The IED problem is getting out of control. We've got to stop the bleeding.

By Rick Atkinson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 29, 2007; A12

BAGRAM AIR BASE, Afghanistan -- By the late summer of 2002, as the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington approached, an American victory in Afghanistan appeared all but assured. A pro-Western government had convened in Kabul. Reconstruction teams fanned out through the provinces. U.S. and coalition troops hunted Taliban and al-Qaeda remnants in the mountains along the Pakistani border.

Among the few shadows on this sunny Central Asian tableau -- besides the escape of Osama bin Laden -- was the first appearance of roadside bombs triggered by radio waves.

There were not many. U.S. forces would report fewer than two dozen improvised explosive devices of all sorts in Afghanistan in 2002. But the occasional RC -- radio-controlled -- bombs were much more sophisticated than the booby traps with trip wires typically seen by American troops.

A triggerman with a radio transmitter could send a signal several hundred yards to a hidden bomb built with a receiver linked to an electrical firing circuit, which in turn detonated an attached artillery shell or a scavenged land mine.

That receiver included a slender box about three inches square housing a modified circuit board resembling a long-legged spider. The Spider Mod 1, as the device was dubbed, would remain a weapon of Afghan bombmakers in various iterations for more than five years -- and an emblem of defiance against the world's only military superpower

Captured Spider devices were shipped to the United States for forensic examination. Maj. Gen. John R. Vines, commander of the U.S. task force in Afghanistan, had a sense of what his troops were up against. "What can we do to protect our forces?" he asked his subordinates. "I'll take a 30 percent solution. That's better than zero."

Even that modest request seemed daunting. U.S. soldiers and Marines had no mobile electronic countermeasures capable of disrupting RC triggers by blocking the radio signal.

Bomb squads -- known in the military as EOD teams, for explosive ordnance detachment -- carried a feeble jammer called the Citadel, which created a stationary protective "bubble" around technicians defusing a device. But the few Citadels in service could not be mounted on vehicles to protect patrols and convoys, and they were too weak to provide protection beyond a few yards.

Special Operations units employed electronic countermeasures, and the Secret Service used powerful mobile jammers to shield presidential motorcades and other prominent targets. Yet such gadgets were also few in number, much in demand and highly classified.

That left the Navy as a solution. For decades, electronic countermeasures had been a vital part of airborne combat for Navy fliers. Submariners also considered it a "core mission," as did surface ship officers. "It's how I deal with cruise missiles coming at me," said Rear Adm. Arch Macy, commander of the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Washington.

After a yellow Mercedes-Benz truck stuffed with explosives killed 241 U.S. troops in Beirut in October 1983, the Navy began investing in a top-secret program in counter-RC technology. That led to a family of jammers, known as the Channel series, intended to protect ships arriving at foreign ports where RC bombs could be hidden in the docks.

By 2002, some of these devices were considered obsolete and had been consigned to a warehouse shelf. But Navy specialists in Indian Head, Md., 30 miles south of Washington, reconfigured a jammer they called Acorn, which neatly matched the frequencies used by the Spider Mod 1 in Afghanistan. In November 2002, 45 days after the first plea for help from Afghanistan, several dozen Acorns began arriving at Bagram Air Base.

Army EOD experts distributed each device, mounting the gray box and antenna on Humvees and Special Forces sport-utility vehicles. Instructing soldiers in the nuances of wave propagation and other electronic mysteries proved challenging; one device reportedly was installed on a water truck that never left the base. Successful jamming meant troops had no way of recognizing that they were even under attack by a radio-controlled IED. Acorns could also interfere with radios and other electronics.

Still, Vines's "30 percent solution" was more than fulfilled. As one retired Navy captain later recalled of Acorn: "We expected it to last six months before the bad guys figured it out." Instead, more than 2,000 Acorns eventually outfitted the force in Afghanistan where, like the Spider, it would remain a fixture on the battlefield for the next five years.

* * *

While U.S. forces parried the fledgling IED threat in Afghanistan, secret planning for the invasion of Iraq had accelerated. Little thought was given to roadside bombs as a serious obstacle to the American juggernaut. But U.S. strategists feared that Saddam Hussein would destroy his own oil production facilities rather than let them be captured. Scorched-earth tactics by retreating Iraqi troops in 1991 had turned Kuwait's oil fields into an inferno.

U.S. intelligence in early 2003 reported that wellheads in southern Iraq had been wired for detonation, and that Iraqi forces probably had the ability to use radio-controlled triggers to detonate those demolition charges. Jammers would be needed to secure the fields.

Even as the Navy converted Acorn into a battlefield countermeasure, Army engineers at Fort Monmouth, N.J., were working on their own mobile jammers. First in a laboratory and then in field tests, they modified an old system called Shortstop, originally built in 1990 as a footlocker-sized gadget to confound the proximity fuses in incoming artillery and mortar shells.

By intercepting and modifying the radio signals emitted by such fuses, Shortstop tricked the shells into believing they were approaching the ground, causing them to detonate prematurely. Shortstop had been completed too late for use in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and it was deployed to Bosnia only briefly. A Pentagon inventory showed that the Army had almost 300 systems in storage.

With different computer chips and a cleverly modified ham radio antenna, Shortstop made an admirable jammer. The wife of one Fort Monmouth engineer collected miniature kitchen witches that inspired a new name for the device: Warlock Green. After final fixes in California, five Warlocks were shipped to Kuwait in time to accompany the invasion forces plunging into Iraq in March 2003, according to a senior officer involved in the effort.

The countermeasure proved unnecessary. Not a single oil well was rigged for radio-controlled detonation. Some oil facilities were sabotaged, but the damage was less grievous than feared.

Yet the Army jammer had found a home on the battlefield. As Shortstops were transformed into Warlock Greens -- each device cost about $100,000, according to a contractor involved in the program -- they were shipped in large Rubbermaid storage cases to Afghanistan, where a technician laminated his business card onto the devices so soldiers knew whom to call for help. Others would be packed up, driven to the Baltimore-Washington international airport in a rented van and flown to Iraq.

By late summer 2003, almost 100 Warlocks had been deployed, according to an Army document that said IEDs were "increasing in number and complexity at an alarming rate." Another Navy jammer, originally designed to protect four-star flag officers, also began arriving in the theater -- first six, then 30 and eventually 300.

If no one foresaw that within four years more than 30,000 jammers of all sorts would be in Iraq, a few suspected that something big had started. "We're going to need a lot more jammers," Col. Bruce Jette, who commanded the Army's Rapid Equipping Force at Fort Belvoir, told a Fort Monmouth engineer in August 2003. "And eventually we're going to need a jammer on every vehicle."

***

Bombmaking by definition required explosives, and in that commodity, as in oil, Iraq was richly endowed. "The entire country was one big ammo dump," Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates would observe this past March. "It's just a huge, huge problem."

The problem was also huge in 2003. Yet U.S. strategists, who before the invasion failed to anticipate an insurgency, also drafted no comprehensive plans for securing thousands of munitions caches, now estimated to have held at least 650,000 tons and perhaps more than 1 million tons of explosives. "There's more ammunition in Iraq than any place I've ever been in my life, and it's not securable," Gen. John P. Abizaid told the Senate Appropriations Committee shortly after taking over U.S. Central Command in July 2003. "I wish I could tell you that we had it all under control. We don't."

To forestall looting, U.S. forces tried spreading putrid substances across the dumps, as well as cementing artillery rounds together or burying large caches. "We're now finding people tunneling 30 feet down and carting the stuff away," an analyst noted earlier this year. Sloshing diesel fuel across the dumps and lighting it, among several haphazard "blow and go" techniques, often simply scattered the rounds. More than a year after the invasion "only 40 percent of Iraq's pre-war munitions inventory was secured or destroyed," the Congressional Research Service reported this summer.

Tens of thousands of tons probably were pilfered, U.S. government analysts believe. (If properly positioned, 20 pounds of high explosive can destroy any vehicle the Army owns.) The lax control would continue long after Hussein was routed: 10,000 or more blasting caps -- also vital to bombmaking -- vanished from an Iraqi bureau of mines storage facility in 2004, along with "thousands of kilometers" of detonation cord, according to a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst.

In the summer of 2003, pilfered explosives appeared in growing numbers of IEDs. Main Supply Route Tampa, the main road for military convoys driving between Baghdad and Kuwait, became a common target. Three artillery shells wired to a timer west of Taji, discovered on July 29, reportedly made up the first confirmed delay bomb. Others were soon found using egg timers or Chinese washing-machine timers.

Radio-controlled triggers tended to be simple and low-power, using car key fobs or wireless doorbell buzzers -- Qusun was the most common brand -- with a range of 200 meters or less. Radio controls from toy cars beamed signals to a small electrical motor attached to a bomb detonator; turning the toy's front wheels completed the circuit and triggered the explosion.

U.S. troops dubbed the crude devices "bang-bang" because spurious signals could cause premature detonations, sometimes killing the emplacer. Bombers soon learned to install safety switches in the contraptions, and to use better radio links.

Camouflage remained simple, with bombs tucked in roadkill or behind highway guardrails. (Soldiers soon ripped out hundreds of miles of guardrail.) Emplacers often used the same "blow hole" repeatedly, returning to familiar roadside "hot spots" again and again. But early in the insurgency, before U.S. troops were better trained, only about one bomb in 10 was found and neutralized, according to an Army colonel.

Coalition forces tended to concentrate at large forward operating bases with few entry roads. "Insurgents seized the initiative on these common routes," according to a 2007 account of the counter-IED effort by Col. William G. Adamson. "The vast majority of IED attacks occurred within a short distance of the FOBs."

Each week, the cat-and-mouse game expanded. When coalition convoys routinely began stopping 300 yards from a suspected IED, insurgents planted easily spotted hoax bombs to halt traffic, then detonated explosives that had been hidden where a convoy would most likely pull over.

By the early fall of 2003, IED attacks had reached 100 a month, according to a House Armed Services Committee document. Most were a nuisance; some proved stunning and murderous. A large explosion along a roadbed near Balad in October of that year flung a 70-ton M1A2 Abrams tank down an embankment, shearing off the turret and killing two crewmen. Even more horrifying was a truck bomb at 4:45 p.m. on Aug. 19 that demolished the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, killing the U.N. special representative and 22 others.

Day by day, as Adamson would write, "the concept of a front, or line of battle, vanished" in Iraq, giving way to "360-degree warfare."

***

IEDs had quickly moved to the top of Abizaid's anxieties at Central Command. A Lebanese American who spoke Arabic and who had studied as an Olmsted scholar at the University of Jordan in Amman, the four-star general had seen for himself the aggravation that roadside bombs caused Israeli forces in Lebanon in the 1980s.

Two weeks after taking command from the retiring Gen. Tommy R. Franks, Abizaid publicly described resistance in Iraq as "a classical guerrilla-style campaign," a blunt appraisal that reportedly irked the Pentagon's civilian leadership. But the amount of unsecured ammunition in Iraq, particularly in Sunni regions, alarmed him. So did the realization that many Iraqi military officers -- unemployed and disgruntled after the national army was disbanded in late May -- possessed extensive skill in handling explosives.

Abizaid hoped that American technical savvy would produce a gadget that could detect bombs at a distance, "a scientific molecular sniffer, or something," as he put it. "We thought the problem would spread," Abizaid later reflected, "but it didn't appear overly sophisticated." Underestimating the enemy's creativity and overestimating American ingenuity, a pattern established before the war began, continued long after the capture of Baghdad.

Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior U.S. ground commander in Iraq, told Pentagon strategists that he hoped to minimize the military's "footprint" in Iraq by maintaining an occupation force that was two-thirds motorized and only one-third mechanized. "What I don't want is a lot of tanks and Bradleys," Sanchez said, according to a senior Army commander.

That meant mounting most troops on Humvees, few of which were built to withstand bombs or even small-arms fire. Soldiers had begun fashioning crude "hillbilly armor" for their vehicles from scrap metal. Even factory-built armored vehicles had been designed to resist projectiles fired at a distance, according to a senior Army scientist, and not against point-blank explosions in which steel fragments and blast overpressure -- from gases hotter than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit forming in 1/10,000th of a second -- struck simultaneously.

Production of the stout "uparmored" Humvee started in 1996, but as a specialty vehicle for military police and Special Forces; an average of one per day had been built before the war, according to congressional documents. The entire fleet of uparmored Humvees in the theater in 2003 totaled 235, the Army chief of staff would later report.

With no master list of where uparmored Humvees were deployed, logisticians searched U.S. motor pools around the world. Seventy were found in Air Force missile fields in North Dakota and elsewhere, according to a former senior officer on the joint staff, but it took a four-star order to pry them away for duty in the Middle East.

Protecting individual soldiers was a bit simpler. In June 2003, the Pentagon decided to outfit every trooper in theater with tough interceptor body armor. By December, eight vendors would produce 25,000 sets a month, according to congressional documents, and by April 2004 all U.S. military personnel in Iraq had received high-quality protection. The documents show that Congress has appropriated more than $4 billion for body armor so far.

But as summer yielded to fall in 2003, the final defense against roadside bombs often fell to a few hundred EOD technicians, whose informal motto -- "Initial success or total failure" -- suggested the hazards in what was known as "the long walk."

Summoned to neutralize a suspected bomb, a tech donned a cumbersome, blast-resistant outfit that resembled a deep-sea diving suit, with a transparent face shield and extra padding to protect femoral arteries, genitals and the spinal column. The robots then available to "interrogate" a device were crude and few in number, forcing the tech to conduct the examination himself.

"All you can hear is the fan in your helmet, your heart beating and your breathing," recalled Sgt. First Class Troy Parker, who served in Iraq in 2003. "And you're wondering if this is the last walk you're ever going to take."

Sometimes it was. On Sept. 10, 2003, in Baghdad, Staff Sgt. Joseph E. Robsky Jr. was trying to disarm an IED when an apparent RC-trigger detonated a mortar shell packed with C-4 plastic explosive. Robsky, 31, would be among more than 50 EOD technicians killed in Iraq and Afghanistan by the late summer of this year.

Within hours of his death, a call went out to assemble all EOD robots in Baghdad at the international airport for an inventory, according to a senior Navy EOD officer in Iraq at the time. They found 18 robots, and only six of them worked.

***

By late September 2003, Lt. Gen. Richard A. Cody, the Army's operations chief, believed that IEDs not only threatened soldiers in Iraq, who included his two sons and a nephew, but also posed a strategic risk to U.S. ambitions in the region. "The IED problem is getting out of control," he told Col. Christopher P. Hughes, a staff officer. "We've got to stop the bleeding."

A Lebanese American West Point graduate like Abizaid, Cody was the son of a Chevrolet dealer in Montpelier, Vt. Stocky and intense, with thick hair the color of gunmetal, he had fired the first shots of the Gulf War in January 1991 while attacking an Iraqi radar site as commander of an Apache helicopter battalion. His appetites ran to hard work, New York Times crossword puzzles, Red Man chewing tobacco, Diet Coke and two-pound bags of peanut M&Ms, which he could eat in one sitting.

Hughes drafted a sheaf of PowerPoint slides labeled "IED Task Force: A Way," which proposed forming a small unit with a Washington director and two field teams "designed to respond to incidents." To recruit active-duty Special Operations troops would take at least nine months, so with Cody's approval and a chit for $20 million, Hughes hired Wexford Group International, a security consultant in Vienna, Va. Two retired Delta Force soldiers soon arrived in room 2D468 of the Pentagon to begin assembling the field teams from a "black Rolodex" of former special operators.

To run his task force, Cody chose one of the Army's most charismatic young officers, Joseph L. Votel, then 45, who had just been selected for promotion to brigadier general. A tall, good-humored Minnesotan, Votel had commanded the 75th Ranger Regiment in Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002. More recently, in Iraq, three of his Rangers had been killed near Haditha with a suicide bomb detonated by a pregnant woman; two other Rangers had died in a roadside bombing on Route Irish, near the Baghdad airport.

Votel expected the job of controlling IEDs to take six months, maybe eight. "And then we move on," he said. He moved his small staff into a shabby, malodorous corner of the Army operations center in the Pentagon basement and posted a sign on the wall: "STOP THE BLEEDING."

Even by Pentagon standards, the hours were brutal. Those who lived in the Washington exurbs typically rose at 3:45 a.m. to be at their desks by 5:30, where they remained until 9 p.m. or later. To avoid bureaucratic friction with other agencies, Votel advised: "Stay small, stay light, be agile, move quickly. . . . There's goodness in smallness."

About a dozen former Delta Force operators were hired as contractors for the nucleus of the field teams. Some would earn $1,000 a day while deployed, according to two knowledgeable officers. Cody sent them to Walter Reed Army Medical Center to interview soldiers wounded by IEDs, to learn "what they wished they had done" before being blown up.

To arm the teams, the task force borrowed rifles from the Old Guard ceremonial regiment at Fort Myer and drafted permission slips for the contractors to carry weapons in Iraq. Instead of standard Army pistols, the men requested the Glock 9mm. "Sir," Votel told Cody, "these guys want Glocks." Cody gestured impatiently. "So get them Glocks."

In his diary on Nov. 17, 2003, Cody scribbled: "We have to make sure our commanders and soldiers are not at the end of this process but are engaged throughout the process." Toward that end, Votel and Hughes flew to Baghdad to secure a small compound at Camp Victory and to explain the task force to senior officers in Iraq.

The intent was to train troops to recognize and counter IEDs, Votel said, and to "build an architecture between the theater and Big Army" back in the States. IED incidents would be documented in detail at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and notably effective tactics and techniques would be disseminated to units preparing to deploy.

Eventually, Votel added, the effort would move "left of boom" by attacking bomber networks before devices could be placed and detonated. In the IED battle, the task force was to help "protect, predict, prevent, detect and neutralize" -- known as "tenets of assured mobility" -- which Votel borrowed as his conceptual framework from the Army Engineer School.

"Why are you bringing me a 7,000-mile screwdriver to fix this from D.C.?" asked one skeptical general in Baghdad. "Nothing good ever comes from Washington." Still, most commanders welcomed the assistance.

The first seven-man field team flew to Iraq on Dec. 12, 2003. Several others were to follow, including one sent to Afghanistan. Working initially with the 4th Infantry Division, and shuttling between bases in unarmored Chevy Suburbans, the team members in Iraq advocated infantry basics: "shoot, move, communicate, clear routes, don't set patterns." Troops were advised to watch for wires and triggermen away from the road, to be unpredictable, to use a "porcupine approach" in patrols and convoys, with all guns bristling and flank guards deployed.

By February 2004, the number of IED attacks in Iraq approached 100 a week. About half detonated, a proportion that would remain relatively constant for the next three years. The bleeding had hardly stopped, but to Central Command it seemed to have stabilized.

The casualty-per-blast ratio was dropping. Troops quickly learned counter-IED survival skills. Some bombers were arrested or killed. On good days the number of attacks dwindled to single digits, and U.S. bomb fatalities in February totaled nine, fewer than half the number in January.

"It looks to me like we're winning this thing," Air Force Lt. Gen. Lance Smith, the Centcom deputy commander, told Abizaid at their forward headquarters in Qatar. "We're kicking ass."

Abizaid gave a thin smile. "Stand by," he said. "They're just plotting."

***

On March 28, 2004, U.S. troops shut down the incendiary newspaper of Moqtada al-Sadr, a Shiite cleric with a volatile following in the Baghdad slums. "All hell broke loose," a Centcom officer later noted. By late spring, IED attacks had nearly doubled, with bombers apparently drawn from the ranks of disaffected Shiites as well as Sunnis.

IEDs had become "the greatest casualty producer" in Iraq, Abizaid told Congress, surpassing RPG-7s, a rocket-propelled grenade. Insurgents increasingly promoted their deeds with videotapes released to al-Jazeera and other Arab media outlets. Spectacular explosions of Abrams tanks and other "icon vehicles," as U.S. officers called high-value targets, soon filled airwaves and Web sites.

For Joe Votel and his task force in Washington, the IED fight had become a complex exercise in phenomenology. How did blast and shrapnel interact at close range? How did bomber cells thrive? Why did jammers seem to work in some areas and not others? The six- to eight-month time frame he foresaw for controlling IEDs would require an extension.

More than 500 mobile jammers had reached Iraq, but thousands more were needed. By late spring 2004, the task force had finally established a jammer strategy: get as many systems into theater as possible -- including Warlock Green, a sister device known as Warlock Red, and a Navy jammer called Cottonwood, which was removed from the Suburban in which it typically rode, installed in an armored vehicle and renamed Ironwood. Meanwhile, engineers would develop a single powerful variant that covered as much of the RC spectrum as possible.

Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), a former paratrooper and Vietnam veteran from San Diego who chaired the House Armed Services Committee, watched the Army's response to IEDs with impatience. In February 2004, a committee memo to the service noted that "arsenals, depots, industry, and steel mills" were not at full capacity in making heavy plates for uparmored Humvees. House staffers visited the steel plants, extracting pledges to defer commercial work until almost 7,000 Humvee armor kits were finished in May, six months ahead of the Army's original schedule.

Hunter was particularly incensed to find skittish troops bolting thin steel and even plywood to military trucks traveling along Route Tampa and other hazardous Iraqi roads. In January, he had asked Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory near San Francisco to design an armored gun truck similar to those used in the Vietnam War, the sole surviving example of which he found in the Army's transportation museum at Fort Eustis, Va. In March, a five-ton prototype, with steel and ballistic fiberglass protection added to the cab and truck bed, was shipped for testing to Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland.

On June 4, Hunter appeared at the Pentagon's River Entrance with a freshly painted gun truck and placards, mounted on easels, listing its virtues. Cody and others from the top brass wandered out to kick the tires. No one wanted to buck the powerful chairman, but several paratroopers soon appeared to inform Hunter "how much they loved the Humvee better than these big things, how nice and small and agile it was," he later recalled.

Hunter was not dissuaded. Nearly 100 gun-truck kits would be sent to Iraq, at $40,000 each, and 18 to Afghanistan. Some soldiers sang the truck's praises, while others found it top-heavy and "something of a grenade basket," according to a senior commander in the 10th Mountain Division. Still, of more than 9,000 medium and heavy military transport trucks rolling through Iraq in late 2004, only about one in 10 had armor, according to GlobalSecurity.org. The convoys remained vulnerable.

A Vietnam-era relic would hardly solve the IED threat permanently. Several influential voices in Washington now questioned the Pentagon's approach. Retired Adm. Dennis C. Blair, the president of the Institute for Defense Analyses and a former U.S. commander in chief in the Pacific, complained to the joint staff about the lack of systematic, rigorous analysis of IED trends. "The Army is not dealing with the IED problem well, because it's not in their nature," Blair said. "They're used to taking off from the line of departure, capturing the enemy capital and having a victory parade."

Moreover, the emphasis on defeating the device, Blair added, was "like playing soccer and you're spending all your money and attention on the goalie's gloves. At that point, not only is this the last line of defense, but the ball is already in the air."

At Centcom, Smith also was frustrated by the lack of urgency. Four months after concluding that "we're winning this thing," he now had doubts about the national commitment to overcoming IEDs. "We have got to get at this thing in a different way than we're addressing it right now," he advised Abizaid in Qatar in June 2004. "We've got to have something like the Manhattan Project."

The allusion to the crash program that had built the atomic bomb in World War II -- an effort eventually employing 125,000 people and many of the nation's finest scientific minds -- appealed to Abizaid's imagination. Several days later he wrote a personal message to the Pentagon leadership asking for a "Manhattan Project-like" approach to IEDs.

"What the [expletive] does he think we're doing?" Cody snapped upon learning of the request. But the Centcom commander's plea could hardly be brushed aside. In a meeting with Cody and Votel, according to a participant in the session, Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asked whether the Army could meet Abizaid's request.

The Army believed it could, particularly if the service was made the executive agent for an expanded effort that involved the entire Defense Department. That meant getting the other services to relinquish money, personnel and bureaucratic control, an encroachment that quickly triggered alarms.

Meetings convened, exchanges grew stormy. The Navy and Marine Corps had pursued their own counter-IED programs, and the Air Force particularly resisted putting the Army in charge of a Pentagon-wide enterprise.

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz believed change was necessary. Why, he had asked his staff, did it take so long for armor, jammers and other counter-IED materiel to reach Iraq and Afghanistan? "Where is all this stuff?" he complained. "When is it going to get to theater?"

The effort seemed fragmented and ad hoc -- "sucked into technology rabbit holes," as Votel put it. A survey by the Joint Forces Command in Norfolk that spring had found that at least 132 government agencies were now involved in IED issues, from the FBI and CIA to the National Security Agency and the National Ground Intelligence Center in Charlottesville, Va., according to an Army brigadier general.

The battle against IEDs exceeded the management capacity of a single service, Wolfowitz concluded. On July 12, 2004, he signed a one-paragraph order that transformed the Army task force into a joint task force. Votel would remain director, with cramped offices in the Army operations center. But he now reported to Wolfowitz rather than to Cody, and the task force would draw expertise from all services.

Cody, who became the Army's four-star vice chief of staff in late June, accepted the decision graciously, even as he told one senior Army officer who now worked for Wolfowitz, "Don't forget where you came from."

Creation of the Joint IED Task Force would dramatically expand the U.S. effort. A $100 million budget in fiscal 2004 would mushroom to $1.3 billion in 2005. In subsequent meetings with industry executives and the national research laboratories, Wolfowitz declared that there was no higher priority. Within the Defense Department, countering IEDs would be second only to exterminating Osama bin Laden.

"This is a major strategic effort," Wolfowitz told one group. "What can you put into it?"

Staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.

Monday: The IED Blitz

Iran: As Tensions Rise, So Does Rhetoric

By Jeffrey Donovan

September 28, 2007 (RFE/RL) -- To any reader of the English-language blogosphere, September appeared destined to be the month of the Iran war media blitz.

A first sign of an impending war of words over Iran came in late August. In an Internet blog, professor Barnett Rubin, a highly respected authority on Afghanistan at New York University, said a Bush administration insider told him there would be an "Iran war rollout" in the media in September.

Yet it was in Paris, not Washington, that perhaps the first salvo in the war of words with Iran was fired -- a drumbeat of rising rhetoric over the last month that Admiral William Fallon, the top U.S. military commander in the Middle East, has called "not helpful" and "not useful."

On August 27, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, speaking to a group of French diplomats, called a nuclear-armed Iran "unacceptable." He added: "I underline France's full determination to support the alliance's current policy of increasing sanctions, but also to remain open if Iran makes the choice to fulfill its obligations. This policy is the only one that will allow us to escape an alternative, which I consider to be catastrophic. Which alternative? An Iranian bomb or the bombing of Iran."

Iran Media Blitz

As if on cue, the language of U.S. President George W. Bush, speaking the very next day, also took a confrontational turn toward Tehran.

"Iran's active pursuit of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons threatens to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust," Bush told a gathering of U.S. war veterans. "Iran's actions threaten the security of nations everywhere. And that is why the United States is rallying friends and allies around the world to isolate the regime, to impose economic sanctions. We will confront this danger before it is too late."

Publicly, Bush has refused to take military action off the table if Iran does not comply with UN Security Council resolutions demanding that it suspend its uranium enrichment programs.

Led by the United States, the Western powers are seeking to pass a third round of even tougher Security Council sanctions against Iran. However, at a meeting today in New York, the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany agreed to delay a vote on tougher sanctions until late November at the earliest.

That outcome is a setback to U.S. and French efforts, yet their cooperation still signals a key break from the recent past.

Unlike during the Iraq war run-up, when France voiced fierce opposition to toppling Saddam Hussein, this time Paris is backing up Bush with tough talk of its own.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner weighed in with perhaps even stronger words than his boss, stating on September 16 that the world should brace for war with Iran if negotiations to end its nuclear program fail. Although he later tempered his comments, Kouchner and Sarkozy's rhetoric starkly contrasts with that of former French President Jacques Chirac, whose vocal opposition to war with Iraq dealt a blow to U.S.-France relations.

So what’s motivated France to talk tough now? Jean-Pierre Darnis, a political analyst at the University of Nice and Rome's Institute of Foreign Affairs, says the new French leader is partly motivated by a genuine desire to repair relations with Washington. Darnis adds that France clearly wants to avoid war with Iran, but sees its threat as a necessary prod to change Tehran’s behavior.

"Sarkozy said: 'I don't like the word war. I don't want to use the word war,' after Kouchner [used the word]," Darnis says. "But nevertheless, he is very open to a large panel of actions against Iran."

On September 25 at the UN General Assembly in New York, Sarkozy reiterated that an Iranian nuclear bomb would be an "unacceptable risk to stability in the region and in the world." He was echoed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who said, “If Iran were to acquire the nuclear bomb, the consequences would be disastrous."

Robert Whitman, who studies European foreign policy at London’s Chatham House think tank, says the tough talk from Paris, and to a lesser extent Berlin, is partly aimed at permanent UN Security Council members China and Russia to persuade them to drop their opposition to new Iran sanctions since the alternative -- namely, war -- should appear so much worse to them.

New France

But Whitman adds that Sarkozy’s rhetoric should also be taken at face value -- that is, it reflects genuine French concern over the danger of Iran’s nuclear program:

"I think that’s partly why the French have been using the language why they have, because they think the Iran case is a very serious test of the credibility of the international nonproliferation regime for nuclear weapons," Whitman says. "And I think that their analysis is that it will have grave consequences for nuclear proliferation in the Middle East if Iran is not stopped. And the French do believe that they are being a responsible international citizen by bearing down on the Iranians."

But what about the Iranians? Are they, too, somehow served by all the war talk?

Speaking on September 25 at the UN, Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad vowed Tehran would continue to defy any UN resolutions on Iran’s nuclear program. He said the nuclear question was "closed" as a political issue and that Iran would pursue the monitoring of its nuclear program "through its appropriate legal path," the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN's nuclear watchdog.

British analyst Whitman says the media circus that accompanied Ahmadinejad’s trip to the United States, along with the hard-line rhetoric against him, may actually be helping him in his domestic political battles back home. "Certainly, in terms of external criticism of the regime, and particularly criticism in the U.S., this will obviously assist him in terms of his struggle against moderates in Tehran," Whitman says.

Others have noted that every time the Iranian crisis escalates, the price of oil increases, further filling petroleum-rich Tehran's coffers.

The war drums have also been beating in the right-wing U.S. media, particularly among those "neoconservative" pundits who pushed successfully for the Iraq invasion and now reportedly seek to topple the clerical regime in Iran. Reports say their pro-Iran war views may be shared at least in part by Vice President Dick Cheney and others in the Bush administration.

According to the U.S. magazine "Newsweek," in its October 1 edition, David Wurmser, a former adviser to Cheney on the Middle East, was considering a plan to press Israel to strike Iranian nuclear targets in a move that could bring the United States into a war with Tehran. Wurmser, in remarks today to the "New York Sun" daily, categorically denied those allegations.

But in a clear signal of the mood in Washington, this week the U.S. House of Representatives approved a bill that would tighten sanctions on Iran. The bill, which passed by a vote of 397 to 16, also calls on the U.S. government to list Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist group. The bill calls for sanctions against foreign companies that have U.S. subsidiaries who invest in Iran's energy sector.

A day later, the U.S. Senate passed a similar nonbinding resolution on Iran. Critics such as Democratic Senator Jim Webb of Virginia said the motion "could be read as a tantamount to a declaration of war on Iran."

But if the martial rhetoric serves the interests of "hawks" in Washington, some say it also aides "hawks" in the Middle East opposed to Iran’s ascendance in the region.

Independent author Robert Baer, who spent two decades in the Muslim world as a case officer for the Central Intelligence Agency, predicted in a recent article for the website of the U.S. magazine "Time" that there would be a military strike against Iran "within six months."

Military Caution

Last week, U.S. Admiral Fallon told Al-Jazeera television that he believed there would not be war with Iran, and called the war talk unhelpful. Similarly, General John Abizaid, Fallon's predecessor as chief U.S. commander in the Middle East, said this month that while every effort should be made to stop Iran's apparent march toward nuclear weapons, the world could live with and deter a nuclear-armed Iran.

Baer, for his part, contends that part of the Bush administration, led by Cheney, wants to strike Iran for a number of reasons including the nuclear threat, Shi’ite Iran’s growing influence in Iraq and the region, its ties to terrorism, and its alleged threat to Sunni regimes friendly to Washington, such as Saudi Arabia.

The Saudis "are saying basically, if you want to keep your 10 million barrels or 9 million barrels [of oil] a day flowing freely in international markets, and keeping the price relatively low on oil, you better come to our protection," Baer recently said. "You better do something about Iran. And they’re telling us, or what they’re telling me, is that you have to decapitate the Iranian regime."

Today's UN talks in New York effectively gave the green light for IAEA chief Muhammad el-Baradei to carry on in his efforts to try and clear up doubts about Iran's past nuclear activities. El-Baradei recently gave Iran three months to clear its record in a move criticized by Washington as a tactic to stall sanctions and evade the key issue of halting enrichment.

Reports say the Western powers are considering their own economic and political sanctions against Iran, should efforts to pass a new resolution in the Security Council prove fruitless.

Where the Iran story ultimately goes is anyone’s guess. But as September 2007 draws to a close, some have recalled a famous remark by former White House chief of staff Andrew Card.

About Washington’s Iraq media blitz in September 2002, a half-year before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Card said, "From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August."

Myanmar's Crackdown Reflects Core Military Beliefs

By JAMES HOOKWAY
September 29, 2007

BANGKOK, Thailand -- The Myanmar government's blockage of public access to the Internet, nighttime roundup of demonstration leaders and ransacking of monasteries increased fears that the country's military rulers will go to any lengths to crush civil opposition. Much of the world has looked on with a mixture of revulsion and puzzlement at the reclusive regime's forceful tactics, which reduced the number of protesters in the streets of the main city of Yangon Friday to a few thousand at most. Troops sought to disperse those, beating them with clubs and firing warning shots and tear gas. But experts say the government's response to the unrest is in keeping with the two core beliefs that Myanmar's rulers have cultivated for the past 45 years: that only the army can keep the ethnically diverse country together and that if the generals don't act decisively, they may be ousted by their own army rivals.

The idea that the powerful, 400,000-strong military is the only institution that can stop the country, formerly known as Burma, from splintering and potentially ceding control of key natural resources to neighboring states is one that the head of state, Gen. Than Shwe, repeatedly has spread in the country's state-run media. The battle-hardened 74-year-old regularly blames foreigners, communists and separatist insurgents for trying to destroy the country. "This is the line the generals are pushing: They try to spread the fear that the country will disintegrate if the military isn't there to rule it," says Zin Linn, information director in Bangkok for Myanmar's self-styled government in exile, the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma. "To our way of thinking, there is no danger of the country splintering."

Myanmar was colonized by the British in the 1800s. With its mountainous borders and thick jungles, the whole territory didn't come under colonial rule until the final years of the 19th century. Its population of 53 million is 89% Buddhist, but the government recognizes 135 different ethnic groups. Burmans, who make up 68% of the population, are the dominant group in the center of the country.

Since taking power in 1962, the government often has responded to challenges with crushing force. In 1988, troops massacred 3,000 people to stamp out a growing pro-democracy movement in the country. Many others have been jailed, beaten or killed since then. And the government refused to recognize the validity of a 1990 democratic election won by the National League for Democracy, led by Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who remains under house arrest.

So far, the government says at least 10 people have been killed in the recent violence. But Friday, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he believed the loss of life in Myanmar was "far greater." Those killed still appear to be a fraction of the number gunned down in 1988, a difference some experts attribute to calls for restraint by key trading partners such as China.

But authorities also have learned how to manage crowds more effectively, letting protests develop until ringleaders can be identified and then tracked down and arrested after dark, says Sunait Chutinaranond, director of the Institute of Asian Studies at Bangkok's Chulalongkorn University. Some of the Buddhist monks who were at the vanguard of the protests this past week were arrested at night. As of Friday, far fewer monks were on the street than in previous days.

Gen. Than Shwe is a psychological-war specialist, learning his trade fighting Karen rebels in the late 1940s and early 1950s, shortly after Burma became independent from Britain. He is a career soldier who rose through the ranks, becoming head of government in 1992 after his predecessor unexpectedly resigned for health reasons. His own power base strengthened after the military-intelligence chief, Khin Nyunt, was ousted as prime minister and arrested in 2004. Gen. Khin Nyunt, an ethnic Chinese, was seen as somewhat moderate compared with the other junta members. He was sentenced to 44 years in prison for alleged corruption.

The government's position relies on the army's willingness, if necessary, to battle its own citizens. Soldiers are recruited at a young age and kept separate from ordinary Burmese. Officers are educated in isolated military academies and are instilled with the belief that they are Myanmar's elite designated rulers. Army divisions are rotated around the country to prevent them from building ties to the local communities around them. Even the government has isolated itself from the governed in a new capital called Nyapidaw, about 200 miles north of Yangon, the former Rangoon. There, among new government buildings, a golf course and apartment buildings, the military elite live in comparative luxury at odds with the poverty that affects much of the rest of the country.

Suicide Bombing Kills 27 Afghans

By KIRK SEMPLE

KABUL, Afghanistan, Sept. 29 — A suicide bomber wearing an Afghan military uniform approached a bus full of Afghan soldiers on their way to work early today and detonated a belt of explosives concealed beneath his clothes, officials said. The explosion transformed the vehicle into a smoldering husk of twisted steel and killed at least 27 people, including civilians, making it one of the deadliest suicide bombings in Afghanistan this year, officials said.

The early-morning blast was so powerful that it peeled the sides off the bus, catapulted a huge piece of the vehicle into a park across the street and shattered windows in shops and homes around the neighborhood.

Numerous people were wounded in the attack, including day laborers who had gathered nearby in the hope of finding work, according to a statement issued by the Interior Ministry. Some of the laborers were also among the dead, the statement said, though the exact number was not yet known.

Neighborhood residents and shop owners described a deafening blast followed by bedlam as bloody survivors stumbled around screaming for help. Ghulam Jelani, 48, the owner of a bakery no more than 100 yards from the attack, said he was toiling in his kitchen when the explosion occurred.

“I went outside and there was a lot of dust and I couldn’t see anything,” he recalled. “After five minutes I could finally see the bus.”

Initially there were conflicting accounts from officials on the scene about whether the bomber had made it onto the bus. But the Interior Ministry clarified later in the morning that the bomber had detonated himself on the street.

“It’s a very painful incident,” Gen. Muhammad Razzaq Yaqubi, the deputy police chief of Kabul, said at the scene as Afghan and French forensic investigators sifted through the wreckage and two Afghan police officials wandered down the street picking up body parts and dropping them into a blue plastic bag.

While suicide bombings in Iraq have been employed by the Sunni Arab insurgency to target the Shiite civilian population in an apparent effort to incite sectarian tensions, suicide bombers in Afghanistan have mostly attacked Afghan and foreign security forces.

Early this month, the United Nations said that in the first eight months of the year, Afghanistan had suffered a 69 percent increase in suicide bombings over the same period last year.

There have already been 100 bombings this year, killing at least 290 people, according to Afghan and international officials. A record 123 were carried out in 2006, inflicting some 305 deaths.

In the last large-scale suicide bombing in Afghanistan, at least one bomber blew himself up on Sept. 10 in a crowded market in the south, killing at least 26 Afghans, half of them civilians. The last large suicide bombing in the capital occurred in June when a suicide attacker boarded a bus carrying Afghan police trainers and detonated himself, killing 24 people and wounding 35 others.

A former Taliban commander told United Nations investigators that half of all suicide bombers had been foreigners and that “almost all undergo some form of training and preparation in madrasas based in Pakistan,” according to a United Nations report released earlier this month.

“Over 80 percent of suicide attackers pass through recruitment, training facilities or safe houses in North or South Waziristan en route to their targets inside Afghanistan,” the report added.

Many of the bombers appear to be young, poorly educated Afghans who had attended religious schools in Pakistan, investigators found. Suicide bombers also receive support from networks inside Afghanistan.

North Korea nuclear talks shift focus to energy

By Chris Buckley

BEIJING (Reuters) - Talks on ending North Korea's nuclear ambitions shifted focus on Saturday to U.S. energy aid for the impoverished state as delegates circulated a text of a proposed joint statement.

U.S. President George W. Bush on Friday authorized $25 million in aid for the North, which would provide up to 50,000 tonnes of heavy fuel oil, as a reward for Pyongyang's commitment to disable its nuclear facilities by the end of the year.

U.S. envoy Christopher Hill said he had seen the draft text which Kyodo news agency reported include steps North Korea must take by the end of the year.

"It's a pretty complete draft and we made some comments, but I don't know what the others think about it," he told reporters. "So I don't know if we will have a joint statement or not."

North Korea, which tested a nuclear device last year, shut down and sealed its Yongbyon nuclear plant and allowed U.N. monitors back to the site in July.

Those were its first steps in carrying out a breakthrough agreement reached in February at the six-party talks, which group the two Koreas, the United States, Japan, Russia and China.

But it must now disable its atomic facilities and make a declaration of all of its nuclear programs, in return for a huge injection of fuel aid and an end to diplomatic isolation.

China and South Korea have delivered initial fuel shipments and Russia is expected to do so too, but Japan has indicated it will not participate unless North Korea addresses the issue of Japanese citizens the North abducted in the 1970s and 1980s.

"The issue of abductions by the DPRK poses a serious challenge to human dignity," Japanese Foreign Minister Masahiko Komura told reporters at the United Nations on Friday.

ROAD MAP

Hill had initially said this round of talks would aim to set targets for disablement to the end of the year. He later scaled back expectations, saying negotiators hoped to agree to a "road map".

Hill stressed that disablement of the nuclear facilities, a step towards complete dismantling, had to mean that it would be a long and costly process for Pyongyang to restart its reactors.

"We have a common definition, which is the idea that if there were a return -- and of course we're not planning a return -- to plutonium production, that it should be made difficult by process of disablement," Hill said.

"Our definition of difficult is several months and we would argue it should be 12 months."

In 2002, North Korea was able to restart the Yongbyon reactor in two months, after a previous disarmament agreement fell apart.

South Korea said the issue of North Korea's nuclear ambitions should not be allowed to drag on.

"This problem, if not resolved soon, will seriously undermine the NPT regime," said South Korean Foreign Minister Song Min-soon, referring to the nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.

"It also has significant implications for peace and security in Northeast Asia and beyond," he told the U.N. General Assembly.

(Additional reporting by Paul Eckert in New York)

Residents express despair as troops take back control in Myanmar

The Associated Press
Friday, September 28, 2007

YANGON, Myanmar: Residents worried that pro-democracy protests could be weakening after soldiers and police in Myanmar took control of the streets, firing tear gas and warning shots to scatter demonstrators who ventured out and sealing off Buddhist monasteries.

The streets were quiet early Saturday and monks, who have provided the backbone of recent rallies calling for an end to 45 years of military rule, were locked behind temple gates in the two largest cities, Yangon and Mandalay. Additional troops arrived overnight, consolidating the government's control of urban areas.

Internet links have been cut.

"I don't think that we have any more hope to win," said a young woman who took part in a massive demonstration Thursday that was broken up when troops opened fire into a crowd. She was separated from her boyfriend and has not seen him since. "The monks are the ones who give us courage."

Daily protests drawing tens of thousands of people had grown into the stiffest challenge to the ruling military junta in two decades, a crisis that began more than a month ago when people in the desperately poor nation of 54 million started rallying against a massive fuel price increase. The demonstrations escalated when monks joined in.

The junta, which has a long history of snuffing out dissent, started cracking down Wednesday, when the first of at least 10 deaths was reported, and then let loose on Thursday, shooting protesters and clubbing them with batons.

Small groups of die-hard activists and angry residents have continued to turn out since then, some taunting troops and then scattering into alleyways, soldiers in pursuit.

"Bloodbath again! Bloodbath again!" a Yangon resident yelled Friday while watching troops break up one march by shooting into the air, firing tear gas and beating people with clubs. Participants in the protests asked that their names not be used, fearing retribution.

The mood in Yangon was somber Saturday. Soldiers and police were stationed on almost every street corner. Shopping malls, grocery stores and public parks were closed, and only a handful of residents ventured out.

"People are living in a state of fear and hate," said one onlooker, who asked not to be named. "A few days ago, everyone was friendly. Now no one wants to talk to strangers."

Hundreds of people have been arrested in the last few days, including Win Mya Mya, an outspoken member of the country's main opposition group, the National League for Democracy, who was taken overnight, according to family members.

Images of bloodied protesters and fleeing crowds have riveted world attention on the escalating crisis, prompting many governments to urge the junta to end the violence. A video broadcast by Japan's Fuji Television Network showed a soldier directly shooting a Japanese cameraman during the crackdown Thursday.

The UN special envoy to Myanmar, Ibrahim Gambari, was due to arrive in the country later Saturday to promote a political solution to the crisis. But Western diplomats were already complaining that Gambari's visit likely would not include senior members of the opposition or — apparently — the country's leader, Gen. Than Shwe.

The schedule was being set by the government.

The United States, meanwhile, urged "all civilized nations" to press Myanmar's leaders to end the crackdown.

"They don't want the world to see what is going on there," White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said, as soldiers searched hotels for foreign journalists, who have been largely barred from entering the country.

But analysts said it was unlikely that countries with major investments in Myanmar, such as China and India, would agree to take any punitive measures. They also noted the junta has long ignored criticism of its tough handling of dissidents.

Although the crackdown raised fears of a repeat of a 1988 democracy uprising that saw an estimated 3,000 protesters slain, the junta appeared relatively restrained so far.

The arrival of additional troops in Yangon strengthened the government's hand, said an Asian diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing protocol. The corralling of monks — who carry high moral authority in the predominantly Buddhist nation — was also a serious blow.

Authorities also shut off the country's two Internet service providers, although big companies and embassies hooked up to the Web by satellite remained online. The Internet has played a crucial role in getting news and images of the democracy protests to residents and the outside world alike.

In Yangon, lines formed at stores for shortwave radios, with people eager to hear what was going on in their own country.

The government has put the official death toll from this week's violence at 10, but diplomats and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said many more may have died, citing unconfirmed witness reports.

U.S. Steps Up Confrontation With Myanmar Junta

By DAVID E. SANGER and STEVEN LEE MYERS

WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 — The Bush administration stepped up its confrontation with the ruling junta in Myanmar on Friday, and officials said they were searching for ways to persuade China and other nations to cut off lending, investment and trade into the country.

But in a sign of how limited Washington’s leverage is against the country, which has long been the target of American sanctions, officials said they were concerned that China, a trading partner and neighbor of Myanmar, would block any serious effort to destabilize the Burmese government.

The administration seems to regard the violent crackdown on Burmese monks as a long-hoped-for opportunity to get other Southeast Asian nations to rethink their insistence that they should not interfere with the internal politics of their neighbors. The hope is that American pressure might force the Burmese leaders into a political process that would drive them from power, if not from the country.

“What we are trying to do is speed their demise,” said a senior American official. “The question is, do we have the diplomatic and economic influence to hit a bank shot here,” by persuading Beijing, in particular, that its dealings with Myanmar could embarrass it as the 2008 Olympics approach.

Another senior official said the administration would try to persuade China to offer sanctuary to the leaders of the junta, in hopes it would get them out of the country. Other ideas include getting China and India to halt investment in new oil and gas projects, cutting off bank lending in places like Singapore to freeze Burmese accounts.

The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were discussing internal policy deliberations.

Many of the techniques are modeled on the sanctions designed against North Korea. Officials were surprised at how quickly banks ceased dealing with that country as soon as they realized it could affect their access to the American banking system.

“International institutions take our list seriously,” one of the officials said, referring to banks. The official added, “They quickly realize the downside of dealing with these people is greater than the upside.”

At least for the moment, officials said, the junta leaders seemed to be gaining some ground over the protesters, cutting off their access to the Internet, so that photographs and video of the street confrontations would not circulate around the world.

The government does face international criticism, though. The United Nations, under pressure from the Bush administration and European leaders, is sending a special envoy, Ibrahim Gambari, to Myanmar, which agreed to allow him to visit after China intervened, officials said.

In a meeting on Thursday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice confronted a midlevel Burmese diplomat, according to officials who were present, telling him it was “bizarre” that he was defending his government while pictures emerged of troops shooting unarmed monks.

On Friday, Ms. Rice expressed disappointment that the United Nations Security Council could not act more forcefully, largely because of opposition from China.

“I will say on Burma that given what is going on in the streets in Rangoon, I would have hope that the Security Council would have taken stronger action,” Ms. Rice said in New York, referring to the country’s capital, Yangon, by its traditional name. American policy does not recognize the military government’s changing of the country’s name to Myanmar and continues to refer to it as Burma.

The Bush administration’s efforts have received praise from an unexpected quarter: human rights advocates.

“To the extent the international community is not moving, it is not the fault of the United States,” said Jeremy Woodrum, a co-founder of the U.S. Campaign for Burma, an advocacy organization in Washington. He credited President Bush with forcing through statements critical of Myanmar’s leaders this week by the United Nations Security Council and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

Officials said Mr. Bush saw the events in Myanmar as a chance to reinforce his push for democracy around the world. “It’s a legacy moment,” a senior American diplomat said.

Mr. Bush discussed how to respond to the military crackdown in a video conference on Friday with Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain, who promised to seek tougher sanctions through the European Union. The State Department also announced that it had barred “more than three dozen” senior officials and their family members from entering the United States.

On Thursday, the Treasury Department announced a list of 14 of Myanmar’s leaders who now face sanctions. One of the senior officials said that the list would be expanded next week to include more officials.

Few Burmese leaders have ever traveled to the United States, but President Bush pointedly included family members when he announced the visa bans. The State Department did not specify who was on the list, though it almost certainly includes those on the Treasury Department’s list.

The officials warned that it could easily be expanded to include Burmese officials’ children or grandchildren who might be visiting or studying in the United States.

One of the senior officials said that the administration was also considering the fate of the only major American investment in Myanmar, a Chevron energy stake, which was grandfathered in when the Clinton administration imposed sanctions on the country in 1997.

Chevron owns a share of a gas field and pipeline project that was initially acquired by Unocal. The project also includes Total from France, PTT Exploration and Production of Thailand and Myanmar’s Myanma Oil and Gas Enterprise.

A spokesman for Chevron, Donald Campbell, declined to comment on whether the new sanctions or any other under consideration would affect the company’s investment.

Given the dearth of American investment and trade with Myanmar, the financial levers appear limited, officials acknowledged.

But the United States has stepped up pressure in other ways: Voice of America and Radio Free Asia doubled their broadcasting into the country in Burmese to five hours a day.

Officials hope to increase that, and also to shift funds to help support nongovernmental organizations and purchase cellphones to help disseminate information, especially now that the government has shut down Myanmar’s Internet connections.

Ultimately, though, the officials said the greatest hope for forcing the military government to negotiate its own demise, in effect, rested with the country’s neighbors, especially China.

President Bush used an Oval Office meeting with China’s foreign minister on Thursday to press for strong action, but American officials say the Chinese are reluctant to act against a significant trading partner or set a precedent for undermining a single-party government that represses dissent.

Still, the White House press secretary, Dana M. Perino, said Friday that Mr. Bush was pleased with the outcome of his meeting with the foreign minister, Yang Jeichi. “I think that the Chinese were helpful in allowing to make sure the U.N. special envoy was allowed to get there, to Burma,” she said.

U.S. Urges China to Help Curb Violence in Burma, Prepare for Transition

By Michael Abramowitz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 29, 2007; A12

Senior Bush administration officials have pressed Chinese officials in private conversations this week to use their leverage with Burmese authorities to limit the violence and help manage a transition to a new government in Burma, which is experiencing its most serious and violent demonstrations in two decades, U.S. officials said yesterday.

The Chinese have deflected the entreaties by describing Burma's turmoil as an internal matter. But one senior U.S. official said the Chinese have been "shocked" by the world's reaction to the confrontation between the government and protesters. He added that he believes they are "reconsidering the amount of support" China provides to the Burmese government.

China, which has extensive commercial interests in Burma, has received a blunt message from the United States: "You wanted to become a big power -- part of being a big power is you will be held responsible for you client states," said this official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was discussing private meetings. U.S. officials have also urged China to consider some form of refuge for Burmese leaders, to help speed a transition to a new government, this official said.

The White House is focusing its diplomacy on China largely because it has little independent influence over the military-led government in Burma, which has engaged this week in a crackdown on protesters led by Buddhist monks.

The administration is calculating that Beijing, a major protector of Burma, will not want to risk world opprobrium if widespread bloodshed is caused by its long-time ally. Officials said China is nervous about prospects that the 2008 Olympics in Beijing could be tarnished if the situation in Burma is not stabilized peacefully.

The anti-government protests, which started in August, have become a cause c¿l¿bre in Washington in the wake of this week's crackdown. House and Senate leaders drafted resolutions yesterday condemning the military government, with little of the normal partisan bickering that often accompanies foreign policy debates on Capitol Hill.

The administration, meanwhile, announced sanctions this week aimed at squeezing the government's military leaders and their associates. On Thursday, the Treasury Department imposed new financial sanctions on 14 senior Burmese officials linked to egregious human rights abuses.

Yesterday, the State Department announced that three dozen Burmese military and government officials and their families will be barred from visiting the United States. The U.S. government is also doubling the amount of Burmese-language broadcasts beamed into a country where the authorities have been trying to cut off Internet and other forms of communication with the outside world, an official said.

President Bush has stepped up his rhetoric, calling on other countries to press Burma, which is also known as Myanmar. He has been joined by first lady Laura Bush, who has adopted the pro-democracy cause in Burma in a rare foray into foreign policy and has issued repeated public statements criticizing the government. Both Bushes have been heavily influenced by private meetings with Burmese dissidents and other activists, current and former administration officials say.

"President Bush calls on all nations, especially those nations closest to Burma that have the most influence with the regime, to support the aspirations of the Burmese people, and to join in condemning the junta's use of violence . . .," the first lady said in a statement last night. "The United States stands with the people of Burma. . . . We cannot -- and will not -- turn our attention from courageous people who stand up for democracy and justice."

Bush met with Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi in the Oval Office on Thursday for an unscheduled meeting on Burma after the diplomat came to the White House to see national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice raised the subject of Burma in her own meeting with the foreign minister earlier in the week, and the United States' top diplomat on Asia, Christopher R. Hill, has also discussed the issue in Beijing, where he is attending talks on North Korea's nuclear weapons program, a senior official said.

U.S. officials have limited knowledge about events inside Burma -- including the death toll, so far -- and depend, in large measure, on news reports and information from refugees, exiles and others in neighboring countries. The United States does have a mission in Burma, but the ability of diplomats there to report has been limited in recent days, officials said.

Still, one senior official said the accounts he is seeing suggest "a regime under severe stress." He said the U.S. government is receiving unconfirmed reports that division-level military commanders in Burma are refusing orders to participate in the crackdown. Another official said that it is impossible to predict what will happen but that there is "overwhelming dislike" of the government among civilians.

U.S. officials were cautious in their assessment of the diplomatic road ahead. One acknowledged that there have been only "pretty tepid" statements from China and India, but officials were encouraged by a condemnation this week from neighboring members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. State Department officials quietly raised the possibility of introducing another U.N. Security Council resolution on Burma if they do not see stronger action from China and India.

Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.), the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he agrees with the administration that China is key to resolving the situation. "There is no doubt in my mind that if the Chinese authorities decided to put pressure on Burma, things will change instantaneously," he said.

Letter from China: Myanmar crackdown sheds light on Beijing's aspirations

by Howard W. French
Friday, September 28, 2007

SHANGHAI: The unfolding civil crisis in Myanmar is precisely the kind of test that China's image as an emerging global power will increasingly face in coming years, as Beijing's economic reach and international influence steadily grow.

The question people in this region and in capitals around the world will be asking is beyond the well-worn official rhetoric: What kind of power does China really aspire to be?

Is it a slick free rider on an international system whose workings have done so much to favor its emergence, hiding behind a platitude-based foreign policy while allowing others to do the world's heavy lifting?

Has it placed a bet on America's inevitable decline and settled on Deng Xiaoping's advice about concealing one's strengths until the time when all the pieces of its national reconstruction effort have fallen into place, and it can openly aspire to what it forswears today: hegemony?

Or is it a nation in the midst of a subtle but momentous transition toward a more traditional sense of great power rights and responsibilities?

Tenable arguments and counter-arguments for all of the above exist today, and the best answer may be that no one knows, not even the Chinese themselves.

What is certain is that the unrest in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, is not any ordinary crisis for China. It is a special case whose resolution will tell us a lot about where China's head is right now.

Beijing doesn't advertise such things, least of all to its own citizens, but the Burmese regime and North Korea are among the closest things that China has to real allies in the world today.

In reality, the word ally doesn't do justice to the complex relationship with the Burmese generals. Ties between the two countries are more akin to the vassal-patron relations that China traditionally sought to maintain all along its vast perimeter.

In truth, China is not the only country the Burmese crisis puts on the spot. France has tremendous oil interests in Myanmar, and how its influence will be used and what kinds of sacrifices a Paris under new leadership is willing to make in the name of principles like human rights remains an open question.

Democratic India would like to vie with China for influence in Myanmar and has so far taken an ostrich-like approach to the crisis, as if believing that looking the other way will make it cease to exist. The world, meanwhile, waits for a more democratic ethos to manifest itself in India's foreign policy.

The United States, too, very quick to announce new sanctions, seems to have reached an impasse in its foreign policy, where reflexive invocation of punitive measures, together with Washington's exhausting preoccupation with conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, may have resulted in diminishing returns.

Still, for China the Burmese crisis conjures especially difficult questions, all the more because, unlike its Western counterparts, the country is fashioning a new identity for itself on the world stage, not merely managing one.

There are signs that Beijing had already recently begun edging in tiny, carefully measured steps away from its longtime mantra of non-interference in other countries. It must be said that the policy has always only been selectively applied, but in the ever-more-demanding interest of its own image as a global player, China has recently found ways to apply pressure on countries like North Korea, Sudan and Zimbabwe so as not to be on the wrong side of history, or at least of global opinion.

Cases like these were fairly clear-cut, though, and in most instances, Beijing's moves were subtle; nothing like the bully pulpit tactics long favored in the West, and without dramatic results to show, either.

Myanmar is not testing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, like North Korea, and it is not situated on a faraway continent, where China has no colonial baggage, like Sudan and Zimbabwe.

What it is, in point of fact, is what's most important. Myanmar is a highly repressive state that has been run into the ground by incompetent leaders who have been partially enabled by China. It is, moreover, a country whose people are now risking their lives peacefully for freedom.

This must very nearly be something like a bad dream for Beijing's foreign policy establishment. One gets a hint of confirmation of this from the way the Burmese crisis has been covered in the Chinese press. The official People's Daily carried nothing Friday from Myanmar beyond statements of the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

Most other accounts so far have lacked detailed descriptions of the violence, including the beating and arrest of monks or the use of machine guns against unarmed civilians.

What we are left with are calls for stability and restraint on the one hand, and accusations of "slander" and "ulterior motives" wielded against foreigners who have raised the question of whether China has used its full influence to prevent violence.

Is stability a good thing in a country like Myanmar, after so many years of oppressive misrule? Where does China stand on the question of the democratic rights that Burmese are clamoring for, with or against the people?

In China, the images of peaceful civilian confrontation of heavily armed soldiers, a challenge that has been met in the streets of Yangon with automatic weapons fire, carry uncomfortable echoes of the bloody events of Tiananmen Square.

Surely, from Beijing's perspective it would be better if this would all blow over, the sooner the better. The status quo ante was just fine.

The problem is that the world is made up not just of governments that can agree to formulate rules of a see-no-evil international system and just get on with things however they see fit. It is also made up of people who have needs that often go unmet and rights that go unrespected, and when this persists too long, things go boom in the night. It is how China responds to this piece of the equation that will determine its new image, and it's up for Beijing to decide.

Myanmar’s Descent, Seen From 150 Miles Up

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

In the “before” shot, from May 2004, the village is there, a cluster of seven roofs near a small lake. In the “after” shot, from February of this year, the houses are gone.

Satellite photographs of rural Myanmar released yesterday show what seems to be evidence of human rights abuses gathered from space: villages wiped out, populations relocated and military encampments rising.

The images, of events long reported, were released by the Science and Human Rights Program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in coordination with the U.S. Campaign for Burma, a group working to end such abuses and bring democracy to the country known as Myanmar.

“We want to show the military junta that we are watching from the sky,” said Aung Din, the campaign’s policy director.

Myanmar’s ruling junta is in the middle of a violent crackdown on urban protests that were provoked by price increases and are being led by monks. The release of the pictures was hastened for that reason.

Those pictures show rural provinces that are home to the Karen and Shan tribes, but the director of the project, Lars Bromley, said it had now asked the satellite companies to train their cameras on monasteries, military camps and urban plazas where demonstrations form.

Mr. Aung Din said that because the junta had apparently cut Internet and telephone ties with the outside world to prevent pictures of the violence from getting out, “we’re trying to monitor them via satellite.”

The newly released photographs were taken from seven years to a few weeks ago by three commercial satellites that pass over Myanmar about twice a week, about 150 miles up. They give fairly clear pictures of objects down to about three feet across; roofs, fences and some trees are distinguishable, as are stretches of ground that look burned.

In recent years, a United Nations report found, 3,000 villages of the Karen and nearby tribes have been destroyed, and more than 500,000 people have been driven from their homes. Government troops are accused of systematically raping girls and forcing children to join their ranks.

In several images, all or parts of villages are gone. In one, a palm grove that once looked carefully tended appears overgrown. In others, rows of new buildings have sprung up in refugee camps, or military encampments have expanded and new fences and roads can be seen.

The targets were chosen to corroborate witnesses’ reports of attacks or troop movements gathered by advocates from the Free Burma Rangers, the Karen Human Rights Group and the Thailand-Burma Border Consortium, which have representatives in the area.

One of the hardest parts, Mr. Bromley said, was deciding where to tell the satellites to aim in the region, which is smaller than 1,000 square miles, because tiny villages are often not on maps and refugees shift location. Although global positioning system devices would solve that problem by providing coordinates, for a member of one of the rights groups to be caught on the ground with one “would be a death sentence,” he said. “They would be shot on sight.”

The science society’s human rights project began 30 years ago, helping forensic teams sift mass graves in Argentina.

Recently, it has used satellite photographs to document human rights violations in Darfur and in Zimbabwe. In May 2006, it showed that a Zimbabwean settlement that was a hotbed of political opposition to President Robert Mugabe had been bulldozed flat. It had had 850 homes, and at least 6,000 residents.

Myanmar Apologizes For Journalist's Death: Kyodo

By REUTERS

Filed at 11:33 p.m. ET

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan strongly protested to Myanmar over the killing of a Japanese video journalist during an anti-government rally, and Myanmar Foreign Minister Nyan Win offered apologies, Kyodo news agency said on Saturday.

Fifty-year-old Kenji Nagai was fatally wounded in Yangon on Thursday, and pictures smuggled out of the country showed him clutching a camera as he lay dying.

Japanese Foreign Minister Masahiko Komura made the protest when he met his Myanmar counterpart at U.N. headquarters in New York on Friday.

The death of Nagai "was extremely regrettable and we will lodge a stern protest," Japanese officials quoted Komura as telling Nyan Win, Kyodo said.

Nyan Win told Komura he was indeed sorry for the death, telling Japanese officials: "Demonstrations are beginning to calm down, and we would also like to exercise restraint," Kyodo said.

Japanese Foreign Ministry officials were not immediately available for comment.

Nagai was the first foreign victim of the protests that began as sporadic marches against fuel price hikes but have swelled over the past month into mass demonstrations against 45 years of military rule in Myanmar, which is also known as Burma.

U.N. Envoy Heads Into Myanmar Maelstrom

By REUTERS

Filed at 10:57 p.m. ET

YANGON (Reuters) - United Nations envoy Ibrahim Gambari travels to Myanmar on Saturday carrying worldwide hopes he can persuade its ruling generals to use negotiations instead of guns to end mass protests against 45 years of military rule.

"He's the best hope we have. He is trusted on both sides," Singapore Foreign Minister George Yeo said. "If he fails, then the situation can become quite dreadful."

So far, the junta appears to have ignored the international clamor for a peaceful end to what blossomed from tiny protests against shock fuel price rises in August into a mass uprising led by monks, the moral core of the Buddhist nation.

Yangon was eerily quiet on Saturday morning after troops and riot police barricaded off the city centre from where the protests have reverberated around the world.

Authorities have told foreign diplomats based in Yangon that the trouble was being handled with restraint.

So far, that has meant raiding at least a dozen monasteries thought to be at the van of the protests, detaining perhaps hundreds of monks and sealing off city areas around two pagodas which marked the start and end of the daily mass protests.

So far, it appears to be working and the junta restored international Internet links early on Saturday after cutting them the previous day following a flood of pictures and video of soldiers chasing protesters traveling through it to the world.

On Friday, very few monks took part in the much smaller protests around the barricades. People in Yangon said many young monks were evading arrest by casting off their maroon robes and taking refuge in houses disguised as laymen.

"Peace and stability has been restored," state-run newspapers declared on Saturday, after security forces handled protests "with care, using the least possible force."

SCARED CITY BRACED

However, people in the neighborhood reported the Minnada monastery was raided on Friday and that shots were fired.

Monks have reported six of their brethren have been killed since the army started cracking down on Wednesday to end mass protests by columns of monks flanked by supporters who filled five city blocks.

Yeo said he did not think there would be much action on the streets while Gambari was in Myanmar, but people in Yangon were braced for more of the cat and mouse protests which had kept the city tense on Friday.

Crowds taunted and cursed security forces for hours on Friday around the barbed-wire barriers in a city terrified of a repeat of 1988, when the army killed an estimated 3,000 people in crushing an uprising in the country, then known as Burma.

When the troops charged, the protesters vanished into narrow side streets, only to emerge elsewhere to renew their abuse until an overnight curfew took effect.

State-run media admit nine people have been killed since the crackdown began, prompting international outrage.

"I am afraid we believe the loss of life is far greater than is being reported," British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said on Friday after talking to U.S. President George W. Bush.

Bush and Brown discussed the need to maintain international pressure on Myanmar's rulers and the White House condemned the crackdown as "barbaric."

INTERNATIONAL CLAMOUR

Bush authorized new U.S. sanctions on Thursday against the Myanmar government, which has been operating under similar restrictions for years.

The European Union summoned Myanmar's senior diplomat in Brussels and warned him of tighter sanctions.

EU experts looked into possible restrictions on exports from Myanmar of timber, precious metals and gems, but reached no decisions, one diplomat said. Investments by specific Europeans in the country were not raised, he said.

Activist Mark Farmaner of the Burma Campaign U.K., calling the EU sanctions "pathetic," said a freeze on assets had netted less than 7,000 euros in all 27 EU member states and many countries allowed their companies to do business in Myanmar.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said sanctions were premature but he was sorry to hear about civilian deaths. "As far as sanctions are concerned, this is a topic to be especially considered in the United Nations," he Putin.

Russia, like China, is a veto-wielding member of the U.N. Security Council and has shown growing interest in Myanmar's rich gas fields.

China, the junta's main ally, publicly called for restraint

for the first time on Thursday. But at the United Nations, China has ruled out supporting sanctions or a U.N. condemnation of the military government's use of force.

The Association of South East Asian Nations, which rarely criticizes a member directly, expressed "revulsion" at the crackdown.

There were protests across Asia on Friday, with many people wearing red to symbolize the blood spilled in Myanmar, and outside the United Nations building in New York.

Blacklisted Bank to Return to Original Owner

By DONALD GREENLEES

HONG KONG, Sept. 28 — A small family-owned bank in Macao accused by the United States of laundering money for North Korea will be returned to its original owner despite earlier warnings from the United States Treasury that to do so invited a return to illegal activity by the bank.

Stanley Au, a prominent Macao businessman and adviser to the Chinese government, is to resume control of Banco Delta Asia from a state-appointed administrative committee on Saturday, the Monetary Authority of Macao said Friday.

The monetary authority said the decision to allow Mr. Au to resume full control was taken in light of “remarkable improvement” in the bank’s operations and Mr. Au’s own “persistent requests.”

Mr. Au is an influential figure in Macao, a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and a former candidate to be Macao’s first chief executive.

Banco Delta Asia, among the top 10 largest banks in the gambling enclave, was blacklisted by the United States Treasury in March following allegations that it had committed financial crimes on behalf of North Korea, including laundering the proceeds of narcotics and weapons sales and passing counterfeit dollars.

The bank was prohibited from dealing with any American financial institution and effectively frozen out of the international banking system.

It has been under state supervision since September 2005, when the Treasury Department publicly revealed it was investigating the bank as a “primary money laundering concern.” At the time, the Macao government, under pressure from the United States, also froze $25 million in accounts in the bank held by North Korea-linked entities.

North Korea demanded that the accounts be released and refused to participate in nuclear disarmament talks until the United States agreed this year to support the return of the frozen funds to account holders.

Despite the release of the North Korean money, the Treasury Department pushed ahead with the ruling in March to exclude Banco Delta Asia from the American financial system.

In an explanation of the ruling, it said the “primary concern” was a pattern of activity by the former management and owners “to ignore, facilitate or even encourage illicit activity.” It also warned that there was a “likelihood of recidivism” if the bank was returned from state control to its previous owners.

But under local law, the Macao government was unable to further extend the mandate of the administrative committee in charge of Banco Delta Asia. It had the options of returning the bank to Mr. Au, liquidating it or selling it to new owners.

In a statement welcoming the Macao government’s move Friday, Mr. Au said the American decision to support the release of the frozen North Korean funds had proved that the bank was not involved in any financial crime.

“If the account holders in question were involved in illicit business transactions or money laundering as accused, then the money should have been confiscated,” he said.

The Macao government has made considerable efforts to clean up a reputation as a money laundering center to protect a gambling industry that is outstripping Las Vegas in terms of revenue. It has implemented new laws and imposed stiff penalties against money laundering and terrorist financing in the past year.

Under the supervision of the administrative committee, Banco Delta Asia also instituted new anti-money laundering procedures. But it remains unable to conduct operations using either American or Hong Kong dollars because of the Treasury sanctions.

Two Different Accounts of Deadly Airstrike in Baghdad

By ALISSA J. RUBIN

BAGHDAD, Sept. 28 — For the battered working-class district of Abu Dshir, Ramadan evenings bring a rare air of festivity. The temperature is still warm, but the heat of summer has abated. Families stroll outdoors, and young men play nightly matches of a traditional Ramadan game called mihaidis, in which teams try to find a hidden ring.

As the teams lined up Thursday for the game, neighborhood residents said, a crowd of men gathered to watch. They lighted a large oil lamp which illuminated the street, a small shopping area where grocers and fruit vendors stay open late this time of year.

Two American helicopters hovered overhead, witnesses said.

Moments after the game began, the helicopters opened fire on the crowd, the witnesses said.

Seven men were killed, Sayyid Malik Abadi, the head of the district security committee, who arrived at the scene shortly after the episode, said Friday. He said perhaps an eighth man had died as well, but too many body parts were scattered about to be certain exactly how many were killed.

“The helicopters watched, and they thought it was a gathering and fired on it,” Mr. Abadi said. “They fired rockets. When people started to run, the helicopters’ machine guns began shooting at the people who were running.”

The American military had a different version of events, which took place in the Saha part of the Abu Dshir district. A spokesman said that earlier in the evening American forces had twice observed episodes when two or three men fired mortars into the neighborhood to the north. After the second episode, the military called for an airstrike.

“We assess possibly two or three were killed or wounded,” said Maj. Brad Leighton, a spokesman for the multinational forces in Baghdad. “We were not able to get an accurate assessment,” he added.

“Collateral damage was not observed, but it is a possibility,” Major Leighton said. “If some innocents were killed, we regret that.”

The Abu Dshir district, a district that is majority Shiite, is largely controlled by the Mahdi Army, the militia loyal to the anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr, according to people who live there. However, members of the Mahdi Army in Abu Dshir have been observing the cease-fire ordered by Mr. Sadr in August, neighbors said. No one in the neighborhood appeared to be armed during a reporter’s visit on Friday, although a few wore the black shirt and pants that the Mahdi Army often favors.

Hussein Jassim, 61, a shop owner, said the militia members in the area were no longer active. “All the world knows that the Mahdi Army has been frozen on the orders of our leader Sayyied Moktada al-Sadr, so targeting this gathering, and saying they are Mahdi Army fighters, is all a lie,” he said.

On Friday morning, relatives and neighbors gathered to escort the men’s coffins to the neighborhood’s Shiite mosque. The coffins arrived at the mosque in the back of pickup trucks.

A crowd of men in loose T-shirts and sandals stood silently watching the trucks as they approached. Men from the family stood among the coffins. On one truck was a boy, crying hysterically. Mr. Abadi said three of the boy’s brothers had been killed.

The violence on Thursday occurred a little before 8 p.m., after families had finished breaking the daily Ramadan fast, according to eyewitnesses. For Ahmed Abdullah, 37, a taxi driver, who was also near the scene, confusion mixed with anger and grief. On Friday, he stood watching the coffins being loaded back onto the trucks to be driven for burial to Najaf, a city holy to Shiites.

“It was a real massacre of innocent people, without clear reason,” he said. “I lost my brother-in-law — he was the father of three kids and he was just watching the game. May God revenge the bloodshed of those martyrs.”

Elsewhere in Baghdad on Friday, five bodies were found.

American forces also announced that they had killed a man they described as a senior terrorist in an airstrike in Musayyib, south of Baghdad, on Tuesday. The military said that the man, Abu Osama al-Tunisi, was a leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a homegrown extremist group whose leadership has foreign ties, according to American intelligence.

In Ankara, Turkey, on Friday, Iraq and Turkey signed an agreement to cooperate in fighting the Kurdish separatist group P.K.K. along their shared border, but the agreement did not include a provision allowing the Turkish Army to conduct cross-border operations against the Kurdish group.

At Least Seven Reported Dead After U.S. Helicopter Attack

By ALISSA J. RUBIN

BAGHDAD, September 28 — At least seven young men were killed in an attack late Thursday that witnesses say was launched by an American military helicopter in a suburb outside Baghdad. The young men, the witnesses said, were playing a traditional Ramadan game at the time of the attack.

The American military did not comment immediately on the attack and was checking the report, and the witnesses’ statements could not immediately be verified. The residence was in a district south of Baghdad that is dominated by local militias.

Witnesses reported seeing at least one helicopter gunship in the attack, which took place in al-Saha neighborhood. It was unclear whether the attack was on a house or apartment, or whether the men were gathering outside.

“The American helicopters hovered over the area and then bombed the gathering with rockets and chased and attacked the young people with their machine gun and killed seven and injured more than 10 people,” said Ahmed Aubdulla, 37, a taxi driver.

About 30 young men were playing the game after a meal in which they broke the day’s fast during Ramadan, the witnesses said. The funeral for the men was held today, and the bodies were sent to Najaf.

Hussein Jassim, 61, a shop owner, said that the militia members in the area were no longer active. “All the world knows that the Mahdi Army has been frozen on the orders of our leader Sayyied Moktada al-Sadr, so, targeting this gathering, and saying they are Mahdi Army fighters, is all a lie,” he said.

Graham Bowley contributed reporting from New York.

5 Witnesses Insist Iraqis Didn't Fire On Guards

State Dept. to Study System for Security

By Sudarsan Raghavan and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, September 29, 2007; A01

BAGHDAD, Sept 28 -- Five eyewitnesses to a Sept. 16 shooting incident in Baghdad involving the private security firm Blackwater USA insisted that company guards fired without provocation, forcing civilians and Iraqi police to run for cover, and that the Iraqi officers did not return fire.

The eyewitnesses and a senior Iraqi police official close to an investigation of the incident contradicted initial accounts provided by the company and the State Department, which employs Blackwater to protect U.S. diplomats. At least 11 Iraqis died in the shootings, which have focused attention on the actions of largely unregulated security companies operating in Iraq.

"The Iraqi security forces had the right to shoot at them when they saw the [Blackwater] convoy shooting at the people, but they did not shoot at the convoy," said Ahmed Ali Jassim, 19, a maintenance worker who saw the incident. "When they see Iraqis getting shot like that, their blood would be boiling. But no one crossed the limits."

The latest eyewitness accounts emerged as the State Department announced the creation of a high-level panel to assess whether appropriate rules are in place for the three private firms that protect U.S. diplomats and other civilian officials, whether the companies -- including the largest, Blackwater -- are following those rules, and whether the system should be altered or scrapped altogether.

Named by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the panel will travel to Baghdad on Saturday to begin a comprehensive review of the State Department's multibillion-dollar private security operation in Iraq, according to Patrick E. Kennedy, the department's senior management official and head of the panel. The inquiry would remain separate from probes into the Sept. 16 incident, including a joint Iraq-U.S. committee composed of U.S. military and State Department personnel and Iraqi officials.

An ABC News report Friday quoted what it said were sworn statements from Blackwater employees, four of whom said they fired on a white sedan that failed to slow down despite hand and arm signals and water bottles they threw as it approached their convoy.

"I turned and engaged the car with approximately 20 to 30 rounds from my M4 rifle. After I no longer felt the threat to my life, I turned back to cover my sector," wrote one guard, according to ABC.

The guards also reported taking fire from gunmen dressed as civilians and Iraqi police officers from a tree line, a red bus and a dirt mound. One guard reported firing on a man who exited another white sedan with what the guard believed was a detonating device.

"Fearing for my life and the lives of my team members, I fired several well aimed rounds center mass at the threat," he wrote, according to ABC.

Another guard wrote that he fired in response to shots fired from Iraqis dressed as civilians. "I fired one shot from my SR-25 at the closest threat," wrote the guard, referring to a semiautomatic sniper rifle. "He went down and did not fire anymore."

The ABC report showed a photo of what Blackwater said was an armored vehicle that had been hit by at least five rounds during the incident.

The report also showed the fiery images of what Blackwater guards said was a car bomb attack before the incident. The car bomb detonated outside a financial compound where a U.S. official under Blackwater's protection was attending a meeting. The compound is about a mile from the site of the shootings, which did not occur until nearly 30 minutes after the bombing.

The eyewitnesses -- three traffic policemen and two maintenance workers who were interviewed separately -- offered a dramatically different account of the events in Nisoor Square.

Traffic police officer Sarhan Thiab said that shortly after noon he saw two Blackwater convoys, minutes apart, come through the traffic circle. Following procedure, he and other traffic officers ordered cars to stop entering the circle to allow the convoys to pass.

Fifteen minutes later, a third Blackwater convoy of four gray REVA armored vehicles arrived. Unlike the two previous convoys, this one swerved left and rolled into the circle against the flow of traffic, the eyewitnesses said. Such a move made it more difficult for the traffic policemen to slow down vehicles that were driving directly into the convoy.

The Blackwater guards threw water bottles in the circle to halt traffic, Thiab said. He and another officer, Ali Khalaf, walked into two intersections to stop traffic heading toward the convoy, which had stopped in a semicircle.

Suddenly, guards fired on a white sedan that did not slow down quickly enough, the witnesses said. The car kept moving forward, but not in a threatening way, said Khalaf, who has given his account to U.S. and Iraqi investigators.

"The car went on rolling slowly. But they kept on shooting," said Khalaf, who ran for cover. Thiab and other witnesses said that they heard loud booms and that the vehicle burst into flames, killing the female passenger.

In seconds, there was shooting in all directions, eyewitnesses said. People were fleeing their cars and running for cover. Afterward, dead and wounded were found in almost every direction, police said.

Eyewitnesses also disputed the Blackwater guards' account that civilians were firing from a red bus. Hussam Abdul Rahman, 25, another traffic policeman who was near the bus, said passengers were kicking out the windows in a desperate attempt to escape the firing.

"There were many on this bus. They were hardly able to walk and they were screaming," Khalaf said.

The senior Iraqi police official also rejected Blackwater's account of being ambushed by gunmen. Nisoor Square, he said, sits in front of the National Police headquarters. There were checkpoints, Iraqi army and police, nearby in nearly every direction, making it hard for gunmen to take positions to ambush the convoy.

The police guards in the square, he added, would not shoot without orders. The square is a common route for dozens of heavily armored U.S. military and embassy convoys. Anyone planning an attack would use heavy weapons such as rocket-propelled grenades -- not guns, the official said. "To attack body-armored vehicles with bullets? No one can believe this," the police official said.

Both the State Department and the Defense Department have maintained they have no choice but to contract out security and other functions in an era of downsized government and increased international danger. "As long as the security threats continue at the level they are now, we're going to have to figure out a way" to protect civilians operating in Iraq, Afghanistan and other hot spots, Kennedy said. "How that is done is the purpose of the review."

Kennedy's team includes retired NATO commander Gen. George A. Joulwan; J. Stapleton Roy, a former senior diplomat who is now vice chairman of Kissinger Associates; and Eric Boswell, a senior official in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The Defense Department this week sent its own five-man team to Iraq for a parallel review of contractor security operations.