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NUCLEAR
China leading world in next generation of nuclear plants
U.S. Nuclear Cargo Draws Protests in France
Iran Says Its Missiles Can Now Reach 1,250 Miles
Iran's Hardline Parliament Wants Uranium Enrichment
US: No Prospect of Bargain on Iran Nukes
Iran adds to international concerns with missile, nuclear moves
U.N. CURBS Inspector's Report to Detail Iraqi Plans
N. Korea says U..S rights law makes talks meaningless
S Korea demands end to controversy over its nuclear tests
US, Brazil Predict End to Brazil's UN Nuke Dispute
Al Qaeda leader identified in 'dirty bomb' plot
Agency lost money on equipment, audit says
MILITARY
Fearful Choice for Afghan Women: To Vote or Not to Vote
Afghan City Is Calmed, U.S. Reports
Taipei worries EU might lift ban on arms to China
BAE chief linked to slush fund for Saudi royals: BBC
The HMCS Chicoutimi, Canada's rebaptized British submarine
Bremer Criticizes Troop Levels
Iraqi President condemns US air assaults
Car Bombs Kill at Least 22 in Iraq
At Least 26 Die as 3 Car Bombs Explode in Iraq
Bremer Criticizes Troop Levels
Rumsfeld Sees Retaking of Samarra as Model
Iraqi Premier Gives Sobering Account of Insurgency
Bremer Says U.S. Was Short on Troops for Occupation of Iraq
Israel Blunts Uprising's Impact
Israeli Missile Strike Kills 2 Senior Figures in Islamic Jihad
Ukraine membership of NATO important: US official
Civilian Craft Rises Above
NASA Awards Contracts for Rescue of Hubble
Goss Pick Withdraws From CIA Consideration
Aide Declines a Top C.I.A. Post After Questions
London Ex-Policeman Sentenced for Spying
Israeli Ex-Aide to McGreevey Avoids Investigators From U.S.
Army Charges 4 Soldiers In Death of Iraqi General
Army Charges 4 Soldiers With Murder
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Justices Show Inclination to Scrap Sentencing Rules
Senators Offer New Oversight Structure
Senate Leans to a Powerful Intelligence Chief
Patriot Act terror protection
Report Details FBI's Changed Priorities
City Challenged on Fingerprinting Protesters
U.S. Defends Detentions
POLITICS
Tax-Cut Bill Draws White House Doubts
Partisan Politics at Work
Rumsfeld Sees Lack of Proof for Qaeda-Hussein Link
The Nuclear Bomb That Wasn't
Impact From the Shadows
OTHER
St. Helens Continues To Rumble
Kerry Calls Stem Cell Policy Unscientific and Political
Lead Levels in Water Misrepresented
ACTIVISTS
Greenpeacers Blockade Plutonium Transport Road in France
Activists held ahead of nuclear shipment
U.S. Nuclear Cargo Draws Protests in France
Aristide backers protest in capital
Dear Mike, Iraq sucks
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- china
China leading world in next generation of nuclear plants
AFP
Oct 5, 2004
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20041005/sc_afp/china_nuclear_041005042309
BEIJING (AFP) - Facing enormous demand for electricity, China is to build dozens of nuclear plants in the next half century and is at the forefront of efforts to develop the next generation of safer, more efficient reactors.
With China set to become the world's biggest market for atomic power in the future, top nuclear scientists from around the world gathered in Beijing during the end of September to discuss the development of the sector.
Due to huge energy needs spurred by its booming economy and an environment choking on fossil fuels like coal, China has ambitious plans to build up to 30 nuclear reactors using existing technology by 2020.
In the longer-term, up to 2050, China hopes to have up to 300 gigawatts of nuclear-generated capacity that will largely usher in a fourth generation reactor design that on paper is safer, more efficient and more secure against proliferation, scientists at the symposium sponsored by Tsinghua University said.
China and South Africa are leading the world in the development of the next generation of reactors, with both nations enjoying full government backing and tremendous cooperation with international nuclear engineers.
Both have plans to build 160 megawatt demonstration pebble bed modular reactors -- high temperature gas reactors -- by 2010 in the hopes of eventually commercializing the technology and bring electricity and modern lifestyles to communities throughout China and Africa.
"China's plans for nuclear power are very ambitious and very aggressive," Andrew Kadak, former president of the American Nuclear Society and a leading nuclear researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (news - web sites), told AFP.
"China desperately needs energy. If the pebble bed reactor can fill this tremendous need and demonstrate that it is safe, this will be very significant for the future of nuclear power."
The reactor is theoretically "meltdown proof" which means that accidents like the Chernobyl nuclear disaster could be avoided, while the cost of the reactors should fall significantly as multiple safety systems and expensive pressure domes will not have to be built, he said.
The "inherent safety" of the reactors stems from the helium gas coolant used in the reactors and the fuel, which is formed by encasing uranium oxide in round balls or pebble-shaped silicon carbide and graphite shells.
The spent fuel will be much harder to process into weapons-grade uranium and will be much easier to dispose of than the traditional-style water-cooled reactor fuel rods, Kadak said.
"People are very excited to finally have this kind of technology, now we need to see if it can be built on an industrial scale."
"If this technology proves to be economically efficient and safe, then China will be on track to set up a standardized cookie-cutter-type production process where they could build as many as they need," Kadak said.
As China and South Africa forge ahead, Western nations like the United States and Germany are hampered by regulations on building new reactors, while France and Japan have already met their electrical needs through existing reactors, scientists said.
China and Japan currently operate the world's only two experimental high temperature gas reactors.
"Nuclear power development in China is very rapid. In Japan we had similar development 30 or 40 years ago and we had many problems. China will meet similar problems," Nozumu Fujimoto, senior researcher at the Japan Atomic Energy Institute, told AFP.
"To build a big pebble bed reactor, there are no fundamental problems, but other problems could arrive.
"This is the same for every technology, especially as you scale up in size... There are a lot of areas where problems could arise."
The safe production of the fuel spheres and their storage or disposal will also pose challenges for China, Fujimoto said.
China would have to build at least three 160 megawatt pebble bed reactors and the fuel needed for them before the technology could fully prove itself as economically efficient and safe, he said.
The modular structure of the pebble bed reactor further means that the reactors will be produced in a factory and not on site as with traditional light and heavy water reactors, said Regis Matzie, a Westinghouse engineer.
"The pebble bed modular reactor will be built in a stable environment in a factory, with highly trained workers," meaning that errors in construction will be reduced and construction costs reduced.
-------- europe
U.S. Nuclear Cargo Draws Protests in France
October 5, 2004
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/05/international/europe/05france.html?pagewanted=all&position=
PARIS, Oct. 4 - France is poised to take possession of 300 pounds of weapons-grade plutonium from the United States for reprocessing into fuel, an operation that its opponents contend creates a risk of nuclear terrorism.
Two vessels carrying the volatile cargo from South Carolina were expected to dock secretly at a secure area of the French port of Cherbourg as early as Monday night.
From there, the cargo - enough to make 20 nuclear bombs - is to be taken to a secure plant at nearby La Hague. It will then be loaded onto armored, unmarked trucks and escorted by French security forces to a factory 700 miles away at the southeastern town of Cadarache, where it will be turned into fuel for nuclear reactors.
The project to turn weapons-grade plutonium into fuel was initiated by President Bill Clinton with an agreement with Russia in September 2000 to neutralize 34 tons of plutonium from American and Russian weapons dating from the cold war.
But that was before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks heightened concerns about the risks of other terrorist attacks, even nuclear-related terrorism. Islamic militants have openly expressed their desire to secure material to make a nuclear weapon, and have even discussed stealing or attacking plutonium shipments in France. Critics say it would be far wiser merely to bury the nuclear material in the United States than to ship it long distances for reprocessing.
For France, money is the main motive for this operation. Areva, the state-owned giant nuclear power company, will fabricate the plutonium into mixed-oxide fuel rods and ship them back to the United States. If the process goes well, Areva will build a fabrication plant in South Carolina. The entire deal could be worth more than $250 million, an Areva official said.
For the United States, the deal is a convenient way to get another country to reprocess the fuel for nonmilitary uses, which it lacks the technology to do itself. It is the first time the United States is sending weapons-grade material abroad.
It is also a remarkable display of Franco-American cooperation at a time when President Bush continues to criticize France for its opposition to the American-led war in Iraq.
Mr. Bush said Friday at a campaign stop in Pennsylvania that "the use of troops to defend America must never be subject to the veto of a country like France." The remark prompted France to register an official protest with the White House, French officials said.
By contrast, France's economy minister - and a presidential hopeful - Nicolas Sarkozy on Friday described the atmosphere between the United States and France as "more serene" after he left a meeting in Washington with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.
Nonproliferation and environmental experts say transporting weapons-usable nuclear material is an unnecessarily risky operation.
"Here the United States is telling the whole world that the greatest threat to our security is nuclear terrorism and we must keep nuclear-weapon material out of hands of terrorists," said Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control in Washington. "And here we are shipping this stuff around for no good reason. Just dispose of it - embed it in concrete, bury it."
Mr. Milhollin and other nonproliferation and environmental experts contend that even if the plutonium is well guarded by troops, it could be hijacked or diverted by terrorists or criminals.
The transport of the fabricated mixed oxide fuel rods back to the United States will also be unsafe, because they will still contain usable plutonium that could be extracted later, Mr. Milhollin said.
Antinuclear activists have gathered at Cherbourg in recent days to protest the imminent arrival of the two British-registered vessels carrying the plutonium sent by the National Nuclear Security Administration, an arm of the Energy Department.
On Sunday, the French police arrested three activists with the environmental group Greenpeace who were in a flotilla protesting the shipment. One was Eugène Riguidel, a French round-the-world yachting champion whose sailboat was impounded by the police. The protesters were released Monday.
Greenpeace charges that carrying the plutonium on a long overland trip constitutes a "considerable" risk, and that the cargo's containers could be blasted open with shoulder-launched rockets.
To prove the vulnerability of such shipments, Greenpeace has tracked convoys and posted license plates and itineraries on its Web site. In February 2003, the organization blocked a convoy carrying about 300 pounds of plutonium in the eastern French city of Chalon-sur-Saône.
But the American and French governments, as well as Areva, a giant holding company created in 2001 to consolidate the country's nuclear activities, have rejected charges that the operation is unsafe.
France has long been a depository and fabrication center for spent nuclear fuel and plutonium from foreign sources, including Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and Japan.
"Areva has traveled more than one million kilometers for the past 15 years without a radiological incident," said Patrick Germain, an Areva spokesman.
In its licensing submissions before the operation was approved, the Energy Department called the French transportation methods "comparable to those used in the U.S. for land transportation."
But opponents of the practice say that the transport of weapons-usable plutonium is unsafe in the United States as well.
The clash between the advocates and opponents of the current operation underscores the tension between two geo-strategic goals: a determination by the United States after the cold war that American and Russian stockpiles of military-grade plutonium should be reduced, and the concern after the Sept. 11 attacks about protecting the world against nuclear terrorism.
In a letter to Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham in August, Representative Jim Turner of Texas, the ranking Democrat on the House Select Committee on Homeland Security, lauded the agreement between the United States and Russia, but added, "In the post-Sept. 11 environment, it is also crucial to ensure that the transportation of special nuclear materials is adequately secured from theft or diversion by terrorists."
In defending the operation, Hervé Ladsous, the spokesman for the French Foreign Ministry, described it as a nonproliferation initiative, saying, "France brings its support to American and Russian efforts to reduce their military plutonium declared in excess of their defense needs."
Ariane Bernard contributed reporting for this article.
-------- iran
Iran Says Its Missiles Can Now Reach 1,250 Miles
By REUTERS
October 5, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iran-missile.html
TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran has increased the range of its missiles to 1,250 miles, a senior official was quoted as saying on Tuesday, putting parts of Europe within reach for the first time.
Military experts had earlier put Iran's missile range at 810 miles, which would allow it to strike anywhere in Israel.
``Now we have the power to launch a missile with a 2,000 km (1,250 mile) range,'' the news agency IRNA quoted influential former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani as saying. ``Iran is determined to improve its military capabilities.''
``If the Americans attack Iran, the world will change ... they will not dare to make such a mistake,'' Rafsanjani was quoted as saying in a speech at an exhibition on Space and Stable National Security.
Washington has accused Tehran of secretly developing nuclear weapons.
Iran insists its nuclear program is aimed only at generating electricity. It says its missiles are for defensive purposes and would be used to counter a possible Israeli or U.S. strike against its nuclear facilities.
``The United States has had, and continues to have, serious concerns about Iran's missile programs,'' State Department spokesman Adam Ereli told reporters.
``We view Iran's efforts to further develop its missile capabilities as a threat to the region and to the United States interests, and all the more so in light of its ongoing nuclear program.''
Ereli declined to say whether Washington believed the Iranian official's 1,250 mile range claim, saying he could not discuss intelligence matters.
UPGRADE
In recent months, Iranian officials have frequently trumpeted their ability to strike back at any aggressor, and in August they announced they had successfully tested an upgraded version of the medium-range Shahab-3 missile.
Military experts say the unmodified Shahab-3 had a range of 810 miles. Shahab means meteor in Persian.
While Iran has had Israel in its missile sights for some time, Israeli officials said the longer 1,250 mile range was more significant for Europe than for Israel.
``We are well prepared to defend the state of Israel ... The Iranians will have to think twice before using these kinds of weapons,'' a senior Israeli government said.
Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani said last month that a new ``strategic missile'' had recently been delivered to the armed forces, but did not give its range.
Israel has long accused Iran of working on a long-range missile, the Shahab-4, which would be able to reach Europe. Iran denies any plans to build a Shahab-4 missile.
Tehran recently announced plans to launch its own satellite into space next year. Military experts say a satellite launch rocket could easily be adapted for military purposes.
``We are very happy that our defense ministry ... will take us to the stage that we are able to use independent satellite technology in the fields of building, launching, positioning and receiving,'' Rafsanjani said.
----
Iran's Hardline Parliament Wants Uranium Enrichment
By REUTERS
October 5, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iran-nuclear-parliament.html
TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran's conservative-dominated parliament has prepared a bill which would force the government to resume uranium enrichment, a process that can be used for making an atomic bomb, state radio said on Tuesday.
Parliament's Foreign Affairs and National Security Commission approved the draft which calls on the government to continue developing a civilian nuclear program, which Washington says is a cover to make nuclear bombs.
``This bill obliges the government to seek peaceful nuclear technology including the control of nuclear fuel cycle,'' radio quoted Kazem Jalali, spokesman of the commission, as saying.
The bill reflects a new political climate in Iran where religious hard-liners now firmly have the upper hand over the pro-reform allies of moderate President Mohammad Khatami since conservatives won parliamentary polls in February.
Government officials have said Iran will have no choice but to resume uranium enrichment should parliament approve the bill.
The U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has urged Iran to abandon uranium enrichment and has threatened to take tough actions if Tehran continues to defy the agency's call.
Washington wants Iran sent to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions.
Iran insists its nuclear program is solely geared to producing atomic power, not bombs.
The bill, which lawmakers say has been backed by 238 out of parliament's 290 members, will be discussed by the full house in the coming days. If passed as expected, the bill has to be approved by the Guardian Council, a hardline overseeing body, before becoming law.
``This bill will surely be passed. It is our right to pursue peaceful nuclear technology,'' Alaeddin Boroujerdi, head of the commission, told Reuters.
International pressure forced Iran last year to agree to snap checks of its nuclear sites and to halt the enrichment of uranium.
But while Iran has not enriched any uranium, it has begun processing raw uranium to prepare it for enrichment.
Boroujerdi said Iran has been trying to assure the international community about its nuclear ambitions by allowing ``anytime and anywhere'' inspections of the IAEA.
``They should not force us to go toward pulling out of the Non-Proliferation Treaty,'' he said. ``Enjoying peaceful nuclear technology is our legitimate right.''
----
CORRECTED:
US: No Prospect of Bargain on Iran Nukes
By REUTERS
October 5, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iran-nuclear-usa.html
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The United States sees no reason to offer Iran incentives to ensure its nuclear program remains peaceful, a U.S. government official said on Tuesday.
European states want the United States to make such proposals to Tehran after the Nov. 2 U.S. presidential election to add weight to efforts by Britain, France and Germany to reach an accord with Iran and avoid a U.N. Security Council showdown.
``At this point a grand bargain is not where we are heading,'' said the official, who requested anonymity.
He was referring to suggestions that Washington offer Iran economic and political inducements to halt activities which Washington suspects are aimed at making the atom bomb.
``We haven't seen any Iranian recognition thatis in their interest,'' the official, in Brussels for talks with EU and Canadian officials on managing the challenge of Iran, told reporters.
But he said the United States would closely follow at any future signs that Tehran could respond positively to an offer.
``That would be a new factor we would look at very seriously. We don't have that now,'' he said.
Hardliners in the Bush administration have made it clear they would oppose offering any incentives to Tehran.
Iran has rebuffed a proposal by U.S. presidential candidate John Kerry to supply the Islamic state with nuclear fuel for power reactors if it gives up its own fuel-making capability.
Iran could be referred to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions if its cooperation is seen as insufficient at a Nov. 25 board meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog.
The talks launched by Britain, France and Germany have yielded disappointing results. There has been alarm at Iran's announcement last month that it had begun processing raw uranium for enrichment, a possible route to the bomb.
The U.S. official said there was a need to define a common approach to Iran between the United States and Europe but said it was not clear how that could be achieved at the moment.
``How do you ... elicit from Iran a readiness to engage? I don't know the answer and I don't think the Europeans do either,'' he said.
--------
Iran adds to international concerns with missile, nuclear moves
(AFP)
Oct 5, 2004
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20041005/wl_afp/iran_nuclear_iaea_041005153817
TEHRAN - Iran gave cause for fresh international alarm as a top regime official announced the Islamic republic had boosted the range of its ballistic missiles and hardline MPs backed a move to defy the UN's nuclear watchdog.
"Today, we have the power to send our missiles up to 2,000 kilometres (1,240 miles)," former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani was quoted as saying Tuesday by the official news agency IRNA.
He further cautioned that "experts know that once a country has made such a step, all further steps are accessible", while boasting that "if we had not limited our progress, we would have been even more advanced."
On August 11, Iran tested an upgraded version of its Shahab-3 missile, which experts believe is based on a North Korean design.
Previous figures had put the missile's range at between 1,300 and 1,700 kilometres, already bringing arch-enemy Israel and US bases in the region well within range.
Last month Iran showed off its array of ballistic missiles draped in banners vowing to "crush America" and "wipe Israel off the map".
While the country has announced it has upgraded the Shahab-3, it has denied it is working on a Shahab-4 -- a device that would involve a two-stage propulsion system and possibly bring many European capitals within range.
Steady progress made by Iran's ballistic missile programme is a major cause of concern for Israel as well as European countries and the United States, which are already alarmed over the country's suspect nuclear activities.
And the duration of Iran's cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was also thrown into question on Tuesday.
Top deputies in the hardline-controlled parliament gave preliminary approval of a bill aimed at forcing Iran's reformist government to resume uranium enrichment.
Depending on the level of purification, enriched uranium can be used as either as fuel for a civilian reactor or as the explosive core of a nuclear bomb.
Under IAEA pressure, Iran suspended enrichment in October last year.
According to IRNA, the move surmounted its first legislative hurdle after winning the backing of parliament's foreign affairs and national security committee.
If eventually passed by a Majlis vote and rubber-stamped by legislative watchdogs, the government would be forced to resume enrichment -- a step almost certain to see Iran referred to the UN Security Council.
But many analysts say parliament's move is more a case of posturing and a means of raising the stakes in the standoff with the IAEA. Perhaps tellingly, the bill was not prioritised for immediate debate in the assembly.
The enrichment suspension was part of an October 2003 deal with the three main European powers -- Britain, France and Germany. But the accord has since come under pressure, with Iran pressing on with work on other parts of the nuclear fuel cycle.
Iran says it only wants to generate electricity, and emphasises that enrichment is permitted under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) -- the treaty overseen by the IAEA -- if for peaceful purposes.
But the IAEA's board on September 18 passed another resolution calling on Iran to widen the suspension to include all uranium enrichment-related activities -- such as making centrifuges, converting yellowcake into UF6 feed gas, and constructing a heavy water reactor.
Iran, facing a November 25 deadline, has so far rejected the demands but has urged more negotiations. Top officials have also warned that if referred to the Security Council, Iran would halt its cooperation with IAEA inspectors.
Israel charges that the clerical regime could have a nuclear warhead by 2007 has led to speculation that the Jewish state -- currently believed to be the only nuclear-armed nation in the Middle East -- may launch a pre-emptive strike against Iran's nuclear facilities.
But Rafsanjani, who now heads the Expediency Council, Iran's top political arbitration body, said not even the Americans would dare attack.
"The United States and the Zionist regime are our enemies, but given their past experience, the United States knows that they should not engage themselves in a dangerous conflict with us," he said.
-------- iraq / inspections
U.N. CURBS Inspector's Report to Detail Iraqi Plans to Undermine Sanctions and Produce Illicit Arms
October 5, 2004
New York Times
By DOUGLAS JEHL
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/05/politics/05weapons.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Oct. 4 - A report to be made public on Wednesday by the top American weapons inspector in Iraq will outline new details of attempts by Saddam Hussein's government to undermine United Nations sanctions as part of a plan to produce illicit weapons if those sanctions were lifted, Bush administration officials said Monday.
The report by the arms inspector, Charles A. Duelfer, will make clear that Iraq did not possess stockpiles of illicit weapons at the time of the American invasion in 2003, and that it had not begun any large-scale program for weapons production by the time of the invasion, the officials said. Those findings had previously been reported, based on an early draft of the document.
Mr. Duelfer's conclusion that Iraq clearly intended to produce illicit weapons if the sanctions were lifted had also been previously reported. But the final version of the document, in making that case, describes new evidence of concerted Iraqi efforts to bypass the sanctions while they were still in place and to undermine international support for them, the administration officials said.
That evidence is expected to be figure prominently in efforts by the administration to cast the report in a favorable light. With Election Day less than a month away, the White House has been seeking to persuade voters that the war in Iraq was justified even though the weapons stockpiles it cited as the main rationale for the invasion now do not appear to have existed.
Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, has portrayed President Bush's decision to invade Iraq as "a colossal error of judgment."
In an appearance in Atlanta on Friday, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell provided what other officials described Monday as a preview of how the White House and other agencies would depict the new report.
Mr. Powell said the report by Mr. Duelfer would make "very, very clear" that "what Saddam Hussein was trying to do was to break out of the sanctions" imposed by the United Nations. "He was trying to break the sanctions, not for the purpose of applying to be Soldier of the Month, but for the purpose of going back and developing these kinds of weapons," Mr. Powell said.
The final version of the 1,500-page report is now circulating within the government, and it was described by three administration officials who have seen it or been briefed on its contents. The officials said the document did not describe any specific plan by Mr. Hussein to build chemical, biological or nuclear weapons once sanctions were lifted, but did include what they described as significant new disclosures about Iraqi efforts to subvert the sanctions and to whittle away international support for them. The officials said the evidence went well beyond longstanding American accusations that Iraq was seeking to evade the sanctions, but they declined to provide details.
The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity, and were guarded in their comments, saying they had not been authorized to speak about the report until Mr. Duelfer makes it public in Congressional testimony scheduled for Wednesday. In a television interview on Sunday, Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, said she would "argue to this day" that Mr. Hussein had posed a threat to the United States even though prewar intelligence reports now appear to have been mistaken in asserting that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons and was reconstituting its nuclear program.
Ms. Rice did not specifically mention Mr. Duelfer's report, but she said the threat posed by Mr. Hussein had been magnified "with sanctions breaking down, with many states ready to help Saddam Hussein come out of those sanctions."
She cited an article by Mahdi Obeidi, a former Iraqi nuclear scientist and the author of a new book, "The Bomb in My Garden: the Secrets of Saddam's Nuclear Mastermind," who wrote in an Op-Ed article in The New York Times on Sept. 26 saying that "our nuclear program could have been reinstituted at the snap of Saddam Hussein's fingers."
"When you're confronting that kind of threat, you're best to go after it before it is too late, and I stand by the decision firmly today," Ms. Rice said in the interview, on the ABC News program "This Week."
The report by Mr. Duelfer is to be by far the most comprehensive in a series of updates issued by American inspectors in Iraq since a team known as the Iraq Survey Group began work there in June 2003. The new report is not intended as a final accounting, government officials have said, but it will provide the most detailed picture yet of what the inspectors have unearthed in an effort to understand where Iraq's illicit program stood when the war began.
In general terms, government officials have said, in describing an earlier draft of the document, the report will largely uphold earlier findings, issued in October 2003 by David A. Kay, the first chief weapons inspector, and then in March 2004 by Mr. Duelfer, who replaced Mr. Kay in January 2004. Those findings include no evidence that Iraq had chemical or biological weapons or was reconstituting its nuclear weapons, as well as no evidence of a continuing large-scale effort to produce illicit weapons, the officials have said.
But Mr. Duelfer will point to indications that Iraq maintained the ability to resume weapons production, as well as to new evidence that the Iraqi Intelligence Service used clandestine laboratories to manufacture small quantities of chemical and biological weapons, although probably for use in assassinations, not to inflict mass casualties.
The administration officials who spoke Monday said the final draft of the report included those findings as well as what they described as the new evidence that Mr. Hussein's government was trying to undermine the United Nations sanctions as part of a longer-term plan to resume weapons production. The officials said the report included new information about efforts by Iraq to bypass the sanctions and to undermine international support for them, but did not spell out any precise Iraqi plan on how it might resume weapons production once they were lifted.
-------- korea
N. Korea says U..S rights law makes talks meaningless
(Reuters)
By Paul Eckert
Oct 5, 2004
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=6411778&pageNumber=1
SEOUL - A law urging more human rights in North Korea passed unanimously by the U.S. Congress showed nuclear talks were meaningless because America was "hell-bent" on toppling the communist state, the North's foreign ministry said.
The North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004, which cleared its final legislative hurdle in Washington on Monday, "rendered the dialogue and negotiations for solving the nuclear issue meaningless", said the North Korean Foreign Ministry.
"This has deprived the DPRK of any justification to deal with the U.S., to say nothing of the reason for holding the six-party talks for settling the nuclear issue," the ministry said in an overnight statement published by the official KCNA news agency.
North Korea, whose official title is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), has kept the world guessing about whether it intends to attend another round of talks on its nuclear ambitions with the United States, China, Japan, Russia and South Korea.
The parties to talks aimed at ending a two-year impasse over its nuclear programmes failed to hold a planned fourth round of negotiations in September.
The North is being urged to scrap all its nuclear programmes in exchange for security guarantees and energy aid.
With Democratic challenger John Kerry differing with President George W. Bush on calls for direct talks with North Korea, analysts say Pyongyang is awaiting the result of next month's U.S. presidential election.
"NO TOLERANCE"
U.S. Ambassador to South Korea Christopher Hill said North Korea should not wait for the election.
"I think they need to understand that whoever is elected president, there is absolutely no tolerance for dealing with a country that maintains nuclear weapons programmes," Hill said in a speech in Seoul on Tuesday.
"I would hope that they would not waste more time and would figure out a way to negotiate it," he said.
The foreign ministry repeated a frequent North Korean threat to accelerate its arms build-up, saying the human rights law gave Pyongyang "no option but to put spurs to increasing the deterrent force to counter the U.S. by force to the last".
"It is nothing strange that the U.S. is hell bent on its hostile Korea policy," KCNA said.
Last week, North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Choe Su-hon reiterated that his country had weaponised the fuel from 8,000 reprocessed spent fuel rods that experts say could raise Pyongyang's nuclear cache from one or two bombs to eight.
The North Korean human rights legislation unanimously passed the U.S. House of Representatives in July and cleared the Senate unopposed with slight revisions two months later. Monday's House approval of the revisions prepares the act for Bush's signature.
The legislation calls for the expansion of human rights for North Korea's 22 million citizens and allots funds to support refugees who have fled hunger and repression in the North.
The North Korean Foreign Ministry denounced the law as "full of anti-DPRK poisonous clauses".
Last month, British Foreign Office minister Bill Rammell returned from a trip to North Korea saying government officials had said Pyongyang put a lower priority on human rights than the West.
Rammell said he urged Pyongyang to allow a visit by the U.N. special rapporteur for North Korea to investigate persistent reports of vast forced labour camps, torture and other abuses.
-----
S Korea demands end to controversy over its nuclear tests
(AFP)
Oct 5, 2004
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20041005/wl_asia_afp/skorea_nuclear_iaea_041005084051
SEOUL, - South Korea has called for an early end to controversy over its secret nuclear experiments, saying this is hindering efforts to stop North Korea's nuclear weapons drive.
Unification Minister Chung Dong-Young expressed the wish in a meeting with Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Chung's office said.
ElBaradei is in Seoul to attend an anti-nuclear weapons forum while his inspectors are investigating Seoul's unauthorized experiments to produce plutonium and enriched uranium -- essential ingredients for atomic bombs.
South Korea insists the lab experiments were purely for scientific purposes, not linked to nuclear weapons programs, but IAEA inspectors last month visited the country twice and are expected to visit again soon.
ElBaradei has expressed "serious concern" about South Korea's nuclear activities. The Vienna-based UN watchdog will hold a meeting of its board of directors in November to determine whether the matter ought to be referred to the UN Security Council.
"We hope the case will be closed at the IAEA meeting of directors in November and will not be referred to the UN Security Council," Chung told the IAEA chief, his office said.
Chung warned that a further delay in resolving the case would affect talks to end the two-year impasse over North Korea's nuclear ambitions.
"It's up to the meeting but we will do our utmost to avoid (having the case being referred to the UN)," ElBaradei was quoted as saying.
The UN watchdog wants South Korea to come clean about its past unauthorized nuclear experiments and not to repeat its mistake.
The case has embarrassed the United States and South Korea when they are trying, through six-party talks, to pressure Stalinist North Korea to end its nuclear weapons drive.
North Korea refused to take part in a fourth round of the multilateral talks, scheduled for last month, blaming what it called hostile US policy and the secret nuclear experiments.
The North's attitude prompted South Korea to make a fresh pledge that it would not develop or possess nuclear weapons and would pursue research transparently.
South Korea said its scientists produced 150 kilograms (330 pounds) of uranium metal in 1982 in undeclared activities and a small amount of that was used in 2000 to produce a microscopic amount of enriched uranium.
The scientists also admitted to having extracted a miniscule amount of plutonium from 2.5 kilograms of fuel rods in secret research in 1982.
South Korea has the world's sixth-largest civilian nuclear industry, operating 19 power plants that produce 40 percent of the country's energy needs.
-------- latinamerica
US, Brazil Predict End to Brazil's UN Nuke Dispute
(Reuters)
By Saul Hudson
Oct 5, 2004
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=6423048
BRASILIA, Brazil - The United States and Brazil predicted on Tuesday Latin America's largest country would resolve a dispute with the U.N. nuclear watchdog over inspections of a uranium enrichment plant.
Secretary of State Colin Powell and his Brazilian counterpart, Celso Amorim, said the International Atomic Energy Agency would likely strike a deal to monitor the Resende plant, where enrichment can only begin with the body's approval.
The United States believes Brazil wants only peaceful nuclear power programs. But it has pressed its ally to compromise and avoid setting an example to Iran and North Korea, which it believes have defied the IAEA to develop bombs.
This month, the watchdog will send a team to Brazil but it is unclear if it will win access to see the plant's machines, known as centrifuges, that purify uranium by spinning at supersonic speeds. Brazil says it wants to keep technology it has developed secret for commercial reasons.
"I think we're now quickly reaching an accord on the Resende plant," Amorim said in a joint news conference in Brazil's capital, adding he had spoken to the IAEA about preparations for the mission.
On his first visit to Brazil as the top U.S. diplomat, Powell said: "I think these issues are resolvable ... I do not believe that whatever arrangement the IAEA and Brazil come to would in any way give either Iran or North Korea additional bargaining power with the IAEA."
Brazil's case and its impact on negotiations with Iran and North Korea -- nations President Bush bracketed with prewar Iraq in an "axis of evil" -- is sensitive for Americans worried about militant groups getting a nuclear weapon.
Bush and his challenger for the White House Sen. John Kerry have said nuclear proliferation is the No. 1 risk for the United States.
The IAEA inspections also touch a nerve with Brazil, which has the world's fourth largest reserve of uranium and has balked at any suggestion it is under suspicion of seeking a nuclear weapon.
Enrichment is a process of purifying uranium for use as fuel in nuclear power plants or in weapons.
Henry Sokolski, head of the Washington-based think-tank, the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, criticized Washington for dismissing fears over possible Brazilian proliferation.
There was a risk the plant would be an economic failure and create the temptation for sales of its technology, he said.
"Of course, there's a proliferation concern. It's not immediate, but down the road you have to be worried," he said. (Additional reporting by Andrew Hay)
-------- terrorism
Al Qaeda leader identified in 'dirty bomb' plot
October 05, 2004
By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20041005-013052-7047r.htm
A top al Qaeda cell leader spotted in Mexico and Canada has been identified as an active player in a scheme to obtain radioactive materials for a so-called "dirty bomb" that could be smuggled into the United States, federal authorities said.
Adnan G. El Shukrijumah, who worshipped at the same South Florida mosque as Jose Padilla - now being held as an enemy combatant in a plot to detonate a "dirty bomb" - has attempted unsuccessfully to enter the United States using phony passports, authorities said.
The al Qaeda leader reportedly was observed last year during a trip to Canada, where authorities suspect he posed as a student at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. An FBI informant told authorities the terrorist leader was seeking material to build a dirty bomb - a conventional explosive laced with radioactive material.
McMaster University has a five-megawatt research reactor, whose uranium-based fuel rods come from the United States. Canadian officials have denied any security breach of the McMaster facility.
Authorities said El Shukrijumah lived in the same South Florida area as Padilla and that the two worshipped at the Darul Aloom mosque. It is not clear whether they knew each other, but authorities said their names surfaced during the interrogation of captured senior al Qaeda organizer Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, one of Osama bin Laden's closest advisers.
Mohammed has been called a mastermind of the September 11 attacks.
Meanwhile, a seven-count indictment unsealed yesterday in Boston accused a British man of conspiring with Richard C. Reid to use shoe bombs to blow up airplanes. Saajid Badat, 25, was charged with attempted murder and trying to destroy an aircraft. The indictment said bomb components similar to Reid's were found at his home.
El Shukrijumah, for whom the State Department has offered a $5 million reward, is being sought for questioning by the FBI in connection with terrorist threats against the United States. He was named in a March 2003 material-witness arrest warrant by prosecutors in Northern Virginia, where U.S. Attorney Paul J. McNulty said he is sought as a potential terrorism threat.
Known to law enforcement officials as the "diminutive terrorist" because of his 5-foot-4-inch stature, El Shukrijumah also is believed by authorities to have met with alien smugglers in Mexico and Honduras, seeking help in bringing al Qaeda members illegally into the United States.
Authorities said those meetings involved members of the Mara Salvatrucha gang, which U.S. immigration officials said has smuggled hundreds of Central and South Americans - mostly gang members - into the United States.
They said El Shukrijumah was spotted in July in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, meeting with leaders of the gang, which has been tied to alien, drug and weapons smuggling, along with numerous killings, robberies, burglaries, carjackings, extortions, rapes and aggravated assaults - including at least seven killings in Virginia.
Padilla, a Muslim convert also known as Abdullah al Muhajir, was arrested by FBI agents on a material witness warrant in May 2002 at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport after a flight from Pakistan. He was carrying $10,000 in U.S. currency from his al Qaeda handlers.
El Shukrijumah also was friends in Florida with Imran Mandhai, one of two college students convicted of conspiring unsuccessfully to bomb electrical stations, a National Guard armory, Jewish businesses and Mount Rushmore.
Authorities said El Shukrijumah also is believed to have taken part in or directed surveillance efforts by al Qaeda members of the financial districts in New York - which led this summer to an increase in the terror alert level from Code Yellow to Code Orange in New York City, Washington D.C., and Newark, N.J.
They said there were specific threats against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in the District, the Prudential Building in Newark, and Citigroup and the Stock Exchange in New York City.
An FBI bulletin in March said El Shukrijumah was born in Saudi Arabia, although the Saudi government has denied that he is a Saudi citizen.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- nevada
Agency lost money on equipment, audit says
October 05, 2004
By STEVE TETREAULT
Las Vegas Review-Journal
http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2004/Oct-05-Tue-2004/news/24917200.html
WASHINGTON -- The Department of Energy in 2003 gave away 1,300 pieces of equipment no longer needed at Yucca Mountain, including a refurbished rock-boring machine and thousands of tons of iron and steel that could have raised more than $450,000 for the financially strapped nuclear waste project, federal auditors said.
A conveyer belt feeder that was never used and a generator listed as new were among the items turned over to a disposal contractor rather than sold at auction or offered to other federal agencies through normal procedures.
A refurbished rock-boring machine called a roadheader valued at $792,000 was put up for sale on the Internet by the contractor, who advertised it as being "in very good condition with only 165 hours of use."
Disposal of property estimated to carry a potential value of $1.75 million was detailed in a Sept. 27 report by the Energy Department inspector general that was made public Monday.
Auditors estimated the department lost $458,000 from "poor property management practices" when it rid itself of excess inventory after completing site studies for the proposed nuclear waste repository.
The department gave the contractor about 9,000 metric tons of property, "and the government received no monetary benefit from the sale of potentially reusable property," auditors said.
"With the uneconomic disposal of Yucca Mountain property, the department lost the potential to recover funds that could have been used to satisfy pressing mission needs," they said.
Auditors said two diagnostics trailers that belonged to the National Nuclear Security Administration for use at the Nevada Test Site were turned over mistakenly for disposal. And a drilling rig was sold after test site manager Bechtel Nevada requested it for transfer.
The report comes as the Energy Department is scrambling to avoid financial shortfalls that could cripple the Yucca Mountain Project.
Responding to the audit, DOE officials said they were revising their property management. But they defended their actions as the most cost-effective way to dispose of material they said had little value.
The property included 4,580 tons of scrap metal, plus fencing, piping, drill rigs and other heavy equipment, mining tools, water tanks and other industrial material that was stored in equipment yards and remote locations on the Yucca site, a DOE official said.
Critics said the report highlighted management problems in the Yucca Mountain Project.
"You've heard the phrase 'waste, fraud and abuse.' Now you can add mismanagement to that," said Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev. "We're not talking about chump change; this is a half-million dollars."
Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., is researching ways that Congress could force DOE to repay $458,000 to taxpayers, spokeswoman Amy Spanbauer said.
"Such disregard for the American taxpayer is simply unacceptable and indefensible," Gibbons said in a statement.
Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev., said the department "has wasted U.S. tax dollars."
Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., said the report "highlights the ongoing mismanagement of the Yucca Mountain Project and is further evidence the project is misguided and unmanageable."
Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., said, "I can assure you that the half-million (dollars) is just the tip of the iceberg. The more auditors probe they will find millions and millions in waste."
Government rules require offering excess equipment to other federal agencies or selling it at auction. But auditors said DOE paid $73,000 to a contractor to dispose of the material.
A DOE spokesman identified the contractor as Toxco Inc., a metals recycling company in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
Responding to the audit, John Arthur, the Yucca project's deputy director, said the department chose the most cost-effective method to get rid of the material. He said some of it had been sitting around after being shipped to Nevada when DOE abandoned repository studies in Texas and Washington state in 1987.
The equipment had little value after "years of nonuse and harsh exposure to the desert environment," Arthur said.
The material that did have value was limited because of its age, remote location and lack of maintenance records, he said.
But inspectors said they found that 70 percent of the equipment was less than 10 years old and still had value. The department's financial estimates were unreliable because of failure to inventory the age and condition of the equipment, they said.
"The financial advantage of disposing of excess property was shifted, essentially in its entirety, from the government to the disposal contractor," auditors said.
Arthur said disposal rules would have required the equipment to have been surveyed for possible radiological contamination at a cost of more than $250 per metric ton.
"Since there was 9,000 metric tons of property, these radiological release surveys would have cost the program over a million dollars, which exceeded any estimated value of the property," he said.
Auditors said the disposal contractor identified five items that were contaminated out of 1,300 turned over for disposal.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Fearful Choice for Afghan Women: To Vote or Not to Vote
October 5, 2004
By AMY WALDMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/05/international/asia/05afghan.html?pagewanted=all&position=
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, Oct. 4 - When Afghanistan votes Saturday in its first presidential election, three women, Hajira, Roshana and Farida, will face a choice, but not the one many people expect.
Choosing their candidate was the easy part. All three women, residents of this southern city, favor the incumbent, President Hamid Karzai. But in the face of threats from Taliban insurgents to attack the election process, they cannot decide whether to vote at all, let alone whether to work at the polls as they have been asked to do.
The women say they do not fear death. They fear the shame a public death would bring their families.
"My biggest fear is that if something happens election day, the whole town will talk afterward," said Farida, who is 23 and unmarried, and who, like the others, uses only one name. "There is already a general rumor that women who work outside the home are prostitutes to Americans or foreigners, that women who work outside the home lose their honor."
There is a saying in the culture, she said. For a woman, a death in the home - with purdah, which literally means curtain - is a death of honor. A death outside the home is a death with dishonor.
"I just don't want to die on the street," she said.
Roshana, about 30 and the mother of a 14-year-old son, agreed. She envisioned lying in the street missing a head or a limb, being viewed by strange men. It would be an insoluble stain on her family's reputation.
The women were among a group of 30 recruited by the United Nations to work at the polls on Saturday in this southern city. For their work, they are to be paid $40.
Is the money worth the risk?
For many women, the answer is no. Only 15 of the 30 showed up for the training, said Rangina Hamidi, the director of women's projects for Afghans for Civil Society, an aid organization, which had offered its office to the group. More than half of those who showed up dropped out. Now the six or seven who are left argue constantly over whether the chance to shape their country's future is worth the risk to their family's honor.
"A lot of women are fearful," said Ms. Hamidi, a 27-year-old Afghan-American. "They are completely confused about whether to vote."
She herself is not planning to vote, she said, because she promised her parents, who are in the United States, that she would not go out on the day of the election.
"God forbid something should happen," she said.
Nobody feels that there will be a war after the election, she said. The fear is of insurgent activities before or during the election. Combined with the fact that many husbands oppose participation by their wives in a male-dominated activity, she said, she doubts that more than 10 percent of women here in Kandahar, which was the Taliban center, will go to vote.
The picture is even bleaker in rural areas across the south, where Pashtun culture severely limits women's ability to leave their homes and a stubborn insurgency has radically altered the character of the election.
Of 1.4 million registered voters in the five southern provinces - Kandahar, Zabul, Uruzgan, Helmand and Nimruz - only 200,000 are women. In Uruzgan and Zabul, only 10 percent of registered voters are women.
Most of those who did register are from cities and district capitals where, because of security concerns, registration was concentrated. As a result, women from far-flung villages did not register, said Dr. Humayan, who also uses one name and who oversees the southern region for the Joint Electoral Management Board.
In the southern provinces, the board has struggled dismally to recruit women to work at polling places in rural areas but instead will rely on local elders and mullahs to help women who do show up at the polls with voting procedures. One reason is the lack of educated women; Dr. Humayan estimates that only 5 percent of women in the south are educated. But security is a bigger problem, he said, ensuring that in some districts neither men nor women want to be seen working with the electoral process.
Farida, Hajira and Roshana said many women did not understand what the election was about, or what they had registered for. Even Hajira, a 39-year-old widowed mother of four, expressed confusion: if she did not vote, would her registration card still be valid?
Farida said many women had registered because they had been told that a male member of their family could take the card and vote for them, which is not the case.
Hajira said the women in her family had gotten in trouble with the men for registering, and she did not think that they would vote. Roshana, too, said that while her mother would probably vote, her sister and sister-in-law would probably not get permission from her father and brother to go.
All three women said there had been far too little voter education for women, and they feared that many women would just vote for whoever's ballot photo looked best to them.
The three women work on an embroidery project run by Ms. Hamidi, coming to the office each day despite the whispers behind their backs.
"Generally, whenever we step outside, for work or shopping, the talk is there," Roshana said.
They favor Mr. Karzai because, even if he has done little for them personally, he has brought peace and opened schools.
All three women said their own education had been thwarted by conflict and local leaders who opposed education for women - Farida after four years, Hajira after two months, Roshana after just two days of school. Now they cannot get jobs with the new government because they are not educated.
"Because we ruined our lives not being educated, we want a good future for our own kids so they do not have the same life," Roshana said.
As of Monday, Hajira and Roshana said they were determined to vote and work at the polls, although that could change in the next five days.
Farida was unsure. She had heard the day before of a woman killed outside Kandahar. No one knows why, but her brothers advised Farida not to go to work Monday. She did anyway.
The women expressed frustration. Since it will be the first time the country is holding a presidential election, it had taken them a long time to understand what it meant. Now that they did, there were people working against it.
"For the 30 years of my life I've only seen war, killing, bloodshed and guns," Roshana said. "There is fear, but we have to put the fear behind our backs."
--------
Afghan City Is Calmed, U.S. Reports
October 5, 2004
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/05/international/asia/05kabul.html?pagewanted=all
KABUL, Afghanistan, Oct. 4 - The American ambassador to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, on Monday declared a success for the government of President Hamid Karzai, reporting a rapid disarmament operation in the western city of Herat after the recent removal of the governor, Ismail Khan.
He also announced that Mr. Khan had agreed to join the government if Mr. Karzai wins the presidential election on Saturday.
The president has tried to persuade Mr. Khan to come to Kabul as minister of mines and industries to remove his strong influence from western Afghanistan, but the governor has refused until now.
Mr. Khan's agreement is likely to further ease tension in Herat, where violent riots took place two weeks ago. Yet Mr. Khan has made no comment about his decision, and it is not clear if he will announce his support for Mr. Karzai in the presidential race.
In Kabul on Monday, the Afghanistan Foundation for Culture and Civil Society sponsored a presidential debate, Agence France-Presse reported, but just 2 of the 18 presidential candidates showed up. Mr. Karzai and his chief rival, Yunus Qanooni, were absent.
-------- arms
Taipei worries EU might lift ban on arms to China
October 05, 2004
By William Foreman
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041004-112326-7667r.htm
TAIPEI, Taiwan - Taiwan is getting jittery about a new push within the European Union to lift a 15-year embargo on weapons sales to China - the communist giant periodically threatening to attack this tiny democratic island.
Taiwan officials argue that dropping the ban would shake up the delicate military balance in Asia and increase the threat of war with Taiwan, a conflict that could drag in the United States and spark a Japanese military buildup.
They also insist that the EU embargo - imposed after China's bloody 1989 crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests - should continue until the Chinese improve their dismal human rights record.
Some analysts agree that EU sales could pose a threat to Asia's security, but Taiwan's argument that the embargo should be used to push for better human rights rings hollow, others say, noting that the island has for years been one of China's biggest investors.
In recent months, France and Germany have been the most enthusiastic about selling weapons to China. EU leaders are reviewing the policy, but no date has been set for a decision.
The French hope the arms sales to China can help create a more "multipolar" world with several strong nations or blocs that can check American power, said Willem van Kemenade, a Dutch sinologist and author who is writing a book about the U.S.-China-EU relationship.
Mr. van Kemenade does not think ending the ban would destabilize the region.
For many years to come, European nations' arms sales to China will represent just a fraction "of what the U.S. is stuffing into Taiwan," he said. Taiwan's legislature is expected to vote this year on an $18 billion arms purchase already approved by the Bush administration.
But Lai I-chung, director of foreign policy studies at the Taiwan Thinktank, said there would be booming trade with China's massive, big-spending military if the EU embargo ended. With advanced weaponry, China would feel emboldened and tempted to use force to achieve its sacred goal - taking back control of Taiwan.
"The regional balance of power will be tipped over," Mr. Lai said.
Lobbying for the EU arms embargo to continue has become a top priority for Taiwan in recent weeks. Grass-roots support is beginning to build, and a small protest was held Friday in the capital. Demonstrators held up France's tricolor flag and wrote, "EU Say No to China" down the white strip at the flag's center.
Taiwan Foreign Minister Chen Tan-sun recently wrote an opinion piece about the embargo for London's Financial Times. The first argument he made for keeping the ban was that human rights in China have not improved enough since 1989.
But analysts note that human rights considerations rarely factor into Taiwan's commercial relations with China, just 100 miles across the Taiwan Strait.
-------- business
BAE chief linked to slush fund for Saudi royals: BBC
LONDON (AFP)
Oct 05, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041005161557.xtgb6mol.html
Britain's biggest defence contractor, BAE Systems, allegedly paid millions of dollars into a slush fund for a leading member of Saudi Arabia's royal family with the knowledge of its chief operating officer, the BBC says in a television programme to be screened Tuesday.
BAE, formerly British Aerospace, laid on luxury hotels, chartered aircraft, limousines and exotic holidays for Prince Turki bin Nasser and his entourage, the broadcaster's Money Programme alleges, according to a press release.
The prince was responsible for running the Saudi side of Al Yamamah, the biggest arms sale in British history, worth billions of dollars in orders to
Peter Gardiner tells the programme how his small travel agency became a major conduit for money from BAE's alleged secret fund.
"Going back to 1989 it was 200,000 pounds or 300,000 pounds (a year). Then it moved to about a million pounds a year and quickly to two and three and by the time it was completed it was moving up towards seven million pounds a year," Gardiner said.
Overall, Gardiner reckons, the five-star hotels, flights, limousines and security the Turki family enjoyed that summer cost BAE around two million pounds (2.9 million euros, 3.6 million dollars).
"This is way beyond the life style of most film stars," Gardiner told the programme. "Film stars were quite often around at the large hotels that we were visiting, but they wouldn't be living in this level of affluence."
He said he was also required to provide money to the Saudi prince and his entourage. Sometimes as cash, sometimes as a bank transfer to pay off a credit card bill. The bank transfers, Gardiner recalls, averaged 100,000 dollars.
Another interviewee, Edward Cunningham, who was given the task of looking after the Saudis who mattered to BAE, says he settled gambling bills and arranged prostitutes for Saudis visiting London on Al Yamamah business.
The executive in charge of the Al Yamamah project at the time, Steve Mogford, authorised a series of slush fund invoices for payment with just three words: "OK to pay", according to the BBC.
Mogford, now BAE's chief operating officer, also halted an internal BAE investigation which might have revealed the true nature of the slush fund, the broadcaster said.
BAE denied the allegations, calling them "ill-informed and wrong".
It said in a statement: "The facts are that the Al Yamamah contract, which is the subject of these allegations, is a contract between the governments of the United Kingdom and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
"BAE Systems can state categorically that there is not now and there has never been in existence what the media refers to as a 'slush fund'."
-------- canada
The HMCS Chicoutimi, Canada's rebaptized British submarine
LONDON (AFP)
Oct 05, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041005183348.iwwge7r5.html
The HMCS Chicoutimi, the Canadian submarine hit by fire while submerged deep in the North Atlantic Ocean Tuesday, is one of four conventionally-powered submarines built for the British Royal Navy in the 1980s, then sold in refitted form to Canada in 2000.
The Chicoutimi, an Upholder/Victoria-class submarine like its counterparts the Victoria, Windsor and Cornerbrook, is diesel-electric-propelled.
Britain sold the four off to Canada in a 1998 deal when London opted for a entirely nuclear-powered fleet, and have replaced Ottawa's three Oberon-class submarines which were in service for more than 30 years.
The Canadian navy has hailed the stealth and silence of the 70-meter (230-foot), 2,150-tonne submarine, saying it is difficult to detect and useful for conducting surveillance and intelligence-gathering.
The Chicoutimi, built in 1983 by Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering, in Barrow-in-Furness, northwest England, can travel without refueling for up to 14,400 kilometers (8,950 miles), at a speed of eight knots (roughly 14.5 kilometers per hour).
With a standard crew of about 50, it is armed with Gould forward Mark 48 torpedos that are effective for hundreds of kilometers, according to Jane's Fighting Ships reference book.
The four Victoria-class subs were purchased from Britain for 750 million Canadian dollars (595 million US dollars, 483 million euros, in current rates).
But criticism of the purchase began in 2002, when a dent was discovered in the first delivery, the HMCS Victoria.
Exhaust valves were also found to be faulty on all four ships, which led to a massive leak in 2002 on a training exercise of the HMCS Windsor.
The Chicoutimi was only formally handed over to the Canadian navy on Saturday, in a formal renaming ceremony at Britain's Faslane submarine base in Scotland.
It was on its way to Halifax, in the eastern Canadian province of Nova Scotia, when the fire broke out Tuesday.
A major rescue operation by Britain's Royal Navy and Air Force was under way, with helicopters and ships including a frigate dispatched to the submarine, located some 100 nautical miles (180 kilometers) northwest of Ireland.
-------- iraq
Bremer Criticizes Troop Levels
Oct 5, 2004
Washington Post
By Robin Wright and Thomas E. Ricks
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1802&ncid=1802&e=3&u=/washpost/20041005/ts_washpost/a7053_2004oct4
The former U.S. official who governed Iraq after the invasion said yesterday that the United States made two major mistakes: not deploying enough troops in Iraq and then not containing the violence and looting immediately after the ouster of Saddam Hussein.
Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, administrator for the U.S.-led occupation government until the handover of political power on June 28, said he still supports the decision to intervene in Iraq but said a lack of adequate forces hampered the occupation and efforts to end the looting early on.
"We paid a big price for not stopping it because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness," he said yesterday in a speech at an insurance conference in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va. "We never had enough troops on the ground."
Bremer's comments were striking because they echoed contentions of many administration critics, including Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry, who argue that the U.S. government failed to plan adequately to maintain security in Iraq after the invasion. Bremer has generally defended the U.S. approach in Iraq but in recent weeks has begun to criticize the administration for tactical and policy shortfalls.
In a Sept. 17 speech at DePauw University, Bremer said he frequently raised the issue within the administration and "should have been even more insistent" when his advice was spurned because the situation in Iraq might be different today. "The single most important change -- the one thing that would have improved the situation -- would have been having more troops in Iraq at the beginning and throughout" the occupation, Bremer said, according to the Banner-Graphic in Greencastle, Ind.
A Bremer aide said that his speeches were intended for private audiences and were supposed to have been off the record. Yesterday, however, excerpts of his remarks -- given at the Greenbrier resort at an annual meeting sponsored by the Council of Insurance Agents and Brokers -- were distributed in a news release by the conference organizers.
In a statement late last night, Bremer stressed that he fully supports the administration's plan for training Iraqi security forces as well as its overall strategy for Iraq.
"I believe that we currently have sufficient troop levels in Iraq," he said in an e-mailed statement. He said all references in recent speeches to troop levels related to the situation when he arrived in Baghdad in May 2003 -- "and when I believed we needed either more coalition troops or Iraqi security forces to address the looting."
He said that, to address the problem, the occupation government developed a plan that is still in place under the new interim Iraqi government.
Bremer also said he believes winning the war in Iraq is an "integral part of fighting this war on terror." He added that he "strongly supports" President Bush's reelection.
The argument over whether the United States committed enough troops to the mission in Iraq began even before the March 2003 invasion.
Prior to the war, the Army chief of staff, Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, said publicly that he thought the invasion plan lacked sufficient manpower, and he was slapped down by the Pentagon's civilian leadership for saying so. During the war, concerns about troop strength expressed by retired generals also provoked angry denunciations by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
In April 2003, for example, Rumsfeld commented, "People were saying that the plan was terrible and there weren't enough people and . . . there were going to be, you know, tens of thousands of casualties, and it was going to take forever." After Baghdad fell, Rumsfeld dismissed reports of widespread looting and chaos as "untidy" signs of newfound freedom that were exaggerated by the media. Rumsfeld and Bush resisted calls for more troops, saying that what was going on in Iraq was not a war but simply the desperate actions of Baathist loyalists.
In yesterday's speech, Bremer told the insurance agents that U.S. plans for the postwar period erred in projecting what would happen after Hussein's demise, focusing on preparing for humanitarian relief and widespread refugee problems rather than a bloody insurgency now being waged by at least four well-armed factions.
"There was planning, but planning for a situation that didn't arise," he said.
A senior defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said yesterday that Bremer never asked for more troops when he was the administrator in Iraq -- except for two weeks before he left, when he requested forces to help secure Iraq's borders.
Bremer said in his speech that the administration was clearly right to invade Iraq. Though no weapons of mass destruction have been found, he said, the United States faced "the real possibility" that Hussein would someday give such weapons to terrorists.
"The status quo was simply untenable," he said. "I am more than ever convinced that regime change was the right thing to do."
-----
Iraqi President condemns US air assaults
Reuters
By Sabah al-Bazee
October 5, 2004
http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news2/age15.html
Samarra, Iraq - The Iraqi provisional Government has condemned US air assaults as "collective punishment" as US forces claimed victory in an offensive against the rebel city of Samarra.
"Air strikes on cities are a very annoying issue and not acceptable in any way," Iraqi interim President Ghazi Yawar told al-Arabiya television network. "I consider it collective punishment."
Iraqi religious leaders also condemned the assault and warned that other towns in the restive Sunni triangle would not fall so easily.
Waving white flags, Iraqis fled Samarra at the weekend as US forces claimed victory over insurgents in the first step of an offensive aimed at taking control of rebel-held cities.
Iraq interim Government is hoping American and Iraqi forces will crush a bloody insurgency and take back all of the country before elections scheduled for January.
About 3000 US troops and 2000 Iraqi soldiers stormed Samarra, 100 kilometres north of Baghdad, on Friday, determined to rid the city of its insurgent population.
In 36 hours of fighting in the city, the US military said it killed 125 guerillas and seized 88, and about 70 per cent of the city was under US-Iraqi control.
But the operation brought condemnation from residents about the cost in lives and suffering, and guerillas in the rebel-held city of Fallujah are expected to put up a tougher fight.
Residents said bodies were left in the streets, untended because of the fear of snipers.
Families tried to bury their dead, but the road to the cemetery was blocked off by US troops, witnesses said.
One man who said he escaped the city said a number of civilians had been killed.
The man who gave his name as Abu Qaqa told reporters in Baghdad he had seen stray dogs picking at corpses in the street.
Meanwhile, a hospital near Baghdad said it had received the unidentified bodies of a man and a woman, both believed to be Westerners, found by police. The man had been beheaded and the woman shot in the head.
In a statement, the US military said warplanes had conducted "another precision strike" in Fallujah, the latest in a long campaign of strikes targeted at Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his followers.
Some people unable to flee Samarra by road travelled on small boats along a river holding up white flags as helicopters hovered overhead.
An Iraqi Red Crescent spokeswoman, Firdoos al-Ubadi, said her group and other aid organisations had received a letter from Iraq's Human Rights Ministry describing the situation in Samarra as a tragedy and calling for emergency assistance.
· The Iraqi group that freed two Italian woman hostages is trying to "buy" Kenneth Bigley, the British kidnap victim, from his captors in the hope of releasing him for a substantial ransom, a Kuwaiti newspaper editor said on Sunday.
The news came from Jassim Bodai, editor of al-Rai al-Aam, which first reported that Italy had paid $US1 million ($A1.4 million) to secure the release of the Italian women aid workers, "the two Simonas", last week.
----
Car Bombs Kill at Least 22 in Iraq
'Hour by Hour, the Situation Is Getting Worse,' Witness Says
By Karl Vick and Omar Fekeiki
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, October 5, 2004; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A4981-2004Oct4?language=printer
BAGHDAD, Oct. 4 -- Of the four car bombs that exploded in Iraq on Monday, it was the concussive detonation on Baghdad's crowded Saadoun Street that left Muhammed Ahmed suddenly all by himself in his third-grade classroom.
"All the students ran away," said Muhammed, 8, who, though frightened, made his way with his book bag to the scene of the explosion "to see what happened."
A pickup truck loaded with explosives had barreled into a convoy of sport-utility vehicles, which have become the most conspicuous targets in Baghdad because they invariably carry foreigners. The truck's charred chassis littered the street, along with gnarled hunks of metal and rubber, the shining gravel of burst window glass, a human head and other body parts.
"I always fear when I see the explosion scenes on TV, but now I see it live," Muhammed said. "I didn't know it would be this scary."
Across Iraq on Monday, car bombs killed at least 22 people and injured more than 100. The car bomb on Saadoun Street, outside the Baghdad Hotel, killed six and injured 15, and was the second bombing there in the past year. So was the bomb that killed 15 and wounded 81 at a National Guard recruiting station on the stretch of road just outside Baghdad's Green Zone where the head of Iraq's former Governing Council was killed in May, and close to the U.S. Embassy and key government installations.
Monday's third blast, in the northern city of Mosul, killed a bystander and the two bombers, who apparently blew themselves up by accident while waiting behind an elementary school for a U.S. military patrol to pass by. Yet another suicide bomber struck a U.S. patrol elsewhere in Mosul, injuring one American soldier.
"Hour by hour, the situation is getting worse," said Saad Muwaffaq, 25, who was guarding a building about 50 yards from the Saadoun Street blast. "We cannot walk for 100 meters without fearing a car bomb now."
Two American soldiers were killed Sunday by small-arms fire at a Baghdad checkpoint, the U.S. military. A senior official at Iraq's Ministry of Science and Technology was assassinated in Baghdad, Col. Adnan Abdul-Rahman, an Interior Ministry spokesman, told the Associated Press. Another Science Ministry employee was also killed.
One U.S. soldier was killed and two others were injured late Monday when a roadside bomb exploded beside their convoy near Baghdad, the military said.
The al-Jazeera satellite television network reported the release of a video showing two hostages -- one an Iraqi businessman based in Italy, the other a Turkish national -- being shot in the head by guerrillas.
Car bombings in Iraq have become commonplace in recent weeks; U.S. officials counted more than 70 during September.
The people killed, more than ever, are Iraqis. The aftermath of the Saadoun Street bombing brought home the horrors that may have become routine to a world watching from a safe distance but that in Iraq still pierce individual lives as deeply as ever.
"Why are they doing these attacks? Is it forbidden for Iraqis to live normally?" Khairiya Abdul Hussein, 51, cried as she searched for her daughter, who worked as a maid for a company on Saadoun Street. "I always asked her to quit. We know this street is a target, but she didn't listen."
Jafar Zyara, 17, who sells tea on the street, said he saw the convoy of SUVs emerge from an alley beside the Baghdad Hotel, which is known as a residence for foreign private security firms and intelligence personnel. Iraqi guards halted traffic to make way for the convoy, which carried members of DynCorp, a Reston-based defense contractor. News services said the bomb was hidden under a load of dates in the pickup.
"A woman came to me 10 minutes before the explosion and had tea," Zyara said. "After, I went near the scene to look for her, but I found nothing but her scarf on the ground full of blood."
The losses are counted not only in human lives. The blast undid the renovation of the Manhal restaurant in the al-Kuwait Hotel, a small enterprise unprotected by the type of towering blast walls that gird the Baghdad Hotel.
"If the situation continues like this, I will not stay longer in Iraq," said Abdul Adhim Hussein, 44, an Egyptian who was working on the renovation. "If I build or renovate something, the next day it will be demolished by a car bomb.
"People try to rebuild their country, but the terrorists give them no chance."
William B. Taylor Jr., head of the new Iraqi Reconstruction Management Office, confirmed on Monday that insecurity has greatly retarded efforts to spend the $18.4 billion that Congress appropriated to rebuild the country.
For example, of 21 water treatment plants under construction in Iraq, Taylor said, one has been completed. Its official opening in a south Baghdad neighborhood last Thursday was devastated by two car bombings. Among the dead were 35 children, a wrenching toll that one Iraqi official said "pushes very hard at the limits of barbarity."
"I fear to go to school now," said Muhammed, the third-grader taking in the sight of body parts on Saadoun Street. "What if this happened to me on the way to school? What if my mother couldn't recognize me when I am laying on the ground? I'll be left alone on the street."
A couple of miles away, Dhia Abbas, 24, stood amid a flurry of activity in the emergency room at Yarmouk Hospital. His face was bloodied by shrapnel from the car bomb detonated near the National Guard post where he had reported for his first day of work. It was also his last, he said.
"This is it," said Abbas, who had worked in security for the government of deposed president Saddam Hussein. "I am never coming back to that place. I may starve, but I am not going back."
Not everyone, however, was dissuaded by the day's violence. Razaq Hadi, a postgraduate student at Baghdad University, was in a minibus on his way to school when the Saadoun Street blast killed the bus driver and two passengers. He felt the bus leap into the air, and escaped only by climbing out a window.
"I escaped death today," said Hadi, 36. "That means I have another chance in life.
"So does Iraq," he added with a smile. "It has another chance in life, and we will use it."
Special correspondents Khalid Saffar and Bassam Sebti contributed to this report.
--------
INSURGENTS
At Least 26 Die as 3 Car Bombs Explode in Iraq
October 5, 2004
By EDWARD WONG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/05/international/middleeast/05iraq.html?pagewanted=all
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 4 - Three powerful car bombs exploded across Iraq on Monday morning, killing at least 26 people and wounding 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 police officers and insurgents broke out in the middle of downtown Baghdad after one of the explosions, security contractors at the scene said.
The first blasts hit Baghdad, where 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 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 attack struck north of the Baghdad Hotel, which is mostly occupied by foreign security contractors. A red station wagon packed with explosives sped down a wide commercial street and plowed into two sport utility vehicles, the cars often used by contractors, witnesses said. At least six people were killed and 20 wounded, an Interior Ministry spokesman said. The explosion scattered body parts and pieces of flesh across nearby blocks, and men rushed to the scene and began scraping the remains 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, because there were no American soldiers or Iraqi security forces in the area, the officers said.
Car bombs have become the most lethal weapons employed by insurgents in Iraq. At least 35 exploded in September alone, more than in any other month since the war began. The surge in violence during this 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 scheduled.
This is a particularly crucial month for the American military here, as it struggles to stand 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 try seizing cities controlled by guerrilla fighters and placing Iraqi policemen and soldiers in charge of security. Over the weekend, the First Infantry Division and Iraqi forces chased insurgents from the streets of Samarra in a relatively quick battle. But the bombings on Monday showed that guerrillas can readily answer such offensives with ones of their own, right in the heart of the capital.
After the second bomb exploded in Baghdad, angry and anxious Iraqi policemen began firing wildly with their AK-47 rifles, 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 wounded.
At least four of the wounded from the second bombing 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 severely wounded.
The American military suffered its own losses. Two soldiers were killed by small arms fire at a traffic control checkpoint in Baghdad on Sunday afternoon, the military said. At least 1,059 American soldiers have died in the war, according to the Defense Department.
The military said it launched an airstrike at 1 a.m. Monday against what it called an insurgent safe house on the outskirts of Falluja. The military said in a statement that about 25 guerrilla 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 at least 11 people had been killed in the airstrike, 4 of them women, and at least 10 people had been wounded.
The military continued its airstrike campaign in the Sadr City district of Baghdad late Monday night, and troops were reported to be in heavy fighting with Shiite militiamen.
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 propaganda from Al Qaeda, and an Iraqi National Guard officer had to be restrained by American soldiers when he tried to attack the cowering homeowner, the military said.
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.
Rick Lyman contributed reporting from Samarra for this article, and Thaier Aldaami contributed from Baghdad.
--------
Bremer Criticizes Troop Levels
Ex-Overseer of Iraq Says U.S. Effort Was Hampered Early On
By Robin Wright and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, October 5, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7053-2004Oct4.html
The former U.S. official who governed Iraq after the invasion said yesterday that the United States made two major mistakes: not deploying enough troops in Iraq and then not containing the violence and looting immediately after the ouster of Saddam Hussein.
Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, administrator for the U.S.-led occupation government until the handover of political power on June 28, said he still supports the decision to intervene in Iraq but said a lack of adequate forces hampered the occupation and efforts to end the looting early on.
"We paid a big price for not stopping it because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness," he said yesterday in a speech at an insurance conference in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va. "We never had enough troops on the ground."
Bremer's comments were striking because they echoed contentions of many administration critics, including Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry, who argue that the U.S. government failed to plan adequately to maintain security in Iraq after the invasion. Bremer has generally defended the U.S. approach in Iraq but in recent weeks has begun to criticize the administration for tactical and policy shortfalls.
In a Sept. 17 speech at DePauw University, Bremer said he frequently raised the issue within the administration and "should have been even more insistent" when his advice was spurned because the situation in Iraq might be different today. "The single most important change -- the one thing that would have improved the situation -- would have been having more troops in Iraq at the beginning and throughout" the occupation, Bremer said, according to the Banner-Graphic in Greencastle, Ind.
A Bremer aide said that his speeches were intended for private audiences and were supposed to have been off the record. Yesterday, however, excerpts of his remarks -- given at the Greenbrier resort at an annual meeting sponsored by the Council of Insurance Agents and Brokers -- were distributed in a news release by the conference organizers.
In a statement late last night, Bremer stressed that he fully supports the administration's plan for training Iraqi security forces as well as its overall strategy for Iraq.
"I believe that we currently have sufficient troop levels in Iraq," he said in an e-mailed statement. He said all references in recent speeches to troop levels related to the situation when he arrived in Baghdad in May 2003 -- "and when I believed we needed either more coalition troops or Iraqi security forces to address the looting."
He said that, to address the problem, the occupation government developed a plan that is still in place under the new interim Iraqi government.
Bremer also said he believes winning the war in Iraq is an "integral part of fighting this war on terror." He added that he "strongly supports" President Bush's reelection.
The argument over whether the United States committed enough troops to the mission in Iraq began even before the March 2003 invasion.
Prior to the war, the Army chief of staff, Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, said publicly that he thought the invasion plan lacked sufficient manpower, and he was slapped down by the Pentagon's civilian leadership for saying so. During the war, concerns about troop strength expressed by retired generals also provoked angry denunciations by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
In April 2003, for example, Rumsfeld commented, "People were saying that the plan was terrible and there weren't enough people and . . . there were going to be, you know, tens of thousands of casualties, and it was going to take forever." After Baghdad fell, Rumsfeld dismissed reports of widespread looting and chaos as "untidy" signs of newfound freedom that were exaggerated by the media. Rumsfeld and Bush resisted calls for more troops, saying that what was going on in Iraq was not a war but simply the desperate actions of Baathist loyalists.
In yesterday's speech, Bremer told the insurance agents that U.S. plans for the postwar period erred in projecting what would happen after Hussein's demise, focusing on preparing for humanitarian relief and widespread refugee problems rather than a bloody insurgency now being waged by at least four well-armed factions.
"There was planning, but planning for a situation that didn't arise," he said.
A senior defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said yesterday that Bremer never asked for more troops when he was the administrator in Iraq -- except for two weeks before he left, when he requested forces to help secure Iraq's borders.
Bremer said in his speech that the administration was clearly right to invade Iraq. Though no weapons of mass destruction have been found, he said, the United States faced "the real possibility" that Hussein would someday give such weapons to terrorists.
"The status quo was simply untenable," he said. "I am more than ever convinced that regime change was the right thing to do."
--------
Rumsfeld Sees Retaking of Samarra as Model
Defense Secretary Outlines Three-Step Process for Defeating Iraqi Resistance
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 5, 2004; Page A20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7182-2004Oct4.html
NEW YORK, Oct. 4 -- Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Monday portrayed the retaking of the Iraqi city of Samarra over the weekend by U.S. and Iraqi forces as a model for military action he said is likely to be needed to reestablish government control elsewhere in Iraq.
"What has to be done in that country is what basically was done in Samarra over the last 48 hours," he told an audience here at the Council on Foreign Relations.
With Sunni insurgents operating with virtual impunity in a number of areas in central Iraq, U.S. and Iraq officials have warned of a series of coming military offensives to restore order in advance of of national elections scheduled for January. Rumsfeld outlined a series of steps for dealing with these strongholds of resistance, starting with diplomacy, followed by threatening force and finally using force.
"That's what happened in Samarra," Rumsfeld said. "And my guess is that what you'll see in that country is the government of Iraq systematically deciding that they are not going to accept the idea of safe havens and foreign terrorists and former regime elements running around threatening and killing people."
Rumsfeld's remarks came during a lengthy question-and-answer session that touched on a range of issues, though most were related in some way to the conflict in Iraq. Among the highlights:
• Rumsfeld said Iran is doing "a lot of meddling" in Iraq and is clearly intent on affecting the upcoming elections. "They're sending money in, they're sending weapons in, and they're notably unhelpful," he said.
He also spoke of Iran serving as a haven for al Qaeda operatives, although he described the relationship between the country and the terrorist network as "a funny one." He noted that "a lot of" senior al Qaeda members have moved in and out of Iran "over a period of time" and some apparently are there now. "But there is at least an impression that they're not fully free to do anything they want at the moment," he added.
• He called Syria "unhelpful" as well for refusing to release frozen Iraqi assets and for allowing movement of foreign terrorists across its 450-mile border with Iraq.
A delegation of senior Pentagon and State Department officials traveled to Damascus last month to press U.S. concerns about the border. Some U.S. officials have expressed the hope that the discussions would lead to greater military cooperation along the border. But Rumsfeld made it clear he is reserving judgment on whether the talks will make much difference.
• On possible connections between al Qaeda and the former government of ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, Rumsfeld said he had "not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two." But he also said he had seen intelligence on that question "migrate" in the past year "in the most amazing way," adding that intelligence differences persist.
Last night, saying his remarks had been "misunderstood," Rumsfeld issued a clarification. He noted that as far back as September 2002 he had acknowledged "ties" between Iraq and al Qaeda based on a CIA assessment. That assessment cited, among other things, the presence of al Qaeda members in Iraq and "senior-level contacts" stretching back a decade.
--------
Iraqi Premier Gives Sobering Account of Insurgency
October 5, 2004
By EDWARD WONG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/05/international/middleeast/05CND-IRAQ.html?hp
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 5 - In his first speech before the interim national assembly here, Prime Minister Ayad Allawi gave a sobering account today of the threat posed by the insurgency, saying the country's instability is a "source of worry for many people" and that the guerrillas represent "a challenge to our will."
Dr. Allawi, who has tried hard to cast himself as a tough and confident leader since taking office in late June, asserted that general elections would go ahead in January as planned, but acknowledged that there were significant obstacles standing in the way of security and reconstruction. The nascent police force is underequipped and lacks the respect needed from the public to quell the insurgency, he said, and foreign businessmen have told him they fear investing in Iraq because of the rampant violence here.
The tone of the speech was a sharp departure from the more optimistic assessment Dr. Allawi gave to the American public on his visit to the United States last month. At his stop in Washington, Dr. Allawi made several sweeping assertions about the security situation in Iraq, including that the only truly unsafe place in Iraq was the downtown area of Falluja, the largest insurgent stronghold in Iraq, and that only 3 of 18 provinces had "pockets of terrorists." Dr. Allawi did not directly contradict those statements in his appearance today, but his words reflected a darker evaluation of the state of the war.
"It is true that the security situation in our country is the first concern for you, and maybe for your inquiries, too," Dr. Allawi said to the roughly 130-member national assembly, which asked him combative questions following his speech in the nearly hourlong session. "It is true that it is a source of worry for many people concerned about the future of Iraq and the process of democracy in Iraq."
The insurgents "are today a challenge to our will," he continued. "They are betting on our failure. Should we allow them to do that? Should we sit down and watch what they are doing and let them destabilize the country's security?"
Though Dr. Allawi joined President Bush last month in boasting of having 100,000 fully trained and equipped Iraqi policemen, soldiers and other security officials, he acknowledged today that there were difficulties in fielding an adequate security force.
"It's clear that since the handover, the capabilities are not complete and that the situation is very difficult now in respect to creating the forces and getting them ready to face the challenges," he said, adding that "the police force is not well equipped and is not respected enough to lay down its authority."
Dr. Allawi suggested that it was time to start supplying the new Iraqi Army with sufficient heavy weapons and armored vehicles. To that end, Dr. Allawi said, he had begun discussions with neighboring Arab countries and with the leaders of Russia and Ukraine to help arm the Iraqi forces. "We need to build our military capacity and increase the number of people to face the challenges that we have," he said.
Dr. Allawi's speech, given inside the fortified government headquarters on the west bank of the Tigris River, comes at a crucial juncture for Iraq, as insurgents have stepped up a bloody campaign of car bombings and assassinations to cripple the interim government while American-led forces try to take back rebel territory.
Over the weekend, the First Infantry Division led Iraqi troops in seizing the streets of insurgent-controlled Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad. But the success of that effort and others like it around the country will ultimately depend on whether the Iraqi security forces can fight the insurgency on their own.
At stake now are the general elections scheduled for January, which will depend on large voter turnout - even in virulently anti-American regions - to have any chance of appearing legitimate. In recent months, experts have voiced increasing doubts about the ability to hold such elections.
A nationwide poll of 3,500 Iraqis just completed by the Iraq Center for Research and Strategic Studies shows that the number of Iraqis who say they are "very likely" to vote in the elections has dropped to 67 percent, from 88 percent in June. About 25 percent say they will "probably" vote. The poll has a margin of error of 3.5 percent.
Violence continued flaring up across the country today. At noon, a car bomb exploded next to a military convoy in the northern city of Mosul, killing at least three civilians in a car behind the convoy, the American military said. Right after the explosion, insurgents ambushed the convoy with rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire. Four soldiers were wounded and taken to a military hospital in Mosul.
The police officials in Mosul said that they had discovered four headless bodies - a local woman and her family. The woman had been running a prostitution house and was apparently decapitated, along with her relatives, by a fundamentalist Islamic group, the officials said.
Several mortar blasts rocked Baghdad in the morning. One shell landed at a passport office in the center of the city, seriously wounding one person, the police said. The mortar had been fired from a vehicle driving along a highway.
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Bremer Says U.S. Was Short on Troops for Occupation of Iraq
October 5, 2004
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/05/politics/campaign/05CND-BREM.html?oref=login&hp
WASHINGTON, Oct. 5 - The former top American administrator in Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer III, has told private audiences that the United States did not send enough troops to Iraq to establish security after driving Saddam Hussein from power.
The Kerry campaign today seized on his statements as evidence that the Bush administration has mismanaged the war, while the White House sought to minimize the significance of his remarks.
In two recent appearances, Mr. Bremer said he had been concerned about inadequate troop levels from the time he arrived in Baghdad in May, 2003. That left the White House struggling to explain his remarks, which contradicted his own past statements as well as administration statements on how the war has been handled.
In a speech on Monday to an insurance conference in White Sulphur Springs, West Va., Mr. Bremer said: "We never had enough troops on the ground" to stop the widespread looting immediately after the fall of Baghdad and the lawlessness and insurrection that followed. The group released portions of his remarks after the speech.
In a Sept. 16 appearance at DePauw University, Mr. Bremer said that "the single most important change - the one thing that would have improved the situation - would have been having more troops in Iraq at the beginning and throughout" the occupation. He said that he raised his concerns a number of times within the administration, but that he should have been even more insistent.
His remarks were posted on the DePauw Web site, but received little attention until today when they appeared in The Washington Post, along with remarks from his West Virginia speech. Mr. Bremer could not be reached for comment this afternoon.
Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, implied that Mr. Bremer had never raised his concerns about troop levels with Mr. Bush, but he did not entirely rule out that such a conversation had occurred.
"They met on a regular basis; I don't remember that Ambassador Bremer ever talked about that, but we never got into the habit of reading out any of those discussions," Mr. McClellan said.
Mr. Bremer served for more than a year in Iraq, up until the handover of power on June 28.
At the same briefing, Mr. McClellan also reasserted the White House's position that there were ties linking Saddam Hussein to the Al Qaeda network, a day after Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that he had not seen "any strong, hard evidence" to prove such a link.
"There are clearly ties between Iraq and, between the regime, Saddam Hussein's regime and Al Qaeda." Mr. McClellan said. "And there are clearly some disturbing similarities that existed as well."
After making his remarks on Monday at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, Mr. Rumsfeld issued a statement saying he had been misunderstood, and that "there were ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq."
Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, today seized on Mr. Bremer's remarks as more evidence of what he called the administration's wrong course in Iraq.
Mr. Kerry said the administration had made "a long list of mistakes" in Iraq, and added, "I'm glad that Paul Bremer has finally admitted at least two of them, and the president of the United States needs to tell the truth to the American people."
The two mistakes, Mr. Kerry said, were that "we didn't deploy enough troops to get the job done, and, two, we didn't contain the violence after Saddam was deposed."
In an e-mailed statement quoted by The Washington Post today, Mr. Bremer said that he fully supported the Bush administration's course in Iraq.
"I believe that we currently have sufficient troop levels in Iraq," he said in the statement, according to The Post.
President Bush has said on several occasions that there were as many troops in Iraq as the military deemed necessary.
Mr. Bremer's remarks in his two speeches were considerably at odds with his previous public statements about Iraq.
In an interview on the NBC news program "Meet the Press" on July 20, 2003, not quite 11 weeks after he arrived in Baghdad, Mr. Bremer was asked if the United States needed more troops in Iraq.
"I do not believe we do," Mr. Bremer replied. "I think the military commanders are confident we have enough troops on the ground, and I accept that analysis."
-------- israel / palestine
Israel Blunts Uprising's Impact
Military Actions Slow Suicide Bombers but Take Toll on Palestinian Civilians
By John Ward Anderson and Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, October 5, 2004; Page A22
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A6984-2004Oct4?language=printer
JERUSALEM -- After four years of fighting between Israelis and Palestinians, Israel has established dominance on the battlefield, sharply reduced loss of life among its soldiers and civilians, and advanced its own agenda for the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the absence of negotiations to bring peace, according to officials and analysts from both sides.
In a pivotal shift in the conflict, Israel has crippled the effectiveness of the Palestinian militants' primary strategic weapon -- the suicide bomber -- with frequent military operations in the Palestinian territories, assassinations of dozens of militant leaders, improved intelligence, and construction of a massive barrier through and around the West Bank. At the same time, however, Israel's reliance on military options also has killed Palestinian civilians and inflicted hardships on Palestinian communities.
Since the uprising erupted in September 2000, approximately 2,800 Palestinians and about 1,000 Israelis have been killed, according to records compiled by The Post. About 27,200 Palestinians and 5,700 Israelis have been wounded.
Moreover, the Palestinian death toll has increased more dramatically than the Israeli toll. When Palestinian suicide attacks were at their peak two years ago, an average of two Palestinians were killed for each Israeli. So far this year, five Palestinians have been killed for each Israeli.
The trend has continued during the past week in the Gaza Strip, where Israel launched a military operation on Sept. 28 to thwart Palestinian rocket and mortar attacks on Israeli targets. Continued fighting Monday raised the death toll to 74 Palestinians in northern Gaza, according to Palestinian medical officials. Five Israelis have been killed in northern Gaza.
Violence also continued Monday in the West Bank, where an Israeli policeman and two Palestinians died in a gun battle in Ramallah.
The conflict -- which entered its fifth year on Sept. 28 -- has also divided both societies internally. Israelis question whether their country is losing its moral compass because of its tactics in the Palestinian territories. Growing numbers of Palestinian leaders recognize how seriously suicide bombings against Israeli civilians have set back their cause.
"Israel's victory has come at a very high price," said Michael Oren, a prominent Israeli historian and senior fellow at the Shalem Center, an Israeli think tank whose members primarily represent hawkish views of the conflict. "It comes in terms of Israel's deepening isolation and vilification, the danger of sanctions, and tension in Israeli society -- to say nothing of the deaths of hundreds of people."
Today no peace process is being pursued, and the three primary players in any attempt to resolve the conflict -- Israel, the Palestinians and the United States -- have abandoned fundamental commitments to bringing about peace, according to representatives of each.
The United States, seen as the critical power broker by both Israel and the Palestinians, is engaged in presidential elections and the continued fighting in Iraq and has given up most serious efforts at mediation. Israel has not controlled the steady growth of Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territories, and the Palestinian Authority has done little to stop attacks against Israel or implement security reforms, officials and analysts say.
The Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, has "no vision, no strategies, no policies," said Abdul Jawad Salah, an independent member of the Palestinian Legislative Council. Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia has resigned or threatened to resign numerous times in a continuing power struggle with Arafat that has contributed to a climate of political and security chaos in the Palestinian territories. Militant organizations have attacked and kidnapped Palestinian Authority officials to protest Arafat's refusal to embrace internal reforms.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, on the other hand, is taking advantage of the Palestinians' political stalemate and Israel's overwhelming military superiority to chart his own course -- planning a withdrawal of troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip while consolidating Israel's hold on the West Bank by building a fence around the territory and permitting steady growth of Jewish settlements there.
Despite international condemnation and Israel's pledge to freeze the growth of settlements, the number of settlers in the Palestinian territories has risen by about 39,000 since the start of the uprising, or intifada, four years ago, according to the Israeli Interior Ministry. Over the same period, the Israeli government has issued tenders for the construction of more than 6,500 new housing units in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, anti-settlement groups report.
"Ariel Sharon knows exactly what he wants and is working to achieve this every day in his own way," said Uri Avnery, head of the Israeli peace group Gush Shalom. "He thinks the losses are negligible compared to the aim he's set for himself."
One of the most dramatic shifts in the conflict has been in day-to-day loss of life. Fewer Israelis are being killed but more Palestinians are losing their lives. In the first nine months of this year, 478 Palestinians and 90 Israelis were killed, compared with 392 Palestinians and 171 Israelis killed during the same period last year.
A key reason for the sharp decline in Israeli deaths has been Israel's increasing ability to stop Palestinian suicide bombers. So far this year, 13 suicide bombers have hit Israeli targets. In all of 2003 there were 44 suicide bombings and in 2002 there were 61.
According to figures provided by the Israel military, two out of three bombers reached their targets in 2001. This year the ratio has fallen to one in nine.
"The reason we don't have [as many] Israeli casualties is because we are successful in fighting terror," said Gideon Meir, a senior official at the Israeli Foreign Ministry. "We are pinpointing more and more terrorists."
Palestinian militant groups, under pressure from Egyptian mediators and many senior Palestinian political leaders to curb their violence, are also making fewer attempts to dispatch suicide bombers, despite public opinion surveys showing that Palestinians overwhelmingly support continuing the attacks. Thus far this year, 92 potential bombers were dispatched compared with 229 in 2003, according to Israeli military figures.
Palestinians and an increasing number of Israelis and international organizations contend that Israel's military efforts to crush Palestinian militant groups have caused excessive loss of life and property to civilians and subjected an entire population to severe hardship. Both President Bush and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell have said that Israel must end its "daily humiliation" of Palestinians.
In the past year, the Israeli military has increased the demolition of Palestinian houses, razing of farmlands and destruction of olive groves. Since the uprising began, the Israeli military has demolished 2,751 homes -- nearly 40 percent of them in the first eight months of this year, according to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency. It has uprooted or burned 382,695 olive trees -- 30 percent of them this year, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture.
Israel contends, at least in some cases, that the olive trees are used as cover by Palestinian militants to fire rockets. Other trees have been removed to make way for the West Bank barrier. Israel routinely destroys homes belonging to relatives of suicide bombers.
Palestinian cities in the West Bank have become isolated from one another by 659 checkpoints, roadblocks, trenches and earthen walls maintained by the Israeli military. Palestinians are often forbidden to drive on major thoroughfares.
As a result, Israel has been threatened with international boycotts, economic sanctions and divestiture. In July, leaders of the Presbyterian Church in the United States voted overwhelmingly to begin "selective divestment in multinational corporations operating in Israel." In August, the 100-plus-member Non-Aligned Movement adopted a resolution calling upon members to ban the import of goods produced in Jewish settlements. Two weeks ago, a nongovernmental conference meeting at the United Nations drafted a plan for sanctions against Israel if it does not dismantle settlements and the West Bank barrier.
In an effort to head off the prospect of sanctions, Israeli Attorney General Menachem Mazuz recently recommended that the government consider applying the Fourth Geneva Convention to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, formally acknowledging that they are occupied territories.
Any such move would be a sharp reversal of Israeli policy. For decades, Israel has rejected applying the Geneva Convention -- which forbids the transfer of civilians to an occupied territory -- to areas it captured in the 1967 war, arguing that they are "disputed territories" that were not sovereign before the war.
Researchers Hillary Claussen, Samuel Sockol, Ian Deitch and Soufian Taha contributed to this report.
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Israeli Missile Strike Kills 2 Senior Figures in Islamic Jihad
October 5, 2004
By STEVEN ERLANGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/05/international/middleeast/05CND-MIDE.html?pagewanted=all&position=
JERUSALEM, Oct. 5 - An Israeli helicopter strike killed a senior member of the radical group Islamic Jihad and his bodyguard as they rode in a car in Gaza, Palestinians there said this evening.
The dead men were Bashir Al Dabash, 42, a brigade leader and one of Islamic Jihad's top officials in Gaza, the group said, and Zareef Al Araeer, who was said to be his bodyguard. Three bystanders were slightly wounded when one of the two missiles missed the militants' car near the Shifa hospital in Gaza City, where Mr. Al Dabash had been visiting a wounded fighter, Palestinians said.
Young women and children rushed toward the car, some brandishing remains and shouting, "Welcome to Ezzedine Al Qassam Brigade!" - the military wing of Hamas.
In a separate action later in the night, an Israeli aircraft fired a missile that killed at least two militants and wounded three others near the Jabaliya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, witnesses and Palestinian security sources said. The men, from Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, were preparing to attack Israeli forces, according to witnesses and army officials.
As the Israeli military presses on with its campaign to stop homemade missile strikes from Gaza on Israeli settlements and towns, the military is also using the opportunity to try to eliminate the leadership of radical groups of Palestinians like Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
The campaign started on Wednesday, after two children in the Israeli town of Sederot were killed by a Qassam rocket fired by Hamas; since then, at least 70 Palestinians have died, at least 20 of them civilians, as well as one other other Israeli civilian and two soldiers.
The Israelis say it is intolerable for their citizens to be subject to rocket attacks even as the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, vows to withdraw unilaterally from the Gaza Strip, with its 1.3 million Palestinians and 7,500 or so Israeli settlers.
But the Israeli campaign is also running into more - and expected -- international criticism, from Egypt, on the 31st anniversary of the Yom Kippur war; from Russia, and even from the United States, as Colin L. Powell, the secretary of state, said he hoped Israel's 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," Mr. Powell said. "I hope it does not expand. 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.`
Israel publicly appears to be in no rush to end the operation. The defense minister, Shaul Mofaz, said on Monday that "it will take time until we can be sure that we remove the threat" of the Qassam rockets. Other military officials, speaking on background, say they are realistic and hope to reduce the number of rockets fired by 70 percent to 80 percent, and say they do not want to be stuck in Gaza indefinitely.
Perhaps to mute criticism, Israeli officials said that indirect contacts about ending the operation had begun with Yasir Arafat's Palestinian Authority, but the Palestinians denied the suggestion.
Still, Mr. Arafat, and especially his government, have been quietly urging Hamas not to provoke the Israelis by firing the highly inaccurate Qassams, Palestinian officials have said. But Hamas is trying to show that it is fighting the Israelis even as it becomes more difficult to carry out suicide bombings inside Israel proper.
Other Israeli officials openly say they are working hard at public relations, not wanting the kind of unfair criticism, as they put it, that Israel got in the spring of 2002, when it went hard into the West Bank, including towns like Jenin, Nablus and Bethlehem.
The public-relations effort included a fierce attack on the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which aids Palestinian refugees, when an Israeli aerial drone photographed what Israeli officials said was a Qassam rocket being transported in a United Nations vehicle or ambulance. The Israelis called correspondents Friday night to draw their attention to the film, then protested to the United Nations and called for the dismissal of the head of the agency, Peter Hansen.
But Mr. Hansen, often critical of Israel, denied the charge and said the film appeared to show a folded-up stretcher, not a rocket, being placed into the vehicle, and promised to investigate.
Today, the ambulance driver, Wail Raban, said that the object was a stretcher, not a rocket. Wahel Ghabayen, a relief worker, said he was the person in the film, and he was carrying a stretcher. "If it was a missile, I would not throw it into the car but would put it in carefully," he said.
Israeli officials said today that they were re-evaluating their claim, which may prove embarrassing for the government here. But the commander of the Gaza Division, Gen. Shmuel Zakai, said that there had been many other incidents.
"This ambulance is only one incident out of dozens," he told Army Radio. "When the commission of inquiry arrives we will also obtain unambiguous testimony of these past incidents."
General Zakai also said that the army was taking great precautions not to harm civilians.
"The fighting is taking place in a refugee camp," he said. "The terrorists are using the civilians as human shields. They simply take them, and fire from their midst at our troops. And when I say fire, I'm referring to antitank rockets.
"They send children to plant bombs. They commit all their horrific acts, which we are used to seeing in the daily fighting in Gaza. We select our use of fire carefully so as to do everything possible not to hit civilians. The troops do this in a praiseworthy way. I can tell you that the overwhelming majority of those killed in the fighting were armed terrorists."
Despite the stated efforts to minimize civilian casualties, Israeli troops at an observation post shot and killed a 13-year-old Palestinian girl, Imam al-Hams, near the Rafah refugee camp. The army said the girl was in an area banned to Palestinians, and when the girl threw away her schoolbag, troops mistook it for a bomb and shot at her as well as at the satchel.
Palestinian residents said she was just a schoolgirl walking to school, had no bomb and was shot 20 times, including 5 times in the head.
Israeli military officials said troops posted along the Egyptian border had fired at the girl after she crossed into a restricted zone and was spotted placing "what seemed to be an explosive charge."
On Monday, Mr. Arafat, while denying that the Qassams had hurt anyone, urged Hamas and other militants "not to give the occupation any excuse against us," which will be interpreted as an appeal to stop the rocket fire.
The report of Palestinian-Israeli cease-fire contacts came as Palestinians pushed for quick adoption of a United Nations Security Council resolution demanding an end to the Israeli operation. Arab nations that introduced the resolution said they wanted a vote today.
The United States ambassador to the United Nations, John Danforth, said another resolution was not the answer, and that the council "acts as the adversary of the Israelis and cheerleader to the Palestinians."
Taghreed El Khodary contributed reporting from Gaza City for this article.
-------- nato
Ukraine membership of NATO important: US official
WARSAW (AFP)
Oct 05, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041005190408.5x58wjyp.html
US Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz on Tuesday said it was important to expand NATO to Ukraine, where a pro-Western opposition candidate is tipped to win presidential elections later this month.
"It is particuliarly important to extend the values of what NATO stands for to the whole of Europe," Wolfowitz said in a speech at Warsaw University.
"Our objective of a Europe whole and free will not be complete until Ukraine is a full pledged member of Europe.
"As President (George W.) Bush said here in Warsaw, we must extend our hand to Ukraine as Poland has done with such determination," he added.
Ukraine announced in 2002 that it planned to join NATO and has set 2011 as a target date for starting negotiations on European Union membership.
But outgoing President Leonid Kuchma has recently sought to move closer to Russia, stepping back from Kiev's drive for NATO and EU accession and agreeing to form an economic space with Moscow and two other major ex-Soviet republics.
His annointed successor, Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich, is lagging in opinion polls behind liberal opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko, who has promised to pursue Ukraine's Western integration.
But a recent survey showed Ukrainians are highly skeptical that the election will be honest, with nearly two-thirds saying they believe the results will be falsified.
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Civilian Craft Rises Above
Team Reaches Space Again to Win $10 Million X Prize
By William Booth
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 5, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A5119-2004Oct4?language=printer
MOJAVE, Calif., Oct. 4 -- A manned rocket ship powered by laughing gas and rubber fuel, financed entirely with private funds, reached the edge of suborbital space Monday to win the $10 million Ansari X Prize -- a milestone that its builders and backers say will usher in a new age of commercial space tourism and travel.
Built by designer Burt Rutan and steered by veteran test pilot Brian Binnie, the squid-shaped SpaceShipOne was carried aloft at dawn Monday by its mother ship, White Knight, which resembles a giant dragonfly. At an altitude of 45,000 feet, the spaceship disengaged from its cradle, paused a moment and then lighted its rocket, sending a long white contrail across the skies above the Mojave desert during the 84-second burn.
Unlike two previous flights, which were plagued by wild rolls and problems with stability and trim, Monday's launch saw SpaceShipOne blast straight and true to a record-breaking altitude of 367,442 feet -- 69.7 miles. The craft went 30,000 feet higher than the previous record holder, the X-15 rocket jet, which performed its feat in 1963.
At its apogee, Binnie experienced about three minutes of weightlessness and saw the curvature of Earth below and black void above. He became the 434th human to go into space and only the second astronaut to get there without the help of a government.
After reaching velocities three times the speed of sound, Binnie glided SpaceShipOne back to the desert airport for a perfect landing before thousands of spectators.
"It is literally a rush," Binnie said of his flight. "You light the motor and the world wakes up around you." He compared the flight to riding a rodeo bull and said, "I wake every morning and just thank God that I live in a country where this is possible."
Binnie was greeted on the tarmac by Rutan and his financial backer, Paul Allen, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, who put $25 million into the project. Also on hand was Richard Branson, head of the Virgin Group, who announced last week that he is going to buy five larger and still unbuilt five-seater spaceships from Rutan in a $100 million bid to take paying passengers -- for about $200,000 a seat -- into space.
Branson said Monday that he plans to launch his fleet of Virgin Galactic spaceships from airports in Japan, Australia, England, South Africa and the United States. "And the next generation of spaceship will have even bigger windows," he promised, adding that he saw no reason that a healthy octogenarian such as his father couldn't take a ride.
Branson said there is undeniably a market for space tourism. He said that his Web site had 5 million hits in recent days and that more than 5,000 people had offered to pay deposits for a seat on the first flights, which Branson says will begin in three years. He promised, along with Rutan, to be on the inaugural flight.
When Allen was asked whether he would go along for the ride, he mentioned that as a boy he tried to build a rocket out of an aluminum lawn chair. "It made a loud noise and melted in place," he said. "As for whether I'll be holding hands with Richard and Burt on the first flight, I don't know."
Marion C. Blakey, head of the Federal Aviation Administration, attended the flight and said the winner of the X Prize "opens a new frontier in commercial spaceflight." She predicted that one day rocket ships might be used not only for quick sightseeing jaunts but also for suborbital passenger flights from the United States to Asia and Europe.
Blakey said her agency is working on regulations to oversee the new industry, and that Congress is debating a set of bills to support commercial space tourism.
Branson said the sightseeing flights would only be the beginning, and he predicted that Rutan or others will develop safe and affordable technology to launch and maintain orbiting "five-star" space hotels.
"The message to investors is to start investing, the market is here, a multibillion-dollar market," said Peter Diamandis, chairman of the X Prize Foundation. "There is a real dollar to make. Surveys show that 60 percent of public want to go to space."
Col. Rick Searfoss, the X Prize judge and the commander of two shuttle flights, welcomed Binnie, 51, to the exclusive club of astronauts. "We're starting another space age. We're taking the blinders off." Searfoss said the future of space travel will be shared by private entrepreneurs. "In many respects," he said, "our government space agencies have lost their way."
Branson praised Rutan as "the most brilliant aviation engineer of the last century," adding: "If somebody says something is impossible, Burt will set out to prove him wrong."
After touchdown Monday, Rutan said there are now two space agencies in the country -- his and NASA. Rutan has often disparaged NASA as being what he sees as a bloated and timid bureaucracy. On Monday, Rutan said that the "big boys" at NASA, and its contractors Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, must have watched his flight and concluded, as he put it, "We're screwed."
The Ansari X Prize was inspired by the $25,000 award that Charles Lindbergh won for crossing the Atlantic nonstop in 1927. The contest was conceived by space enthusiasts as a way to launch a commercial space tourism business.
The X Prize competition has attracted 26 teams worldwide. It required that the winning craft -- made by a civilian entrepreneur with no government financing -- carry three 198-pound people, or a pilot and equivalent ballast, into suborbital space, defined as 100 kilometers or 62 miles, and then repeat the feat within two weeks.
The Rutan team put test pilot Michael Melvill into space twice -- first in the test flight in June and again on Wednesday. Melvill's second flight topped out at 337,591 feet, but only after the craft went into a series of dizzy rolls, 29 in all, that could have ended in tragedy.
Rutan and his team say they decided to alter the trajectory for Monday's flight, which seemed to calm SpaceShipOne's tendency to roll.
"This is very, very safe," Rutan said. He promised that tourist hops to space would be "safer than the first commercial airline flight."
Rutan said that what makes his SpaceShipOne so robust is its lightweight materials of graphite and epoxy (it weighs about 6,000 pounds and can be towed by a pickup truck), a safer propulsion system fuel of rubber and nitrous oxide, and the ability to fold and open its wings, which stabilizes the craft like a badminton shuttlecock.
If the third spaceflight Monday was beginning to feel routine, that is the point. With the exception of refueling its rocket motors, 97 percent of the spaceship was reused for the two X Prize flights.
The X Prize foundation also disclosed that it would host another competition in 2005 or 2006, in which operations could win cash and prizes for longest flight, highest altitude and most passengers.
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NASA Awards Contracts for Rescue of Hubble
By Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 5, 2004; Page A11
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6959-2004Oct4.html
NASA has awarded a $330.6 million contract to the aerospace company Lockheed Martin to design and build a robot spaceship to carry replacement parts to the Hubble Space Telescope to keep it operating for five to seven years.
In another, widely expected move, NASA awarded a preliminary $144 million contract to the Canadian firm MD Robotics to provide the "grappling arm" that will help the unmanned spaceship dock with the telescope, and a "dexterous robot" to mount the new instruments inside it.
NASA spokeswoman Susan M. Hendrix, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said Monday the agency awarded the MD Robotics contract Friday. A NASA Acquisition Internet Service bulletin said the agency granted the "De-Orbit Module" contract to Denver-based Lockheed Martin Space Systems Co. on Sept. 24.
NASA has said for months that it needed to begin work on a robotic servicing mission this fall to have the spacecraft ready by the end of 2007, when Hubble's batteries are expected to give out, causing the telescope to shut down within hours.
Still, "we haven't totally discounted" a manned repair mission by the space shuttle, Hendrix added in a telephone interview. "We're still maintaining our options for a shuttle servicing mission."
NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe, who canceled a planned shuttle servicing mission because of safety concerns after last year's Columbia tragedy, reversed course in August, saying the agency would plan a robotic mission.
Carlos McKenzie a Goddard procurement officer, said MD Robotics, of Brampton, Ontario, had been awarded a "letter contract" good for three months, until Congress finalizes NASA's 2005 budget.
MD Robotics is under contract to the Canadian Space Agency to build a stick figure-like robot nicknamed "Dextre," whose performance as an orbital mechanic so impressed Goddard engineers that NASA embraced it over the summer as the key component of the servicing mission. MD Robotics did not respond to telephone inquiries yesterday.
Hendrix said Lockheed Martin's contract was not provisional but will be "incrementally funded" as money became available. Lockheed Martin issued a statement saying "we're all looking forward to NASA's public announcement, and we respectfully reserve comment until that time."
Aerospace engineers have said that a Hubble De-Orbit Module will have many potential uses, because it will give the United States a robotic cargo-carrying capability in space, a capability currently possessed only by Russia.
Hendrix said Goddard will oversee and design the Hubble mission. Goddard will also build an "Ejection Module" that will be loaded on the robot ship to hold Dextre, MD Robotics' grappling arm and replacement instruments.
The grappling arm will hold onto the telescope until the spacecraft can dock with it, Hendrix said. Dextre will then open Hubble's cargo bay and insert the new instruments.
Hendrix said one of these, Wide Field Camera 3, has room inside its casing to hold three to six new gyroscopes that Hubble needs to control its attitude in space. The De-Orbit Module will carry Hubble's new batteries, which will be connected through the docking junction.
Once the jobs are finished, the Ejection Module will jettison Dextre and the grappling arm, which will burn up in the atmosphere.
-------- spies
Goss Pick Withdraws From CIA Consideration
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 5, 2004; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6122-2004Oct4.html
Michael V. Kostiw withdrew from consideration yesterday as CIA executive director, the third-ranking position at the agency, after it was publicly disclosed that he had resigned from the agency under pressure more than 20 years ago.
"Allegations about my past would be a distraction from the critical work the Director of Central Intelligence needs to focus on," Kostiw said in a statement released by the CIA yesterday. He withdrew, he added, because "I thought it was in the best interests of the agency and all concerned."
CIA Director Porter J. Goss then named Kostiw his senior adviser, abandoning the plan to make him executive director, a position that would have given Kostiw (pronounced COST-ie) responsibilities for day-to-day operations involving budget and personnel, including disciplinary action.
The change came after The Washington Post reported Sunday that, in late 1981, Kostiw was caught shoplifting a $2.13 package of bacon from a supermarket in Langley, according to two former CIA officials familiar with the incident. At the time, Kostiw had been a CIA case officer for 10 years.
In a CIA polygraph test, Kostiw's responses to questions about the incident and his past tours abroad led agency officials to place him on administrative leave for several weeks, according to four sources familiar with the events. Kostiw has told friends he decided to resign during the leave. Agency officials arranged for the misdemeanor shoplifting charge to be dropped and the police record expunged in return for his resignation and agreement to seek counseling, a former official said.
Kostiw, a colonel in an Army Reserve military intelligence unit at the Pentagon, has worked as a lobbyist for ChevronTexaco Corp. and more recently was staff director of the terrorism subcommittee of the House intelligence committee, which Goss chaired.
"Kostiw underwent the security vetting given all employees, and, from a security standpoint, has met the standards required," said a CIA official who asked not to be named.
The Kostiw appointment, announced last Thursday, had quickly drawn criticism inside and outside the CIA. It came from officials who knew about Kostiw's resignation under a cloud and who were already concerned about Goss bringing in four of his Republican staff members. Several former agency officials said they believed that Goss was moving too quickly to make changes amid a presidential election campaign where intelligence is an issue and at a time when Congress is debating the future of the intelligence community.
But Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), former chairman of the Senate intelligence committee and a friend of Goss, said the new CIA director "does not intend to be a caretaker," even if he is there only a short time. "The place has a lot of problems," he said, "and the fact that Porter brought in people he was comfortable with should not be criticized."
A former senior agency official who has remained a frequent consultant on special projects said Goss "was not well served by his staff," which allowed him to proceed with elevating Kostiw. Staff members knew there were CIA employees who were aware of Kostiw's past and "had their long knives out," a reference to their ability to leak the information that led to questioning Kostiw taking a post where "one of the toughest jobs is dealing with disciplinary problems."
"The last thing Goss should have wanted to do was to stir up a cesspool," said Robert Baer, a former CIA case officer. Referring to criticism of the CIA for failing to predict or prevent the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and for overstating the Iraqi threat, he said, "There was so much unhappiness out there already."
Goss now must find a new nominee for the No. 3 post, in effect the CIA's chief operating officer. In the interim, Martin Petersen, the deputy executive director, will be acting director. Petersen plans to retire next month.
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Aide Declines a Top C.I.A. Post After Questions
October 5, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/05/politics/05intel.html
WASHINGTON, Oct. 4 - The House Republican aide named to become the No. 3 official at the Central Intelligence Agency said Monday that he would not accept the post because of questions about his resignation from the agency 22 years ago.
The official, Michael V. Kostiw, said that he would still go to the C.I.A. as a senior adviser to Porter J. Goss, the new director of central intelligence. Mr. Kostiw, 57, said he decided that "allegations about my past would be a distraction from the critical work'' on which Mr. Goss needs to focus.
As the C.I.A.'s executive director, Mr. Kostiw would have served as the agency's day-to-day manager, overseeing many budgetary and personnel decisions. An intelligence official said that questions about Mr. Kostiw's resignation had raised doubts "about whether this was the best position for him to serve.''
The Washington Post reported that Mr. Kostiw had resigned from the agency in 1982 after being put on administrative leave in connection with a shoplifting case. The Post described Mr. Kostiw as having resigned under pressure, saying that he had decided to resign while on leave, and that in return, C.I.A. officials had arranged for misdemeanor theft charges to be dropped and the police record expunged.
In his statement, Mr. Kostiw did not address those allegations in any detail, but said that his decision was based on "recent press articles and attendant speculation.'' A C.I.A. spokesman, Mark Mansfield, declined to comment beyond Mr. Kostiw's statement. But an intelligence official said that Mr. Kostiw had cleared the security checks required of everyone who works at the C.I.A., and that he was sworn in on Monday as an agency employee.
Mr. Kostiw served most recently as staff director for the House subcommittee on terrorism. He was among four House Republican aides named to senior positions at the C.I.A. last week by Mr. Goss, a former chairman of the House intelligence committee. All four have been critical of the agency recently, and their appointments had stirred discontent within the agency, with former intelligence officials describing them as ill-suited for top posts.
The other aides were Patrick Murray, named Mr. Goss's chief of staff, and Joseph Jakub and Merrell Moorhead, named senior advisers.
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London Ex-Policeman Sentenced for Spying
Associated Press
Tuesday, October 5, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7201-2004Oct4.html
LONDON, Oct. 4 -- A judge sentenced a former London police officer to 2 1/2 years in prison Monday for spying on Saudi dissidents and others in Britain in exchange for $25,000 from a diplomat representing Saudi Arabia.
Ghazi Kassim, 53, pleaded guilty in September to three counts of misconduct in public office and one count of illegally owning a police tear gas canister. The 14-year veteran was fired by the Metropolitan Police after he was charged.
According to Kassim's plea, Ali Shamarani, a third secretary at the Saudi Embassy in London, paid Kassim to gather information on several people, including Muhammad Massari, a Saudi dissident, and Abu Hamza Masri, a Muslim cleric in Britain who is being held in a British jail on a U.S. warrant for allegedly orchestrating a hostage-taking plot in Yemen.
Kassim illegally used police computers to obtain information and questioned people in their homes, saying he was part of a police investigation.
Judge Peter Rook, however, cited several mitigating factors in his sentencing deliberations, including the length of Kassim's service in the police force, several police commendations and the fact that Kassim is the sole provider for his family.
The judge also noted that Kassim met Shamarani because their children attended the same school, highlighting his belief that Kassim did not actively seek the illegal work.
Shortly before Kassim was charged in July 2003, Shamarani, the Saudi diplomat who provided the money, fled the country, lawyers told the court.
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Israeli Ex-Aide to McGreevey Avoids Investigators From U.S.
October 5, 2004
By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/05/nyregion/05cipel.html?pagewanted=all&position=
RISHON LE ZION, Israel, Oct. 4 - Somewhere among the fashionable shops and palm-lined streets of this Tel Aviv suburb are hidden the secrets of Gov. James E. McGreevey's stunning fall from power. The only question is when - or if - federal investigators will be able to uncover them.
F.B.I. agents were hoping to travel here last week to interview Golan Cipel, the former McGreevey aide who returned to Rishon Le Zion, his prosperous hometown, after a complaint of sexual harassment that led the governor to step down. Mr. McGreevey announced his resignation by disclosing that he had had an affair with a man he did not name, but aides accused Mr. Cipel of threatening to expose the affair unless he received a seven-figure settlement. Federal investigators have already questioned nearly every other major figure in the case, but Mr. Cipel canceled plans for an interview last week, citing scheduling problems relating to the Jewish holiday of Sukkot.
So far, agents have found virtually no evidence to support the claim that Mr. Cipel's threat to file a sexual harassment suit, which led to three weeks of heated, behind-the-scenes settlement talks with the governor's lawyers, was an extortion attempt. They are nonetheless eager to speak with Mr. Cipel, a confidant of Mr. McGreevey during his campaign for governor and his administration's first year, to determine whether he can help their various corruption investigations into the governor's inner circle of aides and fund-raisers.
Mr. Cipel's advisers say he is still recovering from the ordeal of the scandal, the furious media storm and his abrupt move to Israel, but will be happy to tell the F.B.I. everything he knows. Discussions are under way to reschedule the interview.
"He's eager to talk with no immunity, no strings attached, nothing but the truth," said Paul Batista, a lawyer who has spoken to federal agents about Mr. Cipel's prospective interview. But after seven weeks of efforts to arrange a meeting, some investigators are growing concerned that Mr. Cipel's skittish behavior is a sign that he may never agree to talk about the inner workings of the administration.
Here in Israel, Mr. Cipel was initially viewed as either an enigma or an oddity.
His arrival set off a blaze of sensational headlines, and while one news reporter derisively dubbed him "Israel's Monica Lewinsky," most of the coverage was sympathetic, portraying Mr. Cipel as an ambitious young man whose attempt to succeed in the United States fell victim to political lechery. Israeli society is generally quite accepting of same-sex relationships; nevertheless, leaders of major gay rights groups were prepared to offer Mr. Cipel support when he was identified as the man with whom Mr. McGreevey had had an affair.
On his return, however, Mr. Cipel made brief statements to the press insisting that he was not gay and that the governor had sexually assaulted him. Despite that assertion, and the widely publicized photographs of him accompanied by a provocatively dressed female friend, his life remained fodder for gossip columns.
A few weeks after returning home, Mr. Cipel met with Avi Yechzeckal, a former employer, for a drink at the Archer Pub in Tel Aviv. After 90 minutes or so, an Israeli reporter, who had apparently been tipped off, descended on the two men, giving Mr. Cipel a jolting reminder that refuge from an international sex scandal is hard to find in an age of global communications. Three days later, a gossip column reported that Mr. Cipel had been spotted out on the town with Mr. Yechzeckal, a former member of the Knesset.
"He was telling me that he'd been through dark days and dark nights," Mr. Yechzeckal, who gave Mr. Cipel his start by hiring him as an aide, said on Sunday. He declined to discuss their conversations any further, saying that he wanted to protect his friend's privacy.
Fortunately for Mr. Cipel, Israeli news media were soon distracted with the country's own scandals, celebrities and the continuing violence in Gaza. Mayor Meir Nitzian, who employed Mr. Cipel as a spokesman until 2001, said that most people in Rishon Le Zion had all but forgotten the scandal. Mr. Cipel, who has lived with his parents, sister and other relatives and friends in turn, has declined to give interviews in recent weeks. His spokeswoman in Israel did not return repeated calls requesting comment during the past week, and his mother, contacted at the family's home on Sunday, said, "He's not ready to tell his story yet."
Nonetheless, two people close to Mr. Cipel, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said he had begun to regain a sense of equilibrium in recent weeks, He has been spending time with family members, deciding whether to return to the United States or look for work in Israel. While he rarely participates in Tel Aviv's rollicking nightlife, he no longer has to cloister himself from the media and has been happily reacquainting himself with the country he left in spring 2001 to join Mr. McGreevey's campaign.
"He's trying to have a normal life," one friend said.
As long as Mr. Cipel remains in Israel, American agents have little leverage over him. Mr. Cipel has not been charged with a crime. So New Jersey's United States attorney, Christopher J. Christie, must hope that his own patience and Mr. Cipel's sense of injustice motivate him to talk.
Investigators must also hope that Mr. Cipel is not dissuaded by the uncomfortable prospect of describing the unusual attention Mr. McGreevey had lavished upon him. Although Mr. Cipel came to the United States with no background in American politics or government, he was granted frequent access to the highest level of the campaign for governor and was later appointed to an $80,000-a-year job as a liaison for homeland security. When newspaper stories ridiculed the appointment - Mr. Cipel's status as a foreigner prevented him from gaining a security clearance or attending counterterrorism briefings - he was eased out of the job in February 2002, and left the administration completely six months later. Even then, Mr. McGreevey helped him find another job, and on his first day in the new office, a potted lily was delivered with a card saying it was from the governor.
But investigators say that what most interests them is Mr. Cipel's knowledge of Mr. McGreevey's top aides and fund-raisers, like the developer Charles Kushner. Mr. Kushner, who pleaded guilty in August to hiring a prostitute to coerce witnesses in a federal campaign-finance investigation, also helped Mr. Cipel during his time in New Jersey: he sponsored his visa application, gave him a part-time job during the campaign and arranged for him to meet with Howard J. Rubenstein, a New York City publicist.
The authorities also hope to ask whether Mr. Cipel knows whether any of the governor's aides used their official positions to enrich themselves. For nearly two years, Mr. Christie has been looking into whether the governor's former chief of staff and chief counsel used their jobs on Mr. McGreevey's transition team to inflate the value of a billboard company they later sold for a hefty profit.
But none of those questions can be asked unless Mr. Cipel follows through on his promise to speak candidly to investigators. Until then, the agents can do little but wait.
-------- us
Army Charges 4 Soldiers In Death of Iraqi General
Associated Press
Tuesday, October 5, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6891-2004Oct4.html
FORT CARSON, Colo., Oct. 4 -- The Army charged four soldiers with murder Monday, accusing them of suffocating an Iraqi general during an interrogation last fall.
Chief Warrant Officers Jefferson L. Williams and Lewis E. Welshofer Jr., Sgt. 1st Class William J. Sommer, and Spec. Jerry L. Loper could get life in prison without parole in the Nov. 26 death of Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush, 57, in Qaim, Iraq.
The Army said Mowhoush died of asphyxiation from chest compression and from being smothered. Welshofer was part of a two-person team that interrogated the general, according to the Army.
The Army gave no details on what the men are alleged to have done. But the Denver Post, citing unidentified military documents, reported earlier this year that Welshofer and Williams slid a sleeping bag over Mowhoush's head and rolled him from his back to his stomach while asking questions.
Mowhoush, a member of the Republican Guard's air defense branch, was captured in a raid in Qaim. A U.S. military spokeswoman said at the time that Mowhoush was believed to have been financing attacks on U.S. forces.
All four soldiers were assigned to the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, based at Fort Carson, at the time of Mowhoush's death and have since returned to the United States. They remain on duty with their units and have not been jailed, officials said.
Their ages and home towns were not immediately available.
A decision on whether to court-martial the men will be made after an Article 32 hearing, which is similar to a preliminary hearing in civilian court.
--------
PRISON ABUSE
Army Charges 4 Soldiers With Murder in the Death of an Iraqi General During Interrogation
October 5, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/05/national/05abuse.html?pagewanted=all
DENVER, Oct. 4 - The Army charged four soldiers on Monday with murder and dereliction of duty in the smothering of an Iraqi general during an interrogation last fall. The charges bring to at least 10 the number of soldiers charged with murder in the deaths of Iraqis.
The soldiers charged with murder in the case are two chief warrant officers, Jefferson Williams and Lewis Welshofer Jr.; Sgt. First Class William Sommer, and Specialist Jerry Loper. They are accused of killing Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush, 57, in Qaim, Iraq. The Army said General Mowhoush died of asphyxiation from chest compression and from being smothered.
Attempts to reach the four men were unsuccessful.
The men were assigned to the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, based at Fort Carson, Colo., at the time of General Mowhoush's death on Nov. 26. The last of the regiment returned to the post in May after about a year in Iraq.
Mr. Williams is now at Fort Gordon, Ga., after being transferred to the 513th Military Intelligence Brigade there. The other three soldiers remain with the Third Armored Cavalry and are at Fort Carson, said Kim Tisor, a spokeswoman at the base. Mr. Welshofer and Sergeant Sommer are in the 66th Military Intelligence Company. Specialist Loper is in aviation maintenance.
All four remain on duty and have not been jailed, Ms. Tisor said. Their ages and hometowns were not immediately available.
General Mowhoush, a member of the Republican Guard's air defense branch, was captured in a raid in Qaim. The military said at the time that he was suspected of financing attacks on American forces.
The handling of Iraqi prisoners by American troops has become a scandal, fed by images from Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere. But General Mowhoush's case is rare, if not unprecedented, said Christopher Wilson, a former military prosecutor and defense lawyer now in private practice in Torrance, Calif.
"I don't know of any other case where a major general died of asphyxiation during interrogation," Mr. Wilson said. "I doubt that this has happened in the past 50 years."
He said interrogators were probably under pressure to get information from General Mowhoush. "I imagine we may see that as a defense," he said.
Details of the allegations were not provided by the Army, which has said Mr. Welshofer was part of a two-person interrogation team that questioned General Mowhoush.
The Army's initial report in November said General Mowhoush had lost consciousness after complaining that he did not feel well. In May, however, the Army said that he had been asphyxiated and that a criminal investigation was under way.
Mr. Welshofer and another officer reportedly slid a sleeping bag over General Mowhoush's head before rolling him back and forth while asking questions.
A decision on whether to court-martial the defendants will not be made until after Article 32 hearings, similar to a preliminary hearing in civilian court. The defendants could also waive the hearing and go directly to court-martial. No dates were announced.
In other homicide cases, four soldiers from Fort Riley, Kan., were charged last month with murder in the deaths of four Iraqi civilians in two incidents. A soldier from the First Armored Division in Germany has been charged with murder in the shooting death of a badly wounded driver for a militant Iraqi cleric, Moktada al-Sadr. Another soldier was sentenced to 25 years in prison last month after pleading guilty to murder in the death of an Iraqi national guardsman; his unit was not identified.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts / tribunals
Justices Show Inclination to Scrap Sentencing Rules
October 5, 2004
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/05/politics/05scotus.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Oct. 4 - By the time the first day of the new Supreme Court term ended on Monday, there seemed little doubt that criminal sentencing in the United States was about to change. But what form the change might take, how drastic it might be, and whether defendants or prosecutors would benefit the most remained very much open to question as the court heard arguments on the constitutionality of federal sentencing guidelines that have been in effect for 17 years.
A series of Supreme Court decisions, culminating in June with the invalidation of the sentencing guidelines in the Washington State, established the principle that juries, and not judges, must rule on the facts that are the building blocks of a criminal sentence.
In the June case, Blakely v. Washington, the court said that the Sixth Amendment right to trial by jury requires that any fact, like the quantity of drugs in a narcotics case, that leads to a sentence greater than the maximum the defendant could otherwise receive must be proven to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.
Most of the justices on Monday appeared prepared to apply that decision to the federal guidelines, despite the vigorous effort of Paul D. Clement, the acting solicitor general, to persuade the court otherwise. The court's concern, Mr. Clement said, has been not to allow judges to set sentences beyond the "statutory maximum" for a crime. While the Washington guidelines were part of state law, the federal guidelines came from the United States Sentencing Commission, which does not enact statutes and should not raise the same concern, he said.
Justice David H. Souter rejected the argument. "The defendant in the courtroom is going to suffer the same effect, whether it's a rule, a guideline, or a statute," he said. "Why should that make any difference under the Sixth Amendment?"
And Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg told the government lawyer, "The distinction you're making really doesn't stand up."
Those two justices' responses were significant because both were part of the 5-to-4 majority in the Blakely decision and have been seen by some court-watchers as the most likely of the five to try to draw a boundary between that case and the federal guidelines. But they showed no inclination to do so.
The other members of the majority were Justices Antonin Scalia, who wrote the opinion; John Paul Stevens, who wrote the opinion in Apprendi v. New Jersey that started the court on this path four years ago; and Clarence Thomas.
The court spent most of the argument debating what might happen if the guidelines in their current form could no longer be used. There appeared to be no consensus.
The government's position is that if the guidelines can no longer be applied as binding sentencing rules, judges should be able to use them in an advisory way and have the discretion to impose any sentence within the range that Congress has set for the crime. Justice Stephen G. Breyer, for one, appeared to find that alternative attractive. What would be wrong, Justice Breyer asked, with substituting the word "may" for the word "shall" in the law that directs judges to use the guidelines?
There would be nothing wrong with that, Mr. Clement replied.
Justice Scalia interjected, "Could it be that 'shall' does not mean 'may'?''
Justice Breyer is the court's strongest advocate for the guidelines. He played a leading role in their development as a Senate staff member and later as a member of the sentencing commission. In contrast to his usual air of wry good cheer, Justice Breyer appeared weary and somewhat forlorn as the argument progressed.
To J. Christopher Kelly, a defense lawyer arguing on behalf of Freddie J. Booker, one of the two defendants before the court, Justice Breyer observed that Congress's objective in establishing the guidelines system was uniformity in sentencing. "I think it was a noble objective, whether or not it was achieved," Justice Breyer said. "Are you saying, 'Sorry, there's just no way to do it?' ''
The result, he suggested, would be that one cellmate would serve a day in prison and the other cellmate 50 years when their "real conduct was the same."
Mr. Kelly replied, "The real conduct can still be proved to a jury." He and Rosemary Scapicchio, representing the other defendant, Ducan Fanfan, both said that under current sentencing practice, the government "proves the easiest charge and saves the heart of the case for sentencing," as Mr. Kelly put it.
In his client's case, United States v. Booker, No. 04-104, the jury convicted Mr. Booker of possessing and intending to distribute at least 50 grams of cocaine base. For that crime, the guidelines recommended a sentence of 20 to just over 22 years. But the judge sentenced him to 30 years by finding that he had distributed 10 times that amount of cocaine in the weeks before his arrest.
Mr. Booker had been neither charged nor convicted of distributing that amount, but the manual on sentencing guidelines instructs judges to base the sentence on all acts "that were part of the same course of conduct or common scheme or plan as the offense of conviction."
The federal appeals court in Chicago found that this additional sentence violated the principle established in the Blakely decision, and the government appealed to the Supreme Court.
In the second case, United States v. Fanfan, No. 04-105, a jury found the defendant guilty of conspiring to possess and distribute at least 500 grams of cocaine. Four days after the Supreme Court issued the Blakely ruling, a judge sentenced Mr. Fanfan to six and a half years in prison, the maximum guidelines sentence for the offense. Prosecutors had sought about 15 to 20 years, in light of the evidence it presented at sentencing that the defendant had been a ringleader of the conspiracy.
The judge, D. Brock Hornby of Federal District Court in Maine, said the federal guidelines were "exactly comparable to the Washington state scheme in all respects material to the Blakely decision." Mr. Clement referred at one point Monday to "carnage and wreckage" in the federal criminal justice system, and began his argument by noting that federal courts impose 1,200 criminal sentences every week. All the justices did not share the government's sense of dread. Justice Stevens noted several times that 97 percent of federal criminal cases are settled by plea bargains, with only 3 percent going to trial. He said he was "not persuaded" that a major problem loomed for the government.
In addition to making the guidelines advisory for judges, another option discussed was keeping the guidelines but having the jury, rather than the judge, make the factual findings on which the sentence depends. That would require the government to specify those facts - such as the quantity of drugs, or the degree of the defendant's involvement in a conspiracy - and to prove them to the jury beyond a reasonable doubt.
Mr. Clement dismissed this idea as the "Blakely-ization of the guidelines," which he said would amount to "judicial law-making." Guidelines that were "clearly designed for judicial fact-finding" were not suited for use by the jury, he said.
At one point, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, one of the strongest dissenters from the Blakely decision, seemed to reach a moment of frustration and resignation. "Maybe we should just leave it to Congress," she said.
-------- homeland security / national intelligence
Senators Offer New Oversight Structure
Intelligence Panels Would Be Reworked
By Helen Dewar
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 5, 2004; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6888-2004Oct4.html
Key senators of both parties yesterday proposed several steps to strengthen Senate oversight of intelligence and homeland security operations but stopped short of one of the most far-reaching recommendations for congressional reform made by the Sept. 11 commission.
The proposals were unveiled for action by the full Senate later this week as both houses moved toward approval of separate bills to restructure intelligence operations within the executive branch before Congress recesses at the end of the week for the elections.
The oversight initiatives, outlined by Majority Whip Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Minority Whip Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), who headed a 22-member task force on reorganization of Senate anti-terrorism oversight, included a beefed-up role for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and reconstitution of the Governmental Affairs Committee to include homeland security.
Under their proposals, the intelligence panel's current term limits of eight years would be abolished and an intelligence oversight subcommittee would be created. The full committee would be reduced in size from 17 to 15 members, and the Senate's majority party would be barred from having more than a one-vote majority on the panel to help ensure its bipartisanship. In addition, a new Appropriations subcommittee would be created to handle intelligence financing.
The combined Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee would have responsibility for activities now within the jurisdiction of nine other committees, and the Governmental Affairs Committee will relinquish some responsibilities to other panels.
While approving most of the Sept. 11 commission's proposals, McConnell and Reid did not embrace the biggest and most controversial proposal: to create a joint House-Senate intelligence committee or set up separate committees with combined powers to set policy and appropriate funds.
"Tinkering with the existing structure is not sufficient," the commission said in recommending these and other changes to what it described as a "dysfunctional" system of congressional oversight of intelligence. Other major reforms, including creation of a national intelligence director and a counterterrorism center, "will not change if congressional oversight does not change too," the commission said.
But the proposal to add the power of the purse to the intelligence committee's existing policy responsibilities ran into stiff opposition from some of the Senate's most powerful members, especially those who sit on the Appropriations Committee.
In defense of the senators' recommendation to keep financing authority for intelligence under control of appropriators, Reid quoted commission chairman Thomas H. Kean as saying he thought creation of an Appropriations subcommittee on intelligence would be within the spirit of the commission's recommendations.
"If you're on a football field, maybe this gets you to 90 yards down the field," Reid added. "This is really quite significant."
But, at a news conference shortly before the McConnell-Reid proposals were announced, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) accused appropriators of "trying to protect their turf" and added: "If we do not give this new permanent intelligence committee the appropriation authority that they need, then there will be no reform and a vital part of the 9/11 commission recommendations will be neutered."
McConnell and Reid said they expect McCain to offer an amendment to give funding authority to the intelligence panel when the Senate considers the oversight proposals, most likely after completion of action on the executive branch reorganization bill tomorrow or Thursday.
House leaders are working on oversight proposals for their chamber and plan to be ready for action before the next Congress convenes in January, said John Feehery, spokesman for Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.).
As the Senate continued work on the executive branch measure, it rejected efforts by some of its most senior and powerful members -- including Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) and ranking minority member Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) -- to reverse some of the commission's key proposals.
A proposal by Byrd to eliminate the budgetary powers recommended by the commission for the new intelligence director was defeated 62 to 29. A proposal by Stevens to drop the commission's recommendation for public disclosure of the intelligence budget was rejected 55 to 37.
--------
Senate Leans to a Powerful Intelligence Chief
October 5, 2004
By CARL HULSE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/05/politics/05panel.html
WASHINGTON, Oct. 4 - Senate authors of a plan to reorganize United States intelligence agencies defeated efforts on Monday to reduce the power of a new national intelligence director. The leadership, meanwhile, unveiled a plan on how the Senate could better oversee intelligence and security activities.
With lawmakers hoping to gain approval this week for a measure based on the recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission, the backers of the legislation won a series of significant votes, including their push to disclose the total spending by United States intelligence agencies.
"The public has a right to know at least that," said Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut and a chief author of the bill that seeks to centralize intelligence gathering.
The ability of the sponsors to hold off challenges from some of the most senior and powerful members of the Senate illustrated the momentum behind the reorganization and the influence of leaders of the Sept. 11 commission and relatives of Sept. 11 victims, who have been lobbying against changes to the legislation.
Their intense efforts were starting to rub some lawmakers the wrong way. Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska and chairman of the Appropriations Committee, described the Sept. 11 commissioners on Monday as a "pressure group."
"I am tired of having this bill pushed so hard," said Mr. Stevens, who threatened to use procedural tactics to slow the measure. "This is going too fast."
Reversing current policy, the Senate agreed to declassify the total spent annually on intelligence gathering, defeating on a 55-to-37 vote a proposal by Mr. Stevens to study the issue. He and others argued that making public the aggregate amount could harm covert operations.
"In the case of intelligence collection and analysis, secrecy is absolutely necessary," said Mr. Stevens, who said the information was of "no use to anyone but those who wish to do us harm."
The Senate also defeated on a 62-to-29 vote a proposal by Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, the senior Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, to leave much of the responsibility for intelligence spending with the Department of Defense instead of shifting it to the new national intelligence director.
Mr. Byrd also said that Congress was moving too fast on the overhaul and that the initiative would give too much power to one person.
"We should take some more time here because we're doing some dangerous things in this bill," said Mr. Byrd. He said the new director would ultimately control 15 different agencies and a $40 billion budget. "This is one-man rule, intelligence could be manipulated by one man."
The fight between the two veteran senators and the more junior authors of the legislation illustrated the tensions over the legislation and its efforts to redraw long-established lines of authority and spending.
The measure's backers did reach a compromise with Senator John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia and chairman of the Armed Services Committee, accepting his plan for the defense secretary and intelligence director to share responsibility for nominating critical agency directors.
The House is expected to consider and pass its own version of the legislation this week, but it is unlikely that a final version can be quickly produced from negotiations between the House and Senate.
Responding to a finding by the Sept. 11 commission that Congressional oversight of intelligence and homeland security was redundant, the Senate leadership proposed a bipartisan set of institutional changes that lawmakers said they also hoped to consider by the end of the week.
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, joined Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, his Democratic counterpart, in proposing a series of changes that included lifting term limits on Intelligence Committee members and putting most of the responsibility for homeland security issues under what is now the Governmental Affairs Committee.
They did not go as far as the commission recommended, however, and stopped short of giving the intelligence panel both policy-making and spending power. The two senators said they expected Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and others to push that approach on the Senate floor.
-------- justice
Patriot Act terror protection
October 05, 2004
Washington Times
By Deroy Murdock
http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20041004-103824-3279r.htm
"We are a nation of laws and liberties, not of a knock in the night," Sen. John Kerry told Iowa voters last Dec. 1. "So it is time to end the era of John Ashcroft. That starts with replacing the Patriot Act with a new law that protects our people and our liberties at the same time."
Characteristically, Mr. Kerry now denounces the Patriot Act, although he voted for it. "Most of [the Patriot Act] has to do with improving the transfer of information between CIA and FBI, and it has to do with things that really were quite necessary in the wake of what happened on September 11," Mr. Kerry bragged to New Hampshirites on Aug. 6, 2003.
Unlike the Tumbleweed-in-Chief, members of the new Coalition for Security, Liberty and the Law unswervingly advocate the Patriot Act as a shield against homicidal Islamofascism.
"We write to express our strong support for the U.S.A. Patriot Act and concern about misinformation about the necessary legal tools it provides to battle al Qaeda and other terrorist enemies," states a Sept. 23 letter to congressional leaders signed by former New York City mayors Rudy Giuliani and Ed Koch, ex-CIA chief James Woolsey, actor Ron Silver and 66 other leading Americans.
By boosting penalties for terrorism, dragging analog-era surveillance laws into the digital age and tearing down the wall that divided American spies from cops, the Patriot Act has helped thwart numerous terrorist conspiracies:
c The FBI began watching the Lackawanna Six al Qaeda cell in the summer of 2001. Separate teams probed their suspected drug and terrorist violations.
According to Justice's July "Report from the Field: The U.S.A. Patriot Act at Work," "there were times when the intelligence officers and the law-enforcement agents concluded that they could not be in the same room." Under the Patriot Act, these officials exchanged data, pooled resources and jailed all six Upstate New York terrorists for pro-al Qaeda subterfuge.
c In the Portland Seven case, the Patriot Act let the FBI follow one terrorist's plan to attack domestic Jewish targets while other conspirators tried to reach Afghanistan to help al Qaeda and the Taliban battle American GIs. The FBI and prosecutors jointly imprisoned six extremists, while Pakistani troops killed their comrade.
• The Palestinian Islamic Jihad Eight were indicted for materially supporting foreign terrorists. Earlier, the Patriot Act let the supervising federal judge quickly issue a search warrant in another jurisdiction, rather than consume time involving a local jurist.
c As Dick Morris recalled in the Sept. 12 New York Post, under the Patriot Act, federal intelligence agents in March 2003 gave information to the New York Police Department squeezed from al Qaeda honcho Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM).
New York's Finest then patrolled the Brooklyn Bridge and arrested Iyman Faris before he could blast it into the East River.
Similar intelligence-sharing helped the NYPD unravel an al Qaeda plot to use a lawful Manhattan garment company to ship bombs and Stinger missiles into New York. Details massaged out of Khalid Sheik Mohammed foiled Islamist designs to fire these Stingers at jetliners departing Newark's airport.
Civil-libertarian purists nonetheless see the Patriot Act as the birth certificate of an American police state. But the Justice Department's inspector general found only 17 Patriot Act-related complaints through December 2003 that merited investigation and substantial review. That's a rather low error rate, given millions of contacts over two years between Justice employees and average citizens.
Reauthorizing the Patriot Act every five years would help Congress guard against potential abuses. Journalists also would howl if overzealous feds ever began examining library reading lists without search warrants.
That said, wouldn't it have been nice had FBI agents on, say, Sept. 1, 2001, learned Mohamed Atta had borrowed books on Boeing 767 flight techniques and high-rise firefighting challenges?
While Americans ponder legal niceties, those who want you dead likely weigh the relative merits of explosives vs. poisons. Remember the enemy against whom the Patriot Act is deployed. Osama bin Laden's 1998 declaration of war against the United States is icily clear:
"The ruling to kill all Americans and their allies - civilians and military - is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it."
The Patriot Act stands between that and you.
Deroy Murdock is a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University and a columnist with Scripps Howard News Service.
-------- police
Report Details FBI's Changed Priorities
Associated Press
Tuesday, October 5, 2004; Page A23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6802-2004Oct4.html
When the FBI shifted its focus to anti-terrorism efforts, investigations targeting illegal drugs, organized crime and white-collar crime took the biggest hit, according to a Justice Department report issued yesterday.
The report by Glenn A. Fine, the department's inspector general, provides the first detailed look at where the FBI moved resources after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Fine said the review, which drew no conclusions about the wisdom of the changes, showed that the FBI's staffing shifts "generally were in line with its post-Sept. 11 priorities."
The greatest reduction occurred in the FBI's organized crime and drug program, which lost 758 agents to counterterrorism matters between 2000 and 2003. The largest cuts took place in investigations involving Mexican drug organizations, primarily in the Southwest, the report said.
An additional 321 agents were shifted from white-collar crime investigations -- especially health care fraud -- and 286 were moved from violent crime programs such as tracking down fugitives.
The report found that the FBI opened about 17,000 fewer cases in the programs most affected by the shift in priorities. Of those, the biggest change was the 11,600 fewer fugitive cases opened by the FBI.
However, even though the FBI reduced by 26 percent the number of agents working bank robberies, there were 485 more such cases opened in 2003 compared with 2000.
Other federal agencies are picking up the slack in some areas. The Drug Enforcement Administration, for example, is increasing its focus on drug investigations, while the U.S. Marshals Service has instituted a broader effort involving state and local police to catch fugitives.
The report also found that in 2003 the FBI used more agents for terrorism investigations than were allocated for that purpose by its budget. More than 3,600 agents worked terrorism matters last year, compared with 2,811 set by the budget.
The FBI had no immediate comment on the report, which was released publicly in edited form to remove classified material.
--------
City Challenged on Fingerprinting Protesters
October 5, 2004
By DIANE CARDWELL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/05/nyregion/05prints.html
Since coming under fire for their handling of protesters arrested during the Republican convention, Bloomberg administration officials have said that sluggish fingerprint processing in Albany was a major cause of the long delays in releasing detainees, although state officials have denied any tardiness.
Now it looks as if much of the fingerprinting may not have been legal in the first place. According to lawyers at the New York Civil Liberties Union, the city may have violated state law by routinely fingerprinting arrested protesters.
In a letter sent yesterday to Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, officials of the organization wrote that although the law allowed the police to fingerprint people charged with minor offenses in certain circumstances, "this could not justify the routine fingerprinting of the nearly 1,500 people reportedly arrested during the convention for minor offenses."
The officials, Donna Lieberman and Christopher Dunn, the group's executive director and associate legal director respectively, wrote that state criminal-procedure law defined narrow circumstances for fingerprinting when the offenses are minor. Those circumstances are when the police cannot establish the person's identity, when they suspect that the identification supplied is not accurate, or when they suspect that there is an outstanding warrant.
Legal questions about the fingerprinting policy have come up before. At a hearing in September over the city's treatment of arrested protesters, Justice John Cataldo of State Supreme Court in Manhattan noted that the city could have dispensed with the fingerprinting entirely as most of the offenses were so minor that state law did not require it.
Ms. Lieberman and Mr. Dunn also wrote that they found the "blanket fingerprinting" of people arrested at demonstrations troubling because "the entry of fingerprints into law enforcement databases can have lifelong consequences."
Normally, when a person is arrested and fingerprinted in New York, the State Division of Criminal Justice Services checks the prints in its system and sends them to the Federal Bureau of Investigation as well, state officials said. Information about arrest records and outstanding warrants is then sent back to the city's Police Department.
As a result, the lawyers wrote, they are "deeply troubled by the notion that the N.Y.P.D. may have forced hundreds of political activists," as well as "a number of innocent bystanders arrested during the convention, to surrender their fingerprints for entry into state and federal databases."
Saying that they were prepared to sue the city if necessary, the lawyers asked that any illegally obtained fingerprints held by the police, the state or the F.B.I. be destroyed.
John Feinblatt, criminal justice coordinator for the Bloomberg administration, defended the city's actions, saying the fingerprints were automatically destroyed and therefore could not pose a threat to those arrested in the future.
"The normal procedure for violation arrests is to take fingerprints for one purpose and one purpose only: to definitively establish who the person is and whether he has a warrant or other law-enforcement hold," he said. "After that the prints are destroyed and not made part of any permanent record. That's exactly what was done with every violation during the R.N.C., no more, no less."
Without commenting on whether the city had broken the law, he added, "In an age of identity theft and high-quality fake ID's, fingerprints are the only surefire way to establish who's in front of you." State and federal officials said they did keep fingerprints from violation arrests.
In the view of Mr. Dunn of the civil liberties union, though, destroying the fingerprints would not remedy the fact that they were illegally taken.
"The practice has to stop," he said. "It's an unlawful practice. And more importantly, we're skeptical that fingerprints that were sent to New York State or the F.B.I. have been destroyed."
-------- prisons / prisoners
U.S. Defends Detentions
By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 5, 2004; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7587-2004Oct5.html
The Bush administration argued yesterday that the president can detain enemy combatants at a military prison in Cuba as long as necessary to protect national security and that they have no constitutional rights to hear charges against them.
Facing a deadline yesterday to give a federal judge some answers about 60 people held at a U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the government filed a 96-page response detailing the reasons it believes it need not explain why they were detained or account for how long they might be imprisoned.
The Justice Department argued that the war powers of the president and the federal government are intentionally broad and specifically allow for the capture of enemy combatants "to prevent the captured individual from serving the enemy" and renewing hostilities.
"Detention of enemy combatants is an integral and inexorable part of the Commander-in-Chief's power to defend the nation and vanquish the enemy," government lawyers wrote.
The government began transferring hundreds of men captured in the Afghan war to Guantanamo in early 2002, accused them of being "enemy combatants" and contended that it was not required to formally charge them or allow them to see attorneys. Officials cited security concerns in holding them incommunicado. The Supreme Court disagreed in June, and several dozen detainees have sued in federal court in Washington, demanding hearings.
In papers filed late yesterday evening, the government also objected to the argument of plaintiffs' lawyers that their clients are unfairly labeled as enemy combatants because they were captured far from Afghanistan battlefields or in other countries or were found without a weapon.
"The detention powers of the Executive, not less than the terrorist threat they aim to repel and defeat, obviously do not stop at the geographic borders of Afghanistan," the government wrote.
Researcher Karl Evanzz contributed to this report.
-------- POLITICS
-------- budget
Tax-Cut Bill Draws White House Doubts
Corporate Provisions Go Beyond 'Core Objective,' Treasury Secretary Says
By Jonathan Weisman and Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, October 5, 2004; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7369-2004Oct4.html
The Bush administration yesterday raised serious objections about congressional efforts to approve a corporate tax-cut bill this week, warning that the Republican-backed legislation risked growing from a narrow effort to help manufacturers into a complex assortment of special-interest tax breaks.
As members of a House-Senate conference committee met last night to begin discussing a final draft of the proposal, Treasury Secretary John W. Snow wrote that the initial House and Senate versions of the legislation had included "a myriad of special interest tax provisions that benefit few taxpayers."
The 633-page conference committee draft released last night included 170 provisions that, along with helping old-line industries, give tax breaks to restaurant owners, filmmakers, brewers, distillers, bow-and-arrow manufacturers, tackle-box companies, native Alaskan whalers, NASCAR track owners, and importers of Chinese ceiling fans.
Those sorts of provisions, Snow wrote to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), went far beyond the bill's "core objective" of replacing a set of export subsidies for manufacturers with equivalent tax relief. The export subsidies have been ruled illegal by the World Trade Organization, and they had led the European Union to impose increasingly punitive tariffs on U.S. goods.
That basic thrust of the legislation, important to those manufacturers who must keep paying the E.U. tariffs until the law is changed, may now be at risk.
Though Snow did not threaten a presidential veto in his letter and offered to help work out a compromise, sources familiar with the administration's strategy on the bill said the letter was meant to slow the legislation down until at least after the election.
The bill is the most comprehensive revision of the corporate tax code in two decades, and it would in its current form reduce by $76.5 billion over 10 years the taxes on profit derived from domestic manufacturing and a wide range of other activities. It also changed the tax treatment of companies that manufacture overseas -- a sensitive issue connected to the debate over the outsourcing of jobs to other countries. As it progressed, the bill also came to include a buyout of the annual quota payments made to tobacco growers, a provision some lawmakers hoped to use to bring the tobacco industry under the regulation of the Food and Drug Administration.
Despite the administration's criticism, House and Senate conferees last night said they still hoped to pass the legislation before they adjourn Friday for the end of the campaign. They noted that some of the items cited in Snow's letter -- including tax penalties on overseas manufacturing that, on one hand, might discourage businesses from relocating abroad, but could also dissuade foreigners from investing in the United States -- were not even included in the proposal that House and Senate Republican leaders introduced to the conference committee last night.
The proposal would reduce corporate taxes by nearly $145 billion over 10 years, but would be more than offset by revenue raised through closing tax loopholes and other measures.
Even before the administration raised its objections, passage was uncertain. The tobacco buyout provision, for example, offers tobacco growers a one-time cash payment, presumably to end their yearly subsidies. But a handful of Republican and Democratic senators are threatening to torpedo the entire bill if the buyout is not amended to include FDA regulation of the tobacco industry.
The compromise leans toward the House version in many ways. The Senate tax bill included tough rules on corporations that move their headquarters to post office boxes in offshore tax havens such as Bermuda. The Senate provision would have raised $3.1 billion over the next 10 years, not only by stopping such moves in the future but by collecting back taxes from companies that recently moved offshore.
Under heavy lobbying pressure, GOP negotiators generally sided with the House version. The nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that the new compromise version would raise $830 million over 10 years, a fraction of the revenue anticipated from the Senate proposal.
Negotiators also dropped a Senate provision that would have written into law a strict new definition of illegal tax shelter activities. Tax courts generally rule against any corporate tax maneuver designed solely to reduce a company's tax bill. By codifying that "economic substance doctrine," the Senate hoped to close tax shelters worth $15 billion over the next 10 years. No such provision emerged in the version unveiled last night.
On the biggest issues, however, Senate tax aides say Grassley won over House Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas (R-Calif.). The House wanted a straightforward reduction in the corporate income tax for domestic manufacturing that applied only to traditional corporations, or "C corporations." The compromise bill adopts the Senate tack, offering a tax deduction on income derived from domestic manufacturing to traditional corporations, small businesses, sole proprietorships, partnerships and cooperatives.
Thomas also bowed to Grassley on paying for the bill with revenue-raising provisions. The original House bill would have cost the Treasury $34.4 billion over 10 years.
-------- corruption
Partisan Politics at Work
Criticized Federal Employees Used as a 'Prop' in Bush Reelection Campaign in Violation of Hatch Act, Union Charges
By Christopher Lee
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 5, 2004; Page A23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A6892-2004Oct4?language=printer
Military and civilian employees at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque received an unusual e-mail inviting them to attend an Aug. 26 campaign rally for President Bush.
"The White House has extended an invitation to TEAM KIRTLAND to attend President Bush's speech downtown at the Convention Center," read the message, sent by Deborah Mercurio, the director of public affairs for the 377th Air Base Wing. "Doors open at 12:00 p.m. and no one is to arrive later than 2:00 p.m. For those interested, please stop by the Wing PA office for tickets."
To Mercurio, the e-mail, which cautioned military personnel not to wear their uniforms or represent themselves as attending in their official military capacity, amounted to nothing more than a nice gesture by the White House to provide the base's workers with a chance to see their commander in chief.
To federal employee unions, it represented the latest attempt by the Bush administration and its supporters to transform what is supposed to be a politically neutral federal bureaucracy into an arm of the president's reelection campaign. Bush spent the day touting his record in three cities across the battleground state, which he lost by 366 votes four years ago.
"They basically rounded up the people and told the military, 'Don't wear your uniforms and get over to the convention center and root for the president,' " said John Gage, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal employee union. The "party, the administration, whoever, just seems to be using our military and our civil service as a prop for campaign events."
Gage and other union leaders are keeping track of such incidents. They say government officials have used agency computers to e-mail federal workers memos highlighting presidential accomplishments and posted politically charged language on a Cabinet department's Web site.
At the same time, federal bosses have tried to restrict their employees from volunteering on their own time for Democratic nominee John F. Kerry and issued guidelines on campaigning on federal property that favor Bush, the administration's critics say.
"It seems like there's not really a level playing field here," said J. Ward Morrow, assistant general counsel for AFGE, which represents about 600,000 federal workers and has endorsed Kerry for president.
Mercurio said she does not understand what all the fuss is about. Base officials did not encourage attendance at the Bush rally, and the e-mail pointed out that on-duty personnel would have to take leave to go.
"It was to see their commander in chief and not at all the politician," she said. "I don't even know for sure who I'm going to vote for, so it's not like I was campaigning for him or anything."
But when Michelle Sandoval, president of AFGE Local 2263, later asked base officials to give employees the same opportunity to attend a Kerry speech Sept. 16 in Albuquerque, she was turned down.
Col. Hank Andrews, commander of the 377th Air Base Wing, said in an e-mail to Sandoval that after complaints were filed about the Aug. 26 e-mail, "the Commander of AFMC [Air Force Materiel Command] subsequently felt it was important to emphasize that we should exercise caution regarding these events. . . . In light of all of this information, I must decline your request."
White House spokeswoman Erin Healy dismissed as unfounded the union's allegations that officials have trampled the spirit -- and at times the letter -- of the Hatch Act, a decades-old law that restricts partisan political activities in the federal workplace.
"This White House and this administration adheres to the highest ethical standards and the rules and regulations put in place by the Hatch Act," Healy said. The complaints go beyond mere grumbling about the natural political advantages enjoyed by an incumbent president who can command daily media attention, crisscross the country in Air Force One and mix his official duties and political events. Some of the incidents appear to be clear violations of the Hatch Act, union officials said.
The law, which dates to 1939 and most recently was amended 11 years ago, is supposed to keep politics out of the federal workplace and ensure that taxpayer-supported resources are not misused in the service of partisan campaigns. It also is designed to foster a work environment in which employees know their job security does not depend on supporting the same candidate as the boss.
Under the act, federal employees cannot engage in political activity while on duty, use their official authority to influence an election, solicit money for a partisan candidate or run as a candidate for partisan office. Employees may, however, run in nonpartisan elections, vote, express opinions about candidates and contribute money to them, as well as campaign for or against a candidate -- so long as they do such things on their own time.
Union officials cited several examples of what they consider to be inappropriate political activity within executive branch agencies this election season:
• On Aug. 16, the Department of Veterans Affairs e-mailed its public affairs officers a two-page "fact sheet" titled, "Supporting and Strengthening the Military and Military Families." The document, which was created by the White House and touted Bush's record on veterans issues, was, in turn, e-mailed to all VA employees in the Tampa area. An identical version was posted on the official Bush-Cheney campaign Web site two days later.
Cynthia R. Church, a VA spokeswoman, said the document was an internal resource for use by public affairs officials in responding to reporters' queries. After its wider dissemination generated questions, VA Secretary Anthony J. Principi halted distribution and began a legal review, which found nothing improper, Church said.
"We don't have anything to do with the campaign," Church said. "The department's mission transcends politics. Our only job is to serve our nation's veterans."
• In early April, shortly before federal tax returns were due, the Treasury Department issued a news release that read, in part: "America has a choice: It can continue to grow the economy and create new jobs as the President's policies are doing; or it can raise taxes on American families and small businesses, hurting economic recovery and future job creation." The language appeared verbatim on an April 2 fact sheet put out by the Republican National Committee.
Various Democratic groups called the Treasury release unethical and a possible violation of the Hatch Act. Treasury officials maintained that they did nothing wrong.
The Office of Special Counsel, an independent agency headed by Bush appointee Scott J. Bloch, enforces the Hatch Act, but critics say Bloch has failed to aggressively pursue apparent violations of the law that favor Bush.
Cathy Deeds, an OSC spokeswoman, defended the agency's record, saying, "We enforce the Hatch Act equally in a totally bipartisan manner."
Deeds noted that the agency recently sought disciplinary action against two employees accused in separate incidents of sending partisan messages to colleagues through government e-mail. In one case, an Environmental Protection Agency employee sent an anti-Kerry message featuring a purported photograph of Kerry and actress Jane Fonda speaking at an anti-Vietnam War rally. In the other, an Air Force civilian worker e-mailed a document mocking Bush's résumé and urging the president's defeat this fall.
"One [incident] was anti-Kerry, one was anti-Bush," Deeds said. "We're going to enforce the Hatch Act no matter who the offender is."
Union officials say some of the administration's actions seem designed to intimidate employees who might want to support Kerry.
For example, supervisors recently told some Los Angeles-area employees of the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection that anyone who wants to engage in outside volunteer activity, including political campaign work, would have to request formal approval first. In a Sept. 7 letter to Robert C. Bonner, commissioner of the bureau, Colleen M. Kelley, another union leader, called such a requirement "an intolerable infringement" of employees constitutional rights that would create "an impermissible chilling effect."
Agency officials called the situation a misinterpretation of rules governing outside employment that arose during a routine discussion about avoiding conflicts of interest. They said the agency had begun correcting the problem even before the union sent its letter.
"As soon as our chief counsel saw the mistake, they called up and said, 'Whoa, whoa, you don't fill out these forms for this,' " said Christiana Halsey, an agency spokeswoman. "Employees can do whatever political activity outside of their official time that they want. That's their constitutional right."
In July, an internal newsletter for employees of the Internal Revenue Service sought to clarify the Hatch Act's restrictions on political activity by employees. It offered an example of "Revenue Agent Smith" who becomes "very inspired by her fellow volunteers" while working on Bush's reelection campaign. Smith decides to put a campaign sticker in her cubicle and send out a division-wide e-mail asking people to vote for Bush, actions the newsletter warned would violate the law.
The newsletter's message may have been well-intentioned, but it would have been better delivered without naming either major party candidate, said Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents 150,000 federal employees and, like AFGE, has endorsed Kerry.
"There was no such message that federal employees would be supporting Kerry because they were 'inspired,' " Kelley said. "I can tell you when it hit the workplace, I got a lot of phone calls."
AFGE's Morrow acknowledged that in every election season a few isolated employees of both parties will cross the line in bringing political passions into the workplace. But whether such incidents are honest mistakes or the product of a coordinated effort by the administration, the chilling effect they have on federal workers is the same, he said.
"The whole point of the Hatch Act is to protect the employees from being coerced into doing things," Morrow said. "If employees want to go out and vote and work for the candidate of their choice, they should. But what we don't want to see is [federal] employers treating it like merit system employees are part of a patronage system that, because your manager is in favor of this or that candidate, therefore there is a presumption that you should show up and support that candidate. . . . That's certainly going to chill the workforce in terms of what they think they can and cannot do."
-------- propaganda wars
THE DEFENSE SECRETARY
Rumsfeld Sees Lack of Proof for Qaeda-Hussein Link
October 5, 2004
By THOM SHANKER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/05/politics/05rumsfeld.html
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said yesterday that he had seen no "strong, hard evidence" linking Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, although he tempered his comment by noting that stark disagreements on that issue remained among American intelligence analysts.
"I have seen the answer to that question migrate in the intelligence community over the period of a year in the most amazing way," Mr. Rumsfeld said when asked about ties between Mr. Hussein and the terror network run by Osama bin Laden. Senior administration officials cited the existence of ties between them as a rationale for war on Iraq.
"Second, there are differences in the intelligence community as to what the relationship was," Mr. Rumsfeld said at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. "To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two."
Relationships among terrorists and terrorist networks are complicated to track, Mr. Rumsfeld said, because "in many cases, they cooperate not in a chain of command but in a loose affiliation, a franchising arrangement almost."
He said that even Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born terrorist leader blamed for some of the most violent attacks inside Iraq since the end of major combat operations, probably had no formal allegiance to Mr. bin Laden, although "they're just two peas in a pod in terms of what they're doing."
The extent of Iraq's ties to Al Qaeda has been subjected to intense and often contentious scrutiny, especially this campaign season. While Mr. Rumsfeld often has cited C.I.A. reports of murky ties, including the presence of Qaeda operatives in Iraq, he has not been as adamant on the issue as other senior administration officials, in particular Vice President Dick Cheney.
"There is no question but that there have been interactions between the Iraqi government, Iraqi officials and Al Qaeda operatives," Mr. Rumsfeld said in November 2002. "They have occurred over a span of some 8 or 10 years to our knowledge. There are currently Al Qaeda in Iraq.''
But even when discussing intelligence pointing to Iraq- Qaeda links, he has noted the absence of certainty. In September 2002, he warned that it was not always possible for the government to satisfy a public desire for "some hard evidence" of Iraq's ties to terrorist networks. "We have to face that fact that we're not going to have everything beyond a reasonable doubt," he said.
Mr. Rumsfeld's comments were made one day before Mr. Cheney is to meet Senator John Edwards in a vice-presidential campaign debate, during which the topic of administration statements on Iraq-Qaeda ties are likely to come up.
Mr. Rumsfeld issued a statement late last night in which he stated, "I have acknowledged since September 2002 that there were ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq."
That assessment, he said in the statement, was based on points provided by George J. Tenet, the former director of central intelligence, to describe the C.I.A.'s understanding of the Qaeda-Iraq relationship. Those points, Mr. Rumsfeld said, included evidence of Qaeda members in Iraq, reports of senior-level contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda going back a decade and of possible chemical and biological agent training, and of information that Iraq and Al Qaeda discussed safe haven opportunities in Iraq.
In his speech yesterday, Mr. Rumsfeld praised a weekend offensive by the First Infantry Division and members of the new Iraqi security force that chased insurgents from Samarra. He said the offensive should serve as a warning to other guerrillas holding territory before elections scheduled for January.
In the face of a tenacious insurgency, he said, "your first choice is to talk and to gather people together.
"And that's what they tried in some areas, and it worked, and in some areas it didn't," he added. "And the next thing you have to do is have the threat of force. And finally you may have to use force. And that's what happened in Samarra."
Mr. Rumsfeld also gave an impassioned defense of President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan for his actions in support of the military effort to topple the Taliban in Afghanistan and for serving as a voice of moderation in the Muslim world.
--------
The Nuclear Bomb That Wasn't
October 5, 2004
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/05/opinion/05tue1.html?ex=1097640000&en=2cb14c57f154db66&ei=5040&partner=MOREOVER
Of all the justifications that President Bush gave for invading Iraq, the most terrifying was that Saddam Hussein was on the brink of developing a nuclear bomb that he might use against the United States or give to terrorists. Ever since we learned that this was not true, the question has been whether Mr. Bush gave a good-faith account of the best available intelligence, or knowingly deceived the public. The more we learn about the way Mr. Bush paved the road to war, the more it becomes disturbingly clear that if he was not aware that he was feeding misinformation to the world, he was about the only one in his circle who had not been clued in.
The foundation for the administration's claim that it acted on an honest assessment of intelligence analysis - and the president's frequent claim that Congress had the same information he had - has been steadily eroded by the reports from the Senate Intelligence Committee and the 9/11 commission. A lengthy report in The Times on Sunday removed any lingering doubts.
The only physical evidence the administration offered for an Iraqi nuclear program were the 60,000 aluminum tubes that Baghdad set out to buy in early 2001; some of them were seized in Jordan. Even though Iraq had a history of using the same tubes to make small rockets, the president and his closest advisers told the American people that the overwhelming consensus of government experts was that these new tubes were to be used to make nuclear bomb fuel. Now we know there was no such consensus. Mr. Bush's closest advisers say they didn't know that until after they had made the case for war. But in fact, they had plenty of evidence that the claim was baseless; it was a long-discounted theory that had to be resurrected from the intelligence community's wastebasket when the administration needed justification for invading Iraq.
The tubes-for-bombs theory was the creation of a low-level C.I.A. analyst who got his facts, even the size of the tubes, wrong. It was refuted within 24 hours by the Energy Department, which issued three papers debunking the idea over a four-month period in 2001, and by the International Atomic Energy Agency. A week before Mr. Bush's 2003 State of the Union address, in which he warned of an Iraqi nuclear menace, international experts in Vienna had dismissed the C.I.A.'s theory about the tubes. The day before, the International Atomic Energy Agency said there was no evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program and rejected the tubes' tale entirely.
It's shocking that with all this information readily available, Secretary of State Colin Powell still went before the United Nations to repeat the bogus claims, an appearance that gravely damaged his reputation. It's even more disturbing that Vice President Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, had not only failed to keep the president from misleading the American people, but had also become the chief proponents of the "mushroom cloud" rhetoric.
Ms. Rice had access to all the reports debunking the tubes theory when she first talked about it publicly in September 2002. Yet last Sunday, Ms. Rice said that while she had been aware of a "dispute" about the tubes, she had not specifically known what it was about until after she had told the world that Saddam was building the bomb.
Ms. Rice's spokesman, Sean McCormack, said it was not her job to question intelligence reports or "to referee disputes in the intelligence community." But even with that curious job disclaimer, it's no comfort to think that the national security adviser wouldn't have bothered to inform herself about such a major issue before speaking publicly. The national security adviser has no more important responsibility than making sure that the president gets the best advice on life-and-death issues like the war.
If Ms. Rice did her job and told Mr. Bush how ludicrous the case was for an Iraqi nuclear program, then Mr. Bush terribly misled the public. If not, she should have resigned for allowing her boss to start a war on the basis of bad information and an incompetent analysis.
-------- us politics
Impact From the Shadows
Cheney Wields Power With Few Fingerprints
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 5, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7036-2004Oct4.html
At a crucial moment during diplomacy over North Korea's nuclear ambitions this year, Vice President Cheney late one night persuaded President Bush to draft new, more hard-edged instructions for U.S. negotiators in Beijing -- which Secretary of State Colin L. Powell only learned about the next day.
And during negotiations on last year's tax-cut bill, when House and Senate Republican lawmakers were barely on speaking terms, it was Cheney who went up to Capitol Hill and in a series of closed-door meetings cut through animosity and arranged the deal that passed the Senate by a single vote -- his own.
Cheney, who tonight debates his Democratic challenger, Sen. John Edwards (N.C.), is arguably the most powerful vice president in U.S. history. He is also the administration's essential man.
He roams across the foreign and domestic policy landscape, identifying issues on which he can make a difference. When he chooses to insert himself into the process, he is a powerful force for resolving problems -- or an unmovable roadblock that thwarts the agenda of others, especially Powell.
"He has become the national security adviser," said David Rothkopf, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who interviewed more than two dozen administration officials for an upcoming history of the National Security Council. "Time after time, he has co-opted the leadership and policy-shaping role that the national security adviser or secretary of state usually has."
But Rothkopf said assertions by Cheney's detractors that he is a secretive puppetmaster, wreaking havoc on administration policy, are overblown. "He is not a monster. He is not Darth Vader," he said. "He is a very purposeful, thoughtful guy, but highly conservative to the point of being ideological."
Although Cheney's impact is felt, he leaves few fingerprints, administration officials say. He often doesn't tell his staff what he thinks, or even what he did in private meetings with lawmakers or the president. He also chooses his moments carefully: He may skip repeated meetings of senior officials on a particular issue, appearing only when his intervention could make a difference.
"He was kind of a one-way street. You give him information, but you don't know what he does with it," said Cesar V. Conda, for three years his top domestic policy aide. "He is the quintessential policy wonk. We would give him three-inch-thick binders full of information, and he would read every single page, every fact and figure."
Lawrence B. Lindsey, director of the National Economic Council in the first half of Bush's term, said the outside image of Cheney as a Machiavellian figure inside the administration may stem in part from the way he absorbs information.
"What you see is what you get. He's a very substantive person," Lindsey said. "He is not the most expressive person; it's a real midwestern-strength kind of thing. You get the sense of him taking it all in without signaling what he thinks. Then he makes up his mind and results happen."
Cheney's small, effective and intensely loyal staff also works to provide him with intelligence on key issues bubbling through the bureaucracy. Often, in tandem with allies such as the Defense Department, they may push an issue in a certain direction, making Cheney's personal involvement unnecessary. But if that fails, he still has a chance to swing the debate in meetings with Bush's top advisers -- or later, in a private conversation with the president.
Cheney's résumé includes stints as White House chief of staff, House minority whip and defense secretary. He "has a great sense of how things work in Washington," said an official who has worked for Cheney in the administration of President George H.W. Bush and in the current administration. "He loves to hear tales of bureaucratic infighting," the official added. Cheney then uses the information gleaned from those lower-level conflicts to inform his strategy for meetings with other top officials.
Though Cheney's immediate staff is relatively small, the vice president has allies sprinkled throughout the administration. Rothkopf said Cheney has "an unprecedented virtual staff, especially in Defense, which he has worked very effectively."
Cheney's aides say this is overstated. But one administration official, who often agrees with Cheney on the issues, described the vice president as a "trump card" in the tense interagency conflicts that have characterized this administration. "You can only play him selectively and only that often," he said.
Cheney doesn't win every battle. During the investigation by the Sept. 11 commission, he opposed releasing a crucial intelligence briefing -- warning al Qaeda planned attacks in the United States -- that Bush received a month before the attacks. Cheney believed release of the information would chill intelligence reporting. But White House political advisers won that debate and the document was released to the media.
Following are two case studies of how Cheney operates in the arenas of domestic and foreign policy. Given the power and influence of the vice president, few officials involved agreed to be quoted by name. The vice president declined a request for an interview.
Cutting a Tax Deal
In the last week of May 2003, Bush had a problem. He had spent months trying to get his third tax cut through Congress, and needed a deal by Memorial Day in order to get tax rebate checks to the voters by July. But House and Senate Republicans were split over the size and shape of the bill.
So he sent Cheney to Capitol Hill to find a solution.
When the bill was proposed at the start of 2003 as a $726 billion package, Cheney had already had a significant impact. He convinced the president that the bill needed to accelerate cuts in individual tax rates, overriding concerns of White House political advisers that cuts in rates for wealthy taxpayers would fuel attacks by Democrats.
Now, the key problem was that the influential chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), had made a commitment to two senators that the tax bill would not be larger than $350 billion over 10 years. But there was a dispute over what the agreement meant.
Grassley thought the promise covered only tax cuts; one of the senators, George Voinovich (R-Ohio), believed the $350 billion figure also included spending that would add to the deficit -- $20 billion in financial aid to states that the administration already was not happy to see attached to its tax bill. The unresolved dispute meant the tax cut might have to be reduced to at least $330 billion.
House leaders could not believe they would have to scale back their ambitions further because of a vague promise made to a senator. Rep. Bill Thomas (R-Calif.), chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, fumed to Grassley that a deal was a deal, and the whole thing was an outrage. He stormed out of one meeting in anger.
Enter Cheney. The vice president first determined that Voinovich was not going to change his mind. He met privately with Thomas, before bringing Voinovich into the meeting to make it clear to Thomas that the Ohio Republican would vote against the bill unless the House compromised.
Cheney held most of these sessions with no staff members in the room -- not even his own. Candida Perotti Wolff, his legislative aide, stood outside as Cheney cut the deal, and then never received a report from him about what was discussed. "He prefers to do these meetings without staff, and he does not tend to divulge what happens behind closed doors," she said.
One congressional official who attended some meetings between Cheney and the lawmakers said he was astonished at the level of detail the vice president understood about the complex issues under discussion, particularly as lawmakers had to reshape the tax bill to fit into the smaller $330 billion box.
"He was very calm, very deliberate. He had an air of confidence and control over the details," the official said. Within two days, Cheney had resolved the impasse. The tax bill passed the Senate, 51 to 50, with Cheney casting the tiebreaker vote in his role as president of the Senate.
Steering North Korea Policy
Few issues have divided the Bush foreign policy team as much as North Korea's nuclear ambitions. Cheney has played a critical -- but largely unknown -- role in this debate.
On one side are those, such as Powell, who think North Korea can be persuaded to abandon its nuclear ambitions in exchange for eventual aid, guarantees of security and other diplomatic incentives. Other top officials, such as Cheney, profoundly mistrust the North Koreans and think political and economic pressure will be necessary to force Pyongyang to capitulate. Bush has given rhetorical support to the first approach but has never settled the question internally.
Cheney has tipped the scales at key moments. Administration officials had agreed the United States would not be drawn into one-to-one negotiations with North Korea unless other countries from the region were at the table. North Korea, the United States and four other countries finally met in Beijing in August 2003.
But the results were minimal and, by December, China was pressing for another meeting that they hoped would demonstrate progress. Chinese officials drafted a statement to be released at the end of the meeting, saying quick approval would ensure that the North Koreans would attend a round of talks in December.
When Bush's top foreign policy aides met on Dec. 12 to discuss the Chinese initiative, Cheney -- who had not attended a North Korea meeting for months -- unexpectedly showed up. The text, as drafted by the Chinese, did not call for "irreversible" dismantling of North Korea's programs or mention "verification," two key phrases in previous U.S. statements.
The vice president weighed in strongly at the meeting, saying those phrases needed to be in the statement. At one point, Cheney invoked the president and said he had made it clear that the United States doesn't negotiate with tyranny, according to two officials who attended the meeting. "We don't negotiate with evil; we defeat it," Cheney declared. That ended the discussion: The Chinese draft was rejected.
Kevin Kellems, Cheney's spokesman, expressed doubt that Cheney put it that bluntly: "I don't think he said it. I have never heard him say anything like it."
When the six-nation talks in Beijing finally resumed in February, Cheney intervened again. On Thursday evening, Feb. 26 -- Friday morning in China -- Cheney met with Bush and persuaded him to send new instructions to the U.S. delegation as it sat down for another day of discussions.
The original instructions to the delegation said that any joint statement issued after the talks must include language on a "complete, verifiable irreversible dismantlement" of North Korea's weapons, known in the diplomatic world by the shorthand of "CVID."
But the North Koreans had rejected that during the talks. The chief U.S. negotiator, Assistant Secretary of State James A. Kelly, reported back about the impasse, wondering if the delegation instead should try to obtain a bland diplomatic statement short of original U.S. goals.
With Powell and his deputy, Richard L. Armitage, away at a black-tie event, Bush drafted new instructions with Cheney's input. The instructions -- which in diplomatic terms suggested the administration's "continued support" of the six-nation talks was in jeopardy unless the U.S. demands were met -- were dictated over the phone by White House official Michael Green to the delegation, bypassing the standard State Department cable system.
Powell and Armitage did not find out about the new instructions until they woke up next morning, and Powell began fielding anguished calls from his Asian counterparts. The Chinese foreign minister told Powell the North Koreans were now willing to sign a more generic statement calling for continued talks.
That afternoon, Powell pulled Bush aside before a luncheon with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, and argued for accepting a statement that the U.S. government 12 hours earlier said was unacceptable.
Bush reluctantly agreed -- but, despite Chinese assurances, the North Koreans rejected it anyway.
-------- OTHER
-------- environment
St. Helens Continues To Rumble
Scientists Keep Wary Eye On Nearby Mount Rainier
By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 5, 2004; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5914-2004Oct4.html
SEATTLE, Oct. 4 -- Pillowy clouds of steam gushed out of Mount St. Helens on Monday in the volcano's largest eruption since it woke up 10 days ago from years of slumber.
Scientists said that molten rock is pushing upward, like a piston, inside the volcano. It is venting hot gases that are vaporizing ice and snow, causing periodic plumes of steam and some ash. A large eruption of rock and ash is possible at any time, they said, but it will almost certainly be smaller and far less destructive than the 1980 eruption at Mount St. Helens that killed 57 people.
"We know magma is close," Tom Pierson, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, told reporters. "We know it is deforming the crater floor in a drastic way. We are detecting gases that give away the presence of that magma."
There has been a steady buildup of pressure inside the mountain in the past few days, Pierson said. But he and other scientists say there is no way to be certain when -- or if -- magma will explode through the 1,000 feet of loose volcanic rock that forms a dome and plugs the top of the volcano's mile-wide crater.
On Monday, there was also a small earthquake beside Mount Hood, a towering volcanic peak near Portland, Ore., and about 60 miles south of Mount St. Helens. Seismologists from the University of Washington said the earthquake was unrelated to the flurry of seismic activity at Mount St. Helens, which is one of about two dozen volcanoes in the Cascade Range.
But the tremor in Oregon was a reminder that the Pacific Northwest is a geologically unstable region where several huge volcanic mountains -- nearly all of them draped in snow and glacial ice -- loom near population centers.
In that row of volcanic peaks, which extends 1,000 miles from northern California to southern British Columbia, the most active is Mount St. Helens. But it is in an unpopulated region of southwest Washington, and the cataclysmic eruption of 1980, which blew away nearly a half billion tons of earth, essentially gutted the volcano and defanged much of its destructive potential.
By far the greatest volcanic threat to human life along the entire West Coast is presented by Mount Rainier, a 14,410-foot monster of a mountain that has more glacier ice on it than all the other Cascade volcanoes combined.
Rainier is just 87 miles from Seattle and 65 miles from Tacoma, which together form the largest population center in the region. Even more at risk are about 150,000 people who live in a chain of several smaller towns built on or near historic mudflows from previous eruptions on Mount Rainier.
"Any kind of eruption from Rainier would always cause more concern than what is happening at Mount St. Helens," said Tony Qamar, a seismologist at the University of Washington.
USGS scientists have been warning in recent years that Rainier, which is an active volcano but hasn't produced a major eruption for about 500 years, has an unpredictable record of spontaneous activity that triggers massive mudflows, or lahars.
The shoulders of the mountain are believed to be fragile, with a high potential for a collapse, either from an earthquake or a volcanic eruption. That could send huge volumes of snow, ice and mud all the way down to ports on Puget Sound, scientists warn.
In the town of Orting, about 30 miles downstream from Rainier, residents would have about 40 minutes to get to higher ground before mudflows would sweep the town away, the USGS predicts.
In recent days, though, volcano experts in the Northwest have turned all their attention to Mount St. Helens, which, in its current state, offers the relatively benign prospect of a sizable eruption without sizable human consequences.
Qamar said he went for a hike last fall on the volcano's dome. "It is generally an unstable pile of rocks, and you pass by steam vents every once in a while," he said, referring to the structure that was formed during the 1980s in a series of eruptions that followed the big blow.
In the past 10 days, pressure from rising magma and gas deep in the volcano has pushed up the south corner of that unstable pile of rocks about 100 feet, according to the USGS. Under that pressure, the dome has been creaking and cracking and has destroyed some USGS measuring devices. "We believe that about 10 million cubic yards of rock has been uplifted," Qamar said. "That is roughly equivalent to about 1 million cement trucks worth of stuff being pushed up."
Qamar and other scientists say they do not believe that anywhere near that much rock (the cooled magma from previous eruptions) is likely to be blown out of the mountain's crater.
If there is a major eruption, scientists said, the most likely consequence for residents of the Pacific Northwest would be a large plume of ash that could drift over cities and towns, depending on wind direction.
-------- genetics
Kerry Calls Stem Cell Policy Unscientific and Political
By Dana Milbank and Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, October 5, 2004; Page A06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6966-2004Oct4.html
HAMPTON, N.H., Oct. 4 -- John F. Kerry charged Monday that President Bush has "turned his back on science" in limiting embryonic stem cell research financed by the federal government.
The Kerry campaign rolled out a television ad on the subject, saying that "millions of lives" are at stake, as the Democratic presidential nominee was joined by actor and activist Michael J. Fox at a town-hall-style meeting here.
"It's time to lift the political barriers blocking the stem cell research that could treat or cure diseases like Parkinson's," the ad says. "I believe that science can bring hope to our families."
Joined by Fox, who has Parkinson's disease, the senator from Massachusetts listened as people expressed their hopes that stem cell research could lead to cures for their afflictions. "We stand at the next frontier, but instead of leading the way, we're stuck on the sidelines," Kerry said. The president, he said, is "unwilling to change course."
The stem cell dispute follows Bush's 2001 decision to limit federal funding for such research to the "lines" of cells already in existence, citing moral concerns about the destruction of new embryos. Federal health officials say that just 19 stem cell lines, about one-quarter of what was originally estimated by the White House, have been available for research.
Bush campaign officials accused Kerry -- and many media outlets -- of inaccurately describing the president's decision as a ban on such research, although the ad does not use that word. They note that Bush is the first president to provide funding for the research, which became medically feasible only in recent years. "John Kerry's attacks on stem cell research are trying to mislead the American people by implying a ban that doesn't exist," spokesman Steve Schmidt said.
The invited New Hampshire crowd became emotional when a father, on stage with his diabetic son, held a large package of needles to show how many insulin injections the boy must have in a month.
"The majority of the American people support stem cell research, and it's high time we had a president of the United States who does, too," Kerry said. "We can't afford any more stubborn refusal to face the facts." Fox said of Bush's restrictions: "It was kind of like he gave us a car and no gas."
Kerry's pollster, Mark Mellman, found in a July survey that 69 percent of those questioned favored stem cell research. The support cut across party lines, with 77 percent of Democrats, 67 percent of independents and 60 percent of Republicans in favor of using discarded embryos for the research. Other polls have produced similar findings.
"It's an issue where it's very clear that George Bush is on the wrong side as far as a majority of the American people is concerned," Mellman said. He said that "ideological blinders are preventing Bush from attempting research into treatments for deadly and debilitating diseases." Scientists caution that years of research could be required to make progress against such diseases as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
The National Right to Life Committee called the ad "misleading," noting that 53 percent of those questioned in a poll for the organization opposed stem cell research "that requires the killing of human embryos." Advocates say researchers would use embryos that are going to be discarded anyway.
In recent months, 206 House members, 58 senators and former first lady Nancy Reagan, whose husband, Ronald Reagan, died this year of Alzheimer's, have called for an expansion of federally subsidized stem cell research.
The Democratic National Committee also focused on health concerns in an ad released Monday, charging that Bush "stood with the big drug companies -- signing their Medicare law." The ad continues: "Blocking low-cost drugs from Canada. And under George Bush, prescription costs are up 22 percent. He's sided with the insurance industry as health premiums soared 57 percent."
Kurtz reported from Washington.
-------- health
Lead Levels in Water Misrepresented
Across U.S. Utilities Manipulate or Withhold Test Results to Ward Off Regulators
By Carol D. Leonnig, Jo Becker and David Nakamura
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, October 5, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7094-2004Oct4.html
Cities across the country are manipulating the results of tests used to detect lead in water, violating federal law and putting millions of Americans at risk of drinking more of the contaminant than their suppliers are reporting.
Some cities, including Philadelphia and Boston, have thrown out tests that show high readings or have avoided testing homes most likely to have lead, records show. In New York City, the nation's largest water provider has for the past three years assured its 9.3 million customers that its water was safe because the lead content fell below federal limits. But the city has withheld from regulators hundreds of test results that would have raised lead levels above the safety standard in two of those years, according to records.
The result is that communities large and small may have a false sense of security about the quality of their water and that utilities can avoid spending money to correct the problem.
In some cases, state regulators have helped the utilities avoid costly fixes. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which is supposed to ensure that states are monitoring utilities, has also let communities ignore requirements to reduce lead. In 2003, records show, the EPA ordered utilities to remedy violations in just 14 cases, less than one-tenth of the number ordered in 1997.
Taken together, the records point to a national problem just months after disclosures that lead levels in the District's water are among the highest in the country, a problem the city's utility concealed for months. Documents from other cities show that many have made similar efforts to hide high lead readings, taking advantage of lax national and state oversight and regulations riddled with loopholes.
The Washington Post examined 65 large water systems whose reported lead levels have hovered near or exceeded federal standards. Federal, state and utility records show that dozens of utilities obscured the extent of lead contamination, ignored requirements to correct problems and failed to turn over data to regulators.
Jim Elder, who headed the EPA's drinking water program from 1991 to 1995, said he fears that utilities are engaging in "widespread fraud and manipulation."
"It's time to reconsider whether water utilities can be trusted with this crucial responsibility of protecting the public. I fear for the safety of our nation's drinking water," said Elder, now a water consultant. "Apparently, it's a real crapshoot as to what's going to come out of the tap and whether it will be healthy or not."
Recent attention to the dangers of the District's drinking water has prompted scientists and some members of Congress to call for revamping the lead rules in the 30-year-old Safe Drinking Water Act, which was aimed at limiting dangerous contaminants flowing out of the tap. EPA Administrator Michael Leavitt declined to be interviewed for this article, but his agency has said that a major overhaul to its regulations is unnecessary.
"We have not identified a systemic problem," EPA Acting Assistant Administrator Benjamin H. Grumbles told Congress in July. In an interview, Grumbles said, "We are going full throttle" to pinpoint lead levels across the country. "So far," he said, "we have not seen anything that closely resembles the District in the data we've received."
EPA data analyzed by The Post identified 274 utilities, which together serve 11.5 million people, that have reported unsafe lead levels since 2000. Those numbers do not include cities where testing methods concealed true lead levels.
Utility officials defend their testing methods, saying that they are not designed to deceive the government and that state regulators approved their practices. Others argue that they should not have to spend millions to remove lead that often leaches from their customers' own fixtures.
Some suppliers have worked hard to avoid lead problems. The utility in Kansas City, Mo., tested its water more frequently and treated it more aggressively than the law required. And after the District's problem surfaced, several other jurisdictions in the Washington region voluntarily tested their water and found less contamination than in the city.
Lynn Stovall, a Greenville, S.C., utility manager and member of the American Water Works Association, said many utilities are "hard-pressed" and need more public funding to comply with mounting regulations and improve aging plants.
"The drinking water community faces a complex array of expensive new federal requirements and new standards," Stovall told Congress at this summer's hearing on lead.
Lead exposure can cause serious health problems, including lower IQs in children and brain and kidney damage in adults. Although health experts agree that no amount of lead in drinking water is considered safe, there is some dispute about how much tainted water has to be consumed to cause permanent damage. Because the effect is cumulative, lead in water is particularly problematic in older, urban areas where children are more likely to also be exposed to lead paint, which utilities note is a more prevalent threat.
Despite the health risk caused by lead in water, efforts to eliminate it have run up against other realities, including the high cost of replacing underground pipes that contain lead. Recognizing that states lacked the resources to carefully monitor more than 90 contaminants covered by federal law, the EPA issued lists of priorities starting in 1996. In both cases, its top concern was microbes, which can sicken large populations overnight. Lead did not make the list, and this year, the EPA dropped drinking water altogether from its enforcement priority list, records show.
Competing interests were also in play in 1991 when the EPA wrote new rules on lead. The compromise that emerged requires that, when lead levels exceed 15 parts per billion, utilities must inform the public, treat the water to make it less corrosive or, in some cases, replace pipes.
Because of the cost, many utilities are reluctant to act. In the District, where the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority is under an order to replace service lines, water customers are expected to pay for most of the $350 million project over the rest of the decade.
Withholding Results
Water suppliers are required by law to test for lead regularly -- the largest utilities must check the water in at least 50 homes once every three years. They must follow a strict regimen, trying consistently to test the same "high risk" homes most likely to have lead problems. High-risk homes are defined as those with lead service lines or built in the 1980s, before lead solder in plumbing was banned.
Because so few homes are tested, the results of just one or two can mean the difference between passing and failing. Utilities are required to report to regulators all their test results -- good and bad.
The D.C. Water and Sewer Authority knew in the summer of 2001 that its water contained unsafe lead levels, but it withheld six high test results and said the water was fine, records show. When it tested over the next two years, records show, WASA dropped half of the homes that had previously tested high for lead and avoided high-risk homes.
The EPA, which cited WASA for violations in June, called the utility's practices unprecedented and a "serious breach" of the law.
Documents show that water systems across the country have used similar practices.
In such cities as Boston and Detroit, records indicate that utilities have failed to test the high-risk homes they were required to check. State regulators and the EPA discovered in the spring that at least one-fourth of the locations tested in the Boston area were not high risk and ordered the utility to revamp its program, records show.
After several years of above-the-limit test results, New York water officials reported that tests in 2000 showed lead had fallen to safe levels. But the city had not reported all of its results.
Records obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request revealed more than 300 withheld test results that, if reported, would have given New York water a failing grade for safety in 2001 and 2002. That would have required the city to alert the public to the problem and take expensive steps to fix it.
Christopher O. Ward, commissioner of New York's Department of Environmental Protection, said his agency is "highly confident" the city's water is safe. He said extra tests were taken to ensure that the city had a sufficient number to report to regulators, though he said the agency did not formally notify state and city regulators of this practice or seek their approval. Ward said that he believed this complied with the rules and that it was unfair now to count irrelevant results.
"In light of the issues that have recently been raised, DEP is in the process of reviewing our lead and copper monitoring to ensure that all requirements in the regulations are being met," Ward said.
In a similar situation, when WASA said the six test results it withheld were replacement or backup samples, the EPA cited the utility and said it was a violation of the law.
In Philadelphia, state and utility officials said they could produce none of the required documentation for their decision to toss out a high test result in 2002. The federal law does not allow utilities to discard high tests except under very limited circumstances, and the utilities must carefully document their reason.
Utility director Gary Burlingame said in an interview that the high test result "didn't jibe" with past tests and that the utility decided it should be discarded after learning the house had undergone plumbing work. Had that test been counted, records show, it would have put Philadelphia over the federal safety limit and required corrective steps.
The law prohibits throwing out tests for the reasons given in Lansing, Mich., in 2001 -- that homeowners did not follow directions in collecting them. Four discarded tests would have put the water over the federal lead limit, documents show. In one case, the homeowner disputed the reason the utility gave for tossing her sample -- that the occupants had been away overnight.
"That's a big, fat lie," said Jennie Horiszny, an 85-year-old Lansing resident. She said she had not gone out of town and had carefully followed the utility's instructions not to run the water overnight. She remembers pouring glasses of water before going to bed in case she or her husband became thirsty -- and taking the sample first thing in the morning. "That's what the directions said to do, and that's what I did," she said. "It was a clean sample."
John Strickler, a spokesman for the Lansing water system, said, "I find it hard to believe that any of our employees would have made that up." He said the city has voluntarily embarked on an aggressive plan to replace lead service lines, in part because "we started seeing news stories" about the District's problem.
Federal law also requires utilities to try to test the same homes over time and prohibits dropping any merely because they have tested high.
After exceeding the acceptable limits in 2000, the Ridgewood, N.J., water system dumped "hot" houses that had tested high, records show. Frank Moritz Sr., director of operations for Ridgewood's water department, said that was not done by design. "Each year, we take out the previous year's list and ask if they want to participate," he said.
But five residents whose homes showed high lead readings said in interviews that the utility never informed them of the results or asked them to test again.
"It would have been nice if someone had looked out for us," said Matthew Criscenzo, whose son was 4 at the time. "Obviously, this news is causing some alarm."
Bradley M. Campbell, New Jersey's commissioner of environmental protection and an EPA official in the Clinton administration, said that his agency is "actively investigating" testing irregularities uncovered by The Post in Ridgewood and other communities in northern New Jersey and that it could take action against some utilities. "The public has a paramount right to know" the true lead levels in those communities, he said.
Just as dropping tests can lower the official lead figures, so can adding tests.
The utility in Providence, R.I., exceeded safe lead levels in 2002. Instead of informing the public, as required, records show that the utility waited and, the next summer, sampled 30 more homes, most of which showed very low lead and brought levels below the federal standard. Utility officials said they believed that their actions complied with the law. June Swallow, the Rhode Island official charged with overseeing utilities, said Providence did not comply and that the state will in the future ensure that utilities test within the requisite four-month period.
Frequent Irregularities
Under the Safe Drinking Water Act, states must oversee utilities to ensure that they follow the law and the EPA is required to step in when states fail to correct problems.
For the most part, states take the word of utilities, doing little to check whether they are testing properly. The EPA's most recent audits point out that testing irregularities are common. Also, states frequently miss the violations or fail to force utilities to take required steps to reduce lead, according to the audits.
The latest EPA audit of Hawaii's program, for instance, found in 2001 that regulators there "put an emphasis on 'helping' " utilities "rather than enforcing the law."
Records show that regulators rarely force communities to replace lead service lines, even in such cases as Yonkers, N.Y., where the law required it because repeated tests showed excessive lead levels.
In Seattle, the city missed a 1997 deadline to reduce lead by making its water less corrosive. The state of Washington gave it six extra years to correct the problem, allowing high lead to persist until last year. Denise Clifford, director of the state's office of drinking water, said the delay gave Seattle time to build treatment facilities that will reduce lead and other more serious contaminants.
"I know this doesn't look like a good decision to a lot of people," she said, but "there are more acute public health risks than lead."
In the interim, more than 43,000 Seattle residents -- including Nimi Sandhu -- gave birth, according to vital records statistics. Sandhu used unfiltered tap water to make her babies' formula, unaware of the lead levels.
"It's outrageous -- the state is supposed to be protecting us," said Sandhu, whose children are 5, 4 and 10 months old. "I don't know how they can live with themselves knowing that they were possibly endangering children."
State officials say they are forced to engage in a form of triage.
"It's tough, given all the other priorities out there for drinking water, to oversee this rule at that level of detail," said Barker G. Hamill, chief of the New Jersey Bureau of Safe Drinking Water.
If states fail to enforce the law, the EPA is the last line of defense. But the agency devotes four times the staff to enforcing the laws that govern sewage released into rivers and lakes as it does to safeguarding the nation's drinking water supply, records show. The agency has 72 enforcement employees to oversee the nation's drinking water laws -- one employee for every 2,238 water systems.
"We can't afford to do these kind of checks everywhere, and neither can the states," said Jon M. Capacasa, water administrator in the EPA's mid-Atlantic office.
Officials at EPA headquarters say the need for intervention has declined over the years, because more utilities understand and comply with the law. But sometimes the EPA is without the information it needs to act.
A March report by the agency's inspector general found that the data the EPA uses to assess water quality are "flawed and incomplete" because states are not reporting violations, despite legal requirements.
But even when it is aware of a problem, the agency does not always enforce the law, records show.
It didn't do so in Portland, Ore., for instance, where excessive lead persisted through much of the past decade. The state approved the city's decision to launch a public education campaign on lead dangers rather than build an expensive treatment plant to comply with the law.
Lead levels climbed, and in 2002 the EPA stepped in, but not to discipline the city. Instead, the agency suggested testing more homes in the suburbs. The utility dropped more than half the homes with lead higher than the federal limit, replacing them with suburban homes that had, on average, significantly lower levels, records show.
"That change in the sampling population helped" the city slip back under the federal limit, said Mark Knudson, the Portland Water Bureau's director of operations. EPA officials said that that was not their goal and that they had recommended the changes to get a fuller picture across the area.
Although top EPA officials have contended that the law does a good job of catching most problems, those charged with enforcing it do not always agree. EPA regulators who met in the spring in Newport, R.I., noted in a three-page memo a series of loopholes that weaken the law. Among them: Nothing requires utilities to notify individual homeowners that their water has high lead, and the regulation does not allow the same stiff sanctions for high lead that it does for other contaminants such as bacteria.
At headquarters, the EPA's Grumbles has said in recent weeks that he will push to ensure that cities are complying with the law when they test and that he will consider changes early next year, such as stricter rules for notifying the public. But critics fear that, without much tougher laws and enforcement, unsafe water in other communities may not come to light.
"The problems we know about are just the tip of the iceberg," said Erik D. Olson of the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, "because utilities are gaming the system, states have often been willing to ignore long-standing violations and the EPA sits on the sidelines and refuses to crack down."
Database editor Sarah Cohen and staff researcher Bobbye Pratt contributed to this report.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Greenpeacers Blockade Plutonium Transport Road in France
October 5, 2004
CHERBOURG, France, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/oct2004/2004-10-05-04.asp
Greenpeace activists have blockaded the only road that can be used to transport the first shipment of American plutonium from Cherbourg Harbor to the La Hague where it is scheduled to be reprocessed into mixed oxide (MOX) reactor fuel. Two ships carrying the 140 kilograms of plutonium are due to arrive in Cherbourg today.
This morning, Greenpeacers placed a truck across the secondary road 901 between the naval port of Cherbourg and the Areva/Cogema reprocessing facility at La Hague. The message "Stop Plutonium" and a nuclear bomb are painted on the truck, which is bolted to the road.
Ten activists have locked themselves onto the truck and the road in protest of the plutonium shipment.
Also in connection with the plutonium protest, Greenpeace has been summoned to appear in the Cherbourg Court today, where the international environmental organization faces a request for an injunction preventing it from approaching within 300 meters of the two ships carrying plutonium from the United States to France or within 100 meters of the Cherbourg harbour.
The nuclear companies Areva, through its subsidiary Cogema, and British Nuclear Fuels Ltd (BNFL) are seeking to keep Greenpeace from getting closer than 100 meters from the road that the nuclear transport will take from the harbor to the La Hague plant - the road that is now blockaded.
Greenpeace is threatened with a € 300,000 penalty for each recorded violation at sea, and € 150,000 for each recorded violation on the road between Cherbourg and the plant in La Hague, to which some € 19,000 lawyer expenses also have to be included.
"Once more the nuclear industry is trying to gag peaceful protest," said Tom Clements of Greenpeace International. "They have nothing to fear from Greenpeace, rather the courts time would be better focused on the threat posed by 140 kg of bomb grade plutonium traversing the high seas and France's highways."
The plutonium, sent by the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration, left the port of Charleston, South Carolina, on September 20. The ships Pacific Teal and Pacific Pintail, operated by BNFL, are approaching Cherbourg where an international flotilla of French, English and Irish protest vessels is waiting.
Areva says the protesters and the public have nothing to worry about because the shipment complies with national and international regulations. "The shipping company involved has safely transported nuclear material over four million nautical miles without a single incident involving the release of radioactivity. The cargo is protected by armed guards throughout its journey and the ships are equipped with naval guns," Areva says.
By signing the START I and START II disarmament agreements in the early 1990s, the United States and the Russian Federation committed to reducing their nuclear stockpiles, notably by dismantling "excess" nuclear warheads.
Each country agreed to eliminate 34 metric tons of plutonium recovered from its dismantled weapons. In January 2002, following comparative studies of two disposition options -immobilization or recycling in reactors- the US administration chose to recycle its 34 metric tons of weapons-grade plutonium into MOX fuel A MOX fuel fabrication facility will be built in the United States for this purpose.
The MOX Fuel Fabrication Facility project is managed by Duke Energy, Cogema and Stone & Webster, on behalf of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The plant, which will be located on the Savannah River site in South Carolina, will implement Cogema technology. The DOE intends to validate the MOX fuel performance in an American reactor before pursuing construction of the MOX facility.
Four MOX fuel assemblies will be fabricated by Areva in France from American weapons plutonium, and will be loaded in a commercial U.S. reactor operated by Duke.
Greenpeace says the current plutonium shipment is only the beginning of a long series of such nuclear transports at a dangerous time. "It is the first instalment of 68 metric tons of plutonium from U.S. and Russian stockpiles to be put on the world's roads and seas at a time when terrorists are actively seeking such material," Clements said.
Areva explains that the shipment is part of a program being implemented by the United States Department of Energy for the disposition of former weapons-grade plutonium, by using it in reactors to generate electricity. "The program starts with the manufacturing of four nuclear fuel assemblies in France," Areva says.
Greenpeace wants an immediate end to plutonium production and separation. The organization says both civil and military plutonium "should be treated as nuclear waste not shipped around the world as reactor fuel."
Plutonium should be mixed with radioactive waste, solidified or vitrified, and stored. This approach would be cheaper, faster, safer, and more secure than shipping it across the Atlantic for reprocessing, the organization believes.
On Monday, Eugene Riguidel, one of France's most famous sailors, John Castle of Guernsey, and Pernilla Svenberg from Greenpeace International were released from the military arsenal in Cherbourg. They were arrested Sunday for mounting a protest against the plutonium shipment inside the military port.
"We have a military exclusion zone in Cherbourg against small yachts while plutonium transports are free to threaten the lives and livelihoods of everyone in their wake. It is the trade in nuclear bomb material that should be banned not peaceful protest," said Riguidel, upon his release from jail.
In France the Atlantic flotilla is made up of sailors concerned about the safety aspects of this transport, and the direction that the nuclear industry is taking in their country.
"Areva claims that with this transport it reduces the nuclear threat of proliferation. It is all the opposite," said Greenpeace France activist Yannick Rousselet. "Areva produces always more plutonium with its factory of La Hague. Already 70 to 80 tons of plutonium are stored there."
"Plutonium makes it possible to manufacture bombs, in France, in the United States or in North Korea. Its handling and its circulation throughout the world are a terrible threat," Rousselet said. "Program "MOX for Proliferation" must cease."
In France, more than 10,000 kilograms of plutonium each year are transported from the La Hague reprocessing plant in Normandy to nuclear fuel fabrication plants elsewhere in France. In contrast to high level of security surrounding U.S. plutonium transports, in France weekly transports of weapons-usable plutonium are carried out in non-armored vehicles under low-level police protection.
Shaun Burnie of Greenpeace International said, "The French government now has a real dilemma. If this shipment is conducted with U.S. style military security then how will state nuclear industry Areva be able to continue justifying the paltry protection for the thousands of kilos of plutonium transported around the country each year?"
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Activists held ahead of nuclear shipment
REUTERS FRANCE:
October 5, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/27510/story.htm
CHERBOURG, France - French police have detained a Greenpeace boat and two activists ahead of the arrival of a U.S. shipment of bomb-grade plutonium on two British-registered ships, the environmental pressure group says.
The shipment is due to arrive in France late yesterday.
Dozens of activists have since Saturday awaited the arrival of the two ships, escorted by armed commandos, at the port of Cherbourg in northern France.
Activists question the wisdom of transporting such security-sensitive cargo at a time of heightened risk of terror attacks globally.
French nuclear energy firm Areva, whose Cogema unit will recycle the 140 kg (308 lb) of plutonium, said it would only release information on the shipment from Charleston, South Carolina, a few hours ahead of its arrival.
"The two ships transporting the plutonium should arrive yesterday night," said a Greenpeace spokesman. He said the activists were detained while putting up a protest banner.
The shipment is part of a post-Cold War agreement between the United States and Russia to get rid of plutonium from excess nuclear warheads.
Greenpeace criticised the transport, saying on arrival in Cherbourg the plutonium would be driven over 1,000 km (660 miles) in vulnerable trucks to a factory in southeast France.
Areva's Cogema unit will recycle the plutonium into nuclear fuel at its Cadarache and Marcoule plants in southeastern France and ship it back to the United States, which plans to use it in an electricity-generating reactor.
It is part of the U.S. Department of Energy's controversial programme to turn plutonium from the "excess" nuclear warheads into mixed-oxide (MOX) plutonium-uranium enriched fuel.
Critics fear the fuel could potentially be used to build nuclear weapons.
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U.S. Nuclear Cargo Draws Protests in France
NY TIMES
October 5, 2004
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/05/international/europe/05france.html?ei=1&en=3b0e07093433e2f8&ex=1097989210&pagewanted=print&position=
PARIS, Oct. 4 - France is poised to take possession of 300 pounds of weapons-grade plutonium from the United States for reprocessing into fuel, an operation that its opponents contend creates a risk of nuclear terrorism.
Two vessels carrying the volatile cargo from South Carolina were expected to dock secretly at a secure area of the French port of Cherbourg as early as Monday night.
From there, the cargo - enough to make 20 nuclear bombs - is to be taken to a secure plant at nearby La Hague. It will then be loaded onto armored, unmarked trucks and escorted by French security forces to a factory 700 miles away at the southeastern town of Cadarache, where it will be turned into fuel for nuclear reactors.
The project to turn weapons-grade plutonium into fuel was initiated by President Bill Clinton with an agreement with Russia in September 2000 to neutralize 34 tons of plutonium from American and Russian weapons dating from the cold war.
But that was before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks heightened concerns about the risks of other terrorist attacks, even nuclear-related terrorism. Islamic militants have openly expressed their desire to secure material to make a nuclear weapon, and have even discussed stealing or attacking plutonium shipments in France. Critics say it would be far wiser merely to bury the nuclear material in the United States than to ship it long distances for reprocessing.
For France, money is the main motive for this operation. Areva, the state-owned giant nuclear power company, will fabricate the plutonium into mixed-oxide fuel rods and ship them back to the United States. If the process goes well, Areva will build a fabrication plant in South Carolina. The entire deal could be worth more than $250 million, an Areva official said.
For the United States, the deal is a convenient way to get another country to reprocess the fuel for nonmilitary uses, which it lacks the technology to do itself. It is the first time the United States is sending weapons-grade material abroad.
It is also a remarkable display of Franco-American cooperation at a time when President Bush continues to criticize France for its opposition to the American-led war in Iraq.
Mr. Bush said Friday at a campaign stop in Pennsylvania that "the use of troops to defend America must never be subject to the veto of a country like France." The remark prompted France to register an official protest with the White House, French officials said.
By contrast, France's economy minister - and a presidential hopeful - Nicolas Sarkozy on Friday described the atmosphere between the United States and France as "more serene" after he left a meeting in Washington with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.
Nonproliferation and environmental experts say transporting weapons-usable nuclear material is an unnecessarily risky operation.
"Here the United States is telling the whole world that the greatest threat to our security is nuclear terrorism and we must keep nuclear-weapon material out of hands of terrorists," said Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control in Washington. "And here we are shipping this stuff around for no good reason. Just dispose of it - embed it in concrete, bury it."
Mr. Milhollin and other nonproliferation and environmental experts contend that even if the plutonium is well guarded by troops, it could be hijacked or diverted by terrorists or criminals.
The transport of the fabricated mixed oxide fuel rods back to the United States will also be unsafe, because they will still contain usable plutonium that could be extracted later, Mr. Milhollin said.
Antinuclear activists have gathered at Cherbourg in recent days to protest the imminent arrival of the two British-registered vessels carrying the plutonium sent by the National Nuclear Security Administration, an arm of the Energy Department.
On Sunday, the French police arrested three activists with the environmental group Greenpeace who were in a flotilla protesting the shipment. One was Eugène Riguidel, a French round-the-world yachting champion whose sailboat was impounded by the police. The protesters were released Monday.
Greenpeace charges that carrying the plutonium on a long overland trip constitutes a "considerable" risk, and that the cargo's containers could be blasted open with shoulder-launched rockets.
To prove the vulnerability of such shipments, Greenpeace has tracked convoys and posted license plates and itineraries on its Web site. In February 2003, the organization blocked a convoy carrying about 300 pounds of plutonium in the eastern French city of Chalon-sur-Saône.
But the American and French governments, as well as Areva, a giant holding company created in 2001 to consolidate the country's nuclear activities, have rejected charges that the operation is unsafe.
France has long been a depository and fabrication center for spent nuclear fuel and plutonium from foreign sources, including Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and Japan.
"Areva has traveled more than one million kilometers for the past 15 years without a radiological incident," said Patrick Germain, an Areva spokesman.
In its licensing submissions before the operation was approved, the Energy Department called the French transportation methods "comparable to those used in the U.S. for land transportation."
But opponents of the practice say that the transport of weapons-usable plutonium is unsafe in the United States as well.
The clash between the advocates and opponents of the current operation underscores the tension between two geo-strategic goals: a determination by the United States after the cold war that American and Russian stockpiles of military-grade plutonium should be reduced, and the concern after the Sept. 11 attacks about protecting the world against nuclear terrorism.
In a letter to Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham in August, Representative Jim Turner of Texas, the ranking Democrat on the House Select Committee on Homeland Security, lauded the agreement between the United States and Russia, but added, "In the post-Sept. 11 environment, it is also crucial to ensure that the transportation of special nuclear materials is adequately secured from theft or diversion by terrorists."
In defending the operation, Hervé Ladsous, the spokesman for the French Foreign Ministry, described it as a nonproliferation initiative, saying, "France brings its support to American and Russian efforts to reduce their military plutonium declared in excess of their defense needs."
Ariane Bernard contributed reporting for this article.
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Aristide backers protest in capital
By AMY BRACKEN
Associated Press
October 5, 2004
http://www.billingsgazette.com/index.php?tl=1&display=rednews/2004/10/05/build/world/50-aristide.inc
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - Machete-wielding supporters of ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide are turning their wrath on Haiti's demoralized police force, beheading some of their victims in a campaign imitative of the insurgency in Iraq.
Seven of at least 18 people killed in the turmoil in Port-au-Prince have been police officers, judicial police chief Michael Lucius said Monday. He said an eighth officer remains hospitalized in serious condition with a gunshot wound to the head.
Three of the slain policemen were decapitated after being shot during clashes with pro-Aristide demonstrators last week.
Interim Prime Minister Gerard Latortue, who is leading a U.S.-backed transitional government installed after Aristide's ouster in February, has said the police killings were part of an offensive by pro-Aristide gangs dubbed "Operation Baghdad."
Deadly clashes continued Monday between street gangs in Cite Soleil, a Port-au-Prince shantytown teeming with Aristide supporters where police shot and killed two gang leaders last week.
"I don't know how many or who was killed, but people were killed," said Cite Soleil Mayor Corneille Jean-Jorel, speaking by telephone from the seaside slum.
The violence in Port-au-Prince, in southern Haiti, has coincided with the chaotic aftermath of Tropical Storm Jeanne in the northwest.
As rescuers recovered more bodies from the devastating floods and mudslides around Gonaives, the official toll rose Monday to 1,870 with another 884 people reported missing and most presumed dead.
About 150 Aristide supporters used torched cars and rocks to block roads into the downtown slum of Bel Air on Monday, accusing police of night-time raids. Police fired in the air in an effort to disperse the mob as U.N. peacekeepers guarded the nearby National Palace.
"We'll be in the streets until death or Aristide comes back," said Milo Fenelon, 24. "We won't stop. If they come in here, we're going to cut off their heads. It's going to be just like Baghdad."
Some of the demonstrators carried machetes and rocks. At least two had guns - a rifle and a homemade shotgun. Some wore masks, others covered their faces with T-shirts. A burning tire lit in the middle of a road sent acrid smoke into the air.
"We will fight until the return of Aristide," said Georges Jean, a 33-year-old mechanic. "We can also cut off Latortue's head."
The interim prime minister told reporters Sunday night Haiti is seeing "a climate of terror" resembling months leading up to Aristide's departure.
Now in exile in South Africa, Aristide has accused U.S. agents of ousting him from the presidency on Feb. 29 amid a bloody rebellion - a charge the U.S. government denies.
Dozens of police officers were killed by rebels - made up of gangsters and former soldiers from Haiti's disbanded army - who torched police stations. Hundreds of officers fled their posts, and some fled the country.
Latortue's government undertook a massive recruiting and U.N.-backed training drive to rebuild the police force. Aristide supporters consider the new officers sellouts.
Aristide, who became Haiti's first freely elected president in 1990, was chased from power by the army in 1991 and restored by U.S. troops in 1994. He then stepped down under U.S. pressure and a term limit but was re-elected in 2000.
The violence in Port-au-Prince erupted Thursday as his Lavalas Family party commemorated the 1991 coup with demands to end "the occupation" by foreign troops - referring to the U.S. Marines who arrived the day Aristide fled and the U.N. peacekeepers who took over in June.
On Saturday, police arrested Haiti's Senate president and two other politicians on suspicion of orchestrating the violence.
The politicians deny the charges. Pro-Aristide groups allege the arrests amount to political persecution and said police and gangsters opened fire on Aristide supporters during last week's demonstrations, killing several people. At least one teenager was killed by police.
Some Haitians have criticized Brazilian-led U.N. peacekeepers for not doing more to prevent violence. But U.N. officials say they are doing the best they can with about 750 troops from the 3,000-member force deployed to the flood-ravaged northwestern city of Gonaives. The force is less than half the 8,000 initially promised by the United Nations.
Associated Press reporters Stevenson Jacobs in Port-au-Prince and Michael Norton in San Juan, Puerto Rico, contributed to this report.
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Dear Mike, Iraq sucks
The Guardian
October 5, 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1319654,00.html
Civilian contractors are fleecing taxpayers; US troops don't have proper equipment; and supposedly liberated Iraqis hate them. After the release of Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore received a flood of letters and emails from disillusioned and angry American soldiers serving in Iraq. Here, in an exclusive extract from his new book, we print a selection
From: RH To: mike@michaelmoore.com Sent: Monday, July 12, 2003 4:57 PM Subject: Iraqi freedom veteran supports you Dear Mr Moore, I went to Iraq with thoughts of killing people who I thought were horrible. I was like, "Fuck Iraq, fuck these people, I hope we kill thousands." I believed my president. He was taking care of business and wasn't going to let al Qaeda push us around. I was with the 3rd Squadron, 7th Cavalry, 3rd Infantry division out of Fort Stewart, Georgia. My unit was one of the first to Baghdad. I was so scared. Didn't know what to think. Seeing dead bodies for the first time. People blown in half. Little kids with no legs. It was overwhelming, the sights, sounds, fear. I was over there from Jan'03 to Aug'03. I hated every minute. It was a daily battle to keep my spirits up. I hate the army and my job. I am supposed to get out next February but will now be unable to because the asshole in the White House decided that now would be a great time to put a stop-loss in effect for the army. So I get to do a second tour in Iraq and be away from those I love again because some guy has the audacity to put others' lives on the line for his personal war. I thought we were the good guys.
From: Michael W Sent: Tuesday July 13 2004 12.28pm Subject: Dude, Iraq sucks
My name is Michael W and I am a 30-year-old National Guard infantryman serving in southeast Baghdad. I have been in Iraq since March of 04 and will continue to serve here until March of 05. Advertiser links Save Now - 21st Century Insurance
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In the few short months my unit has been in Iraq, we have already lost one man and have had many injured (including me) in combat operations. And for what? At the very least, the government could have made sure that each of our vehicles had the proper armament to protect us soldiers.
In the early morning hours of May 10, one month to the day from my 30th birthday, I and 12 other men were attacked in a well-executed roadside ambush in south-east Baghdad. We were attacked with small-arms fire, a rocket-propelled grenade, and two well-placed roadside bombs. These roadside bombs nearly destroyed one of our Hummers and riddled my friends with shrapnel, almost killing them. They would not have had a scratch if they had the "Up Armour" kits on them. So where was [George] W [Bush] on that one?
It's just so ridiculous, which leads me to my next point. A Blackwater contractor makes $15,000 [£8,400] a month for doing the same job as my pals and me. I make about $4,000 [£2,240] a month over here. What's up with that?
Beyond that, the government is calling up more and more troops from the reserves. For what? Man, there is a huge fucking scam going on here! There are civilian contractors crawling all over this country. Blackwater, Kellogg Brown & Root, Halliburton, on and on. These contractors are doing everything you can think of from security to catering lunch!
We are spending money out the ass for this shit, and very few of the projects are going to the Iraqi people. Someone's back is getting scratched here, and it ain't the Iraqis'!
My life is left to chance at this point. I just hope I come home alive.
From: Specialist Willy Sent: Tuesday March 9 2004 1.23pm Subject: Thank you
Mike, I'd like to thank you for all of the support you're showing for the soldiers here in Iraq. I am in Baghdad right now, and it's such a relief to know that people still care about the lemmings who are forced to fight in this conflict.
It's hard listening to my platoon sergeant saying, "If you decide you want to kill a civilian that looks threatening, shoot him. I'd rather fill out paperwork than get one of my soldiers killed by some raghead." We are taught that if someone even looks threatening we should do something before they do something to us. I wasn't brought up in fear like that, and it's going to take some getting used to.
It's also very hard talking to people here about this war. They don't like to hear that the reason they are being torn away from their families is bullshit, or that their "president" doesn't care about them. A few people here have become quite upset with me, and at one point I was going to be discharged for constantly inciting arguments and disrespect to my commander-in-chief (Dubya). It's very hard to be silenced about this when I see the same 150 people every day just going through the motions, not sure why they are doing it.
[Willy sent an update in early August]
People's perceptions of this war have done a complete 180 since we got here. We had someone die in a mortar attack the first week, and ever since then, things have changed completely. Soldiers are calling their families urging them to support John Kerry. If this is happening elsewhere, it looks as if the overseas military vote that Bush is used to won't be there this time around.
From: Kyle Waldman Sent: Friday February 27 2004 2.35am Subject: None
As we can all obviously see, Iraq was not and is not an imminent threat to the United States or the rest of the world. My time in Iraq has taught me a little about the Iraqi people and the state of this war-torn, poverty-stricken country.
The illiteracy rate in this country is phenomenal. There were some farmers who didn't even know there was an Operation Iraqi Freedom. This was when I realised that this war was initiated by the few who would profit from it and not for its people. We, as the coalition forces, did not liberate these people; we drove them even deeper into poverty. I don't foresee any economic relief coming soon to these people by the way Bush has already diverted its oil revenues to make sure there will be enough oil for our SUVs.
We are here trying to keep peace when all we have been trained for is to destroy. How are 200,000 soldiers supposed to take control of this country? Why didn't we have an effective plan to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure? Why aren't the American people more aware of these atrocities?
My fiancee and I have seriously looked into moving to Canada as political refugees.
From: Anonymous Sent: Thursday April 15 2004 12.41am Subject: From KBR truck driver now in Iraq
Mike, I am a truck driver right now in Iraq. Let me give you this one small fact because I am right here at the heart of it: since I started this job several months ago, 100% (that's right, not 99%) of the workers I am aware of are inflating the hours they claim on their time sheets. There is so much more I could tell you. But the fact is that MILLIONS AND MILLIONS of dollars are being raped from both the American taxpayers and the Iraqi people because of the unbelievable amount of greed and abuse over here. And yes, my conscience does bother me because I am participating in this rip-off.
From: Andrew Balthazor Sent: Friday August 27 2004 1.53pm Subject: Iraqi war vet - makes me sound so old
Mr Moore, I am an ex-military intelligence officer who served 10 months in Baghdad; I was the senior intelligence officer for the area of Baghdad that included the UN HQ and Sadr City.
Since Bush exposed my person and my friends, peers, and subordinates to unnecessary danger in a war apparently designed to generate income for a select few in the upper echelon of America, I have become wholeheartedly anti-Bush, to the chagrin of much of my pro-Republican family.
As a "foot soldier" in the "war on terror" I can personally testify that Bush's administration has failed to effectively fight terrorists or the root causes of terror. The White House and the DoD failed to plan for reconstruction of Iraq. Contracts weren't tendered until Feb-Mar of 2003, and the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (the original CPA) didn't even come into existence until January 2003. This failure to plan for the "peace" is a direct cause for the insecurity of Iraq today.
Immediately after the "war" portion of the fighting (which really ended around April 9 2003), we should have been prepared to send in a massive reconstruction effort. Right away we needed engineers to diagnose problems, we needed contractors repairing problems, we needed immediate food, water, shelter, and fuel for the Iraqi people, and we needed more security for all of this to work - which we did not have because we did not have enough troops on the ground, and CPA decided to disband the Iraqi army. The former Iraqi police were engaged far too late; a plan should have existed to bring them into the fold right away.
I've left the military. If there is anything I can do to help get Bush out of office, let me know.
From: Anthony Pietsch Sent: Thursday August 5 2004 6.13pm Subject: Soldier for sale
Dear Mr Moore, my name is Tony Pietsch, and I am a National Guardsman who has been stationed in Kuwait and Iraq for the past 15 months. Along with so many other guard and reserve units, my unit was put on convoy escorts. We were on gun trucks running from the bottom of Iraq to about two hours above Baghdad.
The Iraqi resistance was insanity. I spent many nights lying awake after mortar rounds had just struck areas nearby, some coming close enough to throw rocks against my tent. I've seen roadside bombs go off all over, Iraqis trying to ram the side of our vehicle. Small children giving us the finger and throwing rocks at the soldiers in the turrets. We were once lost in Baghdad and received nothing but dirty looks and angry gestures for hours.
I have personally been afraid for my life more days than I can count. We lost our first man only a few weeks before our tour was over, but it seems that all is for nothing because all we see is hostility and anger over our being there. They are angry over the abuse scandal and the collateral damages that are always occurring.
I don't know how the rest of my life will turn out, but I truly regret being a 16-year-old kid looking for some extra pocket money and a way to college.
From: Sean Huze Sent: Sunday March 28 2004 7.56pm Subject: "Dude, Where's My Country?"
I am an LCPL in the US Marine Corps and veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Mr Moore, please keep pounding away at Bush. I'm not some pussy when it comes to war. However, the position we were put in - fighting an enemy that used women, children, and other civilians as shields; forcing us to choose between firing at "area targets" (nice way of saying firing into crowds) or being killed by the bastards using the crowds for cover - is indescribably horrible.
I saw more than a few dead children littering the streets in Nasiriyah, along with countless other civilians. And through all this, I held on to the belief that it had to be for some greater good.
Months have passed since I've been back home and the unfortunate conclusion I've come to is that Bush is a lying, manipulative motherfucker who cares nothing for the lives of those of us who serve in uniform. Hell, other than playing dress-up on aircraft carriers, what would he know about serving this nation in uniform?
His silence and refusal to speak under oath to the 9/11 Commission further mocks our country. The Patriot Act violates every principle we fight and die for. And all of this has been during his first term. Can you imagine his policies when he doesn't have to worry about re-election? We can't allow that to happen, and there are so many like me in the military who feel this way. We were lied to and used. And there aren't words to describe the sense of betrayal I feel as a result.
From: Joseph Cherwinski Sent: Saturday July 3 2004 8.33pm Subject: "Fahrenheit 9/11"
I am a soldier in the United States army. I was in Iraq with the Fourth Infantry Division.
I was guarding some Iraqi workers one day. Their task was to fill sandbags for our base. The temperature was at least 120. I had to sit there with full gear on and monitor them. I was sitting and drinking water, and I could barely tolerate the heat, so I directed the workers to go to the shade and sit and drink water. I let them rest for about 20 minutes. Then a staff sergeant told me that they didn't need a break, and that they were to fill sandbags until the cows come home. He told the Iraqis to go back to work.
After 30 minutes, I let them have a break again, thus disobeying orders. If these were soldiers working, in this heat, those soldiers would be bound to a 10-minute work, 50-minute rest cycle, to prevent heat casualties. Again the staff sergeant came and sent the Iraqis back to work and told me I could sit in the shade. I told him no, I had to be out there with them so that when I started to need water, then they would definitely need water. He told me that wasn't necessary, and that they live here, and that they are used to it.
After he left, I put the Iraqis back into the shade. I could tell that some were very dehydrated; most of them were thin enough to be on an international food aid commercial. I would not treat my fellow soldiers in this manner, so I did not treat the Iraqi workers this way either.
This went on for eight months while I was in Iraq, and going through it told me that we were not there for their freedom, we were not there for WMD. We had no idea what we were fighting for anymore.
Will They Ever Trust Us Again?
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