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NUCLEAR
A United World or a Divided World ?
Bruce to return Ontario Bruce B 8 nuke to service
Cylinders stall, but cleanup moving forward
U.S. use of depleted uranium under fire
Pollution Chokes the Tigris, a Main Source of Baghdad's Drinking Water
Will Bush Flatten Fallujah?
Nuclear fusion reactor deal close
EU again warns could mount nuclear project without Japan
India and Pakistan courting danger: Michel Krepon
Iranians, Europeans Meet on Nuclear Deal
European-Iran Nuclear Deal Tottering
Japanese Government Energy Commission Ignores Nuclear Dangers
Terror threat
MILITARY
France Blamed in Ivorian Unrest
French military says several dozen assaults on civilians Ivory Coast
Japan raises submarine issue with China: report
Significant changes in Japanese defense 'largely overlooked'
Insurer Lombard holds 7.3 pct in arms manufacturer Rheinmetall
Chinese Whistle-Blower Punished
New insurgency confronts US forces
U.S. Troops force men trying to flee Assault on Fallujah to return to city
Violence Spreads in Iraq; Car Bomb Kills 17 in Baghdad
U.S. Tries To Corner Fallujah Insurgents
Black Flags Are Deadly Signals as Cornered Rebels Fight Back
Iraqi Insurgents Shoot Down U.S. Army Helicopter
Behind the Camp David Myth Arafat didn't blindly spurn a generous offer.
Secrecy surrounds diagnosis
Just What Mr. Palestine Ruled Over
Arafat Embarks on Final Trip Home
After Chaotic Procession, Arafat Is Laid to Rest in West Bank
P.L.O. Picks Abbas, a Pragmatist, as Followers Mourn Arafat
Nicaragua Says It Will Destroy Missiles
U.S. to Consider Naming Mideast Peace Envoy
NATO's Chief Backs U.S. Views on Terrorism
Russia to Reduce Troops in Chechnya
Robot Helps NASA Refocus on Hubble
Former Chief of CIA's Bin Laden Unit Leaves
Base closures
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Trials of G.I.'s at Abu Ghraib to Be Moved to the U.S.
Ashcroft says judges threaten national security by questioning Bush
Ashcroft and medical marijuana
Cuffing Bush and the FBI
Inmate Is Ordered to Pay Ex-Wife Millions
Ivory Coast Says 4,000 Prison Inmates Escaped
POLITICS
Unit Plans Closed Hearings on Collapse of the Towers
Afghanistan TV Networks Ordered Off Air
Hispanics Applaud Gonzales Nomination
AARP Opposes Bush Plan to Replace Social Security With Private Accounts
Cheney Protects Rumsfeld's Job Until the Spring
Vote Fraud Theories, Spread by Blogs, Are Quickly Buried
OTHER
EPA Backs Nanomaterial Safety Research
W.H.O. Panel Backs Gene Manipulation in Smallpox Virus
ACTIVISTS
Israeli police arrest nuke whistleblower
VANUNU RE-ARRESTED BY DOZENS OF ARMED POLICE;
Nuclear Whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu Re-Arrested in Israel;
Military's Presence at Antiwar Rally Is Called a Coincidence
-------- NUCLEAR
A United World or a Divided World ? Multiethnicity, Human Rights, Terrorism
Under the high patronage of the President of the Italian Republic
WORLD SUMMIT OF NOBEL PEACE LAUREATES
Rome, 10th - 12th November 2004
STATEMENT OF THE 5TH SUMMIT OF NOBEL PEACE LAUREATES
November 12, 2004, Rome, Italy
Two decades ago, the world was swept with a wave of hope. Inspired by the popular movements for peace, freedom, democracy and solidarity, the nations of the world worked together to end the cold war. Yet the opportunities opened up by that historic change are slipping away. We are gravely concerned with the resurgent nuclear and conventional arms race, disrespect for international law and the failure of the world's governments to address adequately the challenges of poverty and environmental degradation. A cult of violence is spreading globally; the opportunity to build a culture of peace, advocated by the United Nations, Pope John Paul II, the Dalai Lama and other spiritual leaders, is receding.
Alongside the challenges inherited from the past there are new ones, which, if not properly addressed, could cause a clash of civilizations, religions and cultures. We reject the idea of the inevitability of such a conflict. We are convinced that combating terrorism in all its forms is a task that should be pursued with determination. Only by reaffirming our shared ethical values -- respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms -- and by observing democratic principles, within and amongst countries, can terrorism be defeated. We must address the root causes of terrorism -- poverty, ignorance and injustice -- rather than responding to violence with violence.
Unacceptable violence is occurring daily against women and children. Children remain our most important neglected treasure. Their protection, security and health should be the highest priority. Children everywhere deserve to be educated in and for peace. There is no excuse for neglecting their safety and welfare and, particularly, for their suffering in war.
The war in Iraq has created a hotbed of dangerous instability and a breeding ground for terrorism. Credible reports of the disappearance of nuclear materials cannot be ignored. While we mourn the deaths of tens of thousands of people, none of the goals proclaimed by the coalition have been achieved.
The challenges of security, poverty and environmental crisis can only be met successfully through multilateral efforts based on the rule of law. All nations must strictly fulfil their treaty obligations and reaffirm the indispensable role of the United Nations and the primary responsibility of the UN Security Council for maintaining peace.
We support a speedy, peaceful resolution of the North Korean nuclear issue, including a verifiable end to North Korea's nuclear weapons program, security guarantees and lifting of sanctions on North Korea. Both the six-party talks and bilateral efforts by the United States and North Korea should contribute to such an outcome.
We welcome recent progress in the talks between Iran and Great Britain, France and Germany on the Iranian nuclear program issue and hope that the United States will join in the process to find a solution within the framework of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
We call for the reduction of military expenditures and for conclusion of a treaty that would control arms trade and prohibit sales of arms where they could be used to violate international human rights standards and humanitarian law.
As Nobel Laureates, we believe that the world community needs urgently to address the challenges of poverty and sustainable development. Responding to these challenges requires the political will that has been so sadly lacking.
The undertakings pledged by states at the UN Millennium Summit, the promises of increased development assistance, fair trade, market access and debt relief for developing countries, have not been implemented. Poverty continues to be the worlds most widespread and dangerous scourge. Millions of people become victims of hunger and disease, and entire nations suffer from feelings of frustration and despair. This creates fertile ground for extremism and terrorism. The stability and future of the entire human community are thus jeopardized.
Scientists are warning us that failure to solve the problems of water, energy and climate change will lead to a breakdown of order, more military conflicts and ultimately the destruction of the living systems upon which civilization depends. Therefore, we reaffirm our support for the Kyoto Protocol and the Earth Charter and endorse the rights-based approach to water, as reflected in the initiative of Green Cross International calling upon governments to negotiate a framework treaty on water.
As Nobel Peace Prize Laureates we believe that to benefit from humankind's new, unprecedented opportunities and to counter the dangers confronting us there is a need for better global governance. Therefore, we support strengthening and reforming the United Nations and its institutions.
As immediate specific tasks, we commit to work for:
- Genuine efforts to resolve the Middle East crisis. This is both a key to the problem of terrorism and a chance to avoid a dangerous clash of civilizations. A solution is possible if the right of all nations in the region to secure, viable statehood is respected and if the Middle East is integrated in all global processes while respecting the unique culture of the peoples of that region.
- Preserving and strengthening the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. We reject double standards and emphasize the legal responsibility of nuclear weapons states to work to eliminate nuclear weapons. We call for continuation of the moratorium on nuclear testing pending entry into force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and for accelerating the process of verifiable and irreversible nuclear arms reduction. We are gravely alarmed by the creation of new, usable nuclear weapons and call for rejection of doctrines that view nuclear weapons as legitimate means of war-fighting and threat pre-emption.
- Effectively realizing the initiative of the UN Secretary General to convene a high-level conference in 2005 to give an impetus to the implementation of the Millennium Development Goals. We pledge to work to create an atmosphere of public accountability to help accomplish these vitally important tasks.
We believe that to solve the problems that challenge the world today politicians need to interact with an empowered civil society and strong mass movements. This is the way toward a globalization with a human face and a new international order that rejects brute force, respects ethnic, cultural and political diversity and affirms justice, compassion and human solidarity.
We, the Nobel Peace Laureates and Laureate organizations, pledge to work for the realization of these goals and are calling on governments and people everywhere to join us.
Mikhail Gorbachev, Kim Dae-Jung, Lech Walesa, Joseph Rotblat, Jose Ramos-Horta, Betty Williams, Mairead Corrigan Maguire, Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo, Adolfo Perez Esquivel, and Rigoaberta Menchu Tum; and, United Nations Children's Fund, Pugwash Conferences, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, International Peace Bureau, Institut de Droit International, American Friends Service Committee, Médicins sans Frontières, Amnesty International, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, International Labour Organization, International Campaign to Ban Land Mines, United Nations.
Alyn Ware Vice-President, International Peace Bureau P.O.Box 23-257, Cable Car Lane Wellington, Aotearoa-New Zealand Phone (64) 4 385-8192. Fax 385-8193 <mailto:alyn@pnnd.org>alyn@pnnd.org www.ipb.org
-------- canada
Bruce to return Ontario Bruce B 8 nuke to service
Reuters
Nov 12, 2004
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=ITYYCZXEQ3WS0CRBAEKSFFA?type=topNews&storyID=6799089
NEW YORK, Nov 12 - Bruce Power's 840-megawatt Bruce B 8 nuclear power in Ontario will return to service shortly following a brief, unplanned outage on Nov. 10, a company spokesman said Friday.
The unit shut after its turbine cooling water pumps automatically shut down.
Also on Nov. 10, the company shut its 825 MW Bruce A 3 to work on the unit's heat transport system.
Units 4, 5 and 7 remain online while unit 6 remains off line for its scheduled inspection program and will likely return to service later this month.
One megawatt powers about 1,000 homes, according to the North American average.
The 6,660 MW Bruce station is located in Tiverton, on the shores of Lake Huron, about 155 miles (249 km) northwest of Toronto. There are four 825 MW A units and 840 MW B units at Bruce. Units 1 and 2, built in the late 1970s, have not operated since the end of 1999 because they needed extensive upgrades.
The province appointed a negotiator on Sept. 8 to discuss the potential restart of units 1 and 2, which have been the subject of technical evaluations by Bruce Power since January. The restart could cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
Bruce Power, one of Ontario's largest power generators, is owned by Cameco Corp. (CCO.TO: Quote, Profile, Research) (31.6 percent), TransCanada Corp. (TRP.TO: Quote, Profile, Research) (31.6 percent), BPC Generation Infrastructure Trust, established by the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System (31.6 percent), the Power Workers' Union (4 percent) and the Society of Energy Professionals (1.2 percent).
-------- depleted uranium
Cylinders stall, but cleanup moving forward
Paul Parson paul.parson@oakridger.com
Oak Ridger Staff
November 12, 2004
http://www.oakridger.com/stories/111204/new_20041112040.shtml
More than 2,000 uranium-related cylinders have been shipped out of Oak Ridge to date.
The vast majority of the cylinder-stored material, referred to as depleted uranium hexafluoride, is a byproduct of an operation where uranium was ultimately processed into nuclear reactor fuel and weapons-grade material. An extremely small percentage of the cylinders contain other forms of uranium.
For fiscal year 2004, the Department of Energy and its local cleanup contractor, Bechtel Jacobs Co., planned to ship approximately 2,154 cylinders from the Oak Ridge K-25 site to the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Ohio. But, they ultimately transported 1,906 of them for the fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30.
Mike Hughes, president of Bechtel Jacobs, said this week that the number of departed cylinders has surpassed the 2,000 mark. He discussed the work during Wednesday's Oak Ridge Site-Specific Advisory Board at the DOE Information Center.
Hughes acknowledged that project officials spent some time determining the best method for shipping the waste material. And, DOE's Oak Ridge cleanup chief, Steve McCracken, said, any "political issues" pertaining to the shipments are in the past, adding that the looming obstacles pertain to regulations, like weight limits for interstate shipping.
SSAB member Norman Mulvenon strongly urged DOE and Bechtel Jacobs to remedy the situation in order to get the cylinders back on the road to Ohio where the material will be processed into a safer form for disposal or storage. More than 3,000 cylinders are left, and the goal is to have all of them out of Oak Ridge by the end of fiscal year 2005.
Bechtel Jacobs has tackled DOE's Oak Ridge environmental remediation work since 1998. The company recently completed the first year of its latest contract, which put cleanup efforts on an accelerated schedule.
According to Hughes, 80 percent of the work is being done by subcontractors while the other 20 percent is self-performed by Bechtel Jacobs. The company has 111 subcontracts and is working with 62 small businesses - seven of which are owned by women.
Here's a look at some of the work that's been accomplished so far:
- Asbestos removal is 80 percent complete in the mile-long K-25 building, located at the site that bears the same name. Additionally, 43 converters have been cleared from the building while 85,000 square feet of transite panels have been taken off its sides.
- At K-25, 43 structures have been demolished, which is ahead of the 19 initially planned for FY 2004.
- Capping of three nuclear waste burial grounds in Melton Valley is progressing ahead of schedule, with one of them 93 percent finished and the other two 47 percent and 35 percent complete.
Looking at the big picture, Bechtel Jacobs' contract calls for the Melton Valley cleanup effort to be completed in 2006 while the work at the K-25 site should be wrapped up by 2008.
----
U.S. use of depleted uranium under fire
By LORI MATSUKAWA
Nov 12, 2004,
Axis of Logic
http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/printer_13526.shtml
Alvin Clark, of Tacoma, developed aplastic anemia he believes is related to his exposure to depleted uranium dust after he was hit by friendly fire in Saudi Arabia.
Shells and armor used by U.S. tanks, gunships and helicopters are often made of depleted uranium because depleted uranium, or D.U., is a heavy metal, able to pierce armored vehicles or resist being pierced. But it's also radioactive, a waste product of nuclear enrichment plants like Hanford.
A pentagon training film shows how the D.U. ordnance bursts into a fiery powder on contact.
So, what happens when U.S. Troops are forced to march through the D.U. dust that's left on the ground? Or get hit by friendly fire? Some vets say it made them sick. The Pentagon disputes that.
Shinichi Matsuura of Renton fought in the first Gulf War. His Bradley tank was hit not once, but twice, by U.S. forces. He breathed a lot of D.U. smoke.
"Matter of fact I didn't know we were using D.U. until six years ago," said Matsuura.
Alvin Clark of Tacoma says his unit was nearly hit by a friendly fire missile in Jubail, Saudi Arabia. He developed aplastic anemia and needed a bone marrow transplant.
Clark said no one ever warned him there might be some depleted uranium out there, and if he were exposed to it, what he was supposed to do about it.
Dennis Kyne of San Jose says his unit marched along the bombed-out "highway of death" to Baghdad. He receives a disability check from the government each month for an "undiagnosed illness."
"My chain of command says I'm big enough and strong enough and soldier enough to walk through this stuff and .. it's just like lead. Just a little bit heavy and might affect the kidneys," he said.
This October, the Pentagon released findings of a five-year study of D.U. dust. Residue was collected from shot-up tanks, and analyzed by computer models. The military's conclusion? Half of the inhaled D.U. - a radioactive heavy metal - would be excreted by the body in 10 to 100 days.
"Even individuals with the highest potential for exposure still have doses that are well below peacetime safety standards. Which would be allowable here in the states so if you put that in the context of other combat risks, I'd have to say the military exposures to depleted uranium are safe," said Lt. Col. Mark Melanson.
It's a slightly different story for veterans with D.U. shrapnel embedded in their bodies.
The V.A. in Baltimore is studying about 70 Gulf War one vets, including Shinishi Matsuura, and has found elevated levels of uranium in the urine of several men more than a decade after the conflict.
But Pentagon officials say this, too, is no cause for alarm.
"It's important to note that this group has been followed for over 10 years and no adverse health effects associated with depleted uranium have been found," officials said.
In the first Gulf War, the Pentagon estimates it used 315 to 350 tones of D.U. In today's conflict, it estimates coalition forces have used three to six times that.
So what about the D.U. remaining in Iraq?
In a video provided by the Uranium Medical Research Centre of Canada, researchers found soil and spent munitions with radiation levels thousands of times higher than Department of Defense guidelines. U.S. soldiers tried to warn-off the researchers.
Congressman Jim McDermott, a medical doctor and Iraq war critic, questions using D.U. at all. During a hospital visit in Baghdad before the war, McDermott was told Iraq now has the highest rate of childhood leukemia in the world.
"I saw what it did to the Iraqis, but now I see that we're marching our own people through that, creating birth defects in children, leukemia in children, illnesses among adults. Then it becomes a question of really a war crime. The Geneva Convention says you cannot do something that has a long term effect on the country," said McDermott.
The Pentagon maintains D.U. is safe and necessary in war.
"You take with you the best weapons systems you can so you can defeat the enemy with overwhelming lethality," said Dr. Michael Kilpatrick.
The Pentagon says for penetrating armor, depleted uranium is the heavy metal that is the best.
"It's not the best, it's the worst," said Kyne. "It inherently becomes the worst possible weapon because it's no longer just attacking the enemy, it's omnicidal, it kills all of us."
The U.S. and U.K. are the only militaries that use D.U. Most exposure to U.S. soldiers has been from fire from its own forces.
In 1996, the United Nations Sub Commission on Promotion and Protection of Human Rights found use of D.U. weapons "incompatible" with existing humanitarian law.
Online at: http://www.king5.com/topstories/stories/NW_111104WABdepleteduraniumSW.49604608.html
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[This mentions "heavy metals" which cause cancer. I suspect that's a euphemism for depleted uranium.]
Pollution Chokes the Tigris, a Main Source of Baghdad's Drinking Water
newstandardnews.net
by Dahr Jamail
November 12, 2004
http://newstandardnews.net/content/?action=show_item&itemid=481
Water from the Tigris River -- consumed by Iraqis in Baghdad every day -- is contaminated with war waste, and much of it goes untreated despite obligations of a US company to reconstruct vital facilities.
Baghdad , Jun 6 - With reconstruction of a highly inadequate water treatment and distribution system at a near standstill throughout much of Central Iraq, some residents of Baghdad are left with little choice but to drink highly polluted water from the Tigris River. Aside from a newly formed Iraqi non-governmental organization that is focusing on the cleanup of one section of the river, not much is being done to improve Baghdad residents' access to potable water, and US contractors appear unable or unwilling to help.
While many areas of Baghdad have access to drinking water from a few of the functional treatment plants, millions of residents remain without a clean, reliable source. All too many of these unfortunates turn to the rotten banks of the Tigris, which snakes prominently through the heart of Baghdad collecting toxins as it flows.
Abdul Salam Abdulali works on the river, running a dredging machine. A river man for most of his life, he has long been employed by a company that dredges the muddy Tigris, but which was recently incorporated into the Ministry of Water Resources.
"I am married to the water," he said standing atop his dredging machine as it floated atop the river. "But it is too polluted now. I wish I could eat the fish, but when I cut them open I can smell the oil."
The remains of a cow decompose on the banks of the Tigris near Baghdad, a major and often direct source of water for the city's residents. (Dahr Jamail/NewStandard) PHOTO: The remains of a cow decompose on the banks of the Tigris near Baghdad, a major and often direct source of water for the city's residents. (Dahr Jamail/NewStandard)
In an alarming development, Dr. Husni Mohammed's research has additionally concluded that Iraqi and US military waste during the 2003 invasion deposited oil and benzene into the Tigris, the effects of which include nervous system damage, birth defects and cancer. The residents of the impoverished Baghdad neighborhood called Sadr City are often forced to drink untreated water directly from the Tigris. They are also plagued by diarrhea; many reportedly suffer from recurring kidney stones.
Sadr City shopkeeper Ranzi Amher Aziz joined a chorus of voices protesting the lack of potable water in this Baghdad slum. "The situation here is worse now than before the war," he said, echoing others' complaints.
Many here say they cannot see any sign of the US making an effort to help. Aziz stood near a pool of raw sewage in the street. "There has been no work here by the Americans to give us clean water or fix the sewage problem," he said.
Tigris River water is a concentrated cocktail of pesticides, fertilizers, oil, gasoline and heavy metals, reports Dr. Husni Mohammed, an Iraqi who holds a PhD in Environmental and Biological Science and has researched the condition of the Tigris. Raw sewage mixes with particles from antiquated piping and US-fired depleted uranium munitions, he says, plus remnants from untold amounts of other chemicals released by American and Iraqi weaponry used since the 1991 Gulf War.
In an alarming development, Dr. Mohammed's research has additionally concluded that Iraqi and US military waste during the 2003 invasion deposited oil and benzene into the river.
The health effects of benzene -- an ingredient found in gasoline and jet fuel -- are well known and severe. Short-term exposure can cause significant damage to the nervous system and dramatic suppression of the immune system. Consistent consumption of benzene-tainted water can cause long-term effects including cancer (particularly Leukemia), birth defects and damage to the reproductive system.
Heavy metals in drinking water are also known to damage the liver, brain and other vital organs.
Adding to the hazards, very few sewage treatment plants in Baghdad are operational. Raw waste from the city of five million residents can be pumped through the sewer system, completely bypassing any treatment, and flow right into the river.
Statistics underscore the widespread suffering of Iraqis. The incidence of diarrheal diseases, such as typhoid, dysentery and cholera, doubled between August 2002, before the US-led invasion, and a year later. So reported the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), a UN agency tasked with coordinating responses to severe humanitarian crises. Seventy percent of all children's sicknesses are linked to contaminated water, the report adds.
Over one year into the occupation, the situation is not seen by most residents here as having improved much. Therefore, some have begun to take on the responsibility and work of enacting changes they do not believe can wait for foreign authorities or the new interim government to undertake.
Shwaqi Kareem, the president of the National Association for Defense of Environment and Children (NADEC), founded the non-governmental organization (NGO) because he felt it was time to start cleaning up a particularly polluted section of the Tigris. He hopes to remove the garbage, stop the deluge of raw sewage that is flowing into the river and establish gardens along the banks.
Kareem said the Tigris is in worse condition now than before the invasion, and blames the US's disinterest in taking care of a waterway considered vital by Iraqis.
NADEC draws on the labor of around 1,000 workers, said co-founder Salim Kamel. Some are paid, but the majority are volunteers. "We get some money from the municipality," Kamel said, "but some of the volunteers are business owners who donate money as well."
Kareem is reluctant to work with the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in the cleanup; he blames the Coalition for allowing companies to dump their garbage and sewage into the river over the past year.
A contractor interviewed inside the Coalition-run "Green Zone" area echoed Kareem's sentiments. Awshalim Khammo recently quit his job in frustration after working to clean up the areas of the CPA near the Tigris. "I tried all last year to help improve the Palace ground and the river side within the Green Zone, but things went from bad to worse," he said. Khammo complained in particular about dumping -- which he referred to as a "disaster" -- near the Kellogg Brown and Root warehouse and yards on the east end of the presidential palace.
Bechtel Corporation was awarded a no-bid, cost-plus-fixed-fee contract on April 17, 2003 worth $680 million. The controversial contract made Bechtel and its subcontractors responsible for the rehabilitation of the Sharkh Dijlah water treatment plant in Baghdad, as well as the Kerkh Waste Water Treatment Plant.
Repeated contacts with various authorities in charge of civilian press access to water treatment projects yielded no invitations to verify progress made on any Baghdad area water treatment facilities.
The brochure produced by Bechtel to highlight its work in Iraq concerning the drinking water situation only gives a concrete finishing date for two projects, one of which is the rehabilitation and capacity-building of the Sharkh Dijlah plant.
Work on the plant, Bechtel's number two priority in Baghdad since June 2003, is expected to increase potable water by 225 million liters per day. The work was due to be completed by this month.
According to the Washington Post, however, Baghdad officials said Bechtel spent four months studying plans for the expansion made by Iraq's state-run water company, finally concluding they were acceptable. They then reissued the same orders for the same parts from the same supplier Iraqi engineers had tried to acquire them from. Bechtel estimates it will spend $16 billion on the project, carrying out the work essentially as had previously been done by Iraqi engineers no longer permitted to participate.
Bechtel admits the water treatment plant is still being rehabilitated, but says the delay is caused by extra capacity. "We are expanding the treatment capacity of the plant by 50 percent over the design capacity, or 50 million gallons per day," said company spokesperson Francis Canavan. "Our work is expected to be completed in the fall."
Dr. Abdul Latif Rashid, the Minister for Water Resources in Iraq, told the BBC that the poor state of Iraq's infrastructure and past mismanagement are to blame for some of the water problems Iraqis are now facing.
The UN's OCHA report spread the blame more broadly: "Three wars and 13 years of sanctions, as well as the Coalition invasion and the looting that followed it, have dealt a heavy blow to the country's already creaking water system."
Kerkh Wastewater Treatment Plant -- another Baghdad area plant in Bechtel's Implementation Plan -- is currently undergoing rehabilitation efforts, according to a company spokesperson, who said, "Last week, the Kerkh Wastewater Treatment Plant, which we are rehabilitating, began treating sewage for the first time in years, when one-third of the plant reopened."
During a boat tour of the Tigris' banks taken to inspect treatment facilities, NADEC founder Shwaqi Kareem pointed to a massive outpouring of brownish gray wastewater flowing right into the river. The source of this vile discharge? "The Kerkh Wastewater Treatment Plant," said Kareem.
----
Will Bush Flatten Fallujah?
progressivetrail.org
by Kurt Nimmo
November 12, 2004
http://progressivetrail.org/articles/040408Nimmo.shtml
Imagining the probable future of places such as Fallujah, Sadr City, Nasiriyah, Karbala, Kut, and Ramadi, I recall the photographs of Grozny (Djohar), Chechnya, taken by the Gamma Press Agency photographer Eric Bouvet.
"In February [2000] when I entered Grozny, it was as if I was hit by an apocalyptic vision," Bouvet writes. "In 20 years of covering wars I never had the occasion to feel like a astronaut landing on another planet. I had visited Grozny four times in the last war, but this time I couldn't even be sure where I was. Where Minutka Square -- with it imposing buildings that lead to Lenin Avenue -- once was nothing remained, just a huge, imposing void. The Russians had dynamited the city, leaving it totally in ruins."
Sooner or later, in desperation, Bush will surely order the destruction of wide swaths -- inhabited by "bad guys" -- of Iraqi cities in response to the undefeatable Shia and Sunni uprisings against the occupation. It is inevitable. Like Sharon and the Likudites, Bush's ideological mentors, the US military will eventually repeat the atrocities and violations of human rights and international law the Israelis eagerly committed in the Jenin refugee camp in September of 2000. Civilians always pay the price for any "up tick" in support for the resistance -- be they Palestinians, Chechnians, or Iraqis.
Both Republicans and so-called liberal Democrats will fervently support the flattening of Iraqi cities and the mass murder of civilians, especially now that the Shia have joined the Sunnis in resisting Bush's neoliberal plans for Iraq. Or should I say the Likudite plan for the Arab Middle East?
In fact, Democrats have a long track record of supporting state terrorism directed against civilians, from the torching of Vietnamese villages to the cluster bombing of neighborhoods in Yugoslavia. Bush Senior, Clinton, and Bush Junior all supported and kept in place brutal sanctions that resulted in the death of 500,000 Iraqi children from 1991 until Bush invaded Iraq last year. All three administrations engaged in the recurring slaughter of Iraqi civilians over the same period of time.
The Pentagon has repeatedly attacked civilians since Bush invaded the country over a year ago, killing more than 10,000 of them. For instance, most recently, on April 7, in response to the murder of four US "contractors" (rumored to be CIA operatives) and increased resistance, the US bombed a Fallujah mosque "as worshippers were gathering for afternoon prayers," the AP reported. "The bodies of dead and wounded were rushed away in cars to private homes in the area where temporary hospitals have been set up." On April 6, 60 Iraqis were killed and more than 120 wounded. The dead and wounded are invariably described as "militants" or "insurgents" by the corporate media, but as the history of modern warfare in urban environments demonstrates, a high percentage of the casualties are invariably civilians.
In the weeks ahead, as the Shi'ites intensify their resistance to the occupation, the number of dead will go up dramatically -- not that the US cares.
For as the Pentagon told Helen Thomas last September, dead Iraqis "don't count. They are not important." Iraqi Health Ministry, Dr. Nagham Mohsen, was ordered by her superior, Dr. Nazar Shabandar, to stop collecting data on the number of Iraqi dead last December, probably at the behest of Paul Bremer and the CPA.
In fact, dead Americans are not important either, for as retired General Tommy Franks told an audience at the annual Chamber of Commerce banquet in Salina, Kansas, in February, "If [conquering Iraq] costs 500 [American lives], that's OK, or 5000, OK, or 50,000, that's OK with me." Obviously, it is OK with the American public as well, since there was virtually no response to Franks' outrageous remarks.
As the events in Samarra last year reveal, US troops respond to attacks on convoys by slaughtering civilians in trigger-happy fashion. "There was an attack and an exchange of fire between the Americans and the resistance lasting half an hour," Samarra police chief, Colonel Ismail Mahmoud Mohammed, told the media. "The resistance withdrew, then [US] bombardments started, using all manner of weapons in all directions and without any discrimination." This resulted in numerous civilian dead and wounded. "We received the bodies of eight civilians, including a woman and a child," said hospital director Abd Tawfiq. "More than 60 people wounded by gunfire and shrapnel from US rounds are being treated at the hospital." Many of the wounded came from the al-Shafi mosque, targeted by US rockets and gunfire.
"So far, in the 'war on terror' initiated since 9/11, the USA and its allies have been responsible for over 13,000 civilian deaths, not only the 10,000 in Iraq, but also 3,000-plus civilian deaths in Afghanistan, another death toll that continues to rise long after the world's attention has moved on," reports the Iraq Body Count website. "Elsewhere in the world over the same period, paramilitary forces hostile to the USA have killed 408 civilians in 18 attacks worldwide. Adding the official 9/11 death toll (2,976 on 29 October 2003) brings the total to just under 3,500."
The Pentagon and Rumsfeld brag about avoiding "collateral damage," but the history of warfare over the last 60 or so years tells a different story. In fact, the deliberate targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure is a military strategy used over and over with gruesome results. From the Allied fire and nuclear bombings of German and Japanese cities during WWII to Bush Senior's calculated plan to destroy Iraqi sanitation and water purification plants during the Gulf War, the engineered mass murder of innocent civilians is a frequently used "tactic" of war. It will be no different in Iraq now that Shi'ite and Sunni resistance fighters have apparently come together to fight the US occupation.
Last year a newspaper in Ohio revealed the numerous war crimes committed against Vietnamese civilians by the US Army's Tiger Force in 1967. "The paper said the Army's investigation of Tiger Force found 27 soldiers who said the severing of ears from dead Vietnamese was an accepted practice," Reuters reported in October. "One soldier told the newspaper that troops would wear necklaces of ears to scare Vietnamese civilians."
As would-be president John Kerry admitted before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971, US soldiers in Vietnam "raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country." Kerry admitted taking part in these war crimes. "Yes, I committed the same kinds of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed. I took part in search and destroy missions, in the burning of villages."
Since the Winter Soldier investigation and his testimony before the Senate, however, Kerry has undergone a remarkable transformation from an antiwar activist to a Republican Lite senator who wants to send an additional 40,000 troops to Iraq to bomb mosques and shoot down protesting Iraqis. "I have to tell you, sometimes in foreign policy, certain things are complicated," Kerry told MSNBC's Chris Matthews last October.
Many Democrats are literally indistinguishable from their warmongering Republican colleagues. For instance, Zell Miller, Georgia Democrat, advised Bush to "Bomb the hell out of them" after 9/11. As it turned out, most of "them" were poor Afghan citizens, such as wedding celebrants massacred in the southern Afghan province of Uruzgan in August, 2002.
The urge to reduce sections of Iraq into a "parking lot" will only increase as the Iraqi resistance begins to accomplish its objectives of fighting the US to a standstill, inflicting a growing number of casualties, and eventually driving them from the country.
For instance, as I write this, it appears Moqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army has "captured a number of soldiers from the coalition during clashes currently taking place across a large swathe of Iraq," Reuters reports, citing Lebanon's al-Manar television station run by Hezbollah. Naturally, these captured soldiers will likely be exploited for propaganda purposes by the Shi'ites the same way the US exploited the captured and humiliated Saddam Hussein. As Donald Rumsfeld made obvious during the invasion, the capture and parading of US soldiers sincerely angers the Bush administration, as did the murder and gruesome public display of four so-called "contractors" in Fallujah last week.
Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the coalition's senior military spokesman, has promised "powerful offensive operations to destroy the al-Mahdi army throughout Iraq," a highly unlikely prospect considering al-Mahdi claims to have tens of thousands of supporters. Kimmitt is setting the US military up for failure -- there is simply no way the US, the Iraqi Governing Council, the CPA , or even Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani can stop the resistance and violence from spreading like wildfire across Iraq -- that is, short of flattening cities and killing thousands of al-Sadr's followers along with an indeterminate -- and uncounted -- number of civilians.
Eventually, faced with defeat, the Bush administration -- or a Kerry administration -- will vengefully flatten large sections of Iraqi cities. As the Israeli experience in the West Bank town of Jenin demonstrates, incredible violence and destruction is required to defeat an entrenched enemy in an urban environment. "Only when armored Israeli bulldozers demolished buildings sheltering the last of the Palestinian gunmen was the resistance finally quelled and the full extent of the damage revealed: According to the United Nations, 23 Israeli soldiers and 52 Palestinians were killed. Hundreds of houses were seriously damaged or destroyed," Yagil Henkin writes in Azure. "Many people, in Israel and abroad, judged the operation by a strict moral standard concerning treatment of civilians."
Fallujah, Sadr City, Nasiriyah, Karbala, Kut, and Ramadi may eventually resemble Grozny - vast plains of strewn rubble where buildings once stood -- but this will not put an end to the resistance. In addition to blasted homes and shops, the US will leave behind 75 tons of depleted uranium in the same way it left behind 72 million liters of the deadly defoliant Agent Orange in South Vietnam. It will not apologize or pay reparations.
Even with their cities flattened, Chechen resistance fighters continue the struggle. Earlier this week, Chechnians fired on Russian positions 19 times, killing four soldiers and wounding seven. As well, Chechnians have taken the battle to the enemy, recently blowing up oil pipelines in Russia.
Is it possible Bush will repeat Russia's Chechen mistakes in Iraq?
Kurt Nimmo is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Visit his excellent no holds barred blog at www.kurtnimmo.com/blogger.html . Nimmo is a contributor to Cockburn and St. Clair's, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. A collection of his essays for CounterPunch, Another Day in the Empire, is now available from Dandelion Books.
-------- europe
Nuclear fusion reactor deal close - statement
REUTERS AUSTRIA:
November 12, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/28128/story.htm
VIENNA - Major industrial nations are close to an agreement on where to build the world's first nuclear fusion reactor in a project to try to replicate the way the sun generates energy, a joint statement said.
It did not say where the $12 billion International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) would be located, but EU officials said they were confident it would go to Cadarache, France, and not a rival Japanese site.
After talks involving the EU, the United States, Russia, China, Japan and South Korea, a joint statement issued late this week said: "All parties were greatly encouraged by the positive atmosphere and expressed their optimism that the process was now proceeding effectively towards a fruitful conclusion among the six parties in the near future."
The careful wording of the statement appeared to support the EU's optimism.
It said the two potential hosts, the European Union and Japan, had presented "the results of recent intensive bilateral discussions on the balance of roles and responsibilities of host and non-host in the joint realisation of ITER".
Discussions would resume soon to seek a final agreement.
EU sources said Japan had effectively conceded that it would not win the contest and was holding out for industrial and scientific compensation.
A European Commission spokesman stepped back from EU threats to press ahead and build the reactor in France with whatever partners it could find if there was no global agreement.
"We're not there yet. We are still in a multilateral process," spokesman Fabio Fabbi said after the talks.
Nuclear fusion has been touted as a long-term solution to the world's energy problems, as it would be low in pollution and use limitless sea water as fuel.
The process involves sticking atoms together, as opposed to today's nuclear reactors and weapons, which produce energy by blowing atoms apart.
However, 50 years of research have failed to produce a commercially viable fusion reactor.
--------
EU again warns could mount nuclear project without Japan
BRUSSELS (AFP)
Nov 12, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041112140849.gv7pde69.html
The European Union will keep trying to persuade Japan to drop its bid to host a revolutionary nuclear energy project, while reserving the right to press ahead if talks fail, an EU source said Friday.
The European Commission is set to propose that negotiating strategy next week, after talks this week which failed to resolve the standoff between Japan and France over the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER).
Talks in Vienna on Tuesday made some progress but failed to break the essential deadlock over the two candidate sites for ITER, Cadarache in southern France and Rokkasho-mura in northern Japan, diplomats say.
Six partners are seeking an accord on the multi-billion dollar project: Japan and the EU, plus the United States and South Korea -- which support the Japanese bid -- and Russia and China, which back the EU bid.
Ambassadors from the 25-member EU discussed the situation on Friday, and a new negotiating mandate is expected to be proposed next week by the European Commission, the EU's executive arm.
The new mandate, to be unveiled on Tuesday, will "give priority to a solution involving all six parties, but there is a fallback option which is to do it with less than six," said one EU source.
"Cadarache is not negotiable for the EU," he added.
EU ministers for science and research will debate the commission's recommendations at their next meeting on November 26.
ITER is a test bed for what is being billed as a clean, safe, inexhaustible energy source of the future. The project, emulating the sun's nuclear fusion, is not expected to generate electricity before 2050.
The ITER budget is projected to be 10 billion euros (13 billion dollars) over the next 30 years, including 4.7 billion euros to build the reactor. The EU plans to finance 40 percent of the total.
Another source added that the EU "is reasonably confident of achieving an agreement between the six partners."
He noted that the bloc's current six-month Dutch presidency "is putting the emphasis on achieving a result with six partners by the end of the year," when it hands over the EU reins to Luxembourg.
The Dutch presidency itself declined to comment, saying the subject was "very sensitive" although admitting that there were daily contacts with Japanese officials.
-------- india / pakistan
India and Pakistan courting danger: Michel Krepon
By Khalid Hasan
Pakistan Daily Times
Fri Nov 12, 2004
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_12-11-2004_pg7_42
WASHINGTON: India and Pakistan are traversing a very dangerous passage marked by periods of intense confrontation, while the offsetting of nuclear capabilities on the Subcontinent has made crisis avoidance and conflict resolution more imperative, but at the same time more difficult to achieve.
According to Michel Krepon, founding president of the Stimson Centre and co-author and editor of a book on escalation control and the nuclear option in South Asia which was released here on Thursday evening, crises have become more prevalent "under the nuclear shadow." "Some in Pakistan have sought to use conventional warfare, backed by nuclear weapons, to leverage a more favourable outcome of the Kashmir dispute," whereas India's "ill-advised policies" have given "ample opportunities for mischief-making in Kashmir."
Krepon, who also has a special interest in Kashmir and has been visiting the region regularly, said Pakistan's "failed Kashmir policies" had worsened social, economic and political conditions at home and penalised those living across the dividing line. He criticised elements in Pakistan who support the Kashmiri "freedom struggle" and derive satisfaction from "India's grief". Continued support for militancy, he warned, would only need another single catalytic event by the jihadis to spark a severe crisis in the Subcontinent. He pointed out that it may not always be possible to contain crises since "the unexpected becomes commonplace" in such situations. He observed that some in India and Pakistan continue to believe that gains can be secured below the nuclear threshold. New Delhi, some reports have suggested, is now contemplating "limited war" in answer to Pakistani incursions. He expressed the apprehension that the next escalation in the Subcontinent may not be easily controlled.
According to Krepon, while Pakistan is pressing for a solution of Kashmir, India wants the issue to be placed on the back burner. That being so, "a tenuous and crisis-prone status quo is likely to be maintained." While such a status quo will serve no party's interests, including those of the Kashmiris, it might look better than some of the alternatives. In his view, nuclear risk-reduction and confidence-building measures are necessary, though insufficient. While Pakistan has held these measures hostage to progress towards its preferred outcome on Kashmir, India has sought to pursue them in lieu of progress on the issue. Dialogue between the two countries has, therefore, been "episodic and disappointing", with even "small steps forward checkmated by bureaucratic resistance, domestic political sensitivities and big explosions."
In a paper contributed to the book released this week, Krepon wrote that there has been a succession of "nuclear-tinged" crises in the Subcontinent since 1998, including the Kargil conflict. He noted that so far India and Pakistan, like the US and USSR, have been fortunate to avoid a nuclear exchange and it is possible that this luck will hold and the two countries will make joint efforts to reduce nuclear risks. India and Pakistan also feel more confident since they have both acquired second strike capability. "It is, however, far too early to declare that the tide has turned and that offsetting nuclear capabilities have ushered in a new era of stability on the Subcontinent," he added. Kargil and the 2002 standoff have led both countries to seek constructive engagement on nuclear risk reduction. He mentioned in this context the expert-level talks held in June 2004.
Krepon argues that Indian and Pakistani leaders need to move from recurring crises to nuclear safety, a passage that can only be traversed safely with sustained collaboration. While the two countries could be at the beginning of a sustained process of nuclear risk reduction, "deterrence pessimists are correct in warning that nuclear risk-reduction measures are not in place. Much could go badly wrong on the Subcontinent unless Pakistan's national security establishment reassesses its Kashmir policy and unless New Delhi engages substantively on Islamabad's concerns and with dissident Kashmiris. The way out of this morass is widely appreciated, but rarely acted upon. This exit strategy points to placing a much higher priority on the well-being of Kashmiris - something both governments profess to hold dear, but rarely act upon." He believes that if the two governments act with sincerity, the Line of Control would become permanently fire-free, crossings of jihadis cease altogether and human rights violation in Kashmir virtually come to an end. Trade and development projects would flourish across the dividing line. "Nuclear risk reduction begins along the Kashmir divide," he concludes.
-------- iran
Iranians, Europeans Meet on Nuclear Deal
By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 12, 2004; Page A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43761-2004Nov11.html
TEHRAN, Nov. 11 -- After five days of intense internal deliberations, Iranian officials met with European envoys here Thursday to seek "clarifications" on a proposed deal that would require Tehran to indefinitely suspend a pivotal aspect of its nuclear energy program that could be converted to military use, Western diplomatic sources here said.
European envoys said they were cautiously hopeful that Iran would agree this weekend to suspend its controversial uranium-enrichment program. But an agreement remained elusive, even though a top Iranian official had suggested earlier that a formal announcement was imminent.
"I am optimistic about a positive answer from Tehran," Iranian nuclear negotiator Hossein Mousavian told Reuters shortly before the ambassadors from Britain, France and Germany were summoned to hear Iran's response.
A European envoy confirmed reports out of Vienna that the Iranian response was "not definitive" but "not disappointing." The clarifications Iran sought were "highly technical," he added.
Details of the proposal have been closely held, but they include commercial and political incentives from Europe, possibly including a light-water reactor that would be more difficult than a heavy-water reactor to convert for use in a weapons program.
Europe has resisted requests from Iran for additional incentives and for flexibility on an early step in the uranium-conversion process, Western diplomats here said.
Europeans diplomats here said they had hoped to have an answer from Iran before British Prime Minister Tony Blair arrived in Washington on Thursday so he could discuss the specifics with President Bush. A deal to get Iran to indefinitely suspend uranium enrichment is only the first phase. The next stage is working out a permanent arrangement to ensure that Iran does not have the capability to produce a nuclear bomb.
Iran is also under pressure to provide an answer in time for the International Atomic Energy Agency to carry out inspections and make a report before its Nov. 25 meeting.
U.S. officials have made it clear they prefer pressing the IAEA, the U.N. nuclear watchdog, to referring the Iranian issue to the Security Council.
The deal was negotiated in Paris talks over the weekend, after which Iranian and European officials said considerable progress had produced a provisional agreement that would be taken back for final approval by Iran's leadership.
The Iranian-European talks have been "anything but easy," German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer told Germany's parliament Thursday. "Only the full and lasting suspension of enrichment activities . . . by Iran can open the way for results-oriented talks on long-term cooperation," he said.
--------
European-Iran Nuclear Deal Tottering
Associated Press
By GEORGE JAHN
Nov 12, 2004
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/UN_NUCLEAR_AGENCY_IRAN?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- A tentative deal committing Iran to suspend activities that Washington says are part of a nuclear arms program was in jeopardy Friday, with diplomats suggesting Tehran had reneged on an agreement reached just days ago with European negotiators.
As envoys for both sides tried to salvage the deal, the International Atomic Energy Agency delayed a report on Iran's nuclear activities that was scheduled for limited circulation Friday.
A diplomat familiar with the IAEA said the delay was meant to give the two sides a chance to resolve the dispute and allow agency head Mohamed ElBaradei to include in his report an Iranian commitment to full suspension of uranium enrichment and related activities.
The IAEA overview of nearly two decades of clandestine activities that the United States asserts is a secret weapons program is being prepared for review by the agency's 35-nation board of governors at its Nov. 25 meeting. Based on the report, the board will decide whether to refer Iran to the U.N. Security Council, which could call for sanctions. President Bush has accused Iran of being part of an "axis of evil" with North Korea and prewar Iraq.
After ending talks in Paris with Iranian envoys last weekend, European diplomats said there was tentative agreement by Tehran to suspend uranium enrichment - which can be used to make nuclear arms - and all related activities.
The deal leaves open the exact length of the suspension but says it will be in effect at least as long as it takes for the two sides to negotiate a deal on European technical and financial aid, including help in developing Iranian nuclear energy for power generation.
But diplomats told The Associated Press on Friday that Iranian officials had presented British, French and German envoys in Tehran with a version of the agreement that was unacceptable to the three European powers.
The key dispute was over conversion of uranium into gas, which, when spun in centrifuges, can be enriched to lower levels for producing electricity or processed into high-level, weapons-grade uranium, the diplomats said on condition of anonymity.
"The processing of what is to be enriched is the main problem," a diplomat said.
The diplomats - all of them briefed on the dispute and based in Vienna or other European capitals - said Iran was insisting that the deal allowed it to process uranium into a precursor of uranium hexafluoride, the gas introduced into centrifuges for enrichment. The diplomats said that was not allowed under the tentative deal reached in Paris.
Iranian officials denied they had reneged. A senior Iranian official on the Supreme National Security council who requested anonymity said his country's response had been "positive," but he refused to elaborate.
But former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani acknowledged there still was some way to go before Iran reached an agreement with the Europeans.
"If the Europeans show wisdom and don't make excessive demands, I think the way is open and we can reach an agreement," said Rafsanjani, a senior parliamentary official. "If they resist, they will give in one day but at a higher price."
Talks continued to try to salvage the agreement.
Tehran already had drafted a letter for the U.N. agency, saying it was committed to voluntary suspension that was less than what was agreed on in Paris and would "ask for the next step, which is IAEA inspections," to shore up support before the board meeting, one of the diplomats said.
Iran suspended uranium enrichment last year but has repeatedly refused to stop other related activities such as reprocessing uranium or building centrifuges, insisting its program is intended purely for the production of fuel for nuclear power generation.
But even if Iran agrees to full suspension of nuclear activities - as demanded by the Europeans - the deal would be short of U.S. calls for an indefinite suspension.
The IAEA unanimously passed a resolution in September demanding Iran freeze all work on uranium enrichment and related activities, and the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency will judge Iran's compliance Nov. 25.
Tehran has defied the agency by continuing to build centrifuges and by already converting a few tons of raw uranium into hexafluoride gas.
Iran is not breaching its Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty obligations by seeking to enrich uranium but is under international pressure to drop such plans as a good faith gesture.
-------- japan
Japanese Government Energy Commission Ignores Nuclear Dangers
Greenpeace
Japan Press Release
November 12, 2004
http://www.greenpeace.or.jp/press/2004/eng/20041112b_html
The government commission to revise Japan's Long-term program for Research, Development and Utilization of Nuclear Energy (long-term nuclear energy policy) is expected to conclude in favor of reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel today. Greenpeace Japan warns that reprocessing causes deadly radiation releases into the environment that are a threat to public health, and urges the committee to hold a more comprehensive review and public hearings.
Activists from Greenpeace stood outside the meeting with a banner showing a map of expected radiation dispersal. Others inside the meeting brought a question to the committee members saying "Are you going to export radiation contamination from Rokkasho to Japan, and to the world.?"
"There was almost no discussion on the environmental impacts and human health impacts from the reprocessing in the commission." Said Nogawa ATSUKO, nuclear campaigner for Greenpeace Japan. " Seeing names of members is to know the conclusion of continuing reprocessing. It is no surprise this commission supports reprocessing, as most come from organizations that will profit from the decision. Without a comprehensive review on the environment, safety and nuclear proliferation, conclusion should not be made." she continued.
The dangers of radiation from reprocessing plant discharges are well known through-out the world. At the annual meeting of the OSPAR Commission, in Copenhagen in 2000 government representatives from 15 countries throughout Europe agreed to call for an end to nuclear reprocessing and the implementation of dry storage. The Leukemia rate among children living around the reprocessing plants is higher than average There are on going studies looking at the relationship between reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel and leukemia.
Following this decision a number of safety agreements have to be signed with local governments. A shipment of depleted uranium is expected to be sent to the plant to begin tests in the plant in early 2005. JNFL hopes to begin burning spent nuclear fuel with a year of the depleted uranium tests.
Greenpeace Japan continues to campaign against the reprocessing and to stop conclusion of the safety agreement.
For further information, please contact: Greenpeace Japan, Telephone +813 5338 9800 Atsuko Nogawa , Greenpeace Japan Nuclear Campaigner, mobile phone 090-3654-4035 Kazue Suzuki, Greenpeace Japan Campaign Director, mobile phone 090-2249-1502
-------- terrorism
Terror threat
November 12, 2004
Inside the Ring
By Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/inring.htm
The U.S. government this week relaxed its warning of a terrorist threat to financial centers in Washington and New York. The decision led to a lessening of the security posture on Capitol Hill, where barriers have blocked traffic at checkpoints for months.
Intelligence officials tell us one of the strange bits of threat information obtained by the CIA was that al Qaeda had targeted 24 members of Congress for assassination. The intelligence report, according to officials who have read it, said that al Qaeda had picked the congressmen because they had access to one of the three Energy Department national laboratories, including the Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Sandia facilities.
Intelligence officials said there was no explanation for why the terror group was targeting the members linked to the laboratories.
The intelligence reports indicated that al Qaeda would attack using explosives-laden vehicles, hijacked tanker fuel trucks and hijacked helicopters.
Fortunately, the threat did not materialize. Some officials believe the CIA was fooled by at least one source who claimed that an attack by al Qaeda would be timed to coincide with the Nov. 2 elections. The source later was found to have been bogus, officials said.
-------- MILITARY
-------- africa
France Blamed in Ivorian Unrest
Colonial Power Undermining Him, Leader Says in Interview
By Craig Timberg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, November 12, 2004; Page A22
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A44055-2004Nov11?language=printer
ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast, Nov. 11 -- President Laurent Gbagbo on Thursday challenged French accounts of a bombardment that killed nine French troops and a U.S. aid worker Saturday. Gbagbo accused France of using the incident as a pretext to launch a drastic counterattack to weaken his grip on power.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Gbagbo questioned whether French troops had died in the bombing, saying that only an investigation by his government would clarify the events that led to a massive retaliation by French military forces.
"I haven't see any dead bodies," said Gbagbo, dressed in a dark suit and tie as he sat in the library of his official residence. "I didn't see anything."
The streets of Abidjan were calmer Thursday, with little of the looting and street mob scenes that had reigned since Saturday. But an additional 700 French citizens left the commercial capital on the second day of an airlift to Paris, while hundreds of Gbagbo's supporters controlled sections of the battle-scarred city.
Gbagbo called the Saturday attack a "pretext" for retaliation by former colonial rulers intent on undermining him. He said the French military response was so swift that it must have been planned long in advance of the incident.
He also said that without the French intervention, which destroyed the tiny Ivory Coast air force, his government would have been able to defeat a revolt in the north that has split the country for two years.
The president's comments were immediately disputed by French authorities here. The French military spokesman, Col. Henry Assauvy, said, "It's absolutely false. I know that the rumor is always that France is always preparing a coup. . . . We are not here to prepare a coup."
Assauvy added that the French became involved militarily last weekend because the Ivory Coast air force attacked a position held by French peacekeeping forces. The counterattack destroyed two fighter jets and some helicopters.
"We attacked the warplanes because we were attacked," Assauvy said.
Gbagbo's comments appeared to be part of a public relations push by Ivory Coast officials to portray themselves as victims in the complex standoff that has provoked nearly a week of violent unrest in this West African country.
As calm returned to the streets, the French military relinquished control of the international airport, and commercial flights were to resume Friday. French troops also pulled back from the Hotel d'Ivoire, where their highly visible position had stirred protest because of its proximity to Gbagbo's home.
But signs of the recent unrest were visible throughout the city. Overturned hulls of burned-out cars and trucks lay by roadsides, and coils of hastily laid barbed wire snaked along routes leading to the French military base. Hundreds of Gbagbo supporters, dubbed "Young Patriots," used makeshift barricades such as tree limbs to block passage to sections of the city where they roamed freely.
About 1,500 French nationals have flown to Paris since the outbreak of violence, and nearly the same number remained camped out at the French military base awaiting flights.
Until last week, an estimated 15,000 French citizens lived in Ivory Coast, most of them in Abidjan, a city of wide, tree-lined boulevards that once prompted comparisons to Paris. Since then, the city has deteriorated with a swiftness that startled many longtime residents.
Lavender Degre, 37, a Zambian who runs a nonprofit group here, said mobs looted her son's school this week. The family spent Thursday morning in line, waiting to join the exodus to Paris.
"My husband is white, and we're scared," she said. "We've been here for 10 years, and this is the first time we're really scared."
Gbagbo, in the interview, expressed little concern over such departures. "They will come back," he said, wagging his finger in the air. "You must come back in three months. They will be there."
He displayed more worry about the world's perception of the past week's events. As he explained it, a longtime war with anti-government rebels was nearing its end after the government suddenly broke a peace deal Friday and resumed attacks on rebel positions.
Gbagbo said the French military intervention had prevented his forces from finishing the job. The embattled leader, who took office in 2000 after an aborted vote count in national elections, has long maintained that the French support the rebellion.
"The government of Jacques Chirac never accepted that I have reached the position of president," he said.
The mobs of Gbagbo supporters want the French military to leave Ivory Coast. In interviews, many said the military presence is a remnant of the colonial era that ended with Ivory Coast's freedom in 1960.
Thousands of Young Patriots have gathered in recent days outside state television and radio stations and outside the president's home. Their numbers dwindled Thursday, but those who remained said they would continue their demonstrations until the French forces leave.
"I'm here to protect my country," said Marielaure Kone, 37, who runs a small clothing shop in Abidjan. "The French attacked us."
--------
French military says several dozen assaults on civilians Ivory Coast
PARIS (AFP)
Nov 12, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041112202413.590sxtlh.html
The French military said Friday that several dozen foreigners had been victims of assaults, rapes and attempted rapes during the mob violence in Ivory Coast.
"It is impossible at this point to provide a reliable number on the number of people who were mistreated, injured or raped during the pillaging that happened last Sunday," said Colonel Gerard Dubois, a spokesman for the French military's chief of staff.
"It can be estimated that the people who were victims of assaults, rape and attempted rape number in the dozens," he told AFP.
Earlier Friday a French military official in Paris said that several dozen white women were raped in Ivory Coast but no foreign nationals were killed in violence that has shaken the west African state since last week.
Mob violence broke out in Ivory Coast's main city Abidjan after French forces wiped out the Ivorian government's air force following an airstrike that killed nine France peacekeepers.
A representative of French expatriates in Ivory Coast, Catherine Rechenmann, said foreign residents in Abidjan were subjected to at least "37 serious atrocities including three or four confirmed rapes."
The head of the French forces in Ivory Coast, General Henri Poncet, said late Thursday: "I confirm there have been rapes. There were atrocities, tragedies for a certain number of women. I will not comment further out of respect."
Court officials in Bobigny, near Paris's Charles de Gaulle airport to which hundreds of French and other foreign nationals have been evacuated from Ivory Coast since the sudden upsurge at the weekend in violence against westerners, said Friday two 10 women, including one in her sixties, have filed suit for rape.
-------- asia
Japan raises submarine issue with China: report
AFP
November 12, 2004
http://asia.news.yahoo.com/041111/afp/041111194232asiapacificnews.html
TOKYO (AFP) - Japan took up with China the issue of a suspicious submarine that intruded into its waters amid alarm in Tokyo that the vessel was a show of strength from its neighbour and growing competitor.
Japan's former prime minister Ryutaro Hashimoto said he told Chinese leaders the incident was "regrettable" without assigning blame for the submarine which has been tracked for two days, Kyodo News reported from Beijing.
Hashimoto said Chinese Vice President Zeng Qinghong and Defence Minister Cao Gangchuan were looking into whether the submarine could be Chinese and told him "'once the issue is clarified, the two countries could discuss the matter'," according to Kyodo.
The submarine spent about two hours in Japanese waters Wednesday near the southern island of Okinawa before being chased on the high seas by two Japanese destroyers and a surveillance plane.
Both countries have been cautious in identifying the nationality of the submarine. If confirmed as Chinese the incident is expected to damage already sour diplomatic relations between the Asian powers.
"We have seen the reports and are watching the situation closely," Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue said earlier.
"Of course the relevant departments are maintaining close contact to watch this incident."
The Japanese government spokesman, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda, told an afternoon news conference that the vessel was moving "in many different directions".
"Once we find out the nationality of the submarine, we would take appropriate measures," Hosoda said.
Moscow categorically denied the submarine was Russian.
Japan's Defence Agency believes the vessel is a Chinese navy Han-type nuclear-powered submarine because of its cruising sound, the mass-circulation Yomiuri Shimbun and Jiji Press news agency said.
"If the submarine is confirmed to be a Chinese vessel, the government must strongly protest to China immediately," the Yomiuri said in an editorial.
The liberal Asahi Shimbun said that while Japan needed to gather all the facts first and avoid unnecessary tension, "criticism towards China would inevitably increase if the submarine is of the Chinese navy."
"We urge the Chinese government to investigate the incident urgently. We must not let this issue drag on," the Asahi said.
The Sankei Shimbun called the submarine an "alarming sign" and suspected China wanted to show its military might to Japan, the United States and Taiwan, where support has been growing for a declaration of independence from Beijing.
"It is unlikely that China will come forward to reveal the submarine's nationality and purposes," said the daily, which is sympathetic to Taiwan.
"But if it was aimed to demonstrate the (Chinese) presence to Japan and the United States as well as Taiwan," the Sankei said, "the objective seems to have been fully achieved."
China feels deep resentment over Japan's failure to formally apologise for atrocities during its brutal occupation of the country from 1931 to 1945. That resentment has been regularly reinforced by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's visits to a Tokyo shrine that honors the war dead including convicted war criminals.
On its part, Japan has said China may be planning new fields in a disputed gas project around the maritime boundary between the countries, which are both major energy importers.
A Japanese parliamentary report Wednesday called for slashing aid to China, saying its neighbour tolerated anti-Japanese sentiment and felt in a position to hand out loans of its own.
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Significant changes in Japanese defense 'largely overlooked'
News World Communications
November 12, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041111-094923-4893r.htm
Brad Glosserman, research director at Pacific Forum CSIS in Honolulu, spoke to Washington Times reporter Takehiko Kambayashi about Japan's change of attitude on security issues. Pacific Forum CSIS is the Asia-Pacific arm of the D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Question: You have said that Japan's changes [toward national defense] in recent years, overshadowed by China's dynamism and North Korea's nuclear programs, are significant.
Answer: Yes, they are very significant. These are very important changes, but they have been largely overlooked.
Q: What role do you expect Japan to play from now on?
A: First of all, in many ways that depends on what Japanese people will decide. That is the most important factor. What we are seeing now is the change in Japan's thinking about national security. I believe this process has been unfolding since the [1991] Persian Gulf war.
I think there was a sense in Japan that a traditional way of thinking about national security no longer worked for Japan. External environments were very different from what the Japanese had anticipated.
You had dynamism in China, You had the Taiwan Strait crisis in 1995 and 1996. You had the first North Korean nuclear crisis in 1993 and 1994. You had problems in the U.S.-Japan alliance because of the 1995 rape of a 12-year-old Okinawan schoolgirl [by American servicemen]. You had [North Korea's] Taepo-Dong missile launch [that overflew Japan's main island]. You had the second North Korean nuclear crisis in 2002. You always have the invasions of [North Korean] spy boats and questions about [Japanese kidnapped by North Korean agents over decades].
I think you had the understanding in Japan that the world was very different from [what] they had expected. I think, at the same time, there was some thinking in Japan that the ways Japan had responded to them was no longer working.
Of course, the very important one was the response in 1991 when Japan contributed $13 billion to the first Persian Gulf war and no one noticed.
You also had Japan's changing economy - several years of stagnation. And traditional tools of Japanese diplomacy were proving less useful. There was not as much money to give for [official development assistance].
The Chinese were not even noticing the ODA they had received. Japan was not being given any credit for it. And don't forget, Japan sent peacekeepers to Cambodia in 1992 as part of [U.N. Transitional Authority in Cambodia]. ...
There was a sense that Japan could play different kinds of role. Of course, there are problems with this - the [U.S.-drafted post-World War II] constitution is a big issue. I think bigger than that is the uncertainty in Japan about what role it wants to play in the world.
I think Prime Minister [Junichiro] Koizumi has some ideas. But I'm not sure that those ideas are shared by most Japanese. So, slowly, there is the beginning of a debate about what is Japan's proper role in the world.
My answer to that question is that I think that is most importantly something that the Japanese people have to figure out for themselves.
[However], I personally think that the United States and Japan need to be more creative about how we think about our alliance, how we think about burden sharing. Because if, in fact, many of the threats in the 21 century are nontraditional security threats, they require different approaches to them.
They are not about armies. They are about diseases. They are about terrorism. They are about causes of terrorism. I think what Japan needs to do is to figure out the best way for it to contribute to solving these problems.
And that doesn't necessarily mean always putting more troops on the ground and more ships to sea. ... Honestly, I don't think Japan helps the United States more by necessarily spending more money on the Self Defense Forces.
Q: So you think the U.S.-Japan alliance is more important than ever to the two countries' interests, and to those of the region.
A: Yes. China and South Korea are changing. The U.S. presence in Asia is changing. Asia is changing, and Japan is changing.
With all of those changes, it seems to me we need a very stable foundation for Japan's engagement in the region and for U.S. engagement in the region - something that keeps the U.S. there and reassures allies and our friends, and will deter possible adversaries and let them know that the United States will stay and commit to the region. I think the U.S.-Japan alliance is a very important part of that.
-------- business
Insurer Lombard holds 7.3 pct in arms manufacturer Rheinmetall
FRANKFURT (AFP)
Nov 12, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041112153730.8a6toe4q.html
Rheinmetall, the German automotive and defence technology specialist, said Friday that the Luxembourg-based insurer Lombard International Assurance has acquired a 7.354-percent stake in its share capital.
Under German stock law, investors are obliged to report changes in their shareholdings in listed companies above or below certain key thresholds, such as five and 10 percent.
Rheinmetall's share capital comprises 18 million voting common shares and 18 million non-voting preference shares.
And Lombard had notified Rheinmetall that it had amassed 14.72-percent of Rheinmetall's common stock, equivalent to a stake of 7.354 percent in the overall company, the statement said.
The Mannheim-based holding company, Roechling Industrie Verwaltung GmbH, remains the biggest shareholder with an overall stake of 42.1 percent in Rheinmetall, or 73.7 percent of its voting shares and 10.5 percent of its preference shares.
Any changes in Rheinmetall's share capital are notable because the company specialises in defence technology.
The German government this year passed a new law that gave it the right to veto the acquisition by foreign investors of stakes of more than 25 percent in any companies active in the sensitive area of defence.
Press reports have suggested that US investors, such as Carlyle or General Dynamics, were interested in buying Rheinmetall, which makes tanks.
-------- china
Chinese Whistle-Blower Punished
By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, November 12, 2004; Page A22
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42852-2004Nov11.html
BEIJING, Nov. 11 -- A Communist Party cadre who briefly rose to fame in China by denouncing official corruption has been relieved of his duties and placed under a form of house arrest while authorities investigate his conduct, friends and neighbors said Thursday.
The case of Huang Jingao, party secretary for Lianjiang county in Fujian province, demonstrated the potential cost of speaking out against China's pervasive corruption, despite repeated pledges from leaders in Beijing to prosecute city, county and provincial officials on the take.
Huang generated a national buzz in August when he wrote an open letter complaining that his efforts to investigate and prosecute corruption were being stymied by higher-level party and government officials because of what he called "the underlying rules" by which unscrupulous functionaries protect one another.
The letter, which was posted on the Web site of the People's Daily, the party's official newspaper, became an immediate sensation. Internet users across the country chatted about Huang's integrity. Editorialists in Beijing exulted in the airing of his charges by the party's own press. And ordinary Chinese, inured to official corruption, commented on his bravery.
But within a few days, the letter was taken down from the People's Daily site, and Huang was called on the carpet by party authorities in Fuzhou, the nearby provincial capital, 300 miles south of Shanghai. In a statement using 1960s-vintage Marxist-Leninist rhetoric, they accused him of "individualism" and ordered him to "do a complete self-examination."
In the weeks since then, Huang has been rendered unable to perform his duties as the county's party secretary and has been in effect replaced by his deputy, according to his friends and neighbors. Although he still has his title, he has been confined to his home or office, according to a source aware of the situation.
"In other words, Huang Jingao has been shelved," one acquaintance said.
Seven people have been detained for questioning as part of the investigation against Huang, a Lianjiang official said. One was a vegetable farmer who was urged to accuse Huang of accepting bribes, the official added, while another was a deputy of Huang's who went to Beijing in an effort to bring Lianjiang's corruption cases to the attention of national-level officials.
Huang's anti-corruption efforts centered on what he described as crooked deals in which officials took bribes to confiscate peasants' land and sell it at below-market prices to developers. Such land confiscations have become one of China's most common points of conflict.
Researcher Jin Ling contributed to this report.
-------- iraq
New insurgency confronts US forces
Kurds come under attack as rebels rampage in city
November 12, 2004
The Guardian
Rory McCarthy in Baghdad and Michael Howard in Sulaymaniyah
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1349505,00.html
US troops were drawn into a new offensive in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul yesterday to tackle a tide of insurgency unchecked by the military assault on Falluja.
In Baghdad at least 17 Iraqis were killed in a suicide car bombing as gunmen set up checkpoints on roads in the west of the capital and fought battles with US troops.
Rebels also took to the streets of the northern town of Baiji, home to Iraq's main refinery, clashing with security forces.
The violence suggests the four-day operation in Falluja may have cleared out the most important insurgent stronghold in Iraq, but has done little to curb the burgeoning militant movement.
For two days insurgents have defied a curfew to rampage through Mosul, attacking or setting fire to at least seven police stations as well as government buildings.
Masked gunmen stole bullet-proof jackets and Kalashnikov rifles from police stations and were roaming the city centre yesterday setting fire to police cars and taking control of bridges. The five bridges over the Tigris were later closed to civilian traffic.
At one stage a group tried to storm an office of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the two major Kurdish parties, and fought gunbattles with Kurdish guards. Mosul's television channel went off air for an hour and the US military admitted the Iraqi police were unable to handle the crisis. At least five Iraqi national guardsmen and a civilian have been killed and a dozen injured.
By 1pm soldiers from the US 25th Infantry Division and a team of Iraqi national guardsmen were called in to launch "offensive operations" in south-east and south-west Mosul against "known concentrations of insurgents".
A senior Kurdish official in Mosul said he believed the gunmen were militants loyal to the wanted Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and former Ba'athists. He said the men had arrived three days ago from Falluja and Samarra, another troubled Sunni town.
The official, who declined to be named, said: "They are working together and know what they are doing. They have had a lot of notice about the Falluja assault, and were prepared to move the fight."
Residents said there had been explosions and heavy gunfire from assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.
"I have been inside my house for 24 hours and am too frightened to go out," said Shereen Hawleri, a Kurdish resident. "I think they could turn on the Kurds next."
Since the start of the Falluja offensive on Sunday night, attacks have taken place across Sunni areas in central and northern Iraq in towns such as Samarra, Baiji, Baquba, Tikrit, Ramadi, Hawija and now Mosul. The violence in Mosul has been the worst since the invasion began and a sign of the growing influence of Sunni militants.
"The [insurgent] activities have now spread to the borders with the Kurdish self-rule area, and are threatening Kurdish and other minorities in the region," said the official.
The Kurdish governor of Kirkuk, a disputed city to the north-east, survived an assassination attempt yesterday when a car bomb exploded as his convoy passed.
Abdulrahman Mustafa was not hurt, but six members of his personal security detail and eight civilians were hurt, according to Arif Qurbany, the director of a local TV station.
"The situation in the city is very tense," he said. "The Kurds here believe that Arab militants are deliberately targeting them just for being Kurds." Last night Kurdish leaders in Arbil and Sulaymaniya, inside the Kurdish self-rule region, said they were preparing Kurdish troops in the national guard to restore order in Mosul and Kirkuk in coordination with the US military.
"We cannot stand by and let minorities be attacked, as they were under Saddam," said a military commander in Sulaymaniya. But the deployment of Kurdish fighters in Kirkuk would be sensitive.
A Baghdad centre car bomb killed at least 17 and wounded 30. It also destroyed 11 cars and brought down a building.
The bomb detonated at 11.15am, moments after a US convoy had passed in a crowded high street.
-----
U.S. Troops force men trying to flee Assault on Fallujah to return to city
abcnews
Nov 12, 2004
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=246764
NEAR FALLUJAH, Iraq - Hundreds of men trying to flee the assault on Fallujah have been turned back by U.S. troops following orders to allow only women, children and the elderly to leave.
The military says it has received reports warning that insurgents will drop their weapons and mingle with refugees to avoid being killed or captured by advancing American troops.
As it believes many of Fallujah's men are guerrilla fighters, it has instructed U.S. troops to turn back all males aged 15 to 55.
"We assume they'll go home and just wait out the storm or find a place that's safe," one 1st Cavalry Division officer, who declined to be named, said Thursday.
Army Col. Michael Formica, who leads forces isolating Fallujah, admits the rule sounds "callous." But he insists it's is key to the mission's success.
"Tell them 'Stay in your houses, stay away from windows and stay off the roof and you'll live through Fallujah,'" Formica, of the 1st Cavalry Division's 2nd Brigade, told his battalion commanders in a radio conference call Wednesday night.
Many of Fallujah's 200,000 to 300,000 residents fled the city before the assault, at which time 1,200 to 3,000 fighters were believed in militant stronghold.
Later Prime Minister Ayad Allawi imposed a 24-hour curfew on Fallujah and ordered roads in the area closed, providing the legal background for the U.S. blockade.
Troops have cut off all roads and bridges leading out of the city. Relatively few residents have sought to get through, but officers here say they fear a larger exodus.
On Wednesday, a crowd of 225 people surged south out of Fallujah toward the blocking positions of the Marines' 2nd Reconnaissance Battalion. The Marines let 25 women and children pass but separated the 200 military-age men and forced them to walk back into Fallujah.
"There is nothing that distinguishes an insurgent from a civilian," the 1st Cavalry officer said. "If they're not carrying a weapon, you can't tell who's who."
Also Wednesday, troops halted two ambulances leaving Fallujah and found 57 refugees packed inside. Most were women and children who were allowed to leave. Smaller bands of refugees have also turned up at U.S. roadblocks, some allowed to pass and others turned back.
Single refugees have made their way out of the city by swimming across the broad Euphrates River or sneaking out across desert paths, military officials said.
On Wednesday and Thursday, American troops sunk boats being used to ferry people and in some cases, rebel arms across the river.
The ongoing U.S. advance is bottling up Fallujah's insurgents and others fleeing the fighting in the southern section of the city, where U.S. forces were moving Thursday night.
Most of the remaining attacks by insurgents inside Fallujah have been on Marines blocking the roads and bridges leaving the city, reports show. Marines have returned fire killing numerous insurgents trying to escape, officers here said.
The military estimates 600 insurgents have already been killed, about half the total of guerrillas in the city.
Fallujah has been under relentless aerial and artillery bombardment and without electricity since Monday. Reports have said residents are running low on food. An officer here said it was likely that those who stay in their homes would live through the assault, but agreed the city was a risky and frightening place to live.
U.S. military says it does all it can to prevent bombing buildings with civilians inside them.
Once the battle ends, military officials say all surviving military-age men can expect to be tested for explosive residue, catalogued, checked against insurgent databases and interrogated about ties with the guerrillas. U.S. and Iraqi troops are in the midst of searching homes, and plan to check every house in the city for weapons.
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Violence Spreads in Iraq; Car Bomb Kills 17 in Baghdad
By Karl Vick and Bassam Sebti
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, November 12, 2004; Page A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43807-2004Nov11?language=printer
BAGHDAD, Nov. 11 -- Armed insurgents rampaged Thursday through Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city, detonated a massive car bomb in the capital and apparently seized control of two smaller urban centers. This violence took place as U.S. forces continued their major offensive in Fallujah.
The scattered and spreading guerrilla attacks appeared to be part of a threatened effort by insurgents to open new battle fronts away from Fallujah, an anti-American bastion 35 miles west of Baghdad in the Sunni Triangle.
Masked men brandishing machine guns and wrapped in ammunition bandoliers overran police stations in Mosul, a major city 220 miles north of the capital, carrying off weapons and armored vests in a second day of street violence, U.S. military officials here said.
In Baghdad, gunfire and explosions continued to rattle sections of the city, while gunmen battled U.S. Army units and Iraqi police in western neighborhoods largely populated by Sunni Muslims and officials of former president Saddam Hussein's Sunni-led government.
In a late-morning attack on Sadoun Street, a busy commercial strip, a car bomb exploded with a force that stunned even jaded residents.
The blast killed 17 people, blackened one block of the street, destroyed a medical supply store and incinerated 10 cars. The suicide bomber had apparently tried to hit a passing convoy of five Iraqi police cars.
"These are the Arab fighters who are losing now in Fallujah. I saw a whole family burned in front of me," said Abu Adullah, as a tear rolled down his cheek. Adullah's real estate office was damaged in the blast.
"May God curse them," he said. "May God curse them."
Thae Khudhair Jasim, 23, suffered wounds to his neck and chest when the windshield of his taxi shattered, showering glass over him and his passengers, a woman and her three daughters. All five survived.
"No one should see what I saw: pieces of flesh, cut legs, burned bodies," Jasim said.
Clashes in the capital erupted near the headquarters of the Association of Muslim Scholars and a mosque known for its militancy. The association, which represents Iraq's Sunni Muslim clergy and vocally supports the insurgency, said U.S. troops had raided the homes of two of its senior officials, including Harith Dhari, the secretary general.
American troops also participated in a raid on Baghdad's Ibn Taymiya mosque that resulted in the detention of Mehdi Sumaidi, a militant Sunni cleric. Sumaidi heads the strict Salafist movement in Iraq and recently threatened to issue "a general call to arms" over Fallujah.
The call appeared to have already gone out, judging by the number of attacks in the capital during the past 48 hours. On Wednesday, U.S. forces were assaulted 66 times by gunfire, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, roadside bombs or car bombs.
In Mosul, U.S. troops mounted offensive operations early Thursday afternoon aimed at reclaiming the captured police stations and a food warehouse that was also being held. The warehouse was considered significant for its association with voter registration, which is in turn linked to Iraq's food rationing system. Insurgents have threatened Iraqis who take part in the elections, scheduled for late January.
Attack helicopters swooped overhead, and residents were warned to avoid the city's bridges, which insurgents were battling U.S. and Iraqi security forces to control. Five members of the Iraqi National Guard were killed in a battle on one bridge. American troops were responding to a call from the governor of Nineveh province, who imposed a curfew Wednesday.
"In several cases, anti-Iraqi forces exceeded the capabilities of the police on site, requiring reinforcements," said a statement issued by the U.S. military.
Insurgents have targeted Westerners and Iraqi security forces for months in Mosul, where the mostly Sunni population has long had a reputation for nationalism. In recent weeks, the city has also become known for intolerance, with vigilantes harassing and even killing members of its Christian minority.
Gunmen also roamed the streets of Baiji, an oil refining center in the Sunni heartland north of Baghdad, and Salman Pak, a small city in the band of angry towns that ring the capital's southern flank.
In Washington, several military experts said it was no surprise that bombings and insurgent attacks were occurring in other cities. Some said they saw Fallujah as symbolically significant but not the epicenter of the insurgency.
"It was a very important symbol, a dangerous ulcer," said Anthony H. Cordesman, a senior analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "This will be gone, and that is important. That doesn't mean there won't be problems in Baghdad, Mosul, Baqubah or Samarra, and that's easy to predict because it's already happening."
But Cordesman added that Fallujah's role as a recruiting station, haven and clearing point for foreign insurgents made it an important target.
On NBC's "Today" show Thursday morning, Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the nature of any insurgency was that people fight one minute and blend into the surroundings the next. He said the central goal of the offensive in Fallujah was not so much suppressing the insurgency as making it possible for people to vote in January.
"If anybody thinks that Fallujah is going to be the end of the insurgency in Iraq, that was never the objective, never our intention, and even never our hope," Myers said. "We're exactly on plan."
Staff writer Josh White in Washington contributed to this report.
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U.S. Tries To Corner Fallujah Insurgents
Evidence of Guerrilla Atrocities Is Found
By Jackie Spinner, Karl Vick and Omar Fekeiki
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, November 12, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42331-2004Nov11?language=printer
FALLUJAH, Iraq, Nov. 11 -- U.S. forces pushed toward a corner of Fallujah where commanders said insurgents may be preparing to make a last stand, as soldiers and civilians uncovered evidence of atrocities committed by the foreign and Iraqi guerrillas who controlled the city for nearly seven months.
In the industrial area on Fallujah's south side, residents said Thursday that the bodies of 20 foreign fighters had been found outside a truck repair shop, many killed by a single shot to the head. Insurgents native to Fallujah said the foreigners were executed for deserting their positions when the U.S.-led assault on the city began Monday night.
In the northern half of the city, now largely under the control of U.S. and Iraqi forces, Marines making a door-to-door sweep on Wednesday found a bruised, starving man chained to the wall of a house. The man, who identified himself as a taxi driver from nearby Abu Ghraib, said he had been kidnapped by men who refused to give him food or water and beat him with electrical cords during 10 days of captivity.
Military commanders said Marine and Army units were continuing to battle pockets of insurgents throughout the city as they pushed toward Fallujah's southern residential districts. Troops on foot patrol traded fire with guerrillas, then scurried for cover behind concrete walls and buildings, returning fire that rang through the otherwise deserted streets.
The U.S. military said 18 of its troops had been killed and 178 wounded during four days of fighting in Fallujah. Five Iraqi troops were reported killed and 24 wounded in the same period.
A U.S. military spokeswoman said 102 seriously wounded soldiers from around Iraq had been flown to the main U.S. military hospital in Germany on Thursday, joining 125 who arrived Monday through Wednesday.
Numbers of insurgent and civilian casualties could not be independently determined, but a military spokesman in Baghdad, Lt. Col. Steve Boylan, said an estimated 600 rebels had been killed so far, the Associated Press reported.
The Reuters news agency reported that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, in El Salvador at the start of a week-long trip through Latin America, said that although some insurgents likely fled Fallujah before the offensive, "we also know that there are a number of hundreds that didn't, and have been killed. Others have been captured."
But officials cautioned that despite the large number of casualties, the insurgency would continue elsewhere. Bryan Whitman, a Defense Department spokesman in Washington, called the military's success in Fallujah "an important milestone" but said it by no means marked the end of the insurgency.
U.S. troops reported that Fallujah was laced with booby traps, including the rudimentary bombs the military calls improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, tucked into rubble and garbage. The troops reported uncovering large stockpiles of weapons, some of them hidden in mosques.
Maj. Gen. Richard F. Natonski, commander of the 1st Marine Division, said U.S. forces "respect the law of the war, unlike the other side, who uses mosques. In almost every single mosque in Fallujah, we've found an arms cache. We've found IED factories. . . . We've also seen the use of schools for the storage of weapons. This is the enemy that we fight. It doesn't respect the religious mosques or the children's schools."
Asked at a news conference at a camp outside Fallujah if troops expected to find more insurgents in the city, Natonski said yes, "And we will kill them."
Before the offensive began, Fallujah police announced that 157 civilian families remained in the city, whose population is normally about 250,000. On Wednesday, those who had survived the fighting found leaflets dropped by U.S. aircraft offering safe passage out of the city.
They emerged to the stench of burning flesh, on streets littered with broken bricks and scores of bodies, some subjected to such heat that they had melted. Dead fish floated on the Euphrates River, brought to the surface by mortar shells that insurgents had fired at U.S. positions on the river's western bank.
In a charity hospital operating in tents because its building was damaged by bombing, a young Arab fighter writhed in agony while blood seeped from his ears, eyes, nose and mouth. A doctor said the hospital, donated by the United Arab Emirates, counted 32 civilian wounded by Wednesday, including nine women and four children.
As civilians filed out of the city, scores of fighters put down their guns and joined them, residents said. Several told a witness that they were not quitting the war, but rather moving to open a second front in Baqubah, an insurgent hotbed northeast of Baghdad.
As the new refugees recounted the events of recent days and weeks, a picture of the battle from the insurgents' side began to emerge. Witnesses described an insurgency fractured by distrust and rivalries between locals and foreigners, and visibly shaken by the thunderous U.S. assault.
The foreigners found slain Thursday in southern Fallujah were described as foot soldiers with Monotheism and Jihad, a guerrilla group headed by Jordanian Abu Musab Zarqawi that now calls itself al Qaeda in Iraq. In the plans developed by insurgent leaders for a coordinated defense of the city, Zarqawi's fighters were to man bunkers in two neighborhoods, according to witnesses. Others were to be defended by various Iraqi insurgent groups, including the First Army of Mohammad and Ansar al-Sunna Army.
But residents said strains between the local insurgents and the foreigners quickly turned into a deep schism under the intense pressure of the U.S.-led offensive. When a senior Zarqawi commander was found dead of a bullet to the head during the battle, debate ensued over whether he was killed from a distance by a U.S. sniper or at close range by an Iraqi insurgent, residents said.
Residents said everyone in the city, including the insurgents, was stunned by the firepower the Americans brought to the battle. Guerrillas counted 40 armored vehicles approaching their positions as night fell Monday.
The insurgents suffered their worst single loss -- at least 50 dead -- counterattacking U.S. forces who had taken the Rawdha Muhammediya mosque that had served as the insurgency's headquarters, witnesses said. The witnesses said they also counted as many as 10 American bodies.
"The confrontation with the American Army, which is the most powerful military organization in the world, is itself a great victory for us," said Abdullah Janabi, head of the mujaheddin shura, the council that had ruled Fallujah as a self-appointed government since April. "We were proud enough that Fallujah . . . was able to fight and confront America for seven months and still force the Americans and the Iraqi government to sit down and negotiate."
The kidnap victim discovered Wednesday by Marines was shackled to a wall by his wrists and ankles, according to Maj. Francis Piccoli, a spokesman for the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force. When the Marines entered the house, the driver, who speaks little English, called out "Uncle, uncle" to communicate with the troops.
Video footage shot by an ABC crew showed the man, shirtless and wrapped in a wool Marine-issue blanket, saying through an interpreter that when his captors fled, he told them he would die without food or water. They responded: "We brought you here to die."
In the video footage, the man, still wearing handcuffs, said he had been kidnapped while walking through Abu Ghraib. Two men grabbed him and shoved him into a car, he said.
Vick reported from Baghdad. Staff writer Josh White in Washington contributed to this report.
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THE MARINES
Black Flags Are Deadly Signals as Cornered Rebels Fight Back
November 12, 2004
By DEXTER FILKINS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/12/international/middleeast/12scene.html?oref=login&hp
FALLUJA, Iraq, Nov. 11 - The stars began to glimmer through a wan yellow-gray sunset over Falluja on Thursday evening. The floury dust in the air and a skyline of broken minarets and smashed buildings combined for the only genuine postcard image this country has to offer for now.
Sitting on a third-story roof, Staff Sgt. Eric Brown, his lip bleeding, peered through the scope of his rifle into the haze. Moments before, a lone bullet had whizzed past his face and smashed a window behind him. "God, I hate this place, the way the sun sets," Sergeant Brown said.
Sgt. Sam Williams said, "I wish I could see down the street."
But these marines did see a black flag pop up all at once above a water tower about 100 yards away, then a second flag somewhere in the gloaming above a rooftop. And the shots began, in a wave this time, as men bobbed and weaved through alleyways and sprinted across the street. "He's in the road, he's in the road, shoot him!" Sergeant Brown shouted. "Black shirt!" someone else yelled. "Due south!"
The flags are the insurgents' answer to two-way radios, their way of massing the troops and - in a tactic that goes back at least as far as Napoleon - concentrating fire on an enemy. Set against radio waves, the flags have one distinct advantage: they are terrifying.
The insurgents are coordinating their attacks at a time when they have nowhere left to run. American forces have pushed south of Highway 10, the boulevard that runs east to west and approximately bisects Falluja. American intelligence officers believe that many of the insurgents have retreated as far as the Shuhada, a relatively modern residential area that is the southernmost neighborhood in Falluja.
But beyond Shuhada is only the open desert, patrolled by the United States Army. So the insurgents are turning and fighting. And at night, they are setting up deadly ambushes in the moonless pitch blackness of Falluja's labyrinthine streets.
Going straight up the gut in the center of the American advance on Thursday was Bravo Company, First Battalion, Eighth Regiment of the First Marine Expeditionary Force. Those marines, including Sergeants Brown and Williams, started their day by getting mortared in a building they had captured at Highway 10 and Thurthar Street.
The building's windows were blown out. Parts of the ceiling had collapsed. The mortars drew closer and closer and then stopped, as if the insurgents were temporarily short of ammo. "I thought, 'This is it,' " said Senior Corpsman Kevin Markley.
At about 2 p.m., the company walked 100 yards east along the highway, then turned south into the Sinai neighborhood, with its car garages and fix-it shops as well as concealed weapons caches and bomb-making factories.
Immediately, shooting broke out, pinning down the marines for an hour. Finally they moved south to a mosque with the stub of a blasted minaret. An armored vehicle drove up from the rear and dropped its hatch. Out walked a group of blinking, disoriented Iraqi national guardsmen. They had been brought in only to search mosques.
Meantime, the marines went to the rooftop, saw the flags and got into a firefight. It was silenced when they called in a 500-pound bomb from above onto a house where some of the insurgents had concentrated. The strike was so close that the marines had to leave the roof or risk being killed by shrapnel.
The Iraqi guardsmen left the mosque and trooped back into the vehicle, which drove off. Soon the marines were headed south again, through a narrow alley between deserted houses.
"Enemy personnel approaching your position in white vehicle with RPG's," someone said over a radio, referring to rocket-propelled grenades. A few seconds later, the same voice said: "More enemy personnel approaching your position from the south."
The alley exploded with gunfire and RPG rounds. Somehow the company commander, Capt. Read Omohundro, got two tanks in place to fire down the alley. They let loose with a volley and a building crumbled.
Captain Omohundro turned to a lieutenant and said, "Are they dead?"
"They must be, sir," came the reply.
But the insurgents had gotten off an RPG round and disabled one tank; the other tank mysteriously stopped working as well.
The company had moved 500 yards south. They regrouped in the pitch blackness and pushed on at about 11:30 p.m. without the tanks, trying to keep up with the rest of the front, but after moving 25 feet they were attacked again in what appeared to be a well-organized ambush.
Two more tanks came in, but one had a problem with its global-positioning system unit. There was an hour's delay. The 50 or so men of the First Platoon, which had taken casualties, started bickering. Then they moved forward, behind the tanks.
At 1:30 a.m., now roughly 700 yards south of Highway 10, they stopped and entered a house, intending to find a place to sleep. There was a huge boom inside. "Oh no! Oh no!" someone shouted. "My leg!" someone else screamed. "My leg!"
They looked further around the house and found tunnels underneath. They retreated and a tank fired rounds into the house, which caught fire.
They looked for another place to sleep.
--------
Iraqi Insurgents Shoot Down U.S. Army Helicopter
November 12, 2004
By ROBERT F. WORTH and JAMES GLANZ
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/12/international/middleeast/12cnd-iraq.html?ei=5094&en=82063e5b6cd40c73&hp=&ex=1100322000&partner=homepage&pagewanted=all&position=
FALLUJA, Iraq, Nov. 12 - Insurgents shot down an Army helicopter north of Baghdad today, wounding its three crew members, military officials in Baghdad said.
Earlier today, insurgents attacked an American patrol in southern Baghdad, killing one American and wounding three others, the miiltary said.
The UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter was hit by anti-aircraft fire in Taji, 12 miles north of the capital, the military said. The crew members injured in the attack were rescued and are expected to recover. The helicopter was recovered.
This was the third time an American helicopter was shot down this week. On Thursday, in separate incidents to the north and southeast of Falluja, two Super Cobra helicopters were brought down after being fired on from the ground, military officials said. Both Marine pilots and their two-man crews escaped after being picked up by American troops in the area, and one of the pilots was injured, officials said.
In Falluja, on the fifth day of an American campaign against insurgents, a battle erupted near a mosque in northwest part of the city today just hours after the Marines said insurgents were now trapped in the south of the city, Reuters reported.
"They can't go north because that's where we are,'' Master Sgt. Roy Meek told Reuters. "They can't go west because of the Euphrates River and they can't go east because we have a huge presence there. So they are cornered in the south." The news agency reported that relief agencies were calling on the interim Iraqi government and American forces to grant relief workers and medics access to the city, saying more than a hundred families were in desperate need of help and describing the situation as a "big disaster."
A military spokeswoman, Capt. Angela Bowman, told Reuters that Mosul was calm overnight, after insurgents appeared to have opened up a second front in the fighting by overruning police stations and laying siege on the provincial headquarters there.
The insurgents in Mosul stormed a half-dozen police stations and looted the buildings of weapons, ammunition and body armor, police officials and witnesses said. By the afternoon, they had seized five bridges running across the Tigris River, which splits the city in half.
The American military said it had mounted a major counteroffensive in Mosul hoping to control the violence before guerrillas could seize the government center. But at nightfall, carloads of guerrillas continued to roam the streets freely, melting away at the approach of American troops.
"It's very fluid," Lt. Col. Paul Hastings, an Army spokesman, said in a telephone interview near midnight. "It's been going on for much of the day, and it's still going on."
Brig. Gen. Carter Ham, the commander of American forces in northern Iraq, said in an e-mail message early today from his headquarters in Mosul that there had been "some tough fighting" on Thursday, but that the city was "quite calm" at the moment. "I do expect more attacks on Friday," General Ham said, adding that it was "hard to say if the enemy includes some who may have left Falluja, but clearly they are responding to operations there."
Violence surged throughout the Sunni triangle west of Baghdad, with ambushes, bombings and mortar attacks jolting Tikrit, Kirkuk, Hawija, Samarra and the provincial capital of Ramadi, just 30 miles west of Falluja. Iraqi officials have imposed curfews on Baghdad, Mosul, Baiji, Ramadi and Falluja. A curfew has been in place in Samarra since last month.
American military officials have said in recent days that insurgent leaders probably fled Falluja before the assault on the city began and could be organizing the counter offensive now unfolding across the country.
The invasion of Falluja, now in its fifth day, is seen by military planners as a way to smash the largest safe haven for the insurgency in Iraq. Since the assault began on Monday, about 600 rebels have been killed, along with at least 19 American and 5 Iraqi soldiers, military officials said.
American marines and soldiers seem to be carrying out a pincer movement in Falluja, pressing insurgents ever farther south in intense fighting. But the military has been forced to detach an armored battalion from its cordon operation around Falluja to help quell violence in Mosul, about 200 miles to the north, siphoning off about a third of the forces that had been put in place to catch insurgents attempting to flee the fighting here.
In downtown Baghdad, a powerful suicide car bomb exploded on a busy commercial street Thursday morning, killing at least 17 people and wounding at least 30 others. In the evening, explosions rattled across the capital with a frequency not seen here since August, when American soldiers fought a Shiite uprising in the south.
In Falluja, the Second Battalion of the Seventh Cavalry pressed south and east from Highway 10, which runs across the middle of the city, sparking heavy fighting in the neighborhoods of Resala, Nazal and Jebail. Another unit, the Second Battalion of the Second Infantry, swung south and west through an industrial area, seemingly trapping the insurgents in a pincer.
But in the center of the movement, heading due south, a Marine battalion ran into ambushes, stiff counterattacks and at least one booby-trapped house, all of which slowed their advance. This advance moved through Sinai, a neighborhood known both for car garages and hidden weapons caches, and Shuhada, a relatively modern residential area at Falluja's southernmost edge.
"They're all over the place," a Marine officer, Lt. Christopher Wilkens, said. "They're very well trained."
Still, some insurgents have tried to escape across the Euphrates River to the south and west of the city by boat or swimming. On Thursday, Apache gunship helicopters destroyed five rowboats and a motorboat as insurgents prepared to board them.
Insurgents in the towns and rural areas to the north of Falluja have become more sophisticated in their bomb and mortar attacks, military officials said. In one apparently coordinated attack on Thursday near Karma, one group fired mortars at an American position. As an armored vehicle began moving on the only road leading to the mortar's point of origin, another group detonated a roadside bomb and began firing mortars at the vehicle. No one was injured in the attack.
Military commanders had hoped to take time in the next few days to clear out insurgents thought to be congregating in Karma, north of Falluja, and Amariya, to the south. But with the armored battalion, called a Stryker group, headed up to Mosul, that operation could become much more difficult.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, arriving Thursday in El Salvador at the start of official visits across Central and South America, said the American and Iraqi offensive in Falluja was going well and that hundreds of adversary fighters had already been killed.
"They are well along in that task and they'll finish it successfully," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "It will end, and it will end successfully, and it will no longer be a safe haven for terrorists or extremists."
Mr. Rumsfeld acknowledged that an unknown number of insurgent leaders and fighters had fled Falluja before the offensive began. "I have no doubt but that some people did leave before it started," he said. "We also know that there are a number of hundreds that didn't and have been killed. Others have been captured."
As American forces continued their advance through Falluja, support troops were filtering into more secure parts of the city to begin what officials called an ambitious relief and reconstruction effort. "The marines and Iraqis are working to bring humanitarian assistance right behind tactical units once areas are clear and secure," one senior American officer in Iraq said in an e-mail message. "There is, for example, already food and water going in to certain areas, and Iraqi medical assistance/supplies going into the hospital."
One of the Super Cobra helicopters came down just west of Falluja after being struck by a shoulder-fired missile. The pilot and crew were rescued by the Third Light Armored Regiment, which is posted nearby. The other helicopter was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade 10 miles north of the city. The pilot was rescued but the burning helicopter was destroyed.
On Thursday afternoon, the Muslim Scholars Association, a powerful group of Sunni clerics that says it represents 3,000 mosques, held a news conference in Baghdad at which it condemned the offensive in Falluja and renewed its call for a boycott of elections scheduled for January. The clerics have been uncompromising in their stand against the Americans and the interim Iraqi government, and it is unclear how much impact their protest will have on the elections. A spokesman for the group said American-led forces conducted dawn raids on the homes of Harith al-Dhari, the group's director, and Abdul Salam al-Kubaisi, a senior official, in the capital.
If a widespread Sunni boycott of the elections were to ensue, it could jeopardize the legitimacy of the vote. Sunnis make up a fifth of Iraq and are still embittered after having been ousted from power during the initial American invasion.
American and Iraqi officials have also said they need to dampen the insurgency in Ramadi. The Marines still control the government center and police headquarters, and maintain bases on the edge of downtown, but are fending off daily assaults.
In the northern oil city of Kirkuk, a car bomb aimed at a convoy carrying the Kurdish provincial governor, Abdul-Rahman Mustafa, exploded in the city center, wounding 16 people, news agencies reported. In Baquba, about 30 men attacked an Iraqi National Guard post at dawn, killing one guardsman and injuring three others. A mortar attack on a national guard compound in Hawija wounded eight people, and a car bomb at a petrol station in Hilla injured four.
No word emerged of the fate of three relatives of the Iraqi prime minister, Ayad Allawi , who were kidnapped on Tuesday night. A group called Ansar al-Jihad posted an Internet message on Wednesday saying it would behead the hostages within 48 hours unless Dr. Allawi halted the invasion of Falluja and released all prisoners in Iraq. Those kidnapped were Ghazi Majeed Allawi, a 75-year-old first cousin, his wife and their daughter-in-law.
A Lebanese satellite channel broadcast a tape showing weeping relatives of one of the women begging for her release, Reuters reported. The relatives said the captive, Wasnaa Muhammad Jaafar Husseini, was nine months pregnant. "She's pregnant, and she can't hold up to this," said a sobbing woman who identified herself as Ms. Husseini's sister.
Robert Worth reported from Falluja and James Glanz from Baghdad.
Ed Wong and Khalid al-Ansary contributed reporting from Baghdad, Dexter Filkins from Falluja, an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from Mosul, Eric Schmitt from Washington, Thom Shanker from El Salvador and Maria Newman from New York.
-------- israel / palestine
Behind the Camp David Myth Arafat didn't blindly spurn a generous offer.
Los Angeles Times
By Robert Malley
November 12, 2004
http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news2/latimes393.htm
It took Yasser Arafat many years to persuade his fellow Palestinians of the wisdom of the two-state solution, and it took longer still to convince Americans and Israelis of the genuineness of his views. Yet it took only two weeks at Camp David in the summer of 2000 to wreck all the progress that had been made and for Arafat to regain the pariah status he once held.
Those talks failed, and in the aftermath a myth was born that has had a lasting and devastating effect: that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak made the most generous offer possible, but that Arafat summarily turned it down. He did so, the story goes, because he never really believed in the Jewish state's right to exist in the first place and because he had never really hoped to reach a just, comprehensive and lasting peace with Israel. Since 2000, it is this narrative - Camp David as a metaphor for Palestinian rejectionism - that has ravaged the Israeli peace camp, distorted both U.S. and Israeli policy and badly undermined confidence in a peaceful settlement of the conflict.
Why Arafat acted as he did during those 14 days will hover over any appraisal of his life. I was a member of the U.S. delegation at those talks and have never concealed my frustration with the Palestinians' attitude. Divided, they spent more time backstabbing each other than seeking a deal. Suspicious, they were quick to see potential loopholes and slow to recognize possible leads. Passive, they failed to put forward their own ideas, leaving it to others to present proposals they could then conveniently turn down. In all this, Arafat played his customary role - sitting back, standing still, staying mum.
Still, some reminders are in order. First, the question is not whether Arafat was up to the occasion - clearly, he was not - but whether his attitude reflected an inherent inability or unwillingness to end the conflict. As many Israeli and U.S. participants in the talks now acknowledge, numerous alternative explanations help account for his behavior: utter distrust of Barak, whom he saw as having humiliated and ignored the Palestinians and who he believed violated commitments; a rushed timetable oblivious to Palestinian political constraints; concern about domestic opposition at the popular level and divisions within the elite; and the absence of support from Arab countries for a deal. Arafat, as anyone who dealt with him knows well, moved only when compelled, preferring the ambiguity of deferral to the clarity of choice. At Camp David he had every reason to postpone and, as he saw it, little incentive to decide.
Second, although Camp David undoubtedly was a breakthrough, and although Israel was prepared to concede far more than in the past, the deal nevertheless didn't meet the minimum requirements of any Palestinian leader. Washington now welcomes the new leadership of Mahmoud Abbas and Ahmed Korei, but it is worth bearing in mind that neither could have embraced the Camp David ideas - and neither did.
A third oft-neglected point about Camp David is that the Palestinian positions, though clearly inconsistent with Israel's, nonetheless were compatible with the existence of a Jewish state: a Palestinian state based on the lines of June 4, 1967; Israeli annexation of limited West Bank territory to accommodate settlement blocs in exchange for the transfer of an equivalent amount of land from Israel proper; Palestinian sovereignty over Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem and over its holy sites; and implementation of the refugees' right of return in a manner designed to protect Israel's demographic interests. Those stances probably went beyond what the Israeli people could accept. But why is that any more relevant than whether Barak's stances went beyond what the Palestinian people could stomach?
The more difficult question is not why Arafat rebuffed the Camp David ideas but why he failed to embrace the Clinton parameters five months later in December 2000, which came far closer to meeting the Palestinian principles.
By then, however, everything had changed. The intifada was raging, Palestinians were seething and mourning their dead, and many of Arafat's advisors were counseling against the deal. Arafat, ever the short-term tactician and with his finger invariably fastened to the public pulse, wanted neither to reject the deal nor embrace it, basking in his reinvigorated popular status and unsure whether he could swiftly turn his people's mood from anger at Israel to peace with it. With President Clinton only weeks away from leaving office, and Barak not far behind, he probably believed he could wait for a better time, feeling more comfortable riding the wave of popular anger than risking his domestic status with a controversial agreement. Why rush to solve a 50-year-old conflict in a mere five months?
Besides, every previous encounter had suggested that if he held out for more, more would soon be offered. How Arafat will be remembered is a matter of historical interest, but, far more than that, one of great political import. Whoever succeeds him will lack his legitimacy, and any future peace agreement inevitably will be measured against what, in his people's eyes, would have been his stance. Arafat was a man who resorted to violence and tragically missed several opportunities. But he also was the first Palestinian leader to embrace the two-state solution and recognize Israel's right to exist. If we wrongly choose to depict Arafat as the man who could only say no, his successors will find it virtually impossible ever to say yes.
By Robert Malley Robert Malley was President Clinton's special assistant for Arab-Israeli affairs. He now directs the Middle East and North Africa program at the International Crisis Group.
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Secrecy surrounds diagnosis
International Herald Tribune
By Elisabeth Rosenthal
November 12, 2004
http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2004/11/11/news/health.html
PARIS Even after Yasser Arafat's death Thursday morning, French health officials continued their stony silence about exactly what disease killed the Palestinian leader. And so, the man who lived so much of his life simply and in the public eye, died mysteriously, surrounded by secrecy.
After two weeks, the medical databases at Percy Military Training Hospital in Clamart must be crammed with information about Arafat's condition - scans, biopsies, reams of blood test results - that would have defined for doctors within minutes the condition of Arafat's kidneys, liver and lungs. But these remain top secret.
The hospital officially announced Arafat's death in a terse statement delivered by the hospital spokesman, General Christian Estripeau, who told reporters there would be no details released on tests, the cause of death or whether there would be an autopsy. When reached by telephone later on Thursday, Estripeau said there would be "no information."
In fact, all the information about Arafat's sudden death that has dribbled out comes from his Palestinian aides, who provide facts through a non-medical and highly politicized filter. These few misshapen puzzle pieces are insufficient to create a picture of what went wrong.
As their beloved leader deteriorated in the past two days, Arafat's aides announced only that he was in a deep coma on life-support machines, having suffered a brain hemorrhage - a stroke caused by bleeding into the brain. But such a fatal event can have many underlying causes, and does not explain why Arafat's health had deteriorated so precipitously in the past month.
In France, a patient or the next-of-kin must give permission for doctors to release information. In his carefully worded statements, Estripeau suggested that this permission was not given: "It is not up to the defense forces' health services to reveal information given to the family," he said today.
Strokes are generally sudden affairs, and Arafat's was almost certainly a secondary result of his underlying and undisclosed illness. At the time of his medical evacuation to Paris two weeks ago, aides revealed that he was suffering from a low platelet count and had undergone a platelet transfusion. Since platelets are involved in blood clotting, patients with low platelet counts are predisposed to brain hemorrhages, and this may have contributed to Arafat's death.
But low platelet counts in the blood are a common finding in a wide range of illnesses, including severe infections, liver disease, end-stage cancer, and even AIDS. And doctors made no mention of a hemorrhage until Wednesday, suggesting that it was a recent event.
On Nov. 4, doctors and aides announced that Arafat was being transferred to the intensive care unit because his condition had deteriorated. No mention of a brain hemorrhage was made at that time, although such bleeding would have been immediately obvious on a CAT scan.
It is accepted medical practice throughout the world that patients or their families have the right to keep medical information private. In France, politicians and celebrities frequently keep their medical lives secret, but in many countries, such as the United States, public figures are expected to reveal private health information and hospitals tend to encourage it.
"There can be tension between what the public would like to know and what the family feels comfortable talking about, but our policy is that the privacy of the patient and the patient's family comes first and is paramount," said Myrna Manners, spokesperson for the New York-Presbyterian Hospital, which has treated many world leaders including the Shah of Iran.
But, she added: "Rather than have rumors or speculation run amok, we feel its better to have a clear process and a bit of information. We encourage that."
There are various reasons why Arafat's inner circle would want to keep the cause of his death a secret. Perhaps he suffered from a disease that they considered embarrassing. Or perhaps the doctors who treated him during the early phases of his illness in Ramallah missed a treatable medical condition, letting him deteriorate to the point it was too late to cure him once he was moved to Paris.
In the end, the actual timing of his death - like in much of his life - was probably tinged with a hefty dose of politics and religion.
At some point after he was transferred to intensive care, Arafat was placed on a ventilator, a machine that assists in breathing. Such assistance can be required because of lung problems - like pneumonia - or in cases where the brain-centers that control breathing are not functioning properly. Both deep comas and large strokes can damage these centers temporarily and require that a patient be placed on a machine.
Once a patient's breathing is maintained by a ventilator, the exact timing of death often becomes something of a matter of choice. More important, it also becomes subject to religious variations concerning the ethics of caring for terminally ill patients.
Islamic scholars have generally prohibited the discontinuation of life support machines, since the Koran advises: "Don't throw yourself into death." Nabil Shaath, the Palestinian foreign minister, reacted violently to press reports yesterday that Palestinian officials had arrived in Paris to "pull the plug" on Arafat.
"We don't accept euthanasia," he said, Arafat "is in the hands of God."
But in France, as in much of the world, death is now defined by the death of the brain, or "brain death." A patient on a ventilator can be breathing and have a pumping heart- at least for some time - even though he is medically and legally dead.
Many Islamic scholars say that a patient can be disconnected from life support once he is brain dead, since he is no longer really alive. But some conservative Muslim groups, as well as many conservative Jews, still maintain that the person lives so long as the heart is beating.
It is not known if Arafat was removed from life-support machines or if his heart stopped beating while he was still on them.
-----
Just What Mr. Palestine Ruled Over
(Inter Press Service)
by Ferry Biedermann
November 12, 2004
http://www.antiwar.com/ips/biedermann.php?articleid=3962
RAMALLAH - For almost four decades, Yasser Arafat was Mr. Palestine to many in this fractured homeland.
Yasser Arafat represented the Palestinian people, wherever they are, as the head of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), which was accepted by the Arab League as "the sole legal representative of the Palestinian people." He had an iron grip on the organization.
Arafat assumed leadership of the PLO in 1969, two years after the Fatah movement that advocated armed struggle against Israel joined the organization. Both Fatah and the PLO were founded in exile.
At the time, Israel existed within what was known as the "green line" cease-fire border of 1949. This demarcation had come about as the result of the war that started with the founding of the Jewish state after the UN resolution to partition Palestine in 1947.
Israel then did not include the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan heights. The war of 1947-1948 between Israel and the Palestinians and a number of Arab countries had displaced an estimated 700,000 Palestinians from areas that were assigned under the UN plan to Israel and from the areas into which it expanded during the war.
The rest of the area that was assigned to a future Palestinian state was taken over by neighboring Arab countries. The West Bank, including East Jerusalem, was annexed by Jordan. Egypt took over the Gaza strip.
In the six-day war of June 1967, Israel captured these areas as well as the Golan Heights and the Sinai peninsula. It withdrew from the latter after the 1977 peace agreement with Egypt.
The six-day war set off another wave of Palestinian refugees, some 300,000. Since 1949 all refugees, whether in "camps" in Gaza and the West Bank or in neighboring countries are taken care of by the UN Refugees and Works Agency (UNRWA), the only UN body that deals with a specific body of refugees.
The PLO is nominally the representative of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, refugees or not, and of those in the Arab countries and around the world.
All major Palestinian political factions such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) used to be part of the PLO, but now some of those allegiances have frayed.
After the outbreak of the first Palestinian uprising in 1987, the Intifada, two Islamic fundamentalist groups sprang up, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. They are not part of the PLO and are seen as openly in opposition to it most of the time, although sometimes they are invited to sit in on important meetings.
The situation became still more complicated with the Oslo peace accords in 1993 and subsequent agreements when the Palestinian Authority (PA) was established in the West Bank and Gaza.
The PA held its own elections for a legislative council and for the post of chairman of the PA in 1996. Hamas and Jihad did not participate, and Fatah overwhelmingly won the election. Yasser Arafat became chairman of the PA. He also remained head of the PLO.
The Palestinian population worldwide is estimated at between nine and ten million, including some 1.2 million who live in Israel and are sometimes called Israeli Arabs or Arab Israelis, according to figures provided by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, and several international studies.
The population of the Palestinian territories, including East Jerusalem, is just under 3.5 million. This is divided between some 2.3 million people in the West Bank, of which some 200,000 are in Jerusalem, and some 1.2 million in Gaza.
That leaves more than 4.5 million people outside the area of "historic Palestine." Most of them live in the Arab world. About 500,000 live outside the Arab world, half of them in the Americas.
The people in the West Bank and Gaza, even though tightly controlled by Israel, are nominally ruled by the PA. The legislative council, also called the Palestinian parliament, has so far merely rubber-stamped Arafat's decisions.
Under U.S. and Israeli pressure, rules were changed last year to make room for a prime minister, because neither country wanted to deal with Arafat. Under Arafat, this function proved to be mostly powerless, not least because he remained chairman of the PLO.
The first prime minister was Mahmoud Abbas, Arafat's number two in the powerful executive committee of the PLO and in the central committee of Fatah. This did not help him, however, and Abbas was ousted after some four months.
The former speaker of the legislative council, Ahmed Qureia, then became prime minister, a post he still held when Arafat died.
Qureia, also known as Abu Ala, has taken over some of Arafat's responsibilities in the PA. Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, has taken over the running of the important Fatah and PLO committees.
Under its laws, the PA is required to hold elections for a new chairman within 60 days of him dying or becoming incapacitated. Fatah would have to choose a new leader at its rarely held "annual" conference. And the PLO's Palestine National Congress, which meets even less frequently, would have to elect a new PLO leadership.
--------
Arafat Embarks on Final Trip Home
West Bank Burial Will Follow Cairo Service; Four Successors Installed
By John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, November 12, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42497-2004Nov11.html
JERUSALEM, Nov. 11 -- As Yasser Arafat's body was flown from Paris to Cairo on Thursday for a memorial service that will precede burial in the West Bank later Friday, the Palestinian leader's powers and responsibilities were transferred to four new leaders. The handover marked what many here and around the world are anticipating as a new era for Palestinian governance and a chance to restart peace talks with Israel.
Arafat, the embodiment of the Palestinians' fight for an independent state, died about 3:30 a.m. at a French military hospital outside Paris, where he had been admitted nearly two weeks earlier with what doctors described as digestive and blood disorders. The 75-year-old leader slipped into a coma a week ago and suffered a brain hemorrhage and organ failure this week.
On Thursday afternoon, his flag-draped wood coffin was carried by eight French military pallbearers to a French government plane during a brief ceremony at Villacoublay Military Airfield, southwest of Paris, as Arafat's wife, Suha, dressed in a black overcoat, looked on.
Arafat's body was flown to Cairo for a military funeral that is expected to be attended by many Arab heads of state and other dignitaries. His body will then be returned to the West Bank city of Ramallah, just north of Jerusalem, for burial at about 4 p.m. Friday in the battered headquarters compound where Arafat spent the last years of his life, frequently under Israeli siege.
Arafat wanted to be buried in Jerusalem -- which both Palestinians and Israelis consider their capital -- at the al-Aqsa mosque, one of Islam's holiest sites, but the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, rejected the idea. Instead, Palestinian officials said, part of Arafat's grave in Ramallah will be filled with dirt from the mosque, and he will be interred in a concrete casket so that his remains can someday be moved to al-Aqsa.
Sharon, Arafat's longtime nemesis, called his death "a turning point in Middle Eastern history" and expressed hope that "the new Palestinian leadership that will arise will understand that progress in relations and in the resolution of problems depends -- first and foremost -- on the cessation of terrorism and their fighting terrorism."
However, the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, the militant group that rejected the 1993 Oslo peace accords and branded Arafat a traitor for signing them, said in a statement that his death would "increase our determination and steadfastness to continue jihad and resistance against the Zionist enemy until victory and liberation is achieved."
Across the West Bank and Gaza Strip, home to about 3.5 million Palestinians, thousands of grieving residents milled in the streets, many carrying large pictures of Arafat or waving black flags. Mosques blared verses from the Koran, boys set tires ablaze in the streets and men fired weapons into the sky.
As bulldozers and dump trucks cleared rubble from Arafat's Ramallah compound, senior Palestinian leaders installed his successors. That there were four men named to replace him was testimony to his unique stature as the father of the Palestinian national movement, but also evidence of his autocratic, one-man rule.
The man named to lead the Fatah movement -- founded by Arafat in 1959 and long the Palestinians' most powerful mainstream political group -- was widely considered a surprising choice. Farouk Kaddoumi, 70, the foreign minister of the international Palestine Liberation Organization, rejected the Oslo accords in 1993 and refused to return from exile with Arafat to the West Bank and Gaza Strip the following year.
Palestinian officials said it was unclear whether Kaddoumi, who lives in Tunis, the capital of Tunisia, would now return to the territories -- or if Israel would allow him to.
"Farouk Kaddoumi hasn't changed his point of view -- he's still against Oslo," said Ahmed Ghnaim, a senior Fatah leader in the West Bank. "He's the head of Fatah, but we have a central committee that makes decisions, not just one person."
A senior Israeli official who spoke on condition of anonymity said: "I don't think he will be allowed to enter the territories. This is what the Palestinian people need? A rejectionist?"
The speaker of the Palestinian parliament, Rawhi Fattouh, 55, was sworn in as interim president of the Palestinian Authority, the entity created under the Oslo accords to govern the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Although Arafat used the presidency to retain ultimate control over government operations -- particularly budgetary and security matters -- Fattouh is considered politically weak, and the post is expected to be transformed into a more ceremonial one. Fattouh's main responsibility will be to organize presidential elections within 60 days.
Mahmoud Abbas, 69, the first Palestinian prime minister and arguably the most powerful Palestinian official in the post-Arafat era, will head the PLO, the umbrella organization for most Palestinian groups here and abroad. Abbas and his successor as prime minister, Ahmed Qureia, 66, will be in charge of running the most important affairs of state, at least until a new president is elected.
Many analysts say that if the transition is smooth and there is no clash between Arafat's old guard and younger reformers, or between the Palestinian Authority and Islamic militant groups, Abbas and Qureia are likely to emerge after the elections as the strongest leaders.
"These institutions and men will determine what will happen next with regard to the succession process," said Khalil Shikaki, a Palestinian pollster and political analyst, who said that holding elections soon was crucial to stability and the peaceful evolution to a new era.
"In the short run it may be calm, and the fact that Arafat died of an illness and not from Israeli violence will lead to a smooth transition. But after that, a lot depends on the old guard, which is inheriting these institutions," he said. "This is an opportunity for those who long ago left the institutions because Arafat controlled them and began fighting for power in the street to return and say, 'These institutions are ours, not theirs.' "
--------
After Chaotic Procession, Arafat Is Laid to Rest in West Bank
November 12, 2004
By TERENCE NEILAN and NEIL MacFARQUHAR
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/12/international/middleeast/12cnd-arafat.html?hp&ex=1100322000&en=e78f1fb4aef6ad56&ei=5094&partner=homepage
Yasir Arafat was laid to rest in a marble-and-stone grave today in Ramallah, on the West Bank, after his flag-draped coffin was carried through a crowd of chanting Palestinians who swarmed the helicopter that brought him from a military state funeral in Cairo earlier this morning.
The Palestinian leader's body was lowered into the ground at his battered compound known as the Muqata. Afteward, Muslim clerics read Koranic verses and Mr. Arafat's bodyguards wept and embraced each other, The Associated Press reported.
The sound of bullets being fired into the air rang out, as they had from the moment the helicopter touched down, from the police trying to keep the crowd at bay.
As the coffin was carried toward the gravesite, the emotional crowd chanted in Arabic, "With our blood and our soul we will redeem you Yasir Arafat!"
The helicopter carrying Mr. Arafat's body was met by chaotic crowds, which climbed over walls around the scene, for a while preventing Palestinian and foreign officials from disembarking. They chanted "Welcome, welcome Abu Ammar,'' using his nom de guerre.
After about a half-hour of chanting, Mr. Arafat's coffin was brought from one of two helicopters and carried through a now-quietened crowd of mourners. Stretchers carried away two people who were trampled in the melee, news agencies reported.
The crowd was expressing its deep emotion for a man revered by the Palestinians for his leadership, even as they were aware of his limitations, including corruption.
Earlier, in Cairo, presidents, kings and potentates from across the Arab world and beyond paid their last respects to the Palestinian leader, holding a state memorial service for a leader without a state.
The ceremony followed the brief, somber choreography of most Muslim funerals, a few moments of prayer followed by a gathering of mourners in a large tent, then a march behind the coffin, drapped in a Palestinian flag and resting on a caisson drawn by six black horses.
In this case the coffin was not carried to its final resting place, but to an Egyptian military transport plane which flew it to Al Arish in the northern Sinai, where a military helicopter whisked it to Ramallah.
In Cairo, the public was not allowed anywhere near the military service, with traffic halted and armed security forces stationed on all rooftops and even in mosque minarets along the brief, 150-yard route of the funeral march on Cairo's main airport road. Homeowners in apartments lining the road were evidently told not to even open their windows.
For the public, an emotional Friday prayer service inside the venerable Azhar mosque was designated a memorial service.
"What a shame, what a shame, Arafat's funeral was at the airport!" the mourners chanted, with the couplet rhyming in Arabic, underscoring the failure of the area's leaders to solve the Palestinian problem.
Speaking at the mosque prayers at a military club, which started the official ceremony, Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, the grand sheik of Al Azhar and Egypt's highest religious figure, said brief prayers over the coffin resting on the patterned black and white marble floor.
"He has served his people all his life, until he faced his God, with courage and honesty," said the sheik. "Let us pray for his soul." Then he repeated "God is great" numerous times.
After that, the coffin was transferred to the caisson. Not far from the mosque, mourners, including some 60 senior officials from around the world, gathered in a traditional cloth tent used for funerals in Egypt, carpeted and the walls lined with giant red, green and yellow patterned arabesques.
Most of the pantheon of Arab leaders flew in for the occasion, some landing at the very last minute and some chosing to overlook often bitter differences with the Palestinian leader.
President Bashar al-Assad of Syria and King Abdullah II of Jordan, both of whose fathers had long sparred with Mr. Arafat, attended, as did Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. The presidents of Algeria, Tunisia, Yemen, Sudan and Lebanon were there, along with a host of princes from the royal houses of the Gulf.
From farther afield, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa came, as did the presidents of Indonesia, Bangladesh and Zimbabwe. There was a sprinkling of prime ministers, although most European nations were represented by their foreign ministers. The United States sent Assistant Secretary of State William J. Burns.
After a delegation of Palestinian leaders lead by Mahmoud Abbas standing at the entrance to the mourning tent had greeted everyone, all the officials attending lined up behind the caisson and marched from the military club to the adjacent airfield along a main thoroughfare.
An Egyptian military band, marching in unison and playing Chopin's funeral march as well as other dirges, led the way.
At the airfield, the mourners were joined by Suha Arafat and Egypt's first lady, Suzanne Mubarak. In a rare public appearance, Mr. Arafat's only child, a nine-year-old daughter named Zahwa, was at her mother's side, both of them weeping. Eight pall bearers, lead by a three man honor guard, all in blue dress uniforms, marched the coffin crisply up a red carpet onto the plane, again to the sound of the Palestinian national anthem and the funeral march.
Egyptian state television was the only media allowed inside the official ceremonies, and an unidentified commentator said, "Don't cry Zahwa. Your father never cried. He was a man of patience and endurance."
Terence Neilan reported from New York for this article and Neil MacFarquhar from Cairo.
--------
THE OVERVIEW
P.L.O. Picks Abbas, a Pragmatist, as Followers Mourn Arafat
November 12, 2004
By JAMES BENNET and STEVEN ERLANGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/12/international/middleeast/12mideast.html?pagewanted=all
RAMALLAH, West Bank, Nov. 11 - Hours after the death of Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leadership quickly filled its top posts on Thursday, trying to signal that the chaos and ambiguity that characterized his decades-long hold on the Palestinian national dream died with him.
With tears and angry chants, Palestinians contended with the loss of the iconic, erratic figure who led them from a splintered diaspora to the threshold of a state and left them stuck there, divided over the way ahead and in danger of fragmenting once again.
Mr. Arafat, 75, died of an undisclosed illness at 3:30 a.m. in a Paris hospital, far from the land he longed to rule. In death as in life, he was barred by Israel from Jerusalem, the city he envisioned as his capital and burial site.
As Palestinians absorbed the news that the wily survivor had at last succumbed, the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization replaced Mr. Arafat as chairman with Mahmoud Abbas, a pragmatic negotiator and a critic of the intifada, the armed uprising against Israel.
But the confusion and uncertainty that are still part of Mr. Arafat's conflicted legacy were on sharp display in scenes of grief, resignation and anger throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Hunted in exile by Israel as a terrorist, later embraced by Israel as a peace partner and finally spurned as a terrorist once again, he left his supporters pasting up the same poster of him smiling warmly and waving in what seemed a farewell, even as they picked among his mixed messages for the one they preferred.
In poignant testimony to how far short of his dreams Mr. Arafat died, his body was flown Thursday to Cairo to lie in state before a military funeral on Friday to be attended by Arab leaders, many of whom would not or could not visit Ramallah, still under Israeli occupation; the foreign ministers of Germany, France and Britain; and the presidents of Indonesia, South Africa and Algeria. William Burns, the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, will represent the United States.
After the ceremonies, Palestinian officials said Mr. Arafat's coffin was to be flown here on Friday, for burial under a half-dozen dusty pine trees that stand in the Muqata, the ruined compound in which Israel trapped him for his last years.
Palestinian leaders called the gravesite a temporary step forced on them by Israel, which forbade burial in Jerusalem. In a symbol of the tenacity of their national ambition, Palestinian officials placed soil taken from Jerusalem under Mr. Arafat's black-and-white marble tomb. They built hooks into the tomb so that, they said, it can be raised easily for the eventual trip 10 miles south to Jerusalem and the holy site that Muslims call the Noble Sanctuary and Jews call the Temple Mount.
As burning tires and garbage cast a bitter pall over Ramallah and an unmanned Israeli surveillance aircraft droned overhead, some Palestinians invoked Mr. Arafat to speak of a yearning for peace and accommodation with Israel. But masked, hatchet-wielding young men also praised Mr. Arafat as they spray-painted fierce slogans in black on downtown walls.
Despite some shooting in the air and shouting matches, the day passed largely in calm. The reaction to Mr. Arafat's death was muted and layered, with the grief of many overlaid with yearning for change and skepticism of the new leadership.
"For 50 years, he's been leading our struggle," said Muhammad Abu Majdi, 55, who runs a stationery shop in the Kalandia refugee camp here. He called the death "our irreplaceable loss."
But, he continued: "May God have mercy on him. We hope that this will be a new beginning, of a new era of peace."
Said Aslan, 15, said he heard of Mr. Arafat's death as he was about to eat a pre-dawn meal, in preparation for the daylight fast of the holy month of Ramadan. "We were so upset we started to cry," he said. "When men cry, then of course kids also cry."
Many Palestinians expressed doubt that Mr. Abbas or any new leader could unify them as the compelling Mr. Arafat did. "They can sit in Arafat's chair," said Mouin Ragheb, 28, "but they cannot fill his place."
Knots of young men trotted through the Ramallah, condemning the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, with chants like "Sharon, Sharon, you can burst and die."
The masked men with hatchets, who wore bandanas identifying them as part of an "execution unit," spray-painted a slogan that referred to Mr. Arafat by his nom de guerre: "Abu Ammar is all the nation, and all the nation does not die."
Mr. Arafat's post as president of the Palestinian Authority, created by the Oslo Accords to govern Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, devolved automatically under law upon Rawhi Fattouh, the speaker of the Palestinian parliament.
Mr. Fattouh, a minor figure with no political base, is in theory to hold the post for 60 days, by which time the Palestinians are to carry out national elections for a new president.
"The era of the symbol is over," said Mohammed Dahlan, a leading member of a forty-something cadre of politicians who chafed at Mr. Arafat's rule.
"Even though it's a very sad day because we lost Abu Ammar," he added in an interview here Thursday night, "it is a great day in the Palestinian history, because we have emphasized today the implementation of the law as it is written."
But the seeming efficiency with which the leadership filled Mr. Arafat's vacant posts belied the challenges that lie ahead. They include practical steps like unifying Mr. Arafat's many overlapping security services, which have clashed with one another, and political and perhaps military steps like containing Hamas, the popular militant group.
Beyond achieving Mr. Abbas's stated goal of ending the conflict, he and his allies - many of whom have potentially divergent ambitions - are faced with the deeper challenge of reassuring Israelis that not just the leadership but the Palestinian people are ready for a durable, fair division of the land. Palestinians say they await the same reassurance from Israelis.
Shaul Mofaz, the Israeli defense minister, said in a telephone interview Thursday, "We want to see a different direction, by a different leadership, for creating a better atmosphere and trust between the two sides, and a better life for both peoples."
Bush administration officials, who shunned Mr. Arafat as fomenting terrorism, struck a conciliatory note on Thursday. "We know that, in the eyes of the Palestinian people, Arafat embodied their hopes and dreams for the achievement of an independent Palestinian state," Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said.
Mr. Arafat's longtime nemesis, Mr. Sharon, who has expressed regret at failing to kill the Palestinian leader during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon 22 years ago, referred obliquely to his death. "Recent events are likely to constitute a turning point in Middle Eastern history," he said.
He said Israel would "continue with its efforts to reach a diplomatic settlement with the Palestinians without delay." Pointing to Mr. Arafat to argue that Israel had no peace partner, Mr. Sharon has set in motion a plan to withdraw without a peace agreement from the Gaza Strip to secure what he calls more defensible Israeli boundaries.
He indicated Thursday that he would not soften his expectations of the Palestinian leadership, demanding a "cessation of terrorism" and a fight against it.
Mr. Mofaz said that if a new Palestinian leadership began to crack down on terrorism, "we would regard them as a partner for dialogue," first to carry out the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, and then to begin to implement the peace plan known as the road map.
The leadership changes made Thursday could be read as not so much eliminating the contradictions of Mr. Arafat's polar stances of negotiation and confrontation as embodying them in different people. Left unfilled was his post as head of the dominant faction, Fatah, meaning its highest official is now Farouk Kaddoumi, an advocate of armed struggle. Mr. Kaddoumi broke with Mr. Arafat to oppose the Oslo Accords and has never returned from exile, remaining in Tunis.
Fatah officials insisted Mr. Kaddoumi would have little influence. "There is no change within Fatah," said Mr. Dahlan, the head of security services in the Gaza Strip.
He said Fatah's candidate for president of the Palestinian Authority would be Mr. Abbas, who with American backing briefly served as Palestinian prime minister last year before quitting, criticizing Mr. Sharon and Mr. Arafat for undermining him. Mr. Dahlan acknowledged that Mr. Abbas was not popular, but insisted he was respected and would win by calling for law and order and a government that is not corrupt.
Mr. Dahlan did not rule out seeking the top Fatah job for himself, when elections for that post are eventually held.
Mr. Dahlan, whose base is in the Gaza Strip, faces a political struggle of his own. On Thursday, as he visited a building in downtown Ramallah, a muscular young man stopped his car near Mr. Dahlan's armored black sport utility vehicle and leaned out a window to fire bursts into the air from a semiautomatic rifle. It was seen as a sign from Ramallah's Fatah militants that they did not respect Mr. Dahlan's authority.
Mr. Abbas is widely expected to win the presidency, but he could face challenges from independent figures supported by militant groups like Hamas.
In Gaza City, a Hamas spokesman, Sami Abu Zuhri, refused to say whether Hamas candidates would run. "Whenever the structure for elections is clear, Hamas will declare its position," he said. "But in general, elections are the only way to choose the leadership."
He said Hamas sought a unified Palestinian leadership. But, asked if the group would join in a truce with Israel, he said, "As long as there is occupation, Hamas will continue its resistance."
Palestinian officials said elections were crucial to legitimize a post-Arafat government. But carrying them out will require a high degree of cooperation from Israel, which during the conflict has fractured Palestinian areas, encircling the cities with armored forces and tightening travel restrictions on Palestinians. On Thursday, Israel chose to lock Palestinians into their cities, citing fears of unrest.
"By hook, by crook, we must have the elections within 60 days," said Hassan Khreisheh, an opposition politician and an Arafat critic who was elevated in Thursday's shuffle to speaker of the parliament. He called for international pressure on Israel, especially from the United States, which favors Palestinian elections to replace Mr. Arafat.
Mr. Mofaz, the Israeli defense chief, promised cooperation. "The moment they decide for elections and will ask our support for such a democratic event, I believe we will allow them to carry out this democratic exercise in all areas," he said.
Secretary of State Powell said, "We will do all we can to support and help the Palestinian people move forward toward peace during this period of transition, and we encourage others in the region and the international community to do the same."
James Bennet reported from Ramallah for this article, and Steven Erlanger from Jerusalem. Greg Myre contributed reporting from Gaza.
-------- latin america
Nicaragua Says It Will Destroy Missiles
Associated Press
By JOHN J. LUMPKIN
Nov 12, 2004
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/R/RUMSFELD_NICARAGUA?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
MANAGUA, Nicaragua (AP) -- President Enrique Bolanos told U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld Friday that Nicaragua would completely eliminate a stockpile of hundreds of surface-to-air missiles with no expectation of compensation from the United States.
Bolanos said the anti-aircraft missiles would be destroyed within a year-and-a-half.
Nicaragua had 2,000 SA-7 missiles, which are portable weapons of Soviet design, left over from the Latin American country's days as a client of the Soviet Union. U.S. officials sought their destruction, fearing they could make their way into terrorist hands for use against airliners or military aircraft.
In May and July, Nicaragua destroyed batches of more than 300 missiles each. Defense officials said they expect to have 1,000 destroyed by the end of the year.
"We seek no compensation for destroying the missiles," Bolanos said at a press conference. He said destroying them is "the will of Nicaragua."
The missiles are worth tens of thousands of dollars each.
Rumsfeld arrived Friday in Nicaragua during a trip through Latin America.
The Nicaraguan army had said it wants to hold on to about 400 of the missiles, which it argued are needed to offset the military capability of neighboring Honduras. The two countries, which have a history of animosity, have become embroiled in a border dispute in recent years.
But U.S. defense officials said they believed Nicaragua intended to eliminate its entire stockpile.
Nicaragua had also previously suggested it would eliminate all its remaining SA-7s in exchange for planes and radar modules from the U.S. military, totaling about $80 million in aid.
The leftist Sandinista government, which ruled Nicaragua from 1979 to 1989 after the fall of a U.S.-supported authoritarian right-wing regime, obtained the missiles from the Soviet Union to fight off U.S.-backed Contra rebels.
The Sandinista party, now out of power, wants the United States to compensate the country for destroying the missiles, but a senior American defense official said that was unlikely.
Rumsfeld also thanked Nicaragua for sending 115 soldiers to Iraq. They left last February; Nicaragua said it could no longer afford to keep them there.
Rumsfeld is expected to visit Panama before traveling to Quito, Ecuador, for a conference of Western Hemisphere defense ministers next week.
Earlier Friday, Rumsfeld met with President Tony Saca of El Salvador and awarded the bronze star to six Salvadoran soldiers credited with saving the lives of several occupation officials this year in Iraq.
The soldiers defended a convoy during an insurgent ambush last March outside Najaf, a Shiite Muslim holy city in southern Iraq. One soldier, Sgt. Victor Manuel Gonzalez Chanta, said their fighting back "was just an automatic response, and thank God."
Rumsfeld described their actions as "a story of courage and calm under fire."
In addition to Gonzalez Chanta, the soldiers honored by Rumsfeld on Friday were 1st Sgt. Fredy Adolfo Castro Urbina, the group's leader and a veteran of El Salvador's civil war; as well as Carlos Enrique Echeverria, Luis Evelio Mejia, Jose Daniel Oporto and Juan Francisco Cordoba.
In addition to Nicaragua, two other Latin American contingents - from the Dominican Republic and Honduras - returned home early or left as scheduled without replacements, leaving El Salvador the only country from the Western Hemisphere, other than the United States, with troops in Iraq.
About 370 Salvadoran troops are in the country, serving primarily in a humanitarian capacity. El Salvador has had one soldier killed.
-------- mideast
U.S. to Consider Naming Mideast Peace Envoy
By Glenn Kessler and Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, November 12, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43777-2004Nov11.html
The White House, seeking to take advantage of the diplomatic opening created by Yasser Arafat's death, is prepared to consider a British proposal that President Bush appoint a special Middle East envoy to shepherd the peace process, administration officials said yesterday.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who arrived here yesterday and ate dinner privately with Bush last night, has said he hopes to prod the White House into becoming more engaged in resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict. U.S. officials said they have an open mind about the idea of a special envoy, which would be a departure for an administration that has generally shunned such diplomatic assignments.
"We will certainly listen very carefully to what they have to say," said a White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the formal Bush-Blair discussions are to be held today.
Another official involved in the administration's deliberations said the concept of an envoy will work only if the administration decides to give the person real authority. He said the administration could opt for what he called the "James Baker" model, a hard-nosed negotiator like the former secretary of state who forces both sides to confront uncomfortable truths. Or, he said, if the administration were less ambitious, it might accept a "George Mitchell" model, referring to the former Senate majority leader who wrote a report on cooling down the conflict that gained little traction.
In his first term Bush promoted the idea of an independent Palestinian state, but in contrast to President Bill Clinton he generally avoided robust efforts to resolve the conflict.
More broadly, administration officials said yesterday that they want to seize on the opening provided by Arafat's death, both to make progress and to show that Bush is trying. But these officials said they are being extremely cautious about what they say publicly because they do not want to hurt the chances of moderates among the potential Palestinian leaders by making them look like the candidates of the United States.
Another White House official said that the Middle East is a priority for Bush's second term and that the president and Blair will discuss ways "we can accelerate the process and take advantage of the opportunity of Arafat's passing." But the official cautioned that the administration "will also be patient," watching the Palestinians over the next few weeks to avoid "acting too assertively or too precipitously."
"You can move too quickly and embrace too hard and hurt the process, and that's the last thing we want to do," the official added. "It is critical that we allow the new Palestinian leadership to emerge. You don't want to quickly embrace a leader who has not established his own credibility with the Palestinian people."
A fourth official said Arafat's death is "an opportunity" because he "had become an obstacle not just in our eyes but in Arab eyes." He said that the emerging Palestinian leaders had taken the right initial steps but that they need to show they can get control of Arafat's multiple security forces and arrange a meaningful cease-fire in the terrorist campaign against Israel.
A huge problem the new leaders face is the emergence of individual cells of militants, financed largely by Iran, who appear to lie outside the control of traditional Palestinian groups. "This is a dangerous and serious phenomenon," this official said.
Sean McCormack, the National Security Council spokesman, called it "a time of mourning for the Palestinian people" and said he would not comment on how Arafat's death changed the diplomatic landscape "out of respect for them."
Privately, administration officials made it clear that Bush will keep the onus on the Palestinians, saying that the United States cannot impose a desire for peace on them if they do not want it themselves.
Still, officials said, a renewed push to make progress on Mideast peace carries the potential of altering the extremely close relationship between Israel and the United States in Bush's first term. The shunning of the Palestinian leadership during most of Bush's tenure left the field open for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to help shape U.S. policy. So the emergence of a new player at the table could mean additional pressure on Israel, since Palestinians could force debate on issues that have been largely ignored in recent years, officials said.
One factor weighing on administration officials is the sense that they did not energetically support Mahmoud Abbas, when he served briefly as prime minister in 2003 under Arafat. Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, became leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization after Arafat's death. His resignation as prime minister after three difficult months helped stall the U.S.-backed peace plan known as the "road map."
"We all failed with Abu Mazen. Not enough was done by the international community, by us and by Israel," an administration official said. "This is another opportunity to see if we can do it differently."
In the first week of December, Palestinian, U.S., Israeli and European officials are scheduled to meet in Oslo to discuss Palestinian reform, giving a showcase for the new Palestinian leaders and an opening for Israel and other parties to demonstrate support.
While Bush and Blair will take questions from reporters today, officials indicated there will not be any major announcements resulting from their talks.
Officials said Bush received a positive response from the Arab world to his off-the-cuff remark last week when a reporter incorrectly told him Arafat had died. Bush said, "God bless his soul," focusing the comment on Arafat the man rather than on the political situation.
-------- nato
NATO's Chief Backs U.S. Views on Terrorism
November 12, 2004
By WARREN HOGE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/12/international/europe/12nato.html?pagewanted=all
UNITED NATIONS, Nov. 11 - The secretary general of NATO said Thursday that there was a critical "perception gap" between Europe and the United States on the subject of global terror and that Europeans must move closer to the American view of the seriousness of the threat.
The United States "focused very much on the fight against terror while in Europe we focused to a lesser extent on the consequences for the world," the secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, said in an interview. "We looked at it from different angles, and that for me is one of the reasons you saw such frictions in the trans-Atlantic relationship."
As a result, he said, Europe was lagging behind the United States in merging external and internal security to combat terrorism and Europe had to catch up.
"If the gap is to be bridged, it has to be done from the European side and not from the United States," he said, adding that the war in Iraq, the issue that divided the alliance, now offered an opportunity for uniting it.
"Where allies very much agree and must agree is the fact that, whatever ways they have looked at the war in Iraq and the run-up to it and the split we saw, we cannot afford to see Iraq go up in flames," he said. "It is everyone's obligation that we get Iraq right."
Mr. de Hoop Scheffer, a former Dutch foreign minister who backed the Bush administration's war in Iraq without alienating European leaders, said his meeting with President Bush in Washington on Wednesday should be taken as a sign that trans-Atlantic frictions had eased.
"Whatever way you look at it, the fact that the secretary general of NATO is the first foreign visitor that President Bush has met since the election is a clear sign of the full commitment of this administration and of this president to the trans-Atlantic alliance," he said.
NATO has been asked by the Iraqi government to train its security forces and Mr. de Hoop Scheffer said that 10 of the alliance's 19 member states were contributing to that training, both within Iraq and outside Iraq in places like Jordan and in military schools in Europe.
Mr. de Hoop Scheffer said the experience of Iraq had taught him two lessons. "The first is that if Europe sees its integration process as one directed against the United States, it will not work because the result will be a split in Europe, and that is an ambition that no European should have,'' he said.
"The second is that if you want to have a trans-Atlantic dialogue between grown-ups, I know that any president and any American administration is willing to listen to the European voice as long as it is one European voice," he said. "If it is five different voices, they will not take the trouble to listen and they will wonder what is Europe."
-------- russia / chechnya
Russia to Reduce Troops in Chechnya
Associated Press
By SERGEI VENYAVSKY
Nov 12, 2004
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=518&ncid=732&e=10&u=/ap/20041112/ap_on_re_eu/russia_chechnya
ROSTOV-ON-DON, Russia - The Russian military will cut its deployment in Chechnya by about 1,000 troops and stop using conscripts in the war against separatist rebels next year, Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said Friday.
The announcement, however, did not appear to indicate that Russia believes it is gaining an advantage over the guerrillas it has been battling for more than five years. Ivanov said the 42nd Motorized Division that is the military's main unit in Chechnya "will stay there forever."
Ivanov, who made the statements during an inspection trip in Rostov-on-Don, headquarters for the military's southern region, did not give an overall figure for the troop presence in Chechnya.
But Russian officials this year said there were about 70,000 armed forces in Chechnya, including from the army, the Interior Ministry and the Federal Security Service, the main successor to the Soviet KGB. In addition, Chechnya has a large presidential security service that conducts operations against rebels and is widely alleged to abduct and abuse civilians.
Another military official, North Caucasus District commander Alexander Baranov, said the construction of 31 barracks for soldiers in Chechnya was under way or planned within the next year, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported, an apparent indication of Russia's intention of keeping large contingents of soldiers in the republic for the long term.
Neither the Russian forces nor the rebels have made obvious advances in recent years, with the conflict remaining a bloody stalemate of hit-and-run attacks by the insurgents and small operations and airstrikes by the Russians.
The Russian military is weakened by dismal morale among conscripts, not only because of the years of bloodshed in Chechnya but also due to widespread hazing and other abuse that provokes desertions and suicides.
The switch to a fully professional force in Chechnya was initially promised for 2004.
President Vladimir Putin (news - web sites) has made reform of the underfunded military a top priority but backtracked on his initial plan to fully phase out the unpopular draft, accepting the top brass' proposal for a mixture of draftees and volunteer soldiers.
Russian forces had withdrawn from Chechnya in 1996 after separatists fought them to a standstill in a 20-month war. But they swept in again in 1999 following an incursion by Chechnya-based fighters into neighboring Dagestan and after some 300 people died in apartment bombings blamed on Chechen separatists.
Also Friday, the Russian human rights group Memorial reported that in 2004 alone, 241 Chechens have been killed and 128 have been kidnapped. The group accused security forces of being primarily responsible for the spike in abductions, which it said were up 25 percent, compared with last year.
-------- space
Robot Helps NASA Refocus on Hubble
Written-Off Mission to Extend Telescope's Life Is Revived Because of 'Dextre'
By Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 12, 2004; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43778-2004Nov11?language=printer
The promotional video shows a multi-jointed titanium handyman untwisting knobs and disconnecting an electrical cable with slow-motion aplomb, displaying fine motor skills that the voice-over assures will enable it to install "new batteries, gyroscopes and scientific instruments" aboard the aging Hubble Space Telescope.
But the video is only a teaser. In April, when NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt showed the whole sequence to headquarters VIPs, what had first seemed an elusive dream -- a robotic mission to service Hubble and extend its life by five years or more -- suddenly became real.
"I remember coming to look at this stuff and asking, 'Is that an [animation]?' And somebody said, 'No, it's really happening,' " recalled Edward J. Weiler, who was NASA's associate administrator for space science at the time and is now Goddard's director. "I didn't think robots could do this kind of stuff."
It is by no means a sure thing. Yet largely because of the Canadian robot named "Dextre," NASA has gone in less than a year from virtually writing off the Hubble to embracing a mission that will cost between $1 billion and $1.6 billion and approach in complexity the hardest jobs the agency has ever undertaken.
"Almost as difficult as landing on Mars successfully twice," Weiler called it. Servicing the Hubble, like the nine-month tour de force that has kept two rovers tooling around the Martian countryside, will demand a host of technical tasks and tricks that have never been tried.
To do it, the United States must develop its first-ever robotic docking vehicle, fill a bag with tools that, in many cases, have not been invented, and use the robot repairman to unscrew j-hooks, open and shut doors and "drawers," disconnect and attach electric connectors, and rig jumper cables.
By the end of 2007, NASA hopes to put into orbit its Hubble Robotic Vehicle of four components: a de-orbit module designed to dock with Hubble; a grappling arm to seize the telescope during docking and serve as a repair platform; an ejection module to carry spare parts and tools; and Dextre.
The jobs, in descending order of importance, are to change Hubble's batteries; install new gyroscopes; swap an old camera for a new, more sophisticated one; install a new spectrograph; and, if possible, replace a telescope pointing device and repair another spectrograph.
"There's nothing easy about it. It's all firsts," said Goddard's Preston M. Burch, Hubble's program manager. "And some of the things we're thinking about make people nervous." The fundamental tenet for a servicing mission, he noted, is the same one that doctors espouse: "Above all, do no harm."
In the past, shuttle astronauts had the job of servicing Hubble, missions that required a few days of spacewalks lasting six hours each. Dextre "can work 24-7," Weiler said -- a fortunate feature, because robots are not as supple as humans. "Watching it is like watching grass grow," Weiler said.
Burch hopes to complete the mission in a month. Some of it will be done by the robot working on its own, but most will be handled by ground controllers manipulating the robot's two arms -- like playing a video game.
"Astronauts are keen to do this," Burch said, and they will probably get the call because of their experience and knowledge of the perils inherent in handling large objects in space -- where something pushed or pulled does not slow down until it is checked.
"Hey, if they ask me, I would be very happy to do this," said Michael Massimino, an astronaut who serviced the Hubble in 2002 and has joysticked Dextre in the lab. "It's an interesting and challenging project -- it's cool, really cool."
Dextre, so nicknamed by the Canadian Space Agency, was developed by MD Robotics, of Brampton, Ontario, as the Special Purpose Dextrous Manipulator, a robotic repairman destined for eventual duty on the international space station.
Dextre has a central "torso" with two 10-foot arms that can pivot, turn, reach and grab in seven different ways. In repose, it is a 2,220-pound, Rube Goldberg-style titanium stick figure, but in action it can readily choose a mix of intricate movements to execute the commands of its operator.
Dextre's future changed dramatically in January, after NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe canceled a scheduled shuttle servicing mission to Hubble, citing safety concerns after last year's Columbia tragedy.
Public outrage greeted this decision, which essentially sentenced Hubble to a watery grave once its batteries give out, but O'Keefe left open the possibility of robotic repair, and NASA sent out a bulletin asking for proposals.
Burch, who oversees Hubble from Goddard's Greenbelt labs, said the cancellation did not come as a surprise: "We knew it was going to be a long time before a shuttle mission, and if that day never came, what could we do?"
MD Robotics responded to the bulletin, and Goddard asked to see Dextre perform. "We were able to demonstrate a lot that astronauts had done," said Dan King, MD Robotics' director for orbital robotics. "We opened doors, gained access, changed an existing connector, that kind of thing."
After Goddard and MD Robotics engineers dazzled the NASA brass in last April's demonstration, excitement started to build, climaxing in August, when O'Keefe traveled to Goddard to tell the Hubble team to get to work on a robotic mission to fly by the end of 2007.
Late last month, NASA awarded MD Robotics a $144 million preliminary contract to provide Dextre and the grappling arm, and gave a $330.6 million contract to Lockheed Martin for the de-orbit module. Goddard will build the ejection module and assemble the package, which will weigh about 24,000 pounds, fully fueled.
NASA set 2007 as the deadline, at first suggesting that Hubble's batteries would give out by then and cause the telescope to shut down within hours. But Weiler said a second set of test batteries on the ground show that Hubble's power should last until 2009. Still, engineers are sticking with an early launch in case the schedule slips.
Each of the contemplated jobs is complicated but doable, Massimino said. "The main thing is to move very slowly." There is a time lag of 1.5 seconds between the command sent by the operator on the ground and Dextre's ability to execute it as it orbits with Hubble 360 miles above the Earth, but Massimino said he and another astronaut were able to handle the delay "pretty well" during a recent practice run, "as long as we took our time."
The Hubble Robotic Vehicle will be built from scratch, giving the United States a robotic rendezvous and docking capability for the first time in the history of space travel.
The spacecraft will use the 39-foot grappling arm to grab Hubble, then swing down until the de-orbit module can lock to the telescope's underside. Executing this maneuver -- which is routine for the shuttle -- will require precision sensors that Lockheed Martin must develop.
The de-orbit module will have six new batteries inside and will feed power to the telescope through the same "umbilical" cable that the shuttle used, an arrangement that will survive for the rest of Hubble's life. The robot will jettison the tool-carrying ejection module at the end of the servicing mission, but the de-orbit module will stay with Hubble until the end, eventually steering it into the sea.
The trouble with the new alignment is that power can only move in one direction, so the batteries cannot be recharged through the umbilical cable. Instead, Dextre will rig jumper cables from the telescope's solar arrays to the batteries.
Next, Dextre will unlatch the fastener holding Hubble's Wide-Field and Planetary Camera 2 in place and remove it from the telescope, like pulling out a drawer. Wide Field Camera 3, one of four imaging instruments on the telescope, will then be inserted to replace it.
This would also be a relatively straightforward task, except engineers will attach six new gyroscopes to the camera, thus avoiding the hazards involved with opening the difficult-to-handle doors that guard the compartment where the original gyros are mounted.
To make it work, Dextre will have to run a cable from the new gyroscopes out the compartment door, back to control units in the de-orbit module, then up to the telescope's computer, so Hubble can receive the information it needs to aim the telescope and stay stable in space.
Next comes the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, another swap-out requiring Dextre to disconnect and reconnect four electrical cables. After that, Burch would like to have it install a new Fine Guidance Sensor, a pointing device, and he has also asked for ideas on robotic repair of the nonfunctioning Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph.
"The concern of headquarters" is that "these crazy people at Goddard" want to do too much, Burch acknowledged. "And it's true, we don't want to lose sight of the main objectives."
-------- spies
Former Chief of CIA's Bin Laden Unit Leaves
By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 12, 2004; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43899-2004Nov11.html
Michael Scheuer, the author and former chief of the CIA's Osama bin Laden unit, announced yesterday that he had resigned from the agency so he could speak openly about terrorism and what he sees as the government's failure to understand the threat from al Qaeda.
"I have concluded that there has not been adequate national debate over the nature of the threat posed by Osama bin Laden and the force he leads and inspires, and the nature of the intelligence reform needed to address that threat," Scheuer, whom the CIA banned from speaking publicly in July, said in a statement issued by his publisher.
The agency allowed Scheuer to publish his book, "Imperial Hubris," anonymously, and to conduct media interviews to promote it under the name "Mike." The book became a bestseller.
But he became a critic of the war in Iraq, saying it inflamed anti-American sentiment among Muslims, and eventually his name was published. After some White House officials and pundits asserted that the CIA had allowed Scheuer to act as its surrogate critic on the war, CIA officials forbade him from speaking publicly.
Scheuer said in an interview with The Washington Post on Monday that he believes the agency silenced him after CIA officials realized he was blaming the CIA, not the administration, for mishandling terrorism. "As long as the book was being used to bash the president, they gave me carte blanche to talk to the media," he said. "But this is a story about the failure of the bureaucracy to support policymakers."
The statement, issued in the name of Scheuer's publicist, Christina Davidson, said Scheuer criticized the CIA leadership for allowing "the clandestine service to be scapegoated for pre-9-11 failures -- failure more properly placed at the door of senior members of the U.S. intelligence community and senior policymakers, for whom, in Scheuer's view, saving lives has seldom appeared to be the top priority."
Scheuer was chief of the CIA's bin Laden station from 1996 to 1999 and remained a counterterrorism analyst after that. He could not be reached for comment yesterday.
The statement released by his publicist said that "after a cordial meeting with senior CIA officials on Tuesday, Scheuer decided that it would be in the best interests of the intelligence community and the country for him to resign in order to continue speaking publicly with regard to Osama Bin Laden, al Qaeda, and the 9-11 Commission Report."
A CIA spokeswoman declined to comment.
-------- us
Base closures
Inside the Ring
By Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
November 12, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/national/inring.htm
The Pentagon is quietly moving ahead with plans to conduct another round of contentious military base closings, we are told.
Defense officials said a series of "scenarios" for shutting down bases and facilities across the country has been drawn up for the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process for 2005.
The BRAC process already has prompted furious lobbying against local closures by such varied figures as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, California Republican, and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat. Base shutdowns in the past lead to job and income losses for states and communities.
Congress has authorized a new round of closures for 2005 as part of Pentagon efforts to streamline unneeded infrastructure and to save money. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld regards the upcoming BRAC round as a necessary part of his military transformation campaign.
The BRAC scenarios were drawn up by Rumsfeld aide Raymond F. DuBois, deputy undersecretary of defense for installations and environment, who has made it known within the Pentagon he will be leaving in January.
Earlier base closures in 1988, 1991, 1993 and 1995 led to a total closure of 97 military installations.
The next round of closures will be a joint effort of the Pentagon and the nine-member Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission over the next two years.
DIA director
Pentagon officials tell us the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency is in trouble. Vice Adm. Lowell E. Jacoby is said to have run afoul of Undersecretary of Defense Stephen Cambone.
Officials tell us that Adm. Jacoby is not in trouble because of policy differences, although some say he should be. The problem is related to Adm. Jacoby's withholding of budget information from Mr. Cambone, who holds the top Pentagon civilian post dealing with intelligence.
Adm. Jacoby has been criticized by some in the Pentagon for the DIA's failure to correctly assess the state of Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction program prior to the Iraq war.
Adm. Jacoby has been head of DIA since 2002 and is expected to be replaced. Officials said he also has been viewed as someone who does not share the hawkish views of communist China held by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.
A DIA spokesman said he is unaware of any conflicts between Adm. Jacoby and Mr. Cambone.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts / tribunals
MILITARY JUSTICE
Trials of G.I.'s at Abu Ghraib to Be Moved to the U.S.
November 12, 2004
By KATE ZERNIKE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/12/international/middleeast/12abuse.html?pagewanted=all
A military judge has ordered the trials of the soldiers accused of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison moved from Baghdad to the United States, an action that lawyers for the accused said was intended to draw more public attention to the proceedings.
Lt. Col. Fred P. Taylor, a judge advocate in the regional defense counsel's office at Camp Victory in Iraq, notified the soldiers' lawyers of the judge's order in an e-mail message sent yesterday. The message said all further hearings in the case would be held at Fort Hood, Tex.
Seven soldiers, all reservists in the 372nd Military Police Company based in Cresaptown, Md., were accused in the abuse scandal, which broke last spring with the leak of photographs showing prisoners in sexually humiliating positions at Abu Ghraib, outside Baghdad.
The photographs - showing prisoners naked and stacked in human pyramids, or leashed and crawling like dogs, with soldiers posing alongside them - were sent around the world on the Internet, damaging the image of the United States military and inflaming anti-American sentiment among Muslims.
A military inquiry begun in January by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba found that the soldiers had committed "sadistic, blatant and wanton" criminal acts.
The e-mail message indicates that three of the seven accused soldiers - Specialist Sabrina Harman, Specialist Charles A. Graner Jr. and Sgt. Javal S. Davis - are to be moved from Baghdad to face trial at Fort Hood. Specialist Graner, who Army investigators have said was a ringleader of the abuse, will be the first to face trial, on Jan. 7.
Three others - Specialist Megan Ambuhl, Staff Sgt. Ivan L. Frederick II and Specialist Jeremy C. Sivits - have pleaded guilty in agreements for lesser punishment and pledges to testify against the other soldiers. Pfc. Lynndie England, who last month gave birth to a son whose father, she has said, is Specialist Graner, was transferred to Fort Bragg, N.C., when she became pregnant and is to stand trial there beginning in January.
----
Ashcroft says judges threaten national security by questioning Bush decisions
The Associated Press
Nov. 12, 2004
http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/breaking/111204ashcroft.html
WASHINGTON - Federal judges are jeopardizing national security by issuing rulings contradictory to President Bush's decisions on America's obligations under international treaties and agreements, Attorney General John Ashcroft said Friday.
In his first remarks since his resignation was announced Tuesday, Ashcroft forcefully denounced what he called "a profoundly disturbing trend" among some judges to interfere in the president's constitutional authority to make decisions during war.
"The danger I see here is that intrusive judicial oversight and second-guessing of presidential determinations in these critical areas can put at risk the very security of our nation in a time of war," Ashcroft said in a speech to the Federalist Society, a conservative lawyers' group.
The Justice Department announced this week it would seek to overturn a ruling by U.S. District Judge James Robertson in the case of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, who the government contends was Osama bin Laden's driver.
Robertson halted Hamdan's trial by military commission in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, rejecting the Bush administration's position that the Geneva Conventions governing prisoners of war do not apply to al-Qaida members because they are not soldiers of a true state and do not fight by international norms.
Without mentioning that case specifically, Ashcroft criticized rulings he said found "expansive private rights in treaties where they never existed" that run counter to the broad discretionary powers given the president by the Constitution.
"Courts are not equipped to execute the law. They are not accountable to the people," Ashcroft said.
During his successful re-election campaign, Bush repeatedly promised to appoint judges who would adhere to strict interpretations of the Constitution. In addition to numerous lower courts, Bush is likely to appoint at least one and perhaps several justices to the Supreme Court during the next four years.
The administration lost a crucial legal battle this year when a divided Supreme Court determined the president lacks the authority to hold terror suspects classified as enemy combatants indefinitely with no access to lawyers or the ability to challenge their detention.
Ashcroft intends to remain as attorney general until his nominated successor, Alberto Gonzales, is confirmed by the Senate.
-------- drug war
Ashcroft and medical marijuana
November 12, 2004
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20041111-075633-6518r.htm
Seriously ill patients across America are celebrating the resignation of U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft ("Ashcroft, Evans quit Bush Cabinet," Page 1, yesterday). Under his supervision, the Drug Enforcement Administration conducted a cruel and pointless war against patients with cancer, AIDS, multiple sclerosis and other terrible illnesses who found relief from medical marijuana when conventional medicines failed.
It made no difference to Mr. Ashcroft that these patients were obeying the laws of their states, or that their use of medical marijuana was with the recommendation and guidance of their physicians. During one particularly gruesome raid in September 2002, five DEA agents pointed automatic rifles at the head of a disabled woman, Suzanne Pfeil, then handcuffed her while they proceeded to ransack the medical-marijuana co-op where she was a patient.
The departure of Mr. Ashcroft gives President Bush an opportunity to reconsider this war on medical-marijuana patients - a war that has been rejected again and again by voters, most recently in Montana.
BRUCE MIRKEN
Director of communications Marijuana Policy Project Washington
-------- homeland security / national intelligence
Cuffing Bush and the FBI
A serious setback to the Patriot Act, despite the victorious Bush's unstinting support
November 12th, 2004
Village Voice
Liberty Beat
by Nat Hentoff
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0446/hentoff.php
ush's re-election ensures that he and John Ashcroft's designated successor, Alberto Gonzales, will press Congress hard to retain the Patriot Act in its entirety, and enact a Patriot Act II that will further disable the Constitution.
There are two primary roadblocks to further assaults on our liberties. Despite continued Republican control of Congress, there is still a firm alliance there between civil-liberties Democrats and conservative Republican libertarians, especially in the Senate. That coalition will continue to oppose Bush's determination to fight the Patriot Act's "sunset clause," which permits reconsideration of parts of the act by December 2005.
During the presidential campaign, Bush repeatedly urged Congress to ignore the "sunset clause" and enshrine the Patriot Act permanently. The Bill of Rights Defense Committee resolutions in nearly 400 cities and towns, and four state legislatures, will keep the pressure on Congress to resist this expansion of executive powers.
Our second hope is the awakening lower federal courts, which are now challenging sections of the Patriot Act. But even if these judicial curbs on Bush and Ashcroft grow, any such victories can be overturned by the Supreme Court, to which Bush is going to make at least one appointment, and possibly more, by the end of his second term.
These are obviously perilous times for constitutional freedoms. But attention should be paid to the strongest blow yet against Bush and the Patriot Act-the September 28, 2004, decision by Federal District Judge Victor Marrero in New York in John Doe, American Civil Liberties Union v. John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller.
Judge Marrero struck down as unconstitutional on Fourth and First Amendment grounds section 505 of the Patriot Act that had greatly increased the government's capacity to secretly get large amounts of personal information by sending out National Security Letters, which do not require a judge's approval.
During one of the presidential debates, Bush flatly told an untruth-as Ashcroft often has on this subject-when he said that any action taken under the Patriot Act requires a judicial order. No judge is involved in National Security Letters under the Patriot Act.
The ACLU, which brought this lawsuit, explains that before the Patriot Act, a 1986 law allowed the FBI to issue these National Security Letters "only where it had reason to believe that the subject of the letter was a foreign agent." Section 505 of the Patriot Act, however, removed the individualized suspicion requirement and authorizes the FBI to use National Security Letters to obtain information about groups or individuals not suspected of any wrongdoing.
"The FBI need only certify-without court review-that the records are 'relevant' to an intelligence or terrorism investigation." (Emphasis added.)
Who decides what "relevant" means? The FBI, all by itself. That's why its headquarters are still named after J. Edgar Hoover. You can trust the FBI.
Jameel Jaffer, a lawyer for the ACLU involved in this case, told me both why the National Security Letters are so dangerous, and what the effect of Judge Marrero's ruling will be-if it is upheld by the appellate courts all the way up.
"The provision we challenged [that the judge struck down]," says Jaffer, "allows the FBI to issue NSLs against 'wire or electronic service communication providers.' Telephone companies and Internet service providers [are included.]" As Judge Marrero noted, the FBI could also use an NSL "to discern the identity of someone whose anonymous web log, or 'blog,' is critical of the Government."
Jaffer adds that by requiring information from telephone companies and Internet providers, "The FBI could . . . effectively obtain a political organization's membership list, like the NAACP or the ACLU, [and could] obtain the names of people with whom a journalist has communicated over the Internet."
Furthermore-dig this-every National Security Letter comes with a gag order. The recipients are forbidden to tell any other person that the FBI has demanded this information, and can't even tell their lawyers that the long hand of the government is scooping up their data.
As Judge Marrero said in his decision, this omnivorous invasion of privacy is so broad that it mandates this gag rule "in every case, to every person, in perpetuity, with no vehicle for the ban to ever be lifted from the recipient."
The scope of this court's setback to Big Brothers Bush, Mueller, and Ashcroft is underlined by Jaffer's point that if Judge Marrero's decision is upheld, it could "apply with equal force" to other dimensions of National Security Letters that allow the FBI to get personal information from financial institutions, including credit card companies and banks.
Furthermore, the much publicized and dreaded section 215 of the Patriot Act, which gives the FBI authority to search your personal data from your visits to libraries, bookstores, and other sources of information, could also be overturned.
In striking down the noxious National Security Letters section 505 of the Patriot Act, Marrero wrote: "Under the mantle of secrecy, the self-preservation that ordinarily impels our government to censorship and secrecy may potentially be turned on ourselves as a weapon of self-destruction . . . "
Marrero then emphasized a truth that ought to be kept in mind as George W. Bush, having won the popular vote, unlike in 2000, uses national security even more forcefully against the Constitution. Judge Marrero warns:
"Sometimes a right, once extinguished, may be gone for good." (Emphasis added.)
But for now, as Judge Andrew Napolitano, Fox News Channel's resident-and admirable-constitutional analyst, says of the Marrero decision: "This stops the FBI from writing their own warrants."
During the campaign, John Kerry said nary a word about National Security Letters.
-------- prisons / prisoners
Inmate Is Ordered to Pay Ex-Wife Millions
Associated Press
Friday, November 12, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43755-2004Nov11.html
PHILADELPHIA, Nov. 11 -- A once-successful lawyer has been ordered to pay his ex-wife $4.2 million, but his odds of paying up soon do not look good -- he has sat in jail for nearly a decade insisting he does not have the money.
H. Beatty Chadwick, who has been jailed on a civil contempt charge longer than anyone else in state history, said the money the court is ordering him to pay was lost in a failed investment. But the judge who sent him to jail in 1995 found that he had hidden his wealth in overseas bank accounts rather than allow his ex-wife to get it.
A series of judges have found him in contempt of court, and the Supreme Court rejected an appeal from him last year.
Chadwick, of Philadelphia's tony Main Line suburbs, previously had been ordered to turn over to the court an investment believed to be worth $2.5 million.
Unconvinced by Chadwick's contention that the money does not exist, a judge in October ordered him to pay Barbara Jean Crowther Chadwick $4.2 million. The total includes a 50 percent share of the couple's marital assets, plus $1.4 million in legal fees and overdue alimony.
Beatty Chadwick's attorney, Michael Malloy, said his client's once-substantial wealth is all but gone.
"This money is like the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It seems like it should be there, but it isn't there," Malloy said. "We are the Saddam Hussein of the marital world."
Earlier this year, the court appointed a former county judge as a special investigator who will try to locate the missing money. The judge has been working with a team of forensic examiners but has yet to issue a report.
--------
Ivory Coast Says 4,000 Prison Inmates Escaped
November 12, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/12/international/africa/12ivory.html?pagewanted=all
ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast, Nov. 11 - More than 4,000 inmates of Ivory Coast's largest penitentiary escaped through the sewers during an outbreak of political violence and are believed to be hiding out in a forest in the middle of Abidjan, officials said Thursday.
Many of the prisoners, including murderers, robbers and other hard-core offenders, are believed to have made their way into the city itself, a Justice Ministry official said.
The breakout unfolded from Saturday to Monday, the official said, as violent street protests aimed at the French in this former French colony overran Abidjan, killing at least 17 people and wounding more than 900.
Military policemen guarding the outside of the prison were diverted to deal with the street violence.
Prisoners wrested off a manhole cover and made their way out.
"They left this weekend, in small groups," the Justice Ministry official said.
Abidjan was mostly calm Thursday for the first time in six days after France destroyed Ivory Coast's air force Saturday in retaliation for an airstrike that killed nine French peacekeepers and an American aid worker.
The mayhem outside the prison followed chaos inside.
Inmates rioted last week after at least five days without water at the prison. The uprising killed at least seven people, and left several prison buildings in the inmates' hands, officials said.
Women imprisoned in a separate building remained locked up Thursday.
Ivory Coast officials have given different accounts of the breakout, with the country's security minister, Martin Bleuo, saying on Wednesday that the number of escapees was more than 2,000.
Mr. Bleuo had said the breakout occurred last week, during the prison riot.
-------- POLITICS
-------- investigations
Unit Plans Closed Hearings on Collapse of the Towers
November 12, 2004
By JIM DWYER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/12/nyregion/12trade.html
The federal agency investigating the collapse of the World Trade Center said this week that some of its deliberations would take place in secret, including discussions on possible changes to national building codes and standards.
The announcement has been sharply protested by advocates for families of the 9/11 victims, who said they were considering a lawsuit to force the agency to open the meetings to the public.
For more than two years, the agency, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, has been studying how the trade center was built and why it fell. A draft of its final report is due in January.
In an e-mail notice sent earlier this week, the institute said that its construction advisory committee, a group of experts overseeing the investigation, would meet for 10 hours on Nov. 22 at its headquarters in Gaithersburg, Md., but that only the first 2 hours would be public.
The remainder will be closed because of the agency's concerns that discussions about changes in construction codes could prematurely influence the building industry and the people who write the codes, said Mat Heyman, the institute's chief of staff.
"We are still literally formulating our possible recommendations regarding improvements in standards, codes and practices," Mr. Heyman said.
Monica Gabrielle, whose husband Richard was killed when the south tower collapsed 57 minutes after it was hit by one of the hijacked jets, vehemently objected to the decision.
"You have one job, and one job only - to find out the truth of what happened to those buildings and to report to the public about it," she said yesterday in an interview. "You don't owe industry, the Port Authority or federal agencies anything. You owe it to the public - the truth, no matter where it goes."
The investigation was started in 2002 after lobbying by, among others, the Skyscraper Safety Campaign, an organization created by Ms. Gabrielle and Sally Regenhard, the mother of Christian Regenhard, a firefighter who died. A lawyer for the campaign, Norman Siegel, said he was studying the possibility of a lawsuit.
While the investigation has not received anything like the wide public attention given to the 9/11 commission, the agency's work has been closely followed by the building and real estate industries, and by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
The agency does not have the power to enact new codes, but its findings on design issues - including the number of escape staircases needed in skyscrapers, the strength of the materials, the quality of fireproofing - are expected to influence structural requirements for new buildings.
"There has been considerable pressure on us to come out with our final recommendations," Mr. Heyman said. "We do not want in any way, shape or form to influence any recommendations until they at least have had the benefit of advisory committee review."
Mr. Heyman said the agency has been aggressive about sharing information with the public throughout the investigation. Thousands of pages of documents have already been published on its Internet site. He said draft proposals would be issued for public comment before the final report is written.
Ms. Regenhard said it was not clear how the agency had reached some of the findings it has already released. "We have had no access to the process by which those conclusions are reached," she said.
-------- propaganda wars
Afghanistan TV Networks Ordered Off Air
Associated Press
By AMIR SHAH
Nov 12, 2004
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=516&ncid=731&e=10&u=/ap/20041112/ap_on_re_as/afghan_tv_shutdown
KABUL, Afghanistan - Western pop videos, India's Bollywood movies and even Charlton Heston's "The Ten Commandments" have Afghanistan (news - web sites)'s fledgling cable TV stations in hot water.
An appeal from the country's top Islamic judge this week prompted the Cabinet to order television networks temporarily off the air - just three years after a Taliban ban on TV was lifted.
The spat is the latest in the battle for control of Afghan society between still-influential religious conservatives and liberals and entrepreneurs enjoying new freedoms.
"The consequences are disastrous for Afghanistan," Saad Mohseni, director of Tolo TV, said Thursday. He predicted more restrictions would follow.
Supreme Court chief justice Fazl Hadi Shinwari, an arch conservative, appealed to President-elect Hamid Karzai during Ramadan to shut down TV programming, and the Cabinet did so, at least until new regulations are drawn up.
It was a victory for Shinwari, who was on the losing side in January, when the government ignored his protests at the return of veiled female singers to state television screens. The ban had originated with Islamic fundamentalists who ruled in the early 1990s and was lifted only when the repressive Taliban regime fell.
A screening last week of the "The Ten Commandments" starring Charlton Heston provided ammunition for the conservatives.
"It showed the prophet Moses with short trousers and among the girls," Wahid Mujdah, a Supreme Court spokesman, said. "He's a very holy person and Islam respects him. This is wrong."
Mohseni, director of Tolo TV, a new Afghan channel that showed the biblical epic, said the situation epitomized the threat to free speech in a country championed by the United States as a model for the region.
He accused officials of trying to silence increasingly sophisticated media coverage of Afghan politics.
"Ministers will come and go. But the free media should be here to stay to serve the nation and its public," he said. "This is a time for people to take a stand."
In the political jockeying for positions in Karzai's new government following his victory in Afghanistan's landmark Oct. 9 election, the liberals lost their champion. Culture Minister Makhdom Raheen fought for the TV stations in January but is accused of switching his views to try to salvage his post as Karzai ponders his new team.
Mujdah made plain that the conservatives' main target are the Indian films hugely popular with young Afghans for their raunchy dance routines.
"Immoral" movies were even blamed for the recent fatal stabbing of a student at Kabul University, which has led to street protests in capital.
"The boys are disturbing the girls in these films. Then there are then gangs fighting each other. All these things are against Afghan culture," Mujdah said.
Mohammed Hashem Pakzad, the owner of Ariana, one of about 20 cable operators in Kabul, said he read about the new ban in the newspaper and stopped transmitting for fear police - "in a bad mood" - might smash up his office.
"I'm a Muslim, and I wouldn't show any sexy films," he said. "This is just a conspiracy against the cable operators. These people just want to keep Afghan people in the dark."
-------- us politics
Hispanics Applaud Gonzales Nomination But Some Civil Rights Leaders Express Concern
By Darryl Fears
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 12, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43753-2004Nov11.html
Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organizations yesterday hailed President Bush's nomination of White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales as attorney general, which put the Texas Republican on track to become the nation's most powerful Hispanic public official.
But while some embraced the nomination as a big step toward wider acceptance of Hispanics, others joined People for the American Way and the American Civil Liberties Union in calling for thorough hearings on Gonzales's role in shaping anti-terrorism policies that led, they said, to the abuse of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Many Hispanic leaders agreed that a Senate confirmation of Gonzales would make Bush even more appealing to Hispanics, who gave the president about 44 percent of their vote a week ago, more than any previous Republican presidential candidate.
"This is probably the most meaningful nomination ever for the Latino population," said Brent A. Wilkes, national executive director of the League of United Latin American Citizens. "I think Hispanics pay close attention to these types of things."
Larry Gonzalez, Washington director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEAO), agreed. "Oftentimes in our community people look at things and say, 'We'll never have a person in a position like that,' " he said. "Well, it's happening, folks. It's only taken hundreds of years."
The Gonzales nomination comes on the heels of the election of two Hispanics to the Senate, Mel R. Martinez (R-Fla.) and Ken Salazar (D-Colo.). In addition, Hispanics recently overtook black Americans as the nation's largest ethnic minority. Black Americans remain the nation's largest racial minority because Hispanics, also widely known as Latinos, are an ethnic group of people who can be of any race, and a majority declared in the 2000 census that they are white.
Gonzales, a Mexican American who was born in San Antonio and lived in Houston, would have a better grasp on civil rights and immigration matters than the current attorney general, John D. Ashcroft, said Fernando J. Guerra, who studies Latino political power at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.
But Guerra also said that while Gonzales is a brilliant lawyer, he can be insensitive to the impact of his decisions. Guerra cited a memo Gonzales wrote defending policies on the treatment of prisoners taken in the war on terrorism.
"As good as his legal logic is, he has to know there are political and social consequences to that logic," Guerra said. "That memo of his, there's a sort of smugness that says, 'Look at how smart we are.' "
The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights praised the nomination, but not without qualification.
"We are obviously very disturbed about the issues of the rationale for ignoring the Geneva Conventions," said Nancy Zirkin, deputy director of the conference. "We have lots of questions about overriding a policy that has been in effect for a long time. But overall we are very pleased that a Latino has been nominated for the first time in history."
The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) of Los Angeles and the Washington-based National Council of La Raza offered praise and expressed similar concerns in statements released Wednesday, the day Gonzales was nominated.
"We are profoundly concerned about all aspects of the attorney general's responsibilities, not only its enforcement and prosecutorial duties, but also important due process questions, including right to counsel," said Ann Marie Tallman, MALDEF president and general counsel. "It has yet to be seen whether or not Judge Gonzales would be the best fit for our community, but we are encouraged by this development."
Gonzalez, of NALEAO, said Hispanics' concern about the appointment is fair, even though Gonzales has been a frequent supporter of affirmative action and a frequent presence at events held by civil rights organizations.
"It's not enough to say you support civil rights," he said. "The question is, do you support it in its current form? I think there are some folks in his party who are going to try to make the argument that we no longer need the Voting Rights Act. But our organization has known him long before he came to Washington to work for the president. He has said the right things when questioned by our own members."
--------
AARP Opposes Bush Plan to Replace Social Security With Private Accounts
November 12, 2004
By ROBERT PEAR
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/12/politics/12benefit.html
WASHINGTON, Nov. 11 - Gearing up for battle over the future of Social Security, AARP, the influential lobby for older Americans, said Thursday that it opposed President Bush's plan to divert some payroll taxes into private retirement accounts. But it supports new incentives for private accounts that supplement Social Security.
Working closely with Congress and the White House, AARP helped shape legislation adding drug benefits to Medicare last year. Social Security is an even bigger issue, politically and financially, and lawmakers said Congress was unlikely to make major changes in Social Security over the organization's objections.
Marie F. Smith, president of the organization, said, "AARP adamantly opposes replacing any part of Social Security with individual accounts.'' But Ms. Smith added that the group supported incentives for people to establish personal retirement accounts in addition to Social Security.
John C. Rother, the organization's policy director, said, "We favor private accounts when they are in addition to Social Security, but not as a substitute.''
The fight over Social Security, pitting Mr. Bush's vision of an "ownership society" against the Democrats' determination to preserve a cornerstone of the New Deal, is reflected in a battle over the proper terminology.
The White House dislikes the word "privatization,'' which it sees as a misleading and imprecise way to describe Mr. Bush's ideas for Social Security. Democrats insist that the term is accurate.
E-mail messages circulated within AARP in recent weeks indicated that the group would avoid the word whenever possible.
One message, by an editor of an AARP magazine, says, "There is a new forbidden word at AARP: Social Security privatization.''
Another e-mail message, by a manager of its Web site, says, "The term 'privatization' is stricken from our vocabulary forever.''
David M. Certner, the organization's director of federal affairs, said "privatization'' had no fixed meaning or definition. To some people, he said, it means "getting rid of the entire program'' - a goal not favored by the White House.
Martis J. Davis, a spokesman for the organization, said it was sensitive to the views of younger workers and retirees.
"Younger people think private accounts make sense,'' Mr. Davis said. "Polls by some organizations suggest that young people believe in flying saucers more than in Social Security. We have a problem with that. We don't want to end up being perceived as dinosaurs, and we don't want to be labeled as greedy geezers, because we are not.''
In interviews this week, three Republican members of Congress - Representative E. Clay Shaw Jr. of Florida and Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John E. Sununu of New Hampshire - said Mr. Bush would make a major effort next year to overhaul Social Security.
"The election results have given new life to proposals for Social Security reform,'' Mr. Graham said.
Mr. Sununu said, "The president is very committed to an approach based on personal accounts.''
House Democrats have begun to devise a strategy to oppose private accounts.
"Privatizing Social Security will divert trillions of dollars from the trust funds and force significant benefit cuts,'' said Representative Robert T. Matsui, Democrat of California.
In general, Social Security payroll taxes are credited to the Social Security trust funds, and revenues not needed to pay benefits in the current year are invested in government securities. White House officials and many Republicans in Congress say workers could get higher rates of return if some of their retirement savings were invested in private stocks and bonds rather than in government securities.
Mr. Shaw, who is chairman of the House Ways and Means subcommittee on Social Security, said private accounts were "the only way we can take care of our kids in the future, when we'll have more retirees and fewer workers.''
White House officials said it was unfair to portray the president as supporting privatization.
"I do not favor 'privatization' of Social Security,'' Mr. Bush wrote last month in the AARP Bulletin. "Those workers who do not want a personal account would continue to receive their benefits from the federally administered Social Security system. Even those who choose a personal account would continue to draw traditional Social Security benefits.''
Mr. Bush said his proposal would give workers ownership and control of their accounts, allowing them to pass wealth to their heirs. But AARP says retirees would bear a substantial investment risk and would have to accept lower guaranteed benefits under the president's plan.
The Cato Institute, a libertarian research center, established a Project on Social Security Privatization in 1995, but in 2002 it was renamed the Project on Social Security Choice.
"Republicans in Congress do not like the word 'privatization' because it does not poll well,'' said Michael Tanner, director of the project. "The word polls more poorly than the actual concept, in part because people do not understand what it means.''
----
Cheney Protects Rumsfeld's Job Until the Spring
The New York Sun
BY JAMIE DETTMER
November 12, 2004
http://www.nysun.com/article/4694
WASHINGTON - Donald Rumsfeld is likely to remain at the Pentagon until the spring, enabling him to to stay in the administration through the Iraqi elections and advance his plans for transforming the American military, despite strong pressure from key White House political advisers for him to leave sooner.
According to well-placed Pentagon sources, Vice President Cheney has argued the case for Mr. Rumsfeld to remain as defense secretary until at least the spring, and Mr. Cheney would prefer that Mr. Rumsfeld stayed longer.
Karl Rove and other White House advisers, however, have maintained that Mr. Rumsfeld has become a political liability and will undermine possible improvement in relations between Washington and European allies, the sources said. "The White House political shop wants him out now," a senior Defense Department source said of Mr. Rumsfeld.
Much will depend on what happens with the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice. Administration officials told The New York Sun that Ms. Rice, who spearheaded the White House's decision a year ago to take command from the Pentagon of the American occupation of Iraq, wants to replace Mr. Rumsfeld.
Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld are old friends who served together in the Ford administration, and the vice president was instrumental in getting Mr. Rumsfeld appointed defense secretary in the first place.
The two have generally been allied in policy fights against Secretary of State Colin Powell, who, a Pentagon official says, may remain several months after Mr. Rumsfeld has departed. Earlier this week, when a reporter asked President Bush if he would like Mr. Powell to stay and lead new peace efforts in the Middle East, Mr. Bush replied: "I'm proud of my secretary of state. He's done a heck of a good job."
"No one is nudging Powell out at the moment," the Pentagon official said.
"He has a lot more responsibility for what happens in Iraq in terms of reconstruction and diplomacy, and that is getting his juices flowing," the official added.
If Ms. Rice gets the nod from the president, that will relieve pressure to create an opening for her soon at Foggy Bottom.
"She wants to move on and has made it clear that she wants to become the first woman to head the Defense Department," a high-level Pentagon source said of Ms. Rice. The State Department already has been headed by a woman, Madeleine Albright.
Details of the behind-the-scenes tussle over who goes and who remains in Mr. Bush's second-term Cabinet are being closely watched by the foreign policy establishment in Washington for clues as to what the president intends to do overseas in the next four years.
Indications that Mr. Rumsfeld will last less than the full year that he is said to have requested are dismaying neoconservatives outside the administration. There is fear among some key figures of Washington-based think tanks, for example, that the neoconservative approach risks losing influence in the administration.
"I hope all of this doesn't happen, but what you are telling me is entirely plausible," the president of the Center for Security Policy, Frank Gaffney, told the Sun.
"Rumsfeld is uniquely capable of confronting the big foreign and domestic problems, from transforming our military while fighting the global war on terrorism," Mr. Gaffney, assistant secretary for defense in the Reagan administration and a key neoconservative hawk, said. "While Condi has done a reasonably good job at the National Security Council," he said, "it is not the same thing as running the Pentagon, and she is not equipped as a manager, or as a person steeped in defense affairs, to run the department and handle the twin problems of the war on terror and military modernization."
Ms. Rice, whose background is largely as an academic expert on Soviet affairs, has little experience of running a big bureaucracy. Before joining the administration she was provost of Stanford University.
If Ms. Rice does secure the Pentagon post, then there would probably be a major shakeup of the senior civilian staff there, and several neoconservative advisers brought in by Mr. Rumsfeld would be expected to leave.
Their departure would delight Democrats and would be seen by supporters of Mr. Powell as a victory for him.
The undersecretary of defense for policy, Douglas Feith, who was one of the policy architects of the pre-emptive strategy adopted by the president and used to justify the toppling of Saddam Hussein, has already told friends he will be leaving the administration.
Mr. Feith, who is the third most senior civilian at the Pentagon, has informed his Washington law firm, Feith and Zell, that he will be returning to it in the next few months, senior administration officials said.
Ms. Rice, if she is appointed to the Pentagon, is likely to give it a very different staff in terms of policy advisers and civilian officials.
"Her instincts are not Rumsfeld's," the Annenberg professor at the Institute of World Politics, Michael Waller, said. "At the National Security Council, she kept Clinton holdovers like Richard Clarke and favored Foreign Service career officers. The problem with that is there are few people in the council who share the president's foreign-policy vision."
Mr. Waller and other neoconservatives hope that in the event Ms. Rice moves to the Pentagon, one of their own will take over at the National Security Council.
The deputy defense secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, a prominent neoconservative, remains high on the list of possible replacements for Ms. Rice. Few Pentagon officials believe he could remain at the Defense Department if Ms. Rice moves over.
-------- voting
Vote Fraud Theories, Spread by Blogs, Are Quickly Buried
November 12, 2004
By TOM ZELLER Jr.
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/12/politics/12theory.html?pagewanted=all&position=
The e-mail messages and Web postings had all the twitchy cloak-and-dagger thrust of a Hollywood blockbuster. "Evidence mounts that the vote may have been hacked," trumpeted a headline on the Web site CommonDreams.org. "Fraud took place in the 2004 election through electronic voting machines," declared BlackBoxVoting.org.
In the space of seven days, an online market of dark ideas surrounding last week's presidential election took root and multiplied.
But while the widely read universe of Web logs was often blamed for the swift propagation of faulty analyses, the blogosphere, as it has come to be known, spread the rumors so fast that experts were soon able to debunk them, rather than allowing them to linger and feed conspiracy theories. Within days of the first rumors of a stolen election, in fact, the most popular theories were being proved wrong - though many were still reluctant to let them go.
Much of the controversy, called Votergate 2004 by some, involved real voting anomalies in Florida and Ohio, the two states on which victory hinged. But ground zero in the online rumor mill, it seems, was Utah.
"I love the process of democracy, and I think it's more important than the outcome," said Kathy Dopp, an Internet enthusiast living near Salt Lake City. It was Ms. Dopp's analysis of the vote in Florida (she has a master's degree in mathematics) that set off a flurry of post-election theorizing by disheartened Democrats who were certain, given early surveys of voters leaving the polls that were leaked, showing Senator John Kerry winning handily, that something was amiss.
The day after the election, Ms. Dopp posted to her Web site, www.ustogether.org, a table comparing party registrations in each of Florida's 67 counties, the method of voting used and the number of votes cast for each presidential candidate. Ms. Dopp, along with other statisticians contributing to the site, suggested a "surprising pattern" in Florida's results showing inexplicable gains for President Bush in Democratic counties that used optical-scan voting systems.
The zeal and sophistication of Ms. Dopp's number crunching was hard to dismiss out of hand, and other Web users began creating their own bar charts and regression models in support of other theories. In a breathless cycle of hey-check-this-out, the theories - along with their visual aids - were distributed by e-mail messages containing links to popular Web sites and Web logs, or blogs, where other eager readers diligently passed them along.
Within one day, the number of visits to Ms. Dopp's site jumped from 50 to more than 500, according to site logs. On Nov. 4, that number tipped 17,000. Her findings were noted on popular left-leaning Web logs like DailyKos.com and FreePress.org. Last Friday, three Democratic members of Congress - John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, Jerrold Nadler of New York and Robert Wexler of Florida - sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office seeking an investigation of voting machines. A link to Ms. Dopp's site was included in the letter.
But rebuttals to the Florida fraud hypothesis were just as quick. Three political scientists, from Cornell, Harvard and Stanford, pointed out, in an e-mail message to a Web site that carried the news of Ms. Dopp's findings, that many of those Democratic counties in Florida have a long tradition of voting Republican in presidential elections. And while Ms. Dopp says that she and dozens of other researchers will continue to analyze the Florida vote, the suggestion of a link between certain types of voting machines and the vote split in Florida has, at least for now, little concrete support.
Still, as visitors to Ms. Dopp's site approached 70,000 early this week, other election anomalies were gaining traction on the Internet. The elections department in Cleveland, for instance, set off a round of Web log hysteria when it posted turnout figures on its site that seemed to show more votes being cast in some communities than there were registered voters. That turned out to be an error in how the votes were reported by the department, not in the counting.
And the early Election Day polls, conducted for a consortium of television networks and The Associated Press, which proved largely inaccurate in showing Mr. Kerry leading in Florida and Ohio, continued to be offered as evidence that the Bush team somehow cheated.
But while authorities acknowledge that there were real problems on Election Day, including troubles with some electronic machines and intolerably long lines in some places, few have suggested that any of these could have changed the outcome.
"There are real problems to be addressed," said Doug Chapin of Electionline.org, a clearinghouse of election reform information, "and I'd hate for them to get lost in second-guessing of the result."
It is that second-guessing, however, that has largely characterized the blog-to-e-mail-to-blog continuum. Some election officials have become frustrated by the rumor mill.
"It becomes a snowball of hearsay," said Matthew Damschroder, the director of elections in Columbus, Ohio, where an electronic voting machine malfunctioned in one precinct and allotted some 4,000 votes to President Bush, kicking off its own flurry of Web speculation. That particular problem was unusual and remains unexplained, but it was caught and corrected, Mr. Damschroder said.
"Some from the traditional media have called for an explanation," he said, "but no one from these blogs has called and said, 'We want to know what really happened.' "
Whether that is the role of bloggers, Web posters and online pundits, however, is a matter of debate.
Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor in the interactive telecommunications program at New York University, suggests that the online fact-finding machine has come unmoored, and that some bloggers simply "can't imagine any universe in which a fair count of the votes would result in George Bush being re-elected president."
But some denizens of the Web see it differently.
Jake White, the owner of the Web log primordium.org, argues that he and other election-monitoring Web posters are not motivated solely by partisan politics. "While there are no doubt large segments of this movement that are being driven by that," he said in an e-mail message, "I prefer to think of it as discontent over the way the election was held."
Mr. White also quickly withdrew his own analysis of voting systems in Ohio when he realized the data he had used was inaccurate.
John Byrne, editor of an alternative news site, BlueLemur.com, says it is too easy to condemn blogs and freelance Web sites for being inaccurate. The more important point, he said, is that they offer an alternative to a mainstream news media that has become too timid. "Of course you can say blogs are wrong," he said. "Blogs are wrong all the time."
For its part, the Kerry campaign has been trying to tamp down the conspiracy theories and to tell supporters that their mission now is to ensure that every vote is counted, not that the election be overturned.
"We know this was an emotional election, and the losing side is very upset," said Daniel Hoffheimer, the lead lawyer for the Kerry campaign in Ohio. But, he said, "I have not seen anything to indicate intentional fraud or tampering."
A preliminary study produced by the Voting Technology Project, a cooperative effort between the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, came to a similar conclusion. Its study found "no particular patterns" relating to voting systems and the final results of the election.
"The 'facts' that are being circulated on the Internet," the study concluded, "appear to be selectively chosen to make the point."
Whether that will ever convince everyone is an open question.
"I'd give my right arm for Internet rumors of a stolen election to be true," said David Wade, a spokesman for the Kerry campaign, "but blogging it doesn't make it so. We can change the future; we can't rewrite the past."
Ford Fessenden and John Schwartz contributed reporting for this article.
-------- OTHER
-------- environment
EPA Backs Nanomaterial Safety Research
Activists Say $4 Million Is Far Too Little for Studies
By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 12, 2004; Page A23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43763-2004Nov11?language=printer
The Environmental Protection Agency has awarded $4 million in grants to study the health and environmental risks posed by manufactured nanomaterials -- the new and invisibly tiny materials that are revolutionizing many industries but whose effects on living things remain largely unknown.
The grants to a dozen universities mark the first significant federal effort to assess the biological and medical implications of nanotechnology, a burgeoning field of science that is expected to become a trillion-dollar industry within the next decade.
Among the products the field has begun to make are carbon "nanotube" electrical wires, each just a few ten-thousandths the diameter of a human hair; minuscule cages of atoms that can capture pollutants in water and soil; and ultra-fine-grained catalysts that reduce manufacturers' dependence upon caustic chemicals and other pollutants.
But the strange physical and chemical traits that make these materials so valuable also have potential downsides.
Measuring three-billionths of an inch or less, they are small enough to enter the lungs and perhaps even be absorbed through the skin. Experiments in animals have shown that once in the body, they can travel to the brain and other organs.
Several experiments are already underway that involve deliberately spreading nanomaterials in the environment despite some studies suggesting they can accumulate in the food chain and kill ecologically important microorganisms.
With hundreds of tons of nanomaterials already being made in U.S. labs and factories every year -- and the release this year of several cautionary reports from European scientific organizations and insurance companies -- activists have become more vocal in their demands for safety studies.
The 12 new EPA grants, to be announced today by Paul Gilman, the agency's assistant administrator for research and development, aim to address some of those concerns.
"This emerging field has the potential to transform environmental protection, but at the same time we must understand whether nanomaterials in the environment can have an adverse impact," Gilman said in prepared remarks released last night.
The grants are a small fraction of the $3.7 billion the federal government has committed to boosting the technology over the next four years. Still, said Barbara Karn of the EPA's Office of Research and Development, "it's a lot more than has ever been done" on nanotech safety. "It is infinitely more."
Among the grants being funded:
• A study of the absorption and toxicity of nanoparticles on skin. (Several cosmetic products already contain nanoparticles.)
• A study of what happens to nanoparticles when they get into drinking water, how they interact with other pollutants there, and how toxic they are in water.
• Studies of nanoparticles' effects on cultured human lung tissues and in the airways of live animals -- including a test of whether nanoparticles cause especially severe inflammation, as some suspect.
• Studies of the environmental impacts of nanotubes that have settled into marine and freshwater sediments, and the effects of nanoparticles on aquatic bacteria, algae and plankton.
• A study of the conditions under which nanoparticles may absorb -- and perhaps later release -- environmental contaminants.
Scott Walsh, a project manager at Washington-based Environmental Defense, called the EPA grants "a great start" but decried the federal government's failure to invest more in the effort.
"Government is not yet investing enough to ensure that the risks are discovered in the laboratory instead of in our bodies, our back yards and our workplaces," Walsh said. "We're probably $90 million shy of what we need to be spending to do the job right."
The EPA is not the only federal agency looking into the safety of nanomaterials. The National Toxicology Program, a part of the National Institutes of Health, recently agreed to conduct animal studies to investigate the effects of nanoparticles in the lungs and on the skin, and their uptake and distribution into and through the body.
Other agencies, including the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Food and Drug Administration, have also begun to pay attention to the field.
But compared to the federal investment in nanotech's "applications," the investment in the field's "implications" remains far too small, said Hope Shand, research director for ETC Group, an Ottawa-based research and advocacy organization that has called for a moratorium on commercializing nanotech products until governments adopt stricter oversight programs.
"Hundreds of nano products are on the market today, and there is no regulatory oversight to ensure that new manufactured nanomaterials are safe for human health and the environment," Shand said. "The U.S. government is spending nearly a billion dollars per year to promote nanotech. In comparison, EPA's new funding is like a nanodrop in the bucket."
Even revelations of health effects are unlikely to derail the nano-revolution, experts said. One recent promising study, by scientists at Rice University, has shown that it is possible to redesign nanoparticles to make them less toxic. If need be, said Karn of the EPA, existing regulations guiding conventional chemicals and workplace exposures can be made more stringent for nanomaterials.
Risk is not a matter of toxicology alone but also of exposure, safeguards and other factors, Karn noted, offering the example of gasoline.
"If you drink it, it kills you. If you put it in the water, it kills fish. And yet we use it every day, and nobody would think of banning gasoline just because it's toxic."
-------- genetics
W.H.O. Panel Backs Gene Manipulation in Smallpox Virus
November 12, 2004
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/12/health/12smallpox.html?pagewanted=all
An advisory committee to the World Health Organization for the first time has recommended that Russian and American scientists be allowed to manipulate a gene in the smallpox virus to speed the development of drugs that could treat the disease, the agency said yesterday.
But the recommendation is just the first step in what officials said could be a lengthy process to approve the experimentation.
Smallpox was a scourge until it was eradicated in 1980 by the W.H.O., a United Nations agency based in Geneva. Since then, stocks of the variola virus that causes the disease have been kept frozen in W.H.O.-approved laboratories in Russia and the United States.
The Bush administration and some health officials have expressed fear that terrorists might have obtained smallpox virus from Russia, or that scientists in some countries might have kept the virus without telling the United Nations agency.
Although a vaccine can prevent smallpox, no known drugs can cure the disease after it has developed.
The proposed laboratory experiments would involve inserting a so-called marker gene into the smallpox virus that glows green under fluorescent light. The technique is a standard way to screen for potential antiviral drugs, and the manipulation would not change the virulence of the virus, said officials at the W.H.O.
The agency's initial intent was to destroy the remaining stocks of smallpox virus after it had stopped person-to-person transmission of the disease. But its member states delayed destroying the virus, demanding additional research to find effective drugs, develop safer vaccines and improve diagnostic tests. Such research must be conducted in the laboratories at the highest biosecurity level.
The idea of conducting any genetic research on the virus has been a subject of debate.
Last week the W.H.O.'s 20-member international advisory committee voted unanimously to allow insertion of the gene, known as G.F.P. for green fluorescent marker protein, into variola virus at the two laboratories in Russia and the United States, said Dr. Daniel Lavanchy, a smallpox expert for the health organization. The American laboratory is at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.
National Public Radio reported yesterday that W.H.O. had approved the research.
Officials at the agency said the committee's recommendation must still go through a lengthy review process. It would need to obtain approval from the agency's director general, Dr. Jong Wook Lee; from an executive board that meets in January; and from a meeting of the agency's member countries, scheduled for May 2005. In addition, the matter could be referred to other committees at any step along the way, officials said.
Last year, a W.H.O. advisory committee reportedly expressed significant reservations about experiments that would take single genes from the smallpox virus and insert them into other viruses, because it might accidentally create an even more potent version of smallpox that could be used in bioterrorism.
But Dr. Lavanchy said the experiments the advisory committee rejected last year were "fundamentally different" than those recommended last week, and that the insertion of the marker gene in the experiments now being proposed would not alter the ability of variola virus to cause disease.
The experiments do not involve inserting a gene or deleting one to observe what happens to the variola virus, Dr. Lavanchy said in a telephone interview.
In the proposed screening test, the fluorescent marker inserted in the virus glows green only if the virus is not susceptible to a drug; the glow disappears if a drug destroys the altered virus.
So far, only one drug - cidofovir has been identified as a candidate for treating smallpox. The proposed experiments aim to identify a number of additional candidate drugs, a process that may take "a few years," Dr. Lavanchy said.
Using the gene-marker technique would also reduce the risk of a laboratory worker accidentally becoming infected with smallpox, according to W.H.O.
The recommendation did not address how many candidate drugs must be identified or how long the experiments should continue.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Israeli police arrest nuke whistleblower
November 12, 2004
By Peter Enav
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041111-100234-8188r.htm
JERUSALEM - Heavily armed police commandos stormed a Jerusalem church compound yesterday and arrested nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu for purportedly revealing classified information, seven months after he completed a prison sentence for treason, police said.
Mr. Vanunu was detained at his rented rooms in Jerusalem's St. George's Anglican Cathedral, but Israeli police spokesman Gil Kleiman declined to discuss the nature of Mr. Vanunu's purported disclosures or to whom he made them.
Police removed papers and a computer from Mr. Vanunu's rooms, Mr. Kleiman said.
Mr. Vanunu, 49, was released from prison in April after 18 years, much of it in solitary confinement, for disclosing secrets he learned as a technician at the Israeli nuclear reactor in the southern town of Dimona in the 1980s.
He has acknowledged violating his release arrangement, which barred him from meeting foreigners or discussing his work at Dimona, but he said he had no more classified information to reveal.
Yesterday morning, about 20 police commandos wearing bulletproof vests and wielding machine guns burst into the walled compound of St. George's Anglican Cathedral, where Mr. Vanunu took sanctuary in a guesthouse after his release, arresting him as he ate breakfast.
Although Mr. Vanunu appeared calm as he was led away, Bishop Riah Abu El-Assal accused Israeli police of violating the sanctity of the church, said Ninni Rydsjo, a Swedish aid worker staying at the hostel attached to the church.
Mr. Vanunu was convicted in 1988 of divulging information and pictures of the Dimona reactor. The details, published in London's Sunday Times, led analysts to conclude that Israel has the world's sixth-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons, including hundreds of warheads.
Israel has followed a policy of nuclear ambiguity, neither confirming nor denying it has nuclear weapons.
Mr. Vanunu, a convert to Christianity, became a hero to peace activists for his role in revealing Israel's nuclear program.
Peter Hounam, the Sunday Times journalist who published Mr. Vanunu's nuclear revelations, said he was "horrified" by the arrest, and accused the Israeli authorities of using yesterday's death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to try to divert attention from it.
"I think they deliberately waited until Arafat died," he said from England.
----
VANUNU RE-ARRESTED BY DOZENS OF ARMED POLICE;
LATER RELEASED TO HOUSE ARREST
US Campaign to Free Mordechai Vanunu,
November 12, 2004
http://www.nonviolence.org/vanunu/20041112released.html
Contact:
In Israel - Rayna Moss, 0507-368236,
<mailto:legalese@netvision.net.il> legalese@netvision.net.il
In the U.S. - Felice Cohen-Joppa, 520-323-8697,
freevanunu@mindspring.com
For more information, see
http://www.vanunu.co.uk , http://www.vanunu.com , http://www.vanunu.org
Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu was released from custody that evening, following his arrest in a dramatic and excessive show of force early Thursday morning, November 11, at St. George's Cathedral in East Jerusalem. He has been punished yet again, and placed under house arrest for seven days. His cell phones were returned to him, but he is still waiting for his laptop computers to be returned.
Vanunu was warned that he is still bound by the severe restrictions placed on him by Israeli authorities when he was released on April 21 after serving his complete 18 year sentence. Issues regarding his re-arrest are under investigation, and no formal charges have been filed. However, Vanunu was told that he may face charges for interviews that he has given to foreign media.
When Vanunu was released from custody, he told the press, "Once, twice, three times - how many times will I be punished for the same act?"
Thursday morning, at least 30 armed police stormed the compound of St. George's Cathedral, terrifying the clergy as well as pilgrims and guests having breakfast. The force consisted of special unit officers on motorcycles as well as additional police in other vehicles.
A reporter for Israel's Channel 2 evening news called the raid "unnecessary and embarrassing" and wondered aloud why the police hadn't simply asked Vanunu to report for questioning.
By the time he was released from detention, the general opinion in the Israeli media was that, once again, Israel's security services had gone out of their way to make Vanunu headline news. After his release Vanunu told friends that he was well and glad to be back at St. George's, but that as long as he is kept in Israel against his will, he remains a prisoner. He thanked his supporters for their immediate response to his arrest.
Daniel Ellsberg, author of the book "Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers," said: "The only secret Mordechai Vanunu has left to tell the world is the one he revealed on the day of his release from 18 years in prison, April 21, 2004: 'I am a symbol of the will of freedom, that the human spirit is free. You cannot destroy the human spirit.' That is indeed the most dangerous secret in the eyes not only of Israel but of every state that withholds vital information from its own citizens, including the U.S. and U.K. Israel should let the foremost prophet of the nuclear age go forth to be honored throughout the world -- and we call on them to do so -- but even if it returns him instead to his 6-by-9 foot cell, Mordechai Vanunu will remain the most free man on earth."
Vanunu's adoptive American parents, Nick and Mary Eoloff, said after learning of their son's re-arrest: "We are horrified that today armed Israeli special police forces entered St. George's Cathedral compound in order to kidnap Mordechai Vanunu for the second time. It is further proof that the security forces have no respect for an individual's human rights and dignity nor respect for a religious site which is a sacred place of sanctuary. Mordechai has always acted from a moral belief that nuclear weapons are immoral and illegal and that all nations should begin the process of their disarmament."
In 1986, Vanunu was kidnapped, taken back to Israel for a secret trial and convicted on charges of treason and espionage after revealing information about Israel's secret nuclear arsenal to the London Sunday Times. The restrictions include not being allowed to leave Israel and not being allowed to talk to foreign press, among other things restricting his freedom of movement and speech.
Supporters around the world continue to work for Vanunu's total freedom, and join him in continuing to call for nuclear abolition in the Middle East and around the world. Fifteen British supporters vigiled at the Israeli Embassy in London on November 11 to immediately protest Vanunu's arrest.
Felice Cohen-Joppa, coordinator of the U.S. Campaign to Free Mordechai Vanunu said: "It is an outrage that Israel has re-arrested nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu only six months after his release from prison. The unjust and severe restrictions that have forced Mordechai Vanunu to remain in Israel following his release last April, and intend to muzzle his voice for nuclear disarmament, are grave violations of his human and civil rights. After 18 years in prison, he has no secrets to reveal. Israel must stop punishing this man who has already suffered so much for letting the world know about Israel's nuclear arsenal."
Rayna Moss, Israeli coordinator for the International Campaign to Free Vanunu, said: "The attempt to silence Mordechai Vanunu on this of all days, is an attempt to bury Israel's secret nuclear arsenal together with Yasser Arafat. While the world media and attention are focused on the burial of the Palestinian leader, the Israeli government is attempting to disappear the nuclear whistleblower, whose only crime is revealing the terrible truth that Israel is trying to hide: weapons of mass destruction that are concealed from Israeli citizens and from the world."
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Nuclear Whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu Re-Arrested in Israel;
Post-Election Return to Maybury
BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS
From: Jimmy Moore <jmc@lisco.com>
Thu, 11 Nov 2004
This is disturbing news.
Mordechai Vanunu has been re-arrested in Israel, after being under virtual house arrest for seven months since serving his 18 year sentence-the first eleven and a half in solitary confinement-for exposing Israel's nuclear weapons' program back in 1986.
I have been in touch with him via email and was just about to do an interview. He had given me his phone number and was eager to talk. He very much wants to leave Israel and perhaps relocate in the US. Originally from Morocco, he refused to speak Hebrew after being released from prison.
Prior to his arrest, which involved being lured to Rome from London by an American woman who was working with the Israeli Mossad spy agency and then being drugged and taken back to Israel, he had converted to Christianity. In a secret trial, he was given the maximum sentence for treason and served it all. (In 5 other cases of treason, none served out their full sentence.)
The world mostly dismissed his claims that ran in the London Times, even though it contained many photographs from the Dimona nuclear reactor where he had worked as a technician for nine years, until he wrote on his palms, dramatically holding up handcuffed hands for reporters that he had been "hijacked" by Israel for revealing these secrets.
Israel's official farce of a policy-it neither confirms nor denies that it has these nuclear weapons, though everyone routinely considers that they do-is embraced by the US government because to force the issue would not only be uncomfortable for our special ally in the Middle East, it would mean all the military aid we pour into Israel might come under question.
The U.S. has a policy not to give military aid to countries that have or are pursuing nuclear weapons' capabilities if they do not allow inspections. Israel gets around the issue of inspections by its patently ambiguous policy of "neither confirming nor denying" the existence of such a program. We do a little wink-wink and look the other way.
Of course, this becomes more of an issue in the Arab/Muslim world when we attack sovereign countries ostensibly because they are harboring weapons of mass destruction, or even that they may develop them. Right now Israel is threatening to take out Iran's nuclear reactor because they fear it may be used to develop-you got it-the very thing Israel neither confirms nor denies it did with its own nuclear reactor.
I remind you that Israel's unprovoked bombing of Iraq's nuclear reactor in the 80s led to worldwide condemnation, although secretly the US may have been pleased. Israel has threatened to use "all options" to thwart Iran's nuclear ambitions. Iran has said it will retaliate fully if attacked, including missiles that can now reach Israel from Iran.
The unlevel playing field that allows Israel to have a nuclear weapons program and leaves Arab countries subject to preemptive strikes for developing programs of their own-or even thinking about it-is clearly hypocritical. If they're such good things, why shouldn't they have them, too?
Don't get me wrong. Personally, I think we should be working towards nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament. It's time for Israel to come clean on their weapons' program. What makes it right for them to secretly develop a nuclear weapons' program and stop others from doing the same thing? Has it created peace in the Middle East? Has it created peace in Israel? Why are we funding a country so heavily that won't be honest about such a fundamentally vital issue? Could it be that this blatant double standard is a source of resentment and fueling discontent in the greater Arab/Muslim world? Isn't it worth addressing?
The U.S. should be leading the way towards the end of the use and manufacture of nuclear weapons, not supporting those who secretly develop them and then do not allow inspections. My understanding is that Israel is in violation of a number of UN sanctions and/or resolutions in this regard.
What do you think the odds are of anyone in Washington pursuing such an obvious and cogent line of reasoning?
How do you spell FAT CHANCE?
Israel has been a wonderful ally, no doubt about it. But even allies need to abide by the law, by international standards. The world shouldn't be an old boys' club with special privileges for the guys with the big bucks and the big weapons. If you treat it as such, you're only encouraging others to do the same. Come on, it's sheer hypocracy to expect others to abide by international standards that you yourself are above.
Please pray for Mordechai. He is a hero. He thinks nuclear weapons should be buried. And he put his life on the line to reveal the truth.
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Military's Presence at Antiwar Rally Is Called a Coincidence
Los Angeles Times
By Wendy Thermos
November 12, 2004
http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news2/latimes391.html
Photos and a video posted on the Internet this week depicting tanks at an antiwar demonstration in front of the Federal Building in Westwood provoked hundreds of outraged postings.
But police and witnesses said the armored vehicles were on their way to a Veterans Day event at the nearby Veterans Affairs grounds on Wilshire Boulevard, stopping only for a red light near the Federal Building.
"It's a whole lot of nothing," said Officer Kathy Simpson, a Los Angeles Police Department spokeswoman. "The 'tanks' were there for Veterans Day. They ride in the parade and wave."
The antiwar protest, sponsored by the group Act Now to Stop War & End Racism, was held Tuesday evening near the VA grounds, where a parade and exhibit were staged Wednesday.
Blurred photos posted on the Internet showed military personnel in battle gear standing at their hatches, behind gun turrets mounted on two tank-like vehicles rolling through traffic. Closer inspection showed the vehicles were not tanks but light-armored vehicles, which are smaller than tanks and ride on rubber tires instead of treads.
Several websites denounced the vehicles' presence and accused the military of trying to intimidate peaceful protesters. "There was absolutely no excuse to deploy tanks against a law-abiding crowd," said one site.
A statement posted Wednesday by Answer said, "It is an outrage to see tanks rolling through the streets of Los Angeles."
By Thursday, however, a representative fielding phone calls for the nonprofit group was considerably calmer. "I can't speak for everybody, but I think people are overreacting a little bit," said Darrin Downey, who saw the vehicles driving by. "It didn't seem hostile. I believe they were just going around the corner."
The demonstration was already over, he added.
It's not clear which branch of the military the vehicles belonged to. A Camp Pendleton spokesman said he believed his base sent one or two armored vehicles to the exhibit and parade, which celebrated Veterans Day and the Marine Corps' 229th birthday Wednesday. "I can guarantee you we didn't send them over there to scare a bunch of protesters," Sgt. Mark Ledesma said.
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