Jets’ Cargo a Threat to Security

April 4, 2004 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Counter-Terrorism, Security

Passenger planes still at risk as efforts to fight terror lack funds, technology

Each month, freight loaders pack some 17 million pounds of
uninspected cargo into the bellies of passenger planes leaving
Denver.

More uninspected commercial cargo – an estimated 2.5 million tons a
year – moves at airports nationwide. No federal agency monitors the
cargo or who’s sending it. Counterterrorism officials see each
piece as potentially explosive – and call this a major threat to
passenger safety.

Congressional leaders have demanded inspections.

“It is a matter of such critical importance, such an obvious
security gap, we cannot afford not to inspect the cargo that
travels on every passenger plane,” said U.S. Rep. Jim Turner,
ranking Democrat on the House Select Committee on Homeland
Security.

But U.S. Transportation Security Administration officials say
inspecting all cargo is unrealistic. They say they don’t have
enough money or big enough machines to scan enough cargo fast
enough without impeding commerce.

The situation illustrates the soft spots in security and heightened
anxiety plaguing the home-front war on terrorism today.

The railway bombings that killed 191 and wounded more than 1,800 on
March 11 in Madrid, and testimony at the Sept. 11 commission’s
hearings in Washington, have raised concerns that Americans aren’t
as safe as they should be.

Federal agents with access to classified intelligence say there’s
still no way to know whether Denver, or any other city, is more or
less vulnerable.

Part of the problem is money. Part is the nature of the threat.
Agents say their job is becoming harder with new vulnerabilities
emerging as the war on terrorism evolves. “It’s difficult to cover
every potential vulnerability,” said Phillip Reid, FBI agent in
charge for Colorado and Wyoming. “There obviously are
vulnerabilities out there that we aren’t aware of. … It’s an
endless job.”

Government intelligence suggests that enemies, particularly those
tied to al-Qaeda, “tend to look for the major terrorist attack,
where it has major consequences and numerous fatalities,” Reid
said. So agents assume the risk in cities is greatest and treat
Denver as a potential target.

  Bus, rail lines threatened

FBI and homeland security chiefs issued bulletins last week warning
police that terrorists might try to bomb buses and rail lines in
U.S. cities this summer and that terrorists might try to use
cultural, artistic or athletic visas to slip into the country.

For three years, security officials have focused on airports.

The bulletins reflect a desire, after the Madrid attacks, to do
more. In addition to rail and bus systems, there’s also concern
about cargo containers that aren’t always fully inspected at
seaports and border crossings. Thousands of these metal containers
sit unattended in rail and truck yards around downtown Denver –
possible vehicles for delivering deadly weapons.

“We’ve got to get to a point where we have a high level of
confidence,” said John Suthers, the U.S. attorney in Colorado.

The Sept. 11 commission this month is scheduled to look more
closely into homeland security. Meanwhile, the $40 billion budget
for the Department of Homeland Security, created last year after
other agencies were consolidated, is not expected to increase
dramatically.

Recent congressional testimony from counterterrorism chiefs
revealed that a unified terrorist watch list to enable screening
for terrorists is not complete. The list drawn from multiple
intelligence databases was supposed to be done last year. FBI
leaders said it should be done this summer.

Testimony also revealed that another task is incomplete: a national
threat and vulnerability assessment to prioritize critical
infrastructure for protection. Homeland Security spokesman Donald
Tighe said that work would be done by December.

Implementing protective measures will be left to “local
leadership,” Tighe added.

There’s the rub. Colorado Department of Public Safety spokeswoman
Patti Micciche said local agencies are requesting equipment and
training “far beyond” what Colorado can afford after receiving
about $50 million in federal homeland security funds last year.

Few on the front lines see security spending as sufficient.

“We get all kinds of information,” said Pat Ahlstrom, the U.S.
Transportation Security Administration director in Denver.

“Does the Madrid thing portend the possibility of that happening
in America? Yes, it does. Do the suicide bombings in other parts of
the world portend what could happen in America? Yes. Does 9/11
portend that people who planned that horrible, unthinkable set of
acts, could they or others of their mind-set attempt the same thing
again, only now trying to defeat what we have in place? The only
answer is yes.”

Ahlstrom said he’s pushing to increase his force of 750 passenger
screeners at Denver International Airport – up from 600 to 700
before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks – to about 1,000 until better
technology is available. He’s also asking for more inspectors – 13
instead of the current 10 – to ensure that there aren’t any
lapses.

Cargo slipping through

The matter of cargo moving on passenger planes looms unaddressed –
at DIA and nationwide.

While TSA agents swarm around passengers and their carry-on
baggage, and check-in baggage is scanned, commercial cargo moves on
conveyor belts and carts toward passenger planes without systematic
inspection. Officials have the authority to conduct random spot
checks but could not confirm whether any had been done.

DIA statistics show that in January, passenger airlines carried
17,922,194 pounds (8,961 tons) of commercial cargo domestically and
internationally.

“What is essentially too cumbersome at this point is to check
everything,” said TSA spokesman Mike Fierberg. “We don’t have the
resources. And we don’t have the technology, most important.”

Instead, airlines are supposed to police themselves by allowing
only “known shippers” to send cargo on passenger planes. TSA
officials keep no list of known shippers – the airlines are
supposed to do that – and no audits are done to make sure airlines
comply, Fierberg said. However, TSA technicians are working on
giving airlines access to government databases so that they are
able to check out cargo shippers and customers before loading
planes, he said.

At one point, officials considered issuing licenses to known cargo
shippers, Fierberg said. They decided that would be too
cumbersome.

Current policy “meets the requirements of Congress” that cargo be
inspected, Fierberg said.

U.S. Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., said he is “very concerned about
the potential risks of unscreened cargo on passenger airlines” and
has supported efforts to have all cargo screened. “A lot of work
remains to be done,” he said.

Also in the Denver area, hundreds of cargo containers arrive daily
by truck and rail – all supposedly screened by customs agents at
U.S ports and border crossings.

A federal security directive also deploys Denver-based customs
agents in this effort.

The concern, customs agents say, is that terrorists could smuggle
weapons of mass destruction in containers and team with terrorists
already inside the country to coordinate attacks.

The rail yards are fenced but not impenetrable. Union Pacific
security agent John Cavanaugh said pilfering “goes on.” He also
said federal customs agents seldom inspect containers in rail
yards. “My understanding is (that) whatever is inspected, it is
inspected at the port of entry.”

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials were unable to give
statistics on how many physical inspections are conducted at ports,
border crossings and in Denver. They are setting up radiation
detectors and X-ray scanners at seaports and elsewhere.

Yet along the U.S.-Mexico border at El Paso, customs agents raise
concerns. Trains moving from Mexico into the United States pass
through X-ray and other scanners but only occasionally are stopped
for physical inspections, agents said.

“Customs and Border Protection officers are not comfortable with
the emphasis on facilitation of traffic and trade,” said Kevin
Odenborg, a National Treasury Employees Union representative on the
customs force at El Paso. “The security systems are not
infallible,” he said. Hundreds of trucks and cars deemed low-risk
are routed through fast lanes where they may not be checked, and
staffing levels aren’t always sufficient, he added.

Spot checks in fast lanes have found illegal drugs, raising the
specter that dirty bombs or explosives might slip through in trucks
or cars, Odenborg said. “With the emphasis on facilitation in the
vehicle and truck cargo area, inspectors feel they are less able to
use their observational and interviewing techniques. The fact is,
that’s how most contraband is caught.”

Cash smuggling a concern

Another concern is money moving illegally through airports.

Terrorists trained in Afghanistan and Sudan have fanned out into
more than 30 independent anti-U.S. groups, said Ambassador Heraldo
Munoz, the Chilean diplomat who chairs the United Nations Security
Council’s al-Qaeda sanctions committee. And “finding the money”
that funds attacks is “absolutely fundamental,” Munoz said.
Today, with more banks monitoring transactions, terrorists “are
using, now, couriers, bags of money,” he said. “For example, we
know the Bali bombing was financed by about $100,000 and a second
amount of about $35,000 brought into Indonesia in suitcases.”

A recent customs spot check at DIA found a London-bound passenger
carrying $17,000 in cash he had not declared. The man told agents
he was going on vacation. The legal limit for undeclared cash is
$10,000.

A federal agent relaying that incident on condition of anonymity
said there’s no systematic enforcement of financial controls at DIA
and that customs agents need an ink-sniffing dog to conduct that
work effectively.

Federal supervisors acknowledged those challenges, though they
declined to comment on specific cases. Dealing with “an enormous
problem” of cargo containers and better enforcement of financial
controls “are in the scope,” TSA chief Ahlstrom said. “You focus
on what you can afford to do at the time and try to develop plans
for other pieces as you are able to get some resources.”

America must set priorities: “Look at all the holes you have at
once and then decide how many of those you can afford to deal
with,” said Page Stoutland, program leader for radiological and
nuclear countermeasures at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory,
which does homeland security work.

Stoutland supervised recent testing, at Federal Express cargo
facilities in Denver, of a device placed beneath a cargo conveyor
belt to detect possible dirty bombs. The device proved effective
and is available at a cost of about $50,000, he said.

“There is no way to predict with high confidence” what terrorists
might do, he said. But “our security (system) can’t be one where
we fix one hole and then fix the next because we’ll never get
done.”

Two weeks ago, customs agents scrambled when they learned that an
uninspected shipping container from Uzbekistan was moving by rail
toward Denver. It had been targeted overseas for inspection in
Houston. A recipient’s name and address in Denver proved to be
fake. Authorities figured that the manifest describing the
container’s contents – motorcycles – also might be fake.

Inspectors in Houston let the container pass. It arrived in Denver
around March 25 and sat in a Union Pacific freight yard north of
downtown. Customs agents here, speaking on condition of anonymity,
said they sealed it and notified Union Pacific that they wanted to
examine it.

But for lack of a proper inspection facility in the freight yard,
the white container sat unattended for seven days. “We couldn’t
shield it from the public. We wanted it moved to an indoor facility
so we could contain it” if dangerous material was inside, one
agent said.

Finally on Thursday, at a contract cargo warehouse in Aurora, a
team of three customs agents wearing radiation monitors on their
belts opened the container – and found motorcycles. Old,
broken-down antique ones, brown and green, with black sidecars.

They were hauling out the bikes for further inspection that night.

“Something that ends up in Denver is always considered low risk”
because port inspectors presumably have cleared it, a customs
supervisor said.

“We had to look to make sure.”

Dying For Clean Water

November 23, 2003 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Latin America, Water

As many as one-fifth of the world’s people lack safe water – and 6,000 children are dying every day as a result. But developed nations and companies with know-how are doing less to help.

CANDELARIA, Honduras – Struggling for the water her family needs to
live, Maria Garcia hikes five times a day from her dirt-floor shack
to a creek. The creek – cloudy from pesticides and from villagers
bathing and washing clothes – isn’t safe. Her first son, Roni, died
of hepatitis at age 3 – one of an estimated 2 million children a
year worldwide who die from diseases linked to bad water. Now her
second son, 1-year-old Jose, “is always with diarrhea, always
coughing.” Still, Garcia, 23 years old and seven months’ pregnant,
has no choice. This is the only water she can get.

She scoops the creek water into her red jug. She hoists this
40-pound load onto her back and, stretching rattan cords across her
forehead to support it, claws her way up a slippery clay slope on
the quarter-mile haul home.

“It’s hard to do without falling,” she says. “I’m going to have
to do more trips. I’m going to need the water.”

Today, nobody is moving to help Garcia and the growing numbers of
people – an estimated 1.1 billion, nearly a fifth of humanity – who
lack safe water. Twice that many lack basic sanitation.

The death toll from bad water mounts. United Nations officials say
it tops 6,000 children a day – mostly in low-income Africa, Asia
and Latin America.

Children are especially vulnerable to waterborne diseases that can
lead to fatal dehydration. Most common is diarrhea – easily
preventable in developed nations such as the United States.

But elsewhere, solutions are constrained by spreading poverty and
increasingly limited water resources.

Water shortages and deficient sanitation now are starting to
aggravate conflicts, leading to political turmoil. Three years ago
in Bolivia, slum dwellers rioted when the government tried to
install a water system that required them to pay fees they found
intolerable. International bankers would only back a for-pay
system.

And last month, Bolivian peasants and slum dwellers, riled about
their government’s free-market policies in general, marched on
Bolivia’s capital, hurling dynamite. They forced President Gonzalo
Sanchez de Lozada to resign.

“We could have water wars – not riots, I mean wars – between
countries over control of river systems,” said Andrew Natsios,
chief of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the
nation’s main humanitarian agency. “We are very worried about
that.”

  World aid agencies doing less

In Iraq this year, a sudden collapse of water-supply networks
enraged Iraqis as U.S. troops, who had bottled water, occupied
their communities. In India, a dispute over water allocations has
led to interstate rioting. In China, an estimated 100 million
peasants unable to irrigate crops converge on ill-equipped cities.
In the Middle East, a behind-the-scenes struggle for water strains
efforts to broker Israeli-Palestinian peace.

Water shortages also are expected to spur migration from water-poor
regions to Europe and the United States, where jobs and water are
plentiful.

Many experts believe that a concerted effort to address global
water supply and sanitation should be a priority for the United
States and other wealthy countries. U.S. government studies have
found that installing a basic water system in a village can cut
infant mortality by up to 50 percent.

Yet the governments and corporations that could help instead are
withdrawing from the challenge instead.

Government water aid from 21 of the richest countries to poor
countries decreased by 18 percent between 1997 and 2001, according
to data compiled by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and
Development, an international group based in Paris.

The U.S. government – focusing on military priorities this year –
budgeted only $162 million for water-supply and sanitation help
abroad.

USAID’s Natsios said this will change. The United States will
follow through on a presidential “Water For the Poor” initiative
to spend $970 million over three years “to deal with these
issues,” he said. That money – a third of it approved so far by
Congress – falls far short of the tens of billions U.N. leaders say
are needed.

The other key players in addressing water shortages and poor
sanitation are corporations that can design and install efficient
systems. They, too, are doing less. Private-sector spending on
water supply and sanitation decreased by 82 percent between 1997
and 2002, from $8.3 billion to $1.5 billion, according to data from
the World Bank, the main international financing agency.

Engineering, construction and utility firms aren’t motivated. As
the poor world gets poorer, the potential for profit diminishes.
Companies no longer bid on requests to install water systems even
in megacities – let alone in the villages where more than half the
world’s poor reside, said Don Evans, chief of water operations for
Denver-based CH2M Hill – one U.S. firm in a water industry
dominated by Europe- based conglomerates.

“The poor residents of these countries have no access to water.
They have incredible sanitation issues with huge health impacts,”
Evans said. “It’s a tragedy to these countries that nothing is
going to happen.”

‘It’s very hard to lose a son’

In Honduras, population 6.6 million, one of the poorest countries
in the world, water problems are chronically as severe as anywhere
in the Western Hemisphere. The struggle for clean water is constant
in villages such as Candelaria in the central highlands.

Here, amid screeching roosters and the hum of insects, Maria Garcia
enters her shack and unloads her sloshing jugs beneath rafters
where she stores maize, in the tradition of Lenca Indians,
descendants of the Mayans who once thrived across Central America.
A small fire smokes in the corner.

The only way to make the water safe – Garcia has heard from
visiting Cuban health workers – is to boil it.

But boiling water requires wood. The nearest forest lies 3 miles
away in the mountains – meaning a major chore for Reyes Gomez, 24,
her husband.

“We can’t get that much wood,” Garcia says. At the same time, she
believes that Roni died, and Jose is sick, because “we drink the
water without boiling it.”

The family tried to get help for Roni. Gomez carried the boy 13
miles down the muddy road to La Esperanza – the nearest city.
Doctors took blood and urine samples and sent Gomez and his son to
a regional hospital 60 miles across mountains in Comayagua.

There, nurses sent them back to La Esperanza. Gomez turned to a
private specialist who suggested a test for $147. Gomez sold the
family’s bull for $264 to pay for the test. The specialist
concluded Roni’s hepatitis was chronic. There was nothing to do.
Gomez carried his son home. Six nights later, on Dec. 28, as
parents and grandparents cradled him, Roni died.

“It’s very hard to lose a son,” Gomez said. “You want to kill
yourself.”

Doctors face similar cases every day.

More people worldwide enter hospitals with waterborne diseases than
with any other type of ailment, said Mark Brown, chief of the
United Nations Development Program. Lack of safe water ranks among
the leading causes of death. An estimated 2 million children a year
are victims of water-related diarrhea, U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq
said. Typically, the diarrhea comes from swallowing fecal
bacteria.

In a dimly lit emergency ward along the northern coast of Honduras,
Dr. Marta Benitez said 40 percent of her patients are children sick
from foul water. It’s a bigger killer than the mosquito-borne
malaria and hemorrhagic dengue fever that also haunt Central
America.

During a recent night shift, Benitez and two nurses handled five
critical cases. One dehydrated boy, Daniel Ramos, 3, lay on a
gurney, eyes rolling as he drifted in and out of consciousness,
loops of white tape holding an intravenous tube on his tiny right
wrist.

“He’s always sick with diarrhea,” said his mother, Esperanza
Hernandez, 27. He’d been crying that his stomach hurt, and in the
middle of the night his family hustled down a rocky trail from
their village in foggy forests above banana plantations. “I was
worried he would pass out on the way to the hospital,” Hernandez
said.

The family drinks stream water. “We don’t boil the water,” said
Dolores Ramos, the boy’s grandmother, “because we don’t like the
taste of boiled water.”

Benitez told the parents to just wait. “With IV, I think he’ll
respond.” As they hung their heads, she added: “We could prevent
these.”

Polluted water hurts people in countless ways. Typhoid and cholera
flare regularly. Waterborne parasites cause onchocerciasis –
“river blindness.” Other parasites contribute to malnutrition.

And everywhere, girls give their lives to the chore of hauling
water for their families.

Miriam Garcia, 13, and her friends recently balanced 20-pound water
buckets on their heads along the Guaymitas River on the outskirts
of El Progresso, an industrial boomtown in northern Honduras. They
had to quit school after third grade.

“My mother doesn’t come to get water because her hip hurts, so I
am the only one who comes,” Garcia said.

The girls bathe, wash clothes and play in the river – within a mile
of family shanties. Diarrhea and headaches are the norm.

Doctors at public clinics “only pay attention to those who have
money,” Garcia said. “We all have parasites in our stomachs.”

Population growth erases gains

For three decades, leaders of rich countries have vowed to help the
world’s water have-nots.

The United Nations, which declared the 1980s “The Decade of
Water,” again has put water at the top of its global agenda. After
last year’s U.N. World Summit on Sustainable Development in
Johannesburg, South Africa, U.N. leaders set a goal to halve the
proportion of people without access to safe drinking water and
sanitation by 2015.

Yet “the water situation worldwide is distressing and not
improving noticeably,” said Jack Hoffbuhr, president of the
Denver-based American Water Works Association, a leading group of
water professionals.

Part of the challenge is that deaths caused by contaminated water –
unlike deaths from earthquakes or hurricanes – are “a persistent,
growing problem,” said John Halpern, senior water supply and
sanitation adviser for the World Bank. Politically, it’s hard to
get governments to focus on such problems because they don’t seem
as urgent even if the consequences are huge, Halpern said.

And gains have been nullified by population growth in the most
severely afflicted countries across Asia, Africa and Latin
America.

Finally, lenders who could supply the billions needed for urban
water systems turn away because governments in poor countries often
can’t or won’t pay bills.

Meanwhile, villages like Candelaria – population 1,500 – are so
scattered that only small-scale solutions are feasible. Grassroots
nonprofit aid groups are the best hope for villagers, Halpern
said.

“The rich world needs to be involved. In pure economic terms,
growth in these countries is what’s going to help grow the world
economy. The industrialized countries including the United States
need somebody to sell goods and services to. Most of the population
lives in the developing world and will live increasingly in the
developing world.”

A debate among water experts also stalls action.

The issue is whether corporations should control water. In the
mid-1990s, corporations backed by the World Bank began installing
and operating water systems in needy countries – for profit, with
the view that charging for water is essential to allocate it
efficiently. People in rich countries generally pay for their
water, though rates often are lower than in poor countries where
water is scarce. Critics argue that water essential for life
shouldn’t be privately controlled.

“There has to be strong government oversight and protection of the
public good,” said Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific
Institute, a water policy research center.

While the debate rages, children die. Anger grows.

“The U.S. response, in particular, has been inadequate. Our
contribution to water projects internationally is pathetically low.
It’s a tiny fraction of the aid we give, which itself is a tiny
fraction of what’s needed,” Gleick said.

“If this problem got the attention it deserves, we could eliminate
deaths from water-related diseases. But we seem to do better at
dealing with short-term crises. It’s more upsetting to us when a
plane crashes than when 6,000 kids died yesterday, and today, and
will die again tomorrow from preventable water-related diseases.”

For a few years, Honduras stood out among water-poor countries
because it did get some serious attention in 1998 following
Hurricane Mitch. The death and destruction – concentrated in the
north where U.S. corporations Chiquita and Dole for decades have
run banana plantations – drew more than $1 billion in emergency
aid. The United States gave more than $145 million.

Hurricane aid helped town

The aid paid for CH2M Hill, the Denver-based engineering firm, to
install $3 million worth of water supply and sanitation systems,
mostly in northern cities near the plantations and new factories.

Now in La Lima, population 70,000, healthy children play soccer
beneath red tanks that supply purified water.

The water immediately improved lives of thousands who lacked access
before, said caretaker Gilberto Nunez, 40, a father of two, who was
watering Llama del Bosque trees recently at the base of one tank.

“We don’t have the shortages we had before. People are really
satisfied,” Nunez said. “Before, they had to walk far and carry
their water. We were always working to get water.”

CH2M Hill sent engineer Leda Amador, who grew up in Honduras, to
coordinate work at the local level – including the delicate matter
of convincing low-income residents to pay for treated water piped
to their homes.

Incomes here, as across much of the world, are generally less than
$500 a year. And newcomers flocking from rural areas for factory
work often bristle at the notion of paying for water. Sometimes
they refuse.

“The question is whether the poor can pay,” Amador said. “I
think they can. If you figure what their other options are – what
they pay to buy water from private water trucks or to buy water in
bottles – it’s more than what they would pay for (municipal) water
service.”

Amador teamed with leaders of neighborhood “patronata” self-help
associations to explain plans. City officials backed her up,
cutting off service when people didn’t pay. Rates were set on a
sliding scale to help the poor. A typical family pays $7 a month.

But now Honduras’ hurricane money has run out. CH2M Hill is closing
its office. And, as in other poor countries, hundreds of thousands
of Hondurans – the population is growing by 3.2 percent a year –
still lack access to safe water.

The United States “must continue helping, because in poor
countries, we don’t have the capability to build up our water
systems because it’s too expensive,” said Mayor Nelly Soliman of
El Progresso, population 200,000. “Always, the policy has been,
the richer countries should help the poorer countries. This is a
severe problem for us.”

U.S. officials say the most children die in rural areas, where 36
percent of Hondurans lack water. “I’d like to put more in. It is
needed,” said Paul Tuebner, USAID’s director in Honduras.

“Have you ever hauled water daily for 2 miles on your head up and
down mountains? … We have studies that show, once we put in a water
system, infant mortality goes down.”

The anger that has led to riots over water has erupted here, too.
Last March, 1,500 protesters riled about water targeted roads in a
northern industrial area where they knew they might get attention.
They blocked traffic around new “maquila” factories where, for
about $50 a month, workers make Fruit of the Loom, Wrangler, Tommy
Hilfiger and other garments for U.S. consumers.But Honduras’ rural
poor traditionally are peaceful. And in Candelaria, villagers
preferred a practical approach.

They’ve designed a water system that would pipe water from a spring
to spigots at family compounds.

A few years ago, they bought pipes and laid them, with dozens of
men contributing free labor. But the pipes burst. Local engineers
had failed to allow for pressure changes as water whooshed up and
down hills. Now, with help from different engineers, village
leaders have modified their plan and are looking for a better kind
of pipe.

Some villagers are hopeful. Maria Garcia and Reyes Gomez are
impatient after their son’s death.

Gomez now plans to emigrate to the United States. Friends who have
managed to sneak into the country send home money that lets their
families live comfortably in La Esperanza.

Working abroad “would be harder. This is my father’s land. I
learned to grow crops from my father. This is the natural way for
me to earn my living,” Gomez said. But potato and banana crops
don’t pay. His wife, Maria, is too busy hauling water to work in a
sewing cooperative.

So Gomez talks of borrowing $1,300 to hire a smuggler to guide him
north. There are alligators in the river along the U.S.-Mexico
border, he said. “That’s what I’m scared of, and maybe somebody
will kill me.”

If he gets through, his first earnings will pay off his lender, he
said. “Then I could help my family.”

FOR MORE INFORMATION

American Water Works Association (Based in Denver):

….www.awwa.org; 303-734-3410

….www.water4people.org; 303-734-3476; ….303-734-3494

World Vision, aid contacts in La Esperanza, Honduras:

….Cesar_zelaya@wvi.org

….Region_intibuca@wvi.org

….honduras@wvi.org

Pacific Institute, an Oakland, Calif.- based water research center
that publishes the biennial survey “The World’s Water”:
www.pacinst.org

USAID, a government humanitarian agency: www.usaid.gov

World Bank, an international finance organization:
www.worldbank.org

HONDURAS

Population: 6,669,789

Median age: 18.8 years

Population growth rate: 3.2 percent

Infant mortality rate: 29.96 deaths per 1,000 live births

Life expectancy at birth: 66.65 years

Fertility rate: 4.07 children born per woman (2003 estimate)

Literacy rate: 76.2 percent (those 15 and over who can read and
write)

Population below poverty line: 53 percent (1993 estimate)

Unemployment rate: 28 percent (2002 estimate)

Sources: Denver Post research,

CIA Factbook

Young Iraqis Doubt Future

April 21, 2003 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Iraq During the U.S. Invasion

Many hoping for new life in West

BAGHDAD, Iraq – On a market street that survived bombing and
looting, 25-year-old Sudad al-Bayati sat on a bench recently eating a chicken shwarma sandwich.

A white Iraqi police car pulled up by her and parked.

“It’s probably stolen,” she said, watching the two officers.

She’s equally skeptical that voting could ensure better Iraqi
leaders in the future. Her participation in elections would
“depend on whether any of the candidates are good,” said Bayati,
a recent graduate of engineering school.

Anyway, she added, she plans to leave her war-torn Iraq – for
Denmark or the United States.

“I know Iraqi people. They are still the same. Things will not
change. Each man who gets a little power, he will try to use it to
get more money.”

Today, she’s one of thousands of Iraqi university graduates
delicately testing freedom as Iraq staggers back to life. They
venture out to shop and look around as gun battles recede into the
night and black smoke from burning buildings thins. Vegetable
stands and grocery shops are opening. Barefoot soccer players cut
and swerve in the rubble.

But her skepticism raises a key question for Iraq’s future: Will
young Iraqis commit to their country? There are no jobs in sight,
universities are trashed, and many such as Bayati are convinced
that a better life lies elsewhere.

They prefer to simply get out, slipping across Iraq’s borders.

This represents a major challenge not only for Iraq but the Bush
administration, which has promised to create a stable post-Hussein
society that can spur democracy around the authoritarian Middle
East.

Iraqi religious and political figures this past weekend were
talking the talk of building democracy. And interviews with elders
in various communities last week revealed strong agreement that
Iraq, with its Shiite, Sunni, Kurdish and other factions, must stay
together as a country.

Yet, without the participation of a new generation, elders
lamented, success will be limited, at best.

Grinding poverty in the hinterlands was worsened by a war that
broke down food and water distribution. Mobs of teens lurk along
roadways waving worthless dinars and occasionally attacking
vehicles. Factional leaders have begun to assert their own
interests.

First, Kurdish armies, backed by U.S. special forces soldiers,
captured the oil-rich northern city of Kirkuk before withdrawing as
Turkey protested. Then, Iran-based Shiite leader Abdul Aziz Hakim
returned to Iraq at a time when many Shiite Iraqis are organizing.
And Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi, with Pentagon
connections, has moved from a U.S.-run base at Nasiriyah to Baghdad.

Today, U.S. troops remain crucial, shifting from combat operations
to enforcing law and order. Gunners atop Humvees secure strategic
intersections, buildings and former government compounds across
Baghdad. Troops also search Iraqis for explosives, patrol
neighborhoods and try to stop looting. One soldier, spotting Iraqis
scavenging gasoline from an abandoned oil truck recently,
repeatedly fired his M-16 rifle into the ground and shouted “Get
out! Go away!” until the scavengers scattered.

Behind the scenes, U.S. civil affairs soldiers convene meetings for
Iraqi authorities, including about 2,000 re-hired police and
firemen.

But troops say anything could happen any minute.

“A lot of people here are worried we are going to stay – sit on
the oil,” said Marine Cpl. John Hoellwarth at a central compound
targeted repeatedly by renegades with Kalashnikovs firing from
abandoned buildings. “We want Iraqis to know we are only going to
stay long enough to help Iraqi people restore critical
infrastructure and form a government for and by the Iraqi
people.”

Iraqi elders, meanwhile, are beginning to express their visions for
the future.

“What we want is that there will be no poor people in Iraq. We
want every man to be able to get married. Most of the men around
here cannot afford to get married because there’s no work,” said
Ayad Shuber Al-Mosawy, 47, a leading Shiite imam.

“And we want everybody to be able to own their own house – not pay
rent. Iraq will start a new life, a new system.”

Wearing a black headdress, he spoke from behind a copy of the
Koran, seated in Al-Hurea Alaaskareen Mosque in a crowded
low-income neighborhood.

Heads of local families gathered around him.

“We want Islam to be our law,” Mosawy said. “God willing, there
will be no separation” into tribal and religious factions.

“America did a very good thing. America saved us from Saddam. Now
we hope we will be like brothers with America,” Mosawy said.
“America is a country with power. Its soldiers came for us and
helped us. Because of our ex-leader, we were weak. It was a favor
we will never forget. All the Iraqi people will remember how
America saved us.”

Iraq’s future leaders could come from any faction, said Saaed
Khaleel Omar, 43, a Kurdish electrician living in a dilapidated
central neighborhood with overhanging wood balconies. “We just
need a fair president. Muslim, Christian – that doesn’t matter.
Just fair.”

Under Hussein, Omar said, Kurds in Baghdad felt they were excluded
unfairly from government jobs. Sometimes they couldn’t even enter
government ministries.

“We are afraid that somebody like Saddam Hussein will take
power,” Omar said.

Even though a neighborhood youth, 15-year-old Mohamad Haidar Dara,
had been killed in a crossfire the day before as U.S. soldiers
battled renegades, Omar and other Kurds here said they want U.S.
forces to stay as long as possible.

The problem is that wanting stability, let alone democracy, does
not guarantee it will happen.

There simply is no model in oil-rich Iraq for transparent
self-rule, taxation in return for representation, and civic
participation for the common good. When it comes to settling
conflicts, Iraqi notions of legal systems clash with Western norms.
Many favor Islamic law based on the Koran, or eye-for-eye justice.

Anybody who served in Hussein’s collapsed government now is
discredited – including the police and firemen that U.S. officials
are counting on to ensure security.

Iraqi-American Talib Zangana, 53, a silver-bearded “Free Iraqi”
fighter in camouflage fatigues, said he returned home after 25
years in San Diego, Calif., hoping to build a democratic Iraq. He’s
guiding U.S. efforts to beam in radio and television programs.

But he said last week’s looting, including the plunder of the
national museum, shook his confidence. He’ll leave his
Mexican-American wife and two children back in San Diego for now
and devote one year to the effort.

People are united in hatred of Hussein now that his government has
collapsed, Zangana said, but “I just don’t know if hatred is
enough to build up a nation.”

Zangana said he was approached by a young man asking him about
leaving for America.

“I said: ‘Why do you want to go to U.S.A. when U.S.A. is coming
here? We are going to make this place look like the U.S.A.’ ”

The young man was adamant. “He was still afraid,” Zangana said.
“This is the big challenge we face. Every Iraqi will have to
change themselves psychologically.”

But Sudad al-Bayati said she just doesn’t want to commit. Under
Hussein’s rule, she lost a beloved uncle in the war with Iran, and
her grandfather was executed. She yearned to see the world but
couldn’t leave because Hussein wouldn’t let women leave Iraq unless
their fathers accompanied them. Bayati’s father had abandoned her
family.

Now, she said, she figures those rules are over. She and her
sisters have planned a passage to India and from there would aim
for Europe.

The postwar looting is only making their lives harder. Bayati
studied French at a French Embassy-run school. It was trashed last
week. She had also enrolled in a master’s degree program at
Baghdad’s leading technical university, but it, too, was
ransacked.

“We have been suffering for so long,” she said. “I feel as if I
haven’t had a chance yet to live my life.”

Iraqis Look to GIs for Stability

April 13, 2003 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Iraq During the U.S. Invasion

BAGHDAD, Iraq – Iraqis from the hinterlands to the capital are
seizing their new freedom – children swiveling on abandoned
anti-aircraft guns, former prisoners unburdening themselves of
torture under Saddam Hussein, families contemplating travel.

But a three-day journey through Iraq’s populated center also
reveals a growing dependence on the U.S. military to stop a slide
into anarchy.

“We don’t trust the United Nations. We trust the Americans,” said
Sami Abdullah, 60, a hotel manager.

On Saturday, U.S. troops struggled to restore order. Iraqi forces
in a three-story building fired across the Tigris River at a Marine
camp. Cpls. Tyler Dekarske and Richard Keever raced to return fire,
backed up by tanks. “They can still kill Marines,” Keever said.
“And the looting is getting more intense.”

But the feeling is still jubilation for the most part.

Shopkeeper Wathq Jasim, 32, climbed to the top of a heap of rubble
from a bombed prison and found a gray metal door he knows too well.
He was imprisoned behind it for 16 months.

Hussein’s agents jailed Jasim along with other Shiite Muslims
accused of gathering illegally to pray. He said he was tortured –
with electrical wires attached to his toes and genitals, and his
toenails were ripped out. Guards slid food through a square hole in
the door. Now, he tapped it.

“I really hate this door!” he said. He ripped off a loose handle
and threw it down hard against the metal – clapping like a
gunshot.

“Free!” he declared.

But many Iraqis now demand a more active U.S. role ensuring
security.

“There is robbery; there is shooting. Why don’t you Americans stop
this?” implored Abdul Al-Stan, 40, a trader who had just sped his
maroon BMW through crossfire.

U.S. commanders respond with an exhausted call for Iraqis to think
about taking care of themselves. “How are 40 of us going to stop
all this?” said Marine Master Sgt. Scott McCullough, 38, as crowds
converged on either side of a bridge over the Tigris River where he
stood. Opening the bridge would only enable more looting, he knew,
but that was his order.

Few Iraqis on Saturday had ready ideas for setting up their own
police and government. “That’s up to God,” said bakery owner Emad
Al-Sada, facing a line of customers.

Americans “will either have to leave us lawless like this or
organize everything for us,” said mattress factory worker Mohamad
Rethaly, 53.

Some fled south. “Baghdad no good now. There’s nothing: water,
food, light,” said Abdul Kareem, 45, as his son, Haidar, 13,
siphoned gas from an oil tanker while an oil fire flared nearby.

Elsewhere in Iraq, U.S.- backed maneuvers toward establishing an
interim authority were cloaked in secrecy. At a military camp
outside Nasiriyah, Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi and
other opposition leaders apparently have gathered.

Marine Lt. Col. Royal Mortenson, who led the U.S. push north of the
Euphrates River, said his 850 men are finding huge weapons caches –
one so big, with French- and Italian-made mines, that destroying it
will require three weeks of work by ordnance teams.

And almost every small town has a clique of Hussein loyalists lying
low, Mortenson said.

“We can’t be in every town all the time,” he said. Iraqis “have
got to police themselves.”

None of the institutions that stabilize life is functioning. Fires
set by looters burn for hours. Schools are closed. Hospitals have
been ransacked.

Children probably won’t attend any more school this year, said
Balkis Agali, 42, a mother of four who lives on the outskirts of
Baghdad. She and her three daughters and son huddled together on a
foam pad in the central room of their house during the heavy
bombing last week. Pots and containers are filled with water. Sacks
of flour and rice sit in a hallway with a newly acquired gas
stove.

Agali counts on getting work at a business center. In the meantime,
she had draped blankets over her prized possession, a silver
Peugeot sedan she worked long hours to afford. Agali also carries a
pistol.

Her family would leave their home in a minute if they could gain
passage to Europe, Agali said. Her sister lives in Denmark. She
wonders about the border to Syria, whether Europeans would accept
Iraqis as refugees and whether her children, who have no passports,
can travel. “We are not safe here,” she said. “We just want a
stable life.”

U.S. officials long have promised to help re-establish order in
Iraq by sending experts. None are visible. The group the Bush
administration has appointed to run a postwar civilian
administration still works mostly from luxury suites along the
Persian Gulf in Kuwait.

“Why do American soldiers just guard the oil wells? Why didn’t
they guard this hospital?” said Salam Kazim, 40, a primary school
teacher. He pointed at the elite Olympic Hospital – run by one of
Hussein’s sons, Odai – now ransacked down to the water faucets
ripped out of walls. “We want to like the American people. But we
want the soldiers in every square now to guard things.”

The problem is that most Iraqis see no other option but to
scavenge.

A dozen men parked their cars outside a looted military office in
south Baghdad. They climbed to a roof where, after pulling back
sandbags, they found a hidden petroleum tanker – a secret military
supply of fuel. They dipped plastic containers in barehanded,
filling them, then siphoned the gas using hoses to fill their car
tanks.

“We don’t want to steal. We don’t really know how to steal. We
want to work,” said Ala Abdul Kader, 42, a mechanic.

“But I ate no breakfast today.”

Basra Collapses Into Death, Disorder

April 8, 2003 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Iraq During the U.S. Invasion

BASRA, Iraq – They died in the mud at the edge of a pond – a dozen
paramilitary fighters with rocket-propelled grenades, rifles and
blankets.

Some were Iraqis. Others came from Syria and Saudi Arabia. One of
them, making this last stand for Saddam Hussein, apparently had
tried to sleep, burrowing into a berm.

Bullets tore into them, a head here, thigh there, chest, neck. Now
Iraqi Red Crescent volunteers wearing plastic gloves, mouths and
noses covered, waded into the mud and lifted out the bloated
bodies.

These men are “martyrs,” said Enas, 24, a schoolteacher who
helped lug a bloodstained stretcher. “They were resisting,” she
said. “My heart is broken for these dead soldiers.”

Monday brought many sorry scenes like this, as coalition tanks and
paratroopers punched into the heart of Basra, Iraq’s second-largest
city.

While the Red Crescent workers loaded their dead onto a pickup,
British soldiers nearby lay on their bellies. “Apparently there’s
mortars coming in,” Rob Hammond, 26, said as he flattened himself
at the side of the road.

The British targeted local militiamen, “small bands but vicious
when they catch you,” said British army Sgt. Maj. Pat Geraghty,
37, standing nearby after ordering a bulldozer to raze an empty
home.

The dozen fighters who died by the pond were typical of the
trouble, Geraghty said. British troops captured an Algerian among
them, he said, as well as an Iraqi who pretended to be dead. Red
Crescent workers said the dead also included Saudis and Syrians.

Geraghty, too, was heartbroken Monday. “I lost two of me boys,”
he said softly.

Tanks roared. At noon, two Cobra helicopters clattered overhead,
“a fly-by to see if they can see anything we can’t,” said U.S.
Marine Cpl. Steve Salicos, gripping his black M-16, moving on the
ground past a defaced portrait of Hussein. Troops advanced across
the city, then focused on mop-up patrols across a landscape of
black smoke plumes, rubble, and twisted Iraqi tanks and trucks.

Basra, population 1.3 million, more or less fell by sunset. Where
the city will ultimately land is the question. Residents erupted in
a frenzy of looting – gutting their university, oil ministry and
premier hotel at the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Law
and order no longer seemed to matter.

Inside the University of Basra, men and boys scavenged through
shattered glass and flames. Portraits of Hussein were defaced.
Marauders snatched swivel chairs, shelves, appliances – almost
anything of value down to wood. Ali Hatu, 31, opened a white sack
showing empty soft drink bottles and blue curtains.

Some looters rode in from surrounding farm towns. One farmer
whipped his white donkey, towing a refrigerator on his tiny cart.
At Basra’s fanciest hotel, once a Sheraton, black smoke billowed
from the back. A smiling man strode away from the entrance carrying
a large satellite dish on his head.

Retired Iraqi Petroleum Co. manager Amir Humadi, 67, concentrated
on finding a new house. After 40 years supervising shipping, he’d
never been given a house or car. Hussein’s elite, “they always
have a good house, a car, a comfortable life,” Humadi said.

But two years ago, when he retired, he moved his family from Basra
west to dusty Zubayr. His son-in-law had to move to Germany for
work to support the family.

Now Humadi was determined to put things right. He found and
occupied “a big house, a company house,” he declared proudly. “I
am entitled.”

The man next door had done the same. Now this “neighbor”
hopefully would watch Humadi’s place while he rushed home to
persuade his wife and daughter to move. “I told the neighbor to
keep an eye out,” Humadi said as he searched for a ride to
Zubayr.

Iraqis here generally welcomed the British-U.S. takeover. A few
carried flowers and confetti.

Some whispered messages to visitors: “Saddam Hussein is a son of a
bitch,” one said – reluctant to identify themselves fully because
loyalists still control pockets of the city.

“Saddam Hussein killed my two brothers and father,” said Mohamad,
28. “And he cut my ears.” He slowly lowered a tightly wrapped
head scarf to show the gashes – a common punishment for army
deserters.

Then Mohamad pulled from his back pocket some photos. They showed
dead bodies, burned, flayed. “Look!” One photo showed three
smiling men at a banquet table. “Look! The militia of Saddam.”

Troops said imposing law and order here could be hard.

“This is wrong. It isn’t civilized, is it?” said British
infantryman Bruce De’ath, 21, on patrol just west of the
university.

Early in the day, a boy with a burned face sought help from British
paratrooper Matthew Penney, 29. The memory of that boy lingered
with Penney, he said, as he led Monday’s push with other
paratroopers, murmuring into their microphones, stopping at
intersections and looking into their telescopic rifle sites in
search of militiamen.

“These things happen,” he said of the child.

And some Iraqis acknowledged the ugliness during what could have
been a day of pure celebration.

“Life now will be better, because we have freedom now. I feel
sorry for the dead, and I am against this stealing,” said Mohamad
al-Mayde, 31, a father of two. “But people here are very poor.
They are lucky to eat one meal a day. They suffer too much for
Saddam. This gives people an excuse.”

Iraqi-Americans Serve With Troops

April 4, 2003 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Iraq During the U.S. Invasion

Group translates, deals with locals

UMM QASR, Iraq – Another Hussein is fighting for power in Iraq.

His name is Ali.

The difference between Ali and Saddam Hussein is that Ali and
several hundred loyal buddies – all Arabic speakers, well armed,
with gas masks and the latest intelligence – are fighting on the
side of the Americans. They serve as translators, gather
intelligence from the locals and help to deal with an Iraqi
population torn and traumatized by three decades of war and
totalitarian control.

And as U.S. forces moved within 6 miles of Baghdad on Thursday,
their mouths were practically watering at the prospect of Hussein’s
downfall.

“You see,” said Ali Hussein, a soft-spoken, 40-year-old father of
two, “Saddam took away my beautiful life.”

They call themselves the Free Iraqi Fighters, and they entered this
war via the Iraqi National Congress opposition group. They took
lie-detector tests administered by U.S. officials in Texas, combat
training in Hungary and a night flight into northern Kuwait to join
the Americans.

The U.S. government enlisted these fighters because they know Iraqi
culture down to the faces of reliable local water-truck drivers and
have fought before in Iraq’s mind-addling heat.

They launched the 1991 uprising that the first President Bush
encouraged after the Persian Gulf War and then failed to support.
Then they escaped to America, where many grew comfortable.

Ali Hussein supports his wife Paula and their two children in St.
Louis by driving a blue-and-white cab.

They stand out most in situations like one that frayed nerves here
this week. Six dusty Iraqi soldiers strode toward a U.S.-British
perimeter, seeking to surrender. British troops ordered them to lie
face down on hot asphalt. Were they for real? Or fedayeen fighters
strapped with explosives?

Hussein approached in a Humvee with Lt. Col. Ken Knox, the
operations chief at the main U.S. beachhead in southern Iraq.

He sized up the Iraqis and asked Knox to “let me talk with them.”
Knox nodded and told the British his man could help. Hussein parked
and bolted right in close, searching the Iraqis, who apparently
thought they were going to be killed.

“I say: ‘Feel safe. These soldiers will help you. They’ll give you
water and a blanket,”‘ Hussein said.

One man said he had a bad headache. Hussein reached in the big side
pocket on his fatigues and slipped him a Motrin 800 – telling him
to take it only with food and water that the soldiers soon would
provide.

Surrender accomplished – one fewer hair-trigger encounter for
exhausted troops trying to consolidate their battlefield gains.

“I try to, like, make both sides feel better,” Hussein said
later.

Not all Iraqis trying to surrender are greeted with Arabic-speaking
brethren. The first stop for most after they turn themselves in
here is a white metal shipping container with 14 air holes cut in
the side – a makeshift holding pen. When patrol vehicles are
available to ferry them, they move to a larger holding area with
more than 4,000 others along the Iraq-Kuwait border.

Yet with their ability to translate, the Iraqi-American fighters
add instant understanding when tensions are high. They also gather
intelligence practically everywhere they patrol. One fighter this
week obtained a list with addresses of fedayeen loyalists hiding in
a city. This is how commandos know where to go on their flare-lit
nighttime house calls.

And Thursday, Ahmed, 33, who asked that his last name not be
printed to protect relatives, even gave lessons on citizenship to
Iraqis who fought in line as they waited for water.

Ahmed ordered the people filling the water containers to stop and
yelled out: “Stop. We Iraqis have to try to live America style. We
have to try to live organized lives. If you fight each other in
front of these Americans, they are not going to want to help you
again. You know, I have lived for 12 years in America. I’ve never
had to fight for my turn. My turn is my turn. A lot of things are
going to be different.”

The crowd calmed.

For their wartime service, the Free Iraqi Fighters are paid about
$1,600 a month, less than most earn in America. Hussein said he
earns at least $2,000 a month driving his cab. Same for his
tentmates – Habib Ali, 39, a forklift driver in Lincoln, Neb., and
Ahmed, who makes radar screens in Portland, Ore.

Yet the fighters work fiercely. Sometimes they barely sleep as
American colonels call for translators. Iraqi-American fighters
“are really helpful,” said Col. Dave Bassert, 51, a U.S. Army
civil-affairs chief here. “They are really true soldiers. They are
sticking their necks on the line, and in some cases their families’
necks on the line.”

Their motivations emerge over meals or riding around in Humvees.
Ali Hussein is a Shiite Muslim denied schooling under Saddam
Hussein. He was forced to fight in Iraq’s eight-year war against
fellow Shiites in Iran. He couldn’t fully settle in America knowing
relatives were suffering in Iraq.

He lost one brother, executed for refusing to fight in Iran, and
his best friend Mansuour, who was jailed after the 1991 uprising.
Mansuour decided against fleeing with Hussein so that he could stay
with his pregnant wife.

When Habib Ali fled Iraq, Saddam Hussein’s henchmen arrested his
brother-in-law in Baghdad, he said. They held him for weeks. Ali
fears he may have been tortured.

“I knew it was a bad situation when he called me in the United
States from Baghdad. He didn’t talk much. He was with others. He
just said: ‘Habib, I have a bad situation here.’ When he told me
that, I knew.”

When Ahmed was hiding in Basra, trying to escape Iraq, Iraqi agents
picked up his younger brother. Ahmed said they beat him with metal
cables and threatened to shoot him. As his brother stood without a
blindfold before a firing squad, Ahmed said, he asked the captain
if he could face away from the bullets. The captain laughed and
asked why. By then, Ahmed’s brother was just praying. The captain
then asked subordinates why this man was facing the firing squad.

He was being punished because of his brother Ahmed, they said. The
captain set him free.

“Because I got involved in the revolution, my brother got beaten
up, and almost shot to death.”

When recruiters called last year for a classified mission to help
U.S. forces eliminate Saddam Hussein, Ahmed recalled, he
immediately volunteered. Then he started making careful phone calls
home. He told a brother in the Basra area: “I’m going to be in
Europe soon. Some day I’m going to be very close to you guys.”‘

He also called Rana, the girl he had courted for 13 years by
telephone. He met her when she was 9 and arranged to marry her
according to Shiite custom. She was 21 when he called and was
giving up hope of ever seeing Ahmed.

Ahmed recounted their conversation. He asked her: “What would you
do if someday I knocked at the door of your house and met you in
person?”

“That’s not going to happen,” she said.

“Please, just pretend. Play this game with me.”

“I don’t know what I would do. I miss you. I’d want to touch you,
feel you. But why this game?”

Here, patrolling roadways in southern Iraq, he met his brothers and
mother and Rana last week. They’d spotted him in a television
broadcast and realized he was back in Iraq. On a street in Umm
Qasr, they cried and hugged. U.S. soldiers slowed their convoy for
the reunion.

Ahmed rushed, head spinning. “Where is my mother?”

When he saw her she pointed at Rana. “Look! That’s your
fiancée!”

Rana said: “I thought you were playing a game with me.”

Now Free Iraqi Fighters say they really want to get back to real
life.

But not until Saddam Hussein is gone.

Some say real life for them will unfold in America.

Ali Hussein has a different dream. He wants to come home to Iraq.
He wonders about jobs in Baghdad. He envisions his wife Paula
working at a U.S. Embassy there. He talks about multiparty
elections.

“Peace. No president for life. Worship freely,” he said. “I’m
not really doing this to help the U.S. Army. The U.S. Army is
helping us, because without them we couldn’t fight Saddam. You
Americans are actually helping us.”

“Liberated” Town Remains Captive to Its Tragic Past

March 30, 2003 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Iraq During the U.S. Invasion

SAFWAN, Iraq – A week after American tanks rolled through their
town, a group of Shiite Muslim men here is making a daring move to
open a new mosque.

Saddam Hussein’s henchmen for years denied permission to do this,
in line with his decades of ruthless suppression of the Shiites.
The men now are emboldened by America’s invasion.

Yet as they defy the Iraqi regime, they also are ambivalent about
embracing an America they deeply mistrust.

“I don’t like Saddam Hussein, but I like Iraq,” said farmer Hamed
al-Anizi, 45, ranting against U.S. bombing and praising
paramilitary forces waging resistance against U.S. forces as
“brave.”

He and fellow farmers laughed at the notion of working with America
to establish a democracy in postwar Iraq. The only power they’ll
respect in the future: “Allah,” the men say, nodding in
agreement. “Allah.”

The situation in this farming town of 24,000 offers an early look
at Iraq and the forces shaping what may be a longer war than many
Americans expected.

Safwan is fearful, volatile and far from grateful for the allies’
presence. Local officials loyal to Hussein struggle to retain
control, directing fighters that military officials say are capable
of launching ambush or suicide attacks on U.S. supply lines.

They badger the townspeople who are thirsty and reduced to looting
as the first Kuwaiti aid convoys approach their scattered mud-brick
and cement-block houses, wilting green vegetable patches, and
dilapidated, mile-long main street. One minute, young men riding in
pickups flash thumbs- up for America, begging for water and
cigarettes. Next minute, they lapse into singing for Hussein:
“Saddam a good man!”

This might be a moment for trying to sway hearts and minds – a
crucial part of the Bush administration plan to rebuild Iraq into a
beacon of democracy for the Middle East.

But American humanitarian workers have stayed out, with southern
Iraq deemed potentially deadly. U.S. troops now skirt Safwan and
other southern towns as they move north toward Baghdad. America is
visible only as a distant, green-black-and-brown-splotched boa of
gun-topped war machines.

The Pentagon has claimed control over more than 30 percent of
California-size Iraq.

Here, British troops find control is tenuous at best. On Saturday,
Col. Chris Vernon, a British military spokesman, announced a new
counterinsurgency campaign that will run parallel to fighting the
war. Iraqi forces that continue to fire low-trajectory missiles
regularly at Kuwait probably are based in southern Iraq, Vernon
said.

At first “Safwan did not pose a threat,” but now strengthened
patrols will try “to win the people and appear non-oppressive to
them,” Vernon said.

The most vulnerable here simply cower.

“I am afraid,” said 10-year-old Salwah Ganem, who was barefoot,
wearing a yellow dress and squatting in a dusty field about 5 miles
north of Safwan as a helicopter swooped about 100 feet overhead.
Tears streamed down her face. Finally, her three barefoot brothers
and mother, clad in black, arrived. The mother hoisted an emergency
Red Crescent box of water and food on her head, and they walked
away into the hot, gritty haze.

While a dozen or so patrolling British soldiers spoke into headset
microphones, Kuwaiti Red Crescent workers unloaded hundreds of
these boxes. More than 500 Iraqis rushed to the scene, lined up,
then began pushing, fighting and shouting.

Standing back by his battered Toyota pickup, tomato farmer Mohamad
Khalid, 33, said Hussein “has left us with nothing.” He clutched
two nearly empty vials of insulin, hoping to find a doctor who
could supply more.

Some Iraqis will support Americans, Khal

Views of War – Arabs Dismayed by U.S. Push

March 13, 2003 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Pre-war Reports From Syria and Elsewhere

Iraq’s neighbors warn of backlash

Syrians and Jordanians: ‘Democracy does not ride in on top of American tanks’

DAMASCUS, Syria – Arab students at the Fakhresham Language Center
spend hard-won family savings to fulfill the school’s promise:
“Speak English as Fluently as Americans Do.”

They hone their accents in halls festooned with red, white and blue
“Let Freedom Ring” banners that director Moutaz Kalam bought
during a visit with relatives in Denver.

But now these admirers of America in Syria – a country the U.S.
government labels a sponsor of terrorism – cry betrayal at the
prospect of war against neighboring Iraq. Kalam, 32, worries that
students will quit if he sticks with his American imagery, and he
ponders a new “learn the language of the enemy” pitch.

“Be ready for the reaction” to a war on Iraq, Kalam said. “Maybe
your government takes their decision because they think American
people don’t care. But if the outcome is hatred, it’s going to be a
big loss for your nation.”

Such are the signs of backlash across the Arab-

Muslim world, where 1.2 billion people increasingly reject a
once-revered America because it seems to be letting them down. Many
who previously were drawn to U.S. culture and democracy now see
America primarily as a bully gluttonous for oil.

The tilt is not in favor of Saddam Hussein but rather against U.S.
power. Arabs interviewed in Syria and Jordan this past week oppose
war without United Nations approval as unfair. They question U.S.
targeting of Muslim Iraq while America also aids Israel against
Palestinians, tolerates North Korean missile tests and downplays
what they consider the root causes of terrorism. Mostly, they
mistrust America’s promise to ensure democracy in Iraq and beyond
when they are looking down the barrel of a gun.

“Democracy does not ride in on top of American tanks,” said Ali
Orsan, president of the Arab Writers Union, which represents public
opinion leaders in 16 countries. “What’s changing is the
trustworthiness of America. Before, America really was fighting for
democracy. Now, America is fighting for its own interests under the
name of democracy.”

Syrian President Bashar Assad has led Arab-Muslim opposition to a
war, denouncing U.S. “pretexts” for “domination of the region.”
Syria serves as a lifeline for Iraq, allowing oil experts via
Mediterranean ports that bring billions to Hussein’s regime.

America wants Arabs “with beating hearts and nonworking minds,”
Assad said, rallying fellow rulers at a recent summit in Egypt.
This followed Turkey’s refusal to admit U.S. troops headed for war
on Iraq. Anti-war protests in Morocco, Turkey and Pakistan have
intensified. On Wednesday, Turkish troops fired shots over
protesters in the port of Iskenderun, where U.S. troops were
unloading war supplies.

Authoritarian governments in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Jordan, which
quietly support U.S. war preparations, also face popular anger. In
Jordan’s capital, Amman, the opposition Muslim Brotherhood last
week denounced military action in Iraq, demanded that King Abdullah
cut Jordan’s ties with Israel, and called for sharia, or Islamic
law.

Some U.S. advocates of a war contend Arab-Muslim backlash is
inevitable, the result of pent-up rage in dysfunctional societies.
“There will be assaults on America,” said Lebanese-American
professor Fouad Ajami of the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced
International Studies, who has advised White House and Pentagon
officials.

But critics contend that backlash could disrupt the volatile Middle
East and that making Americans safer from terrorism ought to take
priority over ousting Hussein now.

Arab governments that U.S. officials rely on for help catching
terrorists “will be constrained by public opinion if it is
increasingly hostile to the United States,” said Ambassador Phil
Wilcox, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace in
Washington, D.C., and former coordinator of U.S. counterterrorism
efforts.

Invading Iraq now “will weaken our efforts to identify and
apprehend terrorists,” Wilcox said. “And it will create a climate
of hostility in which new terrorists can breed.”

U.S. diplomats around the Middle East are bracing for action.
Family members have moved. Embassy duck-and-cover drills heighten
awareness of regular bomb threats in Jordan.

In Syria, diplomats anticipate government-organized demonstrations
if war breaks out. After the 1998 missile attacks on Iraq, a mob
barged into the U.S. Embassy compound in Damascus, sacked the
ambassador’s residence, cornered his wife in a safe room, and began
burning her out before Marines came to the rescue.

The coalition of “the willing” that President Bush has sought
simply isn’t shaping up in the rocky hills where Bedouins herd
sheep or the working class, urban living rooms where 24-hour
television news blares, or the cafes where intellectuals sip
coffee.

Consider the Kattan family in their basement apartment here, where
creamy white curtains and a massive chandelier lend regal elegance
to the room in which brothers Oday, 7, and Layth, 9, play with
their baby sister, Judi. Al-Jazeera images of Palestinians fighting
Israeli tanks flash.

Young Layth has concluded that “Americans just want to get oil out
of Iraq to America.” He asks: “Why does your American government
help Israel to kill Palestinian women and children?”

His mother, Louay, 36, nodding at the television, laments that war
on Iraq will bring more images of blood and destruction into her
home – unsettling her children with what feels like an attack
against Muslims, she said.

Husband Mohamad, 36, a construction engineer, warned that the
outcome of war “will be worse for the United States than Iraq.
This will unite Arabs,” he said, and held up two parted fingers.
“Victory for Muslim people.”

Many Arabs distinguish between American people and their
government. Images of U.S. anti-war demonstrations – more massive
than what governments permit here – made an impression. Some also
know that Muslims live happily in America.

“We love the American people, when they visit us and when we visit
them,” said Muslim preacher Waleed Haq, 43, perched on cushions at
his riverside central mosque recently after leading the evening
prayer.

Yet the Bush administration’s “public diplomacy” to mobilize
opposition to Saddam Hussein is failing. When Jordanians refer to
“that crazy man,” they mean Bush. Down the steps from hillside
apartments, in Amman’s Theater Internet Cafe, dread of the damage
Bush could cause drowns out talk of local affairs. Here, men from
around the Middle East, visiting Muslims from London, and
occasional Iraq-bound activists converge for $1-an-hour Internet
access.

“This stupid man! He will kill millions in Iraq! He thinks he the
policeman for all this world,” fumed owner Essam Awayes, 27,
serving tea at his counter beneath a portrait of Jordan’s King
Abdullah.

Awayes said he once loved America.

“I always saw American movies. I wanted to go and see if it was
true how people were living. I always thought American people were
smart.”

He worked awhile for IBM in Jordan before moving for better money
to Dubai on the Persian Gulf.

“Now go to America?” he said. “No. Not now. Because they elected
this crazy man.”

Some Arabs now are considering whether they should join Iraqis
fighting Americans. Out on Syrian’s basalt-streaked desert steppe
near the border with Iraq, Bedouin herders Ahmad and Kald Alden set
up a “Bagdad Caf” to augment their earnings from sheep. They give
out hand-painted flat rocks as business cards. They once sold many
trinkets to tourists who flocked to Roman ruins at Palmyra. U.S.
talk of war on Iraq has killed their business.

If only Bush and Hussein would stop here for coffee, said Kald, 30.
“I’d sit them down at a table in the back for a private peace
talk.”

The Aldens are devout Muslims, adhering strictly to the Koran –
“like a constitution for us,” said Ahmad, 31, ducking into the
cafe after adjusting a rattling oily generator that powers their
water pump and light.

“In the Koran it says we should fight those who fight us.
Otherwise, do not be the aggressor against those who are peaceful.
The Israelis are fighting us. We must fight them. And if the
Americans fight the Iraqis, we have to fight back. We have to
defend ourselves.”

So Ahmad may cross the desert and enter Iraq to fight off American
aggressors, he said. “If not me, my brother.”

The problem he sees is that “America’s real intent is not only
Iraq,” he said. “It wants to control the region. So, if U.S.
troops attack, we have to help defend Iraq. Syria will be next.
Then, the whole Arab world.”

A Nation With No Country

November 24, 2002 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Pre-war Reports From Syria and Elsewhere

NORTHERN IRAQ – For 11 years, U.S. fighter jets kept these
honey-colored mountains safe from Saddam Hussein.

“We can’t keep living like this.”

Anti-Terror Tactics Costing U.S. Allies

September 9, 2002 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Counter-Terrorism, Yemen

Critics: Military focus, perceived arrogance ignore problem’s
roots

MEDGHIL AL-JEDAAN, Yemen – A U.S. convoy cut past wild camels and
ancient stone cities recently to a rocky plateau west of Osama bin
Laden’s ancestral home.

U.S. Ambassador Edmund Hull got out in a crowd of pro-al-Qaeda
tribesmen, proud in their turbans, cheeks puffed with sour wads of
qat, armed with traditional curved daggers and Kalashnikov assault
rifles.

“Welcome,” Sheik Bin Rabeesh Kelaan told Hull. The two cemented a
ceremonial brick in a wall of what is to be a U.S.-funded health
clinic Rabeesh’s people desperately need.

It was one brick in a wider wall against terrorism that – a year
after the Sept. 11 attacks – is far from solid.

Resistance to the U.S.-led campaign to eradicate terrorism is
growing across much of the world. America’s emphasis on military
and police tactics rather than addressing the roots of terrorism
often causes as much concern abroad as terrorism itself.

Here in Yemen, young men cry, “Osama bin Laden a good man!” In
the capital, Sana’a, a recent explosion ripped open an apartment
where Islamists had hidden bombs like those used to attack the USS
Cole warship two years ago as it refueled in a Yemeni port. Yemen’s
government, though officially a partner against terrorism,
restricts U.S. special forces.

Nearly a year ago, Bush declared “you’re either with us or against
us.” He announced a 136-country military coalition to fight “a
new enemy.” Nations teamed up to topple an Afghan regime that
tolerated anti-American training camps and hosted Osama bin Laden.

Now, with Bush invoking terrorism to push military action in Iraq
and elsewhere, official government support is strained. People from
Arabia to London who initially rallied with America are becoming
doubtful and sometimes openly hostile to the U.S.-led campaign.

A Denver Post assessment based on dozens of interviews and visits
in five countries found that:

Treating the campaign as a “war,” with military deployments and
open threats, fosters resentment that feeds support for
terrorists.

Bin Laden and al-Qaeda fighters have ready support in areas beyond
government control.

Backlash against broader U.S. policies – toward Israel and the
Palestinians, Iraq, and on global issues from the environment to
criminal justice – erodes support for U.S.-led efforts against
terrorism.

Key allied governments call on America to focus more on root causes
of terrorism and consult more about tactics.

“We are acting in solidarity with the United States, but we really
do not mean war,” Karsten Voigt, Germany’s coordinator of
relations with America, said in a telephone interview from his
office in Berlin.

An ex-parliament member targeted by European terrorists in the
1970s, Voigt said Americans must deal with a perception “that the
campaign against international terrorism is only pretext, that what
you are really interested in is access to oil and gas pipelines.”

One of Bush’s strongest overseas allies on Afghanistan, British
Prime Minister Tony Blair, has said something must be done about
Iraq’s Saddam Hussein – but just what is “an open question,” he
said. Any military action, he said last week, would require “the
broadest international support.”

Bush in recent days also has lobbied the leaders of Russia, China
and France to support U.S. pressure to oust Hussein.

Beyond Blair, there is little sign of support for a war on Iraq.
And allies worry about U.S. tactics on foreign policy in general.

European leaders are increasingly concerned that U.S. policymakers
approach all the world’s complex and interconnected challenges
through “the exclusive prism of the war on terrorism,” French
Ambassador Bujon de l’Estang said from Washington, D.C.

“The response to terrorism cannot be only a military response,”
de l’Estang said. “That’s the basic issue. There are a number of
causes of terrorism, roots of terrorism that we need to address. If
you want to win people’s hearts – not only to be feared – you
certainly need to address these roots.”

America’s efforts also raise questions in Africa. Millions of
jobless Africans struggling to survive watch America ramping up “a
war economy,” said Ambassador Molelekeng Rapolaki of Lesotho, a
south African nation.

Some who grow bitter could be prey for terrorist recruiters, she
said. “A poor person can become so desperate that he can be
vulnerable,” Rapolaki said.

Even in Turkey, a NATO member straddling Islam and modern Western
ways, public opinion is shifting quickly.

The government favors “international cooperation against
terrorism, and in that regard supports the United States,” said
Turkish Foreign Ministry spokesman Huseyin Dirioz. U.S. warplanes
use Turkish bases for patrols over Iraq’s no-fly zones.

Turkey is strongly opposed to a U.S.-led war on Iraq, but the NATO
member has long been an ally with the United States.

Yet when Turks saw television images of U.S. bombs exploding in
Afghanistan, popular support for the campaign against terrorism
plummeted. Relying on force to stop terrorism “will only make more
enemies,” said Murat Sabuncu, 33, an editor at Milliyet, one of
Turkey’s largest newspapers. “When Muslims see (military action),
they think it is a ‘crusade.’ Uneducated people especially think it
is a ‘crusade.”‘

Some Turkish university students now link the war against terrorism
with U.S. foreign policy toward Palestinians, Iraqis and economic
growth at all costs.

“America is using the attack on Sept. 11 as a reason to attack, to
push its policies around the entire world,” said biomedical
engineering researcher Koray Ciftci, 28, sitting in a Bosphorus
University canteen.

In Istanbul’s working-class Fathi neighborhood, political
campaigner Turker Saltabas, 44, a district director for the
“Saadet” Happiness Party that tries to restore Islamic
traditions, said America could be a model for Muslims who desire
greater religious freedom.

“But now America only gives freedom to its own people” while
supporting repressive governments for Muslims, Saltabas said.

“Before, the United States was for human rights. After Sept. 11,
it changed. Now it is for security first, freedom second,”
Saltabas said. “Why did this change? I think the American nation
is going to end, and the U.S. president and government see that. So
they are trying to do whatever they can to keep it on top.”

So how much global goodwill does America need to be safer?

Some diplomats and scholars contend that lining up official
government support for counter-terrorism – as opposed to rallying
popular support – is sufficient. But governments such as Yemen’s
can’t always control all their people. In a wired world where a few
men hidden in apartments can cause great harm, others contend
grassroots support and cooperation will be crucial.

Today, U.S. programs aimed at building understanding and goodwill
lag. Funding for exchanges that bring influential foreign
professionals to America decreased by 33 percent from $349 million
in 1993 to $232 million last year. While Bush has called for some
increases in aid, his emphasis in words and dollars has been on the
military.

Meanwhile, a U.S. Council on Foreign Relations study found that 85
percent of Germans, 80 percent of French and 73 percent of Britons
believe the United States is acting in its own interests in the
fight against terrorism. It found that more than two-thirds of
Turks, and higher percentages in Arab countries, opposed U.S.
bombing of Afghanistan as morally wrong.

If bin Laden or al-Qaeda fighters walk into the outskirts of Sana’a
seeking help, Yemenis say, they would be as likely to be welcomed
as rebuffed.

Al-Qaeda “is for Islam,” said qat farmer Mohammad Rabiama, 19,
chewing a cheekful of the mildly narcotic green leaf with his
brother, Yahya, 20. Al-Qaeda fighters “are the good guys,”
Mohammad said, “because they support Muslim people.”

A month or so after the Sept. 11 attacks, said dagger-maker Ali
Odary, 28, terrorist recruiters approached him outside a mosque.
They offered money. He shares their views – that “the United
States wants to colonize the whole world.”

Only his religious belief against killing, and his devotion to his
family’s dagger business, made him resist, he said: “I want to be
rich, but I want to be rich in my own way.”

It’s not just in Arab countries that al-Qaeda forces draw support.

In graffiti-splotched immigrant apartment blocs north of Paris,
men’s “hearts are with Osama bin Laden, against Bush,” said
Abdallah Selman, 30, a preacher struggling to moderate extremists
at his mosque. “Put yourself in their place. They are a minority
in France. They see injustice. They experience racism. They are
rejected in French society.”

They find their identity in a fundamental Islam that blames
infidels for their woes.

What most worries people in France – not only Muslims – is the
sense conveyed by Bush in the fight against terrorism “that ‘I
decide who is good and who is bad,”‘ said Syria-born Farouk Mardam
Bey, 55, a scholar at the Arab World Institute in Paris. America’s
approach, demonizing perceived enemies while disregarding global
treaties on the environment and other matters, only encourages more
terrorism, Bey said.

Back in Yemen, the Aug. 9 explosion that rocked a three-story
apartment building raised U.S. concerns of a possible escalation of
violence. The blast killed two men, both identified by authorities
as bomb-makers plotting attacks against U.S. interests. Jamal
Al-Badani, 27, who lives nearby and rushed to the scene, said he
counted 16 wooden boxes of explosives among other weapons before
police hauled them away.

It was only the latest reminder of resistance. A man lobbed a
grenade over the U.S. Embassy wall in March, and a bomb exploded
near the embassy in April. Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh,
had visited Washington in November and agreed to crack down on
pro-al-Qaeda elements. He reversed his previous refusal to accept a
rotating contingent of about 100 U.S. special forces soldiers to
mobilize a Yemeni counter-terrorism force.

But the situation is far from solid. Some security officials in
Yemen are former jihad fighters who returned from Afghanistan in
the mid-1990s and were rewarded with government positions. Yemen’s
coastline is still unpatrolled, and airport security lets
Pakistanis, Iraqis and Saudi Arabians come and go freely.

Ambassador Hull and others seek other ways to undermine terrorist
recruiting, training and plotting here.

Three days after the explosion, Hull set out through the searing
heat to open what he called “another front.”

His convoy wound through mountains and dry river beds into one of
three northern provinces where al-Qaeda forces recently have
clashed with soldiers.

Hull, through intermediaries, had proposed funding a health clinic
at Medghil.

By diverting $80,000 from other projects, he could help
tribespeople address medical needs that Sheik Bin Rabeesh Kelaan
considered dire. Since 1990, tribesmen in the area, where average
annual income is less than $380, have kidnapped more than 100
tourists in an effort to get government money and draw attention to
social needs.

“After the building is finished, it must have equipment inside”
and trained doctors, Rabeesh demanded upon Hull’s arrival at this
dusty outpost.

Hull nodded, then announced in fluent Arabic: “God willing, we’ll
try to do the best we can do.”

The two cemented the ceremonial brick. Then Rabeesh and tribesmen
in a Toyota topped with a mounted machine gun escorted Hull down a
backroad to a mud-walled compound resembling the Alamo.

Inside they sat, shoeless, on blue cushions and talked quietly
about everything from guns to U.S. support for Israel.

Even as Hull and Rabeesh conferred, 40-year-old tribesman Saleh
Ahmed, sitting across from them, confided that the only solution to
terrorism he sees is for Osama bin Laden to rule the world.

But guns were set down. A goat feast followed.

Hull’s commitment “shows how American authorities are willing to
help the Yemeni people in the future,” Rabeesh said.

Winning over these tribesmen “would be a major victory,” Hull
said. “It will make it very difficult for al-Qaeda and like groups
to find refuge, to have breathing space, which they use to
organize, to train, to plot. What we did today may not be as
dramatic as some of the military operations. But I think it is just
as important.”

Other sheiks who control Yemen’s countryside are seeking American
help.

Sheik Abdul Karim Bin Ali Murshed, 38, formed a group of tribal
leaders that U.S. officials have dubbed “sheiks against terror.”
They include 60 of about 200 sheiks in the three provinces where
al-Qaeda is active, Murshed said, “who find it very difficult to
convince their people to give up weapons and fighting.”

Young jobless tribesmen with nothing in the world but their machine
guns “are the ones most easily recruited,” Murshed said. Clinics,
schools and exchange visits to America would give hope.

That may seem like extortion, but some officials in Washington see
a strategic rationale.

America must step in with development assistance, Murshed said,
because pro-terrorist forces “are waiting for the chance to say,
‘Look, this project is no good.’ They are willing to spend their
own money to undermine the efforts.”

If America only sends soldiers and police, he said, “people will
say you are selfish and people will become enemies.