Archive By Date | Today's Links to Search By
Activists' News | Nuclear | Depleted Uranium | Military | Police
Alternative Energy Etc. | From Subscribers
NUCLEAR
Edmonton filmmaker attempts to unravel Cold War secret in Lost Nuke
Miners Seek Fortune In Uranium's Glow
EU's Solana says Iran nuclear deal 'only the start'
UN says found no proof of secret Iranian nuclear program
Uranium enrichment to be suspended, U.N. told
Europeans try to play down deal on Iran's uranium plans
Iran Vows To Freeze Nuclear Programs
Britain, France and Germany Announce Accord With Iran
Iran Gives Pledge on Uranium, but Europeans Are Cautious
Tokyo bows to Bush on defence
Two Faces of Japan's Nuclear Power
Consort's death rocks Kim Jong-il
Roh urges US dialogue with North Korea
European Commission's Joint Research Centre
Al-Qaeda considers moving nuclear material to US through Mexico: report
Arms Control Glance
Vandy hosts scientist workshop on nuclear materials
Emergency alert problem silences radios in nuclear planning zone
Feds don't have funds to test nuclear waste casks
MILITARY
Nerve gas death was 'unlawful'
CONTRACTS AWARDED
Hungarian MPs vote to withdraw troops from Iraq by year-end
Trouble Spots Dot Iraqi Landscape
Fighting in Fallujah Nears End
Rebels Routed in Falluja; Fighting Spreads Elsewhere in Iraq
'Catastrophic conditions' in Falluja
His Red Right Hand
Shooting Breaks Out in Gaza Around Likely Arafat Successor
Israel rights group condemns army
Arafat's rival heirs - a field guide
McCain Backs CIA Shake-up
C.I.A. Shakeup Continues as 2 Senior Officials Quit
CIA Plans to Purge Its Agency
Government looking at military draft lists
Commanders plead for armor
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Death Sentences Hit 30-Year Low in U.S.
Justice Dept. Reports a 30-Year Low in Death Sentences
U.S. Plans Assault On Afghan Heroin Poppy Growing Still Widespread
Pentagon Finds First Responders Inadequately Prepared
Private jet takes men for 'torture'
POLITICS
A Watchdog Follows the Money in Iraq
Empire of the Senseless
U.S. plans to sneak tiny radios into North Korea
Powell to Leave Bush's Cabinet When Successor Is Chosen
Powell, 3 others leaving Cabinet
ENERGY
Energy Secretary Abraham Resigns Post
Executive Shows Great Energy in Attempt to Sell Wind-Farm Project
OTHER
Indian Marchers Protest Coca-Cola Pollution, Water Use
Geneticist claims to have found 'God gene' in humans
ACTIVISTS
Noam Chomsky on Yasser Arafat, Iraq and the Draft
Thai PM says military will no longer break up rallies
What happened last Thursday Nov' 11th.
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Edmonton filmmaker attempts to unravel Cold War secret in Lost Nuke
The Canadian Press
November 15, 2004
http://www3.cjad.com/content/cp_article.asp?id=/global_feeds/canadianpress/entertainmentnews/e111513A.htm
TORONTO (CP) - High up in the mountains of northern British Columbia, among jagged rocks and ice, lies the scorched wreckage of a Cold War-era mystery - one that Edmonton-based filmmaker Michael Jorgensen has tried to crack but now admits may never be solved.
In his latest documentary Lost Nuke, which airs this Friday evening on Discovery Channel, Jorgensen and a team of experts fly about 160 kilometres north of Terrace, B.C., to the site of America's first "broken arrow" incident - a military codeword for an accident involving a nuclear weapon.
"The evidence to be able to solve this mystery is on the mountain, because the U.S. military is never going to release the classified documents about what really happened that night," Jorgensen said in a recent interview in Toronto.
The documentary by the Emmy Award-winning filmmaker centres on a U.S. Air Force mission that began in Fairbanks, Alaska on February 13, 1950.
A B-36 bomber - the largest bomber ever built - carrying 17 crewmembers and a Mark IV nuclear weapon flew out on a simulated combat training mission to Fort Worth, Texas.
Part of the way to their destination, along the coast of B.C., three of the six engine propellers caught fire and the crew was forced to parachute out.
Twelve of the crewmembers were later rescued from Princess Royal Island on B.C.'s west coast while the other five were presumed drowned.
Jorgensen says the U.S. military issued one brief news release about the incident, six months after it happened, saying "We dropped the weapon over the Pacific Ocean and it exploded in a non-nuclear detonation (near Vancouver Island)."
Official U.S. Air Force documents also claim the bomber was set to autopilot before it plunged into the Pacific.
But three years later, U.S. Air Force crews found the B-36 bomber crashed in B.C.'s rugged interior - 300 kilometres in the opposite direction from where it supposedly went down.
Jorgensen says the facts don't add up.
"This airplane had three engines on fire, it was losing 500 feet per minute so it really could've only flown about another seven minutes," he explained in an impassioned recount of the story.
"But somehow, after the crew of 17 supposedly jumped out, the plane turned around 180 degrees and flew another 300 kilometres in the exact opposite direction and it crashed just 80 kilometres from Alaska."
Jorgensen says the team is convinced that somebody stayed on board the plane and steered it toward U.S. territory, "And that guy, they believe, is the weaponeer - the guy responsible for the bomb, Capt. Ted Schreier."
Jorgensen calls Schreier a "hero" who "did everything in his power to try to save the weapon," which could have been picked up by a Soviet submarine had it been dropped in the Pacific.
And yet Schreier, the Third Pilot who was among the five men presumed drowned, was never acknowledged by U.S. Air Force officials as having any significant role in the operation.
In fact, when Schreier's nephew was contacted for the documentary, he had no idea that his uncle was even a weaponeer.
"The family didn't know anything. They were told when Ted went missing that he was on a transport plane ... they were totally shocked," says Jorgensen, who wrote, directed, shot and produced the documentary in about a year and a half.
What's more, after the incident, the U.S. Air Force named streets after all of the men who perished - all except Schreier.
The actions are unexplainable, says Jorgensen, who is also befuddled as to why the U.S. Air Force sent in a special operations team to blow up the wreckage when it found out the crash site.
"Why do you need to blow up an airplane that's lost in a remote part of the mountains?" asks Jorgensen.
"It just doesn't make any sense - unless there's something there that you don't want anybody to find."
After obtaining documents on the incident through the Freedom of Information Act in the U.S., Jorgensen put together an expedition team of three men who had been independently pursuing the story for the past two decades.
The team's leader, nuclear weapons expert Dr. John Clearwater, was then granted the first Canadian archeological permit to remove artifacts from the site and they flew in via helicopter last August.
During their stay, the team found several strong clues, but not the key item they were looking for.
"One treasure hunter from the U.S. went to the site in, I think it was in '98, and removed this object called 'the birdcage,' which they used to transport the plutonium core in," said the 40-year-old filmmaker.
The lead-lined container may have held the key evidence to suggest whether there was an atomic device onboard, ready for detonation.
Jorgensen also interviewed - but obtained little information from - two of the four surviving crewmembers who are still alive, gunner Dick Thrasher and co-pilot Ray Whitfield, who is now a priest.
"The couple of guys that I interviewed ... say 'there are things that happened that we just can't talk about because we don't want to say anything to damage our country,"' says Jorgensen.
Still, he is confident the expedition team obtained enough strong, albeit inconclusive, evidence to explain what happened.
"I think there was a plutonium core in that birdcage, but I think it was on the mountain and I think it was taken out in 1954, when the Air Force went in there to destroy the airplane."
He then puts it into perspective. "It's my belief, given the evidence that we have, that a nuclear weapon laid in the mountains of northern Canada for four years."
But Jorgensen concedes that in the end, it's just a theory.
"Unless the Pentagon comes clean with the documents ... we may never really know what happened."
-------- canada
Miners Seek Fortune In Uranium's Glow
November 15, 2004
REUTERS CANADA:
by Nicole Mordant
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/28151/story.htm
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Nov 12 (Reuters) - Canada's crowd of small, fortune-seeking miners have fixed on a new pot of gold.
(Amounts in US dollars unless noted)
Uranium is suddenly the hottest topic in the high-stakes mining industry in the mineral-rich country that is home to the world's richest deposit.
Its price has doubled to above $20 a pound and the shares of producers and junior explorers have soared as analysts predict that the metal will become an increasingly important energy source for producing electricity around the world.
"To me it's one of the next commodities that there is going to be a boom in," said Randy Turner, a well-known Canadian diamond executive who spent 11 years in the uranium business.
"There are a lot of juniors that are getting back into it. There's tremendous staking activity going on in Saskatchewan, Alberta, the Northwest Territories and Labrador," he said.
Named after the planet Uranus, uranium's elemental make-up allows it, under certain conditions, to give off a lot of energy, which is used in nuclear reactors to drive generators that produce electricity.
Concerns of a future of declining energy resources have put nuclear power back on the map, overshadowing uranium's murkier role in bomb-making, and its dangers in the event of power-plant accidents.
Regarded as the world's worst nuclear disaster, the 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl power plant in Ukraine killed 30 people and forced 200,000 to flee a cloud of radioactive debris as it drifted over the then Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
RUSH TO SASKATCHEWAN
Northern Saskatchewan is home to the world's richest uranium belt, the Athabasca Basin, where a third of the world's yearly uranium supply comes from. Cameco Corp., the world's biggest producer, has its largest mines here
Juniors have watched Cameco's stock double in value this year, prompting a rush to buy up every inch of land in the area. They have also gone further afield, purchasing potential uranium-bearing properties in Australia, Peru, the United States and Asia.
On Friday, Cameco's stock climbed 6 percent to C$107.10, helping lift the Toronto Stock Exchange's S&P/TSX composite index , which ended 10.20 points higher at 8,896.37.
For 20 years, the world has used more uranium than has been mined, filling the gap from utility and government stockpiles that include material from dismantled nuclear weapons.
But with nearly half of annual supply coming from above-ground stocks, inventories of the dense, silvery metal are running down.
At the same time, the price of oil has soared and the burning of fossil fuels like oil or coal has fallen out of favor because they give off carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas.
"Recently, security concerns over the global oil supply and fears of global warming have shifted public opinion, with nuclear energy becoming an acceptable option again," said Jim Mustard, an analyst at Haywood Securities.
"Significant uncovered demand exists in the market, and the uranium price will have to rise in order to encourage uranium exploration and bring higher-cost producers back on line," Mustard said in a research report.
According to the World Nuclear Association, about 16 percent of global electricity is generated by 430 nuclear plants. Three-quarters of France's electricity supply is nuclear, 35 percent in Japan and 20 percent in the United States.
The world industry body says that a further 30 reactors are being built and another 70 are on the drawing board, news that is encouraging explorers to find new uranium deposits.
This week, CanAlaska Ventures Ltd. bought land in the Athabasca Basin to position itself to take part in what chairman Harry Barr described as "the largest expansion in uranium exploration since the 1970s." CanAlaska's stock jumped 9 percent on Friday to 31.5 Canadian cents.
Clan Resources Ltd. said this week it has staked uranium properties in Nevada and Arizona. Its stock has quadrupled this year.
"All the uranium books are being dusted off," said Turner, adding that next year's Mineral Exploration Roundup, an annual mining conference in Vancouver, of which he is chairman, will feature a short course on the metal.
-------- europe
EU's Solana says Iran nuclear deal 'only the start'
BRUSSELS (AFP)
Nov 15, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041115190356.uk9slevp.html
European Union foreign affairs chief Javier Solana said Monday a hard-fought agreement clinched by the EU to get Iran to suspend its nuclear uranium drive was "only the start" before a long-term accord.
"This is a welcome agreement. We can now look forward to the International Atomic Energy Agency's report that Iran's voluntary suspension is being implemented in full," he said in a statement.
"Potentially it is the start of a new chapter in our relations. The negotiations on a Trade and Cooperation Agreement (with the EU) should be resumed as soon as suspension is verified," Solana noted.
"It is however only the start. We now need to work rapidly to produce a solid long-term agreement," the Spanish official continued.
"This should on the one hand provide lasting confidence in the peaceful nature of Iran's nuclear programme and on the other bring concrete results in the area of trade, technology exchange and security, as well as in the nuclear dimension.
"This will not be an easy task but we have taken the first step and that is very important."
In an 11th-hour deal with the EU's three biggest powers -- Britain, France and Germany -- late Sunday, Iran agreed to freeze uranium enrichment-related activities to ease fears its fuel cycle work could be diverted to make an atomic bomb.
The agreement, which is to be verified by the UN's atomic watchdog, was seen as averting the threat of Iran being hauled before the UN Security Council for possible sanctions later this month.
---- iran
UN says found no proof of secret Iranian nuclear program
VIENNA (AFP)
Nov 15, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041115174631.gj4djqos.html
The UN atomic watchdog said Monday it had found no proof of a secret Iranian nuclear weapons program but could not yet conclude there was no covert activity, as Iran pledged to suspend uranium enrichment to prove its peaceful intentions.
In a confidential report, the International Atomic Energy Agency said that while Iran had been guilty of breaching international safeguards, almost two years of inspection had uncovered no proof of an illicit weapons program.
The IAEA's report sets the stage for a definitive review of Iran's nuclear program when its board of governors meets here on November 25, with the United States charging that Tehran is secretly developing nuclear weapons.
"All the declared material in Iran has been accounted for, and therefore such material is not diverted to prohibited activities," the IAEA report said, according to a copy obtained by AFP.
A diplomat close to the agency pointed out that the IAEA's legal authority was to investigate nuclear material and was "quite limited when you get into the area of nuclear weapons related activity."
The report said the IAEA was "not yet in a position to conclude that there are no undeclared nuclear materials or activities in Iran."
Washington wants the agency to haul Iran before the UN Security Council for possible sanctions, but the Iranian agreement to suspend enrichment, and the lack of a "smoking gun" in the report, will make that task harder.
The report was issued after Iran agreed in a deal with Britain, France and Germany to suspend uranium enrichment activities pending a longer-term accord, comprised of European Union incentives and "objective guarantees" it will not make nuclear weapons.
A test of the agreement released in Tehran said the suspension covers "the manufacture and import of gas centrifuges and their components; the assembly, installation, testing or operation of gas centrifuges; work to undertake any plutonium separation... and all tests or production at any uranium conversion installation".
Uranium enrichment makes fuel for nuclear reactors but also what can be the explosive core for atomic bombs.
"The suspension will be sustained while negotiations proceed on a mutually acceptable agreement on long-term arrangements," the text said.
Iran said those talks, carried out by the European trio on behalf of the EU would begin in the first half of December, and would include "negotiations with the EU on a trade and cooperation agreement."
The EU "will actively support the opening of Iranian accession negotiations at the WTO (World Trade Organisation)," the text said.
Iran's top national security official Hassan Rowhani said the timespan of the talks should be "reasonable," as Iran has refused an indefinite suspension of enrichment.
But Rowhani admitted the talks would "take some time."
A European diplomat in Vienna said it was now "out of the question" for the IAEA to take Iran to the Security Council.
The United States is still certain to point out that the IAEA found Tehran guilty of "many breaches" of international nuclear safeguards obligations in a policy of concealment that lasted until October 2003.
"It is clear that Iran has failed in a number of instances over an extended period of time to meet its obligations under its safeguard agreement with respect to the reporting of nuclear material, its processing and its use as well as the declaration of activities where such material has been processed and stored," the IAEA report said.
"Iran's policy of concealment continued until October 2003 and has resulted in many breaches of its obligations to comply."
Iran has been cooperating, although somewhat reluctantly, with the agency since then. In September, the IAEA demanded that Iran suspend all activities concerning uranium enrichment.
The report noted that Iran had invited the agency to verify the suspension as of November 22, although this would leave inspectors only three days before the board meeting to confirm Iran's suspension.
"We may or may not finish by the board," a Western diplomat close to the IAEA said, adding that the agency "will do its job and do it thoroughly and if it takes a few more days, it will take a few more days."
The board meeting is expected to last around a week, which would give the IAEA time to verify suspension by the time it ends.
--------
Uranium enrichment to be suspended, U.N. told
November 15, 2004
By George Jahn
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041114-111415-7652r.htm
VIENNA, Austria - Iran notified the U.N. nuclear watchdog in writing yesterday that it would suspend uranium enrichment and related activities to dispel suspicions that it was trying to build nuclear arms.
With its move, Iran appeared to have dropped demands to modify a tentative deal worked out with European negotiators on Nov. 7.
Diplomats said Iran promises in its letter to continue freezing enrichment - the process to make either nuclear fuel or the core for nuclear weapons - and also to suspend related activities.
"Basically, it's a full suspension," said one of the diplomats, speaking on condition of anonymity. "It's what the Europeans were looking for."
Shortly after diplomats revealed the Iranian move, Tehran's top nuclear negotiator, Hossein Mousavian, confirmed that his country was giving its "basic agreement" to a temporary suspension.
"We accept suspension as a voluntary measure on the basis of agreement with the European Union," Mr. Mousavian said on Iranian state television, emphasizing that his country viewed the move as a concession for "confidence building" and not a "legal obligation."
As part of the agreement, "Europe will support Iran's joining the international group of states possessing the ability to manufacture nuclear fuel" once the suspension ends, Mr. Mousavian said, signaling yet again that Iran viewed the freeze as temporary.
State Department spokeswoman Darla Jordan said yesterday: "We are awaiting a briefing by the EU three on Monday. We continue to believe that Iran has to abide by the IAEA Board of Governors' resolution."
Washington has argued that Iran's enrichment activities violate its international treaty obligations and part of a nuclear-arms program.
The United States has called for the indefinite suspension, if not an outright scrapping, of Iran's domestic enrichment program. Iran says it wants to master the technology only to generate power.
The diplomat said Iran also had fulfilled a key part of the deal by formally informing the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency - the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) - of its decision.
That cleared the way for inclusion of Iranian intentions in a report prepared by IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei.
As negotiators for France, Germany and Britain struggled with Iranian counterparts to bridge differences over the weekend, the IAEA had delayed the report on Iran's nuclear activities scheduled for limited circulation to diplomats accredited to the agency. A diplomat close to the agency said the report would be released today.
The IAEA study on 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 when it meets Nov. 25.
Based on the report, they will decide on actions that might include referring Iran to the U.N. Security Council, which could lead to sanctions.
After talks in Paris with Iranian envoys last weekend, European diplomats said Tehran tentatively had agreed to suspend uranium enrichment and all related activities.
The suspension would last at least as long as it took the two sides to negotiate a deal on European technical and financial aid, including help in developing Iranian nuclear energy for power generation.
But the diplomats said Friday that Iranian officials had presented British, French and German envoys in Tehran with a version of the pact that was unacceptable to the three European powers - the main brokers of the deal - and the European Union as a whole.
The key dispute concerned the 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.
The diplomats - all of them briefed on the dispute and based in Europe - 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 the tentative deal reached in Paris disallowed this.
--------
Europeans try to play down deal on Iran's uranium plans
By Financial Times Reporters
November 15 2004
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/a35801b8-372e-11d9-a8bb-00000e2511c8.html
European and Iranian officials on Monday described a Sunday agreement, under which Iran agreed to suspend all its uranium enrichment activities, as an important first step in a longer process of negotiation.
But while European officials played down the deal, Iranian officials hailed it as the start of a "new era" in Iranian European relations.
The agreement was reached in negotiations between Tehran and three European governments France, Germany and Britain. The suspension should head off, for now, US-led efforts to have Iran referred to the United Nations Security Council by the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN's nuclear monitor.
Hassan Rowhani, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, said on Monday the agreement would lead to talks on "fundamental issues" that could begin "a new era between Iran and Europe".
"We have never held serious talks with the Europeans with such an extensive scope," he said.
Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, responded cautiously. "We have seen a little bit of progress, hopefully, over the last 24 hours," he said, adding that the US had to work with its "European Union friends" and the IAEA to find a solution.
Silvan Shalom, Israel's foreign minister, expressed his government's displeasure at the agreement. "They are trying to buy time," he said of Iran after talks in Washington.
Richard Boucher, the State Department spokesman, said the US position remained that Iran should be referred to the Security Council because of past violations of their nuclear safeguards commitments. But he suggested the US could change its mind if the IAEA verified that Iran was correcting those breaches. The US had previously refused to endorse the European strategy. But diplomats said Washington remained in close touch during the talks. Iranian officials produced a text of the agreement making clear the three European governments had accepted Iran's suspension as a "voluntary confidence-building measure" to be "sustained while negotiations proceed on a mutually acceptable agreement on long-term arrangements".
As well as beginning talks on "political and security issues, technology and co-operation, and nuclear issues", the three governments would resume negotiations on a trade agreement and support the opening of negotiations on Iranian accession to the World Trade Organisation, according to the agreement.
Mr Rowhani said Iran would begin suspension of uranium enrichment on November 22, which would include the conversion of raw uranium into uranium hexofluoride gas and the manufacture or assembly of centrifuges, the means of converting the gas into enriched uranium.
The three European governments are not trumpeting their achievement, however, due in part to Washington's enduring suspicions, despite Iranian denials, that Tehran is pursuing a nuclear weapons programme. A European diplomat insisted on Monday that the accord was only "a step towards a long-term agreement".
Javier Solana, the EU foreign policy chief, said the agreement was "only the start. We now need to work rapidly to produce a solid long-term agreement . . . This will not be an easy task but we have taken the first step and that is very important."
In a report on Monday to its board, the IAEA made plain that the suspension agreed by Iran went beyond a previous halt it had agreed last year and later abandoned. The new suspension covered "the manufacture and import of gas centrifuges and their components; the assembly, testing or operation of gas centrifuges; and all tests and production for conversion at any uranium conversion installation".
Reporting by Gareth Smyth in Tehran, Raphael Minder in Brussels, Stephen Fidler in London and Guy Dinmore in Washington
--------
Iran Vows To Freeze Nuclear Programs
In Return, Europeans Guarantee Freedom From U.N. Sanctions
By Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 15, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A49246-2004Nov14?language=printer
Iran agreed yesterday to immediately suspend its nuclear programs in exchange for European guarantees that it will not face the prospect of U.N. Security Council sanctions as long as their agreement holds.
The nuclear deal, accepted by Iranian officials in a meeting in Tehran with French, German and British ambassadors, set the stage for a serious test of whether diplomatic engagement is capable of halting Tehran's nuclear ambitions in the long term.
European officials were reviewing Iran's acceptance letter, diplomats said, and expected to brief Washington today before making an official announcement.
The European deal will require months, and possibly years, of further negotiations before Iran agrees to permanently end its nuclear work and falls far short of the strategic decision the Bush administration said Tehran needs to make to convince the world it is not a danger.
For nearly two years, the administration's Iran policy has been based on the threat of taking the Islamic republic to the Security Council. During that time, the White House has remained steadfast in its opposition to negotiating with Iran and has chided European allies for offering inducements to a country President Bush once said was in an "axis of evil" with North Korea and Iraq.
But Washington's closest allies chose another path. A previous agreement reached by the European trio and Iran last year fell apart after six months, leading the Bush administration to argue that negotiations with Tehran produce only empty promises.
Washington's push for Security Council action is unlikely to succeed as long as Iran and the Europeans continue to work together. Officials said that they expect the deal to be lauded in a report today by Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and that the agreement is likely to win the support of much of the agency's board when it meets to discuss Iran on Nov. 25 in Vienna.
U.S. officials, who would discuss the next steps only on the condition of anonymity, said Bush had not decided whether to support the European deal or to lobby the IAEA board to get tougher with Iran. Previous U.S. attempts to win over the board have been unsuccessful.
"That's a decision that will have to be made this week," said one U.S. official involved in Iran policy but unauthorized to discuss it publicly. "But I can't imagine how anyone could argue to the president the tactical benefits of trying to do that again because the result would be U.S. diplomatic isolation."
Senior Bush administration officials have declined to say whether they would seek economic sanctions or an oil embargo against Iran if it was taken to the U.N. Security Council. The public response to those questions has been only: "No options are off the table." But the ambiguity convinced Iran and much of Europe that the White House is trying to take Tehran down a path similar to the one Iraq experienced in the Security Council for more than a decade.
Of the 35 countries on the IAEA board, only Canada and Australia had shown a willingness to refer Iran's file to U.N. headquarters in New York. "That leaves us 2 to 32, and I'm not sure Canada and Australia would even be with us now that there's a deal," the U.S. official said.
Diplomats who have seen drafts of ElBaradei's report said it will be similar to a positive assessment of Iran's cooperation that he offered the IAEA board in September. Several outstanding issues regarding Iran's program remain unanswered, and U.S. diplomats said they would focus on those and pursue a toughly worded resolution against Iran that included more aggressive IAEA inspections and an automatic referral to the Security Council if Tehran breaks any part of the European deal.
Over 18 years, Iran secretly assembled uranium enrichment and conversion facilities that could be used for a nuclear energy program or for the construction of an atomic bomb. The underground sites became a target of a massive IAEA investigation after they were exposed by an Iranian exile group two years ago.
Although Iran's work does not violate international law and U.N. nuclear inspectors have not found evidence that the country is trying to build a bomb, the scale and history of the program have continued to fuel U.S. and Israeli suspicions that Tehran has a covert weapons program. The deal with Europe's three main powers is meant to blunt those suspicions by putting an end to nuclear energy work that could be diverted for bomb making.
The agreement, set out in two phases, began immediately yesterday when Iran informed ElBaradei it had agreed to a full suspension and invited inspectors to verify the commitment.
Western diplomats in Vienna, where the IAEA is based, said that a small team of nuclear inspectors would begin sealing and tagging Iran's nuclear facilities and equipment immediately and that the work would be completed by the time the agency's board meets on Thanksgiving day.
Hassan Rohani, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, told reporters in Tehran the suspension would remain as long as talks continued on a resolution of Iran's nuclear case. Those negotiations could begin next month, and diplomats said they were discussing a kickoff ceremony to be attended by Iranian, British, German and French foreign ministers.
The four countries involved in the talks will then set up three working groups: one to tackle nuclear issues, another for nonnuclear cooperation between Iran and Europe, and a third for regional security issues. The groups will report every three months to a steering committee made up of senior participants.
Iran had wanted that phase of negotiation to last no more than six months, but Europe insisted that it be open-ended to avoid time-pressured negotiations. One European diplomat said Europe expected the negotiations to last two years or more.
As part of the understanding reached by the parties yesterday, negotiators will spend that time working out a package deal that gives Iran lucrative trade agreements with Europe once it agrees to put a permanent end to its nuclear programs.
The suspension arrangement, which was reached in two days of talks in Paris that ended Nov. 7, nearly collapsed last week after Iran pushed for two changes: an exemption on an early step in the uranium conversion process and promises that the IAEA would close its Iran file. European officials balked at both, and Iran agreed to accept the deal as it had been offered. But the disagreements over interpretations and expectations indicated that future negotiations would not be easy.
European diplomats said Bush's reelection helped the negotiations by limiting Iran's options. Had Democrat John F. Kerry won, Iran might have tried to play for time or probe what policy shifts a new administration was considering, they said.
Staff writer Robin Wright contributed to this report.
--------
Britain, France and Germany Announce Accord With Iran
November 15, 2004
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/15/international/middleeast/15cnd-iran.html?ei=5094&en=f809ee363a1db915&hp=&ex=1100581200&partner=homepage&pagewanted=all&position=
PARIS, Nov. 15 - France, Britain and Germany announced today that they had reached a formal agreement with Iran that commits the country to suspend production of enriched uranium in exchange for an array of possible rewards.
Under the complex but limited agreement aimed at preventing Iran from developing nuclear bombs, Iran agreed to stop all uranium enrichment and reprocessing activities as long as it was negotiating the possible benefits it would receive with the three European countries and the European Union.
Uranium can be enriched both for use in peaceful nuclear power plants and to make nuclear weapons.
Iran is the second-largest oil producer in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, and the announcement of the deal apparently calmed fears of potential turmoil in the region. Crude oil prices fell to their lowest level in almost two months, with the December futures contract trading as low as $45.25 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
The agreement is a diplomatic victory for both the Europeans and the Iranians, although both sides had to make hard concessions and it fell far short of the comprehensive deal the Europeans had hoped for by which Iran would permanently end its enrichment activities.
"This accord constitutes an important stage in the diplomatic efforts that lead the international community to find a satisfactory response to the preoccupations created by the Iranian nuclear program," said Hervé Ladsous, the French foreign ministry spokesman.
The Europeans were deeply embarrassed after Iran violated the terms of a less-precise agreement both sides reached in Tehran 13 months ago. Determined to do better this time, the Europeans insisted that Iran accept the agreement as negotiated and rejected Iran's attempts in the past several days to modify it.
The Iranians, by signing on to the agreement, are likely to defuse a threat by the United States to take Iran to the Security Council for possible censure or sanctions because of its nuclear activities when the International Atomic Energy Agency's ruling board of governors meets in Vienna later this month.
In a related development today, the International Atomic Energy Agency, a United Nations group that monitors nuclear programs around the world, announced in a still-confidential report that Iran had agreed in writing to suspend its uranium enrichment program starting a week from now.
But the agency's report did not totally reject the view of the United States and the three European countries that Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons, saying it could not rule out covert activities inside the country.
"All the declared nuclear material in Iran has been accounted for, and therefore such material is not diverted to prohibited activities," the report said, referring to possible work weapons activity. "The agency is, however, not in a position to conclude that there are no undeclared nuclear materials or activities in Iran."
Under the agreement with the Europeans, there must be "objective guarantees" that Iran's nuclear program "is exclusively for peaceful purposes." In exchange, the Europeans must provide "firm guarantees" on nuclear, technological and economic cooperation."
Specifically, Iran agreed to suspend "the manufacture and import of gas centrifuges and their components" all work on plutonium separation and the construction or operation any plutonium separation installation; and "all tests or production at any uranium conversion installation."
Last year's agreement said nothing about the production and assembly of centrifuges, which purify uranium by spinning at supersonic speeds. When International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors caught Iran building centrifuges, the Europeans felts duped.
The agreement implicitly requires Iran to stop its program to convert raw uranium into uranium tetrafluoride, a precursor to the form of uranium that is fed into centrifuges to enrich it for use as fuel that can be used either for energy or weapons purposes.
Finally, the agreement commits both sides to combat terrorist activities, including those of Al Qaeda and the Iranian opposition group known as the Mujahedin al-Khalq.
Once suspension is verified, the European Union will restart negotiations on a trade and cooperation agreement with Iran. It will also "actively support" negotiations for Iran to enter the World Trade Organization, a move that the Bush administration has blocked and can continue to block.
Iran's leadership has steadfastly held to the position that Iran is not engaged in a nuclear weapons program but has the sovereign right to enrich uranium as it sees fit.
So as a face-saving gesture for the Iranians, the agreement says that Iran's suspension of its enrichment activities "is a voluntary confidence building measure and not a legal obligation."
Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, Hassan Rowhani, reiterated that point at a news conference in Tehran today, calling uranium enrichment "Iran's right, and Iran will never give up its right to enrich uranium."
He also said that the suspension during the negotiations for the incentives package "will be a matter of months, not years," an assertion that the Europeans immediately rejected.
"Suspension must remain in force until the I.A.E.A. gives Iran a clean bill of health," one European official said. "If the suspension is lifted, the process is deemed to have broken and we, the Europeans, will withdraw and go to the Security Council."
Making concessions on Iran's nuclear program has been widely unpopular inside Iran, and Mr. Rowhani was put on the defensive by conservative journalists during the news conference.
When the Pars news agency reporter remarked that "the reason Iran has given so many concessions is because the Iranian team was weak," Mr. Rowhani replied that the country's best diplomats conducted the negotiations and "this is the outcome of our best diplomacy."
Another Iranian journalist cited an Iranian newspaper report today that accused Iran of giving "a pearl in exchange for a lollipop."
"That's not true," Mr. Rowhani shot back.
In Washington, White House press secretary Scott McClellan withheld judgment on the agreement, saying: "We will be talking to our friends and allies about this agreement. We will have more to say after we've had the opportunity to learn more about the specific details. At this point, we have not had that opportunity."
The hours before the announcement of the deal with the Europeans were mired in confusion about whether or not a deal had been reached.
The European governments were unwilling to accept the deal until after they reviewed Iran's letter to the International Atomic Energy Agency today, and some European negotiators were irritated that the agency announced on Sunday that there was a deal.
There was also a flurry of last-minute conversations among the Europeans about why Iran told the International Atomic Energy Agency it would begin the enrichment suspension on Nov. 22, not immediately. In the end, European officials said, the three governments decided to let the matter drop.
--------
Iran Gives Pledge on Uranium, but Europeans Are Cautious
November 15, 2004
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/15/international/europe/15iran.html
PARIS, Nov. 14 - The governments of France, Germany and Britain are studying a letter delivered Sunday by Iran in which it pledged to suspend uranium enrichment activities temporarily in exchange for economic and political incentives, European officials said.
The officials said it was unclear whether Iran had agreed to all the conditions set out in marathon talks in Paris last weekend with senior officials from France, Britain, Germany and the European Union or had inserted new conditions that could not be accepted.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the diplomacy between the Europeans and Iran is so sensitive, said the letter had been delivered to the ambassadors of the three countries in Tehran and to the United Nations' nuclear watchdog agency in Vienna and would have to be scrutinized Monday before any announcement of a deal was made.
"All three governments need to examine the text carefully to see if this is what we want," said one British official in London.
A French official in Paris said an issue of such magnitude could not be rushed, adding, "We need to get as clear a deal as we can."
However, at the International Atomic Energy Agency, as the watchdog agency is called, the mood was more upbeat.
A Western diplomat connected to the agency said: "A letter has been received from Iran confirming that it will implement a full suspension of its uranium enrichment program. It's what the Europeans asked Iran to do."
The agency is prepared to include Iran's new pledge in its comprehensive special report on Iran's nuclear activities, expected to be released Monday.
But the three European governments are particularly cautious about a premature embrace of Iran.
The foreign ministers of the three countries brokered a deal, announced with much fanfare in Tehran 13 months ago. In it, Iran agreed to suspend its production of enriched uranium, which can be used in nuclear energy or nuclear weapons programs, and to submit to more intrusive inspections of its nuclear facilities.
After Iran violated the agreement, officials from the three countries acknowledged that the deal had been made too hastily and that the language of the final accord was too vague and open to misinterpretation.
In Tehran on Sunday, Hassan Rowhani, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, announced that the letter had been given to the three ambassadors. Mr. Rowhani, who conducted the negotiations with the Europeans last year and who reports directly to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said the suspension would not be indefinite. Rather, he said, it would continue "during the period of talks" with the European Union on the entire package deal, which includes a long list of incentives for Iran.
"We have agreed to suspend nearly all activities related to enrichment," Mr. Rowhani was quoted as saying by Agence France-Presse in Tehran after meeting with the ambassadors of the three European countries. He added that what Iran had accepted "virtually corresponds" with what the 35-country ruling board of the International Atomic Energy Agency demanded in September.
Mr. Rowhani's deputy, Hossein Mousavian, who led the Iranian delegation talks in Paris a week ago, told reporters in Tehran that Iran had bowed to European demands that it suspend its program to convert raw uranium into uranium tetrafluoride. Uranium tetrafluoride is a precursor to the form of uranium that is fed into centrifuges to enrich it for use as fuel that can be used either for peaceful purposes or to develop nuclear weapons.
Mr. Mousavian also made clear that Iran's decision was not legally binding. "We have accepted the suspension as a voluntary step, and it does not create any obligations for us," Mr. Mousavian told Iranian state television.
On Nov. 25, the 35-country governing board of the International Atomic Energy Agency is scheduled to decide whether to accept the Bush administration's call for Iran's case to be referred to the Security Council for possible sanctions over its nuclear program. The United States contends that Iran's program is a cover for a secret program to build nuclear bombs.
The Bush administration has repeatedly expressed skepticism over the European initiative, arguing that Iran needs to be punished, not rewarded, for its nuclear activities.
But in a surprising shift last Friday, President Bush lent support to the European initiative. At a joint news conference with the British prime minister, Tony Blair, at the White House, Mr. Bush praised Mr. Blair's efforts to try to achieve a deal.
"We don't want Iran to have a nuclear weapon, and we're working toward that end," Mr. Bush said. "And the truth of the matter is the prime minister gets a lot of credit for working with France and Germany to convince the Iranians to get rid of the processes that would enable them to develop a nuclear weapon."
-------- japan
Tokyo bows to Bush on defence
Peter Alford, Tokyo correspondent
November 15, 2004
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,11387411%255E2703,00.html
UNDER pressure from the Bush administration, the Koizumi Government is moving quickly, if warily, to craft a new defence posture.
On Friday in Washington, within a fortnight of President George W. Bush's re-election, the two sides had completed a new round of preparatory talks on the realignment of US forces in Japan.
"Forces realignment" is the critical factor in the future shape of the Japan-US Security Treaty, the cornerstone of Japanese defence policy and strategy. And it is an important part of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's "global transformation" of the US military.
The Americans are ready to withdraw some troops and facilities from Okinawa, where their overbearing presence is the main cause of domestic friction over the alliance.
But they want Japan's co-operation in several force consolidations. The most significant - and troublesome for the Japanese - is the proposed transfer of US Army 1 Corps headquarters from Washington State to Camp Zama, southwest of Tokyo.
--------
Two Faces of Japan's Nuclear Power
donga.com
NOVEMBER 15, 2004
by Won-Jae Park parkwj@donga.com
http://english.donga.com/srv/service.php3?bicode=060000&biid=2004111602978
The Japanese Daily Yomiuri said on November 15 that Japan, the world's fourth-largest plutonium holder (40 tons), has decided to reprocess its spent nuclear fuel (fuel rods) itself and to continue to produce plutonium.
Until now, the Japanese government has put the U.K. and France in charge of reprocessing its nuclear fuel. Yomiuri said that, however, starting in 2006, when the reprocessing facility in Japan is completed, the Japanese government plans to reprocess the nuclear fuel itself. If so, Japan is likely to posses an additional five tons of plutonium every year, which is equivalent to an amount that can produce 1,000 nuclear weapons.
In fact, until now, Japan has enjoyed several favors regarding nuclear power thanks to its cooperative relationship with the U.S. and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Knowing this, critics have pointed out that Japan is not in a position to raise its voice towards Korea for its nuclear experiments.
Energy Security First, Economic Efficiency Later-
The Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute (JAERI) under the Japanese Cabinet has recently established a new long-term plan, which makes reprocessing all spent nuclear fuel mandatory.
Against the institute's decision, Japanese electric power companies requested the JAERI to reclaim at least some of the rods, arguing that reprocessing all spent nuclear fuel would dramatically increase the production cost of electricity. But the institute rejected the request, saying that increasing the efficiency of using nuclear fuel is more important.
If reprocessed nuclear fuel is used, each Japanese household is expected to pay 800 yen (or 8,000 won) more annually for electric charges than they used to pay from power by the reclaimed fuel.
However, the Japanese government reconfirmed its decision, saying that the reclamation is likely to cause environmental problems and nuclear fuel is a significant resource as well.
Currently, Japan is known to have 52 nuclear power plants running at full capacity producing 1,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel. The Japanese press said that if a second reprocessing plant in Aomori of northern Japan starts operation in 2006, annually, 800 tons of fuel would be reprocessed, producing five tons of plutonium along with it.
Double Standard of Japan's Nuclear Policy
Japan is the only non-nuclear weapon nation that has run its own reprocessing facilities to extract plutonium from spent nuclear fuel.
As of late 2003, Japan holds a total of 40.7 tons of plutonium, including 5.5 tons in Japan, 21.6 tons in France and 13.6 tons in the U.K., which Japan has entrusted with reprocessing work. With this amount, Japan is capable of producing a large number of nuclear weapons anytime it wants. Though low enriched uranium, experts have pointed out that if Japan changes the use of the Aomori plant, it is possible to produce high-enriched uranium (HEU) there for nuclear weapons.
In the meantime, the IAEA reached an agreement that Japan's nuclear capability was unlikely to be converted into nuclear weapons, and it decreased the number of nuclear inspections on Japan from four to two times.
The problem is that Japan, still not deciding how to use surplus plutonium, continues to accumulate its plutonium reserve. Even the nation's conservative newspaper Yomiuri pointed out that the Japanese government should be clear regarding the use of plutonium so as not to attract suspicion of attempting nuclear weapons development.
-------- korea
Consort's death rocks Kim Jong-il
Michael Sheridan, Beijing
November 15, 2004
The Sunday Times
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,11387512%255E2703,00.html
HARDLINERS have tightened their political grip on North Korea while Kim Jong-il, the Stalinist state's dictator, has retreated into virtual seclusion after the death of his favourite consort from cancer.
Chinese and Western sources say the regime has prepared for a state of siege as it confronts a re-elected US administration under George W. Bush that is determined to break Pyongyang and disarm it of nuclear weapons.
As Japanese envoys tried to persuade the North Koreans last week to rejoin multinational talks, Mr Kim's absence from the scene led to speculation a debilitating power struggle might have paralysed the ruling group.
This followed the death of Koh Young-hee, a dancer who had provided Mr Kim with an heir-apparent to the world's only communist dynasty.
"The loss of this woman was a blow," said a foreign diplomat.
"But (US Democratic candidate) John Kerry's loss in the US election was a harder one. These are now very worried men."
Diplomats and aid officials in Pyongyang noticed the first signs of a clampdown when some members of their North Korean staff were abruptly reassigned to new jobs and others became more nervous than usual about discussing current affairs. Restrictions had been imposed on foreigners' movements, they said.
Telephones used by foreign residents have been cut off and the secret police have assumed control of the country's mobile phone service.
Entry permits for foreigners have been curtailed.
The story of how personal bereavement and international crisis became intertwined began with the shipment of an elaborate coffin from Paris to Pyongyang during the summer.
North Korean diplomats had ordered it for Koh, 51, who flew home to die after specialists at an exclusive Paris clinic decided she could not be saved from breast cancer.
There was no public funeral, but North Koreans noticed that extravagant praise for a figure called Omonim ("respected mother") had vanished from propaganda documents.
Koh, whose family arrived from Japan in the 1960s, caught Mr Kim's roving eye when she was dancing in the renowned Mansudae Art Troupe.
The dictator, 63, has had at least two wives and many affairs, but defectors say Koh emerged as the most influential woman in a regime beset by dynastic rivalries.
In 1981, she gave birth to their son Kim Jong-chul, who was educated in Geneva and now works in the propaganda department of the ruling Korean Workers Party. A second son, Kim Jong-un, followed three years later.
South Korean intelligence officials have identified Jong-chul as Mr Kim's chosen heir, displacing his eldest son, Kim Jong-nam, whose mother, Song Hye-rim, died in Moscow in 2002 after seeking treatment for depression.
Chinese, Japanese and Russian diplomats have all urged the North Koreans to return to the negotiating table to avoid a showdown with the US. The response was a demand that the US President renounce a refugee law he signed to help North Korean refugees.
Meanwhile, the human toll of China's treaty of friendship with North Korea is mounting. The Chinese have sent home 62 defectors caught in police raids, knowing they are destined for concentration camps. The deportations, commented Chosun Ilbo, the South Korean newspaper, were "tantamount to telling them, 'Go and die"'.
--------
Roh urges US dialogue with North Korea
reuters
November 15, 2004
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_14-11-2004_pg4_3
SEOUL: South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun has called on the United States to try dialogue with North Korea rather than take a hardline approach in its efforts to persuade Pyongyang to give up its nuclear weapons programme.
"The use of force as a negotiation strategy should be restricted," Roh said in an address to an international affairs think tank in Los Angeles on Friday, according to a text released by the presidential Blue House on Saturday.
"I can't ask Koreans to risk a war again ... I believe the United States will respect the situation here." A blockade against North Korea would be undesirable too, as it would only drag out uncertainties and risks, Roh said.
"I'm saying here that there's no other way than dialogue. A hard-line policy means too much for the Korean peninsula."
According to Japanese and Chinese officials on Thursday, the North has said that early resumption of six-nation talks on the nuclear crisis would be difficult, insisting that it first wants to see what approach US President George W Bush will take to the issue following his recent re-election. At the beginning of his first term, Bush branded North Korea part of an "axis of evil" along with Iran and pre-war Iraq.
The United States, China, Japan, Russia and South Korea have held three rounds of talks with the Stalinist North since mid-2003, but Pyongyang declined to attend a previously agreed follow-up meeting in September.
In his Los Angeles speech, Roh insisted that the nuclear issue must be resolved through six-party talks, "peacefully and as soon as possible". "North Korea will certainly give up nuclear weapons," he said. "If it doesn't, Pyongyang won't be able to get any aid, not only from the United States and the Western world, but also from China, Russia and South Korea."
IAEA report: South Korea is satisfied with the IAEA report on its unauthorised nuclear experiments and expects an "impartial" conclusion from the U.N. agency's upcoming board meeting, Seoul's Foreign Ministry said on Saturday.
The International Atomic Energy Agency report confirmed on Thursday that South Korea had enriched a tiny amount of uranium in 2000 to a level close to what could be used in an atomic weapon.
Seoul only recently revealed the experiments, saying that they had been conducted without government knowledge or approval.
"Although the quantities of nuclear material involved have not been significant, the nature of the activities - uranium enrichment and plutonium separation - and the failures by (South Korea) to report these activities in a timely manner ... is a matter of serious concern," said the report, obtained by Reuters.
-------- russia
European Commission's Joint Research Centre marks ten years of nuclear safeguard cooperation with Russian Federation
2004-11-15
CORDIS RTD-NEWS
http://dbs.cordis.lu/cgi-bin/srchidadb?CALLER=NHP_EN_NEWS&ACTION=D&SESSION=&RCN=EN_RCN_ID:22917
The European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) celebrated ten years of cooperation with the Russian Federation in the field of nuclear safeguards on 12 November.
Collaboration first began after the break-up of the Soviet Union and its centralised control and management structures for nuclear installations and material. JRC programmes and projects are carried out under the EU's Technical Assistance to the Commonwealth of Independence States (TACIS) programme.
'We are committed to developing further our relationship with the countries of the former Soviet Union to assist in the control of nuclear material,' said Roland Schenkel, acting Director-General of the JRC. 'Ten years of successful cooperation in the areas of training and the development of nuclear accountancy and monitoring systems has led to improved nuclear safety and security, which is so important in the fight against illicit trafficking and nuclear and radioactive material.'
The main objective of the partnership under TACIS has been the establishment of Nuclear Material Accountancy and Control (NMA&C) based on international standards. The EU has done this through a programme divided into three pillars focusing on: safeguards methodology training for experts, operators and inspectors; improving nuclear analytical capabilities serving NMA&C; and developing the instrumentation in cooperation with industry in the Russian Federation.
One of the big successes of the partnership has been the Russian Methodological Training Centre in Obninsk, which was established to facilitate training in internationally approved nuclear safeguards methods. To date, over 2,000 nuclear experts from the Russian Federation and the Russian nuclear regulatory body have been trained. Legislation on nuclear material control has also been completed, and pilot implementation projects have been carried out in several nuclear facilities.
Future TACIS projects will continue to develop reference laboratories and methodological training centres for the exchange of expertise. The JRC is also planning to provide expertise and support in the area of environmental monitoring and waste management.
For further information, please consult the following web address: http://npns.jrc.it/frameset.html
-------- terrorism
Al-Qaeda considers moving nuclear material to US through Mexico: report
Mon Nov 15, 2004
AFP
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20041115/ts_alt_afp/us_mexico_pakistan_041115145032
WASHINGTON (AFP) - Al-Qaeda has considered plans to smuggle nuclear material into the United States through neighboring Mexico, an Egyptian operative from the extremist group told interrogators after his capture in Pakistan, Time magazine reported.
Sharif al-Masri, who was captured late August near Pakistan's border with Iran and Afghanistan, has told interrogators of "al-Qaeda's interest in moving nuclear materials from Europe to either the US or Mexico," according to a report circulating among US government officials, the weekly magazine reported.
Osama bin Laden's network has considered plans to "smuggle nuclear materials to Mexico, then operatives would carry material into the US," Masri said, according to the report, parts of which were read to Time.
Though unproved, Masri's account has added to US concerns over its border with Mexico, the magazine said.
US and Mexican intelligence officials have also discussed reports from several Al-Qaeda detainees saying that Mexico could potentially be used as a staging area "to acquire end-stage chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear material."
US officials are closely monitoring heavy trucks crossing the border, while Mexicans will watch flight schools and aviation facilities in Mexico.
Some senior US officials are worried about the theft in southern California of a crop duster plane that was seen flying south toward Mexico two weeks ago.
Though it is unclear whether the theft is connected to terrorism, a senior US law enforcement official told Time crop dusters can be used to disperse toxic agents.
-------- u.n.
Arms Control Glance
By The Associated Press
November 15, 2004
http://www.newsday.com/news/politics/wire/sns-ap-arms-control-glance,0,412078.story?coll=sns-ap-politics-headlines
A look at some Bush administration nonproliferation activities:
- Proliferation Security Initiative: Begun in 2003, this calls on countries to work together to intercept components of weapons of mass destruction.
- Global Threat Reduction Initiative: Introduced this year, this provides assistance for nations to remove and secure high-risk radioactive materials so they can't be used by terrorists.
- Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program: This 1991 program initiated by Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., and then-Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., provides funding for the dismantling of weapons of mass destruction in the former Soviet Union and finding work for former weapons scientists. In 2003, it was expanded to other nations and President Bush recently approved using Nunn-Lugar money to destroy chemical weapons in Albania, the first time for use outside the Soviet Union.
With support from the administration, Lugar is proposing changes to the program intended to remove bureaucratic obstacles and proposing a new program for the dismantling of conventional weapons.
- Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty: This long-debated treaty would ban production of plutonium and highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons. The administration supports the treaty but says verification is not possible and that trying to develop verification procedures would delay approval of the treaty. Some arms control advocates say the treaty would be meaningless if compliance can't be verified.
- Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty: The administration supports an additional protocol to the treaty intended to make it harder for countries to use civil nuclear programs as a cover for nuclear weapons programs.
- U.N. Security Council Resolution 1540: Approved in April, this resolution sought by the administration required all U.N. members to pass laws preventing "non-state actors" such as terrorists and black marketeers from making or trafficking in weapons of mass destruction or the materials, the materials to make them and the missiles and other systems to deliver them.
Subscribe to Newsday home delivery
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- tennessee
Vandy hosts scientist workshop on nuclear materials
November 15, 2004
American City Business Journals Inc.
http://www.bizjournals.com/nashville/stories/2004/11/15/daily2.html
Russian and American scientists are meeting this week at Vanderbilt University to share methods and research related to the management of nuclear materials, including those at nuclear power plants, weapons sites and nuclear waste facilities.
The workshop is sponsored by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Vienna, Austria, in cooperation with the International Science and Technology Center in Moscow and Vanderbilt.
The keynote speaker is Alexander Eliseev, chief of the Headquarters for Civil Defense and Emergency Situations of Moscow City Government and Larry Satkowiak of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
-------- vermont
Emergency alert problem silences radios in nuclear planning zone
By Kathryn Casa
Vermont Guardian
November 15, 2004
http://www.vermontguardian.com/local/0904/VYRadios.shtml
BRATTLEBORO - A weeks-old glitch in southern Vermont's emergency alert system has disabled an unknown number of the thousands of weather-alert radios used to notify people of a nuclear crisis, emergency management officials have told the Vermont Guardian.
The problem, if it persists, could force regulators to increase inspections at the plant or take other action.
Officials from the National Weather Service in Albany, NY, were in Brattleboro last week to conduct a special test of the alert system. They determined that some radios did not emit a tone when tested.
"We haven't been able to determine exactly where the problem lies," Warning Coordination Meteorologist Raymond O'Keefe said Monday.
A second test will be conducted from Albany between noon-1 p.m. Tuesday, O'Keefe said. The problem came to the attention of emergency-management officials "several weeks ago," he said, adding that he did not yet know enough to determine whether the problem is with the radios themselves, the transmission lines or the local transmitter. There are 21 sirens and some 5,000 weather-alert radios in the three-state, 10-mile emergency planning zone around Vermont Yankee, according to the Nuclear Regulator Commission. Of those radios, Vermont emergency planners said there are five or six different makes and models in use.
Contacted Monday afternoon, officials at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and a spokesman for Vermont Yankee, said they were not aware of the problem.
NRC Region I spokesman Neil Sheehan wrote in an e-mail that the agency "will be checking into this and if there is a problem with this or any other aspect of the system, we would expect Vermont Yankee to remedy it as expediently as possible.
"If the system fails to meet specific measures of performance, we could heighten our level of inspection until satisfactory improvement is shown," Sheehan wrote. "We also have other regulatory tools at our disposal, including orders, if problems persisted. "In the event of an accident, prompt notification of those who live and work around the plant would be essential. The system must be capable of notifying members of the public in a timely manner."
The NRC last week issued a finding of "low to moderate safety significance" after inspectors determined that Vermont Yankee does not keep adequate records on the number or condition of weather-alert radios within the 10-mile emergency planning zone surrounding the nuclear power plant in Vernon.
In a Nov 12 letter to Vermont Yankee site Vice President Jay Thayer, NRC inspectors said the plant "did not have the means to provide early notification to the entire populace within the plume exposure pathway emergency planning zone.
"Specifically, it was determined that Entergy did not properly assure the distribution and maintenance of tone-alert radios, which are relied upon to alert the populace outside of siren coverage within the emergency planning zone. In your efforts to advertise the availability of the tone alert radios, you ultimately placed the onus on the individuals who needed the radios and not on your organization," the letter stated.
Vermont Yankee has subsequently begun making more radios available to the public. "It's essential that these radios function and they're capable of receiving the signal if an event did occur at the plant," Sheehan said Tuesday.
NRC inspectors reviewed the plant's emergency preparedness system between July 26-Oct. 12.
O'Keefe said during his tests in Brattleboro last week "some of the radios worked and some didn't." On Tuesday, a signal will be sent to the same set of radios from the Albany transmitter, rather than the one near Brattleboro, he said.
During the NWS weekly test of the emergency tone-alert system, a signal leaves the Albany office and travels via land lines and microwaves to a transmitter near Brattleboro. From there, the alert is sent to weather radios, which alert listeners to any weather or radiological emergency within the region.
"People have indicated that they haven't gotten the weekly test on some radios and they have gotten them on other radios," O'Keefe said.
The problem could be with the radios, the lines or the transmitter, or some combination, he said. Emergency planners will narrow it down through a process of elimination, he said.
The problem exists within the Brattleboro Municipal Center, where Town Manager Jerry Remillard said the radio in his office works consistently, but some radios upstairs in the state emergency management office do not work.
Steve Goldsmith, the state's emergency-response planner in Brattleboro, did not return phone calls on Monday.
-------- us nuc waste
Feds don't have funds to test nuclear waste casks
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
November 15, 2004
http://www.harktheherald.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=40145&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0
SALT LAKE CITY -- A federal agency is lacking the funds to test casks that will be used to transport nuclear waste across the country to the underground repository planned for Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
But even without that testing, the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved the casks for transporting 3,000 tons of waste yearly past more than 11 million people in 45 states -- including Utah -- to the repository 90 miles north of Las Vegas.
The NRC, however, won't test casks to demonstrate their ability to survive severe real-world accidents, The Salt Lake Tribune reported Sunday. The agency, instead, is relying on computer analyses and scale modeling.
One in question is the cask model destined to hold waste at a temporary storage facility in Utah.
Critics contend the computer simulations are inadequate.
"The NRC has adopted as fact the fictional notion there are no real-world accidents that could cause casks to fail," said Bob Halstead, a consultant to Nevada on Yucca Mountain transportation issues.
NRC senior transportation adviser Earl Easton says the agency doesn't have the money to do real-world testing.
"We're trying to scrape together the funds," Easton said.
The states of Utah and Nevada are demanding full testing of the casks.
NRC regulations require casks to pass a series of hypothetical accident conditions: a 30-foot free fall onto an unyielding surface, followed by a 40-inch fall onto a steel rod six inches in diameter.
Then, casks would be subjected to a 1,475-degree Fahrenheit fire for 30 minutes before being submersed in 3 feet of water for eight hours. The sequence is supposed to mimic a rail or truck crash.
The casks are protected by "impact limiters," which are caps on both ends that make the containers resemble barbells and cover vulnerable seals and bolts.
The NRC has tested full-scale impact limiters by dropping them onto unyielding surfaces. But Halstead said the most dangerous impact wouldn't be to the limiters.
"It's a sideways truck jackknifing so the bridge abutment hits the cask in the body, bypassing the limiter, causing it to twist and force the lid to pop open, like Popeye's can of spinach," he said.
That could cause a tiny opening and allow lethal radioactive cesium and strontium to escape.
The casks, weighing between 25 and 125 tons, are made of multiple layers of steel and other materials. The NRC has certified 16 different designs, including a rail-transport model made by New Jersey-based Holtec International that Private Fuel Storage would use at its facility proposed for the Skull Valley Goshute Reservation 45 miles southwest of Salt Lake City.
Holtec would be willing to sell the $3 million casks for any kind of testing NRC would want to do, said Joy Russell, a Holtec spokeswoman.
Private Fuel Storage, a consortium of eight utilities, is planning to send 40,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel to an open-air storage site in Skull Valley.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Atomic Safety and Licensing Board is expected to decide early next year whether Skull Valley can safely keep nuclear fuel. The board in March 2003 stalled construction by ruling the chances of a fighter jet from Hill Air Force Base crashing into the storage pad makes the project too risky.
As planned, the storage pad would hold up to 4,000 casks filled with depleted nuclear fuel -- about 10 million rods -- across 100 acres of the Skull Valley. The waste would be shipped over rail lines, mostly from reactors east of the Mississippi. Utah has no nuclear power plants.
-------- MILITARY
-------- britain
Nerve gas death was 'unlawful'
Monday, 15 November, 2004
BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/wiltshire/4013767.stm
Ronald Maddison died after an experiment at Porton Down The inquest into a young airman who died 51 years ago during secret nerve gas tests has ruled that he was unlawfully killed.
Ronald Maddison, 20, from County Durham, died after being exposed to sarin at Porton Down in Wiltshire.
The original inquest in 1953 ruled that Leading Aircraftman Maddison's death was caused by misadventure.
In 2002, the High Court quashed that verdict and ordered that a new inquest should be held.
After hearing 64 days of evidence, the jury concluded that the cause of Mr Maddison's death was "application of a nerve agent in a non-therapeutic experiment".
An MoD spokesman said: "The Ministry of Defence notes the jury's findings and will now take some time to reflect on these.
It was Russian Roulette, Ronald Maddison was just the first... they have got away with murder Terry Alderson, 74, Porton Down veteran
"We will be seeking legal advice on whether we wish to consider a judicial review.
"We don't believe the verdict today has implications for other volunteers. However, we will consider the implications."
The original inquest was held behind closed doors "for reasons of national security".
Volunteer Terry Alderson, 74, said outside the court: "It was Russian Roulette, Ronald Maddison was just the first.
"Reading between the lines they have got away with murder - our health was never monitored afterwards and nobody knows how many died.
'Cold research'
"This shows what liars (the MoD) were - nobody volunteered for these tests. We were sent in there like sheep."
Family lawyer Alan Care said: "We would now join with the Porton Down veterans in calling for a public inquiry."
Mr Maddison's family claimed he was tricked into taking part in the tests, and was told he was helping to find a cure for the common cold.
We would now join with the Porton Down veterans in calling for a public inquiry Family lawyer Alan Care
Mr Maddison was exposed to 200 milligrammes of sarin which was dropped on to a piece of uniform material wrapped around his arm.
The second inquiry was prompted after ex-serviceman Gordon Bell complained to Wiltshire Police that he had been duped into similar tests.
The constabulary launched Operation Antler which looked at experiments using chemical and biological agents at Porton Down government research centre between 1939 and 1989.
The operation found that the coroner at the original inquest was "not apparently provided with all the potentially available material".
The outcome could lead to legal action by veterans of Porton Down who claim they were duped into taking part in similar dangerous trials.
The hearing, at Trowbridge Magistrates' Court, lasted six months.
-------- business
CONTRACTS AWARDED
By Washington Technology
Monday, November 15, 2004; Page E04.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A50196-2004Nov14?language=printer
CACI International Inc. of Arlington won a $15.7 million contract from the Navy to support its command and control processor/common data link management system.
KSJ & Associates Inc. of Falls Church won a $30 million contract to perform program management functions for the Defense Department's Tricare Management Activity, part of the military health system.
Northrop Grumman Information Technology of Herndon won a $46 million contract from Indianapolis/Marion County, Ind., for outsourced informaton technology services.
Constellation NewEnergy Inc. of Baltimore won a $44.3 million contract from the Defense Energy Support Center for various Defense Department and federal civilian installations in the District, Maryland and Pennsylvania.
Dimensions International Inc. of Alexandria won a $12.2 million contract from the Army Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command for armor installation for medium tactical vehicles.
VSE Corp. of Alexandria won an $11 million contract from the Army Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command for the application of a fuel tank self-sealing system and necessary add-on armor panels for fuel-dispensing tankers.
Integrated Systems Support Associates of Herndon won a $1.3 million contract from the Navy for program management and engineering services.
Nextel of California Inc.'s McLean office won a $20 million contract from the Navy for nationwide and branch-wide cellular phone service.
AT&T Wireless Inc. of Beltsville won a $20 million contract from the Navy for nationwide and branch-wide cellular phone service.
Building Technology Inc. of Silver Spring won a $1.5 million contract from the General Services Administration for management, organizational and business improvement.
Dimensions International Inc. of Alexandria won a $12.2 million contract from the Navy for tank/automotive services.
Intelligent Decision Systems Inc. of Fairfax won a $4.1 million contract from the Navy for education, training, evaluation and development technical support services.
Amentra Inc. of Richmond won a $1 million contract from the General Services Administration for management, organizational and business improvement.
Leadership Performance Solutions Inc. of Falls Church won a $2.5 million contract from the General Services Administration for management, organizational and business improvement.
C2 Technologies Inc. of Vienna won a $6.7 million contract from the Environmental Protection Agency for course development and video services.
Systems Planning and Analysis Inc. of Alexandria won a $3.6 million contract from the Navy for Strategic Weapons Systems program assessment support.
Johnson Controls Security Systems LLC of Gaithersburg won a $3.8 million contract from the Department of Health and Human Services for the nationwide MDI security network system.
ICS Technologies of McLean won a $3.2 million contract from the Army for AFRN equipment.
Staff writer Judith Mbuya contributed to this report.
-------- europe
Hungarian MPs vote to withdraw troops from Iraq by year-end
BUDAPEST (AFP)
Nov 15, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041115191330.44zyh7xx.html
The Hungarian parliament voted Monday to withdraw the country's 300 troops from Iraq by the end of the year, rejecting a government initiative that would have prolonged the deployment until March
Conservative opposition parties made good on their pledge to block the extension of the military mandate beyond the current one, which expires on December 31.
The vote in parliament was 191 in favour and 159 against the extension of the deployment, short of the two-thirds majority needed in order to approve the measure.
Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany earlier this month said the government planned to withdraw the soldiers from Iraq, but wanted to do so three months after their mandate expires, on March 31, in order to see through the Iraqi elections planned for January.
The Iraqi mission has been unpopular in Hungary and public opinion is also strongly in favour of a quick withdrawal.
Some 54 percent of Hungarians want the soldiers to return home before year-end, while only 19 percent are in favour of them staying through the Iraqi elections, according to the results of a Median poll published in Nepszabadsag daily on Monday.
Gyurcsany, meanwhile, has called a troop pullout prior to the Iraqi elections "irresponsible politics".
"We must not flee from Iraq but come back with respect," Gyurcsany said in a radio interview last week.
"In order to do this we must stay through the democratic elections which is the most important condition in the establishment of a democratic order.
"To come home before this is irresponsible politics," he added.
A deputy of the main conservative opposition Fidesz party, Istvan Simicsko, however argued that Hungary has already sacrificed enough in Iraq and expressed doubt that the elections would restore order there.
"There is a lot of uncertainty in Iraq and the Iraqi elections may not establish order in the country," Simicsko told AFP on Monday.
"The Hungarian public is also overwhelmingly opposed to us staying in Iraq and political decisions must reflect the will of the people," he added.
"Our mission in Iraq is over."
The Hungarian soldiers, charged with carrying out logistics work, are based at Hilla, 100 kilometers (60 miles) south of Baghdad under Polish command. So far the contingent has suffered one fatality when a soldier was killed by a bomb in June.
Hungary is one of some 30 countries that contributed troops to the US-led force in Iraq in March 2003.
Several allies have since withdrawn, including Spain, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, the Philippines and Thailand.
Other coalition members, such as Poland, Italy, Ukraine and Latvia have announced they would begin to scale back the scope of their deployment or withdraw in early 2005.
Dutch Foreign Minister Ben Bot on Monday confirmed his country's decision to withdraw its troops from Iraq next March, despite a call by Washington for the troops to remain involved in the strife-torn country.
"We will leave Iraq by mid-March ... By that time Iraqi security will have taken over," Bot told journalists in The Hague.
The Netherlands has 1,300 soldiers serving under British command in southern Iraq.
Hungarian Defence Minister Ferenc Juhasz has said that in case Hungary, a member of NATO, opted for withdrawal from Iraq it would look for other military missions abroad to which it could contribute the troops currently serving in strife-torn country.
Hungary currently has 1,000 troops taking part in international peacekeeping missions, including Afghanistan.
-------- iraq
Trouble Spots Dot Iraqi Landscape
Attacks Erupting Away From Fallujah
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, November 15, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A49770-2004Nov14?language=printer
BAGHDAD, Nov. 14 -- The fighting started in Mosul two days after U.S. tanks entered Fallujah. Armed men appeared in a sudden tide on a main street in Iraq's third-largest city, a wide avenue where so many American convoys had been ambushed that locals nicknamed it "Death Street."
At 11 a.m. Thursday, the target was an armored SUV. Witnesses said that after its Western passengers were chased into a police station, the driver was burned alive atop the vehicle as the attackers shouted "Jew!" The city of 1.8 million people then devolved into chaos. Thousands of police officers abandoned their precinct houses. The governor's house was set alight. Insurgents took the police chief's brother, himself a senior officer, into his front yard and shot him dead.
By Sunday, the dawn of a three-day festival celebrating the end of Ramadan, control over sections of the city remained in doubt. In streets emptied by fear and gunfire, insurgents battled hundreds of Iraqi National Guard reinforcements dispatched by the interim government to quell an uprising that was at once largely expected and disquieting.
U.S. and Iraqi officials said they knew that Ramadan would bring attacks, and that the widely publicized offensive in Fallujah would spark violent provocations in other predominantly Sunni Muslim centers. But the scale of the Mosul attack surprised the U.S. forces in the city. And the disintegration of the city's police force recalled the debacles of April, when a suddenly rampant insurgency shattered faith in the security forces that are expected to assume the ever more difficult task of making Iraq at least reasonably safe.
"They were scaring us, and we are from Mosul, so we withdrew to our houses," said Yusuf Rashid, a police officer in a Mosul neighborhood named "Justice."
As fighting winds down in a Fallujah that has been returned by overwhelming force to the sovereignty of the new Iraq, U.S. forces are turning to the many other cities besieged by a fresh wave of insurgent attacks. The resistance remains concentrated in regions dominated by the Sunni Muslim minority, further complicating the interim government's stated desire to include Iraq's entire population in January elections. U.S. tanks and attack helicopters on Sunday swooped into Baiji, the midway point between Mosul and Baghdad, where insurgents destroyed a key highway bridge and claimed the city. Masked men carried guns aloft in a protest Sunday in Baqubah, a chronic trouble spot for U.S. forces just northeast of the capital. U.S. forces also engaged fighters in Tall Afar, a largely Turkmen city west of Mosul, and in Hawija, northwest of Baghdad.
Bands of armed men moved freely at night in several neighborhoods of Baghdad, where the number of attacks on U.S. forces has more than doubled from a week ago. Ramadi, 30 miles west of Fallujah, remains a rebel stronghold.
And U.S. and Iraqi forces continue to fight in Samarra, the city advertised as a model for the assault on Fallujah when 1st Infantry Division tanks rolled in there six weeks ago to reclaim the city from insurgents. Under the curfew again in effect there, Samarra residents are allowed on the street for only four hours each morning, and over the weekend its latest police chief, installed just last month, quit.
"We never believed a fight in Fallujah would mean an end to the insurgency," a U.S. Embassy official in Baghdad said. "We've never defined success that way.
"We still have the very difficult problem of a Sunni insurgency."
Just how much the move on Fallujah is roiling the rest of Iraq is a matter still being assessed by Iraqi and U.S. officials. They appear heartened that the country's Shiite majority remains quiescent and largely animated by the prospect of asserting power through the ballot. That marks the sharpest contrast with the April uprising, when militias loyal to Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr took control of cities across the country's south, opening a vast new military front just as Marines assaulted Fallujah the first time.
Sadr's defeat in August by a U.S. offensive in the holy city of Najaf, followed by weeks of grinding assault in the Baghdad slum named for his father, did much to persuade the radical cleric to shift his energies to politics. For Iraqi and U.S. decision-makers, it also reinforced the decision to confront the Sunni insurgency in its own strongholds.
But if the tactical battle was won in Fallujah -- removing both a symbol of successful resistance and a genuine paramilitary base -- it remains far from clear who will prevail in the larger strategic fight to make the interim government credible to a Sunni population embittered by the loss of influence it enjoyed under the government of former president Saddam Hussein.
The attacks in Mosul did not signal imminent success, at least not to its residents.
"The city is a mess," said Bahaa Aldeen Abdulaziz, owner of the Casablanca Hotel. "The shops are closed. There's no security. And the reason for all this is because the Americans invaded Fallujah.
"And Fallujah will never finish. It has gotten into people's blood."
"I believe the situation will continue like this, and Mosul will become another Fallujah," said Noofel Mohammed Amen, a shoe salesman. "And later on all the cities of Iraq will be Fallujah."
The most immediate concern for the interim government is manpower. Iraq has no more than eight battalions of the newly trained troops, whose main job is to occupy cities after U.S. forces defeat insurgents. Duty in Samarra and Fallujah, which have about half a million people between them, was already stretching that force thin. Adding duty in Mosul "means you're operating right out on the edge of what forces you have -- Iraqi forces," the U.S. official said.
American forces may be stretched thin as well. A battalion deployed outside Fallujah raced back to its Mosul base when insurgents struck, attacking in groups as large as 50 at a time, numbers not previously seen in the city, said Lt. Col. Paul Hastings of Task Force Olympia, the brigade that in February replaced a much larger unit, the 101st Airborne Division.
The magnitude of the Mosul assault generated a wave of excited reports that officials feared would further undermine public order elsewhere in Iraq. The city's governor went on state television to attack "lies" on Arabic-language satellite news channels, which at one point reported that U.S. forces had evacuated one of their main bases. On Sunday, the interim Interior Ministry issued a statement denying that insurgents had overrun two police stations in northern Baghdad.
The news was not all bad for the government. Also Sunday, Najaf buzzed with the news that local tribesmen had carried out three days of devastating attacks in the town of Latifiyah. Located on the exceedingly dangerous road between Baghdad and Najaf, the town harbors extremists blamed for killing 18 young Iraqi men returning from Najaf after signing up for the National Guard earlier this month. The victims' tribal leaders, incensed after extremists demanded payment before handing over the bodies, last week sent fighters north to burn farms and carry out revenge killings, officials in Najaf said.
But in the Sunni Triangle west and north of Baghdad, the insurgency regularly demonstrates its resilience. In Samarra, local insurgents and foreign fighters driven from the city Oct. 1 began trickling back a month later. A wave of car bombs and mortar attacks Nov. 6 killed 17 Iraqi police and made the city a combat zone once more.
Residents assembled each day at the bridge leading from the main highway across the Tigris River into town, shut down by U.S. forces.
"It is our fault," said Abu Muhammed, stranded on the wrong side. "We sold the city to those terrorists and let them enter, and now we cannot enter because of them."
"They made it hard to live till the army came and freed the city," said another man, who gave his name as Abu Omar. "We were able to move around freely and stay out late at night. But now they are back."
Special correspondents Naseer Nouri near Samarra and Saad Sarhan in Najaf contributed to this report.
--------
Fighting in Fallujah Nears End
U.S., Iraqi Forces Target Small Pockets of Insurgents; Commanders Claim Victory
By Jackie Spinner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 15, 2004; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49798-2004Nov14.html
NEAR FALLUJAH, Iraq, Nov. 14 -- U.S. and Iraqi security forces scoured Fallujah for remaining insurgent fighters and pounded the city's southernmost neighborhoods with heavy artillery and bombs late Sunday night, as military commanders declared victory seven days after launching their largest operation since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
"The city has been seized," said Lt. Gen. John F. Sattler, commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force. "We have liberated the city of Fallujah."
Marines found the mutilated body of a Western woman in a street Sunday as they searched for the remaining fighters, the Associated Press reported. The disemboweled body, which could not be immediately identified, was wrapped in a blood-soaked blanket, the Marines said.
Two Western women abducted last month from Baghdad are known to be missing. Margaret Hassan, 59, director of CARE International in Iraq, and Teresa Borcz Khalifa, 54, a Polish-born longtime resident of Iraq, were taken at gunpoint.
The military said 38 U.S. troops had been killed and 275 wounded since the offensive operation began Nov. 8. Three of the fatalities resulted from noncombat injuries. Six Iraqi soldiers have been killed and more than 40 wounded. Military commanders estimated that between 1,000 and 1,200 insurgents have been killed.
Marine units engaged fighters throughout the day, poking at what Sattler called "isolated pockets of enemy resisters."
"If they are trapped and isolated and want to fight till the death, we'll have no choice but to accommodate them," he said.
With Iraqi soldiers following closely behind, the Marines went door-to-door Sunday, searching for fighters and stockpiles of weapons. A day earlier, advancing Army units found evidence of a highly trained and well-organized fighting force dressed in professional military uniforms.
"The enemy is broken into very small groups," Sattler said during a visit with wounded troops at a Naval field hospital outside the city, about 35 miles west of Baghdad. "They don't have eyes. They can't see outside. They are truly broken into isolated pockets."
A U.S. official in Baghdad said most of the fighters carried no identification.
"The normal Iraqi would carry minimal identification, ID cards at least. Food ration cards or something," the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "These people are carrying nothing."
U.S. and Iraqi forces have detained more than 1,000 military-age men since the battle started, and Sattler said he expected that two-thirds would be questioned and freed.
U.S. forces failed to capture Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian leader of a group linked to al Qaeda that has claimed responsibility for numerous car bombings targeting Iraqi civilians and security forces, assassinations of local leaders and beheadings of foreign hostages.
"I feel we really had an impact" on Zarqawi's network, Sattler said. "We don't know where he is. Maybe he's dead and we don't know. We weren't really focused on him."
Iraqi soldiers who participated in the battle said Sunday that they also felt confident that the insurgency had been broken.
"They cannot move," said a 22-year-old soldier from the Sadr City neighborhood of Baghdad who gave his name only as Ahmed. He had been shot in his left shoulder and was recovering at an Iraqi army base outside the city.
"We destroyed the head of the snake, their leaders," he said. "They don't have anyone to lead them."
Although Iraqi forces fought mainly in the rear of advancing U.S. troops, they were responsible for keeping areas clear after the Americans pushed through, a role that military commanders said would remain vitally important after the combat operation had ended.
Sattler said U.S. forces would keep a "hand on the shoulder" of the Iraqi security forces.
A U.S. official in Baghdad said the Fallujah battle was nearly over. "There are some groups still fighting but it's pretty much the end of the game. It is clearly not a battle that is going to go on for days and day and days."
Correspondent Karl Vick in Baghdad and special correspondent Omar Fekeiki contributed to this report.
--------
THE INSURGENCY
Rebels Routed in Falluja; Fighting Spreads Elsewhere in Iraq
November 15, 2004
The New York Times
By DEXTER FILKINS and JAMES GLANZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/15/international/middleeast/15falluja.html?oref=login&pagewanted=all&position=
FALLUJA, Iraq, Nov. 14 - American forces overran the last center of rebel resistance in Falluja on Sunday after a weeklong invasion that smashed what they called the principal base for the Iraqi insurgency.
While much of the city lay in smoking ruins and isolated bands of rebels still harassed American and Iraqi troops, the American takeover of Falluja addressed a growing problem that had gnawed at the Iraq occupation force for months. But American military commanders were reluctant to declare the invasion a total success and were forced to contend with insurgent violence spreading elsewhere, particularly in the northern city of Mosul.
The governor of Mosul's province, saying he had lost faith in local security forces, called in thousands of Kurdish militiamen for the first time to help quell the insurgent uprising there. The American commander in the area, Brig. Gen. Carter Ham, called the situation "tense, but certainly not desperate," and said the next few days would bring more hard fighting.
Tanks and armored vehicles, their guns blazing in all directions, finished the sweep through Falluja early Sunday and were followed by infantry troops of the 15,000-member invasion force that had first besieged the city on Nov. 7. The patrols turned up huge caches of weapons in methodical house-to-house searches.
"We're sweeping through the city now," said Maj. Gen. Richard Natonski, a senior Marine commander in Iraq. "We're clearing out pockets of resistance. There are groups numbering from 5 to 30. They're moving, too. They're trying to get behind us."
"People will never appreciate the movement of soldiers down here, what it took to move them and immediately conduct a relief in place with the soldiers," he said. "It ought to go down in the history books."
American commanders said 38 American servicemembers had been killed and 275 wounded in the Falluja assault, and the commanders estimated that 1,200 to 1,600 insurgents - about half the number thought to have been entrenched in Falluja - had been killed. But there was little evidence of dead insurgents in the streets and warrens where some of the most intense combat took place.
Army reconstruction teams were already beginning to survey the devastation in the city, which will require an enormous rebuilding effort. Most of Falluja's 250,000 residents had fled the city before the assault began and have been staying with relatives or in makeshift camps.
Solely from a military standpoint, the operation redressed a disastrous assault on Falluja last April that was called off when unconfirmed reports of large civilian casualties drove the political cost too high.
This time, the Americans, with the limited participation of Iraqi security forces, pummeled a dark and mostly abandoned city defended only by a wraithlike band of insurgents who fired Kalashnikovs, mortars and rockets at the Americans and then fled into alleys and apartment blocks, only to reappear elsewhere.
In the end they were no match for American armor, air power and military training.
As the battle for Falluja wound down, however, clashes continued for the fourth day between insurgents and American and Iraqi forces in Mosul. American commanders said guerrillas remained deeply rooted in the heart of that city. The revolt also appeared to be spreading to the town of Tal Afar, near the Syrian border, forcing American forces to encircle the area. In Ramadi, the insurgent stronghold 30 miles west of Falluja, violence against American troops continued as well. There were several attacks with small-arms fire, and insurgents fired a rocket-propelled grenade at troops. American commanders said many rebels who had fled Falluja were now in Ramadi.
A representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most powerful Shiite cleric in Iraq, condemned the violence of both the Americans and the insurgent fighters.
"What is happening in Falluja, Samarra, Latifiya and other cities in Iraq is a disaster, because the occupation doesn't want our cities to be stable," the representative, Murtada al-Qezweni, said during prayers in the southern city of Karbala at the start of Id al-Fitr, the three-day holiday marking the end of Ramadan, the Islamic holy month of fasting.
In the northern Kurdish region, a member of the National Assembly died in a car crash on Saturday night after being ambushed by gunmen, Reuters reported. The politician, Waddah Hassan Abdel Amir, an official in the Iraqi Communist Party, and two of his aides were chased down by four cars between the cities of Khalis and Erbil.
Elsewhere, two relatives of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi were released by insurgents, though a third remained captive, Al Jazeera, the Arab news network, reported Sunday. News of the releases, attributed to unidentified sources, could not be immediately confirmed.
Those said to be released were the wife and daughter-in-law of Ghazi Majeed Allawi, a 75-year-old cousin, the network reported. The three were kidnapped last Tuesday. The next day, a group called Ansar al-Jihad posted an Internet message saying it would behead the three hostages within 48 hours unless Dr. Allawi called off the invasion of Falluja and released all prisoners in Iraq.
The fate of Dr. Allawi's cousin, Ghazi Allawi, remains unknown.
Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin of France said at a political congress that he believed that two French journalists abducted south of Baghdad in August were in a relatively calm area of Iraq. Mr. Raffarin said the assumption was based on information from the journalists' Syrian driver, who was discovered in a house in Falluja last week. "The messages we are getting have reassured us a little," Mr. Raffarin said, according to Reuters.
The kidnapped reporters are Georges Malbrunot, a writer for Le Figaro, and Christian Chesnot of Radio France Internationale.
In Baghdad, rocket and mortar explosions jolted the downtown area and the fortified compound known as the Green Zone, which houses the interim Iraqi government and the American Embassy.
The absence of insurgent bodies in Falluja has remained an enduring mystery. Roaming American patrols found few on Sunday in their sweeps of the devastated landscape where the rebels chose to make their last stand, the southern Falluja neighborhood called Shuhada by the Iraqis and Queens by the American troops. Now, the Americans are rushing in engineers who will begin rebuilding what the conflict has just destroyed.
Falluja's power grid, for instance, is so decayed that it must be turned on sector by sector or it will fail, officials said. If residents manage to return before the power is on, they could be without services like plumbing, water and heat, and any ensuing crises could aid rebels hoping to destabilize the reconstruction.
Even as those needs loom, however, military officials have not yet allowed aid groups into the city, saying that the situation is not safe. The decision has outraged some critics who say substantial numbers of people still need aid.
Although large-scale fighting in Falluja appeared to have ended, American commanders have been reluctant to declare success.
"We don't want this to become a microcosm of what this whole country has become," said one Marine officer who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the American claim of victory in Iraq in May 2003.
In Washington, a Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, said that it was too early to declare victory but that American and Iraqi troops had achieved one of their major objectives in eliminating the insurgents' largest haven.
Troops were still combing the deserted houses in southern Falluja on Sunday after a mechanized unit smashed through the Shuhada neighborhood the day before.
The searches have turned up large caches of weaponry like artillery shells and mortar rounds along with electronics for bombs and mujahedeen literature. Fearing booby traps, the troops generally entered the houses only after tanks rammed through walls or specialists put explosive charges on doors. American troops also discovered the body of a woman on a street in Falluja, but it was unclear whether she was an Iraqi or a foreigner.
As the searches moved southward through the neighborhood, leaving a swath of devastation behind, fighting continued around the city, and at least one marine was killed by a sniper on Sunday morning, shot through the head from an area that had been all but obliterated the night before.
It seemed clear that any further resistance would have to come from smaller bands of rebels rather than from a coherent fighting force.
In the northern city of Baiji, the site of Iraq's largest oil refinery, American troops fought off an ambush on Sunday morning, said Capt. Bill Coppernoll, a spokesman for the First Infantry Division. The troops called in air support and pursued the insurgents into a building. Apache helicopters fired missiles while M1 tanks blasted the building.
A Black Hawk helicopter carrying medical supplies north of Falluja was struck by antiaircraft fire on Sunday, but landed safely. Another helicopter was struck east of Falluja, but managed to land safely at the Baghdad airport.
Reporting for this article was contributed by Edward Wong from Baghdad, Eric Schmitt from Washington, Robert F. Worth from Falluja and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from Karbala.
--------
'Catastrophic conditions' in Falluja
aljazeera
15 November 2004
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/7D9D45C5-DD8A-4F6C-9A19-A7EF943DCF38.htm
The six-day US-led assault on Falluja has turned catastrophic for civilians there and fuelled fighting in Iraq's northern city of Mosul.
"Conditions in Falluja are catastrophic," Firdus al-Abadi, spokeswoman for the Iraqi Red Crescent in Baghdad, said.
A four-truck convoy of relief supplies left Baghdad on Saturday for Falluja, even though the US military and Iraq's interim government have not accepted the Red Crescent's pleas for permission to enter the urban war zone.
Dangerous destination
"Our destination is Falluja. We know it is risky but this is our duty as a humani-tarian society and as Iraqis," al-Abadi said.
Officials said the trucks are carrying food, blankets, first-aid kits, medicine and a water-purification unit from the Red Crescent, the International Committee of the Red Cross and Unicef.
"We've had no contact with the Americans," said Jamal al-Karbuli, the doctor in charge of the convoy. The trucks would drive until troops stopped them, he said.
"Then we'll try to talk to them, let them search the trucks to see we only have medicine, food and first-aid," he said as the convoy began its eastward 50km drive to Falluja.
Fierce fighting
Fadhil Badran, Aljazeera's correspondent in Falluja, said fighting was fierce and continuous in Falluja's south-eastern neighbourhood al-Shuhadaa and in al-Julan to the north-west.
Day sometimes turns into night due to the intense smoke from burning homes, shops and factories as also from US military vehicles set ablaze, Badran said.
US forces have moved from the middle to the north of the town, Badran said. The north and west are still controlled by the city's Iraqi resistance, he said, adding that large numbers of fighters were present in the Senaee and Askari neighbourhoods.
Describing the conditions of civilians as abysmal, Badran said US air strikes had killed several families. Women, children and the sick had been buried in their gardens, he said.
"I met a Falluja civilian who told me that he asked the Red Crescent for help but they could not oblige. He said he had buried two of his children and that two would die today, and hence he would not need any assistance," Badran said.
Resentment
The attack on Falluja has inflamed resentment across central Iraq, where anti-US fighters have launched a wave of attacks and bombings.
Iraqi national guardsmen based near the Syrian border were ordered to move to Mosul where the fighters have taken over streets and police stations since Wednesday.
On Saturday, looters rampaged through a palace that had been used as a US base in Mosul after troops apparently left at dawn.
Cars and trucks packed with people swarmed to the palace, where they were seen making off with food, equipment and clothes, even a mattress, a reporter at the scene in northern Mosul said.
Air strikes
The government fired Mosul's police chief after nine police stations fell into the hands of fighters. Residents said armed men roamed the streets on Saturday, with no sign of security forces.
The US military denied on Friday that Mosul was out of control, but said it had launched air strikes on Thursday night to try to curb fighters.
The United States said the Falluja offensive launched by 10,000 US and 2000 Iraqi troops on Monday would not stop until all resistance in the city had been wiped out.
Aljazeera's offices in Iraq were shut by Iraqi government order
Aljazeera regret
In New York, the Committee to Protect Journalists said it was deeply disturbed by a new directive from Iraqi authorities warning media to stick to the government line on Falluja.
"It damages the government's credibility in establishing a free and democratic society," CPJ director Ann Cooper said.
Aljazeera has meanwhile apologised to its viewers for being unable to cover the Iraqi events directly due to the closure of its offices by the Iraqi interim government three months ago.
AMS member held
In other incidents, an Iraqi national guards team arrested Mustafa al-Dulaimi, a member of Iraq's influential Muslim body Association of Muslim Scholars, after raiding his home in Baghdad.
Witnesses confirmed that he was brutally assaulted by some of the guardsmen.
Oil pipeline in Baiji was set ablaze
Al-Dulaimi had earlier led a demonstration in front of the Abu Hanifa mosque to condemn the US and Iraqi forces attacks on Falluja.
Clashes spread
Also on Saturday, four Iraqis were killed and 12 injured in a US raid at Abu Ghraib west of Baghdad. Two military vehicles were damaged in the area by an explosive device that targeted a US army convoy on the highway, Aljazeera has learned.
In Baiji, a blast in an oil pipeline caused by an explosive device set it ablaze. Two of the oil facility guards were reported missing after the incident.
In Tikrit, four Iraqis, three of whom were policemen, were injured seriously in an explosion.
US vehicle destroyed
In Baquba, a US Humvee military vehicle was destroyed by an explosive device. The US forces cut off all roads leading to the accident site. Witnesses said the injured were evacuated in a US military aircraft.
"We know it is risky but this is our duty as a humanitarian society and as Iraqis"
Anti-US fighters also broke into al-Sadr hotel located in al-Karada, a centrally located area of Baghdad, Aljazeera reported.
Fighting erupted in al-Adhamiya between Iraqi fighters and US and Iraqi police forces near the Abu Haneefa mosque.
US and Iraqi forces also raided a mosque in al-Habaniya on the suspicion that fighters from Falluja carrying weapons had taken refuge there.
Iraq's international airport in Baghdad will remain closed for commercial flights until further notice, the office of US-backed interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi has said.
--------
His Red Right Hand
By William Rivers Pitt
truthout | Perspective
Tuesday 16 November 2004
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/111604A.shtml
He's a ghost, he's a god He's a man, he's a guru You're one microscopic cog In his catastrophic plan Designed and directed by His red right hand
- Nick Cave
The top story on the New York Times website on Monday morning read, "Rebels Routed in Fallujah." It's a good thing, too, because we need to be fighting the terrorists over there in Iraq instead of over here in America. Who were these Fallujan terrorists, anyway? They really must have been the hardest of the hard-core to have gotten the kind of military reaction we have seen from U.S. forces in the last week. This is what I've been told, anyway.
Michael Georgy of the UK Independent, writing from the heart of the battlefield, described the aftermath of the battles: "After six days of intense combat against the Fallujah insurgents, U.S. warplanes, tanks and mortars have left a shattered landscape of gutted buildings, crushed cars and charred bodies. A drive through the city revealed a picture of utter destruction, with concrete houses flattened, mosques in ruins, telegraph poles down, power and phone lines hanging slack and rubble and human remains littering the empty streets."
At last, these scabrous terrorists have felt the awful price to be paid for defying our God-blessed right to bring 'democracy' wherever we wish by the point of the sword and the Sidewinder missile. The level of devastation wrought upon Fallujah is clear proof that the people who dwelled there were the scum of the earth, deserving of death and disaster. This must certainly be so, because George W. Bush would never order an all-out assault on a city filled with civilians in order to cover up his gross mismanagement of the situation lo these last twenty months. This is what I've been told, anyway.
An Associated Press photographer named Bilal Hussein calls Fallujah his home town. He was there to watch our justice come down. "Destruction was everywhere," said Hussein. "I saw people lying dead in the streets, wounded were bleeding and there was no one to come and help them. Even the civilians who stayed in Fallujah were too afraid to go out. There was no medicine, water, no electricity nor food for days."
After a few days, the shooting got too close for comfort, so Hussein decided to try and flee across the Euphrates River with other civilians. "I decided to swim," said Hussein, "but I changed my mind after seeing U.S. helicopters firing on and killing people who tried to cross the river." Down by the river, he was treated to the sight of a family of five being shot down as they tried to cross the water. Not long after, he "helped bury a man by the river bank, with my own hands. I kept walking along the river for two hours and I could still see some U.S. snipers ready to shoot anyone who might swim. I quit the idea of crossing the river and walked for about five hours through orchards."
Stories like this have been coming out of Fallujah for days now. Thousands of families went without food and water, trapped in their homes, watching tanks roll over dead bodies that littered the streets. Aid organizations like the Red Cross and the Red Crescent were barred from entering the city to distribute food and medical supplies. Large numbers of wounded civilians have been evacuated to hospitals in Baghdad because the Fallujah hospitals have either run out of supplies or been blasted to rubble.
A young refugee who gave his name only as Ahmed said, "The Americans didn't care about us. Every night we said goodbye to one another because we expected to die. You could see areas where all the houses were flattened, there was just nothing left. Even those of us who do not fight, we are suffering so much because of the U.S. bombs and tanks. Can't they see this is turning so many people against them?"
The Sunni population of Iraq, watching as Sunni mosques were destroyed and Sunni religious leaders were arrested in this Sunni city, see this assault as an attack upon their religious core. In all likelihood, the Sunni population will boycott whatever cobbled-together election American forces can manage to organize in the coming months. The attack upon Fallujah has further divided Sunni from Shi'ite; Sheik Mahdi al-Sumaidaei, leader of the Supreme Association for Guidance and Daawa, a conservative Sunni organization, took a swipe at the Shi'ites for not condemning the attacks. "We didn't hear from them at all," he said. "I assume they are either satisfied or they are afraid. However, when there were attacks on Shiite cities, the Sunni clerics in Iraq immediately condemned them. What about the Shiites?"
As for American casualties, 67 soldiers have died in the last fifteen days. The total number of American soldiers killed in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion stands at 1,188. The total number of 'Coalition' troops killed to date stands at 1,334. There is no accurate count of the number of wounded from these first two weeks of November.
Thanks to the competent yet generous leadership of George W. Bush, the military invasion of Fallujah will certainly cure what ails us in Iraq. To be sure, the deaths of thousands of civilians will further inflame the Iraqi populace. To be sure, the number of 'insurgents' killed in Fallujah will be immediately replaced by fresh recruits. To be sure, fierce battles have erupted in Mosul, Tal Afar, Ramadi, Beiji, Baquba, Buhriz, Khabbaza, Baghdad, and indeed all across the country. To be sure, we will have to grind all these cities to powder, along with all the residents of these cities, to make sure no one thwarts our aforementioned God-given right to bomb and shoot and burn and smash whomever and whatever we please.
Fear not, however. All is well. "The objective," said John Ashcroft in his resignation letter last week, "of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved." This is what I've been told, anyway.
Mission accomplished.
- William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books - 'War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know' and 'The Greatest Sedition is Silence.'
-------- israel / palestine
Shooting Breaks Out in Gaza Around Likely Arafat Successor
November 15, 2004
By GREG MYRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/15/international/middleeast/15mideast.html?pagewanted=all&position=
JERUSALEM, Nov. 14 - A group of Palestinians unleashed deadly bursts of gunfire on Sunday as Mahmoud Abbas, a likely successor to Yasir Arafat, arrived at a mourning service for Mr. Arafat in Gaza City. Mr. Abbas was whisked away by security guards and was not hurt.
As Mr. Abbas approached the tent where the service was held, the gunmen chanted slogans denouncing him and then began firing into the air without aiming at him. Palestinian security officers began firing, and two officers were killed and four more were wounded by the time the gunfire ended.
The shooting came just hours after the Palestinian leadership announced that presidential elections would be held on Jan. 9 to replace Mr. Arafat, who died Thursday.
The leadership has moved swiftly to fill Mr. Arafat's posts, and the January election is to choose a new head of the Palestinian Authority, which runs Palestinian affairs in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The vote will be crucial in providing legitimacy to whoever succeeds Mr. Arafat, and could also improve the prospect for renewed peace talks.
While he is seen as the strongest contender in the election, Mr. Abbas lacks support on the Palestinian street. He prefers behind-the-scene negotiations to the public stage. And perhaps more than any other senior Palestinian figure, he has criticized Palestinian violence against Israel as counterproductive to the Palestinian cause. That has angered many militants, who view him as conciliatory toward Israel.
In the days after Mr. Arafat's death, Palestinian areas have been highly combustible. The latest demonstration of that came Sunday, at the large, crowded tent erect in Gaza City so Palestinians there could pay their last respects to their longtime leader.
Mr. Abbas, widely known as Abu Mazen, traveled from the West Bank and arrived Sunday afternoon at the tent grounds, in an open field near Mr. Arafat's seaside compound in Gaza City. The mourners numbered in the hundreds, and a small group of armed men spotted Mr. Abbas and began shouting, "No to Abu Mazen!" and "No to Dahlan!" a reference to Muhammad Dahlan, a former security chief who accompanied Mr. Abbas.
Between 10 and 20 armed men pushed their way into the tent, and amid much shoving, began firing their rifles into the air, witnesses said.
Security guards ringed Mr. Abbas, 69, but kept him inside the tent as the shooting increased and carried on for several minutes. Most of the fire by the security guards and the gunmen was directed into the air, and witnesses said the casualty toll would have been much higher if the two sides had fired directly at each other in such a tightly enclosed space.
The gunmen wore civilian clothes and many had black-and-white checkered scarves around their necks, the kind favored by Mr. Arafat, witnesses said. They were believed to be members of Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, which is linked to the Fatah movement. Israel's Channel One television reported Sunday that Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades had denounced the shooting.
Mr. Arafat was Fatah's founder, and Mr. Abbas has been a senior figure in the group for many years. Mr. Abbas served briefly as prime minister last year, and immediately after Mr. Arafat's death was named as head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which incorporates numerous factions, including Fatah.
But many young members of the brigades were fiercely loyal to Mr. Arafat and are deeply suspicious of Mr. Abbas.
The gunmen eventually left the scene, but in no particular hurry, and no one was arrested, according to witnesses and Palestinian officials.
"It was not an assassination attempt," Mr. Abbas told reporters shortly afterward at his office in Gaza City. "Emotions were high. There was random gunfire and pushing in the crowd."
"We must deal with the security situation,'' he said. "Some aspects of the security situation are chaotic."
Rawhi Fattouh, installed as the caretaker leader of the Palestinian Authority after Mr. Arafat's death, announced the January election date in the West Bank city of Ramallah, at the compound where Mr. Arafat was confined for the final three years of his life and is now buried.
"There will be free and direct elections," Mr. Fattouh said. The ballot date is in keeping with Palestinian law, which requires a vote within 60 days if a leader dies.
Just a couple hundred yards away, ordinary Palestinians arrived throughout the day to visit Mr. Arafat's gravesite, which is covered with floral wreaths and photos.
The Palestinian areas have been mostly calm in recent days, but Sunday's outburst in Gaza City reflected one of several potential obstacles to elections in January.
Israeli troops have been in or near Palestinian cities in the West Bank for the last two and a half years, and they stage frequent raids in against Palestinian militants. Palestinians are demanding that the soldiers be pulled back for the election.
Israel has not said how it will respond, though Prime Minister Ariel Sharon expressed a willingness to smooth the way for the election, according to Gary L. Ackerman, a Democratic congressman from New York who met Mr. Sharon on Sunday.
Mr. Sharon said "he wants them to have successful elections, and Israel will not put obstacles in their way," Mr. Ackerman said.
The prime minister also said he "expected that the military presence would be reduced," according to Mr. Ackerman.
There is also the question of whether Israel will allow Palestinians in East Jerusalem to vote, as they did in the only previous Palestinian national election, in 1996.
The Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, said: "They have the right according to all agreements. They are part of the Palestinian people."
Israel captured the eastern part of Jerusalem in the 1967 Middle East war and subsequently annexed it. Although the move has never been recognized internationally, Israel claims all of Jerusalem as its capital. Some Israeli officials believe its position would be weakened if the Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, totaling about 225,000, were allowed to vote in a Palestinian election. But Mr. Ackerman cited Mr. Sharon as saying Palestinians in East Jerusalem would be allowed to vote.
On Sunday, Reuters reported that the Bush administration was considering directing millions of dollars to nongovernmental organizations to help the Palestinians prepare for elections and to provide other support. As much as $75 million in aid is already in the pipeline for Palestinian programs, and a portion of that could be used for the elections, Reuters quoted American congressional aides as saying.
Taghreed el-Khodary contributed reporting from Gaza for this article, and Steven Erlanger from Jerusalem.
--------
Israel rights group condemns army
B'Tselem described Israeli policy as 'illegal'
Monday, 15 November, 2004
BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4014341.stm
An Israeli human rights group has issued a report attacking the army's policy of demolishing the homes of suspected Palestinian militants.
B'Tselem estimates that, on average, twelve innocent Palestinians are made homeless every time a suspected militant's home is destroyed.
The report said 47% of the demolished houses had never been home to militants involved in attacks on Israelis.
B'Tselem described Israel's policy as a "war crime".
Israel maintains that the demolitions act as a deterrent to further attacks by Palestinian militants.
Flattened
The rights group said that 628 buildings were demolished as a punitive measure by the Israeli military, leaving almost 4,000 Palestinians homeless.
These homes were destroyed because of the actions of 333 Palestinians, the report said.
There is no compensation for Palestinians made homeless by Israeli demolitions A further 3,400 homes were flattened after Israel said they had been built without permission or as part of ""clearing operations".
Clearing operations often entail the demolition of buildings Israel says are used by Palestinian militants to launch or plan attacks.
In total, Israeli soldiers have demolished 4,100 Palestinian homes since September 2000, leaving 28,000 homeless, B'Tselem said.
Palestinians were given prior warning of the demolitions in fewer than 3% of cases, according to the report.
Compensation
B'Tselem said that the deterrent effect of home demolitions had never been proven.
The group went on to describe Israel's policy as "a grave breach of international humanitarian law".
It concluded the report by demanding the government "cease the policy of demolishing houses as a means of punishment, and compensate Palestinians whose homes have been demolished as a result of this policy".
The Israeli military replied by saying: "House demolition is based on clear military considerations and is done in full accordance with the law."
The statement said that the Israel Supreme Court had upheld the practice on several occasions.
----
Arafat's rival heirs - a field guide
Haaretz
By Bradley Burston
November 15, 2004
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=500568&displayTypeCd=1&sideCd=1&contrassID=2
In the annals of gaming, Palestinian Politics as devised by Yasser Arafat was unique: made to be played by millions at once, it remained forever a form of solitaire. The rules, if unstated, were clear to all. Nothing was left to chance. The deck was stacked by the lone dealer. The preponderance of chips stayed with the house, which laundered and squirreled them away in the hundreds and hundreds of millions. Nonetheless, the dealer was revered, unerringly granting the players a sense of victory even in successive defeats.
There was one other unvoiced rule. No one was to ask what would happen if the dealer were unable to conduct the game. That is, no one was to ask what would happen if, for the first time, power were to be shared.
Now the players are about to find out.
Until he succumbed this week in a Paris hospital, Yasser Arafat had since the 1960s controlled all key positions in mainstream Palestinian institutions.
At once the Zeus and the lightning rod of all affairs Palestinian, he was alone among the top leadership of the Palestinian Authority in enjoying the respect of a breathtaking cross-section of his constituency, gunmen and professors, exiles and insiders, veterans and young Turks, the desperately impoverished and the gilt-edged alike.
Now, with Arafat's death, all bets are off.
The landscape of Palestinian political power, for four decades in Arafat's long shadow, is divided into a loose network of camps, some armed, some moneyed, their leaders quietly circling one other in anticipation of future struggles for succession.
The following is a guide to the main camps, their leaders, and how they line up at present.
THE FOUNDERS As longtime head of the PLO diplomatic department and the self-styled - but largely marginalized - foreign minister of Palestine, 73-year-old Farouk Kaddoumi was the most prominent opponent to the Oslo accords within the Palestinian leadership.
The sole living remnant of the five founders of Arafat's Fatah movement power base, Kaddoumi lacks the cache and legitimacy of the military mantle as worn by Arafat and two late deputies and once-heirs apparent: Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad), assassinated by IDF commandos in Tunis in 1988 and Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad), gunned down by the rebel Fatah Abu Nidal group.
When the stricken Arafat was abruptly airlifted to Paris for emergency treatment last week, Kaddoumi was suddenly much in evidence, taking the lead in accusing Israel of having poisoned the PA chairman.
"Anyone who thinks that I have abdicated my authority is mistaken, and ought to think again," Kaddoumi declared this week. Asked what he thought Fatah should do now, he replied that it should wage guerrilla warfare against the Israel Defense Forces.
In a surprise move apparently meant to silence Kaddoumi, he was was elected Thursday to head the Fatah Central Committee, the movement's most senior formal post but, in the case of the foreign-based Kaddoumi, a role of little clout.
Kaddoumi's camp, largely made of men born in pre-state Palestine but who spent most of their lives in Syria and elsewhere in the Arab world, also includes veteran Fatah leaders and Oslo opponents Muhammad Ghneim (Abu Mahir) and Sahkr Habash. It derives what strength it has from largely hollow PLO institutions abroad and its element of control over Palestinian legations around the world.
Although the Kaddoumi camp's influence over the Palestinian street is decidedly limited, notes Haaretz territories correspondent Arnon Regular, "where this group is concerned, its dynamic within the Fatah is not how much support you have or what sort of majority you can muster, but rather, the dynamic is always 'How much can you spoil, how much you can de-rail?'
"That is what is important to them."
THE SECOND GENERATION, OR OLD GUARD Led by 69-year-old former Palestinian prime minister Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) and his successor the 67-year-old Ahmed Qureia (Abu Ala), the Old Guard holds all key posts within the Palestinian Authority, but has little popularity or support in the Palestinian street.
Most members of the group were born in pre-state Palestine, but spent decades as PLO apparatchiks in comfortably-funded Palestinian institutions based in Beirut, Tunis and elsewhere.
One of the younger members of the group is Rouhi Fattouh, 58, the speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council (the parliament), who is to serve as acting chairman of the Palestinian Authority for 60 days until elections for a permanent chairman are held.
It was the inner circle of the Old Guard which met Wednesday night in Ramallah - prior to Arafat's announced death in the pre-dawn hours Thursday - to divvy up the formal powers of the rais.
The closed-door discussions ratified the appointment of Abu Mazen as chairman of the PLO Executive Committee, responsible for state affairs and the figure representing the Palestinian nation outside the territories. It also confirmed Abu Ala as prime minister, overseeing the National Security Council and the security apparatus.
The Old Guard, widely seen by Palestinians as effete, corrupt, overly Westernized, unschooled in and unwilling to engage in armed struggle with Israel, has been the target of derision and even rioting in the territories. "The Old Guard is a group of technocrats which would like to see changes made, but because they lack all backing from or influence on the street, they always seek to preserve their power through Palestinian institutions - but those, from the standpoint of legitimacy, are also of no value at this point," Regular says.
The primary means at the Old Guard's disposal for gaining legitimacy is elections, Regular continues. But there are signs that even this step will fail to grant a significant imprimatur to the current leadership.
According to pollster Khalil Shkaki, only general elections, to include voting for the Palestinian Legislative Council and a candidate list allowing representation for Hamas, will be seen by the public of the West Bank and Gaza as granting legitimacy to the elected government.
THE YOUNG GUARD, THE 'INSIDE PEOPLE' The generation that came of age surrounding Israel's 1967 capture of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, this group - characterized by a maze of sub-camps and local and regional alliances - is anchored by the home-grown commanders of the seven-year first Intifada, which preceded the 1993 Oslo accords and the subsequent return of Arafat's Old Guard from Tunis beginning the next year.
Many of the leaders of this group were "educated at the university," a code for the years they spent in Israeli prisons, many of them studying Hebrew as well as political thought and other disciplines.
"At present, most of them are now biding their time, first of all to see what roles Abu Ala and Abu Mazen are planning to give them, if any," Regular says of the group, strongly represented in the steering committee of Fatah in the West Bank.
The group includes Palestinian deputy cabinet ministers and legislators, among them Faris Kadoura, Sufyan Abu Zaydah and Muhammad Hurani - some of whom are well known to Israelis as frequent guests on broadcast news shows.
Many of the younger politicians owe allegiance to the heads of one of number of sub-camps, among them, those headed in the Gaza Strip by former senior PA security chief Mohammed Dahlan, 43, and in the West Bank by his opposite number and off-and-on rival Jibril Rajoub, 51.
A second Dahlan rivalry is with Arafat's cousin Moussa Arafat of Gaza, considered by many Palestinians as among the two most corrupt officials of the Authority, and a man in effective command of as many as 25,000 armed PA personnel.
The best-known and arguably most popular of the Inside People is Marwan Barghouti, 45.
In a poll conducted by Shkaki's Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in May, 2002, Barghouti, at the time head of the Fatah movement in the West Bank and effective commander of Fatah Tanzim gunmen, finished second in grass-roots support only to Arafat, whose backing showed signs of waning.
The poll showed Arafat had the support of 35 percent of respondents. Barghouti, then recently jailed by Israeli security forces on suspicion of having ordered and funded deadly terrorist attacks, was cited by 19 percent.
Last June, Barghouti was sentenced to five life terms for murder, in connection with terror attacks.
Barghouti's stay in prison has been seen as both boosting his popularity and credibility among Palestinians, and shielding him from Arafat's jealousy. An organizer of Palestinian youth well before the first Intifada, Israel jailed him for six years during the 1980s, later deporting him to Jordan. He returned after the signing of the Oslo agreement.
The group has spearheaded efforts for financial reforms and democratization within the Authority, in which Old Guard figures headed by Yasser Arafat financial right-hand Mohammed Rashid, and lavishly supplied beneficiaries led by Suha Arafat have siphoned off, misappropriated, and socked away hundreds of millions of dollars or more in funds originally earmarked for the needy.
"Now the question is, which new alliances are about to be concluded," Regular says. "No matter which choices Abu Mazen and Abu Ala make, whichever camps they favor with positions, other groups will rise up in anger."
-------- spies
McCain Backs CIA Shake-up
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 15, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50314-2004Nov14.html
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) yesterday supported CIA Director Porter J. Goss's shake-up of the intelligence agency, which he described as "dysfunctional" and not providing President Bush with the information needed to conduct the war on terrorism.
Reacting to stories about potential resignations of CIA officials in response to actions taken by Goss and his staff, McCain, appearing on ABC's "This Week With George Stephanopoulos," said, "A shake-up is absolutely necessary."
But Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, which Goss formerly chaired, said the current uneasiness at the CIA has been caused by the "highly partisan inexperienced staff" that Goss brought to the agency. They have acted in a "heavy-handed or precipitous way," she said on CBS's "Face the Nation."
Harman said she agrees that some changes are needed but that Goss's staff had offended agency personnel and she feared the departure "of some talented people," including Stephen R. Kappes, head of the clandestine service who has delayed making a retirement decision until today.
McCain said that although the agency has "good and decent people" it had become dysfunctional and that "a shake-up is absolutely necessary."
--------
C.I.A. Shakeup Continues as 2 Senior Officials Quit
November 15, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/15/politics/15cnd-inte.html?hp&ex=1100581200&en=47c98c2d61b21f75&ei=5094&partner=homepage
WASHINGTON, Nov. 15 - The head of the Central Intelligence Agency's clandestine service resigned today, along with his deputy, becoming the highest-level casualties of an effort by Porter J. Goss to overhaul the agency's spying operations.
Stephen R. Kappes, the deputy director for operations, and Michael Sulick, the associate deputy director, submitted their resignations at a morning staff meeting after days of clashes with advisers to Mr. Goss, the new director of central intelligence, intelligence officials said.
Mr. Kappes and Mr. Sulick had been highly regarded within the C.I.A., and their departures suggest that Mr. Goss is confident of having a mandate from the White House to make sweeping changes at the agency, despite loud protests from former intelligence officials. The resignations of other senior officials within the operations directorate are expected to follow, according to former intelligence officials.
Tensions between the C.I.A.'s new leadership and senior career officials remain extraordinarily high, and similar divisions emerged today between senior members of Congress about whether Mr. Goss was going too far. Representative Jane Harman, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, warned of an "implosion" at the C.I.A, while Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican, said he believed that Mr. Goss should continue to do "whatever is necessary" to clean house at the agency.
In an interview, Senator McCain said he had told President Bush last week that "the C.I.A. was dysfunctional and unaccountable and that they refused to change." Senator McCain also said he believed that the C.I.A. had in some ways acted as a "rogue agency" in recent months, and accused the agency of leaking information detrimental to Mr. Bush and his re-election campaign.
That is a view that has been expressed by other Republicans close to the White House, which never regarded the C.I..A. as sufficiently supportive of the war in Iraq. But Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a Republican member of the Senate intelligence committee, expressed concern about the developments.
"There's no question when a new leader comes into an organization, there are adjustments made, and people leave," Mr. Hagel said in a telephone interview. But he said the Senate intelligence committee would be looking closely into the shakeup during closed meetings this week.
"We have to be careful here that we don't lose an entire top tier of senior experienced C.I.A. operatives and managers,'' Mr. Hagel said. "I've got some questions why these people have left, how many more are going to leave, and whether it's a personality conflict or a policy conflict. If we find ourselves without a senior group of C.I.A. hands that would certainly not enhance American security, and might undermine our security."
There was no immediate formal announcement today from the C.I.A. about the resignations of Mr. Kappes and Mr. Sulick. As deputy director for operations, Mr. Kappes had been in charge of the agency's spying and other covert operations worldwide.
Mr. Kappes is a former Marine who had spent more than 20 years at the C.I.A., serving as station chief in Moscow and a Middle Eastern capital. Before assuming the post in August, when he succeeded James L. Pavitt, Mr. Kappes had been Mr. Pavitt's principal deputy.
Mr. Sulick had been associate deputy for counterintelligence under Mr. Pavitt, and moved up to become Mr. Kappes' principal deputy.
Both Mr. Kappes and Mr. Sulick had clashed in recent days with the former House Republican aides whom Mr. Goss has brought with him to the C.I.A. as top deputies.
--------
CIA Plans to Purge Its Agency
Knut Royce
Newsday; Sierra Times
11. 15. 04
http://www.sierratimes.com/04/11/15/CIA_Plans_to_Purge_Its_Agency.htm
Sources say White House has ordered new chief to eliminate officers who were disloyal to Bush.
Washington - The White House has ordered the new CIA director, Porter Goss, to purge the agency of officers believed to have been disloyal to President George W. Bush or of leaking damaging information to the media about the conduct of the Iraq war and the hunt for Osama bin Laden, according to knowledgeable sources.
"The agency is being purged on instructions from the White House," said a former senior CIA official who maintains close ties to both the agency and to the White House. "Goss was given instructions ... to get rid of those soft leakers and liberal Democrats. The CIA is looked on by the White House as a hotbed of liberals and people who have been obstructing the president's agenda."
One of the first casualties appears to be Stephen R. Kappes, deputy director of clandestine services, the CIA's most powerful division. The Washington Post reported yesterday that Kappes had tendered his resignation after a confrontation with Goss' chief of staff, Patrick Murray, but at the behest of the White House had agreed to delay his decision till tomorrow.
But the former senior CIA official said that the White House "doesn't want Steve Kappes to reconsider his resignation. That might be the spin they put on it, but they want him out." He said the job had already been offered to the former chief of the European Division who retired after a spat with then-CIA Director George Tenet.
Another recently retired top CIA official said he was unsure Kappes had "officially resigned, but I do know he was unhappy."
Without confirming or denying that the job offer had been made, a CIA spokesman asked Newsday to withhold naming the former officer because of his undercover role over the years. He said he had no comment about Goss' personnel plans, but he added that changes at the top are not unusual when new directors come in.
On Friday John E. McLaughlin, a 32-year veteran of the intelligence division who served as acting CIA director before Goss took over, announced that he was retiring. The spokesman said that the retirement had been planned and was unrelated to the Kappes resignation or to other morale problems inside the CIA.
It could not be learned yesterday if the White House had identified Kappes, a respected operations officer, as one of the officials "disloyal" to Bush.
"The president understands and appreciates the sacrifices made by the members of the intelligence community in the war against terrorism," said a White House official of the report that he was purging the CIA of "disloyal" officials. " . . . The suggestion [that he ordered a purge] is inaccurate."
But another former CIA official who retains good contacts within the agency said that Goss and his top aides, who served on his staff when Goss was chairman of the House intelligence committee, believe the agency had relied too much over the years on liaison work with foreign intelligence agencies and had not done enough to develop its own intelligence collection system.
"Goss is not a believer in liaison work," said this retired official. But, he said, the CIA's "best intelligence really comes from liaison work. The CIA is simply not going to develop the assets [agents and case officers] that would meet the intelligence requirements."
Tensions between the White House and the CIA have been the talk of the town for at least a year, especially as leaks about the mishandling of the Iraq war have dominated front pages.
Some of the most damaging leaks came from Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA's Bin Laden unit, who wrote a book anonymously called "Imperial Hubris" that criticized what he said was the administration's lack of resolve in tracking down the al-Qaida chieftain and the reallocation of intelligence and military manpower from the war on terrorism to the war in Iraq. Scheuer announced Thursday that he was resigning from the agency.
-------- us
Government looking at military draft lists
The Brownsville Herald
By ALMA WALZER
November 15, 2004
http://www.brownsvilleherald.com/ts_more.php?id=62232_0_10_0_C
McALLEN, - It's taken one year, seven months and 19 days of combat in Iraq for the Lone Star State to lose 100 of its own.
Texas is the second state, after California, to lose 100 service members, according to The Associated Press.
With continuing war in Iraq and U.S. armed forces dispersed to so many other locations around the globe, Americans may be wondering if compulsory military service could begin again for the first time since the Vietnam War era.
The Selective Service System (SSS) and the U.S. Department of Education now are gearing up to compare their computer records, to make sure all men between the ages of 18 and 25 who are required to register for a military draft have done so.
The SSS and the education department will begin comparing their lists on Jan. 1, 2005, according to a memo authored by Jack Martin, acting Selective Service director.
While similar record checks have been done periodically for the past 10 years, Martin's memo is dated Oct. 28, just a few days before the Nov. 2 presidential election, a hard-fought campaign in which the question of whether the nation might need to reinstate a military draft was raised in debates and on the stump.
It took several more days, until Nov. 4, for the document to reach the Federal Register, the official daily publication for rules and notices of federal agencies and organizations.
The memo was also produced after the U.S. House voted 402-2 on Oct. 5, against House Resolution 163, a bill that would have required all young people, including women, to serve two years of military service.
Under federal law, a military draft cannot be started without congressional support.
About 94 percent of all men are properly registered for a draft, according to Richard Flahavan, associate director of the office of public and intergovernmental affairs for SSS.
Martin's memo is just a routine thing, Flahavan said.
"Back in 1982 a federal law was passed that basically linked federal grants, student loans and federal assistance to students with Selective Service," Flahavan said. "You had to register with Selective Service with a Social Security number (in order to receive federal assistance), and as a consequence of the law the Department of Education came up with an agreement on how to exchange and compare data to comply with the law.
"It just so happens that the current agreement in effect expires next month," Flahavan said. "All we did is update the agreement slightly, but it has no substantive changes. There is nothing new or shocking to link this to some type of draft right around the corner because its all been in place for almost 18 years."
Flahavan said the written agreements between SSS and the Department of Education normally run for about four or five years and suggested that a reporter search the 1999 or 2000 records of the Federal Register for the most agreement.
A search of the Federal Register by The Monitor found four such agreements between the two agencies, with effective dates as follows: Jan. 1, 1995; July 1, 1997; Jan. 1, 2000; and July 1, 2002.
All four agreements lasted for 18 months, during which time the SSS and the Department of Education could complete their comparisons.
The most recent agreement, which began July 1, 2002, actually expired Jan. 1, 2004, according to federal records located by The Monitor.
"This has nothing to with current events," Flahavan said. "This is just the periodic renewal of previous agreements - this one is 18 months but normally it runs four years and that's why we're doing it now. I'm not quite sure why it's 18 months versus the normal number of years."
Flahavan said the agency was required to place the agreement in the Federal Register.
"That's fine and we did," Flahavan said. "We believe the public wouldn't stand for a draft that isn't fair and equitable.
"And the only way to be fair and equitable is if everyone who should register is registered, because that's the pool from which the people who would be drafted would be selected from. So you want everyone who should be in the pot in the pot," Flahavan said.
U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Austin, who officially begins representing western Hidalgo County residents in January, said Congress has voted on record against a draft.
"It was a near unanimous vote in the House," Doggett said. "When things are filed in the Federal Register, there will be standards, and they are a reminder that if we cannot get more international participation that the risk of a draft remains out there.
"And I think we do need people to remain watchful of this possibility."
Doggett said one type of "draft" was already being used by the military.
"I'm concerned that a very real form of the draft is there now for those already in the service," Doggett said. "People are being forced to stay in beyond their commitment, and that's an indication of being overextended.
"I want us to pursue policies that don't overextend us and involve more international participation, so that Americans don't have to do all the dying and endure all the pain for these international activities," Doggett said.
Flahavan said the computer records check would help Selective Service with its compliance rates.
"From 1999 to 2000, it was dropping about a percent a year," Flahavan said. "It's now inching back up about a percent a year. Last year it was 93 percent.
"At the end of 2004 we anticipate about a 94 percent compliance rate," Flahavan said. "We're pleased we've got it back on the rise and that's where we want to keep it - that's our goal."
Draft Gear Up? Who Has To Register?
All male U.S. citizens and male aliens living in the U.S. between the ages of 18 and 25
Dual nationals of the U.S. and another country, regardless of where they live
Young men who are in prison or mental institutions do not have to regsiter while they are committed, but must do so if they are released and not reached age 26
Disabled men who live at home and can move about independently.
Myths
Contrary to popular belief, only sons and the last son to carry a family name must register and they can be drafted.
What Happens In A Draft
Congress would likely approve a military draft in a time of crisis, in which the mission requires more troops than are in the volunteer military.
Selective Service procedures would treat married men or those with children the same as single men. The first men to be called up will be those whose 20th birthday falls during that year, followed by those age 21, 22, 23,24 and 25.
The last men to be called are 18 and 19 years of age.
Historical Facts
The last man to be drafted was in June 1973.
Number of Drafted for WWI : 2.8 million
Number of Drafted for WWII: 10 million
Number of Drafted for the Korean War: 1.5 million
Number of Drafted for the Vietnam War: 1.8 million
Source: Selective Service System
------
Commanders plead for armor
November 15, 2004
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20041115-124102-1142r.htm
Commanders have requested to nearly double the number of armored utility vehicles in Iraq to 8,000, in yet another shift in equipment needs to keep pace with an insurgency that continues to strike troops.
Acting Army Secretary Les Brownlee told of the newest requisition during a recent hourlong interview with The Washington Times.
It is the commanders' job in the field to devise the tactics to defeat an enemy made up of foreign terrorists, Saddam Hussein loyalists and criminals freed by the fallen dictator.
Back at the Pentagon, it has been Mr. Brownlee's job to make sure they have the guns, ammunition and equipment.
Perhaps in Army history there has never been a war whose character changed so quickly and required a whole new set of tactics and equipment - within weeks.
"Suddenly, a different ballgame," Mr. Brownlee said.
U.S. war planners never foresaw that the fall of Baghdad would spawn a new enemy able to attack soldiers and Marines no matter their battlefield position. Rear-line support troops became just as vulnerable as front-line ones.
That meant the Army suddenly had a need for armored Humvee utility vehicles, armored trucks, more body armor and huge shipments of spare parts.
The problem became so acute by December that Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, then the top commander in Iraq, sent an urgent letter to the Army saying, "I cannot continue to support sustained combat operations with [readiness] rates this low." Soldiers were being killed by the score by roadside bombs, or improvised explosive devises (IEDs), that ripped through a Humvee's thin plating.
Within weeks, Mr. Brownlee convened a summit at the Pentagon of defense contractors who design and build armor.
In February, he traveled to AM General, which makes the ubiquitous Humvee, and to O'Gara-Hess & Eisenhardt, which makes armor. He got the chief executives in one room.
"I told them to show me the fastest rate at which they can build these things," Mr. Brownlee recalled.
AM General responded by increasing production of "up-armored" Humvees (as opposed to "thin skin" Humvees) from 150 to 450 a month.
By this fall, the Army had put 5,000 in Iraq, only to learn a few weeks ago that commanders had upped the need to 8,000.
"We had soldiers killed by IEDs in up-armored vehicles," the acting secretary said. "If they make them powerful enough they can blow up just about anything. But they clearly have a better chance" in an armored one.
On a second front, the Army needed to start providing armor kits so mechanics in the field could plate the basic 5- and 10-ton trucks that insurgents found as easy prey. To date, the Army has sent more than 9,000 kits to Iraq.
"I'm not sure anybody in the Army ever thought we would start armoring our truck fleet," Mr. Brownlee said. "But that's what we're doing."
The Army has lost more than 800 soldiers in combat deaths in Iraq. Critics say a failure by the Pentagon to predict the insurgency left too few service members in Iraq and many of those that were there lacked body and vehicle armor.
"I expected once we took the Army down and took the main forces down, we would then begin the programs we were planning to reconstruct the country and get things moving," Mr. Brownlee said.
In addition to the armor issue, Mr. Brownlee convened a special task force to come up with ways to defeat IEDs, set up new training at Fort Polk, La., that included anti-ambush techniques and brought in the Army Corps of Engineers to shepherd many construction projects.
Mr. Brownlee, 65, a retired Army colonel who earned the Silver Star, Bronze Star and Purple Heart in Vietnam, never envisioned such a large portfolio. He came to the Pentagon in 2001 as undersecretary of the Army, after serving as Sen. John W. Warner's staff director on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Mr. Brownlee said he realized Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had a penchant for CEOs to run the military branches. Mr. Rumsfeld picked Thomas White, a retired Army general and former Enron executive, as Mr. Brownlee's boss. But the White-Rumsfeld relationship fell apart over a sharp difference of opinion on force transformation.
For months, the Senate Armed Services Committee refused to act on the nomination of Air Force Secretary James G. Roche to succeed Mr. White. Finally, Mr. Roche bailed out.
The power gap has left Mr. Brownlee, at 18 months the longest serving acting Army secretary.
Powerful senators, including Ted Stevens, Alaska Republican, and Mr. Warner, Virginia Republican, supported Mr. Brownlee as the next nominee. But Mr. Rumsfeld refused and backed another businessman, Francis Harvey, whose nomination is pending in the Senate.
Mr. Brownlee has put in a steady stream of 14-hour workdays, and travels to Iraq every three months.
"Now, down deep, I hoped they might recognize that and honor me with the job," he said. "Things don't always work out the way you hope they do."
The Army now requires one-year tours in Iraq, twice as long as the Marine Corps. Mr. Brownlee said commanders want to continue that policy, though unpopular with some soldiers. But he has ordered the Army staff to draft plans for shorter tours if January elections and expanded Iraq security forces allow the Pentagon to reduce U.S. troops in the country.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- death penalty
Death Sentences Hit 30-Year Low in U.S.
Activists See Shift in Juries' Attitudes
By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 15, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49905-2004Nov14.html
The number of U.S. convicts imprisoned with death sentences dropped in 2003 to its lowest level in 30 years, helping to provoke the third straight annual decline in the nation's death row population and signaling the continuation of a slow trend away from state- and federally ordered executions, according to data released yesterday by the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics.
The data stirred activists to speculate that support for the death penalty is dropping among jury panels, which in many states now are the only groups eligible to impose it. Only 144 new inmates incarcerated in 2003 were sentenced to execution, well below an annual average of 297 between 1994 and 2000, the bureau's report stated.
The number of executions that were carried out also dropped, from 71 in 2002 to 65 in 2003, while the average length of time between death row sentencings and executions continued to grow. More than 40 percent of those on death row are now imprisoned in three states -- California, Texas and Florida -- while more than two-thirds of the executions were carried out in Texas, Oklahoma and North Carolina.
The Justice Department -- led in recent years by an attorney general who strongly supports the death penalty -- did not return a phone call seeking comment about the data. But Robin M. Maher, director of the American Bar Association's Death Penalty Representation Project, said, "The declining figures probably indicate a loss of confidence in the fairness and reliability of the death penalty."
Maher said her group has noticed "that juries overall . . . seem more cautious about imposing a death sentence," perhaps because of highly publicized recent cases in which police and judicial errors have contributed to death sentences for convicts who were later exonerated through DNA testing or judicial reviews. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, a group critical of the sanction, 117 death row inmates have been exonerated in the past 30 years, including 21 in Florida and 18 in Illinois. In 2003, outgoing Illinois Gov. George H. Ryan commuted the sentences of every death row inmate, citing what he described as a concern about potential errors.
Ryan's decision accounted for about 60 percent of the 2003 decrease in the number of inmates on death row. But his actions were complemented that year by legislation enacted in six of the 38 states that allow the death penalty to restrain or exclude its application with defendants who are mentally retarded, and legislation imposed by two other states -- Nevada and Idaho -- restricting the authority of judges to impose the death penalty without the support of juries.
Charles Hobson, a lawyer with the Sacramento-based Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, which supports crime victims, expressed skepticism about the data's significance. He noted that no state acted in 2003 to bar the death penalty altogether and said that making year-to-year comparisons is difficult because the number of such sentences is routinely small.
"The numbers are decreasing, but this is almost entirely explained by what was done in Illinois," Hobson said. Claims of judicial errors are overstated, and "concluding anything with respect to [the opinions of] juries is purely guesswork," he added.
Two states -- Texas and Colorado -- actually expanded their authority to impose the death penalty in 2003. Texas alone has accounted for more than a third of the 885 inmate executions since 1977, according to the bureau's report.
--------
Justice Dept. Reports a 30-Year Low in Death Sentences and Fewer Inmates on Death Row
November 15, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/15/politics/15deathrow.html
WASHINGTON, Nov. 14 (AP) - The number of people sentenced to death reached a 30-year low in 2003, when the death row population fell for the third year in a row, the Justice Department reported Sunday.
The department said that 144 inmates in 25 states were given the death penalty last year, 24 fewer than in 2002 and less than half the average of 297 from 1994 to 2000.
Death penalty opponents say the report shows how wary the public is of executions, heightened by concerns about whether the punishment is administered fairly and publicity about those wrongly convicted. Illinois emptied its death row in 2003 after several inmates were found to be innocent.
"What we're seeing is hesitation on the death penalty, skepticism, reluctance," said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. "I do think there is some concern about the death penalty, and it's reflected in death sentences from juries."
Opponents also point to other possible reasons, including continuing fallout from Supreme Court decisions requiring that juries be told that life in prison without parole is an alternative to death.
Mr. Dieter said 47 states now offered a sentence of life without parole as an option for at least some convictions, compared with 30 in 1993.
Supporters say they doubt the decline signifies a major shift in public opinion about the death penalty, which is in effect in 38 states and the federal justice system.
"I don't think the numbers mean a lot, quite frankly," said Dianne Clements, president of Justice for All, an advocacy group for crime victims. "I don't think it means a change in death penalty attitudes. I think it means the numbers change."
At the end of last year, 3,374 prisoners were awaiting execution, 188 fewer than in 2002, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Illinois accounted for 91 percent of the decline, the result of the decision by George Ryan, then the governor, to commute the death sentences of 167 inmates to life in prison and to pardon four others.
Nationally, 267 people were removed from death row last year. That was the largest drop since 1976, when the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty, according to the report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Last year 65 people, all men, were executed. Texas again was the leader, with 24, followed by Oklahoma, with 14, and North Carolina, with 7. No other state had more than 3.
All but one were killed by lethal injection. The other was electrocuted.
From 1977 through 2003, 885 inmates were executed by 32 states and the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Two-thirds were in five states: Texas, Virginia, Oklahoma, Missouri and Florida.
The report also found that 56 percent of death row inmates were white and 42 percent were black. Hispanics, who can be of any race, accounted for 12 percent of inmates whose ethnicity was known.
The states with the largest numbers of death row inmates were California, with 629; Texas, 453; and Florida, 364.
Ten people died while awaiting execution in 2003, six from natural causes and four from suicide.
-------- drug war
U.S. Plans Assault On Afghan Heroin Poppy Growing Still Widespread
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 15, 2004; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A49908-2004Nov14?language=printer
Worried about a vast and still growing heroin industry in Afghanistan, the Bush administration has devised a more aggressive counternarcotics strategy aimed at greater eradication of poppy fields, promotion of alternative crops and prosecution of traffickers.
The plan, a mix of stronger carrots and sticks, attempts to bring more coordination, more money and more muscle to Afghan and international programs launched over the past three years that have not made much of a dent in the lucrative drug business.
The intensified campaign stops short of using U.S. troops to target opium labs and attack drug kingpins. Instead, at the Pentagon's insistence, U.S. forces will be limited to supporting Afghan law enforcement efforts by providing airlift and intelligence leads to Afghan police and by helping tighten security along Afghanistan's borders, administration officials said.
The new approach emerged from a high-level administration review this summer of U.S. operations in Afghanistan. The review acknowledged the gravity of the drug problem and the ineffectiveness of past measures to confront it, according to several officials who participated.
President Bush is scheduled to be briefed this week on the revised U.S. strategy, which his principal national security advisers approved in outline form in mid-September. To fund it, officials expect to notify Congress soon of plans to shift more than $700 million from other programs into Afghan counternarcotics activities in 2005. That compares with about $123 million spent by the Pentagon and State Department in 2004.
"The issue in Afghanistan, I think from my viewpoint, is the drug issue. . . . That's the next big challenge in Afghanistan," Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a meeting of the Institute of Land Warfare earlier this month.
In an impoverished country with an average per capita income of less than $200 a year, the cash lure of the poppy plant is hard to resist. Afghanistan ranks as the world's largest producer of heroin, with more than 450 square miles of poppies under cultivation -- an area about the size of Los Angeles.
The country's earnings from the opium trade, estimated last year to exceed $2.3 billion, amount to more than half of Afghanistan's legal gross domestic product. Assessments of this year's crop by the CIA and the United Nations are due soon and will show a jump to record levels, officials said.
Most of the opium produced by Afghanistan goes to Europe, not the United States, feeding 95 percent of Europe's heroin demand. But the drug business has become a critical strategic concern for U.S. authorities because it helps finance the activities of insurgents and regional warlords. U.S. and Afghan officials now frequently cite the danger of Afghanistan becoming a "narco state," with drug-related corruption threatening to undermine the country's fledging democratic institutions.
Given the scope and urgency of the problem, some in the administration, in Congress and elsewhere have argued for direct U.S. military action against traffickers. They say Afghan forces are not yet large or strong enough to manage enforcement actions alone or ensure security for aerial spraying and other eradication efforts.
"Short-term, in order to eradicate the poppy and eliminate the income for those shooting at American soldiers, the U.S. military is going to have to provide protection to those doing eradication," said Rep. Mark Edward Souder (R-Ind.), who chairs a Government Reform subcommittee on drug policy. "There is no other option."
But U.S. commanders and senior Pentagon civilians contend that battling the drug trade is primarily a law enforcement problem, not a military one, and must be led by homegrown Afghan forces. Enmeshing U.S. troops in drug fights, they say, would alienate many Afghans -- some of whom have become useful intelligence sources -- and also divert attention from the core U.S. military missions of combating insurgents and aiding reconstruction.
"The last thing we want to do is have U.S. forces running around the countryside doing this sort of thing," said Col. David Lamm, chief of staff for the U.S. military command in Afghanistan. "That would change our relationship with the Afghan people, which right now is very positive."
Pentagon guidance allows U.S. troops in Afghanistan to destroy drugs they come across in the course of combat operations against al Qaeda and Taliban fighters. But senior defense officials resisted a proposal earlier this year that would have designated counternarcotics a core military mission in Afghanistan.
"The key to success there is not turning this into a military mission for the Americans," Douglas J. Feith, the Pentagon's chief policy official, said in an interview. "It's the Afghan government trying to enforce its own laws, and what we're interested in doing is building up their capacity so they could do it."
At the same time, Feith said, U.S. troops, who number about 15,000 in Afghanistan, will "be substantially more involved" in countering the drug trade. "There certainly is a sense this is a problem that we need to address because it could get to the point where it could endanger key goals of ours in Afghanistan," he said.
Lt. Gen. David Barno, the senior military commander in Afghanistan, has proposed expanding U.S. military counternarcotics assistance in three ways: by focusing more intelligence-gathering assets on suspected drug operations; by ferrying Afghan counternarcotics police in U.S. military aircraft; and by providing emergency support.
Two other broader security initiatives put forward by Barno would also enhance the country's ability to go after traffickers, defense officials said. One is a plan to strengthen key border checkpoints with more forces and equipment. The other would enlist U.S. troops in extended and specialized training of Afghan police.
After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001 and the fall of the Taliban government, Britain agreed to take the lead on counternarcotics -- part of an international nation-building plan that also gave the Germans the lead on police and the Italians the lead on courts. But some British strategies have faltered badly.
A plan in 2002 to compensate farmers who destroyed their poppy crops ended up spurring poppy cultivation. A 2003 effort to rely on local governors to eradicate poppy fields was misused for political purposes.
Reflecting concern in Washington about Britain's leadership on the issue, Souder's House subcommittee held a hearing in April with the unusually pointed title: "Are the British Counternarcotics Efforts Going Wobbly?"
The new U.S. approach, administration officials said, has been developed in coordination with the British and with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who made clear publicly this month that going after traffickers would be a top priority of his newly elected government.
The U.S. plan calls for eradicating an area five to seven times larger than the nearly 10,000 acres of poppy fields destroyed this year. The destruction is to be offset by more than $100 million in aid to Afghan farmers to plant wheat, barley, corn and other crops and for other rural economic development projects.
A special Afghan interdiction force, trained by the British, and other Afghan counternarcotics police units will be expanded. Additionally, a special task force of prosecutors and judges to handle drug cases is being set up and will be housed in a secure facility -- a refurbished wing of the Pol-e-Charki prison on the outskirts of Kabul.
Another element of the plan includes the launching of a public awareness campaign to stress to farmers and other Afghans that the drug business poses a serious menace to the country and will not be tolerated.
Although Pentagon officials do not foresee any increase in U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan to support the new strategy, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration plans to increase its ranks in the country from eight agents and analysts to as many as 30, according to Doug Wankel, a former DEA agent who now serves as the counternarcotics coordinator at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.
"We have to make an impact in the next year," Wankel said in a phone interview last week. "And I would say, in the next two years, we have to show this pendulum swinging back in the other direction or we run a real risk of losing Afghanistan."
Others warn, however, against expecting a quick solution or taking precipitous action that fails to cushion stronger eradication and interdiction measures with a substantial infusion of rural economic aid.
"Given the scope of the problem, it is not one that will get solved in one year," Lamm said in a phone interview. "We need to take a very deliberate, systematic and long-range approach to the problem or else we run the risk in many provinces of destabilizing the country."
-------- homeland security / national intelligence
Pentagon Finds First Responders Inadequately Prepared for WMD Attacks Against Army Bases
Deseret Morning News
November 15, 2004
http://www.nti.org/d_newswire/issues/2004_11_17.html#014DE519
U.S. Defense Department inspectors have found that first responders are not prepared to respond to WMD attacks against U.S. Army bases, the Deseret Morning News reported Monday (see GSN, Oct. 7).
"Plans to implement an Installation Preparedness Program for first responders were substantially fragmented and ineffective," says an Army Audit Agency report obtained by the Morning News.
A survey of Army bases in 2000 found "that installation first responders weren't adequately equipped, trained or funded to respond to all facets of a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and/or high-yield explosive incident," the report states.
In May 2001, the Army provided base commanders with "eight critical tasks" to help improve training, equipment and funding for first responders. The report found, however, such efforts have been "fragmented," "ineffective" and "not adequate."
Officials overseeing different groups of first responders failed to coordinate training or consult with WMD specialists on training or equipment, while the Pentagon had not developed a doctrine for WMD training, the report states. In addition, money that was supposed to be used for training was regularly diverted to unrelated work.
The report, though, is almost a year old, and Army officials said that improvement measures have been taken since its release, the Morning News reported (Lee Davidson, Deseret Morning News, Nov. 15).
-------- torture
Private jet takes men for 'torture'
November 15, 2004
The Australian
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,11387412%255E2703,00.html
LONDON The Sunday Times : An executive jet is being used by US intelligence agencies to fly terrorist suspects to countries that use torture in their prisons.
The movements of the Gulfstream 5, leased by agents from the US Defence Department and the CIA, are detailed in confidential logs obtained by The Sunday Times which cover more than 300 flights.
Countries with poor human rights records to which the Americans have delivered prisoners include Egypt, Syria and Uzbekistan, according to the files. The logs have prompted allegations from critics that the agency is using such regimes to carry out "torture by proxy" - a charge denied by the US Government.
The Gulfstream and a similarly anonymous-looking Boeing 737 are hired by US agents from Premier Executive Transport Services, a private company in Massachusetts.
The white 737 is a frequent visitor to US military bases, although its exact role has not been revealed.
More is known about the Gulfstream, which can carry 14 passengers. Movements detailed in the logs can be matched with several sightings of the Gulfstream at airports when terrorist suspects have been bundled away by US counter-terrorist agents.
Analysis of the plane's flight plans, covering more than two years, shows that it always departs from Washington DC. It has flown to 49 destinations outside the US, including the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba and other US military bases, as well as Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Morocco, Afghanistan, Libya and Uzbekistan. Its prisoner transfer missions were first reported in May by the Swedish television program Cold Facts. It described how US agents had arrived in Stockholm in the Gulfstream in December 2001 to take two suspected terrorists from Sweden to Egypt.
At the time of what was presented as an "extradition" to Egypt, Swedish ministers made no public mention of American involvement in the detention of Ahmed Agiza, 42, and Muhammed Zery, 35, who was later cleared.
Witnesses described seeing the prisoners handed to US agents whose faces were masked by hoods. The clothes of the handcuffed prisoners were cut off and they were dressed in nappies covered by orange overalls before being forcibly given sedatives by suppository.
The Gulfstream flew them to Egypt, where both prisoners claimed they were beaten and tortured with electric shocks to their genitals.
A month before the Swedish extradition, the same Gulfstream was identified by Masood Anwar, a Pakistani newspaper reporter in Karachi. Airport staff told Anwar they had seen Jamil Gasim, a Yemeni student who was suspected of links to al-Qa'ida, being bundled aboard the jet by a group of white men wearing masks.
The jet took Gasim to Jordan, after which he has disappeared.
"The entire operation was so mysterious that all persons involved in the operation, including US troops, were wearing masks," a source at the airport told Anwar.
On another mission, in January 2002, a Gulfstream was seen at Jakarta airport to deport Muhammad Saad Iqbal, 24, an al-Qa'ida suspect who was said by US officials to be an acquaintance of Richard Reid, the British "shoe-bomber" jailed in the US for trying to blow up a flight from Paris to Miami.
An Indonesian official told an American newspaper that Iqbal was "hustled aboard an unmarked, US-registered Gulfstream . . . and flown to Egypt", where almost nothing has been heard of him since.
The CIA Gulfstream's flight logs show it flew from Washington to Cairo, where it picked up Egyptian security agents, before apparently going on to Jakarta to take Iqbal to Egypt.
Some former CIA operatives and human rights campaigners claim the agency and the Pentagon use a process called "rendition" to send suspects to countries such as Egypt and Jordan. They are then tortured largely to gain information for the Americans who, it is alleged, encourage these countries to use aggressive methods banned under US law.
-------- POLITICS
-------- corruption
A Watchdog Follows the Money in Iraq
November 15, 2004
By ERIK ECKHOLM
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/15/politics/15reconstruct.html?pagewanted=all
If leaders at the Army Corps of Engineers expected the agency's pesky contracting director, Bunnatine H. Greenhouse, to be forced out quietly, they were wrong.
From 1997, when Ms. Greenhouse joined the Army's sprawling construction agency with orders to end what some called casual and clubby contracting practices, Corps veterans grumbled that she was a troublemaker. As former officials describe it, some officers regarded her as a stickler for cumbersome rules on things like sharing contracts with small businesses and ensuring open competition for bids.
She was also an African-American woman and a civilian, trying to shake up what one former Corps commander has called a "good ole boy" network of longtime officers and favored companies.
Things reached a climax as the Corps was thrust into the center of the Iraq war effort, given the task of distributing billions of dollars in reconstruction money. For the urgent repair of Iraqi oil fields, the Corps turned - too readily and too generously, Ms. Greenhouse charged in bruising internal debates last year - to the Houston-based Halliburton Company with one of the biggest single contracts of the war.
Now the Army Corps of Engineers is trying to demote Ms. Greenhouse, 60, or push her into retirement. To the surprise of no one who knows her, she is unbowed, charging in a much publicized letter of Oct. 21 that the Corps has shown a pattern of favoritism toward Halliburton that imperils "the integrity of the federal contracting program."
"I never dreamed it would come to this," Ms. Greenhouse said in an interview last week at her home in Reston, Va., as she described her long, determined climb through the labyrinths of Pentagon contracting, and her alarm over what she saw as the Corps' inappropriately cozy relations with certain companies.
With the bluntness and rectitude that has angered some of her superiors, she explained why she was not taking the vested retirement her commander had pointedly dangled.
"When our officers don't understand that a decision is giving one company an exceptional advantage," she said, "when they don't understand that a decision doesn't protect the public trust, then it's my job to make them understand it."
Ms. Greenhouse, known as Bunny, sent her letter to the acting Army secretary, with copies to Congress and the news media. The Pentagon was forced to promise an inquiry and to protect her position in the meantime, and her allegations drew the interest of the F.B.I.
Officials of the Corps decline to comment on Ms. Greenhouse's charges or the personnel proceedings, beyond a general statement that the agency "fully supports the rights and responsibilities of all Federal employees to use established procedures to ensure governmental actions comply with applicable laws and regulation."
Halliburton has denied any wrongdoing, and both the company and senior Pentagon officials involved in the war effort have argued, in defense of the noncompetitive, costly projects she criticizes, that hair-splitting was neither possible nor wise in the ominous chaos after the Iraq invasion. Halliburton had vital experience and ties with the American military in the Middle East, officials have said to explain their early reliance on the company.
Ms. Greenhouse traces her dogged resistance to her upbringing. She grew up in a segregated cotton town in Louisiana, with parents who barely finished grade school.
She beamed as she described how her parents instilled religious devotion - she sings in a church choir every Sunday - and a drive to excel. She talked of two sisters who earned doctorates, and the triumphs of her brother Elvin Hayes, the N.B.A. all-star and a player who, incidentally, was known to coaches and teammates for his uncomfortably brusque talk. ("I speak what I feel," he once explained.)
"I grew up feeling there was nothing I couldn't do," Ms. Greenhouse said. "I try to instill that attitude in my employees, too."
Ms. Greenhouse studied math at Southern University, and in 1967 she joined a high school in Louisiana as its first black teacher. Her husband was a military procurement officer, and after years of teaching while following his postings around the country, she entered government herself in 1981.
As she applied herself to successive contracting jobs, Ms. Greenhouse also picked up three master's degrees, in business management, engineering and national resources strategy. "It appealed to my love of mathematics," she said of contract management. "I like structure and rules. I don't ever want to feel like I am in La-La Land."
And so, as the Corps's chief custodian of rules devised to ensure fair competition, Ms. Greenhouse said she found herself troubled by some recent deals with Halliburton.
In March 2003, she saw no reason why the Corps should give the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root, without competition, a five-year, $7 billion contract to repair oil fields. If an emergency required a quick deal, it should be for only one year at most, she argued. (The contract was given for five years over her objection, but later, after a public outcry, was cut short and put to competition.)
In December, she said, she was outraged when Corps leaders went behind her back to issue a legal document approving the unusually high prices KBR had charged for fuel imports to Iraq - prices that the Pentagon's own auditors called inflated by at least $61 million and that are now the subject of criminal inquiries.
This spring, she questioned why, after four years, an expiring Halliburton logistics contract in the Balkans had to be extended for an extra 11 months and $165 million on grounds that no other company could do the job in time.
"There is no legitimate explanation for what I witnessed," she said last week of the succession of disputes. The Corps, she said, "was at the point of knowingly violating federal acquisition regulations in favor of Halliburton. It can't get much worse than that."
To the Halliburton defense that critics like Ms. Greenhouse did not understand the urgency of wartime, she replies, "Of course I care about the soldiers who are dying."
"That $61 million could have gone for body armor for the soldiers," she said in the interview.
On Oct. 6, the commander of the Corps, Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock, informed Ms. Greenhouse in a letter that because her last two performance ratings had been "less than fully successful," she must be removed from her post as chief of all contracting and demoted from the Senior Executive Service. She is eligible for retirement, he pointed out.
Corps leaders had tried to demote Ms. Greenhouse a year earlier, but that effort was derailed in hearings where a former commander of the agency - the one who brought Ms. Greenhouse to the Corps in 1997 with a mandate to make contracting more professional - praised her work.
"She did an outstanding job," wrote the former commander, Lt. Gen. Joe N. Ballard, in a sworn affidavit in September 2003.
Many senior officials of the Corps, said General Ballard, who retired in 2000, "were associated with favorite companies" and resisted Ms. Greenhouse's "strict and ethical application" of rules intended to encourage fairness and competition.
General Ballard added, "I did not believe that females and minorities are always treated fairly at the Corps because of long-standing 'good ole boy' mentality by a number of members of the Command."
The Corps refused to comment on General Ballard's allegations, simply stating its dedication to equal opportunity, fairness and respect.
Through all the recent turmoil, Ms. Greenhouse said, she has continued going to work each day, watching her staff get whittled down and sitting through meetings in which superiors have made sarcastic remarks about whistle-blowers.
"I pass colleagues in the hall who say, 'We're proud of you,' and 'You go get 'em Bunny,' " she said. "But they say this while keeping their heads straight ahead."
-------- propaganda wars
Empire of the Senseless: A Review of Bill Blum's Freeing The World to Death
LewRockwell.com
by Adam Engel
November 15, 2004
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig4/engel8.html
Bill Blum, one of the great American historians of the post WWII period, surely one of the boldest and most interesting, has his work cut out for him. From 1946 until now, this moment, and in the foreseeable future, the U.S. Empire's record of invasions, interventions and general malicious meddling in the governments, societies and "freedoms" of foreign peoples is virtually unparalleled in the history of meddlesome Empires. Never have so many been made so miserable so often by so few. And it's all on the public record, or enough of it to fill volumes denser by orders of magnitude than the two previous volumes, Killing Hope and Rogue State, both sizeable books Bill Blum has already written (he also wrote a fascinating autobiography, West Bloc Dissident, regarding the pursuit of a life of intellectual liberty in the totalitarian mindscape of the "free world").
Unlike most "academic" historians, Blum's style is to rely not on obscure scholarly journals or information grudgingly released by the government under the Freedom of Information Act, but on everyday newspapers accessible to all: the bulk of his citations come from dailies such as the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, the London Guardian, The Observer and others, both full-size and tabloid, that millions read regularly as hard-copy or on the web but do not penetrate. Unlike Blum, they/we do not read between the lines, but accept the relentless propaganda churned out by Washington and Wall Street and dutifully "reported" by the nations "most respected" papers as truth. Hence the charade of "objective journalism" in which every uncomfortable fact or point of view is "balanced" by a cheerful explanation of "what's really going on" by a government official or hack journalist/lobbyist whose job it is to help the public "understand" the news.
It's not that Blum "trusts" the mainstream newspapers more than the "alternative" journals and websites he himself writes for, or that he hasn't waited years for various tidbits to be released under the FIOA. Rather, it is his method to record and comment upon events that are exposed to all, accessible to all, even read by quite a few, but seldom really seen for what it is and, on such rare occasions, never believed. To believe the truth about U.S. Foreign policy would be to fight against it with every fiber of one's being, or live a quiet, desperate lie. Fortunately, Blum has chosen the former, for if we assume that what has taken place since the end of WWII has actually taken place, that it is not the result of a conspiracy to fool us into thinking the world is bad or worse, America is bad, "We the People" don't know anything. Or worse. We don't care.
But what about Bill Blum, author of the essays collected in Freeing the World to Death? Well, he's an historian, he's supposed to know stuff. Does that excuse us from not knowing? Or allow us to deliberately tell ourselves childish lies, such as we're "liberating" the people of Iraq by slaughtering 100,000 of them, not to mention the 100,000 we slaughtered in Persian Gulf I and the several hundred thousand, perhaps a million, we killed after that through sanctions. Well, if Uncle Sam did it, it must have been the right thing. Even Madeleine Albright, who not only had a job, but who rose to the position of Secretary of State, said all the living people who became dead ones during the sanctions were "worth it." That is, worth more to The Empire dead than alive. In America, and perhaps beyond, that is the conventional wisdom, "all that goes without saying," to paraphrase Nietzsche, who noticed some troubling trends in German culture that were later to manifest themselves in the ugliness, barbarism, mass murder and plain old tackiness that was Nazism. What Bloom argues is not so much the hypocrisy of the American government, but the gullibility or "willful ignorance" of the American people. Blum takes his citations from some of the most popular news sources of our time. The facts are there for everyone to see. Yet we don't see, or we gaze with eyes wide shut.
The United States, "leader of the free world" has spent over 50 years harassing over 100 countries world-wide, compiling a nearly spotless record of always supporting the most brutal, corrupt, and murderous dictators, even schooling these exotic beasts in the American way of torture and murder at the infamous School of the Americas, whose graduates rank among the vilest representatives of our species.
Freeing the World to Death cites sources that are familiar to many of us as the daily paper on the street or the URL that's so commonplace it's often pre-packaged as a "News Site" bookmark that comes with new internet browsers (though since 9/11, U.S. Journalism has become such an obvious public relations arms of Washington and Wall Street that Blum has turned to the Guardian and the Observer, both British papers, to find out what's actually happening as a result of U.S. Foreign Policy). In his previous books, Killing Hope, and Rogue State, Blum demonstrated that today's journalism is tomorrow's history, culling the most outrageous transgressions of the U.S. against the rest of the planet (and its own citizens, who end up fighting its wars or taking the hit come "blowback" time i.e. September 11, 2001). But what if the corruption of American journalism, the reconstruction of the "fourth Estate" into an out-house, is so pervasive that there will be nothing left but lies for future historians to sort through?
Well, there's always the victims. The many millions who did not have to "bear witness" or even get a job with a big corporate news outlet to experience U.S.-sponsored violence first-hand. By being born in the wrong place at the wrong time and daring to "say no to America," they became "the news" and consequently, "history."
Freeing the World to Death is history as most of us U.S. Citizens have "lived" it, via CNN or Fox News flashing and spewing in the background, or the daily reporting, corrections, and re-reporting of "the morning paper." The daily violations of human dignity that is the media background to our day-to-day lives. I guess it's better than being the focus of attention ŕ la the "victims," but there is a relationship, however distant, between the rebel fighting the Empire's G.I.s or local proxies, and the U.S. Citizens whose tax dollars foot the bill.
Blum writes, "An Empire can be defined as a state that has overwhelming superiority in military, economic and political power, and uses those powers to influence the internal and external behavior of other states to accommodate the empire's needs. This imperial power intrinsically includes the ability to overthrow or otherwise punish those governments which seek to thwart the empire's desires." (Freeing the World to Death, pg 8).
We must pause just to address the invasions/interventions that have occurred since 1987, the year after the first edition of Killing Hope was published: did the people of Panama WANT the U.S. Marines to "oust" Noriega, causing massive damage to lives and property? Do the people of Cuba, who are no more responsible for what their allegedly "Communist" government does than the people of China, living under an even more repressive "Communist" system, WANT to be punished by U.S. Sanctions? Did the people of Nicaragua, having survived a revolution against the U.S.-sponsored Samoza dictatorship and a relentless "covert" war against U.S.-backed "contras," want to cede to U.S. demands that the Sandinistas be removed from power? Did the people of the Sudan want the U.S. to destroy the country's largest pharmaceutical plant because the U.S. "mistook" it for a chemical weapons factory and, since a mistake has been made, don't they deserve reparations? Did the people of Serbia want the U.S. and it's NATO "allies" to bomb it into the stone age for "humanitarian reasons?" Do the people of Iraq think it's "worth it" (declared in 1996 - a whole lotta blood under the blown-up bridges since then) that 100,000 people died in the first "Gulf War" in 1991, followed by a conservatively estimated million deaths due to 12 years of sanctions, followed by an again conservatively estimated 100,000 deaths, again mostly civilian women and children, since the April, 2003 invasion, to get rid of Saddam Hussein, the man the U.S. armed and supported when he "bombed his own people," as well as when he pursued a bitter internecine war with Iran which resulted in another million deaths on both sides (hooray, cried Uncle Sam, "got rid of two birds with one stone and didn't have to waste a shot")?
Oh, I didn't mention the ouster of Aristide in Haiti, or the absolute destruction of what was left of Afghanistan, or the U.S.'s $3-5 billion/year support of Israel while upbraiding the Palestinians as an "equal partner" in both peace and war. Blum covers these topics and other "diplomatic" sleights-of-hand in Freeing the World to Death. ("Interventions: The Unending List;" "Debate in Dublin" and other chapters).
Ask most Americans what "wars" the U.S. has been involved in before 1991, and you'll probably hear "WW1 and WWII - the 'good' wars - Korea, and Vietnam." But according to Blum there were at least 50 "attempts to overthrow foreign governments; unprovoked military invasion of some 20 sovereign nations; 25 countries who suffered the onslaught of U.S. bombing campaigns, including 40 consecutive days and nights in Iraq in 1991, 78 days and nights in Yugoslavia in 1999, and the subsequent destruction, post-9/11 of Afghanistan and Iraq. Depleted Uranium (DU), "one of the most despicable weapons ever designed by mankind" (Blum, pg 129) was and is still being used with increased frequency and intensity, turning the areas we bombed into nuclear wastelands and poisoning the people exposed to DU, including U.S. troops, dooming them to a future of illness, deformed children, and other maladies experienced by the survivors of the world's two other nuclear Petri dishes, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The U.S. has used its massive but ever-expanding "defense" budget to finance the oppression of the planet, either through open invasions, like the ones we're witnessing today in Afghanistan and Iraq, or "covert" operations as we saw - if we caught the movie, "Missing" - in Chile, in which the CIA, (with a little help from the NSA and other branches of the military, not to mention the storm troopers of whatever lucky tyrant we happen to be supporting in the name of "freedom," in this case Pinochet), staged and supported a coup by a ruthless dictator and the inevitable "purging" of "radicals or extremists" (anyone who made the mistake of fighting back, like the Iraqis of today, in defense of his/her country's independence from U.S. domination - "Foolish mortals! Resistance is futile!" said the Bad Guy from Planet X).
We saw it all in Iraq, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Central America. We watched the Empire grind up thousands if not millions worldwide, day to day, thwarting human desire and fulfillment of the basic necessities of life, never mind liberty and the almost unthinkable "pursuit of happiness" (can you imagine that once some poor idealist considered that a "human right?"), yet we did and continue to do nothing. Well, not absolutely nothing: many of us voted for a cleaner, more efficient war in Iraq run by Kerry. Surely we realize some connection between the suffering of millions across the globe and the excessive, wasteful, much ballyhooed "life style" that more and more Americans cannot afford.
Our recent "great struggles" between Democrats, so called, and Republicans, so called, in light of bi-partisan support for Bush's invasion of both Afghanistan and Iraq, the absence of any real investigation into the affairs of 9/11, and Kerry's graceful acceptance of defeat as if, like Gore, he at least acknowledges that sometimes the "good" guys win, and sometimes the "bad" guys win, but no one ever cries "fix" or "foul" in Pro Wrestling.
We were an empire when Kennedy invaded Cuba as surely as we were an empire when both Johnson and Nixon showered South East Asia with ordnance. We were an empire under the "human rights" champion, Jimmy Carter, whose regime trained Al Quaeda and began the U.S.'s covert economic and military offensive against Nicaragua, just as we were an empire under Ronald Reagan who, perhaps falling back on his old tricks as a Hollywood snitch and back-stabber during the McCarthy Inquisitions, supported both sides with guns and butter during the Iraq/Iran war. We were an empire under Bush I, who as CIA Chief, Vice-President and President helped arm and create the tyrant, Saddam, even as the latter "gassed his own people" with chemicals manufactured by American and European companies.
Reagan and Bush armed, trained, and supported a fanatic fundamentalist named Osama Bin Laden (whose family goes back a long way with the Bushes) and his fellow Mujhadeen.
When I first read Killing Hope ten years ago, then Rogue State a few years after that, I pushed them on friends and family alike, saying "read this, you're not gonna believe ninety percent of this stuff, but it's been there all along, right there in the newspapers in front of our faces." The newspapers we skimmed daily without actually reading "between the lines." The dull block-paragraphs we failed to compare to similar paragraphs relating the same events months, weeks, perhaps days earlier with a "different" skew or spin according to what the powers in D.C. willed us to believe.
We'd already tossed the newspapers in piles for recycling or weaned puppies on them without questioning the "revisions" these proudly "objective" journals placed on events, without reading between the lines.
The newspapers purported to "balance" unpleasant facts with avuncular, "expert" opinion provided by corporate and government PR flacks who washed from our brains the vague suspicion that the U.S. was not acting with the best of intentions for all the good, hard-working people who didn't take drugs and "played by the rules" or some other such nonsense.
"The main shortcoming of the establishment media lies in errors of omission, much more than errors of commission. It's not that they tell bald lies so much as it is that they leave out parts of stories, or entire stories, or historical reminders, which if included might put the issue in a whole new light, in a way not compatible with their political biases. Or they might include all the facts, leading to an obvious interpretation, but leave out suggesting an alternative interpretation of the same facts which stands the first interpretation on its head. But the information they do report is often quite usable for my purposes." (Blum, pg 233.)
More than any particular "fact" or omission, reading Bill Blum and others like him teaches us not what to read so much as HOW to read. How to read between the lines; how to recognize government double-speak from facts reported by "renowned" journalists or even burped up by accident - then quickly retracted - from our "leaders'" own mouths. Such "accidents" and misstatements have kept George Bush's press handlers and their willfully gullible audience of mainstream reporters busy explaining what the president didn't say when he said whatever offensive thing he said the previous day, but what he meant to say, which was [fill in the blank and wish upon a star].
Though Blum's specialty is American Foreign Policy, also included in this collection, destined to provide fodder for future historians of our era, are essays regarding our domestic illusions or rather, the kind of domestic policy which one would expect to complement a foreign policy which puts us at endless war with everyone always: The War Against Drugs (but not Drug Companies), The War Against Crime (and Free Speech), The War Against Cholesterol (but not Fast Food conglomerates), The War Against The Philistines (or Palestinians, as Israel's all-powerful persecutors are known as today), The War Against Hugo Chavez (and any other defiant Latin American leader who might threaten the U.S. by setting a good example). The War Against Communism (or selective memories of it: sanctions against Cuba, but free trade with China), and of course, Son of the War Against Communism, the War Against Terror ("we have nothing to fear but fear itself?"), which is the toughest one of all. Freud, Jung, and countless others before and after them have devoted their lives to fighting Terror and the best anyone is yet to come up with is Oxycontin, to name only one of the legal chemicals, besides alcohol, in our vast armory of WMDs (gallant Republican Warrior, Rush Limbaugh, used Oxycontin to fight terror for over five years!)
Finally, Blum's book leaves one with a queasy feeling not only about the government created, ostensibly, "of the people, by the people and for the people," but...the people. Either "we" are extraordinarily ignorant and naďve, believing what "our" government tells us no matter what facts, opinions, or international outcry appears on the scene to nudge us awake, or we are not a very kind people at all. True, if one looks at Blum's citations one would see that virtually all of them are from nationally famous, "main stream" newspapers, television news shows, and magazines, but not all of us have the skill of a historian for weeding out public information from Public Relations.
Blum points out that "in the absence of European and Arab governments showing a lot more courage to stand up to the empire, it's the American people we have to turn to, for no one has the potential leverage over the monster than the monster's own children have. And that's the problem, for the American people are...well...how can one put this delicately?...like one in every 50 adult Americans claims a UFO abduction experience; a National Science Board survey found that 27 percent of adults believe the sun revolves around the earth; according to a Gallup poll 68 percent believe in the devil (12 percent are unsure); and most Americans believe that God created evolution...There are all kinds of intelligence in this world: musical, scientific, mathematical, artistic, academic, literary, and so on. Then there's political intelligence, which might be defined as the ability to see through the bulls##t which every society, past, present and future, feeds its citizens from birth on to assure the continuance of prevailing ideology." ("Winning Hearts and Mindless" pg 265-267)
Is Blum saying that a citizenry 42% of whom believed (according to June, 2003 polls) that Iraq had a direct involvement with 9/11, most being certain that Iraqis were among the 19 hijackers and 55% of whom believed that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Quaeda, (pg 265) aren't up to the task of being responsible citizens of a working democracy?" One can only wonder what, besides a crowbar, it would take to pry such people away from their total support of what The Empire does to the world," writes Blum (pg 266).
Freeing the World to Death is an invaluable contribution to understanding (or attempting to understand) why contemporary Americans behave the way they do. The strongest point of this book, among many strong points, lies in its re-evaluation, from the side of rationality, not "gut feeling" or "faith," of all the "news" we've been exposed to since the "humanitarian" war in Bosnia ushered in the age of Bush. It was Democrat Bill Clinton, after all, who signed the Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act well before 9/11; Clinton who liquidated hundreds of thousands of Iraqis with sanctions; Clinton who said he would refuse to lift the sanctions, which amounted to a siege that hurt the Iraqi people, not Saddam, so long as Hussein remained in power; Clinton who oversaw the Empire between Bushes I and II. Kerry, it should be noted, debated Bush not on whether the U.S. Military should be in Iraq, but how it can be used most effectively while in Iraq.
Every American old enough to remember the enormous amount of government time, citizens' tax-money and creepy, voyeuristic wind, the foul air of a moral scold's "secret" perversions, blown across the "Lewinsky Scandal" should read this book. The news events are the stories they heard, or read, as they were being made, but with the difference that Blum puts it into the necessary context of an Empire at war - covert or overt - with much of the planet, including its own pathetically loyal and unquestioning citizen/consumers ("We want to feel needed. What can we do to help?" asked the Citizen/Consumers. "Shop," said the Retailer-in-Chief).
Blum writes of "people who get virtually all their news from the shock-and-awe tabloid weeklies, AM-radio talk shows, and television news programs which, because of market-place pressure, aim low in order to reach the widest possible audience, resulting in short programs with lots of commercials, weather, sports and entertainment. These news sources don't necessarily have to explicitly state the above falsehoods to produce such distorted views; they need only channel to their audience a continuous stream of statements from the government and conservative 'experts' justifying the war and demonizing Saddam Hussein as if they were neutral observers; ignore contrary views except when an expert is on hand to ridicule them and label them 'conspiracy theories;' and never put it all together in an enlightening manner. This constant drip-drip of one-sided information, from sources who can be described as stenographers for the powers-that-be, can produce any benighted variety of the human species." (pg 267).
Ultimately, after reading a book such as Freeing the World to Death, we are faced with the question we ourselves put to Nazi Germany: to what extent are "the people" responsible? It is difficult, almost impossible, to finish this book, to "re-live" the events written about (often at the time they were happening at the end of the nineties and first years of this decade up to June, 2004, but with the perpetually happy talking heads excised, commercials lifted, man behind the curtain exposed), without asking oneself the question that was asked again and again of the citizens as well as the leadership of Nazi Germany: what kind of people would let this happen?
Bill Blum's updated commentary on the affairs of The Empire can be viewed on his website.
November 15, 2004
Adam Engel [send him e-mail: bartleby.samsa@verizon.net] is a disloyal, disobedient, disgruntled and disillusioned citizen-by-circumstance of The Empire. He has seen crowds of up to 100,000 people at open air music and sports events, but he has never met 100,000 people, or even counted sheep past a few hundred, yet as a tax-payer, he has participated in the killing of 100,000 Afghans and Iraqis and over 1000 Americans, mostly since President-elect George Bush posed in a flight suit on May 1, 2004 and declared victory over...what?
----
U.S. plans to sneak tiny radios into North Korea for its information-starved citizens
Nov 15, 2004
By Tim Johnson
Knight Ridder Newspapers
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/10167096.htm
SEOUL, South Korea - The U.S. government is preparing to smuggle tiny radios into North Korea as part of a newly financed program to break down the country's isolation.
For the next four years, Washington will spend up to $2 million annually to boost radio broadcasts toward North Korea and infiltrate mini-radios across its borders.
North Korea, probably the most isolated country in the world, has only radios that are rigged to capture broadcasts lionizing the nation's Stalinist leadership. The broadcasts also blare from outdoor loudspeakers.
The American plan to smuggle small radios into North Korea is outlined in the North Korean Human Rights Act, which President Bush signed into law Oct. 18. The sweeping act provides money to private humanitarian groups to assist defectors, extends refugee status to fleeing North Koreans and sets in motion a plan to boost broadcasts to North Korea and get receivers into the country.
North Korea's Kim Jong Il regime says the tiny radios will air "rotten imperialist reactionary culture" to undermine the country.
The human rights act, in its broad scope, also has encountered opposition from President Roh Moo-hyun, South Korea's center-left leader. Officials under Roh say the act will stiffen Pyongyang's resistance to the outside world and hinder already-stalled talks to get North Korea to abandon its efforts to build a nuclear arsenal.
They scoff at the U.S. plan to smuggle in radios, saying it's a goodhearted idea but one that will worsen the plight of North Koreans. Anyone captured with a radio, they said, might face prison.
Supporters of the tactic argue that it offers a ray of hope to a populace that's hungry for news amid food shortages and an acute humanitarian crisis.
"There's an incredible desire among North Korean people to know what's going on," said Suzanne Scholte, the head of the Defense Forum Foundation, a nonprofit group in Falls Church, Va., that focuses on American policy toward North Korea.
A small number of clandestine radios are already in the country, sent in by helium-filled balloons deployed by South Korean religious groups or brought in by traders across North Korea's border with China.
"Some people listen to South Korean broadcasts under their blankets," said Lee Gui-ok, a young North Korean mother who fled to China in 1999 and later moved to Seoul.
Lee said the plan was worth carrying out - even if it endangered some people - because it would offer hope to North Koreans that the outside world cared about their situation.
"If they don't have radios, they can't listen to South Korean broadcasts. If they had them, they would listen," Lee said.
A House of Representatives International Relations Committee report on the human rights act says North Korea's radio broadcasts exalt ruler Kim Jong Il, feed "paranoia about the threat of attack by the United States, and misrepresent the conditions and standards of living that exist in the outside world, particularly in South Korea."
The plan takes a cue from previous U.S. efforts in other parts of the world. In 2001 and 2002, American diplomats in Havana, Cuba, passed out more than 1,000 short-wave radios so Cubans could tune in to the Florida-based anti-Castro radio station Radio Marti. The radios were taken to Havana in diplomatic pouches.
That wouldn't work in Pyongyang, because the United States and North Korea don't have diplomatic relations.
How to smuggle the radios in remains to be worked out. Legislators may keep operational details of the program classified to prevent North Korea from countering them, said a Capitol Hill staff aide who's active in shaping U.S. policy on North Korea, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"I don't see radios in balloons as particularly tenable," the staff aide said. During most of the 1990s, the South Korean military deployed balloons to send propaganda leaflets, rice and radios into North Korea, but suspended the practice in late 1999 under then-President Kim Dae-jung's "sunshine policy" of opening contacts with Pyongyang.
Since then, Seoul has sought to stop even private groups from airlifting radios with balloons. In March 2003, police blocked a Korean-American pastor from Artesia, Calif., Douglas E. Shin, as he and colleagues prepared to send 700 radios across the border slung from 22 helium-filled balloons.
"Everybody wants the radios," Shin said. "If a regular farmer or worker gets caught, they get slapped on the hand, and the guy who confiscates it keeps it because he wants to listen to it."
-------- us politics
Powell to Leave Bush's Cabinet When Successor Is Chosen
November 15, 2004
The New York Times
By DAVID STOUT and MARK J. PRENDERGAST
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/15/politics/15cnd-cabi.html?ei=5094&en=e6d4c24b00751519&hp=&ex=1100581200&adxnnl=1&partner=homepage&adxnnlx=1100556063-tofM5BwaTOfFYF0rGReYvw&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Nov. 15 - Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said today that he would resign as soon as a successor was chosen, the result of what he described as a longstanding agreement with President Bush that he would serve only four years as the nation's chief diplomat.
"It has always been my intention that I would serve one term," Mr. Powell told reporters in a televised briefing from the State Department early this afternoon.
"In recent weeks and months, President Bush and I have talked about foreign policy and we've talked about what to do at the end of the first term," Mr. Powell said. "After we had had a chance to have good and fulsome discussions on it, we came to mutual agreement that it would be appropriate for me to leave at this time."
"What am I going to do next?" he later asked rhetorically. "I don't know."
The capital was abuzz late this afternoon with talk that Mr. Powell's successor would be Mr. Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice. Ms. Rice, an influential adviser to the Bush family since the administration of the president's father, had been said to be interested in the defense secretary's post, but there is as yet no indication that its current occupant, Donald H. Rumsfeld, will be leaving. But another name being mentioned for the State Department post was that of John C. Danforth, the ambassador to the United Nations and a former Republican senator from Missouri, who has enjoyed good relations through the years with both sides of the partisan aisle.
Mr. Powell did say that he would remain active in carrying out his responsibilities until his last day, noting that "we have to make sure that we continue to pursue the global war against terror, we have to consolidate the very significant gains we've seen in Afghanistan, and we have to make sure we defeat this insurgency in Iraq."
Those were themes that Secretary Powell also touched on in his letter of resignation to the president, which he said was tendered on Friday. In that letter, Mr. Powell also expressed satisfaction that he had been part of administration efforts that "brought the attention of the world to the problem of proliferation, reaffirmed our alliances, adjusted to the post-cold war world and undertook major initiatives to deal with the problem of poverty and disease in the developing world."
Mr. Powell also suggested today that "a new opportunity has presented itself in the Middle East" with the death of the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat, whom the Bush administration had sought to isolate, and noted that the president had "spoken to this."
The secretary further said that the Bush administration needed to continue working on "strengthening our alliances," particularly in Asia, "to find a solution to the North Korean nuclear program."
And referring to Iran's nuclear program and the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency, Mr. Powell also counseled that "we have to work with our European Union friends and with the I.A.E.A. to find a solution to the Iranian nuclear program."
Elsewhere, he went on, "the president also has an active agenda with respect to trade - open trade, with respect to the Millennium Challenge Account, development funding, going after H.I.V./AIDS, building on the partnerships and alliances that we have around the world."
"So," he concluded, "I think there are still challenges out there, but I think there are far more opportunities out there."
In an exchange with reporters at a White House news conference earlier this afternoon, the president's chief spokesman, Scott McClellan, rebuffed suggestions that Mr. Powell was being eased out, saying that "it was his decision to resign and he made that decision," adding that "Secretary Powell made a decision, for his own reasons, that this was now the time to leave."
Prominent lawmakers in both parties praised Mr. Powell. Senator Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat who sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, said the secretary "has been a moderate voice in an administration that has too often chosen a path of unilateralism to the detriment of our nation's security." Another Democrat, Representative David Obey of Wisconsin, the ranking minority member of the House Appropriations Committee, called Mr. Powell "by far the most responsible, thoughtful, realistic and credible member" of President Bush's foreign policy team.
And Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said all Americans should consider Mr. Powell's "great service to our country."
"When he took the helm at the State Department nearly four years ago, I was confident that Secretary Powell would lead with honor and distinction," Mr. McCain said. "I have not been disappointed."
Mr. Powell's departure has long been expected, given his repeated disagreements with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and others who have taken a harder line on Iraq and other international issues.
Mr. Powell argued the United States' case before the United Nations on whether Saddam Hussein possessed deadly unconventional weapons of mass destruction, and persuaded President Bush to seek United Nations support on Iraq as well. The secretary had asserted that Mr. Hussein did have such weapons - a paramount rationale for the American-led invasion that toppled the Baghdad regime - and was reported to have been deeply dismayed when none were found.
Mr. Powell's disappointment over the course of events in Iraq is believed to have been compounded by the poor intelligence about Iraq's weapons, since he is known to have been leery of the invasion in any event.
Although he was a professional soldier for 35 years, rising to chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and oversaw the first war against Saddam Hussein, in 1991, he urged the administration to use caution this time around. Some colleagues said Mr. Powell had used a slogan typically found in antique stores in describing what the United States' predicament might be if it went to war: "If you break it, you own it."
Three other cabinet resignations, all involving members with much lower profiles, were also announced today. Ann M. Veneman, the secretary of agriculture; Rod Paige, the education secretary, and Spencer Abraham, the energy secretary, will not be staying on for Mr. Bush's second term.
Such turnover is not unusual between administrations, as presidents and their most trusted advisers decide whom they would like to retain in their cabinets and whom they would like to see leave. Nor is it always entirely clear which resignations were encouraged and which were prompted by purely personal reasons: fatigue over long hours and a desire to return home, for instance.
Mr. Powell, 67, is the nation's 65th secretary of state. Both people named as possible successors, Ms. Rice and Mr. Danforth have obvious appeal.
Ms. Rice, a longtime member of the president's innermost circle of advisers, is an expert on Russia and is known to be concerned over whether Russia, under President Vladimir Putin, might be lurching back to the kind of internal control of the Soviet era. Mr. Danforth, an ordained minister known for his starchy rectitude, is someone whom both Republican and Democratic presidents have found comfortable turning to in the past.
Before his nomination to the United Nations post, Mr. Danforth was sent as President Bush's special envoy for peace talks in Sudan to try to end a civil war between the Muslim-dominated government in the north and Christian and animist rebels in the south. And the Clinton administration asked him to lead a review of the F.B.I.'s deadly attack in 1993 on the Branch Davidian complex near Waco, Tex.
If President Bush did not choose Ms. Rice to succeed Mr. Powell - perhaps preferring to keep her closer to the White House - and did not tap Mr. Danforth, other possible candidates are Senator Richard G. Lugar, the Indiana Republican who heads the Foreign Relations Committee and is respected by both Republicans and Democrats, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, a former ambassador to Indonesia and a foreign-policy scholar.
But Mr. Wolfowitz is known as a hawk on Iraq, and his nomination might touch off a spirited confirmation fight in the Senate.
Although Mr. Powell is known to have differed often with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, it is by no means clear that there was any personal animosity between them. Some months ago, for instance, Mr. Powell was photographed embracing Mr. Rumsfeld in an affectionate bear-hug.
In the European view, the United States did not give the United Nations enough time to reach a full conclusion that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Rumsfeld referred to "old Europe" in his criticism of the opposition to the war by France and Germany, in particular.
Mr. Powell, on the other hand, while supporting Mr. Bush on Iraq, managed to maintain generally good relations around the world and is known to want the United States to begin mending fences. One of Mr. Powell's most recent missions was in late October to East Asia, where he tried to forge a united front on dealing with North Korea and its nuclear ambitions.
The secretary is scheduled to meet later today with the Israeli foreign minister, Silvan Shalom, and is to attend a meeting in Chile on Wednesday, as well as a multinational conference on Iraq next week.
Although Mr. Powell was widely reported to be restless, some associates and friends thought he might stay, hoping in particular to get Middle East peace talks on track again and to rally Asian allies to deal with North Korea.
One friend described the secretary as "the eternal optimist," and the secretary himself has described his life as emblematic of the American dream. Mr. Powell, son of Jamaican immigrants, was raised in the South Bronx, educated in New York City public schools and graduated from the City College of New York, where he earned a degree in geology and participated in ROTC.
Several years ago, Mr. Powell was asked in a television interview how a C.C.N.Y. graduate with less than outstanding grades beat out more senior West Point graduates to become chairman of the joint chiefs. "It's a great country," he said with a smile.
David Stout reported from Washington for this article, and Mark J. Prendergast contributed reporting from New York.
-----
Powell, 3 others leaving Cabinet
Announcement raises to six the number of Bush inner circle changes
Nov. 15, 2004
NBC News and news services
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6492238/
WASHINGTON - Accelerating the shake-up of President Bush's inner circle in advance of his second term, the White House announced Monday that Secretary of State Colin Powell and three other Cabinet members had submitted their resignations.
"I believe that now that the election is over, the time has come for me to step down as secretary of state and return to private life," Powell said in a resignation letter released by the White House.
At a brief news conference, Powell said he would stay "a month or two" until a successor is confirmed by Congress.
Powell, who often butted heads with fellow members of Bush's foreign policy team, also said he never intended to serve beyond a first term.
"We came to the mutual agreement that it would be appropriate for me to leave at this time," he said. Powell also dismissed reports that he had offered to stay longer.
The other members of Bush's 15-member Bush Cabinet whose departures were announced Monday are are Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, Education Secretary Rod Paige and Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said that no nominations for the departing Cabinet members would be announced Monday.
Attorney General John Ashcroft and Commerce Secretary Don Evans announced their resignations last week. Bush has so far moved to fill just one vacancy, nominating White House counsel Alberto Gonzales to succeed Ashcroft.
Rice seen as leading candidate Republican sources told Reuters that National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice had emerged as the likely candidate to replace Powell.
Rice has been Bush's national security adviser since he took office in January 2001 and has been one of his closest confidantes. She was previously the provost of Stanford University.
U.N. Ambassador John Danforth, a Republican and former U.S. senator from Missouri, also has been mentioned as a possible successor.
Powell has had a controversial tenure, reportedly differing on some key issues at various junctures with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Powell has generally had good relations with his counterparts around the world, although his standing has been strained by the U.S.-led war in Iraq.
Colin Powell submitted his resignation to President Bush on Nov. 12; news was announced Nov. 15. He plans to stay on until a successor is confirmed.
Possible successors include National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and John Danforth, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
Spencer Abraham plans to resign, an administration official said Nov. 15.
Possible successors include Deputy Energy Secretary Kyle McSlarrow; retiring Democratic Sen. John Breaux of Louisiana; Tom Kuhn, president of the Edison Electric Institute trade group; and U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Tony Garza.
Ann Veneman's resignation was announced Nov. 15.
Among those mentioned as possible successors are Charles Kruse, president of the Missouri Farm Bureau Federation; farm trade negotiator Allen Johnson of the U.S. Trade Representative's office; White House agriculture adviser Chuck Conner; and Texas Rep. Charles Stenholm, a Democrat who was defeated after 13 terms in the House.
Rod Paige's resignation was announced Nov. 15.
Among the possible successors is Margaret Spellings, President Bush's domestic policy adviser.
Donald Rumsfeld likely will stay on for a year or two to continue restructuring the U.S. military.
National security adviser Condoleezza Rice, if speculation holds true, could take Rumsfeld's place to become the first female defense secretary. But her current and former colleagues say she has shown little interest in the Pentagon job.
Condoleezza Rice may stay, though a departure would be left up to her. Friends say she wants to go home to California.
Possible successors include Stephen Hadley, deputy national security adviser, and Robert Blackwill, Rice's coordinator for strategic planning.
President Bush seems likely to allow John Snow to choose when and whether he wants to leave the post, and analysts expect him to stay on at least temporarily to push domestic issues such as permanent tax cuts.
Possible successors include Andrew Card, Bush's White House chief of staff, and Trade Representative Robert Zoellick.
Tom Ridge is expected to leave after being the first person to fill the post created in the months following the Sept. 11 attacks.
Possible successors include: Asa Hutchinson, one of Ridge's undersecretaries; Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who successfully oversaw security at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City; and Thomas Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey who co-chaired the independent Sept. 11 commission.
Robert Zoellick is expected to leave, but there are no leading candidates to succeed him.
Possible successors include Gary Edson, former deputy assistant to the president for international economic affairs, and Grant Aldonas, undersecretary of commerce for international trade.
John Ashcroft, who has become a target of criticism by Democrats and civil liberties groups over the anti-terrorism policies implemented after Sept. 11, 2001, submitted his resignation Nov. 2. The news of his resignation became known a week later. He is expected to remain in office until a successor is confirmed.
President Bush on Nov. 10 named White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, a Texas confidant and one of the most prominent Hispanics in the administration, to succeed Ashcroft.
Donald Evans resigned Nov. 9 to return home to Texas.
Possible successors include Mercer Reynolds III, who served as finance chairman of Bush's re-election campaign.
Delivered U.N. speech on Iraq
Powell, a retired four-star general and former chairman of the military Joint Chiefs of Staff, led the Bush administration's argument at the United Nations for a military attack to oust Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Most notable was his U.N. Security Council appearance on Feb. 5, 2003, during which he argued that Saddam must be removed because of its possession of weapons of mass destruction.
There is no evidence that those claims had any foundation. Powell has maintained all along that the use of force of by the American coalition in Iraq was justified.
Despite his public support of the war effort, the son of Jamaican immigrants has generally been seen as representing more moderate views on foreign policy in the Bush administration.
After the Sept. 11 terror attacks, he helped fashion a fragile coalition of countries for the war against terrorism, careful to request all the help a country could give without pushing any country beyond its limits. Similarly, when leaders decided to end or shorten their troops' duty in postwar Iraq the State Department avoided any harsh reaction, saying simply that it was up to each country to make up its mind.
He also pressed for negotiations with North Korea over its suspected nuclear arsenal and has acquiesced on European talks with Iran over its atomic programs.
FACT FILE Secretary of State Colin Luther Powell Personal
-- 67 years old. Born April 5, 1937.
-- Wife Alma and three children: Michael, Linda and Anne. Education
-- Bachelor of science in geology, City College of New York, 1958.
-- Master's in business administration, George Washington University, 1971. Experience
-- Secretary of state, 2001-present.
-- Founder and chairman, America's Promise, a nonprofit organization for youth.
-- Twelfth chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Oct. 1, 1989, through Sept. 30, 1993, under the George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations.
-- National security adviser to President Reagan, 1987-89.
-- Served in the Army for 35 years in command and staff positions.
Awards
Military awards include:
-- Defense Distinguished Service Medal.
-- Army Distinguished Service Medal.
-- Defense Superior Service Medal.
-- Bronze Star Medal.
-- Purple Heart.
Civilian awards include:
-- Two Presidential Medals of Freedom.
-- President's Citizens Medal.
-- Congressional Gold Medal.
-- Secretary of State Distinguished Service Medal.
Powell intends to maintain a busy schedule until a successor is named, aides said. He was meeting Monday with Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom and was to attend a meeting of Pacific nation ministers in Chile on Wednesday and a multinational conference on Iraq next week.
Word of his impending departure came shortly after Pentagon officials said there was a "strong possibility" that the secretary of state will visit the West Bank next week and meet with Israeli leaders and the new Palestinian leadership.
Abraham had longest tenure at Energy Abraham leaves after leading the Energy Department longer than any of his predecessors, but without delivering on a top Bush administration priority - getting Congress to enact a broad energy agenda.
In his resignation letter, the former Republican senator from Michigan expressed optimism that Bush would get the energy policy he has long desired, writing that larger Republican Senate and House majorities in the new Congress will ensure that "much needed energy legislation will finally be enacted."
Abraham faced a number of major issues during his tenure, from the nation's worst power blackout to soaring crude oil and gasoline prices.
Abraham was credited with getting the White House to provide more money to work with Russia in protecting nuclear materials. He considered reducing the global nuclear nonproliferation threat his top priority. Abraham also took a personal interest in expanding research into hydrogen fuel vehicles.
Among those mentioned as possible successors to Abraham are:
- Deputy Energy Secretary Kyle McSlarrow.
- Retiring Democratic Sen. John Breaux of Louisiana, one of the few Senate Democrats to support Bush's plan to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
- Tom Kuhn, president of the Edison Electric Institute trade group.
- U.S. ambassador to Mexico Tony Garza.
Domestic adviser seen as Paige successor The leading candidate to replace Paige is Margaret Spellings, President Bush's domestic policy adviser who helped shape his school agenda when he was the Texas governor.
The 71-year-old Paige, the nation's seventh education secretary, is the first black person to serve in the job.
Paige is content to move on after overseeing Bush's aggressive education agenda for four years, said an administration official, who has spoken to him about his plans.
Paige, has been an outspoken defender of No Child Left Behind, the law at the center of Bush's domestic agenda.
The law, which aims to get all children up to grade level in reading and math, has faced sustained criticism from state and school leaders who say they need more money and support. But Paige says schools are showing improvement among students who have long been overlooked.
Paige has had rocky moments, with none more glaring than when he called the National Education Association a "terrorist organization" in a private meeting with governors.
He apologized but maintained that the NEA, the nation's largest teachers union, uses "obstructionist scare tactics" in opposing the law. The union called for his resignation.
Veneman praised for mad cow response
Veneman, the first woman to lead the USDA, won praise for deft handling of the mad cow crisis last winter, but came under fire in 2002 from some farm lobbyists after the administration argued for restraint in spending and more attention to land stewardship at a time when Congress wanted to expand crop subsidy spending.
Among those mentioned as possible successors are:
- Farm trade negotiator Allen Johnson of the U.S. Trade Representative's office.
- White House agriculture advisor Chuck Conner.
- Texas Rep. Charles Stenholm, a Democrat who was defeated after 13 terms in the House.
- Charles Kruse, president of the Missouri Farm Bureau Federation.
NBC News' Tammy Kupperman and Norah O'Donnell and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
-------- ENERGY
Energy Secretary Abraham Resigns Post
Reuters
November 15, 2004
By Steve Holland and Tom Doggett,
http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=382
WASHINGTON - Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, whose tenure has seen U.S. crude oil prices soar to a record high of nearly $56 a barrel, has resigned but will stay in office until his successor is in place, the White House said Monday.
Abraham informed President. Bush last week of his decision and told his own top staff Monday, the official said.
The White House also announced the resignations of three other cabinet officials -- Secretary of State Colin Powell, Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman and Education Secretary Rod Paige.
Bush is working on a second-term Cabinet and last week Attorney General John Ashcroft and Commerce Secretary Don Evans announced their resignations.
As crude oil and gasoline prices soared to record highs this year, Abraham unsuccessfully pressed for Senate passage of a White House energy plan that would open Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.
In his resignation letter to President Bush, Abraham said larger Republican Senate and House majorities in the new Congress will ensure that "much needed energy legislation will finally be enacted."
Some lobbyists have quietly questioned how much say Abraham had in shaping U.S. energy policy, claiming Vice President Dick Cheney calls most of the shots in the administration on energy issues. The White House says that is not the case.
Sen. Pete Domenici, who chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, praised Abraham for a job "well done."
"He worked overtime to do what is necessary to stabilize world energy markets and was key to developing a good national energy policy," Domenici said of Abraham.
The senator also praised Abraham's work in preventing the spread of nuclear material, especially what was produced by the former Soviet Union, from reaching terror groups.
Rep. Joe Barton, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said Abraham "did an excellent job under difficult circumstances."
Energy lobbyists and congressional aides have speculated about several possible replacements for Abraham, who was tapped by Bush in 2001 after losing his Senate seat in Michigan.
Among the names mentioned were deputy energy secretary Kyle McSlarrow, who already runs the day-to-day operations of the department and is liked by lawmakers and Capitol Hill staff. McSlarrow also serves as the American co-chair of the U.S.- Russia Energy Working Group established by Presidents Bush and Vladimir Putin.
Other possible candidates are retiring Democratic Sen. John Breaux from Louisiana; Tom Kuhn, president of the Edison Electric Institute trade group; and U.S. ambassador to Mexico Tony Garza, according to lobbyists.
Before becoming Energy Secretary, Abraham served from 1995 to 2001 as a U.S. senator from Michigan. While in the Senate, he sponsored legislation to do away with the Energy Department. The legislation was brought up during Abraham's confirmation hearing and he often joked he had changed his position on the issue.
Abraham was also chairman of the Michigan Republican Party from 1983-1990 and Deputy Chief of Staff to Vice President Dan Quayle from 1990 to 1991.
Source: Reuters
-------- alternative energy
Executive Shows Great Energy in Attempt to Sell Wind-Farm Project
November 15, 2004
By Stephanie Ebbert,
The Boston Globe
http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=378
Back when Jim Gordon was a Boston University broadcast and filmmaking student begging for a job in television, a cable executive asked him whether he could sell.
Of course he could, he insisted, although he was untested.
So Gordon spent his nights and Saturdays banging on doors in Chelsea and Everett, introducing this phenomenon called cable TV. He signed so many new subscribers that he broke a national sales record, and company executives came from New York to ask whether he would develop a training program. Could he sell.
Gordon, now president of the company that plans the nation's first offshore wind farm, makes his pitches with almost messianic zeal, certain not only of his conviction but of the virtue of the technology he is touting.
"What I was saying was what I believed in," Gordon recalled of his cable days.
Since then, his passion has become wind energy, and he speaks to anyone who will listen. Including high school science classes.
"How many of you really think about where electricity comes from?" Gordon asks Lexington students in a flat voice one sunny September afternoon. A few hands rise.
Within four minutes, the eyes of sullen teenagers are glazing over, as Gordon intones, "Even in Massachusetts, we have more resources we can tap to create jobs, rather than spending billions of dollars on foreign sources of oil for energy." Within eight minutes, girls in the back of the room whisper to one another. Several students yawn.
And then, a funny thing happens: They start asking questions. They buy in.
Gordon, 51, doesn't have to spend his afternoons this way. He is wealthy, having sold five natural gas plants at the industry's peak, a feat attributed to canny instincts and uncanny luck. His four-story Beacon Hill townhouse is assessed at nearly $2.8 million, and he owns two garaged parking spaces worth nearly $80,000 each.
But he is wholly focused on this project, a $770 million gamble that is not without its arrogance. He plans to build 130 wind turbines in Nantucket Sound, in the sight lines of some of the most powerful people in the Northeast, and he needs every believer he can muster.
If he loses his bid, this will be the first time the entrepreneur has been denied a right to build a power plant where he wanted.
Raised in a Newton apartment, Gordon spent summers at his parents' modest Yarmouth vacation home, where he fell in love with Cape Cod, a place opponents say they must protect from his wind-farm plan.
His father was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants who grew up in the West End; he later owned three convenience stores in Allston-Brighton, where Gordon worked in his youth.
Gordon played at the West End House Boys & Girls Club of Allston-Brighton and spent several weeks each summer at its Maine camp, which drew underprivileged and middle-class children. Later, he donated $1.5 million to help renovate the club's building, now named for his older brother, Michael, who died of a heart attack six years ago, said William Margolin, former club director. He continues to raise money for the club through a foundation in Michael's name.
Gordon has always had an unusual focus, said his mother, Florence, who contrasted her sons' temperaments.
"Michael, he should rest in peace, he would have to have 100 toys to play with. And Jimmy played with one," she said. "That one toy would be his satisfaction. He would do it until he got it right."
Gordon's second wife, Meg, 30, who once handled his company's public relations and is now attending culinary school and caring for their 1-year-old, compared him to the fable of the tortoise and the hare. "He's a turtle, and he always wins."
Gordon has trained his focus on energy since 1975, when he grew frustrated with America's dependence on foreign oil while waiting in a two-block-long line for gasoline and sniffed opportunity in the energy crisis. He had no background in the field, but at 22 the quick study began poring over energy research. Gordon founded Energy Management Inc. with $3,000 in savings and would occasionally take then-girlfriend Jan Saragoni on double-dates with 40-year-old investors.
"We'd both be very buttoned down, and Jimmy, at a very early age, would present a very disciplined, coherent business plan to investors," recalled Saragoni, now president of Saragoni & Co. public relations firm.
After a decade pitching businesses on conservation, energy prices collapsed, dampening enthusiasm for such projects. Watching government policy begin to encourage alternative energy projects, Gordon shifted his focus. His company built a wood-burning power plant in Alexandria, N.H., and cogeneration power plants, using natural gas and steam to power factories in Pepperell and Pawtucket, R.I. At a time when New England relied heavily on oil for energy, the company began building power plants fired by natural gas, and he built what is believed to be the nation's first merchant power plant, one without utility power-purchase agreements, earning him a reputation as a risk-taker.
His strategy was to select ideal sites, close to gas and electric lines, and to win over detractors by being responsive, generous, and by persuading local officials, often in communities searching for revenue, that his plants were in their best interest.
Craig Olmsted, Energy Management's vice president for project development, recalled how Gordon reacted when residents objected to widening a utility corridor through conservation land and private property to service a plant in Rumford, Maine. He took Olmsted to the 250-year-old farmhouse of opponent Bart Hague, who offered the men cookies.
"He was open and he wanted to listen," said Hague, 77, who also visited one of Gordon's existing power plants, but whose East Waterford land was ultimately taken by the utility. "I didn't feel that I got any feedback from having done that. But I certainly liked Jim very much."
East Waterford is a long way from the Cape and islands, where many politically savvy players resist Gordon's blend of principled persuasion and down-to-earth charm. The Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, which formed to block the project, has accused Gordon of seizing the public waterfront for his own profit.
"His whole mantra has been about how he's just trying to save the planet, but Jim Gordon is really just an opportunistic businessman, very focused on getting what he wants," said Ernie Corrigan, an alliance consultant. "Which is to make even more money than he's already made."
Gordon returns the charge of entitlement.
"Our opponents are fond of saying that Nantucket Sound is not for sale," Gordon said. "And sometimes I think that's because they believe they already own it."
It's the harshest criticism he will offer out loud, though those who know him well say he is frustrated when he cannot persuade others to see things his way.
Last year, he converted Walter Cronkite, the legendary former television news anchor who had lent his opposition to the alliance's ad campaign against the project. Gordon was unsuccessful at persuading historian David McCullough to back off his ads and was recently rebuffed in a Beacon Hill gym by public relations executive Thomas P. O'Neill III.
"The guy comes over to me and says, 'Hey, I'd like to talk to you about the wind farm,' " O'Neill said. "I say, 'Great, but I'm running and watching CNN.' " Gordon tried to engage him three times before O'Neill said, "Listen pal, it's a land grab. And if you want to talk to me, give me a call."
In 1999, as the market became saturated with natural gas, Energy Management got out, selling five plants for a price industry sources put at more than $250 million.
Searching for the next big thing, with national policy encouraging hydroelectric and wind power, Gordon began scouting for offshore locations. He said Nantucket Sound emerged as the most economically viable, wind-rich spot in the region.
But someone had gotten there first, so Gordon teamed up with two other proponents and, when they sold out, he became the face of the project.
"I feel that there is a greater public good with this project," Gordon said. "But I believe that this project can help set an important precedent for the United States."
-------- OTHER
-------- environment
Indian Marchers Protest Coca-Cola Pollution, Water Use
November 15, 2004
VARANASI, India, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/nov2004/2004-11-16-05.asp
A march between two Coca-Cola bottling facilities 250 kilometers (155 miles) apart is underway to focus public attention on problems the protesters say have been created by the Coca-Cola company in India.
Thousands of people are expected to take part in the march and rally between the Coca-Cola bottling plants in Ballia and Mehdiganj, both in the state of Uttar Pradesh. The 10 day march began Monday in Ballia, and organizers plan that it will end at a rally in Mehdiganj, near the holy city of Varanasi, on November 24.
Rally against Coca-Cola in Mumbai (Photo by Nadia Khastagir courtesy India Resource Center) Marchers are calling for the revocation of Coca-Cola's license to operate because of hardships created for communities as a result of water shortages and pollution created by the Coca-Cola company.
But Coca-Cola India says that all 25 of the India Division's company owned bottling plants have gained the international standard ISO 14001 Environment Management System certificate, the internationally recognized standard of Environmental Management.
Sanjiv Gupta is president and Chief Executive Officer of Coca-Cola India. (Photo courtesy Coca-Cola India) "We have been able to achieve this due the unwavering commitment and belief demonstrated by all our associates in protecting, preserving and enhancing the environment," says India Division President Sanjiv Gupta.
But the march comes after a series of defeats for the Coca-Cola company across India, through orders by the courts and various government agencies. On December 16, 2003, for instance, the Kerala High Court directed Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages Private Limited to find alternative sources of water for its bottling plant at Plachimada in Palakkad.
Communities living around the bottling facilities are experiencing severe water shortages, and the remaining scarce groundwater, along with the soil, has been polluted by Coca-Cola's practice of dumping its wastewater into the nearby fields, the demonstrators say.
"Drinking Coke is like drinking farmer's blood in India," said march organizer Nandlal Master of the nongovernmental organization Lok Samiti and the National Alliance of People's Movements.
"Coca-Cola is creating thirst in India, and is directly responsible for the loss of livelihood and even hunger for thousands of people across India," said Master. "Water and land are essential to life, and challenging Coca-Cola is a fight for our survival. We have to shut it down."
Coca-Cola has become the target of numerous communities across India who are demanding that the company shut its bottling facilities because of water shortages and pollution.
The single largest Coca-Cola bottling facility in India, in Plachimada, Kerala, remains shut because the local village council refuses to issue it a license to operate. Community leaders from Coca-Cola affected communities across India are joining the march and rally in Uttar Pradesh.
In October, local residents protested that the Coca-Cola plant at Mehdiganj, a village 20 kilometers (12 miles) from Varanasi, was discharging liquid effluent in the fields behind the plant. (Photo courtesy India Resource Center) There are also irregularities in the manner in which Coca-Cola has acquired the land for its bottling facilities, and many farmers have yet to be compensated for the use of their land, the protest organizers say.
"Coca-Cola will pay for its crimes in India and internationally," said Amit Srivastava of the India Resource Center, an organization that works with local groups in India to coordinate the campaign internationally. "We will take this battle to where it hurts Coca-Cola the most - the U.S. and the European Union, its largest markets."
Srivastava has just returned from an October trip to the UK where he took the Coca-Cola demonstration from Bristol to Liverpool and from Glasgow to London.
Srivastava says that farmers in India are using Coca-Cola as pesticide. Hundreds of farmers in Andhra Pradesh and Chattisgarh are spraying Coca-Cola directly on their crops, with amazing success. "Using Coke to destroy pests is also more cost-effective than using other branded pesticides, and forecasts are that soon, thousands of farmers in India will be using Coca-Cola as pesticide," Srivastrava said.
Yet in January, Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages' Dasna unit near Delhi, was awarded the "Golden Peacock Environment Management Award 2004." The award for excellent environment practices and effective control of environmental impact was presented at a gala function in Bangalore on January 24 by Karnataka's Industries Minister.
The annual award winner is decided on the basis of a rigorous assessment procedure, which includes a visit to the facility by a team of experts.
Speaking at the award ceremony, Gupta said, "At Coca-Cola we are committed to preserve, protect and enhance the environment and this simple belief guides us in everything that we do. We will continue to further improve our systems and are confident of making a significant positive impact on our environment in times to come."
Coca-Cola will have to prove that claim by early December, at least in Rajasthan. On November 3, Chief Justice Anil Dev Singh and Justice K.S. Rathore of the Rajasthan High Court directed "Coca-Cola, and all other manufacturers of carbonated beverages and soft drinks, to disclose the composition and contents of the products, including the presence, if any, of pesticides and chemicals, on the bottle, package or container..." within 30 days.
-------- genetics
Geneticist claims to have found 'God gene' in humans
November 15, 2004
By Elizabeth Day
LONDON SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041114-111404-8087r.htm
LONDON - An American molecular geneticist has concluded after comparing more than 2,000 DNA samples that a person's capacity to believe in God is linked to brain chemicals.
His findings have been criticized by leading clerics, who challenge the existence of a "God gene" and say the research undermines a fundamental tenet of faith - that spiritual enlightenment is achieved through divine transformation rather than the brain's electrical impulses.
Dean Hamer, the director of the Gene Structure and Regulation Unit at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, asked volunteers 226 questions in order to determine how spiritually connected they felt to the universe. The higher their score, the greater the person's ability to believe in a greater spiritual force and, Mr. Hamer found, the more likely they were to share the gene VMAT2.
Studies on twins showed that those with this gene, a vesicular monoamine transporter that regulates the flow of mood-altering chemicals in the brain, were more likely to develop a spiritual belief.
Growing up in a religious environment was said to have little effect on belief.
Mr. Hamer, who in 1993 claimed to have identified a DNA sequence linked to male homosexuality, said the existence of the "God gene" explained why some people had more aptitude for spirituality than others.
"Buddha, Muhammad and Jesus all shared a series of mystical experiences or alterations in consciousness and thus probably carried the gene," he said. "This means that the tendency to be spiritual is part of genetic makeup. This is not a thing that is strictly handed down from parents to children. It could skip a generation. It's like intelligence."
His findings, published in a book, "The God Gene: How Faith Is Hard-Wired Into Our Genes," are being greeted skeptically by many in the religious establishment.
The Rev. John Polkinghorne, a fellow of the Royal Society and a canon theologian at Liverpool Cathedral, said: "The idea of a God gene goes against all my personal theological convictions. You can't cut faith down to the lowest common denominator of genetic survival. It shows the poverty of reductionist thinking."
The Rev. Walter Houston, the chaplain of Mansfield College, Oxford, and a fellow in theology, said: "Religious belief is not just related to a person's constitution. It's related to society, tradition, character - everything's involved. Having a gene that could do all that seems pretty unlikely to me."
Mr. Hamer insisted, however, that his research was not antithetical to a belief in God.
"Religious believers can point to the existence of God genes as one more sign of the Creator's ingenuity - a clever way to help humans acknowledge and embrace a divine presence," he said.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Noam Chomsky on Yasser Arafat, Iraq and the Draft
Monday, November 15th, 2004
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/15/1448219
We hear an excerpt of a speech by MIT linguistics professor Noam Chomsky speaking at the 25th Anniversary of Coalition for Peace Action in Princeton. The historian and author spoke about Yasser Arafat, Iraq and the military draft. [includes rush transcript] Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was buried in the West Bank this weekend. For decades, Arafat was the embodiment of the Palestinian cause and the symbol of resistance against Israeli occupation. He was laid to rest in the Ramallah headquarters where was confined by Israel for the final years of his life.
Tens of thousands of Palestinians gathered around his flag-draped coffin as it was carried across the compound. Mourners wept and chanted in an emotional farewell bid to the only leader many of them have ever known. New Palestinian officials has been named to lead in the post-Arafat era but the future remains uncertain.
The new chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Mahmoud Abbas, escaped injury Sunday after masked members of the Al Aksr Brigade opened fire on a gathering where Palestinians were mourning the death of Yasser Arafat. Two of Abbas' bodygards were killed in the shooting.
This past weekend, MIT linguistics professor Noam Chomsky spoke at the 25th Anniversary of Coalition for Peace Action in Princeton, New Jersey. The historian and author of over 100 books spoke about Yasser Arafat, Iraq and the military draft. This is an excerpt of what he had to say.
- Noam Chomsky, speaking at the 25th Anniversary of Coalition for Peace Action in Princeton, New Jersey.
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
This transcript is available free of charge, however donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution. Donate - $25, $50, $100, more...
AMY GOODMAN: This past weekend, MIT linguistics professor, Noam Chomsky spoke at the 25th anniversary of the Coalition for Peace Action in Princeton, New Jersey. Noam Chomsky has written over 100 books, well-known political analyst, linguist at MIT. He talked about Yasser Arafat, about Iraq, about the military draft here in this country. He spoke on Sunday. This is an excerpt of what he had to say.
NOAM CHOMSKY: I had a little time on the airplane and read this morning's Times and there is, as expected, a front page story that is in the weekend review by a very good reporter. It's about a highly significant topic, how to establish democracy -- or the president's messianic vision, as the Boston Globe calls it, my own newspaper. And it discusses a current example, which has had a huge amount of media commentary in the last couple days, the Palestinian issue, what happens after Arafat. The first paragraph says that the post-Arafat era will be the latest test of a quintessentially American article of faith, that elections provide legitimacy, even to the frailest institutions. Okay, that's our quintessential article of faith. Then it goes on, and we'll skip to the last paragraph. The last paragraph on the continuation page says there's a paradox. In the past, the Bush administration, and he could have added every previous one, resisted new national elections among Palestinians. The thought was that the elections would make Mr. Arafat look better, and give him a fresher mandate, and might have helped give credibility and authority to Hamas. So in other words, we have a quintessential commitment to democracy, but in the single example that is given we oppose democracy because the outcome might come out the wrong way. Well, there are some conclusions you can draw from that one example. Yes, we support democracy, as long as it comes out the right way. Otherwise, we'll block it. Now, more has to be said. The first paragraph is not false. If by Americans you mean American people, that's quite true. It is a quintessential article of faith among the general population that we ought to have democracy and elections. It simply is rejected by every single government, and by the media and by elite opinion. Their position is we should are democracy and elections when it comes out the right way, as in this case. So, there's really no contradiction, if you sort of interpret it properly, but the lessons are there, and the single example chosen does in fact illustrate them, and incidentally, it's not unusual to re-find them. I often discover, probably others do too, that if you want to read an article in a major newspaper, the best way to do it is to start with the end. The last paragraph quite often has something interesting. The first paragraph usually has something for the headline writers and for the casual reader. And I don't know if this is done consciously or not, but it's pretty consistent. Well, let's continue. What is illustrated by this front page article and in a series of front page articles and editorials in the last few days is a principle. The principle is that we, and we is identified with the government, not the population and - I'll come back to this, there's a radical difference in opinion between them, but that we, the government, are always guided by benign intent. That's kind of like an axiom. We can make mistakes along the way, but the intention was benevolent. Try to find an exception to that way at the left liberal end of criticism in the mainstream. Well in conformity with these guidelines, the New York Times before had a front page think-piece on Arafat's death. So did many other journals, but I'll keep to the Times, they're all approximately the same. The article begins by informing us, first paragraph again, that Arafat was both the symbol of the Palestinians' hope for a viable independent state and the prime obstacle to its realization. He was never, it goes on, he was never able to reach the heights of President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, who won back the Sinai through a peace treaty with Israel in 1979 because he was able to reach out to Israelis and address their fears and hope with his visit to Jerusalem in 1977. That was the same story in every newspaper I looked at with slight nuances. There is a documentary record, rich as possible sources, unambiguous, and it happens to tell a different story. But it's not allowed. And it is not allowed because it would violate the fundamental principle that what we do is benign, we, meaning the government, not the population. So, let's take a look at that. The documentary record shows uncontroversially and explicitly and unambiguously that the main obstacle to the realization of the Palestinian state was Washington, and competing pretty well for second place is the New York Times and its colleagues, which have consistently "mispressed" or misrepresented the crucial facts. And the crucial facts are not in doubt. I'll run through a small sample because it's brief. Let's pick some examples. So in 1976, the United States became the chief obstacle to a Palestinian state, very simply. The Security Council of the United Nations debated a resolution calling for a two-state settlement, a Palestinian settlement, a Palestinian state alongside of Israel, both states having all the rights guaranteed in the international system. This was in accord with a very broad international consensus that was supported by the Arab states, backed by the PLO and just about everybody. And in fact by then it had crystallized as an overwhelming international consensus. The U.S. vetoed. It was vetoed. The U.S. veto, incidentally, is a double veto. It vetoes the resolution and also vetoes recording in history. So it's out of history but it happened. It happened again in 1980, the same resolution, the same again. There is a long record up to the present. It continues consistently, General Assembly initiatives from Europe, initiatives from the PLO, initiatives from the Arab states. Whatever they are, the U.S. blocks them. And that continues, the most recent dramatic case, there are plenty of others, was in Geneva in the year 2002. There are a series bases for settlement along the lines of the international consensus. It was presented by prominent Israeli and Palestinian negotiators. It was strongly supported by almost the whole world with the notable exception the United States, which alone refused to send even a message of support as was indeed reported in the New York Times in a very dismissive article, saying, this is all nonsense. Let's go to Sadat. Well again, the facts are clear. Sadat in fact did go to Jerusalem and make a proposal, but it was not - but that proposal in 1977 repeated one that he had made in 1971. In 1971, not 1977, Sadat offered a full peace treaty to Israel in accord with official U.S. government policy offering nothing to the Palestinians. Their rights had not yet entered the international agenda. That was recognized by Israel to be a genuine peace offer. They rejected it. They preferred expansion to peace. This is the labor government. Expansion then meant into the northeastern Sinai. Important question as always is what's the U.S. going to do under Kissinger's initiative. The U.S. decided to reject its official policy and to support Israeli rejectionism, the policy was what Kissinger called stalemate in his memoirs. Stalemate, we prefer to stalemate not negotiations, just force. That led directly to the 1973 war. A very close call for Israel. Nuclear alert. Very close call for the world. After that, Kissinger recognized that you cannot just dismiss Egypt as a basket case, began his famous shuttle diplomacy, that led to the Camp David agreements where indeed in 1979 the United States and Israel accepted Sadat's 1971 offer, okay. Actually from the U.S.-Israeli point of view, a harsher offer because by that time, it included a call for a Palestinian state in accordance with a new emerging international consensus, which faced an impossible obstacle, namely the U.S. government and its median commentary. Well, that goes down in history as a diplomatic triumph for the United States. In real history it's a diplomatic catastrophe. The U.S. refusal to accept a peaceful settlement in 1971 led to a terrible war, very dangerous one, years of suffering and misery with effects that still are very much there. But it shows the advantages of owning history. You can kind of reshape it into your own -- to satisfy your own needs. And you therefore get the first paragraph that I just read from the world's leading newspaper, front page think-piece, duplicated just about everywhere in the media, and that includes journals of opinion. You might try to look for an exception. The example does illustrate again the basic guidelines of commentary, media in particular, but commentary generally. We're good, meaning the government, not the people, we accept the totalitarian notion that we identify the people with the state, so when they say we, it means the government. The government is good. We are good, benevolent, well-intentioned, that we seek peace and justice. We're foiled by villain who cannot rise to our exalted level. It doesn't matter what the facts are. Not that it matters what simple logic tells us.
AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, speaking on Sunday in Princeton, New Jersey. Afterwards, he was asked a series of question, one of them was, would the draft be reinstated.
NOAM CHOMSKY: I think it's extremely unlikely. I should tell you this as a word of personal background. I was very much involved in the resistance movement in the 1960's. In fact, I was just barely -- the only reason I missed a long jail sentence is because the Tet Offensive came along and the trials were called off. So I was very much involved in the resistance, but I was never against the draft. I disagreed with a lot of my friends and associates on that, for a very good reason, I think at least as nobody seems to agree. In my view, if there's going to be an army, I think it ought to be a citizen's army. Now, here I do agree with some people, the top brass, they don't want a citizen's army. They want a mercenary army, what we call a volunteer army. A mercenary army of the disadvantaged. And in fact, in the Vietnam war, the U.S. military realized, they had made a very bad mistake. I mean, for the first time I think ever in the history of European imperialism, including us, they had used a citizen's army to fight a vicious, brutal, colonial war, and civilians just cannot do that kind of a thing. For that, you need the French foreign legion, the Gurkhas or something like that. Every predecessor has used mercenaries, often drawn from the country that they're attacking like England ran India with Indian mercenaries. You take them from one place and send them to kill people in the other place. That's the standard way to run imperial wars. They're just too brutal and violent and murderous. Civilians are not going to be able to do it for very long. What happened was, the army started falling apart. One of the reasons that the army was withdrawn was because the top military wanted it out of there. They were afraid they were not going to have an army anymore. Soldiers were fragging officer. The whole thing was falling apart. They were on drugs. And that's why I think that they're not going to have a draft. That's why I'm in favor of it. If there's going to be an army that will fight brutal, colonial wars, and that's the only likely kind of war, I'm not talking about the militarization of space and that kind of thing, I mean ground wars, it ought to be a citizen's army so that the attitudes of the society are reflected in the military.
AMY GOODMAN: MIT Professor, Noam Chomsky, speaking in Princeton, New Jersey, celebrating 25 years of the Coalition for Peace Action.
To purchase an audio or video copy of this entire program, click here for our new online ordering or call 1 (800) 881-2359.
--------
Thai PM says military will no longer break up rallies
15/11/2004,
Radio Australia
http://www.abc.net.au/ra/news/stories/s1243267.htm
Thailand's premier says the military will no longer break up protests following the deaths of 87 Muslim demonstrators after a riot in the country's south.
Thaksin Shinawatra met a delegation of academics after 182 last week jointly demanded that he apologise for the deaths.
Most of those who died suffocated when they were piled in the back of army trucks after police broke up a demonstration on October 25.
However Mr Thaksin continued to balk over an apology over the deaths at Tak Bai that have sparked a wave of retaliatory attacks against Buddhists in Thailand's south.
Officials also confirmed that Mr Thaksin had changed his mind and will attend the 21-nation summit of Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation in Chile on November 20-21.
--------
What happened last Thursday Nov' 11th.
by Mordechai Vanunu,
November 15, 2004
Nonviolence.org
http://www.nonviolence.org/vanunu/20041115report.html
Dear friends.
First the timing, Israel spies chose the day of Arafat's death, they were ready with this plan to arrest me since Oct' 19th. I saw the paper signed by the same jewish religon judge from Oct' 19th. So they knew Arafat was going to die, and they decided to arrest me on that day.
The police started investigating in May when they arested Peter Hounam. But instead of questioning me, they decided to build a huge case, gathering a lot of interviews in hope to have a real case for going to court and imprisoning me.
So they invaded the church St George cathedral with two motorcycles black clothes helmets, machine guns, 3 cars with more police with machine guns, special detectors ready to use force to grab me, they arrive to Jerusalem since 5:00 AM, ready for the invasion ,until 9:00 AM when they receive the orders, they come with a warrant to search my room, all by the jewish religious judge who didn't respect the holy place church, imagine what Israel would say if the same on jewish synagogue.
The bishop Reyah, come immediately furious of this invading his church demanding from them to put down the machine guns, and to respect the guest house the visitors.
After a few times their chief told them to hide their guns, they search my room 10 people took all the computers and any electronic devices, mobile phone every CD, DVD, books papers. And then they want me to sign their papers, I refused because they did not wrote all what they took.
They took me with them in their car to Petah Tikva, in the police station they started questioned me about all my interviews since May until Oct'. They had all the information from internet, and also from arresting questioning some journalists. I in the begining refused to answer later I told him every thing was all ready published 18 years ago or go see Sunday Times article from 1986.
After 2 hours I demanded to meet my lawer Feldman then they say I am undr arrest, Feldman came, we met,and they agree to go to court at 19:00. I stopped answering their questions, and just waiting to go to the court. In the court they demanded one week house arrest, to come to police for questions any time they call, again to speak about NWS in Israel, we disagree, but the judge impose these rules and set me free.
I continue to speak with the media and returned back to St George. So my view they want to frighten me, and to let me see the church is not helping, can not give me sanctuary. The police love to show they can put me back in prison. But it seems they can not prove that I am revealing any new secrets, only that I am speaking to foreigners. The conclusion all is in the hand of shaback mosad they are deciding what will happen. So if they will not charge me then they should set me free next April.
Anyway this event prove I can not live free here, hope to see you in real freedom.
VMJC
-------
------- OneList (submissions from subscribers)
------- Depleted Uranium Keeps On Killing!
-----------
Posted
without profit or payment for research and educational
purposes only,
in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107.