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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 wi