Ehrlich backs flag-burning ban
By James Fisher
Daily Times Staff Writer
OCEAN CITY -- Maryland's governor touted the state's services for veterans Thursday and asked them to encourage the U.S. Congress to pass a bill banning flag-burning.

"At times in this country we love dissent. At times that dissent crosses the line," Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich said in a speech to members of Maryland American Legion posts gathered in Ocean City for a convention. "We need to be cognizant of that."

He asked the veterans to push senators to approve a Constitutional amendment outlawing flag desecration, a bill that has not emerged from Congress with majority support. The issue was first raised in the 1980s.

Ehrlich also praised his recently appointed secretary of veterans affairs, George W. Owings III, and thanked a banquet hall of hundreds of veterans for their efforts.

"Your service was about liberation, not conquering. It's why America has always stood apart," he said.
The governor spoke for 15 minutes to a dimly lit hall of men, walked out, shook hands and posed for pictures, then entered a brighter room filled with members of Ladies' Auxiliary members -- the wives of the veterans who had heard his first speech.

"It is an interesting life, being a new dad and a governor," Ehrlich told the women. "I am not bored."
Ehrlich's second son, Josh, was born in March.
To both audiences he stressed new challenges for the state after the attacks of 9-11.
"I am in charge of the front called Maryland. Every state is a front, a potential target," Ehrlich said in his second speech.

Several attendees said the flag-burning issue was of keen interest to them.
"Our two senators (Barbara Mikulski and Paul Sarbanes) in Maryland do not vote for the flag amendment. I've tackled them face-to-face," said Perry Reese of Crisfield, who said she was a mess sergeant in the Army Air Corps in World War II.

Her criticisms were echoed by William Davis, a Frostburg, Md., vet who said he supported Ehrlich in part because of his stance on the flag amendment.

But fellow Post 24 member Robert Coburn, a Democrat, disagreed with Davis.
"We didn't put him in office, and we hope he makes room for another guy," Coburn said of Ehrlich.
The American Legion convention began Tuesday and wraps up Friday.
"You meet the shakers and the movers" at conventions, Reese said. "This is when you find out what's really going on."
Army Raises Cost of Combat Modernization
Futuristic Project Includes Drones, Unmanned Vehicles, 'Smart' Munitions
By Renae Merle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 23, 2004; Page A23
The Army outlined yesterday a restructuring of its modernization program, the Future Combat System, increasing the cost by between $20 billion and $25 billion, accelerating the deployment of key technology and adding new models of drones and ground vehicles.

The program, which is critical to the Army's transformation into a lighter, more mobile force, was originally expected to cost about $92 billion. Boeing Co. and Science Applications International Corp. are jointly managing the project.

The program aims to connect soldiers to a mobile and wireless network to assist them in battlefield decisions. It would replace the current fleet of ground vehicles with a mix of high-tech manned and unmanned ground and aerial vehicles.

The massive modernization effort has been dogged by questions about its complexity and the pace of progress on the futuristic drones and ground vehicles. The high-tech renovation will require more than 30 million lines of software code. The program "has so many moving pieces and they are so technically challenging it would be almost unbelievable to suggest it could stay on its original schedule," said Loren B. Thompson, defense consultant and chief operating officer of the Lexington Institute, an Arlington think tank.

Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker acknowledged the challenges Wednesday, telling Congress that as originally structured the program had only a 28 percent chance of success. The revisions boost its chances to more than 70 percent, he said.

Under the restructuring, the military will delay deployment of the first fully modernized unit, which will include about 2,500 soldiers, for two years, until 2014. Instead the Army will create an experimental unit in 2008 to begin testing some of the technology, including missiles stored in remote locations that a soldier could deploy through the network.

The cost increase will cover several changes to the program, including adding an armed unmanned robotic vehicle, a recovery and maintenance vehicle, two classes of unmanned aerial vehicles and an intelligent munitions system, also known as a "smart mine," which a soldier could turn on and off remotely or program to deactivate in 30 days.

"This is a very prudent and logical progression" of the program, said Army Lt. Gen. Joseph L. Yakovac Jr., military deputy to the assistant secretary for acquisition.

Some of the changes were prompted by experiences in the Iraq war, Army officials said. The Army will equip all eight manned vehicles in the program with self-protection technology for attacking incoming missiles. The previous plan called for the technology to be applied only to vehicles that would operate at the front. The change is an acknowledgement that the boundaries of the traditional battlefield no longer exist, Army officials said.

Chicago-based Boeing, which serves at the lead manager of the program, said the changes were good news. "Now we have to show the flexibility to get these new capabilities to our soldiers even faster," Dennis Muilenburg, Boeing's vice president and general manager of the project, said in a statement.

The 2005 defense appropriations bill includes $2.9 billion for the program, $1.2 billion more than this year but $268 million less than was requested.

Army Calls Abuses 'Aberrations'
Report Cites 94 Detainee-Mistreatment Cases in Iraq and Afghanistan
By Josh White and Scott Higham
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, July 23, 2004; Page A01
The Army's inspector general reported yesterday that 94 incidents of confirmed or possible detainee abuse occurred in U.S. prison facilities throughout Iraq and Afghanistan, but he added that the incidents were not due to "systemic" problems, even though a months-long inspection found that soldiers were inadequately trained and lacked proper supervision and clear orders.

The report by Lt. Gen. Paul T. Mikolashek -- presented to the Senate Armed Services Committee at a hastily scheduled hearing yesterday morning -- concluded that cases of abuse such as those at Abu Ghraib prison were "aberrations" that did not result from flawed Army doctrine.

Some senators and human rights advocates criticized the report. They said it ignored many of the most important questions, such as the hiding of "ghost detainees" and the use of unmuzzled dogs during interrogations. They also said the report's findings are contradicted by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Mikolashek and his team blamed 20 detainee deaths and 74 other reported instances of abuse -- including beatings, sexual assaults and thefts -- on "the failure of individuals to follow known standards of discipline and Army values and, in some cases, the failure of a few leaders to enforce those standards of discipline."

Mikolashek's 300-page report was released on the same day as the eagerly anticipated report of the national commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Mikolashek's inspection team detailed failures at 16 prison facilities. His report said the abuse cases were not part of a pattern and involved a tiny percentage of the more than 50,000 detainees who have been held by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Pentagon and the Bush administration have blamed a band of rogue soldiers for the abuse at Abu Ghraib.

"These abuses should be viewed as what they are -- unauthorized actions taken by a few individuals," the report said, which went on to praise the majority of soldiers. "We found numerous examples of military professionalism, ingrained Army values and moral courage in both leaders and soldiers."

Mikolashek said that he looked at broad Army doctrine and training, interviewed 650 soldiers and officers, and visited more than two dozen military installations in Iraq, Afghanistan and the United States.

He did not investigate individual cases of abuse, relying instead on the findings of previous Army investigations. His team looked at the records of 125 reported cases of detainee abuse and found that no abuse occurred in 31 cases. Of the rest, 54 cases remain "open or undetermined."

Of the 20 deaths considered confirmed or possible abuse, 10 occurred at prisons or other permanent holding facilities, five at forward collection points and five at the point of capture. Nearly half of the alleged cases of abuse occurred at the point of capture, while 22 percent were reported at the holding facilities, which included Abu Ghraib. The remainder came from collection points and other locations.

Though the Army inspectors did not discover systemic detainee abuse, they did document widespread problems throughout the U.S. military's detention operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. They said that there were not enough translators and interrogators in the field and that valuable intelligence may have been lost. To make up for the shortage, the military hired private contractors to conduct interrogations, but more than a third of those workers were not properly trained in military interrogation techniques, the report said.

The inspectors found that nearly two thirds of the detainees were held at makeshift prison camps called collection points for as long as 30 days. Army doctrine restricts the lengths of stay to 12 hours at the camps, some of them little more than concertina wire and a feeding station set up in the middle of the desert.

The inspectors also said that there were widespread problems with preventive medical services for those captured, and that none of the U.S.-run facilities the team inspected was in compliance with the Army's medical screening requirements.

In addition, only four of the 16 facilities the team visited had copies of the Geneva Conventions in the detainees' native languages, as required under international laws of war. None of the facilities in Afghanistan complied with the requirement, according to the report.

Extremely poor conditions were documented at U.S.-run facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan. At Abu Ghraib, the inspectors discovered serious overcrowding, garbage and sewage covering the grounds of the outdoor camps, and only 12 shower heads for 600 to 700 detainees. Fresh water was in short supply. So were detainee meals, which were frequently contaminated with dirt and rodent droppings.

The location of Abu Ghraib, 20 miles from Baghdad and near an urban and hostile area, "lends itself to poor and dangerous living and working conditions," the report said. The inspectors recommended that Abu Ghraib be closed and its detainees transferred to Camp Bucca, in a more isolated area of the country.

In Afghanistan, inspectors documented numerous problems at the Bagram air base, a former Soviet airfield, portions of which the United States turned into a detention and interrogation center. The inspection team said the facility was plagued with safety hazards. The roof leaked. Toxic chemicals from previous airport operations contaminated sections of the facility. There was no sanitary system. "Human waste spills were frequent on the main floor," the inspectors said.

The report stands in sharp contrast to findings issued by the Red Cross. The agency has called the abuse it found part of a pattern.

In February, the Red Cross prepared a confidential report concluding that detainees under the supervision of military intelligence soldiers and officers "were at high risk of being subjected to a variety of harsh treatments ranging from insults, threats and humiliation to both physical and psychological coercion, which in some cases was tantamount to torture."

The agency said the widespread "use of ill-treatment" could be considered a "practice tolerated" by the coalition forces because it continued even after Red Cross warnings to U.S. military and government officials.

A Red Cross spokeswoman declined to discuss the Army report yesterday.
Mikolashek said his team found no widespread evidence that unmuzzled dogs were used in interrogations or that ghost detainees were shuttled through the system, practices that were mentioned in an earlier and widely publicized report by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said he was not satisfied with Mikolashek's report or its findings. "If you didn't look at the gross and egregious violations, what else didn't you investigate?" McCain asked.

Sen. James M. Talent (R-Mo.) praised the report as "vindicating our leaders and our soldiers."
The Army's inspection report was one of several ordered this spring after the revelation -- in vivid and shocking digital photographs -- of abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison.

Though the report detailed many problems at Abu Ghraib, it blamed a few soldiers and failed leadership at the prison.
Mikolashek assigned no blame to high-ranking officers in Iraq, but he criticized some policies as confusing. He reported that military intelligence and military police had conflicting instructions about their relative roles at the prison that could "create settings in which unsanctioned behavior, including detainee abuse, could occur."

The report attacked the interrogation policies as being vague: "While the language of the approved policies could be viewed as a careful attempt to draw the line between lawful and unlawful conduct, the published instructions left considerable room for misapplication."

A lawyer for one of the seven soldiers implicated in the Abu Ghraib case labeled as a "whitewash" the finding of no systemic abuse.

"That would be tantamount to hiding one's head in the sand," said Guy Womack, who represents Spec. Charles A. Graner Jr., a reservist with the 372nd Military Police Company in Cresaptown, Md.

After the hearing, McCain said he does not believe the report was a whitewash, but he added "there are certainly questions."

Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) faulted the report in an interview yesterday for not examining chain-of-command issues. "It has not answered with finality what went wrong," he said. "We don't know in a definitive and factual way what were the policies coming out of higher headquarters. It's pretty murky."

USS Reagan Nears California Home Port
By JEFF WILSON
The Associated Press
Friday, July 23, 2004; 8:52 AM
ABOARD THE USS RONALD REAGAN - The 1,092-foot nuclear aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan steamed toward its San Diego Bay home port for the first time Friday, with the late president's son on board.

Nancy Reagan was to make her first public appearance since her husband's death last month when she participates in Friday morning's home-porting celebration at Coronado in San Diego Bay. A helicopter was to take her out to the carrier shortly before it arrives.

More than 10,000 people are expected dockside for the ship's arrival.
The late president's son Michael Reagan was flown to the aircraft carrier Thursday morning as it steamed hundreds of miles offshore. Celebrities such as actor Tom Selleck and members of the news media also were brought aboard.

"It's really such a pleasure to be here," Michael Reagan told a gathering of crew members.
Nancy Reagan christened the partially completed ship in 2001, breaking a bottle of American sparkling wine against its bow. She was on hand in Norfolk, Va., again last year when it was commissioned, telling the crew to "bring her to life."

Capt. Andres "Drew" Brugal, the executive officer, said hosting Mrs. Reagan aboard the ship will be a thrill.
"Obviously it's kind of a sad time right now, so close to the president's death. She's the sponsor of the ship and we're very happy to see her. Her only request was she wanted to see the sailors and see the Ronald Reagan Room," he said. The room is a museum featuring wardrobe from Reagan's movies, posters and a video presentation.

The USS Reagan towers 20 stories above the waterline and is nearly as long as the Empire State Building is tall. Its flight deck covers 4 1/2 acres.

The ship sailed May 27 from Norfolk with a crew of 3,600, making its lengthy journey through the Straits of Magellan at the tip of South America. Reagan died June 5 at 93.

"It was probably most fitting and most appropriate that at the time of his passing, a carrier strike group named in his honor was in fact conducting the very same kind of operations that he espoused through his presidency - peace through strength," said Rear Adm. Robert Moeller, who commands the carrier strike group named for Reagan.

As a nod to Reagan's Hollywood days, the ship has a celebrity walk of fame with such names as Alfred Hitchcock and Spencer Tracy on the mess deck.

No sunset in sight for USS Kitty Hawk

ABOARD THE USS KITTY HAWK (AP) - In his office under the flight deck of the Japan-based USS Kitty Hawk, Capt. Thomas Parker points at a wall covered by the photos of his 32 predecessors.
The first one took command before the 1962 Cuban missile crisis; in the middle are the Vietnam-era captains. You have to turn a corner down the hall to get to Capt. Parker's own picture.
After 43 years and assignments in just about every conflict from Vietnam to Iraq, the Navy's oldest active-duty warship is what a charitable sailor would call "mature."
But even though the carrier fleet went nuclear long ago, officials aren't quite ready to let the diesel-powered Kitty Hawk sail off into the sunset.
"The ship is in superb mechanical condition," Capt. Parker, the aircraft carrier's commanding officer, said in an interview. "The ship could continue for however long it's necessary for us to be here."
Although its sister ship, the USS Constellation, was retired last summer, officials say they plan to squeeze at least another four years out of the Kitty Hawk - a decision reflecting the Navy's need for battle-ready ships in an increasingly unpredictable world.
Underscoring that concern, the Kitty Hawk left port this week to join the "Summer Pulse 2004" exercises, in which seven U.S. carriers and their battle groups will be deployed worldwide to demonstrate the Navy's ability to respond to numerous, simultaneous conflicts.
Rear Adm. James Kelly, commander of the Kitty Hawk battle group, said that while the ship could be retained for longer, it is set to be retired largely because of the cost of maintenance. It costs about $1.2 million a day to run at sea.
"We use about 1,000 barrels of fuel a day," Adm. Kelly said. "Our fuel costs are pretty heavy."
Adm. Kelly said the fuel costs of newer ships are lower because they are nuclear powered, but didn't give specifics.
The Kitty Hawk and the Constellation went into service at the New York Naval Yard in 1961. The San Diego-based Constellation, which launched 1,500 missions from its decks during the Iraq war, was decommissioned last August and replaced by the USS Ronald Reagan.
That was a switch: the Reagan was initially supposed to replace the older Kitty Hawk. But now the Kitty Hawk will stay in service until at least 2008, when the next new carrier, the USS George H.W. Bush, is to replace it.
The carrier and eight other Seventh Fleet vessels operate out of Yokosuka, Japan. The Seventh Fleet vessels based in Japan are the only ships in the Navy whose home ports are outside the United States, although for political reasons officials prefer to say they are "permanently forward-deployed."
The Seventh Fleet of a carrier, fleet command ship, three cruisers, three destroyers and two frigates is at sea about half the year and has about 14,000 sailors deployed to Japan, along with nearly 10,000 family members. Submarines frequently transit through.
The Kitty Hawk and the USS John F. Kennedy, commissioned in 1964, are the only diesel-powered carriers left in service, meaning the Kitty Hawk is likely to be replaced by a nuclear-powered vessel.
Inside the Ring

By Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough
Covering up?
U.S. officials tell us that the FBI is focusing on a single document in its investigation of former White House National Security Adviser Samuel R. Berger. Investigators are trying to determine why Mr. Berger improperly removed a highly classified after-action report by Richard A. Clarke, an aide to Mr. Berger, that was harshly critical of the Clinton administration's response to the so-called millennium terrorist plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport and other targets in late 1999.

Mr. Clarke was the National Security Council staff aide who ended up as a Democratic holdover in the Bush administration. He went public before the September 11 commission with harsh criticism of President Bush and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice for failing to take his advice in doing more against al Qaeda before the 2001 terrorist attacks.
Officials said the investigation into the removal of the Clarke memorandum is expected to lead to the declassification and publication of the document. This could expose the duplicity of Mr. Clarke, who had little criticism of the Clinton administration in public.
U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies have used the millennium plot as an example of a counterterrorism success. But the Clarke memorandum is likely to portray a different picture.

Strings attached
The Air Force is offering personnel $300 more per month. But there's a catch. They must agree to longer tours in South Korea.
It's part of a test program to see whether airmen will agree to serve extended time in overseas billets, thus further engendering the idea that the armed forces of today are truly all-volunteer forces.
An Air Force message said the assignment incentive program (AIP) will last through December next year and is designed to "provide more stability for airmen and units [and] improve readiness in Korea."
"Other incentive programs such as home basing and follow-on assignment, overseas tour extension incentive and in-place consecutive overseas tour program will continue but cannot be used in conjunction with this new [AIP].
"An open season will allow airmen who signed up under another incentive to switch to the new program. Airmen who have already received benefits under another program are not eligible for the new incentive."

China proliferation
The White House and Energy Department apparently do not want the public to know that China was the source of nuclear warhead design information supplied to Libya and possibly other rogue states by the covert nuclear supplier group led by Pakistani Abdul Qadeer Khan.
Asked recently about Chinese-language warhead design documents found in Libya, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said he could not speak to the "chain" of how design information reached Libya from the Khan network.
Mr. Abraham referred the Chinese document question to the White House National Security Council, which also ducked.
The NSC told us that President Bush said in February that Mr. Khan had sold a blueprint for 'a nuclear design stolen from the Pakistani government.'
But the NSC statement noted: "We cannot offer any further details about Dr. Khan's transactions but continue to support Pakistan's efforts to investigate and prosecute those associated with Khan's network."
Other officials said the Energy Department and NSC are trying to avoid linking the warhead documents to China to keep from upsetting Beijing.
China's government initially said it was investigating reports of the Chinese warhead documents found in Libya, but has not revealed what its investigation found.
U.S. security officials said China provided the warhead documents to Pakistan. Depending on when they were transferred, the discovery could prove to be a violation of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which China signed in 1992.

Hunting bin Laden
A senior CIA official said this week that the hunt for al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is continuing.
"We have pins on a map. We have reports," the official said at CIA headquarters. "We're looking for one person here in a part of the world where not many people have gone before. There are several candidates for that part of that world, by the way."
The official said it took four years for the agency to capture Mir Amal Kansi, the Islamist who fatally shot several CIA employees in their cars as they waited to enter the Langley headquarters. And it took seven years to capture al Qaeda leader Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.
"So bin Laden's time will come. We won't give up until that time comes," the official said.

Arab illegals
U.S. border agents since October have picked up five Arabs trying to cross into the United States illegally from Mexico, according to U.S. officials. The arrests are raising new concerns that al Qaeda terrorists are trying to enter the country from Mexico.
However, officials at the Homeland Security Department's Customs and Border Protection section - formerly the U.S. Border Patrol - were quick to dismiss as erroneous an Internet report this week that said a "flood" of Middle Eastern men were caught recently trying to sneak into the United States across the Mexican border with Arizona.
The officials said the report probably was based on the recent arrests of a group of people from a small southern Mexican Indian tribe. Known as the Oaxacan, the tribesmen were caught trying to cross the border. The Oaxacans speak a very different Spanish dialect and completely different indigenous language that was mistaken for Arabic, the officials said.

Rummy vs. Sy
The Pentagon has waged a below-the-radar battle against Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker. Donald H. Rumsfeld and other defense officials say Mr. Hersh writes "fiction" about their counter-terrorism efforts. They have written letters of complaint to the liberal magazine, but gotten no relief.
Mr. Rumsfeld's dislike for Mr. Hersh's reporting broke into the open in a recent interview by Juan Williams of National Public Radio.
Mr. Williams: But you, I believe, had some knowledge of these pictures and the things that we're talking about that had taken place at Abu Ghraib. But at the time you knew about it, you didn't respond or make it public until the newspapers, until I believe the New Yorker made it public.
Mr. Rumsfeld: If you're talking about the Seymour Hersh article in the New Yorker - is that it? Was that it?
Mr. Williams: Yes.
Mr. Rumsfeld: Yes. We've had people here trying to figure out what in the world he was talking about. We still can't figure it out. So any connection to that article and what we're talking about here, I just can't draw any linkages. I've had a team of people trying to find out if there's anything like what he wrote about and we've not been able to discover. Second, I saw the pictures for the first time on television just like you did.

WASHINGTON, July 21 /PRNewswire/ -- One of the world's most sophisticated systems for keeping electronic health records will soon be easily available to doctors, hospitals and clinics around the country, courtesy of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the federal Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. "VA is proud to lead the health care industry in the use of information technology. The expertise we have gained, however, belongs to the American public," said Dr. Jonathan Perlin, VA's Acting Under Secretary for Health. "With our federal partners, we're making it easier for the private-sector health care industry to make use of this electronic system for health care records." The system, called VistA-Office Electronic Health Record, was developed by VA. A version of VistA is used at more than 1,300 VA facilities throughout the United States to maintain records on 5 million veterans who receive their health care from VA. Under the plan announced today, private-sector health care providers can obtain a version of VistA at nominal cost. Distribution of the software is expected to begin in late 2005. VistA offers health care providers a complete electronic record covering all aspects of patient care, including reminders for preventive health care, electronic entry of pharmaceutical orders, display of laboratory results, consultation requests, x-rays and pathology slides. Besides the VA system, VistA is currently used by the Department of Health for the District of Columbia, plus health care systems in Finland, Germany, Egypt and Nigeria.

Joe March, Director
National Public Relations
The American Legion
(317) 630-1253