Archive By Date | Today's Links to Search By
Activists' News | Nuclear | Depleted Uranium | Military | Police
Alternative Energy Etc. | From Subscribers
NUCLEAR
Bush Toughens Line On Nuclear Threats
Bush zeros in on nuclear weapon projects
Black horsemen swoop down on White House
Study Links Cancer Cases In Sweden to Chernobyl
Dounreay workers exposed to lethal plutonium
Legislator Takes Up Veterans' Cause Will Back Depleted Uranium Tests
Bush Says Iran Speeds Output of A-Bomb Fuel
LaPorte warns that N. Korea may try to sell plutonium
ONCE-SECRET EXPERIMENTS DRAW U.N. SCRUTINY
US 'Star Wars' missiles will be in Europe in five years
Unthinkable? An attack on an American city by terrorists
The price of blowing the whistle in Salem
DOE team to hear Hanford worker complaints
MILITARY
Rebel Attacks Raise Tensions in Darfur
Rights Groups Cite Pattern Of Abuse by Nepal's Army
Britain joins EU army
Senators Want Boeing Deal Investigated
Cost of War in Iraq Escalates
Iraq: The Uncounted
'Hey, hurry up. You're holding up my men'
The soldiers' story: the war the video cameras do not see
Rockets from over the river make terror just part of army routine
Falluja women, children in mass grave
Iraq Schedules National Elections for Jan. 30
Children Pay Cost of Iraq's Chaos
Baghdad Suffers A Day of Attacks, Assassinations
Rebels Keep Up Attacks in Central and North Iraq
In Falluja, Young Marines Saw the Savagery of an Urban War
Palestinians: Arafat poisoned
3,000 Indian Troops Pull Out of Kashmir
Intelligence Overhaul Bill Blocked
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Where Execution Feels Like Relic, Death Looms
Intelligence Overhaul Bill Blocked
Pentagon Called Major Factor in Defeat of Intelligence Bill
House Leadership Blocks Vote on Intelligence Bill
Broad Influence for Justice Dept. Choice
Peru Won't Release Imprisoned N.Y. Woman
City and F.B.I. Reach Agreement on Bioterror Investigations
POLITICS
In role reversal, president rescues Secret Service agent
Congress Agrees on Tight Budget for U.S.
Taking Charge Even if she doesn't
The Power-Values Approach to Policy
Spending Bill in Hand, Congress Departs
ENERGY
Sixth Iraq oil well set ablaze by saboteurs
OTHER
Children Pay Cost of Iraq's Chaos
Creditors consider writing off 80 percent of debt
ACTIVISTS
Bahrain Activist Pardoned by King
Anti-war advocates contemplate 'where to go from here'
Additional fence and barbed wire fail to stop Latin school protest
-------- NUCLEAR
Bush Toughens Line On Nuclear Threats
President Singles Out Iran, N. Korea
By Mike Allen and Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, November 21, 2004; Page A24
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A64951-2004Nov20?language=printer
SANTIAGO, Chile, Nov. 20 -- President Bush said Saturday that he believes Iran is continuing to pursue a nuclear weapon, which he called "a very serious matter," and said he had won pledges from Asian allies to increase pressure on North Korea's leader to restart disarmament talks.
During his reelection campaign, Bush said little about the two nuclear threats. But with aides contending that his victory gave him new international leverage, he took confrontational lines with both countries, insisting they disarm but pledging to pursue that goal diplomatically.
At his first international summit since being reelected, and on his first trip abroad in five months, Bush escalated warnings issued by outgoing Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, saying he did not believe claims by Iran's ruling clerics, who have denied that the country was taking steps to develop a nuclear weapon.
Bush said the United States was closely monitoring Iran's activities in the run-up to Thursday, when the International Atomic Energy Agency is scheduled to meet in Vienna to determine whether to refer the country's nuclear activity to the U.N. Security Council. In an agreement with Britain, France and Germany that was announced this month, Iran agreed to suspend uranium enrichment, the pivotal process in a peaceful nuclear energy program capable of being diverted for military use.
"We're concerned about reports that show that prior to a certain international meeting, they're willing to speed up processing of materials that could lead to a nuclear weapon," Bush said on the sidelines of the 12th annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit. "The world knows it's a serious matter, and we're working together to solve this matter."
Bush said it was "very important for the Iranian government to hear that we are concerned about their desires," and that he would continue working with European powers "to convince the Iranians to give up any nuclear ambitions they may have."
"The reason why they're involved is because they do believe that Iran has got nuclear ambitions, as do we, as do many around the world," Bush said, as Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi stood at his side.
The president met with the leaders of his four partners in arms talks with North Korea -- China, Japan, Russia and South Korea -- and said afterward that all had supported his call for them to bolster their united front to try to get North Korea to return to talks that have been on hold since June. Bush went into the summit determined to urge them to more energetically apply pressure on North Korea, and by day's end, he had declared his diplomacy a success.
In a speech to chief executives meeting here at the base of the Andes Mountains, Bush said: "I can report to you today, having visited with the other nations involved in that collaborative effort, that the will is strong, that the effort is united and the message is clear to Mr. Kim Jong Il: Get rid of your nuclear weapons programs."
A Chinese Foreign Ministry official told reporters that President Hu Jintao had said to Bush, "This is a rather complex issue, and it requires all relevant parties to display patience, flexibility and sincerity."
Bush ate lunch with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and in contrast to their previously jovial appearances together, the two men were silent when photographers were briefly ushered in. A senior administration official who attended the meeting said Bush expressed skepticism about Putin's proposals to change the Russian political system in ways that have raised questions about his commitment to democracy.
The official said Bush "noted the concerns that we've had about checks and balances, about the centralization of power inside Russia, and asked Putin to give his own explanation of what was going on and why these steps were being taken inside Russia."
The official said Putin "went back deep into Russian history, the Stalinist period, and made the point that what the Russian government was trying to do at this point was to develop a democratic style of government that was consistent with Russian history and the unique problems that Russia faced as a multiethnic society on a large landmass."
Bush branded Iran part of an "axis of evil" in 2002, along with Iraq and North Korea, and in April said it would be "intolerable" if Iran were to develop an atomic weapon. Iran agreed Monday to a deal brokered by three European powers -- Britain, France and Germany -- to indefinitely suspend uranium enrichment until a permanent agreement could be reached to ensure that Tehran complies with its obligations as a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But diplomats in Vienna have reported that Iran is scrambling to convert nearly raw uranium, also called yellowcake, into hexafluoride gas, the end stage for the uranium before it can be enriched, in advance of the deadline.
Powell, appearing a few hours after Bush at a joint press conference with Chile's foreign minister, Ignacio Walker, expressed frustration with Iran over what he depicted as its clandestine efforts to develop a nuclear weapon.
"Iran has been working on long-range missiles," Powell said. "They have been working on intercontinental range missiles, which they claim are for perhaps space-launch purposes. And we have reason to believe that when you see what they have been doing, the high aspects of their nuclear programs, when you see what they have been doing over the years with missiles and potential delivery systems, it is a cause of concern."
Speaking about North Korea after his meeting with Koizumi, Bush said it was "very important for the leader of North Korea to understand that the six-party talks will be the framework in which we continue to discuss the mutual goal we all have, which is to rid the Korean Peninsula of nuclear weapons."
A Japanese government official said after the meeting that Koizumi had told Bush he wanted "to continue cooperation toward Iraq's reconstruction," but stopped short of promising to extend the deployment of Japanese troops beyond their current commitment of Dec. 14.
Bush met with Hu, China's president, for the first time since Hu assumed his full powers. "I invited President Hu to come and visit the United States as soon as he can, and he invited me to China," Bush said.
During Bush's meeting with the chief executives, he won the heartiest applause when he recognized "a man who has served our country so well, a great United States secretary of state, Colin Powell."
"Right after my speech, he's headed to the Middle East. That's a heck of a retirement, Mr. Secretary," Bush said, drawing laughter. "I look forward to your report when you get back."
Bush, reprising an issue he had discussed with Koizumi, acknowledged to the leaders his "concern about whether or not our government is dedicated to dealing with our deficits."
He said he looked forward to outlining to Congress in his State of the Union address in January the steps he will take in his new budget to deal with the deficit.
----
Bush zeros in on nuclear weapon projects
New York Times
By David E. Sanger
November 21, 2004
http://www.marinij.com/Stories/0,1413,234~24410~2549945,00.html
SANTIAGO, Chile - President Bush increased the administration's pressure on Iran yesterday, saying there were indications that the country was speeding forward in the production of a key ingredient for nuclear weapons fuel, a move he said was "a very serious matter" that undercut Iran's denials that it is seeking to build weapons.
On the first day here of the annual gathering of Pacific Rim leaders, his first summit meeting since winning re-election, Bush also tried to re-establish a unified front against the other nuclear challenge facing his second term: North Korea.
In back-to-back meetings with the leaders of China, Japan and South Korea here yesterday morning, Bush urged each to draw North Korea back into six-nation negotiations. And in a speech later, he issued a direct challenge to North Korea's reclusive leader that echoed President Reagan's demand in 1987 for the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. After the meetings, Bush said, he was convinced "that the will is strong, that the effort is united and the message is clear to Mr. Kim Jong Il: Get rid of your nuclear weapons programs."
His aides played down informal intelligence estimates that the country has already produced enough plutonium in the past two years to manufacture six additional nuclear weapons.
Bush's efforts here underscored his determination to reverse two nuclear projects that appear to have made significant progress while American attention has been focused on Iraq.
In Iran's case, he is clearly skeptical about a European-led effort to suspend the country's manufacture of nuclear material, and in North Korea he is facing a country that has defied every previous effort he has made to force it to dismantle what it has already built.
He told reporters yesterday that he was "concerned about reports" that said Iran appeared "willing to speed up processing of materials that could lead to a nuclear weapon."
Diplomats had said the day before that Iran had told the International Atomic Energy Agency that it was racing to produce uranium hexafluoride, a gas that can be enriched into bomb fuel, before it begins to observe the temporary suspension of nuclear activity that it negotiated with the Europeans.
The president's comments marked the second time this week that the administration has accused Iran of heading quickly toward nuclear weapons, despite its protestations to the contrary.
Following Bush's assertion yesterday that Iran had accelerated its uranium enrichment, Secretary of State Colin Powell appeared at a news conference here with Foreign Minister Ignacio Walker Prieto of Chile and was asked to provide details to back that up but declined to do so. He said that in the past four years, as a result of American cries of alarm about Iran's intentions, the international community was now "as concerned as we are" about the problem.
The focus of most of Bush's sessions was North Korea, and one participant said Bush hinted he would show "some flexibility" in offering incentives to the North, a subject of furious infighting within the administration. But a senior American official told reporters yesterday afternoon that could only happen after North Korea returned to the negotiating table.
"The North Korean strategy of running out the clock didn't work," said this official, referring to the speculation that North Korea thought Bush would be defeated on Election Day.
In 2003 Bush said he "will not tolerate nuclear weap-ons in North Korea," and in April 2004, he told a convention of newspaper editors in Washington that a nuclear program in Iran was "intolerable" and would be dealt with, starting at the United Nations if necessary. He did not repeat either phrase yesterday, and the agreement with Europe appears to have halted, at least temporarily, the administration's hopes of taking the Iranian program to the U.N. Security Council this month.
But Bush's quickness to seize on the Iranian production of uranium hexafluoride was driven, administration officials said, by a sense among his national security aides that there is still time to stop Iran from actually producing a weapon. "We're past that point with North Korea," one senior adviser said recently. "With the North, it's a question of unwinding what's already happened."
So far, there have been three sessions of talks involving North and South Korea, China, Japan, Russia and the United States, but no real agreement on the scope of the North Korean program. Meanwhile, North Korea appears to have reprocessed a trove of 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods.
In preparation for the meeting yesterday morning with China's president, Hu Jintao, American officials took the unusual step several weeks ago of passing to Beijing what one senior Asian official called "classified packets" of data intended to convince the Chinese that North Korea has two weapons programs under way.
Chinese leaders had few doubts that North Korea has been trying to produce plutonium weapons, and they have not questioned unofficial American intelligence estimates that the North has reprocessed enough plutonium for four to six weapons since international inspectors were expelled from the country nearly two years ago.
But until recently China expressed considerable doubts about a second program that the United States believes the North started with help from A.Q. Khan, then the head of Pakistan's nuclear weapons project. Like the Iranian program, which also received extensive aid from Khan's network in the 1990s, the North's program involves enriching uranium to make bomb fuel.
"The Chinese made their own inquiries from Pakistan, and we believe they got confirmation there," said one senior Asian official involved in yesterday's talks with Bush. "They don't seem to be questioning the validity of that intelligence anymore, at least in private."
-----
Black horsemen swoop down on White House
Mike Davis
SF Chronicle
Sunday, November 21, 2004
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/11/21/ING5A9TCVL1.DTL
Earlier this year, four gaunt horsemen in black shrouds cantered down Pennsylvania Avenue. No one complained or even noticed, and they grazed their hungry steeds on the White House lawn. They've been there ever since and threaten never to leave.
This interview with them is a Chronicle exclusive: "First Horseman, please state your name for our readers."
"My name is Oil, and my price is $50 per barrel and higher yet to come."
"Fine, and you're from ...?"
"Huppert's Peak."
"Is that in Colorado?"
No response.
"Are you in Washington for business or pleasure?"
"Both, actually. While wrecking the American economy, I'm also hoping to bring immense happiness to a handful of giant energy corporations."
"Well, that's a popular cause in this town, so please enjoy your stay. Now, Second Horseman, can I have your name for the record?"
"My name is Proliferation, son of Wot and destroyer of worlds."
"Wot?"
"The War on Terrorism. Only the strong and nuclear-armed shall survive, so sayeth Bush."
"I see, you're a traveling salesman. Visited any exotic locales lately?"
"Mainly Tehran and Pyongyang with some overnights in Karachi, Delhi and Brasilia. But I have a heavy travel schedule over the next year."
"Enjoy your frequent-flier points. And now, No. 3, if I could interrupt for a minute?"
"No problem. My name is Global Chaos. I was just sorting through some vacation photos. Take a look."
"Thanks. Hmm, very National Geographic."
"Yes, I love the great outdoors. This is a melting glacier in Alaska. Here's a flood in Bangladesh. Oh, one of my favorites, the epic drought in the American Southwest."
"Eh, what are those white objects?"
"You mean the bones?"
"Bones? Maybe I'd better move on and meet Horseman Four."
"I am the pale rider, and my name is Plague."
"I bet your first name is Bubonic?"
"No, that's my cousin. I'm the avian influenza pandemic."
"I'm sorry, but have I heard of you?"
"The World Health Organization says I am an unprecedented threat to humanity. The world is utterly unprepared to deal with my arrival."
"Well, that's one helluva blurb."
"Yes, and my grandfather killed 100 million people in 1918-19."
"No kidding? Well, thanks for sharing. Now, I wonder if I can ask a few questions of the entire group. First, does your posse, band, whatever, have an agent or publicist?"
"Yes, St. John."
"OK, and has he arranged your D.C. publicity? Have you had much election- year media exposure? You know, O'Reilly, the Washington Post, 'Meet the Press, ' 'NewsHour' ... ?"
"Oh, no," laughs Chaos, "no one has interviewed us."
"Come on, four big guys in black on horses, here in front of the White House during an election season ..."
"No, honest," Proliferation chips in, "they don't want to acknowledge our presence."
"Well, how about the other side, the opposition party? Surely, they've looked to you for a juicy angle. I mean the horse doo-doos all over the White House lawn, not to mention ... Hey, are you guys even citizens? Do you have passports?"
"I can assure you," Proliferation insists, "none of that matters. No one wants to admit we're here."
"But why?"
Plague speaks. "Apocalypse denial. Your whole society is suffering from acute apocalypse denial."
"That's preposterous, we're afraid of all kinds of things these days. We tremble at the very thought of anthrax in the mail, plutonium on the subways or botulism in our Big Macs. We have regular orange alerts ..."
Plague interrupts. "No, that's the whole point. You're so terrified of the shadows your rulers project on the wall that you can't see us standing here, right outside your door."
"Hmm, so I guess you guys are the real deal?"
"Believe it."
"So what's your business plan?"
Chaos clears his throat. "For generations, the wealthier 40 percent of your population has lived inside an extraordinary bubble of privilege."
"In addition to enormous security of wealth and status," Proliferation takes over, "your affluent classes have been sheltered from the bitter winds of history."
"We're the bitter winds," adds Plague.
"And we'll burst your bubble," Oil promises.
A pale horse neighs.
"Unfortunately, my recorder has run out of tape. I'm afraid we'll have to end the interview with that."
"No problem," Oil smiles. "Y'all come back and visit. We're not going anywhere."
Mike Davis is the author of "Dead Cities: And Other Tales'' and "Ecology of Fear.'' A version of this piece appeared on tomdispatch.com.
-------- accidents and safety
Study Links Cancer Cases In Sweden to Chernobyl
By Mattias Karen
Associated Press
Sunday, November 21, 2004; Page A26
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A827-2004Nov20.html
STOCKHOLM, Nov. 20 -- More than 800 people in northern Sweden may have cancer as a result of the fallout that spewed over the region after the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986, according to a new study by Swedish scientists.
The figure is significantly higher than any previous estimate, and the study drew immediate fire from critics who said they doubted the accuracy of the results.
The radiation was released on April 26, 1986, when reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear plant exploded and caught fire, contaminating an area roughly half the size of Colorado. The accident forced the resettlement of hundreds of thousands of people and ruined some of Europe's most fertile farmland.
The study monitored cancer cases among the more than 1.1 million people in the northern parts of Sweden who were exposed to radioactive fallout. Researchers found that the cancer risk increased in areas with higher levels of fallout, which was spread by winds.
Of the 22,400 cancer cases among the group, 849 can be statistically attributed to Chernobyl, said Martin Tondel, a researcher at Linkoeping University who headed the study. The findings were first published in this month's issue of the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, a science magazine.
Leif Moberg, a radiation expert with the Swedish Radiation Protection Authority, questioned the findings. "The radiation dosage that we in Sweden got after the accident was too low to produce this many cancer cases," Moberg said, adding that it was probably too early to see any definite results of Chernobyl. "Most cancer cases don't develop until 20, 30 or 50 years later," he said.
Tondel said that although the increase in cases cannot directly be attributed to Chernobyl, he could not see any other explanation. "We've tried our best to explain it in other ways, but we can't," he said.
-------- britain
Dounreay workers exposed to lethal plutonium
Lab sealed off after mucus samples reveal highest contamination levels on record
By Rob Edwards, Environment Editor
Sunday Herald
21 November 2004
http://www.sundayherald.com/46186
A laboratory at the Dounreay nuclear plant has been closed and sealed off because it has contaminated at least 10 workers with plutonium over the last three months.
The Sunday Herald has discovered that high levels of radioactivity have been detected in "nose-blow" samples taken from three workers. One was 200 times the "action level" that triggers a health investigation, and the highest that Dounreay safety officials could remember.
An investigation has been launched by the government's safety watchdog, the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate. If it finds evidence that safety rules have been breached, it will submit a report to the procurator fiscal, which could lead to Dounreay being prosecuted.
Anti-nuclear campaigners claim the contamination is "life-threatening" and have accused Dounreay of acting irresponsibly. But this is denied by the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA ), the government body that runs the plant, near Thurso, Caithness.
Plutonium is a heavy metal which emits short-range alpha radiation. Although relatively harmless outside the body, experts say that when it has been inhaled or ingested, it can bombard living cells with radiation and increase the chances that they will trigger cancers.
The contamination has come from the Pulsed Column Laboratory, an old plutonium research facility. It was where scientists used to study how best to reprocess the plutonium burnt in fast breeder reactors, which are now defunct.
The lab, along with other facilities at Dounreay, was in the process of being decommissioned. But on August 24 a routine nose-blow sample from a worker who had been in the lab was found to contain more radioactivity than the action level of 0.5 becquerels (Bq).
On October 19 a sample from another worker in the lab also breached the action level, and decommissioning work was halted. But workers were still sent into the facility to do other work.
Then on November 11 three people working on the building's ventilation system suffered high levels of plutonium contamination. The mucus blown from their noses onto tissues contained respectively 17, 22 and 100Bq of radioactivity.
As a result the UKAEA decided to bar all access to the lab while the cause of the contamination is investigated. It accepts that 100Bq is a high level of contamination, but stresses that it will take two or three weeks of additional sampling to discover how far the plutonium has spread into the workers' bodies.
All five of the workers with nose-blow samples in excess of the action level have been put on a biological monitoring programme. This involves regularly measuring their urine and faeces for plutonium.
Another five workers who had nose-blow samples below the action level are also being monitored, along with a further five, who had been in the building, "as a precaution". Automatic monitoring systems have not picked up any unexpected levels of contamination, or any leaks to the environment.
So far the biological monitoring suggests that the whole-body radiation doses received by two of the 15 workers are well below the safety limits. But the results for the others - including those with the worst contaminated nose-blow samples - are not yet available.
Dounreay's spokesman, Colin Punler, stressed that nose-blow samples were just a rough, initial, indication of contamination and that a proper assessment of the risks couldn't be made until full biological monitoring had been completed.
But he accepted that the higher the contamination of the samples, the greater the worry. "Any unplanned exposure to radiation is a cause for concern," he said. "Any incident such as this is a matter of regret."
Lorraine Mann, from Scotland Against Nuclear Dumping, accused Dounreay of exposing its workers to unnecessary risks. "Sending them in when they knew there was a problem is irresponsible in the extreme and quite unforgivable," she said.
"This is a life-threatening position they put people into. The extent to which they put these guys at risk was appalling."
It was an anonymous phone call to Mann last week that first suggested that one of the nose-blow samples had been higher than anyone at Dounreay could recall. The UKAEA had been downplaying the risks, she alleged.
"They have been deliberately misleading," she claimed. "Nothing has changed. They still refuse to tell the truth until they are forced to." She would be astonished if the contamination didn't lead to a prosecution.
The Nuclear Installations Inspectorate said it had been informed of the contamination by the UKAEA. Inspectors at Dounreay last week had begun an investigation into the cause, but it was too early to say what the outcome would be.
A spokesman for the inspectorate argued it had been "a prudent step" to close the building. "If we find any breaches of legal provisions, we will take appropriate action," he said.
-------- depleted uranium
Legislator Takes Up Veterans' Cause
Will Back Depleted Uranium Tests
The Hartford Courant
By THOMAS D. WILLIAMS
November 21, 2004
http://www.ctnow.com/news/health/hc-dubill1121.artnov21,1,7836871.story?coll=hc-headlines-health
Eddie Miles' legs were blown off in Vietnam. Despite his injuries, the Army veteran spent much of the rest of his life obtaining artificial limbs for Vietnamese and Cambodian children injured by the landmines the war left behind.
Inspired by the work of Miles, a high school friend of hers, state Rep. Patricia Dillion, D-New Haven, says she is committed to helping those Connecticut National Guard veterans who were exposed to depleted uranium during the wars in Iraq.
"What [Miles] taught me," Dillon said, "was that the war never ends, because the people who are affected by it continue to suffer, but the politicians forget about it."
Dillon, Democratic deputy majority whip in the House, will propose a bill in the General Assembly to provide for independent laboratory health screening of service members from Connecticut who may have been exposed to depleted uranium munitions dust. The bill probably would have to go through the health and appropriations committees.
During the past three years, Dillon has obtained documents and searched the Internet to find what she considers proof of the health dangers those exposed to depleted uranium, or DU, dust can face. The dust is a byproduct of exploding DU munitions used by the United States and Great Britain in Iraq.
As a legislator and community activist, Dillon, 56, has been involved with financial and other issues for the veterans hospitals in Rocky Hill and West Haven. Her husband, Dr. Jack Hughes, teaches at the Yale University School of Medicine and is an internist and part-time physician at the VA hospital in West Haven.
Dillon said she decided to get involved because veterans hospital administrators and veterans advocates constantly discussed the health crisis faced by veterans of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, including illnesses they believed were related to depleted uranium dust. As planning began for the present war in Iraq, Dillon said, she began to worry that more soldiers would be exposed.
In April, Dillon said, she read in the New York Daily News that independent tests determined that four soldiers from a New York Army National Guard unit probably had become contaminated with dust from the depleted uranium shells fired by U.S. troops in Iraq. When her legislative aides called New York Guard officials to find out what was wrong with the soldiers and what the state was doing about it, Dillon said, they "hit a brick wall of silence and bureaucracy."
The same month she read in the British newspaper The Guardian that British soldiers returning from the war in Iraq were being tested for depleted uranium exposure. That convinced Dillon that Connecticut needs to do the same.
Even though federal law requires blood and health tests for returning war veterans, Dillon said she is not convinced the Pentagon or the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is properly screening service members for possible DU poisoning.
Dillon said she plans to lobby hard for her bill when the legislative session opens in January because the health effects of depleted uranium are a "hot button issue." The U.S. Department of Defense has long ignored DU's toxic dangers just as it ignored landmines after Vietnam, Dillon said.
The Defense Department insists the dust is only dangerous when inhaled in large quantities, usually an unlikely event.
The United States and Great Britain used tons of DU to destroy tanks and bunkers in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. They continued to use it in the Balkans, Afghanistan and the present war in Iraq. The inhalation of DU dust by soldiers and civilians has long been suspected as one of the causes of the illness known as gulf war syndrome.
Depleted uranium is a toxic, heavy metal byproduct of uranium enrichment for use in nuclear weapons and reactor fuel. It is also used in munitions, ballast for airplanes, tank armor and other products. It has a half-life of 4.5 billion years. Its use on the tip of shells fired at tanks is lauded by the military because it ignites a fiery mass that can destroy or disable a tank with a single shot.
But the fine DU dust created by the blast can blow in the wind for many miles and if inhaled, ingested or absorbed through the skin in sufficient quantities can cause lung cancer or kidney ailments. In 2002 at the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute in Bethesda, Md., researchers found that even though the alpha radiation from depleted uranium is relatively low, internalized DU as a metal can induce DNA damage and carcinogenic lesions in the cells that make up bones.
Last December at a national conference of state legislators, Dillon asked Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld about the states' partnering with the Defense Department to pay for health care for returning troops. Rumsfeld, she said, promised to consider less wartime reliance on the National Guard, but did not comment on partnering with states on funding military health care.
One urine screening test for depleted uranium exposure by an independent lab can cost as much as $2,500, said Tedd Weyman, who works for the Uranium Medical Research Center in Toronto. Because his center does not make profits from the tests, it charges $1,100 per test, he said. But if a state has an available mass spectrometer capable of measuring isotopes in parts per billion, he said, it could reduce that cost to $500. Federal urine tests presently performed on veterans are insufficient to do the job, he said.
More than 32,000 veterans of the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are said to have illnesses many of whose causes have not been identified.
Dillon is not convinced federal help is on the way. After talking to administrators in state hospitals and veterans advocates, she decided to offer the bill, which, if adopted, would require depleted uranium exposure screening for all state service members returning from the war.
Dillon's friend, Eddie Miles, died in January at age 60. An obituary in the Manhasset Long Island Press said Miles' quest for artificial limbs for the children took him throughout the world raising money, generating medical research and support and, in 1991, establishing a prosthetics clinic at Kien Khleang, outside Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
Michael Bennett, a spokesman for Miles' organization, the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, said: "We certainly support any and all efforts to ensure the health and welfare of our troops as they return home. This [legislation would be] a great step toward recognizing the risks of depleted uranium on the battlefield."
Jose Llamas, a spokeswoman for the VA in Washington, said the VA does not screen veterans specifically for DU exposures, but its representatives and literature make the veterans aware of DU's potential health dangers.
Dillon said the DU bill is in part dedicated to Miles. "I don't want this war to be like Vietnam, where public officials waved the flag and no one did anything about it [except the veterans]," she said. "We should learn from our mistakes."
-------- iran
Bush Says Iran Speeds Output of A-Bomb Fuel
November 21, 2004
By DAVID E. SANGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/21/politics/21prexy.html?ei=5094&en=b7f042cd9c0e0422&hp=&ex=1101099600&partner=homepage&pagewanted=all&position=
SANTIAGO, Chile, Nov. 20 - President Bush increased the administration's pressure on Iran on Saturday, saying there were indications that the country was speeding forward in its production of a key ingredient for nuclear weapons fuel, a move he said was "a very serious matter'' that undercut Iran's denials that it was seeking to build weapons.
On the first day here of the annual gathering of Pacific Rim leaders, his first summit meeting since winning re-election, Mr. Bush also tried to re-establish a unified front against the other nuclear challenge facing his second term: North Korea.
In back-to-back meetings with the leaders of China, Japan and South Korea here Saturday morning, Mr. Bush urged each to draw North Korea back into six-nation negotiations. And in a speech later, he issued a direct challenge to North Korea's reclusive leader that echoed President Reagan's demand in 1987 for the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. After the meetings, he said, he was convinced "that the will is strong, that the effort is united and the message is clear to Mr. Kim Jong Il: Get rid of your nuclear weapons programs."
His aides have played down informal intelligence estimates that the country had already produced enough plutonium in the past two years to manufacture six additional nuclear weapons.
Mr. Bush's efforts here underscored his determination to reverse two nuclear projects that appear to have made significant progress while American attention has been focused on Iraq.
In North Korea, he is facing a country that has defied every previous effort he has made to force it to dismantle what it has already built. And in Iran's case, he is clearly skeptical about a European-led effort to suspend the country's manufacture of nuclear material.
He told reporters on Saturday that he was "concerned about reports" that said Iran appeared "willing to speed up processing of materials that could lead to a nuclear weapon." Diplomats had said the day before that Iran had told the International Atomic Energy Agency that it was racing to produce uranium hexafluoride, a gas that can be enriched into bomb fuel, before it begins to observe the temporary suspension of nuclear activity that it negotiated with the Europeans.
Following Mr. Bush's assertion on Saturday that Iran had accelerated its uranium enrichment, Mr. Powell appeared at a news conference here with Foreign Minister Ignacio Walker Prieto of Chile and was asked to provide details to back that up but declined to do so. He said that in the past four years, as a result of American cries of alarm about Iran's intentions, the international community was now "as concerned as we are" about the problem.
The focus of most of Mr. Bush's sessions was North Korea, and one participant said Mr. Bush hinted he would show "some flexibility'' in offering incentives to the North, a subject of furious infighting within the administration.
But a senior American official told reporters this afternoon that could only happen after North Korea returned to the negotiating table. "The North Korean strategy of running out the clock didn't work,'' this official said, referring to the speculation that the North thought Mr. Bush would be defeated on Election Day.
In 2003, Mr. Bush said he "will not tolerate nuclear weapons in North Korea," and in April 2004 he told a convention of newspaper editors in Washington that a nuclear program in Iran was "intolerable" and would be dealt with, starting at the United Nations if necessary. He did not repeat either phrase on Saturday, and the agreement with Europe appears to have halted, at least temporarily, the administration's hopes of taking the Iranian program to the United Nations Security Council this month.
But Mr. Bush's quickness to seize on the Iranian production of uranium hexafluoride was driven, administration officials said, by a sense among his national security aides that there is still time to stop Iran from actually producing a weapon. "We're past that point with North Korea," one senior adviser said recently. "With the North, it's a question of unwinding what's already happened."
So far, there have been three sessions of talks involving North and South Korea, China, Japan, Russia and the United States, but no real agreement on the scope of the North Korean program. Meanwhile, North Korea appears to have reprocessed a trove of 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods.
In preparation for the meeting on Saturday morning with China's president, Hu Jintao, American officials took the unusual step several weeks ago of passing to Beijing what one senior Asian official called "classified packets" of data intended to convince the Chinese that the North has two weapons programs under way.
Chinese leaders had few doubts that the North has been trying to produce plutonium weapons, and they have not questioned unofficial American intelligence estimates that the North has reprocessed enough plutonium for four to six weapons since inspectors were expelled from the country nearly two years ago.
But until recently China expressed considerable doubts about a second program that the United States believes the North started with help from A. Q. Khan, then the head of Pakistan's nuclear weapons project. Like the Iranian program, which also received extensive aid from Mr. Khan's network in the 1990's, the North's program involves enriching uranium to make bomb fuel. "The Chinese made their own inquiries from Pakistan, and we believe they got confirmation there," said one senior Asian official involved in the Saturday talks with President Bush. "They don't seem to be questioning the validity of that intelligence anymore, at least in private."
But Mr. Bush was clearly concerned that South Korea's president, Roh Moo Hyun, might diverge from the American strategy, and offer the North more aid and investment even before it agrees to surrender its weapons, halt its production of new weapons and allow open inspections.
Iran's intentions are unclear. If it is truly suspending the production of all nuclear fuel, it is unclear why it would work so quickly to finish production of the raw material that is fed into centrifuges and enriched. At low enrichment levels, the fuel could be used to produce nuclear power; at high enrichment levels, it could make the core of a bomb.
American officials said Mr. Bush spoke out because he wanted to highlight the possibility that Iran could cheat on its deal with the Europeans, and to raise the possibility that it had a secret complex of centrifuges that could keep producing bomb fuel. A dissident group operating outside Iran charged this week that Tehran was doing exactly that, but American officials say they cannot verify the claim.
Mr. Bush's day was tense in other ways, as well. He had an unusual encounter with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, questioning him over lunch about Mr. Putin's efforts to concentrate more power in the Kremlin. It was the first time Mr. Bush had expressed his concerns in person to the Russian leader.An American official said later that Mr. Putin responded with "a very long explanation, went back deep into Russian history, the Stalinist period'' and said the country was still struggling to "develop a Russian-style democracy.''
The conversation did not appear to satisfy either side, but the American official said it would be the "basis for further conversations."
Then, in an odd scene on Saturday before dinner, Mr. Bush had to rescue his lead secret service agent.
The agent had been blocked from entering the ornate dinner hall and was surrounded by a scrum of shoving Chilean security officers. The president, realizing what was happening, turned around and walked up to the group, reached in to pull his agent free, and walked back into the hall, shaking his head.
-------- korea
LaPorte warns that N. Korea may try to sell plutonium
Stars and Stripes
By Teri Weaver,
November 21, 2004
http://www.estripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=25623
SEOUL - The United States' top military commander in South Korea warned Friday that North Korea might market its plutonium to terrorists to bolster the communist country's economy.
"An additional concern the international community shares is that North Korea, in its desire for hard currency, would sell weapons-grade plutonium to some terrorist organizations," Gen. Leon J. LaPorte, commander of U.S. Forces Korea, told a breakfast forum in Seoul. "And that would be disastrous to the world."
LaPorte said North Korea has the ability to harvest plutonium and is known to sell missile technology throughout the world.
"Clearly, they have an opportunity to harvest plutonium from the enrichment rods," LaPorte said. "From a military standpoint, they do have a capability we must address."
LaPorte's concern comes as talks among the United States, North Korea, South Korea and three other Asian nations to stem North Korea's nuclear ambitions have stalled.
At the same time, America and South Korea have pledged billions of dollars to upgrade defense systems and weaponry in the next few years as the United States pulls 12,500 of its 37,500 troops from the peninsula.
This week, South Korea announced plans to spend $92.5 billion by 2008 to develop defenses less reliant on American forces. In return, U.S. officials have pledged $11 billion toward weapons systems by 2006 to supplement remaining troops on the ground.
The investments include improvements in communication, intelligence and surveillance systems, as well as a weapons system that includes precision-guided missiles, he said.
Earlier this week, U.S. Forces Korea announced LaPorte has agreed to extend his command by one more year through 2006.
----
ONCE-SECRET EXPERIMENTS DRAW U.N. SCRUTINY
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWS SERVICE
By Tim Johnson
Nov. 21, 2004
http://www.kentucky.com/mld/heraldleader/news/world/10236810.htm
SEOUL, South Korea - South Korea is in the global "hot seat" over its once-secret experiments with nuclear materials, and it fears that it risks being hauled before the U.N. Security Council as an example to more serious apparent nuclear renegades: Iran and North Korea.
Officials under South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun say state nuclear engineers had no high-level approval for the small-scale experimentation over the past two decades and sought only to satisfy "scientific curiosity."
The testing involved tiny amounts of plutonium in 1982 and uranium in early 2000. A confidential report last Thursday from the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency said the uranium-enrichment experiment four years ago produced a minuscule amount of near-weapons-grade nuclear material.
By nearly all accounts, South Korea has cooperated fully with three teams of international nuclear inspectors since early September. The 35-member board of governors of the U.N. watchdog agency will meet Nov. 25 to decide whether to refer the case to the U.N. Security Council as a possible violation of international nuclear safeguards. South Korea says it has no ambitions to build nuclear weapons.
"There is nothing to hide," said Moon Chung-in, a Yonsei University professor and adviser to Roh on Northeast Asian security.
But parts of East Asia, including China, are skeptical of the suggestion that state-employed nuclear engineers at the Korean Atomic Energy Research Institute acted on their own, without approval and with lax oversight.
The South Korean government says those scientists "were doing it by themselves. It is not credible," said Shi Yinhong, a Northeast Asia expert at People's University in Beijing.
Some three decades ago, South Korea's military leaders tried to crank up their own covert nuclear-weapons program. Washington halted the scheme. In 1991, U.S. forces withdrew their own nuclear weapons from the peninsula and oversaw a treaty that banned South Korea and North Korea from seeking their own nuclear weapons or possessing nuclear-processing or uranium-enrichment facilities.
In more recent years, under democratic rule, South Korea's civilian nuclear-energy program has been a source of national pride. The program oversees 19 nuclear power plants and generates 40 percent of South Korea's energy needs.
The International Atomic Energy Agency, as the U.N. watchdog is called, hasn't said how it learned of South Korea's nuclear experiments. Some South Koreans say Washington passed the word to the agency as a lesson to the Roh government, with which it's had rocky relations even though South Korea is an ally.
-------- missile defense
US 'Star Wars' missiles will be in Europe in five years
independent.co.uk
By Severin Carrell
21 November 2004
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=585127
The US wants to base at least 10 missiles in Europe for the "son of Star Wars" missile defence system within the next five years, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.
The Pentagon has also already decided to prepare for a major new missile interceptor base in Europe and is starting detailed studies to find the best site - including possible bases in the UK.
These proposals - which go far beyond previous statements about US plans in Europe - were disclosed by Lt-Gen Henry Obering, the head of the US Missile Defence Agency, in an exclusive interview with the IoS.
Lt-Gen Obering revealed that the US would start buying missiles for the new site as early as October next year, and would choose which European country would host the site soon afterwards.
He confirmed that the UK is in the running to host the interceptors - provoking angry claims from opposition MPs and defence analysts that Parliament and British voters were being deliberately kept in the dark by the Government.
The base is a key part of President Bush's $10bn-a-year plan to construct a "missile shield" to protect the US and its European allies from weapons fired by rogue states in Asia and the Middle East, such as North Korea and Iran. Two sites have already been built in Alaska and California.
Lt-Gen Obering said he was unaware of Tony Blair's informal pledge to President Bush - revealed by the IoS last month - that Britain would agree to a US request to station the missiles in Britain, as long as it is made after the election. "There are several nations that we're undergoing talks with, with respect to the hosting of the third site," he said, adding: "We're still very much in the exploratory stages of what's possible - not just with the UK."
In a reference to his plans to begin ordering the missiles next year, he said: "We've some significant money in the 2006 President's budget that we would begin to execute in October 2005."
The agency is now starting a "technical assessment" of possible sites, he said, to determine, for example, whether the ground could bear the weight of the silos, the quality of power supplies and roads, and the site's military suitability. The US is understood also to be looking closely at Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary.
However, the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office deniedthe Government was helping the US to find a site in Britain, and insisted no decision had been made on whether the UK would allow the missiles to be based here.
-------- terrorism
Unthinkable? An attack on an American city by terrorists armed with a small nuclear device is an even bet within a decade, some experts say
Charles Burress,
San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, November 21, 2004
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/11/21/BURRESS.TMP
Imagine a relatively small nuclear bomb of 10 kilotons exploding in San Francisco's Union Square. "Everything to the Museum of Modern Art would vaporize," writes Harvard security analyst Graham Allison in his chilling new book, "Nuclear Terrorism."
"Everything from the Transamerica building to Nob Hill would be sites of massive destruction; everything within the perimeter of Coit Tower and the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge would go up in flames."
No survivors would be found amid nearly 100 square blocks, and buildings in about 400 square blocks would be totally destroyed or left looking like the Oklahoma City federal building after it was crushed by a truck bomb.
To alert Americans to the intimate extent of the peril, Allison's book is linked to an Internet "Blast Map" showing the radius of destruction for such a nuclear device anywhere in the United States. It can be viewed by ZIP code at www.nuclearterror.org.
Allison and other experts agree that the most likely form of nuclear terrorism is a "dirty bomb," where radioactive material is scattered by a conventional explosive or perhaps an attack on a nuclear reactor.
But some analysts are worried more by the less likely but far more catastrophic detonation of a terrorist nuclear bomb.
"The gravest danger, however, and the one requiring the most urgent attention, is the possibility that terrorists could obtain highly enriched uranium or plutonium for use in an improvised nuclear device," according to Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, and former Sen. Sam Nunn, now head of the nonprofit Nuclear Threat Initiative.
Their warning comes in the opening pages of another sobering new book, "The Four Faces of Nuclear Terrorism," from the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, the nation's largest nongovernmental organization focusing exclusively on nonproliferation issues. Based on a two-year study, the book says terrorist organizations are now able to build crude nuclear bombs.
This new nuclear nightmare was summoned up in the presidential campaign last month, when Vice President Dick Cheney warned in a widely reported speech:
"The biggest threat we face now as a nation is the possibility of terrorists ending up in the middle of one of our cities with deadlier weapons than have ever before been used against us -- biological agents or a nuclear weapon or a chemical weapon of some kind, to be able to threaten the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans."
The Boston Herald's story about Cheney's speech carried the headline, "Vote Kerry, get nuked, veep warns." Critics accused Cheney of election scaremongering, but analysts on both sides of the partisan divide share his assessment of the terrorist nuclear threat, even if they disagree with him about Kerry.
"Fissile material is widely available," said UC Berkeley Professor Harold Smith, a nonproliferation expert who served in the Clinton White House. "The technology is widely known. The prudent man would assume that this kind of tragedy is going to happen and should be asking himself, 'What can I do about it?' "
Fueling the alarm was an ABC News demonstration last year of how easy it would be to penetrate post-Sept. 11 security. A news team successfully sent uranium inside a shipping container from Jakarta through the Port of Los Angeles.
The shipment underscored findings of a report from the Peace Research Institute in Frankfurt, Germany, that terrorist transport of nuclear weapons by sea or by land "probably would not be detected."
The U.S. government has several approaches to reducing the danger, but critics question their adequacy. The strategies range from new radiation detectors at U.S. ports to Department of Homeland Security advice to "learn how to build a temporary fallout shelter ... even if you do not live near a potential nuclear target."
In August, San Francisco became the first port on the West Coast to receive the radiation detectors, with Oakland scheduled to be added by the end of this year.
If sufficient funding is provided, the Department of Homeland Security hopes to have the machines at all of the United States' more than 300 ports of entry -- including sea, land and air -- by the end of 2005, said Customs and Border Patrol spokesman Barry Morrissey.
Asked if the monitor would have detected the ABC News uranium shipment, Department of Homeland Security spokesman Michael Milne said, "It's designed to, yes. They should identify most sources of radiation."
UC's Smith was skeptical. "I doubt it will be very effective," he said, adding that radiation from highly enriched uranium and plutonium "is difficult to detect and easily shielded." Also, he added, the system wouldn't prevent offshore detonations inside a port harbor.
Allison welcomes the screening, but he too believes the current technology can be circumvented. "The opportunities for shielding overwhelm the current capability for finding," he said.
Allison urges that top priority be given to denying terrorists access to nuclear materials and weapons in the first place, with such steps as securing existing stockpiles and weapons, blocking production of new fissile materials, stopping more nations from acquiring nuclear arms and eliminating the nuclear black market.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., introduced legislation in April directing the president to establish a task force on removing nuclear materials from vulnerable sites around the world, but opposition turned the measure into a "sense of Congress" recommendation in this year's defense authorization bill.
Everyone agrees on one thing: A nuclear blast in a U.S. city would eclipse Sept. 11 in its horror.
"With a 10-ton nuclear weapon stolen from the former Soviet arsenal and delivered to an American city in a cargo container, al Qaeda could make 9/11 a footnote," said Allison, founding dean of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government and a former assistant secretary of defense for policy and plans.
"And if not al Qaeda, one of its affiliates can step up, using a weapon built of (highly enriched uranium) from Pakistan or North Korea or from a research reactor in Uzbekistan," Allison wrote.
Such a bomb at noon in New York's Times Square would kill a million people in the blast itself and in collapsing buildings, fires and fallout in the following hours, he said.
"A nuclear terrorist attack is more likely than not within the next decade," he told The Chronicle. To dramatize the point, he's accepting bets, at 51-to-49 odds, on such an event.
Alarm over the prospect of a city being devastated by a terrorist nuclear bomb was sounded soon after Sept. 11, but has grown noticeably louder in recent weeks and months.
"An American Hiroshima" was the ominous title of a recent New York Times column by Nicholas Kristof. It quoted former Secretary of Defense William Perry saying there is an even chance of a nuclear terror strike in the United States in the next six years.
"We're racing toward unprecedented catastrophe," said Perry, a Stanford professor and co-director of the Stanford-Harvard Preventive Defense Project. "This is preventable, but we're not doing the things that could prevent it."
The most dangerous source of a "loose nuke" or the materials to make one, many security analysts say, are the former states of the Soviet Union, where much of the nuclear materials and weapons left over from the Cold War remain scattered and inadequately guarded.
To confront the danger, Lugar and Nunn started the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, by which the U.S. government assists former Soviet states in securing nuclear materials and weapons, a program Smith implemented when he served in the White House.
That program and similar efforts, however, receive only about $1 billion a year, just a third of the amount recommended by a bipartisan presidential commission in 2001.
"Roughly two-thirds of Russia's fissile material is inadequately secured," Carl Robichaud of the Century Foundation said a critical report in August, "What the 9/11 Commission Forgot."
At the same time, fears have been fueled by mounting evidence of terrorist groups making repeated attempts to obtain nuclear materials and weapons at the same time as potential sources multiply. Added to the stockpiles in the former Soviet Union are the contraband exports of nuclear secrets and materials from Pakistan, Iran's uranium enrichment plans and North Korean nuclear weapons development.
At Berkeley, Smith has a somber plan, not for prevention but for the harrowing days and months after such a catastrophe. He and Professor Steven Weber, director of the Institute of International Relations at UC Berkeley, propose to study what would happen if a nuclear bomb blew up in a major city somewhere in the world.
Their proposed study, for which they seek funding, would use Moscow as the hypothetical target, given the frequent terrorist strikes in Russia.
Unlike disaster-response plans already developed by the United States and other governments for a nuclear terrorist strike, the two UC researchers want to look beyond emergency response, evacuation and radiation containment.
They ask: What precautionary plans could help avert retaliation against the wrong target, mass panic, a collapse of world trade brought on by sudden closure of ports?
If Moscow were destroyed by an anonymous bomb, what could reduce the risk of Russian retaliation mistakenly launched against Chechnya or the United States?
One of their ideas is to have a team of international technical experts prepared for immediate dispatch to assess the bomb's origin by analyzing its distinctive radioactive signature, Smith and Weber said.
"A week's delay in retaliation could literally save the world," said Smith.
It's a topic so chilling that few people want to face it, Smith said. "I'm finding what I call the psychology of denial."
Yet, given al Qaeda's many efforts to acquire nuclear materials, its desire to inflict extensive casualties and the unrelenting stepping up of the scale of its attacks, the prospects of what-if must be faced, Smith and Weber said.
"I'm a great believer in having these thinking-the-unthinkable discussions up front," Weber said. "It would be irresponsible not to plan for it."
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- new jersey
The price of blowing the whistle in Salem
November 21, 2004
By JEROME MONTES,
Press of Atlantic City Staff Writer, (856) 794-5115
http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/news/cumberland/112104NCRITIC_N20.cfm?CFID=1209376&CFTOKEN=dd28bc64d0fb7819-5CC53BCA-C7EE-F057-9B425B097037B5A7
Dr. Kymn Harvin's pulse raced as she slipped a tape recorder under a file folder on her office desk.
In the corridor next to her office she could hear the footsteps of Larry Wagner, a director at Salem's nuclear power plant, as he walked toward her.
Moments before he walked in, Harvin hit the record button on the hidden device.
"What did you mean yesterday when you said this place is 'dangerous?'" Harvin asked after Wagner sat down in front of her desk. "Is it the decision-making ... like muddled?"
Wagner had spoken to her about company officers nearly deciding to restart an offline reactor without repairing a malfunctioning bypass valve.
"Yes, I meant it from a nuclear-safety standpoint," Wagner replied. "When I say dangerous, we almost talked ourselves on Monday of just starting right back and not going into the bypass valve."
Wagner said he was shocked company officers would even consider such an action.
"If we had done that ... that would have been grounds for taking the keys away," he said. "That would be grounds for 'You guys aren't safe.'"
Moments after Wagner left her office, Harvin began trembling. Tears rolled down her cheeks.
"I felt awful, feeling I was betraying someone I cared about, someone who was confiding in me," she said.
The taped conversation took place March 20, 2003. Eight days later, Harvin left Public Service Enterprise Group, the Newark-based company that owns the Salem County nuclear plant.
The plant in Lower Alloways Creek Township is the second-largest in the country. Two reactors are located on the plant's Salem facility; another is located on the adjacent Hope Creek facility.
About 1,800 employees work on the 292-acre site. The plant provides electricity for about 60 percent of PSEG's 2 million customers.
Harvin, who has a Ph.D. in organizational development, had worked for AT&T and Pennsylvania's government and was running her own consulting firm when she came to work for PSEG in 1998.
The 48-year-old Watchung resident was given the role of manager of development, quality and culture transformation at the Salem nuclear plant. Harvin said employee morale was low because of harsh working conditions and the perception that upper management did not value workers.
Harvin coached Salem plant executives on leadership and worked to improve communication and accountability throughout the site. She said the resulting boost in employee morale helped generate millions of dollars in cost savings and revenue.
But things unraveled after she stood up for a group of employees concerned about an improper repair action taken by an operations manager in late 2002 at the Salem plant.
Harvin said there was a growing perception that senior leadership valued production over safety and would go to dangerous lengths to keep the plant running. Over the next several months, she frequently urged senior leaders to address employee safety concerns.
Harvin was given her 45-day termination notice Feb. 26, 2003. The notice said her position was eliminated in a force reduction.
She consulted an attorney, who advised her that it was legal in New Jersey to tape conversations without another party's consent.
At first, she wasn't sure about secretly taping conversations with colleagues, especially those she respected.
It took a conversation with Wagner on March 19, 2003, to convince Harvin that someone had to gather evidence about the plant's safety practices.
The facility's Hope Creek reactor had been offline. When Wagner complained to Harvin about the company officers' push to bring the reactor online prematurely, she decided to get his comments on tape.
Harvin taped Wagner on March 20, 2003, and went on to record conversations with other colleagues.
The recordings are now evidence in a whistleblower lawsuit she filed against PSEG in September 2003. Harvin has alleged that PSEG retaliated against her for raising safety concerns.
Harvin said she felt less guilty about a tape she made directly after Wagner's.
After her conversation with him March 20, Harvin walked into the office of her direct superior, then-PSEG Chief Nuclear Officer Harry Keiser.
She had butted heads with Keiser over safety issues and was convinced that he had betrayed both her and the site. But Harvin also wanted a final chance to relay Wagner's concerns to him.
"The message that's being sent, whether intended or not, is that production and getting the Hope Creek unit back online is more important than nuclear safety," Harvin told her boss that day.
"Yeah, I appreciate that feedback," Keiser replied. "I don't believe it, but I appreciate it, right?"
"So when the guys with the licenses say that they are being pressured to start the unit back up and don't believe it is safe, I owe you that feedback," Harvin said. "The word that got spoken to me this morning is 'dangerous.'"
"It's a bunch of (expletive)," Keiser said. "I mean, you've got an operator who doesn't know (expletive) ... saying he's being pushed, right? And he's not putting out the effort to begin with."
The next day, PSEG informed Harvin that her termination date had been moved up to March 28, 2003.
The message stung, but it made her even more determined to gather as much evidence as possible before her final day as an employee.
On March 27, 2003, Harvin taped a heated, tearful conversation with then-PSEG Vice President Timothy O'Connor, a colleague she respected.
"Are they after me?" Harvin asked O'Connor.
"They are after you and they are after others," he replied. "And it is only a matter of time and I will be in the same position."
PSEG officials said O'Connor left voluntarily after Harvin's termination; O'Connor could not be reached for comment.
Harvin said she made no more recordings after she left PSEG, but won't comment on the number of tapes in existence.
In her civil lawsuit, Harvin contends that she was fired because of her refusal to keep silent on issues of industrial and nuclear safety. Such expression is protected under the state's Conscientious Employee Protection Act.
Harvin said she contacted PSEG Chairman of the Board Jim Ferland to request an independent investigation into the Salem facility's safety and her termination.
But she felt the result was a whitewash. That convinced her to approach the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission in September 2003 and to file her own lawsuit against the company that month.
NRC officials said Harvin's testimony helped launch recent investigations into general working conditions at the plant. The commission also is investigating Harvin's specific allegations that she was retaliated against for raising safety concerns.
Since her dismissal, the PSEG plant has drawn criticism, citations and calls for corrective action from federal regulators and independent consultants on issues ranging from faulty equipment to workers being reluctant to report maintenance problems.
Federal investigators are looking into an Oct. 10 steam leak that prompted the shutdown of the Hope Creek reactor. The reactor has remained idle since then for repairs and refueling.
Hope Creek suffered other mishaps after the leak. A Freon leak Oct. 28 temporarily restricted access to the building's second floor. On Nov. 3, a worker was hospitalized after fracturing his fingers and suffering slight radiation contamination.
PSEG spokesman Skip Sindoni said Harvin's termination had nothing to do with retaliation.
"Her position was eliminated in a company reorganization," Sindoni said.
Calls to Keiser, who is no longer with the company, and Wagner, who is now manager of plant support at the Salem facility, were not returned.
Harvin returned to consulting after leaving the company, and is in the process of writing a book about leadership. She wants to return to the nuclear industry but believes she has been blacklisted.
And she continues to pay an emotional price for speaking out.
Harvin said former co-workers phone and e-mail her, fearful that they have been caught on tape.
When she plays the tapes she took so much trouble to conceal, she can't help breaking into tears.
"I thought I might be a doctor or a senator when I grew up," Harvin said.
"I never thought I'd be a whistleblower."
To e-mail Jerome Montes at The Press:
JMontes@pressofac.com
-------- washington
DOE team to hear Hanford worker complaints
tri-cityherald
By Annette Cary
November 21st, 2004
http://www.tri-cityherald.com/tch/local/story/5810287p-5738685c.html
The Department of Energy has brought in consultants to evaluate concerns regarding harassment, intimidation and discrimination at the vitrification construction project at Hanford.
More than 100 construction workers at the project responded to notices saying DOE would like to interview Bechtel National employees, said Erik Olds, spokesman for DOE's Office of River Protection in Richland. About 1,100 to 1,200 construction workers are employed at the site, including subcontractor employees.
The concerns were raised by a group of employees at the construction site, Olds said.
Some were among a group of employees who previously raised similar concerns to DOE, he said. "Given that there are multiple and serious concerns and that this is the second time concerns were raised, we've brought in a small team of independent investigators," Olds said.
He declined to discuss specifics of the complaints.
The independent investigators, all former law enforcement officials, are working with officials at the DOE employee concerns office, he said.
Interviews with workers have concluded, and DOE is waiting for a written report, he said.
Some Bechtel National employees were notified in a letter that DOE would be evaluating equal employee opportunity, labor relation, industrial safety and human resources concerns from employees.
Employees who did not feel comfortable meeting with the investigation team at the construction site were offered the chance to meet with the team on their own time at the Federal Building in Richland.
"We're cooperating with DOE's investigation" and have encouraged employees to raise concerns, said John Britton, spokesman for Bechtel National in Richland. "We can't deal with them if they do not raise them."
DOE contractor Bechtel National is building a $5.8 billion plant to turn some of the worst waste from the past production of plutonium at Hanford into glass logs for permanent disposal.
It's believed to be the largest construction project in the nation.
-------- MILITARY
-------- africa
Rebel Attacks Raise Tensions in Darfur
Hostage-Taking Sparks Retaliations;
Insecurity Cuts Refugees Off From Aid
By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, November 21, 2004; Page A24
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A824-2004Nov20?language=printer
ZALINGEI, Sudan -- The wobbly bus chugged up through the hills, bound for Fadel Sesese Mohamed's village. He was feeling tired but optimistic after a long journey from Libya, where the 72-year-old tribal leader had participated in a peace conference last month aimed at ending Sudan's civil conflict.
The bus suddenly stopped, and a group of men armed with AK-47 rifles leaped on board, Mohamed recounted last week. They poked at the luggage and asked if any passengers had military ID cards. They pulled a group of men off the bus, punching one over and over and shouting, "Are you a soldier?"
Then the gunmen, who wore the green and brown netted head covers of a rebel group called the Sudanese Liberation Army, motioned at the bus driver to resume his journey. Most of the hostages have not been seen since.
There are contradictory reports about how many passengers were taken. The United Nations has said 18 were taken. The African Union said five of the hostages had been released. It is also not clear whether they were civilians or soldiers, and whether they were all Arabs or included some Africans.
But the incident, which alarmed the international aid community, has highlighted the growing number of attacks by African rebels. Until now most of the human rights abuses in the western region of Darfur have been blamed on pro-government Arab militiamen.
Officials of the United Nations and the African Union, which has sent a force of military observers into Darfur to monitor a shaky cease-fire, said the hostage-taking incident also shows that rebel groups -- not just the Arab militias known as Janjaweed -- must be pressured to uphold an agreement signed in Abuja, Nigeria, on Nov. 9.
In a report issued this week, Human Rights Watch strongly criticized the Khartoum government for fueling the conflict, but it also blamed rebel groups and urged the Sudanese Liberation Army to release all hostages.
"There's no security. There's no stability. This is the main problem," said Mohamed, a leader of the Fur tribe, waving his walking stick in agitation as he recounted the story of the hostage-taking at home here. He said he sympathized with the African rebels, but that in this case they had "made a mistake."
Within hours of the hostage-taking, Janjaweed militiamen threatened to attack this hillside town and a cluster of nearby refugee camps if the captives were not released. Foreign relief organizations quickly pulled 82 staffers out of the area. No attack took place, but the workers have not returned.
Meanwhile, tribal leaders and human rights groups said, the government responded to the crisis by arming local Janjaweed members. On Oct. 26, a squad of uniformed Janjaweed militiamen ambushed an African Union mission trying to retrieve the hostages, killing a Sudanese Liberation Army commander and four others, officials said.
In camps for displaced families surrounding Zalingei, food was distributed Saturday for the first time since the end of September. Highway banditry had cut off aid to the 82,000 people there, and the once-bustling town remains in limbo, with few buses traveling the hazardous roads and only helicopters able to reach the remote spot.
Tony P. Hall, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. World Food Program, flew to Zalingei to tour the camps last week. Families living in tattered shelters told him that security was their main concern. On Friday, more than 50 women who ventured outside the camp to collect straw and firewood were stopped by militia forces and held for more than five hours, aid workers told Hall.
U.N. and aid officials said the African rebel groups, which enjoy support from African tribes in the area, are hurting the local populace as they resort to such tactics as ambushing food convoys, stealing aid trucks and taking hostages.
"The rebels are using the wrong instruments to make their points," Jan Pronk, the U.N. special representative to Sudan, said during a visit earlier this month to Nyala, the capital of South Darfur. "They have to stop. Otherwise they are blocking access to the very people they say they are protecting."
The Darfur conflict erupted in February 2003, after the Sudanese Liberation Army and another rebel group, the Justice and Equality Movement, attacked police stations and military outposts to protest what they called regional discrimination by the mostly Arab clique controlling Sudan's government.
Relief groups say the government responded by arming and supporting the Janjaweed, an Arabic word often translated as "devils on horseback," to crush the rebellion. Tens of thousands of people have died in the violence and more than 1.5 million have been uprooted.
Abdou Abdullah, a leader of the Sudanese Liberation Army and a member of the African Union's cease-fire commission, said the rebel group had never mistreated its hostages, most of whom were soldiers. He promised the group would stop taking hostages.
"We are serious about the peace deal," Abdullah said in a telephone interview from El Fasher. "Now we have to see that the government also keeps its promises and stops attacking us and our villages."
Last week, the rebel group turned 20 captured government soldiers and police over to the African Union mission.
In the fetid camps that stretch for miles outside Zalingei, people have barely enough to eat, and relief officials said the food situation could become desperate if security was not established.
Inside one camp this week, old men passed out from the relentless heat. Children flew kites made of plastic bags, and a few donkeys -- survivors of wartime livestock looting -- wore leather pouches filled with Koranic verses to guard against danger.
Khartouma Mohamed Abakar, 25, sat despondently in her shelter, too depressed to adjust her disheveled scarf or shoo the flies off her sleeping infant. Her husband was killed in a militia attack on their village, 20 miles north. Last week, when she went out to collect firewood, she said a strange man taunted and beat her, calling her a "rebel wife."
Abakar has one small bag of millet left over from the last food distribution to feed her children. She dreamily recalled better times, when the family had mutton, sugar cane, watermelon and cucumbers to eat. Now, she said, they are grateful for the gooey yellow porridge that keeps them alive.
-------- asia
Rights Groups Cite Pattern Of Abuse by Nepal's Army
U.S. Gave $22 Million to Forces Trying to Contain Maoists
By John Lancaster
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, November 21, 2004; Page A25
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A680-2004Nov20?language=printer
KATMANDU, Nepal -- His captors said it was time to "swim in cold weather," Basu Sigdel recalled.
Blindfolded and stripped to his undershorts, the 40-year-old lawyer struggled to breathe as strong-armed men repeatedly plunged his head into a water-filled steel drum, Sigdel said in an interview. They demanded to know the whereabouts of several Maoist rebels, accusing him of lying when he said he didn't know.
"It was so long that I almost choked, and I felt that I might die," Sigdel said, describing the early morning interrogation on the fourth day of his 50-day unofficial detention by Nepal's security forces last winter. "I could feel foam coming out of my mouth. Most probably the water got into my lungs."
Sigdel's ordeal highlights what human rights monitors call a pattern of abuses by government security forces, who have received roughly $22 million in U.S. military aid over the last several years. The forces are struggling to contain a Maoist insurgency that began in 1996 and recently has spread to virtually every corner of this picturesque Himalayan kingdom.
In a report last month, New York-based Human Rights Watch accused both the Maoist rebels and government forces of "summary executions, torture, arbitrary arrests and abductions, and persecution based on political associations." Of particular concern, the report said, was the growing phenomenon of "enforced disappearances," in which rebels or people suspected of helping them -- a loose category that includes lawyers who argued their cases in court -- were secretly taken into custody by the army or police and sometimes tortured or killed.
One disappearance that has received widespread attention involves a 15-year-old girl, Maina Sunuwar, who allegedly was murdered by soldiers in the Kavre district earlier this year. The incident occurred after the girl's mother claimed in statements to journalists and human rights workers to have witnessed an extrajudicial killing.
"There has been a massive increase in the number of disappearances" since the breakdown of a cease-fire agreement between the rebels and the government in August 2003, said Achyut Acharya of the National Human Rights Commission in Nepal, which has recorded 1,260 cases of disappearance involving security forces since 2000. "Most of the disappeared cases are in detention centers controlled by the army."
Brig. Gen. Dipak Gurung, chief spokesman for the Royal Nepal Army, said he would "not rule out the fact that some human rights violations might have taken place," and he acknowledged that the army sometimes held people without disclosing their whereabouts.
He said such methods were necessary to avoid compromising investigations and that torture and other forms of abuse were contrary to army policy. Gurung noted that in 2002, the army established a special "human rights cell" to investigate claims of abuses and had sometimes prosecuted soldiers accused of particular crimes.
Gurung also asserted that claims of abuses should be treated with skepticism because they often were based on information from "Maoists and Maoist sympathizers."
The army has no monopoly on mistreatment of civilians. According to human rights groups, the Maoists have grown increasingly brutal in their methods, which include cutting out the tongues of suspected informants and burning them alive.
Once part of Nepal's political mainstream, the Maoists took their movement underground in 1996 and launched what they call a "people's war" against the constitutional monarchy now run by King Gyanendra. His family has dominated this impoverished and isolated country of about 25 million people for more than two centuries. Nepal has not had a functioning parliament since 2002, and Gyanendra has assumed an increasingly autocratic role, political analysts say.
So far, human rights monitors say, about 10,000 people, many of them noncombatants, have died in the conflict.
Over the last two years, the Maoists have made steady gains and now roam freely throughout most of Nepal's 75 administrative districts, according to Western diplomats. Maoist attacks on police outposts have proved so effective that the government has closed roughly 80 percent of them.
The Maoists have also struck in the capital, Katmandu, staging several high-profile assassinations and, in September, a bomb attack against a cultural center affiliated with the U.S. Embassy. The bombing caused no casualties but helped precipitate the withdrawal of Peace Corps volunteers from the country.
U.S. officials contend that a Maoist takeover could be disastrous for the region, especially for India, an increasingly close ally that is battling several Maoist insurgencies of its own. The United States is supplying Nepal's army with M-16 rifles, night-vision gear and body armor and has dispatched Special Forces instructors to train troops in counterinsurgency tactics.
Human Rights Watch accused the United States of paying insufficient attention to complaints of abuses by the army. It said that the U.S. Embassy had not issued any statements critical of army actions, though it has routinely condemned Maoist atrocities.
In an interview, U.S. Ambassador James F. Moriarty described that statement as "flat-out wrong." But he added: "I do not think abuses are part of government policy. . . . We have seen individuals tried and convicted, court-martialed." The military aid is necessary, he said, for the simple reason that without it, the Maoists might win.
"You should never underrate the possibility of a Maoist takeover, particularly given the horrors that that would entail," he said.
Sigdel, the lawyer, seems an unlikely participant in the conflict.
A farmer's son with a wife and three children, he works out of a grubby second-floor walk-up with no computer, earning a modest living, he said, from land disputes, commercial cases and other routine civil matters. He described himself as apolitical, but once served on a human rights committee of the Nepal Bar Association. On several occasions, he has represented families trying to learn the whereabouts of relatives picked up by security forces on suspicion of involvement with the Maoists, he said.
On the morning of Jan. 22, Sigdel said, he was confronted in his office by three men in civilian clothes, who refused to identify themselves or produce an arrest warrant. He was bundled into a small van, blindfolded with dark goggles and a cloth sack and driven to what he presumed was an army facility in Katmandu.
For the next 50 days, he said, he was kept alone in a tent and repeatedly questioned about his political views as well as his purported associations with Maoists, of whom he claimed to have no knowledge. During the dunking session, he recalled, he struggled so violently for air that he opened wounds on both knees.
Shortly after his disappearance, Sigdel's wife, Sharda, filed a legal petition demanding that the army produce her husband in court, but the government denied knowledge of his whereabouts, Sigdel said. He was returned to his home one evening after signing a document falsely stating that he had been treated well, Sigdel said.
Gurung, the military spokesman, confirmed that Sigdel had been held in army custody. "I don't think he was that brutally handled -- maybe a bit roughed up," Gurung said. Asked specifically about the immersion treatment, a technique known to human rights workers as "submarining," Gurung acknowledged the possibility that it had occurred: "We don't have truth serum," he said. He added: "If it happened, he should lodge a protest."
-------- britain
Britain joins EU army
UK Times Newspapers Ltd
November 21, 2004
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1368150,00.html
BRITAIN is to commit more than 2,000 troops to a new 18,000-strong European Union army that will be deployed as a peacekeeper to the world's trouble spots, write Adam Nathan and Nicola Smith.
Despite concerns within the military about overstretch, ministers will announce this week that at least one battle group will be ready by January.
They will also say the force will expand by 2007 to comprise a multinational force of up to 12 elite rapid-reaction battle groups - each with 1,500 soldiers. At least two of these groups will be ready to deploy at 15 days' notice to humanitarian or peacekeeping emergencies, primarily in Africa.
Soldiers from the Parachute Regiment and the Royal Marines have been earmarked for the new force.
A British official said: "A commander could immediately draw on 1,500 troops who will be sitting in the barracks with their boots on, ready to go."
The creation of the force was signalled earlier this year by Tony Blair following the crisis in Darfur, Sudan, and comes only a week after Britons had to be evacuated from fighting in the Ivory Coast.
Although it is not envisaged that the battle groups would be deployed to the Middle East, they could have a role in supporting policing and the rule of law. An EU team is to visit Iraq within the next fortnight.
The force - which would comprise the rapid-reaction units in an EU army that supporters want to expand to 60,000 - is already prompting some concerns that it could duplicate the role of Nato.
Nicholas Soames, the Conservatives' defence spokesman, said: "We believe the EU defence contribution should be under the Nato umbrella. Anything that undermines Nato is damaging. We will be studying the details but this sort of duplication is an expensive waste of time."
Some Nato planners are concerned that the new force should not be used as a cheaper substitute for the alliance and insist that EU military units must be trained to Nato standards. "It is right to pose the political questions, but at the moment we do not need to sound the alarm bell," said a diplomat at Nato HQ in Brussels.
Any deployment would require an emergency meeting of the EU's council of ministers. Membership of a battle group would not be compulsory and individual nations would retain a veto over deployment.
Military command in the field would lie with the country with the biggest contingent. Britain, France, Italy and Spain will each provide one battle group made up solely of its troops, while Britain will share a second battle group with the Dutch. Seventeen EU countries have committed soldiers.
General Jean-Paul Perruche, French head of the EU's military staff, said the creation of the battle groups was a "significant" development.
"It is the adaptation of the capabilities of Europe to the new context of crisis in the world. To be able to commit at short notice a significant trained force, to intervene in an emerging crisis ," he said.
It has also been mooted as an attempt to encourage European countries to investment more in military capabilities. There is growing concern within Britain's armed forces about their ability to meet their commitments after it emerged that more than £1 billion is to be cut from "frontline" forces.
Senior officers - including, it is believed, General Sir Michael Jackson, chief of the general staff - are concerned that it will leave the army without the funding needed for 1,000 soldiers, about 1% of its force.
# Commonwealth troops working in sensitive positions in the British armed forces have been told to adopt British nationality or lose their jobs. Some 8,000 Commonwealth troops work for the services and the ultimatum will affect those with access to sophisticated equipment and sensitive information, particularly in the special forces.
The Ministry of Defence said: "There are various criteria that must be satisfied for personnel with access to sensitive material, one of which is nationality. The Home Office will fast-track dual nationality, but if they do not wish to take it we will endeavour to move them to another part of the service. We are not asking them to turn their backs on their countries."
-------- business
Senators Want Boeing Deal Investigated
November 21, 2004
By PETER T. KILBORN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/21/politics/21boeing.html
WASHINGTON, Nov. 20 - Leaders of the Senate Armed Services Committee asked the Defense Department on Friday to have its inspector general's office investigate the Air Force's effort to give the Boeing Company a $23.5 billion contract for aircraft-refueling tankers.
In a letter to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the Republican Senators John W. Warner of Virginia, the committee chairman, and John McCain of Arizona and the committee's ranking Democrat, Carl Levin of Michigan, asked for an investigation of all who had a role in awarding the contract, not just someone acting criminally.
In a 42-minute Senate speech on Friday, Mr. McCain disclosed a score of often pungent e-mail letters to and from Boeing executives and lobbyists, Air Force Secretary James G. Roche and Pentagon officials.
They depicted Mr. Roche belittling competitors and critics of the plan, both in the government and among defense analysis organizations, on the grounds of cost and need for the planes. The senators said the Pentagon's earlier, criminal investigation had not gone far enough.
As a result of that investigation, Darleen Druyun, an Air Force procurement official, was found to have been favoring Boeing with contracts while negotiating a $250,000-a-year job with the company. Ms. Druyun has been sentenced to nine months in prison.
In their letter, the senators wrote, "It is astonishing to us that one individual could have so freely perpetrated, for such an extended period, this unprecedented series of fraudulent decisions and other actions that were not in the best interest of the Department of Defense."
An Air Force spokesman, Lt. Col. Frank Smolinsky, said the e-mail messages cited in Mr. McCain's speech "reflect negotiations on an acquisition program that is now behind us."
-------- iraq
Cost of War in Iraq Escalates
MEDIA GENERAL NEWS SERVICE
JAMES W. CRAWLEY
November 21, 2004
http://www.counton2.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=WCBD/MGArticle/CBD_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1031779280062&path=!news!localnews
WASHINGTON - As casualties mount in Iraq, so has the cost of the war. The military is now spending more than $5.8 billion each month, top officials told Congress this week.
The Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps service chiefs told the House Armed Services Committee the price of war has jumped as fighting continues and reconstruction efforts are stymied by security concerns. And, in a few months, more money will be needed.
The Army, with about 110,000 troops on the ground in Iraq, has a monthly "burn rate" of $4.7 billion. The Air Force is spending about $800 million monthly. The Marines, which are spearheading the fighting in Fallujah, had an average monthly war cost of $300 million. The Navy, which was silent about its spending during the committee hearing Wednesday, did not provide its war spending Thursday.
War spending, known euphemistically as the "burn rate," includes the cost of fighting, feeding and fueling the forces in the area, according to the military. Besides consumables such as bullets, bombs, food and gas, the money is used to bolster the body and vehicle armor protecting troops; buy weapons, uniforms, tents and other gear for soldiers; and replace vehicles lost in attacks, roadside bombs and accidents.
It doesn't include soldiers' regular pay and other routine costs unchanged by the war.
On a yearly basis, the war tab is about $70 billion.
"That's larger than the gross domestic product of most nations," said Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute, an Arlington, Va., think tank.
The price of war is escalating.
Initial cost estimates pegged the monthly burn rate at $2.2 billion in early 2003. By July 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said costs were running about $3.9 billion per month. In June, the Pentagon comptroller testified the monthly bill was nearly $5 billion.
In August, the Pentagon got a $25 billion boost for the war through a supplemental appropriation, but military officials said this week the money will likely run out in a few months unless another temporary spending bill is approved.
The Marine Corps' $1.6 billion set aside will "take us through the spring," said Marine Commandant Gen. Michael Hagee. He testified alongside Army Gen. Peter Schoomaker, Air Force Gen. John Jumper and Navy Adm. Vern Clark.
Defense analyst John Pike said the burn rate is likely to increase.
"I think the burn rate is going to get worse because the counter-insurgency effort will continue to be on our shoulders," said Pike, who is director of GlobalSecurity.org, an independent think tank.
The fighting in Fallujah and other cities has been rising as January elections in Iraq near. The increasing war costs could have lasting impacts on the military's future, military analysts say.
"If the current rate of expenditures is sustained, this will cut into Rumsfeld's plan to transform the military" into a more capable and flexible force, said Lexington's Thompson.
The result, he suggested, could be cutting new weapons systems or stretching out the purchase of fighters, warships and other weapons.
To help understand how much money $5.8 billion is, think of it in $1 bills.
That would be 5,800,000,000 bills, weighing nearly 12.8 million pounds. Stacked, the bills would reach more than 393 miles into space. That's for one month.
What does the money buy?
The Army has already bought 180,000 new combat uniforms for deployed troops with 130,000 more coming. Body armor - which has been instrumental in saving many soldiers from roadside bombs and snipers, but is in short supply - has been bought for more than 400,000 troops. About 373,000 more vests are needed as new troops rotate into the combat zone.
Also on the Army shopping list are 41,600 radios, 25,000 machine guns, 33,000 M-4 and M-16 assault rifles and thousands of radio jammers to foil improvised explosive devices, Schoomaker said.
While war materiel is expensive, an immeasurable price has been paid by the 1,216 troops who have died so far.
The fighting for Fallujah has been the toughest of the war, including last March's invasion, Hagee said.
By Thursday, 51 Marines had been killed and another 425 wounded in Fallujah, said Lt. Gen. John Sattler, the senior Marine Corps commander in Iraq, during a televised briefing from Iraq.
And, said GlobalSecurity's Pike, every time a soldier is killed or wounded, there are additional costs to the military, including medical treatment and transportation to Germany and U.S. hospitals, along with replacement personnel and equipment.
"Every (improvised explosive device) that puts a soldier in the hospital puts a vehicle in the junkyard," he added.
-----
Iraq: The Uncounted
CBS
Nov. 21, 2004
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/11/19/60minutes/main656756.shtml
(CBS) Approximately 300,000 American men and women have served at one time or another in Iraq.
Most will return to the United States more or less intact. But some come home the hard way - on a stretcher, bloody and broken.
And, as Correspondent Bob Simon says, there are few bloodier or more broken than Chris Schneider.
Schneider says he believed in the war in Iraq, and liked wearing the uniform. "[I was] proud to wear it. I loved wearing it," says Schneider, a Kansas boy straight off the recruitment poster.
He went to college on a wrestling scholarship, started a family, and joined the Army Reserves. This past January, his unit was providing security for a supply convoy traveling through 100 miles of dangerous Iraqi desert. He was riding in a two-and-a-half ton cargo truck, armed to the teeth.
"In my vehicle there was my driver, there was my 50-cal gunner who was in a turret on top," says Schneider. "And then there was myself and another individual in back. We both had M249 machine guns."
Schneider saw another convoy coming in his direction - a line of HETS (heavy equipment transports), big rigs on steroids, hogging the road. The first HET just missed hitting his truck. The second one did not.
"It threw me up over my vehicle, over the HET and about 50 feet into the field on the left," says Schneider. "When I landed, the next HET in line had locked up their brakes to keep from rear ending the one that we hit. And when he came to rest, the first set of tires on his trailer were parked on my pelvis. And the second set had my lower leg wedged in it to the axle. I've been told a rough estimate of approximately 120,000 to 140,000 pounds."
Today, Schneider walks with a limp, on his artificial leg. But even though he was injured while on a mission in a war zone - and even though he'll receive the same benefits as a soldier who'd been shot - he is not included in the Pentagon's casualty count. Their official tally shows only deaths and wounded in action. It doesn't include "non-combat" injured, those whose injuries were not the result of enemy fire.
"It's a slap in the face. Although it was through no direct hostile action, I was on a mission that they'd given me in hostile territory. Hostile enough that we had to have a perimeter set up at the time of my accident to prevent from an ambush or an attack," says Schneider. "For those of us that were unfortunate enough to get injured. Whether it was hostile action or not, we're all paying the same price." How many injured and ill soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines - like Chris Schneider - are left off the Pentagon's casualty count?
Would you believe 15,000? 60 Minutes asked the Department of Defense to grant us an interview. They declined. Instead, they sent a letter, which contains a figure not included in published casualty reports: "More than 15,000 troops with so-called 'non-battle' injuries and diseases have been evacuated from Iraq."
Many of those evacuated are brought to Landstuhl in Germany. Most cases are not life-threatening. In fact, some are not serious at all. But only 20 percent return to their units in Iraq. Among the 80 percent who don't return are GIs who suffered crushing bone fractures; scores of spinal injuries; heart problems by the hundreds; and a slew of psychiatric cases. None of these are included in the casualty count, leaving the true human cost of the war something of a mystery.
"It's difficult to estimate what the total number is," says John Pike, director of a research group called GlobalSecurity.org.
As a military analyst, Pike has spoken out against both Republican and Democratic administrations. He's weighed all the available casualty data and has made an informed estimate that goes well beyond what the Pentagon has released.
"You have to say that the total number of casualties due to wounds, injury, disease would have to be somewhere in the ballpark of over 20, maybe 30,000," says Pike.
His calculation, striking as it is, is based on the military's own definition of casualty - anyone "lost to the organization," in this case, for medical reasons. And Pike believes it's no accident that the military reports a number far lower than his estimate.
"The Pentagon, I think, is afraid that they're going to lose public support for this war, the way they lost public support for Vietnam back in the 1960s," says Pike. "And minimizing the apparent cost of the war, I think, is one way that they're hoping to sustain public support here at home."
60 Minutes asked the assistant secretary of Defense for Health Affairs about that claim - that casualties are being underreported, for political reasons. And we got a flat denial. In a letter, he told us, "We in the Department of Defense categorically reject the notion that we are underreporting casualties from Operation Iraqi Freedom."
He pointed out that he'd already provided us with some figures - the 15,000 evacuations of non-combat injured and ill. Still, Pike says the military is trying to minimize the casualty count. It's an effort Pike believes is misguided, because he says that even if Americans understood the full human cost of the war, public support would not weaken.
"I think that all of the public opinion polling that we're seeing suggests that the public is prepared to sustain far higher casualties than politicians give them credit for," says Pike. "I think that it's basically that the politicians and the Pentagon, don't have confidence in the American people." The Department of Defense did not include non-battle injuries in its casualty reports in other recent wars, either. But that's of little comfort to Joel Gomez, who was riding in the back of a Bradley fighting vehicle, looking for insurgents, when disaster struck.
"Unfortunately, the Bradley was too heavy for the road, a dirt road, and the ground gave way. And we wound up flipping down the mountain. And it landed upside-down in the Tigris River," says Gomez.
His two buddies were killed. Gomez made it out, but he's now paralyzed. "[It's] a horrific change. I can't move my legs. I can't move my arms," says Gomez. "It just totally changes your life in a manner that you could never imagine."
Even though Gomez tumbled into the Tigris while looking for insurgents, he is, by the Pentagon's definition, "non-combat injured."
"They blow it off and say it's just an accident," say Gomez. "I'm sure that somebody getting shot in the back would just be an accident. But that's how they see it."
The Department of Defense says the injuries and illnesses suffered by Gomez and thousands of other troops should not be taken out of context. In their letter to 60 Minutes, they said: "In order to understand rates of injuries and diseases, it is necessary to understand what the normal or usual rates of injuries and diseases might be in other situations."
What does this mean? That there are always going to be a certain number of accidents and injuries, war or no war - though they offer no numbers for comparison.
"Soldiers and Marines are gonna get sick. They're gonna get into accidents. But there's gonna be more disease, more accidents, more psychiatric stress in Iraq than if they were back here," says Pike, who adds that hundreds of troops in Iraq have been so paralyzed by stress that they've had to be medically evacuated - though you won't see them reported in the casualty count. Traditionally, that count has not included combat stress. It was long thought, in the military's macho culture, that psychological trauma is best suffered in silence.
Graham Alstrom has been back from Iraq for over a year, but he's still haunted by what he saw - and what he did to other people. "Some of them I shot. Some of them I blew up with grenades. Some of them were stabbed," says Alstrom.
The memories of killing invaded his mind. Soon after he returned home, Alstrom's life began to unravel.
"The drinking started immediately. I stopped sleeping. And I started getting very angry. I didn't want to talk to my family anymore. I didn't want them to see me. I didn't want to see them. I felt like they were ashamed of me," says Alstrom. "I was partly ashamed of some of the things I had done. ...I couldn't separate the killing people and killing them in combat."
He says he's frustrated that the military says his illness is not combat-related. "I know what I was like before I went to combat. I had a life beyond the Army," says Alstrom. "I talked to my family. I'd share feelings and emotions with people I cared about. I lived a very regular life."
Alstrom won't get a Purple Heart for his service in Iraq. It was only his mind that was wounded in battle. "It doesn't matter what the paperwork says. We know what happened over there. We know what we did over there," says Alstrom. "And no piece of paperwork saying that I'm not a casualty could ever take that away. For any of us."
They've had so much taken away already, but both Alstrom and Schneider insist that what remains inside them is the heart of a good soldier.
"I'm very supportive of why we're there. I'm very supportive of what we did while I was there," says Schneider. "I believe wholeheartedly that not only should we have gone, but that we've done the right thing."
Now, he'd like the military to do the right thing, too.
"Every one of us went over there with the knowledge that we could die," says Schneider. "And then they tell you - you're wounded - or your sacrifice doesn't deserve to be recognized, or we don't deserve to be on their list - it's not right. It's almost disgraceful."
--------
'Hey, hurry up. You're holding up my men'
telegraph.co.uk
21/11/2004
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/11/21/wirq21.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/11/21/ixworld.html
Once the fighting in Fallujah began, Toby Harnden was keen to prove he would not be a burden to his platoon. Here he reveals his life embedded with the US Army.
The ground rules were simple, said Lieut Nathan Braden, as he read out all 12 pages of them to our group of embedded journalists. We were to bring no drugs, no alcohol and no guns. Especially no drugs, he repeated, his gaze lingering over the longer-haired photographers. US Army troops search for insurgents
"If you have it, get rid of it. If we find it on you, we'll kick you out."
We had just been helicoptered into Camp Fallujah for what the United States marines referred to euphemistically as the likelihood of "increased activity in our area of operations".
This was the attack on the rebel-held city. It was going to be a big battle and we would be part of it. First, we had to agree to behave.
In addition to forswearing all illegal substances, we promised not to print or broadcast details of battle plans, troop numbers or force locations. The names or images of dead American soldiers were not to be published until their next of kin had been informed.
In return, we would have a soldier's-eye-view of the conflict.
With our flak jackets marked "Press" and helmets that had our blood group scrawled on them - one wag had a sticker reading: "O+. If found injured, please apply drugs. Lots of drugs" - we joined our units.
I was assigned to the US army's Task Force 2-2. On the Thursday, I was told that the battle would start at 7pm on Monday.
I knew that 24 hours earlier US Special Forces would seize the hospital on the Fallujah peninsula and secure the bridges on the west of the city. I could not report any of this. I could not even reveal where I was.
"Near Fallujah" was as specific as I could get.
None of us had much difficulty with any of this. After all, anything that put the lives of soldiers at risk would be potentially just as dangerous for us.
For the next two weeks we would share the vehicles, fears and possibly the fate of the troops. One reporter was to be hit by shrapnel and a photographer injured when her convoy was hit by a roadside bomb on the eve of battle.
The soldiers received me with some bewilderment. "You don't have a weapon?" asked a sergeant, brushing aside my protest that we weren't allowed to carry a gun, as I climbed into the back of his Bradley fighting vehicle.
"If you change your mind, there are plenty spare."
They were also mystified that I wasn't being paid more to go into combat.
"You're either crazy or have balls the size of watermelons," observed the sergeant. After that, I was treated as one of the team. The sergeant was responsible for my safety as well as that of his men.
I had already pondered the gun issue. If it came to it, I wanted to be able to use one. I had visions of being stuck in a damaged Humvee with three dead soldiers and several M16s lying around me as insurgents approached.
So while in America a few months ago, I had persuaded a friend to take me to the National Rifle Association range in Virginia where I fired an AR15, the civilian variant of the M16, the US army's standard infantry rifle.
In Fallujah, I was essentially a member of the platoon. When clearing buildings, I was an extra pair of eyes. If a room had been overlooked or there was a possible sniper position nearby, I would tell the sergeant.
Before becoming a journalist, I served in the British armed forces. Last week, if the distinction between journalist and soldier was becoming blurred, it was part and parcel of being an "embed".
On one occasion, I spotted a copper wire that could have been the trigger for a booby trap. The sergeant thanked me and we all stepped over it.
My view of the action was detailed but incomplete. Task Force 2-2 went only into the east and south of the city. I knew nothing of what happened elsewhere. What they saw, I saw - nothing more, nothing less.
Yet my access to them was total. Lt Col Pete Newell, Task Force 2-2's commanding officer, had a policy of transparency.
I attended the main battle briefing, held over a mocked up battlefield using broken bricks for city blocks and artillery rounds for mosques.
I heard the eve-of-war address at which he pointed to Fallujah and told his men: "I expect you to pile in and kick someone's ass."
During a morning command briefing, a hulking chief warrant officer saw a Washington Post reporter and me taking notes and ordered us to leave.
We protested, saying that the colonel knew we were there. "Are these civilians cleared to be present?" the marine asked, halting the briefing as 30 pairs of eyes turned to us. "Yep," said Lt Col Newell, as we inwardly cheered.
Once the fighting began, I had to prove that I would not be a burden.
"Hey, hurry up," one soldier shouted on the first night, when I hesitated momentarily before vaulting over a wall. "You're holding up my men." I vowed to do better.
Sitting in the back of the Bradleys for hours, sweating, I soon learnt much about these men.
"I went to London once," a medic told me. "I met a girl on the internet. It didn't work out because she hadn't told me about her two children, and the picture she had used was of her sister. When I arrived, she said, 'I thought you were lying too'."
When we heard the fighting was over, we were in an abandoned house after spending the night sleeping on the floor.
Spontaneously and joyfully, the soldiers began to smash up the place. It had been wrecked already but there were a few windows and doors still intact.
They jumped, trying unsuccessfully to pull down a cheap fan hanging from a high ceiling. Seeing it was on a hook, I grabbed a piece of wood.
As they watched, I gave it a sharp prod and it came crashing to the floor. There was a hearty cheer from the platoon. I had become one of them.
But relations did sour towards the end, when a photograph of a dead soldier - whom I had been speaking to minutes before he was killed - appeared in a German newspaper.
It was a haunting image of the body lying in a dusty kitchen, blood seeping from a bullet wound to the head. For me it summed up much of what had happened in Fallujah and was also a memorial to a brave American who died for his country.
In the pain of the moment, Task Force 2-2 saw it differently.
"Grab your stuff, asshole, and come with me," was how a captain addressed Stefan Zaklin, of the European Picture Agency, when news of the picture reached the unit.
Zaklin was placed under armed guard and told he had violated the rules of propriety. Nothing in the rules had been broken. The soldiers had seen Zaklin snapping away in the kitchen - but it seemed that this was where the military and the media parted company.
I, too, was castigated, for quoting a searingly authentic talk by a staff sergeant, in which he suggested to his men that their commanding officer had been killed because he had been careless. He did say it. But only so much reality could be tolerated.
-----
The soldiers' story: the war the video cameras do not see
independent.co.uk
21 November 2004
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=585070
This is a momentous time for the US marines in Iraq. Their story here is intrinsically linked to the story of Fallujah, and the fallout from what is happening there will shape what happens to this country in the days to come.
One of the seminal moments in the assault on the rebel stronghold was the shooting by a US marine of a wounded prisoner in a mosque. It is likely to become one of the enduring images of the conflict, much the way the shooting of a Viet Cong prisoner by a South Vietnamese officer became during that war.
The killing, captured on television, has been played over and over internationally, and nowhere more so than in Iraq, with Americans, British and Iraqis all saying it has brought back bitter and barely healed memories of the infamous Abu Ghraib scandal. The International Red Cross yesterday highlighted the mosque shooting and the murder of the kidnapped aid worker, Margaret Hassan, as signs of how "basic tenets of humanity" have unravelled in Iraq.
The US marines have also played a key part in the events which has made the struggle for Fallujah so symbolic. Last April, after a mob had lynched four American security guards, the White House and Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, ordered the city to be invested. The then commander of the marines, General James T Conway, advised strongly against this, pointing out that an attack would look like pure revenge and destroy relations he and his men were trying to build with the people of Fallujah through reconstruction projects.
The general's protestations were ignored. But within days, with graphic pictures and accounts of death and devastation in the media, inter- national condemnation, and a jittery Tony Blair urging caution on George Bush, the assault was halted and the marines withdrew.
The attack, which had left 600 Iraqis dead, triggered the rebellion that has swept through the country since. The American retreat was also a huge propaganda triumph for the insurgents, and for the next six months Fallujah became their national headquarters as well as the base of the murderous Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Mortar and rocket attacks were planned there, and waves of car bombers sent to the rest of the country, especially the capital, Baghdad.
With Fallujah "pacified", the US marines are now engaged in a bloody, and largely unreported, struggle in what is the new heartland of the militants in Babil, south of Baghdad - the so called "triangle of death". Zarqawi is believed to have taken refuge from Fallujah here, and the scale of action, as well as the body count, is far higher than anything taking place in Mosul or elsewhere in Iraq.
The operation is by the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU), with the Black Watch battlegroup playing an essentially defensive, blocking role. The British deployment has, of course, been hugely controversial in Britain, and Downing Street, we are told, has attempted to impose an information straitjacket. Reports of soldiers openly declaring that they did not want to deploy to this new area, calling Tony Blair a liar, and the leak of an email in which the commander, Col James Cowan, himself appeared to question the mission, created a fractious atmosphere in which there have been several bruising encounters between journalists and the military.
At the Black Watch base, Camp Dogwood, the media are essentially corralled into a room and a tent, with no access to the rest of the base. Interviewees are brought over to the tent by arrangement, and press officers sit in during the interviews.
At the marines' base, Camp Kalsu, Colonel Ron Johnson, 48, the commander of the 24th MEU, had very different ideas. "You can go and talk to anyone in this base," he declared. "They may say to you they hate Iraqis, they may say to you this is an unjust war. I'll accept that. But if anyone says 'no comment' let me have his name. Iraq is too important for people to come and serve here and not have any views."
Major General Bill Rollo, the British commander in Basra, came in for a flying visit, and Col Johnson invited me to sit in at their meeting. "After all, you represent a British newspaper, it'll be useful." I pointed out it was highly unlikely that the British military would agree to anything like that, and, of course, that turned out to be the case. The colonel's own meetings with his staff remained open.
Col Johnson, a big, cigar-chomping man with a resemblance to Robert De Niro, looks straight out of central casting. He has a reputation of being tough, but seems popular among his men - "a marine's marine," said a sergeant. "He is prepared to take the same risks as you are, he will stand up for you, and he doesn't give you bullshit. Believe me, these qualities can be pretty rare in officers."
The colonel, who comes from Duxbury, Massachusetts and is married with a 12-year-old daughter, has some surprising views. The United Nations sanctions on Iraq, he feels, harmed ordinary people far more than it did the regime. He was not convinced by the claims made about Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction, although he insists that it was worth having the war to free the people of Iraq from Saddam Hussein's brutal dictatorship.
He also eschews terms like "terrorists" because they are "too simplistic". In many cases, he holds, impoverished Iraqis are joining the insurgents because the occupying powers have failed to provide them with jobs and means of earning a livelihood.
The colonel talked about TE Lawrence - "Lawrence of Arabia" - and his Seven Pillars of Wisdom. There is, he says, a void in the US military's knowledge of the Arab world. He would like to take his staff officers on courses to study the language and culture. But, unfortunately, "wars keep getting in the way".
The abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, said Col Johnson "was an appalling, disgusting thing. No one should attempt to justify it. It led to a lot of anger among the Iraqi people, and who can blame them? We have got our own detention centre here, and I have made sure that nothing like Abu Ghraib will ever happen here. I want the Red Cross and human rights groups to carry out snap inspections here. I want the media to go and also see for themselves. I think all this will be beneficial, it'll keep us on our toes."
Lt Col Robert l'Abriola, in charge of the detention centre, said air-conditioning was put into the cells, on Col Johnson's instructions, before much of the rest of the camp. The prisoners get the same food as the marines, with adjustments made for religious reasons. The rules also stipulate that the guards must account for every hour of their duty. "The prisoners are treated according to regulations laid down," said Lt Col l'Abriola. "I try to apply the rules of the Geneva Convention as far as possible."
There is, however, an acceptance that the footage of the shooting of the prisoner in the mosque will lead to adverse publicity, and there will be a linkage to Abu Ghraib. Did Col Johnson think the two are comparable? This is an uncomfortable matter for him and other marines. There is a desire for solidarity, especially at a time when they are facing action every day.
"There will be an inquiry, and if there is evidence the guy will be charged," he said finally. "But I do think there are differences. Abu Ghraib was premeditated and organised. Here something happened in the heat of a conflict. This guy had been shot himself the previous day, and they had come across booby-trapped bodies.
"I am not condoning what happened, but these are things that will have to be taken into consideration in anything that follows. The big problem is the effect on the Iraqi people. We have been making progress since Abu Ghraib, now we have just slid a hell of a long way back."
There is, predictably, sympathy for the marine who carried out the shooting among his comrades. But it is not universal. "I hear people saying things like the other side would have done the same, and much worse. But aren't we saying we are better than the other side?" asked a young lieutenant in the huge, hangar-like canteen at Camp Kalsu. " If we are going to say that, then we have got to be accountable, there is no getting away from that. I am glad the TV camera was there - hopefully what was shown will prevent something similar happening in the future."
Unlike some other American and British officers, who privately speak about the interim Iraqi government's security forces with disdain, Col Johnson displays an almost messianic zeal in his support of them. "These guys are leading far more dangerous lives than the rest of us," he said. "When they are captured, they are killed, sometimes after torture. Their families have been murdered as well. I think it takes a hell of a lot of guts under these circumstances to do what they do.
"The bottom line is that Iraqis must be allowed to run their own country. This is a country with history and culture and education. They are good workers. It is patronising of Westerners who say somehow that Iraqis cannot cope.
"This brings me to the question I keep on asking, but never get a satisfactory answer. What happened to the $18bn that Congress voted for reconstruction ? Why are so many contracts going to American and other foreign firms? Why aren't they going to more Iraqis? Who's deciding all this?"
At Mahmudiya, where the 2nd Battalion are based, the marines are very much in the front line of the current operation. There are daily and, at times, fierce clashes with insurgents. The commanding officer, Lt Col Mark Smith, had just returned from an all-night operation and still had his camouflage "war paint" on. The raid, on a farm, followed information that Zarqawi was hiding there. They did not find him, but, he said, they caught two senior members of the insurgency.
"We have had lots of engagements and we have killed lots," he said. "With Fallujah over, the action has moved here. The people we are killing are Zarqawi's, and, let me tell you, I don't mind killing beheaders at all. Hell, if Zarqawi wants to have a knife fight with me, one to one, I'd be happy to oblige."
Conversations over dinner of chicken and mashed potatoes moved on to politics. The debate was whether there would ever be peace in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East as long as the Palestine dispute remains unsolved. One officer storms off, saying: "It seems to me that Israel can do whatever it wants and then come up with some bullshit excuse, and then the rest of us have to pick up the pieces elsewhere." Another officer shrugged: "We are the marines, not the army, so we encourage debate. But it's best not to do it over dinner, you only get indigestion."
A raid took place on Mahmudiya in a hunt for targeted suspects, arms and distribution centres for insurgent literature. Nine men were arrested, and guns and ammunition, including a Dragonov sniper's rifle, taken from two shops which had allegedly been supplying militant factions.
Large crowds gathered as roads were sealed off, the mood unhappy but resigned. There were only two interpreters, and they were both busy in another location. One of the officers shook his head in exasperation "I can't talk to these people. That is the biggest problem, we can't communicate." He asked me whether I could go and buy some pastries for him and his men from a bakery. Wouldn't it be better if he came along as well and actually met the people in the shop, I asked. In an ideal world, he said, but it is considered just too dangerous here.
In the shop people said they had no idea what the Americans were after, the reason for the disruption of their lives. "They do not really talk to us," said the shopkeeper. "I did not even know they liked our food."
He refused to take money for the pastries. The marines were getting increasingly apprehensive. The longer we stayed on the streets, the more the chance of getting hit by mortars and car bombers. There was sporadic gunfire in the background, but no one was quite sure who was firing at whom.
"I keep on thinking in these situations that if I am going to die, I want to savour these last moments, what I see, what I feel," said a young marine. "And right now, I feel I don't really understand these people, and they don't really understand us."
-----
Rockets from over the river make terror just part of army routine
Jamie Wilson, who was caught in latest Camp Dogwood attack, reports on everyday life with the Black Watch
The Guardian
November 20, 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1355657,00.html
War, they say, is 95% boredom and 5% terror, and for the men of the Black Watch, even the latter is beginning to feel routine.
Nearly three weeks since the regiment arrived at Camp Dogwood, and with the exception of a brief but welcome respite over the Muslim holiday of Eid, rockets and mortars have fallen inside their bleak and uncomfortable base almost every day.
But the distant crump, followed by a high-pitched whistle, and the shouts of "Get down" drowned out by the boom of the explosion, still manage to raise the level of adrenaline in even the most experienced soldiers.
Two arrived before breakfast yesterday, with three more whistling in around elevenses. The second salvo came just as a squad of Royal Engineers was starting an exercise on a rubble-strewn patch of desert that doubles as a parade ground.
At the first explosion, all nine men - and a small group of unsuspecting journalists - threw themselves to the ground. The second was accompanied by the confusing commands to "get down" and "run like shit" and, by the time the third rocket arrived, much of the assembled company was trying to cram into the front shovel of a digger.
No one was injured in the attacks, the third largest bombardment by insurgents since the Scottish regiment began its controversial deployment at its remote desert base west of Baghdad.
The regiment's commanding officer, Lt Col James Cowan, calls them a "nuisance", but Corporal Paul Brown, 34, from Gosport, might disagree. Last week, he became one of only two soldiers to be injured in the attacks within the camp, and a small piece of shrapnel that missed his jugular by little more than an inch is still embedded in his neck.
"They told me it will probably work its way out at some point," he said.
But while it is hard to imagine anywhere more uncomfortable or unforgiving, for most of the 850-strong battle group the war being fought around Camp Dogwood is dusty and dirty, but it is not hell. Instead, it is an exercise in what the engineers, sat against the walls of their quarters yesterday morning waiting for the all-clear, call discomfort management. They have christened the crumbling brick building they call home Taiconderoga Cottage, after the US name for the base, and have adorned the sign with flowers. The walls are covered with pictures of women in various stages of undress, while another sign reads: "Mushroom Troop - kept in the dark, fed on shite." The engineers have even used old cardboard boxes from their ration packs to make Venetian blinds to cover the holes in the walls where there were once windows.
As they lolled around, a whistle sounded from the far end of the corridor. Briefly, the men tensed, before Sergeant Dave Parsley, the troop leader, growled: "If you do that again, I'll rip your fucking lips off."
"They're a lot better at this game than those we have come up against down south," said Sgt Parsley of the insurgents as he chewed on a fat cigar.
He should know. The paperweight next to his army issue camp bed is the top of a rocket fired into the base last week. It landed about seven feet from where he had taken cover, but it failed to go off. "I couldn't bloody believe it when I saw it," he said.
"Welcome to the Dogwood Hilton," reads a sign on the wall of probably the safest place in the camp. Nobody else wanted the underground bunker when the Black Watch arrived at the former industrial complex. But the 11 members of the refuelling crew who now call it home spent three days clearing it of rubble. It doesn't have hot running water, piles of white towels or king-sized beds, but the soldiers have done their best.
"We filled every spare little bit of space on the truck," said Corporal Robert Smith, 29, from Dundee. "We bought a DVD player and a stereo, and darts, of course," pointing to a board hanging on the wall.
For the men inside the camp, the insurgents remain an elusive enemy, firing rockets from the lush east bank of the Euphrates, a restricted zone under Saddam Hussein that was home to members of the well-trained Special Republican Guard.
For most of them, the only contact they will have with their shadowy foe will come in the form of the metre-long metal tubes similar to the one a bomb disposal officer attached wires to yesterday. After his retreat, a loud explosion sent a column of dust and smoke into the clear blue sky, a reminder, amid the boredom, of the danger the soldiers face.
"I never, ever, want to see this place again," one soldier said, no doubt speaking for many.
-----
Falluja women, children in mass grave
Aljazeera
21 November 2004
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/24EBE5BB-CA3F-462B-8279-546BC1D9B7E6.htm
Residents of a village neighbouring Falluja have told Aljazeera that they helped bury the bodies of 73 women and children who were burnt to death by a US bombing attack.
"We buried them here, but we could not identify them because they were charred by the use of napalm bombs used by the Americans," said one resident of Saqlawiya in footage aired on Aljazeera on Sunday.
There have been no reports of the US military using napalm in Falluja and no independent verification of the claims.
The resident told Aljazeera all the bodies were buried in a single grave.
Late last week, US troops in Falluja called on some residents who had fled the fighting to return and help bury the dead.
However, according to other residents who managed to flee the fighting after US forces entered the city, hundreds more bodies still lay in the streets and were being fed on by packs of wild dogs.
Danger zone
Meanwhile, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said Falluja remained too dangerous to secure proper retrieval and burial of corpses.
The ICRC and other relief groups are unable to enter the city
"We could not enter Falluja city so far due to the security measures and the continuing battles," Muain Qasis, ICRC spokesman in Jordan, told Aljazeera.
When asked about the security measures, Qasis said: "In order to carry out an independent and acceptable humanitarian action, we must have guarantees ensuring the safety of the humanitarian staff.
"The humanitarian situation in Falluja city is very difficult.
"The city is still suffering shortage of public services. There is no water or electricity. There is no way to offer medical treatment for the injured families still surrounded inside the city," he added.
Detained civilians released
In related news, the US military in Falluja announced that it had released 400 of the 1450 men it had detained in the war-ravaged city.
"More than 400 detainees have since been released after being deemed non-combatants," the military said, adding that 100 more were due to be released on Sunday.
--------
Iraq Schedules National Elections for Jan. 30
November 21, 2004
By EDWARD WONG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/21/international/middleeast/21cnd-iraq.html?hp&ex=1101099600&en=a67b1fd95bdf31f7&ei=5094&partner=homepage
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 21 - Iraqi electoral officials announced today that they had set a date of Jan. 30 for the country's first democratic elections despite a sharp rise in violence in the last month and threats of a boycott by Sunni Arab leaders.
The officials said they had no legal authority to push the elections back beyond January, because an interim constitution drafted last spring requires that the elections take place by then.
But electoral officials also acknowledged that security problems have arisen during the voter registration process. "There are some disturbances in certain areas," said Adel al-Lami, an organizer at the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq, in charge of putting together the elections. The areas affected are primarily Anbar Province, which encompasses the hostile cities of Falluja and Ramadi, and Ninevah Province, which includes Mosul, a strong insurgent base and the country's third-largest city, officials said.
Political entities will have until 3 p.m. on Monday to register themselves, said Abdul-Hussein Hindawi, the head of the commission. So far, 198 entities have registered, 44 of them individuals, he said.
"All the political parties in Iraq that are known historically and represent large numbers of people have registered their names for the elections," he said.
Campaigning will start on Dec. 15 and end 48 hours before the actual polling begins, officials said.
On Jan. 30, Iraqis will vote for members of a 275-seat national assembly, which will then install an executive government and draft a permanent constitution. Elections for a full-term government are planned for the end of 2005.
The same day, Iraqis will also vote for members of provincial councils in the country's 18 provinces. In the northern Kurdish region, residents will vote in a third election, one for a Kurdistan Assembly.
Expatriate Iraqis in at least 14 countries are expected to be able to vote in the National Assembly elections. Smaller countries such as Jordan and Great Britain will have a voter registration and polling center in the capital, said Safwat Rashid, an electoral commissioner. Larger countries, like the United States, Australia and Iran, will have multiple centers, he added.
Throughout most of this country, Iraqis are receiving sheets with names of eligible voters from their household when they collect their food rations in November. If something is incorrect, the Iraqis then go to a registration center to fix the mistake.
Last week, a warehouse in Mosul with printouts of voter rolls to be distributed was raided and the papers burned. Mosul has been pushed to the brink of chaos since an insurgent uprising last Thursday in which guerrillas stormed six police stations, spurring 3,200 of the city's 4,000 police officers to abandon their jobs.
Prominent Shiite leaders, including Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most powerful Shiite cleric in Iraq, have insisted that elections take place by the end of January, no matter the violence.
But several Sunni organizations, including the Muslim Scholars Association, which claims to represent 3,000 mosques, says it is calling on all Iraqis to boycott the elections. Sunni Arabs, who make up a fifth of the population here, were ousted from power with the toppling of Saddam Hussein and fear that elections will give the Shiites, who account for at least 60 percent of Iraqis, a huge amount of power over them. Until the Sunni Arabs abandon that fear and their hunger to return to power, the insurgency will continue.
Also today, news agency reports said the Iraqi prime minister's 75-year-old cousin, Ghazi Majeed Allawi, had been freed by captors who had detained him and two other family members on Nov. 9. A group called Ansar al Jihad had posted an Internet message saying the three would be beheaded unless Dr. Allawi called off the siege of Falluja and released all prisoners in Iraq.
Two of the relatives, both women, were released last week. And today, Al-Arabiya news channel, quoted by Reuters, reported that Ghazi Allawi had been freed.
--------
Children Pay Cost of Iraq's Chaos
Malnutrition Nearly Double What It Was Before Invasion
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, November 21, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A809-2004Nov20?language=printer
BAGHDAD -- Acute malnutrition among young children in Iraq has nearly doubled since the United States led an invasion of the country 20 months ago, according to surveys by the United Nations, aid agencies and the interim Iraqi government.
After the rate of acute malnutrition among children younger than 5 steadily declined to 4 percent two years ago, it shot up to 7.7 percent this year, according to a study conducted by Iraq's Health Ministry in cooperation with Norway's Institute for Applied International Studies and the U.N. Development Program. The new figure translates to roughly 400,000 Iraqi children suffering from "wasting," a condition characterized by chronic diarrhea and dangerous deficiencies of protein.
"These figures clearly indicate the downward trend," said Alexander Malyavin, a child health specialist with the UNICEF mission to Iraq.
The surveys suggest the silent human cost being paid across a country convulsed by instability and mismanagement. While attacks by insurgents have grown more violent and more frequent, deteriorating basic services take lives that many Iraqis said they had expected to improve under American stewardship.
Iraq's child malnutrition rate now roughly equals that of Burundi, a central African nation torn by more than a decade of war. It is far higher than rates in Uganda and Haiti.
"The people are astonished," said Khalil M. Mehdi, who directs the Nutrition Research Institute at the Health Ministry. The institute has been involved with nutrition surveys for more than a decade; the latest one was conducted in April and May but has not been publicly released.
Mehdi and other analysts attributed the increase in malnutrition to dirty water and to unreliable supplies of the electricity needed to make it safe by boiling. In poorer areas, where people rely on kerosene to fuel their stoves, high prices and an economy crippled by unemployment aggravate poor health.
"Things have been worse for me since the war," said Kasim Said, a day laborer who was at Baghdad's main children's hospital to visit his ailing year-old son, Abdullah. The child, lying on a pillow with a Winnie the Pooh washcloth to keep the flies off his head, weighs just 11 pounds.
"During the previous regime, I used to work on the government projects. Now there are no projects," his father said.
When he finds work, he added, he can bring home $10 to $14 a day. If his wife is fortunate enough to find a can of Isomil, the nutritional supplement that doctors recommend, she pays $7 for it.
"But the lady in the next bed said she just paid $10," said Suad Ahmed, who sat cross-legged on a bed in the same ward, trying to console her skeletal 4-month-old granddaughter, Hiba, who suffers from chronic diarrhea.
Iraqi health officials like to surprise visitors by pointing out that the nutrition issue facing young Iraqis a generation ago was obesity. Malnutrition, they say, appeared in the early 1990s with U.N. trade sanctions championed by Washington to punish the government led by President Saddam Hussein for invading Kuwait in 1990.
International aid efforts and the U.N. oil-for-food program helped reduce the ruinous impact of sanctions, and the rate of acute malnutrition among the youngest Iraqis gradually dropped from a peak of 11 percent in 1996 to 4 percent in 2002. But the invasion in March 2003 and the widespread looting in its aftermath severely damaged the basic structures of governance in Iraq, and persistent violence across the country slowed the pace of reconstruction almost to a halt.
In its most recent assessment of five sectors of Iraq's reconstruction, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington research group, said health care was worsening at the quickest pace.
"Believe me, we thought a magic thing would happen" with the fall of Hussein and the start of the U.S.-led occupation, said an administrator at Baghdad's Central Teaching Hospital for Pediatrics. "So we're surprised that nothing has been done. And people talk now about how the days of Saddam were very nice," the official said.
The administrator, who would not give his full name for publication, cited security concerns faced by Iraqi doctors, who are widely perceived as rich and well-connected and thus easy targets for thieves, extortionists and the merely envious or vengeful. So many have been assassinated, he said, that the Health Ministry recently mailed out offers to expedite weapon permits for doctors.
Violence has also driven away international aid agencies that brought expertise to Iraq following the U.S. invasion.
Since a truck bombing at the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad killed more than 20 people last year, U.N. programs for Iraq have operated from neighboring Jordan. Doctors Without Borders, a group known for its high tolerance for risk and one of several that helped revive Iraq's Health Ministry in the weeks after the invasion, evacuated this fall.
CARE International closed down in October after the director of its large Iraq operation, Margaret Hassan, was kidnapped. She is now presumed to be dead. The huge Atlanta-based charity had remained active in Iraq through three wars, providing hospitals with supplies and sponsoring scores of projects to offer Iraqis clean drinking water.
By one count, 60 percent of rural residents and 20 percent of urban dwellers have access only to contaminated water. The country's sewer systems are in disarray.
"Even myself, I suffer from the quality of water," said Zina Yahya, 22, a nurse in a Baghdad maternity hospital. "If you put it in a glass, you can see it's turbid. I've heard of typhoid cases."
The nutrition surveys indicated that conditions are worst in Iraq's largely poor, overwhelmingly Shiite Muslim south, an area alternately subject to neglect and persecution during Hussein's rule. But doctors say malnutrition occurs wherever water is dirty, parents are poor and mothers have not been taught how to avoid disease.
"I don't eat well," said Yusra Jabbar, 20, clutching her swollen abdomen in a fly-specked ward of Baghdad's maternity hospital. Her mother said the water in their part of Sadr City, a Shiite slum on the capital's east side, is often contaminated. Her brother contracted jaundice.
"They tell me I have anemia," Jabbar said. Doctors said almost all the pregnant women in the hospital do.
"This is not surprising because since the war, there is lots of unemployment," Yahya said. "And without work, they don't have the money to obtain proper food.''
Iraqis say such conditions carry political implications. Baghdad residents often point out to reporters that after the 1991 Persian Gulf War left much of the capital a shambles, Hussein's government restored electricity and kerosene supplies in two months.
"Yes, there is a price for every war," said the official at the teaching hospital. "Yes, there are victims. But after that?
"Oh God, help us build Iraq again. For our children, not for us. For our kids," the official said.
---------
Baghdad Suffers A Day of Attacks, Assassinations
Residents Fear an Insurgent Offensive; Bodies of 9 Iraqi Troops Found in Mosul
By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, November 21, 2004; Page A30
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A49-2004Nov20?language=printer
BAGHDAD, Nov. 20 -- Insurgents fought U.S. troops in running street battles in the capital Saturday, assassinated three Iraqi officials and their driver and detonated a car bomb in Baghdad's Liberation Square, a grim cadence that some Iraqis feared signaled the onset of a rebel offensive in the capital. In northern Iraq, the U.S. military discovered the bodies of nine slain Iraqi soldiers.
There were moments of fleeting optimism amid the bleakness Saturday: A woman abducted last month was freed and returned to her native Poland, and the United States and Germany reached a tentative deal to forgive as much as four-fifths of Iraq's crushing $122 billion foreign debt.
But most of the day's news fit a familiar pattern in a country reeling from relentless violence. Acting on a tip, U.S. troops discovered the bodies of the Iraqi soldiers in an open expanse off a main road in Mosul about a mile from the Tigris River. All nine had been shot in the back of the head, said Lt. Col. Paul Hastings, an Army spokesman in the northern Iraqi city.
The men, who were not in uniform, were identified as members of an army unit stationed at the Kisik military base, about 30 miles west of Mosul, Hastings said. Their discovery follows the recovery of four beheaded bodies on Thursday, he said. Like the soldiers, they were in civilian clothes but have yet to be identified.
"It tells you something about the enemy and the level of extremism that possesses these people to do that," Hastings said. About 2,500 U.S. troops entered Mosul this week to try to staunch a surge of rebel attacks. "It's obviously very disturbing, to say the least."
The scenes in Baghdad sent a shudder through the capital, as fighting emptied streets and unfurled columns of black smoke over the Sunni Muslim neighborhood of Adhamiya. Overhead, AH-64 Apache attack helicopters buzzed through a cloudless sky, while in the streets, men with rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers hurried through the neighborhood.
The U.S. military said one American soldier was killed and nine were wounded in an attack at 7 a.m., when insurgents detonated improvised mines and fired rifles and rocket-propelled grenades at their unit. In the hours that followed, clashes erupted in at least four Baghdad neighborhoods, with most of the fighting centered in Adhamiya.
Roads there were closed, some barricaded with tires and blocks of concrete, forcing cars the wrong way down streets to escape the fighting. The police station came under attack, and firetrucks tried to extinguish blazes in several shops in Antar Square. Footage broadcast by Arab satellite networks showed a U.S. Humvee in flames.
Ambulances raced through the neighborhood with sirens blaring, and smoke blocked the view of the Royal Cemetery, distinguished by a turquoise-domed tomb for members of the Hashemite family that ruled Iraq until the monarchy's fall in 1958.
The clashes in Adhamiya came a day after Iraqi troops backed by U.S. soldiers raided the most revered Sunni mosque in Baghdad, setting off stun grenades, arresting dozens and leaving at least two people dead. The raid was part of a U.S. and Iraqi crackdown on clerics perceived as supporting the insurgency, but it ignited anger in a neighborhood that has smoldered almost since the start of the U.S. occupation in 2003.
A U.S. general familiar with the operation, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the raid on the Abu Hanifa mosque was planned by U.S. Special Forces, working with Iraqi allies. While several officers stressed that U.S. forces would not allow insurgents sanctuary anywhere, even in intensely sensitive sites such as mosques, the general said that he believed the raid could have been less provocative. The operation was carried out right after Friday prayers, often a time when emotions are running high.
To many in Baghdad, the fighting was redolent of the days during the U.S. invasion, when the streets were largely deserted by dusk. On Saturday, with electricity in especially short supply, swaths of the city were cast in darkness by nightfall.
"They said they are bombing Adhamiya, and my mother is there alone. Why is this happening?" asked Mary Polis, 13, who was visiting relatives across town and unable to return to her family's home. Her relatives said her father was wounded in the right shoulder by stray gunfire Saturday morning, when the fighting was most intense.
Some residents complained that the U.S. attack last week on Fallujah, a city along the Euphrates River about 35 miles west of the capital, had unleashed fighting that has raged in regions north and west of Baghdad and in the capital itself. Those sympathetic to the insurgency equated the U.S. attack with striking a hornet's nest. Those opposed used Iraqi slang to describe the rebels. "Inchalabow," they said: to become like wild dogs.
On Saturday, the attacks stretched across the tattered capital. In Liberation Square, at the end of Saadoun Street, a busy commercial thoroughfare, smoke billowed over central Baghdad after a suicide bomber blew up his vehicle just after noon, killing an Iraqi civilian, wounding another and setting several vehicles on fire.
In the neighborhood of Qadisiya, masked men driving in an Opel attacked the car of Amal Abdel Latif, an adviser to the Public Works Ministry. She was killed, along with her secretary, driver and another employee, said Alan Aref, a ministry spokesman.
The offensive against Fallujah was designed to eradicate what had become a virtually independent fiefdom of rebels and, in the eyes of many Iraqis, the base for a wave of kidnappings, beheadings and car bombings that has repulsed many here.
U.S. officials estimated that 1,200 fighters were killed in the city, once home to 300,000 people, but the insurgents' main leaders -- Abdullah Janabi, Omar Hadid and Abu Musab Zarqawi -- appear to have escaped.
The U.S. general who oversaw the capture of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein last December predicted that Zarqawi's arrest would prove more difficult.
With Hussein, "after the fall, there was no organization, he was fleeing for his life, whereas I think Zarqawi is a little more organized. . . . He has a more organized group around him than Saddam Hussein," Army Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno told reporters traveling with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. "That's what makes it a bit more difficult." Powell attended a summit with President Bush in Santiago, Chile, Saturday before heading for the Middle East.
Beyond Baghdad, fighting continued in the turbulent region known as the Sunni Triangle. Another day of clashes erupted in Ramadi, west of Fallujah, where U.S. forces sealed roads into the city and flew helicopters low overhead. The Associated Press, quoting hospital officials, said nine Iraqis were killed and five were wounded. Mortar shells were fired at the U.S. base in Baqubah, northeast of the capital, residents said, and guerrillas fought U.S. troops in Qaim, a restive town near the border with Syria.
A militant group, the Army of Ansar al-Sunna, posted a video on a Web site that it said showed one of its members shooting dead two men from the government-allied Kurdistan Democratic Party. It accused Kurds of helping fight insurgents in Mosul.
The freed Polish woman, Teresa Borcz Khalifa, spoke to reporters in Warsaw on Saturday but declined to say how she was freed or to give any details.
Prime Minister Marek Belka said she arrived in the Polish capital the night before.
"It was a very joyous moment for me," said Khalifa, 54, whose abductors had demanded Polish troops withdraw from Iraq. "I feel well, very well."
Khalifa, who holds dual Polish-Iraqi citizenship and is married to an Iraqi, said she was treated well and called her abduction "very well organized." More than 170 foreigners have been kidnapped in Iraq. At least 34 have been killed, including Margaret Hassan, 59, an aid worker for CARE International abducted last month who had British, Irish and Iraqi citizenship.
In Berlin, after a months-long U.S. effort, Germany and the United States agreed to a proposal for writing off as much as 80 percent of Iraq's foreign debt. The deal still needs approval from the Paris Club of creditor nations, to which Iraq owes about a third of its debt.
Staff writers Robin Wright in Santiago, Chile, and Bradley Graham and special correspondents Bassam Sebti and Naseer Nouri in Baghdad contributed to this report.
--------
Rebels Keep Up Attacks in Central and North Iraq
November 21, 2004
By EDWARD WONG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/21/international/middleeast/21iraq.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 20 - Violence surged through central and northern Iraq on Saturday as a tenacious insurgency led by Sunni Arabs kept up relentless assaults in several major cities, including Baghdad, Ramadi and Falluja, which the Americans devastated during an intense weeklong offensive aimed at routing the insurgency.
In the capital, insurgents armed with Kalashnikov rifles and rocket-propelled grenades tried storming a police station at dawn in the northwestern neighborhood of Amariya, where American and Iraqi soldiers had engaged in a mosque shootout on Friday. The attack on the police station left three Iraqi policemen dead and two others wounded, said Col. Adnan Abdul-Rahman, an Interior Ministry spokesman.
Hours later, a car bomb exploded in downtown Baghdad, at the eastern end of the bridge over the Tigris River leading to the Green Zone, the fortified compound housing the American Embassy and the headquarters of the interim Iraqi government. The bomb was aimed at a convoy of vehicles from a Western security contractor. At least one Iraqi was killed and another wounded, witnesses said.
Four employees of the Public Works Ministry were gunned down from a passing car, and three Iraqi national guardsmen died in explosions in western Baghdad during gun battles with insurgents, Iraqi officials said.
An ambush on an American military convoy in central Baghdad ended with the death of one soldier, the military said. Nine others were wounded in what appeared to be a highly coordinated attack, with insurgents using explosives, automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. Fighting raged in the rubble of Falluja. Two marines were killed and four wounded in an ambush on Friday in which an insurgent deceived the Americans by waving a white flag, military officials said Saturday.
The weeklong offensive, which began Nov. 8, smashed a haven for the insurgents, but guerrillas still roam the devastated streets, sniping at American troops and deterring military engineers brought in to try to rebuild the city.
American commanders in Falluja say they are seeing an increasing number of guerrillas using white flags to pose as unarmed civilians.
In a bit of positive news, a Polish woman abducted in October by insurgents announced her release to reporters in Warsaw in a brief news conference with the Polish prime minister, Marek Belka, broadcast by the BBC and CNN.
The woman, Teresa Borcz-Kalifa, 54, said her captors had treated her well. She is married to an Iraqi and had lived in Iraq for 30 years. Her captors made at least two videos that were shown on Al Jazeera, the Arab satellite television network, demanding the withdrawal of Polish troops.
The unrelenting wave of assaults in the Sunni-dominated parts of the country indicate that the attack on Falluja could have inflamed Sunni resentment against the American presence.
American and Iraqi officials have found it impossible in the 19 months since the invasion to persuade hostile Sunni Arabs to lay down their arms and engage in the emerging political system.
The Sunni Arabs, who make up a fifth of the population here, ruled the region known as modern Iraq for centuries, until the American invasion toppled Saddam Hussein.
Mr. Hussein, himself a Sunni, heightened ethnic and religious differences by installing Sunnis in the most senior positions and persecuting Shiite Arabs and Kurds. Now, with a power and security vacuum throughout Iraq, those tensions are reviving and threatening to unravel the very social fabric of the country.
Sunni-dominated cities exploded during and immediately after the Falluja offensive. In April, when the Marines tried to take control of Falluja, thousands of unruly Shiites rose up also, led by the firebrand cleric Moktada al-Sadr.
During the more recent invasion, Mr. Sadr condemned the Americans' use of force but did not call on his militia to fight. These days, even radical Shiites appear ready to use legitimate politics to ensure that Shiites seize majority rule of the country.
--------
In Falluja, Young Marines Saw the Savagery of an Urban War
November 21, 2004
By DEXTER FILKINS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/21/international/middleeast/21battle.html?ei=5094&en=bc339766506f30ca&hp=&ex=1101099600&partner=homepage&pagewanted=all&position=
FALLUJA, Iraq, Nov. 18 - Eight days after the Americans entered the city on foot, a pair of marines wound their way up the darkened innards of a minaret, shot through with holes by an American tank.
As the marines inched upward, a burst of gunfire rang down, fired by an insurgent hiding in the top of the tower. The bullets hit the first marine in the face, his blood spattering the marine behind him. The marine in the rear tumbled backward down the stairwell, while Lance Cpl. William Miller, age 22, lay in silence halfway up, mortally wounded.
"Miller!" the marines called from below. "Miller!"
With that, the marines' near mystical commandment against leaving a comrade behind seized the group. One after another, the young marines dashed into the minaret, into darkness and into gunfire, and wound their way up the stairs.
After four attempts, Corporal Miller's lifeless body emerged from the tower, his comrades choking and covered with dust. With more insurgents closing in, the marines ran through volleys of machine-gun fire back to their base.
"I was trying to be careful, but I was trying to get him out, you know what I'm saying?" Lance Cpl. Michael Gogin, 19, said afterward.
So went eight days of combat for this Iraqi city, the most sustained period of street-to-street fighting that Americans have encountered since the Vietnam War. The proximity gave the fighting a hellish intensity, with soldiers often close enough to look their enemies in the eyes.
For a correspondent who has covered a half dozen armed conflicts, including the war in Iraq since its start in March 2003, the fighting seen while traveling with a frontline unit in Falluja was a qualitatively different experience, a leap into a different kind of battle.
From the first rockets vaulting out of the city as the marines moved in, the noise and feel of the battle seemed altogether extraordinary; at other times, hardly real at all. The intimacy of combat, this plunge into urban warfare, was new to this generation of American soldiers, but it is a kind of fighting they will probably see again: a grinding struggle to root out guerrillas entrenched in a city, on streets marked in a language few American soldiers could comprehend.
The price for the Americans so far: 51 dead and 425 wounded, a number that may yet increase but that already exceeds the toll from any battle in the Iraq war.
Marines in Harm's Way
The 150 marines with whom I traveled, Bravo Company of the First Battalion, Eighth Marines, had it as tough as any unit in the fight. They moved through the city almost entirely on foot, into the heart of the resistance, rarely protected by tanks or troop carriers, working their way through Falluja's narrow streets with 75-pound packs on their backs.
In eight days of fighting, Bravo Company took 36 casualties, including 6 dead, meaning that the unit's men had about a one-in-four chance of being wounded or killed in little more than a week.
The sounds, sights and feel of the battle were as old as war itself, and as new as the Pentagon's latest weapons systems. The eerie pop from the cannon of the AC-130 gunship, prowling above the city at night, firing at guerrillas who were often only steps away from Americans on the ground. The weird buzz of the Dragon Eye pilotless airplane, hovering over the battlefield as its video cameras beamed real-time images back to the base.
The glow of the insurgents' flares, throwing daylight over a landscape to help them spot their targets: us.
The nervous shove of a marine scrambling for space along a brick wall as tracer rounds ricocheted above.
The silence between the ping of the shell leaving its mortar tube and the explosion when it strikes.
The screams of the marines when one of their comrades, Cpl. Jake Knospler, lost part of his jaw to a hand grenade.
"No, no, no!" the marines shouted as they dragged Corporal Knospler from the darkened house where the bomb went off. It was 2 a.m., the sky dark without a moon. "No, no, no!"
Nothing in the combat I saw even remotely resembled the scenes regularly flashed across movie screens; even so, they often seemed no more real.
Mortar shells and rocket-propelled grenades began raining down on Bravo Company the moment its men began piling out of their troop carriers just outside Falluja. The shells looked like Fourth of July bottle rockets, sailing over the ridge ahead as if fired by children, exploding in a whoosh of sparks.
Whole buildings, minarets and human beings were vaporized in barrages of exploding shells. A man dressed in a white dishdasha crawled across a desolate field, reaching behind a gnarled plant to hide, when he collapsed before a burst of fire from an American tank.
Sometimes the casualties came in volleys, like bursts of machine-gun fire. On the first morning of battle, during a ferocious struggle for the Muhammadia Mosque, about 45 marines with Bravo Company's Third Platoon dashed across 40th Street, right into interlocking streams of fire. By the time the platoon made it to the other side, five men lay bleeding in the street.
The marines rushed out to get them, as they would days later in the minaret, but it was too late for Sgt. Lonny Wells, who bled to death on the side of the road. One of the men who braved gunfire to pull in Sergeant Wells was Cpl. Nathan Anderson, who died three days later in an ambush.
Sergeant Wells's death dealt the Third Platoon a heavy blow; as a leader of one of its squads, he had written letters to the parents of its younger members, assuring them he would look over them during the tour in Iraq.
"He loved playing cards," Cpl. Gentian Marku recalled. "He knew all the probabilities."
More than once, death crept up and snatched a member of Bravo Company and quietly slipped away. Cpl. Nick Ziolkowski, nicknamed Ski, was a Bravo Company sniper. For hours at a stretch, Corporal Ziolkowski would sit on a rooftop, looking through the scope on his bolt-action M-40 rifle, waiting for guerrillas to step into his sights. The scope was big and wide, and Corporal Ziolkowski often took off his helmet to get a better look.
Tall, good-looking and gregarious, Corporal Ziolkowski was one of Bravo Company's most popular soldiers. Unlike most snipers, who learned to shoot growing up in the countryside, Corporal Ziolkowski grew up near Baltimore, unfamiliar with guns. Though Baltimore boasts no beach front, Corporal Ziolkowski's passion was surfing; at Camp Lejeune, N.C., Bravo Company's base, he would often organize his entire day around the tides.
"All I need now is a beach with some waves," Corporal Ziolkowski said, during a break from his sniper duties at Falluja's Grand Mosque, where he killed three men in a single day.
During that same break, Corporal Ziolkowski foretold his own death. The snipers, he said, were now among the most hunted of American soldiers.
In the first battle for Falluja, in April, American snipers had been especially lethal, Corporal Ziolkowski said, and intelligence officers had warned him that this time, the snipers would be targets.
"They are trying to take us out," Corporal Ziolkowski said.
The bullet knocked Corporal Ziolkowski backward and onto the roof. He had been sitting there on the outskirts of the Shuhada neighborhood, an area controlled by insurgents, peering through his wide scope. He had taken his helmet off to get a better view. The bullet hit him in the head.
Young Men, Heavy Burdens
For all the death about the place, one inescapable impression left by the marines was their youth. Everyone knows that soldiers are young; it is another thing to see men barely out of adolescence, many of whom were still in high school when this war began, shoot people dead.
The marines of Bravo Company often fought over the packets of M&M's that came with their rations. Sitting in their barracks, they sang along with the Garth Brooks paean to chewing tobacco, "Copenhagen," named for the brand they bought almost to a man:
Copenhagen, what a wad of flavor
Copenhagen, you can see it in my smile
Copenhagen, hey do yourself a favor, dip
Copenhagen, it drives the cowgirls wild
One of Bravo Company's more youthful members was Cpl. Romulo Jimenez II, age 21 from Bellington, W.Va.. Cpl. Jimenez spent much of his time showing off his tattoos - he had flames climbing up one of his arms - and talking about his 1992 Ford Mustang. He was a popular member of Bravo Company's Second Platoon, not least because he introduced his sister to a fellow marine, Lance Cpl. Sean Evans, and the couple married.
In the days before the battle started, Corporal Jimenez called his sister, Katherine, to ask that she fix up the interior of his Mustang before he got home.
"Make it look real nice," he told her.
On Wednesday, Nov. 10, around 2 p.m., Corporal Jimenez was shot in the neck by a sniper as he advanced with his platoon through the northern end of Falluja, just near the green-domed Muhammadia Mosque. He died instantly.
Despite their youth, the marines seemed to tower over their peers outside the military in maturity and guts. Many of Bravo Company's best marines, its most proficient killers, were 19 and 20 years old; some directed their comrades in maneuvers and assaults. Bravo Company's three lieutenants, each responsible for the lives of about 50 men, were 23 and 24 years old.
They are a strangely anonymous bunch. The men who fight America's wars seem invariably to come from little towns and medium-size cities far away from the nation's arteries along the coast. Line up a group of marines and ask them where they are from, and they will give you a list of places like Pearland, Tex.; Lodi, Ohio; Osawatomie, Kan.
Typical of the marines who fought in Falluja was Chad Ritchie, a 22-year-old corporal from Keezletown, Va. Corporal Ritchie, a soft-spoken, bespectacled intelligence officer, said he was happy to be out of the tiny place where he grew up, though he admitted that he sometimes missed the good times on Friday nights in the fields.
"We'd have a bonfire, and back the trucks up on it, and open up the backs, and someone would always have some speakers," Corporal Ritchie said. "We'd drink beer, tell stories."
Like many of the young men in Bravo Company, Corporal Ritchie said he had joined the Marines because he yearned for an adventure greater than his small town could offer.
"The guys who stayed, they're all living with their parents, making $7 an hour," Corporal Ritchie said. "I'm not going to be one of those people who gets old and says, 'I wish I had done this. I wish I had done that.' Every once in a while, you've got to do something hard, do something you're not comfortable with. A person needs a gut check."
Holding Up Under Fire
Marines like Corporal Ritchie proved themselves time and again in Falluja, but they were not without fear. While camped out one night in the Iraqi National Guard building in the middle of city, Bravo Company came under mortar fire that grew closer with each shot. The insurgents were "bracketing" the building, firing shots to the left and right of the target and adjusting their fire each time.
In the hallways, where the men had camped for the night, the murmured sounds of prayers rose between the explosions. After 20 tries, the shelling inexplicably stopped.
On one particularly grim night, a group of marines from Bravo Company's First Platoon turned a corner in the darkness and headed up an alley. As they did so, they came across men dressed in uniforms worn by the Iraqi National Guard. The uniforms were so perfect that they even carried pieces of red tape and white, the signal agreed upon to assure American soldiers that any Iraqis dressed that way would be friendly; the others could be killed.
The marines, spotting the red and white tape, waved, and the men in Iraqi uniforms opened fire. One American, Corporal Anderson, died instantly. One of the wounded men, Pfc. Andrew Russell, lay in the road, screaming from a nearly severed leg.
A group of marines ran forward into the gunfire to pull their comrades out. But the ambush, and the enemy flares and gunfire that followed, rattled the men of Bravo Company more than any event. In the darkness, the men began to argue. Others stood around in the road. As the platoon's leader, Lt. Andy Eckert, struggled to take charge, the Third Platoon seemed on the brink of panic.
"Everybody was scared," Lieutenant Eckert said afterward. "If the leader can't hold, then the unit can't hold together."
The unit did hold, but only after the intervention of Bravo Company's commanding officer, Capt. Read Omohundro.
Time and again through the week, Captain Omohundro kept his men from folding, if not by his resolute manner then by his calmness under fire. In the first 16 hours of battle, when the combat was continuous and the threat of death ever present, Captain Omohundro never flinched, moving his men through the warrens and back alleys of Falluja with an uncanny sense of space and time, sensing the enemy, sensing the location of his men, even in the darkness, entirely self-possessed.
"Damn it, get moving," Captain Omohundro said, and his men, looking relieved that they had been given direction amid the anarchy, were only too happy to oblige.
A little later, Captain Omohundro, a 34-year-old Texan, allowed that the strain of the battle had weighed on him, but he said that he had long ago trained himself to keep any self-doubt hidden from view.
"It's not like I don't feel it," Captain Omohundro said. "But if I were to show it, the whole thing would come apart."
When the heavy fighting was finally over, a dog began to follow Bravo Company through Falluja's broken streets. First it lay down in the road outside one of the buildings the company had occupied, between troop carriers. Then, as the troops moved on, the mangy dog slinked behind them, first on a series of house searches, then on a foot patrol, always keeping its distance, but never letting the marines out of its sight.
Bravo Company, looking a bit ragged itself as it moved up through Falluja, momentarily fell out of its single-file line.
"Keep a sharp eye," Captain Omohundro told his men. "We ain't done with this war yet."
-------- israel / palestine
Palestinians: Arafat poisoned
news24.com
21/11/2004
(SA)
http://www.news24.com/News24/World/News/0,,2-10-1462_1624546,00.html
Nablus - More than 80% of Palestinians believe that veteran leader Yasser Arafat died as a result of poisoning and not from natural causes, a poll published on Sunday revealed.
Since Arafat died in a Paris hospital on November 11, the Arab world has been abuzz with rumours that he fell foul of an assassination plot, aggravated by no public declaration about his cause of death.
Asked whether they believed the rumours were true, 80.3% of respondents said "yes", with 93% saying his medical report should be made public.
Under French confidentiality law only Arafat's widow Suha has so far been permitted to see his medical file - a fact that has caused intense frustration among the Palestinian leadership and general public.
In a bid to end the uncertainty, Arafat's nephew Nasser al-Qidwa, a senior Palestinian official, arrived in Paris on Sunday to collect a copy of the file.
The survey also revealed a worrying lack of faith in the current leadership, with 56.6% of respondents saying they did not believe Palestinian prime minister Ahmed Qorei was capable of performing his duties as premier.
Less than half of respondents, 45%, thought PLO chief Mahmud Abbas was capable of running the Palestine Liberation Organisation.
Asked who they would most likely to vote for in the January 9 presidential election should Israel refuse to release jailed Fatah firebrand Marwan Barghuti - the most popular candidate after the deceased Arafat - only one in four said they would vote for Abbas.
Nearly half, 48.2%, said they would decide on the day, while less than half, 47.9%, believed the upcoming elections would be fair.
About 1 360 Palestinians over the age of 18 were interviewed for the survey by the Al-Najjah university in the northern West Bank town of Nablus.
The poll has a margin of error of 3%.
Edited by Elmarie Jack
-------- pakistan / india
3,000 Indian Troops Pull Out of Kashmir
Reuters
Sunday, November 21, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A825-2004Nov20.html
JAMMU, India, Nov. 20 -- India pulled about 3,000 troops out of Kashmir Saturday in a planned withdrawal of army units from the disputed region, Indian officials said. The soldiers left their bases in convoys of trucks, jeeps and buses.
The troops were not withdrawn from the Line of Control that divides Indian and Pakistani portions of Kashmir, but from positions to the rear, according to local news accounts. They "were involved in counterterrorism operations, patrolling and sanitation and surveillance of the area," Brig. D.K. Chowdhary told reporters.
Last week, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India, in a move aimed at giving momentum to the sluggish India-Pakistan peace process, announced that his government would withdraw some troops from Kashmir.
He cited a sharp drop in separatist guerrilla attacks in the Himalayan territory as the reason for the reduction.
India has at least 400,000 soldiers in Kashmir. It has not said how many it plans to withdraw, but some army officers have put the number at more than 20,000.
In the first withdrawal since Singh's announcement, hundreds of soldiers pulled out of the Muslim separatist rebel stronghold of Anantnag in southern Kashmir on Wednesday.
But Singh's reiteration that the region was an integral part of India and that there could be no redrawing of borders sparked irritation in Islamabad, where Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's president, said the "vibes" from New Delhi were not encouraging.
-------- spies
Intelligence Overhaul Bill Blocked
House Conservatives Deal Blow to President, Speaker in Rejecting Compromise
Washington Post
By Charles Babington and Walter Pincus
November 21, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A381-2004Nov20?language=printer
Long-debated legislation to dramatically reshape the nation's intelligence community collapsed in the House yesterday, as conservative Republicans refused to embrace a compromise because they said it could reduce military control over battlefield intelligence and failed to crack down on illegal immigrants.
The impasse, which caught congressional leaders by surprise, was a blow to President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and others who had personally asked House conservatives to accept the measure proposed by House-Senate negotiators early yesterday. It also marked a major setback for the Sept. 11 commission -- whose July report triggered a drive toward overhauling the nation's intelligence operations -- and for many relatives of victims of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The sidetracked bill would have created a director of national intelligence and a counterterrorism center, along with scores of other changes to the nation's approach to gathering intelligence and battling terrorism. The measure would have given the new intelligence chief authority to set priorities for the Central Intelligence Agency and 14 other agencies that gather intelligence, including several at the Defense Department. Hastert refused to call the proposal dead, saying Congress may reconvene Dec. 6 to try again, although lawmakers had planned to close out the 108th Congress this weekend.
Even some key Republicans, however, said prospects appear slim for producing a compromise that the House and Senate can pass. "I don't now see a process for which we can get this done in the next few weeks," said Rep. Peter Hoekstra (Mich.), chairman of the House intelligence committee and the House's top GOP negotiator.
Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), the committee's top Democrat, said, "I think those who are vehemently opposed are not going to come around." She said it is up to Bush, Hastert and other GOP leaders to overcome the House conservatives' resistance. If a bill is not enacted by year's end, efforts would have to start anew in the 109th Congress that convenes in January.
Despite the deep disappointment expressed by the measure's proponents, some have noted that Bush has already used executive orders to give the director of central intelligence (DCI) enhanced authority over intelligence budgeting. He has also created a National Counterterrorism Center, a main objective of the bill and the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission.
Sen. Susan Collins (Maine), the chief Senate GOP negotiator, told reporters she was disappointed and surprised that Bush's support of the compromise -- which he expressed via White House statements and telephone calls to a few House Republicans -- was not enough to obtain its passage. "It's surprising," she said, "and what's so frustrating to us is that this bill has such widespread support."
Collins called its collapse a victory for "the forces in favor of the status quo," and said Bush will have to redouble his efforts if the measure is to pass this year.
Hastert said the two chief opponents of the compromise were House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) and Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.). They persuaded scores of GOP colleagues to join their opposition in a sometimes emotional closed-door meeting of House Republicans. There, in a Capitol basement room, Hastert tried in vain to find enough votes to pass the bill without relying mainly on Democrats, a scenario too embarrassing for Republicans to endure. His failure seemed to stun many lawmakers, and some Democrats denounced the GOP for being unable to deliver a high-profile measure backed by a Republican president.
Former New Jersey governor Thomas H. Kean (R), chairman of the Sept. 11 commission, said he was "obviously disappointed" that the House was not given a chance to vote. "There's no question it would have passed easily," he said, because most Democrats and a good number of Republicans would have supported it.
Hunter said he opposed the bill because Senate conferees had removed a White House-drafted section ensuring that tactical or battlefield intelligence agencies would still be primarily directed by the secretary of defense, even as they report to the new national intelligence director. The compromise called for the president to issue "guidelines" on the respective authorities of the director of national intelligence (DNI) and the defense secretary, which Hunter said, "was elevating for the DNI but detrimental to the defense secretary . . . a change that would make war fighters not sure to whom they report and translate into confusion on the battlefield."
Collins called Hunter's argument "utterly without merit," saying the measure actually would improve the real-time satellite intelligence that troops receive in combat. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), another key negotiator, said: "The commander in chief, in the middle of a war, said he needed this bill" to keep the American people and military safe.
Another conferee, Rep. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), said: "Clearly, House Republicans never really wanted this bill. . . . Sadly, there are those who are so wedded to the Department of Defense that they, ultimately, ensured the bill's demise."
Sensenbrenner's opposition focused on immigration provisions dropped in the negotiations' final hours. Those provisions, important to many House Republicans who believe illegal immigration is out of control, would have made it easier to deport alien suspects and deny drivers licenses to undocumented immigrants, among other things. Collins said immigration questions should be handled in separate legislation in the next Congress.
Democrats ripped into House Republicans for blocking the bill. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said that "their inability to overhaul our intelligence system is a staggering failure." Harman called it "a tragedy for America." Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said that "the Republican leadership had a choice between protecting the security of the American people and placating its extreme right wingers. The American people lost, and the extreme right won."
Under the compromise, the new DNI would have set objectives and priorities for the 15 agencies in the intelligence community. The director would have determined budgets and hold operational authority over the national intelligence program, foreign and domestic, which covers accounts for 75 percent of the $40 billion spent annually on intelligence. The remainder would go to the Pentagon for tactical intelligence operations.
The overall intelligence budget was to remain secret and hidden in the Pentagon's budget -- as it does now -- but the funds for even Pentagon-based intelligence collection agencies would be controlled by the DNI. Opposition to this provision from Hunter, supported by a letter from Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was never overcome, and it played a role in yesterday's actions.
The new national intelligence chief's powers in the compromise would have been somewhat greater than those now held by the director of central intelligence, who also heads the CIA. But under the legislation, the DNI would not run the CIA, nor would his deputy.
The measure would have established by law the national counterterrorism center (NCTC), making it the primary agency handling terrorism intelligence and planning strategic operations at home and abroad to be carried out by the CIA, the FBI and Pentagon personnel. The NCTC director would have been a presidential appointee, approved by the Senate and reporting to the president on terrorism operations and to the DNI on terrorism intelligence.
Ironically, some of the increased budget authority in the legislation is already being asserted by Porter J. Goss, the new DCI, under an executive order Bush signed in August. The NCTC is also being set up under another Bush executive order, although not with all of the authority the legislation proposes.
The past two days of negotiations were spent almost entirely on the immigration issues raised by Sensenbrenner, with the Judiciary Committee chairman often accepting proposals, then returning after consulting colleagues with demands for new changes, sources said. At one point, the Senate staff by mistake offered language for one section that had been submitted by Sensenbrenner, and he returned it, saying it was not good enough, according to one participant.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- death penalty
Where Execution Feels Like Relic, Death Looms
November 21, 2004
By WILLIAM YARDLEY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/21/nyregion/21execute.html?pagewanted=all&position=
HARTFORD, Nov. 19 - At 2:01 a.m. on Jan. 26, corrections workers in northern Connecticut are to begin administering a fatal flow of chemicals into the bloodstream of Michael Bruce Ross.
The execution by lethal injection would be the culmination of a two-decade case that began in 1984 when Mr. Ross confessed to strangling six teenage girls and two young women, four while he was a life insurance salesman in eastern Connecticut, one while he was a student at Cornell University. He has decided against further appeals of his sentence.
Beyond resurrecting the vicious details of the killings, the pending execution is forcing a confrontation with a discomforting fact for one of the country's most liberal regions. It would be the first time in more than 40 years that an inmate has been put to death north or east of Pennsylvania.
The death penalty does not exist in many states in the Northeast, a region that has had its share of notorious killers: from David Berkowitz, the New York City serial killer of the 1970's known as the Son of Sam, to Charles Cullen, the nurse who has confessed to poisoning at least 23 people in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. But the last time an inmate was executed in the Northeast was in 1963, when New York electrocuted two men and New Jersey electrocuted one.
Within New England in particular, the death penalty can seem like a relic. Connecticut, which has eight people on death row, has not executed anyone since 1960. New Hampshire, the only other New England state that has capital punishment, has not executed anyone since 1939; death row there is empty. The last man executed in Rhode Island, the murderer John Gordon, was hanged in 1845.
"I have always thought of New England as the last death-free zone in the United States," said Michael A. Mello, a former capital defense lawyer in Florida, Texas and other states and now a professor at Vermont Law School.
There have been 59 executions in the country so far this year, 85 percent of them in the South, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, an anti-death penalty group.
The looming execution date for Mr. Ross, 45, is just beginning to renew controversy over the death penalty here, where the notion of a state execution can still evoke images of 17th-century accusations of witchcraft and piracy and the public hangings employed as punishment.
Adding ambiguity, Mr. Ross, who has twice appealed his sentences and delayed his execution, now says that further challenges would be futile.
Just as his crimes shocked rural eastern Connecticut two decades ago, his decision to forgo his final appeal option is unsettling, said Michael P. Lawlor, a Democrat from East Haven who is co-chairman of the Judiciary Committee in the Connecticut General Assembly.
"One of the great ironies of this whole thing," Mr. Lawlor said, "is that if he gets executed in January, the only reason it's going to happen is because he wants it to happen."
Neither judges nor most politicians in the Northeast are pushing to speed executions.
In New York, the state's highest court declared in June that the state's death penalty law was unconstitutional, and lawmakers have been reluctant so far to try to revise and restore it. In New Jersey, the state's highest court in February effectively halted executions, ordering the state to change its procedures for carrying them out. In Massachusetts, which has not executed an inmate since 1947 and banned the death penalty in 1984, Gov. Mitt Romney, a Republican, has pushed for a new state death penalty measure but the Democratic Legislature has not passed it. Last year, however, a death sentence was imposed in a federal trial in Boston. Gary Sampson, the defendant in that case, killed two men who picked him up separately while he hitchhiked in July 2001. Mr. Sampson was charged under a federal law that allows capital punishment when a killing is committed during a carjacking.
In Mr. Ross's case, even as activists and lawyers opposed to the death penalty try to find a way to stay or delay the execution, some experts - including some opposed to the death penalty - believe that Mr. Ross will die as scheduled, at the Osborn Correctional Institution in Somers, near the Massachusetts line.
"I think this execution is going to happen," said Professor Mello, "because he has the right to determine his own destiny. Because lawyers can come up with clever reasons and arguments, but ultimately, Ross has the law on his side."
Opponents of the death penalty are planning a public awareness campaign in the coming weeks, and say that religious leaders will speak out against the execution. Some death penalty experts, like Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, say that Connecticut residents may not even know that capital punishment is an option here.
"I think as people realize this is the first in the area in many, many years,'' he said, "it will wake people up to the fact that, yes, we do have the death penalty in some of these states."
But even as the case generates new interest and new protests, some people who have been close to it for two decades say they have already waited too long for Mr. Ross to die.
"This guy is a poster boy for the death penalty," said Michael Malchik, the former Connecticut State Police detective who arrested Mr. Ross in 1984, after the body of his last victim was found hidden inside a stone wall bordering a field. "He deserves no sympathy from anyone. I think the problem is that the people who are against it have never seen the other side of it. They've never smelled it, looked at it, felt the weight of a dead body in a body bag."
The depravity of Mr. Ross's crimes, the number of them, as well as his apparent willingness to enter the execution chamber, complicate the efforts of death penalty opponents seeking a platform to repeal the state's capital punishment law.
"We have it on pretty good word from the powers that be that nobody's going to touch this," said Robert Nave, director of the Connecticut Network to Abolish the Death Penalty. "Of all the people up on death row, without a doubt the most infamous is Michael Ross."
Connecticut's governor, M. Jodi Rell, a Republican, supports the death penalty. Dennis Schain, a spokesman for Mrs. Rell, said her powers were limited to granting a temporary reprieve. Asked whether Mrs. Rell would consider such a reprieve, Mr. Schain said, "That depends on whether or not the Legislature has an interest in changing the law, and to date there's been no discussion of this."
After graduating from Cornell, in upstate New York, Mr. Ross moved to Jewett City, north of Norwich, Conn., and became a life insurance salesman for Prudential. He had grown up on his parents' egg farm in Brooklyn, Conn., a tiny spot in the state's rural northeast. Mr. Malchik, the former detective, said Mr. Ross told him that as a boy he had to strangle under-producing chickens on the farm.
"He said, 'You know, strangling someone is not as easy as it looks on TV,' " Mr. Malchik recalled. " 'I had to reapply my grip to finish them off.' "
Mr. Ross confessed to eight murders, six cases in Connecticut and two in New York, and he was sentenced to death for four of them. In the death penalty cases, he raped three of the victims before strangling them. In one case, he raped and strangled a 14-year-old girl while her 14-year-old friend, whom Mr. Ross had bound, was present. He then strangled the second girl.
Mr. Malchik said Mr. Ross had told him he expected to be caught eventually. Mr. Malchik recalled how he and his partner drove the "casual, cooperative" Mr. Ross to the crime scenes to have him explain what happened.
"We have dozens and dozens of pictures of him just pointing to different spots where he did different things to different women," Mr. Malchik said. "He wasn't handcuffed or anything. We just took him around."
Mr. Ross fought his death sentence twice, first winning a retrial of the sentencing phase only to be sentenced to death a second time, in 2000. He appealed the second death sentence to the State Supreme Court and lost earlier this year.
At one point in the 1990's, Mr. Ross tried to enter an agreement with the state to be executed, saying then what he says now, that he did not want to cause more pain for the families of his victims. A judge rejected the agreement.
"He really, truly and sincerely, and this is what the public I don't think buys, he doesn't want to put the families through any more of this," said T. R. Paulding, a lawyer who represents Mr. Ross, though not as his defense attorney.
Mr. Malchik, for one, does not believe him.
"First of all, it's been 20 years," he said. "Why now, after 20 years? What did he do, wake up a couple of months ago and say, 'I think I want to do away with my appeals'? I think he's manipulative. He loves publicity."
Mr. Paulding stressed that while Mr. Ross opposes execution, he feels that further appeals, even to the United States Supreme Court, would not overturn his sentence. "He doesn't think there's any way he'll get out without death," Mr. Paulding said.
Mr. Ross professes discovery of a deep Christian faith since his arrest and has posted essays on the subject on the Internet. He takes a medication, Depo-Lupron; Mr. Paulding said the drug reduced the symptoms of sexual sadism, a psychiatric disorder that some think is rooted in childhood trauma, and a condition that Mr. Ross has long claimed caused his criminal behavior.
"In his words, it kind of clears the demons or monsters out of his head," Mr. Paulding said. "You know, if you and I were sitting in a room having coffee with him, we'd think he was just a normal guy. Of course, a lot of people would disagree with that.''
-------- homeland security / national intelligence
Intelligence Overhaul Bill Blocked
House Conservatives Deal Blow to President, Speaker in Rejecting Compromise
By Charles Babington and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, November 21, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A381-2004Nov20.html
Long-debated legislation to dramatically reshape the nation's intelligence community collapsed in the House yesterday, as conservative Republicans refused to embrace a compromise because they said it could reduce military control over battlefield intelligence and failed to crack down on illegal immigrants.
The impasse, which caught congressional leaders by surprise, was a blow to President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and others who had personally asked House conservatives to accept the measure proposed by House-Senate negotiators early yesterday. It also marked a major setback for the Sept. 11 commission -- whose July report triggered a drive toward overhauling the nation's intelligence operations -- and for many relatives of victims of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The sidetracked bill would have created a director of national intelligence and a counterterrorism center, along with scores of other changes to the nation's approach to gathering intelligence and battling terrorism. The measure would have given the new intelligence chief authority to set priorities for the Central Intelligence Agency and 14 other agencies that gather intelligence, including several at the Defense Department. Hastert refused to call the proposal dead, saying Congress may reconvene Dec. 6 to try again, although lawmakers had planned to close out the 108th Congress this weekend.
Even some key Republicans, however, said prospects appear slim for producing a compromise that the House and Senate can pass. "I don't now see a process for which we can get this done in the next few weeks," said Rep. Peter Hoekstra (Mich.), chairman of the House intelligence committee and the House's top GOP negotiator.
Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), the committee's top Democrat, said, "I think those who are vehemently opposed are not going to come around." She said it is up to Bush, Hastert and other GOP leaders to overcome the House conservatives' resistance. If a bill is not enacted by year's end, efforts would have to start anew in the 109th Congress that convenes in January.
Despite the deep disappointment expressed by the measure's proponents, some have noted that Bush has already used executive orders to give the director of central intelligence (DCI) enhanced authority over intelligence budgeting. He has also created a National Counterterrorism Center, a main objective of the bill and the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission.
Sen. Susan Collins (Maine), the chief Senate GOP negotiator, told reporters she was disappointed and surprised that Bush's support of the compromise -- which he expressed via White House statements and telephone calls to a few House Republicans -- was not enough to obtain its passage. "It's surprising," she said, "and what's so frustrating to us is that this bill has such widespread support."
Collins called its collapse a victory for "the forces in favor of the status quo," and said Bush will have to redouble his efforts if the measure is to pass this year.
Hastert said the two chief opponents of the compromise were House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) and Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.). They persuaded scores of GOP colleagues to join their opposition in a sometimes emotional closed-door meeting of House Republicans. There, in a Capitol basement room, Hastert tried in vain to find enough votes to pass the bill without relying mainly on Democrats, a scenario too embarrassing for Republicans to endure. His failure seemed to stun many lawmakers, and some Democrats denounced the GOP for being unable to deliver a high-profile measure backed by a Republican president.
Former New Jersey governor Thomas H. Kean (R), chairman of the Sept. 11 commission, said he was "obviously disappointed" that the House was not given a chance to vote. "There's no question it would have passed easily," he said, because most Democrats and a good number of Republicans would have supported it.
Hunter said he opposed the bill because Senate conferees had removed a White House-drafted section ensuring that tactical or battlefield intelligence agencies would still be primarily directed by the secretary of defense, even as they report to the new national intelligence director. The compromise called for the president to issue "guidelines" on the respective authorities of the director of national intelligence (DNI) and the defense secretary, which Hunter said, "was elevating for the DNI but detrimental to the defense secretary . . . a change that would make war fighters not sure to whom they report and translate into confusion on the battlefield."
Collins called Hunter's argument "utterly without merit," saying the measure actually would improve the real-time satellite intelligence that troops receive in combat. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), another key negotiator, said: "The commander in chief, in the middle of a war, said he needed this bill" to keep the American people and military safe.
Another conferee, Rep. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), said: "Clearly, House Republicans never really wanted this bill. . . . Sadly, there are those who are so wedded to the Department of Defense that they, ultimately, ensured the bill's demise."
Sensenbrenner's opposition focused on immigration provisions dropped in the negotiations' final hours. Those provisions, important to many House Republicans who believe illegal immigration is out of control, would have made it easier to deport alien suspects and deny drivers licenses to undocumented immigrants, among other things. Collins said immigration questions should be handled in separate legislation in the next Congress.
Democrats ripped into House Republicans for blocking the bill. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said that "their inability to overhaul our intelligence system is a staggering failure." Harman called it "a tragedy for America." Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said that "the Republican leadership had a choice between protecting the security of the American people and placating its extreme right wingers. The American people lost, and the extreme right won."
Under the compromise, the new DNI would have set objectives and priorities for the 15 agencies in the intelligence community. The director would have determined budgets and hold operational authority over the national intelligence program, foreign and domestic, which covers accounts for 75 percent of the $40 billion spent annually on intelligence. The remainder would go to the Pentagon for tactical intelligence operations.
The overall intelligence budget was to remain secret and hidden in the Pentagon's budget -- as it does now -- but the funds for even Pentagon-based intelligence collection agencies would be controlled by the DNI. Opposition to this provision from Hunter, supported by a letter from Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was never overcome, and it played a role in yesterday's actions.
The new national intelligence chief's powers in the compromise would have been somewhat greater than those now held by the director of central intelligence, who also heads the CIA. But under the legislation, the DNI would not run the CIA, nor would his deputy.
The measure would have established by law the national counterterrorism center (NCTC), making it the primary agency handling terrorism intelligence and planning strategic operations at home and abroad to be carried out by the CIA, the FBI and Pentagon personnel. The NCTC director would have been a presidential appointee, approved by the Senate and reporting to the president on terrorism operations and to the DNI on terrorism intelligence.
Ironically, some of the increased budget authority in the legislation is already being asserted by Porter J. Goss, the new DCI, under an executive order Bush signed in August. The NCTC is also being set up under another Bush executive order, although not with all of the authority the legislation proposes.
The past two days of negotiations were spent almost entirely on the immigration issues raised by Sensenbrenner, with the Judiciary Committee chairman often accepting proposals, then returning after consulting colleagues with demands for new changes, sources said. At one point, the Senate staff by mistake offered language for one section that had been submitted by Sensenbrenner, and he returned it, saying it was not good enough, according to one participant.
--------
Pentagon Called Major Factor in Defeat of Intelligence Bill
November 21, 2004
By BRIAN KNOWLTON,
International Herald Tribune
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/21/politics/21cnd-inte.html?ei=5094&en=04514eeb77535af5&hp=&ex=1101099600&partner=homepage&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Nov. 21 - Lawmakers of both parties said today that the Pentagon played a clear role in the defeat of compromise legislation aimed at remaking United States intelligence agencies.
They said the failure to act had left only slender prospects of reform this year, although Republicans in Congress and the White House vowed to push the measure next month.
Some legislators said Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had made clear his opposition to the proposed overhaul, which would have stripped the Pentagon of some budgetary control over its vast intelligence operations. A Defense Department spokesman denied any such Pentagon involvement.
The Senate intelligence committee chairman, Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, was asked why the Republican-controlled House had been unable to pass a measure sought by President Bush and endorsed by the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission and many relatives of victims of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
"Some of it is turf, quite frankly," Mr. Roberts said on CNN, "some of it is from the Pentagon."
Mr. Roberts said he held little hope that Congress, in a brief session starting Dec. 6, could salvage efforts to address what he called systemic intelligence weaknesses, exposed dramatically by the Sept. 11 terror attacks and the Iraq war.
The landmark bill, which would have created the post of national intelligence director to oversee American spy agencies, with authority over the bulk of their combined budgets, was blocked Saturday after what lawmakers said was practically a rebellion by some conservative House Republicans.
Asked about prospects for passage this year, Mr. Roberts quipped grimly that they were "between slim and none, and Slim just left town." He said on "Fox News Sunday," "Some of us who have been working for reform perhaps underestimated the strong undertow of opposition." A Senate version of the bill had passed with overwhelming support.
Representative Jane Harman of California, the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, said on Fox that some House members "never wanted a bill, they never will want a bill."
Another Democrat, Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, told CNN that the bill's failure represented a "real test" for Mr. Bush. "The president's going to have to stand up, both to his own Defense Department and to the hard right," Mr. Schumer said.
And Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the majority leader, said on the CBS News program "Face the Nation" that passage was still possible next month, but that it would "take significant involvement by the president and the vice president."
The turn of events was seen as a surprising embarrassment to the president, who as late as Friday night called on rebellious House Republicans to agree on a bill.
Vice President Dick Cheney, for his part, had personally called the man considered the leader of the House resistance, Representative Duncan Hunter, to urge passage of the compromise legislation. Mr. Hunter is chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.
Democrats, and some Republicans, said the Pentagon was working to block legislation it saw as threatening its budgetary control over intelligence-development, and thus its ability to generate the intelligence needed in war-fighting.
Ms. Harman, who had helped fashion the compromise bill, said Mr. Rumsfeld had made it "absolutely clear" in congressional testimony that he opposed the changes, adding, that he "was resisting it, in public."
She said it was "unfortunate that the president, as commander-in-chief, couldn't get the secretary of defense to stop his opposition, which has been ongoing for months and which emboldened some of these House folks to dig in."
Ms. Harman pointed to a letter late last month from Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in which he endorsed much of the House version of the bill - buttressing opposition to a compromise.
A senior Republican, Senator John McCain of Arizona, said it was hard for him to believe that General Myers would have sent such a letter without consulting Mr. Rumsfeld.
"This is one of the more byzantine kinds of scenarios that I've observed," Mr. McCain said on the NBC News program "Meet the Press."
The proposed compromise came apart dramatically Saturday when House leaders withdrew it following objections from Mr. Hunter, a Rumsfeld ally. Mr. Hunter had long warned that the creation of a national intelligence director could place an obstacle between American troops fighting in Iraq and the timely intelligence they need.
The bill would have forced the Pentagon, which controls roughly 80 percent of the $40 billion United States intelligence budget, to yield much of its authority on intelligence matters to a new national intelligence director.
"That, to many people, is threatening, and there is a huge debate there," Dr. Frist said. He acknowledged that there was "no general agreement between the Pentagon and members of the White House."
What remained far from clear was whether Mr. Rumsfeld or other Pentagon leaders were defying President Bush or perhaps quietly working in the same direction.
One theory was that Mr. Bush wanted changes in the bill, but wanted to be credited publicly with supporting intelligence reform; and that he was perhaps looking toward passage next year, by an even more supportive Congress, of a bill closer to his liking.
Mr. Roberts, referring to opposition to the bill, said, "Some of it, quite frankly, is from the White House, despite what the president has said."
It was also possible that conservative House Republicans, energized by their party's election victory Nov. 2, were digging in their heels in the sort of rebellion that could become troublesome as Mr. Bush tries to steer his second-term agenda through the next Congress.
Ms. Harman said it would be difficult now to gain passage of the reforms.
"I thought it was a fair, tough compromise - the stars and moon were aligned, and these few folks embarrassed the speaker of the house, embarrassed the president of the United States and sadly set us back," she said.
Any further changes to the bill to overcome resistance from the conservative House Republicans, she said, would "unglue all the careful compromises."
Mr. Roberts expressed some impatience with resistance from Pentagon allies. As a former marine, he said, he simply would not support a bill that meant that "war fighters will be endangered in time of war."
"If somebody doesn't understand that there is a systemic problem in the intelligence community, all 15 agencies, and that we need reform, they're like an ostrich," he said.
Stansfield Turner, who was director of central intelligence under President Jimmy Carter, said on CNN that he saw, in the opposition to intelligence reform, "the last throes of the military-industrial-congressional complex that was built up by the Cold War."
"We're now trying to shift the paradigm" of intelligence work toward a war against terrorism, he said, and that meant that "the military is no longer the primary user of our intelligence."
--------
House Leadership Blocks Vote on Intelligence Bill
November 21, 2004
By PHILIP SHENON and CARL HULSE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/21/politics/21panel.html?oref=login&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Nov. 20 - House Republican leaders blocked and appeared to kill a bill Saturday that would have enacted the major recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission, refusing to allow a vote on the legislation despite last-minute pleas from both President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to Republican lawmakers for a compromise before Congress adjourned for the year.
The decision to block a vote on the landmark bill, which would have created the job of a cabinet-level national intelligence director to oversee the C.I.A. and the government's other spy agencies, came after what lawmakers from both parties described as a near-rebellion by a core of highly conservative House Republicans aligned with the Pentagon who were emboldened to stand up to their leadership and to the White House.
The bill would have forced the Pentagon, which controls an estimated 80 percent of the government's $40 billion intelligence budget, to cede much of its authority on intelligence issues to a national intelligence director.
"What you are seeing is the forces in favor of the status quo protecting their turf, whether it is Congress or in the bureaucracy," said Senator Susan Collins, the Maine Republican who was the chief Senate author of the failed compromise bill, in what amounted to a slap at her Republican counterparts in the House.
The chairman of the Sept. 11 commission, Thomas H. Kean, a Republican and the former governor of New Jersey, said that the lawmakers who blocked the vote should be held accountable by the public, and he blamed senior Pentagon officials as well.
"I think there's no question that there are people in the Pentagon who want the status quo, and they fought very hard with their allies in Congress for the status quo," Mr. Kean said.
The decision to block a vote was announced by the House speaker, J. Dennis Hastert, who said that his members had determined that the bill hammered out by a House-Senate conference committee earlier in the day might dangerously dilute the authority of the military commanders over intelligence issues and could "endanger our troops in the field."
"It's hard to reform; it's hard to make change," Mr. Hastert said, only hours after House and Senate negotiators ended a monthlong stalemate and announced their agreement. "We are going to keep working on this."
While Mr. Hastert said that the negotiations would continue and that as a result he would not formally adjourn the House for the year, many lawmakers said the action had effectively killed the legislation. Saturday was supposed to be the last day of business for the House and Senate in their so-called lame-duck session after the election, with many lawmakers not expected to return to Washington until January.
The decision to block a vote was seen by the bill's proponents and others in Congress as a surprising embarrassment to the president, who had personally intervened as late as Friday night to pressure rebellious House Republicans to agree on an intelligence bill, and to Mr. Hastert, who had signaled that he wanted the legislation and was willing to overrule the opposition from within his ranks.
Congressional officials said that Mr. Bush had telephoned a leading Republican critic of the bill, Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. of Wisconsin, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, from Air Force One on Friday en route to a economic summit meeting in Chile to urge him to compromise.
They said a similar call was made Saturday morning by Mr. Cheney to the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Duncan Hunter of California, who has long warned that the creation of a national intelligence director could interfere with the military chain of command as American troops continue to fight in Iraq.
But the calls were to no avail, since House and Senate negotiators agreed that the continuing opposition of Mr. Sensenbrenner, Mr. Hunter and a handful of other influential Republicans had tipped the balance for Mr. Hastert in deciding to block a vote.
Less than three weeks after Democrats suffered a stinging defeat at the polls, the bill's failure could provide Democratic leaders with a political opening to argue - along with members of the Sept. 11 commission and the families of victims of the terrorist attacks - that House Republicans killed a bill that had widespread, bipartisan support and that would have allowed the government to protect the public better against terrorist threats.
"Today, the House Republicans missed an opportunity to make the American people safer," said Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader. "Their inability to overhaul our intelligence system is a staggering failure."
Representative Jane Harman of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee and one of the authors of the compromise bill, said, "This is a tragedy for America." Ms. Harman added, "If there is another major terrorist attack on our soil - and sadly, there will likely be one - we will have only ourselves to blame. Congress had a chance to protect America, and Congress failed."
The decision appeared also to reflect a sharp split between Republicans in the House and Senate. Senate Republicans voted unanimously last month to support a version of the intelligence bill that had been endorsed by both the Sept. 11 commission and the White House and that would have granted sweeping budget and personnel authority to a national intelligence director.
In its final report in July, the commission cataloged the blunders and turf battles of the nation's spy agencies in the months and years before the Sept. 11 attacks and called for the appointment of a powerful intelligence director to force them to cooperate.
At a news conference on Saturday to explain the tumultuous events of the day, Mr. Hastert singled out Mr. Hunter as instrumental in the decision to prevent a final vote on the bill. Mr. Hunter, a member of the House-Senate conference committee that shaped the compromise bill, had opposed the final product when it was made public on Saturday morning, warning colleagues that it could interfere with the transfer of vital intelligence to soldiers on the battlefield.
Mr. Hunter's views reflected those of senior Pentagon officials, who have quietly lobbied for months to block the creation of the job of a powerful national intelligence director, the central recommendation of the Sept. 11 commission.
In an interview, Mr. Hunter predicted that Congress would eventually approve an intelligence-overhaul bill, but one that would not permit a national intelligence director to interfere with the transfer of intelligence within the military and "leave a state of confusion, which is deadly on the battlefield."
"I'm very proud today of House Republicans and the House Republican leadership," he said. "They care. If they didn't care, Denny Hastert could have hammered this thing across the goal line."
He said that during his telephone call with the vice president, Mr. Cheney had said "he wanted to have a compromise and wanted to have a bill." But Mr. Hunter said the vice president "also very much understands the importance of this lifeline between the combatants and the troops."
A spokesman for the Defense Department, Lt. Col. Barry Venable, rejected the suggestion by Mr. Kean and other proponents of the compromise bill that Pentagon officials were behind Saturday's developments. "What goes on on Capitol Hill is entirely within their purview," he said. "We don't have a vote."
House and Senate negotiators said that Mr. Sensenbrenner had been equally responsible for the decision to block a vote on the bill, which did not include a variety of provisions he had championed to broaden the powers of law-enforcement and immigration agencies.
They said Mr. Sensenbrenner had been adamant that the bill include a provision to create federal standards for drivers' licenses to prevent them from being issued to illegal immigrants, a move widely criticized by civil liberties groups as a step toward a national identification card.
"Regrettably, the Senate thus far has been hellbent on ensuring illegal aliens can receive drivers' licenses, regardless of the security concerns," Mr. Sensenbrenner said in a statement.
-------- justice
Broad Influence for Justice Dept. Choice
November 21, 2004
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/21/politics/21gonzales.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Nov. 20 - Two hallmarks of the Bush White House have been its expansive view of presidential power and its intense secrecy, as the administration has pushed for widening authority to fight terrorism while resisting efforts by some members of Congress and the public to keep closer tabs on how that power is used.
As President Bush's White House counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales has been a principal architect on both fronts. And with his selection as attorney general, some government watchdog groups and political analysts say they believe that the push for greater presidential authority and less stringent oversight could grow even more pronounced, both at the Justice Department and throughout the Bush administration.
At the White House, Mr. Gonzales has emphasized the president's broad and often unfettered authority to conduct executive branch business as he sees fit, particularly when it comes to protecting national security. On matters ranging from terrorism and wartime detainees to energy policy, judicial nominees and the release of presidential papers, Mr. Gonzales has advocated wide discretion for the president.
When private groups and members of Congress sought, for instance, to obtain records on Vice President Dick Cheney's 2001 meetings with energy industry groups, it was Mr. Gonzales who pushed to keep the records private. Mr. Gonzales and the White House argued that they needed the ability to solicit confidential advice from outside experts on government business. While the White House eventually turned over some records to Congress, it prevailed on procedural grounds five months ago before the Supreme Court, which refused to order the remaining records released and sent the issue to a lower court.
"Gonzales is credited with preserving the power of the White House, but it seems to come at the expense of giving Congress the authority to do its job," said Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog group in Washington. "We're living in a time when we need a greater balance of power between the different branches, not weaker, or else you risk a runaway presidency."
While critics see Mr. Gonzales as emblematic of a White House closed to public scrutiny, his supporters describe him as a savvy lawyer who is willing to give far-reaching - and private - advice in response to extraordinary challenges.
He displayed that attitude in a much-scrutinized draft memo that he wrote in 2002 at the White House on the treatment of Qaeda and Taliban detainees, in which he said that the new fight against terrorism "renders obsolete" the Geneva Conventions' limitations on questioning prisoners and "renders quaint" some provisions on prisoner amenities.
"This is a new type of warfare - one not contemplated in 1949 when the GPW was framed - and requires a new approach in our actions towards captured terrorists," he wrote, referring to the Geneva Conventions' standards for war prisoner treatment. Critics contend the memo helped clear the way for the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Mr. Gonzales is declining any interviews before his Senate confirmation hearing, which will probably take place in January, and the White House declined to discuss his views on presidential power and related issues before his hearing.
"Out of respect for the process, we're not going to be commenting," said Erin Healy, a White House spokeswoman. "All these issues are things that will be looked at in his hearing."
Senate Democrats say they plan to press Mr. Gonzales on his views on presidential power and Congressional oversight after four years of what Democrats - and even some Republicans - complain has been a frustrating lack of access to important national security information under Attorney General John Ashcroft.
If Mr. Gonzales is confirmed as attorney general, as now seems virtually assured, he will have an even wider platform than he did at the White House in influencing executive branch policies and practices on a range of law enforcement matters. As attorney general, he will oversee terrorism prosecutions and domestic counterterror operations, areas in which the Bush administration has sought to broaden its authority.
In addition, he will be responsible for overseeing policies across the federal government for Freedom of Information Act requests, which Mr. Ashcroft revised after the Sept. 11 attacks on national security grounds. The Justice Department has also issued subpoenas to several reporters in its continuing investigation into the leak of a C.I.A. officer's identity, but Democrats are pushing for Mr. Gonzales to remove himself from oversight of the case because he was involved in it at the White House.
Some legal analysts caution against reading too much into what Mr. Gonzales's actions at the White House say about how he will run the Justice Department.
"They're very different jobs," said Michael Greve, a legal scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.
"As White House counsel, the fact is that he was the president's confidante, and his principal job is to keep the president out of trouble," he said. "But the post-Nixon Justice Department can't be run out of the White House's hip pocket. There needs to be a distance."
But others say Mr. Gonzales's record worries them.
"As attorney general, he'll be setting the tone for whether this is going to be a secret administration or an open administration," said Lucy Dalglish, executive committee of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. "Based on what we saw of Mr. Gonzales at the White House, I'm concerned."
In a report issued last week, the Reporters Committee said Mr. Gonzales "has been an active defender of what is best described as quasi-executive privilege, invoked repeatedly by the Bush administration in attempts to keep government information from public scrutiny."
Concerns date back to Mr. Gonzales's days in Texas as an aide to Mr. Bush, the group's analysis said. Although Mr. Gonzales generally voted to uphold news media rights in cases before the Texas Supreme Court, he was also involved in efforts to keep Mr. Bush's papers as governor of Texas out of the pubic eye for a time by housing them at his father's presidential library, the analysis noted.
Once at the White House, Mr. Gonzales quickly became enmeshed in a number of contentious issues that pitted presidential prerogatives against demands from Congress, the news media and others for access to sensitive information.
In the case of the failed judicial nomination of Miguel Estrada, for instance, Mr. Gonzales blocked members of Congress last year from reviewing Mr. Estrada's earlier work at the Justice Department in the solicitor general's office.
Although Democrats argued that there was precedent for the release of such internal records, Mr. Gonzales maintained that they must stay confidential to maintain the integrity of executive branch decision-making powers. The prospect that such in-house material might someday be turned over to Congress, he said, would discourage government lawyers from giving frank legal advice.
Another rift developed earlier this year when the Sept. 11 commission sought to hear sworn testimony from Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, and to gain access to classified written briefings that the president received on terrorism, including an Aug. 6, 2001, memo titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."
The White House finally relented in allowing Ms. Rice to testify before the commission under strict conditions set by Mr. Gonzales.
In laying out the conditions, Mr. Gonzales wrote that "based on principles underlying the constitutional separation of powers, presidents of both parties have long taken the position that White House advisers and staff are not subject to the jurisdiction of legislative bodies and do not provide testimony - even on a voluntary basis - on policy matters discussed within the White House or advice given to the president."
Not that Republicans were the only beneficiaries of Mr. Gonzales's legal opinions.
Mr. Gonzales also successfully recommended in 2002 that President Bush invoke executive privilege in refusing to disclose material related to pardons issued by President Bill Clinton, and he did the same in refusing to comply with Congressional subpoenas for records related to several Clinton-era investigations at the Justice Department.
Turning over such material, the Bush White House argued, would compromise the president's ability to get frank advice and have a "chilling effect" on internal deliberations.
----
Peru Won't Release Imprisoned N.Y. Woman
The Associated Press
November 21, 2004
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/P/PERU_BERENSON?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
LIMA, Peru (AP) -- Peru will not abide by an international human rights court ruling supporting the release of Lori Berenson, a New York woman imprisoned for collaborating with Marxist guerrillas, the country's foreign minister said, according to news reports Saturday.
The Inter-American Human Rights Court, the Costa Rica-based legal arm of the Organization of American States, is scheduled to deliberate Berenson's case Nov. 24-25 to decide whether she received a fair civilian retrial in 2001. Peru is an OAS member.
"If this error were made, the Peruvian state, with legal justification, would take the position of not liberating any person accused of terrorism," several newspapers quoted Foreign Minister Manuel Rodriguez saying Friday from Santiago, Chile, where he attended the Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum.
"In no case would any disposition be observed that recommends freedom of people accused of terrorism in Peru."
Berenson, 34, was arrested in 1995 for allegedly helping the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement. Former President Alberto Fujimori identified her as a leader in a foiled plan to seize Peru's Congress and exchange hostages for imprisoned MRTA members.
Berenson was convicted by hooded military judges, who denied her a chance to present evidence or cross-examine witnesses. She was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.
At her 2001 retrial, which came after intense U.S. pressure, she was convicted of the lesser charge of terrorist collaboration and sentenced to 20 years in prison, including time served.
But Berenson's defense team, led by former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, argued that her retrial was based on Fujimori's draconian anti-terrorism laws and failed to meet international standards for due process.
Also, Berenson was improperly tried twice for the same crime, Clark said, and faced hostile judges who relied on coerced testimony and tainted evidence from the earlier military trial. Berenson has denied any wrongdoing.
Peruvian legal experts say the court could order Berenson's release, but they believed it would more likely give Peru leeway to try her for a third time - a result that last month Berenson said she also anticipated.
Her case is a touchy issue for President Alejandro Toledo, who has vowed that "no accused or convicted terrorist" will be released on his watch.
Toledo said Saturday at the APEC forum in Chile he will await the court's ruling before making any decision on Berenson's fate.
Political analysts say that with his approval rating hovering around 10 percent, Toledo does not want to be labeled by opponents as soft on terrorism - particularly after the embarrassing collapse last week of a civilian retrial against Shining Path founder Abimael Guzman and his top rebel commanders.
-------- police
City and F.B.I. Reach Agreement on Bioterror Investigations
November 21, 2004
By JUDITH MILLER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/21/nyregion/21protocol.html?pagewanted=all&position=
The New York Police Department, the F.B.I. and the city's health department have agreed for the first time on a set of rules that will govern investigations of suspected biological attacks in the city, detailing the roles the agencies will play as well as how confidential medical information is to be shared.
The "protocol," a six-page document that officials regard as something of a remarkable cooperation agreement, resulted in part from lessons learned in New York during the 2001 anthrax letter attacks, which killed five people in Florida and the Northeast and infected more than a dozen others in the months after the Sept. 11 strikes.
The anthrax investigations, and several subsequent inquiries into suspected germ attacks, were strained by tension between health and law enforcement officials over turf and procedures.
The accord, which was worked out in confidential, sometimes contentious meetings over the last two years, states that while law enforcement officials have the lead in investigating any terrorist crime, such investigations must be conducted jointly with the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene since physicians are likely to be the first to identify a victim of a germ attack.
To aid that effort, the protocol agreement details some novel compromises among agencies that sometimes have competing interests.
For instance, law enforcement officials, in the course of a bioterrorism investigation, will have access to the once typically confidential medical information of those who might have become infected. But the police and F.B.I. must keep such information confidential. And to encourage sick people to seek medical help, law enforcement agencies have agreed essentially to overlook a sick person's immigration problems or minor criminal activities.
The agreement also lays out some minor but still meaningful tactics. For example, law enforcement officials involved in interviews of patients will, by design, not wear uniforms, to avoid intimidating possible victims. And while patients will be interviewed jointly by teams of medical and law enforcement officials, physicians will be authorized to ask police and federal agents to leave the room.
"This is a groundbreaking agreement in uncharted waters," said Michael A. Sheehan, the Police Department's deputy commissioner for counterterrorism. "Both law enforcement and the public health community have made some tough compromises on what they consider sacred ground. But New Yorkers will be safer and healthier for it."
With the agreement, which was signed a month ago by Thomas R. Frieden, the health commissioner; Raymond W. Kelly, the police commissioner; and Pasquale J. D'Amuro, the assistant director of the F.B.I.'s New York office, New York becomes the first city in the nation to have adopted such a formalized protocol.
Richard A. Falkenrath, President Bush's former deputy homeland security adviser, said that he knew of no comparable agreement at the federal level and that New York was ahead of other cities in trying to systematically sort through the roles of public health and law enforcement officials in a potential bioterrorist attack. "This is in the public interest to do," Mr. Falkenrath said.
A copy of the internal protocol was provided to The New York Times. It provides for joint training of law enforcement and public health officials that is scheduled to start in January.
The agreement has not solved all outstanding issues. For instance, it does not state when and how quickly public health officials must notify the F.B.I. and police if they come across someone who may be infected with a dangerous germ. Officials said that law enforcement and health officials were still discussing which germs should require immediate notification and joint investigations as part of a separate agreement, a so-called "annex" to the broader agreement.
According to a draft of the annex, the city's health department is to provide immediate notification of the detection of illnesses that could involve nine pathogens, including germs that cause anthrax, plague, and such virally induced, highly infectious diseases as smallpox and Ebola. But the Police Department is trying to broaden that list to include germs that also cause Q fever and tularemia, which though naturally occurring, have also been studied by several countries for use as potential germ weapons.
In areas of disagreement concerning the specifics of how the joint efforts will work, law enforcement and health personnel may rely on what one official called the document's "creative ambiguity."
"A lot of this has to do with trust that has developed between the people who have worked together on bioterrorism investigations," said Dr. Dani Margot-Zavasky, a physician with the Police Department who helped draft the accord.
Phil T. Pulaski, assistant chief of the Police Department's counterterrorism bureau, said the accord reflected an effort to institutionalize that trust, along with the techniques and procedures that have developed over time. The accord was filled with qualifiers because of what he called the "knucklehead factor" - the "one-in-one-hundred chance that someone will try to wave this document around to assert authority in a spirit that was not intended."
The effort to draft such rules actually predate the 9/11 and anthrax letter attacks of 2001, some officials said. William A. Zinnikas, the weapons of mass destruction coordinator for the F.B.I.'s New York office, said he and Marcelle Layton, his counterpart from the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, began discussing the need for such guidelines in 1999.
"It was derived from a common acknowledgment of the problems we would all face if an incident of bioterrorism were to develop in New York City," Mr. Zinnikas said.
But the effort did not move at a "lightning pace" until after the 9/11 and anthrax attacks, Mr. Pulaski said. "Before that, there was just no immediacy."
The communication gaps, turf disputes between departments, fear of sharing information, and other complications highlighted by the anthrax letter attacks, a crime that remains unsolved, were reinforced by other, less well publicized bioterrorism scares, officials said.
Law enforcement and public health officials referred specifically to an investigation in the summer of 2003 of a suspected case of brucellosis, also known as undulant fever, a disease that can be caused by a biological attack but that is usually acquired from consuming unpasteurized dairy products.
Accounts of the tension vary, but officials said that after a Syrian man checked himself into a New York hospital and seemed to be suffering from an illness that could have been deliberately induced, the medical staff resisted turning over to the police potentially relevant information about him and his case. The police, according to two separate accounts of the case, reacted by pursuing the investigation very aggressively at the hospital.
Encouraged by the health department, the medical staff at the hospital finally began cooperating more fully. Both the medical investigators and the police eventually concluded that the man had acquired brucellosis, which is not contagious person-to-person, naturally during a vacation back home.
Some physicians continue resisting the trend in New York and at the federal level toward joint investigations by medical and law enforcement officials, and, in particular, the sharing of sensitive medical data that identify individuals by name.
Victor Sidel, a past president of the American Public Health Association and the New York City Public Health Association, expressed concern that such information-sharing might dissuade sick people from seeking medical help and hence, encourage the chances that infectious agents might spread throughout the city.
"I find the provision of such medical information inimical to human freedom and medical care," he said. Based on a reporter's description of the protocol, which has not been made public, he said he feared that the agreement negotiated between law enforcement and public health officials might jeopardize civil liberties and fail to provide the security it claims to bolster.
"There must be a balance between human freedom and counterterrorism," he said. "And an agreement like this steps over the line."
Public health and law enforcement officials disagreed, saying the accord contained many acknowledgments of the need to safeguard sensitive patient information and to underscore the fact that while physicians and police may have common goals, they continue to have separate cultures, rules, and requirements.
"We are not an agent of the police," said Dr. Frieden, the health commissioner. He noted that under the agreement, medical records would continue to be controlled by public health officials. "Our documents do not become declassified," he said. "Unless there is a bioterrorist event, that information is essentially sealed from the public, permanently and forever."
He said that "99.999 percent of the time," the health department carried out its mandate to protect public health without Police Department help. But in certain rare cases, he added, "I make the determination that police help would be valuable."
"Many of us are queasy about sharing health data with anybody, because we take confidentially of health data very seriously," said Dr. Frieden, who oversees the nation's largest municipal public health department of some 6,000 people and an annual budget of $1.5 billion. "There has never been a breach of this confidentiality as far as I know."
But after the Sept. 11 and anthrax attacks, "we all became much more aware of the circumstances in which the police and health departments must work together," he said.
The document acknowledges what Dr. Zavasky and Chief Pulaski called the differing approaches and concerns of each community. The document notes that all parties to the accord recognized the "potential chilling effect" that the presence of law enforcement officers might have on patients being interviewed and on medical professionals. It states, "it is understood that joint investigations remain essentially a public health epidemiological investigational activity," and that the health department is "not an agent of law enforcement when conducting investigations."
Nevertheless, securing access to sensitive patient data is sometimes critical, said Mr. Sheehan, the police counterterrorism deputy director, because it may help spot a bioterrorism attack more quickly and by limiting the spread of a deadly germ, save hundreds, and potentially thousands of lives.
-------- POLITICS
In role reversal, president rescues Secret Service agent
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By James G. Lakely
November 21, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20041120-113709-8651r.htm
SANTIAGO, Chile - President Bush broke up a fight last night between his lead Secret Service agent and a Chilean security detail, pulling the agent through a wall of men trying to bar his bodyguard's access to a state dinner.
Mr. Bush and first lady Laura Bush arrived at 8 p.m. local time yesterday at the Estacion Mapocho Cultural Center for the official dinner of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.
After the first couple posed for photos with Chilean President Ricardo Lagos and his wife, the four entered the doorway with a line of Chilean security guards and uniformed police closing quickly behind him.
The president's lead agent approached the line of men as quickly as it closed and demanded to be allowed through. Within a few seconds, the confrontation began to escalate with voices being raised and shoving in all directions.
"You're not stopping me! You're not stopping me!" yelled the agent, as captured by several television cameras. "I'm with the president."
During the fracas, another Secret Service agent was roughly pulled from the tumult and pushed against a concrete wall by Chilean security. A few seconds later, after posing for yet more pictures about 15 feet inside the doorway, Mr. Bush and the rest of the party turned to enter the dining room. But the president quickly turned his head to the growing din just outside.
Mr. Bush calmly turned right as the other three continued on and inserted himself into the fight. The president reached over two rows of Chilean security guards, grabbed his lead agent by the shoulder of his suit jacket and began to pull.
The tape of the incident, viewed by reporters last night, could not pick up any words the president might have been saying as he worked to get the agent through the line.
A few Chilean guards turned their heads and noticed that the arm draped over their shoulders was that of the president, and the line softened. Mr. Bush pulled his agent through, who was heard to say, "Get your hands off me" as he passed roughly through the doorway.
Mr. Bush then adjusted his shirt cuff and said something to the first dignitary he passed as a grin crossed his face.
According to Secret Service sources, the man Mr. Bush pulled through is a high-level agent and one of the president's personal favorites. The president normally has two agents near him at all times, but the second agent on the detail was not immediately allowed through.
The second agent, who was nearly put in a headlock and pushed against the concrete wall, did not aggressively retaliate and was soon seen standing next to the presidential limousine. No punches were thrown.
The Secret Service source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the president's security detail and that the Chileans had argued about security procedures all day and that he wasn't surprised to see last night's skirmish unfold.
The Chileans, he said, were determined to take charge of security, but the president of the United States is the only world leader who takes his bodyguards with him wherever he goes. Normally, foreign countries defer to that demand. The Chilean security detail resisted, the source said, and was determined to take a stand at the dinner.
"That's what the argument this afternoon was about," he said. "I saw this coming."
Chilean security knew that the Secret Service always accompanies the president and knows how to identify them by the pins on their lapels, the source said, but blocked them anyway.
The White House downplayed the incident last night.
"Chilean security tried to stop the president's Secret Service from accompanying him," said White House deputy press secretary Claire Buchan. "He told them they were with him, and the issue was resolved."
This was not the only physical conflict at the summit yesterday. During the first photo opportunity between Mr. Bush and Chinese President Hu Jintao, Chinese photographers yelled and pushed their way to the front of a rope 12 feet away from the two leaders.
"Easy, easy," Mr. Bush said.
Such photo ops are routine events to the regulars in the White House press corps. They quickly jockey for the prime positions for photos, but do not shove each other, and the bitter feelings over the incident lasted throughout the day.
A cameraman for CNN was knocked off his ladder but was not hurt, and a tall light stand was nearly knocked over toward the leaders as the shoving continued for about 10 seconds. After the shoving match in front of the Chinese president, Mr. Bush's press handlers ushered in the press in smaller waves to avoid chaos.
-------- budget
Congress Agrees on Tight Budget for U.S.
$388 Billion Spending Bill Bars Officials From Requiring Abortion Services
By Dan Morgan and Helen Dewar
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, November 21, 2004; Page A01
Congress reached final agreement last night on a $388 billion spending bill funding 13 government departments and dozens of domestic agencies in 2005, after last-minute objections from abortion rights advocates threatened to delay or derail the entire measure.
House passage came on a vote of 344 to 51. Later in the evening, the Senate gave its approval, 65 to 30.
The bill, consisting of more than 1,000 pages and weighing 14 pounds, codifies the stingiest budget for domestic departments since the late 1990s. Although a few favored agencies, such as Amtrak and NASA, were spared cuts, the measure bears evidence of a new austerity in domestic spending, brought about by soaring budget deficits and the rising costs of war and counterterrorism programs.
The abortion battle erupted after Senate negotiators on the huge spending package unexpectedly agreed to a House-backed provision that opponents described as part of a broad strategy by Republican social conservatives to "chip away" at abortion rights. It would bar federal, state or local agencies from forcing doctors, hospitals, insurers, HMOs or other health care entities to provide abortion services or referrals.
"Roe v. Wade is the law of the land, but Republicans are gutting it step by step," said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). Republicans denied that the legislation would restrict access to abortion and said it is intended only to prevent government agencies from "intimidating" health care entities that did not perform abortions or provide training or referrals.
The abortion language remained in the spending bill, but late yesterday, Senate opponents agreed not to block its consideration after Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) promised to schedule a vote in the near future on a bill drafted by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) to repeal the provision.
Adding to the chaotic finale of the proceedings on the giant bill was a last-minute fracas over another provision, apparently slipped into the bill at the last minute by a House staff aide, that would allow agents designated by the chairman of the House or Senate Appropriations Committee to look at tax returns.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) described the provision as a "terrible, egregious abuse of power," and GOP senators joined in denouncing it.
To snuff out what appeared to be an incipient rebellion, Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) took the floor to apologize for the provision and to promise that it would be corrected.
"It's wrong," an angry Stevens shouted at one point, saying it was inserted without his knowledge.
Under an agreement between GOP and Democratic leaders, the Senate later approved language dropping the controversial provision and delayed sending the bill to the president until the House follows suit next week. With spending authority for most federal agencies running out at midnight, Congress also approved stopgap legislation to keep the government running until the spending package becomes law.
The uproar over abortion and tax returns all but overshadowed the underlying spending bill, which Rep. C. W. Bill Young (R-Fla.) described as "a lean and clean package."
The White House had threatened to veto the entire package if domestic spending grew by more than 1 percent, and GOP officials boasted that they had stayed within that margin.
Faced with this ceiling, House and Senate conferees launched marathon negotiations, juggling accounts to take care of White House and congressional priorities.
In a move that underscored the extensive influence of the federal workforce in almost every congressional district, Congress rejected White House objections to a 3.5 percent pay increase for civilian government employees, starting in January.
Despite the spending cap, lawmakers found ways to earmark funds for thousands of highway, bridge, water and research projects in the home states and congressional districts of influential senators and House members.
The Missouri Pork Producers Federation came away with $1 million to develop technology that would improve the environment by converting animal waste into energy. The Big Sandy Airport in Kentucky got $150,000 for "fencing," and $25,000 went for the study of mariachi music in the Clark County, Nev., school district. Airport terminal improvements were approved for Juneau, Alaska, Stevens's home state.
But across much of the rest of the domestic budget, the tight spending ceiling was apparent. Subsidies in the main Small Business Administration loan program were jettisoned, and the administration's request for funds to prepare a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, was slashed by $303 million. The Environmental Protection Agency suffered a cutback of $612 million and, within its accounts, federal aid to rural communities and Indian tribes for water and sewer improvements -- favorite vehicles for congressional earmarks and patronage -- was slashed by $518 million.
To provide more funds for congressional and White House priorities, such as NASA and veterans health programs, negotiators used a combination of accounting gimmicks and a four-fifths of 1 percent tax on all other programs to produce the necessary funds.
Both the White House and GOP leaders said the spending bill is a victory in the battle to get the federal budget back into balance, but Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a fiscal watchdog group, was skeptical.
"The big money isn't in this part of the budget," he said, noting that domestic discretionary spending makes up barely one-seventh of the total federal budget of $2.3 trillion. The soaring cost of entitlement programs, such as farm subsidies and Medicare, remains largely unaddressed, Bixby said. "They're chasing after the weeds in the lawn while the house is burning down."
Democrats, meanwhile, charged that the package is laden with favors to business and social conservatives, groups that were key to Republican electoral victories on Nov. 2.
Rep. David R. Obey (Wis.), ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, cited provisions limiting review of timber sales in Alaska, removing wilderness designations in various parts of Georgia, and extending grazing permits without requiring environmental reviews.
Abortion rights forces appeared to have been caught by surprise late last week when negotiators accepted the House-backed provision on abortion services. Abortion rights advocates lacked the votes to challenge it in the House and expected Senate negotiators to object to its inclusion in the final omnibus spending package.
That calculation, however, did not reckon with the fact that Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), a principal negotiator on health issues, would become a target of antiabortion forces as a result of his recent remarks questioning whether an antiabortion nominee would be confirmed for the Supreme Court by the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Sources said yesterday that although Specter objected to the provision during bargaining on the bill, he was forced to spend much of last week reassuring conservatives that he would push President Bush's nominees for the court, regardless of their position on abortion, if he were chosen chairman of the committee.
Others suggested, however, that the provision's inclusion reflected the strength and increased aggressiveness of GOP social conservatives after the election.
Since the mid-1990s, federal law has provided "conscience protection" for medical students who do not want to undergo training for abortions. The new proposal would expand such protection from medical training facilities to nearly all providers of health care.
While all states would be affected in varying degrees by the proposal, the major impact would fall on the 22 or 23 states that use their own money to provide abortion services to recipients of Medicaid, the federal-state program of health care for low-income Americans. In the future, they would not be able to force health care providers to continue providing abortions or abortion referrals.
According to NARAL Pro-Choice America, 15 states -- others say as many as 17 -- use state funds to cover abortion costs for Medicaid recipients. Another seven states, including Maryland and Virginia, cover costs in some cases, the group said.
The new provision would also make it easier for health care providers to deny Medicaid-funded abortions in rape or incest cases and for federally funded family planning clinics to drop abortion services, according to critics of the provision.
-------- us politics
Taking Charge Even if she doesn't have all of Powell's charms and stature, Condi Rice has something more influential: the ear of the president
Newsweek
By Richard Wolffe
Nov. 21, 2004
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6505204/site/newsweek/
Nov. 16 - It's no coincidence that the first two cabinet nominations of the second Bush administration are some of the very same people he first named in 2000. Condoleezza Rice and Alberto Gonzales were among the initial wave of appointments by George W. Bush, less than a week after the Florida recount was brought to a halt. Both were named a day after the president-elect's first big personnel announcement-the return of Colin Powell to government as secretary of State.
Four years later, there's an unmistakable symmetry. First, the choreography around Powell. The former four-star general was courted carefully by Bush in 2000, even though he wasn't part of the Texas governor's inner circle (like Rice or Gonzales). Powell's role was more than just to sprinkle stardust over the new president-elect. It was to lend him foreign policy gravitas, like Dick Cheney's addition to the ticket earlier that year; to reassure the world that a rarely-traveled governor could make the transition to the leader of the free world.
Powell's courtship ended within days of the president's inauguration. Powell imagined he would be helping an inexperienced president come to grips with a complex world. He imagined wrongly. In one week in March 2001, Powell said that U.S. policy towards Iraq would be focused on tightening sanctions on arms, while easing the more punitive restrictions on civilian life under Saddam Hussein. Within days Powell was under fire from conservatives who wanted to know why he wasn't planning to overthrow Saddam. Then Powell suggested the new administration would continue President Bill Clinton's approach of engagement with Stalinist North Korea. The next day, Bush himself-meeting with then president Kim Dae Jung-said the talks were over and the North couldn't be trusted.
It was around this time that Rice herself was taking her first steps on stage as national-security adviser in an unhappy collision of Bush's uncompromising foreign policy with America's awkward allies. At a meeting of European Union ambassadors, Rice told the ambassadors that the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gases was simply dead. Such straight talk was hardly diplomatic, even if the Kyoto deal was going nowhere in Washington. Those comments helped to set a fractious tone across the Atlantic-a dialogue that only worsened as Rice and Bush began planning for war in Iraq. The contrast in style and substance between Powell and Rice is not superficial.
Even if she doesn't have all of Powell's charms and stature, Condi Rice has something more influential: the ear of the president That's not to say that Powell couldn't be blunt, or that Rice can't be charming. Far from it. Powell could lash out at fair-weather friends like Dominique de Villepin, the French foreign minister, in the run-up to the war in Iraq. And Rice can charm and outclass even the most skeptical Europeans, as she did when she urged them to kiss and make up with the United States in London in June 2003. Moreover Powell and Rice worked closely together before and after the invasion of Iraq. Their relationship, according to Powell, was warm and often funny. And Rice was genuine when she praised Powell at the White House on Tuesday, saying he was "a great and inspirational" leader at the State Department. "It is humbling to imagine succeeding my dear friend and mentor, Colin Powell," she said.
Even if she doesn't have all of Powell's charms and stature, Rice has something more influential: the ear of the president. As Powell's distance from the White House became apparent over the last two years, his position in the world's capitals was seriously weakened. Powell may have been adored overseas, but foreign ministers understood he was speaking for one faction within the Bush administration-and a faction that often seemed to lose in the bitter, internal struggles over U.S. foreign policy.
Rice has no such problems-and no such advantages. Powell's position as chief internal critic of Bush's policies made him even more popular abroad, where those plans were mostly disliked. Yet diplomacy is less about popularity than power. Take the Israeli-Palestinian conflict- the most pressing crisis facing the administration after Iraq, as British Prime Minister Tony Blair never tires of reminding Bush. After several frustrating forays into the region, Powell achieved little with two parties that seemed determined to continue with war. In contrast, Rice worked closely with Dov Weisglass, the senior adviser to Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, as the Israelis secured U.S. approval for their plan to withdraw from Gaza and annex parts of the West Bank. Whether or not the rest of the world agrees with Sharon's plan, or American approval of it, is open to debate. What isn't questionable is that Rice was present at its creation, and will be there-as secretary of State-to see it come to reality next year.
In the snap analysis of some pundits, Rice is an almost neo-conservative hawk; just look at her hand in Sharon's approach to Gaza. Yet that hardly squares with her support for Powell during the run-up to war in Iraq. And it doesn't square with her support for the diplomatic channels to Iran and North Korea.
In reality, the biggest contrast between Rice and Powell is the use of their respective political skills. Powell deployed his charm with foreign officials, but could rarely travel overseas because, he said, he needed to stay in Washington to fight his corner. Rice should face no such need to cover her own back. And while Powell opted out of campaigning for the president's re-election (citing precedent for keeping his job non-partisan), Rice spent her time touring the battleground states this year (breaking with precedent in her traditionally non-partisan job).
Whether that frees her to travel more than Powell, and achieve more than Powell, is unclear. But Rice will find it hard to be as popular as Powell, either inside the State Department's headquarters or outside these shores in the world's capitals. The shadow of her dear friend and mentor will be a long one.
-----
The Power-Values Approach to Policy Move to State Raises Rice's Profile
Washington Post
By Glenn Kessler
November 21, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A684-2004Nov20?language=printer
Condoleezza Rice, whom President Bush nominated last week as his next secretary of state, was pegged early in her career as a disciple of the "realist" school exemplified by Henry A. Kissinger, more concerned with great-power relations than moral issues. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, she has been viewed as an enabler of the "neoconservative idealism" that believes evil governments must be confronted -- and toppled.
In many of her speeches, Rice has decried such distinctions, saying they "obscure reality" and represent a false choice. "In real life, power and values are married completely," she said in New York on Oct. 1, 2002. "Great powers matter a great deal -- they have the ability to influence the lives of millions and change history. And the values of great powers matter, as well. If the Soviet Union had won the Cold War, the world would look very different today."
Indeed, Rice will bring to the job of the nation's top diplomat a firm belief that power and values are critical variables in successful diplomacy, according to a review of her writings and speeches before and during her tenure as Bush's national security adviser.
Rice, a specialist on the Soviet Union, has generally given thematic speeches that support Bush's policies. But she is regarded as Bush's closest adviser on foreign policy, and her move to the State Department will give her a high-profile platform to put her own stamp on the administration's policies -- and the selling of those policies overseas.
At their core, her speeches and writings reveal a determined individual willing to knock aside established doctrines, especially in this period of international turmoil, but grounded in a strong belief in American values and the essential good of U.S. power.
Rice's aides and friends declined to comment, citing her upcoming Senate confirmation hearings, though some privately suggested certain speeches to review.
Three critical elements appear to have fused Rice's outlook on the world. First, her original foreign policy mentor was Josef Korbel, a University of Denver scholar and the father of former secretary of state Madeleine K. Albright. Korbel, a refugee from communism, saw the United States as a moral beacon to the rest of world, though his ideology was tempered by pragmatism. Rice dedicated her first book to Korbel and her parents.
Second, Rice's formative governmental experience before becoming national security adviser was assisting Bush's father on the reunification of Germany -- the subject of another one of her books. That experience taught her that foreign policy goals that appear impossible should be sought, even when everyone assumes the effort is pointless. "Despite the occasional, almost ceremonial references to a unified Germany, the international system had grown quite satisfied with the status quo," said the book, which she co-wrote with Philip D. Zelikow. "In a year it was all gone."
Rice has also said that her travels to Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union helped further her belief in the power of American democracy. As an African American, she wrote in 1996, she had once thought such claims by U.S. presidents could be "chalked up to bad speechwriting and hyperbole," especially since "my ancestors were property -- a fraction of a man."
Third, there was the searing experience of the Sept. 11 attacks. As a student of diplomatic history, Rice frequently compares the current era to the period of uncertainty faced by policymakers in the aftermath of World War II. "This is, then, a period akin to 1945 to 1947, when American leadership expanded the number of free and democratic states -- Japan and Germany among the great powers -- to create a new balance of power that favored freedom," she said in 2002.
"The international system has been in flux since the collapse of Soviet power," she said. "Now it is possible -- indeed, probable -- that that transition is come to an end. . . . Before the clay is dry again, America and our friends and our allies must move decisively to take advantage of these new opportunities."
Rice has increasingly infused this theme with moral fervor, pitching it as a rationale for the administration push to bring democracy to the Middle East.
"Lasting peace and long-term security are only possible through the advance of liberty and justice. The war on terror, like the Cold War, is as much a conflict of visions as a struggle of armed force," Rice told an audience at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, Calif., earlier this year. "All of the early heroes of the Cold War -- Truman, and Churchill, and Adenauer -- understood this. Decades later, we seemed poised to forget it" until "President Reagan re-infused the Cold War with moral purpose."
Rice argues that "the terrorist ideology is the direct heir to communism, and nazism, and fascism -- the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. The struggle against terror is fundamentally a struggle of vision and values."
James Mann's history of the Bush war Cabinet, "Rise of the Vulcans," says that Rice voted for Jimmy Carter for president in 1976 -- though she turned to the Republicans and Ronald Reagan by 1980, after she was dismayed by Carter's handling of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Her boss in the administration of George H.W. Bush was Brent Scowcroft, a national security adviser in the tradition of Kissinger's "realist" approach. But Mann writes that Rice avoided alienating conservatives and tried to avoid fractional divisions, appearing to straddle the realist and neoconservative camps in her writings during the 2000 campaign.
In an article in 2000 for Foreign Affairs, the bible of foreign policy thinking, Rice wrote that "power matters, both the exercise of power by the United States and the ability of others to exercise it." But she said that because many in the United States are uncomfortable with the notion of great power, there is "a reflexive appeal instead to notions of international law and norms, and the belief that the support of many states -- or even better, of institutions like the United Nations -- is essential to the legitimate exercise of power."
Rice instead argued that "multilateral agreements and institutions should not be ends in themselves" and the "United States has a special role in the world and should not adhere to every international convention and agreement that someone thinks to propose."
While Rice wrote that "it is simply not possible to ignore and isolate other powerful states that do not share those [American] values," she made the case that pursuing U.S. interests together with countries that share similar values, "the world becomes more prosperous, democratic and peaceful."
Before the Sept. 11 attacks -- and before the invasion of Iraq strained ties with Europeans -- Rice said in a June 2001 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations that it was a misnomer to say there was a "values gap" between Europe and the United States because of differences on the death penalty, gun control and other issues.
She said it was a "fundamental irony" that "the values debate is taking place at a moment when our core values -- the common values of the transatlantic community -- are ascendant," pointing to shared beliefs that there are fundamental freedoms to "say what we think, worship as we wish and choose who shall govern us."
Outlining Bush's national security strategy in October 2002, Rice said: "We have an historic opportunity to break the destructive pattern of great power rivalry that has bedeviled the world since the rise of the nation-state in the 17th century. Today, the world's great centers of power are united by common interests, common dangers and -- increasingly -- common values."
After the Iraq invasion, when French officials in particular were pressing the idea of trying to counter U.S. "hyperpower," Rice traveled to London in June 2003 to address the issue. She argued that it was essential for great powers to work together, not balance each other in a constant state of tension.
"The reality is that 'multi-polarity' was never a unifying idea, or a vision," Rice said. "It was a necessary evil that sustained the absence of war but it did not promote the triumph of peace. Multi-polarity is a theory of rivalry, of competing interests -- and at its worst -- competing values" -- which, she said, led to World War I, World War II and the Cold War.
-----
Spending Bill in Hand, Congress Departs
November 21, 2004
By CARL HULSE and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/21/politics/21congress.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Nov. 20 - Congress approved a $388 billion spending measure and left town on Saturday without completing a reorganization of the nation's intelligence agencies as a postelection session drew to a ragged close.
Following on the heels of the House, the Senate voted 65 to 30 to adopt legislation that provides money for much of the federal government, but not before agreeing to a convoluted procedure to eliminate a newly discovered provision that many lawmakers found objectionable.
The Senate acted after the House voted 344 to 51 earlier in the day to adopt the measure, which encompassed nine separate spending bills that Congress failed to pass on time before the election, but not before Democrats criticized its contents as well as the process of voting on a huge piece of legislation that few had digested.
"The nine appropriations bills that are wrapped into this early Thanksgiving turkey should have been dealt with by the House months ago," said Representative David R. Obey of Wisconsin, senior Democrat on the Appropriations Committee.
Republicans credited the bill with holding the line on spending and said its approval would allow the new Congress to start fresh when it convened in January.
"It is a clean bill, it is a lean bill, it is within the budget limitations set by the House and set by the president," said Representative C. W. Bill Young, a Florida Republican who is chairman of the House spending panel.
The Senate action was slowed by a fight over an anti-abortion provision as well as a last-minute flare-up that had members of both parties expressing outrage on the floor.
Senator Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota, said he discovered a provision that would allow leaders of the House and Senate spending panels to designate people who would be given access to tax returns.
"Are we really going to pass legislation here that says an Appropriations Committee staffer can look at the individual tax returns of any American?" Mr. Conrad asked.
Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska and chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said that the provision had been added erroneously and that it would not become law even though the bill had already been passed by the House.
"It is absolutely a mistake, and I apologize to the Senate," Mr. Stevens said.
Under an agreement to resolve the matter, the overall spending bill will not be sent to President Bush until the House adopts a Senate resolution next week eliminating the tax return provision. Until then, the government will continue to operate under a stop-gap bill.
The spending measure, called an omnibus bill, will pay for the operations of a wide range of government agencies whose appropriations for the current fiscal year, which began on Oct. 1, had not been passed by Congress. Republicans hailed the measure for holding the line on domestic spending levels through a slight across-the-board cut, but Democrats said the voluminous bill - which rose more than a foot high - was being forced through too quickly.
"Have you read this bill well enough to have confidence you know what is in it?" Representative Brian Baird, Democrat of Washington, asked his colleagues on the House floor.
House Democrats raised objections to language that would expand the rights of health care providers to refuse to perform abortions and abortion-related services. The Democratic minority leader, Nancy Pelosi of California, called it an "extraordinary sneak attack on women's rights and a disgraceful display of ideology over health."
But its Republican authors said the action was warranted to prevent government agencies from forcing health care providers who oppose abortion to perform the procedure or counsel women seeking abortions.
"The right of conscience is fundamental to our American freedom," said Representative Dave Weldon, a Florida Republican who is the main architect of the provision.
In the Senate, the abortion language - favored by the White House and the House and Senate Republican leadership - drew objections from Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, and others.
Ms. Boxer had tried to negotiate changes to the language and warned that she would slow Senate business to a crawl if the provision was not altered. But as the day progressed, Ms. Boxer and other Democrats agreed to drop their procedural objections in exchange for a guarantee from the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, that he would schedule a separate vote on the abortion language in the Senate next spring.
The criticism of the spending bill and the failure to progress with the intelligence overhaul was, in some respects, a reflection of the highly partisan nature of the 108th Congress, which drew to a close after elections that tightened Republican control of the House and reshaped the Senate for 2005.
The gains set the stage for Mr. Bush and his Republican allies on Capitol Hill to push an ambitious agenda of changes in the Social Security system and the tax code.
"We are going to hit the ground running in the next session," said John Feehery, spokesman for the House speaker, J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois.
Senate officials said they might not formally adjourn their current session, allowing committee chairmen to get an early start on confirmation hearings for Mr. Bush's new cabinet choices, particularly Condoleezza Rice for secretary of state. Aides said that Senator Richard G. Lugar, an Indiana Republican who is chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, had indicated that he wanted to move ahead before the start of the year. And House leaders did not adjourn for the year either, leaving the chance for an agreement on the intelligence bill.
The end of the session also marks the end of the Senate careers of some prominent lawmakers, including Democrats Ernest F. Hollings of South Carolina, John B. Breaux of Louisiana and Bob Graham of Florida, along with the Republican Senator Don Nickles of Oklahoma, all of whom chose to retire. Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the Democratic leader, lost his seat in the Nov. 2 election.
Senate Republicans grabbed the majority in the 2002 elections, the first in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, giving the party control of the White House and both chambers of Congress. But the new era started with controversy. Within weeks of the voting, Republicans installed Mr. Frist, of Tennessee, as their leader after Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi had to step down after making comments that many people considered racially divisive.
The one-party control provided opportunity for legislative accomplishment, though the narrow Republican majority in the Senate meant Democrats retained the ability to influence legislation and impede judicial nominees.
-------- ENERGY
-------- energy
Sixth Iraq oil well set ablaze by saboteurs
(AFP)
21 Nov 2004
http://servihoo.com/channels/kinews/v3news_details.php?id=60349&CategoryID=47
KIRKUK, Iraq Firefighters extinguish an oil well at the Al-Khabbaza oilfields west of the Iraqi city of Kirkuk
Saboteurs set ablaze another well in Iraq's northern oilfields overnight, bringing to six the number firefighters are trying to extinguish in the region, security guards said.
"Saboteurs exploded a bomb, setting oil well number 20 on fire," said Lieutenant Colonel Hammudi Ali, of the security force operating for the state-owned North Oil Company.
The well is located in the Al-Khabbaza field, west of the city of Kirkuk, where five other wells were already ablaze following previous attacks.
"The firefighters are still trying to put out the fires, but so far they haven't managed to extinguish a single one," Ali said.
Guards thwarted a second sabotage attempt overnight, killing one assailant and wounding another, at a well further west, said Colonel Nawzad Ahmed, also from the oilfields protection force.
In an audio message posted on the Internet a week ago, a man claiming to be Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, Iraq's most wanted man, urged insurgents to attack oil facilities around the country in their battle against the US military presence.
-------- OTHER
-------- health
Children Pay Cost of Iraq's Chaos
Malnutrition Nearly Double What It Was Before Invasion
Washington Post
By Karl Vick
November 21, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A809-2004Nov20?language=printer
BAGHDAD -- Acute malnutrition among young children in Iraq has nearly doubled since the United States led an invasion of the country 20 months ago, according to surveys by the United Nations, aid agencies and the interim Iraqi government.
After the rate of acute malnutrition among children younger than 5 steadily declined to 4 percent two years ago, it shot up to 7.7 percent this year, according to a study conducted by Iraq's Health Ministry in cooperation with Norway's Institute for Applied International Studies and the U.N. Development Program. The new figure translates to roughly 400,000 Iraqi children suffering from "wasting," a condition characterized by chronic diarrhea and dangerous deficiencies of protein.
"These figures clearly indicate the downward trend," said Alexander Malyavin, a child health specialist with the UNICEF mission to Iraq.
The surveys suggest the silent human cost being paid across a country convulsed by instability and mismanagement. While attacks by insurgents have grown more violent and more frequent, deteriorating basic services take lives that many Iraqis said they had expected to improve under American stewardship.
Iraq's child malnutrition rate now roughly equals that of Burundi, a central African nation torn by more than a decade of war. It is far higher than rates in Uganda and Haiti.
"The people are astonished," said Khalil M. Mehdi, who directs the Nutrition Research Institute at the Health Ministry. The institute has been involved with nutrition surveys for more than a decade; the latest one was conducted in April and May but has not been publicly released.
Mehdi and other analysts attributed the increase in malnutrition to dirty water and to unreliable supplies of the electricity needed to make it safe by boiling. In poorer areas, where people rely on kerosene to fuel their stoves, high prices and an economy crippled by unemployment aggravate poor health.
"Things have been worse for me since the war," said Kasim Said, a day laborer who was at Baghdad's main children's hospital to visit his ailing year-old son, Abdullah. The child, lying on a pillow with a Winnie the Pooh washcloth to keep the flies off his head, weighs just 11 pounds.
"During the previous regime, I used to work on the government projects. Now there are no projects," his father said.
When he finds work, he added, he can bring home $10 to $14 a day. If his wife is fortunate enough to find a can of Isomil, the nutritional supplement that doctors recommend, she pays $7 for it.
"But the lady in the next bed said she just paid $10," said Suad Ahmed, who sat cross-legged on a bed in the same ward, trying to console her skeletal 4-month-old granddaughter, Hiba, who suffers from chronic diarrhea.
Iraqi health officials like to surprise visitors by pointing out that the nutrition issue facing young Iraqis a generation ago was obesity. Malnutrition, they say, appeared in the early 1990s with U.N. trade sanctions championed by Washington to punish the government led by President Saddam Hussein for invading Kuwait in 1990.
International aid efforts and the U.N. oil-for-food program helped reduce the ruinous impact of sanctions, and the rate of acute malnutrition among the youngest Iraqis gradually dropped from a peak of 11 percent in 1996 to 4 percent in 2002. But the invasion in March 2003 and the widespread looting in its aftermath severely damaged the basic structures of governance in Iraq, and persistent violence across the country slowed the pace of reconstruction almost to a halt.
In its most recent assessment of five sectors of Iraq's reconstruction, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington research group, said health care was worsening at the quickest pace.
"Believe me, we thought a magic thing would happen" with the fall of Hussein and the start of the U.S.-led occupation, said an administrator at Baghdad's Central Teaching Hospital for Pediatrics. "So we're surprised that nothing has been done. And people talk now about how the days of Saddam were very nice," the official said.
The administrator, who would not give his full name for publication, cited security concerns faced by Iraqi doctors, who are widely perceived as rich and well-connected and thus easy targets for thieves, extortionists and the merely envious or vengeful. So many have been assassinated, he said, that the Health Ministry recently mailed out offers to expedite weapon permits for doctors.
Violence has also driven away international aid agencies that brought expertise to Iraq following the U.S. invasion.
Since a truck bombing at the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad killed more than 20 people last year, U.N. programs for Iraq have operated from neighboring Jordan. Doctors Without Borders, a group known for its high tolerance for risk and one of several that helped revive Iraq's Health Ministry in the weeks after the invasion, evacuated this fall.
CARE International closed down in October after the director of its large Iraq operation, Margaret Hassan, was kidnapped. She is now presumed to be dead. The huge Atlanta-based charity had remained active in Iraq through three wars, providing hospitals with supplies and sponsoring scores of projects to offer Iraqis clean drinking water.
By one count, 60 percent of rural residents and 20 percent of urban dwellers have access only to contaminated water. The country's sewer systems are in disarray.
"Even myself, I suffer from the quality of water," said Zina Yahya, 22, a nurse in a Baghdad maternity hospital. "If you put it in a glass, you can see it's turbid. I've heard of typhoid cases."
The nutrition surveys indicated that conditions are worst in Iraq's largely poor, overwhelmingly Shiite Muslim south, an area alternately subject to neglect and persecution during Hussein's rule. But doctors say malnutrition occurs wherever water is dirty, parents are poor and mothers have not been taught how to avoid disease.
"I don't eat well," said Yusra Jabbar, 20, clutching her swollen abdomen in a fly-specked ward of Baghdad's maternity hospital. Her mother said the water in their part of Sadr City, a Shiite slum on the capital's east side, is often contaminated. Her brother contracted jaundice.
"They tell me I have anemia," Jabbar said. Doctors said almost all the pregnant women in the hospital do.
"This is not surprising because since the war, there is lots of unemployment," Yahya said. "And without work, they don't have the money to obtain proper food.''
Iraqis say such conditions carry political implications. Baghdad residents often point out to reporters that after the 1991 Persian Gulf War left much of the capital a shambles, Hussein's government restored electricity and kerosene supplies in two months.
"Yes, there is a price for every war," said the official at the teaching hospital. "Yes, there are victims. But after that?
"Oh God, help us build Iraq again. For our children, not for us. For our kids," the official said.
-------- imf / world bank / wto (economics)
Creditors consider writing off 80 percent of debt
ASSOCIATED PRESS
By Emmanuel Georges-Picot
November 21, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041120-114355-4211r.htm
PARIS - The Paris Club of creditor nations yesterday was debating a plan to write off as much as 80 percent of the debt that Iraq owes them, a key step in the United States' push to ease the financial burden on the rebuilding nation.
U.S. Treasury Secretary John W. Snow and German Finance Minister Hans Eichel sealed the agreement, Mr. Eichel said earlier yesterday, adding that he expected the Paris Club would approve the deal.
Iraq owes about $42 billion to the members of the Paris Club, a groupof 19 countries that includes the United States, Japan, Russia and European nations.
An agreement by the Paris Club to forgive its Iraqi debt would be a significant step toward freeing the country from paying interest on the money owed as it struggles to put its economy back on its feet.
Still, Iraq owes $80 billion more to various Arab governments.
"We agreed that there should be a write-off of debts in several stages amounting to 80 percent in total," Mr. Eichel told reporters on the sidelines of a meeting of finance officials from the Group of 20 industrial and developing countries.
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder later stressed, "There is no final outcome - there are discussions, particularly with France," which opposed last year's U.S.-led war in Iraq and previously had called for a lower level of debt relief.
Still, the German-U.S. agreement was being discussed by the Paris Club, and "our expectation is that it will be accepted," said Mr. Eichel's spokesman, Joerg Mueller.
"We have made substantial progress today - we're advancing toward an agreement. Several details still need to be examined," said a French official close to the Paris Club talks, being held in the French capital.
The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said an agreement could be announced today.
Mr. Eichel said the proposal would see 30 percent of Iraq's Paris Club debt written off immediately, another 30 percent in a second stage "tied to a program of the International Monetary Fund" and an additional 20 percent "linked to the success of this program."
The United States has been pushing for a generous debt write-off for Iraq, trying to win support for wiping out as much as 95 percent.
However, other governments, including Germany, have questioned whether a country with rich oil reserves should benefit from huge debt reduction. France previously had proposed that the Paris Club write off just half of the debt, postpone debt service for three years and revisit the issue when Iraq's economy is in better condition.
But World Bank President James Wolfensohn last year said Iraq needs to have two-thirds of its debt forgiven if the country is to have a chance at economic recovery.
Mr. Schroeder, noting that the final stage of the proposed deal would be conditional, suggested that it could at some point be reassessed.
"If the situation in Iraq improves fundamentally - Iraq is a rich country with respect to its oil reserves - we should be able to talk about it again," he told reporters at the meeting.
Iraq has said its overall foreign debt of $122 billion is hindering postwar reconstruction.
The Paris Club of creditor countries comprises Austria, Australia, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Bahrain Activist Pardoned by King
Associated Press
By ADNAN MALIK
November 21, 2004
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/B/BAHRAIN_ACTIVIST_CONVICTED?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
MANAMA, Bahrain (AP) -- Bahrain's king ordered the immediate release of human rights activist who was convicted of inciting hatred of the government and sentenced to one year in prison Sunday in a case linked to criticism of the prime minister.
The intervention by the king, Sheik Hamad, came hours after Abdul-Hadi al-Khawaja was sentenced in a courtroom where scores of his supporters chanted slogans against the prime minister.
Al-Khawaja, the executive director of the now-dissolved Bahrain Center for Human Rights, was detained on Sept. 25 after he called publicly for the resignation of Sheik Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa, accusing him of being responsible for economic failures and human rights violations.
The king ordered al-Khawaja released, saying he was "pardoning al-Khawaja from spending the rest of his sentence in jail, to suffice with the period he spent in jail before issuing this decree." The decree appeared to be a suspension of the remainder of the sentence rather than a pardon of the charges.
"I am happy that he is coming out," Khadija al-Mousawi, his wife, told The Associated Press by telephone. "The authorities shouldn't have put him on trial or put him behind bars in the first place."
"There is a little bit of justice somewhere," she said, calling the decree a "good gesture" by the king. Loud exclamations of joy could be heard in the background.
One of his daughter, Zeinab, was jubilant on the phone: "I can't believe this."
Sheik Hamad also ordered the release of 13 people who were arrested last month during a demonstration in his support.
The arrest of al-Khawaja raised fears that Bahrain - which has made democratic reforms - was taking new action against dissent.
When the verdict and sentence were announced Sunday, scores of supporters at the court chanted: "Khalifa, you should be behind bars! Abdul-Hadi should be free!" Al-Khawaja refused to attend the trial and was not present at Sunday's session.
Al-Khawaja has been on a hunger strike since Nov. 14 to press for the release of the 13 supporters arrested at last month's demonstration.
New York-based Human Rights Watch said that by arresting the activist, "the prime minister is reverting to the authoritarian ways that had given Bahrain such a bad name in the past."
Bahrain has taken bold steps toward democratization, putting it ahead of its neighbors in the conservative region. But ultimate power remains with the king, Sheik Hamad. The prime minister is the king's uncle.
Sheik Ali Salman of the Al-Wefaq National Islamic Society, a Shiite Muslim-backed organization that has campaigned for al-Khawajah's release, said Sunday's conviction and sentencing would add to tension and perhaps lead to violence.
Al-Khawajah is Shiite, as are most of his supporters in this largely Shiite Muslim country ruled by a Sunni Muslim royal family.
Bahrain had seen clashes in the past between government forces and Shiite Muslim Bahrainis, many of whom long have complained of discrimination and demanded better representation and equal rights.
--------
Anti-war advocates contemplate 'where to go from here'
11/21/2004
The Herald Press
By JULIE A. VARUGHESE
http://www.newbritainherald.com/site/printerFriendly.cfm?brd=1641&dept_id=10110&newsid=13410054
NEW BRITAIN -- A line of anxious audience members waited their turn to ask questions that burned in their minds. One man, Steven Hiller, whose question was encased within a two-minute monologue, said that the presidential election was a "landslide" -- 51 percent voted for Bush, but 99 percent voted for pro-war candidates.
A panelist, Bill Fletcher, president of Trans Africa Forum, disagreed. "It's absurd that it was a landslide," he said. "There was a deep, deep hatred of [President] Bush. In practice, most forces on the left were very clear on distinguishing themselves from [Sen. John] Kerry."
The panel to discuss strategies and perspectives was held Saturday at Central Connecticut State University during a day-long, state-wide forum hosted by the Peace Studies Department and sponsored by Connecticut United for Peace.
The day was a retreat for those who claim to be anti-war. Attendees had the opportunity to listen to Fletcher speak, ask questions to panelists, and participate in interactive workshops. The questions that the forum wanted to address focused on how the United States can bring the troops home and what the human costs of American wars in the Middle East are.
The panelists included Fletcher, of Trans Africa Forum, and Mazin Qumsiyeh, an author and intellectual. Trans Africa Forum is a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating the general public on the social, political, and economic ramifications of U.S. foreign policy on blacks around the world. Mazin Qumsiyeh authored the new book, "Sharing the Land of Canaan: Human Rights and the Israeli-Palestinian Struggle."
Fletcher said anti-war movements tend to be successful after the war had started. However, Fletcher said the movement has yet to be successful because it lost momentum when people saw that Bush would not let down on his decision to go to war in Iraq.
"I think we have to change the common sense of this country," Fletcher said regarding his view of America as a bully who thinks it is "on top of the world."
Qumsiyeh pointed to the fact that the language used by the media makes it seem as though the battle to take control of Fallujah is a fight for a prize. He pointed to a Time magazine cover that said "Street Fight: Inside the Battle for Fallujah."
"It's the war on Fallujah, not for Fallujah," he corrected.
Qumsiyeh pointed to the fact that the U.S. military said there have been 1,600 insurgents killed, but, according to him, there is no way of knowing if they really were insurgents. He said that thousands of civilians have been killed; males between the ages of 14 and 60 are not allowed to leave the city.
"Anyone who moved was shot," he said.
Fletcher said he wanted to add a cautionary note in addition to what an audience member asked.
"We often respond when body bags are coming back and to monstrous costs," he said, as he made the point that this is an ideological battle. Fletcher said that the American right-wing has made fighting the war on terrorism a matter of principles, where they are willing to make sacrifices to fight terrorism in order to see that justice prevails.
"If we do not challenge the premise, sophistry works," he said.
Qumsiyeh said a way to strengthen the peace movement is to speak to groups like churches and synagogues who are the most organized groups out there.
Art professor Meyer Alewitz concluded the panel by saying that "the stakes are much greater now than with Vietnam."
Julie A. Varughese can be reached at jvarughese
@newbritainherald.com or (860) 225-4601, ext. 223.
-----
Additional fence and barbed wire fail to stop Latin school protest
Associated Press
Elliott Minor
November 21st 2004
http://www.soaw.org/new/newswire_detail.php?id=596
COLUMBUS, Ga. - At least 20 demonstrators were arrested Sunday, on charges ranging from trespassing to wearing a mask, as a record 16,000 people protested against a Fort Benning school for Latin soldiers.
Seventeen of the arrests were federal trespassing charges for people who scaled chain-link fences, some topped with coils of barbed wire, to carry the protest into military property, said Bill Quigley, legal adviser for the protest group.
One who attempted to enter illegally was Ed Lewinson, 74, a blind, retired Seton Hall University professor. One protester was charged with the unusual crime of wearing a mask. A law aimed at the Ku Klux Klan makes it illegal to wear masks in Georgia except on "special occasions," although the rule is seldom invoked.
Organizers of the star-studded protest by School of the Americas Watch said concern about the war in Iraq and President Bush's re-election boosted attendance to the record 16,000.
Oscar-winning actress Susan Sarandon addressed the group on Saturday, and Martin Sheen, who plays the president in NBC's "West Wing" TV series, delivered a fiery speech on Sunday.
George Wendt, who played norm in the TV series, "Cheers," carried a cross during the group's traditional funeral procession to honor alleged victims of SOA graduates. Because of the huge number of protesters this year, the procession lasted more than two hours, about an hour longer than usual. Some carried signs that said, "Drop Bush, not bombs," and "Shut down the SOA."
"All we can do is be a presence," said Sheen, who has been arrested but not jailed for trespassing during previous demonstrations. "It's no secret that the country has been very much to the right... Any protest is taken as unpatriotic. So it's very important to speak up."
SOA Watch has been holding vigils at Fort Benning's front gate since 1990 to call for the closing of the School of the Americas, now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. They blame school graduates for human rights abuses, including murders of six Jesuits in El Salvador in 1989, and exploitation of the poor and the natural resources of Latin America.
"We gather to revive the memory of those who have died at the hands of this combat school," said the group's founder, the Rev. Roy Bourgeois, a Catholic priest who served as a Naval officer during the Vietnam War. "How do you teach democracy behind the barrel of a gun? If they are so concerned about teaching democracy, then why not close this school and send these students to some of our fine universities."
In previous years, Army officials have held news conferences to deny the group's claims, but this year they offered no response.
The Army recently erected a second 10-foot chain link fence, topped by coils of concertina wire, inside the post's outer fence, which was topped by strands of barbed wire. But neither of the fences proved adequate to stop some of the young protesters, who seemed to scamper over the barriers with relative ease.
The vigil attracted college students and activists, young and old, from all over the country. Speakers included a Marine veteran of the Iraq war and a mother who lost her son in Iraq.
"The pre-emptive war and the torture is an affront to God," said Celeste Zappala, whose son, Sherwood Baker, 30, was killed on April 26. He was a member of the Pennsylvania National Guard.
"Let us not think of these casualties as just casualties," said Zappala, from Philadelphia. "They were someone's beloved."
-------
------- 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.