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NUCLEAR
Nuclear weapons would leave Taiwan isolated: experts
US likely to approve exports of nuclear reactors to China
Danger From Depleted Uranium Is Found Low in Pentagon Study
DEPLETED URANIUM: OBSERVATORY LAMENTS DENIAL
Pakistan announces dates for new round of peace talks with India
Iran May Suspend Some Nuclear Activities
Blueprints for terrorists?
MILITARY
Blast Kills 5 in Jeep Used by Afghan Vote Board
'Why Does the War Keep Chasing Us?'
US offers sale of Patriot missile system to India
India softens on Xinjiang
Officials don't want to fail U.S.
Blair Plan To Shift Iraq Force Assailed
TSA Deal Overpaid Boeing, Report Says
Titan Wins $170 Million NORAD/NORTHCOM IT Support Contract
Report: Russia, Brazil Plan to Swap Fighters, Airliners
Rebuilding costs soar in Iraq -Iraqi officials
Use of civilian contractors in war zones is at record levels
Secret Papers About China Are Released by the C.I.A.
Taiwan must acquire submarines to head off China blockade: minister
Washington Votes for War in Colombia
How Many Iraqis Are Dying? By One Count, 208 in a Week
Chief negotiator for Fallujah released
Zarqawi Is Said to Swear Allegiance to Bin Laden
U.S. Frees Fallujah Negotiator
The Strategy to Secure Iraq Did Not Foresee a 2nd War
Attack on Iraqi National Guard Headquarters Kills Four
US air strikes on Fallujah,
Baghdad needs 10,000 more policemen - U.S. general
This is a Massacre, Not a War in Iraq
Israeli Demolitions Deemed Excessive
China feels threat to its engineers
SI International Awarded ID/IQ Air Force Space Command Contract
The 9/11 secret in the CIA's back pocket
Limited U.N. Role Hinders Iraq Vote
Reservists Who Refused Order Tried to Persuade Superiors
Army Is Told to Plan for Shorter Tours in Iraq
U.S. Has Contingency Plans for a Draft of Medical Workers
Rewarding Bad Behavior
Reservists Doubt Their Combat Readiness
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Texas Districting Challenge Is Revived by Supreme Court
Access to polling places tightened
2-Fingerprint Border ID System Called Inadequate
Europeans Debate Plan For Immigrant Camps
High-Profile N.Y. Suspect Goes on Trial
POLITICS
REP. TOM DELAY'S ETHICS VIOLATIONS RAISE QUESTIONS
Ruling seen as free-speech landmark
Cheney Evokes Blasts in U.S. as He Questions Kerry's Leadership
So, Did Saddam Try to Kill Bush's Dad?
The Cheney-Rove Manure Flinger Hits Overdrive
Candidates Spar on Iraq, Terrorism War
Man charged in vote fraud says NAACP paid in crack
Evangelicals endeavor to redeem the vote
Gore Charges Bush With Prewar Deceit
Justice Dept. Intervenes in Vote Dispute
ENERGY
Analysis Russia calls oil shots with China
OTHER
American Indians Who Fish for Their Food Are Worried
Japan's Top Court Orders Government to Pay
ACTIVISTS
21 Arrested in Arlington
Dozens arrested at Belarus rally
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- china
Nuclear weapons would leave Taiwan isolated: experts
The News International
October 19, 2004
http://jang.com.pk/thenews/oct2004-daily/19-10-2004/world/w6.htm
TAIPEI: Any attempt by Taiwan to acquire nuclear weapons would leave it isolated in its standoff with China and spark a dangerous arms race, analysts said. Such a move would risk losing the support of the United States, which is treaty-bound to help Taiwan defend itself against any invasion by China, which views the island as a renegade province.
"I really don't think Taiwan would benefit from operating nuclear bombs," said Homes Liao, a researcher of the Taiwan Research Institute private think-tank. "It would not help enhance Taiwan's military strategic profile in dealing with China." Liao's comments followed denials last week by Taiwan's government that it was trying to develop nuclear weapons.
It also dismissed reports from Austria that the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had uncovered evidence that the former Kuomintang government carried out plutonium separation experiments in the 1980s.
But David Albright, president of the Washington think tank Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), had said that in US circles "there is presently concern that Taiwan may be doing nuclear weapons planning now or thinking about it, particularly after the comment in the Taiwanese parliament."
Taiwan was forced by Washington in the 1980s to scrap its plans to develop nuclear warheads. The plan surfaced after a senior researcher was smuggled off the island by the United States, according to Lee Wen-chung, parliamentarian from the ruling Democratic Progressive Party. Under the constraints set up by the United States and IAEA, Taipei would not be able to resume nuclear weapon research programme without being caught, analysts said.
Taiwan's leaders "are not thinking in this direction", said Liao. Shuai Hua-min, a retired lieutenant general, warned that the dangers of acquiring nuclear weapons were great. "Developing nuclear weapons will only force Taiwan into an arms race with a powerful nuclear country like China.
There is no return if we walk down that road," he said. Chung Chien, professor of National Tsing Hua University's nuclear science department, estimated that it would cost billions of dollars to reopen the nuclear programme. "The United States strongly opposes Taiwan's any efforts to develop nuclear weapons," he added.
Washington is the island's long-standing arms supplier despite switching diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979. Fears of a possible move towards nuclear arms were heightened by Premier Yu Shyi-kun's reference last month to the "mutually assured destruction" which prevented open hostilities between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
"You (China) have the capability to destroy me and Taiwan should have the capability to counter.
--------
US likely to approve exports of nuclear reactors to China: official
BEIJING (AFP)
Oct 19, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041019095455.qv3afaj1.html
The United States' nuclear regulator said Tuesday it is likely to approve the export of US-designed reactors to China soon, giving American companies access to a multi-billion-dollar market.
Nils Diaz, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, told reporters it was reviewing export licenses for Westinghouse's recently approved "state of the art" AP-1000 reactor.
He said he was unaware of any significant objections to exporting the technology to China.
"The commission will actually vote on this issue hopefully in the next couple of months," Diaz told a news conference.
"The process is relatively simple once we get to this stage ... I haven't heard of any significant opposition to the issue."
Diaz, who tried to sell the safety of the AP-1000 to Chinese officials on his visit, said China would be the first country to put the recently approved reactor to use if it makes a purchase.
China currently has nine nuclear reactors, most of which are imported from France or are locally designed.
To meet its huge energy needs, the rapidly industrializing country plans to build some 30 nuclear-power plants by 2020, triggering competition among foreign reactor suppliers.
While Beijing has not said it wants to buy the US reactor, it has long sought US nuclear power technology. US companies have also lobbied hard to sell to China.
Having lagged behind their counterparts in France and Canada, they do not want to be left out of the world's only major market for reactors.
It is estimated that as a result of this vast expansion plan, 80 percent of all new nuclear power plants over the next two decades will be built in China.
Trade in US nuclear technology to China was blocked due to sanctions imposed on Beijing after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, as well as by additional export controls and concerns about Chinese proliferation of nuclear technology to Pakistan and Iran.
China has sought to appease US concerns in recent years, giving reassurances it will not transfer technology to third parties and joining a US-backed nuclear non-proliferation group.
"My understanding is that China is looking for an advanced reactor that provides greater assurance of safety, a reactor that has more passive fission so it requires less personnel involvement and less safety systems," Diaz said.
"They are looking I think for a reactor with reduced maintenance, reduced monitoring, something that is state of the art, and the AP-1000 is a state-of-the-art reactor."
If a sale goes through, the reactor will be the first US-designed reactor to be sold to China.
Diaz said Washington will seek assurances from China that it will not transfer the technology to other countries. The reactor costs 1,200 to 1,500 US dollars per kilowatt of electricity, he said.
China will not be limited on how many reactors it can buy.
Power generated by nuclear power plants currently accounts for about two percent of China's total output.
Coal-generated power meets about 80 percent of its energy needs but China is looking for alternative sources, including nuclear power, to ease pressure on fuel transportation and reduce environmental damage.
China hopes to achieve a total nuclear power capacity of 36 million kilowatts by 2020, almost four times the current capacity.
A move by the US to allow exports will offer China more choices, and likely stronger bargaining power for a reduced price from companies competing for bids.
Two new nuclear power projects on its east coast -- at Sanmen in Zhejiang province and at Yangjiang in Guangdong province -- are in the works.
Foreign ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue said the government was inviting bids for reactors and hoped US companies would "actively participate".
Westinghouse will likely bid its AP-1000, with its main rival being French company Areva which is expected to bid its EPR reactor.
-------- depleted uranium
Danger From Depleted Uranium Is Found Low in Pentagon Study
October 19, 2004
By MATTHEW L. WALD
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/19/politics/19uranium.html
WASHINGTON, Oct. 18 - A Pentagon-sponsored study of weapons made from depleted uranium, a substance whose use has attracted environmental protests around the world, has concluded that it is neither toxic enough nor radioactive enough to be a health threat to soldiers in the doses they are likely to receive.
In a five-year, $6 million study, researchers fired depleted uranium projectiles into Bradley fighting vehicles and Abrams tanks, in a steel chamber at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland, and measured the levels of uranium in the air and how quickly the particles settled.
The conclusion, said Dr. Michael E. Kilpatrick, deputy director of the Deployment Health Support Directorate of the Defense Department, is that "this is a lethal but safe weapons system."
The new study did not seek to measure how depleted uranium traveled through the environment or its potential for entering drinking water or crops.
But it did measure how quickly uranium that is inhaled was passed through the body. Lt. Col. Mark A. Melanson, the program manager for health physics at the Army Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine, said that the aerosolized particles of depleted uranium were "moderately soluble," and that inhaled particles would dissolve in lung fluids and eventually pass through the kidneys and enter the urine, with half the uranium being excreted in 10 to 100 days. Uranium that is eaten would pass through far faster and with little absorption, Colonel Melanson said.
He said the long-term risks were tiny compared with the risk of being killed outright by the weapon.
The study, conducted by contractors led by the Battelle Memorial Institute, is scheduled to be released Tuesday. Dr. Kilpatrick said the test results and the findings would be publicly posted for peer review.
But opponents of using depleted uranium, who have not yet seen the study, were skeptical of the findings.
"We do know that depleted uranium is radioactive and toxic," said Tara Thornton, of the Military Toxics Project, a nonprofit group in Lewiston, Me., which seeks to clean up military pollution. "Studies have shown health impacts on rats and other things." Depleted uranium is a byproduct of nuclear weapons production. It is almost entirely a form called Uranium 238, which is left after the more valuable Uranium 235, the kind useful in bombs and reactors, has been removed. Depleted uranium is 1.7 times more dense than lead and penetrates armor easily.
The United States military has never confronted an opponent that used depleted uranium. Most exposure to American military personnel has been a result of fire from their own forces.
--------
DEPLETED URANIUM: OBSERVATORY LAMENTS DENIAL
(AGI)
Oct. 19, 2004
http://www.agi.it/english/news.pl?doc=200410191947-1213-RT1-CRO-0-NF11&page=0&id=agionline-eng.oggitalia
Rome, Italy, - According to the Italian Military Health Observatory a total of 109 Italian soldiers have died thus far due to exposure to depleted uranium. The observatory stressed the fact that 41 pct of active personnel casualties relate to disease. According to Domenico Leggiero at the Military Health Observatory, "The total of 109 casualties exceeds the total number of persons dying as a consequence of road accidents. Anyone denying the significance of such data is purely acting out of ill faith, and the truth is that our soldiers are dying out there due to a lack of adequate protection against depleted uranium". Leggiero pointed out the fact that the Senate has to date failed to establish a probe committee on this matter: "it is proof of a worrying lack of oversight on matters which are frankly dramatic". Members of the Observatory have petitioned a urgent hearing "in order to study effective prevention and safeguard measures aimed at reducing the death-toll amongst our serving soldiers". (AGI)
-------- india / pakistan
Pakistan announces dates for new round of peace talks with India
ISLAMABAD (AFP)
Oct 20, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041020104928.k3yjlgt3.html
Pakistan and India have agreed on a schedule of eight bilateral meetings in the next two months including talks on nuclear confidence building measures, the foreign office said here Wednesday.
Islamabad will host the meeting to discuss nuclear issues on December 14-15 which will raise the question of a draft agreement on advance information about missile tests, foreign office spokesman Masood Khan told a weekly briefing.
Pakistan and India, who conducted tit-for-tat nuclear tests in 1998, have been conducting periodic missile tests throughout a peace dialogue which has been underway since January.
The first meeting on the schedule will focus on on narcotics control in New Delhi on November 29-30.
Talks on restarting a dormant rail link between the Indian city of Munnabao and the Pakistani southern border city of Khokhrapar will take place in Islamabad on December 2-3.
It will be followed by a meeting between the Pakistan Maritime Security Agency and the Indian Coast Guards on December 3-4 in New Delhi to establish communication links between them.
A meeting on starting a first bus service across the Line of Control in disputed Kashmir between Srinagar, the summer capital of restive Indian-administered Kashmir, and Muzaffarabad in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir will be held in New Delhi on December 7-8.
Talks on trade issues are set for December 9-10, also in the Indian capital. A confidence building measures meeting in the sphere of conventional sources will be held in Islamabad on December 15-16.
Pakistani and Indian officials will meet on December 14-15 in the southern port city of Karachi for a joint survey of boundary markers in the marshy stretch called Sir Creek off the western Indian state of Gujarat.
Khan said Pakistan has proposed a meeting of foreign secretaries of the two countries in the third or last week of December to wrap up the second phase of the dialogue process.
Kashmi, the cause of two of three wars between the two countries, will be discussed between the two foreign secretaries along with Peace and Security, he said.
Pakistan hope that the step-by-step dialogue process will lead to a resolution of Kashmir dispute in line with the aspiration of Kashmiri people.
-------- iran
Iran May Suspend Some Nuclear Activities
Associated Press
By ALI AKBAR DAREINI
October 19, 2004
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAN_NUCLEAR?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran said Monday it is prepared to temporarily suspend some nuclear activities but would not surrender its right to enrich uranium.
The remarks by the country's top nuclear negotiator, Hasan Rowhani, came just as the three major European powers were expected to offer Iran a package of economic incentives in hopes of persuading Tehran to abandon uranium enrichment, a process that can be used to produce fuel for nuclear weapons and reactors.
The move by Britain, France and Germany, expected this week, is designed to head off a confrontation between Iran and the U.N. nuclear agency, where the United States has been arguing that Iran has secret plans to build atomic weapons.
"From a tactical point of view, discussion on how long to continue suspension (of some nuclear activities) is negotiable," Rowhani told state television Monday. "But if the discussion is about depriving us of our legitimate right (to manage the cycle of nuclear fuel), it's not negotiable. Our negotiating team is not authorized to discuss this either with Europeans or others," Rowhani said.
Any suspension of nuclear activities would have to be for "a short period," he said. He did not specify what activities Iran would suspend.
Iran says its nuclear program is devoted entirely to electricity generation. Its first nuclear reactor, built with Russia assistance, is due to come on stream next year.
But the country has come under intense international pressure to halt uranium enrichment. Last month, the International Atomic Energy Agency unanimously passed a resolution demanding that Iran freeze all work on uranium enrichment and related activities, such as uranium reprocessing and the building of centrifuges used for enrichment.
The U.N. nuclear watchdog is due to meet Nov. 25 to judge Iran's compliance. An unsatisfactory judgment could put Iran at risk of U.N. Security Council sanctions.
Iran has already defied the IAEA resolution by continuing to build centrifuges and by converting a few tons of raw uranium into hexafluoride gas, a stage before enrichment.
Iran has branded the IAEA resolution as illegal and says the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty entitles it to enrich uranium.
"We have some red lines. We have some principles. And we won't give up our principles," Rowhani said. "It's unacceptable for us that we are told Europeans and Americans have the right to manage the cycle of nuclear fuel and possess nuclear power plants, but Iran doesn't."
Rowhani said Iran had done all it could do to remove doubts about its nuclear program.
"We have provided the IAEA with all the information required to remove ambiguities and answered all the questions which the inspectors asked," he said.
-------- terrorism
Blueprints for terrorists?
Sensitive nuclear info ends up on NRC Web site
CNN
October 19, 2004
From Mike M. Ahlers
http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/10/19/terror.nrc/index.html
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- When David Lochbaum perused a government Web site one day last summer, he came across documents he thought would be of limited value to the public -- but a potential bonanza for terrorists.
Included in a Nuclear Regulatory Commission report on Waterford III Nuclear Power Station near New Orleans, Louisiana, were diagrams showing all the toxic chemicals and pipelines near Waterford III -- including the natural gas pipelines that lace through the complex.
Explicit in detail, the maps even showed gas line valves, the amount of pressure in the lines, and the proximity of gas lines to air intakes for the nuclear plant's control room.
Lochbaum, nuclear safety engineer for the Union of Concerned Scientists, a watchdog group, said he did what he always does when he finds sensitive documents on the NRC's Web site: He called the NRC's nuclear safety managers and suggested they remove the diagram. They did.
Lochbaum isn't alone in finding sensitive material on the NRC Web site. In a four-hour time span recently, Scott Portzline, a Pennsylvania piano tuner and civic activist, found material about four university nuclear laboratories, including floor plans and lists of the radioactive materials they use.
The four schools were Norwich University in Northfield, Vermont; Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston; Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota; and the University of Florida in Gainesville.
Portzline said the floor plans would be valuable to terrorists, allowing them to hunt for potential sources of nuclear material from the relative obscurity of their computers, without taking the riskier step of conducting surveillance.
Using the NRC Web site, a terrorist "could prioritize the largest sources, more dangerous sources or the weapons grade sources" of radioactive material, Portzline said. "You'd know exactly where the sources are, having never visited the facility."
The NRC said Tuesday it is trying to balance the public's right to know with the need for security, and that information is sometimes put on the Web site that, upon review, doesn't belong there.
After the Harrisburg (Pennsylvania) Patriot-News reported Portzline's find on October 3, the NRC began reviewing the material. A CNN check last week showed the material was still on the Web site, but the NRC said Tuesday it has since removed the material, saying it was prudent to do so.
Roy Zimmerman, director of the NRC's Office of Nuclear Security and Incident Response, said the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks highlighted the need to safeguard sensitive information, a process that has taken several steps. In the days immediately after the attacks, the NRC took the Web site entirely off line. When it was restored weeks later, it had been purged of more than 1,000 sensitive documents, he said.
Initially, the agency decided to withhold documents if "the release would provide clear and significant benefit to a terrorist in planning an attack," Zimmerman said.
In early summer, the agency tightened the restriction, opting to exclude information "that could be useful or could reasonably be useful to a terrorist," he said. "It is currently unlikely that the information on our Web site would provide significant advantage to assist a terrorist." 'Next tier' information
The information that Portzline found represents a "next tier" of information that deserves review, he said.
An NRC spokesman told CNN Tuesday the agency is considering establishing a task force to address the Web site issue.
Experts asked by CNN to review the Portzline material agreed it doesn't belong on public Web sites, but said that doesn't necessarily mean the material is of value to terrorists.
One expert likened it to a bank, saying customers may know the location of the vault, but still don't have the wherewithal to empty it.
"It [the Web site] may help a little, but if someone's determined to do this, it won't help them much. If someone wanted to find this out, they can," said David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security.
"If secrecy is your only security, then you don't have it. Because everybody that has a brain knows that physics departments use radioactive sources ... and it's not that hard to find where they are," he said.
Lochbaum, who discovered the Waterford power plant maps last summer, said so far this year, he has notified the NRC of six documents he believed should not have been posted; the agency removed four of them.
One document that was removed was an instruction manual for metal and explosive detectors used at Waterford nuclear plant entrances, he said.
"If you were trying to defeat those detectors, having that kind of information would be usable," he said.
"The problem is the NRC is in the habit of trying to close the barn door after the horse is out," said Jim Riccio, nuclear policy analyst for the environmental group Greenpeace.
"Every one of these reactors is a pre-positioned weapon of mass destruction that could be used to hurt this country," he said, adding that sensitive material should be caught before it is posted -- not afterwards.
The NRC's Zimmerman said, "We are appreciative of the public bringing these particular documents to our attention. Our plan, though, is to get out in front of this."
He said the NRC is training licensees to highlight sensitive material when they submit it.
Said Lochbaum, "I'm ... not blaming the NRC for the occasional document that gets out. They handle thousands of documents a year. So even if you're 99.9 percent [efficient at editing documents] an occasional document gets out. I think that's something we have to live with.
"I think everybody's doing their best under the situation."
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Blast Kills 5 in Jeep Used by Afghan Vote Board
October 19, 2004
By CARLOTTA GALL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/19/international/asia/19afghan.html
KABUL, Afghanistan, Oct. 18 - Five people traveling in an election commission jeep were killed Monday morning in a roadside explosion in Paktika Province in the southeast, close to the Pakistani border, said the election commission spokesman in Kabul.
The deaths were a reminder that although the Oct. 9 presidential election passed without any major attacks, insurgents remain a deadly threat to election and other government officials, especially in southern and southeastern Afghanistan. An election official, his driver and three civilians were killed in the latest explosion, said Sultan Ahmad Baheen, a spokesman for the Joint Election Management Board.
It was not clear if the explosion was aimed specifically at the election vehicle, but the gray jeeps have been targets before. Twelve election workers were killed and 33 injured in the months before the vote, and 14 people, most of them police officers and soldiers, were killed on election day.
A spokesman for the Taliban, the insurgents who say they represent the movement that previously controlled most of the country, said Taliban fighters were responsible for the attack on Monday. The spokesman, Abdul Latif Hakimi, reached by telephone, also said the Taliban had attacked an army convoy in the same province, killing two soldiers, but a Defense Ministry spokesman denied that any such attack had occurred.
With 20 percent of the votes counted by Monday evening, President Hamid Karzai, the incumbent and favorite in the presidential race, was leading easily, with 61.3 percent of the vote. His nearest rival was his former education minister, Muhammad Yunus Qanooni, with 18.8 percent.
The remaining 16 candidates were all below 10 percent. Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, the Uzbek leader, was third with 8.3 percent, and Muhammad Mohaqeq, the Shiite Hazara leader, was fourth with 4.8 percent. The only woman in the race, Masooda Jalal, was fifth with 1.1 percent. Analysts are saying that is a remarkable showing for a woman in Afghanistan's conservative tribal society only three years after the repressive Taliban leadership was removed.
Despite his healthy lead, Mr. Karzai, a member of the Pashtun ethnic group, has made a poor showing in much of the north, which is dominated by Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks and Turkmen. He was trailing regional leaders in 12 northern and central provinces, sometimes in third or fourth place behind General Dostum, Mr. Mohaqeq and Mr. Qanooni.
In the Panjshir Valley, a stronghold of resistance to the Taliban, Mr. Qanooni won 95.6 percent of the vote, with Mr. Karzai barely scoring at 0.7 percent. Panjshir is one of five provinces where counting has been completed. Mr. Karzai's gamble of choosing Ahmed Zia Massoud, the brother of the legendary resistance hero of the Panjshir, Ahmed Shah Massoud, as his running mate, does not seem to have won him many votes from the valley. Similarly, his choice of the Hazara leader Karim Khalili as his second running mate has not delivered the desired votes in Hazara areas, where the local leader, Mr. Mohaqeq, has done well.
Mr. Qanooni has contended that widespread fraud and irregularities in the voting have cost him much of the vote. At a news briefing on Monday, he listed many complaints from his representatives around the country, including accusations of intimidation of voters and observers, ballot box stuffing and multiple voting. He identified people whom he accused of voting more than once, as well as local officials whom he accused of filling in ballots for voters without their consent - sometimes for whole communities or the women of a community - on behalf of Mr. Karzai.
In a 30-page report of complaints from his representatives, he said armed men loyal to a local commander named Zarif in Nimruz Province in the far southwest had forced four people - he identified them - to vote for Mr. Karzai.
In Zabul Province in the southeast, the report said, an observer representing Mr. Qanooni objected when he saw officials processing women's cards for voting even though the women were not present. When the observer stopped their action, the report continued, he was beaten by the district officials and was ejected from the polling place.
-------- africa
'Why Does the War Keep Chasing Us?'
Sudan's Dinkas, Displaced by Past Conflict, Fear Violence in Darfur
By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, October 19, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43348-2004Oct18?language=printer
BELIEL CAMP, Sudan -- Dinka men once danced in a green field here in Darfur. A weave of drum rhythms would rise with the smoke of their twilight bonfires. The men would form a tight line with their spears, honoring their lost homeland in war-scattered southern Sudan and chanting praise for the peace they had found as refugees.
Now, come nightfall, the camp is silent. No more dancing, no more music, nothing to celebrate. The towering Dinkas now find themselves strangers in the middle of Sudan's latest war.
Squatting on a mud floor, Peter Bak Mrach squeezed into his dank shelter with his wife and children. He now lives in fear that government-backed militia fighters, known as the Janjaweed, will attack the camp where he and thousands of Dinkas have lived peacefully for the last two decades.
The peace these Dinkas once praised in Darfur has long been erased. Beliel is less than five miles from a newer camp, Kalma, where about 70,000 other refugees have built row after row of shelters patched together from twigs, plastic sheeting and rags, just as many Dinkas did years ago. Like the war in the south that expelled the Dinkas, the conflict in Darfur has left a parade of human suffering, with 1.5 million driven from their homes, and tens of thousands dead.
"Sudan's wars are chasing each other now," said Mrach, 35, who had yellowing, cloudy eyes and spoke in hushed tones. "The same thing that made me leave the south so long ago has happened again in Darfur."
The story of how two camps from Sudan's separate wars wound up as neighbors highlights the fragility of Africa's largest nation. Conflicts between the central government and rebel groups in the south and the west have made Sudan a country unified only on maps.
The war in the south, which has lasted 21 years, has caused the deaths of 2.2 million people and has displaced 4.5 million more. After a long delay, peace talks between the government in Khartoum, the capital, and the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army resumed last week in Naivasha, Kenya. In a tentative peace deal, the government agreed to share oil wealth and to allow regional autonomy, including a referendum on secession in six years.
The negotiations between the Islamic and Arab government and Christian and animist tribes in southern Sudan could be a model for resolving other conflicts in the country, some analysts said. The government, which came to power in a 1989 coup, has been accused of concentrating development and slowly rising oil wealth in Khartoum.
"The road to peace in Darfur is through the north-south peace agreement," said Charles R. Snyder, the U.S. special envoy to Sudan, who visited Khartoum last month to push for an agreement. "We have to remember there is a bigger Sudan, where a bigger war took place. But there are worries that what is happening in Darfur will distract from the larger peace." Witnessing a Reenactment
The trauma of Darfur has reminded Mrach of the atrocities that his Dinka community once suffered: the raiding of cattle, raping of women and burning of huts. Such tactics are nothing new in Sudan, he said. It was like watching a reenactment of the chaos that overran his village of mud huts in Bahr el-Gazal in southern Sudan in 1988.
He was 16 when men on horses came to his village, he said. They were local militiamen armed by the government. After a rebel attack in the area, the government had provided automatic weapons to Arabs of the Baggara tribe and encouraged raids on Dinka villages, according to human rights reports at the time.
The government-backed fighters were known as Muraheleen, and they were the forebears of the Janjaweed who terrorize Darfur today.
Just as in Darfur, militiamen stole the Mrach family's cattle and burned their homes. Women were taken as "wives," Mrach said, whispering that they were held and raped and some were never seen again.
Mrach's family walked with thousands of other Dinkas through the bush, along the railway line and into Darfur, where 17 camps are now home to 53,000 Dinkas.
Mrach said he survived for six weeks on tiny amounts of wild seeds and muddy water. He hid in the reeds and traveled early in the morning and late at night, arriving in Beliel, a patch of unwanted land just 10 miles north of Nyala, the capital of South Darfur province.
"There was a horrible food problem," he said. "We walked along the railroad to get here. I never felt hunger like that. I never saw so many starving people dying."
They set up camp in Beliel. Aid groups from around the world came to feed them and provide health care.
Over the years, the aid groups left. But the business community in Nyala considered the Dinkas good cultivators and low-wage workers who could do laundry and cooking. There were instances of racial tension at first between the black Dinkas and lighter-skinned Arabs, but overall, Darfurians tolerated and sometimes welcomed the Dinkas' presence, he said.
Some local citizens from African tribes donated seeds, and an exchange program began. Nyala's economy was vibrant with overstuffed, Arab-run souks, or markets, and the town served as a crossroads between Nigeria and Chad to the west and central Sudan to the east.
"We became self-sufficient," Mrach said. "We missed the south. But we had no options."
The Dinka here changed some customs, he said. They started wearing Darfur's omnipresent dress: a white, flowing jallabah, or robe, and a turban that sets off their dark-skinned faces like a curl of white icing.
"Darfur was very good to me," Mrach said as he looked over his children, who had grown thin in the past few months. "But today it's all war. I don't want to say this, but I think there is no chance for peace in Sudan. What do I tell my children about their country?" In the Wrong Place
Even though the war in Darfur is not being waged against the Dinka tribe, there are new arrivals streaming into Beliel every day. They are Dinkas who lived in camps to the south and were attacked by the Janjaweed because they were simply in the wrong place.
On a sweltering afternoon, Manyuat Mahol, a gaunt and graying 68-year-old chief with oversize plastic glasses, displayed his few belongings, all under an acacia tree: three plastic jerry cans, a burnt cooking pot, a withered-looking donkey. He bore a haunting resemblance to his displaced Darfurian neighbors in Kalma camp.
He arrived here in the last few months, along with 1,000 other Dinkas, all of them running from one displaced camp to another.
The first time Mahol was forced to flee war in Sudan was in 1988, when men on horses stole his 270 cows, he said. He settled 70 miles southwest of Beliel in a Dinka camp in Darfur. Then four months ago, he found he was in the middle of another war and had to flee once again. The Janjaweed rode in, firing guns, he said, as the Dinkas ran.
"My life was interesting in Darfur," said the chief, who has four wives and 26 children to care for. "Now we are in the same situation again. We have no food again. My sons are hungry again. Why does the war keep chasing us?"
Then, out of a shelter made of sticks, a woman ran up to the chief. She was wearing a shredded dress that revealed her spine. Her name was Akot Tick Thiep; she was 88 and angry.
She said she was too afraid to farm because the Janjaweed recently attacked one Dinka woman, leaving her bloody and beaten. With new refugees coming, their food stores have now dwindled.
"I want to go home to south Sudan now. Give me wings. I will fly," Thiep yelled. "Give me a car. I will travel right now. Every year we say, 'Next year in southern Sudan,' and we never go. What is wrong with us? We just want to stay here and die?"
She showed her skeletal waist and collapsed into hysterics.
The chief gently told her: "You can't go. The road is closed. The government has blocked off the route because of the war in Darfur."
She waved her hand in front of her face and walked away, her head hung low. All but Forgotten
There is only one small health post for 5,000 Dinkas in Beliel. A winding line of sickly people wait for help under the hot sun.
By contrast, there are 150 doctors and aid workers from Africa and Europe at the nearby Kalma camp, setting up watering holes, sanitation projects and feeding centers.
The caregiver for the Dinkas is Yusuf Amin Abdullah, an overwhelmed medical assistant, working for the Spanish branch of UNICEF. He is required to ask patients for contributions toward their medical costs. He works with a tight budget and little more than aspirin and malaria medication.
He has watched, over the years, as the world forgot Beliel and focused on Africa's other disasters, such as Rwanda, Congo, Liberia and now Darfur.
"We need a feeding center here now, too," Abdullah said. "The children are getting thinner. The parents can't cultivate anymore. They have run from one war straight into another one."
The U.N. World Food Program has started giving out rations at Beliel again, just as it did 20 years ago. But some local staff members say they worry that funds will disappear when the next conflict emerges.
One recent afternoon, sitting outside a mud hut that serves as a Seventh-day Adventist church, Mrach said he didn't plan to wait for the next Sudanese war.
"My idea is to make it to south Sudan and then leave to Kenya," he said. "I'm not trusting anyone in Sudan to help us anymore."
With that he trudged back into the pitch-dark church to pray, he said, for a miracle.
-------- arms
US offers sale of Patriot missile system to India
October 19, 2004
The News International
http://jang.com.pk/thenews/oct2004-daily/19-10-2004/main/main15.htm
NEW DELHI: With India and the United States beginning talks here on Thursday on phase II of the "Next Steps in Strategic Partnership (NSSP)," Indian officials say negotiations on facilitating high-technology trade are entering the "most difficult and crucial stage".
A senior official said "the US is looking to discuss changes in our domestic laws to tighten export controls". Washington not only wants stricter controls on possible diversion of its high-tech exports but is keen on India slapping restrictions on exports of indigenous dual-use products, too. Finally, the US is expected to formally flag contentious issue of "human resources". The US side believes the Indian scientists are valuable to would-be proliferators because they represent only pool of talent familiar with "start-up stage" of nuclear weapons and missile programmes.
Asked whether the recent US decision to impose sanctions on two Indian nuclear scientists--YSR Reddy and CH Surender--for allegedly assisting Iran was opening salvo of a campaign to control movement of scientific talent, officials said any attempt to link this issue to supposed security lacunae in India would not be accepted.
In their review of NSSP, Indian Ministry of External Affairs officials have a more positive view than Indian scientific community. But, Indian Ministry of External Affairs, is sanguine. "You cannot get everything in one shot," said an official involved in the process. The four benchmarks are India must sign CTBT, stop production of fissile material, curtail missile development and enforce "state-of-the-art" export controls.
The Indo-US strategic partnership is blooming at a rapid pace with every passing day and Washington is offering New Delhi with all sorts of modern pieces of arms and equipment every other day. Echo of last week's sale offer of the latest F-16's aircraft had not yet died down that the Untied states has offered to sell its Patriot missile defence system to India, sources said.
The highly placed sources said the offer was made during the discussions between the US and Indian officials on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in September last. The Patriot, it may be mentioned here, is an air-defence system which can defeat both attacks aircraft and tactical ballistic missiles.
Sources said the sale of the Patriot might be linked to India getting on board the national missile defence (NMD) as it can also be integrated into the broader NMD framework. While India is said to have kept its option open on the system, it is in the process of getting a detailed briefing on the NMD.
Commenting on this rapidly increasing Indo-US defence cooperation, defence experts have expressed their apprehension that development could start a new arms race in the region. "Smaller states of the region are fully aware of the hegemonic designs of India and are certain that the US supply of latest arms and machines to her would encourage New Delhi to fulfil her military ambitions in the area, leading to total destabilisation of the region", they said.
-------- asia
India softens on Xinjiang
Oct 19, 2004
Asia Times
By Sudha Ramachandran
http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/FJ19Df07.html
BANGALORE - At first glance, the visit to India last week of the governor of Xinjiang, Ismail Tiliwaldi, could be dismissed as a trip by just another leader to promote investment and bilateral interaction with India. Though largely ignored by the Indian media, the visit was of some significance - evidence of the deepening relationship between India and China.
Xinjiang is China's "Wild West". In 1949, when the communists came to power in China, the Uighurs - the local population of Xinjiang - declared an independent East Turkestan state. Beijing quickly crushed the Uighur rebellion. Since 1955, the region has been known as the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, but despite Beijing's best attempts - it has altered the demographic composition of the region and tried to assimilate it - its integration into China has never been easy or complete. The region remains restive to date and Islamist militants believed to have links with the Taliban are said to be active here.
It is the first time in several decades that a leader from Xinjiang has visited India. Vibrant trade relations between India and Xinjiang, a key center on the Silk Route, date back centuries. Independent India used to have a trade mission in Kashgar until the 1950s, but after its closure, commercial and other links gradually declined. With India's relations with China freezing after the 1962 war, the ties with Xinjiang were not revived.
Tiliwaldi's visit to India focused on economic issues. His delegation and the Confederation of Indian Industry have decided to study the feasibility of laying a natural-gas pipeline from Xinjiang to India. Tiliwaldi's delegation also expressed interest in a land link with India. India and Xinjiang have identified four areas for potential cooperation - agriculture and food processing, traditional medicine and herbs, energy and oil production, and tourism.
Analyzing the significance of Tiliwaldi's visit, Dr C Raja Mohan, a leading strategic-affairs analyst and professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, points out in an article in Indian Express that it signals that "New Delhi has given up its traditional defensiveness about Xinjiang and is now ready for an expansive engagement with a region, just north of Jammu and Kashmir [J&K]".
"The closest parallel that would help explain the political significance of Tiliwaldi's visit," he writes, "would be, say, a trip to Beijing by the chief minister of J&K, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed!"
The absence of interaction between India and Xinjiang in recent decades was in part the result of the frosty relations between Beijing and New Delhi. China inflicted a humiliating defeat on India in the 1962 war. Relations between the two remained frozen for years. The visit has become possible because of the gradual normalization of relations between India and China that was set in motion in the early 1980s and which has gathered momentum in recent years. It signals that Sino-Indian relations, despite the deep suspicion and rivalry between the two Asian giants and their unresolved border dispute, has reached a level where the two countries are willing to engage, even in what is a sensitive region, if it will take forward their commercial and trade interests.
Another reason for Delhi's reluctance to engage with Xinjiang was that territory India lays claim to and which is now under Chinese control is shown on Chinese maps as part of Xinjiang. This is the case with the Aksai Chin region that borders northern J&K. The Shaksgam Valley, a part of the princely state of J&K that Pakistan occupied and subsequently gifted to the Chinese in 1963 and which India lays claim to, is also part of Xinjiang now.
The economic boom in Xinjiang and the proximity of Xinjiang to resource-rich Central Asia appears to have prompted India to set aside its earlier reluctance to adopt a proactive approach to engaging Xinjiang. Now, it seems, India is geared up to woo Xinjiang. Inviting Tiliwaldi appears to be a significant step in this direction.
While an air link between Delhi and Kashgar is in the cards, it is a road link that could transform the two economies. With a reliable land link through Pakistan to Central Asia still a distant dream, analysts have suggested linking Ladakh, which is in eastern J&K and borders Tibet, to Xinjiang and then reaching out to Central Asia. Of course, all this demands an early settlement of the territorial claims that India and China have along their disputed border.
Efforts to negotiate a settlement to the border dispute have been going on for several years at the official level, but things have moved at a glacial pace. The Chinese blame India's intransigence for the slow pace of progress. A proposal China put forward that envisaged an "east-west swap" - under this China would abandon its claims on India in the eastern sector, recognizing Indian sovereignty over that area, in exchange for India giving up its claim to Aksai Chin, recognizing Chinese sovereignty over that area - was rejected by India years ago but is now gaining support in Delhi. Sections in India's strategic community seem in favor of a settlement of the border along the lines of the east-west swap, in essence a recognition of the situation on the ground.
Tiliwaldi's visit to India signals the start of a new area of Sino-Indian engagement. In recent years Beijing and Delhi have shown that they are willing to do business with each other in spite of their deep differences and mutual suspicions. India's economic interaction with Xinjiang is based on the same principle. But for the full potential of the India-Xinjiang relationship to be realized, the border dispute, especially over the western sector, would need to be settled.
Sudha Ramachandran is an independent researcher/writer based in Bangalore, India. She has a doctoral degree from the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, in New Delhi. Her areas of interest include terrorism, conflict zones and gender and conflict. Formerly an assistant editor at the Deccan Herald (Bangalore) she now teaches at the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai.
-------- britain
Officials don't want to fail U.S.
October 19, 2004
By Ed Johnson
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041018-103743-4642r.htm
LONDON - The British government said yesterday that it would be failing an important ally if it refused to redeploy British troops closer to Baghdad to free up American soldiers for anti-insurgent operations.
Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon said American military commanders had asked Britain to reposition a small number of soldiers, now stationed in southern Iraq, to the U.S.-controlled sector farther north.
"The specific reason is to free American forces to conduct extra operations in those places like Fallujah, where terrorists are well-established and are attacking coalition forces, but also innocent Iraqi civilians," Mr. Hoon said.
He said military leaders are assessing whether to meet the request and would send a reconnaissance team to the undisclosed area today. Britain's chief of defense staff would make a recommendation later this week, he added.
Mr. Hoon did not say how many troops might be redeployed. But military sources have said that if the request was granted, Britain's reserve regiment, the 650-strong First Battalion Black Watch, which is stationed near the southern port city of Basra, would be the obvious choice to move.
Facing a barrage of hostile questions from lawmakers reluctant to see British troops sent into the more volatile U.S.-controlled sector, Mr. Hoon said the government did not want to let Washington down.
"We cannot go into a coalition and then simply cross our fingers and say there are certain circumstances in which we will not participate," Mr. Hoon said.
"Were we to refuse the request, I can see that would be an issue that would go to the heart of our relationship, not only with the U.S., but with other members of that alliance."
One lawmaker asked what penalties Britain might incur if it refused the request.
"There will be no penalty, but we will have failed in our duty as an ally and as a country that has closely supported the United States," he responded.
Mr. Hoon rejected accusations by some lawmakers that any redeployment would be a political gesture designed to bolster President Bush ahead of presidential elections on Nov. 2.
"I want to make clear that the request is a military request," Mr. Hoon said.
He stressed that the United States, contrary to media reports, had not asked for British soldiers to be sent to Baghdad or Fallujah.
Britain has about 9,000 troops in Iraq, operating in the relatively peaceful area around Basra. Sending British soldiers into the U.S.-controlled sector, where there are more attacks by insurgents, carries a risk of higher casualties and would be politically sensitive for Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Some lawmakers are opposed to British troops coming under U.S. command, believing that might put them under a greater threat of attack. Many think that three decades of Irish Republican Army violence in Northern Ireland have given British soldiers experience in urban patrolling and helped them develop both a well-honed instinct for ambushes and a sense of restraint. Critics suggest that the U.S. military lacks such experience and has a tendency to overreact.
"Is it really possible for them to retain that restraint if they are deployed to a U.S. sector which has been policed for over a year by U.S. forces which have not been showing the same level of restraint?" asked Labor lawmaker Robin Cook, who quit the Cabinet in opposition to the war in Iraq.
Mr. Hoon said it was sometimes unfair to compare British troops with U.S. troops, who have faced a more intense threat from insurgents in and around Baghdad.
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Blair Plan To Shift Iraq Force Assailed
Critics See Attempt To Appease U.S.
By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, October 19, 2004; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42539-2004Oct18.html
LONDON, Oct. 18 -- British lawmakers in the ruling and main opposition parties alike sharply criticized Prime Minister Tony Blair's government on Monday for planning to dispatch hundreds of British troops to an area just south of Baghdad to supplement U.S. forces.
Speaking during a government presentation in the House of Commons, legislators accused U.S. forces of showing reckless disregard for Iraqi civilians and expressed alarm that the deployment of British troops would help free up the Americans for an all-out assault on the city of Fallujah. Some lawmakers also accused the Bush administration of seeking greater British participation as an election ploy to demonstrate to U.S. voters that there is international support for the Iraq campaign.
The criticism came not just from the war's long-standing critics, but from several of Blair's most ardent Labor Party loyalists. They contended that their leader is being dragged into a Vietnam-style quagmire by his close ally, President Bush.
"The United Kingdom has given 110 percent on this issue, and some of us have provided political cover and support for this government," said Andrew Mackinlay, a Blair supporter. He warned the government "not to try to stretch the envelope too much. . . . Some of us will not stomach it."
Gerald Kaufman, another Labor loyalist, raised "the possibility of United Kingdom forces risking their lives being exploited politically in a closely fought United States election."
Secretary of Defense Geoffrey Hoon, who fielded questions from the floor, said the deployment had been requested by American commanders in Baghdad and had nothing to do with U.S. politics. Hoon insisted no final decision had been made, but made it clear that the government would respond positively.
Asked by one lawmaker what the consequences of turning down the American request would be, he replied: "There will be no penalty, but we will have failed in our duty as an ally and as a country that has closely supported the United States."
While he gave no figures, newspaper reports said Britain would likely send 600 to 700 members of the Black Watch Regiment to the area just south of Baghdad.
Hoon's response caused one longtime Labor critic, Alan Simpson, to mockingly allude to a line from the musical "Oklahoma" in describing the government's position: "I'm just a girl who can't say no."
Britain maintains about 7,500 troops in the Basra region in southeastern Iraq, dominated by Shiite Muslims and a zone of relative tranquillity compared with the violence-wracked region around Baghdad where Sunnis form the majority.
British military commanders have cited their policy of comparative restraint in dealing with Iraqi civilians as one reason for the calm, and have privately been highly critical of American tactics and rules of engagement, especially during the first siege of Fallujah earlier this year.
"The last time the United States besieged Fallujah they left Iraq in an uproar over the many civilian casualties," said Robin Cook, who resigned from the cabinet last year to protest the war. He asked Hoon to consider the risk to British troops if they are seen by Iraqis as being responsible for civilian casualties.
Even people who have supported the war, such as Ian Duncan Smith, former leader of the Conservative Party, warned that British forces are subject to the newly established International Criminal Court for possible war crimes, while the United States has refused to submit to the court.
Nicholas Soames, the Conservatives' spokesman on defense, demanded "absolute assurance" that British troops would not be compromised by U.S. rules of engagement in dealing with civilians. Members of the Liberal Democrats, the third major party in the House of Commons, also expressed profound skepticism.
Hoon defended U.S. conduct, saying American forces had faced more dangerous circumstances than their British counterparts. He cited Soames's comment to the Sunday Times newspaper that "the concept of peacekeeping is one alien to our American friends," and added: "No doubt that will be read with great enthusiasm in the White House and in the Pentagon."
-------- business
TSA Deal Overpaid Boeing, Report Says
Inspector Discovers $49 Million in Excess
By Renae Merle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 19, 2004; Page E01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43339-2004Oct18.html
Boeing Co. received at least $49 million in excessive profits on a $1.2 billion contract to supply explosives-detection systems to hundreds of the nation's airports, the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general reported yesterday.
The Chicago-based company won the bidding for the Transportation Security Administration contract in June 2002 to install X-ray machines and trace detection devices at more than 400 airports by Dec. 1, 2003. The contract was expected to be worth $508 million, but it was extended and increased to $1.2 billion.
"It was a TSA problem, this was the contract they agreed to," said Clark Kent Ervin, the department's inspector general. "Boeing was not the lowest bidder; it was the highest bidder in terms of total cost and in terms of the fees."
The TSA said it awarded the contract to Boeing because the company could provide the most efficient and quickest solution at a time when the agency was rushing to meet deadlines set by Congress after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
"As a new agency, TSA needed to rely heavily on private industry to meet those congressional mandates," said Amy von Walter, a TSA spokeswoman. "Boeing was selected based on the merit of its proposal, which included detailed contingency plans to ensure all deadlines were met."
Boeing has billed the TSA $889 million so far, including $106 million in profit. About $49 million of the profit is excessive compared with acceptable levels at other agencies, according to the inspector general's report. For example, Boeing received $44 million in award fees, which are usually a reward for good performance, during the first 18 months of the contract, but the TSA had not evaluated the company's accomplishments during the period.
The deal failed to conform to standard contract regulations, the report said. Boeing was reimbursed for the cost of its services, which includes a small profit margin. Boeing was also awarded additional profit automatically based on a percentage of its costs, the report said.
Through August 2003, Boeing incurred costs of $39 million and a profit of $82 million, for a return of 210 percent, the report said.
The contract will expire at the end of the year, and a competition will be held to determine who will continue to maintain the machines, the TSA said.
"We did a job that everybody said could not be done in the time frame that was allotted it," said Fernando Vivanco, a Boeing spokesman. "We are pleased to have helped the TSA restore the confidence of the traveling public."
The inspector general's report comes as Boeing, the Pentagon's second-largest contractor, is seeking to emerge from controversy surrounding its defense-related work. This month, a former Air Force procurement officer admitted favoring the company in contract awards, sparking a Pentagon inspector general review of many of the company's recent competitions.
Boeing acted as a general manager on the TSA contract, with 92 percent of the work performed by subcontractors. Two other contractors provided the machines, and Boeing's job was to decide how many of the machines each airport needed and where they should be located and to oversee their installation and maintenance.
--------
Titan Wins $170 Million NORAD/NORTHCOM IT Support Contract
San Diego CA (SPX)
Oct 19, 2004
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/milspace-comms-04zzk.html
The Titan Corporation announced Monday that it has been awarded the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) / U.S. Northern Command's (NORTHCOM) Command Information Sharing, Infrastructure, Architecture, Integration and Implementation and Operations Support contract.
This single-award, indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity (ID/IQ) contract has a potential value of $169.9 million through August 2009, if all options are exercised (one base year, plus four option years).
"Titan is especially proud to have the opportunity to continue providing support to NORAD/NORTHCOM," said Gene Ray, Titan's president, chairman and CEO.
"With the award of this new major contract, we look forward to continuing and enhancing our partnership with NORAD/NORTHCOM in its vital Homeland Defense mission."
Under this contract, Titan will provide a wide range of information technology and infrastructure support to the NORAD/NORTHCOM command, control and communications systems directorate (J6).
This support encompasses enterprise-wide command, control, and communications (C3) solutions that will help the command accomplish its Homeland Defense mission and interact with Homeland Security Agencies at the federal and local levels.
Services that will be provided include supporting the common operational picture, future concepts, information sharing/synchronization, network engineering and administration, system integration and operations and maintenance support.
-----
Report: Russia, Brazil Plan to Swap Fighters, Airliners
Moscow Times
October 19, 2004
http://www.moscowtimes.ru/stories/2004/10/19/041.html
Russia wants to swap a dozen Sukhoi fighter jets for 50 Brazilian Embraer passenger aircraft in a $1.5 billion deal expected to be clinched in November, Kommersant reported Monday.
The dozen Russian Su-35 warplanes are of equivalent value to 50 of the Embraer 170/175 and 190/195 regional airliners -- due to be acquired by Russian flag carrier Aeroflot, the newspaper said.
--------
Rebuilding costs soar in Iraq -Iraqi officials
Reuters
By Sue Pleming
19 Oct 2004
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N19488105.htm
ARLINGTON, Va., Oct 19 (Reuters) - Rigid U.S. contracting rules are adding to delays in Iraq's rebuilding program and project prices are escalating rapidly due to a hike in the cost of materials, senior Iraqi officials said on Tuesday.
Speaking to U.S. business leaders about opportunities in the Iraq construction sector, several Iraqi officials voiced disappointment it was taking so long to get projects off the ground and blamed some delays on U.S. procurement rules and problems understanding the U.S. way of doing business.
Moreover, prices for building materials such as concrete, gravel and sand were rising fast and the longer it took to get reconstruction moving the more expensive it would be.
"Everything is costing twice or triple what it cost before the war as most cement factories were looted. We need new factories, equipment and new training for our people to support us," said an Iraqi building official, who was identified publicly but asked not to be named in the media because of security fears at home.
For example, before the U.S.-led invasion, a ton of cement cost about $8 but this had shot up to $110 a ton, according to figures released at the briefing, which was organized by the U.S. Trade and Development Agency.
The Iraqi official said U.S. procurement rules were tough for many Iraqis to follow and it had taken too long for many projects to get off the ground because so many U.S. regulations had to be followed.
WORK BEFORE SECURITY
Another Iraqi official, who also asked not to be named because he feared for his life, said delays in getting Iraq's reconstruction program rolling were making security worse.
"Some people say security will come first and then we will work. But this is wrong. We should work and this will bring security," he told about 350 company representatives attending the briefing at a hotel near the Pentagon.
The Iraqi delegation is in the United States to try to encourage more U.S. companies to become involved in Iraq via work advertised by the ministries and elsewhere.
Most U.S. firms doing business there have deals with U.S. government agencies which are usually cost-plus arrangements, meaning all their security and other costs are reimbursed.
The head of an Iraqi state-run enterprise said he was surprised U.S. firms were not applying for construction contracts being offered by his company.
"Why do American companies not submit offers with others? We are here for you," said the business leader.
However, a U.S. lawyer doing business in Iraq told Reuters most U.S. companies were reluctant to take such risks if their security and other costs were not reimbursed.
"What benefit would they have by doing that? It's far too risky," he said.
Iraq's Minister of Construction and Housing Omar Al-Farouk Al-Damluji, who was the only Iraqi official prepared to be named, said he hoped more U.S. funds would soon be released for reconstruction.
Of the more than $18.4 billion appropriated by the U.S. Congress, just over $1.5 billion has been spent so far and more than $7 billion has been obligated in future work.
"We need foreign investments, especially those from the United States, so that the Iraqi economy can stand again," he said.
He anticipated rebuilding would speed up after the U.S. presidential election on Nov. 2 as well as the elections in Iraq which are expected in January.
"We want to see that when both elections are finished then there will be governments that can take action." he said.
--------
Use of civilian contractors in war zones is at record levels
10/19/2004
The Associated Press
By DEBORAH HASTINGS
http://www.mlive.com/newsflash/business/index.ssf?/base/news-19/1098181141297540.xml&storylist=mibusiness
(AP) - The war against terror constitutes the greatest use of civilian contractors in American history. They do everything from serving chow to armed combat, some of them earning salaries of $200,000 a year or more.
There are an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 in Iraq - more people than any American ally has in the country, including Britain. It is a profitable business for employee and employer. Many of the former are retired military members from elite groups including Special Forces and the Green Berets.
In August, Virginia-based CACI International Inc. posted a 56 percent increase in fourth-quarter profits - from $13.3 million to $20.7 million - a boost the company's chief financial officer publicly attributed to increased demand for homeland security and intelligence services. More than 90 percent of CACI's revenues come from the U.S. government.
Titan Corp. of San Diego received a 19 percent increase in revenues for the first quarter of 2004, based largely on a rise in security contracts. But by the end of the second quarter, the firm posted a loss of $66.6 million, hurt by the Abu Ghraib scandal, a federal foreign bribery investigation and a failed merger with defense and aerospace giant Lockheed Martin Corp.
Nonetheless, the Army awarded a contract worth as much as $400 million to Titan in September for additional translators. Titan, which receives 96 percent of its revenue from the American government, is the biggest supplier of linguists to the Army. This spring, the Army issued a new contract worth up to $23 million to CACI for more interrogators.
According to the latest update from the Center for Public Integrity's Windfalls of War project, more than 150 U.S. companies have received contracts worth up to $48.7 billion for postwar work in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Pentagon officials often cite the downsizing of the military as a major reason for relying on corporate soldiers.
Allegations of wrongdoing by civilian contractors have seeped into the presidential election and became a fighting point in last week's vice presidential debate. Most notably the subject comes up in connection with Halliburton, the Texas-based defense giant once led by Vice President Dick Cheney.
The company, which has not been implicated in the abuse scandals, is under investigation by several government agencies probing aspects of Halliburton's multibillion-dollar contracts, including alleged overcharging for food service and alleged kickbacks by Kuwaiti subcontractors.
-------- china
Secret Papers About China Are Released by the C.I.A.
October 19, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/19/politics/19china.html
WASHINGTON, Oct. 18 - The Central Intelligence Agency made public on Monday a rich trove of previously classified documents on China, including the supposedly authoritative National Intelligence Estimates issued over the 30-year period of Mao Zedong's rule.
For scholars of what Mao called China's "continuous revolution," of its tumultuous and intertwined relationships with the United States, the Soviet Union and Taiwan, and of the American intelligence efforts aimed at understanding the unfolding events, the documents disclose a mixed record of insights and miscues. A National Intelligence Estimate published in June 1954 said that "no clearly established factions" existed within the Chinese leadership. In fact, the first major party purge had taken place earlier that year, but did not become public for another year.
Yet in the confusion and chaos of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960's, when radicals published so many documented exposés and denunciations that the flow of data became a glut, a 1967 intelligence estimate correctly predicted the probability that cautious military and political leaders would find common cause eventually.
"As long as Mao is capable of political command, China's situation will probably be tense and inherently unstable," it said; a "disorderly and contentious" struggle would follow, and eventually a move away from "discredited" policies to "secure modest economic growth."
In an introduction to the collection of 71 documents, which are on the agency's Web site at www.cia.gov and will be released by the Government Printing Office on compact disc, Robert L. Suettinger, a career intelligence analyst and China scholar, says that "unfortunately, the collection provides only a few examples of this kind of cogent analysis on China's leadership situation." But Mr. Suettinger described the record as "nonetheless an impressive one" in which "the fundamentals are consistently right."
Among the most important judgments, Mr. Suettinger wrote, was a consistently accurate assessment that the Communist Party in China was never challenged from 1948 on in its predominance of power on the Chinese mainland.
Other assessments contained in the documents include one written in 1950, on the eve of China's entry into the Korean War. It correctly said that Chinese forces were capable of either halting the northward path of United Nations forces or of "forcing U.N. withdrawal further south through a powerful assault."
A pair of Special National Intelligence Estimates on China's response and involvement in the Vietnam War made clear that China would not risk an open confrontation with the Untied States. One of the estimates, issued in 1966, said, "At present levels of American action [in North Vietnam], we continue to believe that China will not commit its ground or air forces to sustained combat against the U.S."
The documents show that American intelligence agencies were slow to recognize the emergence of differences between the Soviet Union and China in what is known as the Sino-Soviet split. As late as 1966, three years before clashes along the border took the relationship to its lowest state, an estimate described an open break in relations between the Soviet Union and China as unlikely.
A main shortcoming, Mr. Suettinger wrote in his assessment, was "overestimating the importance of ideological solidarity and other centripetal forces within the Communist Bloc at least during the 1950's."
Documents on the emergence and status on China's strategic nuclear forces, the subject of 13 estimates between 1962 and 1974, were heavily censored, Mr. Suettinger writes, but if nothing else, they "reveal that estimating a country's nuclear capabilities - much less intentions - on the basis of a few photographs and other scarce clues has been an imprecise science from the start."
It is a lesson that will not be lost on students of intelligence still looking at the agency's work on Iraq, Iran and North Korea.
Robert L. Hutchings, the chairman of the National Intelligence Council, described the documents as presenting "a unique historical record of a formative stage in China's development" between 1948 and 1978, including "the drama of the Chinese Civil War, the establishment and consolidation of Communist rule, and the Sino-Soviet split."
The collection of documents is the most extensive to be released by the C.I.A. on China. Since 1996, the C.I.A. has released a series of similar collections on the Soviet Union, but those documents were largely retrospectives on the cold war. By contrast, Mr. Suettinger noted that the China documents contained "formative thinking on an existing state, an ongoing challenge to American interests and security."
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Taiwan must acquire submarines to head off China blockade: minister
TAIPEI (AFP)
Oct 19, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041019063415.4urfkwnf.html
Taiwan must acquire a fleet of submarines to prevent China from mounting a naval blockade of the island in the event of a war, Defense Minister Lee Jye was quoted by a newspaper as saying Tuesday.
Lee told parliament China "would require only 13 submarines to fully blockade Taiwan," one of the military options tipped to be used by the People's Liberation Army (PLA) against the island, the China Times said.
The PLA navy now operates a fleet of 86 submarines, 40 of them in the "new generation" category, Lee said.
In contrast, Taiwan navy's submarine fleet consists of two 50-year-old Guppy-class diesel-electric boats, both in very poor condition, and two Dutch-built Hai-Lung-class boats commissioned in 1987/88.
But Lee said Taiwan would be able to defend its waters if it went ahead with the purchase of eight submarines from the the United States.
The remarks come as Taiwan debates whether to spend 18 billion US dollars on eight conventional submarines, as well as 12 P-3C submarine-hunting aircraft and six PAC-3 missile systems.
Taiwan's cabinet on June 2 approved the special budget to buy weaponry from the United States. It needs final approval by parliament.
Critics of the deal warn the hefty military spending would further provoke China. Others say the government would be forced to incur more debts or cut social welfare and education budgets.
US President George W. Bush approved the submarine sale in April 2001 as part of Washington's most comprehensive arms package to the island since 1992.
Tensions between Taiwan and China have been growing following the re-election as president of Chen Shui-bian, from the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party.
-------- colombia
Washington Votes for War in Colombia
The Nation
by Bill Weinberg
October 19, 2004
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041101&s=weinberg
The Western Hemisphere's longest, bloodiest war has become an invisible one, pushed from the headlines by the ongoing crisis in Iraq. But Washington's involvement in Colombia--which the United Nations calls the worst humanitarian disaster in the Americas, and one of the worst in the world after Congo and Darfur--is rapidly escalating.
The United States has plowed $3.3 billion in mostly military aid into Colombia since "Plan Colombia" was passed in 2000--making it the third-greatest recipient of Washington's largesse after Israel and Egypt. Since 9/11 the focus of Plan Colombia has quietly shifted from a counternarcotics campaign to a crusade against "terrorism." And now the number of US forces on the ground is set to double.
On October 10 Congress voted to raise the cap on US military advisers in Colombia to 800, and raise that on the number of US civilian contract agents--pilots, intelligence analysts, security personnel--from 400 to 600. The measure, a little-noted part of the 2005 Defense Department authorization act, was a defeat for human rights groups, which had been pushing for a lower cap. The new 800/600 cap is exactly what the White House asked for. An earlier House version would have established a 500 cap for military personnel and kept the cap for civilians at 400, but this was rejected in joint committee. A Senate proposal establishing these lower caps--known as the Byrd amendment, for Senator Robert Byrd--was defeated in June by a vote of 58 to 40. Among the two senators who abstained was John Kerry.
The bill says the measure is aimed at helping the Colombian government fight "against narcotics trafficking and against activities by organizations designated as terrorists," such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). But rights groups point to a long record of collaboration between Colombia's armed forces and the AUC, a rightist paramilitary group.
"This amounts to authorization of increased involvement by US troops in an internal armed conflict in Colombia," says Kimberly Stanton, deputy director of the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA). "And it was passed without significant public debate. We are sliding into a protracted civil war in Colombia."
The vote comes just as Colombia's hard-line President Álvaro Uribe is pursuing a new offensive against the FARC guerrillas in the south of the country. While US soldiers are ostensibly barred from combat missions, there have already been reports in the Colombian press that US troops are leading "scorched earth" campaigns in the southern Amazon region.
The New York Times story on the raising of the troop cap (at the bottom of page nine) claimed that "Under Mr. Uribe's administration, violence has ebbed in Colombia." But human rights groups in Colombia say that state-sponsored terror has only increased since Uribe took office in 2002. Yenly Angelica Mendez of the group Humanidad Vigente, which works closely with peasant groups in militarized rural areas, claims that assassinations and arbitrary imprisonment have doubled under Uribe, especially in the conflicted eastern department of Arauca, which she calls "a laboratory for the so-called Democratic Security policy of the current Colombian administration."
In an interview with the independent Colombian press agency ANNCOL, Mendez said: "Since the start of the present administration human rights violations in Arauca have risen about 100 percent. The primary victims have been the social movements, who at the moment have more than ten leaders jailed, primarily those with a record of uncompromising and dedicated protest against human rights violations, and of promoting a model of alternative development."
Just four days before the Congressional vote, the body of Pedro Jaime Mosquera Cosme, an Afro-Colombian leader of the Campesino Association of Arauca, was found near the Venezuelan border, with what the group called "clear signs of torture."
The Congressional vote also coincided with the release of a new Amnesty International report on sexual violence in Colombia's war. The report, "Colombia: Scarred Bodies, Hidden Crimes," finds that rape and other sexual crimes--including genital mutilation--are frequently used by both the paramilitaries and the official security forces against communities accused of collaborating with the guerrillas.
"Women and girls are raped, sexually abused and even killed because they behave in ways deemed as unacceptable to the combatants, or because women may have challenged the authority of armed groups, or simply because women are viewed as a useful target on which to inflict humiliation on the enemy," said Susan Lee, director of Amnesty's Americas program.
The vote also came in spite of the recent release of a US government document linking Uribe to the drug trade. The 1991 Defense Intelligence Agency report was released under the Freedom of Information Act to a DC-based research group, the National Security Archive. It asserts that Uribe, then a senator from the department of Antioquia, was "dedicated to collaboration with the Medellin cartel at high government levels." It named him as a "close personal friend" of cartel kingpin Pablo Escobar, and claimed he helped Escobar secure his seat as an auxiliary congressman.
Most ironic of all, the vote comes just as a vocal civil movement is emerging in Colombia to demand an end to the military option. Some 1.4 million public-sector workers walked off their jobs and took to the streets for a one-day strike October 12. Organized by major trade unions as well as civil organizations, the strike demanded an end both to the rights abuses and atrocities associated with the government's counterguerrilla war and to President Uribe's push to join Bush's Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).
Bogotá's central square, Bolívar Plaza, was filled with some 300,000--Colombia's largest protest in recent memory. Business was also paralyzed in Medellín, Cali, Barranquilla, Bucaramanga and Cartagena, and traffic was blocked on the Panamerican Highway. In addition to protesting the war and FTAA plans, the strikers also opposed Uribe's scheme to alter the Constitution to allow himself to seek another term in office. Uribe, Bush's closest ally in South America, has refused to talk with the FARC, and a negotiated settlement to the conflict was among the strikers' demands.
Also part of this general movement for peace are indigenous communities now standing up to demand that all armed groups in the war respect their constitutionally recognized right to autonomy. After marching four days from their communities in Colombia's heavily indigenous southern department of Cauca, some 60,000 Nasa Indians and their supporters arrived in the city of Cali on September 17 for a massive rally at the city's stadium. The unprecedented march was held in defiance of threats and intimidation by paramilitaries, guerrillas and official armed forces alike--including the abduction of indigenous leaders.
Rights advocates fear that in next year's Defense Department authorization act, the White House will again push to get the cap on US troop levels raised--or done away with altogether, as is proposed by California Representative Duncan Hunter. "The American people are not aware that we are increasingly involved, with all attention focused on Iraq," says WOLA's Stanton. And to the extent that Colombia now garners any media attention at all in the United States, it certainly doesn't include the new civil movement, which is demanding an end to precisely the policy that Washington is directing and abetting.
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TALLYING THE DEAD
How Many Iraqis Are Dying? By One Count, 208 in a Week
October 19, 2004
By NORIMITSU ONISHI
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/19/international/middleeast/19CND-CASU.html?oref=login&pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 19 - It began with the killing of two Iraqi civilians in a suicide bomb attack against an American military convoy in the northern city of Mosul last Monday. It ended Sunday evening, when a car bomb killed seven Iraqi police officers and civilians at a Baghdad cafe where police officers had apparently broken their fast during this month of Ramadan.
A weeklong effort to tally Iraqi casualties shows soldiers, insurgents, politicians, journalists, a judge, a medic and restaurant workers among the victims. They included Dina Mohammed Hassan, a television reporter killed by three men who called her a collaborator, and Ali Hussein's son and nephew, nighttime guards who died when Americans bombed a restaurant in Falluja.
From Oct. 11 to Oct. 17, an estimated 208 Iraqis were killed in war-related incidents, significantly higher than the average week; 23 members of the United States military died over the same period.
And today, violence claimed more Iraqi lives when four were killed and at least 80 were wounded in a mortar attack on an Iraqi National Guard base north of Baghdad, the American military said in a statement.
The deaths of Iraqis, particularly those of civilians, has become an increasingly delicate topic. Early this month, the Health Ministry, which had routinely provided casualty figures to journalists, stopped releasing them. Under a new policy that the government said would streamline the release of the figures - which were clearly an embarrassment to the government as well as to the Americans - only the Secretariat of the Council of Ministers is now allowed to do so.
"It's a political issue," a senior Health Ministry official said last week.
This account was pieced together from partial tallies by the Iraqi government, reporting by Iraqi employees of The New York Times stationed in Falluja, Mosul and Najaf, and counts from hospitals, news agencies and the American military.
The tally remains imprecise and does not fully answer many of the most charged questions about the war. How can civilians be distinguished from insurgents? How can contradictory accounts of the same death be reconciled?
According to a report by the Health Ministry, which last April began compiling figures for all regions except the Kurdish north, 3,040 Iraqis were killed in war-related incidents during the 22 weeks from April 5 to Sept. 6 - a little more than 138 deaths a week. The dead included 2,753 men, 159 women and 128 children. There are no agreed figures for civilian deaths in Iraq over all since the war began in early 2003, but the best estimates, by private groups and independent news organizations, place the figure in the 10,000 to 15,000 range.
While many Iraqis blame American airstrikes and other military actions for taking the lives of innocents, they also believe that foreign fighters are behind the suicide attacks that tend to kill more Iraqis than Americans.
The United States military emphasizes that the targets of its actions have been insurgents, and it also blames them for other deaths and damage that result from such raids.
Last Thursday, on the same day that American jets intensified their bombardment of Falluja, thought to be the base of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant suspected of leading many anti-American attacks, the United States military released a statement that read in part: "A top priority is to avoid harming civilians and causing damage. However, by operating and hiding among civilians, the terrorists endanger innocent civilians and are directly responsible for any harm to the women and children they hide behind."
The Secretariat of the Council of Ministers gave only partial figures for last week, releasing the numbers for only four days and mostly for Baghdad and the nearby cities. Of course, casualty figures tend to vary greatly depending on their source. On the first day of the seven-day period, 12 Iraqis were reported killed, including in the Mosul suicide attack. The other deaths took place in the three locations that proved the deadliest over the week: Falluja and Ramadi, where American forces have been engaged in combat, and Baghdad.
On a highway outside Falluja, five passengers in one car were killed in an incident involving American soldiers.
According to residents and hospital officials, the five - Kadhim Ahmed Hussein and his two sons, Jawad and Dhiya; and Layla Awad and her son Ali Khalaf - were driving from the Lake Habbaniya area, where they had sought shelter during the ongoing fighting, to check on their houses in Falluja.
According to the United States military, the car approached a checkpoint at a location that an American patrol had cordoned off.
Because the driver ignored warnings to stop even as the patrol received fire from elsewhere, the soldiers fired on the car. People in Falluja, however, said the five were shot without provocation.
On Tuesday, 46 Iraqis were reported killed. Just after midnight, an American warplane flattened Falluja's most popular restaurant, Hajji Hussein, famous for its kebabs. The military said it was a meeting place for terrorists and was no longer frequented by ordinary people. Ali Hussein, the owner, said his son and nephew, who had been working as nighttime guards, were killed in the strike.
He denied that insurgents came to the restaurant, which was founded by his father.
"This is a well-known restaurant in midtown," Mr. Hussein said. "We have a lot of people always going in and out. No one can hide in here. We are on the main street. How could there be any Zarqawi people inside?"
The largest number, at least 15, were reportedly killed in an attack against an Iraqi National Guard outpost near Qaim, along the border with Syria. Many Iraqi insurgents are believed to be based on the other side of the border and to receive support from Syrians. On Wednesday, 10 people were reportedly killed, including a police captain in Baquba, 35 miles northeast of here.
Thursday, with 58 reported deaths, was the week's deadliest day and was also punctuated by suicide bombs inside the Green Zone, the site of the American Embassy and Iraqi government ministries.
Many Iraqis regarded by insurgents as collaborating with the Americans or the United States-backed government have been assassinated, and several were killed Thursday.
South of here near Latifiya, Kamel al-Yassiri, an official with the secular National Democratic Coalition Party, was gunned down while driving on a highway; he was buried in Najaf the next day. In Mosul, a photographer who has worked for Western news organizations, Karam Hussein, 22, was gunned down outside his home.
In Baghdad, a judge was shot to death while leaving his home for work; around the same time, Ms. Hassan, 38, a reporter for the Kurdish television network Al Huriya, was also killed.
She had received three letters warning her to quit her job, said colleagues who were waiting to pick up her body outside the city morgue. She joined the network nine months ago after long working at the Ministry of Information, they said.
"We used to joke to her that she should use the money she had saved to fix her teeth and get married," said a colleague, Naseer al-Timimy. "But because she was an orphan, she felt she needed to hold on to her money."
On Thursday morning, as she and a colleague waited outside her apartment building for a company van, a blue Oldsmobile with three men pulled up in front of them, according to the account of the colleague, who survived. One of the men shot at her with a Kalashnikov and, after she fell on her back, shot her again in the face. "Collaborator! Collaborator!" the gunman is said to have yelled.
"You could no longer recognize her features," said Ahmed al-Hamdani, a colleague who saw her minutes after the shooting.
On Friday, the first day of Ramadan, though many had feared a surge in violence similar to the one last year, there were fewer deaths than on Thursday, with 24 people killed. Of those, 10 civilians died after a car bomb aimed at an Iraqi police patrol exploded in Baghdad.
The dead included four laborers working in a nearby palm grove, two bystanders and a family of four inside a car, according to the American military.
On Saturday and Sunday, 31 and 27 deaths were recorded, respectively. The largest number of victims were police officers, who have been attacked with deadly frequency by insurgents, who accuse them of supporting the Americans.
On Saturday, nine police recruits returning from a training course in Jordan were ambushed near Latifiya. Then on Sunday evening, seven police officers and civilians were killed here after a car bomb went off outside a cafe popular with police officers, bringing an end to a deadly week in Iraq.
Iraqi employees of The New York Times contributed reporting from Mosul, Falluja and Najaf for this article.
Christine Hauser contributed reporting from New York for this article.
Four Iraqis were killed and at least 80 wounded today when an Iraqi National Guard compound came under mortar bombardment from insurgents north of Baghdad, the American military said in a statement.
according to mod four iaq national four were killed and 80 ing were wounded in a mortar attack at ing base near taji.
the MNFI assoised inthe evacuation
It was the latest attack on Iraqi security forces who are seen as collaborators with American and other foreign forces in Iraq. The Iraqi national guards and police are trained by American forces and work side-by-side with them in operations intended to impose security and quell an unruly insurgency before elections planned for January.
An Iraqi Defence Ministry spokesman quoted by Reuters said that the attack took place in al-Mushahida, about 19 miles north of the capital.
The American military said in a statement that
Twice in the last several weeks several hundred Iraqi police officers and national guard members, operating together for the first time, planned and executed successful counterinsurgency missions with Americans acting only as observers. Just a few days ago, a similar joint operation broke up a kidnapping gang here and rescued three Iraqi children who had been held for ransom.
During the first week of this month, 2,000 Iraqi national guard, army and special interior police forces joined 3,000 American soldiers in retaking Samarra, to the south of here.
It was one of several recent offensives aimed at driving insurgents from rebel-controlled towns and cities, particularly in the Sunni heartland north and west of Baghdad.
Training and equipping more Iraqis to defend their country, and eventually to allow American troops to withdraw, is one of the Pentagon's top priorities. The American commander in Iraq, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., told Mr. Rumsfeld at a meeting in Baghdad that he expected 45,000 additional Iraqi security forces to be trained and ready by January, to bring the total to about 145,000.
Iraqi employees of The New York Times contributed reporting from Mosul, Falluja and Najaf for this article.
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Chief negotiator for Fallujah released
October 19, 2004
By Robert H. Reid
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041019-121309-3441r.htm
BAGHDAD - U.S. and Iraqi authorities yesterday released the chief negotiator for Fallujah after three days of captivity in a failed bid to restart talks that could avoid a military assault on the terrorist hotbed west of Baghdad.
The negotiator, Sheik Khaled al-Jumeili, said the peace talks will remain suspended as a protest against his detention by U.S. troops, who accused him of representing the militants.
Also yesterday, car bombers struck Baghdad and Mosul, raising the two-day death toll from the weapons to 12, and the interim Iraqi government extended an arms turn-in program in Baghdad's Sadr City until Thursday, and said other Iraqi cities would be included in the weapons buyback program.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said he thought the wave of terror attacks in Iraq was aimed at derailing President Bush's chances of re-election, in what was widely seen as an attempt to help Mr. Bush.
Sheik al-Jumeili told the Associated Press that he had been released yesterday from U.S. and Iraqi custody after being detained Friday when talks broke down over the city's rejection of a demand by Prime Minister Iyad Allawi to turn over terrorist leader Abu Musab Zarqawi.
Speaking separately to a reporter from Al Arabiya satellite television station, he said: "The fact is that I'm negotiating on behalf of Fallujah people - civilians, kids, women - who have no power but through being represented by somebody. Since the situation has got up to this, each can go wherever they want and we don't need to talk about negotiations."
Zarqawi's group Tawhid and Jihad has claimed responsibility for numerous beheadings and suicide bombings, including two attacks on Baghdad's green zone last week that killed six, including four U.S. civilians.
Witnesses said Sheik al-Jumeili was picked up with three other men after leaving a mosque following prayers in a village about 10 miles south of Fallujah.
The cleric said he was taken to a Marine base outside Fallujah and then by helicopter to another location. During his detention, Sheik al-Jumeili said he was treated well by the Americans and was not handcuffed or blindfolded like his companions. The other three men have not been released, he said.
The Interior Ministry said Sheik al-Jumeili was being released on the orders of Mr. Allawi, who last week issued a stern warning that the city must turn over Zarqawi or face a military attack.
But yesterday Mr. Allawi told the National Council that an "olive branch" was still extended to Fallujah in order to find a peaceful resolution. However, he said, "We shall not be lenient in regard to the question of maintaining security and granting security to every Iraqi." U.S. forces have staged days of air and ground assaults in Fallujah, targeting sites believed to be used by Zarqawi associates. The Americans also have asked Britain to shift some 650 crack troops to the Baghdad area, freeing U.S. Marines for the anticipated Fallujah campaign.
The latest U.S. assault began Thursday after Fallujah clerics rejected the "impossible" demand to turn over the terrorist leader, insisting that Zarqawi was not in the city. Fallujah fell under control of radical clerics and their armed mujahideen fighters after U.S. Marines lifted a three-week siege of the city in April.
The U.S. military meanwhile announced that five Iraqis were killed and 15 wounded when a car bomb detonated on a bridge in Mosul on Sunday morning. The blast occurred when the car-bomber collided with another car, setting off a giant blaze that damaged several other vehicles. Another car bomber yesterday hit a civilian convoy, killing one and wounding four others.
In Baghdad, a car bomb exploded late Sunday near a police patrol in the Jadiriyah district, killing six persons, including three police officers, and wounding 26 others. The blast hit a cafe near the Australian Embassy, although there were no Australian casualties.
The U.S. military also announced the crash of two helicopters on Saturday, raising the American death toll in the Iraq war to 1,100, comprising 1,097 service members and three civilians - two working for the Army and one working for the Air Force. The Associated Press count includes accidental and noncombat deaths.
Mr. Putin, speaking to reporters after a summit in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, said, "I consider the activities of terrorists in Iraq are not as much aimed at coalition forces but more personally against President Bush."
"International terrorism has as its goal to prevent the election of President Bush to a second term," he said. "If they achieve that goal, then that will give international terrorism a new impulse and extra power."
In Baghdad, Mr. Allawi said a cash-for-weapons program for followers of radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in Sadr City and other locations would be extended until Thursday, with plans for a nationwide program.
"Our forces are now ready to fight terrorists and there's no justification for people to keep weapons at home," he said.
Iraqi officials hope Fallujah leaders also can be persuaded to negotiate a weapons buyback.
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Zarqawi Is Said to Swear Allegiance to Bin Laden
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 19, 2004; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43280-2004Oct18.html
The U.S. intelligence community considers authentic a message on an Islamic Web site in which Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant who has asserted responsibility for bombings and assassinations in Iraq, was announced to have sworn his network's allegiance to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, a senior administration official said yesterday.
The practical implications of the statement are unclear, the official said, but it could serve the propaganda purposes of Zarqawi's organization and of al Qaeda.
Abu Musab Zarqawi has asserted responsibility for Iraq bombings.
"It puts Zarqawi in a top rung of al Qaeda and as a force to be reckoned with internationally," the official said. The statement "is also good for al Qaeda showing that [its] organized terrorist group is more aligned with the activity in Iraq," he added.
Although President Bush and his top national security officials have for two years described Zarqawi as an al Qaeda official, most analysts in the intelligence community have seen him until now as independent, someone who shared some aims with bin Laden but also considered himself a competitor. Zarqawi has differed in the past with bin Laden over the al Qaeda leader's determination to carry on terrorist operations in the United States and not just in the Middle East.
The new message, posted in the name of the spokesman of Zarqawi's group, said that he and the "soldiers" of his organization, Tawhid and Jihad, announce to the Islamic nation their "allegiance . . . to the sheik of the mujaheddin, Osama bin Laden." It adds, "When you give us orders, we will obey. If you forbid aught, it will be forbidden," according to the Search for International Terrorist Entities Institute.
In what one nongovernment analyst said could be considered a change in Zarqawi's approach to operate solely within the Middle East and Europe, the message said, "We swear to God that should you want us to cruise the sea with you, God Willing we will."
The message also refers to communications between Zarqawi, 38, and bin Laden "eight months ago" that were "interrupted by fate." U.S. intelligence intercepted a January letter from Zarqawi to al Qaeda and American officials made it public in February.
In it, the Jordanian laid out his plans for Iraq and sought bin Laden's support. In making the letter public on its Web site, the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Baghdad emphasized Zarqawi's statement that, with Iraqi sovereignty approaching in June and "with the deployment of [Iraqi] soldiers and police, the future has become frightening."
L. Paul Bremer, then the CPA administrator, told reporters at the time, "Zarqawi and all the others know they are falling behind in a race against time, a race against Iraqi self-government, when he says, 'Democracy is coming and there will be no excuse thereafter for the attacks.' " Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz told PBS in March that Zarqawi's letter showed that he believed "things are bad for us [in Iraq]. If we can't start a civil war pretty soon between the Shia and Sunnis, our goose is cooked and this is important."
Some intelligence analysts, however, assessed the letter differently at the time, saying it did not reveal desperation on Zarqawi's part but rather a declaration that attacks should escalate to coincide with the political transition in Iraq. Indeed, since the letter was intercepted, Zarqawi has carried out many of the tactics he proposed to bin Laden.
Zarqawi's January letter said the "zero hour" for stepped-up insurgency attacks would come at the end of June, when the United States passed sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government. That is "when we will begin to appear in the open, gain control [of] the land at night and extend it into daylight," Zarqawi said. He promised to "create companies of mujaheddin that repair to secure places and strive to reconnoiter the country, hunting the enemy -- Americans, police and soldiers -- on the roads and lanes."
Today, Zarqawi is recognized as equal to bin Laden by at least one U.S. measurement. The reward for anyone who provides information that leads to his capture or death has been increased from $10 million in February to $25 million, the same price put on bin Laden's head.
In his abortive negotiations with the leaders of Fallujah, interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi has insisted they turn over Zarqawi, and repeated U.S. bombings in that city have been justified as attempts to kill him or his associates. The negotiations were suspended when the Fallujah representatives said the demand to produce Zarqawi was unreasonable because he was not in their city.
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U.S. Frees Fallujah Negotiator
Both Sides in Talks Say Peace Agreement Remains Possible
By Steve Fainaru
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 19, 2004; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43168-2004Oct18.html
BAGHDAD, Oct. 18 -- U.S. forces released the negotiator representing Fallujah on Monday after detaining him for three days, and both sides in talks to end fighting in the insurgent-held Iraqi city said an agreement was still possible.
The negotiator, Khalid Hamoud Jumaili, said he had denied U.S. accusations during questioning that he represents the insurgents. He described his detention as a setback, but said an agreement was still possible if U.S. forces "are sincere with us."
A car bomb exploded on a bridge in the northern city of Mosul after the vehicle slammed into another car. The attack killed five Iraqi civilians and wounded 15, the U.S. military said.
No fighting was reported in Fallujah, but it was not clear whether the lull was tied to Jumaili's release and softer rhetoric from the interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, who last week threatened to attack the city unless residents handed over Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant.
"We are trying our best, using all possibilities, to solve it peacefully," Allawi told Iraq's interim National Council. "We are still carrying the olive branch."
Jumaili, who heads an insurgent group known as Mohammad's First Army, and other Iraqis continued to deny that Zarqawi resides exclusively in Fallujah. Mohsen Abdul Hamid, president of the Iraqi Islamic Party, called the government's demands "impossible to fulfill. How can the people of Fallujah surrender Zarqawi if he moves here and there in Iraq?"
But Allawi reaffirmed that he believes Zarqawi, whose organization has asserted responsibility for numerous attacks, is in Fallujah. "Zarqawi and [Osama] bin Laden's men are there," he said.
Although their numbers are not known, foreign fighters are believed to represent a significant portion of the insurgents who control Fallujah, a predominantly Sunni Muslim city 35 miles west of Baghdad.
The U.S. military did not initially confirm Jumaili's detention and has yet to explain it. Jumaili said he was seized at a checkpoint outside Fallujah while en route to Baghdad to resume negotiations with representatives of the interim Iraqi government.
"I told them that I am the head of the delegation to negotiate with the government," Jumaili told al-Arabiya television. "When I told them this, it was like I exploded a bomb in their faces. They immediately arrested me."
Jumaili said he was asked questions about his relationship with the insurgents.
He said he later was told that his detention had been "a mistake."
Meanwhile, three U.S. soldiers were wounded Monday afternoon when a roadside bomb exploded in western Baghdad, the U.S. military said in a statement.
The attack in Mosul brought the number of Iraqis killed by car bombs in the past two days to at least 12. Another car bomb exploded in Baghdad late Sunday night, killing seven Iraqi police officers.
U.S. forces reported 30 car bomb incidents in the first 13 days of October.
That figure includes car bombs that exploded and others that were discovered and detonated by U.S. forces.
Fifty-nine car bombs exploded in September, the most in one month since the invasion of Iraq last year. The car bomb attacks accounted for nearly 60 percent of all attacks against U.S.-led forces that month.
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'CATASTROPHIC SUCCESS'
The Strategy to Secure Iraq Did Not Foresee a 2nd War
October 19, 2004
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/19/international/19war.html?ei=5094&en=a9cce3b11a8114c4&hp=&ex=1098244800&partner=homepage&pagewanted=all&position=
Gen. Tommy R. Franks climbed out of a C-130 plane at the Baghdad airport on April 16, 2003, and pumped his fist into the air. American troops had pushed into the capital of liberated Iraq little more than a week before, and it was the war commander's first visit to the city.
Much of the Sunni Triangle was only sparsely patrolled, and Baghdad was still reeling from a spasm of looting. Apache attack helicopters prowled the skies as General Franks headed to the Abu Ghraib North Palace, a retreat for Saddam Hussein that now served as the military's headquarters.
Huddling in a drawing room with his top commanders, General Franks told them it was time to make plans to leave. Combat forces should be prepared to start pulling out within 60 days if all went as expected, he said. By September, the more than 140,000 troops in Iraq could be down to little more than a division, about 30,000 troops.
To help bring stability and allow the Americans to exit, President Bush had reviewed a plan the day before seeking four foreign divisions - including Arab and NATO troops - to take on peacekeeping duties.
As the Baghdad meeting drew to a close, the president in a teleconference congratulated the commanders on a job well done. Afterward, they posed for photos and puffed on victory cigars.
Within a few months, though, the Bush administration's optimistic assumptions had been upended. Many of the foreign troops never came. The Iraqi institutions expected to help run the country collapsed. The adversary that was supposed to have been shocked and awed into submission was reorganizing beyond the reach of overstretched American troops.
In the debate over the war and its aftermath, the Bush administration has portrayed the insurgency that is still roiling Iraq today as an unfortunate, and unavoidable, accident of history, an enemy that emerged only after melting away during the rapid American advance toward Baghdad. The sole mistake Mr. Bush has acknowledged in the war is in not foreseeing what he termed that "catastrophic success."
But many military officers and civilian officials who served in Iraq in the spring and summer of 2003 say the administration's miscalculations cost the United States valuable momentum - and enabled an insurgency that was in its early phases to intensify and spread.
"I think that there were Baathist Sunnis who planned to resist no matter what happened and at all cost, but we missed opportunities, and that drove more of them into the resistance," Jay Garner, the first civilian administrator of Iraq and a retired Army lieutenant general, said in an interview, referring to the Baath Party of Mr. Hussein and to his Sunni Muslim supporters. "Things were stirred up far more than they should have been. We did not seal the borders because we did not have enough troops to do that, and that brought in terrorists."
A senior officer who served in Iraq but did not want to be identified because of the sensitivity of his position said: "The real question is, did there have to be an insurgency? Did we help create the insurgency by missing the window of opportunity in the period right after Saddam was removed from power?"
Looking back at that crucial time, those officers, administration officials and others provided an intimate and detailed account of how the postwar situation went awry. Civilian administrators of the Iraqi occupation raised concerns about plans to reduce American forces; intelligence agencies left American forces unprepared for the furious battles they encountered in Iraq's southern cities and did not emphasize the risks of a postwar insurgency. And senior American generals and civilians were at odds over plans to build a new Iraqi army, which was needed to impose order.
The First Principles
In August 2002, leading administration officials circulated a top-secret document blandly titled, "Iraq: Goals, Objectives and Strategy." Months of wrangling at the United Nations were still ahead, but senior officials were drafting the principles that would guide the invasion if the president gave the order to strike.
The goals for Iraq were far-reaching. The aim was not just to topple a dictator, but also to build a democratic system. The United States would preserve, but reform, the bureaucracies that did the day-to-day work of running the country. There were some unstated objectives as well. Policy makers hoped that installing a pro-American government would put pressure on Syria to stop supporting terrorist groups and Iran to halt its nuclear weapons program.
But grand goals did not mean huge forces. From the start, the Pentagon's plan to invade Iraq was a striking contrast to the doctrine for using military power that was developed by Colin L. Powell when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Instead of assembling a giant invasion force over six months, as he did in the Persian Gulf war in 1991, the administration intended to attack with a much smaller force as reinforcements were still streaming to the Middle East.
The strategy was consistent with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's push to transform the military so it would rely less on heavy ground troops and more on technology, intelligence and special operations forces.
Mr. Rumsfeld had long been impatient with what he thought was a plodding, risk-averse and overly costly way of waging war. At General Franks's Central Command, planners thought that the new approach was necessary for another reason: to catch the Iraqis by surprise and prevent any efforts to sabotage the oil fields or stiffen their Baghdad defenses.
"Almost everybody worried about what would happen if the war were prolonged," Douglas J. Feith, the under secretary of defense, said in an interview. "This highlighted the importance of speed and surprise. It argued for this unusual and creative way of starting the war, with fewer forces than Saddam expected us to have and to have the flow continue after the war started."
If the Iraqi Army mounted a tougher fight than anticipated, Mr. Feith said, the Pentagon could continue to send forces. If the resistance was light, as many civilian aides expected, Washington could stop the troop flow. There would be "off ramps," in the vernacular of the Pentagon.
Achieving the administration's ambitions meant dealing with any turmoil that followed the collapse of Mr. Hussein's government and his iron-fisted security services. Administration officials assumed that American and multinational troops would help stabilize Iraq, but they also believed that the newly liberated Iraqis would share the burden.
"The concept was that we would defeat the army, but the institutions would hold, everything from ministries to police forces," Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, said in an interview. "You would be able to bring new leadership but that we were going to keep the body in place."
Early Warnings
Some military men, though, were worried that the administration would be caught short. Gen. Hugh Shelton, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the first nine months of the Bush administration, was one of them.
General Shelton had contacts in the Middle East who had warned that Iraq could devolve into chaos after Mr. Hussein was deposed.
At a Pentagon meeting early in 2003 with former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, former vice chairmen and their successors, he voiced concerns that the United States would not have sufficient troops immediately after the dictator was ousted. He cautioned that it was important to have enough troops to deal with the unexpected.
At the White House, officials also were thinking about how many troops would be needed.
Military aides on the National Security Council prepared a confidential briefing for Ms. Rice and her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, that examined what previous nation-building efforts had required.
The review, called "Force Security in Seven Recent Stability Operations," noted that no single rule of thumb applied in every case. But it underscored a basic principle well known to military planners: However many forces might be required to defeat the foe, maintaining security afterward was determined by an entirely different set of calculations, including the population, the scope of the terrain and the necessary tasks.
If the United States and its allies wanted to maintain the same ratio of peacekeepers to population as it had in Kosovo, the briefing said, they would have to station 480,000 troops in Iraq. If Bosnia was used as benchmark, 364,000 troops would be needed. If Afghanistan served as the model, only 13,900 would be needed in Iraq. The higher numbers were consistent with projections later provided to Congress by Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, then the Army chief of staff, that several hundred thousand troops would be needed in Iraq. But Mr. Rumsfeld dismissed that estimate as off the mark.
More forces generally are required to control countries with large urban populations. The briefing pointed out that three-quarters of Iraq's population lived in urban areas. In Bosnia and Kosovo, city dwellers made up half of the population. In Afghanistan, it was only 18 percent.
Neither the Defense Department nor the White House, however, saw the Balkans as a model to be emulated. In a Feb. 14, 2003, speech titled "Beyond Nation Building," which Mr. Rumsfeld delivered in New York, he said the large number of foreign peacekeepers in Kosovo had led to a "culture of dependence" that discouraged local inhabitants from taking responsibility for themselves.
The defense secretary said he thought that there was much to be learned from Afghanistan, where the United States did not install a nationwide security force but relied instead on a new Afghan Army and troops from other countries to help keep the peace.
James F. Dobbins, who was the administration's special envoy for Afghanistan and had also served as the ambassador at large for Kosovo, Bosnia, Somalia and Haiti, thought that the administration was focusing on the wrong model. The former Yugoslavia - with its ethnic divisions, hobbled economy and history of totalitarian rule - had more parallels with Iraq than administration officials appeared willing to accept, Mr. Dobbins believed. It was Afghanistan that was the anomaly.
"They preferred to find a model for successful nation building that was not associated with the previous administration," Mr. Dobbins said in an interview. "And Afghanistan offered a much more congenial answer in terms of what would be required in terms of inputs, including troops."
As the Iraq war approached, Mr. Dobbins was overseeing a RAND Corporation study on nation building. The larger the number of security forces, the fewer the casualties suffered by alliance troops, the study asserted. When L. Paul Bremer III was appointed the chief administrator for Iraq in May 2003, Mr. Dobbins slipped him a copy.
By the end of 2002, the military was scrambling to get ready. The troop deployment plan had been devised so that the Pentagon could regulate the flow and send only as much as was needed. Throughout the process, Mr. Rumsfeld was scrutinizing the troop requests. Defense officials said he had wanted to ensure that the deployments did not outrun the United Nations diplomacy and added that requests for Iraq had to be examined because the United States faced other potential crises.
Concern in the Field
But some military officers were concerned about what they perceived as second-guessing at the Pentagon, and complained of delays. One major troop request submitted in late November was not approved until a month later, for example.
The issue came to the attention of Newt Gingrich, the former Republican Congressional leader and a member of the Defense Policy Board that advises Mr. Rumsfeld, during an early February 2003 meeting with American officers in Kuwait. He said he would go back and press the secretary to stop messing around with tactical-level decisions, according to an account of the session by participants. "The worst they can do is take my designated parking space away," he said.
As the war drew near, Mr. Bush asked his senior commanders if they had sufficient forces, including enough to protect vulnerable supply lines. "I can't tell you how many times he asked, 'Do you have everything that you need?' " Ms. Rice said. "The answer was, these are the force levels that we need."
Senior military officers acknowledge that they did not press the president for more troops. But some said they would have been more comfortable with a larger reserve. And some officers say the concept of beginning the invasion while reinforcements were still being sent did not work so smoothly in practice.
On March 18, the day before the conflict began, the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff met to discuss plans for removing American forces once they had triumphed. Aides to General Franks argued that the meeting was premature.
As the American forces drove toward Baghdad in the early days of the war, the fighting was different than had been expected. Instead of a clash of armies, however mismatched, the American forces had to contend with paramilitary forces and even suicide bombers. Thousands of Saddam Fedayeen paramilitary troops had infested Iraq's southern cities and were using them as bases to attack American supply lines.
But after several days of hard battle, the Americans resumed their march north and began moving in for what they thought would be a climactic confrontation with the Republican Guard. With seemingly little doubt that the Americans would win, talk of withdrawal soon resurfaced.
In mid-April, Lawrence Di Rita, one of Mr. Rumsfeld's closest aides, arrived in Kuwait to join the team assembled by General Garner, the civil administrator, which was to oversee post-Hussein Iraq. Mr. Bush had agreed in January that the Defense Department was to have authority for postwar Iraq. It was the first time since World War II that the State Department would not take charge of a post-conflict situation.
Speaking to Garner aides at their hotel headquarters in Kuwait, Mr. Di Rita outlined the Pentagon's vision, one that seemed to echo the themes in Mr. Rumsfeld's Feb. 14 address. According to Col. Paul Hughes of the Army, who was present at the session, Mr. Di Rita said the Pentagon was determined to avoid open-ended military commitments like those in Bosnia and Kosovo, and to withdraw the vast majority of the American forces in three to four months.
"The main theme was that D.O.D. would be in charge, and this would be totally different than in the past," said Tom Gross, a retired Army colonel and a Garner aide who was also at the session. "We would be out very quickly. We were very confused. We did not see it as a short-term process."
Mr. Di Rita said in an interview that he had no responsibility for force levels, but added that military commanders wanted the postwar troop numbers to be as low as necessary.
Thomas E. White, then the secretary of the Army, said he had received similar guidance from Mr. Rumsfeld's office. "Our working budgetary assumption was that 90 days after completion of the operation, we would withdraw the first 50,000 and then every 30 days we'd take out another 50,000 until everybody was back," he recalled. "The view was that whatever was left in Iraq would be de minimis."
Not Enough Troops
Even as Mr. Hussein's government was losing its struggle to hold onto power, some preliminary reports suggested that Iraq could remain a battleground.
The National Intelligence Council had cautioned in a January 2003 report that the Iraqis would resent their liberators unless the American-led occupation authority moved quickly to restore essential services and shift political controls to Iraqi leaders. But those efforts turned out to be frustratingly slow.
While much of the country was chaotic and lawless, the American generals there were still not sure that they were facing a determined insurgency. The limited number of United States troops, however, posed problems in policing the porous borders, establishing a significant presence in the resistant Sunni Triangle and imposing order in the capital.
"My position is that we lost momentum and that the insurgency was not inevitable," said James A. (Spider) Marks, a retired Army major general, who served as the chief intelligence officer for the land war command. "We had momentum going in and had Saddam's forces on the run.
"But we did not have enough troops," he continued. "First, we did not have enough troops to conduct combat patrols in sufficient numbers to gain solid intelligence and paint a good picture of the enemy on the ground. Secondly, we needed more troops to act on the intelligence we generated. They took advantage of our limited numbers."
In Baghdad, some neighborhoods were particularly restive, but American forces were hampered in carrying out patrols. The Third Infantry Division, the first big unit to venture into the city, had about 17,000 troops. But it was a mechanized division, and only a fraction could carry out patrols on foot. The tank crews had to wait for body armor.
North and west of Baghdad, in the volatile cities of the Sunni Triangle, resisters found refuge while they plotted new attacks.
In Falluja, which would become a hotbed of the insurgency, no troops arrived until April 24, two weeks after American forces entered Baghdad. Soldiers from the 82d Airborne were the first ones there. But because of constant troop rotations and the limited number of forces, responsibility for the city repeatedly shifted. The chronic turnover made it difficult for the Americans to form ties to residents and gather useful intelligence. Today, the city is a no-go zone surrounded by United States marines.
Lt. Col. Joseph Apodaca, a Marine intelligence officer who is now retired, said there were early signs in the Shiite Muslim-dominated south that the paramilitary forces American troops faced might be the precursor of a broader insurgency. But chasing after potential rebels was not the Marines' assigned mission, and they did not have sufficient troops for this, he said.
"The overall plan was to go get Saddam Hussein," Colonel Apodaca recalled. "The assumption seemed to be that when people realized that he was gone, that would get the population on our side and facilitate the transition to reconstruction. We were not going to chase these guys when they ran to the smaller cities. We did not really have the force levels at that point to keep the insurgency down."
Hoping Multinationally
In Washington, however, White House and Pentagon officials thought that the most dangerous part was over. The goal of quickly enlisting Iraqi support appeared to be frustrated when the police abandoned their posts and Iraqi military units did not surrender en masse. But the administration thought that more of the burden could be shifted to multinational forces.
On April 15, 2003, Mr. Bush convened his National Security Council and discussed soliciting peacekeeping forces from other countries so the United States could begin to pull out troops. Even though there had been widespread opposition to the invasion, administration officials thought that some governments would put aside their objections once victory was at hand and the Iraqis began to form a new government.
Pentagon officials briefed the president on a plan to enlist four divisions: one made up of NATO troops; another from the Gulf Cooperative Council, an association of Persian Gulf states; one led by Poland; and another by Britain. The thinking was that the United States would leave no more than a division or two in Iraq.
The next day, General Franks flew to Baghdad and instructed his commanders to draw up plans to begin pulling out. At that palace meeting with his commanders, he noted that it was possible for the United States to wear out its welcome and keep too many troops in Iraq too long. A functioning interim Iraqi government was expected within 30 to 60 days, he said. He told his commanders to be prepared to take as much risk going out as they did coming in.
After that discussion, the general and his officers took part in a satellite video conference with Mr. Bush. The president asked about integrating foreign troops into the security force. Noting that Secretary of State Powell and Mr. Rumsfeld would be asking other nations for troops, the general said he planned to talk to officials in the United Arab Emirates about an Arab division.
General Franks's talk of being prepared to take risks alarmed General Garner, the civil administrator. Fearing that an early troop reduction threatened the mission of building a new Iraq, General Garner took his concerns to Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, the chief allied land commander.
"There was no doubt we would win the war," General Garner recalled telling General McKiernan, "but there can be doubt we will win the peace."
Soon after, the Pentagon began turning off the spigot of troops flowing to Iraq.
Mr. Rumsfeld had started to question whether the military still needed the Army's First Cavalry Division, a 17,500-member force that was slated to follow the lead invasion force into Iraq. He and General Franks discussed the issue repeatedly.
"Rumsfeld just ground Franks down," said Mr. White, the former Army secretary who was fired after policy disputes with Mr. Rumsfeld. "If you grind away at the military guys long enough, they will finally say, 'Screw it, I'll do the best I can with what I have.' The nature of Rumsfeld is that you just get tired of arguing with him."
A Canceled Deployment
General Franks insisted that he had not faced pressure on the First Cavalry issue. "It was Rumsfeld's idea," he said, referring to the cancellation of the deployment. "Rumsfeld did not beat me into submission. Initially, I did not want to truncate the force flow, but as it looked like we were likely to get greater international participation, I concluded that it was O.K. to stop the flow."
General Franks also said he accepted the suggestion only after his field commanders agreed that the division was not needed. But a former staff officer to General McKiernan said the land war commander had wanted the unit to be deployed and was disappointed that he had to do without the additional division. The deployment of the division was canceled on April 21.
It was not long, though, before the optimistic talk of a speedy withdrawal of American forces was set aside. Neither NATO nor Persian Gulf nations wanted to put forces into Iraq. An American general was sent to New Delhi to talk to the Indians, but any hope of securing Indian troops quickly faded. Turkey later offered peacekeeping troops, but the Iraqis would not accept them. Only the Polish-led and British-led divisions became a reality.
Soon after arriving in May, Mr. Bremer, who replaced General Garner as the chief occupation official sooner than expected, became concerned that American forces were stretched too thin. In late June, John Sawers, the senior British official in Baghdad, sent a confidential report to his government, which chronicled Mr. Bremer's concerns.
'A Difficult Week in Iraq'
"It has been a difficult week in Iraq," Mr. Sawers wrote. "The new threat is well-targeted sabotage of the infrastructure. An attack on the power grid last weekend had a series of knock-on effects which halved the power generation in Baghdad and many other parts of the country. "
"The oil and gas is another target, with five successful attacks this week on pipelines," he continued. "We are also seeing the first signs of intimidation of Iraqis working for the coalition."
"Bremer's main concern is that we must keep in-country sufficient military capability to ensure a security blanket across the country," Mr. Sawers reported. "He has twice said to President Bush that he is concerned that the drawdown of US/UK troops has gone too far and we cannot afford further reductions."
Mr. Bremer also questioned whether multinational forces "will be sufficiently robust when push comes to shove," Mr. Sawers reported.
According to United States officials, Mr. Bremer raised the troop issue in a June 18 video conference with Mr. Bush. Mr. Bremer said the United States needed to be careful not to go too far in taking out troops. The president said the plan was now to rotate forces, not withdraw them, and agreed that Washington needed to maintain adequate force levels.
Still the American forces shrank, from a high of about 150,000 in July 2003 to some 108,000 in February 2004, before going up again when violence sharply increased early this year. Some of the troop declines were offset by the arrival of the Polish-led division in August 2003.
General Franks said he had sought to assure Mr. Bremer that he would have enough troops in late May. While Mr. Bremer argued that he could not get Iraq's economy going until the American military made the country safer, General Franks asserted that the slow pace of reconstruction was undermining security.
"Some people say there can be no economic building in a country until there is security," General Franks recalled, referring to Mr. Bremer and others in the Coalition Provisional Authority. "When I would talk to Jerry Bremer, I would say, 'Listen Jerry, you want to talk to me about security in terms of forces. I want to talk to you about the C.P.A. and how many civilians - wing tips, I call them - you guys have out in these 18 provinces in order to take large sums of money, move them around in civil works projects, and get the angry young men off the streets so that fewer troops will be necessary."
This debate between Mr. Bremer, who declined to comment for this article, and the senior military officers in Iraq would become a continuing refrain.
What Went Wrong?
For some who served in Iraq, the summer of 2003 was a time of lost opportunities. Now there is a passionate debate about what went wrong.
"Combat is a series of transitions, and the most critical part of an operation is the transition from combat to stability and support operations," one general said. "When you don't have enough combat power, you end up giving the enemy an opportunity to go after your vulnerabilities."
General Franks, for his part, said the United States had sufficient combat forces in Iraq but did not initially have enough civil affairs, military police and other units that are intended to establish order after major combat is over. The issue, he said, was not the level of forces, but their composition.
While saying he was not criticizing Mr. Rumsfeld, General Franks suggested that this was partly a result of difficulties in getting all of the Central Command's force requests approved quickly at the Pentagon. He also said delays in obtaining funds from Congress for reconstruction efforts and the decision of many foreign governments not to send troops had contributed to the continuing turmoil in Iraq.
Ms. Rice puts the blame for the insurgency primarily on the fact that many Iraqi forces fled during the American push to Baghdad, only to fight another day. She also said the minority Sunni population, which had been in power under Mr. Hussein, felt unsettled, contributing to a "permissive environment."
"Any big historical change is going to be turbulent," she said. "There was a lot of planning based on the assumptions, based on the intelligence. It is also the case that when the plan meets reality, it's what it didn't think of that really becomes the problem. So the real question is, can you adjust and make the changes necessary?"
General Garner said the administration's mistakes had made it easier for the insurgency to take hold.
"John Abizaid was the only one who really had his head in the postwar game," General Garner said, referring to the general who served as General Franks's deputy and eventually his successor. "The Bush administration did not. Condi Rice did not. Doug Feith didn't. You could go brief them, but you never saw any initiative come of them. You just kind of got a north and south nod. And so it ends with so many tragic things."
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Attack on Iraqi National Guard Headquarters Kills Four
October 19, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq.html?pagewanted=all
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Gunmen seized the head of CARE International's operations in Iraq -- a woman who has worked on behalf of Iraqis for three decades -- as the British government on Tuesday weighed a politically volatile American request to transfer soldiers to dangerous areas near the capital.
Elsewhere Tuesday, a mortar attack killed at least four Iraqi National Guard soldiers and wounded 80 at a base north of Baghdad. An American contractor also died when mortar shells crashed onto a U.S. base in the Iraqi capital. And three car bombs exploded in the northern city of Mosul, killing two Iraqi civilians and wounding three.
Margaret Hassan, who holds British, Irish and Iraqi citizenships and is married to an Iraqi, is among the most widely known humanitarian officials in the Middle East. She is also the most high-profile figure to fall victim to a wave of kidnappings sweeping Iraq in recent months.
The Arab television station Al-Jazeera broadcast a brief video showing Hassan, wearing a white blouse and appearing tense, sitting in a room with bare white walls. An editor at the station, based in Qatar, said the tape contained no audio. It did not identify what group was holding her and contained no demand for her release.
Hassan, who is in her early 60s, was kidnapped about 7:30 a.m. while being driven from her home to CARE's office in a western neighborhood of the capital, a CARE employee said. The employee said the group did not employ armed guards.
In an interview with Al-Jazeera, Hassan's husband, Tahseen Ali Hassan, said his wife was abducted near the CARE office.
``Two cars intercepted her from the front and back,'' he said. ``They attacked the car and pulled out the driver and a companion. Then they took the car to an unknown destination.''
He said his wife had not received threats and that the kidnappers had not contacted anyone with any demands. ``Nothing like this happened before, because CARE is a humanitarian organization, and she has served the Iraqi people for 30 years,'' he said.
Hassan has lived in Baghdad for 30 years, helping supply medicines and other humanitarian aid and speaking out about Iraqis' suffering under international sanctions during the 1990s.
She went to work for CARE International soon after it began operations in Iraq in 1991 following the Gulf War, with programs focusing on rebuilding and maintaining water and sanitation systems, hospitals and clinics.
The kidnapping was the latest attack against humanitarian organizations, many of which have curtailed operations and withdrawn international staff because of the violence in Iraq. It also follows a wave of abductions targeting foreigners in the heart of the capital.
Although militants have kidnapped at least seven other women over the past six months, all were later released. By contrast, at least 30 male hostages have been killed, including three Americans beheaded by their captors. Hassan's abduction occurred less than two weeks after a video posted on an Islamic Web site showed the beheading of British hostage Kenneth Bigley.
CARE said Hassan was born in Britain, but the British and Irish foreign offices said she was born in Ireland, which is not part of the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq. When the kidnappers sent the tape to Al-Jazeera, they said they had abducted a ``British aid worker,'' according to the station.
The British government is weighing a U.S. request to shift some of the country's 9,000 soldiers from relatively peaceful southern Iraq to areas south of Baghdad -- presumably to free U.S. troops for an all-out assault on the insurgent bastion Fallujah.
British lawmakers are worried about sending their soldiers to the more volatile U.S.-controlled sector at a time when public opposition to the war in Britain has reduced Prime Minister Tony Blair's popularity.
The U.S. command said U.S. Marines and Iraqi soldiers have rounded up nearly 130 suspected insurgents over the past two days in areas south of Baghdad where British media say the British forces would be sent.
U.S. officials have admitted in the past that faulty intelligence had led to the arrests of thousands of Iraqis who had no ties to the insurgency. However, officials claim their intelligence is better now that Iraqi security forces are playing important roles in such operations.
The mortar attack on the Iraqi National Guard occurred early Tuesday when six mortar shells crashed onto a base in Mushahidah, 25 miles north of Baghdad. The troops were lined up in a courtyard for the morning formation, according to Iraqi and multinational officials.
The U.S. military said four guardsmen were killed and 80 wounded. Iraqi officials on the scene said five guardsmen were killed and more than 100 injured. American helicopters helped ferry the wounded to U.S. hospitals in the area. Iraqi police and security units have been a frequent target of insurgents trying to undermine U.S.-led security efforts ahead of January national elections.
An American contractor working for KBR, formerly known as Kellogg, Brown & Root, was killed and a U.S. soldier was wounded during a pre-dawn mortar and rocket barrage Tuesday at a garrison in Baghdad, officials said.
The three car bombs in Mosul, killing two Iraqi civilians and wounding three, occurred between 12:30 p.m. and 1:30 p.m., the military said. One bomb targeted a provincial convoy belonging to the governor of Ninevah, though he was not in the convoy himself. Another hit a military coalition convoy, causing minor injuries to one U.S. soldier.
The wave of violence that has swept Iraq has convinced many humanitarian organizations -- even those that have hung on through conflicts in Africa, Asia and the Balkans -- that it is time to leave.
Last month, Italian aid workers Simona Torretta and Simona Pari, both 29, were kidnapped from their Baghdad offices. They were released after three weeks in captivity.
Astrid van Genderen Stort, spokeswoman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, said it was up to each non-governmental organization whether to keep staff in Iraq.
``We, the U.N., decided last year not to have international presence anymore because we deemed the situation too dangerous for us,'' van Genderen Stort said. ``The kidnapping of the Italian and Iraqi women only a while ago should have alerted others even more as to the dangers of operating in Iraq.''
Last year, as U.S.-led forces massed for the invasion, Hassan told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that she would not leave ``because I think it's important for my staff that I stay with them. The strength comes from us supporting one another.''
Associated Press reporters Fisnik Abrashi and Rawya Rageh in Baghdad and Edward Harris in Taji contributed to this report.
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US air strikes on Fallujah,
Iraq announces nationwide arms-for-cash plan
Oct 19, 2004
FALLUJAH, Iraq (AFP)
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041019055534.xdkstr6d.html
US warplanes struck suspected hideouts of Islamic militant Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi in rebel-held Fallujah early Tuesday, while the Iraqi government announced plans for a national arms-for-cash program.
Amid a rising tide of religious extremism, a group calling itself the Islamic Army in Iraq has said it had executed two Macedonian men it accused of spying for US forces, Al-Jazeera television reported.
US warplanes struck one of the breeding grounds for radical Islam early Tuesday with 90 minutes of air strikes on suspected safe houses and weapons depots thought to belong to Zarqawi in southern Fallujah, the military said.
The strikes, a regular event since June, were conducted for about 90 minutes overnight, the army said, as US and Iraqi forces seek to subdue the city in the Sunni Muslim heartland ahead of January elections.
The military statement made no reference to any possible casualties.
US and Iraqi forces believe that Fallujah, west of Baghdad, has been transformed into the main base for the Jordanian-born Zarqawi and his followers, who are blamed for a slew of car bombings and kidnappings across Iraq.
Desperate to regain control of the no-go zone, more than 1,000 joint forces have encircled the city for the past five days, though they have given no indication about whether a ground assault would be launched.
The military said its air strikes had significantly altered the structure of Zarqawi's groups by killing off key figures.
The latest assault deflated hopes for a peaceful solution to the crisis after a city leader, Sheikh Khaled Hamoud, was released by the military after being detained since Friday.
Fellow negotiator Sheikh Abdul Hamid Jadu described the release of Hamoud as a positive step and expressed his wish to restart talks with the Iraqi government that had broken off Thursday.
"If the US bombing stops, that would be another positive indication and the negotiating channels could be reopened," Jadu said. "From the beginning we have been calling for a peaceful solution."
The delegation team stormed off from peace talks after Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi issued them an ultimatum to hand over Zarqawi, who they deny is in the city. The same day, intense air strikes hammered Fallujah.
Seeking compromise, Allawi announced in a speech to parliament on Monday that his government would send aid worth two million dollars to the city and the International Committee of the Red Cross said it had sent 1.5 tonnes of urgent medical and surgical equipment to a hospital there.
Allawi also offered a sweetner to the rest of the nation with the announcement of countrywide the weapons buyback program, begun last week in a Baghdad slum.
The program would be expanded to Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, Allawi told parliament.
The weapons-for-cash scheme to disarm the militia of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in Sadr City was so successful it has been extended until Thursday, Allawi said.
On the ground, three US soldiers were wounded in a bomb blast in Baghdad, while a US soldier was found dead in his bunk house late Monday. The military said the non-combat death was under investigation.
With US forces concentrating on Fallujah, British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon told parliament the government was considering whether to redeploy British troops from southern Iraq to the more violent central areas currently patrolled by US troops.
"The US request is for a limited number of UK ground forces to be made available to relieve US forces and to allow them, in turn, to participate in further operations elsewhere in Iraq, to maintain the continuing pressure on terrorists," Hoon told parliament.
A reconnaissance team will provide the government with information needed to make the redeployment decision, Hoon told the BBC.
Hoon stressed that any decision to redeploy British troops would be for military, not political reasons.
A decision is expected by mid-week, though Hoon hinted his government was leaning toward approval.
At the Pentagon, spokesman Larry DiRita said General George Casey, the US commander of the multinational force in Iraq, was considering ways to reposition forces in Iraq and was asking coalition members how their forces might participate.
Casey's plan involves moving coalition troops into the area around Baghdad, allowing US troops there to take part in other operations.
DiRita would not say how many coalition troops Casey hopes to reposition, or whether additional US troops would be needed if he does not get them.
The US State Department warned Iran against providing any type of support to al-Zarqawi, but declined to comment on allegations of an Iran-Zarqawi link.
"We have generally been very concerned about some of the reports of Iranian activity in Iraq," spokesman Richard Boucher said.
Iraq's interim national intelligence chief Mohammed al-Shahwani told AFP last week that he believed Iran, through its embassy in Baghdad, was masterminding an assassination campaign that has seen nearly 20 of his agents killed since the middle of last month.
--------
Baghdad needs 10,000 more policemen - U.S. general
Reuters
By Luke Baker
19 Oct 2004
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/GEO952403.htm
BAGHDAD, Oct 19 (Reuters) - The U.S. general in charge of Baghdad said on Tuesday it would be at least another eight months before the Iraqi capital had enough police, contradicting previous U.S. claims that numbers were sufficient.
Major General Pete Chiarelli, whose 1st Cavalry Division is responsible for security in Baghdad and its suburbs -- an area of about six million people -- said there were currently about 15,000 people working for the capital's force.
"We're about 10,000 short of what we need," he told reporters. "But by next spring, or early next summer, we'll be right where we need to be."
He said recruitment to the police force was strong despite almost daily suicide car bombings on recruitment posts in Baghdad and elsewhere. More than 1,000 police and recruits have been killed in bombs and shootings over the past year.
Chiarelli's timeframe may raise questions about whether Baghdad will have enough police to help provide security for the country's elections in January -- the biggest security test the interim Iraqi government faces.
While 135,000 U.S. troops will still be in Iraq in January, the U.S. military has said it intends to put Iraqi forces in control of the country ahead of the polls.
The huge shortfall of police in Baghdad is particularly remarkable because U.S. authorities repeatedly claimed ahead of the handover of power in June that numbers were sufficient.
In January, the chief spokesman for the U.S. administration in Iraq said that there were already 150,000 people working for the country's security forces and that 220,000 would be on the job by the June handover to the Iraqi government.
But more than three months after the handover, there are still about 150,000 people working in security, including 90,000 police nationwide, according to the Interior Ministry.
CORRUPT COPS
There were more members of the force, but of those recruited many turned out to be criminals or corrupt -- collecting a salary but not turning up to work, the Interior Ministry said. Others resigned, were killed or went into retirement.
Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said recently that corruption, disloyalty or phantom employment had caused around 40,000 names to be struck from the roll. The Interior Ministry said it would be some months before precise police figures were available.
While there may be 90,000 police serving around the country, the real problem is in Baghdad, the city with the largest population and a very high degree of insecurity.
Chiarelli said that while recruitment was strong, training new police was taking time.
"We've had some police that we weren't that happy with. It takes time to get the right ones," Chiarelli said.
All recruits to the force must go through eight weeks' training, much less than in most parts of the world, and are then put straight to work. The Interior Ministry spokesman said that many are illiterate and not up to the job.
Chiarelli said he hoped there would be 20,000 police on Baghdad's force by the elections, which he hoped would be sufficient to provide security on election day.
That will mean adding 5,000 recruits in the next few months.
-----
This is a Massacre, Not a War in Iraq
bellaciao.org
By Sam Hamod
19th October 2004
http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=3789
This is a massacre, not a war in Iraq. The U.S. bombing Samarra, Fallujah, Baghdad and other cities, killing hundreds of civilians and calling them terrorists is like the massacres of the Native Americans during America's push westward.
In this case, it has to do with America's push eastward.
What is also troubling is that no major media outlet, no major politician--none are callig this what it is, an immoral, unmitigated killing of hundreds of Iraqi civilians every week.
Those who are experts in Arabic have claimed for months that the man alleged to be Zarqawi is not really Zarqawi because he does not have the real Zarqawi's Jordanian accent. But, the American military, we are positive by now, has created this mythical Zarqawi to allow it to mercilessly attack Fallujah and punish its inhabitants because they withstood the American ground attack and chased the Americans out. Even today, the Fallujhans have said aloud to Al Jazeera and other outlets, that they will come out into the streets and fight the Americans--but our country, America, is immoral and cowardly, every day attacking Fallujah by F16, Apache and long range cannon fire. In the process, killing hundreds of civilians, but as in the Viet Nam war, saying, "It's just collateral damage and we are not responsible for that."
My question then, is who is responsible for the killings. I point my finger at General Abizaid, a man who should know better. I also point the finger of guilt at his subordinate commanders in Iraq and all the way up to the two devils at the top of the pole, George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. By now, it is obvious why Bush and his cronies do not want to support the International Criminal Court and are even attacking the court at the Hague--because they know that they are breaking international laws and that they would be pulled up, kicking and screaming ala Milosovich, to that court for their war crimes and crimes against humanity in Iraq.
It is time for Americans to speak up to stop this massacre. We are killing Iraqis in the name of "Freedom" and "Democracy!" How absurd, must we kill the Iraqis to "save them". This sounds almost like the old Salem Witch Trials, where they put people to death in order to save them. But it also smells of the aforementioned slaughter of the Native Americans by the jolly good American cavalry--ironically, it's the same cavalry that is repeating its deeds 200 years later, but this time against Iraqis. For shame.
Also, shame on our media outlets, our church leaders, those phony Christians, Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson--men who shall certainly be condemned to hell by God on the day of judgement. Some may say, I have no right to say such a thing, but all you have to do is see how they are supporting these atrocities--especially Billy Graham and his son, both men who had built reputations for decency but have now destroyed them with this endorsement of slaughter in Iraq.
As for Falwell and Robertson, they not only endorse the Iraq slaughter, they also are doing all they can to praise Sharon and Israel for their slaughter, on a daily basis for the past 3 years of Palestinians. They also cheer when Palestinian homes are bulldozed, as in the 200 taken down in the past month.
In the process, some at the UN have spoken out, even Kofi Annan, but people in America are not hearing. Instead, America is trying to distract the public with stories about Darfur, about the non-existant Zarqawi, about "staying the course" (as if there is a course and as if it is justified), and few are asking, "Just why are we in Iraq, after all, Saddam is gone?" We hear such nonsense as, "We have to stay to settle things down in Iraq." But President Jimmy Carter and most international experts say that we are the problem and that Iraqis could solve their own problems if we'd leave. But, as most know, and this has been pointed out by Jane's of London and other experts in the U.S. such as Chalmers Johnson, America intendes to build at least 2 dozen bases or more in Iraq to stay on--never to leave.
I want to say again, as I said in articles since Bush's invasion of Iraq, we shall pay a heavy price for this slaughter of Iraqis who are Arabs and Muslims. This slaughter, this massacre has incensed the entire Muslim world. America is no longer respected in any part of the Muslim world. In fact, a recent poll in Egypt, one of our strongest allies in the Arab and Muslim world, showed that over 90% of the Egyptians are now angry at America. But what of the 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, many of them are so incensed that they will become militant against us. Our behavior has taken away any credibility moderates had, now the radicals can say, "See, moderation got you nowhere with America. They even kicked Cat Stevens out of America, a leading moderate in England, a man who had even given advice to the White House on how to deal with radicals."
Samuel Huntington in his book, The Clash of Civilizations, claimed Islam was intent on making a war on the West. This was not true, but what has happened is that Bush and his fundamentalist Christian friends are making war on Islam--it can be seen with American troops attacking Muslims in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in the Phillippines, in Indonesia, in Malaysia, in Yemen, in assisting Israel with money, weapons and expertise in their killing of Palestinians.
America may win some battles, but it losing the larger war. The entire world is condemning our behavior in Iraq as illegal and immoral. What is coming is the long term hatred of America by the majority of Muslims in the world, and some will become combatants in time--not necessarily in Iraq, but in their own countries. Bush and his massacre of Muslims is sowing anger, hatred, desire for revenge--in time, America will reap a whirlwind that the ignorant GW Bush has sown. Make no mistake about it.
America has played its last cards as a moral world leader. Our moral arguments now are laughable to the rest of the world. The word has gotten out on how we tried to remove Chavez from office in Venezuela, have placed a puppet regime in Iraq to lord over the people ala Vichy in France in WWII, have supported Israel in its massacres of Palestinians, and the continued killing and bombings of innocents in Iraq and Afghanistan, while now threatening Syria, Iran and Lebanon. It is obvious to any intelligent and moral observer that our the Bush team has gone out of its mind.
And one last point, have you noticed two important things that never get into the news: 1. Israel has the second largest supply of atomic weapons in the world and has threatened to use the, but you never hear that criticized or even admitted by America. 2. Bush is afraid of North Korea because it has atomic weapons, but also because China told him in no uncertain terms, "Keep your nose out of this area or we'll bloody it for you and wreck your economy as well."
Our fearless leader is only good at killing innocent civiilans through attcks from the air with F16s, Apaches and long range missiles, then calling those killed "enemy combatants," "terrorists," or "insurgents." I hope more people in America will wake up before things get much worse. It is already too late in most cases for America to recover its place in the world. But, if we kick Bush out of office and replace his military commanders in the field, especially Myers and Abizaid, we may be able to salvage something--but it's going to be a long, hard road and will take us decades and maybe centuries to ever again be trusted by any Muslims or Arabs in the world.
Let's call it what it is in Iraq and Palestine, massacres, not wars. Somehow, it is as if Bush and Sharon are joined together at the hip and in their immoral hearts and minds. Both are guilty of war crimes. We knew this about Sharon by recalling his infamous invasion of Lebanon in the 1980s; but we didn't know how much Bush would follow Sharon's lead and take America down this illegal and immoral path with him. Unfortunately, for America, Bush has, as President Carter said, "Destroyed our reputation in the world as a moral leader, it may take decades or more to repair the damage."
Just remember what I am saying, "This is a massacre, not a war."
The Iraqis have no planes, helicopters or tanks; the Palestinians have no planes, helicopters or tanks; but America does and uses them indiscriminately, as does Israel. America should take a cue from the resistance to Israel, some day it will come here, when the people in the Muslim and Arab worlds have had enough and decide to strike back.
Woe unto us for allowing the madman Bush to kill people in Iraq, Afghanistan and by proxy, in Palestine. Some day, as Malcolm X prophesied, "The chickens will come home to roost."
Sam Hamod is an expert on Islam and the Middle East; he is a former advisor to the State Department, editor of 3rd World News and Director of The Islamic Center of Wash, DC. Watch for his new book, in 2005, ESSAYS IN TIMES OF WAR. He may be reached at shamod@cox.net .
-------- israel / palestine
Israeli Demolitions Deemed Excessive
Gaza Tactic Violated Law, Report Asserts
By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, October 19, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43167-2004Oct18.html
JERUSALEM, Oct. 18 -- Israeli troops have destroyed hundreds of houses and left thousands of Palestinians homeless in the southern Gaza Strip in operations that far exceeded military security requirements during the past four years, the New York-based organization Human Rights Watch said in a report issued Monday.
Human Rights Watch officials alleged that Israel's excessive use of force against innocent Palestinian civilians in southern Gaza has contributed to outrage across the Muslim world toward Israel and its closest ally, the United States.
"The pattern of destruction strongly suggests that Israeli forces demolished homes wholesale, regardless of whether they posed a specific threat, in violation of international law," Human Rights Watch said in its 133-page report, adding that in most of the cases "the destruction was carried out in the absence of military necessity."
Responding to the report, an Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman, David Saranga, said the government was doing its "utmost to minimize the damage to the civilian populations."
A spokeswoman for the Israel Defense Forces, Maj. Sharon Feingold, said, "No country in the world would allow their border to be turned into a gateway to terrorism." The threat posed by the tunnels Palestinian militants use to smuggle weapons has become "so concrete and so dangerous" that expansive military operations are needed to find and destroy them, she said.
"The Palestinian Authority is doing absolutely nothing" to stop the arms smuggling or the use of civilians' houses to hide tunnel entrances," Feingold added. "So we will continue to operate there."
According to the United Nations, the Israeli military has destroyed at least 1,686 Palestinian houses in the congested, concrete-block warrens of the Rafah refugee camp and adjacent city of Rafah, which stretch 2 1/2 miles along the Gaza border with Egypt. Nearly 17,000 people -- about 10 percent of the population of the Rafah communities -- have been left homeless during the last four years of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees reports.
The Israeli military says it has destroyed an estimated 100 smuggling tunnels during those operations.
Human Rights Watch wrote that the military "has consistently exaggerated and mischaracterized the threat from . . . tunnels to justify the demolition of homes." The report said many of the tunnels the military includes in its counts are actually tunnel entrances, some of which had already been plugged by Palestinian security forces or were only partially dug out.
The organization also criticized Caterpillar, the U.S. company that sells the massive D9 bulldozers Israel used in most of the home demolitions. The equipment is sold through the U.S. Foreign Military Sales program and fitted with armor plating by an Israeli company.
Caterpillar's public relations office did not respond to e-mail or voice mail messages concerning the report Monday.
Human Rights Watch said that a proposal by military officials to create a 300-yard buffer along 12 1/2 miles of the border between Egypt and the Gaza Strip would also result in the demolition of hundreds of houses.
The housing demolitions in the Rafah area represent about two-thirds of the 2,500 Palestinian houses destroyed by the Israel Defense Forces in operations across the Gaza Strip, according to the U.N. relief organization.
In continuing violence across the strip on Monday, Israeli military forces killed five Palestinian militants, including two who breached a security fence into Israel, two who were killed while allegedly trying to plant a bomb near a Jewish settlement in Gaza, and a militant who was shot near another Jewish settlement, according to militant groups, Palestinian officials and the Israeli military.
-------- pakistan / india
China feels threat to its engineers
Vice FM seeks security guarantee
The News International
October 19, 2004
http://jang.com.pk/thenews/oct2004-daily/19-10-2004/main/main3.htm
ISLAMABAD: There is a danger to Chinese engineers in Pakistan and Beijing wants guarantee of their security, a senior visiting Chinese official said here on Monday.
"We understand, this is a fact, that there is a danger for Chinese engineers in Pakistan," Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Wu Dawei told a gathering of tribal elders in Islamabad. "We want categorical assurance for their safety and also protection of their property."
A jirga (council) of 55 tribal elders from seven agencies held a meeting with senior Chinese officials and expressed deep shock and sorrow over the death of the Chinese engineer Wang Peng during a rescue operation in South Waziristan last week.
Wu said some 3,000 Chinese engineers, technicians and other workers were involved in more than 100 development projects in Pakistan. He assured the Pakistani Government that all under-construction projects would be completed and China is ready to carry out other major projects in the country.
"Chinese working here are peace-loving people but the terrorists are harming them, which is against Islam and humanity," he said.
He stressed the need for joint Pak-China fight against terrorism, saying this will further cement bilateral ties. He thanked the Pakistan Government for its efforts to peacefully resolve the hostage crisis. He said Chinese leadership has been concerned over the crisis and that's why they were in constant contact with the Pakistani leadership.
Speaking on the occasion a tribal elder from South Waziristan Malik Inayatullah Khan said the tribal people are deeply shocked over the killing of the Chinese engineer. He condemned the hostage taking and said it was the act of a few individuals who violated the traditional values of hospitality of the tribal areas.
He said tribal elders tried to persuade the captors to free the hostages but they did not pay attention to their call. He lauded the contribution of Chinese engineers and other staff in the development of tribal areas.
The tribal jirga appreciated the government of China for its consistent support in development projects and said these have helped the country's economy considerably. The jirga assured that all measures would be taken to ensure security and safety of the Chinese working in Pakistan.
Secretary Security Fata Brig (retd) Mahmood Shah and parliamentarians from Fata were also present during the meeting with the Chinese assistant ministers for trade and foreign affairs and Chinese Ambassador to Pakistan Zhang Chunxiang. They expressed their solidarity with the Chinese brothers and condemned the acts of terrorism in any form, anywhere.
Shah said the security forces have identified the location of the leader of the captors, Abdullah Mahsud but he was rapidly shifting positions. He hoped that Abdullah Mahsood would be caught some time. He said it would be the government's priority to capture him alive as the government agencies were not irresponsible like the captors.
Wu, who was on an official visit to Pakistan, spoke at a gathering of dozens of tribal elders who had travelled to Islamabad to meet him and other Chinese officials to offer condolences over Wang's death.
At the ceremony, the tribal elders gave Wu a gun and turbans in a sign of friendship. Meanwhile, a top government administrator in South Waziristan, Asmatullah Gandapur told The Associated Press that work on the Gomal Zam Dam has been stopped. "Definitely it is stopped," he said. About 70-80 Chinese workers are helping build the dam, located about 335 kilometres southwest of Islamabad.
-------- space
SI International Awarded ID/IQ Air Force Space Command Contract
Reston VA (SPX) Oct 19, 2004 http://www.spacedaily.com/news/milspace-comms-04zzj.html
SI International Monday announced that the Air Force Space Command (AFSPC) has awarded SI International an indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity (ID/IQ) contract for Advisory and Assistance Services and Engineering Technical Assistance (CAASETA) for Headquarters AFSPC at Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado.
The contract enables SI International to compete with one other large business contract awardee and two small business contract awardees for task orders having an aggregate ceiling value of $610 million over a five-year period.
Tasks to be performed under this contract include management and professional services; studies, analyses and evaluations; and engineering and technical services.
"Through our longstanding relationship with the Air Force Space Command, SI International has developed industry-recognized expertise in space systems acquisitions, military space operations and missile defense to support the Air Force Space Command mission to defend the United States through the control and exploitation of space," said Ray Oleson, Chairman and CEO of SI International.
"We are extremely honored to have been selected by the U.S. Air Force Space Command to assist in the upgrade, modernization, and development of current and new systems." SI International is one of the largest systems engineering, network, telecommunications and implementations contractors supporting the Air Force Space Command.
-------- spies
The 9/11 secret in the CIA's back pocket
Agency withholds damning report that points at senior officials
10.19.04
Creators Syndicate
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=17898
It is shocking: The Bush administration is suppressing a CIA report on 9/11 until after the election, and this one names names. Although the report by the inspector general's office of the CIA was completed in June, it has not been made available to the congressional intelligence committees that mandated the study almost two years ago.
"It is infuriating that a report which shows that high-level people were not doing their jobs in a satisfactory manner before 9/11 is being suppressed," an intelligence official who has read the report told me, adding that "the report is potentially very embarrassing for the administration, because it makes it look like they weren't interested in terrorism before 9/11, or in holding people in the government responsible afterward."
When I asked about the report, Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice), ranking Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, said she and committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.) sent a letter 14 days ago asking for it to be delivered. "We believe that the CIA has been told not to distribute the report," she said. "We are very concerned."
According to the intelligence official, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, release of the report, which represents an exhaustive 17-month investigation by an 11-member team within the agency, has been "stalled." First by acting CIA Director John McLaughlin and now by Porter J. Goss, the former Republican House member (and chairman of the Intelligence Committee) who recently was appointed CIA chief by President Bush.
The official stressed that the report was more blunt and more specific than the earlier bipartisan reports produced by the Bush-appointed Sept. 11 commission and Congress.
"What all the other reports on 9/11 did not do is point the finger at individuals, and give the how and what of their responsibility. This report does that," said the intelligence official. "The report found very senior-level officials responsible."
By law, the only legitimate reason the CIA director has for holding back such a report is national security. Yet neither Goss nor McLaughlin has invoked national security as an explanation for not delivering the report to Congress.
"It surely does not involve issues of national security," said the intelligence official.
"The agency directorate is basically sitting on the report until after the election," the official continued. "No previous director of CIA has ever tried to stop the inspector general from releasing a report to the Congress, in this case a report requested by Congress."
None of this should surprise us given the Bush administration's great determination since 9/11 to resist any serious investigation into how the security of this nation was so easily breached. In Bush's much ballyhooed war on terror, ignorance has been bliss.
The president fought against the creation of the Sept. 11 commission, for example, agreeing only after enormous political pressure was applied by a grass-roots movement led by the families of those slain.
And then Bush refused to testify to the commission under oath, or on the record. Instead he deigned only to chat with the commission members, with Vice President Dick Cheney present, in a White House meeting in which commission members were not allowed to take notes. All in all, strange behavior for a man who seeks reelection to the top office in the land based on his handling of the so-called war on terror.
In September, the New York Times reported that several family members met with Goss privately to demand the release of the CIA inspector general's report. "Three thousand people were killed on 9/11, and no one has been held accountable," 9/11 widow Kristen Breitweiser told the paper.
The failure to furnish the report to Congress, said Harman, "fuels the perception that no one is being held accountable. It is unacceptable that we don't have [the report]; it not only disrespects Congress but it disrespects the American people."
The stonewalling by the Bush administration and the failure of Congress to gain release of the report have, said the intelligence source, "led the management of the CIA to believe it can engage in a cover-up with impunity. Unless the public demands an accounting, the administration and CIA's leadership will have won and the nation will have lost."
-------- un
Limited U.N. Role Hinders Iraq Vote
Security in Crisis, Citizens Take Lead
By Robin Wright and Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, October 19, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43378-2004Oct18.html
The United Nations has failed to fully staff its operation in Iraq, imperiling the timing and quality of the elections there and forcing inexperienced Iraqis to take the lead in preparing for the country's first democratic balloting, due in January, U.S. officials and election experts said.
Of the 35 U.N. officials in Iraq, only four or five are election experts, U.N. officials said. In Afghanistan, which has a similar-size population, the U.N. had 600 international staff, including 266 election experts, for the first democratic poll this month. A major increase in Iraq is unlikely soon because of deteriorating security and the U.S. failure to quickly mobilize Georgian and Fijian troops for a protection force or provide an acceptable alternative, U.S. and U.N. officials said.
U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan is trying to lower expectations that the United Nations will play a central role in the voting, telling reporters in Ireland on Friday that the world body "is not going to Iraq to monitor the elections in January."
"Our role is to support and advise the Iraqi authorities as they organize the elections," he said. "They are responsible for the elections, and they have ownership of those elections."
The U.S.-led coalition had anticipated that the United Nations would have the dominant role in Iraq's elections, as it has in democratic transitions around the world over the past quarter-century. A prominent U.N. role was also considered essential to confer legitimacy on the political transition, which has faced challenges both inside and outside Iraq because it has been widely viewed as controlled by the United States so far.
But the United States and the United Nations are now caught in a diplomatic Catch-22, U.S. and U.N. officials and election experts said. The Bush administration is disappointed in U.N. reluctance to deploy more staff; the United Nations is frustrated that the United States has not quashed the insurgency, leaving the country too dangerous for foreign election workers.
U.S. officials insist the elections will proceed as planned, but election experts say the U.N. team is inadequate to oversee the process. "It certainly looks like an enormous gap between what is needed and what's available," said Columbia University's Edward Luck. "It looks like the U.N. has a group that would be sufficient for Costa Rica. It's clearly not sufficient for a country as large and diverse as Iraq, especially when taking place under very special circumstances."
The top U.N. election official, Carina Perelli, originally estimated that Iraq would need at least 270 U.N. advisers to oversee credible elections. But tentative plans to deploy an additional 25 U.N. staff members in Iraq were put on hold after bombings last week in the tightly secured Green Zone, where the Iraqi government, the U.S. Embassy and military headquarters, and the U.N. election team are based, U.N. officials said. "The latest bombing underscores our concern about the overall security situation in Iraq," U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said yesterday.
As a result, a seven-member Iraqi election commission is now largely in charge of the elections, which will choose a 275-member national assembly. The assembly will then select a new government to replace the current, appointed leadership and oversee the writing of a new constitution.
So far, the Iraqi commission has hired about 500 staff members. But Iraq, a country the size of California, is expected to have 10 million or more voters eligible to register at 550 sites, which will require about 6,000 Iraqis to help. For the elections, U.N. and election experts said, Iraq will have 30,000 polling stations dispersed in 18 provinces, with at least four people at each site -- for a total of 120,000.
U.S. officials praise the Iraqis for their hard work and determination but note that they were picked for their reputations and lack of ties to Iraqi politics, past or present. So they came to the job with little experience, and their training has been limited to a two-week course in Mexico this summer.
"You're not talking about an election run by the U.N., but an election run by Iraqis with some U.N. assistance. And then the question becomes Iraqi capabilities, not the U.N. capability," said Daniel Serwer, a former diplomat and director of the Peace and Stability Operations program at the United States Institute of Peace. "We shouldn't underestimate them, but it's really a question of how much Iraqis want to vote and how much they can get organized under truly horrendous conditions."
U.S. officials praise the chief U.N. election official in Iraq, Carlos Valenzuela, for performing ably and seriously. He is a nonvoting member of the Iraqi commission. But with the voting just 3 1/2 months away, both Iraq and the U.S.-led multinational force there are pressing U.N. officials for more help. "We had expected them to be more involved in the elections in terms of numbers, the scope of work and preparations, and to help organize voter education and political parties," said a State Department official involved with Iraq.
U.N. officials hope the deployment of a small group of Fijian troops next month to provide personal security for U.N. officials will lead Annan to send more staff. But the battalion of Georgian troops, which would provide the bulk of protection, may be several weeks away, U.S. officials said. The United Nations insists on a comprehensive security plan before expanding its team.
A proposal by Saudi Arabia for a Muslim peacekeeping force in Iraq was quashed by both Iraqi and U.S. officials because of concerns about the chain of command, the White House said yesterday.
Annan faces strong resistance from two U.N. unions representing 60,000 staffers, which recently called for the withdrawal of the current staff in Iraq, citing an increase in hostage-takings and executions of foreigners. "Last year, we witnessed the tragic death of 22 colleagues in Baghdad. We do not wish to witness the same again," said a joint letter from the two groups. Annan withdrew U.N. personnel in Iraq a year ago after two suicide bombings at U.N. headquarters in Baghdad.
Three U.S.-based groups -- the International Foundation of Election Systems, the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute -- are assisting the Iraqis with different aspects of the poll.
But U.S. election experts now say that election preparations will have to be accelerated dramatically if the voting is to be held on schedule.
-------- us
THE SOLDIERS
Reservists Who Refused Order Tried to Persuade Superiors
October 19, 2004
The New York Times
By NEELA BANERJEE and JOHN KIFNER
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/19/national/19reservists.html
JACKSON, Miss., Oct. 18 - Members of the Army Reserve platoon in Iraq that disobeyed orders to deliver fuel to another base last week had tried to persuade their superiors for hours to cancel the mission, relatives of the soldiers said Monday.
That defying an order had become an option for 18 members of the 343rd Quartermaster Company seemed to signal a worsening of the low morale that had plagued the unit.
The 13th Corps Support Command, which the 343rd belongs to, and its commander, Brig. Gen. James E. Chambers, have been singled out for repeated criticism by soldiers on the Web site and column of David H. Hackworth, a retired Army colonel and decorated veteran of the Korea and Vietnam wars. The Web site, www.hackworth.com, serves as a channel for complaints against military leadership, and Colonel Hackworth calls himself "the voice of the grunt." Mr. Hackworth wrote on Sept. 13 of low morale in the command.
The soldiers who refused their mission had complained to relatives in months past about the poor quality of their trucks and equipment, though they never indicated they would do anything other than pursue changes through the chain of command, the relatives said.
But Kathy Harris said she received an e-mail message from her son, Specialist Aaron Gordon, in which he asked about possible repercussions for disobeying orders. According to the time on the e-mail message, Ms. Harris said it was probably sent between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m. on Oct. 13, Iraq time.
The platoon had returned from a fuel-delivery mission that lasted four to five days, according to accounts of relatives who spoke to the soldiers. The cargo of jet fuel was rejected because it was contaminated with diesel, relatives said. The military has denied that the fuel was unusable.
Some of the trucks, which were due for repairs, broke down on the journey, said Stephanie Parks, the fiancée of Johnny Coates, father of Specialist Major Coates of Charlotte, N.C., a member of the platoon. The platoon returned late on the evening of Oct. 12. At 4 a.m. the next day, they were roused to take the fuel from their base in Tallil to Taji, much farther north, family members said.
"That's when everything went haywire," said Ricky Shealey, father of Specialist Scott Shealey. "My son says they argued for three hours trying to get some sense into them people. They utilized their chain of command. They even had a civilian out there. He said it was contaminated."
The soldiers also feared for their safety, saying their trucks lacked armor and the convoy lacked a proper armed escort, relatives have said.
Soldiers have complained bitterly on Colonel Hackworth's Web site about low morale at the 13th Corps Support Command, and about General Chambers himself. General Chambers said on Sunday in Baghdad that he had ordered a safety review of the 343rd's equipment and trucks. He also said an inquiry had begun into the actions of the soldiers.
Pentagon officials indicated efforts were under way to defuse the situation. For example, the Army is considering returning all but five of the unit's members to duty, one senior official said. But two who may face discipline have past instances of wrongdoing in Iraq, in particular of substance abuse, the official said. He did not give names and the accusations could not be confirmed.
The accusations have incensed relatives of the soldiers. "They have to make them look bad," said Stacy Shealey, Specialist Shealey's sister. "It's just another reason to mess with them."
Ariel Hart contributed reporting from Atlanta for this article, and Thom Shanker from Washington.
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Army Is Told to Plan for Shorter Tours in Iraq
October 19, 2004
By THOM SHANKER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/19/politics/19army.html
WASHINGTON, Oct. 18 - The acting secretary of the Army has told the service to begin drawing up plans to shorten the 12-month tour lengths of soldiers sent to Iraq and Afghanistan.
The memo dated Oct. 8 from Les Brownlee, the acting Army secretary, makes clear that those reductions would not be taken until the insurgency in Iraq diminishes and the capabilities of Iraqi security forces improves.
But the memo clearly emphasizes the urgency of having plans ready. It comes as the Army wrestles with two powerful, competing needs: finding enough soldiers to fulfill commitments in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and finding ways to make those tours less onerous for the soldiers and their families.
"As we continue to develop Iraqi security forces in both size and capabilities, the opportunity presents itself to address both the size of our committed forces and the tour lengths of those soldiers assigned," Mr. Brownlee wrote in the memo to Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff.
"Please develop a plan that would enable us on fairly short notice to curtail tour lengths for our deployed and deploying soldiers," he wrote.
A copy of Mr. Brownlee's memo, which states that "it is important that these plans be available for implementation when the security conditions and the capabilities of the Iraqi security forces might enable us to do so," was provided by a senior Army official who closely tracks these issues.
Army personnel officers, as well as those representing the Army Reserve and National Guard, say their ability to recruit and retain soldiers will erode unless combat tours are shortened, perhaps to six or nine months. At the same time, Army war planners have significant concerns that the Army, at its current size and configuration, cannot meet projected requirements for Iraq and Afghanistan unless active duty and reserve troops spend 12 months on the ground there.
Questions of stress on the armed services, the size of the military and the wisest path to success in Iraq have all been major themes of the presidential campaign this year.
Other factors, both foreign and domestic, also will play a role in determining how quickly the Army can reduce tour lengths and numbers in Iraq. Contributions of additional forces by allies would relieve the burden, and the Army's plans to reorganize its divisions are projected to increase the number of deployable combat brigades over the next few years.
The length of combat tours has become a point of stress for Army troops, as well as a significant point of friction between Army personnel and marines, who rotate out of Iraq or Afghanistan after seven-month tours.
The Army, since Vietnam, had deployed its forces in overseas combat situations in six-month tours. The major exception has been in South Korea, where soldiers serve for one year. The 12-month deployment was introduced last year after the end of major combat operations in Iraq, when a vigorous insurgency persuaded the military that it would need to maintain large numbers of troops in the country. The Army decided then that only 12-month tours would meet its needs.
--------
THE MILITARY
U.S. Has Contingency Plans for a Draft of Medical Workers
October 19, 2004
By ROBERT PEAR
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/19/politics/19draft.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Oct. 18 - The Selective Service has been updating its contingency plans for a draft of doctors, nurses and other health care workers in case of a national emergency that overwhelms the military's medical corps.
In a confidential report this summer, a contractor hired by the agency described how such a draft might work, how to secure compliance and how to mold public opinion and communicate with health care professionals, whose lives could be disrupted.
On the one hand, the report said, the Selective Service System should establish contacts in advance with medical societies, hospitals, schools of medicine and nursing, managed care organizations, rural health care providers and the editors of medical journals and trade publications.
On the other hand, it said, such contacts must be limited, low key and discreet because "overtures from Selective Service to the medical community will be seen as precursors to a draft," and that could alarm the public.
In this election year, the report said, "very few ideas or activities are viewed without some degree of cynicism."
President Bush has flatly declared that there will be no draft, but Senator John Kerry has suggested that this is a possibility if Mr. Bush is re-elected.
Richard S. Flahavan, a spokesman for the Selective Service System, said Monday: "We have been routinely updating the entire plan for a health care draft. The plan is on the shelf and will remain there unless Congress and the president decide that it's needed and direct us to carry it out."
The Selective Service does not decide whether a draft will occur. It would carry out the mechanics only if the president and Congress authorized a draft.
The chief Pentagon spokesman, Lawrence T. Di Rita, said Monday: "It is the policy of this administration to oppose a military draft for any purpose whatsoever. A return to the draft is unthinkable. There will be no draft."
Mr. Di Rita said the armed forces could offer bonus pay and other incentives to attract and retain medical specialists.
In 1987, Congress enacted a law requiring the Selective Service to develop a plan for "registration and classification" of health care professionals essential to the armed forces.
Under the plan, Mr. Flahavan said, about 3.4 million male and female health care workers ages 18 to 44 would be expected to register with the Selective Service. From this pool, he said, the agency could select tens of thousands of health care professionals practicing in 62 health care specialties.
"The Selective Service System plans on delivering about 36,000 health care specialists to the Defense Department if and when a special skills draft were activated," Mr. Flahavan said.
The contractor hired by Selective Service, Widmeyer Communications, said that local government operations would be affected by a call-up of emergency medical technicians, so it advised the Selective Service to contact groups like the United States Conference of Mayors and the National Association of Counties.
Doctors and nurses would be eligible for deferments if they could show that they were providing essential health care services to civilians in their communities.
But the contractor said: "There is no getting around the fact that a medical draft would disrupt lives. Many familial, business and community responsibilities will be impacted."
Moreover, Widmeyer said, "if medical professionals are singled out and other professionals are not called, many will find the process unfair," and health care workers will ask, "Why us?"
In a recent article in The Wisconsin Medical Journal, published by the state medical society, Col. Roger A. Lalich, a senior physician in the Army National Guard, said: "It appears that a general draft is not likely to occur. A physician draft is the most likely conscription into the military in the near future."
Since 2003, the Selective Service has said it is shifting its preparations for a draft in a national crisis toward narrow sectors of specialists, including medical personnel.
Colonel Lalich, citing Selective Service memorandums on the subject, said the Defense Department had indicated that "a conventional draft of untrained manpower is not necessary for the war on terrorism." But, he said, "the Department of Defense has stated that what most likely will be needed is a 'special skills draft,' " including care workers in particular.
That view was echoed in a newsletter circulated recently by the Selective Service System, which said the all-volunteer force had "critical shortages of individuals with special skills'' that might be needed in a crisis.
The Selective Service and Widmeyer held focus groups this summer to sample public opinion toward registration and a possible draft including medical personnel. People from a variety of professions, including doctors and nurses, were questioned.
The report summarized the findings this way:
¶"There was substantial resistance to the notion of a call-up of civilian professionals that would send draftees to foreign soil."
¶A draft of civilian professionals was seen as unworkable because "training would be inadequate to transform groups of people who had never worked together into cohesive units."
¶People are apprehensive about the length of service that might be required. The "occupation of Iraq has proved more costly, in terms of dollars and lives, than most Americans expected." Members of the National Guard are "serving tours of duty far longer than many ever anticipated."
¶People believe the government has the ability to "find whomever it needs" in a crisis, by using a "master database" if necessary.
President Bush and Mr. Kerry have said they oppose a draft. "Forget all this talk about a draft," Mr. Bush said at the second presidential debate, on Oct. 8 in St. Louis. "We're not going to have a draft so long as I'm the president."
But Mr. Kerry said, "You've got a backdoor draft right now" because "our military is overextended" as a result of policies adopted by Mr. Bush.
Bryan G. Whitman, a spokesman for the Defense Department, said: "The all-volunteer force has been working very well for 30 years. There is absolutely no reason to go back to a draft."
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Rewarding Bad Behavior
Months after Abu Ghraib, senior officers implicated are in line for promotions, and the House is pushing to legitimize torture.
10.19.04
The American Prospect
By Deborah Pearlstein
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=8788
With most of the nation's eyes on a tight presidential race heading into its final days, it is hardly surprising that the growing allegations of torture and abuse of detainees carried out by U.S. authorities have largely fallen off the political radar screen. Neither campaign has much interest in saying anything that could be seen as negative about our troops, the vast majority of whom have indeed performed admirably. Likewise, the last topic any member of Congress facing re-election wants to discuss is how to be more "sensitive" to the laws against torture in the "war on terrorism."
Still, it is one thing for the political parties in these final weeks to remain silent on how to address the damage done by the now many hundreds of allegations of torture and abuse -- and dozens of deaths -- of those in U.S. custody from Iraq to Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It is quite another to actively embrace these practices as a matter of law. Yet, not even six months removed from the publication of photos of torture from Abu Ghraib, that is precisely where we seem to be.
On the accountability front, senior commanders and civilian leaders whom the military's own investigations have found responsible for gross failures to train and discipline their subordinates are not facing censure but promotion. Major General Geoffrey Miller -- formerly in charge of interrogations at Guantanamo Bay and credited in Major General George Fay's investigation with instituting the use of dogs at Abu Ghraib -- is now the senior commander in charge of detention operations in Iraq. Major General Barbara Fast -- the highest-ranking intelligence officer tied to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal -- is on deck to be put in charge of the U.S. Army's main interrogation training facility at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. And last week, Pentagon officials indicated that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was planning to reward Army Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez -- who oversaw detention facilities in Iraq and received scathing criticism in Defense Department investigations for his handling of interrogation policy and practice -- with a fourth star following the election.
As for policy developments, the Pentagon continues to hold detainees at Guantanamo Bay in prolonged solitary confinement, under conditions that, according to one detainee's appointed military defense counsel, violate basic prohibitions against cruel and inhuman treatment under U.S. and international law. At the same time, the administration has steadfastly refused to allow the International Red Cross, which operates in complete confidentiality, even to visit an unknown number of detainees still held in U.S. custody. Arguably worst of all, 232 members of the House earlier this month voted for a bill, introduced by Speaker Dennis Hastert, that would require the secretary of homeland security to exclude from the protection of the United Nations Convention Against Torture -- a treaty the United States signed and ratified a decade ago -- any foreign national the government deems a terrorist suspect.
A particularly telling case in point, the dense and hastily drafted House version of the bill to implement the September 11 commission recommendations includes a provision widely seen as an attempt to legalize "extraordinary rendition" -- a technical euphemism to describe the practice of sending suspects to the Syrians or Jordanians so we can avoid doing the dirty work of torture ourselves. The Torture Convention naturally bars parties from sending anyone to a country where "there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture." But the House bill would lift this prohibition, enabling the United States to deport (or "render") foreign nationals to countries long condemned by the U.S. State Department for widespread practices of torture and other gross abuse. A potential deportee could avoid this fate only by proving through "clear and convincing evidence that he or she would be tortured" upon return. Merely showing that torture is more likely than not would no longer be enough.
Given the parade of horrors around the world these past few years, Americans may understandably be too shell-shocked to debate such issues carefully and in public. We have witnessed the stunning deaths of some 3,000 friends and loved ones in New York and Washington. We have lost more than a thousand U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, with thousands more badly wounded. We have seen deeply disturbing photos of our own troops brutalizing the Iraqis that we were supposed to set free. And we are now treated with alarming frequency to gruesome reports of beheadings in Iraq. The violence is enough to overwhelm rational consideration of evidence that torture does not produce reliable intelligence, or that revelations of our detention practices have spurred terrorist-recruiting efforts more effectively than the terrorists ever could. But psychic exhaustion will be small comfort if the rendition provision -- which has now been publicly condemned by everyone from Human Rights First to the American Bar Association to the White House itself -- survives the congressional conference committee this week.
Whichever candidate wins in November has an enormous task ahead of him to repair the damage done this past year to America's efforts in counterterrorism, and to restore America's moral authority to advance the cause of democracy and human rights around the world. Congress might be forgiven for pausing to catch its breath before it begins. But there is no excuse for doing further violence to the cause of security and justice while we wait.
Deborah Pearlstein is director of the U.S. Law and Security Program at Human Rights First (formerly the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights) and a visiting lecturer on human rights and national security at Stanford Law School.
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Reservists Doubt Their Combat Readiness
Agence France-Presse
October 19, 2004
http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,FL_ready_101904,00.html
An internal U.S. Defense Department survey has shown substantial doubts among many Army Reservists about their preparedness for wartime missions, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.
The newspaper said the survey, conducted in the spring, found that almost half of Army Reserve soldiers believed their units were not "well prepared" for their wartime missions.
Army Reservists who had served in Iraq graded their units' readiness for war even lower, the report said.
Only 45 percent of those veterans said their unit was "well prepared for its wartime mission", compared with 54 percent of Army Reservists overall, according to the paper.
It said the survey had been sent electronically to 55,794 Reservists in all military branches in April, May and June. Thirty-nine percent of them responded.
"We do the survey as a source of leading indicators to adjust our personnel policies," the Journal quoted David Chu, Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, as saying.
As a result of the survey, the Pentagon in some instances tripled enlistment bonuses to as much as 15,000 dollars for a six-year commitment, the paper quotes Chu as saying.
The paper said the results also indicated that the desire of the part-time soldiers to stay in the Reserves and National Guard was eroding.
About 59 percent of Army Reservists and 62 percent of Army National Guard soldiers said they intended to stay in the military, down about 10 percentage points from 12 months earlier, according to the report.
Sound Off...What do you think? Join the discussion.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts / tribunals
Texas Districting Challenge Is Revived by Supreme Court
October 19, 2004
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/19/politics/19scotus.html
WASHINGTON, Oct. 18 - Though too late at least for next month's election, the Supreme Court on Monday gave Texas Democrats a renewed chance to challenge the Congressional redistricting plan that is expected to cost as many as five Democratic incumbents their House seats.
In an unsigned and apparently unanimous order, the justices vacated a ruling issued in January by a special three-judge federal district court in Austin that upheld an unusual mid-decade redistricting imposed by the Texas Legislature's new Republican majority last year over Democratic opposition.
The district court had rejected the Democrats' argument that the new plan, engineered by Tom DeLay of Texas, majority leader of the United States House, was an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander. But the justices ordered the panel to reconsider that decision in light of the Supreme Court's own decision six months ago in a redistricting case from Pennsylvania.
The order was something of a surprise. In the Pennsylvania case, Vieth v. Jubelirer, decided April 28, the court voted 5 to 4 to reject the Democrats' claim of an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander in new Congressional districts drawn by state legislators after the 2000 census. In light of that ruling, some election law experts assumed the justices would deal with the Texas Democrats' appeal simply by summarily affirming the district court's decision. That would have been the end of the Texas case.
Instead, the order to reconsider the decision keeps the case alive and strongly suggests that Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who cast the swing vote in the Pennsylvania case, agreed with its four dissenters that there is more to say about partisan gerrymandering and the Constitution.
In the Pennsylvania case, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in an opinion for himself, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Clarence Thomas that claims of political gerrymandering were not the business of the federal courts. The Constitution provides no "judicially enforceable limit on the political considerations that the states and Congress may take into account when districting," he said. Justice Kennedy, while providing a fifth vote to reject the Pennsylvania Democrats' case, did not join that analysis.
"I would not foreclose all possibility of judicial relief if some limited and precise rationale were found to correct an established violation of the Constitution in some redistricting cases," he wrote in his separate opinion.
The four dissenters - Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer - all would have permitted the Democrats' lawsuit to proceed under various theories.
As the Texas case returns to the district court in Austin, the question is likely to be whether the circumstances of the 2003 redistricting, particularly that it was the second redistricting of the decade, provide a sufficiently objective indication of undue partisanship to meet Justice Kennedy's test.
After the 2000 census, in which Texas gained two seats in the House, the politically divided State Legislature was unable to agree on a plan and left it up to a federal court to draw one. That plan proved quite favorable to the Democrats, and the Texas Congressional delegation elected under it in 2002 consisted of 15 Republicans and 17 Democrats.
At the same time, however, Republicans gained unified control of the Legislature. They decided to redistrict again, holding successive special sessions as Democrats fled the state to deprive the Legislature of a quorum necessary to conduct business. The new plan shifted more than eight million people into new districts, split one Democratic district into five pieces, and paired six Democratic and Republican incumbents in districts redrawn to favor Republicans.
Five groups of plaintiffs filed lawsuits on a variety of claims, including Voting Rights Act violations as well as partisan gerrymandering. The Supreme Court denied the plaintiffs' request for a stay after the district court upheld the new plan in January. That meant that even though a Supreme Court appeal was pending, the 2004 election would go forward under the new plan.
Paul M. Smith, a lawyer for the Democratic plaintiffs in the lead case, Jackson v. Perry, No. 03-1391, said Monday that even if the challenge ultimately prevailed, there would be no undoing the results of the 2004 election. "It's an unfixable problem now," he said.
In an unrelated case on Monday, the court, accepting an appeal from a Missouri death row inmate, agreed to decide whether his constitutional rights were violated when he was presented to the jury at his sentencing hearing while shackled and handcuffed to a chain around his waist.
The court ruled in the 1970's that it was unfairly prejudicial to a defendant to appear shackled, or even simply to appear in prison clothes, during a trial. The question in the new case, Deck v. Missouri, No. 04-5293, is whether the same principle applies to the separate sentencing hearing that follows a conviction for capital murder. The Missouri Supreme Court rejected the defendant's argument, holding that there was no evidence that the jury had actually been prejudiced. The defendant, Carman L. Deck, confessed in 1996 to shooting an elderly couple to death in their bedroom after robbing them.
-------- homeland security / national intelligence
Access to polling places tightened
October 19, 2004
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Charles Hurt and Valerie Richardson
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20041019-123227-7468r.htm
Judges in Florida and Colorado yesterday tightened access to polling places in their states, a blow to Democrats who had argued that legal restrictions there disenfranchised voters - especially new ones, mostly Democratic-leaning minorities.
The decisions came as residents in both states began early voting. Early voting was instituted in Florida after the 2000 election in hopes of preventing the electoral mayhem of four years ago that held the presidency in abeyance for weeks after Election Day.
"If you vote early now," Democratic nominee Sen. John Kerry told a crowd of Democrats here yesterday, "We don't have to stay up late Tuesday night."
In a unanimous ruling in Florida, the seven justices of the state Supreme Court said the votes of residents who cast ballots at the wrong precincts do not have to be counted, upholding a state law that labor unions argued unconstitutionally deprived residents of the right to vote if they did not know their polling place.
In Colorado, a Denver district judge yesterday upheld a new state law requiring voters to show identification before they cast their ballots and also said residents' can vote only at their predetermined precinct.
Republican Gov. Bill Owens hailed Judge Morris B. Hoffman's decision, saying that the ruling would help Colorado "ensure the integrity of next month's elections."
"With Democrats and Republicans raising concerns about potential voter fraud, it is essential that we have a common-sense mechanism to make sure that voters who come to vote are indeed who they say they are - and that they vote only once," Mr. Owens said.
By midmorning yesterday, minor problems had surfaced in early voting. Florida voters faced faulty ballots, crashed voting computers and other problems as they joined voters from battleground states, including Iowa, Nevada, Ohio and New Mexico, that already had begun voting.
The Florida justices, two of whom were appointed by Gov. Jeb Bush - the president's brother - after 2000, disagreed with a group of labor unions that argued that many people might not know their polling place because it might have been moved, displaced by a hurricane or eliminated in redistricting.
They said the Constitution gives the legislature the authority to dictate voting rules.
Under Florida law, if voters show up at a polling place but officials there have no record that they are registered, they are given provisional ballots. Those ballots are then held until officials determine whether the persons were entitled to vote at that precinct and had not already voted.
If they should have been allowed to vote at that precinct, the ballots count; if not, they are thrown out.
The court said requiring that provisional voters vote at the correct precinct is no more unreasonable than requiring that everyone else vote at the correct polling place.
"This is like saying you can only do your banking in this building downtown," said Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Florida, which supported the plaintiffs in the Florida case. "What we're seeing here is the difficulty of trying to drag Florida kicking and screaming out of the horse-and-buggy era."
The Florida court's ruling contradicted a ruling last week by a federal judge in Ohio. U.S. District Judge James Carr blocked a directive requiring poll workers to send voters to their correct precinct, ruling that Ohio voters can cast provisional ballots as long as they are in the county in which they are registered. Ohio's secretary of state is appealing.
In Colorado, the ruling came in response to a lawsuit filed by Colorado Common Cause, which challenged three provisions of a state election law passed by the legislature in 2003.
Judge Hoffman struck down one section of the law regarding absentee ballots. Under the judge's ruling, those who request absentee ballots later can change their minds and instead vote in person with a provisional ballot on Election Day.
Pete Maysmith, executive director of Colorado Common Cause, praised the judge's ruling on the absentee-ballot issue, saying it would increase voter turnout. He cited testimony stating that 13,000 voters who asked for absentee ballots in 2002 never turned in those ballots and voted in person instead.
But state Republicans warned that the decision could increase the potential for voter fraud. Election clerks caught about 85 people who tried to vote twice, once by absentee and once in person, in 2002.
There were concerns that the ruling will increase the workload of county election clerks, who must mark provisional ballots and set them aside to be checked by hand later against their voter rolls. That process could delay the results of close elections.
Mr. Maysmith argued that increasing voter turnout, not reducing the workload of the county clerks, should be the ultimate goal.
"Maybe they never received their absentee ballot. Maybe they lost it. Maybe their dog threw up on it," said Mr. Maysmith. "If they didn't cast it, that's all that matters."
Common Cause had argued that the identification requirement amounted to a poll tax because many forms, including driver's licenses, cost money. But Republicans noted that the law allows voters to produce 10 different types of identification, including a current utility bill, bank statement, U.S. birth certificate or certified document of naturalization.
They argued that many everyday transactions, ranging from boarding an airplane to renting a movie, require identification.
Even so, Mr. Maysmith argued that mandating identification at the ballot box will inhibit voter turnout. "Renting a movie at Blockbuster isn't a constitutional right. Voting is," he said.
Judge Hoffman had a few remarks for Common Cause and the other plaintiffs.
"At the moment, if I were trying to design a system that maximizes the chances that fraudulent and ineligible registrants will be able to become fraudulent voters, I'm not sure I could do a better job than what [the plaintiffs] are asking me to do in this case - allow voters to vote wherever they want without showing identification," said Judge Hoffman.
The state legislature approved the law in 2003 "after much heated debate," said state Senate President John Andrews. He said the law came in response in part to the 2000 presidential election debacle in Florida, as well as a desire to protect Colorado's election process from fraud.
"I'm delighted to learn that the court has upheld the reasonable power of the legislature to protect honest elections in Colorado," Mr. Andrews said.
The problems in Florida included a brief computer-system crash in one county and voter complaints of incomplete paper ballots. But there were no early reports of problems with the ATM-like touch-screen voting machines introduced since the troubled 2000 election.
Florida's early voting was touted partly as a way to avoid long lines on Nov. 2, but it turned out to be so popular that Lucien Gennaro, a police aide in Coral Springs, waited for an hour and finally had to leave for work.
"A lot of people who were waiting just left. I'll try again tomorrow," he said. "It was a little frustrating after what happened in 2000."
Critics say the extended voting period increases opportunities for fraud. And some groups urged voters to ask for paper absentee ballots because of concerns about the touch-screen machines and the possibility of recounts. Voters can choose either method through Nov. 1.
The touch-screen voting machines got a favorable review from Robin Punches, who used one of them for the first time in Palm Beach County. "It tells you exactly what to do. It's idiot-proof," she said.
During early voting in Texas, President Bush got at least two votes in Houston - from his parents.
"We love voting for our son," former first lady Barbara Bush said after casting her electronic ballot at a community center.
•Charles Hurt reported from West Palm Beach, Fla., and Valerie Richardson reported from Denver. This article is based in part on wire service reports.
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2-Fingerprint Border ID System Called Inadequate
By Robert O'Harrow and Jr. Scott Higham
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, October 19, 2004; Page A08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43276-2004Oct18.html
Terrorists who alter their fingerprints have about an even chance of slipping past U.S. border watch-list checks because the government is using a two-fingerprint system instead of one that relies on all 10 prints, a lawmaker said in a letter he made public yesterday to Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge.
Rep. Jim Turner (D-Tex.) wrote that a study by researchers at Stanford University concluded the two-finger system "is no more than 53 percent effective in matching fingerprints with poor image quality against the government's biometric terrorist watch-list." Turner said the system falls far short of keeping the country secure.
"It's going to be a coin toss as to whether we can identify terrorists," Turner, the ranking member of the House Select Committee on Homeland Security, said in an interview yesterday. "It's a 50-50 chance, and that's not good enough."
Turner's Oct. 15 letter comes as government officials supervising the burgeoning border security system, known as US-VISIT, have been touting their use of fingerprints for identifying people crossing the border and checking them against watch lists of suspected terrorists.
The US-VISIT program aims to create a "virtual border" using computer networks, databases, fingerprints and other biometric identifiers. The program requires foreign visitors to register their names before traveling to the United States and have their fingerprints checked when they arrive and depart. Officials estimate the system could cost up to $10 billion and take a decade to build.
The border security program is relying on technology first developed for a program at the former Immigration and Naturalization Service called IDENT. Government officials have known for years that IDENT did not work well with the identification system used by the Justice Department, a 10-fingerprint system called the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System. That system is known for producing good results, even with poor-quality fingerprint images, Turner's letter said.
But homeland security officials have told Congress they decided to use the IDENT system for the first phase of US-VISIT as a way to quickly improve security at the borders, and move to a 10-fingerprint system later. "It was a logistical issue we had to deal with," said Robert A. Mocny, deputy director of US-VISIT. "It will get better. . . . It's a matter of what we can do right now."
Turner's letter said the Department of Homeland Security ignored numerous warnings from the "government's top biometric scientists" that the "two-fingerprint system could not accurately perform watch list searches and the ten-fingerprint system was far preferable."
The letter quotes Stanford researcher Lawrence M. Wein, who said his study found that at best, with a software fix, the two-finger system would properly identify only about three of four people. Two weeks ago, Wein told the Homeland Security Committee that the "implications of our findings are disturbing."
Turner accused homeland security officials of failing to be "more forthcoming" about the limitations of their approach. Turner asked Ridge to direct homeland security officials to "preserve all documents and electronic communications" relating to their decision on fingerprints.
"I understand your desire to deploy biometric screening at our borders as quickly as possible," Turner said in his letter. "But more than three years after the 9/11 attacks, we have invested more than $700 million in an entry-exit system that cannot reliably do what the Department so often said it would: Use a biometric watch-list to keep known terrorists out of the country."
A spokesman for the Republican-controlled Homeland Security Committee, Ken Johnson, said the release of Turner's letter was driven by election-year politics. Johnson acknowledged that there are "some concerns" with the current system, but he said US-VISIT continues to evolve. "In a perfect world, where money is not an issue, and people wouldn't mind spending countless hours or days at the border, the 10-fingerprint system would be preferable. But that's not reality," Johnson said. "They're playing politics with some very sensitive issues."
-------- immigration / refugees
Europeans Debate Plan For Immigrant Camps
Associated Press
Tuesday, October 19, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43297-2004Oct18.html
FLORENCE, Oct. 18 -- Ministers from five European countries said Monday that they hoped to start digital fingerprinting for passports by 2006 in an effort to improve security, but they split over a German proposal to put illegal migrants in transit camps in North Africa.
Interior ministers from Britain, France, Germany, Spain and Italy held two days of informal talks in a 19th-century villa in Florence to prepare initiatives they hope will eventually be adopted throughout the 25-member European Union.
But they failed to overcome their differences over Germany's proposal, backed by Italy, to set up camps in North Africa to process asylum seekers before they set out on perilous sea journeys to southern Europe.
In a statement at the end of the talks, the ministers said they were hoping to introduce the fingerprint measure for passports issued in their countries starting in 2006. Conservative Italian politicians hailed the measure as an important step in the fight against terrorism and immigrant smuggling.
The transit camp proposal, however, was the focus of the meeting.
Although Spain, like Italy, is flooded with immigrants who have made clandestine voyages across the Mediterranean from North Africa, it sided with France against the German idea.
"For France, it's out of the question to accept transit camps or shelters of any kind," Dominique de Villepin, the French interior minister, said at a closing news conference. Spain's interior minister, Jose Antonio Alonso, said such camps would not provide humanitarian guarantees.
Opponents of the transit camp proposal have expressed fears that bids for asylum might not be handled fairly. A summary of the discussions appeared to take into consideration the concerns of international organizations about transit camps in countries such as Libya that have been criticized for human rights violations.
Italy has been concentrating its efforts to keep thousands of migrants from illegally reaching its shores by working with Libya, a major trading partner. Officials said many of the smugglers' boats depart from Libya.
Interior Minister Otto Schily of Germany, who initially proposed the transit camps, said the initiative would deal with the problem "where it is born."
His Italian counterpart, Giuseppe Pisanu, who has been trying to encourage Europe to take more concerted action against immigrant smuggling, stressed that any camp plan should be part of a broader policy.
While noting that there is a "clear distinction between economic immigrants and asylum seekers," the ministers' statement said efforts were needed to develop "capacity building of asylum policy" in transit countries.
-------- prisons / prisoners
High-Profile N.Y. Suspect Goes on Trial
Arrest Was Called Part of War on Terrorism, but Doctor Faces Other Charges
By Michael Powell
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 19, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43278-2004Oct18?language=printer
SYRACUSE, N.Y., Oct. 18 -- Federal prosecutors heralded the arrest 19 months ago as another blow in the Justice Department's war on terrorism. More than 85 federal agents descended on the home of a prominent local doctor, Rafil Dhafir, handcuffing him in his driveway and hauling away dozens of boxes of books and records .
Attorney General John D. Ashcroft spoke of a terrorism supporter apprehended. A federal prosecutor suggested that an Arab engineer who was a friend of Dhafir's might be proficient in fashioning "dirty bombs." And a federal magistrate denied bail to the oncologist, saying he might escape to Canada over the ice on the St. Lawrence River.
But federal prosecutors never filed a terrorism-related charge against Dhafir, 56, who emigrated from Iraq to the United States 32 years ago and became an American citizen. Instead, Dhafir, whose trial starts this week, faces charges that he defrauded a charity he ran and violated U.S. sanctions by sending millions of dollars to feed children and build mosques in pre-invasion Iraq.
Dhafir has also been charged with Medicare fraud and tax evasion, accusations that grew out of the federal terrorism investigation. If convicted, he faces at least 10 years in prison and millions of dollars in fines.
In a prison interview and a letter to a newspaper, Dhafir has attributed his troubles to anti-Arab bias and fallout from the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Humanitarian groups and prominent American corporations have violated U.S. sanctions against Iraq without facing criminal charges, his lawyer contends.
"We believe the government targeted him because he's an Arab American," said Deveraux L. Cannick, Dhafir's attorney. "They rushed to the conclusion that this man was sponsoring terrorism. They colored him as the devil incarnate."
Dhafir's trial begins at a sensitive time for the Justice Department. In early September, a federal judge in Detroit threw out the convictions of three Arab American men accused of belonging to a terrorist "sleeper operational combat cell." A government review has blamed an overzealous prosecutor for withholding evidence from the defense and misrepresenting other evidence in the case.
In June, Sami Omar Hussayen, a Saudi graduate student at the University of Idaho, was acquitted of charges he provided material support to terrorism by running an Internet network that sought to raise money and recruit fighters for holy war abroad. The FBI arrested Hussayen and Dhafir on the same day.
Federal law enforcement sources had suggested a link between the men, who shared membership in the Islamic Assembly of North America, a charity with Web sites that extol radical struggles in Chechnya, Kosovo and the Palestinian territories. Prosecutors have declined to comment on the case, referring reporters to the voluminous document file.
Still, many questions remain unanswered about Dhafir. He allegedly neither filed for a required tax exemption for his charity, Help the Needy, nor obtained a license to send donations to Iraq. He is accused of using false Social Security numbers obtained in the names of several associates to open charity bank accounts, and of siphoning money from the charity to buy real estate in the United States.
Dhafir aroused suspicions by sometimes writing apparent coded e-mails to associates in the Middle East, according to government papers. An affidavit filed by U.S. Attorney Glenn T. Suddaby cites a particularly mysterious example. In December 2002, Dhafir sent an e-mail to a friend in England, inviting him to attend his daughter's wedding in Drumlin Hall in England. Dhafir signed the e-mail "Uncle Ralph."
Dhafir does not have a daughter, and no wedding was scheduled that day in Drumlin Hall.
Cannick, Dhafir's attorney, said much of the government's case will fall apart. Confusion inevitably arises, he said, when key evidence is written in Arabic. Others argue that Dhafir was taking precautions to avoid Saddam Hussein's secret police in Iraq.
Dhafir risked missing his own trial by refusing as a matter of religious faith to consent to strip searches before leaving the county lockup. On Monday, a judge waived that requirement.
Who Is He?
The doctor walked into the interview cell dressed in a pale blue jail jumpsuit. His black beard was broad and streaked with white, and he smiled and put his palm flat against the glass as a sort of prison handshake. Dhafir has tried five times to win release on bond, and each time has been denied.
He says the time in prison has not been lost. "I've been able to counsel a number of youths here and I believe I've touched some," he said through a prison phone. "That gives me pleasure."
This is the Dhafir who his supporters talk of, a man who gives tens of thousands of dollars to charity and who often allows poor or working-class patients of all faiths to pay but a portion of their chemotherapy expenses. He has lent employees money to pay off mortgages and to hire lawyers to represent wayward children, and he never asks for repayment, they said.
"He gives you hope," said Peggy Tosti, who has fought three types of cancer and lives in a small home in Upstate New York. "He would laugh and talk, and he never, ever, pressed me to pay him. His faith is inspirational."
Dhafir is a Salafist, a believer in a fundamentalist strain of Islam that regards most Muslim practice as polluted by idolatry. Salafis strive to return to the religion's austere roots. It is a variant of Wahhabism, the strict brand of Islam dominant in Saudi Arabia. Osama bin Laden is an adherent, though by no means do all Salafis support terrorism. FBI agents and prosecutors have repeatedly raised Dhafir's Salafism as a matter of concern. "It's enormously difficult to sort out," said Michael Doran, a professor in Princeton University's Department of Near Eastern Studies. "It's quite possible that he has only honorable intentions. Or it's possible that it's not so innocent."
Dhafir founded Help the Needy in 1996 to send money to Iraqi children. Under economic sanctions imposed on Iraq after the Persian Gulf War, 1 million Iraqi children became chronically malnourished by 1997, according to the United Nations. "This may sound naive, but . . . children were dying," Dhafir said. "I had to do something."
Dhafir proved to be a prodigious fundraiser. But he was, at the least, sloppy with records. He used a tax-exempt number assigned to a different charity, the Somali Relief Network. Some Help the Needy funds paid for animals for slaughter at religious festivals, after which meat was given to the poor. Other money paid for the construction of mosques and the hiring of preachers, costs that Dhafir did not mention in his fundraising appeals in the United States.
The federal investigation of Dhafir began in 1999, when Fleet Bank notified federal prosecutors that an associate of Help the Needy had deposited 100 checks. Each was for just under $10,000, raising suspicions of money laundering.
Prosecutors apparently asked Medicare officials to examine Dhafir's billing records as part of a potential terrorism investigation. Medicare officials say that he charged the top rate for chemotherapy sessions, which requires the doctor's presence in the office. But Dhafir often was overseas at the time.
After Dhafir's arrest, his wife, Priscilla, pleaded guilty to a count of making a false statement to a Medicare investigator. FBI agents asked Dhafir's employees if they were allowed to celebrate Christmas (they were). And they questioned more than 100 local Muslims, asking about Dhafir but also how often they prayed and whether they attended mosques, according to a dozen friends and former employees of Dhafir's.
"It was all about the T-word," Dhafir said. "I don't recognize myself in their accounts."
Terror Accusations
There is a shadow-boxing quality to the terror allegations lodged against Dhafir. In August, Gov. George E. Pataki (R) described Dhafir's as a "money laundering case to help terrorist organizations . . . conduct horrible acts." Prosecutors hinted at national security reasons for holding Dhafir without bail. But no evidence was offered to support the allegations.
"The government plays the fear card to keep people locked up," said Barry Boss, a defense lawyer in the District and former federal public defender who is writing a book on criminal procedure. "It's unusual for a professional charged in a white-collar case with no history of flight to be held without bond."
Last week, U.S. District Judge Norman A. Mordue prohibited Dhafir's attorneys from raising the question of selective prosecution because he is a Muslim. Nor can his attorneys mention that authorities have offered no evidence of a terrorism tie. Mordue said that such issues have nothing to do with the charges lodged against Dhafir.
Back at the county lockup, Dhafir shrugged when asked about the prospect of decades behind bars. "Religion is what keeps me going. I know that nothing happens without a reason." He offered a slight smile. "But sometimes you won't know what it is until the end."
-------- POLITICS
-------- corruption
REP. TOM DELAY'S ETHICS VIOLATIONS RAISE QUESTIONS
U.S. Reps. Asked To Return Tainted Contributions
Common Dreams
October 19, 2004
http://www.commondreams.org/news2004/1019-09.htm
WASHINGTON - October 19 - All but five House Republicans vying for re-election this November have received more than $2 million from House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, according to new data released today by the Campaign for America's Future. Rep. DeLay recently received a series of reprimands by the House Ethics Committee, raising serious questions about his use of bribery and unethical tactics in the U.S. House and prompting calls for his ouster.
The analysis, based on Oct. 4 data from the Federal Election Commission and analyzed by the Center for Responsive Politics, shows that 241 current members of the House and Senate received $2,135,802 from Rep. DeLay's political action committee, Americans for a Republican Majority, since it was formed in 1994. More than $1 million of the $2.1 million was donated in this election cycle.
The top recipients of Rep. DeLay's contributions are Rep. Mike Ferguson, R-N.J., Rep. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., Rep. Robin Hayes, R-N.C., Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M., Rep. Mike Rodgers, R-Mich., Rep. Anne Northrup, R-Ky. and Rep. Jim Ryun, R-Kan., who all accepted more than $30,000 from the PAC.
Campaign for America's Future Co-director Robert Borosage called on House Republicans to return the campaign contributions in question and urged all elected officials to take a stand before the election on the series of ethics charges leveled against Rep. DeLay.
"Tom DeLay is the kingpin of the most corrupt Congress in recent history," said Borosage. "DeLay has a long record of working in the shadows. Taking money from DeLay compromises the integrity of every elected official who supports his dark tactics. Everyone who has taken Tom DeLay's dirty money must publicly decide if they stand with DeLay or with decency."
The Campaign for America's Future has already called on House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., to oust Rep. DeLay from his leadership post following rulings from the House Ethics Committee on charges filed in June by Rep. Chris Bell, D-Texas.
The House Ethics Committee reprimanded Rep. DeLay earlier this month for, among other violations, attempting to bribe a Republican colleague to change his vote on President Bush's Medicare prescription drug bill.
Rep. DeLay tried to force Rep. Nick Smith, R-Mich., to vote his way on the bill and threatened to work against the House candidacy of Rep. Smith's son if he refused. Rep. Smith voted against the bill and Rep. Smith's son lost his primary.
Last month, a Texas grand jury indicted three of Rep. DeLay's political associates in a case involving a political committee affiliated with the majority leader. A separate three-part complaint to the committee says Rep. DeLay also misused his office and taxpayer resources for political purposes related to elections and redistricting in Texas.
-------- propaganda wars
Ruling seen as free-speech landmark
October 19, 2004
(AP)
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041018-103747-4788r.htm
BEIJING - A Chinese court has cleared a magazine of libel charges filed by a state-owned real estate developer in what is seen as a landmark ruling for freedom of speech.
All Chinese media are state controlled and expected to sing the praises of the government and play down bad news. The constitution enshrines freedom of speech, but defendants rarely win libel lawsuits.
The People's Intermediate Court in Tianhe district in the southern city of Guangzhou ruled on Oct. 12 against Guangzhou Huaqiao Real Estate Development Co., which had sought $711,000 in damages from China Reform magazine.
The July 1, 2003, edition of the monthly said Guangzhou Huaqiao had been stripped of its assets, posted losses and laid off workers as a result of its ownership changing hands several times. The news was sourced to company and official documents.
The court ruled that journalists enjoyed legal immunity if news was backed up by a source that was reasonable and believable, and not based on rumors or fabrication, according to a copy of the verdict.
"Room for freedom of speech has been expanded," libel lawyer Pu Zhiqiang said.
"In the past, if you say I'm no good and I'm unhappy, I can sue you," Mr. Pu said. "The ruling, at the very least, does not consider a fair commentary to be infringement."
An employee of Guangzhou Huaqiao said the firm had not received a copy of the verdict and declined further comment. It has 15 days to appeal. The magazine welcomed the verdict.
"This is an inspiring milestone," said 33-year-old reporter and editor Liu Ping, whose story was headlined "Who is Splitting the Fat?"
"It's not only good news for the media, but also big happy news for the judiciary and the academic world," she said. "We are gratified the judiciary gave a certain degree of space and affirmation to the media playing a supervisory role."
Guangzhou Huaqiao said in its complaint that the magazine had "dealt a heavy blow to a large-scale state-owned enterprise with hopes of soaring, and caused huge economic losses."
Millions of workers have been laid off from loss-making state enterprises as China moves from a planned to market economy.
--------
Cheney Evokes Blasts in U.S. as He Questions Kerry's Leadership
October 19, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Cheney.html?hp&ex=1098244800&en=0bed67005fc7769c&ei=5094&partner=homepage
CARROLL, Ohio (AP) -- Vice President Dick Cheney on Tuesday evoked the possibility of terrorists bombing U.S. cities with nuclear weapons and questioned whether Sen. John Kerry could combat such a threat, which the vice president called a concept ``you've got to get your mind around.''
``The biggest threat we face now as a nation is the possibility of terrorists ending up in the middle of one of our cities with deadlier weapons than have ever before been used against us -- biological agents or a nuclear weapon or a chemical weapon of some kind to be able to threaten the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans,'' Cheney said.
``That's the ultimate threat. For us to have a strategy that's capable of defeating that threat, you've got to get your mind around that concept,'' Cheney said.
Cheney, speaking to an invitation-only crowd as he began a bus tour through Republican strongholds in Ohio, said Kerry is trying to convince voters he would be the same type of ``tough, aggressive'' leader as President Bush in the fight against terrorism.
``I don't believe it,'' the vice president said. ``I don't think there's any evidence to support the proposition that he would, in fact, do it.''
The Kerry campaign has contended its Republican opponents are trying to frighten people with warnings of likely terrorist attacks in the United States and by suggesting America's enemies want Bush to be defeated. Cheney sparked Democratic outrage last month when he linked ``the wrong choice'' in the presidential election with a future terrorist attack.
In Des Moines, Iowa, on Sept. 7, Cheney told supporters: ``It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we'll get hit again, that we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States, and that we'll fall back into the pre-9/11 mind set if you will, that in fact these terrorist attacks are just criminal acts, and that we're not really at war.''
Cheney praised the recent elections in Afghanistan but said they don't mean the U.S. mission there is finished.
``Does that mean it's over now and we can walk away? No, it doesn't,'' he said. ``This is three yards and a cloud of dust. There's no touchdown passes in this business. We'll stay as long as we need to help them train their own security forces, which we're doing actively so they can take over responsibility for their own security.''
In a campaign appearance Monday in Johnstown, Pa., Cheney criticized rival vice presidential candidate John Edwards for going ``overboard'' in his comments about Kerry's support of unrestricted federal funding for stem cell research, which Bush and Cheney oppose. He also accused Edwards of giving people ``false hope.''
Edwards told supporters in Newton, Iowa, on Oct. 11, ``If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve will get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.'' The actor, a quadriplegic who became an advocate for stem cell research, had died a day earlier.
``I thought, frankly, the other day what John Edwards suggested when he made his comments about Christopher Reeve, that somehow if John Kerry were president, Christopher Reeve could get up out of his wheelchair and there all of his problems would be solved, I really thought was an inappropriate remark, especially given ... well, given the false hope it engendered,'' Cheney said.
On the Net:
Bush campaign: http://www.georgewbush.com
-------
So, Did Saddam Try to Kill Bush's Dad?
Inter Press Service
by Jim Lobe
October 19, 2004
http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=3814
Now that President George W. Bush's allegations about former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's ties to al-Qaeda and ambitious weapons programs have been thoroughly discredited, another outstanding charge remains to be resolved.
During a campaign speech in September 2002, Bush cited a number of reasons - in addition to alleged terrorist links and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) - about why Saddam was so dangerous to the U.S., noting, in particular that, "After all, this is the guy who tried to kill my dad."
He was referring, of course, to an alleged plot by Iraqi intelligence to assassinate Bush's father, former president George H.W. Bush, during his triumphal visit to Kuwait in April 1993, 25 months after U.S.-led forces chased Iraqi troops out of Kuwait in the first Gulf War and three months after Bush Sr. surrendered the White House to Bill Clinton.
Although he did not name his father, Bush Jr. also cited the assassination attempt in his September 2002 address at the United Nations General Assembly where he called on the UN Security Council to approve a tough resolution demanding that Saddam fully give up his (nonexistent) WMD weapons and programs
While the alleged plot was never cited officially as a cause for going to war, some pundits - including Maureen Dowd of the New York Times - have speculated that revenge or some Oedipal desire to show up his father may indeed have been one of the factors that drove him to Baghdad - as the sign of one demonstrator suggested in a big antiwar march here just before the war: "I love my dad, too, but come on!"
The circumstances of the alleged plot, which ended in a trial and conviction of 11 Iraqis and three Kuwaitis, have always evoked skepticism, although Clinton himself was apparently sufficiently convinced after receiving reports from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to order a missile strike on the Iraqi intelligence headquarters in Baghdad that killed six civilians in June 1993.
But a closer look at the 11-year-old plot, particularly in light of the findings by the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), the special team of experts that spent 15 months investigating Baghdad's WMD programs and found they were all dismantled in 1991 shortly after the end of the Gulf War, may now be warranted, especially if Bush is still laboring under the impression that Saddam "tried to kill [his] dad."
While the ISG's 960-page report, known as the Duelfer Report, does not address the assassination attempt, its chronology and depiction of Hussein's worldview - adduced through lengthy interviews by one Arabic-speaking FBI investigator and other interviews of Saddam's closest advisers - make the notion that the Iraqi dictator tried to kill Bush all the more implausible.
For one thing, Saddam, according to the report, was convinced that the CIA had thoroughly penetrated his regime and thus would know not only that he had dismantled his WMD (which the CIA apparently did not), but also would know about his plans for important intelligence operations. Under those circumstances, it is hard to understand why he would then order an assassination attempt on the former U.S. president.
Even more interesting, according to the report, was Saddam's "complicated" view of the U.S. While he derived "prestige" from being an enemy of the U.S., he also considered it to be "equally prestigious for him to be an ally of the United States - and regular entreaties were made during the last decade to explore this alternative."
Indeed, beginning already in 1991, according to the report, "very senior Iraqis close to the president made proposals through intermediaries for dialogue with Washington."
"Baghdad offered flexibility on many issues, including offers to assist in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Moreover, in informal discussions, senior officials allowed that, if Iraq had a security relationship with the United States, it might be inclined to dispense with WMD programs and/or ambitions," it added.
The report even concluded that Iraq was willing to be Washington's "best friend in the region bar none."
The fact that the U.S., under Bush Sr. and Clinton, did not show interest was apparently a source of bewilderment to the Iraqi leader, according to the Duelfer report.
If Saddam had tried to kill the ex-president, he probably would not have been bewildered by Washington's lack of interest, but, by all accounts, he was.
"From the report, Saddam seems to be not a madman, but someone who would understand very well the consequences of an assassination," notes Gregory Thielmann, a former senior State Department analyst who specialized in Iraq's WMD programs
"If his top priority was getting the [UN economic] sanctions lifted [as indicated by the report], then it doesn't follow that he would try to kill the president of the United States," added Thielmann.
As portrayed by both the alleged assassins and the Kuwaitis who grabbed them, the plot was itself deeply amateurish, dependent on the leadership of Wali Abdelhadi Ghazali, a 36-year-old male nurse, Raad Abdel-Amir al-Assadi, from Najaf, and a dozen Iraqi whiskey smugglers led by a 33-year-old owner of a coffee shop in Basra that was meeting-place for cross-border smugglers. Despite his age, al-Assadi confessed to being a colonel in the Iraqi intelligence service, the Mukhabarat, according to the Kuwait authorities.
Ghazali, who initially said he was approached and supplied with explosives and cars by the Mukhabarat, was the only person in the group who knew that Bush was the target. Other defendants confessed to transporting explosives across the border from Iraq but insisted they had no idea what they were for.
Both Ghazali and Assadi retracted their confessions during the trial, claiming that they were extracted by repeated beatings. At the time, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International expressed strong doubts that the trials could be fair, noting that it had received credible reports of severe beatings meted out to defendants accused of capital crimes in Kuwait. Assadi insisted that he was asked by the Mukhabarat to plant bombs around shopping centers in Kuwait City.
U.S. investigators, however, reported that they believed the confessions were not coerced and noted the similarity in the construction of the bombs found with the Iraqis with one known to have been built in Iraq in 1991.
In October, 1993, however, New Yorker investigative journalist Seymour Hersh assailed the government's case as "seriously flawed," noting among other problems that seven bomb experts had told him that the devices were mass-produced and probably not even manufactured in Iraq.
Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who met with Saddam when he served as U.S. charge d'affaires in Baghdad during the Gulf War, said he found the plot "odd."
"[Saddam] had to have had some idea that his ability to run operations outside Iraq was not very good, because we had foiled so many things before the war. So you have to ask why someone who was a risk-taker but clearly not suicidal would undertake to assassinate a former president of the United States," pointed out Wilson.
Larry Johnson, a top counter-terrorist official at the State Department, said he still has "no doubts" about the plot, recalling Saddam's "gangster" ethic. "Personal honor was involved," he said.
--------
The Cheney-Rove Manure Flinger Hits Overdrive
The Columbus Free Press
October 19, 2004
http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/7/2004/970
Back on our organic commune in western Massachusetts we often laughed about a fabled farmer who owned a manure spreader. This fabulous device flung cow, horse and chicken droppings high and far onto corn and hay fields.
We had one. It worked great.
Allegedly this mythical farmer once used his to render the home of a corrupt Selectman terminally fragrant. It was a great story.
So amidst our endless disputes with local officials and polluters, we fantasized about arming our own crap flinger for a few choice passes at town hall or the local utility office.
But there was nothing explicit in the law books about airborne poop, and we weren't sure Gandhi would have approved. So despite the great laughs, we never actually did it.
No such qualms plague Dick Cheney or Karl Rove, disciples of the ultimate filthy trickster, Dick Nixon.
Cheney-Rove have already escalated their infamous crap flings. As election day speeds toward us, expect their runs to include such offal as John Kerry's divorce files, more fabricated swift boat libels, and whatever else still lurks at the bottom of the GOP cesspool. And expect the mainstream media to feed on it all with craven delight.
The latest airborne offal has been about Mary Cheney. After John Kerry demolished George W. Bush for the third time in three debates, Dick and Lynne Cheney howled their "outrage" over Kerry's brief mention of their daughter's lesbianism.
Their crocodile tears have all the credibility of an airborn cow pie. Mary Cheney made her sexual orientation public long ago. But her parents either haven't adjusted or are all too happy to use their daughter as a political buffalo chip.
The Cheneys' carefully calculated moanings ate up two days of media bloviation that might otherwise have focussed on the pitiful peformance of a hopelessly outclassed incumbant. The dour, frumpy Cheney himself appeared equally obsolete in his debate with John Edwards, where Mary Cheney's sexual orientation was a subject for civilized discussion.
But no matter. Cheney-Rove need a crap screen to distract from their president's mean-spirited incompetence. If it hadn't been Mary Cheney, it would have been something else.
In the final lead-up to election day, one certainty is that Cheney-Rove will ride their swift boat manure flinger all through the national media, hurling vile toxins at John Kerry, John Edwards and anyone else that dares oppose them.
Rain or shine, as we head to the polls, carry a thick umbrella. And hold your nose.
But keep your eyes wide open. It'll be hard not to step in the deepening piles of whatever Cheney-Rove continue to fling all over the national mindscape.
HARVEY WASSERMAN'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES is available at www.harveywasserman.com. He is senior editor of www.freepress.org, and co-author, with Bob Fitrakis, of IMPRISON GEORGE BUSH.
-------- us politics
Candidates Spar on Iraq, Terrorism War
By Dana Milbank and Lois Romano
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, October 19, 2004; Page A08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A41687-2004Oct18?language=printer
MARLTON, N.J., Oct. 18 -- President Bush and Democratic challenger John F. Kerry lunged into the final two weeks of the 2004 presidential campaign on Monday by feuding feverishly over the Iraq war and the fight against terrorists.
Here in the Philadelphia suburbs, the president jettisoned all talk of domestic affairs as he assembled a barrage of new and old attacks on Kerry's record on terrorism, using numerous and sometimes suspect accusations to describe Kerry as eager to return to a "September the 10th attitude" in which the country did not effectively fight terrorists. In Florida, Kerry overshadowed his planned focus on health care by describing Bush's handling of Iraq as "arrogant" and "cavalier," and he suggested Bush was guilty of ideologically driven mismanagement.
The long-distance exchange of insults gave an overheated tone to a political contest that was already tense and unrelenting. On the day early voting began in Florida, and with 15 days to go until the election, both men discarded fine distinctions as they fought for any advantage in a close race.
With polls showing Bush regaining a small lead after losing ground during the debates, Kerry sought to keep pressure on him by citing a letter from the U.S. commander in Iraq last year complaining that inadequate supplies threatened the troops' ability to fight. The existence of the letter, written in December by Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, was reported in Monday's Washington Post.
"Despite the president's arrogant boasting that he's done everything right in Iraq and that he's made no mistakes, the truth is beginning to catch up with him," Kerry told supporters in West Palm Beach and Tampa. "Mr. President, your management or mismanagement of this war, your diversion from al Qaeda and from Osama bin Laden, your shift of the troops to Iraq when there was nothing to do with al Qaeda, nothing to do with 9/11, has made America less safe."
Kerry added: "I will never be a commander in chief who just cavalierly, ideologically and arrogantly dismisses the advice of our best military commanders in the United States."
Bush aides said Kerry had no standing to complain about a lack of supplies in Iraq because he voted against an $87 billion Iraq spending measure.
Kerry had planned to emphasize health care, but the campaign shifted course after his recent emphasis on domestic issues such as Social Security and the flu vaccine shortage allowed gains by Bush in polls. The campaign issued a new ad asserting that "American troops are attacked 87 times a day" and using a statement by Bush on March 13, 2002, that "I truly am not that concerned" about bin Laden. Bush denied in the final debate that he had made such a remark.
The Bush campaign released a new ad pointing to Kerry's votes against the Persian Gulf War, intelligence spending and weapons programs. "John Kerry and his liberal allies: are they a risk we can afford to take today?" the ad asks.
The president delivered the same message to a rally in New Jersey. Describing the 1990s as a time when efforts against terrorists were "piecemeal and symbolic," Bush said: "That is the time that my opponent wants to go back to -- a time when danger was real and growing, but we didn't know it; a time when some thought terrorism was only 'a nuisance.' But that very attitude is what blinded America to the war being waged against us."
Bush also sought to reverse Kerry's charge that the president has alienated allies. "Senator Kerry has managed to offend or alienate almost every one of America's fighting allies in the war on terror," he said. "He has dismissed the sacrifice of 14 nations that have lost forces in Iraq, calling those nations 'window dressing.' "
Casting Kerry in his 1970s role of antiwar demonstrator, Bush charged: "While America does the hard work of fighting terror and spreading freedom, he has chosen the easy path of protest and defeatism."
In several instances, Bush took liberties in characterizing Kerry's positions. Although Kerry has said he would always reserve the right to use preemptive force, Bush charged that Kerry's position is otherwise, saying: "Senator Kerry's approach would permit a response only after America is hit. This kind of September the 10th attitude is no way to protect our country."
Bush quoted Kerry as saying Sept. 11 "didn't change me much at all." Added Bush: "His unchanged worldview is obvious from the policies he still advocates." But in the interview to which Bush referred, Kerry went on to say the attack "accelerated, confirmed in me, the urgency of doing the things I thought we needed to be doing. . . . It was a kind of anger, a frustration and an urgency that we weren't doing the kinds of things necessary to prevent it and to deal with it."
The president also said that Kerry "spoke with sympathy for a communist dictator in Nicaragua in the 1980s and criticized the democracy movement as terrorism." The Kerry quotation about the Sandinistas on which the Bush campaign based this statement said: "Our foreign policy should represent the democratic values that have made our country great, not subvert those values by funding terrorism to overthrow governments of other countries."
On Iraq, Bush said Kerry has "now flip-flopped his way to a dangerous position: My opponent finally has settled on a strategy, a strategy of retreat. He has talked about artificial timetables to pull our troops out of Iraq." Kerry has said that he would like to reduce troop levels in Iraq "significantly" within six months but that this would depend on the situation there.
Bush said efforts by Kerry to cut intelligence spending in 1994 and 1995 gave him "a record of trying to weaken American intelligence," and he pointed to numerous votes by Kerry against weapons systems. But the Kerry campaign said that Vice President Cheney, as defense secretary, also opposed some of the same weapons programs, and Kerry's proposed intelligence cuts were smaller than those proposed in 1995 by Bush's choice to head the CIA, Porter J. Goss.
Bush's visit to New Jersey, on his way to Florida for an overnight, was somewhat unconventional because Al Gore won the state comfortably in 2000, and a Republican presidential candidate has not won here in 16 years. Although the GOP's hopes to win in New Jersey are slim, Marlton is in the Philadelphia media market, which means Bush's appearance reached electorally important eastern Pennsylvania.
Cheney expressed optimism about the race as he campaigned in West Virginia. Cheney also dismissed Democratic charges that Bush would "privatize" Social Security. "It's an age-old cry," he said. "It's usually a good thing when it happens because it means they are behind."
Like Bush's No. 2, Kerry's vice presidential pick, John Edwards, suggested that Bush's side is the desperate one. Bush, Edwards said, "is making one last stand to con the American people."
In three cities across Florida, Kerry implored voters to take advantage of the state law that allows them to cast a ballot before Nov. 2 . Surveys here show the race to be a dead heat, and Democrats, anticipating voting troubles in part because 1 million new voters have registered, have already filed about 1,000 preemptive lawsuits.
Although preoccupied with Iraq, Kerry continued to try to saddle Bush with the flu-vaccine shortage, accusing him of putting the interest of the drug companies above the needs of consumers by not developing a health plan that allows the importation of cheaper drugs from Canada.
"With senior citizens standing in line for hours and mothers frantic about how to protect their children, the president gave the public his solution -- don't get a flu shot," Kerry said. Bush suggested that healthy Americans skip vaccinations to leave supplies for the young, old or vulnerable.
Romano was traveling with Kerry. Staff writers Michael Laris, with Cheney, and John Wagner, with Edwards, contributed to this report.
--------
Man charged in vote fraud says NAACP paid in crack
October 19, 2004
By Joyce Howard Price
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20041018-103741-2380r.htm
An Ohio man charged with filing fictitious voter-registration forms says he was paid in crack by a woman affiliated with the NAACP National Voter Fund.
The Sheriff's Office of Defiance County arrested and charged Chad Staton, 22, of Defiance, with false registration, a felony of the fifth degree.
The sheriff's office said Mr. Staton was hired by a Toledo woman, who, it said, admitted paying Mr. Staton in crack but has not been charged. She said she was working for a local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) official, who also has not been charged and could not be reached for comment.
Officers confiscated drug paraphernalia and voter-registration forms from the woman's home, the sheriff's office said.
The sheriff's office said it received the initial complaint about the phony registrations from the Defiance County Board of Elections. The board received the fraudulent forms from the Cuyahoga Board of Elections, which had received them from the NAACP National Voter Fund.
--------
Evangelicals endeavor to redeem the vote
October 19, 2004
By Bill Sammon
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20041019-123226-2184r.htm
President Bush's re-election campaign is getting a boost from powerful Christian groups, which are enlisting entertainers such as actor Jim Caviezel of "The Passion of the Christ" to cajole millions of evangelicals into voting.
One of the newest groups is Redeem the Vote, the religious community's answer to MTV's secular Rock the Vote. The group is touring battleground states with Christian rock groups and voter-registration drives that organizers say are putting the fear of God into Sen. John Kerry's supporters.
"This is really scaring Democrats," said Redeem the Vote founder Randy Brinson. "This is major, major news that the major media have ignored because we're not liberal."
Mr. Brinson persuaded Mr. Caviezel, the actor who portrayed Jesus in Mel Gibson's hit film, to appear in a Webcast imploring Christians to vote. Although Mr. Caviezel never explicitly endorses the president, his message is designed to remind Christians that Mr. Bush shares their opposition to abortion, judicial activism and homosexual "marriage."
"In this election year, Americans are faced with some of the most important issues in the history of our country," he said. "In order to preserve the God-given freedoms we each hold dear, it's important that we let our voices be heard."
The message is hammered home in millions of e-mails that Redeem the Vote is sending to evangelical Christians, whose names were obtained from the marketing firms that made "The Passion of the Christ" a blockbuster.
A more-established Christian group, Focus on the Family, is making a similar appeal for evangelical votes through its popular radio show, hosted by James Dobson.
"In the year 2000, 4 million evangelicals did not go to the polls," Mr. Dobson said in a recent speech that will be broadcast next week. "Twenty-five million Christians of various stripes - Catholics, mainline, other perspectives - did not register.
"That is an outrage," he added. "And it must not happen again."
The grass-roots efforts by these and other Christian groups are being monitored closely by the Bush campaign, which is taking a more active role in turning out evangelicals than in the 2000 election.
White House political strategist Karl Rove long has bemoaned the fact that Mr. Bush likely would have won the popular vote if more Christians had shown up at the polls four years ago.
"I see a lot of parallels between the evangelical vote and the African-American vote," Mr. Brinson said. "For years, the Republican Party wrote off African-Americans, saying they were unable to make inroads, while the Democratic Party took them for granted.
"I see a lot of that with the evangelicals," he added. "The Republicans have taken them for granted, and the Democrats write them off, saying they don't have any way to reach these people."
Christian groups are hoping to change that dynamic two weeks from today. To that end, they implicitly are reminding evangelicals that Mr. Bush shares their values.
"We have sat here, many of us for 35 years, while the family has been battered and bruised and broken," Mr. Dobson said. "Many of us have just let it happen.
"But I'm telling you, now's the time to say, 'Enough is enough.' "
The remarks, which were delivered to a cheering crowd in Colorado, will be broadcast next Monday and Tuesday to 1.5 million listeners of the "Focus on the Family" radio show.
--------
Gore Charges Bush With Prewar Deceit
President Called Reckless, Dishonest
By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 19, 2004; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43279-2004Oct18.html
Former vice president Al Gore finished a two-year series of policy addresses yesterday by accusing President Bush of deliberately suppressing information about Iraq that would have undermined his case for war.
Gore said that he had previously resisted saying Bush intentionally deceived the public in the run-up to the invasion but that the evidence now shows "that in virtually every case the president chose to ignore -- and indeed often to suppress -- studies, reports, information, facts, that were directly contrary to the false impressions he was in the process of giving to the American people."
Echoing a campaign theme of Democratic nominee John F. Kerry, Gore told about 700 students and activists at Georgetown University that Bush is "arrogantly out of touch with reality."
"He refuses to ever admit mistakes, which means that so long as he is our president we are doomed to repeat his mistakes," Gore said, to applause. "It is beyond incompetence. It is recklessness that risks the safety and security of the American people."
The event was sponsored by the liberal MoveOnPAC. Gore said he had found "the answer to what some have regarded as a mystery: How could a team so skilled in politics be so fumbling and incompetent when it comes to policy?"
"The same insularity and zeal that makes him effective at smash-mouth politics, makes him terrible at governing," Gore said, in front of a dozen U.S. flags, calling the Bush administration "a rarity in American history: It is simultaneously dishonest and incompetent."
Bush-Cheney campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt said Gore "seems intent on shattering whatever minuscule credibility he has left with baseless, mean-spirited personal attacks and conspiracy theories."
Gore, 56, decided in December 2002 against seeking a rematch with the man he beat by 500,000 votes in 2000 but to whom he lost the electoral-college count. His address reflected the continuing anger among Democrats who have vowed to turn out in large numbers on Nov. 2 to avenge what they consider an illegitimate result in the last presidential election.
Rebutting what he said are misconceptions among Bush opponents, Gore said he believes the president "is plenty smart."
"While I have no doubt that his religious belief is genuine . . . ," Gore said, "most of the president's frequent departures from fact-based analysis have much more to do with right-wing political and economic ideology than with the Bible." Gore said Bush "takes an astonishingly selfish and greedy collection of economic and political proposals, and then cloaks them with a phony moral authority."
Gore added that "the simplicity of many of his pronouncements, which are often misinterpreted as evidence that he has penetrated to the core of a complex issue, are in fact exactly the opposite, because they usually mark his refusal to even consider complexity."
-------- voting
Justice Dept. Intervenes in Vote Dispute
By Jo Becker
Tuesday, October 19, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43205-2004Oct18.html
The Justice Department yesterday jumped into an intensely partisan legal battle over the election rules that will govern the upcoming presidential election, arguing in federal court that the Democratic Party has no right to challenge rules in Michigan or elsewhere that govern the counting of "provisional ballots."
A new federal law requires that voters across the country who show up at the polls but whose names do not appear on the rolls be given a provisional ballot, which will count if it can be determined after Election Day that the voter was eligible.
Democrats have challenged rules in a number of states, including Michigan, that prohibit such ballots from being counted if they are cast in the wrong precinct. They contend that provisional ballots are more likely to be cast by low-income or minority voters, and that the Help America Vote Act, which Congress passed in 2002, does not allow for such restrictions on otherwise eligible voters.
Federal judges in several swing states have issued conflicting rulings, which led the Justice Department to file a brief in the still-pending Michigan case, a spokesman said.
"Congress made an explicit decision not to disturb states' long-standing authority to determine how ballots are to be counted, and the United States believes that courts must respect that congressional decision," spokesman Mark Corallo said. (The Florida Supreme Court ruled yesterday that voters may not cast provisional ballots outside their designated precincts.)
Democrats said the Justice Department is wrong on the law, and they questioned the intervention by a Bush administration agency. "Here you have the Justice Department waiting until two weeks before the election and suddenly taking this position, which is the Republican Party's position," said Robert F. Bauer, national counsel for voter protection at the Democratic National Committee.
A Republican for Kerry
It is perhaps not a big surprise, but former Michigan governor William Milliken, a moderate Republican, is unhappy with President Bush's conservative views. What may be more of a surprise is that he endorsed Democrat John F. Kerry yesterday, slamming Bush for "pandering to the extreme right wing."
Milliken, governor from 1969 to 1982, accused the Bush administration of rushing into the Iraq war, pushing tax cuts that benefit the rich and blocking meaningful stem cell research.
"I felt so strongly about the direction of this country that in the end, it wasn't a difficult decision to make," Milliken said in an interview with the Traverse City Record-Eagle.
Milliken issued a three-page statement about his views of Bush's domestic and international agenda. "This president has pursued policies pandering to the extreme right wing across a wide variety of issues and has exacerbated the polarization and the strident, uncivil tone of much of what passes for political discourse in this country today," he said in the statement.
-------- ENERGY
-------- energy
Analysis Russia calls oil shots with China
WASHINGTON, (UPI)
Oct. 19, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/upi/2004/1019-155926-russia-china-analysis.html
China rolled out a lot more than the red carpet to court Russian President Vladimir Putin on his state visit last week, but Putin stayed silent on the one thing China's leaders wanted above all else -- his green light for a pipeline to feed Siberia's oil wealth to their energy-hungry industrial juggernaut.
The Chinese went out of their way to be accommodating. They agreed to settle their last complicated border dispute with Russia essentially on the Kremlin's terms. And they offered $16 billion of investment in Russia over the next decade and a half. Chinese President Hu Jintao even officially backed Moscow's bid to join the World Trade Organization -- a crucial economic and diplomatic priority for Russian policymakers.
But no progress was made on two key planks of Beijing's strategy -- an $18 billion, 3,000-mile gas link from the massive Kovykta field in eastern Siberia, first proposed nearly a decade ago, and a 1,500-mile oil link from western Siberia to the heart of China's refining industry.
Putin's cool, canny stand took the Chinese by surprise. They were confident in advance that they would get what they wanted.
Officials at the China National Petroleum Co., China's leading oil and gas firm, had told Western businessmen and energy analysts they were confident that Putin would approve the gas link during his talks with Hu, who raised the issue personally. But all CNPC got was a vague agreement on cooperation with Gazprom, the world's largest gas company.
Putin's visit reversed a dynamic of Sino-Russian relations over the past decade and more. Since the disintegration of the Soviet Union -- a cash-strapped, long-impoverished Russia suffering from few export markets and the flight of hundreds of millions of dollars in capital -- has repeatedly offered its remaining crown jewels, its still potent weapons and space technologies, to China on bargain-basement terms and had them snapped up accordingly.
But now soaring global energy prices and Russia's emergence this year ahead of Saudi Arabia as the world's largest exporter of crude oil, not to mention natural gas, has finally put Moscow back in the driver's seat of the relationship. Indeed, over the past month, Putin has stunned the Chinese by making unanticipated major energy deals with South Korea. Also, he has appeared to favor Japan as a partner for Siberian oil pipeline development.
Now it is the Chinese who are going out of their way to woo the Russians rather than -- as has been the case for so long -- the other way round.
Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jinbao told a state dinner to honor Putin that China and Russia should open their markets wider to each other, increase trade volume and improve the current trade structure. The two countries should regulate trade through the early warning and consultation mechanisms on sensitive products and carefully handle bilateral trade problems, he said.
Talking about investment in Russia, the Chinese premier said his country is willing to increase investment in Russia on the construction of infrastructure facilities, exploitation of oil and gas and high-technology cooperation.
Putin, in fact, appears to be perfectly happy to maintain warm ties with Beijing. He has given the go-ahead for stepped up anti-terrorism cooperation with China within the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the so-called Shanghai Pact that also functions as a mechanism for Russia and China to work together in blocking the extension of U.S. military power and influence among the former Soviet republics of Central Asia.
Putin told his Chinese hosts Friday that Russia's regions should become involved in development programs in western China. He spoke at a meeting of Russian and Chinese regional leaders in the Chinese city of Xian, noting that Russian participation in Hu's ambitious new programs to develop western China would give a strong boost to the huge Eurasian heartland. I am confident that numerous Russian territories and regions and also state agencies and businesses may join this program, he said.
Under Putin, Russia's trade with China has risen to new levels. It will hit $20 billion this year, nearly double its value of $10.67 billion in 2001. Bilateral trade between the two giant nations of Eurasia is expected to top $20 billion this year, compared with only $10.67 billion in 2001, Chinese Deputy Prime Minister Wu Yi said on a recent visit to the Russian capital.
In the first eight months of this year, the total value of trade was $12.8 billion and it is still increasing, Wu said during a visit to Moscow a few weeks ago. But Putin knows that China's increasingly desperate hunger for Siberian oil in an inelastic global market where prices hit a previously inconceivable $55 a barrel this week now defines his relationship with Beijing.
Only a few weeks before Putin's visit, China announced it was picking up the costs of oil imports from Russia after the Yukos Corp. said it could no longer pay them. Gennady Fadeyev, president of Russian Railroads, also known as RZD, said that Chinese officials agreed during the visit of Prime Minister Wen to Moscow to cover RZD's transport costs for exports of oil produced by the embattled Yukos Oil Corp.
The Russian government has hit Yukos with $7 billion in back tax demands for 2000 and 2001 and on Sept. 20, Yukos announced it would stop supplying the state-owned Chinese National Petroleum Corp. with the 400,000 tons of crude oil it sends every month unless CNPC came up with $160 in transport tariffs and export duties per ton -- a total of $64 million per month. The move was widely seen as an attempt to embarrass Putin ahead of the Chinese prime minister's visit, but it backfired, illustrating instead how desperate China was to keep the flow of Siberian oil coming.
The development of a powerful new Moscow-Beijing access has been one of the most important and underreported ongoing stories in global politics and strategic affairs over the past decade. That process is continuing and even accelerating. But the balance of power within the relationship has changed. Russia is now in the driver's seat because of the oil factor -- and both sides know it.
-------- OTHER
-------- environment
American Indians Who Fish for Their Food Are Worried About Mercury in the Nation's Waters
Associated Press
By Ashley H. Grant
October 19, 2004
http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=207
ST. PAUL, Minnesota - American Indians are adding their voices to the controversy over mercury in the nation's waters, saying they are among the biggest consumers of fish and therefore more at risk from contamination.
"It is a real issue," said Bob Shimek, a member of the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota, who says he fishes to put food on the table. "It's not something abstract."
A recent report by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, which analyzed 2003 data collected by the Environmental Protection Agency, showed that 44 states including Minnesota had active mercury consumption advisories last year.
Earlier this year, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency listed about 1,900 lakes and streams as "impaired," meaning they contain harmful levels of pollutants like mercury or excess nutrients like nitrogen.
People who buy their freshwater fish at markets usually aren't at risk because most of it is raised on farms.
It's a different story for tribal members like Shimek, 51, who fish on their reservation. The practice is a treaty right and something members of his tribe have relied on as a dietary staple for generations.
"What good is a treaty-reserved right if it's not safe?" said Shimek, who works for an Indian environmental group on a mercury education project.
Shimek believes he suffered mercury poisoning in 1996 from eating fish he netted regularly from a lake on the reservation. He said he initially believed he had suffered a stroke when tingling in his left hand spread and affected his feet and speech.
Though Shimek never saw a doctor for his symptoms - he said he wasn't able to take time off from work - he's sure of the cause.
"Once I ran out of (fish), over a period of quite a number of weeks, the symptoms began to diminish," said Shimek.
Mercury can be harmful to the nervous system if consumed in large quantities, especially by children or pregnant women.
The EPA recently announced a mercury-reduction plan that envisions a 70 percent cut in mercury emissions from coal-burning power plants by 2018, from the current 48 tons a year to 15 tons.
------
Japan's Top Court Orders Government to Pay Minamata Mercury Poisoning Victims 22 Years After Case Was Filed
Associated Press
By Kozo Mizoguchi
October 19, 2004
http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=210
TOKYO - Japan's top court ordered the government to pay US$703,000 in damages to victims of the Minamata mercury poisoning 22 years after their famous case was filed over an industrial pollution disaster that killed more than 1,700 people and caused diseased mothers to give birth to deformed babies.
After the decision, several plaintiffs rushed from the courthouse and unfurled a banner declaring their victory to cheering supporters. The government apologized to victims for failing to prevent the pollution.
"We assure you that this horrific incident won't ever be repeated," Environment Minister Yuriko Koike said, making a deep bow to plaintiffs in a meeting after the verdict. "The government will tell about the lessons learned here for generations to come."
The Minamata poisoning was Japan's worst case of industrial pollution. Since the 1950s, hundreds of people have contracted Minamata disease - a neurological disorder caused by mercury poisoning - from eating tainted fish. The disease, first discovered in the 1950s, was named for Minamata Bay in southern Japan, where a company dumped tons of mercury compounds.
Babies of poisoned mothers were born with gnarled limbs. The victims were seared into memory by a famous series of photographs by W. Eugene Smith from the 1970s, including one of a woman holding her deformed child in a bathtub.
The case came to symbolize the dark side of Japan's remarkable growth to the world's second-largest economy in the post World War II era.
The Supreme Court upheld a high court ruling from April 2001, bringing an end to the case filed more than two decades ago, court officials said.
The court said the government and Kumamoto prefecture (state) failed to stop chemical manufacturer Chisso Corp. from dumping tons of mercury compounds into Minamata Bay beginning in the 1930s, said the plaintiffs' lawyer Satoe Nagashima.
"I have devoted my life to this moment for the past 22 years. It felt like it went by quickly," Toshiyuki Kawakami, head of the plaintiffs' group, told a news conference. "I'm satisfied," Kawakami said, but added: "There are still many more patients."
Chisso Corp., based in Tokyo, had accepted a 2001 high court ruling to pay some $2.18 million in damages to the plaintiffs. The company declined to comment.
The case revealed how government officials had looked the other way for years as Chisso violated pollution laws.
The suit was originally filed by 40 plaintiffs in October 1982 at the Osaka District Court. When the Osaka High Court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in 2001, the group had grown to 58. By the final verdict, there were 45, including 15 relatives of plaintiffs who had died.
Nagashima said 37 plaintiffs were awarded between $13,700 and $22,800 in compensation, depending on the seriousness of their illnesses. Claims by the remaining eight were rejected because they had moved from Minamata, about 560 miles southwest of Tokyo, before 1960, Nagashima said.
According to government figures, 2,955 people contracted Minamata disease, and 1,784 people have since died. Under a special law, victims can receive free medical care and compensation.
Another 12,000 people who were sickened had received a one-time government payout but weren't eligible for free medical care. The plaintiffs were among this group and sued to force the government, Kumamoto prefecture, and Chisso to accept responsibility for causing the sickness and to ask for more compensation.
The Environment Ministry said it had no plans to change the special law.
-------- ACTIVISTS
21 Arrested in Arlington
Protest of Bush Administration AIDS Policy
By Elaine Rivera
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 19, 2004; Page A07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43605-2004Oct18.html
Arlington police arrested 21 protesters yesterday after they chained themselves to the front door and one another at Bush-Cheney campaign headquarters during a demonstration against administration policies.
About 120 protesters took part in the demonstration outside the building on Wilson Boulevard that houses the campaign headquarters, police said. The protest began about 2 p.m. and lasted 90 minutes, they said.
The protest was organized by ACT UP and Housing Works, a nonprofit agency that provides social services, housing and health care to people with AIDS in New York, said Robert Cordero, director of federal advocacy for Housing Works.
"We are here to protest the failures of the Bush administration's AIDS policies," Cordero said. "There are 40,000 new infections per year in the United States, more people uninsured, more people who need housing."
The protesters were charged with trespassing, and police used bolt cutters to remove seven people who had chained themselves to the front door, said Matt Martin, a police spokesman. Fourteen other people, chained to one another, were removed from the office, he said.
Sharonann Lynch, a member of ACT UP, criticized what she said was under-funding of programs to combat AIDS globally.
Taylor Griffin, a spokesman for the Bush-Cheney campaign, said the president is "fully engaged in the fight against AIDS."
"The president has proposed a five-year, $15 billon initiative that triples funding to fight AIDS in the hardest-hit areas of the world," Griffin said. "Domestically he has increased funding by 27 percent in AIDS research, care and prevention since taking office."
He said the protest is part of the democratic process.
"We understand that," he said. "At the same time, it's important that it doesn't disrupt the work environment."
Several of the protesters carried signs with a picture of Vice President Cheney and a statement he made during the vice presidential debate Oct. 5 In response to a question by moderator Gwen Ifill -- who asked about the AIDS crisis in the United States, where black women ages 25 to 44 are 13 times more likely to die of AIDS than their counterparts -- Cheney said he had "not heard those numbers."
Idell Gillard, 52, said she came from New York to take part in the protest because of the AIDS crisis.
"There are a lot of heterosexual women of color being affected by this. . . . They continue to die, leaving their children behind," Gillard said. "The Bush people have continued to ignore this."
-------
Dozens arrested at Belarus rally
BBC
19 October, 2004
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3758032.stm
The protesters were mainly young people and students Hundreds of opponents of the Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko have held a second night of demonstrations in the capital, Minsk.
Three opposition leaders were said to be among at least 30 people arrested in clashes with police.
One of the opposition leaders is said to be in hospital after being beaten.
The protesters say a referendum held on Sunday which allowed Mr Lukashenko to stand for a third consecutive term as president was fraudulent.
'No to tyranny'
The mostly young demonstrators marched on the presidential residence, waving banners reading "No to tyranny", when the clashes broke out.
United Civic Party leader Anatoly Lebedko was said to have been rushed to hospital suffering from a fractured skull, broken ribs and a blood clot in his liver.
"He was beaten severely, he was bleeding and in bad shape, but emergency medical personnel weren't allowed to treat him," United Civic Party deputy chairman Alexander Dobrovolsky told the AFP news agency.
"The commander of the riot troops ordered he be hit," he added.
Two other opposition leaders, Nikolai Statkevich and Pavel Severinets, were also arrested, the Interfax news agency reported.
An Associated Press photographer, Sergei Grits, was also detained.
More than 1,000 people demonstrated against the results on Monday.
They clashed with police and accused Mr Lukashenko of being a dictator.
Foreign observers in Belarus have criticised Sunday's referendum and parliamentary elections.
The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe said the referendum fell significantly short of democratic norms.
The president has run the ex-Soviet republic since 1994.
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