Det danske Fredsakademi

Kronologi over fredssagen og international politik Juli 2004 / Timeline July, 2004

Juni 2004, August 2004

07/01/2004
Det er nu fjorten måneder siden, at USAs præsident Bush erklærede krigen i Irak for vundet.

07/01/2004
Golden Doves Peace Prize
Blandt årets modtagere af den italienske fredspris Colombe D'Oro er Hans Blix og Cora Weiss, skriver Peace Matters, July 2004.

07/01/2004
Invitation
Christiania, 28.maj 2004
I sommerhalvåret ved vi erfaringsmæssigt, at der kommer mange besøgende på Christiania, og fristaden er som bekendt blandt et af Københavns største turistmål. I det område, hvor der kommer flest besøgende, har vi plads tilovers til at udvalgte NGO’er kan opstille en bod til oplysning og indsamlingsformål. Læg mærke til at den målgruppe, der besøger Fristaden, generelt er den samme, der erfaringsmæssigt tilhører jeres målgruppe. Vores rige kulturliv tiltrækker fortrinsvis både et dansk og internationalt publikum med en social bevidsthed og nysgerrighed.
Visionen er at skabe en hyggelig gade med NGO-boder i stil med tidligere NGO Summits i København. Forskellen er, at dette i første omgang vil vare 3 måneder fra d. 1. juni til den 31. august 2004. Opstilling af boderne er vederlagsfrit, der betales ingen leje og din organisation skal kun betale for materialer til jeres bod og øvrige egne omkostninger. Efter en tre måneders periode, vil vi sammen gøre status med henblik på at oprette et permanent center for miljø og humanitært arbejde.
Desuden arbejder vi på en stor fredsfestival i sluttningen af August (tidspunktet er endnu ikke fastlagt) hvor i selfølgelig også er inviteret.
Formålet med Christiania er beslægtet med jeres, og vi håber din organisation er interesseret i at tage imod denne specielle indbydelse.
Hvis du har spørgsmål eller ønsker yderligere oplysninger kontakt da venligst den NGO ansvarlige på Christianias kommunikationskontor. Stine Hurtigkarl
telefon 32956508
mail aktion@christiania.org

07/02/2004
"Eyes Wide Open: the Human Cost of War in Iraq" exhibit at the Independence Visitors Center in Philadelphia
By: Marlene Santoyo
There were more than 800 pairs of combat boots, each bearing the name of a U.S. soldier who has died in the Iraq war; a 24 foot long wall of names and incidents of Iraqi civilian deaths; a multi-media exhibit inside the Visitors Center featuring videos, arts, and panels on the human cost of the war of occupation.
People were moved, some to tears. There were other Quakers who had volunteered to be at the exhibit for a couple of hours and most of us wore a shirt that showed rows of boots and had the words, WAR IS COSTLY. Instead, I wore a black shirt that had the word, "PEACE!", written in Arabic, Hebrew & English. Rather than stay at the table with literature, I decided to walk among the folks who were walking between the boots and myself walked up to the these pensive women & men holding out the small white button that says, "NO WAR ON IRAQ!" and asked if I could pin it on their shirt. Most said, "Yes". I made another request.. that when they took off this shirt they pin it on the next one.
Like many others who were grateful to AFSC, American Friends Service Center for having put up the exhibit, I too felt honored to have been a part of powerful visual and visceral expression, conveying the cost in American & Iraqi lives.
This is only one instance of protest. All around the country, American citizens are finding different ways to express their/our grief about what resident Bush has done in our name and we are standing up and saying, "No! Not in our name!"

07/03/2004

07/04/2004

07/05/2004
posted by www.democrats.com
BushGame: The Anti-Bush Video Game
Check out the new anti-bush video game that's a hot sensation on the internet. You play as powerful political voices such as Howard Stern, Michael Moore, John Edwards, John Kerry, Christopher Reeve, Hulk Hogan, Mr. T, and many more! You have to battle huge monsters that represent members of the Bush Cabinet and travel to exotic Enron tax escapes like Bermuda, and war zones like Iraq. All the while you're entertained and fascinated by powerful information concerning the administration's bungling of domestic and foreign policy. It's an incredibly informative and hilariously entertaining critique of the current presidential administration. (Broadband connection recommended). http://www.emogame.com/bushgame.html

07/06/2004

07/07/2004
Exiled to Canada Again? U.S. High-Tech “Military Draft”
Resources;
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/164693_draft13.html;
http://www.pej.org/html/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=194&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0;

If another U.S. Military Draft follows U.S. Federal Nov. 2004 Elections, even more will flee yet another U.S. draft for pathological empire. Draft Resisters will once again need to face choices of exile or jail. Going to prison avoids migratory exile, yet risks a 21st Century peril twist and Jail time for resisting the (economic and/or political) U.S. Military Draft in the 21st-Century may, through prison rape or beatings, forcibly induce pandemic AIDS HIV+ and Hepatitis …, (or related immuno-suppressant diseases), across the USA detention establishment.
As its more mobile, “best” or wealthier youth escape the U.S. once again, their “blood” loss may also again be relatively counter-balanced by planet-wide hemorrhaging deaths, such as Iraq & Israel–Palestine wars.

As to Canada, during the 1960s-1970s U.S. South-East Asian wars and invasions, officially, the U.S. Pentagon-State Department flatly denied that more than “12,006” left for Canada; (no “guestimate” planet-wide).
But Canada's Federal Government believed that over two million exiled U.S. Citizens registered as Canadian “Landed Immigrants” then, including friends and families of resisters - that is, mostly - middle or upper-middle - or upper-class youth exiles or refugees who represented the wealthiest, (costliest to “raise”), economic-political “cream” (as it were) of an entire U.S. generation.
Basic Canadian publications then included AMEX/Americans in Exile, (Toronto Newsletter); Jack Calhoun, Editor, (now in Washington, D.C.)
and Bonnie Day's This Life One Leaf (Toronto: SAANES, 1972).
Many caged 20th Century U.S. war resisters then landed in federal prison south of Ann Arbor MI, more or less along the traditional 1860s-1960s “Underground Railroad” Michigan-Ohio Route to Canada.
Even after prison, the more direct peace and environmental activists still had to go into exile.

See also http://www.objector.org/;
http://www.nisbco.org/;
http://www.cic.gc.ca/;
http://www.web.net/~ccr/related.htm;
and War Resisters in Canada,
http://www.library.ubc.ca/jones/amcan.html.

07/07/2004
Winning Contractors – An Update
As the number of contracts rises, problems continue to plague the contracting process
http://www.publici.org/wow/printer-friendly.aspx?aid=339
By Daniel Politi
WASHINGTON, July 7, 2004 — More than 150 American companies have received contracts worth up to $48.7 billion for work in postwar Afghanistan and Iraq, according to the latest update of the Center for Public Integrity's Windfalls of War project.
This figure represents an increase of 82 companies and more than $40 billion since the Center first released its study of contracts awarded to U.S. companies for postwar work in Afghanistan and Iraq on Oct. 30, 2003.
The Center has continued to file Freedom of Information Act requests with, among others, the Department of Defense, the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development in hopes of getting the complete picture of U.S. contractors involved with Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. As was the case with the Center's initial report, contractors and dollar values have only been included in the overall list if there was authoritative information from either an official government source or a company source.
Since the Center's first release in October 2003, there has been more scrutiny of these postwar contracts by Congress, the media and various government agencies. This was partly due to the revelation that employees of private contractors Titan Corporation and CACI were present during the alleged torture of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison.
The agencies that have been awarding these postwar contracts have in turn become more organized with contract information and more responsive to requests from the media; some agencies have even increased the amount of information available to the general public. For example, USAID has enhanced the Iraq section of its Web site, posting redacted versions of some contracts the agency awarded. The Coalition Provisional Authority, which formally ceased to exist on June 28, added a listing of awarded contracts on its Web site, while the Commerce Department's list of contracts awarded for work in Iraq is more complete now than it was previously.
Still, much of the work continues to be uncoordinated within federal agencies and no agency seems to have a full picture of all the postwar contracts. For example, the Center did not receive a contract or any list of contracts that included Titan Corporation or CACI; those contract values came, rather, from Congressional testimony. This may be due to the number of agencies involved in the contracting process. The CACI contract, for example, is funded by the Army but was awarded through the Department of the Interior.
Although agencies are providing more information regarding the postwar contracts awarded for work in Iraq, there is scant information available to the general public—just as there was months ago—on contracts for work in postwar Afghanistan.
This lack of information about postwar Afghanistan is also notable in the U.S. government's examinations of the contracting process. Although there have been several official reports and congressional hearings on the postwar reconstruction of Iraq, considerably less attention has been paid to the Afghanistan effort.
Several of these reports and hearings regarding the Iraq effort painted a picture of undermanned and overworked contracting staffs without sufficient knowledge of the contracting process, who stretched contracting rules for the sake of expediency, particularly in the early days of postwar reconstruction. This lack of resources has also resulted in inadequate oversight of the current contracts, according to published reports by the General Accounting Office and the inspector general of the Department of Defense.
Problems with awarding contracts plagued the Iraq reconstruction process from the get-go. In the early days, the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (which became the CPA in May 2003) suffered from a lack of personnel. Additionally, there was no formal contracting plan to purchase equipment.
"A key oversight of the DoD planners was not recognizing earlier in the process the need for acquisition personnel," the DoD inspector general wrote.
A specialist from the Defense Contract Management Agency told IG investigators from the Department of Defense that officials of the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance "neither followed nor tried to learn the acquisition process." In addition, ORHA wanted quick results and, yielding to pressure, contracting officers from the Defense Contracting Command-Washington did not correctly award or manage the contracts. Of the 24 contracts awarded by the DCC-W that the Defense Department's IG investigated, 22 did not follow the Federal Acquisition Regulation, part of the official guidelines governing the contracting process.
This lack of structure in the contracting process, coupled with the need to start work as quickly as possible, led to contractors providing draft statements of work and cost estimates to contracting officers, when the government usually provides this information, according to GAO. In addition, contracting officers often allowed contractors to begin work before key terms of the contracts, including price, had been agreed on.
Contracts were also awarded to those with connections to the ORHA. In one instance, ORHA requested that a contract for a protocol officer be awarded to an individual who had once been a private-sector colleague of the former ORHA director, retired Army Lt. Gen. Jay Garner. In hopes of eliminating any appearance of conflict, the protocol officer left her job with the contractor for a position with another firm, Native American Industrial Distributors. They then received a contract to hire this same protocol officer that ORHA had requested.
(A copy of the contract is available here: www.publicintegrity.org/wow/docs/Native_American.pdf)
Acquisition rules were also often not followed when ORHA officials extended the scope of contracts. For example, ORHA used the Iraqi Free Media contract awarded to SAIC, which was designed to aid in the development of local media, to hire an expert who, it turned out, did no work related to the objective of the contract.
The Iraqi Free Media contract was awarded in March 2003 with a value of $15 million; by the end of that September, the contract was valued at $82.3 million.
(See the original contract here: www.publicintegrity.org/wow/docs/SAIC_0533.pdf)
An acquisition specialist with the Defense Contract Management Agency told investigators with the DoD's inspector general that the program manager for the Iraqi Free Media contract bought a Hummer H2 and a Ford pickup truck, then chartered a cargo jet to fly the vehicles to Iraq for his use on the contract.
The GAO investigation also noted that there was less compliance with regulations when contracting officers issued task orders for existing contracts. The law does not require work issued under a task order on an existing contract to be competitively bid if the task is within the scope of the main elements of the original contract.
Several agencies, however, gave out task orders that went beyond the work delineated in the original contract. For example, through an interagency agreement (see it here: www.publicintegrity.org/wow/docs/USAID_AFCAP.pdf) the Air Force Contract Augmentation Program was used to provide logistical support services to USAID. In addition to the regular logistical tasks the contract was designed for, AFCAP was also used for such services as creating plans for fixing the power generation for Baghdad water treatment plants, which, according to the GAO, were outside the scope of the original contract.The original contract, awarded March 2003, had a value of $26 million. As of June 2003, USAID has allocated more than $91 million under this interagency agreement.
After the contracts are awarded, agencies often suffer from a lack of resources and personnel to oversee the contracts.
The DoD IG determined that 13 of the 24 contracts it reviewed did not adequately monitor contractors. Those assigned to monitor the contracts were not properly trained to assure the contractors were performing the required work. Similarly, State Department officials told investigators from the General Accounting Office that they did not have enough staff to monitor their law enforcement support contract. (See the contract: www.publicintegrity.org/wow/docs/DynCorp.pdf)
Federal agencies have sometimes hired contractors to oversee the work being done by yet other contractors. This, however, can raise questions of conflicts of interest. A report by the minority staff of the House Committee on Government Reform and the Senate Democratic Policy Committee detailed such conflicts in two oversight contracts awarded by the CPA to Parsons and CH2M Hill. Both companies are partners in other projects with the very firms they have been tasked to oversee. For example, one of the companies Parsons is tasked to oversee is Fluor, even though the two firms have a $2.6 billion joint venture contract in Kazakhstan.
Several agencies have recognized that there are problems with the contracting process; with the initial rush to reconstruction having passed, officials there are trying to develop new ways to oversee the work of contractors. USAID, for example, requested that the Army Corps of Engineers provide oversight for a $1 billion infrastructure contract awarded to Bechtel. Additionally, USAID has come to an agreement for the Defense Contract Audit Agency to audit its contracts. Despite these new arrangements, a USAID procurement official told GAO that the agency still did not have enough permanent staff to properly oversee all the contracts in Iraq.
© 2004, The Center for Public Integrity. All rights reserved.

07/08/2004
Der indføres undtagelsestilstand i Irak, skriver Information.

07/07/2004
Cirka 55 procent af 2.500 nystartede værnepligtige vælger frivilligt at fuldføre ni måneders værnepligt, skriver Berlingske Tidende.

07/08/2004
Democracy; Israel
Tel Aviv District Court Judge upheld the Ministry of Interior's deportation order of American peace activist Ann Petter. Judge Mudrik accepted the Ministry of Interior's argument that Petter should be barred from entering Israel because of her participation in a peace march last year organized by the International Solidarity Movement, which is a Palestinian-led movement working for Palestinian freedom and an end to the Israeli occupation. Judge Mudrik held that the case did not warrant the Court's intervention in the decision of the State, writes International Solidarity Movement.

07/08/2004
Privatisation of Iraq on Trial - POSTPONED Until November 23-24
In amendment to earlier press releases sent out regarding the trial of peace activists Pennie Quinton and Ewa Jasiewicz, charged with aggravated trespass of the Iraq Procurement Conference, the defendents' has been trial adjourned until November 23-24.
This is due to the Crowns failure to disclose related materials concerning their arrest. The Crown will also need more time to respond to the political nature of the defences arguments.
The Iraq Procurement Conference was sponsored by Erinys, the oil giants Chevron, Exxon and Shell plus arms dealers Raytheon. The conference was supposed to serve three purposes:
(i) To allow the suppliers of goods and services to meet.
(ii) To form partnering agreements.
(iii) To sign procurement contracts.
The conference website described the event as, not a talking shop but a place where deals are made and contracts signed.
During the protest the pair unravelled banners and addressed the delegates, as collaborators, complicit in massacres in Iraq. They went on to declare the conference illegal under international law.
The defendants have been charged with 'disrupt[ing] a lawful meeting.
The defence will argue that the meeting was not a lawful event as it was facilitating acts of pillage - illegal under the Hague Regulations of 1907 which Britain and the US are both signatories to.
In a leaked memo dated March 26th 2003, UK Attorney General, Lord Peter Goldsmith advised Prime Minister Blair that in his view, 'the imposition of major structural economic reforms would not be authorised under international law'. (Source: Guardian, 7 November 2003, Pillage is forbidden: Why the privatisation of Iraq is illegal Aaron Mate).
The defendants have asked the Attorney General to give evidence. It is not yet known whether he will attend. Expert legal evidence plus statements of Governing Council ministers declaring the Privatisation plans as coercive and illegal will also be heard.
This case will set a legal precedent by putting the pillage of Iraq on trial. The defendants hope the court will rule that the conference was unlawful based on international law, writes Pennie Quinton and Ewa Jasiewicz.

07/09/2004
One in six US veterans of Iraq war suffers trauma disorders
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/jul2004/post-j09.shtml
By Joanne Laurier
Nearly a thousand US soldiers have died in the predatory wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thousands more have been maimed. For those who escape physical injury, however, there is the mental stress caused by combat and the specific stress of fighting in colonial-style wars against hostile populations.
According to researchers, large numbers of American soldiers returning from combat in Iraq and Afghanistan show signs of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other psychiatric difficulties. The average age of the fighting personnel is just 19, but the prognosis for a healthy life is bleak.
A study published July 1 by the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) found that one in six soldiers returning from Iraq was suffering from a variety of emotional problems, with lower levels of mental disabilities exhibited among those who served in Afghanistan. The report, conducted by a team from the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Washington, D.C., is the first such assessment of war-related psychiatric disorders made while military action is underway. Most studies in the past that have focused on the effects of combat on mental health were performed years after the fighting had ended.
“Research conducted after other military conflicts has shown that deployment stressors and exposure to combat result in considerable risks of mental health problems, including post-traumatic stress disorder, major depression, substance abuse, impairment in social functioning and in the ability to work, and the increased use of health care services.... A problem in the methods of such studies is the long recall period after exposure to combat. Very few studies have examined a broad range of mental health outcomes near to the time of the subjects’ deployment,” according to the investigation.
The all-volunteer forces in Iraq and Afghanistan have been involved in the first sustained ground combat undertaken by the US since Vietnam. The researchers surveyed more than 6,000 American soldiers in the months before and after combat in the two countries. Nearly 17 percent of those who fought in Iraq showed symptoms of PTSD, major depression or severe anxiety, versus 11 percent for those who served in Afghanistan. The higher rates of psychiatric trauma reported by troops returning from Iraq reflected a greater exposure to combat, with some 90 percent of the soldiers in Iraq having been in a firefight, compared to 31 percent in Afghanistan.
“For all groups responding after deployment, there was a strong relation between combat experiences, such as being shot at, handling dead bodies, knowing someone who was killed, or killing enemy combatants and the prevalence of PTSD,” stated the NEJM researchers.
The NEJM study is not the first indicator of major problems. In February, Mark Benjamin of UPI reported that as many as one out of ten US soldiers being evacuated from Iraq and Afghanistan to the army’s biggest hospital in Europe, the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, was being sent there for psychiatric or behavioral health issues.
The NEJM issue also carried an editorial by Dr. Matthew J. Friedman, director of the Department of Veterans Affairs at the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Friedman discussed the relationship between mental trauma and the nature and character of a war.
“Indeed, there is reason for concern that the reported prevalence of PTSD of 15.6 to 17.1 percent among those returning from Operation Iraqi Freedom or Operation Enduring Freedom [Afghanistan] will increase in coming years.... [O]n the basis of studies of military personnel who served in Somalia [when the nature of the mission changed from peacekeeping to the capture of warlords], it is possible that psychiatric disorders will increase now that the conduct of the war has shifted from a campaign for liberation to an ongoing armed conflict with dissident combatants.
Of course, the war in was never a “campaign for liberation,” but no doubt many US troops thought it was. The realization by soldiers that they are engaged in a brutal occupation and mass repression, Friedman suggested, will have its own mental and emotional consequences.
He continued ominously: “In short, the estimates of PTSD reported by [military psychiatrist Charles] Hoge and associates [authors of the NEJM study] may be conservative not only because of the methods used in their study but also because it may be too early to assess the eventual magnitude of the mental health problems related to the deployment to Operation Iraqi Freedom or Operation Enduring Freedom.” Besides the change of mission from “liberation” to occupation, Friedman also cited extended tours of duty as a cause of mental health difficulties.
The crisis is further compounded by the fact that military personnel are skeptical that their use of mental health services will remain confidential and are apparently “afraid to seek assistance for fear that a scarlet P could doom their careers,” observed Friedman.
He warned of an increase in psychological problems among soldiers despite an important distinction between the present period and the post-Vietnam war era: “Americans no longer confuse war with the warrior; those returning from Iraq and Afghanistan enjoy national support, despite sharp political disagreement about the war itself.”
Surveys of veterans conducted years after their military service ended have shown a prevalence of current PTSD among 15 percent of the Vietnam veterans and 2 to 10 percent among veterans of the first Gulf War, claimed the NEJM report.
Once called “shell shock” or “combat fatigue,” PTSD displays symptoms that include flashbacks, nightmares, panic attacks, feelings of detachment, irritability, trouble concentrating, emotional outbursts and sleeplessness. The National Center for PTSD states that PTSD is a highly prevalent lifetime disorder.
The National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Survey (NVVRS), conducted between 1986 and 1988, estimated that more than half of all male Vietnam veterans and almost half of all female Vietnam veterans—some 1,700,000 in all—have experienced “clinically serious stress reaction symptoms.”
This translates into a 40 percent divorce rate for male Vietnam veterans, with 23 percent having high levels of parenting problems. Almost half of all male Vietnam veterans suffering from PTSD between 1986 and 1988 have been arrested or jailed at least once, and the estimated lifetime prevalence of substance abuse or dependency among male Vietnam veterans is nearly 40 percent.
There is also another psychiatric fallout from the war in Iraq: suicide.
According to an Army mental-health team studying soldiers in the combat environments of Iraq and Kuwait last year, there were 23 suicides in Iraq in 2003, mostly young and in lower enlisted ranks. The survey showed that nearly 90 percent of soldiers were concerned about not knowing how long they would be deployed, separation from family, and lack of privacy and personal space.
“Soldiers indicated their most troubling experiences in combat came from seeing dead bodies (67 percent), being shot at (63 percent), being attacked or ambushed (61 percent) and knowing someone who was killed or seriously wounded (59 percent).... Additionally, 72 percent of the soldiers said their unit morale was low and 52 percent said their own morale was low,” according to a March dispatch from the Army News Service.
The NEJM study is a preliminary and rather elemental description of the psychological damage inflicted on a whole generation of economic conscripts—that is, working class youth bereft of options—by the Bush administration’s illegal and open-ended wars of conquest.
The possibility of obtaining career training or a college education paid for by Uncle Sam—the mantras of the military recruiters—evaporates with the onset of post-combat mental illness. Research has documented the profound connection between the nature of a war—the reasons why men and women fight—and the degree of psychic trauma endured by the fighters. A rotten colonialist enterprise based on lies is wreaking havoc on the minds of those obliged to carry it out.
Dry scientific data conveys only so much; it takes a poet on the order of Wilfred Owen (1893-1918), who fought and died in World War I, to capture something of this nightmarish ordeal:
These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished.
Memory fingers in their hair of murders,
Multitudinous murders they once witnessed.
Wading sloughs of flesh these helpless wander,
Treading blood from lungs that had loved laughter.
Always they must see these things and hear them,
Batter of guns and shatter of flying muscles,
Carnage incomparable and human squander
Rucked too thick for these men’s extrication.
—from Mental Cases
Copyright 1998-2004
World Socialist Web Site

07/10/2004

07/11/2004
Den brasilianske kulturminister, Gilberto Gil, som også en kendt musiker, holder et foredrag om Fred som kultur - fredskultur på Anneks A, Studiegården, Studiestræde 6, d. 11. juli, kl.11.00. Samme aften holder han koncert i Tivoli på plænen kl. 22.00.

07/11/2004
Ex-Army reservist sues to avoid recall
By TIM WHITMIRE, Associated Press
CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) - A former Army reservist who returned to civilian life in December - only to be recalled five months later - filed a lawsuit Thursday to avoid duty in Iraq.
Todd Parrish, 30, served four years of active duty and another four years in the reserves, a commitment he believed expired Dec. 19. The Army maintains he will be in a voluntary reserve status until he's 50.
The Army says Parrish never formally resigned his commission as a lieutenant, making him eligible for involuntary recall to duty. He received a letter May 10 to report for duty at Fort Sill, Okla., and is due Aug. 10.
Parrish says he did not know he had to resign. Believing he was free, he married, bought a house and began preparing for a career as a civil engineer.
"It was a life-altering experience when I read the orders to report to active duty," Parrish said in a recent interview. "I felt like I was being drafted without a draft being instituted."
The complaint filed in federal court in Raleigh contends Parrish was never informed in any enlistment contract or other document "of any requirement or need to 'resign' his Army Reserve commission in order to terminate his status with the U.S. Army Reserves."

07/12/2004
EU-kommissionen meddeler oprettelsen af the European Defence Agency.

07/13/2004
UN report raps CPA over actions involving Iraqi oil sector
http://www.platts.com/Oil/News/3719005.xml?p=Oil/News&S=n
By: Tyson Slocum
Research Director
Public Citizen's Energy Program
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has sent a report to the Security Council calling into question a variety of actions by the the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which ruled Iraq until the handover of sovereignty in late June. Among the things questioned by the report were the awarding of so-called sole-sourced contracts, employing of barter transactions where oil was concerned which presented a "scope for fraudulent or non-transparent transactions," and a lack of "adequate control" over Iraqi oil production. The report was prepared by the International Advisory and Monitoring Board for Iraq, which was set up by the UN Security Council to oversee the handling of Iraq's oil revenue after the ousting of the former Iraqi regime. It was tasked with assuring that the oil revenues were spent to benefit Iraqis. The concerns detailed in the report were communicated to the CPA before it was dissolved. The report said the CPA promised to take the appropriate action on all the issues raised in the report.

07/13/2004
Radiation in Iraq equals 250,000 Nagasaki bombs
By Bob Nichols,
Online Journal Contributing Writer
http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/071304Nichols/071304nichols.ht=
As a writer I do not have a set of words to describe what 142 degrees in the shade is like. I've seen 120 degrees in Phoenix and 110 degrees in the spa's sauna I use. One hundred forty-two degrees leaves me speechless. Try to imagine 142 D temperature while wearing a helmet, long sleeve shirt, long pants, a bulletproof vest, boots, and carrying a 70-pound pack.
By contrast the Inuit of Alaska and Canada are said to have 37 words to precisely talk about different kinds of snow.
So, since the temperature is heating up in Iraq it seemed like a good time to float this story to different Internet sites and news publications. There was one story in 2003 of a 19-year old British soldier whose military job was to work in a British tank. In Iraq. In the summer. Word is, from London, that he forgot to drink enough water and he literally cooked in his tank.
But, this story is not about the temperature in Iraq. You can bet, though, the weather will be really important for those Americans unfortunate enough to still be in Iraq this summer.
This story is about American weapons built with depleted uranium components for the business end of things. Just about all American bullets, tank shells, missiles, dumb bombs, smart bombs, 500 and 2,000-pound bombs, cruise missiles, and anything else engineered to help our side in the war of us against them has depleted uranium in it. Lots of depleted uranium.
In the case of a cruise missile, as much as 800 pounds of the stuff. This article is about how much radioactive depleted uranium our guys, representing us, the citizens of the United States, let fly in Iraq. Turns out they used about 4,000,000 pounds of the stuff, give or take, according to the Pentagon and the United Nations. That is a bunch.
Now, most people have no idea how much Four Million Pounds of anything is, much less of depleted uranium oxide dust (UOD), which this stuff turns into when it is shot or exploded. Suffice it to say it is about equal to 1,333 cars that weigh 3,000 pounds apiece. That is a lot of cars; but we can imagine what a parking lot with 1,333 is like. The point is this was and is an industrial strength operation. It is still going on, too.
No sir-ee, putting Four Million Pounds of Radioactive Uranium Dust (RUD) on the ground in Iraq was a definitely "on-purpose" kind of thing. It was not "just an accident." We, the citizens of the United States, through our kids in the Army, did this on purpose.
When the depleted uranium bullets, missiles, or bombs hit something or explode most of the radioactive uranium turns instantly into very, very small dust particles, too fine to even see (they call it: uranium oxide, that's the really bad stuff). When US troops or Iraqis breathe even a tiny amount into their lungs, as little as one gram, it is the same as getting an X-Ray every hour for the rest of their shortened life.
The depleted uranium cannot be removed, there is no treatment, there is no cure. The depleted uranium will long outlast the veterans' and the Iraqis' bodies though; for, you see, it lasts virtually forever.
But, it gets worse. Seems an admiral who is the former chief of the naval staff of India wanted to know how much radiation this represented. He also wanted to express the amount in a figure that the world, especially the non-American world, could easily understand.
The admiral decided to figure out how many Nagasaki plutonium bombs it would take to include the equivalent of the total amount of radiation deployed in Iraq in 2003 in the Four Million Pounds of depleted uranium.
The admiral also wanted to figure out how much radiation the United States Military Forces have deployed in the last five American wars, the so-called Five Nuclear Radiation Wars.
That is a simple enough task for somebody like the naval chief of staff for a country that is a member of the Nuclear Club. Using the Nagasaki bomb for the measuring stick is a particularly gruesome twist, though. For those of you in the States who do not know it, United States military forces dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan at the close of World War II. The rest of the world remembers that.
One atom bomb was dropped by Americans on the city of Hiroshima, the other bomb on the city of Nagasaki three days later. About 170,000 to 250,000 people were vaporized or incinerated immediately. It was a really big deal.
It is a measuring stick that plays very well in the rest of the world; but, not very well on American Fox News (Fair & Balanced)(c) channel or the rest of the Fox-like American media. The Department of Energy still lists the Hiroshima and Nagasaki detonations as "tests".
The admiral released the data months ago at a scientific conference in India. This article is the first report of the data in the United States. It will first be released on the Internet.
The admiral in India calculated the amount of radiation in the Nagasaki bomb and compared it with the number in the 4,000,000 pounds of depleted uranium left in Iraq from the 2003 war. Now, believe me, it is a lot more complex than that; but, that is essentially what the experts in India did.
How many Nagasaki bombs equal the radiation in the 2003 Iraq war? Answer: about 250,000 Nagasaki bombs.
How many Nagasaki bombs equal the radiation in the last Five American Nuclear Radiation Wars? Answer: about 400,000 Nagasaki bombs.
Who would do something like this?
We would. The only people in the history of the world to engage in nuclear wars are Americans, citizens of the United States. Allegedly, the Germans and Japanese of WWII also wanted to engage in nuclear wars, except the American military beat them to the draw, so to speak.
Respected academic scholars could debate forever whether or not Herr Hitler, Fuhrer of Germany, would have deployed uranium munitions in the Sudetenland if the weapons had been available. Certainly the Germans knew just as much about uranium wars as we did at the time. It seems doubtful that Adolph Hitler would have ordered the use of uranium munitions there because the Sudetenland was so close to the Fatherland, Nazi Germany.
An American general named Leslie Groves was in charge of the bomb making operation called The Manhattan Project. In 1943 The War Department knew exactly what uranium bullets and bombs were good for.
If the nuclear weapons did not detonate in Japan, the use of uranium bullets and bombs were the fall back position. It was not 'til Ronald Reagan was president in 1981 did the re-named Defense Department resurrect the deadly radioactive uranium bullets, shells, bombs, and missiles. No wonder his popular nick-name was Ronnie Ray-Gun.
The American military knew the symptoms of radiation poisoning in 1943, too; starting with the irritated sore throat through to an agonizing death from being cooked from the inside out.
President [sic] Bush promised to invade and attack many countries in the 2003 State of the Union speech. I believe the man. For some reason, some misguided Americans do not believe him, or think he was "exaggerating." The rest of the world has every reason to believe him and fear him, though.
Not to worry, Americans, the president [sic] has plenty of raw material for radioactive uranium munitions left. There are more than 77,000 tons stored at the 103 nuclear waste plants and a stunning 1.5 billion pounds at the several nuclear weapons labs and related facilities in the US.
Each nuke waste generating plant makes another 250 pounds of radioactive material a day for radioactive bullets, shells, bombs, and missiles. Not to put too fine a point on it; but that is enough for 288 more gloriously successful campaigns like the 2003 Nuclear Radiation War in Iraq. Who's next?
Every year about this time the southern winds leave a fine desert sand on the windshields of cars parked outside in Africa then Continental Europe and Britain. Soon this sand dust will carry a surprise. Thanks to the Americans. Thanks to us. We did this to the world. And, we wonder why they hate and despise us so.
These depleted uranium weapons' indiscriminate killing effect gives a whole new meaning to the age old term: cannon fodder. In Iraq, what goes around, comes around. If not the depleted uranium munitions themselves, the depleted uranium dust will be in the bodies of our returning armed forces, time bombs slowly ticking away the lives of the gullible and the ignorant with their very own personal internal radiation source, the cannon fodder of the 21st Century American Nuclear Radiation Wars.
A lot of people have done everything they can think of to stop these nuclear wars. Even more specifically to stop the use of depleted uranium in munitions and shut down the nuclear power plants. We have tried and failed for years. Why don't you give it a try? Can't hurt anything! Write what steps you would take to turn this situation around.
Contact me at: bobnichols@cox.net. - Copyright 2004, Bob Nichols. All rights reserved. Permission for reposting is granted provided the complete text and attribution are kept intact.
Bob Nichols writes in Oklahoma City and is a contributing writer for LiberalSlant, Democratic Underground, Online Journal, AmericaHeldHostage, and other online publications. Mr. Nichols is a frequent contributor to The Oklahoma Observer and other print publications. He is a member of CASE-Citizens' Action for Safe Energy, and president of the Carrie Dickerson Foundation. CASE has successfully killed two serious, well funded attempts to build nuclear power plants in Oklahoma and several attempts to site what is now known as the "Yucca Mountain Reactor Dump" in Oklahoma. All these efforts to build nuclear facilities have failed. CASE won every time.

07/14/2004
ARMS EXPO 2004
By Kurt Singer
Have you ever heard of a town in the Ural Mountains called Nizhny Tagil? It's only 2 driving hours from Yekatrinburg. There you'll in the weapon proving grounds of the old Soviet Union. Now it tests new rifle models, grenade launchers and anti tank rockets. Along the Tagil River you can locate a large industrial development, which produces the new Russian tanks, which supposedly are superior to the American counterpart. 200 Russian companies exhibit their wares while a dozen Secret Service agents watch.
They came from far away as members of delegations from Egypt, Iran, China, Libya, North Korea and individual buyer's, the merchant of death traders. A global audience is viewing the new Russian armament production available for sale to cash buyers.
A government controlled arms export agency is supervising all export deals. Russia has grown as the second largest arms exporter after the USA selling tanks, frigates, submarines, helicopters and jetfighters. Even an old Soviet aircraft carrier has been sold to India. Both India and Pakistan had observers and buyers at the Expo, This is the 4th tradeshow, which has grown to be a yearly event organized by the Rosoboronexport government agency.
Russia exported weapons in the amount of $5.07 Billion in 2003. The US Congressional Research Service claimed that Russia has conquered 25.5% of the world's armament market. America remains the leading arms merchant with 41.9% of the world market. It seems that China and India are Russia's best clients. In the past the Middle East countries as Syria and Iraq were the leading customers buying equipment for guerrilla warfare but this has changed in 2004. Mr. Putin's old KGB comrade’s are now in charge of the armament export agency. Naval equipment is in demand also radar, radio and small weapons. Jammers are in demand, which would oppose the Pentagon's sophisticated high tech weapons. The actual amount of individual sales are kept confidential and not disclosed if they were cash deals or barter arrangements for instance with Indonesia or Vietnam. Both visitors and exhibitors have formed a new commercial friendship. But the outstanding mood that overshadows everything in this Ural town is the immense pride that the Russian show to have entered the global weapons market.
One word was never heard at the Expo 2004: PEACE.

07/14/2004
Butler-rapporten udkommer. Rapporten analyserer kvaliteten af de oplysninger Storbritanniens efterretningstjenester havde om irakiske masseødelæggelsesvåben.

07/14/2004
"The Fall [in the sense of the sin at the Garden of Eden]--Iraq"
TV Program "Report" concerning maltreated children in the torture-prison
"Report Mainz" vom 5. Juli 2004 - [English translation]
http://www.traprockpeace.org/iraqi_child_prisoners.htm
German news video
http://www.swr.de/report/archiv/sendungen/040705/02/04070502.ram
Moderation Fritz Frey:
Reports from Iraq: the daily attack, Saddam on trial, kidnapped soldiers, every new headline covers over the preceding one. The scandal of the torture prison of Abu Gharib, oh yes, that was indeed one.
REPORT has stuck to this story and has in the process come across a totally unbelievable suspicion. In Abu Gharib and elsewhere children and youth have been incarcerated and mistreated. Thomas Reutter with a difficult search for clues.
Report:
With tanks coming through the gate. U.S. soldiers storm an apartment building looking for terrorists. Sometimes during such roundups the soldiers also arrest children. What happens to the children? About that the military gives no information. We investigate, as it happens, through informants.
One of them, who is knowledgeable about these things, is Sergeant Samuel Provance from U.S. Army Intelligence. For half a year he was stationed in the notorious Abu Ghraib torture-prison. Today, five months later, we meet with Sergeant Provance in Heidelberg.
His superiors have strictly forbidden him from reporting to journalists about what he experienced in Abu Ghraib. Yet Provance wants to talk about it nonetheless. Pangs of conscience plague him. He tells us about one 16-year-old, whom he himself had to lead away.
O-Ton, Samuel Provance, US-Sergeant: "He was full of fear, very alone. He had the thinnest little arms that I have ever seen. His whole body shook. His wrists were so thin that we could not put handcuffs on him. As soon as I saw him for the first time and led him to the interrogation, I felt sorry for him. The interrogation specialists doused him with water and put him in a truck.
Then they drove with him throughout the night, and at that time it was very, very cold. Then they smeared him with mud and showed him to his likewise imprisoned father. With him [the father] they had tried out other interrogation methods. But they had not succeeded in making him talk. The interrogation specialists told me that after the father had seen his son in that condition, it broke his heart. He wept and promised to tell them what they wanted to know."
The son however remained in custody, and the 16-year-old was put in with the adults. Yet Provance reported also about a special department, expressly for children. A secret children's wing in the horror prison of Abu Ghraib.
One person, who has seen the children's wing with his own eyes, is the journalist Suhaib Badr-Addin Al-Baz. Our correspondent met him some week ago in Baghdad. The Iraqi TV reporter related how he himself was arrested arbitrarily by the Americans while shooting film and spent 74 days in Abu Ghraib.
O-Ton, Suhaib Badr-Addin Al-Baz, Fernsehreporter: "There I saw a camp for children. Young, under the age of puberty. In this camp were certainly hundreds of children. Some of them have been released, others are definitely still in there."
From his solitary cell in the adults' wing, Suhaib heard a perhaps 12-year-old girl weeping. Later he learned that her brother was on the third floor of the prison. One or two times, says Suhaib, he saw her himself.
In the night, according to Suhaib, they were with her in her cell. The girl shreeked out to the other prisoners and called out to her brother.
O-Ton, Suhaib Badr-Addin Al-Baz, Fernsehreporter:
"She was beaten. I heard her call: 'They have undressed me. They have poured water over me."
Daily, says Suhaib, one heard her crying and wimpering. Many of the prisoners wept when they heard her. Suhaib reported also about a sick 15-year-old youth. [They chased him up and down the corridor with heavy water cannisters. translation uncertain] For so long until he collapsed from exhaustion, says Suhaib. Then they brought in his father, also a prisoner. He had a hood over his head. From shock the youth collapsed once again.
In the so-called "War on Terrorism," the Americans storm Iraqi houses. According to Suhaib, they sometimes in the process seize whole families who appear suspicious to them. Statements from individual witnesses, difficult to confirm.
In the report it reads:
Citation:
"Children, who had been seized in Basra and Kerbala, were routinely put over into an internment facility in Um Qasr.
Internment camp Um Qasr. Footage/photos from 2003. Today it is too dangerous for reporters to travel to Um Qasr. The camp, a prison for terrorists and criminals. Precisely here should Americans therefore hold children interned as prisoners of war.
"The classification of these children as "internees" is alarming, since it contains them for an indefinite time in prison, without contact with their families or expectation of legal proceedings or trial."
Over this up to now unpublished report UNICEF does not yet want to say anything. [Their reason is that] Their own workers in Iraq should not be put in danger. Seeking more information, we turned to the International Committee of the Red Cross, whose helpers inspected Um Qasr, Abu Ghraib and other places of detention. And after intensive conversations came a further confirmation and even statistics.
O-Ton, Florian Westphal, Internationales Komitee vom Roten Kreuz:
"We have recorded a total of 107 children between January and May of this year in the course of 19 visits to 6 different detention places. And it must be emphasized that these are detention places that are controlled by coalition troops."
In the internment camp Um Qasr and also in Abu Ghraib the Red Cross recorded minors as prisoners. Two international organizations confirmed to us independently of each other that the occupation troops are holding Iraqi children prisoner. Yet we have not received any information directly from the prisons. Even UNICEF was not allowed to visit the child prison in Baghdad.
Zitat:
"In July 2003 UNICEF applied for a visit to this detention facility, but access was refused."
Since December, according to UNICEF, there have been no independent observers in the children's prison. To be sure, the U.S. Army opened the scandal-prison Abu Ghraib for a tour for journalists. Yet the reporters were presented with a for-show facility. Child prisoners were not shown to the press.
We hold fast to this: four sources confirm independently of one another, that occupation troops are holding children as prisoners. Two witnesses even report instances of maltreatment. The human rights organization Amnesty International is outraged over the reports of Iraqi child prisoners. Barbara Lochbihler of Amnesty International, Germany, calls for follow-up action.
O-Ton, Barbara Lochbihler, Generalsekretärin Amnesty International:
"The U.S. government has to respond to this report, it must give concrete information about how old the children are, the grounds on which they have been detained, and under what circumstances they were incarcerated. And here we do not know the names of the children or how many children are there. That is scandalous."
Concluding moderation by Fritz Frey:
Self-evidently, we have confronted the responsible authorities with our research. The British Defense Ministry responded: Children and youth are not being held prisoner by British troops. We are still waiting for an answer from the American Pentagon.

Links

www2.amnesty.de
www.icrc.org
www.unicef.de
Berichte der Menschenrechtsorganisation Amnesty International zu Irak
http://www2.amnesty.de
Report of the Human Rights Organization Amnesty Internation in Iraq.
Internationales Komitee vom Roten Kreuz
http://www.icrc.org
International Committee of the Red Cross.
Das Kinderhilfswerk der Vereinten Nationen UNICEF
http://www.unicef.de
Children's Relief Organization of the United Nations UNICEF
Exclusive translation for Traprock Peace Center by Richard Gawthrop.
Thanks to Paul Amrod, who saw this on German TV and brought it to our attention.
Traprock Peace Center http://www.traprockpeace.org
Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space

07/15/2004
Kids Sodomized At Abu Ghraib
http://www.tompaine.com/print/kids_sodomized_at_abu_ghraib.php
Daily Kos
Kids sodomized at Abu Ghraib, Pentagon has the videos - Hersh Seymour Hersh says the US government has videotapes of boys being sodomized at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
"The worst is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking," the reporter told an ACLU convention last week. Hersh says there was "a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there, and higher."

07/15/2004
Neighbouring states dump nuclear waste in Iraq
(Al-Mashriq) - Information revealed in southern Iraq that the marsh area has become a dump for nuclear waste. Trucks carrying nuclear waste entered Iraq from neighbouring States, taking advantage of the insecurity and the absence of authority. Political sources said the act was an illegal attempt to hide the nuclear projects of those States.
(Al-Mashriq is published daily by Al-Mashriq Institution for Media and Cultural Investments
No war nukes for the new Iraq
(Al-Mada) - Minister of Sciences and Technology Rashad Mendan Omar will concentrate on having scientists establish a peaceful nuclear research programme unlike the destroyed one of the deposed president. He added that Iraq needs $15 billion to make repairs and to supply the laboratories that were polluted during the years of war and UN sanctions. The minister said the search for Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) in Iraq would continue and that his ministry would be free of such programmes.
(Al-Mada is issued daily by Al-Mada institution for Media, Culture, and Arts.), writes IWPR's Iraqi Press Monitor

07/16/2004
Første amerikanske kernevåbenforsøg, Trinity, i New Mexico, 1945.

07/16/2004
Tony Blair's New Labour loses seats over Iraq war
In Leicester South, Parmjit Singh Gill became the first Lib Dem MP from an ethnic minority in a 21% swing from Labour.
In his victory speech, Mr Gill said the people had spoken for Britain and "the message is that the prime minister has abused and lost their trust" over Iraq.
Labour just held Birmingham Hodge Hill by 460 votes ahead of the Lib Dems.
In a turnout of 36%, the Conservatives slipped to third and Labour's victorious Liam Byrne said: "This is a disaster for Michael Howard.", writes BBC.

07/16/2004
Congress's Inquiry Into Abuse of Iraqi Prisoners Bogs Down
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/16/politics/16abus.html?th
By Eric Schmitt
The Congressional investigation into the abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison has virtually ground to halt, as a senior Senate Republican said Thursday that no new hearings would be held on the matter until this fall at the earliest.
The Republican-controlled House Armed Services Committee made it clear weeks ago that it believed that the several current military investigations of the scandal were sufficient, and that summoning commanders to Washington would only hinder American operations in Iraq.
That left the issue to the Senate Armed Services Committee, whose chairman, Senator John W. Warner, a Virginia Republican, has held a series of hearings, but none since May 19. On Thursday, Mr. Warner said he would hold off calling any more witnesses until several criminal prosecutions and seven pending Pentagon inquiries were completed.

07/17/2004
Den israelske militærnægter Aleksej Kornev som søger politisk asyl i Norge, er blevet udvist, skriver Politiken.

07/17/2004
Allawi shot prisoners in cold blood: witnesses
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/07/16/1089694568757.html?oneclick=true
By Paul McGeough in Baghdad
Iyad Allawi, the new Prime Minister of Iraq, pulled a pistol and executed as many as six suspected insurgents at a Baghdad police station, just days before Washington handed control of the country to his interim government, according to two people who allege they witnessed the killings.
They say the prisoners - handcuffed and blindfolded - were lined up against a wall in a courtyard adjacent to the maximum-security cell block in which they were held at the Al-Amariyah security centre, in the city's south-western suburbs.
They say Dr Allawi told onlookers the victims had each killed as many as 50 Iraqis and they "deserved worse than death".

07/17/2004
Suicide no.1 cause of death in IDF
43 soldiers committed suicide in 2003, a 30% increase. In comparison, 30 soldiers were killed during military operations.
By: Amir Rapoport
Maariv International
http://www.maarivintl.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=article&xCache=%7Bts%20%272004%2D07%2D16%2016%3A26%3A18%27%7D&articleID=9796
The greatest fear of a family sending their children to the army is that they will be killed during a military operation but an internal report conducted by the security services reveals that parents should be more concerned about suicide.
According to a report prepared by the Rehabilitation Division in the Ministry of Defense referring to 2003, the number of soldiers who committed suicide was significantly higher than the number of soldiers killed during military action or who died from any other cause.
The report disclosed that for the first time, suicide became the leading cause of death in the IDF. Last year, 43 soldiers committed suicide, in contrast with 30 soldiers who were killed during military operations, a 30% increase in the number of suicides in comparison with 2002, when 31 soldiers took their own lives.
Last year, 32 soldiers died of illness, 27 in traffic accidents or during vacations, and 10 were killed in traffic accidents while on duty. Nine soldiers were killed during training practice exercises and four during the course of military operations. Eight soldiers died due to other reasons.
Ministry of Defense data further revealed that suicide is not a transient phenomenon. In the first half of 2004 alone, 15 additional soldiers killed themselves.
The rise in the number of suicides in the IDF in 2003, and the fact that suicide has become the number 1 cause of death, has stunned the IDF. Senior security sources who received the report requested that steps be taken in order to fight the phenomenon. Criticism was heard within the IDF regarding the fact that the army “not only has not been able to reduce the number of suicides over the years, but the phenomenon has actually increased”.

07/18/2004
Africa: Women Legislators Lobby for Peace
http://www.peacewomen.org/news/International/July04/lobby.html
In a bid to promote peace in Africa's conflict-ridden Great Lakes region, women parliamentarians from the area say they intend taking a more prominent role in talks to end fighting, writes IPS.

07/19/2004
Tyskland nægter at betale erstatning for folkemordet i Nanibia 1904, skriver Berlingske Tidende.

07/19/2004
Governors Tell of War's Impact on Local Needs
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/20/national/20guard.html?th
By Sarah Kershaw
With tens of thousands of their citizen soldiers now deployed in Iraq, many of the nation's governors complained on Sunday to senior Pentagon officials that they were facing severe manpower shortages in guarding prisoners, fighting wildfires, preparing for hurricanes and floods and policing the streets.
Concern among the governors about the war's impact at home has been rising for months, but it came into sharp focus this weekend as they gathered for their four-day annual conference here and began comparing the problems they faced from the National Guard's largest callup since World War II. On Sunday, the governors held a closed-door meeting with two top Pentagon officials and voiced their concerns about the impact both on the troops' families and on the states' ability to deal with disasters and crime.
Much of the concern has focused on wildfires, which have started to destroy vast sections of forests in several Western states. The governor of Oregon, Ted Kulongoski, a Democrat, said in an interview after meetings here Monday that the troop deployment had left his National Guard with half the usual number of firefighters because about 400 of them were overseas while a hot, dry summer was already producing significant fires in his state.
"We're praying a lot that a major fire does not break out," he said. "It has been dry out here, the snow pack's gone because of an extremely warm May and June and the fire season came earlier."
He added, "You're just going to have fires and if you do not have the personnel to put them out, they can grow very quickly into ultimately catastrophic fires.''
Gov. Dirk Kempthorne, a Republican of Idaho and departing chairman of the National Governors Association, also said through a spokesman that he was worried about the deployment of 2,000 members, or 62 percent of his National Guard, who are now training in Texas for a mission in Iraq.
"In the past we've been able to call on the National Guard," said Mark Snider, a spokesman for the governor. "We may not be able to call on these soldiers for firefighting capabilities."
California fire and forestry officials said they were not using National Guard troops to battle wildfires plaguing that state, but they did say that they were using nine Blackhawk helicopters borrowed from the Guard to fight the fires. Some of the helicopters are bound for Iraq in September.
More than 150,000 National Guard and Reserve troops are on active duty. Many of the Guard troops have received multiple extensions of their tours of duty since the United States went to war with Iraq last year.

07/20/2004
Halliburton Subpoenaed Over Unit's Iran Work
By Matt Daily
Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=businessNews&storyID=5710588
Houston - A U.S. grand jury issued a subpoena to Halliburton Co. seeking information about its Cayman Islands unit's work in Iran, where it is illegal for U.S. companies to operate, Halliburton said on Monday.
The oilfield services company, formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, said it understood that the investigation of its subsidiary's work in Iran had been transferred to the U.S. Department of Justice from the Treasury Department, which first initiated an inquiry in 2001.
Justice Department Enters Probe Into Halliburton Unit's Iran Ties
By Russell Gold
The Wall Street Journal
Halliburton Co. said the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into whether a subsidiary violated U.S. trade restrictions against Iran, upgrading the probe from a regulatory inquiry conducted by the Treasury Department. The Houston energy-services company also said it received a federal grand-jury subpoena seeking documents related to the case. Halliburton said its subsidiary, which provides oil-field services, didn't violate sanctions because it is based in the Cayman Islands and wasn't overseen by U.S.-based managers. Since 1995, U.S. companies and individuals have been banned from conducting commerce with Iran, but the sanctions allow "independent foreign subsidiaries" of U.S. companies to do so.

07/20/2004
How has the US been spending other people's billions?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1264767,00.html By: Simon Tisdall
The Guardian
Henry Waxman is an awkward customer. For 30 years, this California congressman has probed, badgered and embarrassed US administrations of every hue. As the senior Democrat on the House of Representatives' government reform committee, Congress's principal standing investigative panel, he is a difficult man to ignore. Right now, Mr Waxman has a question on Iraq. In fact, he has several - and in typically robust fashion, he is demanding answers. What he wants to know is whether the Bush administration has been fiddling with Iraq's oil revenues.
He wrote to the Republican chairman of the reform committee on July 9, suggesting there was a serious case to answer. Subpoenas should be issued, he said, "to investigate potential mismanagement of the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI) by the United States". The DFI was set up after last year's invasion as the depository for Iraq's multi-billion-dollar oil revenues and was administered, until June 28, by the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) - with notional UN oversight.
In particular, Mr Waxman is curious about "the [Bush] administration's last-minute 'draw-down' of billions of dollars from the DFI for unspecified expenses" prior to last month's transfer of sovereignty. "For example, $1bn [about £550m] was withdrawn from the DFI during the last month of the CPA's existence for unspecified 'security' purposes."
The administration provided no information about how these funds would be spent, Mr Waxman says, and has yet to do so.
He is concerned about apparent attempts by the then CPA chief, Paul Bremer, to mandate and direct the spending of a further $4.6bn in Iraqi oil funds after the handover. He is also exercised by the results of a belated audit of the DFI's accounts that concluded they were "open to fraudulent acts" and lacked "transparency". In all, the CPA earmarked more than $6bn of Iraqi funds in the last two months of its existence.
He wants to know whether CPA officials obstructed the auditors, KPMG, who were employed by the UN-created International Advisory and Monitoring Board (IAMB).
And he also asks why the White House has "failed to comply with numerous IAMB requests [for information about] payments of approximately $1.5bn in DFI funds to Halliburton" - the Texas-based oil services company formerly headed by the vice-president, Dick Cheney. Such matters are plainly extremely sensitive as the US presidential election approaches - especially for George Bush and Mr Cheney.
In this context, two facts may be of interest: Halliburton was the largest single recipient of Iraqi oil funds during the occupation, according to the Army Corps of Engineers' figures released last month. And among US politicians, according to the Center for Public Integrity, Mr Bush has been the largest single recipient of US oil and gas industry campaign contributions since 1998 - his total stands at $1,724,579.

07/20/2004

07/21/2004
Dyncorp seeks to overturn Iraq contract
By Jimmy Burns and Thomas Catan
http://news.ft.com/s01/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1087373886473&p=1045511312523
Dyncorp, the Texas-based private military contractor, is seeking to overturn the largest private security deal in Iraq, claiming that the contract was improperly awarded.
The US army surprised many in the industry last month when it awarded a $293m contract to co-ordinate private security companies in Iraq to Aegis Defence Services - a small UK start-up with no experience in Iraq. More controversially, the company is run by Tim Spicer, a former British army officer who was at the centre of a political scandal in the UK during the late 1990s.
Dyncorp, which lost out on the contract, has a long and close relationship with the US government, performing a range of tasks including guarding military compounds and training the Iraqi police.
Dyncorp has submitted a formal protest to the audit arm of the US Congress, the Government Accountability Office, which will rule on the dispute by September 30.
In its complaint, a copy of which was obtained the Financial Times, Dyncorp draws attention to Mr Spicer's past involvement in the "Sandline affair" of 1998, in which a company he was director of sold arms to Sierra Leone in contravention of a United Nations embargo.
Mr Spicer later touched off a political storm by claiming that he had done so with government approval. In 1999 a UK parliamentary committee attacked foreign office officials for treating the UN embargo "in a disgracefully casual manner".
Mr Spicer was briefly imprisoned by the military in Papua New Guinea, which overthrew the government when it learnt that he had been hired to put down a rebellion.

07/21/2004
Where War Isn't Bad for Business
It's not a bad time for the defense industry, and Honeywell today said solid growth in all four of its major business units and healthy order rates led to a 13% rise in quarterly net income and to an increase in its forecast for full-year earnings. The aerospace company had a profit of $361 million, up from $319 million a year earlier, on revenue that rose 11% to $6.39 billion. Sales in the company's aerospace unit, its biggest moneymaker, increased 14%. Within the unit, defense and space sales grew 7%. Sales at its automation and control-solutions business increased 7.1%. And Honeywell's transportation-systems business had the largest increase in sales, up 15%.
Rival General Dynamics posted a 24% increase in earnings, propelled by growth at its aerospace, information systems and technology, combat and marine units. It's net income was $300 million, up from $242 million a year earlier, on revenue that rose 21% to $4.76 billion, writes Wall Street Journal.

07/22/2004
The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States
The official 9/11 Commission report: “The 9/11 Commission Report”, is released.

07/22/2004
War Funds Dwindling, GAO Warns : Pentagon Needs Billions More This Year in Iraq, Afghanistan
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A4065-2004Jul21?language=printer
By: Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
The U.S. military has spent most of the $65 billion that Congress approved for fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and is scrambling to find $12.3 billion more from within the Defense Department to finance the wars through the end of the fiscal year, federal investigators said yesterday.
The report from the Government Accountability Office, Congress's independent investigative arm, warned that the budget crunch is having an adverse impact on the military as it shifts resources to Iraq and away from training and maintenance in other parts of the world. The study -- the most detailed examination to date of the military's funding problems -- appears to contradict White House assurances that the services have enough money to get through the calendar year.
Already, the GAO said, the services have deferred the repair of equipment used in Iraq, grounded some Air Force and Navy pilots, canceled training exercises, and delayed facility-restoration projects. The Air Force is straining to cover the cost of body armor for airmen in combat areas, night-vision gear and surveillance equipment, according to the report.
The Army, which is overspending its budget by $10.2 billion for operations and maintenance, is asking the Marines and the Air Force to help cover the escalating costs of its logistics contract with Halliburton Co. But the Air Force is also exceeding its budget by $1.4 billion, while the Marines are coming up $500 million short. The Army is even having trouble paying the contractors guarding its garrisons outside the war zones, the report said.

07/22/2004
Documents taken from archives
While vetting materials for September 11 Commission hearings, former National Security Advisor Samuel "Sandy" Berger removed highly classified documents and handwritten notes from a National Archives reading room. Berger, who advised President Clinton during his second term (and until his resignation earlier this week served as an "informal" advisor on foreign policy to Democratic presidential candidate designee John Kerry), admits that he knowingly removed some handwritten notes, but claims he "inadvertently" took copies of actual classified documents, and "accidentally" threw away other documents. Of greatest concern to investigators was the removal of all six drafts of a critique of the government's response to the millennium terrorism threat which was classified "codeword" -- the government's highest level of document security. Federal law prohibits unauthorized release or removal of classified documents.
Last summer and fall, Berger spent a total of three days in a special room at a NARA facility (there are conflicting reports as to which NARA facility actually served the papers to Berger) where he reviewed thousands of documents. According to Lanny Breuer, Berger's attorney, "[t]here was huge pressure to review the documents quickly for claims of executive privilege and responsiveness."
After being informed by employees of the National Archives that they "thought they witnessed Mr. Berger putting documents into his clothing" and in his briefcase, the FBI was notified and agents searched his home. NARA normally has tight restrictions on the viewing of classified materials and rules forbid allowing researchers to bring portfolios or anything else with them into research rooms; it is unclear why Berger was not held to those rules. (At this writing NARA officials are not at liberty to comment on any aspect of the investigation.)
Reportedly, Berger has returned all of the hand written notes he removed from the archives as well as most of the classified documents. He, however, could not locate two or three copies of a highly classified millennium terror report. None of the still-missing items are believed to be "one-of-a kind" and most were widely circulated among Cabinet agencies. Berger has characterized the incident as "an honest mistake" and "one that I deeply regret."
Berger claims that he knew he was only looking at copies of original documents but also knew that removing them from the archives was a "technical violation of Archives procedure." Berger's attorney, however, claims "it is not all clear to us [that] this represents a violation of the law."
An FBI probe is continuing and the House Government Reform Committee also may investigate, writes NCH Washington Update (Vol. 10, #31; 22 July 2004).

07/23/2004
Halliburton Swings to a Loss
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB109057894622072167,00.html?mod=dartTAR
By Russell Gold
Halliburton Co. reported a second-quarter loss as revenue from its U.S. government contract work in Iraq began to ebb and the company recorded two hefty charges related to an offshore construction project and mounting costs for its asbestos-litigation fund.
The Houston energy-services and construction giant said revenue from U.S. government contracts in Iraq was $1.7 billion, well above a year ago, but below the last two quarters. And it is expected to continue to decline. The U.S. government has begun to re-bid work previously performed under Halliburton's contingency contract, with awards going to other companies.
Halliburton has spent $1.1 billion in Iraq that the government hasn't reimbursed yet, the company said, due to delays in providing expense details. This is slightly down from the $1.25 billion owed at the end of March and a "general decline" is expected through the end of the year, said chief financial officer C. Christopher Gaut. Still, company-wide receivables, or money owed to Halliburton by customers, was up 57.6% to $5.8 billion in the second quarter. The period included $809 million in after-tax charges.
Overall, Halliburton reported a net loss of $663 million, or $1.51 per share, compared to a profit of $26 million, or six cents a share in the year-ago quarter. Revenue in the quarter was $5 billion, up 37.7% from $3.6 billion a year ago, writes the Wall Street Journal.

07/24/2004

07/25/2004

07/26/2004

07/27/2004

07/28/2004

07/29/2004
CIA om Irakkrigen
CIA udarbejder den såkadlte Kerr-rapport om Irakkrigen: Intelligence and Analysis on Iraq : Issues for the Intelligence Community. Rapporten offentliggøres 13. oktober 2005.

07/29/2004

07/30/2004
U.S. Authorities' Spending in Iraq Is Criticized in Audit Report
Associated Press
WASHINGTON -- U.S. authorities in Iraq spent hundreds of thousands of dollars without keeping good enough records to show whether they got some services and products they paid for, government investigators said.
Officials of the former Coalition Provisional Authority did not have records to justify the $24.7 million cost for replacing Iraq's currency, according to a report from the authority's inspector general. The report also said the authority paid nearly $200,000 for 15 police trucks without knowing if the trucks were delivered.
The report, released in Iraq late Wednesday, is the first formal audit of contracting procedures under the authority, which oversaw billions of dollars in reconstruction spending that critics say was doled out without proper controls.
The agency's defenders say it did the best it could given the pressure of operating in a war zone and trying to get reconstruction going quickly.
"We believe the contracts awarded with Iraqi funds were for the sole benefit of the Iraqi people, without exception," Army Brig. Gen. Stephen M. Seay wrote to the inspector general.
The authority ran Iraq from May 2003 until the U.S. handed over power to an interim Iraqi government on June 28. The authority used seized funds from Saddam Hussein's government and oil revenues to pay for 1,928 contracts worth about $847 million, the inspector general's report said.
An authority rule from last August called for following international law and U.N. regulations while spending Iraqi money. But the authority did not issue standard operating procedures or develop effective contract review, monitoring and evaluation, the report said.
Gen. Seay said the authority's contracting office was overworked, understaffed and under constant threat of attack.
The investigators reviewed 43 contracts and found 29 had incomplete or missing documentation. For each of the 29, "We were unable to determine if the goods specified in the contract were ever received, the total amount of payments made to the contractor or if the contractor fully complied with the terms of the contract," investigators wrote.
For example, the official overseeing a contract for 15 double-cab pickup trucks for an Iraqi police department paid $87,500 before the trucks were delivered and an additional $100,000 without getting written records that the trucks arrived at the police department, the report said. The report did not say whether the trucks were ever delivered.
The report also criticized the contract for exchanging Iraqi currency, which had been cited as a key success by the authority's former administrator, L. Paul Bremer.

07/30/2004

07/31/2004

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