>> REBUILDING IRAQ?
Iraqi Currency Exchange Comes Up Millions Short
Cashiers Held Responsible for Missing Funds
By Ariana Eunjung Cha and Omar Fekeiki
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, March 11, 2004; Page A16
BAGHDAD -- For the past month, Nadhima Hussein and 12 other women have been locked inside a dark, fly-infested room at a police station here. The Iraqi Finance Ministry says Hussein, a bank manager, owes them millions of dollars to compensate for counterfeit or missing money her branch accepted during the currency exchange that ended in mid-January. She says she did nothing wrong.
The cash swap, designed to erase the image of former president Saddam Hussein from Iraqi bills, was among the most visible projects of the U.S.-led reconstruction, and, on the surface, things appeared to go smoothly. The transport trucks were not hijacked, the banks were not held up. The exchange, which took place between Oct. 15 and Jan. 15, was credited with helping to stabilize the economy.
But a Finance Ministry audit that began a few weeks ago turned up a surprise: The amount of new money given out exceeded the amount of old money taken in by more than $22 million. The ministry has accused bank employees, almost all of whom are female cashiers, of stealing the money for themselves or for organized crime groups. It has sent out notices to hundreds of them, demanding that they repay the money or face imprisonment.
The accused say others had access to the money after it had been counted and that the new government, in a rush to judgment, is acting just like the old government, putting the blame for its own mistakes or corruption on rank-and-file workers. Demonstrations this month have called for the release of the cashiers, who are believed to be the largest group of women to be detained since Hussein was toppled last year.
"They took these women as a sacrifice, so that their colleagues will be frightened to pay the money back and that their problem of the shortage will be solved," said Falih Maktuf, a lawyer who has volunteered to represent the women without pay.
Suspects who maintain their innocence are eligible for release on bail, but few can afford it. Maktuf has asked that the women be released without bail pending trial. They will be tried by a special judge with expertise in economic crimes.
Law is still a fluid concept in the new Iraq. On Monday, the Iraqi Governing Council approved an interim constitution with a bill of rights, but it is a legal framework that does not address the nitty-gritty of crime and punishment. Committees are drafting new foreign exchange laws and guidelines for the role of regulatory bodies. In the meantime, most of the laws in effect during Hussein's rule are still being followed.
The banking scandal is one of several examples of alleged government corruption in postwar Iraq that have hampered reconstruction efforts. The Oil Ministry spent months waiting for spare parts for pumping stations and then discovered forged records showing the equipment had been paid for but never shipped from Amman, Jordan. The Interior Ministry has fired border police who took bribes to let people enter the country from Iran without proper identification. Officials at Iraq's five ports have disciplined workers for stealing from humanitarian aid shipments.
The Governing Council and the U.S.-led occupation authority began a crackdown on corruption a few weeks ago, creating commissions with independent authority to investigate possible crimes in government ministries. A new law governing the operations of the Central Bank authorizes the creation of a financial services tribunal, which will determine the fate of the cashiers.
"In the past, employees did not have any respect for laws. We want to teach people this respect," said Sabah Nouri, head of the Finance Ministry's bank audit committee.
One cashier has confessed to accepting counterfeit old dinars and exchanging them for new ones because she pitied the old man who brought them to the bank. Another said she inserted some white papers in place of old bills and paid herself in new Iraqi dinars. But the rest of the accused say they are innocent and that either someone else tampered with the money, they made an honest mistake in counting it or they unknowingly accepted counterfeit currency.
Their attorneys said the women were arrested because they were easy targets. Samir Adel, the head of the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq, accused the new Iraqi ministries of using "the same old Baathist ways."
"They don't have evidence," he said, "but they imprison people."
Nadhima Hussein was summoned to the Finance Ministry in February for what she was told was urgent business. There, she recalled, a government representative laid out several bricks of forged money and told her they had come from the bank she manages -- a branch of Rafidain Bank in Nasiriyah, about 200 miles south of Baghdad. Hussein, 35, said she was called a thief and told to repay $6.9 million.
"This is fiction," she said she replied. She told them she knew nothing about the fake money and therefore could not return it. A few hours later, she was in jail.
The currency exchange followed months of planning by experts from the U.S. Treasury Department and other foreign government agencies. Occupation officials hoped to get rid of dinars with Hussein's portrait and replace them with bills carrying images from Iraq's history.
They devised an elaborate system for security. They flew the new money in on jumbo jets direct from the printers, paid for four armed escort vehicles for each truck carrying the money, and asked U.S.-led military forces to guard storage facilities.
At each bank, a cashier counted and inspected old money, then dipped it in red ink so it couldn't be used again. With a rubber band, the cashier attached to the brick of money a credit card-sized piece of paper with her name on it. The money was sewn up in a bag and taken to be burned. But between the point where the cashiers signed off on their work and the time the money was destroyed, several other people handled the money, according to a description of the process by occupation officials.
Representatives from the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq, Women's Freedom Organization and other workers' rights groups who have reviewed procedures for the cash exchange also said there were several vulnerable points. Maktuf, the lawyer, said the manager and other bank employees had access to the old cash before it was destroyed. Drivers who took the old cash to warehouses for eventual destruction -- and the Central Bank employees who accompanied each driver -- also could have tampered with the money, he said. Because the ink used to mark the obsolete bills could be washed away with special chemicals, he added, the old bills were not worthless.
But Nouri, of the Finance Ministry, said he believed it was impossible that anyone but the cashiers could have inserted forged bills or taken some of the money.
Iraqi Police Col. Wahda Nasrrat, head of the new economic crimes section, said he expected more arrests but that people other than the cashiers may be involved in the forgeries and stealing. The system that was used to transport the money "is not a good system and can be broken," Nasrrat said.
Nadhima Hussein now shares a large, drafty room with a group of other suspects. They sleep on the concrete floor on piles of blankets and spend their time sharing stories about their families and crying. Among Hussein's roommates is Zainab Jabbar, 35, a cashier at a Rasheed Bank branch near the Shaab Stadium in Baghdad. Jabbar has been asked to pay $40,000. With her salary of about $180 a month, she calculated, it would take her 19 years to repay.
? 2004 The Washington Post Company
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>> REBUILDING 2...
Missteps Led to Canceled Iraq Contract
House Panel to Begin Hearings on Procedures; Pentagon Awards 7 New Projects
By Mary Pat Flaherty and Jackie Spinner
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, March 11, 2004; Page A22
Vague contract language, missing paperwork, staff turnover and general instability on the ground led to such flaws in a $327 million contract to outfit the new Iraqi Army that the work had to be canceled and rebid, according to a senior U.S. Army official involved in the contracting.
U.S. contracting officers working for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad were imprecise in describing the work needed when they sought bids and they did not follow their own procedures for ranking offers, the Army official said.
The hostile setting and a Baghdad staff too small to do the job help explain the failures but there is "no excuse for doing this with a contract of this magnitude," said the Army official, who would speak only on background about the problems his office has uncovered.
The cancellation of what had been the largest non-construction contract yet awarded in the Iraqi rebuilding effort comes as the House Government Reform Committee is set to hold hearings today on contract coordination and management in Iraq. Meanwhile, the Defense Department announced yesterday that it had awarded seven contracts to support the Program Management Office in Baghdad, the entity that will oversee the spending of the $18.6 billion in supplemental reconstruction funding that Congress authorized last fall.
Retired Rear Adm. David Nash, who heads the Program Management Office, said the remaining 10 construction contracts will be awarded within the next 30 days, two months late.
"You can do things expeditiously but you still have to do it correctly," said Nash, who is testifying today before the congressional panel. "There's a balance."
The Iraqi Army contract, funded by U.S. tax dollars, was awarded in January to Nour USA Ltd., a Vienna firm. The firm's bid drew immediate formal protests from several losing companies and prompted U.S. Army lawyers and Pentagon-based officials to begin a review that led to the contract's cancellation Friday. The Washington reviewers could not reconcile the facts presented on the final evaluation sheets for bidders with information in the contract files and noticed missing documents, said the contracting officer, who added that he had not seen anything comparable during his 29 years in Army contracting.
Normally, he said, "the paperwork follows a consistent trail" that leads to the overall rating for bidders. "We couldn't track" the factors for the ranking, he said.
CPA officials in Baghdad declined to talk about the contract and referred all questions to the Army. However, Lt. Col. Joseph M. Yoswa, a Defense Department spokesman based in Washington for the CPA, said yesterday, "We have a much better capability of contracting here in Washington. We have the experience here -- not saying that the CPA and civilians and military in Iraq are doing things wrong. But they have a lot of pressure they are dealing with. Contracting is not a simple process, and this is important. We've got civilians on the ground doing work, and we're still in combat conditions. It's not easy."
The language used to describe the required work was so "ambiguous," the Army contracting official said, that it could have been held against the government by losing firms if the contract moved forward. The vague language, he said, may help explain the wide range of bids on the work made by 19 firms, ranging from Nour's $327 million to a high of more than $1 billion.
The contract's cancellation, the Army stressed, "is not a reflection on Nour or its capabilities."
In interviews, Nour USA said it won the contract based on merit and stood by its proposal. The company has drawn attention because its president, A. Huda Farouki, is a financier and friend of Ahmed Chalabi, chairman of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council. Nour spokesman Robert Hoopes has said there is no business relationship between the two men. A Nour press release said any suggestion that politics played a role in the contract is false.
Ongoing hostilities in Iraq make it hard to be as exacting in contract requests as might normally be expected, said the senior Army official, however "we need to be as informative as we can." The original contract, he said, should have been more precise about equipment needs or the number and range of sites in which the work would be done -- factors that can dramatically influence costs.
The problems were exacerbated by staff turnover. The military contracting officer who had handled the bidding in Baghdad was rotated back to the United States on regular duty a week before the contract was awarded, the Army official said.
A new contract to outfit the Iraqis likely will not be awarded for 60 to 90 days, said Mark J. Lumer, deputy assistant secretary of the Army for Iraqi operations, policy and procurement, who spoke at a Pentagon briefing yesterday. The Army could piggyback on several existing government contracts to buy some supplies more quickly, the Army contracting official said -- using an existing law enforcement contract, for example, to purchase some weapons.
But the rebidding of the main contract will set back the establishment of new Iraqi forces as coalition officials race to hand off sovereignty this summer to the Iraqis.
Army contracting officers in Washington will draft and award the new contract.
Delays in equipping the new Iraqi Army and other Iraqi security forces have frustrated U.S. military commanders in the field, said Army Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack Jr., commander of the 82nd Airborne Division.
In a press briefing yesterday in Baghdad, he said that "if we had the equipment for these brave young men, we would be much farther along." Swannack said he would have drawn on funds available to him as a commander to buy some equipment earlier had he known the extent of the delays.
Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), who called today's House hearing, said of the canceled contract: "They probably don't have as many contracting officers over there as they need." And, he said, "they need to make a decision on what to do next time on this. What did they learn? When you're making decisions in a war zone you always make mistakes."
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>> REBUILDING 3...
Administration pressed for real estimate of war's cost
By Pauline Jelinek
Associated Press
Pressed to estimate the cost of future operations in Iraq, the Defense Department has repeatedly said it's just too hard to do.
Now the ranks of disbelievers are growing -- in Congress and among private defense analysts. Some say the Bush administration's refusal to estimate costs could erode American support for the Iraq campaign, as well as the credibility of the White House and lawmakers.
"It is crucial that we have every bit of information so we can level with the taxpayer," Democratic Rep. David Obey fumed recently at Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. "We don't have that information now."
"The White House plays hide and seek with the costs of the war," said Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va.
The object of their ire is President Bush's proposed defense spending for the budget year beginning Oct. 1 -- a $402 billion request that didn't include money for the major military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And it's not just Democrats who disagree with the administration's approach.
Republican chairmen of the House and Senate budget committees penciled in tens of billions of dollars for the two military campaigns in spending plans they began pushing through Congress this week.
Asked at a recent congressional hearing why costs for Iraq were not included in the Bush administration's budget, Pentagon comptroller Dov Zakheim replied: "Because we simply cannot predict them."
Yet many contend the administration at least knows that roughly 100,000 soldiers will remain in Iraq for another year, and could have budgeted an estimate or a placeholder request for that.
"We know it will not be free," said Steve Kosiak of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
Private and congressional analysts, in fact, have done a number of studies and projections of possible costs:
* Daniel Goure of the conservative Lexington Institute said he expects troop levels to gradually drop over five years to one-half or one-third the present deployment -- meaning 30,000 to 50,000 Americans troops could remain in Iraq through 2009.
* The Congressional Budget Office a few months ago estimated the cost to occupy Iraq through 2013 at up to $200 billion, depending on troops levels.
* Casualties could rise to at least 1,000, said a recent report by Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a frequent Pentagon adviser. "One thousand or more dead in Iraq is hardly Vietnam," Cordesman said. "But it must be justified and explained, and explained honestly."
The Council on Foreign Relations, citing polls that show American support for the mission slipping, urged leaders of both parties this week to publicly commit to a multibillion dollar program over at least the next several years, outlining "the magnitude of resources that will be necessary, even if they cannot identify all of the specific requirements."
White House budget chief Joshua Bolten acknowledged in a briefing with reporters last month that the military will need money over and above the defense request -- up to $50 billion the administration will seek in a so-called emergency supplemental budget for Iraq and Afghanistan. It used a similar supplemental last fall to ask for $87 billion for Afghanistan and Iraq
But administration officials don't plan to ask for that supplemental, or specify what it might include, until sometime after Jan. 1, 2005 -- about two months after November's presidential election.
Had Bush included it in the budget proposal sent to Congress in February, the government's surging deficit problem would have looked even worse.
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>> SYRIA WATCH...
Generals say they need help securing Iraqi borders
By John Diamond
USA Today
U.S. military commanders say they are struggling to secure the borders of Iraq, particularly with Syria in the remote western desert, to prevent Islamic militants from crossing into Iraq to set up operations.
The commander of U.S. forces in western Iraq told Pentagon reporters by video-conference Wednesday that field units are pressing for more men and vehicles to cover huge, sparsely populated regions where small terrorist cells of five to eight people each may be infiltrating on their way to Iraqi cities.
"Our biggest fight is in regards to disallowing terrorist organizations to get established out there in the west," Army Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack Jr. told Pentagon reporters from Baghdad. "You must understand the vastness of the border region out there. It's 850 kilometers (527 miles) of desert with a 10-foot, 12-foot berm marking the border."
The problem is much the same in northern Iraq, along the border with Turkey and Iran, according to Brig. Gen. Carter Ham, who spoke to Pentagon reporters in a teleconference Tuesday. Ham said he and other field commanders have been pressing their superiors to provide additional border police units, better training and more equipment.
Swannack, who said he had to order body armor, radios and vehicles out of his own unit's budget because of bureaucratic delays, said Iraqi forces taking over border control need SUVs to cover the many unofficial crossing points into Iraq from Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria. These are routes that have been used by smugglers and nomads for 2,000 years.
About 18,000 troops from the Army's 82nd Airborne Division and other Army units under Swannack's command are about to give the Marines responsibility for Al-Anbar province, Iraq's largest, a region that stretches from the edge of Baghdad along the Euphrates River and such hostile cities as Fallujah to the vast western border regions. U.S. intelligence has been watching this area closely, both for terrorists coming in and for Iraqi weapons scientists going out.
"It's a long, porous border," CIA Director George Tenet said in Senate testimony Tuesday. "Syria could do far more than they are today to close off at least major crossing points."
As of last fall, Swannack said, "It was a wide open border," to terrorists, foreign fighters and smugglers. The situation is improving with the establishment of new Iraqi police organizations that are taking up some of the patrol work. But in Swannack's huge area, border police have a few buses and "a couple of small trucks." They still lack the equipment to get to the remote desert crossings.
In Al-Anbar province, Swannack estimated there are between 50 and 80 foreign terrorists operating in eight to 10 cells, mostly in cities such as Fallujah and Ramadi. U.S. forces have been making progress getting tips about the activities and whereabouts of these cells because, Swannack said, "the Iraqis don't want them there."
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>> DULLES WATCH...
Financial Agencies Criticize U.S. for Detaining Spanish IMF Worker at Dulles
By Mary Beth Sheridan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 11, 2004; Page A12
A Spanish economist working for the International Monetary Fund was handcuffed as he got off a flight at Dulles International Airport last weekend and questioned for three hours, an incident that prompted startled complaints from international financial institutions in Washington.
Alex Segura, 33, who lives in Springfield, said he was detained Saturday by U.S. Homeland Security officials as he returned from a work trip to Senegal. He said the officials questioned him about his travels and passport and searched his luggage before freeing him with no explanation.
A Homeland Security spokeswoman said Segura's name and birth date matched those of a "dangerous individual" listed in federal security databases.
"It was unfortunate. But his name came up as a match when we do our advanced passenger information. Obviously Mr. Segura is not a terrorist," said the spokeswoman, Christiana Halsey, who works for the Customs and Border Protection agency within Homeland Security.
She added that "with the new focus on terrorism . . . these mistakes are going to happen."
Since the incident, e-mails have ricocheted through international financial institutions in Washington, with employees expressing outrage and concern that they, too, could be detained. The agencies employ thousands of people from around the globe, who routinely travel abroad for work.
A spokesman for the IMF, William Murray, said the agency had complained to the U.S. executive director's office at the fund, which represents the U.S. government.
"The management of the IMF is extremely concerned about the development and asked the U.S. executive director's office to raise this with the appropriate authorities," Murray said.
The World Bank also contacted U.S. authorities to see "what can be done to avoid this sort of incident happening in the future," the bank said in a memo to its staff.
Segura said Homeland Security officials boarded his Air France plane shortly after it arrived from Paris and made a beeline for him. He said he showed them his Spanish passport, which carried the G-4 visa given to employees of international organizations, and also handed over his United Nations identification. The officials asked him to leave the plane and promptly handcuffed him, Segura said.
The officers then drove Segura to the main terminal, took off the handcuffs and questioned him. They refused to let him call his wife, who was waiting in the terminal, but eventually sent an officer to contact her, according to Segura and the Customs spokeswoman.
"What's really annoying, when you come to the U.S. . . . you feel like they can do anything to you," Segura said. He added, however, that the officers were polite.
Segura said his previous trip abroad, a visit to Peru in December, occurred without incident.
Halsey, the spokeswoman, said agents have to follow security procedures when they believe a dangerous person is arriving. She said she could not provide details about the person named Segura who was on the government's lookout list.
Segura said he told the U.S. officials that his previous passport had disappeared about five years ago, when he submitted it to the U.S. Embassy in Madrid for a visa. It was not clear whether the person on the lookout list might be using that document.
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>> PENTAGON WATCH...
Nominee to Head Army Withdraws
Roche's Air Force Leadership Criticized
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 11, 2004; Page A04
The Bush administration dropped efforts yesterday to shift James G. Roche from heading the Air Force to heading the Army, acknowledging that his nomination had become so mired in controversy over a cadet sex scandal and a potential deal with Boeing Co. to lease tanker aircraft that Congress was unlikely to act on the appointment this year.
The admission of defeat highlighted the difficulties confronting the administration in trying to put both controversies behind it. Roche's nomination as Army secretary, presented last spring as a way to bring energetic new leadership to that service, instead drew congressional ire at the Pentagon's inattention, questionable judgments and resistance to demands for internal documents.
Although Roche took forceful action early last year to probe reports of sexual assaults at the Air Force Academy, investigations have continued into assault cases stretching back a decade. Calls in Congress have persisted for some Air Force leaders to be held accountable for past lax enforcement.
In the past week, new reports have emerged of flaws in the handling of sexual assault cases by the Air Force's Pacific command, and the Air Force has launched a service-wide review.
Even more problematic for Roche was the Air Force's plan to lease as many as 100 Boeing 767s as refueling tankers. Roche championed the $21 billion proposal as a novel way of bolstering an aging tanker fleet, but critics attacked it as corporate welfare for Boeing that would needlessly raise taxpayer costs. Investigators also are examining alleged improper contacts between the Air Force and Boeing during negotiations on the deal.
Additionally, the matter has grown into a struggle between Congress and the administration over access to internal documents. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a leading congressional opponent of the plan, put a hold on nominations of civilian Pentagon officials to protest the administration's unwillingness to surrender Roche's e-mails and other material related to the tanker deal. McCain said yesterday that removal of Roche's nomination would have no effect on other appointments being held up.
"I still believe we need these documents, and I will continue to fight for them as long as I can hold the nominations," he said in a phone interview.
In a brief statement released by the Pentagon, Roche said he requested that his nomination be withdrawn. "Given the range of issues before the Senate in a busy legislative year, I accept that my nomination is unlikely to be considered this year," he said, adding that he intends to continue as secretary of the Air Force.
An official close to Roche said that months ago, Roche had given Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld a standing offer to remove his name from consideration. Rumsfeld, the source said, accepted the offer this week.
"At several points in the last few months, Roche went to Rumsfeld and said, 'If you want me to back out, I will,' " the official said. "Rumsfeld was all, 'No, you're the choice. Let's go forward with it.' I think there was just a realization by Rumsfeld at this point in the calendar" that time had run out.
Rumsfeld had asked Roche, a 23-year Navy veteran and former Northrop Grumman Corp. executive, to move to the Army last spring, as part of an attempt to bring in new civilian and military leadership that would modernize and restructure the service.
Rumsfeld had dismissed the previous secretary, Thomas E. White, after months of strained relations. He also had summoned Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker from retirement to take over as Army chief of staff. Schoomaker succeeded Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, who like White had clashed with Rumsfeld over the pace and nature of Army modernization.
But Roche's nomination quickly ran into trouble when a congressional commission probing the academy sex scandal concluded that Air Force leaders had not done enough to prevent sexual assaults or respond to reported cases for much of the past decade.
Roche purged the academy's leadership earlier in the year and issued new policies to fortify the school's ability to monitor and respond to sexual misconduct. Nevertheless, the Senate Armed Services Committee made clear it would not act on his nomination until after an investigation by the Air Force's inspector general.
That investigation, due soon, will comment positively on Roche's actions over the past year, according to the official close to him.
The tanker proposal, meanwhile, remains in limbo pending not only resolution of the documents dispute with Congress but also investigations by the Pentagon's inspector general, federal prosecutors and securities regulators into whether the deal was tainted by unethical conduct.
In November, Boeing fired two senior executives -- its chief financial officer, Michael M. Sears, and Darleen A. Druyun, a former Air Force procurement official. The company accused Sears of beginning employment discussions with Druyun while she was still overseeing Boeing contracts at the Air Force. The company's chief executive, Phil Condit, resigned shortly afterward.
Rumsfeld also ordered a review of the condition of the existing tanker fleet and other options for replacing or refurbishing it.
Les Brownlee, the undersecretary of the Army, has been serving as interim secretary, and a senior defense official said yesterday that Bush would likely move to make Brownlee permanent. Brownlee is a former Senate staff member with deep ties to Congress.
In another personnel matter yesterday, the White House said that Bush had picked the FBI's chief financial officer, Tina W. Jonas, to take over as the Pentagon's chief financial officer, succeeding Dov S. Zakheim, who announced his resignation Tuesday. Before joining the FBI in 2002, Jones was deputy undersecretary of defense for financial management. She also worked for the House Appropriations Committee, the White House Office of Management and Budget, and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.
Staff writers Renae Merle and R. Jeffrey Smith contributed to this report.
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GAO Urges Better Tests of Missile Defense System
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 11, 2004; Page A08
The Pentagon has taken some steps toward more realistic testing of the antimissile system that it plans to deploy this year to protect the United States, but many aspects of the system remain to be tested, according to a congressional report.
The report, prepared by the General Accounting Office, expressed concern about a lack of test data showing whether the system can work using all its final parts instead of prototypes, and whether it can adequately identify warheads in a field of decoys. Also still to be demonstrated, the report said, are such actions as multiple launches of interceptors, nighttime intercepts and operations under adverse weather conditions.
The report, a copy of which was made available to The Washington Post ahead of public release today, focused on assessing the Bush administration's efforts against a list of 50 recommendations issued in the final weeks of the Clinton administration by Philip Coyle, then the Pentagon's chief weapons evaluator. President Bill Clinton decided in August 2000 not to proceed with deployment of the antimissile system pending further development and testing.
President Bush has substantially altered the program, expanding the scope of experimentation and committing the country to deploying a rudimentary national antimissile system by the end of 2004. Even so, most of the recommendations put forward by Coyle "are still relevant," the GAO report said, "because the technical challenges and uncertainty with developing, testing, and fielding effective defensive capabilities . . . remain significant."
"The administration hasn't gone through the technical and testing steps the way they've been advised to do by the Pentagon's own operations and testing people," said Rep. John F. Tierney (D-Mass.), who requested the GAO review. "The report very clearly indicates that there's not been enough progress to give us any sense of security and comfort that this system is at a place where it ought to move forward."
The report said construction of a "test bed" facility in Alaska will help bring more realism and complexity to a testing program whose eight flights have been limited to a single scenario -- a target missile has flown out over the Pacific from California and the interceptor has launched from the Marshall Islands. Greater attention also is being paid to improving the system's ability to distinguish enemy warheads from decoys, the report said.
But the report warned that test plans through 2007 do not include sufficiently challenging targets and decoys. It said the first attempt at launching two interceptors against two targets is not scheduled until 2007. And no plans exist to assess the effects of severe weather on the system's performance or to conduct flight tests "under unrehearsed and unscripted conditions," the report said.
The antimissile system, when activated, will rely on tracking data from an old surveillance radar in Alaska, called Cobra Dane. But the report noted that the radar will not have been tested in its new role and will lack the ability, even with software improvements being completed, to provide more than a rudimentary analysis of incoming missile threats.
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>> A OF E...
Alarm Raised Over Quality of Uranium Found in Iran
By CRAIG S. SMITH
VIENNA, March 10 -- United Nations nuclear inspectors have found traces of extremely highly enriched uranium in Iran, of a purity reserved for use in a nuclear bomb, European and American diplomats said Wednesday.
Among traces that inspectors detected last year are some refined to 90 percent of the rare 235 isotope, the diplomats said. While the International Atomic Energy Agency has previously reported finding "weapons grade" traces, it has not revealed that some reached such a high degree of enrichment.
The presence of such traces raises the stakes in the international debate over Iran's nuclear program and increases the urgency of determining the uranium's origin. If the enrichment took place in Iran, it means the country is much further along the road to becoming a nuclear weapons power than even the most aggressive intelligence estimates anticipated.
Iran has said that its nuclear program is for purely peaceful purposes, while the United States contends it has secretly tried to produce nuclear weapons. The atomic agency is expected to vote Friday on a resolution criticizing Iran for lack of candor about its nuclear efforts.
Iran has said that all of the highly enriched uranium found on its nuclear facilities was contamination that occurred before imported equipment arrived in the country. Iranian officials said they could not identify the origin of the contamination because the equipment was imported through middlemen in five countries.
I.A.E.A. officials said the contamination may have originated in Pakistan. Abdul Qadeer Khan, a Pakistani nuclear weapons scientist, has admitted secretly supplying uranium enrichment equipment to Iran and other nations. The agency has asked Pakistan for permission to take environmental samples from its enrichment facilities to see if they match the weapons-grade traces in Iran. "Pakistan could let Iran off the I.A.E.A. hook," said a European diplomat here.
American officials argue that traces of such highly enriched uranium, regardless of their origin, are another disturbing clue to what they believe are Iran's hidden ends.
"What it shows is that they have a system that is capable of producing weapons grade uranium," said an American official speaking from Washington. "If it's an assembly that was removed from Pakistan or elsewhere, it's already battle tested," he said.
On Wednesday, Iran's defense minister, Ali Shamkhani, acknowledged for the first time that the Iranian military had produced centrifuges to enrich uranium, the Associated Press reported from Teheran. He said they were manufacturing unsophisticated models for civilian users. The admission came after the I.A.E.A. presented Iran with evidence that some of its nuclear activities were taking place on military bases.
"It's rather strange, don't you think, that the military gets involved in the electric-power generating business?" asked one senior American official. "Or that they forgot to mention this before, when they were `fully disclosing' all details of their program?" American officials are lobbying hard to keep international pressure on Iran.
An I.A.E.A. resolution on Libya, passed by the agency's board of governors on Wednesday, is part of that campaign. The resolution, negotiated by the United States, Britain and Libya in London last week, praises Libya for swiftly dismantling the nuclear weapons program discovered last year. But the resolution's key paragraph calls for the agency to report Libya's past breaches of the Nonproliferation Treaty to the United Nations Security Council.
"The trap is sprung," said a senior American administration official speaking from Washington, saying that the Libyan resolution sets a precedent for future I.A.E.A. resolutions on Iran. "It makes it very hard not to at some point address Iran's breaches by referring them to the Security Council," he said.
The United States has been lobbying since late last year to threaten Iran with Security Council scrutiny if it continued to withhold information on the scope of its nuclear program. Britain, France and Germany have resisted making an explicit threat for fear that it would anger Iran and hinder future cooperation.
Iran warned Wednesday that American-led criticism could "complicate" its relations with the I.A.E.A. "America is taking advantage of any opportunity to put pressure on Iran," Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi said in Teheran, the Associated Press reported. "Unfortunately the I.A.E.A. is sometimes influenced in this regard."
Mr. Kharrazi was quoted as saying that Iran would resume enriching uranium for peaceful purposes once its relations with the I.A.E.A. "return to normal."
David E. Sanger contributed reporting from Washington for this article.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |
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Iran's muffled coup
By Seth Cropsey
Iran's latest coup d'etat did not use guns, but silence. Faced with rising dissent and the prospect of reformists winning more seats in parliament, the country's hard-line mullahs gagged opponents, shut down public debate, and perhaps most important, silenced national media from reporting the facts. Until that silence is broken, people in Iran and around the world will pay the price.
The coup began with February's elections to the nation's parliament, whose incumbent reformist majority, with President Mohammad Khatami, had challenged the hard-liners' control. But under the pseudo-democratic constitution, only candidates approved by the country's repressive Guardian Council could be on the ballot. In January, the council barred thousands of reformists, including more than 80 incumbent lawmakers. After a three-week sit-in, 125 lawmakers resigned in protest, and reform parties urged people not to participate in the farcical balloting. The unsurprising result put hard-liners in control, despite low voter turnout and many blank ballots.
If more than a quarter of the members of the U.S. Congress staged a three-week sit-in on the floor of the Capitol, and then resigned their seats, you can bet American TV coverage would be 24-7. Not in Iran. As world media reported the deepening crisis, official news sources, including the country's only domestic television sources, stood mute.
Iran's official TV news channel, Voice and Vision, imposed a near-blackout on the MPs' sit-in, and even censored President Khatami's own statements, over protests from his office.
There is, in fact, nothing new about the regime's effort to control information. The Islamic Republic of Iran has consistently restricted the information that reaches the public. There is only one official TV broadcaster, although many Iranians risk owning banned satellite dishes to pick up international TV broadcasts. Newspapers must be licensed by the government, which has shut down scores.
Computer-savvy Iranians have turn to the Internet for news; but Internet service providers need government permission to operate, and there is an extensive official blacklist of banned international news sites. After the February elections, even more Web sites were threatened.
This heavy hand is meant to intimidate and control, but brave journalists continue working. There can be harsh consequences. In a special "Press Court," scores of editors and reporters have been tried and sentenced to jail and even floggings for such crimes as "promoting subjects that might damage the foundation of the Islamic Republic."
As 2004 began, 10 journalists were known to be imprisoned, including respected investigative journalist Akbar Gandji, and the ailing, 74-year-old, Siamak Pourzand, held in solitary confinement and reportedly tortured.
Today, new trials are scheduled for journalists who tried to report on the election crisis.
The hard-liners also employ the threat of violence: Militia thugs break up public meetings to silence speakers they oppose, from reform candidates to Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi. Journalists have also been targets of extrajudicial killings. The case of Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi, murdered last summer by an Iranian intelligence agent, made international news.
What's lost when people lose free speech and a free press? Plenty. Without credible news sources, Iranians can't get the information they need about economic issues like lagging per capita income and corruption; or education, health, and environmental problems; or the fatal unreadiness to respond to catastrophes like the Bam earthquake.
Nor can Iranians get straight answers about their government's military and foreign policies: the extent of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs, Iran's support for terrorism; and the worldwide concern these have engendered. Without information -- without genuine democratic controls -- Iran's secret programs will continue posing a security threat to the U.S. and the Free World.
It is a testament to the Iranian people's love for freedom that, despite the hurdles, they continue to reach for truth, for democracy, for open relations with the world.
In a public-opinion poll sponsored in late 2002 by members of parliament, 75 percent of Iranians supported dialogue with the U.S., and almost half approved of U.S. policy toward their country. The authorities responded by jailing the pollsters.
The Iranian regime's tools of silence speak volumes about the nature of its rule. But Iranians, like captured peoples before them, are trying to search out the information they need.
They deserve our help and are getting it. U.S. broadcasting to Iran includes Radio Farda -- "tomorrow," in Iran's Farsi language -- and, beginning last July, the daily News and Views televised credible news about issues concerning Iranians.
News and Views reaches millions of Farsi-speaking Iranians who aren't fluent in English, and thus can't benefit from global broadcasts like CNN. And, unlike global broadcasts, News and Views focuses on Iran, permitting real depth of coverage. The program is on the air one half-hour daily.
But News and Views could do more; it could cover even more voices and issues, interview more experts on democracy from the U.S. and other free nations, and increase its dialogue with and among the Iranian people.
"Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter," said Thomas Jefferson. He went on to explain why.
If ever people lose their knowledge of and involvement in public affairs, then all the officials of government -- "Congress & Assemblies, judges & governors, shall all become wolves."
Today, the Iranian people try to keep their country from the wolves of injustice, repression and corruption. They will not succeed until all Iranians have access to real news and views.
Seth Cropsey is director of the U.S. Government International Broadcasting Bureau.
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Iranians to Resume Enriching Uranium
Minister Discloses Military's Atomic Role
By Ali Akbar Dareini
Associated Press
Thursday, March 11, 2004; Page A22
TEHRAN, March 10 -- Iran said Wednesday that it would resume enriching uranium and warned that it might quit cooperating with the International Atomic Energy Agency, which it accused of kowtowing to the United States at a crucial meeting in Vienna.
Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani also said the Iranian military had built nuclear centrifuges for civilian use -- the first time the country has acknowledged that its military was involved in its nuclear program.
The head of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, warned that Iran risked undermining its efforts to convince the world that its nuclear intentions were peaceful.
"I think suspension is a good confidence-building measure, and Iran needs to do everything possible right now to create the confidence required," ElBaradei said Wednesday in Vienna, where the U.N. nuclear monitor's board of governors was meeting.
The agency's 35-nation board was preparing for a debate Thursday on whether Iran was living up to its pledge of full transparency on its nuclear program.
The United States, which suspects Iran is building a nuclear weapons program, wants a draft resolution on Iran to take a tough line because of evidence that it was developing this program secretly. But the Europeans want to acknowledge that Iran has made substantial steps toward openness.
The draft of the resolution said the agency noted "with the most serious concern" that Iran's declarations "did not amount to the correct, complete and final picture of Iran's past and present nuclear program." But it also praised Iran for signing an agreement that granted a free hand to IAEA inspectors.
Iran's chief delegate to the IAEA, Pirouz Hosseini, said Iran was unhappy with the draft and accused the United States of putting pressure on the Europeans.
"We have never been involved in any nuclear weapons program . . . and the Americans don't want to accept the fact," Hosseini said.
In Tehran, the Iranian capital, Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi accused the IAEA of failing to reciprocate.
"We take steps and expect the other side to take steps," Kharrazi said. "It can't go one-sided."
Kharrazi warned Britain, France and Germany -- whose foreign ministers visited Tehran last year to discuss the nuclear issue -- that Iran would stop cooperating with them if they failed to resist U.S. pressure at the Vienna meeting.
Kharrazi said Iran had a "legitimate right to enrich uranium" to fuel the nuclear reactor it is building to generate electrical power.
"We suspended uranium enrichment voluntarily and temporarily. Later, when our relations with the IAEA return to normal, we will definitely resume enrichment," said Kharrazi, who accused the IAEA of giving in to U.S. pressure.
"Unfortunately, the agency is sometimes influenced by the United States, while it should maintain its technical and professional identity," Kharrazi said.
The Reuters news agency reported from Vienna:
Libya signed an agreement Wednesday allowing the IAEA to conduct more intrusive inspections of nuclear facilities.
"This is a step by Libya to be clean of all nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction," Maatoug Mohammed Maatoug, the scientific research minister, said after signing the accord with ElBaradei.
ElBaradei said, "Libya's decision could be, and should be, a first step towards an Africa and Middle East free from weapons of mass destruction and at peace."
The protocol allows for IAEA inspectors to obtain short-notice access to any declared or undeclared sites where nuclear material may be present, in order to check for evidence of banned weapons activity.
Earlier in the day, the IAEA's governing board passed a resolution praising Libya for dismantling its nuclear weapons program.
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Getting serious about Iran
The Bush administration deserves applause for working tenaciously to focus the international spotlight on the danger posed by Iran's nuclear weapons programs. The compromise reached late Tuesday on a resolution to be considered by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) included language praising Iran's belated cooperation with investigators while criticizing Tehran's failure to resolve questions about its uranium enrichment programs. The question now is what steps the United States should take to reduce the likelihood of an Iranian nuclear breakout.
One person with some sound ideas for dealing with this danger is Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Washington. Mr. Sokolski would begin by having the administration request that the IAEA's safeguards division spell out how much time and effort would be required to certify that Iran is out of the bomb-making business. Second, in preparation for the IAEA's next board meeting in June, as well as upcoming G-8 and NATO summits, Washington should lobby its European allies to adopt a host of country-neutral nonproliferation rules that would affect Iran and other aspiring nuclear powers. These rules, to put it mildly, could make life very uncomfortable for such regimes.
The allies should declare that nations cannot free themselves from their obligation to abide by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) by announcing their withdrawal unless the IAEA can clearly find them in full compliance and determines that they have dismantled all undeclared nuclear facilities. In addition, all countries should suspend nuclear cooperation with any nation that the IAEA cannot find to be in full compliance with its safeguards agreement until the agency can establish that that country is completely out of the weapons business. Civilian nuclear exports from NPT member nations that the IAEA can't find in full compliance with the NPT should be considered illegitimate.
Mr. Sokolski would ratchet up the pressure on Iran in myriad other ways. For example, the secretary of state should call for help from France, the EU and Japan to declare that they will delay making investments in Iran's oil industry "until and unless the IAEA finds Iran in full compliance or Iran has dismantled the nuclear facilities and materials it forgot to declare from the IAEA as required by its safeguards agreement with the agency."
Washington should work with its allies to prepare against the contingency of Iran using its nuclear capabilities in the future, either to threaten the Straits of Hormuz (through conventional means, including mining) or to use nuclear mines directly.
As we noted yesterday, the United States does not have the luxury of waiting. Iran has become increasingly defiant in recent weeks, demanding that the IAEA end sanctions. Washington and its allies need to confront the danger before it is too late.
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Leaker of nuke secrets curbed
By Abraham Rabinovich
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
JERUSALEM -- Nuclear whistleblower Mordecai Vanunu, who will complete his 18-year prison sentence in April for having revealed some of Israel's nuclear secrets, will be denied a passport in order to prevent him from ever leaving the country, Israel Radio reported yesterday.
The decision was said to have been made at a meeting of senior officials called by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon Tuesday night.
Mr. Sharon, however, rejected a request by the head of the Defense Ministry's security department, Yehiel Horev, to keep Vanunu locked up even after completion of his sentence. Mr. Horev asked that Vanunu be placed under administrative detention, which would permit his incarceration indefinitely without trial.
Instead, it was decided to use "certain supervisory means" to keep track of him, according to a statement by the prime minister's office. There have been unconfirmed reports that Vanunu will be kept under semi-house arrest, denied use of telephones and kept under constant guard.
Vanunu, who had worked as a minor technician at the Dimona nuclear plant, left for Australia after his dismissal from the job in 1986 and converted to Christianity. He then flew to London for interviews with the Sunday Times about the nuclear plant, where he had secretly made numerous photographs. The articles and photographs led to estimates that Israel had about 200 nuclear warheads.
The U.S. government does not acknowledge publicly that Israel has a nuclear arsenal. But in his new book, "Rumsfeld's War," Rowan Scarborough, Pentagon correspondent for The Washington Times, reveals a Defense Intelligence Agency report that says Israel has about 82 deployable nuclear bombs and missiles.
A few days before the London Sunday Times story went to press, the Israeli Mossad had a female agent lure Vanunu to Rome where he was kidnapped, sedated and transported to Israel for trial. His confinement was mostly in solitary and the only visitors he has been permitted are first-degree relatives, his lawyer and a clergyman.
Security officials have recently met with Vanunu to sound out his intentions. According to reports in the Israeli media, he refused to answer most of their questions. However, family members have said that he told them he would not leak any more information.
During his interviews with the Sunday Times he had declined to give the names of co-workers, saying he did not want to endanger them and that the information was irrelevant.
A former senior official of the Shin Bet Security Services, Haim Ben-Ami, told Israel Television on Tuesday that Vanunu might be abducted if he left the country and forced to tell all he knew.
Most of Vanunu's family is said to have severed ties with him for having abandoned the Jewish faith. However, two brothers have remained in contact. One of them, Meir, is said to be living in Australia.
Tuesday's meeting on Vanunu, chaired by Mr. Sharon, was attended by senior legal and security officials, as well as a top official of Israel's Atomic Energy Commission.
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>> SO CALLED REVOLUTION WATCH...
From Chavez, Divisive Rhetoric
Embattled Venezuelan's Bluntness Is Fuel for Recall Effort
By Jon Jeter
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, March 11, 2004; Page A23
CARACAS, Venezuela -- When he addresses the nation, President Hugo Chavez sometimes breaks into song. He sermonizes his supporters and taunts his foes. In January he called Condoleezza Rice, the White House national security adviser, "a real illiterate." And last month, he used a profanity to describe President Bush, alleging Bush supported a campaign by Venezuela's political opposition to remove him. Then he issued a challenge.
"We're going to make a bet to see who lasts longer, Mr. George Bush -- you in the White House or Hugo Chavez here in Miraflores," he said, referring to Venezuela's presidential residence. He added that he would make the bet in Venezuelan currency "or in dollars, as you wish."
Chavez's policies, Venezuela's faltering economy and allegations of creeping authoritarianism are ostensibly driving the violent street protests here and the growing efforts to oust the president.
But language also divides this country. Supporters and critics of Chavez have said that the president's salty, earthy and even profane speeches are anything but presidential. While Venezuela's poor, and its black and indigenous minorities, often find Chavez's use of blunt language appealing, wealthy and middle-class Venezuelans find it boorish and embarrassing.
"When Chavez talks, it is like he is one of us," said Pablo Rosales, 53, a black cab driver here. "He is the first president I've seen who talks to the poor and not just the high class. He includes us when he talks."
Said Adriana Ruggiero, 45, a dentist: "He uses such profanity. That is not how a world leader should present himself. He is like a cave man. He makes all Venezuelans look bad."
Class is the principal fault line in Venezuelans' fractured opinion of Chavez. Recent polls indicate that Venezuela's poor, who are nearly 80 percent of the country's 25 million people, are almost evenly split on Chavez. About 41 percent of Venezuelans support Chavez, the vast majority of them poor, said Luis Vicente Leon, executive director of the national polling firm Datanalisis.
But the 59 percent of Venezuelans who disapprove of Chavez include virtually all of the country's most prosperous residents, Leon said.
"There's no doubt that Chavez's strongest support comes from those sectors of Venezuelan society who have typically been the most excluded: blacks, indigenous people and the poor," Leon said.
The son of rural teachers, Chavez has said that he has more support than the polls reflect because researchers avoid the shantytowns and poor neighborhoods where the bulk of his supporters live.
His weekly broadcast program, "Hello President," has a preacher's cadence and is peppered with slang. When the actor Danny Glover visited last month and attended a ceremony to name an elementary school for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., televised news accounts showed Chavez pointing to his curly hair and broad nose and saying that he, like Glover, was of African heritage.
"He speaks the language of the excluded," said Maximilien Arvelaiz, a Chavez adviser. "He doesn't just speak about the poor. He speaks to the poor."
After returning from a state visit abroad, for example, Chavez has spoken on television using a map and pointer. "He will say this is where I was and it takes X number of hours to travel there by plane from Caracas," Arvelaiz said. "For the rich and the middle class, this is all quite boring because of course they know where Spain is on the map. They think it is stupid. But poor people love this. No one has ever taken the time to explain this to them."
Julio Borges, a spokesman for the campaign to recall Chavez, acknowledges that the president has considerable charisma. But Borges said there had not been any substantial improvements in the lives of the poor since Chavez took office five years ago. Inflation is rising, the economy has lost jobs and crime in urban centers has increased, he said. "He's a demagogue," Borges said.
Elections officials last week validated only 1.8 million of the more than 3 million signatures collected by Borges and other opposition leaders in support of a referendum to recall Chavez. Constitutional provisions require that 2.4 million signatures, representing 20 percent of eligible voters, be validated.
Monitors from the Organization of American States and the Atlanta-based Carter Center said they did not see widespread fraud in the referendum process. But the National Electoral Council ruled that many of the forms were improperly completed and that signatures did not match identification numbers. Chavez said many names were of dead people.
On Wednesday, his opponents condemned the electoral council's action, saying that Chavez's allies on the panel were blocking the referendum with a complex and unfair review process, the Reuters news agency reported. The opponents, a coalition of political parties, labor leaders and civic groups, said their analysis showed that they have enough signatures to force a vote.
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>> WHITE HOUSE WATCH
President's Unfunded Mandates Criticized
Group Says States Face Huge Bills
By David S. Broder
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 11, 2004; Page A25
It's a familiar complaint from state officials -- the charge that the federal government passes bills that voters love and then passes the buck on paying for them.
The issue, a hardy perennial in the 1990s, came back with a vengeance yesterday as the National Conference of State Legislatures, a bipartisan organization that currently has Republican leadership, assailed the Bush administration and the Republican-controlled Congress for socking the states with at least $29 billion in "unfunded mandates" in the current fiscal year.
President Bush's budget for next year will increase the burden to $34 billion, according to the report made public at a news conference beginning the NCSL's winter leadership meeting in Washington.
Accusing the federal government of "cost-shifting," Utah House Speaker Martin R. Stephens (R), president of the NCSL, said "we have seen an increase" in that practice in recent years "and we're concerned this is going to get worse."
Nine years ago, a concerted campaign by organizations representing state and local governments led to the passage by the first Republican Congress in 30 years of the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act -- a measure that ostensibly requires Washington to provide the money needed to carry out the programs it passes. But Stephens and Pennsylvania state Rep. David Steil (R), the head of the NCSL's budgets and revenue committee, said the record in recent years is one of backsliding.
The report fingered two big education programs -- the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act and Bush's landmark No Child Left Behind Act -- as creating a gap of almost $20 billion in state budgets this year.
Another major culprit, the NCSL report said, was the mandate for states to provide prescription drugs for people eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid. It put the shortfall on that program at $6 billion.
The figures are open to dispute. The Congressional Budget Office does not classify either of the big education programs as mandates, because states are not required to participate in them. But Stephens, whose legislature considered not participating in No Child Left Behind, said staying out would have cost Utah $100 million a year it had been receiving to help school low-income children.
"It's kind of a shell game to say states have a right to decide" whether to participate, Stephens said.
NCSL officials said only one piece of legislation -- an immigration bill -- was repealed after Congress determined that it had violated the unfunded-mandates law. On only three other occasions in the past nine years, the report said, has the Congressional Budget Office identified other measures that appeared to violate the statute, and none of the three was altered.
One problem, NCSL officials said, is that the 1995 law does not apply when bills are amended on the floor or changed in a House-Senate conference committee. And it does not apply to appropriations bills, which the report said often fall short of the commitments made in the underlying legislation.
NCSL officials said they hope to highlight the problem by resuming publication of a regular newsletter, the Mandate Monitor, updating the fiscal effects of legislation. They also said they would lobby members of Congress while they are in Washington.
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>> WHITE HOUSE WATCH...2
Behind the gender gap
President Bush makes overtures to women, but is largely solidifying support among men.
By Linda Feldmann | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
WASHINGTON - When President Bush addressed a Cleveland forum on women's entrepreneurship this week, the visuals matched the theme - the president standing with women. But the talk's focus on jobs seemed aimed more at Ohio, a central battleground of the 2004 election and a state struggling with massive job losses, than at the female vote.
In a nation where the "gender gap" has become a permanent feature of electoral politics, Bush is finding it as difficult as most other recent GOP presidents to bring women to his side. So far this year, the Gallup Poll gap between male approval and female approval of Bush is above 7 percent - slightly higher than it was in 2001.
Bush can get away with lower support from women as long as he keeps support from men high. And that is exactly what the president seems to be doing in the early phase of the campaign: solidifying and expanding his support among men (see appearances at NASCAR and the Houston rodeo) and saving the "compassionate conservative" theme of 2000 for later in the campaign.
"Each side's in a fight now to expand their base and mobilize their base," says Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, who notes that that's why Bush adviser Karl Rove is talking less about women and more about getting the 4 1/2 million born-again Christians who didn't vote in 2000 to turn out for Bush this time. "That's why we're saying we can get unmarried women, Hispanics, and African Americans."
To be sure, the Bush campaign isn't ignoring women. First lady Laura Bush has stepped up her political activity in recent months, spearheading efforts on women's health and appearing in Bush campaign ads. The Bush administration has pushed through major reforms in education and healthcare, issues that are especially important to women. But the public prefers the Democrats' positions to the Republicans'.
Still, says independent pollster John Zogby, the gender gap under Bush isn't as big as it has been under previous presidents. "The reason is that there's a marriage gap," he says. "Married women and married men tend to see things much more similarly. They're more conservative; they have more traditional family values."
And that is why there's a move afoot to target unmarried women, a segment of the population with a low rate of participation in politics. In the 2000 election, 68 percent of married women voted, while only 52 percent of unmarried women turned out. And those nonvoters would have, on balance, helped the Democrats.
The organization Women's Voices, Women's Votes, sees across the country a vast untapped population - 22 million single women, 16 million of them unregistered - that it wants to mobilize. The group is planning outreach to these women, through television, mail, Internet, and door-to-door canvassing.
Why are these women not voting? "They don't believe the politicians care about what they have to say," says project co-director Chris Desser, her conclusion drawn from focus groups and surveys. "When we respond with, 'Well, do you know there are 22 million of you?' - their minds are blown."
These single female nonvoters are also diverse - young, old, all races, rich, poor, divorced, never-married, widowed. Thus, they are hard to define, or at least to market to the press with a pithy nickname like NASCAR dads or soccer moms. But they share some traits: As unmarried people, they tend to bear their financial burdens alone - often as the sole caretakers for children, aging parents, or both.
"Healthcare is their No. 1 concern," says Ms. Desser. "Second comes employment - job parity, consistent employment, job security. Third is education. They want to make sure their children get a decent education and a shot at the American dream. They also know how important their own education is to job security and a decent salary."
In interviews on the street, women shared concerns as they look ahead to Nov. 2. Hilda DaSilva, a divorced mother of three from Brazil, fits the profile of the unmarried women that Democrats are keen to attract - though this is the first election she's eligible to vote in, as a newly minted US citizen. "I feel like a lot of people lost their jobs," says Ms. DaSilva, who lives in Somerville, Mass. "Healthcare has gone down so badly. I love this country, I see a better life here.... [But] I don't trust [Bush]."
For Susan, a married woman in her 40s who lives in suburban Boston, the issues are the economy, jobs, and healthcare. But national security factors in as well.
"I voted for Bush, but the whole war in Iraq - at first I thought it was a good thing, and then they never found the weapons of mass destruction," she says. "And the economy has tanked. I think back to his father, and the Democrats were saying, 'Are you better off than you were four years ago?' And I don't feel like I'm better off."
* Sara B. Miller contributed to this report
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>> ASHLAND WATCH...
String of alleged terror cases in Northwest
Muslim fundraising efforts in the region draw federal indictments, and a national guardsman is in prison.
By Brad Knickerbocker | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
ASHLAND, ORE. - To his friends, neighbors, and customers, Pete Seda was known for two things: his professional work as an arborist, especially his efforts to save trees that otherwise would be cut down for development, and his dedication to showing the gentle face of Islam. He was active in interfaith groups, visited grade schools, and paraded his camel on the Fourth of July in this quintessential small town.
Now the man known as Pirouz Sedaghaty when he emigrated from Iran some 30 years ago is suspected of helping a Saudi Arabia-based charity raise and launder thousands of dollars used to fund jihad (holy war).
It's part of a recent confluence of terrorism-related events in the Pacific Northwest:
* The arrest of National Guardsman Ryan Anderson, accused of offering to help Al Qaeda by providing information about US weapons and military tactics.
* The conviction of several of the so-called "Portland Seven," Muslims who tried to get to Afghanistan, where they wanted to help fight Americans.
* The investigation of members of the Muslim community associated with the University of Idaho and Washington State University, where Mr. Anderson had been a student and converted to Islam.
* The sentencing of Earnest James Ujaama, a Seattle man charged with conspiring to aid the Taliban, including plans to set up a remote terrorist training camp in the desert of Oregon.
This region has a significant number of potential terrorist targets, including aircraft carriers and ballistic-missile submarines based in Puget Sound, plus 19 major hydropower dams.
But despite occasional concerns about explosives and weapons slipped across the border from Canada, there's nothing in particular that makes the Northwest interesting to federal officials urgently hunting for terrorists and their supporters. If anything, the most radical antigovernment types here tend to be otherwise engaged: white supremacists opposed to anything having to do with other races or religions, and their politically polar opposites - anarchists concerned with economic globalization and the evils of SUVs.
But federal officials, armed with the controversial USA-Patriot Act and other statutes, have brought the antiterrorism aspects of homeland defense to the region nonetheless. Today, Ryan Anderson - who also uses the name Amir Abdul Rashid - is in a military prison at Fort Lewis in Washington State. He was arrested last month shortly before his Army unit was to leave for Iraq, charged with seeking links to Al Qaeda on the Internet, where he told his contacts, "I share your cause." Those contacts turned out to be FBI and military intelligence agents in an online sting operation. He was quickly arrested.
One thing investigators want to know is if Anderson was recruited and trained while he was a student studying Middle Eastern history at Washington State University in Pullman. Washington State and the University of Idaho are less than 10 miles apart, and they share an active Muslim community of about 200 people.
The investigation of possibly illicit fundraising with connections to terrorism began there in 2002, the year Anderson graduated. There have been several arrests since then, and in January the first of those being investigated was indicted on federal charges of fundraising and recruiting on behalf of Saudi clerics and charities allegedly supporting terrorism.
Sami Omar Al-Hussayen, a doctoral student from Saudi Arabia, is charged with providing $300,000 to Islamic charities to support "murder, maiming, kidnapping and the destruction of property." Mr. Al-Hussayen also is alleged to have connections to a member of the "Portland Seven" as well as to a branch of the Al-Haramain charity in Ashland, Ore., started and run by Mr. Seda.
"The indictment alleges that Al-Hussayen operated more than a dozen websites, including some for the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation and two radical Saudi sheikhs," US Attorney General John Ashcroft said last week. "It further alleges that Al-Hussayen knew and intended that his computer services and expertise would be used to recruit and raise funds for violent jihad around the world and that he conspired to conceal the nature of his support for terrorists." Members of the Portland group - who tried but failed to get into Afghanistan through China - reportedly were influenced by a website managed by Al-Hussayen.
In some of these varied cases, those charged appear to have been amateurs.
Many of those donating to charities now considered to have terrorist links thought they were helping fellow Muslims such as Palestinian or Chechnyan refugees. But in the post-9/11 era, that does not lift them above the cloud of suspicion.
"We continue to pursue financiers of terrorist barbarism as aggressively as those that actually perpetrate such horrible crimes," Attorney General Ashcroft has testified before Congress.
Mr. Seda, the Ashland, Ore., arborist, has yet to be charged, although he was placed on an FBI watch list. The IRS alleges that he tried to conceal the transfer of funds, and federal officials recently took computers and video tapes from his home. For the past year, he and his family have been living in the United Arab Emirates. Through his American lawyer he says, "I am certain that once all the facts come out, it will be clear that neither [the charity he represented] nor I have engaged in any criminal activities."
The whole episode has left many here in disbelief, including Rabbi David Zaslow, who told the local newspaper that "Pete is the kind of Muslim we Americans should be standing up applauding."
"The sad irony is that Pete Seda came to the United States as a refugee from Iran in the 1970s and has been promoting peace and understanding of the Islamic faith for many years," says Paul Copeland, co-chair of the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and a long-time friend of Seda.
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>>
Bodies intended for science were used in Army land-mine tests
By Cain Burdeau
Associated Press
NEW ORLEANS -- Seven cadavers donated to Tulane University's medical school were sold to the Army and blown up in land mine experiments, officials said Wednesday. Tulane said it has suspended dealings with a national distributor of donated bodies.
Tulane receives up to 150 cadavers a year from donors but needs only between 40 and 45 for classes, said Mary Bitner Anderson, co-director of the Tulane School of Medicine's Willed Body Program.
The university paid National Anatomical Service, a New York-based company that distributes bodies nationwide, less than $1,000 a body to deliver surplus cadavers, thinking they were going to medical schools in need of corpses.
The anatomical services company sold seven cadavers to the Army for between $25,000 and $30,000, said Chuck Dasey, a spokesman for the Army's Medical Research and Materiel Command in Fort Detrick, Md. The bodies were blown up in tests on protective footwear against land mines at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio.
Tulane said it found out about the Army's use of the bodies in January 2003. It suspended its contract with the anatomical services company this month. The company did not immediately return calls for comment.
"There is a legitimate need for medical research and cadavers are one of the models that help medical researchers find out valuable information," Dasey said. "Our position is that it is a regulated process. Obviously it makes some people uncomfortable."
Cadaver remains are routinely cremated, he added.
For years military researchers have bought cadavers to use in research involving explosive devices. In the last five years, that research has been used to help determine safe standoff distances, on how to build the best shelters, and to improve helmets, Dasey said.
Michael Meyer, a philosophy professor at Santa Clara University in California who has written about the ethics of donated bodies, said the military's use is questionable because it knows donors did not expect to end up in land mine tests.
"Imagine if your mother had said all her life that she wanted her body to be used for science, and then her body was used to test land mines. I think that is disturbing, and I think there are some moral problems with deception here," Meyers said.
The market in bodies and body parts is under scrutiny after two men, including the head of the Willed Body Program at the University of California at Los Angeles, were arrested for trafficking in stolen body parts.
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>> FT ENERGY...
El Paso may face probe over reserves
By Sheila McNulty in Houston and Adrian Michaels in New York
Published: March 11 2004 22:12 | Last Updated: March 11 2004 22:12
US regulators are poised to consider a formal inquiry following El Paso's sharp downward revision of its oil and gas reserves and delayed earnings report.
The company said on Thursday that it had been supplying the Securities and Exchange Commission, the US's chief financial regulator, with details of its 41 per cent reduction in reserves.
"We have been providing information to the SEC all along, upon their request," said Aaron Woods, a spokesman. "If we receive notification from the SEC regarding a formal inquiry, we will make that information public."
The SEC does not comment on individual investigations. However, people close to the discussions said the agency was reviewing the latest moves by El Paso and considering its next steps.
Analysts expect the SEC to step up its review to a formal investigation, as it did with Royal Dutch/Shell, which is under SEC scrutiny for a 20 per cent reduction in its proven reserves. Proven reserves are the amount of oil or gas a company estimates will be recovered by a certain date.
Gordon Howald of Credit Lyonnais Securities said he had been expecting an SEC investigation since El Paso surprised the market with its announcment last month.
The revision has forced El Paso to delay the release of its fourth quarter 2003 earnings, scheduled for Thursday, as well as a 10K filing to the SEC. Analysts said that delay breaches its $3bn bank covenant, although they expected the banks to grant a waiver, which could come at a higher cost to El Paso. The company is in the process of unloading a series of assets to reduce its $24bn in debt.
Analysts say El Paso has long been seen as aggressive with its figures, noting it has sold assets that new owners booked for 25-30 per cent less than what they had been on El Paso's books.
Standard & Poor's has pushed El Paso's credit rating down to B-. "S&P considers it to be a highly speculative rating and one that is very much susceptible to default," said Todd Shipman of S&P.
Below the B- category, companies are seen to have substantial risks associated with them or actually be in default. S&P believes that rating is more likely to go down than up.
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Sibneft tycoon seeks to sell 46% stake
By Carola Hoyos and James Politi in New York and Arkady Ostrovsky in Moscow
Published: March 12 2004 0:13 | Last Updated: March 12 2004 0:13
Roman Abramovich, the Russian billionaire and owner of Chelsea football club, is in talks to sell half his 92 per cent stake in Sibneft, the Russian oil company, to a foreign energy group.
Royal Dutch/Shell, the Anglo-Dutch group, ChevronTexaco of the US, and Total of France have had discussions about a possible deal giving them a stake in Sibneft close to 46 per cent, according to oil industry bankers.
Shell is in upheaval after slashing 20 per cent of its oil and gas reserves that had been wrongly listed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Last week, Sir Philip Watts, the company's chairman, and Walter van de Vivjer, its head of exploration and production, were forced out.
Analysts say the possible Sibneft stake sale will be a key test of whether the management reshuffle will handicap Shell in making investment decisions that would be vital to its future growth. Buying Sibneft would help Shell catch up with its peers in Russia - such as BP, its UK rival, which has a joint venture with TNK - and add to its reserves base.
Mr Abramovich is keen to line up a buyer before he completes the unravelling of Sibneft's merger with Yukos, its bigger Russian partner.
However, a firm decision is unlikely to come before that process is complete. Any deal would also require the blessing of Vladimir Putin, Russia's president, who is expected to be re-elected on Sunday for a second term.
Analysts speculate Mr Abramovich does not yet have Mr Putin's blessing to sell a controlling stake.
It is believed that Mr Abramovich started looking for a buyer after a Moscow court ruling paved the way for unwinding the merger with Yukos. He had been trying to offload his Russian assets since last year, at a time of growing pressure on the oligarchs from the Kremlin.
Bankers said ChevronTexaco is particularly keen on acquiring a controlling stake in Sibneft and would probably push for a promise that this would eventually happen.
Total executives have said they would rather move into Russia on a project-by-project basis, but people close to the Paris-based company say they are keeping their options open with Sibneft.
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Assets of Yukos Oil's Shareholders Frozen
By Susan B. Glasser
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, March 11, 2004; 1:00 PM
MOSCOW, March 11 -- Swiss authorities have frozen nearly $5 billion in personal bank accounts belonging to imprisoned Russian tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky and other major shareholders in his embattled Yukos oil company, Russian prosecutors announced here Thursday.
In a statement, the prosecutor general's office said the $5 billion was frozen at Russia's request, in accounts of 20 individuals "implicated in the misappropriation of particularly large amounts of state funds." It gave no details about why such a large amount was involved but said prosecutors have asked a court to allow the seizure of the frozen funds.
One of the targeted Yukos shareholders confirmed the frozen bank accounts in an interview but disputed the sum cited by Russian prosecutors. "There's never been $5 billion in these accounts," said Leonid Nevzlin, a close Khodorkovsky associate who fled prosecution here for exile in Israel.
Nevzlin, a billionaire who said his frozen account contained less than $100,000, said the prosecutors appeared to be making an inflated claim in advance of Russian presidential elections Sunday. "They're just excited before the elections, and they're going to be apologizing after the elections," he said.
President Vladimir Putin, the inevitable winner Sunday, has seen his approval ratings climb since his government launched an all-out legal assault on Yukos shareholders last year and arrested Khodorkovsky on fraud and tax evasion charges last October. Prosecutors have publicly accused Khodorkovsky and Yukos of costing the state $1 billion.
Andrea Sadecky, a spokeswoman for the Swiss attorney general, said she could not confirm or deny how much money was frozen. "We cannot speak for investigations by Russia," she said.
The Russian statement, by spokeswoman Natalya Vishnyakova, named only six of the 20 individuals whose bank accounts were blocked, including Khodorkovsky, Nevzlin and two other Yukos shareholders who have also fled to Israel to avoid prosecution. Khodorkovsky is Russia's richest man, with a net worth estimated at $15 billion by Forbes magazine.
Many investors have feared that the legal assault on Yukos could mark the start of a broader attempt to renationalize the oil company that rose, under Khodorkovsky, to become Russia's largest producer. But Vishnyakova denied that, saying the frozen funds were purely "personal cash deposits by private individuals" and not the result of "a review of privatization."
Nevzlin said that his frozen Swiss account at UBS bank had contained a token sum just for the purposes of paying off credit card bills. He said the Russian request to freeze Yukos shareholders' accounts had been made about six months ago, and that there was no way Khodorkovsky or others had kept billions of dollars there. Khodorkovsky's Swiss account, he said, "cannot exceed several million dollars."
Anton Drel, a lawyer for Khodorkovsky, said he was unaware of the Swiss action but also doubted that his client would have had such a sum in his bank account there. "They've never had close to this amount in the past" in Switzerland, Drel said. "Can you imagine them keeping $5 billion in cash?" He said that as far as he knew, Khodorkovsky had closed his personal Swiss bank account last year.
Swiss authorities revealed last week they had searched offices of several companies and seized documents in Switzerland in connection with the Yukos investigation.
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Tough targets set for China's state banks
By Mure Dickie in Beijing
Published: March 11 2004 13:43 | Last Updated: March 11 2004 20:41
China's banking regulator has set tough performance targets for two leading state lenders chosen to spearhead financial sector reform by cleaning up their books and selling shares to international investors.
However, Liu Mingkang, chairman of the China Banking Regulatory Commission, also highlighted the difficulty of dealing with the bad debt burden weighing down the nation's financial institutions.
"Our fight against non-performing loans will be long and arduous," Mr Liu said. Beijing recently injected $45bn into the Bank of China and the China Construction Bank as part of a reform effort aimed to clear the way for their listings in the next few years in Hong Kong and possibly New York.
Mr Liu said the CBRC had set strict performance targets for the banks, two of China's "big four" lenders, including achieving return on equity of 11 per cent by 2005 and 13 per cent by 2007 and return on assets of close to the "average level of the top 100 banks in the world".
And Mr Liu, a former head of the Bank of China, said efforts this year would concentrate on rooting out those responsible for "policy mistakes that caused losses", underlining Beijing's determination to ensure that senior bank officials focus on financial performance.
The two banks have already made progress in improving their balance sheets, with Bank of China cutting its non-performing loan ratio to under 16 per cent and Construction Bank reducing its NPL ratio to under 12 per cent.
Regulators say the NPL ratio for China's overall banking sector fell by 5.32 percentage points to 17.8 per cent, a dramatic improvement.
However, Mr Liu acknowledged that although the stock of bad loans was reduced, the improvement in the NPL ratio was mainly the result of rapid growth in new loans.
Some economists and officials say enthusiastic lending risks fuelling over-investment in sectors such as automaking and steel, an issue of increasing concern to government planners.
The rapid lending growth also raises the possibility that the new loans will merely add to the NPL burden in the future.
"Of the 5 percentage point fall in the NPL ratio, 4 percentage points were the result of the increase in overall lending," Mr Liu said.
"If banks cannot correctly review, judge, quantify and control the risk involved in expansion of assets, this will be a very dangerous issue," he said.
The success China's banking reform will depend largely on whether managers can adopt more market-oriented lending policies.
Some analysts say change will be difficult as the leading state banks are seen as too big to be allowed to fail, but Mr Liu stressed that Construction Bank and Bank of China should not rely on further injections of public funds.
The banks would be able to raise enough capital by issuing subordinated debts, seeking new investors or selling assets, he said.
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China vows bank reforms and stable currency
By Richard McGregor in Beijing
Published: March 11 2004 10:09 | Last Updated: March 11 2004 10:09
Zhou Xiaochuan, the governor of the People's Bank of China, said on Thursday that Beijing's efforts to relieve upward pressure on its currency through a series of monetary measures to reduce renminbi demand had begun to take effect.
The central bank head said tighter controls on lending, open market operations to soak up liquidity and allowing Chinese firms to hold greater amounts of foreign currency had helped reduce pressure on the renminbi.
"We have been able to choke the over-supply of the monetary base and the excessive growth of credit," Mr Zhou said.
Mr Zhou, who was speaking at a press conference during the annual meeting of the National People's Congress, warned that there was a "time lag" before the impact of monetary policy could be assessed, which meant that the Bank remained vigilant about the need for further measures.
China has resisted pressure from Washington to begin loosening the longstanding dollar peg for the renimbi, a policy that it believes has been a cornerstone of its economic success in recent years.
Mr Zhou continued to emphasise the benefits of "currency stabilty" on Thursday, saying it was crucial in "promoting economic development."
China's longer-term plan is to allow the renminbi to fluctuate within a wider band than its current Rmb8.3 peg to the dollar but it has given no indication to the timing of such a move.
Some foreign analysts have ambitiously forecast a revaluation as high as 10 to 15 per cent this year, but government officials have suggested that any initial policy change will be slight.
China has witnessed a surge in consumer inflation and wholesale prices recently, mainly caused by rising food and raw materials prices, which may help ease pressure on the currency by reducing the country's export competitiveness. Mr Zhou ruled out an interest rate increase this month to tackle rising prices, as he said inflation was still relatively mild.
"We have yet to adjust the interest rate this month - the reason why is, although there has been some increase of the CPI, the extent of the growth is not large enough for the adjustment," he said.
China last changed deposit and lending rates more than three years ago, in February 2001, reducing the savings rate to 1.98% for single year renminbi deposits and 5.31% for one-year renminbi loans.
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China brushes aside Intel's Wapi protest
By Mure Dickie in Beijing
Published: March 11 2004 18:10 | Last Updated: March 11 2004 18:10
The developers of a controversial Chinese standard for wireless data networks on Thursday waved aside a decision by Intel, the world's largest computer chip producer, to shun their technology.
"This could be a critical decision that Intel is making. China is such a strategic market," said an official of the state-backed group promoting China's new standard, known as Wapi. "I think Intel should calm down."
Beijing says Wapi resolves chronic security problems suffered by the popular "Wi-fi" standard for local wireless networks, and has demanded that all manufacturers selling such mobile data products in China adopt the standard by June 1.
However, Intel this week announced it would not support Wapi, saying the standard was backward and poor quality. The move throws into doubt future sales in China of computers that use Intel's wireless-enabled Centrino chips.
"If the Centrino remains what it is today, without any upgrading, it will not comply with the law so it will obviously be banned," the Chinese standards official said. "I don't see any reason why the Chinese government should retreat on this."
The dispute between standards authorities and Intel reflects a gulf in attitudes toward the new standard that may become an increasingly hot issue in trade ties between China and the US. Last week, US officials warned Beijing that Wapi would create a dangerous precedent in using technology as a trade barrier.
US electronics manufacturers fear that Wapi marks an attempt to force them to share their technology with Chinese companies, since Beijing refuses to share encryption methods at the heart of the standard directly with international manufacturers.
They also object to the need to tailor products to the Chinese market, a demand that will raise their costs while handing a competitive advantage to local rivals.
However, Chinese officials and the local companies entrusted with Wapi encryption insist that international wireless equipment manufacturers can easily abide by the new standard by developing simple software or hardware upgrades, and that there is no risk to their intellectual property.
Any halt in Chinese sales of Centrino would also have particular impact for leading local computer manufacturers such as Legend, one of the Chinese companies given access to the Wapi encryption but which uses the Centrino in many of its "Lenovo" brand laptop computers.
Legend on Thursday declined to comment.
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>> SOUTH KOREA WATCH...
S. Korea Parliament Impeaches President
By SANG-HUN CHOE
ASSOCIATED PRESS
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -
Parliament voted to impeach President Roh Moo-hyun on illegal electioneering and incompetence charges Friday following hours of scuffles and dramatic protests.
Roh's presidential powers will be suspended while the matter is referred to the Constitutional Court for final approval to unseat the leader. The court has 180 days to rule.
The impeachment passed by a vote of 193 to 2.
The voting took place as pro-Roh lawmakers who earlier tried to block the vote were held outside the chamber by National Assembly security officers.
A shoving match was sparked earlier when pro-Roh Uri Party members tried to stop Assembly Speaker Park Kwan-yong from taking the podium, the only place he can call a vote.
Assembly security officers then moved in to begin removing lawmakers trying to block his progress. Park had warned Thursday that he might exercise his right to have security officials clear the lawmakers.
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Fmr. Daewoo Head Kills Himself Following Roh's Comments
119 rescue forces search for the body of Nam Sang-guk, former head of Daewoo Construction. Nam committed suicide Thursday in the southern end of Hannam Bridge, after being investigated by prosecutors for allegedly giving bribes to President Roh Moo-hyun's older brother Geon-pyeong. / Yonhap
Nam Sang-guk, former Daewoo Construction head, committed suicide Thursday by jumping into the Han River. The act was committed at 12:30 p.m. near the southern end of Hannam Bridge, leading to the Olympic Expressway. Nam had recently been undergoing investigations by prosecutorssp and was charged with passing W30 million to Roh's older brother Geon-pyeong, in a request that he be reappointed as the head of Daewoo Construction last September.
President Roh said in a morning press conference at Cheong Wa Dae that Roh's older brother Geon-pyeong had approached the president with a request from Nam that he be re-appointed head of the company, but Roh had ordered Civil Affairs and the personnel office to reject the reappointment of Nam as head of the company, and made sure that Nam was not hired for the job.
Roh added, "I hope that people like the former head of Daewoo Construction, who have attended good schools and have greatly succeeded, will no longer go to small people in the countryside and pass them money for their own interests."
Before committing suicide, Nam called Mr. Shin, Daewoo Construction Judicial Affairs Manager, at 12:09 p.m. On the phone, Nam said, "I will bear everything and go. My car is parked at the southern end of the Han River, so take it later," reports Chae Dong-wook, Director of the Special Investigations 2nd Unit at the Seoul District Public Prosecutors' Office.
Shin repeated the conversation to Nam's lawyer Shin Man-seong, who called the prosecutors' office, and reported the incident to police.
The police found a gray Leganza sedan with the license plate "Seoul 30 Ma 1343," a car owned by Nam's wife, at the southern end of Hannam Bridge at 1:20 p.m. Police also found Nam's cellular phone floating in the water between the 12th and 13th piers, but were unable to find Nam's body. Search operations still continue.
Choi Jong-chang, a witness of the act, said, "I was driving my car around 12:30 p.m. when a person suddenly got out from the car in front of me and went on to the railing. I had a strange feeling and stopped for a moment. When the man jumped down, I immediately called the police."
Nam was a graduate of Seoul National University and Kyunggi High School, and entered Daewoo in 1974. A former engineer of an introvert character who spent much of the next 19 years on construction sites, Nam was promoted to executive director in 1997. As Nam did not appear to conduct public relations activities when his reappointment as head was being decided, Daewoo employees have been showing surprise at recent investigations into Nam's political lobbying activities. Daewoo Construction workers say that they "cannot believe that quiet Nam Sang-guk would give money to Roh Geon-pyeong to ensure his reappointment."
One Daewoo Construction employee who wishes to remain anonymous says that Nam was a person of "great pride and responsibility." Although the employee claims to be unsure of whether Nam, who "attended a good school and greatly succeeded," actually "went to small people in the country to pass them money for his own interests," in the words of President Roh Moo-hyun, the employee says that Nam certainly felt deeply insulted by the president's remarks.
(Youm Kang-su, ksyoum@chosun.com )
Posted by maximpost
at 10:19 PM EST
Updated: Thursday, 11 March 2004 10:28 PM EST
