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NUCLEAR
Of Pynchon, Thanatos and Depleted Uranium
Report on Iraq Arms Deals Angers France and Others
IAEA Chief Doubts S. Korean Arms Plans
South Korea completes deployment of new medium-range missiles
MILITARY
Afghan Opposition Alleges Fraud in Voting
U.S. Congress approves $422 billion arms bill
Japan to cut ground troops by one-fourth within 10 years
Lawsuit Accuses a Contractor of Defrauding U.S. Over Work in Iraq
Rightist Militias in Colombia Offer to Disarm 3,000
British Hostage Beheaded in Iraq
Video Shows Beheading of Kidnapped British Engineer
Israelis Trudge Home, in Shock After Bombings
Symbol of peace becomes a mass grave
NATO military chief criticises member states over Afghanistan
Inmates Were Reportedly Kept Off Books to Speed Transfer
U.N. Approves Anti-Terrorism Initiative
Report Cites U.S. Profits in Sale of Iraqi Oil Under Hussein
Naval Academy Policies On Sex Assault Studied
Rumsfeld Says More Troops May Be Asked For
Defense bill would kill tanker lease deal
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Papers Show Confusion as Government Watch List Grew Quickly
Faulty 'No-Fly' System Detailed
Schools, on Alert, Step Up Security Measures
Iraq Disk Prompted Warning to Schools
New Intelligence Chief Backed
House Approves Intelligence Bill
Israel Says Hotel Blast Bears Signs of Al Qaeda
Terrorist Hunt Leads To Irish Immigrants
POLITICS
Pelosi Seeks Special Counsel for an Inquiry on DeLay
Bulge Under President's Coat in First Debate Stirs Speculation
Plenty of Flaws Among the Facts
Nuclear Bait and Switch
The source Duelfer didn't quote
A Debate on Iraq and the Home Front
Kerry blasts Bush on nuclear non-proliferation
OTHER
Environmental Group Cites Partisanship in the Judiciary
Ocean Exploitation Surfaces as Crisis
Chiron flu vaccine unlikely to get FDA nod
Flu shot shortage calls for sacrifice
Britain: U.S. Told Of Vaccine Shortage
ACTIVISTS
Kenya's 'Green Militant' Wins Nobel Peace Prize
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- depleted uranium
Of Pynchon, Thanatos and Depleted Uranium
Weapons of Mass Destruction Found in Iraq
By WALTER A. DAVIS,
October 9, 2004
Counterpunch
http://www.counterpunch.org/davis10092004.html
I. Laugh In Brings You the News:
Jake Gittes: "Why do you need it? You've got enough money." Noah Cross: "The future, Mr. Gittes. The future."
Chinatown
The US CODE, TITLE 50,CHAPTER 40 Sec. 2302 defines a Weapon of Mass Destruction as follows: "The term 'weapon of mass destruction" means any weapon or device that is intended, or has the capability, to cause death or serious bodily injury to a significant number of people through the release, dissemination, or impact of (A) toxic or poisonous chemicals or their precursors, (B) a disease organism, or (C) radiation or radioactivity."
Depleted uranium (DU) is a waste product of the uranium enrichment process that fuels both our nuclear weapons and civilian nuclear power programs. In fact, over 99% of the uranium enrichment process results in this waste product, which has a half life of 4.5 billion years. DU is both a toxic heavy metal and a radiological poison. The U.S. currently has over 10 million tons of DU. As we all know, the disposal of nuclear waste is one of the unintended consequences or blowback of the development of nuclear power. A solution to the problem of DU has, however, been found. DU is now used in virtually every weapon employed by the U.S. in Iraq (and in Afghanistan and in Kosovo). To cite the most conspicuous example: every penetrator rod in the shell shot from an Abrams tank contains 10 pounds of DU. DU is selected for weapons for three reasons: it's cheap (was made available to arms manufacturers free of charge and is easy to develop); it's heavy, 1.7 times the density of lead and thus most effective at killing because it penetrates anything it hits; it's pyrophoric, igniting and burning on contact with air and breaking up on contact with its target into extremely small particles of radioactive dust dispersed into the atmosphere. The result: permanent contamination of air, water, and soil. [1]
DU was first used by the U.S. in Desert Storm. The amount used was between 315-350 tons. Five times as much was used during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Over a third of the U.S. soldiers who served in the first Gulf War are now permanently disabled. VA reports indicate 27,571 U.S. soldiers already disabled from the current war and occupation.. The Department of Energy and the Department of Defense of course continue to deny that DU has any harmful effects. A U.N. sub-commission on Human Rights has ruled that DU, which fits the definition of a "dirty bomb," is an illegal weapon. [2]
Huge chunks of radioactive debris full of DU now litter the cities and countryside of Iraq. Fine radioactive dust permeates the entire country. The problem of clean-up is insoluble. The entire ecosystem of Iraq is permanently contaminated. The Iraq people are the new hibakusha. Their fate, like that of the "survivors" of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is a condition of death-in-life. The long term health effects of DU on the Iraqui people (and on our own troops) are incalculable. There is no mask or protective clothing that can be devised to prevent radioactive dust from entering the lungs or penetrating the skin. Moreover, DU targets the DNA and the Master Code (histone), altering the genetic future of exposed populations. Because it is the perfect weapon for delivering nanoparticles of poison, radiation, and nano-pollution directly into living cells, DU is the perfect weapon for extinguishing entire populations. The Iraqi's are not alone. Vast regions of the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Balkans have been permanently contaminated with radioactive dust and debris [3]
These facts are worth bearing in mind the next time we are told what has now become a bipartisan article of faith: the Iraqi people are better off with Saddam Hussein gone. Or as Bill Maher put it on his show of Sept. 24th "Eventually they're better off."
A footnote to the above, the shape of things to come. Recently a takeover was engineered transferring the no bid University of California management contract (of 61 years duration) for the US nuclear weapons program at the nuclear weapons labs at Berkeley, Livermore, and Los Alamos to the University of Texas where the Carlyle Group ( an investment conglomerate that specializes in Defense Developments and whose members include George H.W. and George W. Bush, James Baker, the bin laden family and John Major) will assume control over it. A ramping up of the nuclear weapons program is now underway with funding at the highest level ever-even higher than during the Cold War. These developments are the first yield of the top secret meeting of 150 top U.S. officials and military contractors (chaired reportedly by Dick Cheney) held at the U.S. Strategic Command Center in Nebraska on Aug. 6th 2003 as an official commemoration of the 58th Anniversary of Hiroshima and to plan the weaponry of the nuclear future. [4]
We need a new term to describe our actions in Iraq. Genocide is inadequate. Thus: Ecocide [from Gr oikos, house; and cide, the destruction of] Ecology has two referents. It refers to the branch of biology that deals with the relations between living organisms and their environment; and the branch of sociology that deals with relations among human groups with reference to material resources and the consequent social and cultural patterns. The destruction of both is the goal of Ecocide. Ecocide is the deliberate production of a condition of permanent radiological, biological, and chemical contamination whereby death comes to inhabit an entire ecosystem. A condition of ecocide exists when life itself and all possibilities of its renewal are being systematically destroyed in an identifiable geographical area, which is also defined in terms of specifiable racial and religious characteristics. As is now known, the cumulative result of such actions may bring about this condition for the entire planet. The condition of homo sacer as described by Giorgio Agamben. [5] The European Council on Radiation Risk, for example, calculated the damage to human health of low level radiation thusfar released into the atmosphere from nuclear weapons testing to be 61,600,000 deaths by cancer alone. Moreover, in our wars since 1991 the U.S. has now released in terms of global atmospheric pollution the equivalent of 400,000 Nagasaki Bombs. [6]
II. Appointment in Samarra
"-the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event-in the living act, the undoubted deed-there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask." Ahab in Melville's Moby Dick
Does the situation described above offer us an intimation of what Sigmund Freud had in mind when he spoke of a pure culture of thanatos, the death drive?
It's always a good idea when seeking an explanation of the human motives behind actions to stick with the empirical. With stated intentions and official rationales. Otherwise we give ourselves over to psychobabble. Despite official denial by the Department of Defense that DU is harmful, a series of explanations have been put in place to account for the development and use of DU weapons. DU is cost effective, militarily efficient, and turns to productive use a waste product we'd otherwise have to dispose of at great cost. With motives and intentions thus circumscribed the decision to use DU in weaponry need not raise the spectre of anything dark in the psyche. It's all a matter of pragmatic efficiency with a little capitalist profit motive thrown in for good measure. There's only one thing wrong with this explanation. It leaves out the basis for the calculus. There's every reason to use DU and no reason not to use it if, and only if, one rationale informs all decisions. How to maximize death, regardless of consequences or alternatives. Introduce any countervailing motives and the entire chain of decisions is blocked by questions of conscience. Conscious, stated intentions then reveal themselves as functions of something else that has been conveniently rendered unconscious. What looks like a purely pragmatic matter involving nothing disordered in the psyche now reveals the opposite: the fact that thanatos so inhabits the system and everyone in it that its hegemony and the absence of anything opposed to it "goes without saying." It has become what Wittgenstein called a "form of life." [7] So deeply rooted is the force of thanatos in us that it operates automatically, habitually, and of necessity. It has become a collective unconscious. And as such is no longer accessible to those whose intentions conceal and reveal it. The reason for sticking with the empirical is now clear. Alethia. There is something insane in the empirical. It is what the historian must uncover.
Before we ask ourselves how this situation came to pass we need to ask another question. For it's easy to claim we don't know about such things because the media refuses to tell us about it. There's another reason for our ignorance, however, and it's the one we need to learn about. I refer to the possibility that we choose our ignorance because otherwise we'd lose the system of guarantees on which we depend for our identity and our understanding of history. As Barbara Bush put it in telling Diane Sawyer why she doesn't watch the news: "Why should we hear about body bags, and deaths, and how many, what day it's gonna happen, and how many this or what do you suppose. Or, I mean, it's, it's not relevant. So, why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?" [8] It would be easy to deride Mrs. Bush, to congratulate oneself on not sharing her attitude. What I hope to show , however, is that on an essential level, one that is determinant in the last instance, we are in full agreement with her and delude ourselves as long as we think otherwise.
III. The Fatality of Guarantees
"The purpose of thought is to eliminate the contingent."
Hegel
Three weeks ago my mother died. At the end of her funeral the priest left us with these words as a final reminder of what had been said repeatedly in a variety of ways for the past two days: "We who leave here in sorrow know that we will one day be reunited with her in joy." My concern here is not with the truth or falsity of this preposterous belief, but with its psychological function as a guarantee that offers human beings a way to deprive death of its finality. And of the terror that prospect entails. The function of guarantees is to enable human beings to bear events and contingencies that would otherwise be too traumatic. There is much that we can face apparently only when we can deny it through the working of what we'll soon see is an entire system of guarantees. Such perhaps is one accurate estimation of what it means to be a human being, to remain a child of one's needs and desires disguising that fact in the form of ideas and concepts.
The primary purpose of religion, philosophy, and culture is to provide conceptual, psychological, and emotional guarantees so that traumatic events become part of a larger framework that assures the realization of our hopes and dreams. Most people simply find life unlivable without such supports. Through the ministry of the guarantees we overcome or banish thoughts and feelings that we are convinced would deprive life of meaning, plunging us into despair. Experience accordingly becomes the movement from and to the affirmation of the guarantees through their imposition on events. The main line of Western philosophy can most profitably be seen as a series of efforts to provide a ground for the guarantees. That effort achieves one of its culminations in Hegel who defined the purpose of philosophy as the elimination of the contingent. As father of the philosophy of history, he offered that new discipline a single goal: to show that the rational is real and the real rational; that history is the story of progress, liberty, the realization of a universal humanity. Or, to put it in vulgar terms, democracy and civilization are on the march and will soon sweep the entire Middle East. In order to triumph over the contingencies of existence-- doubt about oneself, one's place in the world, and one's final end -- many guarantees are needed. Moreover, they must form a system of reinforcing beliefs such that if one guarantee is threatened other guarantees come in to fill the breach. Thereby the function of the system as a whole is assured, the triumph of the guarantees over the central contingencies of existence.
Within the system of guarantees one guarantee is superordinate. The belief that human nature is basically good. Animal rationale. We are endowed with an ahistorical essence that cannot be lost. Evil is an aberration. Consequently there is always reason for hope and the belief that no matter how bad things get we'll always find a way to recover everything that the guarantees assure.
What follows is a brief and by no means exhaustive description of the basic system of guarantees. One need not believe all of it for the system to hold. Guarantees are superfluous. If they collapse at one point, their hold becomes even stronger at another. That is one reason why the death of God gave birth to so many secular religions. The way to read what follows accordingly is for each reader to locate the guarantees that have the greatest hold over them. They identify what controls one's response to traumatic events. Or, to put it in other terms, they identify what one must overcome in oneself in order to know the ontological force of existence, contingency, and history. Perhaps one only begins to know, to think, and to respond appropriately to events once one has eradicated the entire system of guarantees.
Here then a list of some of the central planks in that edifice.
Religious: a loving creator with a redemptive purpose assures us of the triumph of goodness and the rewards of eternal life.
Philosophic: rationality gives meaning, direction, and pragmatic efficiency to the human mind and all the purposeful activities in which we engage.
Scientific: science is the fulfillment of reason and through its development we will harness nature to our needs. That guarantee gives birth to another: the technological imperative, which teaches us that all technological developments are good. In any case, the die is cast since all technological problems require for their solution the development of new technologies. [9]
Historical: History is the story of progress, of the development of those universal values through which eventually the real becomes rational and the rational real. Through that long march all contingencies are eventually overcome. A Political corollary: the democratic ideal as realized in the United States is an ultimate good; globally its benefits should be extended to all humanity.
Economic: capitalism, which is nothing but the economic realization of human nature, is the global principle that will bring the greatest good to all. Therefore, any actions required to advance it are both necessary and good. The deepest guarantees, of course, address us on a far more personal level.
Psychological: We have an identity, a self, that is strong and once attained can never be lost. Trauma is but the occasion for its recovery. We are not haunted by anything dark or disordered in our psyche, nor do our actions derive from such forces. The intentions we give offer a full account of our actions, and thus the term and limit of our responsibility.
Emotional: The innermost need of human beings is to feel good about themselves. Whatever threatens that feeling must be exorcised. Health, normalcy, and productivity depend on avoiding negative feelings. Hope and optimism are not only healthy attitudes, they are requirements of our nature. Biologically wired. We cannot remain for long in trauma. Recovery, moreover, must restore our faith in the guarantees and our hopes for the future. The need for hope is the capstone of the entire system of guarantees. Yet it too apparently has a history. Today over 10 million of our children are on prescription drugs to prevent depression and anxiety. Informed of this fact by Bill Maher, the French actress Julie Delphy spoke the spontaneous wisdom of an archaic culture: "Don't they know that depression is a good thing; that it's something you have to go through in order to grow?" Not anymore.
The key to understanding the power of the guarantees is to understand the fears that they exorcise. Thanks to religion death, suffering, and evil are deprived of their power. Through the attainment of reason all other forms of consciousness and their objects are put in their place. Poetic knowing is deprived both of its legitimacy and its terror. Science, as fulfillment of reason, assures us of domination over nature. What Heidegger termed technoscientific rationality becomes the measure of the real. [10] Belief in historical progress banishes the recurrent suspicion that history may be unmoored or may be moving to the darkest of ends. The condition is thereby set that makes it impossible for us to experience traumatic events such as 9-11 except as occasions to take whatever actions are needed to reaffirm our goodness and restore our guarantees. It is in the personal order, however, that the guarantees do their deepest work. Psychologically, belief in the self or self-identity exorcises the most frightening contingency: that there is a void at the center of the American psyche with panic anxiety and its corollary, compulsive consumption, the proof of a desperate non-identity. That spectre brings us before the greatest fear: that our psyche, not our conscious, deliberative intentions, is the author of our actions, an author who will readily do anything in order to feel safe, secure, and righteous. All of our emotional needs then stand forth under the rule of a single necessity: the need to feel good about oneself at whatever cost and to sustain hope by banishing anything that would trouble us. Resolution, catharsis (i.e., the discharge of painful tensions or awareness), and renewal emerge as the needs that bind us with an iron necessity to the guarantees and all that they make it impossible for us to know. It is easy to deprecate Bush and, apparently, to hold onto the idea that he's a temporary aberration. But the problem goes deeper. To revive a battle cry from the 60's, insofar as one is wedded to any one of the guarantees one is part of the problem and not of the solution. For the grandest function of the system of guarantees, as a whole and in each one of its parts, is to blind us to history. [11]
And so to take up again the question stated previously, how did the situation now being created in Iraq come about? The next three sections constitute an attempt to answer that question by tracing a repressed history.
IV. The Nuclear Unconscious
"he begins to expand, an uncontainable lighthero and horror, engineer and Ariadne consumed, molten inside the light of himself, the mad exploding of himself."
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
To recapitulate a historical fact that took over 50 years to rescue from myth: the United States did not bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki "to end the war and save countless lives." It did so for four reasons (and in the knowledge that a defeated Japan was pursuing terms of surrender through several diplomatic channels): (1)to avenge Pearl Harbor, (2) to justify the amount of money spent developing the Bomb, (3) to create a laboratory whereby our scientific, medical, and military personnel could study its effects, and (4) to impress the Russians and the world-with this opening salvo of the Cold War. In short, Hiroshima was the first act of global terrorism. That story couldn't be told, however, and still encounters strenuous resistance from most Americans, because it exposes too many of the guarantees we want to have about our Nation and its actions in history. [12]
Those actions also gave birth to another myth and another history. The story of the development of "the peaceful atom." No sooner were the tidings of the Nuclear Age broadcast to a terrified world than we heard promises of a nuclear Utopia. Through those promises a collective fantasy was created about the assurances that the peaceful atom gave us about the future. Entire cities would have all their energy needs met for the cost of a nickel. Etc. Now fifty years later we find that we can't get rid of the stockpiles of nuclear waste we've created. We find that nuclear technology is the least cost effective and most environmentally destructive source of energy ever developed. What it provides -less that 20% of our electrical energy comes at a cost of trillions of dollars and at the expense of the safe and clean technologies (wind, solar) that we must soon develop if there is to be a future. What we now know is that nuclear power was a mistake from the start and should have been aborted in its inception. Also that the cost in lives to those living near or downwind of our reactors now well exceeds the combined loss of life in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.[13] But to know these things we'd also have to come to know that the peaceful atom was always a fantasy, created after the fact for motives that have nothing to do with official proclamations.
Robert Oppenheimer made two prescient observations. "The use of the Bomb was implicit in its invention." "We [the scientists] did the devil's work." His error was the belief that by calling on the guarantees it would be possible to reverse the process we thereby set loose. Thus the humanistic reflections that preoccupied his final years, one of the clearest examples of the effort to reassert essentialistic ahistorical guarantees as a way of cleansing his own and our collective hands of history. What Oppenheimer thereby hoped to exorcise was the spectre that there are certain actions that are irreversible and that give history a totally new direction, permitting no return to the way things once were. Perhaps there are events in history that mark fundamental turning points in which the human psyche with no essential, ahistorical nature to protect it makes a quantum leap into a new way of being. In doing so it embraces a logic that will propel it to move in new, unseen, and unwanted directions.
Oppenheimer offers us a picture of the Los Alamos scientists that exposes the official ideology of science. He and his colleagues know what their discoveries will lead to but dissemble that knowledge. Hiding it from their consciousness they thereby, as Freud teaches, empower it. The rush to the Bomb that seized them fulfilled a desire that has little to do with value free objective inquiry. Devil's work is of a different order and draws on something else in the psyche. Here briefly is one way to constitute its meaning. In inventing the Bomb the scientists of Alamogordo realized the two sublime motives that have informed the history of science: the effort to know the secrets of nature and to harness them to our will so that its power will become an extension of our power to overcome any and all limitations, moral as well as physical. [14] (The belated effort of Leo Szilard and others to draw up a petition banning the use of the Bomb and Oppenheimer's reminder that doing so overstepped their role as scientists is merely the comedy of a reaction formation, the effort to restore the a priori cleanliness of hands that are already dirty, the nostalgic attempt to arrest a historical process that has already broken free of them, and of Oppenheimer too as Edward Teller would soon reveal.)
Once the Bomb was used the consequences of devil's work announced themselves. Nuclear fear became condition general in the United States, producing for the first time a collective national psyche. What we did to the other we could expect in return. Projection and denial assumed command over both consciousness and policy. Globally. The only way to make ourselves safe from ourselves was through the production of more nuclear weapons. Like Macbeth we had to repeat our deed, increasing its scope each time, as if somehow this would undo the original error. Teller's Hydrogen bomb promises omnipotence to a quest for power fueled by the engines of guilt and fear. The whole world became a prisoner to the logic of Mutual Assured Destruction. Bush's recent actions in Iraq merely ratify once again the basic truth: the only way to prevent U.S. aggression is to develop one's own nuclear arsenal. M.A.D. offers the only certitude, security, and "peace of mind" that is now possible. A psychotic peace. Devil's work thereby evolves the condition inaugurated by the thanatos that the Bomb released in the psyche. Death has cut itself loose from anything that could restrain it. What began as a fantasy of unlimited power ends in the assurance of total annihilation.
While we've resisted this knowledge there is another knowledge fatally tied to it that we've resisted with even greater fervor. Namely, the true story of "the peaceful atom." As a continuation of the same thanatopic process under the guise of a prolonged search for a felix culpa. For expiation and redemption. To expel any lingering (unconscious) guilt over having dropped the Bomb. How else but by finding in the atom a new guarantee. Which would enable us to claim that everything we did from the start stemmed from good motives and served finally to bring about a greater good. Technoscientific rationality as secular theodicy. The peaceful atom as Messianic historiography. Our faith in this new faith, like our rush to the Bomb, could not be questioned. And the two primary dogmas of this faith gave birth to a historical process that could not be halted since any negative results could only lead to a further investment in the process: (1) Technoscientific rationality, the new logos which will finally reveal the truth of everything, always produces good results in the end. All we have to do is develop the appropriate technology. (2) Moreover, we must do so. Technological development is the only thing that can save us.
All technical problems require new technological developments for their solution. Like the rush to the Bomb there is no way to halt or question the technological imperative no matter how troubling the results nor how great the ensuing technological problems they pose; i.e., how to contain or clean up the vast amount of nuclear waste and the radiation that now poisons the atmosphere. Having committed ourselves to "the peaceful atom" in order to deny and repress guilt we found ourselves wed to the development of civilian nuclear power because it fulfilled both a psychological necessity and what had become a technological imperative. Like the logic of nuclear weaponry leading of necessity to M.A.D., the peaceful atom was wedded to a logic that could not prevent the development of the situation we now face. We've been promised the benefits of the peaceful atom for over 50 years. Since 1945 Dr. Strangelove has operated simultaneously on two fronts. The results are now in. The production of what we now see as massive piles of shit we have no place to dump or bury. (And try sometime devising a warning sign that can be immediately deciphered 4.5 billion years from now.) Such is the nature of "devil's work." Every step you take to try to get out of it only leads you deeper into it.
Hegel found in "the cunning of reason" a way to redeem any and every historical situation: all evils are but apparent; even the darkest events serve the course of progress. 1945 inaugurates a different logic, calling for an antithetical understanding. That history lets loose consequences that cannot be controlled, consequences both for a psyche that finds itself fatally wedded to its actions with no way to return to the way it was, the guarantees it had, before those actions; and in the destructive results produced by the subsequent actions ( both military and peaceful nuclear technologies) taken to make that agent safe from its own destructiveness and the terrors its actions have unleashed or to expiate those actions by somehow turning the entire process to a good end. There was no way to forsee or prevent the situation that pursuit of the peaceful atom would create because belief in it derived from the same grandiosity that fueled the Bomb. Its task was in fact even more grandiose. Utopian and Messianic. Otherwise the unthinkable: history would have to be conceived in a radically different way. But that idea is even more terrifying than the magnitude of the nuclear pollution that now confronts us because it reveals that nothing protects us from history and the irreversible changes that certain events bring about. There are, in short, no guarantees. Nothing in the conceptual, psychological, or emotional orders that we can call on to deliver us. We face instead a different task: we must deracinate the entire system of guarantees because it is what stands between us, a correct understanding of our situation and, of perhaps greater importance, how we must learn to feel in the face of it. Einstein said the bomb changed everything except the way we think. That task still beckons.
The development traced above offers us a way to understand the Nuclear Unconscious in its movement from 1945 to the present. As a history defined by what I call the Macbeth principle. To live with the guilt of a deed one repeats that deed until one is no longer troubled by it; or what amounts to the same thing, until nothing other than it exists. A world ruled by Thanatos.
Within the psyche that development produces the necessary inner transformation. Through increasingly more rebarbative actions one progressively eviscerates the voice of conscience. Eventually it becomes so thin that it's transformed into its opposite: the fanatical voice of fundamentalism proclaiming its rectitude. We are ready for a tour of Bush's Amerika.
V. The Fantasmatic Becomes the Real
"The rational is real and the real rational."
Hegel
Here is one way to describe Amerikan foreign policy since 9-11. Fully formed fantasies of democracy sweeping the Middle East dance like sugar-plums in the neo-con imaginary awaiting the opportunity for their projection. 9-11, however, upped the ante. As return of the repressed, a terrifying case of the chickens coming home to roost, it raised the spectre of Hiroshima. A new exorcism was needed. Projection and denial were once again called on to provide the only possible psychological response. By appropriating ground-zero (the term used to identify the epicenter of the Bomb's detonation point in Hiroshima) as a symbol of what had happened to us we became fantasmatically the innocent victims of an unmotivated and unprecedented terror. Bush's "they hate us because they're jealous of our freedom." Our duty is clear: we must rid the world of evil. The trauma of 9-11 has thus become the only thing that it could be: the occasion for unleashing destructive rage toward any object deemed the target of our wrath.
Preemptive unilateralism is psychologically necessary to the fantasmatic demand. Grandiose action as the only means of restoration. Reality be damned. Thus, the unleashing of a Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD), Depleted Uranium (DU) on a country, people, race, and religion that deserves that fate for being the non-cause of 9-11. The need to proclaim the fantasy over against any correction by reality has become peremptory. We know that the Iraqi people (and then the entire Middle East) will embrace us for setting them free; and surface evidence to the contrary we see new signs of progress toward that goal each day. And such is the need to delude ourselves that we can't wait to crow. Bush on the Abraham Lincoln, the first President ever to appear publicly in military uniform, imitating Bill Pullman in Independence Day, proclaiming mission accomplished.
Only our hold on Iraq deteriorates more every day. None of the things the fantasy assured happen. Two things necessarily happen, however, providing a new confirmation of Engel's Law. (1) The shelling of Iraq with DU increases, contaminating the entire infrastructure with chemical and radiation poisoning. Ecocide becomes official policy. (2) The fantasms become more fervent in their affirmation the more they prove false to reality. Bush proclaims "Democracy is on the march." Quantity has, as Engels argued, become quality bringing about a fundamental psychological change. Before Iraq neo-con fantasy was a dream that longed for projection in the belief that it could be realized in reality. It is now a delusion sustained only by denying reality. The fantasmatic has become a psychosis. There is accordingly no way it can be referred to or corrected by reality. Only one solution is now possible: reality must be eradicated. The conditions of psychotic certitude have been met. One willingly destroys the infra and eco structure of an entire country in order to sustain the fantasy that one will be embraced as a liberator for doing so. Because psychotic certitude has been attained, otherness cannot exist. Any challenge to Belief activates what has now become an underlying paranoia. Failure of reality to conform to fantasy can only be the product of conspiracy. Patriot Acts become necessary as a way to hypnotize oneself by systematically seeking out and eliminating any and all signs of dissent from the fantasy. It must become omniscient and omnipotent. Consequently, everything must become hyperreal in a blind rush to the global realization of the entire fantasmatic system because with the onset of psychosis the mad know, in the evanescence of a consciousness they cannot sustain, the actual function that the entire body of fantasms have played from the beginning.
They are the ways one flees the void within, the catastrophic condition into which one would plunge should they ever collapse. Such is the inner state of those who throw themselves into the Lord , into absolute belief systems, in order to deliver themselves from themselves. The final solution has been reached in the inner condition of the paranoid psychotic: the necessity of continued, increased explosions in order to avoid a psychological implosion.
We are now in a position to describe the Amerikan psyche-a void defined by a panic anxiety that can only be relieved by conversion to an absolute faith: Jesus for Bush and Ashcroft, Leo Strauss for neo-con ideologues; Kapital for Dick Cheney. Because the faith offers total salvation its reach must be global.
That's what Technoscientific Rationality is: the obliteration of any logic other than its development and thereby a progressive estrangement from any other way of relating to Being. That's what capitalism is: the abolition of any moral restraint preventing the imposition on people of whatever conditions will maximize profits. After all, people are nothing but consumers consuming. And it's what Christian fundamentalism Amerikan style is: the need to establish an allegory in which one is Good and thus empowered in an apocalyptic effort to rid the world of Evil. By turning Iraq into a vast thanatopolis all three imperatives achieve simultaneous fulfillment. Karl Marx, at a far more innocent time in history, saw the task of philosophy as one of extracting the rational kernel from the mystical shell of Hegelianism. That kernel was the proletariat and the materialist understanding of History the new guarantee. Living at a later stage of things, shorn of all guarantees, we face a far different task: to extract the psychotic kernel from the fantasmatic shell.
And thereby to see its objective correlative. For the fantasmatic process traced above has a mundane corollary. Converting DU into WMDs that we could deploy all over Iraq fulfilled another fantasy dear to the dream logic that informs capitalism. DU is pure waste. Shit, if you will. And like surplus production and the falling rate of profit it keeps piling up with no way to get rid of it. It's one thing when we only killed the poor bastards who had the bad luck to live downward of our reactors or the black inner city children to whom we shipped radioactively contaminated milk.[15] But now things are out of hand. We've got over 10 million tons of this useless crap. Eventually it'll seep into everything turning even our paradisiacal estates into nuclear cesspools. Unless we can find a way to really shit it out of our system. Any solution, however, must derive from the logic that informs the system--and fulfill the unconscious needs that fuel it. And then Voila! in answer to our prayers one day we see a way to turn our shit to gold. Nothing is ever lost. The deepest article of capitalist faith is fulfilled. There were no bad unintended consequences from our lengthy romance with the atom. We've found our own cunning of reason. Even our shit can be redeemed once we've developed the appropriate technology. With its discovery we seized a way to turn our waste to profit while fulfilling an even deeper need: to take a dump on everything that impedes the progress of global capitalism. Iraq is perfect. After all, the oil is the only thing there that has value. The rest of that landscape is nothing but a toilet; by relieving ourselves on it we get the true macho pleasure that comes from a good shit: the feeling that we're releasing all of our toxic matter on the Other-in this case those people of color committed to a religion that Samuel Huntington and others remind us stands unalterably opposed to the forward looking logic of modernism. The clash of civilizations and the making of world order requires no less than the shit storm that now rages all over Iraq.
The maximization of death under the reign of thanatos finds in Iraq one of its ghostliest embodiments. War in the 20th century witnessed the progressive erosion of all distinctions between combatants and non-combatants, military and civilian targets. Inflicting the greatest possible physical and psychological damage to "the enemy" became the object of military strategy. [16] Hiroshima was the first realization of that logic as a pure and unrestrained expression of thanatos as global terror. Iraq now serves to advance that logic in a new, and qualitatively different, way. Thanks to DU death is again released from all restrictions and extended over time in a way promises to bring about its omnipresence through its silent, unseen, inner working on all that lives. Death is everywhere now: in the air they breath, the food they eat, the water they drink, the shards radiating up at them from the DU debris that litters their cities, the sperm they transmit in the act of love, the cancers and birth defects, the violence to the DNA, in all the leukemias of body and of soul that will turn Iraq into one vast Thanatopolis, the city of the future, an oidos where all that lives will come to bear Death as its sole meaning, the visible and invisible sign that is present everywhere.
VI A Billet for Dubya
"Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide."
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
Here, then, is a picture of our true historical situation, what we'd know if we looked at our world without the guarantees. (That antithesis to the picture drawn in section III that forever destroys all possibilities of synthesis.) The categorical imperative of the historian is to know the horror of a situation by getting at the madness behind it. One name for that madness is Nuclearism. A proper definition of it is now possible: nuclearism is the assertion of the right to unlimited power over nature through the overcoming of anything in the psyche that would question or resist that assertion. To put it concretely, there is no peaceful atom and there never was. Nuclearism has only one logic, implicit in it from the beginning. Ecocide. Another name for the madness is Capitalism. It too is wedded to a deadly imperative: the extinction of everything in the human being that opposes the logic of acquisition and consumption. The ideal condition it seeks is one where there is nothing but consumers consuming. Everything else must be purged from the psyche. When a belief becomes dominant in American psychological circles one can be sure of one thing: that belief refers to something that no longer exists. Such is the case today with self, subject, identity, and the ego.
The same goes for the countless guarantees that are invented to support that belief: as in the current emphasis on attachment theory to provide the guarantee of healthy, normal development, the perfect theory of mothering for the age of child beauty pageants.[17] In its rush to be the mental health wing of the guarantees, contemporary American psychoanalysis has become a primary barrier to the truth. That there is no self in Amerika today, only a void producing panic anxiety in the rush to compulsive consumption in an attempt to fill what progressively becomes empty of everything save one necessity. Malignant envy, the psychological disorder described by Melanie Klein, has become the only motive that remains: the desire not to attain but to destroy anything and everything that excites one's envy. Iago triumphant. Only thanatos matters. The envy that nuclearism projects unto nature, capitalism projects onto all human relations. The whole world must come to gorge itself under the golden arches. No moral restraint, no residual humanity can intrude on the necessity to reduce everything and everyone to the conditions that benefit capitalism. It's no accident that Dick Cheney's dam Lynne's time as Head of the NEH was a watershed of reactionary ideology.
The History of the U.S. since 1945 is the antithesis of secular theodicy, an eradication of the entire system of guarantees on which it depends. Events dance to a far different logic, which is present on the surface once we learn to see the psychological roots from which the decisions made there derive. That logic is one of Thanatos in the progression needed for it to become an absolute principle freed of all restrictions and certain of its command over any sources of potential resistance. Which is why the principles expressed overseas must perforce inform actions in the Homeland. The result is an Amerika that can be defined by three interconnected developments: (1) an Apocalyptic christo-fascism wedded (as in Mel Gibson's masterpiece) to sado-masochism as the only pleasure capable of convincing people that they are alive and able to feel deeply; (2) corporate capitalism in control of all political and economic decisions and alternatives so that the system is assured of its own reproduction and extension; (3) a police state through the series of Patriot Acts required to assuring the ruling order that even in the privacy of the home a condition of generalized surveillance will exist and with it the eventual extinction of any trace of otherness or resistance. To use Hegelian language, Thanatos as "Absolute Spirit In and For Itself" has attained the form it requires.
In Amerika today the condition Dostoyevsky described in the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor slouches toward its final realization. Miracle, Mystery, and Authority find in Bush, Cheney, and Ashcroft the three functionaries needed to create a lasting, impermeable collective psyche. One that offers all subjects deliverance from freedom and anxiety, especially the anxiety that can never be uttered or allowed to enter consciousness-that we exist without any guarantees. Bush or miracle: the allegorization of politics and international relations in order to assure us that we are Good and everything other than us Evil. (The neo-cons offer secular versions of the same faith: western culture opposes Islamic fundamentalism, etc.) Cheney or mystery: capitalism is the ultimate truth of economic reality; whatever we have to do to secure its empire is therefore good and ultimately of benefit to the entire world. Put money in thy purse: the hidden hand is the cunning of reason assuring us of a future of benefit to all. Aschcroft or authority. Surveillance working in all subjects will complete what the Grand Inquisitor called "the happiness of man" in a condition of total obedience. Thereby Abu Ghraib becomes the inner world that defines the mass subjects relation to itself (On the surface, of course, the psychotic need to deny reality continues to take on new forms, each progressively further removed from the possibility of correction. Thus, in the latest effort to affirm that we were right all along even if we were wrong about any WMD being in Iraq, we get the following sequence: we couldn't know then what we know now; "Saddam aspired to making nuclear weapons(Bush/Cheney);" "Once out from under the sanctions, he would have developed them (Powell); "Saddam Hussein is himself a Weapon of Mass Destruction" (Guliani). We now know why were going to Mars: that's where Saddam hid the WMDs.)
Sections IV-VI describe a collective psyche. Such a use of psychoanalysis is a far cry from the justly discredited "psychohistory," which I'll indulge briefly here for purposes of an important theoretical contrast. Thus: Bush had a hard-on for Saddam from the day he took office because deposing him would enable Dubya both to avenge and to replace his father. Recall, in this connection, his statement that if we'd had the courage and determination we'd have finished the work we (i.e., his father) began in 1991. Fortinbras replaces Hamlet in Dubya's imaginary. No wonder he couldn't wait to dress himself in borrowed garb, (a miltary uniform such as his father wore as a pilot in WWII) pulled in as tight across the crotch as he could bear, and stride across the decks of the Abraham Lincoln. He finally had a dick and had to trumpet it to the world. And having found it he can't stop shaking it. All of this is of course true, irrelevant-- and pernicious whenever it functions as an ideological blinder to deflect our attention from the real psychological forces that shape history. Bush is but a part of that psyche. At times its farcicalia and village idiot, at others its fundamentalist believer (and new "great communicator") who conveys the tidings to the masses in a way sure to create in them fascination with their own fascization. Bush is convenient as a way to fixate our attention or our rage so that we won't see the puppetmaster Cheney pulling the strings. Nor, of more importance, the part that Bush and what he represents plays in the constitution of the collective psyche I've described. It is that psyche that forms the object of psychoanalytic cultural and political theory.
My attempt here has been to offer us a new way to think about the possibility that there is a collective Amerikan psyche ruled by a nuclear Unconscious that has a history that can be described in rigorous psychoanalytic terms. The operation of that psyche is not so much a question of the conscious intentions of particular individuals as of the role that different individuals and institutions play in securing the hegemony of the whole. That whole finds the man or woman it needs at each place it needs them (from Groves and Oppenheimer to Colonel Tibbets, from Cheney and Rice to Private England) because the decision to accept the call when chosen derives from an entire system of choices that each individual has made long before the call comes. The end result in each and all is the hegemony of a way of being in which it is not Reason but Thanatos that directs History. The result is the age we live in. An Age of Terrorism. State Terrorism. Everything else is a reaction.
VII. The Principle of Hope
"'Personal density' is directly proportional to temporal bandwith 'Temporal bandwith' is the width of your present, your Now."
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
To know this situation for what it is challenges what is finally the deepest and most fundamental of the guarantees. The principle of Hope. To appropriate Eliot: "After such knowledge, what forgiveness." For it is hard to look on the situation described in this essay without raising the spectre of despair. In view both of the unlikelihood that there is anything that can be done to change the situation and in terms of the amount of pain one must accept in order to sustain this knowledge. What is the purpose of knowing such things if they only produce meaningless suffering? Or, to put it another way, isn't despair the end result of a life shorn of the guarantees? Aren't we finally like the drunks in O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, who know that in order to sustain the illusions that are required to go on living they must decide that Hickey was mad and that all he revealed to them about their lives a product of that madness?
It is time to admit what the need for Hope really amounts to. Denial of responsibility for certain situations under the assumption that knowing them correctly would lead to despair. The concept of despair, in short, is no more than a rhetorical ploy to prematurely terminate one's awareness of a situation so that one can cling, in the face of it, to hope and all the other emotional and psychological needs that follow in its train. Despair remains an empty concept. We don't know what it is. And we never will as long as we use the need for Hope to prevent the discovery of our capacity to endure. We will only know what we are capable of when we get rid of hope. Whether despair is what we will find on the other side of it is something we can't know. For all hope really signifies is a testament to our weakness and our fears. Perhaps we are called to something beyond it. What Shakespeare called tragic readiness. For in opening ourselves to the possibility of despair we also open ourselves to the possibility of self-overcoming as well as to a discovery of a praxis that lies on the other side of the many paralyses created by the guarantees. We can't know "what is to be done?" as long as we keep trying to transcend our situation with values and guarantees that we insist must remain a-historical and in service to an essentialistic and a-historical theory of human nature. (For the ethical implications of this idea see below, section IX.)
VIII. The Evil of Banality
" The man has a branch office in our brain called the ego and its mission is bad shit. We know exactly what they're doing and do nothing about it."
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
As we struggle to develop a concept of evil equal to our situation, Hannah Arendt remains an invaluable source. Not so much for what she said, but for what she failed to say due to the self-imposed limit she placed on her thought. I refer to her life-long avoidance, suspicion, and eschewal of psychoanalytic concepts. Yet in Eichmann Arendt identified a new kind of criminal. One who commits a crime under circumstances where they can't know or feel they're doing wrong. For Arendt that fact does not mitigate Eichmann's guilt. I want now to suggest that it magnifies it. Eichmann served the Reich apparently for no motive other than to advance his career. But the ease with which he went along with everything he was asked to do does not reveal the absence of choice or intention but the true mode of it's presence. Eichmann's service to the final solution was a function of the choices of a lifetime, the choices that eventuated in making him the kind of man he was. It is there that his responsibility lies. Eichmann is responsible, in short, for his psyche. And there is only one relationship he can have to that psyche-guilt. Eichmann is responsible for making himself the kind of man who could become Eichmann.
The great and still unconstituted contribution of psychoanalysis to our moral history is the expanded understanding it offers us of our ethical responsibility. It's always pretty to restrict responsibility to conscious intentions. This is the primary way we escape self-knowledge in all our important dealings. We only let ourselves know what we want to know about our motives. In one of his late reflections Freud asserted that we are responsible for our dreams. I take that statement to mean that we are responsible for what our dreams reveal about the desires and disorders that define us and that must therefore become our self-knowledge. Which is another way of saying that we are responsible for our psyche. Our ethical duty is to gain knowledge of it as the author of our actions. The fatal choice one may make one day is not a result of bad luck or simply going with the flow. It's a function of the choices one made long before the fatal one became irresistible. In this as in so much else Eichmann and Tibbets are one, brothers of the architects of Abu Ghraib and their progeny. Adorno said that Hitler gave the world a new moral imperative: so act that Auschwitz will never again be possible. Freud also gave it a new moral imperative: to become responsible for one's unconscious and all the suppressed motives and desires that inform one's "intentions," for it is from one's psyche that one thinks and acts in all one's dealings in the world. Both imperatives are extreme and necessarily connected. That extremity is perhaps the true measure of our historical situation.
IX. Final Jeopardy
"Nothing can trouble the dominance of the true image." Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus
"Is there anything more evil than shooting children in a school yard or flying planes into buildings?" One hears this rhetorical question often today. Getting it firmly implanted in our minds seems to be one of the current ideological functions of the media. A correct response requires careful reflection on the single circumstance that underlies the knee-jerk response. The power of the image. The promise inherent in Technoscientificrationality is deliverance from that reality. Killing for it, like everything else, occurs at a distance. In the inaugural moment: Tibbets in his Enola Gay unable to imagine what he has just done as a human act. "It was all impersonal." [18] And today: in the silent, secret, midnight ways that radiation poisoning works from within, like a deed without a doer, separated in space and time from its absent cause. Perhaps killing at a distance is the far greater evil precisely because it abrogates the image and the human connection between slayer and slain. If I kill another man with my bare hands my deed is immediate to my embodied consciousness. To kill that way you have to feel hate, fear, anguish, remorse, etc. whereas to kill from a distance or invisibly is to render the whole thing impersonal. With the desired result: the ability, for example, of the man who dropped the Bomb on Hiroshima, incinerating 200 to 300,000 people in a second, condemning another 2 to 300,000 to the condition of hibakusha, the walking dead, to boast proudly for over 59 years now that he has never felt a moment of regret or remorse. Tibbets' lack of moral imagination is one with his representative status as precursor. For now it is a thing of trifling and contemptible ease to form policies and take actions that litter a landscape with DU while denying that the stuff has any long term medical or environmental effects. [19] The evil of killing at a distance is that is makes death unreal. Protected from the image, all who participate in the deed are delivered over to a pure and impersonal calculus. (An aside: if we really want to support our troops we must achieve for them a new Bill of Rights. No one should ever be told to use weapons without being given a full knowledge of the long term human and environmental consequence of those weapons. To do otherwise is to deprive our soldiers of the choice that makes them human.)
The powers that be learned one lesson from Vietnam. No more images. The mistake was to let us see the carnage, every night, up close, over TV. The news entered our consciousness at the register where genuine change is possible. Where horror is felt. Free of the tyranny of the concept, the hypnotic power of the guarantees. Desert Storm was the corrective: the ninetendo war, a war broadcast to look just like another one of the video games we'd been programmed to love. Prohibition of the image is now a fundamental article of faith of our religion. No images are allowed to come back to us from Iraq II. (Michael Moore's real crime was to give us a brief glimpse at what the mainstream media proscribe.) The abolition of the image is one of the primary conditions of Ecocide. Everything must be rendered abstract, invisible, unreal. No image can be allowed to trouble our sleep, to lacerate our soul. For then we might begin to know that there is indeed an evil far worse than shooting children in schoolyards or flying airplanes into buildings.
To move us toward that knowledge let me end with the forbidden, which I must here try to convey solely through the more abstract medium of words since I've not yet gained permission to reproduce a photograph I saw a week ago. It's the picture of an Iraqi baby, a victim of DU, who was born with no nose, mouth, eyes, anus or genitals and with flipper limbs, a common result of radiation exposure in utero. That child's body, full of red open ulcers, is twisted in knots, its ulcerated face contorted in a look of unspeakable suffering. An authentic image of the sacredness of human life. Of the preciousness of every breath. To look at that child is to realize one's duty to mourn it, to give voice to its right to invade our consciousness and expose the evil of those who prate on about the right to life while refusing to let us see what they've reduced life to. Luke, 17:1-2. The image of that child must become the force in our minds that enables us to deracinate all guarantees that would protect us from the reality of that child's situation. Or, to put it another way, every time one chooses catharsis, resolution, and renewal that child is born again, condemned to an unspeakable suffering.
That is why its image must embolden us to question the most hallowed of the guarantees, the one I've refrained from discussing until now. In the face of such evil what is to be done? To fight it is one ever justified in resorting to violence? No, we are told, because "if we do so we become just like them." This ethical principle supposedly holds above and beyond any situation we might face. Ever. Because it assures the guarantee that no matter what happens we will never get our hands dirty. History can't intrude on the categorical imperative. Whatever action one takes one must assure oneself of one's ethical purity. Even if that means there is nothing that one can do and after it has been demonstrated that there are no non-violent ways to change the situation. Perhaps we can no longer allow ourselves the luxury of such an ethic. Bush did the moral imagination one favor. His preemptive unilateralism made official what has been clear for so long but denied due to its implications. There is no body to which we can turn for Justice: not the U.N., the World Court, or any other framework of International Law. The U.S. will flaunt its contempt for such bodies whenever it suits its purpose. And thus another mode of peaceful, non-violent praxis is deprived of its guarantee. But then what is to be done? I can't offer an answer. Because I don't have one? Because to do so would be to drive the last nail into the coffin of Hope? Because any answer would only serve to deliver us from the trauma we have perhaps only begun to experience? Because doing so would minimize the psychological terrorism of the essay? Or, for a final hypothetical reason, which I included when delivering an earlier oral version of this essay to a Conference on Depleted Uranium: because to do so would legally open everyone who hears it to the charge of taking part in a conspiracy? Such warnings need not be attached to what we read. Surely we can preserve that guarantee. But of course we can't. Thanks to the Patriot Act the same warning must now accompany the written word.
Walter A. Davis is professor emeritus of English at Ohio State University. He is the author of Deracination: Historiocity, Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative. He can be reached at: davis.65@o....
ENDNOTES:
(1) I've relied on numerous sources for the factual bases of this essay. An extremely useful website is Depleted Uranium Watch. See also: www.umrc.net/contact.asp and www.informationclearinghouse.into/article5941.htm. On the nature of depleted uranium see: www.umrc.net/whatIsDU.asp.
(2) In connection with this paragraph, see: http://www.sfbayview.com/081804/Depleteduranium081804.shtml;
(3) In connection with this paragraph, see: http://www.traprockpeace.org/rokke du 3 ques.html; and traprockpeace.org/chrisbusby08may04.html. Desert Storm was not, however, the first use of DU. DU was used by Israel under U.S. Army supervision in 1973. For purposes of this essay I've bracketed the way events in Iraq relate to the Palestinian problem.
(4) On this takeover, see the report by Leuren Moret for The Danish Peace Academy: www.fredsakademiet.dk/library/stealth.htm. For examples of the nuclear weapons planned for development, see: www.Haarp.alaska.edu/haarp; www.dtic.mil/jointvision/jupub2.htm; and www.popsci.com (Defense 2020). Recently 153 million dollars of DU weapons including bunker busters ( or to use official language and thus gain insight into the libidinal bases of the new technologies, Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrators) was sold to Israel. The purpose of all these developments is to blur the distinction between conventional and nuclear war. Iraq is the systematic eradication of that distinction, and as such the first shape of things to come.
(5) Giorgio Agamben, Homer Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford UP, 1998).
(6) See: www.fredsadademiet.dk/library/stealth.htm.
(7) See Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. For example, #129: "The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something-because it is always before one's eyes.) The real foundations of his inquiry do not strike a person at all.-And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful." One purpose of this essay is to show that our responsibility is precisely to see and become aware of such things and to trace the full implications of their historical operation. History deprives us of the luxury of leaving the social, ideological, and communal bases of our thoughts and feelings in the dark, however convenient or natural it is to do so.
(8) I ran across this delight quote in Mark Crispin Miller's Cruel and Unusual: Bush/Cheney's New World Order (Norton, 2004), p.298.
(9) Jacques Ellul's great book The Technological Society remains the definitive study of this dilemma.
(10) Martin Heidegger's The Question Concerning Technology offers a magisterial meditation on the ontological implications of technology.
(11) The description and critique of the guarantees offered here is a simplified statement of the argument I develop at length in Deracination: Historicity, Hiroshima, and the Tragic Imperative (SUNY P, 2001).
(12) On this see especially the confession of the architect of the myth, McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (Knopf,1992) and Robert J. Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America: A Half Century of Denial (Putnam, 1995).
(13) See, for example, Harvey Wasserman, Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America's Experience with Atomic Radiation (Delacorte,1982).
(14) Chapters 3 and 4 of Deracination develop an extended psychoanalytic discussion of the idea summarized here.
(15) See: http://www.fredsakademiet.dk/library/stealth.htm.
(16) As Richard Rhodes shows in The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Simon and Schuster, 1986) this was the primary rationale behind General Grove's argument that Kyoto be chosen as the city to receive the first Atomic Bomb.
(17) Some of the central texts behind these "developments" in psychoanalysis: Heinz Kohut ,The Restoration of the Self; Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love; Peter Fonagy, Attachment Theory and Psychoanalysis; and Stephen Mitchell, Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis.
(18) See The Paul Tibbets Story by Paul Tibbets with Claire Stebbins and Harry Franken (Stein and Day, 1978), p.227.
(19) The Department of Energy continues to insist that there is no evidence to support the claim that DU is harmful; and of course they've lined up the usual scientists to support the proposition, despite all the evidence that now exists in our returning soldiers, that we simply do not know what DU does. Last time I checked the tobacco industry was still denying a scientific link between smoking and lung cancer. Though false the claim by the Department of Energy is also pernicious, since not knowing what the effects of a weapon will be is a prima facie reason not to use it. That is, what stands forth once one cuts through the defenses and obfuscations is that the 1 of the 4 rationales for Hiroshima not mentioned previously in this essay remains a primary motive. We are still creating laboratories so that our scientific, medical, and military personnel can study the effects of our weapons. If we kill our own in the process, that too has been for a long time a matter of indifference. As Henry Kissinger put it, apropos of Vietnam: "Military men are just dumb stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy. ( See Monika Jensen-Stevenson, Kiss the Boys Goodbye (E.P. Dutton, 1990) Finding out the full range of its destructive powers is now the primary reason for using a weapon. That is why to use any weapon that has not been fully tested in terms of all its possible consequences should be classified as a War Crime. (Of course the powers that be can always claim-and this explanation has already been floated that the source of all the cancers etc. of the Iraqi people stem from Saddam's use of chemical and biological weapons. A result, that is, of the weapons we gave him, a transfer presided over by none other than Donald Rumsfeld.) [On this see: www.newscientist.com Pynchon vivant. Which leads to a concluding fantasy of how the clean up of Iraq should begin. Each of them-Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, Perle, Rove and all the others should be given a sack and sent to fill it with chunks of the radioactive debris that now fills Iraq. They should then be required to take that sack home and use it as their pillow. Pleasant dreams.
-------- iraq / inspections
DIPLOMACY
Report on Iraq Arms Deals Angers France and Others
October 9, 2004
New York Times
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/09/politics/09diplo.html
WASHINGTON, Oct. 8 - The Bush administration's handling this week of a report on Saddam Hussein's attempts to purchase weapons and buy influence has angered French officials and set back a year of American efforts to repair the rupture caused by the Iraq war, French and other European officials said Friday.
The anger of France and others is focused on the assertions in the report by Charles A. Duelfer, the top American arms inspector in Iraq, that French companies and individuals, some with close ties to the government, enriched themselves through Iraq's efforts to gain influence around the world in the years before the war.
Administration spokesmen said Friday that there was no intent in releasing the report to endorse its findings or blame France or any other country for corruption, or to link any alleged corruption to that country's subsequent opposition to the war in Iraq.
On the other hand, Vice President Dick Cheney and others in the administration are citing the Duelfer report as evidence that Mr. Hussein had sought to corrupt foreign countries in order to have sanctions on Iraq lifted. Although Mr. Cheney did not say so directly, French officials say it was obvious that he was referring to France and other countries that had opposed the war.
French officials say that the report's charges, based on documents and interviews in Iraq, have been denied in the past, but that Mr. Duelfer's report did not contain the denials. They also complain that France was not given more than one day's notice before the report was issued.
They were incensed that the report also mentioned Americans in connection with similar charges but that unlike the French they were not identified because of American privacy regulations.
"You protect American citizens, but you put in danger a number of private citizens in other countries who may be innocent people," said Jean-David Levitte, the French ambassador to the United States. "These names are from an old list, published months ago, and those mentioned denied it flatly."
A European diplomat said the damage to French-American relations was so great that it could disrupt a new spirit of cooperation with France on other fronts, namely the joint American and European efforts to put pressure on Iran to dismantle its suspected nuclear weapons program and to organize an international conference next month on Iraq.
"This report does great damage," Mr. Levitte said. "There really is a sense of outrage in Paris. We don't want to create a situation that will put us back to one year ago. But these are dirty tricks at the expense of France, with the White House putting the finger on the name of France." Mr. Duelfer's main conclusion - that Iraq did not have unconventional weapons when the Bush administration was charging that it had them - got the most publicity when the 918-page report was issued.
But the administration highlighted charges that under Mr. Hussein, Iraq was successful in circumventing the sanctions placed on it by the United Nations by purchasing conventional weapons with money siphoned fraudulently from a program authorized by the United Nations in 1996, allowing Iraq to sell oil and use the revenue for food, medicine and other human necessities.
To curry favor around the world, Iraq set up a system in which some individuals and companies were able to profit by manipulating the oil-for-food program. Among those enriched in this process, the report said, were French, Russian and other officials.
Administration spokesmen said Friday that the United States did not endorse the allegations that anyone was enriched by Iraq's practices, only that Iraq was trying to buy influence and weaken sanctions.
"It doesn't say that those transactions were completed," said Richard A. Boucher, the State Department spokesman. "It doesn't say whether or not governments intervened. It doesn't say whether or not the individuals declined. It doesn't really say what happened."
But that was not the tone adopted by Mr. Cheney and other officials caught up in President Bush's tough re-election campaign. In Florida on Thursday, Mr. Cheney said Mr. Hussein had used oil funds to corrupt "some employees of the United Nations as well as other governments in the hopes that they would work with him to undermine the sanctions."
A day before releasing the Duelfer report, the State Department called in officials from several embassies in Washington to give them a preview. That meeting itself stirred anger, according to those who attended. "We were not given the text of the report," said a diplomat from a country other than France. "We were directed to the C.I.A. Web site, and we couldn't download it," because the site was swamped.
Mr. Levitte said he had called top officials at the White House and the State Department to protest "in very strong terms that I considered this very unfair and not good behavior from a great democracy, to protect your own citizens and give publicity to others in the Web site of the C.I.A."
He said the officials had "noted with some embarrassment that I had a point."
-------- korea
IAEA Chief Doubts S. Korean Arms Plans
By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, October 9, 2004; Page A27
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18674-2004Oct8.html
TOKYO, Oct. 8 -- The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said on Friday that South Korea's recently disclosed work with uranium and plutonium did not appear to be part of a weapons program, describing it as "simply two scientific experiments on a small scale."
"I don't think we have seen any intentions to develop nuclear weapons" by South Korea, the director general of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, told reporters in Tokyo after completing an official trip to the South Korean capital, Seoul. "What we have seen are experiments that have to do with separation of plutonium and making uranium. These experiments by themselves are not illegal."
Mohamed ElBaradei calls Seoul's research "experiments on a small scale."
But ElBaradei suggested that the work, disclosed by the South Koreans last month, should have been reported to the IAEA earlier. South Korea's failure to report it promptly, some nuclear experts say, could constitute a violation of international law.
South Korea has acknowledged that government scientists conducted experiments to enrich uranium in 2000 and to extract plutonium in 1982; both are building blocks of atomic weapons. Diplomats in Vienna, where the IAEA is based, have said that the peak levels of the South Korean experiments produced material close to weapons grade. The head of South Korea's atomic energy agency has denied that.
South Korean officials have maintained that the work was purely scientific in nature and not linked to weapons research. In addition, they said that though the work was conducted by government scientists, it was performed without the knowledge or approval of higher-level officials.
ElBaradei, who spoke to reporters after giving a speech at United Nations University in Tokyo, said, "We still are doing our own investigations to make sure that we understand fully the circumstances surrounding these experiments, to make sure that these experiments have not continued and there is nothing more to it than simply experiments."
The IAEA investigation has so far consisted of two inspections, with at least one more planned before a team of experts submits a report on its findings to the 35-member IAEA board next month. If it is found to be in noncompliance with the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or other international laws, South Korea could face a number of penalties, including referral to the U.N. Security Council.
During his visit to the region, ElBaradei has drawn a sharp distinction between South Korea and North Korea, which international authorities have said is amassing a nuclear arsenal. The Pyongyang government expelled U.N. weapons inspectors almost two years ago, and earlier this week in Seoul, ElBaradei criticized the Security Council for failing to take action against North Korea.
North Korea has cited the South Korean disclosures in an attempt to blunt international pressure to force it to abandon its nuclear programs. This week, North Korea continued that campaign through its official KCNA news service, insisting that IAEA officials were "downplaying the gravity" of South Korea's actions. ElBaradei, however, said the situations in the two Koreas were "not comparable."
Concerning Iraq, ElBaradei told reporters at the Japan National Press Club that he felt "vindicated" after the release this week of a report by the chief U.S. weapons inspector, Charles A. Duelfer. The report essentially confirmed that Saddam Hussein had destroyed his chemical and biological weapons stockpiles in the 1990s and had effectively given up efforts to pursue nuclear weapons, findings similar to those of U.N. weapons inspectors before the invasion of March 2003.
"Although it took a war to prove that, we were proven correct," ElBaradei said. "The lesson I take from that is that the international community should listen to us more carefully in the future before they take the decision to use coercive action."
--------
South Korea completes deployment of new medium-range missiles: report
SEOUL (AFP)
Oct 09, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041009073407.25ww9f8m.html
South Korea has completed the deployment of new medium range missiles capable of hitting most strategic targets in North Korea, a report said Saturday.
Defense ministry officials told lawmakers more than 100 of the locally developed Hyeonmu missiles had already been deployed in an unidentified frontline unit, according to Maeil business daily.
Hyeonmu missiles have a range of up to 300 kilometers (186 miles) and are capable of reaching most of North Korean territory including the northwestern city of Sinuiju near the border with China, it said.
The ministry also said it had purchased and deployed 110 ATACMS Block 1A Missiles produced by Lockheed Martin. These missiles have the same range as Hyeonmu.
Defense ministry officials declined to comment on the report.
ATACMS Block 1A and Hyeonmu are the longest-range missiles deployed in South Korea.
Their deployment became possible only after Washington and Seoul in 2001 revised an accord to pave the way for South Korea to possess missiles with a range of up to 300 kilometers instead of the past limit of 180 kilometers.
The United States has restricted South Korea's missile development to avoid an arms race on the Korean peninsula.
But US military authorities yielded to Seoul insisting the range of their own missiles should be extended to cope with North Korea's missiles.
North Korea has already deployed short range Scuds and Rodongs with a range of 1,300 kilometers, while actively developing longer-range Taepodong missiles with a range of up to 6,000 kilometers, according to South Korean analysts.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Afghan Opposition Alleges Fraud in Voting
October 9, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Afghan-Election.html?pagewanted=all&position=
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- Afghanistan's historic presidential election turned sour Saturday when all 15 candidates opposing U.S.-backed interim President Hamid Karzai withdrew in the middle of voting, charging the government and the United Nations with fraud and incompetence.
In the end, faulty ink -- not Taliban bombs and bullets -- threatened three years of painstaking progress toward democracy. The opposition candidates claimed the ink used to mark people's thumbs rubbed off too easily, allowing for mass deception.
Electoral officials rejected opposition demands that voting be stopped at midday, saying it would rob millions of people of their first chance to directly decide their leader, and the joint U.N.-Afghan panel overseeing the election would rule later on the vote's legitimacy.
But the controversy nonetheless cast a pall over what had been a joyous day in Afghanistan. Millions of ethnically diverse Afghan voters crammed polling stations for an election aimed at bringing peace and prosperity to a country nearly ruined by more than two decades of war. Men and women voted at separate booths in keeping with this nation's conservative Islamic leanings.
Karzai -- who is widely favored to win -- said the fate of the balloting was with electoral panel, but he added that, in his view, ``the election was free and fair ... it is very legitimate.''
``Who is more important, these 15 candidates, or the millions of people who turned out today to vote?'' Karzai said. ``Both myself and all these 15 candidates should respect our people -- because in the dust and snow and rain, they waited for hours and hours to vote.''
Even if the vote is ultimately validated, Karzai's ability to unite this nation, fight rampant warlordism and crush a lingering Taliban insurgency in this nation of an estimated 25 million people might be fatally compromised if his opponents refuse to accept the results and insist that his rule is illegitimate.
Taliban rebels got into a skirmish with U.S. troops that left at least 25 insurgents dead, and managed to kill three Afghan policemen accompanying ballots back to a counting center after the vote. Eight more police and two civilians died when their vehicles ran over mines.
But the rebels did not muster anything approaching the massive attack they had threatened to derail the election.
The boycott was a blow to the international community, which spent almost $200 million staging the vote. At least 12 election workers, and dozens of Afghan security forces, died in the past few months as the nation geared up for the vote.
The chaos also threatened to become part of the debate in the U.S. presidential campaign. President Bush has held Afghanistan up as an example of flourishing democracy and a precursor to elections his administration insists will move forward in January in Iraq, despite continuing violence there.
In St. Louis, the president exulted in the Afghan vote as a ``marvelous thing'' and said his administration should receive at least partial credit.
``Freedom is powerful,'' Bush told a Republican breakfast fund-raiser. ``Think about a society in which young girls couldn't go to school, and their mothers were whipped in the public square, and today they're holding a presidential election.''
It was a starkly different scene in Kabul, where the opposition candidates met at the house of Uzbek candidate Abdul Satar Sirat and signed a petition saying they would not recognize the vote results.
Sirat, an ex-aide to Afghanistan's last king and a minor candidate expected to poll in the low single-digits, said all 15 challengers to Karzai agreed to the boycott.
``Today's election is not a legitimate election. It should be stopped and we don't recognize the results,'' Sirat said. ``This vote is a fraud and any government formed from it is illegitimate.''
Islamic poet Abdul Latif Padran, another minor candidate, said, ``Today was a very black day. Today was the occupation of Afghanistan by America through elections.''
Election officials acknowledged that workers at some voting stations mistakenly swapped the permanent ink meant to mark thumbs with normal ink meant for ballots but insisted the problem was caught quickly.
``Halting the vote at this stage is unjustified and would deny these people their right to vote,'' said Ray Kennedy, vice chairman of the joint U.N.-Afghan electoral panel. ``There have been some technical problems but overall it has been safe and orderly.''
Kennedy said it could take time for the electoral body to reach a decision on the vote's legitimacy. Initial results were not expected until late Sunday or early Monday, and anything approaching a full count could take two weeks.
About 10.5 million registration cards were handed out for the election, a staggering number that U.N. and Afghan officials say was inflated by widespread double registration. Organizers had argued that the indelible ink would prevent people from voting twice.
A 13-member U.S. observer team from the bipartisan International Republican Institute described the polls as ``a triumph for the Afghan people.''
``It is not surprising that some of the candidates are raising the question (about the ink),'' said former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Bernard Aaronson, the team's co-leader. ``Perhaps some of those who don't do so well are trying to provide an excuse for why they didn't do so well.''
The European Union and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe sent observer missions as well.
U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad arrived at the opposition camp to meet with Sirat, making no comment other than to say he was there ``only to help.''
Khalilzad, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Afghanistan, has been widely criticized for perceived favoritism for Karzai and is seen by many Afghans as a puppet-master. Afghans gathered outside the house joked that a resolution to the crisis was near because ``the big man has arrived.''
Later, the ambassador issued a statement calling the elections ``a profound success.'' He said initial indications pointed to turnout that was ``extraordinarily high.''
``We recognize that some allegations remain and that there should be a process to address these allegations through a thorough and transparent investigation,'' Khalilzad said.
But he also warned, ``For Afghanistan to win, the losers in the election should not undermine the achievement of the Afghan people.''
The election was supposed to offer a stark contrast to Afghanistan's many forms of imposed rule in the past 30 years -- monarchy, Soviet occupation, warlord fiefdoms and the repressive Taliban theocracy ousted by the U.S.-led invasion following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
``I am old, but this vote is not just for me. It is for my grandchildren,'' said Nuzko, 58, a widow who stood in line at a Kabul voting station. Like many Afghans, she uses only one name.
``I want Afghanistan to be secure and peaceful.''
Associated Press reporters Stephen Graham in Kandahar, Burt Herman in Mazar-e-Sharif and Amir Shah and Daniel Cooney in Kabul contributed to this report.
-------- arms
U.S. Congress approves $422 billion arms bill
Sat Oct 9, 2004
(Reuters)
By Vicki Allen
http://www.reuters.com/financeNewsArticle.jhtml?type=bondsNews&storyID=6459128
WASHINGTON, Oct 9 - The U.S. Congress on Saturday gave final approval to a $422 billion bill for defense programs that backs next year's round of military base closings and kills a proposed $23.5 billion Air Force deal with Boeing Co. (BA.N: Quote, Profile, Research) .
The defense bill also authorizes but does not mandate adding 20,000 soldiers to the overall size of the Army and 3,000 Marines in 2005, reflecting lawmakers' concerns that forces have been stretched thin by operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The White House has resisted a permanent increase in troop strength, which Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry has urged.
The Senate approved the bill by unanimous agreement in a rare weekend session hours after the House of Representatives passed it 359-14. The measure goes to U.S. President George W. Bush before Congress breaks next week to campaign for Nov. 2 presidential and congressional elections.
To avert a White House veto threat, the final bill dropped a bid by House members to put off by two years a process for closing and realigning domestic military bases deemed obsolete or unnecessary.
House members initially voted for the delay as lawmakers whose districts' economies are supported by the bases argued they should not be cut while U.S. forces were deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Lawmakers also said the Pentagon should first review overseas bases before trimming domestic facilities.
The Pentagon is to issue a list next May of domestic bases that could be closed, which will then be reviewed by an independent commission before being sent to the president.
Base closings also were a potent political issue in the Senate, which on a narrow 49-47 vote backed the scheduled round of closings in the face of the veto threat.
The House passed the defense bill a day after House and Senate negotiators finished work to resolve differences in their versions of the legislation.
BOEING DISPUTE
In the long-running Boeing dispute, the final bill bans the leasing of aerial refueling aircraft, defeating the Air Force's plan to lease and then buy aerial refueling tankers from the Chicago-based contractor.
Instead, it calls for a multiyear effort to buy 100 new refueling aircraft to replace the aging fleet.
Last week the Air Force's former No. 2 weapons buyer was sentenced to nine months in prison for illegal job talks with Boeing while still overseeing the tanker deal and other Boeing business.
It provides $10 billion that Bush sought for this year to continue development of a ballistic missile defense system. The bill backed an administration plan to ease cleanup standards to allow some radioactive sludge from Cold-War era bomb-making to stay in tanks at sites in South Carolina and Idaho. Opponents said that could force other states to accept lower cleanup standards instead of making the Energy Department abide by a 1982 law to bury the waste in a proposed nuclear repository in Nevada.
-------- asia
Japan to cut ground troops by one-fourth within 10 years: report
TOKYO (AFP)
Oct 09, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041009060211.ugrylvw2.html
Japan plans to reduce ground troops by one quarter within five to 10 years while realigning the military to cope with terrorist attacks and other new threats, a report said Saturday.
The plan will be part of new defence policy guidelines to be put together by the end of the year, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun said without citing sources.
The guidelines, to be revised for the first time in nine years, will envision a cut of 40,000 ground troops from the 160,000-strong force by introducing an early retirement scheme, the business daily said.
They will call for the scaling back of the number of tanks from 900 to 450 and reduce the 300-strong fleet of fighter planes by 20-30 percent, it said.
The locations of army divisions, originally designed to cope with Soviet threats in the Cold War era, will also be realigned for the first time, it said.
An advisory panel to Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi this week proposed the government "drastically" cut back on the military's heavy equipment units, such as armoured brigades, since the country faces no major threat of invasion.
Instead, Japan should build up "multi-functional, flexible defence capability" to counter terrorists and other new threats, the panel said.
-------- business
Lawsuit Accuses a Contractor of Defrauding U.S. Over Work in Iraq
October 9, 2004
New York Times
By ERIK ECKHOLM
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/09/international/middleeast/09secure.html?pagewanted=all
A private security firm that has won more than $100 million in contracts for work in Iraq has been accused of defrauding the government of tens of millions of dollars by two former employees who have brought a suit under the federal whistleblower law.
The accused firm, Custer Battles, was formed in early 2003 by two Army veterans in their 30's.
With no track record, staff or significant assets, the two veterans, Scott Custer and Michael Battles, traveled to Baghdad soon after the American invasion. In June 2003, they obtained a $13.6 million contract to provide security at the Baghdad airport. Since then the company has won numerous other contracts or subcontracts to provide security and logistics, and it employs hundreds of people. The company says four of its employees have been killed.
The suit, which was filed in February but unsealed by the federal authorities only yesterday, alleges that the company repeatedly provided grossly inflated bills, claimed payments to shell companies that provided no services, and billed for purchases never made, causing "tens of millions of dollars in fraudulent damage to the United States."
On Sept. 30, the United States Air Force suspended the company from receiving further contracts, an act that under federal regulations is taken "when it is determined immediate action is necessary to protect the government's interest."
The Department of Justice, in unsealing the suit yesterday, said it had no plans to prosecute the company.
A lawyer for Custer Battles, Richard Sauber of the Washington office of Fried Frank Harris Shriver & Jacobson, cited the Justice Department decision as evidence that the charges were without merit.
"We think these are baseless allegations," he said in a telephone interview yesterday. "They come from a competitor and a disgruntled employee." He said his clients planned to fight the ban on new military contracts.
Alan Grayson, a lawyer for the two former employees, said Justice Department lawyers had indicated to him that they would not prosecute because the fraud was against the Coalition Provisional Authority, not the United States government. He said that the Justice Department had authorized his clients to pursue the case in a civil suit and that the suit was already pending in a Virginia court.
The suit was filed by Robert J. Isakson and William D. Baldwin. Mr. Isakson was an F.B.I. agent for 20 years before forming his own security company, based in Mobile, Ala. He had experience in international security and was hired to start up the Custer Battles operation in Baghdad, hiring Nepali Gurkhas to work at the airport.
Mr. Baldwin, of Jacksonville, Fla., was a manager for Custer Battles in Iraq. Both men were forced out of Baghdad, they said, after they refused to cooperate with fraudulent billing.
The suit is the first involving the freewheeling postwar spending in Iraq to be filed under the Civil False Claims Act, said Patrick Burns of Taxpayers Against Fraud, a private group in Washington. The law rewards employees who reveal fraud against the federal government; guilty companies must repay the government three times their fraudulent gains, and the whistleblowers receive from 15 percent to 30 percent of the proceeds.
The suit provides many examples of alleged fraud. Under the initial airport security contract, soon raised to $16.5 million, the company was to provide 130 security officers. The suit alleges that when the airport received much less use than expected, the company discharged or reassigned many employees, yet kept billing the government illegally at the original price.
The former employees describe leases with fictitious companies, for which the coalition authority was billed, and subcontracts with companies owned by Custer Battles itself that charged exorbitant prices, allowing the company to pass on fees inflated by 60 percent or more.
Custer Battles received a $12 million subcontract to provide security services for power line construction from Washington Group International, a large American firm that was working for the Army Corps of Engineers. The suit says that the company then subcontracted most of the actual work to another company called Falcon Security for just $4.1 million, resulting in "an exorbitant profit."
Custer Battles's billing under that contract has been questioned by W.G.I. and the Army Corps, the suit asserts, but the company has refused to provide information about costs or to refund any money.
In another example, the suit says, the company confiscated old Iraqi Airways forklifts, repainted them and billed the coalition authority for thousands of dollars per month per forklift.
Mr. Battles, one of the company founders, ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a Republican in Rhode Island two years ago.
-------- colombia
Rightist Militias in Colombia Offer to Disarm 3,000 of Their Fighters
October 9, 2004
New York Times
By JUAN FORERO
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/09/international/americas/09colombia.html?pagewanted=all
BOGOTÁ, Colombia, Oct. 8 - A proposal by a coalition of rightist paramilitary groups to disarm 3,000 fighters was presented Friday to President Álvaro Uribe, a gesture that may reinvigorate deteriorating peace talks and lead to the largest one-time demobilization of insurgents in Colombia's 40-year conflict.
The 15,000-member United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, a coalition of outlaw antirebel forces responsible for drug trafficking and mass killings, described its offer as a "great act of faith." The announcement, made Thursday, came days after the magazine Semana released transcripts of disarmament talks that showed them near collapse.
Diplomats and experts on Colombia's conflict reacted cautiously to the development. They say there is no legal framework for the demobilization of top commanders or a plan to reincorporate 3,000 former fighters into Colombian society by the end of the year, as proposed.
"The government cannot just tell them to demobilize without telling them what they're demobilizing into," said Sergio Jaramillo, director of Ideas for Peace, a policy analysis group in Bogotá. "It is imperative that a law be passed, quickly, so people know what the terms of reference are."
The talks, which officially began July 1, have in recent weeks exposed the extent to which several paramilitary units control northern Colombia, including lucrative cocaine-trafficking routes and businesses where drug profits are laundered.
Through its infiltration of Colombian institutions, including the security forces, regional governments and even Congress, the group has a level of power that even Colombia's most notorious drug trafficker, the late Pablo Escobar, never had.
"They're the most effective cartel in Colombian history," said one high-ranking Western diplomat.
For Mr. Uribe, a disarmament deal with the paramilitary forces is central to maintaining his high popularity and winning support for legislation that would let him run for reelection in 2006.
The paramilitary forces, though, have shown little willingness to give in to demands that they pay in jail time and reparations for war crimes while handing over huge tracts of land obtained through drug money or illegal seizures.
Instead, the groups have extended their presence in more than a third of Colombia's 1,100 municipalities, with nearly 30 mayors and 400 town council members openly expressing sympathy. Though paramilitary commanders claim to have called a unilateral cease-fire, the government's human rights ombudsman has identified 342 violations in 23 months, including assassinations of union leaders and mass killings of Indians.
"There have been so many blows to the talks lately," said Adam Isacson, a senior analyst at the Washington-based Center for International Policy who closely tracks Colombia's war. "They had to do something to show that these talks are viable, but this disarmament is just a pledge and a promise."
The Semana tapes showed paramilitary leaders in a state of near panic over the possibility of being extradited to the United States on drug charges. But in the tapes, Luis Carlos Restrepo, the government's peace negotiator, is heard assuring commanders that the government would try shielding them from extradition, and from facing war crimes trials in the International Criminal Court.
Mr. Restrepo also plays down reports of killings inside a 142-square-mile safe haven in northern Colombia that the government ceded to the paramilitary groups - sharply contrasting with how Colombia's government reacts to reports of killings in rebel-held territories.
-------- iraq
British Hostage Beheaded in Iraq
Video, Family Statement Confirm Slaying;
U.S. Strike on Fallujah Kills 11 Iraqis
By Steve Fainaru and Karl Vick
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, October 9, 2004; Page A23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17349-2004Oct8.html
BAGHDAD, Oct. 8 -- A British engineer abducted with two American contractors three weeks ago was beheaded by his captors, according to a videotape of the slaying and comments from the victim's family.
The graphic video showing the slaying of Kenneth Bigley, 62, followed the same pattern as the beheadings of his colleagues, Eugene "Jack" Armstrong of Hillsdale, Mich., and Jack Hensley of Marietta, Ga., on Sept. 20 and Sept. 21. Bigley was shown seated in an orange jumpsuit before six black-clad insurgents of Monotheism and Jihad, the organization headed by the Jordanian militant Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Reuters news agency reported.
After reading a statement, one of the insurgents is seen drawing a knife from his belt and cutting off Bigley's head while three others hold him down. The group said the British government had failed to meet its demand to release all female prisoners held by occupying forces at two military prisons in Iraq.
"We can confirm that the family has received absolute proof that Ken Bigley was executed by his captors," Bigley's family said in a statement released by the British Foreign Office.
"We will always remember Ken for his love, compassion and, above all, his 'Liverpool' sense of humor," the statement said. "He was a truly wonderful father, husband, brother and son. The loss to our family . . . is immeasurable. The horror of these final days will haunt us forever."
In London, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw disclosed that the British Embassy in Baghdad had been approached four days ago by an unidentified intermediary and that messages had been exchanged with Bigley's abductors. But Straw said the captors had stuck to their demands that all female Iraqi prisoners be released, even though British authorities had no authority over the two women who remain in custody. Straw said the government had adhered to its policy of not negotiating with the captors.
"We believed, and still believe, that the policy we set out was the right one," he said at a news conference. Still, he insisted, "we did everything that we possibly could."
After the two Americans were killed, videos posted on the Internet showed Bigley pleading with Prime Minister Tony Blair to agree to the kidnappers' demands. On Friday, however, Bigley's family said it believed that "our government did all it possibly could to secure the release of Ken in this impossible situation. It could be that the fate of Ken, Eugene and Jack was sealed from Day One. We will never know."
However, one of Bigley's brothers, Paul, wrote that Blair had "blood on his hands" in a statement to the Stop the War Coalition, a British group that opposes the conflict, news agencies reported.
Blair told reporters in London that he felt "utter revulsion at the people who did this, not just at the barbaric nature of the killing, but the way, frankly, they have played with him over the past few weeks."
Iraq's defense minister, meanwhile, said the country's interim government had reached an agreement that would enable Iraqi forces to enter the rebel-held city of Fallujah, where U.S. military officials say Zarqawi is based. The accord, struck with civic leaders in Fallujah, calls for insurgents there to give up heavy weapons and mandates a three-day halt to airstrikes there by U.S. forces, Reuters reported.
"The agreement includes a cease-fire on strikes on Fallujah for three days initially, followed by the entry of Iraqi forces without any intervention from multinational forces," Defense Minister Hazim Shalan told the London-based Asharq al-Awsat newspaper. "The city's elders and men have welcomed this initiative, and now we are studying the technical steps to enter."
A U.S. airstrike on Fallujah early Friday killed 11 Iraqis and wounded 17, according to Reuters. A physician in the city said that a groom out on his wedding night was among the dead and that his new wife was among the wounded.
The U.S. military said in a statement that the "precision strike," which occurred at 1:15 a.m., targeted a safe house Zarqawi's associates used to plan operations. The statement did not mention casualties but said that the bombing campaign in Fallujah has involved more than a dozen airstrikes since September and that "a large percentage" of the leaders of Zarqawi's group had been "killed or captured following an intense and relentless campaign."
During Friday prayers at Um al-Qura Mosque in Baghdad, however, Ahmed Abdul Ghafour Samarrae, a local sheik, said: "Do you know what happened in Fallujah? A family had a wedding party which relatives and friends attended. Children were happy, people were celebrating and more visitors were coming. And suddenly, the warplanes of the occupier came and threw their bombs on the celebrants, the happy people, the children and the young men. Their bodies were cut, the blood was everywhere, and the married couple sank in a pool of blood."
The sheik's account could not be independently verified.
Negotiations to disband the militia loyal to the Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada Sadr also appeared to be progressing. Iraq's interim minister for national security, Qasim Dawood, issued a statement welcoming Sadr's "announcement . . . that his militia will disband their weapons, respect the authority and unit of the state and abide by the rule of law in Iraq."
Sadr has not made such a promise publicly, a significant omission given the personal loyalty he commands among many of his fighters, who also revere the memory of his father, an esteemed grand ayatollah.
Correspondent Glenn Frankel in London and special correspondents Bassam Sebti and Khalid Saffar in Baghdad contributed to this report.
--------
HOSTAGES
Video Shows Beheading of Kidnapped British Engineer
October 9, 2004
By EDWARD WONG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/09/international/middleeast/09iraq.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 8 - A militant group released a video on Friday showing insurgents slicing off the head of a man identified as Kenneth Bigley, the British engineer who was kidnapped here last month and later pleaded with the British government to negotiate with his captors.
Mr. Bigley is the first Briton to be beheaded in a series of slayings of foreign hostages that began last spring. The militant group, One God and Jihad, posted a pair of Internet videos last month showing the decapitations of two American engineers kidnapped with Mr. Bigley from their home in central Baghdad.
Two videos of Mr. Bigley, 62, were later released in which the British engineer pleaded with Prime Minister Tony Blair to release all female prisoners in Iraq, a demand made by his captors.
Mr. Bigley's predicament ignited a political firestorm in England, where many residents of Liverpool, his hometown, and antiwar groups urged the government to negotiate. Mr. Blair refused, and little was heard of Mr. Bigley until Friday, when Abu Dhabi Television and Reuters both reported that they had received a video showing the killing of Mr. Bigley.
Mr. Bigley is shown sitting in an orange jumpsuit in front of six black-clad men and a wall with the black banner of One God and Jihad, led by the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Mr. Bigley pleads for his life, saying, "I'm a simple man, I want to live, I want my government's help," according to a journalist familiar with the video.
One of the masked men then reads a statement in Arabic accusing Mr. Blair of failing to free the female prisoners before pulling out a large knife and cutting off Mr. Bigley's head.
One God and Jihad also claimed responsibility for the beheading last May of Nicholas Berg, an American businessman, and the decapitation in June of Kim Sun Il, a South Korean translator. But none of the previous hostage incidents played out with as much national anguish and over as protracted a period of time as that of Mr. Bigley.
The militants cannily hit emotional chords in Great Britain, which has about 8,000 troops here, by first releasing a video of Mr. Bigley beseeching Mr. Blair, then one of him sitting inside a cage of chicken wire, looking weary and gaunt.
Philip Bigley, one of the victim's brothers, read a statement on national television in England defending Mr. Blair.
"We can confirm that the family has now received absolute proof that Ken Bigley was executed by his captors," he said. "The family here in Liverpool believe that our government did everything it possibly could to secure the release of Ken in this impossible situation."
Another brother, Paul, sent a statement to Stop the War Coalition, a British antiwar group that said Mr. Blair has "blood on his hands."
"Please, please stop the war and prevent other lives being lost," he said. "It is illegal. It has to stop."
Mr. Blair released a statement saying, "I feel utter revulsion at the people who did this. Not just at the barbaric nature of the killing, but the way, frankly, they played with the situation over the past few weeks."
The captors have shown a cold cinematic flair. At the end of the 11-minute video last month in which Mr. Bigley pleaded with Mr. Blair, they showed a series of title cards in Arabic and English on a black screen in which they asked whether a British civilian was worth anything to Blair. The last screen read, "Do leaders really care about their people?"
Jack Straw, the Britain's foreign minister, said on television that someone had approached the British Embassy in Baghdad earlier in the week and offered to be an intermediary with the militants.
The British government exchanged messages with the captors through this person, and the captors continued to demand that all women prisoners in Iraq be released.
Military commanders have said that only two women are being held in American prisons in Iraq, both scientists who once worked on Saddam Hussein's weapons programs, and that neither would be freed to meet the demands of One God and Jihad.
More than 150 foreigners have been kidnapped in Iraq since last April, most by bandits who then sell the captives to jihadist groups or to the victims' employers or countries. An industry has sprung up, spurring expatriates to barricade themselves in fortified homes and hotels, if not to leave the country altogether. The widespread fear has crippled reconstruction projects and hobbled foreign investment here.
The American military said a soldier with Task Force Danger was killed and another wounded when their patrol was attacked Friday morning around the town of Tuz. Another soldier died of wounds suffered in a roadside bomb explosion in southwestern Baghdad on Oct. 1. At least 1,063 American soldiers have died since the start of the war.
In the city of Ramadi, 60 miles west of Baghdad, insurgents blew up a building used by the Red Crescent, the American military said. Marines reported seeing four people videotaping the destruction of the building, and insurgents apparently rushed into a mosque for cover as marines arrived on the scene. The building was the third destroyed by insurgents since Sept. 29, the military said, with insurgents trying to blame American troops for the demolitions afterward.
Marines venturing through the streets of Ramadi, the seat of restive Anbar province, come under constant attack. American officials have said the city could be among the next to be seized in an offensive to drive insurgents from areas they use as bases of support. American commanders say the goal is to pacify as much of the country as possible to ensure a large voter turnout for scheduled elections in January, but many experts are voicing growing doubts about whether legitimate polls can be held given the rampant violence here.
The military said American soldiers in Baghdad stopped a truck carrying 1,500 155-millimeter artillery shells, the largest weapons seizure made by Task Force Baghdad.
Heather Timmons contributed reporting from London for this article.
-------- israel / palestine
Israelis Trudge Home, in Shock After Bombings
October 9, 2004
By STEVEN ERLANGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/09/international/middleeast/09mideast.html?pagewanted=all&position=
EILAT, Israel, Oct. 8 - Thousands of Israelis trudged by foot through the Taba border post on Friday, returning home like shocked refugees from a Sinai bloodied by the bombings of three tourist resorts on Thursday night, one of the largest and most skillfully executed terrorist attacks on Israelis in many years.
At least 29 people are dead, most of them Israelis but including some Egyptians and at least one Russian tourist, according to Israeli officials. More than 160 people were wounded, including 11 Russians and some Britons.
But the death toll is expected to rise as rescue workers from Egypt and Israel dig through the rubble of a collapsed 10-story section of the Taba Hilton hotel, which was hit first by a car bomb and then, as tourists fled, by a suicide bomber near the hotel's swimming pool.
Carrying children, luggage and beach paraphernalia across the border, Israelis mourned the loss of security in yet another beloved part of this region. One made the bitter joke that this was a "second exodus from Egypt.''
Carmit Nave, 26, said she had been on a beach within sight and sound of the car bombings at the two other bombing targets, the bungalow camps of Ras al-Sultan and Nuweiba, down the coast from the Hilton. She said she had often visited Sinai, which remained a popular, inexpensive vacation spot even after Israel returned it to Egypt in 1982. "For me, this is the last time,'' she said. "If someone doesn't want me to come, forget it.''
The Palestinian militant groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad said they had not carried out the bombings, and both reiterated their policy of attacking Israelis only at home. But Israel recently killed a Hamas leader in Damascus, for which Hamas promised retaliation.
Still, most political experts consider it unlikely that any Palestinian group would confront and embarrass the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, in such a fashion. Israeli officials speculated that an indigenous Egyptian radical group, perhaps with some affiliation to Al Qaeda or inspired by it, was responsible.
Egypt does have a history of radical Islamic groups, but it cracked down hard on them in years past. At the height of terrorist attacks in the country, in the early to mid-1990's, most were carried out by one of two main groups: the Islamic Group, consisting of followers of the blind cleric Omar Abdel Rahman, who is now serving a life sentence for inspiring a thwarted terrorist bombing plot in New York; and Egyptian Islamic Jihad, run by Ayman al-Zawahiri, now the second in command of Al Qaeda. An audiotape attributed to Mr. Zawahiri last week called for attacks against Israel and "crusader America."
A previously unknown pro-Qaeda group called Islamic Tawhid Brigades claimed responsibility for Thursday's attack on a Web site, Reuters reported. The claim, as well as one from another unknown group calling itself the World Islamist Group, could not be verified.
Aharon Zeevi-Farkash, Israel's chief of army intelligence, told an emergency cabinet meeting Friday that he thought the most likely author was Al Qaeda, with help from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. That group says it is a nonviolent organization, interested in change through political organization; Cairo disputes that.
The Egyptian foreign minister, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, said it was too early to say who had carried out the resort attacks. Egypt, which is heavily dependent on tourism, is expected by Israeli officials to move quickly to try to discover those responsible and to crack down to try to restore confidence.
Egyptian tourism has never quite from the last big terrorist incident there, an Islamic Jihad attack on tourists in Luxor in 1997, when 68 people died. Egypt also suffered from the general falloff in tourism after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The United States warned Americans on Friday to avoid travel to the resorts along Egypt's Sinai Peninsula north of Sharm el Sheikh.
Ziad Abu Amr, a moderate member of the Palestinian legislature in Gaza, said, "The Palestinian groups wouldn't do something like this to alienate their Egyptian friends.
"This should be seen in the broader context of the global war that President Bush talks about. It's a global war on both sides. If you continue to ignore the Palestinians, you can expect to see some kind of retaliation, if not from the Palestinians, then from others who uphold the Palestinian cause.''
The wounded from the three resorts poured into Joseftal Hospital here, a 60-bed unit with 34 doctors that treated more than 120 of the wounded , including 16 children and 13 medium to severe cases, a hospital official, Naomi Halevy, said. Doctors on vacation in Eilat volunteered, and others drove from hundreds of miles away to help.
There were many reports of bureaucratic and practical obstacles to rescue efforts. Kobi Zuza, an ambulance driver from Israel, was at the Taba Hilton two hours after the blast, around midnight. It took 90 minutes for the Egyptians to let him in, he said. "When I got to the hotel, the situation of the dead was shocking,'' he said. "There were bodies and bodies without legs and body parts floating in the swimming pool.''
Inside, he said, people were trapped and crushed by the collapsing wall, with an engine from the truck bomb burning in the lobby. "There was a woman trapped, and I couldn't get to her,'' he said, looking off into the bright desert sun. "We were afraid to pull her out because everything would have collapsed.''
On the way back to the hospital, Mr. Zuza said, the Egyptian border guards insisted on having the passports of the wounded. "People were bleeding and screaming in the ambulance, shouting that their documents were still in the hotel - and the guards then gave them forms to fill out,'' he said angrily.
Doron Kotler, an ambulance coordinator, said Israelis were not allowed to cross to reach Ras al-Sultan or Nuweiba until 4 a.m.
Shimon Romach, the Israeli fire and rescue commissioner, said his men had had to spend 20 minutes pushing their way through the border to get to the Taba Hilton and begin to extinguish the fire. "Egyptians were helping, but there was no professional Egyptian firefighters still,'' he said. One car bomb penetrated Ras al-Sultan, but another blew up outside the resort. Two Israelis were killed and 20 wounded.
Yael Ovadia, 25, and his friend, Moran, came to the hospital in Eilat with their arms around each other, their clothes covered in blood. Mr. Ovadia wore a T-shirt and tan shorts, all spattered with gore. "It's mostly the blood of other people,'' he said.
"I think it was a pickup truck and a Peugeot that blew up,'' Mr. Ovadia said. "We were staying on the beach, and there was a huge blast and a white light, and then everyone started to run, running and running and running.'' He and others spent the night by the water, waiting for the dawn, with no sign of any Egyptian police officers.
Yael, 24, an intern at a law office who did not want to give her last name, lay on a stretcher, her eyes red with smoke. She had come with two women friends, and remembered the warnings about possible attacks on Israelis in Sinai. "My parents told me not to go, and I told them that Tel Aviv wouldn't be any safer,'' she said. "Now I feel lucky. When I was on the beach, I didn't think I'd get out of there alive.''
The Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, praised Mr. Mubarak and the Egyptians for their cooperation in allowing Israeli rescue workers, including members of the Israeli Army, to cross into Egypt. He said he and Mr. Mubarak had also "agreed to continue cooperation in the ongoing struggle against terror.''
Mr. Sharon told his cabinet: "Terror does not distinguish between countries or human beings. Terror is global, and its goal is to strike at the free world. Therefore, there shall be no compromise with terror."
The Israeli Foreign Ministry issued a statement, saying: "Tens of thousands of Israelis who have chosen the Sinai coast as a place to spend the holidays - despite warnings about possible terrorist attacks - as well as thousands of their Egyptian hosts, reflect the strong and courageous will of those who seek peace in the Middle East.''
The terrorist attack, the statement continued, "is an assault on all those who search for peace, contentment, and calm in the Middle East,'' adding: "For Israel and Egypt, the Taba Hilton represents a bridge of understanding and peace. This despicable terrorist attack precisely on this symbol of peace is an attack on all those who look forward to a better future for the Middle East.''
At the Eilat hospital, Edward Svarts still had the key to room 311 of the Taba Hilton in his hand. His wife, Ina, had been hurt by falling debris, and their daughter, Shannon, 7, wandered aimlessly.
"I saw the engine of the bomber's car burning in the lobby,'' he said. "Everything was on fire. We saw our car completely crushed from the lobby. We walked out through a hole in the wall.''
Mr. Svarts began to breathe shallowly, pale and sweaty. "I saw plenty of small children dead,'' he said. "It was horrible, horrible.'' Israeli troops killed four armed Palestinians in the Gaza Strip on Saturday as they pressed an offensive trying to stop militants from firing rockets, Reuters reported. Witnesses said two fighters from Hamas were killed in a gun battle at Beit Hanoun, one of the main launching grounds for the rocket attacks.Two Palestinian policemen were killed in an earlier missile strike on the refugee camp of Khan Younis, witnesses said.
Mona El-Naggarcontributed reporting from Taba, Egypt, for this article, and Neil MacFarquhar from Beirut.
-------- mideast
Symbol of peace becomes a mass grave
THE SCOTSMAN
Sat 9 Oct 2004
BEN LYNFIELD IN TABA,
ALEX MASSIE IN WASHINGTON AND
MIKE THEODOULOU
http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=1175032004
EGYPT'S Taba Hilton was not just a hotel, it was a symbol of the peaceful relations between Israel and its largest Arab neighbour.
Yesterday, as orange-helmeted Israeli soldiers dug through the rubble for corpses, that symbol was wrecked.
One side of the ten-storey hotel had been blown off by the massive car bomb that exploded late on Thursday night. Carpets and insulation hung from the gaping wound. A spiral staircase jutted into the air, leading nowhere.
"Every time we find someone the first thing we do is call the doctor to see if they're alive or not," said Major Yuval Labhman, a leader of the rescue effort. But yesterday no-one was found alive, only seven corpses.
Ali Hisham, president of an Egyptian investment association, predicted the area's economy would be devastated. "Next time the Israelis will think a hundred times before they come here," he said.
Israel had warned its citizens to stay away from the area a month ago following strong hints that terrorists were planning an attack there.
Despite the warnings, up to 10,000 Israelis were in Sinai for the end of the Jewish harvest holiday of Sukkot.
But as the death toll yesterday reached 26, with at least 30 people missing, feared buried in the rubble, thousands of holidaymakers poured back over the border into Israel.
Three previously unknown groups, at least one citing links to al-Qaeda, claimed responsibility for the attacks. While none of the claims was confirmed, analysts and security chiefs agreed Osama bin Laden's terror network was the most likely suspect.
Thursday's triple bomb attack - two devices exploded on beaches further south on the Sinai Peninsula - came a week after an audiotape attributed to the al-Qaeda deputy leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, called for attacks against Israel and "crusader America".
Israel's deputy defence minister, Zeev Boim, said the attacks appeared to be the work of "international terror groups like al-Qaeda or branches of it".
Experts agreed, saying the choice of "soft targets" and the use of co-ordinated attacks bore the hallmarks of al-Qaeda.
Hamas, the main Palestinian faction behind suicide attacks that have killed hundreds of Israelis inside the Jewish state and in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, denied any role in the Egyptian explosions.
Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, yesterday vowed there would be "no compromising" with terror. "It will be fought with every means possible without restraint," he said.
The prospect of an Israeli response to the bombings raises the stakes for all concerned in the war on terror, as previously al-Qaeda and its affiliates have not targeted Israelis.
However, if Israel were to become a frontline player in the battle to vanquish al-Qaeda and its brand of Wahhabist extremism, the prospects for a wider conflagration in the Middle East seem increased. Israel has provided intelligence support for the United States but has not been an open partner in the fight against al-Qaeda.
Mr Sharon's words suggest Israel will insist upon the right to strike at terrorist targets wherever they may be found - be it in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iran or elsewhere - raising the prospect of the US and Israel co-operating to target individual terror chiefs across the Middle East.
"Terrorism doesn't distinguish between countries or peoples. Terrorism is global and its goal is to attack the free world; therefore, there can be no compromise with terrorism. It must be fought relentlessly, in every way possible," Mr Sharon said.
"Egypt needs to be worried. Al-Qaeda is an enemy of moderate Muslims as well as of Jews and Americans," said Danielle Pletka, the vice-president of foreign and defence studies at the American Enterprise Institute. "They need to recognise there is a common enemy."
Unless countries such as Egypt wake up to the threat Islamic fundamentalism poses to regimes such as President Mubarak's, "they will reap the whirlwind", she added.
-------- nato
NATO military chief criticises member states over Afghanistan
BERLIN (AFP)
Oct 09, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041009125309.oesrijyr.html
NATO's military chief has criticised the failure of its member states to contribute troops to the security operation in Afghanistan, in an interview to be published Sunday in a German newspaper.
"I cannot be satsified with the attitude shown by NATO members to contributing to the (International Security and Assistance Force-ISAF) mission in Afghanistan," General Harald Kujat, chairman of the alliance's military committee, told the Sunday newspaper Bild am Sonntag.
"Each member of NATO should contribute in line with its abilities."
NATO has some 9,000 troops in Afghanistan, after boosting numbers in the run-up to Saturday's presidential election -- backing up the 17,000 mostly US soldiers in the country.
ISAF's role, under a United Nations mandate, has been since 2001 to guarantee security in the Afghan capital Kabul and some other areas in liaison with the local authorities.
But Kujat, a German, said progess was slow and the task would take another five years at least.
"There are still attacks being carried out by the Taliban, even the al-Qaeda terrorist network is still operating in the country," Kujat said.
He warned against a premature withdrawal of ISAF troops, for fear that "fighting between Afghan militias could break out again, at worst the Taliban could even reconquer the north, which would mean the return of Afghanistan to the darkest era of the Middle Ages."
-------- prisoners of war
ABU GHRAIB
Inmates Were Reportedly Kept Off Books to Speed Transfer
October 9, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/09/international/middleeast/09abuse.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Oct. 8 - The actions of the Central Intelligence Agency in keeping inmates at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq off official rosters appeared to have been intended to speed their transfer to sites outside Iraq, where they would not be protected by the Geneva Conventions, the former commander of the joint interrogation center at the prison has told Army investigators.
The allegation by Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, in testimony in February, was included in hundreds of pages of secret documents released Friday by the Center for Public Integrity. Colonel Jordan said the approach had been authorized under an unwritten agreement between the C.I.A. and Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the top military intelligence officer at the prison. The center said it had obtained the documents from a journalist, Osha Gray Davidson, a contributor to Rolling Stone magazine.
Two Army generals told Congress last month that at the C.I.A.'s request, Army jailers had failed to register dozens of detainees at Abu Ghraib in order to hide them from Red Cross inspectors. But Colonel Jordan said in his testimony that the C.I.A.'s purpose had been to avoid anything that might have slowed moving them.
"They would not put them in the regular detainee process where you get fingerprinted, cause once a detainee did that, you're kinda in there three to six to eight months," Colonel Jordan said in his testimony, in Camp Doha, Kuwait, on Feb. 21.
He went on to use an abbreviation for "other government agency," a term used in military circles to refer to the C.I.A.: "The O.G.A. folks wanted to be able to pull somebody in 24, 48, 72 hours if they had to get 'em to Gitmo, do what have you."
In the past, American officials have insisted that no prisoners from Iraq were ever transferred to the American detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, which is known as Gitmo. They have acknowledged two cases in which prisoners captured were transferred out of Iraq and then returned, but they have declined to comment on whether there might have been others.
The United States has said all prisoners captured in Iraq were covered under the Geneva Conventions. Prisoners held by the United States in Guantánamo and some other facilities, including those in Afghanistan and some secret locations, have not been granted the same protection.
A C.I.A. spokesman would not comment on Colonel Jordan's remarks, and a lawyer for Colonel Jordan also declined comment.
Colonel Jordan, an Army reservist, is among the military intelligence officers identified by Army investigators as sharing in responsibility for the abuses at Abu Ghraib.
An Army report by Gen. Paul J. Kern and others criticized Colonel Pappas in particular for failing to challenge the C.I.A. practice of keeping detainees off the books.
In 185 pages of testimony, Colonel Jordan also referred to the death at Abu Ghraib of an unregistered detainee who had been brought to the prison by C.I.A. officers. Colonel Jordan said he reminded Colonel Pappas at the time that it would have been better to have a written agreement with the C.I.A. about the handling of such prisoners, and he said the colonel had responded: "Well, if I go down, I'm not going down alone. The guys from Langley are going down with me."
The prisoner had been hit in the head by members of the Navy Seal team that captured him; four Navy personnel have been charged in his death. A C.I.A. inspector general is reviewing that case and others, as part of several reviews of the agency's interrogation practices in Iraq, including the handling of so-called ghost detainees, C.I.A. officials say.
-------- un
U.N. Approves Anti-Terrorism Initiative
In 15-0 Vote, Security Council Urges Nations to Prosecute Offenders and Supporters
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 9, 2004; Page A26
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18641-2004Oct8.html
UNITED NATIONS, Oct. 8 -- The U.N. Security Council on Friday unanimously approved a resolution that expands the organization's fight against terrorism by urging the United Nations' 191 member states to prosecute and extradite anyone who supports or engages in terrorism.
The resolution, which passed 15 to 0, was introduced by Russia after Chechen militants staged an attack on a school in Beslan, Russia, that killed 338 people, more than half of them children. It marked the first time that the 15-nation council has committed to taking the fight against terrorists beyond al Qaeda, its associates and the Taliban.
The council's action came at the end of a particularly bloody week. More than 30 people were killed Thursday in a terrorist attack at a seaside resort in the Sinai frequented by Israeli tourists. A British civilian contract worker, Kenneth Bigley, was beheaded Friday by Islamic militants in Iraq.
The new resolution was co-sponsored by the United States, France, Germany, Britain, Spain and Romania.
John C. Danforth, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said the council "has pussyfooted around" its obligation to confront all terrorists for too long.
Friday's resolution, he said, "states quite clearly that the intentional targeting of civilians for death or serious bodily injury are criminal and never justifiable. The alternative position is that some 'root causes' may, from time to time, justify terrorists. The resolution, which we have adopted, states very simply that the deliberate massacre of innocents is never justifiable in any cause. Never."
The Security Council first moved to sanction al Qaeda and the Taliban government in Afghanistan after the 1998 terrorist bombings of U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. It expanded the scope of those sanctions after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, compelling countries around the world to cooperate in the effort to battle al Qaeda, its associates and remnants of the Taliban government driven from power by the United States.
The Russian initiative initially faced intense resistance from the council's Islamic countries, Pakistan and Algeria, which feared that the effort could be used to suppress groups, including the Palestinians and Kashmiri militants, struggling against what they consider occupying powers. But Russia's U.N. ambassador, Andrey Denisov, won their support by softening two key provisions that would have established a universal definition of a terrorist act and a U.N. list of international terrorists.
The resolution states that "criminal acts, including against civilians, committed with the intent to cause death or serious bodily injury, or taking of hostages, with the purpose to provoke a state of terror . . . are under no circumstances justifiable by considerations of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious or other similar nature."
But in a key compromise, the resolution applies only to a series of international conventions that outlaw specific terrorist acts, such as hijacking airliners, but do not provide a universal definition of terrorism that could be used to sanction groups that use suicide bombers against civilian targets. It will also create a compensation fund for victims of terrorism and establish a committee to explore ways to crack down on all terrorists.
After Friday's vote, Turkey's U.N. ambassador, Umit Pamir, told the council on behalf of the Organization of the Islamic Conference that he was "happy" with the resolution.
"It doesn't open any new doors," added Pakistan's U.N. ambassador, Munir Akram. "We ought not, in our desire to confront terrorism, erode the principle of the legitimacy of national resistance that we have upheld for 50 years."
Still, Danforth and Denisov insisted that they will continue efforts in the terrorism committee to create a broader list of terrorists that could include armed groups from Chechnya to Spain, even if no direct link to al Qaeda is established. "I think it sets in motion a process in which a list is going to be created," Danforth said.
--------
THE SANCTIONS
Report Cites U.S. Profits in Sale of Iraqi Oil Under Hussein
October 9, 2004
By JUDITH MILLER and ERIC LIPTON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/09/international/middleeast/09sanctions.html?oref=login
WASHINGTON, Oct. 8 - Major American oil companies and a Texas oil investor were among those who received lucrative vouchers that enabled them to buy Iraqi oil under the United Nations oil-for-food program, according to a report prepared by the chief arms inspector for the Central Intelligence Agency.
The 918-page report says that four American oil companies - Chevron, Mobil, Texaco and Bay Oil - and three individuals including Oscar S. Wyatt Jr. of Houston were given vouchers and got 111 million barrels of oil between them from 1996 to 2003. The vouchers allowed them to profit by selling the oil or the right to trade it.
The other individuals, whose names appeared on a secret list maintained by the former Iraqi government, were Samir Vincent of Annandale, Va., and Shakir al-Khafaji of West Bloomfield, Mich., according to the report by the inspector, Charles A. Duelfer.
The fact that these companies and individuals received oil from Iraq does not mean they did anything illegal, experts on the program said. Such allocations may have been proper if the individuals and companies received appropriate United Nations approval.
In interviews on Friday, spokesmen for the oil companies and for the El Paso Corporation, which assumed control of the assets of a company, Coastal Corporation, once run by Mr. Wyatt, said the transactions had been legal. But each confirmed that they had received subpoenas from a federal grand jury in New York, which is investigating "transactions in oil of Iraqi origin" as part of the oil-for-food program, according to a federal financial filing by El Paso.
The largest of the allocations went to Mr. Wyatt, who the list said had received allocations totaling 74 million barrels. At the profit rates of 15 cents to 85 cents per barrel that were reported in the arms inspector's study, he could have earned $23 million. The names of the American companies and citizens who benefited from the vouchers were not included in the published report prepared by the Iraq Survey Group that was released Wednesday by the C.I.A., since the names of American individuals cannot be publicly disclosed under privacy laws. But the names were contained in unredacted copies given to the White House and to several Congressional committees. A copy of the unedited list was shown to The New York Times.
Tony Fratto, a Treasury Department spokesman, said United States sanctions on Iraq had prohibited American companies and individuals from interacting directly with Iraqi officials. But the oil dealers were permitted to get special authorization from the federal government to bid on United Nations contracts under the oil-for-food program. He said the agency was "actively investigating" whether the American entities and people circumvented that requirement.
Reid Morden, the staff director of the Independent Inquiry Committee, the United Nations-appointed panel headed by the former United States Federal Reserve chairman, Paul A. Volcker, said his committee too was "reviewing" the new report "to see if it helps us with our investigation."
The oil-for-food program, which was started in 1996, was intended to allow Iraq, in a closely monitored way, to sell enough oil so that the country would have the resources to buy food, medicine and to maintain certain critical public facilities.
The program was abused when Saddam Hussein intervened, personally selecting individuals and companies to receive oil allocations. The allocations, also called vouchers, could be sold so that the recipient approved by Mr. Hussein did not have to trade the oil but could simply profit from the transaction.
Ultimately, Mr. Hussein began to demand kickbacks in return for these oil allocations, a requirement that some oil dealers were willing to honor given the large profit margins associated with oil trade.
The proceeds may have been used by Mr. Hussein to pay for purchases of arms in violation of sanctions, the report says.
Among American companies and citizens, Mr. Wyatt, who did not respond to messages left on Friday at his Houston office, was by far the largest recipient of oil allocations, as recorded on the secret list maintained by the Iraqi government, the report says.
For decades, Mr. Wyatt has been a hard-driving - and controversial - oil merchant who did business with Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya and helped rescue hostages in Kuwait. In 2000, his Coastal Corporation merged with the El Paso Corporation. Mr. Wyatt is still a large shareholder in El Paso, but he is not an executive with the company, which last month received the subpoena related to the Iraqi oil deals.
Mr. Khafaji and Mr. Vincent, who both received much smaller allocations in the secret Iraqi list than Mr. Wyatt, could not be reached for comment. Mr. Vincent is an Iraqi-born businessman who headed Phoenix International.
Mr. Khafaji financed a controversial film about Iraq by Scott Ritter, the former United Nations arms inspector who opposed the American-led invasion of Iraq.
Rep. Christopher Shays, the Connecticut Republican who heads the subcommittee on government reform, which has been investigating the oil-for-food program, said his panel would "follow the list wherever it takes us."
"We want a full explanation of the involvement of all American oil companies and individuals who were involved in a thoroughly corrupt program," he said.
Representative Henry J. Hyde, Republican of Illinois, chairman of the International Relations Committee that is also investigating the seven-year oil-for-food program, said in a statement that the Iraq Survey Group's report showed the "full breadth of Saddam Hussein's corruption and manipulation of the U.N. Oil for Food program."
Scott Shane contributed reporting for this article.
-------- us
Naval Academy Policies On Sex Assault Studied
By Christian Davenport
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 9, 2004; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18695-2004Oct8.html
A government task force began a review this week of how the U.S. Naval Academy handles reports of sexual assault and harassment by spending two days at the elite Annapolis school interviewing students and faculty.
The committee, which is also looking at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, was created by Congress after another committee last year found that dozens of sexual assault reports at the Air Force Academy in recent years went unheeded by the school's administration.
Although Navy Vice Adm. Gerald L. Hoewing told reporters yesterday that the committee does not expect to find anything so egregious, "there is still some element of sexual harassment and sexual violence at the military academies. And our job is to drive that number down to zero, because our nation deserves it. We're going to do everything we can to do that."
The Defense Task Force on Sexual Harassment and Violence at the Military Service Academies is part of a broader effort to tackle the problem of sexual harassment in the military. Recently, the Department of Defense has launched a study of sexual assaults among active-duty service members, the Guard and the Reserve. It is also considering harsher punishment for sex crimes under military law.
"Sexual harassment and sexual violence are an anathema to honorable service to our nation," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said in a statement. "We must ensure that the environment within the department . . . is not conducive to sexual misconduct."
Hoewing's committee, which will issue a report to Congress within a year, is not investigating any one incident, he said. It is studying the overall culture of the academies, gauging attitudes toward sexual harassment and finding ways the institutions can best prevent such problems.
Made up of both military personnel and civilians, the committee plans to meet with counselors and school administrators to see what kind of training students receive and what procedures are in place to handle incidents. The task force will also study how other universities handle the problem.
Hoewing said the committee plans to review past incidents, such as the case last year at the Naval Academy in which a midshipman was charged with raping a 19-year-old female schoolmate. The rape charge was dropped, but the student who was charged was expelled for having "unduly familiar relationships" with two midshipmen of lower rank.
Hoewing said task force members have reviewed "a high-level summary" of reported incidents during the last few years at the academies, but he would not discuss them.
Task force members have already met with more than a hundred midshipmen and cadets. Those meetings, though cursory, left Hoewing feeling "optimistic" about how such problems are handled. Both academies "have a very extensive training program on identification of what is sexual harassment and what is sexual assault," he said.
Committee member Delilah Rumburg, executive director of the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape, said she was heartened by the willingness of the academies to participate in the program. And she said the military's willingness to open its doors to outside experts is an encouraging sign that it is taking the issue seriously.
"We are going to take a hard look at everything," she said.
--------
Rumsfeld Says More Troops May Be Asked For
By ROBERT BURNS
AP Military Writer
Oct 9, 2004
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/R/RUMSFELD?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
MANAMA, Bahrain (AP) -- Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld indicated on Saturday that U.S. commanders in Iraq may yet decide they need more U.S. troops to ensure a viable national election in January.
"To the extent that's appropriate or needed, obviously that makes sense," Rumsfeld told reporters flying with him from Washington to this Persian Gulf island that is headquarters for the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet. He said he preferred that any troop additions be provided by other countries.
The United States now has about 135,000 troops in Iraq.
As the election draws near, the fear is that insurgents, hoping to disrupt progress toward democracy and create more chaos, will attack polling places.
Rumsfeld arrived at Bahrain International Airport on an overnight flight from Washington and was greeted by Bahraini officials.
Later Saturday Rumsfeld planned to fly aboard an aircraft carrier, the USS John F. Kennedy, in the Gulf to meet with his counterparts from about 18 countries considered allies in the war on terrorism. They include Albania, Bahrain, Bulgaria, Hungary, Macedonia, Mongolia, Qatar and Ukraine.
The minister of defense in Iraq's interim government, Hazim al Shalaan, also was scheduled to attend the rare, if not unprecedented, gathering at sea to talk about political and military developments in Iraq.
While aboard the carrier, Rumsfeld and his counterparts were to observe flight operations and receive a briefing on the Iraq situation in a secure video teleconference with Gen. George Casey in Baghdad. Casey is commander of Multinational Force-Iraq, the top military command in the country.
Rumsfeld flew to Bahrain aboard an Air Force E4-B, a Boeing 747 modified to serve as an airborne command post from which the secretary of defense could communicate with U.S. forces in a nuclear war. On long overseas flights the National Airborne Operations Center saves time because it can be refueled in the air.
In an interview aboard the plane, Rumsfeld was asked whether Casey and his boss, Gen. John Abizaid, the commander of all U.S. forces in the Middle East, had asked for more troops. Rumsfeld did not reply directly. He alluded to the continuing and largely fruitless effort to find countries that would send forces to provide security for an expanded United Nations presence in Baghdad.
He noted that the United States also had sought foreign contributions of troops to support Saturday's election in Afghanistan. "In the case of Afghanistan we went ahead and put in some extra forces ourselves," he added, referring to the recent decision to send in troops of the 82nd Airborne Division.
He noted that the NATO alliance is helping U.S. and Afghan troops provide security for the Afghan elections, and he forecast that the extra forces would be needed for at least three weeks to ensure that ballots get to central locations for counting.
In Iraq, he said, the first choice for getting extra security is to persuade other countries to contribute rather than sending more American troops.
"To the extent other countries come in and take some of that responsibility, then it might not be necessary. The thing we've got going in Iraq that is very good is the fact that we've got a steady, growing number of security forces because the Iraqi security forces have been growing at a good clip."
He said it was possible that there would be 40,000 more Iraqi security forces trained and equipped to join the counterinsurgency by January. There currently are an estimated 100,000, many of whom are operating alongside American troops. Besdies the 135,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, other coalition partners - mainly Britain, Poland and South Korea - have another 25,000.
Rumsfeld declined to comment on a New York Times report Friday that the Pentagon had identified 20 to 30 Iraqi insurgent-dominated towns that must be returned to Iraqi government control before the election in January.
"The goal is to assess the situation on the ground - it's not static, it changes," he said, "and to recognize the reality that it's different in different parts of the country at different times, and continue to fashion plans that address the real world. The enemy is not without a brain."
He described the leaders of the insurgency as adaptive.
"They react to whatever is happening and they try to take advantage of it. They look for opportunities, they look for weaknesses, and so do we," he said.
On a later leg of his trip Rumsfeld is scheduled to visit Romania to attend a NATO defense ministers meeting.
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Defense bill would kill tanker lease deal
October 09, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/business/20041008-110450-4016r.htm
The Boeing Co. would lose the $23 billion deal it won last year to lease and sell aircraft refueling tankers to the Air Force, while a plan to close some military bases would go forward, under a nearly $450 billion defense bill moving toward approval in the House.
The measure would kill the leasing aspect of the tanker deal, but would allow the Air Force to buy 100 Boeing 767 planes for use as tankers. However, that purchase could occur only after several studies are completed.
Industry analysts said last spring that the Pentagon had effectively killed the leasing deal because of mounting complaints that the pact had been tilted in Boeing's favor.
Those concerns were exacerbated last week when a former top Pentagon procurement official was sentenced to nine months in prison for discussing a job with Boeing while overseeing the tanker deal. The official, Darleen Druyun, said she inflated the price of the tankers as a "parting gift" to Boeing before joining the company as an executive.
The bill as a whole authorizes $447 billion for defense programs for the fiscal 2005 budget year that began Oct. 1. The legislation was awaiting final votes by the House and Senate.
Regarding the tanker deal, it was not clear yesterday whether the Air Force would be required to hold a competition before buying the aircraft. The legislation would authorize spending $95 million for the tanker program in 2005.
Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican, the leading critic of plans to lease or buy the tankers, said the bill "brings the Air Force's plan back to square one," with a "full and open competition in the traditional budget, procurement and authorization track."
But tanker deal supporters said the bill merely banned leasing the planes. No language in the compromise bill requires the Air Force to open up the deal to other bidders, said Rep. Norm Dicks, Washington Democrat. European-based EADS, the parent company of Airbus, has said it is interested in the tanker deal if the contract were reopened to competition.
"McCain has misstated this," Mr. Dicks said yesterday. "We're not going to lease any planes. We're going to buy 100, and we're going to buy them from Boeing."
The Air Force wants the planes to be built at Boeing's Everett, Wash., plant and modified for military use in Wichita, Kan.
The tanker plan has been on hold since last spring, when Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld ordered a six-month delay to allow completion of two new studies. Those reports are expected by early December.
Defense analysts say they believe the studies will recommend that the Pentagon replace the aging tanker fleet. They also think Boeing is still in the best position to win the contract. The bulk of the Air Force's refueling fleet consists of Boeing-built KC-135s. They average more than 44 years of age.
The bill includes a provision moving forward with base closings, rejecting House language that would have put that off until 2007. President Bush had threatened to veto the bill if the base closures were delayed.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- homeland security / national intelligence
Papers Show Confusion as Government Watch List Grew Quickly
October 9, 2004
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/09/politics/09nofly.html
WASHINGTON, Oct. 8 - The government's list of banned airline passengers has grown from just 16 names on Sept. 11, 2001, to thousands of people today amid signs of internal confusion and dissension over how the list is implemented, newly disclosed government documents and interviews showed Friday.
A transportation security official acknowledged in one internal memorandum that the standards used to ban passengers because of terrorism concerns were "necessarily subjective," with "no hard and fast rules."
More than 300 pages of internal documents, turned over by the Justice Department on Friday as part of a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, provide a rare glimpse inside the workings of the government's so-called no-fly list.
Federal officials have maintained tight secrecy over the list, saying little publicly about how it is developed, how many people are on it or how it is put into practice, even as prominent people like Senator Edward M. Kennedy have been mistakenly blocked from boarding planes.
The American Civil Liberties Union sued the federal government last year under the Freedom of Information Act on behalf of two San Francisco women who said they suspected their vocal antiwar protests led to their being banned from flying.
The Justice Department fought the release of information on the no-fly list on national security grounds, leading a federal judge in San Francisco to admonish government lawyers for making "frivolous claims" to justify the unusual secrecy. He ordered the government to comply with the Freedom of Information Act, prompting the Justice Department to turn over the internal documents to the A.C.L.U. on Friday.
Federal officials said they could not discuss the documents Friday because of the pending lawsuit.
In general, said Brian Roehrkasse, spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, "we have taken numerous steps to refine the no-fly system, including better definition of the criteria for the watch list and putting in place an effective redress system that allows passengers who are mistakenly put on the list to be removed."
But Thomas R. Burke, a lawyer representing the A.C.L.U., said the documents raised "some very serious concerns about the criteria the government is using in developing the no-fly list and the internal miscommunication in implementing it."
In an internal e-mail message in May 2002, for instance, an F.B.I. supervisor, whose name was deleted, complained that the Transportation Security Administration had made the F.B.I. responsible for pursuing possible matches from the list but had failed to inform the bureau about changes in no-fly security directives.
"Despite my best efforts, the T.S.A. just motors along, and I and the agents are being whipped around the flagpole trying to do the right thing," the official wrote.
In another internal message in October 2002, an F.B.I. official in St. Louis cited difficulties in getting suspects put on the no-fly list and in coordinating different watch lists. The various watch lists "are not comprehensive and not centralized," said the official, whose name was also deleted. Some people "appear on one list but not the others. Some of the lists are old and not current. We are really confused."
Federal officials have been developing a master terrorist watch list to consolidate the no-fly list and nine others kept by different agencies. But a report last week by Clark K. Ervin, the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general, found serious coordination problems in that effort.
The documents released Friday show that the government's no-fly list as of Sept. 11, 2001, had only 16 names on it - fewer than the number of terrorists who hijacked the four airliners that day. Several investigations have criticized the government's failure to put two of the hijackers on watch lists even after their terrorist ties became known.
The no-fly list grew drastically after the attacks, and one document in Friday's material said the number of banned passengers ballooned to nearly 600 within about two months. Another 365 names were put on a secondary list that allows them to board a plane after getting closer scrutiny. The two lists had grown to about 1,000 names by December 2002, one document showed.
The documents do not give a current total, but a law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Friday the names on the no-fly and secondary flight lists total about 10,000, with the no-fly list accounting for "a few thousand." Another government official corroborated that account.
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Faulty 'No-Fly' System Detailed
By Sara Kehaulani Goo
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 9, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A18735-2004Oct8?language=printer
The federal government's "no-fly" list had 16 names on it on Sept. 11, 2001. Today, it has more than 20,000.
The list, which identifies suspected terrorists seeking to board commercial airplanes, expanded rapidly even though the government knew that travelers were being mistakenly flagged, according to federal records. The records detail how government officials expressed little interest in tracking or resolving cases in which passenger names were confused with the growing number of names on the list.
More than 2,000 people have complained to the Transportation Security Administration. Airlines, at one point, were calling the agency at least 30 times a day to say that they had stopped a passenger whose name was similar to one on the list but after further investigation was determined not to be a terror suspect, according to a TSA memo.
More than 300 pages of documents related to the no-fly and related lists were released late Thursday night by the TSA and the FBI in response to a federal court order. The American Civil Liberties Union had filed suit on behalf of Jan Adams and Rebecca Gordon, two peace activists who wanted to know why their names had turned up on a no-fly list.
The documents reveal early symptoms of what are now known to be flaws with the watch lists. Travelers who were flagged by the lists said they now foil the system by altering how their names are spelled on their tickets -- adding their middle initials, full middle names or titles, for example.
Government officials do not announce when they stop passengers actually on the lists. The only publicly known case involved Yusuf Islam, once known as the pop singer Cat Stevens, who was prevented last month from entering the country.
The information revealed by the documents is "not very comforting," said Thomas R. Burke, a San Francisco attorney representing the peace activists and the ACLU.
The TSA acknowledges that the system for checking passenger names for suspected terrorists needs fixing, and it plans to overhaul it in a new program called Secure Flight. The Justice Department declined to comment.
The false matches "underscore the need we have to get more information on passengers to adjudicate those that are not a risk," said Department of Homeland Security spokesman Brian Roehrkasse.
Every time a passenger books a ticket, the airline checks the traveler's name against two enormous government databases, or watch lists, of people the government believes pose a threat. The FAA created two lists in 2001: a no-fly list and a so-called selectee list, both of which airlines compare against reservation records. When the TSA was formed in 2002, it took over maintenance of the lists from the FAA. The no-fly list grew from 16 names supplied by the FBI in 2001 to 1,000 names by the end of 2002, according to the newly released TSA documents. There are now more than 20,000 names on the no-fly list, some which are aliases, according to a homeland security source who is not allowed to release such numbers. There are several thousand names on the selectee list, according to the source.
Internal TSA memos direct airlines to refuse boarding to a passenger on the no-fly list and to alert the local FBI. Travelers on the selectee list are to be directed to a law enforcement officer and put through additional security procedures in order to board the plane, the documents said.
Airlines declined to say exactly what kind of technology they use to match names. But the documents make clear that in the months after Sept. 11, carriers were having difficulty with the task. The Air Transport Association, the airline trade group, met with the TSA's top policy director in December 2002 to address the "false positives problem," according to a TSA memo.
"This has been such a headache for me," wrote one Alaska Airlines executive, whose name was redacted, in an e-mail to the TSA a week before the meeting. "Any solutions . . . would be greatly appreciated."
TSA officials wrote letters and e-mails of apology to passengers who complained of being mistakenly flagged by the lists. But in an internal memo, officials said there was little the agency could do.
"While a few carriers keep track of 'false positives' the majority do not," wrote Chad Wolf, now TSA's number-two policy official, in a December 2002 e-mail to agency legislative affairs official Cori Sieger. "Consequently, TSA does not have the ability to record this data nor is there a pressing need to do so."
Passengers are falsely flagged by the lists in such large numbers because of the kind of technology airlines use to compare the reservation lists to the watch lists, according to experts in name-matching technology. Each airline conducts the matches differently. Many major carriers use a system that strips the vowels from each passenger's name and assigns it a code based on the name's phonetic sound, according to the Air Transport Association.
The name-matching technology is "too simplistic for a very complex problem," said Jack Hermansen, co-founder of Language Analysis Systems Inc. in Herndon, a company that has a competing name-matching technology that factors in a name's cultural origin. "It's these accidental matches that cause the big problem."
The phonetic-code concept is traced back to a program called Soundex patented in 1918, which was used by Census Bureau officials to help sort out names that sounded similar but might be spelled differently. The name "Kennedy," for example, would be assigned the Soundex code K530, which is the same code assigned to Kemmet, Kenndey, Kent, Kimmet, Kimmett, Kindt and Knott, according to genealogy Web sites that use the technology. Today's systems are more sophisticated than Soundex, but they grew from the same origins, experts said.
"The reason this technology is used is you're really trying to protect against typing errors," said Steven Pollock, executive vice president at TuVox Inc., a company that sells speech-recognition software. "When someone types in a name, the problem and the challenge is people will spell names incorrectly. . . . Names are definitely the toughest things to get [right], no doubt about it."
But the phonetic coding systems tend to ensnare people who have similar-sounding names, even though a human being could tell the difference. Earlier this month, for example, Rep. Donald E. Young (R-Alaska), said he was flagged on the "watch list" when the airline computer system mistook him for a man on the list named Donald Lee Young.
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Schools, on Alert, Step Up Security Measures
October 9, 2004
By NICK MADIGAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/09/education/09schools.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1097352016-wPyXWUXDWhYxv3mQBtaskA
LOS ANGELES, Oct. 8 - Revelations that a computer disk found in Iraq had diagrams and photographs of some American schools have prompted school officials in several states to review security procedures and assure anxious parents that they are doing all they can to protect their children.
While Homeland Security and F.B.I. officials insisted Friday that they did not believe the material found in Iraq represented a serious threat, some school officials conceded that news of the discovery had unnerved parents already rattled by the school siege in Beslan, Russia, five weeks ago in which 330 people died, 172 of them children.
In a letter sent Friday to parents in San Diego, one of several school districts mentioned on the computer disk, school officials acknowledged that "potential terrorist threats" had led to "increased anxiety in our community about the safety and security of our schools."
But the letter went on to say that law enforcement agencies had concluded that "there is no specific threat to our schools and students here in San Diego." Other school districts issued similar statements.
American military officials said the disk, discovered in Iraq in July, had photographs and information about schools in California, New Jersey, Florida, Georgia, Michigan and Oregon, much of it apparently downloaded from readily available United States government Web sites.
The person found with the disk was an Iraqi national with ties to the Baath Party, which ruled Iraq under Saddam Hussein, according to an unidentified senior law enforcement official quoted on Friday by The Associated Press. Some newspaper reports said the man had connections to terrorism and the insurgency that is fighting United States coalition forces in Iraq, but American officials said on Friday that they have not established that he had any terrorist connections. The officials said the man may have been downloading the information as part of a civil redevelopment project for Iraqi schools.
The computer disk found in Iraq included lists of schools and transportation for students in Lee County, Fla., prompting officials there to send a letter Friday to 70 school principals asking them to review their security plans. The Lee County school superintendent, James Browder, said he was informed of the disk by F.B.I. and Florida Department of Law Enforcement officials.
"I asked if they felt we were in danger and they said no," Mr. Browder recalled. "They said this was informational."
William C. Mathews Jr., the superintendent of schools in Jones County, Ga., where about 5,300 students are registered, said Georgia Bureau of Investigation agents met with him on Sept. 27 and advised him to review the school system's security. Now, he said, all Jones County schools make sure doors are locked and that security people with working radios are on duty. In addition, he said, local law enforcement officers have been visible on campuses.
"We are probably safer now than we ever have been," Mr. Mathews said.
One parent in the district, Charles Newberry, who has a 16-year-old son at Jones County High School and a wife who teaches there, said he was surprised "that a small town like ours, away from everything, would be of any interest to anyone in Iraq."
"It's alarming to some degree that crazy people, if that's what they are, in Iraq are taking notice of a school or anything else in our community," said Mr. Newberry, a lawyer in Gray, near Macon.
In Monmouth County, N.J., parents gathered Friday evening at the Rumson-Fair Haven Regional High School in Rumson for a briefing from John Kaye, the county prosecutor.
Mr. Kaye said that after hearing on Sept. 16 about New Jersey's inclusion on the Iraq disk, he ordered the police chief to double patrols.
"Rumson is one of the wealthiest communities in the nation," Mr. Kaye said. "I guess if you were looking to terrorize a population this would be a good target. But on the same note, if you hit any school you are going to terrorize the entire nation."
Simona Boucek, a spokeswoman for the Salem-Keizer School District in Oregon, said the 38,000-student district was notified last month that information about its schools had been found in Iraq, but that it "in no way implied that there was any threat against us." Ms. Boucek said district officials had reviewed their Web site with an eye toward information that could be exploited by terrorists. "But," she asked, "who knows what a terrorist would find useful?"
On Friday, district and school officials received about 100 calls from parents. "Emotionally, it's just all across the board," Ms. Boucek said. "We just try to take each parent one at a time and calm them down and answer their questions."
Kelsey Lemons, 17, a student at Sprague High School in Salem, Ore., said of the possibility of a terrorist threat, "It's not really anything that I'm changing my lifestyle about. I think about it, but I usually feel pretty safe and I think everything's probably be being done that can be done."
Reporting for this article was contributed by Terry Aguayo from Miami, Jason George from Jersey City, Ariel Hart from Atlanta, Eric Lichtblau from Washington and Eli Sanders from Seattle.
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Iraq Disk Prompted Warning to Schools
No Attack Plans Found, Officials Say
By John Mintz and Kimberly Edds
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, October 9, 2004; Page A06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18703-2004Oct8.html
The FBI advised officials in as many as eight cities last month to tighten security in schools after U.S. soldiers raiding an apartment in Iraq seized computer disks containing information about those towns' school systems that was taken from Web sites, government officials said yesterday.
U.S. officials said they remain uncertain whether the Iraqi whose computer disks contained the school information was involved in terrorist activity, and stressed that the government has no evidence of a plot to attack any schools in this country.
Officials said they decided to issue the warnings to the school systems in New Jersey, Florida, Georgia, California and Oregon after the siege at a school in Beslan, Russia, by Chechen guerrillas last month ended with 338 deaths, half of them children. The computer disks had been discovered in Iraq several weeks before that, officials said.
In reviewing the information seized in Iraq, "officials didn't discover any direct threat, and the reason for collecting the school information is unknown," said Brian Roehrkasse, spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security.
The warnings were issued to officials in San Diego; Fort Myers, Fla.; Salem, Ore.; Gray, Ga.; Birch Run, Mich.; Rumson, N.J.; and a few other towns, officials said.
Intelligence officials theorize that the Iraqi man who owned the computer was a Baathist official now working as a civic planner, according to a government representative. The Department of Homeland Security's intelligence division decided the appearance of the school information on the disk was not an indication of a threat, but the FBI decided to notify the school districts after the Beslan massacre, he said.
Officials with the San Diego schools were notified last month by the FBI that a disk containing a public U.S. Department of Education report on crisis planning was found in the possession of a man arrested in Iraq by U.S authorities. The report mentions San Diego city schools but does not include the emergency crisis plan of the school district or any individual school, district spokeswoman Peri Lynn Turnbull said.
While San Diego district officials said there were no specific threats against any of their 202 campuses, some parents were keeping their children home yesterday after increased local and national media attention regarding the disk.
"The unfortunate thing is that parents are very concerned," Turnbull said. "We want them to know that it is safe for them to send their children to school."
Mary Paulson, a spokeswoman for the school district in Salem, Ore., quoted FBI agents there as saying that Web pages showing the floor plans of some schools in other states had been discovered on the computer disk.
Earlier this week, the U.S. Department of Education sent out an FBI-Homeland Security bulletin to all school districts in the country urging that they review their security procedures in light of the Beslan killings.
For nearly two years, the Education and Homeland Security departments have offered security tips to school officials on strengthening security on their campuses. But yesterday an expert on school security, Kenneth S. Trump, said U.S. officials have failed to publicly stress the need for better school protection.
"This week I guess they're coming out of their posture of 'downplay and deny' that they've had for years," said Trump, who is based in Ohio. He said he has long recommended that schools hold more sophisticated drills in tandem with the police to prepare for emergencies and that school systems stop posting school floor plans on the Web.
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New Intelligence Chief Backed
But Reform Package Hinges on Congressional Negotiations
By Charles Babington and Helen Dewar
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, October 9, 2004; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18138-2004Oct8.html
The House voted yesterday to retool the nation's intelligence structure and immigration policies, creating the widely supported position of intelligence director while adopting contentious provisions that would make it easier to detain and deport illegal immigrants.
The 282 to 134 vote follows action in the Senate earlier this week approving a new national director and counterterrorism center to coordinate the nation's 15 intelligence-gathering agencies and anti-terrorism strategies. Those were top priorities of the commission that studied the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, a panel that spurred Congress to action with a hard-hitting report in July.
Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) is optimistic about the House and Senate agreeing on a compromise.
But the House and Senate versions of the intelligence reform legislation differ in many significant ways, and the two chambers must work out their differences before a final bill can emerge. The bill that overwhelmingly passed the Senate on Wednesday omits many House immigration and law enforcement provisions that prompted sharp debates.
If a handful of House and Senate negotiators can resolve all differences in the two extensive bills, the House and Senate will send a unified measure to President Bush for his signature, perhaps a few days before the Nov. 2 election.
The vote came as lawmakers struggled to complete work on a broad range of issues, including corporate tax cuts, homeland security spending, and drought and hurricane relief. Lawmakers had hoped to adjourn by the weekend and return home to campaign. But conflict in the Senate over the tax cut and a buyout for tobacco producers may force Congress to continue working well into next week.
Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) voiced optimism that the differences the two intelligence measures can be overcome.
"It is no surprise that the House and Senate have passed different bills," the two said in a joint statement. "They are different institutions. But there is much in common with these bills, and we believe that we can reconcile the differences quickly yet responsibly."
Several lawmakers, however, said it was unclear whether senators and House members can reconcile the two bills, given their many differences and the recent days of tough rhetoric, especially from House Republican leaders, suggesting little willingness to compromise.
"Some say that the real goal of the Republican leadership" is to produce a bill "that cannot be reconciled with the Senate bill before the election," Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.) said shortly before the House rejected, 223 to 193, her bid to substitute the Senate language for the House bill. The leaders of the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission have signaled they prefer the Senate version, while critiquing the House bill in diplomatic terms. The Senate bill passed 96 to 2, with all Republicans backing it.
Both House and Senate bills would create a national intelligence director to coordinate the activities of the CIA and several other intelligence agencies throughout the government. The Senate bill would authorize the director to "determine the annual budget" for intelligence agencies and to "control and manage" their accounts. The House bill would permit the director only to "develop and present to the president" a budget plan for the agencies.
Unlike the House bill, the Senate bill would declassify the annual amount spent on intelligence and create a civil liberties board to safeguard individuals' rights as the nation combats terrorism.
Yesterday's sharpest House debate focused on a provision that would have allowed the government to deport alien criminals and terror suspects to nations that might torture them. Many such suspects, backers said, have been released in the United States because a court ruling bars their deportation or long-term incarceration. The House amended the provision to allow the secretary of homeland security to detain such suspects indefinitely.
House members clashed on another question of expedited deportations. Current law allows agents to quickly deport illegal immigrants, without a judge's review, if they have been in this nation less than two years. The House bill would make the cutoff five years, expanding the pool of immigrants subject to such expedited deportations.
On the House bill's final passage, 213 Republicans and 69 Democrats voted aye, while eight Republicans, 125 Democrats and one independent voted no. Washington area lawmakers voting for the bill were Reps. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), Wayne T. Gilchrest (R-Md.) and Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.). Voting against it were Reps. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Albert R. Wynn (D-Md.).
The House bill postpones action on another major recommendation of the Sept. 11 commission: Revamping congressional oversight of intelligence. The Senate is weighing the issue, but efforts stalled yesterday because of a bitter fight -- and stubborn deadlock -- over unrelated issues such as disaster relief and tobacco regulation.
As of late yesterday, exasperated lawmakers were preparing for a rare weekend session and the possibility of remaining in session into next week.
Among those who moved to block action were Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who is angry over Republican plans to pay for disaster relief by slashing a farm conservation program he has championed, and Sens. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Mike DeWine (R-Ohio), who are demanding Food and Drug Administration regulation of tobacco as part of the buyout program.
Later, Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.) complaining about an extension of dairy subsidies opposed by western lawmakers, said the dairy dispute could prolong the session beyond Monday or Tuesday.
The approaching elections appeared to sharpen the divisions, with Republicans accusing Democrats of "obstructionist" tactics and Democrats accusing Republicans of pursuing a "special interest agenda" that thwarted bipartisan cooperation on key issues.
Before work stopped on the oversight plan, the Senate whittled away at the jurisdiction of a proposed new Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee by voting to leave some of the biggest components of the Department of Homeland Security under control of other committees. It has approved some strengthening of the select intelligence committee but rejected a recommendation of the Sept. 11 commission that it be given control over spending as well as policy for intelligence agencies.
Meanwhile, congressional negotiators on the 2005 defense authorization bill agreed to increase troop strength for the Army and Marines and push ahead with next year's round of military base closings. The bill is slated for approval by both chambers before Congress leaves for the elections.
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House Approves Intelligence Bill
October 9, 2004
By PHILIP SHENON and RACHEL L. SWARNS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/09/politics/09panel.html
WASHINGTON, Oct. 8 - The House adopted a Republican-sponsored bill on Friday that would restructure the nation's intelligence community in response to the recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission. But the measure is so different from a bipartisan Senate bill that many lawmakers say it may be impossible to reconcile them.
The bill, adopted 282 to 134 as many House members prepared to return home this weekend to campaign for re-election, would establish the job of national intelligence director, a central proposal of the Sept. 11 commission. But the intelligence director would have significantly less authority over budgets and personnel than the commission recommended or than the Senate bill sets forth.
The House bill also has a variety of law enforcement and immigration provisions not requested by the commission and opposed by Democratic lawmakers and civil liberties groups. Some of the provisions would make it harder for immigrants to obtain political asylum and would subject them to speedy deportation without judicial review.
Friday's vote came after two days of often starkly partisan debate, with Democratic lawmakers accusing the House Republican leadership of trying to sabotage final passage of a bill to enact the commission's recommendations.
In its final report in July, the 10-member commission documented a long history of incompetence and turf battles among intelligence and counterterrorism agencies, and urged that the agencies be brought under the control of a single, powerful intelligence director.
The leaders of the bipartisan commission enthusiastically supported the Senate bill, which was adopted Wednesday on a 96-to-2 vote with none of the partisanship evident in the House. The commission leaders had urged House members to use it as a model.
But late Thursday night, the House rejected a bill that was similar in many ways to the Senate measure and would have been easier to reconcile in a conference committee.
"It's not hard to see what's going on here," said Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York. "Some say that the goal of the Republican leadership is to pass a bill that cannot be reconciled with the Senate bill before the election. The Republican leadership knows that after the elections, when the political pressure is off, the prospects for reform will vanish."
Speaker J. Dennis Hastert said that for many House Democrats opposed to the bill, "it is simply their nature to complain." Mr. Hastert promised that a House-Senate conference committee would quickly agree on a compromise bill that could be sent to President Bush for his signature. "At the end of the day, we will enact a law that will make America safer and the American people proud," he said.
The new chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Peter Hoekstra, Republican of Michigan, said the House bill reflected the obligation of House members to "put our imprint on the recommendations of the 9/11 commission" and to improve on them.
The committee's ranking Democrat, Representative Jane Harman of California, said the House bill was evidence of a "highly partisan process" devised by Republican leaders in responding to the findings of the Sept. 11 commission. "In case anybody missed it, the terrorists didn't check our party labels before they attacked us, and they certainly won't care whether we're Democrats or Republicans when they try to attack us again," Ms. Harman said.
House and Senate leaders have promised to establish a conference committee within days that will negotiate during the Congressional recess that begins this weekend. The conferees will be asked to reconcile the many differences in the two bills, notably those on the powers of a national intelligence director.
They will also have to decide whether the compromise bill should retain the immigration and law-enforcement provisions that Republican leaders tacked onto the House bill even though they were not sought by the Sept. 11 commission.
In the final hours of the House debate, Republican leaders beat back two amendments to eliminate the provisions making it harder for immigrants to obtain asylum and speeding up deportation.
House leaders did agree to amend wording that would have allowed the government to deport foreign terror suspects to countries where they could face torture. The amendment, proposed by Representative John Hostettler, Republican of Indiana, would allow the Department of Homeland Security to detain the suspects but would bar deportation until after the State Department had sought assurances that they would not be harmed. "It will protect the American people from dangerous aliens while continuing our nation's proud history of providing refuge for the innocent," Mr. Hostettler said.
But Representative Christopher H. Smith, Republican of New Jersey, a longstanding advocate of human rights causes in the House, said the bill would "erect a number of brand-new barriers to asylum claims" and would result in "bona fide refugees being returned to their persecutors."
The final House bill would allow speedy deportation, without judicial review, of illegal immigrants who have been in the United States less than five years, compared with two years under current law.
The legislation would make it easier for an immigration judge to dismiss asylum claims based on a number of factors, including a petitioner's demeanor. It would also increase the burden of proof imposed on asylum seekers who are accused of being terrorists by their home governments, which critics said could threaten dissidents fleeing repressive governments.
Opponents of the provisions, including some Republicans from districts with large immigrant communities, scoffed at the idea that repressive governments like those of Cuba or Sudan could be trusted if they gave assurances that their citizens deported from the United States would not be subjected to torture.
"It is unfortunate to diminish the rights of people who are legitimately fearing for their lives," said Representative Lincoln Diaz-Balart, a Republican whose southern Florida district includes many immigrants from Cuba.
-------- terrorism
Israel Says Hotel Blast Bears Signs of Al Qaeda
Explosive-Laden SUV Suspected In Attack in Egypt
By Molly Moore and Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, October 9, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A17015-2004Oct8?language=printer
TABA, Egypt, Oct. 8 -- Israeli and Egyptian investigators said Friday that they believe a Peugeot sport-utility vehicle crammed with more than 400 pounds of explosives caused Thursday's devastating blast at the Taba Hilton, which killed at least 30 people, ripped the front rooms off the 11-story hotel and tossed the mangled wreckage of another car into the middle of a banquet hall.
Rescue workers using cranes, bulldozers and chain saws worked late into the night Friday in search of more bodies in the debris of the Red Sea resort hotel, which had been packed with vacationers from Israel, Russia and Egypt. One woman's bloodied remains were found in a bathtub that had plunged from the eighth floor to the ground.
Israel's deputy defense minister, Zeev Boim, said the bombing, which was far more powerful than the suicide bombings employed against Israelis by Palestinian guerrillas during the last four years of conflict, bore the earmarks of an al Qaeda operation.
"It's not the kind of attack that we know comes from Palestinian terror organizations," Boim told reporters at the Israeli border, just a block from the hotel, a frequent meeting place for Middle East peace negotiators and a popular destination for Israeli and Russian tourists. "In my opinion, it fits more with attacks by international terror groups like al Qaeda or branches of it."
In late 2002, al Qaeda asserted responsibility for the car bombing of an Israeli-owned hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, that killed 15 people, including three Israeli tourists. Five minutes before that attack, assailants fired two shoulder-held missiles at a Boeing 757 Arkia Israeli Airlines charter plane bound for Tel Aviv as it took off from Mombasa's airport. The missiles missed their target.
Israeli officials also were investigating two blasts reported at about the same time Thursday night at the resort of Ras Shytan, about 30 miles south of Taba, part of the string of beach destinations that Egypt calls the Red Sea Riviera. Five people were killed and an estimated 38 injured in those explosions, according to Egyptian hospital officials.
More than 100 people were wounded in the Taba Hilton blast, Israeli and Egyptian authorities said.
The reports of the multiple bombings sent thousands of frightened Israelis -- most of them on foot -- streaming out of the beach resorts and into Israel, cutting short vacations over the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, which commemorates the ancient Israelites' flight from Egypt. On the crowded highway leading north to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, cars loaded with camping gear and surfboards were sandwiched between ambulances and packed tourist buses.
At the Taba Hilton, the charred devastation of the once-elegant lobby, bars and restaurants conveyed the horror that interrupted a carefree night at 9:45 p.m. In the main restaurant, black dust covered half-eaten meals. Sheets and blankets knotted together hung from a third-floor balcony, evidence of an attempt to escape the burning building in the aftermath of the explosion.
Ali Mustafa, 28, a hotel cook, said that as he fled the collapsing building Thursday night, "I saw part of a leg and an arm in the swimming pool."
Twenty rooms at the front of the hotel plunged into the lobby below. Entire bathrooms, bedrooms and wardrobe closets smashed to the ground, burying an estimated 10 to 30 people, according to Israeli search-and-rescue workers. The workers said that they expect recovery efforts to continue at least two more days but that they have no hope of finding anyone alive.
Though the identities of many victims remained unknown Friday night, Israeli and Egyptian rescue and hospital officials said the dead included seven Egyptians, five Israelis and one Russian. Seven members of the hotel staff were killed, according to co-workers.
Meanwhile, survivors of the two explosions at Ras Shytan said a suicide bomber driving a taxi apparently detonated the vehicle as it approached the dining room of the Moon Island Resort. Two Egyptians -- the hotel's assistant chef and buffet manager -- were killed, survivors said. Another Egyptian and two Israelis later died of their wounds, according to Mohammed Naggar, general manager of the provincial Health and Population Department.
Across Egypt on Friday, major tourist attractions such as the Giza pyramids and the Valley of the Kings in Luxor were closed to the public, and police tightened security around other major sites. The attacks are likely to deal a blow to Egypt's $4.6 billion tourism industry, which had been thriving in recent years.
Israeli officials initially had expressed annoyance Thursday night at the slow response to the attack by Egypt, which they said seemed unprepared to cope with the scale of the disaster. Egypt first shut the border when a wave of panicked Israelis fled from the burning hotel and tried to return to Israel, many without passports or personal belongings. Later, Israeli fire and rescue teams were held at the border and not permitted to cross into Egypt to help find and evacuate the wounded. About 4 a.m., in an agreement with Egypt, the Israeli military was given command of the overall response to the disaster, but soldiers from Israel's Home Front Command were barred from entering the hotel until about 8 a.m., officials said.
"We could have gotten there sooner and probably saved more lives," one exasperated Israeli official said.
"This was just a travesty, because these were four critical hours," Israeli national fire chief Shimon Romah told Israel Radio.
After several calls between the Israeli and Egyptian foreign ministers, operations became smoother, and Israel was allowed to bring in two large cranes to move debris. About 20 Israeli buses and several ambulances were permitted to drive down the coast to pick up Israeli tourists who wanted a ride home.
Israel captured the Sinai from Egypt in the 1967 Middle East war but returned it as part of the Camp David peace agreement signed in 1979. But since the start of the Palestinians' uprising against Israel in September 2000, which prompted Egypt to recall its ambassador from Tel Aviv, the two countries' relations have been frosty.
Recently, however, there had been a slight thaw. Egypt has played a key mediation role between Israel and the Palestinians, and Israeli officials made it clear Friday that although they were at first frustrated by Egypt's slow response, they were grateful for its cooperation as operations progressed.
A statement by Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom said that his Egyptian counterpart, Ahmed Abul Gheit, had called and "apologized for delays and explained that Egypt was not used to dealing with events like the series of attacks that took place."
The last major terrorist attack in Egypt was in 1997, when Muslim guerrillas killed 58 foreign tourists in Luxor.
In a statement, Prime Minster Ariel Sharon said that he spoke with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and thanked him for his country's help, and both men noted "that terrorism is the main danger to the free world, and that it must be fought together wherever it may be."
Israeli Foreign Ministry officials said about 15,000 Israelis had gone to the Sinai Peninsula for the Jewish holiday, ignoring a travel advisory issued last month that warned against going to the Sinai because of possible terrorist attacks. Dozens of small hotels and campgrounds line the 110-mile coastline between Taba and Sharm el-Sheikh at the southern tip of the Sinai, and most cater overwhelmingly to Israeli tourists drawn by the mountainous coast, rugged inland deserts, coral reefs, and pristine waters filled with exotic fish.
"All the security organizations issued warnings. Unfortunately, people didn't listen to them," Education Minister Limor Livnat told Israel Radio. On Friday, Sharon called on all Israelis to leave the Sinai immediately, Army Radio reported.
Researcher Samuel Sockol in Taba, correspondent John Ward Anderson in Jerusalem and special correspondent Jill Carroll in Cairo contributed to this report.
--------
Terrorist Hunt Leads To Irish Immigrants
Former Paramilitaries Are Threatened With Deportation After 9/11 Attacks
By Mary Fitzgerald
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 9, 2004; Page A06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A18702-2004Oct8?language=printer
When Ciaran Ferry walked out the rusting gates of Northern Ireland's most notorious jail four years ago, he never expected to see the inside of a prison cell again.
Ferry, a member of the paramilitary Irish Republican Army, had served just over a third of his 22-year sentence for conspiracy to commit murder and arms offenses. Along with more than 400 other paramilitary prisoners, the 28-year-old was granted early release from the Maze prison as part of the Good Friday peace accord, the U.S.-brokered political agreement that ended three decades of violence in Northern Ireland.
Ferry and his new wife, Heaven, an American who had written to him during his incarceration, decided to settle in the United States after police told them his name had been discovered on the hit list of a rival paramilitary group. On an immigration form filled out when he arrived, Ferry ticked the 'no' box in the section asking if he had ever been convicted of a crime.
Ferry's past caught up with him when he attended a green card interview in January 2003. Arrested by immigration officers, he has spent the past 21 months in two Colorado prisons fighting deportation. His legal team argues that he is a law-abiding family man who would face threats and harassment if forced to return to Northern Ireland.
But to the Department of Homeland Security, Ferry and several other former Irish paramilitaries facing deportation are convicted terrorists who lied about their criminal pasts to enter the United States. The issue has galvanized Irish American groups, many of whom believe the Bush administration is unfairly hounding people such as Ferry to demonstrate progress in the war on terrorism.
Their supporters contend that many of those now targeted by the Department of Homeland Security lived openly in this country for years before anti-terrorism laws were introduced after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
"I think we're in a predicament, given the changes in the law since 9/11 and all that transpired out of 9/11," said Malachy McAllister, a former member of the paramilitary Irish National Liberation Army who served three years in prison in Northern Ireland for his involvement in a plot to kill two police officers. He fled to Canada and then the United States in the mid-1990s, after loyalist paramilitaries shot up his home in Belfast. Now living in New Jersey, McAllister will find out later this year whether his petition for asylum has been successful.
Irish paramilitaries have sought refuge in the United States for decades, long before the period of violence known as "the Troubles" erupted in the late 1960s. Some have slipped into the country undetected and live quietly as illegal immigrants. Others have married American citizens. A handful have been granted political asylum.
The current debate hinges on the role paramilitaries played in Northern Ireland's protracted conflict between loyalists who want to remain part of the United Kingdom and republicans fighting for a united, independent Ireland. Those facing deportation, for the most part former republican paramilitaries, justify their failure to declare previous convictions by insisting that they were soldiers in a war, not terrorists; political prisoners, not criminals -- the latter a distinction that can strengthen claims for asylum. Some contend they were unfairly convicted.
Immigration authorities, however, say it is up to the government to decide whether a conviction was criminal or political.
"The whole thing boils down to the ideological argument of whether they were political prisoners or terrorists. And 'terrorism' is a word that is full of subjectivity," said Karen McElrath, an associate professor of sociology at Queen's University in Northern Ireland and author of a book on the subject.
There is no doubt in Heaven Ferry's mind about how to categorize her husband.
"What Ciaran did was not terrorist-related," she said. "He was released from jail under a political agreement -- that makes it very obviously political. This is a guy who came here wanting peace, wanting a new quiet life with his family, and they go after him? They're just too afraid to go after the real terrorists."
The government cannot afford to make such distinctions, countered Robert S. Leiken, of the Immigration and National Security Programs at the Nixon Center, a Washington-based foreign policy research group.
"We have to say that we are opposed to terrorism of any shape or form. Terrorism overrides every other consideration now. The government's first concern is not going to be pleasing the Irish American lobby; it's going to be national security," he said.
In an attempt to bolster the credibility of their case, many of those fighting deportation refer to the decision in 2000 by then Attorney General Janet Reno to drop deportation proceedings against nine IRA members, several of whom had been convicted of crimes including murder, hijacking and bombing offenses, in a move the Clinton administration said would advance the peace process in Northern Ireland. In a statement, however, the Department of Homeland Security said that decision had no bearing on current cases.
"This order applied only to these specific individuals and did not create a precedent for other individuals with similar convictions," according to the statement released by the department's Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau.
Some noted with particular interest one deportation ruling in California earlier this year, believing it could affect future cases. Immigration judge Rose Peters ordered that Sean O'Cealleagh, jailed for his part in the 1988 murder of two British army corporals in Northern Ireland, be allowed to remain permanently in the United States after deciding that his conviction was "purely political."
In a move criticized by loyalist politicians in Northern Ireland, she also described those released early under the Good Friday Agreement as former political prisoners, a qualification not contained in the accord itself.
Others, however, consider that ruling unique, given the current political climate in the United States. They acknowledge that although the argument that one person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter may have worked in the past, attitudes have hardened in the past three years.
"The fallout from the 9/11 attacks has had a real impact on cases similar to mine," said McAllister. "The word 'terrorism' is bandied about a lot these days, but we're different. Any crimes we were involved in were politically motivated."
McAllister's deportation battle has attracted interest from several members of Congress, many of whom backed a private bill, introduced by Rep. Steven R. Rothman (D-N.J.), to allow McAllister and his family to stay in the United States.
"I think this is simply a way of trying to balance the rounding up of Arab men with others so they can say we're going after all terrorists and not differentiating on a country-to-country basis," said Rep. Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.)
"Malachy and the others gave up violence years ago and represent no threat to the security of the United States. If they are putting these old battles behind them in Ireland, why are we conjuring them up over here in the guise of fighting terrorism?" Engel asked.
The Department of Homeland Security rejected claims that former Irish paramilitaries are being singled out after the Sept. 11 attacks. "The statistics and basic facts do not bear that out whatsoever," said Dean Boyd, spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
"Our efforts are designed to strictly enforce the law. The law states that those with prior convictions for certain types of crimes overseas are not allowed entry to the U.S. That is a law that has been around pre-9/11," Boyd said.
In a joint letter released last November, representatives of a dozen Irish American groups accused the Bush administration of reneging on a 2000 Republican platform pledge that called for "a review of issues of deportation and extradition arising prior to the [Good Friday] accord."
Pressed on the issue in a recent interview with Irish America magazine, President Bush defended current legislation as "appropriate and important to the United States' national security."
"My administration has taken great care to ensure that individuals are not unfairly or arbitrarily classified as terrorists or otherwise unfairly denied admission, and will continue to uphold high standards of accuracy and fairness," Bush said.
Those assurances do nothing for Heaven Ferry as she struggles to explain her husband's absence to their 3-year-old daughter, Fiona. "It just doesn't make sense," she said. "How is America safer without Ciaran Ferry? Are we really safer now that he hasn't held his daughter in a year and a half?"
-------- POLITICS
-------- corruption
Pelosi Seeks Special Counsel for an Inquiry on DeLay
Charles Babington
The Washington Post
Saturday, October 9, 2004; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18545-2004Oct8.html
The House's top Democrat yesterday called for a special counsel to look into Majority Leader Tom DeLay's role in an embattled Texas political action committee, ratcheting up an ethics dispute that has gripped the House in the closing days of the 108th Congress.
Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) surprised Republicans by gaining the House floor just after a 6:30 p.m. roll call, when the chamber was nearly full. Before they could rule her out of order, she introduced a resolution condemning DeLay (R-Tex.). GOP members sat stone-faced as the House clerk read the resolution's summation of the House ethics committee's four admonishments of DeLay's conduct, three in the past eight days.
Pelosi called on the committee to pursue another allegation, which it had deferred this week, and to hire an outside lawyer to help. Her resolution said DeLay has "displayed contempt" for the bipartisan panel by claiming that he had been exonerated and by calling the charges frivolous. Republicans immediately set the resolution aside on a party-line vote.
The 10-minute drama constituted the Democrats' first coordinated response to Wednesday's report in which the ethics committee's five Republicans and five Democrats admonished DeLay and warned him to "temper your future actions." Republicans responded with a flood of statements defending DeLay, ridiculing the charges and blaming vengeful Democrats for the fuss.
The ethics panel deferred action on allegations regarding the Texans for a Republican Majority Political Action Committee. A Texas grand jury recently indicted three men associated with TRMPAC and with DeLay, but the majority leader has said he played no role in the PAC's daily operations. Pelosi cited a Thursday article in the Houston Chronicle that said "a newly obtained memo indicates" that DeLay had "personal involvement" in some of TRMPAC's key decisions.
Alluding to the tax cut and anti-terrorism bills passed by the House, DeLay said in a statement: "By contrast, the only bill brought to the floor by Democrats this week was a political smear."
-------- propaganda wars
Bulge Under President's Coat in First Debate Stirs Speculation
By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 9, 2004; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18734-2004Oct8.html
A photograph that flew around the Internet this week shows a boxy bulge in the back of President Bush's suit coat during the first debate, leading to widespread cyber-speculation that he was wired to receive help with his answers.
Bush's aides tried to laugh off the controversy, with one official joking about "little green men on the grassy knoll."
Several officials, pressed for a serious answer, flatly denied that anything was fishy about the hump. These officials said they had checked and that there was nothing under Bush's jacket -- not a wire, not a transmitter, not a garage door opener. Bush was not wearing a protective vest, sources said.
The White House refused to provide an on-the-record comment, saying that it would dignify a baseless issue, and referred questions to the Bush-Cheney campaign.
"It is preposterous," campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt said. He declined to elaborate or to suggest what could have produced the unusual photo.
Bush's aides said the suit was well-tailored and did not have a roll in back. One official, in a cheeky reference to a discredited story about Bush's National Guard record, suggested checking with document experts at CBS News to see if the photo had been doctored.
The subject helped fill the lull before last night's second presidential debate at Washington University in St. Louis.
Democratic National Committee Chairman Terence R. McAuliffe pointed to Bush's shaky, repetitive performance in the first debate. "If he had an earpiece and those were his answers, they ought to fire every person in the back room," he said.
Bush campaign spokesman Scott Stanzel, during a Web chat on washingtonpost.com, was asked if Bush wore "any kind of electronic device on his back during the first debate that allowed him to receive information."
"Senator Kerry? Is that you?," Stanzel typed back. "I think you've been spending a little too much time on conspiracy Web sites. Did you hear the one about Elvis moderating tonight's debate?"
A photo on the Web this week also raised questions about Kerry, showing him taking something out of his pocket when he reached the lectern at the first debate. Aides said it was a pen; debate rules said the pens were supposed to be in place. Aides said removing it from his pocket was a nervous habit.
Journalists had been passing around the link to the photo all week, and yesterday Salon.com posted an article about the photo that began, "Was President Bush literally channeling Karl Rove in his first debate with John Kerry?"
One Web site, www.isbushwired.com, has opened with the sole mission of serving as "a clearinghouse for discussion of whether President Bush uses an earpiece through which he's fed lines and cues by offstage advisers."
--------
For the Record
Plenty of Flaws Among the Facts
Candidates Made Questionable Claims
By Glenn Kessler and Ceci Connolly
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, October 9, 2004; Page A20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19161-2004Oct9.html
President Bush and Sen. John F. Kerry disagreed vigorously last night as they tossed out plenty of numbers, and both demonstrated a talent for relying on facts and assertions of questionable origin.
Kerry said the administration retired Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, because he said that more troops were necessary in Iraq, which is technically incorrect but close to the mark. Shinseki was permitted to retire on schedule, but in revenge for his comments, Defense Department officials leaked the name of his replacement 14 months early, effectively undercutting his authority.
Bush was skating close to the line when he said that he spoke to generals in the White House, asked if they had enough troops, and "they looked me in the eye and said, 'Yes, sir, Mr. President.' " In that 2002 White House meeting, Gen. Tommy R. Franks, whom Bush mentioned, said there were enough troops, but Shinseki told the president there were not. Other senior members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that they were concerned about troop levels.
As in the previous debate and in his stump speech, Bush repeated a number of assertions about Kerry's voting record on taxes, intelligence spending and budgets that are out of context and misleading.
Bush, hitting Kerry for alleged inconsistency, also asserted: "He said he thought Saddam Hussein was a grave threat, and now he said it was a mistake to remove Saddam Hussein from power."
Kerry has never said that. This attack is derived from a Kerry statement that "the satisfaction that we take in [Hussein's] downfall does not hide this fact: We have traded a dictator for a chaos that has left America less secure." Kerry prefaced that statement, however, by saying that although Hussein was "a brutal dictator who deserved his own special place in hell," that by itself was not a reason to go to war.
In last night's debate, Bush also asserted often that Kerry was rated the "most liberal" senator, citing a study by the magazine National Journal. This is correct for the past year -- Kerry earned the rating in part because he missed a number of votes while campaigning -- but in a recent issue, National Journal said "the shorthand used to describe our ratings of Kerry and Edwards is sometimes misleading -- or just plain wrong."
Bush said Kerry's tax-cut rollback would raise taxes on 900,000 small businesses. This is misleading. Under Bush's definition, a small business is any taxpayer who reports some income from investments, partnerships or trusts. By that definition, every partner at a huge accounting firm or at the largest law firm would represent a small business.
Although Bush expressed surprise at Kerry's assertion that the president earned $84 from his investment in a timber company and, thus, qualified as a small business -- "I own a timber company? That's news to me. Need some wood?" -- the Web site www.factcheck.orgbacked up Kerry's assertion.
"President Bush himself would have qualified as a 'small business owner' under the Republican definition, based on his 2001 federal income tax returns," the Web site's analysis said. "He reported $84 of business income from his part ownership of a timber-growing enterprise. However, 99.99% of Bush's total income came from other sources that year."
On health care, Bush continued the specious accusation that Kerry is proposing a "government takeover" of the U.S. health system, saying Kerry's position is: "Let me incent you to go on the government." Kerry's plan builds on both private sector and government programs. Kerry does propose broad expansions of Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program. A report by the Commonwealth Fund, a private social research institute, estimated that under Kerry's proposal an additional 18 million to 21 million people would be covered. Like Kerry, Bush has been a supporter of SCHIP and said he intends to start an "aggressive" outreach effort to sign up a few million more children.
The president suggested he is on the verge of supporting the legal importation of lower-cost prescription drugs from countries such as Canada, which would be a major reversal. Despite overwhelming support in the House and Senate, the White House has blocked legislation opening the borders to the reimportation of U.S.-made pharmaceuticals.
Bush was correct in noting that during the Clinton administration, Health and Human Services Secretary Donna E. Shalala concluded that she could not guarantee a safe system for drug imports. In a tense back-and-forth over Medicare, Bush took credit for achieving much more in his four years in Washington than Kerry has done in his 20 years in the Senate.
"Show me one thing on Medicare he accomplished," Bush said. Kerry responded that he was "involved in" 1997 legislation that extended the solvency of the program, adding: "We balanced the budget and paid down the debt of the nation." In fact, his role was limited to voting for the Balanced Budget Amendment that was designed to keep Medicare afloat through 2030.
On the hot-button subject of medical malpractice, both men skipped over details that did not suit their cases. As he often does, Bush suggested that limiting non-economic damages would sharply reduce health care costs for most Americans. Analysis by the Congressional Budget Office found that legislation capping damage awards to $250,000 would lower physician malpractice premiums by 25 percent to 30 percent. But that reduction "would lower health care costs by only about .4 percent to .5 percent, and the likely effect on health insurance premiums would be comparably small," the CBO said.
Kerry glossed over his opposition to that bill, saying only: "I think we should look at the punitive [damages] and we should have some limitations."
Kerry stretched the truth when he said that the Bush limits on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research "makes it impossible for our scientists" to pursue an array of medical cures. Overwhelmingly, the scientific community has complained that the administration's policy has slowed research efforts but not curtailed them entirely. But Bush's assertions that the work "requires the destruction of life" is subject to debate. The research does involve destroying 5-day-old embryos, but people differ on whether that is life.
Kerry at one point said that "the president has presided over an economy where we've lost 1.6 million jobs." Kerry misspoke. He meant to qualify that statistic by referring to "private sector" jobs. The net number of jobs lost since Bush became president is about 800,000, because of growth in the public sector. It is the first time in 72 years, as Kerry correctly noted, that a president has presided over a net loss of jobs.
Bush asserted that he had tripled spending on homeland security, which depending on the numbers chosen could be an exaggeration. The budget authority has essentially doubled, from $20 billion in 2001 to $40 billion in 2004, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The White House budget office says that Bush was including his proposal for fiscal 2005, and that he was not including non-homeland security activities under the Department of Homeland Security.
Staff writer Thomas E. Ricks contributed to this report.
--------
Nuclear Bait and Switch
by Gordon Prather
Antiwar.com
October 9, 2004
http://www.antiwar.com/prather/?articleid=3746
President Clinton inherited a congressional mandate to help Russia - financially and technically - dismantle thousands of excess Soviet nukes, securely store and eventually dispose of the hundreds of tons of excess weapons-grade materials recovered thereby. The Nunn-Lugar objective was to prevent terrorists from getting their hands on Soviet nukes and/or the weapons-grade materials.
However, by the end of Clinton's presidency, very little assistance had actually been provided Russia for that purpose, and the chances of terrorists getting their hands on nuke materials was greater than ever. Oh, billions of dollars had been spent in the name of "nuclear threat reduction." But most of that Nunn-Lugar money was spent by the Pentagon on projects that had nothing to do with keeping nukes out of the hands of terrorists.
As for the rest of it, Clinton had placed a much higher priority on getting the other nuke powers - starting with Russia, using Nunn-Lugar funding as bait - to just get rid of their nuke stockpiles rather than keeping them out of the hands of terrorists.
Clinton's plan had been to promise U.S. and Russian nuke disarmament in return for every Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) signatory - as well as states like Israel and India, who were not NPT signatories, but were suspected of having nukes - signing on to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. If nuke tests were prohibited from now on, nukes in existing stockpiles would eventually turn into "duds." Furthermore, no new nuke designs - much less new nuke states - could emerge.
Meanwhile, Clinton hoped to get the United Kingdom, France and China to join us in getting rid of our nukes, as promised under Article VI of the NPT.
Fat chance.
And why would nation-states without nukes forever forego acquiring them? After all, nation-states without nukes sometimes get invaded, but nation-states with nukes never do.
Well, the five NPT signatories with nukes essentially assured the 180 NPT signatories without nukes that they would never need nukes to defend themselves.
In addition, NPT signatories had an "inalienable right" to acquire any and all nuclear technology. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was given the job of ensuring that the nuclear technology so acquired was used for peaceful purposes only.
However, by 1993, it was realized that countries like Iraq, Iran and possibly North Korea might feel threatened and attempt to "game" the NPT-IAEA Safeguards system. Hence, the IAEA needed authority to conduct unannounced inspections at suspect - but undeclared - sites as well. The additional authority was to be provided by an Additional Protocol to the existing IAEA-NPT Safeguards Agreement.
So, when Bush took office, Iraq and North Korea were already subject to what amounted to an Additional Protocol, and Iran had agreed to negotiate one with the IAEA.
Well, that presented a problem.
You see, for at least a decade, the neo-crazies had wanted to inflict regime change on oil-rich Iran and Iraq, as well as a few oil-poor countries, such as North Korea. But public opinion polls told them they wouldn't be allowed to invade a country unless the American electorate could be convinced that the country to be invaded was on the verge of providing nukes to terrorists for use against Americans.
Well, according to Bush, getting Congress to vote for Operation Bait & Switch was easy. He just showed them the "intelligence" George "Slam-Dunk" Tenet had provided him.
But getting you to believe that Saddam Hussein had nukes and intended to give them to al-Qaeda turned out to be "hard work." Especially since IAEA Director General ElBaradei reported to the UN Security Council, just days before Bush launched Operation Bait & Switch, that: "As of 17 March 2003, the IAEA had found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq."
But even Bush couldn't have baited you with a nonexistent nuke terrorist threat without the combined assistance of Tony Blair, Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, Ahmed Chalabi, Khirdir Hamza, Paul Gigot, Judith Miller, Bill Gertz, Bill Kristol, Joe Centrifuge, and last - but not least - Fox News.
However, Bush now has a problem. How to convince you that the invasion and occupation of Iran is necessary? That Iran is on the verge of providing nukes to terrorists for use against you?
Well, by continuing to insist right through the election that Saddam Hussein was on the verge of providing nukes to al-Qaeda for use against you. Surely you're not going to take the word of Mohamed ElBaradei, or Scott Ritter, or David Kay, or Charles Duelfer that he wasn't.
----
The source Duelfer didn't quote
The head of the Iraq Survey Group knows regime change was the aim
The Guardian
Saturday October 9, 2004
Scott Ritter - mailto:WSRitter@aol.com
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1323471,00.html
During this week of American election debates, Charles Duelfer, the former deputy executive chairman of the UN weapons inspectors and current head of the CIA's Iraq Survey Group, delivered to Congress his much-anticipated report on Iraq's WMD capabilities. Among his controversial conclusions is that, contrary to pre-war assertions by both the George Bush administration and Tony Blair's government, Iraq had neither stockpiles of WMD nor dedicated programmes for the manufacture of WMD. Duelfer's report did note that Iraq maintained so-called "dual-use" facilities (those with legitimate civilian and/or military functions, but which could be configured for proscribed use), but his ISG has found no evidence that any such conversion had taken place.
One would expect the ISG's conclusions to take the wind out of the sails of those who repeat the mantra that Iraq was a grave and growing threat. But Duelfer has provided a convenient escape from such criticism, by concluding that Saddam Hussein in fact fully intended to convert his "dual use" factories into WMD production facilities once UN weapons inspectors left. In one fell swoop, Duelfer has provided the ideal cover for the justification of the war.
Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, was quick to note that Saddam was, according to the ISG report, "a gathering threat that needed to be taken seriously, that it was a matter of time before he was going to begin pursuing those weapons of mass destruction". The UK foreign secretary, Jack Straw, commenting on the report from Baghdad, was likewise quick to jump on the notion of intent. "Where this report breaks new ground," Straw said, "is by producing extensive new evidence showing that Saddam did indeed pose a threat to the international community ... The world is a safer place without him."
There are, however, several problems with this finding - first and foremost the notion of legality, especially in light of UN secretary general Kofi Annan's comments that the US-led invasion of Iraq represented a violation of the UN charter and international law. Bush and Blair have argued that because the Iraqi government had failed to comply with previous security council resolutions regarding Iraq's obligation to disarm, the right of enforcing these resolutions is implicit.
Duelfer's report slams the door on that line of thinking, since it is now clear that Iraq had in fact disarmed in compliance with security council resolutions. One of the tragic ironies of the decision to invade Iraq is that the Iraqi WMD declaration required by security council resolution 1441, submitted by Iraq in December 2002, and summarily rejected by Bush and Blair as repackaged falsehoods, now stands as the most accurate compilation of data yet assembled regarding Iraq's WMD programmes (more so than even Duelfer's ISG report, which contains much unsubstantiated speculation). Saddam Hussein has yet to be contradicted on a single point of substantive fact. Iraq had disarmed; no one wanted to accept that conclusion.
Charles Duelfer has to date provided no documentation to back up his assertion regarding Saddam's "intent". Nor has he produced any confession from Saddam Hussein or any senior Iraqi official regarding the same. What has been offered is a compilation of hearsay and conjecture linked to unnamed sources whose identities remain shrouded in secrecy.
There is one source I am certain will not be quoted in Duelfer's report - a former officer in Saddam Hussein's intelligence service, who was interviewed by the ISG repeatedly in the summer of 2003. Given the ongoing violence in Iraq today, this officer, who is well known to me, has asked that his name not be published. From 1992 until 2003, he headed a branch of Iraqi intelligence responsible for monitoring the work of the UN weapons inspectors. His office intercepted their communications, and recruited spies among their ranks in Baghdad, Bahrain, New York and elsewhere.
The mission of this intelligence unit was to discern the true intent of the UN weapons inspectors. Conventional thinking would hold that this was being done so that Iraq might better hide its WMD stockpiles. The Iraqi officer has long denied this, stating that instead his job was to find out why the UN refused to accept the Iraqi version of events, and to determine if the UN weapons inspectors were operating inside Iraq for purposes other than the disarmament.
This officer claims to have intercepted conversations between Charles Duelfer, during the time he served as deputy executive chairman of the UN inspection teams, and senior US government officials, in New York and Baghdad, where a US agenda (supported by the British) for removing Saddam Hussein was discussed. I can confirm that such discussions frequently took place.
According to this officer, after 1995 UN weapons inspectors were blocked by Iraq only when their actions were determined by the Iraqi government to represent a direct threat to the president of Iraq, a reality the intercepted Duelfer conversations and ongoing CIA efforts to mount a coup d'etat would seem to underscore.
Duelfer is not an unbiased observer in this matter. For this reason alone, his ISG report must not be allowed to hide its findings behind a wall of secrecy. Far from showing the intent of Saddam Hussein to keep WMD, I believe a full review of all material relevant to the ISG's report will instead portray a dictator whose only desire was to retain his hold on power in the face of a US government which intended to do anything, including violate international law, to prevent this.
The US Congress and British parliament should insist on a full declassification of the ISG report, as well as the sources used to compile it. During this critical time in both our nations' histories, with the war in Iraq playing such a central role in the selection of America's next president as well as the political future of Britain's prime minister, the American and British people deserve to know the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, about the casus belli that collectively got us into the ongoing quagmire that is Iraq today.
· Scott Ritter was a UN weapons inspector in Iraq between 1991 and 1998 and is the author of Frontier Justice: Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Bushwhacking of America
-------- us politics
A Debate on Iraq and the Home Front
Bush and Kerry Clash Sharply Over Economy, Stem Cells, Health Care and the War
By Dan Balz and Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, October 9, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18677-2004Oct8.html
ST. LOUIS, Oct. 8 -- President Bush and Democratic challenger John F. Kerry tangled again over Iraq in a series of pointed exchanges Friday night, with the president charging that Kerry would have left Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in power and made the world more dangerous. Kerry responded that it was Bush's war policies that have left the world less safe.
In a 90-minute town-hall-style debate, the two sharply disagreed on a wide range of issues, from national security to the economy, from taxes, deficits and health care to the ethics and morality of stem cell research. They outlined contrasting governing philosophies and the stark choices for voters in an election that remains deadlocked and increasingly contentious.
The Washington Post and washingtonpost.com examine the accuracy of the claims and charges leveled by President Bush and Sen. John F. Kerry during the second presidential debate.
The debate repeatedly turned personal, reflecting the heated rhetoric the two have used on the campaign trail over the past week, with Bush accusing Kerry of a record studded with inconsistency and liberal values. "I can see why people think that he changes position quite often, because he does," Bush said.
The senator from Massachusetts responded that Bush's campaign has become a "weapon of mass deception" designed to dupe voters and hide a record of failure at home and abroad. "The president's just trying to scare everybody here," Kerry said.
After his performance of a week ago, in which he was caught scowling and frowning during Kerry's responses, Bush kept his facial expressions largely in check, even trying to make a joke at one point. In responding to a comment from Kerry, he quipped, "That answer almost made me want to scowl." Both found themselves on the defensive at times -- Bush on Iraq and the deficit, and Kerry on stem cell research and his Senate record.
But humor took a back seat throughout the night as the candidates fielded questions from an audience of citizens selected because they were uncommitted in the presidential race or softly aligned to either Bush or Kerry. The questioners took Bush and Kerry through a thicket of issues, prodding and probing and challenging each on his record and his promises for the future. The debate was held on the campus of Washington University, with ABC-TV's Charles Gibson serving as moderator.
The most intense disagreements came again over Iraq, an issue where Bush has been on the defensive this week. A report by the chief U.S. weapons inspector, Charles A. Duelfer, concluded that Hussein had eliminated his illicit weapons after the 1991 Persian Gulf War and did not have either stockpiles of banned weapons or the capacity to produce them when the United States invaded Iraq in March 2003.
Bush vigorously defended the decision to go to war. "I tried diplomacy," he said, "went to the United Nations. But as we learned in the same [Duelfer] report I quoted, Saddam Hussein was gaming the oil-for-food program to get rid of sanctions. He was trying to get rid of sanctions for a reason: He wanted to restart his weapons programs."
Bush said that "we all thought there was weapons there," including Kerry, but that Hussein was a unique threat and the world is better off with him removed from power. "And my opponent's plans lead me to conclude that Saddam Hussein would still be in power," he said, "and the world would be more dangerous."
Kerry said Bush rushed to war without winning the support of more allies and did not listen to some military leaders who argued for more troops in Iraq. "The world is more dangerous today because the president didn't make the right judgments," Kerry charged.
Kerry argued that Bush had broken a pledge made four years ago in a debate, saying Bush then had promised not to go to war without an exit strategy or enough forces to get the job done. "He didn't do that. He broke that promise," Kerry said.
If Bush had let U.N. inspectors continue their work, Kerry said, Hussein could have been contained and "we wouldn't have 10 times the number of forces in Iraq that we have in Afghanistan chasing Osama bin Laden." In the meantime, Kerry charged, Bush has ignored growing dangers posed by the nuclear programs of Iran and North Korea.
Bush said he is keeping his eye on those problems, reminding the audience that he had dubbed those countries, along with Iraq, as an "axis of evil." He charged that Kerry's call for bilateral negotiations with North Korea would undercut six-party talks already underway and said the United States was working with Britain, France and Germany to deliver a stern message to Iran about its nuclear ambitions.
On Iraq, Bush said Kerry's apparent faith in international institutions and sanctions was misplaced, given Hussein's history, and said Kerry seems to have changed his view of whether Hussein was a genuine threat. "He keeps talking about 'Let the inspectors do their job.' It's naive and dangerous to say that. That's what the Duelfer report showed. He [Hussein] was deceiving the inspectors."
Both candidates tried to dispel talk that the United States might need to reinstate the military draft because of overextended forces. "Forget all this talk about a draft," Bush said. "We're not going to have a draft so long as I am the president."
Kerry said he, too, opposes a draft but said he would be a better commander in chief by emulating former presidents Ronald Reagan and Dwight D. Eisenhower and working more cooperatively with allies. "We're not going to go alone like this president did," he said.
Bush shot back: "Tell [British Prime Minister] Tony Blair we're going alone. Tell [Italian Prime Minister] Silvio Berlusconi we're going alone. Tell Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland we're going alone. There are 30 countries there. It denigrates an alliance to say we're going alone, to discount their sacrifices. You cannot lead an alliance if you say . . . you're going alone."
To a question about America's frayed alliances, Bush said he recognizes that many of his decisions have been unpopular but argued they are good for the country. "I don't think you want a president who tries to become popular and does the wrong thing," he said.
The debate took place on a day when the Labor Department issued a monthly employment report showing the economy had produced 96,000 jobs last month, well below forecasts, with the unemployment rate unchanged at 5.4 percent. That left Bush in the position of being the first president since Herbert Hoover not to have produced job gains during his first term in office.
"The president has presided over an economy where we've lost 1.6 million jobs. The first president in 72 years to lose jobs," Kerry said in response to a question about allegations that he has flip-flopped. "I have a plan to put people back to work. That's not wishy-washy."
Overall, Bush said little about jobs through the night, noting that 1.9 million new jobs have been created in the past 13 months but omitting that the nation has still seen a net loss in payroll slots since he took office. Bush, speaking of what he called Kerry's liberal voting record, referred to him as "Senator Kennedy" and did not correct himself.
Kerry hammered Bush several times on the return of the federal budget deficit, which had been eliminated under President Bill Clinton. Kerry charged that Bush has "added more debt to the debt of the United States in four years than all the way from George Washington to Ronald Reagan put together -- go figure."
Bush defended his stewardship of the budget, pointing to the recent recession and the cost of war. The president said he is "concerned about the deficit, but I am not going to shortchange our troops in harm's way." He added: "And I'm not going to run up taxes, which will cost this economy jobs."
Kerry has said he would roll back Bush's tax cuts only on people making more than $200,000 a year, and one audience member pushed him to take a pledge, asking whether Kerry would be "willing to look directly into the camera and, using simple and unequivocal language," pledge not to raise the tax burden on families making less than $200,000 a year.
"Absolutely," Kerry replied. "Yes. Right into the camera. Yes. I am not going to raise taxes. I have a tax cut."
One of the more personal exchanges between the candidates resulted from a questioner's challenge to Kerry's call for the expansion of federally funded embryonic stem cell research, asking, "Wouldn't it be wise to use stem cells obtained without the destruction of an embryo?" Kerry, clearly uncomfortable with the question, said he respects the morality behind it but said he thinks "it is respecting life" to reach for cures in an ethical way. "The president has chosen a policy that makes it impossible for our scientists to do that," he said. "I want the future, and I think we have to grab it."
Bush, who decided in 2001 to permit limited federal funding for research on existing embryonic stem cell lines, said the nation has to be "very careful in balancing the ethics and the science." "To destroy life to save life is -- it's one of the real ethical dilemmas that we face," he said.
Kerry then accused Bush of "walking a waffle line," adding: "He says he's allowed it, which means he's going to allow the destruction of life up to a certain amount and then he isn't going to allow it."
Abortion produced another sharp exchange. Asked how he would respond to a "voter who believed abortion is murder and the voter asked for reassurance that his or her tax dollars would not go to support abortion," Kerry talked about the importance of his faith as a Roman Catholic but said, "I can't take what is an article of faith for me and legislate it for someone who doesn't share that article of faith."
"I'm trying to decipher that," Bush responded. "My answer is, we're not going to spend taxpayers' money on abortion."
Near the end of the debate, Bush was asked to cite three mistakes and what he did to correct them. He replied he made some hiring mistakes and that on the war there are "a lot of tactical decisions that historians will look back and say, he shouldn't have done that." But on the big question of going to war in Afghanistan and removing Hussein by force, he said, "I'll stand by those decisions because I think they were right."
Kerry said Bush had made a "colossal mistake" and asked voters to make a "gut check" on the dominant issue of the campaign: "Was this really going to war as a last resort?"
Researchers Lucy Shackelford and Alice Crites in Washington contributed to this report.
--------
Kerry blasts Bush on nuclear non-proliferation
Oct 09, 2004
ST. LOUIS, Missouri (AFP)
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041009041658.0pwi82vi.html
President George W. Bush Friday accused his election rival John Kerry of taking a "naive and dangerous" approach to North Korea's nuclear ambitions while the Democrat said the Iraq war had undermined weapons proliferation efforts.
The two locked horns over nuclear non-proliferation in the second of three election debates at Washington University here, ahead of the November 2 election.
Bush said the Democrat's call for a direct dialogue with Pyongyang would jeopardize six-party talks he had launched bringing in the Asian powers.
"It is naive and dangerous to take a policy that he suggested the other day, which is to have bilateral relations with North Korea," said the Republican president.
"He's the person accusing me of not acting multilaterally," Bush said. "He now wants to take the six-party talks we have ... undermine them by having by bilateral talks."
Bush said his predecessor, Bill Clinton, had pressed bilateral talks with the North Koreans and they ended up not honoring an agreement to suspend their activities in return for fuel and help in building light-water reactors.
"Of course we're paying attention to these," Bush said. "That's why, in my speech to the Congress, I said there's an axis of evil, Iraq, Iran and North Korea, and we're paying attention to it, and we're making progress."
Kerry countered that while the administration was dealing with Iraq, Iran was moving towards production of enriched uranium and "North Korea has moved from one bomb, maybe, to four to seven bombs."
"For two years, the president didn't even engage with North Korea, did nothing at all, while it was growing more dangerous. ... We were safer before President Bush came to office."
The Democrat said Bush "took his eye off the ball" with the invasion of Iraq, diverting attention from Osama bin Laden and the nuclear non-proliferation campaign. "Iran is now more dangerous and so is North Korea with nuclear weapons."
"I'm going to lead the world in the greatest counter-proliferation effort and if we have to get tough with Iran, believe me, we will get tough," Kerry said.
He also criticized the president's move to develop a bunker-busting nuclear weapon. "It's very hard to get other countries to give up their weapons when you're busy developing a new one."
Bush, making a joking reference to his facial grimaces that were widely considered to have cost him points in the first debate last week, said Kerry's answer "almost made me want to scowl."
"He keeps talking about let the (weapons) inspectors do their job. It's naive and dangerous to say that," said Bush, adding that the latest report on Iraq showed Saddam had been deceiving UN weapons inspectors in Iraq.
Bush said his administration was making progress on nuclear non-proliferation and said of Iran, "I fully understand the threat.
"And that's why we're doing what he (Kerry) suggested we do. Get the Brits, the Germans and the French to go make it very clear to the Iranians" they must give up their nuclear weapons program.
Clinton's former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, who sat down with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il in 2000, said nothing would be achieved with Pyongyang until top US officials got personally involved.
"As one who has had the dubious pleasure or honor of talking to Kim Jong-Il, I think it is essential to have face-to-face talks to deliver a tough message to him," Albright said after the debate.
She accused Bush of "subcontracting out" US foreign policy to China over North Korea, and said that bilateral US-North Korean talks could take place under the umbrella of the six-party talks.
-------- OTHER
-------- environment
Environmental Group Cites Partisanship in the Judiciary
Study Shows Divide Between Democratic, GOP Appointees
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 9, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18737-2004Oct8.html
Federal judges appointed by Democratic presidents are several times as likely as Republican appointees to rule in favor of plaintiffs who sue the government claiming violations of environmental law, according to a report issued yesterday by the nonpartisan Environmental Law Institute.
The authors of the study -- which examined 325 judicial rulings between Jan. 21, 2001, and June 30, 2003 -- said the results show the degree to which ideological polarization over the environment has influenced the federal judiciary. The nonprofit institute, which researches environmental law but does not litigate or lobby, focused on cases brought under the National Environmental Policy Act, a 35-year-old law requiring agencies to assess how proposed federal policies and programs affect the environment.
Environmental groups -- and sometimes developers -- often challenge federal actions on the grounds that they violate NEPA, which requires environmental impact statements and public input for proposed projects.
On the district court level, according to the survey, Democratic appointees ruled for environmental plaintiffs a little less than 60 percent of the time, while Republican-appointed judges favored environmentalists 28 percent of the time. GOP-appointed district judges, on the other hand, sided with pro-development forces nearly 60 percent of the time while Democratic appointees ruled for them 14 percent of the time.
The contrast was even starker on the appellate level, where Democratic-majority panels favored environmental plaintiffs 58 percent of the time, but GOP-majority panels sided with these groups in just 10 percent of cases.
District judges selected by President Bush were less sympathetic to environmentalists' pleadings than those appointed by previous Republican presidents, the survey found, ruling in favor of environmental challenges 17 percent of the time.
"We were greatly surprised to find the degree of polarization among the parties," said Jay E. Austin, a senior attorney at the Environmental Law Institute. "We obviously find that troubling."
Other legal advocacy groups have examined recent environmental rulings by Bush-appointed judges, but the institute's study marked the first comprehensive study of decisions by judges selected by presidents dating as far back as Jimmy Carter.
Todd True, a staff attorney for the environmental litigation group Earthjustice, who successfully challenged logging projects in the Pacific Northwest in the 1990s under NEPA, said he had won cases with both Republican- and Democratic-appointed judges but worried about the tendencies revealed in the survey.
"An independent judiciary is central to the functioning of our democracy, and its neutrality needs to be protected," True said.
Several conservative analysts said the discrepancies show that GOP-appointed judges have a stricter interpretation of the law. American Enterprise Institute resident scholar Steven Hayward said that in many cases the government's efforts to comply with NEPA "bear little relation to protecting the environment" and the study demonstrates "judges are applying some tougher standards to these NEPA lawsuits."
"If you reported these results in Utah, they would stand up and cheer," Hayward said.
C. Boyden Gray, a partner at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr who was White House counsel for President George H.W. Bush, said the results were significant only if as a result of a ruling "some development destroyed an important preserve on public land out West."
--------
Ocean Exploitation Surfaces as Crisis
Widespread Pollution, Overfishing Spur Presidential Panel to Urge New Rules
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 9, 2004; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A18656-2004Oct8?language=printer
KEY WEST, Fla. -- Every year in late July, about 30,000 boats descend on this tourist mecca carrying tens of thousands of scuba divers who scour the coral reefs in search of tasty spiny lobsters to catch and eat.
Government officials say the two-day frenzy nearly doubled the monthly reports of boats ramming fragile coral heads or grounding on delicate sea grass compared with the month before. And while no one has an exact figure, researchers estimate the fishing fest took 80 percent of the legal-size lobsters in several Keys habitats.
"It's a consumptive ritual," Phil Frank, project leader for the Key West National Wildlife Refuge, said of the underwater wreckage.
The fate of the slow-growing corals in the Keys is just one small example of the pervasive damage being done to the world's oceans, damage that has been documented by a rapidly accumulating library of studies and reports. The reports -- from governmental, private and academic sources -- all say the same thing: The seas are much worse off than they were just a few decades ago. Oceans across the globe are showing signs of strain in dramatic ways, including declining fish stocks and polluted waters.
Inside and outside the government, a conviction is taking hold that policymakers need to act quickly to avert the looming crisis. Bush administration officials and lawmakers are drafting new rules and changes to the federal bureaucracy to protect fish species, improve water quality and restore coral reefs. Some of these plans were unveiled last month when the presidentially appointed U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy issued its final report to Congress.
"Ocean conservation is poised to become the next global warming issue," said Gerry Leape, who runs the marine conservation network for the National Environmental Trust. "The science is settled. The debate can move on from whether or not there is a crisis to what to do about it." Scientists and policymakers point to a variety of ominous signs. Ninety percent of the world's large predator fish -- those at the top of the food chain -- have disappeared over the past 50 years, two Canadian scientists reported last year in a widely publicized study. At least a third of the fish stocks that the federal government monitors are overfished, officials say, and the status of hundreds of other species is unknown. The motor oil dropped on American streets ends up in the oceans at the rate of 10.9 million gallons every eight months -- the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez spill. And the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico -- an area the size of Connecticut where high nitrogen levels kill all marine life -- expanded again this summer.
"There is a consensus that our oceans are in crisis and that reforms are essential," a massive study funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts concluded last year.
James L. Connaughton, who is President Bush's top environmental adviser as head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said the seas sustain "our economy, our environment and our society."
"Restoration, wise use and conservation of the oceans has come to the forefront of environmental priorities, not just for the nation, but for the world," Connaughton said. "There's a massive bipartisan and regional consensus toward embarking on a new generation of progress."
For centuries, the various studies note, Americans have treated coastal waters as theirs for the taking, seeking bounty with little government oversight. Fishing boats trawled and trapped at will, oil companies built huge rigs to tap offshore resources, and cruise ships crisscrossed sensitive habitats so tourists could gawk at marine life.
"It cannot be viewed as the Wild West anymore," said retired Vice Adm. Conrad C. Lautenbacher Jr., who heads the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "There need to be some sort of property rights. That sort of cultural change is very hard."
He and others note that U.S. territorial waters are the country's largest public domain: Spanning nearly 4.5 million square miles, they are 23 percent larger than the nation's land area. Commercial and recreational saltwater fishing is worth $48 billion a year, and weather- and climate-sensitive industries, which are heavily influenced by the ocean, account for $3 trillion, or more than one-quarter of the country's gross domestic product.
Yet the seas command relatively little attention. Ninety-five percent of the globe's oceans remain unexplored below the surface, and donations to environmental groups that focus on marine issues are 5 percent of the amounts that go their terrestrial counterparts. The nation has marine sanctuaries, the rough equivalent of national parks on land, but most Americans have never heard of them.
Elliott A. Norse, president of the Marine Conservation Biology Institute in Redmond, Wash., said much of the devastation being done to the oceans has gone undetected. The Gulf of Mexico's population of oceanic white-tipped sharks has declined more than 99 percent since the 1950s, but no one noticed until 2003. The eel grass limpet, a snail that used to be ubiquitous on the New England coast and Canada's Atlantic coast, went extinct in 1929, but its demise did not come to public attention until 1991.
"Nobody's out there looking," Norse said. "Nobody's out there measuring what we need to measure."
Despite the commissions and studies, "this is a battle between people who care about the oceans and those who are at best disinterested, or at worst, exploiters," Steven Miller, director of the National Undersea Research Center at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, told ocean experts in Key West in August. "It's a war, and we're losing."
But with calls for action mounting, policymakers are beginning to pay attention. The Commission on Ocean Policy, a 16-member panel, called on Bush in April to appoint a special assistant for oceans issues and to make broad policy changes. The Pew Oceans Commission, a privately funded group that issued its own set of recommendations in May 2003, recommended retooling federal fisheries management and making NOAA independent of the Commerce Department.
Last month, the Senate Commerce Committee endorsed legislation to set a new national oceans policy featuring some of the commissions' recommendations, such as making NOAA more independent. Ted Morton, federal policy director for the marine protection organization Oceana, called the vote "a welcome first step in ocean management reform."
Connaughton said the administration is also reexamining how to govern the seas.
"We're not waiting for anything," Connaughton said. "We are past the ignoring stage. We have collectively moved over the past three years toward action."
The administration has proposed new water quality regulations for beaches near ocean waters and the Great Lakes, stricter curbs on sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions from marine diesel engines, and new zoning restrictions in Florida's Dry Tortugas National Park, he said. But some new protections that have long been under consideration have yet to materialize: In 1994 the United States signed the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, which would create new international standards for protecting marine mammals and fisheries as well as curbing marine pollution, but 10 years later it has yet to be ratified by the Senate.
Experts say existing and proposed national and international measures do not go far enough to address the four major challenges that threaten the oceans: overfishing, incidental bycatch, habitat destruction and pollution.
The sharp decline in fish stocks over the past few decades is one of the clearest indicators of trouble. The list of species whose numbers have plummeted -- some of them edging toward extinction -- is lengthy, from New England cod to California's white abalone. Ellen Pikitch, executive director of the Pew Institute for Ocean Science at the University of Miami, said we may witness "the end of wild fish fisheries in a matter of decades."
In many cases U.S. fishermen have gotten caught in a vicious circle, in which they take so many fish there are not enough left to perpetuate the species. This depletes fish stocks, which in turn makes it even harder to catch enough to turn a profit.
For consumers, the depth of the crisis is obscured, in part because of the rise in fish farming and the fact that some relatively common fish are being mislabeled and sold as valuable but increasingly scarce species, such as red snapper.
Found in the Gulf of Mexico and the western Atlantic, red snapper has been overfished since 1988. For captain Ronald Waters, who has spent a quarter of a century fishing in the Gulf, the outlook is grim. He estimates that half the fish he pulls up are too small to sell, but by the time he throws them back they are dead.
"I need fish there to earn my living," Waters said in an interview. "As the stock's going down, it's taking us a lot longer to catch fish."
Bycatch -- unwanted fish that are hauled in by mistake -- account for more than 25 to 30 percent of the total world catch, which means 60 billion tons of fish is being caught and thrown dead into the oceans. Although NOAA regulators have doubled the number of observers it has on ships in the past four years to monitor bycatch and other fishing practices, they only covers 42 of the 300 U.S. fisheries.
Bottom trawlers that scour the ocean floor pose another serious threat to marine ecosystems, given that 98 percent of known ocean animals live on the bottom. The trawlers' giant nets -- some of them wide enough to accommodate two Boeing 747 jumbo jets, bring in massive amounts of fish, but they decimate ocean-bottom habitats in their path.
The result is like forest clear-cutting, but on a much larger scale, advocates and researchers say. Worldwide nearly 40,000 square miles of forest are clear-cut each year, Norse said, an area the size of Indiana or Kentucky. By contrast, nearly 6 million square miles of ocean floor are swept clean by nets every year, an area twice the size of the lower 48 states, he said.
The impact of pollution is even broader, though it is difficult to gauge and even harder to regulate. Runoff from agriculture pours nitrogen into the seas, which in turn spawns algae blooms that deprive marine creatures of oxygen. Nancy Rabalais, chief scientists for hypoxia research at Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, said agriculture accounts for 50 percent of the nitrogen that deluges the Gulf of Mexico's dead zone.
Lawmakers have proposed revamping the nation's marine management system based on the recommendations of the U.S. Ocean and Pew commissions, and advocates say they may now have their best chance in decades to institute new protections for the seas. It is less of a partisan issue than other environmental questions: Bush administration officials are in discussions with conservation groups, which also see Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry as a potential ally.
"This is a seminal moment," said Roger T. Rufe, president of the Ocean Conservancy.
"It's just like the Grand Canyon or Yosemite or other wonderful areas," said Richard Grathwohl, a third-generation charter boat captain. "We're loving it to death."
-------- health
Chiron flu vaccine unlikely to get FDA nod
October 09, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/business/20041008-110453-5036r.htm
The Food and Drug Administration is unlikely to clear influenza vaccine made by Chiron Corp. as safe for Americans to use this flu season, Dr. Lester M. Crawford, the agency's acting commissioner, said yesterday.
It was not clear whether the lack of vaccine might lead to more flu deaths this year. Dr. Crawford and Dr. Julie Gerberding, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, sidestepped such questions at a House Government Reform Committee hearing. In a typical year, an estimated 36,000 Americans die of the flu.
Jim Young, president of research and development for MedImmune Inc., which makes an alternative flu treatment available to a limited population of healthy people, testified that any spike in the death toll largely hinges on whether scarce flu vaccine makes its way to those most at risk. They include those with impaired immune systems, such as the young, the elderly and people with medical conditions.
The CDC was asking healthy adults to forgo flu shots or to use MedImmune's FluMist if they are within the 5- to 49-year-old age range for that product.
But Mr. Young later testified that the National Institutes of Health was advising employees in its hospitals not to take FluMist.
"The agencies are putting out mixed messages," Mr. Young said.
MedImmune said yesterday it plans to nearly double the number of doses of FluMist it will produce this year.
The Gaithersburg company had made 1.1 million doses for this flu season, following a disappointing first season last year for the drug.
The company will now use bulk supplies of the prescription vaccine to put together nearly 1 million more doses, according to spokeswoman Clarencia Stephen. The extra FluMist could be available to the public by late November, she said.
Dr. Crawford's pessimism about the Chiron vaccine came as FDA officials in England met with Chiron officials and were poised to begin an in-depth inspection of the company's Liverpool vaccine-production facility over the weekend.
Asked if the FDA was likely to coax free 40 million impounded doses of flu vaccine that Chiron testing indicated were free of contamination with bacteria, Dr. Crawford said, "It's not possible to say if any of them are salvageable at this point. I have to present to you a pessimistic point of view."
He told reporters afterward that the FDA probably would have made the same decision its British counterparts did: suspending Chiron's vaccine production and exports due to manufacturing problems. The decision, announced Tuesday, halved the U.S. flu vaccine supply.
Much of yesterday's discussion underscored the frailty of the nation's supply of dispensable vaccine and the scant number of manufacturers producing it.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said manufacturers can make higher profits with blockbuster drugs that patients take regularly. He said a year's supply of Lipitor costs $1,608 versus $3,500 for Viagra. The price of a year's supply of flu vaccine: $7 to $10.
"We need to help with incentives," Dr. Fauci told the committee.
Christine Grant of Aventis-Pasteur - which is supplying 55.4 million doses of flu vaccine for Americans this year - cautioned against the government taking over vaccine manufacturing. She said a government-controlled operation would be an unfair competitor. Government takeover "is the quickest way to chill private investment," she told reporters later.
----
Flu shot shortage calls for sacrifice
October 09, 2004
By Sarah Hoffman
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20041008-110452-5476r.htm
Health officials say there is not enough flu vaccine for the area's high-risk population because of a nationwide shortage of vaccine.
But health officials say there is no need to panic and are encouraging healthy people to forego getting shots this season.
"People who are healthy, it would be better if they'd wait until later on and let those who are high risk get the shot first," said Dr. Walter Faggett, interim chief medical officer for the D.C. Department of Health.
The high-risk group includes children between 6 months and 23 months old, adults over 64, people with a chronic medical condition, pregnant women, nursing-home residents, health care workers and people in contact with children younger than 6 months, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Dr. Diane Matuszak, interim deputy secretary for Maryland's public health services, said about 1.6 million of the state's 5.5 million residents are considered high risk. The state's public health office expects that it will receive only 51,000 doses of vaccine this flu season.
Jim Farrell, director of the division of immunization for the Virginia Department of Health, said the state will send out 25,270 pediatric doses of flu vaccine to county health departments next week, but the situation is not ideal.
"The bottom line is if you've only got half of the pie, you can't feed all of the people," Mr. Farrell said.
Mary Anderson, spokeswoman for Montgomery County health services, said 2,800 flu shots were administered last year to high- and low-risk groups. But the health department doesn't have even a fraction of that number this year.
"We only have a very small amount," Ms. Anderson said. "We don't even have a guarantee that we're getting any adult vaccine at this point."
Prince George's County does not have any vaccine for adults or children, and the District has about 11,000 doses for children and about 400 shots for adults.
According to CDC estimates, about 92 children younger than 5 die of flu each year. About 114,000 Americans are hospitalized and 36,000 die of flu each year.
Flu season runs from October to May, and symptoms include fever, muscle aches, sore throat, headache, chills, coughs and stuffy nose.
Because many will be unable to rely on the flu vaccine this season, Mr. Farrell said those included in high-risk groups and people who come in close contact with them should be especially vigilant about hand-washing, covering their mouths when they cough and staying at home if influenza does strike.
The CDC announced this week that the flu-vaccine company Chiron, based in England, would be unable to manufacture the 48 million doses it had promised this year.
--
Letter to the Editor,
Washington Times
October 9, 2004
I'm disappointed that the Times failed to mention last week's hearings before the House of Representatives on the use of mercury in flu shots, and the very real dangers of autism and attention deficiency disorder. It's particularly alarming that health officials want to reserve this year's injections for small children and pregnant women. Children are at greatest risk from the mentally deranging element of mercury in flu and other required childhood vaccines.
The House bill under discussion on October 6th follows:
Mercury-Free Vaccines Act of 2004 (Introduced in House)
HR 4169 IH 108th CONGRESS 2d Session H. R. 4169
To amend the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act to reduce human exposure to mercury through vaccines.
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
April 2, 2004
Mr. WELDON of Florida (for himself and Mrs. MALONEY) introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on Energy and Commerce
A BILL
To amend the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act to reduce human exposure to mercury through vaccines.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the `Mercury -Free Vaccines Act of 2004'.
SEC. 2. FINDINGS.
The Congress finds as follows:
(1) In July 1999, the Public Health Service and the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a joint statement, which was later endorsed by the American Academy of Family Physicians, proclaiming: `[The] Public Health Service, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and vaccine manufacturers agree that thimerosal-containing vaccines should be removed as soon as possible. Similar conclusions were reached this year in a meeting attended by European regulatory agencies, the European vaccine manufacturers, and the US FDA which examined the use of thimerosal-containing vaccines produced or sold in European countries.'.
(2) In July 2000, the Public Health Service, the Advisory Commission on Immunization Practices, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Academy of Family Physicians issued a joint statement, providing: `The AAFP, [the] AAP, and the PHS in consultation with the ACIP reaffirm the goal set in July 1999 to remove or greatly reduce thimerosal from vaccines as soon as possible for the following reasons: 1) the removal or substantial reduction of thimerosal from vaccines is feasible, 2) the progress in removal which has been made to date is substantial, 3) the discussions between the Food and Drug Administration and the vaccine manufacturers in removing thimerosal are ongoing, and 4) the public concern about the use of mercury of any sort remains high. Based on information from the FDA and manufacturers, the PHS projects that the United States will complete its transition to a secure routine pediatric vaccine supply free of thimerosal as a preservative (i.e. at least two vaccine products each for Hep B, Hib, and DTaP) by the first quarter of 2001.'.
(3) The Institute of Medicine's Immunization Review Committee concluded that significant reasons existed for continued public health attention to concerns about thimerosal exposure and neurodevelopmental disorders and recommended the removal of thimerosal from vaccines administered to children and pregnant women.
(4) Federal regulatory agencies and manufacturers have taken positive steps to remove thimerosal from some medical products, most notably routinely administered childhood vaccines.
(5) Considerable progress has been made in reducing mercury exposures from childhood vaccines, yet 5 years after the July 1999 statement, thimerosal remains in several nonroutinely administered childhood vaccines.
(6) There is no law or regulation to prohibit the reintroduction of thimerosal into any products from which it has been removed, leaving open the possibility that it may be reintroduced at some point in the future.
(7) The Environmental Protection Agency has estimated that as many as 1 in 6 infants are born with a blood mercury level that exceeds the Agency's safety threshold.
(8) Cumulative exposures to mercury , a neurotoxin, are known to cause harm, particularly in young children and pregnant women.
(9) Taking steps to reduce mercury exposures through vaccines is an important way to reduce direct exposures to mercury and mercury compounds.
SEC. 3. BANNED MERCURY -CONTAINING VACCINES.
(a) Prohibition- Section 501 of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (21 U.S.C. 351) is amended by adding at the end the following:
`(h) If it is a banned mercury -containing vaccine under section 351B of the Public Health Service Act.'.
(b) Amendment to PHSA- Title III of the Public Health Service Act (42 U.S.C. 241 et seq.) is amended by inserting after section 351A the following:
`SEC. 351B. BANNED MERCURY -CONTAINING VACCINES.
`(a) In General- For purposes of section 501(h) of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, and subject to subsection (b), a vaccine is a banned mercury -containing vaccine under this section if--
`(1) 1 dose of the vaccine contains 1 or more micrograms of mercury in any form; or
`(2) the vaccine contains any quantity of thimerosal and is listed in the current version of the recommended childhood and adolescent immunization schedule of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
`(b) Public Health Emergency Exception-
`(1) Exception- Subsection (h) of section 501 of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act shall not apply to a vaccine during the effective period of a declaration issued by the Secretary for such vaccine under this section.
`(2) Declaration- The Secretary may issue a declaration concluding that an actual or potential bioterrorist incident or other actual or potential public health emergency makes advisable the administration of a vaccine described in subsection (a) notwithstanding the mercury or thimerosal content of such vaccine.
`(3) Limitation- The Secretary--
`(A) shall specify in any declaration under this section the beginning and ending dates of the effective period of the declaration; and
`(B) may not specify any such effective period that exceeds 12 months.
`(4) Renewals- At the end of the effective period of any declaration under this section, the Secretary, subject to paragraph (3), may issue another declaration for the same incident or public health emergency.
`(5) Publication- The Secretary shall promptly publish each declaration under this section in the Federal Register.
`(c) Effective Dates-
`(1) Mercury -containing vaccines- In the case of a vaccine described in subsection (a)(1), the amendments made by this section apply only to vaccines introduced, or delivered for introduction, into interstate commerce on or after the following:
`(A) July 1, 2004, if the vaccine is an influenza vaccine.
`(B) January 1, 2005, if the vaccine (other than an influenza vaccine) is listed in the January-June 2004 version of the recommended childhood and adolescent immunization schedule of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
`(C) January 1, 2006, in the case of any vaccine not described in subparagraph (A) or (B).
`(2) Thimerosal-containing vaccines- In the case of a vaccine that is not described in subsection (a)(1), but is described in subsection (a)(2), the amendments made by this section apply only to vaccines introduced, or delivered for introduction, into interstate commerce on or after January 1, 2007.'.
SEC. 4. INFORMATION ON THIMEROSAL CONTENT.
Section 2126 of the Public Health Service Act (42 U.S.C. 300aa-26) is amended by adding at the end the following:
`(e) Thimerosal Content- Not later than 2 months after the date of the enactment of this subsection, the Secretary shall revise the vaccine information materials developed and disseminated under this section to ensure that, in the case of any vaccine described in subsection (a) that contains thimerosal, the materials include--
`(1) a statement indicating the presence of thimerosal in the vaccine;
`(2) information on the availability of any thimerosal-free or thimerosal-reduced alternative vaccine and instructions on how to obtain such alternative vaccine; and
`(3) a recommendation against administration of any thimerosal-containing vaccine to a pregnant woman.'.
SEC. 5. SENSE OF CONGRESS.
It is the sense of the Congress that the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should include, in any information disseminated by the Centers to the public or to health care providers relating to the administration of vaccines, a recommendation against administration of any thimerosal-containing vaccine to a pregnant woman.
SEC. 6. REPORT TO CONGRESS.
Not later than 1 year after the date of the enactment of this Act, and annually thereafter, the Commissioner of Food and Drugs shall submit a report to the Congress annually on the progress of the Commissioner in removing mercury from vaccines.
--
Also you should look at:
HR 4260 IH 108th CONGRESS 2d Session H. R. 4260
To provide for the reduction of mercury in the environment.
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
May 4, 2004
Ms. BALDWIN (for herself, Mr. BURTON of Indiana, and Ms. LEE) introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on Energy and Commerce
......
See http://www.33o.com/progressiveconvergence/mercuryexecutivesummary.htm for more information.
Sincerely,
Ellen Thomas PO Box 27217 Washington, DC 20038 202-682-4282
--------
Britain: U.S. Told Of Vaccine Shortage
Flu Shot Records Contradict FDA
By Glenn Frankel and Glenda Cooper
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, October 9, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A18795-2004Oct8?language=printer
LONDON, Oct. 8 -- British health officials said Friday that their American counterparts were informed in mid-September that problems at a drug manufacturing plant in northwest England could disrupt influenza vaccine supplies to the United States.
Records at Britain's Department of Health show that the plant's owner, Chiron Corp., warned officials of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the British Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency on Sept. 13 that potential contamination problems remained unresolved at the plant, according to Alison Langley, a senior spokeswoman at the department.
The British account is at odds with statements by U.S. health officials that they were caught by surprise by the British regulatory agency's decision this week to suspend vaccine manufacturing for three months at the Liverpool plant. It had been expected to provide 48 million doses of flu vaccine to the United States, about half of the U.S. supply this year.
Unlike the United States, health officials in Britain responded to the warning by making "plans by contacting other manufacturers," Langley said.
In Washington on Friday, federal health officials told an emergency hearing in the House Committee on Government Reform that the system for procuring vaccines for the American public has been getting increasingly fragile for years but that none of the proposed solutions are likely to fix the problem quickly.
British officials said there had been regular communication with American public health officials at the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention since Aug. 26, when Chiron announced it would delay releasing supplies of the vaccine because about 4 million doses had been tainted.
Jason Brodsky, an FDA spokesman, provided an agency statement disputing the British account, saying: "None of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) staff who were in regular communication with Chiron since August 25, 2004, were notified by Chiron that there was an increased level of concern regarding the company's investigation of the bacterial contamination."
Furthermore, according to the statement, there had been no communication between CBER and the British agency until that agency suspended Chiron's license. That decision was reached last weekend, and Chiron was informed Tuesday, according to congressional testimony this week.
Britain had been scheduled to receive about 2 million doses of the vaccine, known as Fluvirin, or 10 to 20 percent of its total need.
A British Department of Health statement said officials had already arranged for an additional 1.2 million doses from some of its five other suppliers by the end of the month, with an additional 1 million due to arrive by mid-November.
U.S. officials, by contrast, have said they might not be able to make up the shortfall and urged doctors to give the vaccine only to people who are at highest risk. Influenza kills about 36,000 Americans each year, and as many as 500,000 people worldwide.
A senior British official disclosed this week that the initial cause of the contamination was Serratia marcescens, a potentially dangerous bacterium.
A microbe with a distinctive red pigment, Serratia marcescens is spread by contact with contaminated hands or equipment and was once thought of as harmless, according to Melanie Scourfield of the Society of Microbiologists here.
"It's an opportunistic pathogen that lives in soil and water and has been linked to hospital-acquired infections, dialysis infections and pneumonia," she said.
The Liverpool plant, which Chiron purchased last year, has gone through a series of owners and technical problems in recent years, according to British news reports. In 1999, FDA inspectors accused one of its previous owners, Medeva, of failing to ensure that the plant's systems and equipment for producing Fluvirin were free from contamination.
The following year, British health officials ordered polio vaccines that were manufactured at the plant in 1996 to be withdrawn because of possible contamination with the misformed proteins that cause mad cow disease. And in 2002, Irish officials suspended sales of BCG, a tuberculosis vaccine made at the plant, because of concerns that it was below required strength.
Medeva was bought in January 2000 by Celltech, which later sold its vaccine business to PowderJect Pharmaceuticals, a British-based firm that in turn sold the plant to Chiron.
"This plant has been well known in the industry," said a British pharmaceutical executive who spoke on condition of anonymity. "It's passed through a lot of companies' hands very quickly. . . . One or two companies who have owned this plant -- perhaps they haven't spent the money on it they should have done, while milking it pretty hard."
Chiron's corporate communications headquarters in Emeryville, Calif., did not return a reporter's phone calls on Friday.
Company officials previously have denied that they sought to expand the plant's production capacity too rapidly and said they had spent $75 million to upgrade the facility.
British health experts said U.S. officials should have realized the potential scale of the plant's problems and taken steps to locate other suppliers.
"The American policy has been cruelly exposed -- their decision to put all their eggs in one basket, so to speak," said John Oxford, an international expert on influenza at Queen Mary's College in London.
"But perhaps this will be a good wake-up call and an encouragement to the American government to think again about how they are going to manage flu. It is urgent that we increase production, because there will be a flu pandemic sometime in future years."
Michael Langman, chairman of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization, an independent expert advisory committee, said Britain was wise to line up a half-dozen suppliers. "You have to take the approach that it is always possible that something could go wrong with a company's vaccine," he said. "The probability is that it won't, but the possibility is there."
Staff writer David Brown in Washington contributed to this report.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Kenya's 'Green Militant' Wins Nobel Peace Prize
Champion for Environment, Women
By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, October 9, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A16977-2004Oct8?language=printer
NAIROBI, Oct. 8 -- Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan activist who founded an Africa-wide movement that empowered women, confronted corrupt officials and planted millions of trees in ravaged forestland, will receive the Nobel Peace Prize for 2004, the Nobel Committee announced Friday in Oslo.
Maathai, the first African woman to win the prize, is known as "Kenya's Green Militant." She has championed the environment for more than 30 years on a continent where many people live close to nature but find it under increasing pressure from development, pollution and war.
"We have added a new dimension to the concept of peace," said Ole Danbolt Mjoes, head of the Nobel Committee, which makes its decisions in secrecy. "We have emphasized the environment, democracy building and human rights, and especially women's rights."
An American-educated biologist, Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977, when she planted nine tree seeds in the yard of her house. In ensuing years, she and her movement succeeded in persuading women across Africa to do the same to fight the deforestation that is afflicting much of the continent. Trees help farmers by soaking up rain and preserving nutrient-rich topsoil; they also are a crucial habitat for wildlife.
Her group worked closely with village women, whose traditional duties include collecting firewood. By the millions, they were won over to the idea that planting trees and protecting the environment in other ways would help farming and long-term development of their communities and ensure a supply of wood.
Over almost three decades, the movement has brought about the planting of 30 million trees and given jobs to nearly 10,000 women who plant and sell seedlings to make a living. It was one of Africa's first female activist groups and has become a force in community affairs on a wide variety of issues.
"I feel so very excited, and I am very happy and very appreciative of all those who walked the road with me," Maathai, 64, said in a telephone interview. "Many wars we witness around the world are over natural resources. Without a properly managed environment, all of our lives are threatened."
Daniel arap Moi, who ruled Kenya as president for two decades, once called Maathai a "mad woman," and "a threat to the order and security of the country" for her tireless agitation to preserve forests. Moi's party lost a presidential election in 2002; Maathai was elected to parliament that year and is now assistant environment minister.
Maathai said in the interview that she survived critics by having "the thick skin of an elephant."
The tall and velvet-voiced Maathai joins past laureates who include former president Jimmy Carter, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama and Martin Luther King Jr.
She will receive the award in Oslo on Dec. 10. But on Friday, she celebrated by removing her jewelry, kneeling in the dirt and planting seeds of a Kenyan tree known as the Nandi Flame on the grounds of the Outspan Hotel in Nyeri, her home area in the foothills of Mount Kenya.
President Mwai Kibaki hosted her at the Nairobi State House on Friday evening for a celebration. "Prof. Maathai has waged a sustained campaign to protect our environment," Kibaki said in a statement. "As Kenyans we must re-dedicate ourselves to the fight to conserve the environment as a gesture of appreciation of the prestigious award to one of our own."
Her efforts were not always cherished. In 1989, she led a one-woman charge in court against Moi's autocratic government, after he proposed building the tallest skyscraper in Africa and a six-story statue of himself in the only public green space in Kenya's gritty capital.
"She was threatened physically and was called a busybody in the press, yet she didn't flinch," said Mwalimu Mati, deputy directory of Transparency International, an anti-corruption group with offices in Nairobi. "It was like watching a lone, unknown voice stand up against the whole. She really deserves this, because she's converted a lot of us to understand why the environment is so important. Now she has the real moral authority to challenge people who are selfishly allocating themselves land."
She was famous at the time for saying publicly, "We can provide parks for rhino and elephants; why can't we provide open spaces for the people? Why are we creating environmental havoc in urban areas?"
A lawsuit she filed against the $200 million, Moi-backed project was dismissed. But by then, her protests had scared away investors.
In 1992, she and other women stripped naked in downtown Nairobi to protest police abuses. She said that in taking off their clothes, the women had "resorted to something they knew traditionally would act on the men. . . . They stripped to show their nakedness to their sons. It is a curse to see your mother naked."
On Jan. 8, 1999, she was whipped on the head and arrested by security forces allegedly hired by Moi to disperse Green Belt Movement members who were protesting the clearing of Karura Forest near Nairobi for a luxury housing development. She caught the nation's attention by insisting on signing her police report in blood from her head injury. The houses were never built.
She is also a rare African feminist, whose husband left her in a nasty public divorce. He won the settlement dispute on the basis that she was, by her own account, "too educated, too strong, too successful, too stubborn and too hard to control."
She has been a passionate fighter for women's rights, leading by example on a continent where women often live as second-class citizens, do most of the labor, but have the legal rights of children. Their rights to own property, for instance, are often limited.
Maathai grew up in a Kenyan village, the daughter of farmers. She excelled at the local school and applied repeatedly for scholarships to continue her education, eventually winning one to attend college in the United States. In 1964, she received a degree in biological sciences from Mount St. Scholastica College in Atchison, Kan. She received a master's degree two years later from the University of Pittsburgh and, in 1971, a PhD from the University of Nairobi. That made her the first woman in eastern and central Africa to earn a doctorate. She also became the first female professor at the University of Nairobi.
At times, she has generated jealousy among her peers.
"I have had the fortune of breaking a lot of records," Maathai said in a 1992 interview with The Washington Post. "First woman this. First woman that. And I think that created a lot of jealousy without me realizing. Sometimes we don't quite realize that not everybody's clapping when we're succeeding."
David Makali, director of Nairobi's Media Institute, said he hoped Maathai's newfound global fame would draw attention to a current land-grab controversy in Kenya. Top government officials, including Moi and another former president, Jomo Kenyatta, are accused of seizing public lands for their personal use and arranging the clearing of trees for fast profits.
The award "is fabulous news . . . for Kenya and Africa," Makali said. "This will increase the visibility of the country and our campaign to be better watchdogs over our country's land."
Last week, Maathai threatened to give up her seat in parliament to protest a plan to use forestland for small-scale farming. "I would rather give up my seat than see our forests destroyed," she said Friday.
She added that, prize or no prize, she would continue her fight, for the sake of young Africans.
"The generation that destroys the environment is usually not the generation that suffers," she said. "If they go into the forest, they will be digging their own graves and that of their children and grandchildren."
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