A Growing Afghan Prison Rivals Bleak Guantánamo

The New York Times
A Growing Afghan Prison Rivals Bleak Guantánamo
By TIM GOLDEN and ERIC SCHMITT

While an international debate rages over the future of the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the military has quietly expanded another, less-visible prison in Afghanistan, where it now holds some 500 terror suspects in more primitive conditions, indefinitely and without charges.

Pentagon officials have often described the detention site at Bagram, a cavernous former machine shop on an American air base 40 miles north of Kabul, as a screening center. They said most of the detainees were Afghans who might eventually be released under an amnesty program or transferred to an Afghan prison that is to be built with American aid.

But some of the detainees have already been held at Bagram for as long as two or three years. And unlike those at Guantánamo, they have no access to lawyers, no right to hear the allegations against them and only rudimentary reviews of their status as "enemy combatants," military officials said.

Privately, some administration officials acknowledge that the situation at Bagram has increasingly come to resemble the legal void that led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling in June 2004 affirming the right of prisoners at Guantánamo to challenge their detention in United States courts.

While Guantánamo offers carefully scripted tours for members of Congress and journalists, Bagram has operated in rigorous secrecy since it opened in 2002. It bars outside visitors except for the International Red Cross and refuses to make public the names of those held there. The prison may not be photographed, even from a distance.

From the accounts of former detainees, military officials and soldiers who served there, a picture emerges of a place that is in many ways rougher and more bleak than its counterpart in Cuba. Men are held by the dozen in large wire cages, the detainees and military sources said, sleeping on the floor on foam mats and, until about a year ago, often using plastic buckets for latrines. Before recent renovations, they rarely saw daylight except for brief visits to a small exercise yard.

"Bagram was never meant to be a long-term facility, and now it's a long-term facility without the money or resources," said one Defense Department official who has toured the detention center. Comparing the prison with Guantánamo, the official added, "Anyone who has been to Bagram would tell you it's worse."

Former detainees said the renovations had improved conditions somewhat, and human rights groups said reports of abuse had steadily declined there since 2003. Nonetheless, the Pentagon's chief adviser on detainee issues, Charles D. Stimson, declined to be interviewed on Bagram, as did senior detention officials at the United States Central Command, which oversees military operations in Afghanistan.

The military's chief spokesman in Afghanistan, Col. James R. Yonts, also refused to discuss detainee conditions, other than to say repeatedly that his command was "committed to treating detainees humanely, and providing the best possible living conditions and medical care in accordance with the principles of the Geneva Convention."

Other military and administration officials said the growing detainee population at Bagram, which rose from about 100 prisoners at the start of 2004 to as many as 600 at times last year, according to military figures, was in part a result of a Bush administration decision to shut off the flow of detainees into Guantánamo after the Supreme Court ruled that those prisoners had some basic due-process rights. The question of whether those same rights apply to detainees in Bagram has not been tested in court.

Until the court ruling, Bagram functioned as a central clearing house for the global fight against terror. Military and intelligence personnel there sifted through captured Afghan rebels and suspected terrorists seized in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere, sending the most valuable and dangerous to Guantánamo for extensive interrogation, and generally releasing the rest.

But according to interviews with current and former administration officials, the National Security Council effectively halted the movement of new detainees into Guantánamo at a cabinet-level meeting at the White House on Sept. 14, 2004.

Wary of further angering Guantánamo's critics, the council authorized a final shipment of 10 detainees eight days later from Bagram, the officials said. But it also indicated that it wanted to review and approve any Defense Department proposals for further transfers. Despite repeated requests from military officials in Afghanistan and one formal recommendation by a Pentagon working group, no such proposals have been considered, officials said.

"Guantánamo was a lightning rod," said a former senior administration official who participated in the discussions and who, like many of those interviewed, would discuss the matter in detail only on the condition of anonymity because of the secrecy surrounding it. "For some reason, people did not have a problem with Bagram. It was in Afghanistan."

Yet Bagram's expansion, which was largely fueled by growing numbers of detainees seized on the battlefield and a bureaucratic backlog in releasing many of the Afghan prisoners, also underscores the Bush administration's continuing inability to resolve where and how it will hold more valuable terror suspects.

Military officials with access to intelligence reporting on the subject said about 40 of Bagram's prisoners were Pakistanis, Arabs and other foreigners; some were previously held by the C.I.A. in secret interrogation centers in Afghanistan and other countries. Officials said the intelligence agency had been reluctant to send some of those prisoners on to Guantánamo because of the possibility that their C.I.A. custody could eventually be scrutinized in court.

Defense Department officials said the C.I.A.'s effort to unload some detainees from its so-called black sites had provoked tension among some officials at the Pentagon, who have frequently objected to taking responsibility for terror suspects cast off by the intelligence agency. The Defense Department "doesn't want to be the dumping ground," one senior official familiar with the interagency debates said. "There just aren't any good options."

A spokesman for the Central Intelligence Agency declined to comment.

Conditions at Bagram

The rising number of detainees at Bagram has been noted periodically by the military and documented by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which does not make public other aspects of its findings. But because the military does not identify the prisoners or release other information on their detention, it had not previously been clear that some detainees were being held there for such long periods.

The prison rolls would be even higher, officials noted, were it not for a Pentagon decision in early 2005 to delegate the authority to release them from the deputy secretary of defense to the military's Central Command, which oversees the 19,000 American troops in Afghanistan, and to the ground commander there.

Since January 2005, military commanders in Afghanistan have released about 350 detainees from Bagram in conjunction with an Afghan national reconciliation program, officials said. Even so, one Pentagon official said the current average stay of prisoners at Bagram was 14.5 months.

Officials said most of the current Bagram detainees were captured during American military operations in Afghanistan, primarily in the country's restive south, beginning in the spring of 2004.

"We ran a couple of large-scale operations in the spring of 2004, during which we captured a large number of enemy combatants," said Maj. Gen. Eric T. Olson, who was the ground commander for American troops in Afghanistan at the time. In subsequent remarks he added, "Our system for releasing detainees whose intelligence value turned out to be negligible did not keep pace with the numbers we were bringing in."

General Olson and other military officials said the growth at Bagram had also been a consequence of the closing of a smaller detention center at Kandahar and efforts by the military around the same time to move detainees more quickly out of "forward operating bases," in the Afghan provinces, where international human rights groups had cited widespread abuses.

At Bagram, reports of abuses have markedly declined since the violent deaths of two Afghan men held there in December 2002, Afghan and foreign human rights officials said.

After an Army investigation, the practices found to have caused those two deaths — the chaining of detainees by the arms to the ceilings of their cells and the use of knee strikes to the legs of disobedient prisoners by guards — were halted by early 2003. Other abusive methods, like the use of barking attack dogs to frighten new prisoners and the handcuffing of detainees to cell doors to punish them for talking, were phased out more gradually, military officials and former detainees said.

Human rights officials and former detainees said living conditions at the detention center had also improved.

Faced with serious overcrowding in 2004, the military initially built some temporary prison quarters and began refurbishing the main prison building at Bagram, a former aircraft-machine shop built by Soviet troops during their occupation of the country in the 1980's.

Corrals surrounded by stacked razor wire that had served as general-population cells gave way to less-forbidding wire pens that generally hold no more than 15 detainees, military officials said. The cut-off metal drums used as toilets were eventually replaced with flush toilets.

Last March, a nine-bed infirmary opened, and months later a new wing was built. The expansion brought improved conditions for the more than 250 prisoners who have been housed there, officials said.

Still, even the Afghan villagers released from Bagram over the past year tend to describe it as a stark, forsaken place.

"It was like a cage," said one former detainee, Hajji Lalai Mama, a 60-year-old tribal elder from the Spinbaldak district of southern Afghanistan who was released last June after nearly two years. Referring to a zoo in Pakistan, he added, "Like the cages in Karachi where they put animals: it was like that."

Guantánamo, which once kept detainees in wire-mesh cages, now houses them in an elaborate complex of concrete and steel buildings with a hospital, recreation yards and isolation areas. At Bagram, detainees are stripped on arrival and given orange uniforms to wear. They wash in collective showers and live under bright indoor lighting that is dimmed for only a few hours at night.

Abdul Nabi, a 24-year-old mechanic released on Dec. 15 after nine months, said some detainees frequently protested the conditions, banging on their cages and sometimes refusing to eat. He added that infractions of the rules were dealt with unsparingly: hours handcuffed in a smaller cell for minor offenses, and days in isolation for repeated transgressions.

"We were not allowed to talk very much," he said in an interview.

The Rights of Detainees

The most basic complaint of those released was that they had been wrongly detained in the first place. In many cases, former prisoners said they had been denounced by village enemies or arrested by the local police after demanding bribes they could not pay.

Human rights lawyers generally contend that the Supreme Court decision on Guantánamo, in the case of Rasul v. Bush, could also apply to detainees at Bagram. But lawyers working on behalf of the Guantánamo detainees have been reluctant to take cases from Bagram while the reach of the Supreme Court ruling, which is now the subject of further litigation, remains uncertain.

As at Guantánamo, the military has instituted procedures at Bagram intended to ensure that the detainees are in fact enemy combatants. Yet the review boards at Bagram give fewer rights to the prisoners than those used in Cuba, which have been criticized by human rights officials as kangaroo courts.

The two sets of panels that review the status of detainees at Guantánamo assign military advocates to work with detainees in preparing cases. Detainees are allowed to hear and respond to the allegations against them, call witnesses and request evidence. Only a small fraction of the hundreds of panels have concluded that the accused should be released.

The Bagram panels, called Enemy Combatant Review Boards, offer no such guarantees. Reviews are conducted after 90 days and at least annually thereafter, but detainees are not informed of the accusations against them, have no advocate and cannot appear before the board, officials said. "The detainee is not involved at all," one official familiar with the process said.

An official of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, Shamsullah Ahmadzai, noted that the Afghan police, prosecutors and the courts were all limited by law in how long they could hold criminal suspects.

"The Americans are detaining people without any legal procedures," Mr. Ahmadzai said in an interview in Kabul. "Prisoners do not have the opportunity to demonstrate their innocence."

Under a diplomatic arrangement reached last year after more than a year of negotiations, Afghan officials have agreed to take over custody of the roughly 450 Afghan detainees now at Bagram and another 100 Afghans held at Guantánamo once American-financed contractors refurbish a block of a decrepit former Soviet jail near Kabul as a high-security prison.

Because of the $10 million prison- construction project and an accompanying American program to train Afghan prison guards, both of which are to be completed in about a year, military officials in the region have abandoned any thought of sending any of the Afghan detainees at Bagram to Guantánamo. Still, many details of the deal remain uncertain, including when the new prison will be completed, which Afghan ministry will run it and how the detainees may be prosecuted in Afghan courts.

Pentagon officials said some part of the Bagram prison would probably continue to operate, holding the roughly 40 non-Afghan detainees there as well as others likely to be captured by American or NATO forces in continuing operations.

Prisoner Transfers Stalled

Until now, military officials at both Bagram and Guantánamo have been frustrated in their efforts to engineer the transfer to Cuba of another group of the most dangerous and valuable non-Afghan detainees held at Bagram, Pentagon officials said.

Three officials said commanders at Bagram first proposed moving about a dozen detainees to Guantánamo in late 2004 and then reiterated the request in early 2005. In an unusual step last spring, the officials added, intelligence specialists based at Guantánamo traveled to Bagram to assess the need for the transfer.

But as Central Command officials were forwarding a formal request to the Pentagon for the transfer of about a dozen high-level detainees, at least one of them, Omar al-Faruq, a former operative of Al Qaeda in Southeast Asia, escaped from the Bagram prison with three other men. Mr. Faruq had first been taken to Bagram by C.I.A. operatives in late summer 2002, but was removed from the prison about a month later, a soldier who served there said.

Two officials familiar with intelligence reports on the escape said that last July, after Mr. Faruq had been returned to Bagram by the C.I.A., he and the other men slipped out of a poorly fenced-in cell and, in the middle of the night, piled up some boxes and climbed through an open transom over one of the doors.

In August, weeks after the escape, a Defense Department working group called the Detainee Assistance Team endorsed the Central Command's recommendation for the transfer of nine Bagram detainees to Guantánamo, two officials familiar with the matter said.

Since then, the recommendation has languished in the Pentagon bureaucracy. Officials said it had apparently been stalled by aides who had declined to forward it to Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld out of concern that any new transfers to Guantánamo would stoke international criticism.

"Out of sight, out of mind," one of those officials said of the Bagram detainees.

Carlotta Gall, Ruhullah Khapalwak and Abdul Waheed Wafa contributed reporting from Afghanistan for this article.

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Pentagon: Iraqi troops downgraded; No Iraqi battalion capable of fighting without U.S. support

CNN.com
Pentagon: Iraqi troops downgraded
No Iraqi battalion capable of fighting without U.S. support

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The only Iraqi battalion capable of fighting without U.S. support has been downgraded to a level requiring them to fight with American troops backing them up, the Pentagon said Friday.

The battalion, made up of 700 to 800 Iraqi Army soldiers, has repeatedly been offered by the U.S. as an example of the growing independence of the Iraqi military.

The competence of the Iraqi military has been cited as a key factor in when U.S. troops will be able to return home.

"As we see more of these Iraqi forces in the lead, we will be able to continue with our stated strategy that says as Iraqi forces stand up, we will stand down," President Bush said last month. (Full story)

The battalion, according to the Pentagon, was downgraded from "level one" to "level two" after a recent quarterly assessment of its capabilities.

"Level one" means the battalion is able to fight on its own; "level two" means it requires support from U.S. troops; and "level three" means it must fight alongside U.S. troops.

Though officials would not cite a specific reason for downgrading the unit, its readiness level has dropped in the wake of a new commander and numerous changes in the combat and support units, officials said.

The battalion is still deployed, and its status as an independent fighting force could be restored any day, Pentagon officials said. It was not clear where the battalion is operating within Iraq.

According to the congressionally mandated Iraq security report released Friday, there are 53 Iraqi battalions at level two status, up from 36 in October. There are 45 battalions at level three, according to the report.

Overall, Pentagon officials said close to 100 Iraqi army battalions are operational, and more than 100 Iraq Security Force battalions are operational at levels two or three. The security force operations are under the direction of the Iraqi government.

The numbers are roughly the same as those given by the president last month when he said 125 Iraqi combat battalions were fighting the insurgency, 50 of them taking the lead.

"In January 2006, the mission is to continue to hand over more and more territory and more and more responsibility to Iraqi forces," Bush said. "That's progress."

CNN's Mike Mount contributed to this report.

Find this article at:
http://edition.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/02/24/iraq.security/index.html?section=cnn_topstories

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A Judicial Green Light for Torture

The New York Times
A Judicial Green Light for Torture

The administration's tendency to dodge accountability for lawless actions by resorting to secrecy and claims of national security is on sharp display in the case of a Syrian-born Canadian, Maher Arar, who spent months under torture because of United States action. A federal trial judge in Brooklyn has refused to stand up to the executive branch, in a decision that is both chilling and ripe for prompt overturning.

Mr. Arar, a 35-year-old software engineer whose case has been detailed in a pair of columns by Bob Herbert, was detained at Kennedy Airport in 2002 while on his way home from a family vacation. He was held in solitary confinement in a Brooklyn detention center and interrogated without proper access to legal counsel. Finally, he was shipped off to a Syrian prison. There, he was held for 10 months in an underground rat-infested dungeon and brutally tortured because officials suspected that he was a member of Al Qaeda. All this was part of a morally and legally unsupportable United States practice known as "extraordinary rendition," in which the federal government outsources interrogations to regimes known to use torture and lacking fundamental human rights protections.

The maltreatment of Mr. Arar would be reprehensible — and illegal under the United States Constitution and applicable treaties — even had the suspicions of terrorist involvement proven true. But no link to any terrorist organization or activity emerged, which is why the Syrians eventually released him. Mr. Arar then sued for damages.

The judge in the case, David Trager of Federal District Court in Brooklyn, did not dispute that United States officials had reason to know that Mr. Arar faced a likelihood of torture in Syria. But he took the rare step of blocking the lawsuit entirely, saying that the use of torture in rendition cases is a foreign policy question not appropriate for court review, and that going forward would mean disclosing state secrets.

It is hard to see why resolving Mr. Arar's case would necessitate the revelation of privileged material. Moreover, as the Supreme Court made clear in a pair of 2004 decisions rebuking the government for its policies of holding foreign terrorism suspects in an indefinite legal limbo in Guantánamo and elsewhere, even during the war on terror, the government's actions are subject to court review and must adhere to the rule of law.

With the Bush administration claiming imperial powers to detain, spy on and even torture people, and the Republican Congress stuck largely in enabling mode, the role of judges in checking executive branch excesses becomes all the more crucial. If the courts collapse when confronted with spurious government claims about the needs of national security, so will basic American liberties.

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Bush's Response To the Ports Deal Faulted as Tardy; By the Time President's Political Team Took Notice, Controversy Was an Uproar

washingtonpost.com
Bush's Response To the Ports Deal Faulted as Tardy
By the Time President's Political Team Took Notice, Controversy Was an Uproar

By Jim VandeHei and Paul Blustein
Washington Post Staff Writers

Sen. Charles E. Schumer, an outspoken liberal Democrat from New York, two weeks ago began publicly denouncing a deal to let a Middle Eastern firm take over terminal operations at six U.S. seaports. From the other end of the political spectrum, even more outspoken conservative radio host Michael Savage was doing the same -- and recruiting Republican lawmakers to his cause.

To anyone listening, it was clear that President Bush had a problem on his hands. But Bush was not listening. And his political team had its attention elsewhere. By the time they noticed, Bush's problem had grown a lot bigger.

A behind-the-scenes reconstruction of the ports deal's rapid evolution from obscurity to uproar shows how Bush was blindsided by the same emotion-laden politics of terrorism that he used to win elections in 2002 and 2004. It also raises anew questions of why the White House message machine, so sharply effective in the first term, seemingly has gone dull in the second.

It was on Feb. 13 that the Dubai Ports World deal -- after simmering unnoticed for months in the federal bureaucracy and the transportation trade press -- started to boil, as a result of Savage's blustery on-air alarms and an event by Schumer at the New York harbor with families who lost loved ones on Sept. 11, 2001.

It was not until Feb. 16 that Bush was informed by aides of the controversy -- and that his own administration had approved the port deal a month earlier. It was not until five days after that, on Feb. 21, that Bush spoke up in support of the port deal. By then, dozens of prominent lawmakers in both parties had joined Savage and Schumer in questioning the president's commitment to national security.

The consequences go well beyond political damage to Bush. Relations with the moderate Arab world may suffer as suspicions raised by lawmakers about a Middle Eastern company are now making headlines around the world. Congress is poised to rewrite the rules governing foreign investment, and possibly scuttle the deal altogether.

For a while, the effort by a major port operator based in the United Arab Emirates to take over U.S. operations of a British firm moved through government in a familiar manner. Investments that raise security concerns face scrutiny by a secretive interagency panel, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), consisting of 12 departments and agencies, which can either approve or reject transactions or insist on changes in the terms. People familiar with the process say the committee's deliberations rarely involve top White House officials or command the president's attention, and they did not in this case.

At the same time, White House officials well know that potentially explosive issues are regularly churning through the federal bureaucracy. An effective operation seeks to identify and respond to such matters before they become political problems. That plainly did not happen here, as even White House officials acknowledge.

The political breakdown was partly a matter of timing. The controversy started to build when Bush's top aides were consumed with the fallout of Vice President Cheney's recent hunting accident.

Some Republicans, however, think the episode highlights a structural problem: Without Bush's own reelection to worry about, White House aides are less alert to the political implications of fast-moving issues or unexpected events. Compounding problems, White House staffers have seemed exhausted in general for much of the year, according to people in close contact with them.

"My sense is the people who are over there now are working with a very pronounced double-edged sword: they have been there from the beginning, they are experienced, knowledgeable and they know how things work and to get things done -- but they are tired," said former Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer.

Senior White House aides concede their tardy response but faulted Cabinet officials for failing to alert the White House to the potential controversy.

Still most mystifying to some Republicans on Capitol Hill is why Bush waited five days after learning of growing concern about the deal to address it publicly, even as GOP governors and usually friendly commentators were speaking out in opposition. The White House has always lived by the adage that a president is either defining the issue, or risks being defined by opponents.

"It would have helped in a very extraordinary way for Bush to" share his side of the story, said Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.), who appeared on Savage's show early on and became a vocal critic of the plan. "He could have stymied the issue or at least clarified it."

The process that approved the Dubai Ports World transaction is designed to be politically insulated. The rules are based on the idea that the United States should be generally welcoming to capital from abroad, except for transactions that pose a genuine security risk.

"It's not at all equipped to handle the political or emotional issues. That's the main flaw," said Edward M. Graham, a fellow at the Institute for International Economics who is co-author of a forthcoming book on the panel.

The depth of that flaw is evident from the relatively low level of officialdom that participated in the CFIUS review of the ports transaction. At the Treasury Department, which chairs the panel, the highest-ranking official to know about the deal before the furor began to erupt over the weekend of Feb. 11-12 was Clay Lowery, the recently appointed assistant secretary for international affairs, a former career staffer at the Treasury and at the National Security Council.

At the Department of Homeland Security, it was Stewart A. Baker, the assistant secretary for policy, who acknowledged that he was caught flat-footed by the controversy: "I concluded, once we had the assurances we needed [about the security issues], that this was a relatively noncontroversial decision," he said in an interview. "So I didn't brief" either DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff or Deputy Secretary Michael P. Jackson.

The process began on Oct. 17, when representatives of the Dubai company informally approached the Treasury Department to disclose that they were planning to purchase the British firm, Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Co., according to testimony by administration officials at a Senate hearing last week. Treasury officials directed them to consult with Homeland Security because of the port security question.

The executives of Dubai Ports World -- several of whom are American -- well understood that they might face extensive scrutiny.

"You don't have to do this, but I brought a small team here [from Dubai] to meet with the CFIUS agencies in early December," said Edward H. "Ted" Bilkey, the company's chief operating officer and former U.S. Navy officer. The idea was to give the panel plenty of time even before the company formally filed to start a standard 30-day review.

Homeland Security officials, especially in Customs and Border Protection, had high regard for the company, which is owned by the government of Dubai and operates terminals in 19 ports in Asia, Europe and South America. It was the first in the Middle East to participate in a post-Sept. 11 program in which Customs agents are posted overseas to screen containers before they are loaded onto U.S.-bound ships. U.S. intelligence agencies -- who were asked on Nov. 2 for any information they had on the company -- produced nothing "derogatory" about it, Baker said.

Even so, the department had enough qualms to insist on a number of legally binding conditions for approving the deal -- a frequent CFIUS practice. The company pledged to maintain its participation in the Customs program, "and they agreed to open their books, and give us access to records, without any formal legal process," Baker said.

The department also wanted to ensure that the personnel at the U.S. terminals to be taken over by the company would remain almost entirely American. So it extracted a pledge that the company intended to keep the current management of U.S. operations in place.

At the Pentagon, meanwhile, officials were well aware of the United Arab Emirates' checkered history in combating terrorism; it was the home of two of the Sept. 11 hijackers and home of the banking system through which some of the hijackers' money flowed. But far overshadowing those concerns were the country's current role as a key U.S. ally in the Persian Gulf region, said Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon R. England, who noted at last week's hearing that more U.S. Navy ships dock at UAE ports than any port outside the United States.

Accordingly, once Dubai Ports World had agreed to the conditions required by Homeland Security, none of the agencies on CFIUS objected to the transaction when the 30-day review was completed on Jan. 17. If even one agency had objected, the matter would have gone to a 45-day investigation -- which would have required a presidential decision at the end. Moreover, a single dissent would have meant bringing the matter before higher-ranking officials in each department.

But instead, the matter stayed with assistant secretary-level officials, who told the company the transaction could go forward. Treasury officials planned to inform congressional leaders at a regularly scheduled quarterly meeting on Feb. 17. By then, however, the Associated Press had already reported a statement from the firm trumpeting its approval.

Schumer said he sensed the public would be outraged if they knew about the deal and heard bipartisan objections. His Feb. 13 press event was sparsely attended because New York was consumed by a snowstorm and Washington by the Cheney accident. But two days later, after a flurry of private discussions between Schumer and key Republicans, Foley and Rep. John E. Sweeney (R-N.Y.) were pressing Treasury Secretary John W. Snow and Chertoff in public hearings for details on the deal.

The next morning, White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr., alerted to the controversy by a lower-level aide in his office, briefed Bush, but there was a general feeling inside the White House that the political storm would blow over. Now, officials are ruing that judgment, and the failure to consult more broadly.

"We've learned from this that we have to make a more affirmative effort to give Congress the input they need to exercise their oversight function," said Deputy Treasury Secretary Robert M. Kimmitt. "Even in cases where security work is done diligently and professionally, we need to make sure broader considerations are taken into account."

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Hill Action Could Kill Planned Wind Farm

washingtonpost.com
Hill Action Could Kill Planned Wind Farm, Backers Say
Foes Worry About Offshore Energy Project's Impact on Shipping, Fishing, Beachfront Views in Mass.

By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer

BOSTON -- A proposal before Congress that would limit the construction of wind turbines near shipping lanes could effectively doom plans to build the country's first offshore wind farm near Massachusetts, the project's supporters say.

Officials at Cape Wind Associates LLC say that the rule, being considered as an amendment to a bill in a House-Senate conference committee, would rule out so many crucial sections of Nantucket Sound that there would not be enough space for their 130-windmill complex.

"This is a dire moment for us," said Mark Rodgers, a Cape Wind spokesman. He said the rule "would be totally fatal" for the project.

The Cape Wind project, begun four years ago, has proved consistently controversial: Though environmentalists have praised it for providing a renewable source of energy, Cape Wind has determined opponents who are concerned about its impact on fishing, navigation and beachfront views.

Those against it are a powerful and bipartisan group, including Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.).

The latest move against the wind project has come from Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska), chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. In a letter to his colleagues that was released by Cape Wind officials, Young has called for an amendment banning all wind turbines within 1.5 nautical miles of shipping and ferry lanes.

He said the ban was based on research in Britain, which found that the turbines' massive blades could interfere with shipboard radar. In the letter, Young singled out the Cape Wind site -- which is surrounded by sea routes between Cape Cod and the islands of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard -- as particularly unsafe.

"The Cape Wind proposal provides in some places only a 1,200-foot separation" between sea lanes and wind turbines, ". . . threatening loss of life, injury and pollution," the letter says. A spokesman for Young did not respond to calls for comment about the letter.

Officials at Cape Wind call the concerns about navigation a pretext for killing the project. They noted that a risk assessment completed by a contractor for the Army Corps of Engineers in 2003 found that "the presence of the Wind Park . . . is not expected to create negative impacts to navigational safety."

The project has been closely watched because it is one of the most advanced proposals to build a wind farm in U.S. waters. The country has numerous windmill farms on land, but experts believe offshore turbines could take advantage of strong sea winds and the ease of transporting electricity to nearby coastal cities.

Its supporters say that, in normal wind conditions, the Cape Wind project could provide three-fourths of the power needed by Cape Cod and the nearby islands. After a tortured history in the federal bureaucracy, the federal Minerals Management Service is scheduled to render a final verdict on it early next year.

Supporters said that the move to stop the project was particularly galling in light of President Bush's recent push for the development of alternative and renewable energy sources such as wind.

"This is sort of backdoor politics at its worst, for the worst possible reasons," said Nathanael Greene, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

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Homeland Security Protested Ports Deal

Yahoo! News
Homeland Security Protested Ports Deal
By TED BRIDIS, Associated Press Writer

The Homeland Security Department objected at first to a United Arab Emirates company's taking over significant operations at six U.S. ports. It was the lone protest among members of the government committee that eventually approved the deal without dissent.

The department's early objections were settled later in the government's review of the $6.8 billion deal after Dubai-owned DP World agreed to a series of security restrictions.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and other congressional leaders, the company and Bush administration officials were working on a compromise intended to derail plans by Republicans and Democrats for legislation next week that would force a new investigation of security issues relating to the deal. Talks were to continue through the weekend.

"My comfort level is good, but I have 99 other United States senators who need the opportunity to ask their questions," Frist told the Lexington Herald-Leader before speaking at a Republican dinner Saturday evening in Lexington, Ky.

"We're behind the president 100 percent," he added. "We believe the decision in all likelihood is absolutely the right one."

Under one proposal being discussed, DP World would seek new approval of the deal from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, given the company's surprise decision Thursday to indefinitely postpone its takeover of U.S. port operations. Other proposals included a new, intensive 45-day review of the deal by the government — something the White House had refused to consider as recently as Friday.

Rep. Peter King (news, bio, voting record), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said discussions among congressional leaders centered on that issue. "It's my understanding that they are trying to build support for a deal involving a new 45-day investigation," he said.

Frist, R-Tenn., said that while legislation may not be necessary now, having "30 to 45 days" to step back and evaluate the deal still could be necessary.

"If there's some question about the diagnosis, then maybe we need to get a second opinion," said Frist, a former heart surgeon.

King, R-N.Y., said he would need to see all the details of a compromise before deciding if it met all of his concerns, or met the demands of the legislation he planned to offer.

Despite persistent criticism from Republicans and Democrats, the president has defended his administration's approval of the ports deal and threatened to veto any measures in Congress that would block it. The company's voluntary delay in taking over most operations at the six U.S. ports did little to quell a political furor or appease skeptical members of Congress that the deal does not pose any increased risks to the U.S. from terrorism. Republican House and Senate leaders are to meet Tuesday to discuss how to proceed.

The company declined Saturday to discuss any potential compromise that may be in the works.

A DP World executive said the company would agree to tougher security restrictions to win congressional support only if the same restrictions applied to all U.S. port operators. The company earlier had struck a more conciliatory stance, saying it would do whatever Bush asked to salvage the agreement.

"Security is everybody's business," senior vice president Michael Moore told The Associated Press. "We're going to have a very open mind to legitimate concerns. But anything we can do, any way to improve security, should apply to everybody equally."

The administration approved the ports deal on Jan. 17 after DP World agreed during secret negotiations to cooperate with law enforcement investigations in the future and make other concessions.

Some lawmakers have challenged the adequacy of a classified intelligence assessment crucial to assuring the administration that the deal was proper. The report was assembled during four weeks in November by analysts working for the director of national intelligence.

The report concluded that U.S. spy agencies were "unable to locate any derogatory information on the company," according to a person familiar with the document. This person spoke only on condition of anonymity because the report was classified.

Sen. Carl Levin (news, bio, voting record), D-Mich., and others have complained that the intelligence report focused only on information the agencies collected about DP World and did not examine reported links between UAE government officials and al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden before the Sept. 11 attacks.

The uproar over DP World has exposed how the government routinely approves deals involving national security without the input of senior administration officials or Congress.

President Bush, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and even Treasury Secretary John Snow, who oversees the government committee that approved the deal, all say they did not know about the purchase until after it was finalized. The work was done mostly by assistant secretaries.

Snow now says he may consider changes in the approval process so lawmakers are better alerted after such deals get the go-ahead.

Stewart Baker, a senior Homeland Security official, said he was the sole representative on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States who objected to the ports deal. Baker said he later changed his vote after DP World agreed to the security conditions. Other officials confirmed Baker's account.

"We were not prepared to sign off on the deal without the successful negotiation of the assurances," Baker told the AP.

Officials from the White House, CIA, departments of State, Treasury, Justices, and others looked for guidance from Homeland Security because it is responsible for seaports. "We had the most obvious stake in the process," Baker said.

Baker acknowledged that a government audit of security practices at the U.S. ports in the takeover has not been completed as part of the deal. "We had the authority to do an audit earlier," Baker said.

The audit will help evaluate DP World's security programs to stop smuggling and detect illegal shipments of nuclear materials at its seaport operations in New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami and Philadelphia.

The administration privately disclosed the status of the security audit to senators during meetings about improving reviews of future business deals involving foreign buyers. Officials did not suggest the audit's earlier completion would have affected the deal's approval.

New Jersey's Democratic governor, who is suing to block the deal, said in his party's weekly radio address on Saturday that the administration failed to properly investigate the UAE's record on terrorism.

"We were told that the president didn't know about the sale until after it was approved. For many Americans, regardless of party, this lack of disciplined review is unacceptable," Jon Corzine said.

A federal judge in New Jersey has ordered the government to file a written response to Corzine's suit by Monday and scheduled a hearing for Wednesday.

Bush's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, said there was no going back on the deal.

_____

Associated Press Writers Devlin Barrett and Liz Sidoti in Washington contributed to this report.

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Al-Qaida Vows Attacks After Foiled Bid

Yahoo! News
Al-Qaida Vows Attacks After Foiled Bid
By DONNA ABU-NASR, Associated Press Writer

Al-Qaida on Saturday vowed more attacks a day after an attempt to bomb the world's biggest oil processing complex showed the group still can strike inside Saudi Arabia despite the arrests of hundreds of suspects.

A strike on the Abqaiq complex, near Saudi Arabia's eastern Persian Gulf coast, could have been devastating. Nearly two-thirds of the country's oil flows through the facility for processing before export.

Foiling the attack demonstrated Saudi Arabia's success in putting tough security around the oil industry, the source of the royal family's wealth, oil analysts said.

Two suicide bombers in explosives-packed cars traded fire with police at a checkpoint before a gate in the first of three fences around the sprawling, heavily guarded complex. One bomber collided with the closed gate, exploding and blowing a hole in the fence, a senior Saudi security official said.

The second bomber drove through the hole before police opened fire, detonating his car, the official added on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Witnesses on Friday reported that security forces traded fire with gunmen outside the facility after the explosions and that a hunt for attackers continued for hours. Saudi officials have not reported the capture of any assailants.

At least two attackers and two security guards were killed, the state news agency reported. Eight foreign workers at the facility — all from South Asia — were wounded, a former Aramco employee told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. Aramco is the state oil company that owns the facility.

It was the first attack on Saudi Arabia's vital oil infrastructure. The Saudi branch of al-Qaida, which claimed the attack, warned in an Internet statement Saturday that suicide bombers will target more oil facilities.

"There are more like them who are racing toward martyrdom and eager to fight the enemies of God," the posting said. "You will see things that will make you happy, God willing."

In a later statement, the group said it carried out the attack "based on the instructions of our leader, Osama bin Laden" and identified the two slain suicide bombers as Abdullah Abdul-Aziz al-Tweijri and Mohammed Saleh al-Gheith.

It denied that the bombing was foiled and gave its own account of the attack. It claimed that Al-Qaida fighters overcame guards at the gate, killing three and forcing others to flee. The fighters then opened the gate for a car that entered and blew up, it said, without specifying what the blast targeted.

The authenticity of the statements could not be independently confirmed.

Crude oil prices jumped by more than $2 a barrel on world markets after the attack. But Saudi Oil Minister Ali Naimi swiftly issued assurances that the violence did not affect oil operations.

On Saturday he stressed to U.S. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez at a meeting in Riyadh that the kingdom would "ensure the flow of oil despite the terrorist threats."

Al-Qaida militants launched a campaign of violence in Saudi Arabia — bin Laden's birthplace — in 2003. Attacks on oil infrastructure could represent a new tactic.

Previous targets were peripherally related to the oil industry — expatriate oil workers living and working in the kingdom. Bin Laden first called for attacks on oil facilities in December 2004.

Analysts and diplomats said Friday's events were proof that increased security at oil installations has paid off for the Saudi kingdom.

"It's a success story," said Fareed Mohamedi, head of country analysis at Washington-based PFC Energy. "It's a bit too close for comfort, but it certainly shows that they can repel these types of attacks."

Mohamedi said the Saudi government typically places remote sensors in the desert surrounding oil complexes and several fences around the facilities themselves. About 25,000 security personnel man checkpoints on roads leading to the facilities and gates into the compounds.

Saudi security forces have largely had al-Qaida's branch in the kingdom on the run over the past year, arresting hundreds of suspects. They killed or captured all but one of the top 26 militants on a most-wanted list issued in December 2003, then did the same with 10 of the 15 on a second list issued in June.

Friday's attack was the first major strike since December 2004, when five gunmen attacked the U.S. Consulate in the Saudi port city of Jiddah. Five consulate employees from the Middle East and Asia and four attackers were killed. Ten people were wounded.

Analysts said it was too early to say if the Abqaiq bombing signaled a new, aggressive campaign. But the choice of oil facilities should increase concerns, they said.

"If the Saudi system goes down, then you will have a real problem, and for oil prices the sky is the limit," Mohamedi said. "You're attacking the absolute heart of the world oil system."

Saudi Arabia holds over 260 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, a quarter of the world's total. It currently puts out about 9.5 million barrels per day, or 11 percent of global consumption.

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Bolton Blasts 'Sex and Corruption' at U.N.

Yahoo! News
Bolton Blasts 'Sex and Corruption' at U.N.
By PAUL BURKHARDT, Associated Press Writer

The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations said Saturday that the world body is hobbled "by bad management, by sex and corruption" and a lack of confidence in its ability to carry out missions.

John Bolton also criticized the U.N.'s budget, noting that two-thirds of members pay only 20 percent of the cost.

"We find an organization that is deeply troubled by bad management, by sex and corruption and by a growing lack of confidence in its ability to carry out missions that are given to them," Bolton told an audience at a Columbia Law School symposium held by the Federalist Society, a conservative law organization.

Bolton, a longtime critic of the U.N., has been leading U.S. efforts to reform the United Nations after the oil-for-food scandal and sex scandals involving U.N. peacekeepers.

The oil-for-food program, established in 1996 with Iraq's economy crippled by sanctions, allowed Saddam Hussein to sell oil in exchange for humanitarian goods meant for his people.

An inquiry by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker found that Saddam sold oil to foreign countries in hopes of getting their support for lifting U.N. sanctions, and enriched himself by $1.8 billion through a kickback scheme. Companies and politicians essentially paid him for the right to do business, circumventing the U.N. program.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Thursday is expected to unveil his major overhaul for management reform for the United Nations.

Bolton on Saturday also described the U.N. as inept for not being able to stop Iran's nuclear development and "devaluing the IAEA," the International Atomic Energy Agency.

"Through all of this, the U.S. has been encouraged by Europe to pursue action through the U.N.," Bolton said, adding that patience of the administration was wearing thin.

Bolton was given a recess appointment by President Bush as ambassador to the United Nations on Aug. 1 after failing to win confirmation in the U.S. Senate. Because of the recess appointment, Bolton's term expires when the current Congress concludes on Jan. 3, 2007.

Bolton — who has a reputation for brilliance, obstinacy and speaking his mind — said in 1994 that it wouldn't make a "bit of difference" if the United Nations lost the top 10 stories from its 39-story headquarters.

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Why Are Any U.S.Ports Owned or Operated by Foreign Corporations or Governments?

huffingtonpost.com
Why Are Any U.S.Ports Owned or Operated by Foreign Corporations or Governments?

[Editors Note: This is exactly the same question posed yesterday in an article on The Op Ed Page ( http://TheOpEdPage.blogspot.com ) titled "Dubai Ports World and the Bush administration: Connecting the dots."]

There are plenty of good, non-jingoist, reasons to oppose the sale of 6 US ports to a corporation controlled by the government of the United Arab Emirates. But the bigger question is: why are US ports and other strategic infrastructure being privatized, particularly to companies owned by foreign governments?

Before the UAE controversy erupted, most Americans probably did not know that many US ports are already owned or run by private corporations, some of which are owned by foreign governments.

According to the New York Times, foreign-based companies own and/or manage over 30% of US port terminals. According to Time Magazine, over 80% of the terminals in the Port of Los Angeles are run by foreign-owned companies, including the government of Singapore. In fact, APL Limited, controlled by the Singapore government, operates ports in Los Angeles, Oakland, Seattle and Dutch Harbor, Alaska. Chinese government-owned companies control terminals in the Port of Los Angeles and other West Coast ports, as well as both ends of the Panama Canal.

You don’t have to be an economic nationalist to think that certain strategic infrastructure should not be owned by foreign companies, particularly those owned by foreign governments. Ports certainly fit into that category. Other examples include airports, railroads, and nuclear power plants. If we’re going to sell off strategic facilities to foreign companies and governments, why not sell off the FAA, the Nuclear Regulatory Agency, or the New York City Police? (I’m sure some Saudi or Chinese security personnel know how to crack heads better than New York’s finest.)

Senators Clinton and Menendez have announced that they are introducing legislation to prohibit companies owned or controlled by foreign governments from purchasing port operations in the United States. But they should go one step further. Profit-making corporations, foreign or domestic, should not be allowed to own key strategic infrastructure. Corporation’s responsibility is to their shareholders, not to the nation. If there’s a conflict between security and profits, profits will come first. Strategic infrastructure should be owned and controlled by institutions that put the interests of the American people above profits. This could take the form of government ownership, or more likely ownership by non-profit joint government/private entities.

In the end, the issue comes down to the Bush Administration’s ideology of privatizing everything from social security to port ownership.

The Democrats, if they’re not too timid, should expand congressional hearings on the UAE deal to include the larger issues of port security and the ownership and control of America’s strategic infrastructure. They should make clear that while Bush may sacrifice constitutional liberties in the name of national security, he will sacrifice national security to further the interests of the global business elite.

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Reaping What You Sow

The New York Times
Reaping What You Sow

It's easy to imagine how the Bush administration might have defused much of the uproar over a deal to allow a company owned by the Dubai royal family in the United Arab Emirates to run six American ports. Members of Congress asked for consultation and reassurance that the deal would not compromise already iffy security at one of the most vulnerable parts of the nation's homeland defense system. What they got was a veto threat and a presidential suggestion that they were all anti-Arab.

If the administration is in trouble with Congress, it's long overdue. For years now, the White House has stonewalled Congressional committees attempting to carry out their oversight duties. Administration officials appearing before Senate and House committees have given testimony that was, to put it generously, knowingly misleading. Requests for information have been simply waved away with an invocation of national security. Just recently, the Senate Intelligence Committee attempted to get information on the administration's extralegal wiretapping, but was told that it would compromise national security to tell the senators how the program works, how it is reviewed, how much information is collected and how that information is used.

The chickens are coming home to roost. A White House that routinely brands anyone who disagrees with its positions as soft on terrorism is now complaining that election-bound lawmakers are callously using the ports deal to frighten voters. A White House that invaded Iraq as a substitute for defeating Al Qaeda is frustrated because Congress is using the company, Dubai Ports World, as a stand-in for all the intractable perils of the Middle East.

As satisfying as it may be to see the tables turning, though, there is a serious issue at hand. The United Arab Emirates deserves a serious, respectful explanation if Dubai Ports World is not going to be given the right to manage American ports — a right that has already been granted to companies from countries like Britain and China.

The United Arab Emirates is an ally. But the money to finance the Sept. 11 attacks flowed through that country, according to the 9/11 commission. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the rogue Pakistani nuclear scientist, sent equipment to Libya and Iran through Dubai, helping to create nuclear weapons capacity for those two regimes. And while port managers have little if anything to do with inspecting cargo or checking manifests, they are responsible for hiring guards, securing the areas under their control and working with Customs and Homeland Security officials.

The administration argues that the ports deal was thoroughly vetted, and that proper safeguards are in place to prevent any possible security breaches. That argument might hold if the White House had a good track record on these kinds of sweeping assurances.

As it is, we know that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States approved the sale in what appears to have been handled as a fairly routine matter. We know that same committee has been sharply criticized by the Government Accountability Office for letting the desire for foreign investment override concerns for national security. And we also know that the Homeland Security Department, which has done nothing to earn the public's trust as of yet, did not request any extended review of the deal. That is what many members of Congress are asking for now.

One reason for the current uproar is the halfhearted way the Bush administration has dealt with the issue of port security. Screening incoming containers for nuclear devices is one of the most important missions in any war on terrorism. But the White House has never made it a top priority, and it has opposed those in Congress who have.

The president's main budget priority continues to be tax cuts, and he has not fought for the money needed to keep the ports secure. The administration has worked to eliminate a port-security grant program from the budget. The money that has been available has not been used effectively. The Homeland Security Department's own inspector general reported last year that 80 percent of the allocated funds had not yet been spent, and that scarce dollars for ports were going to places like Martha's Vineyard, which are not likely terrorist targets.

The management of cargo inspections has also been criticized as woefully inadequate. A Government Accountability Office report last year found serious deficiencies in things like the reliability of radiation detection equipment and decisions about which and how many incoming containers to inspect.

Mr. Bush and his defenders say the last thing America needs is more bad publicity in the Arab world. They're right. But this problem won't be resolved by the administration's standard demands that Congress and the public should let it do what it wants and trust Mr. Bush's good judgment.

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IRS finds 'disturbing' political activity by charities in 2004

USA TODAY
IRS finds 'disturbing' political activity by charities in 2004
By Mary Dalrymple, Associated Press

WASHINGTON — IRS examinations found nearly three out of four churches, charities and other civic groups suspected of having violated restraints on political activity in the 2004 election actually did so, the agency said Friday.

Most of the examinations that have concluded found only a single, isolated incidence of prohibited campaign activity.

In three cases, however, the IRS uncovered violations egregious enough to recommend revoking the groups' tax-exempt status.

The vast majority of charities and churches followed the law, but the examinations found a "disturbing" amount of political intervention in the 2004 elections, IRS Commissioner Mark Everson said.

"It's disturbing not because it's pervasive, but because it has the potential to really grow and have a very bad impact on the integrity of charities and churches," Everson said in an interview.

The tax agency looked only at charities, churches and other tax-exempt organizations referred to the IRS for potentially violating laws that bar them from participating in or intervening in elections, including advocating for or against any candidate.

Those referred to the IRS represent a fraction of more than 1 million tax-exempt organizations organized under section 501(c)(3) of the tax law.

The IRS examined 110 organizations referred to the tax agency for potential violations, and 28 cases remain open.

Among 82 closed cases, the IRS found prohibited politicking and sent a written warning to 55 organizations and assessed a penalty tax against one group. Those organizations included 37 churches and 19 other organizations.

In the three additional cases in which the IRS recommended revoking tax-exempt status, none of the organizations were churches. The agency did not identify the three.

The IRS found tax violations unrelated to politics in five cases. Examinations of the 18 remaining groups did not turn up any wrongdoing.

In some cases, the IRS found flagrant violations of the law. In others, charities did not understand their obligations. Many activities fall into an ambiguous area that requires closer scrutiny of context and timing.

"There are very few places where you can draw bright lines," Everson said. "People have to think about this."

Among the prohibited activities, the examiners found that charities and churches distributed printed material supporting a preferred candidate and assembled improper voter guides or candidate ratings.

Religious leaders had used the pulpit to endorse or oppose a particular candidate, and some groups had shown preferential treatment to candidates by letting them speak at functions.

Other charities and churches had made improper cash contributions to a candidate's political campaign.

The IRS said the cases covered "the full spectrum" of political viewpoints.

The tax agency set up a task force in 2004 to review allegations of improper political activity. The special procedures, revealed shortly before the election, drew criticism from some tax-exempt groups.

An audit by Treasury Department inspectors found nothing inappropriate in the examinations, but it faulted the IRS for creating the appearance of political motivation by waiting too long to announce the project and contact organizations.

The IRS said it plans to continue using the task force, and its speedier procedures, for this year's election and in the future. It also released detailed guidance to charities and churches about the prohibitions against political activities.

Find this article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/taxes/2006-02-24-irs-charities-political_x.htm?csp=34

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Al Qaeda claims responsibility for Saudi attack

Reuters
Al Qaeda claims responsibility for Saudi attack
By Souhail Karam

ABQAIQ, Saudi Arabia (Reuters) - Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for Friday's attack on a Saudi oil facility at Abqaiq, when security forces fired at suicide bombers trying to storm the world's biggest oil processing plant.

Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi said oil and gas output was unaffected by the "terrorist attempt" -- the first direct strike on a Saudi oil target since al Qaeda militants launched attacks aimed at toppling Saudi Arabia's pro-Western monarchy in 2003.

In a statement posted on a Web site often used by militants, Saudi-born Osama bin Laden's group said two of its members carried out the operation.

"With grace from God alone, hero mujahideen from the squadron of Sheikh Osama bin Laden succeeded today (Friday)...in penetrating a plant for refining oil and gas in the town of Abqaiq in the eastern part of the peninsula, and then allowed two car bombs in driven by two martyrdom seekers," it said.

It said the raid was within the framework of efforts by al Qaeda to prevent the theft of Muslims' wealth by "crusaders and Jews" and to force "infidels" out of the peninsula.

Oil prices jumped $2 a barrel on news of the attack in the world's largest oil exporter, which came a year after bin Laden urged his supporters to hit Gulf oil targets.

In Abqaiq, a guard manning an outer gate of the facility said security forces were combing the plant in search of any militants hiding there. "The security situation is still unstable," said the guard, ushering people away.

Saudi security adviser Nawaf Obaid said security forces fired on three cars at the outer gates of the Abqaiq facility, 1.5 km (one mile) from the main entrance.

PACKED WITH EXPLOSIVES

One car was carrying gunmen and two others, packed with explosives, rammed the gates, he said. All the attackers were killed. Security sources in Riyadh said four militants and two security officers died and two other officers were wounded.

Mohammad al-Merri, a relative of one of the officers killed, said the militants were able to penetrate the first checkpoint leading to the facility. "They opened fire and killed two officers after the guards at the second checkpoint became suspicious of them," he told Reuters in Abqaiq.

Security sources said the blast after the shootout slightly injured eight workers, including some from the Indian subcontinent.

Dubai-based Al Arabiya television said the attackers used cars bearing the logo of Saudi state-owned oil company Aramco.

Residents said they heard the blast from about two km (more than a mile) away, then saw smoke rising from the site.

Naimi, quoted by the Saudi Press Agency, said a small fire broke out after the explosion but was quickly brought under control.

It was the first major strike by militants in Saudi Arabia since suicide bombers tried to storm the Interior Ministry in Riyadh in December 2004.

MOST VULNERABLE POINT

Most Saudi oil is exported from the Gulf via the huge producing, pumping and processing facility at Abqaiq, also known locally as Baqiq, in the mainly Shi'ite Eastern Province.

The prospect of an attack on Saudi crude facilities has deeply worried nations reliant on Saudi oil, which makes up one-sixth of the world's exports, or 7.5 million barrels a day.

Former Middle East CIA field officer Robert Baer has described Abqaiq as "the most vulnerable point and most spectacular target in the Saudi oil system."

Aramco says it has the tightest security at all its oil plants, including helicopters, cameras, motion detectors and thousands of armed guards.

"The security measures at the oil facilities are better than at the royal palaces," said al Qaeda expert Fares bin Houzam.

Abqaiq handles crude pumped from the giant Ghawar field and ships it off to terminals at Ras Tanura -- the world's biggest offshore oil loading facility -- and Juaymah. It also pumps oil westwards across the kingdom to Red Sea export terminals.

"Abqaiq is the world's most important oil facility," said Gary Ross, CEO at PIRA Energy consultancy in New York. "This just emphasizes fears over global oil supply security when we're already facing major ongoing risks in Nigeria, Iran and Iraq."

Officials say about 144 foreigners and Saudis, including security forces, and 120 militants have died in militant attacks and clashes with police since May 2003, when al Qaeda suicide bombers hit three Western housing compounds in Riyadh.

(Additional reporting by Ghaida Ghantous, Inal Ersan, Miral Fahmy and Amil Khan in Dubai; Richard Mably and Peg Mackey in London; Caroline Drees in Washington; Andrew Hammond)

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Experts see medical ethics violations at Guantanamo

Reuters
Experts see medical ethics violations at Guantanamo
By Alan Elsner

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Doctors and psychologists at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay are taking part in practices, including force feeding, that violate medical ethics, say ethicists and medical associations.

Doctors at Guantanamo have inserted feeding tubes through the noses of prisoners on hunger strike. Psychiatrists and psychologists have observed harsh interrogations and advised interrogators on ways to persuade detainees to cooperate.

"These are fundamental violations. When doctors join the military, their medical ethics should not change. Medical personnel should not participate in any procedures harmful to the patient," said Leonard Rubinstein, executive director of Physicians for Human Rights.

The United States acknowledges using some aggressive interrogation techniques but insists it does not torture of detainees. But a U.N. human rights team this month said the treatment of detainees "amounted to torture."

The United States is holding around 500 suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Many have been there for over four years, all but a handful without charges.

The debate over medical ethics has heated up with the recent disclosure that hunger strikers at Guantanamo had been forcibly tied down in "restraint chairs" for force feedings. Some detainees said the feedings had been made intentionally painful to break the hunger strike.

Defense Department officials denied this, and said they were acting to keep the prisoners alive.

In a letter last month to David Nicholl, chairman of the British Medical Association's ethics committee, the chief medical officer at Guantanamo, Capt. John Edmondson, said the detainees' motivation was to protest their confinement rather than to kill themselves. He said his staff was "providing nutritional supplementation on a voluntary basis to detainees who wish to protest their confinement by not taking oral nourishment."

Officers said they were proud that not a single detainee had died at the prison and were determined to maintain that record.

ORGANIZATIONS SLOW TO ACT

U.S. professional medical associations have been slow to take a position on the ethics of such practices as force feeding and coercive interrogations but that is now changing.

The American Medical Association has said that medical ethics preclude physician participation in the intentional infliction of physical or mental harm.

On force feeding, the AMA says: "When a patient is capable of forming an unimpaired or rational judgment concerning the consequences of refusing nourishment, a physician should respect such a refusal."

Steven Miles of the University of Minnesota's Center for Bioethics said medical organizations had been reluctant to speak out for fear of alienating politicians whose support they need on issues such as malpractice reform, but the flow of news from Guantanamo had forced their hand.

"There's enough smoke now to suggest that bad things are happening," he said.

Last October, the Pentagon flew several leaders of U.S. medical organizations to Guantanamo to dispel their concerns but allowed them no access to detainees.

A month later, the assembly of the American Psychiatric Association endorsed a statement that psychiatrists "should not participate or serve as consultants for coercive interrogations involving methods such as degradation, threats, isolation, imposition of fear, humiliation, sleep deprivation" and others widely reported to have been used at Guantanamo.

And an American Psychological Association task force last year said psychologists could ethically serve in consultative roles to interrogations as long as they stayed within the bounds of their professional code of conduct which forbids torture or cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment.

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Washington told to justify port deal in court

Reuters
Washington told to justify port deal in court
By Jon Hurdle

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The Bush administration was ordered by a U.S. federal judge on Friday to explain why it did not give New Jersey officials documents and information Washington had about a deal allowing an Arab company to take over management of a container terminal in Newark.

U.S. District Court Judge Jose Linares signed an order demanding to know why the government did not carry out a full investigation into the change of ownership of the container terminal at Port Newark.

The judge set a hearing for Wednesday and said in the order he would issue a preliminary injunction blocking the deal, pending a full investigation, unless he was satisfied with Washington's answers.

The judge asked in the order that federal officials explain why New Jersey officials were not given the same documents and information that Washington used to approve the deal, under which state-owned Dubai Ports World would take over management from the British company P&O.

On Thursday, the State of New Jersey sued the federal government to block the deal on the grounds it violated the 10th Amendment, which says states control anything not explicitly mentioned in the U.S. Constitution.

Earlier, New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine urged the governors of states with ports affected by the deal -- Louisiana, New York, Florida, Connecticut, Maryland and Pennsylvania -- to join the lawsuit.

Democrat Corzine issued the invitation in letters to each governor, saying the lawsuit "will seek to enjoin this sale of vital assets to a foreign nation without our states having had the opportunity to determine the extent of the threat to the safety of our citizens."

The latest developments came as a second lawsuit was filed in New Jersey over the controversial deal.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey filed a lawsuit on Friday to stop the change of management of its container terminal at Port Newark in New Jersey.

The authority, jointly owned by the states of New York and New Jersey, said the deal violates the terms of P&O's lease.

The transaction is part of a $6.85 billion deal under which the United Arab Emirates company Dubai Ports World DPW would manage terminals at six major U.S. ports.

The plan has sparked protests from federal and local lawmakers and officials who fear the ports' security will be hurt if they are managed by a company whose owner has been accused of having links with terrorist groups.

The Port Authority said it has a right to review changes in port management under the existing lease agreement. The lawsuit, filed in the Superior Court in Newark, urged the court to declare that the purchase of P&O requires consent of the Port Authority under the lease, that the container terminal is in breach of its lease, and that the lease is terminated.

The suit names P&O Ports North America, and Port Newark Container Terminal LLC as defendants.

U.S. lawmakers opposed to the takeover have cited links between UAE and al Qaeda but President George W. Bush has defended the deal, calling the UAE an ally in his war on terrorism.

"The Port Authority has been deprived of its right to conduct a thorough review of the purchase ... of the identity, qualifications, experience and reputation of the purchasers ... and of the proposed impact that the change may have on the control and ownership," the lawsuit said.

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Did the White House "Authorize" Leaks to Woodward? And did those leaks damage national security?

huffingtonpost.com
Did the White House "Authorize" Leaks to Woodward?
Murray Waas

Did the Bush administration "authorize" the leak of classified information to Bob Woodward? And did those leaks damage national security?

The vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) made exactly that charge tonight in a letter to John Negroponte, the Director of National Intelligence. What prompted Rockefeller to write Negroponte was a recent op-ed in the New York Times by CIA director Porter Goss complaining that leaks of classified information were the fault of "misguided whistleblowers."

Rockefeller charged in his letter that the most "damaging revelations of intelligence sources and methods are generated primarily by Executive Branch officials pushing a particular policy, and not by the rank-and-file employees of intelligence agencies."

Later in the same letter, Rockefeller said: "Given the Administration's continuing abuse of intelligence information for political purposes, its criticism of leaks is extraordinarily hypocritical. Preventing damage to intelligence sources and methods from media leaks will not be possible until the highest level of the Administration cease to disclose classified information on a classified basis for political purposes."

Exhibit A for Rockefeller: Woodward's book, Bush at War.

Here is what Rockefeller had to say:

In his 2002 book Bush at War, Bob Woodward described almost unfettered access to classified material of the most sensitive nature. According to his account, he was provided information related to sources and methods, extremely sensitive covert actions, and foreign intelligence liaison relationships. It is no wonder, as Director Goss wrote, "because of the number of recent news reports discussing our relationships with other intelligence services, some of these partners have even informed the C.I.A. that they are reconsidering their participation of some of our most important antiterrorism ventures."

I wrote both former Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) George Tenet and Acting DCI John McLaughlin seeking to determine what steps were being taken to address the appalling disclosures contained in Bush at War. The only response I received was to indicate that the leaks had been authorized by the Administration. The CIA has still not responded to a follow-up letter I sent a year and half ago on September 1, 2004, trying to pin down which officials were authorized to meet with Mr. Woodward and by whom, and what intelligence information was conveyed during these authorized exchanges.

Were leaks of classified information "authorized" to Woodward? Rockefeller's letter says exactly that. And among other things, it is well known and has been reported long ago that one of Woodward's sources for both of his books about the Bush presidency was then-VicePresidential chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, who is portrayed in quite a flattering manner in both.

Rockefeller said in his letter that the President's directing of administration officials to co-operate with the administration-friendly Woodward was only one example of such "authorized leaks".

Rockefeller said elsewhere in his letter:

On February 9th, the National Journal reported that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby told a grand jury that he was 'authorized' by Vice President Cheney and other White House superiors to disclose classified information from a National Intelligence Estimate to the press to defend the Administration's use of pre-war intelligence in making the case to go to war with Iraq...

This blatant abuse of intelligence information for political purposes is inexcusable, but all to common. Throughout this period leading up to the Iraq war the Administration selectively declassified or leaked information related to Iraq's acquisition of aluminum tubes, the alleged purchase of uranium, the non-existent operational connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and numerous other issues.

The White House is declining tonight to comment on Rockefeller's letter, as is Woodward. (If either of them does at some point have something to say, either to me, or elsewhere, I will update this post accordingly.)

Did the leaks to Woodward damage national security? Michael Scheuer, the CIA's former head of the CIA's Bin Laden Unit, wrote in his book Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror:

After reading Mr. Woodward's Bush at War, it seems to me that the U.S. officials who either approved or participated in passing the information--in documents and via interviews--that is the heart of Mr. Woodward's book gave an untold measure of aid and comfort to the enemy.

What was not known by Scheuer at the time was that officials on the "Seventh Floor" of the CIA were literally ordered by then-CIA director George Tenet to co-operate with Woodward's project because President Bush personally asked that it be done. More than one CIA official co-operated with Woodward against their best judgment, and only because they thought it was something the President had wanted done or ordered.

One former senior administration official explained to me: "This was something that the White House wanted done because they considered it good public relations. If there was real damage to national security--if there were leaks that possibly exposed sources and methods, it was not done in this instance for the public good or to expose Watergate type wrongdoing. This was done for presidential image-making and a commercial enterprise--Woodward's book."

Woodward himself perhaps lends credence to that possibility.

On page 243 of his book Plan of Attack, Woodward wrote:

[O]n December 18, my wife, Elsa Walsh, and I attended a huge White House Christmas party for the media hosted by the president and his wife. The Bushes stood for hours in a receiving line as a photographer snapped pictures with the first couple.

When we reached the front of the line, the president remarked that my book Bush at War was selling well. "Top of the charts," he said, and asked, "Are you planning to do another book?" He then stretched out his arms and indicated with his body language that there might be a story there, that it should be done.

Without any irony, Woodward didn't seem to understand how far he had come from meeting Mark Felt in the middle of the night in a parking garage.

Did Woodward disappoint Bush with his next war? I like to speak no opinions. My saying is: I blog, you decide.

One can skip a read of the book, and go simply to the index, in making their own judgments:

Here are some entries:

Bush, George W.: absence of doubt in, 139-40, 420
Bipartisan solidarity of, 189, 200.
Importance of showing resolve and, 81, 116, 152, 320-21, 406, 418-19, 437
legacy of, 90, 165
morality of, 86-132, 272, 313-14
on freedom, 88-89, 93, 152, 258, 276, 405, 424, 428
optimism of, 91, 93, 313-14
patience of, 162-63, 165, 271
as a strong leader, 91, 430

Cross-Posted at whateveralready.blogspot.com

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U.S. to Pay Big Employers Billions Not to End Their Retiree Health Plans

The New York Times
U.S. to Pay Big Employers Billions Not to End Their Retiree Health Plans
By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH

America's largest companies expect the federal government to pay them about $4 billion over the next four years to help keep their retiree health plans alive at a time when such benefits are increasingly on the chopping block, according to a new study by Credit Suisse First Boston.

The money is due to start flowing to employers this month as part of Medicare's new prescription drug benefit. When Congress authorized the Medicare drug benefit, it also agreed to start subsidizing the drug component of employers' retiree health plans, to keep them from shifting their retirees into the government program.

The goal is to save the government money, even after the subsidies, while giving the retirees a better deal than they might get if they were pushed into Medicare.

Among the nation's 500 largest companies, 331 offer retiree health plans.

With the program just starting its first year, it is not yet clear whether the subsidy will achieve its goals. For one thing, there are about 36 million people 65 and older in this country who are eligible for Medicare, but only about 7 million retirees currently covered by employer-sponsored health plans. Still, the Credit Suisse study, published on Wednesday, shows that the subsidy is popular with big employers — even those that do not fit the stereotype of companies in waning industries unable to cope with health care inflation and armies of baby-boomer retirees.

The money, to be sure, will flow to some financially weaker companies staggering under the weight of their health plans, like General Motors, which is expected to receive $1.1 billion over the next four years in drug subsidies for their retired workers.

But there are also thriving businesses like the utility company Exelon, which seem able to afford their plans on their own but will nonetheless receive the federal payouts.

There are companies, too, like BellSouth, that have been setting aside money for retiree health care for years and have billions on hand.

And some that have no reserves for those outlays, like Delta Air Lines, will also receive subsidies.

The government is not drawing distinctions because the subsidy is meant only to help employers stay in the retiree health care business, not to direct public funds to the neediest employers.

Mark Hamelburg, director of employer policy and operations at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency that runs Medicare, said, "The whole purpose was to incentivize employers to keep providing the good level of coverage that they have had." So far, employers covering 6.4 million retirees have enrolled for the subsidy, he said.

To get the new subsidy, a company must offer retirees a prescription drug benefit that is at least as valuable as the minimum benefits now available under Medicare. Even though General Motors, 3M, Unocal, International Flavors and Fragrances and Avaya are among businesses that have limited or cut back their retiree health plans in recent years, the study showed, all still offer benefits generous enough to qualify for the subsidy.

At the same time, the study found a few large companies that were expanding their retiree health plans, not cutting them. General Electric, for example, in 2003 increased its total obligations of this sort by about $2.5 billion, as part of a new labor agreement. The Medicare subsidy will offset some $583 million of that increase.

And BellSouth's commitments to retiree health care increased $3.3 billion in 2004, after auditors for the company required changes in the way it was accounting for the benefits. The Medicare subsidy will offset $1.1 billion of that.

The Credit Suisse analysts who conducted the study, David Zion and Bill Carcache, prepared it to show investors how successful, or not, companies had been in shifting the cost of their retiree health plans onto other payers.

Companies that fear they have promised more benefits than they can deliver "are actively trying to pass the buck," the analysts wrote. This means trying to shift costs "to anyone who will bear them: their retirees, active workers, the U.S. taxpayer, etc.."

"If they succeed," the analysts added, "it's a giant transfer of risk from corporate America to the work force, and retirees."

Instead of increasing corporate profits in a given year, the subsidies are supposed to free up cash that the company would otherwise have to spend on health care. Mr. Zion and Mr. Carcache said this effect would show up on corporate cash-flow statements. In the future, though, after the Financial Accounting Standards Board completes its current project on pension accounting, retiree medical plan activity might make its way onto corporate balance sheets.

The company with by far the biggest retiree health plan is G.M. — a plan so large that the $77 billion obligation constitutes 18 percent of the combined retiree health obligations of the nation's 500 largest companies. G.M. projects that it will make cash outlays of about $18 billion for retiree health care over the next four years.

Those projections were made before it negotiated a package of concessions with the United Auto Workers union in October, but a G.M. spokesman, Jerry Dubrowski, said newer projections were not available. He said the cutbacks were still being challenged in court by retirees, who argue that the union has no legal authority to negotiate for them, only for active workers. If the concessions are upheld, Mr. Dubrowski said, the retirees will still get a better deal under G.M.'s health plan than if they were pushed into Medicare.

"This is an important first step in reforming the whole health care system," he added.

But the company that will get the biggest boost from Medicare on a percentage basis is not G.M., but Genuine Parts, a distributor of auto replacement parts and office products that has rising sales and profits, and a much smaller health plan. The subsidy, estimated at $6 million over the next four years, will reduce its overall health care obligations to retirees by 62 percent, the study found.

The Credit Suisse analysts found that the big companies, over the life of their retiree health plans, expected to receive about $25 billion from the federal subsidy arrangement.

But Mr. Hamelburg of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said that companies' estimates did not capture the entire outlay expected because they did not include the substantial subsidies that would go to state and local governments that run retiree health plans. The government expects to pay all employers, private and public, about $14 billion over the next four years.

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Role of Sen. Elizabeth Dole's Husband, former Sen. Robert Dole, at Issue

washingtonpost.com
Role of Sen. Dole's Husband at Issue
By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum
Washington Post Staff Writer

The lobbying of former Senate majority leader Robert J. Dole on behalf of the Dubai-owned company set to take over management of terminals at six major U.S. seaports is creating a political problem for his wife, Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R-N.C.).

The chairman of the North Carolina Democratic Party, Jerry Meek, yesterday called on Sen. Dole to remove herself from "any congressional oversight" of the Dubai port deal. "The fact that Dubai is paying her husband to help pass the deal presents both a financial and ethical conflict of interest for Senator Dole," Meek said.

A spokeswoman for Sen. Dole rejected the criticism as "a partisan attack" and defended the senator's role as a lawmaker and her husband's as a lobbyist.

"Elizabeth Dole knows that her work is separate from Bob Dole," said her spokeswoman, Lindsay Taylor Mabry. "Bob Dole works for a law firm. Elizabeth Dole works for the people of North Carolina."

Former senator Dole (R-Kan.), 82, said in a written statement yesterday that he is not going to lobby his wife or members of Congress. His law firm, Alston & Bird LLP, helped steer the application of Dubai Ports World through the federal bureaucracy over the past few months, and Dole signed on as a lobbyist for the company this week. His spokesman would not say what lobbying, if any, Alston & Bird is now doing in Congress; the firm's spokeswoman did not return telephone messages.

Dubai Ports World beefed up its lobbying efforts, including on Capitol Hill, after lawmakers threatened this week to scuttle the transaction. The lawmakers said they feared that national security might be compromised by letting a Middle Eastern firm manage key U.S. ports.

Dole's statement said he will confine his lobbying to the Bush administration. "I have not nor will I 'lobby' Members of Congress on this issue, not even at home," he wrote. "I have not discussed the port issue with any Senator or member of Congress or anyone working for the Congress, nor will I do so in the months to come."

The controversy confronting the Doles is an increasingly common one in Washington. According to Public Citizen's Congress Watch, at least three dozen members of Congress have relatives who are professional lobbyists.

Congress Watch and other watchdog groups have loudly criticized the growing trend. "What better way to buy access to a lawmaker than to hire the lawmaker's son, daughter or spouse as their lobbyist on a lucrative retainer?" said Craig Holman, a lobbyist for Congress Watch.

Some of Congress's most prominent members have relatives on K Street. House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) has a son, Josh Hastert, who works as a lobbyist for PodestaMattoon. The son of former Senate majority leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.), Chester Trent Lott Jr., lobbies for the Livingston Group. A son-in-law of Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) is a lobbyist, as are the wives of both Democratic senators from North Dakota -- one for professional baseball, the other for insurance companies.

In addition, sons of two senior members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) and Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), are lobbyists. The father of Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), former senator Birch Bayh (D-Ind.), lobbies, as does the wife of House Majority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.). Blunt's connection to Altria Group Inc., the tobacco and consumer products company that his wife works for, was an issue in his unsuccessful bid to become majority leader.

Lawmakers defend their connections with lobbyists as just another byproduct of the modern world in which spouses are often professionals, as are their children.

Lawmakers also state that their lobbyist relatives do not lobby them personally.

Blunt's wife does not lobby the House of Representatives, a Blunt spokeswoman said. Hastert's son refrains from lobbying the House Republican leadership. Amid news media scrutiny a few years ago, Reid imposed a prohibition against any lobbying in his office by relatives.

Still, the issue remains sensitive. Various proposals to change lobbying laws amid the Jack Abramoff political corruption scandal have included bans on lobbying by relatives of lawmakers.

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Security issues go beyond ports flap

USA TODAY
Security issues go beyond ports flap
By Mimi Hall, Bill Nichols and Sue Kirchhoff, USA TODAY

When mayors, governors and members of Congress learned this week that an Arab company was poised to oversee terminals at six major U.S. seaports, many reacted with surprise and horror.

They demanded to know why President Bush would support the idea of a government-owned company from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) operating key commercial areas in this country where security is paramount. And they vowed to stop the deal.

The $6.8 billion ports deal has become an extraordinary piece of political theater in Washington, but it is quite ordinary in another sense. It merely is the latest example of a decades-long trend in which foreign interests have become heavily involved in U.S. institutions the government now considers targets for terrorism — from busy seaports to utilities and railways.

At the massive Port of Los Angeles alone, 80% of the terminals are run by foreign firms. And the U.S. Department of Transportation says the United Kingdom, Denmark, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, China and Taiwan have interests in U.S. port terminals.

Bush says a company from the UAE, a U.S. ally in the war on terrorism, shouldn't be treated any differently than other companies that seek to do business here. But the tiny Persian Gulf nation was a base of operations for two 9/11 hijackers — a fact cited repeatedly Wednesday by Democratic and Republican politicians from New York to Miami.

However, port security specialists say much of Wednesday's rhetoric focused on the wrong questions.

Allowing Dubai Ports World to control up to 30% of the port terminals in New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New Orleans and Miami shouldn't really be a cause for concern, says James Loy, former deputy secretary for the Department of Homeland Security and a retired commandant of the Coast Guard. "We're making a mountain out of a mole hill here."

He and other analysts say that instead, politicians should focus on gaps in port-security programs that have left the global shipping system and the nation's 360 ports vulnerable to terrorism. The vulnerabilities extend from companies that load cargo containers abroad and the inspection process at overseas ports, to the need to install radiation detectors at most U.S. ports.

If the Dubai Ports World deal is sealed, the company would oversee only a tiny piece of a security chain that is weak from start to finish, Loy says. At the six ports, the company would be responsible only for keeping cargo containers secure from the time they are unloaded from foreign ships to when the containers are taken away on trucks, generally a few hours later.

The more significant vulnerabilities are abroad, where blue jeans, car parts and other goods are loaded at foreign companies before making the journey to U.S. ports.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents inspect U.S.-bound goods at 42 of the world's busiest foreign ports. However, the Homeland Security Department acknowledges that by the time a pair of jeans ends up in someone's shopping cart in Ohio, the chance that the container in which they were shipped was inspected by a U.S. agent is less than 10%.

That security gap is part of what fueled this week's firestorm. New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, a Democrat, says his state will file suit later this week to stop the deal in which Dubai is taking over the port terminals from a London company. Members of Congress, including Senate Armed Services Chairman John Warner, R-Va., say they are planning hearings.

Loy says he hopes politicians will begin to focus on the significant port-security questions that are "much more deserving of our interest and attention than this little episode."

Key among them: Is the U.S. government doing enough to make sure terrorists abroad don't use cargo containers to sneak weapons of mass destruction past the Coast Guard and Customs officers responsible for security?

Focus on containers

As a terminal operator, Dubai Ports World would be responsible only for terminal maintenance and security in the area where cargo containers are stored before being loaded onto trucks. Before that happens, some containers are inspected by the Coast Guard. Shipping company and port employees who handle cargo are checked against terrorist watch lists.

"I can understand the high level of anxiety the deal has created," says Keith Mason, former chairman of the Georgia Port Authority. "But a more important issue is what's contained in the boxes when they get to the United States."

By J. Pat Carter, AP
An unidentified official guards a shipping container storage area at the Port of Miami.

After 9/11, the U.S. government imposed security requirements and programs at U.S. ports in response to heightened concerns that terrorists could try to smuggle weapons of mass destruction into the USA in cargo containers.

However, the checks are spotty, and once containers arrive in the United States, they seldom are inspected. The government is working to install drive-through radiation detectors at all major ports so that trucks carrying offloaded containers can be checked for radiation on their way to the nation's highways, but that program is just beginning. Now, only 37% of the cargo coming into the U.S. is sent through radiation detectors.

Other government screening programs include:

•The Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism, which offers benefits to companies, ports, terminal operators and others that provide verifiable information about their cargo and operations. The program was designed to allow Homeland Security to focus on high-risk cargo from undisclosed countries the government suspects of having ties to terrorism.

But last year, congressional investigators found that of the 4,357 importers certified under the program, only 564 — or 13% — had been deemed secure by Customs officials.

•A 24-hour advance manifest rule requires most sea carriers to give the U.S. government descriptions of cargo and information on those handling the cargo 24 hours before it is loaded.

•The Container Security Initiative, which is a voluntary program that allows U.S. officials to pre-screen companies and their goods before containers are loaded on ships. Through the program, U.S. agents work at overseas ports using sophisticated computer models to identify potentially risky cargo that should be physically inspected.

Foreign ownership increasing

Besides raising security concerns, the debate over the Dubai deal has cast a spotlight on the increasingly prevalent foreign ownership of U.S. ports.

Stephen Flynn of the Council on Foreign Relations estimates that most port terminals across the nation are run by foreign interests.

In Los Angeles, port spokeswoman Theresa Adams Lopez says, foreign operations include Yusen Terminals Inc., a subsidiary of Japanese shipping giant NYK Line, established in 1885.

The Port of Seattle has five container terminals. Three are run by U.S. companies, one is managed by a South Korean company, and the fifth is managed by a company partly owned by the Singapore government.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey owns five primary cargo terminals, three of which are run by foreign firms. The terminal that would be run by the Dubai-based company is operated in conjunction with a Danish firm. The terminal is leased to the two companies and is five years into the 30-year lease, port authority spokesman Steve Coleman says. The other two main cargo terminals in New York and New Jersey are run by the same Danish firm and by a Hong Kong-based company.

Loy says it's all an inevitable part of a global economy. "The notion that we should not have our ports operated by foreign companies is ludicrous, and indicates someone is not understanding how the global marketplace works today," he says.

Meanwhile, U.S. exporters have worried about possible trade retaliation if the UAE deal is blocked. U.S. shipping companies also have concerns.

Bob Waters, vice president of SSA Marine, the largest U.S.-owned marine terminal operator, said his company has not seen any signs of retaliation at its sites abroad. The Seattle-based company has operations in 150 ports worldwide.

"We haven't seen any indication of that yet," Waters says. But "is there a concern? Sure."

Contributing: Richard Benedetto, Jim Drinkard, Jim Hopkins, David Jackson, Matt Kelley, Martha Moore, Andrea Stone and wire reports

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http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-02-22-ports-flap_x.htm?csp=34

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Sept. 11 report ties bin Laden to UAE

USA TODAY
Sept. 11 report ties bin Laden to UAE

WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States raised concerns with the United Arab Emirates seven years ago about possible ties between officials in that country and Osama bin Laden, according to a section of the Sept. 11 commission's report that details a possible missed opportunity to kill the al-Qaeda leader.

Republicans and Democrats alike are raising concerns this week about the Bush administration's decision to let a UAE-operated company take over operations at six American ports, in part citing ties the Sept. 11 hijackers had to the Persian Gulf country.

President Bush has called the UAE a close partner on the war on terror since Sept. 11, and his aides have listed numerous examples of the country's help.

The Sept. 11 commission's report released last year also raised concerns UAE officials were directly associating with bin Laden as recently as 1999.

The report states U.S. intelligence believed that bin Laden was visiting an area in the Afghan desert in February 1999 near a hunting camp used by UAE officials, and that the U.S. military planned a missile strike.

Intelligence from local tribal sources indicated "bin Laden regularly went from his adjacent camp to the larger camp where he visited the Emiratis," the report said.

"National technical intelligence confirmed the location and description of the larger camp and showed the nearby presence of an official aircraft of the United Arab Emirates.

But the location of bin Laden's quarters could not be pinned down so precisely," the report said.

The missile attack was never launched, and bin Laden moved on, the report said.

A month later, top White House counterterrorism official Richard Clarke "called a UAE official to express his concerns about possible associations between Emirati officials and bin Laden," the report said.

CIA officials hope to continue staking out the Afghan camp in hopes bin Laden would return and a possible strike could be launched.

But "imagery confirmed that less than a week after Clarke's phone call, the camp was hurriedly dismantled and the site was deserted," the report said.

CIA officials were "irate" and "thought the dismantling of the camp erased a possible site for targeting bin Laden, the report said.

At a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee Thursday, Sen. Carl Levin, the ranking Democrat, asked Deputy Treasury Secretary Robert Kimmitt if he was aware of the 9-11 commission's assertion that the United Arab Emirates represents "a persistent counterterrorism problem"for the United States.

Kimmitt replied that administration figures involved in the decision to approve the deal "looked very carefully" at information from the intelligence community.

"Any time a foreign-government controlled company comes in," Kimmitt said, "the intelligence assessment is of both the country and the company."

"Just raise your hand if anybody talked to the 9-11 commission," Levin told the administration representatives at the witness table. Nobody raised a hand.

Find this article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-02-23-911-report-uae_x.htm?csp=34

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