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NUCLEAR
Majlis security committee to study European proposal: top lawmaker
Diversified energy options should include nuclear power
Depleted Uranium Released During Canadian Plane Crash
Second round of Indo-Pak talks from November 29
Nuke powers warned against technology denial to India
India Unaware of U.S. Plans of More Nuclear Curbs
Iran: Europe Nuke Proposal'Unbalanced'
Iran says uranium conversion plant nearly finished
Iranian uranium facility '70 percent' operational: official
Let me leave and be free, pleads Israeli whistleblower Vanunu
N. Korea threatens more nukes
Powell Presses N. Korea on Weapons Talks
N. Korea's Condition For Talks Rejected
Powell and Japan Ask North Korea to Resume Talks
Powell Rejects North Korean Demand on U.S.
Lab Tests Not Serious: US
U.S., S Korea Agree to Increased Defense Cooperation
Moscow protests at Star Wars plan for UK
Bush policies against terror fail to cover home base
NRC takes dirty-bomb data off Web site
Tycoon foils 'nuclear bomb sale' plot
Strangelove strategy defended
MILITARY
Karzai is unofficial winner of Afghan vote
Yusuf to request security forces
Somali Leader Seeks African Peacekeepers
Dismay as Serbs shun Kosovo poll
Black Watch will not blindly follow US orders
British officers lobbied US to send troops to danger zone
Suicide bombers kill 22 Iraqis
50 Iraq Soldiers Apparent Ambush Victims
Rebels Mount Grisly Ambush, Executing 49 Iraqi Soldiers
Car Bombings Kill 17 Iraqis;
Rebel Attacks Kill 18 Iraqis; G.I.'s Injured
Iraqis protest after silence greets plea for hostage
Why America Has Waged a Losing Battle on Fallouja
Israel Cabinet OKs Settlers' Compensation
EU: Israel's pullout from Gaza Strip will not suffice
NATO's New Colonial Order:
Memo Lets CIA Take Detainees Out of Iraq
Report on CIA Action Concerns Senators
Analysis: Military expert wants better U.S. policy
Army Badge Of Honor Now In Contention
Army Captain Sues U.S. To Block Iraq Deployment
U.S. army has denied most compensation claims by Iraqis
Former soldier remembers near-invasion of Alabama
U.S. dead in Iraq honored
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
After Terror, a Secret Rewriting of Military Law
California Rethinking '3-Strikes' Sentencing
Pentagon breaks with Bush on intel reform
Senators Balk at Intelligence Proposal
Border Patrol consolidates training centers
Boston Police to Use a Weaker Pepper-Ball Gun
Boston Police to Change Pepper-Spray Guns
Abu Ghraib team bids to run UK prisons
POLITICS
Kerry record in Senate put premium on probes
Lauded for 9/11 Work, but Under Scrutiny
Karl Rove: America's Mullah
Rivals Stick to Issue of Security
OTHER
U.S. Stem Cell Policy Delays U.N. Action on Human Cloning
Pandemic pandemonium
-------- NUCLEAR
Majlis security committee to study European proposal: top lawmaker
Tehran Times
October 24, 2004
http://www.tehrantimes.com/Description.asp?Da=10/24/2004&Cat=2&Num=005
TEHRAN (MNA) -- The Majlis National Security and Foreign Policy Committee will study the European offer presented to Iranian negotiators in Vienna and will then make appropriate decisions, committee chairman Aladdin Borujerdi said on Saturday.
On Thursday diplomats from the European Union big three states of Germany, Britain, and France offered Iran a deal to receive technology, including a light-water reactor, if Iran indefinitely suspended all uranium enrichment activities. They have also threatened possible UN sanctions if Iran rejected the offer.
"Our red line is clear. We cannot forgo the right of the Iranian nation stipulated in the NPT (nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty), and therefore we will continue efforts to gain access to nuclear technology and the right to enrich uranium under the supervision of the (UN nuclear) agency," Borujerdi told the Mehr News Agency.
"If the main concern of these countries is diversion of nuclear activities to a military application, we have repeatedly announced that we will never seek such a goal," he argued.
In the past Iran has kept the world abreast of the peaceful nature of its nuclear activities and will continue to do so in the future through the International Atomic Energy Agency, he said.
However, the Europeans are making illogical demands, the top lawmaker observed.
"The offer made by the Europeans runs contrary to all international regulations on nuclear activities in the world, and we will try to convince these countries that such an approach will never lead to the resolution of this dossier," he asserted. Asked about the proposal Iran made to the Europeans in Vienna, he said, "I have not received any report about the negotiations yet, but in the coming days the negotiators must fully brief the representatives of the people about the details of the talks. However, Iran's only proposal will be insistence on using nuclear technology for peaceful purposes as an inalienable right."
"The Islamic republic of Iran will not accept a (Western) monopoly on nuclear technology and will pursue its activities with determination," AFP quoted Borujerdi as saying.
"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.
On October 5, the parliamentary committee headed by Borujerdi approved a bill that would force the government to resume uranium enrichment in defiance of the IAEA.
"The plan to oblige the government to resume enrichment has the support of 238 deputies" out of a total 290, Borujerdi 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 hesitation.
"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 Kayhan newspaper.
U.S. 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.
--------
Diversified energy options should include nuclear power
boston globe
By Charles Stein,
October 24, 2004
http://www.boston.com/business/globe/articles/2004/10/24/diversified_energy_options_should_include_nuclear_power/
With the price of oil and natural gas at nosebleed levels, you might imagine that energy policy would be a high priority in the current presidential campaign.
No such luck.
The subject rarely comes up, and when it does the candidates revert to simplistic partisan answers: Republicans like to drill; Democrats prefer to conserve. The truth is it will a take a range of options to build the energy future. As with investing, the correct approach is to diversify our choices so we don't place too big a bet on any one solution. One of those choices should be nuclear power, especially if we are serious about preserving the environment.
Nuclear power dropped off the radar screen about 15 years ago. The plants became prohibitively expensive to build and the public lost confidence in the industry's ability to produce energy safely.
But nuclear power didn't go away. Instead it got better. Utilities learned to shrink the amount of time the plants are out of service, which means those same plants operate for more hours and produce more electricity than they once did. Nuclear power today supplies 20 percent of the nation's electricity, second only to the 52 percent generated by coal. The industry doesn't make headlines because the plants don't blow up or make people glow in the dark.
Nuclear power has other advantages. It doesn't come from politically unstable countries and it doesn't release greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. That last point is critical. Consider: A year ago, a team of scientists and economists from MIT released a report on nuclear power. The project started with a simple premise: that eventually the world is going to have to get serious about reducing carbon dioxide emissions.
"Without nuclear in the mix, it will be impossible to achieve the reductions most people feel will be necessary," said Richard Lester, director of MIT's Industrial Performance Center, who participated in the study.
The MIT report is not a love letter to nuclear power. The authors concede upfront that nuclear plants are expensive to build.
The economics of nuclear look better if traditional energy prices stay high. They look better still if the costs of pollution are built into the equation.
If the United States adopts limits on greenhouse emissions, coal plants, for instance, would pay a penalty based on the amount of carbon dioxide they emit.
Then there is the issue of nuclear storage. The United States has spent the past 15 years trying to establish a repository in Yucca Mountain, Nev., to hold the radioactive waste created by nuclear plants. The people of Nevada are bitterly opposed to the idea.
Last summer the opponents got a boost when a court ruled that the federal government failed to prove the storage facility would keep people safe for more than 10,000 years.
On one level the court decision was extreme (Do we know if Nevada will be around in 10,000 years?), but the judges had a point: Nuclear power comes with its own set of risks.
So here's my question: How does that make nuclear power different from any other energy choice?
Oil comes from the volatile Middle East; natural gas is getting harder to find; liquefied natural gas could be a target for terrorists; coal pollutes the air; wind power is great unless you have to look at the ugly turbines; hydropower requires damming up rivers. Each energy option involves tradeoffs and each involves some degree of uncertainty. The future is always hard to see and the energy future is no different.
In investing, people cope with uncertainty by making sure they don't put too many eggs in one basket. The same approach makes sense for energy. The MIT report doesn't beat the drum for the revival of nuclear power. Instead it says this: "The nuclear option should be retained, precisely because it is an important carbon-free source of power that can potentially make a significant contribution to future electricity supply."
That sentiment wouldn't fit neatly on a bumper sticker or even in a 30-second television spot. But that doesn't mean it isn't a good idea.
Charles Stein is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at stein@globe.com.
-------- depleted uranium
Depleted Uranium Released During Canadian Plane Crash
Little-Known Use of DU in Commercial Jets Exposed
bellaciao.org
By Christopher Bollyn
24th October 2004
http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=3926
The recent crash of a Boeing 747 in Halifax, Canada, raises a number of questions about the use of depleted uranium (DU) in airplanes, public health concerns and the 9-11 attacks. When a Boeing 747 crashed and burned on takeoff at Halifax International Airport in Nova Scotia, Canada, on Oct. 14, an official accident investigator said the aircraft probably contained radioactive depleted uranium.
Bill Fowler, an investigator with the Transportation Safety Board of Canada, said the plane was likely equipped with DU as counterweights in its wings and rudder.
"A 747 may contain as much as 1,500 kilograms [3,300 lbs.] of the material," the Canadian Press reported. It took 60 firefighters and 20 trucks about three hours to control the fire.
Fowler said: "there is no threat or concern" about DU exposure to those working on the wreckage. "That's baloney," Marion Fulk, a retired staff scientist from Lawrence Livermore National Lab, told American Free Press. Fulk, 83, is currently researching how low-level ionizing radiation causes cancer, birth defects and a host of other health problems. Burning depleted uranium creates a "whole mess of oxides," Fulk said, "which is what makes it so wicked biologically."
In 1988, American physicist Robert L. Parker wrote that in the worst-case scenario, the crash of a Boeing 747 could affect the health of 250,000 people through exposure to uranium oxide particles. "Extended tests by the Navy and NASA showed that the temperature of the fireball in a plane crash can reach 1,200 degrees Celsius. Such temperatures are high enough to cause very rapid oxidation of depleted uranium," he wrote.
"Large pieces of uranium will oxidize rapidly and will sustain slow combustion when heated in air to temperatures of about 500 degrees Celsius," Paul Lowenstein, technical director and vice-president of Nuclear Metals Inc., the company that has supplied DU to Boeing, wrote in a 1993 article.
Now, some researchers are turning to the large number of sick firefighters and workers from the World Trade Center site and reports of elevated radiation levels around the Pentagon after 9-11. They contend that the Boeing 757 and 767 aircraft involved in the attacks may have also contained depleted uranium counterweights.
PENTAGON RADIATION LEVELS
Around the Pentagon there were reports of high radiation levels after 9-11. American Free Press has documentation that radiation levels in Alexandria and Leesburg, Va., were much higher than usual on 9-11 and persisted for at least one week afterward.
In Alexandria, seven miles south of the burning Pentagon, a doctor with years of experience working with radiation issues found elevated radiation levels on 9-11 of 35 to 52 counts per minute (cpm) using a "Radalert 50" Geiger counter.
One week after 9-11, in Leesburg, 33 miles northwest of the Pentagon, soil readings taken in a residential neighborhood showed even higher readings of 75 to 83 cpm.
"That's pretty high," Cindy Folkers of the Washing ton-based Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) told AFP. Folkers said 7 to 12 cpm is normal background radiation inside the NIRS building, and that outdoor readings of between 12 to 20 cpm are normal in Chevy Chase, Md., outside Washington.
The Radalert 50, Folkers said, is primarily a gamma ray detector and "detects only 7 percent of the beta radiation and even less of the alpha." This suggests that actual radiation levels may have been significantly higher than those detected by the doctor's Geiger counter.
"The question is, why?" Folkers said.
If the radiation came from the explosion and fire at the Pentagon, it most likely did not come from a Boeing 757, which is the type of aircraft that allegedly hit the building.
"Boeing has never used DU on either the 757 or the 767, and we no longer use it on the 747," Leslie M. Nichols, product spokesperson for Boeing's 767, told AFP. "Sometime ago, we switched to tungsten, because it is heavier, more readily available and more cost effective."
The cost effectiveness argument is debatable. A waste product of U.S. nuclear weapons and energy facilities, DU is reportedly provided by the Department of Energy to national and foreign armament companies free of charge.
DU is used in a wide variety of missiles in the U.S. arsenal as an armor penetrator. It is also used in the bunker-buster bombs and cruise missiles. Because no photographic evidence of a Boeing 757 hitting the Pentagon is available to the public, 9-11 skeptics and independent researchers claim something else, such as a missile, struck the Pentagon.
A white flash, not unlike those seen in videos of the planes as they struck the twin towers, occurs when a DU penetrator hits a target.
Photographs from the Pentagon reveal that large round holes were punched through six walls in the three outer rings. The outside wall is 24 inches thick with a six-inch limestone exterior, eight inches of brick and 10 inches of steel reinforced concrete; the other walls are 18 inches thick.
The object that hit the Pentagon on 9-11 penetrated several feet of reinforced concrete, leaving holes with diameters between 11 and 16 feet.
Bill Bellinger, then head of the EPA's Radiation Program for Region III, which includes Virginia, told AFP that he had received information of elevated radiation levels and contacted EPA officials at the Pentagon.
"I was concerned about that," Bellinger said. "I didn't disregard it at all."
Bellinger told AFP that he thought the radiation was from DU in the aircraft.
Bellinger, who was based in Philadelphia, did not personally visit the Pentagon site and said that EPA personnel at the site had not reported high levels of radioactivity. However, the EPA official who Bellinger said had worked at the Pentagon, Craig Conklin, now at FEMA, told AFP that he had not been involved at the site, "directly or indirectly."
Workers and FEMA officials at the Pentagon were seen wearing special protective outfits and respirators. FEMA photos show the workers going through decontamination procedures.
Bellinger told AFP that the Department of Defense was responsible for on-site safety procedures at the Pentagon.
In New York, however, considerably less attention was paid to the health risks the burning rubble posed to workers at the WTC site. A recent screening done by Mount Sinai Hospital found that nearly three-quarters of the 1,138 first responders had experienced respiratory problems while working at Ground Zero, and half had respiratory ailments that persisted for an average of eight months afterward.
"We were dumfounded by how many people were sick, and how sick they were, and how sick they still are," said Robin Herbert, co-director of the program.
Thomas Cahill, professor of physics and atmospheric sciences, analyzed the plumes from a station one mile north of the burning WTC rubble. "The small particles worried me the most," Cahill told AFP, referring to the sub-micron-size particles, which can pass through the filters of respirators.
Cahill said the high levels of silicon, vanadium, nickel and sulfuric acid concerned him. The fine concrete dust, he said, acted "like Drano" in the lungs of the workers, where it irritated and burned the wet membranes.
Until Dec. 15, the pile was so hot, a piece of paper would ignite on contact with the rubble, Cahill said. "You had the workers working on top of a huge incinerator in the rush to get Wall Street going again," Cahill said. "It was really dumb.
"Only 30 percent of the firefighters working at the site in October were wearing any protection at all," he said.
A class action lawsuit on behalf of more than 800 people who suffer health effects was filed against WTC leaseholder Larry Silverstein and the companies that supervised the cleanup: AMEC, Bovis Lend Lease, Turner, and Tully Construction.
The suit was filed on Sept. 10, the last day set by a federal three-year statute of limitations for lawsuits related to 9-11.
"Under state labor law, employers have a duty to provide a safe place to work," lead attorney David Worby said. "They violated that duty. Everyone knew what was on the ground."
As many as 100,000 workers at Ground Zero and hundreds of thousands more people in the area were exposed to airborne toxins, Worby said.
"If you expose a person to this amount of lead, cadmium, benzene, asbestos and glass shards, they are going to be sick," he said. "More people could die from this than died on the day of 9-11."
AMEC Construction Management, a subsidiary of the British engineering firm AMEC, renovated Wedge One of the Pentagon before 9-11 and cleaned it up afterward.
AMEC had also renovated Silverstein's WTC 7, which collapsed mysteriously on 9-11, and then headed the cleanup of the WTC site afterward. The AMEC construction firm is currently in the process of closing all its offices in the United States.
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/depleted_uranium.html
-------- india / pakistan
Second round of Indo-Pak talks from November 29
Daily Times
October 24, 2004
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_21-10-2004_pg1_1
ISLAMABAD: Foreign Office spokesman Masood Khan on Wednesday announced the schedule for the second round of talks between Pakistan and India, which will begin from November 29.
At his weekly news briefing, Mr Khan said the two countries had agreed on a schedule for the meetings. According to the schedule, meetings between narcotics control authorities will be held on November 29 and 30 in New Delhi. They will include a meeting to finalise a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). Meetings between railway authorities on the Munabao-Khokhrapar rail link will be held on December 2 and 3 in Islamabad.
Meetings between the Indian Coast Guard and the Pakistan Maritime Security Agency to discuss the MoU for communication links will be held on December 3 and 4 in New Delhi.
Meetings on all issues related to beginning a bus service between Srinagar and Muzaffarabad will be held on December 7 and 8 in New Delhi.
Committee of experts meetings on trade and related issues will be held on December 9 and 10 in New Delhi.
An experts-level meeting on nuclear confidence building measures (CBM) to discuss the agreement draft on advanced notification for missile tests will take place on December 14 and 15 in Islamabad. Similarly, expert-level meetings on conventional CBMs will be held on December 15 and 16 in Islamabad.
A meeting for a joint survey of the boundary pillars on the horizontal segment of the Sir Creek area will be held on December 14 and 15 in Karachi.
The spokesman said the two countries agreed in principle to hold meetings during the foreign minister's visit to India in September.
To a question, the spokesman said Pakistan has given new vigour to attempts to resolve the Kashmir issue in line with the wishes of the Kashmiri people to ensure peace and security in the region.
He said Pakistan appreciated the United States and the international community, particularly China, Japan and Organisation of Islamic Conference states, for encouraging Pakistan and India to move forward to resolve all issues, including Kashmir. He said there is a need for more trust and a deeper understanding between the two sides to move forward.
Responding to a question about a statement by All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC) Chairman Syed Ali Shah Geelani, Mr Khan said Pakistan appreciated the efforts by Kashmiri leaders, particularly of the APHC, and their work to resolve the Kashmir issue.
The spokesman said finding a solution to the Kashmir issue was Pakistan's main objective and it was trying to do this through informal and formal channels simultaneously. "Informal channels are deliberately kept out of the media so they can work effectively," he added.
Mr Khan said the foreign secretaries of both countries would discuss Kashmir and peace and security in the region and they would meet twice a year to do this.
He said Pakistan had proposed foreign secretary-level talks in the third or fourth week of December this year and he expected India would respond positively.
Asked if US Assistant Secretary of State Christina Rocca was in Pakistan to give dictation, he said Pakistan did not take dictation from anyone. He said the US official visited Islamabad to discuss bilateral issues.
He said the main focus during the talks was on dialogue with India, particularly some new developments on the sidelines of President Pervez Musharraf meetings in New York. He said both sides exchanged views on all issues.
He said the Pakistani government had taken strict security measures to protect all foreign nationals, particularly Chinese citizens working in Pakistan.
He said commonwealth secretary general would be visiting Islamabad on Friday and Pakistan would have wide-ranging talks with him on all issues, including technical assistance, information technology, higher education and global trade.
He said the Kuwaiti ban on Pakistani workers tarveling to Iraq had been lifted and they could now go to Iraq, but at their own risk.
He said Pakistan was paying a heavy price in the war on terrorism and Pakistani soldiers had given their lives in this war.
--------
Nuke powers warned against technology denial to India
PM launches FBR programme
newstodaynet.com
Oct 24, 2004
http://newstodaynet.com/24oct/rf3.htm
Kalpakkam, -- India's nuclear programme scaled one more notch with the launch of the commercial phase of fast breeder programme by Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh, who, besides pledging the government's supprt to the endeavours of the Department of Atomic Energy, also issued a veiled warning to advanced nuclear powers that have imposed sanctions against the country in the aftermath of Pokhran II.
Stating that the functions of the DAE were 'closely intertwined with our nation's needs and aspirations', the Prime Minister said, 'technololgy denial and closing avenues for international cooperation 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 technologies.'
He was speaking a function organised to commomerate the golden jubilee of DAE, which was set up in 1954, and also the launch of the commercial phase of the fast breeder programme at Kalpakkam, where the indigenous technology for the fast breeder reactor programme was developed.
The fast breeder technology marks the second phase of the three-stage nuclear programme enunciated by Homi Bhabha, the father of India's atomic energy development. After the government constituted the Atomic Energy Commission on 10 August, 1948, Bhabha designed the three-stage programme for most efficient utilisation of the available fuel in the country.
Since India has limited deposits of uranium but vast quantities of thorium, Bhabha drew up a plan based on 'closed fuel cycle concept', which in other words meant reprocessing of spent fuel from every reactor to judiciously reutilise all available fissile material.
'Uranium 238', the dominant isotope of Uranium, is a fertile material but cannot make the reactor critical by itself. However, it can be converted to fissile plutonium 239 in a nuclear reactor. Similarly thorium is a fertile material but needs to be converted into fissile Uranium 233 in a reactor.
So in the first stage of the nuclear programme, Pressurised Heavy Water Reactors - the country now has 14 units in six locations, including the two units of the Madras Atomic Power Station in Kalpakkam, and eight others are being built - were set up. The spent fuel of these plants are reprocessed at the various fuel cycle facilities, including the Kalpakkam Reprocessing Plant (KARP).
The second stage of the nuclear programme, in to which India has just embarked, Fast Breeder Reactors will be set up to multiply the fissile plutonium, which is essential to establish a higher power base for using thorium in the third stage of the programme.
Yesterday, among the various things that Manmohan Singh did at Kalpakkam was to formally pour the concrete at the site where the country's first Fast Breeder Reactor is being built. The reactor with the capacity of 500 MWe is expected to be completed by 2010.
The technology for fast breeder reactors was developed at the Indira Gandhi Centre of Atomic Research at Kalpakkam, where a Fast Breeder Test Reactor (FBTR) was earlier set up. Having mastered the technology, DAE is constructing the Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor (PFBR) at a cost of Rs 3492 crore.
DAE has floated a seperate company - Bharatiya Nabhikiya Vidyut Nigam Limited (BHAVINI) - to undertake the construction, commissioning, operation and maintence of the PFBR and also for setting up more fast breeder reactors in future.
Work on the PFBR has already started with the excavation of soil in a 250 metre by 270 metre area, about 500 metres away from the Bay of Bengal.
The Prime Minister was earlier scheduled to pour concrete formally on 29 August but called off his visit at the eleventh hour. However, yesterday he did it, besides visiting an exhibition set up at the stie displaying models of the various machinery and equipment that will go into the making of the PFBR.
The Prime Minister also unvelied a 'Minar', a stone monument erected outside the IGCAR building to mark the golden jubilee of DAE. The Minar was sculpted by an artisan from Mahabalipuram.
As of now nuclear power generated through the heavy water reactors accounts for just two per cent of the overall installed capacity in the country. However, India hopes to generate 20,000 megawatts of nuclear power by 2020. In the meantime, the two 1000 megawatt reactors at Kudankulam, which are being built with the help from the Russia, will start generating electricity by 2008. The Kudankulam reactors are light water reactors.
--------
India Unaware of U.S. Plans of More Nuclear Curbs
(Reuters)
Oct 24, 2004
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=CG3GLAB2Q5ZU2CRBAELCFFA?type=topNews&storyID=6590089
NEW DELHI - India said it was unaware of any U.S. plans to slap sanctions on additional Indian persons, companies or institutions which Washington says are aiding Iran's nuclear program.
The Bush administration has already imposed curbs on two Indian scientists -- former heads of India's Nuclear Power Corporation -- late last month for alleged nuclear cooperation with Iran, which Washington says is developing nuclear weapons.
Tehran denies the charge and says its atomic program is for peaceful purposes.
Official U.S. sources told Reuters last week that further curbs on one to three Indian entities were being considered.
"We are...not aware of plans to sanction three entities as mentioned in these press reports," the Indian Foreign Ministry said in a statement late Saturday.
Any plans for further sanctions, if any, should be discussed at the India-United States forum for high-technology trade, termed as the "Next Steps in Strategic Partnership," the statement added.
New Delhi has already asked Washington to lift curbs on its scientists saying they were based on "faulty evidence." The Bush administration said last week it may reconsider the curbs provided India offered "convincing" proof they were not involved.
The sanctions bar the scientists from doing business with Washington.
The spat over sanctions and U.S. concerns about India's nuclear capabilities have marred the increasingly warm ties between New Delhi and Washington.
India-U.S. relations were boosted when New Delhi was quick to offer support to the war on terror after the September 11 attacks.
India's booming technology sector and huge market has led to deeper economic ties.
Last month, the U.S. lifted decades-old curbs on the export of equipment to India's commercial space program and nuclear power facilities.
But the United States remains suspicious of New Delhi's close ties with Tehran, which India sees as an important ally in the Middle East.
Saturday, Indian Prime Minister Singh, speaking to nuclear scientists at a function in the south of the country, said India would never be the source of nuclear proliferation.
-------- iran
Iran: Europe Nuke Proposal'Unbalanced'
October 24, 2004
By ALI AKBAR DAREINI
Associated Press Writer
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAN_NUCLEAR?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran called a European proposal seeking indefinite suspension of its nuclear activities "unbalanced" but said Sunday the Europeans made the right decision to engage in dialogue.
In talks Thursday in Vienna, Austria, envoys from Britain, France and Germany reportedly offered civilian nuclear technology and a trade deal to the Iranians in return for Iran permanently giving up all uranium enrichment activities - technology that can be used to produce nuclear fuel or nuclear weapons.
"The proposal by the Europeans is unbalanced," Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said. "However, the Europeans have chosen the correct path of dialogue."
Britain, France and Germany have warned that most European countries will back Washington's call to refer Iran's nuclear dossier to the U.N. Security Council for possible economic sanctions if Iran does not give up all uranium enrichment activities by the Nov. 25 meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
In a German newspaper interview published Sunday, the European Union's foreign policy chief pressured Iran to cooperate.
"We cannot accept Iran developing nuclear weapons," Javier Solana told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper. "The situation in the region is tense enough - it shouldn't get any more critical."
Iran was still studying the European proposal, Asefi said.
"We think we have to reach a solution acceptable to both sides so that European concerns are eased and, at the same time, our rights under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty are recognized and met," Asefi said.
Iran had its own proposals, Asefi said, but he refused to elaborate. Detailed talks with the three key European powers would resume Wednesday, he said.
However, Asefi said Iran would not accept a permanent suspension of its nuclear activities, and he maintained that the Europeans did not want that, anyway.
"The discussion is not about permanent suspension of enrichment. The Europeans have proposed indefinite suspension until an agreement is reached. They didn't call for a permanent suspension," he said.
Iran insists its nuclear activities are peaceful and geared solely toward generating electric power. The United States contends it is running a covert atomic weapons program, prompting President Bush to label Iran part of an "axis of evil" with North Korea and prewar Iraq.
Last month, the IAEA unanimously passed a resolution demanding Iran freeze all work on uranium enrichment and related activities, such as uranium reprocessing and the building of centrifuges used for enrichment. The U.N. nuclear watchdog agency will judge Iran's compliance at its Nov. 25 meeting.
Iran already has defied the IAEA resolution by continuing to build centrifuges and by converting a few tons of raw uranium into hexafluoride gas, a stage before enrichment.
Iran has said the agency has no authority to ban it from enriching uranium, a right granted under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. However, while not prohibited from enrichment activities under that treaty, Iran faces growing international pressure to suspend them.
--------
Iran says uranium conversion plant nearly finished
(Reuters)
Oct 24, 2004
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=6590847
TEHRAN - A key Iranian nuclear facility which the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog has urged Tehran to shut down is nearing completion, a senior Iranian nuclear official said on Sunday.
The Uranium Conversion Facility in the central city of Isfahan is part of nuclear fuel cycle activities which the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has given Tehran until late November to suspend.
If it does not it faces being sent to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions.
Washington says Iran's efforts to produce its own nuclear fuel are part of a covert bid to produce nuclear arms. Iran says it wants the fuel for nuclear reactors that generate electricity.
"Right now, the Isfahan UCF facility is 70 percent operational," said Mohammad Ghanadi, deputy head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organisation.
"I can say that 21 out of the 24 workshops in this facility have become operational," he added in a speech at the plant to visiting lawmakers, extracts of which were broadcast on state television.
The Isfahan plant is designed to convert uranium ore, or yellowcake, into uranium hexafluoride. This in turn can be spun in centrifuges to produce enriched uranium.
Moderately enriched uranium can be used to fuel nuclear power reactors. But uranium can also be enriched further to make bomb-grade material.
Iran has announced plans to convert 37 tonnes of yellowcake at Isfahan -- enough to produce material for five atomic warheads according to nuclear experts.
But diplomats close to the IAEA say Iran has so far produced only a few kilograms of uranium hexafluoride in experimental tests at Isfahan.
Iran's Foreign Ministry on Sunday rejected a proposal made by European Union officials last week for Iran to scrap its fuel cycle activities in return for assistance with a civilian nuclear programme and the possibility of an EU trade deal.
But Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said Iran was keen to pursue further negotiations with the EU over its nuclear programme ahead of the IAEA's November 25 meeting.
Ghanadi also said Iran's first uranium mine at Saghand in central Iran would become operational by March 2005 and said there were good prospects for other mines elsewhere in the country.
-----
Iranian uranium facility '70 percent' operational: official
TEHRAN (AFP)
Oct 24, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041024192313.rp4xwyn2.html
A uranium conversion facility in the Iranian city of Isfahan, whose activities European states want to suspend, is now "70 percent" operational, an official from the country's nuclear agency said on Sunday.
"Most of the equipment of the Isfahan factory has been built by Iranian scientists and it is 70 percent operational at the current time," said Mohammad Ghanadi, in charge of activities related to the combustion cycle at Iran's atomic agency.
"After the end of cooperation with the Chinese, we grouped together our scientists and in less than four years we managed to complete the construction of these installations," he said in comments broadcast on state television.
"The installations in Isfahan cover a space of 60 hectares (150 acres) and have 60 units and 15,000 machine tools, most of which were built by Iranian experts," he added.
The Isfahan facility should allow Iran to convert uranium yellow cake into uranium hexafluoride, a gas used in the centrifuges that are employed to enrich uranium.
Depending on the level of purification, enriched uranium can be used either as fuel for a civilian reactor or as the explosive core of a nuclear bomb. Iran insists it only wants to generate electricity.
Ghanadi also revealed that Iran was "prospecting in most regions of the country to find uranium mines", and said that four such mines had already been discovered.
"We hope that we will be able to exploit the mine in Saghand (central Iran) from the second quarter of 2005," he said.
On Thursday European countries had asked Iran to suspend the activities of the Isfahan factory as they offered a deal to Tehran to halt uranium enrichment activities in exchange for technical assistance.
On September 18, the UN nuclear watchdog -- the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) -- passed a resolution calling on Iran to suspend all parts of the nuclear fuel cycle, including conversion activities at its Isfahan facility.
-------- israel
Let me leave and be free, pleads Israeli whistleblower Vanunu
LONDON (AFP)
Oct 24, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041024105153.q67xjbby.html
Mordechai Vanunu, who was freed in April after 18 years in an Israeli prison for revealing the country's nuclear program, told the BBC in a television interview from Israel on Sunday that he was desperate to start a new life elsewhere.
"I want to feel free, I'm not free here," said the 50-year-old Vanunu, who on release was subjected to a series of sweeping restrictions, including a ban on travelling abroad as well as holding unauthorised meetings with foreigners.
"The only way to feel and enjoy freedom and start my new life as a free human being will be when I can leave Israel and live my life in the US, in Europe or in London," he said.
Vanunu was sentenced in 1986 to 18 years in prison for "treason" and "espionage" after leaking top-secret details about the Dimona nuclear plant, where he was employed, to The Sunday Times.
"I tried to inform the world and to try to stop this nuclear proliferation," he said on Sunday in the live television interview with BBC's Breakfast with (David) Frost programme.
"My hope was that by revealing the nuclear secrets I would bring new states towards real peace in the Middle East and the abolition of nuclear weapons in all the Middle East," he said.
-------- korea
N. Korea threatens more nukes
October 24, 2004
By Sang-hun Choe
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041024-124550-5225r.htm
SEOUL - North Korea warned it will double its nuclear deterrent force if the United States persists in challenging the North's nuclear-weapons programs.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, en route to Japan on his Asia trip, rejected Pyongyang's demands that the United States "reward" the communist country before it will agree to return to six-party discussions on its nuclear programs.
North Korea, which says it has several atom bombs and insists it needs nuclear weapons to deter a U.S. invasion, said yesterday that talks can recommence only when Washington drops its "hostile policy" 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 todouble its deterrent force, much less any solution to the nuclear issue," Pyongyang's official Rodong newspaper said, using the acronym for Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the North's official name.
On his weekend trip, Mr. 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 on 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.
Pyongyang dismissed Powell's Asian trip as pre-U.S. election trickery.
The nuclear negotiations started after U.S. officials said North Korea admitted to running a secret atomic bomb program in violation of international agreements. That assertion prompted President Bush to say North Korea was part of an "axis of evil" with Iran and prewar Iraq.
Some U.S. intelligence analysts say North Korea may have up to six nuclear weapons instead of the one or two the Central Intelligence Agency estimates. North Korea says it has several plutonium-based nuclear weapons and denies U.S. charges that it admitted having a secret uranium-based nuclear-weapons program.
North Korea sneered yesterday at Mr. Powell's trip, with a spokesman from its 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 that the six-nation talks address its charges that South Korea is 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 Mr. Powell's last to East Asia because it was scheduled 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.
The Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. John Kerry, contends that the government has mishandled the North Korean problem and should have embraced former President Bill Clinton's policy of bilateral talks with Pyongyang rather than the six-nation talks.
--------
Powell Presses N. Korea on Weapons Talks
October 24, 2004
By GEORGE GEDDA
Associated Press Writer
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/P/POWELL_ASIA?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
TOKYO (AP) -- Secretary of State Colin Powell pressed North Korea on Sunday to return to nuclear disarmament talks even as he branded the communist country a "terrorist state" that has "no respect for human rights."
Powell's strong comments came after North Korea accused the United States of "evermore hostile acts," including U.S. participation in a multinational naval exercise set to begin Monday off the Japanese coast.
The maneuvers are part of an effort to curb the smuggling of missiles and nuclear technology on the high seas.
North Korea dominated Powell's discussions in Japan with Prime Minister Junichiro and other officials. Later, Powell flew to China where he planned talks on Monday with President Hu Jintao on North Korea, Taiwan and other issues.
Powell's final stop during his trip to East Asia will be South Korea.
At a news conference, Powell gave assurances that President Bush seeks a peaceful solution to the long-running impasse over North Korea's nuclear weapons programs.
The United States is seeking the permanent dismantling of these programs. Three meetings involving the United States, the two Koreas, China, Japan and Russia have been held in China, with little evidence of progress.
Blaming what it said were hostile U.S. policies, North Korea boycotted a meeting that was to have been held in September. Powell said it was urgent to resume the talks.
Responding to North Korea's wariness about the naval exercises, Powell said, "The only thing North Korea should be concerned about is whether or not they're going to be caught in the act of participating in ... illicit traffic. This is not hostile to any nation that is acting in an appropriate manner."
In the past, North Korea has exported missiles to the Middle East.
The United States, Japan and seven other countries will participate in the naval exercise; some 14 more nations will serve as observers.
The U.S. undersecretary for arms control, John Bolton, will monitor the exercises on Tuesday. Long an outspoken critic of North Korea, he was once derided by officials there as "human scum."
North Korea says U.S. hostile intent also was reflected in a human rights law that was signed by President Bush last week.
The law urges North Korea to allow freedom of speech and religion and calls for the appointment by the president of a human rights monitor for North Korea. In the absence of a reduction in rights abuses, the law would forbid U.S. assistance to North Korea except for humanitarian purposes.
Interviewed by Japanese journalists, Powell said the desperation of North Koreans is apparent by the number of them who jump over fences and penetrate embassy compounds "to get away from this regime that made life so difficult for them - not only economically difficult but by having no respect for human rights."
He also highlighted North Korea's role in kidnaping Japanese citizens and smuggling them into North Korea. "A state did this, not terrorists, but a state, a terrorist state did this," Powell said.
Powell's comments on North Korea were unsually harsh. The administration normally has refrained from such rhetoric as it has pursued renewed North Korean participation in the six-party talks.
Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry has said direct U.S.-North Korea talks are the best way to reach a settlement. Powell said North Korea itself is "desperate" for that kind of negotiation.
"I think anybody who would approach the problem that way, after we have gotten the six-party framework moving forward, will be disappointed, whether it's Mr. Kerry or anybody else," Powell said.
--------
N. Korea's Condition For Talks Rejected
Powell Rules Out Advance Compensation
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 24, 2004; Page A23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56508-2004Oct23.html
TOKYO, Oct. 23 -- Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said Saturday that the United States would not provide "up-front" benefits to North Korea if it agreed to dismantle its nuclear programs, rejecting a key condition laid out by the North Korean government Friday for its return to six-nation negotiations on its weapons programs.
North Korea, which had refused to attend a planned session of the talks in September, said it would consider rejoining the negotiations if the United States was prepared to contribute to a compensation package in return for North Korea's agreement to freeze its nuclear programs. The government in Pyongyang also reiterated its previous demands that the Bush administration drop what North Korea calls a hostile policy and accept its proposal to discuss South Korea's recently disclosed -- and unauthorized -- tests with nuclear materials.
North Korea's insistence that the United States join in providing up-front compensation appeared to be aimed at driving a wedge between the United States and its four allies in the talks -- Japan, South Korea, China and Russia. Japan and South Korea have offered to provide North Korea with fuel oil if it commits to ending its programs, and the Bush administration has been under pressure to provide some symbolic contribution, such as paying administrative expenses. The United States has maintained that it would provide benefits, such as a security guarantee, only after North Korea discloses and allows the verification of the full extent of its programs.
Powell, arriving in Tokyo on the first leg of a three-day tour of East Asia to discuss the crisis over Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions, noted to reporters traveling with him that South Korea and Japan have offered to immediately assist North Korea. But he said the United States would not agree to such conditions.
"President Bush is committed to assisting the Korean people to a better life and to help the Korean people to deal with problems of food sufficiency, energy," Powell said. "But we can't start putting things up front on the table, from our perspective, because we do not think that is the way to ultimately achieve our mutual objective, which is complete removal of a nuclear weapons program and all of its parts from North Korea."
Powell added that North Korea should not be setting conditions for returning to the talks. "Any outstanding issues that are holding up progress should be dealt with in the context of the discussions, not press statements or rhetoric going back and forth," he said.
North Korea has long insisted that the United States has a hostile policy toward it. A key goal of Powell's tour through Tokyo, Beijing and Seoul is to emphasize that Bush, who once labeled North Korea part of an "axis of evil," has no plans to invade the country and has no hostile intent.
But that message has been complicated by the fact that the United States will join Japan and other countries in a naval exercise next week in Japan's Sagami Bay. The exercise is aimed at stemming weapons proliferation.
As Powell departs Tokyo on Sunday, Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton, the driving force behind the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), will arrive to observe the exercise. Bolton, considered one of the administration's hard-liners on North Korea policy, has been labeled "human scum" and a "bloodsucker" by North Korea for his tough speeches about the country.
In its statement Friday, Pyongyang denounced the exercise, saying "the U.S. is becoming evermore undisguised in its hostile acts as evidenced by PSI exercises staged to blockade and stifle" North Korea.
Powell insisted that the exercise, the first held in Asia, "is not a hostile act toward North Korea." He said there is "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 cargoes from reaching the most irresponsible purchasers of such cargo."
But in a speech last week, Bolton made it clear that the exercise was aimed at North Korea. "The threats posed by proliferation from North Korea in the Asian region are obvious," Bolton told the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations. "In addition to training, these exercises serve a useful deterrent to companies that otherwise might be tempted to do business with proliferators like North Korea."
Shortly before Powell arrived here, North Korea issued another threatening statement. The government's KCNA news agency said Pyongyang would double the size of its "nuclear deterrent" if the United States did not drop its confrontational policy. Many U.S. intelligence officials have said they believe that in the past two years, North Korea has quadrupled its stockpile of weapons-grade plutonium, giving the country enough material to produce at least eight weapons.
--------
Powell and Japan Ask North Korea to Resume Talks
October 24, 2004
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/24/international/asia/24cnd-diplo.html?hp&ex=1098676800&en=6f095e35126899fb&ei=5094&partner=homepage
TOKYO, Oct. 24 - Secretary of State Colin L. Powell joined with Japanese leaders today to appeal again to North Korea to resume the stalled negotiations over the future of its nuclear program, and not to see a set of upcoming naval exercises as provocative or an excuse for further delay.
Addressing another sensitive matter on his stop in Tokyo, Mr. Powell also said the United States and Japan would intensify discussions in coming months on a possible reduction of American forces in Japan, particularly Okinawa, in tandem with a similar reduction that is being implemented in South Korea.
The subjects of troop strength in East Asia and how to deal with the threat of North Korea were among several matters taken up by the secretary in his first trip to Japan in a year and a half. He also met today with Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.
From here, Mr. Powell is to go to China and South Korea, where he is also expected to press the cause of resuming negotiations with North Korea.
Perhaps not by coincidence, Mr. Powell's trip comes at a time of a well-publicized naval exercise to be conducted off the coast of Japan, aimed at thwarting the shipment of ingredients that could be used to make nuclear, chemical and biological arms. The exercises have drawn criticism from North Korea, which sees them as hostile.
The exercises - with American, French, Australian and Japanese forces scheduled to participate - have stirred unusual publicity in the region in recent weeks.
As he has before, Mr. Powell asserted here that the exercises were not directed at North Korea, though other American officials have made it clear that they are intended to send a message to the Pyongyang government to stop exporting weapons material.
"The only thing North Korea should be concerned about is whether or not they're going to be caught in the act of participating in this kind of illicit traffic," Mr. Powell said.
Mixing that blunt dismissal with a more conciliatory comment, the secretary added that the only way North Korea could get badly needed economic and energy help was for an accord to be reached in talks with the United States, Russia, China, South Korea and Japan to dismantle its nuclear arms program.
"The sooner North Korea understands that there's only one way to solve this problem - that is, through the six-party framework - the better off we will be," he said, adding: "We're all pressing hard. There is a sense of urgency."
Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura, speaking with the secretary at a government guest house, echoed his comments and added that Japan would urge North Korea to return to the negotiating table at a meeting next month with North Korean envoys to discuss the contentious issue of Japanese citizens abducted by North Korea several years ago.
Talks aimed at ending the north's nuclear program have sputtered for a year and a half with a small breakthrough last summer when the Bush administration agreed to let Japan and South Korea suggest that they could provide energy and economic aid to North Korea if it started on the road to ending its program.
Then just as the first signs of progress were glimmering, North Korea boycotted what was supposed to be another round in September, prompting comments from Japanese and South Korean diplomats that the Pyongyang government was evidently waiting to see how the American presidential election turned out.
Among other things, the north's delaying tactics have deprived President Bush of the opportunity to boast that diplomacy was working with North Korea, even as hardliners in Congress and elsewhere have begun quietly floating the idea that the only thing that will work with the north is "regime change" - either by replacing or reforming the government led by President Kim Jong Il.
Earlier this month, a coalition of both conservatives and liberals in Congress passed a resolution calling on the United States to make human rights reform an element of any discussions with North Korea on its nuclear ambitions. In addition, the resolution calls on the United States not to grant any economic aid to the north - which Mr. Bush has hinted would be forthcoming in a final deal - without measurable progress on human rights.
The resolution, which Mr. Bush signed on Monday on the eve of Mr. Powell's trip to the region, has also caught the attention of the media in Japan, China and South Korea - not to mention in North Korea, where it has been denounced along with the naval exercises as hostile in intent.
Supporters of the resolution in Congress say that, although there is nothing explicit in it calling for the overthrow of the current government, they want such a change at least to be discussed.
The resolution did not have the enthusiastic backing of those in the Bush administration who are trying to push for negotiations with the north, and Secretary Powell has been careful not to say that he would definitely make human rights changes a part of negotiations with the Pyongyang government.
Before arriving in Tokyo, he said he had not brought up this idea yet with China, Japan and South Korea, where it is considered likely to be greeted unenthusiastically.
American officials also do not emphasize the signal that might be sent by the planned reduction of American forces in the region. Instead, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld has been saying the reduction of the 37,000 troops in South Korea would lead to increased capacity to defend the south because of technology improvements in the military.
There are 40,000 American troops in Japan, which welcomes them as a signal that the United States is ready to defend Japan against attack, but which also sees them as an irritant in various communities, especially in the southern island of Okinawa where most of them are based.
An administration official said Japan and the United States had agreed to step up their discussions on the issue, perhaps reaching some kind of agreement before the end of Mr. Bush's term of office in January.
--------
Powell Rejects North Korean Demand on U.S.
October 24, 2004
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/24/international/asia/24diplo.html?pagewanted=all
TOKYO, Oct. 23 - Secretary of State Colin L. Powell on Saturday rejected North Korea's latest demand that the United States drop its "hostile" policy toward that nation and agree to other steps before the stalled regional talks on its nuclear weapons program resume.
Mr. Powell, speaking to reporters on his plane before arriving in Tokyo for a three-day visit to Japan, China and South Korea, said that "to put forward these kinds of conditions, which may lead to yet another set of conditions, is not the way to approach this problem."
He added that North Korea should take up any of its concerns at the talks themselves rather than lay out preconditions for the talks. He was responding to a statement from North Korea the day before that three conditions had to be met before it would return to talks on its nuclear program after more than three months of delay.
The North Korean demands were laid out by a Foreign Ministry spokesman to the official KCNA news agency. North Korea is believed by Western experts to have amassed enough weapons-grade nuclear fuel for at least two nuclear bombs, and possibly several more, in the past two years.
On Saturday, North Korea said that if the United States persisted in its approach, it would double the size of its "deterrent force,'' a commentary by the KCNA news agency said in the official daily Rodong Sinmun, Reuters reported.
Addressing a separate matter, Mr. Powell said that in response to a recently enacted Congressional resolution on North Korea, the Bush administration would press for human rights concerns there to be discussed "by the international community" but that no plans had been set to make that issue a part of the nuclear talks.
The North Korean Human Rights Act, signed into law earlier in the week, links any economic aid to North Korea with progress on political prisoners, free speech and other human rights, and it says that concerns about human rights must become part of the talks on North Korea's nuclear programs.
The law has been denounced by North Korea and has met with skepticism in China and South Korea, where some officials say it might complicate the drive to get cooperation from the highly secretive and suspicious government in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital.
Mr. Powell said that human rights is "something we should talk about" and that he had assured sponsors of the resolution that the United States would do so, but that he and his aides had not yet decided on how best to approach the subject.
The human rights law also authorizes expenditures for aid for civilians and for North Korean refugees, and to private groups pressing for reform in North Korea. Some Asian experts say such steps could prompt charges of inappropriate interference by North Korea, but there is also a strong constituency in Congress for not overlooking the problem of North Korea's dictatorship in any solution on the nuclear issue.
Besides the demand that the United States drop its "hostile" policy, North Korea said that the United States must agree to discuss South Korea's own nuclear program and that there must be American participation in the aid package put forward by Japan and South Korea as an incentive for the North to abandon its nuclear weapons aspirations.
North Korea's nuclear program has been the focus of talks involving the United States, China, Japan, South Korea and Russia, but North Korea boycotted a round scheduled for September, citing several reasons, including the disclosure earlier this year of nuclear weapons technology experiments conducted in South Korea several years ago.
Mr. Powell suggested Saturday that even the subject of the South's nuclear experiments, which he said were minor and being investigated by international inspectors, "should not be an obstacle" to talks, and that North Korea was welcome to bring up its concerns in discussions.
Some Bush administration officials say they believe that North Korea has been stalling its return to the talks until after the outcome of the American presidential election. Mr. Powell said he would not attribute any motives to North Korea, but that, whoever is elected, the framework for dealing with the talks with all six nations would continue.
Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, has said he would continue the six-party format but also engage in two-way talks between the United States and North Korea.
Another recent irritant in American relations with North Korea was dismissed as inconsequential by Mr. Powell: the North Korean government's denunciation of a planned naval drill in the coming week off the coast of Japan, where American, French, Australian and Japanese ships will practice intercepting a ship as if it were carrying chemical weapons.
Several such drills have been conducted around the world in the last year and a half under a program known as the Proliferation Security Initiative. Mr. Powell said North Korea's concerns were unwarranted. "It does not threaten North Korea," he said. "It protects the rest of the world."
Mr. Powell said that the United States would, meanwhile, continue to supply North Korea with food aid to ease starvation. The State Department has said that 50,000 tons of food was recently authorized.
--------
Lab Tests Not Serious: US
10-24-2004
koreatimes.co.kr
By Reuben Staines
http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/nation/200410/kt2004102417174011970.htm
A senior U.S. official has reassured South Korea that its recently disclosed nuclear experiments are not a major worry, quelling reports that Washington is distrustful of Seoul's nuclear activities.
U.S. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice told South Korea Defense Minister Yoon Kwang-ung over the weekend that the United States is comfortable with the Seoul government's handling of the controversial experiments.
``Condoleezza Rice told me that South Korea's uranium and plutonium experiments are not a serious problem and the government does not need to be overly concerned about them,'' Yoon said during a briefing with South Korean correspondents in Washington.
``South Korea's efforts for nuclear transparency are a good example for other countries,'' the defense minister quoted Rice as saying.
Yoon met Rice on the sidelines of his annual bilateral security consultation with U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
Washington's reassurance comes after claims last week that the U.S. was considering dispatching a team of nuclear experts to investigate the circumstances surrounding the lab tests, which are already being examined by the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Another report suggested the U.S. would push to have the issue referred to the U.N. Security Council.
The tests _ one conducted in 1982 to extract plutonium and the other in 2000 to enrich uranium _ were revealed by Seoul last month and initially triggered speculation of a government-funded nuclear weapons research program.
But the government has asserted they were isolated academic exercises and promised to cooperate fully with the U.N. nuclear watchdog to prove it has no ambitions to possess nuclear weapons.
The IAEA will discuss the findings of its probe into the lab tests at a meeting next month but its chief, Mohamed ElBaradei, has downplayed the seriousness of the investigation.
North Korea, however, has denounced the South's nuclear activities, citing them as one reason for refusing to return to six-party talks on dismantling its nuclear weapons programs.
It accuses the U.S. and the IAEA of setting a double-standard by condoning Seoul's lab tests while condemning Pyongyang for developing nuclear weapons.
-----
U.S., S Korea Agree to Increased Defense Cooperation
chosun.com
Oct.24,2004
http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200410/200410240005.html
U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and South Korean Defense Minister Yoon Kwang-ung agreed to establish a Strategic Policy Initiative (SPI) to discuss long-term alliance tasks, during the annual Security Consultative Meeting at the Pentagon on Friday (local time). Assistant Defense Minister for Policy Ahn Kwang-chan said that the initiative will help the two countries to discuss the future of their alliance over the next one to two years. The two defense chiefs announced a 13-clause joint statement, which confirms the two nation's willingness to strengthen their alliance and the U.S.'s pledge to continue to improve the defense and nuclear umbrella for South Korea.
When asked what he thought about bilateral talks between the U.S. and North Korea, during the press conference, the South Korean minister said that the Korean government has never considered bilateral meetings or talks between North Korea and the United States, but if the negotiation were to happen, he would assume there should be close consultations between Washington and Seoul first. Also, in a meeting with Korean reporters, he cited U.S. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice as saying that South Korea's experiments to enrich uranium and plutonium are not serious problems and that South Korea does not need to worry about it. In regards to North Korea's possession of nuclear weapons, he said that his country assumes that the North might have extracted 10 to 14 kg of plutonium in the early 1990s and produced 1 to 2 nuclear weapons.
(Heo Yong-beom, heo@chosun.com )
-------- missile defense
Moscow protests at Star Wars plan for UK
24 October 2004
independent.co.uk
By Severin Carrell and Francis Elliott
http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/story.jsp?story=575481
The Russian government has angrily protested about a secret deal - revealed last week by The Independent on Sunday - to site US missiles in Britain as part of the "son of Star Wars" programme.
A spokesman for the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, warned that the move would "represent a disturbing new step" in international relations and posed a "possible threat to the security of Russia".
The Foreign Ministry also hinted heavily that siting US missiles in Britain or elsewhere in Europe could lead to a new arms race with the US - a threat that will alarm ministers and opponents of the proposal.
Moscow's criticisms came after the IoS disclosed that Tony Blair has privately given President George Bush an agreement in principle to host interceptors in Britain as part of the US "ballistic missile defence" system.
The true extent of Britain's deepening co-operation with the Pentagon on bringing the system to the UK was revealed in an official document on missile defence released by the Secretary of State for Defence, Geoff Hoon, last week.
It confirms that detailed studies into how the "son of Star Wars" weapons system would extend to cover Britain have begun. They include how and where US missiles will be sited and how effective they would be in shooting down an enemy's ballistic missiles.
These further disclosures led Nicholas Soames, the Shadow Defence Secretary, to demand in the Commons last week that Mr Hoon "come clean" about the Government's thinking. As ministers continued to insist no formal decision had been taken, Mr Soames claimed the Government had a history of taking sensitive military decisions in secret without informing MPs.
The "son of Star Wars" agreement - signed in June last year by the MoD's chief scientist, Professor Roy Anderson, and the head of the US Missile Defence Agency, Lieutenant-General Henry Obering - confirms the MoD is working on the "development and analysis of options for the extension of the US system to make missile defence capabilities available to the UK".
It also reveals that the MoD is investigating whether shooting down nuclear-armed, biological or chemical weapons over the UK could contaminate Britain or other parts of northern Europe with fallout.
-------- terrorism
Bush policies against terror fail to cover home base
October 24, 2004
By TOM THOMPSON
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/196204_focus24.html
The threat we face from Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida, made so savagely real by the 9/11 attacks, has mostly been followed, under President Bush, by "taking the battle to the enemy" policies abroad that have missed their mark in making us any safer here in Seattle and throughout the United States.
We have diverted our initial focus on Afghanistan, and we are mainly losing the war in Iraq. In the process, the invasions and occupations of both of those countries -- our most aggressive response to 9/11 -- has made homeland defense the frightening, soft underbelly of the security of our nation as we know it.
The quagmire abroad has left us exposed to the growing grass roots of Muslim anger in a breeding ground for even more terrorism, perhaps this time with a nuclear component. Here in Seattle, as is the case throughout the country, we continue to receive a steady diet of "stay-calm" pronouncements that we are winning the war on terror. The threat-warning indicator is illustrated by way of a tacky and confusing traffic-light-looking device. As if to comfort children who don't know any better, we are told to buy "disaster supply kits" that include duct tape and plastic sheeting to make our homes WMD-proof fortresses.
Fortresses they are not, as evidenced by the knowledge that terrorists are striving to acquire and then use nuclear weapons against us. The battlefield realities, which include Seattle realities, are too chilling to ignore. We know, for example, that Seattle landmarks are on the top-10 target list of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who masterminded the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. We know that some of these landmarks, including the ferry system, have been under suspicious surveillance. And we have a number of documents discovered in Afghanistan that have clearly revealed al-Qaida's detailed knowledge of nuclear weaponry.
Literally nobody doubts that a small group of perhaps four or five expert scientists with adequate design and specifications expertise might be able to build a crude nuclear bomb if they could acquire enough essential fissile material, either highly enriched uranium (HEU) or plutonium.
Acquiring fissile material is the hard part of nuclear weapons construction. Creating material from naturally occurring or reactor-grade materials is a complicated, expensive process. When a nation, for example, wants a completely indigenous, self-sustaining system to build a nuclear arsenal, the enrichment process is crucial and difficult to develop in secret.
But because only a relatively small amount of HEU or plutonium is needed to build a bomb, terrorists such as al-Qaida could feasibly steal or buy enough material to build a weapon. A crude nuclear device might use a hundred pounds of HEU. A more sophisticated design would require less than half that much HEU or maybe just 10 pounds of plutonium. For a device to be finally assembled within U.S. borders, these would hardly be cumbersome packages.
A terrorist doesn't really need the best "weapons grade" material. Building a ballistic missile warhead with limited payload weights would not be the goal. The final product might even "fizzle" and yield a smaller-than-expected blast. The terrorist with limited resources certainly isn't going to mind.
It needs to be said that we are talking about high-risk/low-probability nuclear terror. But aren't we ignoring a straightforward CIA estimate last year that a terrorist nuclear weapon is far more likely to arrive in a cargo container than on the tip of a missile? We live in an area where, of the 3.2 million ocean containers coming through the Ports of Seattle and Tacoma each year, at least 3 million are arriving without screening or content verification.
It's a "needle in a haystack" challenge, especially with perhaps a lead-shielded weapon in one of those containers. But let's at least make it much more difficult for the bad guys to succeed. A massive effort at container tracking from point of origin is one essential example. No matter what the possible delivery method, we are talking about the ultimate security nightmare.
Against this growing reality is the current approach to homeland security -- to mainly leave the home game largely to state and local governments or to the private-sector users of critical infrastructure, our port and inland waterways being prime examples.
The new federal outlays for homeland security in the two years after 9/11 commanded an investment equal to only 4 percent of the Pentagon's annual budget. From another perspective, as Stephen Flynn writes in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, the federal government is spending more every three days to finance the war in Iraq than it has provided over the past three years to secure all U.S. seaports.
Doubters of the possibilities for a Seattle Doomsday Scenario should have the sobering experience, as I have, of looking over a blast map of Seattle as a nuclear target should a nuclear device be detonated here. The path of destruction of a crude 10- or 12-kiloton bomb (on the order of what was dropped on Hiroshima) is staggering.
Yes, weather conditions and blast elevation matter, but certainly the downtown core would be cratered and vaporized. At ground zero, temperatures would rise to 10 million degrees Fahrenheit. At a mile out, ambient temperatures would be equal to the temperature of the sun (with the scale of death and destruction from fires to complete the metaphor). The blast's overpressure and radiation would kill thousands, both quickly, as well as more slowly. Then there is the prospect for a nationwide panic and economic chaos if terrorists subsequently claimed to have another bomb.
Traditional deterrence is likely to fail, because a perpetrator would likely believe there was no return address against which to retaliate. "Even if the perpetrator of such an attack was known," says Stanford University's Scott Sagan, "Jihadi terrorists might welcome U.S. threats to retaliate in kind, since the U.S. use of nuclear weapons could hasten the downfall of allied regimes in the Muslim world through protests and riots."
Ironically, the U.S. invasion of Iraq has not only created more terrorists, it also has encouraged nuclear proliferation. Few analysts doubt that if Saddam Hussein had acquired such weapons, he would still be in power and possibly still in Kuwait. Iran's leaders certainly believe that, and they have seen how North Korea rivets the world's attention. Iran wants that attention and respect for its borders, too. The problem, of course, is that as nuclear states proliferate, the list of potential sources for the first nuclear terrorist's weapons also increases, either by theft, purchase or through sympathizers inside the government.
It would be disingenuous to ignore the fact that 95 percent of the nuclear bombs and most of the nuclear weapons fuel in the world are in the hands of Russia and the United States. Russia has huge, poorly guarded stockpiles of nuclear bomb fuel, which fortunately has been reduced as a result of the U.S. Nunn-Lugar Act. Still, in the two years after 9/11, fewer potential weapons in Russia were secured than in the two years before the attack.
Meanwhile, in the United States, we continue "Strangelovian" plans on unneeded new nuclear weapons. At the same time, the Bush administration has endorsed and promoted reconsideration of "advanced reprocessing" of spent reactor fuel. Why such a problem?
Simply because separated plutonium could be diverted within a plant, or simply stolen, and then readily transformed back into metal plutonium suitable for a bomb.
In contrast to President Bush, Sen. John Kerry has repeatedly claimed that he would do a better job in rallying, and pressuring, other countries to a genuine coalition for a worldwide effort to safeguard all fissile material.
Maybe? Maybe not. Is anybody in North Korea or Iran listening? There is no reason for easy optimism.
Aside from our enemies, we seem to have plenty to fear from our allies -- Pakistan, for example, where it was discovered late last year that A.Q. Khan, the founder of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, had been selling nuclear technology and services on the black market. The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency called Khan's efforts the equivalent of a "Wal-Mart of private sector proliferation," a decades-old illicit market in nuclear materials, designs, technologies and consulting services, and it was all run out of Pakistan.
Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf has tried to bury the whole affair. But nobody denies that Pakistan's nuclear genie is out of the bottle. We just need to identify the now-unknown extent of the metastasis. Even after Musharraf decided to support the war against bin Laden and the Taliban, we do not know how many secret Jihadi supporters are operating inside the shadows of Pakistan's military intelligence agencies.
It is, of course, the unknowns in the scenario of nuclear terrorism that are so frightening. What is known is that our guard at home is down. We are exposed, and we are tempting targets for people who believe that it is their "religious duty" to use nuclear weapons against us. It is certainly not a time when our armed forces should be organized only abroad for what also appears to be a long and deadly struggle at home. Tom Thompson is president of Analytics Inc., a local consulting firm with both business and government clients.
-----
NRC takes dirty-bomb data off Web site
The Patriot-News
BY GARRY LENTON
October 24, 2004
http://www.pennlive.com/news/patriotnews/index.ssf?/base/news/1098609613111490.xml
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has taken eight or nine documents off its Web site, acknowledging they contained information that could be of value to terrorists.
And more of the same kinds of documents, which pinpoint the location of weapons-grade radioactive materials that could be used in a nuclear device or dirty bomb, might also be removed from the public records database, the agency said. The NRC also decided to stop posting documents to the Web until they have been reviewed by staff.
"We are developing a criteria for what should be released [to the public] and what should be withheld," said Beth Hayden, a spokeswoman for the NRC.
The action comes two weeks after The Patriot-News reported that the NRC's Web site included documents showing the exact location of nuclear materials used at colleges, universities, hospitals and research facilities. Some of the records included floor plans showing the building, office number, and location of storage vaults, even which doors were locked.
The documents provided information about plutonium, uranium, strontium, cesium and cobalt.
When told of the discovery by a reporter, an NRC official responsible for safeguarding information admitted that portions of the records should not have been made public.
Joel Lubenau, a former senior assistant to two NRC commissioners and now a consultant for the Monterey Institute for International Study, praised the agency for taking the step.
"Better late than never," said Lubenau, who lives in Lititz, Lancaster County.
Lubenau, who specializes in stopping the proliferation of nuclear materials, urged the NRC to move quickly to review its records. "My only question would be, 'What is your time frame for doing this?'" he said. "What resources will you need and from what program will they be taking resources away?"
Scott Portzline, the Harrisburg resident who discovered the records on the NRC's site, said he was encouraged by the agency's move, but also frustrated.
"It's regrettable that they had to be embarrassed into this situation," said Portzline, who has spent years studying nuclear security issues. "The NRC has had to be dragged kicking and screaming every step of the way to improve security at nuclear plants and in its documentation."
Since the 9-11 attacks, the NRC has imposed stricter security requirements on the nuclear industry. Guard numbers have been increased, weaponry upgraded, and the level of attack plants must be able to defend against was toughened. But it took the agency nearly three years to implement some of those changes.
In the days after 9-11, the agency focused its attention on the high-risk targets, the nuclear plants, the NRC's Hayden said. Now, it is turning greater attention to what it calls "second level" information, information that when used together may be helpful to terrorists, she said.
A task force could be convened to study the documents currently being made public, Hayden said.
The records identified by Portzline, The Patriot-News, and subsequently by NBC News, were routine applications to renew licenses to use radioactive materials. The NRC, which regulates and licenses the use of radioactive materials, tracks more than 21,000 users.
Most possess only small amounts of materials for use in research, medicine, or industry. Alone, they are not enough to pose a threat. But most of the institutions that use the materials are not highly protected, as nuclear plants are. Security experts worry that terrorist groups could steal enough radioactive materials from several locations to build a dirty bomb.
The NRC is working to provide licensees, such as the Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center and Penn State University, with guidelines on what information to leave out of applications, Hayden said.
In the meantime, the NRC must decide which information is in the public interest to reveal and which is not.
The letters removed from the Web site might eventually be returned, but with pages missing, Hayden said.
"We do have to keep openness in mind," Hayden said. "The ideal would be to keep out sensitive portions and return the rest to the Web site."
GARRY LENTON: 255-8264 or glenton@patriot-news.com
--------
Tycoon foils 'nuclear bomb sale' plot
Times Online David Leppard October 24, 2004 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1325302,00.html
THE London-based Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky has claimed that the intelligence services helped to foil a plot by Chechen terrorists to sell a nuclear device on the international black market.
Berezovsky last week described the curious events that led to him tipping off the authorities about the plot.
The exiled Russian oligarch, who according to The Sunday Times Rich List is the 14th richest man in Britain, said that he had contacted British and American intelligence after being approached by a Chechen at his home in Surrey.
The Chechen said he was acting as an intermediary for a man who wanted to sell a nuclear bomb concealed in a suitcase for $3m (£1.6m).
The tycoon arranged for a member of his staff to meet the Chechen at the Bristol hotel in Paris. The two-hour meeting was taped on Berezovsky's instructions and the tycoon handed the tape to the CIA at the American embassy in London.
A senior Whitehall security official confirmed that MI5 was aware that Berezovsky had approached the authorities on several occasions "offering to assist in investigations into the supply of illicit nuclear and radiological materials".
"He has made these allegations to the authorities in private, but we can't discuss the details," the official said.
After the Beslan school siege last month, for which Shamil Basayev, the Chechen warlord, claimed responsibility, the possibility that rebels in the breakaway republic may be able to acquire a small nuclear device is causing alarm among senior officials in Moscow and the West.
Two years ago American officials revealed their fears that Chechen rebels had stolen radioactive materials, possibly including plutonium, from a Russian nuclear power station in the southern region of Rostov.
The disappearance of the materials from the Volgodoskaya nuclear power station, near the city of Rostov-on-Don, heightened fears that weapons-grade material, including caesium, strontium and low-enriched uranium. had been obtained by Chechen terrorists.
The theft was reported by Russian officials to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which told the US energy department. Speaking for the first time about the plot, Berezovsky said that he had been approached in 2002 by a Chechen living in Paris whom he knew as Zakhar.
The Russian tycoon had previously helped Zakhar by giving him $5,000 when the two men were in exile in Paris. He said: "I didn't hear from him again until he rang me when I was in England and said he had enormous, very important information about nuclear weapons.
"I informed the American embassy in London. I told them it could be serious or it could be a provocation." Berezovsky asked Yuli Dubov, a business associate and fellow exile, to investigate the background to the plot. Dubov said that Zakhar had claimed that the portable bomb was one of several made by Soviet scientists during the early 1990s.
"One of them disappeared during the mess of the early 1990s," Dubov wrote in a report. "The person who holds this suitcase with a bomb wants to sell it and he (Zakhar) is empowered to act for him.
"Zakhar approached Berezovsky. The price asked for it is not large, only $3m. The idea is that Berezovsky pays $3m and advises on whom the A-bomb should be delivered (to). Zakhar will then organise everything in the best possible way."
During a subsequent meeting, arranged at the behest of the CIA in London, Zakhar was asked by Berezovsky's aide to provide evidence that the nuclear device existed. But Zakhar, by this time suspecting a trap, failed to do so. Berezovsky said that he reported the matter to British intelligence through an intermediary.
That was end of the affair, as far as Berezovsky was aware. It could have been a hoax and he does not know whether the intelligence services tried to retrieve the nuclear device. The plot is the latest in a series of strange incidents to involve Berezovsky, who was granted political asylum by David Blunkett, the home secretary, last year.
Once Russia's most influential tycoon, Berezovsky, 58, has a £1.8 billion fortune and recently bought a Surrey estate for £10m from Chris Evans, the radio DJ. He was forced to flee Russia after falling out with President Vladimir Putin.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
Strangelove strategy defended
The Union Leader
By ROBERT KOEHLER
October 24, 2004
http://www.theunionleader.com/articles_showa.html?article=46020
NUKE CHINA in order to win the Korean war? Fruitcake bellicosity never seemed so attractive. Such is the charm of Niall Ferguson, the dapper Scot historian who can turn thermonuclear Armageddon and the probable death of vague yellow-skinned millions into nothing worse than a regrettable necessity, an act of tough love.
At least I got a chance to look him in the eye.
The occasion was two intense days of discussion and counter-discussion at Macalester College, in St. Paul, Minn., where my daughter is a heart-melting month and a half into her freshman year. By wonderful design, the school's annual International Roundtable occurs during Family Weekend, so I not only got to visit my kid but also drink my cup of tea - that is, listen, talk and spit out politics.
This year the topic of the roundtable was: "America and Global Power: Empire or . . ." Ferguson, author and Harvard professor, was one of three distinguished academic heavies invited to sit in on panels, present papers and collide with one another and with faculty, students and even parents. The others were Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute and Tariq Ali, author, editor of New Left Review and the only liberal of the bunch (but the school itself is so liberal, things more or less balanced out).
I'd forgotten how heady ideas can get in the ivory tower, where they are not mere servants of policy but ends in themselves, precisely articulated, nuanced, volatile. I had to keep reminding myself that this debate, however academic the setting, was not academic. It was about the real world - the actual future. What the panelists said mattered intensely. Does America constitute an empire? Should it? What are its constraints? Do its ends justify its means? Which principles should control history?
If I have a slight criticism of the event, it might be an insufficiency of urgency about it, a general understatement of the stakes, but that of course is where I come in.
On Saturday morning, I did the best I could to up the ante in my 30 seconds at the Q&A mike. I set my sights on Ferguson, who is not merely professor, author and scholar, but also TV personality. As the star of the multi-episode BBC production "American Colossus" - a history of the United States that calls on the reluctant superpower to stop being such a girlie man and rule the world, damnit - he is the embodiment of what I would call, in memory of the late Herman Kahn, "unthinkable chic."
In 1962, Kahn wrote "Thinking About the Unthinkable," which dared to postulate what winning a nuclear war would look like and called the difference between 10 million and 100 million deaths "tragic but distinguishable outcomes." This was pretty shocking 40 years ago and earned Kahn screen immortality as the real-life model for Dr. Strangelove.
But Ferguson's demeanor is anything but Strangelovian - he was positively witty as he refought the Cold War in "American Colossus" with the nuclear weapons of the day (presumably the H-bomb) and didn't so much as hint that their use might have had messy moral, political and strategic consequences.
Here's my worry - militarily, we're just going to get more and more efficient, even as "victory" in the war on terror grows more elusive. Ferguson and his ilk give no hint that there need be any moral limits on our military efficiency.
I asked him this: "How can you have a moral issue with terrorism and not with nuclear war - including the de facto nuclear war we're waging right now in Iraq with the use of depleted uranium munitions?"
It took him no more than a minute to answer. He ignored the part about DU, with which we're poisoning both Iraqis and our own troops, and cited the alleged shortening of World War II by bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the no-brainer precedent for using nuclear weapons to win subsequent wars. Next question! Nuclear weapons didn't come up again. Ho-hum.
Robert Koehler is an editor at Tribune Media Services.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Karzai is unofficial winner of Afghan vote
October 24, 2004
(UPI)
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20041024-104650-5944r.htm
Kabul, Afghanistan, Oct. 24 -- Interim leader Hamid Karzai has taken an unofficial simple majority in the Afghan presidential election -- enough to avoid a runoff, the BBC reported Sunday.
With 94 percent of the ballots counted, Karzai had 55 percent, 39 points ahead of his main rival, Yunus Qanuni.
Qanuni's spokesman Sunday conceded Karzai as the winner, but no official declaration will be made until all votes are counted and the United Nations completes its investigation of voting irregularities.
Karzai's office said it appears he is the winner, but will not claim victory until all the ballots are counted.
Election organizers say on their Web site Karzai took more than 4.2 million votes, more than half the estimated 8.1 million ballots cast in the Oct. 9 election.
The election period has been largely free of the violence threatened by the Taliban, but the group claimed responsibility for a street bombing Saturday in Kabul that killed two shoppers and the bomber.
-------- africa
Yusuf to request security forces
October 24, 2004
(Agence France-Presse)
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041023-112816-1453r.htm
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia - Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf today will request the African Union (AU) to deploy about 20,000 peacekeepers to the Horn of Africa country to help disarm militias and restore stability, an AU spokesman said.
Mr. Yusuf will make the request while addressing the AU's Peace and Security Council, spokesman Adam Thiam told reporters in Addis Ababa.
"The president on Monday will make an official request for a peacekeeping force of around 20,000 troops to help disarm the warlords in Somalia," Mr. Thiam said.
"[Mr. Yusuf] estimates that there are around 15 million small arms in the streets of Somalia," Mr. Thiam said.
The pan-Africa body's spokesman did not estimate the cost of sending the force to Somalia.
Mr. Yusuf, who is on a three-day visit to Addis Ababa, where the AU is headquartered, was expected to meet AU Commission Chairman Alpha Oumar Konare, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana and Ethiopian government officials to discuss issues of peace and development.
Mr. Yusuf, a veteran Somali faction leader and soldier, was sworn in as the new president of Somalia on Thursday in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, by members of the Somali transitional federal assembly.
During his swearing in, Mr. Yusuf urged the international community to help his nascent administration disarm the hundreds of gunmen allied to various clan-related factions across the country.
--------
Somali Leader Seeks African Peacekeepers
Reuters
By Tsegaye Tadesse
Sunday, October 24, 2004; Page A22
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57466-2004Oct23.html
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia, Oct. 23 -- 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, a spokesman for the organization said 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," the spokesman, Adam Thiam, told reporters.
Thiam said the request would be considered by the union's Peace and Security Council, which is scheduled to meet Monday. Yusuf made the appeal to the chairman of the African Union Commission, Alpha Oumar Konare, during a meeting Saturday in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa.
Yusuf was elected president earlier this month by Somalia's transitional parliament after almost two years of frequently interrupted talks that were held in neighboring Kenya because of insecurity at home. Yusuf, a former army colonel, made his first appeal for peacekeepers at his swearing-in ceremony last week.
The European Union foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, also on a visit to African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa, said the E.U. would offer funding for a peacekeeping mission and consider training Somali security forces.
"The president has not given me any specific request. But if the request comes . . . the E.U. will assist Somalia and finance a peacekeeping mission as it has done for Darfur," Solana said at a news conference, referring to the troubled region in western Sudan. Solana added that the E.U. would host a donor conference for Somalia on Nov. 28.
Somalia descended into chaos after clan-based factions ousted dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991 and then turned on each other, transforming the country of 7 million people into a patchwork of fiefdoms.
U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan issued a warning last 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. The international community is also 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.
Matthew Bryden, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based research organization, said that "the heavy lifting has to be done by the Somalis first."
"No one is going to send troops in to fight, which is what peace enforcement entails, especially after what happened in '93," Bryden added, referring to a botched raid in which two U.S. Black Hawk helicopters were shot down in Mogadishu, the Somali capital, and the bloodied corpses of U.S. servicemen were dragged through the streets.
-------- balkans
Dismay as Serbs shun Kosovo poll
BBC
24 October, 2004
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3946649.stm
The UN's administrator in Kosovo has lamented outside interference after Serbs shunned elections there.
Reportedly fewer than 1% of eligible Serbs cast a vote in the second poll since the UN took over Kosovo in 1999.
UN governor Soren Jessen-Petersen said some had "had their democratic right to vote hijacked" through intimidation.
Most of Kosovo's vast majority of ethnic Albanians want independence for the province, which technically remains part of Serbia and Montenegro.
Total turnout in the poll was put at 53%, compared with 64% in 2001.
The Serbian Prime Minister, Vojislav Kostunica, and church leaders called on Serbs to boycott the ballot because of security fears.
Tens of thousands of Kosovan Serbs who have fled the province since the war in 1998-99 were allowed to vote, as were those still in Kosovo.
Some said they were intimidated by their own people.
Asked by a Reuters reporter if he planned to vote, a Serb in the divided city of Mitrovica replied: "Are you joking? They'd knee-cap me."
Only 15 people were reported to have cast ballots there in eight hours.
"Obviously some decided not to vote and that's their democratic right," said Mr Jessen-Petersen.
"Others obviously have had their democratic right to vote hijacked, who may have wanted to vote but were afraid."
'Great date'
Security remains a major concern following riots in March which left 19 people dead and saw Serb houses and churches burned to the ground.
The violence highlighted the continuing tensions between the two communities and a deep frustration at the lack of any long-term political solution for the province.
Voting passed off peacefully, with only a few minor voting irregularities reported.
Kosovo President Ibrahim Rugova, said the election was "a great and important date of the independence of Kosovo".
"I believe that all citizens will vote as these elections are important for the formal recognition of independence," he said after casting his vote.
Many Serbs were reported to have attended church services instead of going to vote.
"We haven't noticed that elections are being held today," said Milan Ivanovic, one of the Kosovo Serb politicians who led the boycott.
Election results are expected on Monday.
-------- britain
Black Watch will not blindly follow US orders
sundayherald
Trevor Royle
24 October 2004
http://www.sundayherald.com/45626
Senior British military commanders are determined that the Black Watch will be kept on a tight rein throughout their 30 day deployment under US command in their new tactical area of operations 20 miles south of Baghdad.
While the Black Watch's commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel James Cowan, will come under the tactical control of his superior officer in the US Marine Corps, all sensitive decisions about command and control will be referred back to British headquarters in Basra and, if necessary, to Whitehall. Conceding that the decision to deploy the Black Watch under US control had ultimately become "a political decision" , a senior military source told the Sunday Herald: "The Watch will not be ordered to follow US orders blindly and without regard to their own rules of engagement, which are well understood by all British soldiers in Iraq."
What this means is that Cowan will be in daily contact with the US divisional commander, but will run his battle group under British rules of engagement, which will allow him to operate using British military doctrine. This is an important point, as the British Army has an entirely different way of tackling insurgency in the kind of low- intensity warfare which is endemic throughout Iraq. While US forces tend to apply overwhelming force - hence the indiscriminate aerial bombardment of Fallujah - British units prefer a lower profile approach of foot patrols and engaging the local population. A senior officer put the matter in perspective by saying that when confronted by a house used by snipers, the US would invariably call in an air strike or an armoured attack, while a British commander would send troops to search the building to clear it of civilians before using extreme violence.
The US has not signed up to the International Criminal Court by which soldiers accused of committing war crimes can be prosecuted for unlawfully killing civilians. Britain is a signatory, and there was concern within the army that British soldiers operating under US orders could be prosecuted at a later date if they were ordered to act outside their own rules of engagement. According to senior sources, this danger has been avoided.
At the end of what has been a tumultuous week for the Basra garrison, there is widespread dismay in army circles about the way in which the deployment of the Black Watch was handled in London. Under normal circumstances, a routine request for military assistance would have been handled by the senior British officer in Basra, Major-General Bill Rollo, who would have dealt with it after taking the advice of his staff officers. When the call came a week ago from General George Casey, commander of US forces in Baghdad, Rollo was initially responsive and wanted to get the deployment under way without further ado. But because the British military operations in Iraq are unpopular and liable to create political minefields back home, the question was referred to the Ministry of Defence and a week-long debate began.
As the Black Watch begin their deployment - the advance party are on the move this weekend and the battle group should be in position by the end of next week - senior commanders hope that they can be left to get on with their job. But it is not the end of the matter. While it will be easy enough for army planners to make good Tony Blair's boast that the Black Watch will be home by Christmas, the deployment in Iskandariyah could continue well into the new year, and perhaps even longer.
A new British battle group headed by the 1st Scots Guards is already on its way to Iraq to replace the Black Watch as theatre reserve in Basra, and the Chief of the Defence Staff, General Sir Michael Walker, admitted yesterday that the mission could take longer than expected: "If there is a need to replace the troops there within the multinational force, the resources are there so to do."
-----
British officers lobbied US to send troops to danger zone
The Times
October 24, 2004
Nicholas Rufford and Peter Almond
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1326095,00.html
THE decision to send Black Watch troops into Iraq's "triangle of death" followed requests by British military chiefs to take over a US- controlled area.
British officers have been "champing at the bit" for months to be allowed the chance to demonstrate what they believed are superior skills in restoring order, according to a senior military source.
Some officers believe that American 'heavy-handedness' in Iraq is prolonging the conflict. The revelation casts new light on the decision to send 850 British troops to boost American forces. The official position remains that Washington asked for support. It led to accusations that Britain was boosting President George W Bush's election ambitions by supporting the campaign.
However, the request came only after British officers made it clear to their American counterparts that they would be receptive to an approach. Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary, has not revealed the extent of the British Army's enthusiasm for the mission for fear of appearing critical of America.
General Sir Mike Jackson, chief of the general staff, is among senior British officers who have praised British successes in southern Iraq and regretted that the forces had not taken over an area in or around Baghdad at the start of the war.
Jackson has come closest to disapproving of some American tactics, saying that US military culture "differed significantly" from Britain's. During the 2003 Iraq conflict he said: "We have a very considerable hearts and minds challenge."
The deployment is set to go ahead despite an appeal by Margaret Hassan, the British aid worker kidnapped in Baghdad, not to send British troops nearer the city.
Tahseen Ali Hassan, her husband, responded to a video released by her captors by making a fresh call for her release.
"It was very painful to see my wife crying," he told the Dubai-based Al-Arabiya television station. "The scene pained, distressed and saddened her friends and loved ones."
British troops could remain in central Iraq next year if the Black Watch mission is successful and there could be pressure on the American military to modify its approach.
British military chiefs believe that they are better than American forces at turning civilians against insurgents by winning hearts and minds.
The Ministry of Defence would not comment directly on the claim but reiterated that "one of the great strengths of multinational operations is that they bring together different nations with different procedures. This allows the coalition to call upon the strengths of each nation".
The British battle group will attempt to restore order in an area around the lawless towns of Mahmudiya, Iskandariya and Latifiya. Significantly, the Black Watch will not be taking its Challenger II tanks because it does not see the need for heavy armour.
Growing resistance in the area since April has claimed more than 200 American military casualties, including at least 10 deaths. It is also thought to be the location where foreign hostages, including Ken Bigley, have been held and murdered. Its population of 900,000 people include the ancestors of tribesmen who in 1920 launched a ferocious rebellion against British rule.
A British military spokesman in Basra said that the troops were "raring to go".
The US military said yesterday that it had captured a lieutenant of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant blamed for hostage beheadings and suicide bombings. Five others were arrested in the same raids yesterday in the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah.
Violence continued in other parts of Iraq. Twenty members of Iraq's security forces were killed in a spate of insurgent attacks across the country, including 16 police who died in a suicide bombing at an Iraqi police post near the al-Asad base of the US marines west of Baghdad. Up to 40 people were wounded in the attack.
The Army of Ansar al-Sunna, an Iraqi militant group, said it had beheaded an Iraqi man accused of collaborating with US forces in the northern city of Mosul and posted pictures of the killing on the internet.
# In Britain yesterday 250 people demonstrated in Camperdown Park, Dundee, against plans for the merger of Scottish regiments.
-------- iraq
Suicide bombers kill 22 Iraqis
October 24, 2004
By Tini Tran
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041024-124554-4805r.htm
BAGHDAD - Suicide bombers struck Iraqi security targets yesterday north and west of Baghdad, killing 22 Iraqis, officials said. Six U.S. soldiers were wounded in an ambush on the road to Baghdad International Airport - one of the country's most dangerous routes.
Elsewhere, the U.S. military announced the arrest of what it said was a newly promoted senior leader in Abu Musab Zarqawi's terror movement - taken into custody during an early morning raid near Fallujah.
At least 16 Iraqi policemen were killed and 40 others were wounded when a suicide driver detonated his car at a police station near a U.S. Marine base in Khan al-Baghdadi, 140 miles west of the capital, according to police. No Americans were hurt in the 7 a.m. attack, the U.S. military said.
A second suicide driver killed four guardsmen and injured six others in an attack yesterday near an Iraqi national guard checkpoint in Ishaqi, 6 miles south of Samarra, police said. Another two guardsmen were killed in a convoy attack in the northern part of the city.
The six American soldiers were injured when a roadside bomb exploded near their patrol about 7:15 a.m. on the main road linking the Baghdad airport with the city center. One armored vehicle was destroyed, but none of the soldiers sustained life-threatening injuries, the U.S. military said.
Terrorist attacks have increased by 25 percent across the country since the Islamic holy month of Ramadan began last weekend. Most of the recent attacks have been by car and roadside bombs.
The purported Zarqawi aide was arrested along with five other persons in a pre-dawn raid outside Fallujah, the military said. The person's name was not released, but a U.S. statement said the individual had risen in rank as other Zarqawi associates had been killed in U.S. attacks on Fallujah.
Fallujah residents identified those arrested as Abdel-Hamid Fiyadh, 50; his sons Walid, 18, and Majid, 25, and three relatives. Relatives insisted the men had nothing to do with Zarqawi.
Zarqawi's group has claimed responsibility for numerous beheadings of hostages - including Americans - and suicide car bombings, including recent twin bombings inside Baghdad's Green Zone, where the U.S. and Iraqi leadership are housed.
A videotape posted yesterday on Islamic Web sites showed Iraqi militants claiming to have beheaded a man who said he worked for the U.S. military in the northern city of Mosul for the past year. The man, who identified himself as Seif Adnan Kanaan, said he fixed vehicles and delivered beverages to U.S. forces based at Mosul airport.
Responsibility for the killing was claimed by the Ansar al-Sunnah Army, which claims to have killed at least 14 other hostages.
Also yesterday, the husband of the kidnapped director of CARE International's operations in Iraq appealed for her release. Margaret Hassan, 59, who has British, Irish and Iraqi citizenship, was seized Tuesday in western Baghdad.
On Friday, she made an emotional televised plea to British Prime Minister Tony Blair to save her life by withdrawing his country's troops from Iraq.
On Saturday, her Iraqi husband, Tahseen Ali Hassan, begged for the kidnappers to free her "in the name of Islam."
"It hurts to watch my wife cry," Mr. Hassan said on Al-Arabiya television. "This scene has saddened and worried her friends and loved ones. I plead with you, in the name of Islam and Arabism - while we are in the most sacred Islamic month - that my wife and beloved return to me."
The secretary-general of CARE International made his own appeal yesterday.
"She is a naturalized Iraqi citizen and always holds the people of Iraq in her heart," Denis Caillaux said. "CARE joins with many of the people whose lives Mrs. Hassan has touched over her decades of service in Iraq in reaching out to her captors to appeal to their humanity."
Militants have kidnapped at least seven other foreign women over the past six months, and all were released. By contrast, at least 33 foreign male hostages have been killed, including three Americans beheaded by their captors.
In other developments yesterday:
• A mortar round landed in a central Baghdad neighborhood, killing two persons and injuring one.
• An unexploded mortar round was found inside Japan's military base in Samawah. It was the first such incident since hundreds of Japanese troops arrived on a humanitarian mission, a Japanese official said. There were no injuries.
• Gunmen opened fire on a convoy of Turkish trucks in Mosul, killing two drivers - a Turk and a Yugoslav - and wounding two others, hospital and police officials said. The attack occurred about noon in the city center.
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50 Iraq Soldiers Apparent Ambush Victims
By TINI TRAN
Associated Press Writer
October 24, 2004
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- The bodies of about 50 unarmed Iraqi soldiers - many killed execution style with gunshots to the back of the head - were found on a remote road in eastern Iraq, victims of an ambush as they were heading home on leave after basic training, Iraqi authorities said Sunday.
A State Department security officer was killed during a mortar or rocket attack against a U.S. base near Baghdad International Airport, the U.S. Embassy announced. A U.S. soldier was also injured in the attack on Camp Victory, the headquarters of the U.S.-led coalition's ground forces command.
Edward Seitz, an agent with the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security, was killed about 5 a.m., said embassy spokesman Bob Callahan. He is believed to be the first State Department employee killed in Iraq since Operation Iraqi Freedom began in March 2003.
The Iraqi soldiers, who had recently finished a training course, were on their way home when they were ambushed and killed about sundown Saturday on a road about 95 miles east of Baghdad near the Iranian border, said Interior Ministry spokesman Adnan Abdul-Rahman.
The nature of that attack suggested an increased boldness and organization by insurgents, who, until now, have mainly used roadside bombs and suicide car bombs in their attacks on the Iraqi military and police.
Diyala province's deputy governor Aqil Hamid al-Adili told Al-Arabiya TV he believed the ambush was an inside job.
"There was probably collusion among the soldiers or other groups. Otherwise, the gunmen would not have gotten the information about the soldiers' departure from their training camp and that they were unarmed," he said.
"In the future we will try to be more careful when the soldiers leave their camps. We will provide them with protected cars that can escort them home."
Gen. Walid al-Azzawi, commander of the Diyala provincial police, said the bodies were laid out in four rows each, with 12 bodies in each row.
"After inspection, we found out that they were shot after being ordered to lay down on the earth," he said.
Lt. Ali Jawad Kadhim, from the nearby Mandali police station, said all the victims had been shot in the back of the head. Kadhim, who said he took photos of the bodies, said all had their hands were crossed behind their heads.
An Associated Press reporter on the scene reported seeing the burned frames of two minibuses. Bloodstains were visible on the ground, along with human remains. Witnesses said the attackers stole some buses. Police said they had found 51 bodies at the site of the attack.
A U.S. military source in the region confirmed the incident, but was uncertain of the number of dead.
Iraqi security forces are constant targets of insurgents, who consider them collaborators with American forces. Attacks have increased by 25 percent in Iraq since the start of the holy Muslim month of Ramadan last weekend.
Most of the targets have been civilians and Iraqi police or National Guard. Just a day earlier, suicide bombers had struck Iraqi security targets north and west of Baghdad, killing 22 Iraqi policemen and National Guardsmen, officials said.
But U.S. forces also come under daily fire. Six U.S. soldiers were wounded in an ambush on the road to Baghdad airport - one of the country's most dangerous routes.
The early morning attack that killed Seitz had fallen on a trailer where he had been sleeping, said a U.S. Embassy official who asked not to be named.
The Diplomatic Security Bureau is the State Department's own security unit. Its agents conduct a range of tasks, from designing physical security for U.S. diplomatic buildings and personnel, to assessing threats, investigating attacks and devising responses.
Secretary of State Colin Powell and the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, John D. Negroponte, issued statements of condolences Sunday to Seitz's wife, co-workers, family and friends.
"The Department of State and I mourn the loss of one of our own today in Baghdad," Powell said, while on a tour of Asia. "Ed was a brave American, dedicated to his country and to a brighter future for the people of Iraq."
"Ed's death is a tragic loss for me personally, and for all of his colleagues at the Department of State," Powell said. "Ed Seitz died in the service of his country and for the cause of liberty and freedom for others. There is no more noble a sacrifice."
Negroponte said Seitz was a "committed professional" who served with distinction. The American community in Iraq mourns his loss and will "rededicate ourselves to the cause he served so valiantly and selflessly," Negroponte said.
"He came to Iraq, as did his fellow Americans here, to help the Iraqis defeat terrorism and the insurgency, establish democracy, and rebuild their economy," Negroponte said.
Recently, Seitz was involved in a U.S. investigation of a suspected terror cell in Detroit. In April 2002, Seitz testified that three suspects were attempting to wage "economic jihad" against the government and American businesses, especially Jewish-owned ones.
But last month, the Justice Department acknowledged its prosecution was filled with a "pattern of mistakes and oversights" that warranted dismissal of the convictions.
In other developments:
- Muslim al-Taie, the Karbala representative of a senior Shiite cleric, Hussein al-Sadr, was killed in a Sunday drive-by shooting in Karbala. One of al-Taie' s bodyguards was killed and another injured, according to an official in Karbala city.
- Militants targeted Iraq National Guard forces near the central town of Baqouba, wounding seven in bomb attacks since Saturday that included an explosives-rigged flashlight, officials said.
Attackers detonated on Sunday an explosive near a vehicle carrying guardsmen to work, injuring three and a civilian driver. Late Saturday, militants tossed a bomb concealed in a flashlight at a National Guard checkpoint 12 miles south of Baqouba, wounding three of the security forces there, the official said.
- On Sunday, a U.S. Marine warplane bombed a suspected rebel target in the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah, hitting at militants as they tried to rebuild a command post, a Marine official said. Witnesses said six people died in the strike, and at least one fresh corpse lay at the Fallujah General Hospital. The official had no information on casualties.
- In three separate incidents Saturday, insurgents hit Iraq Army and National Guard forces on patrol in and around the central city of Samarra, lightly wounding two Iraqi soldiers, the U.S. military said.
- Gunmen abducted a 7-year-old Lebanese boy and were demanding $150,000 for his release, Lebanon's official news agency reported Sunday. The boy was kidnapped two days ago while returning from school in the Diyala province east of Baghdad, the state-run National News Agency said. The boy's father has lived in Iraq for 30 years.
The Lebanese government was trying to secure the boy's release, the report said.
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Rebels Mount Grisly Ambush, Executing 49 Iraqi Soldiers
October 24, 2004
By EDWARD WONG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/24/international/middleeast/24BODIES.html?ei=5094&en=cdedd61a664cdfa3&hp=&ex=1098676800&partner=homepage&pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 24 - In the single deadliest ambush of the insurgency, guerrillas dressed as police officers executed 46 freshly trained Iraqi soldiers and three civilian drivers in remote eastern Iraq as the unarmed men were going home on leave Saturday evening, Iraqi officials said today.
The men were taken from three minibuses at a fake checkpoint about 95 miles northeast of Baghdad, near the Iranian border in restive Diyala Province, police officials said. The men were told or forced to lie down on the ground in rows, then killed mostly with bullets to their heads. The ambush, extraordinarily ambitious in scope and violence, showed a high level of organization, and the insurgents likely had inside information on the travel plans of the soldiers, who were members of the nascent Iraqi National Guard, officials said.
The mass murder deals a humiliating blow to the American military and the interim Iraqi government at a time when top officials say Iraqi forces are being quickly trained to take over policing duties from the 138,000 American troops, and to help maintain security for general elections scheduled in January. Tonight, a group called Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the new name of the militant band led by the Jordanian fighter Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, claimed responsibility in an Internet posting.
In the capital, a State Department security officer, Edward J. Seitz, was killed by a mortar or rocket attack early this morning at Camp Victory, the American base next to Baghdad International Airport that serves as the military's operations center, said Bob Callahan, a spokesman for the American embassy. Mr. Seitz is the first American diplomatic employee known to be killed in the war. A 16-year veteran of the State Department, he was posted at the base and was struck by chance.
Moktada al-Sadr, the firebrand Shiite cleric who has led two uprisings against the occupation, issued a statement late Saturday night saying he fully supported the leaders of the insurgent stronghold of Falluja, which could face invasion within weeks by the Marines. Mr. Sadr said he was ready to intervene in the standoff, and that he backed the leaders whether they decided to reach a peace agreement with the Americans and the Iraqi government or take up arms. "No mercy to the occupiers, and the resistance will continue, God willing," Mr. Sadr said.
Mr. Sadr's incendiary words come as his aides say he has been trying to disarm his thousands-strong militia, the Mahdi Army, and enter legitimate politics in advance of the elections scheduled for January. Last April, Mr. Sadr told his militia to wage war on the Americans at the same time that the Marines staged an ill-fated assault on Falluja, creating a two-front revolt that led to one of the biggest crises of the occupation.
Mr. Sadr's statement raises the possibility that a similar eruption could take place if the Marines invade again, though a Sadr aide, Hashim Abu Rejaf, said in an interview that Mr. Sadr was just lending "moral support" for now. Mr. Sadr favors a peaceful solution, he said, especially as elections approach. Still, Mr. Sadr's message could be interpreted as a call to arms by some members of the Mahdi Army, which is loosely organized and made up mostly of poor, undisciplined young men.
This morning, a delegation of leaders from Falluja drove to Baghdad to meet with Defense Ministry officials to resume negotiations. An American fighter jet later attacked a suspected insurgent post in northern Falluja, the latest in a series of almost daily airstrikes by the Marines. Witnesses said six people had been killed, The Associated Press reported.
The executions of the 49 Iraqi men raised disturbing questions about the training process and the recruits: Why were the guardsmen allowed to travel unarmed and without protection, given the frequent attacks on the Iraqi security forces? Why did men trained to be soldiers not put up a fight, especially when there were so many of them? How did the insurgents get police uniforms and information on the travel plans of the soldiers?
Iraqi and American officials said they had no immediate answers.
"We're working with the Ministry of Defense to get a full assessment of what happened," said Capt. Steven Alvarez, a spokesman for the office of Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus, who is overseeing the recruitment and training of the Iraqi security forces.
American military officials have been admitting lately that insurgents have infiltrated the ranks of the new security forces and are undoubtedly passing on information. American troops have found piles of Iraqi police and guardsmen uniforms in various raids over the last several months. Reporters, including this one, often meet police officers and guardsmen across Iraq who curse the Americans and say they are willing to fight the occupation.
American troops who work with the Iraqi security forces generally say they are inept or outright hostile.
Outside of ramming car bombs into crowds, insurgents have never killed so many people in one attack, or done so execution style. Even then, the bombs generally wipe out young men standing outside police or national guard stations looking for jobs, and not trained soldiers. On Saturday morning, two car bombs in the volatile Sunni triangle area killed a total of 18 Iraqi police officers, guardsmen and recruits.
The attack on the three busloads of soldiers took place hours later, after sunset, as the men were heading to see friends and family in primarily Shiite cities in the south, said Lt. Col. Najah Mahdi, a police officer in the town of Balad Ruz, near the site of the ambush. The soldiers had left a large American-run training base in Kirkush in the late afternoon and were driving through barren desert, near the rugged hills of the Iranian border. Bandits often roam the road, many Iraqis say.
Just outside the town of Mandali, the men ran into the fake checkpoint.
The insurgents "stopped the three minibuses, forced the soldiers to lie down and started shooting them in the head," Lieutenant Colonel Mahdi said. "Some of them tried to run away, but resistance fighters killed them too. That's why when you look at the scene, you find bodies along the road."
The colonel added: "It was really a disaster. They burned the minibuses. It was a terrible scene. The area is so isolated and quiet. It's infamous for thieves who steal cars and money. The road is so empty and it's easy for anyone to commit such a crime."
Images on Al Arabiya, the Arab satellite network, showed dozens of men lying on the ground, their clothes stained with large splotches of blood. Some wore shirts and jeans, others traditional robes. At one point, the bodies were piled into the back of a truck that drove away down a dusty road.
A reporter for The A.P. at the scene described seeing the burned frames of two minibuses. It appeared the killers had driven away with the third.
Aqil Hamid al-Adili, the deputy governor of Diyala Province, a Sunni-dominated region where attacks on occupation forces are rampant, said on Al Arabiya that the insurgents likely had inside help.
"There was probably collusion among the soldiers or other groups," he said. "Otherwise, the gunmen would not have gotten the information about the soldiers' departure from their training camp and that they were unarmed."
He added: "In the future, we will try to be more careful when the soldiers leave their camps. We will provide them with protected cars that can escort them home."
The capital of the province, Baquba, about 40 miles west of the ambush site, has been plagued by violence for much of the American occupation. The city is mostly Sunni, though it also has a significant Shiite population, and rebels representing both branches of Islam have taken up arms against the Americans at various times. Commanders with the First Infantry Division, charged with controlling the area, say most of the insurgents there these days are Sunni Arabs.
In late June, days before the nominal transfer of sovereignty, black-clad insurgents attacked government and police buildings in the city center, and American soldiers found fliers praising One God and Jihad, the original name of the group led by Mr. Zarqawi.
On the outskirts of the southern holy city of Karbala, a bomb exploded at 5 p.m. by a military convoy, killing one soldier, wounding three others and destroying a vehicle, according to witnesses and a statement from the multinational forces. News agencies reported that the soldier killed was Bulgarian.
In Baghdad, the American ambassador to Iraq, John D. Negroponte, issued a statement offering his condolences for the death of Mr. Seitz, the security officer, while Secretary of State Colin L. Powell did the same aboard a plane from Japan to China.
"Ed Seitz died in the service of his country and for the cause of liberty and freedom for others," Mr. Powell said. "There is no more noble a sacrifice."
Mr. Seitz, in his late 30's and a married father of one, was assigned to a terrorism task force in Detroit for four years before coming to Iraq. His work ranged from interrogating people deemed suspicious at the Canadian border to helping investigate terrorism in a region with one of the nation's most concentrated Arab populations to participating in raids as a field agent. He was involved in one of the most publicized recent cases in Detroit, the government's abandoned terror prosecution of four Arab immigrants once accused of forming a "sleeper operational combat cell."
Zaineb Obeid contributed reporting from Balad Ruz for this article, along with Iraqi employees of The New York Times from Najaf and Karbala, and Danny Hakim from Detroit.
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Car Bombings Kill 17 Iraqis;
Attack Injures 6 U.S. Soldiers Extremists Said to Behead Man Working With Americans
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, October 24, 2004; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A56487-2004Oct23?language=printer
BAGHDAD, Oct. 23 -- Two car bomb attacks killed at least 17 Iraqi security officers Saturday in the Sunni Triangle north and west of the capital, and two foreign truck drivers were fatally shot in the northern city of Mosul. A video posted on an Internet site purportedly showed extremists beheading a man accused of working with the Americans.
Six U.S. service members were wounded in a separate attack on a military convoy shortly after dawn in Baghdad.
The deadliest incident took place in Baghdadi, a city on the Euphrates River about 140 miles west of the capital. A suicide bomber detonated explosives in his vehicle outside a U.S. base guarded by Iraqi police, killing 16 Iraqi officers. A U.S. military spokesman said about 40 people were injured, none of them Americans.
A second car bomb killed one Iraqi National Guardsman at a checkpoint in the village of Ishaqi, located about 12 miles south of Samarra, a city that U.S. and Iraqi forces reclaimed from insurgents on Oct. 1. The Associated Press and Reuters reported a higher death toll, quoting police as saying that four guardsmen were killed in the incident.
The two truckers, a Turk and a Yugoslav, were gunned down as they drove through the center of Mosul.
An Internet video, purportedly posted by a group calling itself the Ansar al-Sunna Army, showed the beheading of a man it called a "crusader spy recruited by the Americans." Before he was executed, the victim identified himself as Seif Adnan Kanaan and said he was employed to deliver drinks to U.S. soldiers based at the airport in Mosul.
"I am telling anybody who wants to work with Americans not to work with them," the man said. "I found out the mujaheddin have very accurate information."
The U.S. military convoy in Baghdad was struck by a roadside bomb on the freeway leading to the city's airport, which is ringed by American bases. The explosion echoed across the city at 7:15 a.m., and a column of black smoke smeared the horizon.
News footage showed at least one armored vehicle in flames on what is widely regarded as the most dangerous road in the capital, because of frequent ambushes.
Also Saturday, Arabic-language satellite news networks aired appeals for the release of Margaret Hassan, an Irish-born humanitarian worker kidnapped this week. On Friday, Hassan, the Iraq country director for CARE, appeared on a videotape pleading tearfully for her life and urging Britain to break its alliance with U.S. forces in Iraq.
"It hurts to see my wife crying. We are in the holiest month of Islam," Tahseen Ali Hassan told al-Arabiya television network, referring to Ramadan. "I would like my wife to come back to me."
"She is a naturalized Iraqi citizen and always holds the people of Iraq in her heart," said Denis Caillaux, the secretary general of CARE International. "CARE joins with many of the people whose lives Mrs. Hassan has touched over her decades of service in Iraq in reaching out to her captors to appeal to their humanity."
In her videotaped plea, Hassan specifically urged Blair not to send British troops to the Baghdad area in a move that would free up U.S. forces for a threatened assault on Fallujah, a city about 35 miles west of the capital that has been under the control of Iraqi and foreign insurgents since April.
Iraqi officials said at a news conference Saturday that informal talks aimed at averting an offensive continued with leaders in Fallujah but that the effort remained hung up on the issue of foreign fighters allied with Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian-born militant who has asserted responsibility for many of the most violent attacks in Iraq. The officials also said airstrikes targeting gatherings of foreign fighters would continue, partly with the help of tips from Fallujah residents.
"The citizens are afraid of these beasts," said Hazim Shalan, Iraq's interim defense minister.
U.S. forces, meanwhile, continued operations around Fallujah. The military said Marines conducted a raid after midnight and apprehended a suspected aide to Zarqawi. Residents identified the man as Ghanim Mohammed Mohammedi, 37, an Iraqi who is a welder and former member of the Baath Party that governed Iraq under President Saddam Hussein.
The man's wife, Suad Fadhil, said he was captured while traveling from Fallujah to a home in the nearby city of Ramadi, where she had taken their three children to escape U.S. airstrikes that have driven most residents from the city.
"Yesterday I told him to go home to bring some winter clothes and some food for the end of Ramadan," she said. "I was shocked when I discovered he was arrested."
A man acting as mayor in the insurgent-controlled city, Mahmoud Ibrahim Jirisi, was also taken away by U.S. forces, but the circumstances were unclear. Jirisi's cousin, Hasan Ali Juraifi, said the mayor had met with the Americans outside town after receiving a call from them the previous night.
In Baghdad's Sadr City slum, Iraqi officials announced the final tally of a weapons-buyback program intended to disarm the Mahdi Army, a militia loyal to Moqtada Sadr, a rebellious Shiite cleric. Sadr has vowed to disarm and participate in politics, but U.S. officials remain wary of that pledge.
Iraqi officials said that $5 million had been paid out for 9,000 mines, 2,000 Kalashnikov assault rifles, 1,000 rocket-propelled grenades, 2,000 rocket-propelled grenade launchers and thousands of other munitions.
"The program was very successful, and the government has the intention of exporting it to other cities," said Barham Salih, the interim deputy prime minister.
In Najaf, 90 miles south of the capital, about 50 Iraqi security forces broke into Sadr's office and ordered it closed, according to Haider Turfi, an aide to the cleric. Turfi said no shots were fired but that both sides beat each other with weapons.
Special correspondent Saad Sarhan in Najaf contributed to this report.
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Rebel Attacks Kill 18 Iraqis; G.I.'s Injured
October 24, 2004
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/24/international/middleeast/24iraq.html?oref=login&pagewanted=all&position=
AGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 23 - Insurgents mounted strikes on United States and Iraqi outposts across Iraq on Saturday, killing at least 18 Iraqi police officers and national guardsmen in car bombings, and wounding dozens of Iraqis and Americans in the assaults, which included mortars and hidden roadside bombs.
No American soldiers were reported killed, but six were wounded when their Bradley fighting vehicle was attacked shortly after dawn on the dangerous road that leads to the Baghdad airport. A senior American military official said there was no indication the attacks on Saturday were coordinated.
The Iraqi militant group the Army of Ansar al-Sunna posted a video on the Internet on Saturday night showing the beheading of a man they called a "crusader spy" for American forces accused of spying on militants in Mosul in northern Iraq. The man said he had worked supplying drinks to an American base in Mosul, news agencies reported. Ansar al-Sunna has taken credit for a string of gruesome killings, including the beheading of three Kurdish truck drivers in September and the beheading and shooting deaths of 12 Nepalese drivers in August.
The flurry of violence underscores the challenge facing American and Iraqi officials as planned national elections draw near. According to one of the major Western private security firms operating in Iraq, daily attacks on American-led and Iraqi forces and civilians have increased by about 30 percent since the Muslim fasting period Ramadan began nine days ago.
On Saturday, the deadliest attack occurred outside the gates of a Marine base in Al Asad, in the restive Anbar Province of western Iraq, a Sunni area where a car bomber killed 10 Iraqi policemen, according to the Marines. The police officers were gathered at a checkpoint outside the base, which is home to the Third Marine Aircraft Wing near the Euphrates River about 120 miles west of Baghdad.
Some witnesses said the bomb exploded as officers were waiting to learn whether they had made the list for a firearms training course. Saad al-Janabi, a policeman whose hand was wounded in the attack, said most of the officers were from the nearby towns of Haditha, Hit and Baghdadi. News agencies reported that at least 40 people had been wounded and that six more policemen had died later in nearby hospitals.
In Falluja, the insurgent-controlled stronghold west of Baghdad where a major offensive is being planned to take back the city, United States officials said an early morning raid led to the capture of a lieutenant to the terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Mr. Zarqawi is the Jordanian militant said to have sworn allegiance to Al Qaeda who has taken responsibility for scores of car bombings, beheadings and other acts.
American officials said the "individual targeted and captured today was recently assessed to be a relatively minor member of the Zarqawi network." But with more important Zarqawi aides having been detained or killed in recent weeks, the aide, captured at a safe house south of Falluja at 1:30 a.m., "had moved up to take a critical position as a Zarqawi senior leader." Five other terrorists were captured, the military said.
Members of Mr. Zarqawi's network are increasingly moving to the city's outskirts in an attempt to evade American attacks on safe houses, meeting places and other hideouts, and blend in with civilians, military officials say. They say Iraqi civilians in Falluja have been providing information about the whereabouts of people associated with Zarqawi's organization, One God and Jihad.
The Marines have stepped up operations on the outskirts of Falluja during the past two weeks, trying to flush out insurgents and Zarqawi loyalists in anticipation of what Iraqi leaders have said will be a major offensive. The Marines have also conducted nightly bombing raids for the past two months aimed at the Zarqawi network. Since this summer, Falluja has been controlled by insurgents and a Taliban-style Islamist local government that United States and Iraqi officials say has given refuge to Mr. Zarqawi and his group.
Attacks against allied and Iraqi forces and civilians are now averaging 80 to 100 per day, a level approaching the frequency of attacks seen during the hostilities in April, according to one of the largest private security firms doing business in Iraq, which asked that the figures not be attributed to it by name. That is an increase, the firm said, from the last two weeks of September and the first half of October, when the daily average was 60 to 80 attacks.
Following the attack on the Iraqi police in Al Asad, the First Marine Expeditionary Force, based at Camp Falluja, noted the recent trend of rising violence, issuing a statement saying, "insurgents have increased attacks on Iraqi security forces seeking to secure a free Iraq."
The pace of attacks is still short of the 120 attacks a day reached in August, when American forces were battling Shiite militants daily in Najaf and the Sadr City district in eastern Baghdad, the security firm said. In Sadr City, home to more than two million Shiites and a strong base of support for the rebel cleric Moktada al-Sadr, the security situation has been surprisingly calm of late, according to some American officers.
Iraqi officials say an 11-day weapons-for-cash exchange meant to disarm Mr. Sadr's militia in Sadr City has been successful. After a disappointing start, a large number of mortars and other heavy weapons were turned in before the exchange ended on Thursday, and almost $5 million was paid out, with prices including $170 for a new rocket-propelled grenade launcher and $220 for a mortar tube in good shape, Iraqi officials say. Agence France-Presse reported that the buyback yielded 9,000 anti-tank mines, 2,000 land mines, 2,000 Kalashnikov assault rifles, more than 1,000 rocket launchers, more than 2,000 anti-tank missles, more than 1,500 mortar shells and almost 600,000 bullets.
It remains to be seen, however, whether the Sadr militiamen will use the money to simply buy new weapons. Military officials also say they are concerned about more than 1,000 improvised explosive devices that Mr. Sadr's own aides recently acknowledged have been buried in the streets around Sadr City.
Near Samarra, an insurgent flashpoint north of Baghdad that United States forces retook early this month after a grisly three-day battle, several Iraqi national guardsmen were killed Saturday morning by a car bomb at a checkpoint south of town.
Several reports quoted Iraqi officials saying that at least four guardsmen died in the attack. Lt. Wayne Adkins, a spokesman for the Army's First Infantry Division, which controls the area around Samarra, said two Iraqi guardsmen had been killed and one injured when "anti-Iraqi forces detonated a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device at an Iraqi National Guard checkpoint near Balad,'' which is south of Samarra.
James Glanz, Edward Wong and Khalid al-Ansary contributed reporting for this article.
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Iraqis protest after silence greets plea for hostage
Sundayherald
By Torcuil Crichton
24 October 2004
http://www.sundayherald.com/45618
Some of the 20,000 Iraqis who have benefited from projects set up by kidnapped aid worker Margaret Hassan are to demand her release in Baghdad tomorrow after televised pleas from her colleagues and husband drew no response last night from her still anonymous captors.
Groups working with charity Care International hope the mass protest by locals to spare her will sway the kidnappers. Workers at Care were facing an agonising wait to hear the fate of the Irish-born aid worker at the end of another day of bloodshed, during which one gang beheaded an Iraqi "collaborator" and posted pictures of it on a website.
Foreign Office officials in Baghdad have been unable to trace her whereabouts of who the kidnappers are.
Care's plea came late on Friday night and was read on the Arab television station Al-Jazeera by the organisation's secretary-general, Denis Caillaux. He said Hassan was dedicated to the Iraqi people and called for her "immediate release".
Care broke its silence on the kidnapping after a distressed Hassan was shown in a video on Friday begging Tony Blair to pull out of Iraq and not to send troops to Baghdad.
Hassan, Care's director in Iraq, sobbed as she said she did not want to die like Ken Bigley. She urged the government not to carry out its controversial decision to move Black Watch soldiers to the Iraqi capital.
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said the video was "extremely distressing".
The Care statement said: "She is a naturalised Iraqi citizen and always holds the people of Iraq in her heart. Care joins with many of the people whose lives Mrs Hassan has touched over her decades of service in Iraq in reaching out to her captors to appeal to their humanity.
Iraqi interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi pledged to remain firm against kidnappers. "Nobody is going to ... give in to their demands. We have to to remain very strong and adamant that we should bring the terrorists to justice."
Hassan, who has lived in Iraq for 30 years, looked tired and distraught. The tape did not include any claim of responsibility and her kidnappers were not pictured.
Hassan's husband, Tahsin Hassan spoke of his pain in seeing his wife crying on 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.
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Why America Has Waged a Losing Battle on Fallouja
Oct 24, 2004
Los Angeles Times
By Alissa J. Rubin and Doyle McManus
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=2026&ncid=2026&e=5&u=/latimests/20041024/ts_latimes/whyamericahaswagedalosingbattleonfallouja
FALLOUJA, Iraq - As soon as the women of Fallouja learned that four Americans had been killed, their bodies mutilated, burned and strung up from a bridge, they knew a terrible battle was coming.
They filled their bathtubs and buckets with water. They bought sacks of rice and lentils. They considered that they might soon die.
"When we heard the news," said Turkiya Abid, 62, a mother of 15, "we began to say the Shahada," the Muslim profession of faith.
There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God.
In Washington, the reaction to the March 31 killings was exactly what the women of Fallouja had expected: anger. Those inside George W. Bush's White House believed that the atrocity demanded a forceful response, that the United States could not sit still when its citizens were murdered.
President Bush summoned his secretary of Defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld, and the commander of his forces in the Middle East, Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, to ask what they recommended.
Rumsfeld and Abizaid were ready with an answer, one official said: "a specific and overwhelming attack" to seize Fallouja. That was what Bush was hoping to hear, an aide said later.
What the president was not told was that the Marines on the ground sharply disagreed with a full-blown assault on the city.
"We felt ... that we ought to let the situation settle before we appeared to be attacking out of revenge," the Marines' commander, Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, said later.
Conway passed this up the chain - all the way to Rumsfeld, an official said. But Rumsfeld and his top advisors didn't agree, and didn't present the idea to the president.
"If you're going to threaten the use of force, at some point you're going to have to demonstrate your willingness to actually use force," Pentagon (news - web sites) spokesman Lawrence Di Rita said later.
Bush approved the attack immediately.
That was the first of several decisions that turned Fallouja from a troublesome, little-known city on the edge of Iraq's western desert to an embodiment of almost everything that has gone wrong for the United States in Iraq.
Just as they had previously, U.S. policymakers underestimated the hostility in Fallouja toward the American military occupation of their land.
The U.S. assault on the city had the unintended effect of fanning the Sunni Muslim insurgency, precisely the outcome the United States wanted to avoid.
U.S. officials ignored the risk that American military tactics and inevitable civilian casualties would undermine support for the occupation from allies in Iraq and around the world.
Although military and civilian authorities eventually agreed on the Fallouja assault, their consensus quickly broke down, leading to hasty and improvised decisions.
The insurgency in Fallouja was never going to be easy to quash, but disarray among American policymakers contributed to U.S. failure.
This account is based on interviews with more than 40 key figures, many of whom refused to be identified because they still hold military or government jobs.
The troubles began with Bush's authorization to attack Fallouja, based on the sole option Rumsfeld and Abizaid gave him.
After the president ordered the Marines to advance, they battled their way into the city against heavy resistance. Four days later, with Fallouja only half-taken, they were abruptly ordered to stop.
The problem was not military but political: Members of the Iraqi Governing Council were threatening to resign, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair (news - web sites) and United Nations (news - web sites) envoy Lakhdar Brahimi had appealed to Washington to halt the offensive.
Before pulling out of Fallouja, the Marines hurriedly assembled a local force called the Fallouja Brigade, which they said would keep the insurgents in check. It proved an utter failure. Many of the men who enlisted turned out to be insurgents.
But it took nearly five months for the Marines and the new Iraqi government to disband the brigade. In the meantime, under the brigade's watch, Fallouja became a haven for anti-American guerrillas, a base for suicide bombers, and a headquarters for the man U.S. officials consider the most dangerous terrorist in Iraq, Abu Musab Zarqawi.
"Fallouja exports violence," said Col. Jerry L. Durrant, one of the Marine officers who inherited the problem.
Today the United States finds itself back where it started in April. Securing Iraq requires solving the problem of Fallouja. The U.S. military is bombing targets in the city almost every day, but few military analysts believe that will get the job done. A major offensive, perhaps the most significant battle of the unfinished Iraq war, is likely after the U.S. presidential election.
As they were in April, the Marines are poised on the outskirts of the city, awaiting orders.
Part I
GOING IN
Fallouja lies in the province of Al Anbar, which stretches west from the outskirts of Baghdad to the Jordanian border, south almost to the ruins of ancient Babylon and north to Salahuddin, the province that includes former President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s hometown of Tikrit. It also borders Saudi Arabia and Syria.
Dominated by Sunni Muslims, Al Anbar is a landscape of shifting sands and mercurial allegiances. Unemployment has always been a problem. Fallouja, one of its largest cities, is deeply tribal, conservative and suspicious of outsiders.
Hussein, himself a Sunni, dealt with the province by drawing on its men for his army, Republican Guard and intelligence service.
When the war came, however, they did not fight for him.
Realistic about Iraq's military inferiority, they followed the instructions of U.S. special operations forces, who had scattered leaflets telling them that if they stayed home, they would not be attacked - and they weren't.
But when troops of the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division occupied a school in the center of the city shortly after Baghdad fell in April 2003, Falloujans did not take it well. A rumor circulated that the soldiers were using their night-vision goggles to see through the clothes of women in the city.
Five days after the soldiers moved in, a protest demanding that they leave turned violent. Seventeen Falloujans were killed and 70 injured in the clash with troops.
Soon after, L. Paul Bremer III, the newly appointed civilian administrator for the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority, dissolved the Iraqi army, along with the intelligence service, the Republican Guard and half a dozen other security services that had worked for Hussein. Overnight, thousands of men in Al Anbar lost their jobs and their pensions. It was a humiliation to them.
Skirmishes continued in Fallouja throughout the next year, even after U.S. troops moved their camps outside the city limits.
By last March, the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force had replaced the Army there. The Marines brought with them a minimal-force strategy, restricting their reprisals to targeted strikes while offering help in the form of money and aid.
But the violence did not end. On March 27, at least four Falloujans died in a confrontation with Marines in an industrial neighborhood on the city's north side.
It was into that landscape that four Americans working as private security guards made a wrong turn into the city on the morning of March 31.
Only a few yards in, they were halted by a barrage of bullets. A home video showed one contractor lying face down as a crowd surged around his sport utility vehicle. He appeared to have gotten the vehicle's door open, and he stumbled out, dying of gunshot wounds.
The mob set the SUV on fire. Two of the contractors' burned bodies were taken to a nearby bridge and suspended, looking like blackened rag dolls. The mob cheered.
Most Americans, including many working in Iraq, were stunned by the fury - the willingness not just to kill but also to mutilate. Many Iraqis also were horrified. A young Baghdad native who went to Fallouja reported with disbelief that adolescent boys were carrying pieces of charred human flesh on sticks "as if they were lollipops."
Among U.S. military officials in Iraq, the first response was to take a deep breath. The comments from spokesman Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt were surprisingly measured given the barbarity that was being rebroadcast every 15 minutes.
"There often are small outbursts of violence. They will go in, they will restore order and they'll put those people back in their place," he said of the Marines.
A day later, Brig. Gen. John Kelly, assistant commander of the 1st Marine Division, told a reporter that he would not be pushed into a counterproductive siege. The Marines would confront the insurgents, make friends with moderates in the city and gather intelligence.
The Marines would also search for Iraqis who could be leaders in Al Anbar. At Camp Pendleton in California, they had studied the problems other military units had encountered in the province and had concluded that the only authority the fiercely anti-Western residents would accept was that of local leaders. The difficulty was finding some who were also acceptable to the Americans.
Kimmitt reiterated the Marines' position. "We are not going to rush pell-mell into the city," he said.
U.S. RESPONSE
At Bremer's headquarters in Hussein's mammoth Republican Palace in Baghdad, and in Bush's Oval Office in Washington, the conversation started from a different premise. The slayings of the U.S. contractors were a challenge to America's resolve.
Bush issued a statement reaffirming his determination to defeat the insurgents. "We will not be intimidated," Press Secretary Scott McClellan quoted the president as saying. "We will finish the job."
Bremer's response was more emotional. At a graduation ceremony at Iraq's new police academy, he called the killers in Fallouja "human jackals" and the battle for the town part of a "struggle between human dignity and barbarism." The deaths of the security guards, he promised, would "not go unpunished."
Conway, the commander of the Marines in western Iraq, told the overall commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, what the Marines had in mind.
According to one well-placed defense official, Conway also told Rumsfeld directly that the Marines favored a deliberate approach. But Rumsfeld rejected his advice. The Defense secretary and Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, believed that "it was unsatisfactory to have parts of the country that were not under control," Pentagon spokesman Di Rita said.
A civilian official who declined to be identified said that "the military leadership told us this was something they could do with a low risk of civilian casualties, using their precision weapons."
It was on April 1 that Rumsfeld and Abizaid briefed Bush on plans for attacking Fallouja. Rumsfeld's decision not to inform the president about the Marines' dissenting recommendation was proper, Di Rita said. That argument had been settled at a lower level.
"Military commanders owe their military advice to each other. The secretary and the chairman owe their military advice to the president," the spokesman said. "It is true that there was not a united view."
In a matter of hours, the president's decision made its way to the Marines at their desert outpost eight time zones away. At Camp Fallouja, the command post outside the city, Sanchez told Conway and his aides: "The president knows this is going to be bloody. He accepts that," an officer recalled.
Conway was perturbed. He expressed his reservations in front of the other staff officers - a way of making sure his objections were on the record.
But Col. John Coleman, Conway's right-hand man, who was present at most of the meetings, said that in the end, the Marines' job is to follow orders. "When the president says we go, we go."
On April 2, the Marines began preparing their attack, named Operation Valiant Resolve. Initially, the Marines estimated that they would need two battalions, a total of 2,500 troops, and that the mission would take 10 days. The fighting was plotted down to the street level. One battalion would take the northern half of the city, another the southern, and they would meet in the middle.
The Marines knew the stakes were high. "This battle is going to have far-reaching effects on not only the war here in Iraq, but in the overall war on terrorism," one young officer wrote home.
But beyond the declaration that the goal was to kill or capture those responsible for the contractors' deaths, there was no clear definition of the endgame. No one explained what, at the end of the day, the U.S. would have won.
"First prize, a week in Fallouja. Second prize, two weeks in Fallouja," a U.S. diplomat working with the occupation authority in Baghdad said dryly.
On April 4, Maj. Gen. James N. Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division, whose units would carry the battle, summoned his commanders to a final briefing.
The general, known as "Mad Dog Mattis" to his men, made it clear that the Marines were now in warrior mode.
"You know my rules for a gunfight?" he asked a reporter outside the meeting. "Bring a gun, bring two guns, bring all your friends with guns."
Sgt. Maj. Randall Carter, the top enlisted man in the 2nd Battalion of the 1st Marine Regiment, known in military shorthand as the 2/1, began to prepare his men.
"Marines are only really motivated two times," he bellowed. "One is when we're going on liberty. One is when we're going to kill somebody. We're not going on liberty.... We're here for one thing: to tame Fallouja. That's what we're going to do."
The young Marines responded with a thunderous shout of "Ooh-rah!" the all-purpose Marine cheer.
Near midnight, the temperature was 41 degrees, one of the coldest April nights Al Anbar province had had in years. The Marines moved out, establishing their forward command post in the cemetery on the northern edge of town.
PREPARATIONS
Inside Fallouja, "we knew we would be wiped off the Earth," recalled Kadhimia Abid Dulaimi, 59, a Fallouja woman who nevertheless helped insurgents, feeding them and letting them station themselves on her roof.
The insurgents' movements paralleled those of the Marines: They readied their weapons, scoped out buildings to use as sniper positions and stockpiled ammunition, said several Falloujans who fled a few days later.
A year after the U.S.-led invasion, the insurgency based in Fallouja had grown into an increasingly sophisticated movement made up largely of Iraqis - former Baath Party members, unemployed members of Hussein's military and intelligence services, and Sunni fundamentalists who wanted Iraq to be governed by Islamic law, Marine intelligence officers said. Foreign fighters were in the minority but were believed to be responsible for many of the suicide bombings.
On April 5, the Marine operation was underway. Carter and the 2/1 advanced into the northern part of the city and almost immediately ran into resistance. Insurgents on rooftops and others in cars peppered the incoming troops with gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades.
"If they want to come out and fight, that's fine with us," Maj. Brandon McGowan, executive officer of the 2/1, said at the time. "That way we don't have to go house to house."
Five Marines died in that first day of combat. Insurgents died too, as did some civilians.
"There was a girl of 20 years who went out to our nearby mosque to give blood, and she was hit in the head by a piece of shrapnel," said Umm Marwan, who fled with six of her children four days later. "The men carried her to the clinic, but I think she died before she got there."
On April 6, the Marines pushed farther into the city and ran into stiffer resistance. The insurgents came up with a strategy to slow the American advance. They blocked streets with buses and trucks to try to force the Marines onto routes where insurgents lay in wait. They ferried fighters from place to place in cars and even in city buses. They used an antiaircraft gun to fire on U.S. helicopters that roared over the rooftops, until the Marines destroyed the weapon.
On April 7, the Arabic-language satellite TV channel Al Jazeera carried a report from the city's hospital director, Tahr Issawi, that 60 people were dead. There was no way to verify the number or how many were civilians.
EYE ON NEWS
Watching the news unfold from his ranch near Crawford, Texas, on April 7, Bush twice requested video briefings directly from Abizaid and Bremer.
The Marines were making progress and taking few casualties. But Arab media reports of civilian deaths sparked protests among Iraqis outside Fallouja. Al Jazeera had a correspondent inside the town, Ahmed Mansur, and his broadcasts were vivid and emotional. He interrupted one report from the roof of a building to hit the deck as a U.S. warplane passed overhead.
After U.S. artillery hit a mosque that the Americans said had been sheltering insurgents, Mansur reported that a family had been killed in a car parked behind the mosque. He also said 25 members of a family were killed when their house was hit.
In his wood-paneled office at the Republican Palace in Baghdad, Bremer was besieged by Sunni members of the Iraqi Governing Council who pleaded to be given safe passage to Fallouja to try to negotiate a peace, top aides said.
Sunni tribal leaders, clerics and physicians appealed to Hachim Hassani for help. Hassani was the No. 2 man in the Iraqi Islamic Party, the most powerful Sunni political organization in the country, and he often represented the party on the Governing Council. He was also an English-speaking economist who had lived nearly 15 years in Detroit and, more recently, Woodland Hills. Bremer saw him as trustworthy and moderate.
Hassani was getting regular updates on civilian casualties in Fallouja and complaining to U.S. officials.
"Hachim was telling us that of the people killed, maybe 20% were civilians," said a senior Bremer aide who asked not to be named, adding that Hassani said that "even if it was 5%, that was 5% too many."
U.N. envoy Brahimi had just landed in Baghdad to help assemble an interim government. He told Bremer, "I can't operate this way," complaining that the offensive made political negotiations impossible, a U.S. official in Baghdad at the time said.
A few days later, Brahimi publicly called the military's response in Fallouja "collective punishments" and "not acceptable."
Criticism also came from Britain's Blair, the key U.S. ally in Iraq. The prime minister had been under pressure for more than a year from an antiwar majority in his ruling Labor Party, and the civilian casualties in Fallouja were causing the opposition to flare.
"The U.S. forces have to stop acting like warriors and start acting like peacekeepers," said Blair's former foreign secretary, Robin Cook. Blair telephoned Bush on April 7 to warn that the offensive in Fallouja was causing a backlash in the rest of Iraq, diplomats said.
The military felt the battle was also becoming a recruiting tool for the insurgency inside and outside Iraq. As portrayed on Al Jazeera, Fallouja was "a rallying call, an Alamo if you will, for the jihad," Col. Coleman recalled.
U.S. military and civilian officials would later blame each other for allowing the Arab media to paint the offensive as an attack on civilians, mosques and hospitals. Under the strain, relationships between American civilian and military officials - including Bremer and Sanchez - were becoming "dysfunctional," one official in Washington said.
Meanwhile, the Iraqis who were to fight alongside the U.S. troops drifted into the desert. The 2nd Battalion of the Iraqi army refused to take up arms against fellow countrymen. An Iraqi national guard unit walked as well. There was no way to put an Iraqi face on the battle.
The assault on the Sunni stronghold had the unexpected effect of buoying radical Shiite Muslims, especially those who followed the anti-American cleric Muqtada Sadr, who sent supplies to Fallouja during the Marine assault. Sadr used the events in Fallouja to help spark one of several uprisings against the occupation, in the Shiite holy city of Najaf.
The upsurge in fighting alarmed Americans as well. Even before the battle, a poll released April 5 found Bush's overall job approval at a new low of 43%.
"We are on the verge of losing control of Iraq," said Sen. Joseph R. Biden (news, bio, voting record) Jr. of Delaware, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee. Added Sen. Robert C. Byrd (news, bio, voting record) (D-W.Va.): "Surely I am not the only one who hears echoes of Vietnam."
Rumsfeld sought to put out the fires.
"The number of people involved in those battles is relatively small.... A small number of terrorists," he told reporters at the Pentagon on April 7. "Some things are going well, and some things obviously are not going well. And you're going to have good days and bad days, as we've said from the outset."
The Marines pressed on. By April 9, Mattis believed he was within 48 hours of taking the city.
BAGHDAD TALKS
In Baghdad, a group known as the Iraqi Security Committee was meeting every day and sometimes twice a day. The committee consisted of a handful of Iraqi Governing Council members, the Iraqi national security advisor and the heads of the Iraqi Defense Ministry, Interior Ministry and the intelligence service. Bremer also attended.
"The situation was very tense," recalled Hassani, the Sunni leader. "The violence by then had spread around Fallouja. I thought the situation was getting very dangerous and we needed to interfere."
On April 8, Hassani and Ghazi Ajil Yawer, another influential Sunni and member of the Governing Council, met with Adnan Pachachi, the usually pro-American elder statesman of the council's Sunni members. The three emerged from Pachachi's headquarters and said they were prepared to resign in protest, a move that could cripple the council and undermine Bush's promise to turn over sovereignty to Iraqis on June 30.
A call came almost immediately from Bremer's office asking for a meeting that night.
The Sunni politicians arrived to find the two top U.S. generals in the Middle East, Abizaid and Sanchez, in Bremer's office. According to one participant, Abizaid told Hassani, "If you give me two days, I'll finish Fallouja."
Hassani, who appeared stunned, replied, "Yeah, you may finish Fallouja but I guarantee you, you'll have all Iraq as one big Fallouja."
Privately, American officials were divided over what course to take. One later said he thought the Sunnis were only "grandstanding." But Bremer was convinced that continuing the military offensive would create a political disaster, and supported the idea of a cease-fire to allow the council members to try to negotiate a deal.
Abizaid and Sanchez were reluctant, participants said, but finally came around. "I know major military action could implode the political situation," Abizaid said, according to one official.
Another person at the meeting recalled that the generals also said, "We can't pull out our troops until we've got some kind of local force on the ground."
The White House also acceded to the mounting pressure. The new view was: OK, give negotiations a try, officials said. But the time element was important. U.S. officials at the National Security Council didn't want the negotiations to go on forever. Give them a deadline, a couple of weeks, they said.
In the early hours of April 9, the orders reached the Marines at Fallouja: A cease-fire begins at noon. By that point, the Marines would later estimate, they had taken a third of the city with relatively modest U.S. losses - 11 dead.
That afternoon, Bremer's spokesman, Dan Senor, and Sanchez's spokesman, Gen. Kimmitt, announced a "unilateral suspension of offensive operations."
Senor said the purpose was "to hold a meeting between members of the Iraqi Governing Council, the Fallouja leadership and leaders of the anti-coalition forces, to allow delivery of additional supplies provided by the Iraqi government, and to allow residents of Fallouja to tend to the wounded and dead."
Kimmitt warned that should discussions fail, "the coalition military are prepared to go back on the offensive."
Part II
CEASE-FIRE
The Marines were unhappy. They had not wanted to attack Fallouja initially, but once their advice was ignored, their only goal was to crush the enemy. Now, they felt, they were being called off just when victory was within their grasp.
Conway seethed in private. Months later he went public with his discontent, an unusual step for a Marine general.
"I would simply say that when you order elements of a Marine division to attack a city, that you really need to understand what the consequences are, and not, perhaps, vacillate in the middle of something like that," he told reporters. "Once you commit, you've got to stay committed."
By midmorning on April 9, the Marines began to relax their cordon around the city to allow women, children and the elderly to leave. Nearly a quarter of the city's population of 285,000 fled through military checkpoints.
Col. John Toolan, commander of the 1st Marine Regiment and a veteran of the taking of Baghdad a year earlier, went to one of the checkpoints. Gun on his hip, he stopped cars in a search for insurgents. He found none, but came across Iraqi policemen and Civil Defense Corps troops fleeing the city.
"When are these people going to discover their manhood and stand and fight with us to save their city?" he demanded at the time.
Meanwhile, insurgents in the city regrouped. They still had considerable assets, including artillery and antiaircraft capability. They were controlling mosques and intimidating religious and civic leaders. They had popular support, and help from some Iraqi police, who were driving cars given by the U.S.
The guerrillas were not under the same restrictions as the Americans and continued to attack Marine positions and patrols. The Marines responded in force. The director of Fallouja Hospital appeared several times a day on Arab satellite TV channels with ever higher estimates of the death toll. On April 9, it was 450. A few days later it was 600.
From the Marines' viewpoint, there seemed to be no reliable way to separate civilians from insurgents.
Elderly men were picking up AK-47s and fighting. Two Fallouja women later described preparing food for the insurgents and giving them shelter. "I cooked rice and lentils for them.... I got them ammunition and held their guns for them as they were climbing onto my roof," said Dulaimi, the homemaker.
During the periods of relative calm, those who did not flee emerged from their houses to bury the dead. They carried the bodies wrapped in white sheets to the soccer stadium, which had been turned into a graveyard because Marines were camped in the cemetery.
Meanwhile, various groups, all claiming to represent Falloujans, clamored to be the ones to negotiate a peace deal. The jockeying made talks difficult.
"There are lots of groups offering to negotiate," said Senor, Bremer's spokesman. "We will talk to anybody, but at the moment we are not sure that anyone is actually able to negotiate on behalf of the people of Fallouja."
In Washington, the picture wasn't much clearer. "Most of this was opaque to us in Washington, certainly the details," one official said later.
With negotiations yielding little, Mattis called in reinforcements. He had begun the fight with only two battalions; by late April, he had seven.
At the same time, the Marines began to assert control over negotiations, trying to employ the tactic they had wanted to use in the first place: turning to moderate Falloujans to help manage the city.
Marine commanders were inclined to believe that former members of Hussein's armed forces were adherents of military order and could offer the city effective leadership. The Marines also had some empathy for the fighters who were former military men - a type they knew well. The ex-fighters had been ignored by officials in Baghdad since the war, much as the Marines felt that their advice often fell on deaf ears.
The Marines recognized that many of the fighters "weren't former regime loyalists, they certainly weren't foreign fighters, and they weren't religious extremists," said Coleman, the colonel.
"They were soldiers who have families," Coleman said later. He noted their frustration over being unemployed for a year after the army was disbanded. "They couldn't do the things a man and a father is expected to do ... and then a force is all of a sudden arrayed and directed against your town. What do you do? Many of those men chose to pick up that AK-47 and join the fight."
The Marines turned to the head of the Iraqi intelligence service, Gen. Mohammed Shahwani, a onetime Hussein operative and a strong supporter of turning to former Hussein-era military men, several of the parties involved said.
Shahwani had fled Iraq in the early 1990s and was a key player in an abortive coup in 1996, backed by the CIA (news - web sites), according to secret police files kept by Hussein and obtained after the war by Ahmad Chalabi, a formerly exiled political leader.
"Gen. Shahwani and I were in direct contact," Conway said later. "He felt like he knew who some of the quality soldiers were from this region, and he did bring these people forward."
Conway explained that he wanted a "charismatic Iraqi general." Shahwani brought him Gen. Mohammed Latif and Maj. Gen. Jassim Saleh. Latif was a former head of military intelligence and Saleh had been a general in the armed forces. At a meeting at Camp Fallouja, Shahwani presented the two men along with two others as the right people to lead an armed force in Fallouja.
Coleman was impressed by Latif, whom he described as a natural leader, but Saleh was necessary for the deal to work. "Saleh was a son of the city, so he could walk right in there and command immediate respect," Coleman said. He was also a professional military man.
Saleh walked into the Fallouja post wearing the traditional Arab robe known as a dishdasha. "We called our troops to attention and gave him the kind of Marine military salute we would to someone of that rank," recalled Maj. Ed Sullivan.
Some Marine officers, including Sullivan, found Saleh almost a caricature of a Hussein-era general. "He played the part wonderfully. He was excessively polite. He met with Col. Toolan. He said, 'Your men fight like tigers,' " Sullivan recalled, shaking his head as he remembered Saleh's confidence.
It didn't take long for the Marines to recognize that Saleh, son of the city or no, might also be a problem. He turned out to be one of the leaders of the insurgency near Taji, a town just north of Baghdad, one Marine officer said. Saleh had been one of the insurgents planning the attacks on a large U.S. military base known as Camp Anaconda, military officials said.
At the same time, in an attempt to reach out to the larger Sunni community, Bremer announced a softening of the coalition policy that had stripped many Sunnis of their Hussein-era government jobs. But no decision in Iraq seemed to come easy; Bremer's move angered Shiite leaders, who accused him of reneging on his commitment to dismantle Hussein's Baath Party power structure.
When the idea of turning over security to a force headed by Latif and Saleh was brought up to Iraq's interim ministers, they expressed dismay.
"It was the equivalent of the poachers becoming the gamekeepers," said Ali Allawi, then interim minister of defense.
On April 29, Mattis held a long negotiating session with Latif, Saleh and two other former Iraqi generals. He struck a deal to allow them to raise a force of local men - the Fallouja Brigade - to take control of the city.
Mattis apparently intended to report the agreement up his chain of command before any public announcement was made, but a Los Angeles Times reporter was outside the meeting between Mattis and the Iraqi generals, and Mattis reluctantly confirmed what was already apparent.
The deal took other U.S. officials by surprise - Bremer and Sanchez in Baghdad, and Rumsfeld and Bush in Washington.
A U.S. official in Baghdad said Abizaid telephoned Bremer and asked, "What's going on down there?" "I have no idea," Bremer replied.
"It was a complete surprise to us," the official said. "Both Bremer and Abizaid were shocked. Bremer was furious.... Bremer learned about it from the press. The Marines sort of said, 'Presto, here it is.' "
In Washington, once it was clear that a deal had been struck, Rumsfeld announced a fait accompli. "The Marines on the ground are the ones that are making those judgments," he told a television interviewer.
At the White House, the move also was presented as a done deal, officials said. "We were told there was a deal," one official said. "We all kind of shook our heads and said, 'OK.' " Next to Bremer's warnings that renewed fighting would torpedo the formation of a new Iraqi interim government, the deal looked "acceptable," he said.
But Bremer and his aides complained privately about what they saw as the military's tendency to sideline the civilian authority. "You need a clear definition of what's a military decision and what's a political decision," one civilian official in Washington said. "In this case, the Marines stepped across that line."
Pentagon spokesman Di Rita defended the Marines against that charge. "They had an enormous amount of authority to go work the problem," he said. Mattis, who made the deal, was promoted to lieutenant general in September.
Iraqi national security advisor Mowaffak Rubaie, who is also a Shiite and deeply distrustful of the minority Sunnis who were part of the Hussein regime, learned of the Fallouja Brigade on May 1 when he read an account in a Western newspaper. The same day, he attended an early-morning meeting in Bremer's office.
"We went full blast. We said: 'This is wrong, you are repeating the same mistake you made in Afghanistan (news - web sites) with the warlords.... This is going to backfire.' It was appeasement," Rubaie said.
Allawi, the interim defense minister, feared that U.S. officials would be tempted to clone it elsewhere - in Najaf, Mosul and Basra - leading to multiple militias and a security disaster, and that the strategy would eventually fail.
"I said, 'You'll get a period of relative quiet and the city will breathe a sigh of relief, but it will only be camouflage and subterfuge,' " recalled Allawi, who now lives in London.
But there was no turning back.
Part III
NEW BRIGADE
With 16 men lost to hostile fire since the offensive began April 5, the first three days of May grated on many of the Marines who had fought to take the city. Hour by hour they ceded positions to newly minted members of the Fallouja Brigade, whom they had been fighting only days before.
"We gave them a battalion's worth of rifles, about 800 rifles, I think," Gen. Conway said later. "Probably 25 to 27 trucks, probably 40 or 50 radios, and about 2,000 uniforms."
Lance Cpl. Jacob Atkinson, 21, of Richmond, Va., said at the time, "I just hope whoever is making the decision for this has a good plan."
His 150-member unit, Echo Company of the 2/1, had suffered significant casualties - three Marines dead and more than 50 wounded - during a month of combat and negotiations.
Echo Company's commander, Capt. Douglas Zembiec, tried to cool his men down. "I told every one of them, 'Your brothers did not die in vain,' " said Zembiec, 31, of Albuquerque. " 'We'll give this a chance. If it doesn't work, we're prepared to go back in.' "
Among Falloujans, the mood was one of heady excitement, pride and relief. One of their own was back in charge. Jassim Saleh was welcomed with cheers and applause as he strutted through downtown wearing his Hussein-era uniform.
There was joy, too, that the Americans, all the more hated after a month of bombing, were leaving. But there was also dismay as many Falloujan natives, who had left during the worst of the fighting, returned to find their homes, businesses and mosques reduced to rubble.
Hot weather had arrived, and flies swirled in clouds. At the edge of the Jolan neighborhood, an insurgent stronghold, Fallouja Brigade recruiters took applications from what seemed like an endless line of men.
Yassir Abaat, 28, who said he used to work for Hussein's presidential guard, joined the insurgency after his father was killed on the fourth day of the Fallouja siege.
"I have not stopped fighting. The war is not over," he said in a calm voice. "If the Americans attack again, we will defend ourselves."
Conway listed several missions that he expected Saleh's brigade to accomplish. They would kill or capture the foreign fighters battling U.S. forces, they would find and arrest the killers of the U.S. contractors, they would make the city safe for Westerners to enter and begin reconstruction, and they would ensure that the insurgents' heavy weapons were handed over.
Saleh would not be around long enough to make any of that happen, however. The Marines removed him amid Shiite accusations that he had been a commander for Hussein when atrocities were committed in southern Iraq. By early May he was out, replaced by Latif, whom the Marines had preferred from the start but who lacked Falloujan roots.
Under Latif, the experiment seemed to work at first. The city was peaceful. Civilians no longer were dying, and the destruction of homes and shops had stopped. Not a shot was fired at the Marines there, and most of the province was quiet as well.
Under the agreement, the Marines did not venture into Fallouja without an escort. But they worked relatively freely in surrounding villages and towns and were able to pay salaries, give compensation to those who had lost children or other civilian relatives in the fighting, and rebuild mosques and hand out bags of seed to farmers.
Coleman considered Latif a military professional and credited him with much of what was going right.
"You can look the man in the eye and you feel a power and presence there that, at least in our profession, you associate with a natural leader," he said.
On May 10, the Marines made their first and only patrol in the city center with the brigade. When it was over, Iraqi national guard and Fallouja Brigade members waved their guns in the air chanting, "From Fallouja to Kufa," a suggestion that the Iraqis should free their cities from American domination from central to southern Iraq.
From that point on, the brigade wanted the Marines to stay out of Fallouja, period. An Iraqi police captain said as much to Mattis.
In Washington, Bush and his aides insisted that progress was being made. "In and around Fallouja, U.S. Marines are maintaining pressure on Saddam loyalists and foreign fighters and other militants," the president said at a Pentagon ceremony May 10. "We're keeping that pressure on to ensure that Fallouja ceases to be an enemy sanctuary."
But as the month wore on, U.S. forces were no closer to vanquishing the insurgency or ridding the area of foreign fighters, and no closer to finding the killers of the contractors. Fallouja had become a no-go zone for the Marines.
Part IV
MORE ATTACKS
In June, insurgents began to push outside the city limits. They staked out the nearby Marine bases and targeted people entering and leaving.
On June 5, six Shiite truck drivers, outsiders in Sunni-dominated Fallouja, became frightened at an insurgent checkpoint and rushed to the police station for help. The police took them to a mosque, where they were handed over to insurgents. They were executed and their bodies mutilated, according to Shiite tribal sheiks and news reports.
Most Westerners steered clear of the highway near Fallouja. If they had to travel to western Iraq, they waited for a military flight.
By mid-June, the U.S. military believed that many of the bombings of civilian targets and other terrorist acts throughout Iraq were being directed by Zarqawi from Fallouja.
On June 19, the U.S. launched airstrikes there on what were believed to be safe houses used by Zarqawi. At least two homes were destroyed and 18 to 24 people killed. It was the beginning of an effort to use precision bombing to go after Zarqawi's network and other insurgents.
But the scenes Iraqis saw on Arab television told a different story. Emergency room doctors again said that many of the dead were women and children. Mothers cried over their lost sons - it was impossible to tell whether they were insurgents or civilians. People picked their way through ruined homes, looking in disbelief at the wreckage. Fallouja was off-limits to Western reporters.
The call to jihad found an audience in Fallouja, where an increasingly militant climate pervaded the city.
Young Iraqi men gathered at outdoor stands where hawkers sold videos shot by insurgents that showed suicide bombings in Iraq. The tapes featured testimonials from bombers before their deaths and then the explosive completion of their missions. Beheading tapes were also for sale.
Dulaimi, the Fallouja woman who had helped the insurgents in April, said that "most of the mujahedin are very brave people, and as long as they are doing something right, God will bring victory."
VIPERS' NEST
On June 28, Bremer transferred sovereignty to the new interim Iraqi government and then flew home. Fallouja was completely in the grip of insurgent forces, and the insurgency was spreading.
"It is a nest of vipers, and the vipers leave Fallouja to go to Baghdad," one U.S. officer said. He called the city and its untamed surroundings "the Cambodia of this war."
Rubaie, the national security advisor, estimated that about 350 foreign fighters had gone north to the city of Samarra from Fallouja and that about 150 had gone west to Ramadi.
Leaders of the Fallouja Brigade cheerfully confirmed much of the account. "Now there is [Islamic] law in Fallouja," said Mohammed Abid Makhlaf, a former brigadier in Hussein's army who had become a leader of the Fallouja Brigade.
"There is a kind of social collaboration between the Iraqi police, the Iraqi national guard, the mujahedin and the Fallouja Brigade," he said. "If there are robbers, the police and the mujahedin, with the imams of a mosque, will determine the punishment from a religious standpoint. For instance, if he is a robber, they will cut off his hand."
He said the view of most Falloujans was: "The U.S. is our first enemy. All the people in Fallouja hate Americans because they hit them, they killed them, they destroyed the whole city. Now the situation is better because there are no Americans. Their touch is not there."
NAJAF UNREST
In August, signs emerged that insurgents from Fallouja were aiding the Shiite insurgency 100 miles away in Najaf, where rebel cleric Sadr and his Al Mahdi militia had occupied the revered Imam Ali Mosque.
Col. Durrant, who runs the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force's coordination with the Iraqi security forces, recalled watching a television clip in which Falloujans were headed to Najaf "driving police cars we gave them, filled with arms and ammo we gave them."
At the same time, attacks on foreigners, including beheadings, became almost commonplace. By the end of August, more than 100 people had been kidnapped - most of them by groups thought to be based in the Fallouja area, intelligence officers said. At least 20 were killed.
The insurgents also were trying to eliminate anyone in Fallouja or Ramadi - the two cities account for 70% of Al Anbar province's population - who represented the interim government. The targets included members of the police, the national guard, ministerial appointees in the provincial offices, governors and their deputies.
One such target was Col. Suleiman Marawi, the head of one of two Iraqi national guard battalions based in Fallouja and a key ally of the Americans.
Marawi was attacked as he returned to the guardsmen's base outside the city. He managed to get into the base, but when a local imam offered to accompany him back into the city and mediate between him and his mujahedin attackers, Marawi agreed. He was soon turned over to the rebels, tortured and killed, Durrant said.
"They dumped his body by the side of the road," Durrant said, adding that it "had marks from boiling water. It was not a fast death."
Without Marawi, the national guard troops deserted. "The insurgents came in and took everything - beds, AK-47s, thousands of rounds of ammunition, machine guns, RPGs," Durrant said.
In the last days of August, the U.S. stepped up its precision bombing in neighborhoods known to have been taken over by insurgents.
"There are no families there now. Around evening we hear bombing and we see smoke and fire. To stay there is to risk your life," one woman said.
The Marines informed the Iraqi Defense Ministry that it would no longer pay the Fallouja Brigade's salary. The ministry and the Marines dissolved the force.
In Washington, Rumsfeld told reporters, "The Fallouja Brigade didn't work."
On Sept. 9, Gen. Abdullah Hamid Wael, the brigade's operational leader, announced the decision to the 2,000 members.
Supplied with U.S. weapons, ammunition, radios and vehicles, they turned their energies wholeheartedly to the insurgency.
Zarqawi and the killers of the American contractors, if they were in Fallouja, remained beyond U.S. reach.
Afterword
All through September and October, American warplanes bombed Fallouja in hope of killing Zarqawi and his followers, and in hope of forcing Fallouja's remaining residents to plead for peace.
It didn't work. Zarqawi remained at large, and the terrorist operations attributed to him continued. Fallouja's ruling council negotiated with the Baghdad government, agreeing to expel foreign fighters and welcome the Iraqi national guard, but the deal fell through.
Nearly two weeks ago, interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi ordered Falloujans to hand over Zarqawi or face a new assault. The leader of Iraq's hard-line Sunni clergy, Sheik Harith Dhari, retorted that an attack would prompt a Sunni boycott of elections scheduled for January - a virtual death blow to the U.S.-authored timetable for Iraq's political progress.
"The Iraqi people view Fallouja as the symbol of their steadfastness, resistance and pride," Dhari said.
So the prime minister now faces the same dilemma Bush and Bremer faced in April: He can attempt to solve the problem of Fallouja with military force, but only at the risk of alienating Sunnis whose support the new government needs. If he leaves the insurgent stronghold to fester, the guerrillas will continue to gather strength. Just as before, there is no easy choice, no clear course that will guarantee success. In April, the Americans found their options limited by earlier missteps: the decision to disband Iraq's armed forces, the failure to reach out to Sunnis, the lack of political and diplomatic groundwork for military actions. The question is whether those factors will again stand in the way of success, or whether Iraq has changed enough that the new interim government can root out the insurgents.
This time, an Iraqi, not an American, would be at least nominally in charge of an attack. The troops who would storm the city would include Iraqis with more training and experience than in April. The people of Fallouja appear divided over whether to fight to the death or cut a deal.
But the ranks of hardened insurgents and foreign fighters in Fallouja have increased. The decisions the United States made in the spring - in particular, the creation of the Fallouja Brigade and the Marines' promise to stay outside the city - gave the insurgents almost six months to dig in. That means Prime Minister Allawi has an even tougher battle ahead.
The Sunni insurgency whose seedbed was Fallouja has now spread far beyond the city's borders. An Iraq with its Sunnis in perpetual rebellion will not be stable. Allawi and his American supporters face the difficult task of winning back not only Fallouja, but also the rest of Iraq's Sunni belt - not only the control of its cities, but its hearts and minds as well.
--
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
Key Iraqi players
Several Iraqis had influential roles during the Fallouja conflict, especially Sunni Muslim leaders who threatened to quit the Iraqi Governing Council if the U.S. didn't end its assault on the city.
HACHIM HASSANI
April 2004: No. 2 in Iraq's leading Sunni Muslim party; Iraqi Governing Council member. Threatened to resign from council unless assault
was halted.
Now: Interim minister of industry and minerals.
GHAZI AJIL YAWER
April 2004: Sunni member of Iraqi Governing Council. Threatened to resign unless assault was halted.
Now: Interim president.
ADNAN PACHACHI
April 2004: Sunni member of Iraqi Governing Council. Threatened to resign unless assault was halted.
Now: Head of Iraqi Independent Democrats.
GEN. MOHAMMED SHAHWANI
April 2004: Interim director of Iraqi intelligence. Put Marines in contact with Iraqi ex-generals after Fallouja cease-fire was declared.
Now: Interim director of Iraqi intelligence.
GEN. MOHAMMED LATIF
May 2004: Commander of Fallouja Brigade (replaced Jassim Saleh).
Now: Unknown.
ALI ALLAWI
April 2004: Interim defense minister. Objected to creation of Fallouja Brigade, saying it would not end insurgency.
Now: Living in London.
Rubin reported from Fallouja and Baghdad and McManus from Washington. Times staff writers Mark Mazzetti in Washington, Patrick J. McDonnell in Fallouja and Baghdad, and Tony Perry in Fallouja and San Diego contributed to this report.
-------- israel / palestine
Israel Cabinet OKs Settlers' Compensation
October 24, 2004
By JOSEF FEDERMAN
Associated Press Writer
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/ISRAEL_PALESTINIANS?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
JERUSALEM (AP) -- The Israeli Cabinet approved guidelines Sunday to compensate settlers uprooted by Ariel Sharon's Gaza withdrawal plan, giving the prime minister a welcome boost ahead of a parliamentary showdown this week.
The compensation bill, passed by a vote of 13-6, is an important part of Sharon's "unilateral disengagement" plan, which calls for a complete withdrawal from Gaza and pullout from four West Bank settlements next year.
On Tuesday, Sharon faces a bigger test, when parliament is to vote for the first time on the entire withdrawal plan. Sharon is expected to win that vote as well, but he hopes to win by a large margin to weaken his opponents.
In the West Bank, a car exploded next to an Israeli army jeep in Nablus, damaging the vehicle, Palestinian witnesses and the army said. No injuries were reported. The blast shook much of the West Bank's largest city. No group immediately claimed responsibility for the explosion.
Also, an Israeli aircraft launched two missiles at a group of Palestinian militants gathered outside a house in the southern Gaza Strip, killing two militants and wounding five other people, including four bystanders, Palestinian security officials said.
An Israeli military source said the strike was aimed at a group of gunmen who appeared to be preparing to attack a Jewish settlement or Israeli military target. l
Sharon's disengagement plan has bitterly divided the ruling Likud Party. Five Likud ministers voted against the compensation bill on Sunday, and nearly half of the party's 40 lawmakers are expected to oppose Sharon on Tuesday.
That has forced Sharon to rely on moderate opposition parties to push forward with the plan, a situation that makes Sharon uncomfortable, his aides say.
Sharon says his plan is necessary to boost Israel's security after four years of fighting with the Palestinians. He also says it will enable Israel to hold on to large blocs of settlements in the West Bank, where most Jewish settlers live.
Jewish settlers, and their hard-line allies in the government, accuse Sharon of caving in to Palestinian violence and fear the withdrawal is only the first step of a larger pullback from the West Bank.
Sunday's vote endorsed guidelines for compensating the more than 8,000 settlers who are slated to be forced from their homes next year. It also approved penalties, including prison terms, for settlers who resist evacuation orders. The guidelines will now be formulated into legislation and sent to parliament.
Neither Sunday's Cabinet decision nor Tuesday's parliamentary vote are the final decisions in the withdrawal plan.
Both bodies will still need to approve the actual evacuations in the coming months, giving Sharon's opponents more opportunities to block the plan. Sharon's government could still fall on other issues, including the budget.
In a related development, a group of Israeli legal experts has determined that even if Israel withdraws from Gaza, it still will be considered the occupying power under international law and as such responsible for the crowded territory.
The conclusion was reached in an internal Israeli government assessment obtained Sunday by The Associated Press.
Since Israel would maintain control over Gaza's border crossings, coastline and airspace, international law will continue to hold the Jewish state responsible for the territory, according to the study by legal experts from the Justice Ministry, Foreign Ministry and the military.
"We must be aware that the disengagement does not necessarily exempt Israel from responsibility in the evacuated territories," said the 47-page report.
Israel could reduce its responsibility over the territory, where 8,200 Jewish settlers currently live among 1.3 million Palestinians, if someone else were to take control there, the report said.
The study, which has been submitted to the National Security Council, responsible for implementing the withdrawal, said that both the involvement of an international force in Gaza or the establishment of a Palestinian state would reduce the burden on Israel.
However, Cabinet Minister Tzipi Livni said Sunday that Israel was unlikely to endorse either option due to its reluctance to let another party handle security.
Meanwhile, a team of Tunisian doctors Sunday examined Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who is recovering from the flu, and said he was OK. The doctors also met briefly with Arafat on Saturday.
The five-man medical team - including eye, ear and nose specialists - was sent to Ramallah after Arafat spoke by phone with Tunisian President Zine El Abdine Ben Ali, said Ahmed al-Habasi, Tunisia's representative in Ramallah.
The 75-year-old leader's health has been the subject of intense speculation in recent years, in part because of the tremor in his lips and hands, considered a possible symptom of Parkinson's disease. Last year, Arafat suffered from gall stones, and his aides denied rumors he had stomach cancer.
Last week, Egyptian doctors examined Arafat after he suffered from fever, nausea and a stuffy nose. But his aides insisted he is fine, and said he has been observing the dawn-to-dusk fast during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
--------
EU: Israel's pullout from Gaza Strip will not suffice
October 24, 2004
Haaretz Service and Reuters
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/492321.html
The European Union's foreign policy chief said in an interview published Saturday that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to evacuate Jewish settlements from the Gaza Strip and four West Bank of settlements would not suffice. Javier Solana called on Sharon to pull out of all the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
If Sharon believes that with a "pullout from Gaza everything is already done and that peace would come automatically, we won't support that," he said. "That wouldn't be a dream, but a nightmare," Solana was quoted as saying by Der Spiegel, a weekly news magazine
Solana also said he hoped to send European experts in cooperation with Egypt to help train Palestinian security forces within the coming months.
"Probably together with Egypt, we will send well-prepared people so that the Palestinians can enact a sensible command structure and also have the ability to fulfill their duty," Solana was quoted as saying.
Under Sharon's disengagement plan, Israel will withdraw from Gaza, where 8,000 Jewish settlers live among 1.3 million Palestinians, next year. The plan also includes a pullback from four small West Bank settlements. It is expected to be presented to the Knesset plenum for a vote of approval on Tuesday.
Solana told The Associated Press last month that no new "bold ideas" for the Middle East should be expected before the U.S. presidential election in November.
He said the EU, the United States, Russia and the United Nations would continue pressing for the internationally backed road map peace plan they drafted with the goal of having two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace in 2005.
According to Israeli sources, the Europeans are trying to use the 'diplomatic vacuum' that has grown during the days and weeks before the presidential elections in the United States. The European Council of Foreign Ministers recently adopted a resolution critical of Israel, and charged Solana with drawing up recommendations for the EU's Middle East policy ahead of its next meeting on November 5. According to the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem, Solana will present a "street map," aimed at outlining the steps needed to implement the road map to a Palestinian state.
During his visit to Israel, French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier said that Europe is seeking to become a diplomatic giant, in the same way that it has already become an economic giant. He also insisted that violence and instability in the Middle East are a threat to Israel.
Sha'ath stresses need for elections The Palestinian Authority needs a general election to shake up the leadership, its foreign minister said on Friday, stressing the need for vibrant democracy in politics long dominated by PA Chairman Yasser Arafat.
Nabil Sha'ath said elections could not take place until the security situation had improved, ruling out an early poll.
"Elections are the single most important act of reform because elections turn a stale democracy to a vibrant democracy," Sha'ath told reporters after talks with Solana in Brussels.
"Elections allow the rejuvenation of the leadership and allow greater participation by the people in decision-making about very important matters, about peace and war and the future."
Palestinian general elections were originally scheduled for early 2003 but put off on security grounds. They are seen as the first concrete step to meet long-standing international and domestic demands for reforms.
Palestinian politics have been dominated for decades by Arafat, who has widespread support among Palestinians, but a September poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research showed more than 90 percent of Palestinians wanted sweeping political reforms.
Sha'ath said that although local elections would go ahead starting in December, there was little chance of a general election in the near future.
"We are going into a small step of local elections on December 9 regardless of the situation," he said.
"But to go into national elections there needs to be a minimum amount of quiet, and withdrawal of Israelis from towns and villages," he added. "Once that is possible then elections are possible."
An EU official said the bloc wanted the elections to go ahead, but added that the Union understood the delays.
"We do want the elections to take place but it is clear that for free and fair elections there would have to be freedom of movement for people to go and vote and register," the official said, speaking on conditions of anonymity.
"We are going to present to our friends, the Palestinians, a plan in order to get that disengagement process in the most effective manner," he told reporters.
"That is part of a process which is not an end in itself, but a part of the process that should lead to the end of the occupation."
Five European FMs to vist Arafat Five European foreign ministers are planning to visit Ramallah in the near future, according to Sha'ath.
Speaking to the Al-Quds newspaper, which is published in East Jerusalem, Sha'ath said that the ministers would meet with Arafat, in an effort to end the physical and diplomatic isolation of the Palestinian leader. Shaath, currently in Paris, was to hold talks Friday night with Barnier.
Of late, Europe has increased the frequency of its comments on the need for a peace process, and on Arafat's standing. During his visit last week, Barnier told President Moshe Katsav that "restricting Arafat's movements and keeping him within the Muqata give him an excuse not to fulfill his commitments." Barnier proposed that Israel lift its restrictions on the Palestinian leader, and put him to another test.
According to Sha'ath, the European move was initiated by Spain, which hopes to convince other European countries to join it. Shaath also claimed that Spain will also try to persuade Israel to renew negotiations with the PA under Arafat.
On Wednesday, Sha'ath met with Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos, the former EU envoy to the Middle East. Moratinos called for immediate implementation of the road map, but told Shaath that any diplomatic moves should be based on the Israeli disengagement plan. Quoting a political sources in Brussels, Al-Quds reported that the EU would not allow Israel to utilize Arafat's need for medical treatment abroad in order to expel him from the West Bank. In recent weeks, physicians from Egypt and Jordan have traveled to Ramallah to treat Arafat for a variety of ailments.
-------- nato
NATO's New Colonial Order:
Going Backwards From the Twentieth Century
REALITY MACEDONIA
By Rick Rozoff
October 24, 2004
http://www.realitymacedonia.org.mk/web/news_page.asp?nid=3807
A recent news dispatch mentions the Democratic Republic of Congo recalling its ambassador to Congo's former colonial master Belgium in protest over Brussel's Foreign Minister Karel De Gucht having urged, on the very eve of Congo's first full general elections since achieving independence from Belgium forty years ago, that the nation "come under international 'trusteeship' so outsiders can run it."
This diplomatic contretemps is starkly emblematic of the past thirteen years' international developments and the pattern that ineluctably emerges from them, one of the intensified re-establishment of relationships between former colonial metropolises and their ex-colonies that are more reminiscent of the 19th than of the 20th Century.
That Belgium of all nations is advocating an 'international trusteeship' for Congo after the 1877 model that placed Brussels in nominal control of a joint Western European colonization of Central Africa, occurs against the backdrop of a French and German led European Union troop deployment in Congo beginning last year.
The Man Who Would Be King (1975) Britain is now back in control of its former West African colony of Sierra Leone, with troops and all, as well as returning its military to Afghanistan after having been driven out following the successive British invasions of 1838-42, 1878 and 1919.
Some 9,000 British military personnel are also back in Iraq after the departure of the last United Kingdom troops to occupy that country in 1932,
And of course London continues to maintain colonial suzerainty over Diego Garcia, Northern Ireland, the Malvinas [British designation: Falkland Islands], assorted Caribbean and other possessions.
Similarly, French troops are back in Haiti, Cote d'Ivoire and Djibouti, the latter shared with NATO ally troops from the US and Germany, with an ever expanding German global military expansion, Berlin currently having more forces deployed overseas than any nation other than the United States, creeping down the East African coast towards its former colony of Tanganyika.
As recent developments in the United Nations Security Council demonstrate, Paris's eye is also once again set on Lebanon.
Like Britain and other NATO allies, France too continues subjugation of centuries-old colonies, in Paris's case the Italian-speaking island of Corsica, Martinique, Guadalupe, Saint Martin, La Reunion, Mayotte in the Indian Ocean and French Polynesia .
The United States, never officially acknowledged as a colonial master, is back in control of its quasi-colony of Liberia and US Marines are back in Haiti, with the former's sanguinary antecedents during the American occupation of that nation from 1915-1934 still fresh in Haitians' memories.
Denmark remains in colonial possession of majority Inuit/Eskimo Greenland, which is maintained as a joint Danish-US military base, soon to be home to 'Son of Star Wars' missile shield facilities, as well as the Faro Islands, where polls regularly show most residents want independence from Copenhagen.
The Netherlands still occupies the Dutch Antilles, from where it aids its NATO allies the US and Britain with surveillance and other assistance for the counterinsurgency war in Colombia.
Spain is poised to regain control of oil-rich Equatorial Guinea when the next coup attempt succeeds and was until recently commanding former Central American and Caribbean colonies' forces in Iraq.
Not to be left out of NATO's revived colonial alliance, Portugal is eagerly planning a return to Sao Tome and Principe, with their newly-discovered oil riches, and Guinea Bissau when the next, successful, coup occurs there.
Additionally, over the past four years Portugal has led annual joint military exercises with its former colonies Brazil, Angola, East Timor, Sao Tome and Principe, Capo Verde, Guinea Bissau and Mozambique.
Closer to the capitals of classical European colonialism, Turkish and German troops have returned to the Balkans as Serbia and Macedonia are 'decentralized,' fragmented and rendered effective colonies in their own right, with the same masters as before, the same as are recolonizing the world from North to South, East to West.
Would that another Mark Twain or Joseph Conrad were alive to identify this new international colonial scramble as what it is.
-------- prisoners of war
Memo Lets CIA Take Detainees Out of Iraq
Practice Is Called Serious Breach of Geneva Conventions
By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 24, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A57363-2004Oct23?language=printer
At the request of the CIA, the Justice Department drafted a confidential memo that authorizes the agency to transfer detainees out of Iraq for interrogation -- a practice that international legal specialists say contravenes the Geneva Conventions.
One intelligence official familiar with the operation said the CIA has used the March draft memo as legal support for secretly transporting as many as a dozen detainees out of Iraq in the last six months. The agency has concealed the detainees from the International Committee of the Red Cross and other authorities, the official said.
The draft opinion, written by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel and dated March 19, 2004, refers to both Iraqi citizens and foreigners in Iraq, who the memo says are protected by the treaty. It permits the CIA to take Iraqis out of the country to be interrogated for a "brief but not indefinite period." It also says the CIA can permanently remove persons deemed to be "illegal aliens" under "local immigration law."
Some specialists in international law say the opinion amounts to a reinterpretation of one of the most basic rights of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which protects civilians during wartime and occupation, including insurgents who were not part of Iraq's military.
The treaty prohibits the "[i]ndividual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory . . . regardless of their motive."
The 1949 treaty notes that a violation of this particular provision constitutes a "grave breach" of the accord, and thus a "war crime" under U.S. federal law, according to a footnote in the Justice Department draft. "For these reasons," the footnote reads, "we recommend that any contemplated relocations of 'protected persons' from Iraq to facilitate interrogation be carefully evaluated for compliance with Article 49 on a case by case basis." It says that even persons removed from Iraq retain the treaty's protections, which would include humane treatment and access to international monitors.
During the war in Afghanistan, the administration ruled that al Qaeda fighters were not considered "protected persons" under the convention. Many of them were transferred out of the country to the naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and elsewhere for interrogations. By contrast, the U.S. government deems former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party and military, as well as insurgents and other civilians in Iraq, to be protected by the Geneva Conventions.
International law experts contacted for this article described the legal reasoning contained in the Justice Department memo as unconventional and disturbing.
"The overall thrust of the Convention is to keep from moving people out of the country and out of the protection of the Convention," said former senior military attorney Scott Silliman, executive director of Duke University's Center on Law, Ethics and National Security. "The memorandum seeks to create a legal regime justifying conduct that the international community clearly considers in violation of international law and the Convention." Silliman reviewed the document at The Post's request.
The CIA, Justice Department and the author of the draft opinion, Jack L. Goldsmith, former director of the Office of Legal Counsel, declined to comment for this article.
CIA officials have not disclosed the identities or locations of its Iraq detainees to congressional oversight committees, the Defense Department or CIA investigators who are reviewing detention policy, according to two informed U.S. government officials and a confidential e-mail on the subject shown to The Washington Post.
White House officials disputed the notion that Goldsmith's interpretation of the treaty was unusual, although they did not explain why. "The Geneva Conventions are applicable to the conflict in Iraq, and our policy is to comply with the Geneva Conventions," White House spokesman Sean McCormick said.
The Office of Legal Counsel also wrote the Aug. 1, 2002, memo on torture that advised the CIA and White House that torturing al Qaeda terrorists in captivity abroad "may be justified," and that international laws against torture "may be unconstitutional if applied to interrogations" conducted in the war on terrorism. President Bush's aides repudiated that memo once it became public this June.
The Office of Legal Counsel writes legal opinions considered binding on federal agencies and departments. The March 19 document obtained by The Post is stamped "draft" and was not finalized, said one U.S. official involved in the legal deliberations. However, the memo was sent to the general counsels at the National Security Council, the CIA and the departments of State and Defense.
"The memo was a green light," an intelligence official said. "The CIA used the memo to remove other people from Iraq."
Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the CIA has used broad authority granted in a series of legal opinions and guidance from the Office of Legal Counsel and its own general counsel's office to transfer, interrogate and detain individuals suspected of terrorist activities at a series of undisclosed locations around the world.
According to current and former agency officials, the CIA has a rendition policy that has permitted the agency to transfer an unknown number of suspected terrorists captured in one country into the hands of security services in other countries whose record of human rights abuse is well documented. These individuals, as well as those at CIA detention facilities, have no access to any recognized legal process or rights.
The scandal at Abu Ghraib, and the investigations and congressional hearings that followed, forced the disclosure of the Pentagon's behind-closed-doors debate and classified rules for detentions and interrogations at Guantanamo Bay and in Afghanistan and Iraq. Senior defense leaders have repeatedly been called to explain and defend their policies before Congress. But the CIA's policies and practices remain shrouded in secrecy.
The only public account of CIA detainee treatment comes from soldier testimony and Defense Department investigations of military conduct. For instance, Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba's report on Abu Ghraib criticized the CIA practice of maintaining "ghost detainees" -- prisoners who were not officially registered and were moved around inside the prison to hide them from Red Cross teams. Taguba called the practice "deceptive, contrary to Army doctrine and in violation of international law."
Gen. Paul J. Kern, who oversaw another Army inquiry, told Congress that the number of CIA ghost detainees "is in the dozens, to perhaps up to 100."
The March 19, 2004, Justice Department memo by Goldsmith deals with a previously unknown class of people -- those removed from Iraq.
It is not clear why the CIA would feel the need to remove detainees from Iraq for interrogation. A U.S. government official who has been briefed on the CIA's detention practices said some detainees are probably taken to other countries because "that's where the agency has the people, expertise and interrogation facilities, where their people and programs are in place." The origin of the Justice Department memo is directly related to the only publicly acknowledged ghost detainee, Hiwa Abdul Rahman Rashul, nicknamed "Triple X" by CIA and military officials.
Rashul, a suspected member of the Iraqi Al-Ansar terrorist group, was captured by Kurdish soldiers in June or July of 2003 and turned over to the CIA, which whisked him to Afghanistan for interrogation.
In October, White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales asked the Office of Legal Counsel to write an opinion on "protected persons" in Iraq and rule on the status of Rashul, according to another U.S. government official involved in the deliberations.
Goldsmith, then head of the office, ruled that Rashul was a "protected person" under the Fourth Geneva Convention and therefore had to be brought back to Iraq, several intelligence and defense officials said.
The CIA was not happy with the decision, according to two intelligence officials. It promptly brought Rashul back and suspended any other transfers out of the country.
At the same time, when transferring Rashul back to Iraq, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet asked Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld not to give Rashul a prisoner number and to hide him from International Red Cross officials, according to an account provided by Rumsfeld during a June 17 Pentagon news conference. Rumsfeld complied.
As a "ghost detainee," Rashul became lost in the prison system for seven months.
Rumsfeld did not fully explain the reason he had complied with Tenet's request or under what legal authority he could have kept Rashul hidden for so long. "We know from our knowledge that [Tenet] has the authority to do this," he said.
Rashul, defense and intelligence officials noted, had not once been interrogated since he was returned to Iraq. His current status is unknown.
In the one-page October 2003 interim ruling that directed Rashul's return, Goldsmith also created a new category of persons in Iraq whom he said did not qualify for protection under the Geneva Conventions. They are non-Iraqis who are not members of the former Baath Party and who went to Iraq after the invasion.
After Goldsmith's ruling, the CIA and Gonzales asked the Office of Legal Counsel for a more complete legal opinion on "protected persons" in Iraq and on the legality of transferring people out of Iraq for interrogation. "That case started the CIA yammering to Justice to get a better memo," said one intelligence officer familiar with the interagency discussion.
Michael Byers, a professor and international law expert at the University of British Columbia, said that creating a legal justification for removing protected persons from Iraq "is extraordinarily disturbing."
"What they are doing is interpreting an exception into an all-encompassing right, in one of the most fundamental treaties in history," Byers said. The Geneva Convention "is as close as you get to protecting human rights in times of chaos. There's no ambiguity here."
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Report on CIA Action Concerns Senators
(AP)
October 24, 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-4572283,00.html
WASHINGTON - Leading senators expressed concern Sunday about a report that the CIA has secretly moved as many as a dozen unidentified prisoners out of Iraq in the past six months, a possible violation of international treaties.
Sen. John McCain said interrogations can help extract crucial information from detainees on plans for attacks against Americans. But international law, including the Geneva Conventions, must be followed, he said.
``These conventions and these rules are in place for a reason because you get on a slippery slope and you don't know where to get off,'' McCain, R-Ariz., told ABC's ``This Week.''
``The thing that separates us from the enemy is our respect for human rights,'' he said.
Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., called for new leadership at the Justice Department.
The detainees were removed without notification to the International Red Cross, congressional oversight committees, the Defense Department or CIA investigators, The Washington Post said in Sunday editions, citing unidentified government officials.
The Justice Department drafted a memo dated March 19, 2004, authorizing the CIA to take prisoners out of Iraq for interrogation, according to the report.
Iraqis can be taken out of the country for a ``brief but not indefinite period,'' and that ``illegal aliens'' can be removed permanently under ``local immigration law,'' the newspaper quoted the memo as saying.
The transfers could violate the Geneva Conventions, which do not allow ``individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory.''
White House spokesman Sean McCormick said the U.S. policy is to comply with the international treaty, which protects civilians during war and occupation.
The Bush administration did not consider al-Qaida fighters in Afghanistan to be ``protected persons'' under the Geneva Conventions. Many were sent to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for interrogation.
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Analysis: Military expert wants better U.S. policy
October 24, 2004
By Derek Lundy
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20041022-122352-7258r.htm
Washington, DC, Oct. 22 (UPI) -- Is the United States inept at planning for war?
It is if we take it from Anthony Cordesman, senior fellow in military affairs at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
In a speech this week, Cordesman argued that from Vietnam to Iraq the United States has consistently failed to develop and implement coherent grand strategic goals in times of conflict, despite our successes on the battlefield.
Arguing that Bush administration's grand strategy for Iraq was "at best ridiculous," Cordesman noted that policymakers "failed to see the need for serious stability operations and nation building; they did not see the risk of insurgency; and they assumed that we were so right that our allies and the world would soon be forced to follow our lead."
In the war on terrorism, the United States' inability to understand the complexity of the forces at work also points to overarching policy failures, according Cordesman. We have been too slow to realize the broad religious, cultural, political, economic and demographic dimensions at play in the Middle East.
The problem, he said, is that while American military might is unrivaled, in times of war our most serious blunders "are problems in planning and executing conflict termination, and in using stability operations and nation-building to shape the desired grand strategic outcome."
In other words, the United States has trouble when it comes to winning the peace.
The most recent failures of the neo-conservatives in Iraq follow a long tradition of flawed American strategies stretching back to the Korean War, Cordesman said.
The United States tends to focus too much attention on fighting and battles at the expense of looking at bigger picture -- the causes, consequences and political goals of conflict.
This problem shines through in American preoccupation with the pomp and circumstance of war at the expense of understanding the foundations of conflict, dooming liberals, moderates and conservatives alike to repeat the same policy mistakes.
Shelves of books have been written on military uniforms and equipment, too few exist on forces that drove people to war and the policies that helped end the conflicts.
Now instead of being liberators, American soldiers shoulder much of the blame from the Iraqi people for the instability in Iraq.
According to Cordesman, policymakers have forgotten Prussian military thinker Carl von Clausewitz's famous axiom of treating war as a continuation of policy and diplomacy by other means.
Lacking a broad understanding of conflict, throughout the 20th century the U.S. has consistently failed to plan for the political struggle that begins once the war ends.
"It is all too clear," he said, "that the grand strategic goals of any given side in going to war have normally been based on a massive misestimation of what will happen once the war begins."
But this view might be questioned.
"Too much wishful thinking went into the Iraq postwar planning," Walter Russell Mead, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told United Press International, "but it is not self evident that we are worse at planning for the peace."
While postwar strategies are poor, Mead argues that this is precisely because winning the peace is so difficult to do, not because there are problems with American strategic thinking.
"To whom are we being compared out there that are so brilliant?" Mead asked. "Britain was a disaster after 1945 and very few would think that their performance after World War I would be anything but lousy."
"Part of our problems in the developing world is because of the British and French colonialism," noted Michael E. O'Hanlon, senior fellow for Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution.
Moreover, the United States got it right when it counted, many would argue.
For nearly half a century, the United States put most of its energy toward developing and implementing the successful strategies of deterrence and containment that led to the peaceful implosion of the Soviet Union.
Many conflicts cited as American failures stood in the shadow of the Cold War and can been heralded as strategic successes when taking into account that the United States' primary goal was standing up to the Soviets.
Mead made the point that while planners may try to develop strategies for all phases of a conflict, that war by nature is messy and unpredictable.
Clausewitz referred to this fog of war as friction.
Circumstances on the ground often call for immediate action, leaving little time for peace planning. Goals and events in a crisis are always more fluid than expected given that information going into a conflict is usually spotty.
The more pressing point is the United States' questionable record at nation building.
Democratic and prosperous post-war Germany and Japan are often pointed to as examples of American know-how.
Yet, in countless cases -- the Philippines, Angola, Lebanon, Liberia and Somalia to name a few -- the United States was unable to create stable countries, let alone prosperous democracies.
However, O'Hanlon said this is an area the United States is improving in.
"I think that our military has the right skills for peacekeeping," he said. "We sometimes make policy mistakes, but it's not an inability to perform. It is important that we should not think that we are generally bad at this."
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Army Badge Of Honor Now In Contention
Award Denied to GIs Retrained for Infantry
By Steve Fainaru
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 24, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A57435-2004Oct23?language=printer
BAGHDAD -- Capt. Steve Gventer is still picking shrapnel out of his right shoulder. It became lodged there last month when a rocket-propelled grenade sailed over his head and exploded against a wall, splattering him with hot metal.
That attack came two weeks after an insurgent in Sadr City, the Baghdad slum, shot Gventer through his left calf with a machine gun.
Gventer's street fighting would appear to qualify him for one of the U.S. Army's most prestigious awards, the Combat Infantryman Badge. The award recognizes soldiers whose daily mission is to pursue the enemy, primarily on foot, and engage in close combat.
But Gventer won't get the award -- at least not under current rules. Normally a tank company commander, Gventer was retrained as an infantry officer before he was deployed. He and his men have fought furious street battles in one of Iraq's most perilous corners. But because they are technically tankers, they are ineligible for an award that for six decades has distinguished those who fight at ground level, where war is most lethal.
The Army retrained thousands of soldiers -- tankers, engineers, artillerymen -- to perform as infantry in Iraq's urban hot spots. But part of the fallout is an intense internal debate over who qualifies for the Combat Infantryman Badge, or CIB, and, more broadly, what constitutes an infantryman in a rapidly changing Army.
The award is "a divisive tool now," said Capt. Chuck Slagle, an infantry company commander who favors expanding the award's recipients to include non-infantry units. He and Gventer "do exactly the same thing," he said. "But because of this, we're separated."
The commander of the 1st Cavalry Division, Maj. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, recently petitioned the Army for an "exception of policy" to allow non-infantry units to receive badges, according to division officers. The decision will be made by the Army's chief of staff, Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, who "because of the changing nature of combat" has directed the Army staff to form a task force on the issue, according to Lt. Col. Michael J. Negard, his spokesman.
A spokesman for the 1st Cavalry, Maj. Philip J. Smith, neither confirmed nor denied that Chiarelli had made such a request. "It is our policy not to discuss pending policy decisions that will be made at levels above the division," he wrote in an e-mail.
But Schoomaker will be facing entrenched resistance to anything that appears to diminish the coveted award.
"I think they should get something, but not a CIB," said Sgt. Aaron Josey of the 1st Battalion, 41st Infantry Regiment. "I'm an infantryman. They're not."
The debate revolves around a swatch of fabric that features a rifle and a wreath and is normally sewn above the soldier's breast pocket. The award was created on Oct. 27, 1943, in recognition that the infantry "continuously operated under the worst conditions" and sustained "the most casualties while receiving the least public recognition."
From World War II through Vietnam, four out of five combat deaths were sustained by infantrymen, according to retired Army Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales Jr., a historian. "Not soldiers and Marines, but infantrymen," Scales wrote in an e-mail. "That's 5 percent of the [U.S. military] manpower suffering 81 percent of those" killed in action.
The badge is recognition for engaging in and surviving intimate violence. The award's requirements state that the recipient "must be personally present and under hostile fire . . . in a unit actively engaged in ground combat with the enemy."
"There isn't anything that equals the Combat Infantryman's Badge," said retired Army Col. John M. Collins, a military historian. "That is the prize on top of the prize. It says, 'I did it. I was there and I came back.' " Only soldiers whose formal "occupational specialty" is infantry are eligible for the award "regardless of the circumstances," the requirements state.
But perhaps never has that distinction been less clear than in Iraq.
As the military prepared for Operation Iraqi Freedom II -- the phase of the war that followed the defeat of former president Saddam Hussein -- army planners recognized that heavy armor would be less effective in areas such as Baghdad, where it was hoped that soldiers would spend most of their time rebuilding infrastructure and, if necessary, quelling resistance in the capital's narrow streets.
Both tasks required vast numbers of infantry, soldiers who primarily travel in five-man Humvees, then dismount, whether to rebuild sewers or fight insurgents.
Entire companies were ordered to trade in their tanks for Humvees and undergo months of retraining in urban warfare.
The transition was especially dramatic for the 1st Cavalry Division, which has operational responsibility over Baghdad. The real and fictional exploits of the 20,000-man division, which is based in Fort Hood, Tex., have been chronicled in movies from "Apocalypse Now" to "We Were Soldiers." Its very insignia features the black silhouette of a horse, representing the 1st Cavalry's historical evolution from horseback to heavy armor.
The commander of the division's 1st Brigade, Col. Robert. B. Abrams, is a former tank company commander. The M1 Abrams main battle tank is named after his late father, Gen. Creighton W. Abrams Jr., a renowned World War II tank commander who later served as overall military commander in Vietnam.
In an interview, Abrams said that for many soldiers, the badge has become "an emotional subject, but for me it's not very important right now. Perhaps after I've redeployed back to the United States it will become an emotional subject, but from my perspective and my expectation of my leaders, what we should really focus all of our intellectual and emotional energy on is accomplishing our mission and taking care of our soldiers and protecting the force.
"We can worry about badges and everything else later," said Abrams. "That doesn't mean it's not important, but in the Abrams version of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it ain't there yet."
Current and retired soldiers on both sides of the issue emphasized the badge's symbolic importance. They offered widely different opinions on what they agreed was a highly charged issue.
Command Sgt. Maj. Stanley Small, of Huntsville, Ala., of the 1st Cavalry's 1st Brigade, said that expanding the award's recipients to include non-infantry units would be nearly impossible, given the range of soldiers who have been reassigned to combat roles in Iraq. He said it would inevitably dilute the award.
"I've got cooks out there -- not many, but some," he said. "I've got mechanics out there -- not many but some. . . . No matter how hard they try, they'll never be able to get the parameters right."
But Collins, the historian, said the Army runs a risk if soldiers essentially doing equal work are not rewarded equally.
"If they are going to be part of an infantry organization, then everybody in that organization is exposed to precisely the same risk," he said. "And to say that some of them are second-class citizens, I just think it would be a big mistake. It would encourage morale problems."
Gventer, a Baylor University graduate, said he did not want to be seen as emphasizing awards over mission, but he described the award as "huge." Both his father, a platoon leader in Vietnam, and his older brother, who fought in the Persian Gulf War, received badges.
Last year, two of three tank companies from the 1st Cavalry Division's 2nd Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment were reassigned to infantry roles; Gventer's Company C -- Cobra Company -- was one. The transition was dramatic. Gventer's men traded in 70-ton M1 Abrams tanks, which fire 120mm cannon shells with accuracy up to four miles, for the Humvees, much smaller vehicles that essentially transport troops into ground combat.
The Army now calls the soldiers "dragoons" to differentiate them from infantry, but they perform exactly the same tasks. In Sadr City for the past several months, that task has entailed patrolling the insurgent-held slum in platoon-size convoys, then dismounting to fight insurgents loyal to Moqtada Sadr, the rebellious Shiite Muslim cleric, or conduct raids to find them.
"It's much easier to have bad things happen when you dismount," said Gventer.
The first time he was wounded, Gventer was standing near a chain-link fence when he was shot. In the second incident, he and eight other men had descended from a roof during a blackout. The lights suddenly went back on, at which point an insurgent spotted the group and fired the grenade.
Seven of the nine men were wounded when the grenade exploded against the wall, including battalion commander Lt. Col. Florentino "Lopez" Carter, who was struck in the heel by shrapnel. None is currently eligible for the badge.
Neither is Sgt. Ben Brown, 27, from Tomball, Tex., another converted tanker from the 8th Cavalry Regiment.
On Aug. 6, Brown found himself and his Humvee isolated in Sadr City. For an hour, he managed to hold his ground until the crew found a way out. At one point, Brown traded blind fire with an insurgent who stood on the other side of a wall. Brown chased him away or shot him -- he isn't sure -- by grabbing a shotgun, pointing it over the wall and firing.
During the same battle, Brown pursued a mortar team into a dark field and silenced it with machine gun fire. When he finally ran out of ammunition, he grabbed spare machine-gun rounds from the Humvee's gunner.
His company commander, Capt. John Morning, later nominated Brown for the Silver Star for gallantry in combat "for continually exposing himself to enemy fire."
Morning said he regrets that not only Brown but the entire company is ineligible for the badge. "In my opinion, my soldiers have earned it as much as anyone else in the theater," he said. "A lot of guys aren't going to admit it, but it would mean a lot to them. It shows that they fought as infantrymen, on the ground."
Brown himself is philosophical, but he said the criteria make little sense. "The excuses they're using aren't really legitimate excuses," he said. "This is my second deployment and I haven't been in a tank yet."
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Army Captain Sues U.S. To Block Iraq Deployment
Associated Press
Sunday, October 24, 2004; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57464-2004Oct23.html
NEW YORK, Oct. 23 -- An Army captain sued the government Friday to block his pending deployment to Iraq, saying he resigned in June after completing eight years of service in the Army and Army Reserve.
Jay J. Ferriola, 31, said in the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Manhattan that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld unlawfully continues to exercise control over him even though he properly resigned and was asked to turn in his equipment.
The New York resident has never received a written, official response to his resignation request, said the lawsuit, which asks a judge to process and approve the resignation.
A spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office declined comment.
Ferriola last week received orders to report Monday for active duty with the 306th Military Police Battalion, which will leave for a year and a half "on a dangerous mission in Iraq," the lawsuit said.
It was not fear that prompted Ferriola to take legal action but a desire to get on with his life, said his lawyer, Barry I. Slotnick.
Last month, a judge ruled that an Army reservist from North Carolina must report to active duty. Todd Parrish had argued he had fulfilled his military obligation and sent the Army a letter resigning his commission, but the judge agreed with the Army that he could be recalled to duty because he failed to sign a resignation line on a letter asking for an update on his personal information.
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U.S. army has denied most compensation claims by Iraqis, report says
(AP)
October 24, 2004
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/World/Iraq/2004/10/24/683806-ap.html
DAYTON, Ohio - An analysis by an Ohio newspaper has found that the U.S. army denied about 75 per cent of the thousands of compensation claims Iraqis submitted against the military, which determined that combat accounted for most of the deaths, injuries and property damage.
The Dayton Daily News reported Sunday its analysis of 4,611 civil claims in Iraq - hundreds alleging abuse and misconduct by American military personnel - showed just one in four resulted in some type of payment.
Army officials disputed the results, saying the database inspected by the Daily News was incomplete and that it only recently began cataloguing the claims. The newspaper had gained access to the claims database through a Freedom of Information request.
Because coalition forces are immune from civil lawsuits and criminal charges in Iraq, the only option left to Iraqis is filing for compensation under the Foreign Claims Act.
However, Iraqis' recourse is limited. The military does not pay claims for incidents deemed to be caused by "combat operations," which could include checkpoint shootings and other incidents involving civilians.
In response to a man who claimed that his two brothers were killed and his parents injured during a March 29, 2003 coalition bombing, the military concluded: "Coalition forces dropped ordnance during Operation Iraqi Freedom on legitimate targets. Your family was in an area that was being legitimately targeted and therefore regrettably harmed."
Another case involved a man driving to get his infant daughter who became ill while staying with his wife's parents. The man was killed when soldiers opened fire on his car at a checkpoint. His family's claim for compensation was denied.
"Our point of view toward the Americans has changed. You can feel the fury inside you," said Amir Shleman, whose brother was killed by American soldiers, told the newspaper. "If they treated people like human beings, no one would take up weapons against them."
The day after his brother was killed, soldiers left $2,000 US near his widow's pillow - money the family was told was for funeral expenses.
When the family filed a claim for compensation for the man's two children, they encountered months of delays before finally receiving a letter denying the claim, the Daily News said.
At least 437 claims seek compensation for Iraqi deaths and 468 for injuries, but those numbers likely are just a portion of the actual totals, the newspaper said.
More than 1,000 claims involved vehicle accidents, by far the largest category in the database. More than 400 claims involved destruction of crops, trees, livestock or water sources.
According to the newspaper's analysis, the average payment for a death in Iraq was $3,421. In addition to the formal claims system, Iraqis were sometimes given up to $2,500 in sympathy payments without any paperwork, said lawyer Jack Bournazian, who held seminars to show Iraqi lawyers how to file the claims.
About 78 per cent of the claims were for incidents that occurred after President George W. Bush declared major combat operations over May 2, 2003.
Lt.-Col. Charlotte Herring, the chief of the army's Foreign Torts Branch, said the army database inspected by the newspaper is incomplete. In fiscal year 2004, the army paid 11,000 claims and denied 3,000, she said. Prior to this past June, however, the army did not track how many claims were denied.
Herring said the army, which handles civil claims for all three service branches in Iraq, has given out $8.2 million since June 2003 and budgeted $10 million in fiscal year 2005 to help Iraqis deal with losses suffered because of war.
The claims process is made difficult, officials said, because of the time it takes to sort through invalid claims.
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Former soldier remembers near-invasion of Alabama
Mobile Register
By COKE ELLINGTON
October 24, 2004
http://www.al.com/news/mobileregister/index.ssf?/base/news/109860943311800.xml
MONTGOMERY -- A regular customer sitting in Buddy & Richard's Barber Shop in Montgomery, where Richard Bene, 60, plies his trade, might hear him talk about his scuba diving, his 18 months in Vietnam or a college literature course he once took.
Perhaps Bene's most remarkable story involves the spring of 1963, when he was stationed at Fort Campbell, Ky. In an interview after hours at the two-chair barber shop on the Atlanta Highway, he recounted his memories of a little-known bit of U.S. history.
A 19-year-old machine-gunner in the 1st Platoon of D Company, First Brigade of the 101 Airborne Division, Spec. 4 Bene (pronounced Benny), was among the men called back from field training, put on alert and restricted to their company area. "We just were told that there was an operation in planning," he recalled. "We didn't know when the go was. And we were on alert. The next day, our platoon leader briefed us on what the mission basically was going to be."
He said, "From what I gathered later, we were going to hit all communications in Alabama -- civilian, police and military -- so that we could control them."
Montgomery was not named on the map, but he saw that his squad would take over WBAM radio. A native of Parma, Ohio, Bene recognized it as a rock'n' roll station he listened to when he was stationed at Fort Benning, Ga., about 100 miles from Montgomery.
"We just stayed in our barracks, ready to go," he said. "It was going to be an air assault with helicopters.
"My company was going to be responsible for Montgomery, Alabama, the National Guard Headquarters if they failed to follow federal orders to be nationalized, the State Police Building, Department of Public Safety; of course, the governor's office; and all TV and radio stations."
Bene said he had never even told his wife about the 1963 alert until he read Col. David H. Hackworth's 1989 book, "About Face," which mentions that he helped conduct reconnaissance in Mississippi and Georgia of broadcasting stations and other locations in case federal troops needed to intervene to quell integration violence.
Hackworth's book says:
"From our Task Force headquarters at Fort McClellan, we began contingency planning in neighboring Mississippi and Georgia. The hatred of the time was incredible, and with blood spilling as passionately as it had during the Civil War, fears were high that all of Dixieland would soon be engulfed. One recon in Mississippi had me cruising in a Hertz rental car with two FBI agents, General Cassidy and Major Joe Wilson (Task Force G-3). We played the average tourists as we drove around picking out landing zones, radio and TV stations, and staging, assembly, and enclosure areas (the latter to wire in anyone who was arrested), but ... we didn't fool the rednecks for a minute. Our skinhead paratrooper haircuts and the FBI guys' short top, back and sides (not to mention their identical black plastic sunglasses) made us about as inconspicuous as a band of black guys at a Ku Klux Klan rally."
Bene said the company was to bring M-14's and ammunition but that no resistance was expected at the civilian radio stations.
The concern was not just that some National Guard units might not obey orders, he said, but "about the Ku Klux Klan starting some stuff."
"From what I was told," he recalled "we needed to secure all communications in the state of Alabama, so that we could control what went out over the airwaves."
Three retired colonels who were involved in the military's 1963 contingency plan to enter Alabama said they didn't remember any component of the plan calling for taking over broadcasting stations.
John Seigenthaler, an aide to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy from 1961 to 1962 and founder of the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., went further in denying the Kennedy administration would have included such an element in the plan.
If there had been such a plan, he said in a recent interview, "I would have known that, I would have heard it and would have raised hell about it. ... If it was some harebrained military scheme to do that, it ought to come out."
E. Culpepper Clark, dean of the College of Communication and Information Sciences at the University of Alabama, did not confirm any takeover plans but did say the White Citizens' Council "had heavy involvement in radio in the state." Clark is the author of "The Schoolhouse Door: Segregation's Last Stand at the University of Alabama."
Nicholas Katzenbach, deputy U.S. attorney general at the time, has a perspective that differs from Seigenthaler's. He said he thinks it was "entirely possible" that the military had a contingency plan to take over broadcasting stations. He compared the situation to a foreign invasion, in which local communications might be put under control of the military forces coming in.
Bene said his unit stayed on alert until Gov. George C. Wallace's June 11, 1963, stand in the schoolhouse door -- an attempt to block the admission of black students Vivian Malone and James Hood to the University of Alabama.
Bene remembered, "Once they realized that the Alabama National Guard was going to obey the presidential directive to federalize, we pretty much stood down."
--------
U.S. dead in Iraq honored
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Guy Taylor
October 24, 2004
http://www.washingtontimes.com/functions/print.php?StoryID=20041023-112816-3512r
From the steps of the Lincoln Memorial yesterday morning, Shannon Lampton looked at the 1,100 empty coffins placed along the Reflecting Pool to honor U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq and knew her nephew has not been forgotten.
"It's stunning to see all this," said Mrs. Lampton, sweeping her hand across the tableau of coffins, each draped in crisp red, white and blue flags.
Mrs. Lampton had come from Melbourne, Fla., to honor her nephew, Army 1st Lt. Kenneth Michael Ballard, 26, who was killed in Najaf, Iraq, on Memorial Day. Later yesterday, she would read his name aloud, as part of a ceremony honoring every U.S. soldier who died in Iraq.
The litany would take nearly two hours, and Mrs. Lampton said it was stunning to see the "thick book of single-spaced names," from which people read at a makeshift lectern.
"My nephew is on page 29 at the bottom," she said. He was buried yesterday at Arlington National Cemetery.
The tribute was organized by several activist groups known collectively as the Iraq War Memorial to Honor U.S. War Dead.
Unlike many recent events in the District concerning the war in Iraq, there were no protest banners or protesters shouting angry slogans among the thousands who came to mourn and pay their respects to the dead.
"It's not anti-war," said Pat Elder, 49, a Bethesda resident who helped organize the tribute. "It's just sad, that's all. ... We're not the radical ones. We're just sad."
The coffins were placed seven deep on each side of the pool and stretched about 200 yards toward the National World War II Memorial and the Washington Monument.
"It really brings home the loss," said Mrs. Lampton, 39. "We clump them together as casualties ... but they're all somebody's brother, nephew or husband."
As of yesterday, 1,103 U.S. service members have died in Iraq since March 2003, according to the independent Iraq Coalition Casualty Count Web site.
"It's as many people as I graduated from high school with," Michael Alemar, 45, said as he looked at the coffins. "People just don't realize what 1,100 people looks like. Here's 1,100 people."
Mr. Alemar, a former Air Force service member who described himself as a Quaker, said the event was "not political" or even a protest but a "demonstration of what war does."
"This is the result of war," he said.
Mr. Alemar also said he helped construct the cardboard coffins for the event and was there to honor the soldiers, though he does not support the war in Iraq.
Lauren McCutcheon, 23, of the District, was another volunteer who did not support the war.
Today is "not about partisan politics or any other ideology," she said. "It's about showing the magnitude of human loss. When it's a few a day, I think people ... don't really see how many 1,100 is or realize that these are young, bright, well-trained men and women who are dying."
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts / tribunals
After Terror, a Secret Rewriting of Military Law
By TIM GOLDEN
October 24, 2004
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/24/international/worldspecial2/24gitmo.html?pagewanted=1&ei=1&en=7b1e1025d742f508&ex=1099549719
WASHINGTON - In early November 2001, with Americans still staggered by the Sept. 11 attacks, a small group of White House officials worked in great secrecy to devise a new system of justice for the new war they had declared on terrorism.
Determined to deal aggressively with the terrorists they expected to capture, the officials bypassed the federal courts and their constitutional guarantees, giving the military the authority to detain foreign suspects indefinitely and prosecute them in tribunals not used since World War II.
The plan was considered so sensitive that senior White House officials kept its final details hidden from the president's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and the secretary of state, Colin L. Powell, officials said. It was so urgent, some of those involved said, that they hardly thought of consulting Congress.
White House officials said their use of extraordinary powers would allow the Pentagon to collect crucial intelligence and mete out swift, unmerciful justice. "We think it guarantees that we'll have the kind of treatment of these individuals that we believe they deserve," said Vice President Dick Cheney, who was a driving force behind the policy.
But three years later, not a single terrorist has been prosecuted. Of the roughly 560 men being held at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, only 4 have been formally charged. Preliminary hearings for those suspects brought such a barrage of procedural challenges and public criticism that verdicts could still be months away. And since a Supreme Court decision in June that gave the detainees the right to challenge their imprisonment in federal court, the Pentagon has stepped up efforts to send home hundreds of men whom it once branded as dangerous terrorists.
"We've cleared whole forests of paper developing procedures for these tribunals, and no one has been tried yet," said Richard L. Shiffrin, who worked on the issue as the Pentagon's deputy general counsel for intelligence matters. "They just ended up in this Kafkaesque sort of purgatory."
The story of how Guantánamo and the new military justice system became an intractable legacy of Sept. 11 has been largely hidden from public view.
But extensive interviews with current and former officials and a review of confidential documents reveal that the legal strategy took shape as the ambition of a small core of conservative administration officials whose political influence and bureaucratic skill gave them remarkable power in the aftermath of the attacks.
The strategy became a source of sharp conflict within the Bush administration, eventually pitting the highest-profile cabinet secretaries - including Ms. Rice and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld - against one another over issues of due process, intelligence-gathering and international law.
In fact, many officials contend, some of the most serious problems with the military justice system are rooted in the secretive and contentious process from which it emerged.
Military lawyers were largely excluded from that process in the days after Sept. 11. They have since waged a long struggle to ensure that terrorist prosecutions meet what they say are basic standards of fairness. Uniformed lawyers now assigned to defend Guantánamo detainees have become among the most forceful critics of the Pentagon's own system.
Foreign policy officials voiced concerns about the legal and diplomatic ramifications, but had little influence. Increasingly, the administration's plan has come under criticism even from close allies, complicating efforts to transfer scores of Guantánamo prisoners back to their home governments.
To the policy's architects, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon represented a stinging challenge to American power and an imperative to consider measures that might have been unimaginable in less threatening times. Yet some officials said the strategy was also shaped by longstanding political agendas that had relatively little to do with fighting terrorism.
The administration's claim of authority to set up military commissions, as the tribunals are formally known, was guided by a desire to strengthen executive power, officials said. Its legal approach, including the decision not to apply the Geneva Conventions, reflected the determination of some influential officials to halt what they viewed as the United States' reflexive submission to international law.
In devising the new system, many officials said they had Osama bin Laden and other leaders of Al Qaeda in mind. But in picking through the hundreds of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, military investigators have struggled to find more than a dozen they can tie directly to significant terrorist acts, officials said. While important Qaeda figures have been captured and held by the C.I.A., administration officials said they were reluctant to bring those prisoners before tribunals they still consider unreliable.
Some administration officials involved in the policy declined to be interviewed, or would do so only on the condition they not be identified. Others defended it strongly, saying the administration had a responsibility to consider extraordinary measures to protect the country from a terrifying enemy.
"Everybody who was involved in this process had, in my mind, a white hat on," Timothy E. Flanigan, the former deputy White House counsel, said in an interview. "They were not out to be cowboys or create a radical new legal regime. What they wanted to do was to use existing legal models to assist in the process of saving lives, to get information. And the war on terror is all about information."
As the policy has faltered, other current and former officials have criticized it on pragmatic grounds, arguing that many of the problems could have been avoided. But some of the criticism also has a moral tone.
"What several of us were concerned about was due process," said John A. Gordon, a retired Air Force general and former deputy C.I.A. director who served as both the senior counterterrorism official and homeland security adviser on President Bush's National Security Council staff. "There was great concern that we were setting up a process that was contrary to our own ideals."
An Aggressive Approach
The administration's legal approach to terrorism began to emerge in the first turbulent days after Sept. 11, as the officials in charge of key agencies exhorted their aides to confront Al Qaeda's threat with bold imagination.
"Legally, the watchword became 'forward-leaning,' '' said a former associate White House counsel, Bradford Berenson, "by which everybody meant: 'We want to be aggressive. We want to take risks.' ''
That challenge resounded among young lawyers who were settling into important posts at the White House, the Justice Department and other agencies. Many of them were members of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal fraternity. Some had clerked for Supreme Court justices, Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia in particular. A striking number had clerked for a prominent Reagan appointee, Lawrence H. Silberman of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
One young lawyer recalled looking around the room during a meeting with Attorney General John Ashcroft. "Of 10 people, 7 of us were former Silberman clerks," he said.
Mr. Berenson, then 36, had been consumed with the nomination of federal judges until he was suddenly reassigned to terrorism issues and thrown into intense, 15-hour workdays, filled with competing urgencies and intermittent new alerts.
"All of a sudden, the curtain was lifted on this incredibly frightening world," he said. "You were spending every day looking at the dossiers of the world's leading terrorists. There was a palpable sense of threat."
As generals prepared for war in Afghanistan, lawyers scrambled to understand how the new campaign against terrorism could be waged within the confines of old laws.
Mr. Flanigan was at the center of the administration's legal counteroffensive. A personable, soft-spoken father of 14 children, his easy manner sometimes belied the force of his beliefs. He had arrived at the White House after distinguishing himself as an agile legal thinker and a Republican stalwart: During the Clinton scandals, he defended the independent counsel, Kenneth W. Starr, saying he had conducted his investigation "in a moderate and appropriate fashion." In 2000, he played an important role on the Bush campaign's legal team in the Florida recount.
In the days after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Flanigan sought advice from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel on "the legality of the use of military force to prevent or deter terrorist activity inside the United States,'' according to a previously undisclosed department memorandum that was reviewed by The New York Times.
The 20-page response came from John C. Yoo, a 34-year-old Bush appointee with a glittering résumé and a reputation as perhaps the most intellectually aggressive among a small group of legal scholars who had challenged what they saw as the United States' excessive deference to international law. On Sept. 21, 2001, Mr. Yoo wrote that the question was how the Constitution's Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure might apply if the military used "deadly force in a manner that endangered the lives of United States citizens."
Mr. Yoo listed an inventory of possible operations: shooting down a civilian airliner hijacked by terrorists; setting up military checkpoints inside an American city; employing surveillance methods more sophisticated than those available to law enforcement; or using military forces "to raid or attack dwellings where terrorists were thought to be, despite risks that third parties could be killed or injured by exchanges of fire."
Mr. Yoo noted that those actions could raise constitutional issues, but said that in the face of devastating terrorist attacks, "the government may be justified in taking measures which in less troubled conditions could be seen as infringements of individual liberties." If the president decided the threat justified deploying the military inside the country, he wrote, then "we think that the Fourth Amendment should be no more relevant than it would be in cases of invasion or insurrection."
The prospect of such military action at home was mostly hypothetical at that point, but with the government taking the fight against terrorism to Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world, lawyers in the administration took the same "forward-leaning" approach to making plans for the terrorists they thought would be captured.
The idea of using military commissions to try suspected terrorists first came to Mr. Flanigan, he said, in a phone call a couple of days after the attacks from William P. Barr, the former attorney general under whom Mr. Flanigan had served as head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel during the first Bush administration.
Mr. Barr had first suggested the use of military tribunals a decade before, to try suspects in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Although the idea made little headway at the time, Mr. Barr said he reminded Mr. Flanigan that the Legal Counsel's Office had done considerable research on the question. Mr. Flanigan had an aide call for the files.
"I thought it was a great idea," he recalled.
Military commissions, he thought, would give the government wide latitude to hold, interrogate and prosecute the sort of suspects who might be silenced by lawyers in criminal courts. They would also put the control over prosecutions squarely in the hands of the president.
The same ideas were taking hold in the office of Vice President Cheney, championed by his 44-year-old counsel, David S. Addington. At the time, Mr. Addington, a longtime Cheney aide with an indistinct portfolio and no real staff, was not well-known even in the government. But he would become legendary as a voraciously hard-working official with strongly conservative views, an unusually sharp pen and wide influence over military, intelligence and other matters. In a matter of months, he would make a mark as one of the most important architects of the administration's legal strategy against foreign terrorism.
Beyond the prosecutorial benefits of military commissions, the two lawyers saw a less tangible, but perhaps equally important advantage. "From a political standpoint," Mr. Flanigan said, "it communicated the message that we were at war, that this was not going to be business as usual."
Changing the Rules
In fact, very little about how the tribunal policy came about resembled business as usual. For half a century, since the end of World War II, most major national-security initiatives had been forged through interagency debate. But some senior Bush administration officials felt that process placed undue power in the hands of cautious, slow-moving foreign policy bureaucrats. The sense of urgency after Sept. 11 brought that attitude to the surface.
Little more than a week after the attacks, officials said, the White House counsel, Alberto F. Gonzales, set up an interagency group to draw up options for prosecuting terrorists. They came together with high expectations.
"We were going to go after the people responsible for the attacks, and the operating assumption was that we would capture a significant number of Al Qaeda operatives," said Pierre-Richard Prosper, the State Department official assigned to lead the group. "We were thinking hundreds."
Mr. Prosper, then 37, had just been sworn in as the department's ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues. As a prosecutor, he had taken on street gangs and drug Mafias and had won the first genocide conviction before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Even so, some administration lawyers eyed him suspiciously - as more diplomat than crime-fighter.
Mr. Gonzales had made it clear that he wanted Mr. Prosper's group to put forward military commissions as a viable option, officials said. The group laid out three others - criminal trials, military courts-martial and tribunals with both civilian and military members, like those used for Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg.
Representatives of the Justice Department's criminal division, which had prosecuted a string of Qaeda defendants in federal district court over the previous decade, argued that the federal courts could do the job again. The option of toughening criminal laws or adapting the courts, as several European countries had done, was discussed, but only briefly, two officials said.
"The towers were still smoking, literally," Mr. Prosper said. "I remember asking: Can the federal courts in New York handle this? It wasn't a legal question so much as it was logistical. You had 300 Al Qaeda members, potentially. And did we want to put the judges and juries in harm's way?"
Lawyers at the White House saw criminal courts as a minefield, several officials said.
Much of the evidence against terror suspects would be classified intelligence that would be difficult to air in court or too sketchy to meet federal standards, the lawyers warned. Another issue was security: Was it safe to try Osama bin Laden in Manhattan, where he was facing federal charges for the 1998 bombings of American Embassies in East Africa?
Then there was a tactical question. To act pre-emptively against Al Qaeda, the authorities would need information that defense lawyers and due-process rules might discourage suspects from giving up.
Mr. Flanigan framed the choice starkly: "Are we going to go with a system that is really guaranteed to prevent us from getting information in every case or are we going to go another route?"
Military commissions had no statutory rules of their own. In past American wars, when such tribunals had been used to carry out battlefield justice against spies, saboteurs and others accused of violating the laws of war, they had generally hewed to prevailing standards of military justice. But the advocates for commissions in the Bush administration saw no reason they could not adapt the rules, officials said. Standards of proof could be lowered. Secrecy provisions could be expanded. The death penalty could be more liberally applied.
But some members of the interagency group saw it as more complicated. Terrorism had not been clearly established as a war crime under international law. Writing new law for a military tribunal might end up being more difficult than prosecuting terrorism cases in existing courts.
By late October 2001, the White House lawyers had grown impatient with what they saw as the dithering of Mr. Prosper's group and what one former official called the "cold feet" of some of its members. Mr. Flanigan said he thought the government needed to move urgently in case a major terrorist linked to the attacks was apprehended.
He gathered up the research that the Prosper group had completed on military commissions and took charge of the matter himself. Suddenly, the other options were off the table and the Prosper group was out of business.
"Prosper is a thoughtful, gentle, process-oriented guy," the former official said. "At that time, gentle was not an adjective that anybody wanted."
A Secretive Circle
With the White House in charge, officials said, the planning for tribunals moved forward more quickly, and more secretly. Whole agencies were left out of the discussion. So were most of the government's experts in military and international law.
The legal basis for the administration's approach was laid out on Nov. 6 in a confidential 35-page memorandum sent to Mr. Gonzales from Patrick F. Philbin, a deputy in the Legal Counsel's office. (Attorney General Ashcroft has refused recent Congressional requests for the document, but a copy was reviewed by The Times.)
The memorandum's plain legalese belied its bold assertions.
It said that the president, as commander in chief, has "inherent authority'' to establish military commissions without Congressional authorization. It concluded that the Sept. 11 attacks were "plainly sufficient" to warrant applying the laws of war.
Opening a debate that would later divide the administration, the memorandum also suggested that the White House could apply international law selectively. It stated specifically that trying terrorists under the laws of war "does not mean that terrorists will receive the protections of the Geneva Conventions or the rights that laws of war accord to lawful combatants."
The central legal precedent cited in the memorandum was a 1942 case in which the Supreme Court upheld President Franklin D. Roosevelt's use of a military commission to try eight Nazi saboteurs who had sneaked into the United States aboard submarines. Since that ruling, revolutions had taken place in both international and military law, with the adoption of the Geneva Conventions in 1949 and the Uniform Code of Military Justice in 1951. Even so, the Justice memorandum said the 1942 ruling had "set a clear constitutional analysis" under which due process rights do not apply to military commissions.
Roosevelt, too, created his military commission without new and explicit Congressional approval, and authorized the military to fashion its own procedural rules. He also established himself, rather than a military judge, as the "final reviewing authority'' for the case.
Mr. Addington seized on the Roosevelt precedent as a model, two people involved in the process said, despite vast differences. Roosevelt acted against enemy agents in a traditional war among nations. Mr. Bush would be asserting the same power to take on a shadowy network of adversaries with no geographic boundaries, in a conflict with no foreseeable end.
Mr. Addington, who drafted the order with Mr. Flanigan, was particularly influential, several officials said, because he represented Mr. Cheney and brought formidable experience in national-security law to a small circle of senior officials. Mr. Addington turned down several requests for interviews and a spokesman for the vice president's office declined to comment.
"He was probably the only one there who would know what an order would look like, what it would say," a former Justice Department official said, noting Mr. Addington's work at the Defense Department, the C.I.A., and Congressional intelligence committees. "He didn't have authority over anyone. But he's a persuasive guy."
To many officials outside the circle, the secrecy was remarkable.
While Mr. Ashcroft and his deputy, Larry D. Thompson, were closely consulted, the head of the Justice Department's criminal division, Michael Chertoff, who had argued for trying terror suspects in federal court, saw the military order only when it was published, officials said. Mr. Rumsfeld was kept informed of the plan mainly through his general counsel, William J. Haynes II, several Pentagon officials said.
Many of the Pentagon's experts on military justice, uniformed lawyers who had spent their careers working on such issues, were mostly kept in the dark. "I can't tell you how compartmented things were," said retired Rear Adm. Donald J. Guter, who was then the Navy's senior military lawyer, or judge advocate general. "This was a closed administration."
A group of experienced Army lawyers had been meeting with Mr. Haynes repeatedly on the process, but began to suspect that what they said did not resonate outside the Pentagon, several of them said.
On Friday, Nov. 9, Defense Department officials said, Mr. Haynes called the head of the team, Col. Lawrence J. Morris, into his office to review a draft of the presidential order. He was given 30 minutes to study it but was not allowed to keep a copy or even take notes.
The following day, the Army's judge advocate general, Maj. Gen. Thomas J. Romig, hurriedly convened a meeting of senior military lawyers to discuss a response. The group worked through the Veterans Day weekend to prepare suggestions that would have moved the tribunals closer to existing military justice. But when the final document was issued that Tuesday, it reflected none of the officers' ideas, several military officials said. "They hadn't changed a thing," one official said.
In fact, while the military lawyers were pulling together their response, they were unaware that senior administration officials were already at the White House putting finishing touches on the plan. At a meeting that Saturday in the Roosevelt Room, Mr. Cheney led a discussion among Attorney General Ashcroft, Mr. Haynes of the Defense Department, the White House lawyers and a few other aides.
Senior officials of the State Department and the National Security Council staff were excluded from final discussions of the policy, even at a time when they were meeting daily about Afghanistan with the officials who were drafting the order. According to two people involved in the process, Mr. Cheney advocated withholding the draft from Ms. Rice and Secretary Powell.
When the two cabinet members found out about the military order - upon its public release - Ms. Rice was particularly angry, several senior officials said. Spokesmen for both officials declined to comment.
Mr. Bush played only a modest role in the debate, senior administration officials said. In an initial discussion, he agreed that military commissions should be an option, the officials said. Later, Mr. Cheney discussed a draft of the order with Mr. Bush over lunch, one former official said. The president signed the three-page order on Nov. 13.
No ceremony accompanied the signing, and the order was released to the public that day without so much as a press briefing. But its historic significance was unmistakable.
The military could detain and prosecute any foreigner whom the president or his representative determined to have "engaged in, aided or abetted, or conspired to commit" terrorism. Echoing the Roosevelt order, the Bush document promised "free and fair" tribunals but offered few guarantees: There was no promise of public trials, no right to remain silent, no presumption of innocence. As in 1942, guilt did not necessarily have to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt and a death sentence could be imposed even with a divided verdict.
Despite those similarities, some military and international lawyers were struck by the differences.
"The Roosevelt order referred specifically to eight people, the eight Nazi saboteurs," said Mr. Shiffrin, who was then the Defense Department's deputy general counsel for intelligence matters and had studied the Nazi saboteurs' case. "Here we were putting in place a parallel system of justice for a universe of people who we had no idea about - who they would be, how many of them there would be. It was a very dramatic measure."
Mounting Criticism
The White House did its best to play down the drama, but criticism of the order was immediate and widespread.
Civil libertarians and some Congressional leaders saw an attempt to supplant the criminal justice system. Critics also worried about the concentration of power: The president or his proxies would define the crimes (often after an act had been committed); set the rules for trial; and choose the judges, juries and appellate panels.
Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who was then chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was among a handful of legislators who argued that the administration's plan required explicit Congressional authorization. The Congress had just passed the Patriot Act by a huge margin, and Mr. Leahy proposed authorizing military commissions, but with some important changes, including a presumption of innocence for defendants and appellate review by the Supreme Court.
Critics seized on complaints from abroad, including an announcement from the Spanish authorities that they would not extradite some terrorist suspects to the United States if they would face the tribunals. "We are the most powerful nation on earth," Mr. Leahy said. "But in the struggle against terrorism, we don't have the option of going it alone. Would these military tribunals be worth jeopardizing the cooperation we expect and need from our allies?"
Senators called for Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Ashcroft to testify about the tribunals plan. Instead, the administration sent Mr. Prosper from the State Department and Mr. Chertoff of the Justice Department - both of whom had questioned the use of commissions and were later excluded from the administration's final deliberations.
But the Congressional opposition melted in the face of opinion polls showing strong support for the president's measures against terrorism.
There was another reason fears were allayed. With the order signed, the Pentagon was writing rules for exactly how the commissions would be conducted, and an early draft that was leaked to the news media suggested defendants' rights would be expanded. Mr. Rumsfeld, who assembled a group of outside legal experts - including some who had worked on World War II-era tribunals - to consult on the rules, said critics' concerns would be taken into account.
But all of the critics were not outside the administration.
Many of the Pentagon's uniformed lawyers were angered by the implication that the military would be used to deliver "rough justice" for the terrorists. The Uniform Code of Military Justice had moved steadily into line with the due-process standards of the federal courts, and senior military lawyers were proud and protective of their system. They generally supported using commissions for terrorists, but argued that the system would not be fair without greater rights for defendants.
"The military lawyers would from time to time remind the civilians that there was a Constitution that we had to pay attention to," said Admiral Guter, who, after retiring as the Navy judge advocate general, signed a "friend of the court" brief on behalf of plaintiffs in the Guantánamo Supreme Court case.
Even as uniformed lawyers were given a greater role in writing rules for the commissions, they still felt out of the loop.
In early 2002, Admiral Guter said, during a weekly lunch with Mr. Haynes and the top lawyers for the military branches, he raised the issue with Mr. Haynes directly: "We need more information."
Mr. Haynes looked at him coldly. "No, you don't," he quoted Mr. Haynes as saying.
Mr. Haynes declined to comment on the exchange.
Lt. Col. William K. Lietzau, a Yale-trained Marine lawyer on Mr. Haynes's staff, often found himself in the middle. "I could see how the JAGs were frustrated that the task of setting up the commissions hadn't been delegated to them,'' he said, referring to the senior military lawyers. "On the other hand, I could see how some of their recommendations frustrated the leadership because they didn't always appear to embrace the paradigm shift needed to deal with terrorism."
Some Justice Department officials also urged changes in the commission rules, current and former officials said. While Attorney General Ashcroft staunchly defended the policy in public, in a private meeting with Pentagon officials, he said some of the proposed commission rules would be seen as "draconian," two officials said.
On nearly every issue, interviews and documents show, the harder line was staked out by White House lawyers: Mr. Addington, Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Flanigan. They opposed allowing civilian lawyers to assist the tribunal defendants, as military courts-martial permit, or allowing civilians to serve on the appellate panel that would oversee the commissions. They also opposed granting defendants a presumption of innocence.
In the end, Mr. Rumsfeld compromised. He granted defendants a presumption of innocence and set "beyond a reasonable doubt" as a standard for proving guilt. He also allowed the defendants to hire civilian lawyers, but restricted the lawyers' access to case information. And he gave the presiding officer at a tribunal license to admit any evidence he thought might be convincing to a "reasonable person.''
One right the administration sought to deny the prisoners was the ability to appeal the legality of their detentions in federal court. The administration had done its best to decide the question when searching for a place to detain hundreds of prisoners captured in Afghanistan. Every location it seriously considered - including an American military base in Germany and islands in the South Pacific - was outside the United States and, the administration believed, beyond the reach of the federal judiciary.
On Dec. 28, 2001, after officials settled on Guantánamo Bay, Mr. Philbin and Mr. Yoo told the Pentagon in a memorandum that it could make a "very strong" claim that prisoners there would be outside the purview of American courts. But the memorandum cautioned that a reasonable argument could also be made that Guantánamo "while not part of the sovereign territory of the United States, is within the territorial jurisdiction of a federal court." That warning would come back to haunt the administration.
A Shift in Power
Some of the officials who helped design the new system of justice would later explain the influence they exercised in the chaotic days after Sept. 11 as a response to a crisis. But a more enduring shift of power within the administration was taking place - one that became apparent in a decision that would have significant consequences for how terror suspects were interrogated and detained.
At issue was whether the administration would apply the Geneva Conventions to the conflicts with Al Qaeda and the Taliban and whether those enemies would be treated as prisoners of war.
Based on the advice of White House and Justice Department lawyers, Mr. Bush initially decided on Jan. 18, 2002, that the conventions would not apply to either conflict. But at a meeting of senior national security officials several days later, Secretary of State Powell asked him to reconsider.
Mr. Powell agreed that the conventions did not apply to the global fight against Al Qaeda. But he said troops could be put at risk if the United States disavowed the conventions in dealing with the Taliban - the de facto government of Afghanistan. Both Mr. Rumsfeld and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard B. Myers, supported his position, Pentagon officials said.
In a debate that included the administration's most experienced national-security officials, a voice heard belonged to Mr. Yoo, only a deputy in the Office of Legal Counsel. He cast Afghanistan as a "failed state," and said its fighters should not be considered a real army but a "militant, terrorist-like group." In a Jan. 25 memorandum, the White House counsel, Mr. Gonzales, characterized that opinion as "definitive," although it was not the final basis for the president's decision.
The Gonzales memorandum suggested that the "new kind of war" Mr. Bush wanted to fight could hardly be reconciled with the "quaint" privileges that the Geneva Conventions gave to prisoners of war, or the "strict limitations" they imposed on interrogations.
Military lawyers disputed the idea that applying the conventions would necessarily limit interrogators to the name, rank and serial number of their captives. "There were very good reasons not to designate the detainees as prisoners of war, but the claim that they couldn't be interrogated was not one of them," Colonel Lietzau said. Again, though, such questions were scarcely heard, officials involved in the discussions said.
Mr. Yoo's rise reflected a different approach by the Bush administration to sensitive legal questions concerning foreign affairs, defense and intelligence.
In past administrations, officials said, the Office of Legal Counsel usually weighed in with opinions on questions that had already been deliberated by the legal staffs of the agencies involved. Under Mr. Bush, the office frequently had a first and final say. "O.L.C. was definitely running the show legally, and John Yoo in particular," a former Pentagon lawyer said. "He's kind of fun to be around, and he has an opinion on everything. Even though he was quite young, he exercised disproportionate authority because of his personality and his strong opinions."
Mr. Yoo's influence was amplified by friendships he developed not just with Mr. Addington and Mr. Flanigan, but also Mr. Haynes, with whom he played squash as often as three or four times a week at the Pentagon Officers Athletic Club.
If the Geneva Conventions debate raised Mr. Yoo's stature, it had the opposite effect on lawyers at the State Department, who were later excluded from sensitive discussions on matters like the interrogation of detainees, officials from several agencies said.
"State was cut out of a lot of this activity from February of 2002 on," one senior administration official said. "These were treaties that we were dealing with; they are meant to know about that."
The State Department legal adviser, William H. Taft IV, was shunned by the lawyers who dominated the detainee policy, officials said. Although Mr. Taft had served as the deputy secretary of defense during the Reagan administration, more conservative colleagues whispered that he lacked the constitution to fight terrorists.
"He was seen as ideologically squishy and suspect," a former White House official said. "People did not take him very seriously."
Through a State Department spokesman, Richard A. Boucher, Mr. Taft declined to comment.
The rivalries could be almost adolescent. When field trips to Guantánamo Bay were arranged for administration lawyers, the invitations were sometimes relayed last to the State Department and National Security Council, officials said, in the hope that lawyers there would not be able to go on short notice.
It was on the first field trip, 10 days after detainees began to arrive there on Jan. 11, 2002, that White House lawyers made clear their intention to move forward quickly with military commissions.
On the flight home, several officials said, Mr. Addington urged Mr. Gonzales to seek a blanket designation of all the detainees being sent to Guantánamo as eligible for trial under the president's order. Mr. Gonzales agreed.
The next day, the Pentagon instructed military intelligence officers at the base to start filling out one-page forms for each detainee, describing their alleged offenses. Weeks later, Mr. Haynes issued an urgent call to the military services, asking them to submit nominations for a chief prosecutor.
The first trials, many military and administration officials believed, were just around the corner.Next: A Policy Unravels
Jack Begg contributed research for this article.
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California Rethinking '3-Strikes' Sentencing
October 24, 2004
By DEAN E. MURPHY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/24/national/24strikes.html?pagewanted=all&position=
SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 23 - Public outrage over the murder of Polly Klaas, a 12-year-old who had been kidnapped from her bedroom by a man who had repeatedly committed violent crimes, was the driving force behind California's passage 10 years ago of the country's harshest "three strikes" sentencing law.
Now the Klaas family is at the center of an election battle over an initiative that would significantly scale back parts of the 1994 law. This time, Polly's father and grandfather are on opposite sides of an impassioned campaign that criminal justice experts say reflects a broad rethinking of the nation's tough-on-crime legislation of a decade ago.
"The politics of crime and punishment has calmed down," said Franklin Zimring, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of a book about the three-strikes law. "It isn't that people are less punitive; they are less concerned."
One of the most significant changes proposed in the ballot measure, known as Proposition 66, would put California more in line with the 24 other states that have three-strikes laws. The change would restrict so-called third-strike offenses for repeated felons, which require a 25-year-to-life sentence, to serious or violent crimes.
Currently, even crimes not defined as serious or violent can count as a third strike, leading to instances in which multiple offenders have received the maximum penalty for committing crimes like shoplifting or possessing small amounts of narcotics. Last year, the United States Supreme Court rejected constitutional challenges to sentences of 25 years without parole for a man who stole three golf clubs from a pro shop and 50 years without parole for another man for stealing children's videotapes from a Kmart store.
The changes proposed in Proposition 66 infuriate Polly Klaas's father, Marc Klaas, founder of the KlaasKids Foundation, a nonprofit group that focuses on crimes against children. He appears in a television advertisement, expected to be broadcast next week, which features a rape victim worrying about her rapist's going free under Proposition 66.
"I don't want my family legacy to have anything to do with this," Mr. Klaas said in a telephone interview. He said he was so angry about his father's involvement on the proponents' side that he forbade him from using Polly's name in the campaign.
"For them to use this, our family tragedy, for their own political agenda is just terribly unfair," he said. "I think my father has made a huge mistake here. I don't know. It may even be an unforgivable mistake here, quite frankly. I just can't believe my father is allowing himself to be the token victim in this."
His father, Joe Klaas, 84, said the proposed revisions were long overdue and in the interest of justice. While honoring his son's request not to invoke his granddaughter's name, Joe Klaas has emerged as the most listened-to proponent of the ballot measure, in large part because of his family's suffering from Polly's kidnapping and murder in 1993. A campaign official described him as a "stud grandpa" who has been tirelessly flying across the state.
"The three-strikes law needs fixing," the elder Mr. Klaas said. "Everybody thought they were voting to put violent criminals away. It has taken 10 years to get the word out and educate the public."
The Klaas family schism mirrors a philosophical divide across California over the three-strikes law as an array of liberal advocacy and criminal justice groups, backed by money from people like George Soros, clash with law enforcement officials, the measure's main opponents.
Mr. Soros, the philanthropist and financier, has contributed $150,000 to the campaign, as have both Peter B. Lewis, chairman of the Progressive Corporation insurance company, and John G. Sperling, founder of the University of Phoenix. The three also supported a successful ballot measure in 2000, which requires many nonviolent drug offenders to be sent into treatment instead of prison.
The biggest donor has been a Sacramento businessman, Jerry Keenan, who contributed $1.9 million toward the signature-gathering effort and $800,000 toward the initiative's passage, according to campaign finance reports. Mr. Keenan's son, Richard, is serving an eight-year prison term for vehicular manslaughter stemming from the deaths of two of his passengers when he crashed his car in 1999 after drinking beer and smoking marijuana. Though application of the law to his case is complicated, it is possible Richard Keenan's sentence would be reduced if Proposition 66 passes.
On the other side, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Attorney General Bill Lockyer and every district attorney in the state have lined up in defense of the existing statute. The politically influential correctional officers' union also backs the law, having donated $150,000 to the cause.
Opponents argue that the law has contributed to the steep decline in crime across the state since 1994. Though prosecutors have the discretion to invoke the law, they say they need that option to lock up dangerous criminals, even those caught for relatively minor crimes. The law has been applied sporadically and unevenly, with some counties, like San Francisco, virtually ignoring it, and others, like Fresno County, relying more heavily upon it, but none of the state's 58 district attorneys want to forfeit it.
In a campaign appearance on Wednesday, Mr. Schwarzenegger said Proposition 66 "is a danger to public safety and it threatens our neighborhoods." In a Republican Party voting guide mailed this week, defeating Proposition 66 was listed as one of Mr. Schwarzenegger's top election priorities.
But even with the popular governor against it, opinion polls show passage of the measure leading among likely voters of both parties. A Field Poll early this month indicated the measure was comfortably ahead, with the support of 65 percent of likely voters. A recent Los Angeles Times poll put support at 3 to 1.
Professor Zimring said the surveys pointed to a remarkable shift in public perceptions about a law that only a few years ago was considered politically off limits. Though critics have long argued the law was flawed, too costly and overreaching, tinkering with it in the crime-sensitive 1990's was out of the question.
"Any two-sided debate about three strikes is a real novelty in California," Professor Zimring said. "The fact that we are having this kind of conversation is already evidence of an enormous sea change in criminal justice."
While most attention in the Proposition 66 campaign has focused on so-called third-strikers - the felons convicted of a third offense - data compiled by the Policy and Evaluation Division of the Department of Corrections show the 1994 law has had a greater impact on second-strike offenders.
The law doubled the sentences of second-strikers and made it more difficult for them to qualify for parole. The data show that of the 42,920 inmates serving sentences under the three-strikes law as of June 30, 35,462 were second-strikers.
Proposition 66 would make life easier for some of the second-strikers. The requirement that third-strike offenses be serious or violent felonies would also apply to second-strike offenses. The measure would reduce the number of felonies considered as violent or serious. Taken off the list would be crimes like burglary of an unoccupied residence and taking part in felonies committed by a criminal street gang.
Mr. Schwarzenegger and other opponents of the measure have focused on a provision that would apply the law retroactively to prisoners serving an indeterminate life sentence for crimes that were not violent or serious. Proponents estimate passage of the measure would lead to the reconsideration of 4,000 or so sentences, while opponents suggest as many as 26,000 prisoners, including many convicted on second strikes, could be eligible for early release.
Marc Klaas calls the retroactive provision a "get-out-of-jail-free card" for some of the state's most hardened criminals. He said many residents feared that released criminals could strike again.
"Each one of these fellows is going to move next door to somebody," he said. "My father lives in a gated community. None of these guys are going to end up next to him. But I don't live in a gated community and most people don't."
The elder Mr. Klaas said opponents were using scare tactics by raising the specter of criminals on the loose.
"I am not worried about one of them moving in next to him," Joe Klaas said of his son, "because all along we have been talking about nonviolent offenders."
-------- homeland security / national intelligence
Pentagon breaks with Bush on intel reform
October 24, 2004
By Shaun Waterman
UPI Homeland and National Security Editor
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20041022-011537-4549r.htm
Washington, DC, Oct. 22 (UPI) -- The nation's most senior military official has publicly broken with the White House in the ongoing controversy over reforming U.S. intelligence.
In a letter to Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., who heads the House Armed Services Committee, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers makes it clear that he does not support the White House-backed proposal to give a new national spy chief budgetary control over three key intelligence agencies inside the Department of Defense.
"The budgets of the combat support agencies should come up from the agencies through the secretary of defense," reads the letter, signed Thursday by Myers and obtained by United Press International.
"For appropriations," the letter continues, "it is likewise important that the appropriations are passed from the national intelligence director through the Department (of Defense) to the combat support agencies."
The term "combat support agencies" encompasses the three bodies that build and run the United States' spy satellites and other eavesdropping equipment, and which absorb more than three-quarters of the country's intelligence budget.
Myers says the House version of the intelligence-reform package currently being debated "maintains this vital flow," adding, "It is my recommendation that this critical provision be maintained."
In the Senate version of the reform bill, however, the budgets would be passed from the agency heads directly to the new intelligence chief, who would also spend -- "execute" in lawmakers' jargon -- the appropriations allocated to them by Congress. Effectively, the Senate bill cuts the Department of Defense out of the loop.
The White House -- in a letter to lawmakers signed by national security adviser Condoleezza Rice earlier this week -- and the Sept. 11 Commission both have supported the Senate version of the bill, and reformers are adamant that without budgetary control over the agencies inside the Pentagon, the new spy chief will be toothless.
The Myers letter therefore represents an intervention by the nation's most senior military man in a vexed ongoing debate among lawmakers and officials about how to give legislative shape to the recommendations of the Sept. 11 Commission, which called for a single chief to run all 15 U.S. intelligence agencies and for tighter controls over borders and transportation.
"The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff previously raised these concerns with us," White House spokeswoman Erin Healy told UPI Friday. "We looked at the issues, and came to a different conclusion than he did."
She said that the administration would continue to press for a national intelligence director with full budgetary powers -- a move that some staff on Capitol Hill said might make Myers' position uncomfortable, if not untenable.
Myers' spokesman did not respond to a request for comment Friday.
The question of the authorities the new intelligence director should have over the budgets and personnel of the intelligence agencies inside the Pentagon has been a key sticking point in negotiations in the so-called conference -- the ad hoc committee of lawmakers from both chambers charged with the unenviable, and increasingly impossible-seeming, task of resolving the broad differences between the bills passed by the House and the Senate in time to get bill on the president's desk before the Nov. 2 election.
The Senate version leaves untouched the so-called tactical spy agencies -- the intelligence elements of the four armed services -- but Hunter and the Pentagon's other allies maintain that the distinction between tactical and strategic assets is increasingly meaningless in a military where troops in combat can get direct access to satellite imagery to help them pinpoint the enemy.
At the first -- and so far only -- meeting of the conference Wednesday, Hunter described that connection as "a lifeline ... for our men and women in uniform" and urged lawmakers to make sure "it is still there ... when the smoke clears on this bill."
One House Democratic staffer who is sympathetic to the military's concerns about the Senate bill told UPI that Myers intervened "because he thinks the White House is selling out the Department of Defense."
"If those combat support agencies are controlled by an entity outside of (the Pentagon), it will not only undermine the chain of command, but it raises the prospect that non-military priorities could be forced on them," said the staffer.
But the opposition of Hunter and other supporters of the Pentagon is likely to stymie any chance of getting a deal on the bill in time to get it signed by the president before the election. Supporters of the Senate version have said that since a weak intelligence chief will make matters worse, they would rather have no bill at all than one that deprived the post of needed authority.
"Someone needs to look Duncan (Hunter) in the eye and say, 'Do you really want to do this?'" said one House GOP supporter of the bill.
Others see the hand of the Pentagon in Hunter's stance. At an impromptu press briefing after the conference Wednesday, Hunter was accompanied not by a member of his own staff or a committee aide, but by an employee of the Pentagon's House liaison office. Hunter told reporters he was in close and constant touch with defense officials.
"They're not interested in a real fix," said the bill's supporter of Hunter and his allies in the Pentagon.
Even if a deal can be reached on this issue, other sticking points remain.
A provision of the Senate bill declassifies the amount of money the United States spends every year on intelligence. The White House opposes making the so-called top line public, as do House Republicans.
"There's no reason not to declassify that number," said Steven Aftergood, who runs the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists.
Aftergood said that acting CIA Director John McLaughlin told Congress last month that it made sense to declassify the budget top line. "There's the national-security assessment right there," said Aftergood.
"Taking out that provision would be the triumph of prejudice over policy ... exactly the kind of reflexive secrecy that the Sept. 11 Commission warned about."
Nonetheless, House Republicans were adamant that the provision would be removed. "I think we'll get that out," said a GOP leadership aide.
The final barrier is a series of provisions in the House bill that strengthen USA Patriot Act-type surveillance powers and toughen immigration and border controls.
These measures are not included in the bill passed by the Senate, which specifically voted down efforts to add similar provisions to its legislation. The White House has supported some of them but called for others to be removed or amended.
"The Senate won't have that," said one Democratic Senate staff member. "They'll all have to come out."
But House GOP leaders argued that several of these additional provisions were recommended by the Sept. 11 Commission, and all of them were designed to make the country safer. "These are not extraneous provisions," said Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which authored most of them. "They are vital."
Several GOP staff members told UPI that there was some doubt that a compromise bill without any of the law-enforcement or border provisions would get the votes it needed to pass.
"The point is to get a bill that Hunter and Sensenbrenner will support," said John Feehery, spokesman for House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill.
One GOP staffer involved in the negotiations said that a deal with the Senate on the law-enforcement and border provisions was close. The staffer said the provision for so-called expedited removal -- deportation without appeal or judicial review for those in the country less than five years -- would be replaced by money for extra detention spaces.
"That provision was drafted because people were simply being turned loose," said the staffer. With the extra detention spaces, additional authorities were unnecessary. "Now they can stay at the Hotel Homeland Security while they are checked out," said the staffer, adding that another provision relating to asylum seekers that had been denounced as draconian was also being watered down.
(Please send comments to nationaldesk@upi.com.)
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Senators Balk at Intelligence Proposal
Language by House Conferees Deemed Unacceptable
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 24, 2004; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57461-2004Oct23.html
Senators working on the bill to restructure U.S. intelligence-gathering will not accept House-proposed language delivered late Friday on the powers for a national intelligence director and other elements, according to congressional staff members involved in the conference committee negotiations.
House and Senate conferees are trying to find common language in the complex legislation that each chamber approved earlier this month, but differences between the measures -- and proposals acceptable to the White House -- have prevented agreement.
Although President Bush used his radio address yesterday to urge Congress "to act quickly, so I can sign these needed reforms into law," any hope of a resolution before Election Day has all but faded.
Both House and Senate measures, which began with recommendations from the Sept. 11 commission, call for creating a national intelligence director with authority over all 15 agencies in the intelligence community. Both also establish a national counterterrorism center to combat terrorists at home and abroad. In addition, both chambers amended laws covering immigration, terrorist financing and other areas related to the war on terrorism.
On Friday, the chairman of the Senate conferees, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), said negotiations should at first be limited to finding agreement on Title I, which deals with the national intelligence director and NCTC. "If we can't reach agreement on these," she said in an interview, "there will be no bill."
The House Republican language on Title I received Friday was described as not acceptable by congressional aides involved in the process. The Senate conferees will make a counteroffer today, the aides said.
Although most attention has been paid to the budget authority the national intelligence director would have over funding of three Pentagon-based intelligence collection agencies, now controlled by the defense secretary, Collins said there are other key portions of Title I that remain at issue.
The Senate bill calls for establishment of an independent Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board within the executive branch that has drawn opposition not only from the House conferees but also from the White House. In addition, the Senate wants the foreign intelligence budget figure made public, which is also opposed by the White House and House members.
The White House wants Congress to authorize only the national intelligence director and a deputy, while allowing all other jobs in the new national intelligence authority to be established by the executive branch. Collins said she and her colleagues plan to insist there be an inspector general and comptroller established within the organization by law.
There also are major differences in the role of the NCTC in formulating plans for covert operations carried out by the CIA, Pentagon or FBI and whether the national intelligence director "controls" the CIA or just receives reports on its activities from the CIA director.
Meanwhile, a Democratic campaign official confirmed a Financial Times report yesterday that Rand Beers, national security adviser to the Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry, said that the new CIA director, Porter J. Goss, would "likely" be asked to resign if Kerry wins the presidency on Nov. 2. "It is to be expected," the official said, noting that other political appointees to that post, including onetime CIA director George H.W. Bush, who later became president, were also asked to leave.
"Kerry ought to announce that publicly," a former CIA official said yesterday, "because it would get him votes among agency employees." They resent Goss bringing as aides a handful of GOP staff members from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which he had chaired.
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Border Patrol consolidates training centers
October 24, 2004
By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20041024-124557-5104r.htm
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has opened a new Border Patrol academy in Artesia, N.M., consolidating for the first time training activities for the agency that previously had been spread among New Mexico, Texas, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina.
CBP Commissioner Robert C. Bonner dedicated the facility during ceremonies Thursday, saying the Border Patrol had operated "for far too long" under a fragmented system of facilities and training depots.
"The Border Patrol is the sole law-enforcement agency within CBP with the tremendous responsibility to protect the homeland from terrorists and their terrorist weapons between the ports of entry," Mr. Bonner said. "This hallmark effort to consolidate the educational assets and expertise at a centralized location will be an extraordinary benefit to the caliber of agents and the specialized training our new agents receive."
Mr. Bonner said the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center will host the Border Patrol Academy at its Artesia training center, which will be responsible for addressing the basic and advanced training needs of more than 11,000 Border Patrol agents nationwide.
He said new agents must complete a rigorous, 19-week training program that includes courses in anti-terrorism, U.S. immigration and drug laws, criminal law and statutory authority, behavioral science, intensive Spanish-language training, the care and use of firearms, physical training and motor vehicle operations.
The academy's location, he said, provides "a unique environment similar to the Southwest border where many agents initially are assigned due to the vast amount of illegal migration and illegal drug smuggling."
"The Border Patrol academy and its instructors provide some of the best law-enforcement training in the world," Border Patrol Chief David V. Aguilar said.
"Combining all of our tested methodologies and best practices under one roof allows us to more effectively and efficiently provide an advanced training environment that enables our agents to reach that state of readiness, that state of professionalism their fellow agents can depend on in the field and, more importantly, the American people depend on at home," Mr. Aguilar said.
Currently, more than 11,000 Border Patrol agents are protecting more than 6,000 miles of international boundary between the established ports of entry with Mexico and Canada. Often operating in very remote locations without immediate support or real-time tactical intelligence, the agents arrested more than 1.1 million people last year attempting to enter the United States illegally and seized more than 684 tons of narcotics with an estimated value of $11 billion.
CBP is the unified border agency within the Department of Homeland Security charged with the management, control and protection of the nation's borders at and between the land and sea ports of entry. It is charged with keeping terrorists and terrorist weapons out of the country, while enforcing hundreds of U.S. laws.
-------- police
Boston Police to Use a Weaker Pepper-Ball Gun
Officials Will Switch Crowd-Control Weapon Until Probe of Red Sox Fan's Death Ends
By Jonathan Finer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 24, 2004; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57462-2004Oct23.html
BOSTON, Oct. 23 -- The Boston Police Department announced Saturday it will switch to pepper-pellet guns that fire pellets at a lower velocity, until the conclusion of its investigation into the death of a local college student. The student was struck in the eye by one such projectile from a more powerful gun during a rowdy celebration that followed Wednesday night's Red Sox victory.
Police said pellets fired by the new weapons will make less of an impact than those shot by the guns used for crowd control last week . Before the opening game of the World Series here Saturday night, department officials also said they were prepared for mass arrests and would beef up police presence on the streets by about 70 officers.
Victoria Snelgrove, 21, a journalism student at Emerson College, was among tens of thousands of people celebrating around Fenway Park after Boston beat New York late Wednesday. Some engaged in violence and vandalism. On Thursday, Police Commissioner Kathleen M. O'Toole said in a written statement that the department accepts "full responsibility" for Snelgrove's death.
"I also condemn, in the harshest words possible, the actions of the punks last night who turned our city's victory into an opportunity for violence and mindless destruction," she said.
Snelgrove's death cast a pall over the jubilation felt by fans before the Red Sox first World Series appearance since 1986 and has sparked increasing scrutiny of "less-lethal" weapons used by police in many cities to maintain order.
The incident was the second time in less than a year that a fan celebrating a local team's victory was killed in this city. In February, amid rioting after the New England Patriots' Super Bowl victory, a man was struck dead by a car. Boston police were criticized for having just 150 officers assigned to crowd control.
Thursday night, with about 700 officers on the streets, images of fans tipping over cars, climbing lampposts and smashing windows were broadcast on local news stations.
"We tend to hear about these things happening in other cities and say, 'those knuckleheads, this could never happen here,' " said Matt McDonald, a Boston police officer who was not working the night that Snelgrove was killed. "It puts a lot of what we're so happy about in perspective."
The Boston Herald sparked an outcry Friday, by publishing graphic photographs of Snelgrove sprawled and bleeding on the sidewalk, one of which ran on the tabloid's front page. The newspaper apologized in a statement Friday afternoon.
"Our aim was to demonstrate this terrible tragedy as comprehensively as possible," said Kenneth A. Chandler, editorial director of Herald Media Inc. "In retrospect, the images of this unusually ugly incident were too graphic."
There were at least two other less severe injuries caused by the pepper pellets early Thursday. The plastic, ball-shaped projectiles are designed to break on impact, dispensing a chemical irritant. The device that fires them is not a firearm but works similarly to a paintball gun, using compressed air to propel its ammunition.
Law enforcement experts said that officers are generally trained not to fire the weapons at a person's head. Melvin L. Tucker, a retired police chief who works as a security consultant in Tennessee, said he is not aware of any other deaths from pepper-pellet weapons. "My guess is it was a violation of the training or an inaccurate shot," he said.
"The dreadful irony is that the use of less-lethal weapons is intended to reduce the risk of fatal injury," O'Toole said, adding that the officers directly involved in the fatality -- who have not been identified -- have been placed on leave to recover from the trauma of the event.
Some local students have expressed outrage over what they called excessive use of force. Snelgrove's father, Richard, told reporters outside her family home in East Bridgewater, south of Boston, that "what happened to her should not happen to any American citizen going to any type of game, no matter what."
Beginning Friday, the day before the start of their best-of-seven series with the St. Louis Cardinals, Red Sox players participated in a public service advertising campaign, asking fans to "keep the faith, and keep the peace."
Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino announced a host of regulations designed to minimize the potential danger of the large crowds expected to gather at the bars and restaurants near the stadium this weekend. Bar owners agreed to keep lines outside short, to restrict the capacity of their establishments and to monitor more closely customers' drinking.
They also agreed to prevent television crews from filming "live shots" inside the bars, which Menino spokesman Seth Gitell said can incite rambunctiousness.
Rioting and arrests after the Red Sox win were reported at several other New England colleges, including the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Plymouth (N.H.) State University. Emerson, a small liberal arts college, suspended classes Friday.
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Boston Police to Change Pepper-Spray Guns
October 24, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/24/national/24soxgun.html
BOSTON, Oct. 23 - The Boston police said on Saturday that they were giving up the type of pepper-spray gun that killed a college student during a rowdy celebration last week, switching to a weapon that fires the pellets at a lower speed.
In a brief news conference outside Fenway Park about an hour before Game One of the World Series between the Boston Red Sox and the St. Louis Cardinals, the police said pellets fired by the new weapons would make less of an impact than those shot by the guns used earlier this week by officers.
Tens of thousands of fans poured into the streets around the stadium Wednesday night and early Thursday morning to celebrate the Red Sox's win over the New York Yankees, which sent Boston to its first World Series since 1986. Some revelers set small fires, threw bottles at police officers and vandalized property.
Officers fired pepper-spray pellets into a crowd, hitting Victoria Snelgrove, a 21-year-old Emerson College student from East Bridgewater, in the eye. She died on Thursday at a hospital.
An investigation continues into the death, which sparked outrage about police tactics and led the mayor and bar owners to reach an agreement on restrictions to try to keep fans from getting out of control.
Bars around Fenway Park agreed to not allow lines to form outside, to keep a closer eye on how much patrons drink and to not allow television stations to film patrons inside so fans do not get rowdy playing to the cameras.
The police said on Saturday that patrols would be beefed up around Fenway Park during the World Series, using officers from around the Boston area.
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Abu Ghraib team bids to run UK prisons
Antony Barnett, Martin Bright and Solomon Hughes
guardian.co.uk
October 24, 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/prisons/story/0,7369,1334933,00.html
The American prison company whose director set up Iraq's infamous Abu Ghraib jail for use by the US military is bidding to run a number of prisons in Britain.
The Utah-based Management and Training Corporation (MTC) has set up a London headquarters and is in advanced negotiations to operate at least one prison in Britain. It is also planning bids to build and manage a number of other jails, including the extension of Belmarsh in south-east London, Britain's maximum security prison, where terrorist suspects are being held without trial.
The disclosure has provoked anger among MPs and prison groups. Brian Caton, general secretary of the Prison Officers' Association, said: 'Serious questions have to be asked about a British prison being run by a company whose director was in charge of setting up a system that led to the atrocities and torture of Iraqi detainees by prison personnel.'
After Saddam Hussein's regime was toppled, John Ashcroft, the US attorney general, put MTC director Lane McCotter in charge of reopening Iraq's prison system. He helped to rebuild Abu Ghraib and trained Iraqi citizens to work in prisons.
New York's senior senator, Democrat Charles Schumer, has been pushing for an investigation into any alleged role played by civilian contractors in the prisoner abuse scandal. McCotter left Iraq to resume his executive job at MTC in September 2003, a month before the worst documented atrocities against Iraqi prisoners occurred. In a statement, he insisted he had nothing to do with training military personnel to run the prison and had no involvement with Abu Ghraib after handing it over to the US armed forces. He said he was 'offended and sickened' by the abuse of Iraqi prisoners.
Last week US Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick was sen tenced to eight years in prison for sexually and physically abusing detainees at Abu Ghraib.
There is no suggestion that McCotter was personally involved in the abuses at Abu Ghraib, but questions have been raised about whether the culture of the US private penal system influenced the environment that allowed the atrocities to occur.
McCotter, a Vietnam veteran, has a chequered record of running US jails. In 1997 he was forced to resign as a senior prison official in Utah after a scandal surrounding the death of a mentally ill inmate strapped naked to a chair for 16 hours. This year, Schumer wrote to Ashcroft, asking why someone with McCotter's controversial history was sent to Iraq.
Last year MTC was criticised by the US Justice Department over its management of Santa Fe prison in New Mexico which was found to have unsafe conditions and lack adequate medical care for inmates. The company said the problems have been resolved and it has had its contract renewed.
Liberal Democrat Home Affairs spokesman Mark Oaten expressed concerns that Britain's prison culture could be undermined by the arrival of American firms.
'The government is in cloud-cuckoo-land if it thinks privatising prisons will solve the mess. The problems of suicides, overcrowding and reoffending will not be solved by bringing in a private company from the US.'
This view was echoed by Labour MP Gwyn Prosser, who sits on the home affairs select committee and said the Home Office should 'proceed with caution'. Last year the Prison Service announced a £3 billion, 10-year refurbishment programme of Britain's prison network. Since 1992, 13 prisons or secure training centres in Britain have been built and managed by private contractors under the government's Private Finance Initiative. The POA has been vociferous in its campaign against prison privatisation.
Carl Stuart, MTC's communications director, said MTC began its corporate life as a training company aimed at helping offenders and has a long track record in successful rehabilitation.
-------- POLITICS
-------- investigations
Kerry record in Senate put premium on probes
October 24, 2004
By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20041024-124559-1575r.htm
Sen. John Kerry has been called many things during his high-profile 20-year career in the U.S. Senate, but the lasting legacy of the junior Democrat from Massachusetts may be easy to define: He's more an investigator than a legislator.
His defining moments have included a progression of signature investigations that, by design, thrust him into the national spotlight. Some, mostly Democrats, have called his investigative efforts relentless and groundbreaking. Others, mostly Republicans, have labeled them as shameless grandstanding.
Both could be right.
But the four-term Democrat, now his party's presidential nominee, has held a number of key leadership roles involving a host of Senate committee investigations, many of which grabbed headlines, three minutes on the evening news and, ultimately, the attention of the voters.
"I always had a prosecutor's mind and a prosecutor's bent," Mr. Kerry said in a New Yorker profile in May. "It was always what I wanted to do, even in law school."
Even the Kerry for President Web page cites his Senate investigations as why he is "well regarded as a national leader in foreign affairs and national security." It said he "closely investigated" terrorism, global threats to national security, international espionage, weapons of mass destruction, trafficking of drugs and arms, nuclear security, international banking scandals, the Vietnam POW/MIA situation and the Iran-Contra affair.
A hardy claim.
Sen. Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, described Mr. Kerry's investigative talents - particularly as a member of the Senate POW/MIA Select Committee and in a separate investigation of the infamous Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI) - as well-grounded, aggressive and successful. "His Senate investigative work bears many of the same hallmarks of his long road to the presidential nomination - a willingness to take on tough assignments, a talent for hiring good people, and success at building coalitions and in getting more done than anyone would have thought possible at the start," Mr. Leahy said.
But Barbara Comstock, former chief counsel and chief investigator to the House Government Reform Committee, which targeted, among other things, campaign-finance abuses in the Clinton administration, called Mr. Kerry's investigative record "an extension of his 1970s, left-wing anti-military agenda."
"Investigations at this level are really done by the staff, not the members," said Mrs. Comstock, now a government-relations specialist at the Washington-based law firm of Blank Rome. "You have to go into the weeds, look at all the documents, put together in plain language something that already happened.
"After Watergate, many politicians discovered that investigations were something that got you headlines," she said. "What John Kerry did was aimed solely at getting attention. He has no record as a legislator or a leader, and his investigations were consistent with his record as a left-wing follower."
Mr. Kerry came to the Senate by way of the Middlesex County District Attorney's Office, Massachusetts' largest, where his nonstop media appearances as a prosecutor earned him the moniker "live-shot Kerry." And while he has used his Senate seat to bring attention to a number of headline-popping issues, including the Iran-Contra scandal, drug trafficking by then-Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega and the illegal financial dealings of BCCI, there was little legislative follow-up.
While championing one Senate investigation or another, Mr. Kerry's name has appeared on 56 bills and resolutions since his freshman year, 11 of which were signed by the president or otherwise became law.
Six successful bills awarded a congressional gold medal to Jackie Robinson posthumously; reauthorized funds for the small business technology-transfer program; amended the Small Business Act regarding women's business programs; authorized funds for the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972; authorized funds for the National Sea Grant College Program Act; and redesignated the federal building in Waltham, Mass., as the "Frederick C. Murphy Federal Center."
But as a newly appointed member of the subcommittee on terrorism, narcotics and international operations in 1985, Mr. Kerry immediately sought to establish his investigative credentials. The subcommittee had targeted the Reagan White House, particularly Vice President George Bush, father of the current president, and a little-known Marine Corps lieutenant colonel named Oliver North, accused of dealing arms to Contra rebels in Nicaragua.
While the subcommittee's findings of a Contra drug connection ultimately were validated, Mr. Kerry was left off the special Senate committee later named to investigate Iran-Contra when some of his colleagues viewed him as too outspoken.
Others were angered by his unofficial 1985 trip to Nicaragua, where - just three months after his election - he visited Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega, accompanied by several reporters. The visit preceded by only a few days a trip by Mr. Ortega to the Soviet Union, where he collected $200 million to help finance Marxist rebels in Nicaragua.
Republicans at the time also questioned the Kerry-led probe, coming in the middle of the 1988 presidential election, with Vice President Bush running against Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, for whom Mr. Kerry had served as lieutenant governor.
Sen. Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican, said at the time the hearings had "deteriorated into a biased, partisan agenda" focused on derailing Mr. Bush's presidential bid. But Jack Blum, Mr. Kerry's special counsel, said it was the Kerry investigation that changed the public's perception of foreign-policy issues.
"We did begin to get people to understand the dimension of the drug problem and refocus on the drug problem," Mr. Blum told the select committee, adding that Mr. Kerry closely reviewed documents during the Senate investigations, not leaving the work solely to staffers.
Mr. Kerry's investigative efforts dwindled after the 1994 elections, when Republicans assumed control of the Senate and committee assignments. But it was Mr. Kerry's probe of Noriega's ties to international drug smugglers that led to the financial shenanigans of BCCI, which had laundered billions of dollars in illicit cash from drug and arms dealers to political leaders and international bankers, some of whom helped finance terrorism.
The 1988 Kerry BCCI probe was capped three years later, when federal prosecutors closed the bank and brought criminal charges in the case.
But Mr. Kerry fell out of favor with some of his Democratic colleagues after the BCCI hearing targeted some prominent Democrats - including former Defense Secretary Clark Clifford, whose Washington-based bank had been used as a BCCI shell. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Sen. Claiborne Pell, Rhode Island Democrat, called on Mr. Kerry to bring the inquiry to a close, and several key Democrats spoke with him personally to back off on Mr. Clifford.
When the 84-year-old Mr. Clifford was called to testify, Mr. Kerry did not vigorously pursue the elder statesman, although he later told his staff - according to a book on Mr. Clifford by David McKean, a Kerry cousin and a staff member - the committee had proven its case, and he did not intend to "humiliate an old man."
--------
FOLLOWING UP
Lauded for 9/11 Work, but Under Scrutiny
October 24, 2004
By JOSEPH P. FRIED
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/24/nyregion/24folo.html
For his grim work in the aftermath of 9/11, Richard B. Marx received public praise. Then came the accusations that threatened to taint his reputation.
Mr. Marx, an F.B.I. agent and a forensics expert, supervised the operation in which hundreds of agents sifted through thousands of body parts, personal effects and other items recovered from the vast rubble of the World Trade Center. Working at the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island, where more than 1.5 million tons of debris had been trucked from ground zero, the agents sought items that could aid in the investigation of the attack or be returned to survivors and victims' families.
Mr. Marx, who is based in the F.B.I.'s Philadelphia office, was applauded not only for his organization and leadership of the 10-month task, but for the consideration that victims' relatives said he showed them and for his role in helping museums receive hundreds of recovered items.
But then, last February, government officials said that the Justice Department inspector general's office had found that 13 agents took items and debris from Fresh Kills as mementos - including a Tiffany globe paperweight, an American flag and pieces of concrete - and that two F.B.I. supervisors had received such items.
The officials also quoted the investigators' report as saying that Mr. Marx had given deceptive answers when asked if he had permitted or abetted those actions.
While many F.B.I. colleagues and relatives of trade center victims were angered by the taking of mementos, many found it hard to believe that Mr. Marx had sought to deceive investigators.
Last week, Jerri Williams, a spokeswoman for the F.B.I.'s Philadelphia office, said officials at the bureau's headquarters in Washington were still reviewing the deception accusation, along with the Philadelphia office's "strong disagreement" with it.
"We believe there was no deception," she said, noting that the Philadelphia office challenged "the wording of the questions" asked of Mr. Marx on a lie-detector test.
Mr. Marx did not respond publicly when the accusations were disclosed, and Ms. Williams said he was on leave last week after returning recently from temporary duty in Iraq, where he pursued "investigative leads and interviewed detainees."
Not Stirring Up Dust
Stirs Up Some Dust
David Chang helped bring down a United States senator, but left an unfinished building standing.
Mr. Chang, a New Jersey businessman, pleaded guilty in 2000 to having funneled $53,700 in illegal contributions to Senator Robert G. Torricelli's 1996 campaign, and told prosecutors he had also given the senator cash and gifts in return for his lobbying on behalf of Mr. Chang's businesses. Mr. Chang served 15 months in prison.
Mr. Torricelli denied wrongdoing, and prosecutors did not seek his indictment. But he ended his 2002 re-election campaign as questions about the scandal persisted.
Meanwhile, Mr. Chang was not finished with officialdom. In 1992 he bought property in Fort Lee on which a developer had erected the steel frame for a six-story office building before going bankrupt. But Mr. Chang did not advance the project, and today it remains a rusty eyesore.
In March, Fort Lee took the site in condemnation proceedings, but a subsidiary of LG Electronics, a large Korean company, challenged the action, saying that Mr. Chang had given it the title to the site. It lost in a lower court and is appealing.
In interviews last week, lawyers for Mr. Chang and LG questioned the claims and good faith of Fort Lee officials, whose lawyer spoke likewise of Mr. Chang and LG.
-------- us politics
Karl Rove: America's Mullah
This election is about Rovism, and the outcome threatens to transform the U.S. into an ironfisted theocracy.
Los Angeles Times
October 24, 2004
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-op-gabler24oct24,1,1450207.story?coll=la-sunday-commentary
By Neal Gabler, Neal Gabler, a senior fellow at the Norman Lear Center at USC Annenberg, is author of "Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality."
Even now, after Sen. John F. Kerry handily won his three debates with President Bush and after most polls show a dead heat, his supporters seem downbeat. Why? They believe that Karl Rove, Bush's top political operative, cannot be beaten. Rove the Impaler will do whatever it takes - anything - to make certain that Bush wins. This isn't just typical Democratic pessimism. It has been the master narrative of the 2004 presidential campaign in the mainstream media. Attacks on Kerry come and go - flip-flopper, Swift boats, Massachusetts liberal - but one constant remains, Rove, and everyone takes it for granted that he knows how to game the system.
Rove, however, is more than a political sharpie with a bulging bag of dirty tricks. His campaign shenanigans - past and future - go to the heart of what this election is about.
Democrats will tell you it is a referendum on Bush's incompetence or on his extremist right-wing agenda. Republicans will tell you it's about conservatism versus liberalism or who can better protect us from terrorists. They are both wrong. This election is about Rovism - the insinuation of Rove's electoral tactics into the conduct of the presidency and the fabric of the government. It's not an overstatement to say that on Nov. 2, the fate of traditional American democracy will hang in the balance.
Rovism is not simply a function of Rove the political conniver sitting in the counsels of power and making decisions, though he does. No recent presidency has put policy in the service of politics as has Bush's. Because tactics can change institutions, Rovism is much more. It is a philosophy and practice of governing that pervades the administration and even extends to the Republican-controlled Congress. As Robert Berdahl, chancellor of UC Berkeley, has said of Bush's foreign policy, a subset of Rovism, it constitutes a fundamental change in "the fabric of constitutional government as we have known it in this country."
Rovism begins, as one might suspect from the most merciless of political consiglieres, with Machiavelli's rule of force: "A prince is respected when he is either a true friend or a downright enemy." No administration since Warren Harding's has rewarded its friends so lavishly, and none has been as willing to bully anyone who strays from its message.
There is no dissent in the Rove White House without reprisal.
Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki was retired after he disagreed with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's transformation of the Army and then testified that invading Iraq would require a U.S. deployment of 200,000 soldiers.
Chief Medicare actuary Richard Foster was threatened with termination if he revealed before the vote that the administration had seriously misrepresented the cost of its proposed prescription drug plan to get it through Congress.
Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill was peremptorily fired for questioning the wisdom of the administration's tax cuts, and former U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer III felt compelled to recant his statement that there were insufficient troops in Iraq.
Even accounting for the strong-arm tactics of Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon, this isn't government as we have known it. This is the Sopranos in the White House: "Cross us and you're road kill."
Naturally, the administration's treatment of the opposition is worse. Rove's mentor, political advisor Lee Atwater, has been quoted as saying: "What you do is rip the bark off liberals." That's how Bush has governed. There is a feeling, perhaps best expressed by Georgia Democratic Sen. Zell Miller's keynote address at the Republican convention, that anyone who has the temerity to question the president is undermining the country. At times, Miller came close to calling Democrats traitors for putting up a presidential candidate.
This may be standard campaign rhetoric. But it's one thing to excoriate your opponents in a campaign, and quite another to continue berating them after the votes are counted.
Rovism regards any form of compromise as weakness. Politics isn't a bus we all board together, it's a steamroller.
No recent administration has made less effort to reach across the aisle, and thanks to Rovism, the Republican majority in Congress often operates on a rule of exclusion. Republicans blocked Democrats from participating in the bill-drafting sessions on energy, prescription drugs and intelligence reform in the House. As Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez) told the New Yorker, "They don't consult with the nations of the world, and they don't consult with Congress, especially the Democrats in Congress. They can do it all themselves."
Bush entered office promising to be a "uniter, not a divider." But Rovism is not about uniting. What Rove quickly grasped is that it's easier and more efficacious to exploit the cultural and social divide than to look for common ground. No recent administration has as eagerly played wedge issues - gay marriage, abortion, stem cell research, faith-based initiatives - to keep the nation roiling, in the pure Rovian belief that the president's conservative supporters will always be angrier and more energized than his opponents. Division, then, is not a side effect of policy; in Rovism, it is the purpose of policy.
The lack of political compromise has its correlate in the administration's stubborn insistence that it doesn't have to compromise with facts. All politicians operate within an Orwellian nimbus where words don't mean what they normally mean, but Rovism posits that there is no objective, verifiable reality at all. Reality is what you say it is, which explains why Bush can claim that postwar Iraq is going swimmingly or that a so-so economy is soaring. As one administration official told reporter Ron Suskind, "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.... We're history's actors."
When neither dissent nor facts are recognized as constraining forces, one is infallible, which is the sum and foundation of Rovism. Cleverly invoking the power of faith to protect itself from accusations of stubbornness and insularity, this administration entertains no doubt, no adjustment, no negotiation, no competing point of view. As such, it eschews the essence of the American political system: flexibility and compromise.
In Rovism, toughness is the only virtue. The mere appearance of change is intolerable, which is why Bush apparently can't admit ever making a mistake. As Machiavelli put it, the prince must show that "his judgments are irrevocable."
Rovism is certainly not without its appeal. As political theorist Sheldon Wolin once characterized Machiavellian government, it promises the "economy of politics." Americans love toughness. They love swagger. In a world of complexity and uncertainty, especially after Sept. 11, they love the idea of a man who doesn't need anyone else. They even love the sense of mission, regardless of its wisdom.
These values run deep in the American soul, and Rovism consciously taps them. But they are not democratic. Unwavering discipline, demonization of foes, disdain for reality and a personal sense of infallibility based on faith are the stuff of a theocracy - the president as pope or mullah and policy as religious warfare.
Boiled down, Rovism is government by jihadis in the grip of unshakable self-righteousness - ironically the force the administration says it is fighting. It imposes rather than proposes.
Rovism surreptitiously and profoundly changes our form of government, a government that has been, since its founding by children of the Enlightenment, open, accommodating, moderate and generally reasonable.
All administrations try to work the system to their advantage, and some, like Nixon's, attempt to circumvent the system altogether. Rove and Bush neither use nor circumvent, which would require keeping the system intact. They instead are reconfiguring the system in extra-constitutional, theocratic terms.
The idea of the United States as an ironfisted theocracy is terrifying, and it should give everyone pause. This time, it's not about policy. This time, for the first time, it's about the nature of American government.
We all have reason to be very, very afraid.
------
Rivals Stick to Issue of Security
Bush, Kerry Trawl Midwest for Votes of Uncommitted
October 29, 2004
Washington Post
By Dana Milbank and Jim VandeHei
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7376-2004Oct28?language=printer
SAGINAW, Mich., Oct. 28 -- President Bush and Democratic challenger John F. Kerry combed the Midwest for the last few uncommitted voters on Thursday, each carrying severe warnings that his opponent's victory would worsen the security of Americans.
With polls showing no clear advantage for either man and the election just five days away, Bush returned to his accusation that Kerry's words "embolden our enemies" and undermine U.S. troops in Iraq.
"Senator Kerry will say anything to get elected," Bush told 6,000 supporters at a hockey rink here. Playing on Kerry's description of the Iraq conflict as the "wrong war," he added: "The senator's willingness to trade principle for political convenience makes it clear that John Kerry is the wrong man for the wrong job at the wrong time."
Kerry again jettisoned plans to emphasize domestic issues in a bid to keep the campaign's focus on the disappearance of nearly 400 tons of explosives in Iraq. "The president's shifting explanations and excuses and attacks on me prove, once again, that the president believes the buck stops everywhere but with the president of the United States," he said in Toledo. Kerry also attended a rally in Madison, Wis., that attracted more than 80,000 people, drawn by Bruce Springsteen. A fire marshal said the crowd, near the state Capitol, was the largest to assemble for a single event in the city.
With the approach of the final weekend of campaigning, each candidate's strategy, both geographical and rhetorical, came into sharper focus. Geographically, both men will concentrate almost all their efforts on Florida and on the upper midwestern states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio. Among those states, the only surprise is Michigan, which had been expected to be safely Democratic; recent polls have shown a close race. Another surprise is a trip on Sunday by Vice President Cheney to traditionally Democratic Hawaii, where polls show the race to be close.
Kerry has been spending most of his time in Wisconsin, Iowa, Ohio and Florida; he will visit Detroit on Saturday, although the campaign is increasingly optimistic about Michigan, Minnesota and Pennsylvania.
Bush strategist Karl Rove said Thursday night that the campaign's private polls show the president even or ahead in eight of the 10 battleground states -- including Ohio, Iowa, Wisconsin and New Mexico -- with leads outside the polls' margins of error in four. He predicted a victory for Bush but said "the next five days are critical."
Thematically, both sides remain content to let the campaign's closing days be about matters of national security. Kerry advisers continue to believe that the explosives missing from an Iraqi munitions depot are a metaphor for Bush's mishandling of Iraq. A top Kerry aide said there is evidence that the issue is hurting Bush's standing, although not necessarily lifting Kerry's. And Bush advisers, originally thrown on the defensive by news that nearly 400 tons of powerful explosives had been discovered missing, now say that the dispute, while unhelpful to Bush, keeps the focus on terrorism, which is the president's strongest suit, and away from joblessness and health care, in which Kerry has an advantage.
Bush has responded to Kerry's onslaught about the munitions with a last-minute adjustment in his campaign message. He now devotes the bulk of his speeches to criticism of Kerry -- a sharp change from his pattern through much of the campaign in which his barbs at Kerry were few and lighthearted. And he dropped the word "liberal" from his speeches on Thursday, returning to his original accusation that Kerry is opportunistic and prone to vacillation.
"The issues vary, the challenges are different every day, tactics and strategy must be flexible, but a president's convictions must be steady and true," Bush said on Thursday. Kerry, he said, "has taken a lot of different positions, but he rarely takes a stand."
Bush and his allies on Thursday portrayed Kerry's criticism of Bush on the missing explosives as an insult to U.S. troops. Cheney, in Wisconsin, called the Democrat's charges "a cheap shot" and said: "I believe it says something about the character of the man who would take that kind of shot at the military." Cheney cited an ABC News report that all but three tons of the munitions were gone before American forces invaded. "Kerry is just dead wrong," he said.
Later, after the International Atomic Energy Agency said the report was incorrect, Cheney dropped the "dead wrong" phrase from his criticism of Kerry.
Introducing Bush at a rally in suburban Cleveland, retired Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks, who presided over the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, echoed Cheney's assertion. He said Kerry "denigrates, disrespects our troops" and "cannot lead troops to victory."
But the Republican argument that Kerry was insulting the troops was inadvertently undermined by Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor who has been campaigning for Bush. He appeared to blame the troops explicitly on NBC's "Today Show," saying "the president did what a commander in chief should do, and no matter how you try to blame it on the president, the actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there. Did they search carefully enough, or didn't they search carefully enough?"
The Bush campaign also acknowledged Thursday that it had doctored a photo used in an ad by multiplying the images of troops watching Bush speak. The ad, released on Wednesday, was intended to underscore Bush's commitment to the military.
In Toledo, Kerry contrasted Bush's handling of the explosives situation with John F. Kennedy's response to the Bay of Pigs debacle, the bungled invasion of Cuba in 1961. "When the Bay of Pigs went sour, John Kennedy had the courage to look America in the eye and say, 'I take responsibility, it's my fault,' " said Kerry. "John Kennedy knew how to take responsibility for the mistakes he made, and Mr. President, it's long since time for you to start taking responsibility for the mistakes you made." Kerry adviser Michael McCurry said Kerry was not trying to compare the events in Cuba and Iraq, just the responses.
Concerned about the GOP argument that the Democrats are blaming the troops for the lost munitions, Kerry's running mate, John Edwards, escalated his defense on Thursday, demanding that Bush show that he had ordered the troops to secure the explosives in Iraq. "Our men and women in uniform did their job. It's George Bush, the commander in chief, who didn't do his job," said Edwards, who called on Bush to "step aside."
Both sides are targeting what they see as the typical undecided voter, a person troubled by the Bush presidency but torn over Kerry's ability to do a better job on national security. At rallies in swing states, Kerry and Bush appeal specifically to such individuals mostly by criticizing their opponent and raising the prospects of catastrophe if they do not win.
"The security of our country is at stake," Bush bluntly said on Thursday. Bush said Kerry's "lack of conviction" signals to enemies "that if you make things uncomfortable, if you stir up trouble, John Kerry will back off."
In Toledo, Kerry said Bush has put troops -- and Americans in general -- at greater risk. Kerry said he will fight a "smarter, more effective, more strategic war on terror that will make America safer."
In making these arguments, both candidates have largely scrapped earlier intentions to close the campaign on a positive note. And jobs, health care and social issues have become secondary in the final battles, as have specific policy ideas. In Michigan, Bush acknowledged: "I understand there are some people hurting in Michigan." But the admission was buried deep in his stump speech -- a relief to the Bush campaign on a day when the Labor Department reported an unexpectedly large increase in new claims for unemployment benefits.
Anxious strategists on both sides, digesting inconclusive and sometimes contradictory daily poll results, acknowledge that they have little confidence to predict what will happen on Tuesday.
Kerry's crowds have been generally larger than Bush's, although this may reflect the Bush campaign's more stringent controls on attendance as much as the growing support for Kerry. The Massachusetts senator still plans to shift away from Iraq in the final days to make a broader pitch for a Democratic victory and a leadership change in Washington. But a top aide said Kerry will ride the explosives issue right up until election night if it works.
The candidate's most prominent foray into domestic affairs on Thursday was his donning of an oversized Boston Red Sox cap as he celebrated his hometown team's World Series victory. But Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling said on ABC's "Good Morning America" that he supports Bush -- and the campaign quickly scheduled him to appear with Bush in New Hampshire on Friday.
VandeHei is traveling with Kerry. Staff writers John Wagner, traveling with Edwards, and Lyndsey Layton, traveling with Cheney, contributed to this report.
-------- OTHER
-------- genetics
U.S. Stem Cell Policy Delays U.N. Action on Human Cloning
October 24, 2004
By WARREN HOGE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/24/international/24nations.html?pagewanted=all
UNITED NATIONS, Oct. 22 - A United Nations effort to ban the reproductive cloning of human beings is being held up for the third straight year by a polarizing argument over whether the prohibition should be extended to cover stem cell and other research known as therapeutic cloning.
All 191 United Nations members agree on a treaty that would prohibit cloning human beings, an idea first proposed in 2001, but they are divided over whether to broaden the ban to cover therapeutic cloning.
The Bush administration is aggressively seeking the total ban. That has set it against close allies like Britain and much of the world's scientific establishment, who contend that it would block research on cancer, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, diabetes, spinal cord injuries, multiple sclerosis and other conditions.
The White House says that enough stem cells from human embryos exist for research and that cloning an embryo for any reason is unethical.
The United States has thrown its weight behind a resolution offered by Costa Rica to outlaw all forms of human cloning as "unethical, morally reproachable and contrary to due respect for the human person." Such a global ban would go beyond the restrictions put on cloning under American law.
The measure, which was debated Thursday and Friday in the General Assembly's legal committee, has 63 cosponsors, most of them Roman Catholic countries or nations from the developing world.
Belgium has offered a compromise resolution, cosponsored by Britain and 19 other countries, that would ban human cloning for reproductive purposes outright and would offer nations three options for dealing with therapeutic cloning - banning it, putting a moratorium on the practice or regulating it through national legislation to prevent misuse.
Belgium's representative, Marc Pecsteen, said it was important to have a ban on reproductive cloning as soon as possible to crack down on unscrupulous scientists. "A compromise formula must be found in a constructive spirit to allow consensus," he said.
In a brief statement that included three quotations from President Bush, Susan Moore, a United States special adviser, told the committee on Friday, "A ban that differentiates between human reproductive and experimental cloning would essentially authorize the creation of a human embryo for the purpose of destroying it, thus elevating the value of research and experimentation above that of a human life."
She said the United States supported efforts to find breakthrough treatment and cures for disease but that it felt scientific progress was possible without posing a "threat to human dignity."
Opponents contended that by ignoring the fact that there is little likelihood of a consensus in the United Nations on therapeutic cloning research and pushing for a vote, the sponsors of the broader measure were effectively destroying the possibility of action on a ban on reproductive cloning on which all nations could agreed.
Vanu Gopala Menon of Singapore said progress on achieving that goal was being thwarted by countries that had "adopted an all-or-nothing attitude and paralyzed the process."
One of the most defiant objections came from Britain, whose ambassador, Emyr Jones Parry, said that his country was convinced that therapeutic cloning held enormous promise for new treatments for serious degenerative conditions that were currently incurable. He said that Britain would not sign or be bound by a final convention that called for a total ban.
Turkey's representative, Gokcen Tugral, said the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference was opposed to a vote on either one of the alternatives, saying that one side imposing its views on the other in such a polarizing setting would "only create a negative atmosphere."
On Thursday, Secretary General Kofi Annan said that while the issue was one for the member states to decide, "in my personal view, I think I will go for therapeutic cloning."
Last December, Costa Rica backed off pressing for a vote in the General Assembly until this year. Thursday, South Korea proposed another year's delay and said that an international scientific conference should be held and a study should be made of national laws and regulations that govern cloning.
The stem cell dispute has become an issue in the American presidential race, with President Bush opposing government financing of any research involving the destruction of human embryos, and his Democratic opponent, Senator John Kerry, pledging a national campaign in pursuit of embryonic stem cell research.
-------- health
Pandemic pandemonium
Tribune-Review
October 24, 2004
By Joseph Sabino Mistick
http://pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/opinion/columnists/mistick/s_264980.html
As flu season approaches, our nation will be short of the vaccine we need to stay alive and healthy. Was it sabotage by al-Qaida? Was it some clandestine operation by Iran or that crazy guy who runs North Korea? Or maybe a few vengeful agents of Saddam Hussein?
No, it's none of those things. We have met the enemy and it is us. And the Bush administration, well practiced at its standard denials and mightily trying to pass this colossal failure off to anyone else, may dodge another one.
Remember, President Bush cannot recall ever making a mistake. And since failing to protect Americans from the ravages of influenza qualifies as one gigantic mistake, it is unlikely that Bush will end up wearing this.
But just for fun, let's check the facts. The Centers for Disease Control claims to be "the lead federal agency for protecting the health and safety of people -- at home and abroad." The CDC also touts itself as "the national focus for developing and applying disease prevention and control."
The CDC is an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services, which is run by Secretary Tommy G. Thompson. And who appointed Secretary Thompson? None other than President Bush, the same man who is ultimately responsible for our national health system.
How tough a job was it to protect us from the flu? Not too tough; influenza is a biological pathogen that arrives at a time certain and that can be rendered harmless by known vaccines.
In this world of terrorists, there are other biological, chemical and radiological nemeses on the horizon that are less predictable and against which we have few protective measures. Plutonium, cobalt-60, chloride, Ebola, anthrax and smallpox are the things that terrorists will use to kill Americans. But if Bush can't beat the flu, how will we survive these others?
In "America the Vulnerable," Stephen Flynn describes a hypothetical anthrax attack that duplicated the effect of merely 2 pounds of anthrax dropped on an American city. More than 100,000 citizens would die -- in large part because antibiotics would not be distributed soon enough to head off the symptoms that would cause a stampede of inadequately staffed and equipped hospitals.
Admittedly, compared to these other killers the flu is relatively mild, unless it resembles the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918.
Back then, more people died from the flu than were killed in both world wars combined. Nearly 600,000 Americans and between 20 million and 100 million people worldwide died from the flu.
Then, as now, official Washington was distracted by war. And in 1918 -- as we might see again -- the influenza spread more rapidly with troop movements. And our economy, military might and social structures collapsed.
In 1918, the very young and very old died from the virus. This supports the Bush administration's directive that these groups be inoculated first this year. But everyone was surprised to discover that the 1918 outbreak claimed more 21- to 29-year-old victims than anyone else.
President Woodrow Wilson, faced with the Hobson's choice of sending troop reinforcements to Europe or restricting travel to control the spread of the virus, spent dismal days in the White House that autumn. Ultimately, he sent the troops, knowing that their close quarters would kill thousands on the journey.
As described in the PBS American Experience episode "Influenza 1918," Wilson then recited a common children's ditty of the time to an aide: "I had a little bird/Its name was Enza/I opened up the window/and in flew enza."
Let's hope President Bush never has reason to recite that limerick. But if this flu season is a dry run for worse things to come, it's not looking good.
(Correction: Salena Zito of Political Technology Group was misidentified in last week's column.)
Joseph Sabino Mistick is a lawyer, law professor and political analyst. He lives in Point Breeze. E-mail him at: SabinoMistick@aol.com.
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