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NUCLEAR
Langley to be the first school to use nuclear power curriculum
Don't let WMD issue bore you . . . to death
Researchers describe how natural nuclear reactor worked Like Old Faithful
No radiation threat from 747 crash, experts say
On the Issues: Iran Showdown Over Nuclear Plans Awaits Election Winner
Photos point to removal of weapons
Analysis Munitions Issue Dwarfs the Big Picture
Pentagon Seeks to Account for Explosives
Video Shows G.I.'s at Weapon Cache
'No-fly' zone perils were for Iraqis, not allied pilots
No Swedish asylum for Israeli nuclear whistleblower Vanunu
Powell says no intent to attack North Korea
South Korea disagrees with U.S. proposal on six-party talks
Yucca Mountain Looms Over Vote
Man Living in Cave on Los Alamos Lab Land
Appeal Filed in Nuclear Waste Storage Decision
MILITARY
'Nervous and angry', the Black Watch arrive in the Triangle of Death
'Political' merger of Snecma, Sagem leaves analysts cold
Curbs On Sonar Use Sought In Europe
Georgia: A Meltdown of Weapons, or of Responsibility?
100,000 Civilian Deaths Estimated in Iraq
11 local soldiers killed on video
Video Shows Slaying of 11 Iraqi Guardsmen
Study Puts Iraqi Deaths of Civilians at 100,000
Arafat approves Abbas as deputy
Putin enters Ukrainian election row by attending army parade
Putin has an eye on the future as he looks back on Soviet glory victory
Iraq Casualties
Navy Drops Charges Against Commando in Abuse of Prisoners
US troops refused requests to protect explosives store
This GI Joe Won't Go
Wives of U.S. Troops Share Pain -- and Often Politics
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Chile Uses Anti-Terror Law Against Indians, Says Report
Adviser in Lindh Case Sues Justice Dept.
Homeland Security Disavows Document Touting Successes
Police Officer Is Put on a Year's Probation
FBI Glossed Over Abu Ghraib Abuses
Tape With Terror Threat Is Broadcast
Refinery and Chemical Workers Are Not Ready for an Attack
POLITICS
State Department Tried to Stop Airing of Bin Laden Tape
Why I turned against the war
The monarchization of America under Bush
VotePact.com Offers Alternative Way of Voting
Kerry's Foreign Policy Views Still a Puzzle
Justice to monitor voting in 25 states
Justice Department Triples Election Monitors;
Military ballots no 'emergency'
Bush Administration Attempts To Overturn Decades of Legal Precedents
ENERGY
Polish Ex-spy Chief Says Russia Flexes Oil Muscle
OTHER
Utilities Apply To Construct Power Plants Near Parks
Study Finds Warming Trend in Arctic Linked to Emissions
Approved Stem Cells' Potential Questioned
Flu Shots for Federal Workers, Military Diverted
ACTIVISTS
Mary Kelly, Her Axe and a US Navy 737 No Justice in County Clare
A Soldier Speaks: Robert Sarra
-------- NUCLEAR
Langley to be the first school to use nuclear power curriculum
October 29, 2004
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
By Amy McConnell Schaarsmith,
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04303/403478.stm
As part of the Bush administration's effort to boost the nuclear power industry, physics students at Langley High School will become the first in the country to use a new curriculum from the U.S. Department of Energy that promotes nuclear energy.
With memories of the 1979 near-disaster at Three Mile Island fading, federal energy officials said last week they hope the new curriculum will encourage more students to pursue careers in nuclear engineering -- a field energy officials expect to grow.
"No new nuclear power plants have been built for many years, but now because of increasing oil and natural gas prices, utilities are looking to build some new plants in the next few years," said William Magwood IV, a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University and director of the U.S. Energy Department's Office of Nuclear Energy, Science and Technology. "They're looking for people to work in those plants and design those plants, and there you are."
Among those attending Magwood's presentation at Langley last week were 13 physics students. Several of the students plan to study medicine, become teachers, practice psychiatry or go into a math-related field. But a few interested in scientific careers said the two-week pilot program might persuade them to consider nuclear engineering.
"I was interested in aviation, but this really showed me how much broader it could be, that there could be better fields to go into," said Jon Mack, a junior from Crafton Heights, after Magwood's presentation.
The program, which is called "The Harnessed Atom: a new curriculum in nuclear science and technology," is not officially part of the Pittsburgh Public Schools physics curriculum that was designed by the district. Physics teacher Ed Henke, however, said he has committed to teaching the program by volunteering to participate.
It is designed to teach the students about energy physics, atomic structure, power plant design and operation, safety and environmental protection, according to federal officials.
The program -- part of a push by the Bush administration to develop additional nuclear power as an alternative to foreign oil -- could be expanded to other high schools throughout the country if it succeeds at Langley, Magwood said.
No new reactors have been built in the United States since a partial meltdown at Three Mile Island 25 years ago released a small amount of radioactive water into the Susquehanna River, tainting the industry's public image for decades.
Now, however, federal energy officials are touting nuclear energy as "green" power and the nation's largest source of pollution-free electricity. Unlike fossil fuels such as oil and coal, nuclear energy does not emit sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide or carbon dioxide; sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide create acid rain, while carbon dioxide contributes to global warming.
Critics, however, point out that nuclear power is not truly "clean" because the production process creates radioactive waste that remains potentially dangerous for thousands of years. Currently, a backlog of about 80,000 tons of high-level radioactive waste is being stored at nuclear reactor sites throughout the country.
Despite such concerns, the general public's worries about nuclear energy have begun to lift, Magwood said.
"I think people recognize that since [Three Mile Island], a lot of changes have been made, and we haven't had any significant problems with nuclear power," he said. "We know how to operate plants safely."
(Amy McConnell Schaarsmith can be reached at aschaarsmith@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1548.)
--------
Don't let WMD issue bore you . . . to death
ajc.com
10/29/04
By CHAM DALLAS
http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/1004/29weapons.html
The term weapons of mass destruction has swept into the American lexicon as we face a volatile array of political, cultural and technological realities that seem to mandate their imminent use.
These weapons include chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive devices, which are steadily spreading to more nation states and to small but determined terrorist groups.
The term evokes different responses, ranging from a dull fear to jokes on late-night talk shows. After giving hundreds of hours of lectures on the topic, I have noticed that in most instances peoples' eyes seem to glaze over as the magnitude of it all sinks in.
It is just too much to take in, and the mind wants to go on to something a lot more pleasant. However, the data are pouring in now that WMD are spreading farther and wider, and angry partisans are declaring their intent to use this technology in increasingly bizarre ways.
One chilling example is the quote from al-Qaida spokesman Suleiman Abu Gheith in the London newspaper al-Sharq al-Awsat, where he said Muslims "have the right to kill 4 million Americans - 2 million of them children - and to exile twice as many and wound and cripple hundreds of thousands."
"Furthermore, it is our right to fight them with chemical and biological weapons," he said.
As the national elections draw near, WMD are frequently cited (or perhaps I should say utilized) by both sides, in recognition of both the imminent threat and its power to sway the electorate. It appears that this has only increased the glazed look of most folks on the topic, as familiarity diminishes impact.
Perhaps the biggest issue has been whether these weapons were in Iraq immediately before the invasion. There is no doubt that Iraq possessed WMD in the past, including substantial quantities of chemical and biological weapons. Saddam Hussein used them to kill thousands of his own people, as well as many thousands of Iranians in the war between Iran and Iraq two decades ago.
Even after dealing with WMD for more than 20 years, some of the most unsettling photographs I have ever seen were those of the thousands of men, women and children killed with chemical weapons by the Iraqi dictator in his brutal suppression of the Kurds in Iraq. Recent reports by those investigating whether there were WMD in Iraq at the time of the invasion have concluded that Saddam wanted the Iranians to think that he still had them, in order to instill fear in them. Apparently, this effort succeeded so well that William Tenet, CIA director under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, believed it, as did Bush, Sen. John Kerry and a lot of other people.
There are others who believe Iraqi WMD were secreted across the border into Syria in the lengthy time before the invasion. However, the eye-glazing Iraqi WMD issue really pales in comparison to the reality of nuclear weapons and missile technology in the hands of North Korea (with arguably the most insane leadership in the world), the claims of al-Qaida to have suitcase nukes, and the rapid proliferation of WMD among nations and special interest groups throughout the world (many of whom hate us).
Scores of tons of weapons-grade plutonium sit in warehouses in Russia, while only 40 pounds, detonated in downtown Atlanta, would kill 300,000 people, injure 500,000 and destroy the majority of area hospitals and clinics. The sheer size of the developing nuclear weapons program in Iran is a dangerous portent of the future, as this radical Islamic state will be able to produce nuclear weapons at a rate much higher than North Korea.
Among the substantive issues facing us is the enormous task of having to prepare the nation's clinical care/public health systems to deal with the mass casualties that could result from terrorist attacks with WMD. As Shakespeare said, there is a tide in the affairs of men. The cultural phenomenon of radical Islamic terrorism is not fleeting or illusory.
The number of actual fighters continues to be constantly replenished, despite substantial interdiction by military and intelligence sources. Tides can be treacherous, even before they hit the shore. Whoever is elected next month is likely to preside over the response to terrorist attacks with WMD in this nation. The tide is coming in.
• Dr. Cham Dallas is also professor of toxicology at the University of Georgia, clinical professor of emergency medicine at Medical College of Georgia, and adjunct professor of epidemiology at Emory University.
-------- africa
Researchers describe how natural nuclear reactor worked Like Old Faithful
29-Oct-2004
By Tony Fitzpatrick
Washington University in St. Louis
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-10/wuis-rdh102804.php
To operate a nuclear power plant like Three Mile Island, hundreds of highly trained employees must work in concert to generate power from safe fission, all the while containing dangerous nuclear wastes.
On the other hand, it's been known for 30 years that Mother Nature once did nuclear chain reactions by her lonesome. Now, Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have analyzed the isotopic structure of noble gases produced in fission in a sample from the only known natural nuclear chain reaction site in the world in Gabon, West Africa, and have found how she does the trick. Picture Old Faithful.
Analyzing a tiny fragment of rock, less than one-eight of an inch, taken from the Gabon site, Alexander Meshik, Ph.D., Washington University senior research scientist in physics, has calculated that the precise isotopic structure of xenon in the sample reveals an operation that worked like a geyser. The reactor, active two billion years ago, worked on a 30-minute reaction cycle, accompanied by a two-and-a-half hour dormant period, or cool down.
In the Oct. 29, 2004 issue of Physical Review Letters, Meshik and his Washington University collaborators write: "This similarity (to a geyser) suggests that a half an hour after the onset of the chain reaction, unbounded water was converted to steam, decreasing the thermal neutron flux and making the reactor sub-critical. It took at least two-and-a-half hours for the reactor to cool down until fission Xe (xenon) began to retain. Then the water returned to the reactor zone, providing neutron moderation and once again establishing a self-sustaining chain."
Prior to this calculation, it was known that the natural nuclear reactor operated two billion years ago for 150 million years at an average power of 100 kilowatts. The Washington University team solved the mystery of how the reactor worked and why it didn't blow up.
Meshik and his collaborators, Charles Hohenberg, Ph.D., Washington University professor of physics, and Olga Pravdivtseva, Ph.D., senior research scientist in physics, used a selective laser combined with sensitive, ion-counting mass spectrometry to concentrate on the sample's moderator, a uranium-free mineral assembly of lanthanum, cerium, strontium and calcium called alumophosphate. The xenon found and analyzed provides the story of this ancient natural nuclear reactor. Meshik and his colleagues inferred from the xenon analysis the mode of operation and also the method of safely storing nuclear wastes, particularly fission xenon and krypton.
"This is very impressive, to think this natural system not only went critical, it also safely stored the waste," said Meshik. "Nature is much smarter than we are. Nature is the first genius. We have all kinds of problems with modern-day nuclear reactors. This reactor is so independent, with no electronics, no models. Just using the fact that water boiled at the reactor site might give contemporary nuclear reactor researchers ideas on how to operate more safely and efficiently."
In 1952, the late Paul Kuroda predicted that if the right conditions existed, a natural nuclear reactor system could go critical. Twenty years later, noticing that uranium ore from the Oklo mine was depleted in 235 Uranium , it was discovered that the site had once been a natural nuclear reaction system.
"The big question we addressed was: When it reached criticality, why didn't it blow up?" Meshik said. "We found the answer in the xenon."
Critical means that a fissionable material has enough mass to sustain a reaction. There were two major theories on how the reactor operated. One held that the system burned up highly neutron-absorbing impurities such as rare earth isotopes or boron, and because of that the system shut down regularly, and different parts of the reactor might have operated at different times. The other involved the role of water acting as a neutron moderator. As the temperature of the reactor went up, water was converted to steam, reducing the neutron thermalisation and shutting down the chain reaction. The chain reaction re-started only when the reactor cooled down and the water increased again.
Analysis of the xenon, the largest concentration of xenon ever found in any natural material, confirmed the water method. It also revealed the role of alumophosphate as the system's waste absorber.
Xenon is extremely rare on earth and very characteristic of the fission process. Chemically inert, the element has nine isotopes and is abundant in many nuclear processes.
"You get a big diagnostic fingerprint with xenon, and it's easy to purify," said Hohenberg, who noted the importance of alumophosphate in the natural nuclear reactor.
"More krypton 85, a major waste from modern nuclear reactors, is getting piped into the atmosphere each year," he said. "Maybe this natural mode can suggest a safer solution."
Can there be a natural nuclear reactor in actual operation today?
"Today even the largest and richest uranium deposit cannot become a reactor because the present concentration of 235 U is too low - only about 0.72 percent," said Meshik. "However, because 235 U decays much faster than 238 U, in the past, 235 U was more abundant. For example, two billion years ago 235 U was five times higher, about three percent, approximately the concentration of enriched uranium used in modern commercial reactors."
Another vital condition for self-sustaining nuclear reaction is the high content of a moderator to slow the neutrons, Meshik said. Water, carbon, most organic compounds, silicon dioxide, calcium oxide and magnesium oxide all are natural neutron moderators. Also, the concentrations of neutron absorbents - iron, potassium, beryllium, and especially gadolinium, samarium, europium, cadmium and boron - should be low.
"Only when all of these requirements are met can a self-sustaining chain reaction occur," Meshik said.
-------- depleted uranium
No radiation threat from 747 crash, experts say
Broadcast News
October 29, 2004
http://www.canada.com/fortstjohn/story.html?id=ca8c934f-8d9c-4f40-8e9d-8e83029f0720
Investigators say radioactive ballast in the tail of the Boeing 747 cargo jet that crashed in Halifax two weeks ago does not pose a threat.
The Transportation safety Board's Bill Fowler says the protective metal coating covering it remained intact.
The tail broke off after hitting an earthern mound 300 metres beyond the end of the runway during the crash.
It didn't burn up like the rest of the fuselage.
Fowler says depleted uranium was used as ballast in the rudder and elevator portion of the older cargo jet's tail.
Newer jets use tungsten.
Depleted uranium is a dense, heavy waste produced during the making of nuclear fuel and weapons.
It's considered toxic if absorbed or inhaled into the body.
-------- iran
On the Issues: Iran Showdown Over Nuclear Plans Awaits Election Winner
By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 29, 2004; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7434-2004Oct28.html
For all the focus on foreign policy in this campaign, neither presidential candidate has spent much time explaining what may loom as the largest new challenge after Tuesday: what to do about Iran.
The United States faces a major test with Tehran over its nuclear program just three weeks after the U.S. election. Yet neither candidate has addressed the growing prospects that diplomacy may not work, that the world may be too divided to agree on punitive sanctions, and that military options, after Iraq, could spark major new domestic and international controversy.
And short of a new deal with Iran, a new president could face a showdown at the United Nations about the time of the inauguration in January, foreign policy analysts warn.
In the campaign, President Bush and Democratic candidate John F. Kerry have vowed to prevent Iran from converting its peaceful energy program into a nuclear weapons program. Beyond that, the difference between their positions is more subtle than substantive. Each has issued ultimatums and pressed for diplomacy.
Unable to issue a formal policy for four years because of internal divisions in his administration, Bush has long maintained a confrontational stance on Iran, a country he has called one of three in the "axis of evil." Only reluctantly has he recently agreed to let European leaders offer Iran a compromise to end the standoff. The deadline for an answer is Nov. 25, the next meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
But the Bush administration has already concluded that Iran will not accept the deal -- to scrap its own uranium enrichment in exchange for nuclear technology and fuel controlled by the outside world -- forcing the United States to press for international action at the United Nations.
"We believe that the Iranians are going to have to be referred to the Security Council because, when they refuse to live up to their obligations, that is the course that is prescribed," national security adviser Condoleezza Rice told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee on Monday.
In the second debate, Kerry pledged to "lead the world in the greatest counterproliferation effort. And if we have to get tough with Iran, believe me, we will get tough."
In a slight variation from Bush, Kerry earlier said that the United States, rather than Britain, France and Germany, should have initiated negotiations to curb Iran's nuclear potential. "I believe we could have done better. I think the United States should have offered the opportunity to provide the nuclear fuel, test them, see whether or not they were actually looking for it for peaceful purposes. If they weren't willing to work a deal, then we could have put sanctions together," he said in the first debate.
Kerry foreign policy adviser Richard C. Holbrooke, a former U.N. ambassador, told the AIPAC conference this week that the current European initiative is "self-evidently not going to ever succeed. And anyone who's worked with the Europeans knows this."
The Iran nuclear issue looms as the next big foreign policy challenge because it is "a crucial test of whether it is possible, by means short of the use of military force, to prevent a resourceful and determined country from acquiring nuclear weapons," said Robert J. Einhorn, former assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation, who is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
But whoever wins the election is likely to quickly face problems, foreign policy analysts warn. Unless a last-minute deal emerges, they say the United States will have to do serious arm-twisting to get the minimum number of votes at the IAEA to refer Iran to the United Nations.
Iran has become a symbol for a growing number of developing nations, such as Brazil, that want nuclear energy -- and control over their own fuel-production cycles without international intervention. Many Third World countries sympathize with Tehran's position that it will never permanently surrender the right to enrich uranium for nuclear energy, which the United States agrees is not illegal under the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Neither candidate has developed a detailed strategy on this broader aspect of proliferation, which Washington could be dealing with for decades in many countries, foreign policy analysts say. Unless Washington outlines a policy that applies globally, they add, an agreement with Iran could prove elusive because Tehran leaders argue theirs is the only country being deprived of a legal right and a technology important for peaceful development in the 21st century.
But even if the United States does prevail at the IAEA, it could face a "high-stakes confrontation" against other veto-wielding members at the United Nations about the time of the inauguration, Einhorn said. Any drastic measure, such as an oil embargo, will also be "impossible," he added, because of shifting global economic realities and Iran's leverage. China buys 17 percent of its oil from Iran and European Union countries buy almost 7 percent, oil analysts say.
"Taking this to the Security Council is not going to solve much because it is unlikely to vote serious sanctions against Iran," said Shaul Bakhash, an Iran specialist at George Mason University and author of "The Reign of the Ayatollahs." "China depends on Iran for large amounts of oil and is eager to secure supplies for years to come, so it won't go along with sanctions."
The best the next president may initially achieve is U.N. pressure on Iran to be more cooperative with the IAEA, which analysts say would probably have minimal impact on Tehran.
Staff writer Glenn Kessler contributed to this report.
-------- iraq / inspections
Photos point to removal of weapons
October 29, 2004
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20041028-115519-3700r.htm
U.S. intelligence agencies have obtained satellite photographs of truck convoys that were at several weapons sites in Iraq in the weeks before U.S. military operations were launched, defense officials said yesterday.
The photographs indicate that Iraq was moving arms and equipment from its known weapons sites, said officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
According to one official, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, known as NGA, "documented the movement of long convoys of trucks from various areas around Baghdad to the Syrian border."
The official said the convoys are believed to include shipments of sensitive armaments, including equipment used in making plastic explosives and nuclear weapons.
About 380 tons of RDX and HMX, used in making such arms, were reported missing from the Al-Qaqaa weapons facility, though the Pentagon and an embedded NBC News correspondent said the facility appeared to have been emptied by the time U.S. forces got there.
The photographs bolster the claims of Pentagon official John A. Shaw, who told The Washington Times on Wednesday that recent intelligence reports indicate Russian special forces units took part in a sophisticated dispersal operation from January 2003 to March 2003 to move key weapons out of Iraq.
In Moscow, the Russian government denied that its forces were involved in removing weapons from Iraq, dismissing the claims as "far-fetched and ridiculous."
"I can state officially that the Russian Defense Ministry and its structural divisions could not have been involved in the disappearance of the explosives, because Russian servicemen were not in Iraq long before the beginning of the American-British operation in that country," Defense Ministry spokesman Col. Vyacheslav Sedov told Interfax news agency.
Bush administration officials reacted cautiously to information provided by Mr. Shaw, who said details of the Russian "spetsnaz" forces' involvement in a program of document-shredding and weapons dispersal came from two European intelligence services.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters aboard Air Force One that he was unaware of the information in The Times report.
"I know that there is some new information that has come to light in the last couple of days," Mr. McClellan said, noting that another news report said the amount of high-explosive materials may have been less than 377 tons, as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) claims.
Asked about foreign intelligence reports of Russian troops moving Iraq's weapons to Syria, Mr. McClellan said, "I have no information that points in that direction."
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said in a interview on the Laura Ingraham radio show that she also was not aware of the information about Russian troops relocating Saddam's weapons to Syria, Lebanon and possibly Iran.
Defense officials said the information has been closely held within the Pentagon because Mr. Shaw, a deputy undersecretary of defense of international technology security, has been working with the Pentagon inspector general in investigating the Russian role in the weapons transfers.
Information in the inspector general office is not widely shared within the policy and intelligence communities.
The Pentagon is still investigating the fate of the explosives and possible Russian involvement.
Officials said numerous intelligence reports in the past two years indicate Saddam used trucks and aircraft to withdraw weapons from Iraq before March 2003. However, the new information indicates that Russian troops were directly involved in assisting the Iraqi military and intelligence services to secure and move the arms.
Documents reviewed by one defense official include specific Russian military unit itineraries for the truck convoys.
The arms that were taken out of the country included missile parts, nuclear-related equipment, tank and aircraft parts, and chemicals used in making poison gas weapons, the official said.
Regarding the satellite photographs, defense officials said the photographs bolster the information obtained from the European intelligence services on the Russian arms-removal program.
The Russian special forces troops were housed at a computer center near the Russian Embassy in Baghdad and left the country shortly before the U.S. invasion was launched March 20, 2003.
Harold Hough, a satellite photographic specialist, said commercial satellite images taken shortly before U.S. forces reached Baghdad revealed Russian transport aircraft at Baghdad's international airport near a warehouse.
"My thought was that the Russians were eager to get something out of Iraq quickly," Mr. Hough said. "But it is quite possible that the aircraft was used to transport the Russian forces."
Also yesterday, the IAEA said it warned the United States about the vulnerability of explosives stored at Al-Qaqaa after Iraq's Tuwaitha nuclear complex was looted.
"After we heard reports of looting at the Tuwaitha site in April 2003, the agency's chief Iraq inspectors alerted American officials that we were concerned about the security of the high explosives stored at Al-Qaqaa," IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming told the Associated Press.
She did not say which officials were notified or exactly when.
--------
Analysis Munitions Issue Dwarfs the Big Picture
By Bradley Graham and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, October 29, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7418-2004Oct28.html
The 377 tons of Iraqi explosives whose reported disappearance has dominated the past few days of presidential campaigning represent only a tiny fraction of the vast quantities of other munitions unaccounted for since the fall of Saddam Hussein's government 18 months ago.
U.S. military commanders estimated last fall that Iraqi military sites contained 650,000 to 1 million tons of explosives, artillery shells, aviation bombs and other ammunition. The Bush administration cited official figures this week showing about 400,000 tons destroyed or in the process of being eliminated. That leaves the whereabouts of more than 250,000 tons unknown.
Against that background, this week's assertions by Sen. John F. Kerry's campaign about the few hundred tons said to have vanished from Iraq's Qaqaa facility have struck some defense experts as exaggerated.
"There is something truly absurd about focusing on 377 tons of rather ordinary explosives, regardless of what actually happened at al Qaqaa," Anthony H. Cordesman, a senior analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote in an assessment yesterday. "The munitions at al Qaqaa were at most around 0.06 percent of the total."
Retired Army Gen. Wayne A. Downing, who served briefly as President Bush's adviser on counterterrorism and has criticized some aspects of the administration's performance, said yesterday he considered the missing-explosives issue "bogus."
Kerry has seized on the incident to press his charge that Bush mishandled the invasion of Iraq, failing, among other things, to secure sites containing dangerous Iraqi munitions, some of which were stored in bunkers marked with International Atomic Energy Agency seals to designate particular international concern.
Bush administration officials have refused to accept a statement issued earlier this month by a senior official of Iraq's interim government that the munitions disappeared after the April 9, 2003, fall of Baghdad "due to a lack of security." Iraqi authorities have not offered any supporting evidence, and Bush administration officials have suggested the explosives may have been removed earlier by Iraqi forces. Several defense analysts said Kerry's focus on Qaqaa has resonated mainly because the explosives issue has become symbolic of the Bush administration's handling of Iraq, especially its long-running insistence that it has a sufficient number of U.S. forces there.
"The issue has been out there for a long time," said James Bodner, who helped formulate Iraq policy in the Clinton-era Pentagon. "Are we properly manned to carry out the specific military tasks that need to be accomplished? If the answer is, 'Yes, we have enough troops,' then why are these facilities unguarded?"
Whatever the case, the military significance of the loss, in a country awash with far larger amounts of munitions, is open to question.
The most powerful of the three explosives -- HMX -- can be used in a trigger for nuclear devices, which is why it was placed under IAEA seal. But HMX is obtainable elsewhere, and the chief U.S. weapons investigator in Iraq, Charles A. Duelfer, has acknowledged that the Iraqi stockpile posed no particular concern in this regard.
Matthew Bunn, a Harvard University expert in nuclear weapons and terrorism, said that although he is concerned by the removal of the explosives, he is far more worried by IAEA reports that large quantities of sophisticated equipment, such as electron beam welders, were looted and removed from Iraq's nuclear weapons program. "That material, which would be quite useful to a nuclear weapons program, was also well known to the United States, was not guarded and today is probably in hostile hands," with Iran being a likely recipient, said Bunn, who noted that he has been advising the Kerry campaign but does not speak for it.
HMX and the two other types of explosives reported missing from Qaqaa -- RDX and PETN -- could also be used in devices targeting U.S. forces in Iraq. But defense officials say the many car bombs and roadside explosive devices that have menaced U.S. forces and other foreigners in Iraq have tended to be constructed from old artillery shells and other munitions, which remain in ample supply in Iraq.
Pentagon officials, reconstructing a timeline of what might have occurred at Qaqaa, believe they have narrowed the window for the disappearance to a two-month period between mid-March 2003, when the IAEA verified its seals were still in place, and May 2003, when U.S. military search teams arrived at the site and found it had been looted, stripped and vandalized. The search teams saw none of the explosives that were once under seal.
Although invading U.S. forces never secured the facility, defense officials have disputed the notion that such a large quantity of explosives could have been transported without notice by the U.S. military.
Bolstering the possibility that the munitions were removed before U.S. troops arrived, defense officials say, is the Hussein government's history of moving weapons to elude air attack. An official also said intelligence photos show lots of activity at Qaqaa before U.S. forces reached the site.
The Pentagon has contributed to confusion surrounding the case. John A. Shaw, deputy undersecretary for international technology and security, told the Washington Times on Wednesday that Russian troops, working with Iraqi intelligence, "almost certainly" removed the explosives from Qaqaa. Yesterday, other senior defense officials, after reviewing Pentagon intelligence reports, said Shaw's remarks had no basis in fact.
Other confusion has arisen over how much explosive material had been stored at Qaqaa. The 377-ton figure was cited by Iraq's interim government in a letter to the IAEA earlier this month first reporting the amount missing. That figure was based on a Hussein government declaration in July 2003 of what existed at the site. It included about 155 tons of RDX. On Wednesday, ABC News reported that IAEA documents indicated there were only about 3 tons of RDX remaining at Qaqaa in January 2003, two months before the U.S.-led invasion. Yesterday, however, IAEA officials said records showed another 138 tons of the RDX were being kept then at a military warehouse used by Qaqaa's managers at Mahaweel, 25 miles away. The IAEA has not accounted for an additional 14 tons in the July 2003 Iraqi declaration.
Melissa Fleming, an IAEA spokeswoman, said yesterday that the IAEA warned the United States in April 2003 of concerns about security at Qaqaa. Other U.N. officials said repeated efforts were made for more than a year to get answers from the U.S. government about the explosives and other weapons-related materials that had been under U.N. seal before the war.
A fresh request to the Iraqi government generated the Oct. 10 reply that the explosives were no longer at Qaqaa.
Staff writers Colum Lynch at the United Nations and Dafna Linzer in New York contributed to this report.
--------
Pentagon Seeks to Account for Explosives
October 29, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-US-Iraq-Weapons.html?oref=login
WASHINGTON (AP) -- An Army unit removed 250 tons of ammunition from the Al-Qaqaa weapons depot in April 2003 and later destroyed it, the company's former commander said Friday. A Pentagon spokesman said some was of the same type as the missing explosives that have become a major issue in the presidential campaign.
But those 250 tons were not located under the seal of the International Atomic Energy Agency -- as the missing high-grade explosives had been -- and Pentagon spokesman Larry Di Rita could not definitely say whether they were part of the missing 377 tons.
Maj. Austin Pearson, speaking at a press conference at the Pentagon, said his team removed 250 tons of TNT, plastic explosives, detonation cords, and white phosporous rounds on April 13, 2003 -- 10 days after U.S. forces first reached the Al Qaqaa site.
``I did not see any IAEA seals at any of the locations we went into. I was not looking for that,'' Pearson said.
Di Rita sought to point to Pearson's comments as evidence that some RDX, one of the high-energy explosives, might have been removed from the site. RDX is also known as plastic explosive.
But Di Rita acknowledged: ``I can't say RDX that was on the list of IAEA is what the major pulled out. ... We believe that some of the things they were pulling out of there were RDX.''
Further study was needed, Di Rita said.
Meanwhile, videotape shot by a Minnesota television crew traveling with U.S. troops in Iraq when they first opened the bunkers at the Al-Qaqaa munitions base nine days after the fall of Saddam Hussein shows what appeared to be high explosives still in barrels and bearing the markings of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The video taken by KSTP of St. Paul on April 18, 2003, could reinforce suggestions that tons of explosives missing from a munitions installation in Iraq were looted after the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. The video was broadcast nationally Thursday on ABC.
``The photographs are consistent with what I know of Al-Qaqaa,'' David A. Kay, a former American official who directed the hunt in Iraq for unconventional weapons and visited the site, told The New York Times. ``The damning thing is the seals. The Iraqis didn't use seals on anything. So I'm absolutely sure that's an IAEA seal.''
Whether Saddam Hussein's forces removed the explosives before U.S. forces arrived on April 3, 2003, or whether they fell into the hands of looters and insurgents afterward -- because the site was not guarded by U.S. troops -- has become a key issue in the campaign.
Pearson's comments raise further questions about the chain of events surrounding these explosives, the disappearance of which has been repeatedly cited by Democrat John Kerry as evidence of the Bush administration's poor handling of the war in Iraq.
Still, 377 tons of explosives amount to a tiny fraction of the weaponry in Iraq. U.S. forces have already destroyed, or have slated to destroyed, more than 400,000 tons of all manner of Iraqi weapons and ammunition. But at least another 250,000 tons from Saddam's regime remain unaccounted for, and some has undoubtedly fallen into the hands of insurgents.
The window in which the explosives were most likely removed from Al-Qaqaa begins on March 15, 2003 -- five days before the war started -- and ends in late May, when a U.S. weapons inspection team declared the depot stripped and looted.
Two weeks ago, Iraqi officials told the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency that the explosives vanished as a result of ``theft and looting ... due to lack of security.''
The explosives were known to be housed in storage bunkers at the sprawling Al-Qaqaa complex and nearby structures. U.N. nuclear inspectors placed fresh seals over the bunker doors in January 2003. The inspectors visited Al-Qaqaa for the last time that March 15 and reported that the seals were not broken; concluding the weapons were still inside at the time.
A U.S. military reconaissance image, taken of Al Qaqaa on March 17, shows two vehicles, presumably Iraqi, outside a bunker at Al-Qaqaa. But Di Rita said that bunker was not known to contain any of the 377 tons, and that the image only shows that there was activity at the depot after U.N. inspectors left.
Elements of the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division arrived in the area on April 3 en route to Baghdad. They fought a battle with Iraqi forces inside Al Qaqaa and moved on, leaving a battalion behind to clear out enemy fighters in the area. Troops found other weapons, including artillery shells, on the base, he said. They didn't specifically search for the 377 tons of high explosives that are missing. On April 6, the battalion left for Baghdad.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others have advanced the theory that the materials were removed before U.S. forces arrived, saying looting that much material would be impossible by small-scale thieves, and that a large-scale theft would have involved lots of trucks and would have been detected.
About four days later, another large unit, the 2nd Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division, moved into the area. That unit did not search Al-Qaqaa. A unit spokesman said there was heavy looting in the area at the time.
On April 13, Pearson's ordnance-disposal team arrived and took the 250 tons out in a day. That materiel was later destroyed by U.S. forces. His comments may suggest that some of it was still there when U.S. forces arrived. The videotape of the Minnesota television crew traveling with the 101st Airborne was shot April 18.
U.S. weapons hunters did not give the area a thorough search until May, when they visited on three occasions, starting May 8. They searched every building on the compound over the course of those three visits, but did not find any material or explosives that had been marked by the IAEA.
--------
MISSING EXPLOSIVES
Video Shows G.I.'s at Weapon Cache
October 29, 2004
By WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/29/politics/29bomb.html?ei=5094&en=7b767c25018de326&hp=&ex=1099108800&partner=homepage&pagewanted=all&position=
A videotape made by a television crew with American troops when they opened bunkers at a sprawling Iraqi munitions complex south of Baghdad shows a huge supply of explosives still there nine days after the fall of Saddam Hussein, apparently including some sealed earlier by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The tape, broadcast on Wednesday night by the ABC affiliate in Minneapolis, appeared to confirm a warning given earlier this month to the agency by Iraqi officials, who said that hundreds of tons of high-grade explosives, powerful enough to bring down buildings or detonate nuclear weapons, had vanished from the site after the invasion of Iraq.
The question of whether the material was removed by Mr. Hussein's forces in the days before the invasion, or looted later because it was unguarded, has become a heated dispute on the campaign trail, with Senator John Kerry accusing President Bush of incompetence, and Mr. Bush saying it is unclear when the material disappeared and rejecting what he calls Mr. Kerry's "wild charges."
Weapons experts familiar with the work of the international inspectors in Iraq say the videotape appears identical to photographs that the inspectors took of the explosives, which were put under seal before the war. One frame shows what the experts say is a seal, with narrow wires that would have to be broken if anyone entered through the main door of the bunker.
The agency said that when it left Iraq in mid-March, only days before the war began, the only bunkers bearing its seals at the huge complex contained the explosive known as HMX, which the agency had monitored because it could be used in a nuclear weapons program. It is now clear that program had ground to a halt.
The New York Times and CBS reported on Monday that Iraqi officials had told the agency earlier this month that the explosives were missing, and that they were looted after April 9, 2003, the day Baghdad fell.
Yesterday evening, the Pentagon released a satellite image of the complex taken just two days after the inspectors left, showing a few trucks parked in front of some bunkers. It is not clear they are the bunkers with the high explosives.
"All we are trying to demonstrate is that after the I.A.E.A. left, and the place was under Saddam's control, there was activity," said Lawrence DiRita, the Pentagon spokesman. It is not clear from the photo what activity, if any, was under way.
On Thursday, a top Iraqi official said the interim government had spoken to witnesses who said the material was still at Al Qaqaa at the time Baghdad fell.
The videotape , taken by KSTP-TV, an ABC affiliate in Minneapolis-St. Paul, shows troops breaking into a bunker and opening boxes and examining barrels. Many of the containers are marked "explosive." One box is marked "Al Qaqaa State Establishment," apparently a shipping label from a manufacturer.
The ABC crew said the video was taken on April 18. The timing is critical to the debate in the presidential campaign. By the Pentagon's own account, units of the 101st Airborne Division were near Al Qaqaa for what Mr. DiRita said was "two to three weeks," starting April 10.
Then they headed north to Baghdad, and the site was apparently left unguarded. By the time special weapons teams returned to Al Qaqaa in May, the explosives were apparently gone.
In disputing claims by Mr. Kerry that the Americans had lost the explosives, a senior administration official said Thursday, "We don't know all the facts and no one should be jumping to conclusions." Al Qaqaa, the official said, "was not controlled for three weeks after the I.A.E.A. left," and added "there are a lot of dots we have to connect."
The Pentagon also notes that it has destroyed 400,000 tons of munitions from thousands of sites across Iraq, and that the explosives at Al Qaqaa account for "one-tenth of 1 percent" of that amount.
The Minneapolis television crew was with an Army unit that was camped near Al Qaqaa, members of the crew said. The reporter and cameraman said that although they were not told specifically that they were being taken to Al Qaqaa by the military, their videotape matches pictures of the site taken by United Nations weapons inspectors, according to weapons experts.
"The photographs are consistent with what I know of Al Qaqaa," said David A. Kay, a former American official who led the recent hunt in Iraq for unconventional weapons and visited the vast site. "The damning thing is the seals. The Iraqis didn't use seals on anything. So I'm absolutely sure that's an I.A.E.A. seal."
One weapons expert said the videotape and some of the agency's photographs of the HMX stockpiles "were such good matches it looked like they were taken by the same camera on the same day."
Independent experts said several other factors - the geography; the number of bunkers; the seals on some of the bunker doors; the boxes, crates and barrels similar to those seen by weapon inspectors - confirm that the videotape was taken at Al Qaqaa.
"There's not another place that you would mistake it for," said Dean Staley, the KSTP reporter, who now works in Seattle.
The accidental news encounter began last year after the invasion, Mr. Staley recalled in an interview. Their Army unit arrived in the region on Friday, April 11, and made camp. The Fifth Battalion of the 101st Airborne's 159th Aviation Brigade flew helicopter missions from the camp in the Iraqi desert, moving troops and supplies to the front.
A week later, on Friday, April 18, two journalists recalled, they joined two soldiers who were driving in a Humvee to investigate the nearby bunkers. Among other things, wandering inside the cavernous buildings offered the prospect of relief from the desert sun.
"It was just by chance that we were able to go," said Joe Caffrey, the team's photographer. "They wanted to go out and we asked to tag along."
Mr. Caffrey provided The New York Times with the latitude and longitude of the camp, which places it between 1.5 and 3 miles southeast of Al Qaqaa bunkers. A commercial satellite photograph of the region shows that the camp was close to the storage site. Mr. Caffrey said the soldiers used bolt cutters to cut through chains with locks on them, as well as seals. He said the seals appeared to be lead disks attached to very thin wires that were wrapped around the doors of the bunker entrances, forming a barrier easily cut in two.
They visited a half dozen bunkers, he said. The gloomy interiors revealed long rows of boxes, crates and barrels, what independent experts said were three kinds of HMX containers shipped to Iraq from France, China and Yugoslavia.
The team opened storage containers, some of which contained white powder that independent experts said was consistent with HMX.
"The soldiers were pretty much in awe of what they were seeing," Mr. Caffrey recalled. "They were saying their E.O.D. - Explosive Ordinance Division, people who blow this kind of stuff up - would have a field day."
The journalists filmed roughly 25 minutes of video. Mr. Caffrey added that the team left the bunker doors open. "It would have been easy for anybody to get in," he said.
Mr. Staley recalled that during the drive back to camp, they saw a red Toyota pickup truck with some Iraqis in it. "Our impression was they were looters," he said. "This was a no man's land. It was a huge facility, and we worried that they were bad guys who might come up on us."
The two journalists filed a short story, which ran soon thereafter in Minneapolis-St. Paul.
In the interview, Mr. Caffrey said he had carefully rechecked the date on the cassette for his camera, adding that he was sure it was April 18, 2003.
Yesterday Mohamed al-Sharaa, director of the national monitoring directorate at the Iraq Ministry of Science and Technology, explained for the first time why Iraqi officials had specified in their letter to the United Nations agency that the explosives had been looted after April 9, 2003. "We have some witnesses," Mr. Sharaa said outside his office at the ministry. "They say that the materials," he added, were "in this site after April 9."
The witnesses were people working at Al Qaqaa, Mr. Sharaa said. Still, he said, the evidence is not yet definitive, and "we don't say it's impossible" that the material was somehow taken out of Al Qaqaa before the American forces came through the area. The first American forces arrived at Al Qaqaa on April 3.
Rashad M. Omar, the minister of science and technology, said that as far as he was concerned, the exact timing of the disappearance remained unknown. "How, where, when is it taken, all these questions, we don't have answers," Dr. Omar said.
He said a committee headed by himself was about to undertake an investigation of the disappearance, in parallel with American efforts to clear up the mystery. Dr. Omar said that he was extremely confident that the investigations would determine the facts of the case.
"The quantity was so huge," Dr. Omar said. "Somebody must know what happened to the material. I am sure the facts will not be hidden for a long time."
James Glanz contributed reportingfrom Baghdad for this article.
--------
'No-fly' zone perils were for Iraqis, not allied pilots
October 29, 2004
St. Petersburg Times
By SUSAN TAYLOR MARTIN
http://www.sptimes.com/2004/10/29/Columns/_No_fly__zone_perils_.shtml
Among the reasons U.S. Senate candidate Mel Martinez supported the war in Iraq was the alleged danger faced by U.S. and British pilots who protected "no-fly" zones in that country before the 2003 invasion.
In his first debate with Betty Castor, the Orlando Republican said that pilots were fired on "almost daily" and that "our men and women in uniform flying those aircraft were risking their lives."
Technically, that's true. But a closer look at the history of the no-fly zones shows that the real risk was to innocent Iraqis. Over an 11-year period, hundreds of civilians, including children, were killed or injured by U.S. and British airstrikes, while not a single allied pilot was shot down or killed by Iraqi fire.
"The casualties were in the very areas allegedly established to protect people," Hans von Sponeck, then coordinator of the U.N. humanitarian program in Iraq, said in 2002. "The cruel reality is that people are dying as a result of these no-fly zones."
After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the United States, Britain and France created the zones in northern and southern Iraq to keep Saddam Hussein's forces from bombing rebellious groups in those regions. All Iraqi planes were grounded, but allied jets routinely took to the skies, hitting Iraq's air defense systems and other military targets.
"It was a permanent, low-level war," says James Paul, executive director of Global Policy Forum, which monitors U.N. policymaking. "I don't think citizens of the United States and the U.K. realized the intensity of this thing - there were thousands of sorties flown at huge expense."
By 2002, it became clear that the United States and Britain viewed the main purpose of the no-fly zones as more military than humanitarian.
With so many bombs dropped and missiles fired, civilian casualties were inevitable.
On Jan. 25, 1999, Saeidh Hassan and her three daughters were at home in Basra, a southern port city, when a U.S. missile slammed into their apartment block. Trapped under concrete and steel, Mrs. Hassan called to her daughters but got no answer.
All three were killed instantly. A neighbor boy also died and more than 60 people were critically injured.
U.S. Central Command in Tampa said the strike was a "misfiring," and denied that the allies targeted civilians. Yet that year alone, there were 132 bombings that killed 120 Iraqis and injured 220, the U.N.'s von Sponeck found. Allied strikes also destroyed farms and other civilian property.
"How at a (33,000)-foot height can you protect a population?" von Sponeck wondered. "That is a fantasy."
By 2002, it became clear that the United States and Britain viewed the main purpose of the no-fly zones as more military than humanitarian. (France, concerned by the casualties, dropped out of the coalition in 1996.)
"Since the current Bush administration took power," journalist Jeremy Scahill wrote from Baghdad in 2002, "there has been a significant increase in the frequency and intensity of the bombings, particularly in the south of the country.
"The administration has used the zones to pre-emptively degrade Iraq's already limited ability to defend against a large-scale U.S. attack while not citing a single incident of attempted repression of Shiite or Kurdish populations as a justification."
By late 2002 - just a few months before the invasion - the allied sorties seemed more intended to frighten Iraqis than protect them. U.S. warplanes dropped leaflets in the no-fly zones with pictures of an explosion and a cowering Iraqi family.
"Before you engage coalition aircraft, think about the consequences," the flier warned in Arabic.
U.S. military officials say allied planes were repeatedly threatened while patrolling the zones - 470times in one 18-month period. Given that not a single pilot was killed or injured, though, does Martinez think the threat was exaggerated?
"I know (Defense) Secretary (Donald) Rumsfeld didn't think it because I had that discussion on and on prior to the war," Martinez, a former Bush Cabinet member, said Thursday.
But for Iraqis, there was no question who faced the real danger. As Dr. Jawa Al-Ali, a Basra physician, told the St. Petersburg Times in 2000: "The Americans and British say we are protecting you with our airplanes, but at the same time they are killing us on the ground."
Times staff writer Steve Bousquet contributed to this column. Susan Taylor Martin can be contacted at susan@sptimes.com
-------- israel
No Swedish asylum for Israeli nuclear whistleblower Vanunu
(AFP)
Oct 29, 2004 http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20041029/wl_mideast_afp/israel_nuclear_vanunu_041029183541
STOCKHOLM (AFP) - Mordechai Vanunu, who was freed in April after 18 years in an Israeli prison for revealing the country's nuclear program, will not receive asylum in Sweden, an immigration department official said.
"Mordechai Vanunu had applied for asylum in Sweden and I think in several other countries ... We have rejected his application," Mats Baurmann of the Swedish Migration Board told AFP.
The rejection, Baurmann explained, had to do with the fact that Vanunu is still living in Israel, meaning that he can not technically be considered a refugee.
"We haven't tried his case at all, because he is not considered a refugee. Had he been in Sweden, we would have been required by law to try his case, and even if he had been living in a third country we may have taken him in on a special refugee quota.
"But he's living in Israel, so he is not a refugee," he said.
Since his release, Vanunu, 50, has frequently said he wants to leave Israel where he is widely reviled as a traitor for not only for revealing the Jewish state's nuclear ambitions -- the country is widely suspected to have nuclear weapons -- but also for converting to Christianity.
"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 in a BBC interview earlier this week.
Vanunu was abducted by Israeli secret service agents in Italy, smuggled back to Israel and then jailed in 1986 after leaking top-secret details about the Dimona plant to the Sunday Times.
Since his release from prison on April 21, he has been subject to a series of sweeping restrictions in Israel, including a ban on travelling abroad as well as holding unauthorized meetings with foreigners.
-------- korea
Powell says no intent to attack North Korea
The Korea Herald
October 29, 2004
http://www.koreaherald.co.kr/SITE/data/html_dir/2004/10/27/200410270028.asp
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell yesterday reiterated that the United States has no intent to attack North Korea, and urged the communist regime to return to the discussion table.
"We don't intend to attack North Korea; we have no hostile intent, notwithstanding their claims," Powell said in a joint news conference with Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon.
"The North Koreans are likely to hold back and keep putting forward conditions to the talks. We hope that in the very near future, the North Koreans will see that it is in their interest to have the talks started again," Powell said.
Stressing that it is "time to move forward" in the six-nation disarmament talks, Powell also said bringing the nuclear matter to a conclusion will mobilize all of the international community into helping North Korea and its people toward an improved life.
Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon also stressed the importance of improving life in the North, as well as the advancement of human rights there.
"With regard to the North Korean human rights act, it is my government's view that human rights issues are universal and that human rights should be upheld anywhere in the world," Ban said.
"This human rights matter should not have a negative effect on the current South-North talks that are going on and also the six-party process," he added.
Powell also told reporters that Washington does not intend to change its previous proposal made to Pyongyang during the third round of six-nation talks in Beijing back in June.
"We have a good proposal on the table we modified for the third round of six-party talks to show flexibility and to accommodate the interest of the other parties," he said.
"The way to move forward is to have the next round of six party talks," Powell said, referring to the stalled talks among the United States, the two Koreas, China, Japan and Russia.
He added that during his visit the United States and South Korea reconfirmed their commitment to a "peaceful denuclearized Korean Peninsula."
"We agreed to continue devoting maximum efforts to achieving this goal through multilateral diplomacy and six-party talks," Powell said, adding,
"Clearly, everybody wants to see the next round of six-party talks get started."
U.S. officials believe North Korea is biding its time on the six-party talks, sensing that Democratic candidate John Kerry might win the election and be a better negotiating partner than President George W. Bush.
Powell's overnight 20-hour trip, divided literally into minutes, consisted of meetings with President Roh Moo-hyun, Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon and Unification Minister Chung Dong-young.
President Roh, in their meeting, underscored the roles of the United States, China, Japan and Russia in peacefully resolving the nuclear dispute, presidential aides said.
Roh asked Washington to help Pyongyang revive its economy and join the international community, and Powell vowed to make more efforts to resume the six-party talks after the U.S. election, the officials said.
The nuclear dispute erupted exactly two years ago when U.S. officials said North Korea had acknowledged having a secret uranium-based arms program in violation of international agreements.
The six-party talks have engaged in discussions to peacefully resolve the nuclear standoff. But North Korea refused to attend a fourth round of meetings in September, citing Washington's "hostile" policy toward it and South Korea's past nuclear activities.
Early last month, South Korea acknowledged that its scientists had experimented with plutonium and uranium, the two key ingredients in making atomic weapons, in 1982 and 2000, respectively.
In an earlier meeting with Unification Minister Chung Dong-young, Powell said that the South's past nuclear experiments are insignificant and cannot be compared with the weapons programs that have been pursued by North Korea and Iran, according to the ministry spokesman.
Seoul claimed that the experiments were not part of any weapons program but Pyongyang has refused to accept the explanations. The issue will be discussed in detail when the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency holds a board meeting in late November.
Wrapping up his visit in Seoul, Powell met with a group of 31 local university students at the U.S. ambassador's residence in Seoul to share with them Washington's foreign policies.
Explaining that the Pentagon's newly implemented global defense posture plan is a system that meets the needs of the 21st century, Powell said the reduction of Uncle Sam's forces in Korea will not in any way weaken the deterrence or alliance here.
"I think that our military will be able to demonstrate to the Korean people, that even though our numbers have gone down the technology has gotten better °¶ and there will be no weakening of the deterrence of the U.S. presence," Powell said. "There is no way in which the United States can ever turn away from Korea, say 'goodbye, you're on your own.'"
Pointing out that Korea and the United States have been together for more than half a century, Powell said "This creates a bond that just doesn't just go away. We will stay as long as the Korean people want us to stay,"
"Even during the periods of anti American sentiment when people were protesting our presence, I think most Korean people understood that it was American military presence that was creating a condition of security and stability on northeast Asia."
(bluelle@heraldm.com)
By Choi Soung-ah
-----
South Korea disagrees with U.S. proposal on six-party talks
Knight Ridder Newspapers
By Renee Schoof
Oct 29, 2004
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/10021010.htm
SEOUL, South Korea - South Korea's foreign minister called Tuesday "for a more creative and realistic" proposal that would lure North Korea back to six-nation talks over its nuclear program.
The position differed from that of visiting Secretary of State Colin Powell, who said the United States already had a good proposal on the table.
Powell, wrapping up a trip to Japan, China and South Korea, said leaders of all three countries agreed to press North Korea to return to the talks as soon as possible, but there were indications that they weren't unified on the best approach.
South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon, appearing with Powell at a news conference, said he told Powell that the countries involved in the talks "must come up with a more creative and realistic proposal" to get North Korea back to the negotiating table.
On Monday, Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing had called on the United States to be more flexible.
But Powell said Tuesday that he saw no reason for a new proposal. In June, the United States "put forward a new position, which we believe was a balanced position showing flexibility on our side as we try to deal with the concerns" raised by North Korea, he said.
"The way to move forward is to have the next round of six-party talks so that we can discuss that proposal and not have negotiations with ourselves at press conferences," he said.
A fourth round of talks planned for September was canceled after North Korea refused to attend. The six countries are North and South Korea, China, Japan, the United States and Russia.
Under the June proposal, South Korea and Japan would provide North Korea with fuel for energy once Pyongyang declared that it planned to give up its nuclear weapons programs. The United States would offer a formal guarantee that it wouldn't attack after North Korea demonstrated seriousness about not developing a nuclear arsenal. The proposal holds out the possibility of U.S. aid after weapons programs are eliminated in a verifiable way.
The nuclear crisis arose in 2002 when U.S. officials said North Korea admitted that it had a secret uranium-enrichment program that could provide material for nuclear weapons. North Korea then threw out international inspectors and said it had started reprocessing spent plutonium, an alternate nuclear-weapons material.
U.S. analysts estimate that North Korea had material for one or two nuclear weapons before the crisis and may have reprocessed enough plutonium since then for several more.
North Korea on Tuesday repeated its conditions for resuming the talks: an end to America's "hostile policy," U.S. compensation for freezing its nuclear programs and a promise to discuss South Korea's nuclear experiments at the talks.
In Seoul, the South Korean foreign minister said his government had concerns about a new U.S. law, the North Korea Human Rights Act, that links American aid to North Korea with Pyongyang's progress on human rights such as freedom of speech and religion. The law calls for human rights to be part of the talks on ending North Korea's nuclear weapons programs.
Ban said North Korea's "particular situation" must be taken into consideration and that the American emphasis on rights shouldn't be allowed to have "a negative effect on North-South (Korean) talks and the six-party talks."
Earlier on Tuesday, South Korean soldiers patrolling the heavily militarized boundary with North Korea found two holes cut in wire barriers about 40 miles north of Seoul, raising the possibility that North Korean troops might have infiltrated the South the day of Powell's visit. South Korean troops put up more roadblocks and conducted search operations. Powell said it was a small breach and didn't come up in his discussions.
Powell also met with South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun and Unification Minister Chung Dong-young, whose duties include North Korea and national security.
Powell thanked South Korea for its contribution to the coalition forces in Iraq. South Korea has the third largest force there, after the United States and Britain, with 2,800 soldiers in Irbil, in northern Iraq. That's expected to increase to 3,600 by early November.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- nevada
Yucca Mountain Looms Over Vote
Nevada May Hinge on Candidates' Plans for Nuclear Waste
By Evelyn Nieves
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 29, 2004; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7362-2004Oct28.html
YUCCA MOUNTAIN, Nev., Oct. 28 -- Few signs of life disturb the lonely peace of Yucca Mountain. It juts above the scarred landscape of the Nevada Test Site, overlooking the Funeral Mountains of California's Death Valley and a rocky desert the color of tumbleweed.
The only community of sorts nearby is Amargosa Valley, a town of about 1,600 people spread over 455 square miles where the main attractions are a brothel, a saloon, an opera house and the sight of Yucca Mountain itself.
But all of Nevada cares deeply about the fate of Yucca Mountain, which stands 90 miles west of Las Vegas. Nevada cares so deeply that Yucca Mountain may decide whether President Bush or Sen. John F. Kerry wins the state's five electoral votes on Tuesday -- and with them, perhaps the presidency.
Most Nevadans are dead set against Yucca Mountain becoming the nation's nuclear dump site. In 2000, Bush, who defeated Vice President Al Gore in Nevada by four percentage points, told voters that he would approve Yucca Mountain as a burial ground for 77,000 tons of radioactive waste from 131 sites in 39 states based on "sound science." Bush approved the site in 2002 on the recommendation of the Energy Department -- a move Nevadans have not forgotten.
Not that the Democrats will let anyone here forget. A dizzying number of television ads over the past several weeks from the Kerry campaign, the National Democratic Committee and MoveOn.org all hammer home the point: Kerry is against using Yucca as a nuclear dump, Bush is for it.
And although terrorism, security, the war in Iraq and the economy are the big issues here, in a deadlocked race, pollsters say, Yucca Mountain could tip the balance.
Kerry repeated his promise to keep the nuclear waste away in a rally in Las Vegas on Tuesday. "How many broken promises do you need, Nevada?" Kerry said, adding that Bush promised he would not go forward on Yucca Mountain unless it was safe. "Nevada, not on my watch."
Two of the state's largest newspapers cited Yucca Mountain in endorsing Kerry. The Las Vegas Sun wrote: "President Bush campaigning in Nevada in 2000 masked his true stance on Yucca Mountain. . . . He pushed for Yucca Mountain almost from day one in the White House." The Reno Gazette-Journal used Harry M. Reid, the popular Democratic senator, to vouch for Kerry: "When Kerry says that he will not allow Yucca Mountain to be used as a nuclear waste repository, Reid says that Nevadans can believe him."
The latest polls show the race is a dead heat. A Reno Gazette-Journal/News 4 poll of likely voters released this week showed 49 percent for Bush and 47 percent for Kerry; 2 percent remained undecided, Ralph Nader received 1 percent and other candidates claimed 1 percent. The margin of error was plus or minus four percentage points.
Democrats and Republicans each claim about 40 percent of the electorate, but Clark County, encompassing not only Las Vegas but also booming suburbs such as Henderson, which helped the county become the fastest-growing region in the country in the 1990s, is a Democratic stronghold.
In the Gazette-Journal/News 4 poll, Kerry led Bush in Clark County, with 70 percent of the state's voters, 53 percent to 42 percent. Bush was ahead in Washoe County, the state's other population center, by 10 points, 53 percent to 43 percent.
"Yucca Mountain is what's probably making Kerry competitive in Nevada," said Del Ali, whose firm, Rockville-based Research 2000, conducted the latest poll.
"It's really not so much a Clark County issue since Kerry has to do well there anyway," Ali added. "But if Yucca Mountain pulls Bush's support under 55 percent in Washoe County and other rural parts of the state, Kerry will win."
Early voting, which ends Friday, has been heavy, suggesting a record turnout, according to state election officials. More than 200,000 people in Clark County had cast their ballots as of Wednesday, with Democrats holding the lead. Both parties say turning out their voters is key, as it is in all the swing states, and they have huge get-out-the-vote efforts underway, climaxing this weekend when thousands of volunteers are set to blanket the state.
Bush, like Kerry, campaigned in Nevada this week, and both are scheduled to bring in big-gun surrogates for the final lap of the race. Former president Bill Clinton, who carried Nevada twice, is to headline a rally Friday in Las Vegas. Vice President Cheney will be in Reno and parts of Clark County on Monday.
-------- new mexico
Man Living in Cave on Los Alamos Lab Land
Associated Press
October 29, 2004
http://start.earthlink.net/newsarticle?cat=10&aid=D861E5P80_story
LOS ALAMOS, N.M. - Authorities have evicted a man from a cave on Los Alamos National Laboratory land where they say he apparently lived for years with the comforts of home - a wood-burning stove, solar panels connected to car batteries for electricity and a satellite radio.
Los Alamos Deputy Fire Chief Doug Tucker said Roy Michael Moore's hideaway, which also was equipped with a bed and a glass front door, was discovered earlier Oct. 13 after a Department of Energy employee working at the Los Alamos site office noticed smoke wafting from the cave in a heavily wooded, steep canyon.
The employee reported the smoke to the fire department. Tucker said the smoke came from Moore's wood-burning stove.
Ten marijuana plants were found outside the cave. Moore, 56, has been charged with possession of a controlled substance and possession of drug paraphernalia, according to court documents. He pleaded not guilty and was released on bond.
An officer called to the site by firefighters pulled up the plants and confiscated about 21 ounces of dried marijuana, according to a statement of probable cause filed in magistrate court in Los Alamos.
Tucker said that as fire crews and lab security force members approached the cave after its discovery, they saw Moore and discovered "numerous" marijuana plants growing around the cave.
"From the campsite that I saw, he had been there quite a long time. ... I was really impressed with his ability to set up a camp," Tucker said.
He said it was impossible to see the cave or any sign of Moore from the edge of the 75- to 100-foot cliff above, which is inaccessible because of a tall fence.
The lab has not used the restricted area where the cave is located for years, said Bernie Pleau, a spokesman for the department and the National Nuclear Security Administration in Los Alamos. It is about 50 yards out his office door and down the cliff, he said.
"I don't know if anyone has tried squatting on DOE property before or not," Pleau said. "Pretty strange, don't you think?"
The site was not near any high-security or critical areas, he said.
"It wasn't a security threat by any means," Pleau said.
The DOE ordered the lab to remove all of Moore's property from the area Oct. 16, Pleau said.
-------- us nuc waste
Appeal Filed in Nuclear Waste Storage Decision
Oct. 29, 2004
The Associated Press
http://tv.ksl.com/index.php?nid=5&sid=129353
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- Utah's governor and attorney general want the U.S. Supreme Court to decide who has authority over the transportation and storage of nuclear waste, the latest move in the battle to keep thousands of tons of radioactive waste out of the state.
On Friday, Gov. Olene Walker and Attorney General Mark Shurtleff announced the filing of a petition with the high court to review an August ruling by the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
That ruling upheld a lower court which rejected Utah laws enacted to block a nuclear waste repository proposed for the Goshutes' Skull Valley reservation.
The federal government alone has complete authority to license and regulate the transportation and storage of high-level nuclear waste, the Denver-based court ruled, siding with a lower judge that laws enacted between 1998 and 2001 to prevent the storage of 40,000 tons of nuclear waste on the tribal lands conflicted with federal law.
State lawmakers passed significant laws aimed at protecting citizens from the hazards of moving waste across highways should such a site be located in the state, Walker and Shurtleff said. Those laws were wrongly upset by the federal moves, they said.
"I oppose high-level nuclear waste storage in Utah and hope the waste never comes here, that we never have to rely on these laws," Walker said. "But history has taught us that a strong framework of federal and state law is needed, especially when dealing with high-level nuclear waste. If it comes here, it will never leave."
The Skull Valley Band has been locked in a leadership battle since Tribal Chairman Leon Bear signed a lease in 1997 allowing Private Fuel Storage to store up to 44,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel in upright steel-and-concrete casks on Goshute land.
The tribe's deal was largely seen as a way for the band to emerge from poverty, and for Private Fuel Storage -- a consortium of seven electrical utilities -- to meet the demand of plants that are fast running out of onsite storage for the depleted but radioactive fuel rods.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Atomic Safety and Licensing Board is expected to decide early next year whether Skull Valley can safely keep nuclear fuel. The board in March 2003 stalled construction by ruling the chances of a fighter jet from Hill Air Force Base crashing into the storage pad makes the project too risky. It has taken arguments for and against that decision and is weighing other aspects of the project.
As planned, the storage pad would hold up to 4,000 casks filled with depleted nuclear fuel -- about 10 million rods -- across 100 acres of the Skull Valley. The waste would be shipped over rail lines, mostly from reactors east of the Mississippi. Utah has no nuclear power plants.
Both major party candidates for governor, Republican Jon Huntsman Jr. and Democrat Scott Matheson Jr., oppose the facility, as do the members of Utah's congressional delegation.
-------- MILITARY
-------- britain
'Nervous and angry', the Black Watch arrive in the Triangle of Death
independent.co.uk
By Colin Brown
29 October 2004
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=577149
Soldiers of the Black Watch regiment expressed their anger yesterday at being airlifted from the Basra area to a dangerous mission in Iraq's so-called "triangle of death''.
Some of the first 75 troops to be airlifted to the area to guard a route into Fallujah said they had been expecting to go home when they were redeployed. Instead of a homecoming, they have been warned to expect suicide bombers and other attacks. "I'm nervous and angry," said Pte Manny Lynch, 19, from Fife, as he was about to board a Hercules C-130 transport aircraft. "I was supposed to be going home last Monday and I only found out that I was being deployed four days before ... Finding out just days before I was due to go home is hard to take."
Ben Brereton, 19, from Truro, Cornwall, a craftsman with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, said: "I don't know how they justify it."
-------- business
'Political' merger of Snecma, Sagem leaves analysts cold
PARIS (AFP)
Oct 29, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041029151737.6p74823e.html
The planned merger of Sagem and Snecma left analysts bewildered Friday at what was seen as a balantly political move by the government to create a defence industry giant that made little financial sense.
The two companies announced earlier that Sagem, a French telecommunications equipment and defence electronics maker, would takeover French state-controlled aircraft engine maker Snecma in a deal analysts expect to be worth up to five billion euros (6.36 billion dollars).
In terms of sales, Snecma is more than twice as big as Sagem, whose chairman, Gregoire Olivier, only last week told the media his company had no desire to be bolted on to a "large group".
The deal would see Sagem offer three of its own shares for every 13 shares in Snecma, with a cash alternative of 20 euros per share capped at 1.25 billion euros. Sagem would also offer a pre-payment dividend of 0.50 euros per share.
Once the deal is finalised, the French state's 66.22-percent stake in Snecma would be reduced to around 33 percent.
The French government was left gloating over the new-born defence giant.
"The tie-up of the two high French high tech groups will allow for a new actor in the European industry," Finance Minister Nicolas Sarkozy and Defence Minister Michele Alliot-Marie said in a joint statement, adding: "it will beef up European industrial capacities in strategic sectors such as defence".
But other observers were less impressed.
Deutsche Bank analysts Georges Memmi and Ben Fidler said the proposed merger "appears to us to make little strategic or industrial sense."
"The operational overlap between the businesses is minimal and the deal represents a major strategic shift for Sagem," they added.
The companies have said they expect costs savings from their merger to reach 160-190 million euros per year pretax from the third year of operation.
Even Alcatel chief executive Serge Tchuruk, speaking on France Info radio, said the merger looked like a political decision "taken quickly, doubtless by the finance ministry," and an analyst at a major US brokerage called the deal "blatantly a (government) stitch-up."
Analysts were united in having doubts about the industrial sense of a merger and the US analyst said: "It's really hard to see where the synergies are going to come from."
Fortis Bank analyst Stephane Houri said the group's financial plan looks "clever" and positive for earnings.
"But there are still too many questions. I'm still not positive on this merger. There are doubts about how they will present the merged company and you have to wonder if they will make all the synergies given that they are from things like marketing rather than proper cost savings."
A trader at KBC Securities said the merger "doesn't really make sense for Sagem, their shares will probably move sharply down. There's no sense in being a Sagem shareholder right now ... but it will benefit Snecma."
"The real question is where will they get synergies from, where will they get any value for shareholders," he added, noting comments from Snecma chief executive Jean-Paul Bechat that the merged entity is not considering job losses, as the two groups' activities do not overlap.
The companies earlier said that they expected Sagem's technical expertise in electronics to "find new outlets through applications on Snecma's aircraft engines and equipment."
"In the same way, Snecma would provide Sagem with access to an extended international commercial network," they said.
In afternoon trading, Sagem shares were off 6.75 euros or 8.58 percent at 71.95 euros after being suspended for the morning session. Snecma shares rose 0.75 euros or 4.66 percent at 16.85 euros after resuming trade. Meanwhile the CAC-40 index of leading share was flat.
Shares in French defence electronics firm Thales were up 0.65 euros or 2.36 percent at 28.20 euros on speculation that the company could join the merged group eventually.
Some analysts were baffled why Snecma, and not Thales, was being merged with Sagem.
Analysts at Aurel Leven said: "We're wondering why Snecma had refused to merge with Thales. A merger with the latter would have made much more sense."
"This would have created a major player in the aerospace and defense sector which would have been in a position to compete in the global industry," they said.
-------- europe
Curbs On Sonar Use Sought In Europe
By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 29, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7419-2004Oct28.html
The European Parliament called on member nations yesterday to suspend the use of high-intensity sonar during naval maneuvers until research determines whether the very loud sounds are leading to the deaths of whales and other sea creatures.
The nonbinding resolution, overwhelmingly adopted by the 25-nation body, marks the first time that any governmental body has weighed in on the controversial issue. Although the resolution does not require member navies to stop using "active" sonar, it concludes that there is growing research suggesting that the widespread use of loud sonar has caused some whales and other animals to beach themselves.
The resolution also calls on member nations to push the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and other international alliances to adopt similar moratoriums and to work toward developing alternative technology.
In recent years, mass strandings of whales have been recorded following naval sonar maneuvers in Greece, the Virgin Islands, the Bahamas and the Canary Islands.
The U.S. Navy and many others use loud "active" sonar to detect submarines. While the Navy has acknowledged that its sonar played a central role in the stranding of 17 whales in the Bahamas in 2000, it says that sonar can be used safely and that it has been unfairly linked to other whale strandings.
The recent strandings suspected to have been caused by sonar have all involved the older mid-frequency variety.
The U.S. Navy and others are also developing more powerful low-frequency sonar that can travel hundreds of miles underwater. Some environmentalists believe it will be more hazardous than the mid-frequency sonar now used.
Pentagon officials say the low-frequency sonar -- which has been the subject of protracted litigation -- is needed to meet the future threat of low-technology submarines in crowded coastal waters.
The European Parliament passed the moratorium resolution with 441 votes in favor, 15 opposed and 14 abstentions. "This is a global problem that must be solved through international cooperation," said Frederick O'Regan, president of the International Fund for Animal Welfare. "The resolution adopted today by the European Parliament is a significant step toward that goal."
In July, the scientific committee of the International Whaling Commission found "compelling evidence" that high-intensity sonar was harming whales and leading to some mass strandings.
--------
Georgia: A Meltdown of Weapons, or of Responsibility?
Scandal Hits Georgian Army
balkanalysis.com
by Christopher Deliso
October 29, 2004
http://www.antiwar.com/deliso/?articleid=3871
While controversy continues to rage over how hundreds of tons of heavy weaponry went missing in Iraq, a quieter scandal of the same kind, but involving more assignable culpability, is unfolding in Georgia.
On Wednesday, it was announced that ammunition has gone missing from barracks in the southwestern district of Akhaltsikhe. But that's minor in comparison to other recent events.
One week ago, in a joint news conference with Security Minister Vano Merabishvili, Defense Minister Giorgi Baramidze, and Givi Targamadze, chair of the Parliamentary Committee of Defense and Security, it was announced that Georgian army munitions have been comprehensively "recycled," melted down and sold for scrap, allegedly by members of the Georgian military.
When a team from these ministries raided an "artillery-recycling facility" in the east Georgian Dedoplistskaro district, they discovered that "the military hardware stored there had been stolen piece-by-piece and sold as a scrap metal," reported local Tbilisi television stations, the newspaper 24 Hours, and Resonance magazine this week.
Apparently, this facility for destroying decommissioned weaponry is a cooperative venture between the military and a private firm, Delta. While representatives of the center claimed they'd received the official OK for destroying the outdated weaponry, the government now claims that the documents were forged and that the weapons were in fact up to snuff. According to Defense Minister Baramidze, any attempt to profit from private sales of the weapons would be tantamount to "high treason." MP Targamadze, following the same line, declared the need to eliminate the scheming of "these private firms together with some of the defense officials." Some media are even speculating that the fallout of the scandal might "reach cabinet level," and that "the resignation of Defense Minister Baramidze is only a matter of time."
Apparently, the Delta company has earned a "shady reputation for exporting the outdated weaponry" that it oversees under an OSCE-supervised project for the dismantling of "hundreds of dangerously unstable bombs and various types of artillery ammunition."
Exporting scrap metal is just one of several ways that defense officials have profited from the general disarray and lack of motivation in the Georgian armed forces - where the soldiers even had to buy their own uniforms - since the 1990s.
This scandal came on the heels of a somewhat more serious one, which saw two Defense Ministry officials arrested in September over the disappearance of eight Strela-2 man-portable anti-aircraft missile systems earlier this year. The missiles, as well as other arms and ammunition, were spirited away from the central Georgian Osiauri military base - which has also become the much-publicized training site for Georgia's new civilian "reservist" army.
Although they didn't forward any evidence, the Russians implied today that these missiles had been sold to Chechen terrorists.
Whatever the truth may be, these incidents are not reassuring. The concern looming behind everything, here and in other CIS states, is the possibility of radioactive or nuclear materials being stolen from the former Soviet country and sold to terrorists. This specter materialized in December 2002, when three containers of radioactive cesium-137 disappeared from Vaziani military base, near Tbilisi.
The new revelations are especially embarrassing for the Saakashvili government, as it has spent the past six months or so trumpeting the strength and preparedness of the Georgian military. Since June, the government has warned incessantly that the army may be called upon at any moment to attack rebellious South Ossetia. However, in the biggest engagements to date (in August), 18 soldiers were killed. It was a huge and unexpected humiliation for the government. Saakashvili vowed never again would such a disaster occur.
Of course, the Georgian army has taken major strides in its drive to professionalize over the past two years. Claiming to be combating an al-Qaeda threat from Georgia's Pankisi Gorge, American military trainers embedded themselves in the country starting in spring of 2002, when Eduard Shevardnadze was still in power. The change of government has made no difference in policy; tangible American aid continues to flow in, most recently two weeks ago when a U.S. Air Force cargo plane unloaded "93,000 lbs. of military supplies valued at over $1.1 million. The U.S. equipment included uniform material and other supplies that would be used by Georgian troops deploying to Iraq later this year," stated the Messenger.
Next year, the U.S. will up its military aid to Georgia by $3 million - reaching a nice round number of $15 million total. It also plans to train 4,000 troops and finance the Georgian cannon fodder while in Iraq. It's ironic that, with the many internal crises the Georgian president is always going on about, the country finds it possible to send any of its troops on an Iraqi vacation. But that is the price of alliance, we suppose.
In April, Great Britain also funded and staffed a $50,000 military training program (with some German help) for the Georgians. Most recently, longtime ally Turkey has also stepped up to the plate. On Oct. 20, Georgia's western neighbor earmarked $2 million for the Georgian National Academy, the Marneuli military airport, marine and border forces, and the logistics battalion's general headquarters. In addition, Ankara is also handing over $396,058 worth of goods. According to the Messenger, these include "six Land Rovers, ten portable radios, sixteen backup batteries and communication equipment, [for] the Kodjori special forces and the 11th mechanized brigade." This is just a small part of the $37 million worth of military aid Turkey has sent to Georgia over the past six years.
Finally, Turkish Major General Yurdaek Olcan also disclosed that by year's end "we also intend to deliver nearly 40 cars and 100 communication equipment" to the Georgians.
However, the deprived economic situation means that corruption will always be a factor in the decisions of malnourished, mistreated soldiers and their scheming superiors. Will the American-supplied munitions someday meet the same fate as have the ones "recycled" and melted down these past couple of months?
As journalist Zaal Anjaparidze dryly put it, "[T]he actual state of affairs in the Georgian military infrastructure obviously runs counter [to] the government's bombastic statements about the country's defense potential."
Whether or not Saakashvili's vaunted reforms can overcome the ingrown culture of corruption in the Georgian military, there is still much to be done before theirs becomes a fighting force of extraordinary magnitude. 'Til then, the Russians can just laugh off the provocations, as they did in August when stating that recent Georgian threats were "not even worth of commenting [on] because of their absurdity."
A close associate of the 35-year-old Georgian president recently told me that "Misha is a bit hotheaded, and I fear he is still intoxicated with the power he so suddenly acquired. I don't know why he is taking this militaristic attitude. It can't be a wise policy for the future."
-------- iraq
100,000 Civilian Deaths Estimated in Iraq
By Rob Stein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 29, 2004; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7967-2004Oct28.html
One of the first attempts to independently estimate the loss of civilian life from the Iraqi war has concluded that at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians may have died because of the U.S. invasion.
The analysis, an extrapolation based on a relatively small number of documented deaths, indicated that many of the excess deaths have occurred due to aerial attacks by coalition forces, with women and children being frequent victims, wrote the international team of public health researchers making the calculations.
Pentagon officials say they do not keep tallies of civilian casualties, and a spokesman said yesterday there is no way to validate estimates by others. The spokesman said that the past 18 months of fighting in Iraq have been "prosecuted in the most precise fashion of any conflict in the history of modern warfare," and that "the loss of any innocent lives is a tragedy, something that Iraqi security forces and the multinational force painstakingly work to avoid."
Previous independent estimates of civilian deaths in Iraq were far lower, never exceeding 16,000. Other experts immediately challenged the new estimate, saying the small number of documented deaths upon which it was based make the conclusions suspect.
"The methods that they used are certainly prone to inflation due to overcounting," said Marc E. Garlasco, senior military analyst for Human Rights Watch, which investigated the number of civilian deaths that occurred during the invasion. "These numbers seem to be inflated."
The estimate is based on a September door-to-door survey of 988 Iraqi households -- containing 7,868 people in 33 neighborhoods -- selected to provide a representative sampling. Two survey teams gathered detailed information about the date, cause and circumstances of any deaths in the 14.6 months before the invasion and the 17.8 months after it, documenting the fatalities with death certificates in most cases.
The project was designed by Les Roberts and Gilbert M. Burnham of the Center for International Emergency, Disaster and Refugee Studies at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore; Richard Garfield of Columbia University in New York; and Riyadh Lafta and Jamal Kudhairi of Baghdad's Al-Mustansiriya University College of Medicine.
Based on the number of Iraqi fatalities recorded by the survey teams, the researchers calculated that the death rate since the invasion had increased from 5 percent annually to 7.9 percent. That works out to an excess of about 100,000 deaths since the war, the researchers reported in a paper released early by the Lancet, a British medical journal.
The researchers called their estimate conservative because they excluded deaths in Fallujah, a city west of Baghdad that has been the scene of particularly intense fighting and has accounted for a disproportionately large number of deaths in the survey.
"We are quite confident that there's been somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 deaths, but it could be much higher," Roberts said.
When the researchers examined the causes of the 73 violent deaths collected in the study, 84 percent were due to the actions of coalition forces, although the researchers stressed that none was the result of what would have been considered misconduct. Ninety-five percent were due to airstrikes by helicopter gunships, rockets or other types of aerial weaponry.
Forty-six percent of the violent deaths involving coalition forces were men ages 15 to 60, but 46 percent were children younger than 15, and 7 percent were women, the researchers reported.
The researchers and the Lancet editors acknowledged that the study has clear limitations, including a relatively small sample of violent deaths that were examined directly and the researchers' reliance on individual memories for some information. But the researchers said the findings represent the most reliable estimate to date.
The paper was "extensively peer-reviewed, revised, edited" and rushed into print "because of its importance to the evolving security situation in Iraq, Richard Horton, the journal's editor, wrote in an accompanying editorial.
But Garlasco of Human Rights Watch said it is extremely difficult to estimate civilian casualties, especially based on relatively small numbers. "I certainly think that 100,000 is a reach," Garlasco said.
In addition, his group's investigation indicated that the ground war, not the air war, caused more of the deaths that have occurred.
Staff writer Josh White and research editor Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.
--------
11 local soldiers killed on video
October 29, 2004
By Mariam Fam
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041028-100823-5275r.htm
BAGHDAD - Terrorists slaughtered 11 Iraqi soldiers, beheading one and shooting the others execution-style, and declared on an Islamic militant Web site yesterday that Iraqi fighters will avenge "the blood" of women and children killed in U.S. strikes on the guerrilla stronghold of Fallujah.
The wave of foreigner kidnappings claimed another victim - a Polish woman in her 60s who is married to an Iraqi. Her captors demanded that Poland withdraw its 2,400 soldiers and that the U.S.-led coalition free all Iraqi women held at Abu Ghraib prison.
The Ansar al-Sunnah Army took responsibility for killing the 11 Iraqi national guardsmen. A videotape of their deaths was shown on the group's Web site yesterday along with a warning to all Iraqi police and soldiers to desert or face death.
The terrorists said earlier that the soldiers were abducted this week on the road between Baghdad and Hillah, 60 miles to the south.
After forcing each of the soldiers to state his name and unit, the militants forced one of them to the ground and cut off his head. The others were forced to kneel with their hands bound as a gunman fired shots into the back of their heads.
A voice on the videotape warned all Iraqi soldiers and police to "repent to God, abandon your weapons, go home and beware of supporting the apostate crusaders or their followers, the Iraqi government, or else you will only find death."
"We will not forget the blood of our elderly, our women and our children that is shed daily in Fallujah, Samarra, Ramadi and elsewhere," a statement on the Web site said.
The al-Sunnah movement has taken responsibility for a number of attacks and kidnappings, including the slaying of 12 Nepalese hostages in August.
Elsewhere, two more American soldiers were killed - one in a car bombing in Baghdad and the other in an ambush near Balad, 40 miles north of the capital. At least 1,109 U.S. service members have died since President Bush launched the Iraq war in March 2003.
In Tokyo, Japanese authorities said they had failed to enlist the help of a prominent Iraqi cleric in trying to free a 24-year-old Japanese hostage.
An al Qaeda affiliate led by Jordanian terror suspect Abu Musab Zarqawi threatened Tuesday to behead Shosei Koda in 48 hours unless Japan withdraws its troops from Iraq, a demand rejected by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.
The video of the Polish hostage, aired on Al Jazeera television, showed a middle-aged woman with gray hair wearing a polka-dotted blouse sitting in front of two masked gunmen, one of whom was pointing a pistol at her head.
The woman was identified as Teresa Borcz-Kalifa by one of her former superiors at the Polish Embassy in Baghdad, where she worked in the 1990s. Leszek Adamiec told Poland's private Radio Zet that Mrs. Borcz-Kalifa worked in the consular section until 1994.
Interior Ministry spokesman Col. Adnan Abdul-Rahman said the woman, a longtime resident with Iraqi citizenship, was thought to have been abducted Wednesday night from her home in Baghdad. In Warsaw, Foreign Minister Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz said she was a Polish citizen who is married to an Iraqi.
She was the ninth foreign woman abducted in Iraq since a wave of kidnappings began last spring.
The Abu Bakr al-Siddiq Fundamentalist Brigades took responsibility for her abduction.
President Aleksander Kwasniewski said Poland will not surrender "to the dictate of terrorists" by meeting their demands. Poland commands about 6,000 troops from 15 nations, including about 2,400 from Poland, in the Babil, Karbala and Wasit provinces south of Baghdad.
All but two foreign female hostages have been released. In a statement issued yesterday in London, CARE International appealed for the release of Margaret Hassan, a British-Irish-Iraqi citizen who has directed the humanitarian organization's operations in Iraq since 1991.
Meanwhile, the first wave of 75 British soldiers set up camp yesterday at their new base at an undisclosed location about 30 miles south of Baghdad, part of about 800 British troops who are moving closer to the capital to bolster U.S. forces. Soldiers of the Scottish Black Watch Regiment, redeployed from the southern city of Basra, were told they will be pulled out of Iraq in early December, the British news agency Press Association reported.
U.S. and Iraqi forces are gearing up for a possible assault on Fallujah and other terrorist strongholds west of Baghdad if community leaders do not hand over foreign fighters and extremists, including Zarqawi and his followers.
Also yesterday, U.S. aircraft bombed a suspected terrorist safe house in Fallujah, killing two persons, hospital officials said. The overnight strike in the northern part of the city targeted a "meeting site" used by suspected Zarqawi allies, the U.S. military said.
--------
Video Shows Slaying of 11 Iraqi Guardsmen
2 U.S. Soldiers Die in Attacks; Pole Kidnapped
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, October 29, 2004; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A4793-2004Oct28.html
BAGHDAD, Oct. 28 -- Eleven kidnapped Iraqi National Guardsmen were shown being killed in a video posted Thursday on the Internet, extending a succession of recent slayings of Iraqi and foreign security forces by insurgents.
Two U.S. soldiers were also killed Thursday, and a Polish woman was added to the ranks of foreigners taken hostage in Iraq.
The Ansar al-Sunna Army, an Islamic group that also asserted responsibility for the almost identical execution of 12 Nepalese workers in August, posted warnings to other Iraqi security forces with the footage of the guardsmen's deaths -- the first by beheading, the others by gunshot. Each victim recited his name and unit before being killed.
"Abandon your weapons and go home and beware of supporting the apostate Crusaders or their followers, the Iraqi government, or else you will only find death," an unidentified voice said in Arabic on the soundtrack. A written statement on the site added: "We will not forget about the blood of our elderly, women and children that is shed daily in Fallujah, Samarra, Ramadi and elsewhere on your hands and the hands of those you work with."
The insurgent group announced last week that it had kidnapped the 11 guardsmen. Iraq's Defense Ministry said Thursday, however, that it had not received any reports that 11 guardsmen were missing, news services reported.
The National Guard, one of a handful of Iraqi security agencies established after the U.S.-led invasion last year, has borne the brunt of insurgent attacks aimed at forces defending Iraq's interim government. Most recently, 49 unarmed National Guard recruits were massacred by unknown gunmen Saturday near a training base northeast of Baghdad.
The U.S. soldiers slain Thursday were attacked in the kind of ambushes that have become common in Iraq. One soldier was killed when a huge car bomb exploded beside a convoy under a freeway overpass in southern Baghdad. The second died in a rocket-propelled grenade attack on a convoy between Baghdad and Balad, a huge logistics base north of the capital. The military withheld the names of the soldiers pending notification of next of kin.
In the latest kidnapping, a middle-age woman identified as a Polish national was displayed on a video aired by al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based satellite news channel. The woman was shown sitting calmly before two masked men, one of whom pointed a pistol at her head. Al-Jazeera reported that the woman could be heard urging Poland to pull its troops out of Iraq. Poland has about 2,400 troops in the country's south.
Polish Foreign Minister Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz said the woman was a Polish citizen married to an Iraqi and worked at the Polish Embassy in Baghdad in the 1990s, according to the Associated Press. President Aleksander Kwasniewski, often praised by President Bush as a stalwart ally on Iraq, declared that Poland would not surrender "to the dictate of terrorists."
The kidnapping was at least the third in 10 days involving a citizen of a country that has provided troops to the U.S.-led military coalition. Margaret Hassan, the CARE International country director who also has an Iraqi husband, was seized Oct. 19 and has been shown in Internet videos pleading for British Prime Minister Tony Blair to quit the coalition. Hassan, a native of Ireland, also has British and Iraqi citizenship.
On Thursday, the charity, which earlier had suspended operations here, announced it was closing entirely in Iraq and repeated its call for Hassan's release.
There was no word on the fate of a third hostage, Shosei Koda, the Japanese backpacker who had warned in a video that he would be beheaded by Thursday unless the Tokyo government pulled out its troops. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has refused the demand.
[The Japanese government convened an emergency session Friday following a media report that a body believed to be Asian was found in Iraq, according to the Associated Press. "We haven't confirmed anything yet," Koizumi said.]
In yet another video display, a band of masked men claimed that insurgents had acquired "a large quantity of explosives" from Qaqaa, the arms facility from which a U.N. agency says tons of high explosives had disappeared.
No support was offered for the claim, made by a group calling itself the Islam Army Brigades Karrar Brigade. One analyst said Iraq had more than 900 munitions sites before the invasion, and insurgents have long boasted that arms and explosives were readily available.
As if to prove the point, residents of Fallujah said a shipment of explosives, assault rifles, rockets and missiles recently was smuggled into the city in a tank truck. The city, under the control of local insurgents and foreign fighters since April, is preparing for an expected U.S. military offensive intended to restore Baghdad's authority before national elections promised for January.
Informal talks aimed at averting military action in Fallujah continued Thursday, but the office of interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi warned in a statement, "This chance could be the last."
U.S. warplanes bombed a house before dawn in Fallujah's battered Jolan neighborhood, killing three fighters inside, residents said. And in a helicopter raid, U.S. forces arrested a leader of Mohammad's First Army, Nouri Halboosi, in Halabsa, west of Fallujah.
--------
CASUALTIES
Study Puts Iraqi Deaths of Civilians at 100,000
October 29, 2004
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL,
International Herald Tribune
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/29/international/europe/29casualties.html?pagewanted=all
PARIS, Oct. 28 - An estimated 100,000 civilians have died in Iraq as a direct or indirect consequence of the March 2003 United States-led invasion, according to a new study by a research team at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
Coming just five days before the presidential election the finding is certain to generate intense controversy, since it is far higher than previous mortality estimates for the Iraq conflict.
Editors of The Lancet, the London-based medical publication, where an article describing the study is scheduled to appear, decided not to wait for the normal publication date next week, but to place the research online Friday, apparently so it could circulate before the election.
The Bush administration has not estimated civilian casualties from the conflict, and independent groups have put the number at most in the tens of thousands.
In the study, teams of researchers led by Dr. Les Roberts fanned out across Iraq in mid-September to interview nearly 1,000 families in 33 locations. Families were interviewed about births and deaths in the household before and after the invasion.
Although the authors acknowledge that data collection was difficult in what is effectively still a war zone, the data they managed to collect is extensive. Using what they described as the best sampling methods that could be applied under the circumstances, they found that Iraqis were 2.5 times more likely to die in the 17 months following the invasion than in the 14 months before it.
Before the invasion, the most common causes of death in Iraq were heart attacks, strokes and chronic diseases. Afterward, violent death was far ahead of all other causes.
"We were shocked at the magnitude but we're quite sure that the estimate of 100,000 is a conservative estimate," said Dr. Gilbert Burnham of the Johns Hopkins team. Dr. Burnham said the team excluded data about deaths in Falluja in making their estimate, because that city was the site of unusually intense violence.
In 15 of the 33 communities visited, residents reported violent deaths in their families since the conflict started. They attributed many of those deaths to attacks by American-led forces, mostly airstrikes, and most of those killed were women and children. The risk of violent death was 58 times higher than before the war, the researchers reported.
The team included researchers from the Johns Hopkins Center for International Emergency, Disaster and Refugee Studies and included doctors from Al Mustansiriya University Medical School in Baghdad.
There is bound to be skepticism about the estimate of 100,000 excess deaths, since that translates into an average of 166 deaths a day since the invasion. But some people were not surprised. "I am emotionally shocked but I have no trouble in believing that this many people have been killed," said Scott Lipscomb, an associate professor at Northwestern University, who works on the www.iraqbodycount.net project.
That project, which collates only deaths reported in the news media, currently put the maximum civilian death toll at just under 17,000. "We've always maintained that the actual count must be much higher," Mr. Lipscomb said.
The researchers said they were highly technical in their selection of interview sites and data analysis, although interview locations were limited by the decision to cut down on driving time when possible in order to reduce the risk to the interviewers. Each team included an Iraqi health worker, generally a physician.
Although the teams relied primarily on interviews with local residents, they also requested to see at least two death certificates at the end of interviews in each area, to try to ensure that people had remembered and responded honestly. The research team decided that asking for death certificates in each case, during the interviews, might cause hostility and could put the research team in danger.
Some of those killed may have been insurgents, not civilians, the authors noted. Also, the rise in deaths included a rise in murders and some deaths were caused by the decline of medical care. "But the majority of excess mortality is clearly due to violence," Dr. Burnham said.
The study is scientific, reserving judgment on the politics of the Iraq conflict. But Dr. Roberts and his colleagues are critical of the Bush administration and the Army for not releasing estimates of civilian deaths.
"This study shows that with moderate funds, four weeks and seven Iraqi team members willing to risk their lives, a useful measure of civilian deaths could be obtained," the authors wrote.
-------- israel / palestine
Arafat approves Abbas as deputy
October 29, 2004
By Paul Martin
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041028-100822-8258r.htm
LONDON - Yasser Arafat approved plans by senior officials in his Palestinian Authority to name former Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas to a newly created post of "deputy chairman" prior to Mr. Arafat's departure for a Paris hospital early today.
Senior Palestinian officials cautioned that such a change could take weeks or even months to orchestrate, and probably would wait until after Mr. Arafat completed treatment for a serious blood disorder.
Moreover, they said that the current prime minister, Ahmed Qureia, could continue to run day-to-day affairs of the Palestinian Authority during Mr. Arafat's absence.
Nevertheless, the move marks the first indication of who will succeed Mr. Arafat as the Palestinian leader.
"This latest illness has at last got [Mr. Arafat] to understand he needs to have a deputy," said one Palestinian Cabinet minister who declined to be named.
"He told us ... 'you guys have to be responsible and deal with matters' in his absence," the minister added.
Following a series of emergency meetings in the West Bank city of Ramallah, the minister also said: "[Mr. Abbas] has had a reconciliation with [Mr. Arafat]. He is the man most of the important people here want."
A second official, an aide to a key Palestinian minister who was present when the plan was discussed with Mr. Arafat, said it definitely would happen.
Mr. Arafat, unable to stand on his own, agreed to leave the West Bank compound in Ramallah, where he has been under virtual house arrest for more than two years, and fly to a Paris hospital for treatment.
Blood tests showed that Mr. Arafat, 75, suffered from a low platelet count, though it was unclear what caused the ailment. His doctors ruled out leukemia.
In Paris, French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier welcomed the decision by Mr. Arafat to come.
"France ... will be always on your side to back your effort in favor of a just and negotiated peace," Mr. Barnier said.
It was not clear whether Mr. Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, would accompany Mr. Arafat to Paris. The two frequently had disagreed, and last year, Mr. Arafat effectively fired Mr. Abbas as prime minister.
Despite many months of total estrangement, Mr. Arafat held two one-on-one meetings with Mr. Abbas in the past several days.
Mr. Abbas' return to favor came about after senior Cabinet ministers urged the two men to bury their differences for the sake of avoiding a chaotic and potentially explosive succession battle.
A consensus was reached among "some powerful men in the Cabinet, who were pushing for this," the second official said.
The majority of the Cabinet wanted to prevent either Jibril Rajoub, the current national security adviser, or his rival and predecessor, Mohamed Dahlan, from entering the fray.
The central committee of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), the Palestinian political movement, is to be convened to approve the move, followed by a rubber-stamping of the decision by the much larger PLO executive committee, this official said.
However, the plan could be stillborn if Mr. Arafat falls victim to the illness, leaving insufficient time for the gatherings necessary to amend the current laws. As things now stand, there is no provision for a deputy chairman.
"Mr. Abbas has managed to swing the support of most factions in the PLO," the official said.
Mr. Arafat, who holds the official post of chairman of the Palestinian Authority despite his preference for the title "president," has declined to name an acting leader while the moves toward creating a deputy chairmanship are taking place.
Mr. Abbas would hold the post until national elections could take place, giving him time to consolidate support among Palestinian masses, if the scenario works as planned.
Mr. Abbas had been arguing for a "demilitarization" of the four-year-old uprising against Israel ever since the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States.
Mr. Abbas is one of the few surviving founding members of Fatah - the main political grouping within the PLO.
In exile in Qatar during the late 1950s, he helped recruit a group of Palestinians to the cause. They went on to become key figures in the PLO.
He co-founded Fatah with Mr. Arafat and accompanied him into exile in Jordan, Lebanon and Tunisia. In the early days of the movement, he became respected for his clean and simple living.
-------- russia / chechnya
Putin enters Ukrainian election row by attending army parade
29 October 2004
independent.co.uk
By Askold Krushelnycky in Kiev
http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/story.jsp?story=577136
A Soviet-style military parade shut down the streets of Kiev yesterday as Ukraine entered the final stretch of a tense election campaign marred by allegations of dirty tricks and intimidation tactics.
The West-leaning opposition has accused the government of flooding the capital with uniformed soldiers to scare off their support and to use force against planned mass demonstrations in the event of electoral fraud.
Watching the parade alongside the Prime Minister and presidential hopeful, Viktor Yanukovych, was Vladimir Putin. The Russian leader used the show of force as an occasion for some high-profile campaigning on behalf of the pro-Moscow candidate.
The parade itself - to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Ukraine's liberation from the Nazis - was brought forward by a week, without explanation, and overshadows the last 72 hours of the campaign.
Supporters of Viktor Yushchenko, leader of the pro-Western democratic coalition, say they have a real chance of winning and that has prompted the military presence. "On the day of voting there will be several tens of thousands of men in uniforms near Kiev," said Mr Yushchenko, "or has the government even forgotten the date on which Kiev was liberated?"
Mr Yushchenko is running neck and neck in the polls with Mr Yanukovych, the chosen successor of the incumbent, Leonid Kuchma, and the vote is seen as a watershed for Ukrainians. Most independent observers believe the opposition leader would win a fair election by a clear margin.
Observers say the result will determine whether Kiev charts a course towards democracy and the West or goes down the more authoritarian route of Russia and Belarus.
A bitter campaign has been fought against a backdrop of bomb explosions and opposition supporters being beaten and detained. The latest scandal has arisen after the opposition claimed that some of its members were attacked by police masquerading as skinheads at a rally. The assailants were found to have police identification cards and pistols.
Mr Yushchenko is the head of a liberal and centre-right coalition and is promising democratic reforms to fight endemic corruption. He also advocates EU and Nato membership.
Mr Yanukovych is the successor chosen by the outgoing President Kuchma who has been largely isolated internationally due to accusations of corruption, authoritarianism, and human-rights abuses. He is avowedly pro-Russian and supports Mr Putin's plan to create a Moscow-led economic zone comprising their two countries, Belarus and Kazakhstan. The opposition calls it a plan to recreate the USSR.
Mr Putin was at yesterday's rally on the last day of a three-day visit that outraged the opposition which said it was a flagrant attempt to boost the chances of Mr Yanukovych. Alongside the two leaders was Belarus's Stalinist President Alexander Lukashenka who bolstered his own powers a fortnight ago in sham elections.
On the first evening of his visit, Mr Putin appeared on three government-controlled television channels to praise Mr Yanukovych's economic policies. He also promised that Ukrainian citizens will be able to travel to Russia without passports - an electoral present that will win the approval of millions of ethnic Russians in Ukraine.
Forming a new economic bloc has become one of Moscow's top priorities, and Ukraine - bigger than France and with 50 million people - is vital to the plan.
Yurko Pavlenko, an opposition MP, said: "It's disgusting that the Ukrainian government, knowing its candidate will lose in any fair contest, needs to enlist the help of the Russian President."
Many ordinary people also disapproved. Oleksander, an office worker, was certain the visit was designed to influence the election: "It's dishonourable for Russia to intrude at this time. It reminds people of the times when Ukraine was a colony in Russia's empire."
The deputy president of the European Parliament, Janusz Onyszkiewicz, said: "The level of interference of some circles in Russia in the elections is something deplorable. It is not for other countries to indicate which candidate would be better."
-----
Putin has an eye on the future as he looks back on Soviet glory victory
29/10/2004
telegraph.co.uk
By Julius Strauss in Moscow
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/10/29/wputin29.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/10/29/ixhome.html
In scenes eerily reminiscent of the Cold War, President Vladimir Putin joined President Leonid Kuchma of Ukraine to watch a military parade goose-step through Kiev yesterday.
They stood on a raised platform as thousands of soldiers, sailors and a Second World War T-34 tank moved down the main street of the Ukrainian capital behind the red Soviet flag that was raised over the Reichstag in Berlin in 1945. Thousands of soldiers march through Kiev The parade could give a boost to Viktor Yanukovich's election
The parade was ostensibly to celebrate victory over the Nazis nearly 60 years ago, but it was brought forward to try to give a boost to Viktor Yanukovich, the regime's candidate for the Ukrainian presidential election this weekend.
For Mr Putin, a Yanukovich victory would be a big step towards realising plans to reconstitute a mini-Soviet Union by forming a common economic zone constituting Belarus, Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan.
Mr Yanukovich, a businessman from the coal-mining region of Donetsk with an unsavoury past, has promised closer ties with Russia, dual citizenship and making Russian a second state language.
According to Jane's Intelligence Report, he has also promised to hand over the port of Sevastopol in the Ukrainian region of Crimea to the Russian Black Sea Fleet. At present, the facilities are shared under a deal reached in the 1990s.
Mr Kuchma, who is retiring after two terms in office, is also anxious for a Yanukovich win, otherwise he and his cronies could face prison over a series of scandals.
Viktor Yushchenko, the pro-western candidate whose face was badly disfigured after he was allegedly poisoned, has threatened to take Ukraine out of the Russian orbit and seek membership of the European Union and Nato.
Polls show that victory for Mr Kanukovich is far from certain. Recently several pro-democracy and opposition activists have been arrested. Last weekend provocateurs attacked a crowd of 100,000 people protesting at government attempts to influence the vote.
Volodymyr Polokhalo, an independent analyst, said: "This election is the dirtiest, most immoral and most dishonest of all post-Soviet campaigns in Ukraine.
"The Russian factor is present everywhere."
Mr Putin's increasingly Soviet-era style was also on display in Russia yesterday as the Kremlin bused in thousands of students and schoolchildren for a "spontaneous" pro-Putin demonstration.
The rally was said to be a protest against terrorism but critics say it was timed to undermine simultaneous opposition demonstrations against Mr Putin's plans to abolish gubernatorial elections.
-------- us
Iraq Casualties
Friday, October 29, 2004
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7965-2004Oct28.html
Iraq Casualties
Number of total U.S. military deaths in the Iraq war as announced by the Pentagon yesterday:
1,106
Fatalities in hostile actions:
847
In non-hostile actions:
259
Total fatalities include three civilian employees of the Defense Department.
A full list of casualties is available online at www.washingtonpost.com/nation
SOURCE: Defense Department's www.defenselink.mil/news
--------
DETAINEES
Navy Drops Charges Against Commando in Abuse of Prisoners
October 29, 2004
By SCOTT SHANE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/29/politics/29abuse.html?pagewanted=all
The Navy dropped criminal charges this week against one of seven commandos accused of mistreating prisoners in Iraq, a spokesman for the Naval Special Warfare Command said yesterday.
The member of the Navy's special forces, the Seals, was subjected instead to nonjudicial punishment and remains with the unit, said the spokesman, Cmdr. Jeffrey A. Bender. He declined to describe the punishment, but officials said nonjudicial sanctions could be as mild as a letter of reprimand. The resolution of the case was first reported yesterday in The Los Angeles Times.
Preliminary hearings on charges against two other commandos were held yesterday and planned for today at the Navy base in Coronado, Calif. The four remaining officers will have their hearings, the military equivalent of grand jury proceedings, probably next month, Commander Bender said.
The commandos, members of the Sea-Air-Land Team 7, were part of an elite group of special operations forces and Central Intelligence Agency operatives hunting insurgents in Iraq. They are accused of abusing a number of prisoners between October 2003 and April 2004 by kicking them, punching them, twisting their testicles, breaking their fingers and pointing loaded guns at them.
None of the commandos have been publicly identified. Commander Bender said their names were being withheld both because of the secret nature of Seal operations and to prevent damaging their reputations if they are not guilty of crimes.
Some, though not all, are charged with mistreating Manadel al-Jamadi, an Iraqi who died in American custody on Nov. 4, 2003, at Abu Ghraib prison and whose body was later photographed wrapped in plastic and packed in ice. The incident also drew attention because Mr. Jamadi was a "ghost detainee," questioned by the C.I.A. at Abu Ghraib but kept off the prison roster.
No one has been charged with manslaughter or murder in connection with Mr. Jamadi's death, but one of the commandos is accused of "kicking and punching him in the stomach and back with a means or force likely to produce death or grievous bodily harm."
An investigation led by Maj. Gen. George Fay of the Army said the detainee later identified as Mr. Jamadi was a suspect in a bombing of the Baghdad headquarters of International Committee of the Red Cross. When he was captured by a Seal team, one commando reportedly hit him on the side of the head with the butt of his rifle, according to the Fay report. An autopsy concluded that he died of a blood clot in the brain, probably caused by injuries during his capture, the report said.
But Milton J. Silverman, a lawyer for one of the commandos under investigation, said yesterday that three forensic pathologists who reviewed the autopsy report at his request concluded that Mr. Jamadi's death was not caused by trauma from a blow to the head.
Mr. Silverman also said in a telephone interview that he believed many of the charges against his client and the other commandos were based on false testimony from a former member of the Seals who was facing discharge for taking another serviceman's body armor.
Commander Bender, the Navy spokesman, declined to respond to Mr. Silverman's assertions, saying he could not comment on an open criminal investigation.
--------
US troops refused requests to protect explosives store
29 October 2004
independent.co.uk
By Kim Sengupta in Baghdad
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=577148
Al-Qaqa'a, the Iraqi military complex from which 350 tons of explosives disappeared, was looted after US troops left the area refusing requests to protect the site, Iraqi witnesses say.
They say unguarded buildings were stripped of their contents after the arrival and departure of American troops in the last few days of the war.
Yesterday an armed Islamic group claimed to have obtained a large quantity of the explosives and threatened to use them against coalition troops. The group, calling itself al-Islam's Army Brigades, al-Karar Brigade, said on a video that it had co-ordinated with officers and soldiers of "the American intelligence" to obtain a "huge amount of the explosives that were in the al-Qaqa'a facility".
The looted explosives have become a contentious issue in the US election campaign, adding weight to the accusations of John Kerry, that George Bush mishandled the war.
Iraqi people claim US forces were specifically asked to secure the complex but declined to do so, saying their orders were to proceed towards Baghdad. The looters are said to have removed everything from desks and computers to ammunition and artillery shells.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has revealed that among the items stolen were HMX and RDX, key components in plastic explosives such as C-4 and Semtex, which are favoured by insurgent groups. The IAEA said it had warned the Bush administration of the vulnerability of the al-Qaqa'a arsenal in April last year after the looting of the main Iraqi nuclear facility. There is strong suspicion that the explosives have been used in the car bomb attacks in which hundreds of civilians as well as US and Iraqi government forces have been killed.
Al-Qaqa'a was identified in Tony Blair's Iraq weapons dossier of September 2002 as a place where phosgene was used to produce chemical or nerve agents. The United Nations, the IAEA and the Iraq Survey Group all found the claims to be false. The factories did, however, legitimately produce explosives for Iraq's armed forces. Before the war, IAEA inspectors checked the seals in the bunker where the material was stored and found them to be intact.
The Bush administration has moved to discredit the reports about the al-Qaqa'a looting, accusing Russian special forces of helping to spirit the explosives out of Iraq. The Russian defence ministry was adamant in denying the charge.
Mohammed Hamid Abdullah, from Yusufiah, 30 miles south of Baghdad, where al-Qaqa'a is located, said: "I know the Americans were told what was in the factories, and they must protect it. But they said they had to go on to Baghdad. We all saw people go in there afterwards and take everything they could. It went on for days." Colonel Joseph Anderson, of the 2nd Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division, said his troops had mustered at al-Qaqa'a on 10 April 2002, simply as a convenient location. No one had told him about the explosives inside the complex.
-----
This GI Joe Won't Go
Ex-soldier resists backdoor draft into Iraq war
laweekly
by Howard Blume
OCT. 29 - NOV. 4, 2004
http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/49/news-blume.php
Maybe it was that first bayonet drill, in basic training at Fort Knox, Kentucky, that made Jim Denofa realize he didn't belong in the Army.
"You had to stab a dummy shaped like a person," says Denofa. "I hated it. I hated it. It was like you had to stab a person."
Denofa got through the minimum tour - three years - and got out in early 2003. Since February he's been teaching gym classes for young children in Los Angeles, while also working as a personal trainer.
Then, in late July, he got the call. Uncle Sam wanted him back to fight in Iraq. Denofa, 24, has become a casualty in what critics - including Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry - are calling a backdoor draft caused by the stagnating war.
Denofa thought he'd left military service behind. The Army, however, has the right to call him back for up to eight years from the time he first enlisted. He's part of what's called the Individual Ready Reserve.
But this GI Joe won't go.
He's filed paperwork as a conscientious objector, joining a hard-to-calculate number of other uneager warriors. Army statistics list only a few dozen soldiers per year who claim to be conscientious objectors. About half of these achieve official conscientious-objector status. Others avoid combat through exemptions for education, health reasons or family necessity. And then there are deserters, those who just stop showing up.
Numbers from this latest call-up suggest a lot of would-be soldiers want to remain civilians. About 40 percent of the 4,166 summer call-ups of ex-active-duty soldiers - such as Denofa - have already requested that their military service be delayed or canceled for a variety of reasons. That seems a high percentage, but it's difficult to compare because ex-soldiers have so rarely been called back. The most celebrated call-up to date is that of 31-year-old Captain Jay Ferriola of New York. He submitted retirement paperwork in June after completing his full eight-year obligation. Ferriola has responded to the military summons with a lawsuit alleging "involuntary servitude," and a federal judge this week suspended, for now, Ferriola's obligation to report.
Another call-up, ex-soldier Panha Vy, from Long Beach, says he didn't understand that his three- or four-year commitment could stretch as long as eight years. And the killing and dying part never sunk in, he admits. Vy was trained as a chemical-weapons specialist, and the Army wants him back. As a civilian, Vy is working two full-time jobs, one at a phone store and the other at Home Depot, and he's also got custody of his 1-year-old son. It's grueling, but it's not Iraq. He's applying for an exemption as a single parent. But he also considers himself a conscientious objector.
"I believe it's unnecessary at this point to be over there," says Vy. "I don't believe in the nation fighting a war if it doesn't have to, and I don't believe in going to war if I don't have to." He'd consider fighting in what he regarded as a just war.
He'd better hope he gets off as a single parent, because as a conscientious objector, his case is a loser.
"You can't pick out a particular war and say it's immoral, and I object to this war," says Martha Rudd, a spokesperson for the Army at the Pentagon. "Your objection has to be to any killing and fighting.
"When people enter the Army," says Rudd, "they sign a statement indicating they're not a conscientious objector. The Army does recognize that sometimes someone will have a change of heart. The burden of proof is on the individual. That person must demonstrate that his sentiment is genuine, that his change of heart is genuine."
Denofa, like Panha Vy, also dislikes what's going on in Iraq. "I don't agree with the war," he says, "and I don't agree with us being over there. They're fighting to get us out of their home by any means necessary. It makes my blood boil."
So is Denofa a legitimate conscientious objector or a young man who doesn't want to die in an Iraq war he opposes? Or maybe he just doesn't want to die in warfare at all.
The Army makes too fine a distinction in these cases, says Steve Morse, GI Rights Program coordinator for the Oakland office of the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors. "Why can't a conscientious objector be a person who is opposed to this war?" asks Morse. "Why shouldn't people be able to say that?"
Denofa was still in the Army during the invasion of Afghanistan. He says he wouldn't have fought in that conflict either. He didn't, however, follow through with his desire to be a conscientious objector, he says, because the unit chaplain discouraged him. The chaplain, says Denofa, wouldn't endorse his claim, because Denofa is an atheist. Denofa thought that he couldn't apply without support from the chaplain.
He got better information this time around.
An Internet search put Denofa in contact with the nonprofit GI Rights Hotline, which has been crowded with inquiries since the run-up to the Iraq war. Following its advice, Denofa mailed in letters supporting his case and received an automatic one-month extension of his reporting date until October 27. A military panel in Washington, D.C., is charged with making a determination.
One letter comes from a friend he met while stationed at Oahu in Hawaii. "He is a very gentle soul who would capture a centipede and walk it a block to let it be free rather than kill it," wrote Suezete Geer. "He gets upset over the fact that a cat would kill a mouse just for fun rather than to eat and survive. I believe that if James is confronted with a life-or-death situation he would be killed before he would kill another living thing - no matter what the species, age, race or circumstances."
"When September 11th happened," wrote Denofa in a September 21 letter to the Army, "when I saw all those people dying on TV, I was angry and scared at the same time. I knew it wasn't over. People were going to want revenge and revenge would mean killing more and more people. I didn't want to be part of the people's revenge. I don't believe in revenge."
Army brass appears concerned about the breadth of such resistance. At first, officials started talking about threatening soldiers with AWOL status. They've since backed off. A spokesman told the Army Times that each case is being "worked individually" and "handled delicately."
"We've not done something of this magnitude before now," a brigadier general told the Army Times. "We're basically in new territory here."
An Army spokesperson told the Weekly that not one of the currently re-called soldiers has claimed to be a conscientious objector. But it looks as though the Army just hasn't done the tabulating yet.
If Denofa avoids service in Iraq, it won't be because this former competitive power lifter doesn't look the part. He's got the physical equipment - with his taut, muscular build, and brown hair that's short, straight and obedient.
But he doesn't exactly sound like a refined killing machine on Friday mornings, when he's surrounded by eight children, all about 2 years old, give or take, at the My Gym on La Cienega, south of Pico Boulevard. Last week, as usual, he was taking them through their own basic training: singing silly songs; maintaining a near-nonstop patter; teaching them about shapes, body parts and following directions.
Denofa also teaches older kids. He shakes his head at what he's heard about Iraq, about how children sometimes carry guns or explosive devices. He says he couldn't shoot a child. He says he's not sure he could shoot anyone, even if his own life or those of his comrades were at stake.
Denofa's hardly alone in confronting a situation he didn't expect. About 7,000 current soldiers have had their tours of duty extended by the Iraq war. These include members of the National Guard and career soldiers eligible to retire after 20 years of service as well as enlistees who've completed their eight-year commitment.
All told, the United States has about 130,000 troops in Iraq operations. About 40 percent are reserve forces. Before the summer call-up, the Army had mobilized about 2,500 soldiers from the Individual Ready Reserve since the September 11 attacks; about 1,100 were volunteers. The latest involuntary muster is by far the largest since the first Gulf War.
This mobilization could be just the beginning, no matter who wins the presidential election. Democrat Kerry, for one, has talked about needing more troops in Iraq. Meanwhile, Bush administration sources have leaked discussions about a post-election offensive against the insurgency. About 100,000 ex-soldiers could be vulnerable.
Denofa chose his specialty, generator repair, because it meant he could barrack in Hawaii. But basic training in Kentucky immediately sowed doubts. "Kill, kill - that's what you had to say while practicing with the bayonet," he says. "Kill! Kill! It freaked me out, but I didn't say anything about it. I didn't want to be the guy who didn't want to kill."
His overall misgivings manifested themselves in wisecracks he made about Army lingo in front of officers. He went AWOL once for three days. He excelled on the first day of rappelling training to prove he could do it, then dropped out to show he didn't want to.
Denofa has a countdown feature on his watch. He set it to mark the day that he could leave the Army for good. That day arrived in February 2003, on the eve of the Iraq war.
Eventually, he followed his girlfriend to Los Angeles, where she made a stab at acting and where they now live L.A.-style lives. They share - with a cat and a dog - a simply furnished one-bedroom in a West Los Angeles complex with a pool for $1,000 a month.
Winning conscientious-objector status is a hard go, and in recent times, few soldiers have even tried, according to Army numbers. In 2002, the Army approved conscientious-objector status for 17 soldiers and denied it to six others. In 2003, the numbers were 31 approved and 30 denied. In 2003, another 2,782 soldiers simply deserted.
Being a conscientious objector does not guarantee stateside safety. In the Vietnam War, for example, some conscientious objectors were trained as medics and served very much in harm's way. That would be a difficult path for Denofa, who objects to the entire effort in Iraq.
"I joined the Army thinking I was going to help people," he says. "Now I realize I should have joined the Peace Corps."
In his letter to the Army, Denofa quotes Gandhi saying, "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." Denofa embraces the sentiment, but makes no claim to have emulated Gandhi, who was, perhaps, the quintessential conscientious objector - brilliant, pacifistic, willing to be beaten, willing to die for justice, unwilling to hit back.
Once you get past Gandhi, there's the imperfect remainder of humanity, which includes Denofa, a mostly apolitical kid who doesn't want to fight, doesn't want to get hurt, wants to be left alone to build his life in a free country that he'd rather have others fight to defend.
Denofa says he'll go to prison if necessary. The Army doesn't send all refuseniks to the brig. What it really wants is for soldiers - even the deserters - to return to their units.
But it does make an example of someone every so often. Such was the fate of Sergeant Camilo Mejia, who failed to return to his Florida National Guard unit after a furlough and later filed for conscientious-objector status. Mejia's reasons for wanting out included his allegations that soldiers were abusing Iraqi civilians and detainees. The military has not accused soldiers in Mejia's unit of misconduct, though such charges proved true elsewhere. In May, a military jury in Georgia sentenced Mejia to a year of detention.
As for Denofa, the Army doesn't care if he's got a gift for working with young children. And it doesn't care if losing a leg in war would cost Denofa his civilian career as a personal trainer. The Army needs soldiers. Jim Denofa signed away his peaceful soul for longer than he realized, and the Army would rather not give it back.
-----
Wives of U.S. Troops Share Pain -- and Often Politics
Washington Post
Michael Powell
October 29, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7401-2004Oct28?language=printer
LONDONDERRY, N.H. -- Shona Emery, short and blond, a mother of four whose youngest most often sleeps curled beside her in bed, wakes up at 1:40 a.m. and pads to the computer. She taps out an instant message to her husband, Jesse.
"Hey babe."
Jesse's answer pops up two seconds later on her screen. "Hey babe. I am leaving for the airport in 5 minutes."
"Cool. Running a little late?"
"I got delayed already, car bomb near the front gate of the airbase. It's clear now though."
"Great."
"I love you," he writes.
"Love you," she responds. "Be safe."
"I will," he writes, "I will."
Shona's life plays like that now. She drops the kids off at school, hauls groceries at Shaw's Supermarket, and handles the play date and soccer game and breakfast-lunch-dinner regimen. Then she catches a snatch of AM radio or cable news and hears about another soldier killed and she sucks in her breath and waits to hear whether the attack occurred near her husband's base.
Her feel for the geography of Iraq matches that of a long-haul truck driver from Basra. Her husband is a corrections officer who now lives in the 110-degree heat of the Iraqi desert. He rides shotgun on the truck convoys that cut across the horizon like video-game targets for jihadi snipers and roadside bombers.
New Hampshire ranks second per capita in the percentage of National Guard members serving in Iraq. These soldiers -- diesel mechanics, auto parts managers and school counselors -- have left behind families in states -- such as New Jersey and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin -- that are divided with almost mathematical precision between Republican and Democrat, hawk and dove, President Bush and John F. Kerry. The families may or may not swing an election. But there is little doubt where most stand. Polls show that two-thirds of them favor Bush.
Shona is no different. She may absorb a grim vision of war in her early-morning electronic exchanges with her husband, but she remains a ready vote for Bush, even if Jesse does another tour.
"My husband's a hunter and a warrior," she says. "He's totally pro-Bush."
Shona works the home front, along with her friends Dawn Cameron, Laura Robischeau and Jennifer Rowan. They are war wives with 12 children among them, and they gathered one afternoon last week at the Robischeau home, in the Merrimack River valley. A visitor is instructed to look for the 12-foot-wide American flag constructed of red-white-and-blue plastic cups in the front yard. Four vans are parked outside with a dozen yellow ribbons affixed.
Their conversation winds through gales of laughter and chatter before turning to the war. They keep careful track of the New Hampshire men killed in action; their dread is that an official military car might pull up in their driveway. Shona's and Laura's husbands have gone temporarily deaf in one ear from the concussive explosions of roadside bombs.
"Do I get nervous?" asked Jennifer, a former soldier and a realist. "Am I ever not nervous?"
Laura leans forward on her couch. "You wake up in the morning and you pray your husband made it through the night. Is he eating? Is he sleeping? Is my guy okay?"
In a society where income and stock options often rule, these women measure their working-class men by a different standard: They answered their country's call.
Each can recite her husband's unit by heart: HHB 197 Field Artillery. A Company 118 Medical Battalion. 172 Field Artillery. Laura wears her husband's dog tags. Shona, Jennifer and Dawn sleep in their husbands' Army shirts.
"When 9/11 came, I knew he was following his heart," Shona says. "He re-enlisted in the middle of us having two kids."
Says Jennifer: "My husband was born to be a soldier. That's why I fell in love. Love him to death. Obsessed."
The connective tissue of the modern world makes for a curiously intimate war. Shona and Dawn instant-message or e-mail their husbands, sometimes several times a day. Laura talks on the satellite phone. The connection is immediate and intense, and when they hang up no one knows their anxiety. Not the clerk at the Grand Union, not their neighbors, not their aunts and uncles.
"I've got friends who say to me, 'Oh, I know how you feel,' " Shona says. "And I want to scream: 'Oh, no, you don't!' " Laura nods. A few weeks back, the kids were screaming and the microwave was spinning and there was homework to be done and the phone rang and her husband, Dion, was on the line and she knew something was up. Two mortar shells had landed near him -- shrapnel had pierced his shirt, his ears were ringing.
"The first thing he asks me is: 'Baby, how much do you want to know?' " Laura says. "I never know how to answer that." The Election
One recent Saturday, Shona messaged her husband: "In my eyes, Kerry really blew the debate. Bush is not so articulate but I actually think it brings him more down to earth and makes him more believable."
He wrote back: "Yeah, when he talks, he talks from the heart."
Shona gave a speech when Bush came to New Hampshire and Pease Air National Guard Base this month. Her view of the war's progress is not as sunny as Bush's -- her man takes too much incoming fire to see victory in the offing. But that's okay.
"People laughed at Ronald Reagan for fighting the Cold War," Shona says. "We won't beat the terrorists in one year."
Jennifer listens and nods. "If it takes three, four, five years over there, get the job done," she says. "I'd rather have my husband fight than my children."
There are voices of dissent. Martha Jo McCarthy and her husband, Ryan, cleaned homes and scrimped for years. Last October, they bought a home in Wakefield, a town tucked along New Hampshire's eastern border. A few months later, Ryan, 31, flew with his National Guard artillery unit to Iraq.
He was assigned to military police duty at a prison. His e-mails to Martha Jo talk about 115-degree temperatures and dehydration and getting shot at. Nothing he writes smacks of victory. "No one is going to die from the heat but it sure is hell," he writes. "We heard firing Sunday night but we always hear firing."
Martha Jo has a yellow ribbon on her car and war wives to talk with when her skin starts to crawl. But her car also bears a sticker that says: "My Husband is Protecting Dick Cheney's Stock Price, Not Freedom." She has spoken at rallies for Kerry. "Ryan and I felt like going to Afghanistan was about protecting freedom," she says. "But Iraq? We've turned it into a breeding ground for terror, casualties have gone up since the handover. . . . It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see it's going terribly."
Ryan's best friend got married a few months ago, and Ryan was supposed to be the best man. Martha Jo went in his place. "Ryan sent me an MP3 recording from Iraq and I blew up a life-size cutout photo of Ryan holding an Arabic Pepsi," she recalled. "When my turn came to give a toast, I played the recording of Ryan."
She looks away, her voice hitches. "You could have heard a pin drop." Coming Home
The question lingers unspoken. Will the husband who comes home be the same guy who left? The wives had a trial run a few weeks ago, when their husbands got a two-week leave in the States. One husband drove through Londonderry looking side to side for bombs. Ryan McCarthy cranked up the heat in the Jeep until it was 85 degrees in October in New Hampshire.
"In one way, it was like riding a bike -- it was sooooo easy to be back with him," Martha Jo McCarthy says. "But Ryan was blasting that heat. He was a little angry, too. He did a lot of venting."
A recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that 90 percent of the soldiers deployed to Iraq reported being shot at, a far greater combat exposure than for soldiers in Afghanistan or the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Fifteen percent of the soldiers report feeling major depression and generalized anxiety -- almost twice the rate as recent wars.
"There's a clear difference between training twice a year and living in a war zone -- we are seeing much more serious cases of PTSD," said Ehsan Biswas, chief of psychiatry at Manchester VA Medical Center, referring to post-traumatic stress disorder. "They constantly live with the threat of death. That hyper vigilance takes a great toll."
Back in Londonderry, Shona and Laura, Dawn and Jennifer talk about the day their husbands will return for good, about packing tents and beer coolers and suntan lotion and going on a "wicked awesome" vacation together. "Our husbands better like each other," Laura says, "because we won't give them any choice."
Their men have served nearly a year in Iraq and will remain through next summer. The two-week leave was fine, but also a tease. A soldier cannot unwind from a war in two weeks.
"When Dion came home," Laura says, "he just sat in that hammock with his beer."
Jennifer nodded. "My husband had a little issue with driving. His eyes went back and forth like crazy."
Shona hoisted her young daughter over her head. "Jesse had an issue with crowds," she says. "And he wouldn't unpack his duffel bag. He just kept it by his bed. He said this war isn't over yet."
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Chile Uses Anti-Terror Law Against Indians, Says Report
Reuters
By Louise Egan
October 29, 2004
http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=274
SANTIAGO, Chile - Chile's center-left government is using a draconian anti-terror law inherited from former dictator Augusto Pinochet to repress Indian protesters battling for land rights, rights groups said this week.
Mapuche Indian activists face unfair trials with anonymous witnesses and excessive prison sentences under a 1984 law originally targeted at leftist guerrillas, according to a report by the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch and Chile's Indigenous People's Rights Watch.
The Mapuches, a small minority of Chile's 15 million people, are fighting expanding commercial tree plantations on their ancestral lands in the south of Chile.
Small groups of Mapuches have clashed with the police and forestry companies since the late 1990s and have occupied land, set fire to forests, and sabotaged logging trucks.
In the the biggest Mapuche trial yet, 16 Indians face between five and 15 years in prison for arson or planning arson attacks. So far, more than six secret witnesses have testified, hidden behind a screen and their voices distorted.
The government and timber companies - one of Chile's most powerful industries - say these arson attacks are terrorist acts.
The report says protesters have committed crimes that have not injured anybody nor threatened public safety.
"Chile tells the world community that it suffers no threat from terrorism domestically ... yet it applies this legislation to crimes of arson and land occupation. These do not constitute terrorism," said Jose Miguel Vivanco, executive director of the Americas Division of Human Rights Watch.
Chile has become a regional model of political stability after emerging from the 1973-1990 military dictatorship. The coalition in power since 1990 was born out condemnation of Pinochet's dismal human rights record.
"It's a sad spectacle that has nothing to do with guaranteeing due process," said Rodrigo Lillo, legal director of Indigenous People's Rights Watch.
-------- courts / tribunals
LEGAL MOVES
Adviser in Lindh Case Sues Justice Dept.
October 29, 2004
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/29/politics/29justice.html
WASHINGTON, Oct. 28 - A former Justice Department lawyer who says she was forced out of her job in 2002 after raising legal and ethical objections over the handling of the John Walker Lindh case in Afghanistan sued the department on Thursday for taking "illegal retaliatory actions" against her.
In a federal lawsuit, the lawyer, Jesselyn Radack, accused Justice Department officials of destroying internal e-mail messages that spelled out her concerns about the Federal Bureau of Investigation's interrogation of Mr. Lindh after he was captured with the Taliban in late 2001.
Justice Department officials declined to comment on the lawsuit. They have previously defended both the department's interrogation of Mr. Lindh and its treatment of Ms. Radack.
At the time of Mr. Lindh's celebrated capture, Ms. Radack was working as a legal adviser in a Justice Department office that counseled federal prosecutors on issues of professional responsibility and ethics. She said she had received an inquiry from a federal prosecutor in December 2001 about whether the bureau could seek to interview Mr. Lindh after his father had retained a lawyer for him in California.
Ms. Radack said she had advised the prosecutor that any bureau interview bypassing Mr. Lindh's lawyer would not be authorized under federal law.
But Justice Department officials disagreed, saying they were not bound by the hiring of a lawyer by a suspect's family in such a situation. The bureau went ahead with Mr. Lindh's interrogation. Mr. Lindh later pleaded guilty to supporting the Taliban and agreed to a 20-year sentence, which he is seeking to have reduced in light of the recent release of Yaser E. Hamdi, another American citizen captured in Afghanistan.
Ms. Radack's run-ins with the Justice Department did not end with the interrogation. As the criminal case against Mr. Lindh was under way, Ms. Radack said in her lawsuit, she discovered that memorandums she had written raising ethical concerns about the propriety of the interrogation had been "purged" from the office file and apparently not turned over to a criminal court as required.
The Justice Department has denied that accusation, maintaining that all relevant material was properly disclosed.
When she pressed the issue, Ms. Radack said, a supervisor threatened her with a negative review and told her to find another job. She resigned in April 2002 and went to work for a private law firm.
About two months later, Ms. Radack acknowledged in her lawsuit, she gave the e-mail memorandums to Newsweek magazine, which used them as the basis for an article in 2002 about dissension within the Justice Department over the Lindh interrogation.
Justice Department officials have maintained that Ms. Radack's disclosure of the memorandums violated attorney-client communications. In her lawsuit, however, she said that her actions were "authorized and protected" by a federal whistle-blower statute insulating those who report government fraud and abuse.
Ms. Radack said she was fired from the private law firm after she refused to say whether she had given the documents to Newsweek. The Justice Department opened a criminal investigation against her over the disclosure of government material and reported her actions to bar associations in the District of Columbia and Maryland.
The criminal investigation was closed last year without charges being brought. The bar reviews are continuing, and Ms. Radack, a Yale Law School graduate, said in an interview that while she had contacted about 20 law firms and legal groups about work, the cloud of the inquiries had made her "unemployable."
One hope in suing the Justice Department, she said, was to bring the bar investigations to a quicker end and help to clear her name.
"I thought this whole nightmare would be over a long time ago," said Ms. Radack, 33, who lives in Washington with her husband and three children. "As much as I'd like to put all this behind me, I can't. My life is on hold, and I can't even get a job."
-------- homeland security / national intelligence
Homeland Security Disavows Document Touting Successes
Officials Say Agency's Public Relations Plan Was Not Approved
By Scott Higham and Robert O'Harrow Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, October 29, 2004; Page A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7445-2004Oct28?language=printer
A Bush political appointee in the Department of Homeland Security's Customs and Border Protection bureau drafted and distributed a public relations strategy designed to "change perception" about the nation's security by repeating the message, in the weeks leading up to the presidential election, that America is safer, according to internal government documents.
The "90-day Strategy" lays out a detailed media plan to "push information out," "maximize" the media and "brand" the border protection agency as a model of counterterrorism operations.
"Reassure the citizens of the United States," says the strategy, which was presented five weeks ago to public affairs officials for Customs and Border Protection regional offices around the country. "Repeat the message. . . . Repeat until we are completely exhausted by it."
This week, the chief public affairs officer for the border protection agency disavowed the 90-day strategy document and said it was never approved or implemented by senior officials. Dennis Murphy said it should never have been distributed and does not represent the department's approach to public affairs.
"Our job is not public relations," Murphy said. "It's to communicate facts."
James M. Loy, deputy secretary of homeland security, dismissed the document as an unfinished draft and a "piece likely produced by well-meaning, enterprising public affairs folks." A copy of the three-page strategy obtained by The Washington Post is not labeled as a draft.
Loy and Murphy said they were unaware of any details about the document. They said they did not know that it existed or had been distributed to field officers until reporters contacted them this week.
The two officials said that politics played no role in writing the document, and that senior homeland security and White House officials knew nothing about it. Other documents from the same public affairs office take note of the campaign season by listing the dates of the presidential debates alongside radio interviews and media appearances by high-ranking Homeland Security officials.
Murphy said the debates were listed for planning purposes.
"If there's an announcement that you need to communicate and the public needs to know about, you need to know when the debates are," he said. "If you're going to make an announcement, you're not going to make it on that day."
Although Loy and Murphy said they disagree with the strategy's emphasis on repeating positive messages, they said the document is essentially accurate.
"We are absolutely safer as a nation today than we were on the occasion of 9/10/01," Loy said.
Murphy said the strategy was written by Kristi M. Clemens, assistant commissioner in the U.S. Customs and Border Protection's office of public affairs. She came to the border protection agency, known as CBP, in August after working as a spokeswoman for L. Paul Bremer, administrator of the former Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. Clemens also served as a spokeswoman for the Federal Transit Administration and liaison between the Small Business Administration and White House personnel.
"I developed a draft communications plan intended to spur debate on how we could effectively communicate some of our recent border security improvements and more efficiently structure CBP public affairs' activities which are spread out across the country," Clemens said in a statement. "The draft plan was an internal CBP product that was never shared outside of my staff nor executed."
The 90-day strategy surfaces at a time when the effectiveness of homeland security has become a key issue in the presidential campaign.
The Bush administration and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge have been warning that the nation can expect another terrorist attack, but homeland security officials have also trumpeted as successes a series of initiatives designed to make America safer.
Officials have emphasized improvements in several areas, among them border security, the inspection of cargo containers brought in from overseas and the screening of visitors to the United States.
On Aug. 31, U.S. Border Patrol Chief David Aguilar declared at a news conference in Laredo, Tex., that his agents are securing the Southwest's border against illegal immigrants. "Even if they get past the border, they're going to be caught up in that net of enforcement," he told the Associated Press.
In September, Robert C. Bonner, commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, told the U.S. Marine Security Conference and Expo: "We assess the risk of every ocean-going container headed for the U.S." Six months earlier, he told Congress, "We're inspecting all high-risk containers for terrorist weapons."
Last month, C. Stewart Verdery Jr., assistant secretary for Border and Transportation Security Policy and Planning, told a House Homeland Security subcommittee that "enforcement capabilities are growing by leaps and bounds" with help from US-VISIT, a new program. It is aimed at using computer technology to identify and track the entry and exit of every traveler to the United States.
On Oct. 7, a border protection agency fact sheet stated: "Following 9/11, under the leadership of President Bush, we developed and implemented a smart cargo container security strategy to identify, target and inspect cargo containers before they reach U.S. ports."
But government audits and investigations have detailed numerous shortcomings and continuing problems in those initiatives. Some security analysts say homeland security has improved but officials sometimes overstate the advances.
"We're getting security through rhetoric," said Stephen E. Flynn, a former commander of the U.S. Coast Guard whose work on border and port security has been cited in Bush administration reports and speeches. "Is it better than what we had before? Absolutely. Is it sufficient? No."
The 90-day strategy was given to the public affairs field officers in mid-September at a planning meeting in Washington.
The document contains sections titled "MESSAGE," "OBJECTIVE," "AUDIENCE," "STRATEGY" and "TOOLS." It also contains an action plan that calls on the public affairs officials to "Maximize media" and "Brand CBP."
"America is safer today because of U.S. Customs and Border Protection," states the section labeled "MESSAGE." It continued: "Department of Homeland Security's U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency is doing everything in its power to protect our nation at and beyond her borders from terrorists and terrorist weapons, while facilitating global trade routes and fostering economic security."
Under the section labeled "OBJECTIVE," the document states: "To change perception through continuous, consistent and highly credible information."
The document also suggests the use of "surrogates" to spread the agency's message and to "Implement a 'theme of the month.' " It proceeded to list them: "OCTOBER: Border Patrol. NOVEMBER: Agriculture. DECEMBER: Trade."
In one related document labeled as a draft, October is listed as "National Border Protection Month."
One action listed in the draft document, a news conference with Bonner on the use of FBI fingerprint technology at the borders as a "web of enforcement," took placed as scheduled during the week of Oct. 4.
The document stated a message: "In this time of increased security, the United States Customs & Border Protection Agency is controlling and securing our nation's border: preventing terrorists and terrorist weapons from entering the U.S.; and, preventing illegal aliens, smugglers, and other contraband from entering the U.S."
To get that message out, the document proposed pitching stories to the "Editorial Board with Washington Times," to "Morning Shows" and to "pitch exclusive" to "FOX 3-4 part series ending with the Commissioner Live in studio. Geraldo or as backup Dr. Bob Arnot with MSNBC."
Research editor Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.
-------- police
Police Officer Is Put on a Year's Probation for Refusing to Arrest a Homeless Man
October 29, 2004
By MICHELLE O'DONNELL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/29/nyregion/29cop.html
A police officer who cited his religious beliefs after he refused to arrest a sleeping homeless man in 2002 was placed on probation for one year for disobeying an order, the Police Department said yesterday.
The officer, Eduardo Delacruz, 39, was also suspended for 30 days without pay, a suspension that he has already served, his lawyer, Gregory M. Longworth, said.
"We're very happy that he's allowed to continue his work in the department, and he will continue to do the excellent job that he has done," Mr. Longworth said yesterday after learning of the decision by Michael D. Sarner, an assistant deputy commissioner for the department.
It was unclear yesterday why the penalty included the year's probation. During his trial, the department recommended that Officer Delacruz, who could have been fired, not be further penalized. After refusing to arrest a homeless man at a Union Square parking garage on Nov. 22, 2002, Officer Delacruz became a hero to advocates for the homeless and to some religious groups.
Lawyers for the Police Department said that Officer Delacruz was not a martyr for the homeless. Rather, they said, he simply wanted to get home on time that night. During his trial, Officer Delacruz acknowledged that he had arrested homeless people in the past. Asked whether he had ever said that he answers to a higher authority than his superiors in the Police Department, he answered repeatedly: "My God is in control."
--------
FBI Glossed Over Abu Ghraib Abuses
October 29, 2004
TheNewStandard
by Lisa Ashkenaz Croke
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/croke.php?articleid=3869
An FBI memorandum released Oct. 15 demonstrates a lack of consistency regarding agents' knowledge of permitted interrogation techniques used at Abu Ghraib prison. Several Bureau special agents and translators told inspectors during an internal inquiry in May that, while visiting the infamous facility between October and December 2003, they saw detainees hooded or naked and learned of allegations of other mistreatment.
None of the agents reportedly believed such actions "rose to the level of misconduct or mistreatment," according to the report.
The document further notes that none of the 14 FBI personnel interviewed was aware of the activities at Unit 1A or 1B of the prison, where the military acknowledges detainees were harmed, and of which photographs leaked to the media have appeared.
The memorandum, entitled "Inquiry Regarding Activities of FBI Personnel at Abu Ghurayb [sic] Prison," [.pdf] is just one of numerous documents the American Civil Liberties Union received this month after filing Freedom of Information Act requests with various government agencies for documents related to the United States' use of torture. The FBI's report, like many of the released documents, is heavily redacted; the names of FBI employees questioned during the inquiry, military personnel, detainees, and even the memorandum's authors have been blanked out by censors.
Examples of questionable treatment agents witnessed while working at Abu Ghraib include numerous acts now known to have been relatively commonplace. For instance, a special agent witnessed the subjection of a detainee to sleep deprivation and "handcuffed to a waste-high railing," his head covered with a "green nylon sandbag" and "draped in a shower curtain."
In another example, an agent witnessed a detainee found unattended "either naked or wearing boxer shorts, lying prone on the wet floor," reads the May 19 document.
Each of the cases listed in the report includes explanations for the employees' conclusions and at least implies excuses for inaction on the part of FBI personnel who neither intervened in or reported the acts.
In one instance, an agent watched "military personnel restraining a detainee who was 'spread eagle' on a mattress on the floor yelling and flailing." The document does not clarify how many people comprise "military personnel" in these cases, nor are they identified as guards, interrogators, interpreters, clerks, or by nationality. In this case, the "military personnel" assured the FBI special agent that the prisoner suffered from mental illness; the report notes the agent's own observation of the incident as "consistent with the military personnel attempting to assist a mentally ill person." The memorandum does not explain how the special agent drew such a conclusion.
Regarding instances of prolonged nudity, an agent's report that he saw detainees ordered to remove their clothes before being put into isolation is tempered with his statement to inspectors that "the stripping was no different from the searching procedures he had observed used by guards in U.S. jails." The report's retelling, however, neither indicates that the stripping was followed by a search of the detainee, nor suggests that the detainee's clothes were returned to him.
Despite the report's conclusion that agents saw nothing they deemed out of the ordinary, FBI personnel interviewed gave different responses regarding their knowledge of accepted interrogation techniques. According to the report, several agents confirmed that they signed a Department of Defense form specifying permitted methods and those requiring specific approval. Only one stated correctly that "sleep deprivation was not on the list of permissible interview activities, but [that it] required a specific request."
Another special agent reported that "he was not aware of [Department of Defense] techniques as they were not relevant to his interviews." Still another told inspectors that he was aware that the military used sleep deprivation and isolation, but he witnessed neither. One agent said he learned of the techniques through Military Intelligence personnel and understood they were permissible for limited periods.
The actual legality of such techniques is difficult to determine, in no small part due to the Bush administration's hostility toward international law as it pertains to prisoners in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
In a May 28 letter [.pdf] to Attorney General John Ashcroft, Representative Patrick J. Leahy (D, Vt.), a ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, asked for further explanation regarding the Justice Department's role in advising the White House on issues of detention and torture. He asked for clarifications on the Justice Department's policies relative to the capture and treatment of so-called "enemy combatants" and others.
In a June 6 response [.pdf], Assistant Attorney General William E. Moschella rejected Leahy's suggestion that "the Department of Justice may have assisted the Pentagon and the intelligence community in circumventing the law." Moschella wrote that Iraqi military prisoners "are generally entitled" to protections provided in the Third Geneva Convention, and that the Fourth Geneva Convention protects Iraqi civilians.
However, Moschella selectively cites protections "against 'grave breaches' including 'willful killing,' 'torture or inhuman treatment' or 'willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or heath,'" completely ignoring that Geneva Convention III relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War also demands that prisoners be "at all times humanly treated," and "are entitled in all circumstances to respect for their persons and their honor."
Cases expressly prohibited under international law include occasions when a prisoner undergoes disciplinary confinement. Article 98 states that such prisoners "shall continue to enjoy the benefits of the provisions of this Convention except in so far as these are necessarily rendered inapplicable by the mere fact that he is confined." Further, the Fourth Convention, which protects civilians in wartime, prohibits "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment."
FBI personnel did tell inspectors that there were three known instances of abuse, but each occurred before the victims were brought to Abu Ghraib.
"Examples of the reported abuse included being kicked in the stomach, electric shock, threats to harm family members, and one burn victim," reads the report, which further notes that FBI employees' interviews with detainees last year "determined those acts of abuse occurred during arrests by military personnel further described as 'non-American.'"
The report says that only one prisoner agents interviewed at Abu Ghraib in 2003 found his treatment unacceptable. A special agent told inspectors that he had received complaints from a detainee who was "kept naked and subject to sleep deprivation." He also alleged being "roughed up" by American personnel, but the agent said there was no physical evidence to confirm this. The detainee also told the agent that he heard "commotion and screaming at night," but this allegation was dismissed as "posturing."
-------- terrorism
Tape With Terror Threat Is Broadcast
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 29, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7504-2004Oct28.html
ABC News aired a videotape last night of a purported American member of al Qaeda declaring that a new series of terrorist attacks against the United States could come "at any moment."
The network, which has held the tape since Monday while it tried to authenticate it, acted after being told by the CIA that the video bears "all the trademarks of an al Qaeda production," as reporter Brian Ross explained. Federal investigators do not know the identity of the man on the tape, but copies are going to 13 current and former officials named during the 75-minute video.
Officials have been unable to match the speaker's voice to any known al Qaeda supporter or sympathizer.
The speaker, face obscured by a headdress and identified only as "Azzam the American," says on the videotape: "No, my fellow countrymen, you are guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty. You are as guilty as Bush and Cheney. You're as guilty as Rumsfeld and Ashcroft and Powell."
The man continued: "After decades of American tyranny and oppression, now it's your turn to die. Allah willing, the streets of America will run red with blood, matching drop for drop the blood of America's victims." The man speaks in accented English, pronouncing, for example, "tyranny" as "tie-ranny."
He also makes references to comedian Bill Maher, who once said that suicide attackers were less cowardly than long-distance cruise missile launchers, and Sept. 11 commission Chairman Thomas H. Kean (R). The man also criticizes Muslims who have lost their faith. "September 11 was but the opening salvo of the global war on America," he says.
A U.S. counterterrorism official told The Washington Post that intelligence analysts are still examining the tape. It has been judged to be of professional quality, and the speaker is considered to be college-educated and probably raised or schooled in the United States, the official said.
ABC executives were frustrated that after holding the tape and working closely with federal officials to authenticate it, Fox News obtained and aired a copy about 20 minutes before it was shown on Peter Jennings's newscast last night.
Staff writer Susan Schmidt contributed to this report.
--------
Refinery and Chemical Workers Are Not Ready for an Attack, Says Survey
By Reuters
October 29, 2004
http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=269
HOUSTON, Texas - Workers at U.S. refineries, chemical plants, and paper mills that might be attractive terrorist targets are not adequately trained to prevent or respond to attacks, according a survey released this week.
The survey of local union leaders by the Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical, and Energy Workers International Union (PACE) found only 38 percent of respondents at 125 U.S. plants believed the company had effectively prepared to respond to a terrorist attack.
The results show chemical plants, refineries and paper mills have not adequately improved security at their facilities in the three years since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, said Dave Ortlieb, PACE director of health and safety.
"We feel the primary emphasis has been on the three Gs: guards, gates, and guns," Ortlieb said.
A spokesman for the National Petrochemical & Refiners Association (NPRA), which represents chemical manufacturers and oil refiners, said the industry association had yet to see the survey and could not discuss its findings.
"We do know NPRA members have made significant improvements in security since Sept. 11," said Maurice McBride, NPRA director for security. "We look forward to making additional improvements in the future."
The PACE survey was sent to the president and recording secretary of local unions at 189 U.S. plants that process or store hazardous chemicals regulated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. PACE represents 50,000 workers at the 189 plants.
Leaders at 133 plants responded to the survey. Among the plants represented, 125 possessed enough chemicals to cause a catastrophic event.
Of the 125 plants, 32 percent are chemical plants, 24 percent are paper mills, and 26 percent are oil refineries. The remaining 18 percent are involved in other industries.
-------- POLITICS
-------- propaganda wars
State Department Tried to Stop Airing of Bin Laden Tape
The Associated Press
By Barry Schweid
Oct 29, 2004
http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGB5HREYW0E.html
WASHINGTON (AP) - The State Department on Friday urged the government of Qatar, which finances Al-Jazeera, not to broadcast a videotaped speech by Osama bin Laden, a senior State Department official said.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the State Department spoke to officials in Qatar before Al-Jazeera showed a portion of the tape. In it, the al-Qaida leader said the United States can avoid another attack if it stops threatening the security of Muslims.
The request to the Persian Gulf government, which is considered an ally in the U.S. campaign to counter terror, was passed through the U.S. embassy in Doha, Qatar's capital.
Secretary of State Colin Powell and other Bush administration officials have appeared in Al-Jazeera interviews, although the State Department has occasionally denounced the network as biased against the United States. The reason for going on these programs is to convey the U.S. message to the Arab world, the official said.
--------
Why I turned against the war
spectator.co.uk
29 October 2004
http://www.antiwar.com/spectator2/spec501.html
Nairobi - The other day, shortly after returning from a longish stint in Iraq on behalf of the Daily Telegraph, I had dinner with a staunch Republican friend at a restaurant here. I was expecting a stern rebuke, and she did not disappoint. 'I thought you were fairly unbiased,' she said. 'Yet your stories became increasingly focused on the attacks. Why didn't you write about the good things, about how Americans troops are building schools and restoring services?'
Many of those intending to vote for President Bush next week would share my chum's frustrations. They believe there is a conspiracy, perpetrated by the undoubtedly liberal-dominated press, to bury the good news and report only on the bad in an effort to make sure he is not re-elected.
Do they have a point? The difference between the despondency of media reports from Iraq and the optimism of the press releases put out by US military command in Baghdad certainly could not be starker.
My inbox is filled with emails from a Sgt Steve Valley at the Coalition Press Information Center bearing cheery headlines such as 'Iraqi Children Get a Kick out of Donation', 'Winning Hearts by Filling Stomachs' and 'Another Precision Strike in Fallujah'. Sgt Valley, who signs off his emails with the words 'Cowboy Up', recounts heart-warming tales of brave American soldiers handing out soccer balls to children, delivering food to poor mothers and rebuilding schools, clinics and playgrounds. The interim Iraqi government sees things Sgt Valley's way. Addressing a joint session of Congress in September, Prime Minister Iyad Allawi was profuse in his praise of the US-led invasion and announced that, while there were a few problems in three of Iraq's provinces, things were pretty much hunky-dory in the other 15.
Yet the Western press is daily filled with disheartening stories of suicide bombings, allegations of American bungling and the denouncements of furious Iraqis. Our television screens show grim images of dust-covered children being pulled out of the rubble after raids in Fallujah, or panicked civilians fleeing the latest suicide bombing in Baghdad, Mosul, Baqubah or a host of other towns and cities.
As we all know, bad news sells papers. Most foreign correspondents lean left and some may even twist the truth, especially if they think that by doing so they may lose Mr Bush the election. Indeed, there are a few reporters in Baghdad who do greet each atrocity with unbecoming glee for that very reason, as my colleague Toby Harnden reported in these pages in May. But the majority of journalists do not, I believe, put a liberal spin on their reporting, if only because there is no real need to. The situation in Iraq, despite what the military command and government would have you believe, is unrelentingly grim - if not everywhere, then at least in a large proportion of the country.
Before I flew into Iraq in early June, I - like the editor of this magazine - was uneasy about what was happening, but believed the war to be right. As someone born and raised in Africa, the issue for me was not so much whether Saddam had weapons of mass destruction (though I assumed the British and American governments knew something they weren't telling us) but whether the country was better off without him. I wasn't convinced that the Iraqi regime had much to do with al-Qa'eda, and accepted that an invasion would be a diversion from the real war on terror. But I did savour the words 'regime change'.
For far too long Western countries have sat back or even lent a hand as African dictators imprisoned, tortured and murdered their opponents. During the Cold War, Washington and London pumped in money to support venal regimes like those of Mobutu Sese-Seko in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, Idi Amin in Uganda and even our own Daniel arap Moi in Kenya. So the idea of a dictator getting his comeuppance rather than retiring to a villa in the Côte d'Azur was appealing. I was not quite so naive as to assume that the American and British navies would soon be steaming into the Indian Ocean to prepare for an assault on Robert Mugabe. But I did think that it would be harder to ignore the excesses of such men without being accused of hypocrisy.
When I arrived in Baghdad, I was initially encouraged. The place seemed normal. The streets were busy, clogged with traffic and the shops and restaurants were open. People seemed to be getting on with life. Sure, there were signs of war and occupation here and there: patrols of US Humvees; Bradley Fighting Vehicles; Abrams tanks; concrete barricades topped with razor wire and warnings scrawled on the barriers - 'Do not stop here, or you will be shot.' But there was less bomb damage than I had expected and fewer explosions. My only problem, to start with, was that I could not seem to find an Iraqi with a good word to say about the Americans.
On my second Friday in the city I visited Mutanabbi Street in the heart of Baghdad's intellectual quarter. Surely here they would be grateful for having been liberated. The weekly book market was in full swing and the reading matter that lined both sides of the winding alleyway would have made Saddam blanch: Shia religious texts, communist tomes, plays that satirised the former dictator and his sons, even the odd slightly racy novel. Most of the booksellers seemed to have been imprisoned or tortured by Saddam's ghastly secret service, the Mukhabarat.
I fell in with Sami al-Mutairy, a one-eyed Trotskyite poet (the other had been gouged out by the Mukhabarat). We went for a cup of coffee at the famous Shahbandar café at the top of the street. As we listened to excited debates on political theories, I turned to Sami and said: 'You and your friends must have been pretty delighted with the US invasion.' He stared at me as though I were mad. 'But look at this place,' I insisted. 'You're free to talk about what you want and nobody is going to lock you up. Surely things are better than they were.'
'Of course we are glad Saddam has gone,' Sami replied gravely. 'But things are worse in many ways now. Then, if you stuck your neck out you got clobbered. Now it's indiscriminate and everyone is affected.'
Sami was right. As the weeks progressed, the attacks escalated. The number of explosions I could hear from my hotel jumped from about two a day to about 15. Suicide bombings claimed more and more lives. Najaf and the southern Shia cities again rose up at the bidding of Muqtada al-Sadr, the spoilt, portly young cleric who drew to his cause the hopeless and the dispossessed.
But Iraqis were not just being killed by insurgents or foreign fighters. In a hospital in Sadr City, the sprawling Shia slum in northern Baghdad that is home to perhaps half the city's population, I watched as, in the space of an hour, six young children were brought in. They were smeared in blood, screaming in agony and terror, faeces dribbling from their bowels. They were victims of the 1st US Cavalry Division, sent to quell the fighting raging around us. Outside the hospital an old man, surrounded by four small coffins, wailed at the loss of all his children struck by a shell fired from an American tank.
During the course of one week, the Telegraph's chief driver and office manager, brother and sister, lost six relatives - two in a suicide bombing in Baqubah, four mowed down by a US tank as they drove back to Baghdad.
In an opinion poll conducted by the International Republican Institute at the end of September, Iraqis were asked the following question: in the past year and a half, has your household been directly affected by violence in terms of death, handicap or significant monetary loss? Over one in five, 22 per cent, replied yes. A Western security company working for the Coalition estimates that there are about 80 insurgent attacks a day in Iraq. Barely a week goes by when one of Iraq's 18 provinces escapes an attack.
It is true that the Americans have refurbished 3,500 schools and built 70 healthcare centres, but such positive developments are overwhelmed by the violence and lawlessness that grip Iraq every day. We hear a lot about the abduction of foreign nationals. More than 150 have been taken and more than 30 executed. But what of the thousands of Iraqis who have also been kidnapped for ransom? Schools may have been built, but many Iraqi mothers are too afraid to send their children to them lest they too are seized.
My stint as a reporter in Iraq showed me where America went wrong. Listening to his closest advisers - Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith - President Bush went into Iraq not with a postwar reconstruction plan but with a theory. Iraq was to be an experiment in imposing unfettered capitalism on what had effectively been a socialist command economy. Taxation and tariffs were more or less abandoned. Unable to compete, Iraqi businessmen watched as Bechtel, Halliburton and their kind took over, and invested instead in the insurgency. Iraqi doctors and engineers, who could expect no more than $200 a month, watched in disbelief as foreigners were brought in as drivers on $10,000 a month. Where once most Iraqis could at least find casual work, now nearly 60 per cent are unemployed. Proconsul Paul Bremer disbanded the Iraqi army, though it was from its ranks that most of the assassination attempts on Saddam and his execrable sons were launched. Many soldiers have since joined the rebels. Most of the civil service was given the heave-ho too, including 12,000 teachers who would have been useful in those refurbished schools. Mr Bush deployed only half the number of troops his commanders asked for. As a result, he has exposed the men who are in Iraq to further danger, while robbing them of any realistic chance to stymie the insurgency .
But that does not explain everything. Whitehall often made the most idiotic decisions during the first half of the last century, but the Empire held together, largely because of the work of district officers in remote locations. I am continually astounded, when venturing out into northern Kenya or southern Sudan, by the wizened half-naked gentlemen who approach me to reminisce about the young white man who lived among them for three years, spoke their tribal tongue and dispensed Her Majesty's justice.
The young men sent out from America are not cast in the same mould. Do not get me wrong: they are, by and large, incredibly brave. But because of their poor education and an American tendency towards parochialism, they have little understanding of any culture other than their own. Most are terrified of the Iraqis and bewildered by the lack of gratitude of the people they believe they liberated. While embedded with the US marines outside Fallujah, I saw these young men kick Iraqis to the ground during interrogation, stomp across prayer mats in their boots, eye up women in their homes and routinely humiliate the Iraqi guardsmen they are supposedly working with.
Their behaviour is in some ways understandable. Forbidden from entering Fallujah until after the US elections (for fear that civilian casualties could cost votes) the marines launch pointless raids outside the town that rarely uncover anything. In the meantime remotely detonated mines, suicide bombings and mortar attacks claim more of their colleagues' lives.
The 'cowboy up' school of politics has been given a chance. It has failed. Whether the unimpressive-looking John Kerry will do any better is beside the point. The cowboy has messed up in Iraq, the policy on which he has centred over half his reign. Americans should punish him accordingly.
Adrian Blomfield is eastern and central Africa correspondent of the Daily Telegraph.
-------- us politics
The monarchization of America under Bush
lp.org
by Bill Winter
OCTOBER 29, 2004
http://www.lp.org/lpnews/0411/review.html
[Review of "The Bush Betrayal," by James Bovard. 330 pages. Published by Palgrave Macmillan. Hardbound, $26.95. Available at: Amazon.com.]
The Chicago Tribune once described humorist P.J. O'Rourke as "a trophy hunter let loose in an unguarded zoo." They should have saved that description for James Bovard.
In his new book, The Bush Betrayal, Bovard opens fire on President George W. Bush with a thunderous barrage of facts and revelations that proves, beyond any doubt, that Bush has broken every small-government promise he ever made, and has shattered any credibility his Republican lackeys in Congress have for claiming to be a party of "limited government."
The premise of the book is simple: Bush is a terrible president who is savagely shredding the liberties of the American people.
As Bovard writes in the first chapter: "Bush is expanding federal power and stretching prerogatives in almost every area that captures his fancy."
Sure, Bush loves to talk about "freedom." But, as Bovard acerbically notes, "Bush is as qualified to speak about freedom as former President Clinton is to speak about chastity."
You want specifics? The only question is where to start, because the "unguarded zoo" that is the Bush Administration is a target-rich environment for Bovard. Here's a sample of the Bush Administration's big-government crimes:
- On stifling dissent: Bush's Secret Service detail arrested or detained peaceful American protesters who made the mistake of carrying "No War for Oil" or other anti-Bush signs at Bush campaign appearances in Arizona, California, Connecticut, Michigan, New Jersey, New Mexico and Texas. As Bovard notes, the Secret Service has now apparently been relegated to suppressing "any affront to the dignity of the supreme ruler."
- On free trade: Despite claiming that he is a "fierce free trader," Bush slapped a 30 percent tariff on imported steel in 2002. One consulting firm estimated that the move destroyed eight American manufacturing jobs for every one steel-producing job it saved. But as Bovard notes, the tariff was never about fair trade -- it was about "the president's own political advantage," since some steel-producing states were up for grabs in the 2004 election.
- On education reform: Bush claimed that his No Child Left Behind (NCLB) program, which mandated standards and testing for local schools, was "the boldest plan to improve our public schools in a generation." However, Bovard notes that the law only requires schools to improve their "baseline" standards -- so most states immediately dumbed-down their existing standards so they could easily show future gains. For example, the NCLB baseline standard set in Delaware required only 33 percent of children to test at grade-level in math. NCLB also required states to identify "dangerous" schools. So, New York politicians mandated that 5 percent of a student body had to be suspended for weapons violations before a school could be declared "dangerous." Such standards, notes Bovard, "practically guarantee no school would be found guilty." Needless to say, NCLB also came with a hefty price tag. At various times, Bush boasted that he had increased federal spending on education by 36 percent or 49 percent.
- On continuing the Clinton legacy: Bush has been the #1 fan of former president Bill Clinton's AmeriCorps program, which pays people $16,000 a year in cash and benefits to "volunteer." Bush increased funding for the program -- whose employees engage in such vital civic activities as organizing gay proms at high schools, paying children a $5 bounty for toy guns, and recruiting people for food stamp programs -- by more than $120 million in 2004.
- On government subsidies: During his 2000 campaign, Bush claimed to support a "market-driven approach" to agriculture. So, when he became president, he signed a bill that earmarked an additional $50 billion in federal handouts to farmers over 10 years. The bill funneled two-thirds of that money to the richest 10 percent of farmers, and will, by one estimate, cost every American family $4,377 over the coming decade in higher taxes and inflated food costs.
- On government-run health care: In 2003, Bush pushed through Congress a $400 billion-a-year Medicare bill to provide prescription drugs to seniors. (More accurate estimates later said the annual cost would actually be $576 billion.) Bovard notes that the program is the "worst financial blow Medicare ever suffered" -- and pushed Medicare's bankruptcy forward by seven years, to 2019.
- On the government's failure to stop the 9/11 terrorist attacks: After the attacks, Bush claimed that no one "could envision flying airplanes into buildings." But Bovard notes that "in the previous few years, the CIA had issued several warnings that terrorists might fly commercial airplanes into buildings or cities."
- On spying on Americans: Bush enthusiastically endorsed the USA Patriot Act, which expanded the federal government's ability to read your e-mail, search your home without notifying you, obtain a list of the books you checked out at your local library, and subpoena information from businesses without a court order. Bush's hand-picked attorney general, John Ashcroft, explained that the USA Patriot Act protects what he called "ordered liberty." Bovard disagrees, and writes, "The only way to reconcile the Patriot Act with freedom is to assume that unjustified government intrusions into people's lives are irrelevant to freedom."
- On extra-Constitutional powers: On November 13, 2001, Bush signed an executive order giving himself the power to designate Americans as "enemy combatants" and put them on trial before secret military tribunals -- with no right to appeal. The move, which stripped Americans of their Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Amendment rights to a fair trial, was necessary to fight terrorism, Bush declared. In fact, Bovard counters, if Bush can, by imperial decree, deprive Americans of fundamental civil liberties at his whim, it means the president is no longer "bound by the Constitution." And that, ultimately, is more dangerous than any terrorist.
- On waging unnecessary war: Bush invaded Iraq after claiming that Saddam Hussein possessed "the most lethal weapons ever devised." After intensive postwar searches turned up no such weapons (and after more than 1,000 American soldiers where killed in an increasingly violent insurgency against the U.S. occupation), Bush backpedaled slightly and claimed the invasion was justified because of the "possibility" that Hussein might acquire weapons of mass destruction. As evidence for even that claim evaporated, Bush backpedaled further, and said the invasion was necessary because the United States has "an obligation to help the spread of freedom." In reality, Bovard notes, "Bush was determined to demagogue the American people into war" -- no matter how feeble the rationale. Bovard notes, "Bush's war against Iraq may be his greatest abuse of power."
That's not all: The Bush Administration also launched a campaign to arrest medical marijuana users; proclaimed Thailand a "force for good" after its government ordered police to execute 2,700 suspected drug dealers (and innocent civilians) without trials; federalized airport security at a cost to taxpayers of more than $10 billion; helped cover up the brutal beating of dozens of post-9/11 detainees in U.S. prisons; and signed the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act, which made it illegal for Americans to engage in certain kinds of free speech in federal elections.
By the way, Bovard doesn't just make these claims; he documents them. If some of his allegations seem unbelievable, just check the 42 pages of footnotes -- it's all there.
Add up all of the president's anti-freedom actions, and you can't help but to agree with Bovard when he writes: "The monarchization of America is proceeding by leaps and bounds under Bush."
As I read The Bush Betrayal, I thought about the group called "Libertarians for Bush," which supports the president's re-election. After finishing the book, I am tempted to write to them and encourage them -- in the interest of accuracy -- to change their name to "Libertarians for Massive Government." As Bovard makes clear, any Libertarian who votes for George W. Bush is voting for a bloated, expensive, un-Constitutional, warmongering, civil liberties-smashing, anti-free trade, pro-Drug War federal leviathan. Could you please explain to me how any so-called "libertarian" could support that?
There's almost nothing to quibble about in this book. Yes, Bovard does recycle Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 claim that Bush sat in a Florida classroom with a "deer-in-the-headlights" look after being informed of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. So what? I would prefer that Bush sat and did nothing -- if our choice was the barrage of un-Constitutional measures that followed once he stood up. Why waste time criticizing Bush for the one time he didn't do something bad?
But, wisely, Bovard sticks to the important issues most of the time. And it's that relentless focus on Bush's war against freedom that makes this book so shocking, eye-opening, and important.
With The Bush Betrayal, Bovard cements his claim as America's journalistic superman -- fighting for truth, justice, and the American way of freedom and limited government. We may have been stuck with George W. Bush for four years, but at least we have Bovard on our side.
And that evens the odds just a bit.
[About the author: Bill Winter is communications director for the Advocates for Self-Government. From 1997 to 2004, Winter was editor of LP News.]
--------
VotePact.com Offers Alternative Way of Voting
democracynow.org
October 29th, 2004
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/29/1420246
We speak with Washington-based political analyst Sam Husseini about Votepact.com, a website he founded that encourages dissatisfied voters from either side of the two party divide to make a pact in pairs and cast their ballot for a third party candidate. [includes rush transcript]
Sam Husseini, Washington-based political analyst and the founder of the website Votepact.com.
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
This transcript is available free of charge, however donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution. Donate - $25, $50, $100, more...
AMY GOODMAN: Before we look the at latest situation with Yasser Arafat sick and going to Paris, we have Sam Husseini on the line, who is a political analyst based in Washington, founder of the website, VotePact.com. As we continue on this theme of people struggling with who to vote for, what is your suggestion, Sam?
SAM HUSSEINI: My suggestion is that people who -- take the most obvious case, somebody who, say, wants Ralph Nader to be president, but they feel like they have got to vote for Kerry because they don't want Bush. My suggestion is to reach out across the two-party divide. Find a disenchanted Bush voter. There are Bush voters who, if they thought about it a little bit might actually prefer somebody like either a Libertarian or Constitution Party or conceivably even Ralph Nader. And if you have a relationship with this person -- a friend, a co-worker, a neighbor, whatever -- as people say, okay, we'll both, instead of wasting our votes and both canceling out each other, one of us voting for Kerry and one of us voting for Bush, let's both vote for the third party of our choice. They can both vote for Nader, or one can vote for Nader or the Green or the Socialist, and the other can vote for the Constitution or Libertarian Parties. That way, it's siphoning off votes by twos, one from each Kerry and Bush, and giving them to third parties. You don't affect the balance between the two parties, but you do help third parties. What this requires is meaningful dialogue with, god forbid, a would-be Bush voter. To actually reach out, see them as a human being and try to do something that benefits you both and gets you out of the partisan boxes, so that you're not stuck voting for Kerry with all of his lies and hypocrisies, and they're not stuck vote for Bush with all of his lies and hypocrisies.
JUAN GONZALEZ: But, Sam, your proposal assumes, obviously, that the republican counterpart or democratic counterpart in this deal or arrangement will keep his or her word and won't actually end up lying in the same way that the candidates are, right?
SAM HUSSEINI: Well, largely, the one way around that would be that if you both had absentee ballots. If you both had absentee ballots you could both sit down, fill them out in front of each other, walk down to the mailbox, and mail them together. That's one sure-fire solution. Short of that, I mean, the webpage, VotePact.com, I'm not trying to link people up who meet each other over the internet. It's just an idea. Do you trust your wife? Do you trust your brother? Do you trust even your brother-in-law who might be annoying over the Thanksgiving table because you disagree with him politically, but you kind of like him as a human being. So, I'm saying people who you have a relationship with, people who you break bread with and look in the eye and you can trust. If we're going to be a nation of liars, then maybe we get what we deserve. But if we can find a way out of that, and find a way to either verify what the other party is doing through absentee ballots or by having relationships that come out of meaningful dialogue with each other, then you can trust each other.
AMY GOODMAN: Sam Husseini, founder of the website, VotePact.com. Thanks for joining us.
--------
Kerry's Foreign Policy Views Still a Puzzle
October 29, 2004
Cato Institute
by Christopher Preble
http://www.cato.org/dailys/10-29-04-2.html
Senator John Kerry has spent a lot of time criticizing President Bush's foreign policies: his neglect of international institutions, his unilateralism and his conduct of the Iraq war. Kerry's own foreign policy views remain a puzzle, which leaves open the possibility that his conduct of foreign policy wouldn't be much different.
Of particular concern is Kerry's attitude toward the use of the military and his vote in October 2002 granting the president authority to wage war against Iraq. For most of the month of August 2004, Kerry struggled to explain his position. At the time, the editors at the New York Times wondered: "There are undoubtedly circumstances that call for military action, but we would like to know whether, as president, John Kerry would insist on a higher threshold than he settled for as an opportunistic senator in 2002."
Many assume that the threshold would be higher under President Kerry than it has been under President Bush, but Kerry's statements as a candidate, and his earlier actions as a senator, do not always support that assumption. With the failure to find evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and with a similar failure to link Hussein's regime with Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, the Bush administration has fallen back on a humanitarian justification for removing Hussein from power, one that could easily be applied to dozens of countries around the world. That poses a special challenge to many of the current critics of the Bush administration's policies who were among the most vocal defenders of President Clinton's use of the military in the late 1990s.
It cannot be explained solely by partisanship, although that is a factor. The so-called neo-conservatives -- the editors of the Weekly Standard, for example -- were among the most vocal proponents of military action against both Serbia and Iraq. Meanwhile, many of the so-called "hard right" opposed both wars. Liberal Democrats (including, for example, Madeleine Albright, Richard Holbrooke and Gen. Wesley Clark) are left to explain how the Clinton administration's actions against a sovereign state can be differentiated from the Bush administration's attack on Hussein's regime in Iraq.
But what about John Kerry? He should not be judged solely by his comments before Congress in 1971 as a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. In the course of his political career, Kerry has supported many U.S. military ventures, including those in Bosnia, Panama, Somalia, Haiti, and even Grenada.
The senator supported the Clinton administration's policies in the 1990s. With respect to Kosovo, he actually went further than the Clinton administration, arguing that ground troops should remain as an option for stopping former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's assault on the province's ethnic Albanians.
In early September, Kerry criticized the Bush administration for not doing more in the Sudan. According to Kerry, the United States cannot stand by and ignore the developments in the Darfur region, but should instead "ensure the immediate deployment of an effective international force to disarm militia, protect civilians and facilitate delivery of humanitarian assistance in Darfur."
Senator Kerry is a strong supporter of multilateralism in principle, but he has in the past favored the use of force even without the UN's formal authorization. Consider Kosovo. John Kerry's foreign policy adviser Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute points to the exemplary nature of the 1999 U.S.-led intervention in that troubled Balkan region. According to Marshall, Clinton's policy was "based on a mix of moral values and security interests with the parallel goals of halting a humanitarian tragedy and ensuring NATO's credibility as an effective force for regional stability." Notwithstanding the vague reference to "security interests" -- were those U.S. security interests? -- the fact remains that the events in the Balkans never posed a threat to the United States.
In more general terms, Kerry's foreign policy views flow both from his commitment to the principle of humanitarian intervention, and more broadly from his belief that the government is a force for good.
Take, for example, Kerry's stance with respect to Bosnia. Speaking out in favor of the Clinton administration plans, and in opposition to congressional Republicans' attempts to block the deployment of U.S. troops to Bosnia as part of the Dayton peace accord, Kerry maintained that he contemplated "only keeping troops in Bosnia for so long as the parties continue to opt for peace over war."
In that same speech, Kerry also laid out the distinction between the defense of vital U.S. national interests, and broader humanitarian objectives. "Some Members assert that there is no vital national interest in Bosnia," but that, he went on, "is the wrong test to apply to Bosnia."
"Our vital national interests are our territorial integrity, our political system and ideology, our economic security, and our way of life... [L]et us say up front, in this conflict, in this effort, in this mission, they are not at stake. That is not what is at issue here."
"Whether vital national security interests are at stake is the right question to ask... if you are deciding whether or not to send troops to war, it is not the right question to ask when you are being asked to participate in a multilateral, internationally sanctioned effort to keep the peace..."
In short, Senator Kerry sees the U.S. military both as an effective tool for promoting change abroad and as a stabilizing force in post-conflict settings. He has argued that the U.S. military should be deployed in places and in ways that are not directly related to defending America's vital interests. Relieved of the need to justify military actions according to those constraints, the world could see an even more frequent recourse to the use of force under Kerry than it did under Clinton or Bush, with the notable caveat that he will be constrained (at least temporarily) by the available military resources at hand.
On the other hand, John Kerry voted against the authorization to use force in the first Gulf War. He was harshly critical of the Reagan administration's interventions in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Concerning the use of force, he seems to have combined the cautious worldview of his diplomat father with an underlying skepticism, and even cynicism, of a chastened ex-soldier.
Perhaps the clearest indication of those sentiments came through in a speech at the New York University on September 20, 2004, when Kerry began to distance himself from the humanitarian justification for waging war on Iraq. He said: "Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who deserves his own special place in hell. But that was not, in itself, a reason to go to war."
That seems to suggest that threat-as in, was Hussein a threat to the United States? -- is still a, if not the, determining factor in whether a President Kerry would choose to send forces into combat. But it is merely a suggestion.
John Kerry must make it clear. He owes it to the voters to explain the criteria that he would use as president in deciding when to unleash America's military power. Wielding this power, or even threatening to do so, in order to spread democracy, halt humanitarian crises, or punish cruel dictators, represents a dramatic departure from America's founding principles. At a minimum, you would think that embarking on such a fundamental reorientation of U.S. policy would merit an extended debate, one that could not be confined to three 90-minute, stage-managed affairs. The reason why this national discussion has yet to take place may be partly explained by the uncertainties surrounding Kerry's views.
-------- voting
Justice to monitor voting in 25 states
October 29, 2004
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Jerry Seper and Joyce Howard Price
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20041028-115519-4857r.htm
The Justice Department yesterday said it will send out 1,090 federal poll watchers to monitor elections in 25 states, three times as many as in 2000, as Democrats and Republicans squabbled in an escalating war of words over potential voter fraud and intimidation.
In Florida, election officials in Broward County, a trouble spot in 2000, yesterday began sending out about 10,000 absentee ballots to replace ones that vanished after being mailed earlier this month.
Florida Republicans, who think that thousands of voter registrations collected in that state are invalid, said they fear that sending out duplicate absentee forms could open the door to more fraud. Democrats expressed concern that some people will receive their absentee ballots too late to cast votes.
A report yesterday by Advancement Project, a national civil rights organization, said an unprecedented number of highly partisan poll watchers or "challengers" are expected to be deployed disproportionately in predominately black precincts.
Judith Browne, the project's acting co-director, said it was imperative that supervisors of elections establish guidelines so partisan challengers will not be permitted to lodge indiscriminate challenges, tie up poll workers, clog the election process and disenfranchise black voters.
Meanwhile, the Federation for American Immigration Reform yesterday warned that little is being done to protect against non-U.S. citizens' casting what could be the deciding votes.
"We are staring at the possibility of our second consecutive disputed national election, and all across the country, voter registrars are turning a blind eye to a huge potential source of voter fraud," FAIR President Dan Stein said. "If American elections are to be decided by American citizens, we must secure our registration process to ensure that only eligible voters may register."
In addition to instances of overt fraud, Mr. Stein said an unknown number of illegal aliens across the country might have registered to vote under the so-called motor-voter law. He said with no requirements to verify citizenship, beyond an attestation on the registration form, and no effort by county registrars to verify the validity of the information given by an applicant, it is reasonable to assume that many noncitizens are registered to vote.
With four days to go before Tuesday's presidential election, the accusations are part of a continuing increase in threats between the supporters of the two parties, with an army of lawyers hired by both Republicans and Democrats ready to take any challenge to court. Dozens of lawsuits already have been filed, and both parties have ramped up their rhetoric, accusing each other of trying to sabotage the election.
The Republican National Committee (RNC) has been concerned about the potential for fraud resulting from a multimillion-dollar, voter-registration drive financed by a coalition of Democratic tax-exempt organizations, labor unions and wealthy donors that targeted, in part, black, Hispanic and urban working-class neighborhoods.
RNC Communications Director Jim Dyke said the Republican Party has "a zero-tolerance policy for anything that smacks of impropriety in registering voters," and he challenged Democrats to do the same.
"Anyone who engages in fraudulent voter-registration activities should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law," he said.
Democrats say a Republican plan to send thousands of poll watchers to predominantly Democratic urban areas to challenge the credentials of would-be voters at polling precincts is a bid to disenfranchise minorities.
The Republican poll watchers are expected to be particularly visible in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania, whose 68 total Electoral College votes are seen as key to the election.
Justice Department personnel from its civil rights division will be on hand in Florida, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, Minnesota, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Nevada. Their job, department officials said, will be to check for violations of federal election law, such as ballot tampering and destruction of voter-registration materials.
In 2000, it dispatched 317 poll watchers.
Also, senior prosecutors will be at all 93 U.S. attorneys offices to handle complaints and pursue accusations of voting fraud or other elections abuses. The FBI will have agents on duty at headquarters in Washington and in each of its 56 field offices to handle complaints.
Election officials in Broward County yesterday lowered their estimate of missing absentee ballots from 60,000 to between 10,000 and 15,000, saying the original ballots were merely delayed.
"We will send the ballots by Federal Express to those living outside Broward County, who did not receive them," said Gisela Salas, deputy supervisor of elections for Broward, a large county that includes Fort Lauderdale.
Broward and 14 other Florida counties, some of which had recount difficulties in 2000 with the prescored punch-card ballots, which are counted by a machine, will be using electronic touch-screen machines on Tuesday. But because some people are uncomfortable with this high-tech equipment, which cannot provide a printed record of a vote, the Bush and Kerry presidential campaigns have been advising voters to request absentee ballots.
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Justice Department Triples Election Monitors;
More Than 1,000 Head to Polls
Friday, October 29, 2004
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7423-2004Oct28.html
The Justice Department said yesterday that 1,090 observers -- more than three times the number deployed in 2000 -- will be dispatched to polling places in 25 states on Election Day.
Federal observers will monitor voting in eight Florida counties -- including Broward, Dade and Palm Beach -- as well as communities in at least six other battleground states: Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Iowa, Minnesota and New Mexico.
The Justice Department is required to monitor polling places in 27 jurisdictions covered by the Voting Rights Act or related court orders.
Some Democrats and voting-rights groups have complained that the Justice Department and Attorney General John D. Ashcroft have focused their efforts primarily on fraud allegations levied by Republicans, rather than on ensuring that minority and elderly voters are not discouraged from voting.
-- Dan Eggen
Florida GOP Scrutinizes Felon Voters
MIAMI -- Republicans railed yesterday against Florida's error-plagued list of felons who are ineligible to vote.
Al Cardenas, co-chairman of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Florida, said Republican research shows 14,000 felons who have not had their voting rights restored are registered to vote in the state. At least 925 ineligible felons have voted early or asked for absentee ballots, said Cardenas, who has referred his accusations to the Florida Secretary of State's office.
"In essence, they've committed another felony" by voting, Cardenas said. "Frankly, I have a feeling a lot of these people have been conned by groups telling them it's okay to vote."
-- Manuel Roig-Franzia
Iowa to Set Aside Ballots Cast in Wrong Precincts
Iowa's attorney general said yesterday that election officials will not count ballots cast in the wrong precincts on election night but will set them aside in the event of a lawsuit to determine their legality.
Attorney General Thomas J. Miller said the best thing for elections officials to do is segregate the ballots so that if the election outcome in Iowa hinges on them, the parties can litigate the question.
-- Jo Becker
--------
Military ballots no 'emergency'
October 29, 2004
By Guy Taylor
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20041028-112118-4603r.htm
The Pentagon is taking no last-minute emergency measures in its absentee-ballot system and the U.S. Postal Service says it has had "no delays" in handling the ballots, despite complaints from some soldiers.
"It doesn't look like we will get our vote counted," one soldier in Iraq wrote in an e-mail to his sister, who contacted The Washington Times.
The soldier, in western Iraq, said he and others were given forms to request absentee ballots from their home states.
"Well, it hasn't gotten here yet," the soldier wrote in the Oct. 22 e-mail. "I'm a little angry about that. We will see what happens."
His sister, Sheila Brothers, of Wilmington, N.C., voiced her own frustration: "They are fighting for us and implementing a democratic voting system over there, but they can't even vote in our own elections? Come on. "
Military officials said problems with absentee voting are not so widespread as to warrant emergency measures. Complaints are being handled "on a case-by-case basis," said Air Force Lt. Col. Ellen Krenke, a Pentagon spokeswoman.
She said military overseas ballots are sent to New York or San Francisco, then mailed overnight to their destinations.
The U.S. Postal Service issued a statement Wednesday saying it was handling absentee ballots "as expeditiously as possible," and had "identified no delays in our handling of balloting materials or actual ballots."
For those who don't receive their ballots in time, the Pentagon last week announced a federal write-in absentee ballot that can be downloaded from the Internet. If postmarked on time, the ballot will be accepted by local elections officials nationwide.
In order to be eligible, however, an overseas voter must meet "very specific conditions," the Pentagon said. They need to have applied for a regular ballot and had their application received by local election officials "at least 30 days before the election."
Complaints about the absentee-ballot system reach beyond military and overseas voters. Some are coming from battleground states.
In Ohio, more than 17,000 absentee ballots were scrapped this month when officials ordered independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader off the ballot for submitting bogus names on his petitions.
The incident was worsened by a mix-up in the positioning of punch holes on ballot cards in Ohio's southwestern Hamilton County. The county had more problems when it was reported that Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry was left off some absentee ballots.
In Florida's Broward County, state officials are concerned that as many as 60,000 absentee ballots might be missing, and they have stepped up efforts to man an overwhelmed telephone system swamped with calls from anxious and frustrated voters.
--------
Bush Administration Attempts To Overturn Decades of Legal Precedents & Block Voting Rights Lawsuits From Voters
democracynow.org
October 29th, 2004
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/29/1414225
Bush administration lawyers are now attempting to overturn decades of legal precedence by claiming that under the Help America Vote Act only Attorney General John Ashcroft -- and not individual voters - have a right to ask federal courts to enforce voting rights. [includes rush transcript] Bush administration lawyers are attempting to overturn of legal precedence by claiming that only Attorney General John Ashcroft and not individual voters have a right to go to federal courts to enforce the right of citizen's to vote. This according to the Los Angeles Times.
In legal briefs filed in Ohio, Michigan and Flordia, the Bush administration is arguing that only the Justice Department, and not voters themselves, may sue to enforce the voting rights set out in the Help America Vote Act which was passed after the 2000 election.
Veteran voting rights lawyers say this would overturn decades of legal precedent and could greatly affect any legal challenge to Tuesday's election.
According to the paper, since the civil rights era of the 1960s, individuals have gone to federal court to enforce their right to vote, often with the support of groups such as the NAACP, the AFL-CIO, the League of Women Voters.
Even the Supreme Court has backed the idea of private suits. In 1969, the justices issued a ruling in a case related to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that "the achievement of the act's laudable goal would be severely hampered ... if each citizen were required to depend solely on litigation instituted at the discretion of the attorney general."
Steve Mulroy, former Justice Department voting rights litigator. He now teaches law at the University of Memphis.
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
This transcript is available free of charge, however donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution. Donate - $25, $50, $100, more...
JUAN GONZALEZ: We're also joined on the telephone by Steven Mulroy, an assistant professor at the University of Memphis Law School and a former Justice Department attorney. Welcome to Democracy Now!
STEVEN MULROY: Thank you very much. I'm glad to be here.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Professor Mulroy, could you talk to us about this L.A. Times article that came out in terms of the Justice Department taking the stand that it is the, under HAVA, the new voting rights protection act, that only the Justice Department can sue on behalf of citizens for voting rights violations?
STEVEN MULROY: Right. I haven't seen the article, but I didn't leave, someone might have talked to me about it. The issue is whether there is what you call a private right of action under the statute. Sometimes statutes will expressly provide that not only federal agencies, but private individuals will have the right to enforce the federal statute through a private suit. Sometimes they won't expressly provide, but an implied right of action is discerned by the courts. Sometimes the court will discern that there is no private right of action. It's a legal question. With respect to HAVA, the help Americans Vote Act that was passed two years ago by congress, the Department of Justice has taken the position in the lawsuits under HAVA that are sprouting up around the country, there is no private right of action. This is a controversial position. I think it's debatable on the merits, but the interesting thing is some people have criticized the justice department because it's not completely unprecedented for the Justice Department to take this position, but somewhat unusual. Normally, you would think that the agency that's charged with enforcing the law would welcome assistance from private groups in also enforcing the law. And in the past, there have been some instances where there were similar issues with respect to the Voting Rights Act and the department of justice took the position there was a private right of action. As recently as 1996, in a case called Morris v. Republican Party, which went all the way up to the Supreme Court, with respect to section 10 of the Voting Rights Act, the justice department took on the position in litigation that there was a private right of action, so I think it caused some surprise, and some dismay among voting rights advocates when the department of justice recently took the position that there was no private right of action under HAVA.
AMY GOODMAN: And what about the fact that it's ultimately all in the control of John Ashcroft.
STEVEN MULROY: Well, from the perspective a progressive or a person who is very concerned about preserving Voting Rights Act, certainly that could lead to suspicions, because, you know, I mean I don't think we need to recite the record of John Ashcroft for the last several years. If you don't trust the current Attorney General to vigorously enforce protections, you know, regarding voter access to or do it in a fair manner, then one natural check in the system would be if you had a private right of action, that's one of the advantages of having a private right of action in something as fundamental as voting rights in that area. So, obviously, that's a concern.
AMY GOODMAN: Going back to the headline. In '69, the Supreme Court issuing a ruling in a case related to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 saying, quote, "The achievement of the act's laudable goal would be severely hampered if each citizen were required to depend solely on litigation instituted at the discretion of the Attorney General."
STEVEN MULROY: Well, first of all, that is a correct quote. The Supreme Court has said that. Second of all, I personally believe that that's true. I agree with that statement on the merits. I think with something as fundamental as protecting Voting Rights Act, you want to have a broad interpretation of private rights of action. So, I agree with all of that. I mean, you know, as a technical legal matter, sometimes, you know, when you look at what the legislative intent is, when you look at the language, you look at the legislative history, sometimes there's a legal matter. There is an argument for saying there is no private right of action. I haven't thoroughly researched this issue, but from what I know of it, it really sounds like it would be a good idea to have a private right of action. I was surprised when I heard that D.O.J. took the position that it did.
AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you for very much for being with us, Steven Mulroy, ex-voting rights litigator for the U.S. Justice Department, now a law professor at the University of Memphis, and Ohio state senator Teresa Fedor. This is Democracy Now!
-------- ENERGY
-------- energy
Polish Ex-spy Chief Says Russia Flexes Oil Muscle
Reuters
By Adam Jasser
October 29, 2004
http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=270
WARSAW, Poland - Russia is seeking to re-establish its grip on ex-communist countries in central Europe through its near monopoly on oil and gas, a former Polish chief spy says.
Zbigniew Siemiatkowski, a senior figure in the ruling left, told a parliamentary inquiry that as part of this drive Russian oil firms were seeking control of their peers in ex-Soviet satellites, many of which are now European Union members.
"I agree that we are facing a restoration of the Russian empire through economic means and with the principle of 'Yesterday tanks, today oil'," Siemiatkowski told the inquiry on Wednesday, according to a transcript released by parliament.
The Russian embassy declined to comment on Siemiatkowski's remarks, which may hurt tense relations between the former Cold War allies. Poland's foreign ministry also declined to comment.
Polish newspapers seized on the testimony, with the top daily Gazeta Wyborcza reporting on it on the front page under the headline, "The empire strikes."
Fear of Moscow is acute across central Europe 15 years after it escaped Soviet clutches and reoriented itself toward the West, a process crowned with its E.U. entry this year.
Such fears are reinforced by signs that Russia under President Vladimir Putin may be trying to regain influence in the region it had controlled for centuries and which many Russian politicians still refer to as their "near abroad."
In Ukraine, for instance, Russia is openly siding with a pro-Kremlin candidate for president in this weekend's elections.
Russia remains the main supplier of oil and gas to central Europe, much of it delivered over Soviet-era pipelines.
The Russian energy giants that have emerged from the Soviet oil monopoly have unsuccessfully bid for a number of refineries and petrol distribution chains in the region, reflecting widespread suspicion of Russian investment.
Poland, the biggest economy among the former Soviet satellites, in 2002 blocked a bid by LUKOIL (LKOH.RTS) to buy the country's second largest refinery, Rafineria Gdanska.
In recent weeks the circumstances surrounding that episode have surfaced as part of a highly charged parliamentary inquiry probing whether the then Polish government used the secret service to exercise undue control of the fuel sector.
The most shocking revelation the inquiry has produced so far was that Poland's richest man, industrialist Jan Kulczyk, held secret talks in Vienna about the future of the Polish energy sector with a former KGB resident in Poland.
According to declassified intelligence reports, made public by a special parliamentary committee leading the inquiry, Kulczyk had offered to use his political influence to help Russian firms make another try for the Gdanska refinery.
Kulczyk, who denies the accusations, is set to testify before the committee in November.
-------- OTHER
-------- environment
Utilities Apply To Construct Power Plants Near Parks
Officials Concerned About Air Quality
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 29, 2004; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7523-2004Oct28.html
In the last four years, power companies have deluged regulators with applications to build power plants in locations that could affect air quality and visibility in national parks or wilderness areas, according to federal statistics compiled by the Natural Resources News Service, a nonpartisan organization.
Since 2000, the number of permits sought for plants within 62 miles of park boundaries has quadrupled, compared with the previous five years, and 33 of the 280 proposed plants would be coal-fired. Both trends have prompted concern among federal and state officials that the energy boom could harm already reduced visibility.
Between 1995 and 1999 utilities built 10 coal plants nationwide, none within that distance of a national park or wilderness.
The trend is particularly pronounced near some popular tourist sites in the West, where National Park Service and state officials say visibility-obscuring haze is increasing.
Several recent studies indicate that while visibility is improving in many parks on the East and West coasts, the overall number of low-visibility days is on the rise. A federal report found that as of 1999, on the 20 percent of days when skies are haziest, "most parks show at least some degradation or worsening of conditions, especially in the Southwestern U.S.," compared with 1990. A Park Service report last year concluded that "poor air quality currently impairs visibility in every national park and most, if not all, wilderness areas."
"The interior West is witnessing the biggest resurgence in coal-fired power plants in a generation," said Vickie Patton, a senior attorney for the advocacy group Environmental Defense, "and these power plants will release air pollution that threatens human health, mars scenic vistas in premier national parks and adds staggering amounts of climate-disturbing greenhouse gases to the atmosphere."
Interior Department officials, however, said they have been working with utilities and state agencies to ensure that energy development will not harm the environment.
"We can have our power and clean air, too," said Paul Hoffman, deputy assistant secretary for fish and wildlife and parks. "It is not our job to stop power plants; it's to ensure if they're built, they don't have adverse impacts" on parks and wilderness areas.
New power plants tend to be cleaner than older ones, and Hoffman said this would help improve park visibility in the long run.
But several state and federal officials said in interviews that the increase in power production would exacerbate existing visibility problems stemming from wildfires, dust, weather and industry.
"We do continue to see a deterioration in visibility in the Southwest and Intermountain West area," said Chris Shaver, who directs the Park Service's air quality division. "It also seems to be a hot spot for energy development. There's reason to be concerned."
While most utilities focused in the 1990s on building natural gas-powered plants, rising gasoline prices have prompted some to shift new plants to coal, which produces much more pollution.
Outside Colorado's Mesa Verde National Park, home to ancient Anazasi cliff dwellings, there are three pending power plant applications as well as a plan to drill 10,000 gas wells over the next 20 years, said George San Miguel, the park's natural resource manager.
"If all these things happen, Mesa Verde could be negatively impacted," San Miguel said. Although the states issue the permits in most cases, the federal Clean Air Act requires park officials to review any proposed plant that could affect a park larger than 5,000 acres or a wilderness area of more than 6,000 acres. Park officials negotiate with utilities if a project could measurably diminish visibility, but park officials said nearly all permits get approved.
Park officials, Shaver said, have to rely on "friendly persuasion," which produces mixed results. This month, the Utah Department of Environmental Quality signed off on a proposed Intermountain Power Project Corp. (IPP) plant despite warnings that it could worsen declining visibility at Capitol Reef National Park. On May 27, Hoffman told Utah regulators that the plant on its own would not harm park views, but "emissions from the existing IPP boilers could be diminishing visibility at the potentially affected . . . areas that we manage, and adding the proposed new unit could further contribute to this visibility degradation."
Scott Segal, who represents utilities as director of the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, said the Bush administration is addressing critics' concerns by pushing for new air pollution rules that would reduce sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and mercury emissions over the next 14 years.
--------
Study Finds Warming Trend in Arctic Linked to Emissions
October 29, 2004
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/29/science/earth/29cnd-arctic.html?hp&ex=1099108800&en=7e91d5b052c0aba2&ei=5094&partner=homepage
The first thorough assessment of a decadeslong Arctic warming trend shows the region is undergoing profound changes, including sharp retreats of glaciers and sea ice, thawing of permafrost, and shifts in ocean and atmospheric conditions that are likely to harm native communities, wildlife, and economic activities while offering some benefits, as well.
The report, while noting that conditions in the far north have varied naturally in the past, says the current shifts match longstanding scientific projections that the Arctic should be the first place to feel the impact of rising atmospheric concentrations of heat-trapping greenhouse gases from smokestacks and tailpipes.
It adds that the warming and other changes are likely to accelerate in this century because of the ongoing buildup in greenhouse gases.
Prompt efforts to curb such emissions could slow the pace of change sufficiently to allow communities and wildlife to adapt, the report says. But it also stresses that some further warming and melting is unavoidable given the centurylong buildup of the long-lived gases, mainly carbon dioxide.
"These changes in the Arctic provide an early indication of the environmental and societal significance of global warming," the executive summary of the report says.
The study, called the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, was commissioned four years ago by the eight nations with Arctic territory - Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, the Russian Federation, Sweden and the United States - and conducted and reviewed by 250 scientists and representatives of six organizations representing Arctic native communities.
The study was scheduled for release at a conference in Iceland on Nov. 9, but electronic copies of some portions were provided to The New York Times by European participants in the project, several of whom said that publication had been delayed in part by the Bush administration because of the political contentiousness of global warming.
Officials of the Arctic Council, the international body that commissioned the study, denied that was the case. "There is no truth to the contention that any of the member states of the
Arctic Council pushed the release of the report back into November," said Gunnar Palsson of Iceland, the chairman of the council's eight government representatives.
He said that the countries all agreed to delay the issuance to November from September because of conflicts with another international meeting in Iceland.
The American scientist directing the assessment, Dr. Robert W. Corell, an oceanographer and senior fellow of the American Meteorological Society, said the timing was set during diplomatic discussions that did not involve the scientists.He said he could not yet comment on the specific findings, but noted that the signals from the Arctic have global significance.
"The major message is that climate change is here and now in the Arctic," he said today. "The scientific evidence of the last 25 to 30 years is very dramatic and substantial. The projections of future change indicate that this trend will continue and be substantially greater than the trends we're seeing on a global scale."
The report is a profusely illustrated window on a region in remarkable flux, incorporating reams of scientific data as well as observations by elders from communities around the Arctic Circle.
The potential benefits of the changes include projected growth in marine fish stocks and improved prospects for agriculture and timber harvests in some regions, as well as expanded access to Arctic waters.
There, sea-bed deposits of oil and gas that have until now been cloaked in thick shifting crusts of sea ice could soon be exploitable, and ice-free trade routes over Siberia could significantly cut shipping distances between Europe and Asia in the summer. But the list of potential harms is far longer.
The same retreat of sea ice, it says, "is very likely to have devastating consequences for polar bears, ice-living seals and local people for whom these animals are a primary food source."
Oil and gas deposits on land are likely to be harder to extract as tundra continues to thaw, limiting the frozen season when drilling convoys can traverse the otherwise spongy ground, the report says. Alaska has already seen the "tundra travel" season on the North Slope shrink from about 200 days a year in 1970 to 100 days now.
And it concludes that the consequences of the fast-paced Arctic warming have global reach, in part as sea levels rise in response to the accelerated melting of Greenland's two-mile-high sheets of ice.
There have been continuing disagreements between American officials and other participants over the report's contents and timetable.
Last year, for example, the State Department distributed a document to representatives from the other Arctic countries saying that it opposed having the technical experts draw conclusions about policies on greenhouse gases or other related factors until the scientific findings had been reviewed by the eight participating governments.
A copy was provided to The New York Times by a person involved in the project who criticized the delay in considering the implications of the climate shifts.
The document said this was "a fundamental flaw" in the process. The implications of the findings could not be legitimately considered before the scientific assessment was completed and governments needed to have the right to suggest changes.
-------- genetics
Approved Stem Cells' Potential Questioned
By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 29, 2004; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7420-2004Oct28.html
All of the human embryonic stem cells available to federally funded scientists under President Bush's three-year-old research policy share a previously unrecognized trait that fosters rejection by the immune systems, diminishing their potential as medical treatments, new research indicates.
A second study has concluded that at least a quarter of the Bush-approved cell colonies are so difficult to keep alive they have little potential even as research tools.
The two studies -- the second still incomplete and the first one provisionally accepted for publication in a top-tier scientific journal but not yet published -- add new elements to the escalating debate over U.S. stem cell policy.
Embryonic stem cell research has become an unexpected wedge issue in the neck-and-neck race for the White House, with Bush insisting that it would be immoral to expand the research to include new cell colonies and Democratic challenger John F. Kerry promising to loosen the restrictions that today limit federal funding to 22 of the more than 150 known cell colonies.
The first study, led by Fred Gage of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif., and Ajit Varki of the University of California at San Diego, focused on a peculiar aspect of the federally approved cell lines: Unlike colonies being derived using newer techniques, all the Bush-approved colonies were initially cultivated in laboratory dishes that also contained mouse cells.
Scientists and the Food and Drug Administration have already expressed concern that animal viruses lurking in those mouse cells might infect the human cells and cause trouble when they are transplanted into patients, as doctors hope to do.
With adequate testing, those cells may yet gain approval for use in patients, the FDA has said. But the new work suggests that the mouse-exposed cells have an additional drawback.
At the heart of the problem is that all mammalian cells -- with the exception of human cells -- bear certain molecules on their surface, known as N-glycoylneuraminic acid. (Human cell surfaces bear a different but related molecule, N-acetyl neuraminic acid.)
Varki had previously demonstrated that the vast majority of people have antibodies against this molecule, perhaps as a result of eating mammalian meat such as beef. The new work shows that human embryonic stem cells grown on mouse cells "consume" the mouse molecules and then display them on their own surfaces.
When human blood serum was added to the mouse-cultivated human stem cells in lab dishes, antibodies attacked the stem cells and killed them. In the eyes of the immune system, "these human cells look like animal cells . . . which leads to [their] death," Gage said at a recent scientific meeting.
Details of the experiment are embargoed until the research report is published, but Gage described the work on Oct. 12 to a panel of experts at the National Academies of Science, which is drawing up policy recommendations on stem cell research.
Several teams around the world have lately had success growing human embryonic stem cells without mouse cells, and proponents of stem cell research said yesterday that the findings strengthen the case for letting federally funded researchers work on newer stem cell colonies.
"This study appears to point out yet another flaw with the president's policy," said Sean Tipton of the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research, a Washington-based consortium of patient advocacy groups, scientific societies and research institutions. "It means these cells are unlikely to be useful for medical purposes."
James Battey, who heads the stem cell program at the National Institutes of Health, said, "No question, this raises important safety questions." But he said he could envision techniques that might remove the problem molecules.
"As with so many safety issues, there are a variety of clever solutions that could potentially be brought into play that could mitigate against this kind of problem," he said.
Former FDA commissioner Mark McClellan added that some patients have already been treated with tissues grown on mouse cells without rejection problems. But he conceded that anti-rejection drugs -- which doctors hope to avoid with new stem cell therapies -- may have been needed.
The second study, also summarized at the academy meeting, is comparing the characteristics of 14 of the 22 Bush-approved colonies. At least five of those colonies "will never be useful for the clinic" because they are so difficult to grow, said Carol Ware of the University of Washington, who led the study.
Moreover, she said in an interview, she has found that each colony has its own quirky propensity to turn into one kind of body cell or another, suggesting many more than the 22 colonies available will be needed if the field is to reach its full potential to treat a wide variety of failing organs.
Richard Doerflinger of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said the new findings could not justify expanding the research arena.
"It's throwing good money after bad," he said, "but here the cost is not in money but in nascent lives."
-------- health
Flu Shots for Federal Workers, Military Diverted
By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 29, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7880-2004Oct28.html
The federal government has diverted 300,000 doses of the flu vaccine originally meant for federal employees and the military to high-risk civilian groups, such as people older than 65 and those with chronic conditions, officials said yesterday.
Injectable vaccine intended for 200,000 military personnel will be replaced with the nasal spray vaccine FluMist, which offers similar protection but is recommended only for healthy people between the ages of 5 and 49, officials said.
The government has also located 5 million vaccine doses at Canadian and German plants. Officials will decide whether to import them after regulators from the Food and Drug Administration inspect the plants and determine whether the vaccines are safe and effective. No decision is expected until December.
Nearly half of this winter's expected allotment of 100 million doses of injectable flu vaccine was lost after the discovery of bacterial contamination at a British manufacturing plant, triggering long lines at clinics and fears that many high-risk people would not be able to get a flu shot. The debacle has become an issue in the presidential campaign, and the Bush administration has scrambled to minimize the fallout.
Yesterday's announcement came at a news briefing by Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson; the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Mark B. McClellan; the acting commissioner of the FDA, Lester M. Crawford; and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony S. Fauci. The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Julie L. Gerberding, spoke from Atlanta.
"On behalf of the president, I want to extend the administration's appreciation to citizens across America who, in accordance with CDC guidelines, are forgoing the flu shot so that someone in a priority category can get one," Thompson said.
The foreign sources of additional vaccine supplies are a GlaxoSmithKline facility in Germany and an ID Biomedical plant in Canada.
The Bush administration has staunchly opposed the importation of cheaper prescription drugs from Canada and other countries, but Thompson said the flu vaccine situation is entirely different. According to federal law, he said, the government can import medications once they are determined to be safe and effective. That determination has not been made for reimported drugs, but it could happen with the flu vaccine from the foreign plants, he said. People who get a flu shot made by these plants would probably have to sign an informed-consent form, he added.
Fauci urged seniors who have not recently gotten a pneumococcal vaccine against pneumonia to get one. Fauci said doctors have stocks of pneumococcal vaccine. Additionally, Merck & Co. will triple the production of the vaccine this year, to about 18 million doses, officials said. Pneumonia is one of the most serious complications of the flu.
Abby Ottenhoff, a spokeswoman for Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D), complained that the Bush administration is moving too slowly in seeking vaccine supplies from foreign sources. Earlier this week, Blagojevich asked the FDA for clearance to buy flu vaccine from Europe. Federal officials said they have scheduled a meeting for today on that proposal.
"This is a public health emergency, and there are hundreds of thousands of individuals who are elderly or very young children with weak immune systems who are very much at risk of severe sickness or death," Ottenhoff said. "We don't have time to spare."
-------- ACTIVISTS
Mary Kelly, Her Axe and a US Navy 737 No Justice in County Clare
counterpunch.org
By HARRY BROWNE
October 29, 2004
http://www.counterpunch.org/browne10292004.html
Peace activist Mary Kelly has been convicted of criminal damage to a US Navy 737 at Ireland's Shannon Airport -- after the jury wasn't allowed to hear evidence that she carried out her act "with lawful excuse". Sentencing has been deferred for a week.
After about three hours' deliberation, the jury in Ennis Circuit Court, only a few miles from the airport, returned with a majority of 10 to 2 finding her guilty. The trial had lasted just over a week, but much of that time consisted of legal argument in the jury's absence.
Kelly, who freely admits taking an axe to the aircraft on January 29, 2003 -- a few weeks before the US/UK invasion of Iraq -- was forced to defend herself, without lawyers, in the trial. Back in June, she fell out with her lawyers over legal strategy just as the trial was set to begin.
Nonetheless, and despite her evident nervousness and inexperience, the Irish nurse conducted her defence meticulously, comprehensively establishing to the satisfaction of everyone except Judge Carroll Moran that she was entitled in law to try to show the jury that she has reasonable cause for her action based on the threat to the people of Iraq and her intention to prevent crimes there.
Moran, who presided over Kelly's first, hung-jury trial last year, as reported in Counterpunch, was determined to insist that "all evidence relating to the war in Iraq and the US use of Shannon Airport is irrelevant". In the first trial he had permitted some testimony from witnesses such as Ramsey Clark, though as that 2003 trial wore on he cracked down, scarcely permitting a word from Scott Ritter and telling the jury to ignore all discussion of the war.
The US military use of Shannon has actually increased in the meantime: a staggering 22,000 troops passed through during last month alone, i.e. more than 15 per cent of the entire US troop deployment in Iraq.
But this time Judge Moran wasn't having any of it. The jury heard next-to-nothing from an array of assembled witnesses: Pentagon-Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg; former UN assistant secretary-general Denis Halliday; Dr Horst Gunther, an expert on depleted uranium; former Irish army commandant Ed Horgan; and even a lowly Counterpunch journalist.
Judge Moran appeared to know little shame. For the first two days of the trial he reminded Kelly, in the jury's presence and absence, that "lawful excuse" could not apply in her case because the law required that any threat she was combating be "immediate" in time and space. But he was wrong: Kelly showed him that the relevant statute had been amended and there was no explicit requirement of immediacy. Even the prosecuting barrister admitted that "to a layperson's eyes" the law seemed to give Kelly wide scope to defend her action on the basis of her "honest belief" that it was justified.
But after some visible squirming in his seat, sadly unseen by the absent jury, Judge Moran -- though admitting that the immediacy requirement had indeed vanished from the statute books -- still barred all evidence relating to the war. (He had, however, permitted the prosecutor to suggest, in cross-examining Kelly, that at the time of her action there were still hopeful diplomatic efforts taking place to prevent war, an assertion of great naivety that Kelly was never allowed to counter effectively.) The fact that the crimes committed by the US in Iraq are prosecutable in Ireland under Irish law also failed to move Moran, as did her appeal, again based in law, for jurors to be the ones to decide about the reasonableness or otherwise of her action.
In his charge to the jury, Judge Moran said he had acted to prevent the case degenerating into a political debate. He said the defence of lawful excuse did not apply as there was no connection in space or time between the act carried out by Kelly and the person or property she was claiming to protect.
Kelly was able to present some evidence in relation to the plane itself, a logistics craft that was bound for Sicily, the Navy's Mediterranean hub. She attempted to discredit the American estimate of the value of the damage she had caused, $1.5 million: her engineer said it would be more like 10 per cent of that figure. But these were relatively peripheral arguments, and her central case was largely unmade because of the judge's rulings.
The fact that two jurors held out for acquittal is somewhat heartening in the circumstances. They must have moved by Kelly's own spell in the witness box, when she spelled out in simple terms her transformation from nurse and mother to axe-wielding activist. Her politicisation, she explained, had been considerably accelerated in 2002 by her hair-raising encounters with Israeli troops in Bethlehem.
Kelly's earnest efforts climaxed in an emotional final speech, when she hoped to convince 12 residents of the area around Shannon, where many locals believe they it need the cash the Americans bring. Her commitment to peace, and to using the democratic forum of trial-by-jury to demonstrate the just and essential nature of her action, put the naïve hopes of US "activists" for John Kerry's election into grim perspective.
Five more people who damaged the same plane a few days after Kelly's action, the Pitstop Ploughshares group, are set for another jury trial next March. They successfully applied last year for a change of venue to Dublin, and so far their new judge has been more accommodating of efforts to subpoena evidence about the war and the use of Shannon.
Kelly, who has gathered a tight and loving circle of supporters around her, is certain to appeal her conviction. The best that can be said for Judge Moran is that he left her with ample grounds to do so.
Harry Browne is a journalist and lecturer at Dublin Institute of Technology. Harrybrowne@eircom.net
--------
A Soldier Speaks: Robert Sarra
AlterNet
By Lakshmi Chaudhry
October 29, 2004
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/20337/
A death in Iraq transforms a nine-year Marine veteran from a soldier into an anti-war activist.
Editor's Note: This is the fourth in a series of profiles of some of the tens of thousands of Iraq War veterans who have come home bearing the scars of battle - emotional and physical wounds that may never heal unless the nation pays them the attention and care that they deserve. We at AlterNet believe that in an election defined by a deep and bitter partisan divide, it is the one issue that can and must bring us all together as Americans.
When Rob Sarra headed out to Iraq in January, 2003 as an infantry sergeant, he had no illusions about the darker side of combat. But the 31-year old was eager to do his duty to his country and to the United States Marine Corps.
But one incident would change almost everything this soldier believed in for the most of his life. It was the day he opened fire on an unarmed Iraqi woman. When he saw the white flag in hands of a dead woman that he'd mistaken for a suicide bomber, Rob began to question the war, and his role as one of its foot soldiers. And though he remained devoted to the Marine Corps, he never felt quite the same again about his presence in Iraq.
Rob returned home in June, 2003, and quit the military soon after. Still suffering from post traumatic stress disorder, his entry into civilian life was marked by alcoholism and later therapy. Rob finally made peace with his war experience by taking on the mantle of an anti-war activist - an unlikely vocation for someone who - as he told the students in Texas - had always seen protesters as hippies who had "no right to protest and just hated the military." He is now the co-founder of Iraq Veterans Against the War, the only anti-war organization comprised entirely of soldiers who served in Iraq.
Rob spoke to AlterNet about his road from soldier to activist from his apartment in Chicago.
Is there one memory from the war that still stays with you?
Yeah, there are a bunch, actually. The day we were getting ready to cross the border, I'll never forget that. My whole battalion was gathered around our commander. We were out in the middle of the Kuwaiti desert. I remember looking around at the faces of all the guys, and all of sudden, we all knew: this was it. This was the real deal. Our battalion chaplain was anointing everyone with oil. It was a very emotional time.
The next one is moving up towards Baghdad, going through the city of Al Nassiriyah. That was really our first taste of warfare. Seeing the dead Iraqis and destroyed vehicles ... Getting shot at for the first time. I look back on it and wonder if I was really there. It's just a very surreal thing.
The incident with the woman still stays with me - though I try to keep it at the back of my mind.
I was sitting on top of an armored vehicle about 200 yards away. A woman starts walking out of this town towards a second armored vehicle with a bunch of Marines on it. They were waving their arms and telling her to stop, but she kept moving towards them. She was dressed in all-black, completely covered, wearing a burqa. And she had a bag under one arm.
My thought process at the time was that either she was going to walk up to this vehicle and explode - and kill a bunch of Marines. Or I can take shot at her and stop it from happening. We'd had reports of suicide bombers in the area. So I raised my rifle and fired two shots. As the second shot went off, the Marines in the other vehicle opened up on her, with everything from M-16s to 40 millimeter grenades.
But as she hit the ground, she pulled a white flag out her bag.
At that point, I was just devastated. I threw my weapon down on the deck of the vehicle and started crying. I just couldn't understand why she hadn't stopped or why it had happened.
That just stayed with me. I think it changed the course of the war for me.
When you look back, how has this war changed you?
I think it's opened my eyes. I think it really reinforced my feelings on what these guys [soldiers] sacrifice, and what they are sacrificing now. And what an honorable job it is.
It opened my eyes to political things. It got me looking into myself and looking at the world and the decisions that our politicians make as pretty serious things. I wasn't a very political person before this.
So now I'm part of Iraq Veterans Against the War - something that two years ago I never thought I would be doing. I'm speaking out against the war, and speaking very publicly. I'm going to schools and colleges. I'm also speaking out at protests. So it's just been a very big change for me.
What I've been doing, though, is to stay non-partisan. I've been doing that because people have got to remember that this isn't something political. There are both Democrats and Republicans with kids over there fighting. If you say, "If you're Republican, you're for the war. And if you're Democrat, you're against the war," it just doesn't make sense.
For the guys over there, politics isn't a factor to them. It's about fighting for that guy next to you and getting home in one piece and getting back to your family.
What are your hopes and fears now that you look at the future?
I hope that this war is going to end sometime soon. That we can bring all these guys home and Iraq will be stable. That we didn't just go in there and stir up a huge hornet's nest.
My biggest fear is that our country is going to go on doing these pre-emptive strikes against others - places like Iran and North Korea. That we're going to jump into another war without finishing this one.
I'm also afraid of a military strike back here in the United States. I really don't think we're safer because we invaded Iraq.
Personally, I'm just hoping to be able to make a difference. I think already have - a little bit. I've opened people's eyes to what warfare is all about.
If you had five minutes with the president - whomever it may be on Nov. 3, George Bush or John Kerry - what would you say to him?
I would ask him what his plan is to get us out of Iraq. What the next step is. And I would like to drive home to whomever is elected that the next time we go to war, it should be for a very good reason. It should be as a last resort because there's been a lot of suffering on both sides. Many, many, many young men and women are going to be coming home that have experienced the worst in life.
Lakshmi Chaudhry is senior editor of AlterNet. This profile was made possible with the assistance of Patricia Foulkrod, the producer/director of The Ground Truth.
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