THE MIAMI HERALD
U.S. NEWS
MiamiHerald.com
INTERNATIONAL EDITION
FRIDAY, JANUARY 7, 2011
5A
Gates announces $78B reduction in Pentagon budget BY ANNE FLAHERTY AND ANNE GEARAN Associated Press
BOB LEVERONE/AP
ICONIC SPECIMEN: Shawn Dorsch, president of the Carolinas Aviation Museum, carries a poster announcing the future arrival of the remains of the U.S. Airways jet that crash landed safely on the Hudson River in 2009, to the Charlotte, N.C. museum. ‘It’s a fantastic piece of history,’ he said.
Sully’s plane headed for museum BY MITCH WEISS Associated Press
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — The U.S. Airways jet that made a near-miraculous landing on the Hudson River in 2009 will finally reach its destination, but as a museum piece rather than in service. The Carolinas Aviation Museum has almost completed an agreement to buy the damaged plane from the insurance company that owns it, museum president Shawn Dorsch said Wednesday. The museum is in Charlotte, which was the destination of U.S. Airways Flight 1549 until a flock of geese disabled the engines. Capt.
Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger glided it to a safe landing on the Hudson in New York City and all 155 passengers and crew members were rescued. Dorsch would not disclose the cost of the plane. The fuselage is in a New Jersey warehouse. Dorsch says he hopes to have the plane on exhibit by May. “It will be trucked down here and will be reassembled in the configuration it came out of the water,” he said. “And it will be reassembled as it came out of the water. So the artifact will be conserved as opposed to restored.” Dorsch said the Airbus
A320 will provide a boost to the museum, which attracts about 30,000 visitors a year — a number that could increase to more than 100,000 once the plane goes on display. The museum, which opened 19 years ago, has over 50 aircraft in its collection. “It’s a fantastic piece of history,” Dorsch said. “It has everything from the dents from the birds to the Coke cans and the food carts to the markings from the NTSB investigation on the aircraft. It’s just fascinating to walk around the aircraft. Except for the passengers’ belongings, it’s like a time capsule.” Dorsch said the project
began in 2010 during a trip to Japan. In a Japanese airport, he noticed a large exhibit honoring Flight 1549. “I realized that 1549 was not just an aviation icon, it was an internationally recognized aviation icon,” he said. So he contacted U.S. Airways and the project took off from there, Dorsch said. U.S. Airways helped put Dorsch in touch with the right people at the insurance company that owned the plane. U.S. Airways spokesman Derek Hanna said Wednesday the airline had no comment about the plane and was directing all calls to the Carolinas Aviation Museum.
WASHINGTON — U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced Thursday he will cut $78 billion from the Pentagon’s budget in the next five years — money that will come from shrinking the military’s ground force, increasing healthcare premiums for troops and other politically unpopular costsaving measures. The plan also identifies a separate $100 billion in savings, including the cancellation of a $14 billion amphibious Marine vehicle. However, the services will be allowed to reinvest that money in new weapon systems and programs that benefit troops, he said. The move is part of a broader effort to trim fat from the military’s mammoth half-trillion annual budget in light of the nation’s ballooning deficit. “We are not exempt from scrutiny and being asked to figure out what we are doing with less dollars,” Gates told reporters. But parts of the plan are likely to run into serious opposition from Congress. Lawmakers have fought past proposals to increase healthcare premiums and cut weapons programs that produce jobs in their states. At the same time, many newly elected lawmakers are tea party activists and antiwar Democrats say the Defense Department isn’t doing enough to scale back. The Defense Department
represents the largest portion of the federal government’s discretionary budget. The final plan calls for $553 billion spent in 2012 — $13 billion less than the Pentagon wanted, but still representing 3 percent in real growth. “Those who feel we’ve gone too far and those who feel we’ve gone far enough,” Gates said. “My view is we’ve got it about right.” Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he and the service chiefs are fully supportive of the plan. Under pressure to rein in deficit spending, the White House has told the Defense Department it must cut $78 billion from its budget plan covering 2012 through 2016. Gates agreed, but insisted that topline reductions not happen until 2015 when presumably the war in Afghanistan will end. Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai has said that it plans to take control of security in its country by the end of 2014. After that, the plan would be to let go of 27,000 Army soldiers and up to 20,000 Marines to save as much as $6 billion. Mullen called the reduction in force size modest and “well within the risk envelope.” Gates said he expects to save some $7 billion by reforming the military’s health care system known as Tricare, including an increase to premiums paid by military families.
Horsemen rally to revive horse slaughter U.S. tries Iraqi accused of spying BY CRISTINA SILVA Associated Press
BY ED WHITE Associated Press
DETROIT — A former U.S. military translator accused of conspiring to help the regime of fallen dictator Saddam Hussein of Iraq, simply passed along benign information in the 1990s about Iraqi Christians in the United States, a defense lawyer told jurors on the first full day of trial. I s s a m Hamama, 60, is charged with conspiring to act as an unregistered agent and making false state- HAMAMA ments to investigators. Hamama, an Iraqi native who left that country in 1979, was identified as agent 6,129 in documents seized by the U.S. government after Hussein’s fall in 2003. Hamama applied to become a U.S. translator in Iraq that same year and declared he had never had contact with foreign governments. Defense attorney Haytham Faraj acknowledged Hamama had contact in the 1990s with Iraqi officials stationed in the United States. “Mr. Hamama believed they were diplomats,” not Iraqi intelligence agents, Faraj told jurors. “Now he finds himself in this terrible nightmare.” Hamama is a natural-
ized U.S. citizen and Iraqi Christian who lived among other Chaldeans in Sterling Heights, a Detroit suburb, before moving to California. The first trial witness was Robert Smego, an expert in translating Arabic, who said Hamama’s secret identity, 6129, showed up “numerous times” in Iraqi records in Baghdad. Hamama was described in a handwritten document as a “collaborator” who supplies good information on “hostile activity” in the United States, Smego testified. The indictment accuses him of traveling to Washington and Iraq to talk to his handlers. There is no allegation that he aided the enemy while serving as a U.S. military translator. In fact, Faraj said he will present witnesses who will praise Hamama’s service. He was arrested in 2008 while working for the United States. “He was on the inside with Army units and had opportunity to do great harm. You know what? He protected them,” Faraj told jurors. Hamama is not the first Iraqi native to be charged because of documents found in Baghdad. In 2009, Najib Shemami of Sterling Heights was sentenced to nearly four years in prison for supplying information to Iraq before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. He was described in records as “our good cooperating source.”
LAS VEGAS — Horses should be slaughtered, processed and sold as food to other countries that regularly consume the lean, tender meat, speakers said Wednesday at a conference aimed at reviving the United States’ unpopular horse processing industry. Horses, traditionally regarded in the United States as companions or distinguished beasts, have been elevated to a position where they mistakenly are no longer treated as livestock ripe for consumption, argued slaughter proponents at the first Summit of the Horse conference. Not eating the animals, in fact, disregards the food chain’s natural cycle that sustains all creatures, said Sue Wallis, vice president of the United Horseman group of Wyoming, which organized the conference. “It’s not intuitive,” Wallis said of the country’s ban on horse processing. The consumption of horses has long been taboo in the United States, where cows, pigs and chickens are considered the protein of choice. Only three horse slaughterhouses remained in the country in 2007, when complaints over inhumane slayings and unsafe conditions prompted Congress to effectively ban horse processing. Animal rights groups claim there is no humane way to slaughter horses because of the animals’ shape and sensitivity to smells and sounds. They
want Congress to outlaw any exchanges that could lead to horse slaughters, including the sale of the animals to overseas processing plants. “The industries that existed never were able to find a way to do it in a humane way,” said Keith Bane, director of equine protection for the Humane Society of the U.S. But slaughter proponents say animal rights groups are pushing romantic notions of a noble beast that once defined the untamed West. Horses, they say, are no different from lambs, cows, pigs or other animals treated as food. Proponents hope the summit — attended by hundreds of ranchers, breeders and lawmakers — will draw attention to an untapped economic resource. Reopening horse slaughterhouses would create jobs and increase the market value of an animal whose sale price has plummeted in recent years, they say. Conference participants are spending three days discussing how to debate animal rights groups, humane horse slaughter methods, and the devastation wrought by uncontrolled populations of wild horses that compete with other species for water and forage. Horse meat remains a dietary staple in Japan, China, France, Belgium, German and Mexico. But the United States’ stomach for horse meat largely disappeared after World War II, when the consumption of Black Beauty’s brethren fell out of fashion. James Ahern, an agribusi-
ness professor at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, found fewer than 1 percent of horses in the United States — or roughly 100,000 — were sent to slaughterhouses each year before the federal ban. Ahern was part of an academic study commissioned by horse slaughter proponents before the 2007 ban that warned the value of horses would drop if the United States barred horse processing, a $26 million-ayear industry. He said horses traded for 40 cents a pound before the ban. Now, it can cost $2,500 to legally dispose of a dead horse. Slaughter advocates claim unwanted horses are agitating the nation’s already overpopulated horse supply. The Bureau of Land Management oversees more than
38,000 wild horses and burros in 10 western states. Another nearly 38,000 are in holding facilities in Kansas, Oklahoma and South Dakota. The cost of the federal horse management program rose from about $37 million in 2004 to $66 million in 2010. The soaring expense is in many ways tied to recent years of economic stress, in which families have been unable or unwilling to adopt wild or abandoned horses as frequently as they did in the past. More than 12,700 horses were adopted from the federal government in 1987, but fewer than 4,000 horses were adopted in 2009. Slaughter proponents say the federal ban contributes to the adoption tensions because it increases competition for homes by creating more unwanted horses.
MCT
BURDEN? Slaughter advocates claim unwanted horses are agitating the United States’ already overpopulated horse supply.
Polygamist sect leader Jeffs fires his new attorney, causing delay in trial BY WILL WEISSERT Associated Press
SAN ANGELO, Texas — Polygamist sect leader Warren Jeffs fired his attorney just hours after hiring him, prompting a judge to delay a trial on sexual assault charges after Jeffs said he would need more time to find a lawyer who “suits my needs.” Gerry Morris, a prominent Austin-based lawyer, told district court Judge Barbara Walther during a morning
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pretrial hearing that he would represent Jeffs as long as a trial on sexual assault charges set to begin Jan. 21 was pushed back to give him time to prepare. But in a subsequent late-afternoon hearing, Morris said Jeffs had “discharged” him. He did not elaborate and said after the hearing that he could not comment. Jeffs, the ecclesiastical head of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, is accused
of aggravated sexual assault, sexual assault and bigamy. Prosecutors say Jeffs had sex with two children, one under age 14 and the other under age 17, and re-arraigned Jeffs during the earlier hearing so that all counts of sexual assault could be heard in a single trial — with a separate trial to be held in the bigamy case. After Morris said he would not represent Jeffs, Walther turned to the defendant and said “Mr. Jeffs, what
do you propose to do?” After a long pause, state prosecutor Eric Nichols stood up and said Jeffs was using an apparent “strategy for more time” but that he had been unwilling even to sign a waiver that would have allowed prosecutors to delay the start of his first trial. Nichols then proposed that the trial for aggravated sexual assault and sexual assault be pushed back until Feb. 21 and that the bigamy
case remain slated to start March 14. The 55-year-old Jeffs stared into space, then addressed the court slowly and deliberately for several minutes. “I just ask you,” Jeffs said, before pausing at length, “to allow me a little more time in finding counsel that suits the needs I have, as I will proceed hastily with help from those who understand my needs.” Jeffs continued that he was
“not attempting to hinder, in any way, the proceedings, only requesting an additional opportunity to accomplish what is needed in determining representation more suitable.” Walther granted Nichols’ motion and appointed attorney Fred Brigman to serve as Jeffs’ standby counsel. Nichols said the state would proceed with discovery and provide Brigman access to evidence. Another pretrial hearing is set for Jan. 31.
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