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NUCLEAR
Ending nuclear proliferation
Nuclear Power Plant Safety Inadequate, U.S. Senators Warn
Plan to cover N-waste with grout has stalled
Former Sellafield worker jailed for bomb hoax
DISINFORMATION & Depleted Uranium [DU]
Singh seeks peace with rival Pakistan
North Korea says US troop cut is a ploy: report
Syrian weapons
U.S. presses Russia on arms initiative, Iran
US official to unveil major non-proliferation plan next week
Nuke info is out in view of public
Los Alamos Lab: Classified Data Missing
Republican Demands More NRC Safety Regulation
Bill stalls as S.C. senators clash
S.C. senators clash on nuclear sludge disposal
N-storage provision in bill worries Utahns
Kabelschlepp Metool cable reels for America's nuclear clean-up
Plutonium Waste Fight Stalls Defense Bill
Nuclear Waste Clean-Up Plans Fuel Debate
Grout idea stalls nuclear sludge clean-up
MILITARY
Afghan Policies on Questioning Prisoners Taken to Iraq
Afghanistan Will Have 24,000 Police Officers for Poll, AP Says
New U.S. aircraft carrier to cost $1.4B
U.S. bioweapons research may violate law
The Sunshine Project
UK Troops 'Available When Needed in Iraq'
Titan worker accused of Iraqi prisoner abuse - WSJ
Funding shortfall
Trucks made to drive without cargo in dangerous areas of Iraq
Iraq sarin shell is not part of a secret cache
Chen's Inaugural Address Skirts Independence Vow
Taiwan's President Tones Down His Pro-Independence Oratory
Warships in Hong Kong harbor
U.S. Aids Raid on Home of Chalabi
U.S. Forces Pull Out From Shiite Mosque
U.S. Says at Least 21 Rebels Are Dead in Clash in Karbala
Iraqis and G.I.'s Raid the Offices of an Ex-Favorite
Iraq Desert Bombing Video Shows Carnage
'US soldiers started to shoot us, one by one'
Gaza's Arabs Tally Non-Human Losses: Houses, Even a Zoo
Call for inquiry as Israel insists 'peaceful' protesters were armed
German Leader to Oppose Sending NATO Troops to Iraq
Skipped autopsies in Iraq revealed
U.S. admits to secret interrogation site in Baghdad
New Details of Prison Abuse Emerge
The New Images Videos Amplify Picture of Violence
Military lawyers objected to Guantanamo interrogation techniques
Memo Gave Intelligence Bigger Role
Pentagon Approved Intense Interrogation Techniques
CIA seeks Justice probe of three deaths
Chalabi - From White House to Dog House in Just Five Months
Kofi's cover up
Interrogation Tactics Evolved
Continuing the Cover-Up?
Vets of Iraq accept the inevitable: Another tour
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
City Wins Right to U.S. Data on Firearms
Republicans and Democrats Clash on New York Drug Laws
Anti-Terror Database Got Show at White House
Database Tagged 120,000 as Possible Terrorist Suspects
Justice Memos Explained How to Skip Prisoner Rights
POLITICS
House Passes $447 Billion Defense Bill
House Approves $447 Billion in Spending for Military
FBI Chief Tells of Interrogation Suspicions
Screening of Prison Officials Is Faulted by Lawmakers
St. Petersburg City Council decries Patriot Act
Hersh's attacks
Bush Visits Hill to Reassure Republicans
Hussein-Era Videos Released to Contrast Prison Scandal
OTHER
Lemurs aren't so dumb after all, study finds
Four States to Sue Power Plants
Irradiated Food Barred From DC School Lunches
ACTIVISTS
STAND WITH DENNIS AT CONVENTION: ORDER YOUR CONVENTION PACKAGE TODAY!
George Bush never looked into Nick's eyes
Activists could target Finnish nuclear plants: security police
'Peace Now' Under Investigation for Espionage Activities
-------- NUCLEAR
Ending nuclear proliferation
2004-05-21
Taiwan News,
Jonathan Power
http://www.etaiwannews.com/Opinion/2004/05/21/1085107338.htm
If the Iraq imbroglio has one blessing it is that it demonstrates that there are no actual or realistically imaginable military scenarios where nuclear weapons would be of any practical use for a major power attempting to subdue a smaller one.
Yet the macho culture of nuclear weapons remains unassailed except by a brave few. General George Lee Butler, the commander of American nuclear forces in president George Bush senior's time, has argued that nuclear weapons are "inherently dangerous, hugely expensive, militarily inefficient and morally indefensible."
Even back in the days of the U.S. nuclear monopoly, the moral sanction against use was such as to render them diplomatically useless, often counterproductive.
This is why Stalin knew he could act with impunity when seizing control of Eastern Europe. Likewise Beijing and Hanoi went to war with American armies in Korea and Vietnam without fear of being halted by nuclear weapons.
Nevertheless, the massive over-kill arsenals from the Cold War era remain only moderately reduced. Even when the latest treaty signed in Moscow by Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin is fully implemented in 2012, large U.S. and Russian nuclear forces will still exist, ready to promptly totally destroy each other's societies. They remain on hair trigger alert.
For a nation besieged with worry that nuclear weapons might fall into the wrong hands it seems more than irresponsible that neither of the two post Cold War younger presidents has wanted to change the culture of nuclear weapons. Reagan did profoundly and George Bush senior too to some degree but there as been nothing less than insouciance from both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Thirteen years after the Soviet Union threw in the towel and requested its former enemy help dismantle many of its nuclear weapons and more effectively guard its stockpiles of weapons grade uranium and plutonium the job remains half done. Indeed Bush's initial response was to cut the already inadequate budget he had inherited from Clinton. According to Sam Nunn, the former chairman of the U.S. Senate's Armed Services Committee, who two weeks ago helped organize a NATO exercise in which an al-Qaida nuclear attack was simulated, 60 percent of dangerous sites have still to be secured.
It was Ronald Reagan, to the consternation of most of his senior officials, who wanted to overturn conventional thinking about nuclear weapons. At his summit in Reykjavik in 1986 with the president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, he proposed what the jargon calls, Zero Ballistic Missiles, ZBM. Gorbachev too was overruled by his entourage. But later in 1991 a group of hard line Republicans including the former assistant secretary of defense Richard Perle and Paul Nitze, the grand old man of arms control who has just had a battleship named after him, fleshed out the idea.
They argued for the abolishing of massive nuclear missiles and a return to the deployment of long distance bombers as the backbone of nuclear defense. It was a fascinating about-face. It was the introduction of missiles and the subordination of bombers in the 1960s that spurred the nuclear arms race. To turn back the nuclear clock would remove the chance of surprise assault, thus finally assuring crisis stability.
This is one plus. The double plus is what ZBM would do for the rest of the world. It would have none of the weaknesses of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty with its abstainers and cheaters. An anti-rocket treaty would have universal application, and it is more easily enforceable. As the Libyan, North Korean and earlier Iraqi experience have shown much of the work of creating nuclear weapons can be concealed from detection. But missile systems cannot be effective unless their engines are tested and their boosters flown in the open.
Such a treaty wouldn't get rid of planes carrying nuclear bombs, or cruise missiles, much less terrorists bombs hand delivered in a suitcase. But it would diminish the tempo of crises and conflicts and put real pressure on would-be nuclear powers to think again.
At the moment the frozen status quo undermines the solemn promises on disarmament the nuclear-haves have made in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and greatly diminishes their negotiating leverage when dealing with the likes of North Korea and Iran. ZBM in contrast, by re-charging the dead batteries of arms control, offers the best chance of mobilizing world opinion against the theft and clandestine development of nuclear weapons by other states and underground groups. The whole corrupting psychology of nuclear arms possession that somehow justifies nuclear possession as being OK for us but not for them has to be turned on its head.
Not before time there is a debate re-surfacing on ZBM. This is the right place to begin the battle against nuclear proliferation.
Jonathan Power is a London-based columnist and a contributor to the Taiwan News.
-------- accidents and safety
Nuclear Power Plant Safety Inadequate, U.S. Senators Warn
May 21, 2004
By J.R. Pegg
WASHINGTON, DC, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/may2004/2004-05-21-10.asp
The oversight of safety at the nation's commercial nuclear power plants is not adequate and must be improved, federal lawmakers said Thursday. A Senate panel warned the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that Congress will step in if the agency does not take steps to address regulatory shortcomings raised by investigations into the shutdown of the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant in Ohio.
The hearing came in the wake of a report by the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) that criticized the NRC for a wide range of failings in how it handled problems at Davis-Besse, where leaking boric acid ate a football size hole in the protective reactor lid.
The report by Congressional investigators found that the Commission failed to identify or prevent the corrosion at the Ohio plant - despite ample warnings and evidence - because of lax oversight.
The lessons of those failings have not be learned and the report's finding "underscores potential for another incident to occur," said Ohio Republican George Voinovich, chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Clean Air, Climate Change and Nuclear Security.
The report calls into question the "NRC's business as usual oversight," said Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, a New York Democrat.
"Many questions remain about the NRC's actions before and after this incident," said Voinovich, who criticized the commission for disagreeing with nearly every complaint brought forth regarding the agency's actions at Davis-Besse. The plant, located 21 miles east-southeast of Toledo, is owned and operated by FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Company.
NRC Chairman Nils Diaz acknowledged that Davis-Besse "was an unacceptable failure on behalf of the licensee and the NRC."
The Commission has taken steps to correct oversight shortcomings that allowed the corrosion at Davis-Besse to occur, Diaz said, and will closely monitor the future operation of the plant, which the NRC permitted to restart in March 2004.
As part of the agreement that allowed the restart, the NRC will "assess safety culture and how the management deals with the safety culture," Diaz said.
But Diaz and the other two NRC commissioners bristled at the suggestion the Commission set strict standards to monitor the "safety culture" at all of the nation's 103 nuclear reactors.
Diaz told the subcommittee that the NRC is "not in the business of managing these utilities or reactors."
"We are not asking you to micromanage these facilities," Voinovich said. "We are asking you to set some standards and see they are being met."
Marvin Fertel, of the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry trade group, said the industry "is responsible for management and we do not want to take that accountability away."
NRC Commissioner Jeffrey Merrifield said the Commission has on-site inspectors at each plant talking to engineers and workers and monitoring plant operations.
"We want all of the licensees to ensure that their incentives put safety first," Merrifield said.
"You had someone there at Davis-Besse and they did not realize problems with the safety culture," Voinovich responded. "We are going to talk about setting standards, and if you will not do it I am going to pass legislation to get it done."
Boric acid crystals on the outer surface of a reactor vessel head at a plant similar to Davis-Besse (Photo courtesy Union of Concerned Scientists) Davis-Besse is not the only incident that has raised concerns about the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the nuclear industry.
Last month, operators at Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant discovered that they have lost two fuel rods - a remote camera search of the spent fuel pool failed to locate the highly radioactive rods.
The plant operator, Entergy Nuclear, says it is likely the fuel rods were put in with low-level nuclear waste and sent to a site in South Carolina, Washington or Nevada.
"This is an outrageous and frightening situation for Vermont families," said Senator James Jeffords, a Vermont Independent. He urged the NRC to review the situation before responding to a request by Entergy to boost power at the Vermont Yankee plant.
Concerns about the NRC's oversight comes as the nuclear industry extends operations and boosts power output at many aging plants.
The NRC has approved more than 100 power upgrades in recent years and renewed 13 licenses in 2003. License extensions are for 20 years and the industry expects virtually every plant to apply for extensions in the near future.
There is also renewed interest in building new plants - no new nuclear plant has been built since the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island.
Voinovich, who is a vocal supporter of nuclear power, said expansion of the industry depends on the public's confidence that the NRC is "a credible agency."
"But unfortunately its credibility is in serious question these days," warned the Ohio senator. "The most important thing we need to do is give complete assurance to the people of this country that our nuclear power plants are safe."
Voinovich questioned whether the agency has the workforce and expertise needed for its increasing workload, which includes the pending review of the Yucca Mountain high-level nuclear waste underground repository for permanent storage of spent nuclear fuel rods.
The Bush administration has asked Congress for $670 million for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in fiscal year 2005, up some $44 million above current appropriations.
"Our budget is adequate and our human resources are getting systematically upgraded," Diaz said. "Right now we are getting the talent we need. It might become more difficult in the future."
David Lochbaum, a nuclear scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, told the subcommittee that there is "compelling evidence" that suggests the NRC is ignoring degrading conditions at many plants across the country.
Davis-Besse is 28th reactor in past 20 years to be shut down for more than a year to deal with safety problems, said Lochbaum, who added that the Commission's response to concerns is akin to "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic."
"The NRC has seldom fixed problems identified by internal and external inspectors," Lochbaum said.
Diaz told the subcommittee the Commission is determined to fix its shortcomings.
"The level of reactor safety has increased steadily," he said. "Not a single member of the public has ever been exposed to a harmful amount of radiation from a nuclear power plant and we intend to keep it that way."
----
Plan to cover N-waste with grout has stalled
May 21, 2004
Associated Press
http://www.billingsgazette.com/index.php?id=1&display=rednews/2004/05/21/build/nation/83-sludge.inc
WASHINGTON (AP) - A Bush administration plan to cover nearly 1 million gallons of highly radioactive sludge with grout has run into obstacles in the Senate, where Democrats say grout is for bathrooms, not leftovers from Cold War weapons.
Senate action on a defense bill stalled Thursday because of disagreement over the Energy Department's plan to leave the sludge in South Carolina, Washington and Idaho, with a protective coating over it.
"For most Americans grout is something they see in their bathrooms and not something used to deal with nuclear waste," said Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash. "... I do not believe you can grout over it, put sand in a tank and say we've cleaned up the waste."
The administration wanted to use the broad defense bill to change a 1982 law requiring that the wastes left from reprocessing plutonium for weapons be shipped to a central repository in Nevada.
The Energy Department contends the new administration plan would shorten by years the time it takes to clean up the wastes and save billions of dollars, while still protecting the environment.
Provisions in a defense bill would let the government reclassify the sludge in tanks in South Carolina so it could be treated as low-level waste. The bill also would allow the department to withhold cleanup funds for Energy Department facilities in Washington and Idaho until they also agree to keep the wastes.
An amendment by Cantwell to get the nuclear waste provision out of the defense bill was debated throughout the day Thursday, but a vote on it was delayed until Congress returns in June from a Memorial Day vacation.
"Who wants to save money by leaving nuclear waste in the ground?" Cantwell asked.
But Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., who had the language inserted into the defense bill during a closed meeting, argued that South Carolina still will have final say in assuring that any cleanup meets state water regulations. He has argued some of the sludge should never have been viewed as high-level waste and that reclassifying it would save $16 billion and shorten cleaning of storage tanks at the government's Savannah River facility near Aiken, S.C., by 23 years.
That didn't satisfy the state's other senator.
"This is a highly dangerous procedure," complained Sen. Fritz Hollings, D-S.C., predicting environmental disaster hundreds of years from now if the waste is kept in the tanks and leaks into the nearby Savannah River.
There are 34 million gallons of waste in underground tanks at Savannah River, 53 million gallons in tanks at DOE's Hanford site near Richland, Wash., and 900,000 gallons in tanks at the INEEL facility in Idaho.
Energy Department officials argue that 1 percent of the tank waste - residual sludge adhering to the bottom and sides of the tank - would be extremely expensive to remove. So, they want to cover it with cement-like grout and keep it in place. A federal judge in Idaho has ruled that would violate the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act. The provision in the defense bill would change the 1982 law and, according to Idaho and Washington officials, could jeopardize the Idaho court ruling.
The Energy Department maintains that by mixing the waste with grout the residual sludge would lose radioactive intensity and qualify as low-level waste.
-------- britain
Former Sellafield worker jailed for bomb hoax
21 May, 2004
ITV
http://www.itvregions.com/news.php?region=Border&content=6204
A fomer Sellafield worker has been sentenced to two years in prison for staging a bomb hoax at the plant. 44-year-old Duncan Ball from Huntley Avenue in Penrith carried out the hoax last August. The court heard he had called police while drunk to say he'd left a bomb at the plant's visitors centre. The court also heard that Ball had previously threatened to set fire to himself in Whitehall while demanding to speak to Tony Blair.
-------- depleted uranium
DISINFORMATION & Depleted Uranium [DU]
COOP RADIO
Leuren Moret
From: "ecologynews" <Ecotoday@aol.com>
Date: Fri, 21 May 2004
LISTEN ONLINE TO COOP RADIO: http://www.coopradio.org/
COOP RADIO - CFRO - 102.7 FM Vancouver, B.C.
Date: Monday, May 24, 2004/
Time: 12 -1pm PT http://www.coopradio.org/
DISINFORMATION & Depleted Uranium [DU]: "The manipulation of information, the invention of pretexts, the falsification of reality, and turning people against their own interests is itself facilitated by the monopoly control over the media, and the process of neo-liberal globalization." Halifax International Symposium on Media and Disinformation July 1-4, 2004 - Dalhousie University - Halifax, Nova Scotia .
GUEST: Leuren Moret was an Expert Witness at the International Criminal Tribunal For Afghanistan At Tokyo. She is an independent scientist and international expert on radiation and public health issues. She is on the organizing committee of the World Committee on Radiation Risk, an organization of independent radiation specialists, including members of the Radiation Committee in the EU parliament, the European Committee on Radiation Risk. She is an environmental commissioner for the City of Berkeley. Ms. Moret earned her BS in geology at U.C. Davis in 1968 and her MA in Near Eastern studies from U.C. Berkeley in 1978. She has completed all but her dissertation for a PhD in the geosciences at U.C. Davis. She has traveled and conducted scientific research in 42 countries. She wrote a scientific report on depleted uranium for the United Nations sub commission investigating the illegality of depleted uranium munitions. Marian Falk, a former Manhattan Project scientist and retired insider at the Livermore Lab, who is an expert on radioactive fallout and rainout, has trained her on radiation issues. DU Tribunal Testimony: http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2003/Leuren- Moret-ICT13dec03.htm
International Criminal Tribunal For Afghanistan At Tokyo: The People Versus George Walker Bush - President Of The United States Of America Tribunal Verdict: http://www.traprockpeace.org/tokyo_trial_13march04.doc
HOST: Alfred Webre, JD, MEd
Halifax International Symposium on Media and Disinformation July 1- 4, 2004 - Dalhousie University - Halifax, Nova Scotia . This International Symposium aims to deal with one of the most pressing matters facing journalists, media and culture workers, and all sections of the people -- disinformation. The main aim of the Symposium is to empower journalists and collectives of the people by definitively exposing the modus operandi and extent of disinformation, presenting the experience of journalists and activists across Canada and abroad in tackling it, and to consolidate the long-term struggle for its elimination.
That disinformation exists is well established. The international situation has become increasingly dangerous, filled with tension between the peoples and the big powers and amongst the big powers themselves. Disinformation has emerged as one of their most powerful weapons against peace and humanity. The whole world is discussing how the invasion and occupation of Iraq was justified by lies and deceptions. But disinformation extends far beyond isolated examples; whether it is the manipulation of "democracy" or of "human rights" or of "nuclear-non-proliferation" to justify interference in the internal affairs of sovereign nations and even launch pre-emptive aggression, it has become so pervasive that it is the central rule, rather than the exception.
Disinformation -- as distinct from misinformation -- relies on mystifying the basis of change, development and motion in society, and reduces objective reality to a matter of interpretation, debate and discussion. Whether it is the "clash of civilizations" or the thesis of "rogue" or "failed" states, disinformation relies on the ideological content of imperialism.
For example, people simply are not able to understand the Palestinian crisis as anything other that an ethnic clash, because they are not provided with information about the whole reality. They are not provided with the context needed to come to any other conclusion than the pre-determined one: a hopeless cycle of violence.
The manipulation of information, the invention of pretexts, the falsification of reality, and turning people against their own interests is itself facilitated by the monopoly control over the media, and the process of neo-liberal globalization. The unprecedented concentration of media and power enables a tiny handful of moguls with a preconceived agenda to deploy colossal resources to dictate what is published and what is not, who is hired and who is fired, all with the aim of disorienting people and usurping any healthy discussion. Under the veneer of being "fair and balanced" and even "objective," this media normalizes bias, disregards and changes essential facts, and ignores and suppresses all those voices presenting information and independent views.
Disinformation is not just a matter of a foreign policy adventure of Bush or Blair, but has become a general method for imperial dictate and monopoly right in the overall neo-liberal assault on conscience and enlightenment, and the sovereign and democratic rights of nations and peoples.
The Symposium will feature discussions of disinformation and how it operates at the local, regional, national, and global levels. We invite media workers, scholars, First Nations, labour, fishermen and farmer's organizers, anti-war and environmental activists, publishers and other concerned groups or individuals to present their experience and expertise of disinformation. We are inviting journalists from Cuba, Venezuela, Haiti, Palestine and other countries to share their rich experience in fighting disinformation and interference in their affairs.
Hostility towards the monopoly media is pronounced. Some are concerned about the Americanization, some dislike the sensationalism, some say that coverage is distorted, and others say that reality is ignored altogether. But all express dissatisfaction and outrage. The media, increasing numbers of people are realizing, does not serve them, and even acts as a barrier to dealing with the pressing issues they face.
These concerns have given rise to an explosion of new and independent media on a global scale, as a voice to address peoples' rights and concerns.
Those who are initiating this conference have professional backgrounds in independent journalism and publishing, in radio, print, film, books, and on the Internet. This Symposium is open to everyone who is deeply concerned about disinformation, the mass media and the kind of information and culture they represent. This Symposium has been borne out of this concern. We share the conviction that now is the time to develop our collective capability to influence the course of events. It is the responsibility of those who stand for the truth to thoroughly deal with the question of disinformation. We are building a space where we can deal with the question, and advance the long work of combating disinformation and building an independent media.
Let all those concerned about fighting disinformation converge on Halifax!
Contact:
Telephone: 902.444.4922 (outside North America: 001.902.444.4922) Fax: 001.902.444.7595 E-mail: info@halifaxsymposium.ca Post: Halifax Symposium, PO Box 31377, Halifax, NS, Canada B3K 5Z1 Website: www.halifaxsymposium.ca http://www.halifaxsymposium.ca/
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RealAudio and Program information for radio station CFRO can be found on the internet at http://www.coopradio.org
Listener phone-in: Call Coop Radio on-air with your questions and comments at (604) 684-7561.
-------- india / pakistan
Singh seeks peace with rival Pakistan
PM-to-be also wants riots to end inside India
Reform agenda aims to raise living standards
thestar.com ASIA BUREAU
MARTIN REGG COHN
May 21, 2004.
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1085091009999&call_pageid=968332188854&col=968350060724
NEW DELHI-India's incoming prime minister has pledged to wage war against poverty and sectarianism at home while aggressively pursuing peace with nuclear neighbour Pakistan.
Laying out an ambitious reform agenda on the eve of taking power, Manmohan Singh stressed the need for secularism and tolerance among India's 1 billion people to avoid the communal tensions and rioting that have plagued the country in recent years.
Holding his first news conference since being tapped by the Congress Party to become India's next leader, Singh struck an earnest yet determined tone as he vowed to give the country a stable coalition government to deliver economic development "with a human face."
But the normally soft-spoken technocrat saved his most impassioned words for Pakistan, saying the two neighbours that have fought three wars since independence must learn to co-exist peacefully.
"We seek the most friendly relations with our neighbours, more so with Pakistan than with any other," he said, taking a break from closed-door meetings with coalition partners before an expected swearing-in ceremony tomorrow.
He called for a change in the "friction and the unfortunate history of our relations with Pakistan," saying the two countries that were partitioned in 1947 should look to the fall of the Berlin Wall as an example of how to overcome historic barriers.
"Who could have imagined that some 15 years ago that the Berlin Wall would melt?" asked Singh, 71, who was born in a Punjabi village in what is now part of Pakistan. "If those impossible things can happen, why not in our case?"
Singh's overtures were immediately reciprocated by warm words from Pakistan's leadership, including President Pervez Musharraf, who was himself born in New Delhi before partition. Musharraf said his country was "sincere in this effort" and that economic development could benefit the region if stable relations took root.
Singh also indicated he would seek a negotiated settlement over the disputed Himalayan territory of Kashmir.But he reserved some of his strongest words for his own countrymen. The man set to be the country's first non-Hindu prime minister said Indians must put aside the sectarian strife that erupted only two years ago in Gujarat when more than 1,000 Muslims were slaughtered, and in 1984 when hundreds of Sikhs were massacred.
"It is very unfortunate that communal riots take place all the time," said Singh, a Sikh who wore his trademark blue turban. "We cannot divide people on the basis of religion and race. We are an ancient civilization and the most tolerant civilization. The essence of Hinduism is that it talks of different paths but the goal is the same."
A finance minister from 1991 to 1996 who is considered the architect of India's free-market economic reforms, Singh tried to calm jittery stock markets by promising continuity.
But he cautioned that the Congress Party, in alliance with Communists, would halt privatization of profitable state-owned enterprises and stressed development must pay dividends to hundreds of millions of rural poor across India.
"The war against poverty, ignorance and disease has to be carried on relentlessly," he told reporters. "We will not do anything that will throw a large number of workers into the pool of unemployment."
Singh spent most of yesterday huddled with Congress Party leader Sonia Gandhi, who stunned the nation earlier in the week by declining to accept the prime ministerial post, handing it instead to her trusted political lieutenant. A senior civil servant before taking on the finance ministry in 1991, Singh has never won an election and remains untested as a political operator but must now bring order to a 12-party coalition as he picks a cabinet.
He was previously appointed to the upper chamber of parliament, and is expected to seek a seat in the Lok Sabha, or People's Assembly, in a by-election within six months. A bookish intellectual with a reputation for honesty, Singh drew inspiration from French author Victor Hugo at his news conference when he said his agenda would succeed because "no power on Earth can stop an idea whose time has come."
-------- korea
North Korea says US troop cut is a ploy: report
SEOUL (AFP)
May 21, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040521042018.tqtbzpso.html
Washington's plan to realign US forces in South Korea is part of a plot to attack North Korea that has triggered a military alert in the Stalinist state, a Pyongyang diplomat was quoted as saying Friday.
Washington announced earlier this week that it was redeploying 3,600 troops from South Korea to Iraq to help cope with deteriorating security there.
Plans are also well advanced for the realignment of the remaining 34,000 US troops in South Korea, withdrawing them from the tense border with North Korea to bases south of Seoul.
"The current redeployment of US forces is aimed at preparing preemptive attacks on North Korea in a plot to start a second Korean War, according to analysts," Han Song-Ryol, Pyongyang's deputy UN ambassador, told South Korea's JoonAng Ilbo in an interview from New York.
North Korea's 1.1 million army was on "high alert" in response to the US move he said.
Pyongyang argues that the withdrawal of US troops from the border to positions south of Seoul and out of range of North Korean artillery would allow US forces to strike North Korea without fear of retaliation.
"The Korean People's Army is watching closely the US moves in a state of high alert," said Han
US troops based near the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) with North Korea have long been seen here as a tripwire, assuring US involvement if North Korea invaded the South.
US Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz said Tuesday the concept was outdated and counterproductive.
Washington says the first troop reduction in South Korean since the early 90s is expected to take place in mid-year and will not affect the US ability to deter North Korea.
US air and sea combat capabilities will be enhanced as part of a US plan announced last year to invest 11 billion dollars in the defence of South Korea in coming years, officials said.
-------- mideast
Syrian weapons
May 21, 2004
Inside the Ring
By Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/inring.htm
Syria's rogue status has been elevated again. Its long history of occupying Lebanon and supporting terror groups has been augmented by new misdeeds: facilitating the movement of foreign terrorists from its soil to Iraq to kill Americans and Iraqis.
It now faces new U.S. economic sanctions. We thought it would be a good time to disclose how the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) assesses Syria's arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. It's contained in a secret DIA report disclosed for the first time in "Rumsfeld's War: The Untold Story of America's Anti-Terrorist Commander," a new book by Rowan Scarborough, a reporter for The Washington Times and one of this column's writers.
The DIA states:
"Currently those countries that have a delivery capability for both chemical and biological agents include Russia, Iraq, China and North Korea. Iran has a chemical weapons capability and probably a limited biological agent delivery means; Libya, Egypt, India, Taiwan, Israel, South Korea and Syria have chemical weapons capabilities. ... Moreover, Libya, Syria and Pakistan probably can produce biological agents on a limited scale and presumably have some means of delivery even if not by military systems."
-------- russia
U.S. presses Russia on arms initiative, Iran
May 21, 2004
Russia Journal
http://www.russiajournal.com/news/cnews-article.shtml?nd=43873
A top U.S. diplomat said on Thursday he hoped Russia would by June 1 join a group of nations prepared to board ships and raid suspect factories in a bid to stem the trade in weapons of mass destruction. But U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton's Russian partner poured cold water on his optimism, saying Moscow still sought answers to a number of questions about President George W. Bush's Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI).
Russia is the only member of the Group of Eight major industrial nations outside the PSI's core group. If Russia joined the PSI group, U.S. officials believe this would influence China, another key power, to back the scheme. Bolton said after talks with President Vladimir Putin's top energy officials that he hoped to see Russia in the PSI by June 1, when Poland hosts a conference of 80-odd members of the group - well before the topic is discussed at the G8 summit at Sea Island, Georgia, June 8-11.
"We are hoping either by that time (June 1) or very shortly thereafter that the government of Russia will join the core group of PSI countries," he told a news conference. "Russia's government asked a number of perfectly legitimate and sensible questions which we are trying to answer," he added. "But we think the government is now making its final decision on the subject and we are hopeful that they may confirm their decision to join the PSI core group."
The United States says the PSI aims to halt the flow of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons-related materials and missiles bound for states like North Korea and Iran by boarding suspect ships on the seas and seizing illegal cargoes. Bush earlier this year said he wanted the PSI to be widened to persuade participating states also to enter suspect factories and raid laboratories where such materials might be stored.
But Russia, which basically supports the need to halt illegal traffic of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), had reservations about the U.S. plan. It is particularly worried about the legality of boarding vessels at sea. "We have similar or close strategic goals with the United States as far as non-proliferation is concerned," Interfax news agency quoted Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Kislyak as saying after talks with Bolton.
"We are satisfied with the consultations, although not all details have been coordinated," Kislyak added. "The work continues, moreover all this should be worked on in a multilateral format of the G8."
Bolton said he also discussed with Moscow U.S. suspicions that Iran is planning to obtain nuclear and missile technology. Washington has concerns about the Bushehr atomic power plant that Russia is building for Tehran despite Washington's demands to ditch the $800 million project.
Iran has denied it has any plans to develop nuclear weapons. But U.S. officials believe Iranian scientists can extract weapons-grade plutonium from the Bushehr reactor and use Russian nuclear know-how to make an atom bomb. Moscow says it will not supply fresh nuclear fuel to Iran until it receives guarantees from Tehran that all spent fuel would be returned to Russian storage facilities after a decade of use at Bushehr.
Moscow also fears that if it backs out of the project other West European companies will step in and take Russia's place. A U.S. official said that even if Bushehr ran normally for three or four years Washington believed that Tehran could - if it pulled out of the non-proliferation treaty (NPT) - develop a nuclear weapon.
-------- u.n.
US official to unveil major non-proliferation plan next week
VIENNA (AFP)
May 21, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040521143718.4a980rwl.html
US Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham will unveil a major nuclear non-proliferation initiative here next week and will meet with the head of the UN watchdog agency, a US embassy spokesman said Friday.
"This is a new initiative on cleaning up and containing stray radioactive sources and also trying to get HEU (highly enriched uranium) out of research reactors," said spokesman Michael Garuckis, adding that the goal was "making sure everything is tagged and traceable."
Highly enriched uranium can be used for civilian purposes but also as raw material for a nuclear bomb.
"It is a major non-proliferation initiative," Garuckis said, adding that Abraham, who will be on a European tour, would deliver a major policy speech Wednesday and meet with Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agencychief Mohamed ElBaradei.
The IAEA has expressed concern about the discovery of HEU traces in Iran. Its board of governors is to meet here in mid-June to focus on Iran's nuclear ambitions.
Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb, admitted in February that he had covertly sold nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- massachusetts
Nuke info is out in view of public
By Cosmo Macero Jr.
Friday, May 21, 2004
http://business.bostonherald.com/businessNews/view.bg?articleid=28780
Highly sensitive data files that could help terrorists assemble a radioactive dirty bomb are being stored in the hallway of a state welfare office in Dorchester.
That means random office workers, night janitors and even the general public may have easy access to information in the files about the locations and quantities of more than 1,000 radioactive compounds around Massachusetts.
``The files are accessible by just reaching in and looking,'' said one employee, speaking only on condition of anonymity. ``There is nothing covering them.''
Concerns about the security of the files revived exactly a year after top safety officials warned Gov. Mitt Romney's administration that the Dorchester site was inappropriate for the state's Radiation Control Program files.
The radiation program - which tracks all companies and agencies licensed to use radioactive compounds such as plutonium, cobalt and iridium - was moved last year from secure facilities on Portland Street to space it now shares with the Department of Transitional Assistance. State officials insisted security was adequate, despite employee protests and complaints from radiation and safety specialists.
``These security lapses endanger everyone in the commonwealth,'' said Mary Richards, president of the Massachusetts Organization of State Engineers and Scientists, a union that represents employees of the radiation agency. ``We warned them before the move. We warned them after the move. What's it going to take?''
The files have been stored in an unsecure hallway and elsewhere around the building since last fall.
The building's construction, according to the state Department of Public Health, was not able to support the full weight of the files.
``We find the current situation unacceptable,'' said Roseanne Pawelec, spokeswoman for DPH, which oversees the radiation program. ``The files are in library carts - big plywood structures. The floors meant to hold the files buckled. And we've been unsuccessful to date in getting the landlord to fix the floors.''
Pawelec said plans call for the radiation program office to be moved again this summer to a location in Revere, where space will be shared with two other agencies.
Still, that move is likely to draw fire once again from the state scientists' union, as well as top safety officials.
Last year, Dr. Sidney Kadish - head of the Advisory Council on Radiation Protection - warned Romney that the council was ``extremely concerned that these files may fall into the wrong hands.''
Kadish has termed the files flap a ``national security issue.''
The move to Dorchester was also criticized by the director of the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency, as well as MEMA's chief nuclear engineer.
Security at the Grove Hall building, employees say, is notoriously lax - though Pawelec noted a ``state trooper'' is posted there and ``at night the building has an electronic security system.''
-------- new mexico
Los Alamos Lab: Classified Data Missing
May 21, 2004
Associated Press
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-4114336,00.html
LOS ALAMOS, N.M. (AP) - Classified information was discovered missing at Los Alamos National Laboratory this week, but a lab spokesman said the data would not jeopardize national security even if it fell into the wrong hands.
The information, which was on a data storage device, was still unaccounted for Thursday, said LANL spokesman Kevin Roark. A federal review team is set to investigate.
``This in our view is not a major event and it's certainly not a breach of security,'' Roark said. He said lab employees conducting an inventory of classified information could not locate the device.
``It's our strong belief (it) was either destroyed or retasked (reused), but the proper paperwork wasn't done to track its destruction or reuse,'' Roark said.
The lab said in a statement that the storage device was slated for destruction in March as part of an effort to reduce what the lab called Classified Removable Electronic Media.
``The lab can spin it however they want,'' said Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington D.C.-based watchdog group that has uncovered Los Alamos issues before. ``Classified data is missing once again from Los Alamos.''
Rep. Tom Udall of New Mexico said he was assured by lab officials the missing information contained no nuclear weapons data.
The lab, operated by the University of California under contract with the Energy Department, has suffered a string of embarrassing management failures in recent years. They include reports of financial abuse by employees, two misplaced computer hard drives with secret nuclear-related material and the firing of two lab investigators who raised concerns about management.
Late last year, Los Alamos management halted operations at its Nuclear Nonproliferation Division after an inventory found that nine floppy disks and a large-capacity storage disk believed to contain some classified information were missing.
Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said then that misplaced classified information at the lab was the type of management failure that prompted the department to seek bids for a new contractor to run the lab when the university's contract expires in September 2005.
-------- ohio
Republican Demands More NRC Safety Regulation
Story by Chris Baltimore
REUTERS USA:
May 21, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/25204/story.htm
WASHINGTON - The Republican head of a Senate panel warned U.S. nuclear regulators on Thursday that he would introduce legislation if they fail to shore up oversight gaps that led to severe corrosion at an Ohio nuclear plant.
Congress' investigative arm, the General Accounting Office, earlier this week criticized the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for failing to act quickly after spotting leaking boric acid that nearly chewed through the reactor at the plant owned by Akron, Ohio-based FirstEnergy Corp. .
Ohio Sen. George Voinovich, head of a Senate subcommittee on nuclear safety, asked NRC Chairman Nils Diaz to explain why the agency didn't do more to address safety standards at the 103 U.S. commercial nuclear plants it regulates.
Diaz called the incident at the Davis-Besse plant an "unacceptable failure" by the NRC and FirstEnergy. But imposing specific "safety culture" rules is the responsibility of plant owners, not the NRC, Diaz said.
"We do not believe that's the role of the commission," Diaz said at a hearing of the Senate subcommittee. FirstEnergy "did not meet its own definition of safety culture," Diaz said.
Voinovich rebuked Diaz. "If you won't do it, I'll get legislation passed to get it done," the senator said.
The General Accounting Office study found the NRC "should have, but did not, identify or prevent the corrosion at Davis-Besse because its oversight did not generate accurate information on plant conditions." Other problems could occur because the NRC hasn't done enough to monitor safety, it said.
Leaking boric acid, used as a coolant, ate a cantaloupe-sized hole in the outer hull of the reactor in Oak Harbor, Ohio, about 35 miles east of Toledo.
No radiation was released into the air, but it was a serious safety violation. The NRC ordered the plant shut in early 2002.
FirstEnergy returned the plant to full power last month after it spent $600 million to repair the damage.
-------- south carolina
Bill stalls as S.C. senators clash
Hollings attacks Graham's proposal to cover waste at Savannah River Site
From Staff and Wire Reports
Fri, May. 21, 2004
South Carolina The State
http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/news/local/8719104.htm
NUCLEAR WASTE DEBATE
WASHINGTON- A Bush administration plan to cover nearly 1 million gallons of highly radioactive sludge with grout has run into obstacles in the Senate - and pitted South Carolina's two senators against each other on the floor of Congress.
Senate action on a defense bill stalled Thursday because of disagreement over the Energy Department's plan to leave the sludge at federal nuclear complexes in South Carolina, Washington and Idaho, with a protective coating over it.
U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., is pushing the plan, in part to save money on cleanup costs at the Savannah River Site near Aiken. But Democratic Sen. Fritz Hollings, D-S.C., told fellow senators Thursday that Graham's plan is a bad one.
So did Washington Sen. Maria Cantwell, a fellow Democrat.
"Who wants to save money by leaving nuclear waste in the ground?" Cantwell asked.
The administration wanted to use the broad defense bill to change a 1982 law requiring that the wastes left from reprocessing plutonium for weapons be shipped to a central repository in Nevada.
Graham and the Energy Department contend the new administration plan would shorten by years the time it takes to clean up the wastes and save billions of dollars, while still protecting the environment.
Provisions in a defense bill would let the government reclassify the sludge in tanks in South Carolina so it could be treated as low-level waste. The bill also would allow the department to withhold cleanup funds for Energy Department facilities in Washington and Idaho until they also agree to keep the wastes.
An amendment by Cantwell to get the nuclear waste provision out of the defense bill was debated throughout the day Thursday, but a vote on it was delayed until Congress returns in June from a Memorial Day recess.
But Graham, who had the language inserted into the defense bill during a closed meeting, argued that South Carolina still will have final say in assuring that any cleanup meets state water regulations.
He has argued some of the sludge should never have been viewed as high-level waste and that reclassifying it would save $16 billion and shorten cleaning of storage tanks at the government's Savannah River facility near Aiken by 23 years.
That didn't satisfy the state's other senator.
"This is a highly dangerous procedure," said Hollings, predicting environmental disaster hundreds of years from now if the waste is kept in the tanks and leaks into the nearby Savannah River.
There are 34 million gallons of waste in underground tanks at the Savannah River Site.
"I can say categorically, the state in the last 48 hours is in an uproar over this particular measure," Hollings said, declining to name the opponents. "They resent it, they resist it and they have asked me by advertisement and telephone calls to please adamantly oppose."
Graham said federal plans to close high-level waste tanks at the Savannah River Site have enough safeguards to protect the environment.
"The people in my state who regulate the environment have sent a letter saying we want this agreement," Graham said.
Energy Department officials argue that 1 percent of the tank waste - residual sludge adhering to the bottom and sides of the tank - would be extremely expensive to remove. So, they want to cover it with cement-like grout and keep it in place.
A federal judge in Idaho has ruled that would violate the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act. The provision in the defense bill would change the 1982 law and, according to Idaho and Washington officials, could jeopardize the Idaho court ruling.
Staff writers Sammy Fretwell and Lauren Markoe contributed to this story.
----
S.C. senators clash on nuclear sludge disposal
Graham has proposed leaving waste sealed at SRS, speeding cleanup
BRUCE HENDERSON Staff Writer
Fri, May. 21, 2004
Charlotte Observer
http://www.charlotte.com/mld/observer/news/local/8719505.htm?1c
South Carolina's two U.S. senators sparred Thursday over a measure that could allow thousands of gallons of toxic nuclear waste to be entombed at the federal Savannah River Site.
Forty-nine tanks hold nearly 35 million gallons of radioactive wastes, the residue of SRS's history of making plutonium for the nation's nuclear weapons. The liquid portion will be turned into glass and buried at a government disposal site in Nevada.
The sludge lining the tanks, however, would be both expensive and time-consuming to remove.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., wants to leave it there. Sealing the tanks with a concrete-like material called grout would safely contain the sludge, he says, while finishing the SRS cleanup 23 years early at a savings of up to $16 billion.
"People in South Carolina want the waste cleaned up. They want it done in an environmentally sound manner," Graham told the Senate Thursday.
"And people in South Carolina want it done sooner rather than later," Graham said. "And they are conscious of the cost to the taxpayer."
The Senate didn't vote Thursday on an amendment that Graham attached to a defense appropriations bill.
But fellow Sen. Ernest "Fritz" Hollings, a Democrat, took the Senate floor to demand a hearing on the measure. His state, he said, is "in an uproar" over the plan.
"This is monkeyshines," Hollings said. "We cannot go along with this one."
Critics say Graham's plan would leave SRS forever contaminated. They fear the aging tanks will leak radioactive elements into groundwater and then the Savannah River, which borders the site.
"It undoes over two decades of congressional work and compromise on nuclear wastes, without a minute of public hearings," said Geoffrey Fettus, a staff attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
NRDC turned back a similar measure last year, challenging a Department of Energy "accelerated cleanup" order that reclassified radioactive wastes at SRS and at government installations in Idaho and Washington. The reclassifications would allow the states, rather than the federal government, determine the extent of such cleanups. A federal judge in Idaho overturned the department's order last July.
S.C. environmental officials, however, endorse Graham's plan, saying they don't want to delay cleaning up SRS. The measure relates only to South Carolina.
The old tanks brimming with radioactive wastes are "the single most potentially hazardous condition to the environment and people of South Carolina," Robert King, deputy commissioner of the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control, wrote the senator this week.
Officials say the Graham amendment essentially gives South Carolina a veto over any material the Department of Energy wants to leave in the state. The state had similar authority, they say, when the first two of 51 storage tanks were cleaned and closed in the late 1990s.
"Our concern has never been the fact that all the material in those tanks has to be removed," said David Wilson, assistant chief of DHEC's land and waste management division. "It's the ability of the state to have oversight" over the process.
NRDC says the Department of Energy deceived Graham and S.C. officials. The amendment "gives the state no more authority than it now has," Fettus said.
Citing SRS waste figures from 1999, the group said more than half the radioactivity in the tanks is concentrated in the 3.1 million gallons of sludge.
Graham's staff says about 1 percent of the tanks' radioactivity would remain. -- STAFF WRITER TIM FUNK CONTRIBUTED.
-- BRUCE HENDERSON: (704) 358-5051; BHENDERSON@CHARLOTTEOBSERVER.COM
-------- utah
N-storage provision in bill worries Utahns
May 21, 2004
By Christopher Smith
The Salt Lake Tribune
http://www.sltrib.com/2004/May/05212004/utah/168446.asp
WASHINGTON -- Although environmental groups warned of possible danger to Utah from language buried in a Senate defense budget bill Thursday that changes the status of radioactive waste in South Carolina, the sponsor of the measure and the state's federal lawmakers discounted such claims.
"What we are doing in South Carolina only affects South Carolina," Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said. His provision, inserted into the spending bill, allows the Department of Energy to treat as less-dangerous waste millions of gallons of radioactive leftovers from Cold War plutonium processing. This would change the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act requirement that such wastes be shipped to a planned permanent repository in Nevada.
Environmentalists urged Utah Republican Sens. Bob Bennett and Orrin Hatch to join a bipartisan move to strip the nuclear waste reclassification from the Senate version of the defense spending bill, claiming that it could open the door to the South Carolina waste coming instead to Envirocare of Utah, which is licensed to accept low-level radioactive waste for disposal at its Tooele County landfill.
"This amendment is arguably limited to South Carolina alone, but it is strangely drafted," said Geoffrey Fettus, a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council. "If DOE is allowed to reclassify stuff in South Carolina that would be high-level anywhere else, it could set a template to allow it to be shipped elsewhere, such as Envirocare."
No thanks, said officials with the Utah landfill.
"We don't want it, we are not interested in it, it's not a part of our plans and never has been, and it would never qualify to come here," said Tim Barney, Envirocare senior vice president in Salt Lake City.
Legislative analysts for Hatch and Bennett consulted with state Division of Environmental Quality officials and found no threat to Utah from the Graham provision.
"There's not really a Utah dog in this fight," said Mary Jane Collipriest, press secretary to Bennett. "Once this waste crosses the South Carolina border, it is classified as high-level waste, which is illegal in Utah." Advertisement
Bennett last year inserted wording into an omnibus spending bill that effectively blocked any Utah disposal of "hotter" radioactive waste from atomic weapon cleanup sites in Ohio and New York until state officials assumed oversight of the Envirocare facility.
Fettus said the latest nuclear waste reclassification provision was an "end run" around an Idaho federal judge's recent ruling that blocked DOE's plan to reclassify waste inside rotting storage tanks. Because of cost savings, the agency wants to pump out most of the liquid and fill the tanks with concrete grout. DOE contends the grouting process would justify reclassifying the waste as low-level.
Graham said the provision allows the leaking tanks at Savannah River to be cleaned up 23 years ahead of schedule, saving taxpayers $16 billion.
Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., condemned the deal because of the precedent it might set for waste in her state, home to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation and 53 million gallons of highly radioactive sludge from reprocessing plutonium.
"One change in the [Department of Defense] bill and billions of gallons of waste in my state is now no longer highly radioactive waste," said Cantwell, who staged a mini-filibuster over the provision Thursday afternoon, refusing to yield the right to speak to any other senator on the floor until leadership agreed to postpone a vote on the Graham amendment and the entire military spending bill until after the Memorial Day recess.
-------- washington
Kabelschlepp Metool cable reels for America's nuclear clean-up
21/05/2004
UK Faversham House
http://www.edie.net/gf.cfm?L=left_frame.html&R=http://www.edie.net/news/Archive/8393.cfm
News release: Kabelschlepp Metool, the UK's largest manufacturer of flexible cable handling systems, has won two contracts totalling $7 million to supply high-specification cable reels for the U.S. Department of Energy's Waste Treatment Plant project in Washington State, USA.
The $5.7 billion Waste Treatment Plant is being designed, built and commissioned by Bechtel National Inc. The project centres on the Hanford Site in south-eastern Washington which, from the Manhattan Project onwards, was used for a number of nuclear-related purposes, including plutonium production and research and development. A large portion of the 53 million gallons of highly radioactive and hazardous waste currently stored in underground tanks at Hanford will be vitrified into glass logs at the Waste Treatment Plant and made ready for eventual transfer to permanent disposal sites.
The reels will be used for feeding twelve remotely controlled cranes being built by PaR Systems of Minneapolis and ACECO of Philadelphia for the waste vitrification plant. There are two types of reel; those for PaR have twin cables carrying power and a wide variety of functions, such as controls, camera feed, variable speed/variable frequency motor drive, profibus and resolvers to the robotic arms. The ACECO cranes have a single-cable reel supplying power and control of similar design.
Kabelschlepp Metool has over twenty years' experience in designing and manufacturing reels for the British nuclear industry. For Hanford, the reels are of a special through-wall design with the reels and cables on the radioactive side and drive and sliprings on the safe side. The reels are driven by Metool's patented Vectorq electronic drive system to control torque and tension. This design enables the reels to be energised continuously, so ensuring that the cable is controlled at all times and eliminating the possibility of slack.
Based in Beeston, Nottingham, Kabelschlepp Metool is the UK's largest manufacturer of flexible cable and hose handling systems supplying power as well as controls to all types of moving machinery. In addition to cable and hose reels, products include a comprehensive range of Kabelschlepp cable carriers, drag chains, cables and festoon systems. Metool's industrial hose and cable reels range from large motorized reels for heavy plant to smaller, spring-operated reels for workshops and mobile applications, such as broadcasting and film. Metool Products Ltd. is a member of the international Kabelschlepp group of companies. For more information please contact Kabelschlepp Metool http://www.water-waste-environment-marketplace.com/mailform2.asp?CId=12572
-------- us nuc waste
Plutonium Waste Fight Stalls Defense Bill
Friday May 21, 2004
By H. JOSEF HEBERT
Associated Press Writer
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-4114064,00.html
WASHINGTON (AP) - A Bush administration plan to cover nearly 1 million gallons of highly radioactive sludge with grout has run into obstacles in the Senate, where Democrats say grout is for bathrooms, not leftovers from Cold War weapons.
Senate action on a defense bill stalled Thursday because of disagreement over the Energy Department's plan to leave the sludge in South Carolina, Washington and Idaho, with a protective coating over it.
``For most Americans grout is something they see in their bathrooms and not something used to deal with nuclear waste,'' said Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash. ``...I do not believe you can grout over it, put sand in a tank and say we've cleaned up the waste.''
The administration wanted to use the broad defense bill to change a 1982 law requiring that the wastes left from reprocessing plutonium for weapons be shipped to a central repository in Nevada.
The Energy Department contends the new administration plan would shorten by years the time it takes to clean up the wastes and save billions of dollars, while still protecting the environment.
Provisions in a defense bill would let the government reclassify the sludge in tanks in South Carolina so it could be treated as low-level waste. The bill also would allow the department to withhold cleanup funds for Energy Department facilities in Washington and Idaho until they also agree to keep the wastes.
An amendment by Cantwell to get the nuclear waste provision out of the defense bill was debated throughout the day Thursday, but a vote on it was delayed until Congress returns in June from a Memorial Day vacation.
``Who wants to save money by leaving nuclear waste in the ground?'' Cantwell asked.
But Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., who had the language inserted into the defense bill during a closed meeting, argued that South Carolina still will have final say in assuring that any cleanup meets state water regulations. He has argued some of the sludge should never have been viewed as high-level waste and that reclassifying it would save $16 billion and shorten cleaning of storage tanks at the government's Savannah River facility near Aiken, S.C., by 23 years.
That didn't satisfy the state's other senator.
``This is a highly dangerous procedure,'' complained Sen. Fritz Hollings, D-S.C., predicting environmental disaster hundreds of years from now if the waste is kept in the tanks and leaks into the nearby Savannah River.
There are 34 million gallons of waste in underground tanks at Savannah River, 53 million gallons in tanks at DOE's Hanford site near Richland, Wash., and 900,000 gallons in tanks at the INEEL facility in Idaho.
Energy Department officials argue that 1 percent of the tank waste - residual sludge adhering to the bottom and sides of the tank - would be extremely expensive to remove. So, they want to cover it with cement-like grout and keep it in place.
A federal judge in Idaho has ruled that would violate the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act. The provision in the defense bill would change the 1982 law and, according to Idaho and Washington officials, could jeopardize the Idaho court ruling.
The Energy Department maintains that by mixing the waste with grout the residual sludge would lose radioactive intensity and qualify as low-level waste.
----
Nuclear Waste Clean-Up Plans Fuel Debate
Groups Question Government Plans for Radioactive Materials
May 21, 2004
NPR
http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=1904687
A DOE storage tank, filled to the top with nuclear waste, sludge and salts. Credit: Department of Energy
http://www.npr.org/programs/morning/features/2004/may/nuclearwaste/before140.jpg
Storage Tank After Clean-Up See a DOE tank after its nuclear waste has been removed. -- The Senate is immersed in a floor fight over nuclear waste clean-up. A bill now under debate would allow the Department of Energy to leave what could be millions of gallons of high level waste in old underground tanks. The DOE says the material, left over from nuclear weapons production, won't pose a hazard. But opponents contend it could leak out, contaminating rivers and groundwater.
At question are nuclear waste storage tanks in Washington state, Idaho and South Carolina. The DOE says it can remove more than 99 percent of the radioactive sludge from the tanks, and seal the remaining traces in concrete or grout. But environmental groups say studies haven't convinced them that the grout prevents small leaks over time. NPR's David Kestenbaum reports.
Related NPR Stories
U.S. Eyes Security Reforms for Nuclear Sites
http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=1888675
The Science of Yucca Mountain
http://www.npr.org/programs/atc/features/2002/july/yucca/
----
Grout idea stalls nuclear sludge clean-up
Democrats disagree with administration that it's safe
The Associated Press
May 21, 2004
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5030895/
WASHINGTON - A Bush administration plan to cover nearly 1 million gallons of highly radioactive sludge with grout has run into obstacles in the Senate, where Democrats say grout is for bathrooms, not leftovers from Cold War weapons.
Senate action on a defense bill stalled Thursday because of disagreement over the Energy Department's plan to leave the sludge in South Carolina, Washington and Idaho, with a protective coating over it.
"For most Americans grout is something they see in their bathrooms and not something used to deal with nuclear waste," said Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash. "...I do not believe you can grout over it, put sand in a tank and say we've cleaned up the waste."
The administration wanted to use the broad defense bill to change a 1982 law requiring that the wastes left from reprocessing plutonium for weapons be shipped to a central repository in Nevada. The Energy Department contends the new administration plan would shorten by years the time it takes to clean up the wastes and save billions of dollars, while still protecting the environment.
Reclassify as low-level waste?
Provisions in a defense bill would let the government reclassify the sludge in tanks in South Carolina so it could be treated as low-level waste. The bill also would allow the department to withhold cleanup funds for Energy Department facilities in Washington and Idaho until they also agree to keep the wastes.
An amendment by Cantwell to get the nuclear waste provision out of the defense bill was debated throughout the day Thursday, but a vote on it was delayed until Congress returns in June from a Memorial Day vacation.
"Who wants to save money by leaving nuclear waste in the ground?" Cantwell asked.
But Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., who had the language inserted into the defense bill during a closed meeting, argued that South Carolina still will have final say in assuring that any cleanup meets state water regulations. He has argued some of the sludge should never have been viewed as high-level waste and that reclassifying it would save $16 billion and shorten cleaning of storage tanks at the government's Savannah River facility near Aiken, S.C., by 23 years.
That didn't satisfy the state's other senator.
"This is a highly dangerous procedure," complained Sen. Fritz Hollings, D-S.C., predicting environmental disaster hundreds of years from now if the waste is kept in the tanks and leaks into the nearby Savannah River.
Waste basics, background
There are 34 million gallons of waste in underground tanks at Savannah River, 53 million gallons in tanks at DOE's Hanford site near Richland, Wash., and 900,000 gallons in tanks at the INEEL facility in Idaho.
Energy Department officials argue that 1 percent of the tank waste - residual sludge adhering to the bottom and sides of the tank - would be extremely expensive to remove. So, they want to cover it with cement-like grout and keep it in place.
A federal judge in Idaho has ruled that would violate the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act. The provision in the defense bill would change the 1982 law and, according to Idaho and Washington officials, could jeopardize the Idaho court ruling.
The Energy Department maintains that by mixing the waste with grout the residual sludge would lose radioactive intensity and qualify as low-level waste.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Afghan Policies on Questioning Prisoners Taken to Iraq
May 21, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL and ERIC SCHMITT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/21/politics/21ABUS.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, May 20 - The interrogation center at Abu Ghraib prison was run by a military intelligence unit that had served in Afghanistan and that had taken to Iraq the aggressive rules and procedures it had developed for the Afghan conflict, according to documents and testimony.
Some members of the unit, part of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, from Fort Bragg, N.C., have already been quietly punished in connection with the abuse of an Iraqi woman at the prison, according to documents recently released by the Army.
In August 2003, the officer in charge of the unit, Capt. Carolyn A. Wood, an experienced Army interrogator, posted her own list of "interrogation rules of engagement," which were inconsistent with those later issued for Iraq by the top American commander, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, according to Congressional officials.
The Abu Ghraib prison's questioning area, the existence of which was classified information, was formally called the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center.
It was not in the cellblock where the severe abuses that have come to light in recent weeks occurred.
Interrogations took place in buildings outside the cellblock, and military police were not present.
To date, the only people charged with crimes in the abuse have been members of the 372nd Military Police Company, who served as guards in the cellblock.
But lawyers representing some of the accused say some photographs of the abuses also show unidentified military intelligence officers and contractors assigned to the interrogation center.
Some of the accused have said they were told or encouraged to harshly treat prisoners by military intelligence officers, as part of a broader effort to soften the detainees up for interrogation.
"Only one with Pollyannaish myopia could conclude that the M.I. community is not deeply involved in the abuse," said Gary Myers, a lawyer whose client, Staff Sgt. Ivan L. Frederick II, is facing a court-martial in the case.
The Washington Post published in its Friday edition sworn accounts of prisoners who said they were abused at the prisons, as well as previously undisclosed pictures and images from a video of guards beating and humiliating naked detainees and forcing a number of them to form a human pyramid.
The article quoted the detainees as saying that soldiers abused them as punishment for breaking the rules of the prison.
In addition to the threats and humiliations that have previously been reported, the newspaper said the detainees were forced to retrieve food from toilets, were ridden like animals and were force-fed pork and liquor. One prisoner declared he had seen an Army translator having sex with a teenage boy detainee. Some of the detainees identified soldiers already charged in the case.
Neither the statements, nor the picture shed any new light on who might have ordered the abuse.
General Sanchez issued no rules to govern procedures for interrogations until after a visit last fall by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller. The rules he later issue emerged in stages, and some were contradictory. In a closed briefing on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, a senior Army lawyer acknowledged that the process might have left unclear to some officers the degree to which harsh measures, including sensory and sleep deprivation, were permissible.
The interrogation center is the focus of a continuing inquiry into the role of military intelligence officers and civilian contractors who oversaw it.
Until now, very little information about the interrogators or the evolution of interrogation rules has emerged publicly.
But the role played by the center, formally established in September by Brig. Gen. Barbara G. Fast, the top intelligence officer in Iraq, has emerged in documents, testimony and interviews.
Beginning in September, the center was headed by Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan. Captain Wood acted as officer in charge.
Elements of the 519th Battalion, including Captain Wood, had served as interrogators in Afghanistan, where the American military runs detention centers at Bagram Air Base and at a site in Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan.
They were among several units that brought to Iraq "their own policies that had been used in other theaters," Col. Marc Warren, the top lawyer at the Army's headquarters in Iraq, said at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Wednesday.
In Afghanistan, military officials said, American forces use harsher tactics for interrogations than in Iraq, where it has insisted that the Geneva Conventions apply to all prisoners in American custody.
Colonel Warren and other Army officials have not said whether they believe the military intelligence unit put into practice at Abu Ghraib the harsher procedures used in Afghanistan.
A report by The Denver Post in April - based on Army records and published in April, before the broader Abu Ghraib scandal became known - disclosed that three soldiers from the 519th Battalion had been fined and demoted in a closed proceeding stemming from the abuse of an Iraqi woman at Abu Ghraib. It is not clear whether those soldiers reported to Captain Wood.
The records obtained by The Post were heavily edited by the military to delete the names of the soldiers involved and other details of the incident. Spokesmen for the XVIII Airborne Corps did not respond to repeated inquiries for more information about the incidents.
Captain Wood had served 10 years in enlisted ranks as an interrogator, and her unit specializes in "tactical exploitation" of intelligence, including interrogation of prisoners, Army officials said. It remained unclear on Thursday exactly when and where Captain Wood and her unit served in Afghanistan; a spokesman for the XVIII Corps in Fort Bragg said he was not able to provide that information on short notice.
Maj. Rich Patterson, the spokesman, also said that Captain Wood was no longer assigned to the 519th Battalion. An official at the Command and General Staff College, at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., said she had graduated from an advanced officer's course there earlier this week.
Major Patterson confirmed that Captain Wood and her unit had been assigned to the interrogation center at Abu Ghraib last year.
No one has made public accusations of wrongdoing against Captain Wood or any members of her unit. But she and several other of its officers are named in military court documents as being among witnesses being sought by a lawyer defending a military police officer charged in connection with the abuse.
Among the questions that investigators are examining is how the rules that Captain Wood posted at Abu Ghraib differed from the directives issued by General Sanchez, including unsigned memorandums on Sept. 10 and Sept. 28, and signed directives on Sept. 14 and Oct. 12, each of which spelled out different rules.
Those directives are still classified, but their contents were described by Colonel Warren on Wednesday and Thursday by several Senate aides who were briefed by senior Army officials.
The unsigned Sept. 10 draft authorized approaches spelled out in Army Field Manual 34-52 and other widely used interrogation techniques, as well as sensory deprivation, which could mean the hooding of prisoners.
On Sept. 14, General Sanchez approved the first formal policy for Iraq that allowed the use of "sleep management" techniques, like limiting prisoners to four hours' rest each 24 hours, and stress positions, including standing or crouching for up to an hour at a time, Senate aides said.
That policy was sent to the Central Command and to other military, legal and intelligence experts for review. On Oct. 12, in response to objections from military lawyers, General Sanchez issued a second, much narrower policy that Colonel Warren said Wednesday complied with the Geneva Conventions.
Most of the harsher methods that had been automatically authorized in the Sept. 14 directive, like long-term isolation of a prisoner, were dropped in the October version, except in cases in which General Sanchez sanctioned them.
The Oct. 12 directive also ordered that interrogators take control of the "lighting, heating, and configuration of the interrogation room, as well as food, clothing and shelter" given to those questioned at Abu Ghraib, a Senate aide said. The memo directed interrogators to work closely with military police guarding the prisoners to "manipulate internees' emotions and weaknesses" to gain their cooperation.
As the officer in charge of the interrogation center at Abu Ghraib, Captain Wood reported to Colonel Jordan, an Army reservist who arrived at the prison in September to take charge of the unit, which was established Sept. 20, according to a chronology provided by Senate officials.
In a report by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, Colonel Jordan, Col. Thomas M. Pappas and two civilian contractors were identified as having been "directly or indirectly responsible" for the abuses.
Captain Wood's unit and Colonel Jordan both reported to the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade under Colonel Pappas, who moved his headquarters to Abu Ghraib in September and was the top Army officer at the prison.
--------
Afghanistan Will Have 24,000 Police Officers for Poll, AP Says
(Bloomberg)
May 21, 2004
http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000080&sid=anohJ64_2RmA&refer=asia
May 21 -- Afghanistan will have a 24,000-member police force helping guard polling stations during September's presidential and parliamentary elections, the Associated Press said, citing Interior Minister Ali Ahmad Jalali.
``The police will provide security to the extent it can,'' AP cited Jalali as saying late yesterday in the Afghan capital, Kabul. International and Afghan troops will also have to help with security, he said.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has asked the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which leads a 6,500-strong peacekeeping force in Kabul, to provide more soldiers to help with security during polling. Jean Arnault, the UN envoy for Afghanistan, yesterday asked an international donor conference in Qatar to provide money for a police force, the UN said on its Web site.
Karzai in March delayed the elections to September from June because of a lack of security in the country, where warlords control areas outside Kabul, and because of the slow registration of voters. Only 1.8 million of the 10.5 million Afghans eligible to vote have registered, the UN said last month.
-------- arms
New U.S. aircraft carrier to cost $1.4B
Washington, DC, (UPI)
May. 21
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20040521-095007-4117r.htm
Northrop Grumman was awarded a contract worth nearly $1.4 billion Friday for construction of the first ship in the newest class of U.S. aircraft carriers.
The unnamed nuclear-powered vessel, designated CVN 21, will be built at Northrop Grumman's shipyard in Newport News, Va., the only U.S. yard capable of building aircraft carriers.
The new-generation flattop comes equipped with advanced nuclear power plants and an improved flight deck and can be sailed by a smaller crew than the ones serving on current carriers.
Construction of the ship is scheduled to begin in 2007 with delivery seven years later.
-------- biological weapons
U.S. bioweapons research may violate law
By ELIZABETH WOLFE
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
Friday, May 21, 2004
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/apwashington_story.asp?category=1152&slug=US%20Biodefense
WASHINGTON -- Arms control advocates are warning the Bush administration that proposed research for a new Homeland Security center may violate an international ban on biological weapons and encourage other countries to follow.
In a statement posted on the Internet, three arms control experts say proposals for the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center, established by Congress last year, appear to flout the prohibition on development of bioweapons.
"The rapidity of elaboration of American biodefense programs, their ambition and administrative aggressiveness and the degree to which they push against the prohibitions of the Biological Weapons Convention are startling," the authors said.
The writers are Milton Leitenberg, an arms control expert at the University of Maryland; James Leonard, who headed the U.S. delegation that negotiated the bioweapons ban in 1972; and former U.N. weapons inspector Richard Spertzel.
Their critique, posted by the journal "Politics and the Life Sciences," stemmed from a presentation last winter by Lt. Col. George W. Korch Jr., deputy director of the Homeland Security's center, to be housed on the grounds of Fort Detrick, Md.
Korch said in February that the center might study whether deadlier bacteria and viruses could be developed to ensure that U.S. defenses would be effective among the most dangerous pathogens. Other areas to be studied could include developing aerosols that contain deadly germs and new methods of delivering germ-warfare agents.
The department stressed that its institute would comply with the biowarfare convention's ban and all federal laws.
"I categorically deny that we will be developing offensive weapons," Gerald Parker, director of the department's office of science-based threat analysis and response, said Friday.
All sides acknowledge the difficulty of determining what constitutes defensive biological research, which the convention permits, and development of bioweapons, which it forbids.
Leitenberg said the administration should consider how research at the center, even if it would not violate the convention, will be interpreted by countries that may be eager to do similar research, also in the name of defense.
"Several of these (measures) all by themselves would be no problem at all," Leitenberg said. "The question is what this looks like as a whole."
Politics and the Life Sciences: http://www.politicsandthelifesciences.org
Homeland Security: http://www.dhs.gov/
----
The Sunshine Project
Resource Pointer
21 May 2004
http://www.sunshine-project.org
"Map of the US Biodefense Program: High Containment Labs and Other Facilities"
is now available under the biodefense tab of the Sunshine Project website. It and an accompanying key may be downloaded in PDF format or viewed as (large) images. This map is a revised and updated version of the US biodefense program map first published in October 2003.
Two dozen facilities across the country have been added. New types of facilities tracked include open air testing sites. Also added are sites conducting secretive research and/or which appear to be conducting classified studies.
The US biodefense program continues to change and to expand rapidly, including classified research. Thus, it is difficult to comprehensively track. This map is based on open sources and open records requests and is periodically updated. The Sunshine Project believes that it is the best compilation of US biodefense sites that is publicly available. Reader comments and submissions are welcomed and will be incorporated, as appropriate, into future versions.
The direct URL to view the map is: http://www.sunshine-project.org/biodefense/
-------- britain
UK Troops 'Available When Needed in Iraq'
PA News
By Louise Barnett
Fri 21 May 2004
http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=2958781
The Government was willing to send more troops to Iraq if necessary without a House of Commons resolution, the Defence Secretary said today.
Geoff Hoon said additional British forces would be deployed if necessary, although no decision to so had yet been made.
Speaking at the launch of the Red Arrows 2004 display season at Royal Air Force Cranwell in Lincolnshire, the the Defence Secretary said the situation in Iraq was under constant review.
"Can I make it plain that if a commanding officer on the ground judged that the security situation required extra troops to be sent to Iraq for the safety of our existing forces we would not have to wait before a resolution of the House of Commons was passed," he said.
"That has never been the way these things were decided in the United Kingdom. What is most important is that we send the extra troops needed in order to safeguard our other forces. If that becomes necessary we will take that decision."
Mr Hoon told Sky News that British officials were in constant contact with colleagues from the US and other coalition forces. But he said the US had made no direct request for additional British troops in Iraq.
"As will not surprise you with the withdrawal of the Spanish contingent there is an issue there about how in the longer term they will be replaced but for the moment of course they have been replaced by US troops so that is not an issue that has to be resolved straight away," he said.
The Defence Secretary rejected claims made by Conservative MP Crispin Blunt that preparations for the hand-over of sovereignty in Iraq on July 1 were a "complete shambles".
Mr Hoon said: "I simply don't recognise from the reports I get from Iraq his description. I am sorry he has come to that view. I simply do not accept what he says."
Adding that preparations were "on track" for a successful hand-over, he said: "I am confident that on July 1 once the hand-over is complete the Iraqi people will see a very different situation as they assume ever greater responsibility for their own affairs. That is what we are working to achieve. A situation where the Iraqis take decisions for the Iraqi people. That is part of our strategy."
-------- business
Titan worker accused of Iraqi prisoner abuse - WSJ
Reuters,
05.21.04,
http://www.forbes.com/business/manufacturing/newswire/2004/05/21/rtr1380079.html
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A Titan Corp. worker has been accused of taking part in the sexual humiliation of Iraqi detainees, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday.
Defense contractor Titan, which provides translators and interpreters to the U.S. Army in Iraq, was named in an internal Army report about abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, the newspaper said.
The unnamed Titan employee admitted he helped hold down three detainees who were "nude, handcuffed to each other and placed in sexual positions," a U.S. official who reviewed the report told the Journal.
Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba's report includes an Army Criminal Investigation Division report that said the Titan employee committed "indecent acts" and "cruelty and maltreatment," the Journal reported.
A Titan representative was not immediately available to comment, but Titan spokesman Wil Williams told the Journal that the Army had not advised the company of any wrongdoing by its employees, or asked for cooperation in the ongoing investigations into prisoner abuse.
"If we find evidence that any of our employees has done anything illegal or unethical, we will take appropriate action," Williams told the Journal.
Lockheed Martin, which has agreed to buy Titan, said Monday that Titan employees' possible links to prisoner abuse in Iraq were "not significant to our strategic decision" to buy the defense contractor. The initial report of Titan's involvement had raised fears among analysts and investors that the deal might fall apart.
----
Funding shortfall
May 21, 2004
Inside the Ring
By Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/inring.htm
Defense and military officials are scrambling throughout the Pentagon to find money to help pay for the war in Iraq.
The funding shortfall for this year is in the hundreds of millions.
The military estimates that it will be $4 billion short in next year's operating accounts.
Defense officials tell us that aides to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld are looking at all areas of the defense budget and plan to raid arms programs and operations and maintenance accounts to pay for the war.
The main fear of many weapons builders is that the budget reprogramming will seriously damage ongoing weapons development and production and shut down entire production lines if the money meant for the programs is taken away.
----
Trucks made to drive without cargo in dangerous areas of Iraq
Knight Ridder Newspapers
BY SETH BORENSTEIN
May. 21, 2004
http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/news/politics/8726376.htm
WASHINGTON - (KRT) - Empty flatbed trucks crisscrossed Iraq more than 100 times as their drivers and the soldiers who guarded them dodged bullets, bricks and homemade bombs.
Twelve current and former truckers who regularly made the 300-mile re-supply run from Camp Cedar in southern Iraq to Camp Anaconda near Baghdad told Knight Ridder that they risked their lives driving empty trucks while their employer, a subsidiary of Halliburton Inc., billed the government for hauling what they derisively called "sailboat fuel."
Defense Department records show that Kellogg Brown and Root, a Halliburton subsidiary, has been paid $327 million for "theater transportation" of war materiel and supplies for U.S. forces in Iraq and is earmarked to be paid $230 million more. The convoys are a lifeline for U.S. troops in Iraq hauling tires for Humvees, Army boots, filing cabinets, tools, engine parts and even an unmanned Predator reconnaissance plane.
KBR's contract with the Defense Department allows the company to pass on the cost of the transportation and add 1 percent to 3 percent for profit, but neither KBR nor the U.S. Army Field Support Command in Rock Island, Ill., which oversees the contract, was able to provide cost estimates for the empty trucks. Trucking experts estimate that each round trip costs taxpayers thousands of dollars.
Seven of the 12 truckers who talked to Knight Ridder asked that they not be identified by name. Six of the 12 were fired by KBR for allegedly running Iraqi drivers off the road when they attempted to break into the convoy. The drivers disputed that accusation.
In addition to interviewing the drivers, Knight Ridder reviewed KBR records of the empty trips, dozens of photographs of empty flatbeds and a videotape that showed 15 empty trucks in one convoy.
The 12 drivers, all interviewed separately over the course of more than a month, told similar stories about their trips through hostile territory.
"Thor," a driver who quit KBR and got his nickname for using a hammer to fight off a knife-wielding Iraqi who tried to climb into the cab of his truck, said his doctor recently told him he might lose the use of his right eye after a December attack. Iraqis shattered his windshield with machine gunfire and bullets whizzed by his ear. Glass got in his eye, and he broke two bones in his shoulder, he said.
His truck was empty at the time.
"I thought, `What good is this?'" he recalled.
Shane "Nitro" Ratliff of Ruby, S.C., who quit working for KBR in February, recalled a harrowing trip in December.
As he was hauling an empty truck to Baghdad International Airport, Iraqis threw spikes under his tires and a brick, a cement-like clot of sand and gasoline through his windshield, scattering shards of glass all over him and into his eyes.
"We didn't have no weapons; I had two rocks and a can of ravioli to fight with," Ratliff said.
Ratliff caught up with his fleeing convoy in his damaged truck and made it to the airport safely. He figured he'd pick up a load there, but he was told to return with another empty trailer.
Iraqi insurgents have killed two civilian drivers.
Kellogg Brown and Root, the Army and the truckers gave different reasons for why empty trucks were driven through areas that the drivers nicknamed "rockville" and "slaughterhouse" for the dangers they presented.
Some of the truckers charged that KBR is billing the Pentagon for unnecessary work. KBR described the practice as normal, given the large number of trucks it has delivering goods throughout Iraq. Army officials said longer convoys may provide better security.
The Army's contract with KBR calls for daily truck runs, but doesn't dictate how many trucks must be in a convoy or whether they must be full, said Linda Theis, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Army Field Support Command in Rock Island, Ill. The area military commander or KBR officials might choose to run empty trucks as a security measure, she said.
KBR denied there was any problem with the truck runs. "KBR is proud of the work we do for the military in Iraq. It is difficult and dangerous work and requires a lot from our employees," said Cathy Gist, a KBR spokeswoman. KBR truckers say they can earn about $80,000 a year, which is tax-free if they remain in Iraq for a year.
The empty trailer runs in Iraq peaked in January, February and March of this year but have dwindled as violence has escalated and forced contractors to reduce the number of trucks in each convoy and how far they travel, the drivers said.
Earlier this year, as many as a third of all the flatbed trucks in a 30-truck convoy were empty, they said. Much of the time, drivers would drop off one empty trailer and pick up another empty one for the return trip.
"There was one time we ran 28 trucks, one trailer had one pallet (a trailer can hold as many as 26 four-foot square pallets) and the rest of them were empty," said David Wilson, who was the convoy commander on more than 100 runs. Four other drivers who were with Wilson confirmed his account.
James Warren of Rutherfordton, N.C., one of the fired KBR drivers, said he drove empty trucks through Iraq more than a dozen times. Besides the risks to the truckers, the six National Guard or Army escorts who provided security were also in danger, he said.
The KBR driver who shot the videotape of the 15 empty trailers on the road in January described it this way: "This is just a sample of the empty trailers we're hauling called `sustainer.' And there's more behind me. There's another one right there. ... This is fraud and abuse right here."
KBR documents viewed by Knight Ridder showed that one February run included 11 "MT" (trucker lingo for empty) trailers, 11 containers (which could be full or empty) and six with pallets on them. On another February day, three of 15 trucks were empty.
KBR officials said empty runs resulted from the lack of cargo at one depot. The company ran all the trucks so they'd be available to pick up cargo for the return trip. "This is the same as typical commercial trucking operations work in the U.S.," said Gist.
Drivers discounted that explanation.
"Sometimes we would go with empty trailers; we would go both ways," said one driver who goes by the nickname Swerve and declined to be named for fear of retribution. "We'd turn around and go back with empty trailers."
An independent expert on trucking economics put the cost of a 300-mile one-way run at a minimum of $1,050. Researcher Mark Berwick at the Upper Great Plains Transportation Institute at North Dakota State University used a computer model, the fuel costs that Halliburton charged the Army and the truckers' salaries to come up with that figure.
Wilson and Michael Stroud, of the Seattle area, another former KBR trucking convoy commander, said the actual costs were probably far higher.
"It was supposed to be critical supplies that the troops had to have to operate," said Wilson, who returned to his home in southwest Florida after being fired by KBR. "It was one thing to risk your life to haul things the military needed. It's another to haul empty trailers."
Peter Singer, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and the author of "Corporate Warrior," a book on privatization of the military, said the use of empty trucks illustrates how the government's contracting system is broken.
The government gives out large cost-plus contracts in which "essentially it rewards firms when they add to costs rather than rewarding them for cost savings," Singer said.
Despite a massive increase in contracts for the war and occupation of Iraq, the Army hasn't increased the number of officials who oversee those contractors. Only 180 Army officials monitor defense contracts and only a little more than a handful of them are in Iraq, Singer said.
-------- chemical weapons
Iraq sarin shell is not part of a secret cache
csmonitor
By Scott Ritter
May 21, 2004
http://csmonitor.com/2004/0521/p09s01-coop.html
DELMAR, N.Y. - In the mid-1980s I served as the intelligence officer for a Marine artillery battalion. Stationed in Twentynine Palms, Calif., I would often find myself deployed in the field, on exercises where thousands of live artillery rounds were fired downrange.
In keeping with the Marine artillery motto of "shoot, move, communicate," we were always moving from one firing location to another to simulate modern war. This mobility had us often passing through live-fire impact areas. One thing you quickly learned was not to touch anything lying on the ground, because modern artillery shells had a high "dud" rate, meaning they didn't always function the way they were intended. Tens of thousands of these "duds" were scattered across the desert terrain, not unlike those found in Iraq.
What makes this relevant now is the ongoing speculation about the source of the sarin chemical artillery shell that the US military found rigged as an improvised explosive device (IED) last week in Baghdad. If the 155-mm shell was a "dud" fired long ago - which is highly likely - then it would not be evidence of the secret stockpile of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that the Bush administration used as justification to invade Iraq.As a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998, I know that the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), the US-led unit now responsible for investigating WMD in Iraq, could quite easily determine whether this shell had been fired long ago or not. Given the trouble the administration has had in documenting its past allegations about WMD, releasing the news of last week's sarin shell without the key information about the state of the shell itself seems disingenuous.
As a former UN inspector, I'm also familiar with the level of disarmament achieved concerning Iraq's banned WMD. And during my time in Iraq, 95 percent of the WMD produced by Iraq were verifiably accounted for. But I've always contended that Iraq is a WMD archaeological site, and that if one digs long enough, vestiges of these past WMD programs will be uncovered. Determining whether the discovery of the sarin artillery shell represents such an archaeological discovery, or is part of Saddam Hussein's alleged stockpile of WMD, rests with a full forensic exam of the shell.
The key to whether the sarin artillery round came from an arms cache or was a derelict dud rests in the physical characteristics of the shell. The artillery shells in question were fitted with two aluminum cannisters separated by a rupture disk. The two precursor chemicals for the kind of sarin associated with this shell were stored separately in these containers. The thrust of the shell being fired was designed to cause the liquid in the forward cannister to press back and break the rupture disk, whereupon the rotation of the shell as it headed downrange would mix the two precursors together, creating sarin. Upon impact with the ground - or in the air, if a timed fuse was used - a burster charge would break the shell, releasing the sarin gas.
Many things go wrong when firing an artillery round: the propellent charge can be faulty, resulting in a round that doesn't reach its target; the fuse can malfunction, preventing the burster charge from going off, leaving the round intact; the rupture disk can fail to burst, keeping precursor chemicals from combining. The fuse could break off on impact, leaving the fuse cavity empty. To the untrained eye, the artillery shell, if found in this state, would look weathered, but unfired.
What gives away whether the shell had been fired is the base-bleed charge, which unlike the rest of the shell, will show evidence of being fired (or not). Iraq declared that it had produced 170 of these base-bleed sarin artillery shells as part of a research and development program that never led to production. Ten of these shells were tested using inert fill - oil and colored water. Ten others were tested in simulated firing using the sarin precursors. And 150 of these shells, filled with sarin precursors, were live-fired at an artillery range south of Baghdad. A 10 percent dud rate among artillery shells isn't unheard of - and even greater percentages can occur. So there's a good possibility that at least 15 of these sarin artillery shells failed and lie forgotten in the Iraq desert, waiting to be picked up by any unsuspecting insurgent looking for raw material from which to construct an IED.
Given what's known about sarin shells, the US could be expected to offer a careful recital of the data with news of the shell. But facts that should have accompanied the story - the type of shell, its condition, whether it had been fired previously, and the age and viability of the sarin and precursor chemicals - were absent. And that's opened the door to irresponsible speculation that the shell was part of a live WMD stockpile. The data - available to the ISG - would put this development in proper perspective - allowing responsible discussion of the event and its possible ramifications.
Given that the US is in the midst of a contentious presidential campaign, it's essential that accurate data about Iraq be available to the electorate. The handling of the sarin shell incident is the greatest justification yet for shutting down the ISG, and the immediate return to Iraq of UN weapons inspectors - if for no other reason than to restore a vestige of credibility to a disarmament effort that long ago lost its moral compass.
-------- china
Chen's Inaugural Address Skirts Independence Vow
Taiwanese Leader Heeds U.S. Warning Not to Anger China
By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, May 21, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A44028-2004May20.html
TAIPEI, Taiwan, May 20 -- Setting out on a second term, President Chen Shui-bian pledged Thursday to hold off on formal independence for Taiwan but clung to his vision of a society that is basically different and perhaps permanently separate from mainland China.
Chen's inaugural address, delivered under a tropical downpour, heeded warnings from the Bush administration not to announce any plans for his next four years in office that would move this self-governing island of 23 million people closer to independence. He declared a willingness to postpone such steps, and while not renouncing independence permanently, held out the promise of several more crisis-free years in the Taiwan Strait.
In Washington, the Bush administration said it was gratified by the tone of Chen's speech, calling it "responsible and constructive."
"By making clear his administration's commitment not to take steps that would unilaterally change the status quo, underscoring its openness to seeking accord with Beijing, and reaffirming previous commitments on cross-strait relations, Chen Shui-bian's address creates an opportunity for Taipei and Beijing to restore dialogue across the strait," Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, said.
Su Chi, who ran Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council under the former Nationalist Party president, Lee Teng-hui, described Chen's speech as "basically tailored for the U.S." He added: "This may get the U.S. off the hook. At least, the U.S. hopes so."
Beijing has warned it will prevent Taiwanese independence at any cost, including war; in its view, the island is a province of China that must reunite with the mainland. With the United States committed to defending Taiwan, the standoff between Beijing's resolve and Chen's aspiration carries the seeds of a clash between U.S. and Chinese forces that both sides seek to avoid.
With Chen's inaugural address billed as a look at his second-term intentions, U.S. officials made it clear in recent weeks that this was not the time to test China's will, according to Taiwanese and U.S. officials. Joseph Wu, who has been assigned to head Chen's new Mainland Affairs Council, told reporters here that the president and his aides in the Democratic Progressive Party had received the message loud and clear.
Chen's second mandate also has been hampered by his thin margin of victory in the March 20 elections and a Nationalist legal challenge to the vote count that is still before the courts. As he was inaugurated, Nationalist demonstrators rallied at the edge of the crowd, and a giant sign reading "No truth, No president" hung from Nationalist headquarters facing the presidential podium.
At the same time, Chen, 53, once again rejected the "one China" principle that the government in Beijing regards as the foundation for any exchanges with Taiwan. The United States also has followed a "one China" policy since it established formal diplomatic relations with Beijing in 1979. But Chen, in much-remarked words that he refrained from repeating Thursday, has suggested that times have changed and that now there is one country on each side of the 100-mile Taiwan Strait.
"We can understand why the government on the other side of the strait, in light of historical complexities and ethnic sentiments, cannot relinquish the insistence on the 'one China' principle," Chen said. "By the same token, the Beijing authorities must understand the deep conviction held by the people of Taiwan to strive for democracy, to love peace, to pursue their dreams free from threat and to embrace progress.
"But if the other side is unable to comprehend that this honest and simple wish represents the aspiration of Taiwan's 23 million people," he continued, "if it continues to threaten Taiwan with military force, if it persists in isolating Taiwan diplomatically, if it keeps up irrational efforts to blockade Taiwan's rightful participation in the international arena, this will only serve to drive the hearts of the Taiwanese people further away and widen the divide in the strait."
Chen announced he would move ahead with constitutional reforms that Chinese authorities have defined as steppingstones to a declaration of independence. However, Chen defined the goal as streamlining the government. He specifically ruled out changing the most sensitive parts of the document, those that would affect Taiwan's international status.
"I am fully aware that consensus has yet to be reached on issues related to national sovereignty, territory and the subject of unification-independence," he said as raindrops bouncing off the podium splattered his dark suit and made his forehead glisten. "Therefore, let me explicitly propose that these particular issues be excluded from the present constitutional re-engineering project."
The Chinese government, which had no immediate reaction, said Monday that Chen is launched on a "dangerous lurch toward independence" that threatens peace in the Taiwan Strait. It was not clear, therefore, what reception Chen's offer to limit the constitutional reforms would receive in Beijing. But in the wake of Monday's statement, the atmosphere was not welcoming.
"He may have adjusted his tactics and eased his rhetoric, but we know the U.S. was very concerned about the speech and he was under pressure," said Zhu Weidong, senior Taiwan analyst at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. "How far he will adjust his tactics and whether he will do what he says are still not clear."
Beyond the specific steps that may be taken in the next four years, Chen outlined a vision of the future that understands Taiwan and its democratic system to be different -- maybe irreconcilably -- from China. The mainland has to understand, he said, that Taiwan's voters ultimately will decide future relations with China. "If both sides are willing, on the basis of goodwill, to create an environment engendered upon peaceful development and freedom of choice, then in the future the Republic of China and the People's Republic of China -- or Taiwan and China -- can seek to establish relations in any form whatsoever," he said. "We would not exclude any possibility, so long as there is the consent of the 23 million people of Taiwan."
Correspondent Philip P. Pan in Beijing and staff writer Glenn Kessler in Washington contributed to this report.
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Taiwan's President Tones Down His Pro-Independence Oratory
May 21, 2004
By JOSEPH KAHN and CHRIS BUCKLEY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/21/international/asia/21taiw.html
BEIJING, May 20 - China's militant threats along with hands-on mediation by the United States appear to have persuaded Taiwan's president, Chen Shui-bian, to postpone any moves toward independence. But Beijing experts say China will remain on high alert as long as Mr. Chen holds office.
Mr. Chen used relatively soft language in his inaugural address on Thursday, prompting private expressions of relief in Beijing that he seemed to have abandoned the most provocative pro-independence pledges he had made on the campaign trail.
The shift defused, at least for now, a volatile standoff that some Bush administration officials feared could spiral into armed conflict over sovereignty claims, almost certainly prompting American intervention.
Mr. Chen, 53, began his second term vowing not to promote independence and pledging to reform rather than scrap the island's existing Constitution, which Beijing feels symbolizes Taiwan's ties to mainland China. But the carefully balanced address still left China wary, while disappointing hard-core supporters of independence in Taiwan.
"Whether it was China's pressure or America's pressure, it looks like we can avoid a clash over constitutional reform," said Zhu Xianlong, a leading Taiwan expert at Beijing Union University.
But he said Mr. Chen had introduced new ways of pushing Taiwan's separate identity that were likely to make China suspicious, including trying to achieve membership in the World Health Organization by 2006.
Mr. Chen also raised alarms in Beijing when he said, "I personally clearly suggest" that independence issues be excluded from constitutional reform, a less than categorical statement.
China had no official reaction to the inaugural address, which it had threatened could be a trigger for military action if it broached plans for independence.
In softening his stance, Mr. Chen complied with demands from the United States that he avoid challenging Beijing when American troops were heavily engaged in other parts of the world. State Department officials vetted Mr. Chen's speech and consulted with Beijing about its contents, a senior administration official said in a recent interview.
Mr. Chen, who maintains that Taiwan is already independent of mainland China, has long advocated steps to enhance the island's national identity. Many of his supporters aim to do away with the island's formal name, the Republic of China, which denotes the entity that once was governed by Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Party and, before it lost a civil war in the 1940's, included the mainland.
But Mr. Chen said in his speech that he would not use a referendum to create a new Constitution and would instead amend the existing document, keeping the name. He said he would aim to fix clauses that he maintained were hindering efficient, democratic government and the rule of law.
The watered-down reform plan was hailed as an effective compromise by some supporters but was criticized by Mr. Chen's pro-independence allies in the Taiwan Solidarity Union, a political party that broke off from the Nationalists.
Joseph Kahn reported from Beijing for this article, and Chris Buckley from Taipei, Taiwan.
----
Warships in Hong Kong harbor
Washington Times
Letters to the Editor,
May 21, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20040520-083648-4661r.htm
Your editorial "Threatening Hong Kong" (May 11) accused China of "threatening the use of military force to kill Hong Kong's yearning for democracy" by sending a "naval battle group" to Hong Kong. It also attacked a recent decision by the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC) on the methods for selecting Hong Kong's chief executive in 2007 and forming the Legislative Council in 2008. The editorial's accusations are groundless.
First, under international law, China, as a sovereign and independent state, has every right to send its naval ships to any ports in its territory, including the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China (HKSAR). As a matter of fact, the visit to Hong Kong by the People's Liberation Army (PLA) navy task force last April was part of a program celebrating the 55th anniversary of the PLA navy. During the stopover, the task force was welcomed warmly by Hong Kong residents, and more than 20,000 local residents went onboard the warships for tours.
Contrary to what you asserted in the editorial, this was not the first time since 1997 for Hong Kong residents to welcome the PLA navy. A PLA navy task group made a three-day port call to Hong Kong in November 2001.
Second, it is the firm and consistent position of the Chinese government to develop democracy in Hong Kong under the Basic Law, which has explicit provisions on the major principles governing the development of democracy in Hong Kong. These include consistency with the actual situation, gradual and orderly progress and balanced participation. One must recognize that Hong Kong's history of democratic elections is not long, and that Hong Kong residents have exercised the right to select their own chief executive for just seven years.
The general public in Hong Kong is sharply divided on how to elect the chief executive in 2007 and the Legislative Council in 2008. There still is no consensus on the issue, and the conditions for universal suffrage still are not available. The NPC Standing Committee's decision is fully consistent with the provisions of the Basic Law and with the actual situation in Hong Kong, and it also is good for the long-term stability and prosperity of Hong Kong.
Third, it must be pointed out that the NPC Standing Committee's decision leaves adequate room for modification of the methods for selecting the chief executive in 2007 and for forming the Legislative Council in 2008. We firmly believe Hong Kong's democracy will continue to move forward and that the HKSAR eventually will attain the ultimate objective, as stipulated in the Basic Law, of selecting the chief executive by universal suffrage upon nomination by a broadly representative nominating committee. This must be in accordance with the democratic procedures and of electing all members of the Legislative Council by universal suffrage.
Last but not least, the NPC is the highest lawmaking body in China, and its Standing Committee's decision is an important document that is binding on all of China's local legislatures, including Hong Kong's Legislative Council.
SUN WEIDE
Press counselor and spokesman The Chinese Embassy Washington
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U.S. Aids Raid on Home of Chalabi
Iraqi Criminal Probe Seeks Associates of Ex-Ally of Pentagon
By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, May 21, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43761-2004May20?language=printer
BAGHDAD, May 20 -- Iraqi police backed by U.S. soldiers on Thursday raided the home of Ahmed Chalabi, a Governing Council member who was once the Pentagon's pick to run postwar Iraq. Officials later said they were seeking 15 people, including at least one member of Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, on charges including fraud and kidnapping.
In coordinated searches, U.S. troops seized computers, files and dozens of rifles from two offices of the INC, a coalition of political parties that opposed former president Saddam Hussein. Boot prints marked several doors kicked down in the raids, which included a top-to-bottom search of the INC intelligence center that U.S. authorities once turned to for help in searching for former top Hussein officials and weapons of mass destruction.
A visibly agitated Chalabi told reporters after the raids that they were retribution for his increasingly strident criticism of the American management of post-Hussein Iraq. "I call to liberate the Iraqi people and get back our complete sovereignty," he said, speaking in English, "and I am raising these issues in a way that the Americans don't like."
But Hussein Muathin, a judge with the Central Criminal Court of Iraq, said the raids were part of an investigation into such crimes as the detaining and torturing of people, theft of government cars and illegal seizure of government facilities. Eight people, including Aras Habib, Chalabi's security and intelligence chief, have been declared fugitives. Chalabi was not charged.
U.S. and Iraqi officials said that the arrest orders originated in the Iraqi justice system and that senior U.S. occupation officials did not know about the warrants until they were served.
The raids appeared to complete Chalabi's fall from grace in the eyes of U.S. officials over the last difficult year of the occupation. In recent weeks, occupation authorities have cut off a $335,000 monthly subsidy to the INC's intelligence arm and have pursued an investigation focusing on alleged fraud against government agencies by Sabah Nouri, a Chalabi aide who served as the anti-corruption chief at the Ministry of Finance.
This pressure comes as occupation officials are preparing to hand limited authority to Iraqis on June 30 and oppose a government role for such former allies as Chalabi.
The raids alarmed other members of the U.S.-appointed Governing Council, several of whom called on the United States to apologize to Chalabi immediately. "Doing such a thing to a Governing Council member proves that they do not acknowledge this council, which they formed and appointed," said Songul Chapouk, a council member and women's rights activist. "This is an insult to this council."
In his news conference, Chalabi said an urgent council meeting had been called for Friday to address the board's relationship with the United States in light of the raid and the assassination this week of the council president as he waited to enter the compound of the U.S. occupation authority.
Chalabi, a wealthy businessman who returned to Iraq after decades of exile in Britain, won favor among Pentagon officials before the war as a prolific source of information on Iraq's weapons programs. He is also a moderate Shiite Muslim, making him a potentially important bridge to Iraq's majority religious community.
Chalabi's organization received $33 million from the United States between March 2000 and September 2003, which made it the leading exile opposition organization to Hussein. But it became clear after the fall of Baghdad that Chalabi enjoyed little support in Iraq, and much of his prewar intelligence has turned out to be wrong or "intentionally misleading," according to a recent U.S. assessment.
Lately, Chalabi has blamed U.S. officials for allowing members of Hussein's Baath Party to reemerge as a security force in the city of Fallujah, west of Baghdad. He called U.S. security policy a failure after the assassination of Izzedin Salim, the council president who was killed Monday in a suicide car bombing. He has also clashed with L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. civilian administrator of Iraq, over who should manage an investigation of Hussein-era corruption inside the U.N.'s oil-for-food program.
INC officials said U.S. troops and Iraqi police fanned out in the elite Mansour neighborhood, the location of Chalabi's house and the INC offices, around 6 a.m. A few hours later, the officials said, soldiers and police arrived at Chalabi's home and demanded to be let inside. The officers said they were pursing several suspects, INC officials recounted, but would not disclose the reason or produce an arrest warrant when asked.
Haider Musawi, an INC official, said Chalabi conducted negotiations from inside his home. He eventually allowed one Iraqi police officer to enter and search the premises for the suspects. No one was found.
The police and soldiers moved next to the INC offices, housed in a lavish Chinese-style mansion that was once a perk of the director of Hussein's intelligence agency. Several guards on duty said as many as 100 U.S. soldiers arrived.
By their account, six Iraqi police officers entered with an American dressed in civilian clothes and body armor. One of the guards said the American directed the Iraqi police, who they said kicked down doors and smashed a picture of Chalabi. Damaged picture frames, including one holding a photograph of Chalabi, were seen by a reporter in one of the ransacked offices.
Haider Ridha Mohammed, a guard on duty at the time, said he asked the police officer why he had tossed the framed photograph on the ground. Mohammed said the officer responded, "He's gone now, Ahmad Chalabi is finished."
A senior Iraqi police official, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of losing his job, denied that the officers vandalized the offices in any way.
For several months, U.S. officials have been investigating people affiliated with the INC for possible ties to a scheme to defraud the Iraqi government during the transition to a new currency that took place from Oct. 15 last year to Jan. 15, according to a U.S. occupation authority official familiar with the case. The official said the raids were partly related to that investigation.
At the center of the inquiry is Nouri, whom Chalabi picked as the top anti-corruption official in the new Iraqi Finance Ministry. Chalabi heads the Governing Council's finance committee and has major influence in its staffing and operation.
When auditors early this year began counting the old Iraqi dinars brought in and the new Iraqi dinars given out in return, they discovered a shortfall of more than $22 million. Nouri, a German national, was arrested in April and faces 17 charges including extortion, fraud, embezzlement, theft of government property and abuse of authority. He is being held in a maximum security facility, according to three sources close to the investigation.
In recent weeks, several other Finance Ministry officials have been arrested as part of the investigation. A U.S. official familiar with the case said, "We are cracking down on corruption regardless of names involved."
Staff writer Ariana Eunjung Cha in Washington and correspondent Sewell Chan and special correspondents Huda Ahmed Lazim and Bassam Sabti in Baghdad contributed to this report.
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U.S. Forces Pull Out From Shiite Mosque
Attack Near Syrian Border Will Be Probed
By Daniel Williams and Sewell Chan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, May 21, 2004; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43647-2004May20?language=printer
KARBALA, Iraq, May 21 -- U.S. forces withdrew overnight from the headquarters here of Shiite Muslim fighters that they had taken only days before, leaving the areas around two major shrines firmly in the hands of the insurgents.
Earlier, on Thursday in Baghdad, U.S. military officers said that they would open an investigation into a ground and air assault in western Iraq that has produced sharply conflicting accounts of whether the approximately 40 people killed were mostly foreign insurgents or civilians celebrating a wedding.
Overnight in Karbala, rebels loyal to the Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr fired rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons on a company of U.S. troops as they withdrew from the mosque. There were no American casualties.
U.S. Apache helicopters fired on rebel attackers as troops wound out of the center of the city. Capt. Noel Gorospe, a spokesman for the 1st Armored Division's Task Force 1-37, said the withdrawal from the mosque does not mean retreat from the city. "We are certainly not pulling out of Karbala. We will continue to do normal operations," he said. Gorospe said U.S. forces will take measures to keep Sadr's militia, the Mahdi Army, from reoccupying the Mukhaiyam Mosque, which it had used as a major operations center and weapons depot.
For several weeks, U.S. military commanders said U.S. forces here and in other cities expected to chip away at the Mahdi Army and isolate Sadr in Najaf. They had hoped that Shiite religious and political leaders who cooperate with occupation forces would persuade Sadr to give himself up and disband his militia. Sadr is wanted by the United States for the murder last year of a moderate Shiite cleric.
Sadr has refused to surrender and his forces, despite absorbing more than 100 fatalities in Karbala and scores of others elsewhere, have held on. "They have shown a remarkable willingness to die," said Col. Peter Mansoor, commander of the 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division.
Witnesses near the village of Makr al-Deeb, in the desert near the Syrian border, told television crews that a U.S. military aircraft strafed innocent people, mostly women and children, at a wedding party. U.S. military officers, however, maintained for a second day Thursday that the target was a way station used by armed foreign insurgents who cross the porous border into Iraq.
"How many people go into the middle of the desert 10 miles from the Syrian border to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization?" asked Maj. Gen. James N. Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division, which operates in western Iraq. "Let's not be naive."
The dead included "more than two dozen military-age males," Mattis said at a news conference in Fallujah.
On Thursday, the Associated Press quoted people who identified themselves as survivors saying that the attack was directed at a wedding party of the Bou Fahad tribe, a group whose members often herd animals into the desert to graze.
By this account, about 25 men had come from the town of Ramadi for the celebration. A band was playing tribal music Tuesday night when airplanes were heard circling overhead. Out of fear, the celebration was called off. Many of the men retired to a tent to sleep, and women and small children went to a stone house.
The first bomb struck the tent at about 2:45 a.m. Wednesday, people told the news service. Among the dead was Hussein Ali, a popular wedding singer. A second bomb struck the house, killing everyone inside. Two helicopters landed, and about 40 troops searched the area, taking money and jewelry that guests had brought, and blowing up a pair of houses.
The people denied that fighters were in the area, the Associated Press reported.
In a telephone interview, an Iraqi Health Ministry official said a hospital in Qaim, the town closest to the site, reported that 42 people were killed -- 17 men, 11 women and 14 children. One man, four women and four children were wounded, the official said on condition of anonymity. The senior military spokesman in Iraq, Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, said an investigation was "the only prudent thing to do" because of the seriousness of the allegations. TV footage from the scene Wednesday showed several bodies, including those of children, being unloaded from a truck and villagers digging dirt graves.
The dead included 34 to 35 men and "less than a handful of women," Kimmitt said at a news conference in Baghdad. U.S. ground troops stayed at the site "for an extensive period of time," he said, and did not find any dead children among the casualties.
Kimmitt said the number of men killed compared with the number of women killed appeared inconsistent with the makeup of a wedding party. He also said the time of the attack, around 3 a.m., was "kind of an odd time to be having a wedding."
Kimmitt said ground forces were attacked and returned fire. He did not directly answer a question about whether foreign fighters were the only people killed.
"At this point, the intelligence that we have and the intelligence that we drew on to conduct this operation was sufficient for us to believe -- to conduct that operation," he said. "We believe that we operated within the rules of engagement for that operation."
"This is one of those routes that we have watched for a long period of time as a place where foreign fighters and smugglers come into this country," Kimmitt said. He added: "We are satisfied at this point that the intelligence that led us there was validated by what we found on the ground, and it was not that there was a wedding party going on."
The strike was conducted by an Air Force Special Operations AC-130 gunship, which carries machine guns, cannons and a 105mm howitzer, according to a Pentagon official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Ground forces at the site found AK-47 rifles, sniper rifles, shotguns, handguns and machine guns, along with foreign passports, satellite communication equipment and roughly $1,000 in Iraqi dinars, Kimmitt said.
Kimmitt characterized the people at the site as "town dwellers" rather than Bedouin desert inhabitants and said that four-wheel-drive vehicles and jewelry were also found at the site.
In a separate development, the military announced that two soldiers were killed in combat.
In one incident, a soldier was killed and three were wounded when their unit was attacked with hand grenades early Wednesday in central Baghdad.
A 1st Infantry Division soldier was killed Wednesday afternoon and another was wounded by a roadside bomb and gunfire near the northern town of Samarra. A third soldier was slightly injured while trying to put out a fire caused by the explosion. Three suspected attackers were wounded when the soldiers returned fire. Two of the suspects were detained, and the third escaped.
Chan reported from Baghdad. Staff writer Thomas E. Ricks in Washington contributed to this report.
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U.S. Says at Least 21 Rebels Are Dead in Clash in Karbala
May 21, 2004
By EDWARD WONG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/21/international/middleeast/21CND-IRAQ.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
KARBALA, Iraq, May 21 - Fierce fighting erupted today between American forces and insurgents loyal to a young rebel cleric near two shrines in this holy city, killing at least 21 insurgents, American military officials said.
As a company of tanks began rolling past the shrine area early today on their way back to Camp Lima, a military base on the city's outskirts, insurgents fired rocket-propelled grenades at them. One M-1 Abrams tank fired at a building northeast of the Shrine of Abbas with its powerful 120-millimeter main gun. An AC-130 Spectre gunship pounded the area with 40-millimeter cannons.
Insurgents with rocket-propelled grenades had been holed up in a school northeast of the shrines. Military intelligence indicated that many of those fighters might have come from outside Karbala, military officials said. The AC-130 opened fire on that school and on other buildings in the area.
Al Jazeera, the popular Arab satellite TV network based in Dubai, said one of its drivers was killed by gunfire while standing with a television crew on the roof of a hotel in the downtown area. In a statement, the network said that Rashid Hamid Wali was "martyred" while helping to report on the fighting.
The clashes came on a day when hundreds of worshippers poured into two holy Shiite shrines in Karbala to listen to clerics demand an end to the bloody fighting between the American forces and the insurgents loyal to the young cleric, Moktada al-Sadr.
The clerics called for the withdrawal of fighters from both sides, but carefully avoided singling out either the Americans or Mr. Sadr's militia, the Mahdi Army.
Also today, American-led coalition forces captured four people suspected of involvement in the gruesome murder of Nicholas Berg, the American communication specialist whose death was captured on videotape and broadcast on the Internet, officials said. Two of the suspects were released after questioning and the other two remain in custody, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, an American military spokesman, said during a news conference in Baghdad.
"We have some intelligence that would suggest they had knowledge, perhaps some culpability, but we're not going to know until we've actually finished the questioning," he said.
General Kimmitt said he did not have any information about the suspects' identities.
The spokesman also said there was no further information concerning an American attack near the Syrian border this week that reportedly killed 41 people. They continued to maintain that their target was a hideaway for foreign fighters and not a wedding party as claimed by Iraqis there.
Also today, 454 detainees were released from Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, the scene of the abuses against Iraqi prisoners at the hands of American troops. American authorities have periodically released prisoners who are no longer considered suspects. Another 394 prisoners are scheduled to be released on May 28, General Kimmitt said.
A convoy of at least six buses, accompanied by American troops in armored vehicles and jeeps, took the detainees from the prison on the western outskirts of Baghdad to Tikrit and Baqouba, north of Baghdad, The Associated Press reported. Some of the freed prisoners were also returned to Ramadi and Baghdad.
Mr. Sadr, who lives in the holy city of Najaf, has been leading a six-week revolt against the occupation forces. His militia is composed mostly of impoverished young men, many from the sprawling slum of Sadr City in northeastern Baghdad. They have taken over Karbala and Najaf and are launching attacks on other cities across the south.
At Friday prayers this morning in nearby Kufa, Mr. Sadr told 1,500 worshippers, "Don't let my killing or arrest be an excuse to end what you're doing, supporting the truth and standing up to the wrong."
The American military said fighters for Mr. Sadr damaged a mosque in Najaf on Thursday while attacking an occupation patrol at 11:30 p.m. Baghdad time. Mortar fire from the insurgents struck the mosque and started a fire, the military said, and soldiers killed two militiamen fleeing the mosque.
Also on Thursday, an American soldier and two Iraqi civilians were killed in Baghdad by a roadside bomb, the military said.
The clerics in Karbala spoke today at the blue-tiled Shrines of Hussein and Abbas, dedicated to two of Shiite Islam's most revered martyrs. One of the clerics, Ahmed al-Safi, represented Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most influential religious leader in Iraq. The ayatollah demanded earlier this week that all armed forces withdraw from Karbala and Najaf and asked for people to demonstrate against the violence.
"We don't want anybody to manipulate these two cities, whatever his identity might be," Mr. Safi said at his sermon.
The fighting in downtown Karbala in the last two-and-a-half weeks has been the bloodiest in Iraq. More than 100 Iraqis have been killed. Insurgents, including a very skilled sniper, have killed four American soldiers and wounded at least 52 others. Entire city blocks have been destroyed in the fighting. One afternoon, a dog dragged a severed arm from an alleyway and began chewing on it.
After Friday prayers ended at the Shrine of Hussein, many of the worshippers marched along a wide plaza to the Shrine of Abbas, calling for peace. The plaza is usually thronged with pilgrims, many from Iran, but visitors have dropped off considerably since the fighting began. Many pilgrims have opted to stay inside their hotel rooms or not come at all, while merchants have shut down sidewalk stalls were they hawked Shiite religious souvenirs.
On Thursday, the American military cancelled a major night operation at the last minute and decided to pull its forces back from the Mukhaiyam Mosque, which it had occupied on May 12 after a pitched battle. The mosque, a stronghold for the insurgents, was being used by the Americans as a forward base to run patrols into the old city. It had turned into a lightning rod for attacks by the insurgents, drawing mortar and sniper fire.
Three American soldiers were killed while defending the mosque or patrolling the immediate area. The retreat from the mosque and cancellation of a major night assault also came as the American military was coming under increasing scrutiny for its activities, with officials trying to cope with the Abu Ghraib scandal and defending an air strike near the Syrian border that killed 41 people. Commanders here said the military was leaving downtown Karbala to allow local leaders to reach an "Iraqi solution" to the standoff with Mr. Sadr's forces.
After American troops completed their withdrawal from the Mukhaiyam Mosque, Iraqi policemen entered the downtown area, trying to take control for the first time since April, when Mr. Sadr's forces seized the area, said Col. Pete Mansoor, commander of the First Brigade of the First Armored Division. "It seems like a good thing," he added.
But there are doubts that Iraqi security forces are prepared or willing to rid the area of insurgents. Last month, when the uprising began, many Iraqi policemen and members of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, a national militia, ran from the insurgents or even joined in attacks against the occupiers. After the Americans seized the Mukhaiyam Mosque, they had to cajole Iraqi security forces to help them guard the mosque.
When policemen did turn up at the besieged mosque, they sat in the relative safety of the covered rooms while American soldiers went out on patrols. The policemen soon disappeared.
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Iraqis and G.I.'s Raid the Offices of an Ex-Favorite
May 21, 2004
By DEXTER FILKINS and IAN FISHER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/21/international/middleeast/21CHAL.html?pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 20 - American and Iraqi forces on Thursday raided and ransacked the headquarters of Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi leader who was a favorite of the Bush administration but who has fallen out with his former patron and become one of the sharpest critics of the occupation.
Dozens of Iraqi policemen, backed by American soldiers and unidentified men in civilian clothing who Iraqis said were American agents, stormed into Mr. Chalabi's headquarters, carted away computers, overturned furniture and smashed photographs of Mr. Chalabi and his family. They raided another building belonging to Mr. Chalabi's organization, the Iraqi National Congress, as well as his house.
American and Iraqi officials involved in the action said they were seeking to arrest employees of Mr. Chalabi who they believed were involved in kidnapping, torture, embezzlement and the theft of government property. Officials at the Iraqi National Congress said the target of the raid was Aras Habib, Mr. Chalabi's longtime director of intelligence, who presides over a vast network of agents that had been financed by the American government.
Mr. Chalabi is also the target of a government investigation into whether he betrayed American intelligence secrets to foreign governments, including Iran, according to American intelligence officials.
A lawyer for Mr. Chalabi said the accusations were false.
The information appears to have been so secret that it was known only within a small circle within the government; its loss may help explain why Mr. Chalabi has fallen out of the favor with the Bush administration.
The raid was a final rupture in what had been the administration's most important personal relationship in Iraq. It was the intelligence provided by Mr. Chalabi's network, and backed by Mr. Chalabi's ties to high-level Pentagon officials, that helped galvanize support in the Bush administration for an invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein.
But the relationship has markedly deteriorated in recent weeks as Mr. Chalabi criticized Americans for not turning over enough power to the new Iraqi government when sovereignty is formally restored on June 30. He also clashed with American officials over the decision to resurrect members of Mr. Hussein's Baath Party in positions of power.
Three days ago, Pentagon officials said they were ending the $335,000 monthly payments they had been making to support Mr. Chalabi's intelligence-gathering organization, which has been sharply criticized for having grossly exaggerating the threat posed by Mr. Hussein.
Mr. Chalabi, regarded by many Iraqis as an American stooge, seemed to relish his new role as a martyr. Over the last few months, he has repositioned himself here, moving away from the Americans as he has moved closer to the country's Shiite majority.
Standing in the ruins of his building, Mr. Chalabi denounced the Coalition Provision Authority and its chief, L. Paul Bremer III, claiming that the Americans had staged the raids to destroy him as a political force. To illustrate what he described as American heavy-handedness, he stood before a roomful of reporters and held aloft the shattered frame of a black-and-white photograph of his father, taken 81 year ago, which he said had been broken during the raid.
"The Baathists are here to attack us under American supervision," he said. "It is the penultimate act of failure by the C.P.A. in Iraq."
He said the raid was intended to find records related to the United Nations' oil-for-food program. According to a report in March by the General Accounting Office in Washington, Saddam Hussein's government pocketed more than $10 billion from the United Nations-monitored program, which is under investigation. Mr. Chalabi was pursuing his own investigation.
Paul A. Volcker, the head of the inquiry into the United Nations' oil- for-food program, conceded Thursday that there was a struggle in Baghdad over access to the program's records, but he said he had no knowledge of the raid and whether it had targeted such documents.
The records, he said, "are of interest to a lot of people, and they are of interest to us because we want access to them that is unfiltered and unbiased."
"I have no idea what documents were taken from Mr. Chalabi's home," he added, "but if they are relevant documents, we'd like to see them obviously."
In the end, the precise focus of the investigation was unclear. American press aides made available to reporters two men they insisted be identified only as "senior coalition officials," neither of whom revealed in a half hour of questioning the specific charges against the suspects. One of the officials did allow that "broadly speaking" the charges related to fraud, kidnapping, torture and "associated matters."
The official said as many as 15 people were named in the arrests warrants, though not all were arrested Thursday. Mr. Chalabi's name, he said, did not appear among them.
For more specifics, they referred reporters to an Iraqi judge, who also declined to specify charges. The judge, Hussain Muathin, said they concerned kidnapping, car theft and taking over government facilities. He did not answer any questions.
Officials at Mr. Chalabi's office said a gun battle had nearly broken out between Mr. Chalabi's heavily armed militia, which was guarding his house, and the American-backed force. Mr. Chalabi said the American soldiers, accompanied by plain-clothes American agents, cordoned off the areas around the three buildings as the Iraqi police searched. The Americans did not enter, he said.
Mr. Chalabi's colleagues on the American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council rushed to his defense and denounced the raids. The council members, worried that their influence will decline in the new United Nations-brokered government scheduled to take over June 30, are still reeling from the assassination of their president, Ezzadine Salim, in a suicide car bombing on Monday.
"This is an insult, and it happened, and it could happen to any governing council member," Sheik Ghazi Ajil al-Yawar, the new council president, told Al Arabiya, an Arabic-language television station. Mr. Yawar called for an "extraordinary session" of the council on Friday.
American officials scrambled to portray the raid as having been initiated and directed by the Iraqis alone. Mr. Bremer's chief spokesman, Dan Senor, deflected questions about the raid, saying all questions should be directed to the Iraqi police.
"We really don't have anything to do with the investigation or the arrests," Mr. Senor told reporters.
He said Mr. Bremer had referred the case to the Iraqi Central Criminal Court for investigation several months ago. But he said Mr. Bremer had not been informed of the raid beforehand.
"As to what he knew about the actual operation, he was notified today by an aide, who was notified - I think someone from the Governing Council notified one of his aides to let him know that this operation had occurred - and that's when Ambassador Bremer learned of it," Mr. Senor said. "He was notified after the fact."
Many Iraqis said they found it implausible that Iraqi law enforcement officers, who work for the American occupation authorities in the absence of any sovereign government, would have initiated such an operation on their own.
"Of course they know," said Adnan Pachachi, a member of the Iraqi Governing Council.
In a telephone interview, Francis Brooke, an American who is a senior adviser to Mr. Chalabi, said that Mr. Chalabi had never shared any secret information with the Iranians.
Mr. Brooke characterized the account by American officials as "disgusting nonsense that shows how decrepit our intelligence services" have become. He said the suspicions about Mr. Chalabi were illogical and unsupported by any facts.
Mr. Brooke added, "What we are seeing here is the very selective release of information designed to discredit Dr. Chalabi and people with whom they have some disagreement with."
He said the United States intelligence might have been confused by a possible intelligence effort by Tehran to test "the extent to which Dr. Chalabi is actually supported by the U.S."
Samir Sumaidy, the Iraqi interior minister, sought to portray the raids on Mr. Chalabi's buildings as a routine police matter. He said that the Iraqi police were executing a warrant signed by an Iraqi judge, and that Iraqi officials had asked for American support during the operation because of concerns about Mr. Chalabi's armed militia.
"I think maybe people are trying to read too much into this," said Mr. Sumaidy, who is regarded as a rival of Mr. Chalabi's. "We receive orders from the judiciary on the basis of their investigations, and we have to act on them."
Still, Mr. Sumaidy said he was "troubled" that the police had pillaged Mr. Chalabi's headquarters, and he said he personally visited the building after hearing the reports. While he said the raid had not been requested by the Americans, he seemed uncertain about other ways in which the Americans might have played a role.
"Whether the C.P.A. was involved I really cannot tell you," he said.
According to one official of Mr. Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, American officials have been trying to link Mr. Habib to allegations of wrongdoing that led to the arrest over a month ago of an I.N.C. member employed by the Iraqi Finance Ministry.
That member, Sabah Nouri, was arrested on corruption allegations that include stealing a dozen cars from the ministry, the I.N.C. aide said. He said Mr. Nouri had been accused of involvement in "theft, extortion, kidnapping and murder." He described him as a "low level" member of the Iraqi National Congress.
At the State Department, the spokesman, Richard A. Boucher, said, "There were legal and investigative reasons for this event today, and not political ones."
Within hours of the raid, Mr. Chalabi's lawyers had shot off a letter to the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, and the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, condemning what they called a "tawdry action" which they said was "committed by Iraqi policemen under the command of United States soldiers and several men who were identified as part of the F.B.I. and C.I.A."
When guards at Mr. Chalabi's office asked for a search warrant, the Iraqi policemen, along with American military police officers and armed civilians identified as F.B.I. and C.I.A. agents "replied by pointing their guns at the I.N.C. guards' foreheads," wrote the Chalabi lawyers, Collette C. Goodman and John J. E. Markham II. In their letter, they demanded that all of Mr. Chalabi's material be returned and that the American authorities pay for damage caused during the raid.
In an interview, Mr. Markham, a former federal prosecutor who is a lawyer in Boston, said: "Dr. Chalabi has done nothing wrong, and he has on many occasions happily provided whatever information the Coalition Provisional Authority has requested. The timing of this coincides with Dr. Chalabi's public criticism of the way Bremer is handling the situation."
Mr. Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress has received close to $40 million in American taxpayer financing during the past four years, including almost $33 million from the State Department from March 2000 and September 2003, and at least $6 million from the Defense Intelligence Agency in monthly $335,000 payments that began in 2002, payments that I.N.C. and Pentagon officials said this week would be ending.
A Pentagon official said, "We terminated the relationship basically as part of the process of transitioning to a sovereign government over there."
At the United Nations, questions about Mr. Chalabi were raised at a news conference Mr. Volcker had scheduled to update the progress of his inquiry into the oil-for-food program. The two other members of his panel are Richard J. Goldstone, a South African judge, and Mark Peith, a Swiss expert in investigating money laundering. Mr. Volcker said a team of investigators had spent four days in Baghdad seeking to secure documents for their inquiry. He declined to say whether they had seen Mr. Chalabi or Benon V. Sevan, the former head of the program who is accused of receiving illegal oil allotments. He has denied the charge.
Richard A. Oppel Jr., Joel Brinkley and David Johnston contributed reporting from Washington for this article, and Warren Hoge from the United Nations.
--------
Iraq Desert Bombing Video Shows Carnage
By SCHEHEREZADE FARAMARZI
Associated Press Writer
May 21, 2004
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAQ_WEDDING_ATTACK?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Fragments of musical instruments, tufts of women's hair, and a large blood stain are among the scenes in Associated Press Television News film of a destroyed house that survivors say U.S. planes bombed during a wedding party.
It is the first known footage from the site of Wednesday's attack, which killed up to 45 people, mostly women and children from the Bou Fahad tribe in Mogr el-Deeb, a desert village on the Syrian border.
The U.S. military has said the target was a suspected safehouse for foreign fighters from Syria and denied Friday that children were killed in the airstrikes.
Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt told reporters in Baghdad that U.S. troops who reported back from the operation "told us they did not shoot women and children."
"There were a number of woman, a handful of women, I think the number was four to six, caught up in the engagement. They may have died from some of the fire that came from the aircraft," Kimmitt said.
But an Associated Press reporter in the Ramadi area, at least 275 miles east of Mogr el-Deeb, was able to identify at least 10 of the bodies as those of children.
At the Bou Fahad cemetery outside Ramadi, where the tribe is based, each of the 28 fresh graves contain one to three corpses, mostly of mothers and their young children. Relatives said they include those of 2-year-old Kholood and 1-year-old Anoud, daughters of Amal Rikad, who was killed; of 2-year-old Raad and 1-year-old Ra'ed - whose headless body was found near his house - sons of Fatima Madhi, who was killed; of Saad, 10, Faisal, 7, Anoud, 6, Fasila, 5, Kholood, 4, and Inad, 3 - children of Mohammed and Morifa Rikad, who were killed.
There also are photo images of dead children, but it was not possible to determine if those victims were already accounted for by relatives.
In Washington, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Richard Myers told Congress that "we feel at this point very confident that this was a legitimate target, probably foreign fighters" who may have ties to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian wanted for allegedly organizing attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq on behalf of al-Qaida.
"The intelligence right now and what we found at the site, which were weapons and the sort of things you might not expect at a wedding party, were not consistent with that. They were consistent with folks trying to come into the country, across the desert, in vehicles, staying for the night, trying to make it into Iraq."
Several shotguns, handguns, Kalashnikov rifles and machine guns were found at the site, according to Kimmitt.
But Bou Fahad tribesmen denied that any foreign fighters were among them. They consider the desolate border area part of their territory and follow their goats, sheep and cattle there to graze. In the springtime they leave spacious homes in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, and roam the desert.
Smuggling livestock into Syria is also part of a herdsman's life, although no one in the tribe acknowledged that.
Weddings are often marked in Iraq with celebratory gunfire, but survivors insisted no weapons were fired Wednesday - despite speculation by Iraqi officials that this drew a mistaken American attack.
The first bomb hit the huge goat-hair tent - where male guests were said to be sleeping - at about 2:45 a.m. Wednesday. The barrage didn't stop until sunrise, witnesses said. Women and children were in an adjacent one-story house and the men went to their nearby homes, they said.
After the first missile, Hamdan Khalaf ran in panic and hid in a grassy area.
"In the morning, we went back to the hill and saw people torn apart, attacked by the plane," Khalaf, who was not wounded, told APTN.
"We pulled them out of here," another man told APTN, standing on a pile of stones as he picked up a stained green cloth that looked like part of a young man's shirt. A severed arm lay in the rubble. "We took them to hospital - straight to the fridge," the unidentified man said.
An angry voice in the background of the tape denounced President Bush. "This is his terrorism," the voice said.
The body of what survivors said was the wedding's cameraman was pulled out of the debris Thursday.
The footage also showed women in colorful clothes sifting through the wreckage and carrying away blankets and other goods. Pieces of rockets and bullet casings were strewn across the sandy plain, as were pots and pans and a satellite dish. Partly charred pickup trucks and a water tanker stood in the desert.
The attack left few survivors. About a dozen wounded were taken to the town of Qaem, about 140 miles northwest of Ramadi and 130 miles north of Mogr el-Deeb.
Witnesses, interviewed Thursday by AP in Ramadi, said revelers at the wedding party began worrying when they heard aircraft overhead at about 9 p.m. Tuesday. Then came military vehicles, which stopped about two miles away from the village and switched off their headlights. The planes were still overhead at 11 p.m, so the hosts told the band to stop playing and everyone went to bed.
About four hours later, airstrikes began and continued until dawn when two helicopters landed and about 40 soldiers searched the house where the women had stayed and a second, vacant house. Soon after, the two houses were blown up. Some witnesses said the houses were attacked by helicopters; others said Americans detonated them with explosives.
Kimmitt confirmed that the operation was an air and ground assault. "Those people on the ground identified no children as part of that location that were killed," he said, adding that they reported only adult deaths.
He also referred to the APTN video, shot Thursday in Mogr el-Deeb, as well as separate APTN footage from Wednesday in Ramadi that showed a headless body of a child and other bodies of children.
"What we saw in those APTN videos were substantially inconsistent with the reports we received from the unit that conducted the operation," Kimmitt said. "We're now trying to figure out why there's an inconsistency.
"We're keeping an open mind as to exactly what happened on the ground. That's why we're continuing to try to gather all the facts; that's why we're not ruling out anything based on information coming forward," he added.
-----
'US soldiers started to shoot us, one by one'
Survivors describe wedding massacre as generals refuse to apologise
The Guardian
Rory McCarthy in Ramadi
Friday May 21, 2000
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1221658,00.html
The wedding feast was finished and the women had just led the young bride and groom away to their marriage tent for the night when Haleema Shihab heard the first sounds of the fighter jets screeching through the sky above.
It was 10.30pm in the remote village of Mukaradeeb by the Syrian border and the guests hurried back to their homes as the party ended. As sister-in-law of the groom, Mrs Shihab, 30, was to sleep with her husband and children in the house of the wedding party, the Rakat family villa. She was one of the few in the house who survived the night.
"The bombing started at 3am," she said yesterday from her bed in the emergency ward at Ramadi general hospital, 60 miles west of Baghdad. "We went out of the house and the American soldiers started to shoot us. They were shooting low on the ground and targeting us one by one," she said. She ran with her youngest child in her arms and her two young boys, Ali and Hamza, close behind. As she crossed the fields a shell exploded close to her, fracturing her legs and knocking her to the ground.
She lay there and a second round hit her on the right arm. By then her two boys lay dead. "I left them because they were dead," she said. One, she saw, had been decapitated by a shell.
"I fell into the mud and an American soldier came and kicked me. I pretended to be dead so he wouldn't kill me. My youngest child was alive next to me."
Mrs Shibab's description, backed by other witnesses, of an attack on a sleeping village is at odds with the American claim that they came under fire while targeting a suspected foreign fighter safe house.
She described how in the hours before dawn she watched as American troops destroyed the Rakat villa and the house next door, reducing the buildings to rubble.
Another relative carried Mrs Shihab and her surviving child to hospital. There she was told her husband Mohammed, the eldest of the Rakat sons, had also died.
As Mrs Shihab spoke she gestured with hands still daubed red-brown with the henna the women had used to decorate themselves for the wedding. Alongside her in the ward yesterday were three badly injured girls from the Rakat family: Khalood Mohammed, aged just a year and struggling for breath, Moaza Rakat, 12, and Iqbal Rakat, 15, whose right foot doctors had already amputated.
By the time the sun rose on Wednesday over the Rakat family house, the raid had claimed 42 lives, according to Hamdi Noor al-Alusi, manager of the al-Qaim general hospital, the nearest to the village.
Among the dead were 27 members of the extended Rakat family, their wedding guests and even the band of musicians hired to play at the ceremony, among them Hussein al-Ali from Ramadi, one of the most popular singers in western Iraq.
Dr Alusi said 11 of the dead were women and 14 were children. "I want to know why the Americans targeted this small village," he said by telephone. "These people are my patients. I know each one of them. What has caused this disaster?"
Despite the compelling testimony of Mrs Shihab, Dr Alusi and other wedding guests, the US military, faced with appar ent evidence of yet another scandal in Iraq, offered an inexplicably different account of the operation.
The military admitted there had been a raid on the village at 3am on Wednesday but said it had targeted a "suspected foreign fighter safe house".
"During the operation, coalition forces came under hostile fire and close air support was provided," it said in a statement. Soldiers at the scene then recovered weapons, Iraqi dinar and Syrian pounds (worth approximately Ł800), foreign passports and a "Satcom radio", presumably a satellite telephone.
"We took ground fire and we returned fire," said Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of operations for the US military in Iraq. "We estimate that around 40 were killed. But we operated within our rules of engagement."
Major General James Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division, was scathing of those who suggested a wedding party had been hit. "How many people go to the middle of the desert ... to hold a wedding 80 miles (130km) from the nearest civilisation? These were more than two dozen military-age males. Let's not be naive."
When reporters asked him about footage on Arabic television of a child's body being lowered into a grave, he replied: "I have not seen the pictures but bad things happen in wars. I don't have to apologise for the conduct of my men."
The celebration at Mukaradeeb was to be one of the biggest events of the year for a small village of just 25 houses. Haji Rakat, the father, had finally arranged a long-negotiated tribal union that would bring together two halves of one large extended family, the Rakats and the Sabahs.
Haji Rakat's second son, Ashad, would marry Rutba, a cousin from the Sabahs. In a second ceremony one of Ashad's female cousins, Sharifa, would marry a young Sabah boy, Munawar.
A large canvas awning had been set up in the garden of the Rakat villa to host the party. A band of musicians was called in, led by Hamid Abdullah, who runs the Music of Arts recording studio in Ramadi, the nearest major town.
He brought his friend Hussein al-Ali, a popular Iraqi singer who performs on Ramadi's own television channel. A handful of other musicians including the singer's brother Mohaned, played the drums and the keyboards.
The ceremonies began on Tuesday morning and stretched through until the late evening. "We were happy because of the wedding. People were dancing and making speeches," said Ma'athi Nawaf, 55, one of the neighbours.
Late in the evening the guests heard the sound of jets overhead. Then in the distance they saw the headlights of what appeared to be a military convoy heading their way across the desert.
The party ended at around 10.30pm and the neighbours left for their homes. At 3am the bombing began. "The first thing they bombed was the tent for the ceremony," said Mr Nawaf. "We saw the family running out of the house. The bombs were falling, destroying the whole area."
Armoured military vehicles then drove into the village, firing machine guns and supported by attack helicopters. "They started to shoot at the house and the people outside the house," he said.
Before dawn two large Chinook helicopters descended and offloaded dozens of troops. They appeared to set explosives in the Rakat house and the building next door and minutes later, just after the Chinooks left again, they exploded into rubble.
"I saw something that nobody ever saw in this world," said Mr Nawaf. "There were children's bodies cut into pieces, women cut into pieces, men cut into pieces."
Among the dead was his daughter Fatima Ma'athi, 25, and her two young boys, Raad, four, and Raed, six. "I found Raad dead in her arms. The other boy was lying beside her. I found only his head," he said. His sister Simoya, the wife of Haji Rakat, was also killed with her two daughters. "The Americans call these people foreign fighters. It is a lie. I just want one piece of evidence of what they are saying."
Remarkably among the survivors were the two married couples, who had been staying in tents away from the main house, and Haji Rakat himself, an elderly man who had gone to bed early in a nearby house.
From the mosques of Ramadi volunteers had been called to dig at the graveyard of the tribe, on the southern outskirts of the city.
There lay 27 graves: mounds of dirt each marked with a single square of crudely cut marble, a name scribbled in black paint. Some gave more than one name, and one, belonging to a woman Hamda Suleman, the briefest of explanations: "The American bombing."
-------- israel / palestine
Gaza's Arabs Tally Non-Human Losses: Houses, Even a Zoo
May 21, 2004
By ALAN COWELL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/21/international/middleeast/21CND-ISRAEL.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
RAFAH REFUGEE CAMP, Gaza Strip, May 21 - As Israeli forces pulled back a bit from parts of this bleak place today, Nabil Abu Taha, a 34-year-old cab driver, was wondering what to do about his home, bulldozed into a churn of debris. Mohamed Juma was pondering what happened to his zoo.
Reflecting on a four-day Israeli incursion that has so far left some 40 Palestinians dead, Mr. Juma waved an expansive arm across a moonscape of bumpy sand, twisted cages, dead ducks, missing pythons and even a dead ostrich.
"I didn't expect the tanks to come to the zoo," he said.
The Israeli Army announced today that it was redeploying some of the forces it sent here four days ago in a major operation the Israelis say is intended to sever arms smuggling routes in tunnels from neighboring Egypt. The incursion, the biggest in years, followed the killing of 13 israeli soldiers in parts of the Gaza Strip last week.
But the pullback from some areas also enabled some people like Mr. Taha and scores of others to return for the first time today to visit homes bulldozed as Israeli forces carved access routes through this most crowded refugee camp last Tuesday.
Palestinians said up to 35 homes may have been destroyed in addition to those that Israel acknowledges demolishing as part of its attempt to cut off arms supplies here. Power lines were pulled down and cars crushed.
"It was about 3 a.m.," Mr. Taha said, breaking off from scrabbling through the flattened debris of his home to look for lost belongings from identity documents to a refrigerator. "A loudspeaker said: `Get out of your homes and be killed.' " The 12 family members scrambled to flee, picking up children as the bulldozers moved forward, he said, gesturing with hands whitened by sifting through the powder of his home.
Just around the corner, in the Salam district of Rafah, his cousin Nahid Abu Taha, 36, was awakened by the same operation early on Thursday morning. Mr. Taha, a vegetable vendor, gathered his family in one room as a bulldozer thrust into another, he said, then realized there would be no shelter.
"I lifted my children in the air and shouted to the bulldozer driver to stop, but he did not stop, so we escaped" he said.
Nearby, his 32-year-old wife, Afaf, in black headdress and long-sleeved robes that almost hid gold bracelets and rings, had retrieved from the flattened home a mirrored dressing table topped jauntily with plastic flowers in a tin vase.
Still lodged in the rubble was a computer monitor, an oil lamp, onions and bedsprings. Asked what it would take to restart a normal life, she replied: "We want Israel to pull out. We need to be safe and secure. We don't need anything more."
In a briefing for reporters today, Brig. Gen. Shmuel Zakai, the commander of the Israeli incursion force, said that despite a thinning out of forces today, the operation would continue. Today's pause, he said, was "a change to allow the forces to re-energize."
Israeli military analysts had raised doubts about the mission's future after an episode on Wednesday in which an Israel tank opened fire, killing eight civilian protesters, some of them children. The incident provoked a huge international outcry.
General Zakai said today that Israeli forces had resorted to tank fire to deter a crowd of protesters, purportedly including armed militants, that threatened to cut off an undercover force of Israelis. The general said the current incursion was designed to thwart "immense efforts" among Palestinians to smuggle weapons, including Katyusha missiles, antitank rockers and explosives.
A military spokeswoman said no tunnels had so far been found in this incursion.
General Zakai said: "The operation is first and foremost intended to protect the lives of our soldiers who operate throughout the Gaza Strip, as well as protect the lives of civilians here, and the lives of civilians who live outside the strip so that cities outside of Gaza Strip will not be within firing range." He denied that the incursion had been scaled down in response to pressure from countries including the United States.
Some 7,500 Israeli settlers live among 1.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, and the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, has put forward a highly contentious plan to close down the settlements in phases.
Despite the Israeli redeployment, some people in places besieged or encircled by Israeli tanks said they were still pinned down.
"For four days there has been no electricity and no water," said a 40-year-old laborer, Jemal Sehdan, who lives in the Tel Sultan neighborhood, home to some 25,000 people. "Only for two hours today did we have water. The tanks are still shooting."
Indeed, as people like Mr. Taha and his cousin foraged in the ruins of their homes, bursts of gunfire could be heard coming from parts of the nearby Brazil area - one of those where Israeli troops were said to have redeployed. No further casualties had been reported by sundown and the uneasy calm gave mourners a chance to bury their dead. After noon prayers in the main mosque on the Muslim holy day of Friday, hundreds of men poured onto the streets waving yellow, green and red banners to denote their political affiliation in a funeral cortege for six people killed during the incursion. The snouts of militants' AK-47 assault rifles could be seen protruding above the crowd.
Back at the zoo, Mr. Juma was in no mood for burials, brandishing a wounded raccoon as evidence of what, he said, he had seen happening from a window of his one-story villa next to the Rafah Zoo (entrance fee: one shekel, or 22 cents, per person).
"I was watching and I saw they started to destroy the wall and then the fence," he said. "They knocked down trees and made big piles of earth with a bulldozer that looked as if it had the number 7 on the side. I thought they had made a mistake. I thought they couldn't be coming to destroy the zoo."
Then, however, bulldozer No. 7 was joined by what he recalled as bulldozer No.4.
Maj. Sharon Feingold, a spokeswoman for the Israeli Army, acknowledged that Israeli forces had pushed through the zoo but only because their initial incursion route was blocked by explosive charges laid by Palestinians, she said. And, she added, rather than leave the animals caged in a combat zone, Israeli troops released them.
That was not quite how Mr. Juma saw the loss of what he called a $300,000 investment. First of all, he produced from his home a gaudy macaw parrot in shades of turquoise, red and bright-green plumage.
Several of those, he said, had been lost in a total of 80 animals, of which only seven remained - including a small kangaroo bounding around in a basement. Of the two 14-foot pythons, he said, one was lost. The American jaguars, the foxes, the wolves, and two of the three ostriches - the third was dead - had disappeared, he said. Apparently they were somewhere in this place of narrow alleys between gray concrete homes.
An Israeli military spokesman denied Mr. Juma's allegations that Israeli troops stole some parrots.
Where exactly the animals have gone is a mystery. One resident has reportedly sighted a monkey and there have been unconfirmed reports of a runaway ostrich on the streets.
The anger inspired by the incursion among Palestinians is not restricted to Rafah, or to Israel. In an unusually fiery address to thousands of people today at the Jabaliyah camp in northern Gaza, an emergent leader of the Hamas Islamic movement, Ismael Al Ashkar, drew a direct parallel between Palestinian rage and the broader anti-American sentiment provoked by the abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison, near Baghdad.
"Do not wait for American justice," he said. "American justice means Abu Ghraib."
"Gaza is waiting for you, Sharon, and for you, America, to achieve victory over you," he declared.
--------
Call for inquiry as Israel insists 'peaceful' protesters were armed
INDEPENDENT NEWS
By Donald Macintyre in Rafah
21 May 2004
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=523322
As they buried their dead here yesterday after Wednesday's demonstration outside the Tel al Sultan refugee camp, it was already clear that even among the long litany of horror since the present intifada began three and a half years ago, this was an event that will be dissected for months, perhaps even years.
Whatever the detailed facts - and perhaps only a truly independent enquiry can establish them with any credibility - the importance of what happened was underlined by the speed with which the Israelis put out their own version of the catastrophe. This emphatically rejected the demonstrators' uniform claim that the Israeli forces who killed 10 Palestinians and wounded at least 40 had fired directly into the crowd.
Instead, the Israelis say the army had fired first flares, then a helicopter gunship missile into waste land as a warning to the protesters not to advance. This was followed by machinegun-fire and tank shells, all aimed at the wall of a deserted building beside the road on which the demonstrators had marched, and that the carnage was accidental.
They said these weapons had been fired because some of the men in the demonstration including as many as five of the dead, were armed.
Even if this version is true, it raises an immediate question about whether the use of such weaponry in a heavily built-up area near a crowd of mainly civilian demonstrators, including children, was the right way to warn anybody of anything.
Amnesty International's Donatella Rovera, who had been visiting a nearby refugee camp and saw the helicopter flares and heard firing, said such an act would be not only extremely dangerous but a grave breach of international humanitarian law.
But to test the robustness of the Israeli version, whether it can justify what happened, it is necessary first to establish the agreed facts as well as the disputed ones. The demonstrators collected at al-Auda Square after mid-day prayers, as calls for a peaceful (the Arabic silmiya used by witnesses is precise) demonstration were issued through loud speakers from mosques.
Factions such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad appear to have helped to organise the demonstration but armed men were told to stay away. Many, if not most, of the protesters intended to march into the camp with tangible aid in their hands, drawn by the increasingly dire needs of the camp inhabitants.
Many protesters had water, canned food, and medicine for the embattled residents. And they marched without incident along the Beach Road until they got past the Palestinian ambulances waiting for Israeli permission to ferry casualties out of Tel al Sultan.
At the mourning tents for two of those killed, the accounts by bereaved relatives who had been there broadly agreed with those of marchers interviewed as they returned east down the Beach Road on Wednesday as ambulances took the dying and wounded to hospital.
These accounts differ in details and even chronology of a terrifying incident which lasted a few minutes. But they all attest to the suddenness and lack of warning. Rayed al-Saqua, 37, who carried his dying cousin Fouad to a passing car, said he heard the whoosh of a missile in front of him and immediately dropped. Mr al Saqua, who was in the second row, said he thought the missile landed a few metres in front of the crowd but added: "When I got up I saw a lot of blood and people dying behind me. There was a second explosion, seconds afterwards.
"As people went to help the injured, the Israelis continued firing. After I had taken Fouad, I carried a boy who seemed to have only the skin left of his left arm. There was still firing as people were running away.''
Mr al Saqua was willing to admit what he did not know as well as what he did. He thought all the firing was of missiles from an Apache helicopter, two of which he said had come from behind the crowd. But he added: "I can't discriminate between the sounds. Imagine what it was like. You don't know what's happening. I believe there was a tank but I didn't see it.''
Rafah Hospital's casualty officer Dr Ahmed Abu Nkairn said: "You can see from the television pictures that they fired as people ran away." He said he had seen life-threatening injuries in the back and the back of the neck consistent with firing on demonstrators in retreat. But had the protesters not been taking a serious risk by marching past the ambulances and intending to enter the Israeli-guarded refugee camp?
Mr al-Saqua said: "We didn't think anything like this would happen. We never imagined it. We thought the Israeli army would even help us because we were trying to help the people of Tel al Sultan and we know there are Israeli soldiers who have humanity. But we discovered the opposite.''
Amnesty's Ms Rovera, who saw the march-past after it had assembled at al Auda Square said she saw no armed men and pointed out that none of the television footage showed armed men. The Israelis have yet to produce evidence showing armed men on the march, nor have they explained how weapons not fired directly at the crowd caused so much carnage.
The call pressed by four humanitarian organisations in the high court in Jerusalem yesterday for a full independent enquiry seems overwhelming.
-------- nato
German Leader to Oppose Sending NATO Troops to Iraq
May 21, 2004
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN and MARK LANDLER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/21/international/europe/21berl.html?pagewanted=all&position=
BERLIN, May 19 - Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany, seeking to head off any attempt to use NATO forces in Iraq, said Wednesday that he would speak clearly against any such move at NATO summit meeting in Istanbul next month.
In an interview with The New York Times on Wednesday, Mr. Schröder said Germany would not go so far as to block a NATO role in Iraq if a majority of the organization's members wanted it. But he added, "The problem will be that NATO would find itself in the same situation as the coalition forces are in now with regard to the confidence that the Iraqis have in these forces as guarantors of security and stability."
"I would be very grateful," Mr. Schröder said, "if people would understand my doubts as to whether NATO really can play such a positive role as they seem to think and will make no secret of these doubts in Istanbul."
Still, Mr. Schröder said a broad agreement had emerged on the future steps to be taken in Iraq, including the transfer of authority to an interim Iraqi government on June 30 and a United Nations resolution recognizing that government.
"Both France and Germany as well as other European countries are much closer to the coalition than some people think," Mr. Schröder said in an hourlong interview in his Berlin office.
"This Iraqi transitional government must have a say in things; it must not just exist on paper," he said. "It must have powers and not just be seen as a political adjunct of the coalition forces."
Mr. Schröder was relaxed and good-humored as he sat at a conference table in his airy, modern office on the seventh floor of the federal chancellery. The office offers a commanding view of Berlin, with the glass-domed Parliament building visible across a grassy esplanade on one side and the Tiergarten, the verdant park in the center of the city, on the other.
On June 6, Mr. Schröder will stand alongside President Bush and other leaders on the beaches of Normandy as the first German chancellor to attend festivities celebrating the D-Day landings of World War II. Reflecting what has become the prevailing view in Germany, he said that the event was not the celebration of a German defeat but of a liberation for all of Europe, including Germany.
"For me, D-Day was the beginning of the liberation of Europe from National Socialism," he said.
Twenty years ago, on the 40th anniversary of D-Day, Mr. Schröder's predecessor, Helmut Kohl, was not invited to Normandy. At the time, Mr. Kohl said, "There is no point for a German chancellor to celebrate an event in which thousands of German soldiers were miserably killed." The invitation to Mr. Schröder was issued by the French president, Jacques Chirac, and is widely perceived as a sort of culminating gesture, after three major wars in less than a century, of the long process of French-German reconciliation.
"Of course I was very moved by the invitation," said Mr. Schröder, whose father, a 21 year-old corporal, was killed during the war.
"I never knew him, but I still know who started the war, and that is why I took it upon myself to accept this invitation," Mr. Schröder said. He added that for a German chancellor to be present at the D-Day ceremonies was "a sign of recognition of the role of Germany, of postwar Germany, as an established democracy and as a part of the Western community of values."
Germany has sought to balance its strong opposition to the Iraqi war with an effort to affirm its overall cooperation with the United States, and in his interview on Wednesday, Mr. Schröder stressed that cooperation. He talked about the substantial German role in Afghanistan, where Germany has roughly 2,000 troops in the NATO security force, and avoided criticizing the United States even in the wake of the Iraqi prison abuse scandal.
"The dispute over the basic position, which escalated to such an extent last year, is now a part of recent history," Mr. Schröder said. "And now the American president and I have decided that this is not the time for historical reappraisals. It is time for deciding where our joint responsibility lies."
Asked what those joint responsibilities were, Mr. Schröder spoke of the training of the Iraqi police by Germany at a camp in the United Arab Emirates and Germany's willingness to forgive a substantial part of Iraq's debt, but he reiterated his refusal to send troops to Iraq.
"I personally do not desire this," he continued, "and I wouldn't have any support for it in Germany, no legitimacy for such a step, regardless of whether I myself wanted it or not."
Even in connection with the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, Mr. Schröder seemed eager to find a silver lining, saying that, while the reputation of the United States had certainly been tarnished, the response of American society showed the vigor and strength of American democracy.
Mr. Schröder said that when the accusations were first raised, he watched the Senate testimony of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld on CNN.
"I was really impressed by the toughness and intensity of the investigation that was immediately set in motion," Mr. Schröder said, "and that shows how great the power of American democracy is."
At a time of rising anti-Americanism in Europe, Mr. Schröder said that it was the task of those who criticized the Iraq war "to point to this other aspect," namely the strength of the American democracy, in order, he said, "to minimize the damage that has occurred."
"And the second conclusion to be drawn," he said, "is that multilateralism offers a measure of protection even to the strongest and is therefore better than unilateralism."
Basic questions about the role Germany should play in world affairs are being asked both inside and outside Germany today. Analysts have wondered whether the disagreement over Iraq presaged a permanent drifting away from the country's previously powerful ties with the United States, with Germany becoming more and more oriented toward the European Union. It is an idea that Mr. Schröder rejects.
"I don't think it's right to assume that there are divergent interests between the United States of America on the one hand and Europe on the other," he said. "As Europe expands and deepens as a result of the integration process," he continued, "its unity will become increasingly apparent in issues of foreign and defense policy, and this united Europe must be a partner of the United States, a partner of equal standing. And when I say partner, I mean partner, not counterweight."
-------- prisoners of war
Skipped autopsies in Iraq revealed
Denver Post Staff Writer
By Miles Moffeit
Friday, May 21, 2004
http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36%7E6439%7E2162097,00.html
Autopsies were not performed on at least five Iraqi prisoners who died of mysterious causes at Abu Ghraib prison and other detention camps, according to Pentagon records.
And the lack of forensic investigations may conflict with international standards, including the Geneva Conventions, for the handling of war-detainee deaths.
Among the cases is a prisoner who died, the records show, after "gasping for air." Another detainee who had "prior head injuries" fell out of a hospital bed and struck his head on the floor. One prisoner began having "chest pains and collapsed."
Synopses of the death investigations, which do not disclose whether the prisoners were interrogated, are enclosed in documents obtained by The Denver Post from a high-level Pentagon source this week.
The deaths, all characterized as having "undetermined" causes, raise more serious questions about the treatment of detainees in the custody of U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib and other combat-zone facilities, say U.S. lawmakers and human-rights organizations.
A Pentagon spokesman declined to comment on the cases.
The Post reported Wednesday that harsh interrogation techniques by U.S. soldiers are being investigated in the deaths of five other prisoners.
Autopsies were done on those deaths; three of the prisoners died after being suffocated, the autopsies show.
One case involved the November killing of an Iraqi general who was smothered in a sleeping bag after a military-intelligence officer sat on his chest, records show.
In the wake of the newspaper's article, members of Congress are calling on the Pentagon to provide more information about the handling of prisoner deaths - and whether the accused will ever face criminal proceedings.
Top military officials might be pressed for responses as early as today in a meeting of the House Armed Services Committee.
"These are horrendous allegations," said Rep. Vic Snyder of Arkansas, the ranking Democrat on the committee. "These are different issues than what have been the focus so far of public discussion."
Rep. Loretta Sanchez, D-Calif., another committee member, is seeking hearings while rounding up signatures for a letter to the Pentagon, she said, requesting more answers about "these awful issues" involving detainee deaths.
And Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson, a Republican member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he will be demanding answers from the Pentagon: "I want to get to the bottom of this issue or the top of it. If autopsies were waived or not considered, it raises further questions about how high this goes."
The five deaths in which autopsies were not performed are among at least 27 detainee fatalities under internal Pentagon review, records show.
Four of the prisoners died last year - two at Abu Ghraib. The fifth death occurred this year at the Camp Cropper detention facility near Baghdad, records show.
The earliest known death involving no forensic investigation occurred Aug. 3 at Camp Cropper, but no details were provided. "Since no forensic examination of the body was conducted, no greater clarity as to the cause of death is expected," the report notes.
On Aug. 20 at Abu Ghraib, a prisoner was taken to medical personnel, "gasping for air," a document shows. Emergency medical treatment was administered, according to the document, but medics could not save the prisoner: "The investigation was closed." AUDIO
Denver Post staff writer Miles Moffeit talks with 1150 KNRC's Enid Goldstein about his exclusive on the Iraqi prison scandal.
MP3 version
A November case involved a detainee who was rushed to medical personnel after complaining of chest pain and then went into cardiac arrest: "No autopsy was conducted."
In December at a detention facility in Mosul, an inmate was found "unresponsive by guards conducting routine marking wake-up calls. The body did not exhibit any signs of abuse or foul play," according to the document. "Investigation was closed."
In January at Camp Cropper, an Iraqi being treated for chest pains "fell out of his bed, struck his head on the floor and lapsed into a coma. A CT scan and surgery revealed inter-cranial bleeding and signs of prior head injuries."
Six prisoner deaths that did undergo autopsies were classified as involving "natural causes." Most were listed as heart attacks.
One of the cases mentioned the cause of death as "inflammation of the abdomen."
A veteran military lawyer said the incidents without autopsies raise many issues.
"What were the exigencies this organization was operating under that prevented them from conducting autopsies?" said Pat Gallaher, a retired Marine prosecutor who said military law-enforcement personnel typically order forensic examinations in such cases.
"What law-enforcement and medical personnel were available?"
United Nations and Geneva Convention standards for handling war prisoners call for official inquiries into prisoner deaths. United Nations rules mandate that autopsies be performed in suspicious deaths.
"That would seem to be covered under international law," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch.
"The investigative files (published by The Post) reveal deeply disturbing practices, which we hope the Pentagon will explain promptly and criminally pursue those responsible," he said.
Amnesty International released a statement Thursday, saying: "We have written to the U.S. government on numerous cases of deaths of detainees held by U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. The official response has been inadequate, and the evidence now uncovered by The Denver Post has greatly heightened our concern."
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U.S. admits to secret interrogation site in Baghdad
Hundreds of detainees released from Abu Ghraib prison
(CNN)
Friday, May 21, 2004
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/05/21/iraq.main/index.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- As hundreds of detainees were released from Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad, a senior U.S. official Friday confirmed that a previously undisclosed U.S. military interrogation facility at or near Baghdad International Airport does indeed exist.
The official said the site was run in accordance with the Geneva Conventions and all detainees were afforded their rights under that international document.
"That's not to say somebody didn't get their head dunked in the water," he said.
U.S. Special Forces participated in running the site, he added.
Two other intelligence experts have confirmed the existence of a secret interrogation facility as well.
It is not clear if this facility is still being used, the senior official said.
Iraqis interrogated at the site were in a broad category of "more senior than the average security detainee," but none were in the deck of cards that depicted the most senior members of Saddam Hussein's regime, he said.
Insurgents and suspected terrorists were among those questioned at the facility, he added.
The existence of such a facility has long been rumored and has been the subject of recent media reports. NBC News on Thursday reported the existence of the site and that Iraqis were abused there.
Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the coalition spokesman in Baghdad, Friday denied the NBC report's claims of abusive interrogation techniques being used at the site, saying that "any suggestion that torture is used is false and offensive."
He also added that "coalition forces inside Iraq adhere to the Geneva Conventions in the conduct of detention and interrogation operations."
Kimmitt admitted, however, that the NBC report "revealed specific operational locations," in the first direct confirmation of the site's existence. Two held in Berg's case
Also Friday, a senior military official with the U.S.-led coalition said forces had apprehended four people, then released two of them, in connection with the beheading of American civilian Nicholas Berg. (Full story)
The other two could be released after further questioning, the official said, providing no other details.
Berg's decapitation was videotaped, and the video was posted on a Web site linked to al Qaeda. His body was found this month in Baghdad. Abu Ghraib releases
Busloads of Iraqi prisoners Friday left Abu Ghraib prison as part of a planned release, a U.S.-led coalition official said.
Kimmitt said 454 inmates left Friday and 394 are to be released next Friday.
The new U.S. commander of detention operations in Iraq, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, said he plans to reduce the number of prisoners in Abu Ghraib to about 2,500, according to a coalition spokesman.
Miller took over for Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was relieved her of duty January 17, a day after the coalition military announced an investigation into allegations of abuse in the prison.
The spokesman said the review board meets daily to determine which prisoners are eligible for release.
Since February, about 3,000 Iraqis have been recommended for release and are going through the process. Prisoner deaths investigated
The prisoner release comes as more photographs surface apparently depicting U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Some of the images show soldiers posing with an Iraqi corpse, while the soldiers smile and give a thumbs-up to the camera.
Photos of U.S. troops mistreating naked, hooded prisoners at Abu Ghraib, near Baghdad, surfaced in April and have led to outrage, condemnations and hearings in Washington.
The Army's Criminal Investigation Command (CID) is trying to identify additional soldiers and personnel seen in the photos and videos of abuse of Iraqi prisoners, military officials said Friday.
As many as half a dozen new investigations into deaths of Iraqis in custody have been opened by the Army CID in recent days, a military official confirmed. While at least one death is believed to be from a natural cause, typhoid, others "may be suspicious," according to the official.
Meanwhile, the CIA is investigating three cases of prisoner deaths during interrogations in Iraq and Afghanistan.(Full story)
The Army has been investigating the abuses since January. Seven soldiers -- all members of an Army reserve military police company -- have been charged in the case, and six officers have received career-ending reprimands.
One soldier, Spc. Jeremy Sivits, pleaded guilty in a court-martial Wednesday in Baghdad and was sentenced to a year's confinement.
Interrogation techniques approved by top generals in the Iraq war were humane and followed the Geneva Conventions, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Friday. Myers responded to reporters' questions after appearing before the House Armed Services Committee.
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New Details of Prison Abuse Emerge
Abu Ghraib Detainees' Statements Describe Sexual Humiliation And Savage Beatings
By Scott Higham and Joe Stephens
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, May 21, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43783-2004May20?language=printer
Previously secret sworn statements by detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq describe in raw detail abuse that goes well beyond what has been made public, adding allegations of prisoners being ridden like animals, sexually fondled by female soldiers and forced to retrieve their food from toilets.
The fresh allegations of prison abuse are contained in statements taken from 13 detainees shortly after a soldier reported the incidents to military investigators in mid-January. The detainees said they were savagely beaten and repeatedly humiliated sexually by American soldiers working on the night shift at Tier 1A in Abu Ghraib during the holy month of Ramadan, according to copies of the statements obtained by The Washington Post.
The statements provide the most detailed picture yet of what took place on the cellblock. Some of the detainees described being abused as punishment or discipline after they were caught fighting or with a prohibited item. Some said they were pressed to denounce Islam or were force-fed pork and liquor. Many provided graphic details of how they were sexually humiliated and assaulted, threatened with rape, and forced to masturbate in front of female soldiers.
"They forced us to walk like dogs on our hands and knees," said Hiadar Sabar Abed Miktub al-Aboodi, detainee No. 13077. "And we had to bark like a dog, and if we didn't do that they started hitting us hard on our face and chest with no mercy. After that, they took us to our cells, took the mattresses out and dropped water on the floor and they made us sleep on our stomachs on the floor with the bags on our head and they took pictures of everything."
The prisoners also provided accounts of how some of the now-famous photographs were staged, including the pyramid of hooded, naked prisoners. Eight of the detainees identified by name one particular soldier at the center of the abuse investigation, Spec. Charles A. Graner Jr., a member of the 372nd Military Police Company from Cresaptown, Md. Five others described abuse at the hands of a solider who matches Graner's description.
"They said we will make you wish to die and it will not happen," said Ameen Saeed Al-Sheik, detainee No. 151362. "They stripped me naked. One of them told me he would rape me. He drew a picture of a woman to my back and makes me stand in shameful position holding my buttocks."
The Pentagon is investigating the allegations, a spokesman said last night.
"There are a number of lines of inquiry that are being taken with respect to allegations of abuse of detainees in U.S. custody," Bryan Whitman said. "There is still more to know and to be learned and new things to be discovered."
Threats of Death and Assault
The disclosures come from a new cache of documents, photographs and videos obtained by The Post that are part of evidence assembled by Army investigators putting together criminal cases against soldiers at Abu Ghraib. So far, seven MPs have been charged with brutalizing detainees at the prison, and one pleaded guilty Wednesday.
The sworn statements, taken in Baghdad between Jan. 16 and Jan. 21, span 65 pages. Each statement begins with a handwritten account in Arabic that is signed by the detainee, followed by a typewritten translation by U.S. military contractors. The shortest statement is a single paragraph; the longest exceeds two single-spaced typewritten pages.
While military investigators interviewed the detainees separately, many of them recalled the same event or pattern of events and procedures in Tier 1A -- a block reserved for prisoners who were thought to possess intelligence that could help thwart the insurgency in Iraq, find Saddam Hussein or locate weapons of mass destruction. Military intelligence officers took over the cellblock last October and were using MPs to help "set the conditions" for interrogations, according to an investigative report complied by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba. Several MPs have since said in statements and through their attorneys that they were roughing up detainees at the direction of U.S. military intelligence officers.
Most of the detainees said in the statements that they were stripped upon their arrival to Tier 1A, forced to wear women's underwear, and repeatedly humiliated in front of one another and American soldiers. They also described beatings and threats of death and sexual assault if they did not cooperate with U.S. interrogators.
Kasim Mehaddi Hilas, detainee No. 151108, told investigators that when he first arrived at Abu Ghraib last year, he was forced to strip, put on a hood and wear rose-colored panties with flowers on them. "Most of the days I was wearing nothing else," he said in his statement.
Hilas also said he witnessed an Army translator having sex with a boy at the prison. He said the boy was between 15 and 18 years old. Someone hung sheets to block the view, but Hilas said he heard the boy's screams and climbed a door to get a better look. Hilas said he watched the assault and told investigators that it was documented by a female soldier taking pictures.
"The kid was hurting very bad," Hilas said.
Hilas, like other detainees interviewed by the military, said he could not identify some of the soldiers because they either covered their name patches or did not wear uniforms. But he and other detainees did know the names of three, including Graner and Sgt. Javal S. Davis, both of whom have been charged and now face courts-martial. Some of the detainees described a short female MP with dark hair and a blond female MP of medium height who watched and took part in some of the abuses. Three female MPs have been charged in the case so far.
Hilas told investigators that he asked Graner for the time one day because he wanted to pray. He said Graner cuffed him to the bars of a cell window and left him there for close to five hours, his feet dangling off the floor. Hilas also said he watched as Graner and others sodomized a detainee with a phosphoric light. "They tied him to the bed," Hilas said.
Graner's attorney, Guy L. Womack, did not return phone messages yesterday. In previous interviews, he has said that his client was following the lead of military intelligence officers.
Mustafa Jassim Mustafa, detainee No. 150542, told military investigators he also witnessed the phosphoric-light assault. He said it was around the time of Ramadan, the holiest period of the Muslim year, when he heard screams coming from a cell below. Mustafa said he looked down to see a group of soldiers holding the detainee down and sodomizing him with the light.
Graner was sodomizing him with the phosphoric light, Mustafa said. The detainee "was screaming for help. There was another tall white man who was with Graner -- he was helping him. There was also a white female soldier, short, she was taking pictures."
Another detainee told military investigators that American soldiers sodomized and beat him. The detainee, whose name is being withheld by The Post because he is an alleged victim of a sexual assault, said he was kept naked for five days when he first arrived at Abu Ghraib and was forced to kneel for four hours with a hood over his head. He said he was beaten so badly one day that the hood flew off his head. "The police was telling me to crawl in Arabic, so I crawled on my stomach and the police were spitting on me when I was crawling, and hitting me on my back, my head and my feet," he said in his sworn statement.
One day, the detainee said, American soldiers held him down and spread his legs as another soldier prepared to open his pants. "I started screaming," he said. A soldier stepped on his head, he said, and someone broke a phosphoric light and spilled the chemicals on him.
"I was glowing and they were laughing," he said.
The detainee said the soldiers eventually brought him to a room and sodomized him with a nightstick. "They were taking pictures of me during all these instances," he told the investigators.
Mohanded Juma Juma, detainee No. 152307, said he was stripped and kept naked for six days when he arrived at Abu Ghraib. One day, he said, American soldiers brought a father and his son into the cellblock. He said the soldiers put hoods over their heads and removed their clothes.
Then, they removed the hoods.
"When the son saw his father naked he was crying," Juma told the investigators. "He was crying because of seeing his father."
He also said Graner repeatedly threw the detainees' meals into the toilets and said, "Eat it."
Hussein Mohssein Mata Al-Zayiadi, detainee No. 19446, told investigators that he was one of the hooded prisoners shown in photographs masturbating before American soldiers. "They told my friend to masturbate and told me to masturbate also, while they were taking pictures," he said.
Al-Zayiadi also said he and other detainees were beaten and tossed into separate cells.
"They opened the water in the cell and told us to lay face down in the water and we stayed like that until the morning, in the water, naked, without clothes," he said in his statement.
He also said soldiers forced him and others to perform like animals.
"Did the guards force you to crawl on your hands and knees on the ground?" a military investigator asked.
"Yes, they forced us to do this thing," Al-Zayiadi said.
"What were the guards doing while you were crawling on your hands and knees?"
"They were sitting on our backs like riding animals," Al-Zayiadi said.
He said the guards took pictures of the incident. Photographs Described
Al-Zayiadi also described what has become one of the iconic photographs in the prison abuse scandal.
"They brought my friends, Haidar, Ahmed, Nouri, Ahzem, Hashiem, Mustafa, and I, and they put us two on the bottom, two on top of them, and two on top of those and one on top," he said. "They took pictures of us and we were naked."
Another publicized photograph -- that of a hooded detainee hooked up to wires and standing on a box -- is also described in the statements.
"On the third day, after five o'clock, Mr. Graner came and took me to room Number 37, which is the shower room, and he started punishing me," said Abdou Hussain Saad Faleh, detainee No. 18170. "Then he brought a box of food and he made me stand on it with no clothing, except a blanket. Then a tall black soldier came and put electrical wires on my fingers and toes and on my penis, and I had a bag over my head."
Al-Sheik said he was arrested on Oct. 7, and brought to Abu Ghraib, where he was put in a tent for one night. The next day, he was transferred to the "hard site," the two-story building that held about 200 prisoners and contained Tiers 1A and 1B.
He said a bag was put over his head and he was made to strip. He said American soldiers started to taunt him.
"Do you pray to Allah?" one asked. "I said yes. They said, '[Expletive] you. And [expletive] him.' One of them said, 'You are not getting out of here health[y], you are getting out of here handicapped. And he said to me, 'Are you married?' I said, 'Yes.' They said, 'If your wife saw you like this, she will be disappointed.' One of them said, 'But if I saw her now she would not be disappointed now because I would rape her.' "
He said the soldiers told him that if he cooperated with interrogators they would release him in time for Ramadan. He said he did, but still was not released. He said one soldier continued to abuse him by striking his broken leg and ordered him to curse Islam. "Because they started to hit my broken leg, I cursed my religion," he said. "They ordered me to thank Jesus that I'm alive."
The detainee said the soldiers handcuffed him to a bed.
"Do you believe in anything?" he said the soldier asked. "I said to him, 'I believe in Allah.' So he said, "But I believe in torture and I will torture you.' "
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The New Images Videos Amplify Picture of Violence
By Josh White, Christian Davenport and Scott Higham
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, May 21, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43785-2004May20.html
The video begins with three soldiers huddled around a naked detainee, his thin frame backed against a wall. With a snap of his wrist, one of the soldiers slaps the man across his left cheek so hard that the prisoner's knees buckle. Another detainee, handcuffed and on his back, is dragged across the prison floor.
Then, the human pyramid begins to take shape. Soldiers force hooded and naked prisoners into crouches on the floor, one by one, side by side, a soldier pointing to where the next ones should go. The video stops. But there is more.
In a collection of hundreds of so-far-unreleased photographs and short digital videos obtained by The Washington Post, U.S. soldiers are shown physically and emotionally abusing detainees last fall in the Abu Ghraib prison on the outskirts of Baghdad.
The new pictures and videos go beyond the photos previously released to the public in several ways, amplifying the overt violence against detainees and displaying a variety of abusive techniques previously unseen. They show a group of apparently cavalier soldiers assaulting prisoners, forcing detainees to masturbate, and standing over a naked prisoner while holding a shotgun. Some of the videos echo scenes in previously released still photographs -- such as the stacking of naked detainees -- but the video images render the incidents more vividly.
Defense Department spokesman Lawrence T. DiRita said the photographs, by description, sounded like those the Pentagon has exhibited to members of Congress and that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had warned might yet become public. "There are a series of investigations going on as a result of the disclosure of the activities depicted on photos," DiRita said last night.
The new images do not shed light on who directed the abuse, a question central to the court cases of the 372nd Military Police Company soldiers charged in the abuse scandal. But the pictures do show soldiers appearing to delight in the abuses, and they starkly reveal several detainees cowering in fear.
In one video clip, five hooded and naked detainees stand against the wall in the darkness, each masturbating, with two other hooded detainees crouched at their feet. Another shows a prisoner handcuffed to the outside of a cell door. He repeatedly slams his head into the green metal, leaving streaks of blood before he ultimately collapses at the feet of a cameraman.
In one photo, a soldier is seen cocking his fist as he holds a hooded detainee in a headlock amid a pile of several detainees. Later, he is seen kneeling atop the same pile, flexing his muscles, a broad smile on his face, posing.
Another soldier is seen in a photo brandishing a black baton as a naked prisoner -- cuffed at the ankles and smeared with a brown substance -- stands at the center of the prison hallway and holds his arms spread to either side.
Detainees recoil from unmuzzled dogs in at least four photos.
In one, a prisoner in an orange jumpsuit sits up against a wall, his hands behind his back. His fear is unmistakable as a black dog snarls at him, the animal's long, sharp teeth bared inches from his face. The dog is leashed by an unidentified U.S. soldier in a flak jacket and wool hat, the soldier using both hands to keep the dog restrained.
In another photo, the same handler has the black dog, which this time looks ready to pounce as a naked detainee shrinks away in the middle of a prison hallway, his hands defensively up in front of him. Another soldier, his hands in his pockets, watches.
The photos continue, showing an array of abuse in what appear to be different rooms, cells, showers and hallways of Abu Ghraib.
Hooded and cloaked men are handcuffed to hallway rails. A prisoner in flexible handcuffs is made to use a banana to simulate anal sex. Two naked male detainees are handcuffed to each other. A naked detainee hangs upside down from a top bunk. Another naked detainee grimaces, his face pressed against the ground, a soldier bending his arm behind his back. Blood covers the detainee's left knee, and another soldier grabs his right leg.
In one photo, a detainee is stripped to his underwear, in a hood. He is standing, crouched, on top of two boxes of MRE military meals, his arms cuffed around his left knee, his right ankle chained to a cell door.
Another detainee appears to be the victim of a cruel joke: A photo shows the man's deformed left hand emerging from an orange jumpsuit, the words "The Claw" written in English on his left breast pocket. A crude drawing of the man's hand appears on the back of his jumpsuit in another photo, with "The Claw" scrawled across his shoulder blades in black ink.
The situation inside the prison became so chaotic that U.S. soldiers turned their cameras on themselves, filming scenes of consensual sex.
Photographs and videos from Abu Ghraib were presented to Army investigators in January. They began to surface publicly last month, severely damaging the U.S. reputation in the Arab world.
"Be on notice," Rumsfeld said in a standing-room-only Senate hearing room May 8. "There are a lot more photographs and videos that exist. If these are released to the public, obviously it's going to make matters worse."
Staff writer Thomas E. Ricks contributed to this report.
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Military lawyers objected to Guantanamo interrogation techniques, prompting changes: Pentagon
WASHINGTON (AFP)
May 21, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040521011616.s7mbbu61.html
Military lawyers raised objections in the late fall of 2002 to techniques approved by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for interrogating suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that went beyond military doctrine, senior defense officials said Thursday.
Rumsfeld eventually scaled back the interrogation techniques at the US naval base detention center following a review in early 2003 that satisfied senior military lawyers, the officials said.
The officials said the issue came to a head over interrogation of an unidentified detainee who was believed to have information not only about the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, but potential pending attacks.
"Specifically objections were made to some of the interrogation techniques that were being considered that might have been different than what our people had been trained to do under the Geneva Convention," a general who is a military lawyer told reporters.
"We realized this was a different situation. We needed to stake out proper guidance for the people who would be conducting interrogations, and also the people who would be acting in the law enforcement capacity of maintaining the detainees," he said.
Larry DiRita, the Pentagon's chief spokesman, made the general and a senior civilian Pentagon lawyer available to reporters to discuss the origin of the interrogation rules at Guantanamo Bay on condition they not be named.
DiRita said that as prisoners began arriving from Afghanistan, approval was given on a case-by-case basis for interrogations using techniques that went beyond the limits established by military doctrine.
"In fact they said, 'We have detainees we'd like to interrogate. We think it would be useful to have techniques not included in doctrine. Here is a proposal.' And that proposal was based on a legal analysis with the people in Guantanamo.
"Some approvals were made, some approvals were not made, and interrogation was being conducted on that basis," he said.
"It was not being done in a way that was systematic. There are people in this department who like things to be systematic. So there were people who were saying, 'I'm not comfortable with that.'"
DiRita would not dicuss specific techniques approved or those now in use at Guantanamo.
By the fall of 2002, the judge advocate generals (JAGs), as the military lawyers are called, were raising questions about what the limits were, the general said.
Then in December, Rumsfeld approved a range of interrogation techniques that went beyond doctrine to deal with detainees believed to have information about possible future al-Qaeda attacks, the official said.
"There was some substantial urgency in trying to figure out an appropriate way to try to get that information. So that was one of the principal forces at work, to see if there were any techniques or procedures that were appropriate beyond doctrine," the senior civilian lawyer said.
But people began to have second thoughts.
In mid-January 2003, Rumsfeld changed course, ordering a review of the issue by a broad working group that went beyond lawyers to include senior intelligence, military and policy officials with a stake in the process.
"I believe that there were some techniques that were eventually used in the initial phase which began and stopped," the senior civilian lawyer said.
The review was not concluded until mid-April 2003, as intelligence officials pulled one way and the lawyers another.
The general said the JAGs raised their objections verbally, with action officers, and in memos.
In the end, the process produced a scaled back set of interrogation techniques that could be used with higher approval that is in use today at Guantanamo.
"Speaking for me personally, but also having spoken to all the senior uniformed attorneys, I can say the final report did not raise any legal objections," he said. "People were comfortable from a legal standpoint with the direction that was provided."
"Again as has been mentioned, this document was directed for unlawful combatants at Guantanamo Bay. We needed to give guidances for that because that was the exception, and the exceptional circumstances," he said.
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Memo Gave Intelligence Bigger Role
Increased Pressure Sought on Prisoners
By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 21, 2004; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43708-2004May20.html
Shortly before the physical abuses of Iraqis were photographed in Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad last year, the top U.S. military official in Iraq signed a classified memorandum explicitly calling for interrogators to assume control over the "lighting, heating . . . food, clothing, and shelter" of those being questioned there.
The Oct. 12, 2003, memorandum signed by Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez called for intelligence officials at the prison to work more closely with the military police guarding the detainees to "manipulate an internee's emotions and weaknesses."
This memo and the deliberations that preceded it were completely shrouded from public view at the time, but now lie at the heart of the scandal that erupted last month over the abuses at Abu Ghraib. Under congressional prodding, the administration has provided a fuller chronology of the events leading up to its approval.
Congressional critics have alleged that language in the memo helped set the stage for the abuses and were part of a Washington-inspired effort to squeeze more information from Iraqis rounded up by the U.S. military and sent to interrogation sessions at the high-security wing of the Abu Ghraib prison, using methods that some consider illegal.
Those involved in formulating the policy say to the contrary that it was legal and successful, having helped bring in useful data on foreign fighters and roadside bomb attacks.
The backdrop for the policy was an event that occurred on May 1, 2003. President Bush landed that day on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier off San Diego and declared that major combat operations were over. His declaration had direct but unpublicized consequences for those detained in Iraq, military officials say: It meant they were no longer to be treated as prisoners of war, but instead as civilians held by an occupying power.
That meant, the officials said, that the detainees would come under the protections of the fourth article of the Geneva Conventions, which explicitly allows long-term detentions of those considered to pose a threat to governing authorities. An Army captain with 10 years of experience in interrogation, who was serving in Afghanistan, was dispatched in late summer 2003 to Abu Ghraib to improve the interrogation process there.
According to the officials, who briefed reporters at the Pentagon last Friday and congressional staff on Wednesday, the captain made some improvements, using methods she had honed in Afghanistan.
But the Abu Ghraib intelligence unit was soon overwhelmed by a flood of detainees rounded up during Operation Victory Bounty, specifically aimed at capturing members of Saddam Hussein's most loyal fighters, the Fedayeen. Army officers in the field were complaining in the summer of 2003 that they had received no useful intelligence back from the prison.
In a memo signed on Aug. 18, 2003, the Pentagon's Joint Staff -- acting on a request from Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his top intelligence aide, Stephen A. Cambone -- ordered Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller to conduct an inspection there. Miller, who oversaw the interrogation efforts at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, finished his tour on Sept. 9 and left behind his own list of interrogation techniques.
"I think what Miller was trying to do was say, you need something that's maybe a little bit more rigorous," Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita said Friday.
Members of Congress are now investigating how Miller's list -- based on interrogation practices devised for use in Cuba at a site the Pentagon has said is not covered by the Geneva Conventions -- was treated in Iraq.
The military officials said the Army captain memorialized it in a wall posting that said the use of long-term isolation, "working dogs," sleep disruption, "environmental manipulation" and the use of forced "stress positions" were acceptable, but only if they were approved by Sanchez on a case-by-case basis.
Sanchez signed a September memo codifying this policy and then sent it to his superiors at Central Command for review, the officials said. No one has explained precisely what their reaction was, but after what one official called "28 days of coordination," the memo was revised to drop the detailed list of techniques that required special approval.
On Oct. 12, Sanchez signed the new memo, which included a more general statement that "anything not approved, you have to ask for," said one of the officials who briefed reporters. Sanchez has said that after that date, he approved the use of only one harsh technique, long-term isolation, in 25 or so cases.
"I am very comfortable, frankly . . . with that Oct. 12 policy that remained . . . for a period of eight months," Sanchez's legal adviser, Col. Marc Warren, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Wednesday.
But on May 13, after photos of the abuses had provoked a political firestorm, Sanchez signed another memo, which replaced the Oct. 12 policy and explicitly rules out any approval of "stress positions," as well as other, unspecified, aggressive techniques.
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DETAINEES
Pentagon Approved Intense Interrogation Techniques for Sept. 11 Suspect at Guantánamo
May 21, 2004
By DAVID JOHNSTON and THOM SHANKER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/21/politics/21GITM.html
WASHINGTON, May 20 - Interrogators at the Guantánamo Bay prison camp received Pentagon approval to use special, harsher interrogation procedures on a Saudi Arabian detainee who was believed to be the planned 20th hijacker in the Sept. 11 terror plot, government officials said Thursday.
The decision followed a debate among Pentagon and military legal authorities that centered on how to question Mohamed al-Kahtani, who tried unsuccessfully to enter the United States in August 2001.
After he was turned away by a Customs inspector, Mr. Kahtani returned to the Middle East. He was later captured in Afghanistan and sent to Guantánamo, where he was one of the highest ranking Al Qaeda figures at the base.
Mr. Kahtani was believed to have information about the Sept. 11 plot, about possible future attacks and about funding for the Al Qaeda terrorist network, and the internal legal debate showed how the issue of coercive treatment had swirled through the Pentagon before American forces entered Iraq.
At a Pentagon briefing on Thursday, the officials said that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had approved a range of more aggressive interrogation techniques in response to a desire in late 2002 to pry more information from a specific detainee at Guantánamo. But they did not disclose the detainee's identity.
A senior Pentagon civilian lawyer said there was "some urgency" to increasing the pressure on this detainee because he likely "had information that the people at Guantánamo believed was important, not just about perhaps 9/11, but about future events."
Mr. Kahtani was specifically identified in separate interviews with several United States government officials as the detainee at the center of the debate.
A range of techniques harsher than those described in standard military doctrine were sought, based on the administration's legal determination that the Guantánamo detainees were not conventional prisoners of war, covered by the Geneva Conventions, but terrorists and illegal enemy combatants.
Pentagon officials have declined to list the approved techniques, saying that they remain classified.
Officials confirmed that some military lawyers argued against using the techniques, and an interagency working group was appointed to review the issue.
What techniques ultimately were used on Mr. Kahtani remain unclear. But one senior United States government official confirmed Thursday that Mr. Kahtani had provided information about a planned attack and about financial networks to fund terrorist operations.
A senior Bush administration official said Thursday that the techniques used against Mr. Kahtani remained well within the bounds of "humane" interrogation techniques pledged by the Bush administration and included "auditory stimulation" such as loud music, deprivation of light, segregation from other detainees and extended periods of interrogation.
Mr. Kahtani's denial of entry into the United States had been described in detail to the commission investigating the Sept. 11 hijackings. The Saudi national had arrived in Orlando on Aug. 4, 2001, on a one-way flight from London and Dubai carrying $2,800 in cash. The Customs inspector who met Mr. Kahtani, José Melendez Perez, said in testimony to the commission that Mr. Kahtani had become agitated when questioned about his travel plans.
Mr. Melendez Perez said that when told he was being deported, Mr. Kahtani turned and said in English something "to the effect of, `I'll be back.' "
Later, authorities determined that Mohamed Atta, the operational leader of the Sept. 11 plot, was at the Orlando airport on the day that Mr. Kahtani arrived.
Investigators deduced from records of phone calls made by Mr. Atta at the airport to Saudi Arabia that he was probably phoning confederates to determine why Mr. Kahtani had failed to show up.
The more aggressive techniques used on Mr. Kahtani were halted between January 2003 and April 2003, when the working group came up with a set of interrogation techniques that were approved "by consensus," according to one Pentagon official.
A military lawyer who briefed reporters said that the final set of guidelines for interrogation had met with approval from the uniformed legal community.
Congressional officials said those techniques were described Thursday to senior Pentagon and military officials in a classified Capitol Hill hearing to describe the process of interrogations at Guantánamo.
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CIA seeks Justice probe of three deaths
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Jerry Seper
May 21, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040520-114559-8912r.htm
The CIA's Office of Inspector General has asked the Justice Department to investigate the deaths of three prisoners during interrogations by CIA operatives in Afghanistan and Iraq, including one at Abu Ghraib prison, U.S. authorities said yesterday.
One high-ranking U.S. official said yesterday the Justice Department had not yet determined whether it has jurisdiction in the cases or what laws, if any, had been broken. The official described existing law regarding the death of prisoners in foreign lands as "murky."
The official also said jurisdiction might lie with local authorities in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the deaths occurred.
The CIA, which lacks prosecutorial powers, requested the Justice probe in criminal referrals to the Nov. 4 death of Manadel al-Jamadi at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the Nov. 26 death at an undisclosed Iraqi location of Abed Hamed Mowhoush, an army major general who commanded Saddam Hussein's air defenses.
A third referral also was filed in the death of a man identified as a suspected al Qaeda leader, who died last year after interrogations in Afghanistan. His body was shipped out of the country in a plywood coffin to Egypt.
One U.S. intelligence official said he was captured in June 2003 and held at a U.S. holding facility near Asadabad, where he was interrogated by CIA operatives.
The CIA inquiry had focused on two CIA officers and one CIA contract employee, all of whom were involved in the interrogations, U.S. authorities said.
CIA operatives took over the lead role in the interrogation of Iraqi and Afghan prisoners two years ago, replacing FBI agents who previously conducted the sessions. One key U.S. law-enforcement official said the FBI had pulled its agents out of several CIA interrogations, concerned that they were abusive.
Yesterday, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III told a Senate committee his agents did not participate in abusive prisoner interrogations, saying FBI guidelines prohibit agents from taking part in questioning that involves force, threat of force, or coercion.
"The FBI has directed its agents to conform to its policies with regard to the handling of the interviews, whether it be here in the United States or overseas, and to the extent that an agent believes that interviews were not being conducted according to the standards of the FBI, that agent was not to participate in those interviews," he told the Senate Judiciary Committee.
His comments came in response to questions by the committee's ranking Democrat, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, who asked if the FBI witnessed abusive conduct during the questioning of prisoners in Iraq or Afghanistan. Mr. Mueller said no, but added there were occasions when agents raised objections about the way some interrogations were handled.
"In cases where we have been handling interviews, particularly in Iraq, it has been done according to our standards and there has been no waiver of that," he said.
On Wednesday, ABC News said it had obtained new photographs showing Abu Ghraib prison guards posing over the body of a detainee it said had been "beaten to death by CIA or civilian interrogators" in the prison's showers.
U.S. officials told The Washington Times that Army Spc. Jason Kenner advised military investigators that Mr. al-Jamadi was in good health when he was brought to Abu Ghraib on Nov. 4 by members of a U.S. Navy SEAL team, but later saw the man's corpse and noticed extensive bruising.
The officials said Spc. Kenner reported that Mr. al-Jamadi's body was packed in ice. Pictures later were taken showing Sgt. Charles A. Graner Jr. and Spc. Sabrina Harman, both of whom have been charged in the Iraq prisoner abuse scandal, posing with the body.
The Los Angeles Times reported this week that Mr. al-Jamadi was brought to Abu Ghraib with his head covered by an empty sandbag and died during questioning. The newspaper, citing intelligence sources, said after the man collapsed, interrogators removed the bag and observed severe head wounds that had not been treated.
Mr. Mowhoush, captured Oct. 5, was believed to be involved in raising funds for the Iraqi resistance against U.S. forces.
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Chalabi - From White House to Dog House in Just Five Months
antiwar.com
by Jim Lobe
May 21, 2004
http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=2622
It was just last January that Ahmed Chalabi occupied the coveted balcony seat next to First Lady Laura Bush and gazed out at Washington's glittering elite who had gathered to hear President George W. Bush deliver his State of the Union Address from the Capitol's imposing rostrum.
The darling of the neo-conservative hawks around Vice President Dick Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, Chalabi had long been touted by his champions here as the future leader of a democratic Iraq, if not its "George Washington." Indeed, he could legitimately claim credit for having been the Iraqi who was most responsible for persuading the Bush administration to oust Saddam Hussein.
So how is it that exactly five months later Chalabi was rudely interrupted when U.S. agents and soldiers burst into his bedroom Thursday morning as part of a series of coordinated raids at his residence and offices?
According to Chalabi's account, combined Iraqi police and U.S. forces carted away files, computers and some of his aides during the operation.
In an angry press conference conducted a short time later Chalabi accused the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) of striking out against him for political reasons, particularly for his outspoken opposition to efforts by United Nations Special Envoy Lakhdar Brahimi to appoint a new government that will assume formal sovereignty July 1.
"I'm calling for policies that would liberate the Iraqi people and give them full sovereignty now," said Chalabi, who was careful to reiterate his gratitude to Bush for freeing Iraq from former President Hussein. "I'm doing this in a way they don't like," he said, adding that he was severing his relationship with the CPA.
But at the State Department, spokesman Richard Boucher denied that politics was involved. "Clearly there were legal and investigative reasons for this event today and not political ones," he said, stressing that the warrants for the raids were issued by an Iraqi judge and carried out by Iraqi police.
Whatever the reason - and many could be relevant - there is little doubt that Chalabi's apparent fall from grace confirms that the two-year battle for control of U.S. policy in Iraq has reached a tipping point in favor of the realist faction in the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which has long considered Chalabi a self-dealing opportunist, a confidence man and a crook.
Their view appears now to be fully shared by Robert Blackwill, the National Security Council (NSC) official who heads the Iraqi Stabilization Group (ISG) that was created last October when it first became clear the U.S.-led occupation was in deep trouble. Since then, Blackwill, who has been working closely with Brahimi for several months, has been trying with increasing success to reduce the Pentagon's influence in Iraq.
Conversely, the raids also signal the loss of credibility within the administration, at least so far as Iraq is concerned, of the neo-conservatives - including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, Cheney's chief of staff I. Lewis Libby and former Defense Policy Board Chairman Richard Perle - who championed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress (INC) for much of the past decade.
Thursday's raids came in the wake of the announcement earlier this week that the Pentagon was cutting off $335,000 in monthly payments to the INC, which it had provided for the past two years as part of a classified program to help gather intelligence in Iraq. The decisions was criticized by Perle, who insisted Monday that the INC and "Chalabi in particular are the best hope for Iraq."
The raids also came as reports of wrongdoing by the former exile - including nepotism, bribery, corruption and even blackmail - have been steadily piling up in recent months.
Despite his extremely low standing in recent public-opinion surveys, his position on the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC), his influence over key government ministries and his control of intelligence files of Hussein's Mukhabarat seized during the invasion have made Chalabi a formidable power who may no longer rely entirely on his standing in Washington.
While the administration could ignore much of this, more damaging charges have recently surfaced through a number of leaks that have made the continuing existence of a warm relationship with him increasingly untenable.
That INC-affiliated defectors, for example, provided much of the faulty pre-war intelligence on Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs - which became the principal justification for the U.S. invasion - has not gone done well in Congress, among either Democrats or Republicans.
And the fact that Chalabi has boasted about it - "We are heroes in error" and "As far as we're concerned, we've been entirely successful" - has not helped his cause.
In addition, Congress' watchdog, the General Accounting Office (GAO), is currently investigating reports that some of the $18 million provided by Washington to the INC between 1998 - when Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act (ILA) - and last year's invasion was used by the group and its U.S. consultants to lobby the government for an invasion and to plant articles in the media. Both actions would violate U.S. law.
While these acts - as well as the fact that Jordan has considered him a fugitive from justice since his conviction in absentia in 1992 for bank fraud that led to the collapse of the country's second largest bank - may be forgivable, recent moves by Chalabi have put greater strains on his relationship with the administration.
Electronic intercepts by U.S. intelligence agencies suggested he was cultivating Iran's leadership a little too fervently, even to the extent of providing "sensitive" information on the U.S. security operations next door in Iraq of the kind that, according to one source cited by Newsweek, could "get people killed." That information, which was leaked late last month, gave even some of Chalabi's neo-con supporters pause.
At the same time, Chalabi, who as an IGC member organized a sweeping purge of Ba'athists (members of Hussein's ruling Ba'ath Party) from the government, was infuriated by CPA chief Paul Bremer's decision to reverse the IGC by hiring back thousands of former party members to positions in the security forces.
After the Marines permitted former senior Iraqi military offers to take control of Fallujah, Chalabi, a secular Shiite, began publicly campaigning against a "re-Ba'athification" of the country, which he compared to the hiring of Nazis in post-war Germany.
In recent weeks, he has tried to stoke fears among the majority Shia and Kurdish communities that the United States was delivering Iraq back to the Ba'athists and minority Sunnis by attacking Brahimi as a Sunni Muslim and an "Arab nationalist," presumably determined to bring about a Sunni or Ba'athist restoration.
He also rejected U.N. and U.S. demands to turn over intelligence files seized by the INC during the invasion, which allegedly documented massive corruption by U.N. and other officials in the world body's Oil-for-Food Program, to a U.N.-sponsored probe which Chalabi claims will be a whitewash.
All of these activities represent serious threats to U.S. plans - as vague as they continue to be - to transfer sovereignty to a new government July 1, which, given the ongoing chaos in Iraq, is as far ahead as policymakers can think for the moment. "He's trying to destabilize the process," said one official, adding, "He's not on our team any more."
Chalabi on Thursday begged to differ, warning, "When America treats its friends this way, then they are in big trouble."
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Kofi's cover up
washingtontimes
May 21, 2004
http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20040520-083645-2386r.htm
Despite U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's promises to fully investigate the scandal in the Oil for Food program, United Nations officials have been doing their level best to conceal information from investigators and the public. The office of Benon Sevan, the outgoing boss of the program, has sent at least three letters to companies who participated in it urging them not to hand over documents to investigators without first clearing their release with the United Nations. Unfortunately, while Mr. Sevan has continued to stonewall, Ambassador Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), is undercutting efforts by the Iraq Governing Council to conduct its own audit of the program.
One of Mr. Sevan's letters was sent to a firm called Cotecna Inspection SA, which for five years had responsibility for verifying that relief shipments provided through the Oil for Food program actually reached Iraqis in need. Cotecna once employed Mr. Annan's son, Kojo, according to scholar-journalist Claudia Rosett, who has played a major role in exposing the scandal. Mr. Sevan's letter to Cotecna warns that all information "shall be treated as confidential and shall be delivered only to United Nations authorized officials."
Coming from Mr. Sevan, this should raise red flags. A veteran U.N. bureaucrat, he has been at the very heart of the scandal ever since his name turned up in records found in former dictator Saddam Hussein's Oil Ministry in Baghdad. The records suggest that Mr. Sevan was given a voucher enabling him to receive 11.5 million barrels of oil as a result of Saddam's manipulation of the program - enough to earn him a profit of up to $3.5 million. Mr. Sevan, who is retiring at the end of the month, has refused to respond to press questions about his management of the program.
In his own defense, Secretary-General Annan has repeatedly asserted that he didn't know about the myriad problems in the program. He may want to take a look at some of the more than 50 reports put together by the United Nations' own Office of Internal Oversight Services - reports that he refuses to release to Congress. Just one of these reports (which was published earlier this week on the Web site www. mineweb.com), produced in 2002, goes on for close to 20 pages about U.N. malfeasance in the handling of the Cotecna contract. According to Mr. Annan, all of these problems will be fixed thanks to the work of the United Nations' own investigative team headed by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker. Don't believe it. Given the fact that Mr. Volcker lacks subpoena power, his investigation will likely go nowhere.
Meanwhile, Claude Hankes-Drielsma, who is heading the IGC's investigation, told this newspaper yesterday that he continues to face interference from the CPA's Mr. Bremer. Mr. Hankes-Drielsma suggests that Mr. Bremer is motivated by concern that public attention to the scandal will undermine support for transferring responsibility for Iraq to the United Nations on June 30. Whatever the motivation, his refusal to release funds to pay for continuing the IGC's audit of the Oil for Food program is delaying this critical investigation. Mr. Bremer should reverse course and permit the IGC's investigation to proceed.
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Interrogation Tactics Evolved
Rumsfeld Approved Harsh Procedures at Guantanamo, Officials Say
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 21, 2004; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A44078-2004May20.html
To extract information from suspected terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld approved harsh interrogation techniques in late 2002 that were not in accordance with standard U.S. military doctrine, defense officials said yesterday.
The approval led to aggressive questioning of at least one prisoner thought to have information at the time about possible terrorist acts. Interrogators learned about a planned attack from him and about terrorist financing, one official said, without elaborating on the information or identifying the prisoner.
But in early January 2003, the harsher methods were halted, and Rumsfeld ordered a review of tactics that could be applied in questioning prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay military prison, the officials said.
The review was prompted in part by concerns raised by military lawyers about some of the procedures. Lawrence T. DiRita, Rumsfeld's chief spokesman, said the defense secretary wanted a more systematic approach to the interrogation process.
As a result of the review, which lasted three months and involved considerable argument among legal experts, intelligence officials and others, a set of interrogation guidelines emerged for the Guantanamo Bay prison that Rumsfeld approved in April 2003. Those procedures were less coercive than the ones that he had authorized the previous autumn, the officials said.
The Washington Post reported the existence of the April 2003 policy earlier this month. But yesterday's briefing for reporters at the Pentagon provided new details about how it evolved and disclosed Rumsfeld's role in approving it.
The revised measures were implemented by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, Guantanamo Bay's commander at the time. Miller provided them to U.S. commanders in Iraq last summer as a model for development of a separate -- and further reduced -- set of techniques for the questioning of detainees there.
In providing the timeline, Pentagon officials said it reflected their efforts, in the wake of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, to reconstruct the origins of U.S. policy on interrogation of detainees in Iraq as well as other captives in the war on terrorism.
Officials declined to detail the list of approved measures, which remains classified. But sources familiar with the list have said it includes such techniques as disrupting the sleep patterns of detainees and exposing them to heat, cold, loud music, bright lights and other "sensory assault."
The Abu Ghraib prison scandal has highlighted confusion, at least in lower military ranks, about what types of interrogation techniques were permitted and under whose authority. It also has ignited open disagreement among generals over what the proper relationship should be between guards and interrogators at military detention centers. And it has raised questions about whether even some approved U.S. interrogation procedures are in compliance with international law on the treatment of detainees.
Many of the seeds of these controversies were planted with establishment of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in 2002 to hold captives from the Taliban militia and al Qaeda terrorist network. In early 2002, President Bush designated those captives "unlawful enemy combatants" and decided to treat them "consistent with" but not subject to the Geneva Conventions.
That opened the door to use of interrogation procedures harsher than U.S. soldiers had been trained to perform under standard doctrine.
"By the fall of 2002, some questions were being raised about what the limits should be on interrogation techniques," a military lawyer, one of three officials at the Pentagon briefing, said yesterday.
"You had intelligence officials that were tugging in a direction that might have been different from lawyers, and that's fair," added DiRita, the only official in the briefing who agreed to be named. "This is a process that involves, by definition, some tension."
During the review in early 2003, which was led by William J. Haynes, the Pentagon's general counsel, senior military legal officers objected to some interrogation techniques being considered by an interagency working group. The officers complained that the techniques did not fit with existing doctrine.
But the final policy approved by Rumsfeld "did not raise any legal objections," the military lawyer said.
"What the secretary ultimately authorized is far less than what some people in the organization would have liked," said a civilian defense attorney involved in the process.
Asked the extent to which U.S. troops at Guantanamo Bay used the earlier authority from Rumsfeld in 2002 to conduct more aggressive interrogations, DiRita said that period was still being assessed under a recent directive from Rumsfeld to determine how current guidelines evolved.
"We're still learning about this," DiRita said. "But it appears that a range of techniques were authorized -- a very small number" and were used in "a very few cases."
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Continuing the Cover-Up?
Military Takes Action Against Key Witness in Abu Ghraib Abuse Scandal
abcnews
By Brian Ross and Alexandra Salomon
May 21, 2004
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/WNT/Investigation/abu_ghraib_cover_up_040521-1.html
- A witness who told ABCNEWS he believed the military was covering up the extent of abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison was today stripped of his security clearance and told he may face prosecution because his comments were "not in the national interest."
Sgt. Samuel Provance said in addition to his revoked security clearance, he was transferred to a different platoon, and his record was officially "flagged," meaning he cannot be promoted or given any awards or honors.
Provance said he was told he will face administrative action for failing to report what he knew at the time and for failing to take steps to stop the abuse.
"I see it as an effort to intimidate Sgt. Provance and any other soldier whose conscience is bothering him, and who wants to come forward and tell what really happened at Abu Ghraib," said his attorney Scott Horton.
Provance Alleges Cover-Up
A key witness in the military investigation into prisoner mistreatment at Abu Ghraib, Provance told ABCNEWS earlier this week that dozens of soldiers - in addition to the seven military police reservists who have been charged - were involved in the abuse at the prison, and he said there is an effort under way in the Army to hide it.
"There's definitely a cover-up," Provance said. "People are either telling themselves or being told to be quiet."
Provance, 30, was part of the 302nd Military Intelligence Battalion stationed at Abu Ghraib last September. He spoke to ABCNEWS despite orders from his commanders not to.
"What I was surprised at was the silence," said Provance. "The collective silence by so many people that had to be involved, that had to have seen something or heard something."
Provance, now stationed in Germany, ran the top-secret computer network used by military intelligence at the prison.
He said that while he did not see the actual abuse take place, the interrogators with whom he worked freely admitted they directed the MPs' rough treatment of prisoners.
"Anything [the MPs] were to do legally or otherwise, they were to take those commands from the interrogators," he said.
Top military officials have claimed the abuse seen in the photos at Abu Ghraib was limited to a few MPs, but Provance says the sexual humiliation of prisoners began as a technique ordered by the interrogators from military intelligence.
"One interrogator told me about how commonly the detainees were stripped naked, and in some occasions, wearing women's underwear," Provance said. "If it's your job to strip people naked, yell at them, scream at them, humiliate them, it's not going to be too hard to move from that to another level."
According to Provance, some of the physical abuse that took place at Abu Ghraib included U.S. soldiers "striking [prisoners] on the neck area somewhere and the person being knocked out. Then [the soldier] would go to the next detainee, who would be very fearful and voicing their fear, and the MP would calm him down and say, 'We're not going to do that. It's OK. Everything's fine,' and then do the exact same thing to him."
Provance also described an incident when two drunken interrogators took a female Iraqi prisoner from her cell in the middle of the night and stripped her naked to the waist. The men were later restrained by another MP.
Pentagon Sanctions Investigation
Maj. Gen. George Fay, the Army's deputy chief of staff for intelligence, was assigned by the Pentagon to investigate the role of military intelligence in the abuse at the Iraq prison.
Fay started his probe on April 23, but Provance said when Fay interviewed him, the general seemed interested only in the military police, not the interrogators, and seemed to discourage him from testifying.
Provance said Fay threatened to take action against him for failing to report what he saw sooner, and the sergeant said he feared he would be ostracized for speaking out.
"I feel like I'm being punished for being honest," Provance told ABCNEWS on Tuesday. "You know, it was almost as if I actually felt if all my statements were shredded and I said, like most everybody else, 'I didn't hear anything, I didn't see anything. I don't know what you're talking about,' then my life would be just fine right now."
In response, Army officials said it is "routine procedure to advise military personnel under investigative review" not to comment. The officials said, however, that Fay and the military were committed to an honest, in-depth investigation of what happened at the prison.
But Provance believes many involved may not be as forthcoming with information.
"I would say many people are probably hiding and wishing to God that this storm passes without them having to be investigated [or] personally looked at," he said.
--------
Vets of Iraq accept the inevitable: Another tour
The Virginian-Pilot
By MATTHEW DOLAN
May 21, 2004
http://home.hamptonroads.com/stories/story.cfm?story=70622&ran=103837
CAMP ARIFJAN, Kuwait - Last week, Sgt. Michael Swinton carefully power-washed away 13 months worth of Iraqi dirt coating his 5-ton truck.
On his mind, of course, was the upcoming homecoming with his wife and daughter in Germany. But the 24-year-old soldier was thinking about something else, too.
"I know I'm coming back - come 2005, 2006, we'll be back," said Swinton, a graduate of Virginia Beach's Ocean Lakes High School who repaired heavy vehicles at Baghdad International Airport.
He's not alone in his prediction. With the conflict raging on in Iraq, many soldiers here on their way home said they expect to make a return trip through the war's gateway in the near future.
Nearly a quarter million U.S. soldiers passed through this desert kingdom on their way to or from the war in Iraq this spring, the largest such rotation of U.S. forces in history. About 135,000 troops remain in Iraq today. The Bush administration expects the same troop level in the country through next year.
In April, about 20,000 soldiers, largely with the Army's 2nd Armored Division, had their one-year deployments in Iraq extended. Now, they're expected to return home in the summer. Around the same time, about 3,600 members of the 2nd Brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division will deploy to Iraq from South Korea.
People here have dubbed the upcoming rotation Operation Iraqi Freedom 21/2. Pentagon officials last week said they expect to mark the third phase of the war with another massive transfer of troops out of the region through Kuwait from September through March .
It's unclear ultimately how many troops will be replaced, officials said, because the Iraqis could help decide the number after they assume control of their government on June 30.
Nevertheless, the near-constant flow of troops and equipment has made some believe that Kuwait will remain a major stronghold for U.S. forces, no matter what happens in Iraq. U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia are disappearing, and Pentagon officials are working through a major repositioning of forces away from traditional sites in Western Europe and Asia.
"This place is the next Germany, the next Korea," one military commander here said. Not exactly, according to Col. Lou Yuengert, chief of staff to Maj. Gen. Stephen M. Speakes, who runs the rotation of troops into and out of Iraq.
"The units stationed in Kuwait are support units," Yuengert said in an interview Thursday. "In Germany, you have combat and support units."
About 20,000 troops are stationed in Kuwait as part of a permanent force, compared with about 71,000 in Germany and 38,000 in Korea. Yuengert said that the Americans, with some pressure from the Kuwaitis, intend to reduce the number in Kuwait by 5,000 to 10,000 within the next five years.
Kuwait's ruling sheiks, still grateful to the United States for driving out Iraq's invading army in 1991, have given broad swaths of the desert kingdom for the Americans to house troops, store vehicles, land planes, berth ships, assemble convoys and fire weapons.
The U.S. military has 14 camps and bases in Kuwait, including a pair of seaports, a pair of airports and a choice piece of coastal real estate.
Camp Arifjan, south of Kuwait City, has been transformed from a supply depot into a thriving base with some most modern American conveniences.
Soldiers must still brace themselves against blinding dust storms and heat so crushing at points that they can only work 10 minutes for every hour on the job.
While acre after acre of this sandblasted, treeless land is occupied by tent cities, signs of permanence abound. Miles of roads at Arifjan are paved, new sewer and water lines go in every day and the Burger King and Subway do brisk business around an open yard where soldiers gather at night for music and concerts.
The Americans are now consolidating some of their operations here as they move forces out of Camp Doha near the Iraqi border, Kuwait International Airport and Port Ash Shuaybah.
"Arifjan will be one of a couple of enduring bases," Yuengert said. Plans include the construction of a new barracks, warehouse, command center and a hospital run by the Navy.
To run camps like Arifjan, the Army still counts on thousands of contractors for jobs from serving food in the gigantic dining halls to emptying latrines .
Kellogg Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, has more than 24,000 employees and subcontractors at 60 sites in Kuwait and Iraq.
"We provide services so the Army can focus on its real mission - war fighting," said Melissa Norcross, a spokeswoman for KBR in Kuwait.
Norcross said it would be up to the Army to decide how many workers will stay and for how long .
Much of the population at Arifjan is transient, waiting for final preparations to return home. When they're not working, returning soldiers while away the hours at the gym tent, watch DVDs on portable players in their bunks or sit outside to watch the passing pedestrian traffic.
At the post office earlier this week, Army Spc. John Newman, 21, packed his Sony Play Station for shipment home to Kansas.
He has been deployed for 13 months, driving heavy equipment all over Iraq as part of the 129th Transportation Company.
"When we first got here, we had no AC. But now we have five-star accommodations," he said. "I'm sure I'll be back. It's not a matter of if, but when."
News researcher Diana Diehl and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Reach Matthew Dolan at matthew.dolan@pilotonline.com.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts
City Wins Right to U.S. Data on Firearms
May 21, 2004
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/21/nyregion/21gun.html
New York City won a significant victory this week in its civil suit against the firearms industry, winning the right to information that could help prove its claim that the industry closes its eyes to the way guns get into the hands of criminals.
On Wednesday, a federal magistrate ruled that the city was entitled to federal data that traces the path of guns used in crimes, overruling objections by the Justice Department. Lawyers say that without the data the city would have difficulty proving its claim that the gun industry's marketing and distribution practices amount to a public nuisance.
The ruling by Magistrate Judge Cheryl L. Pollak, in Federal Court in Brooklyn, waded into a contentious legal and political issue over the Bush administration's reluctance to release the tracing data, which is likely to be helpful to civil suits against the industry around the country. Access to the data has provoked battles in Congress and in the United States Supreme Court, with the gun industry and its opponents squaring off over whether it should be released.
In 2003 and again this year, the Republican-controlled Congress enacted appropriations measures saying that no funds could be used to release the tracing data. Some supporters said the information could undermine police investigations, while industry opponents said groups like the National Rifle Association had slipped the measure in, to hobble the civil suits against the gun industry.
A Justice Department lawyer suggested during arguments in the city's case that the department, under Attorney General John Ashcroft, had changed a government policy that permitted the limited release of the information in an earlier lawsuit.
The lead lawyer on the case at the city's Law Department, Eric Proshansky, said yesterday that the data would enable the city to prove that gun makers have failed to protect the public.
Judge Pollak's decision, Mr. Proshansky said, "is important to the city because the proof in these suits is developed by demonstrating through these databases that the gun industry knows about problems in the distribution networks" that end in sales of guns to criminals.
A similar battle over a demand for the same information from the City of Chicago is being fought in the courts.
The data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms includes the sales history of guns that law enforcement agencies seek to trace. Many of those tracing requests are begun after guns are found in crime investigations. Taken together, the traces can provide a roadmap showing, for example, that some dealers can be identified as tied more often to guns used in crime than others.
Sheree Mixell, the spokeswoman for the bureau, which fought the release of the information, said lawyers were reviewing the decision but the agency would not comment on pending litigation. But other lawyers said they thought it likely that the bureau would appeal, first to the United States district judge handling the city's case, Jack B. Weinstein, and then possibly to an appeals court.
In a lawsuit by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoplethat raised claims similar to those in the city's suit, the bureau agreed to release some of the information in 2002. Under that agreement, the access to the information was strictly limited and the information could not be used in any other suit.
The N.A.A.C.P. suit failed. But in a decision last year Judge Weinstein seemed to indicate that the city's suit might have a better chance at success.
Some law enforcement officials have been highly critical of the release of the gun-tracing information, saying it is intended for law enforcement purposes and that its release could compromise investigations by showing which cases police agencies are pursuing.
In a letter to Mr. Ashcroft in 2002, the New York police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, took a position that undercut the argument of the city's civil lawyers in the case against the gun industry. Mr. Kelly said release of the information would "compromise critical law enforcement investigations and endanger the lives of police officers and members of the public.''
Backed by the gun industry, the bureau's lawyers argued in the city's case that the appropriations measures barred the bureau from releasing the information.
In her decision Judge Pollak disagreed, saying that the bureau was required to turn over the data under a city subpoena. The city had agreed that the data would not be distributed outside the case. "Congress,'' she wrote, "did not intend to restrict civil litigants from receiving firearms data pursuant to judicial subpoena.''
In a filing in the case, Mr. Proshansky cited remarks made by a federal lawyer at a hearing last month suggesting that the government's policy had changed under Mr. Ashcroft.
The lawyer, Barry Orlow, deputy associate chief counsel of the bureau, had noted that the firearms bureau was transferred from the Treasury Department to the Justice Department during the government's Homeland Security reorganization in 2003.
"We don't work for the secretary of the Treasury anymore, we work for the attorney general,'' Mr. Orlow said, adding that "policy considerations have changed.''
-------- drug war
Republicans and Democrats Clash on New York Drug Laws
May 21, 2004
By MICHAEL COOPER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/21/nyregion/21rocky.html
ALBANY, May 20 - One of the enduring mysteries here in recent years is why the state has been unable to overhaul the Rockefeller drug laws, which force judges to sentence drug offenders to lengthy prison terms that the three most powerful state officials, Gov. George E. Pataki and the leaders of both houses of the Legislature, agree are draconian.
Officials came within a hair's breadth of rewriting the laws last year, only to have the deal dissolve in the middle of the night behind closed doors.
This week, members of the Republican-controlled Senate and the Democrat-controlled Assembly began negotiating with each other in public. Their hearings offered a rare chance to see how the sausage gets made in Albany. They laid bare some of their many policy and political differences, and showed why even their broad areas of agreement might not be enough to bring about change.
The problem boils down to this: The Assembly wants to go much further than the Senate does in changing the state's drug laws. So Assembly members fear that if they agree right off the bat to the Senate's proposals to reduce sentences for the most serious drug offenses, which would affect only a tiny fraction of the state's inmates, they will have no leverage left to persuade the Senate to go along with their own proposals. They want to reduce the sentences for much more common and less serious drug crimes, and to give judges the authority to send some drug offenders to treatment centers instead of prison.
At a hearing here on Thursday, the senators tried to persuade the Assembly members to agree to their proposal on the most serious crimes first, and debate their differences afterward. Assembly members countered that they should debate their differences first and agree on their areas of common ground later. Neither side wanted to budge.
Senator John A. DeFrancisco, a Syracuse Republican, called for agreeing to some compromises right away. He noted that both sides wanted to reduce the sentence for the most serious class of nonviolent drug offenses, which are now punishable by up to life in prison. The Senate would like to see the sentence reduced to 10 to 20 years in prison. The Assembly favors 8 to 20.
"Let's do 9 to 20,'' Senator DeFrancisco suggested, splitting the difference.
But Assembly members were reluctant to agree formally without some indication that the Senate would consider its other priorities.
"It is merely setting up what is on the table in real terms, so that we can know that we're getting something done,'' said Assemblyman Jeffrion L. Aubry, a Queens Democrat who is co-chairman of the conference committee. Senator Dale M. Volker, a Republican from the Buffalo area who is the other co-chairman of the conference committee, tried to assure the Democrats that their issues would get a fair hearing. "We agree to talk about it,'' he said. "We don't agree to agree, but we agree to talk about it.''
The Democrats said the current policy has created a system in which 93 percent of the inmates serving time on drug charges are black or Hispanic, despite national studies showing that the majority of drug users are white. The Republicans spoke of the rights of victims, and tried to maintain a tough-on-crime stance while agreeing to soften the most severe drug laws.
Even the makeup of the panel reflected different backgrounds. Three of the five Republicans are former police officers: Senator Volker, Senator Martin J. Golden of Brooklyn and Assemblyman David R. Townsend Jr. of central New York. Assemblyman Aubry, the Democratic co-chairman, has led a social service agency that provides drug counseling and has taught inmates at a prison in New Mexico.
-------- homeland security
Anti-Terror Database Got Show at White House
By Robert O'Harrow Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 21, 2004; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43608-2004May20?language=printer
One day in January 2003, an entrepreneur from Florida named Hank Asher walked into the Roosevelt Room of the White House to demonstrate a counterterrorism tool he invented after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Soon to be called Matrix, it was a computer program capable of examining records of billions of people in seconds.
Accompanied by Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and the state's top police official, Asher showed his creation to Vice President Cheney, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and Tom Ridge, who was about to be sworn in as secretary of the new Department of Homeland Security, according to people at the meeting.
The demonstration startled everyone in the room who had not seen it before. Almost as quickly as questions could be asked, the system generated long reports on a projection screen: names, addresses, driver license photos, links to associates, even ethnicity. At one point, an Asher associate recalled, Ridge turned toward Cheney and nudged him with an elbow, apparently to underscore his amazement at the power of what they were seeing. A few months later, Ridge approved an $8 million "cooperative agreement" from his department to help states link to the computer system.
Yesterday, the American Civil Liberties Union asked the Homeland Security Department's chief privacy officer, Nuala O'Connor Kelly, to investigate the ties between the department and Matrix. The group said documents show that the federal government's involvement is deeper than previously known. The ACLU said the documents, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, appear to show that the department helped manage the system, a role the ACLU said raises new questions about whether personal information is being used appropriately by law enforcement and intelligence officials.
One document, reported by the Associated Press yesterday, showed that Asher and his colleagues had created a list of 120,000 individuals with personal attributes that gave them a "high terrorist factor" score deemed worthy of extra attention from authorities.
"When the Department deeply involves itself in a program as fraught with significant privacy problems as the Matrix, your office must investigate," Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU's technology and liberty program, and a colleague wrote in a letter to Kelly.
Kelly said in an interview that she would be "happy to review the documents and the scope of the relationship."
"We try to be supportive of state and local homeland security efforts," she said, "but only with appropriate safeguards."
A continuing debate over the proper balance between privacy and security intensified when details of the Matrix system became public last summer. Matrix organizers, including intelligence officials in the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, said the system greatly enhanced the speed of investigations by combining government data with 20 billion commercial records about people.
Though they acknowledged at the time that the system could be abused, supporters said it enabled police, using data they had always had access to, to find patterns and links among people in seconds instead of months.
In the hours after the Sept. 11 attacks, Asher created a prototype at Seisint Inc., the Boca Raton, Fla., information service he founded. It generated the names of thousands of people he thought might be worth the attention of authorities. The tool called "high terrorist factor," which relied on intelligence and profiling, was later withdrawn from the system, Asher said.
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement soon became the lead agency in expanding Matrix and the Justice Department pledged $4 million to improve the system and widen its reach. Initially, 16 states agreed to contribute and draw information from Matrix, but 11 did not follow through or dropped out, citing civil liberties concerns or cost. Currently participating are Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Connecticut.
Organizers intend to ask other data services for proposals to create other Matrix-like systems later this year, in part to create competition, said Mark Zadra of the Florida department. Currently, Matrix operates under a sole-source contract with Florida.
Questions about Asher's past created controversy when the program became public last year. Confidential Florida police documents said he had been involved in drug smuggling in the early 1980s. Asher confirmed that he had limited involvement as a pilot for a few months, but police reports said he was never arrested or charged.
The ACLU and other critics say Matrix gives the government too much power to examine the lives of individuals through a process called data mining. Steinhardt said the government should not be deeply involved without a thorough examination of the implications. "It's a very dangerous marriage," he said.
Asher spent millions of his own money to refine the Matrix system. Asher said he wanted to find accomplices of the 9/11 hijackers and help authorities prevent terrorist attacks before they occur. He said Matrix does what authorities have repeatedly said needs to be done: connect the dots between suspects. "I did this because I thought we were in the middle of a world war," he said yesterday. "That it has drawn so much criticism makes me believe the country does not have its eye on the ball."
The White House meeting was a key moment for Matrix. Asher's work had already drawn the attention of senior authorities from the Justice Department, FBI, Secret Service and intelligence agencies by using Matrix to generate thousands of potential suspects, many of them Muslims.
Not long after the Sept. 11 attacks, Asher generated a list of 120,000 names, most of which he said had nothing to do with terrorism. Asher said he then cut it to about 1,200 names, something known as the "1 percent list," which provided leads in scores of investigations, some of which led to arrests.
Unknown to Asher at the time, he said, five of the names he generated were hijackers on the planes.
--------
Database Tagged 120,000 as Possible Terrorist Suspects
May 21, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/21/national/21database.html
Before helping to start the criminal information project known as Matrix, a database contractor gave United States and Florida authorities the names of 120,000 people who showed a statistical likelihood of being terrorists, resulting in some investigations and arrests.
The "high terrorism factor" scoring system also became a critical selling point for the involvement of the database company, Seisint Inc., in the project.
Public records obtained by The Associated Press from several states show that Justice Department officials cited the scoring technology in appointing Seisint the sole contractor on the $12 million federal project.
Seisint and the law enforcement officials who oversee Matrix insist that the terrorism scoring system was ultimately kept out of the project, largely because of privacy concerns.
But new details about Seisint's development of the "terrorism quotient," including the revelation that the authorities apparently acted on the list of 120,000, are raising questions about Matrix's potential power.
"Assuming they have in fact abandoned the terrorist quotient, there's nothing that stops them from bringing it back," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the technology and liberty program at the American Civil Liberties Union, which learned about the list of 120,000 through its own records request in Utah.
Matrix, short for Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange, combines state records and data culled by Seisint to give investigators fast access to information on crime and terrorism suspects. It was begun in 2002.
Because the system includes information on innocent people as well as known criminals, Matrix has drawn objections from liberal and conservative privacy groups. Utah and at least eight other states have pulled out, leaving Connecticut, Florida, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania still in the program.
Officials involved with Matrix have said that the statistical method was removed from the final product. "I'll put my 26 years of law enforcement experience on the line," said Mark Zadra, chief investigator for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. "It is not in there."
Mr. Zadra said that Matrix, which has four billion records, merely speeds access to material that the police have always been able to get from disparate sources and that it did not automatically identify suspects.
Bill Shrewsbury, a Seisint executive and former federal drug agent, said the terrorism scoring algorithm that produced the names was "put on the shelf" after it was demonstrated after Sept. 11, 2001.
The scoring incorporated such factors as age, sex, ethnicity, credit history, "investigational data," information about pilot and driver licenses, and connections to "dirty" addresses known to have been used by other suspects.
-------- justice
GENEVA CONVENTIONS
Justice Memos Explained How to Skip Prisoner Rights
May 21, 2004
By NEIL A. LEWIS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/21/politics/21MEMO.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, May 20 - A series of Justice Department memorandums written in late 2001 and the first few months of 2002 were crucial in building a legal framework for United States officials to avoid complying with international laws and treaties on handling prisoners, lawyers and former officials say.
The confidential memorandums, several of which were written or co-written by John C. Yoo, a University of California law professor who was serving in the department, provided arguments to keep United States officials from being charged with war crimes for the way prisoners were detained and interrogated. They were endorsed by top lawyers in the White House, the Pentagon and the vice president's office but drew dissents from the State Department.
The memorandums provide legal arguments to support administration officials' assertions that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to detainees from the Afghanistan war. They also suggested how officials could inoculate themselves from liability by claiming that abused prisoners were in some other nation's custody.
The methods of detention and interrogation used in the Afghanistan conflict, in which the United States operated outside the Geneva Conventions, is at the heart of an investigation into prisoner abuse in Iraq in recent months. Human rights lawyers have said that in showing disrespect for international law in the Afghanistan conflict, the stage was set for harsh treatment in Iraq.
One of the memorandums written by Mr. Yoo along with Robert J. Delahunty, another Justice Department lawyer, was prepared on Jan. 9, 2002, four months after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. The 42-page memorandum, entitled, "Application of treaties and laws to Al Qaeda and Taliban detainees," provided several legal arguments for avoiding the jurisdiction of the Geneva Conventions.
A lawyer and a former government official who saw the memorandum said it anticipated the possibility that United States officials could be charged with war crimes, defined as grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions. The document said a way to avoid that is to declare that the conventions do not apply.
The memorandum, addressed to William J. Haynes, the Pentagon's general counsel, said that President Bush could argue that the Taliban government in Afghanistan was a "failed state" and therefore its soldiers were not entitled to protections accorded in the conventions. If Mr. Bush did not want to do that, the memorandum gave other grounds, like asserting that the Taliban was a terrorist group. It also noted that the president could just say that he was suspending the Geneva Conventions for a particular conflict.
Prof. Detlev Vagts, an authority on international law and treaties at Harvard Law School, said the arguments in the memorandums as described to him "sound like an effort to find loopholes that could be used to avoid responsibility."
One former government official who was involved in drafting some of the memorandums said that the lawyers did not make recommendations but only provided a range of all the options available to the White House.
On Jan. 25, 2002, Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel, in a memorandum to President Bush, said that the Justice Department's advice was sound and that Mr. Bush should declare the Taliban as well as Al Qaeda outside the coverage of the Geneva Conventions. That would keep American officials from being exposed to the federal War Crimes Act, a 1996 law, which, as Mr. Gonzales noted, carries the death penalty.
The Gonzales memorandum to Mr. Bush said that accepting the recommendations of the Justice Department would preserve flexibility in the global war against terrorism. "The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians," said the memorandum, obtained this week by The New York Times. The details of the memorandum were first reported by Newsweek.
Mr. Gonzales wrote that the war against terrorism, "in my judgment renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners."
Mr. Gonzales also says in the memorandum that another benefit of declaring the conventions inapplicable would be that United States officials could not be prosecuted for war crimes in the future by prosecutors and independent counsels who might see the fighting in a different light.
He observed, however, that the disadvantages included "widespread condemnation among our allies" and that other countries would also try to avoid jurisdiction of the Geneva Conventions. It also meant that the United States might have difficulty in invoking the conventions in protecting its own personnel who might be captured by an enemy.
Another memorandum from the Justice Department advises officials to create a situation in which they could plausibly claim that abused prisoners were never in United States custody.
That memorandum, whose existence was acknowledged by two former officials, noted that it would be hard to ward off an allegation of torture or inhuman treatment if the prisoner had been transferred to another country from American custody. International law prohibits the "rendition" of prisoners to countries if the possibility of mistreatment can be anticipated.
The former officials said that memorandum was explicit in advising that if someone were involved in interrogating detainees in a manner that could cross the line into torture or other prohibited treatment, that person could claim immunity only if he or she contended that the prisoner was never in United States custody.
The Gonzales memorandum provoked a response from Secretary of State Colin L. Powell on Jan. 26 in which he strongly suggested that the advantages of applying the Geneva Conventions far outweighed their rejection. He said bluntly that declaring the conventions inapplicable would "reverse over a century of U.S. policy and practice in supporting the Geneva Conventions and undermine the protections of the laws of war for our troops." He also said he would "undermine public support among critical allies."
Douglas Jehl contributed reporting for this article.
-------- POLITICS
-------- budget
House Passes $447 Billion Defense Bill
Legislation Would Add 39,000 Troops
By Dan Morgan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 21, 2004; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43997-2004May20.html
The House yesterday overwhelmingly approved a $447.2 billion defense bill that allows the Pentagon to boost the size of the armed forces by 39,000 over the next four years to ease pressure on combat units strained by commitments in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
The increase of 30,000 for the Army and 9,000 for the Marines, the first expansion since the end of the Cold War, ratifies a buildup already underway in the services. GOP officials said it will add $4.7 billion a year to Pentagon costs by 2007.
The "temporary" manpower increases would bring the active-duty strength of the Army to 512,000 troops by 2007, from its present 482,000, an increase of 6 percent. The House Armed Services Committee said this would help the Army achieve its goal of increasing the number of combat brigades from 33 to between 43 and 48. The Marines would grow from 175,000 to 184,000.
The annual defense authorization bill was approved by a vote of 391 to 34.
In a far more contentious election-year vote, the House defied a White House veto threat by preserving a provision that delays new closings of home-state military bases for two years.
The bill sets aside $76.2 billion for the procurement of missiles, aircraft, ships and weapons, and an additional $68 billion for military research, including work on a controversial nuclear weapon designed to bore deep underground to knock out enemy bunkers. It also allocates the $25 billion sought by the administration to pay for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and for the global war on terrorism early next year.
The House bill gives the administration the flexibility it seeks in using most of the $25 billion but specifies the use of $3.4 billion for buying armored vehicles, unmanned drones and other equipment to protect troops in the field. Some of the $25 billion would also be earmarked for troop expansion.
A nonbinding resolution calling for the destruction of the prison where Iraqi detainees were abused by U.S. troops was added to the bill by a vote of 308 to 114. The measure, by Reps. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.) and John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), would demolish the Abu Ghraib prison and build a modern detention facility in its place.
Senate efforts to pass a comparable bill bogged down this week. Differences between the two chambers ensure lengthy negotiations before Congress votes on a final compromise package.
More than in other recent years, the huge defense measure focuses on the physical safety of ground troops and the stresses caused by wartime disruptions on those in the military and their families.
"This is the year of the troops," said Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-Calif.) called the legislation a "soldier's bill."
It provides a 3.5 percent across-the-board military pay increase and more than doubles the allotment for hardship duty. It makes permanent extra pay for those facing "imminent danger" and gives reservists serving actively for more than a year up to $3,000 a month to replace lost civilian income.
The bill adds $704 million to the administration's request for armored Humvees manufactured in Ohio and Indiana, and it doubles the amount for armor kits for the Army's truck fleet.
Democrats, nonetheless, made clear this week that they believe Republicans are vulnerable to charges that the Bush administration sent soldiers to Iraq without adequate armor and protection, even as extended mobilizations were placing financial and personal stresses on thousands of their families back home.
Yesterday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) charged that President Bush had sent troops into battle "without Kevlar lining in their flak jackets and without armor for their vehicles."
House Democrats complained that GOP leaders had used procedures to prevent them from introducing dozens of amendments to the defense bill aimed at improving the lot of National Guard and reserve families and the security of troops in Iraq.
On Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (S.D.) outlined a series of Democratic amendments that he said would help reservists and members of the National Guard obtain health insurance, repay student loans and get help in emergencies. He said that "this country has not reciprocated" the sacrifices made by men and women called up for the Iraq conflict.
On the issue of base closings, however, party allegiances counted for little.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has argued that delays in closings would disrupt plans to transform and restructure the armed services. But 103 Republicans joined 155 Democrats and one independent to defeat an amendment that would have kept the base closings on track. The vote was 259 to 162.
"I can't believe he'd veto the defense bill over a two-year delay," said Rep. Joel Hefley (R-Colo.), who has led the fight for the delay.
In both houses and parties, sentiment to protect military installations -- and the tens of thousands of jobs that go with them -- is running strong. Privately, some Republicans grumbled about the presidential pressure in an election year.
--------
House Approves $447 Billion in Spending for Military
May 21, 2004
By CARL HULSE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/21/politics/21spend.html
WASHINGTON, May 20 - The House on Thursday overwhelmingly approved a $447 billion military package that includes the extra $25 billion sought by the Bush administration to pay for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan through early next year.
Authors of the measure, which passed by a bipartisan margin of 391 to 34, said it was specifically geared toward the needs of those fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, providing $1 billion for new vehicle armor, replenishing stockpiles of arms and ammunition and giving military personnel a pay raise and other benefits.
"This is the year of the troops," said Representative Duncan Hunter, Republican of California and chairman of the Armed Services Committee.
The House defied a veto threat from the administration by keeping a two-year delay on a round of military base closings set for next year, easily defeating an effort to require the closings to move forward in 2005. Mr. Hunter and other senior Republicans said they did not expect the Pentagon's spending plan for the year beginning Oct. 1 to be rejected over the base closing provision.
Senators were moving much more slowly with their own $422 billion measure and abandoned hope of finishing before leaving on their Memorial Day break. Both the House and Senate were considering the proposals against the backdrop of the prison scandal in Iraq and continuing unrest and uncertainty there.
"We are in a war," said Representative Ike Skelton of Missouri, the senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee. "Neither the country nor this Congress was united in initiating the conflict, but we stand now as one with the soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines fighting it."
House Democrats complained throughout two days of debate that they were prevented from offering important amendments, but in the end most of them supported the legislation. Some Democrats said the $400 million for body armor and other "force protection" provisions showed that the troops dispatched to Iraq were ill-equipped in the first place. "There is no excuse for us to send our soldiers into harm's way without this most basic protection," said Representative Louise M. Slaughter, Democrat of New York.
Among the personnel benefits in the measure are a 3.5 percent pay increase, a raise in hazardous duty and family separation pay, improved survivor benefits and elimination of a limit on the construction of military housing. The measure also allows for adding 30,000 troops in the Army over the next three years and 9,000 in the Marine Corps.
Democrats again failed to strip the measure of money for researching a new nuclear weapon capable of penetrating underground bunkers. But Representative Ellen O. Tauscher, Democrat of California, noted that the 214-to-204 vote was closer than a similar effort last year, which she read as a sign of growing skepticism about new nuclear devices. Opponents of the nuclear program say it could spur proliferation.
The most significant fight was over the plan to proceed next year with the base closings, an important matter for lawmakers trying to protect facilities in their districts. Opponents of delaying the base closings said that the military needed to get moving on shutting under-used facilities and that the economic impact on communities was exaggerated.
But supporters of the two-year delay said the makeup of the armed forces was undergoing significant changes given the conflict in Iraq and that it would be impractical to proceed next year before a study of overseas installations was finished.
"Too many balls are in the air," said Representative Joel Hefley, Republican of Colorado and chairman of the subcommittee on military readiness. Mr. Hefley prevailed, 259 to 162, against the push to keep the closings on track. That decision sets up an eventual showdown with the Senate, which this week narrowly defeated an effort to delay the closings.
The House also gave its support to tearing down the Abu Ghraib prison, the scene of the abuse of Iraq detainees, and replacing it with a new facility. But lawmakers defeated a Democratic push for a special Congressional inquiry into the abuse as Democrats complained that the House was failing in oversight of the war.
The debate in the Senate got off track this week when the Armed Services Committee spent much of Wednesday on its third hearing into the prison abuse cases. Lawmakers will take the bill up again in about 10 days. The Senate consideration promises to be more contentious than the House, though the outcome is likely to be the same, with a wide approval for the measure.
Both parties are near agreement on incorporating the $25 billion in war money in the Senate measure. But Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, is trying to add a requirement that President Bush deliver a report on his strategy for stabilizing Iraq. Democrats also intend to challenge the spending on new nuclear weapons and money for missile defense while proposing a troop increase beyond that adopted by the House.
-------- investigations
FBI Chief Tells of Interrogation Suspicions
By Susan Schmidt
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 21, 2004; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A44020-2004May20.html
FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III told Congress yesterday that agents posted abroad have reported instances of possibly improper conduct in prison interrogations overseen by the CIA or U.S. military personnel.
Mueller, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, said FBI agents in Iraq and Afghanistan have been instructed not to participate in interrogations that involve coercive methods and are expected to "report up the chain" if they learn of any possibly illegal conduct by others.
"We have, upon occasion, seen an area where we may disagree with the handling of a particular interview," Mueller said. "Where we have seen that, we have brought it to the attention of the authorities who were responsible for that particular individual."
Mueller provided no specifics about where those incidents occurred, except to say that FBI agents conducting interrogations at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad said they did not witness abuse of prisoners there by military police or others.
The CIA's inspector general in recent weeks referred the deaths last year of three prisoners in CIA custody to the Justice Department for investigation and possible prosecution. Two of those prisoners were in Iraq, including one at Abu Ghraib. The third was in custody in Afghanistan.
The deaths occurred during or after interrogations by CIA officers and contractors. As yet, Mueller said, the FBI has not been asked to investigate the deaths.
Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) pressed Mueller about whether the FBI had refused to participate in CIA interviews of high-level detainees "because of the brutality of the interrogation methods being used." Mueller said the FBI requires its agents to adhere to the same interviewing standards it follows for prisoners held in the United States.
"Senator, it is the FBI's policy to prohibit interrogation by force, threats of force or coercion," Mueller said. "Where we have conducted interviews, we have adhered to that policy."
Referring to the Defense Department and the CIA, Mueller said: "There are standards that have been established by others, legally, that may well be different from the FBI standards. . . . That does not necessarily mean that those standards were unlawful. What I'm saying is that they may not conform to the standard that we use in conducting investigations in the FBI."
Participation by an agent in interrogations that used force or coercion might be used to discredit him in other cases, Mueller said. He also said the FBI generally takes the view that building a rapport with prisoners is more effective in getting information than using fear or force.
Mueller told the panel that alleged prisoner abuse is the responsibility of the Defense Department, and that the FBI is not conducting any prisoner abuse investigations in Iraq, Afghanistan or Guantanamo Bay. The Justice and Defense departments are discussing jurisdictional guidelines for investigating instances of alleged wrongdoing by civilian contractors.
Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) raised questions yesterday about the U.S. government's hiring in Iraq of two civilian contractors previously accused of overseeing penal facilities where prisoners were allegedly mistreated in this country.
One official, Lane McCotter, resigned in 1997 under pressure as director of the Utah Corrections Department after an inmate died while shackled naked to a restraining chair for 16 hours. Schumer said in a news release issued yesterday that the other, John Armstrong, resigned as head of Connecticut's Corrections Department amid allegations that he tolerated and engaged in sexual harassment of female employees.
Neither is accused of wrongdoing in Iraq.
--------
Screening of Prison Officials Is Faulted by Lawmakers
May 21, 2004
By FOX BUTTERFIELD and ERIC LICHTBLAU
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/21/politics/21PRIS.html
The use of American corrections executives with abuse accusations in their past to oversee American-run prisons in Iraq is prompting concerns in Congress about how the officials were selected and screened.
Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, sent a letter yesterday to Attorney General John Ashcroft questioning what he described as the "checkered record when it comes to prisoners' rights" of John J. Armstrong, a former commissioner of corrections in Connecticut.
Mr. Armstrong resigned last year after Connecticut settled lawsuits brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and the families of two Connecticut inmates who died after being sent by Mr. Armstrong to a supermaximum security prison in Virginia. One of the inmates, a diabetic, died of heart failure after going into diabetic shock and then being hit with an electric charge by guards wielding a stun gun and kept in restraints.
In his letter, Mr. Schumer requested that the Justice Department conduct an investigation into the role of American civilians in the Iraqi prison system. Mr. Armstrong is assistant director of operations of American prisons in Iraq, and Mr. Schumer said he was apparently working under contract for the State Department.
State Department officials had no comment on the case and could not confirm whether Mr. Armstrong worked for the department in Iraq or not. Mr. Armstrong, who has an unlisted phone number, could not be reached for comment.
Another official, Lane McCotter, who was forced to resign as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an incident in which a mentally ill inmate died after guards left him shackled naked to a restraining chair for 16 hours, was dispatched by Mr. Ashcroft to head a team of Americans to reopen Iraq's prisons.
After his resignation in Utah, Mr. McCotter became an executive of a private prison company, the Management and Training Corporation, one of whose jails was strongly criticized in a Justice Department report just a month before the Justice Department sent him to Iraq. The report found that the jail, in Santa Fe, lacked adequate medical and mental health care and had no suicide prevention plan, which had contributed to an inmate's hanging himself.
In Iraq, it was Mr. McCotter who first identified Abu Ghraib as the best site for America's main prison and who helped rebuild the prison and train Iraqi guards, according to his own account, given to Correction .com, an online industry magazine
Officials at the Justice Department would not say who decided to give Mr. McCotter the assignment or whether the Justice Department was aware of his history when Mr. Ashcroft announced his appointment.
"The contractors were all vetted in the normal process," said a senior Justice Department official, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity. "They all came highly recommended by corrections experts."
Speaking of the two cases in an interview, Mr. Schumer said: "One might be an aberration. Two is getting awfully close to a pattern."
He said, "Of all the people who have experience running prisons in this country and haven't run into trouble, how did they pick these guys?"
Vincent Nathan, an expert on prison management, said "I find it somewhat mystifying that the Justice Department failed to involve its own professional administrators in the federal Bureau of Prisons" in running the prisons in Iraq.
The Bureau of Prisons, Mr. Nathan noted, is part of the Justice Department and has long experience in running prisons that hold foreigners, including illegal immigrants.
The Justice Department official said Mr. McCotter's role in overseeing prison operations in Baghdad was limited to what are regarded as civilian prisoners, rather than military ones. But the unclear chain of command at Abu Ghraib has made it difficult to distinguish between the two groups.
"What is the civilian side?" Mr. Schumer asked. "Many of the people who were abused were civilians." Mr. Armstrong returned from Iraq last week to attend his daughter's graduation and has not decided whether to go back, said a Michael Lawlor, the chairman of Connecticut's House Judiciary Committee and a neighbor in West Haven.
During his eight years as commissioner of corrections in Connecticut, Mr. Armstrong was also criticized by the guards' union and the National Organization for Women for failing to deal with repeated complaints by female guards that they were being sexually harassed by male guards.
But his most difficult time came when he sent more than 200 Connecticut inmates to Wallens Ridge, a supermaximum security prison in Big Stone Gap, Va.
One inmate, Lawrence Frazier, the diabetic, died after being hit with an electric charge. Another, David Tracy, who had been diagnosed with mental illness, jumped off his bunk with a makeshift rope around his neck in plain sight of a guard who did nothing to come to his aid, said David Fathi, a senior staff counsel for the A.C.L.U.'s National Prison Project.
Mr. Fathi, who oversaw a lawsuit against Connecticut and Mr. Armstrong, said the state had deprived the prisoners at Wallens Ridge of their constitutional right against cruel and unusual punishment.
Inmates at Wallens Ridge were frequently strapped down in four point restraint, meaning their arms and legs were fastened down, and were then hit by stun guns "for trivial things," Mr. Fathi said. The guards, who were all white, often used racial slurs in talking to the prisoners, he said.
Mr. Lawlor, who visited Wallens Ridge, said the warden's office had been decorated with photographs of Confederate generals and Confederate battle flags.
Connecticut in two separate out-of- court settlements agreed to remove all of their inmates from Wallens Ridge and to pay $1.9 million to the families of the inmates who died.
-------- patriot act
St. Petersburg City Council decries Patriot Act
St. Petersburg Times
By CARRIE JOHNSON
May 21, 2004
http://www.sptimes.com/2004/05/21/Southpinellas/St_Petersburg_City_Co.shtml
St. Petersburg leaders join Tampa and nearly 300 other communities across the nation that have taken a stand against parts of the federal measure.
ST. PETERSBURG - The City Council delved into national politics Thursday, adding its voice to the growing chorus of local governments speaking out against a controversial law aimed at finding terrorists.
By a 5-2 vote, council members approved a resolution denouncing portions of the Patriot Act, which was passed after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. President George W. Bush is asking Congress to reauthorize the law as he runs for re-election.
Supporters say it is an important tool that aids the government in its search for terrorists and protects the country from attack.
Critics argue it is too drastic and erodes civil rights such as freedom of speech, freedom of association and privacy.
Council members sided with the critics.
"We have to protect our freedom," said council Chairman James Bennett. "If you give up your freedom, you may never get it back."
Locally, the Tampa City Council was the first to weigh in on the issue, passing a similar resolution last month.
So far, more than 290 communities throughout the country have opposed portions of the act, including Sarasota and the counties of Lee, Broward and Alachua in Florida.
Council members John Bryan and Bill Foster were the only dissenting votes. Council member Earnest Williams was absent.
Foster argued it was futile for the council to approve the resolution because it has no control over federal policy.
"I just don't want to give our citizens any idea that we have the ability to change or modify the behavior of the president of the United States," he said.
But others disagreed.
All citizens, including St. Petersburg residents, will be affected by the act, and although the council's gesture is purely symbolic, it still sends an important message, argued council member Jay Lasita.
"Sometimes this job requires an ability to do more than fill potholes," he said. "There are times you have to stand up."
A group of about 15 people, many wearing peace symbols and antiwar buttons, gathered at City Hall to watch the debate. Among them was Dwight Lawton, a St. Petersburg resident and member of the American Civil Liberties Union, who was a driving force behind getting the City Council to consider the resolution.
Lawton contacted Bennett earlier in the year with the idea and later enlisted constituents to call their council members. He said Thursday he was proud of the council.
"While Congress is starting to get its backbone and actually look at what it passed, every form of public opinion should be used to try to mobilize them," Lawton said.
Also Thursday, the City Council approved a new 14-story luxury condominium and retail project planned for a site near the Dali Museum in south St. Petersburg.
The Harborage Marina Village will consist of a 52-unit condo tower, two parking garages, a restaurant and more than 18,000 square feet of retail space in the 1100 square block of Third St. S.
The project will cost more than $40-million to build. Condos are expected to fetch between $290,000 and $2.2-million. Construction is scheduled to begin this summer.
The council also approved an agreement that would shift 14 acres of commercial property from the unincorporated Pinellas County community of Feather Sound into the city's limits.
The deal was struck with property owner Fred Bullard, who founded Feather Sound in the 1970s. Bullard said he agreed to allow his property to be annexed in exchange for the city's promise to take over the maintenance and repair of several private roads he owns.
A public hearing must still be held before the annexation is complete. A date has not yet been set.
-------- propaganda wars
Hersh's attacks
May 21, 2004
Inside the Ring
By Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/inring.htm
Seymour Hersh has lobbed another bomb at Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his staff in the New Yorker magazine. This time, the Pulitzer Prize winner says Mr. Rumsfeld is responsible for prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib prison because the secretary wants terrorists killed or captured.
The Pentagon vehemently denied the charge, and the CIA called the story "fundamentally wrong."
This is not the first time Mr. Hersh and Mr. Rumsfeld have clashed. Mr. Rumsfeld has called some of Mr. Hersh's reporting "fiction."
Take, for instance, a May 12 , 2003, story that accused Mr. Rumsfeld's staff of being a "cabal." The Pentagon believed the article was so inaccurate it mailed a protest letter on June 9 to New Yorker Editor David Remnick.
"I am writing to express my concern over the inaccuracies in your May 12 Seymour Hersh story on Secretary Rumsfeld and the Department of Defense," wrote Bryan G. Whitman, a senior public affairs official. "There are more inaccuracies than can be addressed in this letter, and it is particularly disappointing given the time and effort taken by my staff to ensure The New Yorker has its facts straight prior to publication.
"During the week of April 28, my staff received from a New Yorker fact-checker a fax with 20 questions regarding the Office of Special Plans and Abe Shulsky, the former director of that office. Mr. Shulsky sat down with those press officers over a period of two days to answer those questions. Once the answers were compiled, they were sent by fax to The New Yorker and their receipt confirmed. When the article appeared the following week, we were disturbed to see that many of the answers provided were left out. In fact, in some instances, the article made statements in direct contradiction to the facts we provided. ... I do hope that you will ensure that this kind of lapse does not recur."
Mr. Remnick, a former reporter for The Washington Post, has stood by his reporter.
--------
Bush Visits Hill to Reassure Republicans
By Dana Milbank and Charles Babington
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, May 21, 2004; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43544-2004May20?language=printer
President Bush ascended Capitol Hill yesterday for what Republican lawmakers called a "pep rally" to restore the spirits of a GOP caucus worried about chaos in Iraq and Bush's declining poll numbers.
Behind closed doors, Bush gave a 35-minute version of his stump speech covering Iraq, the economy and energy policy. When he finished, the participants filed past a bank of microphones to announce that they were unified in support of Bush and that there had been no dissent expressed at the meeting. Bush took no questions.
"The president was great," said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.). "We saw the determination and spirit of a great leader," said Sen. Rick Santorum (Pa.). "There were several standing ovations," reported Sen. George Allen (Va.).
The rare trip by Bush to the Capitol -- he makes such appearances only once or twice a year -- gave Republicans a chance to circle the wagons as the violence and prison-abuse scandal in Iraq have pushed Bush's standing to the lowest of his term, and beneath that of Democratic challenger John F. Kerry.
Democrats have become increasingly pointed in their attacks on Bush. Minutes after Bush's morning visit to the Capitol, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) accused him of incompetence and blamed him for the deaths of U.S. soldiers.
"I believe that the president's leadership in the actions taken in Iraq demonstrate an incompetence in terms of knowledge, judgment and experience, in making the decisions that would have been necessary to truly accomplish the mission without the deaths to our troops and the cost to our taxpayers," she said.
Republicans responded to Pelosi's unusually strong language by suggesting she was aiding the enemy in Iraq. "We are in the middle of a war and in the middle of a political campaign," said House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (Ill.). "Mrs. Pelosi's comments were meant to inspire her political base, but who else do they inspire?"
Bush's campaign chairman, Marc Racicot, sought to tie Pelosi's remarks to Kerry, who has been relatively quiet about recent events in Iraq. "Her remarks are now advancing a blame-America-first attitude that Kerry himself has come dangerously close to advocating," Racicot said in a statement.
The president de-emphasized the troubles in Iraq during his appearance with the GOP caucus, making only a passing reference to the prison-abuse scandal. "He did not dwell on that at all," said Rep. Deborah Pryce (Ohio).
The lawmakers said Bush reiterated the firmness of the June 30 handover of sovereignty to Iraqis and likened it to riding a bicycle. "He talked about 'time to take the training wheels off,' " Pryce said. "The Iraqi people have been in training, and now it's time for them to take the bike and go forward."
Several Republicans were surprised Bush took no questions. He usually does take questions at such sessions, they said, including at a GOP lawmakers retreat in Philadelphia in late January. Bush's reluctance to field queries appeared to be a matter of some sensitivity.
Allen, for example, called yesterday's session a "good team meeting" with no dissent "that I heard." But asked whether Bush allowed questions, Allen replied: "I don't care to answer that question."
The meeting did not satisfy dissidents in the party. "There was nothing you haven't heard at other, public appearances," said Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), whose commitment to the GOP was questioned this week by Hastert. Asked whether he felt better because of Bush's assurances about improvement in Iraq, McCain replied with feigned relief: "Oh, much better."
Rep. John J. Duncan Jr. (Tenn.), one of six House Republicans who voted against the 2003 resolution authorizing war in Iraq, said he saw opinion shifting toward his position. "You'd be amazed how many people have come up to me lately and said this war was a mistake," he said.
But Bush's allies in Congress pronounced the meeting a success. Rep. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), said: "He did what he had to do. He had to give members increased confidence about Iraq." As for reports of panic within GOP ranks, Portman said, "I honestly do not see it."
Several GOP lawmakers said there is predictable unease in their caucus about developments in Iraq, but not as much as there would be if more House members faced serious reelection challenges this fall.
"Most members are from pretty safe districts," said Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (Va.), "so there's no panic up here." From a partisan standpoint, he said, the biggest problem with the Iraq war is that "it suffocates everything else," such as news about an improving economy.
Back at the White House, Bush sat down for more than two hours to discuss the situation in Iraq with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld; Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, head of the U.S. Central Command.
Bush had nothing to say in public about the difficulties facing his administration. In addition to the violence, the prison scandal and the rush to assemble an Iraqi government before June 30, onetime U.S. ally Ahmad Chalabi severed his ties with the Coalition Provisional Authority after U.S. and Iraqi authorities raided offices of his Iraqi National Congress. Also yesterday, the GOP-led House rejected a Bush plan for military base closings, and in the Senate, Republicans decided they did not have enough votes to pass the budget and delayed the vote till next month. "Hi, everybody, good to see you," the president said as he walked briskly into the meeting, followed by political adviser Karl Rove and other aides. Afterwards, Sen. Trent Lott (Miss.), asked about Iraq, told reporters Bush "will talk to you about it." Seconds later, Bush rushed by, ignoring reporters' questions.
Bush left about 15 minutes to shake hands with his listeners. Though the White House press secretary described the session as a pre-recess briefing on "a number of important priorities that we're pursuing," the lawmakers acknowledged it was more about morale.
"The president wasn't there to educate," said Sen. John E. Sununu (N.H.), who said he had not learned anything new. Sen. Wayne Allard (Colo.), was more blunt. "It was a rally," he said. "November's not that far away."
--------
Hussein-Era Videos Released to Contrast Prison Scandal
By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 21, 2004; Page A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A44064-2004May20.html
Video images of brutal treatment of prisoners by Saddam Hussein's government resurfaced this week as part of an effort by some members of the Bush administration and Congress to remind viewers in Iraq and the United States of the previous horrors.
Scenes of floggings, forced amputations and a beheading were distributed to a small number of news organizations in the hope that viewers and readers would see the U.S. invasion of Iraq more favorably and draw a sharp contrast with abuses by American troops, said an administration official who described the publicity effort.
The administration has wanted to "demonstrate the true nature of Saddam's regime, but it's unknown through most of Western Europe and even in the United States," said the official, who requested anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity. "What's really surprising is it's even unknown in parts of Iraq."
The video reached news outlets, including The Washington Post, as senior spokesmen for the Bush administration began to express frustration that the treatment of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. troops had overshadowed well-documented human rights horrors of the Hussein era.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said last weekend there "should be a higher level of outrage" at the recent decapitation of American job-seeker Nicholas Berg by masked kidnappers in Iraq. He also said there should be closer scrutiny of torture in other Arab societies.
"We have international standards that have to be maintained," Powell told "Fox News Sunday." "And those standards don't just apply to the United States of America; they apply to all civilized countries -- or countries claiming to be civilized."
Al Hurra, an Iraqi television station backed by the U.S. government, broadcast video excerpts on Wednesday. They included commentary from former Iraqi prisoners, plus a discussion of the Hussein era and what one guest called "most despicable" acts by U.S. forces.
Mouafac Harb, the network news director of Al Hurra, said yesterday that he was provided with the video images on Monday. He would say only that his source was not a government official. The scenes seemed authentic and the topic newsworthy, Harb said.
"I was approached with a tape, which I had not seen before," said Harb, who also serves as news director of Radio Sawa, a U.S.-sponsored radio station in the Middle East. "I had not seen on the popular Arabic satellite channels any program like this."
Harb said the station has done many shows on the persecution of Iraqi prisoners at the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison, a scandal that has provoked fury and charges of American hypocrisy in the Muslim world.
"We have to be balanced," Harb said. "This was the first time we had been able to tell that story in Arabic to an Arab audience."
The excerpts on Al Hurra showed prisoners being punished or tortured by black-masked members of Saddam's Fedayeen, an elite militia controlled by Hussein. Prisoners were shown being flogged and having fingers chopped off. One is shown being thrown from a roof, another about to be beheaded by a man wielding a sword.
The full video shows the beheading and a man placing the severed head on the victim's prone body. Another scene shows a man's tongue being cut out.
Fox News first broadcast excerpts in October, saying the video had been given to U.S. soldiers by an Iraqi who said he had filmed the punishment for the Iraqi Republican Guard. A Fox reporter noted that the Pentagon was working to declassify such evidence.
Tom Malinowski, a Human Rights Watch analyst who viewed excerpts for Fox, said yesterday that "absolutely we should remind people that this is what Saddam did, and that it's a good thing that Saddam is no longer there to do this."
But Malinowski is skeptical that the video's release will ease the administration's troubles over the abuse photographed by soldiers at Abu Ghraib.
"Simply reminding the world that Saddam was evil," Malinowski said, "is not going to diminish the impact of these pictures from Abu Ghraib. The United States, unlike Saddam, is a standard-setter."
The Al Hurra program featured a debate between London-based human rights activist Abdul Sahib Hakim and Jordanian lawyer Ziad Khasawna, who said he intends to defend Hussein in front of a planned war-crimes tribunal.
"Saddam was the president of a gang. He was a killer," Hakim said. Khasawna focused on the record of the U.S. occupation.
"The United States is a superpower and claims to maintain freedom, democracy and human rights -- and that it came to Iraq to support the Iraqi people," Khasawna said. "The coalition and the U.S. administration should do many things to make the Iraqi people happy, but they instead did the opposite."
Staff writer Sewell Chan and special correspondent Bassam Sabti in Baghdad and researcher Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.
-------- OTHER
Lemurs aren't so dumb after all, study finds
Friday, May 21, 2004
By Reuters
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-05-21/s_23845.asp
WASHINGTON - Lemurs, once believed to be cute but basically stupid, show startling intelligence when given a chance to win treats by playing a computer game, U.S. researchers reported recently.
The study will help shed light on how humans became sophisticated mathematically, the Duke University team said.
So far, it suggests primitive animals such as lemurs need a good reason, such as a treat, to bother trying to count. Humans and monkeys, in contrast, will stretch their minds simply out of curiosity. Lemurs are primates, as are monkeys, apes, and humans. But they are considered far less intelligent.
"The little bit of research that's out there suggests their learning capacities are not as sophisticated as those of monkeys," said psychologist Elizabeth Brannon, who led the research. "So initially, I thought it very unlikely that I was going to get any cognitive experiments to really work with them."
But she found a combination of greed and the lure of a touch-screen computer worked to get the long-tailed animals to cooperate.
"If a task involves a food reward, they can be amazing," she said. "They'll work for a couple of hundred trials because they want these sugar pellets, even though we do not deprive them of food in any way."
Although lemurs are social, they would often stop what they were doing to play on the computer.
"Occasionally, one animal would come over and finish the sequence started by another to get the reward," said Brannon.
Unexpectedly, the lemurs could remember sequences. For instance, they showed they could remember the order of appearance of random images by touching them in order when they reappeared as a group.
"It shows that the animal is actually learning some kind of strategy above and beyond what they're learning about the individual pictures in a given set," Brannon said.
But the lemurs were not especially dexterous.
"While monkeys will use their fingers, the ringtails (lemurs) use their nose or mouth to touch the screen, sometimes kind of kissing it," Brannon said.
-------- environment
Four States to Sue Power Plants
EPA Stopped Investigating Alleged Violations of Clean Air Act
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 21, 2004; Page A07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43546-2004May20.html
Taking action where the Bush administration would not, four northeastern states said yesterday that they will sue five West Virginia power plants for violating the Clean Air Act's pollution-control rules.
The lawsuit -- which will be filed 60 days from now unless the four attorneys general reach an agreement with Allegheny Energy Inc. -- marks the latest skirmish in a long-running battle over the Environmental Protection Agency's handling of New Source Review, the federal requirement that coal-fired power plants built before 1970 install new pollution controls when they upgrade their facilities.
The EPA had spent years investigating possible violations of the requirement but announced in November that it would not bring any new lawsuits unless a plant violated the administration's less stringent interpretation of the law.
The states taking the action are New York, Connecticut, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, where Allegheny Energy has headquarters.
"These cases reflect our continued intent to enforce the Clean Air Act even when the EPA has dropped the ball," New York Attorney General Eliot L. Spitzer said in an interview.
When the EPA stopped its investigation of about 50 cases, Spitzer requested copies of several agency files, including one involving Allegheny Energy. The EPA turned over five to 10 files.
The letter issued yesterday asserts that emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide from the coal-fired plants cause smog, acid rain and respiratory disease in the four states.
Allegheny Energy spokesman Mike Grandillo said the company is reviewing the complaint.
EPA spokeswoman Cynthia Bergman declined to comment on the planned lawsuit but said, "The most important thing we can do to improve air quality in this country is to reduce pollution from power plants, and we have proposed the clean-air interstate rule that will require power plants to reduce their emissions by 70 percent."
The administration's revised New Source Review regulation is tied up in litigation, and in the meantime the administration has pledged to enforce the existing rule.
Angela Ledford, director of the environmental group Clear the Air, said it was significant that Pennsylvania's attorney general was willing to sue a home-state company and that states were pushing for enforcement.
But Scott Segal, who heads the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, an industry group, called the lawsuit misguided. "Emissions from power plants have been declining for decades," he said. "More litigation does nothing to improve the environment."
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Irradiated Food Barred From DC School Lunches
May 21, 2004
WASHINGTON, DC, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/may2004/2004-05-21-098.asp
District of Columbia students will not be eating irradiated hamburgers any time soon. The District of Columbia Board of Education voted eight to one on Wednesday night in favor of a resolution that forbids the 167 schools in the DC system from purchasing irradiated food for any of its meal programs for five years.
Although the school system does not now serve irradiated food, it could choose to do so. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) last year approved the use of irradiated ground beef in the National School Lunch Program. The program provides free or reduced price school lunches to 27 million children annually. Sixty percent of the more than 65,000 students in the DC school system qualify for the federally subsidized meal program.
The school officials' decision was welcomed by nonprofit organizations Public Citizen and the Youth Education Alliance, who had lobbied the Board of Education to ban irradiated food.
"We're happy that the school board banned irradiated meat because we didn't want students to be worried about what was on their lunch trays," said Mayonna Bangura, youth organizer for the Youth Education Alliance and a 10th grade student at Calvin Coolidge Senior High School. "It's a first step in the right direction towards healthy, safe and better tasting lunches."
The groups said banning irradiated food from school cafeterias is one way to safeguard students who would otherwise have no way to protect themselves from eating meat that has been treated with the controversial irradiation technology. Irradiation exposes food to a dose of ionizing radiation to kill bacteria.
Federal law states that while irradiated meat must be labeled in grocery stores, it does not have to be labeled when served in school cafeterias, restaurants or hospitals.
While the USDA says irradiated foods are safe, critics of the process say it produces chemicals that are known or suspected carcinogens. Research presented to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2001 has shown that one class of these chemicals, cyclobutanones, promotes cancer development as well as causes genetic damage to human cells.
Public Citizen and the Center for Food Safety asked the FDA in November 2001 to refrain from legalizing irradiation for any additional types of food until cyclobutanones are tested for safety.
The students also called on the board to improve the quality, safety and wholesomeness of food served in D.C. schools.
A recent WJLA (Channel 7) report revealed that 143 of 155 District schools needed "immediate action" to clean up their cafeterias. "Contributing to the filthy state of the cafeterias were rodent feces, spiders and dead insects, along with insulation materials that had fallen into the food preparation area because of aging building conditions," the TV program was quoted as saying.
Irradiation does not help prevent food contamination in any of these situations. The procedure cannot prevent cross-contamination once packages are opened nor can it kill the abnormal protein that causes mad cow disease.
"Instead of spending more money on irradiated meat - which will not solve the most common contamination problems in DC's cafeterias - we can now focus on bringing fresher and healthier ingredients to improve students' lunches," said Monique Mikhail, organizer for Public Citizen's Safe Lunch Campaign.
Irradiated meat is not popular with schools. To date, no school district has purchased irradiated meat through the USDA for the 2004-2005 school year.
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George Bush never looked into Nick's eyes
Even more than the murderers who took my son's life, I condemn those who make policies to end lives
Michael Berg
Friday May 21, 2004
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1221644,00.html
My son, Nick, was my teacher and my hero. He was the kindest, gentlest man I know; no, the kindest, gentlest human being I have ever known. He quit the Boy Scouts of America because they wanted to teach him to fire a handgun. Nick, too, poured into me the strength I needed, and still need, to tell the world about him.
People ask me why I focus on putting the blame for my son's tragic and atrocious end on the Bush administration. They ask: "Don't you blame the five men who killed him?" I have answered that I blame them no more or less than the Bush administration, but I am wrong: I am sure, knowing my son, that somewhere during their association with him these men became aware of what an extraordinary man my son was. I take comfort that when they did the awful thing they did, they weren't quite as in to it as they might have been. I am sure that they came to admire him.
I am sure that the one who wielded the knife felt Nick's breath on his hand and knew that he had a real human being there. I am sure that the others looked into my son's eyes and got at least a glimmer of what the rest of the world sees. And I am sure that these murderers, for just a brief moment, did not like what they were doing.
George Bush never looked into my son's eyes. George Bush doesn't know my son, and he is the worse for it. George Bush, though a father himself, cannot feel my pain, or that of my family, or of the world that grieves for Nick, because he is a policymaker, and he doesn't have to bear the consequences of his acts. George Bush can see neither the heart of Nick nor that of the American people, let alone that of the Iraqi people his policies are killing daily.
Donald Rumsfeld said that he took responsibility for the sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners. How could he take that responsibility when there was no consequence? Nick took the consequences.
Even more than those murderers who took my son's life, I can't stand those who sit and make policies to end lives and break the lives of the still living.
Nick was not in the military, but he had the discipline and dedication of a soldier. Nick Berg was in Iraq to help the people without any expectation of personal gain. He was only one man, but through his death he has become many. The truly unselfish spirit of giving your all to do what you know in your own heart is right even when you know it may be dangerous; this spirit has spread among the people who knew Nick, and that group has spread and is spreading all over the world.
So what were we to do when we in America were attacked on September 11, that infamous day? I say we should have done then what we never did before: stop speaking to the people we labelled our enemies and start listening to them. Stop giving preconditions to our peaceful coexistence on this small planet, and start honouring and respecting every human's need to live free and autonomously, to truly respect the sovereignty of every state. To stop making up rules by which others must live and then separate rules for ourselves.
George Bush's ineffective leadership is a weapon of mass destruction, and it has allowed a chain reaction of events that led to the unlawful detention of my son which immersed him in a world of escalated violence. Were it not for Nick's detention, I would have had him in my arms again. That detention held him in Iraq not only until the atrocities that led to the siege of Fallujah, but also the revelation of the atrocities committed in the jails in Iraq, in retaliation for which my son's wonderful life was put to an end.
My son's work still goes on. Where there was one peacemaker before, I now see and have heard from thousands of peacemakers. Nick was a man who acted on his beliefs. We, the people of this world, now need to act on our beliefs. We need to let the evildoers on both sides of the Atlantic know that we are fed up with war. We are fed up with the killing and bombing and maiming of innocent people. We are fed up with the lies. Yes, we are fed up with the suicide bombers, and with the failure of the Israelis and Palestinians to find a way to stop killing each other. We are fed up with negotiations and peace conferences that are entered into on both sides with preset conditions that preclude the outcome of peace. We want world peace now.
Many have offered to pray for Nick and my family. I appreciate their thoughts, but I ask them to include in their prayers a prayer for peace. And I ask them to do more than pray. I ask them to demand peace now.
· Michael Berg is the father of Nick Berg, the US contractor beheaded on video in Iraq this month by a group believed to be linked to al-Qaida. This is an extract from his message of support for the Stop The War Coalition's demonstration, End the Torture - Bring the Troops Home Now, which will be held at 11am tomorrow at the Embankment in London
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Activists could target Finnish nuclear plants: security police
HELSINKI (AFP)
May 21, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040521140058.t440u49a.html
As Finland prepares to start building a new nuclear reactor, the threat of environmental activists and extremists targeting the country's nuclear power stations is growing, security police said on Friday.
"There are so few power plants being built in the world for the time being that activists could conceivably target the power plant that will soon be built in Finland," Iikka Salmi, chief superintendent of the Finnish security police, told AFP.
Finnish power company TVO is scheduled to start building a new nuclear reactor in Olkiluoto in western Finland this year, and expects to have it up and running by 2009.
The plans to build the reactor, which will be Finland's fifth, has agitated environmental activists around the world.
"We have seen an increase in activist activity," Salmi said, but added that security police had no reason to believe that there would be any violent attacks against the country's nuclear reactors in the near future.
"It's possible, of course, but it's not likely," he said.
A special security police division in western Finland has been assigned to ensuring the security of the new reactor, he said, but declined to comment on whether the division was cooperating with international security forces.
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'Peace Now' Under Investigation for Espionage Activities
May 21, '04 / 1 Sivan 5764
Israel National News
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/news.php3?id=62808
The left-wing "Peace Now" organization is being investigated after conducting aerial surveillance of Jewish communities and army bases in Jerusalem, Yesha (Judea, Samaria and Gaza), and the Golan.
"Peace Now" says its activities aim “to monitor settlement expansion,” but MK's and journalists suspect that the group - funded by Europe - engages in questionable activities which endanger Israeli soldiers and civilians. The Knesset Interior Committee held a special session this week to discuss the topic of foreign government funding of Israeli left wing movements.
According to investigative journalist David Bedein, documents that were shared with the Knesset Interior Committee confirmed that “Peace Now” received 50,000 Euros from the government of Finland to conduct the surveillance activity of Jewish towns in Judea, Samaria, the Golan, Gaza and Jerusalem.
The Knesset Committee examined a Peace Now grant application to the government of Finland, which indicated how Peace Now intended to use the grant. This included "regular bi-monthly ground surveys to be conducted with the purpose of documenting construction in Jewish communities."
Also included in the grant was a provision for aerial photography: “Twice a month a light plane is rented in order to allow ‘settlement watch’ staff to ascertain the extent of ongoing physical expansion in existing settlements. Once a baseline survey is completed, subsequent surveys can be used to measure expansion using GIS satellite positioning overlays.” The document stated that this “mechanism will yield tangible graphic and quantitative data for the public.”
Peace Now stipulated that the grant of 50,000 dollars would be used in the following manner: "$17,000 Coordinator, $13,000 Jeep, $20,000 Aerial Surveys." The report stated that "funding is necessary to support the staff and rent the vehicles for aerial photography.
In the report given to Finland, Peace Now chose to define itself as an “educational foundation” and indicated that they also receive $100,000 from Americans for Peace Now and 150,000 Euros from “European Foundations” for their “settlement watch project.”
A spokesperson for Peace Now told Bedein that the "European Foundations" mentioned in their grant request to the Finnish government were actually funds from the European Union. “In other words, from other foreign European governments,” said Bedein, “few of which have been favorable to Israel's plight in the war on terror. Far from being an indigenous Israeli organization, it is obvious that Peace Now actually acts as an agent for foreign governments.”
The Israel Penal Code for Espionage was distributed to Knesset Interior Committees. Clause 3 of that code defines "photography of sensitive areas of Israel for any foreign power" as an act of espionage, punishable by ten years imprisonment if convicted.
Dr. Yuri Stern, Chairman of the Knesset Interior Committee, announced that he would ask his legal counsel to examine the matter and report back to the committee if there were indeed grounds for application of the Israel Penal Code's special clauses on espionage against Peace Now.
“The Peace Now settlement expansion maps do not only wind up in the hands of European governments and they do not only include the civilian expansion,” Bedein warns. “The Peace Now settlement expansion maps also include military installations and the maps are featured in all PLO offices. Israeli army bases have been attacked and Israeli soldiers killed. These are the sons and daughters of Israel drafted to protect the country, not, for the most part, even professional soldiers.”
Bedein went on to describe an extremely disturbing incident involving the “settlement-watch” team. “In late May, 2002 a settlement watch group organized by the ‘Christian Peace Makers Team’ reported to its e-mail list that it had successfully photographed the fence surrounding the Carmei Tzur settlement,” Bedein said. “The CPT proudly reported that it had shown several breaches in the fence. The next day, the CSM met with the Fateh (Arafat's mainstream terror group) in Bethlehem. Two days later, late at night, armed members of the Fateh infiltrated the Carmei Tzur settlement at the precise breach that the CPT had photographed. The Fateh used that breach to murder a civilian couple in their bed. The wife was eight months pregnant. “
A decision from the Knesset Committee is expected in coming weeks. “The decision will now rest with Israel's legal system,” concluded Bedein, “whether and how to enforce the espionage clauses of the Israel Penal Code for those organizations who choose to photograph the most sensitive landscapes of Israel on the payroll and at the behest of foreign governments.”
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