150 million contract from the Army for multinational information sharing program support.
Trusted Information Systems, NAI Labs, Network Associates of Rockville won a $3 million contract from the Navy for research and development of advanced technologies for human and information system interactions.
MasiMax Resources Inc. of Rockville won a $5.9 million contract from the Health and Human Services Department for communications support.
Northrop Grumman Systems Corp., Electronic Systems of Linthicum Heights won a $7.2 million research and development contract from the Air Force Materiel Command's electronic systems center.
International Resources Group of Washington won a $23.2 million contract from the Agency for International Development for support of watershed management.
Social & Scientific Systems of Silver Spring won a $6 million research and development contract from the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for the regulatory management center.
Science and Technology Associates Inc. of Arlington won a $3.91 million contract from the Army for science, engineering and technical assistance for the Mid-Range Munitions Program.
New Year Tech Inc. of Reston won a $16 million contract from the Environmental Protection Agency for operation and maintenance of animal facilities.
Bionetics Corp. of Newport News won a $2 million contract from the General Services Administration for management, organizational and business improvement services.
MTS Technologies Inc. of Arlington won a $1.9 million contract from the General Services Administration for logistics worldwide.
Platinum One Contracting of Landover won a $1.7 million contract for Officer's Club roof repair at Langley Air Force Base.
Northrop Grumman Defense Missions of Reston won a $3.3 million research and development contract from the Air Force Materiel Command's Electronic Systems Center.
Pivotal Insight LLC of Arlington won a $2.5 million contract from the General Services Administration for management, organizational and business improvement services.
E-Satisfy.com Inc. of Arlington won a $1.3 million contract from the General Services Administration for management, organizational and business improvement services.
Centex Construction Corp. of Fairfax won a $24.2 million contract from the General Services Administration for construction of FDA Superstructure-Central Shared Use Building at White Oak, Silver Spring.
Northrop Grumman Information Technology Inc., Defense Enterprise Solutions of McLean won an $ 8.1 million contract for research and development at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base on technology for agile combat support.
Unicor/Federal Prison Industries of Washington, D.C., won a $1.1 million contract from the Army Materiel Command for miscellaneous vehicular components.
Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority of Washington won a $5.7 million contract from the Department of Health and Human Services for fare media.
Lockheed Martin Integrated Systems & Solutions of Bethesda won a $2.1 million contract from the Air Force Material Command for communication, detection and coherent radiation equipment.
Northrop Grumman Systems Corp., Denro Systems of Gaithersburg won a $161.3 million contract from the Air Force Materiel Command for communication, detection and coherent radiation equipment.
Contrack International Inc. of Arlington won a $16.1 million contract from the Army Corps of Engineers for construction and building materials in Bahrain.
Staff writer Judith Mbuya contributed to this report.
-------- iraq
Rumsfeld: No 'Hard Evidence' of Iraq-Al Qaeda Link
Reuters
By Will Dunham
Oct 4, 2004
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20041004/pl_nm/iraq_usa_rumsfeld_dc
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Monday he knew of no "strong, hard evidence" linking Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s Iraq (news - web sites) and al Qaeda, despite describing extensive contacts between the two before the Iraq invasion.
Rumsfeld, during a question-and-answer session before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, was asked to explain the connection between Saddam and Osama bin Laden (news - web sites)'s al Qaeda network, blamed for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on America.
"I have seen the answer to that question migrate in the intelligence community over a period of a year in the most amazing way. Second, there are differences in the intelligence community as to what the relationship was," Rumsfeld said.
"To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two," Rumsfeld added.
"I just read an intelligence report recently about one person who's connected to al Qaeda who was in and out of Iraq. And it is the most tortured description of why he might have had a relationship and why he might not have had a relationship. It may have been something that was not representative of a hard linkage."
U.S.-led forces invaded Iraq in March 2003 and toppled Saddam and his government in a war whose main justification offered by the United States was the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. No such weapons have been discovered.
But the relationship between Saddam's government and al Qaeda also figured in the U.S. case for war.
A small Pentagon (news - web sites) intelligence-analysis office found what it considered evidence of Iraq-al Qaeda ties. Rumsfeld was one of the Bush administration officials publicly describing this link. On Sept. 26, 2002, Rumsfeld told reporters at the Pentagon of evidence of contacts and cooperation.
'CREDIBLE INFORMATION'
"We have what we consider to be very reliable reporting of senior level contacts going back a decade, and of possible chemical and biological agent training. And when I say contacts, I mean between Iraq and al Qaeda," Rumsfeld said at the time.
"We have what we believe to be credible information that Iraq and al Qaeda have discussed safe-haven opportunities in Iraq, reciprocal nonaggression discussions. We have what we consider to be credible evidence that al Qaeda leaders have sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire ... weapons of mass destruction capabilities," Rumsfeld added at the time.
The bipartisan 9/11 commission that studied the 2001 attacks concluded this July there was no evidence of a "collaborative operational relationship" between Iraq and al Qaeda or an Iraqi role in attacking the United States.
During a question-and-answer session at the Council on Foreign Relations on Monday, Rumsfeld also was asked what was the "number-one reason for the war."
Rumsfeld said President Bush (news - web sites) made the judgment that Saddam "ran a vicious regime that had used weapons of mass destruction on its own people, as well as its neighbors, and that it was important to set that right by removing that regime before they, in fact, did gather weapons of mass destruction, either themselves or transferring them to terrorist networks."
Before the war, U.S. officials spoke of Iraq already possessing weapons of mass destruction, not a potential for gathering them.
"It turns out that we have not found weapons of mass destruction," Rumsfeld said.
"And why the intelligence proved wrong, I'm not in a position to say. I simply don't know. But the world is a lot better off with Saddam Hussein in jail than they were with him in power," Rumsfeld added.
(Additional reporting by Carolyn Koo)
-----
Three Car Bombs Explode Across Iraq, Killing at Least 26
October 4, 2004
New York Times
By EDWARD WONG
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/04/international/middleeast/04CND-IRAQ.html?hp=&oref=login&pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 4 - Three powerful car bombs exploded across Iraq this morning, killing at least 26 people and injuring more than 100 others in a day of carnage that demonstrated the relative ease with which insurgents are striking in the hearts of major cities.
A firefight between policemen and insurgents broke out in the middle of downtown Baghdad after one of the explosions, according to security contractors at the scene.
The first blasts rocked Baghdad as two suicide car bombs exploded within an hour of each other, one on either side of the Tigris River. The bomb in the west detonated after a car loaded with explosives rammed into a recruiting center for Iraqi plainclothes police officers. The brazen attack took place near a checkpoint to the fortified headquarters of the interim Iraqi government and the American embassy, and officials at one hospital counted at least 15 dead and 82 wounded.
The second car bomb exploded north of the Baghdad Hotel, mostly occupied by foreign security contractors, after a red station wagon sped down a wide commercial street and plowed into two sport utility vehicles, the kinds of cars often used by contractors, witnesses said. At least six people were killed and 20 injured, an Interior Ministry spokesman said. The explosion scattered body parts and pieces of flesh across nearby blocks, and men rushing to the scene began scraping those bits onto slabs of burnt car metal to ensure proper burials.
The third suicide car bomb exploded near a primary school in the northern city of Mosul, killing at least five people, including two children, Reuters reported, citing Iraqi police officers. The car might have exploded prematurely since there were no American soldiers or Iraqi security forces in the area, the officers said.
The attacks are the latest attempts by insurgents to keep up pressure on the interim government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi. Car bombs have become the favorite - and most lethal - weapons employed by the fighters, with at least 35 having exploded in September alone, more than in any other month since the war began. The surge in violence during this bloody campaign has led many experts to voice serious doubts about whether the Bush administration and the Iraqi government can hold legitimate elections across the country in January, as President Bush and Dr. Allawi say they will do.
This is a particularly crucial month for the American military here, as it struggles to back up an Iraqi security force that so far has proven incapable of holding its own against the insurgency. The real test will come as the Americans and their Iraqi allies try seizing cities controlled by guerilla fighters and placing the security of the cities in the hands of Iraqi police and soldiers.
Over the weekend, the First Infantry Division chased insurgents from the streets of Samarra in a relatively quick battle, but the bombings today showed that the guerillas can readily mount a counteroffensive, right in the heart of the capital.
As the second bomb exploded, plumes of smoke darkened the sky above central Baghdad, as if a hurricane had enveloped the city, and glass from shop windows sprayed onto the sidewalks.
Angry and anxious Iraqi policemen began firing wildly with their AK-47's, spurring onlookers to flee in a frenzy. Some security contractors at lookout points along surrounding buildings said they saw insurgents dashing through the area with automatic rifles and trading fire with the police. The shooting lasted a half hour, and at least one policeman was injured by bullets.
As that died down, firefighters struggled to douse flames spouting from four incinerated cars. Medics dragged the body of a driver out of a yellow van, his head wrapped in a red cloth, and placed him on a stretcher.
Another group of rescuers rushed through with a stretcher carrying a half-naked male body that appeared to be missing a head and both arms.
American helicopters buzzed low over the scorched area while soldiers with the First Cavalry Division warily watched from their Humvees.
"This is the second time this has happened here," said Saad Mowaffak, a security guard standing outside an insurance office. "Two months ago, a roadside bomb exploded right next to a Humvee. Iraq will never be stable. You see with your own eyes what we see. Innocent people are dying."
"When the Americans came, we thought all our sorrows were going to end," he continued. "But things are getting worse day after day. We don't want money, we just want safety. Young men are fleeing the country because of the lack of security."
At least four of the wounded from the second attack were taken to Ibn al-Hathem Hospital, a nearby eye treatment center. In a dim, narrow corridor, two men crouched against the walls, their faces and clothes drenched in blood, hands clasped around their heads. "My eye, my eye, my eye," screamed one man whose left eye had been reduced to a bloody pulp.
The American military suffered its own losses: Two soldiers were killed by small arms fire at a traffic control checkpoint on Sunday afternoon, the military said. At least 1,060 American soldiers have died in the war.
The military said it launched an airstrike at 1 a.m. today against what it called an insurgent safehouse on the outskirts of the insurgent stronghold of Falluja. The military said in a written statement that about 25 guerilla fighters were storing weapons and conducting training sessions in the building. It added that "multiple measures were taken to ensure no innocent civilians were present at the time of the strike."
Doctors in the main hospital in Falluja said that at least 11 people were killed in the airstrike, four of them women, and at least 10 people were injured.
In Samarra, the first wave of American soldiers began rolling out of the city after the weekend battle, while others remained behind to help transfer authority over to Iraqi police and military units. They worked feverishly to convert some of the buildings used as command posts during the battle into police stations and barracks for Iraqi National Guard soldiers. In one instance, soldiers searching a house found some Al Qaeda propaganda, and an Iraqi National Guard officer had to be restrained by American soldiers when he tried to attack the cowering homeowner.
A militant group sent out a video that showed the killings of a Turk and an Italian resident of Iraqi origin, Reuters reported. The two were shown blindfolded and kneeling in front of a ditch before being shot. Another group released two Indonesian women to the United Arab Emirates embassy in Baghdad, Abu Dhabi Television reported.
In Yarmouk Hospital in the capital, young men wounded at the recruitment center in the first bombing of the morning struggled to make sense of the chaos.
"I felt myself flying through the air," Ussama Muhammad, a 30-year-old lieutenant in the secret police service, said as he lay in bed with a bloody gauze cloth wrapped around his head. "I saw my shoes come off my feet and strike the wall. I was between life and death. I saw a reddish scene in front of my eyes, and I discovered I was bleeding from my head, and bodies were scattered all over the place. There was the smell of burning flesh."
Lying beneath a blanket, Ahmad Nassir Hussein, 27, spoke of how he fainted as a shock wave rolled through the recruiting center and smoke poured into the room, after he had finished applying for a police job.
"I had discussed the idea with my cousin in Kufa, and we thought it over, and we decided to go ahead and join the security forces," he said. "But it seems the idea did not suit the resistance here in Baghdad."
Rick Lyman contributed reporting from Samarra for this article, and Thaier Aldaami from Baghdad.
--------
INSURGENTS
After 3-Day Fight, U.S. and Iraqi Forces Retake Samarra
October 4, 2004
By RICK LYMAN and DEXTER FILKINS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/04/international/middleeast/04iraq.html?pagewanted=all&position=
SAMARRA, Iraq, Oct. 3 - American and Iraqi forces in Samarra finished retaking the last insurgent-controlled neighborhood early Sunday, completing a relentless three-day push through this ancient city in a first step toward wresting control of important central Iraqi areas held by Sunni guerrillas.
With the city in hand, American commanders said they were beginning the second phase of the operation, turning over the city to the Iraqi police and military forces the same way they took it - one neighborhood at a time.
American and Iraqi officials said the most difficult challenge was ahead, in re-establishing governmental authority and holding off what is certain to be a new round of attacks from guerrillas who melted away before the surging armies.
The Americans said they had killed at least 125 insurgents, but if the past is any guide, more are likely to be lying in wait. American commanders have long said that they could retake the cities of the so-called Sunni Triangle with ease but that the difficulty lies in transferring the cities to Iraqi security forces that have less training. Until the Samarra attack, Iraqi troops had not done well in combat against insurgents.
For that reason, more than 2,000 of the soldiers in the 5,000-member force that attacked Samarra are Iraqi, and many of them will be staying on after the Americans leave. The local government will come in behind them.
But on Sunday, with the city mostly quiet, the American and Iraqi forces celebrated an early success.
"I guess it's about over," said Lt. Col. David Hubner, commander of one of the four American battalions that joined two Iraqi battalions in the battle. Colonel Hubner was resting in the cool afternoon gloom of the living room of a house that he had commandeered for his headquarters in southern Samarra.
As though a bell had been rung, people began to emerge from their homes on Sunday, gathering in small numbers on some market streets and waving warily at passing convoys of armored vehicles. Here and there, people passed along the hot, dusty streets with white flags waving over their heads.
The quick retaking of Samarra, which had fallen under the control of fundamentalists and other antigovernment insurgents, was welcome news to Iraq's provisional government. With national elections promised by the end of January, concerns had been growing over what to do with cities that had fallen out of government control.
Now, bolstered by their victory in Samarra, Iraqi officials are predicting that the other major cities under insurgent control, like Falluja, will also soon be retaken.
American strategists said they had studied earlier battles with insurgents in Falluja, where troops have never been able to establish much of a foothold, and Najaf, which was taken from Shiite militiamen only after a grinding and costly struggle, and decided on an aggressive and relentless strategy that proved successful in Samarra.
The battle began just before midnight on Thursday with a bombardment of the neighborhoods on Samarra's edge. It was immediately followed by the entrance of the main force of American and Iraqi troops, repelling attacks by insurgents firing rocket-propelled grenades and answering their mortar fire with more mortar fire.
"That's when the tide really turned, when we started firing mortars back at them," said Lt. Shawn Tabankin, who led one of the platoons moving into the city. "They were already surprised, but when we started throwing indirect fire at them, they just disappeared."
In past fights in Iraqi cities, insurgents have had time to regroup after the first assault, often buying time by initiating negotiations. But in Samarra, the guerrillas appeared to be thrown off balance by the continuing attack. Some insurgents fled and others tried, unsuccessfully, to counterattack.
The idea, Colonel Hubner said, was to panic the insurgents at the opening of the battle in an effort to scatter them. "We studied what had happened in Najaf and elsewhere very carefully, and we learned some important lessons," he said.
But if the Americans were pleased with their success, not all Iraqis were. In Baghdad, the Association of Muslim Scholars, which represents more than 3,000 Sunni mosques around the country, denounced the military operation and accused American and Iraqi troops of widespread atrocities in Samarra. The clerics, who spoke at a news conference in Baghdad, said the military action would undermine any support in the area for the elections.
"The hospital is full of bodies, children are buried in the gardens, and there are bodies filling the streets," said Muhammad Bashar al-Faidhi, one of the members of the group in Baghdad who said he was basing his accusations on witness accounts. It was impossible to independently verify his claims.
"These policies will increase the anger of the Iraqi people," he said, "and if the government insists on resolving the crisis in this horrible American way, then we expect that the Iraqi people will not cooperate in any forthcoming election or any other political program."
Also on Sunday, the American military said it had carried out an early morning airstrike in Falluja. The military said the attack, which hit a home where people had been seen moving weapons, was followed by 45 minutes of secondary explosions, confirming the presence of weapons there.
The military said it presumed that a large number of enemy fighters had been killed in the attack. But in Falluja, hospital officials said five civilians had been killed.
Iraqi officials said Sunday that they had found the bodies of a man and a woman, both believed to be Westerners, in a troubled area south of Baghdad.
The man had been decapitated, and the woman had been shot through the head and stabbed in the neck, a hospital official in the town of Mahmudiya said. The official said the bodies had been found in the nearby town of Yusefiya. Officials said no identification had been made.
At least three Westerners are believed to be hostages in Iraq - two French journalists and a British engineer, all men. A number of other foreigners, including Indonesians and Lebanese, are also being held.
Rick Lyman reported from Samarra for this article, and Dexter Filkins from Baghdad.
-------- israel / palestine
Palestinians Deny Israeli Gaza Talks Claim
October 5, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Israel-Palestinians.html
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) -- Israeli and Palestinian security officials have begun indirect contacts aimed at ending a major Israeli offensive in northern Gaza, an Israeli military official said Tuesday, but the claim was denied by the Palestinians.
Secretary of State Colin Powell said he hoped Israel incursion -- its bloodiest into Gaza in four years -- would be ended quickly.
``The immediate problem right now is that Israeli built-up areas are being hit by rockets and Mr. Sharon finds a need to respond to that. I hope it does not expand,'' Powell said. ``And I hope that whatever he does is proportionate to the threat that Israel is facing and I hope that this operation can come to a conclusion quickly.''
He said he was unable to say anything about whether the attacks thus far have been proportional.
However, Israel appears to be in no rush to end the operation, saying its troops will remain in the area as long as necessary. Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said Monday that ``it will take time until we can be sure that we remove the threat of the ... rockets.''
An Israeli military official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Palestinian officials delivered messages through mediators offering to try to prevent rocket fire on Israeli towns if Israel ends the operation, which has killed 68 Palestinians in six days.
A senior Palestinian official said he was unaware of contacts with Israel, which refuses to negotiate directly with the Palestinian Authority. However, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat on Monday urged militants ``not to give the occupation (Israel) any excuse against us,'' -- an apparent appeal to stop the rocket fire.
The report of cease-fire contacts came as Palestinians pushed for quick adoption of a U.N. Security Council resolution demanding an end to the Israeli offensive, ``Days of Penitence.''
Arab nations that introduced the resolution said they want a vote Tuesday.
The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, John Danforth, said another resolution is not the answer, and that the council ``acts as the adversary of the Israelis and cheerleader to the Palestinians.''
The Palestinian Authority has complained about what it considers the world's forgiving response to the unprecedented Gaza raid.
Hundreds of troops are deployed at the northern end of the strip, controlling the towns of Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun, as well as the Jebaliya refugee camp, an area with tens of thousands of residents.
The army says the offensive was launched to push rocket launchers back, out of range of Israeli border towns and Jewish settlements. It was triggered by the killing of two Israeli children by Hamas rocket fire last week.
However, the Palestinians say the military has gone much further, destroying dozens of homes, uprooting trees and tearing up roads. Hospital officials say civilians account for nearly half the 68 killed and about 60 percent of the more than 400 wounded.
The United States, the European Union and a number of European countries have urged restraint by Israel and raised concerns about civilian casualties.
France condemned the Israeli operation on Monday, while Egypt's foreign minister urged Israel to stop its ``policy of assassination and destruction,'' the semiofficial Middle East News Agency reported.
However, the international community has also urged the Palestinians to end rocket attacks, and has acknowledged Israel's right to self defense.
U.S. State Department spokesman Adam Ereli urged ``all sides to take every measure to avoid civilian casualties'' while endorsing ``Israel's right to defend itself.''
Hassan Abu Libdeh, the Palestinian Cabinet secretary, described the Western condemnations as ``weak and not consistent with the large-scale of the aggression.''
Raanan Gissin, a senior Israeli official, attributed the tepid international response so far to recognition of Israel's security needs. ``The world has come to know Palestinian terror organizations for what they are,'' he said.
Analysts also cited world ``fatigue'' with the festering Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as the international focus on Iraq.
``All efforts are concentrated on Iraq,'' said Germano Dottori, a political analyst at the Center for Strategic Studies in Rome.
In new fighting Tuesday:
-- A Palestinian gunman was killed and three were wounded in an Israeli air force attack in Jebaliya. Israeli military sources confirmed that armed Palestinians were the target but would not relate to reports that a pilotless drone aircraft fired a missile.
-- A 16-year--old Palestinian girl was shot dead near the Rafah refugee camp in southern Gaza. The army said the girl placed an explosive charge near an Israeli military outpost, and that when she tried to run away, both Israeli soldiers and Palestinian militants opened fire in her direction. Residents said she was killed by army fire.
-- In the West Bank, Israeli undercover agents raided the city of Ramallah and killed two members of Force 17, a branch of the Palestinians security forces, in a shootout. The army said the two had been involved in attacks on Israelis. An Israeli border policeman was killed by a shot to the head, and the army was checking whether he was hit by friendly fire.
-- Near the West Bank city of Hebron, a wanted Hamas militant was killed by Israeli troops. The army said the man had opened fire on Israeli soldiers during an arrest operation and was killed by return fire.
--------
Sharon Vows to Stay in Gaza Until Threat to Israel Is Ended
By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, October 4, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A4370-2004Oct3.html
JERUSALEM, Oct. 4 -- Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Sunday that his forces would expand their incursion into the Gaza Strip and continue the assault until the threat of rocket attacks on Israeli towns and settlements has ended.
At least 10 Palestinians were killed in fighting Sunday. And an Israeli air strike on a northern Gaza refugee camp killed at least three more Palestinian militants early on Monday, witnesses and medics said, the Reuters news agency reported.
That would push the total death toll to at least 74 since the operation began Tuesday.
Israeli tanks and armored bulldozers on Sunday flattened a kindergarten, houses and factories on the edge of Gaza's largest refugee camp, according to Palestinian medical officials and human rights organizations.
Palestinian fighters managed to launch at least three of their crude Qassam rockets into Israel Sunday, according to a spokeswoman for the Israel Defense Forces. Those attacks occurred even though more than 200 Israeli armored vehicles were swarming through the northern Gaza Strip at the time and a network of attack helicopters, fighter planes and unmanned surveillance drones patrolled the sky.
"We have to expand . . . the areas of operation in order to get the rocket launchers out of the range of Israeli towns," Sharon said in an interview on Israel Radio. He added that the operation "is not a short thing -- the forces have to remain there as long as this danger exists."
Israeli armored brigades have isolated the three major population centers in northern Gaza -- the Jabalya refugee camp and the towns of Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun. It had been the heaviest sustained fighting since Israeli troops entered West Bank cities in the spring of 2002 in response to a wave of suicide bombings in Israel.
Black smoke hung over Jabalya, where residents and fighters burned tires, trash and garbage in an effort to impede Israeli forces' aerial surveillance of Gaza's largest refugee camp. More than 100,000 people live there.
Israeli tanks, which were positioned near the camp entrances to try to draw fighters out of their warrens, fired throughout the day. A special correspondent for The Washington Post said Israeli forces fired toward him and other Palestinian journalists who were reporting in the camp.
More than 35 tanks and five armored D-9 bulldozers plowed through the camp's Tel Zatar neighborhood, flattening a kindergarten, at least seven houses and two factories, according to human rights groups and the Reuters news agency, which reported that posters of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, toys and coloring books were scattered in the rubble of the kindergarten.
"Is this place an army base or military training camp to be targeted?" Jaber Abu Oukal, the director of the kindergarten, said in an interview with the news agency. "We have 400 boys and girls, ages 3 to 5, who used to come here to play and start their first step in the educational process. Now they have no place to go but the street."
The dead in Sunday's fighting included two 14-year-olds, a 13-year-old, a deaf man who was shot by an Israeli sniper while standing on the roof of his house and four fighters, according to Moawia Hassanin, chief of emergency room and ambulance services at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. Hassanin said Israeli forces have repeatedly fired on ambulances and medical workers attempting to remove the dead and wounded. An Israeli military spokeswoman said the defense forces have received no reports of ambulances being fired upon.
The spokeswoman said the Israeli military was investigating the death of the 13-year-old but was unaware of the reported shootings of the two other teenagers.
She said an Israeli sniper shot the man who was described as deaf because he had been seen each day on the roof of his house and was suspected of being a lookout for Palestinian fighters. One of the radicals was killed soon after he and other men fired a Qassam rocket from the Beit Hanoun area at about 1 p.m., the spokeswoman said.
Special correspondent Islam Abdulkarim at the Jabalya refugee camp contributed to this report.
--------
Israeli Attacks Kill 11 Palestinian
Fighters Army Attempts to Carve Out Buffer Zone in Gaza Strip to Halt Rocket Strikes
Reuters
By Nidal al-Mughrabi
Sunday, October 3, 2004; Page A26
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2979-2004Oct2.html
GAZA, Oct. 3 -- The Israeli army killed nine fighters in and around the Gaza Strip on Saturday, and two more were killed by Israeli rockets on Sunday, raising the Palestinian death toll to 49 in one of the biggest and bloodiest offensives in four years of conflict.
Nearly 200 tanks and armored vehicles seized control of about 3 1/2 square miles of the coastal territory in a massive operation, witnesses said. The attack was launched after a Hamas rocket attack killed two Israeli toddlers in a border town on Wednesday.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his security cabinet ordered the army to carve out a buffer zone to halt the rocket strikes that have fueled criticism of his plan to withdraw Jewish settlers from Gaza by the end of 2005.
The Israeli incursion, code-named Days of Reckoning, has focused on Jabalya, Gaza's largest refugee camp and a base for Hamas militants who fire daily barrages of makeshift Qassam rockets into southern Israel.
Shooting was sporadic in Jabalya's cramped alleys Saturday after fierce battles the day before. Witnesses and medics said an airstrike killed three Islamic Jihad radicals and a missile attack killed two Hamas fighters in Gaza City.
Four fighters were killed after crossing the border fence to try to infiltrate an Israeli community.
The Palestinian dead in the recent days' fighting include civilians as well as fighters. Israeli fatalities include two soldiers and a female jogger.
Israeli troops in one district of densely populated Jabalya used loudspeakers to urge dozens of Palestinians to leave their houses. Several families fled in fear that their homes would be demolished.
Soldiers, making their way through booby-trapped streets, have destroyed many houses since the beginning of the raid. The army says fighters use houses as cover for rocket attacks. Palestinians call the demolitions collective punishment.
The Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, condemned the Israeli incursion, saying: "I appeal to the world to . . . stop these inhumane and racist crimes."
Cutting short a visit to Jordan, Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia also pointed the finger at Israel, but signaled his cabinet's consensus that rocket attacks should stop because they give the Jewish state what it sees as a pretext for more raids. "We appeal to all Palestinian factions . . . to seriously consider the higher national interest," Qureia told reporters.
The Arab League condemned the offensive.
The cycle of bloodshed has sent Sharon scrambling to counter critics who say his plan to pull out of Gaza has emboldened radicals trying to give the impression that Israel is being driven out. Israel is determined to smash armed groups before leaving.
A White House spokesman said that Israel "has the right to defend itself," but urged both sides to promote a U.S.-backed peace plan known as the "road map," which has been stalled by months of violence.
--------
Israel Kills Militant in 6th Day of Mass Gaza Raid
October 4, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-mideast.html?pagewanted=all
GAZA (Reuters) - Israeli forces launched the sixth day of a massive offensive in the Gaza Strip early on Tuesday with an air strike that killed a Palestinian militant and wounded two others in Jabalya refugee camp.
Israel launched the incursion with more than 200 tanks and armored vehicles after a Palestinian rocket strike killed two young children in a border town on Wednesday, aiming to crush militant groups before a planned withdrawal from Gaza next year.
Witnesses said a pilotless Israeli drone fired a missile into a group of militants in teeming Jabalya early Tuesday morning. An Israeli military source confirmed that three gunmen were hit.
The militant who was killed was from the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed wing of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, raising the Palestinian death toll in Israel's bloodiest raid in Gaza in four years of conflict to 67.
Forty of the Palestinians killed were militants, and most of the rest were civilians.
Three Israelis including two soldiers and a woman jogger have also been killed.
Tuesday's air strike came as fighting intensified in Jabalya, a teeming camp of 100,000, which Israel has targeted as a stronghold of militants who have fired hundreds of Qassam rockets at Israeli towns.
International efforts were underway to put an end to the fighting.
Arab states took the issue to the U.N. Security Council and want it to adopt a resolution demanding Israel stop its Gaza offensive. But the United States raised objections at an emergency meeting on Monday.
U.N. VOTE SOUGHT TO END GAZA INCURSION
Algerian U.N. Ambassador Abdalla Baali, the only Arab member of the council, said ``taking into account the urgency of the situation,'' he would like a vote on Tuesday.
U.S. Ambassador John Danforth said that after two years of attacks, it was not unreasonable for Israel to respond. He said the nearly dormant ``road map'' for the Middle East was ``the way to peace.''
But the British Ambassador Emyr Jones Parry, the current council president, said there was ``strong support for the thrust of the resolution'' and negotiations would resume on Tuesday afternoon.
Egypt was also making efforts to mediate an end to the assault, Palestinian officials told Reuters on Monday.
In what appeared to be a signal to militants, Arafat said in a radio speech broadcast in Gaza on Monday they should ``avoid giving the occupation any pretext'' to attack Palestinians.
Some officials of Hamas, the militant group bent on Israel's destruction that has led the rocket campaign, suggested they might be ready to stop firing the makeshift Qassam rockets if Israel halts its Gaza offensive.
But Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said that while he had heard ``fragments of appeals'' to halt the offensive, Israel could not accept any kind of agreement while rocket fire continues, Israel Radio said.
Violence was also reported in the West Bank where an Israeli policeman and two Palestinian militants died in a gunbattle in Ramallah when Israeli forces came to arrest wanted men on Monday night, Israeli military and Palestinian security sources said.
-------- space
USAF Counterspace Operation Doctrine:
Questions Answered, Questioned Raised
Center for Defense Information
Theresa Hitchens
October 4, 2004
http://www.cdi.org/program/document.cfm?DocumentID=2504&StartRow=1&ListRows=10&appendURL=&Orderby=D.DateLastUpdated&ProgramID=68&from_page=index.cfm
The U.S. Air Force, for the first time ever, has developed and approved a new doctrine document outlining the service's approach to warfare in space. Called Counterspace Operations (AFDD 2-2.1) and dated Aug. 2, 2004[1], the doctrine details the planning and execution of operations against space systems and satellites, both for defensive and offensive purposes.
In effect, the new document establishes as fact U.S. Air Force intentions not only to weaponize space, but also conduct anti-satellite operations, possibly preemptively, against enemy military satellites as well as those with primarily civilian functions and satellites owned and/or operated by third-parties (whether governments or commercial entities).
While, as an Air Force publication, the document's precepts are subordinate to higher-level doctrine (both internal Air Force and at the Joint Chiefs level) and DoD policies, the new doctrine is important for a number of different reasons.
It sets a precedent in that it represents the first time the Air Force has officially articulated counterspace as a part of the Air Force's overarching mission. It states, "This publication codifies United States Air Force beliefs and practices on the use of counterspace operations in planning and executing military operations."[2]
It further seeks to establish "space superiority," with counterspace as the "ways and means" to that end, as a first-order strategic and tactical priority for all military operations, on a par with achieving air superiority. "U.S. Air Force counterspace operations are the ways and means by which the Air Force achieves and maintains space superiority. Space superiority provides freedom to attack as well as freedom from attack (AFDD 1). ...Space and air superiority are crucial first steps in any military operation."[3]
It also represents an assumption by the Air Force leadership that the conduct of space warfare has been approved at the highest levels of the U.S. government. While the administration of President George W. Bush has, for more than a year, been reviewing current National Space Policy, promulgated by President Bill Clinton in 1996[4], no official update has been released. The current policy, while vague and somewhat self-contradicting, was widely interpreted during the Clinton administration (including by the Air Force itself) as eschewing (if not prohibiting in some cases) the deployment of ASATs and on-orbit weapons.[5] That said, it is not the first Air Force or DoD document to make that assumption - several other higher-order documents also have put forth visions of "space control" that include concepts for operations against enemy space systems either to protect U.S. assets or as means of degrading an enemy's capabilities on the ground. This has been accomplished, in large part, by what might be seen as a reinterpretation of the Clinton policy by the Pentagon in anticipation of stronger support from a new Bush administration document.
A close reading of the Counterspace Operations Doctrine document further makes clear that offensive operations against space systems (in some cases, preemptively) is as much a priority for the service's future combat operations as is defense of U.S. space assets. Up until now, when discussing space operations, U.S. Air Force officials widely have emphasized the need for counterspace systems for protective purposes, although previous documents (including Joint Doctrine) have laid out the basic concept of offensive counterspace operations as part of "space control." Gen. John Jumper, Air Force chief of staff, in the Foreword to the document, asserts that: "Counterspace operations are critical to success in modern warfare....Counterspace operations have defensive and offensive elements... . These operations may be utilized throughout the spectrum of conflict and may achieve a variety of effects from temporary denial to complete destruction of the adversary's space capabilities."[6] The Counterspace Operations document further states:
"Potential adversaries have access to a range of space systems and services that could threaten our forces and national interests. Even an adversary without indigenous space assets may use space through U.S. , allied, commercial or consortium space services. These services include precision navigation, high-resolution imagery, environmental monitoring, and satellite communications. Denying adversary access to space capability and protecting U.S. and friendly space capability may require taking the initiative to preempt or otherwise impeded an adversary."[7]
Finally, the document's language can also be interpreted as supporting the use of kinetic energy (or perhaps even explosive) antisatellite (ASAT) technologies - weapon systems U.S. officials have denied pursuing. The document articulates air-launched missiles, direct-ascent ASATs, and on-orbit ASATs as potential systems for destroying satellites. While it does not elaborate on the nature of the missiles or ASATs, it is obvious that a missile can either use kinetic energy or explosives as a means of destruction (a missile could also be nuclear tipped, but it is inconceivable that the Air Force would be postulating nuclear attacks in space due to the harmful repercussions on its own systems). While direct-ascent or co-orbital ASATs could be equipped with directed energy methods of destruction, a separate section of the paper discusses directed-energy attacks, leading to the conclusion that the document is referring to either kinetic energy or explosive means. Further, there are direct references to kinetic-energy ASATs in the section of the document that details types of targets and means of attacking them: "[Offensive Counterspace] operations [against on-orbit satellites] may target the mission sensor or the satellite bus. For example, a laser may deny, disrupt, degrade or destroy certain types of sensors. Kinetic antisatellite weapons on the other hand, usually target the satellite bus for physical destruction."[8] Further, it should be noted that the use of kinetic-energy ASAT systems was also postulated in the U.S. Air Force Transformation Flight Plan released in November 2003.[9]
Such weaponry, along with directed energy weapons that would destroy satellites on-orbit, are controversial because of the fact that their testing and usage would create space debris, which is universally recognized as a danger to satellites and spacecraft. Even tiny pieces of debris can damage or destroy on-orbit assets because of the high speeds at which objects travel in orbit (some 10 km per second in Low Earth Orbit), and the international community - with NASA a leading player - is seeking to develop a set of globally accepted measures for mitigating the creation of debris in order to avoid further polluting usable orbits.[10]
While the Counterspace Operations doctrine itself makes no mention of the dangers of space debris or the need to ensure against unintentional damage caused by its creation (including that of fratricide of U.S. space assets), this is an example of an area where other doctrine and policy documents may take precedence. For example, both National Space Policy and DoD Space Policy[11] both make debris mitigation a priority. Joint Publication 3-14: Joint Doctrine for Space Operations (Aug. 9, 2002), also notes: "Space combat operations may impact friendly forces. For example, the creation of space debris or jamming actions may impact friendly systems."[12]
Likewise, the Counterspace Operations document does not articulate a policy of first relying on "temporary and reversible" means to counter or attack enemy space systems before resulting to debris-creating measures -- a policy Air Force officials repeatedly have stressed in public. For example, Lt. Col. Andy Roake, a spokesman for Air Force Space Command, was quoted by Wired.com on Oct. 1 as saying, "We're concentrating on effects that are reversible. ... [I]f you blow something up in space, you create lots and lots of bitty pieces that threaten your own assets."[13]
It is unclear, however, whether this policy has been codified - as direct instruction to make destructive methods a "last resort" option is not evident in either policy or doctrinal documents to this date. The only direct reference in the Counterspace Operations doctrine on this issue states, "Planners must decide on the desired effect - deception, disruption, denial, degradation and destruction -- when targeting an adversary's space capability. There may be times when temporary, reversible counterspace operations prove more appropriate than operations that permanently degrade or destroy space capabilities."[14]
Definitions and Operations
The Counterspace Operations document details both Defensive Counterspace Operations (DCS) and Offensive Counterspace Operations (OCS).
DCS are defined as providing "the means to deter and defend against attacks and to continue operations by limiting the effectives of hostile action against U.S. space assets and forces. DCS operations include deterrence of attacks against our space system, defense of our space systems as they come under attack, and where necessary, recovery of our space forces and assets."[15] Types of DCS include passive protection measures (such as hardening against electromagnetic pulse), attack detection and characterization, and "active measures" such as maneuvering, but also what might be termed shoot-back capabilities. The latter types of actions, dubbed "Suppression of Adversary Counterspace Capabilities (SACC), include "attacks against adversary antisatellite weapons (before, during or after employment), intercept of antisatellite systems, and destruction of [radio-frequency] jammers or laser blinders."[16] Recovery operations are also included in this category.
OCS are defined as those that "preclude an adversary from exploiting space to their advantage. OCS operations may target an adversary's space capability (space system, forces, information links, or third-party space capability), using a variety of permanent and/or reversible means."[17] As in previous documents, the types of OCS are designated the "5 D's": deception, disruption, denial, degradation and destruction. The OCS section also designates specific target sets: on-orbit satellites, communications links, ground stations; launch facilities; command, control, communication, computer, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) systems, and "third-party providers."[18] As for the latter set, the document explains, "An adversary may gain significant space capabilities by using third-party space systems."[19]
Later in the document, under the section instructing how to go about targeting, weather satellites and satellite navigation systems are cited as specific potential targets. [20]
The document further identifies resources and forces for both DCS and OCS. Possible offensive counterspace forces the U.S. Air Force might use are identified as: aircraft, missiles (including for ASAT attack), special operations forces, dedicated offensive counterspace systems (such as the Counter Satellite Communications System), and ASATs (defined as including "direct ascent and co-orbital systems that employ various mechanisms to affect or destroy an on-orbit spacecraft"), directed energy weapons (including destructive lasers), network warfare operations, electronic warfare weapons, C4ISR systems, and surface forces.[21]
Unintended Consequences
Interestingly, the document admits that counterspace operations could have "unintended consequences," both on "blue forces (i.e. U.S. forces)" and on neutral or not-so-neutral third parties (foreign governments and/or commercial providers). This admission is significant, although the document does not explain how Air Force planners should address such possible consequences. This is not a trivial subject, as one of the potentially fatal flaws in the logic of space warfare is the complexity of using space weapons because of the potential for political, economic or strategic backlash - in military terms, there are problems with the concept of operations. After all, the Air Force is postulating the possibility of destroying third-party assets being used by an enemy, whether with the knowledge of the third party or not; weather satellites that provide civilian authorities with essential data especially in times of weather crises; and commercial communications satellites that are relied on by nations and their publics for everything from emergency communications to wireless bank transfers. Doing so would obviously have consequences not just for the "third party" that owns or operates those assets, but also for potentially millions of non-combatants in neutral or even friendly nations.
The Counterspace Operations Doctrine, indeed, is in some ways quite clear about the potential for complications. Some examples:
· On page 22: "Deconfliction is just as important in counterspace operations as it is in other military operations. Electromagnetic spectrum and physical deconfliction must be accomplished to avoid 'blue on blue' impacts and unintentional interference with other parties."
· On page 29: "Counterspace operations can create effects at the tactical, operational, and strategic level of war. Denying an adversary's access to space can carry many intended and unintended consequences transcending military operations, potentially impacting a nation's economy and diplomatic position. Due to the potential for wide-ranging effects, when planning counterspace actions, airmen ensure the tactical action supports the operational and strategic level objectives and strategies."
· On page 39: The document first asserts that counterspace operations are legal under the UN Charter (an assertion that some legal scholars may well challenge, particularly when neutral third-party assets are involved), but nonetheless notes, "In all cases, a judge advocate should be involved when considering specific counterspace operations to ensure compliance with domestic and international law and applicable rules of engagement."
· On page 40: "Many communications satellites are owned and controlled by third party providers, to include governments, commercial interests and multinational consortia. Multiple transponders allow providers to service the communications requirements of many users, including some who may be adversarial and others who may be friendly or neutral. Therefore, planned action against space communications assets must be carefully deconflicted to avoid unintended consequences."
· On page 41: "When planning operations against an adversary's space-based weather capabilities, consider potential collateral impacts on friendly or neutral nations' assets or information."
· On page 41: "Counterspace operations must be deconflicted with other friendly operations to minimize unintended effects. ...Deconflictions of counterspace and information operations may be required given that counterspace operations can result in substantial losses in exploitable intelligence."
· On page 42: "Certain counterspace operations may carry greater consequences than others. For example, operations against on-orbit systems may have greater consequences than others. Likewise, counterspace operations against adversaries using third-party space capabilities may have economic, diplomatic, and political implications."
However, while the possibility of unintended and negative consequences is raised, the document does not provide instructions about how to judge when those potential consequences are deemed to outweigh an operation. This seems to be a critical lack. At a minimum, it fails to provide Air Force planners with methods to judge the efficacy and desirability of a planned counterspace operation. Perhaps worse, it could give planners the impression that rather than being serious issues requiring in-depth analysis, such possible consequences are, of course, to be minimized if possible, but by and large represent the eggs that must be broken to make the omelet.
Potential for Mistaken Attack
Just as worrisome as the question of "collateral damage" is the other major concept of operations problem with regard to counterspace operations - the potential for space accidents to be misperceived as attacks. The very real possibility of the United States mistaking an accident in space for an attack is compounded by the fact that a response might be taken against a doubly-innocent third-party's space system. Again, the doctrine document touches on this issue: "Operators must be able to differentiate between natural phenomena interference and an intentional attack on a space system in order to formulate an appropriate response."[22] The document later states: "The ability to quickly and accurately distinguish between hostile, unintentional, and natural events is critical to the ability to detect attacks on space systems. Without such confirmation, operations in retaliation should not be undertaken. Given today's capabilities, attack detection involves the support of multiple organizations."[23]
While the latter statement seems to place a burden of proof on a commander calling for a counterspace strike, the doctrine paper does not identify exactly what criteria might constitute establishing such certainty or how a commander can establish it. A serious problem is simply that as of today, the U.S. military does not have the capability to do this. There are not systems or technologies now (or in the near-term) available for always being able to accurately diagnose the causes of an on-orbit satellite's malfunction nor to inspect satellites for damage.
A further problem is that the reality in operations is likely to be that commanders would react with "worse case scenario" in mind, that is, assuming an attack rather than an accident. This mindset would be exacerbated in a world where space weapons were owned not only the United States but by other nations as well. The reason is that by virtue of the high value of space assets, particularly any on-orbit weapons, they foster a "use 'em or lose 'em," mentality, similar to the "hair-trigger" dynamic of nuclear confrontation.
This potential for mistaken response is also exacerbated by the doctrinal document's instructions on how rapidly a counterspace mission should be put together. It states that planning and executing a counterspace attack should take no more than four days -- 72 hours for planning, 24 hours for execution -- but that the cycle could be lengthened or shortened "to meet battle rhythm." This is despite the complexity of determining if something was an attack and having to ensure against unintended consequences against either "blue forces," allied forces or non-combatants.
Conclusion
The new Counterspace Operations Doctrine is the latest in a string of recent DoD and U.S. Air Force policy and doctrinal publications to assert the necessity to conduct warfare in space, represented in the concept of space control. It is also the latest in a string of U.S. Air Force publications asserting that the service's space control mission not only includes, but necessitates, offensive, first-strike means. Finally, while less direct in its language than other Air Force planning documents (particularly the November 2003 Transformation Flight Plan), the Counterspace Operations Doctrine confirms that the service has not ruled out the use of kinetic-energy and other debris-producing ASAT weapons.
While the document answers a number of questions about Air Force intentions, it also raises a number of issues that should be subject to wider review by other U.S. governmental agencies, Congress and the public. First of all, there is absolutely no evidence that Congress and the U.S. public have accepted the idea of the United States being the first nation to arm the heavens. Just the opposite: public opinion polls show a great resistance to space weapons. In the absence of an overarching policy debate (or even a new policy), the current DoD and Air Force course is not justified.
In particular, the fact that achieving space control through a heavily offensive counterspace strategy (rather than, for example, a combination of diplomatic means and protective measures) requires the United States to contemplate attacks upon and possible destruction of the satellites and space systems of allies, friendly nations, neutral nations and third-party commercial providers ought to be the subject of a wider policy debate. At a minimum, such a strategy ought to be vetted and coordinated through the Departments of State, Commerce and Justice to review possible political, economic and legal consequences.
That said, the Counterspace Operations Doctrine document is a lower-level doctrinal paper, which must be considered by Air Force officials and outside analysts alike as subordinate to higher-order doctrinal and policy documents. It is conceivable that evolutions to Joint Doctrine and DoD/National Space Policy may clarify some of the issues raised in this analysis and resolve some of the more troubling issues with the Counterspace Doctrine itself. It would be helpful, in the meantime, if Air Force officials were to further explain to the Congress, as well as the U.S. and international public, how the myriad pieces of the emerging U.S. space superiority strategy fit together. Unfortunately, the three critical questions about this strategy remain yet unresolved:
1. Will the United States be the first to deploy ASAT and on-orbit weapons, and what will be the consequences?
2. How will allies and the rest of the world react to a strategy that deliberately targets their space capabilities and assets?
3. Will such a strategy make the United States, and our critical space assets, safer, or rather, more insecure?
[1] Counterspace Operations, Air Force Doctrine Document 2-2.1, Aug. 2, 2004, http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/service_pubs/afdd2_2_1.pdf
[2] Counterspace Operations, Foreword by Gen. John P. Jumper, Air Force chief of staff.
[3] Ibid, p. 1.
[4] White House Fact Sheet on National Space Policy, http://www.ostp.gov/NSTC.html/fs/fs-5.html
[5] Theresa Hitchens, "National Space Policy: Has the U.S. Air Force Moved the Goal Posts?" May 24, 2004, Center for Defense Information web site, http://www.cdi.org/program/document.cfm?DocumentID=2231&StartRow=11&ListRows=10&appendURL =&Orderby=D.DateLastUpdated&ProgramID=68&from_page =index.cfm
[6] Counterspace Operations, Foreword.
[7] Ibid., p. 31.
[8] Ibid, p. 32.
[9] U.S. Air Force Transformation Flight Plan, November 2003, Appendix D, p. D3, www.af.mil/library/posture/ AF_TRANS_FLIGHT_PLAN-2003.pdf
[10] Theresa Hitchens, "Space Debris: Next Steps," April 1, 2004, Center for Defense Information web site, http://www.cdi.org/program/issue/index.cfm?ProgramID=68&issueid=76
[11] DoD Directive 3100.10, Space Policy, July 9, 1999, www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/dod-spc/dodspcpolicy99.pdf
[12] Joint Publication 3-14: Joint Doctrine for Space Operations, Aug. 9, 2002, p. IV3, http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/new_pubs/jp3_14.pdf
[13] Noah Shactman, "All's Fair in Space War," Wired.com, Oct. 1, 2004, http://www.wired.com/news/space/0,2697,65151,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1
[14] Counterspace Operations, p. 40.
[15]Ibid, p. 26.
[16] Ibid, p. 27.
[17] Ibid, p. 31.
[18] Ibid, pp. 32-33.
[19] Ibid, p. 33.
[20] Ibid, p. 41.
[21] Ibid, pp. 33-34.
[22] Ibid, p. 22.
[23] Ibid, p. 26.
Author(s): Theresa Hitchens
-------- un
U.N. calls emergency meeting on Israel
Associated Press
10/4/2004
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2004-10-04-un-israel_x.htm
UNITED NATIONS (AP) - The U.N. Security Council called an emergency meeting Monday at the request of Arab nations to consider a resolution demanding an immediate halt to a major Israeli offensive in the northern Gaza Strip.
Algeria's U.N. Ambassador Abdallah Baali, the only Arab member of the council, requested the open meeting following the nearly weeklong operation that has killed at least 65 Palestinians.
"Taking into account the gravity, the urgency of the situation, the seriousness of the situation, we need to have the Security Council take a decision quickly - and quickly means tomorrow (Tuesday) at the latest," Baali said.
The draft resolution, which was endorsed Monday morning by Arab nations, expresses "grave concern at the continued deterioration of the situation on the ground" in Palestinian territories and calls on Israel and the Palestinians to immediately implement the internationally-backed road map peace plan.
The Arab draft condemns "the broad military incursion and attacks by the Israeli occupying forces in the area of Northern Gaza Strip, including in and around the Jabiliya refugee camp, resulting in extensive human casualties and destruction and exacerbating the dire humanitarian situation."
It "demands the immediate cessation of all military operations in the area of northern Gaza and the withdrawal of the Israeli occupying forces from that area." It also reiterates the council's call a halt to all violence and adherence to international humanitarian law.
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UNRWA demands Israel apologize over Qassam accusation
04/10/2004
By The Associated Press and Haaretz Service
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/484443.html
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) on Sunday demanded an apology from Israel over accusations that Gaza militants used a UN vehicle to transport a homemade rocket.
The world body refuted the charges at a news conference in Gaza on Sunday. It showed what it said was the ambulance seen in footage released by the Israel Defense Forces and presented its driver and rescue workers to reporters.
Rescue worker Wahel Ghabayen, 38, said he had run with a stretcher to a school in Jabalya on Friday after he heard that someone there may have been wounded. The wounded boy had already been moved by the time he arrived, he said.
"I came back to the car with the stretcher, and I folded it and threw it inside the car," he said. "If it was a missile, I would not throw it into the car but would put it in carefully."
The director of operations for UNRWA, Lionel Brisson, said UN workers do not carry weapons or armed militants in UN vehicles. "We want an apology from the Israelis, because we didn't commit any wrongdoing," he said.
The blurred black-and-white Israeli video showed three men walking toward the UN vehicle, including one who carried an elongated object. The army said the object was a rocket of the type used by militants to target southern Israel.
UN officials said the object was a stretcher, noting that the man in the footage was carrying it with one hand, a difficult task with a Qassam, which weighs anywhere from 5.5 to 35 kilograms.
Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman, has sent a letter to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan demanding the dismissal of Peter Hansen from his position as commissioner-general of UNRWA.
The letter communicates Israel's claim that Hamas is using UN ambulances as a means of smuggling arms and terrorists through the Gaza Strip.
Last Wednesday the Israel Defense Forces documented two men loading a Qassam rocket onto a van bearing a large UN logo. The photographed images, taken from an unmanned plane in the Jabalya refugee camp, were broadcast on network television on Friday night. After the rocket was loaded, the vehicle left the spot. Army sources say that the IDF avoided firing at the vehicle, as it had done in other instances, fearing that it might be a UN ambulance.
UNRWA maintains a fleet of ambulances in the Gaza Strip, which are used for evacuating wounded. UN ambulances have been used before to transport armed Palestinians and weapons. Last May similar scenes were documented by the IDF in Rafah and in the Zeitoun neighborhood in Gaza.
Hansen told Haaretz that it is easy to prove that the suspicious looking object in the photo is a stretcher. According to Hansen, the image broadcast on television shows two men approaching two ambulances, one of whom is carrying an object that could not weigh more than a few kilos. He said that he had learned from a simple Google search that a Qassam rocket is 1.80 meters long and weighs 50 kilos.
The photographic image, on the other hand, Hansen explained, reveals an object 5 centimeters wide, while the Qassam has a diameter of 17 centimeters. A piece of cloth, he added, was clearly visible in the photo, which proves it was an ambulance stretcher, and naturally, this is what the ambulance crew were carrying. Hansen also said that he is concerned that the IDF's unfounded accusations might lead to incitement, since soldiers who give credence to the IDF statement, may become suspicious of every ambulance that arrives at a checkpoint, putting UNRWA crews in grave danger.
Gillerman has conveyed information about the film to Annan, and to his envoy in the region, Terje Larsen, demanding explanations.
"We will demand an inquiry committee with the authority to reach unequivocal conclusions - maybe even personal conclusions - especially regarding Peter Hansen, the UNRWA envoy in Israel, who for years has expressed anti-Israeli, biased, unrestrained positions and statements," Gillerman told Israel Radio on Sunday.
Several months ago Israel filed a complaint in New York against UNRWA personnel for ignoring the use of UN ambulances by Hamas. The complaint never earned a significant response from the director-general. Israel has also voiced objections about Peter Hansen's conduct, claiming he has consistently adopted a trenchant anti-Israel line. However, this is the first time that Israel is directly and unambiguously demanding Hansen's removal from his UNRWA post.
Hansen, a Danish diplomat, was appointed commissioner-general of UNRWA several years ago, making him one of the most senior officials in the organization.
-------- us
Air Force Looks at New Microwave Weapon
October 4, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/science/AP-Microwave-Weapons.html
DAYTON, Ohio (AP) -- The Air Force expects planes will be able to fire non-lethal microwave rays at enemy ground troops with the help of a new superconducting generator system developed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base after about 25 years of research.
Heavy, inefficient generators have been a hurdle to the development of airborne microwave weapons, which create a disabling burning sensation.
Microwaves could be used to control large groups of enemy fighters without killing them or disable electronics-dependent enemy weapons, said Philip Coyle, senior adviser for the Center for Defense Information.
The Air Force is preparing to award a $22 million contract to a private contractor to construct and demonstrate the new electrical generating system by 2009.
``We finally have the materials where we're ready to build this generator,'' Lt. Col. JoAnn Erno, chief of the power division of Air Force Research Laboratory's Propulsion Directorate, said Monday.
Microwaves -- high-powered electromagnetic beams that can rapidly heat water molecules -- and other directed-energy weapons could bring advantages to the battlefield in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, where U.S. troops have had to deal with hostile but unarmed crowds as well as dangerous insurgents.
Aside from paralyzing potential attackers or noncombatants like a long-range stun gun, the weapons could disable the electronics of missiles and roadside bombs or even disable a vehicle in a high-speed chase, developers say. The weapons emit a pulse of energy and can destroy semiconductors with a surge of volts.
Erno said conventional generators, which have heavy copper coils, are large, heavy and less efficient in producing power than the superconducting generators. Planes carrying conventional generators would have to fly at low altitudes and be in danger of being shot down by small-arms fire, she said.
``We can't take those airborne,'' Erno said. ``What we have to do from the Air Force side is to produce much smaller superconducting generators.''
Powered by a turbine engine, the new generators are about the size of a small beer keg and designed to produce five megawatts of power.
The generators have lightweight metal foils coated with superconducting material that carry many times more current and are more efficient, making possible an electric power system strong enough for microwave weapons and light enough for airplanes.
Erno said the system would probably be used on cargo planes such as C-130s. With a superconducting generator, the system will weigh about half of its current 20,000 pounds, which is the equivalent of about eight Toyota Corollas.
``They've got something going there,'' said Ivan Oelrich, director of strategic security programs for the Federation of American Scientists, a private group dedicated to ending the arms race and avoiding the use of nuclear weapons. ``What they're trying to do is doable.''
However, Oelrich said that to operate a diesel engine to power the generator will require a lot of fuel, adding weight and cost to the operation.
``If you're going to use it continuously, then the fuel will be the big weight factor,'' he said. ``To operate a thing like that requires a few tons of fuel per hour.''
Oelrich also questioned whether the Air Force had considered a less efficient, but less expensive superconducting system. He said the proposed system could be expensive to maintain and might require multiple backup systems. Coyle said it is not yet known how effective microwave weapons will be. For example, he said, it may take a lot of microwaves to disable just a few enemy weapons, and microwaves may not be effective in battling small numbers of insurgents in urban areas because the fighters hide and seek cover behind buildings.
On the Net:
Air Force Research Lab: http://www.afrl.af.mil/
Federation of American Scientists: http://www.fas.org/
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Two US F-15 fighters touch each other in mid-air; no injuries
TOKYO (AFP)
Oct 04, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041004094656.ctuhe897.html
Two US Air Force F-15 fighters touched each other in mid-air on Monday off the Japanese southwestern island of Okinawa, but both landed safely to the US Kadena Air Base on the island, the US military said.
No injuries were reported.
The two fighter planes from the 12th Fighter Squadron, home-stationed at Elmendorf, Alaska, "inadvertently made contact over water" at around 2:45 pm (0545 GMT), the US Air Force said in a statement.
The planes, engaged in a drill off the coast of Okinawa, were damaged in the accident, but both recovered safely to the base, "avoiding populated areas by safely using an over-water approach", it said.
A Kadena Air Base spokesman said there the crew was not injured, adding that investigation into the case is now under way.
Japan's public broadcasting network NHK showed footage of damaged vertical fins on one of the planes and damage to a wing and a horizontal fin on the other.
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Guarding the Empire
lewrockwell
by Laurence M. Vance
October 4, 2004
http://www.lewrockwell.com/vance/vance20.html
When faced with evidence that the U.S. Global Empire has troops and/or bases in the majority of countries on the planet, apologists for the warfare state and the "military-industrial complex" attempt to dismiss this U.S. global hegemony by claiming that it is the Marine guards at U.S. embassies overseas that account for our presence in so many countries.
It is traditionally believed that the United States has an embassy in every foreign country and that every foreign country has an embassy in the United States. Most people also think that every U.S. embassy has an attachment of Marine guards to provide security for embassy personnel. Both of these assumptions are wrong.
U.S. Embassies in Foreign Countries
Of the 191 "Independent States in the World" besides the United States, there are 29 countries in which we do not have an embassy:
Andorra
Antigua and Barbuda
Bhutan
Comoros
Cuba
Dominica
Grenada
Guinea-Bissau
Iran
Kiribati
Libya
Liechtenstein
North Korea
Maldives
Monaco
Nauru
Palau
Republic of the Congo
Saint Kitts and Nevis
Saint Lucia
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
San Marino
Sao Tome and Principe
Seychelles
Solomon Islands
Somalia
Tonga
Tuvalu
Vanuatu
The United States does not have an embassy in the countries of Bhutan, Cuba, Iran, and North Korea because we do not have diplomatic relations with them.
Many small countries in which the United States has no embassy are "covered" by another country. The U.S. ambassador to Spain is accredited to Andorra. The U.S. ambassador to Barbados is accredited to Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. The U.S. ambassador to Mauritius is accredited to Seychelles and Comoros. The U.S. ambassador to Senegal is accredited to Guinea-Bissau. The U.S. ambassador to the Marshall Islands is accredited to Kiribati. The U.S. ambassador to Switzerland is accredited to Liechtenstein. The U.S. ambassador to Sri Lanka is accredited to Maldives. The U.S. consul general in Marseille, France, is accredited to Monaco. The U.S. consul general in Florence, Italy, is accredited to San Marino. The U.S. ambassador to Papua New Guinea is accredited to the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. The U.S. ambassador to Kenya is accredited to Somalia. The U.S. ambassador to Gabon is accredited to Sao Tome and Principe. The U.S. ambassador to Fiji is accredited to Tonga, Tuvalu, and Nauru. The U.S. ambassador to the Philippines is accredited to Palau.
The status of U.S. embassies sometimes changes. In some countries, like Antigua and Barbuda, Guinea-Bissau, Iran, and the Solomon Islands, we used to have an embassy, but it is now closed. The United States has an ambassador to the Republic of the Congo, but the embassy is temporarily collocated with the U.S. embassy in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly called Zaire). The Afghan embassy closed in January 1989 but then reopened in December 2001. In the Central African Republic, the embassy is currently operating with a minimal staff. The United States closed its embassy in Libya in May 1980 and then resumed embassy activities in February 2004 through a U.S. "interest section" in the Belgian embassy. Since June 2004, the United States has maintained a "liaison office" in Libya, but has no immediate plans for an embassy. New embassies had to be built in Kenya and Tanzania after they were bombed in August 1998.
Foreign Embassies in the United States
Just because the United States does not have an embassy in a particular country does not necessarily mean that that country does not have an embassy in the United States. Of the 191 "Independent States in the World" besides the United States, there are 18 countries that do not maintain an embassy in the United States:
Andorra
Bhutan
Comoros
Cuba
Iran
Kiribati
North Korea
Libya
Maldives
Monaco
Nauru
San Marino
Sao Tome and Principe
Solomon Islands
Somalia
Tonga
Tuvalu
Vanuatu
As mentioned above, the United States does not have diplomatic relations with Bhutan, Cuba, Iran, and North Korea. All of these countries that do not maintain an embassy in Washington DC are members of the United Nations and have a representative of some kind at the UN in New York.
There are therefore 11 of these countries that have an embassy in the United States even though we do not have one in their country:
Antigua and Barbuda
Dominica
Grenada
Guinea-Bissau
Liechtenstein
Palau
Republic of the Congo
Saint Kitts and Nevis
Saint Lucia
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
Seychelles
There are no countries in which the United States has an embassy that do not likewise have one on U.S. soil.
Marine Security Guards
The question of Marine guards providing security at our embassies is not an easy one to answer. All of our embassies have security measures of some kind, but all are not guarded by U.S. Marines. For security reasons (isn't that always the excuse?), the government does not like to reveal which embassies have Marine guards and which embassies do not.
Marine security guards are members of the Marine Security Guard Battalion headquartered at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia. Quantico is also the location of the Marine Security Guard School, where guards are trained to react to terrorism, fires, riots, demonstrations, and evacuations.
The stationing of Marine Security Guards at U.S. embassies can be traced to The Foreign Service Act of 1946, which authorizes the Secretary of the Navy, "upon the request of the Secretary of State, to assign enlisted members of the Navy and the Marine Corps to serve as custodians under supervision of the Principal Officer at an Embassy, Legation or Consulate." The first Marine security guards went to Tangier and Bangkok on January 28, 1949. By the end of May 1949, 303 Marines had been assigned to foreign posts. By 1953, this number had increased to 6 officers and 676 enlisted men. By 1956, the number of enlisted men was up to 850.
There are currently over 1,200 Marines serving at over 130 posts abroad, in over 100 countries. Exact figures are not available, but in a report "Concerning the Role of Marine Security Guards in Securing U.S. Embassies and Government Personnel" given before the House Armed Services Committee Special Oversight Panel on Terrorism on October 10, 2002, by W. Ray Williams, the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Countermeasures and Information Security, the number of Marine security guards was given as 1,029 "at 131 US Missions abroad, soon to be 132 with the reactivation of a Marine Security Guard Detachment in Belgrade scheduled for January 2003." He further stated that 19 additional detachments of Marine guards were to be added in the next five years, with a long-term goal of 1,352 Marine guards at 159 detachments. According to the U.S. State Department, as of August 2003, the United States had "over 1,200 Marines for the internal security of 132 U.S. embassies, missions, and consulates worldwide."
Marine security guards are organized into 7 regional companies. Company A headquarters is located in Frankfurt, Germany, and is responsible for 20 detachments in Eastern Europe. Company B headquarters is located in Nicosia, Cyprus, and is responsible for 18 detachments in northern Africa and the Middle East. Company C headquarters is located in Bangkok, Thailand, and is responsible for 18 detachments located in the Far East, Asia, and Australia. Company D headquarters is located in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, and is responsible for 26 detachments in Central and South America and the Caribbean. Company E headquarters is also located (with Company A) in Frankfurt, Germany, and is responsible for 16 detachments in Western Europe and Ottawa, Canada. Company F headquarters is located in Nairobi, Kenya, and is responsible for 11 detachments in Sub-Saharan Africa. Company G headquarters is located in Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire, and is responsible for 12 detachments in West and Central Africa.
Marine security guard companies are commanded by a lieutenant colonel. At each diplomatic post, there is a minimum of one detachment commander and five Marine security guards. This allows them to maintain one security post 24/7. Locations with more than one security post have more than five guards. About 40 percent of detachments have the 1/5 ratio of commander to guards, another 40 percent are between 1/6 and 1/10, and the remaining 20 percent have something greater than 1/10. After graduating from security guard school, a Marine can usually expect two fifteen-month duty tours.
The U.S. Global Empire
What, then, do embassies and Marine guards have to do with the U.S. Global Empire of troops and bases that garrison the planet? As mentioned at the onset of this article, apologists for the U.S. Global Empire attempt to dismiss our troop presence in so many countries by claiming that including Marines guarding embassies inflates the total number of countries in which we have a troop presence. The truth, however, is that whether Marine guards are counted or not, the United States still has a global empire that now encompasses 136 countries.
The source for information on U.S. troops stationed abroad is the quarterly publication entitled "Active Duty Military Personnel Strengths by Regional Area and by Country." This is published by a Department of Defense organization called the Directorate for Information Operations and Reports (DIOR). The latest edition that will be referenced in this article is dated March 31, 2004. Previous editions can be seen here. According to the DIOR, the information contained in its report of personnel strengths is provided directly by each branch of the U.S. Armed Forces; that is, the DIOR merely reports the information it receives. The DIOR publication does not indicate why troops are in a particular country, it merely reports the fact that they are there.
The issue here is whether the Marine Corps troops listed as deployed on foreign soil includes Marine guards at embassies. If the figure given for Marines in each country does not include embassy guards, then the United States does in fact have troops in 136 countries. Case closed. There is no need for this article other than to point out that the United States has added one more country (Guyana) since the first time I addressed the subject of the U.S. Global Empire. But if the figure given for Marines in each country does include embassy guards, then what apologists for the U.S. Global Empire are saying is that the United States does not have troops in 136 countries because Marine guards should not be included. Therefore, so they say, the number of countries in which the U.S. has troops should be limited to those countries in which we actually have bases. Of course, that is a problem as well, but it is not under consideration here since I have previously addressed the subject of the bases of the U.S. Empire.
Although the case could be made that these guards are what Lew Rockwell calls "armed servants for the spies and bureaucrats," I am willing to agree with apologists for the U.S. Global Empire that Marine guards should not be counted when determining whether the United States has troops in other countries. This is also assuming that the "Personnel Strengths" document is accurate.
The issue cannot be settled by merely asking the Marine Corps how it determines the number of Marines it has in each country. No one I spoke with in the DOD or the Marine Corps ever heard of the "Active Duty Military Personnel Strengths by Regional Area and by Country" document. And no one in the DOD or the Marine Corps that I sent the document to ever responded. Furthermore, when you start asking questions about Marines guarding U.S. embassies, DOD and Marine Corps officials get nervous (and sometimes downright belligerent) and start asking you questions about why you want the information.
After studying the "Personnel Strengths" document, and after determining which countries have a U.S. embassy, it looks as though the figures given for Marines deployed to foreign countries do not include Marine guards at embassies.
Of the 55 countries in which the United States does not have any troops (not just Marines), the following have a U.S. embassy:
Angola
Armenia
Belarus
Benin
Brunei
Burkina Faso
Cape Verde
Central African Republic
Croatia
Equatorial Guinea
Gabon
Gambia
Holy See (The Vatican)
Lesotho
Marshall Islands
Mauritania
Mauritius
Micronesia
Moldova
Namibia
Panama
Papua New Guinea
Rwanda
Samoa
Slovak Republic
Sudan
Swaziland
Tajikistan
Uzbekistan
If the figures include Marine guards, then this would mean that no U.S. embassy in any of these 29 countries had Marine security guards.
Some countries in which the United States has Army, Navy, and/or Air Force troops have a U.S. embassy but no Marines are listed as being in the country:
Belize
Cambodia
Eritrea
Guyana
Lebanon
Madagascar
Malawi
Mongolia
New Zealand
Suriname
Ukraine
If the figures include Marine guards, then this would mean that no U.S. embassy in any of these 11 countries had Marine security guards.
Other countries in which the United States has troops including Marines have a U.S. embassy but do not have the minimum number of 6 Marines necessary for embassy security guard duty.
Albania
Botswana
Bulgaria
Cameroon
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Guinea
Iceland
Laos
Luxembourg
Malaysia
Mexico
Morocco
Romania
Serbia and Montenegro
Sri Lanka
Sweden
Tanzania
Zambia
Zimbabwe
If the figures include Marine guards, then this would mean that no U.S. embassy in any of these 19 countries had Marine security guards.
There are 13 countries in which the only troops listed are Marines:
Azerbaijan
Burundi
Fiji
Kyrgyzstan
Latvia
Mali
Malta
Mozambique
North Korea
Sierra Leone
Togo
Trinidad and Tobago
Turkmenistan
The countries of Azerbaijan, Burundi, Fiji, Sierra Leone, and Trinidad and Tobago do not have the minimum number of 6 Marines necessary for embassy security guard duty. If the figures include Marine guards, then this would mean that no U.S. embassy in these 5 countries had Marine security guards. We do not have an embassy in North Korea for Marines to guard. Likewise, there are 167 Marines in Cuba but the United States has no embassy there either.
But supposing that the figure given for Marines in each country does include Marine security guards at embassies, we still have a problem. Most of the countries with a U.S. embassy that have the minimum number of 6 Marines that are necessary to provide embassy security guard duty also have Army, Navy, and/or Air Force troops as well. So whether the figures include Marine guards is irrelevant. The following countries have a U.S. embassy, troops from the Army, Navy, and/or Air Force, and at least 6 Marines:
Afghanistan
Algeria
Argentina
Australia
Austria
Bahamas
Bahrain
Bangladesh
Barbados
Belgium
Bolivia
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Brazil
Burma
Canada
Chad
Chile
China
Colombia
Costa Rica
Cote d'lvoire
Cyprus
Czech Republic
Denmark
Djibouti
Dominican Republic
Ecuador
Egypt
El Salvador
Estonia
Ethiopia
Finland
France
Georgia
Germany
Greece
Guatemala
Guinea
Haiti
Honduras
Hungary
Iceland
India
Indonesia/East Timor
Iraq
Israel
Italy
Jamaica
Japan
Jordan
Kazakhstan
Kenya
Kuwait
Liberia
Lithuania
Macedonia
Nepal
Netherlands
Nicaragua
Niger
Nigeria
Norway
Oman
Pakistan
Paraguay
Peru
Philippines
Poland
Portugal
Qatar
Russia
Saudi Arabia
Senegal
Singapore
Slovenia
Spain
South Africa
South Korea
Switzerland
Syria
Thailand
Tunisia
Turkey
Uganda
United Arab Emirates
United Kingdom
Uruguay
Venezuela
Vietnam
Yemen
The "Personnel Strengths" document includes the country of East Timor under Indonesia so it is impossible to determine exactly how the 10 Marines in that region are divided between the countries.
Of the 13 countries in which the only troops listed are Marines, 6 were previously eliminated because either the United States did not have an embassy in the country or there was not the minimum number of 6 Marines necessary for embassy security guard duty. This leaves only the following seven countries as potential examples of countries with a U.S. embassy guarded by Marines that should not be included in the total of 136 countries in which the United States has troops:
Kyrgyzstan
Latvia
Mali
Malta
Mozambique
Togo
Turkmenistan
But a comparison of the current "Personnel Strengths" document with the previous quarterly editions shows that this is not the case. For example, Kyrgyzstan, which is now listed as having 8 Marines, had 14 Marines three months ago and 27 Marines six months ago. And Malta, which is now listed as having 4 Marines, had 7 Marines three months ago and 3 Marines six months ago. This could not possibly be just Marine embassy guards. The next quarterly report of "Active Duty Military Personnel Strengths by Regional Area and by Country" is sure to have similar changes.
So the fact remains: Marine guards or no Marine guards, the United States has troops in 136 countries.
But even that figure is too low, for the United States also has troops in Dependencies and Areas of Special Sovereignty. These are territories controlled by countries that may be located thousands of miles away from the mother country. For example, the United States has troops in Great Britain and areas controlled by Great Britain such as Gibraltar (on the southern coast of Spain), Diego Garcia (an atoll in the Indian Ocean), and St. Helena (an island in the South Atlantic Ocean). The United States has a 234,022-acre Air Force Base in Greenland, a region controlled by Denmark since 1721. Then there is Kosovo (an autonomous province of Serbia) and Hong Kong (a special administrative region of China).
Aside from the 50 states of the United States, there are also U.S. troops in areas we control like Guam (an island in the Pacific Ocean), Johnston Atoll (an atoll in the Pacific Ocean), Puerto Rico (an island commonwealth in the Caribbean Sea), and the U.S. Virgin Islands (islands between the Caribbean Sea and the North Atlantic Ocean, east of Puerto Rico).
According to the "Personnel Strengths" document, the United States also maintains 23 army personnel in the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. After World War II, these island groups in the Pacific Ocean came under the control of the United States. This "Trust Territory" now consists of three sovereign countries (Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and Palau) and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, a commonwealth of the United States.
If these additional areas that have U.S. troops are counted, then it could be said that the United States has troops in 150 countries or territories. It is now easier to list the countries in which the United States does not have troops instead of the other way around. So, although this list could change tomorrow, the following countries are not officially reported as having any U.S. troops:
Andorra
Angola
Armenia
Belarus
Benin
Bhutan
Brunei
Burkina Faso
Cape Verde
Central African Republic
Comoros
Croatia
Dominica
Equatorial Guinea
Gabon
Gambia
Grenada
Guinea-Bissau
Holy See (The Vatican)
Iran
Kiribati
Lesotho
Libya
Liechtenstein
Maldives
Mauritania
Mauritius
Moldova
Monaco
Namibia
Nauru
Panama
Papua New Guinea
Republic of the Congo
Rwanda
Saint Kitts and Nevis
Saint Lucia
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
Samoa
San Marino
Sao Tome and Principe
Seychelles
Slovak Republic
Solomon Islands
Somalia
Sudan
Swaziland
Tajikistan
Tonga
Tuvalu
Uzbekistan
Vanuatu
U.S. Foreign Policy
In his Farewell Address, George Washington warned against "permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world" and said that the United States should have "as little political connection as possible" with foreign nations. But he also warned us about "those overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty."
If any country ever had an overgrown military establishment, it is the United States and its military juggernaut. Before the recent Iraq war, the United States outspent the "evil" rogue nations of Iraq, Syria, Iran, North Korea, Libya, and Cuba on defense spending by a ratio of twenty-two to one. The actual amount that the United States spent on "defense" during fiscal year 2004 has been estimated by Robert Higgs to be about $695 billion. The United States is also the biggest arms exporter, accounting for about half of all global arms exports.
Most of this spending could be eliminated if the United States returned to the foreign policy ideas of the Founders. Current U.S. foreign policy can only be described as reckless, interventionist, militaristic, and belligerent. This can lead to severe consequences, as Chalmers Johnson has pointed out in his incredible book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, "The suicidal assassins of September 11, 2001, did not 'attack America,' as political leaders and news media in the United States have tried to maintain; they attacked American foreign policy."
The U.S. Empire is greatly overextended. Buried on page 362 of the 9/11 Commission Report is an admission that the entire planet is our manifest destiny:
Now threats can emerge quickly. An organization like al Qaeda, headquartered in a country on the other side of the earth, in a region so poor that electricity or telephones were scarce, could nonetheless scheme to wield weapons of unprecedented destructive power in the largest cities of the United States. In this sense, 9/11 has taught us that terrorism against American interests "over there" should be regarded just as we regard terrorism against America "over here." In this same sense, the American homeland is the planet.
The 9/11 attacks were just the beginning of a worldwide revolt against the current U.S. foreign policy of a global empire. Only a Jeffersonian foreign policy of peace, commerce, friendship, and no entangling alliances can arrest the menacing U.S. Empire.
October 4, 2004
Laurence M. Vance [send him mail] teaches Greek at Pensacola Bible Institute in Pensacola, FL. He is also an adjunct instructor in accounting and economics at Pensacola Junior College. Visit his website.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts / tribunals
Supreme Court won't rule on Saddam case
10/4/2004
Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/judicial/2004-10-04-saddam-case_x.htm
WASHINGTON (AP) - A lawyer's long-shot bid to challenge the U.S. detention of Saddam Hussein as unconstitutional failed Monday after the Supreme Court declined to grant special permission to hear the case.
Attorney Curtis F.J. Doebbler of Washington had asked the court to review the case as an indigent appeal without the usual $300 filing fee. The request required special court approval since the legal papers did not have Saddam's signature vouching that he had no assets.
The Supreme Court declined to grant the waiver of its court rules, effectively ending the case unless Doebbler gets the documentation from Saddam. The two have never talked.
Saddam has been held by U.S. officials at an undisclosed location in Iraq after his capture by American forces last December. Since then, U.S. authorities have refused to let any lawyers see Saddam.
In the filing, Doebbler said the detention of the 67-year-old violates multiple international laws and his constitutional Fifth Amendment right "to be free of arbitrary detention." He also said the war crimes tribunal planned in Iraq was neither independent nor impartial.
-------- drug war
New Initiative Planned to Get Marijuana Curbs Eased
By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 4, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A4513-2004Oct3.html
Convinced they have sound science on their side, advocates for the medical use of marijuana plan to launch a novel effort today to get the federal government to ease restrictions on the illicit drug.
Americans for Safe Access, a Berkeley, Calif., coalition of patients and doctors wanting easier access to pot for research and patient use, plans to file a petition with the Department of Health and Human Services charging the agency with spreading inaccurate information about the drug's medical value.
Unlike previous efforts to ease marijuana access, which relied on the courts and have dragged on for years, the petition invokes the Data Quality Act, a little-known but powerful law that gives people the right to challenge scientific information disseminated by federal agencies. The law demands that agencies respond to petitions within two months.
The act's use by marijuana advocates represents a peculiar political twist. The act was written by a tobacco industry lobbyist and slipped into a huge piece of legislation after the 2000 election without any congressional discussion or debate. It has been used almost exclusively by corporations challenging the validity of scientific information that they fear might lead to costly regulations.
Many consumer groups want the act repealed, saying its wording -- and the fact that it is, by law, coordinated by the White House -- makes it easy for companies to dismiss as "junk science" damning evidence that their products are harmful.
But in one of the first uses of the act on behalf of a liberal, consumer-based cause, the new petition seeks to dismiss government assertions that marijuana is dangerous and medically useless, saying they contradict findings of the Institute of Medicine and other authoritative sources.
"The government's position on medical marijuana is out of touch with public opinion, but most important it's out of touch with the science," said William Dolphin, a spokesman for the Berkeley group, which plans to announce its action today. "It's time the federal government gets out of the way and lets doctors make decisions for their patients."
The petition calls for the government to correct "scientifically flawed statements" about marijuana published in the Federal Register, a move that would allow -- though not compel -- the Drug Enforcement Administration to declare it a "Schedule II" drug. That would allow it to be prescribed for specified conditions and more easily obtained for research.
Schedule II drugs, including cocaine and morphine, are tightly controlled because of their high potential for abuse, but less stringently than Schedule I drugs (LSD, peyote and marijuana among them), which by definition have no accepted medical use.
The petition challenges the government contention that "there have been no studies that have scientifically assessed the efficacy of marijuana for any medical condition." In fact, the group notes, a 1999 Institute of Medicine report concluded that studies have found marijuana helpful "for pain relief, control of nausea and vomiting, and appetite stimulation."
The institute called for clinical studies to identify pot's beneficial ingredients and to create drug delivery systems safer than smoking.
David Murray, a policy analyst with the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, agreed it is "beyond dispute" that marijuana's efficacy has been assessed and potential benefits identified. But he dismissed as "lame" another of the Berkeley group's assertions: that pot has "currently accepted" medical uses in the United States -- a key requirement for reassignment to Schedule II.
The Safe Access group cited a survey published in the New England Journal of Medicine finding that more than 40 percent of cancer doctors had recommended the drug to patients to relieve nausea from chemotherapy. The group also noted pot's emerging popularity among people with multiple sclerosis after studies suggesting the drug can reduce muscle spasticity.
But Murray said it is up to the Food and Drug Administration to decide when a drug has "accepted" medical use. To leave that up to doctors and patients, he said, is like "leaving it to fans in the Redskins' end zone to call a touchdown, instead of the referees."
Murray emphasized the negative health effects of marijuana smoke (studies show a possible increase in oral cancers) and concerns about effects on the brain.
But Safe Access's executive director, Steph Sherer, and the group's San Francisco attorney, Joe Elford, pointed to a DEA administrative law judge's conclusion that pot was far safer than aspirin.
"A smoker would have to consume nearly 1,500 pounds of marijuana within about fifteen minutes to induce a lethal response," Judge Francis L. Young determined in 1988. Marijuana, he concluded, "has a currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States . . . and it may lawfully be transferred from Schedule I to Schedule II."
The ruling was upheld by a federal appeals court but was overturned on procedural grounds.
Schedule I drugs are eligible for study under grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and pot from a government farm in Mississippi is occasionally provided for experiments. But advocates say the hurdles to winning a grant are extreme.
"I can't understand why it isn't rescheduled," said John A. Benson Jr., the University of Nebraska Medical Center professor who led the institute study. Research on marijuana could probably lead to an array of useful new medicines, he said in a telephone interview. "But politically, socially, and in general, there's just a reluctance to take this on."
-------- immigration / refugees
Italy Sending Immigrants Back to Africa
October 4, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Italy-Illegal-Immigrants.html?pagewanted=all
ROME (AP) -- Italy planned to send back more illegal immigrants Monday, after hundreds of people arrived over the weekend on a tiny island off the coast of Sicily, news reports said.
Reports said that about 360 would be sent back to Libya and Tunisia later in the day.
For the first time in days, there were no new arrivals on Monday, except for a boat carrying four people, the ANSA and Apcom news agencies reported.
On Sunday, more than 1,200 migrants were held in the detention center in Lampedusa, a tiny island closer to Africa than to Italy. The detention center is meant to hold less than 200 people.
A few hundred were airlifted back to Libya, which is a jumping off point for most of the illegal immigrants reaching Italian shores every year. The runs have increased recently, helped by calm seas and mild early-autumn night temperatures.
Authorities have said they expected a rush of new arrivals ahead of a joint crackdown by Italy and Libya. Italy has pledged to provide Libya with training and equipment to spot and stop the boats from heading out to sea.
Relatively few of the thousands who try to slip into Italy by boat each year intend to stay in the country. Most hope to travel farther north, to countries such as Germany, with proportionally larger immigrant populations.
-------- prisons / prisoners
Putting A Price on Innocents' Lost Years
Exonerations Up, Md. Lacks Formula For Restitution
By Christian Davenport
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 4, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A4412-2004Oct3?language=printer
The scar across Michael Austin's right cheek, from an inmate's makeshift knife, is the most visible reminder of his 27 years in a Maryland maximum-security prison for a murder that DNA evidence now says he didn't commit.
The other scars are the memories. How inmates preyed on new arrivals, a practice he once likened to "watching lions chasing one of those gazelles." How he was unable to attend his mother's funeral after her death from cancer. How his freedom so overwhelmed him at first that a routine errand -- going to buy a tube of toothpaste -- caused him to weep.
When Austin asks himself what it would take to make him whole, he has no answer.
"If they gave me a billion dollars, a trillion, none of that would buy back one minute -- one second -- of the life I lost," he said.
As DNA testing frees increasing numbers of innocents from prison, Maryland and other states across the country are facing a politically sensitive and morally complex calculus: What is the value of a life unjustly spent behind bars?
Although Austin, freed in 2001, says no amount of money can restore his 27 years, he plans to ask the state for compensation nonetheless. Maryland has a law allowing for compensation of the exonerated -- it has awarded a total of nearly $1.5 million to four wrongfully convicted people -- but no specific guidelines for what constitutes a fair settlement. Elsewhere, jurisdictions that have compensation laws, including 15 states and the federal government, vary widely in their definitions of an appropriate payout.
Earlier this year, Virginia passed a law that compensates wrongly convicted people 90 percent of the state's annual per capita income -- or about $30,000 -- for up to 20 years. Alabama pays a minimum of $50,000 for every year of incarceration. New Jersey provides up to $20,000 per year, or twice the person's pre-prison salary, whichever is greater. Like Maryland, the District has a law that allows compensation but offers no specific guidelines.
The wrongfully convicted can sue states without compensation laws, but such cases are usually time-consuming and difficult to win, legal experts said. As for suing judges, juries, prosecutors and police who were involved in a wrongful conviction, a plaintiff would have to prove malicious misconduct, such as destroying or planting evidence or taking a bribe in return for a guilty verdict, said Michael Milleman, a law professor at the University of Maryland.
The other option is to get the state's legislature to pass an individual compensation bill. "But getting a private bill is a political process, and someone who deserves it might not get it," said Adele Bernhard, a law professor at Pace University who has studied compensation laws. "It depends on what senator you know."
When Virginia lawmakers took up the case of Marvin Lamont Anderson last year, they weren't sure what the state should pay.
He spent 15 years in prison before DNA evidence exonerated him of rape and sodomy charges in 2001. At the time of his arrest, he was 18 years old, with dreams of becoming a firefighter. He was sentenced to 210 years.
Other inmates "wanted to mess me up real bad," he said. "They'd threaten me, try to get me to initiate a fight, to start something to keep me from getting out. . . . You're always looking over your shoulder."
After hearing his story, some legislators thought that he should get as much as $1.5 million. Others said he merited a fraction of that. Finally, they arrived at a lump sum of $200,000 and about $2,000 a month for the rest of his life.
After Anderson's case, the Virginia legislature was accused of playing racial politics with the payouts. Anderson, who is black, and his family said that while the legislature dragged its feet on his case, it approved with little discussion $750,000 for a white man who had spent 11 years in prison -- four years less than Anderson.
This year, the state passed a law designed to bring uniformity to the payouts, basing them on the state's annual per capita income. It will also provide up to $10,000 in community college tuition reimbursement.
Del. Robert Tata (R-Virginia Beach) said the legislature wanted to remove politics and emotion from the process. "Everybody will be treated the same," he said. "We don't want to be making this up as we go along."
But even that formula has critics. Bernhard said states that use median income as a standard are not only "chintzy" but insulting.
"Essentially, they're saying, 'We don't think you would have made more than the median income,' " she said.
So, then, what is fair compensation?
"What's a prison rape worth?" asked Ronald Kuby, a New York lawyer who has worked on compensation cases. "What's missing your child's first day of school worth? Not being with your parents as they lay dying? Having your parents go to their graves with you branded a convict?"
As complicated and imperfect as it is, deciding what a person's life is worth is done repeatedly. Juries routinely award damages in wrongful-death cases. They even calculate the value of limbs lost in accidents. After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the federal government set up a fund to pay the victims' families. Using a formula that accounted for a person's age and earning potential, it paid a median amount of almost $1.7 million to nearly 3,000 families.
Mindful of how arbitrary payouts can be in New York, where judges oversee the cases, Kuby ordered a detailed economic analysis of the earning potential of two clients, Charles Shepard and Anthony Faison, who had spent 14 years in prison for a murder they did not commit.
The analysis included their employment history and skills. For Shepard, a construction worker, it noted that he was adept at "sawing lumber . . . mounting pipe hangers and cutting and insulating material." It even included his high school grades. The report concluded that had he not been convicted, he would have been able to earn an annual salary of $49,170.
It's calculating the intangibles -- the pain and suffering, the lost time -- that can be much more difficult to put a dollar figure on, Kuby said.
His clients had "serious problems and serious trauma that grew out of their incarceration," according to psychiatric evaluations Kuby commissioned. Shepard's report noted that he was arrested just before his daughter was born. After he was freed, "she doesn't really think of him as her father, and she only calls him when she needs something," it said.
Shepard was also attacked by three prisoners, who stabbed him with ice picks, the report said. It noted that he wakes up in the middle of the night "all sweaty" from nightmares about prison, including one about the time he saw an inmate get stabbed in the heart.
In 2002, Shepard and Faison won a $3.3 million settlement, the largest payment under the state's wrongful-conviction statute.
It's not clear how much Austin will get. His attorney, Larry Nathans, would not discuss what his client would seek. In Maryland, compensation requests go to the Board of Public Works, which is made up of the governor, the comptroller and the treasurer. In the past, it has awarded the wrongfully convicted about $90 for every day spent in prison. If it uses that formula when considering Austin, he could get close to $1 million.
Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) pardoned Austin last year and said then that the board would look into compensating him. But he acknowledged that it could be a difficult task.
"What's a year worth? What's six months worth?" the governor asked. "It's very hard to quantify that."
Staff researcher Bobbye Pratt contributed to this report.
-------- terrorism
U.S. may be too quick to blame al-Zarqawi
Arab intelligence reports say U.S. too quick to solely blame militant for carrying out violence in Iraq
Newsday
By Mohamad Bazzi
October 4, 2004
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/ny-wozarq1004,0,3708228.story?coll=ny-world-big-pix
BEIRUT -- Whenever a car bombing, beheading or other spectacular act of violence takes place in Iraq these days, U.S. officials are quick to blame Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. If he hasn't already taken credit himself.
But according to an Arab intelligence assessment, al-Zarqawi is not capable of carrying out the level of attacks in Iraq that he has claimed and that American officials have blamed on him.
Al-Zarqawi's own militant group has fewer than 100 members inside Iraq, although al-Zarqawi has close ties to a Kurdish Islamist group with at least several hundred members, according to two reports produced by an Arab intelligence service. The Kurdish group, Ansar al-Islam, has provided dozens of recruits for suicide bombings since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the reports say. And while U.S. forces relentlessly pound the insurgent strongholds of Fallujah and Samarra, claiming to hit al-Zarqawi safe houses, the elusive militant could be hiding in the northern city of Mosul.
The Jordanian-born al-Zarqawi, 37, has used the media effectively to inflate his role in the Iraqi insurgency. In recent months, he and his supporters have claimed credit for scores of suicide bombings, attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces, kidnappings and beheadings of foreigners, and coordinated uprisings in several Iraqi cities.
The reports say al-Zarqawi is likely responsible for the beheadings of American contractor Nicholas Berg and several other foreigners. But the sheer level of other attacks that he has claimed is not consistent with the number of supporters he has inside Iraq and his ability to move around the country, according to the analysis. The reports say former members of Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime are responsible -- either directly or by paying others to carry them out -- for many of the attacks, especially sophisticated roadside bombings and ambushes of U.S. troops.
Terror links in doubt
The assessment contradicts many of the Bush administration's statements about al-Zarqawi and his terrorist network. Before invading Iraq in March 2003, the administration argued that al-Zarqawi was a top lieutenant of Osama bin Laden. U.S. officials said al-Zarqawi had taken refuge in Baghdad and was a major link between Hussein's regime and bin Laden's al-Qaida network. But that assertion has never been proven, and there are doubts about al-Zarqawi's relationships with both bin Laden and Hussein's government, as some Bush administration officials have acknowledged in recent months. In July, U.S. officials raised the reward for information leading to al-Zarqawi's arrest or killing to $25 million -- equal to the bounty on bin Laden's head.
A senior Arab intelligence official shared the contents of the report with Newsday last week on the condition neither he nor his country would be identified. The intelligence service has a track record of infiltrating militant groups, and it kept a close watch on Hussein's regime for decades.
U.S. officials have erred in focusing so much attention since February on al-Zarqawi as the main force behind the insurgency, according to the reports, which were produced for the Arab country's political leadership. The analysis has not been shared with U.S. officials.
"The Americans are inclined to focus on one individual as the mastermind of all the troubles," says one of the reports. "In reality, the situation in Iraq is more complex. There are many small groups that sometimes work together, but at other times they have different agendas ... There are former Saddam loyalists, home-grown Islamic extremists, foreign extremists and Kurdish elements."
Among the other findings in the intelligence reports:
Mosul has become a haven for Islamic militants, and especially for members of Ansar al-Islam. The city is a center for training and dispatching suicide bombers to other parts of Iraq, and a coordination hub between ex-regime loyalists and Islamic militants. Ansar moved many of its operations to Mosul after it was driven out of a remote, mountainous part of northern Iraq by U.S. bombardment during the war. The Baathist regime had strong support in Mosul, and Hussein's two sons were killed in a gun battle with U.S. troops after taking refuge there.
Al-Zarqawi has spent considerable time in Mosul, and he might be hiding there rather than in Fallujah, where U.S. forces have launched numerous air strikes since June on what they describe as al-Zarqawi safe houses. Al-Zarqawi is drawn to Mosul because of the concentration of Ansar members there, and because the city of 2 million people is easier to hide in than Fallujah.
Al-Zarqawi's ties to al-Qaida are unclear, and he is more likely an independent operator than a lieutenant of bin Laden's. (That has been the view of Arab and European intelligence officials for several years.) Al-Zarqawi is also likely to see his own group, Tawhid and Jihad (Arabic for "Unity and Holy War"), as being in competition for recruits with al-Qaida.
Foreign militants need strong Iraqi allies to operate inside the tribal, tightly knit communities of Anbar province, which includes the cities of Fallujah and Ramadi. There have been growing tensions in recent months between some foreign militants and their Iraqi hosts. "The U.S. military has not been able to exploit those tensions because it does not understand the tribal relationships in Iraqi society," says one of the reports.
Al-Zarqawi and his supporters have learned to use the media better than many other segments of the Iraqi insurgency. By sending out a steady stream of audio and videotapes claiming responsibility for suicide bombings, mortar attacks and beheadings, al-Zarqawi appears to have a larger network of supporters than he really does. But one report notes, "There are indications that the public attention is helping al-Zarqawi win more recruits."
Still 'dangerous terrorist' The Arab intelligence official said the reports are not intended to minimize the danger posed by al-Zarqawi and other foreign militants operating in Iraq. "This man, al-Zarqawi, is a very brutal and dangerous terrorist," the official said. "But we do not believe that he is the architect of everything in Iraq. There are many other players on the ground."
The assessments are based on informants who send reports back from Iraq, the intelligence service's own monitoring of developments inside the country and interrogations of so-called "Arab volunteers" who had entered Iraq ahead of the U.S. invasion to fight alongside Hussein's regime. After returning to their homelands, many of those volunteers are being watched by domestic security services because of their Islamist sympathies.
The reports underscore the U.S. need for Arab intelligence cooperation. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the security services of several U.S. allies in the Arab world -- most notably Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia -- have increased their cooperation with U.S. agencies. Even non-American allies, especially Syria, stepped up their information-sharing with the United States, partly for fear of being targeted in the Bush administration's "war on terrorism."
Al-Zarqawi first came to prominence in a February 2003 speech by Secretary of State Colin Powell to the United Nations Security Council. Powell claimed that al-Zarqawi had arrived in Baghdad in May 2002 to have a leg amputated and establish a base of operations there, and described him as "an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida lieutenants."
Since Powell's speech, some U.S. officials backed away from the story of al-Zarqawi's Baghdad hospital visit, saying the militant still has both his legs.
By mid-June of this year, the administration also shifted its view of al-Zarqawi's relationship to al-Qaida. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld conceded that al-Zarqawi might be more of a rival than an associate of bin Laden's. Al-Zarqawi "may very well not have sworn allegiance to [bin Laden]," Rumsfeld said at a Pentagon briefing. "Maybe he disagrees with him on something, maybe because he wants to be 'The Man' himself and maybe for a reason that's not known to me."
Rumsfeld added, "someone could legitimately say he's not al-Qaida."
Despite Rumsfeld's comments, the administration has not backed away from describing al-Zarqawi as a main force behind the Iraqi insurgency. To some analysts, the U.S. focus on al-Zarqawi is part of a political strategy to portray the insurgency as something that is not homegrown and instead driven by Islamic militants and foreigners.
"A year ago, hardly anyone had heard of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Today, he is a superman who is responsible for bringing chaos to Iraq," said Diaa Rashwan, a leading expert on Islamic militants at the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. "The Americans overestimated him for political reasons. It is easier to put all the blame on one man than to deal with an insurgency that includes Iraqi nationalists, former Baathists and Islamists."
Rashwan noted that al-Zarqawi does not have a track record of religious declarations and other ideological statements that would help him attract followers and rise within the world of militant Islam. By contrast, bin Laden has been issuing fatwas, or religious decrees, attacking the United States and Arab regimes since the mid-1990s.
"People who gravitate toward militant movements are attracted to the ideology, and al-Zarqawi has very little to offer," Rashwan said. "He does not have a jihadist manifesto."
----
Alleged Leader of ETA Is Captured in France
By Pamela Rolfe
The Washington Post
Monday, October 4, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A4630-2004Oct3.html
MADRID, Oct. 3 -- The alleged political leader of the armed Basque separatist group ETA and his partner were arrested Sunday along with 19 other accused ETA members during a police sweep in southwestern France, Spanish authorities said.
Calling the raid "historic," Spain's interior minister, Jose Antonio Alonso, said it had netted Mikel Albizu Iriarte, 43, who he said has run ETA since 1993.
Mikel Albizu Iriarte was arrested with 20 other suspects. (File Photo)
Albizu's partner, Soledad Iparraguirre, 43, is accused of involvement in at least 14 murders and is considered by authorities to be the highest-ranking woman in ETA. She is also suspected of collecting, managing and distributing money the group raises through kidnappings and extortion of businesses.
The couple, who appear on wanted posters in government buildings throughout Spain, were caught with their son in a house they used sporadically in the French town of Salies de Bearn, authorities said.
The 19 other people arrested were described by authorities as part of the logistical support network for the outlawed group.
"The blow struck against the terrorist organization today is an important step forward on the road to peace and shows that the end and the defeat of ETA is possible," Spain's ruling Socialist Party said in a statement.
The Interior Ministry said Albizu organized and carried out the jailbreak in the 1980s of two ETA members who had been sentenced to 26 years in prison. In 1985, he fled to Paris.
Albizu, also known as Mikel Antza, allegedly took control of the group after ETA's senior leadership was arrested in a 1992 police raid.
Sunday's operation, four years in the planning, was a joint effort between French anti-terrorist police and the Spanish Civil Guard and is still underway. Police have so far seized about 900 pounds of explosives, dozens of guns including 20 submachine guns, grenade launchers, munitions, detonators and computers.
ETA members have long used southwestern France as a haven. But that refuge has increasingly come under pressure because of closer cooperation between the French and Spanish anti-terrorism units.
The group, which seeks to create an independent homeland in the Basque region of Spain and France, has been relatively quiet in the last year, staging few attacks. The lull has led authorities to wonder if ETA might finally be nearing its end.
But last week ETA released a video vowing to press on with attacks until it had met its goal of an independent state. "The conflict will end when the rights of our people are recognized and respected," the group said in the video, which featured ETA members wearing black ski masks.
Alonso, the Spanish interior minister, said that although the operation was a success, it did not completely debilitate ETA, whose initials in Basque stand for Basque Homeland and Freedom. "Despite this grave blow, we continue on maximum alert and won't let our guard down one single minute," Alonso said at a news conference.
ETA is classified as a terrorist group by the Spanish government, the European Union and the U.S. State Department.
--------
France Joins Spain to Catch Pair Suspected of Terrorism
October 4, 2004
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/04/international/europe/04eta.html?pagewanted=all
PARIS, Oct. 3 - In a major joint operation by France and Spain, two of Spain's most wanted terrorist suspects were captured Sunday in southwestern France, French and Spanish officials said.
About 140 French and Spanish antiterrorist police officers were involved in raids on both sides of the border against the militant Basque separatist group ETA.
At least 16 other people suspected of being ETA members were also arrested. The police uncovered several stockpiles of weapons containing rocket launchers, assault rifles, machine guns and explosives, and seized cash and documents.
The biggest coup was the arrest of Mikel Albizu Iriarte, 43, considered the political leader of ETA, and Soledád Iparraguirre, 43, near Pau, France. The couple, who were carrying false papers and were with their son, had eluded the police for more than a decade.
"It is an extremely important operation, one that we can certainly describe as historic," the Spanish interior minister, José Antonio Alonso, said at a news conference in Madrid. He said that at least seven homes had been searched and that the police had seized documents, weapons and explosives.
But he cautioned that "despite this grave blow" to ETA, "we continue on maximum alert."
In Paris, the French justice minister, Dominique Perben, called the operation "a great battle won in the war against terrorism."
Mr. Albizu, who also uses the name Mikel Antza, is thought to have become a top ETA leader 12 years ago after the police crippled the organization by arresting most of its senior members.
Last January, Mr. Albizu was reportedly one of the ETA leaders to have met secretly with Josep-Lluís Carod-Rovira, a leftist who was the Catalan regional government's No. 2 official. The talks centered on brokering a cease-fire, but only in the region of Catalonia. Mr. Carod was forced to resign his government position - but not his post as party leader - after the fact of the meeting was disclosed.
Mr. Albizu's partner, Ms. Iparraguirre, who uses the alias Amboto, is the highest-ranking woman in ETA, the Spanish Interior Ministry said in a statement. A member of a family of ETA fighters, she is suspected of involvement in dozens of attacks from 1984 to 1992 that killed 15 people.
ETA, which has been branded a terrorist organization by the European Union and the United States, has carried out bombings and assassinations in Spain since the 1960's in a campaign for an independent Basque state. The armed group has claimed or been blamed for more than 800 deaths.
ETA has been severely weakened in recent years by hundreds of arrests by the French and Spanish police and has not carried out a fatal attack in more than a year. However, it resumed its practice of planting small bombs last August, attacking tourist resorts, and then blowing up electricity pylons on lines connecting France and Spain.
-------- POLITICS
-------- budget
Debt Ceiling Could Be Hit This Month
October 4, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Debt-Limit.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The government should hit the national debt's $7.4 trillion ceiling this month, and the Bush administration told Congress again Monday it should raise the limit. That would be a politically sticky move just weeks from the Nov. 2 elections.
Treasury Department spokesman Rob Nichols said the government is on track to reach the limit in early October. He could not provide a more specific date but said the forecast is made ``on a day-to-day basis,'' and Congress would be notified.
The government can juggle accounts to stay under the limit through mid-November to avoid default, as it has in the past. But the Bush administration is urging Congress, which expects to adjourn Friday, to go ahead and raise the ceiling.
``We've been calling on Congress to act now for months, and we think it's important that they do so,'' Nichols said.
The government's debt was $7.364 trillion as of Friday, $18.3 billion from the ceiling. Congress last boosted the limit in May 2003.
Democrats this election year have cited the rising debt as evidence that President Bush is mishandling the economy. The administration counters that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and efforts to strengthen security at home have forced the increased government borrowing.
House Democrats sent a letter to Treasury Secretary John Snow on Monday requesting a meeting to discuss the limit, when it would be reached and what options the department would pursue. It was the second such letter and noted that he failed to respond to the first.
``Our debt has been growing markedly faster than our economy's ability to repay it, thanks in large measure to tax cuts proposed and enacted into law by the administration and congressional Republicans,'' said the letter, signed by Democratic Reps. John Spratt of South Carolina, Charles Rangel of New York and Charles Stenholm of Texas.
Nichols said Snow intends to respond to both letters soon. Should Congress fail to act before the limit is reached, Snow ``would take the appropriate steps to protect the full faith and credit of our government,'' he said.
-------- corruption
U.S. Is Ordered to Tell Indians Before Selling Trust Property
October 4, 2004
By JOHN FILES
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/04/politics/04trusts.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Oct. 2 - A federal judge has ruled that the government must notify American Indian landowners before it seeks to sell property from a trust it manages that collects revenue from oil, timber and grazing leases and other activities on Indian land.
It is the first time such a practice has been required, the Indians say, in the nearly 120 years that the Department of the Interior has administered the fund, called the Indian Trust.
The ruling on Wednesday is part of a complex class-action lawsuit filed in 1996 by Elouise Cobell, a banker and Blackfoot from Montana, on behalf of nearly a half-million Indians who contend that during more than a century the government has cheated them of about $137 billion in royalties from the leases. The government pays beneficiaries a total of more than $500 million each year from the fund, which exceeds $3 billion dollars.
The judge handling the case, Royce C. Lamberth of Federal District Court here, said that the Indian landowners, who may be "fully unaware that their land is up for sale in the first place," had a right to a "full and accurate accounting, appraisal and other relevant information" about their plots, which in some cases are small interests in land that has been passed down from generation to generation.
The Interior Department said that it had routinely notified landowners of sales for decades. Indeed, the department said that many of the transactions related to the property are prompted by the Indian landowners themselves.
A spokesman for the department, Dan DuBray, said Friday that officials had reviewed the ruling and would respond in 10 days.
Lawyers for the Indians said the ruling was an important step toward compelling the government to provide transparency in its work with the trust, particularly in assessing a fair market value to land that they say has dwindled to less than 11 million acres from more than 40 million acres around the turn of the 20th century.
"For more than a century, the U.S. government has sold our land out from under us - without consent, without appraisal, and without informing us of our rights," said Ms. Cobell, the lead plaintiff in the case.
The conflict goes back to the Dawes Act of 1887, which initiated the allotment of land to individual Indians as their reservations were being broken up for sale. While the Indians owned the allotments and sometimes lived on them, the government retained title and generated income for the Indians from use of the land.
The proceeds were put into a trust to be paid out to Indian holders of individual trust accounts, whose number grew as the allotments were passed down to family members. The Interior Department was charged with managing the fund.
In 1994, Congress passed the American Indian Trust Reform Management Act, which required the department to account for all the money in the fund.
The litigation has revealed that the department lost track of beneficiaries and that many of the account records were in a state of disrepair or lost. Judge Lamberth has consistently sided with the Indians, calling the Interior Department's handling of the fund "the gold standard for mismanagement by the federal government for more than a century.''
In a letter sent to Congress in April, Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton wrote that trust reform was one of the department's highest priorities. "We are making real and substantial progress on both reforming our trust management practices and on moving forward with an appropriate accounting,'' Ms. Norton wrote. She said the department had more than $109 million in its 2005 budget for such activities.
Some members of Congress have said that the cost of an accounting of the trust could be as much as $3 billion.
-------- propaganda wars
INTELLIGENCE EVIDENCE
Rice Defends Going to War Despite Dispute About Iraqi Weapons
October 4, 2004
New York Times
By JEFF GERTH
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/04/politics/04tubes.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 - Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, on Sunday defended the decision to go to war against Saddam Hussein even while intelligence analysts disputed an important piece of evidence behind a rationale for the war, namely, that Iraq was rebuilding its nuclear weapons program.
"Whatever the case there," Ms. Rice said on the ABC News program "This Week" with George Stephanopoulos, referring to a debate in 2002 over whether Iraq's efforts to acquire aluminum tubes were related to nuclear weapons, "I stand by the decision to go to war against Saddam Hussein and remove this threat to American security."
Ms. Rice also said she was aware of the dispute in September 2002, when she said in a television interview that the tubes "are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs." But, she said Sunday, it was not until after that television appearance that she learned "the nature of the dispute."
The Central Intelligence Agency said it believed that the tubes were intended for centrifuges used to enrich uranium, an important step in building a bomb. But the Energy Department said it believed that the tubes were more likely intended for rockets.
The difference is important: it would be more troubling if Iraq was rebuilding its nuclear weapons program than if it was acquiring small artillery rockets. The "principal part" of the C.I.A.'s conclusion in 2002 that Iraq was rebuilding its nuclear weapons program was its efforts to acquire tubes, a report by the Senate Intelligence Committee found this summer.
Ms. Rice was reacting to an article in The New York Times on Sunday about the debate. The article said she had been aware before her remarks in 2002 that government experts differed over whether the tubes were intended for nuclear weapons but that she knew that the nuclear theory was strongly backed at the highest level of the intelligence agencies. The article also said experts on her staff, though not Ms. Rice herself, had been told months earlier that Energy Department scientists believed that the tubes were more likely for rockets.
On Sunday, Ms. Rice said of the tubes, "People are still debating this." The Iraq Survey Group, which searched for illicit weapons after Mr. Hussein's fall, told the C.I.A. and Congress that it had found no indications that the tubes were for nuclear weapon development or that Iraq had resumed its weapons program. C.I.A. officials say they still view the tubes as an open question.
By October 2002, intelligence agencies as a whole, including the Energy Department though not the State Department's intelligence arm, agreed that Iraq was resuming its nuclear arms program. That consensus was contained in a then-classified National Intelligence Estimate.
Ms. Rice said the 2002 estimate of nuclear renewal was an assessment "that cannot be ignored." So, she said "a policy maker cannot afford to be wrong on the short side, underestimating the ability of a tyrant like Saddam Hussein."
Members of Ms. Rice's staff told intelligence officials in January 2003 that the case that Iraq had revived its nuclear ambitions "was weak," according to the Senate Intelligence Committee report.
Ms. Rice also defended her 2002 remarks and the decision to go to war on NBC's "Weekend Today" and CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer." In both interviews, Ms. Rice said the "intelligence community as a whole" had backed the theory that the tubes were nuclear related.
On CNN, she said George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence at the time, and "the intelligence community as a whole believed that these were for centrifuge parts."
The October 2002 intelligence estimate said "most agencies" had made an assessment that the attempt to acquire tubes was "compelling evidence" of a nuclear weapons effort. But the Senate Intelligence Committee reported that there was an even split during the Sept. 25, 2002, meeting meant to come up with a coordinated estimate. The Senate report said the Defense Intelligence Agency sided with the C.I.A., while the State Department's intelligence arm backed the Energy Department's judgment that the tubes were probably not nuclear related.
The Senate panel, in a unanimous report and after a one-year inquiry, said the State and Energy departments were correct in 2002.
Ms. Rice's spokesman, Sean McCormack, said her remarks on CNN and ABC resulted from conversations with Mr. Tenet, who is now retired. He said in a statement that he shared "alternate views" about the tubes with the administration after he learned of the debate in September 2002.
----
Kerry's nuclear nonsense
By Frank J. Gaffney Jr.
October 4, 2004
Townhall
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/frankjgaffneyjr/fg20041004.shtml
Global test... October 05, 2004 Washington Times http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20041004-103824-4523r.htm
In last Thursday's debate, the two presidential candidates were asked what represented "the single most serious threat to the national security of the United States." To most observers, the Democratic and Republican contenders seemed to agree: the spread of nuclear weapons.
The seeming agreement on that point masked, however, some fundamental differences between Sen. John Kerry and President Bush on the question of nuclear weapons and their proliferation - particularly into the hands of terrorists. If this danger is indeed our most serious threat, the American people had better understand the full significance of the choice for dealing with it facing them a month from now.
The difference may be summarized as that between Mr. Kerry's orthodoxy of the Left - with its reliance on arms control treaties and the "carrots" of agreements with would-be proliferators, affording them access to nuclear information and materials - and Mr. Bush's post-September 11 realism. Examples of the contrasting policies that flow from these divergent attitudes include:
• Unilateral disarmament? A cornerstone of the Left's nuclear nonproliferation strategy is to control America's arsenal. Its ascendancy during the last 12 years has meant the U.S. has not introduced a new nuclear design for the better part of 20 years; has not validated its existing designs in the only certain way, namely an underground nuclear test, in more than a decade; and has been hobbled on research and development to provide the means, if needed, to attack targets of growing concern - notably, facilities deep under ground for producing and storing weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).
Mr. Kerry said in the debate "It doesn't make sense" for "the United States to pursue a new set of nuclear weapons" including "bunker-busting" ones. He declared "I am going to shut that program down" to "make it clear to the world we're serious about containing nuclear proliferation."
At best, this is a prescription for unilateral U.S. restraint. It is more accurate to say, however, that - given the corrosive effect of obsolescence on the safety, reliability and credibility of our aging nuclear arsenal - it amounts to unilateral disarmament. As such, it is of a piece with the Kerry voting record in the Senate. For 20 years, the senator has embraced a succession of harebrained initiatives including the "nuclear freeze," cuts in American nuclear programs and their delivery systems and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
Fortunately, his positions have been consistently rejected by a majority of his colleagues. (Not surprisingly, Mr. Kerry rated a "zero" in the Center for Security Policy's just-released National Security Scorecard.)
By contrast, the Bush administration has formulated a Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) that envisions maintaining the effectiveness of the U.S. nuclear stockpile by retiring older weapons and modernization, restoring the critically important nuclear industrial base and introducing anti-missile and other defenses against nuclear attack.
Ronald Reagan called this approach "Peace through Strength." It may not be a sufficient condition to today's nuclear threats, but it is certainly a necessary one.
• Rewarding proliferators? Mr. Kerry insists he wants to negotiate directly with North Korea in hopes of persuading it to give up its nuclear arms. This even though his advisers and others in the Clinton administration conclusively established the futility of this exercise in previous bilateral deals struck with Pyongyang. Such deals left the latter with the capability to build the handful of nuclear weapons it now is believed to have deployed - and perhaps others it says are on offer to those with the cash to buy them.
Even worse, Mr. Kerry and his running mate are willing to reprise this dismal experience with another nuclear wannabe, Iran. They profess a willingness to give Iran what North Korea got on its own - weapons-usable nuclear fuel. Messrs. Kerry and Edwards say they want to "test" whether the mullahs are being truthful about wanting nothing more than nuclear energy - as if the falsity of this claim is in any doubt. Should the mullahs, like Kim Jong-il, actually want weapons, we are told the Democratic ticket would lead the world in imposing economic sanctions on the Iranian regime.
President Bush has already shown Iran's friends (notably, Russia, China and the Europeans) are more inclined to enable than punish Iranian nuclear ambitions. The Kerry-Edwards plan would only facilitate the former. Mr. Bush understands the folly of that. He is giving the U.N. a chance to resolve this danger but recognizes regime change is likely once again to be the only way to prevent it from metastasizing.
• Securing Russia's "Loose Nukes"? Mr. Kerry claims he will outdo President Bush at getting the former Soviet Union's nukes and other WMD under control, apparently by throwing more U.S. money at the problem. Unfortunately, the Russian government seems not nearly as worried about the proliferation threat posed by such weapons - even in the face of its own terrorist menace. Otherwise, Russia's new oil windfall would surely be used to secure its arsenal. The Bush realists recognize that, as long as this is the case, Mr. Kerry's posturing about an accelerated solution is more loose talk than real relief from Russia's loose nukes.
Wishful thinking about curbing proliferation through unverifiable treaties, fraudulent negotiations and sweetheart deals with despots has done much to bring us to the point where, today, proliferation is such a foremost concern. Do we really want - or can we really afford - as Mr. Kerry is wont to say, "More of the same"?
Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is president of the Center for Security Policy and a columnist for The Washington Times.
----
MICHAEL MOORE ON KILLIAN MEMOS:
I WAS OFFERED THEM AND TURNED THEM DOWN
The washington note
Steve Clemons
October 4, 2004
http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/000097.html
MICHAEL MOORE STATES THAT HE WAS OFFERED FRAUDULENT KILLIAN DOCUMENTS by the same source who provided them to CBS News while Moore was making Farenheit 9/11 and rejected them.
Speaking Sunday evening at the University of Central Arkansas, Moore was asked during Q&A about the "Dan Rather story." After expressing some reluctance about saying anything, he told the audience that while making Farenheit he had been offered the same fraudulent documents by the same source.
According to my correspondent -- BG -- who attended:
Moore said he looked into it at the time and concluded that they weren't reliable. Not surprisingly, he really didn't seem to have any sympathy for Rather's mistake. He mentioned Burkett's name during the discussion, but never said that Burkett was his source.
Moore said that he hadn't shared this information publicly before.
This is important information on at least two fronts.
First of all, 60 Minutes' source apparently shopped the forged documents around to others before the story ran.
Secondly, if someone like Moore, who seemed to be going after everything he could on Bush, didn't trust the documents, why did Dan Rather?
Does this mean that if there is a legal investigation into the source of the Killian documents that Moore will be subpoenaed?
This could turn out to be a replay of Tim Russert and other media types being subpoenaed to testify in the Valerie Plame case.
-------- reports
Voice of Doubt Won't Go Away
By Al Kamen
In the Loop
Monday, October 4, 2004; Page A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A4520-2004Oct3.html
Even though the Agency for International Development has restricted distribution of reports by contractor Kroll Security International -- annoyingly pessimistic and negative reports, saying the number of daily attacks by insurgents in Iraq is increasing -- the weekly "Kroll Monitor" is still available, even online.
Last week's report says that "doubts continued to grow this week over whether elections can take place in January as planned against the current backdrop of relentless violence." (Note to AID: Either these guys get on message, or that contract will have to be terminated.) Election prospects, the report says, "receded this week," with Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani sounding pessimistic, a major Shiite party pushing for delay and influential Sunnis having "grave reservations."
"For the time being, however," the report continues, "the U.S. appears determined to proceed." Some officials suggest that places such as extremely dangerous Fallujah and Ramadi be excluded from the elections, the report says, "but such places could amount to 25 percent of the country, and that would severely undermine the credibility of the ballot."
"It is likely that the current U.S. firmness is tied to the November presidential elections, and that its stance could change after the U.S. vote, if George Bush is reelected. [Finally, something positive, backing the president?] A revised and perhaps more realistic timetable could then be adopted, especially as violence is expected to escalate further when the election board starts to register an estimated 12 million voters after Oct. 27."
This could be worse than Florida.
-------- us politics
The State Department's extreme makeover
A veteran Foreign Service officer warns that when Colin Powell departs in a second Bush term, America will lose its last bulwark against the radical ideologues who are planning more Iraqs.
Salon.com
By Anonymous
Oct. 4, 2004
http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news2/salon39.html
Editor's note: "Anonymous" is a veteran Foreign Service officer currently serving as a State Department official. The views expressed are personal and not related to his official position.
Secretary of State Colin Powell is not staying for a second Bush term. When he goes, the last bulwark against complete neoconservative control of U.S. foreign policy goes with him. The implications are enormous, yet the American electorate appears to be blinded by the Bush campaign's deliberate manipulations of 9/11.
Powell has served both as the reasoned voice of career diplomats and the experienced voice of career U.S. military in the Bush administration. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ignored military advice and excluded Department of State career professionals from Iraq planning. Power was concentrated in the hands of a clique of neocon ideologues he placed in key policy positions, including Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith. In the first term of George W. Bush, protégés of now disgraced former Defense Policy Board member and neocon godfather Richard Perle achieved control or subordination of every executive branch foreign-policymaking body -- except the Department of State.
Career employees of the department enthusiastically greeted Colin Powell when he pulled up to the curb for the first time at Foggy Bottom in his PT Cruiser. They have supported him, and through him, have unfailingly supported the president through thick and thin over four years -- up to and including volunteering in record numbers to staff fully the highly dangerous positions in the new embassy in Baghdad, Iraq. Even after being dumped on by the Pentagon neocons and witnessing the debacle of the Pentagon's Jay Garner's post-conflict solution, the State Department's Civil and Foreign Service staff took up the slack when the Pentagon unceremoniously fled responsibility for Iraq reconstruction and stabilization. Now, Powell's departure is seen within the department as an invitation to a lynching.
The realization that the same neocons who dismissed State's accurate "Future of Iraq Project," prepared before the war, may now take over at State in the second term is widely viewed inside the department as a threat to the very integrity of the country's diplomatic first line of defense. Corridor discussion has turned desperate -- maybe former Secretary of State James Baker will intervene, maybe former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft will talk to someone, maybe 41 will talk to 43.
State personnel are used to comings and goings of Democratic and Republican administrations, serving all equally and fairly. Not since Vietnam, however, has the U.S. diplomatic establishment viewed the future with such a degree of alarm. Retired U.S. ambassadors and diplomats have raised their own public concerns in signed public statements about the direction of U.S. foreign policy -- but that concern pales compared with the quiet revolt brewing against a neocon takeover at Foggy Bottom.
After 9/11, Wolfowitz, Feith and his subordinate, Harold Rhode, recruited David Wurmser as a contractor from the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute to set up what became known internally as the "Wurmser-Maloof" project. F. Michael Maloof, neocon fellow traveler and former aide to Richard Perle, and Wurmser created a hidden intelligence unit, the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group, under Feith at the Pentagon. The purpose of the group was to end-run the CIA and create the rationale for invading Iraq. The parallel operations model was previously followed by Oliver North at the National Security Council and Elliott Abrams at State in their ill-fated Iran-Contra strategy. It should have come as no surprise that another neocon think-tank insider, Abram Shulsky, an Abrams colleague from their days as staffers to Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, would end up heading up what became the Office of Special Plans, the secret intelligence unit at the Pentagon under Feith. The weapons of mass destruction disinformation that was fed to the president and to the American public came directly from Shulsky's shop.
After setting up this operation at the Pentagon for Wolfowitz and Feith, Wurmser, with the help of Perle, was sent in early 2002 to burrow in at State as senior advisor to John Bolton, under secretary for arms control and international security.
In December 2002, Wolfowitz, Feith, Wurmser and Vice President Cheney's national security advisor, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, acting together, maneuvered Condoleezza Rice into appointing Elliott Abrams to the position of special assistant to the president and senior director for the Middle East at the National Security Council. This appointment gave the neocons everything they wanted -- the NSC, Executive Office of the President, Office of the Vice President, the Pentagon, a cornered director in George Tenet at CIA, and Wurmser at State.
The neocons had control of the information reaching the president and a channel for their pseudo-intelligence product from Wolfowitz and Feith's secret Pentagon Office of Special Plans. The only wild card was Colin Powell and State's elite and independent Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR).
Neither Powell nor his deputy, Richard Armitage, who is also leaving with Powell, seems to have been fooled by Wurmser's desire to leave the Pentagon and join John Bolton's staff -- in effect, to come work for Powell. They cornered and then neutralized Wurmser. Wurmser's target was to get at the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, a thorn in the neocons' side and Powell's intelligence ace-in-the-hole against Tenet's "slam-dunk" sellout at the CIA.
INR kept telling Powell the truth about Saddam's nonexistent WMD. State's Future of Iraq project, led by a career Foreign Service officer, who was cold-shouldered by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, laid out what might happen if we took over control of Iraq. Unfortunately, even the sober minds of INR could not stop Powell from lending his credibility to the "unfortunate error" show at the U.N. Security Council. Modeled on Adlai Stevenson's Oct. 25, 1962, Cuban missile presentation to the Security Council, Powell's Feb. 5, 2003, presentation marks the low point of his tenure and, in retrospect, underscores how badly his credibility was needed and then was abused by Vice President Cheney and the president.
The whole time Wurmser was at State, career professionals around him saw someone acting more like an agent of influence than as a subordinate of the secretary of state. He was in constant contact with his Pentagon intelligence cell. Questions were asked -- but never answered -- as to how Wurmser got a full security clearance when he never registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act for his 1996 policy work for Israel's incoming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (including advice on how to lobby the U.S. Congress) and as someone who was married to an Israeli citizen with close ties to Israel's Likud Party -- in theory, a party to U.S.-brokered Middle East peace negotiations.
In September 2003, Wurmser left the Department of State to become Vice President Cheney's principal deputy for national security affairs under "Scooter" Libby. He left before any questions were answered about his access to and use of classified information. His clearances were never questioned when he joined the vice president's staff, and his status under the Foreign Agents Registration Act has never been clarified.
Powell's early 2005 departure is the subject of intense jockeying among the neocons. A Perle neocon protégé, Michael Rubin, has been given the task of destroying the only competition -- L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer, the former Iraq Coalition Provisional Authority chief, not a neocon insider and the favorite of traditional Republican conservatives. The neocon plan is to make Bremer the scapegoat: It was not bad neocon policy, it was bad Bremer decisions that has led to the fiasco in Iraq. Rubin was sent to Baghdad to be Wolfowitz's man inside the CPA. Bremer dissed Rubin as a lightweight. Rubin tried to push neocon policy inside the CPA -- what he, Perle and Ahmed Chalabi had pushed from the American Enterprise Institute -- restoring the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq by placing Jordan's Crown Prince Hassan on the throne. Bremer would have none of it. Rubin is now tasked by Perle and Wolfowitz to trash Bremer -- which he is dutifully doing in print and media appearances arranged by neocon handler, lecture agent and media booker Eleana Benador. They intend to close the Foggy Bottom door to any aspirations Bremer, a former Foreign Service officer and Kissinger protégé, might have to take over from Powell.
Given the implosion of Iraq, Wolfowitz and his coterie have doubts that Wolfowitz can be confirmed as secretary (of either DOD or State) without a debilitating confirmation process, though State remains choice No. 1. A more complicated plan is to again play behind Condoleezza Rice. With Rice as secretary of state and Wolfowitz in as national security advisor, neocons would put David Wurmser or John Bolton in as Rice's deputy, replacing Armitage.
Wurmser, Perle and Feith were the principal authors of the 1996 100-day policy plan for incoming Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. None ever registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act for this work. That plan, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," published by Israel's Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, has served as the guiding road map for the neocons both in Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's office and in the Bush administration. No one should have been surprised by Iraq -- the neocons have not been coy in laying out their vision of Israel's security requirements. David Wurmser published a book-length version of his IASPS study at AEI. The introduction to that screed, "Tyranny's Ally: America's Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein," was written by Richard Perle. It lists as sources Ahmed Chalabi, Michael Ledeen, Douglas Feith and Harold Rhode.
Control at State would remove the last obstacle to the plan Perle, Wurmser and Feith laid long before 9/11. The neocons telegraphed their intentions clearly in President Bush's GOP convention acceptance speech in New York, in which the neocon hand was palpable in the ambitious agenda to remake the Middle East.
The president used political buzzwords to whip the crowd -- and the voting public -- into a noncomprehending patriotic frenzy of "four more years." Like Pope Urban at the 1095 Council of Clermont, who launched the First Crusade to cries of "God Wills It" from the frenzied Christians wanting to take back the Holy Land, Bush has decreed a crusade to bring enlightened Western democracy to the Muslim populations of the Middle East, left otherwise bereft in dysfunctional colonial-inspired states by the breakup of the Ottoman Empire.
But Bush the Crusader is off to a rocky start in Iraq. The ongoing meltdown is awakening Americans to the reality of the neocon agenda. But is it too late? Neocons are not dissuaded by the problems in Iraq; on the contrary, they are arguing that the problem is "Bremerism" -- the U.S. has not gone far enough. In their view, we need to take out the Palestinians, Syria and Iran now.
The neocons, working in tandem with a similar staff in the office of Prime Minister Sharon of Israel, have a three-part agenda for the first part of Bush's second term: first, oust Yasser Arafat; second, overthrow the secular Baathist al-Assad dictatorship in Syria; and, third, eliminate, one way or another, Iran's nuclear facilities.
Nowhere has support for the neocon Middle East crusade resonated more than in the constituency of Rep. Tom DeLay, who is the top Christian Zionist handler in the Republican Party and poised to strike GOP gold with his gerrymandering of Texas congressional districts.
For the neocons, Sept. 11 and Israel's security policy under Sharon have morphed into a single concept, the kind of thinking typified by Secretary Rumsfeld's recent lapses mixing Saddam Hussein with 9/11 and Osama bin Laden with Iraq.
Working with direct input from Israeli intelligence, Feith's Pentagon office coordinated with Libby and Wurmser in the vice president's office to spread the story that the missing WMD are to be found hidden in Syria. Israeli agents have worked overtime to neutralize and undo Syrian cooperation with the CIA against al-Qaida. This comes on the heels of a similar highly successful destruction of CIA inroads with the Palestinian Authority. We are now light-years beyond the two-state solution focus of Middle East policy. Instead of chasing Laden, the neocons plan to put the U.S. on the road to Damascus -- and Tehran. The groundwork is laid.
While the FBI scrutinizes whether Pentagon neocon aide Larry Franklin and AIPAC passed secrets to Israel, the larger story of Richard Perle and the neocons' carefully orchestrated takeover of Bush foreign policy has yet to be fully comprehended by the electorate.
Powell is leaving. We need to repeat that. When this reality sinks in, we will finally understand what we are getting ourselves into in a second Bush term. A handful of conservative columnists, Republican senators and a few other GOP luminaries are trying to reclaim a traditional conservative Republican foreign policy approach. But it is clearly too late.
Comparing Bush's foreign policy views in 2000 with his New York convention acceptance speech, it is clear that since 2000, the neocons started with a blank foreign policy slate. Looking carefully at Bush's 2000 campaign and statements and comparing them with the current 2004 campaign, it is startling how far he has come from his traditional Republican base. He has become the "Neoconian Candidate."
George W. Bush has signed on to the neocon agenda with the unshakeable faith of the born again. At this point, we all need a reminder that Crusades 1 through 5 ended badly in the long run, not just for the Crusaders, but on the home front. In a new Bush crusade, in a second term, the first to fall may be the professionals at the State Department.
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Bush's Backward Nuclear Policy
Antiwar.com
by Gordon Prather
October 4, 2004
http://www.antiwar.com/prather/?articleid=3703
Hallelujah! In response to a specific question, John Kerry declared that if elected president his number one priority would be preventing nuke proliferation.
How do we know Kerry really means it? After all, President Bush told you that the reason he had to invade Iraq was to keep Saddam Hussein's nukes out of the hands of terrorists.
Of course, Bush knew Saddam didn't have nukes. Didn't have the necessary fissile material to make nukes. Had made no attempt to reconstruct his Iraq-Iran War programs to produce nukes or the makings, thereof.
Mohammed ElBaradei - Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) - had made authoritative reports to that effect to the UN Security Council. As a consequence of an exhaustive decade-long search and destroy mission by the IAEA, on the eve of Operation Iraqi Freedom, if any country was certifiably nuke-free, it was Iraq.
But Bush didn't refute the IAEA certification. He just totally ignored it. It was irrelevant whether Saddam had nukes or not. The real objective of the neo-crazies had always been to establish a puppet regime in Iraq. Operation Iraqi Freedom might better be called Operation Bait & Switch.
So how do we know that keeping nukes out of the hands of terrorists will really be Kerry's number one priority as president?
Well, for one thing, Kerry proceeded to list the disastrous consequences of it not being Bush's first priority.
In particular, Kerry noted that when Bush became president, North Korea (DPRK) was a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and all nuclear facilities and nuclear materials were "frozen," subject to a bilateral U.S.-DPRK agreement and to continuous IAEA monitoring.
Under the so-called Agreed Framework, we had promised to engage in bilateral talks with North Korea, with an end to normalizing relations between the two countries. The U.S. has been at war with North Korea since 1950.
Kerry charged that - upon taking office - Bush made it clear to both Korean presidents that he had no intention of engaging in bilateral talks to "normalize" relations with North Korean.
In his first State of the Union Address - after specifically naming Iran, Iraq and North Korea - Bush had this to say:
"States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.
"I will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons."
Then, later that year, the Bush administration abrogated the Agreed Framework, charging that North Korea had been violating it by having a secret enriched-uranium nuke program, a charge that Bush made again in rebuttal to Kerry during the debate.
But the North Koreans have vigorously and consistently denied having such a program. Despite repeated requests for him to do so, Bush has never provided anyone - including the Chinese - any convincing evidence that North Korea has such a program.
No longer subject to the Agreed Framework, North Korea announced on the eve of Operation Bait & Switch it was withdrawing from the NPT, restarting its frozen plutonium-producing reactor and its plutonium-recovery facility. North Korea now - according to CIA estimates - probably has a half dozen nukes.
If terrorists get their hands on a North Korean nuke, there is absolutely no question whom should be held responsible. Bush refused to engage in bilateral talks with North Korea while they were still subject to the IAEA-NPT Safeguards regime. Then there was no peril. No longer subject to safeguards, Kerry believes the terrorist nuke peril is clear and present. And Bush's rhetoric and actions - including his launching a preemptive attack on Iraq to confiscate the nukes Saddam didn't have - are to blame.
Now, Bush denigrates Kerry, who says he would immediately engage the North Koreans in bilateral talks. There are other reasons - such as his endorsement of the Brit-French-German-Russian multilateralist approach to dealing with the Iranian nuclear "crisis" - to believe Kerry's number one priority is preventing nuke proliferation. But his commitment to do what Bush wouldn't do - engage the North Koreans - is reason enough.
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Robertson: If Bush 'touches' Jerusalem, we'll form 3rd party
Haaretz
By Daphna Berman
October 04, 2004
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/484861.html
Influential American evangelist Pat Robertson said Monday that Evangelical Christians feel so deeply about Jerusalem, that if President George W. Bush were to "touch" Jerusalem, Evangelicals would abandon their traditional Republican leanings and form a third party. Evangelical Christians - estimated at tens of millions of Americans - overwhelmingly support Bush for his pro-Israel policies, Robertson told a Jerusalem news conference Monday.
But if Bush shifted his position toward support for Jerusalem as a capital for both Israel and a Palestinian state, his Evangelical backing would disappear, Robertson indicated.
"The President has backed away from [the road map], but if he were to touch Jerusalem, he'd lose all Evangelical support," Robertson said. "Evangelicals would form a third party" because, though people "don't know about" Gaza, Jerusalem is an entirely different matter.
Robertson, an outspoken supporter of Israel who is in the country to celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles, also added that visitors to Israel should not be overly critical of the government's political decisions.
He has refrained from overtly criticizing Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan and says only that he hopes the "Israeli people will make the right decision" in matters of territorial concessions.
"It is unwise for a visitor from America to get involved in Israeli politics," he stated at a press conference in the capital's International Convention Center.
Together with an estimated 5,000 Christians from around the world, Robertson has been touring the Holy Land this week, in effort to support and pray for the people of Israel. He led a prayer service on Sunday outside the Knesset, where he blasted Hezbollah, Hamas, and the idea of jihad.
"Arab nations want a conflict and want to keep the suffering of people in Gaza," he said. "They don't want peace; they want the destruction of Israel."
Robertson urged that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) be abolished, given what he called the organization's active role in the "perpetuation" of the Palestinian refugee problem. He warned that a Palestinian state would become "a constant source of irritation" that would "endanger the territorial integrity" of Israel.
"A Palestinian state with full sovereignty would be a launching ground for various types of weapons, including weapons of mass destruction," the former presidential candidate said.
Thousands of Christians march for Jerusalem As many as 20,000 marchers were expected to take part in the annual Jerusalem March procession, which was to pass through the heart of the city on Monday the afternoon, among them thousands of Evangelicals and other Christians.
Police officials began closing streets at 1:30 P.M. to allow marchers to pass. Among the central Jerusalem traffic arteries closed, either fully or in sections, were Ben-Zvi, Bezalel, Ben-Yehuda, King George, Jaffa, Shlomzion HaMalka, Koresh, Azza, Agron, Menashe Ben-Israel, HaEmek, HaRav Kook, Havatzelet, Heleni HaMalka, Histadrut, Shammai and Hillel Streets.
Most of the streets were to have been re-opened by 5:30 P.M.
In a gathering of more than 4,000 pilgrims at a Jerusalem convention center Sunday, Robertson warned that some Muslims were trying to foil "God's plan" to let Israel hold on to its lands. The number of pilgrims was about 25 percent higher than the past three years, according to organizers with the International Christian Embassy.
"I see the rise of Islam to destroy Israel and take the land from the Jews and give East Jerusalem to [Palestinian Authority Chairman] Yasser Arafat. I see that as Satan's plan to prevent the return of Jesus Christ the Lord," said Robertson, a Christian broadcaster.
In two Jerusalem appearances, Robertson Sunday praised Israel as part of God's plan and criticized Arab countries and some Muslims, saying their hopes to include Israeli-controlled land in a Palestinian state are part of "Satan's plan."
Robertson, who has made critical statements of Islam in the past, called Israel's Arab neighbors "a sea of dictatorial regimes."
He said he "sends notice" to Osama bin Laden, Arafat and Palestinian militant groups that "you will not frustrate God's plan" to have Jews rule the Holy Land until the Second Coming of Jesus.
Only God should decide if Israel should relinquish control of the lands it captured in the 1967 war, including the Gaza Strip, West Bank and East Jerusalem, Robertson said, in a reference to Sharon's plan to pull out of Gaza next year.
"God says, 'I'm going to judge those who carve up the West Bank and Gaza Strip,'" Robertson said. "'It's my land and keep your hands off it.'"
Blowing rams' horns and exclaiming "Hallelujah," hundreds of pilgrims - including visitors from Norway, England and Germany - gathered in downtown Jerusalem to pray for peace and celebrate Israel's unification of the city with the capture of East Jerusalem in 1967.
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-------- environment
Mount St. Helens Draws Crowd of Curious Revelers
From News Services
Monday, October 4, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A4514-2004Oct3.html
MOUNT ST. HELENS NATIONAL MONUMENT, Wash., Oct. 3 -- A reawakening volcano sparked a makeshift festival here Sunday, as thousands of people staged parties at every wide spot in the two-lane road to the mountain.
Geologic spectators set up lawn chairs in the beds of pickup trucks and fired up barbecues from the park entrance to the Coldwater Ridge Visitor Center at Milepost 43, where the road is closed 8 1/2 miles from the simmering volcano. Impromptu entrepreneurs hawked hot dogs and coffee.
At the futuristic visitor center, with a view straight into the crater, the wraparound veranda was jammed with people in lawn chairs -- most of them with cameras.
"It's beyond amazing," said Steven Uhl, 31, of Everett, who has tried to visit every year since 1982. "I've been a volcano nut since 1980. . . . Just to be here is almost a religious experience."
Thermal images of the volcano, along with the detection of potentially explosive gases and continued tremors early Sunday morning, indicated that new magma is still moving upward into the volcano, said scientists awaiting the next eruption.
U.S. Geological Survey scientists said they are seeing hot spots and emissions of hydrogen sulfide and carbon dioxide typically associated with a magma move in a volcano.
A harmonic tremor -- a sustained, deep movement of the earth within the volcano -- was detected about 6 a.m. Eastern time. Scientists said it is further evidence of how active the volcano might be.
Looking at the Volcanic Explosivity Index, which measures the power behind an eruption, scientists predicted a 50 percent chance of a new eruption reaching Level 2 on the scale from 1 to 10, and a 30 percent chance of a Level 3, according to a preliminary estimate from Thomas Pierson, a USGS hydrologist. By comparison, Friday's combined steam and ash cloud measured less than 1 on the index, while the 1980 eruption measured 5.
Spectators were prepared to capture the moment. Chris Sawyer, 40, of Dundee, Ore., had a large camera with a zoom lens set up on a tripod in what he hoped was a good spot.
"I hope to see something," he said. "It'd be neat if it spews something over and out."
Nearby, an artist known as "O" from Santa Monica, Calif., was working on a 4-by-5-foot painting of the mountain, using three dozen cans of bargain house paint in various tones, mostly grays, blues and olives.
Officials believed people were "out of harm's way" at Coldwater Ridge, said Peter Frenzen, monument scientist for the U.S. Forest Service, which oversees the mountain and surrounding Gifford Pinchot National Forest.
--
Mount St. Helens Q&A From Associated Press at 1:49 PM
Mount St. Helens is poised for its biggest eruption since it blew its top in 1980, killing 57 people. Here are some common questions and answers about the volcano located about 100 miles south of Seattle.
Q: Why is the volcano active now?
A: An active volcano like Mount St. Helens always experiences minor rumblings. Now, hot magma is rising higher inside the mountain and filling its interior chamber. This triggers swarms of earthquakes. The gases dissolved in the magma build up pressure and are very explosive.
Q: What will happen when the volcano erupts?
A: Scientists aren't sure. So far, it has emitted steam and a little ash. A large eruption throws rocks and vents off poisonous gases. Lava flows downhill and melts anything in its path.
In extreme cases, mudslides called lahars roar down mountainsides at 100 mph, filling valleys and covering entire communities. A pyroclastic flow of superheated rocks and ash can shatter and burn anything in its path.
Mostly, people near the volcano must contend with large clouds of gritty ash that spew 60,000 feet high, threatening aircraft.
Q:Is the ash fallout similar to that from a forest fire?
A: No. Wood ash is fluffy. Volcanic ash is a gritty mixture of pulverized rock and natural glass. It can scratch and ruin the painted finish of cars and homes. It clogs engines, machinery, irrigation and ventilation systems. It can kill plants by coating their leaves and preventing photosynthesis. People should wear masks and not breathe in the ash.
Q: How can scientists predict eruptions?
A: Scientists don't know exactly what will happen or when, but they look for clues in the changes registered by seismic and other monitoring devices. Mount St. Helens is one of the world's most heavily instrumented mountains, and researchers are reconnecting instruments that were initially knocked out by tremors. Plus, federal agencies have dispatched airplanes to make air sampling flights. GPS satellites measure bulges and other changes to the mountain's lava dome and steep flanks that signal an impending eruption. Weather stations forecast wind conditions that steer ash clouds.
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Mount St. Helens Belches Massive Clouds
October 4, 2004
The New York Times
By SARAH KERSHAW and KENNETH CHANG
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/04/national/04CND-ERUP.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
TOUTLE, Wash., Oct. 4 - Mount St. Helens belched massive white and dark clouds out of its peak just before 10 a.m. Pacific Time today.
The eruption lasted several minutes, and the steam was followed by "a small amount of ash," Tim McBicker, a spokesman for the United States Geological Survey, told The Associated Press.
A minor eruption on Friday, the first in 18 years, was followed by days of tremors and low-level earthquakes that scientists interpreted as meaning that another, possibly stronger eruption was imminent.
After Friday's eruption, the government raised the volcanic activity to Level 3, the equivalent of a "code red" and the highest stage in a system used to indicate the likelihood of a volcanic eruption that could endanger life or property.
On Saturday, the earthquakes intensified, and shortly after noon, the volcano emitted a brief burst of steam, which was followed by a continuous, low-frequency tremor that lasted 50 minutes, believed to be caused by the movement of magma, or molten rock, underground.
That suddenly created a more serious situation at Mount St. Helens, the most active volcano in the lower 48 states. But scientists said they did not expect an eruption on the magnitude of the May 1980 explosion that killed 57 people and caused widespread destruction.
In the communities surrounding the volcano, lots of people here remember well how racked with fear they were in the weeks and days leading up to the 1980 eruption that rained utter havoc from 30 miles away on this tiny town.
But 24 years later, as scientists warn of a new, imminent eruption, the fear has not returned. For one, scientists do not believe the eruption will be nearly as powerful. But residents now also know the drill, the evacuation routes and the ways to protect themselves and their property from heavy ash fall.
Residents are slightly nervous but mostly aggravated at all the local traffic, caused by the thousands of tourists, reporters and entrepreneurs headed through town over the last few days on their way to a lookout point on the mountain.
In 1980, once scientists knew that powerful earthquakes were stirring Mount St. Helens, few people were visiting the mountain. Now a spot at the Castle Lake Overlook parking lot is a rare commodity. And far from running away, people like Denise Horton, who lives 130 miles away in Sandy, Ore., are traveling hours to get here, bursting with anticipation for the eruption.
"It's like waiting for a parade that's late," said Ms. Horton, who was running a hot dog stand on the mountain, selling mostly to reporters who were among the dozens camped out at the lookout point. `It's like waiting for a baby.`
The fact that they are here is testament to the vast forecasting gains of scientists, who are armed with new technology and skills honed from the 1980 eruption, which in addition to killing 57 people obliterated 200 houses and spawned worldwide interest in the study of volcanoes.
Seismometers pinpoint the tiny earthquakes that have been shaking Mount St. Helens for nearly two weeks. Global positioning system sensors detect outward bulges as slight as a fraction of an inch. Instruments aboard a helicopter sniff out gases seeping out of the rocks below and identify hot spots.
"There's really been a revolution," said Dr. William E. Scott of the United States Geological Survey's Cascades Volcano Observatory in Vancouver, Wash., which is monitoring the mountain and holding twice-daily news conferences.
But for all their high-tech gadgetry, scientists still do not have a direct way to answer the questions they most want to answer: where is the molten rock beneath the volcano? And where is it going?
"We don't know where it is," said William Steele, a seismologist at the University of Washington.
The expectation is that underground molten rock, or magma, will reach the surface and spill out as lava and that there will be more eruptions like the small one that happened Friday, or larger.
"Something could happen at any time, basically," Dr. Scott said at a news conference on Sunday. Or, he said, "It may stall out and we may never see it."
That would disappoint Kathy Teas, who was living nearby in 1980 and was evacuated from her home. Ms. Teas later moved to Oregon, but was back on Sunday, having spent the previous night at a campsite on the mountain, eager to see an eruption.
"Here I am at 52 and I'm back here again," she said. "To have the opportunity to witness this is something I can't pass up."
From the pattern of seismic shakings before and after the 1980 eruption, seismologists laboriously constructed a fuzzy picture of the volcano's workings, the equivalent of a prenatal sonogram. It indicated a deep magma chamber about four miles underground and a shallower one perhaps a mile below the crater.
But unlike hurricanes, which allow meteorologists to make detailed observations by airplanes and satellites, a volcano eruption develops mostly out of sight, hundreds to thousands of feet underground.
"We can't take measurements in the interior," said Dr. Anthony Qamar, a professor of geophysics at the University of Washington.
Instruments on or hovering above the surface offer only indirect suggestions of what is happening. Volcanologists must sift through competing plausible explanations for what they observe and what they do not.
Thus, when a new event occurs, like the continuous 50-minute low-frequency tremor on Saturday, the scientists sometimes need to quickly revise their thoughts.
The swarms of earthquakes, a few a minute, have been interpreted as the breaking of rocks by the buildup of pressure. The tremor - accompanied by a cessation in the earthquakes - suggested that the magma had broken through and was rising smoothly, leading scientists to suspect an eruption might be imminent.
After the tremor ended, the earthquakes resumed. At 3 a.m. Sunday, a second tremor occurred, this time lasting 25 minutes. Again, the seismic activity died down, then picked up. Through the day on Sunday, the intensity of the earthquakes diminished somewhat. "The larger earthquakes have dropped off," Dr. Qamar said then.
That could mean the pressure had lessened and the volcano was quieting down. Or it could mean that the magma had broken through the rock blockage and was now pushing its way toward the surface. Or it could just be a lull.
"We're not interpreting much about that decrease," Dr. Scott said.
What has been unusual about the current episode is that all of the earthquakes have been shallow, within half a mile or so of the surface. That leaves scientists wondering whether magma is rising from the deep chamber or whether the magma driving the tremors and eruptions is left over from six years ago. Then, as now, a swarm of earthquakes shook the area. Scientists believe magma rose upward, although nothing broke through as an eruption.
Whether the magma is new or old is important, because that could determine whether the eruptions will explosively shoot clouds of ash that spread over a large area or, less catastrophically, just push out lava.
"The analogy is the old Coke can that you shake up and open," Dr. Scott said. "If you shake it a whole lot and pop it open, you're going to get a lot of frothing and it's going to be an explosive event. But if you pour it in a glass and let the gas come out and then you try to shake the glass, you can't get as much fizz."
Once scientists realized this weekend that an eruption could be imminent, spectators were evacuated from an observatory five miles from the crater. But lookout points farther away were not considered to be in danger.
Here in Toutle (pronounced TOOT-uhl), a town of 700 that is the closest to the mountain, many residents said that while they were not panicking, they were concerned about an eruption causing a mudflow into the three nearby rivers, which were flooded and full of floating debris in 1980.
Some residents were digging out old masks to protect their faces from potentially heavy ash fall. Should that happen, the authorities will warn people to stay indoors, with their windows closed, and be particularly cautious if they suffer from respiratory diseases.
"All I can say is you better learn to respect it," Karen Meyers, 43, who lives in Toutle and witnessed the 1980 eruption. "I mean, last time, their worst-case scenario didn't even come close to what happened here. Mother Nature is going to win and you'll pay hell trying to predict it."
Sarah Kershaw reported from Toutle for this article, and Kenneth Chang and Maria Newman from New York. Brian Alexander contributed reporting from Mount St. Helens.
-------- genetics
Kerry promotes expanded federal research using stem cells
10/4/2004
Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/nation/president/2004-10-04-kerry-stemcells_x.htm
HAMPTON, N.H. (AP) - John Kerry said Monday that President Bush has sacrificed hopes for disease cures offered by stem cell research to "extreme right-wing ideology."
The Democratic presidential candidate, with actor and activist Michael J. Fox, promised to fund more embryonic stem cell research with federal money if elected. A new campaign ad says it's time to "lift the political barriers" blocking the exploration of stem cell therapies.
"The hard truth is that when it comes to stem cell research, this president is making the wrong choice to sacrifice science for extreme right-wing ideology," Kerry said.
Kerry criticized Bush's decision to prohibit federal funding for research on embryonic stem cell lines created after Aug. 9, 2001. Some religious and conservative organizations oppose such research because days-old embryos are destroyed in the process.
Kerry called it "a far-reaching ban on federal funding for stem cell research, tying the hands of our scientists, driving some of them away from America."
Fox, who has Parkinson's disease, told voters gathered in a high school gym that Bush had "so restricted the stem cell lines available to us that it was kind of like he gave us a car and no gas and congratulated himself for giving us the car."
The Bush-Cheney campaign said the president's decision represents a federal commitment to using the promise of stem cell research in an ethical way.
"Saying that the president's action banned stem cell research is false," said spokesman Steve Schmidt. "Stem cell research of any kind is perfectly legal."
Kerry promises $100 million a year flowing into the research and strict ethical oversight.
The Massachusetts senator gets some of his biggest cheers at campaign rallies when he promises to fund more stem cell research, one aspect of a pledge to increase federal support of science.
Ticking off a list of scientific and environmental issues - water quality, air quality, global warming, high-tech jobs - Kerry said the president repeatedly ignores science and fact in favor of politics.
"This underscores, in my judgment, the perils of having the president who turns his back on science in favor of ideology and as a result abandons millions of Americans' hopes," he said.
Stem cell research got national political attention this summer when President Reagan died after a long battle with Alzheimer's disease and his wife and son Ron urged the administration to lift the funding restrictions. Kerry was among 58 senators who asked Bush to relax his policy.
Voters in California will be asked whether they support a proposition to borrow $3 billion and fund human embryonic stem cell research and cloning projects designed solely for therapeutic purposes. Fox has been active in efforts to pass the proposition along with other research initiatives.
Stem cells are master cells that can turn into all the cells, tissues and organs in the human body. Scientists believe they hold promise for treating many diseases.
-------- imf / world bank / wto (economics)
D.C. as Host of IMF, World Bank Talks Raises Questions
Monday, October 4, 2004
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A4744-2004Oct3.html
Washington's future as the host city for annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank may be in doubt, according to officials of the two institutions interviewed during a weekend meeting.
A number of delegates and bankers from foreign countries are unhappy that the official part of the meetings has been compressed to one weekend, the officials said. The decision to shorten the meetings was taken in 2001 because of security concerns from protests and the 9/11 attacks.
The meetings used to run over five days and offered plenty of opportunities for get-togethers between officials from developing countries and their bankers, as well as with IMF and World Bank staffers. But now long meetings are only possible during gatherings like those held every third year outside the United States.
Moving the meetings out of Washington would be a revenue blow to local hotels, restaurants and limo services. Some delegates and officials attending the weekend gathering expressed satisfaction with Washington and said they don't expect the meetings to be moved. But Rodrigo de Rato, the IMF's managing director, was noncommital when asked at yesterday's closing news conference whether consideration was being given to holding more meetings abroad. He thanked Washington for its hospitality, but said, "Right now, I cannot give you an answer," adding that "there are certainly some problems" with security and inconvenience."
Independence Delays Vote
Independence Federal Savings Bank has set its annual shareholder meeting for Oct. 29, but shareholders will not vote on Independence's pending and increasingly shaky merger with Carver Bancorp, said Thomas L. Batties, Independence's acting chief executive.
Shareholders were to have been asked to approve the $21-a-share merger agreement that would make the Washington-based S&L part of a Carver subsidiary, Carver Federal Savings Bank. The agreement was thrown in doubt after a letter from Carver President Deborah C. Wright said the deterioration of Independence's financial condition required renegotiating the deal, reached in March. Batties said Independence told Wright would not renegotiate the price and has notified Carver that it is in default on its merger agreement. Carver has until Oct. 17 to respond to the notice of default, according to the merger agreement.
DISTRICT
XM Satellite Radio Holdings said sales of its Delphi XM Roady2 receiver were impeded by a four-week production slowdown that ended in late August. XM did not provide the amount of sales affected, but it said its satellite radio service remains on track to have more than 3.1 million subscribers by the end of the year.
Arlington Capital Partners, a private equity fund, acquired Secor International, a privately held provider of environmental consulting services, in partnership with the company's management. Secor, of Redmond, Wash., is a national provider of cleanup management, consulting, compliance and permitting services to industries including petroleum, chemical, industrial, pulp and paper and power. Terms were not announced.
Grameen Foundation USA merged with Digital Partners of Seattle. Both nonprofit groups are dedicated to using digital technology to aid the world's poor.
VIRGINIA
DKL International of Vienna, a provider of human-detection technology, said the Japanese Regional Police Headquarters has ordered additional units of the DKL LifeGuard, a passive electronic sensor that detects the electric field created by a beating human heart. The company's products are designed to be used in search-and-rescue operations or in military or police operations to detect an adversary.
SI International of Reston priced a secondary offering of 3.2 million shares of common stock at $21.85 a share. The company would have proceeds of $48 million from the 2.2 million shares it is offering. It said Frontenac, a private equity firm, is selling an additional 1 million shares. After the announcement SI's stock rose 15 percent Friday, closing at $25.25, up $3.34.
Sunrise Senior Living of McLean entered into two joint venture agreements. The agreement with GEM Investors, a real estate investment company, involves developing two senior living communities in Massachusetts and one in New Jersey. The agreement with the California Public Employees' Retirement System and its adviser, AEW Capital Management, involves developing a community in California.
MARYLAND
Human Genome Sciences of Rockville said results from an early-stage study shows that its cancer treatment HGS-ETR1 is safe and well-tolerated in doses up to 10 milligrams per kilogram of body weight every 28 days. HGS-ETR1 is an antibody the company is developing for the treatment of advanced solid tumors and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
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With Few Protests, Main Action Is Inside for Monetary Fund
October 4, 2004
By ELIZABETH BECKER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/04/politics/04imf.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 - All weekend, drivers headed anywhere near the World Bank and International Monetary Fund headquarters found themselves caught behind newly erected concrete barricades. More than one shouted at the police, "Where are the protesters?"
There were none, except for the few people who gathered in such small vigils that they were easy to miss.
The extraordinary security around the Pennsylvania Avenue corridor was all about terrorism and the orange alert that the two institutions have been under since August because of four-year-old computer records suggesting Al Qaeda might be singling them out. Their annual meetings are the last major events before the election, and the administration did not want to see a terrorist attack or, for that matter, protests, disrupt the proceedings of the institutions charged with keeping the world's financial system on course and helping poor countries catch up.
But, for once, the action was inside, where the world's financial leaders tackled the urgent issues of forgiving the debts of impoverished nations, managing the effects of rising oil prices on development and considering how to get rich countries as well as poor ones to address economic problems and make painful changes.
Over all, there was a strong sense of historic transition.
China was invited to dine with the Group of 7 major industrial nations, an event that was seen as the first step toward admission to that elite club of the world and a belated acknowledgment of China's huge role in the world economy.
At the same time, the World Bank's larger-than-life leader, James D. Wolfensohn, was presiding over what could be his last annual meeting as the heart and soul of that organization. His term as president will end in May and it seems unlikely that he will be asked to stay, no matter who wins the November election.
With his snowy shock of hair and his unrelenting pitch for more money to help the poor, Mr. Wolfensohn gave an impressive performance as a lion in winter. He sat alone at his news conferences - no spokesmen or aides beside him - and easily answered questions about Ghana's debt, the success of Turkey's economic changes and how to privatize a country's water system to lower the costs for the average citizen.
But the fact that the end of Mr. Wolfensohn's term is nearing was rarely mentioned.
Most of the speakers turned their attention to the International Monetary Fund's new managing director: Rodrigo de Rato, a former finance minister of Spain who has already made an impressive debut with his straight talk. Possibly because he is first politician to lead the organization, Mr. de Rato stood out at his news conference for his use of the declarative sentence. When asked about a contentious plan to revalue gold and help the poor, he simply said yes, of course it could be done - it had been done before.
He also did not hesitate to bring the big rich countries to task as well as the poorer ones.
Above all, he had a noticeable ability to see the bright side of financial life - a quality not generally associated with the fund.
He seemed to be following the adage that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. China was doing so well it could change its currency rate. Growth in the United States was good enough for it to begin the essential reduction of its deficit. The good news this year included developments in Japan, which now must speed up its banking changes.
"You must take into account that he was head of his party in opposition for almost 20 years,'' said Ernesto Ekaizer, assistant managing editor of El País in Madrid who was in Washington to cover the meeting. "He is very, very relaxed in almost any situation.''
Just days before the Madrid bombing last March, Mr. de Rato was passed over to lead his Popular Party in the elections. Rebuffed, he gave the green light for Spain to nominate him for the monetary fund job. His qualifications included an impressive reduction of Spain's deficit and a doctoral thesis that he wrote about that effort while he was a minister.
In those days he was known simply as Mr. Rato, a good name for a politician. Now, as leader of the fund, he has become Mr. de Rato, using the aristocratic "de'' of the family name that is actually de Rato Figaredo.
-------- ACTIVISTS
A Brutal Sexual Assault Galvanizes Swazi Women
Activists Behind Rare Protest March in Kingdom Link Men's Attitudes, World's Highest HIV Rate
By Craig Timberg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, October 4, 2004; Page A20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A4589-2004Oct3?language=printer
MANZINI, Swaziland -- Gugu Pungwayo couldn't bear to read the newspaper article. She recalled that she glanced at the headline, then put the paper down. Picked it up again. Put it down. Again. And again.
An 18-year-old woman had been sexually assaulted last month, brutally and repeatedly, by a gang of young men who worked at the chaotic, fume-choked taxi depot a couple of blocks from Pungwayo's office. The reason the men gave for the attack: The young woman was wearing a miniskirt.
By the time Pungwayo finished reading the article in the Times of Swaziland, she was crying, she later recalled. Her daughter -- age 18 like the victim -- demanded: "Mama, what are you going to do about this?" Pungwayo said.
Over the next few weeks, Pungwayo answered that question by helping to organize the first-ever women's march in Swaziland, a mountain kingdom of 1.2 million people. She also successfully lobbied for police and other authorities to take action. Three men have been arrested, but the activists are pressing for dozens more to be charged.
Fueling the outrage of activists such as Pungwayo is their conviction that the traditional subjugation of women is one reason that Swaziland has an HIV infection rate of nearly 40 percent, the highest in the world. Their protests of the assault have initiated uncommonly passionate public debate over what it means to be Swazi in the age of AIDS.
"We are losing the battle against HIV if we sit and allow this," said Pungwayo, 40, a union activist with a bright smile and sleek tortoise-shell glasses. "It's not a matter of short skirts."
Swaziland, a tiny landlocked country surrounded almost entirely by South Africa, is ruled by sub-Saharan Africa's last absolute monarch, King Mswati III. Political parties have been illegal since 1973. Women are regarded as distinctly subordinate to men. Married women cannot own land in rural areas, for example. And each year the king selects a new bride at a ceremony featuring thousands of dancing, topless virgins.
Many women say they lack the power to refuse sexual advances, and if they request that a condom be used to protect against HIV, their husbands or boyfriends accuse them of being unfaithful. Sexual assaults, by both acquaintances and strangers, have also increased.
"Most of the time," said Gcebile Ndlovu of the International Community of Women Living with HIV/AIDS, "it's up to the men to make the choices, as to the how, the when and the where."
The victim of the attack at the taxi depot here was from Mbabane, the capital, a quaintly formal town where full-length dresses and three-piece suits are common. Manzini, a city of 100,000, is the country's bustling industrial center, with factories that attract men and women from rugged mountain villages where traditional ways dominate. Young men from these areas run the taxi depot, which is little more than an oversize parking lot where hundreds of passengers are directed in and out of dozens of vehicles.
Several of the taxi conductors said that a grown woman should cover her legs. Anything less, they say, is un-Swazi.
"The proper girls, they don't put on miniskirts," said Njulo Mamba, 25, a taxi owner.
A conductor, 16-year-old Kati Tsela, said, "When they wear those short things, they want us to buy. They are advertising."
The men at the taxi depot traditionally have whistled and shouted at women wearing what they consider improper clothing. The attack last month started that way, according to witnesses.
A group of about 20 conductors ripped the denim miniskirt from the girl's body, as well as her sleeveless top and underwear, witnesses said. The men assaulted her with their fingers and a scrub brush used to clean the ramshackle minibuses that serve as taxis throughout southern Africa.
A bystander ended the attack after about 15 minutes by wrapping the girl in a piece of cloth and putting her in a taxi that was driven to a police station, witnesses said. She was then taken to a hospital and treated for serious bleeding.
The day the article appeared in the newspaper, Pungwayo recalled, she and other activists started making urgent phone calls to one another. Pungwayo also called the prime minister -- who is the brother of her ex-husband -- at home. He issued a statement condemning the attack.
The makeshift group of activists met in person two days later to organize the march, which they publicized by phone, fax and text messages from their cell phones. And two days after that, the women started marching toward the taxi depot. Organizers estimate their crowd exceeded 1,000, a number that included hundreds of female students led by their teachers from nearby schools.
"We're fed up. Enough is enough," said Doo Aphane of the Women's Legal Rights Initiative, another organizer of the march. "The powers that be have realized that women are angry."
But at the taxi depot, hundreds of drivers and conductors had what amounted to a counter-protest with placards of their own, including one that, according to one news report, threatened more attacks, saying, "We'll get them with our brushes."
Dozens of women, mostly vendors who sell fruit and vegetables by the taxi depot, joined in the protest -- on the side of the conductors. Together, they blocked the entrance to the depot, forcing the women's march to stay on an adjacent street, according to the reports.
There was more backlash elsewhere.
A member of Swaziland's Parliament, whose every action is subject to approval by the king, made a speech criticizing what the press here has dubbed the "miniskirt march."
"We are tired of this. There should be a law against public indecency which would ban the wearing of anything that would expose a woman's thighs, her navel and also the wearing of G-strings," Ernest Dlamini said to rounds of applause, according to the Times of Swaziland.
One day last week, the newspaper ran 19 letters about the miniskirt controversy, seven of which supported the taxi conductors or criticized the victim of their attack.
"It is public indecency to show your underwear!" read one. "This is what promotes immoral behavior in all age groups. HIV is real and you tell me how we are going to fight it?"
Pungwayo said the activists have scheduled another protest for Saturday. They are also preparing other actions, including civil lawsuits against the conductors and a boycott of taxis unless owners create a code of conduct and institute rigorous training for conductors and drivers.
But the bluster has died down among the conductors, whose friends and colleagues are suddenly facing the possibility of jail time.
Many interviewed at the depot maintained that the victim violated something quintessentially Swazi in wearing a miniskirt. But most agreed that the attack went too far.
"This thing," said 21-year-old taxi driver Mugabe Mabuza, "it would not happen today."
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S. Koreans Protest Security Law Change
October 4, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-SKorea-Protest.html
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- Police scuffled with hundreds of protesters in central Seoul Monday as an estimated 100,000 people rallied against calls for the abolition of a security law crafted a half-century ago to fight communism.
Protesters converged on the Seoul City Hall Plaza in a protest against moves to scrap the National Security Law.
``Those who are afraid of the National Security Law should leave this country!'' the protesters chanted, waving small South Korean and U.S. flags.
A group of demonstrators burned three North Korean flags and a poster of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. Scuffles erupted when protesters tried to topple police buses in order to march to the presidential office several blocks away.
Riot police sprayed water to disperse the protesters, and the demonstrators responded with kicks and punches. It was not immediately clear how many people were injured in the scuffles.
Police estimated 100,000 people had joined the rally.
Controversy over the security law gained momentum after President Roh Moo-hyun called for the abolition of the law, which forbids ``anti-state'' activities.
Roh, a former human rights lawyer, noted that past authoritarian governments have used it to persecute dissidents, but the conservative opposition says the law is vital to South Korea's security amid tensions over North Korea's suspected efforts to develop nuclear weapons.
The law, which has not been vigorously enforced in recent years, bans praise for or open sympathy with anti-state groups and carries a penalty of up to seven years in prison for that offense. It also provides for up to five years in jail for failing to notify authorities about other anti-state crimes. Critics say it is inhumane because family members might have to betray their loved ones.
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Howard Government Offered Oil Firm Millions to Sue Greenpeace
October 4, 2004
SYDNEY, Australia, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/oct2004/2004-10-04-05.asp
The government of Prime Minister John Howard offered a multi-million dollar subsidy to shale oil company Southern Pacific Petroleum (SPP) on the condition that the company take legal action against Greenpeace, the Australian branch of the international environmental organization has discovered.
The plan to use taxpayers' money to sue Greenpeace is documented in an internal Department of Industry, Tourism & Resources (DITR) email obtained by the environmental group under Freedom of Information legislation.
The DITR email refers to a 2002 decision by the Federal Cabinet to provide SPP, the developer of the Stuart Shale Oil Project in Queensland, with a sales grant worth nearly $55 per barrel of shale oil or up to A$36.4 million annually.
Written by Marie Taylor, DITR manager for refining and fuels, the email states, "...the Government's decision to put this arrangement in place was made subject to SPP taking legal action against Greenpeace..."
The sales grant for exports was provided because SPP was unable to access a pre-existing subsidy for domestic sales as they could not find Australian buyers for their oil. SPP claimed this was due to Greenpeace's campaign against shale oil.
John Ryan, deputy secretary of the Australian Department of Industry, Tourism and Resources, was one of the email's recipients. (Photo courtesy Abare) "You might recall," wrote Taylor to John Hartwell, head of the DITR Resources Division, and John Ryan, DITR deputy secretary, "these arrangements were put in place to counter Greenpeace's activities which at the time resulted in SPP's inability to sell its product domestically." The email is dated May 19, 2003.
SPP managing director Jim McFarland said in March 2002 that the Greenpeace anti-shale oil campaign had deterred two Australian oil refiners from purchasing SPP oil produced by a demonstration plant. Because there were no domestic sales, federal government financial support was in jeopardy, he said.
"As a direct result of Greenpeace's threatening activities against its potential customers, SPP is being prevented from fully marketing its ultra low sulphur naphtha to Australian refiners," SPP said in a statement.
Confidential Cabinet documents leaked after the decision revealed that the Cabinet approved the multi-million dollar sales grant to SPP against the advice of all federal departments consulted, including Treasury, Environment Australia and Transport & Regional Services.
No legal action was taken against Greenpeace by SPP after the Cabinet decision.
Jeff Sandefer (center), a Texan equity fund manager who headed SPP, is faced with a Greenpeace protest on his way to a business meeting. (Photo courtesy Greenpeace Australia) Since 1998, Greenpeace has been campaigning to stop the development of shale oil, which it calls "the most greenhouse intensive of all fossil fuels."
In July, the environmental group claimed victory when Queensland Energy Resources announced it was ending oil development of the Stuart Shale Project.
Greenpeace climate campaigner Gareth Walton said "Just days before a federal election that John Howard himself said would be about trust, we have learnt that his government used taxpayers' money to incite an oil company to sue Greenpeace. I think most Australians will be appalled by this abuse of power and the blatant attempt by the government to silence a non-profit organization."
The Australian election is set for Saturday, October 9.
"Greenpeace is calling on the federal government to publicly release all documents, including Cabinet documents, relating to this decision," Walton said, "and we have also written to the Prime Minister, Minister [Ian] Macfarlane and the Department of Industry, Tourism and Resources seeking explanation."
Greenpeace is also calling on the Australian Labor Party, the Democrats and the Greens to initiate an inquiry into the matter when Parliament resumes after the election.
Shale oil is extracted from shale rock. Greenpeace was campaigning against the SP Project because of its social and environmental impacts, which include greenhouse gas emissions, dioxin releases, air and water pollution, and health impacts on local people.
----
Activists await US nuclear shipment to France
Oct 04, 2004
CHERBOURG, France (AFP)
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041004101044.90od5z9o.html
Anti-nuclear activists were waiting Monday for a shipment of military-grade plutonium headed to France which they have promised to protest to highlight the environmental threat that they believe it poses.
"The plutonium convoy looks likely to arrive tonight. It's not far away," a spokesman for the French anti-nuclear group Sortir du Nucleaire, Philippe Lemarechal, said.
"We are going to meet today to decide what action to take during the day," he said.
Two British-registered vessels carrying a shipment of 140 kilogramspounds) of plutonium from US weapons arsenals were expected to dock at the French port of Cherbourg after a two-week voyage from North Carolina on the east coast of the United States.
The plutonium is to be taken to the French nuclear reconditioning plant at La Hague, then sent to a facility in southern France to be recycled and eventually returned for civilian use in the United States.
Laurence Pernot, a spokeswoman for Areva, the French company treating the plutonium, refused to confirm exactly when the shipment would arrive, citing reasons of security.
French police Sunday arrested three Greenpeace activists who were in a flotilla protesting the shipment. Among those was a well-known French yachtsman, Eugene Riguidel, whose sailboat was impounded by the police.
They were due to be freed on Monday, according to Greenpeace, which staged a protest in Cherbourg to demand their release.
The environmental group has said that the long distances of road transport involved in handling the plutonium constituted a "considerable" risk, not least because the cargo's containers could easily be broken open by shoulder-launched rockets.
Cogema, the French state nuclear company, issued a statement rejecting the charges, saying the transport of plutonium was carried out with "all safety guarantees" and that the truck convoy would be unmarked to avoid attracting attention.
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We'll put to sea again, say protesters
Oct 4 2004
Western Mail (Wales)
http://icwales.icnetwork.co.uk/0100news/0200wales/tm_objectid=14715386%26method=full%26siteid=50082%26headline=we%2dll%2dput%2dto%2dsea%2dagain%2d%2dsay%2dprotesters-name_page.html
ANTI-NUCLEAR campaigners in Wales have vowed to launch more protest flotillas if British ships, like those carrying weapons-grade plutonium and heading for France, return to the Irish Sea.
Campaigners fear that if the journeys of the Pacific Pintail and the Pacific Teal to France are a success then it could lead to regular shipments of the fuel along the coast of Wales.
Armed, and guarded by British commandos, the two plutonium vessels arrived in Normandy yesterday after a voyage through the English Channel, the world's busiest shipping lane.
The boats are carrying 140kg of plutonium - enough to make 40 nuclear bombs - from US atomic missile warheads, and are headed to a reprocessing plant in South France.
Operated by the government-owned British Nuclear Fuels, the ships are the same two vessels which passed through the Irish Sea two years ago carrying a cargo of rejected plutonium waste from Japan to Sellafield.
Scores of campaigners from both Ireland and Wales - including Jim Corr of Irish band The Corrs - launched a protest flotilla to meet the ships as they passed, to highlight the hazards of transporting such fuel on the open sea.
Now campaigners say they will launch their boats again should the BNFL vessels return.
"It's absolute madness at a time of heightened terrorist threat to be considering transporting plutonium around the world in this way," said Andrew Clemence, of the Pembrokeshire Anti-Nuclear Alliance, which organised the protest flotilla.
"If it is a success, then it will encourage the commissioning of a Mox (Plutonium-mixed oxide) plant at Sellafield, leading to a worldwide trade in plutonium shipments and resulting in the Irish Sea becoming a main plutonium thoroughfare.
"I believe that the Irish Sea is already the most radioactive sea in the world and this trade would add to the dangers faced by people living along the coast should an accident or terrorist attack take place.
"If it goes ahead there's likely to be a protest every time a shipment takes place."
Gordon James, campaigner for Friends of the Earth Cymru, said, "It is a real cause for concern for people living along the western coast of Wales.
"I think if these type of cargoes were to return then there would be protests again.
"People are very concerned, particularly in this age when the threat of terrorism is paramount."
The Pacific Pintail and Pacific Teal docked at Cherbourg in Normandy over the weekend and were "welcomed" by a flotilla of French protest boats.
The two ships' cargo is now due to travel 800 miles overland by road through France to a nuclear reprocessing plant at Cadarache, where it will be converted for use as a commercial fuel.
If successful, the US is believed to want to transfer thousands more kilogrammes of former military plutonium to Europe.
Two years ago, the Pintail and the Teal were met by scores of boats from Wales and Ireland as they carried a cargo of rejected Mox fuel to Sellafield.
The 255kgs of weapons useable plutonium had originally been sent out to Japan from Sellafield in 1999 from BNFL.
However, it was discovered en route that safety data had been falsified and the Japanese government refused to accept it, demanding that it be returned home.
Jean McSorley of Greenpeace said regular shipments of spent nuclear material were already passing along the Irish Sea, which would prove extremely hazardous to the environment should an accident occur.
However, if a Mox plant were to be commissioned at Sellafield - a decision is due at the end of next year - she said there would likely be regular shipments of plutonium, which posed a greater terrorist threat.
----
Two held in French anti-nuclear protest
The Guardian
Owen Bowcott
October 4, 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/france/story/0,11882,1319081,00.html
A round-the-world yachting champion and a veteran Greenpeace activist were seized by police yesterday as they sailed into a military exclusion zone to protest at transatlantic shipments of decommissioned nuclear warheads.
The demonstration by a flotilla of dinghies in Cherbourg harbour came the day before the expected docking of two vessels laden with 125kg (275lb) of weapons-grade plutonium.
The material is being moved under a post-cold war agreement between the United States and Russia to recycle excess warheads into nuclear fuel. Greenpeace and other environmental groups have criticised the security precautions as inadequate and the transportation as unnecessary.
The two men arrested were Eugene Riguidel, a famous French yachtsman who won the 1980 Whitbread round the world race, and John Castle, from Guernsey. They were intercepted and detained by teams of gendarmes on inflatable dinghies. "They were arrested in the military arsenal," a Greenpeace nuclear campaigner, Shaun Burnie, said yesterday. "Their boat's sails were cut down with knives. We have a flotilla of 50 to 70 boats in the Channel and on along the French coast ready to join our protests."
The plutonium, sent by the US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), left the port of Charleston, South Carolina, on September 20. Its voyage is expected to take two weeks.
After being unloaded in Cherbourg, the plutonium will be driven more than 660 miles to a processing plant in south-east France operated by the state-owned nuclear company, Areva.
While the material is on the British-registered vessels, the Pacific Pintail and Pacific Teal, its security is the responsibility of the UK government. The Department of Trade and Industry yesterday confirmed that a detachment of armed officers from the UK Atomic Energy Authority constabulary was on board. The Ministry of Defence denied any of its units were involved.
Greenpeace alleges that the material will be vulnerable while crossing France. "French nuclear transports of plutonium are usually made in light banana trucks," Mr Burnie said. "The bigger issue is that Areva is hoping to expand plutonium use in Russia and the US. Efforts to control proliferation are being hijacked."
An NNSA spokesman said the material was being sent to the French plant because no such facility was available in the US. If the process was successful, a plant could be built in the US and no more plutonium sent overseas. Once converted into fuel rods, the plutonium could not be used in a nuclear weapon.
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