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NUCLEAR
A United World or a Divided World ?
Bruce to return Ontario Bruce B 8 nuke to service
Cylinders stall, but cleanup moving forward
U.S. use of depleted uranium under fire
Pollution Chokes the Tigris, a Main Source of Baghdad's Drinking Water
Will Bush Flatten Fallujah?
Nuclear fusion reactor deal close
EU again warns could mount nuclear project without Japan
India and Pakistan courting danger: Michel Krepon
Iranians, Europeans Meet on Nuclear Deal
European-Iran Nuclear Deal Tottering
Japanese Government Energy Commission Ignores Nuclear Dangers
Terror threat
MILITARY
France Blamed in Ivorian Unrest
French military says several dozen assaults on civilians Ivory Coast
Japan raises submarine issue with China: report
Significant changes in Japanese defense 'largely overlooked'
Insurer Lombard holds 7.3 pct in arms manufacturer Rheinmetall
Chinese Whistle-Blower Punished
New insurgency confronts US forces
U.S. Troops force men trying to flee Assault on Fallujah to return to city
Violence Spreads in Iraq; Car Bomb Kills 17 in Baghdad
U.S. Tries To Corner Fallujah Insurgents
Black Flags Are Deadly Signals as Cornered Rebels Fight Back
Iraqi Insurgents Shoot Down U.S. Army Helicopter
Behind the Camp David Myth Arafat didn't blindly spurn a generous offer.
Secrecy surrounds diagnosis
Just What Mr. Palestine Ruled Over
Arafat Embarks on Final Trip Home
After Chaotic Procession, Arafat Is Laid to Rest in West Bank
P.L.O. Picks Abbas, a Pragmatist, as Followers Mourn Arafat
Nicaragua Says It Will Destroy Missiles
U.S. to Consider Naming Mideast Peace Envoy
NATO's Chief Backs U.S. Views on Terrorism
Russia to Reduce Troops in Chechnya
Robot Helps NASA Refocus on Hubble
Former Chief of CIA's Bin Laden Unit Leaves
Base closures
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Trials of G.I.'s at Abu Ghraib to Be Moved to the U.S.
Ashcroft says judges threaten national security by questioning Bush
Ashcroft and medical marijuana
Cuffing Bush and the FBI
Inmate Is Ordered to Pay Ex-Wife Millions
Ivory Coast Says 4,000 Prison Inmates Escaped
POLITICS
Unit Plans Closed Hearings on Collapse of the Towers
Afghanistan TV Networks Ordered Off Air
Hispanics Applaud Gonzales Nomination
AARP Opposes Bush Plan to Replace Social Security With Private Accounts
Cheney Protects Rumsfeld's Job Until the Spring
Vote Fraud Theories, Spread by Blogs, Are Quickly Buried
OTHER
EPA Backs Nanomaterial Safety Research
W.H.O. Panel Backs Gene Manipulation in Smallpox Virus
ACTIVISTS
Israeli police arrest nuke whistleblower
VANUNU RE-ARRESTED BY DOZENS OF ARMED POLICE;
Nuclear Whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu Re-Arrested in Israel;
Military's Presence at Antiwar Rally Is Called a Coincidence
-------- NUCLEAR
A United World or a Divided World ? Multiethnicity, Human Rights, Terrorism
Under the high patronage of the President of the Italian Republic
WORLD SUMMIT OF NOBEL PEACE LAUREATES
Rome, 10th - 12th November 2004
STATEMENT OF THE 5TH SUMMIT OF NOBEL PEACE LAUREATES
November 12, 2004, Rome, Italy
Two decades ago, the world was swept with a wave of hope. Inspired by the popular movements for peace, freedom, democracy and solidarity, the nations of the world worked together to end the cold war. Yet the opportunities opened up by that historic change are slipping away. We are gravely concerned with the resurgent nuclear and conventional arms race, disrespect for international law and the failure of the world's governments to address adequately the challenges of poverty and environmental degradation. A cult of violence is spreading globally; the opportunity to build a culture of peace, advocated by the United Nations, Pope John Paul II, the Dalai Lama and other spiritual leaders, is receding.
Alongside the challenges inherited from the past there are new ones, which, if not properly addressed, could cause a clash of civilizations, religions and cultures. We reject the idea of the inevitability of such a conflict. We are convinced that combating terrorism in all its forms is a task that should be pursued with determination. Only by reaffirming our shared ethical values -- respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms -- and by observing democratic principles, within and amongst countries, can terrorism be defeated. We must address the root causes of terrorism -- poverty, ignorance and injustice -- rather than responding to violence with violence.
Unacceptable violence is occurring daily against women and children. Children remain our most important neglected treasure. Their protection, security and health should be the highest priority. Children everywhere deserve to be educated in and for peace. There is no excuse for neglecting their safety and welfare and, particularly, for their suffering in war.
The war in Iraq has created a hotbed of dangerous instability and a breeding ground for terrorism. Credible reports of the disappearance of nuclear materials cannot be ignored. While we mourn the deaths of tens of thousands of people, none of the goals proclaimed by the coalition have been achieved.
The challenges of security, poverty and environmental crisis can only be met successfully through multilateral efforts based on the rule of law. All nations must strictly fulfil their treaty obligations and reaffirm the indispensable role of the United Nations and the primary responsibility of the UN Security Council for maintaining peace.
We support a speedy, peaceful resolution of the North Korean nuclear issue, including a verifiable end to North Korea's nuclear weapons program, security guarantees and lifting of sanctions on North Korea. Both the six-party talks and bilateral efforts by the United States and North Korea should contribute to such an outcome.
We welcome recent progress in the talks between Iran and Great Britain, France and Germany on the Iranian nuclear program issue and hope that the United States will join in the process to find a solution within the framework of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
We call for the reduction of military expenditures and for conclusion of a treaty that would control arms trade and prohibit sales of arms where they could be used to violate international human rights standards and humanitarian law.
As Nobel Laureates, we believe that the world community needs urgently to address the challenges of poverty and sustainable development. Responding to these challenges requires the political will that has been so sadly lacking.
The undertakings pledged by states at the UN Millennium Summit, the promises of increased development assistance, fair trade, market access and debt relief for developing countries, have not been implemented. Poverty continues to be the worlds most widespread and dangerous scourge. Millions of people become victims of hunger and disease, and entire nations suffer from feelings of frustration and despair. This creates fertile ground for extremism and terrorism. The stability and future of the entire human community are thus jeopardized.
Scientists are warning us that failure to solve the problems of water, energy and climate change will lead to a breakdown of order, more military conflicts and ultimately the destruction of the living systems upon which civilization depends. Therefore, we reaffirm our support for the Kyoto Protocol and the Earth Charter and endorse the rights-based approach to water, as reflected in the initiative of Green Cross International calling upon governments to negotiate a framework treaty on water.
As Nobel Peace Prize Laureates we believe that to benefit from humankind's new, unprecedented opportunities and to counter the dangers confronting us there is a need for better global governance. Therefore, we support strengthening and reforming the United Nations and its institutions.
As immediate specific tasks, we commit to work for:
- Genuine efforts to resolve the Middle East crisis. This is both a key to the problem of terrorism and a chance to avoid a dangerous clash of civilizations. A solution is possible if the right of all nations in the region to secure, viable statehood is respected and if the Middle East is integrated in all global processes while respecting the unique culture of the peoples of that region.
- Preserving and strengthening the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. We reject double standards and emphasize the legal responsibility of nuclear weapons states to work to eliminate nuclear weapons. We call for continuation of the moratorium on nuclear testing pending entry into force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and for accelerating the process of verifiable and irreversible nuclear arms reduction. We are gravely alarmed by the creation of new, usable nuclear weapons and call for rejection of doctrines that view nuclear weapons as legitimate means of war-fighting and threat pre-emption.
- Effectively realizing the initiative of the UN Secretary General to convene a high-level conference in 2005 to give an impetus to the implementation of the Millennium Development Goals. We pledge to work to create an atmosphere of public accountability to help accomplish these vitally important tasks.
We believe that to solve the problems that challenge the world today politicians need to interact with an empowered civil society and strong mass movements. This is the way toward a globalization with a human face and a new international order that rejects brute force, respects ethnic, cultural and political diversity and affirms justice, compassion and human solidarity.
We, the Nobel Peace Laureates and Laureate organizations, pledge to work for the realization of these goals and are calling on governments and people everywhere to join us.
Mikhail Gorbachev, Kim Dae-Jung, Lech Walesa, Joseph Rotblat, Jose Ramos-Horta, Betty Williams, Mairead Corrigan Maguire, Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo, Adolfo Perez Esquivel, and Rigoaberta Menchu Tum; and, United Nations Children's Fund, Pugwash Conferences, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, International Peace Bureau, Institut de Droit International, American Friends Service Committee, Médicins sans Frontières, Amnesty International, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, International Labour Organization, International Campaign to Ban Land Mines, United Nations.
Alyn Ware Vice-President, International Peace Bureau P.O.Box 23-257, Cable Car Lane Wellington, Aotearoa-New Zealand Phone (64) 4 385-8192. Fax 385-8193 <mailto:alyn@pnnd.org>alyn@pnnd.org www.ipb.org
-------- canada
Bruce to return Ontario Bruce B 8 nuke to service
Reuters
Nov 12, 2004
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=ITYYCZXEQ3WS0CRBAEKSFFA?type=topNews&storyID=6799089
NEW YORK, Nov 12 - Bruce Power's 840-megawatt Bruce B 8 nuclear power in Ontario will return to service shortly following a brief, unplanned outage on Nov. 10, a company spokesman said Friday.
The unit shut after its turbine cooling water pumps automatically shut down.
Also on Nov. 10, the company shut its 825 MW Bruce A 3 to work on the unit's heat transport system.
Units 4, 5 and 7 remain online while unit 6 remains off line for its scheduled inspection program and will likely return to service later this month.
One megawatt powers about 1,000 homes, according to the North American average.
The 6,660 MW Bruce station is located in Tiverton, on the shores of Lake Huron, about 155 miles (249 km) northwest of Toronto. There are four 825 MW A units and 840 MW B units at Bruce. Units 1 and 2, built in the late 1970s, have not operated since the end of 1999 because they needed extensive upgrades.
The province appointed a negotiator on Sept. 8 to discuss the potential restart of units 1 and 2, which have been the subject of technical evaluations by Bruce Power since January. The restart could cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
Bruce Power, one of Ontario's largest power generators, is owned by Cameco Corp. (CCO.TO: Quote, Profile, Research) (31.6 percent), TransCanada Corp. (TRP.TO: Quote, Profile, Research) (31.6 percent), BPC Generation Infrastructure Trust, established by the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System (31.6 percent), the Power Workers' Union (4 percent) and the Society of Energy Professionals (1.2 percent).
-------- depleted uranium
Cylinders stall, but cleanup moving forward
Paul Parson paul.parson@oakridger.com
Oak Ridger Staff
November 12, 2004
http://www.oakridger.com/stories/111204/new_20041112040.shtml
More than 2,000 uranium-related cylinders have been shipped out of Oak Ridge to date.
The vast majority of the cylinder-stored material, referred to as depleted uranium hexafluoride, is a byproduct of an operation where uranium was ultimately processed into nuclear reactor fuel and weapons-grade material. An extremely small percentage of the cylinders contain other forms of uranium.
For fiscal year 2004, the Department of Energy and its local cleanup contractor, Bechtel Jacobs Co., planned to ship approximately 2,154 cylinders from the Oak Ridge K-25 site to the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Ohio. But, they ultimately transported 1,906 of them for the fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30.
Mike Hughes, president of Bechtel Jacobs, said this week that the number of departed cylinders has surpassed the 2,000 mark. He discussed the work during Wednesday's Oak Ridge Site-Specific Advisory Board at the DOE Information Center.
Hughes acknowledged that project officials spent some time determining the best method for shipping the waste material. And, DOE's Oak Ridge cleanup chief, Steve McCracken, said, any "political issues" pertaining to the shipments are in the past, adding that the looming obstacles pertain to regulations, like weight limits for interstate shipping.
SSAB member Norman Mulvenon strongly urged DOE and Bechtel Jacobs to remedy the situation in order to get the cylinders back on the road to Ohio where the material will be processed into a safer form for disposal or storage. More than 3,000 cylinders are left, and the goal is to have all of them out of Oak Ridge by the end of fiscal year 2005.
Bechtel Jacobs has tackled DOE's Oak Ridge environmental remediation work since 1998. The company recently completed the first year of its latest contract, which put cleanup efforts on an accelerated schedule.
According to Hughes, 80 percent of the work is being done by subcontractors while the other 20 percent is self-performed by Bechtel Jacobs. The company has 111 subcontracts and is working with 62 small businesses - seven of which are owned by women.
Here's a look at some of the work that's been accomplished so far:
- Asbestos removal is 80 percent complete in the mile-long K-25 building, located at the site that bears the same name. Additionally, 43 converters have been cleared from the building while 85,000 square feet of transite panels have been taken off its sides.
- At K-25, 43 structures have been demolished, which is ahead of the 19 initially planned for FY 2004.
- Capping of three nuclear waste burial grounds in Melton Valley is progressing ahead of schedule, with one of them 93 percent finished and the other two 47 percent and 35 percent complete.
Looking at the big picture, Bechtel Jacobs' contract calls for the Melton Valley cleanup effort to be completed in 2006 while the work at the K-25 site should be wrapped up by 2008.
----
U.S. use of depleted uranium under fire
By LORI MATSUKAWA
Nov 12, 2004,
Axis of Logic
http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/printer_13526.shtml
Alvin Clark, of Tacoma, developed aplastic anemia he believes is related to his exposure to depleted uranium dust after he was hit by friendly fire in Saudi Arabia.
Shells and armor used by U.S. tanks, gunships and helicopters are often made of depleted uranium because depleted uranium, or D.U., is a heavy metal, able to pierce armored vehicles or resist being pierced. But it's also radioactive, a waste product of nuclear enrichment plants like Hanford.
A pentagon training film shows how the D.U. ordnance bursts into a fiery powder on contact.
So, what happens when U.S. Troops are forced to march through the D.U. dust that's left on the ground? Or get hit by friendly fire? Some vets say it made them sick. The Pentagon disputes that.
Shinichi Matsuura of Renton fought in the first Gulf War. His Bradley tank was hit not once, but twice, by U.S. forces. He breathed a lot of D.U. smoke.
"Matter of fact I didn't know we were using D.U. until six years ago," said Matsuura.
Alvin Clark of Tacoma says his unit was nearly hit by a friendly fire missile in Jubail, Saudi Arabia. He developed aplastic anemia and needed a bone marrow transplant.
Clark said no one ever warned him there might be some depleted uranium out there, and if he were exposed to it, what he was supposed to do about it.
Dennis Kyne of San Jose says his unit marched along the bombed-out "highway of death" to Baghdad. He receives a disability check from the government each month for an "undiagnosed illness."
"My chain of command says I'm big enough and strong enough and soldier enough to walk through this stuff and .. it's just like lead. Just a little bit heavy and might affect the kidneys," he said.
This October, the Pentagon released findings of a five-year study of D.U. dust. Residue was collected from shot-up tanks, and analyzed by computer models. The military's conclusion? Half of the inhaled D.U. - a radioactive heavy metal - would be excreted by the body in 10 to 100 days.
"Even individuals with the highest potential for exposure still have doses that are well below peacetime safety standards. Which would be allowable here in the states so if you put that in the context of other combat risks, I'd have to say the military exposures to depleted uranium are safe," said Lt. Col. Mark Melanson.
It's a slightly different story for veterans with D.U. shrapnel embedded in their bodies.
The V.A. in Baltimore is studying about 70 Gulf War one vets, including Shinishi Matsuura, and has found elevated levels of uranium in the urine of several men more than a decade after the conflict.
But Pentagon officials say this, too, is no cause for alarm.
"It's important to note that this group has been followed for over 10 years and no adverse health effects associated with depleted uranium have been found," officials said.
In the first Gulf War, the Pentagon estimates it used 315 to 350 tones of D.U. In today's conflict, it estimates coalition forces have used three to six times that.
So what about the D.U. remaining in Iraq?
In a video provided by the Uranium Medical Research Centre of Canada, researchers found soil and spent munitions with radiation levels thousands of times higher than Department of Defense guidelines. U.S. soldiers tried to warn-off the researchers.
Congressman Jim McDermott, a medical doctor and Iraq war critic, questions using D.U. at all. During a hospital visit in Baghdad before the war, McDermott was told Iraq now has the highest rate of childhood leukemia in the world.
"I saw what it did to the Iraqis, but now I see that we're marching our own people through that, creating birth defects in children, leukemia in children, illnesses among adults. Then it becomes a question of really a war crime. The Geneva Convention says you cannot do something that has a long term effect on the country," said McDermott.
The Pentagon maintains D.U. is safe and necessary in war.
"You take with you the best weapons systems you can so you can defeat the enemy with overwhelming lethality," said Dr. Michael Kilpatrick.
The Pentagon says for penetrating armor, depleted uranium is the heavy metal that is the best.
"It's not the best, it's the worst," said Kyne. "It inherently becomes the worst possible weapon because it's no longer just attacking the enemy, it's omnicidal, it kills all of us."
The U.S. and U.K. are the only militaries that use D.U. Most exposure to U.S. soldiers has been from fire from its own forces.
In 1996, the United Nations Sub Commission on Promotion and Protection of Human Rights found use of D.U. weapons "incompatible" with existing humanitarian law.
Online at: http://www.king5.com/topstories/stories/NW_111104WABdepleteduraniumSW.49604608.html
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[This mentions "heavy metals" which cause cancer. I suspect that's a euphemism for depleted uranium.]
Pollution Chokes the Tigris, a Main Source of Baghdad's Drinking Water
newstandardnews.net
by Dahr Jamail
November 12, 2004
http://newstandardnews.net/content/?action=show_item&itemid=481
Water from the Tigris River -- consumed by Iraqis in Baghdad every day -- is contaminated with war waste, and much of it goes untreated despite obligations of a US company to reconstruct vital facilities.
Baghdad , Jun 6 - With reconstruction of a highly inadequate water treatment and distribution system at a near standstill throughout much of Central Iraq, some residents of Baghdad are left with little choice but to drink highly polluted water from the Tigris River. Aside from a newly formed Iraqi non-governmental organization that is focusing on the cleanup of one section of the river, not much is being done to improve Baghdad residents' access to potable water, and US contractors appear unable or unwilling to help.
While many areas of Baghdad have access to drinking water from a few of the functional treatment plants, millions of residents remain without a clean, reliable source. All too many of these unfortunates turn to the rotten banks of the Tigris, which snakes prominently through the heart of Baghdad collecting toxins as it flows.
Abdul Salam Abdulali works on the river, running a dredging machine. A river man for most of his life, he has long been employed by a company that dredges the muddy Tigris, but which was recently incorporated into the Ministry of Water Resources.
"I am married to the water," he said standing atop his dredging machine as it floated atop the river. "But it is too polluted now. I wish I could eat the fish, but when I cut them open I can smell the oil."
The remains of a cow decompose on the banks of the Tigris near Baghdad, a major and often direct source of water for the city's residents. (Dahr Jamail/NewStandard) PHOTO: The remains of a cow decompose on the banks of the Tigris near Baghdad, a major and often direct source of water for the city's residents. (Dahr Jamail/NewStandard)
In an alarming development, Dr. Husni Mohammed's research has additionally concluded that Iraqi and US military waste during the 2003 invasion deposited oil and benzene into the Tigris, the effects of which include nervous system damage, birth defects and cancer. The residents of the impoverished Baghdad neighborhood called Sadr City are often forced to drink untreated water directly from the Tigris. They are also plagued by diarrhea; many reportedly suffer from recurring kidney stones.
Sadr City shopkeeper Ranzi Amher Aziz joined a chorus of voices protesting the lack of potable water in this Baghdad slum. "The situation here is worse now than before the war," he said, echoing others' complaints.
Many here say they cannot see any sign of the US making an effort to help. Aziz stood near a pool of raw sewage in the street. "There has been no work here by the Americans to give us clean water or fix the sewage problem," he said.
Tigris River water is a concentrated cocktail of pesticides, fertilizers, oil, gasoline and heavy metals, reports Dr. Husni Mohammed, an Iraqi who holds a PhD in Environmental and Biological Science and has researched the condition of the Tigris. Raw sewage mixes with particles from antiquated piping and US-fired depleted uranium munitions, he says, plus remnants from untold amounts of other chemicals released by American and Iraqi weaponry used since the 1991 Gulf War.
In an alarming development, Dr. Mohammed's research has additionally concluded that Iraqi and US military waste during the 2003 invasion deposited oil and benzene into the river.
The health effects of benzene -- an ingredient found in gasoline and jet fuel -- are well known and severe. Short-term exposure can cause significant damage to the nervous system and dramatic suppression of the immune system. Consistent consumption of benzene-tainted water can cause long-term effects including cancer (particularly Leukemia), birth defects and damage to the reproductive system.
Heavy metals in drinking water are also known to damage the liver, brain and other vital organs.
Adding to the hazards, very few sewage treatment plants in Baghdad are operational. Raw waste from the city of five million residents can be pumped through the sewer system, completely bypassing any treatment, and flow right into the river.
Statistics underscore the widespread suffering of Iraqis. The incidence of diarrheal diseases, such as typhoid, dysentery and cholera, doubled between August 2002, before the US-led invasion, and a year later. So reported the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), a UN agency tasked with coordinating responses to severe humanitarian crises. Seventy percent of all children's sicknesses are linked to contaminated water, the report adds.
Over one year into the occupation, the situation is not seen by most residents here as having improved much. Therefore, some have begun to take on the responsibility and work of enacting changes they do not believe can wait for foreign authorities or the new interim government to undertake.
Shwaqi Kareem, the president of the National Association for Defense of Environment and Children (NADEC), founded the non-governmental organization (NGO) because he felt it was time to start cleaning up a particularly polluted section of the Tigris. He hopes to remove the garbage, stop the deluge of raw sewage that is flowing into the river and establish gardens along the banks.
Kareem said the Tigris is in worse condition now than before the invasion, and blames the US's disinterest in taking care of a waterway considered vital by Iraqis.
NADEC draws on the labor of around 1,000 workers, said co-founder Salim Kamel. Some are paid, but the majority are volunteers. "We get some money from the municipality," Kamel said, "but some of the volunteers are business owners who donate money as well."
Kareem is reluctant to work with the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in the cleanup; he blames the Coalition for allowing companies to dump their garbage and sewage into the river over the past year.
A contractor interviewed inside the Coalition-run "Green Zone" area echoed Kareem's sentiments. Awshalim Khammo recently quit his job in frustration after working to clean up the areas of the CPA near the Tigris. "I tried all last year to help improve the Palace ground and the river side within the Green Zone, but things went from bad to worse," he said. Khammo complained in particular about dumping -- which he referred to as a "disaster" -- near the Kellogg Brown and Root warehouse and yards on the east end of the presidential palace.
Bechtel Corporation was awarded a no-bid, cost-plus-fixed-fee contract on April 17, 2003 worth $680 million. The controversial contract made Bechtel and its subcontractors responsible for the rehabilitation of the Sharkh Dijlah water treatment plant in Baghdad, as well as the Kerkh Waste Water Treatment Plant.
Repeated contacts with various authorities in charge of civilian press access to water treatment projects yielded no invitations to verify progress made on any Baghdad area water treatment facilities.
The brochure produced by Bechtel to highlight its work in Iraq concerning the drinking water situation only gives a concrete finishing date for two projects, one of which is the rehabilitation and capacity-building of the Sharkh Dijlah plant.
Work on the plant, Bechtel's number two priority in Baghdad since June 2003, is expected to increase potable water by 225 million liters per day. The work was due to be completed by this month.
According to the Washington Post, however, Baghdad officials said Bechtel spent four months studying plans for the expansion made by Iraq's state-run water company, finally concluding they were acceptable. They then reissued the same orders for the same parts from the same supplier Iraqi engineers had tried to acquire them from. Bechtel estimates it will spend $16 billion on the project, carrying out the work essentially as had previously been done by Iraqi engineers no longer permitted to participate.
Bechtel admits the water treatment plant is still being rehabilitated, but says the delay is caused by extra capacity. "We are expanding the treatment capacity of the plant by 50 percent over the design capacity, or 50 million gallons per day," said company spokesperson Francis Canavan. "Our work is expected to be completed in the fall."
Dr. Abdul Latif Rashid, the Minister for Water Resources in Iraq, told the BBC that the poor state of Iraq's infrastructure and past mismanagement are to blame for some of the water problems Iraqis are now facing.
The UN's OCHA report spread the blame more broadly: "Three wars and 13 years of sanctions, as well as the Coalition invasion and the looting that followed it, have dealt a heavy blow to the country's already creaking water system."
Kerkh Wastewater Treatment Plant -- another Baghdad area plant in Bechtel's Implementation Plan -- is currently undergoing rehabilitation efforts, according to a company spokesperson, who said, "Last week, the Kerkh Wastewater Treatment Plant, which we are rehabilitating, began treating sewage for the first time in years, when one-third of the plant reopened."
During a boat tour of the Tigris' banks taken to inspect treatment facilities, NADEC founder Shwaqi Kareem pointed to a massive outpouring of brownish gray wastewater flowing right into the river. The source of this vile discharge? "The Kerkh Wastewater Treatment Plant," said Kareem.
----
Will Bush Flatten Fallujah?
progressivetrail.org
by Kurt Nimmo
November 12, 2004
http://progressivetrail.org/articles/040408Nimmo.shtml
Imagining the probable future of places such as Fallujah, Sadr City, Nasiriyah, Karbala, Kut, and Ramadi, I recall the photographs of Grozny (Djohar), Chechnya, taken by the Gamma Press Agency photographer Eric Bouvet.
"In February [2000] when I entered Grozny, it was as if I was hit by an apocalyptic vision," Bouvet writes. "In 20 years of covering wars I never had the occasion to feel like a astronaut landing on another planet. I had visited Grozny four times in the last war, but this time I couldn't even be sure where I was. Where Minutka Square -- with it imposing buildings that lead to Lenin Avenue -- once was nothing remained, just a huge, imposing void. The Russians had dynamited the city, leaving it totally in ruins."
Sooner or later, in desperation, Bush will surely order the destruction of wide swaths -- inhabited by "bad guys" -- of Iraqi cities in response to the undefeatable Shia and Sunni uprisings against the occupation. It is inevitable. Like Sharon and the Likudites, Bush's ideological mentors, the US military will eventually repeat the atrocities and violations of human rights and international law the Israelis eagerly committed in the Jenin refugee camp in September of 2000. Civilians always pay the price for any "up tick" in support for the resistance -- be they Palestinians, Chechnians, or Iraqis.
Both Republicans and so-called liberal Democrats will fervently support the flattening of Iraqi cities and the mass murder of civilians, especially now that the Shia have joined the Sunnis in resisting Bush's neoliberal plans for Iraq. Or should I say the Likudite plan for the Arab Middle East?
In fact, Democrats have a long track record of supporting state terrorism directed against civilians, from the torching of Vietnamese villages to the cluster bombing of neighborhoods in Yugoslavia. Bush Senior, Clinton, and Bush Junior all supported and kept in place brutal sanctions that resulted in the death of 500,000 Iraqi children from 1991 until Bush invaded Iraq last year. All three administrations engaged in the recurring slaughter of Iraqi civilians over the same period of time.
The Pentagon has repeatedly attacked civilians since Bush invaded the country over a year ago, killing more than 10,000 of them. For instance, most recently, on April 7, in response to the murder of four US "contractors" (rumored to be CIA operatives) and increased resistance, the US bombed a Fallujah mosque "as worshippers were gathering for afternoon prayers," the AP reported. "The bodies of dead and wounded were rushed away in cars to private homes in the area where temporary hospitals have been set up." On April 6, 60 Iraqis were killed and more than 120 wounded. The dead and wounded are invariably described as "militants" or "insurgents" by the corporate media, but as the history of modern warfare in urban environments demonstrates, a high percentage of the casualties are invariably civilians.
In the weeks ahead, as the Shi'ites intensify their resistance to the occupation, the number of dead will go up dramatically -- not that the US cares.
For as the Pentagon told Helen Thomas last September, dead Iraqis "don't count. They are not important." Iraqi Health Ministry, Dr. Nagham Mohsen, was ordered by her superior, Dr. Nazar Shabandar, to stop collecting data on the number of Iraqi dead last December, probably at the behest of Paul Bremer and the CPA.
In fact, dead Americans are not important either, for as retired General Tommy Franks told an audience at the annual Chamber of Commerce banquet in Salina, Kansas, in February, "If [conquering Iraq] costs 500 [American lives], that's OK, or 5000, OK, or 50,000, that's OK with me." Obviously, it is OK with the American public as well, since there was virtually no response to Franks' outrageous remarks.
As the events in Samarra last year reveal, US troops respond to attacks on convoys by slaughtering civilians in trigger-happy fashion. "There was an attack and an exchange of fire between the Americans and the resistance lasting half an hour," Samarra police chief, Colonel Ismail Mahmoud Mohammed, told the media. "The resistance withdrew, then [US] bombardments started, using all manner of weapons in all directions and without any discrimination." This resulted in numerous civilian dead and wounded. "We received the bodies of eight civilians, including a woman and a child," said hospital director Abd Tawfiq. "More than 60 people wounded by gunfire and shrapnel from US rounds are being treated at the hospital." Many of the wounded came from the al-Shafi mosque, targeted by US rockets and gunfire.
"So far, in the 'war on terror' initiated since 9/11, the USA and its allies have been responsible for over 13,000 civilian deaths, not only the 10,000 in Iraq, but also 3,000-plus civilian deaths in Afghanistan, another death toll that continues to rise long after the world's attention has moved on," reports the Iraq Body Count website. "Elsewhere in the world over the same period, paramilitary forces hostile to the USA have killed 408 civilians in 18 attacks worldwide. Adding the official 9/11 death toll (2,976 on 29 October 2003) brings the total to just under 3,500."
The Pentagon and Rumsfeld brag about avoiding "collateral damage," but the history of warfare over the last 60 or so years tells a different story. In fact, the deliberate targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure is a military strategy used over and over with gruesome results. From the Allied fire and nuclear bombings of German and Japanese cities during WWII to Bush Senior's calculated plan to destroy Iraqi sanitation and water purification plants during the Gulf War, the engineered mass murder of innocent civilians is a frequently used "tactic" of war. It will be no different in Iraq now that Shi'ite and Sunni resistance fighters have apparently come together to fight the US occupation.
Last year a newspaper in Ohio revealed the numerous war crimes committed against Vietnamese civilians by the US Army's Tiger Force in 1967. "The paper said the Army's investigation of Tiger Force found 27 soldiers who said the severing of ears from dead Vietnamese was an accepted practice," Reuters reported in October. "One soldier told the newspaper that troops would wear necklaces of ears to scare Vietnamese civilians."
As would-be president John Kerry admitted before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971, US soldiers in Vietnam "raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country." Kerry admitted taking part in these war crimes. "Yes, I committed the same kinds of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed. I took part in search and destroy missions, in the burning of villages."
Since the Winter Soldier investigation and his testimony before the Senate, however, Kerry has undergone a remarkable transformation from an antiwar activist to a Republican Lite senator who wants to send an additional 40,000 troops to Iraq to bomb mosques and shoot down protesting Iraqis. "I have to tell you, sometimes in foreign policy, certain things are complicated," Kerry told MSNBC's Chris Matthews last October.
Many Democrats are literally indistinguishable from their warmongering Republican colleagues. For instance, Zell Miller, Georgia Democrat, advised Bush to "Bomb the hell out of them" after 9/11. As it turned out, most of "them" were poor Afghan citizens, such as wedding celebrants massacred in the southern Afghan province of Uruzgan in August, 2002.
The urge to reduce sections of Iraq into a "parking lot" will only increase as the Iraqi resistance begins to accomplish its objectives of fighting the US to a standstill, inflicting a growing number of casualties, and eventually driving them from the country.
For instance, as I write this, it appears Moqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army has "captured a number of soldiers from the coalition during clashes currently taking place across a large swathe of Iraq," Reuters reports, citing Lebanon's al-Manar television station run by Hezbollah. Naturally, these captured soldiers will likely be exploited for propaganda purposes by the Shi'ites the same way the US exploited the captured and humiliated Saddam Hussein. As Donald Rumsfeld made obvious during the invasion, the capture and parading of US soldiers sincerely angers the Bush administration, as did the murder and gruesome public display of four so-called "contractors" in Fallujah last week.
Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the coalition's senior military spokesman, has promised "powerful offensive operations to destroy the al-Mahdi army throughout Iraq," a highly unlikely prospect considering al-Mahdi claims to have tens of thousands of supporters. Kimmitt is setting the US military up for failure -- there is simply no way the US, the Iraqi Governing Council, the CPA , or even Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani can stop the resistance and violence from spreading like wildfire across Iraq -- that is, short of flattening cities and killing thousands of al-Sadr's followers along with an indeterminate -- and uncounted -- number of civilians.
Eventually, faced with defeat, the Bush administration -- or a Kerry administration -- will vengefully flatten large sections of Iraqi cities. As the Israeli experience in the West Bank town of Jenin demonstrates, incredible violence and destruction is required to defeat an entrenched enemy in an urban environment. "Only when armored Israeli bulldozers demolished buildings sheltering the last of the Palestinian gunmen was the resistance finally quelled and the full extent of the damage revealed: According to the United Nations, 23 Israeli soldiers and 52 Palestinians were killed. Hundreds of houses were seriously damaged or destroyed," Yagil Henkin writes in Azure. "Many people, in Israel and abroad, judged the operation by a strict moral standard concerning treatment of civilians."
Fallujah, Sadr City, Nasiriyah, Karbala, Kut, and Ramadi may eventually resemble Grozny - vast plains of strewn rubble where buildings once stood -- but this will not put an end to the resistance. In addition to blasted homes and shops, the US will leave behind 75 tons of depleted uranium in the same way it left behind 72 million liters of the deadly defoliant Agent Orange in South Vietnam. It will not apologize or pay reparations.
Even with their cities flattened, Chechen resistance fighters continue the struggle. Earlier this week, Chechnians fired on Russian positions 19 times, killing four soldiers and wounding seven. As well, Chechnians have taken the battle to the enemy, recently blowing up oil pipelines in Russia.
Is it possible Bush will repeat Russia's Chechen mistakes in Iraq?
Kurt Nimmo is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Visit his excellent no holds barred blog at www.kurtnimmo.com/blogger.html . Nimmo is a contributor to Cockburn and St. Clair's, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. A collection of his essays for CounterPunch, Another Day in the Empire, is now available from Dandelion Books.
-------- europe
Nuclear fusion reactor deal close - statement
REUTERS AUSTRIA:
November 12, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/28128/story.htm
VIENNA - Major industrial nations are close to an agreement on where to build the world's first nuclear fusion reactor in a project to try to replicate the way the sun generates energy, a joint statement said.
It did not say where the $12 billion International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) would be located, but EU officials said they were confident it would go to Cadarache, France, and not a rival Japanese site.
After talks involving the EU, the United States, Russia, China, Japan and South Korea, a joint statement issued late this week said: "All parties were greatly encouraged by the positive atmosphere and expressed their optimism that the process was now proceeding effectively towards a fruitful conclusion among the six parties in the near future."
The careful wording of the statement appeared to support the EU's optimism.
It said the two potential hosts, the European Union and Japan, had presented "the results of recent intensive bilateral discussions on the balance of roles and responsibilities of host and non-host in the joint realisation of ITER".
Discussions would resume soon to seek a final agreement.
EU sources said Japan had effectively conceded that it would not win the contest and was holding out for industrial and scientific compensation.
A European Commission spokesman stepped back from EU threats to press ahead and build the reactor in France with whatever partners it could find if there was no global agreement.
"We're not there yet. We are still in a multilateral process," spokesman Fabio Fabbi said after the talks.
Nuclear fusion has been touted as a long-term solution to the world's energy problems, as it would be low in pollution and use limitless sea water as fuel.
The process involves sticking atoms together, as opposed to today's nuclear reactors and weapons, which produce energy by blowing atoms apart.
However, 50 years of research have failed to produce a commercially viable fusion reactor.
--------
EU again warns could mount nuclear project without Japan
BRUSSELS (AFP)
Nov 12, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041112140849.gv7pde69.html
The European Union will keep trying to persuade Japan to drop its bid to host a revolutionary nuclear energy project, while reserving the right to press ahead if talks fail, an EU source said Friday.
The European Commission is set to propose that negotiating strategy next week, after talks this week which failed to resolve the standoff between Japan and France over the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER).
Talks in Vienna on Tuesday made some progress but failed to break the essential deadlock over the two candidate sites for ITER, Cadarache in southern France and Rokkasho-mura in northern Japan, diplomats say.
Six partners are seeking an accord on the multi-billion dollar project: Japan and the EU, plus the United States and South Korea -- which support the Japanese bid -- and Russia and China, which back the EU bid.
Ambassadors from the 25-member EU discussed the situation on Friday, and a new negotiating mandate is expected to be proposed next week by the European Commission, the EU's executive arm.
The new mandate, to be unveiled on Tuesday, will "give priority to a solution involving all six parties, but there is a fallback option which is to do it with less than six," said one EU source.
"Cadarache is not negotiable for the EU," he added.
EU ministers for science and research will debate the commission's recommendations at their next meeting on November 26.
ITER is a test bed for what is being billed as a clean, safe, inexhaustible energy source of the future. The project, emulating the sun's nuclear fusion, is not expected to generate electricity before 2050.
The ITER budget is projected to be 10 billion euros (13 billion dollars) over the next 30 years, including 4.7 billion euros to build the reactor. The EU plans to finance 40 percent of the total.
Another source added that the EU "is reasonably confident of achieving an agreement between the six partners."
He noted that the bloc's current six-month Dutch presidency "is putting the emphasis on achieving a result with six partners by the end of the year," when it hands over the EU reins to Luxembourg.
The Dutch presidency itself declined to comment, saying the subject was "very sensitive" although admitting that there were daily contacts with Japanese officials.
-------- india / pakistan
India and Pakistan courting danger: Michel Krepon
By Khalid Hasan
Pakistan Daily Times
Fri Nov 12, 2004
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_12-11-2004_pg7_42
WASHINGTON: India and Pakistan are traversing a very dangerous passage marked by periods of intense confrontation, while the offsetting of nuclear capabilities on the Subcontinent has made crisis avoidance and conflict resolution more imperative, but at the same time more difficult to achieve.
According to Michel Krepon, founding president of the Stimson Centre and co-author and editor of a book on escalation control and the nuclear option in South Asia which was released here on Thursday evening, crises have become more prevalent "under the nuclear shadow." "Some in Pakistan have sought to use conventional warfare, backed by nuclear weapons, to leverage a more favourable outcome of the Kashmir dispute," whereas India's "ill-advised policies" have given "ample opportunities for mischief-making in Kashmir."
Krepon, who also has a special interest in Kashmir and has been visiting the region regularly, said Pakistan's "failed Kashmir policies" had worsened social, economic and political conditions at home and penalised those living across the dividing line. He criticised elements in Pakistan who support the Kashmiri "freedom struggle" and derive satisfaction from "India's grief". Continued support for militancy, he warned, would only need another single catalytic event by the jihadis to spark a severe crisis in the Subcontinent. He pointed out that it may not always be possible to contain crises since "the unexpected becomes commonplace" in such situations. He observed that some in India and Pakistan continue to believe that gains can be secured below the nuclear threshold. New Delhi, some reports have suggested, is now contemplating "limited war" in answer to Pakistani incursions. He expressed the apprehension that the next escalation in the Subcontinent may not be easily controlled.
According to Krepon, while Pakistan is pressing for a solution of Kashmir, India wants the issue to be placed on the back burner. That being so, "a tenuous and crisis-prone status quo is likely to be maintained." While such a status quo will serve no party's interests, including those of the Kashmiris, it might look better than some of the alternatives. In his view, nuclear risk-reduction and confidence-building measures are necessary, though insufficient. While Pakistan has held these measures hostage to progress towards its preferred outcome on Kashmir, India has sought to pursue them in lieu of progress on the issue. Dialogue between the two countries has, therefore, been "episodic and disappointing", with even "small steps forward checkmated by bureaucratic resistance, domestic political sensitivities and big explosions."
In a paper contributed to the book released this week, Krepon wrote that there has been a succession of "nuclear-tinged" crises in the Subcontinent since 1998, including the Kargil conflict. He noted that so far India and Pakistan, like the US and USSR, have been fortunate to avoid a nuclear exchange and it is possible that this luck will hold and the two countries will make joint efforts to reduce nuclear risks. India and Pakistan also feel more confident since they have both acquired second strike capability. "It is, however, far too early to declare that the tide has turned and that offsetting nuclear capabilities have ushered in a new era of stability on the Subcontinent," he added. Kargil and the 2002 standoff have led both countries to seek constructive engagement on nuclear risk reduction. He mentioned in this context the expert-level talks held in June 2004.
Krepon argues that Indian and Pakistani leaders need to move from recurring crises to nuclear safety, a passage that can only be traversed safely with sustained collaboration. While the two countries could be at the beginning of a sustained process of nuclear risk reduction, "deterrence pessimists are correct in warning that nuclear risk-reduction measures are not in place. Much could go badly wrong on the Subcontinent unless Pakistan's national security establishment reassesses its Kashmir policy and unless New Delhi engages substantively on Islamabad's concerns and with dissident Kashmiris. The way out of this morass is widely appreciated, but rarely acted upon. This exit strategy points to placing a much higher priority on the well-being of Kashmiris - something both governments profess to hold dear, but rarely act upon." He believes that if the two governments act with sincerity, the Line of Control would become permanently fire-free, crossings of jihadis cease altogether and human rights violation in Kashmir virtually come to an end. Trade and development projects would flourish across the dividing line. "Nuclear risk reduction begins along the Kashmir divide," he concludes.
-------- iran
Iranians, Europeans Meet on Nuclear Deal
By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 12, 2004; Page A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43761-2004Nov11.html
TEHRAN, Nov. 11 -- After five days of intense internal deliberations, Iranian officials met with European envoys here Thursday to seek "clarifications" on a proposed deal that would require Tehran to indefinitely suspend a pivotal aspect of its nuclear energy program that could be converted to military use, Western diplomatic sources here said.
European envoys said they were cautiously hopeful that Iran would agree this weekend to suspend its controversial uranium-enrichment program. But an agreement remained elusive, even though a top Iranian official had suggested earlier that a formal announcement was imminent.
"I am optimistic about a positive answer from Tehran," Iranian nuclear negotiator Hossein Mousavian told Reuters shortly before the ambassadors from Britain, France and Germany were summoned to hear Iran's response.
A European envoy confirmed reports out of Vienna that the Iranian response was "not definitive" but "not disappointing." The clarifications Iran sought were "highly technical," he added.
Details of the proposal have been closely held, but they include commercial and political incentives from Europe, possibly including a light-water reactor that would be more difficult than a heavy-water reactor to convert for use in a weapons program.
Europe has resisted requests from Iran for additional incentives and for flexibility on an early step in the uranium-conversion process, Western diplomats here said.
Europeans diplomats here said they had hoped to have an answer from Iran before British Prime Minister Tony Blair arrived in Washington on Thursday so he could discuss the specifics with President Bush. A deal to get Iran to indefinitely suspend uranium enrichment is only the first phase. The next stage is working out a permanent arrangement to ensure that Iran does not have the capability to produce a nuclear bomb.
Iran is also under pressure to provide an answer in time for the International Atomic Energy Agency to carry out inspections and make a report before its Nov. 25 meeting.
U.S. officials have made it clear they prefer pressing the IAEA, the U.N. nuclear watchdog, to referring the Iranian issue to the Security Council.
The deal was negotiated in Paris talks over the weekend, after which Iranian and European officials said considerable progress had produced a provisional agreement that would be taken back for final approval by Iran's leadership.
The Iranian-European talks have been "anything but easy," German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer told Germany's parliament Thursday. "Only the full and lasting suspension of enrichment activities . . . by Iran can open the way for results-oriented talks on long-term cooperation," he said.
--------
European-Iran Nuclear Deal Tottering
Associated Press
By GEORGE JAHN
Nov 12, 2004
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/UN_NUCLEAR_AGENCY_IRAN?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- A tentative deal committing Iran to suspend activities that Washington says are part of a nuclear arms program was in jeopardy Friday, with diplomats suggesting Tehran had reneged on an agreement reached just days ago with European negotiators.
As envoys for both sides tried to salvage the deal, the International Atomic Energy Agency delayed a report on Iran's nuclear activities that was scheduled for limited circulation Friday.
A diplomat familiar with the IAEA said the delay was meant to give the two sides a chance to resolve the dispute and allow agency head Mohamed ElBaradei to include in his report an Iranian commitment to full suspension of uranium enrichment and related activities.
The IAEA overview of nearly two decades of clandestine activities that the United States asserts is a secret weapons program is being prepared for review by the agency's 35-nation board of governors at its Nov. 25 meeting. Based on the report, the board will decide whether to refer Iran to the U.N. Security Council, which could call for sanctions. President Bush has accused Iran of being part of an "axis of evil" with North Korea and prewar Iraq.
After ending talks in Paris with Iranian envoys last weekend, European diplomats said there was tentative agreement by Tehran to suspend uranium enrichment - which can be used to make nuclear arms - and all related activities.
The deal leaves open the exact length of the suspension but says it will be in effect at least as long as it takes for the two sides to negotiate a deal on European technical and financial aid, including help in developing Iranian nuclear energy for power generation.
But diplomats told The Associated Press on Friday that Iranian officials had presented British, French and German envoys in Tehran with a version of the agreement that was unacceptable to the three European powers.
The key dispute was over conversion of uranium into gas, which, when spun in centrifuges, can be enriched to lower levels for producing electricity or processed into high-level, weapons-grade uranium, the diplomats said on condition of anonymity.
"The processing of what is to be enriched is the main problem," a diplomat said.
The diplomats - all of them briefed on the dispute and based in Vienna or other European capitals - said Iran was insisting that the deal allowed it to process uranium into a precursor of uranium hexafluoride, the gas introduced into centrifuges for enrichment. The diplomats said that was not allowed under the tentative deal reached in Paris.
Iranian officials denied they had reneged. A senior Iranian official on the Supreme National Security council who requested anonymity said his country's response had been "positive," but he refused to elaborate.
But former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani acknowledged there still was some way to go before Iran reached an agreement with the Europeans.
"If the Europeans show wisdom and don't make excessive demands, I think the way is open and we can reach an agreement," said Rafsanjani, a senior parliamentary official. "If they resist, they will give in one day but at a higher price."
Talks continued to try to salvage the agreement.
Tehran already had drafted a letter for the U.N. agency, saying it was committed to voluntary suspension that was less than what was agreed on in Paris and would "ask for the next step, which is IAEA inspections," to shore up support before the board meeting, one of the diplomats said.
Iran suspended uranium enrichment last year but has repeatedly refused to stop other related activities such as reprocessing uranium or building centrifuges, insisting its program is intended purely for the production of fuel for nuclear power generation.
But even if Iran agrees to full suspension of nuclear activities - as demanded by the Europeans - the deal would be short of U.S. calls for an indefinite suspension.
The IAEA unanimously passed a resolution in September demanding Iran freeze all work on uranium enrichment and related activities, and the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency will judge Iran's compliance Nov. 25.
Tehran has defied the agency by continuing to build centrifuges and by already converting a few tons of raw uranium into hexafluoride gas.
Iran is not breaching its Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty obligations by seeking to enrich uranium but is under international pressure to drop such plans as a good faith gesture.
-------- japan
Japanese Government Energy Commission Ignores Nuclear Dangers
Greenpeace
Japan Press Release
November 12, 2004
http://www.greenpeace.or.jp/press/2004/eng/20041112b_html
The government commission to revise Japan's Long-term program for Research, Development and Utilization of Nuclear Energy (long-term nuclear energy policy) is expected to conclude in favor of reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel today. Greenpeace Japan warns that reprocessing causes deadly radiation releases into the environment that are a threat to public health, and urges the committee to hold a more comprehensive review and public hearings.
Activists from Greenpeace stood outside the meeting with a banner showing a map of expected radiation dispersal. Others inside the meeting brought a question to the committee members saying "Are you going to export radiation contamination from Rokkasho to Japan, and to the world.?"
"There was almost no discussion on the environmental impacts and human health impacts from the reprocessing in the commission." Said Nogawa ATSUKO, nuclear campaigner for Greenpeace Japan. " Seeing names of members is to know the conclusion of continuing reprocessing. It is no surprise this commission supports reprocessing, as most come from organizations that will profit from the decision. Without a comprehensive review on the environment, safety and nuclear proliferation, conclusion should not be made." she continued.
The dangers of radiation from reprocessing plant discharges are well known through-out the world. At the annual meeting of the OSPAR Commission, in Copenhagen in 2000 government representatives from 15 countries throughout Europe agreed to call for an end to nuclear reprocessing and the implementation of dry storage. The Leukemia rate among children living around the reprocessing plants is higher than average There are on going studies looking at the relationship between reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel and leukemia.
Following this decision a number of safety agreements have to be signed with local governments. A shipment of depleted uranium is expected to be sent to the plant to begin tests in the plant in early 2005. JNFL hopes to begin burning spent nuclear fuel with a year of the depleted uranium tests.
Greenpeace Japan continues to campaign against the reprocessing and to stop conclusion of the safety agreement.
For further information, please contact: Greenpeace Japan, Telephone +813 5338 9800 Atsuko Nogawa , Greenpeace Japan Nuclear Campaigner, mobile phone 090-3654-4035 Kazue Suzuki, Greenpeace Japan Campaign Director, mobile phone 090-2249-1502
-------- terrorism
Terror threat
November 12, 2004
Inside the Ring
By Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/inring.htm
The U.S. government this week relaxed its warning of a terrorist threat to financial centers in Washington and New York. The decision led to a lessening of the security posture on Capitol Hill, where barriers have blocked traffic at checkpoints for months.
Intelligence officials tell us one of the strange bits of threat information obtained by the CIA was that al Qaeda had targeted 24 members of Congress for assassination. The intelligence report, according to officials who have read it, said that al Qaeda had picked the congressmen because they had access to one of the three Energy Department national laboratories, including the Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Sandia facilities.
Intelligence officials said there was no explanation for why the terror group was targeting the members linked to the laboratories.
The intelligence reports indicated that al Qaeda would attack using explosives-laden vehicles, hijacked tanker fuel trucks and hijacked helicopters.
Fortunately, the threat did not materialize. Some officials believe the CIA was fooled by at least one source who claimed that an attack by al Qaeda would be timed to coincide with the Nov. 2 elections. The source later was found to have been bogus, officials said.
-------- MILITARY
-------- africa
France Blamed in Ivorian Unrest
Colonial Power Undermining Him, Leader Says in Interview
By Craig Timberg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, November 12, 2004; Page A22
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A44055-2004Nov11?language=printer
ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast, Nov. 11 -- President Laurent Gbagbo on Thursday challenged French accounts of a bombardment that killed nine French troops and a U.S. aid worker Saturday. Gbagbo accused France of using the incident as a pretext to launch a drastic counterattack to weaken his grip on power.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Gbagbo questioned whether French troops had died in the bombing, saying that only an investigation by his government would clarify the events that led to a massive retaliation by French military forces.
"I haven't see any dead bodies," said Gbagbo, dressed in a dark suit and tie as he sat in the library of his official residence. "I didn't see anything."
The streets of Abidjan were calmer Thursday, with little of the looting and street mob scenes that had reigned since Saturday. But an additional 700 French citizens left the commercial capital on the second day of an airlift to Paris, while hundreds of Gbagbo's supporters controlled sections of the battle-scarred city.
Gbagbo called the Saturday attack a "pretext" for retaliation by former colonial rulers intent on undermining him. He said the French military response was so swift that it must have been planned long in advance of the incident.
He also said that without the French intervention, which destroyed the tiny Ivory Coast air force, his government would have been able to defeat a revolt in the north that has split the country for two years.
The president's comments were immediately disputed by French authorities here. The French military spokesman, Col. Henry Assauvy, said, "It's absolutely false. I know that the rumor is always that France is always preparing a coup. . . . We are not here to prepare a coup."
Assauvy added that the French became involved militarily last weekend because the Ivory Coast air force attacked a position held by French peacekeeping forces. The counterattack destroyed two fighter jets and some helicopters.
"We attacked the warplanes because we were attacked," Assauvy said.
Gbagbo's comments appeared to be part of a public relations push by Ivory Coast officials to portray themselves as victims in the complex standoff that has provoked nearly a week of violent unrest in this West African country.
As calm returned to the streets, the French military relinquished control of the international airport, and commercial flights were to resume Friday. French troops also pulled back from the Hotel d'Ivoire, where their highly visible position had stirred protest because of its proximity to Gbagbo's home.
But signs of the recent unrest were visible throughout the city. Overturned hulls of burned-out cars and trucks lay by roadsides, and coils of hastily laid barbed wire snaked along routes leading to the French military base. Hundreds of Gbagbo supporters, dubbed "Young Patriots," used makeshift barricades such as tree limbs to block passage to sections of the city where they roamed freely.
About 1,500 French nationals have flown to Paris since the outbreak of violence, and nearly the same number remained camped out at the French military base awaiting flights.
Until last week, an estimated 15,000 French citizens lived in Ivory Coast, most of them in Abidjan, a city of wide, tree-lined boulevards that once prompted comparisons to Paris. Since then, the city has deteriorated with a swiftness that startled many longtime residents.
Lavender Degre, 37, a Zambian who runs a nonprofit group here, said mobs looted her son's school this week. The family spent Thursday morning in line, waiting to join the exodus to Paris.
"My husband is white, and we're scared," she said. "We've been here for 10 years, and this is the first time we're really scared."
Gbagbo, in the interview, expressed little concern over such departures. "They will come back," he said, wagging his finger in the air. "You must come back in three months. They will be there."
He displayed more worry about the world's perception of the past week's events. As he explained it, a longtime war with anti-government rebels was nearing its end after the government suddenly broke a peace deal Friday and resumed attacks on rebel positions.
Gbagbo said the French military intervention had prevented his forces from finishing the job. The embattled leader, who took office in 2000 after an aborted vote count in national elections, has long maintained that the French support the rebellion.
"The government of Jacques Chirac never accepted that I have reached the position of president," he said.
The mobs of Gbagbo supporters want the French military to leave Ivory Coast. In interviews, many said the military presence is a remnant of the colonial era that ended with Ivory Coast's freedom in 1960.
Thousands of Young Patriots have gathered in recent days outside state television and radio stations and outside the president's home. Their numbers dwindled Thursday, but those who remained said they would continue their demonstrations until the French forces leave.
"I'm here to protect my country," said Marielaure Kone, 37, who runs a small clothing shop in Abidjan. "The French attacked us."
--------
French military says several dozen assaults on civilians Ivory Coast
PARIS (AFP)
Nov 12, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041112202413.590sxtlh.html
The French military said Friday that several dozen foreigners had been victims of assaults, rapes and attempted rapes during the mob violence in Ivory Coast.
"It is impossible at this point to provide a reliable number on the number of people who were mistreated, injured or raped during the pillaging that happened last Sunday," said Colonel Gerard Dubois, a spokesman for the French military's chief of staff.
"It can be estimated that the people who were victims of assaults, rape and attempted rape number in the dozens," he told AFP.
Earlier Friday a French military official in Paris said that several dozen white women were raped in Ivory Coast but no foreign nationals were killed in violence that has shaken the west African state since last week.
Mob violence broke out in Ivory Coast's main city Abidjan after French forces wiped out the Ivorian government's air force following an airstrike that killed nine France peacekeepers.
A representative of French expatriates in Ivory Coast, Catherine Rechenmann, said foreign residents in Abidjan were subjected to at least "37 serious atrocities including three or four confirmed rapes."
The head of the French forces in Ivory Coast, General Henri Poncet, said late Thursday: "I confirm there have been rapes. There were atrocities, tragedies for a certain number of women. I will not comment further out of respect."
Court officials in Bobigny, near Paris's Charles de Gaulle airport to which hundreds of French and other foreign nationals have been evacuated from Ivory Coast since the sudden upsurge at the weekend in violence against westerners, said Friday two 10 women, including one in her sixties, have filed suit for rape.
-------- asia
Japan raises submarine issue with China: report
AFP
November 12, 2004
http://asia.news.yahoo.com/041111/afp/041111194232asiapacificnews.html
TOKYO (AFP) - Japan took up with China the issue of a suspicious submarine that intruded into its waters amid alarm in Tokyo that the vessel was a show of strength from its neighbour and growing competitor.
Japan's former prime minister Ryutaro Hashimoto said he told Chinese leaders the incident was "regrettable" without assigning blame for the submarine which has been tracked for two days, Kyodo News reported from Beijing.
Hashimoto said Chinese Vice President Zeng Qinghong and Defence Minister Cao Gangchuan were looking into whether the submarine could be Chinese and told him "'once the issue is clarified, the two countries could discuss the matter'," according to Kyodo.
The submarine spent about two hours in Japanese waters Wednesday near the southern island of Okinawa before being chased on the high seas by two Japanese destroyers and a surveillance plane.
Both countries have been cautious in identifying the nationality of the submarine. If confirmed as Chinese the incident is expected to damage already sour diplomatic relations between the Asian powers.
"We have seen the reports and are watching the situation closely," Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue said earlier.
"Of course the relevant departments are maintaining close contact to watch this incident."
The Japanese government spokesman, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda, told an afternoon news conference that the vessel was moving "in many different directions".
"Once we find out the nationality of the submarine, we would take appropriate measures," Hosoda said.
Moscow categorically denied the submarine was Russian.
Japan's Defence Agency believes the vessel is a Chinese navy Han-type nuclear-powered submarine because of its cruising sound, the mass-circulation Yomiuri Shimbun and Jiji Press news agency said.
"If the submarine is confirmed to be a Chinese vessel, the government must strongly protest to China immediately," the Yomiuri said in an editorial.
The liberal Asahi Shimbun said that while Japan needed to gather all the facts first and avoid unnecessary tension, "criticism towards China would inevitably increase if the submarine is of the Chinese navy."
"We urge the Chinese government to investigate the incident urgently. We must not let this issue drag on," the Asahi said.
The Sankei Shimbun called the submarine an "alarming sign" and suspected China wanted to show its military might to Japan, the United States and Taiwan, where support has been growing for a declaration of independence from Beijing.
"It is unlikely that China will come forward to reveal the submarine's nationality and purposes," said the daily, which is sympathetic to Taiwan.
"But if it was aimed to demonstrate the (Chinese) presence to Japan and the United States as well as Taiwan," the Sankei said, "the objective seems to have been fully achieved."
China feels deep resentment over Japan's failure to formally apologise for atrocities during its brutal occupation of the country from 1931 to 1945. That resentment has been regularly reinforced by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's visits to a Tokyo shrine that honors the war dead including convicted war criminals.
On its part, Japan has said China may be planning new fields in a disputed gas project around the maritime boundary between the countries, which are both major energy importers.
A Japanese parliamentary report Wednesday called for slashing aid to China, saying its neighbour tolerated anti-Japanese sentiment and felt in a position to hand out loans of its own.
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Significant changes in Japanese defense 'largely overlooked'
News World Communications
November 12, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041111-094923-4893r.htm
Brad Glosserman, research director at Pacific Forum CSIS in Honolulu, spoke to Washington Times reporter Takehiko Kambayashi about Japan's change of attitude on security issues. Pacific Forum CSIS is the Asia-Pacific arm of the D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Question: You have said that Japan's changes [toward national defense] in recent years, overshadowed by China's dynamism and North Korea's nuclear programs, are significant.
Answer: Yes, they are very significant. These are very important changes, but they have been largely overlooked.
Q: What role do you expect Japan to play from now on?
A: First of all, in many ways that depends on what Japanese people will decide. That is the most important factor. What we are seeing now is the change in Japan's thinking about national security. I believe this process has been unfolding since the [1991] Persian Gulf war.
I think there was a sense in Japan that a traditional way of thinking about national security no longer worked for Japan. External environments were very different from what the Japanese had anticipated.
You had dynamism in China, You had the Taiwan Strait crisis in 1995 and 1996. You had the first North Korean nuclear crisis in 1993 and 1994. You had problems in the U.S.-Japan alliance because of the 1995 rape of a 12-year-old Okinawan schoolgirl [by American servicemen]. You had [North Korea's] Taepo-Dong missile launch [that overflew Japan's main island]. You had the second North Korean nuclear crisis in 2002. You always have the invasions of [North Korean] spy boats and questions about [Japanese kidnapped by North Korean agents over decades].
I think you had the understanding in Japan that the world was very different from [what] they had expected. I think, at the same time, there was some thinking in Japan that the ways Japan had responded to them was no longer working.
Of course, the very important one was the response in 1991 when Japan contributed $13 billion to the first Persian Gulf war and no one noticed.
You also had Japan's changing economy - several years of stagnation. And traditional tools of Japanese diplomacy were proving less useful. There was not as much money to give for [official development assistance].
The Chinese were not even noticing the ODA they had received. Japan was not being given any credit for it. And don't forget, Japan sent peacekeepers to Cambodia in 1992 as part of [U.N. Transitional Authority in Cambodia]. ...
There was a sense that Japan could play different kinds of role. Of course, there are problems with this - the [U.S.-drafted post-World War II] constitution is a big issue. I think bigger than that is the uncertainty in Japan about what role it wants to play in the world.
I think Prime Minister [Junichiro] Koizumi has some ideas. But I'm not sure that those ideas are shared by most Japanese. So, slowly, there is the beginning of a debate about what is Japan's proper role in the world.
My answer to that question is that I think that is most importantly something that the Japanese people have to figure out for themselves.
[However], I personally think that the United States and Japan need to be more creative about how we think about our alliance, how we think about burden sharing. Because if, in fact, many of the threats in the 21 century are nontraditional security threats, they require different approaches to them.
They are not about armies. They are about diseases. They are about terrorism. They are about causes of terrorism. I think what Japan needs to do is to figure out the best way for it to contribute to solving these problems.
And that doesn't necessarily mean always putting more troops on the ground and more ships to sea. ... Honestly, I don't think Japan helps the United States more by necessarily spending more money on the Self Defense Forces.
Q: So you think the U.S.-Japan alliance is more important than ever to the two countries' interests, and to those of the region.
A: Yes. China and South Korea are changing. The U.S. presence in Asia is changing. Asia is changing, and Japan is changing.
With all of those changes, it seems to me we need a very stable foundation for Japan's engagement in the region and for U.S. engagement in the region - something that keeps the U.S. there and reassures allies and our friends, and will deter possible adversaries and let them know that the United States will stay and commit to the region. I think the U.S.-Japan alliance is a very important part of that.
-------- business
Insurer Lombard holds 7.3 pct in arms manufacturer Rheinmetall
FRANKFURT (AFP)
Nov 12, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041112153730.8a6toe4q.html
Rheinmetall, the German automotive and defence technology specialist, said Friday that the Luxembourg-based insurer Lombard International Assurance has acquired a 7.354-percent stake in its share capital.
Under German stock law, investors are obliged to report changes in their shareholdings in listed companies above or below certain key thresholds, such as five and 10 percent.
Rheinmetall's share capital comprises 18 million voting common shares and 18 million non-voting preference shares.
And Lombard had notified Rheinmetall that it had amassed 14.72-percent of Rheinmetall's common stock, equivalent to a stake of 7.354 percent in the overall company, the statement said.
The Mannheim-based holding company, Roechling Industrie Verwaltung GmbH, remains the biggest shareholder with an overall stake of 42.1 percent in Rheinmetall, or 73.7 percent of its voting shares and 10.5 percent of its preference shares.
Any changes in Rheinmetall's share capital are notable because the company specialises in defence technology.
The German government this year passed a new law that gave it the right to veto the acquisition by foreign investors of stakes of more than 25 percent in any companies active in the sensitive area of defence.
Press reports have suggested that US investors, such as Carlyle or General Dynamics, were interested in buying Rheinmetall, which makes tanks.
-------- china
Chinese Whistle-Blower Punished
By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, November 12, 2004; Page A22
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42852-2004Nov11.html
BEIJING, Nov. 11 -- A Communist Party cadre who briefly rose to fame in China by denouncing official corruption has been relieved of his duties and placed under a form of house arrest while authorities investigate his conduct, friends and neighbors said Thursday.
The case of Huang Jingao, party secretary for Lianjiang county in Fujian province, demonstrated the potential cost of speaking out against China's pervasive corruption, despite repeated pledges from leaders in Beijing to prosecute city, county and provincial officials on the take.
Huang generated a national buzz in August when he wrote an open letter complaining that his efforts to investigate and prosecute corruption were being stymied by higher-level party and government officials because of what he called "the underlying rules" by which unscrupulous functionaries protect one another.
The letter, which was posted on the Web site of the People's Daily, the party's official newspaper, became an immediate sensation. Internet users across the country chatted about Huang's integrity. Editorialists in Beijing exulted in the airing of his charges by the party's own press. And ordinary Chinese, inured to official corruption, commented on his bravery.
But within a few days, the letter was taken down from the People's Daily site, and Huang was called on the carpet by party authorities in Fuzhou, the nearby provincial capital, 300 miles south of Shanghai. In a statement using 1960s-vintage Marxist-Leninist rhetoric, they accused him of "individualism" and ordered him to "do a complete self-examination."
In the weeks since then, Huang has been rendered unable to perform his duties as the county's party secretary and has been in effect replaced by his deputy, according to his friends and neighbors. Although he still has his title, he has been confined to his home or office, according to a source aware of the situation.
"In other words, Huang Jingao has been shelved," one acquaintance said.
Seven people have been detained for questioning as part of the investigation against Huang, a Lianjiang official said. One was a vegetable farmer who was urged to accuse Huang of accepting bribes, the official added, while another was a deputy of Huang's who went to Beijing in an effort to bring Lianjiang's corruption cases to the attention of national-level officials.
Huang's anti-corruption efforts centered on what he described as crooked deals in which officials took bribes to confiscate peasants' land and sell it at below-market prices to developers. Such land confiscations have become one of China's most common points of conflict.
Researcher Jin Ling contributed to this report.
-------- iraq
New insurgency confronts US forces
Kurds come under attack as rebels rampage in city
November 12, 2004
The Guardian
Rory McCarthy in Baghdad and Michael Howard in Sulaymaniyah
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1349505,00.html
US troops were drawn into a new offensive in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul yesterday to tackle a tide of insurgency unchecked by the military assault on Falluja.
In Baghdad at least 17 Iraqis were killed in a suicide car bombing as gunmen set up checkpoints on roads in the west of the capital and fought battles with US troops.
Rebels also took to the streets of the northern town of Baiji, home to Iraq's main refinery, clashing with security forces.
The violence suggests the four-day operation in Falluja may have cleared out the most important insurgent stronghold in Iraq, but has done little to curb the burgeoning militant movement.
For two days insurgents have defied a curfew to rampage through Mosul, attacking or setting fire to at least seven police stations as well as government buildings.
Masked gunmen stole bullet-proof jackets and Kalashnikov rifles from police stations and were roaming the city centre yesterday setting fire to police cars and taking control of bridges. The five bridges over the Tigris were later closed to civilian traffic.
At one stage a group tried to storm an office of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the two major Kurdish parties, and fought gunbattles with Kurdish guards. Mosul's television channel went off air for an hour and the US military admitted the Iraqi police were unable to handle the crisis. At least five Iraqi national guardsmen and a civilian have been killed and a dozen injured.
By 1pm soldiers from the US 25th Infantry Division and a team of Iraqi national guardsmen were called in to launch "offensive operations" in south-east and south-west Mosul against "known concentrations of insurgents".
A senior Kurdish official in Mosul said he believed the gunmen were militants loyal to the wanted Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and former Ba'athists. He said the men had arrived three days ago from Falluja and Samarra, another troubled Sunni town.
The official, who declined to be named, said: "They are working together and know what they are doing. They have had a lot of notice about the Falluja assault, and were prepared to move the fight."
Residents said there had been explosions and heavy gunfire from assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.
"I have been inside my house for 24 hours and am too frightened to go out," said Shereen Hawleri, a Kurdish resident. "I think they could turn on the Kurds next."
Since the start of the Falluja offensive on Sunday night, attacks have taken place across Sunni areas in central and northern Iraq in towns such as Samarra, Baiji, Baquba, Tikrit, Ramadi, Hawija and now Mosul. The violence in Mosul has been the worst since the invasion began and a sign of the growing influence of Sunni militants.
"The [insurgent] activities have now spread to the borders with the Kurdish self-rule area, and are threatening Kurdish and other minorities in the region," said the official.
The Kurdish governor of Kirkuk, a disputed city to the north-east, survived an assassination attempt yesterday when a car bomb exploded as his convoy passed.
Abdulrahman Mustafa was not hurt, but six members of his personal security detail and eight civilians were hurt, according to Arif Qurbany, the director of a local TV station.
"The situation in the city is very tense," he said. "The Kurds here believe that Arab militants are deliberately targeting them just for being Kurds." Last night Kurdish leaders in Arbil and Sulaymaniya, inside the Kurdish self-rule region, said they were preparing Kurdish troops in the national guard to restore order in Mosul and Kirkuk in coordination with the US military.
"We cannot stand by and let minorities be attacked, as they were under Saddam," said a military commander in Sulaymaniya. But the deployment of Kurdish fighters in Kirkuk would be sensitive.
A Baghdad centre car bomb killed at least 17 and wounded 30. It also destroyed 11 cars and brought down a building.
The bomb detonated at 11.15am, moments after a US convoy had passed in a crowded high street.
-----
U.S. Troops force men trying to flee Assault on Fallujah to return to city
abcnews
Nov 12, 2004
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=246764
NEAR FALLUJAH, Iraq - Hundreds of men trying to flee the assault on Fallujah have been turned back by U.S. troops following orders to allow only women, children and the elderly to leave.
The military says it has received reports warning that insurgents will drop their weapons and mingle with refugees to avoid being killed or captured by advancing American troops.
As it believes many of Fallujah's men are guerrilla fighters, it has instructed U.S. troops to turn back all males aged 15 to 55.
"We assume they'll go home and just wait out the storm or find a place that's safe," one 1st Cavalry Division officer, who declined to be named, said Thursday.
Army Col. Michael Formica, who leads forces isolating Fallujah, admits the rule sounds "callous." But he insists it's is key to the mission's success.
"Tell them 'Stay in your houses, stay away from windows and stay off the roof and you'll live through Fallujah,'" Formica, of the 1st Cavalry Division's 2nd Brigade, told his battalion commanders in a radio conference call Wednesday night.
Many of Fallujah's 200,000 to 300,000 residents fled the city before the assault, at which time 1,200 to 3,000 fighters were believed in militant stronghold.
Later Prime Minister Ayad Allawi imposed a 24-hour curfew on Fallujah and ordered roads in the area closed, providing the legal background for the U.S. blockade.
Troops have cut off all roads and bridges leading out of the city. Relatively few residents have sought to get through, but officers here say they fear a larger exodus.
On Wednesday, a crowd of 225 people surged south out of Fallujah toward the blocking positions of the Marines' 2nd Reconnaissance Battalion. The Marines let 25 women and children pass but separated the 200 military-age men and forced them to walk back into Fallujah.
"There is nothing that distinguishes an insurgent from a civilian," the 1st Cavalry officer said. "If they're not carrying a weapon, you can't tell who's who."
Also Wednesday, troops halted two ambulances leaving Fallujah and found 57 refugees packed inside. Most were women and children who were allowed to leave. Smaller bands of refugees have also turned up at U.S. roadblocks, some allowed to pass and others turned back.
Single refugees have made their way out of the city by swimming across the broad Euphrates River or sneaking out across desert paths, military officials said.
On Wednesday and Thursday, American troops sunk boats being used to ferry people and in some cases, rebel arms across the river.
The ongoing U.S. advance is bottling up Fallujah's insurgents and others fleeing the fighting in the southern section of the city, where U.S. forces were moving Thursday night.
Most of the remaining attacks by insurgents inside Fallujah have been on Marines blocking the roads and bridges leaving the city, reports show. Marines have returned fire killing numerous insurgents trying to escape, officers here said.
The military estimates 600 insurgents have already been killed, about half the total of guerrillas in the city.
Fallujah has been under relentless aerial and artillery bombardment and without electricity since Monday. Reports have said residents are running low on food. An officer here said it was likely that those who stay in their homes would live through the assault, but agreed the city was a risky and frightening place to live.
U.S. military says it does all it can to prevent bombing buildings with civilians inside them.
Once the battle ends, military officials say all surviving military-age men can expect to be tested for explosive residue, catalogued, checked against insurgent databases and interrogated about ties with the guerrillas. U.S. and Iraqi troops are in the midst of searching homes, and plan to check every house in the city for weapons.
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Violence Spreads in Iraq; Car Bomb Kills 17 in Baghdad
By Karl Vick and Bassam Sebti
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, November 12, 2004; Page A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43807-2004Nov11?language=printer
BAGHDAD, Nov. 11 -- Armed insurgents rampaged Thursday through Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city, detonated a massive car bomb in the capital and apparently seized control of two smaller urban centers. This violence took place as U.S. forces continued their major offensive in Fallujah.
The scattered and spreading guerrilla attacks appeared to be part of a threatened effort by insurgents to open new battle fronts away from Fallujah, an anti-American bastion 35 miles west of Baghdad in the Sunni Triangle.
Masked men brandishing machine guns and wrapped in ammunition bandoliers overran police stations in Mosul, a major city 220 miles north of the capital, carrying off weapons and armored vests in a second day of street violence, U.S. military officials here said.
In Baghdad, gunfire and explosions continued to rattle sections of the city, while gunmen battled U.S. Army units and Iraqi police in western neighborhoods largely populated by Sunni Muslims and officials of former president Saddam Hussein's Sunni-led government.
In a late-morning attack on Sadoun Street, a busy commercial strip, a car bomb exploded with a force that stunned even jaded residents.
The blast killed 17 people, blackened one block of the street, destroyed a medical supply store and incinerated 10 cars. The suicide bomber had apparently tried to hit a passing convoy of five Iraqi police cars.
"These are the Arab fighters who are losing now in Fallujah. I saw a whole family burned in front of me," said Abu Adullah, as a tear rolled down his cheek. Adullah's real estate office was damaged in the blast.
"May God curse them," he said. "May God curse them."
Thae Khudhair Jasim, 23, suffered wounds to his neck and chest when the windshield of his taxi shattered, showering glass over him and his passengers, a woman and her three daughters. All five survived.
"No one should see what I saw: pieces of flesh, cut legs, burned bodies," Jasim said.
Clashes in the capital erupted near the headquarters of the Association of Muslim Scholars and a mosque known for its militancy. The association, which represents Iraq's Sunni Muslim clergy and vocally supports the insurgency, said U.S. troops had raided the homes of two of its senior officials, including Harith Dhari, the secretary general.
American troops also participated in a raid on Baghdad's Ibn Taymiya mosque that resulted in the detention of Mehdi Sumaidi, a militant Sunni cleric. Sumaidi heads the strict Salafist movement in Iraq and recently threatened to issue "a general call to arms" over Fallujah.
The call appeared to have already gone out, judging by the number of attacks in the capital during the past 48 hours. On Wednesday, U.S. forces were assaulted 66 times by gunfire, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, roadside bombs or car bombs.
In Mosul, U.S. troops mounted offensive operations early Thursday afternoon aimed at reclaiming the captured police stations and a food warehouse that was also being held. The warehouse was considered significant for its association with voter registration, which is in turn linked to Iraq's food rationing system. Insurgents have threatened Iraqis who take part in the elections, scheduled for late January.
Attack helicopters swooped overhead, and residents were warned to avoid the city's bridges, which insurgents were battling U.S. and Iraqi security forces to control. Five members of the Iraqi National Guard were killed in a battle on one bridge. American troops were responding to a call from the governor of Nineveh province, who imposed a curfew Wednesday.
"In several cases, anti-Iraqi forces exceeded the capabilities of the police on site, requiring reinforcements," said a statement issued by the U.S. military.
Insurgents have targeted Westerners and Iraqi security forces for months in Mosul, where the mostly Sunni population has long had a reputation for nationalism. In recent weeks, the city has also become known for intolerance, with vigilantes harassing and even killing members of its Christian minority.
Gunmen also roamed the streets of Baiji, an oil refining center in the Sunni heartland north of Baghdad, and Salman Pak, a small city in the band of angry towns that ring the capital's southern flank.
In Washington, several military experts said it was no surprise that bombings and insurgent attacks were occurring in other cities. Some said they saw Fallujah as symbolically significant but not the epicenter of the insurgency.
"It was a very important symbol, a dangerous ulcer," said Anthony H. Cordesman, a senior analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "This will be gone, and that is important. That doesn't mean there won't be problems in Baghdad, Mosul, Baqubah or Samarra, and that's easy to predict because it's already happening."
But Cordesman added that Fallujah's role as a recruiting station, haven and clearing point for foreign insurgents made it an important target.
On NBC's "Today" show Thursday morning, Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the nature of any insurgency was that people fight one minute and blend into the surroundings the next. He said the central goal of the offensive in Fallujah was not so much suppressing the insurgency as making it possible for people to vote in January.
"If anybody thinks that Fallujah is going to be the end of the insurgency in Iraq, that was never the objective, never our intention, and even never our hope," Myers said. "We're exactly on plan."
Staff writer Josh White in Washington contributed to this report.
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U.S. Tries To Corner Fallujah Insurgents
Evidence of Guerrilla Atrocities Is Found
By Jackie Spinner, Karl Vick and Omar Fekeiki
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, November 12, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42331-2004Nov11?language=printer
FALLUJAH, Iraq, Nov. 11 -- U.S. forces pushed toward a corner of Fallujah where commanders said insurgents may be preparing to make a last stand, as soldiers and civilians uncovered evidence of atrocities committed by the foreign and Iraqi guerrillas who controlled the city for nearly seven months.
In the industrial area on Fallujah's south side, residents said Thursday that the bodies of 20 foreign fighters had been found outside a truck repair shop, many killed by a single shot to the head. Insurgents native to Fallujah said the foreigners were executed for deserting their positions when the U.S.-led assault on the city began Monday night.
In the northern half of the city, now largely under the control of U.S. and Iraqi forces, Marines making a door-to-door sweep on Wednesday found a bruised, starving man chained to the wall of a house. The man, who identified himself as a taxi driver from nearby Abu Ghraib, said he had been kidnapped by men who refused to give him food or water and beat him with electrical cords during 10 days of captivity.
Military commanders said Marine and Army units were continuing to battle pockets of insurgents throughout the city as they pushed toward Fallujah's southern residential districts. Troops on foot patrol traded fire with guerrillas, then scurried for cover behind concrete walls and buildings, returning fire that rang through the otherwise deserted streets.
The U.S. military said 18 of its troops had been killed and 178 wounded during four days of fighting in Fallujah. Five Iraqi troops were reported killed and 24 wounded in the same period.
A U.S. military spokeswoman said 102 seriously wounded soldiers from around Iraq had been flown to the main U.S. military hospital in Germany on Thursday, joining 125 who arrived Monday through Wednesday.
Numbers of insurgent and civilian casualties could not be independently determined, but a military spokesman in Baghdad, Lt. Col. Steve Boylan, said an estimated 600 rebels had been killed so far, the Associated Press reported.
The Reuters news agency reported that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, in El Salvador at the start of a week-long trip through Latin America, said that although some insurgents likely fled Fallujah before the offensive, "we also know that there are a number of hundreds that didn't, and have been killed. Others have been captured."
But officials cautioned that despite the large number of casualties, the insurgency would continue elsewhere. Bryan Whitman, a Defense Department spokesman in Washington, called the military's success in Fallujah "an important milestone" but said it by no means marked the end of the insurgency.
U.S. troops reported that Fallujah was laced with booby traps, including the rudimentary bombs the military calls improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, tucked into rubble and garbage. The troops reported uncovering large stockpiles of weapons, some of them hidden in mosques.
Maj. Gen. Richard F. Natonski, commander of the 1st Marine Division, said U.S. forces "respect the law of the war, unlike the other side, who uses mosques. In almost every single mosque in Fallujah, we've found an arms cache. We've found IED factories. . . . We've also seen the use of schools for the storage of weapons. This is the enemy that we fight. It doesn't respect the religious mosques or the children's schools."
Asked at a news conference at a camp outside Fallujah if troops expected to find more insurgents in the city, Natonski said yes, "And we will kill them."
Before the offensive began, Fallujah police announced that 157 civilian families remained in the city, whose population is normally about 250,000. On Wednesday, those who had survived the fighting found leaflets dropped by U.S. aircraft offering safe passage out of the city.
They emerged to the stench of burning flesh, on streets littered with broken bricks and scores of bodies, some subjected to such heat that they had melted. Dead fish floated on the Euphrates River, brought to the surface by mortar shells that insurgents had fired at U.S. positions on the river's western bank.
In a charity hospital operating in tents because its building was damaged by bombing, a young Arab fighter writhed in agony while blood seeped from his ears, eyes, nose and mouth. A doctor said the hospital, donated by the United Arab Emirates, counted 32 civilian wounded by Wednesday, including nine women and four children.
As civilians filed out of the city, scores of fighters put down their guns and joined them, residents said. Several told a witness that they were not quitting the war, but rather moving to open a second front in Baqubah, an insurgent hotbed northeast of Baghdad.
As the new refugees recounted the events of recent days and weeks, a picture of the battle from the insurgents' side began to emerge. Witnesses described an insurgency fractured by distrust and rivalries between locals and foreigners, and visibly shaken by the thunderous U.S. assault.
The foreigners found slain Thursday in southern Fallujah were described as foot soldiers with Monotheism and Jihad, a guerrilla group headed by Jordanian Abu Musab Zarqawi that now calls itself al Qaeda in Iraq. In the plans developed by insurgent leaders for a coordinated defense of the city, Zarqawi's fighters were to man bunkers in two neighborhoods, according to witnesses. Others were to be defended by various Iraqi insurgent groups, including the First Army of Mohammad and Ansar al-Sunna Army.
But residents said strains between the local insurgents and the foreigners quickly turned into a deep schism under the intense pressure of the U.S.-led offensive. When a senior Zarqawi commander was found dead of a bullet to the head during the battle, debate ensued over whether he was killed from a distance by a U.S. sniper or at close range by an Iraqi insurgent, residents said.
Residents said everyone in the city, including the insurgents, was stunned by the firepower the Americans brought to the battle. Guerrillas counted 40 armored vehicles approaching their positions as night fell Monday.
The insurgents suffered their worst single loss -- at least 50 dead -- counterattacking U.S. forces who had taken the Rawdha Muhammediya mosque that had served as the insurgency's headquarters, witnesses said. The witnesses said they also counted as many as 10 American bodies.
"The confrontation with the American Army, which is the most powerful military organization in the world, is itself a great victory for us," said Abdullah Janabi, head of the mujaheddin shura, the council that had ruled Fallujah as a self-appointed government since April. "We were proud enough that Fallujah . . . was able to fight and confront America for seven months and still force the Americans and the Iraqi government to sit down and negotiate."
The kidnap victim discovered Wednesday by Marines was shackled to a wall by his wrists and ankles, according to Maj. Francis Piccoli, a spokesman for the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force. When the Marines entered the house, the driver, who speaks little English, called out "Uncle, uncle" to communicate with the troops.
Video footage shot by an ABC crew showed the man, shirtless and wrapped in a wool Marine-issue blanket, saying through an interpreter that when his captors fled, he told them he would die without food or water. They responded: "We brought you here to die."
In the video footage, the man, still wearing handcuffs, said he had been kidnapped while walking through Abu Ghraib. Two men grabbed him and shoved him into a car, he said.
Vick reported from Baghdad. Staff writer Josh White in Washington contributed to this report.
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THE MARINES
Black Flags Are Deadly Signals as Cornered Rebels Fight Back
November 12, 2004
By DEXTER FILKINS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/12/international/middleeast/12scene.html?oref=login&hp
FALLUJA, Iraq, Nov. 11 - The stars began to glimmer through a wan yellow-gray sunset over Falluja on Thursday evening. The floury dust in the air and a skyline of broken minarets and smashed buildings combined for the only genuine postcard image this country has to offer for now.
Sitting on a third-story roof, Staff Sgt. Eric Brown, his lip bleeding, peered through the scope of his rifle into the haze. Moments before, a lone bullet had whizzed past his face and smashed a window behind him. "God, I hate this place, the way the sun sets," Sergeant Brown said.
Sgt. Sam Williams said, "I wish I could see down the street."
But these marines did see a black flag pop up all at once above a water tower about 100 yards away, then a second flag somewhere in the gloaming above a rooftop. And the shots began, in a wave this time, as men bobbed and weaved through alleyways and sprinted across the street. "He's in the road, he's in the road, shoot him!" Sergeant Brown shouted. "Black shirt!" someone else yelled. "Due south!"
The flags are the insurgents' answer to two-way radios, their way of massing the troops and - in a tactic that goes back at least as far as Napoleon - concentrating fire on an enemy. Set against radio waves, the flags have one distinct advantage: they are terrifying.
The insurgents are coordinating their attacks at a time when they have nowhere left to run. American forces have pushed south of Highway 10, the boulevard that runs east to west and approximately bisects Falluja. American intelligence officers believe that many of the insurgents have retreated as far as the Shuhada, a relatively modern residential area that is the southernmost neighborhood in Falluja.
But beyond Shuhada is only the open desert, patrolled by the United States Army. So the insurgents are turning and fighting. And at night, they are setting up deadly ambushes in the moonless pitch blackness of Falluja's labyrinthine streets.
Going straight up the gut in the center of the American advance on Thursday was Bravo Company, First Battalion, Eighth Regiment of the First Marine Expeditionary Force. Those marines, including Sergeants Brown and Williams, started their day by getting mortared in a building they had captured at Highway 10 and Thurthar Street.
The building's windows were blown out. Parts of the ceiling had collapsed. The mortars drew closer and closer and then stopped, as if the insurgents were temporarily short of ammo. "I thought, 'This is it,' " said Senior Corpsman Kevin Markley.
At about 2 p.m., the company walked 100 yards east along the highway, then turned south into the Sinai neighborhood, with its car garages and fix-it shops as well as concealed weapons caches and bomb-making factories.
Immediately, shooting broke out, pinning down the marines for an hour. Finally they moved south to a mosque with the stub of a blasted minaret. An armored vehicle drove up from the rear and dropped its hatch. Out walked a group of blinking, disoriented Iraqi national guardsmen. They had been brought in only to search mosques.
Meantime, the marines went to the rooftop, saw the flags and got into a firefight. It was silenced when they called in a 500-pound bomb from above onto a house where some of the insurgents had concentrated. The strike was so close that the marines had to leave the roof or risk being killed by shrapnel.
The Iraqi guardsmen left the mosque and trooped back into the vehicle, which drove off. Soon the marines were headed south again, through a narrow alley between deserted houses.
"Enemy personnel approaching your position in white vehicle with RPG's," someone said over a radio, referring to rocket-propelled grenades. A few seconds later, the same voice said: "More enemy personnel approaching your position from the south."
The alley exploded with gunfire and RPG rounds. Somehow the company commander, Capt. Read Omohundro, got two tanks in place to fire down the alley. They let loose with a volley and a building crumbled.
Captain Omohundro turned to a lieutenant and said, "Are they dead?"
"They must be, sir," came the reply.
But the insurgents had gotten off an RPG round and disabled one tank; the other tank mysteriously stopped working as well.
The company had moved 500 yards south. They regrouped in the pitch blackness and pushed on at about 11:30 p.m. without the tanks, trying to keep up with the rest of the front, but after moving 25 feet they were attacked again in what appeared to be a well-organized ambush.
Two more tanks came in, but one had a problem with its global-positioning system unit. There was an hour's delay. The 50 or so men of the First Platoon, which had taken casualties, started bickering. Then they moved forward, behind the tanks.
At 1:30 a.m., now roughly 700 yards south of Highway 10, they stopped and entered a house, intending to find a place to sleep. There was a huge boom inside. "Oh no! Oh no!" someone shouted. "My leg!" someone else screamed. "My leg!"
They looked further around the house and found tunnels underneath. They retreated and a tank fired rounds into the house, which caught fire.
They looked for another place to sleep.
--------
Iraqi Insurgents Shoot Down U.S. Army Helicopter
November 12, 2004
By ROBERT F. WORTH and JAMES GLANZ
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/12/international/middleeast/12cnd-iraq.html?ei=5094&en=82063e5b6cd40c73&hp=&ex=1100322000&partner=homepage&pagewanted=all&position=
FALLUJA, Iraq, Nov. 12 - Insurgents shot down an Army helicopter north of Baghdad today, wounding its three crew members, military officials in Baghdad said.
Earlier today, insurgents attacked an American patrol in southern Baghdad, killing one American and wounding three others, the miiltary said.
The UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter was hit by anti-aircraft fire in Taji, 12 miles north of the capital, the military said. The crew members injured in the attack were rescued and are expected to recover. The helicopter was recovered.
This was the third time an American helicopter was shot down this week. On Thursday, in separate incidents to the north and southeast of Falluja, two Super Cobra helicopters were brought down after being fired on from the ground, military officials said. Both Marine pilots and their two-man crews escaped after being picked up by American troops in the area, and one of the pilots was injured, officials said.
In Falluja, on the fifth day of an American campaign against insurgents, a battle erupted near a mosque in northwest part of the city today just hours after the Marines said insurgents were now trapped in the south of the city, Reuters reported.
"They can't go north because that's where we are,'' Master Sgt. Roy Meek told Reuters. "They can't go west because of the Euphrates River and they can't go east because we have a huge presence there. So they are cornered in the south." The news agency reported that relief agencies were calling on the interim Iraqi government and American forces to grant relief workers and medics access to the city, saying more than a hundred families were in desperate need of help and describing the situation as a "big disaster."
A military spokeswoman, Capt. Angela Bowman, told Reuters that Mosul was calm overnight, after insurgents appeared to have opened up a second front in the fighting by overruning police stations and laying siege on the provincial headquarters there.
The insurgents in Mosul stormed a half-dozen police stations and looted the buildings of weapons, ammunition and body armor, police officials and witnesses said. By the afternoon, they had seized five bridges running across the Tigris River, which splits the city in half.
The American military said it had mounted a major counteroffensive in Mosul hoping to control the violence before guerrillas could seize the government center. But at nightfall, carloads of guerrillas continued to roam the streets freely, melting away at the approach of American troops.
"It's very fluid," Lt. Col. Paul Hastings, an Army spokesman, said in a telephone interview near midnight. "It's been going on for much of the day, and it's still going on."
Brig. Gen. Carter Ham, the commander of American forces in northern Iraq, said in an e-mail message early today from his headquarters in Mosul that there had been "some tough fighting" on Thursday, but that the city was "quite calm" at the moment. "I do expect more attacks on Friday," General Ham said, adding that it was "hard to say if the enemy includes some who may have left Falluja, but clearly they are responding to operations there."
Violence surged throughout the Sunni triangle west of Baghdad, with ambushes, bombings and mortar attacks jolting Tikrit, Kirkuk, Hawija, Samarra and the provincial capital of Ramadi, just 30 miles west of Falluja. Iraqi officials have imposed curfews on Baghdad, Mosul, Baiji, Ramadi and Falluja. A curfew has been in place in Samarra since last month.
American military officials have said in recent days that insurgent leaders probably fled Falluja before the assault on the city began and could be organizing the counter offensive now unfolding across the country.
The invasion of Falluja, now in its fifth day, is seen by military planners as a way to smash the largest safe haven for the insurgency in Iraq. Since the assault began on Monday, about 600 rebels have been killed, along with at least 19 American and 5 Iraqi soldiers, military officials said.
American marines and soldiers seem to be carrying out a pincer movement in Falluja, pressing insurgents ever farther south in intense fighting. But the military has been forced to detach an armored battalion from its cordon operation around Falluja to help quell violence in Mosul, about 200 miles to the north, siphoning off about a third of the forces that had been put in place to catch insurgents attempting to flee the fighting here.
In downtown Baghdad, a powerful suicide car bomb exploded on a busy commercial street Thursday morning, killing at least 17 people and wounding at least 30 others. In the evening, explosions rattled across the capital with a frequency not seen here since August, when American soldiers fought a Shiite uprising in the south.
In Falluja, the Second Battalion of the Seventh Cavalry pressed south and east from Highway 10, which runs across the middle of the city, sparking heavy fighting in the neighborhoods of Resala, Nazal and Jebail. Another unit, the Second Battalion of the Second Infantry, swung south and west through an industrial area, seemingly trapping the insurgents in a pincer.
But in the center of the movement, heading due south, a Marine battalion ran into ambushes, stiff counterattacks and at least one booby-trapped house, all of which slowed their advance. This advance moved through Sinai, a neighborhood known both for car garages and hidden weapons caches, and Shuhada, a relatively modern residential area at Falluja's southernmost edge.
"They're all over the place," a Marine officer, Lt. Christopher Wilkens, said. "They're very well trained."
Still, some insurgents have tried to escape across the Euphrates River to the south and west of the city by boat or swimming. On Thursday, Apache gunship helicopters destroyed five rowboats and a motorboat as insurgents prepared to board them.
Insurgents in the towns and rural areas to the north of Falluja have become more sophisticated in their bomb and mortar attacks, military officials said. In one apparently coordinated attack on Thursday near Karma, one group fired mortars at an American position. As an armored vehicle began moving on the only road leading to the mortar's point of origin, another group detonated a roadside bomb and began firing mortars at the vehicle. No one was injured in the attack.
Military commanders had hoped to take time in the next few days to clear out insurgents thought to be congregating in Karma, north of Falluja, and Amariya, to the south. But with the armored battalion, called a Stryker group, headed up to Mosul, that operation could become much more difficult.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, arriving Thursday in El Salvador at the start of official visits across Central and South America, said the American and Iraqi offensive in Falluja was going well and that hundreds of adversary fighters had already been killed.
"They are well along in that task and they'll finish it successfully," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "It will end, and it will end successfully, and it will no longer be a safe haven for terrorists or extremists."
Mr. Rumsfeld acknowledged that an unknown number of insurgent leaders and fighters had fled Falluja before the offensive began. "I have no doubt but that some people did leave before it started," he said. "We also know that there are a number of hundreds that didn't and have been killed. Others have been captured."
As American forces continued their advance through Falluja, support troops were filtering into more secure parts of the city to begin what officials called an ambitious relief and reconstruction effort. "The marines and Iraqis are working to bring humanitarian assistance right behind tactical units once areas are clear and secure," one senior American officer in Iraq said in an e-mail message. "There is, for example, already food and water going in to certain areas, and Iraqi medical assistance/supplies going into the hospital."
One of the Super Cobra helicopters came down just west of Falluja after being struck by a shoulder-fired missile. The pilot and crew were rescued by the Third Light Armored Regiment, which is posted nearby. The other helicopter was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade 10 miles north of the city. The pilot was rescued but the burning helicopter was destroyed.
On Thursday afternoon, the Muslim Scholars Association, a powerful group of Sunni clerics that says it represents 3,000 mosques, held a news conference in Baghdad at which it condemned the offensive in Falluja and renewed its call for a boycott of elections scheduled for January. The clerics have been uncompromising in their stand against the Americans and the interim Iraqi government, and it is unclear how much impact their protest will have on the elections. A spokesman for the group said American-led forces conducted dawn raids on the homes of Harith al-Dhari, the group's director, and Abdul Salam al-Kubaisi, a senior official, in the capital.
If a widespread Sunni boycott of the elections were to ensue, it could jeopardize the legitimacy of the vote. Sunnis make up a fifth of Iraq and are still embittered after having been ousted from power during the initial American invasion.
American and Iraqi officials have also said they need to dampen the insurgency in Ramadi. The Marines still control the government center and police headquarters, and maintain bases on the edge of downtown, but are fending off daily assaults.
In the northern oil city of Kirkuk, a car bomb aimed at a convoy carrying the Kurdish provincial governor, Abdul-Rahman Mustafa, exploded in the city center, wounding 16 people, news agencies reported. In Baquba, about 30 men attacked an Iraqi National Guard post at dawn, killing one guardsman and injuring three others. A mortar attack on a national guard compound in Hawija wounded eight people, and a car bomb at a petrol station in Hilla injured four.
No word emerged of the fate of three relatives of the Iraqi prime minister, Ayad Allawi , who were kidnapped on Tuesday night. A group called Ansar al-Jihad posted an Internet message on Wednesday saying it would behead the hostages within 48 hours unless Dr. Allawi halted the invasion of Falluja and released all prisoners in Iraq. Those kidnapped were Ghazi Majeed Allawi, a 75-year-old first cousin, his wife and their daughter-in-law.
A Lebanese satellite channel broadcast a tape showing weeping relatives of one of the women begging for her release, Reuters reported. The relatives said the captive, Wasnaa Muhammad Jaafar Husseini, was nine months pregnant. "She's pregnant, and she can't hold up to this," said a sobbing woman who identified herself as Ms. Husseini's sister.
Robert Worth reported from Falluja and James Glanz from Baghdad.
Ed Wong and Khalid al-Ansary contributed reporting from Baghdad, Dexter Filkins from Falluja, an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from Mosul, Eric Schmitt from Washington, Thom Shanker from El Salvador and Maria Newman from New York.
-------- israel / palestine
Behind the Camp David Myth Arafat didn't blindly spurn a generous offer.
Los Angeles Times
By Robert Malley
November 12, 2004
http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news2/latimes393.htm
It took Yasser Arafat many years to persuade his fellow Palestinians of the wisdom of the two-state solution, and it took longer still to convince Americans and Israelis of the genuineness of his views. Yet it took only two weeks at Camp David in the summer of 2000 to wreck all the progress that had been made and for Arafat to regain the pariah status he once held.
Those talks failed, and in the aftermath a myth was born that has had a lasting and devastating effect: that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak made the most generous offer possible, but that Arafat summarily turned it down. He did so, the story goes, because he never really believed in the Jewish state's right to exist in the first place and because he had never really hoped to reach a just, comprehensive and lasting peace with Israel. Since 2000, it is this narrative - Camp David as a metaphor for Palestinian rejectionism - that has ravaged the Israeli peace camp, distorted both U.S. and Israeli policy and badly undermined confidence in a peaceful settlement of the conflict.
Why Arafat acted as he did during those 14 days will hover over any appraisal of his life. I was a member of the U.S. delegation at those talks and have never concealed my frustration with the Palestinians' attitude. Divided, they spent more time backstabbing each other than seeking a deal. Suspicious, they were quick to see potential loopholes and slow to recognize possible leads. Passive, they fai