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NUCLEAR
Einstein peer blasts Bush administration for its nuclear stance
Hydrogen Production Method Could Bolster Fuel Supplies
Physicist Martin Berger; Studied Radiation
Uranium cleanups may lean on weeds
Gulf War syndrome revisited
Pakistan's PM reiterates commitment to nuclear, missile plan
Iran 'has secret nuclear lab'
Iran vows not to give up demand for exempting 20 centrifuges
Iran apparently agrees to stop enrichment
MILITARY
Ivory Coast colonel says he saw French troops fire on crowd
Israel to purchase Indian copter in bilateral weapons deal
Relatives fear for forgotten war wounded
U.S. uses napalm gas in Fallujah - Witnesses
FALLUJAH NAPALMED
FARC said to call for attack on Bush
US building army base near Iran border
After Falluja, U.S. Troops Fight a New Battle
Marines Widen Their Net South of Baghdad
Scandal-shocked Israelis ask if the army has lost its way
Only Palestinian security forces should carry arms: Abbas
A Girl's Chilling Death in Gaza
Arafat family stirs pot of death conspiracies
US urges ban on antitank mines, but will shun Nairobi talks
Troops Hunting Al Qaeda Members Withdrawn
CIA Documents Show Bush Knew of 2002 Coup in Venezuela
White House Gets Involved In CIA, FBI Talent Search
Blue-ribbon panel to recommend UNSC reform
POLITICS
Hating America on Fox: An Open Letter to John Gibson
Neocons join the lynch mob for 'arrogant' Rumsfeld
Ukrainian Parliament Declares Vote Invalid
Comment: Michael Portillo:
OTHER
Quick update on Ashcroft v. Raich
Homeless Could Use More Reason To Give Thanks
In the Wide-Open Spaces, A Shelter for the Homeless
ACTIVISTS
Kuwaiti anti-war cleric sentenced
Focus: Talking about a revolution
Actress Vanessa Redgrave Helps to Launch Human Rights Party
-------- NUCLEAR
Einstein peer blasts Bush administration for its nuclear stance
posted by zogger
Sunday November 28, 2004
Technocrat.net
http://technocrat.net/article.pl?sid=04/11/28/239218
Physicist Joseph Rotblat in an interview gives his thoughts on "The Bomb", politics and why he doesn't like where things are going.
From the interview intro: "Joseph Rotblat has been a nuclear scientist since 1937, virtually the beginnings of nuclear science. A member of the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb, he resigned from the project, has been working since -- for more than 50 years -- on nuclear disarmament.
He is the last surviving signatory on the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, a document penned by Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein in 1955 and signed by 11 of the prominent nuclear scientists of the time. The Manifesto called attention to the danger of nuclear weapons eliminating the human race, and urged governments to wake up and find other solutions to conflict. The press release announcing the Manifesto was chaired by Dr. Rotblat.
In 1957 he co-founded Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, now an organization with national groups in over 50 countries dedicated to eliminating the nuclear threat and finding peaceful solutions to conflict. In 1995, Dr. Rotblat shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Pugwash. The interview that follows was conducted in his office at the London, England office of Pugwash, on October 25, 2004. " ...long Q and A interview at article link.
From the answer on why he thought the two great thinkers would author such a piece, part of his reply
" ....We felt that we must warn people, the governments. We had to tell them. People didn't realize the great danger. The manifesto tells them that if the human race is to survive, you must stop having wars."
Below is the Manifesto in its entirety:
" The Russell-Einstein Manifesto
Issued in London, 9 July 1955
IN the tragic situation which confronts humanity, we feel that scientists should assemble in conference to appraise the perils that have arisen as a result of the development of weapons of mass destruction, and to discuss a resolution in the spirit of the appended draft.
We are speaking on this occasion, not as members of this or that nation, continent, or creed, but as human beings, members of the species Man, whose continued existence is in doubt. The world is full of conflicts; and, overshadowing all minor conflicts, the titanic struggle between Communism and anti-Communism.
Almost everybody who is politically conscious has strong feelings about one or more of these issues; but we want you, if you can, to set aside such feelings and consider yourselves only as members of a biological species which has had a remarkable history, and whose disappearance none of us can desire.
We shall try to say no single word which should appeal to one group rather than to another. All, equally, are in peril, and, if the peril is understood, there is hope that they may collectively avert it.
We have to learn to think in a new way. We have to learn to ask ourselves, not what steps can be taken to give military victory to whatever group we prefer, for there no longer are such steps; the question we have to ask ourselves is: what steps can be taken to prevent a military contest of which the issue must be disastrous to all parties?
The general public, and even many men in positions of authority, have not realized what would be involved in a war with nuclear bombs. The general public still thinks in terms of the obliteration of cities. It is understood that the new bombs are more powerful than the old, and that, while one A-bomb could obliterate Hiroshima, one H-bomb could obliterate the largest cities, such as London, New York, and Moscow.
No doubt in an H-bomb war great cities would be obliterated. But this is one of the minor disasters that would have to be faced. If everybody in London, New York, and Moscow were exterminated, the world might, in the course of a few centuries, recover from the blow. But we now know, especially since the Bikini test, that nuclear bombs can gradually spread destruction over a very much wider area than had been supposed.
It is stated on very good authority that a bomb can now be manufactured which will be 2,500 times as powerful as that which destroyed Hiroshima. Such a bomb, if exploded near the ground or under water, sends radio-active particles into the upper air. They sink gradually and reach the surface of the earth in the form of a deadly dust or rain. It was this dust which infected the Japanese fishermen and their catch of fish. No one knows how widely such lethal radio-active particles might be diffused, but the best authorities are unanimous in saying that a war with H-bombs might possibly put an end to the human race. It is feared that if many H-bombs are used there will be universal death, sudden only for a minority, but for the majority a slow torture of disease and disintegration.
Many warnings have been uttered by eminent men of science and by authorities in military strategy. None of them will say that the worst results are certain. What they do say is that these results are possible, and no one can be sure that they will not be realized. We have not yet found that the views of experts on this question depend in any degree upon their politics or prejudices. They depend only, so far as our researches have revealed, upon the extent of the particular expert's knowledge. We have found that the men who know most are the most gloomy.
Here, then, is the problem which we present to you, stark and dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war? People will not face this alternative because it is so difficult to abolish war.
The abolition of war will demand distasteful limitations of national sovereignty. But what perhaps impedes understanding of the situation more than anything else is that the term "mankind" feels vague and abstract. People scarcely realize in imagination that the danger is to themselves and their children and their grandchildren, and not only to a dimly apprehended humanity. They can scarcely bring themselves to grasp that they, individually, and those whom they love are in imminent danger of perishing agonizingly. And so they hope that perhaps war may be allowed to continue provided modern weapons are prohibited.
This hope is illusory. Whatever agreements not to use H-bombs had been reached in time of peace, they would no longer be considered binding in time of war, and both sides would set to work to manufacture H-bombs as soon as war broke out, for, if one side manufactured the bombs and the other did not, the side that manufactured them would inevitably be victorious.
Although an agreement to renounce nuclear weapons as part of a general reduction of armaments would not afford an ultimate solution, it would serve certain important purposes. First, any agreement between East and West is to the good in so far as it tends to diminish tension. Second, the abolition of thermo-nuclear weapons, if each side believed that the other had carried it out sincerely, would lessen the fear of a sudden attack in the style of Pearl Harbour, which at present keeps both sides in a state of nervous apprehension. We should, therefore, welcome such an agreement though only as a first step.
Most of us are not neutral in feeling, but, as human beings, we have to remember that, if the issues between East and West are to be decided in any manner that can give any possible satisfaction to anybody, whether Communist or anti-Communist, whether Asian or European or American, whether White or Black, then these issues must not be decided by war. We should wish this to be understood, both in the East and in the West.
There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity, and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise; if you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death.
Resolution:
WE invite this Congress, and through it the scientists of the world and the general public, to subscribe to the following resolution:
"In view of the fact that in any future world war nuclear weapons will certainly be employed, and that such weapons threaten the continued existence of mankind, we urge the governments of the world to realize, and to acknowledge publicly, that their purpose cannot be furthered by a world war, and we urge them, consequently, to find peaceful means for the settlement of all matters of dispute between them."
Max Born Percy W. Bridgman Albert Einstein Leopold Infeld Frederic Joliot-Curie Herman J. Muller Linus Pauling Cecil F. Powell Joseph Rotblat Bertrand Russell Hideki Yukawa "
--------
Hydrogen Production Method Could Bolster Fuel Supplies
By MATTHEW L. WALD
November 28, 2004
NY TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/28/politics/28hydrogen.html?pagewanted=print&position=
WASHINGTON, Nov. 27 - Researchers at a government nuclear laboratory and a ceramics company in Salt Lake City say they have found a way to produce pure hydrogen with far less energy than other methods, raising the possibility of using nuclear power to indirectly wean the transportation system from its dependence on oil.
The development would move the country closer to the Energy Department's goal of a "hydrogen economy," in which hydrogen would be created through a variety of means, and would be consumed by devices called fuel cells, to make electricity to run cars and for other purposes. Experts cite three big roadblocks to a hydrogen economy: manufacturing hydrogen cleanly and at low cost, finding a way to ship it and store it on the vehicles that use it, and reducing the astronomical price of fuel cells.
"This is a breakthrough in the first part," said J. Stephen Herring, a consulting engineer at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory, which plans to announce the development on Monday with Cerametec Inc. of Salt Lake City.
The developers also said the hydrogen could be used by oil companies to stretch oil supplies even without solving the fuel cell and transportation problems.
Mr. Herring said the experimental work showed the "highest-known production rate of hydrogen by high-temperature electrolysis."
But the plan requires the building of a new kind of nuclear reactor, at a time when the United States is not even building conventional reactors. And the cost estimates are uncertain.
The heart of the plan is an improvement on the most convenient way to make hydrogen, which is to run electric current through water, splitting the H2O molecule into hydrogen and oxygen. This process, called electrolysis, now has a drawback: if the electricity comes from coal, which is the biggest source of power in this country, then the energy value of the ingredients - the amount of energy given off when the fuel is burned - is three and a half to four times larger than the energy value of the product. Also, carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions increase when the additional coal is burned.
Hydrogen can also be made by mixing steam with natural gas and breaking apart both molecules, but the price of natural gas is rising rapidly.
The new method involves running electricity through water that has a very high temperature. As the water molecule breaks up, a ceramic sieve separates the oxygen from the hydrogen. The resulting hydrogen has about half the energy value of the energy put into the process, the developers say. Such losses may be acceptable, or even desirable, because hydrogen for a nuclear reactor can be substituted for oil, which is imported and expensive, and because the basic fuel, uranium, is plentiful.
The idea is to build a reactor that would heat the cooling medium in the nuclear core, in this case helium gas, to about 1,000 degrees Celsius, or more than 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. The existing generation of reactors, used exclusively for electric generation, use water for cooling and heat it to only about 300 degrees Celsius.
The hot gas would be used two ways. It would spin a turbine to make electricity, which could be run through the water being separated. And it would heat that water, to 800 degrees Celsius. But if electricity demand on the power grid ran extremely high, the hydrogen production could easily be shut down for a few hours, and all of the energy could be converted to electricity, designers say.
The goal is to create a reactor that could produce about 300 megawatts of electricity for the grid, enough to run about 300,000 window air-conditioners, or produce about 2.5 kilos of hydrogen per second. When burned, a kilo of hydrogen has about the same energy value as a gallon of unleaded regular gasoline. But fuel cells, which work without burning, get about twice as much work out of each unit of fuel. So if used in automotive fuel cells, the reactor might replace more than 400,000 gallons of gasoline per day.
The part of the plan that the laboratory and the ceramics company have tested is high-temperature electrolysis. There is only limited experience building high-temperature gas-cooled reactors, though, and no one in this country has ordered any kind of big reactor, even those of more conventional design, in 30 years, except for those whose construction was canceled before completion.
Another problem is that the United States has no infrastructure for shipping large volumes of hydrogen. Currently, most hydrogen is produced at the point where it is used, mostly in oil refineries. Hydrogen is used to draw the sulfur out of crude oil, and to break up hydrocarbon molecules that are too big for use in liquid fuel, and change the carbon-hydrogen ratio to one more favorable for vehicle fuel.
Mr. Herring suggested another use, however: recovering usable fuel from the Athabasca Tar Sands in Alberta, Canada. The reserves there may hold the largest oil deposits in the world, but extracting them and converting them into a gasoline substitute requires copious amounts of steam and hydrogen, both products of the reactor.
-------
Physicist Martin Berger; Studied Radiation
Washington Post
By Joe Holley
November 28, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17030-2004Nov27.html
Martin J. Berger, 82, a physicist whose early work and calculations have become standard reference data for the radiologic sciences, died Nov. 6 of an intracranial hemorrhage as the result of a fall at a Bethesda gas station. A Bethesda resident, he had lived in the Washington area since 1952.
During his long career, Dr. Berger conducted research in mathematical physics on the penetration, diffusion and slowing of high-energy radiations through matter. His work in the 1950s focused on the development of gamma-ray transport theory and Monte Carlo calculations, a computer technique for arriving at an approximate solution to mathematical and physical problems. He also worked on charged-particle transport, with an emphasis on electrons and protons.
His findings not only provided basic radiation data but remain pertinent to modern medical radiation dosage research, including medical protocols and therapy planning.
Those findings had biomedical applications to nuclear medicine, cancer therapy and space science, fields in which scientists and engineers relied on his discoveries to build radiation shields for people and equipment on spacecraft. His work also was useful in the study of food preservation and sterilization.
Dr. Berger was born in Vienna. He was 16 when Germany annexed Austria in 1938. He was able to escape to England, where he spent 18 months living in a refugee camp for boys and with various English families, but never saw his parents again.
Helped by a Quaker family in the Philadelphia area, he immigrated to the United States in 1940 and became a U.S. citizen in 1944.
He didn't finish high school but was encouraged by an older cousin, a scientist, to study physics on his own. He took a University of Chicago entrance exam and was accepted.
After receiving his bachelor of science degree in physics, he served in the U.S. Army in the Aleutian Islands from 1944 to 1946. He returned to the University of Chicago after the war and studied physics, receiving a master of science degree in 1948 and a doctorate in 1951. His thesis work involved the scattering of fast charged particles. He also completed a postdoctoral fellowship in statistics in the early 1950s.
In 1952, he joined the staff of the National Bureau of Standards, now the National Institute of Standards and Technology, in the Radiation Theory Section. He became chief of the section in 1964. In 1978, he became the group leader of the Radiation Theory Group, a position he held until retiring in 1988.
From his retirement until his death, he continued to work on radiation transport problems under contracts with the National Institute of Standards and Technology and others.
He was considered the father of modern electron and proton Monte Carlo methods. He wrote more than 140 scientific applications, including the seminal 1963 monograph, "Monte Carlo Calculation of the Penetration and Diffusion of Fast Charged Particles." Monte Carlo techniques, using machine-generated random numbers, are a tool for answering questions that cannot be addressed easily by experimental investigations.
---------
Uranium cleanups may lean on weeds
The Denver Post
By Electa Draper
November 28, 2004
http://www.indystar.com/articles/4/198131-6584-010.html
Troublesome weed and symbol of the West's vast open desert, the tumbling tumbleweed captures more than imaginations -- it traps uranium.
The recently released work of a researcher at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology shows that a good crop of tumbleweeds, harvested before their windblown travels begin, could be an effective tool in absorbing toxic heavy metals from soil at inactive uranium mines and other contaminated areas. The EPA estimates that the western United States has as many as 12,000 inactive mines.
With Department of Defense funding, researcher Dana Ulmer-Scholle tested tumbleweeds at two New Mexico sites: an old mine near Grants and an unidentified military training facility. Such sites, contaminated by depleted uranium from spent armor-piercing munitions, are hard and costly to clean up the conventional way -- by removing, transporting, reburying and encasing tons of dirt.
The use of enough tumbleweeds could complete some projects in a decade or so, Ulmer-Scholle said.
It's long been known that some plants absorb metals they don't need, Ulmer-Scholle said. There are arsenic-loving ferns. Old-time prospectors learned to train their Geiger counters on junipers to find buried uranium lodes. And Ulmer-Scholle had hoped some native grasses also would be good at capturing uranium.
But nuisance tumbleweeds, both the somewhat spherical Russian thistle and the Christmas-tree-shaped kochia, absorb uranium at much greater rates.
Research continues. But the uranium-enriched plants likely would be harvested and burned. The uranium would be filtered out and disposed of in hazardous waste dumps.
------- depleted uranium
Gulf War syndrome revisited
Nov 28, 2004
axisoflogic.com
By Vicki Brower
http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_13951.shtml
As troops returned home from the war in Iraq in late April, many wondered whether some would soon fall ill, as did thousands of those who fought in the first Gulf War (GWI) in 1991. During the past 12 years, nearly half of the 700,000 GWI veterans have sought treatment for a wide range of symptoms that many suspect were linked to exposure to depleted uranium, pesticides, vaccines, particulate matter and gases from burning oil wells, biological and chemical weapons, and the anti-nerve-gas drug pyridostigmine bromide (PB). About 29% of soldiers who were deployed are now considered to be disabled due to their wartime service, 23% are receiving disability benefits, and tens of thousands of the rest are still plagued by illness, but do not fall into these categories because of the lack of a clear-cut diagnosis.
For more than a decade, soldiers were told that no single cause, except stress, could explain complaints as diverse as headaches, dizziness, fatigue, bone and joint pain, memory loss, problems with sleep and concentration, muscle weakness, skin rashes and sores, and gastrointestinal problems. The US government cited statistics that showed that GWI veterans were not dying or being hospitalized at higher rates than other soldiers. However, it could not explain how stress could wreak such havoc on health, or why GWI veterans were being diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) at twice the rate of other groups. But new research is putting the stress diagnosis to rest and, after 12 years of desperation for the veterans, answers to the mystery surrounding GW syndrome are being found. This should lead not only to effective treatments, but also to more protection for soldiers and the general population against future military and terrorist attacks.
In June 2002, the 12-member Research Advisory Committee (RAC) on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses released an interim report that brought together studies pointing to several types of neurological damage in the afflicted veterans (http://www.va.gov/RAC-GWVI). In the following October, the US government's "The [US] government is finally realizing that the nature of war is changing, and that soldiers can be damaged by weapons other than bullets and bombs" Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) made a 180-degree turnaround by publicly acknowledging that strong evidence exists that many GWI veterans are suffering from brain damage caused by different combinations of exposure to toxins. Deputy Secretary Leo Mackay Jr admitted in an address to the RAC that, in the past, the US government had "a tin ear, cold heart and a closed mind" about toxic chemical exposure and drug-chemical interactions as possible causes of GW syndrome. "The [US] government is finally realizing that the nature of war is changing, and that soldiers can be damaged by weapons other than bullets and bombs," said Steve Robinson, Executive Director of the National Gulf War Resource Center (NGWRC; Silver Spring, MD, USA; http://www.ngwrc.org), a veterans' health advocacy group that was founded in 1995. According to this organization, incidences of illness in forward-deployed GWI units are higher than those in non-deployed units; 42% of those who entered Iraq and Kuwait are ill, as compared with 31% who served on land in support areas, and 21% who served on ships. Length of service, as well as location, is also significant, with longer tours correlating to more symptoms.
Along with earlier studies, evidence from research funded by the US Department of Defense (DoD) and published in the British Medical Journal (K. Ismail et al., 325, 576; 2002), was, said Mackay, undeniable. The study was conducted at three London hospitals and followed 12,000 disabled British veterans from the Bosnian and Gulf wars. The authors had previously hypothesized that a psychological condition, similar to stress, was the cause of GW syndrome, but the new study found that "post-traumatic stress disorder is not higher in Gulf veterans than in other veterans." Under the weight of this evidence, the DVA pledged to double the budget for research into the illness to an annual US $20 million. Another reason for the US government's about-turn is the recognition that the biological and chemical agents that the soldiers encountered in the desert in 1991 are the ones that terrorists are threatening to use against the general population, suggested Robinson. ...the biological and chemical agents that the soldiers encountered in the desert in 1991 are the ones that terrorists are threatening to use against the general population...
The Office of the Special Assistant for Gulf War Illnesses (OSAGWI) was formed in 1997, but "it spent almost $250 million until 2002 without publishing any med-ical research report or offering a single treatment program for ill GW veterans," Robinson observed. Indeed, in 1997, the General Accounting Office (GAO), the investigatory arm of US Congress, reported that some researchers thought that they would not receive funding for research into the syndrome because of the DoD's position, and that it would be useless to try. Of the research that has been performed, much of the groundbreaking work was started about eight years ago by Robert Haley of Southwestern Texas Medical School (Dallas, TX, USA), formerly at the Centers for Disease Control (Atlanta, GA, USA). Initially, Haley was funded by the Texan millionaire Ross Perot. Using magnetic resonance spectroscopy, Haley and others showed evidence of neuronal loss in the basal ganglia and brainstems of ill soldiers, and this research is summarized in the RAC Interim Report. "Veterans with cognitive problems show neuronal loss in the basal ganglia; those with muscle and joint problems show loss in the brain stem," it states. ...all three [GW] syndromes were strongly associated with exposure to acetylcholinesterase (AChE)-inhibiting organophosphates or carbamates
In 1997, Haley reported that there are three primary syndromes in GWI veterans: syndrome 1 (impaired cognition) includes distractibility, forgetfulness, depression and daytime somnolence; syndrome 2 (confusion-ataxia) is characterized by more profound reduced intellectual processing, confusion, frequent disorientation and episodes of vertigo; syndrome 3 (central pain) is characterized by chronic somatic pain and parethesias of the extremities. Notably, Haley reported that all three syndromes were strongly associated with exposure to acetylcholinesterase (AchE)-inhibiting organophosphates or carbamates. Syndrome 1 correlates to organophosphate pesticides in flea collars; syndrome 2 correlates to apparent low-level nerve agent exposure and advanced side-effects of PB; and syndrome 3 is also associated with exposure to PB and high concentrations of DEET insect repellant. Hans Kang, of the Central Veterans Affairs Office, surveyed 20,000 samples from deployed and non-deployed veterans from the GWI era and found three syndromes closely resembling those identified by Haley. He concluded that syndrome 2 was found only in the deployed GWI population and that these patients were most likely to be unemployed due to their symptoms. Research at the Hebrew University (Jerusalem, Israel) led by Hermona Soreq, PhD, has shown that AChE-inhibitors induce the long-term production of a variant form of an enzyme that is associated with animals that have electrophysiological hyperactivity, impaired working memory, hypersensitivity to head injury and weakened muscles. Earlier work by her group showed that PB crosses the blood-brain barrier more easily in stressed animals.
Other key findings from the affected veterans include an increased cold sensory threshold, abnormal audiovestibular tests that reflect subtle damage to brainstem reflex pathways and abnormal autonomic nervous system function, which is shown by an atypical heart rate during sleep. This could also explain the common complaints of poor sleep, morning fatigue, chronic pathogen-free diarrhoea and an increase in cholecystitis. Soldiers with syndrome 2, who had more brain cell damage in the left basal ganglia, had higher levels of brain dopamine production, a finding that is compatible with the upregulation of dopamine receptors after damage to dopaminergic pathways in basal ganglia.
Haley and others also found a genetic component to GW syndrome. Compared with a control sample, 26 affected veterans had much lower levels of the enzymes paraoxonase (PON1) and butyrylcholinesterase (BChE), which are responsible for inactivating organophosphates, and the levels were particularly low in those with syndrome 2. Mutation of the PON1 gene is also associated with the development of Parkinson's disease (I. Kondo & M. Yamamoto, Brain Research, 806, 271-273; 1998). Interestingly, sheep-dippers in the UK that had fatigue-cognitive-pain syndromes that are similar to GW syndrome and chronic fatigue syndrome, had the same gene variant (N. Cherry et al., Lancet, 359, 763-764; 2002). Japanese researchers have cited the same PON1 genotype in Asians as a possible explanation for the high impact of the low-level sarin exposures in the 1995 terrorist attack on the Tokyo subway. All these risk factors-exposures to environmental toxins, genetics, low-level nerve agents, depleted uranium, stress, medical countermeasures to bio- and chemical weapons, and combinations thereof-are also relevant to domestic terrorism preparedness, the report notes.
As in the Vietnam War, GWI was marked by poor record-keeping of toxic exposures, and much of what was available mysteriously disappeared, said Robinson. Veterans who became ill after contact with Agent Orange in Vietnam struggled for years to get the US government to acknowledge that contact had occurred and had a corresponding direct and negative effect on their health. A recent study stated that two million more gallons of Agent Orange and other defoliants had been sprayed over Vietnam than earlier estimates suggested (J.M. Stellman et al., Nature, 422, 681-687; 2003). GWI veterans face similar systematic cover-ups of exposures to chemical weapons and other toxins, according to congressman Chris Shays and others. In addition to records being destroyed, soldiers who were given vaccinations and prophylactic PB were not always told what they were taking. The US government's position was that toxic exposures could not be verified because sensors in the field were "unreliable." One source said that when marines crossed Iraqi minefields to reach Kuwait during GWI, they were exposed to poisonous gas. But with no accurate records, it was impossible to say that GWI veterans were ill because of the war-time exposures, the government said. Only time will tell whether veterans of the second Gulf War will suffer the same illnesses as those from the first
In 1997, the government finally admitted that soldiers were exposed to poisonous gas when they bombed the Khamisiyah chemical depot during GWI. The estimated numbers of those exposed started at 100, then rose to 10,000, then 15, 000, and finally reached 100,000. Last year, before Michael Kilpatrick was moved from leading the OSAGWI to run the public relations campaign for the second GW, he said that any modelling to determine the exposure and dose rates of poisonous gas at Khamisiyah or elsewhere was "a wild-ass guess"-and indicated that the real number could be much higher than 100,000. Veterans who served at Khamisiyah and Al Jubayl (another chemical depot that was destroyed) are 37% more likely to have one or more service-connected conditions than other veterans, according to the NGWRC.
Despite efforts to cover up the facts, the NGWRC maintains that more than 250,000 GWI veterans received the drug PB, which was under investigation at the time, and which the Pentagon now admits it cannot rule out as a possible cause of GW syndrome. Eight thousand servicemen received the botulinum toxoid vaccine, 150,000 received the now-controversial anthrax vaccine, and 436,000 either entered or lived for months in areas contaminated by more than 315 tons of toxic waste, possibly containing trace amounts of highly radioactive plutonium and neptunium, without awareness, protective gear or medical evaluations. Hundreds of thousands lived outdoors near 700 burning oil-well fires for months without protection.
Whether soldiers during the recent war in Iraq were subject to the same or similar toxic exposures is an open question. Only time will tell whether veterans of the second Gulf War will suffer the same illnesses as those from the first. "If they do, the cause this time will not be a mystery," Robinson said. "Now, the only mystery connected to Gulf War syndrome is whether the Department of Defense will do what Congress told them to do." Here, he is referring to a 1998 US law that requires that soldiers receive comprehensive physical examinations, including blood tests, before and after deployment. Before the war began in March, the DoD declared that it had learned from its mistakes; the troops were being equipped with better environmental sensors and other testing apparatus, and better gas masks and suits. It also said that it would assess soldiers' health using brief questionnaires, before and after deployment. However, the protective equipment was substandard and, according to civilian health experts who testified in Congress on March 25, 2003, once-yearly blood tests for HIV do not fulfil the requirements for comprehensive examinations, which should include lab tests and X-rays immediately before and after deployment. Two days later, at the House Armed Services subcommittee, lawmakers noted that many soldiers did not even fill out the questionnaires, and Robinson said that those that did were likely to give answers that would allow them to be deployed and remain with their units. Twelve years after GWI, it seems that the military is making some of the same mistakes again. However, the DoD stated on April 29, 2003, that it would provide a more comprehensive, face-to-face examination for the returning soldiers. Calling it a "first step", Robinson and the NGWRC are still insisting that baseline data should have been collected. Soldiers who are fighting terrorism around the world should not experience the same system failures that GWI veterans continue to face, he added.
http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/embor/journal/v4/n6/full/embor874.html
-------- india / pakistan
Pakistan's PM reiterates commitment to nuclear, missile plan
The News International
November 28, 2004
http://jang.com.pk/thenews/nov2004-daily/28-11-2004/main/main4.htm
RAWALPNDI: Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz on Saturday reiterated commitment to country's nuclear and missile programme and said Pakistan would continue to play a positive role in international efforts aimed at non-proliferation.
The prime minister while attending a briefing here at the Strategic Plans Division, the Secretariat of the National Command Authority, said Pakistan's security was government's highest priority. "Pakistan believes in retaining minimum deterrence as a cornerstone of its national security policy."
Shaukat said Pakistan "as a responsible, declared and acknowledged nuclear power, will continue to play a positive role in international efforts aimed at non-proliferation". He also expressed full satisfaction over the effectiveness of Pakistan's nuclear command and control structures.
"They have ensured that while our nuclear assets are safe and secure, they continue to oversee force development as per our minimum deterrence needs," he added. During his visit to the Strategic Plans Division, the prime minister also attended a detailed briefing on many dimensions of Pakistan's nuclear programme. He said: "The structures, which have now matured since being in place for the last five years, were well conceived and elaborate." The briefing was also attended by Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee General Ehsan-ul-Haq and Vice-Chief of Army Staff Gen Ahsan Saleem Hayat.
-------- iran
Iran 'has secret nuclear lab'
The UK Times
Peter Conradi
November 28, 2004
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1378248,00.html
IRAN is working on a secret nuclear programme for military purposes despite its promise to halt all uranium enrichment activities, a German news magazine claimed yesterday.
Citing documents from an unnamed intelligence agency, Der Spiegel said Iran had set up a laboratory in a secret tunnel near a nuclear facility in Isfahan. This would be able to produce large amounts of uranium hexafluoride gas which could, in turn, be used to enrich uranium - a vital component for a nuclear bomb.
Orders to build the tunnel were given last month by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, the magazine said.
The claims emerged as Britain, France and Germany warned Iran last night it could face sanctions if it does not agree to freeze key parts of its nuclear programme by tomorrow.
The three have hitherto failed to back calls by America to refer Iran to the United Nations Security Council. Their patience appears to be running out, however, after Tehran last week tried to backtrack over a deal agreed in principle earlier this month.
Under the deal, brokered by Britain, France and Germany, Iran is obliged to accept a complete freeze on nuclear technology that could be used to make weapons-grade uranium. The United States has accused it of trying to develop a bomb.
Iran challenged the terms of the agreement during talks at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) last week. It wants to be allowed to operate 20 centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium, for research purposes.
EU officials rejected this, fearing it could boost Iran's capabilities in a crucial area of nuclear weapons development.
Western countries had expected Iran to back down but despite attempts at mediation by Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, the talks were adjourned on Friday without agreement.
Kamal Kharrazi, the Iranian foreign minister, said yesterday that Iran was sticking to its demand for an exemption. "The centrifuges will work under IAEA supervision and will be for research purposes only," he said. The IAEA's board meets again tomorrow.
The administration of President George W Bush is wary of European attempts to broker a deal. In his most positive comments to date on the initiative, Bush praised Britain, France and Germany for their efforts - but said that any agreement would need to be monitored to ensure Iran was honouring the terms.
Iran's latest wriggling has compounded concerns that Tehran, which has repeatedly failed to come clean about its activities during a two-year IAEA investigation, is trying to find a way of continuing clandestinely with its nuclear programme.
Last week the National Council of Resistance of Iran, an opposition group, released details of another site in Laviza, a suburb in northeast Tehran, where it claims that laser enrichment of uranium is under way.
Additional reporting: Tom Walker
--------
Iran drops nuclear exemption demand
Kamal Kharazi: EU did not ban research involving centrifuges
Sunday 28 November 2004,
Aljazeerah
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/F76FA29C-D9A5-4B32-B82A-C3AF0BC91353.htm
Iran has formally withdrawn its demand to exempt research and development of uranium enrichment technologies from a freeze of its enrichment programme, a Western diplomat said.
"The IAEA received a letter from Iran regarding the 20 centrifuges. It seems to cover all the elements and appears to be acceptable (to the EU)," the diplomat, who is close to the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), told reporters on Sunday.
Earlier, France, Britain and Germany warned Iran that if it did not reach a final agreement to freeze parts of its atomic programme by Monday, they would not block UN Security Council moves to impose sanctions against Tehran.
The United States, which has been pressing for Iran's case to be referred to the Security Council, accuses Tehran of wanting to build a nuclear bomb. Iran, though oil rich, says its programme is aimed solely at generating electricity.
Suspicions deepened
Washington has been pressing to refer Tehran to the Security Council, which has the power to impose sanctions. But the EU has so far favoured a softer approach.
Last week, Iran promised the EU it would halt all activities related to uranium enrichment - a process that can create atomic fuel for power plants or weapons - in return for a EU pledge to neutralise the threat of economic sanctions.
The ink on the hard-won accord was barely dry, however, when Tehran demanded an exemption for 20 enrichment centrifuges for research.
European diplomats said this was impossible and could only deepen suspicions that Tehran had a secret arms programme.
'Not worried'
Iran on Sunday said the stand-off should be settled within the framework of the agency, but said being referred to the Security Council would not be "the end of the world".
"We are not worried about going to the Security Council, because it is not the end of the world," foreign ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told reporters.
"But we would prefer it be sorted out in the framework of the agency. There is no reason for it to go to the Security Council. We think the problems will be finally sorted out in the framework" of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Asefi added.
On Friday, Western diplomats said Iranian negotiators had agreed to drop the demand, paving the way for a comprehensive deal with the EU on an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) resolution that would make the voluntary freeze a binding commitment for Tehran.
But Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi appeared to revive the centrifuge demand on Saturday, telling reporters in Tehran the deal with the EU did not ban research and development involving centrifuges - the equipment used to enrich uranium.
"What we want is not against our previous agreement, it is a matter of research and development for which there is no prohibition," he said.
"We have submitted a letter to the IAEA informing them that we want to keep 20 centrifuge systems working. This would be under the supervision of the agency and is only used for helping research projects."
Demands
A European diplomat said Iran agreed to back down on the issue of the 20 centrifuges, but demanded in return the EU should cut a section out of the draft resolution calling for IAEA chief Muhammad al-Baradai to report to the IAEA board of governors if Tehran resumed any enrichment-related activity.
A Western diplomat said Iran also wanted language in the text guaranteeing Iran's right to enrich uranium.
The Europeans want the freeze, once implemented, to be transformed into a termination of Tehran's enrichment programme.
In exchange, the EU is prepared to offer Iran a package of political and economic incentives.
--------
Iran vows not to give up demand for exempting 20 centrifuges
The Associated Press
11/28/2004
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2004-11-28-iran-nukes_x.htm
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Iran toughened its position over its nuclear program Sunday, vowing to maintain its demand to exempt 20 centrifuges it says it wants for research despite international efforts to save a deal committing Tehran to freeze uranium enrichment and all related activities.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi also said Tehran was not worried about being referred to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions.
"The issue of research and development is separate from discussions about suspension," Asefi told reporters Sunday. "We always had research and development in the past and we will continue that in the future. We will use the 20 centrifuges for research."
Iran insists using the 20 centrifuges purely for research is not prohibited by a Nov. 7 agreement worked out with Germany, France and Britain on behalf of the European Union to suspend all uranium enrichment and related activities. The European Union disagrees.
The dispute over Iran's interpretation of the deal stalled an International Atomic Energy Agency board meeting in Vienna, Austria, which was adjourned Friday until Monday.
That was meant to give time for the Iranian government to consider and approve a total freeze of the program - which can produce both low-grade nuclear fuel and weapons-grade material for the core of nuclear warheads - and for delegates to decide on further steps in policing Tehran's nuclear activities.
Asefi said Iran won't give up on its position on the centrifuges, even if time was running out for a final agreement.
"We are negotiating with Europeans to specify the way we are going to use the 20 centrifuges. ... What is important is the legitimate right of our country, and we won't give (that) up," he said.
EU delegates to the Vienna meeting said discussions continued Saturday by phone between British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and Hassan Rowhani, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council and his country's point man on nuclear matters. But they said the Europeans would not budge on insisting on a full freeze that included the centrifuges.
As the board awaited a formal Iranian response, France, Germany and Britain toned down language in a proposed Security Council resolution in an attempt to entice Tehran to sign on to full suspension. The confidential draft, made available to The Associated Press, weakened language on how any freeze would be monitored by the agency. It was said by Western diplomats to be unsatisfactory to the United States.
Still, refusal by Tehran to drop demands to exempt equipment from the enrichment suspension could prompt a much harsher resolution that could include the threat of U.N. Security Council action.
"We are not worried about referral to the U.N. Security Council," Asefi said. "But we prefer that negotiations be continued within the framework of the IAEA because otherwise the capabilities of the agency and Europe will be in doubt."
-----
Iran apparently agrees to stop enrichment
The Associated Press
11/28/2004
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2004-11-28-iran-uranium_x.htm
VIENNA (AP) - Backing down before a Monday deadline, Iran apparently has given up its demand to exempt some equipment from a deal freezing uranium enrichment programs that can make nuclear weapons, diplomats said Sunday.
Diplomats from the European Union and elsewhere said on condition of anonymity that the International Atomic Energy Agency received a letter from Iran containing a pledge not to test some centrifuges during the freeze it agreed to Nov. 7 during negotiations with Britain, France and Germany on behalf of the European Union.
The pledge appeared to resolve a dispute that threatened to escalate into possible referral of Iran to the U.N. Security Council for defying the IAEA board. The Security Council could then impose sanctions against Iran.
On Sunday, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said Tehran was maintaining a demand made Thursday at the start of the IAEA meeting to use the 20 centrifuges. The centrifuges spin gas into enriched uranium.
Tehran had insisted the Nov. 7 deal allowed it to use those centrifuges purely for research, but the EU disagreed.
The diplomats told The Associated Press on Sunday that the letter still needed close examination to determine what exactly the Iranians had agreed to.
Earlier Asefi had said Iran was not worried about being referred to the Security Council.
"What is important is the legitimate right of our country, and we won't give (that) up," he said.
Only if the Iranians agreed to totally suspend enrichment - including all use of the centrifuges - would the dispute be resolved, they said.
The Iranian promise came a day before the IAEA - the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency - was scheduled to reconvene in Vienna amid a building crisis on the issue of enrichment suspension. Iran's program can produce both low-grade nuclear fuel and weapons-grade material for the core of nuclear warheads.
Iran says its program is for generating electricity, but the United States insists Iran is trying to make nuclear weapons. President Bush called Iran part of an "axis of evil" with North Korea and prewar Iraq.
The IAEA meeting adjourned Friday with the intention of giving Tehran until Monday to approve a total freeze of its enrichment program. Delegates also were to decide on further steps in policing Tehran's nuclear activities.
France, Britain and Germany say a Nov. 7 deal they worked out with Iran includes all equipment as part of he freeze - but Tehran had insisted it had a right to run some centrifuges for research and development purposes.
Iranian officials had suggested the issue of using 20 centrifuges for research was not up for debate only hours before the revelations that they had apparently dropped their demands.
"Referral to the U.N. Security Council would not be the end of the world," Asefi said in Tehran earlier Sunday.
The Europeans say the deal committed Iran to full suspension of enrichment and all related activities - at least while the two sides discuss a pact meant to provide Iran with EU technical and economic aid and other concessions.
EU delegates to the Vienna meeting said British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw spoke this weekend with Hassan Rowhani, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council and his country's point man on nuclear matters, in an effort to resolve the dispute.
As the clock ticked down to Monday, EU officials and delegates spoke of the growing likelihood of tough action at the board meeting if Iran remained defiant - including the start of work on a harsh resolution that could include the threat of U.N. Security Council action.
Hinting at the possibility of such a draft, one of the EU delegates said Iran was "fully aware" of the consequences of not accepting a full freeze.
That would mean withdrawing a draft resolution written last week by Britain, France and Germany containing intentionally weak language on how any freeze would be monitored by the agency in an attempt to entice Tehran to sign on to total suspension.
That confidential draft, made available to the AP, authorized IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei to "pursue his investigations" into remaining suspicious aspects of Iran's nuclear activities over the past two decades.
-------- MILITARY
-------- africa
Ivory Coast colonel says he saw French troops fire on crowd
ABIDJAN (AFP)
Nov 28, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041128205446.jwmj0bsv.html
A senior Ivory Coast police official said Sunday he saw French troops fire "directly" at unarmed demonstrators during an anti-French rally earlier this month.
Colonel Georges Guiai Bi Poin said he was in charge of about 60 gendarmes outside the Hotel Ivoire to prevent demonstrators from storming the building.
He told AFP: "French troops fired directly into the crowd. They opened fire on the orders of their chief Colonel D'Estremon. Without warning."
Guiai Bi Poin said he was at the French colonel's side in the hotel lobby throughout the night.
Almost three weeks after the incident it still remains unclear what exactly happened during the protest and how many people died and were wounded.
Ivorian authorities have said that 57 civilians were killed and that more than 2,200 people were wounded between November 6 and 10, including an unconfirmed number by French troops, but they never released a toll of the specific Hotel Ivoire incident which took place on November 9.
Followers of President Laurent Gbagbo accused French soldiers, including snipers hidden in the hotel, of firing on "Young Patriot" Gbagbo loyalists.
Until now, French Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie has insisted that the victims, including an Ivorian gendarme, were killed in clashes between the Young Patriots and Ivory Coast police. The French military says only that shots were fired in the air as warning and "intimidation."
But Alliot-Marie told RTL radio Sunday, without specifically referring to the Hotel Ivoire incident, that some casualties may have been caused by French troops during the demonstrations.
"They were forced to shoot," she said. "They carried out warning shots and, in a few cases, were forced to make full use of their firearms. There was no way of avoiding it."
"There were doubtless a few victims; we don't know for certain because when things take place by night it is very difficult to know what is going on.
"There were also a great number of victims inside the crowds, killed by the crush and also from a number of stray bullets," she said. She insisted that French troops had shown admirable "self-control and restraint" in "abominable circumstances, faced with a crowd armed with Kalachnikov rifles and guns."
Guiai Bi Poin said the crowd at the Hotel Ivoire was yelling insults but was unarmed and did not shoot.
"Not one of my men fired a shot," he said. "There were no shots from the crowd. None of the demonstrators was armed -- not even with sticks, or knives or rocks."
He said that when he reported to the French commander on the day of the riot, he was told: "Colonel, my barbed wire has been crossed, and the crowd is getting excited. If they do not let us leave within 20 minutes, I am going to shoot."
The Ivorian officer said he negotiated with two or three of the protestors who refused to let the French troops return to their base, saying instead they should move to a nearby hotel.
He said there were "insults, and hostile slogans, but we had no interest in firing on the crowd. I hardly left Colonel D'Estremon's side at all. We co-managed the situation between us. I told him to wait -- that we had to go to the end in seeking a negotiated solution before giving orders to do anything else."
"Suddenly," said Guiai Bi Poin, "there was a movement on our left and my gendarmes were pushed violently by the crowd. They fell back a meter or two. D'Estremon then said to me, 'Colonel, the red line has been crossed. I am going to open fire. FIRE!'"
The officer said the French troops began shooting. "It was not a haphazard fusillade. It was carried out on the orders of their chief. And there was no warning."
"I saw his men firing directly at demonstrators less than 10 meters away. There was nothing equivocal. Everything was clear. The entire detachment was shooting, more than 30 soldiers."
Guiai Bi Poin said he yelled at the French officer to fire in the air, to aim higher, "He did this but some of his men did not obey and some continued to fire on the crowd. I saw lots of people falling, but I do not know how many victims there were."
-------- arms
Israel to purchase Indian copter in bilateral weapons deal
Haaretz
By Yossi Melman
November 28, 2004
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/506790.html
The Israel Aircraft Industry and the Defense establishment will purchase an Indian-made helicopter as part of a bilateral purchase agreement between the two countries.
The helicopter, called Dhruv, will be used for civilian purposes, mainly for transporting VIPs.
Under the bilateral weapon deal, the Indian government promised to purchase from Israel the airborne radar system Falcon.
The Israeli commitment in the agreement is estimated at dozens of millions of dollars. Israel also promised to operate and promote the Hindustan Aeronautics helicopter.
IAI pilots have already tested the helicopter and displayed it in an aviation fair in Chile.
IAI spokesman Doron Soslik said that talks were being held between the two sides over the deal and that all its terms are yet to be finalized.
The Dhruv broke in November the world record by flying at an altitude of around 8,000 meters in the Himalayan mountain ridge.
Israel is the second country to purchase the helicopter after Nepal.
-------- britain
Relatives fear for forgotten war wounded
Soldiers speak out as evidence points to high levels of mental and physical injuries in Iraq conflict
The Observer
Jason Burke
November 28, 2004
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1361319,00.html
Nearly 3,000 British soldiers have been evacuated from Iraq to Britain for medical reasons since the beginning of hostilities there last year, The Observer can reveal.
The news will raise concern that the true cost of the British involvement in the war is being hidden. British forces have so far suffered 74 fatalities, details of which are released by the Ministry of Defence. But, in contrast with the Americans, the number of British soldiers wounded on the battlefield is not made public. Modern medical techniques and the widespread use of body armour mean around six men are wounded for every one killed.
The total of troops 'medically evacuated' from the Gulf - 2,754 since 1 March last year - includes soldiers with serious injuries and severe psychological disorders. The latest figures from the MoD show that 461 soldiers deployed in Iraq have been treated for mental health problems, 50 of whom were diagnosed as suffering from serious post-traumatic stress disorders. At least 12 have lost one or more limbs and scores more have suffered permanent harm from traumatic brain injuries or wounds that damage organs or the spine.
Serving soldiers cannot talk to the press, but one seriously injured infantryman's father told The Observer that men such as his son, who had had much of one leg shot away, risked being 'forgotten'.
'No one is talking about those who have been disabled for life. War cripples healthy young men and we should remember that,' he said.
MoD figures reveal that more than 80 servicemen have been discharged from the forces for medical reasons since the start of the conflict. Many more are undergoing treatment within the army system, some with terrible injuries.
They include two infantrymen with the Black Watch battle group controversially deployed to assist in the US assault on Falluja. The men had their legs amputated after being caught in a suicide bomb attack last month. In one deployment during the summer a single unit, the 1st Battalion of the Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment, sustained more than 110 casual ties in a six-month tour, around half from enemy action.
Trooper Andy Julien of the Queen's Royal Lancers was left with appalling injuries when his tank was hit by friendly fire in Basra last year. Both his legs were crushed and brain injuries left him blind. After a string of operations, Julien, 19, has regained some of his sight but still cannot walk properly.
'I could cry when I look at the photographs taken at his passing out parade. The son that my husband and I had then is not the son we have now,' Julien's mother said.
'Before this he was a fit, energetic, popular boy, who loved sport. He was always laughing, joking and happy, but now it's rare to get a smile out of him. If he hears about Iraq, he gets so upset he cries.'
Specialists say the conditions in Iraq make psychological injury a high risk. The knowledge that the war is controversial in Britain can undermine soldiers' faith in the justification of taking lives and low-intensity counter-insurgency operations can be more damaging than more conventional combat because the enemy is often indistinguishable from civilians.
There are concerns that the numbers of soldiers with mental health injuries will rise sharply over the coming years. 'We are seeing the tip of the iceberg,' said Toby Elliott, chief executive of Combat Stress, which has registered more than 500 new cases of post-traumatic stress disorder in the last year. 'Some people suffer for decades without seeking help.'
Elliott said his organisation was concerned that many servicemen suffering from post-traumatic stress would discharge themselves from the forces without their condition being spotted by the military. 'That means they leave without care and without anyone aware of their injury,' Elliott said.
Some casualties are taking legal action. One soldier who suffered serious injuries when a US tank transporter rammed her vehicle in Iraq is suing the American military. The £1.2 million claim made by Corporal Jane McLauchlan, 33 - along with two other soldiers from the Royal Military Police and an interpreter - is believed to be the first brought by coalition troops against the US Army since the invasion of Iraq.
McLauchlan, who is still in the army, suffered multiple skull fractures, a fractured neck, a punctured lung, a broken leg, ribs and pelvis and a damaged liver when she was thrown from the marked Land Rover in the crash on 7 May last year. 'She has gone from being a fully operational military policeman to being a clerk,' her lawyer said last week. Last year 1,669 servicemen were 'medically downgraded' like McLauchlan, 468 following battlefield injuries and 140 because of mental and behavioural disorders.
Jerome Church, director of the British Limbless Ex-Servicemen's Association (Blesma) said wounded soldiers received less attention today than previously. 'If someone was injured in Northern Ireland or the Falklands it was on the evening news. You at least had a press release,' he said. 'These days you don't hear about it. Iraq is not as dramatic as the Falklands. It is just a running sore.'
A spokesman for the MoD said: 'At the moment it is not meaningful to issue statistics [for wounded] because of the difficulty of classifying an injury.'
-------- chemical weapons
U.S. uses napalm gas in Fallujah - Witnesses
aljazeera.com
11/28/2004
http://www.aljazeera.com/cgi-bin/news_service/middle_east_full_story.asp?service_id=5875#
A 16 month-old Fallujah child cries while lying in a Baghdad hospital.
The U.S. military is secretly using banned napalm gas and other outlawed weapons against civilians in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, eyewitnesses reported.
Residents in Fallujah reported that innocent civilians have been killed by napalm attacks, a poisonous cocktail of polystyrene and jet fuel which makes the human body melt.
Since the U.S. offensive started in Fallujah earlier this month, there have been reports of "melted" bodies which proves that the napalm gas had been used.
"Poisonous gases have been used in Fallujah," 35-year-old Fallujah resident, Abu Hammad said. "They used everything -- tanks, artillery, infantry, and poisonous gas. Fallujah has been bombed to the ground." Hammad was living in the Julan district of Fallujah which witnessed some of the heaviest attacks.
Other residents of that area also said that banned weapons were used. Abu Sabah, said; "They used these weird bombs that put up smoke like a mushroom cloud... then small pieces fall from the air with long tails of smoke behind them."
He said that pieces of these strange bombs explode into large fires that burn the skin even when water is thrown on the burns.
Phosphorous arms and the napalm gas are known to have such effects. "People suffered so much from these," Abu Sabah said.
Fallujah "almost gone"
Kassem Mohammed Ahmed, who fled Fallujah last week, said that he witnessed many atrocities committed by U.S. troops in the shattered city. "I watched them roll over wounded people in the street with tanks," he said. "This happened so many times."
Another Fallujah resident Khalil (40) said that "Fallujah is suffering too much, it is almost gone now." He added that refugees are in a miserable situation now, "It's a disaster living here at this camp," Khalil said. "We are living like dogs and the kids do not have enough clothes."
In many refugee camps around Fallujah and Baghdad, people are living without enough food, clothing and shelter. Relief groups estimate that there are more than 15,000 refugee families in temporary shelters outside Fallujah.
Blair under fire over the use of napalm
On Saturday, Labor MPs have demanded that British Prime Minister confront the Commons over the use of the deadly gas in Fallujah.
Halifax Labor MP Alice Mahon said: "I am calling on Mr. Blair to make an emergency statement to the Commons to explain why this is happening. It begs the question: 'Did we know about this hideous weapon's use in Iraq?'"
Furious critics have also demanded that Blair threatens the U.S. to pullout British forces from Iraq unless the U.S. stops using the world's deadliest weapon.
The United Nations banned the use of the napalm gas against civilians in 1980 after pictures of a naked wounded girl in Vietnam shocked the world.
The United States, which didn't endorse the convention, is the only nation in the world still using the deadly weapon.
-----
FALLUJAH NAPALMED
US uses banned weapon ..but was Tony Blair told?
sundaymirror.co.uk
By Paul Gilfeather Political Editor
Nov 28 2004
http://www.sundaymirror.co.uk/news/tm_objectid=14920109&method=full&siteid=106694&headline=fallujah-napalmed-name_page.html
US troops are secretly using outlawed napalm gas to wipe out remaining insurgents in and around Fallujah.
News that President George W. Bush has sanctioned the use of napalm, a deadly cocktail of polystyrene and jet fuel banned by the United Nations in 1980, will stun governments around the world.
And last night Tony Blair was dragged into the row as furious Labour MPs demanded he face the Commons over it. Reports claim that innocent civilians have died in napalm attacks, which turn victims into human fireballs as the gel bonds flames to flesh.
Outraged critics have also demanded that Mr Blair threatens to withdraw British troops from Iraq unless the US abandons one of the world's most reviled weapons. Halifax Labour MP Alice Mahon said: "I am calling on Mr Blair to make an emergency statement to the Commons to explain why this is happening. It begs the question: 'Did we know about this hideous weapon's use in Iraq?'"
Since the American assault on Fallujah there have been reports of "melted" corpses, which appeared to have napalm injuries.
Last August the US was forced to admit using the gas in Iraq.
A 1980 UN convention banned the use of napalm against civilians - after pictures of a naked girl victim fleeing in Vietnam shocked the world.
America, which didn't ratify the treaty, is the only country in the world still using the weapon.
-------- colombia
FARC said to call for attack on Bush
The Associated Press
11/28/2004
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2004-11-27-bush-plot_x.htm
BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) - Colombia's main rebel group asked followers to mount an assassination attempt against President Bush during his visit to Colombia last week, Defense Minister Jorge Uribe said. There was no evidence Saturday that rebels even tried to organize such an attack.
Uribe told reporters late Friday that informants said the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as the FARC, told followers to attack Bush during his four-hour visit in the seaside city of Cartagena last Monday, where he met with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe. The defense minister, who is no relation to the president, said security forces were on full alert during the visit. About 15,000 Colombian troops and police, along with U.S. troops and Secret Service agents provided security. There was no indication Bush's life was ever in danger.
Uribe did not say where the informants had heard about the attack.
The Secret Service did not comment on security details, as is its policy.
"We have full confidence in the fine work of the Secret Service and their work with security officials on the ground when the President travels," White House spokesman Jim Morrell said Saturday.
The FARC has declared U.S. troops in Colombia military targets. The troops are training local forces and providing logistics and planning assistance for military operations against the rebels.
However, the rebels never publicly declared Bush a target during his first-ever visit as president to Colombia. Bush visited Colombia after attending a summit in Chile.
-------- iran
US building army base near Iran border
Daily Times
Nov 28, 2004
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_28-11-2004_pg1_7
KABUL: The US-led coalition forces in Afghanistan are working on a military base near the country's western border with Iran.
Locals told the Pajhwok news agency that US forces have been sketching and surveying the land for two months for a 300-hectare airbase in the desert area of Holang, in Ghorian district of Herat province, just 45 kilometres from the Iranian frontier.
Some military commentators believe the development could be linked to rising tensions between the United States and Iran, but the US military and the Afghan government say the base is being built for the Afghan National Army.
The Combined Forces' Command in Kabul confirmed that it is building the base, but strongly rejected the suggestion that it would be only for the coalition forces.
"The US government is building a military base in Ghorian in order to provide transportation facilities for the Afghan National Army," the press office told Pajhwok on Saturday. It declined to comment on whether the base might be seen as a threat by Iran, or how long it would take to complete the project.
The US Provincial Reconstruction Team in Herat said the base would be used for training Afghan National Army soldiers.
There has been no reaction from Iran so far. "We will express our view after contacting relevant authorities inside my country, who will assess this issue," Mohammad Ali Najafi, the Iranian consul in Herat, said.
A spokesman for the Ministry of Defence in Kabul said it was not aware of this issue. The presidential spokesman, Javid Ludin, commented: "The coalition forces have the permission to act against terrorism and for the peace and stability of Afghanistan, and to build a base for that purpose."
He added that no action will be taken without agreement from the government.
Some believe the construction of a base that close to the border could provoke Iranian opposition.
"Creation of a base in a place completely dominating Iranian airspace could provoke an argument from Iran," said Gen Nader Azemi, a commander of the ANA in Herat. But he praised the action as good for security in Herat, in addition to providing full control over the shared border of Afghanistan with Iran.
Local residents confirmed that the US military has been working on a base, with some of them supporting the plan, but others fear the US forces. nni
-------- iraq
After Falluja, U.S. Troops Fight a New Battle Just as Important, and Just as Tough
New York Times
By JOHN F. BURNS
November 28, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/28/international/middleeast/28desert.html?ex=1102598586&ei=1&en=cda81122226e212a
CAMP KALSU, Iraq, Nov. 27 - As American commanders turn their concentration toward the area of sullen towns and villages that straddle the southern approaches to Baghdad, they face a battle that is in many ways as crucial to their hopes as Falluja has been. And they enter a battleground where loyalties to Saddam Hussein and the burning enmity for America are at least as intense.
Without a major success here, the battle for Falluja, 50 miles to the northwest, could come to be seen as a Pyrrhic victory, one that reduced much of the city to rubble, cost more than 50 American combat deaths and prompted many insurgents to move on and regroup for yet more chapters in an ever-lengthening war.
The first days of the new campaign suggest it may outstrip Falluja in the demands it will make on American patience and tactical skills.
Once again, marines are leading the fight here, with the best of Iraq's American-trained troops alongside them. But in this area, known for its ceaseless rounds of suicide bombings and ambushes, there will be no knockout blows with tanks and bombs. Rather, as Marine commanders emphasized when 5,000 troops began the offensive this week, success will be built raid by raid, arrest by arrest, until the latticework of rebel cells in virtually every village and town is weakened and the will to sustain the insurgency is broken.
Commanders expect the main offensive to last another week. But nobody is talking about quick victories, rather of the new raids setting the scene for more later on.
A chart of suspected rebels that was developed over months by American intelligence officers and Iraqi undercover agents, laid out like a genealogical table, measures 10 feet by 4 feet. Unrolled in the command center at this Marine base in the desert southeast of the town of Iskandariya, it lists hundreds of rebel leaders, financiers and fighters, grouped together by family, by tribe and by past links in Mr. Hussein's military, political and intelligence apparatus.
"Every day, we have to stay the course," said Col. Ron Johnson, 48, a native of Duxbury, Mass., who commands the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, whose operational area covers parts of three Iraqi provinces with a combined population of 1.2 million. "We're in here for the long haul," he said.
Still, the mood among Marine officers is cautiously upbeat, and the belief, as put to reporters embedded for the offensive, is that the war here can still be won. The immediate objective is to deal a hard enough blow to the insurgents that plans can proceed for the election scheduled for Jan. 30. On its face, this area, the southernmost extension of the Sunni triangle, running about 60 miles south of Baghdad and about 80 miles across, with the Euphrates River to the west and the Tigris to the east, is about as unpromising a political terrain for those favoring elections as any region in Iraq.
About 60 percent of the population living here, in towns like Mahmudiya, Latifiya, Yusufiya, Iskandariya, Musayyib and Hilla, are Sunnis. The rest are Shiite, a group that accounts for about 60 percent of the Iraqi population and strongly favors the election as a way station to Shiite majority rule.
But the religious breakdown alone cannot explain the insurgency's intensity. Sunnis here were favored for decades by Mr. Hussein, who made the area immediately south of Baghdad into a strategic bedrock of his rule. Many of his Republican Guard units were based here and were locally recruited. Weapons research establishments were concentrated here, as were many of the country's main munitions plants.
The American-led invasion 18 months ago destroyed those privileges, and left many local people unemployed. The disbanding of the Mr. Hussein's army made things worse. The insurgency spread rapidly in the months after Mr. Hussein was toppled, feeding off the combination of idled military skills, huge stockpiles of weapons and ammunition, and Sunni resentment at the prospect of being politically usurped.
Early on in American military planning, commanders knew that a campaign to wrest Falluja from the insurgents would necessitate an offensive here, but limitations of logistics, air power and troops dictated the two offensives be staged sequentially. One disadvantage was that this gave the Falluja rebels a ready refuge, one that American generals sought to inhibit by asking Britain to move an 850-soldier battalion of the Black Watch north from Basra to a base just west of the Euphrates.
Marine intelligence officers estimate that 200 to 500 rebels from Falluja, many of them natives of the region south of Baghdad that is the focus of the new offensive, have come here in the past few weeks; some officers say those estimates are too low, as they also say official estimates of 1,200 insurgents killed in Falluja are too high.
Marine intelligence officers say there are 400 to 500 "core leaders" of the Sunni insurgency in the area, many of them former ranking members of Mr. Hussein's Baath Party or senior officers in his military. Although they describe the insurgency as heavily decentralized, they have identified two new political groups that knit together these rebel leaders, one of them known as the Return or Restoration Party. These men, they say, have made common cause in the insurgency with the numerous criminal gangs in the area, who also have much to lose in the new American push. The intelligence estimates say that insurgent attacks in the area are carried out by 2,000 to 6,000 rebels, many of them unemployed youths or criminals released from jail by Mr. Hussein before he was driven from power. In many cases, American officers say, captured men have told them that they were paid sums ranging from $20 to $200 to stage ambushes or plant explosives that are detonated by "part-time triggermen," many of them also paid.
If correct, the estimates make for a startling contrast with the American estimates a year ago, when commanders said they believed that there were no more than 5,000 insurgents across the whole of Iraq.
The havoc the rebels have wrought here emerges from the marines' tallies of recent attacks. In a little over a month, the insurgents have mounted 350 separate attacks, including 12 suicide car bombings and nearly 80 remotely detonated roadside bombs. Since midsummer, when the marines deployed into the area, they have lost 18 men. But by far the heaviest toll has been taken by Iraqi policemen and national guardsmen, of whom nearly 150 have been killed, many by bombs.
Attacks on the police have left barely 550 policemen at work across the entire region, a fraction of the number under Mr. Hussein, and many police stations abandoned.
Despite the attacks, Colonel Johnson said he believed the advantage in the war was moving the Americans' way. Rather than seeing the rising tempo of attacks as a sign of growing confidence among the rebels, he believes the insurgents have stepped up their aggression because they fear they are losing the war.
One reason for this, the colonel said, was the growing involvement of Iraqi troops in the fighting alongside the Americans, and the Iraqis' increasing confidence. "Time is not on the insurgents' side," Colonel Johnson said. "Each day, the Iraqi security forces are getting better and better."
Altogether, in the past four months, more than 600 men have been detained in raids across the area, many of them as a result of intelligence delivered by Iraqi troops and intelligence officers.
"I'll tell you, one I.S.F. who is loyal and effective is worth five marines," Colonel Johnson said, using the abbreviation for men in the Iraqi security forces. "They know exactly who these people running the insurgency are."
----
Marines Widen Their Net South of Baghdad
Troops Say Offensive Is Vastly Different From Urban Warfare in Fallujah
Washington Post
By Jackie Spinner
November 28, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16794-2004Nov27.html
FORWARD OPERATING BASE KALSU, Iraq, Nov. 27 -- Through the scattered towns and along the dangerous roads of an area that one commander described as "kind of like the worst place in the world," U.S. Marines, British soldiers and Iraqi security forces are waging an offensive they say is vastly different from the urban warfare waged elsewhere in Iraq in recent weeks.
Unlike the massive military push into the former insurgent stronghold of Fallujah, or similar assaults on Samarra or Mosul, the operation here in Babil province has involved few firefights. It consists mostly of gathering intelligence and launching raids on homes and suspected weapons caches. Insurgents here are not clustered in urban neighborhoods but scattered over wide areas of what many Iraqis call the "triangle of death."
"We have to go out and hunt them down," said Col. Ron Johnson, commander of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, which is conducting Operation Plymouth Rock, so called because it started around Thanksgiving.
Beginning on Tuesday, a combined force of more than 5,000 U.S., British and Iraqi troops has mounted raids in a region south of Baghdad that resulted in the detention of more than 130 people. Most recently, the troops have targeted the dusty town of Yusufiyah, where 856 projectiles were discovered, the U.S. military said.
Officers say those numbers do not reflect the actual scope of the operation. U.S. military officials estimate that they could be fighting as many as 6,000 insurgents in the region, most of them disgruntled and unemployed local residents. Among them are said to be former members of the Republican Guard, a key element of Saddam Hussein's disbanded Iraqi military.
Johnson said the strategic importance of northern Babil stems from its geographic location along major transportation arteries that link Baghdad with southern Iraq and also extend west to Fallujah and beyond. "It's a natural line of drift" for insurgents, he said.
"The problem is all roads lead to Latifiyah," Johnson said, referring to a town near the center of the region.
At least 32 Iraqi civilians have been killed in the region in recent months, executed at illegal checkpoints the insurgents have set up, Johnson said. "These are bad guys," he said. "They don't care who they kill."
In an office in Latifiyah that used to belong to the city's police chief, Ishmael Jubouri contended that the insurgents in Babil cared deeply about what they were doing.
Jubouri, a member of a prominent Sunni tribe from an area south of Baghdad, is the leader of the Islamic Army in Iraq, one of the armed groups that the Americans and their allies are trying to defeat. The walls of his office are adorned with portraits of rebels killed in fights with U.S. forces, and banners hung around the former police station call for a holy war against the Americans.
Jubouri said the Islamic Army, which has kidnapped and executed Iraqi security troops, had thousands of fighters trying to force foreign troops out of the country. "The members of the army believe in the language of weapons," he said.
The Islamic Army, he said, sent a contingent of its fighters to Fallujah but withdrew them about a week ago as U.S. and Iraqi forces reestablished control of the city.
"Fallujah was a mistake because it is not possible to fight in a city," he said. "We want to open more than one front in the same time to disrupt the U.S. forces and defeat them at once. The Latifiyah battle will be more successful than Fallujah because we learn from the mistakes done by our brothers there."
Jubouri said there were few foreigners among the Islamic Army fighters. "The Americans think that everyone who fights is foreign," he said. "In fact, everyone who fights is an Iraqi. We have Kurds, Arabs, Shiites and Sunnis."
Intelligence gathered by the Americans appeared to be consistent with Jubouri's claims.
Military officials here said they have seen an influx of fighters and weapons since the Fallujah offensive. Maj. Clint Nussberger, the intelligence officer for the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, said many of the insurgents were locals who went to Fallujah to fight and then came back. He estimated that between 200 and 500 such fighters returned to the area "with more skills than when they left."
Johnson said the U.S.-led force would take a methodical approach to wiping out the insurgency in north Babil.
Last month, a platoon of Marines and Iraqi National Guardsmen established a new police station in a government building on the southern edge of Latifiyah. Although they acknowledged that they did not control the town, U.S. military officials said they would ultimately take it back from the insurgents.
"I could take Latifiyah in an afternoon, but why am I going to kill innocent civilians?" Johnson said.
Many people in the town said they already feel like they are under attack. The city has no water or electricity, said residents, some of whom described the outages as a form of punishment by the Americans.
Insurgents, their faces covered with scarves and masks, had set up numerous checkpoints around the city where they questioned drivers about their background, religion and destination.
Schools and official buildings were closed last week, and witnesses said there were no signs of police or Iraqi National Guardsmen in the city.
Special correspondent Omar Fekeiki contributed to this report.
-------- israel / palestine
Scandal-shocked Israelis ask if the army has lost its way
JERUSALEM (AFP)
Nov 28, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041128142507.sqbu3aur.html
Israel's once-unshakable faith in the morality of the army has been put to the test by a series of recent scandals, one of which saw a soldier empty his weapon into the body of a young Palestinian girl, who had been killed moments earlier on her way to school.
It has not been a particularly good couple of weeks for an army which proclaims itself to be "the most ethical army in the world".
Last week, a military court indicted an officer accused by his own soldiers of carrying out a "confirmed kill" -- pumping bullets into the body of a dead 13-year-old Palestinian school girl.
In the same week, the Israeli press published disturbing images of soldiers abusing the corpses of Palestinians, alongside another photo of soldiers forcing a Palestinian violinist to play for them at a checkpoint near the West Bank town of Nablus.
Following the shooting incident, the leading Israeli rights group B'Tselem demanded that General Moshe Yaalon, the army's chief of staff, stand down for what it denounced as a "a culture of impunity" over Palestinian civilian deaths.
Although Israeli troops had killed at least 1,369 unarmed Palestinian civilians since the start of the intifada over four years ago, only one soldier had been charged, B'Tselem said.
"The army has lost its way" read a headline in the right-wing Israeli daily, the Jerusalem Post.
"Can it be that Yaalon and his commanders' attitudes can be summed up as 'a little girl dead, another day at the office'?" questioned the editorial.
Mordechai Bar-On, an Israeli historian and former chief education officer in the army, has little doubt that the continuing Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory is corrupting the moral fibre of the army.
"All the security problems today are not vis-a-vis an army but vis-a-vis a civilian population, and when you're dealing with civilians, you are bound by the very situation, to witness a prolonged process of corruption in terms of behavioural values," Bar-On told AFP.
"The very fact that you occupy another nation will undoubtedly lead to such corruption. We see that now, not only in the behaviour of the soldiers towards Arabs, but also towards themselves, towards their officers and towards the army," he said.
"Senior officers should have absolutely no tolerance for clear abuses of values and be very stringent about punishing them in the most severe way."
But even among the top military, senior officers have been known to show supreme indifference to the suffering of those under occupation.
Two weeks ago, Dan Halutz, Yaalon's deputy and the former head of the airforce, was hauled over the coals by the Israeli supreme court for his blase attitude in the wake of the assassination of a top Hamas leader in Gaza City two years ago.
Seventeen Palestinians were killed and scores more injured after Halutz authorised the use of a one tonne bomb in a densely populated area.
The celebrated Israeli author Yoram Kaniuk said that the "humiliation" of the violin-playing Palestinian threw the justification of the state's very existence into doubt.
"Our entire existence in this Arab region was justified, and is still justified, by our suffering," he wrote in Sunday's Yediot Aharonot daily.
"We grew up with our strength, which stemmed from the injustice that had been done to us. If we allow Jewish soldiers to put an Arab violinist at a roadblock and laugh at him, we have succeeded in arriving at the lowest moral point possible."
-----
Only Palestinian security forces should carry arms: Abbas
CAIRO (AFP)
Nov 28, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041128161745.6xzj53w1.html
Palestinian security forces should be the only group in the occupied territories allowed to carry weapons, Palestine Liberation Organisation chairman Mahmud Abbas said on Sunday.
"We want to control the Palestinian security scene so that we end the phenomenon of arms being carried around everywhere. This is the policy of the Palestinian government," he said.
Abbas, a former prime minister, was responding to a question over the Palestinian Authority's intention to collect arms belonging to the various Palestinian factions.
"We want a single authority, a single government and a single legitimate Palestinian armed force on the Palestinian scene," Abbas told a news conference at the Cairo headquarters of the Arab League.
Palestinian prime minister Ahmed Qorei said the measure was not aimed at quelling the anti-Israeli resistance.
"The resistance will continue as long as the occupation exists, but the work of the resistance is determined by the Palestinian leadership and according to the conditions of each stage," Qorei said at the same news conference.
-----
A Girl's Chilling Death in Gaza
Israeli Army Concedes Failure in Initial Probe of Shooting
Washington Post
By Molly Moore
November 28, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16886-2004Nov27_2.html
JERUSALEM -- On the morning of Oct. 5, Iman Hams, a slight girl of 13 wearing a school uniform and toting a backpack crammed with books, wandered past an Israeli military outpost on the Gaza Strip's southern border with Egypt.
The Israeli captain on duty alerted his troops to reports of a suspicious figure about 100 yards from the outpost. Soldiers fired into the air, according to radio transmissions, military court documents and witnesses.
"It's a little girl," a soldier watching from a nearby Israeli observation post cautioned over the military radio. "She's running defensively eastward. . . . A girl of about 10, she's behind the embankment, scared to death."
Four minutes later, Israeli troops opened fire on the girl with machine guns and rifles, the radio transmissions indicated. The captain walked to the spot where the girl "was lying down" and fired two bullets from his M-16 assault rifle into her head, according to an indictment against the officer. He started to walk away, but pivoted, set his rifle on automatic and emptied his magazine into the girl's prone body, the indictment alleged.
"This is Commander," the captain said into the radio when he was finished. "Whoever dares to move in the area, even if it's a 3-year-old -- you have to kill him. Over."
The girl's body was peppered with at least 20 bullets, including seven in her head, said Ali Mousa, a physician who is director of the Rafah hospital where her corpse was examined.
An investigation was undertaken, and the military's top commanders -- including the chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon -- said repeatedly that the captain had acted properly under the circumstances. But Israeli newspapers published graphic accounts by soldiers who said they witnessed the incident, and Israel's Channel 2 television aired recordings of the radio transmissions.
As a result, the company commander -- identified by the army only as Capt. R -- was indicted this past week on charges of misuse of a firearm, ordering subordinates to lie about the shooting and violation of military regulations. In addition, the military moved to reexamine the investigation, which Yaalon conceded had been "a grave failure" and which the indictment alleged was the subject of an attempted coverup.
The shooting of the schoolgirl added to a growing number of incidents that have spurred Israeli soldiers to speak out about abuses of Palestinians, despite pressure from superiors in the field and statements by senior military officials playing down such cases. Last week, after troops provided photographic evidence to an Israeli newspaper, the military opened an investigation into allegations that soldiers desecrated the bodies of Palestinians killed during army operations.
In a vitriolic meeting of the Israeli parliament's law committee this month, legislator Zahava Galon of the dovish Yahad party said, "The army sends across a message of disregard for human life" with such behavior.
Five days after the October incident, Yaalon told Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's cabinet that the girl likely had been used as a lure to draw soldiers from the outpost and into the range of Palestinian sniper fire. Yaalon told the cabinet that his investigation showed that the soldiers fired into the air, but when the girl continued walking and tossed her backpack aside, they shot at her, fearful that she might have a bomb.
Under questioning from a cabinet member, Yaalon denied press reports that the commander and other soldiers left the outpost to make sure the girl was dead. At the next cabinet meeting a week later, he went further, saying he believed the captain's account that he was responding to "gunfire aimed at him by firing a burst into the ground" and said the captain offered "a reasonable explanation considering the conditions of the location and the events."
But soldiers who witnessed the incident and told their stories to the Israeli news media eventually forced Yaalon to reverse his claims. Last week, Yaalon conceded that the army's investigation had been a failure, and he said he was "determined to deal with every incident of this type in order to root out every failure of values from the Israel Defense Forces."
"There is no logical reason for what he did," a soldier, who declined to be identified, told the daily newspaper Yedioth Aharonoth a few days after the incident. "Not for shooting the two bullets at her, and certainly not the burst afterward. This is the most sickening thing I have ever seen during my army service. It was desecration of a body. That is not what we are taught to do in the army. . . . The 13-year-old girl was already dead. Why did he fire that burst into her?"
Shmuel Shenfeld, one of the indicted officer's attorneys, said the captain opened fire because of "suspicion of a penetration by a terrorist" near the outpost. He added, "I believe he will be acquitted because he acted the way one has to act in order to neutralize a threat on his soldiers."
Shenfeld denied that the captain pumped bullets into the dead girl, saying he was firing in response to shooting from the direction of the nearby refugee camp.
The indictment issued against the captain alleged that he called several of his subordinate officers and soldiers into his office a week after the incident and "tried to convince" them that they "noticed shooting near the body of the deceased only," rather than shooting at the body. The indictment also accused the captain of asking his men to testify that he hit the body with the burst of fire "by mistake" as he was withdrawing from the area.
Shenfeld said that some soldiers in the unit were trying to frame his client.
The shooting occurred on the edge of the Rafah refugee camp in the far southwestern corner of the Gaza Strip near the Egyptian border -- the most dangerous combat zone in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The youngster, Iman Hams, dressed in the striped pinafore worn by girls who attend the U.N.-run schools in Gaza's refugee camps, was on her way to class just before 7 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, her 25-year-old brother, Ihab Hams, said in an interview. Her school is located on the edge of the refugee camp, a few hundred yards from the Rafiakh Jewish settlement to the north and an even shorter distance from an Israeli military border post to the west.
When the school called her family to report that she did not show up for classes and that a girl had been shot nearby, Ihab Hams said he raced to the scene to investigate.
"She was going to school like every day, and the soldiers started to shoot," Hams said he was told by a teacher at the school who witnessed the incident. "She was injured in her leg and became hysterical. She started to run. A teacher tried to stop her, but she didn't listen because she was so scared.
"Then they shot her," he said.
When he returned home, his father asked if Iman, one of nine children, was the girl being reported dead on the radio.
" 'No, she's okay,' " Ihab said his father replied. "I stood at the door and I felt so sad. My father asked me again. Then I told him, 'Iman has passed away.' "
Special correspondent Islam Abdulkarim in Gaza City and researcher Samuel Sockol contributed to this report.
-----
Arafat family stirs pot of death conspiracies
The Times
November 28, 2004
Uzi Mahnaimi, Ramallah, Sarah Baxter, New York and John Follain, Paris
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1378196,00.html
THE old lady comes to the grave at midnight, when there are just two Palestinian guards standing by the heap of flowers covering Yasser Arafat's tomb.
They know her as Um Abed, a widow from a nearby village. She used to visit Abu Ammar, as local people called the Palestinian leader, from time to time in his battered headquarters in the West Bank town of Ramallah. He would give her a little pocket money and help her to survive. Now she is alone and embittered.
Dressed in traditional black, her hair covered with a white shawl, she cries: "To hell with those who betrayed you, Abu Ammar! A curse on the murderers and their collaborators!" Um Abed does not need proof that the 75-year-old Arafat was murdered. She just knows; and while it would be easy to dismiss her views as the ravings of an old woman, her sentiments are shared by many Palestinian leaders.
Nasser al-Kidwa, Arafat's nephew, is the urbane and sophisticated Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations. He was at the Paris hospital where his uncle died and last week came away with a 558-page French medical report into Arafat's condition. As a commission of Palestinian doctors pores over its contents, al-Kidwa has already reached his own conclusion.
"He died of unnatural causes," he said in the UN delegates' lounge in New York last week. "If you insist on putting a grade on it, I would say there was a six out of 10 probability he was murdered."
Why, al-Kidwa wondered, were the Israeli officials evidently so confident that Arafat's illness was terminal when he left the West Bank for the last time after waving to supporters at the doorway to his helicopter?
Could the Israelis have plotted to kill him before the controversial withdrawal from Gaza devised by Ariel Sharon, the prime minister? Were they planning to divide and rule over a new generation of potentially feuding Palestinian leaders?
Al-Kidwa is adamant the truth will out. "This is the Middle East. The facts will leak out at some point in the future," he said. "You can't hide the news about President Arafat."
Ashraf al-Kurdi, Arafat's doctor for 20 years, believes suspicions are so entrenched that the Palestinian leader's body should be exhumed.
"It could be that he was poisoned. I was the last doctor who saw him alive and conscious before he flew to Paris and I'm calling for an investigation and autopsy."
Conspiracy theories are rife in the Middle East, where many take it for granted that Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, organised the September 11 terrorist attacks and warned Jews in the World Trade Center not to turn up for work that day.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an early 20th-century anti-semitic forgery, are regarded by many Arabs as a true guide to Jewish plans to rule the world. The "blood libel" that Jews ritually murder children for unleavened Passover bread is readily repeated.
The West is by no means immune to such speculation: to this day theories abound that Diana, Princess Diana of Wales was murdered. Propaganda of a different kind about Arafat's death has been disseminated in the West, where some have claimed he was suffering from Aids contracted during homosexual romps with his bodyguards.
The rumour was circulated by David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W Bush who coined the phrase "axis of evil".
Frum revived allegations in a 1987 book by a retired Romanian intelligence chief who claimed Arafat's room had been bugged while he roared "like a tiger" with his lovers.
Add to that the fact that Arafat had a low blood platelet count - common in people with damaged immune systems - and the Aids theory soon acquired the status of unofficial "fact", chewed over avidly by the Israeli and western media.
Al-Kidwa is angry that his uncle's reputation has been dragged through the mud. "This is garbage, frankly, for obvious reasons. It's just junk," he said. Yet with so many accusations flying, it seems no amount of medical science is going to settle the matter.
Arafat, like Diana, died in France, where privacy laws are so strict that revealing details of a patient's medical condition is a crime punishable by a fine and a one-year prison sentence. It is fertile territory for conspiracy theorists.
The French government has publicly ruled out poisoning as a cause of Arafat's death on November 11, but the secretive Percy military hospital, where he was tested and treated, has made no such statement.
There was considerable confusion about the Palestinian leader's condition from the moment he fell seriously ill. One of his top advisers, Bassam Abu Sharif, said he had seen Arafat "healthy and cheerful, very energetic" the week before his departure for Paris on October 29. "So what happened all of a sudden and at such speed?"
A confidant of Arafat claimed: "Just before he was loaded onto the Jordanian helicopter, he whispered, 'They got me this time'." Was Arafat, who had escaped numerous assassination attempts, referring to the Israelis? On arrival at the Percy hospital on the outskirts of Paris, Arafat was rushed to the haematology department suffering from abdominal pains, vomiting fits and diarrhoea. He was given a platelet transfusion and his condition improved enough for him to thank his doctors.
According to al-Kidwa: "In Paris for the first few days I got the feeling that he was getting better. He himself thought he was out of the woods." But on the night of November 3, Arafat suffered a brain haemorrhage and sank into a coma.
Only four people apart from al-Kidwa were allowed into the intensive care ward: Suha, Arafat's formidable 41-year-old wife, who had lived in lavish style in Paris for nearly four years; her close adviser, Pierre Rizk, the former head of the Lebanese intelligence service; Yusuf Abdullah, Arafat's bodyguard for 20 years; and a wealthy business friend of the dying leader. His nine-year-old daughter Zahwa was kept by Suha from seeing him on a life support machine.
There were confusing daily bulletins about his prospects of recovery. "He was given a lot of anaesthesia so that a host of tests could be conducted," said al-Kidwa. "It wasn't always clear where the anaesthesia stopped and the coma started. Sometimes officials didn't say everything, at the insistence of Madame Arafat, but they never lied."
On November 10, a Palestinian imam, Tayssir al-Tamimi, went to Arafat's beside. "God alleviate his suffering," the Muslim cleric said. As dawn broke, Arafat's death was announced.
In theory, the French medical dossier of his hospital stay should answer any questions. Suha was determined to keep it confidential and promptly boarded a flight to Tunis, but the French authorities decided that al-Kidwa was a close enough relative to merit his own copy.
Oddly enough, Arafat's nephew claims not to be interested in its contents. "I'm not going to read it, frankly, because it is just a detailed version of what we have already been told by doctors."
For him, the key findings are that the doctors failed to come up with a clear diagnosis of his uncle's illness and did not find any "known" poisons or toxins in his body. That leaves the "unknown": an endless field of possibilities for the conspiracy-minded.
"There is clearly a big question mark about the cause of death," al-Kidwah said. "The low platelets are the problem. The reason for them has never been found."
A poll undertaken by Nablus University showed that 80% of Palestinians believe Arafat was murdered. Their suspicions are not entirely irrational. Sharon was reported in the Israeli press to have told George W Bush in April that he was rescinding an earlier promise not to harm Arafat. "Shouldn't we leave his fate to the Almighty?" Bush suggested. Sharon is said to have replied knowingly: "Sometimes we have to help the Almighty."
The Israelis have found ways to poison their opponents before. In 1997 two burly "Canadian tourists" approached Khaled Mashaal, the head of Hamas's overseas operations, in Jordan and attacked him. A crowd closed in and they were captured.
Mashaal collapsed and nearly died of a heart attack later in hospital. Later he would remember that "one of the tourists sprayed something in my ear".
The "Canadians" were admitted to be members of Mossad. The late King Hussein of Jordan telephoned Benjamin Netanyahu, then the Israeli prime minister, and demanded an antidote that could be administered. A Mossad doctor eventually injected Mashaal.
It is no surprise that Mashaal was among the first to accuse the Israelis of murdering Arafat.
"A man the age of brother Abu Ammar may die a natural death, but all the circumstances which we have seen in the past two weeks and medical reports indicate that (he) was poisoned," he said.
When Arafat was flown to France, the medical file of Wadi Hadad, a Palestinian hijacker who died in a Berlin hospital in 1978 of a "severe blood disorder", was sent to the doctors in Paris so that they could examine it for possible similarities.
Only one French doctor who cared for Arafat has been willing to divulge some information. Speaking through an intermediary, he confirmed that Arafat had died of disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC), a blood disorder in which platelets are depleted and microscopic clots form all over the body. It causes widespread bleeding.
"We know Arafat had contracted DIC but we didn't manage to establish what caused it, even though we carried out all the tests France could offer - toxicological, biological, chemical," the doctor said.
The analysis ruled out leukaemia and other cancers, but left open the possibility of a viral or biological cause of illness. "We didn't get a result on the precise cause because we were racing against time and because we had to start from scratch. We asked for Arafat's previous medical records but nobody gave them to us."
Some Paris doctors have speculated that Arafat's blood disorder could have been caused by poisons such as ricin or snake venom, but for the medical establishment there is nothing peculiar about the old man's death.
"He was worn down by the life he led, physically and nervously. He fought constantly for his cause and to stay in power and wasn't too careful about taking medicine," one doctor said. The dawn-to-dusk fasting during the holy month of Ramadan almost certainly weakened him. For the first 11 days of the fast, he resisted pleas from his doctors to rest, eat and take his medication at regular intervals.
Some conspiracy theories take root because there is a tiny grain of truth in them. In Arafat's case, it is hard to resist the conclusion of his nephew that his confinement in Ramallah, under siege in a windowless, sunless headquarters, may have hastened his decline. "The Israelis have a clear responsibility for his death anyway," al-Kidwa said. "The place was under repeated attack."
In all good detective mysteries, the question is: who benefits? If Bush and Condoleezza Rice, his incoming secretary of state, are to be believed, Arafat's death presents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Middle East peace and the prospect of a Palestinian state.
That is not necessarily good news for Sharon's hardline Israeli government, which may be pressured into making concessions beyond its wishes. But is al-Kidwa, with all his diplomatic and international contacts, hopeful there will be a peaceful settlement? "No, sadly," he said firmly.
-------- landmines
US urges ban on antitank mines, but will shun Nairobi talks
AFP
November 28, 2004
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/041127/1/3ovcf.html
The United States, stung by insurgent attacks in Iraq, has urged the international community to consider banning all sales of antitank and other heavy landmines, but ruled out its participation in an international conference on mines designed to hurt primarily people.
Members of the so-called Ottawa Convention will gather in Nairobi, Kenya, Sunday to review implementation of the 1997 accord that bans use, development, production, stockpiling and transfer of antipersonnel landmines.
As many as 143 nations have signed up to the accord, which took effect in March 1999.
But a group of 42 countries, led by the United States, Russia and China, have refused, citing the need to protect their troops in various theaters of deployment.
In a written statement released Friday, Deputy State Department Spokesman Adam Ereli gave no indication of change in the US approach and said US diplomats will not be attending the Nairobi gathering.
But he pointed out that important work still "remains to be done" to rid the world of the scourge of landmines that, according ban supporters, still kill and maim between 15,000 and 20,000 people around the world every year.
"Eliminating civilian landmine casualties requires a comprehensive approach addressing landmines of every type that remain hazardous after a conflict has ended, including the larger antivehicle landmines that are not covered by the Ottawa Convention," Ereli said.
He urged convention members to examine their use of non-self-destructing antivehicle mines and agree to negotiate, at the UN Conference on Disarmament, "a ban on the sale or export of all persistent mines, including antivehicle mines."
The proposal came after US defense officials have expressed their growing concern about the use of so-called improvised explosive devices by anti-American insurgents in Iraq.
US military experts have calculated that up to 60 percent of all attacks on US troops and Iraqi security forces in late 2003 began with the explosion of one or more such devices, which are often fashioned from unexploded antipersonnel or antitank mines taken from the old Iraqi arsenal.
Before the US-led March 2003 invasion of Iraq, this arsenal included an estimated 10 million such mines, according to GlobalSecurity.com, a local research organization.
US troops in Iraq travel primarily in Humvees and Bradley Fighting Vehicles, which could be vulnerable to devices handcrafted from antitank mines.
Ereli also urged conference participants to ban all non-detectable landmines, which he said "pose a particular hazard to deminers."
The US military is modernizing its landmine inventory, removing from it all non-self-destructing and non-detectable mines. This process is expected to be concluded by the end of 2010, officials said.
Earlier in the day, US Assistant Secretary of State Lincoln Bloomfield sought to assure members of the Ottawa Convention that they will find in the United States a "strong partner" in trying to prevent humanitarian tragedies caused by landmines.
But he reaffirmed the US decision to stay out of the convention because the Pentagon deems it necessary to have landmines at its disposal "either to save US forces in the field or to save allied forces or to save a population that we are protecting."
Meanwhile, an opinion poll unveiled in September by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations showed that 80 percent of Americans disagreed with this position and said the government should support the landmine banning treaty.
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Troops Hunting Al Qaeda Members Withdrawn
Associated Press
November 28, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16841-2004Nov27.html
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Nov. 27 -- The Pakistani army announced Saturday that it would withdraw hundreds of troops from a tense tribal region near Afghanistan where Osama bin Laden and his top deputy were believed to be hiding.
The withdrawals from the South Waziristan area come after several military operations by thousands of troops against bin Laden's al Qaeda organization and its supporters in recent months.
Although the tribal region is considered a possible hiding place for bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman Zawahiri, a senior Pakistani general said this month that no sign of bin Laden had been found.
Bin Laden, architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks against the United States, has been on the run since U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, routing the Taliban rulers who harbored al Qaeda militants.
The army will remove checkpoints in Wana, the main town in South Waziristan, Lt. Gen. Safdar Hussain said after meeting with tribal elders Friday.
Hussain said the moves were "in return for the support of tribesmen in operations against foreign miscreants." Some troops will remain in the area, he said.
"We have been assured by tribal elders that they will not allow miscreants to hide in areas under their control," Hussain said.
As many as 8,000 Pakistani troops were deployed in a three-pronged offensive in the eastern reaches of the rugged region this month. U.S. military forces remain largely on the Afghanistan side in hopes of capturing or killing al Qaeda operatives crossing the border.
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CIA Documents Show Bush Knew of 2002 Coup in Venezuela
democracynow.org
November 29th, 2004
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/29/1448220
Newly released CIA documents show the Bush administration - at the very least - knew about the plot to overthrow Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez weeks before the April 2002 military coup. We speak with Peter Korbluh of the National Security Archive and we go to Caracas to speak with attorney Eva Golinger who obtained the documents. [Includes rush transcript] Newly released CIA documents show the Bush administration - at the very least - knew about the plot to overthrow Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez weeks before the April 2002 military coup and did nothing to stop it.
Until now the Bush administration has claimed it had no role in the failed coup and didn't know one was being planned.
The CIA documents, which were heavily censored before being released, were obtained by Venezuelan-American attorney, Eva Golinger. One of those documents, dated April 6, 2002, says explicitly "dissident military factions...are stepping up efforts to organize a coup against President Chavez, possibly as early as this month." The document adds the groups: " may bungle the attempt by moving too quickly."
A CIA spokeswoman told Newsday the agency played no role in the coup and was merely collecting information about political events in Venezuela for top U.S. officials.
Chavez supporters have long-criticized the U.S. for supporting the failed coup attempt in April 2002. Chavez was removed from power by a coalition of military officials and business leaders but returned to office two days later.
U.S.-Venezuela relations have turned sour ever since Chavez was elected president in 1998. As president, Chavez has condemned the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and threatened to cut off oil sales to the United States.
Since then, more than $1 million in U.S. government money has been given to Venezuelan opposition groups for democracy-training programs under the auspices of the National Endowment for Democracy - a private agency funded entirely by the U.S. government.
- Eva Golinger, Venezuelan-American attorney based in New York. She runs the website venezuelafoia.info which has been using the Freedom Of Information Act to obtain more information on the connection between the U.S. government and the anti-Chavez opposition in Venezuela. She joins us from Caracas in Venezuela.
- Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive, a public-interest documentation center in Washington. He is the author of "The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability."
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
EVA GOLINGER: The documents are obtained under the freedom of information act. I contacted the journalist in Washington and we were surprised actually to get these documents considering they were top secret and the request was submitted, we submitted it in November of last year. So they came fairly quickly. The most important point though, about these documents is the one you referred to, the April 6, senior executive intelligence brief that went to over 200 representatives of five different government agencies, the united states and what the documents, the document that particular one says not only that they were stepping up efforts to organize a coup against President Chavez, but they talk about level of detail in the reported plans and the fact that the plans targeted Chavez for arrest, along with 10 other senior officials, and that to provoke the action, meaning to provoke the coup, the plotters would try to exploit unrest stemming from an opposition march scheduled to take place a few days later and this was April 6, the coup happened April 11. On April 9 and 10 was when the opposition declared a general strike. On April 11 was one of the largest marches ever in Venezuela history and the largest that the opposition has led and that's precisely what happened was that during that march on April 11, violence struck out and basically, I mean what the evidence shows today here is that there were snipers set out in various points along the march route that just began firing and apparently, according to these documents, that was the plan. In fact, it was the plan in order to justify the coup and blame the violence on President Chavez, which is precisely what the opposition did. The importance of this is that this shows the U.S. government knew ahead of time. This was April 6, 2002. The coup was April 11, meaning the U.S. government knew on April 12 when Ari Fleischer and Phillip Reager of the State Department and Ari Fleischer of the White House came out and made statements saying that to the best of their knowledge, President Chavez provoked the violence and had subsequently resigned because of it. They had in their hands, they had received five days before, plans that showed that that is just what the opposition and military officers were going to do was to provoke that violence and take Chavez prisoner, and the fact that the U.S. government spokespeople came out and said that they had no other knowledge besides this version that Chavez was the one doing this is now contradicted by these top-secret documents that have been declassified by the C.I.A. so the United States Government has been caught in its own trap and even more interesting was last week Adam Morelli, the spokesperson for the State Department responded to these documents and he said that the U.S. government had warned president Chavez about a possible coup and assassination attempt before it happened. What's interesting about that is that the documents, the importance of them is not whether or not the U.S. government warned Chavez. We don't know that. President Chavez hasn't responded. He's currently on a trip around the world. But the importance is that they knew about the coup and they knew exactly how it was going to be played out and when it was played out to the T according to the documents they had, the plans they had, they then came out and said they knew nothing about it. And that's what's important here.
AMY GOODMAN: While we were in Spain this controversy continued there with the Venezuela Foreign Minister Martinos saying that the Spanish ambassador to Caracas was involved with the U.S. ambassador, with supporting the coup and Chavez himself said in Spain I have no doubt that's what happened. The Spanish ambassador was the only one together with the U.S. ambassador recognized the tyrant put in place via a blood bath and break with the institutional norm. Peter, the significance of this and do you believe that the US not only knew but was involved with the at the same timed coup?
PETER KORNBLUH: The documents don't really tell us whether the United States was directly involved. They tell us more or less exactly what Eva has just stated, that the U.S. Intelligence community, it's not actually clear whether it was the CIA or the Defense Intelligence Agency or other members of the Pentagon, had contacts with civilian and military sectors in Caracas and were getting a steady stream of reports on planning for this coup. We know that from the documents. We also know from the documents as Eva pointed out, that this information was, you know, not stopped at some low-level, mid-level desk in the state department or in the CIA, but actually distributed through a very interesting committee called the strategic warning committee headed by the CIA to almost, to the very highest levels of the U.S. government. The senior executive intelligence brief is one step below the presidential daily brief, which goes to the president and about 15 of his top advisers. But the senior executive brief goes to 200 of the, all the most important national security advisers. So this was distributed throughout the US government and certainly since we know that it was distributed, we know that there were meetings held about it, discussions on how to respond, how to perhaps prepare, etc., and as events played out, it is clear that the United States developed, the Bush administration had developed its response, who to blame, how to spin this, and how to support it. I suspect, and let me just say that these documents are incredibly important and perhaps the tip of an iceberg that Eve is starting to melt.
AMY GOODMAN: And finally, just very quickly before we move on to Iraq with our guests in Baghdad, in Chile, the government announcing it will give out monthly compensation to 28,000 Chileans who suffered human rights abuses under the Pinochet regime, Peter Kornbluh, you wrote a critical book. Its significance this latest move?
PETER KORNBLUH: Chile is going through a wrenching period where all attention of the nation is being paid to an incredibly detailed report on the torture of perhaps 35,000 people. 28,000 who may receive compensation. The president, president Lagos went on television last night, a major address announcing the release of this report, announcing this compensation. What he didn't denounce, however, is the key question on every victim's mind is who did this? When will they be identified and when will they be prosecuted? And that is still an outstanding question that no amount of compensation for the victims is going to address.
AMY GOODMAN: Well I want to thank you both for being with us, Peter Kornbluh of national security archives. Hi