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NUCLEAR
Superpower Nuclear Confrontation: A Thriller, but Real
10 big stories The mainstream media missed
A nuclear plant problem raises interest, but not among neighbors
Nuclear shutdown cost $10 million
Kyrgyzstan Blocks British Nuclear Shipments
Pentagon uses depleted uranium shells in its raid against Iraq
G-8 Nations to Meet on Iran
U.S. and Industrial Nations Meet on Iran's Nuclear Plans
Industrial powers discuss Iran nuclear tensions
EU Three to present Iran with nuclear incentives next week: US
No Evidence Iraq Sought Foreign Uranium, ISG Says
Iraq Nuclear Sites Were Stripped Methodically, Say Diplomats
Duelfer Report Omitted Long-Term U.N. Plans for Monitoring Iraq
Brazil OKs nuclear inspections
Nuclear Solutions Files Patent for New Technology
U.S. Nuclear Test Compensation Fund Going Broke
U.S. Investigating Accident That Shut Down Salem Reactor
MILITARY
This week's casualty: the legal case for war in Iraq
U.S. backs plans to convert chemical-arms plant
Ex-Troops Fill Haiti's Security Vacuum
Blasts Inside Green Zone Kill at Least 5
U.S. Military Pounds Targets in and Around Falluja
Marines begin raids on Fallujah
Rockets Deliver Daily Terror To Residents of Israeli Town
Sharon Agrees to Pull Back Troops in Gaza
Israel Ends Deadly Gaza Offensive
Palestinian children are not terrorists
Syria agrees to patrol border
Army Official Backs Ex-Abu Ghraib Officer
Army Probes Whether G.I.'s Refused a Mission in Iraq
U.S. Army Inquiry Implicates 28 Soldiers in Deaths of 2 Afghan Detainees
U.S. troops likely to face charges
Chemicals Sickened '91 Gulf War Veterans, Latest Study Finds
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Terror Threat Complicates Election Plans in Region
Intelligence Reform May Be Stalled
Border Security Measures to Tighten Next Month
Deficiencies in U.S. Screening of Cargo Are Acknowledged
Changes Needed in US Cargo Inspection-Audit
U.S. Tries to Calm Foreign Visitors Over Need for Fingerprinting
POLITICS
U.S. Hits Debt Limit After Senators Put Off Raising Ceiling
As U.S. Debt Ceiling Is Reached,
Anti-Bush registration drive stirs fraud concerns
Rove testifies before grand jury in CIA leak probe
Sept. 11 Panel's Chief Wants Help From Bush
Analysis Bush's Cartoon of Kerry Failed to Show Up
Va.-Based, U.S.-Financed Arabic Channel Finds Its Voice
Voting Rights Machinery Doubted
European election observers to check battleground states
OTHER
Male Bass in Potomac Producing Eggs
Worldwide Report Says Amphibians Are in Peril
Amphibian Extinctions Sound Global Eco-alarm, Says Study
Toxic Ghost Ships in Court Again
All Maryland Waters Polluted With Mercury
Mobile Phone Use Linked to Brain Tumors
ACTIVISTS
Platoon defies orders in Iraq
-------- NUCLEAR
BOOKS OF THE TIMES | 'HIGH NOON IN THE COLD WAR'
Superpower Nuclear Confrontation: A Thriller, but Real
October 15, 2004
By RICHARD C. HOLBROOKE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/15/books/15BOOK.html?pagewanted=all&position=
Do we need yet another book on the Cuban missile crisis? Is there anything new to say about the most studied event of the cold war? And does it have any relevance to the post-9/11 world?
In the hands of Max Frankel, who covered the crisis in October 1962 for The New York Times, the answer to all three questions is a resounding yes. For those too young to remember the only direct nuclear confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, Mr. Frankel's short and graceful account is an excellent introduction to a vital part of our recent past. For those already steeped in missile crisis lore, Mr. Frankel offers new insights based on his personal memories and newly available archives.
And for those wondering about the relevance of a cold war crisis, consider some of the many contrasts with Iraq, which, while never mentioned by the author, jump out of his narrative:
¶In 1962, unlike 2003, there really were weapons of mass destruction. Nuclear missiles were being secretly placed off Florida by a dangerous adversary seeking a fundamental change in the balance of power.
¶In 1962, unlike 2003, American intelligence and analysis was excellent. High-altitude photographs found and identified the missiles before they were deployed.
¶When Adlai Stevenson presented the evidence to the United Nations Security Council, the world accepted America's word and its photographs without question. (This precedent led the Bush administration to its ill-fated decision to seek an "Adlai moment" at the United Nations in February 2003.)
¶In 1962, as in 2003, the president was under intense pressure from some members of his Cabinet to take pre-emptive military action, but, unlike 2003, President Kennedy saw the threat of force primarily as a tactical device to achieve a political solution.
¶In 1962, unlike 2003, Washington mobilized the United Nations and NATO into a coalition that isolated its adversary.
In the spring of 1962, Nikita S. Khrushchev gambled that he could sneak nuclear missiles into Cuba and hide them "unnoticed among Cuba's majestic palm trees." It was, Mr. Frankel observes, "worthy of the horse at Troy." But within hours after the missiles were discovered by a U-2 overflight on Oct. 15, 1962, President Kennedy decided that the deployment of such weapons was unacceptable.
During the first week of the crisis, no one but a small group of advisers known as the Executive Committee, or ExCom, knew about the missiles. The importance of this total secrecy cannot be overestimated; a rush to action under public pressure could easily have resulted in a catastrophic mistake. With great self-control, the 44-year-old president absented himself from many of the ExCom meetings to allow freer debate, but he was kept informed by his brother Robert, then attorney general, and by Theodore C. Sorensen, his brilliant alter ego, who drafted many key public statements and private messages during the crisis.
Importantly, the secret held - with an assist from The Washington Post and The Times, which both figured out what was going on a day or two before Kennedy was scheduled to make his address to the nation. They both agreed, after personal requests from Kennedy, not to print the story. (Mr. Frankel recalls listening in as the president pleaded with The Times's Washington bureau chief, James Reston, not to publish what they knew.) It was, given the stakes, the correct decision.
From material that has become public since the cold war (including remarkable secret tape recordings President Kennedy himself made of the ExCom deliberations), it is clear that, once he was caught red-handed, Khrushchev realized that the Soviet Union would have to back down. But he was not sure he could control his own military, which was more belligerent than he was.
Kennedy, to achieve his goal - a withdrawal of all offensive weapons from Cuba without the use of force - put together what Frankel calls a well-concocted "brew of dire threat and prudent action": a carefully calibrated naval blockade that gave Moscow several days to ponder the growing danger as their ships approached the quarantine line, and a very public movement of American troops to Florida to prepare for the possible invasion of Cuba.
As in other accounts, Mr. Frankel's Kennedy is the most careful person in the ExCom, always searching for a solution that would meet his absolute bottom line while giving Khrushchev a fig leaf to cover his retreat.
But what was that fig leaf? Although no one realized it at first, Kennedy himself had mentioned it before the missile crisis began: a pledge that the United States would not invade Cuba. When Fidel Castro and the Russians, in near panic, decided that the United States was indeed ready to use its overwhelming force if necessary, Khrushchev seized the no-invasion pledge as if it were a life preserver (which in a sense, it was) to "disguise his retreat."
There was one other issue, which has been denied, debated and finally revealed bit by bit. This concerned the removal of 15 Jupiter medium-range missiles from Turkey. By the time they were installed in early 1962 they were already obsolete; President Dwight D. Eisenhower said they should have been dumped at sea rather than sent to Turkey, and American nuclear submarines made them superfluous. But a public "trade" of the Soviet missiles in Cuba for the American Jupiters in Turkey would have constituted a substantial propaganda victory for Khrushchev and, Kennedy feared, encouraged future Soviet blackmail.
So Kennedy set out to construct a fully deniable "non-deal deal" on the Jupiters. The critical meeting took place between Robert Kennedy and Ambassador Anatoly F. Dobrynin on Saturday evening, Oct. 27. On that darkest day of the cold war, a Soviet missile team in Cuba shot down a U-2, killing its pilot; the Joint Chiefs of Staff (with its chairman, Gen. Maxwell D. Taylor, dissenting) recommended immediate military retaliation; and Castro asked Khrushchev for urgent help against an invasion he expected within hours. Worst of all Khrushchev sent President Kennedy a letter - his second in two days - that deeply alarmed Washington. It was far more threatening than the first, and, worse, the Soviets broadcast its full text on Radio Moscow. It was a night of fear in both Washington and Moscow; Secretary of State Dean Rusk told me some years later that he went to sleep that night not knowing if he would be alive the next morning.
Ambassador Dobrynin remembers Kennedy during their meeting, the most dramatic in the Russian diplomat's long career, as "very upset." Kennedy told him that the president needed a commitment by the next day that the bases would be removed. There were, Kennedy said, generals, and not only generals, "itching for a fight." When Ambassador Dobrynin asked about Turkey, Kennedy replied, using a clever formulation devised by Rusk, that the Jupiter missiles were not an "insurmountable obstacle" but that, if removed, they could never be linked publicly to the missiles in Cuba. And it would require four to five months and full consultations with America's NATO allies.
The original records of this conversation were carefully edited to remove any hint that there was a connection, and Moscow never mentioned the issue publicly. Many observers suspected a deal from the outset, but it was only decades later that the full story emerged; the Americans had the necessary deniability.
President Kennedy's deft combination of threats and harmless fig leafs worked. The next day the Soviets issued a public statement that effectively ended the crisis. It was, as Mr. Frankel notes, a "euphoric Sunday morning."
There is no certainty that other presidents would have handled history's only nuclear confrontation between superpowers with such coolness and skill. In a world where the media are besotted with interest in the private lives of the presidents (John F. Kennedy first among them), it is well to remember that our leaders should be judged first by their deeds.
Mr. Frankel brings it all back for those who lived it, but, more important, also for a generation who did not.
Richard C. Holbrooke is a former chief American delegate to the United Nations during the Clinton administration and is a foreign policy adviser to Senator John Kerry.
-----
10 big stories The mainstream media missed
Las Vegas City Life
BY CAMILLE T. TAIARA
October 15, 2004
http://www.lvcitylife.com/articles/2004/10/15/cover_story/cover.prt
In late July, more than 600 people showed up in Monterey, Calif., to speak at a Federal Communications Commission hearing on ownership concentration in the news media. The participants were a diverse group - young and old, activists and workers - but they had a single, consistent message: The mainstream news media were doing a deplorable job of covering the day's most important stories.
That's no surprise: Consolidation of the media in the hands of a few corporate Goliaths has resulted in fewer people creating more of the content we see, hear and read. One impact has been a narrower range of perspectives; another is the virtual disappearance of hard-hitting, original, investigative reporting.
"Corporate media has abdicated their responsibility to the First Amendment to keep the American electorate informed about important issues in society and instead serves up a pabulum of junk-food news," says Peter Phillips, head of Sonoma State University's Project Censored.
Every year, researchers at Project Censored pick through volumes of print and broadcast news to see which of the year's most important stories aren't receiving the kinds of attention they deserve. Phillips and his team acknowledge that many of these stories weren't "censored" in the traditional sense of the word - no government agency blocked their publication - and some even appeared (briefly and without follow-up) in mainstream journals.
But according to Project Censored, every one of this year's picks merited prominent placement on the evening news and the front pages. Instead, they went virtually ignored.
This year's list speaks directly to the point FCC critics have raised: Stories that address fundamental issues of wealth concentration and big-business dominance of the political agenda are almost entirely missing from the national debate. From the dramatic increase in wealth inequality in the United States to the wholesale giveaway of the nation's natural resources to the Bush administration's attack on corporate and political accountability, events and trends that ought to be dominating the presidential campaign and the national dialogue are missing from the front pages.
Here are Project Censored's top 10 examples of major stories that have been relegated to the most obscure corners of the media world.
10. New nuke plants
If you thought nuclear energy was dead, think again: The Bush administration's energy bill - yet another product of Cheney's industry-stacked Energy Task Force - doesn't offer any incentives for companies to switch to renewable energy sources. But it does provide for taxpayer cash for companies that build new nukes. A secretly crafted provision of the bill, released late on a Saturday night in November, offers energy companies with as much as $7.5 billion in tax credits to build six new nuclear reactors - this in addition to almost $4 billion set aside for other nuclear energy programs.
"Nuclear power already has had 50 years of subsidy totaling over $140 billion," reported Nuclear Information and Resource Service's Cindy Folkers. The administration also removed terrorism protection provisions included in the House version of the bill, and reversed a previous ban on the export of enriched uranium, which may be used to construct nuclear bombs.
The press has been "woefully silent on the bill's nuclear provisions" wrote Folkers and Michael Mariotte in their update for Project Censored's book, Censored 2005: The Top 25 Censored Stories. And while both Democrats and Republicans managed to defeat the version of bill NIRS warned about last fall, supporters - particularly Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) - are still trying to push those provisions through, in some cases as riders on other bills. Current estimates on the amount of tax credits being considered have since risen to "as much as $15 or even $19 billion."
Sources: "Nuclear Energy Would Get $7.5 Billion in Tax Subsidies, U.S. Taxpayers Would Fund Nuclear Monitor Relapse if Energy Bill Passes," Cindy Folkers and Michael Mariotte, Nuclear Information and Resource Service, Nov. 17, 2003. "U.S. Senate Passes Pro-Nuclear Energy Bill," Cindy Folkers and Michael Mariotte, WISE/NIRS Nuclear Monitor, Aug. 22, 2003.
9. 9/11 widow brings case against the U.S. government
As the National Commission on Terrorists Attacks Upon the United States - also known as the Sept. 11 Commission - completed its first year, Ellen Mariani and her attorney held a news conference on the steps of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania to announce her own startling conclusions. Mariani, wife of Louis Neil Mariani, who died when terrorists flew United Airlines Flight 175 into the World Trade Center's south tower, had come to believe that top American officials - including President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others - had foreknowledge of the attacks, purposefully failed to prevent them and had since taken pains to cover up the truth.
The administration, she argues in a federal lawsuit, allowed Sept. 11 to happen so that Bush and Co. could launch their seemingly endless, global "war on terror" for their own personal and financial gain. The suit uses the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act - a law created to go after the Mafia - to charge the nation's leaders with conspiracy, obstruction of justice and wrongful death.
Her lawyer, Philip J. Berg, a former deputy attorney general of Pennsylvania, filed a 62-page complaint that included 40 pages of evidence. "Compelling evidence Š will be presented in this case through discovery, subpoena power by this court and testimony at trial," he wrote in a news release sent to 3,000 print and broadcast journalists announcing the lawsuit and read at a news conference on the court steps that day.
At the very least, the case presents the potential to uncover and publicize critical documents and testimony about the Bush administration's handling of the al-Qaida threat and its aftermath. But only Fox News showed up to the news conference - and it never ran anything on the topic.
Sources: "911 Victim's Wife Files RICO Case Against GW Bush," Philip Berg, www.scoop.co.nz, Nov. 26, 2003; "Widow's Bush Treason Suit Vanishes," W. David Kubiak, www.scoop.co.nz, Dec. 3, 2003.
8. Secrets of Cheney's energy task force
As the Bush administration continues to protect the iron wall of secrecy its erected around Vice President Dick Cheney's Energy Task Force, at least two documents confirm long-standing suspicions that the Bush administration's foreign policy is being driven by the dictates of the energy industry.
When George W. Bush took office in January 2001, he said that tackling the country's energy crisis would be a top priority. The United States faced nationwide oil and natural gas shortages, and a series of electrical blackouts were rolling across California. The president established the National Energy Policy Development Group and appointed former Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney as its head.
One of the big issues on the table was oil, which accounted for 40 percent of the nation's energy supply and provided fuel for the vast majority of the country's transportation - as well as its vast war machine. And, for the first time in history, the United States had become reliant on foreign imports for more than 50 percent of its oil supply.
But rather than lay the groundwork for converting the economy to alternative and renewable sources, NEPDG's report - later released by Bush as the National Energy Policy report in May 2001 - promoted a central goal of "mak[ing] energy security a priority of our trade and foreign policy." In other words, Cheney's group wanted to find additional sources of oil overseas, and ensure U.S. access to that oil - whatever it took.
Documents recently obtained from Cheney's Energy Task Force as the result of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the public-interest group Judicial Watch indicate that Cheney and his colleagues had their sights on the black gold under the Iraqi desert well before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Last July, the Commerce Department finally turned over records that included "a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, as well as two charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects, and 'Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts,'" according to Judicial Watch's subsequent news release. There were also similar maps and charts for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The documents were dated March 2001.
Sources: "Cheney Energy Task Force Documents Feature Map of Iraqi Oilfields," Judicial Watch staff, Judicial Watch, July 17, 2003; "Bush-Cheney Energy Strategy: Procuring the Rest of the World's Oil," Michael Klare, Foreign Policy in Focus, January 2004.
7. Conservative organization drives judicial appointments
Ever since the Reagan administration, the neocons have pursued an aggressive campaign to stack the federal courts with right-wing judges. Their main vehicle: the Federalist Society of Law and Public Policy, an organization founded in 1982 by a small group of radically conservative law students at the University of Chicago.
The effort has been a resounding success. With the help of Republicans in Congress, 85 extra federal judgeships were created under Ronald Reagan and George Bush the First; Bill Clinton got nine. Now, seven out of 12 circuit courts are anti-abortion. Seven of the nine Supreme Court justices are Republican appointees - and it's been 11 years since a post has opened up, meaning another right-winger or two could be appointed sometime soon. During Bush the First's tenure, one White House insider boasted that no one who wasn't a Federalist ever received a judicial appointment from the president.
One of George W.'s earliest moves in office was to consolidate the Federalist Society's power even further: He "simply eliminated the long-standing role in the evaluation of prospective judges by the resolutely centrist American Bar Association, whose ratings had long kept extremists and incompetents off the bench," wrote Martin Garbus in the American Prospect. "Today, the Federalists have more influence in judicial selection than the ABA ever had."
The Society now counts Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and prominent members of the conservative American Enterprise Institute among its leadership. Attorney General John Ashcroft, Interior Secretary Gale Norton, Solicitor General Theodore Olson and White House Counsel Alberto Gonzalez - charged with approving all judicial nominations before passing them onto Congress - are all members.
As one might expect, the Federalists have consistently acted in favor of property rights over rights of the individual, business deregulation, creationist teachings and much of the rest of the right-wing agenda. But one of the principal victims has been the democratic process itself: Remember, it was the Supreme Court that stopped a hand count of 175,000 uncounted (largely Democratic) ballots in Florida, which could have cost Bush the 2000 presidential election. Conservative jurists have interfered with redistricting efforts to reverse the deliberate segregation of black and Latino voters, and have erected barriers to the participation of third party candidates in the electoral process.
Sources: "A Hostile Takeover: How the Federalist Society Is Capturing the Federal Courts," Martin Garbus, the American Prospect, March 1, 2003; "Courts vs. Citizens," Jamin Raskin, the American Prospect, March 1, 2003.
6. The sale of electoral politics
The Help America Vote Act required that states submit their blueprints for switching over to electronic voting systems by last Jan. 1, and implement those plans in time for the 2006 elections. Some regions are already using the new machines, but those who've bothered to look into the new systems are sending up serious warning flares. Critics say that if Americans don't want a repeat of the 2000 Florida elections fiasco - on a much grander scale - the administration's plans must be halted in their tracks.
A switch to electronic voting might seem innocent enough at first - until you look at who's implementing it and how. Indeed, the transfer represents the privatization of the voting process into the hands of a select few fervent GOP supporters who've insisted on keeping their operating systems and codes a trade secret - meaning that they enjoy absolute control over the entire voting process, including ballot counting and oversight. There is no paper trail.
One prime example is Diebold Inc., one of the nation's top e-voting machine manufacturers, whose equipment was responsible for the Florida debacle. Diebold already operates more than 40,000 machines in 37 states across the country. Many of these are in Georgia, which in November became the first state to conduct an election entirely with touch-screen machines. Oddly enough, incumbent Democratic governor Roy Barnes lost to Republican candidate Sonny Perdue 46 percent to 51 percent - "a swing from as much as 16 percentage points from the last opinion polls," wrote Andrew Gumbel in the Independent. In the same election, incumbent Democratic Sen. Max Cleland lost to his Republican challenger, Saxby Chambliss, thanks to "a last-minute swing of nine to 12 points."
Similar upsets occurred "in Colorado, Minnesota, Illinois, and New Hampshire - all in races that had been flagged as key partisan battlegrounds, and all won by the Republican Party," Gumbel continued.
The other top two e-voting machine manufacturers, Sequoia (which is used in Nevada) and Election Systems and Software (ES&S), are equally suspect. Several of their executives have troubling track records of corruption and conflict of interest. All three companies are prominent Republican Party donors.
Sources: "Voting Machines Gone Wild," Mark Lewellen-Biddle, In These Times, December 2003; "All the President's Votes?," Andrew Gumbel, the Independent (UK), Oct. 13, 2003; "Will Bush Backers Manipulate Votes to Deliver GW Another Election?" Amy Goodman and the staff of "Democracy Now!," Sept. 4, 2003.
5. The wholesale giveaway of our natural resources
Adam Werbach, executive director of the Common Assets Defense Fund and former Sierra Club president, reviewed the Bush administration's environmental policy record and came to a disturbing conclusion: Bush's record is not only bad - it's "akin to an affirmative action program for corporate polluters," he wrote for In These Times.
Vice President Dick Cheney's infamous, secretive, industry-laden energy task force produced what can be boiled down to two main recommendations: "lower the environmental bar and pay corporations to jump over it," Werbach wrote.
For example, Congress has promised $3 billion in tax cuts to mining corporations to help them access natural gas embedded in underground coal deposits in Georgia's Powder River Basin. The Bureau of Land Management has calculated that miners will waste a full 700 million gallons of publicly owned water a year in the process - thereby sucking the region's underground aquifers dry and decimating local farms and wildlife.
The Bush administration's Healthy Forests Initiative essentially entails granting logging companies access to old-growth trees - and then subsidizing them for brush clearing. And even the giant sequoias that former president Bill Clinton sought to protect by creating a 327,000 national monument in the Southern Sierra Nevada just four years ago risk being logged at a rate of 10 million board-feet of lumber per year - a higher rate than allowed on surrounding national forest lands - in the name of "forest management."
All in all, the Bush administration has launched the greatest giveaway of public natural resources in more than a century. Yet, few in the mainstream media have bothered to analyze these plans and put the lie to the administration's rhetorical manipulations.
Sources: "Liquidation of the Commons," Adam Werbach, In These Times, Nov. 23, 2003; "Giant Sequoias Could Get the Ax," Matt Weiser, High Country News, June 9, 2003.
4. High uranium levels found in troops, civilians
Last year, Project Censored included the United States and United Kingdom's continued use of depleted uranium weapons - despite ample evidence of its acute health effects - among its top-10 underreported stories. Almost 10,000 U.S. troops died within 10 years of serving in the first Gulf War, researchers found. And more than a third of those still alive had filed Gulf War Syndrome-related claims.
In study after study, research pointed to the use of depleted uranium in American and British weaponry as the culprit. But authorities concentrated their efforts into obfuscating the problem - downplaying its reach, discrediting scientists and ailing military personnel, and erecting a smoke screen around the syndrome's root causes.
More recently, the Uranium Medical Research Center, an independent group of U.S. and Canadian scientists that's conducted studies of Afghan civilians, found overwhelming evidence that the United States is also using non-depleted uranium in its weapons, which is far more radioactive than DU. "If the use of NDU indicates experimental application of new nuclear weapons, as the UMRC suggests, then it should alert the public that proliferation of small nuclear weaponry, proposed for some future use, has in fact already begun," wrote Stephanie Hiller in Awakened Woman.
At the International Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan in Tokyo in December, a team of attorneys from Japan, the United States and Germany indicted President Bush on a number of war crimes charges - among them the use of DU weapons. Leuren Moret, president of Scientists for Indigenous People, testified that a U.S. government study conducted on the babies of Gulf War I veterans conceived after the soldiers returned home found that two-thirds suffered from serious birth defects or illnesses, including being born without eyes or ears, or with missing or malformed organs or limbs. In Iraq, Moret said, the defects are even worse.
Sources: "UMRC's Preliminary Findings From Afghanistan and Operation Enduring Freedom" and "Afghan Field Trip #2 Report: Precision Destruction, Indiscriminate Effects," Tedd Weyman, UMRC Research Team, Uranium Medical Research Center, January 2003; "Scientists Uncover Radioactive Trail in Afghanistan," Stephanie Hiller, Awakened Woman, January 2004; "There Are No Words Š Radiation in Iraq Equals 250,000 Nagasaki Bombs," Bob Nichols, Dissident Voice, March 2004; "Poisoned?" Juan Gonzalez, New York Daily News, April 2004; "International Criminal Tribune for Afghanistan at Tokyo: The People vs. George Bush," Niloufer Bhagwat J., Information Clearinghouse, March 2004.
3. Bush administration manipulates science
Tampering with data that threatens corporate profits is much more widespread under Bush than we've been led to believe. And the Environmental Protection Agency has emerged as one of the administration's primary targets.
One of the first White House moves - on the very day Bush was inaugurated - was to fire engineer Tony Oppegard, the leader of a federal team investigating a 300-million-gallon slurry spill at a coal-mining site in Kentucky. "Black lava-like toxic sludge containing 60 poisonous chemicals choked and sterilized up to 100 miles of rivers and creeks," wrote environmental lawyer Robert F. Kennedy in the Nation. The EPA dubbed it "the greatest environmental catastrophe in the history of the Eastern United States."
Bush then appointed industry insiders to top posts within the EPA in charge of mine safety and health.
In another case, a week after the EPA released a study to congressional staff about the toxic effects on groundwater of hydraulic fracturing - a process of injecting benzene into the ground to extract oil and gas, used by Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney's old company - the agency revised its findings in response to "industry feedback" to indicate that the practice posed no threat after all.
In the days and months following the World Trade Center attack, the EPA released more than a dozen statements claiming that the air quality in the surrounding "control zone" was safe - despite evidence that asbestos dust was present in quantities well above the 1-percent safety benchmark. The agency opened up the area to the public a mere week after the attacks, allowing Wall Street to reopen and cleanup activities to begin. Some 88 percent of rescue workers suffered ear, nose and throat ailments, and 78 percent suffered lung maladies as a result, according to a Mount Sinai School of Medicine study. Half suffered persistent respiratory problems up to a year later.
The problem isn't limited to the EPA. In fact, government interference in scientific research has gotten so bad that 60 of the country's top scientists - including 20 Nobel laureates - issued a statement in February citing the ways the Bush administration has distorted scientific data "for partisan political ends" and calling for regulatory action.
There have been dozens of scientists willing to blow the whistle - normally, a reporter's dream come true. But news coverage hasn't come close to reflecting the gravity of the problem.
Sources: "The Junk Science of George W. Bush," Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Nation, March 8, 2004; "Censoring Scientific Information," (no author listed), Censorship News: The National Coalition Against Censorship Newsletter, Fall 2003, No. 91; "Ranking Scientists Warn Bush Science Policy Lacks Integrity," Environmental News Service correspondents, www.OneWorld.net, Feb. 20, 2004; "Politics and Science in the Bush Administration," Committee on Government Reform - Minority staff, Office of U.S. Representative Henry A. Waxman, Aug. 2003 (updated Nov. 13, 2003).
2. Ashcroft vs. the human rights law
For decades, the United States has trained right-wing insurgents and torturers, toppled democratically elected governments and propped up brutal dictatorships abroad - all in the interest of corporate profits. But rarely are the agents of repression ever held accountable for the tens of thousands of deaths and the brutal cycles of poverty, subjugation, environmental destruction and violence they leave in their wake. Indeed, many foreign tyrants go on to enjoy plush retirement right here in the United States.
But recently, lawyers have found a way to seek at least a modicum of justice for victims. The Alien Tort Claims Act, a 215-year-old law originally passed to prosecute pirates for crimes committed on the high seas, allows non-citizens to sue any individual or corporation present on U.S. soil.
Human rights lawyers have pursued 100 cases under ATCA since 1980. Defendants have included former high-ranking government and military officials from El Salvador, Guatemala, Argentina, Paraguay, the Philippines (including ex-president Ferdinand Marcos), Indonesia, Bosnia, Ethiopia and elsewhere. And although the law can only be used to pursue monetary damages rather than prison time, it has often resulted in victims being awarded millions - and in the perpetrators sometimes fleeing the country rather than paying up.
Ten years ago, victims began using the act to go after corporate profiteers, too: It was thanks to ATCA, for example, that Holocaust survivors were able to seek redress from the Swiss banks and companies that profited from the slave labor of concentration camp internees during World War II.
But Attorney General John Ashcroft's Justice Department has set its sights on the act, saying in a brief last year that the law threatens "important foreign policy interests" associated with the war on terrorism. Yet hardly a word has been written in the mainstream media about the Bush administration's attack on the one, main legal recourse left in the United States for victims to seek redress for human rights violations.
Source: "Ashcroft Goes After 200-Year-Old Human Rights Law," Jim Lobe, www.OneWorld.net and Asheville Global Report, May 19, 2003.
1. Wealth inequality
As the mainstream news media recite the official line about the nation's supposed economic recovery, a key point has been missing: Wealth inequality in the United States has almost doubled during the past 30 years.
In fact, the Federal Reserve Board's most recent Survey of Consumer Finances supplement on high-income families shows that in 1998, the richest 1 percent of households owned 38 percent of the nation's wealth. The top 5 percent owned almost 60 percent of the wealth.
"We are much more unequal than any other advanced industrial country," New York University economics professor Edward Wolff told Third World Traveler.
But that's just part of the problem. "Most Americans believe we take from people at the top to benefit those below," Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times investigative reporter David Cay Johnston said in a BuzzFlash interview. But our tax system is actually set up such that "people who make $30,000 to $500,000 Š give relief to those who make millions, or tens and hundreds of millions of dollars a year."
The United States is not alone: Today, almost one-sixth of the world's population - 940 million people - "already live in squalid, unhealthy areas, mostly without water, sanitation, public services, or legal security," wrote John Vidal in the Guardian. A recent UN report predicted that, absent drastic change to reverse "a form of colonialism that is probably more stringent than the original," one in every three people worldwide will live in slums within 30 years. That's a bigger threat to democracy and global stability than al-Qaida and international terrorism.
Sources: "The Wealth Divide" (An Interview With Edward Wolff), Multinational Monitor, May 2003; "A BuzzFlash Interview, Parts I and II" (with David Cay Johnston), BuzzFlash staff, www.buzzflash.com, March 26 and 29, 2004; "Every Third Person Will be a Slum Dweller Within 30 Years, UN Agency Warns," John Vidal, the Guardian (UK), Oct. 4, 2003; "Grotesque Inequality," Robert Weissman, Multinational Monitor, July-Aug. 2003.
Camille T. Taiara is a staff reporter for the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
Project Censored's book, Censored 2005: The Top 25 Censored Stories, will be available in bookstores this fall. For more information, go to www.projectcensored.org.
-------- accidents and safety
A nuclear plant problem raises interest, but not among neighbors
Associated Press
By GEOFF MULVIHILL
October 15, 2004
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/ny-bc-nj--reactormishap1015oct15,0,2492903.story?coll=ny-ap-regional-wire
SALEM, N.J. -- Federal regulators and the out-of-town activists who monitor the activity of the three nuclear power plants a few miles from here reacted swiftly this week when one of the plants had to be shut down because of a small leak of radioactive steam.
But in the towns nearby, where being the neighbor of a nuclear plant has been part of life for more than a quarter century, Sunday's mishap isn't exactly the talk of the town.
Ronald Coleman, 51, a Salem resident who works at the local hospital, said he's concerned about what's happening at the plants owned by Public Service Energy Group. But it's not something that his neighbors ever discuss, he said _ even this week, when the mishap was front-page news in the local newspaper.
On the street and in shops in downtown Salem, about eight miles from the Salem I, Salem II and Hope Creek plants that make up one of the nation's largest nuclear generating stations, several people said they weren't aware of any recent problems there.
Rich Gatanis, a township committeeman in nearby Carneys Point and owner of South Jersey Sporting Goods in Salem, said he has paid attention to the plant _ and that he has faith in the behemoth employer that runs it in this sparsely populated southwest corner of New Jersey.
"When they do find a safety problem," he said, "they don't deny it."
But to the activists who follow the plants, the company doesn't communicate or address safety problems as well as it should.
"What we can tell from the outside, this is one more example of the safety culture at PSEG," said Norm Cohen, a Linwood resident and the director of Unplug Salem, which advocates shutting down the plants.
Cohen said he sees a troubling trend of relatively small problems that he links to improper maintenance at the plants.
"You can't say that one of them is going to melt the plant down," Cohen said. "It's the mind-set that the plant is slowly deteriorating."
Both a company spokesman and officials at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said that until the cause of the leak is determined, they won't comment about its cause.
On Sunday, a steam pipe, 8 inches in diameter, in the Hope Creek turbine building ruptured shortly after 5:30 p.m. There were no workers nearby and officials said while radiation levels rose, they stayed well below allowable limits.
"At no point was nuclear safety compromised," said Skip Sindoni, a spokesman for the power company.
When the rupture was discovered, company officials decided immediately to manually shut down the plant. In doing so, they struggled to find the right level of water that covers the radioactive fuel and prevents it from overheating.
Diane Screnci, an NRC spokeswoman, said the water level was never less than 10 feet above the fuel.
PSEG reported the incident immediately to the NRC, which announced on Thursday that it had sent a special team of investigators to determine the cause of the mishap.
Screnci said the agency conducts such investigations a few dozen times a year at nuclear power plants across the nation and that they normally take about a week.
Besides telling the nuclear regulators about the mishap, PSEG did not release any statements to the media or tell people who live near the plant about what had happened.
"They don't tell us much," said Coleman, the hospital worker.
But Sindoni said the company did respond to questions received from people who learned about the incident through the NRC Web site.
He said while problems that spur special NRC investigations are relatively rare, it is not unusual for one of the Salem plants to be shut down at times other than their regular stoppages every 18 months.
PSEG said Hope Creek will remain closed pending the company's own investigation of the steam leak.
--------
Nuclear shutdown cost $10 million
cbc.ca
Oct 15 2004
http://nb.cbc.ca/regional/servlet/View?filename=nb_lepreaushut20041015
SAINT JOHN - NB Power hopes to have the Point Lepreau nuclear plant up and running within days following the most expensive unplanned shutdown in three years.
A series of problems caused the plant to shut down unexpectedly nearly two weeks ago, costing NB Power more than $10 million.
The shutdown raises questions about nuclear power's reliability just weeks before New Brunswick must decide whether to proceed with a billion-dollar plant renovation.
The plant has produced no power since Oct. 2, and other power plants across the province have been called on to pick up the slack.
Even the Mactaquac Dam's head-pond has been drained to fill the gap.
It's an expensive failure at a critical time, as the province decides within the month whether to take another big gamble on nuclear power.
Point Lepreau has had its share of problems, but had been operating remarkably well during the last two years. The latest shutdown has lasted much longer than NB Power had hoped or predicted, and once again raises old questions about nuclear power's reliability.
The latest problem began when an electronic failure caused a shutdown system to partially start itself. NB Power immediately issued a press release predicting a two-day stoppage.
But then, a steam leak was discovered in a pipe during start-up. Then cracks were found in four other steam pipes, dragging the shutdown into one week and then two.
Rod White is vice-president of nuclear for NB Power and says Lepreau's record is good, even with the shutdown. "You recognize that you've got a plant that can perform very well but it is a complicated plant and some things may not go the way you like. Like this inspection found these things. So we'll fix it, but generally over the last three years we've had a good average," he says.
The current shutdown is unsettling because the big issue with Lepreau is whether to begin shutting it down completely, or spend a billion dollars to refurbish it for another 25 years of operation.
Two years ago the Public Utilities Board decided the Lepreau refurbishment plan was too risky, precisely because of unforeseen events that could shut the plant down.
But last June, Premier Bernard Lord was still endorsing the idea as a possibility. "I think the odds are that Lepreau will go ahead, but there are still some evaluations that have to take place."
To work financially, the renovation plan requires Lepreau to operate at an average of 85 per cent capacity for 25 years. The problem is, Lepreau has a dismal record of meeting even yearly targets.
White says this shutdown means Lepreau will reach only 78 per cent of its generation capacity for this year - and that's if it operates flawlessly for the next five months.
This is the fifth time in six years that Lepreau has failed to meet its yearly output goal, raising questions about the accuracy of NB Power's 25-year forecast for the nuclear power plant, when its yearly estimates are so often wrong.
NB Power says it understands the nuclear issue better than it used to, and a refurbished Lepreau can operate much better than the original. Despite that confidence, the current shutdown at Lepreau is a stark reminder of how unplanned nuclear events can still surprise the experts.
-------- asia
Kyrgyzstan Blocks British Nuclear Shipments
By Gulnura Toralieva
BISHEK, Kyrgyzstan, (ENS)
October 14, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/oct2004/2004-10-14-01.asp
A battle between environmental groups and western nuclear energy firms trying to send radioactive materials to Kyrgyzstan came to a head in recent weeks, with the government siding with locals worried about possible contamination.
On September 28, the Kyrgyz government announced it would block efforts by energy producer British Nuclear Fuels Ltd. (BNFL) to send uranium contaminated graphite for processing in Kyrgyzstan.
In a statement, which was re-released in English in London on October 5, the government said it had reached its decision because of safety concerns.
Kyrgyz Prime Minister Nikolay Tanaev, a civil engineer by profession, sided with the environmentalists. (Photo courtesy Office of the Prime Minister) The declaration came after state owned BNFL tried to send about 1,800 metric tons of uranium bearing graphite, a byproduct of the nuclear fuel production process, to the Karabalta mining and processing plant, KGRK.
BNFL and other western firms are struggling to dispose of these materials because of strict controls at home and growing environmental opposition in developing nations.
In the civilian sector, uranium is used to fuel commercial power plants and in certain fertilizers, among other things. Exposure to the radioactive substance has been linked to several types of cancer.
BNFL maintains that it is not looking to dump radioactive waste in Kyrgyzstan. Instead, it intends to extract uranium and send it back to the UK, leaving the remaining material in Kyrgyzstan, the company says.
Kyrgyz activists are strongly opposed to the British shipments, "We will not allow the delivery of such dangerous cargo from abroad. If this goes ahead, we demand that the government resign," said Toktaiym Umetalieva, the leader of a coalition of nongovernmental groups.
A deal between the plant and BNFL would make economic sense for the British firm, but would be bad news for Kyrgyzstan, which is struggling to cope with existing radioactive waste on its soil, said Peter Roche, a nuclear expert at global environmental campaigner Greenpeace.
"BNFL not only gets to dispose of its waste in Kyrgyzstan, but will also get back 60 tons of useable uranium in return," he said.
BNFL spokesman Alan Beauchamp rejected allegations that the company was effectively dumping uranium waste in Kyrgyzstan.
An operator in a BNFL control room moves a graphite drum from buffer store. (Photo courtesy BNFL) "We are not looking to dispose of the waste," he said, adding that the material that would stay in Kyrgyzstan is not known of as waste but "processed residue."
German contractor, RWE Nukem GmbH, which provides services for the nuclear industry, has been trying to arrange the delivery of BNFL consignments of uranium contaminated graphite to the Kyrgyz plant, but has so far failed to get an import license for it.
The contractor started negotiating with the authorities earlier this year, but in July a group of NGOs sent letters to the government protesting against an official commission's decision to support the deal.
The matter appeared to have been settled after the government gave assurances that the shipments would not go ahead. But the controversy resurfaced again in September when the British media reported that BNFL, through Nukem, was negotiating the delivery of uranium contaminated graphite - prompting a renewed outcry from Kyrgyz activists and apparently forcing the government to issue its ban.
In an interview, a Nukem spokesman denied claims that they were organizing the dumping of radioactive material, insisting that it was merely being sent for processing. He added that Kyrgyzstan has been processing uranium containing raw material for 45 years and had been receiving such consignments from Kazakstan quite recently.
For the workers in the Karabalta plant, one of the few factories in the world that separates uranium from graphite, the government's decision imperils their livelihoods.
"We haven't been paid for half a year, and we don't have raw materials to work with. Our plant was built to process uranium, nothing else. What should we do, die of starvation?" said a KGRK employee, who wished to remain anonymous.
Boris Karpachov, the head of the radiation safety service at the Governmental State Agency for Geology and Mineral Resources, lashed out at the groups trying to derail the contract with BNFL.
Students of Karabalta School at lunch (Photo courtesy Association of Christian Schools of Central Asia) "KGRK is looking for partners, trying to survive, while NGOs are busy with their intrigues and demagogy, preventing contracts from being signed, which are the only chance for the workers and for all residents of Karabalta," he said.
Karpachov argued that money made by the factory would allow the country to address economic and social problems, and pay to cleanup and maintain pits containing processed radioactive material.
The BNFL is holding out for a decision in its favor despite the government's categorical statement banning its proposed shipments.
Company spokesman Beauchamp insisted that BNFL "has not received any official notification" about the ban.
"We will find an alternative to the Kyrgyz plant if necessary but we do not have any lined up at the moment because we hope to get the [Kyrgyz import] license."
{Published in cooperation with the Institute for War and Peace Reporting. IWPR intern Eleanor Bindman contributed to this report.}
Read another perspective on the Karabalta KGRK facility on the United Nations Environment Programme Grid Arendal site at: http://www.grida.no/enrin/story.cfm?article=30
-------- depleted uranium
Pentagon uses depleted uranium shells in its raid against Iraq
Contamination caused with depleted uranium will last for 4.5 billion years
Pravda.Ru
10/15/2004
http://english.pravda.ru/world/20/91/368/14451_uranium.html
Increased radioactivity was found in destroyed and abandoned Iraqi tanks. The radiation level may testify to the fact that the US army used uranium-cored projectiles in the raids. Japan's Kyodo News agency reported from Baghdad, a group of specialists had found several radioactive tanks in the area of the Iraqi town of Samawa, where the Japanese contingent was stationed.
The abandoned military hardware is dangerous to people's health, the news agency said. International coalition troops will destroy the tanks for safety reasons. The group of specialists included experts from a Japanese non-governmental organization. The experts said that the radiation level that they had registered near the tanks exceeded the norm 300 times.
Medical examinations of the US military men, who returned home from Iraq, also showed that the Pentagon used depleted uranium armor-piercing shells. American newspaper wrote before that displays of radioactive contamination were registered with the US soldiers, who had been deployed in the area of the Samawa (fierce battles took place in the town during the first two weeks of the US and British incursion in Iraq).
Depleted uranium, also known as uranium-238, is the by-product received from processing fuel for nuclear reactors. The element is 1.7 times heavier than lead. Depleted uranium is used for making projectile cores and special bombs to pierce tank armors and bunkers' concrete ceilings.
Spokespeople for the Pentagon said that uranium-238 possessed short-term harmful impact, which allowed to categorize it as the "chemical contamination" rather than radioactivity. The substance becomes environmentally harmless in seven years after it has been used, experts of the US military department insist.
The Pentagon's independent colleagues are being more precise in their judgments, though. High temperatures destroy the uranium tip of a shell, when it slams into the armored surface. Fine dust is produced as a result of the impact. The dust penetrates into blood via the respiratory system, which results in lung cancer and renal insufficiency. Moreover, regulations prohibit US military men to approach the military hardware, which has been destroyed with uranium shells. It is allowed to do it in case of emergent necessity.
American physicist Doug Rokke, who served in Iraq in 1991 cleaning the country of depleted uranium, said: "For each and every vehicle that is struck by a single uranium munition you have to take that entire vehicle, and physically remove it. Then you have to clean up all the uranium penetration that is left around that vehicle. Then you have to take a bulldozer, and go out to at least 100 metres (yards) and scrape down at least 10 centimetres (four inches) and remove all of that dirt in order to make that area safe again. If that is not done, he said, the contamination will last 4.5 billion years."
Based on the materials of Russia and foreign media outlets
-------- iran
G-8 Nations to Meet on Iran
New Plan Aims to Pressure Tehran About Nuclear Ambitions
By Robin Wright and Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, October 15, 2004; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A33834-2004Oct14.html
After weeks of behind-the-scenes diplomacy, the United States will meet here today with the world's wealthiest countries to determine a strategy for giving Iran one last chance to abandon its alleged nuclear arms program or face new international pressures.
Both Democrats and Republicans increasingly believe that Iran will be the next big foreign policy flash point -- and that action may prove necessary soon after the U.S. presidential election next month, no matter who wins.
A new proposal drafted by European members of the powerful Group of Eight nations is intended to get Iran to fully agree to a plan that will prevent it from being able to convert a nuclear energy program into an arms program. The proposal includes incentives if Iran complies and punitive measures if it balks, U.S. and European officials said. If Iran accepts such a plan, it could resolve an international standoff that has persisted since Russia resumed construction of Iran's first atomic power plant, at Bushehr, in the early 1990s.
The G-8 talks, hosted by the State Department, come a day after Russia and Iran announced that they have completed the Bushehr facility. Washington has charged it could be converted to the production of nuclear weapons.
Despite its heavy focus on Iraq and the domestic election, the Bush administration has agreed to look at one last overture to Iran, to be made as early as next week, because of mounting alarm over the Islamic republic's advancing capabilities and failure to follow through on an agreement to halt activities that could contribute to a weapons program.
"Iran is definitely the next big issue. It's the number one issue that any administration, be it Kerry or Bush, will have to face immediately because of the intelligence assessment that predicts Iran could have the know-how and capability as early as the summer of 2005," said a senior State Department official, who requested anonymity because of the sensitive diplomacy.
"That's a disputed intelligence claim," the official said. "But any capability in the hands of a rogue nation with a long record of supporting terror and a clear interest in challenging the U.S. and Israel makes that the clearest threat facing U.S. interests in the next administration."
Most intelligence assessments project later dates -- three to seven years -- before Iran could develop a nuclear weapon, and U.S. officials say Iran does not now have uranium or fissile material. But Tehran's failure to abide by an agreement with Britain, France and Germany last year not to work toward enriching uranium has triggered broad skepticism among Republicans and Democrats about Iran's long-range intent.
The United States is "open to all ideas" to prevent Iran from developing nuclear arms, Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage said Wednesday in Tokyo. But he warned that Washington is prepared to press for punishment if Tehran does not act.
"We hold the view that Iran needs to be brought to account, and we would like to move to the U.N. Security Council after the November board of governors meeting [of the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency], but we're open to all ideas that people have," Armitage told reporters. He said he was returning to the United States to participate in the talks, which are scheduled to be chaired by John R. Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security.
The new initiative emerged from talks on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly last month between G-8 foreign ministers and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. The G-8 ministers outlined a two-step proposal with a deadline pegged to the next meeting of the IAEA, in Vienna on Nov. 25, U.S. and European officials said.
Given that Britain, France and Germany did not win Iran's compliance, European members of the G-8 -- the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, Russia and Canada -- are seeking a broader front. That would take away Iran's ability to play one country off another and undermine Tehran's contention that the three nations were operating under U.S. pressure, U.S. officials said.
The G-8 umbrella also would give the Bush administration cover for a new international overture and deniability that it is offering incentives to Iran, U.S. and European officials said.
The other G-8 countries will approach Iran individually, but with a single message that it immediately and permanently end uranium-enrichment and processing-related activities or face punitive international action, the officials said.
"We want to make clear to Iran that it has to comply immediately, and everyone agrees we should go to the Security Council [if it does not]. If they do, we might start talking about what we might be able to offer -- in comprehensive ways, not just economic," said a European envoy who has seen the proposal.
The plan has some support within the State Department, but the Bush administration is not eager to put its name on an offer that could help Iran avoid censure by the Security Council. While it has continually suggested that the council needs to discuss Iran's nuclear intentions, the administration has held back on stating that sanctions or other punitive measures should be placed on Tehran.
The administration yesterday played down its role. "We'll be in a listening mode," said a White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the impending talks. "We're going to want to talk about what next steps will be taken."
There is cautious optimism among G-8 countries about the new initiative and the growing unity on Iran policy among the world's major powers.
"Do we expect any change in U.S. policy? Probably not for the moment. But would the U.S. oppose European initiatives with Iran? Probably not either," said a second European diplomat familiar with the plan.
The first European envoy called the talks an "incredibly positive" development that reflects the administration's willingness to look beyond the potential political fallout from a deal that might appear to offer Iran any benefits on the eve of the U.S. election.
Europeans also note the growing cooperation between the United States and Russia, which have long been at odds over the Bushehr facility. To ease U.S. fears, Russia is pressing for an arrangement in which Iran would return spent nuclear fuel to Russia -- another agreement not yet signed by Iran.
--------
U.S. and Industrial Nations Meet on Iran's Nuclear Plans
October 15, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-US-Iran-Nuclear.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The United States and its European allies held inconclusive strategy talks Friday on how to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
The three-hour session at the State Department ended without a communique and without plans for a follow-up meeting. A European diplomat who participated called the talks useful but said no decision was made on a proposed European package of incentives for Iran to stop its suspect program.
The diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the next step was having a U.N. agency take up the Iranian situation next month.
In the meantime, Russian officials said construction had been completed at the Bushehr nuclear reactor in Iran and the hope was to sign agreements next month on shipping nuclear fuel to Tehran.
The United States is worried the $800 million Bushehr deal could help Iran build nuclear weapons. But Russia, dismissing the concern, maintains that having Iran ship spent nuclear fuel back to Russia will serve as a preventive.
The Bush administration sought to lower any expectations of a breakthrough before the G-8 nations met to consider whether to try to induce Iran to halt its nuclear weapons program.
At the center of the discussions was a European proposal to offer trade and fuel supplies if Tehran will stop enriching uranium, a key step toward producing nuclear weapons.
But the Bush administration stressed, instead, the shared goal of stopping the program and taking the issue to the U.N. Security Council for possible economic penalties if Iran did not comply before the board of governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency meets in Vienna, Austria, in late November.
All G-8 nations -- the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, Japan and Russia -- sent senior officials to the session. Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton and Glyn Davies, who is in charge of G-8 issues at the department, headed the U.S. delegation.
Diplomats close to the talks said the European package of incentives included fuel for Iran's civilian programs and a trade arrangement with the European Union.
Even though the Bush administration was reluctant to offer any carrots to Iran, the meeting reflected a willingness to consult with allies -- a strategy Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry has found in short supply under President Bush.
The package of incentives was designed by Britain, France and Germany, who have taken the lead in talking to Iran about its nuclear intentions.
--------
Industrial powers discuss Iran nuclear tensions
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Oct 15, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041015175134.5r0l9cct.html
Top officials from the Group of Eight powers met here Friday to discuss ways of making Iran give up its alleged nuclear weapons programme.
The meeting is to discuss measures proposed by Britain, France and Germany, which have led a European initiative to engage Iran over its nuclear activities.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has set a November 25 deadline for Iran to suspend uranium enrichment activities and answer all questions about its nuclear ambitions.
The United States wants the IAEA to refer Iran's case to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions action. Washington has taken an increasingly hard line on Iran, which it accuses of moving towards nuclear weapons status.
The United States is being represented at the Washington meeting by John Bolton, the State Department's under secretary for arms control and international security, and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.
Top officials from the foreign ministries of the other G8 members -- Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia -- are also taking part.
No official details have been given on what the European nations have proposed to persuade Iran to halt uranium enrichment, a key step toward the making of a nuclear bomb.
However, on Tuesday a diplomat close to the IAEA said a package offer, spearheaded by Britain, France and Germany, giving Iran access to imported nuclear fuel in return for totally suspending its own work on the nuclear fuel cycle, was under consideration.
The Washington meeting, which is being held at the State Department, just blocks from the White House, started this morning and is expected to stretch into the afternoon, diplomatic sources said.
It comes as Iran insists its nuclear programme is purely for civilian power use.
But a top Iranian lawmaker said Thursday his country would bar international nuclear inspections if debate on its nuclear programme moved to the UN Security Council as sought by Washington.
No official statements are expected at the end of the meeting which is being portrayed by the State Department as an opportunity to discuss and exchange ideas.
Diplomatic sources said the meeting has also been convened to send a signal to Tehran that the international community is seriously concerned about the Islamic republic obtaining nuclear weapons.
Armitage has said that Washington is open to proposals regarding Iran, but that the matter must be referred to the Security Council unless Tehran comes forward quickly to resolve international concerns.
US diplomats have said a softening of its hardline policy against Tehran is not being considered, but analysts believe some incentives might be in the offing if Iran shows good will on the issue.
The sources said Washington is not likely to seek a more open dialogue with Tehran on the matter until after the November 2 presidential election here, rather than risk a political storm as voters head to the polls.
Democratic challenger John Kerry has berated President George W. Bush for failing to deal with Tehran while going to war with Iraq on faulty intelligence.
Examination of Iran's nuclear program by the UN Security Council would be a first step to imposing UN economic sanctions against the Islamic republic, something Russia, which has veto power at the Council, is likely to oppose because of its deep economic ties with the country.
-----
EU Three to present Iran with nuclear incentives next week: US
(AFP)
Oct 15, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041015202545.481c9kdn.html
WASHINGTON - Britain, France and Germany have told the United States they will present to Iran next week a package of incentives aimed at convincing Tehran to suspend uranium enrichment activities that could be used to make nuclear weapons, the State Department said Friday.
"The EU Three have indicated they will be presenting their ideas to Iran next week," said Tom Casey, a department spokesman, after a three-hour meeting on the topic between senior diplomats from the United States and the other members of the Group of Eight industrialized nations.
"The United States listened carefully to the EU Three explanations of their approach and the EU Three agreed to inform us of the results of their efforts," Casey said, adding however that Washington did not necessarily endorse the European proposals.
Diplomatic sources say the European package would give Iran access to imported nuclear fuel in return for a total suspension of its own work on the nuclear fuel cycle.
Casey added that the United States remained convinced that Iran's alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons in violation of its international treaty obligations and refusal to abide by demands from the International Atomic Energy Agency be referred to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions.
"The United States has long made clear its views that Iran's confirmed non-compliance with safeguard obligations must be reported by the IAEA board to the UN Security Council," Casey said. "We reaffirmed to our G8 partners that Iran should not be allowed to defy any longer the (IAEA) requirements."
Iran faces a November 25 IAEA deadline to suspend uranium enrichment activities and answer all questions about its nuclear ambitions or face US demands that the matter be sent to the Security Council.
-------- iraq / inspections
No Evidence Iraq Sought Foreign Uranium, ISG Says
Global Security Newswire
By Mike Nartker
October 15, 2004
http://www.nti.org/d_newswire/issues/2004_10_15.html#7E02F26B
WASHINGTON - The Iraq Survey Group, the coalition unit that searched for evidence of prewar Iraq's alleged WMD efforts, has found no evidence that Baghdad sought to acquire uranium from abroad following the 1991 Gulf War, according to a report released last week by U.S. chief weapons inspector Charles Duelfer (see GSN, Aug. 2).
Prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom, U.S. officials cited Iraq's alleged attempts to obtain uranium as evidence of efforts by former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to relaunch his nuclear program. Citing information received from sources such as the former head of Hussein's nuclear weapons program, though, Duelfer dismissed allegations that Iraq sought uranium from Niger and the Democratic Republic of the Congo - two countries cited as possible sources by U.S. intelligence.
"ISG has not found evidence to show that Iraq sought uranium from abroad after 1991," his report states.
In an October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, U.S. intelligence listed the two nations and Somalia as countries from which Iraq may have sought to obtain uranium. The U.S. report was preceded by a British government dossier released in September 2002 indicating that Iraq had sought uranium from Africa.
U.S. President George W. Bush included the Iraq-Africa claim in his 2003 State of the Union address.
"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," Bush said.
The claim began to fall apart in March 2003, when the International Atomic Energy Agency determined that documents provided by the United States, purporting to show an Iraq-Niger uranium deal, were forgeries. The following July, the White House acknowledged that the claim should not have been included in Bush's address.
An inquiry by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in the aftermath of the war found that U.S. intelligence had "overstated" in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate what was known about Iraq's possible uranium procurement efforts. The committee, however, also said that U.S. intelligence had been "reasonable" to assess, prior to receiving the fraudulent documents in October 2002, that Iraq may have sought to obtain uranium from Africa. A British inquiry citing separate intelligence determined that the Iraq-Africa uranium claim was "well-founded."
In his report last week, Duelfer described the claims made by the former head of Iraq's pre-1991 nuclear weapons program, Jafar Jafar, regarding Iraq's two contacts with Niger after 1998. Neither involved discussions on uranium, according to Jafar.
The purpose of one visit in 1999 by Iraq's ambassador to the Holy See, Jafar claimed, was to invite Niger's president to visit Baghdad. Duelfer's report does not mention the possible purpose of the Iraqi invitation.
Jafar also claimed, according to Duelfer, that a second contact between Iraq and Niger occurred when a Nigerien official traveled to Baghdad in 2001 to discuss purchasing petroleum products. The trip did not involve, though, an offer by Niger to provide uranium instead of cash for the purchase, the report says.
In addition, there is no sign that prewar Iraq sought to obtain uranium from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and it may actually have rejected an opportunity to do so, according to Duelfer's report. It notes the discovery in May 2003 of a document from the Iraqi Embassy in Nairobi detailing an offer made by a Ugandan businessman to sell uranium, "reportedly" from the Congo. According to the document, embassy officials told the businessman that they did not handle such issues and explained the circumstances of international sanctions imposed against Iraq, Duelfer's reports states.
"We told him ... that Iraq is not concerned about these matters right now," says the embassy document, a copy of which is included in Duelfer's report.
Duelfer's report does not address the prewar allegations that Iraq may have sought to obtain uranium from Somalia.
The CIA refused to comment on the report, referring all questions to Duelfer. Duelfer has not responded to requests for comment.
----
Iraq Nuclear Sites Were Stripped Methodically, Say Diplomats
Reuters
By Louis Charbonneau
October 15, 2004
http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=194
VIENNA, Austria - The mysterious removal of Iraq's mothballed nuclear facilities continued long after the U.S.-led invasion and was carried out by people with access to heavy machinery and demolition equipment, diplomats said on Thursday.
The United Nations nuclear watchdog told the Security Council this week that equipment and materials that could be used to make atomic weapons had been vanishing from Iraq without either Baghdad or Washington noticing.
"This process carried on at least through 2003 ... and probably into 2004, at least in early 2004," said a Western diplomat close to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which monitored Iraq's nuclear sites before last year's war.
That contrasted with statements by Western and Iraqi officials, who have played down the disappearance of the equipment. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said on Tuesday he believed most of the removals took place in the chaos shortly after the March 2003 invasion.
The United States and Britain said they invaded to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction. Both countries now admit toppled ruler Saddam Hussein had no such weapons.
Several diplomats close to the IAEA said the disappearance of the nuclear items was not the result of haphazard looting.
They said the removal of the dual-use equipment - which before the war was tagged and closely monitored by the IAEA to ensure it was not being used in a weapons program - was planned and executed by people who knew what they were doing.
"We're talking about dozens of sites being dismantled," a diplomat said on condition of anonymity. "Large numbers of buildings taken down, warehouses were emptied and removed. This would require heavy machinery, demolition equipment. This is not something that you'd do overnight."
Proliferation Fears
Diplomats in Vienna say the IAEA is worried that these facilities, which belonged to Saddam's pre-1991 covert nuclear weapons program, could have been packed up and sold to a country or militants interested in nuclear weapons.
The diplomats said that among the sites that had been stripped were a precision manufacturing site at Umm Al Marik, a site connected with Iraq's nuclear weapons activities at Al Qa Qaa, and an engineering facility at Badr.
One diplomat said there were "dozens of others" that gradually disappeared from satellite photos analyzed by IAEA experts at its headquarters in Vienna.
Independent expert Alex Standish, editor of Jane's Intelligence Digest, said Iraqi nuclear and weapons-related material that was monitored by the U.N. before the invasion had since been found in Europe. Raw "yellowcake" uranium, apparently from Iraq, was found in Rotterdam last December, he said.
"It seems extremely negligent for the authorities in Iraq to allow this quantity of material to have been exported from the country," Standish said.
In 1991, the IAEA detected Saddam's clandestine nuclear weapons program and spent the next seven years investigating and dismantling it. By the time U.N. inspectors left the country in December 1998, Iraq's covert atom bomb program was gone.
After returning in November 2002 until they were evacuated in March 2003, the IAEA was confident none of the dual-use nuclear equipment in Iraq was being used in a weapons program.
--------
Duelfer Report Omitted Long-Term U.N. Plans for Monitoring Iraq, U.N. Officials Say
GSN
Oct. 15, 2004
http://www.nti.org/d_newswire/issues/2004_10_25.html#BA34DDFF
The Iraq Survey Group report, which said that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein intended to resume WMD efforts once U.N. sanctions were lifted, failed to note that the U.N. Security Council had planned to maintain long-running controls to prevent such weapons development, the Associated Press reported yesterday (see GSN, Oct. 15).
"It's been a little disturbing," said chief U.N. weapons inspector Demetrius Perricos. "All the arguments say that when sanctions ended, Saddam Hussein would have had a free hand. By the council's own resolutions that wasn't so."
The report by ISG chief Charles Duelfer did not include U.N. plans to implement an Ongoing Monitoring and Verification (OMV) program in Iraq, which would have been in place at hundreds of dual-use and former WMD-related Iraqi sites, according to AP. The program had been envisioned at about a $70 million per year effort involving about 350 people, AP reported.
Inspectors would have used sensors, sampling devices, remote video systems, inspections and interviews to keep track of the facilities. Aerial surveillance, vehicle inspections and imports monitoring would also have been included in the verification program, according to AP.
The program became moot following the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, AP reported.
The CIA and Duelfer did not comment on why the OMV program was not included in the Iraq Survey Group report.
Former U.S. chief weapons inspector in Iraq David Kay said the OMV program was "discounted" and left out of Duelfer's report because it was believed that "the Iraqis over time would find out how to manipulate the cameras, sampling methods, occasional visits" (Charles Hanley, Associated Press/Boston Herald, Oct. 24).
-------- latinamerica
Brazil OKs nuclear inspections
(AFP)
Oct 15, 2004
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20041015/wl_afp/brazil_nuclear_iaea_041015205604
BRASILIA (AFP) - Brazil will allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) into a nuclear facility outside Rio de Janeiro, but will not allow inspections of certain areas, science and technology minister Eduardo Campos said.
Brazil will allow the inspection next week, Campos said. Until then, Brazil and the UN nuclear watchdog are looking for a way to inspect that will "protect the country's technological and trade secrets," Campos said.
Brazil opposes a visual IAEA inspection, claiming that it has a novel method of enriching uranium to protect.
Brazil, which has one of the world's largest uranium reserves, denied IAEA inspectors access in February and March to the uranium-enriching facility in Resende, in the state of Rio de Janeiro.
IAEA director general Mohamed ElBaradei has said Brazil should not be an exception to the organization's norms.
Ten days ago, US Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites), on a two-day official visit here, discussed with President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva Brasilia's disputes with the IAEA inspectors, saying Washington had no worries about the nuclear program here.
-------- terrorism
Nuclear Solutions Files Patent for New Technology to Detect Shielded Nuclear Bomb Materials
(PRIMEZONE)
Oct. 15, 2004
http://www.primezone.com/newsroom/news_releases.mhtml?d=65630
WASHINGTON, -- Nuclear Solutions, Inc. (OTCBB:NSOL) filed a patent application this week for a new nuclear material detection technology intended to screen cargo for shielded nuclear weapons.
"When fully developed, this new patent pending technology could integrate into a system that would screen inbound cargo in real time for uranium-235 and plutonium-239, the essential components of a nuclear bomb," said Patrick Herda, chief executive officer of Nuclear Solutions.
Because the levels of radiation emitted by weapons-grade plutonium and uranium are relatively low, they are easy to shield, which makes identification by radiation sensing devices unreliable and, in some cases, not possible at all.
For example, in a report issued yesterday, the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security revealed that U.S. Customs and border protection services are not always able to detect nuclear materials in ocean-going shipping containers. The investigation commenced after ABC News was able to ship 15 pounds of depleted uranium into the United States two years in a row.
While improvements in cargo inspection were made since Sept. 11, 2001, less than 5% percent of all containers are currently inspected.
The development of Nuclear Solution's new sensing concept could result in a highly sensitive, portable, and low-cost detection system that responds to minute gravitational gradient anomalies produced by high-density nuclear materials like plutonium and uranium and would be unaffected by radiation shielding techniques.
"There are over 400 tons of unsecured fissile nuclear materials loose in the world," said CEO Patrick Herda. "Recognizing this, both presidential candidates recently agreed that keeping nuclear weapons out of terrorist hands is America's top national security priority.
"I applaud their acknowledgement of this grave threat. Unfortunately, the system we currently have in place is inadequate, and reliance on highly sensitive radiation portals is not the best answer.
"It is far too easy for terrorists to shield the radiation emitted by Uranium-235 and Plutonium-239. Furthermore, when employing such highly sensitive radiation detection equipment, you are very likely to wind up with an unacceptably high rate of false positive warnings. What this country needs is a reliable and economical method to prevent a terrorist nuclear weapon from getting in. Once fully funded and developed, our approach using gravitational anomaly sensing techniques, could become a useful tool in the fight against nuclear terrorism worldwide."
Herda will also be a participant in the upcoming conference "Maritime Domain Awareness: Integrated Sensor Strategies for Port/Ship Security", being held in Washington, DC October 18th and 19th, hosted by Defense Today and King Publishing.
About Nuclear Solutions, Inc.:
Nuclear Solutions, based in Washington, D.C., is an emerging innovative technology development company. We are committed to exploring, developing, and commercializing viable product technologies that will enable partner companies to offer new and improved products in the following areas:
Nuclear Weapon Detection for Homeland Security & Defense
-- The development of advanced technology to detect shielded nuclear materials and terrorist nuclear weapons
Nanotechnology/MEMS applications
-- The development of long-lived nuclear micro-power sources, based on three U.S. Patents (5,087,533; 6,118,204; 6,238,812), to power applications in the emerging field of Nanotechnology, Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems, and the new generation of low power microelectronics.
Environmental Technology
-- Development of a patent pending process to remediate tritiated water via an advanced separation technique.
More information about Nuclear Solutions, Inc. may be found on its website, www.nuclearsolutions.com
Disclaimer: The matters discussed in this press release are forward-looking statements that involve a number of risks and uncertainties such as our plans, objective, expectations and intentions. You can identify these statements by our use of words such as "may," "when," "expect," "believe," "anticipate," "intend," "could," "estimate," "continue," "plans," "planning," "would," or other similar words or phrases. Some of these statements include discussions regarding our future business strategy and our ability to generate revenue, income and cash flow. Additional funding is required to develop the technology described herein. The actual future results for the Company could differ significantly from those statements. Factors that could adversely affect actual results and performance include, among others, the Company's limited operating history, dependence on key management, financing requirements, technical difficulties commercializing any projects, government regulation, technological change and competition. In any event, undue reliance should not be placed on any forward-looking statements, which apply only as of the date of this press release. Additionally, patent pending status does not guarantee that a patent will issue or that the technology will be commercially successful. Accordingly, reference should be made to the Company's periodic filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
CONTACT: Nuclear Solutions, Inc. John Dempsey, Vice-President (202) 787-1951 info@nuclearsolutions.com
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
U.S. Nuclear Test Compensation Fund Going Broke
October 15, 2004
WASHINGTON, DC, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/oct2004/2004-10-15-09.asp#anchor4
A fund established by the American government to compensate Marshall Islanders exposed to radiation during 67 nuclear weapons tests in the South Pacific is nearly exhausted.
The Marshall Islands Nuclear Claims Tribunal said that as of October 21, it will be able to make only partial payments to more than 1,700 residents suffering radiation sickness.
When it was set up in 1986, the $150 million fund was supposed to be "full and final compensation" for atmospheric nuclear weapons testing the United States conducted in the chain of Pacific islands in the 1940s and 1950s, starting after the Second World War.
The tribunal says it owes about US$15 million in personal injury awards, but there is less than US$6 million left in the account.
By the end of 2003, the Tribunal had awarded more than $83 million in compensation for such injuries with additional compensable claims being filed on a regular basis.
In addition, the Tribunal has awarded over $1 billion in property damage awards in the class actions of the people of Enewetak Atoll and the people of Bikini Atoll.
The pending property claims from the peoples of Rongelap and Utrik Atolls are near completion, while the people of Ailuk Atoll have recently filed a class action claim for compensation.
The Tribunal stopped accepting property damage claims at the end of August.
In 1991, the Tribunal first implemented a compensation program for personal injuries resulting from the nuclear testing program.
With only $45.75 million made available for actual payment of awards made by the Tribunal during the first 15 years of the Compact and less than $6 million of the initial $150 million now remaining in the Nuclear Claims Fund, it has become clear that the original terms of the settlement agreement are manifestly "manifestly inadequate," the Tribunal said.
Over the past four years the Tribunal has repeatedly sought additional funds from Congress, without success.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- new jersey
U.S. Investigating Accident That Shut Down Salem Reactor
October 15, 2004
The New York Times
By JOHN SULLIVAN and MATTHEW L. WALD
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/15/nyregion/15salem.html
TRENTON, Oct. 14 - Federal regulators have opened an investigation into the causes of the shutdown on Sunday of one of three reactors at the Salem nuclear station in southwestern New Jersey, a power complex troubled by management and equipment problems over the last few years.
On Sunday afternoon, operators shut down the Hope Creek nuclear reactor after a pipe ruptured, sending a cloud of radioactive steam into the building that contains the giant turbine used to generate electricity from the reactor. Federal officials said that as operators worked to shut down the reactor, a key control system malfunctioned and the employees had difficulty finally stabilizing the water that is used to cool the reactor's radioactive core.
Officials at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and at the company that owns the reactor, P.S.E.G. Nuclear L.L.C., said the incident did not pose a threat to the public. Still, the Hope Creek reactor remains closed while a special team of federal inspectors investigates the incident. Regulators and P.S.E.G. officials said that before restarting the reactor, they wanted answers to a series of questions about how equipment functioned or failed to function, as well as about decisions made by the operators in seeking to control the shutdown. Company officials said yesterday that they did not know when the reactor would be restarted.
The company reported the problem immediately to the regulatory commission, which disclosed it this week on its Web site.
Over the last few years, federal regulators and private consultants have raised questions about maintenance and the condition of equipment at the station. In reports delivered to P.S.E.G. this spring, one consulting company criticized it for equipment problems ranging from leaky generators to unreliable backup water pumps. Regulators criticized some managers for taking actions that led employees to believe they placed concerns about production above the preservation of safety.
As a result of the findings, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission kept close scrutiny on the Salem station, which is on the Delaware River about 15 miles south of Wilmington, Del. The owner, P.S.E.G., has pledged to improve conditions at the plant in two years and has replaced many of its senior managers over the past year. The company has also vowed to spend millions to upgrade equipment. In fact, the Hope Creek reactor was scheduled to go off-line at the end of this month for an extended period of repairs.
The three reactors at Salem - Salem 1, Salem 2 and Hope Creek - make its electrical output the second largest at the country's 103 nuclear plants. The plant supplies power to 60 percent of P.S.E.G.'s two million customers in New Jersey. Company officials said service to customers would not be affected by the shutdown.
"We have a series of things we want the inspection team to look at," said Eugene W. Cobey, the supervisor in charge of inspections at Hope Creek for the regional office of the regulatory commission in King of Prussia, Pa., outside Philadelphia. "We want to independently look at the equipment problems that occurred."
Company officials said they were committed to answering questions about what went wrong on Sunday afternoon.
"We had an equipment problem, and we are going to look at it very thoroughly," said A. Christopher Bakken III, the president and chief nuclear officer of P.S.E.G. "We are going to address all that before we start the plant back up."
Regulators say the problems began at the reactor at 5:39 p.m. on Sunday, when an eight-inch metal pipe ruptured in the Hope Creek turbine building. Although the blast of steam was potentially dangerous, the break was in a part of the building that is seldom visited by workers when the reactor is running. The steam was slightly radioactive, regulators said, but was not a long-term contamination threat to the building. They said the radioactive steam was confined to the building and did not escape.
As soon as they detected the leak, regulators said, operators began to shut down the reactor. As they did, the water level in the reactor began to drop. The deep pool of water in the reactor covers the radioactive fuel and prevents it from overheating, and if the water drops below the level of the fuel, it could cause a severe accident.
To deal with the dropping water level, operators turned to one of the reactor's safety systems for such problems. But a circuit breaker tripped, shutting off a critical pump on the system. As a result, operators had to turn to other systems to stabilize the water level. For 12 hours, the water level fluctuated. According to regulators, it went above safe operating limits twice and fell below safe limits four times. At its lowest point, the water was about 50 inches below the level set by federal safety guidelines. Still, Mr. Cobey said, that is more than 10 feet above the fuel.
Regulators say there was never any danger of exposing the radioactive fuel, but they still want to discover the causes of the fluctuation, as well as the reason the pump failed.
Mr. Bakken said that even with the circuit breaker tripped, the high-pressure system was functional. He said operators made a conscious decision to use other systems to deal with the problem.
The regulators also want to make sure that operators made the correct decision when they chose alternate equipment to stabilize the water level in the reactor.
Regulators are also exploring why the metal pipe cracked in the turbine building. Mr. Cobey said that a support connecting the pipe to the building was disconnected and that regulators believe that might have contributed to the break. He said regulators do not yet know why the pipe was disconnected. Mr. Cobey said regulators wanted to know if anyone knew there was a problem with the pipe before it ruptured.
"That is what our inspection has to determine," he said.
-------- MILITARY
-------- britain
This week's casualty: the legal case for war in Iraq
It can only be a matter of time before the invasion is challenged in court
The Guardian
Robin Cook
October 15, 2004
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/comment/0,12956,1327944,00.html
When I met Zaneb in Brighton during the Labour party conference she could only walk with the help of crutches. One of her legs had been amputated after she and the children with whom she was playing were caught in the bombing around Basra at the time of the invasion. Seventeen members of her extended family were killed that day, including her mother.
It is a characteristic of modern, aerial warfare that it leaves behind more casualties among civilians than among combatants; and in a developing country such as Iraq where half the population is under 14, many of them will be children. Any decision to go to war, in full knowledge of the casualties that will follow, therefore has to be born out of necessity and built on cast-iron certainty. The awful truth that is now clear is that the Iraq war was not necessary and was based, in the Joint Intelligence Committee's own words, on "sporadic and patchy" intelligence which has turned out to be wholly false.
The formal admission this week that the 45-minute claim was bunkum comes 18 months too late to save Zaneb and her family, or to influence the vote on war in parliament. Whitehall knew long before that vote that much of the intelligence in the September dossier was unsound. They knew because Hans Blix and his inspectors had visited sites it identified and drawn a blank. They knew because SIS had already developed doubts about the credibility of the source of the 45-minute claim. Andrew Gilligan was only in error about timescale when he claimed Whitehall knew that intelligence in the September dossier was wrong. They did not know it at the time of its publication, but they did know when they asked parliament for authority for war.
The political dilemma for Downing Street is that it desperately wants the nation to move on from the controversy over the origins of the war, but is also determined to avoid anyone taking the rap. Yet it is impossible to see how the government can achieve closure on the biggest blunder since Suez without first achieving a catharsis which attributes responsibility and apportions blame.
At prime minister's questions, Tony Blair again pleaded the defence of good intentions - he acted in good faith but was misled by wrong information. This leaves a conundrum: why is he not more angry with those who misled him? John Smith, for example, would have been incandescent with an intelligence agency that had so badly misinformed him, and with a private office in Downing Street that apparently did not ask elementary questions, such as whether they were talking about battlefield or strategic weapon systems. Tony Blair is curiously indulgent to all those who led him into the most damaging episode of his premiership. We even read that all the key players in preparing the false prospectus for war are to be rewarded in a special honours list. A parade of the relevant officials down Whitehall in sackcloth and ashes would provide a more convincing demonstration that Downing Street is really sorry.
There is another awkward question that has become more acute with each new revelation, and which will not go away until it is answered. What does the government now think was the legal basis for war?
The initial opinion of the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, was that invasion would require a second UN resolution. This was an opinion that he only revisited when it became evident that there would be no second resolution. At this point Elizabeth Wilmshurst, the deputy legal adviser to the Foreign Office, resigned and subsequently protested that "the conflict in Iraq was contrary to international law". This week we learned that two other colleagues resigned along with her, which must have left a lot of empty desks in the legal department.
The attorney general himself still appeared unsure of his ground, but his dilemma was eased by the suggestion from Downing Street that he outsourced the drafting of his opinion to a law professor with a record of support for war. As a result the nation went to war against the advice of Whitehall's experts in international law and on the strength of an opinion from a professor at the LSE.
The government has resisted publishing the text that resulted, presumably because even it would reveal awkward reservations and legal quibbles, but a precis was produced as a parliamentary answer. What is striking is the centrality that disarmament plays in it as the justification for war. Thus Iraq is held to be in material breach of the ceasefire resolution because it had not fulfilled "its obligations to disarm". There is a logical, inescapable conclusion from this chain of reasoning. If Iraq had in reality fulfilled its disarmament obligation there was no legal authority for the invasion.
Tony Blair appeared conscious of this problem when he answered questions this week. He does not now rely on the need to disarm Iraq, but on other breaches by Saddam of UN resolutions. But the only breach that could have justified a war would have been failure to disarm. To be sure, Saddam was in breach of his obligation to keep proper paperwork on the destruction of his chemical and biological weapons, but that hardly justifies an intensive bombing campaign and a ground invasion by a quarter of a million troops. Any international court would be certain to rule by its first coffee break that such a response was not legitimate when weighed against the twin tests of proportionality and necessity. We are left with the unsettling conclusion that the legal case for the war collapses among the rubble of false intelligence in the same way as the political justification.
Lord Goldsmith is a decent, able lawyer. It may be that he was just as duped as parliament by the assurances from Downing Street that the evidence of the intelligence was much firmer than it has turned out to be. Maybe they also withheld from him the growing evidence from the UN inspections that our intelligence was simply wrong. If so, the attorney general owes it to himself, never mind the rest of us, to state what would have been his opinion on the legality of the war if he had been given the true facts. It may be prudent on his part to prepare a revised opinion, as now it can only be a matter of time before the legality of the war is challenged in the British or international courts.
Does the legality of the war still matter over a year after the event? The only responsible answer must be yes.
In the first place we are still struggling with the legacy of our decision to conquer Iraq and the incompetence of an occupation that has compounded the original misjudgment. Iraq may have been no threat to us at the time of the war, but we have certainly turned it into one as a base for international terrorism. Instead of delivering a modern Iraq as a model for the region, we have made Iraq a source of instability in a Middle East that looks much more precarious than two years ago.
But it also matters because the fabric of orderly relations between nations, the strength of human rights law and cooperation against terrorism are built on respect for international law. We cannot demand that respect from other nations if we ourselves do not give it a higher priority than we appear to have done in reaching our decision to go to war in Iraq.
-------- chemical weapons
U.S. backs plans to convert chemical-arms plant
October 15, 2004
By Nicholas Kralev
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041014-093952-3021r.htm
Libya has found an unlikely ally - the United States - in a bid to convert a chemical-weapons plant into a factory making life-saving drugs to battle AIDS, malaria and other deadly diseases.
The Executive Council of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons yesterday approved, in principle, "technical changes" to the global treaty on chemical arms that would make such conversions possible.
The council has yet to grant Tripoli's request.
The Bush administration said it is "very supportive" of Libya's effort and urged the 41-member council to endorse the Rabta facility's conversion "to produce low-cost pharmaceuticals to treat HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, for use mainly in Africa."
"The United States supports the proposal both because it makes sense in this particular instance - we strongly support redirecting this equipment to pharmaceutical production for the benefit of the developing world - and because it provides a means of dealing with similar situations if they arise in the future," the State Department said.
"The process of conversion, and the facility once converted, will be subject to international verification to ensure that no materials are misused for chemical weapons purposes," it said.
The Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) regulations allow its signatories to convert chemical-weapons plants for peaceful purposes, but gave them up to six years after the treaty entered into force, in 1997, to do so.
Because the deadline expired last year, the conversion option is not available to Libya, which did not join the convention until February.
The change adopted yesterday would allow up to six years for conversion after a country becomes a party to the treaty - or, in Libya's case, 2010.
The amendment, which was sponsored by 17 countries, including the United States, was approved by consensus during an Executive Council meeting at The Hague, a senior State Department official said.
Iran, Cuba and Sudan are among the council's members.
The council's recommendation has to be endorsed by a conference of all 166 state parties to the CWC, which is scheduled for late November.
The senior official said he expected a positive outcome, although some members could raise objections in the process.
The next step will be for Libya to present a detailed proposal of how it plans to transform the Rabta facility, what old equipment it wants to keep and what new equipment it would bring in.
"It has already contracted an Italian firm to do the conversion," the official said.
The Rabta plant was part of Libya's weapons program, which Tripoli agreed to scrap in December, after secret negotiations with Britain and the United States.
Since then, Washington has improved relations with Tripoli and lifted most economic and trade sanctions, although Libya remains on the State Department's blacklist of state sponsors of terrorism, which keeps in place an arms embargo.
On Wednesday, prosecutors in Switzerland opened an investigation into two Swiss citizens suspected of illegally exporting nuclear bomb-making technology to Libya.
One of the suspects is thought to be engineer Urs Tinner, who was arrested in Germany last week. He is thought to have been part of the clandestine international network of Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, which helped Libya's nuclear program.
-------- haiti
Ex-Troops Fill Haiti's Security Vacuum
Promised U.N. Force Under Half Strength
By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, October 15, 2004; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A33615-2004Oct14?language=printer
PETIT-GOAVE, Haiti -- Dozens of soldiers in camouflage fatigues control security in this coastal city of 125,000 people. They carry automatic weapons, and their base is a former police headquarters with a freshly painted sign that reads, "General Headquarters of the Haitian Armed Forces."
The trouble is, the Haitian Armed Forces don't officially exist.
The force, which arrived in late August and chased away the town's eight police officers, includes mainly former soldiers from the army, disbanded by former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1994. The men were also part of the armed rebellion that led Aristide to resign in February and flee the country. Now they are demanding that the new government reconstitute the army and have appointed themselves the law in Petit-Goave and a handful of towns across Haiti.
"We are determined to make our voice heard," said Felix Wilso, a spokesman for the soldiers in this city 40 miles west of the capital, Port-au-Prince.
The fact that an unofficial army controls Petit-Goave, unchallenged by the government and U.N. peacekeepers, illustrates how volatile Haiti remains eight months after Aristide's departure. The interim prime minister, Gerard Latortue, said in an interview that his U.S.-backed government was struggling to maintain order in the hemisphere's poorest nation.
"We are just trying our best to keep the country alive," Latortue said. "It is a miracle that we have been able to keep peace. It is a miracle that we are where we are now."
The national police force of 2,500 officers is outmanned and outgunned by groups of ex-soldiers and armed gangs that control many areas of this country of 8 million people. U.N. officials said fewer than half of the 8,300 U.N. soldiers and police promised in April had arrived and that the current force was insufficient to guarantee order in the country.
Adding to the unrest and misery, Haiti has also been battered by devastating natural disasters since Aristide left. Floods in May killed at least 1,300 people, and a tropical storm last month killed about 3,000 more.
The nation remains bitterly divided between supporters and opponents of Aristide, who is in exile in South Africa. That has resulted in a new round of political violence that has left 46 people dead in the past two weeks, including five policemen, three of whom were beheaded. Two U.N. soldiers have been shot and wounded in recent days, the first casualties since the force arrived this summer.
The U.N. troops took over from a contingent of 1,000 U.S. Marines, who had arrived in February following several weeks of fighting between rebels, most of whom were former soldiers, and armed gangs loyal to Aristide. At least 300 people died in the fighting. It was the second U.S. military action in Haiti in a decade; in 1994, 20,000 U.S. troops restored Aristide to power after he had been ousted in a military coup in 1991.
U.S. confidence in Aristide slipped after he was reelected in 2000. The president was dogged by allegations of corruption, although his allies said the Bush administration was demonizing Aristide, a populist former Catholic priest who was the first freely elected president in the country's 200-year history.
In March, a U.S.-backed council of Haitian citizen leaders appointed Latortue to lead a government until new presidential and legislative elections next year. Latortue, a former U.N. development official, was living in Florida and working as a business consultant.
International officials in Haiti say that Latortue has made important strides, winning pledges of just over $1 billion in aid, including $230 million from the United States, at a conference in Washington in July.
Latortue's government has been responsible for some basic improvements in quality of life, such as better trash collection on Port-au-Prince's filthy streets. With help from the United States and Canada, it is also providing electricity for about 14 hours a day in the capital, up from two or three hours a day when it took over.
Latortue said his main problem was a lack of resources, alleging that members of Aristide's government had looted millions of dollars from state coffers. "We found the treasury at zero when we arrived," he said. He said his main hope for job creation was legislation in the U.S. Congress that would lift tariffs on some Haitian textile imports, which he said could create 50,000 jobs.
Latortue also said that international funding was just starting to arrive. "Until the money comes, what can we do?" he asked.
In the meantime, he added, the national police force is not capable of maintaining security across the entire country.
"There is a true security vacuum here," said one foreign diplomat in Haiti, citing what he called "an amazing slowness, an astonishing slowness" on the part of the United Nations to send troops and police.
"We do not have the manpower to do the job," said Adama Guindo, the deputy chief of the U.N. mission to Haiti.
Guindo said that several nations, mainly Brazil, which is leading the force, had honored their commitments, but he did not know why other nations had delayed sending promised troops and soldiers. All forces were supposed to be in place by the end of December, but that date "has slipped so much we don't know when they will arrive," he said.
Much of the current instability stems from the government's strained relations with Aristide's Lavalas political party, which draws support from Haiti's majority poor. Latortue and Lavalas leaders accuse each other of unwillingness to negotiate the party's role in the government and the upcoming elections.
The current violence started on Sept. 30, when a march by about 20,000 Lavalas supporters ended with the deaths of three police officers. Two days later, Sen. Gerard Gilles and two other Lavalas members went on a popular radio talk show to accuse the government of inciting the violence and to deny that Lavalas was behind it.
Gilles, in an interview, said police surrounded the radio station, burst into the studio and arrested him, two other legislators and his attorney. He said he was handcuffed and jailed for four days and that the other two, including the president of the Senate, Yvon Feuille, remained in jail, accused of planning the recent violence.
Gilles and Leslie Voltaire, a senior official in Aristide's government, said they believed the government had hired armed thugs to stir up violence as a pretext for cracking down on Lavalas. They also said the government feared continued calls for Aristide's return to power.
"This is a government that just wants revenge against Lavalas," Gilles said.
Latortue said he believed Gilles was a moderate, nonviolent man whose arrest was a mistake, but that police had claimed to have evidence that Feuille had organized the violence.
In another sign of escalating tensions, the Associated Press reported Wednesday that Remissainthe Ravix, who commands the Petit-Goave soldiers, and other ex-military leaders were planning to enter the capital to help end the recent outbreak of violence, setting up a potential confrontation with police and U.N. peacekeeping forces.
In Petit-Goave, many residents interviewed said the soldiers were providing better security than the force of eight police officers had done. One recent day, at least 20 of them helped dig a drainage ditch in a severely flooded neighborhood.
Mayor Sandra Jules, 21, who was appointed by Latortue's government in August, watched the soldiers working. As she spoke with a reporter, two armed soldiers came up to listen, one of them carrying an Uzi. Jules was asked what she thought of having her town under the control of the unofficial soldiers.
"As mayor, I know this is illegal," she said, looking at the two soldiers monitoring her. "But whatever is good for the security of the people here, I accept."
-------- iraq
Blasts Inside Green Zone Kill at Least 5
Fortified Area in Baghdad Hit by Likely Suicide Attacks
By Steve Fainaru
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 15, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A33566-2004Oct14?language=printer
BAGHDAD, Oct. 14 -- Bombs exploded within moments of each other at a handicraft market and a popular cafe inside Baghdad's fortified Green Zone on Thursday, killing at least five people, including three American civilians. It was the first time insurgents had penetrated the heavily protected area that is the seat of the Iraqi government and home to American officials.
The explosions occurred around 12:40 p.m. and appeared to be caused by suicide bombers, witnesses and a senior Iraqi official said. A waiter at the Green Zone Restaurant and Coffee Shop said he saw two Arab men with black bags enter the cafe, order tea, then sit for 25 minutes while one of the men talked continuously to the other, appearing to reassure him.
The explosion at the bazaar occurred five minutes after the man who was talking got up and left, said the waiter, Abdul Razak Mohammed. The man's companion, still seated, then detonated a bomb, shredding the canvas-enclosed restaurant, which Mohammed said contained 17 or 18 lunch patrons and four workers.
The Americans killed included at least three employees of Dyncorp Inc., a security firm with a large presence in the Washington area, a spokesman said. A fourth Dyncorp employee was missing and two were wounded. At least 20 people were wounded in all, including a U.S. soldier, a U.S. airman and two American civilians, the military said.
DynCorp identified its employees killed in the attack as John Pinsonneault, 39, of North Branch, Minn.; Steve Osborne, 40, of Kennesaw, Ga.; and Eric Miner, 44, of South Windham, Conn., according to the Associated Press. Ferdinand Ibaboa, 36, of Mesa, Ariz., was said to be missing and presumed dead. The two wounded employees were identified as John Jenkins, 39, of Meridian, Ga., and Michael Cannon, 34, of Holly Springs, N.C.
Within hours of the bombings, U.S. warplanes, attack helicopters, field artillery and tanks launched strikes against targets in Fallujah, the U.S. military said. The city is believed to be the base of operations for Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant whose organization, Monotheism and Jihad, asserted responsibility for the Green Zone attacks.
The U.S.-led assault, which the military said also involved Iraqi forces, was of a magnitude well beyond what U.S. officials call the "precision airstrikes" that had become routine in recent weeks. Terrified residents said the sustained attacks began around 10:30 p.m. and grew deafening inside the city near midnight, as buildings in four neighborhoods were targeted.
The Associated Press, citing officials at Fallujah General Hospital, reported at least five people killed and 16 wounded.
"The operations were designed to target the large terrorist element operating in the area of Fallujah," the U.S. military said in a statement. "Operations in Fallujah will continue so long as terrorists remain in the city."
The statement underscored a demand by Iraq's interim government that Fallujah residents hand over Zarqawi or be "smashed," as a senior Iraqi minister put it at a news conference Thursday. Peace talks with a delegation from the city broke off Thursday, with one Fallujah negotiator calling the government's demand "impossible."
The U.S. military is braced for a rise in violence as Iraq prepares for elections scheduled for January. The coordinated bombings inside the Green Zone, which is organized as a safe and comfortable slice of Americana in central Baghdad, was evidence of the insurgents' growing reach.
The U.S. military said it intended to increase security around the Green Zone and bases in and around Baghdad. The new measures will include increased armed patrols around the capital as well as combat air patrols, the military said, and were decided upon after intelligence showed that insurgents were planning to launch new strikes.
In separate attacks Thursday, two U.S. soldiers were killed in Baghdad, one by a roadside bomb in the morning and another when a convoy was ambushed by small-arms fire around 1:45 p.m., the U.S. military said. The combined attacks raised the American death toll in Iraq to 1,086.
"We have intelligence to be prepared for and to expect an increase in activity for attacks on the International Zone," said Lt. Col. Steve Boylan, a U.S. military spokesman, using the official name of the Green Zone, adopted when political power was transferred to an interim Iraqi government on June 28.
Mohammed Obeidi, whose right hand was struck by a piece of flying glass in the cafe explosion, said the timing of the bombings was linked to the start of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, when resistance to the American presence in Iraq has increased. "It's definitely because it's the start of Ramadan," Obeidi said, adding, "This is not what the Koran says."
Monotheism and Jihad used an Islamic Web site to assert responsibility for Thursday's Green Zone bombings. The statement said "two lions" from the group's "Martyrdom Brigade" had managed to penetrate the Green Zone.
First Sgt. Steven Valley, a U.S. military spokesman, said outside the mangled cafe that the bombs had been brought in by hand. "Were they suicide attacks?" he said. "We can't say definitively."
But Qasim Dawood, the Iraqi state minister, said "initial information" indicated that the attacks were suicide bombings. Although insurgents lob mortar shells inside the Green Zone with growing frequency, the bombs were the first to explode inside the compound's four-square-mile perimeter. The zone contains the U.S. and British embassies and effectively serves as the heart of the interim Iraqi government.
The Green Zone is encircled by 12-foot blast walls, five-foot sandbags, coiled razor wire, tanks, machine gun towers and checkpoints manned by U.S. and Iraqi troops. Entry of people and vehicles is restricted and visitors must display identification and pass through multiple body searches and X-ray machines.
But security can be uneven, with some checkpoints limiting access only to people with pre-arranged escorts and others allowing access to anyone carrying a U.S. passport.
Until recently, the Green Zone was an oasis that included Saddam Hussein's ornate palaces, lush green lawns, Chinese restaurants and Internet cafes. Western officials jogged along its wide boulevards and even hailed taxis -- unthinkable acts in the rest of Iraq, which, by contrast, was termed the Red Zone by U.S. officials.
Obeidi, a 25-year-old Iraqi who owns another Green Zone eatery, Mo's Restaurant, said security in the zone had deteriorated as the U.S. military shifted authority to Iraqi security forces in recent weeks.
"Before, it was really safe," Obeidi said. "They passed it over to the Iraqis, the ING [Iraqi National Guard], the Iraqi police. When they see someone they know, it's just 'Go on in.' They don't understand it's for our safety."
Last week, the U.S. military removed what it said was an unexploded bomb outside the Green Zone cafe. U.S. officials issued a warning advising residents to avoid the popular restaurant and the handicraft market, which featured about 20 stalls with Iraqis selling virtually everything from Persian rugs to DVDs.
Valley, the military spokesman, said business at the cafe had dropped dramatically because of the warning.
On Thursday afternoon, the cafe, a large canvas tent built on the site of a former gas station, was a pile of twisted metal. A two-foot crater could be seen inside the restaurant. All that stood was the tent's frame. Around it lay shattered glass, pieces of plastic chairs, small pools of blood and bits of food and flesh that had been blown about 50 feet away into the street.
Uniformed military investigators and dazed and injured workers milled around the scene. One man sat against a nearby wall, his head wrapped in a white bandage. Another had a bandaged chest.
Mohammed, the waiter in the Green Zone Restaurant, said two Arab men, both about 25, entered the restaurant together. One wore a gray shirt, the other a yellow shirt and jeans. Both men carried black bags slung over their shoulders. One got up and walked across the restaurant to the cashier and ordered tea. Mohammed said none of the workers recognized the men.
The cashier asked the man if they were Iraqi. "No, we're Jordanian," the man replied, according to Mohammed.
Mohammed said the man in the gray shirt kept one hand inside his bag and the other on the table while the other man spoke to him. The man in the yellow shirt "kept talking and talking and talking," Mohammed said, speaking through an interpreter. "We think he was brainwashing him, telling him what to do."
After about 25 minutes, the man in the yellow shirt threw his bag over his shoulder and left. Mohammed said he was told by another worker that the man got into a taxi.
Five minutes later, he said, he heard the first explosion at the handicraft market, more than a quarter-mile away.
Seconds later, the man in the gray shirt detonated the bomb, he said.
Obeidi said he had been visiting his cousin, who owns the restaurant. He said he had walked outside, sat on his black Camaro and called his fiancee. After he finished, he said, he walked back inside and went to the cashier to order tea. Then, he said, the bomb went off.
"People were screaming; I was on the floor," he recalled. "People were stampeding, trying to get out."
Mohammed said the attacks violated the principles of Islam. "In Islam we don't have this," he said. "Especially on Ramadan. We don't kill anyone."
Correspondent Karl Vick contributed to this report.
--------
U.S. Military Pounds Targets in and Around Falluja
October 15, 2004
By TERENCE NEILAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/15/international/middleeast/15CND-IRAQ.html?hp&ex=1097899200&en=621565c971d3435b&ei=5094&partner=homepage
American jets, helicopters and artillery pounded insurgents today in and around Falluja, which the military says is home to a terror network headed by the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
The operation, which was supported by American marines, soldiers and Iraqi forces, came as the Islamic holy month of Ramadan began, and a day after Mr. Zarqawi claimed responsibility for twin bombings in Baghdad's heavily-guarded Green Zone that killed at least five people.
It also follows his rejection of peace talks with the Iraqi interim government, headed by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, who had demanded that the rebels hand over Mr. Zarqawi or face military action.
In other violence today, a car bomb exploded on a busy street in southern Baghdad, killing 10 Iraqis - four laborers working in a nearby palm grove, a family of four traveling on the road, and two bystanders, the military said.
The vehicle, estimated to be loaded with nearly 300 pounds of explosives, was aimed at an Iraqi police patrol, the military said. Four policemen were wounded.
Also today, Poland said it planned to reduce the number of its troops in Iraq early next year, and will not remain there "an hour longer than is sensible." Poland has about 2,500 troops in Iraq and has often been cited by President Bush as an important contributor to the multinational coalition in the country.
Falluja was hit by a number of American airstrikes on Thursday, including some aimed at buildings identified as safehouses and ammunition storage areas for Mr. Zarqawi's group.
The American military, referring to the group headed by Mr. Zarqawi, One God and Jihad, said today, "This element has been planning to use the holy month of Ramadan for attacks against the Iraqi interim government and innocent Iraqis."
The military added, "Operations in Falluja will continue so long as terrorists remain in the city."
But a military spokeswoman in Baghdad, Sharon Walker, said, "It is not the beginning of a major offensive."
Three people were killed and seven others were wounded during the night, according to Dr. Rafia Hiyad of Falluja General Hospital, The Associated Press reported.
In a separate development, the police in Falluja, a Sunni Muslim city west of Baghdad, said American marines had arrested the chief negotiator with the interim government, Khaled al-Jumaili, news agencies reported.
The military, however, said it had no confirmation of the arrest.
-------
Marines begin raids on Fallujah
October 15, 2004
By Nadia Abou El-Magd and Alexandra Zavis
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041014-113907-1902r.htm
BAGHDAD - U.S. Marines launched air and ground attacks yesterday on the rebel bastion Fallujah after city representatives suspended peace talks with the government over Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's demand to hand over terror mastermind Abu Musab Zarqawi.
The raids began hours after terrorists struck deep inside Baghdad's heavily fortified green zone, setting off bombs at a market and a popular cafe that killed at least 10 persons - including four Americans - and wounded 20 others in the compound housing foreign embassies and Iraqi government offices.
It was the deadliest attack inside the 4-square-mile compound since the U.S. occupation began in May 2003.
Zarqawi's terror group, Tawhid and Jihad, claimed responsibility for the suicide attacks, according to a statement posted on an Islamist Web site.
Late yesterday, residents of Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad, reported shuddering American bombardments using planes and armored vehicles in what they said was the most intensive shelling since U.S. forces began weeks of "precision strikes" aimed at Zarqawi's network.
In Washington, however, a senior military official, speaking on operational matters on the condition of anonymity, described the latest fighting as strikes against specific targets and of the same scope as previous attacks in Fallujah.
Warplanes and artillery pounded the city as two U.S. Marine battalions attacked rebel positions to "restore security and stability," 1st Lt. Lyle Gilbert, a spokesman for the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, told CNN.
"It is going to be a long night," he said.
Maj. Francis Piccoli, spokesman for the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, said two Marine battalions were engaged in the fight backed up by aircraft.
He would not indicate the attack was the start of a major campaign to recapture the city, saying he did not want to jeopardize any future operations.
Maj. Piccoli said the goal of the operation was to "disrupt the capabilities of the anti-Iraqi forces."
U.S. officials believe Zarqawi's terrorist group is based in Fallujah. The military said its targets were linked to the network, including a building being used to store weapons, two safe houses used to plan attacks, several illegal checkpoints and a weapons cache.
At least five persons were killed and 16 wounded in the raids, according to Fallujah General Hospital.
Residents said the Americans were attacking several areas with rockets, artillery and tanks. One resident said U.S. forces were using loudspeakers in the west of the city to urge Fallujah fighters to lay down their arms "because we are going to push into Fallujah."
Mr. Allawi warned Wednesday that Fallujah must surrender Zarqawi and other foreign fighters or face military attack.
Abu Asaad, spokesman for the religious council of Fallujah, said that "handing over Zarqawi" was an "impossible condition" since even the Americans were unable to catch him.
"Since we exhausted all peaceful solutions, the city is now ready to bear arms and defend its religion and honor and it's not afraid of Allawi's statements," Mr. Asaad said in an interview with Al Jazeera television.
The suicide bombings in Baghdad's green zone took place about 12:40 p.m. on the eve of the Islamic holy month, Ramadan.
The U.S.-guarded enclave - home to about 10,000 Iraqis, government officials, foreign diplomats and military personnel - spreads along the banks of the Tigris River in the heart of the capital. The area's trees and other greenery present a sharp contrast to the rest of dusty and arid Baghdad. The zone is centered on Saddam Hussein's mammoth Republican Palace, and there are dozens of smaller palatial buildings.
A waiter and restaurant patrons saw two men enter the Green Zone Cafe clutching large bags. One appeared nervous while the other seemed to be trying to reassure him, they said.
The two men ordered tea and talked for about 20 minutes - a waiter thought they spoke with Jordanian accents. The more confident of the two then walked out and hailed a taxi, the witnesses said. Minutes later a loud explosion rocked the compound.
The blast left a gaping crater in the pavement where the canopied restaurant once stood. Splatters of blood and pieces of flesh were scattered among the twisted metal, shards of glass and upended plastic chairs littering the scene. Thick, black smoke billowed from the compound.
"People were screaming ... stampeding, trying to get out," said Mohammed al-Obeidi, the owner of a nearby restaurant who was wounded by flying glass from the blast.
Two Iraqis were killed at the cafe and several U.S. Embassy employees suffered minor injuries there, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said in Washington.
Four American employees of DynCorp security company were killed and two State Department employees were wounded in the blast in a vendor's alley near the U.S. Embassy annex. The outdoor bazaar caters to Westerners, selling everything from mobile phone accessories to pornographic DVDs.
The DynCorp employees who were killed include John Pinsonneault, 39, of North Branch, Minn.; Steve Osborne, 40, of Kennesaw, Ga.; and Eric Miner, 44, of South Windham, Conn. Ferdinand Ibaboa, 36, of Mesa, Ariz., was missing and presumed dead.
The green zone is a regular target of terrorists. Mortar rounds are frequently fired at the compound, and there have also been a number of deadly car bombings at its gates. Last week, a bomb was found in front of the Green Zone Cafe but did not explode.
Mr. al-Obeidi said security in the zone has weakened since Iraqi police took a greater role with the June transfer of power.
"Before it was really safe. They [the Americans] passed it over to the Iraqis ... the Iraqi Police. When they see someone they know, it's just, 'Go on in.' They don't understand it's for our safety," he said.
Following yesterday's attack, the U.S. military said intelligence reports indicated terrorists were planning more strikes to "gain media attention."
Security measures in the capital and surrounding areas would be "significantly increased for an undetermined period," a military statement said. They include more armed patrols, intensified security at Baghdad airport and elsewhere, and air patrols.
U.S. Embassy personnel were instructed to remain inside the embassy complex until further notice, Mr. Boucher said.
Across the Tigris River, two U.S. soldiers were killed yesterday in eastern Baghdad - one when his patrol came under small arms fire, the other in a roadside bombing - the U.S. command said. Two more American soldiers were killed when their Humvee was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade and caught fire during a raid in Ramadi, 70 miles west of the capital, the military said.
-------- israel / palestine
Rockets Deliver Daily Terror To Residents of Israeli Town
By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, October 15, 2004; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A33681-2004Oct14.html
SDEROT, Israel -- At the Panic gift shop, the checkout counter chatter is dominated by Qassams, the crude rockets that Palestinians frequently fire at this ragged industrial town of nearly 20,000 two miles from Gaza's northeast corner.
"We're strong, and no one will break us," Rahel Swissa, 50, a customer with short, bleached-blond hair, declared on a recent afternoon.
"Oh, come on, sweetie," retorted Tzippi Aderi, 46, her baby-blue fingernails clacking against the cash register. "I'm scared. A door slams and my kids jump."
Swissa quickly dropped the bravado. "My kids don't even want to come visit me," she confessed. "Another son just moved away."
In the past four years, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have fired more than 325 Qassam rockets at Jewish settlements within the strip and at Israeli towns on its periphery, according to Shin Bet, the Israeli intelligence agency. Few of the wildly inaccurate rockets have ever hit anyone or anything other than fields, empty lots or back yards. Most of the casualties associated with Qassam strikes have been patients treated for shock. But in the last 3 1/2 months, four Israelis have been killed, all of them in Sderot.
A little over two weeks ago, Israel launched its largest military operation in more than 2 1/2 years in an effort to stop the rocket attacks. Since the offensive began on Sept. 28, the fourth anniversary of the start of the current Palestinian uprising, Palestinians have launched nine Qassams toward Sderot. One killed two children.
"How much can the army really do to prevent them from firing?" Marco Mark, 43, a city employee, said on a recent afternoon as he finished his lunch at Burger Ranch, an Israeli fast-food restaurant. "The Palestinians will just fire from another place. We're living here in fear without any security."
This week, military commanders recommended ending the Gaza operations, according to Israeli news accounts, and on Thursday Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered a pullout from a northern refugee camp after indications that the offensive would be widened. So far, 108 Palestinians -- at least 29 of them children and teenagers -- have been killed, including five on Wednesday, the Palestinian Health Ministry reported.
The Israeli Home Front Command on Wednesday began using a radar-based alarm system that is designed to detect rocket launches and gives Sderot residents a 20-second warning before one lands. As a Qassam lunged toward the city Wednesday morning, loudspeakers blared: "Red Dawn! Red Dawn!" The projectile fell in a field outside town, according to a military spokeswoman.
Before the warning system was installed, many residents scoffed at it, predicting it would create more panic than the rockets themselves. "It's only going to make people more afraid," Aderi, the cashier, had said. "People will run from one place to another. Where are they going to hide?"
But after Wednesday's attack, Yehuda Ben Maman, a municipal security officer, declared in an interview: "The warning system is a success. For example, in three schools in Sderot, the students who were in the courtyards were able to run inside of the building when they heard the warning.
"There was a bit of panic here and there," he conceded, "because it was the first time that the system was activated. There were also a few places in which people reported that they didn't hear the warning or understand what was being broadcast."
While suicide bombs have been a primary weapon of Palestinian guerrillas in the West Bank throughout the uprising against Israeli occupation, Qassam rockets are the weapon of choice in the Gaza Strip, which is enclosed by electronic fences, surveillance cameras and Israeli military patrols. Manufactured in garages and apartments, the crude rockets range from three to six feet long and pack between nine and 20 pounds of explosives. They are launched from collapsible tripods.
"Even when no one is hurt, there's fear," said Aderi, a mother of four. "It's psychological. One fell here in the parking lot a few months ago. My daughter was hysterical."
Some residents said the Qassam attacks have forced them to change their daily routines. "We try to be out as little as possible," Aderi said. "We're no safer at home, but at least I know my husband and kids are with me."
The attacks prompted Olga Ameroz, 34, and her five youngsters to leave town. "My children were terrified," Ameroz said during a recent visit to check on relatives. She raised the blouse of her 4-year-old daughter to expose a welt left by shrapnel from a rocket that landed near the child's kindergarten 3 1/2 months ago. "We moved. Even now, they hear a door slam and think, 'Qassam.' "
Scared or not, many Sderot residents say they cannot afford to leave. They split their anger between the Palestinian guerrillas and what they describe as their own government's neglect of a city that ranks fifth among Israel's 210 municipalities in the percentage of residents on welfare and fourth in the percentage receiving unemployment compensation.
Nearly two of every five residents are immigrants who were settled here by the government since 1990 after they arrived from former Soviet republics or Africa.
"I can't even think about leaving," said Swissa as she walked out of the Panic gift shop with a tiny yellow bag of purchases. "Who's going to buy my house? If I sell, I'd lose money."
Researcher Hillary Claussen contributed to this report.
--------
Sharon Agrees to Pull Back Troops in Gaza
October 15, 2004
By STEVEN ERLANGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/15/international/middleeast/15CND-MIDE.html?oref=login
JERUSALEM, Oct. 15 - Israel said today that it had begun to scale back its 17-day military operation into the northern Gaza Strip after the deaths of more than 100 Palestinians, but Gaza residents say there has been little change so far today.
Troops have been redeploying on the outskirts of Jabaliya refugee camp, Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanun, and some will start pulling out of Gaza this weekend, Israeli officials said.
The operation was intended to end or sharply reduce the number of attacks with homemade Qassam rockets that have been fired from northern Gaza at nearby Israeli towns like Sederot. The army has been arguing for nearly a week now that it has largely accomplished its goals, officials say. To stay longer in relatively fixed positions in Gaza, especially on the edge of the sprawling, crowded Jabaliya refugee camp, would be unnecessarily dangerous, army leaders argued.
Ariel Sharon, the prime minister, met with the defense minister, Shaul Mofaz, Thursday night and agreed to scale back the operation, Israel's deadliest since the start of the second intifada four years ago, and to pull out an unknown number of troops, Israeli officials said today.
Zeev Boim, Mr. Mofaz's deputy, said today, the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, that the operation had met its main objectives, but that all Israeli troops would not immediately leave Gaza.
"There is also the start of Ramadan, and we have no desire to make it difficult for the population," Mr. Boim told Israeli radio. "The operation has met its objectives and the level of Qassam attacks has dropped considerably."
Early today, the Israelis rocketed militants who they said were planting a bomb in Jabaliya, which is more like a poor urban slum with alleys than a camp. Three Palestinians, one Hamas member and two members of the Al Aqsa Martyrs's Brigades, died in the attack. Later today, the Israelis said they shot at militants attempting to launch rockets from Jabaliya surrounded by children and all fled; two Qassams were later launched and landed in a field near a town north of the Gaza Strip, but no one was injured.
In a political gesture to Israeli Arabs and Palestinians, Mr. Sharon also agreed to put no limit on the number of worshippers at Jerusalem's Al Aqsa mosque, Islam's third-holiest site, despite concerns that ongoing repair work in an underground prayer room had weakened the foundations.
The mosque compound, called al-Haram al-Sharif by Muslims, shelters the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa mosque. The area is also revered by Jews as the Temple Mount, the site of the Jewish temple, Jewry's holiest site, destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D. It was Mr. Sharon's visit there four years ago that Palestinians cite as the beginning of this intifada.
At least 90,000 worshippers attended prayers at the mosque today. Hundreds of extra police officers patrolled the old city and largely Arab east Jerusalem, and police helicopters flew overhead.
Mr. Sharon, under severe political pressure over his plan to withdraw unilaterally from Gaza and remove nearly 8,000 Jewish settlers from 21 settlements there, felt he could not pursue that course with Palestinian rockets falling on Israeli cities.
His opening speech to the winter session of Parliament was voted down in a symbolic embarrassment, with 15 of the 40 members of his own Likud Party voting against him, abstaining or failing to vote. They oppose removing any settlers, and are urging Mr. Sharon to have a national referendum on his Gaza plan, which he has so far rejected, saying that a referendum would merely delay implementation. He has said he intends to go ahead with an Oct. 25 vote on the plan in Parliament and expects to win it.
But how long he can remain the leader of a party with a significant majority opposed to him is the great guessing game of Israeli politics. If he can win the Oct. 25 vote, an early November vote on compensating Gaza settlers and pass a budget by the end of March, Mr. Sharon will be able to avoid new elections until at least the summer.
On the West Bank, two Israeli settlers in the southern Hebron hills were arrested after attacking Palestinians who were picking olives. Army troops dispersed the settlers by shooting in the air. Israeli farmers have complained that security measures applied against Palestinian movement in and out of the West Bank have badly harmed their ability to harvest olives this year.
--------
Israel Ends Deadly Gaza Offensive
October 15, 2004
By IBRAHIM BARZAK
Associated Press Writer
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/ISRAEL_PALESTINIANS?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
JEBALIYA REFUGEE CAMP, Gaza Strip (AP) -- Israel withdrew tanks and ground forces from populated areas in the northern Gaza Strip on Friday, wrapping up its bloodiest offensive in the area in more than four years of fighting.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered the pullback at the urging of Israeli military commanders, who argued the two-week offensive had played itself out, and after calls from the United States to wrap up the operation.
Since Israel launched the offensive Sept. 29, responding to a deadly rocket attack on the southern Israeli border town of Sderot, at least 109 Palestinians have been killed and hundreds more wounded.
Dozens of civilians, including 18 minors, died in the offensive. Five Israelis, including two preschoolers killed in the Sderot attack, also died.
Meanwhile, the Israeli army suspended an officer whose subordinates had accused him of repeatedly shooting a 13-year-old Palestinian girl to make sure she was dead. An army inquiry, however, cleared the officer in the shooting, saying the punishment was due to his poor relations with his soldiers and operational failures.
Hours before ordering the pullback from northern Gaza on Thursday, Sharon had pledged to expand the offensive, aimed at halting Palestinian rocket attacks.
Sharon's turnaround reflected the dilemma he faces as he prepares to withdraw all troops and Jewish settlements from Gaza next year. Continued Palestinian rocket attacks from Gaza undermine support for the withdrawal, while military action has drawn international criticism and failed to halt the rocket attacks.
The Israeli offensive focused on the Jebaliya refugee camp and the towns of Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza, the main launching grounds for homemade Qassam rockets. After nightfall Friday, Israeli tanks pulled away from residential neighborhoods of all three areas, Palestinian security officials said. They said tanks remained in normal positions along the Israeli border and around nearby Jewish settlements.
Israeli military sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed late Friday that the redeployment was over. They said troops would remain in Gaza and continue to act against rocket attacks.
Israeli tanks and bulldozers have left behind a wide swath of destruction, damaging houses, tearing up water pipes and knocking down electrical poles as they charged through narrow alleys of densely populated areas. Residents flooded into the streets late Friday to inspect the damage.
Shortly before the pullback, a 65-year-old Palestinian woman was shot in the head and killed by Israeli tank fire while eating a traditional dinner for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan in her home, Palestinian hospital officials said.
Military sources said soldiers had opened fire in the area after being attacked by an anti-tank missile. The army also said Palestinians had fired a rocket.
Earlier Friday, an Israeli aircraft fired a missile at four militants in Jebaliya, killing two and critically wounding a third, witnesses said. A Hamas militant died of wounds sustained in a missile strike two days earlier.
In the past two weeks, hundreds of Israeli armored vehicles have patrolled a five-mile stretch of northern Gaza, to try to move rocket launchers out of the range of Israeli border towns. Occasionally, tanks moved deeper into neighborhoods.
For the most part, Israeli forces remained outside of Jebaliya, a densely populated stronghold of Hamas militants.
Late Friday, Palestinian gunmen in Jebaliya fired automatic rifles into the air. "This is a victory for the resistance and for the steadfastness of our heroic people," said one militant, identifying himself as Abu Baker.
Meanwhile, the army completed a preliminary investigation into the Oct. 5 shooting of a Palestinian girl near the Rafah refugee camp in southern Gaza.
An Israeli company commander, whose name was not released, was accused by some of his soldiers of emptying an ammunition clip into the girl, Iyman Hams, after troops shot her when she entered an unauthorized zone near an army post.
The shooting set off a storm of protest in Gaza, where Palestinians accused the Israeli army of criminal conduct. It also sparked debate in Israel, with some commentators seeing it as a blow to the Israeli military's moral standing.
Announcing the results of the inquiry, the army's southern commander, Maj. Gen. Dan Harel, said the officer was suspended for "failure of command" and poor relations with his subordinates.
However, the investigation found no "unethical" behavior by the commander or his soldiers. A separate military police investigation is continuing.
In another development, 60 Israeli rabbis added their voices to a prominent rabbi's call to Orthodox Jewish soldiers to refuse to obey orders to evacuate settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israeli media reported.
Sharon's Gaza withdrawal plan calls for uprooting 21 Jewish settlements, as well as four enclaves in the West Bank, next year.
On Thursday Rabbi Avraham Shapira, a former chief rabbi of Israel, said the Gaza plan violates Jewish law.
Sharon faces growing opposition to his plan, including from religious settlers who consider the West Bank to be land promised to the Jews in the bible.
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Palestinian children are not terrorists
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
By MARIANNE ALBINA
October 15, 2004
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/195275_palestinian15.html
Terrorist is the label all too frequently attached to Palestinian children. Today, many Palestinian youngsters feel misjudged by a world choosing to condemn them rather than know them.
These children are confronted with a hard struggle: to find ways to clear their name and reputation in the media. They want others to realize their only fault was to be born under an occupation that stripped away their childhood.
The life of Palestinian children is far from normal. Their daily trips to school take hours instead of minutes. According to The Washington Post, there are 659 checkpoints, roadblocks, trenches and earthen walls in the West Bank. In recent days, Israeli settlers have twice attacked the Christian Peacemaker Team as they accompanied Palestinian children to their school. Those who do reach their schools are disoriented and tired, ill prepared to absorb anything on the syllabus that day.
Palestinian children quickly realize their parents cannot protect them. They think it's normal to witness the death of friends, Israeli gunmen firing into certain schools and the razing of homes. This is disastrous for us and not without consequence for Israel.
Recently, I was unable to give a guarantee to a child that Israeli soldiers would not harm him. In such an uncertain environment, children become helpless, aggressive, afraid, extremely disobedient or compliant, depressed and fatigued. The Gaza Community Mental Health Program has noted children are plagued by serious psychological ills caused by the stresses of military occupation.
Many Palestinian organizations are aware of what youngsters are going through and work to promote their well-being. These groups help Palestinian children channel their anger and positively serve their nation. Today, due to the efforts of organizations such as the Palestinian Youth Association for Leadership and Rights Activation, some of these children resist the occupation by utilizing their creativity, ambition and enthusiasm. They invest significant energy in the search for meaningful and non-violent ways of contributing to freedom. Some help the victims of the occupation; others prefer to write about the current situation and help spread awareness.
While Palestinian children have chosen different paths in resisting the occupation, they are all trying their best to revive the nation's dying hope of a dignified life. Yet, as the occupation strikes over and over again, children lose confidence that justice is possible.
Contrary to the belief of many, young Palestinians are able to do much more than fling stones in desperation at tanks. If we help, children realize the importance of never giving up, no matter how trying their circumstances. It is not easy. And the world lets them down by voicing principles that are not enforced in the occupied territories.
I urge you not to misjudge our young heroes who are trying to secure a normal life. The courage of the children of Birmingham, Ala., half a century ago is not unknown to our own children. What is missing is the needed media coverage and American empathy as day in and day out another Palestinian child is killed or injured.
We should protect the lives of Palestinian and Israeli children. At this writing, more than 550 Palestinian children and 100 Israeli children have been killed in the past four years. I am convinced by my short visit here that Americans are fair-minded and care for all children.
The U.S. government's backing for almost all of Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's actions, however, comes at the expense of justice for Palestinians and safety for Israelis and for Palestinians. Children need the help of the American people rather than the one-sided rhetoric of your presidential and vice presidential candidates. Marianne Albina, a Palestinian activist, is on a national speaking tour with Partners for Peace. She will speak at 7 p.m. Monday at the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center. Call the World Affairs Council at 206-441-5910 for more information.
-------- mideast
Syria agrees to patrol border
October 15, 2004
By Nicholas Kralev
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041014-113907-5780r.htm
The United States and Iraq's interim government have reached an agreement with Syria on ways to patrol its porous border with Iraq, and it's now up to Damascus to begin deploying forces.
Although joint patrols are not planned at this stage, the officials said constant communication and cooperation between Iraqi and U.S.-led coalition forces on one side of the border and Syrian troops on the other are essential for the effort to succeed.
"We have had, I think, positive meetings in terms of trying to work out those kinds of arrangements, and now it's the moment that actual deployments and policing and efforts have to be undertaken," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told reporters earlier this week.
He noted that decisions have already been made on both the political and military level during meetings in Damascus among U.S., Iraqi and Syrian delegations in recent weeks.
"In terms of the actual sort of deployment of people and the instructions to their people, that's something for the Syrian government to take care of, for them to do their part in this whole enterprise," Mr. Boucher said.
"Our desire now is to see the Syrians adopt a proactive attitude there and to patrol the border ... and to communicate with people on the other side - with the Iraqis especially - in order that they jointly take care of problems that might exist there," he said. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, whose meeting with Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk al-Sharaa in New York last month began to break the ice between Washington and Damascus, said that spirit continued during the recent visits to Syria by two U.S. delegations.
"In these meetings, they have been more forthcoming than they have been in previous meetings, and there has been a new seriousness of purpose in these discussions. But discussions are not action," Mr. Powell told Al Hurra, the U.S.-financed Arab-language TV network, on Tuesday.
"We measure results by action, not discussion," he said.
"It is a very porous border," he said. "I'm not sure it will ever be totally sealed, but we can do more than we are doing now, and we hope that this new attitude on the part of the Syrians will produce results."
At the same time, the United States remains critical of Syria's presence in Lebanon.
Yesterday, it circulated, along with France, a draft U.N. Security Council resolution aimed at putting fresh pressure on Damascus to pull its 17,000 troops out of Lebanon.
The document, which follows up on a Sept. 2 resolution passed by the council but ignored by Syria, asks U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to report on the issue every three months.
Washington and Paris introduced the measure after they failed last week to persuade Islamic nations Pakistan and Algeria to support a council statement welcoming a report on Syria from Mr. Annan. The report said that Syria had not withdrawn its forces from Lebanon or given a timetable for withdrawal.
Syria has maintained political control over Lebanon since it intervened, at Beirut's request, to quell a civil war in 1976.
Meanwhile, the state-owned Commercial Bank of Syria was reported to be holding $261 million worth of frozen funds belonging to the Iraqi government.
Syria's official news agency said the bank was willing to return the money in principle, but had reservations about handing it to U.S. authorities.
The bank's director-general, Duraid Dergham, reportedly said at a banking conference in Beirut that an Iraqi delegation would visit Damascus soon to verify records.
"Returning the funds to Iraq is a rightful entitlement for the Iraqi side," Mr. Dergham said. "But at the same time, there are contracts and claims by the Syrian public and private sectors that carried out contracts in Iraq during the war."
•This article is based in part on wire service reports.
-------- us
Army Official Backs Ex-Abu Ghraib Officer
Intelligence Chief Says He Has 'Great Confidence' in Maj. Gen. Fast
By Dana Priest and Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, October 15, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A33568-2004Oct14.html
The Army's intelligence chief said yesterday that he has "great confidence" in the ability of Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast, the highest-ranking intelligence officer tied to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, to lead the Army's intelligence school.
"In my opinion, she's a great officer and we ought to put her in command," Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, the Army's deputy chief of staff for intelligence, said in a breakfast interview with defense writers.
One of the few female Army officers to reach the rank of two-star general, Fast, 50, was chosen for the command job shortly before news of the prison scandal erupted this spring. Her transfer to the post, however, is being held up pending a review by the Army's inspector general of the actions of all senior officers in Iraq. That review, said Alexander, may be completed in a few weeks.
The U.S. Army Intelligence Center at Fort Huachuca, southeast of Tucson, is where troops learn interrogation methods and the rules of proper prisoner treatment. Taking over as deputy commandant of the school in July 2003, Fast served there only a week or so before leaving for Baghdad and becoming the chief military intelligence officer to Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, then the top U.S. commander in Iraq.
Fast was responsible for assessing threats in Iraq. She also supervised two Army intelligence officers implicated in the scandal -- Col. Thomas M. Pappas and Lt. Col. Steve Jordan, both with the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, which operated the Abu Ghraib prison.
An Army investigation by three generals into military intelligence activities at the prison credited Fast with establishing structures and procedures that significantly improved U.S. intelligence-gathering in Iraq. The changes she instituted, the investigation concluded, facilitated the capture of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and other members of his ousted government and "saved the lives of coalition forces and Iraqi civilians." The investigators, who reported in August, recommended no disciplinary action against Fast.
But another report by an independent panel, appointed by the Pentagon and led by former defense secretary James R. Schlesinger, faulted Fast. It said she failed to advise Sanchez "on directives and policies needed" for conducting interrogations, operating the interrogation center at Abu Ghraib and "appropriately monitoring" separate activities at the prison by CIA interrogators.
According to several official accounts, Fast had received at least two indications of mistreatment at the prison in the weeks before January, when an Army soldier came forward with photographs depicting the abuses and triggered a criminal investigation.
In November, she learned of the death of one detainee, allegedly under the control of the CIA. In December, she was made aware of a report by the International Committee of the Red Cross documenting abusive actions at Abu Ghraib.
Her defenders say she took action, particularly in the case of the dead detainee. "There was no coverup," Alexander said.
At a Senate hearing last month, Gen. Paul Kern, who led the Army investigation, disclosed that it was Fast who had approved a CIA request to bring its prisoners to Abu Ghraib. Kern said that Fast had expected the CIA to abide by U.S. military rules regarding the humane treatment of detainees. Alexander added yesterday that there was good reason for that, citing a commitment by the CIA, FBI and other U.S. agencies operating in Iraq. "It's what the seniors [senior officers] agreed to," he said.
When Fast learned of the detainee death in November, she "went back to the agency and told them they will comply" in the future, Kern said. "She was also the one to ensure that they investigated that incident, and it was properly handled; it did not get pushed aside."
But the CIA's activities at the prison have become the focus of a separate investigation by the agency's inspector general amid reports that CIA operatives avoided registering detainees and kept them hidden from Red Cross inspectors.
Kern has also told the Senate Armed Services Committee that his investigation uncovered no "evidence that would suggest" Fast "was overlooking things that she should have" seen. He praised Fast as one of two senior officers, along with Sanchez, who "stand out" for performing well under difficult circumstances. "She did yeoman work in theater," Kern said.
Nevertheless, Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), the committee chairman, has asked the Army to reassess whether disciplinary action should be taken against Fast and other senior staff who served with Sanchez.
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Army Probes Whether G.I.'s Refused a Mission in Iraq
October 15, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Unit-Investigation.html?hp&ex=1097899200&en=afa95b8f92db332c&ei=5094&partner=homepage
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Army is investigating reports that several members of a reservist supply unit in Iraq refused to go on a convoy mission, the military said Friday. Relatives of the soldiers said the troops considered the mission too dangerous.
The reservists are from the 343rd Quartermaster Company, which is based in Rock Hill, S.C. The unit delivers food and water in combat zones.
According to The Clarion-Ledger newspaper in Jackson, Miss., a platoon of 17 soldiers refused to go on a fuel supply mission Wednesday because their vehicles were in poor shape and they did not have a capable armed escort.
The paper cited interviews with family members of some of the soldiers, who said the soldiers had been confined after their refusals. The mission was carried out by other soldiers from the 343rd, which has at least 120 soldiers, the military said.
Convoys in Iraq are frequently subject to ambushes and roadside bombings.
A whole unit refusing to go on a mission in a war zone would be a significant breach of military discipline. A statement from the military's press center in Baghdad called the incident ``isolated.''
``The investigating team is currently in Tallil taking statements and interviewing those involved. This is an isolated incident and it is far too early in the investigation to speculate as to what happened, why it happened or any action that might be taken,'' the coalition press information center said in the statement, sent to The Associated Press in Washington.
In the statement, U.S. military officials said the commanding general of the 13th Corps Support Command had appointed his deputy commander to investigate the incident.
The statement did not confirm several aspects of the relatives' stories, including the number of soldiers involved and the reason they refused the mission.
The soldiers refused an order on Wednesday to go to Taji, Iraq -- north of Baghdad -- because their vehicles were considered extremely unsafe, Patricia McCook of Jackson, Miss., told The Clarion-Ledger. Her husband, Sgt. Larry O. McCook, was among those detained, she said, saying her husband had telephoned her from Iraq.
The platoon being held has troops from Alabama, Kentucky, North Carolina, Mississippi and South Carolina, said Teresa Hill of Dothan, Ala., who told the newspaper her daughter Amber McClenny is among those being detained.
Patricia McCook said her husband told her he did not feel comfortable taking his soldiers on another trip.
``He told me that three of the vehicles they were to use were 'deadlines' ... not safe to go in a hotbed like that,'' she said, according to the newspaper.
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PRISON ABUSE
U.S. Army Inquiry Implicates 28 Soldiers in Deaths of 2 Afghan Detainees
October 15, 2004
By THOM SHANKER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/15/politics/15abuse.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Oct. 14 - A newly completed Army criminal investigation has implicated 28 active-duty and reserve soldiers in the deaths of two Afghan men detained at the American air base at Bagram in December 2002, and describes potential offenses ranging from involuntary manslaughter to assault to conspiracy, the Army said Thursday.
One Pentagon official said five or six could face the most serious charges, a decision that now rests with the soldiers' commanders.
Those cited by the investigation include officers - the highest ranking are two captains - noncommissioned officers and enlisted soldiers, according to Pentagon officials familiar with the report. The names were not publicly disclosed.
The inquiry by the Army Criminal Investigation Command involved soldiers from two units deployed at the Bagram Control Point, a detention facility at an American base 40 miles north of Kabul. The Army Reserve unit was the 377th Military Police Company with headquarters at Cincinnati, and the active-duty unit was Company A of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, whose home is Fort Bragg, N.C.
After photographs of American soldiers abusing detainees at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad drew global outrage, investigators learned that the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion had played a major role in setting up the prison's interrogation unit. The 519th was in charge of interrogations at the time of the homicides at Bagram, investigators found.
Procedures drawn up in Afghanistan became the template for practices of Abu Ghraib interrogators, who were drawn from a unit of 519th sent to Iraq and assigned to the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, which in turn was in charge of interrogations at Abu Ghraib, according to two Pentagon inquiries. But they provided no specifics on the procedures.
Human rights groups responded to the announcement of the completed Army inquiry by saying the roots of the Abu Ghraib scandal may reach back to the incidents in Afghanistan.
"The failure to promptly account for the prisoners' deaths indicates a chilling disregard for the value of human life and may have laid the groundwork for further abuses in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere," said Jumana Musa of Amnesty International USA.
Pentagon officials said the pace of the inquiry reflected an Army mandate that "thoroughness trumps timeliness." One said the investigation was logistically complicated; the more than 250 people interviewed had to be found at a wide number of locations around the world, since those at Bagram at the time of the two homicides had redeployed.
The two deaths occurred on Dec. 4 and 10, 2002, in separate isolation cells. Both men had suffered "blunt force trauma to the legs," according to Pentagon officials, and investigators determined that they had been beaten by "multiple soldiers" who, for the most part, had used their knees.
Pentagon officials said it was likely that the beatings had been confined to the legs of the detainees so that wounds would be less visible.
Both men had been chained to the ceiling - one at the waist and one by the wrists - although their feet remained on the ground. Both men had been captured by Afghan forces and turned over to the American military for interrogation.
One, Mullah Habibullah, a brother of a former Taliban commander, died Dec. 4 of a pulmonary embolism apparently caused by blood clots formed in his legs from the beatings.
The other, a man identified as Dilawar, died Dec. 10. He suffered from a heart condition, and his death by heart attack was attributed to the beatings he received, Pentagon officials said. Mr. Dilawar was arrested after a broken walkie-talkie and an electric stabilizer were found in his taxi several hours after rockets were fired at an American base.
Only one soldier has been officially charged by the Army in the case. Sgt. James P. Boland, of the military police unit, was charged with assault and other crimes.
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U.S. troops likely to face charges
October 15, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20041014-111511-6405r.htm
About 30 U.S. soldiers face potential criminal charges in connection with the deaths of two prisoners at an American-run prison in Afghanistan two years ago, the Army announced yesterday.
The most serious potential charges include involuntary manslaughter and maiming, the Army said.
The announcement marked the completion of a nearly two-year-old investigation into the deaths. The Army's Criminal Investigation Division recommends various charges against the soldiers.
Only one person, a military police reservist, has been charged so far in connection with the deaths. Sgt. James P. Boland of the Army Reserve's 377th Military Policy Company, based in Cincinnati, was charged Aug. 23 with assault and dereliction of duty.
For 27 others, their commanding officers will make the final call on whether they face a court-martial, administrative discipline or no disciplinary action.
The deaths, in early December 2002, were ruled homicides by U.S. military medical examiners.
In the first case, Mullah Habibullah, thought to be about 28, died of "pulmonary embolism due to blunt force injuries to the legs," doctors said. He was in detention in Bagram, Afghanistan. Previous reports said he died Dec. 3, but the Army's announcement yesterday put his death at Dec. 4.
About a week later, on Dec. 10, an Afghan identified only as Dilawar, 22, died in U.S. custody at Bagram. Doctors blamed the death on "blunt force injuries to lower extremities complicating coronary artery disease."
Others who are expected to face charges are from the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion from Fort Bragg, N.C. Some members of the 519th went from Afghanistan to Iraq last year and are among those accused by Army investigators of abusing Iraqi detainees in fall 2003.
The Boland charge sheet lists one count of dereliction of duty in connection with the first death.
The sheet says Sgt. Boland, who was a guard at the Bagram prison, was derelict "in that he negligently, willfully or through culpable inefficiency" failed to take corrective action against another soldier who struck Mr. Habibullah while he was restrained. The name of the other soldier was blacked out for privacy reasons; his rank was specialist.
The other charges are in connection with Dilawar's death. Sgt. Boland is accused of dereliction of duty for failing to seek medical treatment for the prisoner, "who was visibly in need of medical care and later died," according to the charge sheet issued by Army Forces Command.
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Chemicals Sickened '91 Gulf War Veterans, Latest Study Finds
October 15, 2004
By SCOTT SHANE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/15/politics/15gulf.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Oct. 14 - A federal panel of medical experts studying illnesses among veterans of the 1991 war in the Persian Gulf has broken with several earlier studies and concluded that many suffer from neurological damage caused by exposure to toxic chemicals, rejecting past findings that the ailments resulted mostly from wartime stress.
Citing new scientific research on the effects of exposure to low levels of neurotoxins, the Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses concludes in its draft report that "a substantial proportion of Gulf War veterans are ill with multisymptom conditions not explained by wartime stress or psychiatric illness."
It says a growing body of research suggests that many veterans' symptoms have a neurological cause and that there is a "probable link" to exposure to neurotoxins.
The report says possible sources include sarin, a nerve gas, from an Iraqi weapons depot blown up by American forces in 1991; a drug, pyridostigmine bromide, given to troops to protect against nerve gas; and pesticides used to protect soldiers in the region.
Dr. Joyce C. Lashof , the chairwoman of a presidential advisory group that reported in 1996 that there was no causal link between toxic exposure and the veterans' symptoms, said Thursday that she had not seen the new report. But Dr. Lashof said she was open to changing her views if the findings were based on solid new research and not advocacy by veterans' groups.
"We certainly weren't sure that our report was the definitive answer," Dr. Lashof, professor emerita of public health at the University of California at Berkeley, said. "It was based on the best evidence available at the time."
All the chemicals cited in the new study belong to a group called acetylcholinesterase inhibitors, which can cause a range of symptoms including pain, fatigue, diarrhea and cognitive impairment. Committee members said there might be minor changes in the report, a draft copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, but that the basic scientific findings would not change.
The committee says a search for medical treatments tailored to the new findings are "urgently needed" and recommends $60 million in federal funds for new research over the next four years. It says an estimated 100,000 Gulf War veterans, or about one in seven, suffer war-related health problems.
The report also says that understanding illnesses from the war will be critical in planning future military deployments and measures to improve domestic security. It calls for a reassessment of the use of pyridostigmine bromide.
Though some conclusions are hedged in careful language in the 135-page draft report, committee members said in interviews that they were consciously departing from the past scientific consensus and taking a strong stand on a politically and scientifically volatile subject.
"I would absolutely say it's a break from previous panels," said Dr. Beatrice A. Golomb, an associate professor of medicine at the University of California at San Diego, a member of the panel and its scientific director for much of its existence. "It reflects a different body of evidence, because more studies have come out. No one had gone to the scientific evidence on acetylcholinesterase inhibitors."
The new report, prepared for the federal Department of Veterans Affairs, draws conclusions that are essentially the opposite of those of the Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses, led by Dr. Lashof. That group reported to President Bill Clinton in 1996 that "current scientific evidence does not support a causal link" between the veterans' symptoms and chemical exposures in the Persian Gulf.
Instead, the earlier group said, stress "is likely to be an important contributing factor to the broad range of physical and psychological illnesses currently being reported by gulf war veterans."
Another panel of scientists convened in 1998 by the Institute of Medicine, a unit of the National Academies that focuses on health and medical advice, has produced a series of reports that generally point away from neurotoxin exposure as a likely cause of the veterans' illnesses.
Some 697,000 American troops were sent to the Persian Gulf at the end of 1990 to drive the Iraqi forces of President Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. Though the military campaign was swift and successful, 13 years after the war ended many veterans still complain of persistent fatigue, headaches, joint pain, numbness, diarrhea and other health problems.
Among dozens of studies cited by the new report is a 1998 survey that looked at about 2,000 Kansas veterans, 1,548 of whom served in the gulf. It found that more than 30 percent of the gulf veterans report three or more such symptoms. The presence of multiple symptoms, their persistence for many years and the dominance of muscular and skeletal complaints all distinguish the ailments of gulf war veterans from the ailments of veterans of other wars, Dr. Golomb said.
The Pentagon admitted in 1997 that as many as 100,000 American service members might have been exposed to nerve gas when American combat engineers blew up the Kamisiyah ammunition depot in southern Iraq in March 1991, shortly after the war.
The new panel was appointed in 2002 by Anthony J. Principi, the veterans affairs secretary, in accordance with a law passed in 1998 but never acted on by the Clinton administration. Of the 11 members 7 are scientists and 4 are veterans, including the chairman, James Binns, a Vietnam veteran and former Pentagon official. Eight other scientists worked as advisers to the panel.
Committee members said release of the report, which was described in the Oct. 1 issue of Science magazine, had been set for earlier this month but was postponed because of scheduling problems.
Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Principi, who was in Michigan Thursday for the groundbreaking of a new veterans cemetery, praised the committee's work.
"I'm looking forward to studying the committee's report and working with them to ensure adequate research funding to find answers to these perplexing medical issues," he said. He said the department was already providing disability benefits for some veterans who have developed amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease, based on studies finding that the veterans have nearly double the risk of the disease as veterans who did not go to the Persian Gulf do.
According to his spokeswoman, Cynthia Church, Mr. Principi, a combat-decorated Navy veteran of the Vietnam War, took a particular interest in the research of Dr. Robert W. Haley, whom he appointed to the panel. Dr. Haley, chief of epidemiology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, has written a series of studies of the possible effects of neurotoxins on gulf war veterans, including some financed by the Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot.
Dr. Haley acknowledged that his work, which has been championed by some veterans and members of Congress, has been viewed skeptically by some scientists. He said the current committee's findings represent a "revolutionary change" from the past, when what he called "radically conservative" scientists dismissed the neurotoxin thesis.
"I think this committee has honestly weighed all the evidence," he said. "Although it's not proven, the preponderance of the evidence supports a new explanation - brain cell damage, nervous system damage caused by chemical exposures."
Jim Reichert, a 41-year-old industrial equipment mechanic who lives in Columbia, Ill., said he was heartened to hear of the committee's conclusions.
Mr. Reichert said he had served as a Blackhawk helicopter crewman in the war. After his six months in the gulf region, he developed strange symptoms which have never gone away, he said. Fatigue forced him to give up hunting and fishing, he loses control of his hand muscles and drops tools on the job, and he suffers from chronic diarrhea and a recurring, blistering skin condition.
"If it was stress alone, it wouldn't have lasted this long," Mr. Reichert said. Referring to himself and other ailing veterans, he said: "We're not crazy. If I'm a little nuts, it's because I've been sick so long."
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- homeland security / national intelligence
Terror Threat Complicates Election Plans in Region
By Michael D. Shear
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 15, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A33868-2004Oct14?language=printer
Election officials and law enforcement agencies across the region are putting in place contingency plans to deal with any sudden spike in terror warnings over the next three weeks or the possibility of attacks at polling places on Election Day.
In a memo sent yesterday to each local registrar, Virginia's top election official urged a "delicate balance" between enhancing security to prevent terrorism and the need to avoid intimidating voters with an unnecessary show of force at the polls. Some registrars have opted for visible security changes, including placing uniformed police at polling places. Others are playing down the threat for fear of scaring voters and poll workers.
The schism underscores the difficulty officials are having in balancing voting rights against the uncertain but well-publicized warning that terrorists might try to disrupt the nation's Nov. 2 presidential election. Civil liberties advocates warn that too heavy a police presence might violate federal law.
U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials have warned of a vague election threat. Last month, the National Governors Association, in consultation with Homeland Security, sent a bulletin to the 50 states and the District that contained Election Day guidelines for coordinating police, tips for ballot-counting security and legal advice about ordering emergency election changes. But they offered no specific guidance and, for the most part, left it up to each municipality and county across the country to decide how to act. "State and local elections are administered under state and local law," said Brian Roehrkasse, a spokesman for Homeland Security.
In Maryland, officials said they are reviewing emergency procedures and stepping up police patrols. Montgomery County police said they are still considering whether to station officers at polling places. District officials said they have requested "upgraded support" from the D.C. police department for the election.
Election officials in Chesterfield County, near Richmond, have already decided to post an armed police officer at each of the county's 62 polling places for all of Election Day. The registrar there, a 16-year veteran of the Richmond Police Department, said concerns about intimidation pale in the face of terrorism.
"It's the way things are now. It's regrettable, but I think it's how we have to act," said General Registrar Lawrence C. Haake III. "We're in such a world now that either we've got to be prepared for anything or suffer the consequences of failing to prepare."
Prince William County officers will roam close to polling places, dropping in to check for suspicious cars. They also are training precinct workers to spot danger signs, officials said.
Registrar Betty Weimer said Prince William police will be posted at voting locations only if the nation's terror alert is raised or if terrorist "chatter" gathered by intelligence agencies indicates a more direct threat.
But other local governments have firmly rejected having visible signs of enhanced security and say people probably will notice no difference when they vote.
Maggi Luca, secretary of the Electoral Board in Fairfax County, said the county's security efforts will be invisible. She declined to elaborate, but she said Haake's decision to post uniformed officers at the polls was wrong.
"I don't want voters to be frightened," Luca said. "Can you imagine how intimidating that would be? We're not doing that."
Civil liberties groups and minority organizations across the nation have also expressed concern that a higher police presence at voting places could stifle turnout.
In 2000, black voters in Florida complained that police checkpoints scared some from casting ballots in the very close election. The charges brought back echoes from the nation's civil rights history, when government power was used throughout the South to turn away black voters.
"There's no question that if you were to put police officers and sheriff's deputies at the polling places, it would have an intimidating effect," said Laughlin McDonald, director of the American Civil Liberties Union voting rights project. "There are thousands of precincts around the United States. We can't make them armed guardhouses."
In Maryland, Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich (R) said the state is discussing security with federal authorities. "It's clear to everyone that Election Day 2004 is going to be quite different because of 9/11," he said.
Virginia's homeland security officials said they have discussed with registrars and police the need to balance access and security. "We have to have that absolute right balance, right in the middle," said George Foresman, security chief for Gov. Mark R. Warner (D).
Virginia officials also have urged local registrars, police departments, sheriff's offices and others to be ready to act swiftly in the event of an attack before or during Election Day that might interfere with voting.
Many registrars said they have for the first time developed detailed lists of alternative polling places. In Fairfax, each of the 220 precincts will have two alternatives "in opposite directions," said election manager Judy Flaig.
In Prince William, officials have had to make specific plans for a polling place on the Quantico Marine Base. If the nation's alert level rises, access to the base could be cut, leaving a precinct without a place to vote.
In Norfolk, election officials have decided to use their library bookmobile as a portable polling place, if necessary. In Fairfax, officials said they have made arrangements to use a special county bus for the same purpose.
Officials said they also have revamped their Election Day communications with poll workers in case a terrorist attack requires rapid notification to many precincts simultaneously.
In Fairfax, officials say they have implemented a secure instant message system that can broadcast text messages to thousands of pagers and cell phones. Poll workers who do not have personal cell phones will be given one, county officials said, and workers at polling places where cellular signals are weak will be given pagers.
State election officials in Virginia and Maryland said they will have the capability to move personnel and data to backup locations if their offices are unusable.
"All the mechanics are in place," said Virginia Secretary of the Electoral Board Jean Jensen. Staff writers Phuong Ly, Matthew Mosk and John Wagner contributed to this report.
--------
Intelligence Reform May Be Stalled
9/11 Panel Chief Fears Momentum Loss; Victims' Kin Critical
By Dan Eggen and Helen Dewar
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, October 15, 2004; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A33773-2004Oct14.html
The chairman of the Sept. 11 commission warned yesterday that Congress is moving too slowly to negotiate a compromise intelligence reform package, and relatives of Sept. 11 victims said a White House official raised doubts about the fate of the legislation.
Alberto R. Gonzales, the chief White House counsel, told several relatives of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks yesterday that the administration is not sure an intelligence bill can be signed into law before the end of the year, according to one relative who attended the closed-door meeting.
Mary Fetchet said Gonzales also told her and two other representatives of Sept. 11 victims that there were serious problems in the two competing bills that were passed by the House and Senate.
"So much time and energy has been devoted to this and now they're pushing back the time frame," said Fetchet, a member of the 9/11 Family Steering Committee whose son, Brad, was killed in the attacks. "That horrifies me that there isn't a sense of urgency in moving this forward. . . . This is not about tax reform or something like that; this is about saving American lives."
White House spokeswoman Erin Healy disputed Fetchet's account, however, saying that Gonzales sought to reassure the families that the administration would do everything it could to get legislation passed.
"He wants Congress to work quickly to get legislation to the president, and that has been our position all along," Healy said.
Thomas H. Kean (R), chairman of the Sept. 11 commission, said in an interview that the House and Senate are moving too slowly to negotiate a compromise between competing reform proposals, adding that the pace could jeopardize the whole effort.
"If we lose the momentum, we may lose the whole thing," Kean said. "We need a bill, and we need it soon."
Kean said he believes President Bush "wants a strong bill" and said he has been told the president will be "active" in pushing for an agreement. "He's not for putting it off," Kean added.
Kean's warning and the cautionary message from Gonzales underscore rising doubts on Capitol Hill that the House and Senate can agree on how to restructure the nation's intelligence services before the Nov. 2 election.
Both houses have passed bills creating a national intelligence director and a counterterrorism center -- as advocated by the Sept. 11 commission -- but the legislation differs significantly in key areas, including the budgetary power of the new director. In addition, the House included law enforcement and immigration provisions that have drawn considerable opposition in the Senate.
The two houses have appointed negotiators to work out a compromise on the measure, but no meeting date has been scheduled, despite pressure from key senators for swift action so Congress can enact the legislation before the election.
The House recessed on Saturday and the Senate on Monday, but Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) has said Congress would return to act on the legislation if agreement can be reached in time.
Staff writer Walter Pincus contributed to this report.
--------
Border Security Measures to Tighten Next Month
By Sylvia Moreno
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 15, 2004; Page A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34219-2004Oct14.html
LAREDO, Tex., Oct. 14 -- Tighter security measures designed to stop suspected terrorists, sexual predators and other types of criminals at the nation's borders will begin next month, federal officials announced Thursday.
The security program, known as US-VISIT, will require fingerprint scans and photographs of travelers who enter the United States with a visa and then apply to obtain a tourist permit. The program will begin Nov. 15 here, the nation's second-busiest land port of entry, and in Douglas, Ariz., and Port Huron, Mich. It will be expanded to the 50 busiest land ports of entry by the end of the year and to all 165 by Dec. 31, 2005.
The Department of Homeland Security implemented the program Jan. 5 at 115 airports and 14 seaports.
Among the goals of US-VISIT, the U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology program, are "to enhance the security of our citizens and visitors; facilitate legitimate travel and trade; [and] ensure the integrity of our immigration system," program director Jim Williams said.
It requires visitors to submit to inkless finger scans and digital photographs to allow Customs and Border Protection officers to determine whether the person applying for entry is the same one who was issued a visa by the State Department.
In addition, the biometric and biographic data will be checked against watch lists of suspected foreign terrorists and databases of sexual predators, criminals wanted by the FBI and people deported previously from the United States.
Williams said that since the US-VISIT program began, 280 people have been detained, out of about10 million scanned.
Implementing the program along the Mexican border, where U.S. communities such as Laredo depend on the flow of commerce and foreign visitors to sustain their economy, presents special challenges, federal officials acknowledged.
Texas, which shares a 1,200-mile border with Mexico, has 22 of the nation's 50 busiest land ports of entry. Laredo has annual crossings by 4.6 million pedestrians, 1.4 million trucks, 6.8 million private vehicles and more than 40,000 buses, according to Customs and Border Protection statistics.
"We have to implement it . . . so it will not have an impact on the cross-border traffic that is so vital," said Jayson P. Ahern, assistant commissioner of Customs and Border Protection. "Mexico has and will continue to be a key partner to these communities."
Most Mexican citizens who use border-crossing cards to travel into the United States will not be subject, at least for now, to the US-VISIT program, officials said. About 6.8 million Mexicans use such a card to travel within 25 miles of the border in Texas, California and New Mexico, and within 75 miles of the border in Arizona. The card is embedded with finger scans and a photograph and is inspected at land crossings. It permits the holder to stay for as many as 30 days.
If the card holder wants to travel farther or stay longer, he or she must undergo US-VISIT processing.
Because most Canadians generally are not required to have visas to enter the United States, they will not be subject to the US-VISIT process, officials said.
"We are cautiously optimistic [US-VISIT] won't impede trade or traffic or people that are so used to crossing our borders: our shoppers and visitors and families, our workers who choose to live on the Mexico side," said Laredo Mayor Elizabeth G. Flores. "Our relationship with our sister city [Nuevo Laredo] and with the rest of this country of Mexico is the lifeblood of Laredo."
--------
Deficiencies in U.S. Screening of Cargo Are Acknowledged
By Christopher Lee
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 15, 2004; Page A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34221-2004Oct14.html
The failure to detect uranium shipped by a news organization through two U.S. ports revealed serious deficiencies in the federal government's system for screening cargo, the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general reported yesterday.
Inspector General Clark Kent Ervin began the review of customs and border protection procedures at the request of House Democrats after ABC News twice successfully shipped about 15 pounds of depleted uranium into the country in cargo containers.
"Improvements are needed in the inspection process to ensure that weapons of mass destruction or other implements of terror do not gain access to the U.S. through oceangoing cargo containers," according to the four-page report made public yesterday.
ABC News said depleted uranium is a harmless substance that can be legally imported and gives off a radiation signature similar to that of highly enriched uranium, which is used for nuclear weapons. The network said it shipped the lead-encased uranium in a teak trunk, along with other furniture, from Jakarta, Indonesia, to Los Angeles last year. It shipped the same material from Europe to Staten Island, N.Y., in 2002.
Homeland Security officials have accused the network of breaking the law by making false declarations about the contents of the container in shipping documents.
Network officials have said that the shipments were an important test of the port security system, which screens about 5 percent of cargo containers for nuclear and radiological material.
Ervin reported that the department has improved its ability to screen targeted containers for radioactive emissions by deploying "more sensitive technology" and adopting "better procedures and training."
In a Wednesday letter to Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, however, Rep. Jim Turner (Tex.), the ranking Democrat on the House Select Committee on Homeland Security, said that it is "worrisome" that Ervin was not satisfied with the officials' implementation of a "key recommendation" for correcting the problems. Turner requested the investigation, along with Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.). A DHS official did not return calls seeking comment yesterday.
--------
Changes Needed in US Cargo Inspection-Audit
REUTERS
Deborah Charles
October 15, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/27702/story.htm
WASHINGTON - US customs officials did not have proper technology to detect depleted uranium shipped into the country in 2002 and 2003, an internal audit showed on Thursday as it urged changes in the inspection process.
In a report assessing how the toxic substance, shipped by ABC News reporters, was allowed into the country, the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general called for improvements in Customs and Border Protection procedures to properly screen cargo shipments. "Improvements are needed in the inspection process to ensure that weapons of mass destruction or other implements of terror do not gain access to the US through oceangoing cargo containers," the report said.
Depleted uranium is a slightly radioactive byproduct of nuclear fuel production which strengthens ammunition and gives weapons twice the range of ones using other heavy metals.
"Detection equipment and search protocols and procedures are the two areas where improvements would enhance the effectiveness of the inspection process," the report added.
Homeland Security officials said the uranium emitted very little radiation since it was depleted and equipment used by customs officials at the time was designed to detect highly-enriched uranium, not depleted uranium.
They added that hundreds of highly sensitive radiation detection monitors had since been deployed around the country with more planned for 2005.
The issue of cargo inspections was raised on Wednesday night at the final presidential debate when Sen. John Kerry criticized the Bush administration for inspecting only five percent of cargo shipments coming into the country.
Inspector General Clark Kent Ervin launched an investigation at the request of lawmakers after ABC News shipped a 15-pound cylinder of depleted uranium to the United States on two occasions without it being detected.
In 2002, ABC News reporters shipped the uranium from Turkey to the United States in a suitcase that was placed inside an ornamental chest.
Although the crate containing the uranium was targeted as "high-risk" for screening by customs officials, they did not detect the depleted uranium.
One year later, ABC News shipped the same cylinder of depleted uranium from Jakarta, Indonesia to the United States. Although the crate containing the uranium was again targeted as a "high-risk" shipment, it was allowed through.
"Equipment and protocols in place today detect not only highly enriched uranium ... but also other materials that could emit smaller levels of radiation," said Homeland Security spokeswoman Katy Mynster.
-------- immigration / refugees
U.S. Tries to Calm Foreign Visitors Over Need for Fingerprinting
October 15, 2004
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/15/politics/15visitors.html
WASHINGTON, Oct. 14 - American officials began an overseas media campaign on Thursday aimed at dispelling anxieties about a new security program that requires foreign travelers to be fingerprinted and photographed when they enter the United States.
A full-page newspaper ad taken out in Le Monde in France by the Department of Homeland Security advised travelers: "The flight to America takes about eight hours. Only a few extra seconds will make your trip safer."
Similar American advertisements are running in major newspapers in England, Germany, Japan, Belgium and Australia at a cost of $1.8 million, officials said. The countries are among an expanded group of more than two dozen nations whose American-bound travelers are now required, beginning last month, to undergo digital index-finger scans and have their photographs taken at United States airports and seaports.
"There was a lot of misinformation out there," said Dennis Murphy, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security. "Travelers were asking 'Why are our friends in the U.S. fingerprinting people?' and 'Why are they booking us?' "
"We wanted to dispel some of the false notions and anxieties that are out there and to convey that this is a very simple, very quick, very clean process," he said.
The advertising campaign is an effort to avoid the types of problems that the United States encountered when it began imposing the new restrictions on many foreign travelers earlier this year. The restrictions set off a diplomatic spat with Brazil, as officials there in January began requiring fingerprinting and photographing of American visitors in protest over the American action.
The American security measures come as part of a multibillion program in the Department of Homeland Security called U.S.-Visit, which uses biometric measures to identify foreign visitors and weed out terrorist suspects. Originally, travelers from 27 "visa waiver" nations - whose citizens do not need visas for short visits to the United States - were exempted from the fingerprint and photo requirements.
That exemption was removed last month when the program was expanded to include nearly all foreign countries, with some exceptions for travelers from Canada and Mexico. Some 10 million foreign travelers in all have now undergone the procedure so far this year.
Homeland Security officials say the toughened security measures have allowed them to stop about 300 criminals and immigration violators from entering the country. Officials have also begun a pilot program at 14 major airports requiring the fingerprinting and photographing of foreign travelers as they leave the United States to return home.
The expanded security measures have provoked some irritation among European travelers but no major outcries, suggesting that many world travelers have come to grudgingly accept the security inconveniences spurred by the Sept. 11 attacks.
In the Le Monde ad, with the Statue of Liberty as a backdrop, the Department of Homeland Security assured travelers that "the United States has always welcomed visitors from France."
"And," it went on, "we will continue to do so while seeking to make our borders safer."
The ad explained that the new requirements involved "an inkless digital fingerprint reader." The procedure, it said, "only takes a few seconds and your private sphere will be protected and safe."
-------- POLITICS
-------- budget
U.S. Hits Debt Limit After Senators Put Off Raising Ceiling
Leaders Promise Action After Election;
Snow Withholds Contributions to Federal Pension Plan
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 15, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32985-2004Oct14.html
The federal government reached its $7.4 trillion debt ceiling yesterday, forcing Treasury Secretary John W. Snow to delay contributing to one of the federal employees' pension systems to avoid running out of cash and possibly defaulting on government debt.
The situation will probably be temporary, as it has in the past. Congressional leaders said that when they return for a lame-duck session after the election, they will raise the debt ceiling to allow the government to borrow the money it needs to pay its bills. At that point, any overdue contributions to the pension fund would be paid, with interest.
Snow has pleaded with Congress since Aug. 2 to raise the debt limit, but Senate Republican leaders -- whose aides said they were worried about the possible political backlash -- adjourned for the campaign this week without acting on Snow's request. The Treasury secretary repeated his plea yesterday in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), appealing to his "commitment to maintaining the full faith and credit of the U.S. government."
"Given the current projections, it is imperative that the Congress take action to increase the debt limit by mid-November, at which time all of our previously used prudent and legal actions to avoid breaching the statutory debt limit will be exhausted," Snow wrote.
Congressional leaders in turn promised to raise the borrowing limit as soon as they reconvene. The House passed a $690 billion increase in the debt ceiling in a 2005 budget resolution, but it was never adopted by the Senate.
"Typically with Congress, they do it when they need to do it," said John Feehery, spokesman for House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.). "And we'll do it when we need to do it."
The federal government regularly sells Treasury bonds to finance the difference between the amount of money it collects in taxes each year and the amount it spends. The debt ceiling was first imposed in 1917 to act as a brake on the total amount of accumulated debt the government owes. Today the total debt includes money owed either to private investors or, in the case of funds borrowed from surplus Social Security taxes, to other government programs.
Since then, the Treasury has on five occasions delayed pension fund payments as it approached its limit on borrowing. Three of those incidents came under President Bush -- in 2002, 2003 and yesterday -- as Republicans in Congress have become leery of voting to raise the debt limit. The others were during the rapidly spiraling deficits of 1985 and the budget showdown between the new Republican Congress and President Bill Clinton in 1995.
When Bush came to office, the debt ceiling was $5.95 trillion and had last been raised in 1997.
Since 2002, Congress has raised the borrowing limit by more than $1.4 trillion, as the government ran increasingly large deficits of $158 billion in 2002, $375 billion in 2003 and $413 billion for fiscal 2004, which ended in September. Yesterday the Treasury Department released its final 2004 deficit figure, which came in below initial forecasts but still at a record level in dollar terms.
If Republicans had hoped to avoid the issue before the election, Democrats sought yesterday to make them pay with a litany of accusations.
"This is a heck of a burden to pass on to the next generation," said Rep. John M. Spratt Jr. (S.C.), the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee.
Campaign aides of Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) noted that Bush's 2001 budget anticipated the debt ceiling would not have to be raised until 2008. And, they said, , the government has run up more debt in the past 17 months than was amassed under all the presidents from George Washington to Ronald Reagan.
"George Bush continues to make history for all the wrong reasons," said Kerry campaign spokesman Phil Singer.
Budget watchdog organizations took both Kerry and Bush to task for what they see as a failure to take the deficit seriously. "Following the presidential debate, where more attention was given to the candidates' wives than to the budget deficit . . . it is hard to see where the leadership to put the country back on the path of fiscal responsibility will come from," said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
A number of independent analyses have concluded that the mix of tax cuts and spending plans outlined by both candidates would balloon the budget deficit.
--------
As U.S. Debt Ceiling Is Reached,
Bush Administration Seeks to Raise It Once Again
October 15, 2004
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/15/politics/15debt.html
WASHINGTON, Oct. 14 - Less than a day after President Bush implied that Senator John Kerry lacked "fiscal sanity," the Bush administration said on Thursday that the federal government had hit the debt ceiling set by Congress and would have to borrow from the civil service retirement system until after the elections.
Federal operations are unlikely to be affected because Congress is certain to raise the debt limit in a lame-duck session in November. Congressional Republicans had wanted to avoid an embarrassing vote to raise the debt ceiling just a few weeks before Election Day.
Since Mr. Bush took office in January 2001, the federal debt has increased about 40 percent, or $2.1 trillion, to $7.4 trillion. Congress has raised the debt ceiling three times in three years, raising it most recently by $984 billion in May 2003.
On Thursday, Treasury Secretary John W. Snow said that the federal government was about to breach the limit again and would be able to keep operating only if it started tapping money intended for the civil service retirement fund, the pension system for federal workers.
"Given current projections, it is imperative that the Congress take action to increase the debt limit by mid-November,'' Mr. Snow warned in a statement, declaring that his arsenal of financial tools "will be exhausted'' at that point.
The announcement came a few days after Congress adjourned and one day after Mr. Bush battled Mr. Kerry over economic and social policy in their final televised debate.
In that debate, Mr. Bush accused Mr. Kerry of proposing major new programs without the money to pay for them. "My opponent talks about fiscal sanity,'' the president said. "His record in the United States Senate does not match his rhetoric.''
White House officials and Congressional leaders knew for at least two months that federal borrowing would soon exceed the legal limit. Mr. Snow warned on Aug. 2 that the ceiling would soon be reached, asking lawmakers to raise the limit then.
Senate Republicans tried to insert an increase in borrowing authority into a military spending bill this summer, but were blocked by Democrats and a handful of Republican lawmakers who sought tougher restrictions on spending increases and tax cuts. As the election season moved into the final phase, Congressional leaders tacitly agreed to address the issue, along with about 10 unfinished spending bills, in a session after the November elections.
Representative John W. Spratt of South Carolina, the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee, said the ballooning federal debt reflected Mr. Bush's failure at fiscal responsibility and stemmed in large measure from his three big tax cuts.
"This is the burden Republicans are passing on to the next generation, and they have no plan or prospect for addressing it,'' Mr. Spratt said.
Administration officials cast the latest news in the most positive possible light, reporting in a separate announcement that the official federal budget deficit for the 2004 fiscal year was $413 billion. That is lower than the $522 billion shortfall the administration predicted at the start of this year, though still the biggest federal budget deficit on record.
"We will continue to see improvement and cut the deficit by more than half in five years,'' Joshua B. Bolten, director of the White House's Office of Management and Budget, said in a statement.
Outside analysts are skeptical of that goal, in part because administration budget forecasts omit future costs of the war in Iraq.
In its most recent projection, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that budget deficits would remain at more than $300 billion a year for at least the next five years if Mr. Bush's tax cuts were all extended and even if the costs of the Iraq war ended after next year.
Mr. Bush has often declared that his tax cuts, which will total $1.9 trillion over 10 years, provided crucial support for the economy as it spun into a recession and was then further weakened by corporate scandals, the Sept. 11 attacks and the cost of fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
-------- corruption
Anti-Bush registration drive stirs fraud concerns
October 15, 2004
By Jerry Seper and Donald Lambro
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20041015-121325-3896r.htm
A coalition of liberal groups committed to defeating President Bush has spent more than $100 million orchestrating the largest voter-registration drive in U.S. history, raising concerns of widespread voter fraud in 14 battleground states.
At the same time, Democratic Party officials are gearing up to challenge unfavorable Election Day results in a number of states through "pre-emptive strikes," charging that Republicans prevented minorities from voting even before any such incidents are confirmed.
Working under the banner "America Votes," the 32-member coalition - led by the anti-Bush America Coming Together (ACT), the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and MoveOn.org - has played a key role in what election officials have called a massive increase in registered voters nationwide.
In the past several months, coalition members have flooded minority neighborhoods in an extensive door-to-door voter-registration drive, using bar-coded sheets to identify undecided and potential Democratic voters in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Wisconsin.
Colorado Gov. Bill Owens this week accused the groups of trying to undermine the election process and demanded an investigation by his state attorney of hundreds of questionable voter-registration applications.
"I am very concerned that such groups have registered people who are not qualified to vote," said Mr. Owens, a Republican.
Democrats quickly blasted Mr. Owens, insisting that he was trying to scare people away from the polls.
"This is the classic move by Republican tacticians: create an environment of fear that discourages voters from showing up on Election Day, for this is the only way they know how to win," said Susan Casey, state director of Sen. John Kerry's presidential campaign.
She said Republicans were panicked over polls showing Mr. Kerry in a virtual tie with President Bush. Studies have shown that high voter turnout tends to favor Democrats.
According to a 66-page Democratic National Committee (DNC) manual, first disclosed yesterday on the Drudge Report, Democrats already are planning to challenge election results.
"If no signs of intimidation have emerged yet, launch a pre-emptive strike," the manual said.
The manual, dated November 2004, also said Democrats should rely on party officials, minority organizations and civil rights leaders to denounce Republican tactics to discourage people from voting. It also said Democratic Party officials should assist in placing stories in the press by providing "talking points."
Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Ed Gillespie said the manual "proves the Kerry campaign and the DNC are more interested in scaring minority voters than in working to reach out to them on Election Day, even if it means completely making things up.
"Republicans have worked hard to reach out and bring the president's message of hope and optimism to all Americans, including minority voters around the country," Mr. Gillespie said. "John Kerry sees these efforts, is concerned by them and is now working to scare those voters with lies and wholesale fabrications."
Texas Railroad Commissioner Michael Williams, a black Republican and prominent speaker during the Republican National Convention in New York, denounced the manual as "truly outrageous, careless and shameful."
"For some time now, Democratic operatives have been suggesting that Republicans would engage in voter intimidation. The allegation is not new, but very untrue," Mr. Williams said. "As I look at this 66-page guide, it says, 'If no signs of intimidation occur, launch a pre-emptive strike.'
"What that means is if there is no evidence, and I don't expect there will be, just make it up and talk about it anyway," he said. "The problem is John Kerry hasn't connected with African-American voters, and he's trying to gin up his base. He should talk about what's important instead of scaring the voters."
Democratic spokesman Jano Cabrera, responding to reports of the DNC's aggressive Election Day battle plan, said, "We make no apologies for fighting these tactics by exposing the dirty tricks when they happen and helping educate local officials and activists about past Republican tactics so they can prevent them from occurring this year."
A Democratic Party official, who also confirmed the manual's existence, denied that it suggests Democrats make up stories about Republican intimidation of would-be voters. The official, who asked not to be named, said it explains how to spot voter intimidation before and on Election Day, how to combat it if it is occurring and what to do if it is not, "but you suspect it will."
The official also acknowledged that the manual suggests a pre-emptive strike if no signs of intimidation can be shown, but said that section related to states in which intimidation tactics had been a problem in the past.
Several Democratic activist organizations were sending out statements yesterday that detailed instances of what they said were attempts to prevent minorities from voting, but officials of these groups said they were not doing so as a result of the DNC's initiative.
In Arizona, for example, Debbie Lopez, state director of the Arizona Project Vote, sent out a three-page release warning of what she described as potentially intimidating practices at polling places.
"We have heard that there may be an organized effort of individuals that are encouraged to work polls wearing their sidearms asking all brown voters in the southern border counties for identification as they are waiting to vote," Ms. Lopez said, adding that she expects to have 700 volunteers across the state on Election Day passing out information to minority voters to apprise them of their rights.
In Pennsylvania, the administration of Gov. Edward G. Rendell, a Democrat, plans to put state workers at county election offices on Nov. 2, including one lawyer per office, to watch for any problems, raising suspicions among Republican leaders.
The 14 battleground states can deliver 145 Electoral College votes, with 270 needed to win. Voter registration totals in all 14 states are up significantly, according to election officials, who said more than twice as many new voters have been registered in some states compared with 2000 totals.
But the rush to register has not been without problems or challenges.
Many think that voter-registration fraud, particularly in the battleground states, has been rampant, with those looking to sign up huge numbers of new voters neglecting to obtain correct information or falsifying documents with bogus names, addresses and Social Security numbers.
Authorities in several states are investigating whether thousands of voter registrations have been fraudulently submitted, many by members of the America Votes coalition.
In Florida, for example, the Justice Department is working with state authorities to determine whether voter-registration applications filled out by Republicans and taken by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a coalition member, purposely were not submitted to state election officials as part of a Democrats-only voter-registration drive.
Mac Stuart, a former ACORN field director, told investigators that workers for the organization routinely withheld Republican voter registrations, while "thousands of invalid voter-registration cards" were submitted in their place. He said he was ordered by ACORN officials to generate 103,000 voter registrations from Dade County.
ACORN has said it has registered 1 million new voters since July 2003, adding that its members and staff knocked on the doors of hundreds of thousands of low-income and working families and contacted potential voters at shopping centers, grocery stores, street festivals, sporting events, naturalization ceremonies and hip-hop concerts.
It said it registered 187,510 voters in Florida, 158,036 in Ohio and 120,862 in Pennsylvania.
In Colorado, Mr. Owens demanded an investigation this week into accusations of widespread fraud after his secretary of state, Donetta Davidson, complained that state officials had not done enough to pursue suspected offenders.
Mrs. Davidson said her office had questionable registration applications from county clerks since April, including forms with suspected forged signatures and others with similar signatures, but only one person had been charged and no other investigations were under way.
Jim Fleischmann, ACORN's western regional director, said the group was cooperating with Colorado authorities to track down several hundred fraudulent applications collected by his organization, but he downplayed the severity of the problem. He described registration fraud as different than voter fraud, adding, "Just because you register someone 35 times doesn't mean they get to vote 35 times."
In Ohio yesterday, U.S. District Judge James Carr overruled Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell and ordered that voters who show up at the wrong polling place on Election Day still can cast ballots as long as they are in the county where they are registered.
Meanwhile, two senior Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday asked for a Justice Department investigation into accusations that "hundreds or even thousands" of voter-registration forms submitted by Democrats in Nevada and Oregon were destroyed by a company under contract to the RNC.
Sens. Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont and Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts charged in a letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft that the forms were destroyed by Voters Outreach of America, a private company owned by Nathan Sproul, former head of the Arizona Republican Party.
They said the company also has run registration drives in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, Minnesota, West Virginia and Florida, "leading to fears that similar illegal activity may be occurring or may already have occurred in those states."
Justice Department officials said they would look into the matter.
The Government Accountability Office, Congress' independent investigative arm, yesterday released a 106-page report that said the Justice Department has not established procedures for documenting voting irregularities or voter intimidation and has no clear-cut policy for responding to such accusations.
Other members of the America Votes coalition include the American Federation of Teachers, Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, Democracy for America, Emily's List, Moving America Forward, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People National Voter Fund, NARAL/Pro-Choice America, National Education Association, Partnership for America's Families, People for the American Way, Planned Parenthood Action Fund and the Sierra Club.
Media Fund and ACT have raised $60 million in anti-Bush dollars. SEIU and AFSCME put up $30 million to defeat Mr. Bush. Moveon.org used a $10 million donation from billionaire financier George Soros to attack the president.
• Valerie Richardson contributed to this article, which is based in part on wire service reports.
-------- investigations
Rove testifies before grand jury in CIA leak probe
10/15/2004
Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-10-15-rove_x.htm
WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush's top political adviser, Karl Rove, testified Friday before a federal grand jury trying to determine who leaked the name of an undercover CIA officer.
Rove spent more than two hours testifying before the panel, according to an administration official who spoke only on condition of anonymity because such proceedings are secret.
Before testifying, Rove was interviewed at least once by investigators probing the leak. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell also have been interviewed, though none has appeared before the grand jury.
White House spokesman Trent Duffy referred questions to the Justice Department.
The special prosecutor in the case, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald of Chicago, declined comment through a spokesman.
The investigation concerns whether a crime was committed when someone leaked the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame, whose name was published by syndicated columnist Robert Novak on July 14, 2003.
Disclosure of the identity of an undercover intelligence officer can be a federal crime if prosecutors can show the leak was intentional and the leaker knew about the officer's secret status.
Novak's column appeared after Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, wrote a newspaper opinion article criticizing Bush's claim that Iraq had sought uranium in Niger - a claim the CIA had asked Wilson to check out. Wilson has said he believes his wife's name was leaked as retribution.
In a widely quoted remark, Wilson said after a speech in 2003 that it might be "fun to see Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs." Wilson has accused Rove of spreading word of the Novak column to reporters.
Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry's campaign was quick to pounce on news of Rove's appearance, with senior adviser Joe Lockhart issuing a statement calling on Rove and other aides to "come clean about their role in this insidious act."
"If the president sincerely wanted to get to the bottom of this potential crime, he'd stop the White House foot-dragging and fully cooperate with this investigation," Lockhart said.
Bush and his top advisers have repeatedly said they are cooperating in the probe, which began more than a year ago.
Judith Miller of The New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine have been held in contempt by a federal judge for refusing to testify before the grand jury about sources they talked to while following up on Novak's column. Both are appealing those rulings.
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Sept. 11 Panel's Chief Wants Help From Bush
October 15, 2004
By PHILIP SHENON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/15/politics/campaign/15panel.html
WASHINGTON, Oct. 14 - The chairman of the independent Sept. 11 commission called on President Bush on Thursday to become personally involved in pressuring Congress to overhaul the nation's intelligence community, warning that the legislation recommended by the panel might die in Congress without Mr. Bush's intervention before the election next month.
"I'm very worried," said the chairman, Thomas H. Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey. "I think it's a 50-50 situation now. We've come a long way; we're right up to the finish line. But we have some powerful adversaries."
"I would certainly urge the president to do everything in his power to get a final bill to his desk before the election," Mr. Kean said in a telephone interview, a week after the House and Senate produced sharply different versions of a bill to enact the commission's major recommendations, including creation of the job of national intelligence director.
"I would hope that he would urge his friends in Congress to act," Mr. Kean said of the president. "I will reach out to the White House to urge them to do everything they can."
The Republican author of the Senate bill, Senator Susan Collins of Maine, also called for Mr. Bush to become involved in the Congressional negotiations, even if that meant taking time off the campaign trail. "It would be very helpful for the president to be involved, even though I realize this is an extraordinarily busy period for him," Ms. Collins said. It would be difficult for the White House to ignore requests from Mr. Kean and Ms. Collins, especially since they come in the final days of a campaign in which Mr. Bush is seeking re-election in part on his record in reorganizing the government to prevent terrorist attacks. Mr. Bush has endorsed the commission's major recommendations, including the new intelligence director.
A White House spokeswoman, Erin Healy, did not answer directly when asked if Mr. Bush would consider becoming personally involved in the negotiations. "My response would be that we continue to work with the House and Senate leaders," Ms. Healy said. "The president is very committed to intelligence reform."
Mr. Kean also called on a newly created House-Senate conference committee to abandon law-enforcement and immigration provisions that were placed in the House version by the Republicans and were not among the commission's recommendations. The provisions, which would strengthen the government's surveillance and deportation powers, have been opposed by Democrats in Congress and civil liberties groups.
"We're not for or against them, because we did not consider them," Mr. Kean said of the provisions. "But if they are controversial, they can impede the progress of the bill. We'd like to see them moved to a separate piece of legislation."
The conference committee is expected to begin work in earnest next week to draw up a compromise bill.
Mr. Kean, who is the president of Drew University in Madison, N.J., said he and other members of the commission hoped that a compromise bill would resemble the bipartisan Senate measure passed last week by a vote of 96 to 2. It granted more budget and personnel authority to the national intelligence director than did its House counterpart.
"The Senate bill is obviously a good bill," Mr. Kean said. "The House bill has some good things in it, but it doesn't have a strong national intelligence director. We think the national intelligence director has got to have full budget and personnel authority to do the job. And that is much clearer in the Senate bill than in the House bill."
Mr. Kean said he and other members of the commission were disappointed that Congress had not yet accepted another of their panel's central recommendations, an overhaul of the way the Senate and House conduct intelligence oversight. Last week the Senate voted down a proposal that would have provided the Senate Intelligence Committee with the appropriation powers needed to distribute the billions of dollars spent each year by intelligence agencies, a proposal made by the commission to strengthen the power of the Intelligence Committee. The House has not voted on any substantive reform of its intelligence oversight.
The White House and Congress are also under pressure from family members of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks, who have fanned out to demand passage of a bill to enact the findings of the Sept. 11 commission.
Family members said that they had a disappointing meeting on Thursday with Alberto R. Gonzales, Mr. Bush's White House counsel, and that Mr. Gonzales had suggested there might be no final bill before the election.
"We're getting very mixed signals from the White House," said Beverly Eckert, who attended the White House meeting; her husband died in the World Trade Center.
Ms. Healy, the White House spokeswoman, disputed the description of the meeting, saying Mr. Gonzales had "reiterated the president's position that he wants to see this legislation adopted as soon as possible."
A spokesman for Speaker J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois said that while House Republicans were open to negotiations with the Senate over a final bill, Mr. Hastert continued to believe that the House version passed last week "captured the spirit of the recommendations" of the Sept. 11 commission.
The spokesman, John Feehery, said that while some Democrats and civil liberties groups had criticized law-enforcement provisions inserted into the House bill, all of the provisions would "make the country safer."
"We probably need some further definition of what's considered controversial and not controversial," Mr. Feehery said.
-------- propaganda wars
Analysis Bush's Cartoon of Kerry Failed to Show Up
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 15, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A33567-2004Oct14.html
After the three debates in the past fortnight salvaged John F. Kerry's presidential candidacy, it has become clear to tacticians in both parties that the Democrat, to borrow President Bush's famous phrase from the 2000 campaign, was misunderestimated.
The Bush team's ferocious advertising push in the spring and summer and the Republican convention were successful at defining Kerry as a vacillating opportunist who has no coherent policy on Iraq and is spineless on terrorism. But the strategy may have worked too well, pollsters and operatives say: By turning Kerry into a cartoon, the Bush campaign created such low expectations for the senator that he easily exceeded them in the debates.
"Leading up to the first debate, the Bush campaign very effectively defined John Kerry as a wishy-washy flip-flopper who never knew where he stood, and then they get on the stage and here's a John Kerry who differs from the perception," said Tony Fabrizio, a Republican pollster.
Marshall Wittmann, a former aide to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) now with the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, said Bush had gone "over the top" in making Kerry seem ridiculous.
"It was a case of taking a caricature to such an extent and not realizing the caricature could be disassembled by the candidate himself in the debates," he said. "You would have expected a hybrid of Jane Fonda and Ted Kennedy would walk on stage. . . . People expected to see a left-wing, beaded radical."
Instead, viewers saw a Kerry who, if not dazzling and likable, was generally coherent and at times even forceful. And voters seemed pleasantly surprised. In the Washington Post tracking poll, the number of respondents viewing Kerry favorably jumped 12 percentage points between early September and this week; voters by 48 percent to 43 percent now view Kerry favorably, putting him in the same area as Bush, who is viewed favorably by 49 percent and unfavorably by 46 percent.
The number of people who think Kerry has taken a "clear stand" on the issues, although still low at 37 percent, is up 10 percentage points in less than three weeks.
The overnight change in perceptions of Kerry has reshaped the presidential race; the two candidates are in a dead heat, according to the poll, erasing a nine-point advantage Bush had in early September and also a perception that the race was all but over for the challenger.
Kerry surged even though Americans still do not perceive him as strong and decisive, indicating that even holding his own against Bush was enough to jog voters' views of him.
"People thought he was a candidate who couldn't put one foot in front of the other and didn't have a clear point of view," said pollster Andrew Kohut, who directs the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. "He stood up there calmly and decisively and had a lot of facts."
Kohut said part of the change in perception came from voter discontent with events in Iraq and with the economy, but he said Kerry also benefited from low expectations of him set by Bush's campaign. "Their success in defining Kerry negatively was ultimately undercut . . . by Kerry's performance," he said.
It is no small irony that Bush finds himself on the losing end of the expectations game. Ever since he started his first presidential campaign in 1999 by dubbing his airplane "Great Expectations," he and his aides have skillfully managed public expectations so that the proverbial "bar" was set at a lower height for Bush than for his opponent.
This was most effective during the 2000 debates with Al Gore, in which Gore was expected to trounce Bush but came across as overbearing while Bush seemed comfortable and self-assured. "They misunderestimated me," a pleased Bush famously said at the end of the campaign.
Bush's loss of control over expectations may not be fatal; with 18 days to go, the race appears close enough that neither man has reason for confidence in the outcome. And it is far from clear that the Bush campaign made a mistake in the way it defined Kerry over the summer.
With impressions of Bush already firmly set at the start of the campaign, the incumbent's best hope was in tarnishing his opponent's image.
Indeed, Fabrizio said Bush's mistake was switching in recent days away from portraying Kerry as a flip-flopper and toward describing him as a devoted liberal. "If you're going to take the wood to the guy, take the wood to the guy," Fabrizio said.
By moving away from the "flip-flop" theme, he said, Bush allowed Kerry to redefine himself in the debates. "People believe what they see with their eyes, even if they know it's a sleight of hand," Fabrizio said. "That's why people like magic shows."
Kerry strategist Tad Devine disputes that Kerry was using smoke and mirrors to reposition himself as a centrist with clear and consistent views.
But he agrees that Bush, by turning Kerry into a cartoon, inadvertently helped him defy perceptions.
"The relentlessly negative advertising created a caricature that was not true," Devine said. "When John Kerry showed up and had the presence of a president, it completely undercut $100 million of advertising."
That seems true for now, although Bush still has time to rebuild voters' doubts about Kerry. Asked aboard Air Force One about whether Kerry helped his chances in the debates, the president deflected the question and counseled patience. "The voters will decide that," he said. "That's the great thing about a campaign. All the speculation ends on Election Day."
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Va.-Based, U.S.-Financed Arabic Channel Finds Its Voice
By Ellen McCarthy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 15, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A33564-2004Oct14?language=printer
When a U.S. military helicopter swooped into Baghdad and began spraying bullets into a crowd of civilians believed to be looting an Army armored vehicle, most Arab news channels aired a video of the scene that captured the last words of a journalist killed in the attack.
"Please help me. I am dying," pleaded the reporter, Mazin Tumaisi. His network, al-Arabiya, showed the footage again and again, as did al-Jazeera.
Alhurra TV, however, deemed the video too disturbing to air. The story could be told without such graphic images, news directors for the new U.S. government-funded network concluded.
Editors at U.S. news channels routinely decide that some images are too graphic to air. But to critics and competitors of Alhurra, its decision was evidence that the young network airs U.S. propaganda. "It is very questionable for them not to show it," said Hafez al-Mirazi, Washington bureau chief of al-Jazeera, the Arabic news channel based in Qatar.
Alhurra, a network with 150 reporters based in Springfield, is the U.S. government's largest and most expensive effort to sway foreign opinion over the airwaves since the creation of Voice of America in 1942.
The 24-hour channel, which started operating in February, airs two daily hour-long newscasts, and sports, cooking, fashion, technology and entertainment programs, including a version of "Inside the Actors Studio" dubbed in Arabic. It also carries political talk shows and magazine-type news programs, including one about the U.S. presidential election.
Its programs are produced in a two-story building that once housed local NewsChannel 8. It is staffed by a handful of journalists recruited from Arabic stations and newspapers and dozens of employees scurrying around in jeans and running shoes or kitten heels. A mixture of Arabic and English fills the newsroom as journalists answer phones and click away on their computers.
Congress last year approved $62 million to pay for Alhurra's first year. In November 2003, Congress committed $40 million more to launch a sister station in April aimed solely at Iraq. The operation is overseen by the Broadcasting Board of Governors, an independent federal agency that is also in charge of Voice of America. The U.S. government launched Alhurra after deciding that existing Arab news channels displayed anti-American bias. The aim is to promote a more positive U.S. image to Arabs.
Khalid Disher, 24, who owns a shop in the Mansoor neighborhood of Baghdad, likes Alhurra. "Their news covers everything, the good news and the bad ones. They cover all of Iraq. As a new channel, it is a very good start."
Others are suspicious. "I know that this channel is funded by the U.S. Congress," said Atheer Abdul-Sattar, 24, who owns a sports-equipment store in Mansoor. "The Americans want their interests to be achieved. They will direct the kind of shows or ideas they want the Iraqis to believe."
Mouafac Harb, Alhurra's news director, bristles at that notion. "We're state-funded, but not state-run," Harb said. "I don't recall getting a phone call from someone trying to steer the news. Ever."
Alhurra may have a problem standing out in a crowded field. Middle East viewers generally get about 120 satellite-television channels, including al-Jazeera, Dubai-based al-Arabiya, London-based Arabic News Network and state-run operations.
William A. Rugh, a former ambassador to United Arab Emirates and Yemen who wrote a book on Arabic media, said Alhurra has "been a big waste of money" so far, in part because it must compete in a saturated field of Arabic networks.
The moving force behind the birth of Alhurra, which means "the Free One" in Arabic, was Norman Pattiz, the California radio executive who created Westwood One Inc., the nation's largest radio network. Pattiz was appointed in November 2000 by President Bill Clinton to the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees federally funded international media efforts such as the Voice of America and Radio and TV Marti, which is aimed at Cuba. Pattiz quickly focused his attention on the Middle East, and, he said, he soon concluded that newscasts on Middle East stations often offered "incitements of violence, hate-speak and disinformation."
In 2002, the broadcasting board launched Radio Sawa, a radio station that mixes American and Arabic pop music with five hours of daily news programming. Meanwhile, Pattiz, armed with a video of scenes of Arab citizens stomping on American flags and burning an image of President Bush, lobbied Congress to fund a TV station.
"These are the kinds of visions of America that people in the Middle East see every day," Pattiz said, recalling his sales pitch.
Pattiz helped hire Harb as news director of Radio Sawa. Harb, a Lebanon-born U.S. citizen, attended George Washington University and had been working as the Washington bureau chief of the Arabic-language newspaper Al Hayat. After Congress approved funding for Alhurra, which had strong backing from the Bush administration, Harb became Alhurra's news director as well.
Alhurra and Alhurra Iraq are owned by a nonprofit corporation, the Middle East Television Network Inc., which was set up as a holding company for the Arabic television stations.
Harb said editorial decisions rest with him, but that he reports to the Broadcasting Board of Governors and Bert Kleinman, president of the Middle East Television Network, which oversees the station's finances. Alhurra does not air commercials or generate any revenue and thus is dependent on the U.S. government for its money.
Alhurra spent $20 million to buy broadcast equipment and technology and to renovate the studio. The rest of the money went for operating costs and salaries, which network representatives say are in line with the U.S. government's pay scale. Next year's budget for the one radio and two television stations is expected to total $52 million.
Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.), the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wants to expand the effort. He has introduced a bill calling for similar broadcasts in Farsi, Kurdish and Uzbek, among other languages. The expansion would require $222 million in start-up funding, plus a $345 million annual budget on top of Voice of America's budget of $570 million for 2005.
Eighty of Alhurra's 150 journalists moved here from Lebanon, Egypt, Morocco, Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries. Fifty remained abroad to work in the network's bureaus in Amman, Baghdad, Beirut and Dubai.
Harb said most of the journalists were initially skeptical but agreed to join for the opportunity to try something new.
"Journalism is difficult in Lebanon. It's difficult to say everything you want to say," said Larissa Aoun, who previously worked for a state-run station in Beirut. "I was really looking for an opportunity where I could be more open."
Alhurra had a bumpy start. When the channel was launched in February, government officials in some countries condemned it. A cleric in Saudi Arabia issued a fatwa, or religious decree, against watching the channel, writing in Al Hayat that Alhurra was staffed by "agents in the pay of America."
In Alhurra's first days, there were many technical problems. And when President Bush appeared on the station to discuss the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, he ended the interview by telling Harb he'd done a "good job," prompting more questions about the station's independence.
Harb said he wishes that Bush had not made that comment, but that he also believes the incident was misconstrued. "I don't believe I was soft on the president," he said.
In March, when Israeli missiles killed Hamas leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin as he emerged from a prayer session, most Arab news channels switched immediately to the story. Alhurra stuck with its regular program, a cooking show.
Detractors pounced on that. "Whatever the reason, Al-Hurra's not pursuing the story in real time will be interpreted by many Arabs as politically motivated," wrote an opinion editor at the Daily Star newspaper in Beirut.
Harb agreed that it was a mistake. "This happened very early in the life of Alhurra. . . . When they assassinated the next leader of Hamas, we were more ready to give more comprehensive coverage by then," he said.
Harb does not, however, think that Alhurra was wrong when it decided not to show the video of the dying al-Arabiya journalist.
In U.S. media, "the idea of publishing graphic images is shied away from, frowned upon universally," said Keith Woods, who teaches journalism at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla. "Everybody has a sense of a line that you don't cross without good reason."
Imad Musa, 34, was working in al-Jazeera's Washington bureau before he joined Alhurra as a producer. Musa, an American who is the son of Palestinian immigrants, liked the idea of shaping a new channel. He said he received assurances of journalistic freedom before taking the job and has not felt pressure to slant a story.
There are, he acknowledged, differences between the policies of his current and former employer. Alhurra's reporters are told not to refer to the U.S. presence in Iraq as an occupation. Those who set off explosive devices attached to their bodies are called suicide bombers, not martyrs.
And in Iraq, Alhurra reporters "focus on more human-interest and positive stories. For instance, 'electricity has arrived in this neighborhood,' not 'this neighborhood still doesn't have electricity'," Musa said.
Musa also has to deal with the fact that some Arab politicians refuse to appear on his channels or are criticized for appearing. One member of the Jordanian parliament who agreed to be on Alhurra in August was criticized for appearing opposite an Israeli.
Overall, however, Musa said news judgment at Alhurra is not very different from that of al-Jazeera. Last month, on the day Musa was being interviewed, al-Jazeera began its 5 p.m. newscast with video of violence in Najaf that was almost identical to the scene Musa picked to lead his program.
The Alhurra program's two anchors were positioned in front of a blue map of the Middle East in the Springfield studio. During that day's broadcast, one of al-Jazeera's female anchors wore a head scarf. Alhurra's anchors were dressed in modern business attire. Both stations used a classical form of Arabic in presenting the news. But unlike al-Jazeera, Alhurra didn't sign off with the traditional Islamic greeting assalamu alaikum, or "peace be upon you."
Alhurra is transmitted to the Middle East on two satellites, Nilesat and Arabsat. Viewers in Iraq can also get the network over broadcast television. The network is available to 70 million satellite television viewers in 22 countries. There are few reliable statistics on how many people watch it regularly. One survey conducted for the network by ACNielsen found that 29 percent of Jordanians and 24 percent of Saudi Arabians with satellite-TV receivers tuned in during a seven-day period in July and August. But a Zogby poll of six Middle East countries done in May for the University of Maryland found that Alhurra barely registered as a primary source of news.
"There is a psychological barrier, and this . . . affects people's perceptions in dealing with things coming from across the Atlantic," said Badran A. Badran, a professor of media and communications at Zayed University in Dubai. "The U.S. is viewed in a negative light."
Some Middle East experts assert that the very assumption under which Alhurra was created -- that existing Arab news stations contribute to disdain for the United States -- is flawed. "The managers of Alhurra have stigmatized the competition and stereotyped it as being totally anti-American, and that's simply not true," said Rugh, the former ambassador.
Rather than compete in an already crowded field, Rugh said U.S. policymakers should appear more on al-Jazeera and other widely watched channels. More than 400 Voice of America staff members signed a petition sent to Congress in July charging that Alhurra and Sawa were draining VOA's budgets and not being held to the same editorial standards.
A draft of a report by the State Department's inspector general, obtained by The Washington Post, said Radio Sawa is failing to meet its mandate to promote pro-American attitudes because it is preoccupied with building an audience through music -- an assertion disputed by the Broadcasting Board of Governors. The State Department said it is revising the report.
Some legislators have said that if Alhurra is not promoting U.S. views, the government should not be funding it. "Do not tell us it's not propaganda, because if it's not propaganda, then I think . . . we will have to look at what it is we are doing," Rep. José E. Serrano (D-N.Y.) said at a hearing in April.
Harb countered that fair news is what will promote democracy. "Our track record will speak for itself," he said.
Staff writer Jackie Spinner and special correspondent Omar Fekeiki contributed to this report from Baghdad.
-------- us politics
Voting Rights Machinery Doubted
GAO Says Justice Is Unprepared for a Flood of Complaints
By Jo Becker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 15, 2004; Page A07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A33573-2004Oct14.html
The Justice Department is ill prepared to handle a large influx of complaints about voting rights violations in the Nov. 2 presidential election, according to a report released yesterday by the Government Accountability Office.
Campaign experts predict that the department's voting rights section will be flooded with calls and complaints about poll access and other irregularities in the face of a close race between President Bush and Democrat John F. Kerry and uncertainty over the effects of changes in election law and procedures. Some fear a repeat of the 2000 deadlock over the presidential election results in Florida.
The Justice Department "lacks a clear plan" to reliably document and track allegations in a manner that could allow monitors to swiftly pick up patterns of abuse and take corrective steps, according to the GAO, Congress's nonpartisan investigative arm.
"The reason it's so important to collect this information is to look for patterns in a particular county or in a particular polling place," said William O. Jenkins Jr., who prepared the report at the request of three Democratic lawmakers. "For instance, is it only Democrats or Republicans that seem to be having this problem? Were different voters told different things?"
The Justice Department said it has put in place better reporting and tracking mechanisms since the GAO report draft was completed in August and has devoted significant resources to ensuring that election reform laws passed since 2000 are followed.
"Additionally, as the GAO report points out, the Civil Rights Division, at the direction of the Assistant Attorney General, has worked with civil rights leaders, state and local election officials, and U.S. Attorneys' Offices prior to election day to help ensure that citizens' voting rights are protected," spokesman Eric Holland said in a prepared statement.
The report comes amid criticism by Democrats that the Justice Department is too focused on pursuing allegations of voter fraud and trumpeting terrorism concerns that could scare people away from the polls, at the expense of its mission to safeguard the right to vote.
The Justice Department said it plans to deploy 1,700 civil rights monitors to key states on Election Day. But with more than 200,000 polling places nationwide, the department will be able to cover only a fraction of the facilities.
In 2000, the report found, the department relied on contractors to handle a record number of call-in complaints. The contractors' logs were imprecise, the report found, and did not track complaints at all in four states: Arkansas, Kansas, Montana and North Dakota.
Democrats who requested the report blasted the department.
Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) said it was "inexcusable" that the "Justice Department does not have the systems in place that are necessary to respond to reports of voters being turned away from the polls on Election Day."
New voting rules cited in the report as potentially problematic vary from state to state and continue to change.
In Ohio, for instance, a federal court yesterday reversed a ruling by the secretary of state and said that "provisional ballots" must be counted regardless of whether they were cast in the correct precinct.
Provisional ballots must for the first time be given to people nationwide who show up at the polls and do not find their names on the rolls of registered voters. They will be counted if it can be determined after Election Day that the voter was in fact eligible. Other federal courts have ruled differently, and legal battles are ongoing in battleground states including Florida.
Meanwhile, new problems crop up daily. In Wisconsin, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, a co-chair of Kerry's state campaign, and Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker, a co-chair of Bush's state campaign, are wrangling over the number of ballots that election officials should make available in the city. Barrett wants more, saying the city could run out; Walker has said the request is excessive and poses potential problems of ballot security.
Staff writer Dan Eggen contributed to this report.
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European election observers to check battleground states
October 15, 2004
By Betsy Pisik
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041014-113908-8137r.htm
NEW YORK - The European body charged with ensuring fair and transparent elections in member countries has selected 60 monitors from 25 countries to observe the U.S. elections next month, concentrating on closely contested states.
The observers represent a broad range of political philosophies, from the far left to the far right. The group includes communists from France and Russia, a Turkish women's rights advocate and a counterterrorism expert from Belgium.
Dispatched by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the group will visit a half-dozen states starting Oct. 30 to observe the final days of campaigning, voter registration and the vote-counting.
The observers, mostly sitting and former parliamentarians from across Europe and parts of the former Soviet Union, are to be deployed to polling places in Florida, Minnesota, Missouri, New Mexico, North Carolina and Ohio, as well as the D.C. region.
"As you may know, the election system in the [United States] is decentralized and, therefore, in order to get a balanced picture of the elections, we need to deploy to as many states as we can within limits of resources and logistical capabilities," delegation chief Barbara Haering, a member of the Swiss parliament, wrote in a letter to the observers.
"I realize there is a lot of interest among members to observe elections in Florida, but please bear in mind that we need a balanced picture and that we cannot all go to the same state," she wrote in an Oct. 12 letter provided to The Washington Times.
Ms. Haering, the vice president of the OSCE's Parliamentary Assembly, has made at least two trips to the United States to prepare for the four-day monitoring mission, and even traveled to St. Louis to watch the first presidential debate on Sept. 30.
This is not the first time the OSCE has monitored U.S. elections. Small missions were dispatched in 1998, 2000 and 2002 and to the California gubernatorial recall election last year. In 2000 and 2002, observers mostly focused on how various voting methods performed.
Those visits attracted little attention, but this year, in light of problems with voting machines in many states and lingering concerns about the Florida results in 2000, the presence of foreign election monitors has troubled some politicians. Some, such as Rep. Ron Paul, Texas Republican, see their presence as undermining U.S. sovereignty.
The State Department reluctantly extended an invitation to the OSCE this summer, after a dozen Democratic members of Congress requested observers from U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
The United Nations rebuffed that request on a technicality, but the State Department, which has sent hundreds of Americans to monitor foreign elections in other countries, did tender an invitation to the OSCE.
The observers will travel at the expense of their own governments. The administrative costs of the mission are covered by the OSCE general fund, which assesses Washington 9 percent of its budget.
A preliminary assessment of their findings will be made public a day or two after the elections, with a formal report to follow in about a month.
During a September visit, the OSCE raised concerns that presidential-election results could be delayed again by "vulnerabilities" in the system, such as variations in voting methods between and within states. The advance party also expressed concerns of voter intimidation and that legitimate voters may have been stricken from voting lists along with felons.
Members of the delegation include:
•Leonid Ivanchenko, a former member of the Russian Communist Party, who was expelled from the Russian Duma in September, along with two colleagues, for founding a rival communist political party.
•Jean-Claude Lefort, a member of the French National Assembly and an official of France's Communist Party, who has traveled to Cuba and fought to win legal recognition for French veterans of the Spanish Civil War.
•Belgian senator Hugo Coveliers, an expert in criminology, organized crime and terrorism, who in 2002 tried to resist draft legislation outlawing arms sales to nations such as the United States that do not join the International Criminal Court.
•Swedish member of parliament Carina Hagg, who was sued in 2000 by the Church of Scientology for trying to donate internal church documents to a public library.
•Norwegian parliament member Kjell Engebretsen, who was visiting the southern Sudanese town Yei just before Christmas 1999 when government forces bombed a Norwegian hospital there. No one in the delegation was injured, although three Sudanese were killed.
-------- OTHER
-------- environment
Male Bass in Potomac Producing Eggs
Pollution Suspected Cause of Anomaly in River's South Branch
By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 15, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A33850-2004Oct14?language=printer
MOOREFIELD, W.Va. -- The South Branch of the Potomac River is as clear as bottled water here, where it rolls over a bed of smooth stones about 230 miles upstream from Washington. But there is a mystery beneath this glassy surface.
Many of the river's male bass are producing eggs.
Scientists believe this inversion of nature is being caused by pollution in the water. But they say the exact culprit is still unknown: It might be chicken estrogen left over in poultry manure, or perhaps human hormones dumped in the river with processed sewage. Chances are, it is not something that federal and state inspectors regularly test for in local waters.
The discovery has made the South Branch the latest example of an emerging national problem: Hormones, drugs and other man-made pollutants appear to be interfering with the chemical signals that make fish grow and reproduce.
While researchers look for answers in West Virginia, other scientists are testing Rock Creek, and another group is seeking financial support to test the rest of the Potomac to see whether they can find the same troubling effects downstream.
"Whatever's doing this to the fish may be the canary in the mineshaft," said Margaret Janes, a West Virginia activist with the Appalachian Center for the Economy and the Environment.
Scientists say it's still too early to tell what these findings will mean for the bass population in the South Branch; they aren't sure whether the affected males are still able to reproduce. And no one is aware of any effects on human health in the Potomac watershed. But scientists believe that fish might be the first to absorb any dangerous chemicals that might later affect humans.
"They're likely to be hit first," said Mike Focazio, a researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey. "We look there, and it seems to be happening."
The situation in West Virginia was discovered by accident, when scientists from the state and the geological survey were called in to investigate reports that fish in the South Branch were developing lesions and dying en masse.
They dissected dozens of bass caught last summer, mainly smallmouth bass. They found no obvious cause for the lesions or deaths, but did discover that 42 percent of the male bass had developed eggs inside their sex organs.
The study surprised scientists. Though the South Branch has been cited for problems with bacteria from poultry manure, state officials said it did well on most aspects of water-quality testing.
"We always have, and still do, look at this as one of our highest-quality fisheries," said Patrick Campbell of the state Department of Environmental Protection. "It's counter-intuitive to think we would have this type of problem out there."
But the problem is there: A follow-up survey in the spring found even higher rates of "intersex" bass -- as the affected males are called. A study of 66 male smallmouths from the South Branch found that about 79 percent showed such symptoms, according to U.S. Geological Survey data.
The scientists are now analyzing water samples from the South Branch and the Cacapon River -- a nearby Potomac tributary where intersex bass were also found. The chemicals they're looking for now are not the well-known pollutants that the state already tests for, such as nitrogen and phosphorus from manure and metals from mine runoff.
Instead, the culprit is probably in a class called "emerging contaminants," which includes everything from caffeine and prescription drugs to hormones excreted by livestock or humans.
Some of these pollutants have been linked to developmental problems in wildlife. Scientists believe that fish, especially, absorb hormones from other animals, as well as other chemicals that their bodies mistake for hormones.
One recent study near sewage plants in Colorado found male fish whose bodies were trying to produce eggs and some females whose reproductive systems were out of sync. Other studies have found similar effects from the hormones in cow manure and from chemicals from a wood-pulp plant.
"It is certainly an alarming situation that we're seeing more and more gross effects," said David O. Norris, a professor who worked on the Colorado study.
These emerging contaminants were hard to detect without the finely tuned equipment developed recently. The first nationwide survey, conducted in 1999 and 2000, found hormones in about 37 percent of the streams surveyed and caffeine in more than half.
The only testing in the Potomac, done in Washington in 2002, found low levels of caffeine, plus the insecticide DEET and chemicals produced when a body breaks down nicotine. There were also a few suspected endocrine disruptors, including chemicals found in hand soap and household cleaners.
As of now, little is done to test for these chemicals -- either in river water or in drinking water. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has not set standards, saying more research is needed to determine which contaminants are harmful and what levels are unsafe.
West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland and the District do not test river water regularly for drugs or hormones. The same goes for drinking water after it is processed by the Washington Aqueduct, supplying the District, Arlington County and Falls Church, and the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission.
Still, the West Virginia study has spurred scientists to look for more information. Researchers at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are seeking money for a much larger study across the Potomac watershed. They want to look for intersex bass and potentially disruptive chemicals in sites including the Blue Plains sewage plant in Southwest Washington.
Another federal study is underway in Rock Creek, looking for intersex symptoms and other health problems in a species of fish called white suckers.
Scientists across the region stressed that their work is just beginning. "We really don't know what's going on," said Vicki S. Blazer, a researcher for the geological survey in West Virginia.
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Worldwide Report Says Amphibians Are in Peril
Ecological Stresses May Be Taking Toll
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 15, 2004; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A33569-2004Oct14.html
Amphibians are experiencing a precipitous decline across the globe, according to the first comprehensive world survey of the creatures, which include frogs, toads and salamanders. As many as 122 species have disappeared since 1980, and 1,900 are in danger of becoming extinct.
The rapid drop -- the equivalent of tens of thousands of years' worth of extinctions in just a century -- is being caused by a range of factors that include deforestation, pollution, habitat loss and climate change, researchers said. But they added that the phenomenon also tells a disturbing tale of broad environmental degradation that may ultimately threaten humans and other animals, as well. Amphibians are often considered "canaries in the coal mine" because their permeable skin makes them especially sensitive to environmental changes.
"This is the first group being affected by a death by a thousand cuts in the way that we as humans have been affecting the biosphere in the past 50 or hundred years," said Claude Gascon, a scientific adviser to the study who serves as vice president for regional programs at Conservation International, an environmental group. "It's entirely possible other groups of biodiversity may go down the drain."
The survey found that 32 percent of all amphibian species face extinction, compared with 12 percent of bird species and 23 percent of mammal species. The three-year $1.5 million study, which involved more than 500 scientists from more than 60 countries, is being published today in the journal Science.
Scientists began noticing the disappearance of amphibians in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but before this study they had never conducted a worldwide assessment of the frogs, toads, salamanders and legless caecilians, also called rubber eels.
"We've never documented anything like this for any other species. When species become rare and begin disappearing, we nearly always know why," said Simon Stuart, leader of the global assessment team. "This has taken the scientific world completely by surprise."
Amphibians are under assault for three major reasons, according to the report. Habitat decline -- including deforestation, water pollution and wetlands destruction -- threatens them because the animals live both on land and in water. Overharvesting of amphibians for food and medication is a second threat. The third is more enigmatic, but it has resulted in catastrophic declines, often linked to a fungal disease called chytridiomycosis, particularly in cooler habitats experiencing drought.
Surveys showed the amphibian population of Costa Rica's Monteverde Cloud Forest, for example, was stable until 1987. The next year it began to crash, and by 1989, 40 percent of its amphibian species had gone extinct, including the striking golden toad. Stuart said it is now widely believed that chytridiomycosis played a pivotal role in the devastation, which took place during a dry period.
More than 200 amphibian species are showing rapid and enigmatic declines, which is alarming, Stuart said, because they probably are linked to recent disruptions in rain and storm patterns. "This is a wake-up call to us that we don't have a grip on the massive climate change that's going on," he said.
Humans are responsible for amphibians' decline in other regions of the world, including China, where many are sought as a delicacy. The Chinese giant salamander -- at six feet the largest amphibian in the world -- sells for at least $300 on the street and makes for several meals, and it has now disappeared from nearly all its range.
In the United States, habitat destruction poses the biggest challenge. Developers and environmentalists are feuding in central California over the fate of the California tiger salamander, a striking black animal with yellow spots. Federal officials estimate the salamander has lost 75 percent of its habitat over time, becoming a casualty of urbanization and agricultural development. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decided in July to list the salamander as threatened and identified 383,000 acres of habitat as key to its survival.
Al Donner, an assistant field supervisor in Fish and Wildlife's Sacramento office, said federal officials are trying to "be sensitive to the interests of all affected parties" in the tiger salamander case, including developers, landowners and environmentalists, "while working to ensure the survival of the species."
Four years ago, the federal government launched a national program to research and monitor the state of amphibians in the United States, and it now devotes $4 million a year to identify threats to amphibians nationwide.
"We've had a leap in our understanding into the causes of amphibian decline," said Rick Kearney, national coordinator for the U.S. Geological Survey's amphibian research and monitoring initiative. "We recognize how there are connections between the decline in water quality [and availability] and amphibians. . . . Amphibians are a very important indicator of our environmental quality."
But Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford University ecologist, said the amphibian study is worrisome and shows that administration officials are "destroying the working supports of our life system" by exploiting rather than conserving habitat. "They're sawing off the limb that humanity is sitting on," Ehrlich said. "Without biodiversity, we'd be dead."
Gascon, at Conservation International, said: "There are some actions we can take today to prevent the immediate extinction of many species as we work on a longer-term solution." These include creating parks and ecological reserves, reducing emissions that contribute to climate change, and breeding animals in captivity to sustain vulnerable species.
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Amphibian Extinctions Sound Global Eco-alarm, Says Study
Reuters
By Ed Stoddard
October 15, 2004
http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=193
BANGKOK - They may thrive on land and in water, but amphibians everywhere are in serious trouble, and up to one-third of species are threatened with extinction, a troubling new study said on Friday.
Scientists say this is an ominous sign for other creatures, including humans, as amphibians are widely regarded as biological "canaries in the coal mine," since their permeable skin is highly sensitive to changes in the environment. In short, they go first, and others follow.
The first comprehensive survey of a grouping that includes frogs, toads, and salamanders, the Global Amphibian Assessment says that at least nine species have become extinct since 1980. It says 113 more have not been reported in the wild in recent years and are believed to have vanished. The full details will be published in a few weeks in the respected journal Science.
"Amphibians are one of nature's best indicators of overall environmental health," Conservation International President Russell Mittermeier said in a statement from the World Conservation Union (IUCN), one of the world's top environment bodies.
"Their catastrophic decline serves as a warning that we are in a period of significant environmental degradation," he said in the statement that coincided with the final day of a two-week meeting of signatories to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) in Bangkok.
After birds and mammals, amphibians are only the third broad group of animals to be surveyed on such a global scale. More than 500 scientists from more than 60 countries contributed to the report.
The three-year study analyzed the distribution and conservation status of all 5,743 known amphibian species. Scientists from Conservation International and the IUCN collaborated on the study.
Hopping to Extinction
In the Americas, the Caribbean, and Australia, a highly infectious fungal disease called chytridiomycosis is taking a big toll on amphibians.
Air and water pollution, habitat destruction, climate change, the introduction of invasive species, and consumer demand are the biggest global threats.
About one-third - at least 1,856 amphibian species or 32 percent of them all - are threatened with extinction. By comparison, only 12 percent of bird and 23 percent of mammal species are endangered.
The study also found that the populations of 43 percent of all amphibian species are in decline, while fewer than 1 percent are rising. It found that 27 percent are stable and the rest are not known.
"The fact that one-third of amphibians are in precipitous decline tells us that we are rapidly moving toward a potentially epidemic number of extinctions," said Achim Steiner, director-general of the IUCN.
The study adds to an alarming body of evidence that the planet is facing a sixth wave of "mass extinctions," the first since the dinosaurs perished 65 million years ago. But this round of die-offs is human-made.
The report also highlights the link between poverty and environmental degradation. Dirt-poor and conflict-ridden Haiti has the highest percentage of threatened amphibians, with 92 percent of its species facing extinction.
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Toxic Ghost Ships in Court Again
October 15, 2004
WASHINGTON, DC, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/oct2004/2004-10-15-09.asp#anchor5
An attorney for two conservation organizations told a federal judge today that the Bush administration's plans to export obsolete naval vessels from Virginia to England for scrapping violates U.S. and international laws that ban or regulate the export of toxics.
The so-called "ghost fleet" vessels contain tons of carcinogenic PCBs, asbestos, used fuel, oils and other toxic substances.
Toxic trade watchdog group Basel Action Network (BAN), Sierra Club, and their counsel Earthjustice, say that as a result of the legal pressure and public attention placed on this dubious export practice, more of the ghost fleet vessels are being released to domestic scrappers and no more plans for export have been openly discussed.
In October 2003, legal action by the conservation and public health groups prevented the export of nine of 13 of the ghost ships for disposal in England.
The court did allow four old ships to be towed across the Atlantic in the fall of 2003 and those vessels now lay moored in legal limbo in Teesside, England because the intended scrap yard, Able UK, is not permitted to handle toxic waste.
Judge Rosemary Collyer ordered that the remaining nine vessels in the contract remain in Virginia pending the court's final decision.
"The Bush administration's original plan to export these vessels overseas was a stealth attempt to undermine international law," said Jim Puckett of BAN. "First, a few of these vessels would be shunted off to the UK, thereby setting the legal precedent to open the floodgates for exports to China, India, or Bangladesh where workers are getting cancer and the scrapping is done on the cheap."
Under the Toxics Substances Control Act, it is illegal to export PCBs, without a special exemption granted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency after public hearings. Under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, and under a treaty between the United States and England, it is illegal to export hazardous wastes unless the proposed receiving facility is properly licensed and the receiving nation has consented. Under the National Environmental Policy Act, an environmental impact statement had to be prepared for the export scheme.
Today, the groups went back to court to ensure that the agency complies with all of these laws regarding the export of hazardous wastes.
"The plan to scrap U.S. vessels in England ignores the fact that American firms could do the job more safely," said Michael Town of the Sierra Club in Virginia. "Why didn't the Bush administration send this work to American ship breakers from the outset? We aren't sure, but hopefully the court will put an end to the administration's ill-conceived plan."
Since the court stopped the towing of the other nine vessels to England, the U.S. Maritime Administration (MARAD) has contracted with four American ship breakers to scrap these and about two dozen other high priority vessels.
MARAD administers the National Defense Reserve Fleet, which holds ships designated as being useful for defense. When the ships deteriorate, they are made available for disposal. There are approximately 110 obsolete vessels located in the three fleet sites of the National Defense Reserve Fleet; 60 of them are located in the James River Reserve Fleet in Newport News, Virginia.
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All Maryland Waters Polluted With Mercury
October 15, 2004
BALTIMORE, Maryland, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/oct2004/2004-10-15-09.asp#anchor7
Every river and lake in the state of Maryland had a fish consumption warning slapped on it by the state last year, according to a new report released today by the Maryland Public Interest Research Group, MaryPIRG.
The report, "Fishing for Trouble" analyzes 2003 state data on fish consumption advisories due to mercury contamination.
"MaryPIRG's analysis finds that mercury contamination is a danger at many of Maryland's favorite fishing spots," said Chris Fick, MaryPIRG's field organizer. "The health risk numbers are outrageous."
Nationwide, fish consumption advisories were issued covering more than 13.1 million acres of lakes and 767,000 miles of river.
MaryPIRG's report is timed to influence public opinion on the Bush administration's proposed cap and trade rule to deal with mercury emissions from power plants.
The plan allows facilities to buy mercury pollution credits from facilities located far away instead of reducing their own emissions, a practice that MaryPIRG believes will allow mercury to continue to pollute Maryland waterways.
Power plants are the nation's single largest source of mercury pollution, contributing 41 percent of U.S. mercury emissions.
MaryPIRG and other conservation groups maintain that if the Clean Air Act, as written, were enforced instead of substituting the cap and trade plan, the air would be cleaner and less mercury would be deposited in the waters of Maryland and other states where it is absorbed by fish.
MaryPIRG says the Bush proposal allows power plants to emit six times more mercury over the next decade than the Clean Air Act allows and would delay meaningful reductions until 2018, at the earliest.
"The technology is available to reduce power plant mercury emissions by at least 90 percent by 2008, as the law requires," the organization says.
Maryland officials are considering state level action. MaryPIRG called on Annapolis to take action, urging the passage of the "four pollutant" bill proposed by Delegate Jim Hubbard last year. The bill would reduce mercury emissions, as well as carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxide, emitted from the seven dirtiest power plants in Maryland.
The bill would require reduction of mercury pollution from these plants by 90 percent. MaryPIRG said the bill should be a priority for the General Assembly in the upcoming session.
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Mobile Phone Use Linked to Brain Tumors
October 15, 2004
STOCKHOLM, Sweden, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/oct2004/2004-10-15-03.asp
A study from the Institute of Environmental Medicine at Karolinska Institute, Sweden has found that 10 years or more of mobile phone use increases the risk of a benign tumor of a nerve in the brain. The tumors were found on the side of the head where the phone was usually held. No indication of an increased risk for less than 10 years of mobile phone use were found.
The increased risk of a tumor of the auditory nerve, called an acoustic neuroma, was found to be about four times higher on the side of the head where the phone was held, and virtually normal on the other side, the researchers said on Wednesday.
The study of 148 acoustic neuroma patients and 600 healthy people, included for comparison, was conducted by a team led by Dr. Maria Feychting and Professor Anders Ahlbom, professor of epidemiology and deputy director of the Institute of Environmental Medicine at Karolinska.
Professor Anders Ahlbom of the Institute of Environmental Medicine at Karolinska (Photo courtesy International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection) In his paper, Ahlbom reports that there may still be a risk from the short term use of cell phones. "We cannot exclude the possibility that short term exposure has an effect that can be detected only after a long latency period," he writes.
Approximately one in 100,000 people develop acoustic neuromas. This type of tumor grows slowly and accounts for less than 10 percent of all brain tumors. Because these tumors do not involve invasive growth, they are not classified as cancer.
Hand-held wireless phones with built-in antennas, known as mobile phones, or cell phones, emit low levels of radiofrequency energy in the microwave range while being used. The auditory nerve is exposed to radiation during the normal use of a cell phone.
"These are strong data," Ahlbom told "Microwave News," a monthly publication based in New York which covers the health effects of electromagnetic radiation. "Just how strong will be determined in the upcoming post-publication assessment."
It is possible that other types of brain tumors might result from mobile phone use, and more study is needed, Ahlbom said. "If acoustic neuromas are possible, then the argument that effects are biologically implausible does not apply, and we don't know what is possible."
The Karolinska Institute results are different from previous mobile phone studies, particularly a five year study undertaken in the 1990s by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in the United States.
From 1994 to 1998, Peter Inskip and Martha Linet, M.D. of NCIs Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics conducted a study of brain tumor risk among 782 people who had used hand-held cellular phones compared to 799 people who had not used them. The researchers looked at three tumor types - acoustic neuroma, glioma, and meningioma.
The Karolinska study found the risk of a brain tumor is four times greater on the side of the head where the cell phone is usually held. (Photo courtesy NASA SeaWiFS) "There was no evidence of increasing risk with increasing years of use or average minutes of use per day, nor did brain tumors among cellular phone users tend to occur more often than expected on the side of the head on which the person reported using their phone," the NCI scientists found. "Specifically, there was no indication of increased risk associated with use of a cell phone for one hour or more per day, for five or more years, or for cumulative use of more than 100 hours."
But Inskip and Linet did not rule out the possibility that tumors due to cell phone use could be found for use over periods of time longer than five years.
"If there is an increased risk of brain tumors due to use of cellular phones that only appears after five or more years, or only among very heavy users, it is probable that this study would have failed to detect it," they wrote.
The new Karolinska Institute study, which appears in the November issue of "Epidemiology," is part of the 13 nation Interphone study coordinated by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in Lyon, France, the World Health Organization's cancer research institute.
The multicenter, international case-control IARC study, involving about 3,000 cases and 3,000 controls, is the largest study of the relationship between mobile phone use and tumors underway anywhere in the world.
All the Interphone study teams, including Feychting and Ahlbom's, will report on the risk of the most common types of brain tumors such as astrocytomas and meningiomas.
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Platoon defies orders in Iraq
Miss. soldier calls home, cites safety concerns
October 15, 2004
By Jeremy Hudson
The (Jackson, Miss.) Clarion-Ledger
http://www.navytimes.com/print.php?f=1-292925-453911.php
A 17-member Army Reserve platoon with troops from Jackson, Miss., and around the Southeast deployed to Iraq is under arrest for refusing a "suicide mission" to deliver fuel, the troops' relatives said Thursday.
The soldiers refused an order on Wednesday to go to Taji, Iraq - north of Baghdad - because their vehicles were considered "deadlined" or extremely unsafe, said Patricia McCook of Jackson, wife of Sgt. Larry O. McCook.
Sgt. McCook, a deputy at the Hinds County, Miss., Detention Center, and the 16 other members of the 343rd Quartermaster Company from Rock Hill, S.C., were read their rights and moved from the military barracks into tents, Patricia McCook said her husband told her during a panicked phone call about 5 a.m. Thursday.
The platoon could be charged with the willful disobeying of orders, punishable by dishonorable discharge, forfeiture of pay and up to five years confinement, said military law expert Mark Stevens, an associate professor of justice studies at Wesleyan College in Rocky Mount, N.C.
On Friday, the Army confirmed that the unit's actions were under scrutiny. "The commanding general of the 13th Corps Support Command has appointed the Deputy Commander to lead an investigation into allegations that members of the 343rd Quartermaster Company refused to participate in their assigned convoy mission October 13," said Lt. Col Steven A. Boylan, a spokesman for U.S. Army and multinational forces in Iraq.
"The investigating team is currently in Tallil taking statements and interviewing those involved. This is an isolated incident and it is far too early in the investigation to speculate as to what happened, why it happened or any action that might be taken," Boylan said.
"It is important to note that the mission in question was carried out using other soldiers from the unit," Boylan said.
Boylan also confirmed that the unit is stationed in Tallil, a logistical support air base south of Nasiriyah.
Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said he plans to submit a congressional inquiry today on behalf of the Mississippi soldiers to launch an investigation into whether they are being treated improperly.
"I would not want any member of the military to be put in a dangerous situation ill-equipped," said Thompson, who was contacted by families. "I have had similar complaints from military families about vehicles that weren't armor-plated, or bullet-proof vests that are outdated. It concerns me because we made over $150 billion in funds available to equip our forces in Iraq.
"President Bush takes the position that the troops are well-armed, but if this situation is true, it calls into question how honest he has been with the country," Thompson said.
The 343rd is a supply unit whose general mission is to deliver fuel and water. The unit includes three women and 14 men and those with ranking up to sergeant first class.
"I got a call from an officer in another unit early (Thursday) morning who told me that my husband and his platoon had been arrested on a bogus charge because they refused to go on a suicide mission," said Jackie Butler of Jackson, wife of Sgt. Michael Butler, a 24-year reservist. "When my husband refuses to follow an order, it has to be something major."
The platoon being held has troops from Alabama, Kentucky, North Carolina, Mississippi and South Carolina, said Teresa Hill of Dothan, Ala., whose daughter Amber McClenny is among those being detained.
McClenny, 21, pleaded for help in a message left on her mother's answering machine early Thursday morning.
"They are holding us against our will," McClenny said. "We are now prisoners."
McClenny told her mother her unit tried to deliver fuel to another base in Iraq Wednesday, but was sent back because the fuel had been contaminated with water. The platoon returned to its base, where it was told to take the fuel to another base, McClenny told her mother.
The platoon is normally escorted by armed Humvees and helicopters, but did not have that support Wednesday, McClenny told her mother.
The convoy trucks the platoon was driving had experienced problems in the past and were not being properly maintained, Hill said her daughter told her.
The situation mirrors other tales of troops being sent on missions without proper equipment.
Aviation regiments have complained of being forced to fly dangerous missions over Iraq with outdated night-vision goggles and old missile-avoidance systems. Stories of troops' families purchasing body armor because the military didn't provide them with adequate equipment have been included in recent presidential debates.
Patricia McCook said her husband, a staff sergeant, understands well the severity of disobeying orders. But he did not feel comfortable taking his soldiers on another trip.
"He told me that three of the vehicles they were to use were deadlines ... not safe to go in a hotbed like that," Patricia McCook said.
Hill said the trucks her daughter's unit was driving could not top 40 mph.
"They knew there was a 99 percent chance they were going to get ambushed or fired at," Hill said her daughter told her. "They would have had no way to fight back." Kathy Harris of Vicksburg, Miss., is the mother of Aaron Gordon, 20, who is among those being detained. Her primary concern is that she has been told the soldiers have not been provided access to a judge advocate general.
Stevens said if the soldiers are being confined, law requires them to have a hearing before a magistrate within seven days.
Harris said conditions for the platoon have been difficult of late. Her son e-mailed her earlier this week to ask what the penalty would be if he became physical with a commanding officer, she said.
But Nadine Stratford of Rock Hill, S.C., said her godson Colin Durham, 20, has been happy with his time in Iraq. She has not heard from him since the platoon was detained.
"When I talked to him about a month ago, he was fine," Stratford said. "He said it was like being at home."
Army Times staff writer Gina Cavallaro contributed to this report.
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