Kategorie: International news

Researchers calculated the date they were made by determining that the ash surrounding the artifacts came from an eruption that occurred 40,000 years ago in southern Italy. “Some of the artifacts found right under the ash were almost certainly made by modern humans,” says a University of Colorado archaeologist working at the site. Among them is an ivory piece that appears to be the head of a partially complete human figurine. Radiocarbon and other dating methods also helped establish that the artifacts—stone blade fragments, scrapers, shell ornaments, a bone awl, and various digging and carving tools—are an astonishing 42,000 to 45,000 years old.

American officials, citing the number of terror plots in Britain involving Britons with ties to Pakistan, expressed concern over the visa loophole. In recent months, the homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, has opened talks with the government here on how to curb the access of British citizens of Pakistani origin to the United States.

At the moment, the British are resistant, fearing that restrictions on the group of Britons would incur a backlash from a population that has always sided with the Labor Party. The Americans say they are hesitant to push too hard and embarrass their staunch ally in the Iraq war, Prime Minister Tony Blair, as he prepares to step down from office.

Among the options that have been put on the table, according to British officials, was the most onerous option to Britain, that of canceling the entire visa waiver program that allows all Britons entry to the United States without a visa. Another option, politically fraught as it is, would be to single out Britons of Pakistani origin, requiring them to make visa applications for the United States.

Rather than impose any visa restrictions, the British government has told Washington it would prefer if the Americans simply deported Britons who failed screening once they arrived at an airport in the United States, British officials said. The British also screen at their end, and share intelligence with the Americans.

But Washington feels strongly, Mr. Chertoff has said, that it has the right to build controls against terrorists from Britain who do not have a prior criminal record — precisely the kind of man Mr. Khyam was until he was arrested in early 2004 and put on trial for plotting to blow up targets like a major London nightclub and a popular suburban shopping mall.

For its part, the British government looks with dismay at the frequency with which Britons travel to their ancestral land of Pakistan — an estimated 400,000 trips a year — where a small minority, like Mr. Khyam, link up with extremist groups and acquire training in weapons and explosives.

Foreign office officials have said they have discussed measures with the Pakistani Embassy in London, which grants Pakistani passports to Britons of Pakistani descent, to consider tightening the rules for Pakistani travel documents.

In Washington, an expert on terrorism and Pakistan, Bruce Riedel, who served on the National Security Council under President Clinton and in the early Bush administration, and who recently retired after 30 years in the Central Intelligence Agency, said that Mr. Khyam was perfect material for Al Qaeda.

“He is the classic U.K.-Pakistani connection that Al Qaeda has focused on since 9/11,” said Mr. Riedel, who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “His U.K. passport gives him international mobility. His training at a camp run for Kashmiris by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency gives him expertise. Al Qaeda gives him direction.”

The trial that ended Monday with the conviction of Mr. Khyam and four other Muslim men on conspiracy charges did not establish whether Mr. Khyam or his colleagues belonged to a Qaeda cell.

But the head of counterterrorism at Scotland Yard, Peter Clarke, said after the verdict the investigations into the bomb plot had given “a new understanding of the Al Qaeda threat to Britain.”

At his sentencing, the judge, Sir Michael Astill, described Mr. Khyam as “the energy behind the conspiracy,” the man who attracted other young Muslims to the plan, and inspired them, and who knew how to shuttle from Britain to Pakistan for terrorism training.

From Mr. Khyam’s own testimony, as well as a cascade of official intelligence surveillance presented during the yearlong trial, a portrait of determination and ruthlessness emerged.

As a teenager, Omar became entranced by jihadist ideology. He moved on to the cause of Kashmir, and was then piqued by 9/11 and the Iraq war, things that inspired and angered other Britons with Pakistani roots. But he in the end turned to attacking Britain, where he was born and raised.

Asked on the witness stand his reaction to 9/11, Mr. Khyam did not disguise his delight.

“I was happy,” he recalled in his south England accent. “America was, and still is, the greatest enemy of Islam. I was happy that America had been hit because of what it represented against the Muslims, but obviously 3,000 people died, so there were mixed feelings.”

 Mr. Khyam testified that his parents migrated to Britain from Pakistan in the 1970s, before his birth. He came from a family, he said, with a proud heritage of service, first in the British Army in Pakistan, then in the army of the newly independent Pakistan, and also in the intelligence services.

His parents were not particularly religious, he said, a pattern typical among Pakistani immigrants to Britain where the new generation, often turned off by what they see as the loose morals of binge drinking and broken marriages, has proven to be more devout than their elders.

At the age of 10, his father, a successful businessman with a textile factory in Karachi, left his mother and moved to Belgium, leaving behind Omar, the eldest, and two small children.

His mother’s English was poor. Quickly, Omar became the man of the household, organizing the finances, and bossing his siblings. Instead of enrolling in the local school where most of the students were South Asian, he attended a mostly white, government-run school, and led a middle-class British life.

He did relatively well in his final school exams and enrolled in college but, distracted by his larger cause, never followed through on his studies or sought steady employment.

By 1998, he had taken his first steps into the realm of radical Islam, when he was introduced to Al Muhajiroun, a group led in Britain by Omar Bakri Mohammed, in his neighborhood in West Sussex. The group indoctrinates followers in the virtues of an Islamic state and indoctrinates a strict code of personal behavior. It expects members to shun friends who do not practice strict Islamic mores.

On the political side, Mr. Khyam calmly told the court about how he watched bloody videotapes of Russian soldiers blowing up mosques in Chechnya, and of atrocities by the Serbs against Muslims in Bosnia, which were shown to members of Al Muhajiroun.

But he soon tired of Al Muhajiroun, he said, and yearned for something more than the group’s desire for an Islamic state in Britain, which he deemed to be “not realistic.”

He took his first trip to Pakistan as a vacation with his mother and his brothers in 1999, when he was just a teenager. There, he experienced firsthand what he had heard about at home: the cause of Kashmir, the border area claimed by both Pakistan and India. He met with a group, Al Badr Mujahedeen, that fought, he said, to free Kashmir from Indian control.

In early 2000, Mr. Khyam was back in Pakistan. He found a training camp for fighters being sent to Kashmir that was run, he said, by Inter-Services Intelligence.

According to his testimony, the American-led war in Afghanistan, and later Iraq, dramatically colored his views. Those wars, he said, were wars against Islam, and he hoped to join the fight.

“By this time I had a lot of contact with the I.S.I. because of my family,” he said, referring to the Pakistani intelligence service. He visited the headquarters of the agency in Islamabad, and was told that what the Americans wanted “is to stop anyone who calls for the return of an Islamic state or a caliphate.”

From 2002 on, Mr. Khyam said he shuttled between Britain and Pakistan, culminating in a trip in 2003 to a training camp in Malakand in the North-West Frontier Province with five of his fellow defendants, including his younger brother, Shujah, who was acquitted.

By late 2003, according to prosecution evidence, Mr. Khyam had decided from his trips to Pakistan to concentrate on a plot in Britain that would involve a fertilizer bomb.

Mr. Khyam, using some of the organizational skills he had honed as a young man at home, can be heard on surveillance tapes divvying up responsibilities for the plan.

Along the way, he found time to marry — in what he called a “religious marriage” — Saira, a Pakistani woman.

They finally married in a civil ceremony on March 25, 2004, and a few days later, Mr. Khyam was arrested by the police in a bedroom of a Holiday Inn in England while he was on his honeymoon with his wife.

At the airport, crucially important for the functioning of the country, inspectors found that while $11.8 million had been spent on new electrical generators, $8.6 million worth were no longer functioning.

At the maternity hospital, a rehabilitation project in the northern city of Erbil, an expensive incinerator for medical waste was padlocked — Iraqis at the hospital could not find the key when inspectors asked to see the equipment — and partly as a result, medical waste including syringes, used bandages and empty drug vials were clogging the sewage system and probably contaminating the water system.

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Officials at the oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, said they had made an effort to sample different regions and various types of projects, but that they were constrained from taking a true random sample in part because many projects were in areas too unsafe to visit. So, they said, the initial set of eight projects — which cost a total of about $150 million — cannot be seen as a true statistical measure of the thousands of projects in the roughly $30 billion American rebuilding program.

But the officials said the initial findings raised serious new concerns about the effort.

The reconstruction effort was originally designed as nearly equal to the military push to stabilize Iraq, allow the government to function and business to flourish, and promote good will toward the United States.

“These first inspections indicate that the concerns that we and others have had about the Iraqis sustaining our investments in these projects are valid,” Stuart W. Bowen Jr., who leads the office of the special inspector general, said in an interview on Friday.

The conclusions will be summarized in the latest quarterly report by Mr. Bowen’s office on Monday. Individual reports on each of the projects were released on Thursday and Friday.

Mr. Bowen said that because he suspected that completed projects were not being maintained, he had ordered his inspectors to undertake a wider program of returning to examine projects that had been completed for at least six months, a phase known as sustainment.

Exactly who is to blame for the poor record on sustainment for the first sample of eight projects was not laid out in the report, but the American reconstruction program has been repeatedly criticized for not including in its rebuilding budget enough of the costs for spare parts, training, stronger construction and other elements that would enable projects continue to function once they have been built.

The new reports provide some support for that position: a sophisticated system for distributing oxygen throughout the Erbil hospital had been ignored by medical staff members, who told inspectors that they distrusted the new equipment and had gone back to using tried-and-true oxygen tanks — which were stored unsafely throughout the building.

The Iraqis themselves appear to share responsibility for the latest problems, which cropped up after the United States turned the projects over to the Iraqi government. Still, the new findings show that the enormous American investment in the reconstruction program is at risk, Mr. Bowen said.

Besides the airport, hospital and special forces barracks, places where inspectors found serious problems included two projects at a military base near Nasiriya and one at a military recruiting center in Hilla — both cities in the south — and a police station in Mosul, a northern city. A second police station in Mosul was found to be in good condition.

The dates when the projects were completed and deemed successful ranged from six months to almost a year and a half before the latest inspections. But those inspections found numerous instances of power generators that no longer operated; sewage systems that had clogged and overflowed, damaging sections of buildings; electrical systems that had been jury-rigged or stripped of components; floors that had buckled; concrete that had crumbled; and expensive equipment that was simply not in use.

Curiously, most of the problems seemed unrelated to sabotage stemming from Iraq’s parlous security situation, but instead were the product of poor initial construction, petty looting, a lack of any maintenance and simple neglect.

A case in point was the $5.2 million project undertaken by the United States Army Corps of Engineers to build the special forces barracks in Baghdad. The project was completed in September 2005, but by the time inspectors visited last month, there were numerous problems caused by faulty plumbing throughout the buildings, and four large electrical generators, each costing $50,000, were no longer operating.

The problems with the generators were seemingly minor: missing batteries, a failure to maintain adequate oil levels in the engines, fuel lines that had been pilfered or broken. That kind of neglect is typical of rebuilding programs in developing countries when local nationals are not closely involved in planning efforts, said Rick Barton, co-director of the postconflict reconstruction project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research organization in Washington.

“What ultimately makes any project sustainable is local ownership from the beginning in designing the project, establishing the priorities,” Mr. Barton said. “If you don’t have those elements it’s an extension of colonialism and generally it’s resented.”

Mr. Barton, who has closely monitored reconstruction efforts in Iraq and other countries, said the American rebuilding program had too often created that resentment by imposing projects on Iraqis or relying solely on the advice of a local tribal chief or some “self-appointed representative” of local Iraqis.

The new findings come after years of insistence by American officials in Baghdad that too much attention has been paid to the failures in Iraq and not enough to the successes.

Brig. Gen. Michael Walsh, commander of the Gulf Region Division of the Army Corps, told a news conference in Baghdad late last month that with so much coverage of violence in Iraq “what you don’t see are the successes in the reconstruction program, how reconstruction is making a difference in the lives of everyday Iraqi people.”

And those declared successes are heavily promoted by the United States government. A 2006 news release by the Army Corps, titled “Erbil Maternity and Pediatric Hospital — not just bricks and mortar!” praises both the new water purification system and the incinerator. The incinerator, the release said, would “keep medical waste from entering into the solid waste and water systems.”

But when Mr. Bowen’s office presented the Army Corps with the finding that neither system was working at the struggling hospital and recommended a training program so that Iraqis could properly operate the equipment, General Walsh tersely disagreed with the recommendation in a letter appended to the report, which also noted that the building had suffered damage because workers used excess amounts of water to clean the floors.

The bureau within the United States Embassy in Baghdad that oversees reconstruction in Iraq was even more dismissive, disagreeing with all four of the inspector general’s recommendations, including those suggesting that the United States should lend advice on disposing of the waste and maintaining the floors.

“Recommendations such as how much water to use in cleaning floors or disposal of medical waste could be deemed as an intrusion on, or attempt to micromanage operations of an Iraqi entity that we have no controlling interest over,” wrote William Lynch, acting director of the embassy bureau, called the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office.

It is the first time the machines have been used for a presidential election in France. Amid big queues in general to vote, people using the electronic machines were forced to wait up to two hours to cast ballots.

The left wing parties complained following problems at Noisy-le-Sec, a suburb east of Paris.

"In line with our forecasts, the electronic vote has been a catastrophe," the parties said in a statement. They said that many voters had walked away in disgust because of the wait.

Protests came from other cities as well.

Philippe de Villiers, a nationalist Catholic candidate in the election, called it a "cheating machine" as he voted in his home town of Herbiers in western France.

Daniel Guerin, a member of the Paris regional council made an official complaint to the Constitutionl Council because of "disfunctioning" machines in his constituency in Villeneuve-le-Roi, in the Paris suburbs.

The elderly had particular problems with the machines. Many said they did not believe the computerised system would keep their vote secret.

"I have come here twice and twice I have had to walk away without voting. It takes too long," said Pierre Bascoulergue, a pensioner in Issy-les-Moulineaux, near Paris. "I just don’t trust these machines."

The Issy town hall said the long queues were because of the huge turnout in the election.

In the champagne capital of Reims in eastern France a breakdown delayed the start of computer voting. The complicated machines further held up voting in the city during the day.

"It is total chaos, we don’t understand anything," said 70-year-old Suzanne Antoine.

"You put your card in and it says ‘continue’. Then nothing lights up. I managed to finish but I prefer the way it was before."

Researchers at Paul Verlaine University in Metz said that trials on two of the three machines used in France showed that four people out of every seven aged over 65 could not get their votes recorded.

Researcher Gabriel Michel, a psychologist, said the machines posed "enormous problems".

The computer has several buttons that allow electors to choose the candidate they want to back. There is also an "abstention" button for protest votes.

The interior ministry says the machines are not French but they have not had any problems since they were first used in 2003.