Replies to post #9011 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[F6]

Baghdad Car Bomb Kills 12 Iraqis, Wounds 13 Others, AFP Reports

June 13 (Bloomberg) -- Twelve people were killed and thirteen others wounded in an attack on an Iraqi police patrol in the capital, Agence France-Presse reported, citing an unidentified U.S. military spokeswoman.

Four policemen are among those killed in a car bomb, detonated southeast of Baghdad, said the spokesman, the agency reported.

Unidentified gunmen today also shot dead Kamal Jarrah, an official in Iraq's Education Ministry, outside his home in the city. Bassam Kubba, the undersecretary for international relations in the Foreign Ministry, was killed by gunmen yesterday.

(AFP 6-13)

To contact the reporter responsible for this story:
Dania Saadi in the Dubai bureau on at [e-mail]

To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Paul Tighe at [e-mail]

Last Updated: June 13, 2004 04:23 EDT

©2004 Bloomberg L.P.

http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000087&sid=avYi3Ej2ZU.E&refer=top_world_news

[F6]

Army used private interrogators despite ban

Policy cites national security; commanders allowed to override it

08:27 PM CDT on Saturday, June 12, 2004

Associated Press

WASHINGTON – The Army hired private interrogators to work in Iraq and Afghanistan despite its policy of barring contractors from military intelligence jobs such as interrogating prisoners.

A policy memo from December 2000 says letting private workers gather military intelligence would jeopardize national security.

An Army spokeswoman said senior commanders have the authority to override the contractor ban.

Some of the dozens of private contractors hired to interrogate prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan are under investigation in connection with abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad and other prisons. Army investigators are looking into whether the contracts were awarded properly.

The Abu Ghraib case also stirred criticism from some Democrats that the Pentagon is relying too heavily on private contractors, even for military functions such as collecting intelligence.

Thomas White, who quit as Army secretary last year after clashing with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, said he opposed hiring contractors to question prisoners.

"The principle that should be applied is that the basic process of interrogation and oversight of prisoners should be kept in-house, on the Army side," Mr. White said in a telephone interview. "That's something that would have to be under the direct supervision of the Army."

An Army spokeswoman, Lt. Col. Pamela Hart, said Saturday that the contractor ban remains in effect. The policy allows for hiring private interrogators and interpreters if there are not enough of those specialists in the Army.

"Commanders on the ground may use their discretion," Col. Hart said.

The Army's top personnel official, Patrick T. Henry, wrote the policy in December 2000.

Mr. Henry cited a "risk to national security" in turning over intelligence functions to private sector workers. Private contractors may work for companies that do business with other countries and are not subject to the same chain of command that soldiers are, Mr. Henry wrote.

"Reliance on private contractors poses risks to maintaining adequate civilian oversight over intelligence operations," Mr. Henry wrote. "Civilian oversight over intelligence operations and technologies is essential to assure intelligence operations are conducted with adequate security safeguards and within the scope of law and direction of the authorized chain of command."

An Army report on the abuses at Abu Ghraib says problems at the prison included confusion over who was in charge of contractors and a lack of supervision of the private workers.

© 2004 Belo Interactive Inc.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/nation/stories/061304dnnatabuse.6c01c.html

[F6]

Alcohol Cited as Problem at Prison

Officials at Abu Ghraib tried to rein in the illicit behavior before abuse of inmates surfaced.

By Greg Miller
Times Staff Writer

June 13, 2004

WASHINGTON — Weeks before U.S. military investigators began uncovering evidence of mistreatment of detainees, commanders at the Abu Ghraib prison launched a crackdown on alcohol abuse and told intelligence troops that guards were suspected of soliciting sex from Iraqi prostitutes, according to soldiers and officers who worked at the compound.

Commanders at the prison outside Baghdad launched a series of measures to stem the illegal behavior, the soldiers said, including inspecting troops' living quarters for stashes of liquor and banishing Iraqi vendors who were suspected of helping to procure alcohol and make arrangements for soldiers to visit prostitutes.

The steps were part of an attempt by senior officers at Abu Ghraib to impose order on a facility that had spun out of control. Officers who worked at the prison said the measures were imposed in late December and early January, after the reported abuses of detainees but shortly before military investigators received a computer disc containing photos of prisoner abuse that became public in April.

Some officers believe that alcohol may have been a factor in the behavior of guards who have been charged with beating prisoners, stripping them naked, forcing them to masturbate and stacking them in pyramid-shaped piles on the prison floor. At least one prisoner has told investigators that he frequently smelled alcohol on the guards' breath in the cellblock where most of the abuses occurred.

In a report on his investigation this year into abuses at the prison, Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba cited at least two cases of military police officers being disciplined for drinking alcohol against Army rules. The incident took place in May 2003, before the U.S. was using Abu Ghraib as a detention facility.

Five military intelligence soldiers who worked at the prison said they learned of the crackdown during an impromptu meeting with an irate Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, one of the senior officers at the prison and the leader of the interrogation operation. In telephone and e-mail interviews, the soldiers said that Jordan told them he had recently learned of an outbreak of alcohol abuse and that members of MP units on base had been seeking sex with Iraqi prostitutes. The soldiers said Jordan warned that he intended to put a stop to the illegal behavior.

Spc. Israel Rivera, an Army analyst at Abu Ghraib at the time, said Jordan "came in one evening and said, 'There's a prostitution ring and a liquor smuggling ring…. I'm going to pursue it and I hope there's no military intelligence people involved."

Another soldier who was at the meeting, Spc. Paul Son, said Jordan lectured the assembled troops that it was "absolutely unacceptable and a definite 'no-go' for anybody to be taking sexual advantage of and forcing desperate Iraqi women to prostitution. He said that as American soldiers we were sent to Iraq to do good and not exploit poor Iraqis that are trying to survive."

Other soldiers offered similar accounts of the meeting and the ensuing sweep. All said they did not have firsthand knowledge of the alleged solicitation of prostitution by soldiers at Abu Ghraib but said that alcohol abuse was evident in the compound from early on in its use as a U.S.-run detention facility.

Several members of military police units assigned to Abu Ghraib disputed the prostitution claims, saying they saw no evidence of such behavior during their time there. They acknowledged that alcohol use was a recurring problem. Several soldiers said there were numerous warnings about alcohol — possession of which was prohibited by General Order No. 1 issued by U.S. Central Command — and that there was even an Alcoholics Anonymous chapter at Abu Ghraib.

Under the general order, no U.S. Army soldier may possess alcohol while in Iraq, a ban that stems from the military's desire to keep troops ready for action as well as an interest in abiding by anti-alcohol sensibilities in Muslim countries.

"Prostitution? Absolutely none. Never even heard anything about that at all," said Master Sgt. Greg Rayburn, a medic with the 870th Military Police Company, which is based in Pittsburg, Calif., and was stationed at Abu Ghraib from September 2003 until this April. "Drinking, yes," Rayburn said. "There was drinking that was going on."

Jordan, who remains in Iraq and is among the senior officers at the center of the prisoner abuse investigation, did not respond to e-mail requests for comment.

Despite the denials, there are indications that prostitution may have been an issue at the prison. Among them is a cryptic note taken by a military investigator during an interview with an MP at Abu Ghraib, Cpl. Matthew Bolinger. A copy of the note was obtained by The Times.

In the note, the investigator wrote that Bolinger said he had seen computer images of one of the MPs having sex with an unidentified woman. The MP is identified as Cpl. Charles A. Graner Jr., a guard who has been portrayed as a ringleader of the abuses and now faces a court-martial.

According to the note, Bolinger "observed Garner [sic] having sex with female in video." The next two lines read, "possible in cell" and "possible prostitute."

Bolinger, who is still serving in Iraq, said via e-mail that he could not comment on the matter, citing orders not to talk to the media.

Other soldiers familiar with the photos have said that they include images of Graner having sex with Pfc. Lynndie England, another MP who has been charged in the abuse case. England is now pregnant with Graner's child, and is at Ft. Bragg in North Carolina.

The disclosures regarding alleged problems with alcohol and prostitution add to the portrait of Abu Ghraib as a prison beset by breakdowns in leadership, and where many of the most serious abuses had a sexual theme.

Capt. Leo Merck was relieved of his command of the 870th MP Company at Abu Ghraib after he was caught taking pictures of his nude female soldiers while they showered.

Three soldiers with the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion from Ft. Bragg were fined and demoted last fall after they were accused of taking a female Iraqi detainee into a vacant cell and ordering her to strip.

Soldiers and an officer who were working at the prison at the time said they believed the accused soldiers had been drinking.

Soldiers and officers said much of the liquor was supplied by Iraqi civilians who entered the compound almost daily and were subjected to cursory inspections.

Dozens of Iraqi laborers worked on construction projects at the prison, and vendors sold wares such as prayer rugs and Iraqi military patches collected by U.S. troops.

"I remember one soldier telling me he gave a [vendor] a 20 and he brought him back a bottle of alcohol," said Sgt. Samuel J. Provance III, who worked as an intelligence analyst at Abu Ghraib.

The vendors also would try to curry favor with officers by offering liquor.

"They would try to bring it to you as a gift," said Lt. Antoine Brooks of the 870th MP Company, who added that he never accepted such offers and knew of no officers who did. He also said that vendors sometimes suggested they could line up prostitutes.

"They would say: 'I'm going to get you a woman. You need a woman. You've been away from home too long,' " he said. Brooks said the Iraqis who said such things "were just joking" and that he knew of no incidents involving prostitutes at Abu Ghraib.

No members of Brooks' company have been charged with prisoner abuse.

Provance said an Iraqi laundry service came once a week to collect uniforms and that he was told that "soldiers were meeting or arranging sex with employees" of that service, away from the prison grounds.

When Jordan delivered his lecture, suspicion also centered on an Iraqi named Ali who lived with the MPs in their compound and had been allowed to set up a cafe of sorts where he played American music and served Iraqi food to soldiers at the prison. MPs said Ali frequently left the base to buy blankets and other items for soldiers but never brought anything illegal into the prison.

Ali and others were banished from the prison by Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the commander of the facility, as part of the crackdown that Jordan announced to his troops.

In that crackdown, Criminal Investigation Division agents set up so-called "amnesty bins" into which soldiers could dump alcohol and other contraband and avoid being punished. Commanders also launched "health and welfare" inspections, scouring soldiers' living quarters for illegal items. Officers who took part in the searches said that some alcohol was confiscated and that several soldiers were disciplined.

Weeks later, when officers at the site were confronted with pictures showing abuse of prisoners, some wondered whether alcohol had played a part. A military intelligence lieutenant colonel from a National Guard unit who worked at the prison and asked not to be identified said that the MPs appeared to be drunk and that the atmosphere on the cellblock was "like a fraternity party."

But others are skeptical that alcohol was a factor, saying that though soldiers were sometimes caught drinking off-hours, they were unaware of any instances in which the guards were drinking during their shifts.

Brooks declined to speculate on whether alcohol played a role. That would be "an excuse," he said. "I'm not going to make excuses."

*

Times staff writers Richard A. Serrano and Rone Tempest contributed to this report.

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/la-fg-prison13jun13,1,5373164.story?coll=la-home-headli...

[F6]

Hiding a bad guy named triple X

How the military treated some inmates at Abu Ghraib like 'ghosts'

By Edward T. Pound

6/21/04 Issue

The top U.S. commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, issued a classified order last November directing military guards to hide a prisoner, later dubbed "Triple X" by soldiers, from Red Cross inspectors and keep his name off official rosters. The disclosure, by military sources, is the first indication that Sanchez was directly involved in efforts to hide prisoners from the Red Cross, a practice that was sharply criticized by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba in a report describing abuses of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.

Taguba blamed the 800th Military Police Brigade, which guarded the prison, for allowing "other government agencies"--a euphemism that includes the CIA--to hide "ghost" detainees at Abu Ghraib. The practice, he wrote, "was deceptive, contrary to Army doctrine, and in violation of international law." Taguba's report did not cite the November 18 directive issued by Sanchez to hide Triple X, identified as a high-ranking terrorist. It is not known if Taguba saw the directive. He declined to comment. The Army said it could not discuss a classified order.

The disclosure of Sanchez's involvement may focus more attention on him. There have been reports that his top Army lawyers sought to curb Red Cross access to Abu Ghraib, only weeks after the humanitarian agency uncovered abuses and sexual humiliation at the prison late last year. Some Army officers, including Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the commander of the 800th MP Brigade, have blamed Sanchez's staff for refusing to release security detainees from Abu Ghraib even when they were believed to pose no threat to coalition forces.

Karpinski says Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast, who is Sanchez's top intelligence officer, was a major obstacle to releasing detainees. Fast, she says, served with her and a third officer on a detainee release board and vetoed recommendations to release inmates from the overcrowded facility, even after determining that they were of no intelligence value. "She did not want to release the next Osama bin Laden," Karpinski says. "She had a certain kind of paranoia." Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the top military spokesman in Iraq, denies that Fast had veto authority and says most board decisions were unanimous.

Overcrowding, lack of force protection in a hot combat zone, and unsanitary conditions may have contributed to the problems at Abu Ghraib. Internal Army records obtained by U.S. News show that the military moved at a snail's pace in releasing security detainees from Abu Ghraib and three other facilities. In early December, there were 1,604 detainees kept for more than 91 days. By late January, that figure had grown to 3,016. An additional 1,500 were kept for more than two months, the January report shows.

Karpinski didn't see eye to eye with either Sanchez or Fast. She says that security detainees were held because they were thought to pose a threat to, or had committed crimes against, coalition forces. But many, she says, should not have been held for so long. Some weren't guilty of anything, she says, pointing out that in the wake of the scandal, the military has been releasing large groups of prisoners from Abu Ghraib. According to various news reports, 1,680 prisoners have been released since May 14.

Some detainees, says Karpinski, "were in the wrong place at the wrong time." She explains: "MI [military intelligence] would do an initial interrogation, find out they were passing by, borrowing a cup of sugar, and they get policed up. They try to explain to somebody that they were only going there to borrow a cup of sugar, but nobody believed them."

No one is arguing that decisions on releasing detainees were easy. Army officers point to an embarrassing incident that took place in May 2003: An Iraqi man was released from Camp Bucca in southern Iraq after convincing an interrogator that he was a "tomato farmer," but he turned out to be Mohammed Jawad An Neifus, Saddam Hussein's most loyal tribal leader. Neifus was believed to be responsible for the deaths of thousands of Shiites, an Army officer says.

Triple X certainly fit the category of a potential threat. Sanchez, in his directive to the 800th MP Brigade--Fragmentary Order (FRAGO) No. 1099--identified the man by name, said he was a terrorist, and told the brigade not to put his name in any electronic roster of detainees. He instructed the brigade not to disclose his whereabouts to the Red Cross pending further notice, military sources say.

When the brigade objected, Sanchez's staff lawyers directed the MP s to implement the order, according to a 25-page report sent to the Senate Armed Services Committee by Capt. Lisa Weidenbush, operations officer for the 800th MP Brigade (box). She included only bare-bones information about the FRAGO in arguing that the brigade was not involved in a scheme to hide detainees. She declined comment when reached last week.

Beginning last November, the military sources say, Triple X was kept alone, under guard in his own room, at the High Value Detention facility near the Baghdad airport. When Red Cross inspectors visited the facility, the military sources recall, they had no reason to know Triple X was there, and they were not shown him. Even today, not much is known about the man--he is said to be Middle Eastern, short, slightly built, and in his 40s.

It is not clear why there was so much secrecy surrounding Triple X. One senior officer says there were "all these wild rumors" last fall that Triple X might know the location of Saddam, who had not yet been captured. In the end, however, only a handful of people knew why he was so valuable, Sanchez included, and they're not talking.

Copyright © 2004 U.S.News & World Report, L.P.

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/040621/usnews/21abughraib.htm

[F6]

A dissent from within the ranks

6/21/04 Issue

Last month, when Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba detailed Army abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq for the Senate Armed Services Committee, it was something of a love feast. Senators nearly fell over one another extolling his "service to this country." But Taguba is no hero to Capt. Lisa Weidenbush, the operations officer for the 800th Military Police Brigade, which ran the prison and took the brunt of his criticism.

In a scathing 25-page analysis sent to the armed services panel, she takes Taguba to task for "false" and "misleading" statements. Her report, obtained by U.S. News, does not challenge Taguba's findings of abuse but says he failed to tell the whole story. Among other issues, Weidenbush says, Taguba wrongly blamed the brigade for holding off-the-books "ghost" prisoners, for failures of the Coalition Provisional Authority's prisons department, and for some prisoner escapes that were the fault of another outfit. "I submit that the report was a conclusion in search of an investigation," she said in a cover letter, "and not an investigation seeking truth."

Weidenbush's critique is extraordinary: Army captains don't usually rip two-star generals. But friends say the 20-year Army veteran is a gutsy officer who speaks her mind.

Taguba declined comment. A spokesman, Col. Rick Thomas, said Taguba's report "accurately reflects the information accumulated" during his inquiry. Last month, Taguba blamed failed leadership and lack of training and discipline for the abuses. He said that guards who roughed up prisoners acted alone but were influenced by intelligence personnel who conducted interrogations. Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, a reservist, commanded the 800th MP Brigade. In an interview, she said she and Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, did not get along. "It is my opinion," she said, "that Taguba unfairly blamed me because he was hitching his wagon to Sanchez's star."

Weidenbush was not criticized in Taguba's report. In her analysis, she says the brigade performed well in handling a "monumental" task, which involved much more than running Abu Ghraib and 15 other detention facilities. The brigade, she said, suffered from personnel shortages and lack of support. In one harsh passage, she said that Sanchez "knowingly put soldiers at risk" by not providing correctional training for the brigade, despite concerns about lack of training expressed by brigade leaders before assuming the prisons mission in June 2003. In conclusion, Weidenbush said that others in the brigade feared reprisal if they spoke out. "However, since I risked my life for our country," she said, "I could do no less than risk my career" for the reputation of the soldiers who fought next to her.

Excerpts from the Weidenbush report. [ http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/040612/12weidenbush.htm ]

-- Edward T. Pound

Copyright © 2004 U.S.News & World Report, L.P.

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/040621/usnews/21abughraib.b.htm

[F6]

General Granted Latitude At Prison

Abu Ghraib Used Aggressive Tactics

By R. Jeffrey Smith and Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, June 12, 2004; Page A01

Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior U.S. military officer in Iraq, borrowed heavily from a list of high-pressure interrogation tactics used at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and approved letting senior officials at a Baghdad jail use military dogs, temperature extremes, reversed sleep patterns, sensory deprivation, and diets of bread and water on detainees whenever they wished, according to newly obtained documents.

The U.S. policy, details of which have not been previously disclosed, was approved in early September, shortly after an Army general sent from Washington completed his inspection of the Abu Ghraib jail and then returned to brief Pentagon officials on his ideas for using military police there to help implement the new high-pressure methods.

The documents obtained by The Washington Post spell out in greater detail than previously known the interrogation tactics Sanchez authorized, and make clear for the first time that, before last October, they could be imposed without first seeking the approval of anyone outside the prison. That gave officers at Abu Ghraib wide latitude in handling detainees.

Unnamed officials at the Florida headquarters of the U.S. Central Command, which has overall military responsibility for Iraq, objected to some of the 32 interrogation tactics approved by Sanchez in September, including the more severe methods that he had said could be used at any time in Abu Ghraib with the consent of the interrogation officer in charge.

As a result, Sanchez decided on Oct. 12 to remove several items on the list and to require that prison officials obtain his direct approval for the remaining high-pressure methods. Among the tactics apparently dropped were those that would take away prisoners' religious items; control their exposure to light; inflict "pride and ego down," which means attacking detainees' sense of pride or worth; and allow interrogators to pretend falsely to be from a country that deals severely with detainees, according to the documents.

The high-pressure options that remained included taking someone to a less hospitable location for interrogation; manipulating his or her diet; imposing isolation for more than 30 days; using military dogs to provoke fear; and requiring someone to maintain a "stress position" for as long as 45 minutes. These were not dropped by Sanchez until a scandal erupted in May over photographs depicting abuse at the prison.

The Army has never said whether any of the particularly tough tactics that were authorized were used on detainees at Abu Ghraib or the other U.S.-run detention camps in Iraq before October, in the five-month period after the end of major combat operations in May 2003.

Officials have said that Sanchez approved the use of only one of the more severe techniques -- long-term isolation -- on 25 occasions after Oct. 12 and before the third set of rules was issued this May. The officials have described the abusive acts committed by Army personnel at Abu Ghraib before and during this time as aberrant activities conducted outside the rules.

One of the documents, an Oct. 9 memorandum on "Interrogation Rules of Engagement," which each military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib was asked to sign, sets out in detail the wide range of pressure tactics approved in September and available before the rules were changed on Oct. 12. They included methods that were close to some of the behavior criticized this March by the Army's own investigator, who said he found evidence of "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuse" at the prison.

The document states that the list of tactics in the memorandum is derived from a Sept. 10, 2003, "Interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policy" approved by Combined Joint Task Force-7, which Sanchez directs. While the document states that "at no time will detainees be treated inhumanely nor maliciously humiliated," it permits the use of yelling, loud music, a reduction of heat in winter and air conditioning in summer, and "stress positions" for as long as 45 minutes every four hours -- all without first gaining the permission of anyone more senior than the "interrogation officer in charge" at Abu Ghraib.

Although the October document calls attention to the strictures of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, it neither quotes from that statute nor makes any reference to the Geneva Conventions' rules against cruelty and torture involving detainees.

Wendy Patten, a lawyer and U.S. advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, said two provisions in the Oct. 9 document are particularly troubling. First, she noted its reference to "dietary manipulation -- minimum bread and water, monitored by medics" as a technique permitted with the approval of the interrogation officer in charge. "This seems a clear violation of the Geneva Conventions, which require daily food rations to have enough quantity, quality and variety to maintain good health, prevent weight loss and prevent nutritional deficiencies," Patten said.

She also expressed concern about the policy's blanket approval of "incentive item removal -- regarding religious items" as a tactic that may be used on civilian detainees, which she said appears to conflict with a Geneva Conventions requirement that detainees enjoy "complete latitude in the exercise of their religious duties."

Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman did not defend these tactics. He said "there are a number of investigations that are looking not only into interrogation procedures and processes, but how they were implemented. The baseline standard for all interrogation as well as the security procedures for holding detainees has always been humane treatment."

The list of interrogation options in the document closely matches a menu of options developed for use on detainees held by the U.S. military at Guantanamo Bay and approved in a series of memos signed by top Pentagon officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. In January 2002, for example, Rumsfeld approved the use of dogs to intimidate prisoners there; although officials have said dogs were never used at Guantanamo, they were used at Abu Ghraib.

Then, in April 2003, Rumsfeld approved the use in Guantanamo of at least five other high-pressure techniques also listed on the Oct. 9 Abu Ghraib memo, none of which was among the Army's standard interrogation methods. This overlap existed even though detainees in Iraq were covered, according to the administration's policy, by Geneva Convention protections that did not apply to the detainees in Cuba.

The documents obtained by The Post, which include memos from Abu Ghraib and statements made by prison officials for the Army's investigation, make clear that this overlap was no accident. No formalized rules for interrogation existed in Iraq before the policy imposed on Sept. 10, one day after Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller -- who was then in charge of the Guantanamo site -- departed from Iraq. He was accompanied on the Iraq visit by at least 11 senior aides from Guantanamo, including officials from the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency.

While that list of options was subsequently truncated on Oct. 12, some military personnel at the jail told Army investigators that they lacked awareness or understanding of the changes.

For example, Spec. Luciana Spencer, a member of the 66th Military Intelligence Group who was removed from interrogations because she had ordered a detainee to walk naked to his cell after an interview, told investigators that the military police did not know their boundaries. "When I began working the night shift I discussed with the MPs what their SOP [standard operating procedure] was for detainee treatment," Spencer said in a statement. "They informed me they had no SOP. I informed them of my IROE [interrogation rules of engagement] and made clear to them what I was and wasn't allowed to do or see."

A civilian contractor, Adel Nakhla, an interpreter for military intelligence, told investigators he was briefed on interrogation rules only after being implicated in an abusive event.

Yelling at detainees, a technique approved in September that appears to have been dropped in October, was nonetheless used throughout the last quarter of 2003, Army investigators were told. "It's not common but it happens sometimes," Roman Krol, a military intelligence interrogator, told investigators on Jan. 31. "We asked them [military police] if they could come in and randomly yell at the detainee."

Moreover, when intelligence officers arranged for military police to help impose some of the more severe tactics, they often failed to specify how to do so, leaving wide latitude for potentially abusive behavior. Steven Anthony Stefanowicz, a civilian interrogator at Abu Ghraib, said, for example, that "the MPs are allowed to do what is necessary to keep the detainee awake in the allotted period of time. . . . I've referred to the MPs to give the detainee his special treatment . . . hence the MPs are not directed when and how this is to be administered."

Capt. Donald J. Reese, a member of the 372nd Military Police Company who assigned MPs to work in the isolation tiers, told investigators "it appeared that the MI [military intelligence] tactics were very aggressive and then appeared to taper in intensity as time went along."

But the atmosphere at Abu Ghraib was hardly one of strict adherence to the rules, other officials said. A photograph of the pyramid of naked Iraqi detainees -- one of the most notorious portraits of abuse -- was used as a screen saver on a computer in the isolation area where intelligence officers worked, according to Spencer's statement.

Some of the rules for U.S. military personnel at the prison made it easy for people to duck responsibility for their actions, a factor that may also have opened the door to abuse.

The acronym MI "will not be used in the area," according to an undated prison memo titled "Operational Guidelines," which covered the high-security cellblock. "Additionally, it is recommended that all military personnel in the segregation area reduce knowledge of their true identities to these specialized detainees. The use of sterilized uniforms is highly suggested and personnel should NOT address each other by true name and rank in the segregation area."

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35612-2004Jun11.html

[F6]

Soldiers raised abuse concerns

By Washington
June 13, 2004

The top US military officer in Iraq approved letting officials at a Baghdad jail subject detainees to temperature extremes, reversed sleep patterns and diets of bread and water whenever they wished, The Washington Post reported yesterday.

Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez borrowed from a list of high-pressure tactics used at the US detention centre in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, when he granted wide latitude to officers overseeing detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison, the Post reported, citing newly obtained documents.

The documents spell out in greater detail than previously known the interrogation tactics General Sanchez authorised in early September 2003, and make it clear for the first time that, before last October, these tactics could be imposed without seeking the approval of anyone outside the prison.

Unnamed officials at the Florida headquarters of the US Central Command, which has overall military responsibility for Iraq, objected to some of the 32 interrogation tactics General Sanchez approved. As a result, General Sanchez removed several items on the list in October and required prison officials to obtain his direct approval for the remaining high-pressure methods, the Post reported.

It has also been revealed that at least five American soldiers objected last autumn to abuses they saw at the Abu Ghraib prison. One demanded to be reassigned, saying the behaviour "made me sick to my stomach".

The non-commissioned officers who heard such complaints did little to stop the mistreatment, according to army records obtained by The Associated Press.

One of those NCOs, Staff Sergeant Ivan "Chip" Frederick, is accused of stomping on prisoners' toes and punching another prisoner so hard in the chest that he remarked, "I think I might have put him in cardiac arrest". Staff Sergeant Frederick is among six soldiers facing courts-martial. Another soldier pleaded guilty last month.

The military's full-blown investigation into beatings and humiliations at Abu Ghraib began in January after one soldier wrote an anonymous letter to superior officers about troubling photographs. That soldier, Specialist Joe Darby, came forward later to talk to army investigators and eventually became known as the whistle-blower who uncovered the scandal.

Internal army documents show others condemned the abuse they saw at the prison, although their complaints failed to prevent further mistreatment.

That earlier complaints apparently went nowhere adds to the uncertainty over a key question in the Abu Ghraib scandal: did superior military police or intelligence officers encourage or condone the abuses? A report from army Major-General Antonio Taguba says yes.

- agencies

Copyright © 2004. The Age Company Ltd.

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/06/12/1086749942252.html

[F6]

Iraq dog use 'ordered by US intelligence'

Friday 11 June 2004, 17:18 Makka Time, 14:18 GMT

US intelligence personnel ordered military dog handlers to use unmuzzled dogs to intimidate detainees at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, The Washington Post has reported.

A military intelligence interrogator also told investigators that two dog handlers at the prison were "having a contest" to see how many detainees they could make involuntarily urinate out of fear of the dogs, the Post said, citing statements obtained by the newspaper.

Six US soldiers face possible court martial and one has already been jailed for a year because of the abuses at Abu Ghraib, where photographs have shown detainees being sexually humiliated, physically tormented and threatened with dogs.

Two army dog handlers assigned to Abu Ghraib, Sgt. Michael Smith and Sgt. Santos Cardona, told investigators that military intelligence personnel asked them to bring their dogs to prison interrogation sites numerous times to help question detainees in December and January, the Post reported.

Belief

According to the report, Smith and Cardona said they complied with the requests because they believed the tactics had been approved by Col. Thomas Pappas, the military intelligence officer in charge of the prison.

At the cell blocks, they allowed their dogs to menace detainees, they told investigators.

At the behest of interrogators, Smith said, in some cases he would bring the barking dog to within 15 cm of terrified prisoners, the Post reported.

The officer in charge of the military intelligence-run interrogation centre at the prison had to approve the use of dogs in interrogations, according to a military intelligence memo obtained by The Washington Post.

There is no explanation in the memo of what parameters would have to be in place or what the dogs would be allowed to do, the report said.

Neither Smith nor Cardona have been charged in connection with the abuse at Abu Ghraib.

"It's all under investigation," Lt. Col. Pamela Hart, an Army spokeswoman, told the newspaper.

A Pentagon spokesman was not immediately available for comment.

Reuters

© 2003 Aljazeera.Net

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/1BC56B64-8101-4B14-9AA0-A66339D485CE.htm

[F6]

Interrogation abuses were 'approved at highest levels'

By Julian Coman in Washington
(Filed: 13/06/2004)

New evidence that the physical abuse of detainees in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay was authorised at the top of the Bush administration will emerge in Washington this week, adding further to pressure on the White House.

The Telegraph understands that four confidential Red Cross documents implicating senior Pentagon civilians in the Abu Ghraib scandal have been passed to an American television network, which is preparing to make them public shortly.

According to lawyers familiar with the Red Cross reports, they will contradict previous testimony by senior Pentagon officials who have claimed that the abuse in the Abu Ghraib prison was an isolated incident.

"There are some extremely damaging documents around, which link senior figures to the abuses," said Scott Horton, the former chairman of the New York Bar Association, who has been advising Pentagon lawyers unhappy at the administration's approach. "The biggest bombs in this case have yet to be dropped."

A string of leaked government memos over the past few days has revealed that President George W Bush was advised by Justice Department officials and the White House lawyer, Alberto Gonzalez, that Geneva Conventions on torture did not apply to "unlawful combatants", captured during the war on terror.

Members of Congress are now demanding access to all White House memos on interrogation techniques, a request so far refused by the United States attorney-general, John Ashcroft.

As the growing scandal threatens to undermine President Bush's re-election campaign, senior aides have acknowledged for the first time that the abuse of detainees can no longer be presented as the isolated acts of a handful of soldiers at the Abu Ghraib.

"It's now clear to everyone that there was a debate in the administration about how far interrogators could go," said a legal adviser to the Pentagon. "And the answer they came up with was 'pretty far'. Now that it's in the open, the administration is having to change that answer somewhat."

In the latest revelation, yesterday's Washington Post published leaked documents revealing that Gen Ricardo Sanchez, the senior US officer in Iraq, approved the use of dogs, temperature extremes, reversed sleep patterns and sensory deprivation for prisoners whenever senior officials at the Abu Ghraib jail wished. A memo dated October 9, 2003 on "Interrogation Rules of Engagement", which each military intelligence officer was obliged to sign, set out in detail the wide range of pressure tactics they could use - including stress positions and solitary confinement for more than 30 days.

The White House has ordered a damage-limitation exercise to try to prevent the abuse row undermining President Bush's re-election campaign. Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defence, has ordered that all deaths of detainees held in US military custody are to be reported immediately to criminal investigators. Deaths in custody will also be reported to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Myers, and to Mr Rumsfeld himself.

The Pentagon has also announced an investigation into the condition of inmates at Guantanamo Bay, where more than 600 prisoners suspected of links with al-Qaeda are being held. The inquiry will be led by Vice-Adml Albert Church, who has been ordered to investigate reports that extreme interrogation techniques "migrated" from Guantanamo to Iraq. "This is not going to be a whitewash," said the Pentagon adviser. "The administration is finally realising how damaging this scandal could become."

A new investigator has also been appointed to lead the inquiry into abuse at Abu Ghraib. Gen George Fay, a two-star general, will be replaced by a more senior officer. Gen Fay, according to US military convention, did not have the authority to question his superiors. His replacement indicates that the Abu Ghraib inquiry will now go far beyond the activities of the seven military police personnel accused of mistreating Iraqi detainees.

Legal and constitutional experts have expressed astonishment at the judgments made by administration lawyers on interrogation techniques. In one memo, written in January 2002, Mr Gonzalez told President Bush that the nature of the war on terror "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions".

Scott Silliman, a former US air force lawyer and the director of the Centre for Law Ethics and National Security at Duke University, said: "What you have is a culture of avoidance of law rather than compliance with it."

A separate memo, written by Pentagon lawyers in March 2003, stated that "the infliction of pain or suffering per se, whether it is physical or mental is insufficient to amount to torture. [The pain] must be of such a high level of intensity that it is difficult for the subject to endure".

© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2004.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/06/13/wguan13.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/06...

[F6]

Abu Ghraib torture 'was approved at senior military level'

By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles
13 June 2004

Compelling new evidence emerged yesterday that torture techniques used at Abu Ghraib prison were either endorsed or encouraged high up the US military chain of command, and that complaints by at least five military policemen assigned to "soften up" prisoners for interrogation were disregarded by their superiors for several months.

Army documents obtained by the Associated Press showed that the five objected to what they were asked to do last autumn, but that the noncommissioned officers they reported to did nothing to stop the beatings, sexual humiliation and brutal intimidation techniques practised in Abu Ghraib's Tier 1/A.

The Army documents seen by the Associated Press - mostly transcripts of the military court hearings held so far - showed one soldier at Abu Ghraib complaining last November that the sight of prisoners being forced to masturbate and being stacked naked into human pyramids "made me sick to my stomach".

One lawyer representing Lynndie England, the most prominent of the accused soldiers, said in court: "It's telling that another person ... did complain to their superior officer and was told, 'There's nothing wrong. You have to go forward.'"

One of the junior officers who received complaints, Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick, is among the six soldiers now being court-martialled for physical abuse inflicted on Iraqi prisoners.

Yesterday's Washington Post, meanwhile, disclosed that the commander of US forces in Iraq, General Ricardo Sanchez, had passed a policy document last September that approved the use of military dogs, temperature extremes, reversed sleep patterns, sensory deprivation and near-starvation diets.

General Sanchez, who announced that he was stepping down from his post soon after the scandal erupted in April, stipulated in the document he signed that such techniques (known in US military circles as "stress and duress", as opposed to torture) could be applied at will without approval from anyone outside Abu Ghraib prison.

The document - based on a similar list of techniques in use at Guantanamo Bay - was modified a month later after objections from US Central Command, the Post reported, with some of the 32 duress techniques dropped or subjected to approval higher up the system.

Subsequent events make clear that, whatever the policy, the system was lax enough for serious abuses - up to and including the killing of prisoners - to continue for several months. Considerable evidence has already emerged that that laxity was prompted from the very top of the Bush administration, following legal determinations by White House lawyers that the "war on terrorism" justified disregarding the Geneva Conventions and other articles of international law on the treatment of prisoners.

Even after General Sanchez's list of interrogation techniques was modified, it still included such items as taking prisoners to a "less hospitable" location, restricting their diet, isolating them for more than 30 days, using dogs to intimidate them, and forcing them into "stress positions" for as long as 45 minutes.

Human rights organisations have said many of these provisions are direct violations of the Geneva Conventions and may well meet the formal definition of torture.

The administration, meanwhile, insists that the abuses were the result of unauthorised behaviour by a few "bad apples" and do not reflect broader policy.

© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=530973

[F6]

And while we're at it, who's responsible?

Deciding how high up the 'failure of leadership' went at Abu Ghraib

10:57 AM CDT on Saturday, June 12, 2004

By RICHARD WHITTLE / The Dallas Morning News

WASHINGTON – Seven Army Reserve soldiers have been charged with criminal acts for abusing detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Seven officers have been disciplined.

But as Army and Pentagon investigations continue into sexual humiliation and other violations of the Geneva Conventions inflicted on detainees in Iraq and elsewhere, who to blame is still a matter of conjecture – or political taste.

"Everyone admits there was a failure of leadership; now you have to decide how high up that goes," said P.J. Crowley, a former Air Force colonel who was a spokesman for the Pentagon and the National Security Council under President Bill Clinton.

Officials including President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the top generals in Iraq have accepted "responsibility" for what they describe as a small group of Army reservists run amok. But except for Spec. Jeremy C. Sivits, 24, of the 372nd Military Police Company, no one has accepted any blame.

"I let everybody down," Spec. Sivits said through tears in Baghdad as he pleaded guilty May 19 to dereliction of duty and three other counts. His crimes: failing to stop other MPs from abusing prisoners and taking a photo of some of the abuse at Abu Ghraib on Nov. 8.

The highest-ranking person to face formal consequences in the scandal so far is one-time prison commander Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who has been suspended from her 800th Military Police Brigade command while the investigations proceed.

But as the shock waves of the scandal spread, others in the military and civilian chains of command could pay a price for what they did or didn't do in connection with the scandal. According to military analysts and political professionals, here are key figures that bear watching:

Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense

Leading Democrats are demanding Mr. Rumsfeld's resignation. President Bush has made clear they aren't going to get it – at least not by his hand.

Aides to Mr. Bush let it be known he had chastised his defense secretary for failing to inform him of the explosive nature of the Abu Ghraib investigation. But Mr. Bush declared that he still wanted him in his Cabinet, and he went to the Pentagon to proclaim that Mr. Rumsfeld was doing "a superb job."

No one accuses Mr. Rumsfeld of knowing directly what was happening at Abu Ghraib. He has said he learned of the abuses only when the U.S. Central Command issued a news release Jan. 16 dully announcing an investigation "into reported incidents of detainee abuse at a Coalition Forces detention facility."

But critics argue that he set the climate that allowed excesses at Abu Ghraib, and possibly elsewhere, by devaluing the Geneva Conventions while pressing subordinates to squeeze useful intelligence out of detainees.

Pentagon officials have confirmed that Mr. Rumsfeld also approved a list of severe interrogation techniques – including "mild non-injurious physical contact," according to The Wall Street Journal – for use on al-Qaeda captives held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

But Army officials have testified to Congress that Mr. Rumsfeld played no role in approving harsh interrogation techniques on a list created by a captain on the Iraq headquarters legal staff.

The techniques, which included depriving detainees of sleep, forcing them to hold "stress positions" or threatening them with dogs, were listed on a document labeled "Interrogation Rules of Engagement." It said such measures could be used only with the approval of the commanding general, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez.

Mr. Rumsfeld told congressional committees on May 7 that he had considered resigning and would if he thought he could no longer be effective. But a few days later, during a surprise visit to Iraq, he told troops: "I'm a survivor."

How long he will survive politically, or choose to stay, remains in question.

Mr. Bush is unlikely to dump his hard-edged defense secretary, and not just because he has praised him highly in public.

For one thing, tossing people overboard isn't Mr. Bush's style.

Equally important, Democrats would seize on a Rumsfeld departure as an admission by Mr. Bush that his policies in Iraq have failed and try to use it to their advantage in this year's presidential election campaign.

Stephen Cambone, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence

Critics have focused on Mr. Cambone, a close aide to Mr. Rumsfeld, as one who may have set a tone that led to the abuses by pressing for more fruitful interrogations of detainees. He denies it.

Mr. Cambone told the Senate Armed Services Committee last month that no one ever issued guidelines or policies that could have been construed as approving the sordid abuses inflicted at Abu Ghraib by members of the 372nd MP Company.

He also testified that the guidelines for interrogations in Iraq that included harsh techniques were approved "at the command level and not in the Department of Defense." A key question is what role Mr. Cambone played in a trip to Abu Ghraib last August by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, then commander of the U.S. detention facility at Guantánamo Bay.

For critics, the trip was pivotal, for Gen. Miller afterward recommended that MPs be used in "setting the conditions for successful exploitation of the internees."

Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who initially investigated the Abu Ghraib abuses, concluded that Gen. Miller's recommendation "would appear to be in conflict" with Army doctrine holding that MPs should play no role in interrogations.

Mr. Cambone told the Senate committee that Gen. Miller made the trip "with my encouragement" but not at his direction. With the insurgency in Iraq intensifying last summer, Mr. Cambone said he was eager to improve the "flow of information" from interrogators to field units.

Armed Services Committee member Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., said he and other senators still have questions for Mr. Cambone.

Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander, Multinational Force, Iraq

Gen. Sanchez told the Senate committee that he approved interrogation procedures for use in Iraq but that they excluded the harsh measures that appeared on the Interrogation Rules of Engagement document.

His spokesman in Baghdad also has denied that Gen. Sanchez was present at some interrogations and witnessed some abuse of prisoners by military police, as reported by The Washington Post, which cited a statement by a captain who served at Abu Ghraib, as quoted by a lawyer for one of the MPs facing charges.

Gen. Sanchez also told the committee that he was "fully committed to thorough and impartial investigations that examine the role, commissions and omissions of the entire chain of command – and that includes me."

Last week, Gen. Sanchez removed himself as the "reviewing authority" for what is viewed as the next key investigation – a review by Maj. Gen. George Fay, the Army's top intelligence officer, of the role played in the abuses by military intelligence officers – so that he, Gen. Sanchez, can be questioned along with his subordinates.

After Maj. Gen. Miller's visit to Iraq, Gen. Sanchez accepted his recommendations and ordered the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, under Col. Thomas R. Pappas, to take "tactical control" of Abu Ghraib – a decision some critics say directly contributed to the abuses.

Some of the MPs facing criminal charges have said they abused prisoners at the suggestion of military intelligence officers, who they said encouraged them to "soften up" detainees for questioning.

Gen. Sanchez testified that his order kept Gen. Karpinski in command of Abu Ghraib and was intended only to place Col. Pappas in charge of securing the facility against insurgent attacks and safeguarding prisoners.

Gen. Karpinski, however, has said the prison was no longer under her control after Col. Pappas took charge, suggesting that Gen. Sanchez's order sowed confusion that made the abuses possible.

In the meantime, Gen. Sanchez may be the first higher-up to have paid a price for the scandal, missing out on a fourth star and a chance to take over the U.S. Southern Command. The Post reported May 25 that he is not expected to get a promotion while the Abu Ghraib scandal is hot because such positions require Senate approval.

Pentagon spokesmen have said only that Gen. Sanchez has long been scheduled to depart Iraq sometime after sovereignty is transferred to Iraqis on June 30. Bryan Whitman, a senior Pentagon spokesman, said, "At some point, he will rotate back to being the corps commander in Germany, where he came from."

Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, deputy commander for detainee operations, Multinational Force, Iraq

Gen. Miller's recommendation that MPs be used in "setting conditions" for interrogations at Abu Ghraib was criticized by Gen. Taguba in his report and figures largely in critics' theory that higher-ups established a climate that led to the abuses.

He told the Senate committee that his recommendation wasn't meant to suggest that guards be used to soften up prisoners for questioning, but only that they should engage in "passive intelligence-gathering," passing on to interrogators their observations of detainees.

Gen. Miller also has denied statements by suspended Gen. Karpinski that he told her he wanted to "Gitmo-ize" the prison system in Iraq, a reference to Guantánamo Bay. By presidential decision, detainees there are not legally entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions.

"No methods contrary to the Geneva Convention were presented any time by the assistance team that I took" to Iraq, Gen. Miller testified. He added that no interrogation techniques contrary to the Geneva Conventions were used in Cuba, either.

Similarly, the U.S. spokesman in Baghdad, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, has denied a Post report that Gen. Miller urged the top military intelligence officer at the prison, Col. Pappas, to threaten prisoners with dogs as a means to get them to talk.

The Post said Col. Pappas told Gen. Taguba during his investigation that Gen. Miller said "that they used military working dogs at Gitmo ... and that they were effective in setting the atmosphere for which, you know, you could get information" from prisoners.

"Miller never had a conversation with Col. Pappas regarding the use of military dogs for interrogation purposes in Iraq," Brig. Gen. Kimmitt said. "Further, military dogs were never used in interrogations at Guantánamo."

Answers to some of the questions surrounding these key figures should be contained in the Fay report, expected to be complete next month.

E-mail [e-mail]

© 2004 Belo Interactive Inc.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/sundayreader/stories/061304dnsunblame.b9c4b.h...

[F6]

Moore recruits kings of spin to counter critics

By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles
12 June 2004

Michael Moore's documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 looks like a film, sounds like a film and, after its triumph at the Cannes festival, certainly wins awards like a film.

But its US release this summer is looking more like a political campaign than a Hollywood premiere, and now the production has hired two of Bill Clinton's most fearsome spin doctors to handle the anticipated brouhaha from its stinging election-year critique of President George Bush.

Mr Moore has set up a campaign-style "war room" to counter his critics, headed by two veterans of the Clinton-Gore years, Mark Fabiani and Chris Lehane. "We will allow no attack on this film to go without a response immediately," Mr Moore told yesterday's Los Angeles Times. "And we will go after anyone who slanders me or my work, and we will do it without mercy. And when you think 'without mercy', you think Chris Lehane."

With every new documentary or satirical book, Mr Moore has come to regard himself as a political figure of real influence, not just a film-maker. Mr Moore has said he wants to use Fahrenheit 9/11 to register voters and raise money for military families opposed to the war in Iraq.

It remains to be seen whether the Republican Party will take his bait. George Bush Snr was quoted recently calling Mr Moore a "slimeball". But party operatives, for the moment, are seeking to depict Fahrenheit 9/11 more as entertainment than a serious critique of the man in the Oval Office.

© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=530688

[F6]

Al-Qaeda threat to Western airlines as American shot dead in Riyadh

Time is GMT + 8 hours
Posted: 09 June 2004 0006 hrs

DUBAI : A threat bearing the hallmarks of Al-Qaeda and vowing to attack Western airlines may be designed to create fear but inevitably recalled the 9/11 suicide hijackings on a day when gunmen shot dead an American in the Saudi capital.

An Islamist website published a statement on Monday in the name of Al-Qaeda threatening to attack Western aircraft and places frequented by Westerners in the Arabian peninsula.

Tuesday unknown assailants killed an American man in Riyadh in the latest strike in a campaign to drive foreigners out of the kingdom.

"The (residential) compounds, the bases and the means of transportation of the Crusaders, especially Western and US airlines, will be the direct target of our next operations," the statement said.

The menace, which coincides with the start of the holiday season, cannot be ignored.

British Airways was hit by a series of terror alerts early this year, with a flight to Riyadh cancelled twice and one service from London to Washington called off five times amid fears that terrorists might attempt a September 11 style attack.

Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda has been blamed for repeated attacks on compounds housing Westerners and Arabs in Saudi Arabia in the last year in which more than 85 people have been killed.

Suspected Islamist militants on Sunday shot dead an Irish cameraman and gravely wounded a BBC correspondent on the street of a Riyadh slum known as a hotbed of extremism.

British reporter Frank Gardner, 42, was in hospital Tuesday after emergency surgery to remove bullets from his stomach and legs.

A doctor said Monday night that Gardner, an expert on Al-Qaeda, was still unconscious but stable and they were "hopeful about him".

Freelance cameraman Simon Cumbers, 36, died outside the home of a top wanted militant who was shot dead by security forces in the same district last December.

Despite a relentless hunt, presumed Al-Qaeda supporters have escalated attacks across the vast conservative kingdom since April, making a mockery of repeated official pledges, from King Fahd down, to wipe out terrorism:

-- four gunmen killed 22 people including Westerners in a rampage and hostage-taking drama in the eastern oil city of Al-Khobar on May 29 and 30.

-- a German national was shot dead in Riyadh on May 22

-- six died in the April 21 bombing of a security forces building in the capital.

-- six Westerners -- two Americans, two Britons, an Australian and a Canadian -- were killed when gunmen went on a shooting spree at a petrochemical plant in the Red Sea industrial port of Yanbu on May 1.

-- one American serviceman was slightly wounded when shots were fired at vehicles carrying US military personnel on a highway outside Riyadh on June 2.

After the Al-Khobar bloodshed, Australia and Britain led warnings of worse to come, with the Foreign Office in London seeing a threat of an imminent strike and media reporting that intelligence agencies feared a spectacular attack.

Washington had already warned on May 26 that Al-Qaeda was preparing a major strike in the United States in the months before the November presidential election.

The call to arms from Bin Laden, scion of one of Saudi's wealthiest families and mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States which killed nearly 3,000 people, has found a singular echo among the youth of the fiercely Muslim kingdom.

Fifteen of the 19 suicide hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, a fact long denied by many officials in Riyadh. The government and population struggled to come to terms with the scale of the scourge until bombs started going off inside the kingdom a little over a year ago and Saudi launched its own war on terror in earnest.

Al-Qaeda also vowed in the latest statement to continue its "jihad" or holy war and warned Muslims not to tolerate Westerners in the Arab peninsula.

"We reiterate our warning to our Muslim brothers against the presence of the Crusaders including Americans, Westerners and all other infidels in the Arab peninsula," it said.

"The Muslims should isolate them completely," read the statement published on the website ( http://www.hostinganime.com/neda2/sout/tag13.jpg ).

"We renew our warning to the security services, to the guards at the housing complexes of the Crusaders and at the American bases and all others who are on the side of the Americans and against the mujahedeen and to their agents in the Saudi government."

- AFP

Copyright © 2004 Agence France Presse.

http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_world/view/89075/1/.html

[F6]

Saudis hunt for captors, killers of Americans as Qaeda steps up terror war

Time is GMT + 8 hours
Posted: 13 June 2004 1926 hrs

RIYADH : Saudi authorities on Sunday investigated the presumed kidnapping of a US aeronautics engineer after another American was killed by suspected Al-Qaeda extremists fighting to drive Westerners out of the oil-rich kingdom.

"We are still working with (Saudi) authorities to try to find him. We assume he is kidnapped, but we don't have any more information," US embassy spokesman Robert Keith told AFP.

Statements posted on Islamist websites in the name of the terror network of Saudi-born Osama bin Laden, which wants to "cleanse" the country of "infidels," took reponsibility for Saturday's murder and the first reported case of kidnapping in the Saudi capital.

"Our fighters of the Fallujah Brigade in the Arabian peninsula have kidnapped an American, a Christian, Paul M. Johnson Jr. born in 1955 and working as an aeronautics engineer," said the statement signed "Al-Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula."

Several photographs of the American, a copy of his work permit, driving licence and health card, according to which he was working for top US defense contractor Lockheed Martin and came from Maryland, were included.

But telephone numbers listed with the claim showed Johnson worked, possibly on a contract basis, with Advanced Electronics Company (AEC), the same Saudi firm in which the American killed here on Saturday was employed.

This was confirmed by sources in Riyadh, who named the US national killed in a drive-by shooting as Kenneth Scroggs. He was in his mid-fifties.

Company officials could not be immediately reached for comment, but a Saudi who knew both Americans described them as "extremely polite".

"They're super polite, better than the Arabs. This is a deviant, reckless minority attacking Americans," he said, requesting anonymity.

The capital's police chief said authorities were notified Saturday evening of "the disappearance of a US national after he left his office at a Riyadh company".

His car was found abandoned in east Riyadh, and security authorities were investigating the incident, he said in a statement carried by the official SPA news agency.

The State Department in Washington had confirmed that a US citizen had been reported missing.

"We heard that an Islamic website was making a claim but we have had no direct contacts with any organizations or persons claiming responsibility. We are not releasing the individual's name," spokesman Stuart Patt said.

The Islamist website statement said Johnson worked on Apache helicopter gunships.

"These aircraft have long been used by the Americans, their Zionist allies and the apostates to kill Muslims ... in Palestine, in Afghanistan and in Iraq," said the statement, which bore the hallmarks of Al-Qaeda.

The group also claimed responsibility for the murder of "another American" in the same central area of Riyadh where it said the kidnapping took place.

The killing and presumed abduction were the latest in a string of attacks on Westerners by suspected Islamist extremists since early May.

On Tuesday, another American who worked for Vinnell Corp, which helps train the Saudi National Guard, was shot dead at his home in Riyadh.

Another Islamist website posted video footage, attributed to an Al-Qaeda terror cell, claiming responsibility for that killing.

The video described the victim as "American Jew Robert Jacobs, who worked for the spy group Vinnell".

Qatar's Al-Jazeera television Sunday aired scenes from the video, in which the body of a Western-dressed man is seen hitting the ground as several gunshots ring out.

An Irish cameraman was shot dead and a BBC journalist critically wounded in another attack in the Saudi capital on June 6, just a week after a shooting and hostage-taking rampage in the eastern oil city of Al-Khobar left 22 people dead, including four Westerners.

Six Westerners -- two Americans, two Britons, an Australian and a Canadian -- were killed when gunmen went on a shooting spree at a petrochemical plant in the Red Sea industrial port of Yanbu on May 1.

On May 22, a German national working in the catering department of the Saudi national carrier was shot dead in Riyadh.

On June 2, an American serviceman who also helps train the Saudi National Guard was slightly injured in another shooting incident outside Riyadh.

Western residents of Saudi Arabia, deeply alarmed by the attacks, are increasingly thinking of leaving, and some are not renewing work contracts, expatriates and diplomats told AFP this week.

Many expatriates no longer dare go out of their homes or compounds, and are restricting their movements to traveling to and from their workplaces.

The US embassy on Saturday night called again on American residents to leave.

The attacks have escalated despite a massive crackdown on suspected Al-Qaeda sympathizers, which has netted hundreds of militants, since a wave of suicide bombings began in May 2003.

Around 90 people have been killed and hundreds have been injured in the 13-month-long campaign of violence.

- AFP

Copyright © 2004 Agence France Presse. All rights reserved.

http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_world/view/89795/1/.html

[F6]

Iran rejects curbs and demands to join the 'nuclear club'

By David Wastell, Diplomatic Correspondent
(Filed: 13/06/2004)

Iran flatly rejected European demands to scale back further its nuclear programme yesterday, as its government insisted that the world must recognise that it had now become a nuclear nation.

Kamal Kharrazi, Iran's foreign minister, said: "We won't accept any new obligations. Iran has a high technical capability and has to be recognised by the international community as a member of the nuclear club. This is an irreversible path."

His comments, delivered in Teheran before tomorrow's meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), raise the stakes in a confrontation with Britain, Germany and France over Iran's nuclear programme.

Iran has long been suspected of using its nuclear programme as a smokescreen for building an atomic bomb, despite Teheran's insistence that its scientists are attempting only to generate power for electricity.

A tough draft resolution by the three countries, to be debated by members of the United Nation's nuclear watchdog, asks Iran to freeze operation of a uranium conversion plant near Isfahan and cancel plans for a heavy-water reactor near Arak.

It also deplores Iran's refusal to co-operate fully with the IAEA's nuclear inspectors, including its failure to clarify the origin of traces of highly enriched uranium found by inspectors at two sites. Iran says the equipment was bought abroad and was already contaminated.

Last year Iran promised to suspend its uranium enrichment after a diplomatic drive led by Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, and his French and German counterparts, but it has dragged its feet over implementing the pledge.

The call for a halt to work at Isfahan and to drop plans for the Arak reactor - which would be capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium - reflects fears that Iran is using last year's agreement to buy time as it prepares to build its first nuclear weapon, using domestic uranium ore.

Iran has also been questioned over seeking tens of thousands of magnets for sophisticated centrifuges that can enrich uranium to bomb-grade levels. America is pressing for Iran's nuclear programme to be debated by the UN Security Council, which could eventually impose sanctions.

© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2004.

http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/06/13/wiran13.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/0...

[F6]

Daschle asks for drug card/food stamp clarification

WASHINGTON (AP) — Food stamp recipients will not see reductions in their monthly allotments if they get a Medicare drug discount card and $600 credit, the Agriculture Department said Friday.

The hasty announcement of a revised policy, issued despite the government's closure for former President Reagan's funeral, was to clarify a disagreement between Medicare and state food stamp officials about whether the drug card subsidy should be considered when calculating food stamps.

Citing USDA policy, some state officials said that if household drug expenses decrease, more money should be available for food and less money should come from the government to pay for food. A USDA memo issued in March reinforced this view, noting that food stamp recipients "may not claim a medical deduction for the cost of any prescriptions they receive free through use of the card."

However, Mark McClellan, who runs the Medicare program, insisted this week that the Medicare law clearly said otherwise. "New benefits ... cannot take away any existing federal benefits," McClellan told Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle. The South Dakota senator had complained that a constituent reported she was going to lose food stamps because she signed up for a drug card with a $600 low- income credit.

Daschle said the disagreement illustrated another sign of confusion in the drug card program, no matter who was eventually proved to have been right.

On Friday, USDA, which runs the food stamp program, said the Medicare position was correct. "We will immediately be clarifying policy guidance to ensure that food stamp applicants or recipients who use the new Medicare discount card will experience no impact on their eligibility or benefits," Eric Bost, USDA undersecretary for food, nutrition and consumer services, said.

More than 3 million people have signed up for the discount cards, but most were enrolled automatically by their health maintenance organizations. Enrollment of people eligible for the subsidy has been lagging.

The cards are intended to be temporary, in effect only until prescription drug insurance under Medicare begins in 2006. They are designed to allow people without prescription drug insurance to benefit from lower prices available through group purchasing.

On the Net:

Medicare: http://www.medicare.gov

This Article was published online on Saturday, June 12, 2004

© The Rapid City Journal.

http://www.rapidcityjournal.com/articles/2004/06/12/news/state/news02.txt

[F6]

Boomers! Forget Retirement. Big Business Wants You

Sun Jun 13, 2004 07:06 AM ET

By Ritu Kalra

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Yo! Baby boomers! Thinking about retirement? You may want to shift gears and start thinking about your next career move. U.S. retailers are taking notice of your work ethics and experience, and they want YOU.

The people hammering home your worth are at AARP, the country's largest association for Americans 50 and older.

AARP teamed up with the Home Depot chain in February to recruit older workers. It was the first national hiring partnership that AARP had established with any company.

Now, the 35-million-member organization is joining forces with Toys R Us Inc. and drug store chain CVS Corp. to promote seasoned workers.

"It just became evident that there was real interest from companies that wanted to connect with mature workers," said Emily Allen, AARP's assistant national director of the Senior Community Service Employment Program.

International staffing agency Adecco SA is on the brink of joining the program, and book seller Barnes & Noble Inc. is expected to sign on within a month, she said.

Under the partnership, AARP assesses skills of potential applicants, then refers them to participating companies.

"Managers respect the experience that mature workers bring to the job," Allen said.

That level of experience could soon become a rare commodity: The first of America's 78 million baby boomers -- born between 1946 and 1964 -- reach full retirement age in 2011. And the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that the number of U.S. workers between the ages of 25 and 44 will not increase at a fast enough rate to replace them.

And as boomers become a larger percentage of the work force, recruiting and retaining them will have strategic implications.

"The aging work force is a growing demographic," said Jim Gorenc, U.S. staffing director for Toys R Us. About 10 percent of the toy retailer's 65,000 employees are already over 50. But during the holiday season, when its work force can swell to 125,000 people, the partnership with AARP will help the company recruit more boomers.

"We want to tap into them," said Gorenc. "Their reliability and work ethic are tremendous."

Cindy Milburn, senior director of staffing at Home Depot Inc., agreed. "We have better attendance with older workers," she said, and older workers stay with the company three times longer than their younger co-workers.

Roughly 17 percent of Home Depot's 299,000 worldwide employees are over 50. Milburn said their longer tenures and good attendance help keep turnover low and recruitment costs down.

The thrust by large companies to hire more boomers comes at financial crunch time.

Boston College economist Alicia Munnell has calculated that the typical American household approaching retirement has $50,000 put aside for "the golden years" -- a much smaller nest egg than they had hoped for.

And although longer life spans mean more time to enjoy retirement, shrinking pension accounts demand that many boomers keep working.

The average worker placed in jobs at government agencies by the National Older Worker Career Center, a nonprofit organization based in Arlington, Virginia, is 68.

Most experienced employees, including economists and chemists, who get jobs through that program make a fraction of their market-based salaries. But their $16.87 maximum hourly pay comes with full health benefits, important for those who have retired but are not yet eligible for Medicare, said Joel Reaser, senior vice president of NOWCC.

Joanna Gibson, who taught English to junior high students in Washington for 30 years, applied to the program because her $20,000 annual pension was not enough to support her retirement. The 68-year-old has worked for the EPA's Superfund documents program for 13 years and has no plans to leave.

"I like to be active," she said. "And as long as I have the health, I intend to use my mind."

© Copyright Reuters 2004.

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=reutersEdge&storyID=5407349

[F6]

Bush gives up on more Nato troops for Iraq

By Rupert Cornwell
11 June 2004

President George Bush said yesterday he expected no extra Nato troops to be sent to take the weight off stretched US forces in Iraq, but suggested that the alliance might help train Iraqi security forces, if the new sovereign government in Baghdad requested it.

Speaking after what he termed a "very successful" summit of the G8, Mr Bush portrayed the leading powers as united in their goals for Iraq, after the deep divisions over the March 2003 invasion. But in practical terms his appeal that "the Iraqi people need help" drew little response. At an outwardly cordial bilateral session with Mr Bush yesterday, Jacques Chirac, the French President, re-iterated his opposition to further Nato involvement in Iraq, where 16 of the 25 alliance members are helping with the US-led coalition.

And though they both hailed the "new spirit of co-operation" between the fractious allies, Mr Bush and Tony Blair failed to persuade the G8 to forgive the bulk of Iraq's Saddam-era debt of some $120bn (£65bn).

Once again, M. Chirac led the opposition, arguing that the poorest countries of the world should be given at least equal treatment with oil-rich Iraq. The thorny issue has been handed off to finance ministers. The most likely option is that half the debt will be written off.

But at the lavish resort of Sea Island, 80 miles south of here, where the summit was held amid stifling security, last year's antagonists were on their best behaviour, with M. Chirac stressing how much he had enjoyed the food - if not the finer points of the policy debate.

"He particularly liked the cheeseburger he had yesterday," Mr Bush declared. Mr Chirac agreed: "It was excellent," his guest said. But optimistic US officials had to admit that as far as France and the US were concerned, the two were merely "moving cautiously in the same direction".

They claimed they heard "caution but not a firm 'no'" from France on the possible formal involvement of Nato in Iraq - hinting the White House is still hoping for some kind of deal in the fortnight before the Nato summit in Turkey later this month.

The main achievement was the so-called Broader Middle East initiative, described by Mr Bush as a "partnership to advance democracy and human dignity" in the Arab and Islamic world, between the G8 and countries in the region. But the text was heavily watered down after stinging initial criticism from the Arab world and some European countries.

© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=530323

[F6]

Man beaten so long and so severely his kidneys failed

By Severin Carrell
13 June 2004

A detailed medical file passed to The Independent on Sunday has revealed that an Iraqi civilian was so severely beaten about the body by British troops that it caused his kidneys to fail.

British hospital consultants have revealed that medical records for Kifah Talah, 44, an engineer arrested last September, showed that his kidney damage was due to a sustained and prolonged physical assault all over his body. Doctors say the beatings led to the massive release of a toxic enzyme into his blood stream that overloaded his kidneys, causing them to fail, and left him needing kidney dialysis for life.

Mr Talah's case - first revealed by the IoS earlier this year - is one of the most notorious to come out of a now infamous raid on a hotel near Basra by a Queen's Lancashire Regiment unit on 13 September last year, in a search for an illegal weapons cache.

One of seven other men arrested in the raid, Baha Mousa, 26, died in hospital three days later from injuries allegedly sustained by repeated beatings by QLR members. Up to six QLR soldiers face prosecution for allegedly systematically abusing Mr Mousa at an army interrogation centre. The same ill-treatment allegedly left Mr Talah and the five other men with kidney damage, broken ribs, organ damage, severe bruising and permanent scarring.

An expert analysis of Mr Talah's medical notes is expected to be given to the High Court, with witness statements from all six men, for a hearing next month into allegations that British troops illegally killed more than 20 Iraqi civilians, including two children. Phil Shiner, lawyer behind the court hearing, said: "His records are highly significant because they show he was beaten black and blue."

Last week, the armed forces minister, Adam Ingram, revealed that the Army and RAF police had investigated 75 complaints of deaths in custody, deaths through shootings, and cases of alleged ill-treatment - far more than previously acknowledged. His admissions have led to further pressure for independent investigations into the UK's treatment of Iraqi detainees.

Yesterday, the Ministry of Defence repeated that it was vigorously pursuing the abuse cases, but added that it could not comment further because it could prejudice prosecutions. In a statement the MoD said: "We are trying to be as open as possible about these investigations given the intense public interest,but this has to be carefully balanced against the right to privacy and the need to protect investigative and criminal proceedings."

© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=530972

[F6]

Baghdad fumes as the Americans seek safety in 'tombstone' forts

By Patrick Cockburn in Baghdad
12 June 2004

The US army is paralysing the heart of Baghdad as it builds ever more elaborate fortifications to protect its bases against suicide bombers.

"Do not enter or you will be shot," reads an abrupt notice attached to some razor wire blocking a roundabout at what used to be the entrance to the 14 July bridge over the Tigris. Only vehicles with permission to enter the Green Zone, where the occupation authorities have their headquarters, can now use it. Iraqis who want to cross the river must fight their way to another bridge through horrendous traffic jams.

Gigantic concrete slabs, like enormous grey tombstones, now block many roads in Baghdad. They are about 12 feet high and three feet across and for many Iraqis have become the unloved symbol of the occupation. Standing side by side, they form walls around the Green Zone and other US bases, with notices saying it is illegal to stop beside them.

It is the ever-expanding US bases and the increasing difficulties and dangers of their daily lives which make ordinary Iraqis dismiss declarations by President George Bush about transferring power to a sovereign Iraqi government as meaningless. As Mr Bush and Tony Blair were speaking this week about a new beginning for Iraq, the supply of electricity in the country has fallen from 12 hours a day to six hours. On Canal Street yesterday, close to the bombed-out UN headquarters, there was a two-mile long queue of cars waiting to buy petrol.

Salahudin Mohammed al-Rawi, an engineer, dismisses the diplomatic manoeuvres over Iraq at the UN in New York and the G8 meeting in Georgia as an irrelevant charade. He said: "At the end of the day they cannot cheat the Iraqi people because the Iraqis are in touch with the real situation on the ground."

For many people in Baghdad the real situation is very grim. Twenty years ago Abu Nawas Street on the Tigris used to be filled with restaurants serving mazgouf, a river fish grilled over an open wood fire and a traditional Baghdadi delicacy. These days Abu Nawas is largely deserted and is used mainly by American armoured vehicles thundering down the road.

Shahab al-Obeidi is the manager of the Shatt al-Arab restaurant, where dark grey fish swim in a circular pond decorated with blue tiles. They may survive a long time. Mr Obeidi confesses that business is not good. These days Abu Nawas can only be entered from one direction and culminates in an American checkpoint.

We asked to see the owner of the restaurant and Mr Obeidi explained that he "fled to Syria 40 days ago after his son was kidnapped and he had to pay $20,000 to get him back". A problem, frequently mentioned by Iraqis, is that US security measures appear to be solely directed at providing security for Americans. For Iraqis, life in Baghdad is still very dangerous.

Mr Obeidi said that "in the past 75 per cent of our business was in the evening". Now he closes the Shatt al-Arab at 6pm and goes home. One night he stayed open a little later for some customers who were having a good time, but when he presented the bill they responded by pulling out their pistols and firing volleys of shots into the ceiling and through the windows. Mr Obeidi pointed to numerous bullet holes still awaiting repair.

The reason why Abu Nawas is sealed off is that at the end of the street are the Palestine and Sheraton hotels, where many foreign company employees as well as journalists stay. A few hundred yards away is Sadoun Street, once a main four-lane artery in central Baghdad, but now reduced to two lanes opposite a side street leading to the Baghdad Hotel. This was attacked by a suicide bomber last year, without much damage to the hotel, which was universally believed by Iraqi taxi drivers to be a centre for the CIA. About 30 shops within the cordon sanitaire around the hotel now face ruin. Nadim al-Hussaini, who has a shop selling large air conditioners, says: "My business has completely disappeared, first 30 to 40 per cent when they put up a concrete barrier and 100 per cent when they closed the road." In theory he should get compensation from the Coalition Provisional Authority, but so far he has seen no sign of it.

Next door, Zuhaar Tuma owns a café which is not so badly affected because he still has his regular customers, smoking hubble-bubble pipes and playing dominoes. He was a little more understanding about why the road had been closed, saying: "I don't want to get blown up any more than the Americans do. But the real solution is simply for the Americans staying at the hotel to leave it."

The same could be said of the thousands of other American officials and soldiers in central Baghdad. Had they based themselves on the outskirts of the capital they would have been far less visible. But, cut off as they are in their compounds from real Iraqi life, they probably do not know and may not care about the sea of resentment that surrounds them.

© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=530692

[F6]

Gaddafi accused of plot to attack Saudi ruler's motorcade with rocket grenades

By David Usborne, Colin Brown, Kim Sengupta and Anne Penketh
11 June 2004

Colonel Muammar Gaddafi was accused yesterday of being directly involved in a plot to assassinate the Saudi ruler, causing huge embarrassment to Tony Blair, who was the first Western leader to welcome the maverick Libyan leader back into the international fold.

According to the startling allegations, Saudi dissidents paid by Libyan intelligence plotted to attack the motorcade of Crown Prince Abdullah with shoulder-launched missiles or rocket-propelled grenades. They were also reported to have had plans to fire weapons into the Saudi leader's apartment in the holy city of Mecca.

The plot was reportedly hatched last year at the time when the Libyan leader was renouncing terrorism and negotiating with Britain and the United States to abandon his weapons of mass destruction.

The disclosure in yesterday's New York Times is particularly embarrassing for Mr Blair, who took the risky decision of going to Tripoli to meet Colonel Gaddafi in March. They shook hands in an act of acceptance that the Libyans had permanently rejected terrorism.

The plot allegations came from someone senior enough in the Libyan intelligence service to warrant a serious investigation, British and American security sources confirmed last night. They said that an order to assassinate a foreign leader would have been given at the highest level, but pointed out that as yet there was no hard evidence to link the murder plot to Colonel Gaddafi.

Colonel Mohamed Ismael, one of two men who made the claims, is known to have been an officer in the Libyan security apparatus, and had also been observed meeting Saudi dissidents while on a visit to London. He is now in Saudi custody.

The other person behind the allegations, Andurahman Alamoudi, a US Islamist leader, was arrested at Heathrow airport last year with US$340,000 (£185,000) in cash. He told Scotland Yard's Special Branch and the Security Service that he had accepted the money from the World Islamic Call Society, a Libyan-backed charity. But he later claimed that he had received the cash from a Libyan intelligence officer.

The Libyan government swiftly denied the allegations, and the US and British governments announced no immediate plans to change policy towards Libya while the investigation continues.

US President George Bush has been briefed on the matter, which could have wide-ranging consequences if the accusations are confirmed. The recent lifting by the United Nations of sanctions against Libya would almost certainly have to be reversed and the US could consider criminal charges against the Libyan leader.

But Mr Blair's official spokesman made it clear yesterday that there would be no going back on the deal with the Libyan leader.

"I can say clearly in all our talks with the Libyans, including the Prime Minister's conversations with Mr Gaddafi, we made it absolutely clear that terrorism of all types must stop. That message was well understood in Libya. That is the basis on which we went to Libya and that is the basis on which we went forward in eliminating Libyan weapons of mass destruction,'' he said.

A Foreign Office spokesman also said that the allegations would not knock the government off course. "The holy grail is Libya free of WMD and with no links to terrorism. We're not there yet, but the first step has been taken," he said.

The Libyan Foreign Minister, Abdel Rahman Shalgham, dismissed the plot allegations yesterday. "We were surprised by this [report] and we deny it completely and categorically," Mr Shalqam said in Tripoli. He said the reports were lies intended to poison his country's relations with the international community. Col Gaddafi's son, Seif al-Islam el-Gaddafi, called the claims "nonsense".

It was reported that as the plot progressed last summer and autumn - just as Col Gaddafi was seeking to rid his country of its pariah status and was courting Mr Blair - Mr Alamoudi and Mr Ismael travelled to London to recruit Saudi dissidents to help in the assassination and to give them cash.

The conspiracy was first outlined by Mr Ismael, who was arrested in Egypt after making a similar recruitment run in Saudi Arabia in November. He was returned to Saudi custody. He said he had been hired to co-head the assassination scheme with Mr Alamoudi by two Libyan intelligence chiefs, Abdullah Senoussi and Musa Kussa, who are both believed to answer directly to Col Gaddafi.

Mr Alamoudi, who was arrested and charged with violating an embargo on doing business with Libya, went further by asserting that he met twice with Col Gaddafi in Libya to go over details of the conspiracy, first in June last year and then in August. He said that the Libyan leader told him flatly: "I want the Crown Prince killed either through assassination or through a coup."

Mr Alamoudi, who founded the American Muslim Council, apparently volunteered the information about the plot as part of an ongoing plea deal with prosecutors to try to reduce any sentence he may face for breaking the Libyan embargo.

American investigators, who have already travelled to Saudi Arabia twice, are trying to find associates of Mr Alamoudi to back up his story. They are also seeking to interview four Saudi citizens, now in Saudi custody, who were allegedly paid $1m by Mr Ismael to carry out the plot.

© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=530269

[F6]

Bloody day as 21 die in Iraq blasts

By Robert H. Reid, AP
08 June 2004

Two car bombs exploded in separate Iraq cities today, killing at least 14 Iraqis and one US soldier. Dozens were wounded, including 10 American soldiers. A US Marine was killed in action west of Baghdad.

Elsewhere, six coalition soldiers - two Poles, three Slovaks and a Latvian - were killed in an explosion while defusing mines south of Baghdad, authorities said. The explosion occurred in Suwayrah, 25 miles south of Baghdad. The Slovaks and the Latvians were the first deaths from either of the two countries in Iraq, Polish officials said in Warsaw.

One of the car bombs blew up as a convoy of provincial council members passed by in the northern city of Mosul. The council members escaped injury but the Mosul deputy police chief was hurt but not seriously, officials said. Nine people died and about 25 were injured, the US military said.

In the other attack, a suicide attacker detonated a car bomb during rush hour outside the American forward operating base War Horse in Baqouba, about 30 miles northeast of Baghdad.

At least five Iraqis and one American soldier were killed, the US military and police said. Fifteen Iraqis and 10 American soldiers were wounded while standing at a security checkpoint.

A US Marine was also killed in action, the military said Tuesday. The death occurred Monday in Anbar province west of Baghdad but the military released no further details.

The bombings are the latest in a series of attacks on US forces and their allies in the countdown to the handover of sovereignty in Iraq on June 30. A car bomb exploded Sunday near the gate of another a US-run base north of Baghdad, killing nine people and injuring 30 others - including two American soldiers.

The latest bombings occurred as the U.N. Security Council in New York prepares to vote on a US-British resolution outlining a blueprint for post-occupation Iraq and giving international support to the new Iraqi leadership.

Late Monday, the United States won important French and German approval for the resolution. The draft was revised four times over the past two weeks. It marks an end to the US-led occupation and defines the relationship between the new government and the US-led multinational force which will remain here after June 30.

US Ambassador John Negroponte said he expects the Security Council to approve the US-British resolution on Tuesday afternoon, and council diplomats said the vote could be unanimous.

"We think this is an excellent resolution," Negroponte said. It marks "the fact that Iraq is entering into a new political phase, one where it is reasserting its full sovereignty."

France's foreign minister told France-Inter radio Tuesday that his government would vote for the resolution despite objections over language defining the roles of the new Iraqi administration and the US-led multinational force. France is one of the five permanent council members that have veto power.

"That doesn't stop us from a positive vote in New York to help in a constructive way to find a positive exit to this tragedy," Foreign Minister Michel Barnier. "We would have liked more specifics on what will happen in terms of stability, but for us that is not sufficient reason to oppose this resolution."

The new Iraqi interim government has made security its top priority as it assumes more responsibility for running the country. The new prime minister, Iyad Allawi, is close to the CIA and the State Department and as an exile leader headed an opposition group made up largely of former military officers who had broken with Saddam Hussein.

In an effort to improve security, Allawi announced an agreement Monday by nine political parties to dissolve their militias, integrating some of their 102,000 fighters into the army and police and pensioning off the rest.

The plan does not cover the most important militia fighting coalition forces - the al-Mahdi Army of radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr - or smaller groups that have sprouted across the country since the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime in April 2003.

Those groups will now be considered illegal.

The main groups affected by the agreement are Kurdish peshmerga militiamen who fought alongside American troops during the 2003 invasion that toppled Saddam. Most of the others had effectively dissolved already. The other main group still active is the Badr Brigade of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a mainstream Shiite party.

US officials want to disband the al-Mahdi Army and arrest al-Sadr for the April 2003 murder of a rival cleric, although authorities have deferred both goals to reduce tensions in the Shiite heartland south of Baghdad. Instead, the coalition has opted to let Allawi, himself a Shiite, and Shiite clerics deal with al-Sadr.

The agreement also does not cover the brigade organized by the US Marines to take control of the Sunni city of Fallujah after the end of the three-week siege in April. US officials described the Fallujah brigade as "a special auxiliary unit" under the nominal control of the Marines.

Most of the militias covered by the agreement were organized to fight Saddam. Under the program, the estimated 100,000 fighters will be treated as veterans - eligible for government benefits including pensions and job placement programs depending on their time in service.

Most are likely to be pensioned off or retained for civilian jobs under a $200 million program.

© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=529354

[F6]

Israeli airstrike lands within 12 miles of Lebanese capital

By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem
08 June 2004

Israeli Air Force warplanes penetrated deep into Lebanese airspace last night to launch what military sources said was a retaliatory attack on a base used by Palestinian militants south of Beirut.

The airstrike in the hills at Naameh, within 12 miles of the Lebanese capital, was launched in what the military here said was a response to a missile aimed at an Israeli naval vessel yesterday morning.

The strike went closer to the country's capital than any carried out by the Israelis since they pulled their forces out of southern Lebanon four years ago. Palestinian guerrillas belonging to the small Damascus-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command have operated an underground base in the hills, a frequent target for attacks during Israel's 20 year occupation of southern Lebanon.

Lebanese sources said of the 107mm rockets fired towards Israel yesterday morning that three had landed on the outskirts of the Naqoura, just short of the border with Israel, and that a fourth had fallen into the Mediterranean Sea.

Confirming last night's attack on "a target near Beirut" the Israeli military said that the "state of Israel is determined stop terror acts emanating from Lebanon and places the responsibility for these terror activities on the governments of Lebanon and Syria."

Shaul Mofaz, the Israeli Defence Minister, said: "This is a signal to the Lebanese government ... It is responsible for what goes on in its territory."

The Israeli attack comes a month after an Israeli soldier was killed and two others seriously wounded by Hizbollah anti-tank missiles and mortar shellfire in the disputed area of the Shebaa Farms in the occupied Golan heights.

A spokesman for the PFLP-GC, headed by Ahmed Jibril, said the planes "attacked humanitarian positions and a clinic", and added that "so far there are no human losses, only material losses". There were also no casualties reported as a result of the earlier attack.

While the Syrian and Iranian backed Hizbollah is normally regarded by Israel as the main border threat, radical Palestinian guerrillas have also have fired rockets into northern Israel from Lebanon. On 23 March, Israeli helicopter gunships fired at guerrillas who were launching rockets toward Israel from about six miles north of the border. Two PFLP-GC militants were killed.

Meanwhile the fate of Ariel Sharon's administration as a majority government was still hanging on whether the small, far-right National Religious Party would walk out of the coalition in protest at Sunday's cabinet vote to accept the withdrawal of 7,500 settlers from Gaza. Despite a series of consultations among themselves and rabbis associated with the party, the NRP had still not reached a decision last night. One NRP minister, Effie Eitam, who voted against the decision, has been pressing for the party to walk out, but the Finance Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been urging it not to do so for fear it would encourage Mr Sharon to form a unity coalition with Labour if the NRP leaves.

© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=529317

[F6]

President's analyst? Doctor puts 'Bush on the Couch'



President Bush has never had much use for talking to shrinks. And, according to one Washington-based psychoanalyst, we may all be paying for it.

Dr. Justin Frank has taken it upon himself to put "Bush on the Couch" (the title of his new book). Based on his applied psychoanalysis of Dubya's life, the White House is occupied by an "untreated ex-alcoholic" with paranoid and megalomaniac tendencies. Even though he's a helluva nice guy.

"He's very affable," Frank, a professor of psychiatry at George Washington University Medical Center, tells us. "I like his sense of humor."

But although Frank has never met Dubya, the doc also finds:

-- Bush shows an inability to grieve - dating back to age 7, when his sister died. "The family's reaction - no funeral and no mourning - set in motion his life-long pattern of turning away from pain [and hiding] behind antic behavior," says Frank, who contends Bush may suffer from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

-- His mother, Barbara Bush - tabbed by some family friends as "the one who instills fear" - had trouble connecting emotionally with her son, Frank argues.

-- George H.W. Bush's "emotional and physical absence during his son's youth triggered feelings of both adoration and revenge in George W."

-- Bush has shown a "lifelong streak of sadism," ranging from "childhood pranks (using firecrackers to explode frogs)" to "insulting journalists, gloating over state executions ... [and] pumping his fist gleefully before the bombing of Baghdad."

-- Bush's years of drinking "may have affected his brain function - and his decision to quit drinking without the help of a 12-step program [puts] him at far higher risk of relapse."

Frank's recommendation? "The sole treatment option - for his benefit and ours - is to remove [him] from office."

Though Frank told wouldn't comment on Bush's rival, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, he did express desire that someone else would study him and other politicians with the same level of scrutiny.

A Bush spokesman responded: "The White House simply does not offer book reviews."

© 2004 Daily News, L.P.

http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/200790p-173283c.html

[F6]

A George Bush Fan

A teacher in a small Texas town asks her class how many of them are George Bush fans. Not really knowing what a George Bush fan is, but wanting to be liked by the teacher, all the kids raise their hands except one boy.

The teacher asks Johnny why he has decided to be different. Johnny says, "I'm not a George Bush fan."

The teacher says, "Why aren't you a George Bush fan?" Johnny says, "I'm a John Kerry fan."

The teacher asks why he's a John Kerry fan. The boy says, "Well, my mom's a John Kerry fan and my dad's a John Kerry fan, so I'm a John Kerry fan!"

The teacher is kind of angry, because this is Texas, so she asks, "What if your mom was a moron and your dad was an idiot, what would that make you?"

Johnny says, "That would make me a George Bush fan."

--------------------



http://www.allhatnocattle.net/6-9-04_bringer_of_honor_and_dignity.htm

[F6]

Bush Sidesteps Question About Torture

Fri Jun 11, 5:24 PM ET

By LARA JAKES JORDAN, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - The State Department warned the White House two years ago that rejecting international standards against torture when dealing with detainees could put U.S. troops at risk.

A department memo from Feb. 2, 2002, surfaced Thursday as President Bush (news - web sites) said he ordered U.S. officials to follow the law while interrogating suspected terrorists. Bush sidestepped an opportunity to denounce the use of torture.

"What I've authorized is that we stay within U.S. law," Bush told reporters at the close of the G-8 summit in Georgia.

Asked whether torture is ever justified, Bush replied, "Look, I'm going to say it one more time. ... The instructions went out to our people to adhere to law. That ought to comfort you."

The memo followed recommendations from the Justice Department (news - web sites) advising the president he could suspend international treaties prohibiting torture. It warned that failing to apply the Geneva Conventions to detainees from the war in Afghanistan (news - web sites) — whether al-Qaida or Taliban — would put U.S. troops at risk.

"A decision that the conventions do not apply to the conflict in Afghanistan in which our armed forces are engaged deprives our troops there of any claim to the protection of the convention in the event they are captured," State Department legal adviser William H. Taft IV wrote in the 2002 memo to presidential counsel.

Furthermore, refusing Geneva standards to detainees "weakens protections afforded by the conventions to our troops in future conflicts," Taft wrote. The Associated Press obtained a copy of the memo.

The Justice Department also told the White House that U.S. laws against torture do not apply to the fight against terrorism. The department memos say torture "may be justified" against al-Qaida detainees in U.S. custody abroad and laws and treaties barring torture could be trumped by the president's supreme authority to act as necessary in wartime.

Bush said Thursday he does not recall seeing any of the Justice Department advice.

Democrats say that by suggesting that Bush could legally authorize torture, the memos would have lain the legal foundation for Iraqi prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib prison.

In its memo, the State Department also advised that following Geneva standards "demonstrates that the United States bases its conduct not just on its policy preferences, but on its international legal obligations."

Five days after the State Department memo was written, Bush decided the Geneva Conventions apply to Taliban prisoners but not to captured al-Qaida terrorists.

The Bush administration has said that even though it does not believe the Geneva Conventions apply to prisoners in the war on terror, it has complied with the treaty's guidelines.

Copyright © 2004 The Associated Press.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=544&e=3&u=/ap/bush_prisoner_abuse

[F6]

Howard Stern having impact with crusade against Bush

By Steven Thomma
Knight Ridder Newspapers

Posted on Thu, Jun. 10, 2004

WASHINGTON - Forget Al Franken. Democrats have a new champion on talk radio that they hope will counter the likes of conservative icons Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. It's shock jock Howard Stern.

Known more for crude talk of sex and lewd acts than politics or public policy, Stern has launched an on-air crusade he calls a "jihad" to defeat President Bush. He blames Bush for a government crackdown on his use of obscenity on the air.

And he's having an impact, apparently boosting the prospects of Sen. John Kerry, D- Mass., according to a new Democratic poll released Thursday. That was welcome news to Democrats who've long ached for a liberal voice on talk radio and have watched in frustration as former comic Franken has struggled with a new program that has limited airplay.

"Howard Stern is the most influential political talk-show host in America today," said Michael Harrison, the editor of Talkers magazine, which covers the talk-radio industry.

Stern is going after Bush with near-obsessive zeal, a notable development in a medium in which 20 of the top 27 talk-show hosts are conservatives, including the top-rated Limbaugh and Hannity.

Stern's Web site preaches the virtues of freedom of speech and includes or links to numerous articles, sometimes obscene ones, criticizing or ridiculing Bush. On the air, he spends more and more time urging his listeners to vote against Bush.

"I'm asking you to do me one favor: Vote against Bush," he said on one recent program. "I call on all fans of the show to vote against Bush," he said on another. "We're going to deliver the White House to John Kerry."

Stern has dabbled in New York-area politics before, endorsing Republican Christine Todd Whitman when she ran for governor of New Jersey in 1993 and Republican George Pataki when he ran for governor of New York in 1994. Both won, and a grateful Whitman named a highway rest stop after Stern, as he'd requested. But Stern's new commitment is national in scope.

His anti-Bush crusade stems from the Federal Communications Commission's efforts to combat indecency on the public airwaves. The FCC recently fined radio station owner Clear Channel Communications a record $1.75 million for airing some Stern comments that the FCC deemed offensive. Stern objects that the FCC is censoring his right to free speech. Clear Channel pulled him off its six stations that aired him, though he remains on the air on 36 other stations nationwide.

It's that audience that could make Stern's campaign so important.

He has an estimated 8.5 million listeners each week, third after the 14.5 million who listen to Limbaugh and the 12 million who listen to Hannity, according to Talkers magazine.

But Limbaugh and Hannity devote their programs almost entirely to politics and policy. Their audiences are already interested in politics, and decidedly conservative. A recent poll by the Pew Research Center, for example, found that 77 percent of Limbaugh's listeners were conservative, 16 percent were moderate and 7 percent were liberal.

Stern's listeners are less interested in politics and more likely to be undecided, and thus are better prospects to be persuaded one way or the other, Harrison said.

"The Hannity/Limbaugh audience already knows where it's going," he said. "The Stern audience is fertile ground."

Stern's listeners are older and more affluent than some might think, having aged with the 50-year-old star. "It's a myth that young people listen to Stern," Harrison said. "He's an old guy to them. Their world is far raunchier, far edgier than anything Howard Stern does. They live in the world of the Internet, of porn sites."

It's not just Stern's listeners who could be swayed to vote against Bush. When Clear Channel pulled the plug on Stern, it took him off the air in two cities in Florida, leaving untold numbers of irate fans in a state where the last presidential election was decided by 537 votes.

Nationwide, 17 percent of likely voters listen to Stern's radio show, according to the poll released Thursday by the New Democrat Network, a Washington-based group. They favor Kerry over Bush by 53 percent to 43 percent, and by 59 to 37 percent in 18 battleground states.

Kerry campaign spokeswoman Allison Dobson declined to comment on whether support from someone like Stern might be embarrassing. "It's a big party," she said. "John Kerry's speaking to issues that speak to a lot of people. Howard Stern and his listeners are among them."

Of the likely voters who listen to Stern, 1 out of 4 is a swing voter who hasn't decided how to vote in November. That means that about 4 percent of the national swing vote up for grabs this fall listens to Stern, according to the poll.

"You're now seeing a guy who has phenomenal reach of swing voters and a huge percentage of people who are going to be critical voters in the election spending all of his day every day going after the president," said Simon Rosenberg, the president of the New Democrat Network.

"Rush Limbaugh has met his match."

---

For more on the New Democrat Network, go to http://www.newdem.org

For more on Stern, go to http://www.howardstern.com

-----

(The New Democrat Network poll of 1,515 likely voters was conducted nationally May 19-26 and had a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points. Its polling of battleground states was conducted in Arkansas, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Washington state, West Virginia and Wisconsin.)

(The Pew poll of 3,000 adults was conducted April 19-May 12 and had a margin of error of 2 percentage points.)

© 2004 KR Washington Bureau and wire service sources.

http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/news/special_packages/election2004/thomma/8892681.htm

[F6]

zithead -- just for you and your buds:

[F6]

Republicans defend troops' appearance at Bush rally

By REID MAGNEY / La Crosse Tribune

Published - Friday, June 11, 2004

Republican officials are defending the attendance of Fort McCoy troops at President Bush's rally in La Crosse. Advertisement

A group of local Democrats and others have filed complaints with the Pentagon about the circumstances under which hundreds of soldiers participated in the campaign rally May 7.

The group, calling itself Coulee Region Concerned Citizens, also has complained that local police, working with Bush campaign staff, infringed on their First Amendment rights to protest at the event. The La Crosse County Sheriff's Department is investigating whether La Crosse police violated policies and procedures.

State Rep. Mike Huebsch, R-West Salem, said Democrats and protesters have "turned the event into a black eye for our community."

"If the president does come back (to this area), the city of La Crosse will be dropped lower" on the list of possible locations, Huebsch said. "The city has worked hard to make sure he wasn't welcome."

Bush would be more likely to appear in Onalaska or West Salem, Huebsch said.

Raymond G. Boland, the former garrison commander of Fort McCoy and the retired Wisconsin secretary of veterans affairs, said he is "disappointed in the tone this has taken."

Boland, who attended the rally and sat behind President Bush with Col. Danny Nobles and Fort McCoy executive officer Ron Fournier, said the troops "wanted to be there," and were not ordered to attend the rally.

CRCC and Fort McCoy civilian attorney Al Novotne have alleged Nobles violated military prohibitions against partisan political activity by wearing his uniform to the rally. Novotne also has questioned whether the soldiers were there freely or under the control of senior noncommissioned officers.

A Fort McCoy spokeswoman said Thursday it is "not possible" for Nobles to comment because the complaints are under review.

Boland called the allegations "sensitive stuff" and said they come at a bad time. He said people should focus on the positive aspects of having soldiers at the rally.

"The most inspiring thing to me was how (the troops) were recognized and supported by the people," Boland said. "Those soldiers were inspired" by the people and the president, said Boland, who is Wisconsin state veterans chairman for Bush-Cheney '04.

Huebsch also shed some light on the Bush-Cheney campaign's awareness of rules against soldiers being in uniform at a campaign rally.

Huebsch said 48 hours before the rally, he was contacted by a Bush campaign official from Milwaukee asking where they could find T-shirts for the Fort McCoy troops to wear because they couldn't be in uniform.

Huebsch said he gave the campaign the names of some local companies, but doesn't know where the U.S. flag shirts actually came from.

Bush-Cheney spokeswoman Merrill Hughes Smith has said the campaign is "honored by Col. Nobles' support." She declined to comment on the appropriateness of soldiers wearing military uniforms to campaign rallies.

Video shot by WKBT-TV Ch. 8 at the "Ask President Bush" event at Cabela's in Prairie du Chien, Wis., shows Bush shaking hands with an unidentified uniformed soldier in the front row. The video also shows several men who appear to be wearing battle fatigues sitting in front-row seats.

Meanwhile, Bush supporters are taking aim at CRCC members, who include Karen Dahl of Viroqua, Third Congressional District Democratic chairwoman; Maureen Freedland, a La Crosse attorney; Democrat Hank Zumach of Stoddard; Guy Wolf of Stoddard, a peace and environmental activist who is not a Democrat; and Barbara Frank of La Crosse, a Sierra Club official.

"Are these truly concerned citizens or Democratic political activists?" said Milvia Stokes of Sparta. "Brave men and women from Fort McCoy about to go in harm's way in Iraq are criticized by this obscure group for attending their commander in chief's visit to La Crosse. How low!"

Holmen resident Les Davis said he thinks Novotne is the one who should resign from Fort McCoy, not Nobles.

"It's obvious Mr. Novotne does not support President Bush and doesn't want troops anywhere their commander is speaking," Davis said.

"If Mr. Fournier wants to attend such an event I really don't see a problem with it nor do I have a problem with the highest-ranking military officer in the area showing up to recognize his commander and chief," Davis said.

Novotne acknowledged that he is a Democratic Party member, but said his politics have nothing to do with his position.

"If this was soldiers attending a (John)Kerry rally, I'd do the same thing," Novotne said.

Reid Magney can be reached at [phone] or [e-mail].

Copyright 2004 La Crosse Tribune

http://www.lacrossetribune.com/articles/2004/06/11/news/zz01rally.txt

[My Dime]

lol...now this is a 'fair and balanced' assessment that could only be found in the land of zit. Amazing the 'view' through rose colored glasses.

looks like your opinion needs to pay attention, as his press conference from the g8, showed exactly the opposite, especially when he toasted david gregory.......about time too!

with the new u.n. admittance abut iraq's wmd, the progress in irag, including the sudden turning a new leaf by al-sadr, and the jobs creation issue about to become a big plus for gwb, seems to me gwb is in good shape

[F6]

Afghan election delay is new blow for Bush campaign

Duncan Campbell
Saturday June 12, 2004
The Guardian

The elections in Afghanistan seem certain to be delayed for a second time, dealing a damaging blow to President George Bush's own election campaign.

The delay comes amid growing concern about the security of the election process after the killing on Thursday of 11 Chinese construction workers.

It is now impossible for the election to be held legally in September, the date for which both the interim government of President Hamid Karzai and the United Nations were aiming, itself a delay from the intended June polling day. It is understood that the new date is likely to be around October 5.

It has also emerged that not a single dollar pledged to pay for the elections has been given by donor countries, including members of the EU and the US.

Even if the $70m (£38m) pledged is given, there is still a shortfall in paying for the $101m costs of a proper election, an indication of how far the international community's attention has shifted away from Afghanistan since the official end of the hostilities. The lack of money is hampering registration.

Under Afghanistan's electoral process, 120 days have to elapse between the certification of the constituencies and polling day.

That work was only completed last week, which rules out the September date still being promoted by the authorities. According to Reg Austin, the chief technical adviser to the UN's joint electoral management body, the earliest possible date is early October.

"We are not in September any more," he said. "The law is quite clear and that takes us inexorably into October."

Even this date is by no means certain. If the security situation worsens or the registration process stalls because of violence and intimidation in the southern and south-eastern areas, a decision could be made to post pone the vote until next spring, although President Karzai is strongly committed to a vote this year. There are concerns within the international community that not enough time has been given for the electoral process.

"Given Afghanistan's history and the international community's responsibility in that history, it should allow the Afghan people sufficient time to prepare themselves for the election, if it is to have any credibility," said Barbara Stapleton of the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghanistan Relief (ACBAR). "If the elections are held before the country is prepared, it may well lock Afghanistan's politics into a very dangerous course."

On some levels the registration drive has been going well, said a UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan spokesman. An estimated 3.4 million people have now registered, around a third of the desired total of 9.5 million, and women have registered in far higher numbers than expected, with at least a million enrolled.

In some provinces, including ones such as Herat regarded as conservative, women are accounting for almost half the registered voters.

President Karzai is currently in the US, where he has been meeting President Bush. Mr Bush is anxious that Afghanistan should go to the polls before his own date with the electorate in November so that, with the condition in Iraq deteriorating, he can point to at least one foreign democratisation process.

The role of the US government is regarded as a major factor. While it would be damaging to Mr Bush if Afghanistan were not at the polls before his own date with the electorate, it might be even more harmful if the election took place and was a shambles with some provinces barely participating.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,1237030,00.html