Sunday, April 17, 2005
NYT: Bin Laden Bribed Afghan Militias for His Freedom, German Says
April 13, 2005
Bin Laden Bribed Afghan Militias for His Freedom, German Says
ERLIN, April 12 - The head of the German intelligence agency, in an interview published here Tuesday, said Osama bin Laden had been able to elude capture after the American invasion of Afghanistan by paying bribes to the Afghan militias delegated the task of finding him.
"The principal mistake was made already in 2001, when one wanted bin Laden to be apprehended by the Afghan militias in Tora Bora," the intelligence official, August Hanning, said in an interview with the German business newspaper Handelsblatt.
"There, bin Laden could buy himself free with a lot of money," Mr. Hanning said.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Hanning confirmed the accuracy of the newspaper's account. She said Afghan forces had told Mr. bin Laden they knew his whereabouts and he would be arrested, but they allowed him safe passage in exchange for a bribe.
In the past, other officials - including Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the former American commander in Afghanistan - have acknowledged that Afghan militias who fought on the side of the invasion coalition had allowed leaders of Al Qaeda and the Taliban to get away. But Mr. Hanning is the top intelligence official to say Mr. bin Laden was among them.
Military experts have also raised questions about the practice of relying on Afghan militias in the hunt for senior Qaeda and Taliban figures, saying that once the Taliban fell the militias became more interested in gaining power in Afghanistan's many tribal regions than in fulfilling American political goals.
During the American presidential campaign, the Democratic candidate, John Kerry, frequently criticized the Bush administration for what he called outsourcing the hunt for Mr. bin Laden. The search reached its most active phase after the fall of the Taliban, when American and Afghan troops attacked Qaeda hide-outs in the Tora Bora Mountains on the border with Pakistan.
Defenders of the administration have maintained that using local troops to fight Al Qaeda and the Taliban was aimed both at minimizing American casualties and preventing the conflict from becoming an "American war."
In his interview, Mr. Hanning was critical of that strategy as it applied to the goal of capturing or killing Mr. bin Laden, who, he said, was able to insulate himself inside a protective network of supporters after the early efforts to arrest or kill him failed.
"Since then, he has been able to create his own infrastructure in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area and has won many friends from the tribal groups there," Mr. Hanning said.
Thursday, April 07, 2005
BBC: Death penalty 'at record levels'
 In Iran, the death penalty sometimes comes after a flogging |
China carried out more executions than all other countries combined - at least 3,400 - the human rights group says.
The global rise in executions was "alarming", said Amnesty's UK director Kate Allen, who called the figures from China "genuinely frightening".
China says it will tighten conditions under which people can be executed, and the US has already done so.
The US came fourth in Amnesty's table of executions, with 59 in 2004.
Iran came second, with at least 159, followed by Vietnam with at least 64.
The 3,797 executions in 2004 were the second-largest annual total in the last 25 years, the organisation said.
And it noted that its numbers represented the minimum number of executions it could confirm.
"Many countries continue to execute people in secret," Ms Allen said.
Fairness debate
China's Premier Wen Jiabao said last month that Beijing would improve its justice system so the death penalty would be given "carefully and fairly", the official Xinhua news agency reported.
Sarah Green, a spokeswoman for Amnesty in London, welcomed the announcement, but said the group wanted action, not words.
"It is good to hear people talking about changing their systems. We look forward to seeing the results," she told the BBC News website.
The organisation has two objections to the death penalty, she said - it violates fundamental rights and is applied unfairly.
"There is lots of evidence to show this is not a perfect punishment," she says.
It was more likely to be applied to "people who cannot afford lawyers, who cannot get anyone to stand as a witness for them," she added.
"Discrimination soon enters the equation, for women in particular. It's very concerning."
US changes
The United States - one of the very few democracies on Amnesty's list - last month banned the death penalty for crimes committed by minors.
The number of death sentences is falling in the US, according to the New York Times.
A total of 144 death sentences were handed down in 2003, the lowest level since 1977, the newspaper reported.
Ms Green welcomed the fall in death sentences, but said the US should go further and ban the death penalty.
"We believe it's wrong. The cardinal basic human rights laws say there is a right to life and a right not to be punished in a cruel way."
She disputed surveys that show a majority of Americans support the death penalty.
Slightly more Americans opposed the death penalty than supported it - if a life sentence without the possibility of parole was the alternative, she said.
More than 100 people had left death row in the US when their convictions were overturned, she said.
"There is so much evidence that the death penalty is being applied unfairly, the very possibility of executing anybody who is innocent is reason not to have it," she said.
And she cited a question former UK Prime Minister Ted Heath asked of death penalty supporters: "The real test is, is that person willing to be the innocent one who is executed?"
Saturday, April 02, 2005
NYT: Study Faults U.S. Response to Outlawed Arms + NYT: Strains on Nature Are Growing, Report Says
March 31, 2005
Study Faults U.S. Response to Outlawed Arms
ASHINGTON, March 30 - A report on United States intelligence to be made public on Thursday concludes that the government has failed to respond to the dire threat posed by unconventional weapons with the urgency and national purpose displayed after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
"It's now been three and a half years since the Sept. 11 attacks," the report says in a section titled "Change and Resistance to Change." "A lot can be accomplished in that time."
"Three and a half years after Dec. 7, 1941, the United States had built and equipped an army and navy that had crossed two oceans, the English Channel and the Rhine; it had already won Germany's surrender and was two months from vanquishing Japan," the report continues.
The report of the presidential commission led by Laurence H. Silberman, a retired federal judge, and Charles S. Robb, a former Democratic governor and senator from Virginia, gives a grim account of the spy agencies' capabilities, despite a steady increase in the intelligence budget since 2001, to $40 billion a year from roughly $30 billion a year.
The report, the latest of several scathing assessments of intelligence failures, recommends dozens of major changes at the 15 intelligence agencies. But even before its public release, officials at some intelligence agencies privately expressed fatigue and scant enthusiasm for further reshuffling, noting the agencies have been in a continuous state of flux since the September 2001 attacks.
The succession of reports designed to fix blame for botched intelligence on the attacks and Iraqi weapons has generated some wariness and cynicism at the agencies.
"We've been spending so much time reorganizing, we haven't had time to see if the changes we've already made have worked," said one intelligence official, who asked not to be identified because he is not authorized to speak to the news media.
The nine-member Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction was appointed by President Bush a year ago. The members met Wednesday at commission offices in Arlington, Va., to review the report and plan its presentation to the president on Thursday.
One official who has seen the entire report said the unclassified version totals about 600 pages, including appendixes. The classified version contains fewer than 100 additional pages, he said, but includes the only detailed discussion of current threats like nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea.
The report includes a detailed analysis of the shortcomings of the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that concluded that Iraq had biological and chemical weapons and an active nuclear program. It also contains before-and-after assessments of intelligence on Afghanistan and Libya, since American specialists now have access to those countries and can compare what weapons were expected and what were found.
The report, which focuses its main criticism on the Central Intelligence Agency, proposes the creation of an antiproliferation center to gauge the threat posed by chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. It calls for specific changes at agencies like the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which is urged to create a more independent intelligence unit inside its existing structure.
Publicly, White House officials have said that the administration will embrace the report. But the officials who do the day-to-day work of intelligence said the report was being released at a chaotic time when they were still struggling to build the new organizations established by intelligence laws enacted late last year in response to earlier critiques.
John D. Negroponte, who last was ambassador to Iraq, has been appointed by President Bush as the first director of national intelligence but is only scheduled for Senate confirmation in two weeks. The new law gives him sweeping authority over the intelligence agencies, but how much control he will have in practice over fiercely independent, often competing agencies is uncertain.
Intelligence officials are still negotiating over which personnel from the C.I.A. might move to Mr. Negroponte's new operation, a delicate question that one former intelligence official says is comparable to "the partition of India, with the attendant communal violence." The intelligence reorganization adopted last year gives Mr. Negroponte a staff of 500, with an additional 150 people available to be temporarily assigned by all intelligence agencies. The C.I.A., which is expected to bear the brunt of the commission's criticism, has lost about 20 senior managers since Porter J. Goss replaced George J. Tenet as director last year, with some forced out and others taking advantage of the change in leadership to retire. Mr. Tenet's tenure was so long - more than seven years - that about 40 percent of C.I.A. employees had never worked under anyone else until Mr. Goss arrived.
A similar transition is about to occur at the National Security Agency, which eavesdrops on foreign communications and is the country's biggest intelligence agency by work force and budget. The longest-serving director of N.S.A., Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden of the Air Force, is departing to become Mr. Negroponte's deputy after overseeing six years of rapid change at the agency.
March 31, 2005
Strains on Nature Are Growing, Report Says
SLO, March 30 - Humans are damaging the planet at a rapid rate and raising risks of abrupt collapses in nature that could spur disease, deforestation or "dead zones" in the seas, an international report said Wednesday.
The study, by 1,360 researchers in 95 nations, the biggest review of the planet's life support systems ever, said that in the last 50 years a rising human population had polluted or overexploited two-thirds of the ecological systems on which life depends, including clean air and fresh water. "At the heart of this assessment is a stark warning," said the 45-member board of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. "Human activity is putting such strain on the natural functions of earth that the ability of the planet's ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted."
The report said future strains on nature could bring sudden outbreaks of disease. Warming of the Great Lakes in Africa from climate change, for instance, could create conditions for a spread of cholera.
The study urged changes in consumption, better education, new technology and higher prices for exploiting ecosystems.
