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NUCLEAR
Nuclear power plant shuts down after lightning strikes
Bombing the Panhandle Fighting the Pentagon in Rural Florida
US nuclear reprocessing shipment heads through France by road
India won't sign NPT, at least for now
Pakistan's nuclear bona fides
Iran will keep nuclear technology
Nuclear quest said to be benign
Iran To Launch First Homemade Satellite
Iran to further improve Shahab-3 missile
U.S. 'Almost All Wrong' on Weapons
U.S. Report Finds Iraqis Eliminated Illicit Arms in 90's
Saddam worked secretly on WMDs
Only Hussein Had Full Picture
Japanese FM presses case for reducing US military presence
Russian Foreign Minister May Discuss Missiles with Iran
Russia, Iran to Continue Nuke Cooperation
Russia Rejects Nuclear Criticism
A Terror Attack, Coming Soon to a Plant Near You
Plutonium: rising terror threat
IAEA Chief ElBaradei Calls for Stronger Global Security Framework
NRC SETS SCHEDULE FOR REVIEW OF USEC APPLICATION;
TVA nuclear reactor needs $200 million repair
Agency hunts new site to store nuclear waste
MILITARY
Sailor dies as crippled Canadian submarine keeps drifting off Ireland
Blair: Sudan Agrees to Withdraw Troops, Militias in Darfur
France, Germany vie for Indian submarines deal: report
U.S. warns EU against arms trade with China
Northrop Grumman Conducts First Flight of First Navy Global Hawk
French anger at Duelfer report charges over Iraq corruption
Sadr militia offers arms-for-prisoners exchange with Iraqi government
Lies, Damned Lies, and Bush's Iraq Statistics
Fallujah Group Comes to Table Talks Also Underway in Sadr City
Rockets strike Baghdad hotel housing foreigners
Rockets Hit Hotel in Baghdad;
Sharon Aide Says Goal of Gaza Plan Is to Halt Road Map
Israeli Aide Hints That Gaza Exit Would Freeze Peace Plan
NATO Obstacles Delay Training of Iraqi Force
US to press allies for quicker action on meeting NATO mission requirements
Car Bomb Kills 39 in Pakistan
Separate Space Military Force Has Few Supporters at Pentagon
Brazil In Space: Gaudenzi Plots A Strategy
Israel Holding 25 U.N. Workers
CIA releases oil for food 'secret lists'
Pacific Command Nominee Withdraws; Army Pick Questioned
Water Probe Backs Marine Corps Defense
U.S. Extends Troops' Exit From South Korea
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Secret Rule Requiring ID for Flights at Center of Court Battle
Times Reporter Is Held in Contempt in Leak Inquiry
After Convictions, the Undoing of a U.S. Terror Prosecution
7 Dissenters on U.S. Court Cannot Stop an Execution
Conspiracy Theories Flourish on the Internet
Intelligence Bill Passed by Senate
Senate Approves 9/11 Bill at Odds With House Version
Army Denies Detainee-Release Remark
POLITICS
DeLay Draws Third Rebuke
Ethics Rebuke to DeLay Prompts Democratic Calls for Ouster
Pair Under Inquiry May Face Tribal Action
War's Rationales Are Undermined
Timing of Report Called Inspector's Decision
Bush's Case for War Crumbles
Urging Fact-Checking, Cheney Got Site Wrong
For the Record
Cheney Says Report Finding No Illicit Arms in Iraq Justifies War
Saddam Hussein Sowed Confusion About Iraq's Arsenal as a Tactic of War
FBI Seizes Indymedia Servers
2005: Annus Horribilis
Bush defends Iraq invasion in face of new weapons report
Lawmakers slam White House after long search yields no Iraqi WMD
Benefits and Costs of the U.S. Government's War Making
American Politician's Moral Blind Spot
ENERGY
Coalition Urges Doubled Federal Spending on Renewables
ACTIVISTS
Israel greater nuclear threat than Iran: Israeli whistleblower Vanunu
Reject Draft Slavery
Charges Dropped In Antiwar March
Prosecutors Won't Pursue Cases of 227 in Disputed Protest
Campaign Journal: Getting Out the Vote
DEBATES, DUELFER, & ALUMINUM TUBES
Charges Dropped In Antiwar March
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Nuclear power plant shuts down after lightning strikes
10/7/2004
(AP)
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2004-10-07-kansas-zap_x.htm
BURLINGTON, Kan. - Wolf Creek Generating Station officials Thursday were investigating the cause of an emergency shutdown at the nuclear power plant.
A spokeswoman said the plant automatically shut down after a lightning storm moved through Coffey County, about 50 miles south of Topeka. Thunderstorms moved through much of eastern Kansas throughout the day.
Jeannene Ryan said workers were still investigating whether lighting was the cause of the outage, which occurbed shortly before noon. Ryan said there was no indication when the plant would resume generating electricity.
The nuclear reactor is jointly owned by Westar Energy and Kansas City Power & Light.
-------- depleted uranium
Bombing the Panhandle Fighting the Pentagon in Rural Florida
counterpunch.org
By BRUCE K. GAGNON
October 7, 2004
http://www.counterpunch.org/gagnon10072004.html
JI have just returned from a one-day trip to Perry, Florida to speak to a gathering of concerned citizens who are organizing to stop the placement of a new bombing range in their rural community. It was one of the most inspiring trips that I have ever made.
Perry is up in the Florida panhandle, just south of the capital city of Tallahassee. The region is called the nature coast as Taylor county touches the Gulf of Mexico and has several key rivers that run through its pine tree forests to the gulf. The county has a relatively small population as Florida goes and that is one reason the Pentagon sees it as a good place to put a bombing range.
There is a bombing range already in the region, just further west at Eglin AFB near Ft Walton Beach. I lived there while in high school when my father was stationed at Eglin and I hiked through the middle of the bombing range as an explorer scout. It is one of the largest military bases in the nation but population has grown near the base to the point where the noise from the bombing range has begun to draw complaints. Most recently the Mother of all Bombs (MOAB) was tested at Eglin. The MOAB is the most powerful non-nuclear bomb ever created that creates a mushroom cloud and shockwaves similar to a small nuclear explosion.
Rural Taylor County already has huge problems. The Buckeye paper mill has been contaminating the Fenholloway River that flows into the Gulf. Long ago classified as an industrial river, it is essentially dead and dumps toxic pollution into the Gulf. Groundwater contamination in Perry has long been a result and one local activist, Joy Towles Ezell, has been working to organize people in their company controlled town for years. Joy is a fifth generation Taylor County resident who has now taken on the military over the bombing range.
I met Joy years ago when I worked for the Florida Coalition for Peace & Justice. We tried to support her work around the paper mill and she supported our efforts to alert people when cruise missiles were fired from Navy ships in the Gulf that flew over the panhandle and then crashed into the Eglin bombing range. Before the meeting Tuesday night Joy showed me a letter she wrote to then Gov. Lawton Chiles in 1991 on our behalf protesting the cruise missile tests. Years later when I organized a 700-mile Walk for the Earth from the Everglades to Tallahassee we camped on her land outside of Perry and held a rally at the paper mill. My son had a great time riding one of her prized mules while we were there.
Fifty local residents gathered Tuesday night in the back room at the Chaparral restaurant. The first thing Joy did when we arrived was make two of us go out front and put up on the portable advertising sign the words "Don't Bomb Nature Coast Meeting 7:00 pm" just below the words "Country Buffet."
The first speaker was Dr. Ronald Saff from Florida State University in Tallahassee who is an expert on coal fired power plant pollution. In addition to the paper mill and the bombing range, there are also plans to build a coal power plant in Taylor County. The decision has been made to turn the county into a wasteland, a sacrifice area.
Taylor County is your basic southern, rural, conservative place. People vote Republican and they don't take to outsiders very well. They don't do radical politics either. That is what made the meeting Tuesday night so special.
These 50 folks who gathered were retired school teachers, good church goers, the local industrial development officer, well dressed, quiet and concerned. One of them, a refined southern woman, Republican and Episcopalian, had been in the group that the Air Force recently flew to Eglin so they could see how nice the bombing range looked. The Taylor County delegation was promised that depleted uranium would not be used in their county. Joy was not invited to go along on the trip.
The Eglin AFB bombing range has been testing depleted Uranium (DU) and since 1973 over 220,000 pounds of DU penetrators were expended there. Cruise missiles that crashed on the Eglin range carried DU as ballast in the nose cones in place of a warhead. After so-called "clean-up" a public health assessment at Eglin estimates that 90-95% of the DU remains in the soil.
People in Taylor County have been told that cruise missiles will be tested over their heads and that the weapons will circle around in Alabama and come back to the proposed bombing range to crash land. The military "needs" the Taylor County range they say because they need to practice flying cruise missiles off ships in the Gulf of Mexico. The Pentagon has been telling the residents that the tests are practice for "missile defense" as part of homeland security. A pro-bombing range group called "Citizens for Homeland Security" has been set up but residents say it is just a couple of those who are involved in the money trail behind the bombing range and the coal plant.
I told the residents that it was time to redefine the term "homeland security." I asked how secure they were when their water, air and land was becoming so contaminated that they future generations could not live there? I also told them cruise missiles were first-strike, sneak attack weapons that have nothing to do with "defense." I told them cruise missiles are part of a preemptive military policy that violates international law. I asked them how they'd feel if another country launched sneak attack weapons onto the U.S.?
The local Rotary Club has been offered a gift of $10,000 if they will support the bombing range. The county government has been offered $40 million. Local hunters have been promised continued access to the range so they can hunt deer and wild boar on the land. In spite of all that the local residents are organizing and have forced a non-binding referendum on the question on the November ballot. They think they will win the vote but fear the county will agree to the range anyway.
The folks have yard signs, buttons, bumperstickers and will have a booth at the up-coming forest service "Forest Festival" and draws 20,000 from the region. They keep letters to the editor flowing into their local paper in order to combat new rumors put out by the military.
The meeting ended with Joy calling Vieques, Puerto Rico and getting one of the leaders of their long and successful campaign to close down the military bombing range on their beautiful island. I can't describe the feeling to listen to Robert Rabin as Joy held the microphone up to her cell phone. I looked around the room at the people as they deeply listened as Robert told the story how the Navy dropped a bomb on a Navy building killing one of their own security guards. A moan went through the room like a knife through the heart. The Taylor County community had been promised by the military that they never have accidents. It was incredible to hear Robert use the word love a dozen times to describe the core of their campaign against the Navy and how they used non-violent civil disobedience. The people just listened and after his 15 minute talk they applauded with great vigor.
There is nothing like life experience to change people. The folks in Taylor County are changing rapidly. One woman, a life long Christian and good Republican, told me she'd never vote for another Republican again. (I couldn't help but think how stupid the Bush administration is to bring this bombing range issue up right before the November election in a state where EVERY VOTE really counts.)
At the end of the meeting the people asked me two things. What more can we do and do you think we can win? I told them that the people in Vieques won because they became a "pain in the ass" and they had to do the same. I also told them they could not do this alone, that they needed to send folks out around the state to educate others about the issue. I acknowledged two people in the audience from the Florida Coalition for Peace & Justice (John Linnehan from Jacksonville and Bob Tancig from Gainesville. Bob is the new director of the organization. John had picked me up at the Jacksonville airport and drove me to Perry.) They pledged the support of the Florida Coalition.
I urge others to send a message of solidarity to Joy and the folks in Taylor County. They could use some encouragement and some hope. I know they have just given me a bunch of it. You can reach Joy Towles Ezell at hope@gtcom.net
This is how America will change.
Bruce K. Gagnon is Coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space. He can be reached at: globalnet@mindspring.com
-------- europe
US nuclear reprocessing shipment heads through France by road
CHERBOURG, France (AFP)
Oct 07, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041007031948.166j5r2v.html
A lorry suspected to be carrying a shipment of plutonium from US weapons arsenals, to be reprocessed in southeast France, left a retreatment plant in the country's north under heavy escort early Thursday, a French television journalist at the scene said.
The 140 kilogrammes (300 pounds) of radioactive material had arrived without incident in the northern port of Cherbourg early Wednesday aboard a British vessel .
Police threw a heavy escort around as it was offloaded from the ship adespite protests from environmental activists.
A procession of trucks, accompanied by police vans and motorbike outriders, then took the radioactive cargo to the nearby retreatment plant in La Hague, run by the French state company Areva.
A French court on Tuesday issued an injunction banning the activists from approaching within 100 metres (yards) from the cargo on land, and 300 metres at sea.
The transport vessel left North Carolina, on the eastern seaboard of the United States, on September 20, with another British vessel as escort.
After initial treatment at La Hague, the plutonium was to be taken by road 1,200 kilometres (720 miles) across France to the reprocessing plant in the southeastern town of Cadarache.
There, it will be transformed into two tonnes of fuel used in civilian power plants known as mixed oxide, or Mox, and returned to the United States.
Greenpeace activists, who have denounced the long transport route as particularly dangerous for such a deadly cargo, on Tuesday blocked for several hours a road along which the nuclear cargo was due to be taken to La Hague.
-------- india / pakistan
India won't sign NPT, at least for now
NEW DELHI, (UPI)
Oct. 7, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/upi/2004/1007-130505-india-nuclear.html
India has once again ruled out signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, at least for now.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said India is a responsible nuclear power and the time may not be right for New Delhi to sign the NPT.
I don't know whether the circumstances are ripe right now for us to sign that (NPT). But we are voluntarily fulfilling all the commitments that go with being a responsible nuclear power acting with due restraint, Singh said at a joint news conference with visiting German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in the Indian capital.
We are a nuclear power. We are a responsible nuclear power, Singh said, adding, We have an impeccable record in export control, and we would like to work with like-minded countries on non-proliferation issues.
The premier said that India acted with self-restraint, and it was committed to no-first use. India in any case fulfilled the commitments of a responsible nuclear power, Singh said.
Earlier this week, Defense Minister Pranab Mukherjee also said that India had a credible nuclear deterrence in place.
Whatever is needed to safeguard the country and to ensure effective deterrence, in line with our nuclear doctrine of 'no first use,' has been done, Mukherjee said.
Germany was one of the several nations across the world that was shocked by India's nuclear tests in 1998 that invited a series of economic sanctions against New Delhi.
While the United States lifted most of its sanctions when India sided with its war against terror in Afghanistan in 2001, other nations have been gradually removing trade embargoes on New Delhi.
With India emerging as an economic giant and one of world's largest market, many nations want to benefit the economic scenario by entering into bilateral trade with world's second-most populous nation.
Schroeder's two-day visit is also aimed at bolstering trade ties between India and Germany.
The chancellor sounded confident that last year's $6.16 billion record bilateral trade figures could be surpassed, saying the German industry is impatient to invest in India, and trade between the two countries could be doubled within five years.
We have to convince our entrepreneurs that it will be beneficial to invest in India, the world's largest democracy and a market of 1 billion people, the chancellor said.
I am sure the courageous reforms Prime Minister Manmohan Singh initiated a decade ago will attract more foreign direct investments, which is in our interest, Schroeder said.
Singh, who became prime minister in May, is regarded as the father of economic reforms that he launched in 1991 as finance minister.
New Delhi reciprocated Schroeder's gesture. India attaches special importance to its relations with Germany and is eager to expand and intensify bilateral relations to a level befitting the strategic relations between the two countries, a foreign ministry statement said.
Prime Minister Singh said his government would remove all hurdles to attract more foreign investments, including that from Germany.
In the months and years to come, we will work together with all like-minded countries to remove all the obstacles that come in the way of increased German investment and technology flows and in promoting a harmonious trading relationship, Singh said.
Both India and Germany support each other in their common objective of finding a permanent berth in the U.N. Security Council.
We are both champions of a multilateral approach in international politics and would work for a further strengthening of the United Nations, the visiting chancellor said.
We have promised each other that we will support each other for a possible candidacy on the Security Council, Deutsche Welle Radio quoted Schroeder as saying.
The current members of the Security Council's five permanent veto-wielding members are France, England, United States, China and Russia.
The chancellor will also visit Vietnam, Pakistan and Afghanistan as part of his Asia tour.
----
Pakistan's nuclear bona fides
October 07, 2004
Washington Times
Letters to the Editor
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20041006-101936-9013r.htm
The Op-Ed column "Iran, Pakistan and nukes," by Wilson John (Monday), is mischievous in its content and motivated by malice to malign the leadership in Pakistan over the mercenary activity of Abdul Qadeer Khan and his nuclear-technology black market.
No less than the president of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, has publicly and vigorously condemned his behavior, and the United States and other powers have praised Pakistan for the transparency of the energetic investigation of Mr. Khan's illegal nuclear-technology-proliferation activity.
Mr. Khan is under house arrest as debriefing of his nuclear black market continues. The discovery process has to be thorough and time-consuming so that all those involved can be brought to justice in the interest of the safety of the world.
Already, Pakistan, to its credit, has shared initial investigative information and data with the International Atomic Energy Agency, which has in turn praised Pakistan for its efforts.
One thing certainly is clear: No one should doubt Gen. Musharraf's bona fides on this issue, and until the investigation is concluded, allegations against any institution of Pakistan and speculation about the involvement of Pakistani officials remain just that.
Regurgitating allegations or innuendos is irresponsible and objectionable.
TALAT WASEEM Press counselor Embassy of Pakistan Washington
-------- iran
Iran will keep nuclear technology "at any cost": former president
TEHRAN (AFP)
Oct 07, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041007115423.y3zbjj68.html
Iran will hang on to its sensitive nuclear technology "at any cost" despite pressure from the United States and the Europeans, powerful former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said Thursday.
"The United States and Europe absolutely do not want us to possess nuclear technology but we are determined to keep this technology at any cost," he was quoted as saying by the official news agency IRNA.
He added that "giving up this legitimate right would bring an historical shame that our leadership would never be able to erase".
"A people that is ready for sacrifice cannot fail. We are fighters ready to fight," said Rafsanjani, who now heads Iran's top political arbitration body, the Expediency Council.
On September 18, the board of the International Atomic Energy Agencycalled on Iran to "immediately" widen a suspension of enrichment to include all uranium enrichment-related activities -- such as making centrifuges, converting yellowcake into UF6 feed gas, and constructing a heavy water reactor.
Iran, facing a November 25 deadline, risks being referred to the UN Security Council if it fails to comply.
In addition, the three main European powers -- Britian, France and Germany -- would like Iran to give up its work on the nuclear fuel cycle, a process that can be used to make fuel for atomic energy or nuclear weapons.
Fuel cycle work is permitted under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), of which Iran is a signatory, if for peaceful purposes. Iran insists it only wants to generate nuclear power to meet growing domestic energy demands and free up its huge oil and gas resources for export.
----
Nuclear quest said to be benign
October 07, 2004
By Sharon Behn
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041006-113608-8196r.htm
Iran's minister of finance said yesterday that his country's quest for nuclear energy is an integral part of its plan to become a regional economic powerhouse and has nothing to do with offensive weapons.
There is intense international debate about Iran's need for an indigenous nuclear-energy program, given its oil reserves, and observers say that unemployment is more likely driving the need to open the economy.
A top Iranian nuclear official said yesterday in Tehran that the country already had processed several tons of the gas needed to enrich uranium, a necessary step toward producing nuclear fuel, or weapons.
"We have used part of the raw uranium we had. A few tons of yellowcake has been converted ," Hossein Mousavian, Iran's top delegate to the International Atomic Energy Agency told the Associated Press.
The United States repeatedly has accused Iran of trying to build a nuclear bomb and has tried to get the international community to bring Tehran before the United Nations for its nuclear activities.
Iran, a net oil producer, insists its nuclear efforts are peaceful.
"We are not interested in employing nuclear weapons," Iranian Minister of Finance Tahmasb Mazaheri said during an interview at the Iranian Interests Section in Washington. "We are just seeking the peaceful utilization of this energy [and] in fact, it has many economic impacts."
Mr. Mazaheri said that Iran was in line with the IAEA, and had opened its industry to IAEA inspectors and monitors. The U.N. nuclear watchdog has agreed that, so far, Iran does not appear to have produced any weapons-grade uranium.
Although Iran is among the world's top-10 oil producers, Mr. Mazaheri said the country wanted to diversify its energy base to support its growing economy.
"We should replace oil revenues with another source of energy, because it is a political commodity; so we should employ some other instruments to make the development of the country eaisier," the minister argued.
He said that despite U.S. sanctions, Iran's economy had grown over the past four years at a rate of 5.5 percent, creating roughly 550,000 jobs a year.
Standards of living had risen and women were participating in the economy to a greater degree than in neighboring countries, he said.
"The government policy is one of privatization, and to move to a competitive, market-oriented economy," said Mr. Mazaheri. "The engine of the economy will be the private sector in close interaction with the international markets."
"Our aim is to be the first-ranking economy in the region," Mr. Mazaheri said.
But Cliff Kupchan, vice president of the Nixon Center, said Iran was under tremendous pressure to provide jobs for its youth, and as yet there had been little actual movement away from the state-dominated economy.
"Sixty percent of the population is under 30 and unemployment is high," said Mr. Kupchan. "Their main Achilles heel is providing jobs."
He added that most observers of Iran say the country has yet to lay out a convincing plan to move from a state-dominated economy to a private-sector-led economy.
The United States applied sanctions in 1996 prohibiting American companies from investing in Iran in response to Tehran's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and missile delivery systems, as well as its support for terrorism.
But Mr. Mazaheri said foreign companies have filled the gap.
France, Germany and Italy are the leading foreign investors in Iran, pouring money into oil and gas as well as the food processsing, petrochemical and industrial sectors.
----
Iran To Launch First Homemade Satellite
Tehran, Iran (UPI)
Oct 7, 2004
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/microsat-04p.html
An Iranian military official said Thursday his country would launch its first homemade satellite into space during the next Persian year, which starts in March.
Deputy Defense Minister for Space Affairs Nasser Maliki was quoted by the Iranian News Agency as saying the satellite would orbit the earth at low altitudes varying between 100 and 400 kilometers (about 60 to 250 miles).
It is a small satellite which will prove the capacity of the Islamic Republic of Iran in space technology, Maliki said, noting that only 10 countries in the world possess satellites at present.
He said Iran also improved its missile production and technology in recent years and is manufacturing tens of surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles with longer ranges.
We are on the threshold of entering the international space club ... Until 1998 we were producing short-range missiles and today we are into the production of long-range surface-to-surface missiles like Shihab 1 and 2 which deter the enemy, he said.
----
Iran to further improve Shahab-3 missile
TEHRAN (AFP)
Oct 07, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041007101122.aynbft1t.html
Iran intends to further improve its Shahab-3 missiles, which already have a claimed range of 2,000 kilometresmiles), a senior official was quoted as saying Thursday.
"The Shahab-3 missile has a range of 2,000 kilometres," Nasser Maleki, deputy director of Iran's aerospace industry organisation, was quoted as saying.
"Very certainly we are going to improve our Shahab-3 missile and all of our other missiles."
When asked if Iran intended to produce longer-range ballistic missiles -- such as a Shahab-4 -- a device that would involve a two-stage propulsion system and possibly bring European capitals within range -- the official replied only that "we are at the level of the Shahab-3".
Steady progress made by Iran on its ballistic missile programme is a major cause for concern for the international community, already alarmed over the country's nuclear activities.
On August 11, Iran tested an upgraded version of its Shahab-3 missile, which is believed to be based on a North Korean design.
Previous figures had put the missile's range at between 1,300 and 1,700 kilometres, already bringing arch enemy Israel and US bases in the region well within range.
While the country has announced it has upgraded the Shahab-3, it has denied it is working on a Shahab-4.
-------- iraq / inspections
U.S. 'Almost All Wrong' on Weapons
Report on Iraq Contradicts Bush Administration Claims
By Dana Priest and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, October 7, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A12115-2004Oct6?language=printer
The 1991 Persian Gulf War and subsequent U.N. inspections destroyed Iraq's illicit weapons capability and, for the most part, Saddam Hussein did not try to rebuild it, according to an extensive report by the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq that contradicts nearly every prewar assertion made by top administration officials about Iraq.
Charles A. Duelfer, whom the Bush administration chose to complete the U.S. investigation of Iraq's weapons programs, said Hussein's ability to produce nuclear weapons had "progressively decayed" since 1991. Inspectors, he said, found no evidence of "concerted efforts to restart the program."
The findings were similar on biological and chemical weapons. While Hussein had long dreamed of developing an arsenal of biological agents, his stockpiles had been destroyed and research stopped years before the United States led the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Duelfer said Hussein hoped someday to resume a chemical weapons effort after U.N. sanctions ended, but had no stocks and had not researched making the weapons for a dozen years.
Duelfer's report, delivered yesterday to two congressional committees, represents the government's most definitive accounting of Hussein's weapons programs, the assumed strength of which the Bush administration presented as a central reason for the war. While previous reports have drawn similar conclusions, Duelfer's assessment went beyond them in depth, detail and level of certainty.
"We were almost all wrong" on Iraq, Duelfer told a Senate panel yesterday.
President Bush, Vice President Cheney and other top administration officials asserted before the U.S. invasion that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, had chemical and biological weapons and maintained links to al Qaeda affiliates to whom it might give such weapons to use against the United States.
But after extensive interviews with Hussein and his key lieutenants, Duelfer concluded that Hussein was not motivated by a desire to strike the United States with banned weapons, but wanted them to enhance his image in the Middle East and to deter Iran, against which Iraq had fought a devastating eight-year war. Hussein believed that "WMD helped save the regime multiple times," the report said.
The report also provides a one-of-a-kind look at Hussein's personality. The former Iraqi leader participated in numerous interviews with one Arabic-speaking FBI interrogator. Hussein told his questioner he felt threatened by U.S. military power, but even then, he maintained a fondness for American movies and literature. One of his favorite books was Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea." He hoped for improved relations with the United States and, over several years, sent proposals through intermediaries to open a dialogue with Washington.
Hussein, the report concluded, "aspired to develop a nuclear capability" and intended to work on rebuilding chemical and biological weapons after persuading the United Nations to lift sanctions. But the report also notes: "The former regime had no formal written strategy or plan for the revival of WMD after sanctions. Neither was there an identifiable group of WMD policy makers or planners separate from Saddam" tasked to take this up once sanctions ended.
Among the most diplomatically explosive revelations was that Hussein had established a worldwide network of companies and countries, most of them U.S. allies, that secretly helped Iraq generate $11 billion in illegal income and locate, finance and import banned services and technologies. Among those named are officials or companies from Belarus, China, Lebanon, France, Indonesia, Jordan, Poland, Russia, Turkey, Syria, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen.
Duelfer said one of Hussein's main strategic goals was to persuade the United Nations to lift economic sanctions, which had devastated the country's economy and, along with U.N. inspections, had forced him to stop weapons programs. Even as Hussein became more adept at bypassing the sanctions, he worked to erode international support for them.
Democrats seized on the exhaustive report, which comes amid a presidential race dominated so far by the Iraq war, to argue that the administration misled the American public about the risk Hussein posed and then miscalculated the difficulties of securing postwar peace.
"Now we have a report today that there clearly were no weapons of mass destruction," Sen. John Edwards (N.C.), the Democratic vice presidential candidate, said in West Palm Beach, Fla. "All of that known, and Dick Cheney said again last night that he would have done everything the same. George Bush has said he would have done everything the same. . . . They are in a complete state of denial about what is happening in Iraq."
Neither Bush nor challenger John F. Kerry spoke directly about the report yesterday, though at a campaign appearance in Pennsylvania the president emphasized that Hussein was a threat to the United States.
"There was a risk -- a real risk -- that Saddam Hussein would pass weapons or materials or information to terrorist networks," Bush said. "In the world after September 11th, that was a risk we could not afford to take."
Supporters rallied around the administration, which has suffered a string of setbacks recently with revelations that the CIA had warned the White House about the strength of Iraqi insurgents, and from former Iraq administrator L. Paul Bremer, who said this week that the United States should have put more troops in Iraq during the invasion.
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) said: "We didn't have to find plans or weapons to see what happened when Saddam Hussein used chemical and biological weapons on his own people. So just because we can't find them and Saddam Hussein had 12 years to hide them doesn't mean he didn't have them and didn't use them."
But Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) said the report showed U.N. inspections and sanctions had worked in preventing Hussein from pursuing his weapons ambitions. "Despite the effort to focus on Saddam's desires and intentions, the bottom line is Iraq did not have either weapons stockpiles or active production capabilities at the time of the war."
Duelfer's report contradicted a number of specific claims administration officials made before the war.
It found, for example, that Iraq's "crash" program in 1991 to build a nuclear weapon before the Persian Gulf War was far from successful, and was nowhere near being months away from producing a weapon, as the administration asserted. Only micrograms of enriched uranium were produced and no weapon design was completed. The CIA and administration officials have said they were surprised by the advanced state of Iraq's pre-1991 nuclear program, which was discovered after the war, and therefore were more prone to overestimate Iraq's capability when solid proof was unavailable.
There also was no evidence that Iraq possessed or was developing a mobile biological weapons production system, an assertion Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and others made before the invasion. The two trailers that were found in early 2003 were "almost certainly designed and built . . . exclusively for the generation of hydrogen" gas.
Duelfer also found no information to support allegations that Iraq sought uranium from Africa or any other country after 1991, as Bush once asserted in a major speech before the invasion. The only two contacts with Niger that were discovered were an invitation to the president of Niger to visit Baghdad, and a visit to Baghdad by a Niger minister in 2001 seeking petroleum products for cash. There was one offer to Iraq of "yellowcake" uranium, and that was from a Ugandan businessman offering uranium from Congo. The deal was turned down, and the Ugandan was told that Baghdad was not interested because of the sanctions.
Nuclear Weapons
Despite the U.S. intelligence judgment that Iraq in 2002 had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program, Duelfer reported that after 1991, Baghdad's nuclear program had "progressively decayed." He added that the Iraq Survey Group investigators had found no evidence "to suggest concerted efforts to restart the program."
There was an attempt to keep nuclear scientists together and two scientists were discovered to have saved documents and technology related to the uranium enrichment program, but they appeared to be the exception.
Although some steps were taken that could have helped restart the nuclear program, using oil-for-food money, Duelfer concluded that his team "uncovered no indication that Iraq had resumed fissile material or nuclear weapons research and development activities since 1991."
Biological Weapons
Duelfer's report is the first U.S. intelligence assessment to state flatly that Iraq had secretly destroyed its biological weapons stocks in the early 1990s. By 1995, though, and under U.N. pressure, it abandoned its efforts.
The document rules out the possibility that biological weapons might have been hidden, or perhaps smuggled into another country, and it finds no evidence of secret biological laboratories or ongoing research that could be firmly linked to a weapons program.
Some biological "seed stocks" -- frozen samples of relatively common microbes such as bolutinum -- were found in the home of one Iraqi official last year. But the survey team said Iraq had "probably" destroyed any bulk quantities of germs it had at the height of the program in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The team also found no evidence of stocks of the smallpox virus, which the administration had claimed it had.
Chemical Weapons
Duelfer's report said that no chemical weapons existed and that there is no evidence of attempts to make such weapons over the past 12 years. Iraq retained dual-use equipment that could be used for such an effort.
"The issue is that he has chemical weapons, and he's used them," Cheney told CNN in March 2002. The National Intelligence Estimate said that "although we have little specific information on Iraq's CW stockpile, Saddam probably has stocked at least 100 metric tons and possibly as much as 500 MT of CW agents -- much of it added in the last year."
One of the reasons the intelligence community feared a chemical weapons arsenal was that U.N. inspectors said Iraq had not fully explained missing chemical agents during the 1990s. The report determined that unanswered questions were almost certainly the result of poor accounting.
Iraq's responses to U.N. inspectors regarding chemical weapons appear to have been truthful, and where incomplete, with differing recollections among former top officials, mostly the result of fading memories of when or how stockpiles were destroyed. Those were the identical reasons Iraq offered to U.N. inspectors before the war.
One of the key findings of the report is that "Saddam never abandoned his intentions to resume a chemical weapons effort when sanctions were lifted."
The evidence included in the report to back up claims of Hussein's intent is described as "extensive, yet fragmentary and circumstantial." The report quotes a single scientist who reached that conclusion in hindsight and based on information he learned from the U.S. inspection team long after U.S. troops had captured Iraq.
After 17 months of investigation, the U.S. team was able to find only 30 of 130 scientists identified with Iraq's pre-1991 chemical weapons programs. "None of those interviewed had any knowledge of chemical weapons programs" or knew of anyone involved in such work, according to the report. There was one exception, the reported noted, from a scientist who maintained he was asked to make a chemical agent, but that story was uncorroborated and there was no follow-up.
Delivery Systems
Iraq's secret quest to develop a more powerful missile was discovered and disrupted by U.N. weapons inspectors in the weeks before the U.S.-led invasion. In the 19 months since then, the survey team has uncovered more evidence suggesting that Hussein intended to use the Al Samoud 2 and other proposed missiles to extend the reach of his military beyond the country's borders.
Iraq was allowed to continue developing short-range missiles for self-defense under the terms of the U.N. agreement that ended the 1991 Gulf War. But the Al Samoud 2, which Iraq began building in 2001, was clearly designed for flights exceeding the U.N.-imposed 93-mile limit, the new report says. And Duelfer's team found blueprints for missiles with potential ranges up to 10 times as far.
The team "uncovered Iraqi plans or designs for three long-range ballistic missiles with ranges from 400 to 1,000 kilometers (250 to 621 miles), and for a 1,000-km-range (932-mile) cruise missile," the report says. It adds that none of the planned missiles was in production, and only one of them had progressed beyond the design phase.
The report concludes that Iraq "clearly intended to reconstitute long-range delivery systems," and maintains that the missiles, if built, could potentially have been combined with biological, chemical or nuclear warheads, if Hussein acquired them.
At the same time, the missile that U.S. military planners had most feared in the run-up to the invasion appears to have vanished. While Bush administration officials had asserted that Hussein had hidden a small arsenal of Scud missiles, Duelfer said interviews and documents suggest Iraq "did not retain such missiles after 1991."
Staff writers Dafna Linzer and Joby Warrick contributed to this report.
--------
INSPECTOR'S JUDGMENT
U.S. Report Finds Iraqis Eliminated Illicit Arms in 90's
October 7, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/07/politics/07intel.html?oref=login&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Oct. 6 - Iraq had destroyed its illicit weapons stockpiles within months after the Persian Gulf war of 1991, and its ability to produce such weapons had significantly eroded by the time of the American invasion in 2003, the top American inspector for Iraq said in a report made public Wednesday.
The report by the inspector, Charles A. Duelfer, intended to offer a near-final judgment about Iraq and its weapons, said Iraq, while under pressure from the United Nations, had "essentially destroyed'' its illicit weapons ability by the end of 1991, with its last secret factory, a biological weapons plant, eliminated in 1996.
Mr. Duelfer said that even during those years, Saddam Hussein had aimed at "preserving the capability to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction when sanctions were lifted.'' But he said he had found no evidence of any concerted effort by Iraq to restart the programs.
The findings uphold Iraq's prewar insistence that it did not possess chemical or biological weapons. They also show the enormous distance between the Bush administration's own prewar assertions, based on reports by American intelligence agencies, and what a 15-month inquiry by American investigators found since the war.
Mr. Duelfer said he had concluded that between 1991 and 2003, Mr. Hussein had in effect sacrificed Iraq's illicit weapons to the larger goal of winning an end to United Nations sanctions. But he also argued that Mr. Hussein had used the period to try to exploit avenues opened by the sanctions, especially the oil-for-food program, to lay the groundwork for a plan to resume weapons production if sanctions were lifted.
In addition, the report concluded that Mr. Hussein had deliberately sought to maintain ambiguity about whether it had illicit weapons, mainly as a deterrent to Iran, its rival.
The American inspector presented his conclusions to Congress on Wednesday, including highly charged public testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
With Iraq figuring prominently in the last dash toward the presidential election, Democrats argued that the report had undermined the administration's case for war, while the White House and its Republican allies called attention to elements in the report that highlighted potential dangers posed by Mr. Hussein's government.
"There is no doubt that Saddam was a threat to our nation, and there is no doubt that he had W.M.D. capability, and the Duelfer report is very clear on these points,'' said James Wilkinson, a White House deputy national security adviser, using the abbreviation for weapons of mass destruction.
The three-volume report, totaling 918 pages, represented the most authoritative attempt so far to unravel the mystery posed by Iraq between 1991 and 2003, beginning with the point after the Persian Gulf war when Iraq still possessed chemical and biological weapons and an active nuclear-weapons program. The conclusions suggest that the main war aim cited by the White House in March 2003 - to disarm Iraq, which American intelligence agencies said possessed chemical and biological weapons and was reconstituting its nuclear program - was based on an outdated view of Iraq's weapons stockpiles.
At the time of the American invasion, Mr. Duelfer said in the report, Iraq did not possess chemical and biological weapons, was not seeking to reconstitute its nuclear program, and was not making any active effort to gain those abilities. Even if Iraq had sought to restart its weapons programs in 2003, the report said, it could not have produced militarily significant quantities of chemical weapons for at least a year, and it would have required years to produce a nuclear weapon.
"Saddam Hussein ended the nuclear program in 1991 following the gulf war,'' Mr. Duelfer said in the report. It said American inspectors in Iraq had "found no evidence to suggest concerted efforts to restart the program.''
After a closed briefing by Mr. Duelfer to the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the top Democrat on the committee, described the report as "a devastating account.''
"The administration would like the American public to believe that Saddam's intention to build a weapons program, regardless of actual weapons or the capability to produce weapons, justified invading Iraq,'' Mr. Rockefeller said in a statement. "In fact, we invaded a country, thousands of people have died, and Iraq never posed a grave or growing danger.''
In accounting for what happened beginning in 1991, Mr. Duelfer said Mr. Hussein made a fundamental decision after the Persian Gulf war to get rid of Iraq's illicit weapons and accept the destruction of its weapons-producing facilities as part of an effort to win an end to sanctions imposed by the United Nations to achieve those ends.
Although Mr. Duelfer concluded that Mr. Hussein had intended to restart his programs, the report acknowledged that that conclusion was based more on inference than solid evidence. "The regime had no formal written strategy or plan for the revival of W.M.D. after sanctions,'' it said.
The report notes that its conclusions were drawn in part from interrogation of Mr. Hussein in his prison cell outside Baghdad. Mr. Duelfer, a special adviser to the director of central intelligence, said he had concluded that Mr. Hussein had deliberately sought to maintain ambiguity about whether Iraq possessed illicit weapons, primarily as a deterrent to Iran, Iraq's adversary in an eight-year war in the 1980's.
It was not until a series of meetings in late 2002, just months before the American invasion, that Mr. Hussein finally acknowledged to senior officers and officials of his government that Iraq did not possess illicit weapons, Mr. Duelfer said.
The report said American investigators had found clandestine laboratories in the Baghdad area used by the Iraqi Intelligence Service between 1991 and 2003 to conduct research and to test various chemicals and poisons, including ricin. As previously reported, it said those efforts appeared to be intended primarily for use in assassinations, not to inflict mass casualties.
Mr. Duelfer said in his report that Mr. Hussein never acknowledged in the course of the interrogations what had become of Iraq's illicit weapons. He said that American investigators had appealed to the former Iraqi leader to be candid in order to shape his legacy, but that Mr. Hussein had not been forthcoming.
The report said interviews with other former top Iraqi leaders had made clear that Mr. Hussein had left many of his top deputies uncertain until the eve of war about whether Iraq possessed illicit weapons. It said he seemed to be most concerned about a possible new attack by Iran, whose incursions into Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88 were fended off by Baghdad partly with the use of chemical munitions.
Mr. Duelfer said Iraq had tried to maintain the knowledge base necessary to restart an illicit weapons program. He said Iraq had essentially put its biological program "on the shelf," after its last production facility, Al Hakam, was destroyed by United Nations inspectors in 1996, and could have begun to produce biological questions in as little as a month if it had restarted its weapons program in 2003.
But the report said there were "no indications'' that Iraq was pursuing such a course, and it reported "a complete absence of discussion or even interest in biological weapons'' at the level of Mr. Hussein and his aides after the mid-1990's.
The report will almost certainly be the last complete assessment by the team led by Mr. Duelfer, which is known as the Iraq Survey Group. But he said he and the 1,200-member team would continue their work in Iraq for the time being. He said the team had not completely ruled out the possibility that some Iraqi weapons might have been smuggled out of Iraq to a neighboring country, like Syria.
The report did revise several earlier judgments, including a report by the Central Intelligence Agency in May 2003 that said mysterious trailers found in Iraq after the American invasion in 2003 were intended for use in a biological warfare program. Mr. Duelfer said that the trailers could not have been used for that purpose, and that their manufacturers "almost certainly designed and built the equipment exclusively for the generation of hydrogen,'' upholding claims by Iraqi officials that linked the trailers to weather balloons used for artillery practice.
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Saddam worked secretly on WMDs
October 07, 2004
By Guy Taylor
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20041007-014021-1051r.htm
Saddam Hussein's goal through the 1990s and until the 2003 U.S. invasion was to end U.N. sanctions on Iraq, while working covertly to restore the country's ability to produce weapons of mass destruction, a report by the chief U.S. weapons inspector says.
"Saddam wanted to re-create Iraq's WMD capability - which was essentially destroyed in 1991 - after sanctions were removed and Iraq's economy stabilized, but probably with a different mix of capabilities," the report said.
Charles A. Duelfer told the Senate Armed Services Committee in testimony yesterday that "Saddam sought to sustain the requisite knowledge base to restart the program eventually."
In the interim, Mr. Duelfer said, Saddam hoped to keep "the inherent capability to produce such weapons as circumstances permitted in the future."
Mr. Duelfer said that officials with the Iraq Survey Group continue to receive a "stream of reports about hidden WMD locations" and in one recent case turned up a "partially filled nerve agent container from a 122 mm rocket."
But, "like others recovered, [it] was from old pre-1991 stocks," he said, adding "despite these reports and finds, I still do not expect that militarily significant WMD stocks are cached in Iraq."
Mr. Duelfer was appointed chief weapons inspector in January after then-chief David Kay made headlines by asserting that prewar assessments of Iraq had been "almost all wrong."
The White House did not endorse Mr. Kay's findings at the time, saying the Iraq Survey Group had not completed its post-war search for weapons. Several senior Bush-administration officials, meanwhile, had touted Saddam's weapons "stockpiles" as a central reason for invading.
Mr. Duelfer yesterday said inspectors still cannot "definitively say whether or not WMD materials were transferred out of Iraq before the war," although he stressed how Iraq's ability to produce them weakened under the U.N. sanctions implemented after the 1991 Gulf war.
With Iraq's economy badly damaged and U.N. sanctions, Mr. Duelfer's report says, Saddam's plans for a skeletal weapons program that could be mobilized quickly led him to pursue the needed materials through illegal and indirect channels.
Starting in 1997 and peaking in 2001, he developed a giant smuggling operation that hinged on the establishment of "a network of Iraqi front companies, some with close relationships to high-ranking foreign-government officials," the report says.
Those officials, it says, "worked through their respective ministries, state-run companies and ministry-sponsored front companies to procure illicit goods, services and technologies for Iraq's WMD-related, conventional arms, and/or dual-use goods programs."
Syria was Iraq's "primary conduit for illicit imports" from late 2000 until the start of the U.S. invasion last year, according to the report, which also maintains that the Iraqi Intelligence Service set up front companies to buy prohibited arms from a Syrian totaling $1.2 billion.
"The central bank of Syria was the repository of funds used by Iraq to purchase goods and materials both prohibited and allowed under U.N. sanctions," the report says.
Totaling nearly 1,000-pages, the report includes a broad history of Saddam's regime, how he operated and held power through the Iran-Iraq war and the first war with the United States.
Mr. Duelfer noted that "given the nature of Iraqi governance, one should not look for much of an audit trail on WMD."
As a result, key findings on Iraq's efforts to finance and procure weapons and delivery systems, are based largely on interviews with senior Ba'ath Party officials detained in Iraq.
For example, former Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz and others "answered questions in writing several times, providing information on both the former regime and the mindset of those who ran it," according to the report.
Interviews with Saddam were conducted by a single "FBI person" and the "only thing" offered in exchange was a stake in shaping his legacy, according to an official familiar with the report.
Regarding nuclear weapons, Mr. Duelfer said that during the 12 years after the Persian Gulf war "Iraq's ability to produce a weapon decayed" and that "the time for Iraq to build a nuclear weapon tended to increase for the duration of the sanctions."
"Despite this decay," he said. "Saddam did not abandon his nuclear ambitions."
Regarding chemical weapons, the report outlines Saddam's belief that the extensive use of such weapons and of long-range ballistic missiles was key to Iraq's ability to avoid defeat in the eight-year war with Iran.
Mr. Duelfer also noted that Saddam "used chemical weapons for domestic purposes - in the late-80s against the Kurds and during the Shi'a uprisings after the 1991 war" - a point noted regularly by administration officials in justifying to critics the need to invade Iraq.
While Iraqi chemical-weapons activity "shifted from production to research and development of more potent and stabilized agents" after the Iran-Iraq war, Mr. Duelfer said that when U.N. sanctions were on Iraq, Saddam sought to sustain the knowledge base to restart the program eventually.
"With the infusion of funding and resources following acceptance of the oil-for-food program, Iraq effectively shortened the time that would be required to re-establish [chemical weapon] production capacity," Mr. Duelfer said. "By 2003, Iraq would have been able to produce mustard agent in a period of months and nerve agent in less than a year or two."
Mr. Duelfer said it is "still difficult to rule" on whether Iraq had a mobile biological-weapons production effort, but he noted that Iraq secretly destroyed stocks of biological weapons in 1991 and 1992, after having denied to weapons inspectors that it had such a program.
----
Only Hussein Had Full Picture
Thu Oct 7, 2004
By Bob Drogin and Mark Mazzetti,
Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=2026&ncid=2026&e=4&u=/latimests/20041007/ts_latimes/onlyhusseinhadfullpicture
WASHINGTON - Shortly before the U.S. bombing and invasion of Iraq last year, Saddam Hussein gathered his top generals together to share what came to them as astonishing news: The weapons that the United States was launching a war to remove did not exist.
"There was plenty of surprise when Saddam said, 'Sorry guys, we don't have any' " weapons of mass destruction to use against the invading forces, a senior U.S. intelligence official said.
The unexpected peek inside Hussein's inner circle in the days and weeks before the regime was toppled comes in a report by the CIA's Iraq Survey Group released Wednesday, as well as from Senate testimony Wednesday by Charles A. Duelfer, head of the survey group, and from a briefing for reporters by an official familiar with the interrogations of Hussein and his aides.
The new accounts contradict many U.S. assumptions about relations between Hussein and his senior aides, as well as American views on what Hussein was doing and how he saw the outside world before the invasion.
For example, many in the U.S. intelligence community had believed that Hussein's sycophantic generals kept him in the dark about the state of Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs - that is, that the dictator was misled by associates who told him what he wanted to hear.
Far from being misinformed, the report says, Hussein was micromanaging Iraq's weapons policy himself and kept even his most loyal aides from gaining a clear picture of what was going on - and, more important, not going on - with the program.
"Saddam's centrality to the regime's political structure meant that he was the hub of Iraqi WMD policy and intent," the report concluded.
His paranoia and his fascination with science and technology "meant that control of WMD development and its deployment was never far from his touch," it said.
Although the interrogation reports may shed new light on Hussein's role, they also raise a question: If Hussein understood that he had no stockpiles of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, why did he limit the activities of the United Nations inside Iraq, violate U.N. Security Council resolutions and defy the outside world from the end of the Persian Gulf War in 1991 until his regime was toppled in 2003?
Hussein often denied U.S. assertions that he possessed banned weapons in defiance of U.N. resolutions, but for years he also persisted in making cryptic public statements to perpetuate the myth that he actually did have them. The Iraq Survey Group believes that he continued making those statements long after he had secretly ordered the destruction of his stockpiles.
Based on the interrogations, it appears that Hussein underestimated how seriously the United States took the weapons issue, and he believed it was vital to his own survival that the outside world - especially Iran - think he still had them.
It was a strategy, Hussein has told his FBI interrogators during the last 10 months, that was aimed primarily at bluffing Iraq's neighbor to the east.
"The Iranian threat was very, very, palpable to him, and he didn't want to be second to Iran, and he felt he had to deter them. So he wanted to create the impression that he had more than he did," Duelfer, the Iraq Survey Group head, told members of the Senate on Wednesday.
And, the man known for colossal miscalculations made perhaps his greatest strategic blunder by refusing to believe that President Bush would make good on threats to forcibly remove him from power.
"He kept trying to bargain or barter, and he had not realized the nature of the ground shift in the international community," Duelfer said. "That was Saddam's intelligence failure."
Captured in December hiding in a hole in northern Iraq, Hussein is imprisoned at Camp Cropper, a U.S.-run facility at Baghdad's fortified airport. He spends much of his days writing, reading and tending to a solitary tree inside a walled courtyard on the camp grounds.
Yet despite reports that Hussein is delusional and often engrossed in romance novels, the senior U.S. official said he had shown himself in recent interrogations by an FBI agent to be lucid and even capable of appearing charismatic.
Before the interrogations began, Duelfer tried to determine what incentive U.S. officials could offer the ex-dictator to get him to cooperate. In the end, they decided to appeal to Hussein's vanity.
"The only thing we could offer was an opportunity to help shape his legacy," the official recalled. They asked Hussein whether he wanted "to be remembered by what these characters are saying about you" - referring to other captured Baathist officials who were talking to U.S. interrogators.
According to the report, Hussein told interrogators that two experiences in particular convinced him that Iraq's possession - or at least perceived possession - of banned weapons assured his survival.
During the late 1980s, when Iraq appeared to be losing its war against Iran, Hussein's outnumbered army managed to stave off fast-moving Iranian forces by firing more than 100,000 munitions containing mustard gas and other lethal blister agents and nerve gases. The chemical attacks caused as many as 80,000 Iranian casualties, according to U.N. reports, and ultimately led to a cease-fire.
Second, Hussein and his aides were convinced that their chemical and biological weapons saved the Baath Party regime after a U.S.-led military coalition forced Iraqi troops out of Kuwait in 1991. U.S. and allied troops halted their advance deep in southern Iraq, and Hussein and his regime unexpectedly were allowed to remain in power.
At the time, aides to then-President George H.W. Bush thought the reason Hussein had not used illicit weapons against the coalition was that Washington had delivered a clear warning that it would respond with overwhelming force, implying a nuclear attack if necessary.
Yet Hussein and his aides apparently read U.S. thinking differently. As they described it to interrogators, they thought Washington left him in power because U.S. officials knew of his orders to load and disperse his nerve gases and germ agents, and his orders that the weapons were to be used if U.S. troops entered Baghdad.
In the years after the Gulf War, the senior official said, Hussein became convinced that Washington would decide it was in its interest to deal with his regime because Iraq was large, secular, educated and had oil. That view may have been reinforced by the fact that during much of the Reagan administration, Washington supported Hussein as a counterweight to Iran.
The alliance became strained, however, and was ruptured when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990.
"He believed that ultimately the U.S. would come to deal with Baghdad," the official said. "The mistake he made was thinking he would still be in Baghdad."
The official predicted that Hussein would be "very compelling" when he was finally brought to trial in Baghdad for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
"He's looking forward to the stage, the theater, that the trial will offer him," he said. "Don't expect someone bug-eyed ... or waving his arms."
The Iraq Survey Group report also reveals a passion that Hussein had for certain aspects of Western culture, and how he personally related to certain fictional characters, such as Santiago in Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea."
In the story, the fisherman Santiago hooks a marlin that drags his boat out to sea. When the marlin dies, Santiago fights an ultimately futile battle with sharks that tear into the fish and reduce it to a skeleton.
"Saddam tended to characterize, in a very Hemingway-esque way, his life as a relentless struggle against overwhelming odds, but carried out with courage, perseverance and dignity," the report concludes.
"Much like Santiago, ultimately left with only the marlin's skeleton as the trophy of his success, to Saddam even a hollow victory was by his reckoning a real one."
-------- japan
Japanese FM presses case for reducing US military presence
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Oct 07, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041007205315.ah1g8qnk.html
Japanese Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura pressed the United States Thursday to reduce its military presence in Japan, saying it was "very important" and that it expected a "reasonable solution."
Machimura said after talks on the issue with US Secretary of State Colin Powell that Japan wanted "to lessen the excessive burden on especially Okinawa," where there was increasing resentment against US bases.
"That point is very important for us, so that we will continue and we will reach some conclusions in order to have a reasonable solution between two countries," the newly appointed Machimura told reporters, with Powell by his side.
Okinawa, captured by US forces in 1945 and returned to Japan in 1972, accounts for less than one percent of Japan's land mass but hosts about 65 percent of the 40,500 American military personnel in the country.
A series of crimes committed by US soldiers, as well as disputes over the ownership and use of the land on which US military facilities sit, have made Okinawa residents reluctant hosts.
Most recently, the crash of a US military helicopter on an Okinawan university campus in August revived anti-American sentiment and drew 30,000 protesters.
It was the largest anti-US military rally in Japan in nearly a decade.
Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi is "considering all possibilities" in Tokyo's attempt to reduce the US military presence on Okinawa, a Japanese official said Thursday in Hanoi where Koizumi is attending an Asia-Europe Summit.
Powell said the United States would "certainly take into account anything" raised by Koizumi and Japanese ministers on the military reduction issue but added that Washington had a channel to deal with such issues.
Machimura also held talks with US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice Thursday.
Powell said Rumsfeld would consider Machimura's comments and "present our point of view."
He expressed confidence that a resolution on the issue would be found under the US Defense Policy Review Initiative, or DPRI, a forum for establishing policies between the two countries.
"Through the DPRI system and process, we will work out answers to these questions," he said.
Tokyo and Washington have agreed to reduce the US military presence on Okinawa but no concrete plans have been worked out, partly due to the reluctance of other regions of Japan to assume part of the burden.
The United States wants to relocate some of the Okinawa bases elsewhere in Japan.
-------- russia
Russian Foreign Minister May Discuss Missiles with Iran - Sources
MosNews
07.10.2004
http://www.mosnews.com/news/2004/10/07/iranmissiles.shtml
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov who visits Tehran next week may raise the issue of Iran's missile program which has alarmed the United States and Israel, the Reuters news agency quoted diplomats as saying on Thursday.
Iran, accused by Washington of seeking nuclear weapons, said this week its latest version of its medium-range Shahab-3 missile could hit targets up to 2,000 km (1,250 miles) away.
Moscow is a close nuclear and political partner and last year helped persuade Iran to temporarily halt its uranium enrichment program and allow tougher U.N. checks of its sites.
"Among his planned topics for discussion ... this issue (missiles) does not feature. But of course I cannot state for sure that it won't be discussed," a deputy foreign minister, Alexander Alexeyev, told a news conference.
"A lot of other questions usually arise during talks apart from the topics originally planned to be discussed."
Lavrov's Oct. 10-11 visit will follow Moscow's harsh criticism of Iran's nuclear policies which some diplomats say could lead to Russia backing U.S. efforts to take Iran to the U.N. Security Council for sanctions.
Moscow has made no comment on the missile program.
The Shahab-3 was based on the North Korean Nodong-1 missile and modified with Russian technology. Iran says its missiles would be used to counter a possible Israeli or U.S. strike against its nuclear facilities.
The United States has imposed sanctions on many Russian research labs it accuses of supplying sensitive technology -- including missile and nuclear know-how -- to Iran and other states Washington thinks want arms of mass destruction.
Russia says it knows nothing about such contacts and that the arms trade authority has never formally approved such ties.
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Russia, Iran to Continue Nuke Cooperation
AP
Oct 7, 2004
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=518&ncid=732&e=10&u=/ap/20041007/ap_on_re_eu/russia_iran
MOSCOW - Russia will continue its nuclear energy cooperation with Iran, a senior Russian official said Thursday, despite international concern that Tehran might be trying to develop atomic weapons.
"We have been cooperating and will continue to cooperate with Iran in the peaceful usage of nuclear energy," Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Alexeyev said, according to the Interfax news agency. "It does not matter if there is pressure or not, but it does matter that we will comply with all legal commitments in cooperation with Iran."
Russia is completing a $800 million deal to build a nuclear reactor at Bushehr in southern Iran, a project that has drawn concern from the United States.
The International Atomic Energy Agency, which is the United Nations (news - web sites)' nuclear watchdog agency, is investigating nearly two decades of covert nuclear activity by Iran. Tehran maintains its program is meant to generate electricity, but Washington claims it is a weapons program.
Russia has repeatedly emphasized that Iran has the right to develop a peaceful nuclear energy program, but Moscow has urged Iran to voluntarily halt all efforts to enrich uranium as a sign of goodwill and to show greater openness to IAEA inspectors. The IAEA has also called on Iran to halt uranium enrichment - a technology that could be used to make weapons.
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Russia Rejects Nuclear Criticism
Associated Press
By MARA D. BELLABY
Oct 7, 2004
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/R/RUSSIA_NUCLEAR?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=518&ncid=732&e=10&u=/ap/20041007/ap_on_re_eu/russia_nuclear
MOSCOW - Russia shrugged off U.S. criticism over nuclear issues Thursday, saying it had made progress in reducing its tactical weapons in Europe and would continue cooperating with Iran's program despite concerns Tehran might be trying to develop atomic weapons.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Yakovenko said a 1991-1992 initiative to reduce tactical nuclear weapons and implement other disarmament measures was being "completely fulfilled."
"All of these weapons, unlike the situation in the United States, are exclusively located on our national territory," Yakovenko said in a statement. "They are located under strict control ... there is no reason to be concerned."
His remarks came a day after Stephen G. Rademaker, an assistant U.S. secretary of state for arms control, reportedly said the United States was concerned that Russia had not entirely fulfilled its post-Soviet commitment to reduce the battlefield weapons that would be used in a potential European war.
"First of all, the word 'commitment' in this context isn't correct," Yakovenko said. "We are talking about a unilateral initiative in 1991-1992 that was a goodwill gesture on the side of Russia."
Yakovenko noted that Russia announced in May it had eliminated more than 50 percent of nuclear ammunition for tactical sea and air-based rockets.
Rademaker also said former President Bush (news - web sites) made a similar commitment in 1991 to remove and dismantle tactical nuclear weapons from Europe, adding that the United States removed those warheads years ago and dismantled them last year, according to the Interfax news agency.
Separately, Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Alexeyev said Russia "will continue to cooperate with Iran in the peaceful usage of nuclear energy," another project that has drawn concern from the United States.
Russia is completing a $800 million deal to build a nuclear reactor at Bushehr in southern Iran.
"It does not matter if there is pressure or not, but it does matter that we will comply with all legal commitments in cooperation with Iran," Alexeyev said, according to Interfax. "Russia has said more than once that cooperation with Iran will be developed in line with the well-known norms."
The International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency, is investigating nearly two decades of covert nuclear activity by Iran. Tehran maintains its program is meant to generate electricity, but Washington claims it is a weapons program.
Russia says Iran has the right to develop a peaceful nuclear energy program but has urged Iran to voluntarily halt all efforts to enrich uranium as a sign of goodwill and to show greater openness to IAEA inspectors.
-------- terrorism
A Terror Attack, Coming Soon to a Plant Near You
by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Thursday, October 7, 2004
by the Los Angeles Times
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1007-22.htm
George W. Bush likes to boast of his record on homeland security, but the truth is that corporate and political favoritism by the White House has badly compromised our capacity to defend ourselves against a terrorist attack.
For example, even as we searched, apparently fruitlessly, for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, thousands of potential WMD - our nation's chemical and nuclear energy facilities - have been left unguarded to please the president's corporate friends and funders.
Of the nation's 15,000 chemical plants, the Environmental Protection Agency has identified 123 where toxic gases released by a terrorist assault could kill or injure more than 1 million people, and 700 others where deaths and injuries would exceed 100,000. Yet a series of recent investigations by news organizations has found that most of these plants are effectively unguarded, even though the risks are beyond dispute and Al Qaeda's interest in these targets is generously documented.
Seven weeks after 9/11, a GOP-controlled Senate committee unanimously passed a bill to require chemical plants to take steps to protect the public from terrorist attacks. But the White House, at the chemical industry's behest, derailed the bill and then removed the EPA's existing regulatory authority to require improvements in chemical plant security. Why would the Bush administration do this? All we know for sure is that President Bush and his party have accepted more than $22 million from the chemical industry since 1998.
The nuclear power industry, which gave $15 million to Bush and the GOP, also falls under the White House umbrella. A 2003 General Accounting Office report faulted the administration for failing to bolster nuclear plant defenses and found faulty security the rule at nuclear plants nationwide, despite myriad evidence that U.S. commercial nuclear reactors are high-priority terrorist targets. Astonishingly, federal law absolves nuclear power operators from protecting themselves against attack by enemies of the United States.
In order to be licensed, operators are required to protect their facilities from vandals. But both the GAO and industry reports acknowledge that the industry's private security guards are undertrained, underequipped and demoralized. When the Nuclear Regulatory Commission stages mock assaults, the attackers are able to penetrate plant defenses in half their attempts and trigger simulated catastrophic radiation releases - even though the defenders have advance notice of the exact time of the exercise and reinforce their defenses in anticipation. According to the GAO, the federal government deliberately stages "softball" mock attacks to give the impression of plant security and routinely shields the industry by burying significant security breaches.
Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge's top aide, Al Martinez-Fonts, a former executive of JPMorgan Chase, recently explained why his department was reluctant to force the industry to adopt security reforms beyond voluntary programs, which Ridge himself admits don't work.
"I was in the private sector all my life," explained Martinez-Fonts. "Did I like it when the government came in and stepped in and told [us] to do certain things? The answer's no.. I think we're trying to avoid that."
Applying this philosophy broadly, the White House, at the behest of the airline industry and air cargo carriers, has opposed a bill by Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) to require that all commercial cargo placed on passenger planes be physically screened, just like luggage. Only about 5% of air cargo is now screened. Airline passengers are often sitting only inches above cargo that has not been checked, despite a Transportation Security Administration estimate in 2002 that there is a 35% to 65% chance that terrorists are planning to place a bomb in the cargo of a U.S. passenger plane.
The administration's record on port security is equally dismal. Only 1% of the 10 million cargo containers entering American ports each year are ever checked, yet the administration has opposed bipartisan legislation creating a cargo-container profiling plan that focuses on inspections of high-risk cargo.
Tiptoeing around other big contributors, the White House has done nothing to secure railroad and transit networks or protect oil and gas pipelines. Two billion dollars in annual federal anti-terror grants to the states has been distributed more on the basis of pork than on need.
Martinez-Font's idea that industry will step up to the plate on its own is pure folly. In July 2003, the Conference Board, a business research group, found that American corporations had hiked security expenditures less than 4% on average since the Sept. 11 attacks.
While asking sacrifice of young soldiers and future generations who will pay his giant deficits, Bush has been reluctant to curtail corporate profits or prerogatives or to ask sacrifice of political pals or the large donors who helped put him in office.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the author of "Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering Our Country and Hijacking Our Democracy" (HarperCollins, 2004).
-------
Plutonium: rising terror threat
The Christian Science Monitor
By Mark Clayton
October 07, 2004
http://csmonitor.com/2004/1007/p13s02-wogi.html
The biggest threat facing the United States - and the world - is the spread of nuclear material to rogue states and terrorists. So say terrorism experts. Both major American presidential candidates concurred in last week's televised debate.
So why is the US moving plutonium from military to less secure civilian control? And why, critics ask, is it embarking on research programs that teach other nations how to use plutonium in nuclear power plants after a quarter-century of opposing such moves? That's what Tom Clements wants to know. Lurking beside major highways that cut through the heart of France, Mr. Clements and other antinuclear activists from Greenpeace usually watch for unmarked white trucks carrying plutonium-based fuel to French nuclear power plants. Their aim is to dramatize how easily terrorists could spot the trucks and steal their contents. This week, however, they hope to track more dangerous quarry: a convoy laden with about 275 pounds of plutonium oxide shipped from the US. Unlike nuclear fuel for power plants, which terrorists would have to convert to make a bomb, this plutonium is weapons grade - enough dark, coarse-grained powder that could be used immediately to make 15 to 20 atom bombs the size of the one dropped on Nagasaki in World War II.
Knowing terrorists are seeking nuclear material, nations have made strides to secure bomb-grade highly enriched uranium (HEU). But they have paid far less attention to an alternative: plutonium.
The US shipment of weapons-grade plutonium to France, its first overseas, is not only a security threat but also clouds America's nonproliferation message, critics say. Moreover, it focuses attention on plutonium from another source - nuclear power plants. This "separated" plutonium can be converted into a weapon and poses a threat comparable to HEU, most experts say.
"The big risk we face with separated plutonium is from theft by terrorists at a factory making reactor fuel - maybe an inside job," says David Albright, a researcher at the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), a Washington think tank. "You always have to worry about the physical protection of plutonium. Nations always tell you their protection is good. But it may not be enough." Consider:
• The world is swimming in plutonium. Although military stockpiles have stabilized, the amount of civilian-held plutonium has doubled in the past 13 years, says a new ISIS report. At the end of 2003, 14 nations' civilian reactors held 235 metric tons of the most dangerous variety in terms of a terrorist threat - separated plutonium. That's enough material to fashion some 40,000 Nagasaki-sized weapons; the amount is growing by five to 10 tons a year.
• France annually converts tons of this plutonium to a mixed-oxide or MOX fuel, which is trucked to its nuclear power plants. Despite its "reactor grade" label, MOX could make an effective bomb - as a US test in 1962 revealed. Even if a weapon "fizzled" because its plutonium was only reactor-grade, it would still yield a one-kiloton explosion that would "rip the heart out of a city," says Leonard Spector, deputy director of the Monterey Institute's Center for Nonproliferation Studies.
• While it's far simpler to make a bomb from HEU, it's conceivable that terrorists could build a plutonium-based device with expert help, observers say. Just 15 pounds of the material, a baseball-sized chunk, would be enough to wipe out a large portion of a major city. Last month, Kyrgyz security agents arrested a man trying to sell 60 small containers of plutonium.
The US has carefully protected the onetime shipment of plutonium to France, counters Bryan Wilkes, a spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, an arm of the Department of Energy. "There are efforts and procedures in place we're not going to discuss publicly."
By developing new technology to reprocess the plutonium in nuclear fuel, the US can boost its energy independence and reduce the volume of nuclear waste, the administration argues. It contends this could make unnecessary a second nuclear-waste repository beyond Yucca Mountain.
"It is our hope that this technology will ... provide the benefits of recycling spent fuel without increasing proliferation risks," Kyle McSlarrow, deputy secretary of Energy, told Congress in July.
Two forms, one menace
Plutonium is created when uranium fuel is irradiated within a nuclear reactor. Reprocessing extracts the plutonium from spent fuel, which may then be fabricated into more fuel for reactors. Civilian plutonium comes in two basic varieties: the separated plutonium and irradiated plutonium, which is embedded within spent nuclear fuel rods.
Ironically, irradiated plutonium is less worrisome because it is so radioactive. Terrorists typically wouldn't be able to handle spent rods without fatal consequences, though desperadoes could steal it for use in a dirty bomb. But separated plutonium could be diverted within a plant or stolen en route and readily transformed back into metal plutonium suitable for bombs, nonproliferation experts say.
The arrival in France Wednesday of US weapons-grade plutonium - destined for fabrication into commercial reactor fuel - highlights these concerns.
During the 1960s, it was thought that future shortages of uranium would make it economical to extract plutonium from reactor waste and use it for fuel. Some nations forged ahead, Britain, France, Japan, and the Soviet Union among them, despite the higher cost of reprocessing. So did the US - until India in 1974 conducted a "peaceful nuclear explosion" using a device created with plutonium culled from a research reactor.
Recognizing the danger of nuclear proliferation, presidents Ford and Carter discouraged the use of plutonium as a fuel in civilian reactors. The US government withdrew its support for a "plutonium economy," throttling back America's use of plutonium as reactor fuel.
So while the US military has plenty of weapons-grade plutonium, America has refused to reprocess spent nuclear fuel to extract plutonium for civilian use. Therefore, the US does not have a growing stockpile of civilian plutonium - which some would say is a huge blessing, given the costs involved in disposing of it.
Even so, the idea of using plutonium for civilian use gained a toehold during the Clinton administration. The US and Russia in 2000 signed a disarmament treaty to dispose of "excess" military plutonium by following a dual-track approach. Some of the 34 metric tons of military plutonium from each country would be mixed with nuclear waste and put into canisters for burial - while the rest would be made into MOX for use in the US and Russia.
Russia had resisted the burial option, declaring plutonium a valuable resource. In January 2002, the Bush administration dropped the idea, too. Instead, Energy secretary Spencer Abraham announced all 34 tons of excess US weapons plutonium would be made into MOX for power plants.
"The US and Russia have agreed to dispose of 34 tons each of weapons plutonium through the Russians' preferred method of conversion to MOX," says Mr. Wilkes, whose agency oversees the joint weapons-to-MOX program. "We need the Russians on board."
The US plan calls for France to create a limited amount of reactor fuel from the weapons-grade plutonium and then ship it back to South Carolina's Catawba nuclear-power plant for a test next spring. After that, the plan is for MOX to be made on US soil at a new $2.2 billion fabrication plant in South Carolina. The facility is to be completed by 2008 by a US subsidiary of Areva, the French company that's supplying the MOX to Catawba.
The plan faces some obstacles. Environmentalists have filed suit in a bid to block the use of MOX fuel in the Catawba plant. A bigger obstacle is a dispute between Russia and the US over who would be liable in case of an accident or terrorist act involving US contractors working in Russia on the new MOX plant there. Absent an agreement, the whole plan will grind to a halt, analysts say.
Murky policy
Officially, the US still discourages other nations from using plutonium-based fuels in civilian reactors. But shipping plutonium to France to make MOX undercuts any US efforts to discourage the likes of Iran and North Korea from reprocessing spent reactor fuel, several experts say.
Even for disarmament purposes, the use of MOX in US power plants "sets a terrible example for the world" when burying the material is still an alternative, says Paul Leventhal, head of the Nuclear Control Institute in Washington. "You don't want to in any way legitimate the use of bomb-grade fuels to generate electricity - because you can do that with low-grade fuels. So why allow it?"
The US has in recent years begun promoting nuclear fuel-reprocessing technology for extracting plutonium, experts note. In May 2001, the Bush administration's new National Energy Policy emphasized the use of nuclear power to meet energy needs. At the same time, it also endorsed and promoted reconsideration of "advanced reprocessing" of spent reactor fuel. Despite the administration's hopes, this futuristic material would not significantly decrease terrorists' ability to use it to make a bomb, critics say.
"The Bush administration has explicitly changed its policies," says Edwin Lyman, a senior scientist in the global security program of the Union of Concerned Scientists. "It is actively promoting recycling spent fuel at home and abroad."
The US has spearheaded the Generation IV International Forum with some 10 nations to develop new generation nuclear power plants. At least three of the five reactor designs under consideration would use recycled plutonium, Dr. Lyman says.
The US has also contracted with South Korea and other nations to work on the International Nuclear Energy Research Initiative, which includes new technologies for recycling plutonium. South Korea revealed last month that in 1982 some of its civilian researchers, without permission, had separated plutonium.
From power to bombs?
The revelation caused an uproar among nonproliferation experts, who worry about civilian programs developing reprocessing expertise that can lead to weapons development. International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei called the experiments "of serious concern."
Meanwhile, Japan has a new reprocessing plant seeking certification. India wants to expand its reprocessing capacity. China has said it, too, wants to reprocess for civilian purposes.
"Plutonium production is a machine that just won't stop," says Dr. Spector of the Monterey Institute. "The nuclear establishment is so powerful in some countries, it just drives forward by its own inertia."
The spread of reprocessing technology, combined with the move to use MOX fuel in US reactors, comes at a time when the world is desperate to corral loose nuclear material before terrorists can get it.
Plutonium is especially hard to track. When it's being reprocessed or fabricated, it sticks to nearly everything it comes in contact with. Last year, for example, international nuclear inspectors reported that the Tokaimura nuclear-fuel reprocessing plant north of Tokyo could not account for some of its plutonium - enough to make 25 nuclear weapons. Similarly, France's COGEMA Cadarache plant where the US is shipping its excess military plutonium, was found by EURATOM in 2002 to have "an unacceptable amount of material unaccounted for," according to a recent report in Nuclear Fuel, a trade publication.
"It's like seeing an accident in the future and pressing on the accelerator.," says Henry Sokolski of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center. "We're all human, and we make mistakes in government. But on this we should just cease and desist."
-------- u.n.
IAEA Chief ElBaradei Calls for Stronger Global Security Framework
7 October 2004
International Atomic Energy Agency
http://www.iaea.or.at/NewsCenter/News/2004/globalsecurity.html
IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei spoke of the nuclear threat and the urgent need for countries to seize a window of opportunity for strengthening the world´s security, in an address 6 October 2004 to the Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs in Seoul.
"The nuclear genie is out of the box - but it remains, at least at present, at the bidding of its human makers," Dr. ElBaradei said.
Addressing the conference of scientists working for nuclear disarmament, Dr. ElBaradei said it was clear that insecurity bred proliferation. "Nuclear weapons will not go away until a proved collective security framework exists to fill the vacuum."
The Director General outlined recent lessons learnt about nuclear verification. Among them, that verification and diplomacy, used in conjunction can be effective. "The Iraq experience has demonstrated that inspections - while requiring time and patience - can be effective even when the country under inspection is providing less than active cooperation."
A second lesson, Dr. ElBaradei said, was that "we cannot afford not to act in cases of non-compliance." The Director General cited the case of North Korea and the role of the UN Security Council in nuclear cases referred to it. "The Security Council must be able and ready to engage effectively in both preventive diplomacy and enforcement measures, with the tools and methods in place necessary to cope with existing and emerging threats to international peace and security," he said.
Pointing the way forward, Dr. ElBaradei spoke of measures to strengthen the existing non-proliferation regime. Among them:
- urging all States to bring the additional protocol into force;
- tightening and formalizing the controls over the export of nuclear materials and technology;
- working towards multilateral control over the sensitive parts of the nuclear fuel cycle - enrichment, reprocessing, and the management and disposal of spent fuel - while guaranteeing the reliability of supply to legitimate would-be users; and
- ensuring that States cannot withdraw from the global Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) without clear consequences, including prompt review and appropriate action by the Security Council.
"Each of these measures would be in keeping with a collective security framework that aims simultaneously to curb nuclear proliferation and to achieve nuclear disarmament," Dr. ElBaradei said. See the related links for the full speech.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- ohio
NRC SETS SCHEDULE FOR REVIEW OF USEC APPLICATION;
OFFERS OPPORTUNITY TO REQUEST PARTICIPATION IN HEARING
nrc.gov
October 7, 2004
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/news/2004/04-129.html
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has established a 30-month schedule for reviewing an application from USEC Inc., to build a gas centrifuge uranium enrichment plant in Piketon, Ohio, to be known as the American Centrifuge Plant. The agency will hold a hearing on the application as part of its review and invites those who may be affected by the proceeding to seek permission to participate in the hearing.
The facility would be housed in buildings and areas leased from the Department of Energy (DOE) where DOE operated similar gas centrifuge machines in the 1980s. USEC's gas centrifuge technology is based on DOE's gas centrifuge technology, which USEC obtained by signing an agreement with DOE in June 2002.
The NRC has determined that the application, which was submitted on Aug. 23, contains sufficient information for the agency to begin its detailed review and has formally "docketed" the application. A copy will be available on the NRC's Agencywide Document Access and Management System (ADAMS) using accession number ML042800551 through http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/adams/web-based.html. A copy will also be available at the NRC's Public Document Room at One White Flint North, 11555 Rockville Pike, Rockville, Md.
The NRC staff will conduct a comprehensive review of the USEC application and prepare a safety evaluation report and environmental impact statement before the hearing is completed. The applicant and the NRC staff will be parties to the hearing.
Any other person whose interest may be affected and who wishes to participate as a party in the hearing proceeding must file a petition to intervene within 60 days of publication of the Commission's notice and order in the Federal Register, expected shortly. The petition must be filed with the Secretary of the Commission, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, D.C. 20555-0001, Attention: Rulemaking and Adjudications Staff, with copies by fax or e-mail and to the NRC staff and applicant attorney at the addresses listed in the Federal Register notice. The petition must include the particular interest of the petitioner in the proceeding and how that interest may be affected by the results of the proceeding; a specification of the contentions, or specific issues, that the petitioner seeks to have litigated in the hearing; and other information as set out in detail in the Federal Register notice.
Construction and operation of the American Centrifuge Plant, if authorized, will be preceded by a test and demonstration facility to be known as a "Lead Cascade." NRC issued a license for the Lead Cascade in February, and construction of the cascade is underway in one of the buildings to be used for the full-scale plant.
-------- tennessee
TVA nuclear reactor needs $200 million repair
October 7, 2004
WorldNow and WHNT TV 19
http://www.whnt19.com/Global/story.asp?S=2401749
SPRING CITY, Tenn. The Watts Bar Nuclear Plant needs a 200-(m)-millon-dollar repair.
The plant at Spring City, Tennessee, has been operating for only eight years and has an expected lifetime of five times that.
But T-V-A says it needs to replace four steam generators at the plant, about 40 miles south of Knoxville.
The plant began operation in 1996 after 23 years of interrupted construction and a price tag of seven (b) billion dollars.
T-V-A isn't alone. Utilities across the nation are having to replace these expensive pieces of equipment at pressurized water reactors like Watts Bar because of leaking tubes affecting power generation.
Water from the nuclear reactor goes through the generator and is turned into steam, which turns turbines that produce electricity.
-------- us nuc waste
Agency hunts new site to store nuclear waste
Energy Department tried to ship material to Nevada Test Site
By STEVE TETREAULT STEPHENS WASHINGTON BUREAU
Thursday, October 07, 2004
Las Vegas Review-Journal
http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2004/Oct-07-Thu-2004/news/24935665.html
WASHINGTON -- The Energy Department has begun to look at new disposal choices for nuclear weapons waste it has been blocked from sending to the Nevada Test Site.
Department officials have told a cleanup contractor to identify other sites where special-category radioactive byproducts might be shipped out of three 20-foot-tall silos at the decommissioned Fernald uranium-processing plant 18 miles north of Cincinnati.
The government expects the contractor, Fluor Fernald, to submit a report by the end of the week with cost estimates and a timetable to conduct a search, said Johnny Reising, DOE associate director for environmental restoration at the plant.
In a Sept. 24 letter, a project director at Fluor Fernald was told: "Identify viable alternatives leading to either commercial interim storage or permanent commercial disposal of the silo materials. Permanent disposal is the preferred alternative."
Reising directed questions to headquarters as to whether the search means the department has abandoned plans to move the waste to the Nevada Test Site.
A DOE spokesman in Washington did not respond to a call and an e-mailed query.
Nevada has not received any notification from the Energy Department, said Marta Adams, an assistant attorney general. But Adams said state officials are taking the department's directive to Fluor Fernald as a sign the department might be moving on.
"That says to me they really are trying to find another site rather than the test site, which is quite delightful," Adams said. "We were on pretty solid legal footing."
Attorney General Brian Sandoval threatened to sue the government after the Energy Department in February announced plans to move 3,750 truckloads of the special type of radioactive waste to its low-level nuclear waste dump at the test site.
Sandoval said the Fernald material contained more potent levels of waste than what the test site is licensed to store safely.
The department has shipped 6.4 million cubic feet of low-level radioactive waste from the Fernald site to Nevada since the early 1980s.
Energy Department lawyers said the waste could be buried at the test site but delayed shipments to Nevada after Sandoval's legal threat and said the state would be given 45-days notice before the department began any shipping.
Two of the silos contain 240,000 cubic feet of slurry tainted with byproducts of high-grade uranium that was used at the Fernald plant for 37 years until it was shut down in 1989. The third silo contains 137,000 cubic feet of powdery thorium waste.
-------- MILITARY
Sailor dies as crippled Canadian submarine keeps drifting off Ireland
DUBLIN (AFP)
Oct 07, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041006233332.4ko97w9t.html
One of nine Canadian sailors injured when their newly-delivered, British-built submarine caught fire in the North Atlantic has died, the Canadian government said Wednesday.
Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin announced the death of Lieutenant Chris Saunders in parliament in Ottawa just hours after three of the injured were admitted to hospital in Ireland, one in critical condition.
The trio had been airlifted Wednesday evening in a British Sea King helicopter to the general hospital in Sligo, northwest Ireland.
A British frigate reached the crippled HMCS Chicoutimi earlier Wednesday after the sub and its 57 crew endured a terrifying night adrift in gale-force conditions off northwest Ireland following an electrical fire.
The submarine was on its way to Halifax, Nova Scotia, home of Canada's naval fleet in the North Atlantic, less than a week after it was commissioned in Scotland following a thorough refit.
Irish officials told AFP that the diesel electric submarine -- one of four built in the 1980s that Canada has bought from Britain -- was off County Mayo late Wednesday, drifting southwards at three miles (five kilometres) an hour.
Informed sources in Dublin said they expected Ottawa to ask for permission for the submarine to be towed into Irish waters, probably Blacksod Bay on the western coast of County Mayo.
If such a request is made, "we will deal with it expeditiously," Irish Marine Minister Pat the Cope Gallagher said.
The British frigate HMS Montrose reached the Chicoutimi at around 1:30 pm (1230 GMT) Wednesday to coordinate rescue and salvage efforts, a Ministry of Defence spokeswoman in London said.
"HMS Montrose will be establishing communications with the submarine and assessing the situation to decide what the next step will be," she said.
Photographs from a Nimrod maritime patrol aircraft loitering over the Chicoutimi showed several red-suited Canadian sailors on its bridge, with white froth lapping at the black-hulled vessel in a dark swelling sea.
Commodore Tyrone Pyle, commander of Canada's Atlantic fleet, said earlier Wednesday any towing of the powerless sub would likely not take place before Friday and would last several days.
The submarine made a distress call at around 1415 GMT Tuesday from 100 nautical miles (180 kilometers) off the northwest coast of Ireland after a fire broke out behind an electrical panel, the Canadian navy said.
It took 15 minutes to put out the fire, but the blaze was enough to leave the Chicoutimi without power. Officials said all nine injured had been victims of smoke inhalation.
"They will have a certain amount of battery-powered emergency lighting, but they will be trying to conserve whatever power they have," a Royal Navy spokesman told Britain's domestic Press Association news agency.
"It's going to be extremely dangerous for someone to be on board that frigate throwing a line, and even more dangerous for someone from the submarine crew to be outside trying to tie that up."
Two tugs -- one from the British naval base at Faslane, Scotland and the second a coastguard vessel from Shetland -- were among several vessels trying to reach the submarine, as investigation teams prepared to probe the cause of the accident.
Last week the Times newspaper in London said Canada might sue Britain over all four second-hand submarines -- including the Chicoutimi -- after they had been plagued by "serious malfunctions and corrosion" including leaks and dents.
-------- africa
Blair: Sudan Agrees to Withdraw Troops, Militias in Darfur
By Mohamed Osman
Associated Press
Thursday, October 7, 2004; Page A23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13157-2004Oct6.html
KHARTOUM, Sudan, Oct. 6 -- Sudan has agreed to a joint withdrawal of government and rebel forces in the strife-torn region of Darfur and will accept a large increase in international cease-fire monitors, Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain said Wednesday after talks with Sudan's president.
Blair said Sudan also committed to identifying the location of its troops and weapons in Darfur and to working toward comprehensive peace agreements by the end of the year with rebels there and in southern Sudan.
More than 50,000 people have been killed in Darfur and 1.5 million have been driven from their homes since February 2003. The conflict, rooted in tensions between African farmers and Arab nomads, has grown into a counterinsurgency in which pro-government Arab militiamen have raped, killed and burned the homes of African villagers.
The government denies allegations that it supports the Arab militia, known as the Janjaweed.
Blair, on the first stop of a three-day visit to Africa, said President Omar Hassan Bashir had agreed to all of the suggestions he offered. They included a significant expansion of troops from the African Union in Darfur, where a few hundred of the group's soldiers have been monitoring a shaky cease-fire among two rebel groups, government troops and allied militiamen.
"We need several thousand people there in order to monitor any cease-fire," Blair told reporters at the British ambassador's residence in Khartoum, the capital.
Other proposals called for the government to identify the location of its troops and munitions in Darfur, return its troops to barracks in conjunction with a similar withdrawal by rebel forces, commit itself to reaching a comprehensive peace agreement with the rebels in Darfur and in southern Sudan by Dec. 31 and abide by the humanitarian accords signed with the United Nations on Darfur.
Blair said Britain would ensure that Sudan implemented all the pledges.
Hilary Benn, Britain's international development secretary, who is traveling with Blair, said Britain would also try to push the two rebel groups back to the negotiating table. Peace talks held in Nigeria collapsed last month.
"There is also a message for the Justice and Equality Movement and the Sudanese Liberation Army," Benn told BBC radio. "They, too, have to be part of the solution, and they must enter negotiations in good faith with the government of Sudan, because it is only a political agreement that, in the end, will bring this to a halt."
The Sudanese Foreign Ministry later issued a statement saying Sudan was committed to "the leadership role and engagement of the African Union in addressing the situation in Darfur."
The Foreign Ministry said Blair and Bashir also discussed the "finalization" of the peace process in southern Sudan, where the government and the Sudan People's Liberation Army are in the final stages of a deal to end a war that began in 1983.
-------- arms
France, Germany vie for Indian submarines deal: report
BERLIN (AFP)
Oct 07, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041007195218.bu4b7xb1.html
France and Germany are locked in a battle to win a contract to sell six submarines to India, the German financial newspaper Handelsblatt said Friday, citing German political and industrial sources.
Berlin is backing the HDW consortium's bid, though its French rival DCN was a hot favourite, according to the newspaper in its Friday edition, which says Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder wanted to raise the deal with the Indian government.
After a meeting in New Delhi with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh Schroeder said Thursday the two countries aimed to double trade over a five-year period from the current annual level of five billion euros (some 6.15 billion dollars).
They said science and technology would be the new focus of their strategic partnership.
The two countries also agreed on annual high-level exchanges and said they would continue to support each other's campaigns for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.
Schroeder, accompanied by a business and political delegation, arrived in India Wednesday on the first leg of a four-nation tour aimed at bolstering ties with Asia.
--------
U.S. warns EU against arms trade with China
The Associated Press
October 07, 2004
http://www.iht.com/bin/print.php?file=542527.html
BRUSSELS The United States could restrict transfers of sensitive defense technology to European Union countries if EU members support a French effort to end the bloc's 15-year arms embargo on China, a senior State Department official said Thursday.
Washington argues that lifting the European embargo could undermine stability in East Asia and hurt efforts to improve human rights in China.
"It will be a significant obstacle to U.S. defense cooperation with European Union member states," warned Gregory Suchan, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs.
President Jacques Chirac of France was preparing to visit China on Friday, and has again urged his EU partners to drop the ban, which was imposed after the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing's Tiananmen Square.
"France favors lifting the embargo," Chirac said Thursday in an interview with China's official Xinhua News Agency.
"We are trying to obtain from the European Union the lifting as soon as possible of an embargo that dates to another time and that no longer corresponds to the reality of things," Chirac said.
Chirac and other European leaders will meet Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China at a weekend EU-Asia summit meeting in the Vietnamese capital, Hanoi.
France is expected to try to have the arms ban lifted when foreign ministers from the 25 EU nations hold their regular monthly meeting Monday in Luxembourg.
EU officials said U.S. lobbying had made it unlikely that there would be the unanimous support that is needed for lifting the ban unlikely. "I don't think we have any chance," one EU official said. Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands and others have backed the U.S. position.
The United States fears that sales of high-tech European military equipment, such as radars and communications equipment, could lead to China's increasing intimidation of Taiwan, upset the military balance in the Pacific and even threaten U.S. troops in the region.
"U.S. forces could find themselves targeted by weapons that were built in NATO countries," said Colonel Michael Ryan, defense adviser at the U.S. mission to the EU.
Ryan said EU arms sales to China could force the United States to move troops from Europe to strengthen forces in Asia. Suchan added that the U.S. Congress would almost certainly halt moves to free up the flow of defense technology across the Atlantic and would instead tighten restrictions.
EU nations also face pressure from human rights groups and the European Parliament against lifting the arms ban.
Opponents of the ban say the EU would continue to monitor arms sales to China and restrict exports of goods that could be used for internal repression or international aggression, even after the lifting of the ban.
They argue that the embargo hinders good relations with China, by keeping it on an EU arms black list with Myanmar, Zimbabwe and Sudan. The EU is expected Monday to lift its weapons embargo against Libya.
-------- business
Northrop Grumman Conducts First Flight of First Navy Global Hawk
Palmdale CA (SPX)
Oct 07, 2004
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/uav-04zzz.html
Northrop Grumman conducted the first flight of the first RQ-4A Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle slated for the Navy's Global Hawk Maritime Demonstration (GHMD).
The air vehicle, dubbed N-1, flew from the company's Palmdale, Calif., production facility to the Birk Flight Test Center at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif.
A joint U.S. Navy, U.S. Air Force and contractor team will begin preliminary testing of the air vehicle in preparation for its delivery to the Navy in 2005.
N-1 is the first of two Global Hawks Northrop Grumman is producing for the GHMD program. The second air vehicle is scheduled to make its maiden flight early next year. GHMD will demonstrate the system's ability to support Naval maritime surveillance missions. The Navy will operate both vehicles from Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Md.
-------- europe
French anger at Duelfer report charges over Iraq corruption
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Oct 07, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041007182821.gkrujhkc.html
France on Thursday complained to the United States over accusations that French nationals and businesses took bribes from Iraq made in a report by the chief US weapons inspector.
The French embassy approached the White House and the US State Department to express anger at the way the allegations were made public.
"The ambassador told the White House and the State Department of our displeasure concerning the methods used," an embassy official told AFP.
The official said France was particularly unhappy about "the fact that the names of individuals and companies were made public without any apparent attempt to verify the allegations, and without giving them an opportunity to explain themselves."
The study by the Iraq Survey Group said former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein paid millions of dollars in cash and petrol export vouchers to elicit help in his bid to end the UN sanctions regime on his country.
Mentioned in Charles Deulfer's report are former French interior minister Charles Pasqua and Patrick Maugein, an official of the French petroleum company Soco International said to be close to French President Jacques Chirac.
Pasqua and Maugein have strenuously denied accepting consideration from the Saddam regime.
France and Russia were the main recipients, according Duelfer's report, by virtue of the influence they wielded as permanent members of the UN Security Council.
The French foreign ministry denied the accusations earlier, calling them "unverified, either with those concerned or with the authorities of the concerned countries."
Duelfer's report, citing documents recovered from Saddam's intelligence services, said the Iraqi payments particularly targeted French political, economic and journalistic circles.
The report refers to a list published last January by the Baghdad newspaper Al-Mada of some 200 names from 40 countries that allegedly peddled influence with Iraq in return for export vouchers for millions of barrels of oil.
-------- iraq
Sadr militia offers arms-for-prisoners exchange with Iraqi government
BAGHDAD (AFP)
Oct 07, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041007191854.46y5kmix.html
Shiite militiamen loyal to radical cleric Moqtada Sadr offered Thursday to surrender heavy and medium weapons in return for the release of prisoners and a role in Iraq's political process, a spokesman for Sadr said.
The US-backed Iraqi government welcomed the news, but did not say whether it would comply with the concessions.
"We are ready to lay down our heavy and medium-sized weapons in return for the release of all those imprisoned from our movement, a commitment that members of our movement will no longer be pursued and the restoration of basic services to areas like Sadr City," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Darraji told AFP.
"This initiative is being presented only to the Iraqi government," rather than the US-led multinational forces with which Sadr's militia has been battling, he stressed.
For its part, the interim administration was upbeat over the development.
"The government welcomes the announcement by Sayyed Moqtada Sadr that his militia will disband, hand in their weapons, respect the authority and unity of the state, and abide by the rule of law," national security adviser Qasim Dawood said in a statement.
"The government therefore looks forward to this undertaking being respected and implemented," he said, reiterating a pledge to offer amnesty to anyone who did not commit crimes against the Iraqi people.
The Sadr spokesman said that Sadr's movement was willing to take part in nationwide elections provided they were "free of US influence and overseen by international monitors".
The government of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi has been trying to work out a deal that calls on fighters to lay down their weapons unconditionally in the Baghdad district of Sadr City and the return of full control of the area to Iraqi forces.
The deal, which is being mediated by local tribal leaders, also calls for the launch of reconstruction in the mostly Shiite district.
But the tough-talking Allawi insisted Wednesday that the government was responding to a call from Sadr City citizens to restore stability to the area and that there were "no negotiations or deal to be signed".
Sadr's partisans protest that the frequent US assaults and air strikes against its militia positions in Sadr City are an obstacle to ending the violence.
----
Lies, Damned Lies, and Bush's Iraq Statistics
The security forces are inadequate, the coalition is a joke, and reconstruction has barely begun.
By Fred Kaplan
Thursday, Oct. 7, 2004
The current Iraqi forces are just a start George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have lately been touting three sets of statistics to justify their claims of great progress in Iraq. First, they say, we've trained 100,000 Iraqi security forces. Second, 31 other countries are contributing troops as part of the vast international coalition. Third, Iraqi reconstruction is moving along on schedule, thanks to the $18.4 billion in U.S. economic aid.
Yet the U.S. State Department's most recent Iraq Weekly Status Report, dated Oct. 6, reveals that all three of those claims are either false or so misleading that they might as well be. http://www.export.gov/iraq/pdf/state_wklyrpt_100604.pdf
First, it's true there are 100,000 Iraqi security forces, about three-quarters of whom are police, army troops or National Guardsmen. But that falls far short of the 272,000 forces that the report calculates are required. (For a breakdown of how many trained security forces exist and how many are needed, by category,
http://slate.msn.com/id/2107914/sidebar/2107921/ .
Second, about those 31 coalition members: All told, according to the report, they're contributing about 24,000 troops. The British alone are supplying about 8,000. So the remaining 30 countries have a total of 16,000 troops in Iraq-an average of just over 500 troops per country. The United States has about 130,000 troops over there-more than five times as many as all the other 31 countries combined. (For a full list of the countries involved-which include such powerhouses as Albania, Azerbaijan, and Tonga-click here - http://slate.msn.com/id/2107914/sidebar/2107920/ .) This is not a coalition in the recognized sense of that word.
Compare those figures with these: During the 1991 Gulf War (according to U.S. Central Command's official history of that conflict), 37 other nations took part, sending a total of 800,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines, as well as 300 combat support battalions, over 225 naval vessels, and 2,800 fixed-wing aircraft. Those aircraft flew 112,000 sorties and dropped 87,000 tons of munitions on Iraqi targets. Among the nations sending at least one army division were Egypt and Syria. Now that's a coalition. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB39/document6.pdf
More damning are the report's figures on Iraqi reconstruction. Yes, the U.S. Congress has appropriated $18.4 billion for this effort; but, according to the report, the authorities on the ground in Iraq have spent just $1.3 billion-about 7 percent of the money set aside.
The specifics of this disparity are still more depressing. For security and law enforcement, $3.2 billion was appropriated, but only $646 million has been spent. For electricity, $5.4 billion was appropriated, $330 million spent. For water resources and sanitation, $4.2 billion was appropriated, a pathetic $23 million spent. For oil infrastructure, $1.7 billion was appropriated, just $47 million spent. For justice, public safety and civil society, $1 billion was appropriated, $55 million spent. For health care, $786 million was appropriated, but $4 million spent. For transportation and communication, $500 million was appropriated, $12 million spent. And the list goes on.
Although the State Department issued this report, you will not find it-or its weekly updates-on the State Department's Web site. Nor will you find it on the site of the Agency for International Development (though AID does have a similar report, with far vaguer and rosier figures). Instead, you'll find it on the Web site of the U.S. Commerce Department's Iraq Investment and Reconstruction Task Force-in short, on a site for businesses that need to know what's really happening over there.
What's really happening-in numbers as clear as day-is that the training of security forces is proceeding way too slowly, the coalition is a misnomer, and reconstruction has barely got off the ground.
Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate.
~
http://slate.msn.com/id/2107914/sidebar/2107921/
Iraqi Security Forces | On Hand | Required
Police | 39,041 | 135,000
Army | 4,789 | 27,000
Civil Intervention Force | 0 | 4,920
Emergency Response Unit | 76 | 270
Border Enforcement | 14,313 | 32,000
Highway Patrol | 589 | 1,500
Bureau of Dignitary Protection | 446 | 500
National Guard | 36,496 | 61,904
Intervention Force | 1,928 | 6,584
Special Operations Forces | 581 | 1,967
Iraqi Air Force | 167 | 502
Coastal Defense Forces | 282 | 409
Total | 98,7082@ | 272,556
@ "The military forces continue to receive additional unit training and may require some equipment."
Source: U.S. State Department, Iraq Weekly Status Report, Oct. 6, 2004, Page 22.
--------
Fallujah Group Comes to Table Talks Also Underway in Sadr City
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, October 7, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A13147-2004Oct6?language=printer
BAGHDAD, Oct. 6 -- Iraqi insurgents from Fallujah are in intense negotiations with the country's interim government to hand over control of the city to Iraqi troops, according to representatives of both sides, in hopes of averting a bloody military battle for the city of 300,000 that has become a haven for foreign guerrillas and a symbol of the limits of Baghdad's authority.
"We have met representatives from Fallujah," the interim deputy prime minister, Barham Salih, said Wednesday. "We have had detailed discussion with these representatives, and we have agreed on a road map or a framework to facilitate the resolution of this conflict in Fallujah."
The talks apparently gained momentum Wednesday after the mujaheddin shura -- or council of holy warriors -- that now governs Fallujah voted overwhelmingly to accept the broad terms demanded by Iraq's government. By a vote of 10 to 2, the council agreed to eject foreign fighters, turn over all heavy weapons, dismantle checkpoints and allow the Iraqi National Guard to enter the city.
In return, the city would not face the kind of U.S.-led military offensive that reclaimed the central Iraqi city of Samarra from insurgents last week, a prospect that one senior Iraqi official said clearly grabbed the attention of the Fallujah delegation.
U.S. troops would remain outside the city and end the airstrikes that have shaken residential neighborhoods on an almost daily basis in recent weeks, according to one account of the terms now on the table.
"The government -- the president, the prime minister and the defense minister -- are serious in trying to reach a peaceful solution, and we are, too," said Khalid Hamoud Jumaili, the leader of an insurgent group known as Mohammad's Army. Jumaili is one of six Fallujah residents who have been traveling to Baghdad in the past week to negotiate a peaceful end to the standoff.
"Tomorrow I am going back to Fallujah to discuss some issues which are still not solved," Jumaili said in a brief telephone interview.
If a concrete agreement emerges -- and proves successful -- it would be a substantial boost for the interim government and for prospects for holding nationwide elections in January. Fallujah, an overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim city, has been the fiercest of several areas that remain beyond the reach of Baghdad's authority. It is notorious as the staging base for a steady barrage of strikes aimed at Iraqi government personnel, especially security recruits.
Negotiations also appeared to be moving toward a peaceful settlement in Sadr City, the Baghdad slum and insurgent stronghold that has been an urban battlefield for weeks. The talks were being driven by local leaders in Sadr City, where a homegrown militia loyal to Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada Sadr is fighting a stubborn guerrilla campaign against U.S. Army armor and airstrikes.
Iraq's interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, told reporters Wednesday that a committee was being formed to hash out the final terms of a deal to dismantle the Mahdi Army, Sadr's militia. Allawi's government, which authorized a U.S. offensive against Sadr's militia in the southern city of Najaf in August, has been trying to persuade Sadr to join the political process.
"No cease-fire," Allawi cautioned. "We responded positively to the request of the people of Sadr City. They will surrender their weapons to the authorities. They will dismantle any armed presence in the city. They will respect and abide by the rule of law in the city. They will welcome the police to go back, patrol the streets of the city."
Meanwhile, the wave of car bombings that has plagued Iraq for weeks continued Wednesday. A suicide car bomber plowed into an Iraqi military checkpoint in the town of Anah, near the Syrian border, killing 16 Iraqis and wounding 24.
Iraq's interim president, Ghazi Yawar, said in an interview this week that the Fallujah insurgents negotiating with the government "were more willing" to concede points after U.S. and Iraqi forces stormed Samarra on Friday. Yawar, a Sunni sheik, said he was approached by the Fallujah delegation, already deep in negotiations with a team led by Salih.
"I share both the ethnicity and the faith" of the delegation, Yawar observed. But in sketching out the military offensive that would come if an agreement were not reached, Yawar said, "I expressed my personal views that it's going to be severe and it's going to be harsh. I said it so they would understand the truth: They might be the next operation."
Substantial obstacles to the Fallujah deal remain.
A crucial element in the talks is the fate of foreign fighters, mostly Arabs who flocked to Iraq to fight American forces and found a haven in Fallujah, which Marines have not entered since April. In Wednesday's council vote, one of the dissenters was Omar Hadeed, a representative of Monotheism and Jihad, the organization headed by Jordanian-born Abu Musab Zarqawi, who has asserted responsibility for kidnapping and killing several foreigners in Iraq and for ordering numerous suicide bomb attacks.
The other no vote was cast by a representative of a local insurgent. Both groups vowed to keep fighting regardless of any accord, a prospect that might draw U.S. forces into the city to reinforce the newly trained Iraqi troops, who have no armor or air force of their own.
Another looming question is how the city would rid itself of the foreigners. Several Fallujah residents said the fighters from Syria, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and other nations are commonly regarded as intruders in a nationalist struggle. Their religious fanaticism -- including enforcement of a strict Islamic social code -- irks many residents and has caused a split with local insurgents, as reflected in the shura vote.
But the foreigners, many of whom arrived chasing a dream of martyrdom, are not known for compromising. "Those guys are there to die," said one senior Iraqi official.
Still, Yawar said in remarks to Arabic-language reporters late Wednesday that he was hopeful. "It's in the final stages," an aide said.
Ahmed Harden, another of the six Fallujah delegates to Baghdad, appeared on al-Jazeera television saying the deal was done.
"The Iraqi army will enter the city, and there will be cooperation between the people and this army," said Harden, a city council member chosen to speak for the city's educated classes in the negotiations. Other members were a tribal sheik, two former military officers and an imam who spoke for the city's religious leaders.
"This army will not hurt the people there; rather, its main aim is to protect this city," Harden said.
In the Sadr City stalemate, several Iraqi political parties, covetous of Sadr's following, have been lobbying the junior cleric. The U.S. 1st Cavalry Division, meanwhile, has relentlessly pursued his fighters. Explosions from airstrikes on Sadr City rumble across the Baghdad sky almost nightly.
As in Fallujah, agreement appeared to depend on keeping U.S. forces out of the area while asserting the authority of the new Iraqi security forces, which partially collapsed when the insurgency exploded across much of the country in April.
"We couldn't reach an agreement yet, but we in the Sadr office are optimistic," said Abdul Hadi Darraji, an aide to the cleric. "There are some issues that we disagree with the government about, and they are under discussion now. We want to reach a solution to end the crisis and to save the city from the attacks and airstrikes."
Special correspondents Bassam Sebti and Omar Fekeiki contributed to this report.
--------
Rockets strike Baghdad hotel housing foreigners
10/7/2004
Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2004-10-07-iraq_x.htm
BAGHDAD (AP) - Militants fired rockets at a hotel housing foreigners in the heart of Baghdad on Thursday night, causing minor damage, while U.S. officials said two American soldiers were killed by roadside bombs outside the capital and authorities arrested 20 Iraqis suspected of planting homemade explosives.
Two rockets hit the Sheraton hotel, shattering windows and filling the lobby with smoke and debris. Bursts of automatic gunfire erupted in the street between the Sheraton and the Palestine hotel, both bases for foreigners and journalists. (Related video: Rockets hit Sheraton hotel)
Security guards at the Palestine said two rockets fired from the back of a pickup truck hit the Sheraton, shattering windows, and a palm tree was set blaze as tracer bullets streaked across the darkened sky. Several shaken Westerners emerged from the hotel, some covering their mouths with cloths, as workers swept up broken glass. A huge crack appeared in the lobby wall.
A security guard speaking on condition of anonymity said private security guards deployed on the roofs in the compound fired at the pickup truck, destroying it.
The U.S. Army rolled in reinforcements, including Bradley fighting vehicles, armored personnel carriers and Humvees, to take up positions at the hotels.
The hotels are across the Tigris River from the U.S. Embassy compound in the heavily guarded Green Zone, where U.S. authorities earlier raised a security alert after an improvised bomb was found in front of a restaurant there.
The warning to Americans and Iraqi officials in the Green Zone followed the discovery Tuesday of an explosive device at the Green Zone Cafe, a popular hangout for Westerners living and working in the compound - which houses major U.S. and Iraqi government offices. A U.S. military ordnance detachment safely disarmed it, U.S. officials said.
A loud explosion shook the Green Zone on Thursday afternoon and smoke rose from inside the compound. The U.S. military had no immediate information on the incident. Insurgents regularly fire at the compound.
Americans living and working in the zone were told to travel in groups and avoid specific areas and nonessential travel.
Although movements in and out of the Green Zone are restricted, about 10,000 Iraqis live inside the 4-square-mile district, located along the western side of the Tigris River.
One U.S. soldier from the 13th Corps Support Command died when a bomb exploded near his convoy late Wednesday outside the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah, the command said. Two other soldiers were wounded.
A 1st Infantry Division soldier was killed and an Iraqi interpreter wounded when insurgents attacked a patrol with a roadside bomb near Beiji, 155 miles north of Baghdad, the command said.
Four U.S. Marines and three Iraqi soldiers were injured this week in an operation to crush insurgents south of Baghdad.
About 240 detainees, meanwhile, were released Thursday from U.S. and Iraqi custody - including a prominent supporter of radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, the U.S. military said. It was the fourth round of releases under a joint U.S.-Iraqi review process set up Aug. 21 following the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison in a continuing effort to reduce the inmate population and free those deemed not to be a security threat.
The publication in April of photographs showing naked, terrified Iraqi prisoners being abused and humiliated by grinning American guards at Abu Ghraib caused outrage here and internationally.
None of those freed Thursday were "high-value" detainees, who are processed separately from the 1,700 "security detainees" held at the Abu Ghraib facility near Baghdad and Camp Bucca in southern Iraq, said Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, a military spokesman.
About 830 detainees have been released since a review began in August. The military aims to transfer the bulk of the remaining Abu Ghraib security detainees to Camp Bucca, which is being expanded and upgraded to become the primary holding facility, Johnson said.
In Mosul, the U.S. military said American and Iraqi forces detained 20 people in northern Iraq and foiled a roadside bombing Wednesday in the city of Tal Afar, scene of intense fighting last month.
A U.S. demolition team defused a homemade bomb found beneath a police car, the U.S. command said. Eight people were arrested in raids in Tal Afar, and Iraqi National Guard troops seized two grain sacks full of dynamite, two-way radios used to detonate roadside bombs, and other materials, U.S. authorities said.
Twelve others were arrested in a series of raids in Mosul, the U.S. command said.
Homemade bombs have become an increasing threat because insurgents find them safer than other forms of attack that can draw devastating American return fire. In September, 29 Iraqi and multinational troops were killed by car bombs, according to the U.S. command.
On Wednesday, a suicide car bomber slammed into an Iraqi military checkpoint northwest of Baghdad, killing 16 Iraqis and wounding about 30, Iraqi officials said. The attack occurred near an Iraqi National Guard camp near Anah, 160 miles northwest of Baghdad on the main highway to Syria. According to the U.S. military, the camp came under fire, and a few minutes later a vehicle sped to a nearby National Guard checkpoint and exploded.
U.S. and Iraqi forces are trying to restore enough control so national elections can be held in January. President Bush and Prime Minister Ayad Allawi insist the vote will take place, despite warnings by some U.S. military officials that it may not be possible in some areas.
More than 3,000 U.S. and Iraqi forces are trying to clear an insurgent stronghold in towns and villages just south of Baghdad notorious for kidnappings and ambushes. The U.S. command said 17 suspected insurgents were captured Wednesday in two joint raids by U.S. and Iraqi troops around Haswah and Iskandariyah, both about 30 miles south of Baghdad.
Since the operation began Tuesday, four U.S. Marines, three National Guard members and three civilians have been wounded, U.S. officials said. Raids have yielded 18 500-pound bombs, 197 rocket propelled grenades, dozens of mortar shells and other military supplies, the command said.
The Iraqi government was reported close to an agreement with followers of al-Sadr to end weeks of fighting in his stronghold of Sadr City, a teeming Shiite slum in northeastern Baghdad.
An aide to al-Sadr offered Thursday to hand over medium and heavy weapons and cooperate with Iraqi security forces in the capital if the government stops pursuing members of the Shiite militia and releases most of the cleric's followers from jail.
The offer, made by al-Sadr spokesman Ali Smeisem on Al-Arabiya television, was aimed at striking a deal to end weeks of fighting between U.S. troops and al-Sadr's militia in Sadr City.
There was no comment from the Iraqi government or the U.S. command.
Smeisem made no commitment to disband the Mahdi Army militia - a key U.S. and Iraqi demand.
Smeisem also insisted the government respect the "political role" of al-Sadr's movement.
Allawi said Wednesday a committee was being formed to discuss what he termed an "initiative" to end the conflict. Kareem al-Bakhatti, a pro-al-Sadr tribal elder, said the framework agreement calls for al-Sadr's militiamen to turn in weapons in exchange for cash and immunity from prosecution for most of them.
Some al-Sadr aides expressed reservations, and the fiery cleric, whose Mahdi Army launched bloody uprisings in April and August, has frequently zigzagged in negotiations. A senior al-Sadr follower, speaking on condition of anonymity, said his side rejected the proposal because it did not include a halt to arrests, the release of prisoners or an end to house raids.
On Thursday, al-Sadr aides said authorities released pro-al-Sadr Shiite cleric Moayed al-Khazraji, whose arrest a year ago triggered days of protests and clashes with U.S. troops.
--------
Rockets Hit Hotel in Baghdad;
Shiite Rebel Offers Truce Deal
REUTERS
October 7, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/07/international/middleeast/06wire-attack.html?hp&ex=1097208000&en=e62227f3d8379bbc&ei=5094&partner=homepage
BAGHDAD, Oct 7 (Reuters) - Two rockets slammed into the Sheraton hotel in central Baghdad on Thursday night, temporarily overshadowing a pledge by a Shi'ite Muslim militia to disarm.
Shortly after the rocket blasts, bursts of gunfire echoed across the city centre. A hotel resident said one rocket had hit a first-floor room, a second struck nearby.
There were no immediate reports of casualties in the fortified compound containing the Sheraton and the adjacent Palestine hotel, both used by foreign journalists and contractors. A tree was set ablaze outside the Sheraton.
The blasts occurred shortly after a top aide to rebel Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr announced that Shi'ite militiamen would hand over their weapons as part of a peace initiative in Baghdad's Sadr City and other Iraqi hotspots.
The proposed deal, which requires the government's approval, could help calm violence between U.S. forces and Shi'ite rebels ahead of elections due in January, and may pave the way for similar talks with Sunni-led insurgents.
The proposal was announced by Ali Smeism, considered Sadr's most senior acolyte, in a live broadcast on Arabic satellite television channel al-Arabiya and came hours after a top Sadr cleric was freed from U.S. detention at Abu Ghraib jail.
Smeism said in return for the arms surrender, the government must make assurances that Sadr's followers are not "persecuted" and more of his aides are freed from U.S. detention.
He said the proposed deal focused on militiamen holed up in the Baghdad slum district of Sadr City, a hotbed of anti-U.S. activity, but could be extended to other "areas of tension."
As well as calling for the release of prisoners and for U.S. forces to back off the militia, Sadr, via his aides, has also indicated he wants the government to pay reparations for damage done by U.S. forces to Sadr City in recent bombing raids.
There was no immediate word from the government or from U.S. military officials on the proposed ceasefire deal.
The proposal came hours after senior Sadr cleric Moayad al-Khazraji, detained nearly a year ago along with other Shi'ite clerics close to Sadr, was released from Abu Ghraib near Baghdad, a move seen as facilitating a possible deal.
A U.S. official confirmed Khazraji was among 230 Iraqis freed from the prison this week.
Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi insists that Sadr's Mehdi Army militia give up its weapons and get off the streets. For the past several days his government has been negotiating with Shi'ite elders and Sadr's aides on a possible ceasefire.
FALLUJA PROGRESS
Talks have also been under way to defuse Iraq's most stubborn troublespot, Falluja, and the Sunni Muslim city's chief negotiator said they could bear fruit soon.
"The negotiations with the Iraqi government and the U.S army have reached a positive stage and an agreement has been reached for radical solutions," Sheikh Khalid al-Jumaili told Reuters.
Jumaili, a mosque preacher and member of the Mujahideen Shura (council), which has some influence in the lawless city, said minor outstanding issues would be discussed on Saturday.
Fiercely anti-U.S. rebels have ruled the roost in Falluja, 50 km (30 miles) west of Baghdad, since the U.S. military called off a bloody assault there in April.
A U.S. soldier died after an attack on a convoy near Falluja on Wednesday and two others were wounded. The U.S. military said an American soldier was killed and an Iraqi translator wounded in a separate attack near Baiji, north of Baghdad, at midnight.
U.S. and Iraqi officials say Falluja is a base for foreign Islamist militants such as Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Frequent U.S. air strikes have targeted suspected safe houses of Zarqawi, for whom Washington has offered a $25 million reward.
ELECTION DEADLINE
The U.S. military and the Iraqi government have pledged to retake all insurgent-held areas this year to ensure elections set for January proceed.
But they say they would prefer to achieve that goal by political, not military means, where possible.
Last weekend's U.S.-Iraqi offensive, which drove insurgents off the streets of Samarra, north of Baghdad, showed the government's willingness to use force in its bid to pacify Iraq.
"We're addressing the security situation now throughout the country," Allawi said on Wednesday. "As you know, there has been progress in Samarra, there is progress in Sadr City and we hope to make progress in Falluja."
A U.S.-Iraqi force of about 3,000 pushed on with a crackdown on insurgents and weapons caches in a dangerous region southwest of Baghdad on Thursday. The U.S. military said 48 suspects had been captured, including 30 on Wednesday.
-------- israel / palestine
Sharon Aide Says Goal of Gaza Plan Is to Halt Road Map
Key Adviser: Israel Got U.S. Blessing
By John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, October 7, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11236-2004Oct6.html
JERUSALEM, Oct. 6 -- A senior aide to the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, said in an interview published Wednesday that Sharon's plan to withdraw troops and Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip had "frozen" the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and guaranteed that Israel would never have to remove 80 percent of its settlers from the occupied West Bank, with the "blessing" of the U.S. government.
The aide, Dov Weisglass -- until recently Sharon's chief of staff, his personal attorney and still one of his closest advisers -- said the primary goals of the proposal to withdraw the 8,100 Jewish settlers from Gaza were to strengthen Israel's hold on its more numerous settlements in the West Bank and to freeze the political process as a way to indefinitely block the creation of a Palestinian state.
"What I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns," Weisglass said in an interview with the daily Haaretz newspaper. Under that formula, he estimated that "out of 240,000 settlers [in the West Bank], 190,000 will not be moved from their place."
Weisglass, who has been Sharon's point man in talks with the Bush administration, said the U.S.-backed peace plan called the "road map" is dead. The plan calls for the creation of an independent Palestinian state by the end of next year and is a cornerstone of President Bush's Middle East policy.
The disengagement plan "supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians," Weisglass said.
As a result, he said, "you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem."
Later in the day, Sharon's office issued a statement clarifying that the prime minister "supports the road map, which is the only plan that will enable progress towards a lasting political settlement. The blame for the current stalemate lies with the Palestinians, who are refusing to honor their commitments and who are continuing to cling to the path of terrorism, violence and incitement."
But Palestinians and Israelis from the country's peace camp swiftly attacked Weisglass's remarks, saying they proved that Sharon never intended the proposed Gaza withdrawal to lead to a wider peace or to be a stepping stone in the road map -- as both he and Bush have described it.
Weisglass's interview "confirmed what we feared: that this plan called the withdrawal from Gaza is really to deepen the [Israeli] occupation of the West Bank," said Ahmed Tibi, a prominent Israeli Arab member of Israel's parliament. Tibi said he had sent a letter to the U.S. ambassador, Dan Kurtzer, asking if the United States and specifically Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, one of Weisglass's main U.S. contacts, were a party to Sharon's "deceit."
Yossi Beilin, another member of parliament and one of Israel's foremost peace activists, said that after the Sharon government had said for years that progress toward peace was stalled because there was no partner on the Palestinian side, Weisglass's comments showed that it was Sharon who was not the partner for peace.
Beilin said the interview revealed that the Gaza disengagement plan "is not to test the success of such an experience, and then using that to go on and continue with a broader peace process, but is a way to prevent any step toward completing a peace agreement with the Palestinians."
In the interview, Weisglass contended that the United States fully supported not only the Gaza withdrawal plan but the resulting impediment to the creation of a Palestinian state. "Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda -- and all this with authority and permission," Weisglass said, "all with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress."
In Washington, a spokesman for the State Department, J. Adam Ereli, said the publication of Weisglass's comments prompted contact between the U.S. Embassy and Israeli officials in which "we certainly made it clear that they didn't coincide with what we thought the position of the government of Israel was."
But Ereli said the statement by Sharon's office reassured the Bush administration that "Israel is committed to the road map and the president's two-state vision. . . . Based on that statement and based on Israel's declared policy, we see no cause to doubt it."
The report on Weisglass's remarks came as fighting continued in the Gaza Strip on the eighth day of an Israeli offensive to stop Palestinian militants from firing homemade Qassam rockets and mortars at Jewish settlements and other Israeli targets. The invasion was launched after a Palestinian rocket killed two small Israeli children in the town of Sderot, just outside the strip.
Seven Palestinians and one Thai laborer at a Jewish settlement were killed or died overnight and on Wednesday in Gaza. That brings the Palestinian death toll in Gaza since Sept. 28 to at least 90, according to recent press accounts and the Palestinian Health Ministry, which has compiled a list of all those killed in Gaza since the start of the operation. The number of Israelis killed in conflict over the course of the entire year is 91, according to figures compiled by the Israeli Foreign Ministry and the Magen David Adom emergency rescue service.
As of Tuesday, according to the ministry, 25 of the Palestinians killed and 138 of the 320 wounded were younger than 18.
Staff writer Glenn Kessler in Washington contributed to this report.
--------
Israeli Aide Hints That Gaza Exit Would Freeze Peace Plan
October 7, 2004
NY Times
By GREG MYRE
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/07/international/middleeast/07mideast.html
GAZA, Oct. 6 - Israel's proposed withdrawal from the Gaza Strip is intended to put the issue of Palestinian statehood on indefinite hold, a close aide to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said in an interview that was published Wednesday and immediately stirred controversy.
The comments by the aide, Dov Weissglas, who frequently handles delicate diplomatic contacts with the Bush administration, drew sharp criticism from the Palestinians. Mr. Sharon's office quickly put out a statement saying the prime minister was committed to the Middle East peace plan, known as the road map, which envisions Palestinian statehood sooner rather than later.
The State Department said it had sought clarification from the Israeli government and accepted Mr. Sharon's statement that he was supportive of the road map.
Mr. Sharon has himself dropped many hints that he is less than enthusiastic about the road map, which would require many concessions from Israel. In a recent newspaper interview, Mr. Sharon said Israel was not following the peace plan, which stalled amid violence shortly after it was introduced in June 2003.
Still, Mr. Weissglas's published remarks were unusually blunt. He described the planned withdrawal of Israeli settlers from Gaza and a part of the West Bank as a substitute for the road map, not a means of reviving the moribund peace process, as the Bush administration has stated.
"The significance of our disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process," Mr. Weissglas was quoted as saying in Haaretz, a liberal daily often critical of Mr. Sharon's government. "It supplies the formaldehyde necessary so there is no political process with Palestinians."
"When you freeze the process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state," Mr. Weissglas added. "Effectively, this whole package called a Palestinian state, with all it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda."
In the interview, Mr. Weissglas also said the Israeli position had the "authority and permission" of the White House and Congress.
Until recently, Mr. Weissglas had been the prime minister's chief of staff and continues to serve as a senior adviser.
In Washington, Adam Ereli, a State Department spokesman, said, "Our understanding is that Israel is committed to the road map and to the president's two-state vision."
"Based on Israel's declared policy, we see no cause to doubt it," he said.
Palestinians contend that Mr. Sharon is not serious about holding negotiations, and they seized on Mr. Weissglas' remarks.
"I believe he has revealed the true intentions of Sharon," Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, told Reuters.
The Palestinians are demanding that the Gaza withdrawal be part of a comprehensive peace effort. But they say that Mr. Sharon is using it in a bid to consolidate Israel's control on the much larger settlements in the West Bank.
The statement from Mr. Sharon's office said the prime minister "supports the road map, which is the only plan that will enable progress toward a lasting political settlement."
Meanwhile, six Palestinians and a farm worker from Thailand were killed in violence throughout Gaza on Wednesday, Palestinian hospitals and the Israeli military said.
Israeli forces shot dead two gunmen from the militant group Hamas who infiltrated the greenhouses at the Kfar Darom settlement in southern Gaza, the military said. A third attacker died when his explosive went off, and the Thai worker was killed during the gun battle. In northern Gaza, Israeli tank fire killed a father and son in their hometown, Beit Lahiya, and a 15-year old boy died from gunshot wounds in another Israeli shooting, Palestinian medical officials and doctors said.
For more than three years, Hamas has been shooting crude rockets from northern Gaza, with most directed at the Israeli town of Sederot, just outside Gaza.
Israeli forces charged into northern Gaza on Sept. 28 after the latest upsurge in rocket fire. More than 70 Palestinians and 5 Israelis have been killed in the operation.
-------- nato
NATO Obstacles Delay Training of Iraqi Force
October 7, 2004
By ERIC SCHMITT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/07/politics/07nato.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Oct. 6 - A NATO program to help train the new Iraqi Army will probably not begin until the end of the year, the alliance's top commander says, dealing a setback to the Bush administration's effort to speed the rebuilding of Iraqi security forces in advance of elections there in January.
Administration officials eagerly welcomed NATO's decision last month to dispatch 300 trainers to Iraq to set up a military academy to help prepare mid-level and senior officers, as well as enlisted personnel, in Iraq's security forces. NATO agreed to expand the alliance's presence in Iraq after overcoming resistance from several members, notably France.
But a new set of procedural hurdles lies ahead. NATO's top general, Gen. James L. Jones of the Marine Corps, said the alliance's deliberative, often time-consuming process to approve the details of the program and to recruit trainers from members nations could eat up months.
"Hopefully, if everything goes well, by the end of the year we should have something up and operating," General Jones said Tuesday in an interview at the Pentagon. "Everyone wants to get it done as quickly as possible."
President Bush and his top advisers have said that preparing more than 250,000 members of the Iraqi police, border patrol, national guard and army units for duty is one of the administration's highest priorities in turning over to Iraqis greater responsibility for security. American officials have viewed the NATO training as an important part of that strategy.
NATO officials said their plan is now before the alliance's military committee and would soon be forwarded to NATO ambassadors for approval. At that point, alliance military planners would begin working out the details and seeking NATO members to contribute forces to the mission. NATO ambassadors held their regular weekly meeting in Brussels on Wednesday, but the training issue did not come up, an alliance official said. It is expected to be a central topic when NATO defense ministers meet in Romania next week.
Overall, General Jones said that a total of about 3,000 troops, including logistics, security and command personnel, could be sent to Iraq to support the training mission. But he said there are no plans at present for NATO to take control eventually of the American-led international force inside the country. "For now, our mandate is clear and limited," he said.
There are about 40 NATO trainers in Iraq, and General Jones said they had started working with senior Iraqi generals. But the bulk of the work at the academy involving officers and enlisted forces will have to wait until NATO works out the details, he said, adding that it was too early to predict how many Iraqi forces the academy might train.
General Jones said that the academy, which would complement the training now overseen by Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus of the Army, would be the main NATO training component inside Iraq. About 16 of NATO's 26 members have indicated they would help with training inside the country.
Many other NATO members and non-alliance nations have offered to conduct training, as long as it is outside Iraq. The Iraqi police, for example, are training at camps in Jordan. General Jones said Iraqis could train at bases in Germany or Italy, and some countries may offer positions at their war colleges.
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US to press allies for quicker action on meeting NATO mission requirements
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Oct 07, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041007193011.zkubemml.html
The United States will be pressing allies to move more quickly to meet troop and other requirements for NATO missions in Afghanistan and Iraq next week when alliance defense ministers meet in Romania, US defense officials said.
US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is scheduled to attend the informal meeting October 13-14 at Poiana Brasov in the Carpathian mountains.
No formal decisions are taken at the informal meetings but the ministers will review NATO operations in the Balkans, in Afghanistan and a growing mission to equip and train Iraqi security forces.
"Frankly with all these NATO missions, the good news is the allies are willing to contribute to them, the bad news is that sometimes we want more contributions to fill out the requirements we find," said a senior defense official.
After wrangling over the details, NATO agreed last month to a full training mission in Iraq, but now must approve a concept of operations and operational plans and then generate the forces needed for it.
General James Jones, NATO's supreme allied commander, said last week as many as 3,000 NATO troops could be deployed to Iraq to help train Iraqi security forces.
The defense official, acknowledged, however that they are not likely get there until next year -- too late to have an impact on the training of security forces ahead of Iraq's January elections.
"We'd like to see it happen sooner," the official said.
NATO also has struggled to meet requirements of the first phase of an expansion of the NATO-led International Security Force in AFghanistan before the elections.
The defense official said ISAF now had a solid force in Kabul, and by the end of the month will have five provincial reconstruction teams operating in northern Afghanistan.
"We have been able to by an large fill the requirements for ISAF stage one (expansion). Where we're stalled is ISAF stage two, which is out in the west. And that's where we're struggling to get allies to come forward with the capabilities," he said.
The ISAF force, which now numbers about 9,000 troops, performs a peacekeeping mission in Iraq alongside a US-led coalition force of about 17,000, which operates in the most volatile areas of the country.
Americans also are likely to press their view in the NATO meeting in Romania that countries that contribute troops to NATO missions should do so without placing special restrictions, or so-called "national caveats," on their use.
After-action reviews found that such restrictions impeded NATO peacekeeper's ability to control riots that broke out in Kosovo in March, leaving 19 people dead and hundreds of homes destroyed, the defense official said.
"One of the problem that we had is that countries bring into the mix national caveats when they say their forces can only operate in a particular sector, or they can only perform certain missions, or they are not allowed to do things like riot control," the official said.
"What happens is that these become liabilities sometimes because enemies try to identify where are the seams, who can do what, who can't do what," he said.
In the case of Kosovo, US and allied officials are considering restructuring the 18,000-member NATO-led peacekeeping force in a way that would eliminate sectors controlled by troops of different countries operating under different sets of rules.
"We have made a fair amount of progress in getting those national caveats removed, but we have a ways to go," he said.
"It's true not just of Kosovo but also of Afghanistan with ISAF. Countries sometimes have national doctrines they want to adhere to, sometimes they have political issues at home they have to balance out with and these kind of bleed into the operation with national caveats," he said.
-------- pakistan / india
Car Bomb Kills 39 in Pakistan
October 7, 2004
By SALMAN MASOOD
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/07/international/09CND-STAN.html
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Oct. 7 - A car bomb tore through a religious gathering of Sunni Muslims in the central city of Multan today, killing 39 people and wounding at least 80, Pakistani officials said.
The attack demonstrated the ease with which extremists are able to strike in the main cities of the country. It was the second bombing within a week that shattered a relative period of peace in the country. Just six days ago, a suicide bomber blew himself up in a Shiite mosque, killing 31 people in the eastern city of Sialkot.
No one claimed responsibility for today's blast but Pakistani authorities speculated that it could be a reaction to the suicide bombing in Sialkot.
Pakistan has been racked by sectarian violence in recent years. Shiites make up about 20 percent of Pakistan's population while Sunnis make up 77 percent. There is generally little tension between the groups. A tiny minority of extremists is believed to be responsible for sectarian attacks.
The blast underlines the challenge President Pervez Musharraf, an important ally of the United States in the war against terror, faces in his bid to root out extremism and religious militancy from the country. It also demonstrates the ability of extremists to strike back despite a government crackdown on religious extremism in the country.
Pakistani authorities claimed to have broken the back of extremism in the country after arresting more than 70 suspected terrorists since July.
Authorities in Multan said that the blast took place at 4:30 a.m. at the conclusion of a gathering of Sunni Muslims marking the anniversary of the death of Maulana Azam Tariq, leader of the banned extremist group Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan. Mr. Tariq was gunned down by unknown assailants in the outskirts of the capital Islamabad last year. Sunni Muslims had blamed Shiite extremists for the killing.
Police officials said that a 15-pound bomb was planted in a car idling by the roadside near the site of the gathering. The blast rocked the neighborhood, damaged houses and gutted nearby shops. Local television channels showed images of the charred wreckage of the car, amid the rubble of houses. Shoes and caps lay in pools of blood at the blast site.
Witnesses heard another blast minutes after the first explosion and said that another bomb was planted in a motorbike. But the police said that the second blast was caused by a transformer that blew up as a result of the first blast. Electricity to the adjoining areas was disconnected.
Security was increased after the blast as angry mourners gathered outside the Nishtar Hospital in Multan, where the wounded had been taken for treatment, and chanted slogans against the Shiites. Army troops were called in to help the civil authorities to maintain law and order.
Jamil Usmani, 26, who had been standing in a nearby parking lot with friends, said in a report by The Associated Press that a stampede after the bombing caused many injuries.
"The explosion numbed our ears, we saw people falling on each other, everybody was crying, everybody was running," he said. "Many people were injured in the stampede, we started picking them up and asked passing cars for help."
-------- space
Separate Space Military Force Has Few Supporters at Pentagon
Space News
By Lon Rains Editor,
07 October 2004
http://www.space.com/news/space_force_041007.html
OMAHA, Nebraska -- A debate that will not go away -- whether the United States needs to create a separate branch of the military for space -- topped the list of audience questions after the first panel presentations at the Strategic Space 2004 event here in Omaha sponsored by Space News and the Space Foundation.
The answer from at least two members of the panel "Space at a Strategic Crossroad - Progress and Challenges," was a resounding 'No.'
"All it would do is build walls when now we are doing it together every day," said U.S. Army Col. Jeffrey C. Horne, deputy commander for operations at U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command and U.S. Army Strategic Command.
Army Brig. Gen. Richard V. Geraci, deputy director of the National Security Space Office, agreed. "All of the services have moved out smartly on the development of a space cadre, so we don't need a separate space force," Geraci said. He also noted that the creation of U.S. Strategic Command (USStratCom) makes the creation of a space service less necessary because StratCom now is responsible for making sure that space capabilities are integrated throughout the U.S. military.
Geraci also noted that the deputy secretary of the Air Force, currently Peter B. Teets, now has wide ranging authority over military space programs because his is also the Department of Defense Agent for Space and the director of the National Reconnaissance office, which procures U.S. military and intelligence satellites.
During his presentation, Horne said "things have changed incredibly within the Army since Desert Storm." He noted that the bandwidth available to U.S. forces during Operation Iraqi Freedom was 42 times higher than it was during Operation Desert Storm and will likely be 42 times higher than present levels in the not too distant future.
By the time the Army gets the Future Combat System in the field there will be the equivalent of a T-1 broadband connection going to every vehicle, he added.
"The Army is moving forward to embed space forces in every element," Horne said, noting that the Army's needs for qualified space officers has increased 37 percent. He said overall, the Army needs about 900 new officers with space specialties and even more non commissioned officers, enlisted personnel and certified civilian space personnel.
But one retired military officer said the debate about the need for a separate space service it not likely to go away and that many people believe the Air Force still has to prove that it can make the most of space capabilities. He also said the country's leadership needs to decide what the space mission is and then determine the best way to accomplish that mission.
----
Brazil In Space: Gaudenzi Plots A Strategy
Oct 7, 2004
by Frank Braun
Brasilia, Brazil (UPI)
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/launchers-04zp.html
Brazil will hold a national conference in November to re-consider the future of its space program, according to Sergio Gaudenzi, the president of AEB, Brazil's space agency. "We plan to organize a national conference here in Brasilia to re-evaluate and perhaps even revise the Brazilian space program," Gaudenzi told United Press International in a recent interview.
We expect to have the full participation of the political, academic and industrial communities at this conference. We hope the appropriate congressional committees, such as the Science and Technology committees of the Assembly and the Senate, will also help craft our new plans for the future of Brazil's space program.
In the last few years, the space program has suffered a series of setbacks, culminating in the explosion of the VLS rocket in 2003 on the launch pad at the country's Alcantara facility, killing 21 people.
A government-appointed legislative commission released a report last month citing inadequate funding as the fundamental cause of most of the program's problems, including the events leading to the catastrophic explosion.
According to the report, the lack of investments in new equipment, security measures and training of the personnel working in the space program led to the tragedy. Terezinha Fernandes, a member of the commission, also said low salaries at Alcantara forced many technicians and officials to work extra jobs to meet their own needs.
The commission's report specifically pointed out the dramatic reductions in the budgets allocated for AEB over the last few years. During its height, in 1992 thru 1994, the entire Brazilian space program received about $100 million a year. In 2002, however, the year before the accident, the budget plummeted to $15.3 million.
Last August, Gaudenzi proposed a 2005 budget for AEB of $36 million, more than double the current level.
We just submitted a proposed budget for 2005 for Brazil's entire space program, including our space agency and the National Space Research Institute, he said.
It comes out to close to $100 million. The Congress, of course, has to approve this, but just this last July, the lower house of the Congress, the Assembly, voted to give our agency additional funds this year for work on the VLS and reconstruction of the launch pad for the VLS.
In July, the Assembly approved a one-time, additional outlay for this year of about $12 million for VLS development, accident recovery and initial preparations to launch the Ukrainian Cyclone-4 rocket, which is being done under a joint space agreement between the two countries.
According to Gaudenzi, $100 million, allocated annually, is the minimum that our space program requires for the continuity of our programs.
Prompted by questions within Brazilian society about the relevance of the space program - known as the National Space Activities Program or PNAE - originally established by the military government in the 1970s, space officials see this year's conference as an opportunity to involve larger segments of society in helping to set the course for the future.
In August, Gaudenzi established a working group to conduct a complete analysis of the current PNAE, covering 1998 to 2007, and to revise it for a new period, from 2005 to 2014.
The working group, headed by Luiz Carlos Miranda, director of the NSRI, is made up of representatives from AEB; the ministries of Foreign Affairs, Science and Technology, Development and Industry and Foreign Commerce, and the Air Force Command, along with representatives from the scientific and industrial sectors.
The working group will have three months to go through a complete re-evaluation of the PNAE and present their findings in November at the conference, which will be open to the pubic.
Gaudenzi said the group has been charged specifically with evaluating the impact of current space projects on the nation's industrial policies, technological development and, most important, how it will benefit Brazilian society.
I want to communicate the benefits of the Brazilian space program to the Brazilian public, Gaudenzi said. Getting the support of the Brazilian public helps to guarantee the approval of the necessary funds for our budget.
By the way, we expect to enlist the help of our Brazilian astronaut in this effort as well, since he is a great communicator and is viewed as a celebrity in our society.
In an earlier conversation with UPI, the astronaut, Maj. Marcos Pontes, indicated that the next two months are crucial in gaining public support for Brazil's involvement in the International Space Station - one of the components of the PNAE.
The working group is considering whether Brazil should continue its ISS participation, and if so, at what level.
-------- un
Israel Holding 25 U.N. Workers
Associated Press
Thursday, October 7, 2004; Page A29
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13155-2004Oct6.html
UNITED NATIONS, Oct. 6 -- At least 25 Palestinian U.N. workers have been detained by Israel for as long as two years under charges Israel refuses to reveal, U.N. officials said Wednesday.
The statements coincided with the arrival of a U.N. team in Jerusalem to investigate Israeli charges that a Palestinian employee of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency loaded a Qassam rocket into a U.N. ambulance during fighting in the northern Gaza Strip.
Israel has backed away from its claim that footage from a drone plane showed an agency driver loading a rocket into the ambulance. But Israel will demand that the investigators determine whether the world body employs people who "aid and abet" Palestinian militant groups, an Israeli official said.
Israeli-U.N. relations have been strained for years, with Israel repeatedly accusing the world body of bias. The United Nations, meanwhile, has criticized Israeli policies and military operations in Palestinian areas. Relations have become more strained because of Israel's eight-day incursion into Gaza.
The issue of the detentions surfaced Tuesday in Jerusalem when an Israeli army commander said that 13 agency employees had been arrested during an unspecified period for links to militant groups and that some would be charged soon.
Fred Eckhard, the U.N. spokesman, said Wednesday that "one staffer has been detained in Gaza for over two years and is currently awaiting trial, and 24 are being held under administrative detention without charge or trial." In each case, Israel would not explain the reason for the detention, he said.
--------
CIA releases oil for food 'secret lists'
October 7 2004
Financial Times
By Mark Turner at the United Nations
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/15f1bcee-17f1-11d9-9ac5-00000e2511c8.html
The CIA on Wednesday released 13 "secret lists" of people and companies that allegedly received and lifted oil allocations from Iraq, adding new evidence to inquiries into who might have benefited from the country's controversial oil-for-food programme.
According to Iraq Survey Group's report, the lists were maintained by former vice-president Taha Yassin Ramadan and Amir Rashid, the former minister of oil.
The report says the lists were provided by a high-level official with Iraq's State Oil Marketing Organisation on June 16, 2004. They purportedly specify how much oil individuals were allocated under the scheme, and the name of companies contracted to "lift" oil on their behalf.
The regime "gave prominent vocal Iraq supporters and willing influential UN officials lucrative oil allocations," the report says.
The released lists do not, however, name US citizens and business entities, which were "redacted from this report in accordance with provisions of the Privacy Act". The report also stresses that in many cases the transactions listed might be entirely legitimate.
Many of the transactions involved allocations to an oil company, which then lifted the total or lesser quantity on its own behalf. But in a number of cases, the allocation holders were separate to the companies contracted to lift the oil. The listed names include the following. First name is allocation, second is contracted company.
Mr Patrik Morjan (Dutch) - Trafigura (Dutch); Russian Peace and Unity Party - Lukoil; Mr Joan (Chinese) - Fortun Oil (HongKong); Russian Liberal Democratic Party (Mr Girinovski) - Nafta Moscow (Russian); Mr, Sifan U.N. - African Middle East (Panama); The Russian presidential office - Rosneft (Russian); Charles Pascua (French) - Genmar (Swiss)
-------- us
Pacific Command Nominee Withdraws; Army Pick Questioned
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 7, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13138-2004Oct6.html
A top Air Force general became the first uniformed victim of his service's contracting scandal, withdrawing his nomination for one of the highest positions in the military last night a few hours after a tumultuous confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Air Force Gen. Gregory S. Martin had been nominated by the Bush administration to be the new U.S. commander for the Pacific and East Asia, a position that oversees operations in more than half the globe.
Martin "has requested that his nomination for commander, U.S. Pacific Command, be withdrawn," the Pentagon said in a two-sentence statement issued last night.
It followed by a week the revelation that another senior Air Force officer, Maj. Gen. Thomas J. Fiscus, the service's top uniformed lawyer, had stepped aside temporarily while he is under investigation for, among other things, allegedly having an inappropriate sexual relationship with a subordinate.
Martin's move came after a day in which members of the Armed Services panel also criticized President Bush's nominee for Army secretary as lacking the background needed to oversee the Army as it engages in Iraq in the first sustained combat operations it has faced since the Vietnam War.
Two Republican senators led the charge against the nominees proposed by the Republican White House.
Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) vociferously challenged Martin, the first Air Force officer ever tapped for the command of U.S. forces in the Pacific, which for decades has been seen as a Navy possession. McCain is a retired Navy officer and the son of Adm. John S. McCain Jr., the U.S. commander in the Pacific from 1968 to 1972.
McCain attacked Martin not on that basis, but because Martin has been intimately involved in Air Force acquisition issues for years. Now chief of the Air Force Materiel Command, Martin earlier in his career worked closely with Darleen A. Druyun, a former Air Force procurement official who last week was sentenced to nine months in prison for granting favors in contracts to Boeing Co. before going to work there.
McCain has been locked in a fight with the Air Force over its plan to spend billions to acquire new refueling aircraft from Boeing. "In response to repeated requests by Congress for tanker-related records, the Air Force stonewalled for months," he said, and then under threat of subpoena produced documents "only after doctoring" them.
"In my 22 years in Congress, it's the most frustrating thing that I've ever seen," he said.
Martin said he is not an expert in contracting but would have "raised the flag" had he seen Druyun do anything illegal. "When she made her plea bargain, not only was I disappointed, but I was very surprised," he said.
Unsatisfied, McCain indicated that he would keep Martin's nomination bottled up in the committee until the Air Force turns over all the documents he has requested. Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.) appeared to back that position, saying he would withhold his support until the committee completes its work on the refueler aircraft issue.
A spokesman for Warner declined to comment on Martin's withdrawal from consideration. Neither McCain nor his spokeswoman could be reached.
Martin was born on Fort Myer and attended the Landon School in Bethesda, from which he graduated in 1966. After finishing at the Air Force Academy in 1970, he flew 161 combat missions in the Vietnam War. He later commanded a variety of fighter aircraft units before moving into some top-level jobs in Air Force acquisition. In 2000, he became head of the Air Force in Europe, and in 2003 he took over as chief of the Air Force Materiel Command, which has its headquarters at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.
At the confirmation hearing, Warner also expressed concern about the credentials of Francis J. Harvey, who was nominated to fill the vacancy created when Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld fired Thomas E. White as Army secretary 17 months ago, just after the end of the spring 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Warner and other panel members questioned how well Harvey's background as an engineer and executive at Westinghouse Electric Corp. and Duratek Inc. had prepared him to handle the human side of the Army at a time when it is under stress.
"We will very carefully scrutinize your qualifications," Warner said.
--------
Water Probe Backs Marine Corps Defense
Critics Say Contamination Caused Illnesses at Base
By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 7, 2004; Page A37
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13154-2004Oct6.html
MIAMI, Oct. 6 -- The Marine Corps failed to evaluate health risks after discovering toxic chemicals in the drinking water at Camp Lejeune, N.C., in the early 1980s and did not provide enough detailed information about the contamination to residents of base housing, according to a report issued on Tuesday by an investigatory panel.
The panel, appointed in February by Gen. Michael W. Hagee, commandant of the Marine Corps, criticized military water experts for not helping base officials "understand the significance of the contamination," but it ultimately concluded that the Marine Corps "acted responsibly."
The panel's report agreed with the central tenet of the Marine Corps's defense of its actions at Lejeune, saying there were no federal standards at the time and that the base's water quality was comparable to that of municipal water systems of the era.
Hagee, who has declined repeated requests for interviews about the case and did not respond to written questions Tuesday, has described the panel as an independent body appointed to address the growing controversy over water contamination at Camp Lejeune. Former Marines, their families and civilians who lived on the base have blamed the contaminated water for a variety of chronic health problems, including cancers that claimed the lives of several children.
Sen. James M. Jeffords (I-Vt.), who has been critical of the panel's makeup, dismissed its findings Tuesday and called for a separate, independent panel to investigate the case.
"Marines and their families deserve much better," said Jeffords, who is the ranking minority member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
Retired Marine Master Sgt. Jerry Ensminger, whose 6-year-old daughter died of leukemia after growing up at Camp Lejeune, called the report "a whitewash."
"We gave the Marine Corps a chance to police themselves," Ensminger said. "It's obvious that they do not want to and they are not going to unless they are forced."
The report issued Tuesday is not likely to be the last word about water contamination at Camp Lejeune. The federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry is studying children whose mothers were pregnant at the base between 1968 and 1985.
Ensminger, Jeffords and others have said that the study should be expanded to cover adults.
The metal degreaser trichloroethylene and the dry-cleaning compound tetrachloroethylene were first discovered at Camp Lejeune in 1980 and 1981, but residents were not notified until the wells delivering contaminated water were closed in 1985.
The panel's report said an official with the North Carolina Water Supply Branch, which oversaw some testing at the base, was quoted in a newspaper article at the time, saying that "Camp Lejeune should not worry about getting bad drinking water."
The panel lauded Camp Lejeune officials for "making every effort" to comply with generally accepted water-quality standards, but it noted that water managers did not move quickly after the discovery of chemicals in the water. Poor record keeping, as well as inadequate funding, staffing and training, contributed to the slow response, the report said.
The Naval Facilities Engineering Command Atlantic Division, which provides technical advice to Marine bases, was "not aggressive in providing Camp Lejeune with information and expertise to help the base understand the significance of the contamination," the report said.
"The lack of a quick and aggressive response," it added, "was unfortunate."
--------
U.S. Extends Troops' Exit From South Korea
October 7, 2004
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/07/international/asia/07korea.html?pagewanted=all
SEOUL, South Korea, Oct. 6 - In response to heavy South Korean pressure, the United States has agreed to stretch out over the next three years the withdrawal of one third of American troops here, dropping an earlier deadline of next year, American and South Korean officials said Wednesday.
Washington had announced the withdrawal in June over objections from South Korea. This summer, 3,500 American troops left here for Iraq, the first of a total of 5,000 American troops that are to be withdrawn this year from South Korea. Under the new schedule, the next 5,000 are to leave by the end of 2006. The final 2,500 are to leave by the end of 2008, according to a new calendar announced here Wednesday by the American Embassy and the South Korean Defense Ministry.
In addition, the United States will leave in place many of its Apache helicopters and its multiple-launch rocket systems, which are designed to destroy North Korean artillery that might fire on South Korea.
On Wednesday, South Korea's military praised the new timetable for "fully taking into consideration the concerns" of the Korean public.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts / tribunals
Secret Rule Requiring ID for Flights at Center of Court Battle
By Sara Kehaulani Goo
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 7, 2004; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13076-2004Oct6.html
John Gilmore, a tech-industry millionaire and privacy advocate, set out two years ago to challenge a basic element of airline security.
On July 4, 2002, he refused to show a photo identification when checking in at Oakland, Calif., for a flight to Baltimore on Southwest Airlines. The same day, he declined United Airline's demand to present an ID for a flight from San Francisco to Washington. In both instances, Gilmore, 49, was prohibited from boarding and was informed by the airlines that a federal security rule required passengers to show an ID in order to fly.
However, no airline employee could cite the rule.
Gilmore sued several government agencies and the airlines, claiming the ID requirement infringes on Americans' right to travel freely. The lawsuit, Gilmore v. Ashcroft, has forced the government to defend the existence of secret security rules that apply to millions of travelers.
The Bush administration said in court filings that it cannot discuss the ID rule because it is outlined in a document that the Transportation Security Administration deems "security sensitive information." For that reason, the government has petitioned the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit to file its documents so that they not be made public. The court is expected to make a decision soon.
"We had never heard of the government asking to submit secret briefs . . . when it wasn't based on some secret criminal investigation that needed to be protected," said Susan E. Seager, an attorney who filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of media organizations including the Associated Press, McClatchy Newspapers Inc. and Los Angeles Times Communications LLC.
The news organizations weighed in on the case to keep the court proceedings open to the public, Seager said. "It's highly important that the court address the issue of secrecy and to do so in an open court," Seager said. "Otherwise, it will open the door for the government to ask for all kinds of secret proceedings."
The federal government's requirement for passengers to show a government ID for air travel is relatively new. In the mid-1990s, the Federal Aviation Administration issued a secret temporary order, or "security directive," to airlines that instructed them to request a photo ID from passengers. If passengers did not have an ID, they usually could still fly, but they often had to undergo additional security procedures.
After the terrorist attacks in 2001, the TSA issued a new order directing airlines to require, not just request, an ID before boarding a flight. Until recently, however, it was unclear whether that order existed.
In court documents, the U.S. government at first said it could not confirm whether there was a security directive requiring passengers to show ID. In an about-face, the government last month acknowledged that the order existed in a new court filing. As it turns out, the order was mentioned in an obscure maritime security rule published in May 2004.
If Gilmore succeeds in forcing the government to disclose what its secret law says, other attorneys worry it would set a dangerous precedent that could harm efforts to combat terrorism.
"Courts are justifiably going to defer to the compelling national security interest" of the government, said Kenneth P. Quinn, former FAA general counsel. "Most Americans understand the need for secrecy for security sensitive rules."
Much of Gilmore's case was dismissed by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in March 2004. On appeal, a commissioner for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled on Sept. 10 against the government's motion to file documents under seal. The court is now considering a government appeal of that ruling.
A spokesman for the Department of Justice, which is handling the government's case, declined to comment.
Gilmore, a balding man with a long beard who wears tie-dyed socks and Birkenstocks, has brought the lawsuit in accordance with his civil libertarian views, according to his attorney, James P. Harrison. Gilmore, one of the first employees of Sun Microsystems Inc., founded another tech company that sold for several hundred million dollars. He serves as a director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which supports Internet and electronic communications privacy rights, Harrison said.
"My hat's off to him for actually not going out and buying an island somewhere and putting his feet up. He's a patriot," said Harrison, who represents a client in Alaska who is also suing the government on the "right to travel" issue.
--------
Times Reporter Is Held in Contempt in Leak Inquiry
October 7, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-CIA-Leak.html?hp&ex=1097208000&en=8334394676357cf0&ei=5094&partner=homepage
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A federal judge held a reporter in contempt Thursday for refusing to divulge confidential sources to prosecutors investigating the leak of an undercover CIA officer's identity.
U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan ordered New York Times reporter Judith Miller jailed until she agrees to testify about her sources before a grand jury, but said she could remain free while pursuing an appeal. Miller could be jailed up to 18 months.
Hogan cited Supreme Court rulings that reporters do not have absolute First Amendment protection from testifying about confidential sources. He said there was ample evidence that U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald of Chicago, the special prosecutor in the CIA leak case, had exhausted other avenues of obtaining key testimony before issuing subpoenas to Miller and other reporters.
``The special counsel has made a limited, deferential approach to the press in this matter,'' Hogan said.
Fitzgerald is investigating whether a crime was committed when someone leaked the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame, whose name was published by syndicated columnist Robert Novak on July 14, 2003. Novak cited two ``senior administration officials'' as his sources.
The Novak column appeared after Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, was critical in a newspaper opinion piece of President Bush's claim that Iraq sought to obtain uranium in Niger. The CIA had sent Wilson to Niger to investigate that claim, which he concluded was unfounded.
Miller's lawyer, Floyd Abrams, said he would quickly file notice of an appeal of Hogan's ruling with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He and Miller both noted that although she gathered material for a story about Plame, she never wrote one.
``I think it's really frightening when journalists can be put in jail for doing their job effectively,'' Miller told reporters outside the courthouse.
Fitzgerald also has issued subpoenas to reporters from NBC, Time magazine and The Washington Post. Some have agreed to provide limited testimony after their sources -- notably Lewis ``Scooter'' Libby, who is Vice President Cheney's chief of staff -- released them from their promise of confidentiality.
Miller and Bill Keller, the Times' executive editor, said they would not agree to provide testimony even under those circumstances.
Novak never has said whether he has been subpoenaed.
--------
TRIAL AND ERRORS
After Convictions, the Undoing of a U.S. Terror Prosecution
October 7, 2004
The New York Times
By DANNY HAKIM and ERIC LICHTBLAU
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/07/national/07detroit.html?pagewanted=all&position=
DETROIT, Oct. 6 - Publicly, federal prosecutors declared in the summer of 2002 that they had thwarted a "sleeper operational combat cell" based in a dilapidated apartment here.
Privately, senior Justice Department officials had doubts about the strength of the case even as they were moving to indict four Middle Eastern immigrants on terrorism charges. The evidence was "somewhat weak," an internal Justice Department memorandum obtained by The New York Times acknowledged. It relied on a single informant with "some baggage," and there was no clear link to terrorist groups. But charging the men with terrorism, the memorandum said, might pressure them to give up information.
"We can charge this case with the hope that the case might get better," Barry Sabin, the department's counterterrorism chief, wrote in the memorandum, "and the certainty that it will not get much worse."
But the case did get worse. After winning highly publicized convictions of two suspects on terrorism charges in June 2003, the Justice Department took the extraordinary step five weeks ago of repudiating its own case and successfully moving to throw out the terrorism charges. In a long court filing, the government discredited its own witnesses and found fault with virtually every part of its prosecution.
The blame, the department suggested in its filing, lay mainly at the feet of the lead prosecutor in Detroit, Richard G. Convertino, whom it portrayed as a rogue lawyer. But documents and interviews with people knowledgeable about the case show that top officials at the Justice Department were involved in almost every step of the prosecution, from formulating strategy to editing the draft indictments to planning how the suspects would be incarcerated.
President Bush himself said the Detroit case was one of several critical investigations around the country that had "thwarted terrorists.'' But the wreckage of the case reveals that it was built on evidence that has since been undermined. A series of missteps and in-fighting weakened the case further, documents and interviews show. The first line of the government's indictment now appears to have been copied without attribution from a scholarly article on Islamic fundamentalism. Government documents that cast doubt on a critical piece of evidence - what was described as a surveillance sketch of an American air base overseas - were not turned over to the defense. And tensions between prosecutors in Detroit and Justice Department officials in Washington escalated into open hostility.
Mr. Convertino angered the Justice Department by testifying at a Congressional hearing held by a powerful Republican senator who is a vocal critic of the department. Mr. Convertino, who was ultimately removed from the prosecution, is now suing the department and is under investigation for his handling of this case and others. That inquiry led to the public disclosure of the name of an Arab informant in the case, who then fled the country because, he said, he feared for his safety.
The miscalculations and bad blood so overshadowed the case that the truth about the defendants' intentions may never be known. Some law enforcement officials, however, continue to insist that the prosecution was a good one. In an internal e-mail message, an F.B.I. supervisor in Detroit told agents last month that they should be proud that their work "may have prevented another attack."
But the Justice Department's critics say that the prosecution was overzealous and that it demonstrated how the Bush administration's pre-emptive approach to fighting terrorists by disrupting plots before they materialize can clash with legal principles of due process and the right to a fair trial.
"This case became a poster child for the Justice Department in the war on terrorism, and it had no institutional checks and balances in place to really look hard at the evidence," said Peter Margulies, a law professor at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island who has written extensively about terrorism.
The Justice Department declined to discuss the case publicly, citing a judge's gag order and pending investigations. But internal documents show that from its early days, the case never appeared as strong as the department's public enthusiasm for it.
In August 2002, just days after Mr. Sabin's internal memorandum expressed doubts about the evidence, the suspects were indicted on terrorism charges, prompting a supervisor in Washington to send the prosecutors in Detroit e-mail congratulating them on the indictment "and the nice media coverage."
"For what it's worth," the supervisor, Jeff Breinholt, wrote, "the higher-ups in D.C. are pleased." Willing a Sept. 11 Tie
Six days after the Sept. 11 attacks, just before nightfall, seven federal agents appeared at an apartment on the outskirts of Detroit looking for Nabil al-Marabh, an Arab immigrant on the terrorist watch list.
Mr. Marabh no longer lived there, but agents found three other Arab immigrants. They were detained after agents combing through the apartment found false identification papers, crude sketches that the authorities came to see as outlines of possible targets, religious audiotapes and a videotape that they believed held surveillance of the MGM Grand hotel in Las Vegas, The New York Times headquarters and other sites.
Agents also found expired badges from the Detroit Metropolitan Airport belonging to two of the men, who had once worked there. A fourth suspect, a Moroccan wanted for credit card fraud, was arrested later.
The arrests received worldwide attention as part of a nationwide terrorist dragnet. But for almost a year, the only charges brought were for document fraud.
Mr. Convertino, the lead prosecutor, said the interest in Washington was swift. Senior Justice Department officials, he said, "must have asked me a hundred times" if the men had links to the Sept. 11 attacks. His answer, he said, was that though he believed the men had ties to terrorists, he had no evidence linking them to Sept. 11. Nevertheless, at a press conference on Oct. 31, 2001, Attorney General John Ashcroft said the men were "suspected of having knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks" before they happened.
The statement generated a fresh round of news coverage, but it was baseless. It also violated a week-old gag order by the judge, Gerald E. Rosen, who later rebuked Mr. Ashcroft in an 83-page opinion. The Justice Department retracted Mr. Ashcroft's statement within two days.
Prosecutors continued to pursue a terrorism investigation, however. It was based largely on circumstantial evidence, including the sketches and tapes, and primarily tied together by someone who knew the men, Youssef Hmimssa, a Moroccan wanted on fraud charges. Internal Justice Department memorandums show that the doubts about the case among officials were growing even as prosecutors prepared a new indictment in August 2002, this one charging the men with material support of terrorism. In an e-mail message to Justice officials days before this indictment, David Nahmias, a senior counterterrorism prosecutor in Washington, wrote that "the charge is somewhat aggressive, but worth pursuing," adding, "this case has received press attention before."
In a six-page memorandum attached to e-mail, Mr. Sabin, the Justice Department's head of counterterrorism, said the case was "not as strong as other terrorist financing cases" and the chance of success was "a close call.''
But Mr. Sabin said the men's behavior "fits the pattern of what we know about global jihad planning."
"The weaknesses in this case," he wrote, "reflect the fact that what was a fledgling scheme was disrupted at an early stage." He concluded, "From a nationwide enforcement standpoint, taking a chance on this case is probably worth the risk."
The indictment meant more headlines and coincided with news of an unrelated terrorism case in Seattle.
"I'm enjoying speculation that the Detroit and Seattle cases are linked and part of an orchestrated nationwide enforcement program," Mr. Breinholt, the Justice Department supervisor, said in congratulating the prosecutors. "The press gives us much more credit than we deserve, not knowing that the timing was largely happenstance."
Mr. Convertino said he was surprised to discover that the opening line of the new indictment and a second passage - both written in Washington, he said - had been taken almost verbatim from a scholarly article on terrorism by Quintan Wiktorowicz, a professor at Rhodes College in Memphis.
"It looked like they had just lifted parts of my article word for word," Professor Wiktorowicz said in a recent interview.
Meanwhile, cooperation between Detroit and Washington was fracturing. Keith Corbett, Mr. Convertino's superior, bristled at Washington's intense oversight.
"In the 25 years that I have worked for the Department of Justice, I have never seen anything approaching this level of micromanagement," Mr. Corbett wrote in e-mail to Jeffrey Collins, the top federal prosecutor in Detroit, on Feb. 26, 2003. "Every act was subject to review by petty bureaucrats," Mr. Corbett wrote.
A 2003 departmental review of the Detroit office, obtained by The Times, cited an "us versus them" attitude between Mr. Corbett's unit, which normally focused on organized crime, and Joseph Capone, a senior terrorism prosecutor sent from Washington to monitor the case. The report also said that Mr. Corbett's unit was "not adequately supervised," and it made Mr. Collins, who had no experience as a prosecutor before being named United States attorney in 2001, appear out of touch, saying he "was surprised to hear that there were still problems" between his office and Washington. Mr. Collins, who did not return calls for comment, resigned this August shortly before the government repudiated the case.
In a rebuttal to the review, Mr. Corbett wrote that Mr. Capone had made it clear that "he had no intention of participating" in the trial and had spent 10 weeks "in a hotel at taxpayers expense, when he was not playing basketball in the evenings" with prosecutors. Neither Mr. Corbett nor Mr. Capone would comment.
There were also protracted disputes between prosecutors in Washington and Detroit over the Justice Department's desire to impose extraordinary custody measures on the suspects, an idea that Mr. Convertino said was unworkable and unnecessary. Officials in Washington even floated the idea of declaring the suspects "enemy combatants,'' he said. Mr. Convertino said officials in Washington would not give him the resources he needed, assigning only one full-time F.B.I. agent. Unable to get an adequate computer for closing arguments, "we bought a laptop from Costco," he said. "It was bubble gum and shoestring. Every day we'd come back and say, 'If the American public only knew.' ''
Mr. Convertino was known for an intense and self-righteous manner. Three former attorneys general had praised his dedication in letters, and Mr. Corbett wrote in a performance review, "For Rick, all trials are major." Opposing lawyers found him sharp-elbowed and complained throughout the trial that he was making it difficult for them to see evidence and have access to witnesses. Judge Rosen sometimes exhorted him to be forthcoming.
"There seems to be a significant amount of evidence that was known by Mr. Convertino that was withheld," said James Thomas, a lawyer for one of the suspects. Senior Justice Department officials said in interviews that they did not believe Mr. Convertino was sharing important information with them, either. One official said Washington had directed supervisors in Detroit to "rein him in" before the trial started.
During a nine-week jury trial, the government presented the men - Karim Koubriti, Abdel Ilah Elmardoudi, Ahmed Hannan and Farouk Ali-Haimoud - as a clandestine group that was collecting intelligence for potential terrorist plots and that might even have carried out an attack. The theory was bolstered by the testimony of agents and officials from the F.B.I., the Air Force and the State Department.
But it was Mr. Hmimssa, who once lived with the men, who offered the most chilling testimony. He said the suspects had communicated in a code involving names of Moroccan soccer players and talked about obtaining Stinger missiles, shooting down commercial airplanes and staging an attack in Las Vegas. Mr. Elmardoudi, he said, told him, "Soon, what is happening in the West Bank and Gaza is going to happen here.''
Defense lawyers said Mr. Hmimssa was simply telling the government what it wanted to hear so that he could obtain a favorable plea agreement. One defense lawyer showed that part of a purported sketch of an American air base in Turkey, which the government said was a hangar, actually bore a resemblance to a map of the Middle East.
On June 3, 2003, the government received a split decision. Two of the four defendants were convicted of terrorism and document fraud charges. A third was convicted only of document fraud, and a fourth, Mr. Ali-Haimoud, was acquitted.
"None of us had links with terrorists in any way,'' Mr. Ali-Haimoud, then 22, said in an interview after the verdict. "I'm just a regular Muslim.''
During the trial, the increasingly chilly relations between Mr. Convertino and Mr. Capone, the lawyer sent by Washington to monitor the case, were on display. Instead of joining Mr. Convertino at the prosecution table, Mr. Capone watched from a bench behind the press gallery.
A Political Tangle
Mr. Ashcroft hailed the convictions as "a clear message" that the government would "work diligently to detect, disrupt and dismantle the activities of terrorist cells." But there was unfinished business for the prosecution. That became clear for Mr. Convertino when he was called into Mr. Collins's office the next month and dressed down because of his frosty and "unacceptable" relations with Justice Department supervisors in Washington.
"I've been ordered to reprimand you," Mr. Convertino quoted his boss as saying.
It was the beginning of a spiral that would ultimately derail the terrorism prosecution.
In late August 2003, Mr. Convertino received a phone call from a Senate Finance Committee investigator looking into document fraud by terror suspects. Within days, Mr. Convertino was told that he and his star witness would be subpoenaed to appear before a hearing and explain how such fraud was done.
His testimony, in early September, was an innocuous recitation of the case, but his appearing before the panel set off a firestorm at Justice. The Finance Committee's chairman, Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, a frequent critic of the Justice Department, had held up several high-level appointments at the department because of objections over its treatment of whistleblowers. In a lawsuit against the department filed this year, Mr. Convertino says he was told by Mr. Nahmias, the senior department official, that Mr. Grassley was not "our friend" and "hates the F.B.I."
Mr. Convertino was removed as lead prosecutor on Sept. 4, three days before he was even served with the subpoena. The department also began what became a criminal investigation of his handling of the terrorism case as well as previous cases.
Dissension within the department broke into the open last December at a hearing that was called because a new prosecutor on the case, Eric Straus, had produced two pieces of evidence that had not been turned over to the defense. The most prominent was a letter from Butch Jones, a cellmate of the government's key witness, Mr. Hmimssa. Mr. Hmimssa had said he had lied about the case, Mr. Jones wrote.
At the hearing, Judge Rosen asked five federal prosecutors why he had not been made aware of the evidence. In responding, they hardly presented a united front.
Mr. Convertino called the letter "absurd" and said Mr. Jones, a drug lord facing capital charges, had no credibility. Mr. Corbett agreed with his assessment. But Alan Gershel, the No. 2 prosecutor in Detroit, said he had ordered Mr. Corbett to disclose the letter, calling it a "no-brainer.'' Mr. Corbett said he had "no recollection of that conversation.'' The judge then chastised Mr. Capone, the prosecutor from Washington, for not making sure the letter was turned over.
Judge Rosen ordered the government to review the case in a formal report. "Folks, this is a fine kettle of fish," he said.
Trading Ethics Charges
In the aftermath of the hearing, The Detroit Free Press in January, quoting anonymous Justice Department officials, detailed a range of accusations of legal and ethical misconduct by Mr. Convertino, apparently taken straight from an internal investigation of him.
To Mr. Convertino's detractors, the accusations confirmed their suspicions that he was willing to play rough to win a case. But to his supporters, it showed that Justice Department officials, upset at Mr. Convertino over his dealings with Senator Grassley, were intent on marginalizing him, even if it meant muddying up the Detroit prosecution and disclosing sensitive information in violation of department policy.
"This was all part of an attempt to discredit him," said a senior Democratic aide in Congress who was involved in the case and spoke on the condition of anonymity because of Judge Rosen's gag order.
In the fracas, Mr. Grassley went so far as to put a hold last year on the nomination of James Comey to be Mr. Ashcroft's top deputy. The senator agreed to let Mr. Comey's nomination go through only after the Justice Department agreed to assign Mr. Convertino to work on Mr. Grassley's Congressional drug caucus, officials disclosed.
"It is amazing that the very people within the Justice Department accusing this employee of unethical conduct appear themselves to be committing unethical acts," Mr. Grassley said in a January statement. He declined to comment for this article.
Mr. Convertino has submitted to the Justice Department a point-by-point rebuttal of the accusations against him in a three-inch-thick dossier. The department, meanwhile, has opened an investigation to determine how the accusations were leaked to The Free Press.
The Free Press article also disclosed the names of two confidential informants in the terror-cell case. "I've slept in my truck two nights in a row; I'm afraid for my life," one of them said in an interview with The Times this year. The handling of that informant, who has since fled the country, as well as other informants, has also prompted an internal F.B.I. investigation.
'A Three-Legged Stool'?
On Aug. 31, the Justice Department made public the results of its court-ordered review of the case. It was a scathing critique. Craig Morford, the federal prosecutor in Cleveland assigned to lead the review, described the case as "a three-legged stool" that was built on shaky evidence from the start and that had denied the defense numerous bits of information that pointed to the possible innocence of the defendants.
Some military and intelligence officials, for instance, doubted that the sketches actually represented the Turkish air base or a Jordanian hospital, despite "misleading testimony" that suggested there was a consensus among officials about what they depicted, Mr. Morford said.
Had State Department photos of the Jordan site been turned over to the defense, they would have undermined the prosecution's argument that one of the sketches depicted a hospital there, Mr. Morford wrote.
Moreover, Mr. Morford's assessment gave credence to the newly disclosed testimony of a Tunisian man in Los Angeles who said that the Las Vegas videotape - purported to represent a surveillance operation - was an "innocent" sightseeing memento.
The prosecution, Mr. Morford said, "created a record filled with misleading inferences.''
Some Congressional officials question why Mr. Morford's catalogue of missteps focused so squarely on Mr. Convertino without assessing responsibility in other Justice Department officials. Mr. Morford said his report "was not about blame."
With the terrorism charges dropped, Mr. Hannan, Mr. Koubriti and Mr. Elmardoudi remain in custody, facing a new trial on document fraud and deportation proceedings.
But law enforcement and Congressional officials who continue to believe that the Detroit men represented a terror cell take issue with many of Mr. Morford's key findings, saying he appeared to present the prosecution's evidence in the worst light.
Mr. Convertino said: "If there were mistakes, then I shoulder the responsibility, but this is still a good case. I believe it, the agents believe it.''
James Thomas, the defense lawyer, said he believed that someone should be held accountable in the case.
"To the extent these guys have been vindicated, maybe we should look at people who bang that drum of fear," Mr. Thomas said. "We as United States citizens were vulnerable to that fear, and it was played on."
-------- death penalty
7 Dissenters on U.S. Court Cannot Stop an Execution
October 7, 2004
By ADAM LIPTAK
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/07/national/07death.html
We are faced," Judge Ronald Lee Gilman wrote, dissenting in a death penalty case yesterday, "with a real-life murder mystery, an authentic 'who-done-it' where the wrong man may be executed."
But Judge Gilman was the only one of 15 judges of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati, who thought the case presented anything like a close question.
Eight other judges said the defendant, Paul Gregory House, should be executed. Six said he was not guilty and should be freed immediately. The vote, with Judge Gilman alone saying that Mr. House merely deserves a new trial, was 8 to 7. Unless the Supreme Court intervenes or Mr. House dies first from the multiple sclerosis he has, he will be executed.
Closely divided appeals court decisions are common. But judges tend to differ on questions of law. Yesterday's decision, which turned on sharply divergent interpretations of the same evidence where a man's life is at stake, was quite unusual.
"This is unprecedented," said Eric M. Freedman, a law professor at Hofstra University. "A case in which six judges find that the defendant didn't do the crime is more than just a legal curiosity. In any rational legal universe, there is now at least reasonable doubt about the defendant's guilt."
Mr. House was convicted of murdering a neighbor, Carolyn Muncey, in Union County, Tenn., in 1985. The prosecution argued that he had first raped her, saying that semen found on her clothing matched his blood type. The jury cited the rape as a reason for imposing death.
But DNA testing, which was not available at the time, has proved that the semen was that of Mrs. Muncey's husband, Hubert.
At a recent Federal District Court hearing to determine whether Mr. House should be allowed to reopen his case, witnesses testified that Mr. Muncey was an alcoholic who beat his wife. Two witnesses said he had confessed to killing his wife while drunk. A third witness said he had asked her to supply him with an alibi for the murder. Three others also implicated Mr. Muncey, who denied the accusations. The judges in the majority discounted all of this.
"The lack of any physical evidence of sexual contact," Judge Alan E. Norris wrote for the majority, does not "contradict the notion that the murderer lured Mrs. Muncey from her home with a sexual motive."
The witnesses who said they had heard Mr. Muncey's confession were not credible, the majority said, because they had not come forward until recently. And the testimony of the witness who said Mr. Muncey had asked her to provide him with an alibi was "insufficient to tip the balance in favor of House's theory," Judge Norris wrote.
Six dissenting judges took a different view. "Without any evidence of rape," Judge Gilbert S. Merritt wrote for that group, "the state has lost its motive, its theory of the case and the aggravating circumstance on which the state and the jury relied for his death verdict."
"There is no reasonable basis," Judge Merritt continued, "for disbelieving the six witnesses who now incriminate Mr. Muncey as the perpetrator of the crime."
"House has shown that is highly probable that he is completely innocent of any wrongdoing whatever," Judge Merritt concluded. "House should be immediately released."
Stephen M. Kissinger, a lawyer for Mr. House, said his client would ask the Supreme Court to hear an appeal. He said he was optimistic.
"I've practiced law for 20 years," Mr. Kissinger said, "and this is far and away the best innocence claim I've ever seen." He added that he had gained acquittals for people "who had claims half as good as this."
A spokeswoman for the Tennessee attorney general declined to comment.
The court divided yesterday along strictly political lines. Every judge in the majority was appointed by a Republican president, including four appointed by President Bush in the last two years. Every dissenting judge, including Judge Gilman, was appointed by a Democratic president.
Only Judge Gilman found the case excruciatingly difficult.
"Was Carolyn Muncey killed by her down-the-road neighbor Paul House, or by her husband, Hubert Muncey?" Judge Gilman asked. "At the end of the day, I am in grave doubt."
He said that doubt required at least a new trial.
"Under the circumstances where we face the execution of a man," he wrote, "I believe that our system of justice demands no less."
-------- homeland security / national intelligence
Conspiracy Theories Flourish on the Internet
October 7, 2004
Washington Post
By Steven Ginsberg and Karin Brulliard
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A13174-2004Oct6?language=printer
People soon will be able to carry guns and other dangerous weapons onto the grounds and parking lots of Reagan National and Dulles International airports, after officials yesterday eased what they said were overly restrictive rules.
Without debate, the board of the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority unanimously agreed to permit passengers and other airport visitors to carry guns, knives and other weapons as long as they keep them out of terminals and other buildings that access airfields. Passengers who are taking guns with them on flights still will be allowed to carry them into the terminal but are supposed to make arrangements with airlines in advance, officials said.
The action comes after pressure from an increasingly high-profile Virginia gun rights group whose members have taken to wearing firearms on their hips in public places to make their case.
Before yesterday's action, the authority barred anyone from carrying what it defined as dangerous weapons -- including firearms, knives with blades longer than four inches, bows and arrows and even sandbags -- from all airport property. That covered parking garages, access roads and several highways near Dulles, including parts of the Dulles Toll Road, Route 28 and the Dulles Greenway.
Motorists with weapons in their cars could be arrested if they drove on those roads, even if they had no intention of going to the airport.
Airport officials said they made the changes, which will take effect Dec. 1, because the rules did not enhance security and because they unfairly affected gun owners who might unknowingly break the law. Officials also said they never enforced the gun rules on roadways because they didn't consider those drivers a threat.
"What we're attempting to do is to more clearly define the areas of concern for us," said James E. Bennett, president and chief executive of the airports authority, which manages operations at Dulles and National and whose members are appointed by the president, the District's mayor and the governors of Virginia and Maryland. "At the same time, we want to make sure our regulation does not inadvertently entrap people."
Officials said they were spurred to change their weapons regulation by complaints from gun rights supporters after enactment of a Virginia law that made it illegal to carry dangerous weapons in airport terminals.
The issue at the airports is the latest in a string of battles in the commonwealth over where guns ought to be allowed. Gun owners have created a small stir by openly carrying sidearms into restaurants to generate support, though opponents say the tactic scares customers. And 30 gun-toting residents walked into a Falls Church council meeting last week to protest a policy that asked city workers to call 911 if anyone carrying a gun came onto city property.
Virginia requires permits for people to carry concealed weapons, but openly displayed guns are allowed.
Gun rights groups said the rules at area airports are still too restrictive. Philip Van Cleave, president of the Virginia Citizens' Defense League, said Dulles and National airports should have to follow state law. He also said people should be able to carry their guns into the terminals.
"The point is, terrorists will not pay any attention to this," he said. "What it will do is stop the people who don't want to break the law."
Jim Sollo, president of Virginians Against Handgun Violence, said the changes don't make any sense. "We think just the whole idea of guns around terminals is not a good idea," he said. "We think it puts additional pressure and stress on police who will probably stop and question a person they see openly carrying a weapon, particularly around an airport."
From January to September, authority police arrested 50 people on charges of weapons violations in airport terminals; eight were charged with possession of dangerous weapons on authority roadways or in garages, said authority spokeswoman Tara Hamilton.
A spokeswoman for the Transportation Security Administration declined to comment on whether the change at Dulles and National would threaten passenger safety, saying that the agency's main area of concern is the screening area and beyond.
Airport authority officials said they do not have to abide by Virginia law because of a long-standing compact between Virginia and the District, which left the authority with the right to adopt its own regulations that have the force of law.
Airport security experts said the new law doesn't worry them. Douglas R. Baird, an aviation security consultant, said, "It doesn't raise any concerns with me because if you have the authority of the state to be armed, I don't see why you can't be armed at an airport."
----
Intelligence Bill Passed by Senate
House to Consider Differing Measure
By Charles Babington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 7, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12578-2004Oct6.html
The Senate voted overwhelmingly yesterday to revamp the structure of the nation's intelligence community by creating a national intelligence director, a counterterrorism center and other agencies in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The bill calls for the most dramatic changes to the intelligence community in half a century, and would give the new director authority to coordinate the activities and spending of the CIA and several other intelligence agencies throughout the government. It would also declassify the amount of money the government spends on intelligence and would create a civil liberties board to safeguard privacy and civil rights as the government steps up anti-terrorism activities.
The legislation, passed by a 96 to 2 vote, contains many of the recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission. But a confrontation looms with the House, whose leaders have drafted a bill with many provisions not in the Senate measure.
The vote underscores the influence of the 10-member commission that studied the government's response to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The panel's report, released in July, became a bestseller and spurred Congress and the White House to rethink an intelligence structure built mainly to address Cold War threats.
"This is an historic vote and an historic day," the bill's chief sponsors, Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), said in a statement.
The only nay votes were cast by Sens. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) and Ernest "Fritz" Hollings (D-S.C.), who said Congress was moving too rapidly on so complex a matter.
The Senate bill sharply contrasts with the bill working its way through the House, where the issue has been tightly controlled by GOP leaders. Although senators acclaimed their bipartisan accomplishment, their bill must be reconciled with the one in the House. The House bill, scheduled to reach the floor today or Friday, was written entirely by Republicans and differs in many respects from the Senate bill.
It largely tracks the Senate bill in creating an intelligence director and counterterrorism center. But the House measure contains other provisions likely to cause strenuous debate. One, which would boost law-enforcement and immigration-control powers, has been criticized by civil liberties groups and is opposed by some leading senators. One of the most controversial provisions would make it easier for the government to deport foreign suspects to nations where they might be tortured.
The Sept. 11 commission's chairman and vice chairman -- former New Jersey governor Thomas H. Kean (R) and former representative Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.) -- issued a statement calling the Senate bill "a giant step forward in implementing the recommendations of the 9-11 commission. We look forward to House passage of a counterpart measure, a quick [House-Senate] conference and a good bill on the desk of the president later this month."
One of the commission's major recommendations -- that Congress revamp the way it oversees intelligence operations -- is essentially ignored in the House and Senate bills. Although House leaders have signaled they will not address the issue this year, the Senate last night turned to the question, which promises to be contentious. Senate leaders are pressing for changes in the intelligence committee's structure that would meet some, but not all, of the commission's recommendations.
House GOP leaders, meanwhile, seemed to sharpen their objections to the Collins-Lieberman bill and vigorously defended their proposals to beef up border controls and make it easier to track or deport foreign suspects. At a second news conference in as many days that included no Democrats, House Republicans sternly challenged senators or other critics to explain why a single item in their bill should be changed.
"Democrats . . . are trying to rip out the provisions that would make Americans safe," House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) said.
Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), the House intelligence committee's ranking Democrat, questioned whether DeLay and his fellow leaders can muster enough Republican votes to pass their bill unless items such as the one she called "the outsourcing of torture" are dropped.
"I think some of the Republicans want a train wreck," she told reporters, "and some of them want a least-common-denominator bill, and maybe some of them want something that would actually help the country."
House Democrats were angry that the Rules Committee, which determines the shape of the bill that will reach the floor, deleted several Democratic-backed amendments that committees had added last week. One would have created a civil liberties board similar to the one in the Senate bill.
In an interview, Kean said he believes that the House and Senate can resolve their differences before the Nov. 2 election. He said he believes that House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) "wants a good bill to go to the conference" and result in a measure that President Bush can sign.
During the two weeks of debate, senators blocked efforts to give the national intelligence director almost total budget and personnel authority over agencies such as the National Reconnaissance Office and National Security Agency, which are housed in the Department of Defense. The bill would allow the intelligence director to set many budget priorities for such agencies, but the Defense Department would distribute the funds.
Senators accepted an amendment, offered by John W. Warner (R-Va.), to allow the defense secretary -- not the intelligence director, as the Sept. 11 commission proposed -- to continue nominating the heads of the National Security Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office and similar agencies. The secretary could forward the nominations to the president even if the intelligence director objected, although the objection would have to be formally noted.
--
Intelligence Bill Highlights
The Collins-Lieberman bill passed by the Senate would:
• Create a national intelligence director to coordinate the efforts and set priorities of more than a dozen intelligence-gathering agencies and serve as the president's chief intelligence adviser.
• Create a national counterterrorism center to help develop anti-terrorism plans involving two or more agencies.
• Allow the intelligence director to create national intelligence centers, which would gather and analyze information from available sources on topics such as the Middle East or weapons of mass destruction.
• Declassify the annual sum the government spends on intelligence operations.
• Create a civil liberties board to safeguard privacy and civil rights as the government steps up anti-terrorism activities.
• Allow the defense secretary -- not the intelligence director, as the Sept. 11 commission proposed -- to continue nominating the heads of intelligence-gathering agencies such as the National Security Agency and National Reconnaissance Office.
--------
Senate Approves 9/11 Bill at Odds With House Version
October 7, 2004
By PHILIP SHENON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/07/politics/07panel.html
WASHINGTON, Oct. 6 - The Senate voted overwhelmingly on Wednesday to approve a sweeping bipartisan bill to reorganize the way the nation gathers and shares intelligence, enacting the major recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission, including the creation of the job of national intelligence director and the establishment of a national counterterrorism center.
The lopsided Senate vote, 96 to 2, is likely to increase pressure on House Republican leaders to adopt a similar measure, especially since the Senate bill had the support of all 51 Senate Republicans, as well as the endorsement of both the White House and the leaders of the Sept. 11 commission. The pair of votes against the bill were cast by Democrats.
Opinion polls show that the independent commission, which used its final report in July to catalog years of incompetence and turf battles among the nation's intelligence and counterterrorism agencies, has widespread support among likely voters in next month's election. And the commission's members have proved themselves potent lobbyists for their recommendations.
Still, House Republican leaders insisted again on Wednesday that they intended to press forward this week with their own, very different version of the bill that includes law enforcement provisions that were not recommended by the Sept. 11 commission. Those proposals have drawn harsh criticism from Democrats and civil liberties groups.
The House bill, which was drafted without the involvement of House Democratic leaders, would also more sharply limit the budget and personnel authority of the national intelligence director.
The partisan split in the House became more theatrical on Wednesday, with the House majority leader, Tom DeLay of Texas, calling a news conference at which he held up a summary of the House bill and ripped the papers in two, suggesting that Democrats were trying to shred the recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission. "The Democrats want to rip up the 9/11 commission recommendations that they don't like and throw them out," he said.
The rancor in the House was in stark contrast to the harmony on the floor of the Senate, where lawmakers from both parties praised the spirit of bipartisanship that allowed them - like the Sept. 11 commission - to reach agreement on the need for the most comprehensive changes in the structure of the nation's intelligence community since the creation of the C.I.A. in 1947.
"We are now on the threshhold of getting the job done and getting it done right," said Senator Susan Collins of Maine, the chairwoman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee and the principal Republican author of the bill.
In a separate joint statement with the bill's key Democratic author, Senate Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, Senator Collins said, "Our legislation reorganizes an intelligence program designed for the Cold War into one designed for the war against global terrorism."
The Senate bill would establish the job of national intelligence director to serve as the president's chief intelligence adviser and to oversee the coordination of all 15 of the government's intelligence agencies, including the C.I.A., the National Security Council and the intelligence units of the F.B.I. The intelligence director would take over the oversight job now held nominally by the director of central intelligence, Porter Goss, who would answer to the new cabinet-level intelligence director.
The establishment of the job was the key recommendation of the Sept. 11 commission, which harshly criticized the C.I.A. and F.B.I. and found that lack of communication among intelligence agencies explained why Qaeda terrorists were able to enter the United States undetected and carry out the suicide hijackings on Sept. 11, 2001. The commission showed that several clues warning of an imminent terrorist attack were ignored or not shared about intelligence agencies in the months before the attacks.
The Senate bill would enact another key recommendation of the commission: establishment of a national counterterrorism center, where all intelligence involving terrorist threats would be drawn together and acted on. The bill would also create a civil liberties oversight board to "ensure privacy and civil liberties concerns are being protected," a provision House Republicans have said they may not support.
In a statement, the Republican chairman of the Sept. 11 commission, Thomas H. Kean, and the Democratic vice chairman, Lee H. Hamilton, praised the Senate bill and its authors, describing the legislation as "a giant step forward in implementing the recommendations of the 9/11 commission."
-------- prisons / prisoners
Army Denies Detainee-Release Remark
John Mintz
Washington Post
Thursday, October 7, 2004; Page A29
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13149-2004Oct6.html
An Army officer at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, yesterday denied making statements attributed to him in a British newspaper that suggested many of the alleged al Qaeda and Taliban detainees were no threat to the country and would be freed.
In a statement released yesterday, the military unit running the detention facility said remarks by its deputy commander, Brig. Gen. Martin J. Lucenti Sr., were "misquoted or taken out of context" by the Financial Times in an article Tuesday.
The newspaper quoted Lucenti as saying "most of the [detainees], the majority of them, will either be released or transferred to their home countries." The military's statement yesterday said Lucenti "did not use the word 'most' in this context."
Lucenti also denied another quote attributed to him by the Financial Times, that "most of these guys weren't fighting; they were running," according to the military statement. It added that "many detainees were captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan where their intelligence was deemed to be of enough value to warrant transfer to Guantanamo."
The Financial Times reporter who wrote the article, Mark Huband, said yesterday that "he did use the word 'most,' exactly the way I quoted him."
Lucenti's remarks in the paper appeared to conflict with past statements by other officials who suggested many detainees there were too dangerous to release and some were providing intelligence of considerable value.
-------- POLITICS
-------- corruption
DeLay Draws Third Rebuke
Ethics Panel Cites Two Situations
By Charles Babington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 7, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12933-2004Oct6.html
The House ethics committee last night admonished Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) for asking federal aviation officials to track an airplane involved in a Texas political spat, and for conduct that suggested political donations might influence legislative action.
The two-pronged rebuke marked the second time in six days -- and the third time overall -- that the ethics panel has admonished the House's second-ranking Republican. The back-to-back chastisements are highly unusual for any lawmaker, let alone one who aspires to be speaker, and some watchdog groups called on him to resign his leadership post.
The ethics committee, five Republicans and five Democrats who voted unanimously on the findings, concluded its seven-page letter to DeLay by saying: "In view of the number of instances to date in which the committee has found it necessary to comment on conduct in which you have engaged, it is clearly necessary for you to temper your future actions to assure that you are in full compliance at all times with the applicable House rules and standards of conduct."
DeLay said in a statement that he believed the complaint "should have been thrown out immediately," but, "I accept the committee's guidance. . . . For years Democrats have hurled relentless personal attacks at me, hoping to tie my hands and smear my name. All have fallen short, not because of insufficient venom, but because of insufficient merit."
DeLay's lawyer, former representative Edwin R. "Ed" Bethune (R-Ark.), told reporters that the committee's findings stopped far short of some of the most serious allegations, such as bribery, contained in the complaint filed in June by Rep. Chris Bell (D-Tex.). Bell's complaint triggered the ethics committee investigations of DeLay.
DeLay, 57, a 10-term veteran, helped orchestrate the 1994 GOP takeover of the House and became renowned for his bare-knuckled tactics as majority whip and an unrivaled fundraiser. Democrats long have reviled the former exterminator from the Houston suburb of Sugar Land, but now they are finding fodder in the bipartisan ethics committee.
While DeLay continues to enjoy broad support within his party, some independent analysts warned recently that another ethics rebuke could seriously impair his ability to continue to lead the Republicans or to advance his career.
The ethics panel faulted DeLay's actions in asking the Federal Aviation Administration last year to help locate a private plane that Republicans thought was carrying Texas Democratic legislators. Some Democratic lawmakers were leaving the state to prevent a quorum that Republicans needed in Austin to pass a bitterly disputed congressional redistricting plan engineered by DeLay. DeLay's staff asked an FAA official to help find the plane in a bid to force the legislators back to the capital.
The ethics report cited House rules that bar members from taking "any official action on the basis of the partisan affiliation . . . of the individuals involved." It noted that the FAA official later said he felt he "had been used" for political purposes. DeLay's role in the matter "raises serious concerns under these standards of conduct," the report said.
The redistricting plan, ultimately enacted, now threatens the reelections of five Democratic U.S. House members from Texas. Their losses would boost the GOP's congressional advantage and DeLay's power. Bell lost his reelection bid earlier this year in the Democratic primary, a result of the redistricting plans' movement of borders and voter blocs. DeLay's allies have accused him of seeking revenge, a charge that Bell, a Houston lawyer, denies.
The committee also admonished DeLay for his dealings with top officers of Kansas-based Westar Energy Inc. Some of the officers wrote memos in 2002 citing their belief that $56,500 in campaign contributions to political committees associated with DeLay and other Republicans would get them "a seat at the table" where key legislation was being drafted.
The ethics report said lawmakers may not solicit political donations "that may create even an appearance" that they will lead to "special treatment or special access to the member." DeLay's participation in Westar's "golf fundraiser at The Homestead resort on June 2-3, 2002, is objectionable in that those actions, at a minimum, created such an improper appearance," the report said. The golf tournament, which raised money for DeLay's political committees, "took place just as the House-Senate conference on major energy legislation . . . was about to get underway. . . . That legislation was of critical importance to the attendees."
The report said DeLay was "in a position to significantly influence the conference."
The ethics panel, formally called the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, deferred action on a third component of Bell's complaint. It dealt with the fundraising group Texans for a Republican Majority Political Action Committee, or TRMPAC, to which DeLay is closely linked. A Texas grand jury last month indicted three of DeLay's political associates on charges of using TRMPAC to illegally collect corporate donations and funnel them to Texas legislative races.
The ethics committee said it will take no action on the matter "pending further action" concerning the indictments or the Texas-based investigation that prompted them.
Just as it did six days ago, the ethics committee released its report shortly before 9 p.m. Last night, word of the report seeped out as House members lingered near the Capitol for late votes. Rep. Thomas M. Reynolds (R-N.Y.), chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, told reporters that DeLay "is a good man and a strong leader, and these politically motivated attacks will not deter him. . . . Shame on Chris Bell."
Bell said that the ethics committee "agrees that Mr. DeLay acted inappropriately and unethically in the course of conducting his duties," and called for DeLay to step down as majority leader. House Democratic leaders had no comment.
Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said in a statement that the committee has admonished DeLay for three separate incidents in six days -- in addition to the admonishment issued against him a few years ago. She said that "clearly shows that he believes himself to be above the law."
"If the Republican Conference wants the American people to believe that it takes ethics seriously," she continued, "it must insist that Mr. DeLay resign his post as majority leader."
--------
Ethics Rebuke to DeLay Prompts Democratic Calls for Ouster
October 7, 2004
By DAVID STOUT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/07/politics/07CND-DELAY.html?hp&ex=1097208000&en=48a631ce0c7caaab&ei=5094&partner=homepage
WASHINGTON, Oct. 7 - Top House Democrats today condemned Representative Tom DeLay, the leader of the Republican majority, declaring that the latest ethics case against him proved that he had been corrupted by power and was unfit to lead.
"The ethical cloud that has been hanging over the Capitol has burst," Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leader, said at a news briefing. "Mr. DeLay has proven himself to be ethically unfit to lead the party.`
Other prominent Democrats joined Ms. Pelosi in condemning Mr. DeLay and calling for his replacement during a question-and-answer session that seemed to signal a new level of partisan bitterness in the House with elections less than four weeks away.
"Isolated incidents may be rationalized and minimized, but consistent patterns are powerful proof of corrupt practices," said Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the Democratic whip.
And Representative Henry Waxman of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee, said that "Tom DeLay has allowed power to corrupt him," and that the Republican leadership was trying to "whitewash" the charges against him.
Speaker J. Dennis Hastert came to Mr. DeLay's defense today, describing himself as "profoundly disappointed" in the ethics committee's finding against his fellow Republican. Mr. Hastert said in a statement that Mr. DeLay "fights hard for what he believes, but he has never put personal interests ahead of the best interests of the country."
The Democrats were reacting to a report issued Wednesday night by the House ethics committee, which unanimously admonished Mr. DeLay after concluding that he had apparently linked legislative action to political donations and had dispatched federal officials to search for Texas legislators who were in hiding to avoid having to vote on a redistricting issue.
Mr. DeLay defended himself as soon as the report came out. He accused Democrats of mounting "relentless personal attacks" on him in an attempt to "tie my hands and smear my good name." All the attacks, he said, "have fallen short, not because of insufficient venom but because of insufficient merit."
His Republican allies describe him as a good man and a good politician who is under attack for purely political reasons. Mr. DeLay, a Texan who has been on Capitol Hill for two decades, is acknowledged as a strong party leader. He is also an effective fund-raiser and wields great power in Congress.
The latest report by the House ethics panel (formally, the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct) admonished Mr. DeLay for participating in a golf outing held by a Kansas energy company so that he could raise money for one of his political action committees. The outing coincided with deliberations on legislation from which the energy company stood to benefit.
The ethics panel, which has five Republicans and five Democrats, also admonished Mr. Delay for exhorting officials of the Federal Aviation Administration to track Texas state legislators who fled to Oklahoma last year to escape voting in Austin on a bill that reshaped the political landscape to benefit Republicans and give them perhaps four or more new Congressional seats next month. A challenge to the redistricting is before the Supreme Court, which has yet to rule on it.
The Texas episode might have seemed to be more slapstick comedy than political drama, but the ethics panel said Mr. DeLay's actions had raised "serious concerns" about the use of government resources for a "political undertaking."
The panel deferred action on a third accusation against Mr. DeLay, that he improperly funneled contributions from a political action committee to the Republican National Committee, because that matter is under investigation by a grand jury in Texas. The jury has indicted some of Mr. DeLay's aides, along with several companies.
Democratic leaders said the ethics panel's action - the second in a week against Mr. Delay - illustrated the depths to which the legislative process had sunk under Mr. DeLay.
Last week, the panel admonished Mr. DeLay for trying to persuade a Michigan Republican, Representative Nick Smith, to change his vote on prescription drug legislation in exchange for political help for Mr. Smith's son in a Congressional primary. (Mr. Smith did not change his vote, and his son lost the primary.)
"Let me point out," Mr. Waxman said, "this is how legislation is done today - bribes, threats, allegations of payoffs, concealment."
Republicans control the House, with 227 seats, to 205 for the Democrats. There is one independent, Representative Bernard Sanders of Vermont, and there are two vacancies. Democrats dream of recapturing the House, which they lost in the 1994 elections, and they would love to block Mr. DeLay's ascension to speaker of the House after the incumbent, J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois, retires.
How the latest ethics case will affect Mr. DeLay's future may not be known for a while. But the case seems certain to intensify party feuds in the House, as illustrated in today's comments by Democrats.
--------
Pair Under Inquiry May Face Tribal Action
By Judy Sarasohn
Washington Post
Thursday, October 7, 2004; Page A37
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13153-2004Oct6.html
Lobbyist Jack Abramoff and public relations consultant Michael Scanlon, already under investigation by a Senate panel, the FBI and a task force of five federal agencies, are now facing the strong likelihood of lawsuits from some of the tribes that paid the millions of dollars in lobbying and PR fees to the two men.
"There's not been a decision to sue, but in light of our [internal] investigation" the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana will probably bring suit against Abramoff and Scanlon to recoup any wrongly billed fees, Jay B. Stewart, a partner at the Austin law firm Hance Scarborough Wright Ginsberg & Brusilow, said in an interview yesterday. The tribe hired the firm, whose partner Kent Hance is a former GOP congressman, to represent it during the Senate Indian Affairs Committee investigation and to conduct its own internal investigation.
Hance and Stewart said the tribe had hired lobbyists to help protect its "one major asset" -- its casino -- but in the end may have been defrauded by a "complex scheme."
The Saginaw Chippewas, another former Abramoff client, may also pursue litigation against Abramoff and his former firm, Greenberg Traurig, Legal Times reported Monday.
Abramoff's lawyer Abbe D. Lowell of Chadbourne & Parke said in an e-mail response that the lobbyist and "the law firms for whom he worked have provided valuable services and achieved demonstrable results for the firms' tribal clients."
"Recent stories and the one-sided hearings at the Senate might cause people to forget or ignore these accomplishments. Before anyone is egged on to file a lawsuit capitalizing on the media frenzy that has been generated, they should stop and recall the good work and success that was achieved," Lowell said.
Akin Gump Builds on Indian Affairs
In other news about a former Abramoff tribal client . . . Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld registered to lobby on behalf of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians of Palm Springs, Calif.
The firm had earlier been retained to represent the tribe in the investigation. The lobby registration is for unrelated issues dealing with an array of transportation, education and other tribal issues, said Akin Gump lawyer Steven R. Ross. Also on the lobby team: Allison C. Binney, Susan H. Lent, Jeffrey D. McMillen and John M. Simmons.
Like other law firms and lobby shops in recent years, Akin Gump has been building up its Indian affairs practice. Most recently, the firm brought on Steven J. W. Heeley, who was deputy general counsel for the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona, from 1997 to 2003, and earlier served as chief counsel of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. He also served as deputy minority staff director and counsel to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) on the then-Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs. McCain is now chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee and is leading the investigation into Abramoff's affairs.
Heeley is a member of the Walpole Island First Nation. He most recently was at the law firm of Quarles & Brady Streich Lang.
-------- investigations / reports
Analysis
War's Rationales Are Undermined
One More Time Revelations May Hurt Bush's Image
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 7, 2004; Page A35
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13150-2004Oct6.html
One by one, official reports by government investigators, statements by former administration officials and internal CIA analyses have combined to undermine many of the central rationales of the administration's case for war with Iraq -- and its handling of the post-invasion occupation.
The release of yesterday's definitive account on Iraq's weapons -- and its conclusion that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction years before the U.S.-led invasion -- is only the latest in a series of damaging blows to the White House's strategy of portraying the war in Iraq as being on the cusp of success.
The report also comes just a few weeks after Democratic presidential challenger John F. Kerry gave new life to his campaign by emphasizing what he asserts is the gap between the president's rhetoric and the realities in Iraq.
This week, President Bush's former administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, broke with the administration to say officials had sent too few troops to Iraq and had allowed a culture of lawlessness to develop. The CIA, using information gathered after the invasion, cast doubt last week on whether Saddam Hussein aided Abu Musab Zarqawi, an al Qaeda associate, as the administration repeatedly alleged before the war.
The CIA over the summer delivered an analysis that Iraq could be expected, in the best-case scenario, to achieve a "tenuous stability" over the next 18 months and, in the worst case, to dissolve into civil war. The July assessment was similar to one produced before the war and another in late 2003 that were more pessimistic in tone than the administration's portrayal of the resistance to the U.S. occupation.
The risk for the Bush campaign is that the drip-drip of the revelations will slowly erode the advantage that the president has held among voters for his handling of the Iraq war and especially the struggle against terrorism. Despite growing misgivings about the violence in Iraq, Bush has held a commanding lead on whether he would better protect the country from terrorists.
But in the first two candidates' debates, Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards, have worked to separate the two issues. They have charged that Bush bungled the war on terrorism -- especially against al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who is still at large -- through what they have described as a needless diversion into Iraq.
Kerry has had his own problems on Iraq: He accepted that the administration intelligence on Iraq was correct and voted to authorize the use of force. But he has said that he gave Bush authorization in order to give him credibility in the showdown with Iraq, and that he would have given U.N. weapons inspectors more time to complete their work.
Bush said yesterday that Hussein "chose defiance and war, [and] our coalition enforced the just demands of the world," but Iraq actually had allowed the United Nations to send inspectors into the country, although Iraqi officials had balked at allowing scientists to leave the country for questioning. The inspectors left not because Iraq kicked them out but because the United States said it was about to launch an invasion and their safety could not be guaranteed.
Former chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix, adding weight to Kerry's argument, said yesterday: "Had we had a few months more, we would have been able to tell both the CIA and others that there were no weapons of mass destruction [at] all the sites that they had given to us."
Kerry campaign officials jumped on the report, saying it is one more piece of evidence that the war in Iraq was a mistake and was based on evidence that was either faulty or exaggerated by administration officials. Susan Rice, a senior foreign policy adviser to Kerry, said the Bush campaign is "grasping at straws" as it strains to maintain a link between the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the war with Iraq.
Rice said the White House made a "very dangerous strategic error" by focusing on Iraq, which turns out to have had no banned weapons, while ignoring or mishandling the much more dangerous threat posed by Iran and North Korea -- countries known to have active nuclear programs.
Administration officials have responded to the report by playing down the failure to find weapons, suggesting it was old news. Bush ignored the findings when he gave a major speech attacking Kerry, saying, "There was a risk -- a real risk -- that Saddam Hussein would pass weapons, or material, or information to terrorist networks."
Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage, interviewed by the BBC, stressed yesterday the report found that Hussein had a missile program in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions and that he had the "capability and the intention" to possess dangerous weapons. "He did not, apparently, have WMD. That's clear," Armitage said, adding: "I think all of us have addressed this."
Administration officials spent yesterday trying to refocus the attention of reporters on the disclosures in the report that many U.S. allies, top foreign officials and major international figures secretly helped Hussein generate more than $11 billion in illegal income in violation of U.N. sanctions. The report contains a long list of foreign officials and companies involved in helping Iraq -- while the names of Americans were blacked out because of privacy considerations.
With Kerry making the ability to work with allies a central plank of his foreign policy agenda, the revelations of allied deceit could undercut that argument in the minds of voters. Yesterday on the campaign trail, Bush declared: "I'll never hand over America's security decisions to foreign leaders and international bodies that do not have America's interests at heart."
Rice argued that there is a different lesson from the report -- that the sanctions had prevented Hussein from acquiring weapons and had greatly weakened him. The United States, as a permanent member of the Security Council, could forever veto any attempt to lift the sanctions, she said.
"What this means is that the sanctions had him in a box, and he couldn't have gotten out of the box unless the administration lifted him out of it," she said.
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Timing of Report Called Inspector's Decision
By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 7, 2004; Page A35
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13152-2004Oct6.html
As the White House's prewar claims about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs became increasingly discredited, the investigation by Charles A. Duelfer and his Iraq Survey Group provided a convenient out for President Bush and his aides.
When challenged about mounting evidence that crucial intelligence had been wrong or exaggerated, the administration could say only that Duelfer was still looking for the weapons and that the last word was still to come.
The last word arrived at the White House on Friday and was made public on Capitol Hill yesterday. It carried the title "Comprehensive Report."
From the perspective of the White House and the Bush-Cheney campaign, the timing could be difficult , coming 27 days before the election, two days before the second presidential debate and a day after publication of Ambassador L. Paul Bremer's assertion that the United States had deployed too few troops in Iraq early on.
Duelfer was appointed in January by George J. Tenet, who was then director of the CIA. Duelfer operated independently of the White House, which had no control over the report's timing.
A U.S. official, who declined to be further described, said the timing of the report -- which is dated last Thursday -- was controlled by Duelfer, a former U.N. weapons inspector who had said in interviews before his appointment that he doubted chemical or biological weapons would be found.
"Charlie promised months ago that when the report was done, he would put it out, and that's what he's doing," the official said. "It's completely his show."
Duelfer, who had planned to issue his report in August, delivered more than 1,000 pages of conclusions to the CIA last week and circulated some portions to the State Department for discussion about classification. The CIA did not give it to Bush's National Security Council until later.
Officials in some parts of the administration outside the White House wanted certain sensitive sections to remain classified. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice "thought it was important that the entire report be declassified," said James R. Wilkinson, deputy national security adviser.
"The administration had asked Mr. Duelfer to report when he was ready, and he was ready," Wilkinson said.
The day before the report was made public, the CIA held an invitation-only briefing with Duelfer at the National Press Club for about 40 reporters. Attendees agreed not to report what they learned until after his appearance on Capitol Hill. At that point, Duelfer had not briefed anyone at the White House.
As of yesterday morning, Bush had not read the report but had been briefed on it, White House press secretary Scott McClellan said.
The White House sent administration officials and Capitol Hill Republicans a two-page memo titled "Talking Points on the Duelfer Report" that said it "provides extensive new documentation that Saddam Hussein was a threat to international peace and security, and was in violation of U.N. resolutions."
Bush gave two speeches on the campaign trail yesterday. Neither mentioned the report.
-------- propaganda wars
Bush's Case for War Crumbles
Antiwar.com
by Jim Lobe
October 7, 2004
http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=3723
Is there anything at all left of the Bush administration's case for going to war in Iraq or, for that matter, the way it has been fought?
The answer seems increasingly doubtful given what appears to be an accelerating cascade of news, leaks and admissions by senior administration officials over the past several weeks.
Consider what has been disclosed in just the last few days.
On Monday, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York that he had never seen any "strong, hard evidence that links" ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein with the al-Qaeda terrorist network, which was one of the administration's two major justifications for the war.
One day later, the New York Times confirmed reports by Knight Ridder newspapers about the existence of a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) study on the Iraq-based Jordanian "arch-jihadi," Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which had found no concrete evidence to support the administration's pre-war insistence that Hussein's government had given him safe haven or that he coordinates his actions in any way with al-Qaeda.
On Wednesday, Charles Duelfer, the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, pounded the final nail in the coffin of the second most commonly cited justification for the March 2003 invasion.
His final report concluded not only that Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) at the time of the invasion, but that he made no effort to reconstitute them after United Nations weapons inspectors left the country in 1998.
Indeed, the report, which was based on on-site inspections, interviews with Iraqi scientists and tons of Iraqi documents, concluded that while Hussein was hoping to rebuild a WMD program - particularly one of nuclear weapons - his ability to do so had actually deteriorated over the previous five years, in stark contrast to the administration's warnings and Bush's current campaign rhetoric that Hussein posed "a gathering threat" to the United States and its allies.
As Illinois Democratic Senator Dick Durbin put it, the latest findings mean that the administration had "created a worst-case scenario on virtually no evidence."
If that were not enough to throw the administration on the defensive, consider what else has come out over the last week or so, as well as the sources of the information.
On Monday, the former U.S. viceroy in Baghdad, Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) chief Paul Bremer was quoted as telling an insurance group the administration "never had enough troops on the ground" in Iraq, both during the invasion, to prevent looting, and over the months that followed.
This has been precisely the critique of quite a number of retired military officers, many Democrats - most especially, of course, presidential candidate Senator John Kerry - and a number of prominent Republican senators, who themselves have become increasingly vocal about the administration's performance in Iraq.
And while White House officials tried hard to persuade reporters that Bremer had never requested more troops, two "senior officials" contacted by the New York Times on Tuesday admitted that the CPA chief, who has been prominently mentioned as a possible secretary of state in a second Bush term, had indeed pressed for more forces, even before he went to Baghdad in June 2003.
The Bremer story broke just one day after the Times ran an unusually long investigative report on another specific and highly questionable prewar administration allegation - that 60,000 aluminum tubes Baghdad tried to buy in early 2001 was firm evidence Hussein was trying to build a nuclear weapon.
Based primarily on interviews with officials throughout the U.S. intelligence community, the report found that nuclear engineering experts at the Energy Department had shot down the notion - which originated with a junior CIA analyst who, according to the Times, "got his facts wrong, even about the size of the tubes" - within 24 hours of its being raised in 2001, and did so in four detailed reports that followed.
Aside from the now-discredited report that Iraq tried to buy uranium "yellowcake" from Niger, as well as the testimony of a self-proclaimed Iraqi nuclear scientist handled by the exiled Iraqi National Congress (INC), the tubes were the only evidence for any nuclear program at all, according to the Times report.
While doubts within the intelligence agencies persisted, the administration, particularly Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, raised the specter of a "mushroom cloud" as the only proof, and worked to keep both the public and the Congress in the dark about the dissenting views in the Energy and State departments.
These latest revelations come against a background as well of what has become an escalating battle between the White House and CIA career officers, who apparently are seriously concerned about the agency being blamed for mistaken estimates in the lead-up to the war, especially in the super-heated environment of a presidential campaign and amid considerable politicking over a pending reorganization of the entire U.S. intelligence community.
Thus, while Bush and Cheney last month were fending off charges by Kerry and the Democrats that the situation in Iraq was increasingly chaotic as a result of administration incompetence, CIA officials leaked details of a classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) delivered to the White House in August that concluded the best-case scenario in Iraq over the next 16 months was more of the instability and violence that has prevailed since April.
As likely, according to the leaked assessment, was that Iraq could dissolve into civil war.
A second document drafted two months before the invasion by the National Intelligence Council, which is chaired by the CIA, predicted a number of the challenges - including a strong anti-American insurgency and a surge in anti-American sentiment throughout the Muslim world - Washington would face as a result of war.
The two leaks provoked an outraged response entitled "The CIA's Insurgency," by editorial writers at the The Wall Street Journal, which was one of the leading voices for war, as well as from other neoconservative voices.
James Pavitt, a career CIA officer who retired as head of the agency's clandestine service in July, told the Times he had never in his 31-year career seen such "viciousness and vindictiveness" in the fight between the CIA and its political masters, but could not resist a kicker of his own.
"There was nothing in the intelligence [produced by the CIA] that was a 'casus belli'" that would justify war with Iraq, he said, echoing Kerry.
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Urging Fact-Checking, Cheney Got Site Wrong
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 7, 2004; Page A08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12901-2004Oct6.html
Vice President Cheney dropped a dot-bomb Tuesday night when he inadvertently directed millions of viewers of the vice presidential debate to an Internet site critical of the Bush administration.
After Democratic nominee John Edwards raised some nasty allegations about Halliburton Corp., the company Cheney once ran, Cheney angrily responded to the "false" charges. "If you go, for example, to FactCheck.com, an independent Web site sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania, you can get the specific details with respect to Halliburton," he said.
But when people followed Cheney's instructions, they wound up at a site sponsored by administration antagonist George Soros. "Why we must not re-elect President Bush," the site blared. "President Bush is endangering our safety, hurting our vital interests, and undermining American values."
Evidently, Cheney meant to say FactCheck.org a site run by the Annenberg Public Policy Center. Instead, he directed the nation's attention to a Web site that refers people to sellers of dictionaries and encyclopedias -- at least at first. The company behind the site, Cayman Islands-based Name Administration Inc., which also owns sites such as Lipbalm.com and Antarctica.com, was quickly overwhelmed.
"Suddenly they had 48,000 hits in an hour, then 100 hits a second," said John Berryhill, a lawyer for the company. "They had a technical problem on their hands."
To avoid crashing, and to exact revenge on Cheney for causing it such grief, Name Administration decided to forward traffic to GeorgeSoros.com -- a site that could handle the traffic, was not soliciting funds and clearly wasn't tied to Bush. "And you got to admit it was kind of cute," Berryhill said.
Soros's Web site issued a statement saying it had nothing to do with the redirection of traffic. "We are as surprised as anyone," said Michael Vachon, Soros's chief of staff.
Gradually, people became aware of Cheney's mistake, and the White House transcript of the debate was annotated with the correct address. But, unfortunately for Cheney, FactCheck.org was not much more helpful than Soros in knocking down Edwards's charges.
Cheney "wrongly implied that we had rebutted allegations Edwards was making about what Cheney had done as chief executive officer of Halliburton," the Annenberg site wrote in a posting yesterday. "In fact, we did post an article pointing out that Cheney hasn't profited personally while in office from Halliburton's Iraq contracts, as falsely implied by a Kerry TV ad. But Edwards was talking about Cheney's responsibility for earlier Halliburton troubles. And in fact, Edwards was mostly right."
--------
For the Record
Halliburton Charges Jumbled by Edwards and Denied by Cheney
By Robert O'Harrow Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 7, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13519-2004Oct6.html
In the debate with Vice President Cheney on Tuesday, Sen. John Edwards referred to allegations of wrongdoing by Halliburton Corp. several times and raised questions about the Bush administration's handling of government contracting in Iraq.
But in doing so, Edwards occasionally jumbled or oversimplified the complex details of the company's role as a contractor and of its ties to Cheney, who served as Halliburton's chief executive from 1995 to 2000.
Cheney, for his part, said the Democrats "know the charges are false," even though some are the subject of ongoing investigations.
Edwards correctly noted that Halliburton secured a $7.5 billion no-bid contract from the Pentagon shortly before the war in Iraq to repair any damage to the country's oil fields. He also accurately said that the government is contemplating withholding money from Halliburton because some auditors believe the company has not properly accounted for its bills in Iraq.
But the Democrat conflated two contracts, the second of which is a troop support arrangement awarded to Halliburton before the war, after a competition. That contract helped make Halliburton the top government contractor in Iraq. The Pentagon has considered -- but has not acted on -- several suggestions from auditors to withhold 15 percent of future payments because of questions about the company's billing.
Edwards also chided Cheney for allowing Halliburton to do business in Iran and for pressing U.S. officials for the right to do business in Iran while he was Halliburton's chief executive.
Edwards was referring to oil service work performed in Iran by a Cayman Islands subsidiary called Halliburton Products & Services Ltd. The Houston-based parent company disclosed this summer that a three-year Treasury Department investigation -- into whether that arrangement was a violation of national security sanctions that prohibit U.S. companies from doing business in Iran -- had escalated into a criminal investigation by the Justice Department.
Halliburton has said repeatedly in documents on file with the government that its subsidiary operated legally in Iran, outside the control of U.S. executives.
At one point, Edwards compared Halliburton during Cheney's tenure as chief executive to Enron Corp., the energy trading giant involved in one of the nation's biggest accounting frauds. "While he was CEO of Halliburton, they paid millions of dollars in fines for providing false information on their company, just like Enron," Edwards said.
Here Edwards appeared to be referring to the company's agreement in August to pay $7.5 million to settle Securities and Exchange Commission charges that it failed to disclose a change in accounting practices that allowed the company to report higher earnings in 1998 and 1999, while Cheney was still chief executive. The SEC also cited Halliburton for "unacceptable lapses" that hindered investigators. Cheney, who was not charged with wrongdoing, fully cooperated with investigators, the SEC said.
In one striking line during the debate, Edwards said that Halliburton is "now under investigation for having bribed foreign officials." Halliburton subsidiary KBR is under investigation by the Justice Department over allegations that former employees bribed Nigerian officials to secure work on a huge gas liquefaction plant there. The SEC is also investigating. But the company contends that the alleged wrongdoing occurred before the Cheney-led Halliburton acquired a subsidiary that was involved in the Nigerian deal.
In response to Edwards's remarks, the vice president offered few specifics but asserted that "there is no substance to the charges."
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Cheney Says Report Finding No Illicit Arms in Iraq Justifies War
October 7, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Cheney.html?hp&ex=1097208000&en=4aaa4e3b0074933c&ei=5094&partner=homepage
MIAMI (AP) -- Vice President Dick Cheney asserted on Thursday that a finding by the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq that Saddam Hussein's government produced no weapons of mass destruction after 1991 justifies rather than undermines President Bush's decision to go to war.
The report shows that ``delay, defer, wait wasn't an option,'' Cheney told a town hall-style meeting.
While Democrats pointed to the new report by Charles Duelfer to bolster their case that invading Iraq was a mistake, Cheney focused on portions that were more favorable to the administration's case.
``The headlines all say no weapons of mass destruction stockpiled in Baghdad. We already knew that,'' Cheney said.
He said other parts of the report were ``more intriguing.''
Cheney's comments reflect a GOP strategy to use portions of the report, including abuses of Iraq's ``fuel for food'' program, to try to move discussion away from the central conclusions on the absence of weapons of mass destruction.
Although the report says Saddam's weapons program had deteriorated since the 1991 Gulf War and did not pose a threat to the world in 2003, it also says Saddam's main goal was the removal of international sanctions.
``As soon as the sanctions were lifted he had every intention of going back'' to his weapons program, Cheney said.
The vice president said the report concluded that the United Nations' ``Fuel for Food'' program ``was totally corrupted by Saddam Hussein. There were suggestions employees of the United Nations were part of the scheme as well.''
``The suggestion is clearly there by Mr. Duelfer that Saddam had used the program in such a way that he had bought off foreign governments and was building support among them to take the sanctions down,'' Cheney said.
Thus there was no reason to wait to invade Iraq to give inspectors more time to do their work, Cheney said.
``The sanctions regime was coming apart at the seams,'' Cheney told a later forum in Fort Myers. ``Saddam perverted that whole thing and generated billions of dollars. ... He used the funds to corrupt others.''
The new GOP strategy contained some risks to Bush: Some of the countries possibly implicated in wrongdoing in the program include U.S. allies in Iraq, particularly Poland, as well as Russia -- countries the administration does not want to alienate.
On Wednesday, the former head of the U.N. weapons inspection team, Hans Blix, said: ``Had we had a few months more (of inspections before the war), we would have been able to tell both the CIA and others that there were no weapons of mass destruction (at) all the sites that they had given to us.''
Duelfer's report said what ambitions Saddam harbored for such weapons were secondary to his goal of evading the sanctions, and he wanted weapons primarily not to attack the United States or to provide them to terrorists but to oppose his older enemies, Iran and Israel.
The report of the weapons hunter was presented Wednesday to senators and the public in the midst of a fierce presidential election campaign in which Iraq and the war of terror have become the overriding issues. The Duelfer report said that Saddam's intentions were ``preserving the capability to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction when sanctions were lifted.''
On another topic, Cheney said that this weekend's elections in Afghanistan could be rocky.
``It will be difficult. There will be attacks on polling places. Remnants of the old Taliban regime don't want those elections to succeed,'' Cheney said. But he predicted that democracy would prevail in what he said was ``the first election in Afghanistan in 5,000 years.''
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UNCONVENTIONAL WEAPONS
Saddam Hussein Sowed Confusion About Iraq's Arsenal as a Tactic of War
October 7, 2004
By DAVID JOHNSTON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/07/politics/07saddam.html?adxnnl=1&pagewanted=all&adxnnlx=1097177584-wJuzOXL1ySkXg/99Zjr3zQ
WASHINGTON, Oct. 6 - Saddam Hussein hid behind ambiguities and evasions about whether Iraq possessed unconventional weapons - when in fact it had none - partly as a deterrent to Iran, according to a report by the chief American arms inspector in Iraq.
The former Iraqi leader never discussed deception as a policy and did not adopt a formal written directive outlining his orders, the report said. But privately he told aides, like Ali Hasan al-Majid, a close adviser, that "the better part of war is deceiving,'' the report said. Mr. Majid said Mr. Hussein "wanted to avoid appearing weak and did not reveal he was deceiving the world about the presence of W.M.D.,'' or weapons of mass destruction.
The report by the chief arms inspector, Charles A. Duelfer, described Mr. Hussein's posture on prohibited weapons as "a difficult balancing act between the need to disarm to achieve sanctions relief while at the same time retaining a strategic deterrent.''
Mr. Hussein never reconciled the two competing aims, the report found.
"The regime never resolved the contradiction inherent in this approach,'' it said. "Ultimately, foreign perceptions of these tensions contributed to the destruction of the regime.''
The report provided the first detailed examination of Mr. Hussein's thinking about unconventional weapons and offered an answer to one of the most enduring mysteries of the war in Iraq: why did Mr. Hussein risk so much to hide the truth that Iraq did not possess such weapons?
Overall, Mr. Hussein's strategic actions were aimed at one overriding objective, "the survival of himself, his regime and his legacy,'' the report concluded.
The report found that Mr. Hussein purposely communicated an ambiguous impression about whether Iraq possessed these weapons mainly as a deterrent to Iran, Baghdad's longstanding adversary, which fought a brutal war with Iraq from 1980 to 1988.
The report, based on interrogations of Mr. Hussein, who was captured late last year, and his subordinates, said the confusion also helped Mr. Hussein disguise his underlying desire to maintain the intellectual and industrial foundation needed to quickly rebuild a weapons program in the event Iraq succeeded in lifting international economic sanctions, another top priority for the former Iraqi leader.
Beyond that, Mr. Hussein maintained an almost mystical faith in the power of unconventional weapons, whose stocks, the inspector said, were largely destroyed by Iraq after the 1991 Persian Gulf war under pressure from the United Nations. The report found that Mr. Hussein believed that these weapons, particularly chemical arms, had preserved his rule through repeated military crises.
Earlier this year, the report said, Mr. Hussein was asked by an American interrogator why he had not used such weapons during the 1991 gulf war. Mr. Hussein replied, according to the report: "Do you think we are mad? What would the world have thought of us? We would have completely discredited those who had supported us.''
The report's conclusions are based in part on interrogations of Mr. Hussein conducted primarily by a senior F.B.I. interrogator who spent months questioning the former Iraqi leader in Arabic, attempting to extract information from Mr. Hussein about his weapons programs and other issues. It is not clear from the report whether the former Iraqi leader accepted the motives attributed to him.
Some American intelligence officials have said that Mr. Hussein was vague in responses to questions about his arsenal, and the report does not state explicitly whether Mr. Hussein himself has acknowledged that he engaged in a deception operation about these weapons before the war.
The report said Mr. Hussein's belief in unconventional weapons stemmed from their use in the Iran-Iraq war when the former Iraqi leader concluded that Iraq was "saved'' by employing chemical weapons against Iran. The report concluded that Mr. Hussein believed such weapons had helped him "multiple times,'' helping to stop Iranian ground offensives, and that ballistic missile attacks on Tehran had "broken its political will.''
In 1991, Mr. Hussein believed the threat that Iraq might use these weapons had helped deter the United States-led coalition from advancing as far as Baghdad. After that war, American authorities found unused chemical munitions that had been distributed to battlefield commanders.
The report said Mr. Hussein refused to dispel the impression that he still had such weapons even though the report concluded that his specialized weapons programs were nonexistent or mothballed in the early development stage because of international sanctions.
In Mr. Hussein's mind, the possibility that Iraq possessed these weapons helped keep Iraq's neighbors off balance. The report said the former Iraqi leader had compared the United Nations inspection process to an analogy of a warrior striking an enemy's wrist. "Despite the strength of the arm, striking the wrist or elbow can be a more decisive blow to incapacitate the entire arm; knowledge of your opponent's weakness is a weapon in itself."
But Mr. Hussein, the report said, was concerned that the inspections would "expose Iraq's vulnerability in comparison with Iran. He apparently realized that his adversaries were not the only ones who were confused by what the report referred to as Mr. Hussein's "mixed messages.''
According to the report, Mr. Hussein confused his own generals because he tried to foster the impression among them that Iraq could resist a ground attack using unconventional weapons.
"Then in a series of meetings in 2002, Saddam appears to have reversed course and advised various groups of senior officers and officials that Iraq did not in fact have W.M.D.,'' the report said.
Mr. Hussein's words had an immediate impact. Military morale plummeted when top commanders realized after the meetings in December 2002 that they would have to face the United States military with only conventional arms. Mr. Hussein created more confusion in March 2003 - the month American-led forces invaded - when he implied to his ministers and senior officers "that he had some kind of secret weapon.''
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FBI Seizes Indymedia Servers
TruthOut!
Friday 08 October 2004
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100904W.shtml
The FBI has issued an order to hosting provider Rackspace in the US, ordering it to turn over two of the servers hosting the Independent Media Centre's websites in the UK, a statement from the group says.
Rackspace has offices in the US and the UK. Independent Media Center, which is better known as Indymedia, was set up in 1999 to provide grassroots coverage of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) protests in Seattle.
Rackspace complied with the FBI order, without first notifying Indymedia, and turned over Indymedia's server in the UK. This affects over 20 Indymedia sites worldwide, the group said.
Indymedia said it did not know why the order had been issued as it was issued to Rackspace. Rackspace told some of the group's volunteers "they cannot provide Indymedia with any information regarding the order." ISPs have received gag orders in similar situations which prevent them from updating the parties involved on what is happening.
Indymedia said a second server was taken down at Rackspace. This provided streaming radio to several radio stations, BLAG (a Linux distribution), and a handful of miscellanous things.
In August the US Secret Service used a subpoena in an attempt to disrupt the New York city Independent Media Center before the Republican National Convention by trying to get IP logs from an ISP in the US and the Netherlands.
Last month the US Federal Communications Commission shut down community radio stations around the US. Two weeks ago the FBI asked Indymedia to remove a post on the Nantes IMC that had a photo of some undercover Swiss police and IMC volunteers in Seattle were visited by the FBI on the same issue.
Indymedia said the list of local media collectives affected included Amazonia, Uruguay, Andorra, Poland, Western Massachusetts, Nice, Nantes, Lilles, Marseille (all France), Euskal Herria (Basque Country), Liege, East and West Vlaanderen, Antwerpen (all Belgium), Belgrade, Portugal, Prague, Galiza, Italy, Brazil, UK, part of the Germany site, and the global Indymedia Radio site.
----
2005: Annus Horribilis
October 06, 2004
By Tony Blankley
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20041005-095948-7276r.htm
If you think the last three years have been rough, just wait a few months. Compounding the lethal threat of Islamic terrorism, 2005 will be the year of decision for the world on what to do - or not do - about quickly nuclearizing North Korea and Iran. In the month left before the presidential election, the American people have a right to demand to know from both George Bush and John Kerry precisely what they will or won't accept and do about these appalling developments.
Two news stories in the past week bring the danger into better focus. Last Friday the Associated Press reported that: "Amid heightened concerns of a North Korean missile test, a U.S. destroyer has started patrolling the Sea of Japan in what officials say is a first step toward creating a shield to protect the United States and its allies from a foreign missile attack." North Korea responded to the news by asserting that "the U.S. should clearly understand that a preemptive attack is not its monopoly."
Two days later, Reuters reported that Iran rebuffed a proposal by Mr. Kerry to supply them with nuclear fuel if they agreed to give up their own fuel-making capacity. "We have the technology (to make nuclear fuel) and there is no need for us to beg from others," Reuters quoted the Iranian government.
Regarding the North Korean threat, Jim Hoagland, The Washington Post's esteemed and balanced foreign affairs columnist, wrote over the weekend: "Thursday night's fragmented argument over Kerry's championing of bilateral talks with North Korea and Bush's insistence on the value of multilateral talks... illustrated the triumph of... verbal dexterity over reality."
"Kim Jong Il is interested in nuclear bombs, not in a particular format for talks. His covert betrayal of the nonproliferation agreement struck with a trusting Democratic administration and its overt belligerent defiance of Bush's tougher approach make that clear. But neither Mr. Kerry nor Mr. Bush could voice that inconvenient reality Thursday night."
The same could be said about both candidates public comments regarding Iran's nuclear objectives. They both debate various modalities of working with Britain, France, Russia and the United Nations to induce Iran to stand down from her nuclear aspirations.
The grim reality is that neither country would appear to have any intention of backing down. Thus, very soon (if not already), the world will be faced with two new nuclear powers, one led by a lunatic, and the other led by fanatical Islamists committed to rolling back the advance of Western civilization and wiping out Israel.
North Korea is notorious for selling its most advanced weapons to the highest bidder, while Iran is the world's premier backer of terrorists. But even if they were not to proliferate their dreaded nuclear capacity, they both must be presumed to be willing to use such weapons either actually, or as blackmail devices, for their own state purposes.
It is not for nothing that President Bush listed Iran and North Korea, along with Iraq, as the axis of evil in his 2002 State of the Union address. At the time, commentators giggled and smirked at the metaphor. But whether they constitute an axis, or are merely separate sources of extreme danger, three years on the danger list is no longer theoretical - but imminently actual.
And, as it is increasingly apparent, even extreme international diplomatic blocking actions are not likely to stop Iran and North Korea from their nuclear quest.
So, if diplomacy fails, what will the president of the United States do about it in 2005? President Bush has said that such nuclear status is unacceptable, but continues to express confidence in diplomacy. Unlike Mr. Kerry, the president is committed to making operational a missile defense system. While that is necessary, regretfully, it will not be up and running in time to constitute a full check against the imminent threat.
Mr. Kerry continues to limit himself to expressing confidence in his ability to solve the danger diplomatically. Also, and significantly, unlike the president he opposes the development of nuclear "bunker-buster" technology, which is being developed specifically to deal with North Korea's and Iran's nuclear capabilities.
It is understandable that in a closely fought presidential election, neither candidate would find it appealing to talk of his contingent plans for war with a possible nuclear adversary. It would be even less appealing, one supposes, for either candidate to admit that if it came to it, he would just accept the nuclear status of Iran and North Korea and hope for the best.
But I, for one, would like to know which candidate, if either, would acquiesce to such conditions and which, if either, would be prepared to fight.
So far, a remarkably incurious Washington press corps has not chosen to challenge the candidates to explain beyond their platitudinous paeans to the doubtful efficacy of diplomacy in the face of belligerent madness.
Tony Blankley is editorial page editor of The Washington Times. His column appears on Wednesdays. E-mail: tblankley@washingtontimes.com
-------- us politics
Bush defends Iraq invasion in face of new weapons report
10/7/2004
Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-10-07-cheney_x.htm
WASHINGTON (AP) - Faced with a harshly critical new report, President Bush conceded Thursday that Iraq did not have the stockpiles of banned weapons he had warned of before the invasion last year, but insisted that "we were right to take action" against Saddam Hussein.
"America is safer today with Saddam Hussein in prison," Bush said in a surprise statement to reporters as he prepared to fly to Wisconsin.
"Much of the accumulated body of our intelligence was wrong and we must find out why," Bush said.
But, he maintained that the Iraqi leader retained the "means and the intent" to produce weapons of mass destruction.
Bush spoke one day after Charles Duelfer, the American weapons hunter in Iraq, presented to the Senate and the public a report that Saddam's weapons of mass destruction programs had deteriorated into only hopes and dreams by the time of the U.S.-led invasion last year. The decline was wrought by the first Gulf War and years of international sanctions, the chief U.S. weapons hunter found. (Related story: Final report: No WMD in Iraq)
What ambitions Saddam harbored for such weapons were secondary to his goal of evading those sanctions, and he wanted them primarily not to attack the United States or to provide them to terrorists, but to oppose his older enemies, Iran and Israel, the report found.
Bush ignored the report in a hard-hitting new campaign speech attacking Kerry on Iraq Wednesday. He made his first public comments about the final document as he prepared to board his helicopter en route to Wisconsin for more campaigning.
"The Duelfer report showed that Saddam was systematically gaming the system, using the U.N. oil for food program to try to influence countries and companies in an effort to undermine sanctions," Bush said. "He was doing so with the intent of restarting his weapons program once the world looked away."
"He could have passed that knowledge onto our terrorist enemies," Bush said. "Saddam Hussein was a unique threat, a sworn enemy of our country, a state sponsor of terror operating in the world's most volatile region. In the world after Sept. 11, he was a threat we had to confront and America and the world are safer for our actions."
Bush promised to act on the recommendations of the president's commission investigating flawed intelligence on weapons of mass destruction, chaired by former Sen. Chuck Robb, D-Va., and Republican Laurence Silberman, a senior judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
Campaigning in Pennsylvania Wednesday, Bush defended the decision to invade.
"There was a risk, a real risk, that Saddam Hussein would pass weapons or materials or information to terrorist networks," the president said in a speech in Wilkes Barre, Pa. "In the world after Sept. 11, that was a risk we could not afford to take."
A spokesman for his opponent, Democrat John Kerry, said the report "underscores the incompetence of George Bush's Iraq policy."
"George Bush refuses to come clean about the ways he misled our country into war," Kerry spokesman David Wade added.
"In short, we invaded a country, thousands of people have died, and Iraq never posed a grave or growing danger," said Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va.
Vice President Dick Cheney asserted in Miami Thursday that the report justifies rather than invalidates Bush's decision to go to war. It shows that "delay, defer, wasn't an option," Cheney told a town-hall style meeting.
Duelfer's Iraq Survey Group drew on interviews with senior Iraqi officials, 40 million pages of documents and classified intelligence to conclude that Iraq destroyed its undeclared chemical and biological stockpiles under pressure of U.N. sanctions by 1992 and never resumed production.
The U.S.-led invasion pushed one of Iraq's leaders into seeking chemical weapons to defend the country. But it doesn't appear that Saddam's son Uday located any.
Iraq ultimately abandoned its biological weapons programs in 1995, largely out of fear they would be discovered and tougher enforcement imposed.
"Indeed, from the mid-1990s, despite evidence of continuing interest in nuclear and chemical weapons, there appears to be a complete absence of discussion or even interest in BW at the presidential level," according to a summary of Duelfer's 1,000-page report.
And Iraq also abandoned its nuclear program after the war, and there was no evidence it tried to reconstitute it.
Saddam's intentions to restart his weapons programs were never formalized.
"The former regime had no formal written strategy or plan for the revival of WMD after sanctions," the summary says. "Neither was there an identifiable group of WMD policymakers or planners separate from Saddam. Instead his lieutenants understood WMD revival was his goal from their long association with Saddam and his infrequent, but firm, verbal comments and directions to them."
Duelfer's findings contradict most of the assertions by the Bush administration and the U.S. intelligence community about Iraq's threat in 2002 and early 2003. The White House had argued that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons stockpiles and production lines and had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program.
The United States led an invasion into Iraq in March 2003, taking the capital, Baghdad, within weeks. Since then, the United States and its allies have fought a dangerous insurgency of Iraqis as well as Islamic extremists who have come to Iraq to kill Americans.
Some 1,196 coalition personnel have been killed since the start of the war. Of those, 1,060 are American, 67 British and 69 are from other coalition countries. Unknown numbers of Iraqis have also died on both sides of the conflict.
Before the war, Saddam's chief success was in manipulating an oil for food program that began in 1996, to avoid the sanctions' effects for a few years, acquiring billions of dollars to import goods such as parts for missile systems. Duelfer also in the report accused the former head of the U.N. oil-for-food program of accepting bribes in the form of vouchers for Iraqi oil sales from Saddam's government.
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Lawmakers slam White House after long search yields no Iraqi WMD
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Oct 07, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041006223614.fxkihfkj.html
Democrats on Wednesday slammed the White House Wednesday for leading a months-long search to uncover an Iraqi weapons program that apparently did not exist when the United States invaded the country.
Lawmakers hammered chief US weapons inspector Charles Duelfer after his Iraq Survey Group (ISG) came up empty-handed in searching for Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction program -- the basis for Washington's decision to invade Iraq in March 2003.
Duelfer conceded at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee that he probably would not find "militarily significant" stocks of weapons of mass destruction hidden in Iraq.
"What you're telling us is that in addition to having no WMD stocks before the war ... Saddam chose not to have those weapons," said Senator Carl Levin, top Democrat on the committee.
"Those are stunning statements," said Levin. "That is a 180-degree difference from what the (George W. Bush) administration was saying before the war."
"The fundamental conclusion of the ISG effort means that the administration's two major arguments for going to war against Iraq were incorrect," Levin said.
Duelfer said that not only did Iraq not have an active weapons program but it had not pursued banned weapons since weapons inspections began in 1991.
Duelfer told the panel he found the remnants of a former weapons program in delapidated condition, which could have been reconstituted at a future date if Saddam had the opportunity.
But lawmakers angrily noted that that risk was far from the immediate threat the White House had insisted the Iraqi leader posed at the time of the US invasion.
"We did not go to war because Saddam had future intentions to obtain weapons of mass destruction," Levin said.
In addition to Duelfer's testimony, the Iraq Survey Group issued a report Wednesday which underscored the absence of weapons of mass destruction at the time of the US-led invasion.
And while Saddam Hussein hoped to develop a long-range missile system, his weapons development program was in such disrepair that little work was ever done on warheads, Duelfer said.
When challenged by Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy about the group's "wild goose chase" for WMDs despite several months and millions of dollars spent looking for the weapons, Duelfer defended the effort.
"My task was not to find weapons of mass destruction, my task was to find the truth," he told the committee.
Duelfer could not explain why Saddam did not try harder to cooperate with UN weapons inspectors in a bid to avoid invasion by the United States and its allies.
"It's a question which many of us have puzzled over," he said. "It really requires you to get into Saddam's mind.
"The answer is, it's difficult to know for certain," continued Duelfer, who said Saddam apparently failed to understand that business as usual no longer applied after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
"He wanted to get sanctions lifted. He kept trying to bargain and barter and had not realized the nature of the ground shift in the international community," Duelfer told the senators.
"That was Saddam's intelligence failure," he said. "He did not understand very quickly the dramatic change of the international landscape."
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Benefits and Costs of the U.S. Government's War Making
Robert Higgs
October 7, 2004
Indepndent Institute
http://independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1379
In 1795, James Madison observed that "of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. . . . No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare." All experience during the past two centuries has confirmed the continuing validity of Madison's observation. Apart from all the sacrifices of life, liberty, and treasure that wars have entailed directly, they have also served as the prime occasions for the growth of the central state, and hence in the United States they have fostered the long-term diminution of civil and economic liberties and the ongoing subversion of civil society.
Every government recognizes that force alone is an inefficient means of propping up its position. At the margin, bamboozlement can be effectively substituted for the use of force, especially in so-called democratic systems, where many ordinary people have embraced the fable that they themselves "are" the government because they cast a ballot every few years. Hence, every government seeks to ease its retention of power by persuading people that it acts only in their interest. A government that goes to war promises its subjects that it is doing so only in defense of those persons' security and freedom. "Yet," as Bruce Porter has noted, "having borne the burden of the state for five hundred years, we find that it has rarely fulfilled its twin promises of security and freedom."
Indeed, the government's alluring claim is almost always false. In matters of war making, as elsewhere in their wielding of power, governments act in the interest of their own leaders, with as many concessions as necessary to retain the support of the coalition of special-interest groups that keeps them in power. Libertarians, of all people, understand that, in Randolph Bourne's now-hackneyed phrase, "war is the health of the state." This claim is not some wild-eyed ideological pronouncement; it is as well-established as any historical regularity can be. Entire books, such as Bruce D. Porter's War and the Rise of the State (1994) and my own Crisis and Leviathan (1987) and Against Leviathan (2004), have documented it in excruciating detail.
Aware of this reality, libertarians instinctively resist any claim that war will promote either liberty or security; they do not expect that notwithstanding what has almost always happened before, nature will change its course on this particular occasion. Whereas many other people can be persuaded that the risks war poses to their own life, liberty, and property rights are justified-necessary and only temporary sacrifices in the service of their own long-term security and liberty-libertarians understand that those who embrace this logic are taking a gamble against very long odds.
In the United States, the government has been at war, more or less, since 1940, which is to say, in Madison's phrase, engaged in "continual warfare" or in massive preparation for warfare. Can anyone seriously maintain that we are now freer or more secure than we were before the sainted Franklin D. Roosevelt and his spiritual descendants took command of the ship of state and steered it into the storm of perpetual war? The U.S. government, which once confined its foreign adventures to ad hoc interventions, most of them in small Caribbean and Central American countries, has acted ever since World War II as a globe-girdling empire, projecting U.S. military and political power here, there, and everywhere with reckless unconcern for a reasonable connection between overall cost and benefit. (Why should the rulers care, you may ask, when they themselves-and, as usual, their supporting cronies-reap whatever benefit is produced, whereas the costs of the interventions take the form of other people's sacrifices of life, liberty, and property rights?)
Not least among these sacrifices has been that of the old constitutional structure-the government of checks and balances that once helped to restrain the rulers from launching foreign engagements and suppressing domestic liberties willy-nilly. Owing to the series of hot and cold military emergencies since 1940, the president has become, for all practical purposes, a Caesar. He now goes to war entirely at his own discretion. After all, as his spokesmen tirelessly reiterate, he is the commander in chief of the armed forces (as if this fact simply wiped out the rest of the Constitution).
Congress has become so pusillanimous that it provides no check whatever on the president's war making. In "authorizing" the president to attack Iraq or not, entirely as he pleased, Congress not only abrogated its clear constitutional duty, but it did so with grotesquely cavalier disregard for the gravity of the matter at stake. It did not even bother to debate the issue, but simply handed over its power to the executive and returned to the workaday plundering that is its only remaining raison d'etre. The president and his chief underlings keep telling us that "we are at war," but it's just a turn of phrase for public-relations purposes, inasmuch as the constitutional requirement of a congressional declaration of war has gone unfulfilled. It provokes no great public outcry, however, so conditioned have the people become to this form of executive usurpation.
To the injury of all past attenuations of our rights under the Constitution, the government has now added the insult of shredding the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments. Our rulers declare that by nothing more substantial than the emperor's say-so, any person may be arrested and held incommunicado, without trial, and then punished, even put to death. Say good-bye to the writ of Habeas Corpus, the very bedrock of limited government. Speedy trial? Forget about it. The government has to but whisper those two magic words, "unlawful combatant," and you may be rendered as much a desaparecido as any unfortunate victim of Argentine tyranny. Surely this sort of "defense of our freedom" falls under the rubric of destroying the village in order to save it. As for due process of law, it's obsolete. Your right to be secure "against unreasonable searches and seizures"? That's ancient history, too, outmoded since September 11, 2001, when, the government insists, "everything changed," including your right to be free of warrantless searches of your premises, Carnivore sweeps of your e-mail, and taps of your telephone calls.
A few things definitely did not change after 9/11, however, and chief among them is the government's lust for greater power and control over every single person in the country, nay, over everyone on the entire earth. Do I fear that the USA PATRIOT Act will be abused? No. I know that it has been already, and will continue to be, as its elastic language allows unscrupulous prosecutors to scratch a variety of itches completely unrelated to terrorism. Apart from these egregious and wholly predictable prosecutorial shenanigans, freedom-loving people ought to recognize that-to borrow a phrase from Edmund Burke-the thing itself is an abuse, because it sweeps away fundamental due-process protections of our rights that required centuries to put in place.
In the face of all this, and too much else even to mention, some people, even some self-described libertarians, persist in arguing that the price we are paying is worthwhile and that we can trust the government to act responsibly and effectively in wielding its new powers. Neither element of that argument will bear scrutiny.
As for trusting the government, the fact, well established in history and in contemporary reality, is that, contrary to what conservatives all seem to believe, the government can be trusted to do the right thing and to do it well even less in foreign and defense policy than it can be trusted in matters of domestic policy. Because national-security matters lie outside the immediate experience of the great bulk of the citizens, the government can get away with waste, fraud, brutality, and idiocy far more easily in foreign affairs than it can when prescribing student exams, building houses for poor people, or relieving grandma's aches and pains. The history of U.S. foreign and defense policy in the past sixty years is an unrelieved tale of mendacity, corruption, and criminal blundering. If the government can't fix the potholes in Washington, D.C., it certainly can't build a viable liberal democratic state in Iraq. No one of sound mind could have supposed that it would even try, much less that it would succeed. This adventure, like so much else that the government undertakes, is a gigantic hoax, and all too much of it verges on racketeering of the sort described by the legendary U.S. Marine General Smedley Butler.
But if the government were able and willing to carry out an effective global "war on terrorism" by means of its present policy of empire and naked aggression (politely called preventive war), would the benefits of that policy justify the costs being borne? Not for a moment. The costs are real and huge-hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of dead and wounded so far just for the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention again the grave injuries to civil and economic liberties here at home. The benefits, to the extent that any exist at all, accrue entirely to a small coterie of political leaders and their supporters among the power elite, for the most part their cronies in the military-industrial, financial, and petroleum sectors. Ideological zealots dedicated to serving the interests of Israel's Likud Party and the members of certain Christian sects thrilled by the prospect of apocalyptic mayhem in the Holy Land go along for the sheer intoxication of the spree, the former serving as high-level conspirators and disinformation specialists and the latter forming a legion of useful idiots, a sort of ten-million-strong Karl Rove Brigade on election day. Can any libertarian react except with disgust to any aspect of this criminally lethal and massively destructive government fiasco?
Robert Higgs is Senior Fellow in Political Economy at The Independent Institute, author of Against Leviathan and Crisis and Leviathan, and editor of the scholarly quarterly journal, The Independent Review.
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American Politician's Moral Blind Spot
Toward Israel: Kerry, Edwards, Bush & Cheney
Al-Jazeerah
By Sam Hamod
October 7, 2004
http://www.aljazeerah.info/Opinion%20editorials/2004%20opinions/October/7%20o/American%20Politician's%20Moral%20Blind%20Spot%20Toward%20Israel%20Kerry,%20Edwards,%20Bush,%20%20Cheney%20By%20Sam%20Hamod.htm
John Edwards, in his "debate" with Richard Cheney, made many good points, Unfortunately, he like Kerry last week, have a moral blind spot when it comes to Israel and the killing and maiming of hundreds of Palestinians every week. This killing has been going on for months, but none of our vaunted politicians or media have screamed with outrage about this ongoing massacre of Palestinians in their own land.
Let's get some points straight for the sake of history.
The series of suicide bombers from Palestine did not begin until Israel invaded Palestinian lands, killing and maiming people and destroying water, electrical and hospital works. All of this is illegal under international law.
Yes, some Palestinians did commit moral crimes by attacking civilians. This was bad, but they used the only major weapon they had, their bodies as human bombs. Remember, Israel has, as gifts from America, F15s, F16s, Abrams Tanks, Apache and Blackhawk Helicopters which they use, on a daily basis, to kill and maim Palestinians.
How is it that an Israeli death is worse than the death of 30 or more Palestinians? That's what's going on. How can this be called "defending Israel" when Israel is the one doing the major killings and maimings?
Obviously, Kerry, Edwards, Bush and Cheney prefer not to see the illegal, immoral and brutal acts of Sharon's Israel-they keep glossing over these actions with, "Israel has a right to defend itself." Kerry's crocodile tears about the Israeli kids was too one-sided; how about the hundreds of Palestinian kids and mothers who have been butchered by Sharon and his storm troopers?We all agree, Israel may have a right to defend itself, but it does not have a right to invade and brutalize the Palestinians. It has gotten so bad, that even Kofi Annan has called for a halt to the Israeli brutality and invasion of Palestine-but America keeps getting in the way and supports all the illegal and immoral acts of Israel-the US gives Sharon carte blanche.
Interestingly, America has adopted the Israeli method of brutality in Iraq. How come we changed, or did we? I remember the carpet bombing of Viet Nam. I remember Agent Orange and the deaths it caused. I know that the depleted uranium shells we are using in Iraq have a half life of 4.5 billion years-yes, billion, not million. So, many Iraqis will die from cancer because of the DU; many American troops will die of the same DU; many children will be born deformed, to Iraqis and to Americans from the DU-yet, thought there are no Iraqi tanks or planes, we keep using DU shells and bullets-ignoring all the science that says there are hundreds of times more DU in the ground of Iraq and that we should stop poisoning the country and the people in this way.
Finally, it is apparent to all except the most ignorant that Bush, Cheney, and if they get into office, Kerry and Edwards, if they follow their plans for more troops in Iraq and continued support for Israel, will all be guilty of war crimes. But, of course, being the biggest bully in the world right now, allows America to get away with these evil acts. Some day, and it won't be too long, China will be the biggest kid on the block, then we'll see what the neo-cons and their children will do when we get our face slapped and we are threatened with annihilation or the destruction of most of our country and its infrastructure and population.
Europe and Asia are now having more joint continental talks, moving toward closer alliances, with America being left out. Even South Korea has become wary of American interference in its attempt to re-unite with North Korea, not to mention the Muslim nations that are now putting distance between themselves and the United States. These nations know that America has gone berserk and is already the biggest terrorist in the world. Their unification of plans, and possible military and economic might will isolate America in time, and perhaps its cousin in crime, England. This is something that most Americans are not aware of at this time, but these meetings have been taking place at an increasing rate since America went into Iraq and has increased its brutality and violation of international laws in the Middle East and elsewhere.
--
Why the American people and the American media and politicians can't see the human suffering being inflicted on Iraqis is a puzzle to me. Our people seem to have gone into a constant state of denial when it comes to Iraq and Palestine; not just the media and politicians, but also ordinary people who treat the Arabs and Muslims in these two countries as less than human and less human then Israelis. It is ironic that Israelis and Palestinians are cousins, both being children of Abraham (a proven DNA and genetic fact).
I lay part of the blame for this denial on the U.S. media; it has consistently portrayed Israel as the good guy, moral, democratic and just, and the Palestinians are "terrorists," "suicide bombers," and "uncivilized." These stereotypes are wrong, but they are repeated so often, that after a while, as Goebbels said, the lie is repeated so often that after a while it gains the credibility of truth. Certainly, our media has to be cleaned up, but as long as it's owned by the major corporations that own our media outlets, the lies will continue and anyone who opposes our big business brothers, part of the military/industrial complex, will be seen as the enemy and demonized on our media.
What may be a good sign is that more and more people are turning off their television sets and looking for alternative news sources on the internet, or turning on foreign stations on short-wave or getting those stations on the internet as well. This may help, but there is also growing fear that the government will try to control the internet through work with Microsoft and others. Let us hope that won't happen. But don't bet on it.
It is time that America recovered from this blind spot toward the brutality and immoral and illegal behavior of Israel. If not, this will ultimately destroy us, for it unfortunately leaves us with "leaders" who are ignorant, immoral and looking for money and votes, not working for justice, peace or for the long term good of our country. Eventually, our bad deeds in the world, and our support for such evil men as Sharon of Israel will backfire. As Chalmers Johnson points out in his book, BLOWBACK, the blowback is certain to come and it won't be good for America or its people. I hope our media and our "leaders" wake up in time to help save our country and the good people who inhabit it.
Sam Hamod is an expert on the Middle East and Islam; he is a former advisor to the U.S. State Department; editor of 3rd World News; professor at Princeton & Michigan; and edits, www.todaysalternativenews.com Look for his new book of essays, ESSAYS IN TIMES OF WAR in 2005 (Ishmael Reed Publishing Co.). He may be reached at shamod@cox.net
-------- ENERGY
-------- alternative energy
Coalition Urges Doubled Federal Spending on Renewables
October 7, 2004
WASHINGTON, DC, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/oct2004/2004-10-07-09.asp#anchor2
Twenty-seven of the member groups of the Sustainable Energy Coalition (SEC) today sent Bush administration officials a request to double federal support for energy efficiency and renewable energy programs over the next five years (2006-2010)."
Spending for energy research and development is the lowest of any major industry and has declined since the 1980s, the coalition says.
For Fiscal Year 2006 (FY06), the coalition of business, environmental, consumer, and energy policy organizations submitted program-by-program recommendations totalling almost $1.7 billion.
Saying that "these programs have been chronically under-funded for several years," urged the White House to "support robust funding." The recommendations went to officials in the White House Office of Management and Budget, the U.S. Department of Energy, and other federal agencies.
The document outlines suggested budget levels and program priorities for solar, wind, geothermal, hydropower, and geothermal energy generation and for the Renewable Energy Production Incentive.
Recommendations for the Department of Energy's industrial, buildings, and vehicles energy efficiency programs as well as the weatherization, fuel cells, hydrogen, and Federal Energy Management programs are detailed along with suggestions to increase the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Energy Star and the U.S. Agency for International Development's Clean Energy programs.
The federal government's continued funding of non-renewable energy options over renewable energy and energy efficiency "is putting American ingenuity and resources at a global disadvantage," the coalition said.
"It not only threatens the security of the United States but also cedes the leadership for which Americans have already paid as we advanced energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies over the past quarter century, only to see the commercialization benefits accrue to overseas governments and industries," the SEC said in its statement.
By contrast, the SEC said, federal energy efficiency programs are effective. In 2001, the National Research Council found that for the 17 DOE research programs it analyzed, every dollar of federal investment in energy efficiency has yielded $20 in economic benefits to the nation in the form of new products, new jobs and energy cost savings to American homes and businesses.
The Energy Department estimates that its efficiency and renewables programs will result in savings of $134 billion in energy bills, 157 gigawatts of new conventional power plants, 1.9 quads of natural gas, and 213 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions in 2025.
In 1993, the federal Energy Star program helped Americans save enough energy to power 20 million homes and avoid the greenhouse gas emissions from 18 million cars - while also saving over $9 billion. The U.S. cannot reap these savings without federal support, because private industry will not do the research and development, the SEC said.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Israel greater nuclear threat than Iran: Israeli whistleblower Vanunu
Oct 07, 2004
STOCKHOLM (AFP)
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041007104156.276yy23e.html
Israel is a greater nuclear threat than Iran, Mordechai Vanunu, who was freed in April after 18 years in an Israeli prison for revealing the country's nuclear program, told Swedish Radio on Thursday.
"We can say to Israel that if you're blaming Iran, let's go make Israel and Iran both open their facilities and be nuclear free zones. I think Iran (and) Iraq accept this but Israel is still not ready to accept this policy," Vanunu said in an interview on Swedish public radio.
Iran has been faced with stinging criticism for its atomic program, which it claims is purely peaceful, but which the United States and Israel in particular fear conceals efforts to develop nuclear weapons.
Israel, which now views Iran as its number one enemy after the downfall of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, has been lobbying hard for greater pressure to be exerted on Tehran.
Vanunu meanwhile called in the interview on Israel to dismantle its nuclear program -- a program the Jewish state has never acknowledged -- pointing out that "Israel is the one who became aggressive and who took Arab lands".
He made his remarks despite a prohibition against speaking to foreign media set out at the time of his release.
At his release on April 21, Vanunu was subjected to a series of sweeping restrictions, including a ban on travelling abroad as well as holding unauthorized meetings with foreigners.
Vanunu was sentenced in 1986 to 18 years in prison for "treason" and "espionage" after leaking top-secret details about the Dimona nuclear plant, where he was employed, to the Sunday Times.
His name has circulated in recent years as a possible candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. This year's edition of the prestigious award is to be announced on Friday.
----
Reject Draft Slavery
antiwar.com
October 7, 2004
by Rep. Ron Paul
http://www.antiwar.com/paul/?articleid=3719
I oppose HR 163 in the strongest possible terms. The draft, whether for military purposes or some form of "national service," violates the basic moral principles of individual liberty upon which this country was founded. Furthermore, the military neither wants nor needs a draft.
The Department of Defense, in response to calls to reinstate the draft, has confirmed that conscription serves no military need. Defense officials from both parties have repudiated it. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has stated, "The disadvantages of using compulsion to bring into the armed forces the men and women needed are notable," while President William Clinton's Secretary of the Army Louis Caldera, in a speech before the National Press Club, admitted that, "Today, with our smaller, post-Cold War armed forces, our stronger volunteer tradition and our need for longer terms of service to get a good return on the high, upfront training costs, it would be even harder to fashion a fair draft."
However, the most important reason to oppose HR 163 is that a draft violates the very principles of individual liberty upon which our nation was founded. Former President Ronald Reagan eloquently expressed the moral case against the draft in the publication Human Events in 1979: "[Conscription] rests on the assumption that your kids belong to the state. If we buy that assumption then it is for the state - not for parents, the community, the religious institutions or teachers - to decide who shall have what values and who shall do what work, when, where and how in our society. That assumption isn't a new one. The Nazis thought it was a great idea."
Some say the 18-year old draftee "owes it" to his (or her, since HR 163 makes women eligible for the draft) country. Hogwash! It just as easily could be argued that a 50-year-old chickenhawk, who promotes war and places innocent young people in danger, owes more to the country than the 18-year-old being denied his (or her) liberty.
All drafts are unfair. All 18- and 19-year-olds are never drafted. By its very nature a draft must be discriminatory. All drafts hit the most vulnerable young people, as the elites learn quickly how to avoid the risks of combat.
Economic hardship is great in all wars. War is never economically beneficial except for those in position to profit from war expenditures. The great tragedy of war is that it enables the careless disregard for civil liberties of our own people. Abuses of German and Japanese Americans in World War I and World War II are well known.
But the real sacrifice comes with conscription - forcing a small number of young vulnerable citizens to fight the wars that older men and women, who seek glory in military victory without themselves being exposed to danger, promote. The draft encourages wars with neither purpose nor moral justification, wars that too often are not even declared by the Congress.
Without conscription, unpopular wars are difficult to fight. Once the draft was undermined in the 1960s and early 1970s, the Vietnam War came to an end. But most importantly, liberty cannot be preserved by tyranny. A free society must always resort to volunteers. Tyrants think nothing of forcing men to fight and serve in wrongheaded wars. A true fight for survival and defense of America would elicit, I am sure, the assistance of every able-bodied man and woman. This is not the case with wars of mischief far away from home, which we have experienced often in the past century.
A government that is willing to enslave some of its people can never be trusted to protect the liberties of its own citizens. I hope all my colleagues join me in standing up for individual liberty by rejecting HR 163 and all attempts to bring back the draft.
-----
Charges Dropped In Antiwar March
Associated Press
Thursday, October 7, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13139-2004Oct6.html
NEW YORK, Oct. 6 -- Charges against 227 antiwar protesters who were arrested during the Republican National Convention were dismissed by a Manhattan Criminal Court judge Wednesday at the request of the district attorney's office.
The charges of disorderly conduct and parading without a permit were dropped after the judge was told that the march, sponsored by the War Resisters League, was nonviolent and resulted in neither personal nor property damage.
Assistant District Attorney William Beesch also said that the 227 marchers, among more than 1,800 people arrested during the convention, may have been confused by instructions that police gave them before the procession began.
The marchers, part of a group of several hundred, were arrested Aug. 31 near the World Trade Center site.
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Prosecutors Won't Pursue Cases of 227 in Disputed Protest
New York Times
October 7, 2004
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/07/nyregion/07protest.html
The Manhattan district attorney's office said yesterday that it would not prosecute cases against 227 protesters who were arrested in one of the most disputed demonstrations of the Republican National Convention, saying it would be difficult to prove that the protesters had deliberately defied orders.
The decision effectively throws out one of the largest group arrests to occur on Aug. 31, the second day of the convention, when nearly 1,200 people were arrested around the city.
The demonstrators affected by yesterday's decision were arrested near ground zero after announcing their plan to march up Broadway to Madison Square Garden. They did not have a permit, but they held discussions with local police commanders, who allowed the march after protesters agreed to obey all traffic laws. But they were arrested almost immediately when, the police said, they violated the agreement by blocking the sidewalk.
Civil liberties advocates hailed yesterday's decision and said the dismissals proved the arrests were illegal. "It's so important that they did that," said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. "When people are arrested for lawful activity, it has a lasting chill. When the activity is protest, then the harm is all the greater."
But Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly defended the officers' actions, saying they had worked hard to accommodate the protesters, even those who did not have permits. The protesters broke the law when they unfurled a banner while on the sidewalk on Fulton Street, violating an agreement to walk two abreast, he said in a statement.
The decision "does not cast any doubt about the actions of the defendants, who were blocking pedestrian traffic in violation of the law, but reflects the difficulty of proving their intent in doing so," Mr. Kelly said.
The decision comes amid a continuing dispute between the city and civil libertarians over how long protesters were held in custody during the convention. Lawyers for the protesters have said that one of the city's goals was to stop the protesters from being heard during the convention, an argument that city and police officials have vociferously denied.
At a hearing yesterday for three of the protesters in Manhattan Criminal Court, William Beesch, an assistant district attorney, said his office had decided not to pursue the cases after reviewing the behavior of the officers and the protesters in the tangle of events that day.
While acknowledging that the protesters had "failed to heed the directives of the police," their vast numbers - there were several hundred at the site - would make it difficult to prove that every person arrested was deliberately defying police orders, Mr. Beesch said.
"The police likely created the impression among the participants that the march had official sanction," he said, reading from a statement.
What is more, the protesters behaved well in police custody, he said.
A Manhattan Criminal Court judge dismissed charges in the three cases before her yesterday, and Mr. Beesch said the district attorney's office would move to dismiss all the other cases.
In all, about 1,100 people who were arrested during the convention have been arraigned, out of the 1,784 cases the district attorney's office reviewed, said Barbara Thompson, a spokeswoman for the office.
One protester who appeared in court yesterday, Richard Hardie, a 73-year-old furniture designer from Northampton, Mass., said he was held for 491/2 hours in a holding area on a Manhattan pier and in the courthouse.
Mr. Hardie, who grew up and went to college in New York City, said he was elated that his case was dismissed.
"I feel great," Mr. Hardie said. "I didn't think the city had a case. I was never told why I was arrested. The city should realize, and the mayor should realize, that they violated us."
But a criminal justice official for the city defended the arrests, pointing out that before yesterday, the district attorney's office had decided not to bring charges in only three of the nearly 1,800 arrests during the convention.
"The decision to dismiss the 227 says nothing about the quality of the arrests," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, adding that District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau "felt he could not prove the intent of the protesters beyond a reasonable doubt."
Yesterday's decision applied to 227 cases, but more than 100 of those had already been adjourned in contemplation of dismissal, a common outcome of minor arrests.
A lawyer representing other protesters who were arrested that week, Norman Siegel, said that those who accepted the adjournment of their cases would still be able to join a class action suit or file a lawsuit saying they were held for too long before arraignment.
Martin R. Stolar, president of the New York City chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, who represents about 80 of the 227 protesters, said the protesters planned to bring a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city by the end of the month. For example, many of the protesters claim that they were held for longer than the 24 hours the law allows.
"Just saying, 'Oops, sorry,' is not enough,'' said G. Simon Harak, a coordinator for the War Resisters League, the group that organized the Fulton Street protest, and one of those arrested. "There has to be some kind of redress for the violation of our civil rights."
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Campaign Journal: Getting Out the Vote
Portland 'Mobbed' by Election Activists Using New Tactics
By Evelyn Nieves
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 7, 2004; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13145-2004Oct6.html
PORTLAND, Ore. -- Sunday afternoon was perfect for vote mobbing. Shoppers were out at the Floyd Center mall, runners from the morning's marathon were limping around, draped like superheroes in insulated silver blankets, and the sun was beating down the morning chill. But Xenia Simms and Brytteni Floyd-Mayo, stationed at a park across from the mall, were having a hard time of it.
"Just about everyone we ask is already registered," Floyd-Mayo said.
"And they've already signed the vote pledges, too," Simms said.
The young women sighed. They traveled Friday to Portland from Oakland, Calif., by van -- 13 hours -- with five fellow high school students and four adults, to be part of the biggest get-out-the-vote effort Oregon has ever seen. The students, members of a community action and leadership program at McClymonds High School in Oakland, aren't even old enough to vote. But they came to experience grass-roots campaigning firsthand while helping the 21st Century Democrats' Young Voter Project, which was capping an intensive weeklong drive to register and mobilize thousands of 18-to 34-year-olds in the swing states of Oregon, Ohio and Minnesota.
Floyd-Mayo, a 16-year-old junior, and Simms, a 17-year-old senior, were "vote mobbing" -- a newfangled term for the old-fashioned campaign tactic of approaching people during public events such as ballgames or concerts -- as though their college admissions depended on it.
Just as Young Voter Project field coordinators taught them, they would first ask people if they were registered. Then, they'd ask them if they would sign a pledge to vote so that their names could be checked against voter rolls. Then, for polling purposes, they would ask them which candidate they were backing. Finally, if the people were still with them, they would ask if they were willing to volunteer to get out the vote.
But as in all 17 swing states, the ground game in Oregon this year is extensive and unprecedented. Groups working to defeat or reelect Bush have been hitting the streets for months. About two dozen organizations independent of both the Democratic Party and the Kerry-Edwards campaign are working collaboratively, including America Coming Together (ACT), the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the League of Conservation Voters. They've committed millions of dollars and thousands of foot soldiers to defeat Bush.
The Bush-Cheney campaign, not to be outdone, says it is fielding a ground army of more than 22,000 volunteers in Oregon, recruited since May 2003. The effort dwarfs the organizing the campaign did in 2000, when the Republicans had county chairs in all 36 counties in Oregon. This time, the campaign has precinct chairs in almost every precinct throughout the state, said Molly Bordonaro, the chairwoman of the campaign's northwest region. "Ours is a tremendous volunteer effort of individuals who feel passionate about reelecting Bush," she said.
Kevin Looper, Oregon director of America Votes, a coalition of dozens of progressive organizations, countered that the Republicans have been pretty quiet here, especially in Portland. "Our people are all over the place," he said. "But as for the Republicans, we haven't seen hide nor hair of them."
There's no question that Portland is Democratic territory. It put presidential candidate Al Gore over the top in Oregon in 2000, beating Bush by more than 100,000 votes in a state that Bush lost by half of 1 percent of the vote. Portland is full of tie-dyed, punked-out lefties, aging hippies and run-of-the-mill liberals, and they all seemed to converge Sunday afternoon at a peace rally in the northwest neighborhood that features the famous Powell's City of Books store.
ACT was helping the Young Voters Project vote mob at the rally. But asking people wearing "Dubya the Warmonger" buttons if they were registered to vote was like asking the people in the Portland marathon if they exercised. Asking them who they planned to vote for was like asking delegates to a Christian Coalition convention who they're supporting. Two of the volunteers, Ed and Roberta Schwarz, new to vote mobbing, found themselves getting kidded a lot.
"I'm voting for 'W,' of course," a young woman carrying a billboard with statistics on the number of dead and injured in Iraq told Roberta Schwarz.
The weekend seemed a blur of campaign activity at the warehouse that the coalition of groups working against Bush share as headquarters. Every which way you turned, training sessions and strategy meetings were going on with groups of a dozen or two. But the next few weeks are supposed to get wilder.
The deadline to register in Oregon is Oct. 12. Oregon is a mail-in-ballot state. The state begins mailing the ballots to registered voters beginning Oct. 15. Groups such as the Young Voter Project are planning massive door-to-door registration efforts. They're also planning ballot parties, at which voters would fill out and hand their ballots over to the group. They're planning Halloween ballot pickups, part of a nationwide effort, in which they would dress in costume and collect ballots on Oct. 31. They even plan to deliver and collect ballots from every last registered voter who has not voted already on the nation's official Election Day, Nov. 2.
The Oakland students, who were spending the weekend camping out at a Presbyterian Church, planned to join other volunteers with the Young Voter Project on Sunday night in calling people who aren't on the voter rolls despite having registered. They felt good about being in a state where the presidential campaign was alive and kicking.
"I'm not feeling as discouraged as I was yesterday," Floyd-Mayo said. "Yesterday, we experienced a lot of racism."
Floyd-Mayo and Simms are African American.
But Sunday afternoon, Portland was all smiles and politeness. The young women were having a good time talking politics as they got passersby to sign voter pledges or, in a handful of cases, even register. And, after three hours of vote mobbing, they would get to be regular teenagers for a few hours on a bright day in a new city. They planned to check out the mall.
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DEBATES, DUELFER, & ALUMINUM TUBES
7 October 2004
by Phyllis Bennis,
Institute for Policy Studies
http://www.ips-dc.org/comment/Bennis/tp23debates.htm
THE DEBATES - The debates remind us first of the need to maintain and build a broad, powerful, and INDEPENDENT peace movement, not tied to any candidate. Whoever wins or steals the election, we will likely spend much of the next four years in the streets, protesting and demanding an entirely different agenda than that of the resident of the White House.
The debates showed that while there are important differences on international issues including Korea, nuclear weapons, some aspects of the Iraq war - its origins, its legitimacy, its rationales, its "coalition," and more - the differences between Bush/Cheney and Kerry/Edwards are much less when it comes to a strategy for what to do now.
The parallels between the two was most dramatic in the vice-presidential debate on the issue of Israel/Palestine, something deliberately ignored in the Kerry-Bush debate. Speaking days into Israel's lethal invasion and attacks against the Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza and the day the U.S. again vetoed a Security Council resolution condemning the incursion, Edwards weighed in with Israel having not only the right but the responsibility to "protect its citizens." Not only was there no mention of Israel's occupation, but not even a nod to the collective punishment visible in the scores of Palestinian casualties, including many children, or the disproportionate level of the Israeli attack. Cheney joined the defense of Israel's action, and then as an afterthought mentioned Bush's alleged "commitment" to a Palestinian state.
Bush was consistent with his original positions on Iraq: he segued from September 11 to Saddam Hussein, and was famously peeved when Kerry reminded him it was al Qaeda and not Iraq who attacked. He and Cheney both kept up their reliance on fear as a key mobilizing strategy. They both face the key challenge of claiming "things are getting better" when every headline and television screen says the opposite. Samarra is touted as a victory and a model for routing "the insurgents" despite large numbers of civilian casualties, including many children killed, and thousands of residents fleeing the city altogether. They are also vulnerable claiming that "I would have done exactly the same thing" when it comes to going to war at all despite new headlines that the reasons actually given for the war were all lies.
Kerry claims he "can do it better" to win the war, not end the war. His call for internationalizing the war is based on the idea that the only reason European opponents of the war, especially France and Germany, refused to send troops to bolster the U.S. occupation of Iraq was because they hate George Bush. Of course they do hate George Bush, but that is not why they refused to send troops. Their opposition was rooted primarily in domestic political pressures, along with recognition that the U.S. drive towards unilateral power and empire was not in their interests, and a Kerry administration is unlikely to be able to persuade them to send troops to Iraq.
Our call must be not to internationalize the war, but to end the war and bring the troops home. THEN we can internationalize the peace.
THE REPORTS
The New York Times expose on Iraq's aluminum tubes and Charles Duelfer's report of the Iraq Survey Group confirm what we have been saying for years - Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, no capacity to build nuclear weapons, no links with al-Qaeda and no weapons to give to terrorist organizations. Crucially, they were both based (entirely for the Times, almost entirely for Duelfer) on information long available. The question remains: why did it take so long?
The Times report confirms that the overwhelming opinion among technical weapons experts supported the view that the tubes were for rockets, not nuclear centrifuges. The article states explicitly, citing the 9/11 Commission report, that the National Intelligence Estimate of September 2002, based significantly on the aluminum tubes-as-nuclear-centrifuges claim, "stands as one of the most flawed documents in the history of American intelligence. The [9/11] committee concluded unanimously that most of the major findings in the estimate were wrong, unfounded, or overblown. This was especially true of the nuclear section."
Condoleezza Rice, defending her hyperbolic fear-mongering about the "smoking gun" being a "mushroom cloud," said she was aware of the disagreements among intelligence analysts regarding the aluminum tubes, but it wasn't her job to mediate among the various agencies. In fact, one of the primary job descriptions of the National Security Adviser is precisely to mediate among the intelligence agencies. That was probably what led to the New York Times' Paul Krugman to call for her resignation.
DUELFER & IRAQ'S NON-EXISTENT WMDS
Charles Duelfer's report to Congress, based on the 15 months work of the CIA-linked Iraq Survey Group, confirmed what we have been saying for years: Iraq had no stockpiles of WMDs, it had no weapons to give to al-Qaeda, and it had no viable programs to resume making weapons. All it had, according to the report, was Saddam Hussein's "desire," if military sanctions were lifted, to rebuild Iraq's capacity - itself a speculative claim but one irrelevant to Iraq's actual military capacity. Iraq posed no threat. While Duelfer's report went out of its way to include information far beyond its WMD mandate, and Duelfer himself repeated Bush's "the world is better off" phrase in his congressional testimony, there is no question that this report confirms the war was based on lies.
The speculation regarding Saddam Hussein's "desire" for WMD capacity is based on the claim that he believed it was Iraq's use of chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq war throughout the 1980s that prevented an Iranian victory. That may well be true - largely because the Pentagon provided the targeting information that made the chemical weapons terribly effective against Iranian troop concentrations. This was the period in which Germany was providing precursor chemicals for Iraq's chemical weapons, and the U.S. was providing seed stock for biological weapons.
Duelfer's report makes clear that the Bush administration's false claims on which the war was based - Iraq had WMDs, Iraq could give WMDs to al Qaeda or other terrorists, Iraq was buying parts and rebuilding its nuclear weapons programs - were not based on mistakes by the intelligence agencies but on a fully conscious decision to lie about what they already knew. Almost everything in Duelfer's report documenting the period through late 1998 was already known to government officials from earlier UN reports.
Duelfer confirmed what has been known -but largely hidden from the American public-for years: that Iraq had "essentially destroyed" its weapons capacity by the end of 1991. This exact information was first made available to U.S. officials in 1995 when Hussein Kamal, Saddam Hussein's son-in-law and head of key WMD programs, defected. (He later returned to Iraq and was killed.) Kamal told interrogators the weapons systems were largely destroyed in the first years after, and that information was turned over to both the CIA and Britain's MI6 who then interrogated him themselves. But while U.S. and British officials went public with Kamal's claims about earlier weapons systems, they hid his statements regarding the destruction of the weapons. All the information was already known.
Duelfer also provides evidence that the UN inspections worked. Duelfer himself was the deputy director of the UN arms inspection teams for years, most recently under Hans Blix. His new report documents wide-ranging international activity between the spring of 1991, right after the war, until UNSCOM's departure from Iraq in December 1998 when they were warned by the Clinton administration that the Pentagon's Desert Fox bombing raids were about to begin. But everything Duelfer describes of that period, including the involvement of international corporations possibly violating the military sanctions on Iraq, was already included in UNSCOM's final report, which remains secret to this day. Journalists who saw leaked copies of the document confirm there is virtually nothing in Duelfer's account that was not in UNSCOM's report. Why is the UNSCOM report still kept secret? Much of the nuclear-related material in Duelfer's new report was also included in the reports of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency headed by Mohamed el-Baradei.
In documenting the 1999-2002 period in which no UN arms inspectors were operating in Iraq, Duelfer concentrates on what he calls "potential breaches" of the sanctions regime. But his report is very selective - most notably he ignores the role of the U.S. Duelfer provides details of companies and private individuals who may have violated the sanctions by providing ostensibly "dual use" material to Iraq, meaning items that could potentially have military as well as civilian uses. He identifies people and companies from China, Russia, North Korea, France, Poland, Rumania, Ukraine, Belarus, Syria, and Jordan, as well as one unnamed company from Germany. But there was at least one U.S. company named in Iraq's own arms declaration of December 2002, which had provided potentially militarily valuable material to Iraq after 1998; that company is not included.
Almost everything in Duelfer's report from the post-UNSCOM period from 1999-2002 was included in Iraq's December 2002 weapons report, which is still kept secret. We know from the leaked reports of that weapons declaration (first in the German press, soon afterwards on Democracy Now!) that scores of companies involved in Iraq's weapons systems were detailed in the 12,000-page declaration. But those lists were among the 8,000 or so pages the U.S. deleted from the copies Washington made available to the non-permanent (read: non-nuclear) members of the Security Council.
The exceptions, what was in Duelfer's report that had not been in Iraq's arms declaration, primarily involved the issues of financial procurement, corruption and alleged oil smuggling. On the smuggling issue, the most extensive arrangement was over Iraq's northern border into Turkey. And this large-scale smuggling route was knowingly tolerated by the U.S., largely as a trade-off for Turkey's agreement to allow the Pentagon free access to its Incerlik air base.
In the section reporting alleged corruption in the Oil for Food Program, Duelfer's report includes detailed lists from each six-month period since the program began, including companies, individuals, dates, who was paid surcharges, who allegedly received bribes, etc. The report claims the corruption provided more than $11 billion to the Iraqi regime. The claims, driven by right-wing forces in Congress and the media, is being used to attack the United Nations and particularly Secretary General Kofi Annan (whose son had previously worked for one of the auditing companies involved). In fact, it was the Security Council, not the Secretariat, which had ultimate control over the program. The Council, not the Secretariat, served as the Sanctions Committee, which passed or rejected every contract submitted by Iraq.
In the "oil corruption" section of Duelfer's report, companies and individuals are identified by name - except for companies from the U.S., identified only as "U.S. company" without a company name. Who is he protecting?
The report proves once again what we have said all along: UN inspections worked. Hans Blix, head of UNSCOM (and then Duelfer's boss) and Mohamed el-Baradei, head of the IAEA, both said in their final reports in 2003 before the war that they had found no evidence of WMD programs, and with a little more time they could confirm a final outcome. Instead the U.S. went to war. Hans Blix today was announced the winner of the UN Correspondents Association award as "Citizen of the Year," and there are rumors that Mohamed el-Baradei is short-listed for tomorrow's 2004 Nobel Peace Prize.
Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, and no ability to make them. The war was based on a lie. But we need to keep reminding the U.S. that even if weapons existed, the war would still have been illegal. The UN Charter remains the foundation for international law - and it is very clear that while national self-defense remains a right of all nations, even that self-defense is not unqualified. Article 51 of the UN Charter, detailing the right of self-defense, includes two key qualifiers: military self-defense can only be used IF an armed attack occurs (even those who argue that we shouldn't have to wait for an attack to move to prevent it would have the obligation of proving to the world that a major attack is actually imminent, not just a glimmer in a dictator's eye), and only UNTIL the UN Security Council can meet to decide what to do about the alleged threat.
We still need international law. As Kofi Annan recently told the General Assembly, international law provides "restraints on the strong, so that they cannot oppress the weak....Those who seek to bestow legitimacy must themselves embody it; and those who invoke international law must themselves submit to it." That won't happen by itself. But it gives us something to fight for.
A quick reminder: Be sure and check out IPS's new report, A FAILED "TRANSITION": THE MOUNTING COSTS OF THE IRAQ WAR. Great new information and a two-page "just the numbers" talking points. Available on-line at www.ips-dc.org.
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Charges Dropped In Antiwar March
Associated Press
October 7, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A13139-2004Oct6?language=printer
NEW YORK, Oct. 6 -- Charges against 227 antiwar protesters who were arrested during the Republican National Convention were dismissed by a Manhattan Criminal Court judge Wednesday at the request of the district attorney's office.
The charges of disorderly conduct and parading without a permit were dropped after the judge was told that the march, sponsored by the War Resisters League, was nonviolent and resulted in neither personal nor property damage.
Assistant District Attorney William Beesch also said that the 227 marchers, among more than 1,800 people arrested during the convention, may have been confused by instructions that police gave them before the procession began.
The marchers, part of a group of several hundred, were arrested Aug. 31 near the World Trade Center site.
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