Posted on 07/14/2003 9:06:57 PM PDT by null and void
This one isn't with us. She teaches at Belermine HS, a Catholic parochial school...
Good Morning.
Welcome to the daily thread of Operation Infinite Freedom - Situation Room.
It is designed for general conversation about the ongoing war on terror, and the related events of the day. In addition to the ongoing conversations related to terrorism and our place in it's ultimate defeat, this thread is a clearinghouse of links to War On Terrorism threads. This allows us to stay abreast of the situation in general, while also providing a means of obtaining specific information and mutual support.
Main Street
By Mary Ann Cook
PROTESTERS: Bellarmine teachers Kathy Eder and Chris Wolf, both of Los Gatos, joined six Bellarmine students to protest the School of Americas and call for its closing. The protest was staged in Fort Benning, Ga., where the school is located, over a November weekend.
The school, designed for warfare training, was established in Panama during the '40s. It was moved to Fort Benning when the United States no longer controlled the Panama Canal. Now, with the threat of communism dissolved, protesters want the school ended.
U.S. Ambassador L. Paul Bremer speaks to the press after a meeting with representatives of the Iraqi business community, the World Bank and members of the new Iraqi governing council Monday, July 14, 2003, in Baghdad, Iraq. Council member Dr. Rajaa Habib looks on at left. 'The coalition made it very clear in its discussions yesterday with the governing council that we consider that the coalition has very broad authorities to determine the direction of the Iraqi economy,' Bremer said. (AP Photo/Wally Santana)
U.S.: Iraqis to Rule on Coalition Forces
BAGHDAD, Iraq - The U.S. administrator for Iraq said Tuesday the length of time American forces remain in the country was up to the Iraqi people, and he called the task of rebuilding the economy a "daunting one" that the United States would not ignore.
"The timing of how long the coalition stays here is now in the hands of the Iraqi people," L. Paul Bremer said at a news conference.
Bremer applauded Sunday's formation of the Governing Council, a body that he played a major role in creating. He said the next political task for the country would be the writing of a constitution and eventually holding free elections.
"It represents the diversity of Iraq and diversity of all Iraqis. It is a tangible benefit of the liberation of this great country," Bremer said in opening remarks. "Personally, I'm delighted the coalition now has a strong partner in forming a fully democratic Iraq.
He was less optimistic about the Iraqi economy, however.
Dear Mr. Pierotti,
You say:
"As Ms. Eder states in the article and to me on many occasions, what takes place in the classroom is a separate matter. We are in agreement that these cards and other projects like them would not be appropriate for an academic discussion with adolescents at Bellarmine."
I'm having a bit of difficulty believing this given:
Los Gatos Weekly-Times - December 13, 2000
PROTESTERS: Bellarmine teachers Kathy Eder and Chris Wolf, both of Los Gatos, joined six Bellarmine students to protest the School of Americas and call for its closing. The protest was staged in Fort Benning, Ga., where the school is located, over a November weekend.
At this point I don't feel bad about finances forcing me to pull my kids from Holy Family Ed Center a few years ago.
Regards,
U.S. Refuses to Provide Moussaoui Witness
By LARRY MARGASAK, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - The Justice Department acknowledges its defiance of a judge's order may cause dismissal of charges against accused Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, but says it won't produce an al-Qaida prisoner for questioning by the defendant.
The government notified the trial judge Monday that it wouldn't budge in its refusal to let Moussaoui, an acknowledged al-Qaida loyalist, interview a former superior — suspected Sept. 11 attack coordinator Ramzi Binalshibh.
U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema can now penalize the government, but the ultimate sanction of dismissal is not her only option for disobedience of her order to allow the deposition.
While dismissal could ultimately lead to prosecution by a military tribunal — where the government's national security concerns would be paramount — the Alexandria, Va.-based judge could take less drastic steps. She could throw out some charges, exclude government evidence or instruct jurors that the government refused to provide certain evidence.
Prosecutors said they're banking on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold their argument that any comments by Binalshibh to Moussaoui would jeopardize national security, especially if they're played at Moussaoui's trial on charges of conspiring with the Sept. 11 hijackers to commit terrorism and hijack airplanes.
The Richmond, Va.-based 4th Circuit voted 7-5 on Monday to deny, for now, reconsideration of a three-judge panel's refusal to intervene in the case at this stage. The court is more likely to step in after Brinkema rules on sanctions against the government.
While the appellate ruling concerned the timing of the court's possible intervention, chief judge William Wilkins warned that the court would not blindly accept government claims of national security.
"Siding with the government in all cases where national security concerns are asserted would entail surrender of the independence of the judicial branch and abandonment of our sworn commitment to uphold the rule of law," Wilkins said.
The government said it recognizes that its objection means the deposition of Binalshibh cannot go forward, and that the decision "obligates the court now to dismiss the indictment unless the court finds that the interests of justice can be served by another action."
If the court considers an alternative to dismissal, prosecutors asked that they be heard before action is taken. The government also asked Brinkema to postpone any action pending a ruling by the appellate court.
Brinkema has ruled that Moussaoui, who is representing himself, should be allowed to question Binalshibh through a satellite hookup.
Brinkema had concluded Binalshibh may support Moussaoui's contention that he was not part of the Sept. 11 conspiracy, and said he had a constitutional right to witnesses who might help the defense.
Attorney General John Ashcroft has repeatedly said he wants to continue the prosecution in the civilian court system, although military tribunal rules would be more favorable to the government.
"The military commission approach is outside the constitutional system," said Robert Precht, assistant dean for public service at the University of Michigan law school and a defense lawyer in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing case.
"Once you take this out of the civilian system, all bets are off. All constitutional rights that are familiar to us are simply not applicable. What limited rights the military does give are totally at the government's mercy."
The eventual outcome of this dispute could affect future cases by deciding whether terrorism defendants will have access to enemy combatants, especially those, like Binalshibh, who are being held in secret locations overseas.
Should the courts decide a defendant's access to favorable witnesses trumps national security concerns, the government could bring all future terrorism proceedings before military tribunals.
Repeating earlier arguments, the government said Monday: "The deposition, which would involve an admitted and unrepentant terrorist (the defendant) questioning one of his al-Qaida confederates, would necessarily result in the unauthorized disclosure of classified information.
"Such a scenario is unacceptable to the government, which not only carries the responsibility for prosecuting the defendant, but also of protecting this nation's security at a time of war with an enemy who already murdered thousands of our citizens."
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq's new U.S.-backed Governing Council agreed Tuesday to set up a tribunal to try war criminals, a spokesman for a key member of the council said.
Entifadh Qanbar, spokesman of Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, said the council decided to set up a commission charged with laying down laws, local or international, that would allow it to put suspected war criminals on trial.
"The Council decided to form a judicial high commission to look into the various types of crimes...and to try war criminals," he told Reuters.
The 25-member Council was formed Sunday, the first Iraqi national political body since a U.S.-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein on April 9.
Qanbar said the Council also decided to form a commission to look into ways to "uproot" Saddam's once all-powerful Baath Party from Iraqi society.
The U.S.-led administration of Iraq had banned Saddam's ruling party and launched a de-Baathification process, sacking all senior party members from government jobs.
Qanbar said the Council would start soon with reviewing bylaws for a government before considering naming ministers.
The Council has some executive powers, like nominating ministers, changing laws, helping in naming a committee to draft a new constitution and prepare for free elections. But the final say remains in the hands of U.S. administration Paul Bremer.
Bush: U.S. Working Hard to Find Iraq WMD
By TERENCE HUNT, AP White House Correspondent
WASHINGTON - President Bush, facing questions about his credibility, says the United States is working overtime to prove Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction before the United States invaded Iraq.
"When it's all said and done," Bush said Monday, "the people of the United States and the world will realize that Saddam Hussein had a weapons program."
Bush has been on the defensive since the administration acknowledged it could not document his State of the Union claim in January that Iraq had been trying to buy uranium in Africa to develop nuclear weapons.
That claim was based on British intelligence that had been called into question by the CIA, and the agency's director, George Tenet, has accepted responsibility for not seeking removal of the statement from Bush's speech.
Sen. Bob Graham of Florida, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, accused Bush of deception. "He deceived the American people by allowing into a State of the Union speech — at a critical point when he was making the case for war with Iraq — a statement that he either knew was wrong or should have known was wrong."
Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., said administration officials "should be reminded that what is at stake is not just the credibility of one man or even the credibility of the office of the president of the United States. What we place in the balance is the credibility of the United States as a nation and as leader of the free world."
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., put it differently.
"There is a broader issue," he said on NBC's "Today" show Tuesday, "and that is the failed policy toward Iraq. It's a bankrupt policy, it's a policy that's adrift and the individuals paying the price are the American servicemen and women."
Bush said the United States was reviewing documents and interviewing Iraqis in an intensive effort to support the still unproven claim that Saddam had forbidden weapons.
The embarrassing episode about questionable intelligence forced the administration to concede it did not know the source of the British claims — and, in fact, was not trying to determine the source.
"We don't know if it's true but nobody — but nobody — can say it was wrong," White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said. "That is not known."
Administration officials said Bush's statement was technically correct since he was simply saying that British intelligence said something was true. In the Jan. 28 speech, Bush said, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
Anti-war advocacy groups launched a television advertising campaign accusing Bush of misleading Americans about Iraq's nuclear ambitions. The ad ends with the word "leader" superimposed on Bush's face, and then the word changes to "misleader."
But Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama said on the "Today" program that he believes the administration "has been forthright with the American people" on this issue.
"This is political season," he said. "We've got a presidential race coming up and I think you've got to look at things as what they are and look at the political reasons of people that are fighting the president now."
Defending his administration, Bush said, "I think the intelligence I get is darn good intelligence. And the speeches I have given were backed by good intelligence.
"And I am absolutely convinced today, like I was convinced when I gave the speeches, that Saddam Hussein developed a program of weapons of mass destruction and that our country made the right decision."
The administration said the questionable intelligence claim was simply one piece in a long, documented list of evidence showing that Iraq was trying to acquire material for nuclear weapons.
Said Fleischer, "The fact of the matter is whether they sought it from Africa or didn't seek it from Africa doesn't change the fact that they were seeking to reconstitute a nuclear program."
The White House also drew a distinction between the way Bush handled intelligence claims about Iraq in a speech he gave in Cincinnati last October compared with his State of the Union address in January.
In October, acting on Tenet's suggestion, Bush excised a sentence about Iraq seeking a specific quantity of uranium from Niger, Fleischer said. Yet, several months later, Bush went ahead and raised the claim about seeking uranium in Africa.
Fleischer said it was an apples-and-oranges difference because the Cincinnati speech mentioned Niger while the State of the Union speech talked about all of Africa, and that there was different reporting from the CIA. "So it's an apple in Cincinnati and an orange in the State of the Union," he said. "The two do not compare that directly."
By DAVID E. SANGER The New York Times
WASHINGTON, July 14 North Korean officials told the Bush administration last week that they had finished producing enough plutonium to make a half-dozen nuclear bombs, and that they intended to move ahead quickly to turn the material into weapons, senior American officials said today.
The new declaration set off a scramble in American intelligence agencies under fire for their assessment of Iraq's nuclear capability to determine if the North Korean government of Kim Jong Il was bluffing or had succeeded in producing the material undetected.
Officials said today that the answer was unclear. A preliminary set of atmospheric tests for the presence of a gas given off as nuclear waste is reprocessed into plutonium is the best indicator the United States has from one of the world's most closed nations. The most recent tests suggested that nuclear work has accelerated, but the results were inconclusive. More test results are expected at the end of this week.
"It's the mirror image of the Iraq problem," one official said. "We spent years looking for evidence Iraq was lying when it said it didn't have a nuclear program. Now North Korea says it's about to go nuclear, and everyone is trying to figure out whether they've finally done it, or if it's the big lie."
By Benjamin Kang Lim and John Ruwitch
BEIJING (Reuters) - China, unnerved by the festering North Korean nuclear crisis, is pushing a compromise format for talks that it hopes will satisfy both Washington and Pyongyang and bring them back to the table, diplomats said on Tuesday.
Washington has insisted on multilateral talks while Pyongyang demands bilateral talks with the United States before any multilateral discussions.
To break the impasse, Beijing supports a multilateral framework for the negotiations that would allow for bilateral meetings on the sidelines, a Chinese Foreign Ministry official told a briefing for Western diplomats.
"Multilateral first, bilateral contacts subsequently and even in a separate room," one diplomat who attended the briefing told Reuters.
The revelation came as Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Dai Bingguo wound up a four-day trip to Pyongyang during which he met North Korean leader Kim Jong-il and presented a letter from Chinese President Hu Jintao.
The contents of Hu's letter were not known, but diplomats in Beijing said Dai probably presented the compromise to the North Koreans.
The North's official KCNA news agency said Dai held in-depth talks with North Korean officials before returning to Beijing Tuesday afternoon.
A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said Dai's general message to Kim was that it was critical to seek a peaceful resolution, restart talks as soon as possible, protect peace and stability on the Korean peninsula and keep it nuclear free.
Hu and his South Korean counterpart Roh Moo-hyun had agreed to pursue the compromise format during a summit in Beijing last week, the diplomat said.
HOPE AND ANXIETY
"I'm assuming that the U.S. is willing to wait for a reaction from Pyongyang," said a second diplomat. There was no immediate reaction from North Korea.
"It's clear that there is a sort of hope, even anxiety from the Chinese part, that the Dai Bingguo visit can get some results," the second envoy said.
Analysts say Beijing is best placed to apply pressure on Pyongyang, providing 70 to 90 percent of the North's oil and a third of its imports and food aid.
China, fearful of instability on its northeastern border, was criticized early in the crisis for doing too little. Now it appears to be in overdrive, dispatching envoys to Russia, the United States and, now, North Korea in the past month alone.
South Korea said it hoped Hu's message would help persuade Pyongyang to return to the table, although analysts in Seoul said it was far from clear whether Beijing would succeed.
An initial round of talks between the North, the United States and China in Beijing in April yielded little.
North Korea and the United States seemed to be drifting further apart rather than toward talks, but diplomats and analysts said China's decision to intervene was significant.
"As much as anyone can influence North Korea, the Chinese can," said a senior diplomat in Seoul.
Still, China was expected to support North Korea's demands for security guarantees from the United States -- not to use force or threaten to use force against it.
Beijing is also floating the prospect of replacing the cease-fire ending the 1950-53 Korean war with a firmer peace "mechanism," diplomats quoted the Foreign Ministry official as saying.
The crisis has swirled since October when the United States said Pyongyang had admitted to having a secret atomic program.
North Korea has since quit the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and told Washington it has atomic weapons and aims to make more by reprocessing fuel rods. The United States and its allies have not been able to verify that conclusively, although they have long said Pyongyang could already have one or two bombs.
MADRID, Spain - Police in northern Spain arrested two suspected Basque separatists on Tuesday and seized explosives ready to be used in attacks, the government said.
The two suspected members of the armed separatist group ETA were arrested in an early morning raid on an apartment in Berriozar in the Navarra region, officials said.
Police confiscated guns, timers, detonators and 330 pounds of explosives, including 70 pounds prepared for imminent use, Interior Minister Angel Acebes told reporters.
Acebes declined to say if police blamed the two men for recent attacks or attempted attacks in Navarra: a car bombing that killed two policemen in the town of Sanguesa on May 30 and a failed bombing Sunday in a Pamplona hotel during the annual running of the bulls.
Acebes simply noted that recent attacks have taken place in Navarra and the suspects were arrested there, the national news agency Efe said.
ETA has been blamed for a rash of attacks in Navarra and elsewhere since May 25, when local elections were held in the Basque region and politicians from the outlawed pro-independence party Batasuna, accused of being part of ETA, were barred from running.
ETA has claimed or been blamed for more than 800 deaths in its more than 30-year campaign of bombings and shootings aimed at carving out an independent homeland in territory straddling northern Spain and southwest France.
By NOOR KHAN, Associated Press Writer
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - Suspected Taliban fighters attacked a police headquarters in southern Afghanistan, killing the police chief and four other officers, an official said Tuesday.
Two other policemen were wounded in the attack Monday in Ghorak district, 72 miles northwest of Kandahar, said Mohammed Salim, deputy police chief in Kandahar.
About 12 suspected Taliban drove up to the district police headquarters in two cars and a pickup truck. They stormed the station killing police chief Sakza Mama and his men.
No one claimed responsibility for the attack, but Salim blamed the Taliban, who are usually the first ones to be accused of any attack on government offices in Afghanistan.
The Taliban have warned Afghans not to work for the government of President Hamid Karzai. They are believed to have been behind a spate of such assaults in recent months.
Last weekend, suspected Taliban fighters ambushed a police vehicle near Thaloqan village about 25 miles southwest of Kandahar, injuring a senior police official and his brother.
The Taliban militia were ousted from power by a U.S.-led coalition in late 2001 for harboring al-Qaida, the terror network blamed for the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States.
There are reports that the Taliban have since joined hands with fighters loyal to renegade leader, Gubuddin Hekmatyar, as well as with their al-Qaida allies, to fight international troops in Afghanistan.
About 8,500 U.S. soldiers are in Afghanistan searching for al-Qaida and Taliban fugitives
By TERENCE HUNT, AP White House Correspondent
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration said Tuesday it is a serious matter that North Korea claims it has completed producing enough plutonium to make nuclear bombs. The administration said it could not verify the information and would try to deal with the issue through diplomatic discussions.
"North Korea has made a lot of claims in the past and it is not something at this time that we can confirm the accuracy of," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said.
He said the United States would continue working with China, Japan and South Korea "toward our shared objective of a complete, verifiable and irreversible elimination of North Korea's nuclear weapons program."
North Korea made its declaration last week in New York in a meeting of North Korean diplomats and Jack Pritchard, a State Department official who handles North Korean issues.
Pyongyang's claim poses a major challenge for President Bush, who has flatly stated that a nuclear-armed North Korea will not be tolerated.
"We will not submit to blackmail or grant inducements to the north to live up to its obligations," McClellan said. "North Korea has a clear choice between two paths. The international community has made clear that continued pursuit of nuclear weapons will only lead to further isolation and a deteriorating situation for the regime in Pyongyang. The United States and North Korea's neighbors have indicated we are prepared to talk to the North about a better path based on the elimination of its nuclear weapons program."
Asked if Bush might resort to military force against North Korea, McClellan said, "The president never takes options off the table, but it's something that we want to address in a multilateral way."
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