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NUCLEAR
Committed to Containing Nukes
Plan to Store Anti-Radiation Pills Is Overdue
WXXI picketers knock media
PM Says India Will Not Pass on Nuclear Technology
Restrictions on N-tech equals rewarding those irresponsible
India wants end to nuclear sanctions, pledges to prevent proliferation
Europeans Offer Plan to Ease Dispute on Iran Nuclear Issue
Iranian conservative MPS dismiss EU nuclear deal as unacceptable
North Korea Sets 3 Conditions for Returning to Nuclear Talks
Powell Rejects 'Reward' for North Korea
N.Korea Vows to Boost Deterrent, U.S. Rejects Demand
Powell's Asia trip election hype: N. Korea
Powell rejects North Korean "conditions" for new round of talks
Brazil Could Make 6 Bombs a Year, Report Says
So Much for Non-Proliferation
U.S. May Not Push for Ouster of IAEA Chief
US Navy commissions first in new class of attack submarines
Licensing board wraps up VY hearing
Air Force clears March land that once held nuclear weapons
MILITARY
How 'Ugly Americans' Forced Muslims Into a Wrong War
New Somali President Asks for 20, 000 AU Peacekeepers
Navy Commissions Fast - Attack Submarine
Over 18,000 armaments handed over in Baghdad's Sadr City
Hostage Begs the British to Remove Troops in Iraq
Memos Warned of Billing Fraud by Firm in Iraq
Agent Orange: An Ongoing Atrocity
Officials Fear Iraq's Lure for Muslims in Europe
EU troops prepare for Bosnia swap
Suicide Bombers Kill 20 Iraqi Security Personnel
U.S. Makes Inroads Vs. Iraq Insurgents
Army Reserve unit to train Iraqis
Iraqis tried by al Sadr for aiding U.S. remain missing
Iraqi PM says no deals over Care hostage
Why it's different in Basra
PM to dismiss ministers, deputies who vote against pullout
NATO sends troops to guard key election
Further abuse at Abu Ghraib detailed
Russia Steps Up Antiterror Drive as Chechen War Spreads
CIA withdraws Iraq WMD claim
U.N. Refuses to Assist Iraqis With War Crimes Trials
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
WTC Rescue Hero Sues Bush and Others under RICO Statute
Foreign flight students checked
TSA Tightens Rules For Flight Training
Gen. Myers bucks Bush over intelligence chief
No Direct Evidence of Plot To Attack Around Elections
Intelligence Bill Unlikely to Be Ready by Nov. 2, Negotiators Say
FBI Probes Leads on Election Terror Plot
Kerry Vows Zealous U.S. Terror Hunt, Recalls Vietnam
POLITICS
The envoy silenced after telling undiplomatic truths
President Signs Corporate Tax Legislation
Satellite TV station airs hatred of U.S. globally
Bin Laden's Illusions - and Ours
Bush stresses war on terror
Film suggests U.S. has plan to rule the world
Bush's Choices May Be 'Tough,' but My Choice Is Not
Shortage of Poll Workers Is Cited
OTHER
Russian Vote Will Put Kyoto Pact Into Effect
Russia's Lower House Approves Kyoto Treaty on Emissions
ACTIVISTS
Russians Protest Against War in Chechnya
Quaker Peace activist, 89, begins jail sentence
Russians Protest Against War in Chechnya
-------- NUCLEAR
Committed to Containing Nukes
The Washington Post
By Richard G. Lugar
October 23, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55755-2004Oct22.html
In a remarkable moment in the first presidential debate, both candidates agreed that the No. 1 national security threat facing the United States was the prospect that weapons of mass destruction would fall into the hands of terrorists.
Although the public consensus confirming the importance of this issue is new, it is not a new concern. Our government has been working on solutions to the problems of weapons proliferation and terrorist acquisition of loose nukes for more than a decade. In 1991 Congress passed the Nunn-Lugar Act, which has devoted U.S. money and expertise to helping the nations of the former Soviet Union safeguard and dismantle their enormous stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, delivery systems and related materials. This program has deactivated more than 6,300 nuclear warheads as well as thousands of missiles and hundreds of bombers and submarines. It has employed weapons scientists in peaceful pursuits and provided security enhancements at nuclear, biological and chemical sites.
Today, even after more than 12 years of success, creativity and vigilance are required to ensure that the Nunn-Lugar program is not encumbered by bureaucratic obstacles or political disagreements. But as one of the authors of the program and a frequent traveler to Russia and the newly independent states on missions to accelerate the dismantling, I am gratified that both candidates have strongly endorsed the Nunn-Lugar program and associated nonproliferation initiatives.
Despite this apparent consensus, however, the Kerry campaign has accused the Bush administration of giving Nunn-Lugar and other nonproliferation issues low priority. This charge is not true. The Bush administration's record on securing weapons of mass destruction has been one of innovation and activism. Its record on securing dangerous weapons and materials is a rare case in U.S. politics where the performance of a candidate far exceeds his rhetoric on the issue. The president's campaign has reason to tout his multilateral accomplishments in this area. The Bush campaign has successfully communicated its core national security message: that the president is best equipped to carry out a comprehensive war on terrorism. It must now emphasize its substantial diplomatic achievements in the field of nonproliferation.
Chief among these successes is the rarely mentioned Group of Eight Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction. Under this agreement, negotiated by the Bush administration, the United States will spend $10 billion over the next 10 years to safeguard and dismantle weapons of mass destruction and related materials in the former Soviet Union. The other members of the G-8 agreed collectively to spend another $10 billion over the same period. Our commitment of funds is primarily money that we had planned to spend anyway through the Nunn-Lugar program and associated efforts. With this agreement, the president doubled the funds committed to securing these weapons in Russia with minimal additional obligation to American taxpayers.
The Bush administration also successfully recruited more than 60 countries to participate in the Proliferation Security Initiative, a program that has enhanced our ability to interdict shipments related to weapons of mass destruction around the world. Through the Energy Department, it established the Global Threat Reduction Initiative, which aims to reduce and secure high-risk nuclear and radiological materials globally. It has facilitated the acceleration of Nunn-Lugar work at the critical chemical weapons destruction facility at Shchuchye in Russia through personal intervention by the president and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. It finalized the deal with Libya that laid open that country's weapons programs. It advocated passage of the IAEA Additional Protocol, which greatly expands the International Atomic Energy Agency's ability to detect clandestine nuclear activities. It secured passage in April of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1540, which for the first time required states to criminalize proliferation. It also has provided constant encouragement to the promising talks between India and Pakistan that represent an important opportunity to reduce tensions on the subcontinent. The president supported, through personal communications with congressional leaders, and signed into law the Nunn-Lugar Expansion Act, which establishes new authority to use the program's funds and expertise outside the former Soviet Union. On Thursday President Bush authorized the first use of the Nunn-Lugar program outside the former Soviet Union when he directed U.S. agencies to help safeguard and destroy a chemical weapons stockpile in Albania after the Albanian government appealed to us for aid in dealing with this previously unrevealed hazard.
Sen. John Kerry has correctly sensed the mood of the public on weapons of mass destruction, but President Bush has repeatedly demonstrated his personal commitment to Nunn-Lugar and has been out in the world achieving nonproliferation goals. The administration has established relationships and expertise that are critical to the paramount objective of preventing weapons of mass destruction from falling into terrorist hands. The Bush administration will not have to start from scratch in 2005.
The writer is a Republican senator from Indiana and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
-------- accidents and safety
Plan to Store Anti-Radiation Pills Is Overdue
October 23, 2004
By MATTHEW L. WALD
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/23/politics/23nuke.html
WASHINGTON, Oct. 22 - Amid fears of a terrorist attack's causing a leak from a nuclear power plant, a plan to stockpile pills to protect against one of the contaminants that spreads farthest appears to have slipped through the cracks.
The Bioterrorism Act of 2002 required a study by scientists of how to store and distribute the pills, of potassium iodide, a drug that protects against radioactive iodine.
Health officials say that in the event of a big release of radiation, the pills could prevent the thyroid cancer epidemic that struck Eastern Europe after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. The idea that terrorists want to attack a power plant was bolstered this year by President Bush in his State of the Union address, in which he said American forces had found plans for American power plants in Afghanistan.
The study, by an arm of the National Academy of Sciences and originally due to be completed in October 2002, was not finished until late last year. Mr. Bush had six months to issue guidance to state and local governments on stockpiling potassium iodide pills, but he has not done so.
The writer of the potassium iodide provision in the 2002 law, Representative Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who is frequently critical of national security, said he had written the president to ask about the guidance and had received no answer.
"President Bush has not made America safer against a nuclear attack on our soil," Mr. Markey said this week in a statement. "He won't even implement the laws that Congress has passed to help ensure our communities are better protected against a terrorist nuclear power plant attack. This makes America unsafe."
An administration official said on Friday that the Health and Human Services Department had prepared guidelines that were "in the process of final clearance and will be shared with state and local stakeholders for comment in the near future."
The scientific study said potassium iodide "should be available to everyone at risk of significant health consequences from accumulation of radioiodine in the thyroid in the event of a radiological incident." Infants, children and pregnant and lactating women are high priorities, it said.
The question on storing and shipping the drug is complicated, because it has to be given within hours of exposure to radiation or it is ineffective. Reactors produce radioactive iodine when uranium is split, and if released to the environment, it is absorbed by the body through eating contaminated food or simply through inhalation, and it is concentrated in the thyroid, like ordinary iodine. Potassium iodide protects the thyroid by saturating it, blocking the absorption of the radioactive variety.
Potassium iodide is cheap, about 20 cents for a 24-hour dose, and if kept away from light and moisture, it will last for years in storage. But the number of people who might someday need the drug is in the tens of millions or higher; the law specifies that it should be available to people within 20 miles of nuclear plants.
The government has a contract with a single supplier, Anbex, of New York City. The company's president, Alan Morris, said he had sold 11.5 million potassium iodide pills to the federal government, including 1.2 million in New York State. In case of terrorism or mechanical emergency at a single nuclear plant somewhere in the United States, some pills could be shipped from the vicinity of other plants, Mr. Morris said, but in many cases the pills had already been distributed to households.
"What are you going to do, have thousands of people mail in their tablets?" Mr. Morris asked.
He said the pills should be stocked in post offices, because from there they could be easily distributed door to door or shipped to other post offices.
Mr. Morris said each individual might need 10 or 15 days' worth of the drug. The National Academy study said one day's dose would be adequate, because people would be removed from the area of the plant and because substances like milk, which would carry heavy concentrations as a result of cows' eating contaminated grass, could be quarantined.
"It's hard to understand their motivation for not taking this relatively easy, relatively inexpensive, highly effective approach," Mr. Morris said of the government. "It was the most important thing the Soviets did after Chernobyl."
The scientific report ordered by Congress said radioiodine could be a problem in a release from a power plant. It would also be created by a nuclear weapon explosion, but that would not be a top problem in such an event, it said. Experts also say radioiodine would probably not be an ingredient in a "dirty bomb," a package of radioactive material dispersed with a conventional explosive, because such material has a very short half life, losing half its strength every eight days.
-------- depleted uranium
WXXI picketers knock media
October 23, 2004
Rochester Democrat and Chronicle
http://www.democratandchronicle.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041023/NEWS01/410230334/1002/NEWS
- A handful of people protested outside WXXI Public Broadcasting on Friday, saying its stations and other media outlets have failed to properly cover the military's use of depleted uranium weapons.
Some veterans and other critics say shells made with depleted uranium, used in Iraq and Afghanistan, pose a grave health risk to troops and civilians.
The Defense Department, in a number of studies, says soldiers have not been put at risk by the munitions, which can leave radioactive residue when they explode.
Jim Barlow of Hilton, who organized the protest, which drew three other supporters, said the commercial media has given the issue short shrift.
He chose to picket WXXI's State Street office because he believes publicly funded WXXI has a greater responsibility to report on issues of public interest.
"This is the first place we look to for the full story," he said.
-------- india / pakistan
PM Says India Will Not Pass on Nuclear Technology
October 23, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-india-nuclear.html
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said on Saturday his nuclear-armed nation would not pass on sensitive technologies, weeks after the United States imposed sanctions on two Indian nuclear scientists.
``India will not be the source of proliferation of sensitive technologies,'' Singh was quoted on state television as saying in Kalpakkam in southern Tamil Nadu state, which houses a nuclear power station and a research facility.
``We will also ensure the safeguarding of those technologies that we already possess,'' Singh said at a function to celebrate the golden jubilee of India's Department of Atomic Energy.
Neither India nor neighboring Pakistan are signatories to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), despite Western prodding to sign.
Concerns over their nuclear capabilities have been heightened by tensions between the countries, which came close to war twice between 1999 and 2002.
The United States imposed sanctions on two former chiefs of India's state-run Nuclear Power Cooperation (NPC) in late September, accusing them of passing nuclear technology to Iran, accused by Washington of trying to develop nuclear weapons.
New Delhi considers Iran an important Middle East ally.
New Delhi has protested against the sanctions, and Washington said earlier this week it would consider lifting them if India showed ``significant and convincing'' proof the scientists were innocent.
The Indian Foreign Ministry said on Saturday the curbs were based on ``faulty evidence and must be revoked.''
U.S. officials have said Washington was considering imposing curbs on one to three additional Indian ``entities'' for aiding Iran's weapons program. Tehran denies it is making atomic weapons, saying its nuclear program is peaceful.
New Delhi is also unhappy that Washington has not cracked down on nuclear rival Pakistan, which has attracted international flak for failing to prevent proliferation from its leaky nuclear establishment.
``Constraining those who are responsible amounts, in fact, to rewarding those who are irresponsible,'' Singh said. Ties between the United States and India have improved, with the world's largest democracy attracting U.S. attention for its booming technology and large commercial market.
Last month, the United States removed decades-old restrictions on equipment for India's commercial space program and nuclear power plants.
But U.S. concerns about India's nuclear record and ties to Tehran continue to create diplomatic sparks.
``Technology denial and closing avenues for international cooperation in some more important fields is tantamount to denial of development benefits to millions of people,'' Singh said to the gathering of nuclear scientists.
--------
Restrictions on N-tech equals rewarding those irresponsible: Manmohan
Navhind Times
October 23, 2004
http://www.navhindtimes.com/stories.php?part=news&Story_ID=10243
PTI Kalpakkam (TN) Oct 23: Opposing "artificial restrictions" on genuine peaceful use of nuclear technology, the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh today said this amounted to rewarding those who were "irresponsible" and constraining those responsible.
He suggested a constructive dialogue between advanced nuclear powers and other countries to evolve more effective measures to stem the tide of proliferation without unduly constraining the peaceful uses of nuclear energy.
Asserting that India would not be a source of proliferation of sensitive technologies, Dr Singh said the limitation of the present non-proliferation regime should not be further accentuated by artificial restrictions on genuine peaceful nuclear applications.
"Constraining those who are responsible, amounts, in effect, to rewarding those who are irresponsible," he said while pouring the first concrete for a fast breeder programme at the Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research Centre here.
"We in India are willing to shoulder our share of international obligations, provided our legitimate interests are met. India has actively embraced globalisation. There is no reason why nuclear energy production should be an exception," he said.
"Technology denial and closing avenues for international co-operation in such an important field is tantamount to the denial of developmental benefits to millions of people, whose lives can be transformed by the utilisation of nuclear energy and relevant techonologies," he said.
"India is a responsible nuclear power. We are fully conscious of the immense responsibilities that come with the possession of advanced technologies, both civilian and strategic. While we are determined to utilise our indigenous resources and capabilities to fulfill our national interests, we are doing so in a manner that is not contrary to the larger goal of nuclear non-proliferation," Dr Singh said.
"We will also ensure the safeguarding of those technologies that we already possess. We will remain faithful to this approach, as we have been for the last several decades. We have done so despite the well-known and glaring examples of proliferation, which have directly affected our security needs," he said.
Maintaining that nuclear energy was cost effective, he said it was a cleaner alternative to fossil fuels. "We are determined to utilise its full potential for the national good. It can also be a much needed cushion against fluctuations in oil prices," he said.
The Prime Minister said energy security was an issue of vital importance, particularly in the context of accelerating the pace of economic growth. "If we succeed in instituting an optimal mix of energy resources, in which nuclear energy is an important component, we will be able to ensure our energy security."
India's low per capita energy consumption could not for long go hand in hand with the quest for an accelerated pace of economic growth, he said.
Nuclear power accounted for only two per cent of overall installed capacity of power generation in India today, he said.
"We have embarked on a major programme to generate 20,000 MW of nuclear power by 2020. By 2008, we hope to add 4,000 MW including the two 1,000 MW nuclear reactors coming up at Koodamkulam in collaboration with the Russian federation."
The Prime Minister said it was a matter of national pride that India had developed comprehensive capabilities in the entire gamut of fuel cycle operations. India was also among the select group of nations which had the ability to recover plutonium from irradiated nuclear fuel and use it to produce power in thermal, as well as in fast reactors. This path would ensure for the country a large quantum of nuclear power on a sustainable basis, he said.
The Prime Minister said the country was uniquely placed to utilise techonologies for launching the third stage of its nuclear power programme, based on utilisation of thorium.
--------
India wants end to nuclear sanctions, pledges to prevent proliferation
Oct 23, 2004
KALPAKKAM, India (AFP)
MMIV ad pepper media International N.V.
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041023133017.r6n0tcye.html
India on Saturday urged the West to remove blocks on the transfer of critical nuclear technology, offering an assurance that New Delhi had effective tools to prevent proliferation.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh also said India, which declared itself a nuclear state with a string of weapons tests in 1998, was determined to carry on with its atomic energy programmes to augment the country's ailing conventional power sector.
"India will not be the source of proliferation of sensitive technologies. We will ensure that those technologies, which we already possess, will be effectively safeguarded," he said at a nuclear facility in this southern Indian city.
"While we are determined to use our indigenous capability to fulfill our national interest, we are doing so in a manner that is not contrary to the larger goal of nuclear non-proliferation," Singh said.
Singh criticised the tray of US-led sanctions which were slapped on rivals India and Pakistan after their tit-for-tat nuclear tests, saying such restrictions harmed development.
"Technology denial and closing avenues for international cooperation in such an important field is tantamount to denial of developmental benefits to millions of people, whose lives can be transformed by the utilisation of nuclear energy and relevant technologies," he said.
Singh did not name rival Pakistan but made reference to recent disclosures of proliferation from the neighbouring country.
"India remains faithful to the 'atom-for-peace' policy despite the well-known and glaring examples of proliferation which have directly affected our security interests.
"(And) constraining those who are responsible and rewarding those who are irresponsible -- the international community should face up to the implications of the choice," he said in Kalpakkam, the hub of the country's civilian nuclear programme.
India, which refuses to endorse either the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty or Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, hopes to generate 20,000 megawatts of electricity from its atomic power plants by 2020.
-------- iran
Europeans Offer Plan to Ease Dispute on Iran Nuclear Issue
October 23, 2004
By CRAIG S. SMITH
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/23/international/europe/23iran.html?pagewanted=all
PARIS, Oct. 22 - Britain, France and Germany are working to give Iran a last chance to avoid confrontation with the West over its nuclear program by offering incentives to curtail its most disputed activities.
But Iran's government, which the United States believes is using its nuclear program as a cover to develop nuclear weapons, has given no indication that it would accept the plan.
"The two sides are now engaged in a dialogue with a view to identifying an agreed way forward through diplomatic means," a French Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said Friday.
Representatives of the three European nations and the European Union pressed their case with Iran's representatives in Vienna on Thursday. The spokeswoman said the Europeans and Iranians had agreed to meet again soon, probably next week.
Last month, the board of governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency urged Iran to suspend all activities related to the enrichment of uranium, a process for making nuclear reactor fuel that can be adapted for making weapons, or face unspecified action at the agency's next board meeting on Nov. 25.
At that meeting, the United States will push the board to refer Iran's past breaches of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to the United Nations Security Council, which could decide to impose sanctions.
So far, European board members, led by the three nations that met with Iran on Thursday, have favored dialogue and negotiation, fearing that a confrontation with Iran could lead to its withdrawal from the nonproliferation treaty and end its cooperation with the nuclear agency.
Many people say they believe that Tehran will wait at least until after the American presidential election before giving the Europeans a concrete response, believing that a change in administrations in Washington will buy it more time.
"My understanding from talking to Iranian officials is that anything that requires indefinite suspension is unacceptable," said Gary Samore, a nonproliferation expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. He doubts that the Iranians will do more than offer to broaden the temporary suspension of their activities, arguing that they feel they are in a strong position, with the United States bogged down in Iraq, oil prices high and the Iranian government's domestic political position stronger than it was before.
"In particular, they think the Russians and Chinese will protect them because of those countries' dependence on Iranian oil and gas," Mr. Samore said. He added that even if the United States succeeded in referring Iran's case to the Security Council, the Iranians seemed confident that the Council would not be able to agree on any serious sanctions.
While details of the European offer have not been disclosed, diplomats in Vienna say it includes resumption of trade talks and support for Iran's acquisition of a light-water research reactor. It also includes a guarantee that Iran will receive a supply of low-enriched uranium to fuel the power-generating reactors it is building.
It is this last point that has led to a diplomatic standoff between Iran and the West.
Iran, which is pursuing a 30-year-old plan to develop nuclear power, insists that it cannot rely on Western fuel guarantees, pointing to the embargo that followed the 1979 Islamic revolution. It says the embargo forced it to breach its obligations under the nonproliferation treaty by secretly enriching small amounts of uranium on its own in an effort to develop nuclear self-sufficiency.
Iran suspended uranium enrichment a year ago after Britain, France and Germany offered it a deal similar to the current one. But it has continued with some enrichment-related activities, like preparing the uranium feedstock for enrichment, and resumed others, like the assembly of high-speed centrifuges used to enrich uranium.
The Atomic Energy Agency has urged Iran to stop all of those activities, and the European proposal seeks to win Iran's compliance to avoid a showdown at the agency's November meeting.
--------
Iranian conservative MPS dismiss EU nuclear deal as unacceptable
TEHRAN (AFP)
Oct 23, 2004
MMIV ad pepper media International N.V.
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041023125640.92uoasfi.html
Conservative MPs in Iran on Saturday denounced Europe's call for Iran to halt all uranium enrichment activities if it wants to avoid the threat of UN sanctions over its nuclear activities.
"The European proposal is an excessive demand that is contrary to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and unacceptable," Alaeddin Brujerdi, the influential head of parliament's national security and foreign policy committee, told the conservative newspaper Ressalat.
Britain, France and Germany presented Iran with a deal Thursday aimed at avoiding possible sanctions under which Tehran would receive valuable nuclear technology if it indefinitely suspended all uranium enrichment activities, according to a document prepared by the Europeans.
But Brujerdi also raised the possibility that the conservative-controlled parliament could pass a bill forcing Iran to halt its suspension of uranium enrichment in defiance of the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency.
"The European offer is a denial of the Iranian nation's legal rights bestowed under the NPT," Brujerdi said. "The Islamic republic of Iran will not accept a (Western) monopoly on nuclear technology and will pursue its activities with determination."
Thursday's meeting was to give Iran a last chance to disclose its complete nuclear programme before the IAEA decides on November 25 whether Iran is cooperating with it on Tehran's nuclear activities.
The United States wants the IAEA, which since February 2003 has been investigating US claims that Iran has a covert nuclear weapons programme, to refer Tehran to the UN Security Council, which could impose sanctions.
Tehran has long insisted it is seeking only to generate electricity and on its right to uranium enrichment, which makes fuel for civilian reactors but can also manufacture the explosive material for atomic bombs.
Under the European deal, Iran would receive technology including a light-water reactor which would produce less fissionable material than the heavy-water reactor Tehran is planning to build with Russian help in Bushehr.
"The enrichment of uranium is a question of national dignity and no-one can force the leaders of the country to renounce it, said Hamid Reza Hadji-Babaie, an MP and member of the speaker's office.
"The negotiations were positive but the Europeans must take account of our red lines, that is Iran's refusal to renounce the nuclear fuel cycle."
The official state news agency IRNA quoted an anonymous diplomat in Vienna saying that the next round of talks between Iran and the European Three would start Wednesday.
A report published this week by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a military and defence think tank, said that assuming Iran lifts the suspension on its enrichment programme, "it is still probably a few years away from full scale production of enough enriched uranium for a small nuclear arsenal."
On October 5, the parliamentary committee headed by Brujerdi approved a bill that would force the reformist government of President Mohammad Khatami to resume uranium enrichment in defiance of the IAEA.
If eventually passed in the Majlis (parliament) and approved by legislative watchdogs, it would almost certainly prompt the IAEA to refer Iran's case to the Security Council.
"The plan to oblige the government to resume enrichment has the support of 238 deputies" out of a total 290, Brujerdi said Saturday.
Iran's former representative to the IAEA, Ali-Akbar Salehi, said the European proposals contained both positive and negative points, and urged the country's leaders to examine them without hesitatin.
"I believe the two sides do not want to reach a deadlock. So the Europeans must move some way towards our position," Salehi told AFP.
But another conservative MP dismissed the European offer.
"A light-water reactor is useable only for medical and agricultural needs but a heavy-water reactor can also produce plutonium for use in nuclear power plants," another MP Heshmatollah Falahat-Pisheh said, quoted by the conservative Kayhan newspaper.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Saturday that Washington had seen no sign that Iran would comply with international demands on its nuclear program and would push next month for the matter to be sent to the UN Security Council unless Tehran reversed its course.
-------- korea
North Korea Sets 3 Conditions for Returning to Nuclear Talks
October 23, 2004
By JAMES BROOKE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/23/international/asia/23korea.html
TOKYO, Oct. 22 - With Secretary of State Colin L. Powell arriving here on Saturday for a four-day tour of Japan, China and South Korea, North Korea on Friday set out three conditions to be met before it would return to the regional talks on its nuclear weapons program.
The United States must drop its hostile policy, join an economic aid program for the North and agree to discuss "South Korea's nuclear problem," a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman told the official KCNA news agency.
After three inconclusive rounds of talks, North Korea boycotted the latest one, in September, citing among other reasons news of several nuclear weapons technology experiments conducted in South Korea. Those experiments are being investigated by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations group that North Korea expelled in January 2003, inciting the current international standoff. Since then, North Korea is believed to have processed enough nuclear material to increase its nuclear bomb arsenal to eight from the two it was once thought to have.
Although North Korean diplomats have made it clear to visitors that they are waiting for the outcome of the American presidential election on Nov. 2 to decide their strategy, the Bush administration is keeping pressure on North Korea.
On Monday, President Bush signed into law the North Korean Human Rights Act, which bans any American economic aid to North Korea unless North Korea can prove it has made progress on human rights.
Under the new law, Washington can spend at least $20 million a year until 2008 for aid to North Korean citizens and refugees, and the president can provide grants to private groups to support programs promoting human rights, democracy and the development of a market economy in North Korea. It also paves the way for North Koreans to seek refugee status in the United States and provides $4 million for expanding Korean-language radio broadcasts into the North to promote democracy and human rights.
On Friday, an official in South Korea's Unification Ministry accused the North of selling international food aid on its domestic market, Reuters reported. The official made the claim at a meeting of the World Food Program. Officials with the program, however, denied that aid it had provided was being sold. The South Korean government has said before that it plans to extend its monitoring of food distribution to the North.
North Korea's state news media also criticized Friday a Washington-led naval drill scheduled to take place on Tuesday in Tokyo Bay. Under the Proliferation Security Initiative, 10 naval and coast guard vessels from the United States, France, Australia and Japan will simulate a drill where Tokyo customs officials X-ray a shipping container and find a "chemical weapon." Designed to curb the trade in materials for unconventional weapons, the initiative has won the formal adherence of 10 other nations and has conducted 10 such drills over the past year.
But in a move that has not escaped the notice of North Korea, this will be the first drill in Northeast Asia and will feature John R. Bolton, under secretary of state for nonproliferation affairs, who has been outspoken in criticizing North Korea, riding in a Japanese Coast Guard patrol boat.
While Mr. Bolton is here, Mr. Powell will be in Beijing and Seoul, seeking to stiffen the resolve of North Korea's neighbors to put more diplomatic pressure on the North to find a formula for its nuclear disarmament.
Complementing the high-level American diplomatic pressure on North Korea, Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage was here last week, meeting with Japan's new foreign minister, Nobutaka Machimura. At a news conference after the meeting, he warned North Korea about further delays on serious talks. "The U.S. Congress is entirely behind the efforts of President Bush," he said, "so if the North Koreans feel they need to wait, then they'll wait. But it's a miscalculation."
--------
Powell Rejects 'Reward' for North Korea
October 23, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Powell-Asia.html
TOKYO (AP) -- Secretary of State Colin Powell on Saturday rejected demands by North Korea of a U.S. ``reward'' before the communist country would agree to resume multinational talks about its nuclear weapons programs.
Powell said any proposals from North Korea should be discussed as part of the negotiating process established more than a year ago that involves both Koreas, the United States, China, Japan and Russia.
``This is a six-party discussion, not a U.S.-North Korea discussion or an exchange of U.S. and North Korean talking points,'' Powell told reporters during his flight to Tokyo, the first stop on a three-nation trip to East Asia.
He planned Sunday meetings with Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura before heading to China and South Korea.
In a statement apparently timed for Powell's visit, a spokesman for North Korea's Foreign Ministry spokesman indicated the North would agree to a new round of nuclear discussions only if the United States dropped its ``hostile policy'' and consented to a ``reward'' for a nuclear freeze the North is proposing.
The spokesman, who was quoted by the official KCNA news agency but was not identified, said North Korea is insisting on discussing recent disclosures by South Korea that its scientists had carried out nuclear experiments involving plutonium and uranium years ago. The Bush administration has dismissed the South's experiments as insignificant and said they were of an academic nature.
The United States, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia have held three rounds of nuclear talks with North Korea. A new round was scheduled for September in Beijing, but North Korea declined to attend.
North Korea says it has several plutonium-based nuclear weapons and denies U.S. allegations it has a secret uranium-based nuclear weapons program. The United States has said it would provide economic benefits to North Korea once the North provides a credible commitment to permanent and verifiable disarmament.
Powell's trip could be his last to the region in his current post. The North Korea question is expected to dominate Powell's discussions at each stop.
His decision to travel to Asia shortly before the Nov. 2 presidential election in the United State could be intended as an attempt to show resolve on one of the administration's most difficult foreign policy issues.
Democratic nominee John Kerry contends the administration has mishandled the North Korea problem and should have embraced the Clinton-era policy of direct talks with the country.
Bush administration officials believe North Korea is biding its time on nuclear negotiations, sensing that Kerry might win the election and be easier to deal with than Bush, who has linked North Korea with Iran and Iraq in an ``axis of evil.''
On Saturday, Powell dismissed North Korean concerns about hostile U.S. intent. ``We have no intention of invading them, no plans to attack,'' he said.
But the North Korean news agency said upcoming joint U.S.-Japan naval exercises are a clear indication of U.S. hostility. The exercises are part of an international effort to block attempts at smuggling nuclear technology on the high seas.
The North Korean statement said the maneuvers are an ``undisguised'' attempt to ``blockade and stifle'' the North.
Powell noted that the international anti-smuggling effort is endorsed by the U.N. Security Council.
``There's nothing wrong with naval forces coming together to exercise for the purpose of seeing if we can do a better job of keeping the most dangerous cargos from reaching the most irresponsible purchasers of such cargo,'' Powell said. ``It does not threaten North Korea. ... It protects the rest of the world.''
--------
N.Korea Vows to Boost Deterrent, U.S. Rejects Demand
October 23, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-korea-north.html
SEOUL/TOKYO (Reuters) - North Korea threatened on Saturday to double the size of its nuclear deterrent and the United States rejected its conditions for a resumption of talks, leaving the two nations in a dangerous stalemate.
A day after North Korea set three conditions for returning to six-party talks on its nuclear programs, it warned Washington to drop its ``hostile policy'' aimed at unseating the communist leadership or face a more potent atomic arsenal.
``If the United States persistently pursues its confrontational hostile policy toward the DPRK (the Democratic People's Republic of Korea) from the viewpoint of escapism, it will only compel the DPRK to double its deterrent force,'' the main newspaper in North Korea said in a commentary published by the official KCNA news agency.
North Korea has never said how many nuclear weapons it has and usually refers ambiguously to its ``deterrent force.'' U.S. officials say the North could have between two and eight weapons.
On Friday, North Korea said it would consider returning to the talks if Washington drops its hostile policy, is prepared to join a compensation package in return for the North freezing its programs and allows discussion on South Korea's nuclear experiments.
Secretary of State Colin Powell, who is in the region seeking to revive negotiations, said the demands could be addressed in the six-party talks, which also include China, Japan, South Korea and Russia.
But he ruled out considering improving a U.S. proposal until North Korea, which has refused to return to the talks since June, shows what it will give in exchange at the negotiating table.
``Any outstanding issues that are holding up the progress should be dealt with in the context of thediscussions, not by press statements or rhetoric going back and forth,'' Powell told reporters on his plane en route to Tokyo.
The United States has offered compensatory aid -- from South Korea and Japan rather than Washington -- in return for a freeze as a first step to Pyongyang dismantling its atomic projects.
The United States has been leading slow-moving negotiations since the latest nuclear crisis erupted two years ago when its diplomats said North Korea admitted it was running a covert uranium enrichment program. Pyongyang has since denied this.
ELECTION UNCERTAINTY
On his first trip to the region for 18 months, Powell will also visit China and South Korea and seek to convince his negotiation partners the Bush administration will remain committed to the talks.
But some senior U.S. officials have misgivings about the talks and would prefer to confront and isolate North Korea and presidential Democratic candidate Sen. John Kerry has criticized the administration's mixed signals.
Pyongyang has suggested Powell's trip is merely to keep up the appearance during President Bush's reelection campaign that he is committed to the six-party talks.
Washington suspects Pyongyang is stalling to wait for the outcome of the Nov. 2 election because Kerry favors bilateral talks, which North Korea hopes would lead to more concessions.
The North Korean commentary on Saturday said the root cause of the hostile U.S. policy was that Washington wanted to retain military influence in the region.
The United States holds an international naval exercise in the region next week aimed at stifling any North Korean proliferation.
In a separate report on Saturday, KCNA listed what it said was South Korea's secret nuclear weapons developments over decades. Seoul denies having such a program.
Pyongyang said South Korea was seeking to build a nuclear submarine as part of what it calls Seoul's nuclear-arms scheme and urged it to drop the plan immediately, South Korea's Yonhap News reported on Saturday.
South Korea has denied the submarine plan, which was first raised early this year.
--------
Powell's Asia trip election hype: N. Korea
Canadian Press
October 23, 2004
http://www.canada.com/national/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=48e79cec-a0ef-4895-a897-5e217800d0f8&page=2
SEOUL, South Korea -- North Korea dismissed U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell's Asian trip as pre-U.S. election trickery Saturday and warned it will double its nuclear deterrent force if Washington persists in challenging the North's weapons programs.
Powell, en route to Japan, rejected Pyongyang's demands the United States "reward" the communist country before it will agree to return to six-party discussions on its nuclear programs.
North Korea, which insists it needs a nuclear deterrent against a U.S. invasion, said Saturday talks can only recommence when Washington drops its hostile policy toward it and promises a "reward for freeze" on its nuclear activities.
"If the U.S. persistently pursues its confrontational hostile policy toward the DPRK from the viewpoint of escapism, it will only compel the DPRK to double its deterrent force, much less any solution to the nuclear issue," Pyongyang's Rodong newspaper said, using the acronym for Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the North's official name.
On his weekend trip, Powell intends to consult with Japan, China and South Korea on how to assure the North that Washington is not interested in attacking the country and how to revive the stalled multilateral talks.
The six-party negotiations include the two Koreas, the United States, Russia, China and Japan. Three rounds of talks, held in Beijing, have yielded little progress. A fourth round was set for September but North Korea refused to attend.
The nuclear negotiations started after U.S. officials said North Korea admitted to running a secret atomic program in violation of international agreements. That prompted President George W. Bush to say North Korea was part of an "axis of evil" with Iran and pre-war Iraq.
Some U.S. intelligence analysts said North Korea may have up to six nuclear weapons, instead of the one or two the Central Intelligence Agency estimates.
North Korea said it has several plutonium-based nuclear weapons and denies U.S. allegations it has a secret uranium-based nuclear weapons program.
On Saturday, Pyongyang sneered at Powell's trip, with a spokesman from the North's Foreign Ministry describing Washington's diplomatic effort as a "sleight of hand in the run-up to the (U.S.) presidential elections."
The North also demands the six-country talks address its allegations South Korea may have been developing nuclear weapons. Seoul denies the accusations, although it recently admitted its scientists had conducted secret nuclear experiments in the past.
"The resumption of the six-party talks depends on whether the U.S. is ready to fully consider the demands raised by the DPRK," the Foreign Ministry spokesman said.
Washington has said it would provide economic benefits to the North once Pyongyang has demonstrated a credible commitment to permanent and verifiable disarmament.
The visit could well be Powell's last to East Asia, falling as it does within two weeks of the U.S. presidential election. The timing of his trip could be intended as an attempt to show resolve on one of the U.S. government's most difficult foreign policy issues.
Democratic presidential candidate Senator John Kerry contends the government has mishandled the North Korean problem and should have embraced former president Bill Clinton's policy of direct talks with Pyongyang, rather than the six-country talks.
--------
Powell rejects North Korean "conditions" for new round of talks
TOKYO (AFP)
Oct 23, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041023101421.ajpubf1l.html
The United States will not accept North Korean demands as "conditions" for the resumption of stalled talks on resolving the Korean nuclear deadlock but Pyongyang is free to raise them if it returns to the table, US Secretary of State Colin Powell said Saturday.
Powell, here on the first leg of a three-nation Asian tour that will also take in China and South Korea, said North Korea would not win rewards for simply agreeing to attend a next round of so-called six party talks.
"Anything they wish to talk about we should talk about in six party framework and not talk about conditions to have another session of the six party group," he told reporters on his plane en route to Tokyo.
"They are free to bring anything forward at those discussions but to put forward these kinds of conditions, which may lead to yet another set of conditions, is not the way to approach this problem," Powell said.
A North Korean foreign ministry spokesman Friday demanded Washington drop its "hostile policy" towards Pyongyang and provide rewards for having frozen its nuclear activities.
The spokesman also demanded South Korea's past nuclear experiments be discussed "before anything else" at the six-nation talks, the key multilateral forum aimed at ending North Korea's nuclear weapons drive. North Korea has taken part in three inconclusive rounds of the six-party talks which also involved the United States, South Korea, Russia, China and Japan.
-------- latinamerica
Brazil Could Make 6 Bombs a Year, Report Says
Reuters
Saturday, October 23, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55605-2004Oct22.html
BRASILIA, Oct. 22 -- Brazil's new Resende nuclear plant has the potential to produce enough enriched uranium for six nuclear bombs every year, U.S. researchers said Friday. Brazil denied the claim.
The commentary by the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, published in Friday's issue of the journal Science, came three days after U.N. experts visited the plant to resolve a dispute over inspections.
"At its announced capacity, Brazil's new facility located at Resende will have the potential to produce enough uranium to make five to six . . . warheads per year," according to the article by Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project, and research associate Liz Palmer.
Brazil has disputed for nearly a year the level of access that U.N. inspectors say they need. The International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations' nuclear watchdog, wants full access to Resende to ensure that no uranium is diverted for weapons, but Brazil will not allow complete access to the plant's centrifuges, saying it fears industrial espionage.
The United Nations and the United States have pressed Brazil to resolve the impasse to avoid setting an example for countries, such as Iran and North Korea, that the United States suspects of developing bombs in defiance of the IAEA.
Brazil says that it plans to use its enriched uranium only for energy and that its constitution bans nuclear weapons research.
Milhollin and Palmer said in the journal article that upgrades planned for Resende would raise its capacity to 26 to 31 warheads a year by 2010 and 53 to 63 by 2014.
The Wisconsin Project is a private, nonprofit research organization in Washington, funded by foundations and the U.S. government. It aims to stop the spread of nuclear weapons and operates under the auspices of the University of Wisconsin.
-------- treaties
So Much for Non-Proliferation
Antiwar.com
by Gordon Prather
October 23, 2004
http://www.antiwar.com/prather/?articleid=3841
John Kerry has essentially accused President Bush of making the use of a nuclear weapon against us more likely by failing to fully support the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Bush, in rebuttal, pointed with pride to his Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), which he has made "central" to his "dealing with weapons of mass destruction and proliferation."
When Bush became president, North Korea, Iraq, and Iran were signatories to the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and had made all their NPT proscribed materials, facilities, and activities subject to periodic "safeguards" inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
However, Bush claimed to have "intelligence" that all three were secretly pursuing nuke development programs.
Worse, Bush charged that the IAEA-NPT nuke proliferation prevention regime was incompetent to prevent or even uncover those illicit nuke development programs.
And, obviously, the NPT and other existing international arms control agreements had not prevented the 9/11 terrorists from acquiring box-cutters.
So, Bush announced his own National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction in late 2002, and developed from it the Proliferation Security Initiative of 2003, whose objective was to create a web of international "counter-proliferation partnerships" to prevent "proliferators" from "carrying out their trade in WMD and missile-related technology."
According to Undersecretary of State John Bolton, the PSI was necessary because "proliferators and those facilitating the procurement of deadly capabilities are circumventing existing laws, treaties, and controls against WMD proliferation." Unlike the IAEA-NPT Safeguards regime, "PSI is not diverted by disputes about candidacies for director general, agency budgets, agendas for meetings, and the like."
Bolton began implementing Bush's PSI almost nine months after Bush had unilaterally abrogated the IAEA-monitored Agreed Framework with North Korea and several months after Bush had defied the UN Security Council by unilaterally invading and occupying Iraq.
Now, whenever Bolton suspects anyone is buying, selling, or facilitating the transfer of "deadly capabilities" to or from countries like Iran or North Korea, he just orders one or more of the sixty cooperating states to "interdict" - on land, sea, or in the air - the suspect purchase, sale, or transfer.
Last year, Taiwanese government officials detained - at our request - the North Korean cargo vessel Be Gaehung, which had made port at Kaoshung, boarded it, and confiscated 158 barrels of phosphorus pentasulfide, which U.S. intelligence "suspected" could be used to make "rocket fuel."
Now PSI "interdiction" may sound a lot like piracy to you, a flagrant violation of all kinds of international law. It sounds that way to a lot of international legal experts, too.
But Bolton claims that Bush's PSI is now justified by the U.S.-sponsored Security Council Resolution 1540 of 2004, which reaffirms UNSC President's Statement (S 23500) of Jan. 31, 1992, which says - among other things -
"The proliferation of all weapons of mass destruction constitutes a threat to international peace and security. The members of the Council commit themselves to working to prevent the spread of technology related to the research for or production of such weapons and to take appropriate action to that end.
"The members of the Council underline the need for all Member States to fulfill their obligations in relation to arms control and disarmament, to prevent the proliferation in all its aspects of all weapons of mass destruction; to avoid excessive and destabilizing accumulations and transfer of arms; and to resolve peacefully in accordance with the Charter any problems concerning these matters threatening or disrupting the maintenance of regional and global stability."
Now, Presidential Statements are the product of informal consultations between the Council's president and its members and do not enjoy the status of resolutions. However, having now been cited in UNSC 1540, the Statement carries considerable weight.
Does Bush's PSI constitute the kind of "working together" to "fulfill" their arms control and disarmament "obligations" that members of the Security Council had in mind back in 1992?
Probably not, since the Presidential Statement went on to say,
"On nuclear proliferation, they [Council Members] note the importance of the decision of many countries to adhere to the Nonproliferation Treaty and emphasize the integral role in the implementation of that Treaty of fully effective IAEA safeguards, as well as the importance of effective export controls. The members of the Council will take appropriate measures in the case of any violations notified to them by the IAEA."
Kerry's right. Bush has failed to support the IAEA-NPT regime in North Korea, Iraq, Iran, and elsewhere. Consequently, your chances of getting nuked in your jammies have gone way up.
-------- u.n.
U.S. May Not Push for Ouster of IAEA Chief
October 23, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-nuclear-iaea-usa.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Despite urging U.N. nuclear chief Mohamed ElBaradei to step down after two terms, the Bush administration may be unwilling to undertake an all-out political battle to oust him, U.S. officials and diplomats say.
ElBaradei, who has worked at the International Atomic Energy Agency for 20 years, officially announced his interest in a third term late last month, rebuffing President Bush's team, which said it hoped he would step down and allow the appointment of a new leader.
A senior U.S. official said: ``We'd rather see an elegant way out for everybody. What we're seeking is a resolution that doesn't force the issue.''
Bush and Democratic candidate Sen. John Kerry have both declared that keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists would be their first priority after the Nov. 2 election, and the IAEA is a key player in efforts to halt the spread of weapons of mass destruction.
IAEA directors-general traditionally have not had term limits. But western countries have discussed the need for limits and the White House affirmed its preference for a two-term cap.
Bush administration hard-liners, led by Undersecretary of State John Bolton, fault ElBaradei and the IAEA for not being tough enough on states seeking to develop weapons of mass destruction, including Iran and North Korea.
In the runup to the Iraq war, Elbaradei stoked U.S. anger by saying IAEA inspectors had found no evidence of a continuing nuclear program in Iraq. Bush and top aides insisted the program existed as they made the case for an invasion, but evidence to support the existence of such a program has not been found.
MUCH DEPENDS ON NOV. 2
ElBaradei would have made it easy for his critics if he had agreed to step aside.
His decision to stand for a third term means Washington could provoke an all-out international political battle if it seeks his ouster when the issue comes to a head next year. The IAEA board normally likes to make decisions by consensus.
The U.S. strategy will turn on who wins the presidential election. Bush charted a bold, largely unilateralist, foreign policy course during much of his first term. Kerry has promised to work more closely with allies.
The Massachusetts Democrat has not evolved positions on such issues as the IAEA director-general appointment, campaign sources say.
But a Democratic insider told Reuters that, while some Kerry advisers may like to see ElBaradei replaced, ``We'd have to look at the political consequences.''
Senior Bush officials said there is no obvious alternative candidate to ElBaradei and there is a reluctance, at least in some quarters, to try and forcibly oust an Egyptian-born diplomat from a top U.N. job.
The Clinton administration engineered the ouster of former U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, also from Egypt, after one term.
Some U.S. officials predict an effort to kick out another prominent Egyptian -- ElBaradei was considered this year for a Nobel Peace Prize -- would fan new anti-American feelings in the most populous Arab country.
Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarak, is a close U.S. ally and an important intermediary in the Middle East peace process.
Asked if the Bush administration would actually vote against ElBaradei, another senior official said he did not know.
If Bolton stayed in his current job or were promoted, he might persuade the administration to fight ElBaradei on a third term and this ``could be ``nasty,'' that senior U.S. official said.
The last IAEA director-general, Hans Blix, was in his job for 16 years, and the administration believes these appointments should not be open-ended, officials said.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
US Navy commissions first in new class of attack submarines
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Oct 23, 2004
MMIV ad pepper media International N.V.
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041023081454.4sji0zz3.html
The US Navy on Saturday commissions the first of a new class of nuclear-powered attack submarines, designed more for intelligence missions close to shore than its Cold War predecessors, navy officials said. The USS Virginia, which is to be inducted into the navy in a ceremony in Norfolk, Virginia, can fire Tomahawk cruise missiles from a distance or it can be configured to slip a 50-member special operations force behind the lines, they said.
The two-billion-dollar submarine is the first of 30 that the navy plans to buy, eventually replacing the current fleet of Los Angeles class attack submarines made famous in movies like the "Hunt for Red October". Three others are under construction by Newport News Shipbuilding and Electric Boat Corp. of Groton, Connecticut.
"In the Cold War you'd ask, 'How fast and how deep can the sub go,' for fighting the blue ocean, deep water threats that we had in the Cold War," said Phil McGuinn, a spokesman for the navy's submarine force.
"Well, Virginia is still built to meet those threats, and so you could ask how deep and how fast, and we would still say greater than 25 knots and greater than 800 feet (244 meters). But the important question now for Virginia is, 'How close to a station can you maintain?'"
Unlike the Los Angeles class submarines, the Virginia has automated navigational controls that enable it to spend more time on clandestine missions in coastal areas without tiring the crew.
"If you're going to go sit off someone's coast and do an intelligence and surveillance mission, or be ready to insert some special forces, you want to be able to manage where your boat is and how it hovers in the water," McGuinn said. "You want to be able to really navigate, and fly your boat where you need to go and count on it getting there."
The Los Angeles class submarines can perform those special intelligence missions, but they require more manpower and a more intense effort by the navigation crew to manually keep the submarine on station, he said.
The new submarine has other features designed for special forces missions.
A full nine-member special forces team can get into or out of the submarine through its lockout chamber at a time, instead of only two as is currently the case.
The submarine can host an Advanced SEAL Delivery System mini-submarine, and in the future will be able to carry unmanned underwater vehicles, McGuinn said.
The old style periscope is gone on the Virginia, replaced by photonics and fiber optic sensors that relay images from the mast to large screen monitors in the submarine's command center.
"The captain can sit there with a joystick and a large panel display and get a heads up view of everything that would have been seen through the periscope," he said.
The new submarine's communications systems have greater bandwidth than the Los Angeles class subs, allowing it to communicate and send back more data at higher speeds.
"Its quietness with its ability to hover and maintain station allows it to be in position to be a basically 'big ears,' the ultimate eavesdropper," picking up a variety of signals, analyzing them and relaying them to other commands, he said.
The Virginia also carries Tomahawk cruise missiles, which it can fire either from vertical launchers on deck or through torpedo tubes. It can also fire MK-48 torpedos, or be configured to carry mines.
The submarine, which will be based in Groton, Connecticut, will spend about a year being worked up by its new crew, he said.
It should be ready for real world missions in 2006 or 2007, he said.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- vermont
Licensing board wraps up VY hearing
Reformer
By CAROLYN LORIé
October 23, 2004
http://www.reformer.com/Stories/0,1413,102~8860~2486862,00.html#
After a day and a half of listening to arguments about why there should or should not be a formal hearing in the Entergy Nuclear Vermont Yankee "uprate" case, the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board Panel will review the information and issue a decision, although no one is sure exactly when.
According to Neil Sheehan, spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the panel will take as long as necessary to decide the matter.
On Friday, the nuclear power watchdog, the New England Coalition, presented arguments on their final contentions. Closing arguments were then made by the coalition and the Vermont Department of Public Service. Both are challenging the safety of the 20 percent power increase proposed by Vermont Yankee officials.
Accusing Entergy lawyers and plant officials of telling "half-truths," department lawyer Anthony Roisman pressed the panel to grant a full formal hearing.
"You cannot do your job, which is to get to the truth, without [a hearing]," said Roisman.
Coalition lawyer Jonathan Block made a similar claim, adding that a hearing would be the only way for citizens to "get at least somewhat equal footing with [Entergy]."
The Department of Public Service originally filed five contentions (see sidebar), but then added a sixth in the last week. Only the first five are being considered in this process, as Entergy and the NRC have not yet had a chance to respond to the most recent challenge.
Seven contentions were submitted by the coalition.
NRC staff, which is separate from the Atomic Safety and Licensing board (see sidebar) and presented arguments at this week's hearing, recommended that only portions of two of the state's contentions should be admitted and only one of the coalition's. The regulator opposed the granting of a hearing.
The are several decisions before the three-member panel.
First it must decide, based on NRC regulations, whether the parties have standing -- that is, whether they have a legitimate reason to be concerned about the uprate.
Then it must rule on whether any of the challenges have legal merit. If the panel allows that even one of the contentions is admissible, then it must choose the appropriate venue.
There are two options for resolving contentions. One is through a written process, in which questions are asked and answered through the submission of documents. The other is a formal hearing, which is run very much like a trial in a court of law.
The coalition and the department are seeking a formal hearing.
Any decision made by the panel can be overturned by the three-member commission that heads the NRC. Decisions made by the panel can also be appealed to the commission.
According to Raymond Shadis, technical advisor to the coalition, if the panel does not grant a hearing the group will appeal the decision to the commission.
The process, however, has already put a tremendous financial burden on the grassroots nonprofit, said the executive director of the coalition, Peter Alexander.
"Right now we're in the black," he said. "If we do not get substantial donations within a few weeks, we'll be back in the red."
While the state has invested a great deal resources into the process as well, the cost of hiring an attorney will be billed back to Entergy.
Though the company has aggressively fought the challenges presented by the state and the coalition, Entergy officials maintain that they do not oppose the right to challenge the uprate but that the contentions submitted were without merit.
Company officials remain optimistic that the uprate will be approved.
"We spent 10 months in preparation on that petition and we are confident that every single aspect of it is consistent with applicable regulations," said Rob Williams, spokesman for Vermont Yankee.
The NRC originally planned to make a decision on the uprate by Jan. 31, 2005, but now plans to extend its deadline by several months.
Few people attended Friday's hearing, which was highly technical both legally and scientifically.
On Thursday, many elected state officials were on hand, including Sens. Rod Gander, D-Windham, Jeanette White, D-Windham and Reps. Steve Darrow, D-Putney, Richard Marek, D-Newfane and Sarah Edwards, I-Brattleboro.
Edwards said she attended on behalf of her constituents and in preparation for the next legislative session.
"With so many important issues anticipated to come before the Legislature in the coming session, and nuclear power will be one of them, I need to be as informed as possible," said Edwards, who was present for both days of hearings.
After Friday's closing arguments wrapped up, Shadis expressed his frustration with the complexity of trying to intervene before the NRC.
"You'd think there'd be a better way to get to the truth," he said.
Carolyn Lorié can be reached at clorie@reformer.com.
-------- us nuc waste
Air Force clears March land that once held nuclear weapons
There had been concern over radioactive waste; bunkers could now store fireworks.
The Press-Enterprise
By KIMBERLY TRONE
October 23, 2004
http://www.pe.com/localnews/riverside/stories/PE_News_Local_rland24.58e75.html
An abandoned 187-acre storage facility that once housed nuclear weapons has been given a clean bill of health by the Air Force.
In May 2003, the Air Force announced it would re-survey the Orangecrest-area site for low-level radioactive waste because gloves and rags used to wipe down depleted uranium capsules might have been buried there in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Philip Mook, regional environmental coordinator for the Air Force said a complete report on the inspection should be released by the first part of next year.
When the Air Force surveyed the area for radioactive waste in the mid-1990s, Mook said officials believed nuclear weapons were routinely taken for maintenance to sites such as Los Alamos.
When once-classified documents were reviewed some time later, they described a practice of burying special containers of gloves and rags at some Strategic Air Command bases. March became a strategic air base in 1949 and bombers were stationed there until 1982. The base was downsized to an air reserve base in 1996.
"Since there was a process that we did not know about, we determined we needed to go back and reconfirm what the impact was," Mook said. "The Air Force has completed its survey and did not find anything."
The 16 bunkers may eventually house fireworks for Rialto-based Pyro Spectaculars, said Dan Fairbanks, planning manager for the March Joint Powers Authority.
The March authority is made up of Riverside County and the cities of Moreno Valley, Perris and Riverside. Its mission is to redevelop surplus military land, such as the 1,178 acres surrounded by homes in Riverside's Orangecrest neighborhood.
The Air Force transferred the Orangecrest-area property to the March authority about five years ago. Before any fireworks are stored in the weapons bunkers, Fairbanks said the March authority is committed to holding a public meeting prior to any formal public hearing.
The fireworks would be distributed into the bunkers in smaller amounts to avoid any heavy concentration of potential explosives, Fairbanks said.
Stephanie Vega, who is pregnant and has two young children, recently moved into the family's new Dayton Street home. The family's back yard looks out over the thick-concrete weapons bunkers dug deep into the barren hillsides.
"We have always wondered what was in there," Vega said.
Vega said she was surprised to learn of the facilities' former use but was relieved to know there was no radioactive waste lingering in the area.
However, Vega said she did not know about the possibility that fireworks may be located so close to her family's new home.
"It does worry me, because I have children," she said.
Reach Kimberly Trone at (951) 368-9456 or ktrone@pe.com
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
How 'Ugly Americans' Forced Muslims Into a Wrong War
Arab News
Amir Taheri,
23 October, 2004
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=9§ion=0&article=53315&d=23&m=10&y=2004
The Arab Mujahedeen who went to Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight against the Soviet occupation chose the wrong side in the wrong war in the wrong place and at the wrong time.
This is the message of "The Road to Kabul", a new Arab television series which is captivating millions of spectators as the Arab world is put in low gear for the annual fasting month of Ramadan. The series was made in 38 hour-long episodes by a group of Palestinian and Jordanian filmmakers for the Qatari television that, in turn, sold it to several networks, including MBC, a Saudi-owned satellite channel. The Qatari television, however, decided to cancel its own screening, scheduled for the start of Ramadan just over a week ago, ostensibly for " technical reasons". It then informed other channels that had bought the series that they would not receive the remaining 30 episodes. The Qatari decision has triggered threats of lawsuits from the concerned channels. It has also produced an avalanche of rumors about the reasons for the cancellation. One such is that Condoleezza Rice, President George W Bush's national security advisor, phoned the Qatari leaders to ask them not to air the series.
The series is woven around a love story between a Palestinian whose parents lost their homes when Israel was created, and an Afghan woman whose family were forced to flee Kabul when the Communists seized power in 1979.
Once he develops an interest in the Afghan imbroglio, the Palestinian quickly concludes that this is the wrong war, provoked by the United States against the Soviet Union in the context of the Cold War. In one dramatic scene, he gives an Arab volunteer who is going to Afghanistan a lecture on how the whole thing is an American conspiracy to divert attention from the only war that matters: The war to liberate Palestine, presumably by wiping Israel off the map.
That view is hammered in throughout. One scene shows American intelligence agents encouraging Afghans to grow opium poppies that can then be used to produce heroin to be sold to Soviet soldiers.
We see one particularly obnoxious American agent boasting about an "igneous plan" worked out by his boss William Casey, CIA director under President Ronald Reagan, to finance the Afghan war with money from heroin sold to the Soviet Army. The agent says that the US has tested the method with "The Opium War" that brought China to its knees in the 19th century. (The US, of course, had nothing to do with the Chinese Opium War that involved only the British at the time.)
The series also claims that the Islamist radical movement that began to develop from the late 1970s onwards was the fruit of an American conspiracy to mobilize Muslims against the USSR and use the Mujahedeen as foot soldiers in a proxy war.
"You are not fighting for Islam or the Afghan people," the Palestinian character tells one Arab volunteer. "You are fighting for the Americans."
In a roundabout way the series tries to relay another message: The Americans have only themselves to blame for the Sept. 11 attacks against New York and Washington. The jihadists who carried out the attacks were fruits of a deadly seed sowed by the United States and its regional allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
In order to portray the American as evil incarnate, the series tries to humanize the Soviet occupation. The Red Army is represented by a number of kindly officers led by a bumbling general with a special fondness for the bottle. There is no sign of the systematic destruction that the Red Army carried out throughout Afghanistan. If anything the Red Army is depicted as a double victim, first of unidentified "conspirators" in the Kremlin who fell into the American trap, and then the jihadists who kill indiscriminately. In one scene the series' heroine, a British-educated doctor whose son has just been injured in an explosion meets the Soviet general and gives him a lecture on poverty and despair in Afghanistan. The general, having just emptied his vodka bottle, nods in sympathy and orders that medical supplies be provided for treating the injured boy.
Judging by anecdotal evidence many Arab viewers love the series. They are comforted in their deep-rooted belief that the only issue that deserves their sympathy is Palestine. Even if Afghans are Muslims and six times as numerous as the Palestinians, their occupation and massacre by the Soviets does not appear as shocking as the oppression of the Palestinians by Israel.
The series exaggerates the role played by the so-called "Arab Afghans" who are presented as the backbone of the war against the Red Army. In fact, the "Arab Afghans" never numbered more than 3,000 compared to over 250,000 native Afghan fighters operating in dozens of guerrilla groups throughout the country.
The "Arab Afghans" were mostly attached to three Pushtun groups led respectively by Abdul-Rasul Sayyaf, Yunus Khalis and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
According to most experts, the impact of these groups on the course of the war in Afghanistan was minimal at best. And when the final crunch came in 1992, none of those groups played any role in capturing Kabul that fell to a coalition of Tajik warriors, led by the late Ahmad Shah Massoud, and the Uzbek militia of Abdul-Rashid Dostum. The series elevates Osama Bin Laden, the fugitive Al-Qaeda terror chief, to the position of a major war leader and a "sheikh" with implied religious authority. Again, this flies in the face of historic facts. Despite his claims about having won a Kalashnikov by killing a Russian general in battle, Bin Laden never saw any serious combat in Afghanistan.
Shot in Jordan with Arab actors and soldiers from the Jordanian Army as extras, the series fails to reproduce an Afghan atmosphere. Jordan is a desert land while Afghanistan is a land of high mountains. The decors and the costumes are also more Arab than Afghan while the theme and background music is either Arabic or Western. Much of the dialogue consists of tearjerkers or pseudo-philosophico-religious clichés.
In one scene an Arab jihadist boasts that he is fighting with "the book in my heart and the gun in my hand." The series does not question the combination. It only suggests that the jihadists chose the wrong enemy.
-------- africa
New Somali President Asks for 20, 000 AU Peacekeepers
October 23, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-somalia-au.html
ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) - Somalia's newly elected president, Abdullahi Yusuf, has asked the African Union to send 20,000 peacekeepers to disarm militias controlling his lawless Horn of Africa country, an AU spokesman said on Saturday.
``The president has formally asked the AU for a 20,000-strong peacekeeping force to help in collecting millions of small arms known to be owned by the Somali people,'' AU spokesman Adam Thiam told reporters.
He said the request would be considered by the AU's Peace and Security Council which is due to meet on Monday.
Yusuf made the appeal to AU Chairman Alpha Oumar Konare during a meeting with top AU officials on Saturday in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa.
Yusuf was elected as Somalia's president after almost two years of stop-start talks held in neighboring Kenya because of insecurity at home. The former warlord made his first appeal for peacekeepers at his swearing-in ceremony last week.
EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, also on a visit to AU headquarters in Addis Ababa, said the European Union would offer funding for a peacekeeping mission and consider training Somali security forces.
``The president (of Somalia) has not given me any specific request. But if the request comes ... the EU will assist Somalia and finance a peacekeeping mission as it has done for Darfur,'' Solana told a news conference, adding Brussels would host a donor conference on Somalia on Nov. 28.
Earlier Solana announced the EU would contribute more than $100 million to an enlarged AU force in Sudan's troubled Darfur region, but gave no details on what the EU might offer for an operation in Somalia.
ANARCHY
Somalia collapsed with the ousting of military dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991, disintegrating into fiefdoms run by rival warlords who have thrived in the absence of a central authority.
Diplomats say Yusuf risks leading a government in exile if he is unable to return quickly to Mogadishu and that the legitimacy of his fledgling government hinges on gaining control of the anarchic country.
Despite the new government's need to its stamp authority on the country of more than seven million, the international community is wary of engaging in Somalia after a failed U.S. peacekeeping mission forced the United States and later the United Nations to withdraw in 1993.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned on Tuesday against a hasty expansion of U.N. nation-building activities in the failed state, saying there must first be greater political progress coupled with serious efforts by Somali leaders to improve security.
But with an operation to deal with what the United Nations calls the world's worst humanitarian crisis in Darfur, the AU will be hard pressed to free up 20,000 troops for Somalia, one analyst said.
``The heavy lifting has to be done by the Somalis first,'' said Matt Bryden, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group think-tank.
``I think it is a really worrying sign because he (Yusuf) is out of touch with international reality,'' Bryden told Reuters.
``No one is going to send troops in to fight, which is what peace enforcement entails, especially after what happened in '93,'' Bryden said, referring to a botched raid that resulted in two U.S. Black Hawk helicopters being shot down in Mogadishu.
-------- arms
Navy Commissions Fast - Attack Submarine
October 23, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-USS-Virginia.html
NORFOLK, Va. (AP) -- With bells ringing and horns blaring, the Navy on Saturday commissioned the lead ship of its latest class of fast-attack submarines specifically designed for post-Cold War security threats.
The $2.2 billion, nuclear-powered USS Virginia differs from other submarines because it can not only roam the deep blue ocean but also get close to shore in shallow water, which Navy officials say is important in fighting terrorism.
Lynda Johnson Robb, daughter of President Lyndon Johnson and wife of former Sen. Charles Robb, D-Va., gave the traditional order to ``man our ship and bring her to life'' in ceremonies at Norfolk Naval Station, the world's largest Navy base.
``Aye, aye, ma'am,'' the crew of about 130 responded. They then raced up both ends of the sub and lined up on deck as a Navy band played ``Anchors Aweigh.''
The 377-foot-long sub is the first to be built without a periscope, using a high-resolution digital camera instead. That meant the control room, which always had to be directly below the periscope, could be moved to a larger space in the sub's lower deck.
The Virginia also can launch unmanned undersea vehicles. Other improvements include a new computerized autopilot designed to reduce stress on the crew and a reconfigurable torpedo room that can hold extra beds for special operations forces.
In his keynote address, Sen. John Warner, R-Va., said the Virginia will help lead the fight against terrorism.
``We cannot ever blink. We cannot ever flinch. We cannot yield,'' said Warner, a former Navy secretary. ``This ship will very definitely play a role in that war on terror.''
The sub is the first of 10 Virginia-class submarines scheduled to be built through a partnership between Northrop Grumman Newport News and General Dynamics Electric Boat. The class is projected to have 30 subs.
First lady Laura Bush christened the USS Texas, the second sub in the class, at the Newport News shipyard in July.
Ralph Folger, 81, of Troy, N.Y., was among more than 4,000 invited guests at the ceremonies Saturday. He served on three subs during World War II.
``It's the newest and latest thing out and completely different from anything I've ever served on,'' Folger said. ``It's spectacular.''
Crew members were excited about the commissioning.
``It really means that we are joining the ranks of the rest of the warships,'' said Lt. Cmdr. Luis Molina, 34, of Jacksonville, N.C., who will serve aboard the Virginia. ``You're going from a big hunk of steel that was built by the shipyard to a ship of the line.''
On the Net:
U.S. Atlantic Fleet Submarine Force: http://www.sublant.navy.mil/
--------
Over 18,000 armaments handed over in Baghdad's Sadr City
BAGHDAD (AFP)
Oct 23, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041023145717.2vklegk6.html
About 18,000 armaments were handed over in a recent weapons-for-cash programme in Baghdad's Sadr City, Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh announced Saturday, calling the process a "great success".
"We have spent close to five million dollars on 9,000 anti-tank mines, 2,000 land mines, 2,000 Kalashnikovs, more than 1,000 rocket launchers, more than 2,000 anti-tank missiles," he told a press conference adding that more than 1,550 mortar shells and nearly 600,000 bullets were also handed in.
"The programme was a great success and the government is looking to repeat it in other parts of the country," he said.
The programme, which ended Thursday, lasted 10 days and came after a call by radical Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr to his followers in Baghdad to hand over their weapons in return for promises by the interim government to stop arresting members of his movement and release many of those held in US-run prisons.
Iraqi forces backed by the US military are due to begin searches on Sunday to verify the extent of disarmament in Sadr City, which has been the scene of off-and-on clashes between Sadr's militia and US and Iraqi forces over the past six months.
Saleh said the government has allocated 365 million dollars for reconstruction in Sadr City, which is one of the poorest parts of the capital.
-------- britain
THE INSURGENTS
Hostage Begs the British to Remove Troops in Iraq
October 23, 2004
By EDWARD WONG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/23/international/middleeast/23iraq.html?pagewanted=all
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 22 - A British-Iraqi aid official held hostage by militants made a tearful televised plea on Friday, begging the people of Britain and Prime Minister Tony Blair to save her life by withdrawing troops from Iraq.
The official, Margaret Hassan, a long-time resident of Iraq, appeared in a grainy videotape given to Al Jazeera, the Arab satellite news network. Ms. Hassan, the director of CARE International in Iraq, was abducted Tuesday as she rode to work in her car. In the poor-quality videotape, Ms. Hassan talks of her dire situation between sobs.
"Please help me, please help me," Ms. Hassan said, her face drawn and haggard. "This might be my last hours. Please help me. Please, the British people, ask Mr. Blair to take the troops out of Iraq, and not to bring them here to Baghdad."
Ms. Hassan was referring to an announcement by the British Defense Ministry on Thursday that 850 British troops would be moved from the south to volatile central Iraq to allow American soldiers more time to prepare for an invasion of Falluja, the insurgent stronghold 35 miles west of Baghdad.
Ms. Hassan's kidnapping came less than two weeks after the beheading of Kenneth Bigley, a British engineer who had also been shown in a videotape pleading with Mr. Blair to save his life. The incident raised a furor in England, where residents of Liverpool, Mr. Bigley's hometown, and antiwar advocates attacked Mr. Blair for his support of the American-led occupation. Mr. Bigley was killed by One God and Jihad, the group led by the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
The United States military arrested a senior leader of Mr. Zarqawi's group and five others during overnight raids in Falluja, The Associated Press reported Saturday. The 1:30 a.m. raid focused on a site being used as a haven by Mr. Zarqawi's inner circle, the military said in a statement. Also on Saturday, insurgents fired grenades at an American armored vehicle and set it on fire on a highway leading to Baghdad International Airport, Reuters reported. There was no immediate word on casualties.
No abducted foreign woman has been known to be killed in Iraq. Last month, insurgents kidnapped two Italian women, both aid workers, but later released them. More than 150 foreigners have been taken captive, most of them by bandits seeking ransom, but a few by fighters looking to use the hostages as propaganda tools in the guerrilla war.
It is unclear what group is holding Ms. Hassan. A videotape was released just after Ms. Hassan's abduction showing her looking disoriented and frightened. In that tape and the one released on Friday, militants do not appear; the only image is of Ms. Hassan in a trimmed white shirt, framed from her shoulders up.
At one point, the video cuts to close-up shots of identification cards belonging to Ms. Hassan. Mr. Zarqawi's group, which recently posted an Internet message saying it had changed its name to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, typically shoots its videos with black-clad militants standing behind the hostages, who are dressed in orange jumpsuits.
The fate of Mr. Bigley had clearly upset Ms. Hassan. "That's why people like Mr. Bigley and myself are being caught," Ms. Hassan said of the presence of British troops. "And maybe we will die like Mr. Bigley." Ms. Hassan, 52, was born in Dublin and has lived in Baghdad for more than 30 years. She speaks Arabic fluently and is married to an Iraqi, Tahseen Ali Hassan. Ms. Hassan began working for CARE after the Persian Gulf war in 1991. She leads a staff of about 30 Iraqis who distribute medicine and medical supplies to hospitals and help restore access to clean water. She was an outspoken critic of the sanctions imposed on Iraq by the United Nations after the 1991 war.
The head of CARE International suspended the group's Iraq operations after Ms. Hassan's abduction.
Also on Friday, the Macedonian government confirmed that two Macedonian construction workers had been killed by militants. Al Jazeera said Monday that it had received a videotape showing the beheadings of the two men.
A powerful group of Sunni clerics said American military and Iraqi National Guard soldiers had raided the mosque and home of one of the group's prominent officials, Sheik Abdul-Sattar Abdul-Jabbar, and had arrested him, one of his sons and a neighbor. The group, the Muslim Scholars Association, which has been steadfast in its opposition to the occupation, said through a spokesman that it did not know why the sheik had been arrested. A military spokeswoman, Sharon Walker, said she had no information on operations involving the arrest.
-------- business
CORRUPTION ACCUSATIONS
Memos Warned of Billing Fraud by Firm in Iraq
October 23, 2004
By ERIK ECKHOLM
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/23/politics/23whistle.html?oref=login&pagewanted=all
Managers of a security firm that won large contracts in Iraq warned their bosses in February of what they called a pattern of fraudulent billing practices, internal company memorandums suggest.
The memorandums, written primarily by two company managers, charged that the security firm, Custer Battles, repeatedly billed the occupation authorities for nonexistent services or at grossly inflated prices.
The company, which quickly grew to garner security contracts worth $100 million in little more than a year, denies the charges. It argues that the managers confused sincere attempts to document jobs done in a hurry, in a war zone, with deliberate deception and that the company provided all contracted services for the agreed-upon price.
The memos and a lawsuit filed by former employees cite several specific instances, including billing the Coalition Provisional Authority $157,000 for a helicopter pad that in fact cost $95,000, and repainting forklifts abandoned by Baghdad Airways and then charging the authority thousands of dollars a month, claiming that the forklifts were leased.
One of the managers was later fired by the company and is part of a lawsuit charging Custer Battles with defrauding the federal government of tens of millions of dollars. The other manager, who has since been appointed to a high-level position with the company, recently declared that after further research, he believed that any questionable practices were the fault of a few individuals and had not been condoned by the owners.
On Sept. 30, the Pentagon, concerned by the allegations raised by the employees, barred Custer Battles from receiving further military contracts, and it has withheld at least $10 million in payments to the company. The company is appealing the ban.
The charges swirling around Custer Battles in part reflect a problem that American government auditors have acknowledged: the inability of the Iraq occupation authority, particularly in its first year, to monitor properly the performance of hundreds of companies, large and small, that flocked to Baghdad seeking contracts for everything from building materials to armed guards.
The memorandums, provided by a lawyer for the managers who filed the lawsuit against Custer Battles, charge that the company submitted invoices from supposed subcontractors or suppliers that - unbeknownst to the American officials who paid the final tab - were virtual shells, newly created by Custer Battles executives and their partners.
Custer Battles, founded in 2001 by Scott Custer and Michael Battles, both in their 30's, says it has about 700 employees.
Pete Baldwin, then the Iraq facilities manager, wrote in a Feb. 2 memorandum that in one typical invoice, Custer Battles claimed that one of its shell companies had installed a helicopter pad for $157,000. In fact, Custer Battles had hired a different company to build the pad for $95,000, he asserted. He wrote that "every line item on that invoice," which was submitted for a total of $250,000, was just as "false, fabricated, inflated."
Mr. Baldwin wrote that he had repeatedly informed Mr. Custer, the company co-owner, of similar practices, but to no avail. A lawyer for Custer Battles, Richard Sauber, said that Mr. Custer had subsequently brought accountants to Iraq to clear up incomplete books but that they had not found fraud.
Mr. Baldwin said in the memorandum that after he began raising alarms, an executive with the company tried to fire him. Mr. Baldwin was given notice on Feb. 20 - he has said because of his charges of fraud. Larry Robbins, a lawyer for Custer Battles, says he was fired for "incompetence.''
Last week, documents unsealed by the Justice Department disclosed that two former managers of Custer Battles, including Mr. Baldwin, had brought a civil suit under the federal whistle-blower act charging the company with fraud.
The company called those charges baseless and the work of "a competitor and a disgruntled employee." The two former managers could win million of dollars in rewards if the charges hold up.
In a memorandum dated Feb. 28, 2004, Peter Miskovich, who was manager of the company's $21 million contract to safeguard Iraq's new currency as it was being distributed, gave a scathing review of the project, which he took over in midstream. Mr. Miskovich - who is not part of the whistle-blower lawsuit - wrote to his superior, Charles Baumann, then the country manager, that the records provided "prima facie evidence of a course of conduct consistent with criminal activity and intent."
Mr. Miskovich was later named director of the company's new Office of Corporate Integrity. In an Oct. 13 affidavit, he said that after further review, he had concluded that financial improprieties were more isolated than he had declared in February. He said that "I do not believe, based on what I learned during my tenure" as a project manager, "that Scott Custer or Mike Battles was involved in the questionable conduct."
Reached by telephone this week, Mr. Miskovich refused to speak to a reporter. Mr. Baldwin could not be reached for comment.
The Air Force, which suspended the Custer Battles contract, wrote a memorandum citing suspicion of repeated fraud. The Air Force quotes Mr. Miskovich's Feb. 28 memorandum, and calls the evidence of company misconduct "of so serious or compelling a nature that it affects their present responsibility to be government contractors or subcontractors."
In the case of the currency exchange project, said Mr. Sauber, the lawyer for Custer Battles, the occupation authority agreed on a final fee of $21 million, but the Pentagon has held up the final $10 million in payments while it investigates the contract.
Earlier this month, the Justice Department declined to prosecute Custer Battles, though the civil suit continues under the whistle-blower law. The department gave no public explanation, but officials had previously told lawyers in the lawsuit that because the alleged fraud was against the Coalition Provisional Authority, federal prosecutors did not have jurisdiction. Some experts have questioned that reasoning.
The company founders, Scott Custer and Michael Battles, are both Army veterans. Mr. Battles unsuccessfully ran for Congress in Rhode Island as a Republican two years ago.
The two started out by offering security services to nongovernmental organizations in Afghanistan after the fall of Kabul in late 2001.
But their business really took hold in June 2003, soon after the fall of Baghdad. The men obtained a $16.5 million contract from the occupation authorities to provide security for the Baghdad airport.
That one-year contract was not renewed, but the company had already begun pulling in others, directly with the Coalition Provisional Authority or as a subcontractor to other companies.
As it cut a quick and profitable swath, Custer Battles sometimes angered more experienced security companies with its aggressive recruitment of scarce security experts and claims to industry leadership. The company describes itself as "the premier security company in Iraq" on its corporate Web site.
The two founders have received praise for their entrepreneurship. The internal memorandums charge that part of that success, at least, was built on questionable practices.
One example captures some of the fog of post-invasion Iraq. With forged invoices, Mr. Miskovich wrote, Custer Battles billed for providing a security detail for the road delivery from Baghdad to Mosul of prefabricated cabins. The housing was urgently required by teams carrying out the currency exchange.
Not only did the company provide no guards for the trip, Mr. Miskovich said in his Feb. 28 memo, but the convoy was also somehow lost for a week, officials in Mosul had to sleep in tents, and the company had to offer a reward to locate the cabins.
-------- chemical weapons
Agent Orange: An Ongoing Atrocity
Antiwar.com
by Michael Austin
October 23, 2004
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/austin.php?articleid=3838
A review of Agent Orange: "Collateral Damage" in Vietnam by Philip Jones Griffiths Trolley Ltd. (Great Britain) Hardback, 160 pages, with 100 b/w photographs
In this welcome and timely follow-up to his well-known 1971 classic Vietnam, Inc., photojournalist Phillip Jones Griffiths takes readers on a moving journey into the heart of darkness, shining a light on the pain that still lingers in Vietnam, whose residents are reminded every day of the war most of the world has tried to forget about.
As the title suggests, the photos and text of Agent Orange are focused specifically on the lasting damage done by the most famous of the various defoliants (nicknamed for the orange canisters it was transported and stored in) with which U.S. forces drenched the jungles of South Vietnam. Although "Agent Orange" was intended only as a tactical weapon - not meant to inflict physical damage on the enemy, only to deprive them of cover - it contained a byproduct of chlorine known as dioxin, one of the worst toxins known to man. A huge segment of the population of South Vietnam (along with some residents of Cambodia and many U.S. soldiers) was exposed to the poison during the war, whether it was rained directly onto their skin, inhaled during the spraying of large areas, or ingested in water or food that was exposed. (Unbelievably, the used orange storage barrels were also used for water, food and petroleum storage, and even as barbecue pits, causing further spread of the toxin.) Dioxin is a virtual "genetic time bomb" :once it has entered the body, it may cause any number of birth defects in the children of those exposed, ranging from stillbirth or infant death to mental retardation or physical deformity. Agent Orange is a devastating pictorial catalogue of these defects and more - the enduring legacy of dioxin poisoning in Vietnam.
The images that open the book are of the barren landscapes left by the use of defoliants. They are stark, patchy plains, containing only scrubby grass, often leafless trees, and the occasional sign of militaristic life here and there. These opening pictures are just the calm before the storm, tame in comparison to the images of human suffering that follow, but they do set the mood and illustrate succinctly the quote that opens the book's first section of narration: "America didn't just threaten to bomb Vietnam back to the Stone Age, it went right ahead and did so." As these pictures attest, even 40 years later, 40% of South Vietnam remains barren, growing nothing more than grass.
Following these photos is a section entitled "Poisoning the Land," which contains a slightly more positive group of pictures (despite its grim title), mostly of local people working to clear and cultivate damaged land. This more positive section at first seems out of place in a book about collateral damage, but it does express the enduring strength of the Vietnamese people and their will to do their best with the lot they are given, which turns out to be a major theme of the book.
From here the book dives into much darker territory, beginning with a section entitled "The Bell Jar." Griffiths tells his readers that the vast majority of dioxin-affected fetuses are stillborn or die within 48 hours of birth, if they make it to the end of term at all, and he proceeds to document this statement with silently screaming images of some of the many deformed babies that arrived dead or passed away soon after birth at Tu Du Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City and are preserved in formaldehyde in its basement. Here, like a real-life version of some mad scientist's lab, are babies with two heads or two faces, conjoined twins, children with monstrously cleft palates, seemingly missing parts of their skulls, even children so far from the normal form their bodies are barely recognizable as human. But they are human, every one, and every one had a mother and a father they never knew and a life they never got to live. Griffiths worked to prevent this section from becoming a voyeuristic freak show, instead bringing out the humanity and pathos in the victims where he could. The most striking photo here, for instance, is one of a baby with no visible abnormalities simply lying on its back, its hands appearing clasped over its face, as if in despair - as if it were trying to avoid acknowledgment of its fate and the fate of all those who share his dark, silent room. These still, sleeping children, these glimpses of life perverted and destroyed before it even had a chance, are perhaps the saddest and most haunting pictures in the book, though one might argue that at least these victims were spared the lasting torture endured by the victims whose images fill the remainder of the pages.
In the sections that follow are pictures of people living with a huge range of problems almost certainly caused by dioxin's presence in one or both of their parents. It is a collection of portraits eloquent in their expression, yet elegant in their simplicity, accompanied by simple, blunt captions that explain only the necessary details not obvious in the pictures above them: the names of the people pictured, perhaps their age or the town they come from, the scientific names for the disease or deformation they suffer. These pictures would be beautiful if what they portrayed were not so horrible.
Most of the victims shown are young, but many are full-grown adults. Some appear almost normal but suffer from mental retardation, blindness, or epilepsy. Others have perfectly intact minds but live with missing or terribly malformed limbs. Still others suffer from torturous skin conditions, dwarfism, paralysis, double sets of elbows and knees, tumors, and countless other maladies. Some have doctors checking on them, others have parents patiently massaging and holding them. Amazingly, though most of the pictures show people living with deformations, few readers could imagine facing, very few appear to be pictures of suffering. There is little crying or wailing, little beseeching the camera for help. What Griffiths has created is not so much a record of the miseries caused by Agent Orange, but a record of humanity surviving against all odds. Again, these pictures are a testament to the incredible endurance, will, and acceptance that has become a way of life for the South Vietnamese people. Where it might have been easy to create portraits that begged, accused, and frightened, such pictures are all too easy to turn away from, block out, or ignore. Instead, Griffiths' pictures all contain a dignity and a humanity that stares the reader straight in the eye, drawing him in and forcing him to recognize the injustice these people have been forced to live with. The magnitude of the atrocity looms even larger because of the undeniable humanity and admirable strength visible in Griffiths' pictures.
Frustratingly, though there seems to be a large body of research from some of the chemical companies that created Agent Orange showing the genetic havoc wreaked by dioxin in lab animals, though Americans exposed to the chemical during the war won a $180 million lawsuit against its manufacturers, and though South Vietnamese children suffer from an incredibly high rate of these deformities (even in today's third generation, as Vietnamese soil, water, animals, and parents still contain a high concentration of the chemical, which is dangerous even in trace amounts), neither the chemical manufacturers nor the United States government has ever admitted any fault in the matter, and neither has ever paid a penny in reparations to the people of Vietnam or made any effort to help those who still face exposure to dioxin and live with its horrifying effects.
Perhaps Agent Orange's only weakness is the book's lack of explanation as to why, as the publisher's statement says, "theoretically and scientifically there are no proven connections between the maimed subjects of Griffiths' photographs and the presence of dioxin in Agent Orange." There is conclusive scientific evidence of dioxin's poisonous effects on animals and of its presence in Agent Orange, and the author clearly believes in the connection, as the general thesis of the book seems to be that America owes reparations and assistance to dioxin's victims. The reasons cited for America's denial of responsibility and assistance are also frustratingly vague (though not particularly surprising to anyone familiar with the history of American Empire); apparently, dioxin also exists naturally in the world, and no one has proved decisively that the U.S.' use of Agent Orange is solely responsible for the high concentration of it in South Vietnam. The book also states that "selective experts" have denied links between birth defects and dioxin. Perhaps most pertinently, Vietnam simply lacks the economic and political pull to produce its own scientific proof or to force the United States to own up. Griffiths also brings up the fact that by denying or ignoring the problem's existence, the world scientific community is wasting a rare opportunity to study dioxin's effects, properties, and dangers, as they have a near-identical human populations and environments to compare (North Vietnam was sprayed little if at all with Agent Orange during the course of the war, while South Vietnam was inundated with the chemical).
In any case, if the book leaves one a little starved for detail, it also leaves one incredibly frustrated with the injustice of this self-perpetuating war crime. The victims of dioxin have no choice but to accept its effects. The least the United States government could do is accept some measure of fault for the lasting contamination of an entire country, and do something to assist its victims. One hopes Agent Orange will spread awareness and motivate people to do more to assist dioxin's victims and cleanse Vietnam of the poison. In these days of nuclear materials, chemical weapons, depleted uranium and other deadlier toxins being used in warfare, Agent Orange also stands as an undeniable and invaluable record of the lasting horror we risk inflicting on our world for untold generations if we do not stop to consider the lasting consequences of our actions in war.
-------- europe
RECRUITS
Officials Fear Iraq's Lure for Muslims in Europe
October 23, 2004
The New York Times
By CRAIG S. SMITH and DON VAN NATTA Jr.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/23/international/europe/23france.html?pagewanted=all
PARIS, Oct. 22 - France's antiterrorist police on Friday identified a young Frenchman killed fighting the United States in Iraq, the first confirmed case of what is believed to be a growing stream of Muslims heading from Europe to fight what they regard as a new holy war.
Redouane el-Hakim, 19, the son of Tunisian immigrants, died during an American bombardment of insurgents in Falluja on July 17, according to an intelligence official close to the case.
Intelligence officials fear that for a new generation of disaffected European Muslims, Iraq could become what Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechnya were for European Islamic militants in past decades: a galvanizing cause that sends idealistic young men abroad, trains them and puts them in touch with a more radical global network of terrorists. In the past, many young Europeans who fought in those wars came back to Europe to plot terrorist attacks at home.
"We consider these people dangerous because those who go will come back once their mission is accomplished," the intelligence official said. "Then they can use the knowledge gained there in France, Europe or the United States. It's the same as those who went to Afghanistan or Chechnya."
Hundreds of young militant Muslim men have left Europe to fight in Iraq, according to senior counterterrorism officials in four European countries. They have been recruited through mosques, Muslim centers and militant Web sites by several groups, including Ansar al-Islam, the Kurdish terrorist group once based in northern Iraq.
French officials emphasize that there is not yet evidence of a broad French network funneling fighters to Iraq, and terrorism experts say the vast majority of foreign fighters there come from other countries in the region. But past experience with returning fighters from other Muslim holy wars is causing anxiety in Europe.
Virtually all of the major terrorists arrested in Europe in the past three years spent time in Bosnia, Afghanistan or Chechnya. Two years ago, the French antiterrorism police broke up a cell of Chechen-trained militants who they believe were plotting a chemical attack in Paris. Those arrests triggered an investigation that is still active into what French counterterrorism officials call "the Chechen network."
"Now, the new land of jihad is Iraq," the intelligence official said. "There, they're trained, they fight and acquire a technique and the indoctrination sufficient to act on when they return."
A network of recruiters for Iraq first appeared in Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Norway within months of the United States-led invasion, officials said. Some officials said the recruitment effort had now spread to other countries in Europe, including Belgium and Switzerland. The network provides forged documents, financing, training and information about infiltration routes into the country.
The movement to Iraq has increased in recent months, officials say, but they decline to provide specifics.
One senior European intelligence official said there was evidence that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born militant believed to be operating in Falluja, has established a sophisticated network that has helped recruit nearly 1,000 young men from the Middle East and Europe. "These young men know where the action is - they easily cross the borders of Syria or Turkey, and they go directly to Falluja," the official said.
The French official said many people en route to Iraq were passing through Britain, once the major staging point for Muslims going to Afghanistan, or through Saudi Arabia, using the cover of a pilgrimage to Mecca to enter the Saudi kingdom before making their way across the border.
In June, French news organizations reported that Syria had stopped two French citizens from entering Iraq and had expelled them to Turkey. A Tunisian who left from the southern French port of Marseille was also reported to have died last year in a suicide bombing in Iraq.
That man, Lofti Rihani, had links to a terrorist cell now on trial in France for plotting to attack a market during the Christmas holidays in the eastern French city of Strasbourg in 1999, according to a report in the French newspaper Le Figaro.
Last year, German news media quoted the president of Germany's Federal Intelligence Service, August Hanning, as saying Germany had evidence that some Islamic militants had left Germany to fight in Iraq. He said fighters were also being recruited in Britain and Bosnia.
Seven men arrested in northern Italy last year were accused of providing false passports and money or other support to an Islamic network smuggling fighters to Iraq.
More recently, Rabei Osman Sayed Ahmed, known as Muhammad the Egyptian, who is facing charges of orchestrating the March 11 train bombings in Madrid, was recorded on wiretaps boasting in Italy that he was about to send a team of suicide bombers to Iraq.
Little is yet known about the man recently killed in Falluja, Mr. Hakim, other than that he left France earlier this year ostensibly to study in Syria. Intelligence officials say that he flew to Damascus with his brother, Boubaker, 21, who is wanted for questioning by the French antiterrorist police because of his association with a group suspected of terrorism-related activities in France. Boubaker was detained in Syria and is still in custody there, but Redouane Hakim continued on to Iraq.
Officials say they became aware of Mr. Hakim's death while questioning his family about the activities of his brother, Boubaker.
In June, the investigation in which Boubaker was identified led to the arrest of a dozen people in nine locations north of Paris on suspicion of terrorist-related activities. The 12, including an Islamic cleric, were associated with a small mosque in the Parisian suburb of Levallois-Perret.
The group, identified as Irqa by Le Figaro, had taken control of the mosque and was using it to collect money and recruit volunteers for holy war, the newspaper said. The police say wiretaps picked up conversations that indicated some associates of the group were traveling through Syria to fight in Iraq.
According to Le Figaro, the group's leaders, a Tunisian and an Algerian identified only as Adnen T. and Djamel D., were well known to France's intelligence services. Adnen T. had been questioned during the investigation of the 2002 bombing of a synagogue on the Tunisian island of Djerba, in which 19 people died. Djamel D. was close to a group that provided logistical support for Djamel Beghal, arrested in 2001 for plotting to blow up the American Embassy in Paris.
Le Figaro reported that on June 11 police found a text message from Iraq on the cellphone of a third member of the group, identified as Toufik T. The message said: "The group has arrived. I will contact you if I need help." Le Figaro reported that the police believe that the message was sent by Greg, a French convert to Islam who had previously worked for a security company at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle International Airport in Paris and was known to have gone to Iraq.
A National Police official on Friday confirmed the accuracy of Le Figaro's report.
French intelligence officials say they know of at least two other Frenchmen in Falluja and believe that there are at least 10 others in Iraq, mostly of Tunisian origin from working-class suburbs of Paris.
Craig S. Smith reported from Paris for this article, and Don Van Natta Jr. from London. Hélène Fouquet contributed reporting from Paris.
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EU troops prepare for Bosnia swap
BBC, Sarajevo
By Nick Hawton
23 October, 2004
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3944191.stm
"It is scarcely possible to overestimate the significance of this operation," says Lord Ashdown seated in his office overlooking Sarajevo.
"For Bosnia, it marks a milestone on the route from war towards peace stabilisation and eventually joining the European Union."
A Nato roadblock on the hunt for war criminals Eufor and Nato will continue to hunt for war criminals Enthusiastic words from the chief international envoy to Bosnia ahead of the deployment of the EU military mission to Bosnia, scheduled to take over from the Nato peacekeeping Stabilisation Force (SFor) on 2 December.
"It's the biggest, most important realisation of the Common European Foreign and Security policy. It has to succeed because, upon this, the whole of the rest of the policy will be based.
"We've got to show we have the capacity to do hard defence, that we can provide the troops, the command and the decision making process to cope with the security situation. The future depends on success here," says Lord Ashdown.
The EU force (Eufor) will have the same number of troops as SFor, around 7,000. Eighty per cent of the troops who are currently in SFor will remain in Eufor.
Intelligence
According to the planners, the only thing that will change will be the shoulder and cap badges. The aim is for a "seamless" transition.
But Nato is not totally leaving Bosnia. A small headquarters will remain in Sarajevo under the current commander of SFor, US General Steven Schook. The Europeans let us down during the Bosnian War - it was the Americans who eventually stopped the war, not Europe Senad Alispahic student "Our principal mission after 2 December will be to provide advice on defence reform, focus on the apprehension of indicted war criminals and counter-terrorism," said General Schook.
The Nato office will also have an intelligence capacity, which Eufor will be able to draw upon.
But to what extent will the two international military organisations complement each other and to what extent could they get in each other's way?
The testing ground will be immediate. In the nine years since the end of the war Nato's SFor has arrested 28 war crimes suspects but has failed to arrest the two most wanted, the former Bosnian Serb political leader, Radovan Karadzic and his military commander, Ratko Mladic.
According to Lord Ashdown, both Eufor and Nato will have responsibility for pursuing war criminals. He rejects suggestions this will confuse the matter and make it easier for suspects to evade justice. General Schook agrees.
Italian forces in Bosnia
Many people in Bosnia remain suspicious of the Europeans "With the sharing of intelligence between both organisations, I think you'll get a synergy that will be even better than we have now."
But he admits the division of duties still has to be finalised with the UK General Leakey who will head Eufor.
"We're still working the details of that co-ordination," concedes General Schook with less than eight weeks to go before the changeover.
But there's another potential problem, at least in one part of Bosnia.
"The Europeans let us down during the Bosnian War. It was the Americans who eventually stopped the war, not Europe," says Senad Alispahic, 26, a student at Sarajevo University.
"Many people here remain suspicious of the Europeans," he says.
Trust
Many Muslims and Croats in Bosnia blame Europe for failing to intervene to stop the three and a half year Bosnian War which left more than 200,000 dead and two million homeless.
'Anyone but the Americans' is a popular sentiment among Serbs It was the Americans who eventually led the military action which brought the war to an end. It is the Americans who are seen as the guarantors of peace.
This view is not shared in the Serb-controlled half of Bosnia, where the mainly-American bombing took place. Eufor's arrival is being viewed from ambivalence to an "anyone but the Americans" attitude.
The stakes are high for Eufor. A mission characterised by inefficiency and failure will put back plans for a single European military force.
But a successful mission will help erase the bad blood caused by their perceived indifference during the Bosnian war, and perhaps provide a foundation for future deployments in other trouble spots including neighbouring Kosovo.
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Suicide Bombers Kill 20 Iraqi Security Personnel
October 23, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-iraq.html
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Suicide bombers killed 20 members of Iraq's fledgling security forces near a U.S. marine base west of Baghdad and at a checkpoint north of the capital on Saturday in a spate of guerrilla attacks across the country. The surge in violence underlined the scale of the task facing the U.S. military and Iraq's interim government, which have sworn to crush the guerrillas before elections in January.
Hospital officials said 16 Iraqi police were killed and up to 40 people were wounded when a suicide bomber struck an Iraqi police post near the marine base.
Another suicide bomber blew up his vehicle near a checkpoint manned by Iraqi National Guards in the village of Ishaqi, close to the town of Samarra, north of Baghdad, killing four guards. A policeman was killed by a roadside bomb in Samarra.
There was no let up in violence elsewhere across the Sunni Arab heartland of central Iraq that the interim government and Washington blame on Saddam Hussein supporters and foreign Islamic militants.
Guerrillas killed two Turkish truckers and wounded two in an attack on a convoy near the northern city of Mosul, police said.
BAGHDAD ATTACKS
In central Baghdad guerrillas fired two mortar rounds, killing two civilians and wounding one, witnesses said. Six U.S. soldiers were wounded when their armored vehicle was hit by a bomb on a highway leading to Baghdad airport.
Saboteurs bombed two oil pipelines transporting crude from northern and eastern Iraq to Baghdad's Dora refinery. Neither pipeline carries oil for export.
The U.S. military said it had captured a lieutenant of its top foe in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and five other suspects in an overnight raid on what it said was a hideout of the Jordanian militant's network in the south of Falluja.
U.S. forces also launched a new air strike on the rebel-held militant stronghold city, about 30 miles west of Baghdad, killing two people and wounding three.
U.S. military did not name the man or give his nationality, but said he had once been viewed as a minor member of Zarqawi's militant Tawhid wal Jihad (One God and Holy war) group.
``However, due to a surge in the number of Zarqawi associates who have been captured or killed by (U.S.) strikes and other operations, the member had moved up to take a critical position as a Zarqawi senior leader,'' the military said in a statement.
SHRINKING HAVEN
It said Falluja was a shrinking haven for Zarqawi's group, widely blamed for some of Iraq's bloodiest violence.
``Zarqawi followers are starting to move to outlying areas of Falluja in a continuing attempt to hide amidst the civilian population of Falluja due to precision strikes against Zarqawi hideouts and fighting positions,'' the military said.
Residents of Falluja deny knowledge of Zarqawi's militants and say frequent U.S. air strikes inflict a heavy civilian toll.
Tawhid wal Jihad has declared loyalty to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda and has claimed responsibility for beheading several foreign hostages.
It has not said it is holding Margaret Hassan, who was abducted on Tuesday on her way to work at the aid agency Care International, whose operations she headed in Baghdad.
Hassan, who holds Iraqi, British and Irish citizenship, made a tearful plea for her life in a video broadcast on Friday.
Hassan's husband, Tahsin Hassan, and Care International made separate appeals for her release.
``It is painful to see my wife cry. That image saddened and worried her friends and loved ones,'' Hassan said on Al Arabiya television.
``I ask you in the name of Islam and Arabism, and during the holiest Muslim month for my wife to return to me,'' he said.
``Margaret is an Iraqi citizen and has lived here for over 30 years. She considers Iraq her home and loves it and that is why she dedicated her life to helping her people in Iraq.''
Groups working with Care, from hospitals to water projects, plan a protest in Baghdad on Monday demanding Hassan's release.
The Army of Ansar al-Sunna militant group said it had beheaded an Iraqi man it accused of collaborating with U.S. forces and posted pictures of the killing on the Internet.
In the video, Hassan urged Britons to press their government to withdraw British troops and not move them to Baghdad.
The video surfaced a day after Britain said it would move 850 troops from southern Iraq to an area near Baghdad, to cover for U.S. forces likely to be sent to attack rebels in Falluja.
The U.S. military is widely believed to be preparing for an assault on Falluja, in line with a pledge by the U.S.-backed interim government to retake all rebel-held cities to enable all Iraqis to vote in nationwide elections scheduled for January.
But the interim government said it had resumed talks with Falluja leaders designed to find a peaceful solution.
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U.S. Makes Inroads Vs. Iraq Insurgents
October 23, 2004
By DENIS D. GRAY
Associated Press Writer
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/T/TAKING_ON_DIYALA?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
BAQOUBA, Iraq (AP) -- When U.S. civilian authorities were rooting out Saddam Hussein loyalists, Col. Dana J.H. Pittard recruited 41 of them as advisers and encouraged them to stay in contact with the very insurgents who were fighting his men.
Discovering that a respected Muslim cleric had been in prison for 10 months, Pittard and a small contingent helicoptered 300 miles to the lockup in full battle gear, and confronted military police guards, demanding that they free him. "We made it very clear we wouldn't leave without him," Pittard said. Otherwise, he added jokingly: "I think we would have kidnapped him."
Pittard, commander of an American infantry brigade in the once insurgency-rife province of Diyala, is outspoken and his tactics don't always follow the textbook. But he believes they have produced a "recipe for success" at Baghdad's vital northern gateway.
It includes everything from driving wedges between rebel factions to forbidding his troops to be rude to Arabs.
A Harvard-educated military aide to former President Clinton, the colonel from El Paso, Texas, also believes that contrary to what some military analysts think, a conventional U.S. Army unit with the right training, tactics and mind-set can defeat the rebellion.
While Pittard and others acknowledge the insurgency remains active and could again worsen, he points to evidence of a sharp decrease in attacks in the largely agricultural region of some 1.7 million people.
Roadside and car bombings, while still a serious threat to his 6,000 soldiers, fell 60 percent from their June peak while direct attacks plummeted by 85 percent, according to the military. As mortar and rocket strikes on Camp Warhorse, headquarters of Pittard's 3rd Brigade, 1st Infantry Division, have subsided, body armor no longer has to be worn at all times and outdoor volleyball and basketball courts have come into use.
Pittard, 45, believes it's important to project toughness. "The fact that we allowed ourselves to pull out of Fallujah was a mistake," he says, referring to the insurgent stronghold west of Baghdad. To prevent any such backsliding in his territory, Pittard has troops continuously stationed inside Baqouba, the provincial capital some 35 miles northeast of Baghdad.
"We don't allow even the slightest sign of open resistance," he said.
When the Diyala Province town of Buhritz flared up over the summer, Pittard threatened to destroy it and a sizable U.S.-Iraqi force went in to kill or wound some 50 insurgents. But at the same critical moment, as leaflets circulated demanding U.S. troops stay out, Pittard drove into the center of town, held a news conference for Iraqi media and asked: "What do you need in Buhritz?"
"We realize we can kill the enemy till kingdom come and still not be successful," Pittard says. "You need a full-spectrum, balanced approach... the right balance between lethal and non-lethal action."
Pittard says his staff studies counterinsurgencies going back to the 1899-1902 Philippine Insurrection and holds regular "free-thinking" sessions during which anyone, regardless of rank, can come up with ideas.
Crucial, he says, were the nine months the brigade spent as peacekeepers in Kosovo not long before coming to Iraq in March.
"I think we got to know how important it was to relate to people, and how to separate the bad guys from the population," he says. "We have not scooped up people in a big net to find the rotten fish."
"We deconstruct who is who," he said. "If a guy feels he's a nationalist fighting the occupier of his homeland we can deal with that. It's the hard core that has to be killed or captured."
Not long after the Iraqi national election in January the brigade will leave Iraq and the replacement unit may pursue other tactics.
A Western civilian official, interviewed on condition of anonymity, spoke positively about Pittard's overall approach, but cautioned that the successes in Diyala may prove only momentary. And while the insurgents appear to have lost ground in Diyala, Pittard's intelligence officer, Maj. Kreg Schnell, says 13-15 cells are still operating and elusive.
A unit can be just "three men with a rocket launcher on a pick-up truck," he says, and Diyala's unemployment rate of up to 70 percent among males makes it fertile recruiting ground.
In his favor, Pittard says, is a solid provincial governor and police chief, $560,000 for weapons buybacks and an amnesty program that assistant Gov. Ghassan Abass Jassim says has attracted more than 400 militants.
Jassim claims the province has become the safest in central Iraq. "In the future maybe there will be zero terrorists in Diyala, especially as projects that bring more employment come on stream," he said.
Ex-generals and colonels, who Pittard says had been fired, now sit on a Military Advisory Committee and are encouraged to negotiate with the insurgents. The Americans pay them a salary of $250 a month.
The gamble, Pittard says, is paying off. He says the advisers have weakened links between the hard-core fighters and less militant rebels. Some of the rebels were once soldiers under the command of the officers-turned-advisers and still respect them. They have helped persuade several others to surrender.
An insurgent leader, Ahmed Hamid Jassim, recently laid down his weapons and pledged in writing to the committee he wouldn't take them up again, Pittard said. "If he breaks his promise, they'll probably kill him," he said.
Pittard spends up to three days a week with Iraqis, expanding their security forces and development projects. He's clearly displeased with the funding coming from Washington.
"If people don't see progress right there in their villages, they will turn," he says.
And will they? Pittard doesn't rule it out but says: "I think we do have irreversible momentum." He adds: "We're staking our reputation that elections will go well in Baqouba."
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Army Reserve unit to train Iraqis
October 23, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20041022-110014-6490r.htm
The Pentagon is making a key change in its approach to providing trainers for the fledgling Iraqi army in the hope of getting Iraqis to take control of their nation's security sooner.
For the first time since the U.S. military began training Iraqi security forces more than a year ago, the Pentagon is giving a lead role to an Army Reserve unit that specializes in soldier schooling, but has never carried out that mission abroad.
Up to now, the Iraqi army has been trained by a hodgepodge of U.S. infantry and other units. The Army says the decision to send the 98th Division - one of seven units in the Army Reserve that specialize in training other soldiers - will stabilize the effort. The 98th will have a 12-month tour.
The division is sending about 700 of its 3,600 part-time soldiers to provide a mixture of training, including basic combat skills and the development of a noncommissioned officer corps, said its commander, Maj. Gen. Bruce Robinson.
They also will serve as live-in advisers to the Iraqi army, staying with individual Iraqi units until they are deemed ready for combat, Gen. Robinson said.
Few in the 98th Division speak Arabic, Gen. Robinson said, so making effective use of interpreters will be crucial.
The American soldiers will receive some rudimentary language and cultural instruction at Camp Atterbury in Edinburgh, Ind., before they leave for Iraq, he said.
About one-third of the 700 soldiers are either already in Iraq or are on their way. The rest should be there by early December, the general said.
The 98th Division normally trains U.S. active-duty soldiers at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., and does Reserve Officer Training Corps instruction at more than 20 colleges and universities.
Its goal in Iraq will be to expedite the training of a native army "so that there can then be some relief for the coalition forces, who will then be able to be redeployed out of Iraq," Gen. Robinson said.
Such a training mission is an unprecedented challenge for the U.S. Army, said Anthony Cordesman, who has closely studied the progress in training Iraqi security forces.
"We're having to improvise a lot of this," Mr. Cordesman said. "We're not talking about something people have done before. Even in Vietnam we had a great many problems, but it's quite clear that this is one of the most critical single missions that can be performed" in Iraq.
Mr. Cordesman noted that the 98th Division has not tried this before. "On the other hand, nobody's done it before," he added, referring to the task of building an army virtually from scratch in the midst of a violent insurgency.
In an assessment of Iraqi security forces published in September, Mr. Cordesman estimated that Iraq's forces would not be ready to replace most U.S. and coalition forces until late 2005 or early 2006.
Infiltration by the insurgency also is a problem. A defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said this week that the country's new security forces overall are heavily infiltrated by insurgents. The official pointed to a mortar attack Tuesday on an Iraqi national guard compound near Baghdad as a probable inside job. The attackers apparently knew precisely when and where the unit's members were gathering and dropped mortar rounds in the middle of their formation. At least four Iraqis were killed and 80 wounded.
Gen. Robinson said the 98th Division has been given no deadline or other timeline for accomplishing its mission, although he said it was likely the effort would be handed off to another Army Reserve training division - probably the 80th Division from Richmond - next fall.
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Iraqis tried by al Sadr for aiding U.S. remain missing
Oct 23, 2004
Knight Ridder Newspapers
By Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/9952772.htm
NAJAF, Iraq - In a vault three stories beneath the sprawling Shiite Muslim cemetery in the holy city of Najaf, Hatem Khashan awaited his execution.
The 56-year-old Iraqi border policeman's crime was collaborating with the Americans. His judge and jury were henchmen of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al Sadr, the head of the largest Iraqi-bred insurgency, which had been battling U.S. troops in the center of the city. His sentence, handed down in al Sadr's religious court, would be swift with no appeal.
Khashan was to be tied facedown on a rickety bed frame in the vault. He would then be beaten with a rock-filled section of garden hose until he was dead.
It takes only three blows, Khashan recalled counting, watching his black-clad captors bludgeon one prisoner after another to death with the rubber tube. "I kept thinking, this same thing is going to happen to me," he said recently. "All I could do is pray and ask for God's forgiveness."
Khashan was spared that fate on July 28. A last-minute deal between his commander and al Sadr's Mahdi Army militia prompted his release.
Hundreds weren't so lucky. Police are still counting the number of Iraqis who were dragged before al Sadr's religious courts and executed. As many as 300 victims arrested from April to August in Najaf alone are missing, said Capt. Mohammed Abdul Hussein, the head liaison between the Iraqi Interior Ministry and Najaf authorities investigating the court's activities, who asked that his last name not be used.
When police first entered the court, on Aug. 27, they found at least a dozen mutilated and burned bodies inside.
The identities of the dead remain a matter of debate. Authorities declared them to be victims of al Sadr's summary justice. The cleric's advisers claimed they were Mahdi gunmen killed in battles with the Americans.
A top al Sadr confidant, Sheik Ali Smeisim, dismissed as lies accusations that the missing were al Sadr's victims.
"The missing people were likely taken by a number of groups, who continue to prowl the countryside," he said. "They use the Mahdi Army and the court as a place to hang their dirty laundry."
Al Sadr's courts existed in a handful of Iraqi cities and towns. They were originally created by the cleric's late father during Saddam Hussein's era to mediate civil and familial disputes, but had no power to punish.
"What we were trying to do when we established this court was to build something for this society in the Islamic way," said Smeisim, who added that he was one of the original judges.
Other al Sadr advisers who are now in U.S. custody said they resurrected the courts to restore order to a society left lawless by the American invasion. But Capt. Hussein and officials from the Najaf Human Rights Association said the cleric's gunmen used the courts to terrorize people who opposed them.
In April, the courts' focus narrowed to prosecuting Iraqis who were police officers or otherwise deemed to be linked to the American-led coalition.
The catalyst appeared to be a demonstration April 4 by Sadr followers in front of a Spanish military base on the outskirts of Najaf. The Spanish-led force was tasked with maintaining law and order in Najaf. Who fired first is disputed, but the gunfire exchanged by soldiers under Spanish command and al Sadr's gunmen killed at least 18 people and wounded dozens more.
Often, black-clad Mahdi militiamen would swoop down on their Iraqi targets, arresting and dragging them before the Najaf court. Khashan and many other detainees said they were held without food and water for days. Ultimately, they were taken before a cleric in one of the "courtrooms" to hear the charge, verdict and sentence.
For months after the April demonstration, al Sadr said from his Friday prayer pulpit at the Kufa Mosque that Iraqis working with the coalition or the interim government were spies who must die. Less than 3 miles away, in a two-story mud and brick building, his followers put those words into action.
Many, such as Abdul Salam, 37, and his younger brother, Hadi, were beaten bloody beforehand.
Their youngest brother, who was detained at a separate location, recounted the siblings' tale, but asked that his first name and their family name be omitted for fear of retribution from al Sadr's followers.
Abdul Salam rebuilt schools, using money provided by the coalition. On April 7, Mahdi gunmen came to the family home, taking Hadi and the youngest brother into custody and ordering relatives left behind to inform Abdul Salam that he was ordered to appear before the court.
Abdul Salam did so the same day.
Hadi was the last relative to see Abdul Salam. He told his family that he hardly recognized the bloody, battered man lying in a heap with his hands tied behind his back, some 12 hours later.
"This is your brother," their mutual captors told Hadi. They beat them both with iron rods used in construction. The bound men invoked the name of the Prophet Muhammad's descendants for their jailers to stop. The beatings continued.
Five days later, Hadi was released. The next day, the youngest brother, who was unharmed, also was let go. Neither received an explanation, nor were they told of Abdul Salam's fate.
"It's like, inside me, I know he has to be (dead)," the youngest brother said. "But unless a person sees it with his own eyes, he doesn't want to believe it. There is nothing tangible in our hands for us to believe it."
Fadhil hopes his son is still alive. Amar, his oldest son, was taken away to al Sadr's court to face charges of collaborating with the coalition. It made no sense, said Fadhil, whose last name is being withheld for his safety. He and Amar ran a hotel for Shiite pilgrims visiting the nearby Grand Imam Ali Shrine.
To illustrate his point, the elderly man thumbed through a photo album featuring pictures of Amar during the hotel's grand opening. He agreed to meet a Knight Ridder reporter again the next day to discuss his son's case - anything to bring him home alive, Fadhil said, his voice cracking and eyes filling with tears.
He soon changed his mind. Moments after the reporter left, al Sadr loyalists appeared at the hotel and threatened to hurt other members of his family, Fadhil explained apologetically on the telephone.
Like Fadhil and Abdul Salam's brothers, many relatives of the missing hope their loved ones were spared execution. They cling to rumors that prisoners were carted off to the Baghdad slum of Sadr City or other al Sadr strongholds after the cleric and his gunmen surrendered Najaf to the Iraqi police and national guard in late August.
The Najaf police captain, Hussein, said it was more likely that the victims were dead. Many, like Khashan, were taken to the Najaf cemetery. Finding their remains will be difficult, he said. The cemetery - the largest Islamic graveyard in the world, in which crypts often extend deep below ground - was badly damaged during August's battles between U.S. and al Sadr forces.
A joint investigation into the court and its victims may conclude as early as this month, Hussein said. It's unlikely to bring peace of mind to all the anguished families, he conceded.
What should happen to al Sadr's gunmen and judges? Khashan asked rhetorically. "Their only just medicine is death," he said.
In early September, a half-dozen families including that of Abdul Salam met with the son of Iraqi Shiites' top cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al Husseini al Sistani. They were told to drop the matter so that wounds from al Sadr's siege of Najaf can heal, Abdul Salam's youngest brother claimed.
"I don't expect to learn anything from the government about my brother," he said. "The loss of human life here is not important enough."
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Iraqi PM says no deals over Care hostage
abc.net.au
October 23, 2004
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200410/s1226366.htm
Iraq's Prime Minister Iyad Allawi says he will not meet kidnappers' demands for the release of CARE worker Margaret Hassan.
Mrs Hassan has made an emotional appeal for British forces to withdraw from Iraq in a videotape broadcast on Arabic television channel Al Jazeera.
"Nobody is going to go for their demands...and give in to their demands," Mr Allawi told Fox News.
"We have to remain very strong and adamant that we should bring the terrorists to justice," he said in an interview to be aired on Saturday.
Mrs Hassan, 59, was taken hostage on Tuesday as she drove to her office in western Baghdad.
She has spent nearly half her life in Iraq, and was a vocal opponent of the US-British invasion in March 2003.
She is the director of Iraq operations for CARE International, has resided in Iraq for 30 years and is a naturalised Iraqi citizen.
"Please help me, please help me," Mrs Hassan was shown saying while crying in the video.
"This might be my last hour."
"Please, the British people ask (Prime Minister Tony) Blair to take the troops out of Iraq and not to bring them here to Baghdad.
"Please, please I beg of you, the British people, to help me ... I don't want to die like Bigley," she said, referring to British hostage Kenneth Bigley, who was decapitated by his captors earlier this month.
The identity of her kidnappers is not known, although Dubai-based Al Arabiya television broadcast a video of her, apparently supplied by captors, who did not make demands.
"We hope she will be released, we are doing our best, we are praying for her and we are definitely doing our best to release her," Mr Allawi told the US cable broadcaster.
"She is a very fine lady, she is a very dignified lady and she has helped Iraq a lot and it is a very shameful thing that this happens in Iraq."
Mr Allawi also said "time is running out" for insurgents in Fallujah.
"We intend to ensure that we are doing everything possible and whatever it will take to make this country safe," he said.
Mr Allawi took over as interim prime minister after US-led troops toppled former leader Saddam Hussein.
Fox also asked Mr Allawi about a recent New York Times report that Fallujah insurgents were more numerous than previous estimates of 2,000 and may number 20,000.
"We fought a much [more] formidable force, which was Saddam and his people who systematically killed the Iraqi people and attacked neighbors for years - the Kurds.
"So, whether it's 2,000 or 3,000 or 10,000, that's not going to frighten the Iraqi people," he said.
--------
Why it's different in Basra
By Hugh Sykes
23 October, 2004
BBC, Baghdad and Basra
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/3944741.stm
After spending time with the American First Cavalry in Baghdad and the British army in Basra, Hugh Sykes gives his views on how their different approaches have influenced the attitudes of local people towards the military.
US Solider in a Humvee
I have been in Iraq for a fortnight but I have not really been in Iraq at all.
I have been in occupied Iraq, in the back of a US Army Humvee with men armed with pistols, rifles, machine guns and shot guns. They are good for "bad guys who get too close".
Top Cover for the Humvee stands with his head and shoulders out of the roof, and is mostly a traffic cop as Humvee Man forces his way through the Baghdad traffic, sounding his horn and shouting at other drivers at roundabouts and intersections. "Hey! Get out of the Way! You! Stop!"
Iraqi drivers stop, and swerve, and pull over to the side, and the Humvee rushes on.
This is all justified, they say, because of the acute danger of VBIEDs - Vehicle-Born Improvised Explosive Devices. That is, car bombs.
But I believe this is a vicious circle of their own making, that much of the hatred of the Americans that is now violently expressed was provoked by their ignorant disrespect of decent people.
Shifting attitudes
The first time I was in a crowd of Iraqis, they were chanting a rather peaceful demand: "Give us security, give us jobs".
US Marines loomed over the mostly middle-aged demonstrators with pistols and rifles pointing straight at their increasingly resentful faces.
I witnessed this deadly shift take place.
Over a very few days, the guarded welcome that greeted the "liberation" turned sour and Iraqis protested that the invaders had blundered in and protected only themselves and a few key locations like the oil ministry, and had stood to one side as looters had the time of their lives.
Many of us reported at the time that there seemed to be no plan for the peace, that the occupying forces appeared to be out of control.
Retired American General Jay Garner, the first civilian administrator in post-war Iraq, says this was true.
He told the New York Times this month that the Bush administration did not "have their heads in the post-war game".
A statue of Saddam is pulled over in Firdus Square, Baghdad
An intelligence officer with the US marines admitted to the same paper: "We did not have the force levels to keep the insurgency down."
And yet, amazingly, exactly a week after the fall of Saddam Hussein's statue in Firdus Square, in the middle of this palpable anarchy, US Army commanders in Baghdad were receiving instructions from Washington to prepare to withdraw troops.
What they needed was more troops.
There were not even enough to seal the borders to stop the Zarqawis and al-Qaeda from coming in.
An Iraqi engineer told me this week: "The Americans have made this land truly fertile for terrorism."
With images of severed heads never far from their minds, Western contractors and journalists are now terrified of kidnapping and live in heavily protected camps and compounds, and travel about in armoured vehicles.
Outside the fortifications
Through the metal grill and the bullet-proof glass of the Humvee, I can see Iraq somewhere out there.
General Jay Garner
Blurred snapshots as we speed past women walking in the dust in their black chadors.
A man standing in the shade of a tree drinking a can of lemonade. Workmen sweeping the street.
A busy fruit and vegetable market.
Children with satchels chatting happily on their way to school.
Men digging a trench for a new water main, sewage lying in pools along the road.
Traders selling fridges and TVs from the pavement, and incessant traffic with many new cars amongst the ubiquitous battered old Toyotas.
Also, so many satellite TV dishes on so many roofs that some of the old apartment blocks look like MI6 or CIA electronic listening stations.
Softly, softly
Down with the British in Basra it's all a bit different.
I am still incarcerated - but in an armoured Land Rover.
And we stop here and there, and get out, and talk to people.
Out on patrol the British soldiers sling their helmets from their belts and wear soft hats and buy cans of Coke from street stalls. Softly, softly.
A British soldier talks to local residents
Since the Moqtada al-Sadr uprising in August was suppressed, Basra has been pretty quiet.
Brigadier Andrew Kennet believes that "softly, softly" pays off.
He told me "I did not raze Basra to the ground, but I could have done."
And he says he received a delegation of local people thanking him for targeting the insurgents and not punishing the whole population.
An interpreter at a British base imagines the vehicles the British and the Americans use as a metaphor for the different approaches.
"The Humvee - sinister, aggressive," he said. "The Land Rover - friendly, comfortable and wise."
But it is the troops inside them that count.
And it was inside a Humvee that I met Mike.
A kind and thoughtful man who does not shout at Iraqis.
And in the dark in the Humvee after a long day in Baghdad, Mike handed me a torch and a small dusty book.
His family photo album.
Trying to hold the beam steady in the back of the bouncing armoured car, I looked at pictures of his wife and of their baby son Alexander - born this year, on 11 September.
-------- israel / palestine
PM to dismiss ministers, deputies who vote against pullout
Haaretz
October 23, 2004
By Mazal Mualem and Avirama Golan,
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/491503.html
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon will dismiss ministers and deputy ministers who vote against the disengagement plan in the Knesset vote next Tuesday.
Sources close to Sharon said Thursday that all ministers and deputy ministers must be loyal to government decisions, and that a vote against the plan, abstaining from the vote, or not being present in the Knesset plenum at the time of the vote for will be considered a breach of their collective responsibility as part of the government.
Likud "rebels" said in response that they do not fear the dismissal of ministers and their deputies, and noted that even those who are dismissed will continue to serve as MKs, and will continue to oppose the disengagement plan.
Shas chair: No party support for disengagement
Shas Chairman Eli Yishai said afternoon that the ultra-Orthodox party will not the disengagement plan when it comes to a vote in the Knesset next week, Israel Radio reported.
But Yishai, who made the announcement after talks with Sharon, said that the party's spiritual leader, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, was still undecided whether he would tell Shas MKs to abstain from the vote on the plan to withdraw from the entire Gaza Strip and evacuate four settlements in the northern West Bank.
Sharon had concentrated his efforts on Shas in the hope of ensuring a majority for the Knesset vote. Sharon's aides were also trying Thursday to persuade the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party to abstain in the vote.
While Sharon appears to have a majority among the Knesset members even without Shas, he would like an overwhelming majority of support from a broad spectrum of parties - a move that would strengthen his public and political standing for the future.
Yishai said earlier Thursday that Yosef would not instruct his party's faction members to vote for the plan.
Speaking to Israel Radio, Yishai said he could "say with certainty" that Yosef "will not instruct us to vote for the plan."
However, the 11 Shas MKs may still abstain in next week's Knesset vote if Yosef doesn't explicitly instruct them to vote against it.
Minister Uzi Landau - the leader of the Likud "rebels" opposed to the disengagement plan - met with Rabbi Yosef on Thursday, six days before the bill mandating the Gaza pullout is presented to the Knesset for approval.
Landau told reporters he was impressed by Yosef's proficiency with the details of the plan, and even hinted that the rabbi would instruct Shas MKs to vote against the bill.
"Yosef is aware of the dangers associated with the plan," Landau said.
Yosef has also met twice with Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz on the pullout plan, most recently on Wednesday.
Shas sources stressed that the rabbi's position was purely halakhic [based on Jewish law] and not influenced by political considerations. At the same time, they said, he was aware that Shas followers were much closer in their hearts to the feelings of the settlers than they were to the positions of the secular left.
Mofaz showed Yosef maps during their Wednesday meeting, specified the details of the plan and answered the rabbi's questions pertaining to the possibility of a rise in the number of terror attacks following the pullout from Gaza.
Yosef also met Wednesday with Major General (res.) Ya'akov Amidror, an opponent of the disengagement plan.
Observers said Wednesday that the fact that Yosef is listening to different experts means he is keeping an open mind. Shas no longer carries decisive weight in the government but could perhaps return to the coalition if it abstained or voted in favor. Therefore Yosef could still order a surprise abstention, they said.
During Mofaz's talks with Yosef on Wednesday, their second round of discussions in seven days, the defense minister answered many questions, especially about the possibilities of increased terror in case of a unilateral withdrawal.
-------- nato
NATO sends troops to guard key election
October 23, 2004
By John Phillips
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041022-093812-7854r.htm
PRISTINA, Serbia and Montenegro - NATO dispatched extra troops to Kosovo for an election today seen by majority ethnic Albanians as a key step toward turning their U.N.-ruled protectorate into an independent nation.
The voting marks the second such opportunity for the people of Kosovo to elect representatives to an assembly since the United Nations took over administration of the province in 1999.
In preparation for the vote, NATO moved four extra battalions of peacekeeping soldiers into Kosovo.
The peacekeeping mission, known as Kfor, has been bolstered from 17,800 troops, including about 1,800 Americans, to 19,300 troops.
The reinforcements are designed to prevent a repetition of riots that caught Kfor and the U.N. administrators napping in March when 19 persons were killed, 29 Serbian Orthodox churches were burned and more than 800 Serbian houses were destroyed.
Around 4,000 people were driven from their homes as mobs of ethnic Muslim Albanians rampaged through Serbian villages.
More than 300 French troops parachuted into the province earlier this month in an extravagant display of NATO's resolve in the run-up to the polls.
Serbia's leaders are divided over the usefulness of the voting. But ethnic Albanian politicians see a chance to elect the team that will represent them at talks scheduled to start next year on defining Kosovo's final status - either as an independent nation or a autonomous province of Serbia and Montenegro.
Demands for independence from Belgrade to end Kosovo's current uneasy status as a province of Serbia and Montenegro have dominated the campaign of the ethnic Albanian parties, especially in the speeches of Kosovo's president, Ibrahim Rugova, leader of the Democratic League of Kosovo.
Ethnic Albanians make up 90 percent of Kosovo's population of 1.9 million people.
About 200,000 Serbs have left Kosovo since the U.S.-led NATO bombing campaign 1999, many of them preferring life in refugee camps in Serbia proper to reprisal attacks by Albanian extremists linked to the former Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).
Only about 80,000 Serbs remain but Serbia's prime minister, Vojislav Kostunica, insists that Belgrade will never surrender sovereignty over the province.
-------- prisoners of war
Further abuse at Abu Ghraib detailed
ACLU forces US to disclose records
October 23, 2004
Los Angeles Times
By Richard A. Serrano and Greg Miller
http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2004/10/23/further_abuse_at_abu_ghraib_detailed/
WASHINGTON -- Government documents made public Thursday provide fresh details about allegations of abuse by guards at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and other detention facilities in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
They include incidents in which a female prisoner was sexually humiliated by US military intelligence officers and a male inmate was shot at to force cooperation.
Meanwhile, a military judge has ordered two US Army reservists to stand trial in Baghdad for allegedly abusing Iraqi inmates at Abu Ghraib. Specialist Charles Graner Jr., 36, of Uniontown, Pa., will face a court-martial Jan. 7, while Sergeant Javal Davis, 26, of Maryland, is set to be tried Feb. 1.
The US documents, obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union under court order, include an internal FBI memo from last May that shows bureau employees based at Abu Ghraib witnessed a number of troubling incidents, but ''did not believe [that what they saw] rose to the level of misconduct or mistreatment."
The materials also describe the deaths of three Abu Ghraib prisoners, all reportedly of heart attacks, within days of each other in August 2003, weeks before the now-infamous episodes of photographed abuse began occurring at the prison.
Eight US soldiers have been charged with crimes in the Abu Ghraib scandal. Three have pleaded guilty, and one, Staff Sergeant Ivan L. ''Chip" Frederick II, was sentenced Thursday to eight years in prison.
The latest documents were released after a federal court directed the Defense Department and other government agencies to comply with the ACLU's request under the Freedom of Information Act for more details about alleged prisoner torture and abuse.
''After more than a year of stonewalling, the government has finally released some documents, though many are heavily redacted," said Amrit Singh, an ACLU staff lawyer. ''Unfortunately, the government continues to withhold records that would show who was ultimately responsible for the systemic abuse of detainees."
A preliminary review of some of the newly released material showed one case in which three US soldiers were each ordered detained for a month, fined up to $750, and reduced in rank for an incident in October 2003 in which a female Iraqi prisoner was partially stripped, abused, and threatened with more physical harm.
The woman told army investigators that she was in her cell at Baghdad's Al-Salhyat Prison when three military interrogators escorted her to an abandoned cell. While one soldier ''acted as a lookout," the woman said, another held her hands behind her back while the third soldier ''forcefully kissed" her. She said she then was taken downstairs and shown a naked Iraqi man.
-------- russia / chechnya
Russia Steps Up Antiterror Drive as Chechen War Spreads
October 23, 2004
By C. J. CHIVERS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/23/international/europe/23russia.html?pagewanted=all
GAMURZIYEVO, Russia - Magomed Khashiyev has died again, this time for real.
He was surprised and cornered, caught during a rare reunion with his wife and four children in a small single-story house here on Oct. 10. After years of eluding the authorities, he spent his last moments fleeing shoeless through a garden, as Russian commandos riddled him with automatic rifle fire, witnesses and his relatives say.
Russian authorities described Mr. Khashiyev as an Islamic terrorist loyal to Shamil Basayev, the Chechen who claimed responsibility for the worst acts of terror to strike modern Russia, including the siege at a public school in Beslan in September in which at least 344 people were killed.
Mr. Khashiyev trained in a terrorist camp in Chechnya, the Russians said, led a wing of Mr. Basayev's separatist group and helped organize attacks, including the seizure of the school. The unsparing pursuit of Mr. Khashiyev suggests Russia's invigorated efforts to hunt separatists after terrorist attacks shook the country this year.
The Russian security services, which erroneously announced at least once before that they had killed him, all but openly celebrated his death. "We feel satisfaction," said Maj. Gen. Ilya Shabalkin, spokesman for counterterrorism forces in the North Caucasus.
For all the Russian authorities' evident delight, the circumstances surrounding Mr. Khashiyev's death and the fate that has befallen his family provide insight into why Russia's war in the Caucasus has proved difficult to contain, much less win. It is a profile of the region's porous security and extensive familial connections, and of inhumanity and violence gone awry as the combatants tug each other ever deeper into war.
Mr. Khashiyev, 27, was not Chechen. He was born in what is now Ingushetia, the republic to Chechnya's west that has long supplied the war with Muslim fighters and has developed a potent anti-Moscow insurgency of its own. He waged underground war for years with the tacit support of his family, surviving in a tiny area where tens of thousands of Russian soldiers and intelligence officers are assigned.
For the family the hunt for him was a source of fear and fury. Mr. Khashiyev's relatives said that his mother's house was repeatedly raided over the last several years and that law enforcement officers often stole the family's possessions.
During an interrogation by the security services, one of Mr. Khashiyev's cousins was beaten to near infirmity, the family said, and another was abducted in a raid in September and has not been heard from since.
Moreover, the family said, the cousin who had been beaten was fatally shot in the assault that killed Mr. Khashiyev, and three women and seven children were struck by shrapnel. Another indignity came later, their families said, when armored vehicles knocked down the house in which Mr. Khashiyev had been trapped.
The destruction of life and property, conducted in a society bound by tribal codes of revenge, has been freighted with danger, his family said. "Probably the goal of the authorities is to scare people," said Magomed Tsurova, an Ingush police officer and brother-in-law of Said Khashiyev, the cousin who died with Magomed. "The result is quite the opposite."
The authorities' description of Magomed Khashiyev is of a man whose depravity knew few bounds.
They say he recruited suicide bombers, helped plan a raid in June in which rebels masqueraded as police officers and killed people who stopped for them, and worked to prepare the terrorists who seized the school in Beslan. He willingly risked his relatives' lives, traveling with his young children to shield him on heavily policed roads.
Little predicted such a course for his life. He was raised in Sleptsovsk, a village near the present Chechen border, a religious child who aspired to become a police officer, his family said.
He married in 1997. His wife, Khava Khashiyeva, said he seemed a normal man until the second Chechen war began in 1999. Then he changed. "He began to disappear," she said.
For five years, she said, Mr. Khashiyev kept a rebel's erratic schedule: home for hours or days, gone for weeks or months. No one knew when, or if, he would return.
Sometimes he sent men to his family with money or food, she said. But he never discussed politics or work with women, leaving her to wonder how he lived and what influenced his choices. Was he a nationalist? An Islamist? Both? "I asked him how he explained his absences," Ms. Khashiyeva said. "He said, 'It's just my business.' "
General Shabalkin said that through those years, Mr. Khashiyev was an active fighter, and attended a Chechen terrorist training camp run by Ibn al-Khattab, an Arab who was killed in 2002. Such associations would cost his family dearly.
Russian officers raided his mother's house at least 10 times, his family said, asking for his whereabouts while stealing money, jewelry, cellphones, electronic equipment and photo albums, according to letters the family wrote to the local prosecutor's office to demand investigations. "These were not searches," said another cousin, Asya Khashiyeva. "They were robberies."
The authorities wrote back that investigations were unnecessary, further enraging the Khashiyev clan.
As violence encircled him, Mr. Khashiyev seemed undeterred. He sometimes appeared at his mother's house, although this year he had not been home since March, several relatives said.
General Shabalkin offered a simple reason. At a meeting last year of an Islamic council led by Mr. Basayev, the general said, Mr. Khashiyev was promoted to run a faction of Ingush rebels and became busy with added responsibilities. The new rank also made him a priority suspect for the military and police.
On March 17, his relatives said, Russians swept into the home of Said Khashiyev, another of Magomed's cousins, and beat him for three hours, sometimes putting a phonebook against his head and striking it to deliver a wide, stunning blow. "All the time they asked, 'Where is Magomed?'" said one of Said's two wives, Fatima Khamatkhanova. Her husband limped for months afterward, she said.
On Sept. 3, hours before the siege in Beslan ended in carnage, masked Russians raided an auto shop operated by another of his cousins, Alaudin Khashiyev. Alaudin was abducted, witnesses said. Family members said they had complained to the Ingush government and law enforcement agencies. General Shabalkin and a spokesman for the Ingush administration said they knew nothing of it.
Mr. Khashiyev demonstrated his imperturbability and the gaps in Russian security once more on Oct. 8, when he arrived at his mother's house with Dzhabrail Kostoyev, a driver. His hair fell to his shoulders, his wife said. He wore a beard. He said they were going to find their own apartment.
Ms. Khashiyeva gathered their four children in the car, and the family passed across Ingushetia and arrived here that night, at a home rented by Said Khashiyev, his wives and three children.
Said Khashiyev's connections to Magomed are in dispute. General Shabalkin said he was an accomplice. Said's second wife said that he was guiltless and that there was tension between the men, exacerbated because Magomed had arrived with a pistol. "My husband was against giving him shelter," she said.
But tribal connections are strong in Ingushetia, and when Magomed said he needed a day to find an apartment, Said relented and let him in, she said. On Oct. 10 Magomed was still there. Said Khashiyev confronted his cousin again. "He asked Magomed to leave, to leave our family alone," Fatima Khashiyeva said.
It was too late. Russia's Federal Security Services, or F.S.B., had been tipped that Mr. Khashiyev was in the house, General Shabalkin said.
The raid began at about 6:20 p.m., when roughly 50 Russians surrounded the house, survivors and neighbors said.
The authorities say the men refused to surrender and a shootout ensued. Fatima said that her husband, Said, had been unarmed and that the men had tried only to flee.
This much is clear: shooting began, and Magomed and Said Khashiyev jumped out a window to the garden. A second surge of gunfire erupted.
Said was found dead beneath the window, his neighbors said. Magomed made it about 30 yards farther before he fell. Bullets had struck his right side and leg, his family said; one entered his brain behind the right ear.
Inside, the women frantically worked to protect the children, they say, covering them with rugs and lying atop them. Mr. Kostoyev ran to their room and told them he would jump out a window to escape.
They pleaded with him not to, as he might draw fire toward the children. He leapt anyway, they said. Gunfire resumed. A rocket later struck the building, injuring the women and children with flying glass, plaster and shrapnel, and bringing down the roof.
The families dug their way out. Two breast-feeding infants were among them. One, Fatima's 3-month-old son, suffered a shrapnel injury on his right cheek. The other, a 10-month-old girl, suffered a skull injury and went into a coma.
Mr. Kostoyev was arrested. The authorities said that he was being investigated for collaborating with terrorists and that he is giving evidence against them.
Critics of Moscow's policies in the Caucasus have warned that a paucity of justice or democracy is sustaining conflicts and risks fueling their expansion. As the Chechen war spreads, those who knew Mr. Khashiyev's career and its consequences for his family say Ingushetia now feels as if it might explode.
"People cannot take it," said Jaffar Khashiyev, a brother of Alaudin, the abducted man. "Even a stone, if water drips on it long enough, will crack."
-------- spies
CIA withdraws Iraq WMD claim
abc.net.au
October 23, 2004
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200410/s1226358.htm
The US Central Intelligence Agency has withdrawn its claim that a Danish company sold equipment to Iraq that could be used to make weapons of mass destruction, Denmark's foreign ministry said on Friday.
The CIA has posted a message on its website explaining that the allegation against the Danish company Niro, which belongs to the German group GEA, was based on incorrect information, and it has therefore withdrawn its claim, the ministry added.
The CIA report, entitled "Possible Breaches of UN Sanctions by Danish Companies", said Niro sold equipment to Iraq in 2001 that could be used to make biological weapons, in violation of a United Nations embargo against Iraq.
The Danish Government had investigated the claim and, when its probe turned up nothing, asked the US authorities on Thursday for an explanation.
"I'm pleased that the CIA has now withdrawn its allegation on its website. Niro is no longer accused of having violated the UN sanctions against Iraq," Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller said in the statement.
The statement on the CIA website reads: "The report implies that Iraq procured the spray dryers with precise atomiser nozzles from Danish company Niro Atomiser Inc in 2001. That is incorrect. In fact, the spray dryers and nozzles were procured in the late 1980s, well before UN sanctions were in place on such equipment".
The managing director of Niro had repeatedly rejected the claim.
"We have not delivered one single screw to Iraq since 1989 when we supplied a drier system used in the industrial ceramics industry," Niels Graugaard told the Danish financial daily Boersen earlier this week.
-------- war crimes
U.N. Refuses to Assist Iraqis With War Crimes Trials
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 23, 2004; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55469-2004Oct22.html
UNITED NATIONS, Oct. 22 -- The United Nations has refused a U.S. request to assist Iraqi judges and prosecutors seeking to try former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and his top lieutenants for war crimes, saying that a new Iraqi special tribunal includes a death penalty provision opposed by the United Nations and fails to meet the minimum standards of justice.
The Bush administration appealed to the U.N. war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia to send some judges and prosecutors to a training conference in London for members of the Iraqi tribunal. But U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan's office sent the court's chief prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, a letter barring her staff from attending the week-long conference, which ended Monday, according to U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric.
"The United Nations noted that serious doubts exist regarding the capability of the Iraqi special tribunal to meet relevant international standards," Dujarric said at a news conference at U.N. headquarters Friday. He added that Annan maintains that "U.N. officials should not be directly involved in lending assistance to any court or tribunal that is empowered to impose the death penalty."
The United Nations was constrained in its ability to cooperate with the court without a "specific mandate" from "a competent political organ," such as the U.N. Security Council or the General Assembly, Dujarric said.
The decision was a blow to the United States and Iraq's interim government, who had hoped that a U.N. imprimatur on the court's activities would lend it greater international credibility. In a meeting at U.N. headquarters last month, interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi personally appealed to Annan to support Iraq's efforts to bring the country's former leaders to justice. But Annan warned Allawi that the United Nations has serious concerns about the statute that established the court, which allows the death penalty, according to a U.N. official.
The U.N. decision, which was first reported in the New York Times, irked Bush administration officials, who argued that U.N. participation in the conference could help the Iraqis develop the expertise to conduct fair trials that the United Nations claims they lack. They also noted that the United Nations has supported judicial reform efforts in countries that have the death penalty, including Rwanda and Afghanistan.
A senior U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing diplomacy, said the Iraqi tribunals would proceed without U.N. support, with the first trials against Hussein's associates starting in the new year.
State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said Friday that a June 2004 Security Council resolution authorizing Annan to strengthen the rule of law in Iraq provides a legal basis for the United Nations to support the tribunal. "There is in our view a clear mandate for their involvement, not only in the political future of Iraq but also in contributing to the rule of law," Ereli said.
The Iraqi tribunal was established in December 2003 by the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council to prosecute former Iraqi officials responsible for the worst abuses under Hussein's rule. Since the Iraqi-led court's inception, international legal experts have questioned the ability of Iraq's lawyers, who have little experience in handling complex war crimes cases, to conduct a fair trial.
The court's founding statute has also alarmed U.N. lawyers and independent human rights advocates who say that it denies the accused access to an attorney during interrogations and court appearances, and that it inherits a 1971 Iraqi judicial code that permits the admission of testimony obtained through coercion.
"There are real problems in the tribunal's statute that contradict U.N. fair trial standards," said Richard Dicker, an expert on the tribunal at Human Rights Watch. Dicker said many of the conflicts now arising over the court could have been settled last year if the U.S.-led military coalition had allowed the United Nations to participate in the statute's drafting.
"They refused to do that," Dicker said. "Now they are looking to bring in the U.N. at the second-to-the-last scene in the play, when everything has already been decided."
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts / tribunals
WTC Rescue Hero Sues Bush and Others under RICO Statute
YubaNet.com
23 October 2004
By Philip J. Berg, Margaret Atheling Rowe
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/102404K.shtml
On September 11, 2001, William Rodriguez, a maintenance worker at the World Trade Center in Manhattan, single-handedly rescued fifteen people. The only employee with the master key to the North Tower staircases, he led firefighters up the stairs, unlocking doors as he went, aiding in the evacuation of hundreds of additional people who, but for his efforts, might have perished. Although his job description did not include saving lives, Rodriguez re-entered the building three times after the first plane struck, and was the last person to exit the North Tower alive. He survived the collapse of the North Tower by diving beneath a fire truck to avoid the avalanche of concrete and steel. After onsite treatment for his injuries, Rodriguez plunged right back into rescue efforts at the site. At dawn the next morning, Rodriguez returned to Ground Zero from his home in Jersey City, to continue to aid in rescue efforts.
Later, Rodriguez became an unofficial spokesman for survivors, among other things helping to secure an amnesty for undocumented aliens, many of them Latinos, and in the creation of the World Trade Center Memorial Fund. Although he lost his job of 19 years and his means of livelihood - even falling into homelessness for a time - Rodriguez has continued in the three years since 9-11 to continue his work in honor of the heroes and the victims of that awful day, as president of the Hispanic Victims Group, Director of the 9/11 United Services Group, and member of the Family Advisory Council of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation.
Now, this native of Puerto Rico and remarkable American hero is taking his 9-11 activism to an even higher level. He has commenced, as Plaintiff, a federal court lawsuit against George W. Bush, Richard B. Cheney, Donald H. Rumsfeld and others alleging that they and others were complicit in the 9-11 attacks, and either planned the attacks, or had foreknowledge of the attacks and permitted them to succeed, in order to exploit a "New Pearl Harbor" to launch wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. (The phrase "New Pearl Harbor" comes from a declaration of principles by the neo-conservative "Project for the New American Century," in which it is proposed as an event needed to steel American public opinion to support the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and U.S. military domination of the Middle East.)
Attorney Berg acknowledges that Rodriguez's action will shock and offend many Americans. But he urges critics to read the detailed complaint, posted on the internet at www.911forthetruth.com, before forming conclusions. "The 'Official Story' of what actually took place on 9-11 is a lie," Berg flatly maintains. "We do not pretend to have put together a full and definitive account of how, and by whom, the attacks were carried out. But information reported in mainstream media, and viewed in the light of common sense and the laws of physics, demonstrate that the 'Official Story,' examined closely, is not credible. The 'Official Story' contains an alarming number of inconsistencies and implausibilities. The major media have reported many of the raw facts, but have studiously avoided analysis, because doing so would reveal that the government is lying to us. The 9-11 Commission, a suspect collection of government and intelligence insiders, restated without question or examination all essential elements of the 'Official Story' of the actual events of 9-11. It failed almost completely to refute, or even to mention, the great body of evidence that suggests the 'Official Story' cannot be true, and it failed completely to hold anyone accountable. From the foregoing facts, it ought to be obvious that a cover-up, or a "limited hang-out" admitting only bureaucratic mistakes for which no one is to be held accountable, has taken place and is continuing."
Berg maintains that many prominent figures in politics, the military and the mass media consider the 'Official Story' of 9-11 to be untrue. But while the truth is emerging bit by bit, thanks to anonymous whistleblowers and researchers posting on the internet, to date no one with the stake in being a Senator, a Presidential candidate, or a media celebrity has found the courage to risk being ridiculed as a "tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorist." Berg points out that the only Senator who has dared to publicly question even parts of the 'Official Story," Senator Mark Dayton of Minnesota, has received threats ominous enough to impel him to shut down his Washington, D.C. office until after the coming election.
"Some facts cannot be denied," says Berg. "Clearly, 9-11 was carried out by more than one person. Therefore, by definition there was a conspiracy. What we're arguing is that the true conspirators have abused their enormous power and the trust of the American people to concoct and to sell to the world a false conspiracy theory, to justify war and mass murder for economic and political gain. Since the neo-cons, allied with the President, said in almost so many words that they wished for a New Pearl Harbor, why dismiss out of hand an allegation that they used their undeniably sufficient power to actually bring it about? Why has there been no full and transparent investigation? Indeed, isn't it shocking that the federal government grabbed up all of the physical evidence, and that no police authority has conducted a true criminal investigation into 3,000 homicides? Instead of due process of law, government officials and the mass media convicted Osama bin Laden, and had names and photos of his 19 accomplices on the internet, literally within hours of the attacks. The truth is that there is no definitive evidence that there were any Arabs on those planes, and even less proof concerning the supposed identities of the alleged hijackers." Berg notes too that a poll taken by the respected Zogby organization in August 2004 disclosed that half the population of New York, including such unlikely "conspiracy theorists" as those who identify themselves as "very conservative" and as Evangelical Christians, believe the federal government had foreknowledge of the attacks, and knowingly failed to prevent them.
Asked why he decided to bring this controversial lawsuit, Rodriguez explains that, having survived the World Trade Center disaster when so many did not, he feels he must learn the truth of what happened on that day. "If what the government has told us about 9-11 is a lie," he says, "somebody has to take action to reveal the truth. Since that plane hit the North Tower on 9-11, like it or not my life's meaning has become to reduce the number of victims, and the amount of suffering from those attacks. If suing President Bush is what I have to do to accomplish that, so be it." Rodriguez notes that the events of 9-11 are directly related to the deaths of thousands of people in two ongoing wars, attacks on Constitutional liberties in the United States, the abuse and torture of detainees around the world, and the use by the United States of depleted uranium and other weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Admitting the obvious - that his client's legal fight against powerful government figures is of the "David versus Goliath" variety - Berg, a former deputy attorney general in Pennsylvania, invites both financial support for his efforts, as well as assistance from volunteer attorneys.
The action, filed in the U.S. District Court in Philadelphia on 10/22/04, is Rodriguez v. Bush, et al., Civil Action No. _04 CV 4952_.
-------- homeland security / national intelligence
Foreign flight students checked
October 23, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20041022-115911-3837r.htm
The federal government has begun conducting background checks on all foreigners seeking to attend U.S. flight schools, the Transportation Security Administration said yesterday.
The expanded security measures, aimed in part at preventing potential terrorists from taking pilot lessons here as some of the September 11 hijackers did, now apply to any foreigner seeking flight training in the United States, not just those learning to fly larger aircraft.
Those who want to attend flight school for a second time - for certification to fly a different classification of aircraft, for example - will need to have their backgrounds checked again.
Previously, only those training on aircraft weighing 12,500 pounds or more had their backgrounds checked.
"Fortifying security by knowing who trains at these schools is an integral part of our mission to secure the homeland," said TSA chief David Stone, whose agency expanded the pool to include smaller aircraft on Wednesday.
The new rules follow the TSA's takeover of the program from the Justice Department on Oct. 5. All foreign applicants, including certified pilots, will have to undergo TSA checks starting Dec. 19.
The Justice Department has said 30,000 foreigners applied to U.S. flight schools last year.
Terrorism suspect Zacarias Moussaoui, the only U.S. defendant accused of participating in the al-Qaeda September 11 plot, was arrested a month prior to the attacks when he aroused suspicions at a flight school. One of the September 11 hijackers rented small aircraft several times in the summer before the attacks for practice flights.
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TSA Tightens Rules For Flight Training
Noncitizens Face New Scrutiny
By Sara Kehaulani Goo
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 23, 2004; Page A11
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55573-2004Oct22.html
The Transportation Security Administration said yesterday that it expanded a program to conduct security checks that could affect more than 100,000 foreign students seeking flight training in the United States and U.S. certified pilots who are noncitizens.
Flight schools will be required to submit a photograph and a $130 fee for every foreign student pilot so the TSA can conduct a "security threat assessment." Until this week, the government had not required the photograph or the fee for the 30,000 noncitizens who apply to flight schools in the United States each year. The new security checks will also apply to an estimated 85,000 U.S. certified pilots who are resident aliens if they seek additional training that would change their certification.
The TSA's action aims to prevent foreign terrorists from using U.S. flight schools for training, as terrorists easily did before hijacking four commercial planes on Sept. 11, 2001, and crashing them into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania. TSA spokeswoman Amy von Walter said flight school employees will also be required to undergo "security awareness training" offered through a TSA online course that would teach employees how to recognize suspicious activity.
The new measures follow enactment of a Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization law in December 2003 that transferred pilot security checks to the TSA from the Department of Justice. A law passed after the terrorist attacks had required security checks only for flight school students seeking to fly aircraft weighing more than 12,500 pounds, including large commercial airplanes.
"We've expanded the program so it applies to all non-U.S. citizens, regardless of what type of aircraft they're flying," TSA's Von Walter said.
The Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, which represents many flight instructors, criticized the new rules as bureaucratic and burdensome. The group said the measures will force flight schools to perform immigration and citizenship verification duties that the government should perform. Under the rules, flight schools would have to take a photo of each student and verify that the student's citizenship documents are authentic, then note that in a logbook.
"We have no problem with the intent of the law. It was created to make sure that foreign terrorists don't use our flight schools against us," said Chris Dancy, spokesman for the pilots group. "If TSA wants this, TSA should be doing it."
However, a group that represents flight schools said it welcomed the new rules, which substitute the logbooks for an earlier TSA proposal that schools keep citizenship records of students for five years. "We are pleased that the TSA agreed to this concept as it goes a long way towards easing the paperwork burden on the flight training community," Stan Mackiewicz, a lobbyist with the National Air Transportation Association, said in a written statement.
Dancy also said the pilots group opposes TSA's new requirement that all foreign-born legal residents who hold FAA pilot certificates undergo the security check if they seek to upgrade their license.
The new rules do not "acknowledge the security clearances they've already undergone to gain resident alien status," Dancy said.
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Gen. Myers bucks Bush over intelligence chief
October 23, 2004
From combined dispatches
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20041022-115919-5118r.htm
The chairman of the U.S. military's Joint Chiefs of Staff has asked lawmakers to give less budget authority to the national intelligence director than has been proposed by the commission that investigated the September 11 attacks and backed publicly by the White House.
Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers' apparent break with the White House came in an Oct. 21 letter, obtained by Reuters yesterday, lobbying in favor of a Republican proposal in the House of Representatives that would keep much of the power over the purse in the hands of the defense secretary.
"It is my understanding that the House bill maintains this vital flow through the secretary of defense to the combat support agencies. It is my recommendation that this critical provision be preserved," Gen. Myers wrote.
Gen. Myers' stance runs counter to the White House, which earlier this week issued its own letter to congressional negotiators backing the Senate's plan to give the new national intelligence director "clear authority" over much of the intelligence budget.
Democratic congressional aides said the mixed signals could undercut final negotiations over legislation to overhaul U.S. spy agencies as proposed by the commission that investigated the September 11 attacks.
Yesterday, the House-Senate conference on the intelligence reform bill failed to reach an agreement on the legislation, as four Republican senators came out in support of much fought-over immigration provisions in the House bill.
The Republicans urged that several provisions in the House version not be struck from the final bill, including one section related to asylum, which civil liberties groups aggressively oppose and the White House has raised "concerns about."
"We urge you to retain these provisions, which are based on the 9/11 commission's recommendations and which begin to close the remaining gaps in our immigration and travel systems that jeopardize our homeland security," the Republicans wrote in an Oct. 20 letter to Sens. Susan Collins, Maine Republican, and Joe Lieberman, Connecticut Democrat, who drafted the Senate version of the bill.
The letter, a copy of which was obtained yesterday, is signed by Sens. Charles E. Grassley, of Iowa, Jon Kyl, of Arizona, Jeff Sessions, of Alabama, and James M. Inhofe, of Oklahoma. It maintains the Senate version of the reform bill "does not adequately address" border security and terrorist travel recommendations made by the panel that investigated the September 11 attacks.
Among the provisions at issue is Section 3008 of the original House version, which would require individuals seeking asylum to produce corroborating evidence for their asylum justification. The Senate Republicans specifically defended the section as a way to "make it more difficult for alien terrorists to abuse our nation's generous asylum laws."
Rights groups argue otherwise. The section "would actually encourage repressive governments to label democracy activists and political opposition figures as 'terrorists,' by ensuring that anyone who is so accused would have a harder time finding protection in the United States," said Elisa Massimino, Washington director of Human Rights First.
Leaders of the House-Senate conference, meanwhile, indicated something of an impasse over the overall legislation yesterday. It remains to be seen whether a final version of the bill will reach the president before the Nov. 2 election.
"We still have some very contentious issues that we still have some differences to work through," said the conference's chairman, Rep. Peter Hoekstra, Michigan Republican, who replaced Porter J. Goss of Florida as head of the House intelligence committee after Mr. Goss was picked as the new director of the CIA.
While the House and Senate are still working out differences over the call for a new national intelligence director and National Counterterrorism Center, the biggest roadblock in the legislation apparently stems from Title III of the House version, which includes the immigration-related provisions.
In his letter, Gen. Myers said the budgets of the "combat support agencies should come up from the agencies through the secretary of defense to the national intelligence director" in order to ensure that "required warfighting capabilities are accommodated and rationalized."
He said appropriations - funding for the military approved by Congress - should also be "passed from the national intelligence director through the [Defense] Department to the combat support agencies."
Gen. Myers sent the letter to the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Duncan Hunter, California Republican, and other congressional negotiators.
In contrast, President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and the White House budget director, Joshua Bolten, told lawmakers in an Oct. 18 letter that "the administration supports the strong budget authority provided to the NID [national intelligence director]" in the Senate plan.
"To be effective, the NID must have clear authority to determine the national intelligence budget, strong transfer and reprogramming authorities, explicit authority to allocate appropriations, and the ability to ensure execution of funds by national intelligence agencies consistent with the direction of the NID," they wrote.
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No Direct Evidence of Plot To Attack Around Elections
By Dan Eggen and Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, October 23, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A55597-2004Oct22?language=printer
On Sept. 15, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and John E. McLaughlin, then acting director of the CIA, brought a special note of concern to their daily briefing with President Bush.
Fresh intelligence had arrived pointing to plans for a mass-casualty terrorist attack before Election Day, bolstering previous indications that such an assault was possible on U.S. soil, according to accounts of the briefing provided to Mueller's and McLaughlin's subordinates. What's more, intelligence officials told Bush, there was reason to believe that the plotters may already have arrived in the United States, according to the accounts. The new information led the FBI and other agencies across the government to launch a well-publicized campaign aimed at foiling potential plots before the elections, including hundreds of interviews in immigrant neighborhoods and aggressive surveillance of suspected terrorist sympathizers.
But five weeks after the effort began, U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials say they have found no direct evidence of an election-related terrorist plot. Authorities also say that a key CIA source who had claimed knowledge of such plans has been discredited, casting doubt on one of the earliest pieces of evidence pointing to a possible attack.
Intelligence officials stress that they continue to receive reports indicating that al Qaeda and its allies would like to mount attacks in the United States close to the Nov. 2 elections, and that such reports have been streaming in since terrorists blew up commuter trains in Madrid days before Spanish elections in March. Yet after hundreds of interviews, scores of immigration arrests and other preventive measures, law enforcement officials say they have been unable to detect signs of an ongoing plot in the United States, nor have they identified specific targets, dates or methods that might be used in one.
"We've not unearthed anything that would add any credence to talk of an election-related attack," said one senior FBI counterterrorism official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because authorities have been instructed not to talk publicly about the issue before the elections. "You can never say there is not a threat, but we have not found specific evidence of one."
Like so much of the war on terrorism, the possible election threat is distinctly alarming and maddeningly opaque, according to government officials. The situation provides a clear example of the challenges facing the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and other U.S. agencies as they wrestle with foes whose intentions, capabilities and identities remain unclear.
"We remain convinced that al Qaeda's allies and sympathizers are intent on striking in the U.S. homeland," said one U.S. intelligence official who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because the threat involves classified information. "But the time frame, as it always is, is ambiguous. If we get through the election, it's not like we can walk off the field."
"Until you find the Mohamed Atta of this plot," the official added, referring to the ringleader of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackings, "how can you stop?"
For their briefing with Bush, McLaughlin and Mueller had only fragments. They were concerned enough that they separated their report on the election dangers from the routine daily synopsis of threat reporting known as the "threat matrix," law enforcement sources said.
Yet the two men could not tell Bush who or where the suspected plotters were, whether they had evaded screening at U.S. borders, which targets they had in their sights, or what weapon they planned to employ. McLaughlin and Mueller could not, in fact, say for sure that the plot existed, the sources said.
A CIA spokesman declined to comment.
Mueller and Attorney General John D. Ashcroft had warned as early as May that al Qaeda may seek to strike close to the elections, but the reports had reached such a pitch in September that officials chose a large-scale response. Their plan called primarily for aggressive, and overt, surveillance of people already under scrutiny for possible terrorist ties. In a few cases, law enforcement officials said, the plan would lead to arrests before the bureau would otherwise have made them. In most others, the FBI and its joint terrorism task forces would do little more than "pull up in traffic and have people staring" at their subjects, as one official put it.
"Even if this guy is not likely to become a suicide bomber, will security benefit by letting the guy know we're watching him?" one official said. The hope is to "dissuade them from doing things they might otherwise have done," the official said.
At the Department of Homeland Security, an immigration unit has detained 120 foreigners so far this month on charges of being in the country illegally, including some who are named in databases of criminal or terrorism suspects, officials said yesterday.
At the FBI, about 2,000 counterterrorism agents have been assigned the task of conducting interviews and following up on leads, with instructions to report to 24-hour call centers in each field office. The disruption plan "is intense up to the election, but they're keeping command posts operational for longer than that," one official said.
The person in charge of the campaign is Patrick Cook, who was summoned to FBI headquarters the day after Bush's briefing, officials said. Reassigned on the spot from his job as a senior official in the Washington field office, Cook moved to the FBI's Strategic Information Operations Center with a mandate to run the national disruption plan.
"They told him his whole job is to prevent an attack before the inauguration," said a sympathetic colleague who works elsewhere. "Which is like being told, 'Make the sky turn purple.' "
The FBI's approach depends on "tripwires" to detect suspicious activity. The system, implemented last year and based on the behavior of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers, generates alerts if a known subject buys an airline ticket, rents a car or applies for a driver's license -- in his or her own name. The national criminal information database, consulted routinely when local police make a traffic stop, is now capable of sending a "silent hit" to the bureau if the driver is on a watch list.
"If they follow the model of the 19 [hijackers], we'd detect them, I can tell you that," said a high-ranking law enforcement official, who added that he is unable to discuss the screening methods in public.
The FBI and other agencies have also performed exhaustive searches of records on explosives permits, rental storage facilities, crop-dusting airplanes and other specialized areas that have been identified as potential targets of al Qaeda.
Yet law enforcement and intelligence officials frankly acknowledge that their information is limited. "People are so terrified because they can't see clearly anymore," a government counterterrorism analyst said. Because of the success in closing al Qaeda's sanctuary in Afghanistan, the analyst said, "we can't see the training camps, we've driven their communications further underground, and the operators have effectively disappeared."
Even as the government intensified its campaign, authorities discovered that one of the CIA sources they had relied on had fabricated his story, according to several counterterrorism officials. One intelligence official said the revelation "caused us to go back to square one and reassess where the plotting really is."
Other officials, however, played down the source's importance. "It's thought that what he had said was pure misinformation" designed to mislead the government, a different intelligence official said. But, the official added, that did not increase anyone's comfort level, because there are many other sources indicating that al Qaeda wants to launch an attack.
FBI and Justice Department officials said they are still keenly worried about the whereabouts and activities of seven fugitives who were named in May as possible suspects in the planning of an al Qaeda attack. One person of particular concern is Adnan G. el Shukrijumah, a Saudi-born radical raised in Guyana and the United States who has been identified as a valued operative by Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the al Qaeda lieutenant who is in U.S. custody.
Shukrijumah, 29, is a trained pilot who lived in Florida until he fled after the Sept. 11 attacks. He has a $5 million U.S. bounty on his head. U.S. authorities have linked him to numerous possible plots, including an abandoned scheme with U.S.-designated enemy combatant Jose Padilla to blow up U.S. apartment buildings with natural gas. The FBI has fielded numerous reported sightings of him from Morocco to Central America, but none has been confirmed.
"A number of the detainees, when asked 'Can you think of who would be sent to the U.S. for an attack?,' " have named Shukrijumah, a terrorism analyst with the government said. "He's a real threat. He speaks Spanish, English and Arabic; he's totally bought into the plan, and nobody -- but nobody -- knows where he is."
A key component of the disruption plan has focused on scrutinizing immigrants for violations. Among those arrested by Homeland Security in recent weeks was a 28-year-old Saudi who had dropped out of a U.S. university after enrolling last year, according to a news release from the department's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) bureau. The student, who was not identified, was stopped last year while trying to carry a stun gun onto a U.S. airliner, the release said.
Another former student, a 24-year-old Lebanese citizen, had his visa revoked by the State Department for national security reasons, the release said. He was working in a convenience store and was no longer in school, according to the release. It did not say where the former students were living.
The arrests were made by ICE's Compliance Enforcement Unit, which flagged the suspects with the help of three new systems for tracking visitors: a student database, a system for identifying arriving and departing foreigners, and a program that requires men from two dozen mostly Muslim countries to register.
Not all of the 120 arrests involved security risks. One of those listed, for example, was a South African woman who entered the country this year on a student visa but never enrolled. She was arrested and placed in deportation proceedings but was released with an electronic monitoring bracelet, the news release said.
Staff writers John Mintz and Mary Beth Sheridan contributed to this report.
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Intelligence Bill Unlikely to Be Ready by Nov. 2, Negotiators Say
By Walter Pincus and Charles Babington
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, October 23, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55411-2004Oct22.html
House-Senate negotiators, trying to resolve differences in bills to restructure the nation's intelligence community, announced minimal progress yesterday and conceded it will be difficult to complete the task before the Nov. 2 elections.
House Republicans late in the afternoon delivered a compromise offer to Senate conferees and House Democrats.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), head of the Senate negotiating team, said in a telephone interview from her home state that the House GOP proposals will be discussed this afternoon by Senate conferees and a counterproposal will be drafted.
She also said there was agreement that negotiations should first focus on getting agreement on the new national intelligence director (NID) and a national counterterrorism center before taking on other issues, including the House Republicans' controversial immigration proposals.
At a meeting with reporters yesterday afternoon, the conference chairman, Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), said House and Senate leaders probably have until Monday to summon the nation's lawmakers back to Washington in time to pass a bill before the election.
That would require a dramatic breakthrough in negotiations over the competing 500-page bills, after a slow start to the talks. With no plans to meet over the weekend, the House-Senate conferees offered little concrete hope for prompt enactment of a law to reshape the government's approach to intelligence and anti-terrorism efforts, the top priority of the Sept. 11 commission report released in July.
Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), one of the chief negotiators, told reporters yesterday that although she remains hopeful, "the clock is running out to get action before the election" and that " I also am pessimistic that after the election we will have the momentum we have now."
Rep. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), another conferee, said that "there's still a chance" for a bill before Nov. 2 "but the chance is beginning to be fleeting."
At the afternoon Capitol news conference that included Harman and the conference committee's top two senators, Hoekstra, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said that "we still have some very contentious issues" to resolve.
The conferees said the first major sticking point involves the degree of control the intelligence director would have over determining the budgets of Pentagon intelligence-collecting agencies and how that money is spent.
Under the Senate bill, the new director would determine the annual budgets for these intelligence-gathering agencies and manage the budgets' execution. The House bill would make the director's budgetary powers more advisory to the defense secretary in the case of agencies housed in the Pentagon.
House Democrats have embraced the Senate version, as have members of the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission.
House Armed Services Chairman Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), who is a conferee, is heading the effort to modify the Senate's language on the director's authority when it comes to the budgets of the three major intelligence-collecting agencies. They are the National Security Agency (NSA), which intercepts electronic communications); the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which develops and operates intelligence satellites; and the National Geo-Spatial Agency (NGA), which does imagery analysis and mapmaking.
Armed with a letter received yesterday from Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Hunter is saying the defense secretary must keep control over the budgets of the NSA, NRO and NGA because the intelligence they collect has direct military value to the war fighter.
But the CIA director, in his role as director of central intelligence (DCI), uses these agencies to collect national intelligence used for policymaking and the covert war on terrorism, and therefore as DCI he has a say in their budgets.
Saying he wants to "protect the lifeline" through which the intelligence from these agencies' satellites reaches troops on the ground, Hunter is arguing that the Senate language must be changed.
In addition to developing the budgets, he wants the money approved for those agencies to flow back down through the intelligence director to the defense secretary, who would continue to have control over the "execution" of intelligence programs.
"It has to stay within the chain of command," Hunter said in a interview yesterday. "You can't have the NID directing a Pentagon agency's operation without it going back through the [military] chain of command."
In his letter, Myers said it is "critical" that the "budgets of the combat support agencies should come up from the agencies through the Secretary of Defense to the National Intelligence Director." And, he added, "it is likewise important that the [funds] are passed from the National Intelligence Director through the Department to the combat support agencies."
Hunter said, "I think we are making progress," adding that the compromises in the Republican proposal should be acceptable to the Senate.
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FBI Probes Leads on Election Terror Plot
October 23, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Terror-Threat.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- FBI investigators have made new arrests and developed leads that reinforce concerns that terrorists plan to strike around the presidential election, officials said Saturday, even though the CIA has discredited a person who told its agents of such a plot involving al-Qaida.
A senior FBI official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said some of the leads were culled from interviews with thousands of individuals that agents have conducted in the Muslim community.
The official would not be more specific, but said the FBI continues to have misgivings about possible al-Qaida intentions to launch an attack with the goal of affecting the elections.
Several people have been taken into custody recently on charges not related to terrorism, but officials are investigating whether they may have been involved in terror activities, said another law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
As for the person who warned the CIA, at least some of that individual's reporting no longer is seen as credible, said a U.S. intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity. The official stressed, however, that a number of other sources point to terrorist activity around the election season.
The official also said no concrete plot has been discovered so far with specific mention of time, place, method or identity of would-be attackers.
James Carafano, a homeland security expert with the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation, said there's little doubt that al-Qaida wants to send a message with an attack.
``I think they're probably less concerned with affecting the outcome of the election, whether Bush or Kerry wins, but it would be more prestigious, the capability to do something before the election and really undermine the confidence of the United States,'' he said.
Top government officials have warned since the spring about al-Qaida's desire to attack during the election with the hope of orchestrating something similar to the March commuter train bombings in Madrid. The bombings, which killed more than 190 people, were a factor in the ouster of Spain's former ruling party.
The FBI has partnered with American Muslims and others as part of what the agency describes as a prevention plan aimed at disrupting an attack. Thousands of agents from bureaus across the country are participating in the effort.
FBI agents have interviewed thousands of people considered possible sources of information as well as about 10,000 operators of self-storage facilities, which are considered likely places to hide bomb-making materials or other items that could be used in an attack.
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Kerry Vows Zealous U.S. Terror Hunt, Recalls Vietnam
October 23, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-campaign-kerry.html
PUEBLO, Colo. (Reuters) - Democratic presidential nominee and Vietnam War veteran John Kerry tried to burnish his national security credentials on Saturday by vowing to hunt down terrorists with the same energy he used to pursue the Viet Cong.
The Massachusetts senator also kept up his attack on President Bush, accusing his Republican rival of allowing Osama bin Laden to ``walk out of the back door.''
``This president keeps going around the country trying to scare people,'' Kerry told thousands of supporters at an outdoor rally in Pueblo. ``He talks about only one thing. The only thing he wants to talks about is terror, the war on terror, national security.''
``If that's the debate he wants to have, I'm prepared to have that debate because I can wage a better war on terror than George Bush has.''
Kerry and Bush have stayed on the offensive since their final debate 10 days ago, trying to fire up core supporters and reach out to a small band of undecided voters in states like Colorado, who could decide the election on Nov. 2.
Both Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have tried to raise doubts about Kerry's ability to fight the war on terror launched after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, suggesting he would not pursue terrorists aggressively enough.
``With the same energy ... I put into going after the Viet Cong and trying to win for our country, I pledge to you I will hunt down and capture or kill the terrorists before they harm us,'' Kerry said. ``And we will wage a war on terror that makes America proud and brings the world to our side.''
IN THE MIDST OF WAR
A decorated U.S. Navy lieutenant who served on Swift boats in Vietnam's Mekong Delta, Kerry has drawn on his experiences -- and testimonials from his crewmates -- to help reassure voters who might be concerned about changing commanders in chief in the midst of a war.
He scoffed at Bush's tough talk on terror, but did not repeat the suggestion he made on Friday night that if he had been in the White House, Osama bin Laden would be dead or in jail.
Kerry said Bush had allowed bin Laden -- whose al Qaeda group carried out the Sept. 11 attacks -- to escape in Afghanistan by not using U.S. troops to hunt him down in the mountains of Tora Bora.
``When this president had an opportunity to go capture Osama bin Laden or kill him in the mountains of Afghanistan, he did the same thing with that job that he did with your jobs,'' Kerry said. ``He outsourced it to Afghan warlords and Osama bin laden just walked out of the back door.''
Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt accused Kerry of hypocrisy, saying he had praised the U.S. military's actions at Tora Bora when the fighting was taking place.
``But when the election is 10 days away and Kerry smells a political opportunity, that same battle is the first thing he criticizes.''
Kerry rebuked Bush for diverting money and troops from the war on terror to the invasion of Iraq and promised never to take his eye off the ``real targets,'' al Qaeda and bin Laden.
``A few months later the president was asked, 'well, where's Osama bin Laden?' And after having told America this is the most important goal of the country, you know what he did? He said 'well, I don't know, I'm not really that concerned, I don't think about him that much.'''
Kerry campaigned in Colorado, a state leaning for Bush but one where the Democrat is making a concerted push.
Although he devoted the first part of his speech to security, Kerry hit his opponent hard on pocketbook issues like jobs, health care and Social Security while trying to win over undecided voters and Hispanics with an optimistic message of his own.
``It's time for us to join together to unite America,'' he said. ``To come together around the ideals and hopes and aspirations of the American people, not the fears.''
-------- POLITICS
The envoy silenced after telling undiplomatic truths
23/10/2004
By Robin Gedye
telegraph.co.uk
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/10/23/nenv23.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/10/23/ixhome.html
It is clear when you meet Craig Murray, suspended as ambassador to Uzbekistan for speaking out on human rights, that he is not the Foreign Office type.
He opens the door to the top-floor flat in London Docklands, where he is staying, in an orange T-shirt, loose-fit jeans and trainers.
He went to grammar school and Dundee University and, as he points out, cannot pronounce his Rs. But then, how could the FO refuse a candidate who came in the top three in his year when he took the Civil Service entrance exams in 1984.?
"I always felt a little uncomfortable in the Foreign Office," suggests Mr Murray with uncharacteristically diplomatic understatement.
As he speaks, Nadira Alieva, a 23-year-old Uzbek teacher and his girlfriend, flits through the room, her brown hair artfully backcombed, in tight jeans and a T-shirt that reads: "Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go to London."
Mr Murray continued: "I applied to scores of firms when I left university. What I wanted was to work in sales in the distillery industry but I didn't receive a single reply. It was only when I passed the Civil Service exams that I decided on the Foreign Office."
Mr Murray's brains ensured a rapid rise. Deputy high commissioner in Ghana, first secretary in Warsaw, second secretary in Lagos and, in August 2002 at the age of 43, Uzbekistan as the youngest serving British ambassador.
Two years later he has been hauled back to London and suspended on full pay after "losing the confidence of his colleagues" in one of the most embarrassing scandals to hit the august corridors of Her Majesty's diplomatic corps for many years. He faces a disciplinary inquiry and, almost inevitably, dismissal.
His crime is hard to pin down. Was it his telegrams to London which spoke in undiplomatic terms of torture and corruption, or was it his friendly press relations?
"While still in Tashkent I'd get two or three requests a week for interviews," Mr Murray explained. "And as is the rule, I routinely passed them on to London for clearance.
"Their response was always to tell the journalist, 'Mr Murray does not want to do interviews', which annoyed me because I really wanted to speak about the atrocities." Whatever else he has done, Mr Murray is a man of principle who felt compelled to detail the human rights abuses he saw in a country which, shortly before he arrived, had become America's New Best Friend in Asia.
Run by Islam Karimov, a post-Soviet apparatchik with a Stalinist mindset, Uzbekistan happens to border Afghanistan and was willing - for a large injection of United States money - to provide Washington with one of the region's largest air bases. Two months into his new posting, Mr Murray delivered a speech at the opening of new offices for the human rights organisation Freedom House that changed the tone of relations between London and Tashkent fundamentally and marked the beginning of the end of his career.
His mistake was to tell a stunned audience of diplomats, aid workers and Uzbek officials what they already knew. "Uzbekistan is not a functioning democracy, nor does it appear to be moving in the direction of democracy.
"The major political parties are banned; parliament is not subject to democratic election; and checks and balances on the authority of the executive are lacking," he said.
One of those present said the tension in the room could have been cut with a knife.
Unfortunately for Mr Murray, the repercussions extended far beyond Uzbekistan's frontiers. In the Foreign Office there was total confusion. The speech had been authorised but clearly no one had realised that it would cause such offence.
While the official line insisted that Mr Murray "accurately reflects our concerns", there was a sudden awareness that London had a problem. Other incidents followed. Mr Murray spoke in public of the absence of reform and freedom of speech and about repression. The British embassy, seen as a backwater under its previous ambassador, became a magnet for dissidents.
"They turned up at my door with broken teeth and burns from torture. Some would spend the night in my home. On one occasion the grandson of a dissident I had met was murdered within hours of my speaking to his grandfather. They left his body on the doorstep. His hands and knees had been smashed with a hammer. It was a warning not to speak to me," he said.
"Very little can prepare you for the brutality and viciousness of the Karimov regime. Most diplomats isolate themselves from it."
In August 2003, Mr Murray was called in to the Foreign Office on his way back to Tashkent after his summer holidays and confronted with a list of 18 charges of misconduct. These included accusations of drunkenness, womanising and "unpatriotic behaviour". He was asked to resign and refused.
Specifically, the charges claimed that he had seduced visa applicants in return for entry stamps to Britain, travelled through Tashkent to visit drinking dens in the official car "with the flag up" and driven an embassy Land Rover down a flight of steps to a picnic area In fact, Mr Murray cannot even drive.
All charges, bar one - that he was guilty of talking about the charges laid against him - were dropped through lack of evidence and Mr Murray was allowed to return to work. But far from silencing him, the attempt to blacken his name provided endless headlines. "I am stunned by their incompetence," said Mr Murray. "If they had pulled me out immediately it would have been in the papers for a couple of days and that's it."
Instead there were protests outside the British embassy and 15 British businessmen signed a letter to Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, supporting Mr Murray.
While in London awaiting the outcome of the charges against him Mr Murray had a nervous breakdown and was admitted to St Thomas's Hospital and put on suicide watch for 10 days. It was shortly after Dr David Kelly had died and there were fears that the official hounding of Mr Murray might see another fatality.
No sooner had Mr Murray returned to Tashkent, however, than the awkward memos to London resumed.
He was warned that he was being "unpatriotic" and newspapers started printing stories querying his sanity.
Clearly, someone was briefing against him. Close associates believe that if not the Foreign Office, it would have been MI6 - Mr Murray, after all, was jeopardising a strategic military outpost.
How could America continue to pay President Karimov $295 million per year if he was a major human rights offender? It couldn't, and funding was cut earlier this year because of human rights abuses.
British officials suggest that behind it all lies Downing Street, pressured by the Bush administration to silence the diplomatic embarrassment.
When Mr Murray fired off a memorandum to the Foreign Office last July suggesting that Britain's intelligence services were wrong to use information gleaned from torture victims, his masters threw caution aside. It was clearly time to silence him. He was stripped of his security clearance, making him ineffective as an ambassador.
Yet even this proved insufficient as Mr Murray continued to speak out. Last week, the memo was leaked to the Financial Times.
Because of the leak and a linked appearance on Radio 4's Today, Mr Murray was suspended from his post.
As he watches the rain sweeping up the Thames, Mr Murray might perhaps take comfort in the memory of Sir Henry Wotton, the British diplomat and poet who died in 1639 and who ruined his own career as James I's envoy to Venice by suggesting that an ambassador "is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country".
-------- budget
President Signs Corporate Tax Legislation
$143 Billion Measure Is Bush's Fifth Major Cut
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 23, 2004; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54128-2004Oct22.html
With no fanfare, President Bush yesterday signed into law the most sweeping corporate tax legislation in nearly two decades and the fifth major tax cut since he took office less than four years ago.
His signature means that Bush and the Republican Congress have fundamentally changed the U.S. tax code in ways large and small, for struggling individuals and corporate giants, bow-and-arrow makers and billionaires. Tax experts and academics remain deeply divided about the wisdom and effectiveness of these tax changes, but few disagree on their importance.
"Taken together, those policies and proposals represent a major shift in the structure, incentives, revenues and distributional effects of the American tax system," Brookings Institution economists William G. Gale and Peter R. Orszag wrote last week in the journal Tax Notes.
Since 2001, Bush has signed tax cuts of $1.35 trillion, $42 billion, $350 billion, $146 billion and $143 billion over 10 years. He has lowered income tax rates at every income level and carved out a new, 10-percent bracket from the 15-percent bracket that had been the lowest. The child tax credit was expanded from $500 to $1,000. Married couples, especially those in the middle-income range, received a significant tax break.
And the estate tax is scheduled to disappear in 2010. Already, Bush's cuts have raised the value of an estate exempt from taxation from $700,000 to $1 million. By 2006, an inheritance worth $2 million will be tax free.
But those tax cuts are only the most visible. The president has also raised the amount of child-care and dependent-care costs that can be written off a tax bill and has greatly expanded the amount of retirement savings that can be shielded from taxation. Taxpaying couples with incomes up to $160,000 can deduct thousands of dollars in tuition costs from their taxes until the end of 2005.
Businesses -- especially small businesses -- can deduct significantly more of their investments from their taxes. Investors have received a major cut in the tax rates on dividends and capital gains.
Until yesterday, large corporations complained that they had not been included in the tax-cutting bonanza. Not anymore: The new law showers businesses large and small with $143 billion in tax breaks over the next 10 years, with that cost offset by revenue raisers and loophole closures.
The $76.5 billion centerpiece of the new law effectively lowers the corporate income tax from 35 percent to 32 percent for domestic "producers" -- broadly defined to include old-line manufacturers, newspapers, home builders, even architectural and engineering firms. Also included is $42.6 billion of tax cuts for overseas profits.
Beyond those major provisions are hundreds of smaller measures that benefit restaurant owners and Hollywood producers; makers of bows, arrows and sonar fish finders; NASCAR track owners; and importers of Chinese ceiling fans. The law also includes a significant perk for some individuals, allowing taxpayers in states with no local income taxes to deduct sales taxes from their federal tax bill.
But all of this has come with a cost. All totaled, Bush has enacted more than $2 trillion in tax cuts since he took office. The budget deficit of $413 billion for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 was a record in dollar terms, surpassing the record of $377 billion set in 2003.
Even as the economy has recovered from the 2001 recession, taxes as a percentage of the economy have fallen for four straight years, to an estimated 16.2 percent of the gross domestic product in fiscal 2004. That is the lowest level since 1959.
To many conservative economists, such deficits are necessary to get the economy moving again. Edward C. Prescott, who won the Nobel prize for economics this year, commented after the prize was announced: "Tax rates were not cut enough."
A number of recent reassessments have given the tax cuts some credit for the recovery. Economists at Goldman Sachs wrote this week that households spent about two-thirds of the $38 billion in tax rebates mailed out in 2001, boosting growth in July, August and September of that year by 2.2 percent.
But other economists say the tax cuts could have been structured to have far greater economic benefits at lower long-term costs. They have also been fundamentally unfair, shifting more of the federal tax burden from the affluent to the middle class, critics say.
Although all income levels received a tax cut, a Congressional Budget Office study in August concluded that the share of total federal tax liabilities rose on the middle 20 percent of households from 10 percent, when the first tax cut was passed in 2001, to 10.5 percent this year. The share of the richest 20 percent fell from 65.3 percent to 63.5 percent.
-------- propaganda wars
Satellite TV station airs hatred of U.S. globally
October 23, 2004
By Sharon Behn
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041022-110020-1783r.htm
Every evening about 10 million people across the world are tuning into Al-Manar television, a satellite channel that lauds suicide bombers, accuses the United States of crimes against humanity and shows the Statue of Liberty as a gory, knife-wielding figure dripping blood.
They also hear a clear and violent call to arms against U.S. troops in Iraq and Israeli forces.
One video juxtaposes U.S. footage of soldiers with gory corpses and ends with a suicide bomber's belt exploding, all set to these lyrics: "Down with the mother of terrorism. American threatens in vain, an occupying army of invaders. Nothing remains but rifles and suicide bombers."
The State Department said it has long viewed Al-Manar as being funded and run by Hezbollah, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization funded by Iran, but based in Lebanon.
"We've always been deeply troubled by Al-Manar's programming and content, its anti-Semitic bias, incitement to violence, including support for insurrection in Iraq and terrorist actions against both the U.S. and Israel," said State Department spokesman Gregg Sullivan.
"Obviously Al-Manar's broadcasts, including its content here in the U.S., are something we continue to look at with the appropriate officials," Mr. Sullivan said.
The station's audience is mostly Shi'ite, but its reach is extensive. According to Steve Stalinsky, executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), Al-Manar is watched by Muslims as far away as Argentina, Canada and Europe.
In France there are legal proceedings to block Al-Manar from broadcasting there because of the station's Ramadan series last year that was seen as anti-Semitic, he said.
The Beirut-based popular 24-hour station offers a slick package of news and family programming interspersed with violent videos, such as images of dead Palestinian babies overlaid with the label "Made in Israel."
President Bush is frequently shown, most commonly in tandem with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. In one instance, Mr. Bush and Mr. Sharon are seen as the two sides of a spinning coin with the words "Two Faces, One Terrorism" on the screen.
Second only to Al-Jazeera in popularity in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Al-Manar has correspondents in Belgium, France, Iraq, Kosovo, Kuwait, Morocco, the Palestinian territories, Russia, Sweden, Turkey, Syria and the United States, said Avi Jorisch, who spent two years researching the station.
Mr. Jorisch said that some Al-Manar programming is available in the United States as part of a package of Arab-language news broadcasts.
Al-Manar, or The Beacon, denies it has called for suicide attacks against Americans, but is straightforward on its attitude toward Israel.
"We never called for suicide bombings against the U.S. forces," said one Al-Manar editor contacted by telephone in Beirut, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
"What was really said, by the secretary-general of Hezbollah, is what did the Americans expect? Did they think Iraqis would be receiving them with roses and flowers? Of course there would be suicide bombings," he said.
"When it comes to the Palestinian issue, no one will just sit idle when they are being killed and massacred," the editor said. "We don't claim to be objective when it comes to occupation and occupying forces."
MEMRI's Mr. Stalinsky said Al-Manar's Web site, available in both English and Arabic, was hosted by a company in Hoboken, N.J.
The television station also features short clips with photographs of suicide bombers popping up in Hollywood-type stars, as simulated bomb blasts occur behind them.
One short film features the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center towers and asks: "Why are some ruling out an American or Zionist as the perpetrator?" and "Why would Arabs and Muslims feel guilty about a crime that has not been proven to have been committed by them?"
Mr. Jorisch, a former terrorism consultant for the Department of Defense, has compiled a selection of Al-Manar clips with subtitles and presented them with a book called "Beacon of Hatred."
Although the station is funded by Hezbollah and is broadcast through seven satellite packages including IntelSat and EutelSat, a Pentagon spokesman said he had not heard of Al-Manar. Lt. Col. Barry Venable said he was "unaware of this channel."
"I'm surprised to hear that the Pentagon is not following this very closely, given the fact that Al-Manar is calling for suicide attacks against American soldiers in Iraq," said Mr. Jorisch, who now works for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
"The Department of Defense ought to be studying this issue very carefully," he said in a telephone interview in Washington.
In addition to IntelSat and EutelSat, the station is also broadcast by New Skies Satellites, NileSat, HispaSat, AsiaSat and ArabSat, providing the channel with a wide reach, Mr. Jorisch says in his book. He adds that some of Al-Manar's news programs are also available in the United States through California-based WorldLink TV.
"It's the propaganda arm of Hezbollah and mirrors the ideology of the organization," said Mr. Jorisch. "The U.S. government should consider taking action against any company that does business with Al-Manar and/or Hezbollah," he said.
--------
Bin Laden's Illusions - and Ours
antiwar.com
October 23, 2004
by Tom Engelhardt & Jonathan Schell
http://www.antiwar.com/engelhardt/?articleid=3839
"In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend - but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about Enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."' (Ron Suskind, "Without a Doubt," the New York Times Magazine, Oct. 17, 2004)
"[Before the war] intelligence officials were convinced that American soldiers would be greeted warmly when they pushed into southern Iraq, so a CIA operative suggested sneaking hundreds of small American flags into the country for grateful Iraqis to wave at their liberators. The agency would capture the spectacle on film and beam it throughout the Arab world. It would be the ultimate information operation... The agency believed that many of the towns were 'ours,' said one former staff officer who attended the session. 'At first, it was going to be U.S. flags,' he said, 'and then it was going to be Iraqi flags. The flags are probably still sitting in a bag somewhere.'" (Michael R. Gordon, "Poor Intelligence Misled Troops About Risk of Drawn-Out War," the New York Times, October 20, 2004)
What a world! Everyone his own auteur. Everybody from CIA agents and presidential political consultants to Osama bin Laden directing his own movie or unreality TV show. Of course, why should we be surprised? When it comes to salable products, illusion Hollywood-style has been up there with weaponry as a major American export success for countless years. And the world has paid attention. I can't claim that Osama bin Laden ever saw The Towering Inferno or any of the action-adventure dramas where subways barrel down streets, blimps threaten crowded stadiums, or terrorists unleash nuclear weapons on an unsuspecting world. But retro-fundamentalist though he might be, and no matter how often he invokes the Arabian peninsula of centuries ago, he's a distinctly modern man.
Without the camera - and the knowledge that, whatever you do wherever you are, the camera will somehow be there to catch the moment (viz. Abu Ghraib) and then the TV news will be ready and willing to play it again, and again, and again - the attacks of 9/11 would have been almost inconceivable. They would have made next to no sense. They were, after all, planned and organized as fodder for the TV news, as Osama's Hollywood-style spectacle, his "export" to be viewed by the world. Similarly, George Bush's illusion-based bubble-presidency had been planned and organized as an ongoing spectacle of controlled imagery from early on - from those imaginary mushroom clouds rising over our cities to that aircraft-carrier strut. After all, every publicly made argument for our little Iraqi war that won't end was an illusion, and that's stopped no one in the administration, then or now.
If there hadn't been an even grander illusion evoked by the event that began it all, nothing would have developed as it did. As columnist James Carroll writes this week in the Boston Globe: "After decades [following the A-bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki] of implicitly waiting for the mushroom cloud to appear over the nation, we saw the clouds of ash rising from the World Trade Center as a version of that horror. As I heard the scholar John Dower observe, the use of the term 'Ground Zero' in New York is an unconscious appropriation of the authentic Ground Zeros in Japan. That is why 9/11 traumatized us out of all proportion to the scale of destruction, which, while tragic, was hardly world-historic."
Or put another way: With the help of those camera-ready images, those unbearable shots of the two towers crumbling, and then crumbling again, and yet again, director Osama bin Laden, a man of exceedingly grandiose ambitions and distinctly limited resources, managed on the proverbial shoestring budget to create his own apocalyptic film in lower Manhattan (though not in Washington, where the low-slung Pentagon proved far less photogenic). With the help of a little dismally good luck in the category of destruction, he brought home nuclear-holocaust-style images that had until then, for Americans, been confined to a world of on-screen illusion; hence the almost immediate and blanket adoption of "Ground Zero" in the media and in everyday conversation for the site where the Twin Towers fell. And he did so with box-cutters, mace, and airplanes, not with WMD. What resulted was a fearful illusion that far exceeded a fearful reality, and so launched a presidency based on a principle of illusion onto the path of full-scale war in the Middle East, and into the sort of disaster - the sort of reality - that is painfully unphotogenic, that in the end no illusions can completely cover up.
Even in our world, reality still does have a way of biting back. If the Iraqis weren't quite in the mood to wave little flags, if reality (however buried in illusion) insists every now and then on making itself felt, well, that may be inconvenient indeed; but as Jonathan Schell indicates in the piece that follows, we're less far than we might imagine from a world in which an Orwellian formula like "illusion is reality" could indeed pass muster - as it already seems to in the White House.
Schell's piece, "Invitation to a Degraded World," is as well a preview for a new magazine, Final Edition, just being launched and closed down at one and the same moment. Its editor is Wallace Shawn and he's been kind enough to let me post the piece. In a world where nothing happens just once, the idea of a magazine that appears and disappears in the flicker of a single issue appeals to me. Of his magazine, Shawn writes in a brief introduction: "In confusing times and bad times, it seems natural to collect around oneself a group of friends and people one trusts, to try to figure things out. So that's what this is. It's not going to be an institution, because I don't think everything has to be an institution, and sometimes the impulse to make things permanent can be a symptom of the grandiosity that is part of our problem. So that's why this magazine is going out of business after its first issue and has therefore been given the name FINAL EDITION."
The sole issue of the magazine (being distributed by Seven Stories Press) includes, in addition to the Schell essay, a piece by Shawn, a Noam Chomsky interview (also done by Shawn), a Mark Strand poem, and a story about New York in the wake of 9/11 by Deborah Eisenberg. Tell your local bookstore to order it. Tom
Invitation to a Degraded World
by Jonathan Schell
Ever since Sept. 11, 2001, and the "war on terror" it occasioned, the very quality of public events - their grain, their tenor, their style, if you like - has seemed to undergo a certain deterioration, as if from that day forward history was being authored by a third-rate writer rather than a master, or was being compelled, even as it visited increasing suffering on real people, to follow the plot of a bad comic book. Not the representation of the events but the actual events, not the renderings of the characters involved but those characters themselves, not the telling of the story but the story itself - all seem to have become crasser, coarser, woven of shoddier materials.
The tone was perhaps set by the sudden appearance of Osama bin Laden, a mass murderer who came across at the same time as a comic-book, caricature villain - a man whom it would be impossible to take seriously if he had not killed so many people. The plan that he brought to fruition on Sept. 11 was lifted whole out of any number of action comics, video games, or disaster movies, most of which end up with buildings blowing up, the more the better. (For example, in the most recent Terminator movie, The Rise of the Machines, starring the current governor of California, scarcely any standing structure shown on camera survives for more than a few minutes, and the movie winds up with a nuclear holocaust.)
Bin Laden's choice of spectacle obviously was contrived to match this stock scene. He lacked any capacity even to slightly dent the military power of the United States, so he delivered his blow to the nation's psyche instead. What better means than to turn its most common fantasies into horrifying life? He was assisted in his aim by accident. The towers had been designed to withstand airplane crashes. Perhaps that's why, immediately after the attack, the authorities in New York failed to give timely warning that the towers might come down. Yet they did come down, and when they did the emotional power of the catastrophe was magnified a hundred-fold. The attacks alone would have been an event of the first order; but it was the belief-defying, heart-crushing fall of the towers that knocked history off its course. (What would the world be like now if the girders holding up the buildings had managed to withstand the fires? Would there have been a Camp X-ray in Guantanamo, a war in Iraq, a global "war on terror"?)
As it was, the towers' collapse added an element of the uncanny to the fantasy made real by bin Laden. Yet although the scale of the crime was new, his strategy was hardly original. Terrorists have long compensated for their military weakness by creating the greatest possible spectacle with their bloody acts. They work in a symbolic realm. Real destruction and real deaths are only the means to accomplish their psychological effects. It's a strategy that cannot succeed without the de facto cooperation of the news media, which are routine exploiters for commercial purposes of all varieties of violence and destruction, from the local murder or fire in the warehouse to the latest hurricane. (How often does a meeting of negotiators, or a city council or parliament lead the news?) Their habits have guaranteed that the terrorists get all the coverage they hope for.
These media have in addition been busy in recent years scrambling reality and fantasy for entertainment purposes. A watershed was the coverage of the car chase in which the Los Angeles police pursued the white Bronco carrying O.J. Simpson, fleeing arrest for the alleged murder of his wife. Like the Sept. 11 attacks, the Simpson episode recreated in the real world a type of scene - in this instance, the car-chase - that had been seen endlessly in movies and on television. What was sensational in the event was not any intrinsic drama (all you could see were a couple of cars driving along a highway) but the fact that the stale fictional scene was being lived out by real people. Ghoulish criminal cases, always popular, soon became the main stock-in-trade of television news - infotainment. Soon came "reality" television, which reversed the process of the Simpson chase. If infotainment started with real events and turned them into de facto soap operas, reality television started with soap operas and spiced them up by adding "real" elements (consisting mostly of people being serially kicked off the shows).
It goes without saying that movie mayhem and reality television have no moral likeness to Sept. 11. However, the news media's long-standing symbiosis with violent criminals along with their infection of reality with fantasy provided models for bin Laden's action as well as a global stage on which it would appear and be guaranteed unlimited coverage. Bin Laden strove for maximum effect with his crime, and he was granted it. At the time, it seemed that everyone was saying or writing, "Everything has changed." (I also wrote it, in a column right after the attack.) But in this reaction, felt as defiance of bin Laden, was there not also a kind of surrender - not, to be sure, exactly to him, but to his debased style of thinking, his understanding of how the world works? What was damaged was not only the quality of political discussion and decision-making but something that might be called the dignity of the real.
Surely our reaction suited bin Laden well. He had no power to "change everything" unless the government of the United States agreed. Then everything could change.
The government of the United States did agree. And a lot of things - if not everything - did change. President Bush seemed to accept bin Laden's invitation to enter into the world of an apocalyptic comic book. Even today, it may be hard to think of any response to Sept. 11 as excessive. A great atrocity had been committed. A great reaction was needed. But was it necessary or wise to divide every person and government on earth into two camps - the good, the lovers of freedom, who are "with us," and the "evildoers" who hate the good ones for their very goodness, and "who are against us"? - as if no other evils or horrors existed on earth to compel the attention of human beings?
The comic-book aspect became even more pronounced when the president turned himself into a sort of real life action figure, donning a pilot's suit and landing on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln to declare success in the Iraq war (though in his National Guard service, in which he was trained as a pilot, he was grounded for failing to show up for a physical). But the fullest realization of a fantasy world built on the foundation of Sept. 11 was the Republican convention, where a collection of villains abroad was blurred into one mass of evildoers who were in turn blurred with John Kerry, depicted as their domestic accomplice. Iraq, descending in actuality into anarchy, was presented as an inspiring example of democracy for the entire Middle East. Hidden behind the visions of a glorious future - the favorite tense of the demagogue - rose the pile of corpses, Iraqi and American. It was a further curious demonstration of the power of illusion that bin Laden himself slipped through the administration's fingers, as if the actual villain of Sept. 11 had been dissolved in the fantasy his act set in motion.
Each country that plunges into nightmare - whether Germany under Hitler, the Soviet Union under the Bolsheviks, Chile under Pinochet, or, for that matter, Iraq under Saddam Hussein - travels there along its own path. The American political system - based on free elections, the rights of citizens, and the rule of law - is, though under the severest pressure, still available for use. If it is lost, and the full American nightmare descends, there will be many causes. They will include the militarization of foreign policy, global imperial ambition, the loss of balance among the branches of government, the erosion of civil liberties, and the overwhelming influence of corporate money and power over political life - all present before Osama bin Laden made his appearance. But at every step of the way the skids will be greased by the national capacity, conferred by the media and exploited by politicians, to produce and consume illusion, which, though hardly an American monopoly, may be the specific form of corruption most dangerous to American democracy.
Once, observers imagined that we were entering an information age, but they were wrong. It is a misinformation age. The stupendous machinery of modern media has reached into every cranny of American life. Its outlets have been posted in every household, like a mechanical standing army. The steady, mild propaganda of advertising has long saturated the home for hours every day, the mental equivalent of low-level radiation. Now the public is being dosed with more virulent stuff. The standing army has been given increasingly insistent political marching orders. Stalin and Mao, confined mainly to radios and megaphones, could only dream of such penetration of daily life by their propaganda apparatuses.
The injection of fantasy into the real offends the aesthetic sense, but the true price is paid in blood - in the torture of prisoners, in the launch of wars. If a grasp of reality and the constitutional machinery to act upon it remain intact, then every other ill can be addressed. But if these are lost, the capacity to recover is lost with it, and the game is over.
Jonathan Schell is the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at the Nation Institute. He is most recently the author of The Unconquerable World (Metropolitan Books) and A Hole in the World (Nation Books), a collection of his "Letters from Ground Zero" columns for the Nation Magazine. This piece appears in print in the new magazine Final Edition, edited by Wallace Shawn and distributed by Seven Stories Press.
-------- us politics
Bush stresses war on terror
October 23, 2004
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By James G. Lakely and Stephen Dinan
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20041022-115912-5781r.htm
President Bush yesterday said the race for the White House comes down to "clear choices" between him and John Kerry on five issues: "your family's security, your budget, your quality of life, your retirement and the bedrock values that are so critical to our families and our future."
Despite his new stump speech on tax cuts, education spending, Social Security reform and abortion, Mr. Bush still leaned heavily on a single topic - the war on terror - the issue his campaign thinks the president must emphasize to win re-election.
"The enemies who killed thousands of innocent people are still dangerous and determined to strike us again," Mr. Bush said in Wilkes Barre, Pa. "The outcome of this election will set the direction of the war against terror, and in this war there is no place for confusion and no substitute for victory."
In Milwaukee, Mr. Kerry, facing a potential gender gap of "security moms," yesterday told an audience of Wisconsin women that he would end the culture of worry over domestic issues such as wages and college costs that Mr. Bush has created.
"America never was a country that had to live with that kind of worry, and we deserve to be a country that doesn't have to in the future," he said. "Today, for far too many women, the American dream seems a million miles away because you've barely got time to sleep, and when you've barely got time to sleep, you've barely got time to dream."
Repackaging his stump speech for this audience, Mr. Kerry reduced his references to national security. He briefly mentioned his intention to hunt down and kill terrorists, which drew scattered applause, and his commitment to work with allies, which drew a much broader round of applause.
Instead, he said, Americans, and women in particular, face increasing domestic pressures.
"They work hard every single day, every single night, but still each new day brings on a new set of worries," the Massachusetts Democrat said. "Worry, when their children go out to play, that they might get injured and health insurance won't cover it; that elderly parents can't afford prescription drugs; that jobs will be lost; and that they can't afford college tuitions."
A new Bush campaign ad that began airing yesterday, called "Wolves," criticizes Mr. Kerry for voting to cut defense and intelligence spending.
"In an increasingly dangerous world, even after the first attack on America, John Kerry and the liberals in Congress voted to slash America's intelligence operations by $6 billion," the ad's narrator said over video of a wolf lurking in the woods.
"Cuts so deep they would have weakened America's defenses," the ad continues. "And weakness attracts those who are waiting to do America harm."
The ad was inspired by Ronald Reagan's "Bear in the Woods" ad in 1984, accusing Democrat Walter Mondale of being too liberal to deal with the threat of Soviet communism.
Mr. Bush, speaking to a crowd of about 15,000 in this heavily Democratic northeast corner of Pennsylvania, aggressively painted Mr. Kerry as unable to take the actions necessary to protect Americans from another catastrophic terrorist attack.
"His top foreign policy adviser has questioned whether it's even a war at all, saying that's just a metaphor, like the war on poverty," Mr. Bush said. "I've got news: Anyone who thinks we are fighting a metaphor does not understand the enemy we face and has no idea how to win the war and keep America secure."
The Kerry campaign responded sharply, saying that despite Mr. Bush's claims that he has killed or captured three-fourths of the al Qaeda leadership, "the organization is resurging and morphing."
The Democratic National Committee quickly produced its own animal-themed ad yesterday titled "Protect" to counter Mr. Bush's "Wolves" spot. It portrays Mr. Kerry as an eagle and the president as an ostrich.
In Wisconsin, Mr. Kerry ridiculed Mr. Bush for having said during the first presidential debate that being president was hard.
"Before the president complains about his job, he ought to come here and spend a day with you. He might learn something about how, day after day after day, the women of this country juggle so much with grace and strength," Mr. Kerry said.
He said his campaign promises to raise the minimum wage, to provide health care for all children and to work to close the pay gap between men and women will help ease those worries.
Steve Schmidt, a spokesman for the Bush campaign, said Mr. Kerry's voting history should actually concern women voters.
"He voted for higher taxes on their gas. He voted for higher taxes on their Social Security benefits. He even voted for higher taxes on their children and their marriages," Mr. Schmidt said.
"He has a 20-year record of votes that would weaken our national security, and all the campaign camouflage in the world can't obscure Kerry's record of being wrong for American women and their families," he said.
Polls suggest many female voters are looking for someone they believe makes them feel safer - the "security moms" that Republican pollsters say are gravitating to Mr. Bush.
But Democratic pollsters dismiss the concept of security moms, arguing that married women with children who say security is their highest priority aren't a big group and were probably going to support Mr. Bush already anyway.
And Democrats also say Mr. Kerry gained among women with his performance in the three presidential debates.
Mr. Kerry said 38 million women didn't vote in the 2000 election, and he hopes to win their support as "a president who's on our side."
At his Pennsylvania event, Mr. Bush conceded that "we didn't find the stockpiles [of biological and chemical weapons] we thought were in Iraq, that my opponent thought was there, that the United Nations thought was there, that the world thought was there."
But he pointed out that the report by Iraqi weapons inspector Charles Deulfer on Oct. 6 found that "Saddam Hussein had the intent and capability and the expertise to rebuild a weapons program, that he was gaming the system."
"He was using the oil-for-food program to try to influence officials of other nations to get rid of the sanctions," Mr. Bush said. "And why? Because he wanted the world to look the other way so he could restart his programs."
Mr. Bush has visited Pennsylvania 42 times in his four years in office, and the attention appears to be paying off in a state that Democrat Al Gore won by four percentage points in 2000. A Mason-Dixon poll released this week put the state at a virtual dead heat, 46 percent for Mr. Kerry and 45 percent for Mr. Bush.
Mr. Bush yesterday jetted from Wilkes-Barre to Canton, Ohio, a city that he took narrowly in 2000 to help him win the state. The president hadn't visited Ohio for 19 days before yesterday, causing Democrats to crow that he had given up fighting there. But Vice President Dick Cheney has been dispatched to the state often - he was in Sylvania Thursday and will be in Wilmington Monday - and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice has also delivered speeches in the state.
The president will visit two Ohio cities on Wednesday, and two more on Thursday and also stop twice in Pennsylvania on that campaign swing. The coup of the campaign season, however, could be a planned appearance with Arnold Schwarzenegger in Columbus the weekend before the election.
Today Mr. Bush attends four campaign rallies in Florida, then hits the trail in New Mexico tomorrow and Iowa and Wisconsin on Monday.
After his speech in Wisconsin, Mr. Kerry flew to Reno, Nev., for a rally last night, then to Pueblo, Colo., where he has an event today. Mr. Bush won both states in 2000 and both appear to be safely in Mr. Bush's column this time, according to recent polls.
The complicated Electoral College math shows that Mr. Bush could lose Ohio and Pennsylvania and still win the presidency, but only if he wins Florida and Colorado, which he took in 2000, and also wins Iowa, Wisconsin and New Mexico, which he lost last time.
• James G. Lakely was traveling with Mr. Bush in Pennsylvania. Stephen Dinan was with Mr. Kerry in Wisconsin.
--------
Film suggests U.S. has plan to rule the world
Documentary takes look at neoconservatives.
October 23, 2004
By Anita Gates
The New York Times
http://www.indystar.com/articles/2/188514-6102-062.html
You won't see President Bush swinging any golf clubs in "Hijacking Catastrophe." You won't see his and his advisers' heads attached to the bodies of stars from "Bonanza." This is not Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" revisited.
You will, however, see and hear Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other members of the administration say again and again, with various phrasings, "There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction." (That is an exact quotation from Cheney.)
Throngs of Democrats believe that Bush was determined to go to war with Saddam, come hell or high water. The pop-psychology reasoning goes that Bush the Younger is trying to prove himself to his father or to best him, at the expense of thousands of lives.
The writers and directors of this openly polemical but also sobering documentary -- Sut Jhally, a professor of communications at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and Jeremy Earp, a doctoral candidate there -- suggest that the reality is much bigger and even more disturbing.
They suggest that the real reason for the war with Iraq is a two-decade, three-administration, neoconservative master plan to -- well, let's let Norman Mailer say the words, as he does in the film. At the end of the Cold War, he proposes, the Republicans saw a "golden opportunity, now that Russia is out of the way, to take over the world." Or as the author Chalmers Johnson says on camera, without irony, they wanted to create "a new Rome, beyond good and evil."
You don't hear phrases like "take over the world" often these days without a James Bond movie review attached, but "Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear and the Selling of American Empire" makes a convincing case with simple methods: talking heads, newspaper articles, an authoritative narrator (Julian Bond) and the occasional chart on military spending or the national debt.
The voices speaking out are not all wild-eyed liberals. In addition to predictable administration critics like Mailer, Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg, they include Scott Ritter, a former U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq; Stan Goff, a retired Army Special Forces master sergeant; and Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski (Air Force, retired), a former staff officer at the Pentagon. Their arguments appear to support the filmmakers' most serious accusations.
Documents seem to do the same. A 2000 government report, "Rebuilding America's Defense," suggests that this global empire-building would be a long, tedious process unless some huge event, "like a new Pearl Harbor," speeds it up.
The filmmakers are definitely playing hardball. "Hijacking Catastrophe" begins with a quotation about the ease of making people do what a country's leaders want. "All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked," it begins. Then, after a deliberate pause, the screen reveals that this is something Hermann Goering said during the Nuremberg trials.
-----
Bush's Choices May Be 'Tough,' but My Choice Is Not
Antiwar.com
by Leonard Maluf
October 23, 2004
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/maluf.php?articleid=3840
To: Ed Gillespie Chairman, Republican National Committee
Dear Mr. Gillespie:
Your letter informed me that I have been chosen to take part in the census of the Republican Party as a representative of all Republicans living in my area. It is doubtful that my view of the party's presidential candidate represents that of most party members in my district. However, the Republicans I know personally share many of the concerns I take this occasion to express - on a matter of considerable bearing on the future direction of our party, in light of the upcoming elections.
I voted for Mr. Bush in the last presidential election because he promised us an America with a more humble foreign policy. I will not vote for him again this year because he has not made good on that promise.
I have been critical of what Mr. Bush calls a "war on terror" from the moment the term was used. It quickly came to suggest adopting the mentality of the terrorists in order to fight them, and I believe that is exactly what Mr. Bush has done. He speaks in terms that imply a completely innocent America, on the side of unqualified good, squared off against those "not on our side," who are therefore on the side of absolute evil. This is the same kind of black and white thinking that informs the world-view of Mr. bin Laden. By adopting such a simplistic mentality in response to terrorist actions, Mr. Bush has played directly into the terrorists' hands.
Republicans and Democrats agree on very little. But since Sept. 11, 2001, the two parties appear to share a point of view I have often heard expressed as follows: "The worst thing that could happen to the United States of America is another 9/11-type attack." I disagree.
Horrible as such a physical assault would be, a far worse disaster, in my view, would be our own moral failure if we were to adopt the terrorists' "might makes right" stance and their reckless disregard for the value of human life. This is hardly an unrealistic concern, given the paranoia and the trigger-happy revenge mentality that has flourished in large segments of American society since the 9/11 attacks. To resist this wave of irresponsible militarism and false patriotism is to follow an ancient wisdom that dates back to the age of Socrates, who insisted with utmost clarity that no greater evil can befall a nation than its own moral corruption.
Our country responded with strong emotions - anger, frustration, desire for retaliation - to the terror attack of 2001. Such an initial reaction was both understandable and appropriate. And it was also normal and appropriate that the president of the United States would share these emotions at an instinctive level, as an immediate reaction to the horrors of that day. It was the next step that was vitally important to watch.
As moral leader of a great country, it was the duty of our president to transcend the emotional upheaval and fury triggered by that attack, and to ensure that America's reaction in the world arena would proceed not from reckless rage, but from the universal good as apprehended by reason - which is supposed to guide human and civil behavior in all circumstances.
In my opinion, Mr. Bush failed to articulate a rationally grounded response to the terrorist threat. Instead, he reacted to the attack of 9/11 like a frightened and enraged animal, stoking the fires of passion in the American populace instead of leading the country forward beyond blind anger to a well-reasoned response. Such intemperate action represents a monumental failure in one who would aspire to lead any human community - but especially the world's lone superpower.
A rational response to the attacks on America would have included, in the first place, an honest look inward - a truth-seeking self-examination, which would have revealed long-standing injustices in our own foreign policy that have fueled the rage behind the murderous actions of terrorists throughout the world.
Self-directed scrutiny would also have uncovered disturbing negligence in terms of what was left undone to prepare for or, more importantly, to prevent the 9/11 attacks. You ask in your census survey: "Do you support President Bush's initiatives to promote the safety and security of all Americans?" I find it difficult to answer that question without first strongly indicting Mr. Bush's failure to accept any responsibility for the intelligence and security failures of his administration prior to 9/11.
"Saddam was a threat." So runs the mantra Mr. Bush repeats in his attempt to justify America's unprovoked war of aggression on a third-world country that did not attack us, and that had no capability of doing so. The president appears to believe that any thinking mind would move inexorably from this bald statement (assuming, for the sake of argument, that it is true) to the conclusion that he was justified in launching a preemptive war against Iraq - one that would inevitably kill thousands of innocent Iraqis and well over a thousand young Americans, not to mention seriously injuring many thousands more.
There were plenty of alternative actions that could have been taken and that were in fact being taken to deal with the threat, such as it was, that Mr. Hussein posed to American and world security. In spite of his protests to the contrary, Bush was clearly not interested in those options. His determination to go to war with Iraq was patent, and his frequent protestations that war would be for him a last option were dishonest in the extreme.
"Americans at least know exactly where I stand, what I believe" is another of Bush's favorite slogans these campaign days. Frankly, what Mr. Bush believes does not interest me in the least. As president of the United States, he should act in a rationally and morally defensible way, one based on objective facts and values. He did not do so when he chose to take America to war with Iraq, and his repeated assertion that "we did the right thing" does nothing to diminish the foolishness and immorality of his decision.
We are supposed to sympathize with Bush because, as he tirelessly reminds us in his stump speeches, his determination to go to war all over the world involves "hard" or "tough" choices. In that his choices seem always to involve the use of lethal force, you will pardon me for feeling more sympathy for the innocent victims of the president's "tough choices" than I can muster for his alleged agony in making them. And I have never thought that there is anything particularly "tough" about a president who orders missile strikes from his comfy leather executive chair.
Missile strikes almost inevitably kill noncombatants and "targeted" bombings reliably extinguish the lives of innocent civilians along with (or instead of) the intended target. In one of his recent televised debates with Senator John Kerry, Bush seemed annoyed, even peeved, that the Iraqis failed to cooperate, when we initially entered their country with a campaign of "shock and awe," by lining up their soldiers in an open field, where they would have been incinerated by bombs dropped from thousands of feet in the air by American pilots.
That by his own confession Commander-in-Chief Bush actually expected (and planned on) the Iraqis to embrace such a strategy of wide-open combat with an absurdly advantaged and dependably overpowering American force I find breathtakingly naive. That Bush feels no remorse or revulsion at the idea of having purposely launched a needless war of aggression that was supposed to feature such an orgy of human carnage I find obscene.
As a representative of Republicans in my voting district, I suppose I should say something about Bush's domestic policies. I choose instead to limit my comments to the president's "war on terror" because I think this global preemptive strategy, particularly as he defines and directs it, is by far the most significant aspect of the Bush presidency from a moral point of view. I happen to agree with much of the president's domestic agenda, in particular his support for the "pro-life" movement. But somehow the president's "pro-life" rhetoric rings hollow to me in light of his anti-life, militaristic foreign policy and the curious doctrine of never-ending preventive warfare in the interest of "securing world peace" that he has adopted from his neoconservative advisers.
In sum, my primary reason for rejecting the 2004 Republican presidential candidate is precisely the quality many party members regard as Bush's "strength," namely, his manner of "leadership" in the war on terror. A strong leader moving us in the wrong direction is worse than no leader at all. For this reason, my Republican friends and I were extremely disappointed that our party offered no alternative candidate to Bush in this year's primary elections.
Through the policies of this president, our country has drifted far from the spirit of its founding fathers and their principled pursuit of peace and opposition to American involvement in foreign affairs; and Bush's apparent enthusiasm for big-government "security" at home and big-government warfare abroad hardly exemplifies a conservative ideal. Instead of calming American fears through rational guidance and prudent leadership, Bush has led, and profited from, a surge of national paranoia and xenophobic militarism that is as morally bankrupt as it will be politically suicidal.
Leonard Maluf is a professor of Philosophy and New Testament at Blessed John XXIII National Seminay in Weston, MA, where he has been teaching since the fall of 1997. He studied scripture and theology in Rome, at the Pontifical Biblical Institute, during the 1980s and has been teaching in Catholic seminaries since 1994. He has published articles on biblical topics and philosophy, as well as an abstract of his doctoral thesis on the Benedictus of Zechariah, which was accepted in 1994 by the Gregorian University in Rome. In the last twenty-five years, he has translated a number books from French, mostly in the areas of philosophy and theology. While in Rome, he worked as a translator for the Osservatore Romano, and currently does translation work for the Catholic Biblical Federation in Stuttgart, Germany.
-------- voting
Shortage of Poll Workers Is Cited
Widespread Errors Likely Without Help, Election Officials Say
By Jo Becker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 23, 2004; Page A05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55626-2004Oct22.html
Forget about glitchy electronic voting machines. Never mind confusing ballot designs and hanging chads. The biggest problem in next month's election could turn out to be a shortage of well-trained poll workers that leads to widespread mistakes at polling booths, according to federal election officials.
With less than two weeks to go, the current crop of aging poll workers falls several hundred thousand short of the 2 million the U.S. Election Assistance Commission says is needed to run a smooth national election.
The commission said the problem is acute in large cities, where there are high concentrations of Democratic and minority voters, and it comes at a time when election officials nationwide are expecting that the close race between President Bush and Democrat John F. Kerry will produce record voter turnout.
After the disputed 2000 election, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act. This presidential election, poll workers will play a more crucial role than ever as voters cast ballots on new machines, face new identification requirements and cast new "provisional ballots" if their names are not found on the registration rolls.
The commission, created by Congress to help smooth out national elections, has been warning about a shortage of poll workers for months. Running an election is a massive undertaking: Los Angeles and Chicago alone need a combined 38,000 people.
Shortages, coupled with new voting rules and ongoing litigation that has left basic rules in battleground states in flux, could lead to long lines and confusion and mistakes on the part of precinct workers that end up disenfranchising voters, said DeForest B. Soaries Jr., the commission's chairman.
"If you don't have those people inside the polls to help, no policy and no machine will matter," Soaries said. "The election process breaks down without poll workers, and you can't have a democracy without them."
The commission has tried to attract college students, but Soaries said most of the battleground states face a shortage of trained poll workers.
Rebecca Vigil-Giron, New Mexico's chief election official and president of the National Association of Secretaries of State, said labor unions and others are offering volunteers to work the polls in her home state, but she worries about whether there is enough time to properly train new volunteers. One upside, she said, is that Election Day pressure may be somewhat relieved in states such as hers that offer early voting.
One of the few bright spots in terms of having an adequate number of poll workers, Soaries said, is Florida. But residents complained that there were not enough workers on hand to handle the flood of people casting their ballots on Monday when the state opened early voting sites.
State and local officials say the problem has worsened over time as poll workers have grown older; the average age of a poll worker today is 72, according to the commission. While local election boards in the battleground state of Ohio have tried to recruit a new generation, a spokesman for Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell said shortages continue to be a problem in every election.
In Cuyahoga County, election officials say they are 316 workers short of the 5,744 needed to run the election.
Gwen Dillingham, deputy director of the county election board, said long hours and low pay have made it difficult to attract poll workers, but this year there is an added twist, with both the Kerry and Bush campaigns preparing to send thousands of lawyers to monitor the polls.
"All this talk of attorneys is scaring people away," Dillingham said. The poll workers "are grandmothers and grandfathers -- they don't want lawyers screaming and arguing at them."
Soaries said it is not too late to volunteer to work inside the polls, as opposed to monitoring them from the outside.
"The best way to protect voters' rights is to volunteer to be a poll worker," he said.
-------- OTHER
-------- environment
Russian Vote Will Put Kyoto Pact Into Effect
By Peter Baker
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, October 23, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54120-2004Oct22.html
MOSCOW, Oct. 22 -- Russia's lower house of parliament ratified the long-stalled Kyoto climate change treaty on Friday, clearing away the last major hurdle for the global pact to take force seven years after it was drafted.
The State Duma voted 334 to 73 to approve the treaty on the recommendation of President Vladimir Putin, following years of bitter debate in Moscow and around the world about balancing economic growth and environmental health.
Russia's decision essentially guarantees that the Kyoto agreement will go into effect. The treaty, which commits industrial nations to curb production of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that many scientists blame for global warming, required ratification by countries responsible for at least 55 percent of the world's emissions. Because the United States opted out of the agreement in 2001, only Russia, with 17 percent, could put it over the threshold.
"It's a great event that took place, not only for Russia but for the rest of the world," said Vladimir Zakharov, director of the Moscow-based Center for Russian Environmental Policy and co-chairman of Russia's Social Forum on Climate Change. The two advocacy groups have been lobbying for ratification of the agreement, which was negotiated in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997.
Putin had endorsed the accord several times in the last few years without ever actually allowing a Duma vote. The breakthrough came in May, when he concluded a deal with the European Union in which he agreed to secure ratification in exchange for E.U. support for Russian membership in the World Trade Organization.
Kremlin factions opposed to Kyoto waged a last-ditch campaign to kill it, led by Putin's top economic adviser, Andrei Illarionov, who has termed the pact a "death treaty" that would strangle the growing Russian economy. But Putin settled the matter when his cabinet endorsed it on Sept. 30.
"It's detrimental to Russian interests, and I strongly advised our government in this respect to follow the example of the United States," Natalya Narochnitskaya, a Duma deputy from the nationalist Motherland party, said in an interview after the vote. She said the Kremlin embraced the treaty "to appease the Western society," which has assailed Putin for rolling back democratic institutions.
On Wednesday, the treaty goes to the largely ceremonial upper house of parliament for approval, which has always been a formality in post-Soviet Russia. It will then go back to Putin for his signature.
The treaty requires participating industrial countries to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases by 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. For Russia, the terms could prove an economic boon, because its levels have already fallen about 25 percent since 1990 in the industrial collapse that followed the breakup of the Soviet Union. Russia stands to earn billions of dollars by selling its excess quotas, as the treaty allows, to countries not in compliance with the requirement.
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Russia's Lower House Approves Kyoto Treaty on Emissions
October 23, 2004
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/23/international/europe/23kyoto.html?pagewanted=all
MOSCOW, Oct. 22 - Russia's lower house of Parliament voted overwhelmingly on Friday to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, setting the stage for enactment early next year of the pioneering international treaty aimed at reducing emissions blamed for global warming.
The Parliament's vote was widely expected after President Vladimir V. Putin's government endorsed the long-delayed treaty late last month, ending years of internal debate over its potential effects on Russia and its economy. Nevertheless, environmental groups hailed Russia's latest step as a landmark in environmental diplomacy.
"The vote really does change the geopolitical landscape," Fred Krupp, the president of Environmental Defense, said in a telephone interview, expressing hope that it would accelerate efforts by treaty nations to begin reducing emissions.
Russia's upper house and Mr. Putin still must approve the treaty to make Russia's ratification final, but that is considered a formality at this point. Once the process here is completed and Russia delivers its signed papers to the United Nations, the treaty's provisions aimed at accounting for emissions of gases and reducing their levels are to go into effect within 90 days.
After the United States, Australia and others rejected the treaty, Russia's ratification became essential. Although 126 nations have already ratified the treaty, it can take effect only if supported by enough nations to represent at least 55 percent of industrialized countries' emissions in 1990. Russia was the only country left that produced enough to clear the threshold.
In 1990, Russia accounted for 17.4 percent of emissions; the United States accounted for 36.1 percent.
Leading environmentalists in the United States applauded the Russian decision and used the opportunity to criticize the Bush administration for its refusal to sign the treaty.
"The Russian government's decision to adopt the Kyoto Protocol leaves the United States alone as the largest and most important industrialized nation to not adopt the treaty," said Jeff Fiedler, a policy specialist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "Russian ratification means a new market and a new economy has been given the green light, but the U.S. is not following the signal."
Philip E. Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust, said: "Because of the president's rejection of the agreement, U.S. businesses won't be at the table having input into the details of the emissions reduction system - and there are billions of dollars at stake here. Regardless of who wins the presidential election, there is going to be enormous new pressure for the U.S. to go back to the negotiating table."
Former Vice President Al Gore, who wrote a book on global warming, called the Russian action "an important and historic victory for sanity, science and reason."
He predicted that it would "unleash a chain reaction of adaptation" that would eventually include the United States, adding: "The world faces a climate crisis that will soon be apparent to every person on earth. There is literally no time to lose in taking steps to avoid the worst."
The lower house, or Duma, voted 334 to 73 in favor of the protocol after only an afternoon of debate. Although some officials in Russia have vigorously criticized the treaty's limitations, deputies cited the potential boon for Russia from one of its crucial provisions: the trading system that would allow countries that produce excess gases to buy credits from those beneath their quotas or to earn credits by investing in emission-reducing projects.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Russians Protest Against War in Chechnya
October 23, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-Chechnya.html
MOSCOW (AP) -- Hundreds of demonstrators gathered Saturday to protest against the war in Chechnya, an action that coincided with the second anniversary of the seizure of a crowded Moscow theater by Chechen rebels.
The protesters stood under cold gray skies in a central Moscow square, some holding white balloons emblazoned with the slogan ``No War.''
Russian media reported that about 500 protesters participated and that few of the well-known democratic politicians who were among the event's sponsors had turned up.
But the head of the All-Russian Public Movement for Human Rights, Lev Ponomaryov, told Ekho Moskvy radio that as many as 3,000 demonstrators joined the rally, whose organizers adopted the theme ``Defend Our Freedom. No Terror in Russia.''
About 200 police officers stood guard, and participants filed through metal detectors to get on the square.
Russian forces have been fighting Chechen rebels for much of the last decade. The first 1994-96 war ended with a Russian withdrawal and left the southern region with de facto independence. Russian troops returned again in 1999 when rebels raided a neighboring Russian region and after a series of deadly apartment bombings blamed on rebels.
President Vladimir Putin has refused to negotiate with the rebels, whom he calls terrorists. But the Kremlin's attempt at a military victory has become bogged down, and Chechen rebels and their sympathizers have increasingly turned to terror attacks.
The recent series of attacks, including the hostage-taking at a school in southern Russia, killed more than 430 people and terrified this nation of 150 million. Shamil Basayev, a Chechen rebel leader long hunted by federal forces, reportedly claimed responsibility.
Basayev also said he helped orchestrate the October 23, 2002, siege at a Moscow theater where some 800 people were taken hostage. The siege lasted 60 hours and left 129 hostages dead, mostly from effects of a narcotic gas Russian forces used to subdue the attackers.
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Quaker Peace activist, 89, begins jail sentence
Oct 23, 2004
Knight Ridder Newspapers
BY JOSEPH A. SLOBODZIAN
http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/news/nation/9969325.htm
PHILADELPHIA - (KRT) - Bundled in two sweaters and a jacket against the biting wind as she sat in her wheelchair, 89-year-old Quaker antiwar activist Lillian Willoughby went to jail.
"I never dreamed I'd get this kind of send-off," said Willoughby, of Deptford, as she sat this morning in front of the U.S. courthouse in downtown Philadelphia surrounded by about 50 banner-holding members of the Brandywine Peace Community.
The gathering was both a peace vigil and show of support for Willoughby and five other demonstrators as they reported to the Federal Detention Center to begin seven-day sentences for blocking the courthouse entrance on March 20, 2003, the day after the Iraq war began.
"It will be worth it if it gets the message out and people start working for peace," Willoughby said.
Willoughby and the five other demonstrators - Michael Brix, 28; Marion Brown, 58; and Jason Fultz, 29, all of Philadelphia; and Cassandra Heino-Haw, 22, and husband Christopher Haw, 23, of Camden, N.J. - were among 107 arrested March 20, 2003.
The six were among the last to plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge and elect seven days in jail rather than a $25 fine.
But the presence of Willoughby, just three months shy of her 90th birthday, and husband George - active members of the peace movement for more than 60 years - brought an element of star quality to the event.
It was Willoughby's first arrest as a peace activist, and at times she seemed almost embarrassed by the attention.
"I have no worries whatsoever," said George Willoughby, who has been arrested many times in nonviolent demonstrations and was honored two years ago in India for promoting the precepts of Mohandas K. Gandhi. "She knows how to take care of herself and she is doing this for the right reason."
Also present at the vigil's start, in full dress uniform, was Marine Lance Cpl. Elliot Ruiz, recently returned home to North Philadelphia from Iraq. Though he chose not to speak publicly, Ruiz quietly thanked several demonstrators for promoting peace.
The group remained in front of the courthouse, on Market Street between Sixth and Seventh Streets, for 75 cold minutes handing leaflets to tourists and passersby and ignoring several truck-drivers who blew their airhorns in counter-protest, one of whom added an obscene gesture.
There were brief speeches by some of the six, including Brown, who railed at the government for starting the war the day her grandchild was born, and Brix, who pointed out his pregnant wife.
"I go to jail for my unborn boy because I don't want him, 25 years from now, to have to do the same thing I'm doing," Brix added.
Then it was time for the brief walk one block north on Seventh to Arch Street and the Federal Detention Center, where they will spend the next six days.
Detention Center spokesman Tony Alexander said staff were not making special accommodations for Willoughby: "We are a completely handicapped-accessible facility. We're well equipped to meet her needs."
With some difficulty, Willoughby was wheeled through the front doors and then transferred to a prison wheelchair. Her five associates joined her inside to a burst of applause and a chant from those outside: "We love you, Lillian!"
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Russians Protest Against War in Chechnya
AP
Oct 23, 2004
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=518&ncid=732&e=10&u=/ap/20041024/ap_on_re_eu/russia_chechnya
MOSCOW - Hundreds of demonstrators gathered Saturday to protest against the war in Chechnya (news - web sites), an action that coincided with the second anniversary of the seizure of a crowded Moscow theater by Chechen rebels.
The protesters stood under cold gray skies in a central Moscow square, some holding white balloons emblazoned with the slogan "No War."
Russian media reported that about 500 protesters participated and that few of the well-known democratic politicians who were among the event's sponsors had turned up.
But the head of the All-Russian Public Movement for Human Rights, Lev Ponomaryov, told Ekho Moskvy radio that as many as 3,000 demonstrators joined the rally, whose organizers adopted the theme "Defend Our Freedom. No Terror in Russia."
About 200 police officers stood guard, and participants filed through metal detectors to get on the square.
Russian forces have been fighting Chechen rebels for much of the last decade. The first 1994-96 war ended with a Russian withdrawal and left the southern region with de facto independence. Russian troops returned again in 1999 when rebels raided a neighboring Russian region and after a series of deadly apartment bombings blamed on rebels.
President Vladimir Putin (news - web sites) has refused to negotiate with the rebels, whom he calls terrorists. But the Kremlin's attempt at a military victory has become bogged down, and Chechen rebels and their sympathizers have increasingly turned to terror attacks.
The recent series of attacks, including the hostage-taking at a school in southern Russia, killed more than 430 people and terrified this nation of 150 million. Shamil Basayev, a Chechen rebel leader long hunted by federal forces, reportedly claimed responsibility.
Basayev also said he helped orchestrate the October 23, 2002, siege at a Moscow theater where some 800 people were taken hostage. The siege lasted 60 hours and left 129 hostages dead, mostly from effects of a narcotic gas Russian forces used to subdue the attackers.
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