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NUCLEAR
FirstEnergy explains nuclear fleet approach to NRC
Doug Moe: Madison airman - a lost hero?
Asia's ticking nuclear time-bomb
Beijing Explains Submarine Activity
Weapons of Self-Destruction
Inquiry Urges Recognition of Gulf War Syndrome
Peer's report: Gulf War Syndrome 'exists'
Iran's New Alliance With China Could Cost U.S. Leverage
Iran's New Alliance With China Could Cost U.S. Leverage
Group Says Iran Has Secret Nuclear Arms Program
Nuclear Deal With Iranians Has Angered Hard-Liners
US Exercises Missile Defense System To Prepare For Operations
Putin says Russia working on new nuclear systems
Russia Is Said to Develop New Nuclear Missile
US not worried about Russia's nuclear activities: State Department
NOVEL NUCLEAR MISSILE SYSTEMS FOR THE RUSSIAN ARMY
New Nuclear Weapon to Surpass Others, Putin Says
Russia to deploy new-generation nuclear weapons system: Putin
MILITARY
US offers $1bn weapons deal to Pakistan
Navy Unit Discovers Perils In Task of Rebuilding Fallujah
800 Civilians Feared Dead in Fallujah
Police defections add to Mosul's woes
Troops Move To Quell Insurgency In Mosul
U.S. Troops Move to Drive Out Rebels in North of Iraq
Canadian general elected to head NATO military committee
Quietly, tide of opinion turns on Chechen war
Some 148 Russian soldiers killed in Chechnya
China Plans To Have Over 100 Eyes In The Sky By 2020
Europe's Spacecraft Enters Lunar Orbit
NASA Buys Hydrogenics Light Weight Fuel Cell Stack
The Power of Light: An Airborne Laser for Missile Defense
CIA Says It Will Not Get Mixed Up in Policy
Clarke: CIA had low-level spies inside al-Qaida
Spy scandal rocks Paris
Pentagon cheers CIA shake-up
New C.I.A. Chief Tells Workers to Back Administration Policies
How They Count the Enemy Dead Why's it so hard? Let us count the ways.
Air Force leader quits; Army chief confirmed
Arabs outraged by US marine's 'war crime' against Fallujah Iraqi
Roche, Top Aide Plan to Resign Air Force Posts
Marine Set for Questioning in Wounded Iraqi's Shooting
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Judge Questions Long Sentence in Drug Case
Man With Pot Given Choice: Jail or Military
U.S. Capitol Checkpoints Return, as Do Complaints
Checkpoints return to Capitol Hill
Making the Patriot Act 'SAFE'
Police scoff at Ashcroft speech
Report Faults F.B.I.'s Fingerprint Scrutiny in Arrest of Lawyer
POLITICS
47 parties boycott elections in Iraq
GOP Pushes Rule Change to Protect DeLay's Post
Court Nominee Gave False Data, Text Shows
The rise and rise of Condoleezza
The Rice appointment
White House insider relies on aid of 'allies'
The rise and rise of Condoleezza
The Rice appointment washtimes
White House insider relies on aid of 'allies'
Oil supply II: Why high prices?
We were told to fix Ukraine election, say police chiefs
Rice Is Named Secretary of State
ENERGY
14 Nations to Participate in Plan to Reduce Methane
U.S. and 13 Other States Agree on Push to Gather Methane Gas
OTHER
Terrorism Informant In Serious Condition
Man Who Burned Himself at White House Is Called Central to Terror Case
Abortion pill to stay on market
Global Health Alert Network Adds Languages
ACTIVISTS
Physicist Melba Phillips, 97, Dies
Activist chalks it up to experience
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
FirstEnergy explains nuclear fleet approach to NRC
The Associated Press
November 17, 2004
http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/103-11172004-401959.html
CLEVELAND - FirstEnergy Corp. has shifted to a "fleet" approach to manage its nuclear power plants, a strategy the utility expects will help prevent problems that resulted in costly down time and repairs at its Davis-Besse nuclear plant.
FirstEnergy executives told Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials at a meeting Tuesday in Concord Township near Cleveland that problems might have been avoided if its three nuclear plants had consolidated management rather than operating independently.
The utility's executives met with NRC officials to explain the management overhaul and to give an update on its Perry and Davis-Besse plants in Ohio and Beaver Valley plant in western Pennsylvania.
"We've seen great plans, but plans are just paper," said James Wiggins, an NRC deputy administrator. "It's results that are important."
During a maintenance shutdown in 2002, corrosion was found in the steel lid of the Davis-Besse reactor near Toledo. The NRC ordered the reactor shut down for two years, costing the utility of more than $630 million while FirstEnergy made extensive repairs and overhauled management processes.
Soon after Davis-Besse earned permission last March to restart, the NRC increased scrutiny of the Perry plant, 30 miles east of Cleveland. An inspection team is reviewing FirstEnergy's actions to correct a series of cooling-pump failures at Perry and its improvement plans.
FirstEnergy told the NRC it has hired managers from other nuclear companies that use the fleet approach and reorganized to place senior executives at each of the plants. Newly adopted morning conference calls identify problems that may be common to the plants and to develop shared solutions.
"We're beginning to operate as a fleet," said FirstEnergy chief nuclear officer Gary Leidich. "We've got a lot of work to do, and this organization is designed to get after that work."
The NRC is sticking with its approach of inspecting and regulating nuclear plants individually.
-----
Doug Moe: Madison airman - a lost hero?
The Capital Times
By Doug Moe
November 17, 2004
http://www.madison.com/tct/news/stories/index.php?ntid=18359&ntpid=0
A lifelong resident of Madison, Doug Moe has written a daily column about the city for The Capital Times since 1997. Prior to that, he was editor of Madison Magazine. His books include "The World of Mike Royko," which was a Chicago Tribune Choice Selection of the Year, and "Uncommon Sense: The Life of Marshall Erdman," written with Alice D'Alessio. His new book, "Lords of the Ring: The Triumph and Tragedy of College Boxing's Greatest Team," a history of the storied varsity program at the University of Wisconsin, published in 2004.
MORE THAN half a century after he disappeared, presumed dead, into either the Pacific Ocean or the harsh high mountains of British Columbia, someone is calling Ted Schreier a hero.
It's a story that not even his family knew, and because of what it involves - an Air Force training exercise gone wrong, and the possible loss of the radioactive plutonium core of a nuclear bomb - it's a story still sheathed in speculation and mystery.
Friday night on the Discovery Channel in Canada (but not in the U.S.), Canadian filmmaker Michael Jorgensen will make the case that in February 1950, Capt. Theodore F. Schreier, who was from Madison, risked and ultimately lost his life in a single-handed attempt to keep U.S. nuclear weaponry and secrets from falling into enemy hands. The documentary is called "Lost Nuke," and it promises to be a stunner.
Schreier was born in Cashton, east of La Crosse, and came to school at UW-Madison in 1936. With his wife, Jean, he had a home on the north side of Lake Mendota. Ted's parents, Mr. and Mrs. Fred Schreier, lived in Middleton, and Ted had a brother, Ernest Schreier, who also lived in Middleton.
Ted was a career Air Force officer, and in 1950 he was temporarily stationed in Fort Worth, Texas. On the night of Feb. 13, Schreier was part of a crew of 17 scheduled to fly from Fairbanks, Alaska, to Fort Worth aboard a B-36 aircraft - a larger plane than the 747 of today. Advertisement:
The Air Force called it a routine training mission, but in fact it was a simulated nuclear "attack" on San Francisco, something that was done with some regularity during the Cold War. After completing the "attack," the plane would fly to Texas. A Mark 4 atomic bomb - "the most advanced nuclear weapon in America's growing atomic arsenal," according to a later story in the Edmonton Journal - was on board the B-36.
Some six hours into the flight, the plane encountered heavy rains, and then icing on its wings. An engine sputtered and burst into flames. Soon three engines were burning.
That much is not in dispute. The mystery is over what happened next. As the Edmonton Journal noted in 2000: "To this day, the details of what happened during the next 25 minutes. ... continue to be shrouded in Cold War secrecy and speculation."
It was originally reported that all 17 crew members had parachuted out of the plane. Twelve were found alive by fishing boats and the Canadian Navy, off the coast of British Columbia. The remaining five, including Ted Schreier, were presumed drowned.
No mention was made then of a bomb having been aboard, but six months later, the Air Force issued a brief release saying a non-nuclear bomb had been dropped and exploded in mid-air above the ocean before the crew bailed out. In subsequent interviews, surviving crew members said the bomb's plutonium core was not aboard the airplane.
That is where the story might have remained, except that three years later, in the summer of 1953, a rescue team searching the mountains of British Columbia for a lost civilian plane came across the wreck of the B-36. The strange thing was, the wreck was 300 miles north - back toward Alaska - rather than near the spot where the crew bailed out, when the plane, on auto-pilot and disabled, was heading down and south.
The 2000 article in the Edmonton Journal said that discovery led some to "maintain the bomb or its radioactive components, and perhaps a second nuclear weapon, remained on board the B-36 and that a lone crew member desperately tried to pilot the plane to safety, only to crash into a mountaintop in the province's remote interior."
Shortly after the wreck was discovered the American military descended on the crash sight. They had a Geiger counter - which some said indicated they must have suspected radioactive material in the area - and explosives, which they used to obliterate the wreckage once they were finished with it. When they left, the Edmonton paper noted: "Rumors began circulating locally that a body had been recovered from the plane."
The Edmonton Journal did not speculate which crew member that might have been. But in an interview this week with the Canadian Press - the country's national newswire - filmmaker Michael Jorgensen says a team of experts, led by Canadian nuclear weapons researcher Dr. John Clearwater, believe one member of the crew did stay aboard the disabled plane and try to fly it back to Alaska.
"And that guy," Jorgensen said, "is the weaponeer - the guy responsible for the bomb, Capt. Ted Schreier."
Jorgensen told the Canadian Press that he regards Schreier as a "hero" who "did everything in his power to try to save the weapon" which might have fallen into enemy hands had it been dumped into the Pacific. The filmmaker adds that something called a "birdcage" - an object used to transport the bomb's plutonium core, which is kept separate from the bomb - was found at the British Columbia crash site.
The surviving crew members - now there are only four - have always maintained there was no plutonium core aboard. Jorgensen interviewed two of them, and the filmmaker recalled: "The couple of guys that I interviewed. ... say, 'There are things that happened that we just can't talk about because we don't want to say anything to damage our country.'"
Jorgensen's conclusion: "I think there was a plutonium core in that birdcage. ... I think it was on the mountain and I think it was taken out in 1954, when the Air Force went in there to destroy the airplane. It's my belief, given the evidence that we have, that a nuclear weapon laid in the mountains of northern Canada for four years."
Jorgensen told the Canadian Press that Schreier's family knew nothing of any of this. He reached Ted's nephew while shooting the documentary. "They were told when Ted went missing that he was on a transport plane," Jorgensen said. "They were totally shocked."
There was one other oddity, Jorgensen said. The Air Force named streets after four of the five crew members who died in the crash of the B-36. The only one not getting the honor was Ted Schreier.
Heard something Moe should know? Call 252-6446, write PO Box 8060, Madison, WI 53708, or e-mail dmoe@madison.com.
-------- asia
Asia's ticking nuclear time-bomb
Asia Times
By Alan Boyd
Nov 17, 2004
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FK17Aa02.html
SYDNEY - Asia's relentless pursuit of nuclear energy is causing a few sleepless nights for the anti-terrorism community as the security focus shifts from rogue states with regional ambitions to the equally sinister back door of individual opportunism.
A summit of 18 Asia-Pacific security ministers in Sydney late last week was told that few states had safeguards in place to prevent the illicit export of nuclear materials that could be used to make explosive devices or hold countries to ransom.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) even went so far as to label the threat posed by this trade as "a race against time", noting that there had been about 630 confirmed incidents of trafficking in nuclear or other radioactive materials since 1993.
"We need to do all we can to work on the new phenomenon called nuclear terrorism, which was sprung on us after [September 11, 2001] when we realized terrorists had become more sophisticated and had shown an interest in nuclear and radioactive material," IAEA chief Mohammed ElBaradei said at the talks.
For now, the response is stronger on rhetoric than reason, with politicians in Sydney committing their governments to "expand and enhance the nuclear safeguards and security framework", but offering few leads on how these nebulous aims might be achieved.
The United Kingdom, the United States, France and the Soviet Union, the four original nuclear powers, pledged after China's entry into the select club three decades ago to freeze the spread of the technology in Asia as a Cold War buffer.
There was some logic in this approach, given that six of the 14 known nuclear alerts have occurred in the Asia-Pacific region, dating back to the decision by US president Harry S Truman to send atomic weapons to Guam in 1950 for possible use against China.
More recently, forces from Japan, the US and the Soviet Union went on a war footing in 1984 after a rogue officer in the Soviet navy sent an unauthorized message to nuclear-armed vessels approving a strike.
Two confrontations have occurred since 1999 between India and Pakistan that almost resulted in a nuclear exchange; the first was over Kashmir and the second followed an attack by Islamic militants on the Indian parliament.
But although there are still only three declared nuclear powers in Asia - China, Pakistan and India - the region has 100 reactors for research and power generation that some security experts believe pose a potentially bigger challenge due to the physical impossibility of accounting for every atom of radioactive material. According to the World Nuclear Association (WNA), which represents commercial interests in the nuclear field, Asia is the only region in the world where nuclear power is "growing significantly".
Japan, China, India, Pakistan, Taiwan, Indonesia, Thailand, South Korea, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Vietnam all have operational reactors; North Korea has two partially completed reactors, but work has halted because of concerns over their illicit weapons capabilities. There is also a nuclear power plant in the Philippines, but it has been mothballed over litigation concerning bribery and safety deficiencies and is expected eventually to be converted to coal or oil.
Another 20 reactors are under construction and there are plans for a further 40, mostly in China, Japan, South Korea and India. If all proceed, Asia will have 160 reactors within a decade, with only Singapore yet to declare an interest in the technology.
Not surprisingly, it is big oil importers such as Japan and South Korea that have shown the strongest commitment to nuclear energy. The Japanese have 53 operational power plants and 17 research reactors, with three more under construction and 12 planned. Already nuclear energy provides 39% of total electricity generation and the dependency could rise to 50% by 2010 if greenhouse emission targets are met.
South Korea meets 39% of its electricity needs from nuclear power generated at 18 plants and has two more under construction and eight in the planning stages; there are also two research reactors.
China's nuclear industry is still modest, with only eight power units in operation, but is expected by the WNA to expand rapidly as domestic coal and gas reserves dwindle. An additional three plants are under construction, 10 more are planned or proposed, and there are 13 research facilities.
India and Taiwan have 14 and six power plants respectively, with the Indians expected to gain another 13 by the end of the decade. Taiwan, which gets 21% of its power from nuclear units, is building two more plants.
Keeping track of all of these plants has not proved easy, especially as the two countries with the most checkered record on nuclear brinkmanship - India and Pakistan - are not signatories to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the IAEA's main monitoring mechanism.
Of the other countries with reactors, only Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines are full NPT members, though China, Vietnam, Bangladesh and Thailand have acceded to the treaty. North Korea signed an IAEA safeguards treaty in 1992, but withdrew the following year.
The IAEA itself failed to detect the worldwide black market in nuclear technology overseen by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, even while the highest levels of that country's armed forces were aware of his activities.
Critics, including many scientists in the environmental and human-rights movements, have suggested that the IAEA and other watchdog organizations were too complacent on the proliferation risks posed by Asia's blossoming peaceful nuclear-energy programs.
NPT allows the IAEA to keep count of the isotopes at individual plants, but only if it is granted free access to facilities. As shown by the IAEA's flawed success in verifying nuclear stockpiles in Iraq, Iran, Libya and North Korea, this doesn't always happen.
The Khan case also showed how impotent the agency becomes once materials go missing and reach smuggling routes, where they become entangled with mainstream criminal activities.
Researchers with the US-based Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) and a group of security organizations, including the US Central Intelligence Agency, have concluded that plutonium filched from research facilities is passed along the same channels used by gangs that traffic narcotics and human beings.
Furthermore, "the networks that support the terrorist groups in Asia are probably intersecting with the networks that facilitate trade between suppliers and consumers in nuclear-proliferation trade", the agencies reported after a workshop on the effectiveness of the NPT.
"The nuclear-proliferation networks are in place. Shutting down A Q Khan's network in Pakistan did not necessarily eliminate the networks," the report added.
A review of the NPT is scheduled next year, with Asian policymakers variously advocating an extension of its mandate or total abolition. Japan, China and South Korea are among a group of countries that are lukewarm on multilateral solutions for security issues, though they will probably bow to pressure from Washington for a treaty extension.
Most analysts believe the NPT will only work at the anti-terrorism level if it is backed by a political response and a more responsible attitude by the suppliers of nuclear technology, which often ignore pleas for restraint. But as the SSI workshop noted, there has been a "fundamental failure of any state or group of states to emerge as a force to advocate regional solutions to nuclear security risks facing the Asia-Pacific".
"Important components of the international community's non-proliferation strategies - the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), and other dual-use-technology export-control regimes - have failed to stem the trade in nuclear materials and technologies in Asia. There, nuclear suppliers appear willing to satisfy the demands of persistent buyers," the workshop reported.
The UK, the US and Russia, the original three sponsors of the NPT, have all exported nuclear technology to Asia, as has France. However, most of the recent growth has come from within Asia itself, with Pakistan, China, South and North Korea and India all entering the market.
Khan's network was based in a country that has refused to sign the NPT and its main customers - North Korea and Iran - are also outside the treaty. Yet there has been no peer pressure from elsewhere in the region.
One reason for the political lethargy is that there is no consensus on the extent of the threat posed by illicit exports of nuclear material, with much of Asia viewing localized terrorist activities as a more immediate problem.
IAEA chief ElBaradei also acknowledged in his address to the Sydney summit that attempts to regulate the flow of nuclear technology conflict with Asia's free-trade mentality, and governments are reluctant to provide export data.
"The only reasonable conclusion is that the control of technology is not, in itself, a sufficient barrier against further proliferation," he said. "For an increasing number of countries with a highly developed industrial infrastructure - and in some cases access to high-enriched uranium or plutonium - the international community must rely primarily on a continuing sense of security as the basis for the adherence of these countries to their non-proliferation commitments. And security perceptions can rapidly change."
-----
Beijing Explains Submarine Activity
Japan Considers Account an Apology
Washington Post
By Edward Cody
November 17, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A53858-2004Nov16?language=printer
BEIJING, Nov. 16 -- Facing strong protests, China broke a week-long silence Tuesday and offered Japan its first explanation about a submarine that the Japanese said breached their territorial waters without signaling its identity.
The incursion, by what Japanese officials identified as a Chinese Han-class nuclear vessel, outraged the Japanese public and led Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's government to lodge a diplomatic protest and demand an official apology. It sent temperatures rising in a relationship made delicate by the history of Japanese occupation of China and more complex as Chinese power expands and Japan reassesses its regional role.
The Foreign Ministry did not admit publicly that the submarine was Chinese or acknowledge that it had penetrated Japanese waters. Brushing off questions, a ministry spokeswoman, Zhang Qiyue, said only that Vice Foreign Minister Wu Dawei had briefed Japan's ambassador in Beijing, Koreshige Anami. "This problem has been properly addressed," Zhang said.
But the Japanese government spokesman, Hiroyuki Hosoda, said in Tokyo that Koreshige was called in on Tuesday and told that technical problems caused the submarine to veer accidentally into Japanese territorial waters on Nov. 10 and that the Chinese government regretted the mistake.
"We consider this to be an apology," Hosoda said, according to news agencies reporting from Tokyo.
The delay in China's response may have been due in part to President Hu Jintao's absence from Beijing for his first test as commander of the armed forces, according to Chinese and foreign analysts. Hu, who recently added military chief to his positions as president and Communist Party head, was visiting Brazil on his way to an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meeting in Chile.
The Chinese military, particularly its strategic submarine service, operates with autonomy from lower-ranking civilian authority, the analysts noted. Given the potential for embarrassment or trouble with Japan, decisions on what to do about the submarine detected in Japanese waters likely would have come from the top, they said, meaning Hu's traveling office.
The vessel was detected by Japanese submarine-hunting patrols not far south of Okinawa, a Japanese island 1,000 miles south of Tokyo where there are extensive U.S. military facilities. Although the vessel spent only a few hours in Japanese waters, the Japanese navy mobilized and gave chase for two days as the sub headed back toward China, still without identifying itself, officials in Tokyo said.
It was operating in waters near where Chinese vessels earlier this year began exploring for gas deposits along the median line of overlapping exclusive economic zones claimed by both countries. In response to Japanese demands, the Chinese and Japanese governments last month held a round of talks over the Chinese exploration, after which Japanese officials complained they had been stonewalled.
The Japanese trade minister, Shoichi Nakagawa, told reporters in Tokyo last week that the submarine incident could intensify Japan's doubts about the gas exploration and China's intentions in the disputed economic zones.
The Diaoyu Islands, which Japan controls under the name Senkaku, also lie nearby, about 180 miles southwest of Okinawa. Both nations claim the small chain of dots on the map, where petroleum deposits have been detected, and Chinese nationalists have occasionally sailed out to stake a claim, only to be ejected by Japanese police.
Sachiko Sakamaki in Tokyo contributed to this report.
-------- depleted uranium
Weapons of Self-Destruction
By David Rose
From: davey garland <thunderelf@yahoo.co.uk>
Date: Wed Nov 17, 2004
Is Gulf War syndrome - possibly caused by Pentagon ammunition - taking its toll on G.I.'s in Iraq?
When he started to get sick, Staff Sergeant Raymond Ramos's first instinct was to fight. "I had joint pains, muscle aches, chronic fatigue, but I tried to exercise it out," he says. "I was going for runs, working out. But I never got any better. The headaches were getting more frequent and sometimes lasted all day. I was losing a lot of weight. My overall physical demeanor was bad."
A 20-year veteran of the New York National Guard, Ramos had been mobilized for active duty in Iraq in the spring of 2003. His unit, the 442nd Military Police company, arrived there on Easter, 10 days before President Bush's mission accomplished appearance on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. A tall, soft-spoken 40-year-old with four children, the youngest still an infant, Ramos was proud of his physique. In civilian life, he was a New York City cop. "I worked on a street narcotics team. It was very busy, with lots of overtime-very demanding." Now, rising unsteadily from his armchair in his thickly carpeted living room in Queens, New York, Ramos grimaces. "The shape I came back in, I cannot perform at that level. I've lost 40 pounds. I'm frail."
At first, as his unit patrolled the cities of Najaf and al-Diwaniyya, Ramos stayed healthy. But in June 2003, as temperatures climbed above 110 degrees, his unit was moved to a makeshift base in an abandoned railroad depot in Samawah, where some fierce tank battles had taken place. "When we first got there, I was a heat casualty, feeling very weak," Ramos says. He expected to recover quickly. Instead, he went rapidly downhill.
By the middle of August, when the 442nd was transferred to Babylon, Ramos says, the right side of his face and both of his hands were numb, and he had lost most of the strength in his grip. His fatigue was worse and his headaches had become migraines, frequently so severe "that I just couldn't function." His urine often contained blood, and even when it didn't he would feel a painful burning sensation, which "wouldn't subside when I finished." His upper body was covered by a rash that would open and weep when he scratched it. As he tells me this, he lifts his shirt to reveal a mass of pale, circular scars. He was also having respiratory difficulties. Later, he would develop sleep apnea, a dangerous condition in which he would stop breathing during sleep.
Eventually, Ramos was medevaced to a military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany. Doctors there were baffled and sent him on to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. There, Ramos says, one neurologist suggested that his condition could have been caused by some long-forgotten head injury or might just be "signs of aging." At the end of September 2003, the staff at Walter Reed ordered him to report to Fort Dix, New Jersey, where, he says, a captain went through his record and told him, "I was clear to go back to Iraq. I got the impression they thought I was faking it." He was ordered to participate in a long-distance run. Halfway through, he collapsed. Finally, on July 31, 2004, after months of further examinations, Ramos was discharged with a medical disability and sent home.
Symptoms such as Ramos's had been seen before. In veterans of Operation Desert Storm, they came to be called Gulf War syndrome; among those posted to Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s, Balkans syndrome. He was not the only member of the 442nd to suffer them. Others had similar urinary problems, joint pains, fatigue, headaches, rashes, and sleep apnea. Today, some scientists believe that all these problems, together with others found in war-zone civilians, can be traced to the widespread use of a uniquely deadly form of ammunition.
In the ongoing Iraq conflict, just as in the Gulf War of 1991 and in the Balkans, American and British forces have fired tens of thousands of shells and cannon rounds made of a toxic and radioactive material called depleted uranium, or D.U. Because D.U. is dense-approximately 1.7 times as dense as lead-and ignites upon impact, at a temperature of about 5,400 degrees, it can penetrate armor more effectively than any other material.
It's also remarkably cheap. The arms industry gets its D.U. for free from nuclear-fuel processors, which generate large quantities of it as a by-product of enriching uranium for reactor fuel. Such processors would otherwise have to dispose of it in protected, regulated sites. D.U. is "depleted" only in the sense that most of its fissile U-235 isotope has been removed. What's left-mainly U-238-is still radioactive.
Three of the main weapons systems still being used in Iraq-the M-1 Abrams tank, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, and the A-10 Warthog attack jet-use D.U. ammunition. A 120-mm. tank round contains about nine pounds of solid D.U. When a D.U. "penetrator" strikes its target, up to 70 percent of the shell's mass is flung into the air in a shower of uranium-oxide fragments and dust, some in the form of aerosolized particles less than a millionth of a meter in diameter. When inhaled, such particles lodge in the lungs and bathe the surrounding tissue with alpha radiation, known to be highly dangerous internally, and smaller amounts of beta and gamma radiation.
Even before Desert Storm, the Pentagon knew that D.U. was potentially hazardous. Before last year's Iraq invasion, it issued strict regulations designed to protect civilians, troops, and the environment after the use of D.U. But the Pentagon insists that there is little chance that these veterans' illnesses are caused by D.U.
The U.S. suffered only 167 fatal combat casualties in the first Gulf War. Since then, veterans have claimed pensions and health-care benefits at a record rate. The Veterans Administration reported this year that it was paying service-related disability pensions to 181,996 Gulf War veterans-almost a third of the total still living. Of these, 3,248 were being compensated for "undiagnosed illnesses." The Pentagon's spokesman, Dr. Michael Kilpatrick, deputy director of its Deployment Health section, says that Gulf War veterans are no less healthy than soldiers who were stationed elsewhere.
Those returning from Operation Iraqi Freedom are also beginning to report illnesses in significant numbers. In July 2004, the V.A. disclosed that 27,571 of them-16.4 percent of the total-had sought health care. Of that group, 8,134 suffered muscular and skeletal ailments; 3,505 had respiratory problems; and 5,674 had "symptoms, signs and ill-defined conditions." An additional 153 had developed cancers. The V.A. claims that such figures are "typical of young, active, healthcare-seeking populations," but does not offer figures for comparison.
There is also evidence of a large rise in birth defects and unprecedented cancer rates among civilians following the first Gulf War in the Basra region of southern Iraq, where the heaviest fighting took place. Dr. Kilpatrick says, "I think it's very important to try to understand what are the causes of that high rate of cancer and birth defects. There has to be a good look at that, but if you go to the M. D. Anderson hospital, in Houston, Texas, you're going to find a very high rate of cancer. That's because people from all over the country with cancer go there, because it's one of the premier care centers. Basra was the only major hospital in southern Iraq. Are the people there with these different problems people who lived their entire lives in Basra, or are they people who've come to Basra for care?" It is possible, he says, that some other environmental factor is responsible for the illnesses, such as Saddam's chemical weapons or poor nutrition. "I don't think anything should be taken off the table."
In October 2004, an early draft of a study by the Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses, a scientific panel run by the V.A., was leaked to The New York Times. According to the Times, the panel had concluded that there was a "probable link" between veterans' illnesses and exposure to neurotoxins, including a drug given to troops in 1991 to protect them from nerve gas, and nerve gas itself, which was released when U.S.-led forces destroyed an Iraqi arms depot. Asked why there was no mention of D.U. in the report, Dr. Lea Steele, the panel's scientific director, says that her group plans to address it in a later report: "We've only just begun work on this topic. We are certainly not ruling it out."
D.U.'s critics, meanwhile, say it's entirely possible that both neurotoxins and D.U. are responsible for the widespread sickness among veterans.
Members of the 442nd have vivid memories of being exposed to D.U. Sergeant Hector Vega, a youthful-looking 48-year-old who in civilian life works in a building opposite Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum, says he now struggles with chest pains, heart palpitations, headaches, urinary problems, body tremors, and breathlessness-none of which he'd ever experienced before going to Iraq. He recalls the unit's base there: "There were burnt-out Iraqi tanks on flatbed trucks 100 yards from where we slept. It looked like our barracks had also been hit, with black soot on the walls. It was open to the elements, and dust was coming in all the time. When the wind blew, we were eating it, breathing it. It was everywhere." (The Department of Defense, or D.O.D., says that a team of specialists is conducting an occupational and environmental health survey in the area.)
Dr. Asaf Durakovic, 64, is a retired U.S. Army colonel and the former head of nuclear medicine at a veterans' hospital in Wilmington, Delaware. Dr. Durakovic reports finding D.U. in the urine of 18 out of 30 Desert Storm veterans, sometimes up to a decade after they were exposed, and in his view D.U. fragments are both a significant cause of Gulf War syndrome and a hazard to civilians for an indefinite period of time. He says that when he began to voice these fears inside the military he was first warned, then fired: he now operates from Toronto, Canada, at the independent Uranium Medical Research Centre.
In December 2003, Dr. Durakovic analyzed the urine of nine members of the 442nd. With funds supplied by the New York Daily News, which first published the results, Durakovic sent the samples to a laboratory in Germany that has some of the world's most advanced mass-spectrometry equipment. He concluded that Ramos, Vega, Sergeant Agustin Matos, and Corporal Anthony Yonnone were "internally contaminated by depleted uranium (D.U.) as a result of exposure through [the] respiratory pathway."
The Pentagon contests these findings. Dr. Kilpatrick says that, when the D.O.D. conducted its own tests, "our results [did] not mirror the results of Dr. Durakovic." "Background" sources, such as water, soil, and therefore food, frequently contain some uranium. The Pentagon insists that the 442nd soldiers' urinary uranium is "within normal dietary ranges," and that "it was not possible to distinguish D.U. from the background levels of natural uranium." The Pentagon says it has tested about 1,000 vets from the current conflict and found D.U. contamination in only five. Its critics insist this is because its equipment is too insensitive and its testing methods are hopelessly flawed.
At a briefing before the Iraq invasion in March 2003, Dr. Kilpatrick tried to reassure reporters about D.U. by citing the cases of about 20 Desert Storm vets who had D.U. shrapnel in their bodies. "We have not seen any untoward medical consequences in these individuals," he said. "There has been no cancer of bone or lungs, where you would expect them." It appears that he misspoke on that occasion: one of these veterans had already had an arm amputated for an osteosarcoma, or bone tumor, at the site where the shrapnel entered. Dr. Kilpatrick confirms that the veteran was treated by the V.A. in Baltimore, but says his condition may not have been linked with the shrapnel: "Osteosarcomas are fairly common." Studies have shown that D.U. can begin to move through the body and concentrate in the lymph nodes, and another of the vets with shrapnel has a form of lymphatic cancer. But this, Dr. Kilpatrick says, has "no known cause." He concedes that research has not proved the negative, that D.U. doesn't cause cancer. But, he says, "science doesn't in 2004 show that D.U. causes any cancer."
It does, however, show that it may. Pentagon-sponsored studies at the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute, in Bethesda, Maryland, have found that, when D.U. was embedded in animals, several genes associated with human tumors underwent "aberrant activation," and oncoproteins of the type found in cancer patients turned up in their blood. The animals' urine was "mutagenic," meaning that it could cause cells to mutate. Another institute project found that D.U. could damage the immune system by hastening the death of white blood cells and impairing their ability to attack bacteria.
In June 2004 the U.S. General Accounting Office (G.A.O.) issued a report to Congress that was highly critical of government research into Gulf War syndrome and veterans' cancer rates. The report said that the studies on which federal agencies were basing their claim that Gulf War veterans were no sicker than the veterans of other wars "may not be reliable" and had "inherent limitations," with big data gaps and methodological flaws. Because cancers can take years to develop, the G.A.O. stated, "it may be too early" to draw any conclusions. Dr. Kilpatrick dismisses this report, saying it was "just the opinion of a group of individuals."
Yet another Pentagon-funded study suggested that D.U. might have effects on unborn children. After finding that pregnant rats transmitted D.U. to their offspring through the placenta, the study concluded: "Fetal exposure to uranium during critical prenatal development may adversely impact the future behavioral and neurological development of offspring." In September 2004, the New York Daily News reported that Gerard Darren Matthew, who had served in Iraq with the 719th Transportation Company, which is based in Harlem, had tested positive for D.U. after suffering migraines, fatigue, and a burning sensation when urinating. Following his return, his wife became pregnant, and their daughter, Victoria Claudette, was born missing three fingers.
Ultimately, critics say, the Pentagon underestimates the dangers of D.U. because it measures them in the wrong way: by calculating the average amount of D.U. radiation produced throughout the body. When we meet, Dr. Kilpatrick gives me a report the Department of Defense issued in 2000. It concludes that even vets with the highest exposures from embedded shrapnel could expect over 50 years to receive a dose of just five rem, "which is the annual limit for [nuclear industry] workers." The dose for those who inhaled dust from burned-out tanks would be "far below the annual guideline (0.1 rem) for members of the public."
But to measure the effect of D.U. as a whole-body radiation dose is meaningless, Asaf Durakovic says, because the dose from D.U. is intensely concentrated in the cells around a mote of dust. The alpha particles D.U. emits-high-energy clumps of protons and neutrons-are harmless outside the body, because they cannot pass through skin. Inside tissue, however, they wreak a havoc analogous to that of a penetrating shell against an enemy tank, bombarding cell nuclei, breaking chains of DNA, damaging fragile genes. Marcelo Valdes, a physicist and computer scientist who is president of Dr. Durakovic's research institute, says the cells around a D.U. particle 2.5 microns in diameter will receive a maximum annual radiation dose of 16 rads. If every pocket of tissue in the body were to absorb that amount of radiation, the total level would reach seven trillion rads-millions of times the lethal dosage.
In the potentially thousands of hot spots inside the lungs of a person exposed to D.U. dust, the same cells will be irradiated again and again, until their ability to repair themselves is lost. In 1991, Durakovic found D.U. in the urine of 14 veterans who had returned from the Gulf with headaches, muscle and skeletal pain, fatigue, trembling, and kidney problems. "Immediately I understood from their symptoms and their histories that they could have been exposed to radiation," he says. Within three years, two were dead from lung cancer: "One was 33, the other 42. Both were nonsmokers, in previously excellent health."
D.U., he says, steadily migrates to the bones. There it irradiates the marrow, where stem cells, the progenitors of all the other cells the body manufactures in order to renew itself, are produced. "Stem cells are very vulnerable," Durakovic says. "Bombarded with alpha particles, their DNA will fall apart, potentially affecting every organ. If malfunctioning stem cells become new liver cells, then the liver will malfunction. If stem cells are damaged, they may form defective tissue."
If D.U. is as dangerous as its critics allege, it can kill even without causing cancer. At her home in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, Susan Riordon recalls the return of her husband, Terry, from the Gulf in 1991. Terry, a security captain, served in intelligence during the war: his service record refers to his setting up a "safe haven" in the Iraqi "theatre." Possibly, Susan speculates, this led him behind enemy lines and exposed him to D.U. during the long aerial bombing campaign that preceded the 1991 invasion. In any event, "when he came home, he didn't really come home," she says.
At first, Terry merely had the usual headaches, body pain, oozing rash, and other symptoms. But later he began to suffer from another symptom which afflicts some of those exposed to D.U.: burning semen. "If he leaked a little lubrication from his penis, it would feel like sunburn on your skin. If you got to the point where you did have intercourse, you were up and out of that bed so fast-it actually causes vaginal blisters that burst and bleed." Terry's medical records support her description. In England, Malcolm Hooper, professor emeritus of medicinal chemistry at the University of Sunderland, is aware of 4,000 such cases. He hypothesizes that the presence of D.U. may be associated with the transformation of semen into a caustic alkali.
"It hurt [Terry] too. He said it was like forcing it through barbed wire," Riordon says. "It seemed to burn through condoms; if he got any on his thighs or his testicles, he was in hell." In a last, desperate attempt to save their sex life, says Riordon, "I used to fill condoms with frozen peas and insert them [after sex] with a lubricant." That, she says, made her pain just about bearable. Perhaps inevitably, he became impotent. "And that was like our last little intimacy gone."
By late 1995, Terry was seriously deteriorating. Susan shows me her journal-she titled it "The Twilight Zone"-and his medical record. It makes harrowing reading. He lost his fine motor control to the point where he could not button his shirt or zip his fly. While walking, he would fall without warning. At night, he shook so violently that the bed would move across the floor. He became unpredictably violent: one terrible day in 1997 he attacked their 16-year-old son and started choking him. By the time armed police arrived to pull him off, the boy's bottom lip had turned blue. After such rages, he would fall into a deep sleep for as long as 24 hours, and awake with no memory of what had happened. That year, Terry and Susan stopped sleeping in the same bedroom. Then "he began to barricade himself in his room for days, surviving on granola bars and cartons of juice."
As he went downhill, Terry was assessed as completely disabled, but there was no diagnosis as to why. His records contain references to "somatization disorder," post-traumatic stress, and depression. In 1995 the army doctors even suggested that he had become ill only after reading of Gulf War syndrome. Through 1998 and 1999, he began to lose all cognitive functions and was sometimes lucid for just a few hours each week.
Even after he died, on April 29, 1999, Terry's Canadian doctors remained unable to explain his illness. "This patient has a history [of] 'Gulf War Syndrome' with multiple motor, sensory and emotional problems," the autopsy report by pathologist Dr. B. Jollymore, of Yarmouth, begins. "During extensive investigation, no definitive diagnosis has been determined.... Essentially it appears that this gentleman remains an enigma in death as he was in life."
Not long before Terry's death, Susan Riordon had learned of Asaf Durakovic, and of the possibility that her husband absorbed D.U. His urine-test results-showing a high D.U. concentration eight years after he was presumably exposed-came through on Monday, April 26: "Tuesday he was reasonably cognitive, and was able to tell me that he wanted his body and organs to go to Dr. Durakovic," she remembers. "He knew it was too late to help him, but he made me promise that his body could help the international community. On the Wednesday, I completed the purchase of this house. On Thursday, he was dead.
"It was a very strange death. He was very peaceful. I've always felt that Asaf allowed Terry to go: knowing he was D.U.-positive meant he wasn't crazy anymore. Those last days he was calm. He wasn't putting the phone in the microwave; he had no more mood swings."
After Riordon's death, Dr. Durakovic and his colleagues found accumulations of D.U. in his bones and lungs.
Dr. Durakovic suspects the military of minimizing the health and environmental consequences of D.U. weapons, and suggests two reasons it may have for doing so: "to keep them off the list of war criminals, and to avoid paying compensation which could run into billions of dollars." To this might be added a third: depleted uranium, because of its unique armor-penetrating capabilities, has become a defining feature of American warfare, one whose loss would be intolerable to military planners.
In 1991, the U.S. used D.U. weapons to kill thousands of Iraqis in tanks and armored vehicles on the "highway of death" from Kuwait to Basra. The one-sided victory ushered in a new era of "lethality overmatch"-the ability to strike an enemy with virtual impunity. A Pentagon pamphlet from 2003 states that a central objective of the American military is to "generate dominant lethality overmatch across the full spectrum of operations," and no weapon is better suited to achieving that goal than D.U.
The value of depleted uranium was spelled out more simply in a Pentagon briefing by Colonel James Naughton of the army's Materiel Command in March 2003, just before the Iraq invasion: "What we want to be able to do is strike the target from farther away than we can be hit back.... We don't want to fight even. Nobody goes into a war and wants to be even with the enemy. We want to be ahead, and D.U. gives us that advantage."
If the Pentagon is right about the risks of D.U., such statements should not be controversial. If it is wrong, says retired army colonel Dr. Andras Korenyi-Both, who headed one of the main field hospitals during Desert Storm and later conducted some of the first research into Gulf War syndrome, the position is less clear-cut. "You'd have to deal with the question of whether it's better not to use D.U. and have more of your soldiers die in battle or to use D.U. and lose very few in the field-but have them get sick and die when they get home."
One desert morning in the early spring of 1991, while sitting in his office at the Eskan Village military compound near Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Lieutenant Doug Rokke was shown a memorandum. Rokke, a health physicist and training specialist, was a reservist and had recently been ordered to join the Third U.S. Army's depleted-uranium-assessment team, assigned to clean up and move American vehicles hit by friendly fire during Operation Desert Storm. The memo, dated March 1, came from a senior military officer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, in New Mexico.
During the Gulf War, it said, "D.U. penetrators were very effective against Iraqi armor." However, "there has been and continues to be a concern regarding the impact of D.U. on the environment. Therefore, if no one makes a case for the effectiveness of D.U. on the battlefield, D.U. rounds may become politically unacceptable and thus, be deleted from the arsenal.... I believe we should keep this sensitive issue at mind when after-action reports are written."
Rokke says: "I interpreted the memo to mean: we want this stuff-don't write anything that might make it difficult for us to use it again."
Rokke's assignment was dangerous and unpleasant. The vehicles were coated with uranium-oxide soot, and dust lay in the sand outside. He wore a mask, but it didn't help. "We could taste it and smell it," he says of the D.U. "It tasted very strong-and unmistakable." Years later, he says, he was found to be excreting uranium at 5,000 times the normal level. Now 55, he pants during ordinary conversation and says he still gets a rash like the one Raymond Ramos of the 442nd suffers from. In addition, Rokke has joint pains, muscle aches, and cataracts.
In 1994, Rokke became director of a Pentagon project designed to learn more about D.U. contamination and to develop training that would minimize its risks. "I'm a warrior, and warriors want to fulfill their mission," Rokke says. "I went into this wanting to make it work, to work out how to use D.U. safely, and to show other soldiers how to do so and how to clean it up. This was not science out of a book, but science done by blowing the shit out of tanks and seeing what happens. And as we did this work, slowly it dawned on me that we were screwed. You can't do this safely in combat conditions. You can't decontaminate the environment or your own troops."
Rokke and his colleagues conducted a series of experiments at the U.S. Department of Energy's Nevada nuclear-test site. They set fire to a Bradley loaded with D.U. rounds and fired D.U. shells at old Soviet tanks. At his remote, ramshackle farmhouse amid the rural flatlands of central Illinois, Rokke shows me videos of his tests. Most spectacular are those shot at night, which depict the fiery streak of the D.U. round, already burning before impact, followed by the red cascade of the debris cloud. "Everything we hit we destroyed," he says. "I tell you, these things are just ... fantastic."
The papers Rokke wrote describing his findings are more sobering. He recorded levels of contamination that were 15 times the army's permissible levels in tanks hit by D.U., and up to 4.5 times such levels in clothing exposed to D.U.
The good news was that it was possible, using a special Department of Energy vacuum cleaner designed for sucking up radioactive waste, to reduce contamination from vehicles and equipment to near official limits, and to "mask" the intense radiation around holes left by D.U. projectiles by sealing them with layers of foam caulking, paint, or cardboard. (Such work, Rokke wrote, would naturally have to be carried out by teams in full radiological-protection suits and respirators.)
When it came to clothes, however, D.U. particles "became imbedded in the clothing and could not be removed with brushing or other abrasive methods." Rokke found that even after he tried to decontaminate them the clothes were still registering between two and three times the limit. "This may pose a significant logistics impact," Rokke wrote, with some understatement.
The elaborate procedures required to decontaminate equipment, meanwhile, would be almost impossible to implement in combat. "On a real battlefield, it's not like there's any control," Rokke says. "It's chaos. Maybe it's night. Who's going to come along and isolate contaminated enemy tanks? You've got a pile of rubble and mess and you're still coming under fire. The idea that you're going to come out in radiological suits and vacuum up a building or a smashed T-72 [tank]-it's ridiculous."
Large amounts of black D.U.-oxide dust were readily visible within 50 meters of a tank hit by penetrators and within 100 meters of the D.U.-packed Bradley that was set on fire. But less obvious amounts were easily detected at much greater distances. Worse, such dust could be "re-suspended" in the atmosphere "upon contact, if wind blew, or during movement." For American troops, that meant that "respiratory and skin protection is warranted during all phases of recovery." For civilians, even ones at considerable distances, it meant they might be exposed to windblown D.U. far into the future.
After Rokke completed the project, he was appointed head of the lab at Fort McClellan where it had been based. He resigned the staff physicist post he'd held for 19 years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and moved south with his family. Early in 1996, after he began to voice the conclusions he was drawing about the future viability of D.U. weapons, he was fired. "Then I remembered the Los Alamos memo," he says. "They'd wanted 'proponency' for D.U. weapons, and I was giving them the opposite." I ask Dr. Kilpatrick, the D.O.D. spokesman on D.U., about Rokke's test firings. His reply: "One, he never did that. He was in Nevada as an observer. He was not part of that program at all. At that time he was working in education at an army school, and his assignment was to develop educational materials for troops." Rokke, he says, may have spent a few days observing the tests but did not organize them.
Documents from Rokke's service record tell a different story. His appraisal from December 1, 1995, written by Dr. Ed Battle, then chief of the radiation laboratories at Fort McClellan, describes Rokke's mission as follows: to "plan, coordinate, supervise and implement the U.S. Army ... depleted uranium training development project." He continued: "Captain Rokke has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to function well above his current rank and is as effective as any I have known." He had directly participated in "extremely crucial tests at the Nevada Atomic Test Site," and his achievements had been "absolutely phenomenal."
Rokke was awarded two medals for his work. The citation for one commended him for "meritorious service while assigned as the depleted uranium project leader. Your outstanding achievements have prepared our soldiers for hazards and will have a vast payoff in the health, safety, and protection of all soldiers."
Rokke's work in Nevada helped persuade the military that D.U. weapons had to be dealt with carefully. On September 16, 2002, General Eric Shinseki, the U.S. Army chief of staff, signed Army Regulation 700-48, which sets forth strict rules for handling items, including destroyed or disabled enemy targets, that have been hit and contaminated by D.U. "During peacetime or as soon as operational risk permits," it states, local commanders must "identify, segregate, isolate, secure, and label all RCE [radiologically contaminated equipment]. Procedures to minimize the spread of radioactivity will be implemented as soon as possible." Under pre-existing regulations, damaged vehicles should be moved to a collection point or maintenance facility, and "covered and wrapped with canvas or plastic tarp to prevent spread of contaminants," with loose items placed in double plastic bags. Soldiers who carry out such tasks should wear protective equipment.
The burned-out tanks behind the 442nd's barracks in Samawah may not have been the only D.U.-contaminated pieces of equipment to be left where they lay. In the fall of 2003, Tedd Weyman, a colleague of Dr. Durakovic's, spent 16 days in Iraq, taking samples and observing the response of coalition forces to General Shinseki's directive. "When tanks shot up by D.U. munitions were removed, I saw no precautions being taken at all," he says. "Ordinary soldiers with no protection just came along and used chains to load them onto flatbeds, towing them away just as they might your car if it broke down on the highway. They took them to bases with British and American troops and left them in the open." Time after time, Weyman recorded high levels of contamination-so high that on his return to Canada he was found to have 4.5 times the normal level of uranium in his own urine.
A Pentagon memo, signed on May 30, 2003, by Dr. William Winkenwerder, an assistant defense secretary, says that any American personnel "who were in, on, or near combat vehicles at the time they were struck by D.U. rounds," or who entered such vehicles or fought fires involving D.U. munitions, should be assessed for possible exposure and receive appropriate health care. This category could be said to include any soldier who fought in, or cleaned up after, battles with Iraqi armor.
Still, the Pentagon insists that the risks remain acceptably small. "There isn't any recognized disease from exposure to natural or depleted uranium," Dr. Kilpatrick says. He tells me that America will mount a thorough cleanup in Iraq, disposing of any D.U. fragments and burying damaged vehicles in unpopulated locations, but that, for the time being, such an operation is impossible. "We really can't begin any environmental assessment or cleanup while there's ongoing combat." Nevertheless, he says, there's no cause for concern. "I think we can be very confident that what is in the environment does not create a hazard for those living in the environment and working in it."
As this article was going to press, the Pentagon published the findings of a new study that, according to Dr. Kilpatrick, shows D.U. to be a "lethal but safe weapons system."
In his Pentagon briefing in March 2003, Dr. Kilpatrick said that even if D.U. weapons did generate toxic dust, it would not spread. "It falls to the ground very quickly-usually within about a 50-meter range," he said. "It's heavy. It's 1.7 times as heavy as lead. So even if it's a small dust particle ... it stays on the ground." Evidence that this is not the case comes from somewhere much closer than Iraq-an abandoned D.U.-weapons factory in Colonie, New York, a few miles from Albany, the state capital.
In 1958, a corporation called National Lead began making depleted-uranium products at a plant on Central Avenue, surrounded by houses and an Amtrak line. In 1979, just as the plant was increasing its production of D.U. ammunition to meet a new Pentagon contract, a whistle-blower from inside the plant told the county health department that N.L. was releasing large amounts of D.U. oxide into the environment.
Over the next two years, he and other workers testified before both the New York State Assembly and a local residents' campaign group. They painted a picture of reckless neglect. D.U. chips and shavings were simply incinerated, and the resulting oxide dust passed into the atmosphere through the chimneys. "I used to do a lot of burning," William Luther told the governor's task force in 1982. "They told me to do it at night so the black smoke wouldn't be seen." Later, many of the workers were found to have inhaled huge doses into their lungs, and some developed cancers and other illnesses at relatively young ages.
In January 1980 the state forced N.L. to agree to limit its radioactive emissions to 500 microcuries per year. The following month, the state shut the plant down. In January alone, the D.U.-chip burner had released 2,000 microcuries. An official environmental survey produced horrifying results. Soil in the gardens of homes near the plant was emitting radiation at up to 300 times the normal background level for upstate New York. Inside the 11-acre factory site, readings were up to five times higher.
The federal government has been spending tax dollars to clean up the Colonie site for the past 19 years, under a program called fusrap-the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program. Today, all that is left of the Colonie plant are enormous piles of earth, constantly moistened with hoses and secured by giant tarpaulins to prevent dispersal, and a few deep pits. In its autumn 2004 bulletin to residents, the fusrap team disclosed that it had so far removed 125,242 tons of contaminated soil from the area, all of which have been buried at radioactive-waste sites in Utah and Idaho. In some places, the excavations are more than 10 feet deep. fusrap had also discovered contamination in the neighboring Patroon Creek, where children used to play, and in the reservoir it feeds, and had treated 23.5 million gallons of contaminated water. The cost so far has been about $155 million, and the earliest forecast for the work's completion is 2008.
Years before fusrap began to dig, there were data to suggest that D.U. particles-and those emitted at Colonie are approximately the same size as those produced by weapons-can travel much farther than 50 meters. In 1979, nuclear physicist Len Dietz was working at a lab operated by General Electric in Schenectady, 10 miles west of Colonie. "We had air filters all around our perimeter fence," he recalls. "One day our radiological manager told me we had a problem: one of the filters was showing abnormally high alpha radiation. Much to our surprise, we found D.U. in it. There could only be one source: the N.L. plant." Dietz had other filters checked both in Schenectady and at other G.E. sites. The three that were farthest away were in West Milton, 26 miles northwest, and upwind, of Colonie. All the filters contained pure Colonie D.U. "Effectively," says Dietz, "the particles' range is unlimited."
In August 2003, the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry published a short report on Colonie. On the one hand, it declared that the pollution produced when the plant was operating could have increased the risks of kidney disease and lung cancer. Because the source of the danger had shut down, however, there was now "no apparent public health hazard." Thus there was no need to conduct a full epidemiological study of those who had lived near and worked at the factory-the one way to produce hard scientific data on what the health consequences of measurable D.U. contamination actually are.
The people of Colonie have been trying to collect health data of their own. Sharon Herr, 45, lived near the plant for nine years. She used to work 60 hours a week at two jobs-as a clerk in the state government and as a real-estate agent. Now she too is sick, and suffers symptoms which sound like a textbook case of Gulf War syndrome: "Fourteen years ago, I lost my grip to the point where I can't turn keys. I'm stiff, with bad joint and muscle pain, which has got progressively worse. I can't go upstairs without getting out of breath. I get fatigue so intense there are days I just can't do much. And I fall down-I'll be out walking and suddenly I fall." Together with her friend Anne Rabe, 49, a campaigner against N.L. since the 1980s, she has sent questionnaires to as many of the people who lived on the streets close to the plant as possible. So far, they have almost 400 replies.
Among those who responded were people with rare cancers or cancers that appeared at an unusually young age, and families whose children had birth defects. There were 17 cases of kidney problems, 15 of lung cancer, and 11 of leukemia. There were also five thyroid cancers and 16 examples of other thyroid problems-all conditions associated with radiation. Other people described symptoms similar to Herr's. Altogether, 174 of those in the sample had been diagnosed with one kind of cancer or another. American women have about a 33 percent chance of getting cancer in their lifetimes, mostly after the age of 60. (For men, it's nearly 50 percent.) Some of the Colonie cancer victims are two decades younger. "We have what look like possible suspicious clusters," says Rabe. "A health study here is a perfect opportunity to see how harmful this stuff really is."
On June 14, 2004, the army's Physical Evaluation Board, the body that decides whether a soldier should get sickness pay, convened to evaluate the case of Raymond Ramos of the 442nd Military Police company. It followed the Pentagon's approach, not Dr. Durakovic's. The board examined his Walter Reed medical-file summary, which describes his symptoms in detail, suggests that they may have been caused by serving in Iraq, and accepts that "achieving a cure is not a realistic treatment objective." But the summary mentions no physical reason for them at all, let alone depleted uranium.
Like many veterans of the first Gulf War, Ramos was told by the board that his disability had been caused primarily by post-traumatic stress. It did not derive "from injury or disease received in the line of duty as a direct result of armed conflict." Instead, his record says, he got "scared in the midst of a riot" and was "emotionally upset by reports of battle casualties." Although he was too sick to go back to work as a narcotics cop, he would get a disability benefit fixed at $1,197 a month, just 30 percent of his basic military pay.
On the day we meet, in September 2004, his symptoms are hardly alleviated. "I'm in lots of pain in my joints. I'm constantly fatigued-I can fall asleep at the drop of a dime. My wife tells me things and I just forget. It's not fair to my family."
For the time being, the case against D.U. appears to remain unproved. But if Asaf Durakovic, Doug Rokke, and their many allies around the world are right, and the Pentagon wrong, the costs-human, legal, and financial-will be incalculable. They may also be widespread. In October, the regional health authority of Sardinia, Italy, began hearings to investigate illnesses suffered by people who live near a U.S. firing range there that tests D.U. weapons.
In 2002 the United Nations Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights declared that depleted uranium was a weapon of mass destruction, and its use a breach of international law. But the difference between D.U. and the W.M.D. that formed the rationale for the Iraqi invasion is that depleted uranium may have a boomerang effect, afflicting the soldiers of the army that fires it as well as the enemy victims of "lethality overmatch."
The four members of the 442nd who tested positive all say they have met soldiers from other units during their medical treatment who complain of similar ailments, and fear that they too may have been exposed. "It's bad enough being sent out there knowing you could be killed in combat," Raymond Ramos says. "But people are at risk of bringing something back that might kill them slowly. That's not right."
David Rose is a Vanity Fair contributing editor. His book Guantánamo: The War on Human Rights is an in-depth investigation of the atrocities taking place at the Cuban prison.
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Inquiry Urges Recognition of Gulf War Syndrome
PANews
17 Nov 2004
By Gavin Cordon and Neville Dean, PA
http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=3770038
An independent inquiry into illnesses suffered by veterans of the first Gulf War today called on the Ministry of Defence finally to recognise the existence of a "Gulf War syndrome".
The inquiry, headed by the former law lord Lord Lloyd of Berwick, said it was clear the cocktail of health problems suffered by an estimated 6,000 veterans were a direct result of their service in the 1991 conflict.
It urged the MoD to establish a special fund to make one-off compensation payments to those affected.
The inquiry's report was warmly welcomed by Gulf veterans who called on the Government to accept its findings.
Tony Flint, of the National Gulf Veterans and Families Association, said: "To have Gulf War syndrome recognised means a hell of a lot to us.
"We've said all along that it exists - now we have an eminent body saying it as well.
"We call on the Ministry of Defence to accept the conclusions of the committee and take on board its recommendations.
Veteran Noel Baker added: "This report vindicates the veterans and it shows that we are not malingerers, we are not making it up - there is a real problem."
The inquiry report admitted it had not been able to establish the scientific cause of the various symptoms suffered by the veterans, but said that should not prevent the acceptance that there was a "Gulf War syndrome".
It said that studies carried out by the MoD had shown that veterans who had served in the Gulf were twice as likely to suffer from ill-health as those who had not.
"We can see no good reason why they (the MoD) should not accept Gulf War syndrome," the report said.
"It does not imply a single disease with a single cause. It will not expose them to any new claims. It will make no practical difference. But it will make a great difference to the veterans and their families, if only for symbolic reasons."
Lord Lloyd told a news conference at Westminster to launch the report that even if there was more than one cause for the problems suffered by the veterans, there was no medical reason why they should not be described as a syndrome.
"Gulf War Syndrome means something, it has a certain resonance," he said. "As they (the veterans) are the ones who are ill it seems reasonable that they should name their disease.
"There is no medical objection to it and it is the name which seems to be the most convenient."
The report said that more scientific research was needed into the causes of the various conditions suffered by the veterans.
The most likely explanation was that they were the result of a combination of factors which had had a "potentiating effect on each other".
These included multiple injections of vaccines, including anthrax and plague; the indiscriminate use of organophosphate pesticides to spray tents; low level exposure to nerve gases such as sarin; and the inhalation of depleted uranium dust.
"All these causes are directly related to the veterans' service in the Gulf, in what was a very toxic environment. No other possible causes have been proposed," Lord Lloyd said.
The inquiry was set up at the request of Labour peer Lord Morris of Manchester, the parliamentary adviser to the Royal British Legion, after the MoD refused an official inquiry.
The MoD prevented serving military personnel and officials from appearing before the inquiry although it did submit written evidence.
However, the inquiry was still able to take evidence from former personnel including the commander of the British forces in the Gulf, General Sir Peter de la Billiere, scientific experts, and some 35 veterans or their families.
Lord Lloyd was scathing about the MoD's failure to co-operate fully with his investigation.
"The MoD thus lost a valuable opportunity to start the process of reconciliation with the ill veterans, an opportunity which would have cost them nothing," he said.
Asked if he thought the MoD should apologise to the veterans, he said: "No doubt if they take our recommendations to heart and set up a fund to compensate the veterans that will be tantamount to an apology."
Lord Morris today hailed the report and said that the inquiry showed that it was possible to challenge the Government if it would not accept the case for an official investigation into a particular issue of concern.
"Until now, if executive government refused an independent inquiry it was 'end of story'. Lord Lloyd's report ends that veto. We owe this tilting of the balance against executive government principally to him and those who have worked in fellowship with him," he said.
The Ministry of Defence today said it had just received Lord Lloyd's report and would consider its response once it had had a chance to fully assess his findings.
-----
Peer's report: Gulf War Syndrome 'exists'
17/11/2004
telegraph.co.uk
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/11/17/usyndrome.xml&sSheet=/portal/2004/11/17/ixportaltop.html
Gulf War Syndrome does exist, according to the findings of an independent inquiry into illnesses suffered by thousands of veterans of the 1991 conflict.
The inquiry, headed by Lord Lloyd of Berwick, said there was "every reason" to believe about 6,000 Gulf War veterans who have complained of a huge range of symptoms do suffer from a syndrome linked to their service 13 years ago.
It called on the Government to accept "not before time" that "the illnesses of those who were deployed to the Gulf were caused by their deployment" and urged it to set up a compensation fund.
The report said all scientific studies agreed veterans sent to the "very toxic environment" of the Gulf were twice as likely to suffer from ill health than if they had been deployed elsewhere.
Illnesses suffered by the veterans were likely to be due to a combination of causes, including multiple injections of vaccines, the use of organophosphate pesticides to spray tents, low level exposure to nerve gas and the inhalation of depleted uranium dust.
Illnesses reported have included cancers, motor neurone disease, chronic fatigue, skin rashes, traumatic stress and aching joints - and the report said only a "small proportion" could be attributed to post traumatic stress.
It is the second report in a week to come to the same conclusion, following publication of a report in America.
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has maintained that insufficient evidence exists to prove a link.
Veterans said today the results were better than they had hoped for and called on the ministry to accept the report's findings without delay.
Noel Baker, 38, from Kent, said he had suffered multiple sclerosis, a cyst in his spleen and episodes of skin cancer since 1991.
He added: "This report vindicates the veterans, the people who have given evidence and it shows we are not malingerers, we are not making it up - there is a real problem."
Elizabeth Sigmund, from the Gulf Syndrome Study Group, said: "I think the MoD have got to come out and say 'we have made some terrible mistakes. We want people who have served in the Gulf to know that we believe them and we are going to do the best we can for them.'"
The inquiry was set up at the request of Lord Morris of Manchester, the Labour peer and parliamentary adviser to the Royal British Legion, after the MoD refused an official inquiry.
He said: "I profoundly hope there will be no delay now in giving full effect to Lord Lloyd's findings.
"Those left in broken health and bereaved by the conflict have already suffered more than enough."
Lord Lloyd said his report did not compel the Government to act, but he hoped the MoD would seize the opportunity to say "now is the time to bring this to an end".
-------- iran
Iran's New Alliance With China Could Cost U.S. Leverage
Washington Post
By Robin Wright
November 17, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A55414-2004Nov16?language=printer
TEHRAN -- A major new alliance is emerging between Iran and China that threatens to undermine U.S. ability to pressure Tehran on its nuclear program, support for extremist groups and refusal to back Arab-Israeli peace efforts.
The relationship has grown out of China's soaring energy needs -- crude oil imports surged nearly 40 percent in the first eight months of this year, according to state media -- and Iran's growing appetite for consumer goods for a population that has doubled since the 1979 revolution, Iranian officials and analysts say.
An oil exporter until 1993, China now produces only for domestic use. Its proven oil reserves could be depleted in 14 years, oil analysts say, so the country is aggressively trying to secure future suppliers. Iran is now China's second-largest source of imported oil.
The economic ties between two of Asia's oldest civilizations, which were both stops on the ancient Silk Road trade route, have broad political implications.
Holding a veto at the U.N. Security Council, China has become the key obstacle to putting international pressure on Iran. During a visit to Tehran this month, Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing signaled that China did not want the Bush administration to press the council to debate Iran's nuclear program. U.S. officials have expressed fear that China's veto power could make Iran more stubborn in the face of U.S. pressure.
The burgeoning relationship is reflected in two huge new oil and gas deals between the two countries that will deepen the relationship for at least the next 25 years, analysts here say.
Last month, the two countries signed a preliminary accord worth $70 billion to $100 billion by which China will purchase Iranian oil and gas and help develop Iran's Yadavaran oil field, near the Iraqi border. Earlier this year, China agreed to buy $20 billion in liquefied natural gas from Iran over a quarter-century.
Iran wants trade to grow even further. "Japan is our number one energy importer for historical reasons . . . but we would like to give preference to exports to China," Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh said this month, according to China Business Weekly.
In turn, China has become a major exporter of manufactured goods to Iran, including computer systems, household appliances and cars. "We mutually complement each other. They have industry and we have energy resources," said Ali Akbar Salehi, Iran's former representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
China's trade with Iran is weakening the impact on Iranian policy of various U.S. economic embargoes, analysts here say. "Sanctions are not effective nowadays because we have many options in secondary markets, like China," said Hossein Shariatmadari, a leading conservative theorist and editor of the Kayhan newspapers.
Accurate trade figures are difficult to get, in part because trade is increasing so rapidly and partly because China's large arms sales to Iran are not included or publicized. But at the second annual Iran-China trade fair here in May, Chinese Vice Minister of Commerce Gao Hucheng said trade had increased by 50 percent in 2003 over the previous year, according to the Islamic Republic News Agency.
Beijing has also provided Iran with advanced military technology, including missile technology, U.S. officials say. In April, the Bush administration imposed sanctions on Chinese manufacturers of equipment that can be used to develop weapons of mass destruction.
The Iran-China ties may be partly a response to the United States, analysts here say. President Bush's strategy has been to contain both China and the Islamic republic, said Siamak Namazi, a political and economic analyst, "so that's created natural allies."
The growing presence of U.S. and other Western troops in Central and South Asia and the Middle East is another joint concern. In the English-language Kayhan International, Ali Sabzevari wrote in an editorial: "Politically, the two countries share a common interest in checking the inroads being made by NATO in Asia. . . . The presence of outsiders does not bode well for peace and security."
The countries also share concerns over radical Sunni Muslims. Most Iranians follow the rival Shiite strain of Islam; China has more than 20 million Muslims, and the government has been facing Muslim unrest in some of its western cities. The dissidents receive support from Islamic groups in Afghanistan and the countries of former Soviet Central Asia -- the region that straddles both Iran and China.
Islam has historically been a link between the two civilizations. It made its way to China via Persia, the ancient state that was based in present-day Iran, Iranians note. Many Chinese Muslims pray in Persian, not Arabic. Their everyday language is Turkic, but their alphabet is Persian.
But in recent times, ties between China and Iran have not always prospered. In the midst of the unrest that led to Iran's revolution, one of the last foreign leaders to visit Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi before he was overthrown in 1979 was Chinese Communist Party chief Hua Kuo-feng. "The visit left a very strong negative feeling about China among Iranians," said Abbas Maleki, director of the Caspian Institute, a Tehran research organization.
But today, China with its one-party political system appears to feel fewer restraints than do Western nations in dealing with the world's only theocracy. "For China, issues like human rights don't affect your relations with Iran," Namazi said.
-----
Iran's New Alliance With China Could Cost U.S. Leverage
By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 17, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55414-2004Nov16.html
TEHRAN -- A major new alliance is emerging between Iran and China that threatens to undermine U.S. ability to pressure Tehran on its nuclear program, support for extremist groups and refusal to back Arab-Israeli peace efforts.
The relationship has grown out of China's soaring energy needs -- crude oil imports surged nearly 40 percent in the first eight months of this year, according to state media -- and Iran's growing appetite for consumer goods for a population that has doubled since the 1979 revolution, Iranian officials and analysts say.
An oil exporter until 1993, China now produces only for domestic use. Its proven oil reserves could be depleted in 14 years, oil analysts say, so the country is aggressively trying to secure future suppliers. Iran is now China's second-largest source of imported oil.
The economic ties between two of Asia's oldest civilizations, which were both stops on the ancient Silk Road trade route, have broad political implications.
Holding a veto at the U.N. Security Council, China has become the key obstacle to putting international pressure on Iran. During a visit to Tehran this month, Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing signaled that China did not want the Bush administration to press the council to debate Iran's nuclear program. U.S. officials have expressed fear that China's veto power could make Iran more stubborn in the face of U.S. pressure.
The burgeoning relationship is reflected in two huge new oil and gas deals between the two countries that will deepen the relationship for at least the next 25 years, analysts here say.
Last month, the two countries signed a preliminary accord worth $70 billion to $100 billion by which China will purchase Iranian oil and gas and help develop Iran's Yadavaran oil field, near the Iraqi border. Earlier this year, China agreed to buy $20 billion in liquefied natural gas from Iran over a quarter-century.
Iran wants trade to grow even further. "Japan is our number one energy importer for historical reasons . . . but we would like to give preference to exports to China," Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh said this month, according to China Business Weekly.
In turn, China has become a major exporter of manufactured goods to Iran, including computer systems, household appliances and cars. "We mutually complement each other. They have industry and we have energy resources," said Ali Akbar Salehi, Iran's former representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
China's trade with Iran is weakening the impact on Iranian policy of various U.S. economic embargoes, analysts here say. "Sanctions are not effective nowadays because we have many options in secondary markets, like China," said Hossein Shariatmadari, a leading conservative theorist and editor of the Kayhan newspapers.
Accurate trade figures are difficult to get, in part because trade is increasing so rapidly and partly because China's large arms sales to Iran are not included or publicized. But at the second annual Iran-China trade fair here in May, Chinese Vice Minister of Commerce Gao Hucheng said trade had increased by 50 percent in 2003 over the previous year, according to the Islamic Republic News Agency.
Beijing has also provided Iran with advanced military technology, including missile technology, U.S. officials say. In April, the Bush administration imposed sanctions on Chinese manufacturers of equipment that can be used to develop weapons of mass destruction.
The Iran-China ties may be partly a response to the United States, analysts here say. President Bush's strategy has been to contain both China and the Islamic republic, said Siamak Namazi, a political and economic analyst, "so that's created natural allies."
The growing presence of U.S. and other Western troops in Central and South Asia and the Middle East is another joint concern. In the English-language Kayhan International, Ali Sabzevari wrote in an editorial: "Politically, the two countries share a common interest in checking the inroads being made by NATO in Asia. . . . The presence of outsiders does not bode well for peace and security."
The countries also share concerns over radical Sunni Muslims. Most Iranians follow the rival Shiite strain of Islam; China has more than 20 million Muslims, and the government has been facing Muslim unrest in some of its western cities. The dissidents receive support from Islamic groups in Afghanistan and the countries of former Soviet Central Asia -- the region that straddles both Iran and China.
Islam has historically been a link between the two civilizations. It made its way to China via Persia, the ancient state that was based in present-day Iran, Iranians note. Many Chinese Muslims pray in Persian, not Arabic. Their everyday language is Turkic, but their alphabet is Persian.
But in recent times, ties between China and Iran have not always prospered. In the midst of the unrest that led to Iran's revolution, one of the last foreign leaders to visit Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi before he was overthrown in 1979 was Chinese Communist Party chief Hua Kuo-feng. "The visit left a very strong negative feeling about China among Iranians," said Abbas Maleki, director of the Caspian Institute, a Tehran research organization.
But today, China with its one-party political system appears to feel fewer restraints than do Western nations in dealing with the world's only theocracy. "For China, issues like human rights don't affect your relations with Iran," Namazi said.
--------
Group Says Iran Has Secret Nuclear Arms Program
November 17, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/17/international/middleeast/17iran.html
WASHINGTON, Nov. 16 - An Iranian opposition group says it has new evidence that Iran is producing enriched uranium at a covert Defense Ministry facility in Tehran that has not been disclosed to United Nations inspectors.
The group, the National Council for Resistance in Iran, is planning to announce its finding in Paris on Wednesday. The group says that inspection of the site would demonstrate that Iran is secretly trying to produce nuclear weapons even while promising to freeze a critical part of its declared nuclear program, which it maintains is intended purely for civilian purposes.
A senior official of the group, Muhammad Mohaddessin, said in a telephone interview late on Tuesday that the group had shared the new information "very recently'' with the International Atomic Energy Agency. But he and other officials of the group said it had not discussed the matter with the United States government, and its claims could not be verified.
Iran's mission to the United Nations did not return messages seeking comment on the assertion.
The group, based in Paris, is the political arm of the People's Mujahedeen, which is listed by the United States government as a terrorist organization because of its involvement in attacks on Americans in the 1970's. But the group also has a successful track record in gathering intelligence on Iran, and was the first, in 2002, to disclose the existence of what was then the secret Iranian nuclear site at Natanz.
United Nations inspectors "should not be fooled or deceived by the Iranian regime,'' Mr. Mohaddessin said.
A spokesman in Washington for the National Council for Resistance in Iran provided a seven-page summary of the assertion to The New York Times.
It says that the previously undisclosed site, in northeastern Tehran, covers 60 acres and houses biological and chemical warfare projects as well as nuclear activity. It says that the site, known as the Modern Defensive Readiness and Technology Center, now houses operations previously carried out at another Defense Ministry site in Tehran that was destroyed by the Iranian government this year before international inspectors could visit it.
The assertion by the opposition group is surfacing in a week in which France, Britain and Germany announced a formal agreement with Iran committing the country to freeze a critical part of its nuclear program in exchange for an array of possible rewards.
As part of the pact with the Europeans, the International Atomic Energy Agency said Iran had promised to suspend its uranium enrichment program starting a week from now. But the agency said it could not rule out the possibility that Iran was conducting covert activities.
"All the declared nuclear material in Iran has been accounted for, and therefore such material is not diverted to prohibited activities," the agency said in a report, referring to possible Iran nuclear weapons activity. "The agency is, however, not in a position to conclude that there are no undeclared nuclear materials or activities in Iran."
The United States and European countries have argued that Iran's nuclear program is intended to produce weapons. Iran's leadership has insisted that is not engaged in a nuclear weapons program but has the sovereign right to enrich uranium.
Officials of the opposition group said they believed that the Iranian Defense Ministry and Revolutionary Guards Corps were pursuing their program in secret and had not told Iran's atomic energy agency of the existence of the facility in Tehran.
--------
Nuclear Deal With Iranians Has Angered Hard-Liners
November 17, 2004
By NAZILA FATHI
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/17/international/middleeast/17tehran.html
TEHRAN, Nov. 16 - Iran's hard-line Parliament reacted angrily on Tuesday to a complex deal reached with Germany, France and Britain over the nation's nuclear activities.
The chief nuclear negotiator, Hassan Rowhani, said Sunday that Iran had agreed to stop enriching uranium while it negotiated with the Europeans for the benefits it would receive in return for suspending enrichment. By agreeing to the pact, Tehran also removed the threat of United Nations economic penalties.
But none of that mollified the hard-liners, most of whom were elected in February after moderate candidates were barred from running.
"We agreed to make 13 precise commitments while the Europeans only made four vague ones," Ahmad Tavakoli, one of the hard-liners, fumed during a noisy Parliament session on Monday.
From the Europeans' perspective, the deal fell short of the comprehensive arrangement they had sought to permanently stop Iran from enriching uranium, a crucial step in the production of nuclear weapons.
The Bush administration, which has contended that Iran is likely to cheat on any agreement, had reacted coolly to news of the pact, saying that it needed to study the fine print.
Rafat Bayat, another hard-liner, said the accord ran counter to Iran's national interests. "I say to the United States and the Europeans - and, in particular France, who insists a lot on the suspension of enrichment - that our Parliament will not accept anything that goes against our national interests," she said.
Mr. Rowhani, speaking with journalists after his appearance in a closed-door session with Parliament, dismissed the criticism. "Members of Parliament have made their personal comments, and that is natural," he was quoted as saying by ISNA, the student news agency.
"This agreement has been studied by different bodies," the news agency quoted him as saying. "It has not been the work of an individual or an institute, and the decision was not made solely by the Foreign Ministry or the supreme national security council.''
Iran's supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the final word on state matters and who appointed Mr. Rowhani to lead the negotiations, is widely thought to have approved the agreement. Mr. Rowhani said he assured Parliament during his meeting that the deal was a preliminary agreement.
"The suspension of enrichment will continue while the negotiations are moving in a positive direction," he was quoted as saying. "But if they hit a dead end, we will be under no obligation and the suspension will end."
-------- missile defense
US Exercises Missile Defense System To Prepare For Operations
By the end of 2007, America's ground-based missile interceptors are scheduled to grow to 28 at both the Alaska and California launch sites.
Washington (AFP)
Nov 17, 2004
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/bmdo-04zk.html
The US missile defense system is still on track to go on alert by the end of this year and key US military commands are conducting "shakedown exercises" in preparation, a defense spokesman said Wednesday.
Russia announced plans earlier Wednesday to acquire a new generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of defeating any anti-missile shield, but the spokesman said the US system is not designed to protect against long-range attack from either China or Russia.
US ground-based interceptor missiles are being installed in Alaska and California primarily to defend against a limited attack by a rogue power such as North Korea.
The United States also has proposed a third interceptor site somewhere in Europe to expand coverage against missiles fired from the Middle East, though no decision has been made on where to locate it, said Rick Lehner, a spokesman for the US Missile Defense Agency.
"This missile defense system as being deployed is not a threat to either the Russian or the Chinese strategic deterrent force," he said.
A sixth interceptor missile was installed in a silo at Fort Greely, Alaska last week and two more are due to be put in place before the end of the year at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, forming the first installment of the missile defense system.
Lehner said the plan "is still to have them on alert by the end of the year."
By the end of 2007, the numbers of ground-based missile interceptors are scheduled to grow to 28 at both the Alaska and California launch sites.
By 2007, the agency also plans to have 18 Aegis warships armed with new and faster missiles capable of intercepting and destroying medium range missiles.
Already two Aegis warships have been deployed in waters off North Korea to serve as platforms for forward radars for the missile defense system.
Critics have charged that the Pentagon is fielding the system without adequate testing.
The Missile Defense Agency is planning to conduct its first attempted intercept in more than two years sometime next month, resuming flight tests that were cancelled of delayed six times since December 2002, officials have said.
In earlier tests, target missiles have been successfully intercepted in five of eight attempts, but those have been under artificial conditions using some surrogate components.
The system uses a network of early warning satellites and high powered radars to detect and track and target long range missiles, feeding data to command centers that then fire interceptor missiles into a collision in space with the incoming missile.
The US Northern, Strategic and Pacific Commands are conducting "shakedown exercises" with the system to train crews and test the interconnectivity its parts, Lehner said.
"It's like when you deliver a ship to Navy, they take it out into the ocean sometimes for weeks and months to shakedown the different systems within the ship itself," Lehner said.
"It's the same with this system. It's making sure everything is integrated properly, that all the communications procedures are down pat, all the maintenance procedures for the command and control and for the interceptors themselves, for the radars - all those procedures are in place," he said.
-------- russia
Putin says Russia working on new nuclear systems
(Reuters)
Nov 17, 2004
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=6839668&pageNumber=0
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia is working on new nuclear missile systems that other powers do not have in order to protect itself against future security threats, President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday.
Putin, speaking to armed forces chiefs, said although international terrorism was one of Russia's main security threats the country had also to keep its nuclear defences in sound condition.
"We know that we have only to weaken our attention to such components of our defences as the nuclear-missile shield, and new threats to us could appear," Itar-Tass news agency quoted him as saying.
He said research and successful testing of new nuclear-missile systems technology was being conducted. "I am sure that in the near future weapons will appear ... which other nuclear powers do not and will not possess."
But leading Russian military analyst Alexander Golts said Putin's remarks were more likely to be an attempt to shore up the country's international standing than an announcement of any developments in its nuclear arsenal.
"It's more or less a tradition that the Russian leadership prefers to speak about our nuclear capacity, because after all it's the last attribute of a superpower," he said.
"Our nuclear armament is the single thing that makes us more or less equal to the United States and it's very important from a political point of view for Mr. Putin to keep mentioning it."
More than half of Russia's defence budget goes on nuclear programmes, he said.
Putin gave no further detail about what type of weapons he was referring to or what shape new security threats could take.
"We will continue to consistently and successively build up the armed forces in general and its nuclear component," he said.
Russia's latest nuclear innovation was a test launch in February of a missile designed to outwit Washington's planned $50 billion missile shield.
"It flies as a ballistic missile warhead in space, but when it penetrates the atmosphere it begins flying like a cruise missile," Golts said.
He said it made the American anti-missile plans more or less useless. "And it means that we still think about the United States as a potential adversary," Golts added.
U.S. State Department spokesman Adam Ereli told reporters Washington did not regard Moscow's activities as threatening or as any violation of its arms control agreements with the United States.
"We do not perceive Russia's nuclear sustainment and modernization activities as threatening and what they are doing is fully consistent with our mutual obligations under the Moscow Treaty," Ereli told reporters in Washington.
(Additional reporting by Tom Miles)
----
Russia Is Said to Develop New Nuclear Missile
November 17, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-Nuclear-Weapons.html?pagewanted=all
MOSCOW (AP) -- President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday that Russia is developing a new form of nuclear missile unlike those held by other countries, news agencies reported.
Speaking at a meeting of the Armed Forces' leadership, Putin reportedly said that Russia is researching and successfully testing new nuclear missile systems.
``I am sure that ... they will be put in service within the next few years and, what is more, they will be developments of the kind that other nuclear powers do not and will not have,'' Putin was quoted as saying by the ITAR-Tass news agency.
Putin reportedly said: ``International terrorism is one of the major threats for Russia. We understand as soon as we ignore such components of our defense as a nuclear and missile shield, other threats may occur.''
No details were immediately available, but Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said earlier this month that Russia expected to test-fire a mobile version of its Topol-M ballistic missile this year and that production of the new weapon could be commissioned in 2005.
News reports have also said Russia is believed to be developing a next-generation heavy nuclear missile that could carry up to 10 nuclear warheads weighing a total of 4.4 tons, compared with the Topol-M's 1.32-ton combat payload.
Topol-Ms have been deployed in silos since 1998. The missiles have a range of about 6,000 miles and reportedly can maneuver in ways that are difficult to detect.
Earlier this year, a senior Defense Ministry official was quoted as telling news agencies that Russia had developed a weapon that could make the United States' proposed missile-defense system useless. Details were not given, but military analysts said the claimed new weapon could be a hypersonic cruise missile or maneuverable ballistic missile warheads.
----
US not worried about Russia's nuclear activities: State Department
(AFP)
Nov 17, 2004
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20041117/pl_afp/us_russia_nuclear_041117193617
WASHINGTON - Washington was not threatened by President Vladimir Putin (news - web sites)'s announcement Wednesday that Russia intended to remain a major nuclear power by deploying a new weapon in the coming years that other states lack, a State Department spokesman said.
"We do not perceive Russia's nuclear sustainment and modernization activities as threatening, and what they are doing is fully consistent with our mutual obligations under the Moscow Treaty," deputy spokesman Adam Ereli told reporters.
"Our mutual obligations in this area are covered under the Moscow Treaty. Pursuant to that treaty, we have regular consultations" with Moscow, Ereli said.
"And based on those regular consultations, we are confident that Russia's plans are not threatening and are consistent with its obligations, and I think are indicative of a new strategic relationship between the United States and Russia that is focused on reducing threats and increasing confidence," he added.
Putin announced in Moscow on Wednesday that Russia would soon be armed with nuclear weapons systems "which do not exist and are unlikely to exist in other nuclear powers."
"We have not only conducted tests of the latest nuclear rocket systems," Putin told a meeting of the armed forces' leadership. "I am sure that, in the coming years, we will deploy them."
The ITAR-TASS news agency speculated that Putin was referring to the mobile Topol-M missile, which is analogous to the US Minuteman-3 missile and is meant to form the backbone of Russia's future strategic nuclear arsenal.
Russia this year also successfully test-fired a different new missile that its developers claim can penetrate any shield, since it flies in space on a ballistic trajectory and in the atmosphere as a cruise missile -- swerving away from interceptor rockets.
----
NOVEL NUCLEAR MISSILE SYSTEMS FOR THE RUSSIAN ARMY
Ria-Novosti
17 Nov 2004
http://putinru.com/news/item/33561.html
MOSCOW, November 17 (RIA Novosti) - In the next two years, the Russian army will receive novel nuclear missile systems, which are being tested now, President Vladimir Putin said at a conference of the leading staff of the Russian armed forces. The conference was convened to sum up the results of combat training in the army and navy in 2004 and outline tasks for the next year.
Mr. Putin demanded that the troops be geared to the nature and direction of threats by the end of 2005. "The composition, structure and strength of the armed forces must be geared to the nature and direction of current and future threats by the end of 2005," said the president. "Effective and combat ready armed forces are a crucial factor protecting Russia from any forms of military-political pressure or potential aggression."
The main task of internal command agencies is to improve the combat ability of the troops, above all, permanent-readiness units that must become the core and the main striking force of the army, Mr. Putin said. "Combat training must be based on modern experience and development trends of the art of war."
The president recalled "major decisions" taken in the provision of equipment to the troops and cited positive examples of the creation of a basic missile system for the land forces and new-generation small arms, and the successful completion of trials of a naval nuclear missile system.
Vladimir Putin called for a saving attitude to technical rearmament. "These resources must be spent carefully but effectively, sparingly as good housekeepers do, and with best results," the president said.
He said that the accumulation mortgage program for servicemen must be closely monitored and that the government would allocate an additional 2 billion rubles ($1 = 28.67 rubles) for the construction of housing for servicemen in 2005.
"The deployment of Russian military bases [in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan] has greatly strengthened the collective security system in Central Asia," said Vladimir Putin. "It is being used to create conditions for neutralizing terrorist and extremist attacks in the region and increase the defense capability of Russia and its allies in the southern direction."
----
New Nuclear Weapon to Surpass Others, Putin Says
NYT
Nov 17, 2004
By By STEVEN LEE MYERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/17/international/europe/17cnd-russ.html
MOSCOW, Nov. 17 - President Vladimir V. Putin, meeting with Russia's defense officials and military commanders here, said today that the country would soon deploy new nuclear missile systems that would surpass those of any other nuclear power.
Reiterating previous statements, though providing no new details, Mr. Putin said Russia would continue to emphasize its nuclear deterrent, despite a new focus on new threats like terrorism, which has roiled the country in recent months with deadly result.
"We are not only conducting research and successful testing of the newest nuclear missile systems," he said in concluding remarks to a regular gathering of commanders at the Ministry of Defense, which were reported by news agencies and broadcast on NTV. "I am certain that in the immediate years to come we will be armed with them. These are such developments and such systems that other nuclear states do not have and will not have in the immediate years to come.''In his remarks, which amounted to a broad overview of military strategy and budgets but with a dash of boosterism, Mr. Putin did not elaborate on the new systems he meant. The Russian military, however, is widely reported to have been trying to perfect land- and sea-based ballistic missiles with warheads that could elude a missile-defense system like the one being constructed by the Bush administration.
Mr. Putin announced in February that Russia had successfully tested a new nuclear-tipped missile during an exercise that also included two embarrassing missile misfires. At the time, he said the system would allow "deep maneuvering," a statement arms experts in Russia and abroad took to mean a warhead that could alter its course as it homed in on a target.
A day after that test, Col. Gen. Yuri N. Baluyevsky, who this summer was promoted to the chief of the general staff, said the missile was a "hypersonic flying vehicle," though neither he nor any other officials have provided further details about the weapon or, more importantly, its viability.
The missile is reportedly a variant of the Topol, a ground-based intercontinental ballistic missile that is already in Russia's arsenal, but Russia's efforts are shrouded in secrecy. Although the purpose of maneuverability would be to evade a missile-defense system, Russia already has more than enough missiles to overwhelm the limited system the United States is constructing.
In Washington, White House reaction to Mr. Putin's remarks was measured, with Scott McClellan, the presidential press secretary, telling reporters today that "this is not something that we look at as new.''
He said that President Bush and Mr. Putin, whom he characterized as "allies now in the global war on terrorism,'' had discussed the issue of modernization of Russia's military and that the nuclear element of the modernization was "something that we are well aware of.''
Pressed on whether Mr. Bush would be comfortable with changes that enabled the Russians to get around American missile defense systems, Mr. McClellan responded:
"We have a very different relationship than we did during the Cold War, and we are working together to significantly reduce our nuclear arsenals.''
Mr. Putin's remarks, made almost in passing and not a part of his main address, did not appear to be timed to any particular event. However, he has recently sought to bolster Russia's image as a superpower.
Dmitri V. Trenin, deputy director of the Carnegie Moscow Center and an expert on the Russian military, said Mr. Putin's statement was not particularly new.
He described it as a gesture to bolster confidence of the armed services. The Russian military remains troubled, despite the government's efforts to boost spending, including a 27 percent increase - to roughly $20 billion - in the military budget for 2005. Last month, a senior missile designer publicly complained in remarks to Russian news agencies that production of the Topol missiles had ground to a halt twice this year because of a lack of money.
Mr. Trenin also suggested that Mr. Putin's address could have been meant to calm discontent that has arisen in nationalist quarters over recent diplomatic initiatives, including a territorial concession to the Chinese on the Amur River and the possibility of a similar concession to the Japanese in the Kurile Islands.
"He wants to send a message to the republic that Russia remains a major military force," Mr. Trenin said.
----
Russia to deploy new-generation nuclear weapons system: Putin
MOSCOW (AFP)
Nov 17, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041117164729.zvenke8i.html
President Vladimir Putin served notice Wednesday that Russia intended to remain a major nuclear power by deploying a new weapon in the coming years that other states lack and are unlikely to develop in the near future.
"We have not only conducted tests of the latest nuclear rocket systems," Putin told a meeting of the Armed Forces' leadership. "I am sure that in the coming years we will deploy them.
"Moreover, these will be things which do not exist and are unlikely to exist in other nuclear powers," he added.
Putin failed to specify what type of complex he was referring to, but Russia has been seeking to upgrade its nuclear arsenal after the United States announced plans in 2001 to deploy a missile defense shield in abrogation of its 1972 ABM Treaty with Moscow.
Washington argues its shield would be capable of defending the United States only from attacks from so-called "rogue states" and could not stand up to Russia's massive Soviet-era nuclear arsenal.
However Putin has since mentioned plans for Russia to also develop a similar system along with new types of intercontinental missiles that Moscow claims could penetrate any space shield put up by the United States.
The ITAR-TASS news agency speculated that Putin was referring to the mobile Topol-M missile, which is analogous to the US Minuteman-3 missile and is meant to form the backbone of Russia's future strategic nuclear arsenal.
Russia this year also successfully test-fired a different new missile that its developers claim can penetrate any shield, since it flies in space on a ballistic trajectory and in the atmosphere as a cruise missile -- swerving away from interceptor rockets.
The Topol-M is the first intercontinental missile developed by Russia alone following the Soviet Union's collapse, but deployment of the land-based mobile unit -- initially set for the end of 2002 -- has been repeatedly delayed because of severe cash constraints.
The ITAR-TASS report quoted the missile's Moscow developer as saying that funding for mass production of the mobile Topol-M will be included in the military's 2005 procurement budget.
If that timetable is respected, the missiles could be issued to the armed forces in 2006. Topol-Ms have been deployed in silos since 1998.
The shift in attention to nuclear deterrence came unexpectedly because Putin has for months pointed to international terrorism as the chief threat to Russia's national security amid a wave of deadly suicide attacks from guerrillas in rebel Chechnya.
Putin said Wednesday that Russia still viewed terrorism as the greatest threat to its national security but should also not forget about nuclear dangers.
"We understand that the moment we turn our attention from such elements of our defenses as a nuclear missile shield, then we will be facing new threats," Putin said.
"That is why we will continue to persistently develop our armed forces on the whole, including its nuclear arsenal potential," Putin said.
Putin said that Russia should also build up its navy's nuclear capacity -- it had 10 successful sea-based test launches this year -- and generally work to modernize armed forces that remain bogged down in war-torn Chechnya for a sixth year.
However analysts point to Russia's financial struggles and question how the military intends to follow through on Putin's vow.
Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov reported at the same meeting that the 2005 budget has only pencilled in the purchase of four intercontinental ballistic missiles.
"This proves that Russia is still working from a doctrine of nuclear dissuasion as was the case in the 1990s. This highlights the weakness of its conventional forces," said independent political analyst Alexander Golts.
"The West should not get too excited about this" because it reflects an outdated mentality, Golts said.
-------- MILITARY
-------- arms
US offers $1bn weapons deal to Pakistan
November 17 2004
Financial Times
By Farhan Bokhari in Islamabad and Demetri Sevastopulo
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/d4dc494c-38c3-11d9-bc76-00000e2511c8.html
The US has proposed its largest arms sales package to Pakistan in more than 14 years, underlining the country's role as a close ally of Washington in the war on terror.
The Pentagon notified Congress about the $1.2bn package late Tuesday. It includes eight P3-C Orion surveillance aircraft, six Phalanx rapid fire guns for the Pakistan navy, and more than two thousand TOW 2 missiles for the army.
The package would mark the first significant arms sale to a US ally since this month's re-election of President George W. Bush.
"It's a positive development and it fits in to the context of the fast burgeoning defence relations between our two countries," a senior Pakistani official said.
Pakistan has also asked the US for 18 to 25 new F-16 fighter jets. The delivery of an earlier batch of 60 F-16s was suspended in 1990 over allegations at the time that Pakistan was manufacturing nuclear weapons.
"We are still pursuing the F-16 option," said a Pakistani official. But a western diplomat said: "The F-16 matter is still largely unresolved."
The Pentagon declined to say whether it was negotiating with Pakistan over the F-16 request.
"The issue of F-16 sales is raised periodically by the government of Pakistan," said Lt Col Joseph Yoswa, a Pentagon spokesman. "However, there has been no decision at any level of the US government to provide F-16s to Pakistan."
The Pentagon last month told Congress it planned to sell Turkey $3.9bn of equipment to modernise 218 of its existing F-16s.
The heart of the proposed package for Pakistan is the sale of eight P3-C Orion surveillance planes, built by Lockheed Martin, with a combined price tag of $970m. The Defence Security Co-operation Agency, which handles foreign arms sales for the Pentagon, said 2,000 TOW-2A and 14 TOW-2A fly-to-buy missiles manufactured by Raytheon of Tucson, Arizona, would also be sold for $82m.
Additionally, six Raytheon manufactured Phalanx rapid fire 20mm guns for the Pakistan navy as well as upgrade plans for another six gun systems are included under a separate contract for $155m.
Congress has 30 days to object to the proposed arms sales. But western diplomats said they did not expect the deal to be opposed by the Republican-dominated Congress.
The proposed sale follows an intensified campaign by the Pakistani military within the semi-autonomous tribal region that borders Afghanistan and which is believed to have become a haven for militants linked to al-Qaeda and the Taliban movement fleeing US and Afghan troops.
The sale of weapons such as the Orion land and sea surveillance aircraft follow recent findings by Pakistan's intelligence services suggesting that al-Qaeda had ordered its Arab followers in Pakistan to leave for Iraq to attack US troops.
Pakistani intelligence officers said that fleeing al-Qaeda militants were most likely to use either theland route to Iraq through central Asia or board small vessels, such as fishing trawlers, from Pakistan's south coast.
"The wider significance of this new deal is that it deepens the relationship between the US and Pakistani militaries," said Lieutenant General Talat Masood, a commentator on defence and security affairs.
-------- iraq
Navy Unit Discovers Perils In Task of Rebuilding Fallujah
Engineering Group Encounters Hidden Explosives and Gunfire
Washington Post
By Jackie Spinner
November 17, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A55574-2004Nov16?language=printer
FALLUJAH, Iraq, Nov. 16 -- The green Humvee rolled up to the mangled railroad line on the northern edge of this city Tuesday, where thousands of U.S. and Iraqi forces had launched an offensive more than a week before in a shower of bullets and mortar shells. Pen and notepad in hand, Equipment Operator 1st Class William Seado of the U.S. Navy jumped out and started to inspect the tracks.
As he walked around a tanker car, Seado, 31, of Custer, S.D., noticed a black wire strung across the metal rails. He followed it to the tanker, where he found two sandbags filled with mortar rounds. Seado, a member of the Navy's elite Seabee Engineer Reconnaissance Team, raced back to the Humvee, which was parked only a few feet from the tanker -- well within what is called the kill zone of the improvised explosive device, or IED.
"Let's get out of here," he said, as he cranked up the engine and sped off. "There's an IED on the track."
Navy Lt. Jeffrey McCoy, the convoy commander who was sitting in the passenger seat, grabbed the radio handset to warn the other team members.
"I've never seen you move that fast, Seado," said McCoy, 31, of Youngstown, Ohio.
"I intend to get out of here with my butt in one piece," Seado replied, his voice flat and matter-of-fact.
The assault on Fallujah that began the night of Nov. 8 was aimed at breaking the insurgents' grip on a city they had controlled since April. It was the biggest military operation in Iraq since the invasion in March 2003, involving armored vehicles, artillery, airpower and thousands of troops. It was accompanied by a pledge from U.S. officials to rebuild the city after the offensive was complete.
But keeping that promise -- in a city rigged with booby-traps and explosives, with insurgents still fighting back in some neighborhoods -- may prove more difficult than anticipated, as the Seabees discovered on Tuesday. Their mission was supposed to be fairly simple -- get in, take some measurements, snap a few pictures, get out. That didn't happen.
After Seado discovered the bomb on the tanker car, the convoy quickly but gingerly backtracked across a muddy field dotted with land mines. Then the team spent nearly two hours securing the area around the rigged tanker before moving to another section of damaged railway. There, the Seabees spied the blue wire of a second bomb, forcing another quick exit. At a third stop, a group of Marines advised them to park behind a dirt berm because snipers were firing from a bank of houses a short distance away. The vehicles rolled over the berm and onto a flat area where construction stakes marked another batch of mines.
"These insurgents are really making things inconvenient," McCoy said.
As in other parts of Fallujah where U.S. forces have battled insurgents, the railway was more extensively damaged than the Seabees had expected. "It's pretty bad," Seado said. "I was hoping it wouldn't be that bad, but it's going to be a lot of work to rebuild."
McCoy said most of the city's basic infrastructure was damaged, not only by fighting but also by years of neglect.
"There's a lot of structural damage to houses and public buildings," he said. "The main utilities -- electricity, water, sewage -- are all going to need a lot of work."
On a tour of the city on Tuesday, Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, passed rows of buildings riddled by bullets, tank rounds and artillery fire. Afterward, he said: "I must say, I didn't see a lot of major structural damage. There's a lot of debris in the streets. There's some electrical work that needs to be done, and there's some peripheral damage to the buildings, but I didn't see a lot of structural major damage, so I think it'll be a few months. Things will move along quickly once we get started."
Military engineers said they planned to begin making repairs to the city's infrastructure as soon as Fallujah was secure. But McCoy said those first repairs would amount to first aid, and that making Fallujah livable for its 250,000 residents, most of whom fled before the military operation, could take up to a year.
"If you leave them a mess like this with no running water, living in sewage, they are just going to be disgruntled," McCoy said. "We're going to have anti-American sentiment that's just going to breed. Reconstruction is as essential as the actual purging of the insurgents."
As the Seabees worked on Tuesday, it was clear that the insurgents had not been purged just yet. Heavy machine-gun fire thundered from the neighborhood next to the railroad tracks, and large explosions erupted close enough to make the ground shake and the Seabees scramble for cover.
Later, as he and McCoy rode away, Seado said he was disappointed they had not stuck around long enough for the special ordnance team to arrive. "I kind of wanted to see them blow up the tank car," Seado said.
"Why?" McCoy asked. "It's just another spot of damage we'll have to fix."
-----
800 Civilians Feared Dead in Fallujah
(Inter Press Service)
by Dahr Jamail
November 17, 2004
http://www.antiwar.com/jamail/?articleid=3990
BAGHDAD - At least 800 civilians have been killed during the U.S. military siege of Fallujah, a Red Cross official estimates.
Speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of U.S. military reprisal, a high-ranking official with the Red Cross in Baghdad told IPS that "at least 800 civilians" have been killed in Fallujah so far.
His estimate is based on reports from Red Crescent aid workers stationed around the embattled city, from residents within the city, and from refugees, he said.
"Several of our Red Cross workers have just returned from Fallujah since the Americans won't let them into the city," he said. "And they said the people they are tending to in the refugee camps set up in the desert outside the city are telling horrible stories of suffering and death inside Fallujah."
The official said that both Red Cross and Iraqi Red Crescent relief teams had asked the U.S. military in Fallujah to take in medical supplies to people trapped in the city, but their repeated requests had been turned down.
A convoy of relief supplies from both relief organizations continues to wait on the outskirts of the city for military permission to enter. They have appealed to the United Nations to intervene on their behalf.
"The Americans close their ears, and that is it," the Red Cross official said. "They won't even let us take supplies into Fallujah General Hospital."
The official estimated that at least 50,000 residents remain trapped within the city. They were too poor to leave, lacked friends or family outside the city, and therefore had nowhere to go, or they simply had not had enough time to escape before the siege began, he said.
Aid workers in his organization have reported that houses of civilians in Kharma, a small city near Fallujah, had been bombed by U.S. warplanes. In one instance, a family of five was killed just two days ago, they reported.
"I don't know why the American leaders did not approach the Red Cross and ask us to deal with the families properly before the attacking began," said a Red Cross aid worker, who also spoke on condition of anonymity.
"Suddenly they attacked and people were stuck with no help, no medicine, no food, no supplies," he said. "So those who could, ran for the desert, while the rest were trapped in the city."
If the U.S. forces would call a temporary cease-fire "we could get our trucks in and get the civilians left in Fallujah who need medical care, we could get them out," he said.
Mosques have organized massive collections of food and relief supplies for Fallujah residents as they did last April when the city was under attack, but these supplies have not been allowed into the city either.
The Red Cross official said they had received several reports from refugees that the military had dropped cluster bombs in Fallujah, and used a phosphorous weapon that caused severe burns.
The U.S. military claims to have killed 1,200 "insurgents" in Fallujah. Abdel Khader Janabi, a resistance leader from the city, has said that only about 100 among them were fighters.
"Both of them are lying," the Red Cross official said. "While they agree on the 1,200 number, they are both lying about the number of dead fighters." He added that "our estimate of 800 civilians is likely to be too low."
The situation within Fallujah is grim, he said. If help does not reach people soon, "the children who are trapped will most likely die."
He said the Ministry of Health in the U.S.-backed interim Iraqi government had stopped supplying hospitals and clinics in Fallujah two months before the current siege.
"The hospitals do not even have aspirin," he said. "This shows, in my opinion, that they've had a plan to attack for a long time and were trying to weaken the people."
--------
Police defections add to Mosul's woes
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
By Kathleen Ridolfo
Nov 17, 2004
Asia Times
http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FK17Ak03.html
Multinational forces in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul have arrested General Mohammed Khayri al-Birhawi, the director general of Mosul police, accusing him of cooperating with terrorists in the city. Earlier, Deputy Governor Khisro Goran accused police of colluding with insurgents: "We are convinced, because we have evidence ... that many policemen in Mosul are loyal to the former regime and sympathetic to the terrorists. Their loyalty is not for the new Iraqi regime," Kurdistan Satellite Television reported. Goran added that the police directorate in the city was advised several months ago to purge the police organization of Saddam Hussein loyalists, but the directorate failed to do so.
Reuters reported on Monday that scores of police defected in last week's fighting and joined insurgents. "The terrorists were not able to occupy the offices of the national parties, centers of the National Guard or the Installations Protection Force. They were only able to seize police stations, which is a clear indication that there is collusion between the police [and militants] and that many policemen are sympathetic to the former regime, which is why they handed over the stations very easily," he said. "In many of the [police] stations, there was no shooting or fighting, they were just handed over to the terrorists."
Reports indicate that fighting remains sporadic but US, Kurdish and Iraqi National Guard personnel have secured at least half of the city, which is divided by the Tigris River. Al-Jazeera reported on Friday that gunmen could be seen in the city urging residents to return to their jobs without fear. A statement was also issued by the "Higher commission of the Mujahideen Brigades" calling on residents to return to work, adding that the mujahideen would protect state institutions and banks in the city, and that there was no reason for citizens to close their shops. The Kurdish daily Khabat reported on Thursday that Kurdish homes were repeatedly attacked in the city. The daily said that "Arab democrats" were also being targeted. The Kurdish parliament claimed in a November 6 statement condemning the violence in Mosul that Kurds wearing traditional dress were being targeted in a number of northern Iraqi towns. "These malicious and criminal [acts] aim at planting the seeds of sedition and contention between the Kurds and Arabs," the statement said.
Some reports said that peshmerga (paramilitary) forces had taken up positions in the city in recent days. They launched operations in the Kurdish-populated al-Jihad neighborhood of the city on Monday. Peshmerga forces also defended the Kurdistan Democratic Party office against an attack on Monday, killing four insurgents. Two militants were also killed outside the Ibn Sina Hospital after peshmerga forces caught them trying to plant explosives on a parked car belonging to a peshmerga. Gunfire could still be heard in some areas of the city as multinational forces worked to secure the area. Witnesses said many terrorists were killed but many others escaped to villages south of the city.
A Radio Free Iraq (RFI) correspondent in Baghdad interviewed interim National Assembly member Yonadam Kanna about the situation in Mosul. Kanna pointed out that the city historically has not faced ethnic or religious divisions, despite the fact that it is inhabited by Sunnis, Kurds and Turkomans. "It is not logical that a very secure town like Mosul of more than 2 million people can be victimized by gangs of not more than 1,000 people," he said. Kanna said the Interior Ministry and Iraqi security forces should take the responsibility to solve this "abnormal problem". He contended that gangs in the city want to cause ethnic divisions. He said gangs were also becoming a problem in villages south of Mosul.
Al-Sharqiyah television cited US Brigadier-General Carter Ham as saying on Sunday that militants in the city are not believed to be those who fled Fallujah in recent days. RFI reported on October 28 that at least a dozen militant groups are present in the city.
-----
Troops Move To Quell Insurgency In Mosul
Cleric Vows to Turn Iraq 'Into One Big Fallujah'
By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, November 17, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A53587-2004Nov16?language=printer
BAGHDAD, Nov. 16 -- U.S. and Iraqi troops entered Mosul in force Tuesday to retake streets and police stations seized by fighters in the northern city last week, while a prominent Iraqi insurgent claimed that the battle in Fallujah was only the beginning of an uprising that has already roiled parts of Iraq dominated by Sunni Muslims.
"The Americans have opened the gates of hell," Abdullah Janabi said Monday in Fallujah, a city U.S. commanders have said they now control after a week of often fierce fighting. "The battle of Fallujah is the beginning of other battles."
Iraqi officials had said they believed Janabi, a 53-year-old Sunni cleric, had fled the city before U.S. troops pushed into the insurgent stronghold. But he spoke from the city's southern section, at times boasting of losses inflicted on U.S. troops and at other times insisting that other insurgent leaders remained in Fallujah with him.
After fighting erupted in Fallujah last week, insurgents moved to open a second front in Mosul, seizing control of parts of the city and attacking bridges and six police stations. Some stations were looted of body armor, uniforms, weapons and radios, and at least three were too damaged to be reoccupied.
On Tuesday, more than 2,500 U.S. troops entered Mosul, where gunfire echoed through rain-soaked streets that were largely deserted on the last day of a three-day Muslim holiday. The city's five bridges across the Tigris River were closed, and a curfew was imposed from 4 p.m. to 6 a.m. The troops met little resistance, although four U.S. soldiers were wounded by a car bomb that detonated near their convoy on the city's western edge, said Lt. Col. Paul Hastings, a spokesman for U.S. forces in Mosul.
When the fighting first flared in Mosul, many members of the city's 5,000-man police force fled, and the police chief, Brig. Gen. Mohammed Kheiri Barhawi, was fired following complaints that some officers had cooperated with the insurgents. Hastings said about 1,000 policemen had returned, but he acknowledged that reconstituting the units posed a "huge challenge."
The clashes that have erupted north and west of Baghdad since last week constitute the most intense fighting since the insurgency began in earnest six months ago. The U.S. military has reported 130 to 140 attacks a day, including car bombings, roadside mine blasts and ambushes, along with sabotage and intimidation of Iraqi security forces. On Monday, when fighting broke out in several northern and western cities, seven car bombs were detonated -- two in Mosul and five in the region around Fallujah.
The daily tally is comparable to that seen in a bout of fighting in Fallujah and southern Iraq in April, but across a far smaller area.
Residents reported renewed fighting Tuesday in the northern towns of Baiji and Baqubah. In Balad, about 40 miles north of Baghdad, an improvised mine detonated near a convoy, killing a U.S. soldier and injuring another, the military said.
Since declaring Fallujah liberated on Sunday, U.S. commanders have played down the continuing battles there, but bursts of gun and mortar fire exploded Tuesday across the battle-scarred city as American forces continued to pursue insurgents. Shooting could be heard for most of the afternoon on the city's northern edge, where the U.S. military estimated about 100 fighters were still operating in neighborhoods that troops first entered a week ago.
Organized bands of fighters clashed with U.S. troops Tuesday on Fallujah's southern outskirts. Black smoke rose from burning rubble after U.S. artillery batteries fired 155mm rounds into suspected insurgent hideouts.
The U.S. military said it had killed at least 1,200 insurgents and detained hundreds in fighting that has destroyed scores of buildings in the conservative, deeply religious city. At least 38 U.S. troops and six Iraqi soldiers have been killed, the most in a single offensive since the fall of Saddam Hussein on April 9, 2003.
"I think it was a very substantial victory," Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the U.S. military commander in Iraq, said after touring Fallujah on Tuesday.
"Fallujah is no longer a terrorist safe haven," Casey said. "That's a major accomplishment with the Iraqi security forces and for the coalition forces, and it's a major way ahead for Iraq."
However, Janabi, the insurgent leader, said Monday: "We still have our strength, our force and ammunition, and the battle is long, very long. And we will turn Iraq into one big Fallujah."
"It is only the beginning, from a military point of view," said Janabi, who heads the mujaheddin shura, an 18-member council of clerics, tribal sheiks and former Baath Party members that assumed control of the city of 250,000 shortly after Marines aborted their first attempt to capture it in April. "We have succeeded in drawing them into the quagmire of Fallujah, into the alleys and small pathways. They have fallen into the trap of explosive charges, land mines and, now, the defenders' short supply lines inside the neighborhoods."
Speaking in an undamaged house in the city's Nazal district, Janabi was protected by several bodyguards and wore an explosive vest, the wires that would detonate it dangling a few inches apart. A bodyguard said the cleric preferred martyrdom to "dying on his bed like a camel."
"The cause will not die if the individuals die," Janabi said. "It will survive until the last Iraqi holy warrior dies or runs out of bullets." He added, "If the military leaders agree on another area where we will inflict more losses on them, then we will."
Janabi mocked the statement of a senior Iraqi official who on Saturday told reporters that Janabi and another insurgent leader, Omar Hadid, were "cowards" who had fled the city before the offensive. Hadid is a ranking figure in the group now known as al Qaeda in Iraq, headed by the Jordanian militant Abu Musab Zarqawi, who by all accounts left Fallujah weeks before the U.S. offensive began on Nov. 8.
"I am here," Janabi said. "You can see me. And if you wait for a while, you can see Omar Hadid. He is still in the city."
The Iraqi government announced the capture of another insurgent leader, Moyad Ahmed Yaseen; news of his detention had been broadcast over a Marine public address system earlier in the day. Yaseen was military leader of the First Mohammed Army, the largest militia in Fallujah, which claimed a membership of 6,000 mostly Iraqi volunteers. In announcing the capture, Ayad Allawi, Iraq's interim prime minister, said the group "killed a number of Iraqis, Arabs and foreigners in Iraq by beheadings."
"We arrested the whole leadership," he said.
Fearful of a backlash, Allawi and other Iraqi officials have dismissed suggestions of a humanitarian crisis in Fallujah, where disputed reports of civilian casualties in April unleashed anger across Iraq. They have said most families fled the city before the American assault, an assertion confirmed by some residents. Most reporting in Fallujah is limited to journalists embedded with the U.S. military.
"The Iraqi government strongly rejects suggestions from some sources that there are shortages of supplies in Fallujah," a statement from Allawi's office said.
A spokesman, Thaer Naqib, said 12 trucks carrying food, water and medical supplies entered the city Tuesday under an escort of Iraqi troops.
But Amnesty International, in a release Tuesday, said the city still lacked water, electricity and organized means for evacuating the wounded. The Iraqi Red Crescent Society has been barred from delivering relief supplies, and doctors in Fallujah complained that U.S. troops were preventing them from moving in the city to treat wounded.
Wary of the role played by mosques and Islamic parties in the April uprisings, U.S. forces and the Iraqi government have cracked down on some religious activists, suggesting that they are abetting the insurgency. On Tuesday, U.S. forces detained Naseer Ayaef, a leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party, in a pre-dawn raid on his home, said Ayad Samarrai, a spokesman for the party, which has taken part in the U.S.-led political process.
Staff writer Jackie Spinner in Fallujah and special correspondents Naseer Nouri and Bassam Sebti in Baghdad contributed to this report.
--------
INSURGENCY
U.S. Troops Move to Drive Out Rebels in North of Iraq
November 17, 2004
By EDWARD WONG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/17/international/middleeast/17iraq.html?ei=5094&en=766b3b2f2b60eff6&hp=&ex=1100754000&partner=homepage&pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 16 - The American military raced Tuesday to contain a spreading insurgency, sending hundreds of soldiers and armored vehicles into the streets of Mosul to root out bands of rebels who commandeered parts of the city last week as the Americans were battling their way through Falluja.
The struggle to retake Mosul came as the family of a kidnapped British-Iraqi aid worker, Margaret Hassan, said they believed that she was the woman shown being executed in a videotape released by insurgents. Ms. Hassan was abducted in Baghdad last month as she drove to work. She would be the first foreign female hostage in Iraq to be executed.
In a televised interview shown on the BBC, her husband, an Iraqi, pleaded with her captors to confirm her fate, saying, "I beg those people who have kidnapped Margaret to tell me what they have done with her."
The American military on Tuesday was investigating the videotaped fatal shooting of an apparently wounded and unresisting Iraqi prisoner by a marine in a Falluja mosque. After the videotape was broadcast Monday evening by NBC News, commanders removed the marine from the battlefield, and American officials braced for a wave of outrage in the Middle East as news of the videotape spread around the world.
Though a weeklong American offensive smashed the insurgents' haven of Falluja, snipers continued Tuesday to shoot at American troops roaming the debris-covered streets. Residents began to warily step out of their homes, emerging into a wasteland devastated by American bombs and bullets.
The American action in Mosul, 225 miles north of Baghdad and Iraq's third largest city, answers a burst of violence that erupted there during the offensive in Falluja.
American and Iraqi troops sealed off the five bridges spanning the Tigris River and began blocking off western neighborhoods largely inhabited by Sunni Arabs, who ruled the country in the era of Saddam Hussein. The provincial government imposed a curfew, and the main avenues appeared deserted for much of the day, witnesses said. The loudest noises came from mortar shells exploding near the American forces and helicopters buzzing above rooftops and rows of palm trees.
"It's ongoing offensive operations to eliminate all the pockets of resistance that are out there," said Lt. Col. Paul Hastings, a spokesman for Task Force Olympia, the American units charged with controlling northern Iraq. "Now we're trying to catch a wider swath of targeted areas."
The colonel said that American forces had met little resistance and that groups of insurgents appeared to melt away at the approach of the light-armored vehicles of the Stryker Brigade. But they continued carrying out attacks throughout the city, firing at Iraqi police stations, lobbing mortars at American bases and aiming suicide car bombs at American troops.
Thousands of Kurdish militiamen have entered Mosul at the request of the provincial governor, a move that could increase ethnic tensions in the diverse city, which has large numbers of Kurds, Christians and Sunni Arabs. The governor has also called in Iraqi soldiers to help establish order where the police have failed.
As the American offensive got under way in Mosul, the rebels continued their wave of assaults, with ambushes on American troops across the Sunni Triangle in Baquba and Ramadi and bombings of oil pipelines near Kirkuk.
An American soldier was killed and another wounded by a roadside bomb north of the capital, the American military said.
Iraqi officials claimed success in flushing out some insurgent leaders, saying they had captured several leaders of the Army of Muhammad, believed to be responsible for several beheadings of Iraqis and foreigners.
Al Jazeera, the Arab satellite news channel, reported Tuesday evening that it had received a videotape showing a gunman shooting to death a woman who was likely to be Ms. Hassan, the aid worker. It did not televise the videotape.
Ms. Hassan's family and British officials said they had seen a video that led them to believe she was dead.
"Our hearts are broken," Ms. Hassan's four brothers and sisters said in a statement released by the British Foreign Office. "We have kept hoping for as long as we could, but we now have to accept that Margaret Hassan has probably gone and at last her suffering has ended."
Ms. Hassan was the director of Iraq operations for the aid group CARE International and had lived in this country for more than 30 years. She was born in Dublin and received citizenship here after marrying an Iraqi man, Tahseen Ali Hassan.
A group of armed men snatched her last month as she was driving to work. She was held by an unknown group that released four videos of her. The last one, released Nov. 2, showed Ms. Hassan fainting and a gunman threatening to turn her over to the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi if Britain did not withdraw its forces within 48 hours.
"She dedicated her whole life to working for the poor and vulnerable, helping those who had no one else," her family said. "Those who are guilty of this atrocious act, and those who support them, have no excuses."
Ms. Hassan's kidnapping and that of a British engineer, Kenneth Bigley, who was beheaded by Mr. Zarqawi's group in early October, have increased the political pressure on the British prime minister, Tony Blair. The war has been hugely unpopular in Britain, and the two kidnappings have led to widespread condemnation of British participation.
With Iraq's first democratic elections scheduled to take place in January, the American military is under enormous pressure to pacify Sunni-dominated parts of Iraq, where the guerrilla uprising has grown stronger and more lethal.
Last Thursday in Mosul, up to 500 insurgents working in large groups overran a half-dozen police stations and sent hundreds of policemen fleeing. The Iraqi government is now struggling to rebuild the devastated police force.
In Baquba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, insurgents kept up attacks on American and Iraqi forces on Tuesday, a day after laying siege to police stations. The guerrillas fired rockets, mortar rounds and bullets at a center used by Iraqi security forces and American troops, wounding at least four Iraqi national guardsmen, said Capt. Bill Coppernoll, a spokesman for the First Infantry Division, charged with controlling the area. In the southern suburb of Buhritz, an insurgent stronghold, fighters ambushed an American patrol and wounded two soldiers.
Guerrillas in Ramadi, 30 miles west of Falluja, attacked American troops with small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades. The fighters later tried a suicide car bomb assault but failed. American commanders said troops killed an enemy sniper there.
Insurgents also continued attacking the country's oil infrastructure, bombing a section of the northern export pipeline carrying crude oil from the Kirkuk fields to the Turkish port in Ceyhan. Fires raged at the site of the sabotage, west of Kirkuk. The pipeline has been under constant attack since Mr. Hussein was ousted.
The sabotage of the pipeline came a day after guerrillas set fire to four oil wells near Kirkuk and attacked an oil storage tank by the section of the pipeline near Mosul. In an audio recording posted on the Internet on Monday, Mr. Zarqawi urged fighters to keep up attacks on the pipelines and remain steadfast in the broader war against the Americans.
The Iraqi interior minister, Falah al-Naqib, said Tuesday at a news conference in Baghdad that Moayed Ahmed Yassin, the leader of the Army of Muhammad, and five aides were arrested recently in the capital. Mr. Yassin was a member of Mr. Hussein's Republican Guard, Mr. Naqib said.
American and Iraqi officials have said the group was formed by Mr. Hussein in the final days of his rule to fight for the return of the Baath Party. Since the start of the insurgency, Mr. Yassin has traveled to Syria to meet with close associates of Mr. Hussein, Mr. Naqib said.
In Baghdad, Nasir Ayaef, a member of the interim National Assembly and an official in the influential Iraqi Islamic Party, was arrested, said Ayad al-Samarrai, a senior party official. Mr. Samarrai said on Al Jazeera that Mr. Ayaef had not been engaged in any criminal activity and that he had been detained because of the party's stand against American policies. Last week, the Sunni-dominated party said it was withdrawing from the interim Iraqi government to protest the invasion of Falluja.
If the party decides not to take part in the January elections, it would come as a big blow to the Americans, who are hoping for strong Sunni participation to ensure the legitimacy of the outcome.
In Mosul on Tuesday, American and Iraqi troops hoped to clamp down on the Sunni-led insurgency with their sweep of the city's troubled western half. A suicide car bomb exploded near a patrol, wounding one American soldier, said Colonel Hastings, the Army spokesman. Insurgents also lobbed mortar rounds at an American base near the airfield and at the headquarters of Task Force Olympia.
Mr. Zarqawi, the most wanted man in Iraq, may have moved his base from Falluja to Mosul, according to a new military intelligence report. Some evidence of that appeared in his latest audio recording. He praised most of the insurgents across the Sunni Triangle by calling them "lion cubs." But the fighters of Mosul, he said, were "lions."
Reporting for this article was contributed by an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from Mosul, Robert F. Worth from Falluja, Richard Oppel Jr. from Habbaniya and Sarah Lyall from London.
-------- nato
Canadian general elected to head NATO military committee
BRUSSELS (AFP)
Nov 17, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041117162545.05uvjwwa.html
The Canadian armed forces chief was Wednesday elected to take over as head of NATO's Military Committee, the alliance's highest military authority, officials said.
General Ray Henault was picked over his Danish counterpart, General Hans Jesper Helsoe, to succeed the committee's outgoing chairman, German General Harald Kujat.
"We had two excellent candidates but of course you have to choose one," Kujat told a news conference after Henault was chosen by majority vote at a meeting of chiefs of staff from NATO's 26 member states.
Canada already held the key post at the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation between 1980 and 1983. A Dane has never occupied the post.
The post traditionally goes to a European or a Canadian while US senior officers always head NATO's two strategic commands.
Canada has refused to contribute troops to the US-led coalition in Iraq but its soldiers are serving in the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan.
-------- russia / chechnya
Quietly, tide of opinion turns on Chechen war
November 17, 2004
The Christian Science Monitor
http://csmonitor.com/2004/1117/p04s01-woeu.html
MOSCOW - Every Thursday evening Lena Batenkova and a handful of other intrepid souls picket in Moscow's Pushkin Square, within sight of the Kremlin, to protest the war in Chechnya.
She's been arrested twice and often taunted for her alleged lack of patriotism, but Ms. Batenkova feels she is doing what she must to keep alive a spark of public debate over the war in Chechnya. "We are ready to picket as long as it takes, until the Chechen war is resolved peacefully," she says. "We need to talk to everyone about it."
It could appear to anyone following Russia's major media - highly influenced by the Kremlin - that Batenkova's group represents a tiny, quixotic minority. Yet independent pollster Yury Levada says that 60 percent of Russians agree with her group's central demand - that the Kremlin sit down and talk with the Chechen rebels - and that increasing numbers doubt the possibility of a military solution to the five-year-old war.
Although substantive discussion of Russia's most painful policy issue has been forced to the margins in recent years, many experts say it is not at all certain the majority prefers it that way.
"Where public debate is still possible, it goes on in a lively fashion," says Alexei Simonov, head of the Glasnost Defense Foundation, an independent media watchdog group. "The problem is that the subject of Chechnya has been driven out of most public spaces. The whole climate in this country is undergoing a deep recession."
More than 100,000 people, mostly civilians, have died since the first Chechen war began a decade ago. The second conflict has seen separatist insurgents turn to ruthless terrorism, such as September's bloody school siege in Beslan, while human rights groups charge that Russian forces and their local Chechen allies employ death squads and political prisons.
Russian mainstream media depict Chechnya as "returning to normal," and the ongoing military campaign as having no alternative. The deadly terrorist strikes here are portrayed as the work of "international terrorists" with no direct connection to the conflict in Chechnya - a view expressed by President Vladimir Putin.
"The subject of Chechnya is considered to be too sensitive for our president, and therefore the media largely refrain from any critical discussion of it," says Yury Goland, an expert with the independent Institute of International Economic and Political Studies. "It's largely a matter of self-censorship."
Mr. Goland argues that, while Kremlin control of the media is real, the overriding problem is that Russian society has ignored the war in Chechnya. "I think there is a public consensus that we cannot allow any negotiations about Chechnya's secession, for fear it would create a domino effect and spread to the rest of Russia. So people wearily agree that the use of force is the only way, and they don't want to hear anything further about it."
But the protest movement is growing and might eventually sway opinion. At Moscow's Andrei Sakharov Museum and Community Center over the past month, a steady stream of visitors passed through an exhibit of photos, bloodied clothes, and other materials devoted to the victims of a decade of "war and terrorism" in Chechnya.
"We wanted to make people think about the question: What are we fighting for?" says Yury Samodourov, the museum's director. "If a war has no clear and discernable purpose, then it's impossible to ever win it. We've had groups of cadets, military people, politicians, and many others come through here. I hope it is having an impact."
Last week one of Russia's bigger grassroots groups, the Committees of Soldiers' Mothers, transformed itself into a political party to more effectively project concerns about military conscription and the Chechnya war to the public arena. "There needs to be a flow of accurate information [about the war in Chechnya]. Questions need to be put to the authorities through the proper channels, and in the correct language. Since we no longer have anyone to do this for us, we've decided to do it ourselves," says Valentina Melnikova, chairperson of the new United Peoples' Party of Soldiers' Mothers.
Drawing sharp criticism from the Kremlin, members of the group plan to meet next week in Brussels with Akhmed Zakayev, a representative of Chechen rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov. The mothers' group wants to talk about ways to end the war in Chechnya, but Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov says the group was simply "justifying those who encourage and carry out terrorist attacks," the Associated Press reported yesterday.
A leader of Yabloko, one of the liberal parties excluded from the State Duma after last December's voting, says he sympathizes with Ms. Melnikova's frustrations over the war. "Our political field has narrowed, there is censorship in the mass media, and the war in Chechnya is a prohibited subject," says Sergei Mitrokhin, Yabloko's deputy chairman.
But last month 2,000 people attended a protest rally on the fifth anniversary of the Chechnya war - a minuscule turnout for a city of 10 million, but a sign, organizers say, the public is beginning to stir.
"There is no developed civil society in Russia, and most people are not ready to openly protest," says Lev Ponomaryov, head of the Moscow Human Rights Movement, a coalition of community groups. "But opinion surveys show the war in Chechnya does worry the population, and they do not believe a military solution there is possible. Society is sending signals to the authorities, even if they prefer, so far, not to notice."
-----
Some 148 Russian soldiers killed in Chechnya this year: defence minister
MOSCOW (AFP)
Nov 17, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041117154456.yac7olrf.html
A total of 148 Russian soldiers have died in the breakaway republic of Chechnya since the beginning of the year, bringing to 1,418 the number of soldiers killed there between January 2001 and September 2004, Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov said on Wednesday.
"After the end of the active phase of the anti-terrorist operation in the northern Caucasus, the number (of Russian soldiers) killed in 2001 was 499," he was quoted as saying on the Russian defence ministry's internet site.
"In 2002 and 2003 the number dropped respectively to 480 and 291. In the first nine months of the year the armed forces lost 148 men," he said.
The men lost come from the army working for under the defence ministry, and do not represent the overall troop losses in Chechnya, which also include interior ministry troops and security services.
Ivanov said the number of casualties was dropping every year, as fewer and fewer conscripts were being used for combat missions and commanders were picking the troops sent to Chechnya with a fine toothcomb.
Russia currently has 56,000 troops stationed in the north Caucasus republic, according to latest official figures quoted by ITAR-TASS, where they are engaged in a brutal guerrilla standoff against a few thousand warlords owing allegiance to various field commanders.
-------- space
China Plans To Have Over 100 Eyes In The Sky By 2020
Beijing (XNA)
Nov 17, 2004
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/china-04zzzf.html
China plans to launch more than 100 observation satellites before 2020. The Ministry of Science and Technology says a large surveillance network will be set up to monitor water reserves, forests, farmland, urban development and various events.
The project's main goal is to make it possible to obtain data on any event at any time from space.
China regularly sends research satellites into orbit and in October last year it became the third nation to successfully put a man in space.
Last month, the retrievable chamber of China's 20th recoverable satellite returned to Earth with a bang, crashing through the roof of a house.
And in August, China launched a satellite that carried out land and mapping surveys for several days before returning to Earth.
China says it will also establish a long-term three dimensional satellite observation system to probe the world's land, air, and oceans, China Radio International reported on Tuesday.
Sun Yanlai, director of China's National Space Administration made the comment at the 18th Plenary Meeting of Earth Observation Satellites Committee.
He added that China would produce a new generation of meteorological, resources and ocean observation satellites by 2010.
He revealed that China will also set up a small constellation for environmental and resource supervision and control.
The constellation will consist of eight small satellites. The first three will be finished by 2007, while the rest five will be completed by 2010.
The three-day Plenary Meeting of the Earth Observation Satellites Committee will focus on the latest developments in observation satellites.
----
Europe's Spacecraft Enters Lunar Orbit
Associated Press
Wednesday, November 17, 2004; Page A23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55408-2004Nov16.html
BERLIN, Nov. 16 -- A small spacecraft has made it into lunar orbit, marking a key milestone in Europe's first successful mission to the moon and setting the stage for the craft to begin studying the lunar surface, a European Space Agency spokesman said Tuesday.
The SMART-1 probe made it to within 3,100 miles of the moon Monday morning and will now begin spinning its way closer to the surface as it orbits, said ESA spokesman Franco Bonacina in Paris. By mid-January the dishwasher-size spacecraft will be in an elliptical orbit that will take it within 185 miles of the moon's south pole and 1,850 miles of the north pole, he said.
"Today we have celebrated the successful technology mission, and now we start with science -- we want to do imaging of the surface and study the chemistry of the moon," Bonacina said.
Since its launch 13 months ago, the 809-pound probe has been slowly working its way toward the moon in a mission controlled from the ESA's operations center in Darmstadt, Germany.
To reach lunar orbit, it used 130 pounds of the 181 pounds of xenon fuel it had aboard -- less than expected and a feat that has raised hopes that its ion propulsion technology can be used to send other craft longer distances.
"It works out to something like 1.24 million miles per quarter gallon, which is quite an achievement," Bonacina said.
----
NASA Buys Hydrogenics Light Weight Fuel Cell Stack To Test For Uses In Space
Toronto ON (SPX)
Nov 16, 2004
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/energy-tech-04zzzf.html
Hydrogenics Corporation has sold a light weight 5kW hydrogen/oxygen Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) fuel cell stack to the NASA Glenn Research Center, which will use it in an experimental closed cycle hydrogen-oxygen regenerative fuel cell.
This type of system can be used for energy storage in places where oxygen is not easily available, such as very high altitude, space or underwater environments. NASA will use this stack as part of its research program to understand how the regenerative fuel cell will operate in future aerospace applications.
"Our expertise and experience in this range of PEM stacks was an important part of the reason why NASA chose us," said Pierre Rivard, President and CEO of Hydrogenics Corporation.
"Hydrogenics has been developing PEM stacks for over eight years and this is a testament to the state of our proprietary technology. This sale has the potential to open the door to other sales of this light weight hydrogen fuel cell technology, particularly for aerospace and underwater applications, where weight is a consideration."
This is Hydrogenics' first hydrogen-oxygen PEM stack sale. The stack was designed to be very light, which is critical for this type of application.
The NASA Glenn Research Center is responsible for developing and transferring critical technologies that address national priorities in aero- propulsion and space applications.
Its work is focused on research for new aero-propulsion technologies, aerospace power, microgravity science, electric propulsion, and communications technologies for aeronautics, space, and aerospace applications.
-------
The Power of Light: An Airborne Laser for Missile Defense
By Tariq Malik
17 November 2004
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/airborne_laser_techwed_041117.html
The U.S. military is gearing up to test what might be the ultimate version of laser tag.
With a successful ground test in the bag, the Missile Defense Agency is pushing forward with plans for an Airborne Laser (ABL), a Boeing 747 freighter aircraft with a laser-tipped nose designed to destroy ballistic missiles as they rocket through the sky.
The defense system's primary weapon -- a megawatt-class chemical laser beam -- passed an initial ground-based test last week and a number subsystems have been integrated into the ABL aircraft, Missile Defense Agency (MDA) officials told SPACE.com. If all goes well, a integrated prototype of the Airborne Laser will soon be shooting down missiles in tests over the Pacific Ocean.
"This is a wonderful moment for the Missile Defense Agency and the proponents of a ballistic missile defense around the world," said Col. Ellen Pawlikowski, ABL program director, during a Nov. 12 statement announcing the successful ground-firing.
Under development since 1996, the $1.1-billion ABL project aims to use a powerful, turret-mounted laser to disable enemy ballistic missiles during their boost phase by heating a basket-ball sized portion of the projectile's skin until it buckles.
Because of it's speed-of-light ability to kill, the ABL is the only system under testing that is able to detect and engage enemy missiles in their most vulnerable boost phases, MDA Airborne Laser officials said in response to written questions.
The Missile Defense Agency and U.S. Air Force is working in tandem with Boeing, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin to develop the flying laser system. Boeing is providing the aircraft, battle management and system integration, while Northrup Grumman has developed the laser and Lockheed Martin the weapon's flight turret.
Some ABL developers have said integrated flight tests could occur by the end of the year. In a Nov. 12 announcement, MDA officials said tests of the ABL's main laser would take several months, as engineers fine-tune the weapon and work to increase its firing time.
Lasers in the sky
While the primary weapon behind the ABL missile defense system is its Chemical, Oxygen, Iodine Laser (COIL), the aircraft is equipped with three other lasers and six infrared sensors that detect, track and target enemy targets. None of the ABL lasers -- including its primary weapon -- are visible to the naked eye, though MDA officials said they could be imaged in the infrared spectrum.
Six COIL modules -- each the size of a Chevy Suburban sport utitlity vehicle set on end -- work together to produce ABL's megawatt energy beam, which set fire to dust particles as it burned into a metal wall during a Nov. 10 ground test at Edwards Air Force Base in California. The entire test lasted just a fraction of a second.
"What's important is that the COIL produced photons," Pawlikowski said. "This proves the laser hardware is ready to go."
The COIL system is fueled by a syrupy mix of hydrogen, oxygen and salts that combine to make Basic Hydrogen Peroxide, a volatile compound about 20 times more viscous than water, MDA officials said.
Battle management
Picking the most threatening target from a group of missiles, destroying it and moving on to the next one during a battle would have to occur faster than human gunners could operate, MDA officials said.
MDA designers anticipate enemy missiles to travel an average of about 4,000 miles (6,437 kilometers) an hour, and require a firing system capably of destroying those targets from distance of 100 miles (160 kilometers).
Instead, a computerized battle management system developed by Boeing controls the system, with human weapons crewmembers setting operational limits and providing any necessary mission modifications in flight. The system has successfully tracked Minutemen 2 and Lance missiles, as well as the afterburner plumes of F-16 jets.
MDA officials said the first ABL aircraft will serve as a research and development prototype, though it may have some "residual operational capability" once testing is complete.
Building the turret
Once ground tests are completed, the COIL modules will be installed in the aft end of the ABL aircraft, which Boeing engineers have extensively modified to handle the missile defense system. MDA officials said aircraft engineers left almost no part of the freighter untouched during its two-year refitting.
Perhaps the aircraft's most noticeable outward change to Boeing's 747-400 freighter is the bulbous turret that houses a 5-foot (1.5-meter) telescope serving as the exit point for the ABL weapon.
Designed to whip around and target enemy missiles, the ball-shaped turret is 10 feet (3 meters) in diameter and housed in an assembly that stretches 14 feet (4.2 meters) long, said Paul Shattuck, ABL technical lead at Lockheed Martin, in a telephone interview.
Composite materials keep the turret's weight to about 11,000 pounds (4,989 kilograms) which while heavy is much less than if it were built out of aluminum or other traditional aircraft materials, he added.
"This is all first-of-a-kind hardware," Shattuck said. "I'm excited and I can't wait to get it in the air."
Military Space: Archive of SPACE.com Stories http://www.space.com/news/defense_news_archive.html
-------- spies
CIA Says It Will Not Get Mixed Up in Policy
(Reuters)
By Tabassum Zakaria
Nov 17, 2004
http://olympics.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=6845007
WASHINGTON - The CIA denied on Wednesday that its new director had told the spy agency to shape intelligence to support the policies of President Bush.
The agency was responding to a report in The New York Times which said CIA Director Porter Goss had told his staff to back Bush, a sharp departure for an agency that is supposed to stick to facts and stay out of policy judgments.
Critics have pointed at the resignations of some top CIA officials as a sign that Goss and his advisers who came with him from Capitol Hill were acting in a partisan manner.
There have also been some suspicions at the White House that the CIA leaked negative information about Iraq before the November election to hurt Bush.
The White House and CIA said the full e-mail sent by Goss to the workforce on Monday put the comments in context, but neither released it.
"I also intend to clarify beyond doubt the rules of the road. We support the administration and its policies in our work. As agency employees we do not identify with, support, or champion opposition to the administration or its policies. We provide the intelligence as we see it -- and let the facts alone speak to the policymaker," Goss said in the e-mail, as read by a source.
A CIA spokesman said that comment did not mean that the CIA was now expected to take policy positions.
"What that passage means is that when we are asked to provide intelligence on a particular issue, we do so without shading or shaping the information in any way, that is what intelligence support to the administration means," the CIA spokesman said.
"It does not mean taking positions on policy pro or con, that is not what this agency does, we are a policy-neutral organization," he said.
Ever since Goss was chosen as the new CIA director he has been dogged by critics raising questions about whether the former Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee could be nonpartisan in running an agency that is expected to provide independent assessments to policymakers.
"We do not make policy though we do inform those who make it. We avoid political involvement, especially political partisanship," Goss said in the e-mail.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said some people had "misconstrued" the Goss e-mail and that the CIA's role was to provide unvarnished facts and objective analysis to policymakers. "He (Goss) was not talking about advocacy one way or the other," McClellan said.
He also said that during the presidential campaign there was "a lot of media coverage from anonymous sources talking about intelligence matters and talking about classified information in some instances," but did not point the finger at CIA as being responsible for that.
-----
Clarke: CIA had low-level spies inside al-Qaida
Former official said some intel was in place three years before 9/11
Reuters
Nov. 17, 2004
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6516592/
WASHINGTON - The CIA had some low-level spies inside al-Qaida in the three years before the Sept. 11 attacks, but none who could provide advance information about the group's movements, according to testimony released on Wednesday from a closed-door intelligence briefing in 2002.
The CIA did not have spies inside the network run by Osama bin Laden until 1999, but "none of them very high-level," Richard Clarke, a former White House counterterrorism official, told the joint congressional committee investigating Sept. 11.
In a rare move, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a 103-page declassified transcript of the June 11, 2002, closed-door briefing on its Web site late on Wednesday. Most of the information had been made public during subsequent open hearings and in the final report of the joint inquiry.
The CIA "never had anyone in position to tell us what was going to happen in advance, or even where bin Laden was going to be in advance," Clarke told lawmakers.
On the three occasions when they thought they knew bin Laden's location, the CIA opposed taking military action, saying its sources were not good enough, he said.
"I think it is very difficult to place human sources high up in al-Qaida. I think it is possible to develop low-level sources. I think it is possible to develop technical means of collection that may provide us with information," Clarke said.
Several times in the 1990s the Pentagon was asked to "snatch" terrorism suspects overseas, but the main message to the White House from uniformed military leadership was that they did not want to do this, Clarke said.
Lost chance in Khartoum He said a leading al-Qaida operative had been pinpointed in Khartoum. "We knew what hotel he was in. We knew what room he was in in the hotel."
The CIA did not have snatch capability and the military leadership told the White House that it would never work, while telling subordinates who had planned an operation that the White House had stopped it, Clarke said.
Asked how much information was obtained from hundreds of terrorism suspects held by other countries in the late 1990s, Clarke replied: "That depends on the country. If they were held in a West European democracy, we didn't get very much information."
He said the National Security Agency does not gather intelligence in Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
--------
Spy scandal rocks Paris
AFP
17 nov 04
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,11407196%255E663,00.html
A DOZEN former government officials and police officers have gone on trial for tapping phones so late president Francois Mitterrand could keep tabs on personal enemies.
The affair is described as France's equivalent of the Watergate scandal.
An astonishing 22 years after the undercover listening-room was set up at the Elysee Palace, the 12 - who include the head of Renault, Louis Schweitzer - are accused of breach of privacy and face a maximum sentence of a year in jail and a fine of $76,000.
Conceived in 1982 as a specialist anti-terrorist unit answerable to the President, the team eavesdropped on journalists, lawyers and businessmen to uncover embarrassing information and snuff out potential scandals.
Even the actor and Chanel model Carole Bouquet became a target.
At the trial, to last three months, the defendants are expected to argue they were following orders from Mitterrand and other politicians, none of whom has faced charges in the affair.
"Our tool was diverted for political ends, for dirty police work, for manipulation. The orders came from Mitterrand's office.
"I always denounced the abuses," said the unit's deputy chief Paul Barril, one of the accused.
Among public figures scrutinised during the unit's three years was Edwy Planel, editor-in-chief of Le Monde newspaper, who at the time was investigating claims (since shown to be true) that Barril and others framed evidence against alleged Irish terrorists.
Another target was the late writer Jean-Edern Hallier, who was threatening to publish the story of Mitterrand's secret daughter Mazarine.
On one occasion the Elysee allegedly learned Hallier was to appear on a TV chat-show and it had the program cancelled.
The existence of the secret listening-room was not revealed until 1993, when it confirmed for many in France the arrogance and intrigue of the Mitterrand era. Government secrecy orders had since kept the affair dark.
-----
Pentagon cheers CIA shake-up
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Rowan Scarborough
November 17, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20041117-123335-5881r.htm
The ongoing shake-up at the CIA is a welcome development for senior Pentagon officials that promises to end the agency's below-the-radar opposition to some aspects of President Bush's war on terrorism.
Defense Department sources privately complained that parts of the CIA's entrenched bureaucracy of analysts opposed the military's large role in a war against al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.
Before the September 11 attacks, the CIA had the lead in hunting al Qaeda. Afterward, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld took over that role and put the military on a terrorist-hunting mission that trespassed on some CIA roles.
"Let's just say that a lot of folks over there were still committed to a pre-9/11 way of doing things," said a Pentagon adviser who has played a significant role in forming counterterror policy. "It still hasn't changed."
The adviser added: "They did not want to combine capabilities within the CIA that could improve their analysis and operations in Afghanistan and elsewhere."
A former senior Pentagon policy-maker said that in discussions with the CIA some analysts left the impression they still did not realize al Qaeda's growing threat.
"The feeling in the Pentagon was we had been saying for some time that these guys were dangerous and we didn't get any backing from the CIA," said the former official, who asked not to be named because he still does business with the Bush administration. "They had neglected the operational decision that they needed to go after these terrorists. If they saw terrorism as a threat, they ... sure didn't act as if they had to respond to it."
Defense officials said that while Mr. Rumsfeld and former CIA director George J. Tenet maintained a good working relationship, contacts between Pentagon policy-makers and CIA rank-and-file analysts were often testy.
They say analysts expressed opposition to going to war with Iraq and filed overly pessimistic reports that seemed to always leak to the liberal press.
One senior official told The Washington Times last year of an Iraq station chief's dire predictions on Iraq. The station chief's report leaked to the press within days of its arrival in Washington. What seemed odd to this Pentagon official was that the dispatch contained a long list of "CCs" all the way down to Navy battle group commanders at sea, meaning tens of thousands saw the report.
"This report was designed to leak," the official charged.
Today, the CIA's Langley headquarters is in the throes of a major shake-up. New agency director Porter J. Goss, a former Republican congressman and CIA officer, has seen three top officials - deputy director John McLaughlin and two top clandestine officers - abruptly resign in the past week.
Mr. Goss, who chaired the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, publicly has criticized the CIA for a lackluster operations branch that has failed to recruit agents who can penetrate Islamist groups. Critics say Mr. Goss needs to change the culture at Langley.
"We were unable to recruit agents in the Middle East, so we had to rely on other countries' agencies," said the former Pentagon official who read the intelligence take. "We ought to rely on our own people, not just the intelligence of other countries. You don't really have a picture of where it's coming from."
This source said many reports on terrorists come from the intelligence services of Egypt, Jordan and Israel.
Pentagon officials said Mr. Rumsfeld was not always happy with the CIA's performance in the field. In response, he has worked to give U.S. Special Operations Command authority to collect its own intelligence on which commandos can act in hours or days to kill or capture terrorists.
Officials said Mr. Rumsfeld believed CIA paramilitary officers were too slow to prepare the battle space in the fall of 2001 before the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and ousted the Taliban. In fact, the CIA's paramilitary force was so poorly staffed, they said the Pentagon was forced to transfer scores of active duty special operations personnel to the CIA to fill out the army.
Mr. Rumsfeld signed a secret order to the Joint Chiefs and U.S. Special Operations Command in July 2002 authorizing commandos to perform some spying activities. Since then, SoCom has increased intelligence training for Green Berets at Fort Bragg, N.C., and Fort Lewis, Wash.
A joint Senate-House Intelligence Committee report in 2002 disclosed that the CIA was never able to have a spy inside senior al Qaeda circles.
"Former [Counter-Terrorism Center] officers told the joint inquiry that before September 11 the CIA had no penetration of al Qaeda leadership, and the agency never got actionable intelligence," said the panel's report.
Meanwhile, some in the Pentagon are amused at complaints coming from the CIA about the rough treatment they are getting from Mr. Goss' imported personal staff.
A defense intelligence official said: "The CIA operations directorate should stop whining. If they can't stand up to a group of Hill staffers, how can they be expected to stand up to al Qaeda?"
----
New C.I.A. Chief Tells Workers to Back Administration Policies
November 17, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/17/politics/17intel.html?hp&ex=1100754000&en=5bc2d0eb4566e227&ei=5094&partner=homepage
WASHINGTON, Nov. 16 - Porter J. Goss, the new intelligence chief, has told Central Intelligence Agency employees that their job is to "support the administration and its policies in our work,'' a copy of an internal memorandum shows.
"As agency employees we do not identify with, support or champion opposition to the administration or its policies," Mr. Goss said in the memorandum, which was circulated late on Monday. He said in the document that he was seeking "to clarify beyond doubt the rules of the road."
While his words could be construed as urging analysts to conform with administration policies, Mr. Goss also wrote, "We provide the intelligence as we see it - and let the facts alone speak to the policymaker.''
The memorandum suggested an effort by Mr. Goss to spell out his thinking as he embarked on what he made clear would be a major overhaul at the agency, with further changes to come. The changes to date, including the ouster of the agency's clandestine service chief, have left current and former intelligence officials angry and unnerved. Some have been outspoken, including those who said Tuesday that they regarded Mr. Goss's warning as part of an effort to suppress dissent within the organization.
In recent weeks, White House officials have complained that some C.I.A. officials have sought to undermine President Bush and his policies.
At a minimum, Mr. Goss's memorandum appeared to be a swipe against an agency decision under George J. Tenet, his predecessor as director of central intelligence, to permit a senior analyst at the agency, Michael Scheuer, to write a book and grant interviews that were critical of the Bush administration's policies on terrorism.
One former intelligence official said he saw nothing inappropriate in Mr. Goss's warning, noting that the C.I.A. had long tried to distance itself and its employees from policy matters.
"Mike exploited a seam in the rules and inappropriately used it to express his own policy views,'' the official said of Mr. Scheuer. "That did serious damage to the agency, because many people, including some in the White House, thought that he was being urged by the agency to take on the president. I know that was not the case.''
But a second former intelligence official said he was concerned that the memorandum and the changes represented an effort by Mr. Goss to stifle independence.
"If Goss is asking people to color their views and be a team player, that's not what people at C.I.A. signed up for,'' said the former intelligence official. The official and others interviewed in recent days spoke on condition that they not be named, saying they did not want to inflame tensions at the agency.
Some of the contents of Mr. Goss's memorandum were first reported by The Washington Post. A complete copy of the document was obtained on Tuesday by The New York Times.
Tensions between the agency's new leadership team, which took over in late September, and senior career officials are more intense than at any time since the late 1970's. The most significant changes so far have been the resignations on Monday of Stephen R. Kappes, the deputy director of operations, and his deputy, Michael Sulick, but Mr. Goss told agency employees in the memorandum that he planned further changes "in the days and weeks ahead of us'' that would involve "procedures, organization, senior personnel and areas of focus for our action.''
"I am committed to sharing these changes with you as they occur,'' Mr. Goss said in the memorandum. "I do understand it is easy to be distracted by both the nature and the pace of change. I am confident, however, that you will remain deeply committed to our mission.''
Mr. Goss's memorandum included a reminder that C.I.A. employees should "scrupulously honor our secrecy oath'' by allowing the agency's public affairs office and its Congressional relations branch to take the lead in all contacts with the media and with Congress. "We remain a secret organization,'' he said.
Among the moves that Mr. Goss said he was weighing was the selection of a candidate to become the agency's No. 2 official, the deputy director of central intelligence. The name being mentioned most often within the C.I.A. as a candidate, intelligence officials said, is Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden of the Air Force, the director of the National Security Agency, which is responsible for intercepting electronic communications worldwide. The naming of a deputy director would be made by the White House, in a nomination subject to Senate confirmation.
In interviews this week, members of Congress as well as current and former intelligence officials said one reason the overhaul under way had left them unnerved was that Mr. Goss had not made clear what kind of agency he intended to put in place. But Mr. Goss's memorandum did little to spell out that vision, and it did not make clear why the focus of overhaul efforts to date appeared to be on the operations directorate, which carries out spying and other covert missions around the world.
"It's just very hard to divine what's going on over there,'' said Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, who said he and other members of the Senate intelligence committee would be seeking answers at closed sessions this week. "But on issue after issue, there's a real question about whether the country and the Congress are going to get an unvarnished picture of our intelligence situation at a critical time.''
Mr. Goss said in the memorandum that he recognized that intelligence officers were operating in an atmosphere of extraordinary pressures, after a series of reports critical of intelligence agencies' performance in the months leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks and the war in Iraq.
"The I.C. and its people have been relentlessly scrutinized and criticized,'' he said, using an abbreviation for intelligence community. "Intelligence-related issues have become the fodder of partisan food fights and turf-power skirmishes. All the while, the demand for our services and products against a ruthless and unconventional enemy has expanded geometrically and we are expected to deliver - instantly. We have reason to be proud of our achievements and we need to be smarter about how we do our work in this operational climate.''
-------- us
How They Count the Enemy Dead Why's it so hard? Let us count the ways.
slate.msn.com
By Phillip Carter
Nov. 17, 2004
http://slate.msn.com/id/2109871/fr/rss/
In the battle of Fallujah, U.S. military commanders say they killed between 1,000 to 1,200 or 1,200 to 1,600 enemy fighters, depending on your news source. However, embedded correspondents in the field reported that Army and Marine Corps units found fewer enemy bodies in Fallujah than they expected. How exactly does the military determine its body counts?
As a matter of policy, the U.S. military does not officially track enemy killed in action. But the headquarters responsible for an individual campaign-the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, in the case of Fallujah-often does compile such figures, which explains why they sometimes appear in the papers. After a campaign, the headquarters will pull together reports from every unit in the fight to create one big estimate of the enemy's casualties for the entire operation.
Individual units send in several kinds of reports. The lowest-tech-and most reliable-way to determine enemy KIA is to physically count dead enemy corpses. After a military unit seizes an area, such as Fallujah, the troops will report to their headquarters the number of bodies they see left behind. However, this number usually undercounts the dead because most militaries try not to leave their fallen on the ground. This count also misses wounded soldiers who were evacuated for medical treatment and died later, and enemy soldiers directly hit by high-explosive ordnance, such as an artillery shell or 2,000-pound bomb. In such instances, there's little left to count when the battle's over.
The folks at headquarters also rely on "contact reports" from engaged units. For example, an infantry platoon fighting insurgents will radio (or sometimes e-mail) its headquarters to let them know about the fight and, once done, about the outcome. In addition to data like the time and place of the engagement, contact reports usually include a quantification of enemy casualties, estimated by the platoon commander (or another battlefield leader) based on what he and his troops saw first-hand during the fight. So, if a soldier shot an insurgent and believes he killed him, the platoon commander might include the death in his contact-report tally, even if the unit is unable to physically search the battleground and confirm it when the conflict ends. If his troops destroyed an enemy vehicle, the commander will usually estimate the number of dead inside and include them, too. (Such estimates are often based on the usual size of a given vehicle's crew.) A Marine Corps colonel in Iraq said such reports were fairly reliable in Fallujah, because of the close range of the fighting-but were still inexact. "A report of '20 [enemy KIA]' may be anywhere from 15 to 25" in reality, he said, because the stress and fog of war can obscure what troops see in battle.
The headquarters body counts also include enemy troops (and often civilians) killed by artillery bombardments or airstrikes. Although shooters in these situations can't always see their targets, intelligence analysts rely on observations of the target before and after the strike. Usually, such information is relayed by the person observing the target and calling for the artillery. In Fallujah, military analysts also relied on the camera feeds from unmanned aerial vehicles flying constantly over the city. Analysts watch buildings carefully over the course of a day to see how many people went in and out and guess how many were in when a particular bomb hit. Intelligence staffs at varying levels of command also pore over these "bomb damage assessments" to correlate them and produce a total number of KIA that comes as close as possible to the true number.
The U.S. military as a whole doesn't formally compile these numbers because it is reluctant to use them to measure its success or failure in battle. On Monday, the operations officer for the Marines in Fallujah told reporters, "I don't really like to ever, and nor will I ever, go through enemy killed in action." This reticence can be traced back to the Vietnam War and the significant problems that emerged during that conflict when Defense Secretary Robert McNamara overemphasized body counts as a metric of success.
Next question?
Explainer thanks John Pike of the think tank GlobalSecurity.org, and 1st Lt. Catherine Wallace of U.S. Central Command.
Phillip Carter is a former U.S. Army officer who now writes on legal and military affairs in Los Angeles. Photograph of Marines on the Slate home page by Patrick Baz/Agence France-Presse.
-----
Air Force leader quits; Army chief confirmed
ASSOCIATED PRESS
November 17, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20041116-115228-3373r.htm
Air Force Secretary James Roche resigned yesterday, and the Senate confirmed defense industry executive Francis J. Harvey as secretary of the Army, the service's top civilian post.
The roll-call vote on Mr. Harvey was 85-12, capping a long, convoluted series of moves that began in May 2003 when Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld fired Thomas White from the Army secretary job. The defense secretary then asked Mr. Roche to give up his Air Force post to replace Mr. White.
Mr. Roche was nominated for the Army post, but got caught up in a series of conflicts with members of Congress over contracting decisions and other issues. He withdrew his nomination and remained as secretary of the Air Force.
It was widely expected that Mr. Roche would leave the Air Force before President Bush began a second term.
Mr. Roche said, "We have successfully met many pressing national-security issues facing the nation and the Air Force, especially in the global war on terrorism."
There was no word on a likely successor. The Pentagon said Mr. Roche planned to leave Jan. 20, or sooner in the unlikely event that the Senate confirms a successor by then.
Mr. Harvey was nominated two months ago, but his Senate confirmation vote was put off until after the Nov. 2 elections.
He replaces Mr. White, who was fired by Mr. Rumsfeld on May 9, 2003, after a series of disputes over the scope and pace of the Army's force modernization.
The Army's No. 2 civilian official, Les Brownlee, has been serving as the acting Army secretary.
-----
Arabs outraged by US marine's 'war crime' against Fallujah Iraqi
DUBAI (AFP)
Nov 17, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041117144126.llyc6qz4.html
Arabs voiced outrage Wednesday at the apparent shooting of an unarmed Iraqi by a US marine in Fallujah, calling for an immediate investigation of this "war crime".
US and other television channels this week broadcast footage that appeared to show a marine shooting an unarmed and wounded Iraqi at point blank range in a mosque in Fallujah, where a massive US-led assault began over a week ago.
The Arab League called for "an immediate enquiry into this incident and for the soldier who committed this act, considered a war crime, to be severely punished," if he is found guilty, said spokesman Hossam Zaki.
The US military said Tuesday that it had opened an investigation into the incident but that the soldier involved had been withdrawn from the battlefield.
Zaki also called for investigations into similar incidents in Fallujah and in other Iraqi cities which have not been revealed through the media.
Lebanon's fundamentalist Shiite Muslim movement Hezbollah also condemned the "crime against humanity" saying it showed the values that the United States wants to "install in Iraqi cities and throughout the rest of the region."
Newspapers across the region also vehemently condemned the action.
"This footage reveals the most atrocious war crimes and shameful human rights violations, which are unworthy of those who present themselves as defenders of freedom, democracy and human rights," said Al-Bayan in the United Arab Emirates.
The Abu Dhabi newspaper Al-Ittihad wrote that "international public opinion calls on American to swiftly arrange the trial, in total transparency, of the soldier who committed this crime."
"If this crime goes unpunished, it will be a dangerous precedent in American policy. This crime will then wipe out everything that America has done for Iraq," added the editorial.
In Saudi Arabi, the Al-Jazeera daily said that "the world sees only a tiny slice of the war crimes committed in Fallujah."
"Where are the human rights that the American administration vaunts itself on and which it uses as a sword of Damocles against anyone who opposes them?" asked Qatar's Al-Sharq newspaper.
Jordan's Al-Dustur newspaper called for an investigation into "massacres" committed in Fallujah.
"The danger in what is happening in Fallujah is that it will pave the way for new massacres in other cities and towns in Iraq, unless the international community acts to open an independent investigation into American war crimes against the Iraqi people," Al-Dustur said.
Newspapers in Egypt preferred not to editorialise on the incident, although headlines spoke for themselves, with Al-Akhbar and Al-Ahram carrying "war crime" on their front pages and Al-Gomhuriya writing about "butchery" and "genocide" in Fallujah.
Meanwhile, Israel's Haaretz newspaper published a reaction from its military analyst, Zeev Schiff, under the headline "Let's not learn from the Americans", accusing the Americans of "hypocrisy" because they "use morality to forbid others from doing what they do".
--------
Roche, Top Aide Plan to Resign Air Force Posts
Secretary, Acquisitions Chief Are Criticized on Boeing Deal
By R. Jeffrey Smith and Renae Merle
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, November 17, 2004; Page A11
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55154-2004Nov16.html
Air Force Secretary James G. Roche and the service's senior weapons acquisition manager plan to resign before the start of the second Bush administration, senior Defense Department officials said yesterday.
Roche and Air Force assistant secretary for acquisitions Marvin R. Sambur were involved in the past three years in a scandal-ridden proposal to lease new fuel tanker aircraft for the Air Force from the Boeing Co. The lease program has been blocked by Congress, and two top officials from Boeing and the Air Force have pleaded guilty in federal court to ethics violations; related investigations are underway.
Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman said neither Roche nor Sambur was pushed and that both were leaving "on their own volition. . . . Both have served well." In a statement, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Roche "led the Air Force during an important period in history. . . . I thank him for his service and wish him all the best."
Rumsfeld sought last year to shift Roche from the Air Force to the Army's top civilian post but ran into stiff opposition from lawmakers, including Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), causing Roche to withdraw his nomination. Yesterday, the Senate voted 85 to 12 to confirm Francis J. Harvey, a Maryland businessman, as the new Army secretary.
McCain, a member of the Armed Services Committee, has fiercely opposed the tanker leasing deal, calling it a costly government gift to Boeing; he has criticized Roche and Sambur for promoting the deal.
Internal Air Force e-mails reviewed by McCain have shown that Roche opposed conducting a mandated review of alternatives to the leasing deal. Sambur promoted a procurement strategy that the Pentagon's inspector general called "inappropriate" and unnecessarily risky.
In a statement Monday, following the guilty plea of former Boeing executive Michael M. Sears, McCain said "the conduct of the Air Force leadership in touting the 'merits' of this $30 billion deal requires further scrutiny. The chapter on the tanker lease proposal cannot be closed until all the stewards of taxpayer funds who committed wrongdoing are held accountable."
Roche, a 23-year Navy veteran and former Northrop Grumman Corp. executive, yesterday issued a statement highlighting his efforts to reform the Air Force Academy, which was beset by accusations of sexual harassment, and to supervise the development and production of a new generation of fighter planes -- the F/A-22 and F-35, which are to replace the F-15 and F-16.
Officials said the Pentagon's inspector general is reviewing a May 2003 e-mail exchange about the Boeing lease plan between Roche and Robin Cleveland, the Office of Management and Budget's national security chief, in which Roche offered to recommend Cleveland's brother for a position at Northrop Grumman. Northrop has said Cleveland's brother interviewed for a position but was not hired.
"Doctor Roche is confident that the IG will find nothing criminal or unethical in the course of their investigation," said William Nichols, an Air Force spokesman.
Sambur, an electrical engineer who was president and chief executive of defense work for ITT Industries Inc. of McLean, said in an interview last week, "I will tell you that I said at the beginning that one term would probably be it for me. This job takes a lot out of you."
--------
BODY IN A MOSQUE
Marine Set for Questioning in Wounded Iraqi's Shooting
November 17, 2004
By ERIC SCHMITT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/17/international/middleeast/17mosque.html?oref=login
WASHINGTON, Nov. 16 - The marine who shot and apparently killed a wounded Iraqi prisoner in a mosque in Falluja on Saturday has been removed from the battlefield for questioning, and American commanders in Iraq said they were bracing for a wave of outrage in the Middle East after the broadcast of the videotaped shooting.
Senior military officials and human rights advocates, including those often critical of the armed services, cautioned that the graphic videotape of the shooting, taken by a pool correspondent, Kevin Sites, a freelance cameraman working for NBC News, left many questions unanswered and underscored the confusion of urban warfare.
Agents from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service have taken over the inquiry, a senior Pentagon official said, and will determine whether the marine believed he was acting in self-defense when he yelled that the Iraqi was only pretending to be dead and fired at the prone body.
It is unclear from watching an unedited version of the videotape whether the prisoner was moving before the shot. A senior Pentagon official said Tuesday that an autopsy might be required to help determine whether the man was dead or alive when the marine shot him.
The inquiry will also have to determine what happened to the other Iraqis in the room. Some of them, according to the initial NBC report, appeared to be dead or dying when Mr. Sites entered with a group of marines, joining other marines who were already there. He has suggested that the other Iraqis may have been shot just before he entered, according to The Associated Press.
On Tuesday, Mr. Sites declined to elaborate on what he had seen.
After the on-camera shooting, marines pointed their guns at another prone Iraqi who was reaching out weakly with one hand, but they backed off without shooting at him, the videotape showed.
The initial NBC report said that the Iraqis, all of whom had been wounded in fighting on Friday and then had been disarmed and left in the mosque, did not appear to be threatening, and that there were no weapons visible in the room.
The incident captured in the NBC report unfolded as members of the Third Battalion, First Regiment of the First Marine Division entered the unidentified mosque in Falluja on Saturday. Mr. Sites reported that marines from a different unit had attacked the building on Friday after coming under fire, killing 10 insurgents and wounding 5 others. The marines treated the wounded on Friday, took their weapons and then left, Mr. Sites reported. On Saturday, another group of marines, accompanied by Mr. Sites, entered the mosque, but it is unclear how many of the Iraqis were still alive then.
"Obviously, the shooting of an incapacitated detainee is a fundamental violation of the Law of Armed Conflict," said James D. Ross, senior legal adviser to Human Rights Watch. "But if someone feigns being incapacitated or killed, and then uses that to trick someone and shoot them, that's a war crime, and might justify the shooting."
Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top American commander in Iraq, said Tuesday: "It's being investigated, and justice will be done. That's the way we operate."
The marine, whom the military has not identified, is now at the Marine Corps' main headquarters at Camp Falluja, about three miles east of Falluja, two military officials said.
Other senior officers, while not defending the marine's actions, said that there had been instances in Falluja in which insurgents' bodies had been booby-trapped and that some fighters wore vests with explosives for possible suicide attacks if they came into contact with Americans.
"It is hard for anyone to imagine the stress of urban combat - the fatigue, the threat, the noise, the filth, the death," a senior Marine officer said Tuesday. "But if the incident turns out to have occurred as it appeared in the video, then it is inexcusable. Understandable perhaps, but not excusable."
Florian Westphal, a spokesman for the International Committee for the Red Cross, said it was not clear what had happened in the mosque, based solely on the videotape.
"We cannot, on the basis of TV images, no matter how disturbing and disconcerting they are, arrive at a judgment about an incident," Mr. Westphal told The A.P. "We were not on the spot, so we cannot be aware of all the circumstances."
As Marine commanders in Iraq rushed to learn details of the shooting incident, Al Jazeera broadcast the unedited version of the footage, complete with a name visible on one marine's backpack and the faces of the marines, which were not shown on American networks.
Several commanders voiced concern that no matter what the inquiry determined, the incident had handed the Iraqi insurgency a huge propaganda victory.
The situation in the videotape appears to resemble two earlier incidents in Iraq. One, in Kufa last May, resulted in charges of murder and dereliction of duty against an officer in the Army's First Armored Division. In that incident, Capt. Rogelio M. Maynulet shot the wounded driver of the militant Shiite leader Moktada al-Sadr. Captain Maynulet then told a fellow officer that the man was so badly wounded, with part of his skull blown away, that he had shot him out of compassion.
On Monday, the Army's First Cavalry Division announced that Second Lt. Erick J. Anderson of the First Battalion, 41st Infantry Regiment, had been charged with murder in the death of a 16-year-old Iraqi, who had been badly wounded in Baghdad on Aug. 18.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- drug war
Judge Questions Long Sentence in Drug Case
November 17, 2004
By NICK MADIGAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/17/national/17sentencing.html
SALT LAKE CITY, Nov. 16 - In a case that has spurred intense soul-searching in legal circles, a 25-year-old convicted drug dealer, who was arrested two years ago for selling small bags of marijuana to a police informant, was sentenced on Tuesday to 55 years in prison.
The judge who sentenced him, Paul G. Cassell of the United States District Court here, said that he pronounced the sentence "reluctantly" but that his hands were tied by a mandatory-minimum law that required the imposition of 55 years on Weldon H. Angelos because he had a gun during at least two of the drug transactions.
"I have no choice," Judge Cassell said to Mr. Angelos, who seemed frozen in place as the extent of the sentence became apparent.
The judge then urged Mr. Angelos's lawyer, Jerome H. Mooney, not only to appeal his decision but to ask President Bush for clemency once all appeals were exhausted. He also urged Congress to set aside the law that made the sentence mandatory.
Judge Cassell said that sentencing Mr. Angelos to prison until he is 70 years old was "unjust, cruel and even irrational," but that the law that forced him to do so had not proved to be unconstitutional and thus had to stand. The sentence was all the more ironic, he said, because only two hours earlier he had been legally able to impose a sentence of 22 years on a man convicted of aggravated second-degree murder for beating an elderly woman to death with a log. That crime, he argued, was far more serious.
Mr. Angelos's wife, Zandrah, who sat in court with the couple's two boys, aged 5 and 7, began crying. "He might as well have killed someone," she said bitterly, wiping her eyes, referring to her husband. "He should have done worse than he did if he was going to get 55 years."
The question of Mr. Angelos's sentence was at the center of a debate as to whether it was fair to send a minor drug dealer to prison for 55 years when a murderer, rapist or terrorist, according to the same sentencing directives, would ordinarily receive no more than about 25 years.
During a court hearing in September, Judge Cassell posed a question to the opposing legal teams in the case: "Is there a rational basis," he asked, "for giving Mr. Angelos more time than the hijacker, the murderer, the rapist?"
The sentence against Mr. Angelos, the founder of the rap music label Extravagant Records, stemmed from his conviction on three counts of possession of a firearm while engaged in drug trafficking. The first count carried a mandatory five-year sentence, with each subsequent count calling for 25 years.
According to trial testimony, Mr. Angelos was carrying a pistol in an ankle holster while selling marijuana. He was not accused of brandishing the weapon or threatening anyone with it.
But in court on Tuesday, Robert Lund, an assistant United States attorney who prosecuted the case, called Mr. Angelos a "purveyor of poison," and said he had been dealing drugs for more than four years before his arrest. Carrying a gun in the commission of such crimes, he said, meant that Mr. Angelos was prepared "to kill other human beings."
----
Man With Pot Given Choice: Jail or Military
November 17, 2004
(AP)
http://www.kron.com/Global/story.asp?S=2579902
SALINAS, Calif. -- A Salinas man will have to choose between going to jail or joining the military as his punishment for possession of marijuana.
A judge surprised both the prosecution and defense yesterday when he told Brian Barr that he could avoid a jail term by enlisting in the military.
The 24-year-old Barr was charged with marijuana possession after shooting a would-be robber who had entered his apartment with two others.
Police say Barr sold marijuana from his home, and that the three men were searching for money and marijuana.
In giving Barr a choice of sentence, Monterey County Judge Robert Moody said that the shooting was justified.
Barr is scheduled to return to court next month.
-------- homeland security / national intelligence
U.S. Capitol Checkpoints Return, as Do Complaints
By Sari Horwitz and Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, November 17, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54774-2004Nov16.html
U.S. Capitol Police reinstated 14 traffic checkpoints yesterday and announced that police posts will be deployed intermittently around Capitol Hill for the foreseeable future to deter potential terrorists.
Capitol officials said there was no new intelligence driving the changes. The checkpoints first appeared in August and were disbanded just six days ago as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security lowered the terrorist threat level around financial centers in Washington, New York and New Jersey. At the time, officials warned that they could return suddenly.
Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton is unhappy that Capitol Police reinstated the checkpoints without consulting D.C. officials. (File Photo)
The move drew a new round of protests from Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), who said federal police ignored the views of District leaders and failed again to consult with city agencies before making the decision.
"I hope that a new form of military-type checkpoint security around the Capitol is not creeping permanently into place," Norton said, calling for a House Administration Committee hearing into "primitive" police tactics. She decried "security measures that bear no relationship to alerts, intelligence or calculations of risk and that appear to have little effectiveness as a deterrent to attacks on the Capitol complex."
The changes indicate that security will continue to tighten in the region and that congressional and administrative efforts to coordinate actions among federal, District, Maryland and Virginia officials remain incomplete.
U.S. Capitol Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer had said last week that the checkpoints were part of a broader law enforcement strategy and that he would resurrect them at random to adjust to threats and throw would-be terrorists off balance. The quick return took commuters by surprise yesterday and created traffic bottlenecks.
Capitol Police could change the location and number of checkpoints in the future and without any public notice, Gainer said. He acknowledged that motorists will encounter different traffic patterns on different days.
"Counter-terrorism requires some cloak and dagger," he said. "We aim to discombobulate our adversaries. I think we do that by being vigilant but unpredictable."
Police union officials have complained that officers are worn out from working 12-hour shifts and being called to duty on days off. Rotating deployments will reduce "wear and tear on the officers" and labor costs, Gainer said.
Told of Norton's criticism, Gainer said, "One out of 435 yelling isn't that bad," referring to the membership of the House. "I know she's upset."
Williams is "very disappointed," his spokeswoman said, adding that D.C. officials were notified of Gainer's decision Monday evening without consultation.
Although the mayor "understands the need for security, he feels very strongly that there's a need to keep our city open" for residents, workers and visitors, spokeswoman Sharon Gang said. "There wasn't any sort of collaboration. It was just a decision made unilaterally by the Capitol Police."
The checkpoints first appeared Aug. 4, just after the Department of Homeland Security raised the terrorist threat level for the headquarters of five financial institutions in Washington, New York and New Jersey. Senate Sergeant-at-Arms William H. Pickle, who sits on a three-member congressional panel overseeing Gainer's agency, said that neither the original decision to set up the checkpoints nor the one to take them down last week was related to the threat levels. Instead, he said, Capitol officials were reviewing their intelligence and security plans.
Capitol security officials said that they had been considering checkpoints this summer and that the heightened alert created more urgency.
Rep. Robert W. Ney (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Administration Committee, said he was pleased to see checkpoints reduced from round-the-clock to a "sporadic" basis. He added that he will continue to work with Norton to set up a task force on which representatives from the District, Congress and U.S. security agencies would work together on security and urban planning.
The resumption of the checkpoints was unrelated to Monday's events outside the White House, where an FBI informant set himself on fire and a man jumped the fence hours later, officials said.
Mohamed Alanssi, 52, was upgraded to serious condition at Washington Hospital Center's burn center. Yasuharu Kuga, 31, appeared in D.C. Superior Court on a charge of unlawful entry. A judge ordered him to undergo a psychiatric evaluation before a follow-up court hearing today.
Kuga, who has a Japanese passport, said through an interpreter that he has been in the United States on a tourist visa since Oct. 28. He said he had been staying at a hotel until a couple of days ago, when he ran out of money.
Staff writer Henri E. Cauvin contributed to this report.
-----
Checkpoints return to Capitol Hill
ASSOCIATED PRESS
By Brett Zongker
November 17, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20041116-111403-3156r.htm
Less than a week after the terror threat was lowered to Code Yellow, checkpoints popped up again on Capitol Hill yesterday.
U.S. Capitol Police said that although there are no new threats, the Capitol is always considered at risk and that the vehicle checkpoints will appear on a random basis indefinitely.
The move is "outrageous" as far as Eleanor Holmes Norton is concerned. The Democratic D.C. delegate called it a "cosmetic and primitive" form of security that accomplishes nothing.
"I don't know anybody here who feels safer because of checkpoints that simply usher people through," said Mrs. Norton, who later sent a letter of complaint to U.S. Capitol Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer.
All vehicles are being stopped at the checkpoints on Constitution and Independence avenues. Some are being fully inspected, while others get a quick glance. The security measure was first implemented in August when the alert level was raised to orange.
Although Chief Gainer would not take questions on the change yesterday, he has said in the past that the checkpoints would be randomly reinstituted because police don't want to be predictable to terrorists.
"We know that the Capitol continues to be a target," but there has not been a specific threat, Officer Michael Lauer, a Capitol Police spokesman, said yesterday. "We have implemented these checkpoints on a random basis as a deterrent to any possible threat."
But Mrs. Norton said checkpoints are a drastic measure that deters tourists from the nation's capital.
"It's like a red light saying stay away," Mrs. Norton said, adding that determined terrorists would simply find another way to the Capitol.
Mrs. Norton plans to call for a congressional hearing on the matter, but she suspects that the checkpoints were reinstated because Congress is back in town for a session this week.
"We want to understand that this really protects us," Mrs. Norton said. "So far, we see no relationship between our protection and these checkpoints."
Rep. Bob Ney, Ohio Republican, said he is working to convene a working group of local and federal officials to examine how such security measures affect tourism, traffic and planning in the District. Mr. Ney, chairman of the Committee on House Administration - which oversees the Capitol Police, said he wasn't surprised by the return of barricades and checkpoints outside his office.
"Doing them is better than not, but again, having them 24-7 is questionable," he said.
D.C. Mayor Anthony A. Williams was notified Monday evening that the checkpoints would return, but city officials weren't consulted, spokeswoman Sharon Gang said.
"He's extremely disappointed that the Capitol Police felt compelled to reinstate the checkpoints," Miss Gang said.
"And while he understands the need for security, there's also a need to keep our city open for people who live here, for people who visit here and for people who work here."
Officer Lauer said some officers are back on 12-hour shifts, six days a week to cover the extra work.
"I don't know why they took them down to put them back up," D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey told the Associated Press in a phone interview from an International Association of Chiefs of Police event in Los Angeles. "They're responsible for securing the Capitol, and I'm not going to challenge the chief's assessment of the situation there.
"My only concern is the consequence it has on the rest of the city in terms of traffic and so forth."
• Associated Press writer Candace Smith contributed to this report.
-----
Making the Patriot Act 'SAFE'
November 17, 2004
Washington Times
Letters to the editor
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20041116-085743-8811r.htm
I was disappointed that Jonah Goldberg's column, "Exit Ashcroft" on The Washington Times Web site (Friday), misrepresents remarks I made last year in which I paraphrased the concerns of one of my constituents about the Patriot Act. ABC News' "This Week" issued an on-air correction after the same mischaracterization was made by a panelist on that program last year.
I was also troubled by Mr. Goldberg's attempt to brush aside valid concerns about the Patriot Act's potential to undermine the rights of law-abiding Americans. He goes so far as to question "who really cares" if a library has been searched under the law. In fact, many Americans care deeply about the government having access to library records and other sensitive personal information about citizens who are not even suspects in a terrorism investigation.
A growing number of Americans - including many conservatives - have serious concerns about the Patriot Act and want to modify the law. I have joined a bipartisan group of senators, including Larry E. Craig and Michael D. Crapo, Idaho Republicans; Richard J. Durbin, Illinois Democrat; and John E. Sununu, New Hampshire Republican, to introduce the Security and Freedom Ensured (SAFE) Act. The SAFE Act makes changes to portions of the Patriot Act that go too far. The SAFE Act would allow the government to retain the tools it needs to investigate suspected terrorists while protecting the privacy and civil liberties of law-abiding Americans.
Key provisions of the Patriot Act are set to expire at the end of 2005 for a reason - so that Congress can evaluate their efficacy and their effect on our freedoms with more care and less haste than we did in 2001. I will continue to advocate changes to the law to ensure that we successfully combat terrorism without undermining liberties.
SEN. RUSS FEINGOLD
Washington
-------- police
Police scoff at Ashcroft speech
USA TODAY
By Kevin Johnson
Nov 17, 2004
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=710&ncid=710&e=3&u=/usatoday/20041117/pl_usatoday/policescoffatashcroftspeech
A day after Attorney General John Ashcroft told the nation's largest association of law enforcement executives that the Bush administration had made the nation more secure from terrorist attacks and violent criminals, the group lashed back at the White House on Tuesday.
The International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) said that cuts by the administration in federal aid to local police agencies have left the nation more vulnerable than ever to public safety threats. The 20,000-member group also said in a statement that new anti-terrorism duties for local cops - which have come as state and local budgets have declined and historically low crime rates have crept upward - have pushed police agencies to "the breaking point."
The statement reflected the ongoing tension between the administration and many local police chiefs, who believe the White House has saddled them with anti-terrorism tasks without much regard to the cost.
Among other things, members of the chiefs' group have long complained about localities having to pay millions of dollars in overtime costs when the U.S. government issued terrorism alerts. The group also is annoyed that President Bush is phasing out a $10 billion program begun by the Clinton administration in 1996 to help local departments hire tens of thousands more cops.
IACP President Joseph Polisar, the police chief in Garden Grove, Calif., said hundreds of police officer jobs have been lost across the nation during the past four years. And proposed cuts in federal aid in the 2005 budget could reach almost $1 billion, threatening hundreds more, the chief said.
Ashcroft, who spoke to the group Monday in Los Angeles, listed a range of accomplishments during his tenure at the Justice Department (news - web sites) and got a polite reception from delegates to the group's national convention.
The chiefs' group is particularly concerned about how anti-terrorism efforts have changed how police departments get federal aid. Tens of millions of dollars that in the past was sent to local departments each year by the Justice Department now are directed to the Department of Homeland Security. DHS uses the money to help train and equip agencies that would respond to terrorist attacks.
Police departments still get some of the aid, but now they must share it with fire departments and public health agencies. The money also must be spent on anti-terrorism efforts, rather than to beef up law enforcement programs or to hire more cops.
-----
Report Faults F.B.I.'s Fingerprint Scrutiny in Arrest of Lawyer
November 17, 2004
By DAVID STOUT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/17/politics/17fbi.html
WASHINGTON, Nov. 16 - The Federal Bureau of Investigation wrongly implicated an Oregon lawyer in a deadly train bombing in Madrid because the F.B.I. culture discouraged fingerprint examiners from disagreeing with their superiors, a panel of forensic experts has concluded.
"The error was a human error and not a methodology or technology failure," the panel said in a report on the arrest of the lawyer, Brandon Mayfield of Portland, who was jailed for two weeks in May. "Once the mind-set occurred with the initial examiner, the subsequent examinations were tainted."
"To disagree was not an expected response," said the report, written by Robert B. Stacey, head of the quality-assurance unit of the bureau's laboratory division at Quantico, Va. He said the first, and as it turned out, erroneous conclusion about the fingerprint had not been sufficiently scrutinized.
Mr. Stacey conducted the inquiry with an international team of forensic experts. Its findings were published in the November-December issue of The Journal of Forensic Identification and reported in The Chicago Tribune on Sunday.
In an episode that acutely embarrassed the bureau and prompted an official apology, Mr. Mayfield came under suspicion in the March 11 bombing, which killed 191 people and injured about 2,000, because of a fingerprint misidentification.
Five days after the bombing, the Spanish police sent photographs of several prints found on a plastic bag near the attack scene to law enforcement agencies in the United States, Britain and France. The F.B.I. notified federal authorities in Portland that a Madrid fingerprint matched one of Mr. Mayfield's, on file from his Army service years before.
Mr. Mayfield's home was searched and he was imprisoned as a material witness. The lawyer, a convert to Islam, has accused the federal authorities of leaping to conclusions because of his religion and his ties to Muslims in Oregon.
The F.B.I. has denied the accusations and apologized for its mistake. The bureau issued a statement on Tuesday expressing its appreciation for the study and saying it was reviewing "every aspect'' of its fingerprint-analysis process.
Mr. Mayfield is suing the federal government on the ground that his rights were violated because of his religion. The original lawyer, Steven Wax, called the forensic experts' investigation "tremendously significant" because it points to basic flaws in F.B.I. fingerprint analysis.
The Justice Department is doing its own internal investigation.
-------- POLITICS
47 parties boycott elections in Iraq
2004-11-17
www.chinaview.cn
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2004-11/17/content_2230350.htm
BAGHDAD, Nov. 17 (Xinhuanet) -- Forty-seven Iraqi political and religious parties have decided to boycott the general elections due in January in protest against the extended use of force throughout the country, a joint statement said on Wednesday.
The reason for the move was "the (US-Iraqi) assaults in cities like Najaf, Karbala, Samarra, Sadr City, Adhmiya, and especially the genocide crimes in Fallujah," said the statement obtained by Xinhua.
"These crimes prevent us from taking part in the political process going on under the control of occupation forces," added the statement, signed by the parties and groups, mainly Sunni factions led by the Muslim Clerics Association.
At least eight Shiite groups and one Christian party were also among them. Enditem
-------- corruption
GOP Pushes Rule Change to Protect DeLay's Post
By Charles Babington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 17, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54572-2004Nov16.html
House Republicans proposed changing their rules last night to allow members indicted by state grand juries to remain in a leadership post, a move that would benefit Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) in case he is charged by a Texas grand jury that has indicted three of his political associates, according to GOP leaders.
The proposed rule change, which several leaders predicted would win approval at a closed meeting today, comes as House Republicans return to Washington feeling indebted to DeLay for the slightly enhanced majority they won in this month's elections. DeLay led an aggressive redistricting effort in Texas last year that resulted in five Democratic House members retiring or losing reelection. It also triggered a grand jury inquiry into fundraising efforts related to the state legislature's redistricting actions.
House GOP leaders and aides said many rank-and-file Republicans are eager to change the rule to help DeLay, and will do so if given a chance at today's closed meeting. A handful of them have proposed language for changing the rule, and they will be free to offer amendments, officials said. Some aides said it was conceivable that DeLay and Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) ultimately could decide the move would be politically damaging and ask their caucus not to do it. But Rep. Jack Kingston (Ga.), another member of the GOP leadership, said he did not think Hastert and DeLay would intervene.
House Republicans adopted the indictment rule in 1993, when they were trying to end four decades of Democratic control of the House, in part by highlighting Democrats' ethical lapses. They said at the time that they held themselves to higher standards than prominent Democrats such as then-Ways and Means Chairman Dan Rostenkowski (Ill.), who eventually pleaded guilty to mail fraud and was sentenced to prison.
The GOP rule drew little notice until this fall, when DeLay's associates were indicted and Republican lawmakers began to worry that their majority leader might be forced to step aside if the grand jury targeted him next. Democrats and watchdog groups blasted the Republicans' proposal last night.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said last night: "If they make this rules change, Republicans will confirm yet again that they simply do not care if their leaders are ethical. If Republicans believe that an indicted member should be allowed to hold a top leadership position in the House of Representatives, their arrogance is astonishing."
House Republicans recognize that DeLay fought fiercely to widen their majority, and they are eager to protect him from an Austin-based investigation they view as baseless and partisan, said Rep. Eric I. Cantor (Va.), the GOP's chief deputy whip.
"That's why this [proposed rule change] is going to pass, assuming it's submitted, because there is a tremendous recognition that Tom DeLay led on the issue to produce five more seats" for the Republicans, Cantor said after emerging from a meeting in which the Republican Conference welcomed new members and reelected Hastert and DeLay as its top leaders.
Other Republicans agreed the conference is likely to change the rule if given the chance. An indictment is simply an unproven allegation that should not require a party leader to step aside, said Rep. Tom Feeney (R-Fla.). Rep. John Carter (R-Tex.), a former trial judge, said it makes sense to differentiate between federal and state indictments in shaping party rules because state grand juries often are led by partisan, elected prosecutors who may carry political grudges against lawmakers.
Republicans last night were tweaking the language of several proposals for changing the rule. The one drawing the most comment, by Rep. Henry Bonilla (Tex.), would allow leaders indicted by a state grand jury to stay on. However, a leader indicted by a federal court would have to step down at least temporarily.
"Congressman Bonilla's rule change is designed to prevent political manipulation of the process while preserving the original ethical principles of the rule," Bonilla spokeswoman Taryn Fritz Walpole said.
Hastert and DeLay, meanwhile, are publicly taking a hands-off posture. Hastert told reporters the decision was up to the conference, adding, "we'll see what happens." DeLay spokesman Stuart Roy said his boss "believes we should allow members of the conference to come to their own conclusions and let the conference work its will without him exerting undue influence one way or the other."
A Texas grand jury in September indicted three of DeLay's political associates on charges of using a political action committee to illegally collect corporate donations and funnel them to Texas legislative races. The group, Texans for a Republican Majority Political Action Committee, is closely associated with DeLay. DeLay says he has not acted improperly and has no reason to believe he is a target of the grand jury, which continues to look into the TRMPAC matter.
The House ethics committee on Oct. 6 admonished DeLay for asking federal aviation officials to track an airplane involved in the highly contentious 2003 redistricting battle, and for conduct that suggested political donations might influence legislative action. The ethics panel deferred action on a complaint related to TRMPAC, noting that the grand jury has not finished its work.
The Texas investigation is headed by Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle, an elected Democrat who has been bitterly criticized by DeLay supporters. Yesterday, Cantor called Earle's efforts "a witch hunt."
"It's a totally a partisan exercise," Cantor said. "It's coincidental with what's going on up here [in the Capitol], where they are trying every avenue to go after Tom DeLay because they can't beat him" on the House floor or in congressional elections. Changing the rule is not a sign that lawmakers think DeLay will be indicted, Cantor said, but rather a public rebuke of an investigation they feel is wholly unwarranted.
--------
Court Nominee Gave False Data, Text Shows
Law License Was Suspended Despite Early Denial
By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 17, 2004; Page A25
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55458-2004Nov16.html
Thomas B. Griffith, President Bush's nominee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, appeared to provide inaccurate information to Utah bar officials about his legal work and lapses in obtaining law licenses over the past year, according to documents released yesterday at his nomination hearing.
Griffith's nomination has been stalled for months over concerns that he failed to maintain a valid license for three years while he practiced law in the District and Utah, and that he did not obtain a Utah license after taking a job as general counsel for Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. Even as Griffith defended his record yesterday, the new documents added to that controversy.
They show Griffith reported to Utah state bar officials last year that his law license had never been suspended. It had been suspended from 1998 to 2001. He also told the state bar that he relied on his D.C. license to practice law in Utah. But at yesterday's hearing, Griffith testified that he had practiced law in Utah by relying on associations with licensed attorneys there.
Senate Judiciary Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), a longtime friend of Griffith's who pledged to "do everything in my power" to help him win confirmation, scheduled yesterday's hearing for the middle of a lame-duck session and was the sole committee member present to question Griffith. Democrats said they were surprised Hatch proceeded despite the slim chances of the Senate approving Griffith in the remaining days before Congress adjourns and the objections to the nominee.
"We're going to do our very best to get you confirmed before the end of the session," Hatch told Griffith, before acknowledging: "It'll be miraculous if we do."
Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) asked that Griffith's application and letters to the Utah bar be released at yesterday's hearing.
The Washington Post reported this summer that Griffith's D.C. license had been suspended because he did not pay bar dues from 1998 to 2001, a lapse that prevented Griffith from obtaining a reciprocal law license in Utah after he took the Brigham Young job. Griffith applied late last year to take the bar exam to obtain a Utah license but never sat for the January 2004 test.
Last month, the American Bar Association gave Griffith the lowest passing grade for a judicial nominee, a "qualified" rating. A large minority of the review committee voted "not qualified."
Yesterday, in his first public comments on the matter, Griffith said he "deeply regrets" his failure to make sure that his law firm paid his dues so he could keep a valid District law license. "I bear full responsibility for what happened," he said. "I should not have relied on others."
Griffith added that because his license was suspended for administrative reasons, he never considered it a true suspension or disciplinary matter, and did not report it to Utah officials. "The thought never crossed my mind that it was related," he said.
Griffith also defended his decision not to obtain a Utah law license since becoming general counsel at Brigham Young, Hatch's alma mater, in the summer of 2000.
"It was always my understanding that in-house counsel need not be licensed," he said, as long as he worked with lawyers who did have valid Utah state licenses when he dispensed advice on state matters. He said he has been "meticulous" in limiting his work by collaborating with the four lawyers he supervises in his office.
In the newly released licensing application to the Utah state bar, however, Griffith answered "yes" to a question on whether he practiced law in Utah. He reported that he did so as general counsel for Brigham Young, relying on his D.C. law license.
In April 2003, the documents show, Griffith wrote a letter seeking advice from the Utah bar on how he could obtain a state license. Griffith said he had erred in assuming that a new state rule might help him get a reciprocal license. The bar's general counsel, Katherine A. Fox, wrote back the next month urging him to apply to take the bar exam and warning him to work with licensed colleagues in the meantime.
"It is unfortunate that you anticipated relying on the rule without having an understanding of the restrictions it imposed," she wrote.
-------- us politics
The rise and rise of Condoleezza
The Australian
Roy Eccleston
November 17, 2004
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,11410440%255E2703,00.html
WASHINGTON: How close is Condoleezza Rice to George W. Bush? Guests at a Washington dinner party earlier this year were reportedly flabbergasted when Rice at one point said: "As I was telling my husb... " then stopped and said: "As I was telling President Bush."
True story or not -- the dinner was hosted by the New York Times but not reported by it -- nobody other than Bush's wife Laura spends more time with the President than the 50-year-old Rice, who spends much of her weekends with the Bushes at Camp David or their Texas ranch.
If Rice, as expected, becomes Secretary of State, it will be another example of her lifelong habit of overachieving and proving that her circumstances -- a black girl who grew up in the segregated South -- were no obstacle to success.
At four she played classical piano in public, at 19 she graduated from university, at 25 she was teaching political science, and at 38 she became second in charge of Stanford University.
Then, when Bush won office in 2000, she became the first woman to be national security adviser, age 46.
An only child, she grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, which in the 1960s was wracked by racial violence including the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, when four young black girls including a kindergarten classmate of Rice's were killed.
A single woman, Rice loves football, enjoys Led Zeppelin and hymns, reads Russian, can speak French and still plays piano to concert standard. Her name comes from the Italian musical notation 'con dolcezza', meaning to play with sweetness.
But she has had little time for entertainment in the past four years as she helped steer the presidential foreign policy novice, who once called Greeks Grecians, through one international crisis after another.
Her expertise was Soviet affairs, which she studied under Democrat secretary of state Madeleine Albright's father Joseph Korbel.
When George Bush Sr met Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989 he is reported to have introduced Rice -- then working in his administration -- as the person who "tells me everything I know about the Soviet Union".
But the Cold War was dead when Rice arrived at the White House where one of the emerging problems for American national security was still largely unrecognised by the US.
Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism expert, says he told Rice about al-Qa'ida in a briefing early in 2000 and she "gave me the impression that she had never heard the term before".
Rice has angrily dismissed that claim. Still, the critics say she was too inexperienced on Middle East and Asian policy for the job, and not tough enough to deal with tensions between hawks Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, and the more moderate Colin Powell.
-----
The Rice appointment
washtimes
November 17, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20041116-085740-5885r.htm
Assuming that her nomination as secretary of state is confirmed next year, Condoleezza Rice faces some very difficult challenges, first in dealing with international problems, and second, in managing a department with many employees who seem hostile or indifferent to President Bush's agenda. She brings impressive credentials to the job. As national security adviser for the past four years, she has had a major hand in shaping a more realistic American approach to the complex issues posed by terrorism in the wake of September 11.
Miss Rice will have major responsibility in shaping American policy toward nascent democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan, and she will have to devise a way to deal with the dictatorship in North Korea that is starving many of its own citizens to death and remains determined to press ahead with its nuclear-weapons program.
No less daunting will be the problem posed by Iran - perhaps the world's No. 1 state sponsor of terrorism. Iran has been relentlessly working to develop nuclear weapons. These could serve as a deterrent against a military response to Tehran's efforts to subvert what likely will soon be an elected government in Iraq, and its support for organizations like Hezbollah and terrorists like Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab Zarqawi. Any effort to formulate a more assertive, approach toward Iran will almost certainly encounter opposition from France and Germany, as well as Britain - Washington's otherwise stalwart ally.
The new secretary of state will encounter plenty of other difficult problems. Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza will hold elections in January. She will seek to mobilize support for Palestinian leaders willing to work for democracy, embrace the rule of law and confront the terrorists. But Miss Rice will need to be equally vigilant in resisting efforts from Europe to deliver Israeli conditions on issues like settlements in the absence of Palestinian action against terror. There also will be other complicated geopolitical matters on her plate - everything from dealing with China (and its bullying of democratic Taiwan), genocide perpetrated by the Sudanese government and its allies in Darfur, and the international HIV/AIDS crisis.
Miss Rice will also need to deal with a stubborn bureaucracy filled with officials who are hostile to the Bush agenda. Throughout Mr. Bush's first term, State Department officials kept open the deeply flawed Visa Express program, which made it far too easy for residents of Saudi Arabia to enter the United States after September 11. Behind the scenes, anonymous bureaucrats at Foggy Bottom have repeatedly poor-mouthed and sought to undercut presidential initiatives dealing with rogue states like Iran and North Korea.
Miss Rice will need to be vigilant in rooting out recalcitrant Foreign Service types who attempt to undermine the Bush doctrine. After all, some of those policies were, in fact, courtesy of Miss Rice herself. We wish her luck through the confirmation process, and much more when she gets to Foggy Bottom.
-----
White House insider relies on aid of 'allies'
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Nicholas Kralev
November 17, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041116-115229-5775r.htm
Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, was ushered to the residence of British Ambassador David Manning on Saturday night for what turned out to be her surprise 50th birthday party.
Mr. Bush was there, as was his father, former President George Bush. Other dignitaries included Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Brent Scowcroft and Samuel R. Berger, Miss Rice's predecessors at the White House.
The party's venue was no coincidence. Miss Rice and Mr. Manning became very close when he was her counterpart in Prime Minister Tony Blair's office before coming to Washington 14 months ago.
But, more importantly, Mr. Blair's Britain is exactly the kind of ally Miss Rice, whom Mr. Bush nominated yesterday as the next secretary of state, values most.
It was in London last year, two months after Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq was toppled by the U.S.-led invasion and emotions against it in Europe still ran high, that she said: "There is little lasting consequence that the United States can accomplish in the world without the sustained cooperation of allies and friends."
But then she spelled out her definition of a true friend: a country that does not "put a check" on American power but stands firmly with the United States in its effort to rid the world of weapons of mass destruction and other modern ills.
"Why would anyone who shares the values of freedom seek to put a check on those values?" Miss Rice asked, adding that Europe and democracies worldwide should follow Washington's lead instead of trying to balance it with competing policies.
"Power in the service of freedom is to be welcomed, and powers that share a commitment to freedom can and must make common cause against freedom's enemies," she said in the June 2003 speech.
Miss Rice, who is one of Mr. Bush's confidants, dismissed a vision of "multipolarity" advanced by French President Jacques Chirac and others, calling it "a theory of rivalry, of competing interests," which "only the enemies of freedom would cheer."
"We have tried this before," she said. "It led to the Great War, which cascaded into the Good War, which gave way to the Cold War. Today, this theory of rivalry threatens to divert us from meeting the great tasks before us."
France, Germany and Russia led the opposition to the Iraq war in the United Nations Security Council, which prevented the United States and Britain from winning a final resolution authorizing the invasion.
As foreign leaders yesterday looked for signs of how the new top U.S. diplomat would deal with them, many recalled a famous phrase that was attributed to Miss Rice last year: "Punish France, ignore Germany and forgive Russia."
Yesterday, Miss Rice said she planned to pursue Mr. Bush's "hopeful and ambitious agenda."
Although they realize that her strong views are not likely to change, foreign officials expressed hope that her close relationship with Mr. Bush, who owes much of his knowledge of foreign affairs to her, will help their voices be better heard in the White House.
Similarly, officials at the State Department looked for the silver lining in the appointment of someone considered more of a hard-liner than Mr. Powell.
Although some feared that the only moderate foreign policy agency in Washington is being taken over by the hawks who engineered the Iraq war, others hoped that their department will have a bigger effect on policy because of Miss Rice's intimate access to the president.
"She is the ultimate insider," one senior official said. "That's worth a lot."
Miss Rice's nomination was not met at the State Department with the enthusiasm that had accompanied the arrival of Mr. Powell, and even his predecessor, Madeleine K. Albright, the first woman to hold the most senior Cabinet position.
"It's not because we don't like her, but because we don't know what exactly to expect," one official said.
Many in the department, as on Capitol Hill, have faulted Miss Rice for not being able to manage the foreign policy interagency process while at the White House and balance the views and priorities of different departments.
But yesterday, she tried to reach out to the career employees at Foggy Bottom, following a tradition of newly named Cabinet members.
"In my 25 years of experience in foreign affairs, both in and out of government, I have come to know the men and women of the Department of State," she said after Mr. Bush formally nominated her at a White House ceremony.
"I have the utmost admiration and respect for their skill, their professionalism and their dedication," she added. "And one of my highest priorities as secretary will be to ensure that they have all the tools necessary to carry American diplomacy forward in the 21st century."
Although Miss Rice is known to be a tough and demanding boss, most people find her a pleasant, smart and no-nonsense woman. She is an engaging speaker and skilled communicator, able to deliver speeches based on quickly scribbled notes.
Other than the famous story of her as a black girl who grew up in segregated Alabama and went to college at 15, little is known about Miss Rice's private life - except for her passion for music and sports.
In a rare instance of discussing a personal matter in an interview, she said in 2000 that she had once dated a professional football player.
"I'm not married, but I never met anybody I wanted to live with," she said. "I think I've maintained balance in my life. I'm not a workaholic; I'm pretty relaxed about things. I went back to playing the piano seriously four years ago. I exercise a lot and go to sporting events."
She then recalled some words of encouragement from her parents, both of whom are now deceased, when she was a child.
"I lived in a place where you couldn't go have a hamburger at a restaurant, but my parents were telling me I could be president," Miss Rice said.
-----
The rise and rise of Condoleezza
The Australian
Roy Eccleston
November 17, 2004
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,11410440%255E2703,00.html
WASHINGTON: How close is Condoleezza Rice to George W. Bush? Guests at a Washington dinner party earlier this year were reportedly flabbergasted when Rice at one point said: "As I was telling my husb... " then stopped and said: "As I was telling President Bush."
True story or not -- the dinner was hosted by the New York Times but not reported by it -- nobody other than Bush's wife Laura spends more time with the President than the 50-year-old Rice, who spends much of her weekends with the Bushes at Camp David or their Texas ranch.
If Rice, as expected, becomes Secretary of State, it will be another example of her lifelong habit of overachieving and proving that her circumstances -- a black girl who grew up in the segregated South -- were no obstacle to success.
At four she played classical piano in public, at 19 she graduated from university, at 25 she was teaching political science, and at 38 she became second in charge of Stanford University.
Then, when Bush won office in 2000, she became the first woman to be national security adviser, age 46.
An only child, she grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, which in the 1960s was wracked by racial violence including the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, when four young black girls including a kindergarten classmate of Rice's were killed.
A single woman, Rice loves football, enjoys Led Zeppelin and hymns, reads Russian, can speak French and still plays piano to concert standard. Her name comes from the Italian musical notation 'con dolcezza', meaning to play with sweetness.
But she has had little time for entertainment in the past four years as she helped steer the presidential foreign policy novice, who once called Greeks Grecians, through one international crisis after another.
Her expertise was Soviet affairs, which she studied under Democrat secretary of state Madeleine Albright's father Joseph Korbel.
When George Bush Sr met Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989 he is reported to have introduced Rice -- then working in his administration -- as the person who "tells me everything I know about the Soviet Union".
But the Cold War was dead when Rice arrived at the White House where one of the emerging problems for American national security was still largely unrecognised by the US.
Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism expert, says he told Rice about al-Qa'ida in a briefing early in 2000 and she "gave me the impression that she had never heard the term before".
Rice has angrily dismissed that claim. Still, the critics say she was too inexperienced on Middle East and Asian policy for the job, and not tough enough to deal with tensions between hawks Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, and the more moderate Colin Powell.
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The Rice appointment washtimes
November 17, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20041116-085740-5885r.htm
Assuming that her nomination as secretary of state is confirmed next year, Condoleezza Rice faces some very difficult challenges, first in dealing with international problems, and second, in managing a department with many employees who seem hostile or indifferent to President Bush's agenda. She brings impressive credentials to the job. As national security adviser for the past four years, she has had a major hand in shaping a more realistic American approach to the complex issues posed by terrorism in the wake of September 11.
Miss Rice will have major responsibility in shaping American policy toward nascent democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan, and she will have to devise a way to deal with the dictatorship in North Korea that is starving many of its own citizens to death and remains determined to press ahead with its nuclear-weapons program.
No less daunting will be the problem posed by Iran - perhaps the world's No. 1 state sponsor of terrorism. Iran has been relentlessly working to develop nuclear weapons. These could serve as a deterrent against a military response to Tehran's efforts to subvert what likely will soon be an elected government in Iraq, and its support for organizations like Hezbollah and terrorists like Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab Zarqawi. Any effort to formulate a more assertive, approach toward Iran will almost certainly encounter opposition from France and Germany, as well as Britain - Washington's otherwise stalwart ally.
The new secretary of state will encounter plenty of other difficult problems. Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza will hold elections in January. She will seek to mobilize support for Palestinian leaders willing to work for democracy, embrace the rule of law and confront the terrorists. But Miss Rice will need to be equally vigilant in resisting efforts from Europe to deliver Israeli conditions on issues like settlements in the absence of Palestinian action against terror. There also will be other complicated geopolitical matters on her plate - everything from dealing with China (and its bullying of democratic Taiwan), genocide perpetrated by the Sudanese government and its allies in Darfur, and the international HIV/AIDS crisis.
Miss Rice will also need to deal with a stubborn bureaucracy filled with officials who are hostile to the Bush agenda. Throughout Mr. Bush's first term, State Department officials kept open the deeply flawed Visa Express program, which made it far too easy for residents of Saudi Arabia to enter the United States after September 11. Behind the scenes, anonymous bureaucrats at Foggy Bottom have repeatedly poor-mouthed and sought to undercut presidential initiatives dealing with rogue states like Iran and North Korea.
Miss Rice will need to be vigilant in rooting out recalcitrant Foreign Service types who attempt to undermine the Bush doctrine. After all, some of those policies were, in fact, courtesy of Miss Rice herself. We wish her luck through the confirmation process, and much more when she gets to Foggy Bottom.
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White House insider relies on aid of 'allies'
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Nicholas Kralev
November 17, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041116-115229-5775r.htm
Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, was ushered to the residence of British Ambassador David Manning on Saturday night for what turned out to be her surprise 50th birthday party.
Mr. Bush was there, as was his father, former President George Bush. Other dignitaries included Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Brent Scowcroft and Samuel R. Berger, Miss Rice's predecessors at the White House.
The party's venue was no coincidence. Miss Rice and Mr. Manning became very close when he was her counterpart in Prime Minister Tony Blair's office before coming to Washington 14 months ago.
But, more importantly, Mr. Blair's Britain is exactly the kind of ally Miss Rice, whom Mr. Bush nominated yesterday as the next secretary of state, values most.
It was in London last year, two months after Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq was toppled by the U.S.-led invasion and emotions against it in Europe still ran high, that she said: "There is little lasting consequence that the United States can accomplish in the world without the sustained cooperation of allies and friends."
But then she spelled out her definition of a true friend: a country that does not "put a check" on American power but stands firmly with the United States in its effort to rid the world of weapons of mass destruction and other modern ills.
"Why would anyone who shares the values of freedom seek to put a check on those values?" Miss Rice asked, adding that Europe and democracies worldwide should follow Washington's lead instead of trying to balance it with competing policies.
"Power in the service of freedom is to be welcomed, and powers that share a commitment to freedom can and must make common cause against freedom's enemies," she said in the June 2003 speech.
Miss Rice, who is one of Mr. Bush's confidants, dismissed a vision of "multipolarity" advanced by French President Jacques Chirac and others, calling it "a theory of rivalry, of competing interests," which "only the enemies of freedom would cheer."
"We have tried this before," she said. "It led to the Great War, which cascaded into the Good War, which gave way to the Cold War. Today, this theory of rivalry threatens to divert us from meeting the great tasks before us."
France, Germany and Russia led the opposition to the Iraq war in the United Nations Security Council, which prevented the United States and Britain from winning a final resolution authorizing the invasion.
As foreign leaders yesterday looked for signs of how the new top U.S. diplomat would deal with them, many recalled a famous phrase that was attributed to Miss Rice last year: "Punish France, ignore Germany and forgive Russia."
Yesterday, Miss Rice said she planned to pursue Mr. Bush's "hopeful and ambitious agenda."
Although they realize that her strong views are not likely to change, foreign officials expressed hope that her close relationship with Mr. Bush, who owes much of his knowledge of foreign affairs to her, will help their voices be better heard in the White House.
Similarly, officials at the State Department looked for the silver lining in the appointment of someone considered more of a hard-liner than Mr. Powell.
Although some feared that the only moderate foreign policy agency in Washington is being taken over by the hawks who engineered the Iraq war, others hoped that their department will have a bigger effect on policy because of Miss Rice's intimate access to the president.
"She is the ultimate insider," one senior official said. "That's worth a lot."
Miss Rice's nomination was not met at the State Department with the enthusiasm that had accompanied the arrival of Mr. Powell, and even his predecessor, Madeleine K. Albright, the first woman to hold the most senior Cabinet position.
"It's not because we don't like her, but because we don't know what exactly to expect," one official said.
Many in the department, as on Capitol Hill, have faulted Miss Rice for not being able to manage the foreign policy interagency process while at the White House and balance the views and priorities of different departments.
But yesterday, she tried to reach out to the career employees at Foggy Bottom, following a tradition of newly named Cabinet members.
"In my 25 years of experience in foreign affairs, both in and out of government, I have come to know the men and women of the Department of State," she said after Mr. Bush formally nominated her at a White House ceremony.
"I have the utmost admiration and respect for their skill, their professionalism and their dedication," she added. "And one of my highest priorities as secretary will be to ensure that they have all the tools necessary to carry American diplomacy forward in the 21st century."
Although Miss Rice is known to be a tough and demanding boss, most people find her a pleasant, smart and no-nonsense woman. She is an engaging speaker and skilled communicator, able to deliver speeches based on quickly scribbled notes.
Other than the famous story of her as a black girl who grew up in segregated Alabama and went to college at 15, little is known about Miss Rice's private life - except for her passion for music and sports.
In a rare instance of discussing a personal matter in an interview, she said in 2000 that she had once dated a professional football player.
"I'm not married, but I never met anybody I wanted to live with," she said. "I think I've maintained balance in my life. I'm not a workaholic; I'm pretty relaxed about things. I went back to playing the piano seriously four years ago. I exercise a lot and go to sporting events."
She then recalled some words of encouragement from her parents, both of whom are now deceased, when she was a child.
"I lived in a place where you couldn't go have a hamburger at a restaurant, but my parents were telling me I could be president," Miss Rice said.
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Oil supply II: Why high prices?
Look no further than Iraq
November 17, 2004
International Herald Tribune
By Nordine Ait-Laoussine and John Gault
http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2004/11/16/opinion/edgault.html
GENEVA Each day brings a new explanation for high oil prices. If it is not a new twist in the Yukos saga, it is a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. One day, it is low oil stocks in the United States; another, it is a threatened rebellion in the Niger Delta. And, amid all this, we are reminded repeatedly that it is all the fault of OPEC.
Yet, OPEC has increased its production by about three million barrels a day since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in an effort to curb the price spiral. OPEC's current output, more than 30 million barrels a day, is the highest since the late 1970s. At this level, supply exceeds anticipated consumption, even considering steep growth in demand in China and elsewhere. Global oil stocks expanded in recent months and are generally expected to return to normal levels by year-end. All other things equal, current oil supply would be more than adequate to drive prices downward.
Other factors prevent this from happening. If you want to pick a culprit, blame the occupation of Iraq. Sabotage and insecurity have prevented Iraqi oil production from recovering to pre-invasion levels. Attacks on Iraqi oil installations and repeated interruptions in exports make oil markets nervous and engender fear of a total loss of Iraq's current production of around two million barrels a day.
To be sure, real or perceived threats to oil production elsewhere, as well as refinery bottlenecks and hurricanes in the U.S., have contributed periodic support to oil prices. But without the Iraqi crisis and the tensions it has induced or enhanced throughout the Mideast, these events would not have been sufficient to keep prices at record levels. The possibility of sanctions on oil exports from Syria, Sudan and even Iran also contribute to the climate of market uncertainty.
Speculators, some of whom have profited handsomely from this year's price volatility, are focusing more on politico-military factors than on market fundamentals. In their eyes, the OPEC-led oversupply of the market has become irrelevant. They see the other side of the coin: that OPEC has moved closer to its production capacity. Today, OPEC's idle capacity, concentrated in Saudi Arabia, is just barely enough to replace Iraqi production in the event it is interrupted.
In late 1990 and early 1991, while Iraq occupied Kuwait, the world was left with even less idle capacity than is available today. But markets generally remained calm in the time around Desert Storm because they anticipated that Iraqi and Kuwaiti production would be restored later.
If today's idle capacity is insufficient to calm markets, is it because this time, in contrast to 1991, the U.S.-led coalition invaded and occupied Iraq? Is it because markets are increasingly alarmed at the pace of resistance to the occupation? Is it because traders have come to believe that there is no military solution to the conflict, and that the United States has no realistic exit strategy?
Meanwhile OPEC members have announced plans to increase their production capacities by about 350 thousand barrels a day before the end of 2004 and by at least a further five million a day by 2010.
OPEC might have achieved even higher production capacities already had it not been for sanctions imposed on some member countries. International oil companies were prohibited until recently from investing in Iraq by United Nations sanctions. American companies were restrained from investing in Libya, and continue to be prevented from investing in Iran, by U.S. legislation. Even the recent lifting of Libyan sanctions cannot lead immediately to an increase in production capacity; such investment requires years of planning and preparation.
Transitory "causes" of high oil prices are merely a distraction. It is clearly Iraq that stokes the present market conflagration. At the same time, the confrontational U.S. position vis-à-vis Iran and the carte blanche given by George W. Bush to Ariel Sharon have further heightened Mideast tensions and bolstered a fear of new attacks against energy-related targets throughout the region and beyond. The Bush administration's policies have indisputably raised anxiety over potential supply interruptions.
Major oil-consuming countries should now turn their attention to defusing the many sources of Mideast tension that are directly or indirectly sustaining current high oil prices.
-------- voting
We were told to fix Ukraine election, say police chiefs
UK Independent
17 November 2004
By Askold Krushelnycky in Kharkiv, Ukraine
http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/story.jsp?story=583661
Senior police officers say they have been ordered to help rig the result of the Ukrainian presidential election and to use violence, including bombings, to undermine the opposition.
The second, decisive, round of the presidential election is to be held next Sunday when the two candidates, the pro-Western opposition leader, Viktor Yushchenko, who gained the biggest share of the vote in the first round on 31 October, and the pro-Russian Prime Minister, Viktor Yanukovych, face each other in a run-off.
Foreign election monitors blamed the government for dirty tricks before and during the first round. The opposition expects widespread attempts to distort results of the final round.
Officers from the eastern city of Kharkiv, disgusted that their service was being used to undermine the election, wrote to the speaker of the parliament, Volodymyr Lytvyn, detailing massive election fraud by the government and warning that similar methods were going to be used next Sunday.
They agreed to speak with The Independent on condition of anonymity. The meeting happened at night in a park after they took elaborate precautions worthy of a John Le Carré novel to ensure privacy.
The five men, aged between their late twenties and early fifties, held Ministry of Internal Affairs identity cards. Some covered over their names but revealed their photos, while two showed the entire card, complete with names. Their ranks ranged between full colonel and under-colonel. When asked what the consequences would be for them if their identities were revealed, the officers made gestures showing they would be shot.
The colonel said that police had guarded a room in a local authority building where about 500,000 ballots, pre-marked for Mr Yanukovych, were kept hidden before the first round and organised their dispersal on voting day among local polling stations.
The Ukrainian Central Election Commission was forced to admit that tens of thousands more votes had been cast in the first round than there were genuine ballot papers.
The men also said a special police undercover unit had been formed to intimidate opposition workers and destroy campaign materials. They said the group planted a bomb in a Yushchenko campaign office and another in the car of an opposition activist, Yuriy Potykun, who was then stopped and arrested by uniformed police.
The colonel said a group of about 100 common criminals have been paid to masquerade at Yushchenko rallies as supporters of the opposition candidate, to cause trouble and give the opposition a bad name.
The police did not disguise their contempt for Mr Yanu-kovych, who has twice been imprisoned for assault. They claim he was charged with two other serious crimes but he avoided prosecution both times through bribery.
A spokeswoman for the interior ministry of the Kharkiv region, Larysa Volkova, said the allegations were lies. She said the officers would be "guaranteed safety if they have the courage to give their names".
The sources said they would identify themselves if Mr Yush-chenko won. "We have a lot of documents which mean jail for not only the general in command of the Kharkiv region but for many other officials."
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Rice Is Named Secretary of State
Powell Successor Must Be Confirmed by Senate
By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 17, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A53673-2004Nov16?language=printer
President Bush named his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, to succeed Colin L. Powell as secretary of state yesterday, turning to a confidante at a time when the White House is vowing to mend ties with Europe and put more energy into brokering Middle East peace.
Rice, who tutored Bush in foreign policy when he was Texas governor and sat at his side through two wars, will head seven blocks, from the West Wing to Foggy Bottom, to take charge of diplomacy for a president who values bluntness, and to try to assert control over a department that some at the White House consider hostile territory.
Rice, who turned 50 on Sunday, appeared with Bush at a Roosevelt Room ceremony where he called the secretary of state "America's face to the world."
"In Dr. Rice, the world will see the strength, the grace and the decency of our country," Bush said, before kissing her on the right cheek. "The nation needs her."
Aides said Bush, seeking more discipline and harmony in his war cabinet, had discussed the job with her for weeks and perhaps months and never seriously considered anyone else.
Bush said his new national security adviser will be Rice's deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, a low-key lawyer and Ohio native who is a former principal of the Scowcroft Group consulting firm. Hadley, 57, won Bush's trust as a member of his first presidential campaign's foreign policy team, which was known as the "Vulcans."
Rice, who will be fourth in line of succession to the presidency, will be the first African American woman in the job. She is a classical pianist, was a Stanford University provost and political science professor, and specialized in the former Soviet Union as a National Security Council official for President George H.W. Bush. She once was an intern in the State Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.
Bush referred in his remarks to her childhood in Alabama during segregation, tying her experience to what he called the nation's "great calling of history to aid the forces of reform and freedom in the broader Middle East so that that region can grow in hope, instead of growing in anger." He added: "Dr. Rice has a deep, abiding belief in the value and power of liberty, because she has seen freedom denied and freedom reborn."
White House officials predicted that the deployment of Rice will tighten Bush's control over his national security apparatus and end the public sparring among members of his war cabinet. Powell, who saw himself as pragmatic, clashed repeatedly with Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on such matters as how to reach out to Europe and when to go to war with Iraq.
Bush's aides believed that Powell, who did not attend yesterday's ceremony, allowed his dissenting views to seep anonymously into news accounts and the foreign policy community. Republican officials acknowledged that the public is likely to learn even less about the inner workings of the war cabinet. They said the selection of Rice will also mean that fewer competing views will be available to a White House that brooks little dissent.
A former administration official who met often with Bush and Rice said the appointment is a signal to Bush's critics that he will continue to pursue a foreign policy of "defending American interests, and doing so unapologetically."
Aides said Bush and Rice know each other so well they have conversations based on body language, with maybe four words exchanged.
Lawrence S. Eagleburger, who was secretary of state under Bush's father, told CNN that Rice is "not the person for that job" because the whole administration "is going to speak the same language" rather than considering various views. But another well-known Republican said Rice has the stature to promote "coalition building and outreach in an administration that has relied on confrontation."
Rice frequently makes Bush's case on Sunday talk shows, and she warned six months before the invasion of Iraq that Saddam Hussein could deploy a nuclear weapon, saying that the administration did not "want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." Bush picked up the phrase in a speech a month later. Officials who have left the administration have said she was a loose administrator, allowing disputes to fester within the National Security Council. Rice's image suffered last year amid questions about Bush's claim that Iraq had sought uranium in Africa, an assertion that the CIA had warned the NSC against repeating.
Rice faces confirmation hearings in the Senate, where Democrats said they will take the opportunity to grill her about some of the discredited elements of the White House's case for war against Iraq. But congressional leaders predicted she will be confirmed, probably before Bush begins his second term on Jan. 20.
Powell, who was something of a misfit in a conservative-dominated administration, gave Bush his resignation letter Friday and announced his departure Monday.
Rice spends more time with Bush than any aide except perhaps Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr., and she has developed a friendship with the president and first lady Laura Bush that frequently takes her to Camp David on weekends. It was there, the weekend after the election, that they began to have concrete talks about her new job, aides said.
Rice, a Cleveland Browns fan, bonded with Bush through their love of sports. The president drew laughter when he said in the Roosevelt Room: "Condi's true ambition is beyond my power to grant. She would really like to be the commissioner of the National Football League."
Powell's departure and Rice's arrival have been greeted nervously at the State Department, and she used her brief acceptance remarks to try to reassure the agency's workers. She said she found it "humbling to imagine succeeding my dear friend and mentor Colin Powell."
"If I am confirmed by the Senate," she said, "I look forward to working with the great people of the Foreign Service and the Civil Service. And one of my highest priorities as secretary will be to ensure that they have all the tools necessary to carry American diplomacy forward in the 21st century."
Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage, often described as Powell's best friend, also resigned. Powell has said he will depart after his successor is confirmed.
White House officials would not say who would be nominated as Rice's deputy other than to say that it will not be the most widely rumored possibility -- John R. Bolton, a hard-line former American Enterprise Institute scholar who is undersecretary of state for arms control and international security.
Administration officials said one possibility is Arnold Kanter, who was undersecretary of state for political affairs under the president's father, from 1991 to 1993.
Bush aides said he will replace more than half of the 15 heads of executive departments. Today, he is to announce that his domestic policy adviser, Margaret Spellings, a veteran of his Texas governor's office, will succeed Roderick R. Paige as education secretary.
That will mean that all three of the new Cabinet secretaries Bush has named so far -- Rice, Spellings and White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales as the new attorney general -- are White House staff members, extending his personal control of the Executive Branch.
White House communications director Dan Bartlett is likely to shed some daily duties and assume an expanded portfolio, perhaps as Bush's counselor, a title that was retired when Karen Hughes left in 2002. If he changed roles, his likely successor would be Nicolle Devenish, communications director for the Bush-Cheney campaign. White House press secretary Scott McClellan will stay in his job.
-------- ENERGY
-------- alternative energy
14 Nations to Participate in Plan to Reduce Methane
Gas to Be Used as Energy Source in an Effort to Slow Global Warming
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 17, 2004; Page A24
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55409-2004Nov16.html
Thirteen countries agreed yesterday to join a global plan proposed by the Bush administration to curb methane emissions by capturing the greenhouse gas and using it as an energy source before it is released into the atmosphere.
Methane ranks second to carbon dioxide among human-generated contributors to global warming: Carbon dioxide accounts for 50 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, methane for about 16 percent. The administration pledged to spend as much as $53 million over the next five years to encourage companies to provide participating countries with technologies that can trap the gas and make it available to power utilities, private homes and even pottery kilns.
In the United States, most methane comes from decomposing trash in landfills, though it also escapes during mining operations and drilling for natural gas. There are 370 landfills from which companies recover methane and convert it into fuel, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
James L. Connaughton, who leads the White House Council on Environmental Quality, predicted that by 2015 the effect of reducing methane emissions would be equivalent to taking 33 million cars off the road. China, India, Japan, Mexico and Russia are among the countries that agreed to participate.
"It's a big deal because we're focusing on an unappreciated opportunity to significantly reduce one of the most potent greenhouse gases," Connaughton said. "We know how to do it, we know we can do it, and we know what the results will be."
Some scientists who have questioned Bush's climate-change policies praised the "methane to markets" initiative as a practical effort to avert further warming. James Hansen, who directs NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and just published a paper suggesting that curbs on methane and chlorofluorocarbon emissions can offset considerable carbon dioxide pollution, called the program "a great idea."
On Capitol Hill, however, debate continued yesterday over the administration's resistance to mandatory limits on carbon dioxide emissions. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who will relinquish his chairmanship of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee once Congress adjourns this month, conducted a hearing and called Bush's climate-change policy "disgraceful."
In testimony, the deputy associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Ghassem Asrar, said the United States should ratify the Kyoto Protocol's restrictions on carbon emissions "as soon as possible." Bush rejected the treaty soon after taking office in 2001, saying the restrictions would cost U.S. jobs and calling for voluntary measures and additional research.
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U.S. and 13 Other States Agree on Push to Gather Methane Gas
November 17, 2004
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/17/politics/17enviro.html
WASHINGTON, Nov. 16 - The United States and 13 other countries signed an agreement on Tuesday to work together to capture emissions of methane, a gas that contributes to global warming and, as the main component of natural gas, is a relatively clean-burning fuel.
It makes up 16 percent of the heat-trapping emissions that nearly all climate scientists have linked to global warming, a distant second only to carbon dioxide at 74 percent.
The United States is underwriting some of the costs of the nonbinding methane agreement, $53 million over five years. It calls on the participating industrialized countries to help poorer countries capture and market methane leaking from countries to use American expertise to develop methods of capturing the gas from landfills, coal mines and oil and gas operations.
The gas would then be sold for energy.
Michael O. Leavitt, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, said the agreement was an important step that would lead to "an environmental and economic harvest" for participating countries. The goal is to capture nine million tons of methane a year by 2015.
The agreement won support from both industry and environmental groups. But it also provoked comments about the fact that the Bush administration declined to sign the Kyoto Protocol, the treaty that will take effect early in 2005. That pact requires adherents to reduce heat-trapping gases; the Bush administration by contrast has pursued only voluntary measures for stemming the increase of such emissions.
"It's useful," David D. Doniger, a policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said of the new pact on methane. "But compared to the problem that's being ignored, it's small potatoes."
Similar criticism came from Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who used a Senate hearing on Tuesday to criticize the administration's policy on climate change, calling it "disgraceful."
James L. Connaughton, chairman of the White House's Council on Environmental Quality, insisted that the administration had supported a number of programs to harness the rise of carbon dioxide emissions, including efforts to expand land conservation and to develop advanced hybrid vehicles.
Frank Maisano, an energy industry lobbyist, praised the administration effort because developing countries like India and China were included. "One of the big arguments about climate change is that developing nations never want to participate," Mr. Maisano said. "The fact that they are signing on is significant."
The other countries participating are Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Colombia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Nigeria, Russia, Britain and Ukraine.
-------- OTHER
Terrorism Informant In Serious Condition
Man Tried Suicide at White House
By Caryle Murphy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 17, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55802-2004Nov16.html
The Yemen-born federal informant who set himself on fire outside the White House on Monday remained hospitalized yesterday in serious condition, while FBI and Justice Department officials continued to decline comment on the incident and on his contention that the FBI had mishandled his case.
Mohamed Alanssi's attempted suicide came after he alleged in interviews and a handwritten note that the FBI had failed to keep all of its promises to him after he helped the organization obtain evidence against a Yemeni cleric who is facing trial in New York in January on charges of providing material support to al Qaeda.
Alanssi, 52, whom law enforcement sources said is being guarded round-the-clock at Washington Hospital Center by FBI agents from the Washington field office, was expected to be a government witness at that trial.
On Monday, a defense attorney in the case filed papers in federal court in Brooklyn, N.Y., asking that portions of recorded conversations the government plans to use at the trial be suppressed because they contain comments translated improperly from Arabic to English by Alanssi.
The audiotaped and videotaped conversations were made during an FBI sting operation in Germany against cleric Mohammed Ali Hassan Al Moayad and his aide, Mohammed Mohsen Yahya Zayed. Alanssi's role in the January 2003 operation was to arrange for Moayad and Zayed to meet an FBI undercover agent in Frankfurt, according to Alanssi and others familiar with the case.
While he was being taped by U.S. and German agents, Moayad allegedly boasted of sending money and recruits to al Qaeda. Zayed also was arrested and is to go on trial with Moayad.
Jonathan Marks, who is representing Zayed, said in an interview yesterday that he expected Alanssi to be an important government witness because he was the only person who knew both Arabic and English and acted as a translator during the conversations between the defendants and the FBI undercover agent.
"He is their [the government's] witness," Marks said of Alanssi. "He is the case."
Marks said that the court papers he filed on Monday allege that Alanssi "mistranslated and embellished" many comments of the defendants and the undercover agent.
The defense motion seeks to have the English-language portions of the tapes suppressed. Although prosecutors have said that jurors will be given accurate written English translations of the Arabic heard on the recordings, Marks said in his motion that it "is unrealistic to expect the jury to ignore what they hear and follow only what they read."
Alanssi, whose condition was upgraded from critical to serious yesterday, was burned over 30 percent of his body, a hospital spokesman said.
The Falls Church resident had said in recent interviews and notes that he faxed to The Washington Post and the FBI's New York office that he was particularly upset that he could not travel to Yemen to visit his seriously ill wife and his six children because the FBI was holding his Yemeni passport.
Alanssi said in interviews that the FBI had promised him, among other things, U.S. residency and enough money to make him a millionaire. So far, he said, the FBI has paid him $100,000, and he has not received papers allowing him to live in this country.
An FBI spokesman yesterday did not return a reporter's calls seeking comment on Alanssi's claims. Justice Department spokesman Mark Corallo said: "We have no comment."
Staff writers Allan Lengel and Susan Schmidt contributed to this report.
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Man Who Burned Himself at White House Is Called Central to Terror Case
November 17, 2004
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/17/nyregion/17terror.html?pagewanted=all&position=
Yemeni man who set himself on fire in front of the White House on Monday and survived was the main informer for federal prosecutors in a terrorism financing case in Brooklyn, lawyers involved in the case said yesterday.
The man, Mohamed Alanssi, was recovering yesterday in a Washington hospital with extensive burns after law enforcement officers wrestled him to the ground about 2 p.m. on Monday near the White House's northwest gate and doused the flames. He had been expected to be a central witness in a trial in Brooklyn federal court scheduled for January in which prosecutors have charged that a prominent Yemeni cleric used mosques in Brooklyn and elsewhere to raise millions of dollars for Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.
Last year, when Attorney General John Ashcroft announced the charges in the case that is one of the country's largest terrorism financing prosecutions, he said the cleric, Mohammed Ali Hassan al-Moayad, had boasted that he had personally delivered $20 million to Osama bin Laden.
Defense lawyers in the case yesterday identified Mr. Alanssi as the central informer in the case and said they would seek to undermine his ultimate usefulness to the prosecution because of the bizarre episode.
They said it was Mr. Alanssi who established contact with Mr. al-Moayad in Yemen as part of a sting operation set up by F.B.I. agents. It was Mr. Alanssi, they said, who then lured Mr. al-Moayad to Germany with the promise that he would meet with an American Muslim who wanted to make contributions to Muslim causes.
In Germany, Mr. Alanssi took part in a series of recorded conversations with Mr. al-Moayad and the would-be contributor, who himself was also working with investigators. The tapes are the centerpiece of the prosecution's case, which is expected to continue.
Law enforcement officials said yesterday that Mr. Alanssi had been paid about $100,000 for his work but had been in a dispute with the F.B.I. recently and had been voicing complaints about his treatment by federal agents and threatening suicide. That dispute, first reported yesterday by The Washington Post, included a letter that Mr. Alanssi sent by fax on Monday to one of the agents who had been handling his case, Robert Fuller, an agent in the New York office of the bureau who specializes in terrorism investigations.
"Why don't you care about my life and my family's life," said the letter posted yesterday on The Washington Post's Web site, along with a letter Mr. Alanssi sent at about the same time to the newspaper. "Once I testify," the letter continued, "my family will be killed in Yemen, me too I will be a dead man."
The letter he faxed to the newspaper said he would "burn my body at an unexpected place.''
Spokesmen for the federal prosecutors and the F.B.I. would not comment yesterday. "There is nothing in the public record that would indicate who is or is not cooperating in this particular case," said Joseph Valiquette, an F.B.I. spokesman.
Mr. al-Moayad and an assistant who was also charged in the case in Brooklyn federal court, Mohammed Mohsen Yahya Zayed, were extradited after being arrested by German authorities and are being held in Brooklyn awaiting a Jan. 10 trial.
Their defense lawyers, Howard L. Jacobs and Jonathan Marks, said yesterday that the fire and information about it opened Mr. Alanssi to extensive cross-examination. They portrayed the developments as damaging to the prosecution's case.
"We now have some very valuable information about a very strong motive he had to entrap these people," Mr. Marks said in an interview yesterday. He said that because of the episode the lawyers had reason to argue that Mr. Alanssi, in his role as informer, might have been motivated by concerns about money or the circumstances surrounding his family back in Yemen.
The Washington Post reported yesterday that its reporters had been in contact in recent days with Mr. Alanssi and that he was in anguish about promises he said had been broken by federal agents handling his case, health problems and other issues.
Informers are typically paid for their work, and law enforcement officials have portrayed Mr. Alanssi as an important part of numerous investigations - a court document claims he was responsible for the arrest of 20 people and the recovery of about $1 million - and had been able to infiltrate what they portrayed as Mr. al-Moayad's terrorism financing operation.
If the developments on Monday were a blow to prosecutors, there is no evidence that they intend to abandon the case. The potentially damning recordings of the meetings in Germany could be admitted during the trial, backed up by the testimony of the federal agents who worked with Mr. Alanssi. One of the main F.B.I. agents who worked on the case, Brian Murphy, is now serving in the reserves in Iraq and may have to return to Brooklyn to help the prosecutors bolster the case.
Law enforcement officials said they believed that agents had been treating Mr. Alanssi fairly and said they had believed his intensifying dispute with them in recent days had centered on their expectations for the role he would play at the coming trial.
It is common for informers, some of the officials said, to become caught up in the glamour of working with investigators during the early part of a case and then to become concerned as the date when their full role might be unveiled in court approaches.
In a court filing in Brooklyn on Monday, though, defense lawyers had already begun to lay the groundwork for attacking Mr. Alanssi's credibility. One lawyer, Mr. Marks, asserted that Mr. Alanssi, identified as "CI1,'' the court language for a confidential informer, had often exaggerated and embellished the information he provided to investigators.
During the series of surreptitiously recorded meetings at a hotel in Germany, Mr. Alanssi served as the translator between Mr. al-Moayad and Mr. Zayed, who speak only Arabic, and the man posing as an American Muslim who wanted to contribute to terrorist organizations.
Those transcripts, according to the government, showed that Mr. al-Moayad praised martyrdom and described his ties to terrorist organizations, including Hamas, which was designated as a terrorist group by the United States in 1995.
In Arabic, according to a government translation, Mr. al-Moayad described close ties to Hamas. According to the transcript, evidently of a videotape recording, Mr. al-Moayad locked his fingers together as he described his close ties with Hamas. "I'm in touch and have the knowledge," it quoted him as saying, "with every aspect of Hamas's activities."
The transcript also showed, according to the government, that Mr. al-Moayad described supporting Mr. bin Laden financially during the 1980's and meeting with him as a spiritual adviser. "He tells me that I'm his sheik," the transcript quoted him as saying.
"We offer our lives for the sake of Islam," Mr. al-Moayad said, according to the transcript.
But Mr. Marks argued that the transcript also showed that often during the meetings, Mr. al-Moayad or Mr. Zayed would say something neutral or susceptible to different meanings and Mr. Alanssi would provide a damning translation into English.
Mr. Marks asked that the judge in the case, Sterling Johnson Jr., bar jury members from hearing parts of the recorded conversations in which the two men spoke to each other in English to try to limit the prejudice he said was introduced into the tapes by CI1, Mr. Alanssi.
Time after time, Mr. Marks argued in the legal papers, Mr. Alanssi embellished what were often ambiguous comments, perhaps for the federal investigators who were listening. In one instance, he noted, when the would-be contributor asked for specifics about terror plans, Mr. Alanssi translated the comments of Mr. al-Moayad and Mr. Zayed as saying they would soon know when the next attack would happen and specified Al Qaeda.
Mr. Marks noted that in their Arabic comments that have now been translated, neither defendant said anything about knowing about planned attacks. And, Mr. Marks wrote, "Neither defendant ever mentioned Al Qaeda."
Attempts to reach Mr. Alanssi at Washington Hospital Center were unsuccessful. Hospital officials said he was in a trauma center with burns to his hands, neck and face. They said no visitors other than family members were permitted.
Ian Urbina and David Johnston, in Washington, and William K. Rashbaum, in New York, contributed reporting for this article.
-------- health
Abortion pill to stay on market
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Joyce Howard Price
November 17, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20041116-110658-3983r.htm
The FDA said yesterday the abortion pill RU-486 will remain on the market despite criticisms from opponents who want the pill banned because they say three women have died after taking it.
"We feel the safety profiles of this drug are adequate to allow the drug to be used safely. But we'll continue to monitor it," said Dr. Steven Galson, acting director of the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.
Effective immediately, the drug will carry a "strengthened" black-box warning, advising of risks including death from bacterial infections, septic shock and heavy bleeding. There also is a renewed warning of risks associated with tubal pregnancies.
"We are concerned about any drug that may be related to serious medical complications and death," Dr. Galson said. "But infections, bleeding and death can result from medical and surgical abortions and even childbirth."
One of those calling for the removal of RU-486 from the market is Monty Patterson, 51, of Livermore, Calif. His 18-year-old daughter, Holly, died of septic shock caused by inflammation of the uterus seven days after she took RU-486 to end a pregnancy last year.
"My wife, Helen, and I are pleased that the FDA is adding new black-box warnings," Mr. Patterson said. But he added that it wasn't enough.
At a press briefing yesterday, Dr. Galson discussed the deaths of three American women who took RU-486. He said the deaths occurred between October 2001 and January 2004.
The first woman's death occurred after a ruptured tubal pregnancy. She had been given RU-486, even though the drug does not terminate that type of pregnancy.
Miss Patterson's death occurred in September 2003. The FDA said it was not until August this year that it learned of the death of another young woman in January. Like Miss Patterson, that woman died of a bacterial infection.
"We've investigated the three deaths and don't have information to know that the drug caused the events," Dr. Galson said.
The drug in question, approved by the FDA in 2000, is known generically as mifepristone. It is manufactured by Danco Laboratories of New York, and its trade name is Mifeprex.
It has been taken by about 360,000 women in the United States since its approval.
"We've received 600 reports overall" of adverse events involving people who have taken the drug, Dr. Galson said.
He said Mifeprex already bore a "black-box" warning - the FDA's strongest safety alert - on its label.
In August 2002, three groups - Concerned Women for America (CWA), the Christian Medical Association and the American Association of Pro-Life Gynecologists - filed a petition with the FDA, requesting the withdrawal of RU-486 because of safety concerns.
Yesterday, Wendy Wright, spokeswoman for CWA, said she was puzzled by the FDA's refusal to say Miss Patterson's death was caused by the abortion drug.
"The coroner's report said her death was caused by a drug-induced abortion, so there clearly was a relationship."
-----
Global Health Alert Network Adds Languages
By The Associated Press
November 17 2004
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/nationworld/ats-ap_health15nov17,0,340710.story?coll=sns-ap-tophealth
UNITED NATIONS -- A global system designed to spot bioterrorist attacks or new disease outbreaks became even more global Wednesday -- it now gathers information in six more languages.
The Global Health Intelligence Network, created in 1998, previously scanned only English language news reports for signs of infectious disease crises. Beginning Wednesday, it scours reports in Arabic, French, Russian, Spanish, and both simplified and traditional Chinese.
The $1.3 million upgrade was funded in part by the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to reducing the threat of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.
"I believe the world is in a race between cooperation and catastrophe," said former U.S. Senator and NTI co-founder Sam Nunn, who started the organization in 2001 with media executive Ted Turner. Nunn called the monitoring system "a security imperative."
In addition to concerns about bioterrorism, infectious disease experts are increasingly worried that a novel illness like SARS or bird flu spread among humans could rapidly overwhelm public health efforts if not addressed in its earliest stages.
"We've found that newswire sources are remarkably accurate. They're certainly timely," said Dr. Ron St. John, director of the Canadian Center for Emergency Preparedness and Response, which operates the global health intelligence system.
Analysts at the network's Ottawa headquarters handle about 10,000 news reports a month that are selected by computer from public databases. The incoming information is compiled, edited and supplemented with public health information, then shipped in daily reports to the World Health Organization and other subscribers.
The upgrade of the system was made by officials from the Public Health Agency of Canada and the World Health Organization at U.N. headquarters in New York.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Physicist Melba Phillips, 97, Dies
By Patricia Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 17, 2004; Page B04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55728-2004Nov16.html
University of Chicago physicist Melba Phillips, who lost two higher education jobs during the McCarthy era for refusing to testify before a U.S. Senate subcommittee, died of coronary artery disease Nov. 8 in a nursing home in Petersburg, Ind. She was 97.
Dr. Phillips, who went on to become one of the leading physics educators of her time, was teaching at Brooklyn College in 1952, with a part-time position at the Columbia University Radiation Laboratory. The Senate Judiciary Committee's internal security subcommittee, which was investigating some of her friends and colleagues, summoned her to testify. She appeared but refused to answer the subcommittee's questions.
Melba Phillips refused to testify before a Senate panel in 1952.
Dr. Phillips was fired and was unemployed for several years. During this time, she wrote two textbooks, "Principles of Physical Science" (1957), with Francis Bonner, and "Classical Electricity and Magnetism" (1955), with W.K.H. Panofsky, which is still used in undergraduate and graduate physics classes. She also edited books on the history of physics.
"She came to be a major figure in science education," said Bonner, a Manhattan Project scientist and professor emeritus of chemistry at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. "She was a stellar teacher. She was very soft-spoken. You had to listen carefully to hear her. She had a way of getting her audience spellbound. She was a wonderful teacher and a great source of stimulation.
"She didn't dwell on [the job loss] with me. She didn't see any alternative, and she was a very principled woman who lived according to her principles," Bonner said.
Brooklyn College publicly apologized in 1987. Ten years later, the school held a day-long symposium in her honor and established a scholarship in her name.
But long before that, she had established her credentials as a master teacher and scientist. She helped organize the founding of the Federation of American Scientists in 1945. She was the first woman to be president of the American Association of Physics Teachers in 1966. Last year, the American Physical Society gave her its Joseph Burton Forum Award for her education work and for being "a model of a principled scientist."
She was one of the first doctoral students of J. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the effort to build the first atomic bomb. In 1935, they published an explanation for the unexpected behavior of accelerated nuclei of "heavy hydrogen" atoms, which became known as the Oppenheimer-Phillips effect.
Jobs were scarce for academics during the Depression and scarcer for women working in science, so Dr. Phillips held a series of temporary jobs before she landed her first permanent position at Brooklyn College in 1938.
After her 1952 firing and five years of unemployment, she became associate director of a teacher-training institute at Washington University in St. Louis. She joined the University of Chicago faculty in 1962 and worked there until her retirement 10 years later. Under her influence, the university began teaching physical science courses to non-science majors.
After retiring in 1972, she worked as a visiting professor at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, until 1975 and at the Graduate School of the University of Science and Technology, Chinese Academy of Science, in Beijing in 1980.
Born in Hazleton, Ind., she graduated from high school at age 15 and received a bachelor's degree in math from Oakland City College of Indiana in 1926. She received a master's degree in physics from Battle Creek College of Michigan in 1928 and her doctorate in physics in 1933 at the University of California at Berkeley.
Among her many honors, she was an elected fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
She had no immediate survivors.
--------
Activist chalks it up to experience
November 17, 2004
Minneapolis Star Tribune,
by Larry Oakes, Staff Writer
http://www.startribune.com/dynamic/story.php?template=print_a&story=5089896
DULUTH -- A dozen peace activists mobilized in front of a Duluth courthouse on Tuesday, intent on striking a blow for justice, and perhaps recess.
People on their way to pay parking tickets gawked and courthouse employees peered quizzically from windows as the defiant dozen drew numbered chalk squares on the sidewalk at the foot of the big flagpole and played hopscotch.
One of them, a bearded fellow who said his name was "Ozone with a capital O -- that's all," held a sign that said: "When chalk is outlawed..."
Next to him, 22-year-old Beth Allee held a sign completing the message: "... only outlaws will have chalk."
It was a bizarre scene, but then, that was their point; it was about as bizarre, they said, as the event that brought them downtown: the trial of Michael Larson on a charge of damaging public property by chalking antinuclear messages on city sidewalks.
The case gave them an opportunity to use the seemingly ridiculous protest to emphasize a deadly serious point, they said.
Larson, 22, was among a group of about two dozen peace activists who fanned out across the city's central business district the night of Aug. 5 to memorialize the victims of the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, by the United States.
One of them would lie down on a sidewalk, and another would trace his or her body with chalk.
They also traced outlines of dolls they carried, depicting the bodies of babies.
"The outlines recall the carbon 'shadows' still etched in stone and concrete around Hiroshima from people who were vaporized by the atomic blast nearly 60 years ago," said Joel Kilgour, who along with Larson is a member of Duluth's Loaves & Fishes Catholic Worker community.
Next to the body outlines, the activists wrote messages such as, "Abolish Nuclear Weapons," and "No More Hiroshimas."
'Hippie-looking guys'
Responding to a complaint from a motel desk clerk that "hippie-looking guys are writing anti-war stuff," police asked Larson and another man to knock it off.
"I advised Larson that if he did not clean up the mess he created on public property, he would be given a ticket for damage to property," Duluth police officer Ken Zwak wrote in his report. "He told me he did not care and [that] the laws he believed in allowed him to damage public property because he was sending a message about right and wrong."
Larson said Zwak handcuffed him and put him in a squad car before giving him a petty misdemeanor ticket and releasing him.
Zwak did not return a telephone call Tuesday afternoon, asking for comment.
Hopscotch and H-bombs
Larson pleaded not guilty. His arrest appalled people in Duluth's peace movement.
"We've been doing the same thing on Hiroshima Day for years and years," activist Penny Cragun said. "Does this mean that hopscotch is soon to be outlawed?"
Her question gave Kilgour the idea to stage Tuesday's "Hopscotch-in."
"I thought it might highlight the ridiculousness of the charge," he said.
Larson demanded his day in court. He got about a minute.
St. Louis County District Judge Gerald Martin called his case, and Larson took a seat at the defense table. He wore a green T-shirt on which the word "Peace" was printed in English, Hebrew and Arabic.
Martin looked at interim assistant city attorney Joanne Piper-Maurer and asked flatly: "What do you want to do with this?"
Piper-Maurer responded that because there was insufficient evidence that chalk-writing constituted damage, the city was dismissing the charge.
The defendant himself objected.
"The defendant needs to be changed to the governments that possess nuclear weapons, and they need to be tried under international law," he complained.
Martin responded that "you can't bring a counter-claim in a criminal case." Since the prosecution had dismissed, the matter was done, he said, rapping his gavel and excusing the defendant.
In the hallway afterward, Larson's supporters congratulated him, both for beating the charge and for making his point.
"It was a victory for common sense," Kilgour said. "The next step will be to eliminate nuclear weapons."
He admitted that might be a little harder.
For the city, though, what happened in court appeared to have more to do with hopscotch. Prosecutor Piper-Maurer revealed as much in a comment as she entered the courtroom:
"I'm not going to charge the 7-year-old girl next door because she writes things like 'I love Mommy,' on the sidewalk with chalk."
Larry Oakes is at loakes@startribune.com.
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