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NUCLEAR
Nuclear Nothing
China and the Kashmir crisis
Revealing a Gap Between The Leaders and the People
Eyeball to Eyeball, and Blinking in Denial
Putin Seeks Role as Mediator
On Kashmir Line, Pakistanis Wait, With Few Illusions
India Seeks to Ease Nuclear Fears
Nuclear conflict unthinkable, Musharraf says
Japan Eyes Damage Control Over Nuclear Remarks
Koizumi Cabinet's animosity toward non-nuclear principles
Nuclear Weapons Concern Wolfowitz
U.S. Will Resume Production of Nuclear Warhead Triggers
The Bush 9/11 Scandal for Dummies
Bush Has Proactive Terror Fight Plan
Bush promises to pre-empt terrorist plans
Nuclear Brinkmanship
MILITARY
Report: U.S. - Led Troops Hunt Militants on Afghan Border
India asks Israel to speed up arms sales
Too Smart For Our Own Good
Riddle of sheik's £100m secret fund
Lesson of Iraq's Mass Murder
CDC starts to fight smallpox as weapon
Israel Says Land Seizures Defensive
Pakistan will use all its warheads: Moin
Nuclear conflict unthinkable, Musharraf says
Fission in the Sky
Rwandan - Backed Congo Rebels Expel UN Officials
Bush: U.S. Will Strike First at Enemies
Air Force Probes Internet Auction
High-Stakes Reporting
POLICE / PRISONERS
Scrapping domestic-spying restrictions 'goes too far'
Wary of Risk, Slow to Adapt, F.B.I. Stumbles in Terror War
Lawyer: Most Cuba Detainees Not Terrorists
Feds Debate Sept. 11 Intelligence
Islamic militant groups get 2,000 U.S. recruits
Report: al - Qaida Threatens Attacks
OTHER
In Alabama, a 'Hot Spot' in the Debate Over Clean Air
EPA reports two-thirds at toxic risk
Therapeutic Cloning Shows Promise
Researchers Develop HIV Fighter
ACTIVISTS
Veterans wage peace in Iraq
-------- NUCLEAR
Nuclear Nothing
Sunday, June 2, 2002
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42665-2002May31?language=printer
Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) in his May 28 op-ed called the George W. Bush-Vladimir Putin agreement a "step forward," after which he noted several rather important things wrong with it. The main thing wrong with it is that it says nothing. The short version could well have read, "We agree that someday, we will agree on something, provided, on that day we agree."
WILLIAM McROSTIE
Richfield, Minn.
-------- china
China and the Kashmir crisis
India and China have long been mistrustful
Analysis By Michael Yahuda
Professor of International Relations,
London School of Economics and Political Science,
Sunday, 2 June, 2002
BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/south_asia/newsid_2020000/2020788.stm
China has long been involved in a triangular relationship with Pakistan and India, and is now a reluctant and silent third party to the dispute over Kashmir.
Beijing has traditionally supported Pakistan against India, but now in the post-Cold War era the Chinese have distanced themselves somewhat from Pakistan in order to cultivate better relations with India.
Nevertheless China has a strategic interest in the survival of Pakistan and it will not want to see it drawn into a war which it cannot win, nor will it want to see its government humiliated.
The Chinese approach is determined by three broad considerations; border issues, geopolitics and international strategy.
Borders
There is a contested border with India, and India has not forgotten its defeat by China in a border row in 1962.
China also borders Kashmir and the Indians do not recognise the border agreement the Chinese reached with Pakistan over the section of Kashmir under Pakistani control.
Although the Chinese and Indian sides have been unable to resolve their border dispute, they have nevertheless agreed in recent years to take various measures to reduce tension and the possibility for conflict along the lines of control that separate their two forces.
Geopolitics
From a geopolitical point of view, China has consistently sought to constrain Indian power and confine it essentially to the region of South Asia.
In addition to the strategic interest in not having to confront a single powerful neighbour to the south of the Himalayas, China is also concerned by the residual Indian interest in Tibet.
After all India still harbours the Dalai Lama and his unofficial government in exile.
China has contained India by cultivating its neighbours and by blocking Indian aspirations to be the dominant power in the southern reaches of the Himalayas.
Thus China continues to refuse to recognise India's claims to Sikkim, it encourages Bangladesh to stand up to India and above all China has supported India's arch-rival Pakistan.
In the 1965 Indo-Pak war China went so far as to threaten to open a second front against India.
But its main support has been expressed through the supply of arms.
Once Pakistan was confined to its western sector in 1971 it became no match for Indian power.
The Chinese have sought to redress the balance by helping Pakistan to acquire nuclear weapons and missile technology.
Despite repeated Chinese denials the evidence supplied by the Americans is overwhelming on this score.
International strategy
From a wider international perspective, India and China were rivals in the Cold War era.
From the 1970s this was reflected in American support for China and the Soviet alliance with India.
Since the end of the Cold War, however, India and China have scaled down their enmity and have found reason to co-operate, more especially in managing relations with the sole superpower, the United States.
But after 11 September matters became more complicated.
Both China and India have drawn closer to the US - India perhaps more so than China.
Indeed India and the US held joint military exercises for the first time in May.
But China is anxious to avoid trouble with the US at a time of leadership succession, and at a time when it has to adjust to the terms of entry to the World Trade Organisation.
Moreover, China has benefited to an extent from the "war on terror", which has enabled it to suppress resistance to its rule in its Central Asian province of Xinjiang.
Nevertheless the Chinese eye warily the American military presence in Central Asia.
Nuclear fall-out
Thus from a Chinese point of view the crisis in Kashmir has come at a most difficult time, and it is clear that the Chinese are not best pleased with their Pakistani friends for provoking it.
The Chinese opposed the Pakistani incursion into Kargil 18 months ago, and on this occasion it is clear that the Chinese have withheld support from Pakistan.
They have not joined Islamabad in calling for an international settlement of the Kashmiri issue, but have implicitly sided with New Delhi in calling for dialogue between the two.
Although they have not said so publicly, the Chinese are very much opposed to the possible use of nuclear weapons.
It is they who will be blamed for having supplied Pakistan, and they too have much to fear if the psychological barrier to their use were to be broken.
-------- india / pakistan
Revealing a Gap Between The Leaders and the People
By Nafisa Hoodbhoy
Sunday, June 2, 2002
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42765-2002May31?language=printer
WESTFIELD, Mass. - A group of women from India and Pakistan who came here for a peace conference in April returned home to find their countries on the brink of a nuclear catastrophe. One of the delegates wrote back to me about the "horrific atmosphere of war," which can be averted, she said, only through "sheer good luck."
Luck, of course, plays a magnified role in the lives of many on the subcontinent who cannot rely on receiving the staples that most Westerners take for granted. But sheer chance is not what anybody wants to think is the only thing between rice-for-lunch-as-usual and a nuclear conflagration that U.S. experts estimate could kill as many as 12 million people.
Yet that is what the escalating political rhetoric has made women like these believe -- that the tensions, the saber-rattling, the missile tests and the brutal deaths on either side of the Line of Control in predominantly Muslim Kashmir have less to do with the hopes of the ordinary people than with the self-serving and mercurial goals of their leaders. With a leader like President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who came to power in 1999 in a military coup, Pakistanis fear all the more that their country's response will be a military one. How ironic it was, one Indian delegate pointed out during the conference, that with flights and overland travel between their countries cut off, these women had to travel to the United States -- more than 7,000 miles away from home -- in order to meet face to face with their counterparts.
The delegates had gathered at the conference, titled "Women of Pakistan and India: Rights, Ecology, Economy and Nuclear Disarmament," at Westfield State College just as the war clouds were forming over the subcontinent. Tensions had been building since January, when India accused Pakistan of supporting the Kashmiri militants' attacks on its parliament in Dehli on Dec. 13 -- and retaliated by massing its troops on the border. The potential for a nuclear exchange has since been triggered by the Islamic militants' attack on an army camp in mid-May. The raid killed more than 30 soldiers and family members. That's when Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee rallied troops for an all-out war. In a show of defiance, Pakistan tested three missiles last week (all of them named after Muslim conquerors of India) that are capable of launching a nuclear attack on the Indians. The United States is taking all of this seriously, urging Americans to get out of India and withdrawing all but essential embassy personnel.
For the 10 women from India and Pakistan, coming to Westfield was an occasion to analyze how governments on each side had hijacked discourse to portray the other as the "enemy." Growing up in Pakistan, I was a witness to the constant hammering by state-controlled television about "Indian atrocities in occupied Kashmir." In fact, the phrase masla-i-Kashmir ("the problem of Kashmir") has for me become a metaphor for any problem that can never be solved.
I heard those thoughts echoed in the views of the Indian women at the conference. Journalist Kalpana Sharma blamed her nation's worsening relations with Muslims, and by association with Pakistan, on the rise of the Hindu fundamentalists in India -- the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its coalition partner, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP). India, Sharma said, had buckled under fundamentalist pressure and escalated its military budget after the disastrous conflict near the Kargil area of Kashmir that nearly led to war in 1999. And the costs for ordinary people are clear. India has cut back on the social sector, she said, and instituted higher taxes on its people.
For Anis Haroon, director of a women's non-governmental organization in Karachi, the U.S. support for Musharraf after Sept. 11 "had carved out a permanent role for the army in Pakistan." This, she said, had come with costs, strengthening the military crackdown on demonstrations by political parties, civil liberties groups and women protesting against discriminatory laws. In early May, for example, Pakistani authorities arrested women gathering to oppose the Hudood Ordinances, which demonstrators say end up punishing female victims of rape.
Civil liberties have taken a beating inside India as well, agreed the Indian women. Ruchira Gupta, a member of a women's group in Bombay, pointed to the Indian parliament's passage of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) on March 26 as an example. POTA was advocated by BJP Home Minister L.K. Advani to counter what he called "the terrorism" launched by Pakistan. But Gupta argued that the act would cramp the press, militarize the society and lead to injustices for Muslim minorities.
Both governments, these women believed, were responsible for recent atrocities. The Indians blamed the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat in February following an attack on Hindus in a train on the "frenzy whipped up by the BJP" which forms the central government in Gujarat. The Hindu delegates said that organizations they belonged to had visited the area to distribute food and clothing to Muslim victims. Correspondingly, Pakistani delegates said that the Gujarat violence had not resulted in reprisals against Hindus in Pakistan -- showing that such violence is not supported by ordinary people.
Indeed, my experience shows that all too often it is the self-serving leaderships in the two countries that thwart the people's desire for peace. I saw this firsthand in 1995. As a journalist, I was invited to join the official Pakistan delegation to the Fourth World Women Conference in Beijing. The country was then ruled by Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who was keen to portray a liberal image at the conference. But we were instructed by a male leader of our group to counter the Indian delegates each time the subject of Kashmir came up. I watched as the leaders of both the Indian and Pakistani delegations engaged in allegations and counter-allegations over Kashmir. Slowly the hall began emptying as U.N. delegates walked out of a meeting that was supposed to unite the women of the world.
The discussions at Westfield did not fracture along these lines because the women were not here to promulgate their governments' policies. Instead, they discussed how Sept. 11 has caused India and Pakistan to vie for U.S. attention over Kashmir. Even as India conducts its propaganda war against militants, it stopped Kashmiri women from attending our conference. The pressure was coming from the Hindu right wing, who, as Indian delegate Urvashi Batalia noted, had been cashing in on the "demonizing of Muslims."
U.S. dependence on Pakistan in its fight against terrorism appears to have given legitimacy to the military government, argued Zubeida Mustafa, a senior editor from Pakistan's daily Dawn newspaper. In Pakistan's April referendum, journalists observed few voters at the polling booths. A colleague wrotethat a polling officer he visited had recorded only 125 votes by closing time. The officer told him rather casually that he forged the remaining votes after deadline because the local police directed him to show a voter turnout of nearly 900 and to ensure a "yes" vote of around 98 percent, giving Musharraf five more years in office.
With only the facade of being elected, Pakistan's military government has not had to answer to its people about the failure to improve law and order. Earlier this year, targeted killings of Shia doctors by Sunni extremist groups forced physicians to flee the country. However, no action was taken until last month, when a suicide bomber killed 14 people in Karachi, including 11 French men working on a submarine project. Under severe international pressure, the Musharraf government cracked down on the Sunni militant groupLashkar-i-Jhangvi -- which has been linked to the killings of Shia doctors. Later, three members of this same group were accused in the brutal murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl.
In December, when I last visited Pakistan, I was curious to see how the Musharraf government would rein in Kashmiri militants. The Islamic militants who were brought into the region by the United States during the Cold War had turned to jihad in Kashmir after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989. Since then about two dozen militant Islamic groups fighting for Kashmir under the United Jihad Council have established headquarters in Pakistan.
It's not as if Kashmiris welcome such support. One Kashmiri from Srinagar, Farooq Lone, who now lives in Islamabad, told me that Kashmiris are "fed up" with Pakistan-based militants who attack Indian forces and leave the Kashmiris to face the vengeance of the repressive Indian troops. More than 35,000 people have been killed in Kashmir since the militants entered the fray 13 years ago. Lone's family supports the All Parties Hurriyet Conference, whose moderate Kashmiri separatist leader, Abdul Ghani Lone, was recently assassinated. Although India has never allowed a plebiscite in which the Kashmiris could decide their own fate, the Indian government had been wooing moderates such as Lone for elections planned in Kashmir in September. His murder deals a further blow to any peace prospects. And it is a further example of the voice of the people being stifled.
The issue of Kashmir -- left dangling by the British in 1947 when they divided India and then departed without forcing a plebiscite -- has come to haunt the United States almost 55 years later. It is an issue that is not going be resolved by luck or through a U.S. admonition to Pakistan to stop abetting militants. Instead, the United States will have to throw its weight behind the United Nations to enable the people of Kashmir to decide their own fate. That appears to be the only choice if the world is to be successful in fighting the roots of terrorism.
Nafisa Hoodbhoy, who worked for 16 years for Dawn newspaper in Karachi, Pakistan, teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, with a focus on women, politics and the media in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran.
----
Eyeball to Eyeball, and Blinking in Denial
New York Times
June 2, 2002
By CELIA W. DUGGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/02/weekinreview/02DUGG.html
NEW DELHI - AS India and Pakistan, fledgling nuclear powers, edge closer to war, the rest of the world looks on aghast at a possible nuclear exchange that could kill millions of people. British and American envoys are rushing to the region in last-ditch efforts to avert catastrophe. On Friday, the United States government urged tens of thousands of Americans living in India to leave.
But here in India's capital - a plausible bull's-eye - there has been no panic. The sweltering city moves to its usual somnolent summer rhythm. At a recent seminar titled "Preparing to Survive," the subject was earthquakes and cyclones, not nuclear firestorms and radiation sickness.
And that is in large measure because India's ruling elite and many of its leading strategic thinkers are in nuclear denial.
Though Pakistan's leaders have spoken openly over the years and in recent days and weeks about the possibility of using the country's nuclear weapons, India has seen this "loose talk," as a spokeswoman for India called it Thursday, as evidence of Pakistan's bluffing and blackmail.
K. Santhanam, a physicist who helped organize India's 1998 nuclear tests and now heads the government-financed Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses, said the risk of nuclear war is "overdramatized."
"The probability of occurrence is very low, extremely low, vanishingly low," he said.
Pakistan's leaders and thinkers, too, are living their own form of nuclear denial - that of the smaller, militarily weaker nation. They believe Pakistan's conventional military prowess, combined with its credible nuclear threat, will deter the region's dominant power, India, from daring to attack Pakistan. They also expect that it will force the United States to pressure India to give ground on Kashmir, the land India and Pakistan have fought over for a half century.
"There will be no war, conventional or nuclear," Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg, retired chief of Pakistan's armed forces, declared. "This military buildup is to pressurize Pakistan to stop the liberation movement in Kashmir."
India's and Pakistan's mirrored denials of the nuclear dangers are part of the treacherous dynamic that could lead to war, military analysts and South Asia experts say. As they intensify their rhetorical belligerence and military preparations, each expects the other to back down. But they may just fall into the nuclear abyss.
"There's a complacency that the weapons won't be used which I find baffling," said a senior Western diplomat here. "It's like the early days of the cold war. People here haven't understood what these weapons can do. I don't think most people here have ever heard of Hiroshima and Nagasaki."
While many Indians and Pakistanis say there will be no nuclear war, they often paradoxically acknowledge the possibility in the next breath, exhibiting also the unspoken assumption that these two hugely populous nations - India has a billion people and Pakistan 150 million - would survive.
Mr. Santhanam, the Indian physicist, said his hunch is that a war would remain conventional, but he also said, "If we're hit, we'll know how to handle it. If there's a nuclear attack, India's policy is severe retaliation."
Asked at a public meeting in Islamabad last week if there could be a nuclear catastrophe, General Beg, the former Pakistani army chief, said more people died in the Allied bombing of Dresden than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and that millions have been killed by small arms fire.
"Look," he said, "I don't know what you're worried about. You can die crossing the street, hit by a car, or you could die in a nuclear war. You've got to die someday anyway."
After the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, which surprised and frightened the United States and the Soviet Union at how quickly they could unintentionally slide toward a nuclear exchange, the superpowers shifted to engaging each other indirectly through proxy wars in the third world rather than in direct conflicts. They also began an arms control process to regulate nuclear competition.
In contrast, India and Pakistan have hundreds of thousands of troops poised for war along their border who have been engaged in fierce artillery duels for two weeks. And their senior leaders are not talking. India has withdrawn its ambassador to Pakistan and expelled Pakistan's envoy to Delhi.
A part of this may be due to the sheer power of disbelief that military planning could go so awry that nuclear arms would come into play. Strategists and Indian officials, including Defense Minister George Fernandes, have argued that India can wage a limited conventional war. They say Pakistan would not hit India with nuclear weapons and risk devastation in reprisal. They say they know Pakistan's trip wires and have no desire to conquer or vanquish Pakistan.
BUT what if a provoked India aggressively counterattacked across the border and Pakistan responded more effectively than anticipated? If that opened the way toward a general war, at what point would Pakistan's military rulers feel so endangered they would consider firing a nuclear weapon? Pakistan's leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, recently told Der Speigel that if Pakistan's survival as a nation were threatened, "then it would be a case of: in extreme emergency, even the atomic bomb."
Miscalculation is, after all, at the heart of virtually all the nightmare visions of how any nuclear exchange would start. India's external affairs minister, Jaswant Singh, said last week that India and Pakistan were of the same womb - suggesting they therefore understood each other. But their history is littered with deadly misunderstandings, scholars say. Often, Pakistan underestimates India's military determination and democratic resilience, while India underestimates the depth of Pakistan's suspicion that India is out to vivisect it.
Their misjudgments could be catastrophic. General Musharraf openly threatened Wednesday to take the war into "the enemy's territory" if India stepped even an inch across the line of control that divides Kashmir between them.
This is complicated by the fact that these countries, unlike the United States or the Soviet Union, have no experience of the horrors of modern total war, waged against whole cities with the very intention of leveling them. Americans, while their own cities were left untouched during World War II, dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Soviets saw vast parts of their homeland devastated.
What the Indians and Pakistanis do have is a legacy of deep, intimate mistrust. They are neighbors born in a moment of cataclysmic religious violence. They have a blood feud that features deep personal bitterness between the most senior leaders of the two countries. And they have large cities so close to each other that a nuclear missile could hit its target in minutes.
Pakistan's president, General Musharraf, was born here in India's capital. But his Muslim family fled to Pakistan, the newly created Islamic nation hacked from the British Indian empire in 1947 at the same hour as India. His parents later told their children that they had escaped on the last train to leave India safely - and that Hindus and Sikhs had massacred the Muslims on the trains that came after. As a boy, the general was taught to deeply mistrust the Hindus who are predominant in India, his brother Naved said.
India's leaders also mistrust General Musharraf, whom they believe betrayed India by plotting to sneak army regulars into the Kargil region of Indian Kashmir in 1999. His troops took mountain peaks overlooking a crucial Indian supply route even as India's prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, was on a peace mission to Pakistan.
Many believed Pakistan was emboldened to act so recklessly because the army assumed its nuclear arsenal would deter an Indian counterattack. At the time, India heeded American pleas that, to avoid the possibility of an escalating war, it not cross into Pakistan-administered Kashmir. But after Kargil, frustrated Indian officials talked more about the feasibility of a limited war that involved striking into Pakistani territory.
During the Kargil war, which ended with Pakistan's ignominious withdrawal, American intelligence officials concluded that Pakistan had taken steps to prepare its nuclear weapons for possible use, according to an essay by Bruce Riedel, a special assistant to President Bill Clinton, published by the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania.
The current crisis is another incarnation of the struggle for Kashmir that began in 1947. Pakistan has long backed Islamic extremists who have committed atrocities against civilians as they battle Indian rule. Now, inspired in part by President Bush's post-Sept. 11 policy of zero tolerance for terrorists, India has warned that it will take military action unless Pakistan stops sheltering and arming them.
Human rights monitors say Indian forces have committed gross human rights violations in battling the insurgency, which General Musharraf never fails to describe as an indigenous freedom struggle. LAST week, in a speech, he effectively cast the battle as a Hindu-Muslim conflict, an inflammatory step in the nuclear context. "If war is imposed," he vowed, "a Muslim is not afraid and does not retreat, but with the cry of Allah o-Akbar he jumps into the war to fight."
As alarmed American officials watch the crisis unfold, they worry that India and Pakistan could become a model and inspiration for the likes of Iraq and North Korea if they should ever use their nuclear weapons against each other. "Once you use it," one official said, "that almost mystical taboo is removed."
----
Putin Seeks Role as Mediator
High-Profile Kashmir Initiative Tests Diplomatic Skills
By Peter Baker
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, June 2, 2002; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A45848-2002Jun1?language=printer
MOSCOW, June 1 -- The situation in South Asia was volatile and spiraling out of control, so Moscow gathered the leaders of India and Pakistan together in a neutral Central Asian city to broker peace. The gamble worked. The two sides backed down and pulled back their troops from the disputed region of Kashmir.
That was 1966, when Vladimir Putin was just 13 years old and the Soviet Union still a global superpower. But now Putin, the ambitious president of a weakened Russia eager to play a greater role on the international stage, wants to repeat history as he heads to Kazakhstan to meet with Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf.
While President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair dispatch emissaries to the region, Putin will be the first head of state to intervene so directly and personally in the standoff. Although India has rejected a three-way meeting that would include Pakistan, Putin plans to shuttle between Vajpayee and Musharraf in hopes of forging a compromise along the lines of the Tashkent Declaration, which ended hostilities on the subcontinent more than 35 years ago.
"It's very important that President Putin's initiative has international support," Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov recently told reporters. "The task for Russia today, and not only Russia but the entire world community, is to not let the present tension between the two countries grow into an armed conflict and to get the process of settling this difficult problem back to a political path."
This will be Putin's most significant venture as international mediator. Although the former KGB agent has occasionally weighed in on the Middle East conflict, Putin has never put his personal credibility on the line at such a delicate moment, and many analysts see it as a test of his development as a major diplomatic player.
Putin's meetings with Vajpayee and Musharraf will take place on the sidelines of a conference of Asian leaders in Almaty, Kazakhstan, the fourth of five international summits Putin will host or attend over a two-week period. After signing an arms control treaty with Bush in Moscow on May 24, Putin flew to Rome, where he ratified a new partnership with NATO, then jetted back to Moscow to sit down with leaders of the European Union, who promised to upgrade Russia's trade status. After the Almaty summit, Putin will head to St. Petersburg to receive the leaders of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which includes China and several Central Asian countries.
"Putin wants to reestablish Russia's role in world affairs, and [India-Pakistan] is a region that is much closer to Russia than to Britain or the United States," said Roland Timerbayev, a former Soviet arms control negotiator and U.N. ambassador. "Our interest has nothing to do with strategic domineering. We want to have good trade with them."
"It will be a good attempt to calm down the emerging risks of nuclear war, but of course it would be naive to think that Putin could go to Almaty and solve everything," said Vitaly Fedchenko, an analyst with the PIR Center, a Moscow-based research group, and co-author of a book on South Asia.
Even if not successful on its own, Putin's shuttle diplomacy could pave the way for U.S. officials headed to the region, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. U.S. officials in Moscow have been consulting with the Russians as well as with Indian and Pakistani diplomats.
Putin has not said whether he had a specific plan to take to Almaty. He had hoped to get both leaders to sit down together, but Vajpayee has rejected the idea. "Absolutely not," said Sanjiv Kohli, counselor at the Indian Embassy in Moscow. "We said there can be no talk between them until they put an end to terrorism. The responsibility lies with Pakistan to stop terrorism."
Kohli likewise rejected the comparison with the 1966 summit convened by Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, to put an end to the second Indo-Pakistani war over Kashmir. "There's no parallel now," Kohli said. "It's now a question of terrorism and the resolve of the international community. It's just not an Indo-Pakistani issue."
Still, despite Vajpayee's resistance, Russia maintains considerable influence with India, going back to the days of their Cold War friendship. Russia is India's primary arms supplier, selling New Delhi nearly $1 billion in weaponry a year. Kohli would not confirm reports that India has asked Russia to expedite arms deliveries.
Russia has only an arms-length relationship with Pakistan, a U.S. ally during the Cold War, and Putin has had only one brief meeting with Musharraf, during a U.N. meeting in New York in 2000. Yet Pakistan has been far quicker to embrace Putin's mediation.
"We are prepared to meet the Indians in any format, trilateral or bilateral, and at any level," said Mohammad Akhtar Tufail, the deputy head of mission at the Pakistani Embassy in Moscow. "The best case is a trilateral meeting. Historically, the Indians have been against the concept of mediation. They want the dispute to be dealt with at a bilateral level. If they accept now the premise of a third party in the room, it would acknowledge that mediation is necessary and in fact is taking place."
----
On Kashmir Line, Pakistanis Wait, With Few Illusions
New York Times
June 2, 2002
By DEXTER FILKINS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/02/international/asia/02KASH.html
CHAKOTHI, Pakistan, June 1 - On this side of Kashmir's disputed frontier, the soldiers wait and watch, their guns ready for the assault that they expect could come at any moment.
As Indian soldiers prepare for a possible strike across the border just a few hundred yards away, their Pakistani foes huddle behind their sandbags, scanning the Himalayan passes for the first signs of attack. While the Indians have talked offense, the Pakistanis, harboring few illusions about their chances against their more powerful enemy, plotted defense. Let them come, Pakistani soldiers stationed along the Line of Control said here today, let the Indians come.
"Being Muslims and Pakistanis, naturally we are peace-loving people," Brig. Iftikhar Ali Khan said, eyeing an Indian bunker a mile away. "But I've told my men they will not give up one inch of territory. Not one inch. I've told them, they will be buried here."
Brigadier Khan's remarks reflected the mood of defiance and resignation that has settled into the hamlets and bunkers near the Line of Control, the 450-mile boundary that cuts through the disputed territory of Kashmir. It delineates the current confrontation between the two nuclear-armed nations.
The defiance reflected a belief among Pakistanis that it would be the Indians who would start a war, but that once one started, the Pakistanis, however outgunned and outnumbered they might be, would not suffer the humiliations visited upon them in wars past.
The resignation was that a war was all but inevitable.
The prospect of an Indian attack on Pakistan is greatly troubling to world leaders and military experts watching the subcontinent. The fear is that India's overwhelming superiority in conventional forces could, if deployed decisively, prompt a desperate Pakistani leadership to use their nuclear weapons to halt an attack.
Indian leaders have been threatening a military strike against Pakistan since December, after a terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament. The Indians have deployed some 700,000 troops along the border, saying they could use them to destroy training camps for Muslim militants fighting in Indian Kashmir, unless Pakistan dismantles them first. The standoff has worsened in recent weeks as, according to American officials, the infiltration of militants from Pakistan into Indian Kashmir has continued.
In this heavily fortified village 60 miles northeast of Islamabad, signs abounded that the confrontation with India had already begun working its deadly business. Artillery barrages, sometimes lasting for hours, have smashed houses in the town and killed an undetermined number of civilians. On May 18 alone, the Pakistanis said, 850 shells landed in an area near Chakothi. They were not saying how many of their own shells they sent to the other side.
At Chakothi's high school for boys, the Indian artillery fire used to come so often that teachers would halt their lessons during the barrages and resume once the shelling stopped. But on that day, May 18, the shells landed inside the school. Today, it is a broken building of tattered walls and shattered glass. Two teachers are dead and four students in the hospital.
"Everything was out of control - children were running here and there," said Mansoor Fareed, a science teacher.
With relations so strained, some of the unusual rituals that allowed the two sides to minimize the violence appear to have warped or collapsed. A telephone link between the two sides, installed in more peaceful times to help contain local skirmishes, has fallen into disuse. When the Pakistanis recently escorted a group of Western journalists to a front-line post, a red flag suddenly went up on the Indian side, a warning to take the group away before the Indians opened fire.
One ritual, a tried and tested one, has been added recently. As the sun set behind the mountains this evening, the lights went out throughout Pakistani Kashmir, a precaution against air raids.
Indeed, throughout the region today, the confrontation between India and Pakistan continued on a rocky course. France and the Philippines urged their nationals to leave the region. The Indian government said one of its diplomats had been kidnapped in Islamabad; the Pakistanis retorted that one of its diplomats in New Delhi had been detained and tortured. The Associated Press reported that the United Nations had ordered its foreign staff in India and Pakistan to send their families out of the country.
In the Anantnag district of Indian Kashmir, 17 people were wounded in a grenade attack on a group of Indian police officers. In Nihalpora, 22 miles north of Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian Kashmir, a suspected Muslim guerrilla was killed in a gun battle with security forces, and a teenage boy was killed in the crossfire.
The skirmishes between militants and Indian security officials were particularly troubling. Many people in the region fear that one more bold strike against an Indian target, of the type on May 14 that left 34 people dead, will finally push the Indian Army into Pakistan.
The one bright spot today came during a television interview with Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who tried to play down the possibility that his country might use nuclear weapons. In previous statements, the general has refused to rule out their use.
"I don't think either side is that irresponsible to go to that limit," General Musharraf told CNN.
For all the foreboding that hung about the Line of Control today, at least one of its unusual conventions remained the same. The guided tour given by the Pakistan Army to foreign journalists offered its usual combination of backslapping and propaganda, with few opportunities to delve beneath the surface.
For more than an hour, Brigadier Khan stood before a series of charts and employed horrific phrases to describe the behavior of Indian troops in Indian Kashmir. None of the behavior, he insisted, was attributable to either Pakistani forces or the militants.
"Unprovoked and indiscriminate shelling," he said of the Indian behavior.
"Arrest, torture, rape and pillage," he added. "Torture and gang rape as an instrument of state terror."
When he turned to the subject of the current confrontation, Brigadier Khan had his own stock phrases for that, too. One of his favorites described the final battle between the Indians and the Pakistanis. "Come the hour of sacrifice," he said, "death will be as dear to us as life is to the enemy."
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India Seeks to Ease Nuclear Fears
June 2, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-India-Pakistan.html
NEW DELHI, India (AP) -- India's defense minister said Sunday that his nation won't be ``impulsive'' and sought to ease fears of a nuclear war, as the Indian and Pakistani leaders headed to a summit where they are unlikely to talk peace -- or even talk at all.
As part of a diplomatic offensive, Pakistan announced that it will send envoys to the United States and other countries to relay Islamabad's position on the crisis. The emissaries will carry letters from Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf stating that Pakistan is ready to negotiate but that India does not want to talk.
``Pakistan will not start a war. We support solving the conflict through peaceful means,'' Musharraf told reporters in the Tajikistan during a stopover on his way to Almaty, Kazakhstan for the three-day summit, which begins Monday.
Musharraf has said for months he wants dialogue with Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee over Kashmir, but Vajpayee says there first must be a stop to terrorist attacks by Islamic militants crossing into the Indian part of the province.
Musharraf disputes India's contention that Pakistan actively helps the militants, saying his military government provides only moral and diplomatic support for Kashmiri separatists who want either independence or a merger with Islamic Pakistan.
``I'm ready to meet anywhere and at any level. I would like the talks to be one-on-one, but if (Vajpayee) he doesn't want to, I will not insist,'' Musharraf said.
He was optimistic about Russian President Vladimir Putin's offer to mediate talks this week between the leaders on the sidelines of the Kazakhstan summit in a bid to bring the nuclear-armed nations back from the brink of war.
``I think that President Putin can persuade India to join a dialogue,'' Musharraf said.
Vajpayee said Sunday no talks were planned and he would not meet with Musharraf until the cross-border terrorism stops. Musharraf and Vajpayee have indicated they would meet separately with Putin and officials from other worried nations.
Fears of war have led the United Nations to order its staffers in India and Pakistan to send their families home, and the United States and other countries have advised their citizens to leave amid fears over the standoff, marked by daily shelling and gunfire across the line that divides Kashmir.
This week, the United States is separately dispatching Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage to the region to try to ease tensions.
Vajpayee arrived Sunday in Almaty, where he was greeted by an honor guard at the airport. He did not speak to reporters.
Earlier Sunday, Indian Defense Minister George Fernandes, in a tearful speech at a security conference in Singapore, assured the world his country ``will not be impulsive'' despite what he called heavy public pressure for military action against Pakistan, which India accuses of responsibility for attacks on its soil.
``We don't see the makings of any kind of an escalation that takes one to the extreme,'' said Fernandes, who reiterated India's pledge to avoid first use of nuclear weapons. ``There is no way India will ever use a nuclear weapon other than as a deterrent,'' he said.
Pakistan, which has a smaller military, has not ruled out a first strike, but Musharraf, in an interview with CNN on Saturday, said that no ``sane individual'' would let tensions between the two nations escalate into a nuclear war.
Most of the cross-border attacks are in Kashmir, a divided Himalayan province claimed in its entirety by both India and Pakistan. The disputed region has been the flashpoint of two of the three wars India and Pakistan have fought since independence 55 years ago.
More than 60,000 civilians, Indian troops and guerrillas have been killed in the Indian-ruled portion of Kashmir -- Hindu-majority India's only mostly Muslim state -- since Islamic separatists launched an insurgency in 1989.
Under pressure from the United States and India, Musharraf pledged in January to crack down on Islamic militants and said Pakistan must not be used as a base for terrorism attacks anywhere. But India says cross-border attacks have continued.
Meanwhile, hundreds of people have fled their homes in border areas, with some on the Pakistani side loading up their household goods Sunday on wagons and trolleys.
``We are living in a very dangerous situation,'' said 65-year-old shoemaker Mohammed Sadiq. ``The Indians shelled this area overnight, cutting off electricity and communication. They fired for about an hour. It's very difficult for us to stay here.''
Since a December raid on India's parliament, which killed 14 people, India and Pakistan have amassed a million troops along their border and the Line of Control that divides Kashmir.
The forces have traded artillery and small arms fire almost daily, killing dozens of people and forcing thousands in Kashmir to flee their homes.
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Nuclear conflict unthinkable, Musharraf says
June 2, 2002
By Paul Alexander
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020602-29360312.htm
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, stopping short of matching India's pledge not to use nuclear weapons first, said yesterday that "any sane individual" would not allow a nuclear war.
Still, the growing fear of a wider conflict between India and Pakistan prompted the United Nations on Saturday to tell its staffers in the region to send their families home.
France, Israel and South Korea joined the list of nations advising their citizens to leave the region, as the South Asian neighbors continued shelling each other along their border, killing at least eight persons.
In an interview with CNN, Gen. Musharraf said nuclear conflict was unthinkable. He also restated his willingness to negotiate with India.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has offered to mediate during the regional summit in Kazakhstan next week, which is to be attended by Gen. Musharraf and Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee.
India's defense minister said yesterday there was no sign of a reconciliation with Pakistan. India has demanded that Pakistan first stop cross-border incursions by Islamic militants, whom New Delhi blames for two major terrorist attacks during the past six months.
Gen. Musharraf told CNN that Pakistan has called for a no-war pact with India and the denuclearization of South Asia. He was asked about the possibility the situation would escalate into nuclear war.
"I don't think either side is that irresponsible to go to that limit," Gen. Musharraf said. "I would even go to the extent of saying one shouldn't even be discussing these things, because any sane individual cannot even think of going into this unconventional war, whatever the pressures."
Concern about Pakistan using nuclear weapons stems from the fact that Pakistan has a much smaller military than India does. India has a policy of not using nuclear weapons first in a conflict.
But concern mounted about a broader military conflict, as neither country offered a diplomatic solution to end their long dispute over the Himalayan region of Kashmir, the catalyst for two of their three wars. Both countries claim the region.
Asked if military officials of the two countries might meet, Indian Defense Minister George Fernandes said, "I don't think there is any such possibility." He made the comment while attending a regional security conference in Singapore.
The recent terror attacks ratcheted up tensions over Kashmir and have led to the deployment of more than 1 million troops along the border.
Cross-border shelling Saturday killed three civilians in India and two in Pakistan, according to official reports.
A grenade attack by those suspected to be Islamic militants also killed a 14-year-old boy and injured 16 persons, including two soldiers, in Srinagar, the summer capital of India's Jammu-Kashmir state, while a gunfight between Indian paramilitary forces and guerrillas in Nihalpora, 22 miles to the north, killed one militant and a teen-age boy caught in the cross fire, Indian officials said.
The United Nations said yesterday that its Pakistan and India staffs have been ordered to send their families home in the next few days. The order covers 260 dependents in India and several hundred more in Pakistan.
The United States and Britain are among the countries that have advised their citizens to leave India.
India accuses Pakistan of supporting Islamic militant groups that are waging a 12-year insurgency in Indian Kashmir.
Pakistan says it offers only moral and diplomatic support for the insurgents and does not back terrorist attacks.
-------- japan
Japan Eyes Damage Control Over Nuclear Remarks
June 2, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-arms-japan-nuclear.html
TOKYO - Japan, the only country ever to suffer an atomic bomb attack, will ensure worried Asian neighbors that the world's second largest economy will never arm itself with nuclear weapons, Japanese officials said Sunday.
Japan was scrambling to contain the fallout from remarks by a senior official who suggested the country could abandon a decades-old ban on nuclear weapons.
``The Japanese government will do whatever it take to explain to the countries of the world, especially Asian neighbors, that Japan will never possess nuclear weapons,'' a Japanese government official told Reuters.
On Saturday, Japanese media quoted a unidentified senior government official as saying Tokyo could review its self-imposed ``three principles'' which ban the possession, production and import of nuclear arms.
``The principles are just like the constitution. But in the face of calls to amend the constitution, the amendment of the principles is also likely,'' Kyodo news agency quoted the official as saying.
The Asahi Shimbun newspaper on Sunday quoted the official as saying he did not mean to say Tokyo could go nuclear.
``That was not what I really meant to say... It is not true that the current government is considering changing or reviewing the three non-nuclear principles,'' the official said.
Mindful of a possible backlash from Asian neighbors such as China and South Korea, Koizumi moved quickly to deny that his government would break with the nuclear taboo.
On Sunday, the official came under fire from both the ruling and opposition parties for his ``careless'' remarks.
``It was a careless statement we must not forgive,'' Nobutaka Machimura, Deputy Secretary General of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), said.
``No one in the LDP believes Japan should possess nuclear weapons.''
Opposition legislators said they would grill the official as well as Koizumi in parliament this week.
``Japan should argue for the abolition of nuclear weapons at the time when India and Pakistan, both of which have nuclear weapons, are in a dangerous situation,'' said Naoto Kan, Secretary General of the main opposition Democratic Party.
``But to the contrary, he mentioned the possibility of possessing nuclear weapons. I can't believe it.''
ENDLESS GAME
The controversial statement was the latest in a series of hawkish remarks by officials and politicians seeking to challenge Japan's postwar pacifism.
Ichiro Ozawa, leader of Japan's second-biggest opposition party, drew a sharp response from China in April when he said Japan could easily make nuclear weapons and surpass China's military might.
On Friday, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuo Fukuda expressed what he called his personal view that it was not be against the law for Japan to possess nuclear weapons.
``Japan does not have offensive arms because it restricts military activity to self-defense,'' he said.
He went on to say that Japan could have intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) even under its security policy that is specified as being exclusively for self-defense.
Koizumi, known for his nationalistic tinge, has repeatedly vowed to press for a more active role for Japan's military in international peace-keeping with a view to revising the 1947 pacifist constitution.
Calls have mounted from both ruling and opposition party politicians for changes to Japan's U.S.-drafted constitution, which renounces war as a sovereign right, in a clear break with the traditional taboo on debating revisions.
Tokyo's ties with Asian neighbors have been strained by Koizumi's visits to a shrine honoring Japan's war dead -- the most recent in April -- and by Japan's approval of a history textbook that critics say whitewashes its wartime aggression.
Asian neighbors, particularly China and South Korea which suffered most from Tokyo's wartime aggression, regard visits to the Shinto shrine by Japanese officials as signs of a revival of militarism.
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Koizumi Cabinet's animosity toward non-nuclear principles
Akahata editorial,
June 2, 2002
http://www.japan-press.co.jp/2287/anim.html
Chief Cabinet Secretary Fekuda Yasuo has stated, "Logically speaking, it would be constitutional for Japan to possess nuclear weapons," adding that the "Three Non-nuclear Principles may be altered if public opinion becomes in favor of it."
Prime Minister Koizumi Jun'ichiro denied that he "will consider reviewing the Three Non-nuclear Principles at present" but said, "It's a matter to be decided by the people."
Not only Hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors) but a wide range of the people are angered by Fukuda's remarks that blatantly expressed hostile views to the Three Non-nuclear Principles.
Against the current
The Three Non-nuclear Principles were established as a national will of Japan and are embraced by all people regardless of their political views.
The atomic bomb took the lives of hundreds of thousands of people instantly. Those who were fortunate to survive are still suffering from atomic diseases; they cannot be free from fearing that their children and grandchildren might be affected. This is why the Japanese people, who know how atrocious nuclear weapons are from their experience in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, have been calling for nuclear weapons to be abolished in order to prevent the same tragedy from occurring.
It is natural that Japan does not possess, manufacture, or allow nuclear weapons into the country. This makes the Three Non-nuclear Principles Japan's national policy, which have been unaffected by any government policy.
This is also clear from the fact that many municipalities have declared themselves nuclear-free, calling for nuclear weapons to be abolished.
This explains why past governments have been obliged to stand for the Three Non-nuclear Principles.
The Japanese people's earnest call for the abolition of nuclear weapons and a ban on their use has grown to be a call of the world influencing many governments throughout the world. This call forms such a strong current that no one can stop it. At the 2000 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, nuclear weapons possessing countries, including the United States, had to accept the unequivocal commitment to nuclear weapons abolition.
These remarks that approve of Japan's possession of nuclear weapons as constitutional and suggest that the Three Non-nuclear Principles might be altered trample on the national will calling for nuclear weapons to be eliminated and go against the international current.
The point is that these remarks were made not just as a slip of the tongue or as a sudden idea.
The Fukuda statement is a manifestation of the true colors of the Koizumi Cabinet as made clear from Prime Minister Koizumi Jun'ichiro's comment that Fukuda's remarks were "not even worthy of serious discussion."
The same is true of the hostile remarks to the Constitution which the prime minister has repeated in conjunction with his plan to enact contingency legislation to allow the Self-Defense Forces to take part in U.S. wars and mobilize the people for war.
The Koizumi Cabinet's hostile attitude toward the non-nuclear national policy can only be explained in the context of the U.S. plans for using nuclear weapons against North Korea and Iraq which it labels as an "axis of evil." At a time when most governments in the world are critical of U.S. plans, Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi praises the "axis of evil" threat, expressing support for the plan.
The hostile remarks against the Three Non-nuclear Principles are the clearest expression of the Koizumi Cabinet's dangerous intention to follow the U.S. Bush administration's nuclear weapons adherence policy and even take part in U.S. wars.
Obstacle to friendly relations
The Koizumi Cabinet's reckless animosity toward the Japanese people's desire for a nuclear-free, peaceful, and democratic Japan is no longer controllable.
It is the way to undermine Japan's relations with the rest of Asia and the world and put a major obstacle to the Japanese people's efforts to establish peaceful and friendly relations with other peoples in the 21st century.
No one can deny that the Koizumi Cabinet is not qualified to represent the only atomic-bombed country and that it does much harm and no good in this regard.
-------- terrorism
Nuclear Weapons Concern Wolfowitz
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
June 2, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Asian-Security-Nuclear.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48225-2002Jun2.html
SINGAPORE (AP) -- Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said Sunday that the prospect of terrorists developing nuclear capabilities is ``more frightening and dangerous'' than nuclear proliferation among nation states. At a regional security conference in Singapore, Wolfowitz said the concern that ``nuclear weapons or scientists with nuclear expertise (could) fall into the hands of rogue regimes or terrorist groups is a very, very real one.''
``The events of Sept. 11 if anything ought to intensify our concerns about it,'' he said.
Robert Einhorn, a former assistant secretary of state and a nuclear proliferation expert, said Southeast Asian ports in particular need to beef up security to help stem nuclear proliferation.
``Governments should put in place strong shipment and transshipment controls to reduce the likelihood that their countries will become conduits for the ingredients of weapons of mass destruction programs worldwide,'' Einhorn said.
The discussion on nuclear proliferation was one of a several seminars at a two-day conference, which was organized by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies and attended by more than 150 defense officials.
Maj. Gen. Kim Kook-hun, head of the South Korean defense ministry's arms disarmament bureau, said his government is deeply concerned about North Korea's acquisition of weapons of mass destruction.
President Bush has singled out North Korea as part of an ``axis of evil'' nations that sponsor terrorism or seek to develop weapons of mass destruction.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
U.S. Will Resume Production of Nuclear Warhead Triggers
June 2, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/02/politics/02NUKE.html
WASHINGTON, June 1 - The federal government has announced plans to resume production of plutonium "pits," which are used to trigger nuclear warheads, the Energy Department has announced.
The department halted production of the softball-size plutonium triggers in 1989.
"We need to have the capacity to manufacture certified pits to maintain the safety, security and reliability of the U.S. nuclear deterrent into the future," Secretary Spencer Abraham of the Energy Department said on Friday.
Design work is beginning for the manufacturing plant, which is expected to cost $2.2 billion to $4.4 billion, depending on its production capacity, said a statement from the National Nuclear Security Administration, which is part of the Energy Department.
The plant, to be built at a weapons facility, would start production by 2020. The announcement from the Energy Department said the site-selection process would begin in September.
The department relies on refurbishing triggers, as they are needed, from disassembled warheads. That limited production, done at the Pantex facility near Amarillo, Tex., cannot meet long-term needs, officials said.
A recent study by the Bush administration urged construction of a pit-production plant, and some members of both the House and Senate have expressed concern that the lack of a such plant could jeopardize future readiness of the country's nuclear weapons stockpile.
Plutonium triggers were last produced at the Rocky Flats facility in Colorado. That plant is being cleaned of radioactive waste.
-------- us politics
The Bush 9/11 Scandal for Dummies
By Bernard Weiner
truth out
Sunday, 2 June, 2002
http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/06.03D.bw.911.dum.p.htm
Don't know about you, but all this who-knew-what-when pre-9/11 stuff is mighty confusing. So once again, I head to that all-purpose reference series for some comprehensible answers.
Q. I've heard all these reports about the government knowing weeks and months in advance of 9/11 that airliners were going to be hijacked and flown into buildings, and yet the Bush Administration apparently did nothing and denied they did anything wrong. They claimed the fault lay in the intelligence agencies "not connecting the dots," or that it was the "FBI culture" that failed. Can you explain?
A. Most of the "it's-the-fault-of-the-system" spin is designed to deflect attention from the real situation. Bush and his spokesmen may well be correct in saying they had no idea as to the specifics -- they may not have known the exact details of the attacks -- but it is more and more apparent that they knew a great deal more than they're letting on, including the possible targets.
Q. You're not just going leave that hanging out there, are you? Just bash Bush with no evidence to back it up?
A. There's no need to bash anybody. There is more than enough documentation to establish that the Bush Administration was fully aware that a major attack was coming from Al-Qaeda, by air, aimed at symbolic structures on the U.S. mainland, and that among mentioned targets were the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, the White House, the Congress, Statue of Liberty. (According to Richard Clarke, the White House's National Coordinator for Anti-Terrorism, the intelligence community was convinced ten weeks before 9/11 that an Al-Qaeda attack on U.S. soil was imminent.)
Q. If they knew in advance that the, or at least an, attack was coming, why did the Bush Administration do nothing to prepare the country in advance: get photos of suspected terrorists out to airlines, have fighter jets put on emergency-standby status or even in the air as deterents, get word out to the border police to stop these "watch-list" terrorists, put surface-to-air missiles around the White House and Pentagon, etc.?
A. The explanation preferred by the government is to admit, eight months late, to absolute and horrendous incompetence, up and down the line (although Bush&Co., surprise!, prefer to focus the blame lower down, letting the FBI be the fall guy). But let's try an alternate explanation. Think about it for a moment. If their key goal was to mobilize the country behind the Bush Administration, get their political/business agenda through, have a reason to move unliterally around the globe, and defang the Democrats and other critics at home -- what better way to do all that than to have Bush be the take-charge leader after a diabolic "sneak attack"?
Q. You're suggesting the ultimate cynical strategem, purely for political ends. I can't believe that Bush and his cronies are that venal. Isn't it possible that the whole intelligence apparatus just blew it?
A. Possible, but not bloody likely. There certainly is enough blame to spread around, but the evidence indicates that Bush and his closest aides knew that bin Laden was planning a direct attack on the U.S. mainland -- using airplanes headed for those icon targets -- and, in order to get the country to move in the direction he wanted, he kept silent.
Q. But if that's true, what you've described is utterly indefensible, putting policy ahead of American citizens' lives.
A. Now are you beginning to understand why Bush&Co. are fighting so tenaciously against a blue-ribbon commission of inquiry, and why Bush and Cheney went to Congressional leaders and asked them not to investigate the pre-9/11 period? Now do you understand why they are trying so desperately to keep everything secret, tightly locked up in the White House, only letting drips and drabs get out when there is no other way to avoid Congressional subpoenas or court-ordered disclosures? They know that if one thread of the coverup unravels, more of their darkest secrets will follow.
Q. You're sounding like a conspiracy nut.
A. For years, we've avoided thinking in those terms, because so many so-called "conspiracies" exist only in someone's fevered imagination. Plus, to think along these lines in this case is depressing, suggesting that American democracy can be so easily manipulated and distorted by a cabal of the greedy and power-hungry. But I'm afraid that's where the evidence leads.
Q. You mean there's proof of Bush complicity in 9/11 locked up in the White House?
A. We wouldn't use the term complicity. So far as we now know, Bush did not order or otherwise arrange for Al-Qaeda's attacks on September 11. But once the attacks happened, the plans Bush&Co. already had drawn up for taking advantage of the tragedy were implemented. A frightened, terrorist-obsessed nation did not realize they'd been the object of another assault, this time by those occupying the White House.
Q. This is startling, and revolting. But I refuse to jump on the conspiracy bandwagon until I see some proof. Bush says he first heard about a "lone" pre-9/11 warning on August 6, and that it was vague and dealt with possible attacks outside the U.S. Why can't we believe him? After all, the FBI and CIA are notorious for their incompetence and bungling. You got a better version that makes sense, I'd love to hear it.
A. Bush and his spinners want us to concentrate on who knew what detail when; it's the old magician's trick of getting you to look elsewhere while he's doing his prestidigitation. We're not talking about a little clue here and another little clue there, or an FBI memo that wasn't shared. We're talking about long-range planning and analysis of what strategic-intelligence agencies and high-level commissions and geopolitical thinkers around the globe -- including those inside the U.S. -- saw for years before 9/11 as likely scenarios in an age of terrorist attacks.
The conclusion about Al-Qaeda, stated again and again for years by government analysts, was basically: "They're coming, by air. Get prepared. They're well-organized, determined, and technically adept. And they want to hit big targets, well-known symbols of America." (There was a 1999 U.S. government study, for example, that pointed out that Al-Qaeda suicide-bombers wanted to crash aircraft into a number of significant Washington targets; during the 1995 trial of Ramsi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, he revealed plans to divebomb a plane into CIA headquarters, and earlier he had told FBI agents that the list was expanded to include the Pentagon and other D.C. targets.)
Elements in the FBI, all over the country, who suspected what was coming, were clamoring, begging, for more agents to be used for counter-terrorism investigations, but were turned down by Attorney General Ashcroft; Ashcroft also gave counter-terrorism short shrift in his budget plans, not even placing anti-terrorism on his priority list; John O'Neill, the FBI's NYC anti-terrorism director, resigned, asserting that his attempts at full-scale investigating were being thwarted by higher-ups; someone in the FBI, perhaps on orders of someone higher-up, made sure that the local FBI investigation in Minneapolis of Zacaria Moussauoi was compromised. All this while Ashcroft was shredding the Constitution in his martial law-like desire to amass information, and continues even now to further expand his police-state powers.
(Note: An FBI agent has filed official complaints over the bureau's interfering with anti-terrorism investigations; his lawyers include David Schippers, who worked for the GOP side in the Clinton impeachment effort; Schippers says the agent knew in May 2001 that "an attack on lower Manhattan was imminent." A former FBI official said: "I don't buy the idea that we didn't know what was coming...Within 24 hours [of the attack], the Bureau had about 20 people identified, and photos were sent out to the news media. Obviously this information was available in the files and someone was sitting on it.")
One can accept the usual incompetency in intelligence collection and analysis from, say, an anti-terrorist desk officer at the FBI, but not from the highest levels of national defense and intelligence in and around the President, where his spokesman, in a bald-faced lie, told the world that the 9/11 attacks came with "no warning." More recently, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, in a quavering voice, tried to characterize the many warnings as mere "chatter," and concerned attacks "outside the U.S." But the many warning-reports focused on terrorist attacks both inside and outside the United States; the August 6th briefing dealt with planned attacks IN the United States.
Not only were there clear warnings from allies abroad, but the U.S., through its ECHELON and other electronic-intercept programs, may well have broken bin Laden's encryption code; for example, the U.S. knew that he told his mother on September 9: "In two days you're going to hear big news, and you're not going to hear from me for a while".
And, the word of an impending attack was getting out: put options (hedges that a stock's price is going to fall) in enormous quantities were being bought on United Airlines and American Airlines stock, the two carriers of the hijackers, as early as September 7; San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown was warned by "an airport security man" on September 10 to rethink his flight to New York for the next day; Newsweek reported that on September 10, "a group of top Pentagon officials suddenly canceled travel plans for the next morning, apparently because of security concerns"; many members of a Bronx mosque were also warned to stay out of lower Manhattan on September 11, etc. etc.
Q. You're giving me intriguing bits and pieces. Can't you tie it all together and make it make sense?
A. OK, you asked for it, so we're going to provide you with a kind of shorthand scenario of what may well have gone down, a kind of narrative that attempts to tie a lot of disparate-seeming events together. There is voluminous, multi-sourced evidence that establishes this scenario. It's scary, so prepare yourself.
We believe that the HardRight began serious planning for a 2000 electoral victory -- and then implementation of a HardRight agenda, and the destruction of a liberal opposition -- a year or two after Clinton's 1996 victory. (The impeachment of Clinton was a key ingredient to sully Democrat opposition.) The GOP HardRight leaders decided early to select George W. Bush, a none-too-bright and easily malleable young man with the right name and pedigree. They ran into a speed-bump when John McCain began to take off in the public imagination, and so with dirty tricks they wrecked his campaign in the South and elsewhere, and continued on their merry course.
For a while, they fully expected an easy victory over dull Al Gore, tainted goods for a lot of conservative Republicans and others because of his association with Clinton, but, given the obvious limitations of their candidate, they weren't going to take a lot of chances. In Florida, for example, where it looked as if the race might be tight, they early on arranged things -- through Bush's governor-brother Jeb, and the Bush campaign's Katherine Harriss, Florida's Secretary of State -- so that George W. couldn't lose. An example: removing tens of thousands of eligible African-American voters from the rolls.
As it turned out, Gore won the popular vote by more than a half-million votes nationwide, and, we now know, would have won Florida's popular vote had all the ballots been counted, but the U.S. Supreme Court HardRight majority, despite its longtime support for states' rights, in a bit of ethical contortionism did a philosophical reverse in midair and ordered the Florida vote-counting to stop and declared Bush the winner, installing a President rather than letting the people decide for themselves.
Q. That's ancient history. I'm interested in 9/11, not tearing at an old scab.
A. OK. We're merely trying to indicate that the HardRight's campaign to take power was not an overnight, post-9/11 whim but worked out long in advance. After so many near-chances to take total control, they would do anything to guarantee a presidential victory this time around -- which would give them full control over the reins of power: Legislature (where HardRightists dominated the House and Senate), the Courts (where the HardRight dominated the U.S. Supreme Court and many appelate courts), and the Executive branch, not to mention the HardRight media control they exerted in so many areas.
They had followed the news, they knew that the Al-Qaeda terrorist network was engaged in a maniacal jihad against America, and was quite capable -- as they had demonstrated on many occasions, from Saudia Arabia to East Africa to the first attempt on the World Trade Center -- of carrying out their threats. They also knew, from innumerable intelligence reports from telecommunications intercepts, and from various commissions, CIA and foreign agents that Al-Qaeda liked to blow up symbolic icon structures of countries targeted, and that Al-Qaeda, and its affiliates, had an affinity for trying to use airplanes as psychologic or actual weapons. (The French had foiled one such attack in 1994, where a hijacked commercial airliner would be flown into the Eiffel Tower.)
By early 2001 and into the Summer, warnings were pouring in to U.S. intelligence and military agencies from Jordan, Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia, Israel, and other Middle East and South Asian intelligence sources, along with Russia and Britain and the Phillipines, saying that a major attack on the U.S. mainland was in the works, involving the use of airplanes as weapons of mass destruction.
Indeed, in June and July of 2001, the alerts started to be explicit that air attacks were about to go down in the U.S.; even local FBI offices in Phoenix and Minneapolis began passing warnings up the line about Middle Eastern men acting suspiciously at flight schools. In July, Ashcroft stopped flying on commercial airliners and traveled only by private plane, and Bush, after but a few months in office, announced he was going to ground, spending the month of August on his ranch in Crawford, Texas. Cheney disappeared from view, and our guess is that he was coordinating the overall, post-attack strategy.
Under this scenario, in mid-Summer 2001, Bush&Co. decided this was it. Bin Laden unknowingly was going to deliver them the gift of terrorism, and they were going to run with it as far and as fast and as hard as they could. The various post-attack scenarios had been worked out, the so-called USA Patriot Act -- which contained various police-state eviscerations of the Constitution -- was polished and prepared for a rush-job (with no hearings) through a post-attack Congress, the war plans against the Taliban in Afghanistan were readied and rolled out, the air-base countries around Afghanistan were brought onboard, and so on. All during the Summer of 2001.
Q. I don't understand how war against Afghanistan could have been anticipated so early.
A. Follow the money. Various oil/gas/energy companies had wanted a Central Asian pipeline to run through Afghanistan (costing much less to build, but also so it wouldn't have to go through Russia or Iran); that project was put on hold during the chaos in Afghanistan, but when the Taliban took over and brought stability to that country, the U.S. began negotiating with the Taliban about the pipeline deal. Even after sending them, via the United Nations, $43million dollars for "poppy-seed eradication," and inviting them to talks in Texas, the Taliban began to balk. At a later meeting, the U.S. negotiator threatened them with an attack unless they handed over bin Laden and reportedly told them, in reference to the pipeline, that they could accept "a carpet of gold" or be buried in "a carpet of bombs." (The later U.S. government spin was that the bin Laden issue and the pipeline issues were separate, and that the U.S. threats didn't mix the two and there were misunderstandings of what was said.) Shortly thereafter, bin Laden, hiding out in Afghanistan, initiated the September 11th attacks, and the U.S. bombing of that country began. Oh, by the way, in case you haven't noticed, under the new U.S.-friendly government in Kabul, the pipeline project is back on track. Oh, by the way, the pipeline will terminate reasonably close to the power plant in India built by Enron that has been lying dormant for years, waiting for cheap energy supplies.
Q. You're saying that U.S. war and foreign policy have been dictated by greed?
A. Among other pleasant motivations, such as hunger for domination and control, domestically and around the globe -- which always ties in with greed. That's why Bush&Co. play such political and military hardball. That's why the arrogant, take-no-prisoners, in-your-face attitude, to bully and frighten potential opponents into silence and acquiescence, even questioning their patriotism if they demur or raise embarrassing issues.
Q. But this is a democracy, people are still speaking their minds, right?
A. Certainly, there are areas of America's democratic republic that have not yet been shut down. But where there should be a vibrant opposition party, raising all sorts of questions about Bush Administration policy and plans, America receives mostly silence and timidity. However, as more and more of the ugly truth begins to emerge -- and Enron, Anthrax, and pre-9/11 knowledge are just the tips of the iceberg -- the Democrats (and moderate Republicans) are beginning to feel a bit more emboldened. But just a bit, preferring to run for cover whenever Bush&Co. accuse them of being unpatriotic when they raise pointed questions.
Q. You're so critical and negative about the Bush Administration. Can't you say anything good about what they're doing?
A. Yes. They have moved terrorism -- the new face of warfare in our time -- front and center into the world's consciousness, and have mobilized a global coalition against it. They may be making mistakes, which could lead to horrifying consequences, or acting at times out of impure motives, but at least the issue is out there and being debated and acted upon.
Now, having said that, we must point out that the institutions in this country -- the Constitution, the courts, the legislative bodies, civil liberties, the Bill of Rights, the press, etc. -- are in as much danger as they've ever been in. And the U.S.'s bullying attitude abroad may well lead to disastrous consequences for America down the line.
Q. So, what's to be done?
A. The most important thing at the moment -- even, or especially when, the inevitable next terrorist attack occurs -- is to break the illusion of Bush&Co. invulnerability. The best way to do that, aside from ratcheting up the Enron and Anthrax and 9/11 investigations (and it may turn out that those scandals are deeply intertwined), is to defeat GOP candidates in the upcoming November elections. If the Democrats hang on to the Senate and can take over the House, the dream of unchallengable HardRight power will be broken. Bush&Co. will become even more desperate, overt, nasty, and in their arrogance and bullying ways, will make more mistakes and alienate more citizens. The edifice will begin to crumble even more; there will be more and deeper Congressional and media investigations; resignations and/or impeachments (of both Bush & Cheney, and Ashcroft) may well follow.
Q. You're asking me to support ALL Democrats, even though in a particular race a moderate GOP conservative would be better?
A. Yes. In some cases, you may have to hold your nose and send money to, canvass for, and vote for a Democrat; we can get rid of the bad ones later. The objective right now -- for the future of the Constitution, and for the lives of our soldiers in uniform and civilians around the globe -- has to be to break the momentum of the HardRight by taking the House and keeping the Senate from returning to GOP control. Doing so would be even more important than what happened when that courageous senator from Vermont, Jim Jeffords, appalled by the HardRight nastiness and greed-agenda of the Bush folks, resigned from the GOP and turned the Senate agenda over to the Democrats.
Q. And you think if the GOP gets its nose bloodied in the November election, that will convince Bush to resign or lead to his impeachment? I don't get that.
A. Churchill once told the Brits during World War II that "this is not the beginning of the end, but it is the beginning of the beginning of the end." There is a lot of hard work and organizing and educating to be done, but the recent exposure of Bush coverup-lies about pre-9/11 knowledge is "the beginning of the beginning of the end." With a GOP defeat in November, Democrats will be emboldened to speak up more, investigate deeper, and those inquiries will unlock even more awful secrets of this greed-and-powerhungry administration. And that will be the beginning of the end -- and the beginning of the beginning of a new era of more humane values for America and the rest of the world.
Bernard Weiner, Ph.D., has taught American government & international relations at Western Washington University and San Diego State University; he was with the San Francisco Chronicle for nearly 20 years, and has published in The Nation, Village Voice, The Progressive, Northwest Passage and widely on the internet.
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Bush Has Proactive Terror Fight Plan
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
June 2, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Bush.html
WEST POINT, N.Y. (AP) -- The United States will strike pre-emptively against suspected terrorists if necessary to deter attacks on Americans, President Bush told West Point graduates Saturday. ``The war on terror will not be won on the defensive,'' he said.
Warning of the continuing danger, he said: ``We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt its plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge.''
Bush heard doubts from some Europeans last week about a possible expansion in the war on terror, but he sounded firm Saturday in his belief that a widening may be needed. He chose a receptive audience in the 25,000 people at West Point's Michie Stadium, among them 958 members of the U.S. Military Academy's class of 2002 -- future leaders of the Army -- who applauded throughout his speech.
``This government and the American people are on watch. We are ready, because we know the terrorists have more money and more men and more plans,'' Bush said.
``The gravest danger to freedom lies at the perilous crossroads of radicalism and technology,'' Bush said. ``When the spread of chemical and biological and nuclear weapons, along with ballistic missile technology, when that occurs, even weak states and small groups could attain a catastrophic power to strike at great nations.''
Bush did not mention the nations he has identified as an ``axis of evil'' -- Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Aides said his message, with references to ``unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction,'' was aimed at those states and any others that might sponsor or harbor terrorists.
The president had not previously advised Americans ``to be ready for pre-emptive action, when necessary, to defend our liberty and to defend our lives.'' Aides said that was a newly articulated component of his policy.
Bush said the nation cannot afford to ``put our faith in the word of tyrants who solemnly sign nonproliferation treaties and then systematically break them.'' The administration says Iran, Iraq and North Korea are out of compliance with such treaties.
``All nations that decide for aggression and terror will pay a price. We will not leave the safety of America and the peace of the planet at the mercy of a few mad terrorists and tyrants,'' he said.
The president also framed the war on terrorism as one that could bring a historic shift in international relations, from violent competition among the ``great powers'' to cooperation in fighting a shared enemy.
``More and more, civilized nations find ourselves on the same side, united by common dangers of terrorist violence and chaos,'' he said.
In the wide-ranging, 53-minute speech, Bush took on a host of international responsibilities alongside combating terrorism: fighting global poverty and promoting democracy, human rights and healthier economies overseas.
Bush called for ``moderation and tolerance'' in other nations, though aides said the reference was to no country in particular. Some of America's military and economic allies, such as Saudi Arabia, are strict religious regimes.
The crowd roared when graduates threw their white caps into a cloudless sky at the end of the ceremony. Bush congratulated the newest members of the ``long gray line'' as they collected their diplomas.
As he did at Yale University's commencement last year, Bush poked fun at his own spotty academic career.
He provoked a cheer when he cited former President Ulysses S. Grant, ``who had his fair share of demerits and said the happiest day of his life 'was the day I left West Point.'''
``During my college years, I guess you could say I was a Grant man,'' Bush said.
In his weekly radio address, broadcast after the commencement address, Bush said West Point graduates will ``provide the ultimate service to our nation as we fight and win the war on terror'' -- putting themselves on the line willingly so that other Americans can live in freedom.
``Americans serve others because their conscience demands it, because their faith teaches it, because they are grateful to their country and because service brings rewards much deeper than material success,'' Bush said. ``Government does not create this idealism, but we can do a better job of supporting and encouraging an ethic of service in America.''
Bush also will discuss volunteerism and other ways to serve the country beyond the military when he delivers the commencement address June 14 at Ohio State University.
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Bush promises to pre-empt terrorist plans
June 2, 2002
By Joseph Curl
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020602-32836.htm
Americans must be prepared for "pre-emptive" military strikes against nations or groups that threaten the United States, President Bush said yesterday, and he pledged to "take the battle to the enemy, disrupt its plans and confront the worst threats before they emerge."
Speaking to nearly 1,000 graduating cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., Mr. Bush said that "unbalanced dictators" - an oblique reference to Iraq's Saddam Hussein - must be stopped before they develop weapons of mass destruction or provide them to terrorist groups.
"Our security will require all Americans to be forward-looking and resolute, to be ready for pre-emptive action, when necessary, to defend our liberty and to defend our lives," the president said.
"We cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for the best," he said. "In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action - and this nation will act."
Stung by recent criticism that he failed to act on information he received in an Aug. 6 CIA briefing - including intelligence that al Qaeda terrorists were planning to hijack U.S. commercial airplanes - Mr. Bush said the United States will strike first against terrorist groups.
"The war on terror will not be won on the defensive. We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt its plans and confront the worst threats before they emerge," he said. "If we wait for threats to materialize, we will have waited too long."
The pledge of pre-emptive strikes comes amid calls by congressional Democrats for the creation of a commission to investigate what U.S. intelligence agencies knew before terrorists from Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda group crashed airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing more than 3,000 people.
Last week, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III acknowledged the bureau missed key clues that terrorists were about to strike on U.S. soil, prompting the conservative Wall Street Journal to call for his resignation.
In his West Point speech, the 12th at the academy by a U.S. president, Mr. Bush reiterated his pledge to keep the U.S. military the best in the world, a cornerstone of what some consider his Reaganesque peace-through-strength policy.
"America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenge, thereby making the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless," Mr. Bush said.
The president told the graduating cadets they face an uncertain world where confronting terrorism differs significantly from the Cold War doctrines of deterrence and containment.
"Deterrence, the promise of massive retaliation against nations, means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizens to defend," Mr. Bush said. "Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies."
But the new war on terror is similar to the Cold War with the Soviet Union, he said, in that the United States must remain committed to a clear moral purpose.
"Different circumstances require different methods, but not different moralities. Moral truth is the same in every culture, in every time and in every place. Targeting innocent civilians for murder is always and everywhere wrong. Brutality against women is always and everywhere wrong.
"There can be no neutrality between justice and cruelty, between the innocent and the guilty. We are in a conflict between good and evil, and America will call evil by its name," he said to applause.
Mr. Bush did not shy away from declaring a moral absolute.
"Some worry that it is somehow undiplomatic or impolite to speak the language of right and wrong; I disagree By confronting evil and lawless regimes, we do not create a problem; we reveal a problem, and we will lead the world in opposing it," he said.
The new world - where terror groups operate across borders and join forces with rogue nations to acquire the world's deadliest weapons - presents grave dangers, he said.
"When the spread of chemical and biological and nuclear weapons, along with ballistic missile technology - when that occurs, even weak states and small groups could attain a catastrophic power to strike at great nations."
Mr. Bush, who noted terrorist groups are spread over more than 60 countries, pledged that the United States would help allies train their militaries and would send diplomats to world flash points to head off escalating tensions.
"America needs partners to preserve the peace, and we will work with every nation that shares this noble goal. We can support and reward governments that make the right choices for their own people," he said.
But if those efforts fail, the president told the cadets, "we will send you, our soldiers, where you're needed."
Mr. Bush noted that some U.S. enemies "have been caught" seeking weapons of mass detruction. "They want the capability to blackmail us or to harm us or to harm our friends, and we will oppose them with all our power."
"All nations that decide for aggression and terror will pay a price. We will not leave the safety of America and the peace of the planet at the mercy of a few mad terrorists and tyrants," he said.
More than 25,000 people packed into West Point's Michie Stadium, cheering throughout the 50-minute speech, which Mr. Bush began with a few jokes at his own expense.
"A few of you have followed in the path of the perfect West Point graduate, Robert E. Lee, who never received a single demerit in four years. Some of you followed in the path of the imperfect graduate, Ulysses S. Grant, who had his fair share of demerits and said the happiest day of his life 'was the day I left West Point.'
"During my college years, I guess you could say I was a Grant man," the former C-student said.
At the end of the ceremony, which included Mr. Bush's congratulating the newest members of the "long gray line" as they collected their diplomas, the crowd roared when graduates threw their white caps up against the blue sky.
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Nuclear Brinkmanship
New York Times
June 2, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/02/opinion/L02NUKE.html
To the Editor:
You note some of the ways that United States policy heightens the risk of nuclear war between India and Pakistan, but you miss the main one: our own nuclear weapons policy (Week in Review, May 26).
The charade of reductions (in which we don't destroy warheads, but merely store them) cannot disguise the aggressive edge of new nuclear weapons development and scenarios for United States nuclear first use. If the United States, with overwhelming superiority in conventional weapons, refuses to rule out nuclear first use, where is our moral authority to demand it of India and Pakistan?
Like the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, the Kashmir crisis shows that American military might all too often translates into diplomatic weakness. Leaders with the courage to risk their careers rather than all our lives would work for a world free from nuclear weapons.
DAVID KEPPEL
Bloomington, Ind.,
May 27, 2002
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Report: U.S. - Led Troops Hunt Militants on Afghan Border
June 2, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-afghan-operation.html
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - U.S.-led forces were hunting for Islamic militants in the rugged eastern Afghanistan frontier after Pakistan said it would likely move troops from there to its border with India, an Afghan news agency said on Sunday.
Hundreds of troops began scouring the forbidding mountains along the Pakistan-Afghan border Sunday to prevent Taliban and al Qaeda fighters from crossing it in the event of any Pakistan troop withdrawals, the Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) said.
Coalition forces have blocked all routes leading to the semi-autonomous Torkham area across the border in Pakistan, the independent Pakistan-based AIP said.
Thousands of people use these mountain trails daily to enter into Pakistan after Islamabad closed the border at Torkham in January 2001 to staunch a huge influx of Afghan refugees.
PATROLLING AND RECONNAISSANCE A U.S. military spokesman at allied headquarters in Afghanistan declined to comment on the report.
``I don't have anything like that,'' said Major Gary Tallman, speaking at Bagram air base north of Kabul. ``If there is a current operation underway, I wouldn't comment on that.''
He said coalition forces were patrolling and conducting reconnaissance missions for remnants of the al Qaeda and Taliban in Afghanistan, but there had been no contact over the past 24 hours.
Pakistan, which has deployed thousands of troops in the hunt for fleeing militants, said Thursday it was considering withdrawing some of its forces along the 1,400-mileborder with Afghanistan to reinforce the tense frontier with India.
TROOP REDEPLOYMENTS UNDER WAY
``We are very seriously contemplating on moving some elements...onto the east, if at all the tensions remain as high as they are now,'' Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf told a news conference Thursday.
Earlier, a military official said Pakistan had already begun withdrawing troops from the western border.
British military officials say the withdrawal of Pakistani troops from the semi-autonomous tribal region, where people still have sympathies for the Taliban, was likely to affect the coalition's campaign against Islamic militants in Afghanistan.
Tension between India and Pakistan has risen sharply since a guerrilla attack on an Indian army camp in the disputed region of Kashmir last month. The two nations have been on alert all along the border since December, when the Indian parliament was attacked by suspected Pakistan-based guerrillas.
-------- arms sales
India asks Israel to speed up arms sales
2002-06-02
http://paknews.com/main.php?id=5&date1=2002-06-02
NEW DELHI, June 02 (PNS): India has asked Israel to speed up supply of a large number of Aerostat Balloons to give it capability to detect incoming attacks on targets up to 500 kilometers.
The two countries have recently concluded an agreement to his effect and now Tel Aviv has been asked to speed up the delivery of the system, which is also capable of providing an in-depth battlefield surveillance as well as track incoming enemy artillery shells, a top defense Ministry officials said.
As part of measures to further bolster defense against missiles, officials said New Delhi was according top priority to upgrading border radar systems as well as looking keenly at the United States anti-missile system, which is presently in testing stage.
Officials said India was evaluating the American system, which was likely to be fielded by 2005-2006, with Washington inviting Indian experts to missile command post exercises in June.
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Too Smart For Our Own Good
By Michael Schrage
Sunday, June 2, 2002
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42767-2002May31?language=printer
Speaking at a national security event in Jerusalem four years ago, an American aerospace executive named James Roche half joked that there was a high-tech race between U.S. and Israeli pilots as to who would be indicted first for war crimes.
Roche's provocative theory? In a battle, some of those pilots would be launching precision-guided ("smart") bombs at their targets; they might be dropping dumb bombs, too. The Geneva Conventions ostensibly require belligerents to take every possible precaution to minimize civilian casualties. So if an air force drops dumb bombs that might inadvertently kill civilians when it could have dropped smart bombs that probably would not, doesn't it leave itself open to accusations of war crimes?
Today Roche is the secretary of the Air Force. And it would be hard to find anyone at the Pentagon or in Foggy Bottomwho would consider those remarks humorous now -- however prescient and cynical they were. Roche identified what are emerging as painful military, legal and public relations challenges to winning America's war on terror. These challenges pose awkward questions for the military, its lawyers and its civilian overseers. Why? Because our weaponry is becoming too smart for our own good. Our technological superiority is creating expectations among our allies and enemies that place unrealistic demands on how we deploy it.
By most measures, America's high-tech armaments have performed superbly in Afghanistan. In April, in its preliminary review of the Afghan bombing campaign, the Pentagon found that more than three-fourths of U.S. bombs -- smart and dumb alike -- hit their intended targets. And the precision of the smart bombs (meaning bombs and missiles guided to their targets by lasers or satellites) was breathtaking. The Navy, for example, claimed a 90 percent target hit rate for its smart bombs. Should those estimates hold, the Afghanistan air offensive will define a level of accuracy never seen before in wartime. Compare those figures with the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the 1999 NATO-coordinated strikes against Yugoslavia, where fewer than half of all allied munitions hit their intended targets.
Today's "smart" is a lot smarter than even a few years ago. Precision weapons are becoming not only more reliable, but faster and cheaper. And some old weapons are being retrofitted with global positioning system technology, boosting the IQ of even the dumbest bombs. These Joint Direct Attack Munitions, or JDAMS, have a procurement cost of only $20,000, compared with more than $1 million per cruise missile.
The recent successes have bred a new conventional wisdom both inside the Pentagon and out: If smart bombs are good, smarter bombs are better. Greater precision means greater mission effectiveness and a reduced risk of collateral damage. This sounds terrific, but it's not. Those assumptions create a dangerous trap.
There's no doubt that more precision can increase military effectiveness, but even the most brilliant technological breakthroughs pass the point of diminishing returns. I would argue that America's overwhelming superiority in military technology will actually undermine our ability to prosecute a war successfully. That's because, ironically, our promises of precision will increasingly be turned against us, providing incentives for our enemies to mix military targets with civilian populations and making us more vulnerable to misleading or deceptive intelligence. Moreover, those promises give rise to foolish expectations: If America's weapons are so superb, the accidental destruction of innocents must represent a contempt for human life and be attributable to willful negligence rather than the fog of war.
The problems with precision get worse: U.S. technology is so superior to the rest of the world's -- America's defense R&D budget is larger than Europe's and Asia's combined -- that it becomes easy to imagine America's more sensitive allies, and perhaps even an international court, arguing that we are ethically, if not legally, obligated to make our smart weaponry even more discriminating. For example, a soldier laser-guiding a bomb to a targeted convoy might be able to disarm the bomb in flight if he sees too many women and children in the convoy.
But even if smart bombs were every bit as smart as the pilots or special forces operatives who launch them, they would still require precise targets, which require precise intelligence. And precise intelligence is a scarce commodity in the war on terror.
"A smart bomb is only as accurate as the information which has led to its targeting," British Air Vice Marshal Tony Mason told the BBC during the recent Afghan campaign. "We have the very, very obvious example in Kosovo, the tragic example where an [American] B-2 bomber from a height of probably 35,000 feet placed three -- not one or two, but three -- bombs accurately, in bad weather at night into the wing of one building. Unfortunately it was the Chinese Embassy."
Delivering smart munitions to precisely the wrong targets is the kind of disaster that America's enemies have every reason tofoment. Our military mistakes are their propaganda victories.
This country's technological edge also creates perverse incentives for enemies to use noncombatants as hostages and exploit America's precision weaponry for their own ends. "If killing civilians can complicate a democracy's war effort, then those intent upon waging neo-absolutist war will not hesitate to induce 'collateral damage' situations," observed Col. Charles J. Dunlap Jr., an Air Force judge advocate general, in a 1997 article for Parameters, the U.S. Army War College Quarterly. "Precision weapons will be no panacea in a high-tech war. Critical supply facilities as well as those communications nodes that can't be miniaturized and dispersed may be buried below POW camps, schools, hospitals and similar facilities."
In other words, a logical enemy response to America's precision weaponry is to hide in plain sight: Place that command and control center in the pediatric wing of a downtown hospital; billet the general staff in a town's day care center or its holiest shrine or mosque; have troop transports interspersed with school buses -- and put troops in the buses with the children. You think your weapons are so smart? Take your best shot.
As one Army general told me, "These thugs want to show the world that it's the Americans who are killing their people. They want to create their own little My Lai for propaganda purposes. They want to exploit our conscience because they have none."
Such deliberate blurring of civilian and military targets is, of course, a grotesque violation of the laws of war. That legal fact is seldom discussed publicly by human rights advocates or, surprisingly, by either the Pentagon or the State Department. That's a strategic opportunity missed.
Here's why: Just as technological innovation consistently makes obsolete key aspects of financial regulation and intellectual property law worldwide, it will force fundamental reexamination of the laws of war. As the undisputed leader in military technology, the United States has every incentive to ensure that its technical supremacy doesn't devolve into a legal liability.
While there are no good answers to the political and public relations predicaments posed by precision weaponry, there may be answers that aren't half bad. The first is straightforward: Washington must publicly disavow the explicit targeting of noncombatants in any bombing campaigns. The era of World War II, Dresden-style "area bombing" is over.
At the same time, however, the United States should work with other countries to have nation-states that improperly commingle legitimate military targets with civilian populations declared in violation of international law.
A next step would be for the United States to develop notification protocols to alert foreign civilian populations to likely military targets near them. Perhaps all the cell phones in a given geographical area would receive a message warning of an impending strike, for instance. Or a disposable drone might drop pamphlets explaining evacuation options. Ideally, notification would be coordinated with the United Nations, Red Cross or other humanitarian groups, which would share some responsibility.
Military commanders now have extraordinary latitude in determining what kind of civilian notifications -- if any -- are appropriate, according to a Defense Department spokesman. But a little standardization could go a long way here. Depending on the mission, the military element of surprise might be traded off against the benefit of public notification to minimize civilian deaths.
Once a system of civilian notification is in place, regimes that turn their own citizens into hostages would find it more difficult to win propaganda wars. And civilians who exploit the notification system to aid the enemy should lose their legal status as noncombatants. Managed well, notification would confer military benefits as well as war crimes protections. Observing how populations respond -- if at all -- to notification protocols should yield useful intelligence for future targeting.
Since the end of World War II, America has invested hundreds of billions of dollars in weapons of mass destruction that it has never had to deploy. Since the end of the Vietnam War, it has spent hundreds of billions on weapons of most precision. Those smart weapons represent a triumph of technology. The surest way to facilitate their future success is to remember that precision is a means to an end and not an end in itself. The best way to preserve the effectiveness of smart weapons is to become smarter about using them.
Michael Schrage is a senior adviser to the Security Studies program at MIT and a pro bono consultant to various branches of the Defense Department.
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Riddle of sheik's £100m secret fund
Qatar was desperate to halt a probe into arms 'sweeteners', report Antony Barnett and Conal Walsh. The UK backlash could be explosive
Antony Barnett and Conal Walsh
Sunday June 2, 2002
The Observer
http://www.guardian.co.uk/armstrade/story/0,10674,726395,00.html
On a bright November day, reporter Anthony Lewis was waiting outside Jersey's Royal Court in St Helier, ready to cover a seemingly routine case of a frozen bank account. It should have been a quiet morning.
What Lewis didn't know was that this case would feature some of the most powerful people in the world, from London to the Persian Gulf, involving the international arms industry and the war against terror.
As Lewis patiently stood on the court steps with the paper's photographer, a limousine pulled up. Out stepped a well-dressed man with Arab features. Lewis approached the car to speak to the mysterious figure, but the man panicked and hid his face from the camera. He then dashed for the court and was smuggled in by the door normally used by prisoners.
Lewis was amazed - especially when he discovered the man was oil-rich Qatar's ambassador in Britain, Nasser bin Hamed al-Khalifa. Why was a senior Gulf diplomat so desperate to remain in the shadows?
He tried to investigate, but was obstructed at every turn. The proceedings were being held in camera, preventing anybody from witnessing the events. When his newspaper, the Jersey Evening Post, tried to report the case, the super-rich Gulf state won a contempt of court order effectively gagging it. At one stage, the island's authorities would not even admit that the case was going on.
Six months later, an Observer investigation has uncovered extraordinary details suggesting why so many rich and powerful individuals from Doha to London have been eager to hush up the facts of this case. This remarkable tale revolves around one of the richest and most powerful men in the Middle East - the Foreign Secretary of Qatar - and alleged payments from Britain's largest arms company.
Two years ago, an official at the ANZ Grindlay Trust bank in Jersey stumbled across strange payments by British Aerospace, now known as BAE Systems, into the exotically named Havana and Yaheeb trusts.
Under new laws introduced in Jersey to crack down on money laundering, banks must report any transaction suspected of being the proceeds of crime. The official who discovered these BAe transactions could not have guessed his diligence would lead to a major diplomatic row and one of Britain's biggest ever commercial bribery investigations.
Detectives from Jersey's financial crime unit quickly discovered the ultimate beneficiary of these secretive trusts was the Foreign Secretary of Qatar, Sheik Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani, uncle of the Emir of Qatar and a man of huge wealth and influence throughout the Gulf. Investigators found more than £100 million in these trusts. They became convinced they had uncovered evidence which pointed to a slush fund into which some of Europe's largest defence companies had been paying sweeteners to the Qatar Minister to secure arms contracts.
On 16 July 2000, the Jersey authorities froze these two trusts, in operation for almost 10 years, while they investigated. Qatar's government reacted with fury and protested to the British government, refuting all allegations of corruption or any other wrongdoing - and suspending talks on hundreds of millions of pounds of export orders.
By the end of last year Qatari government insiders said the probe had brought relations between the UK and Qatar close to breaking point. The emir of Qatar refused to meet former Foreign Minister Ben Bradshaw and Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon. But senior sources in Jersey discovered BAe had allegedly funnelled one payment into these trusts totalling almost £7m. Investigators believed they had evidence to link this directly to a large BAe arms contract with Qatar.
It is not known what contracts police have been looking at, but in 1996 BAe sold a number of Hawk fighter jets as part of a £500m arms package between Britain and the Gulf state. There is no suggestion that BAe acted unlawfully. At the time when BAe was alleged to have made payments to the trusts, there was no law prohibiting British firms from paying foreign politicians.
Jersey's attorney-general, William Bailhache, now believed he had accumulated sufficient evidence that an offence may have been committed by Qatar's Foreign Minister. In addition to the money rolling into these trusts from European defence companies, investigators also discovered that the funds from these accounts were being used to purchase real estate and hotels around the world.
But after the horrific events of 11 September, Qatar was an increasingly important strategic ally for Britain and the US. The state was a moderating influence among Islamic countries and the US, worried about the stability of its military bases in Saudi Arabia, was reported to be preparing to move its Gulf HQ to Qatar.
Diplomatic pressure to heal Qatari relations was becoming intense. Then, in a startling turn of events, Jersey's attorney-general announced last Friday he was dropping the investigation.
On the surface it appeared that the Jersey authorities capitulated. But like the rest of this story the true facts lie buried beneath the surface.
While Sheik Hamad continued to protest his innocence, he agreed to pay £6m to the Jersey government to repair any 'damage perceived to have been sustained in the events that have happened'. This was very close to the £7m figure which the Jersey authorities were trying to confiscate. Jersey's attorney-general said continuing action against Sheik Hamad was not 'in the public interest'. There was also the major problem that the Foreign Minister would be protected by diplomatic immunity.
Yet with questions over what precisely the attorney-general meant by 'public interest', it is inevitable that suspicions will arise that the British government put pressure on the Jersey authorities to come to a deal. Both Jersey and the Foreign Office resolutely deny this, stressing that the British government does not have the powers to intervene in the judicial affairs of the Channel Island, which is independent of the Westminster parliament. However, lawyers in the office of Jersey's attorney-general did admit they had meetings with officials in the Foreign Office.
Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker is not convinced. He said: 'I want absolute assurances that no undue pressure was applied on the Jersey courts to drop a criminal investigation into a major corruption inquiry because of political considerations. I will also want assurances that the British government has at no time sponsored the payments made by British arms companies into these Channel Island accounts.'
A BAe spokesman said: 'We have a strong ethical policy and comply with the law... We will rigorously defend ourselves against any allegations of wrongdoing. We have never been the subject of any investigation into these matters. We have co-operated fully with the appropriate authorities into an investigation which has now terminated. We have nothing further to add.'
Like BAe, the State of Qatar denies any wrongdoing. In two weeks the Jersey Evening Post is challenging the court's decision to hold the original hearings in secret. If the paper wins, the evidence and transcripts that emerge will detail all the payments made into Sheik Hamad's offshore trusts. Only then will more light will be shone on the dealings of the international arms industry.
-------- biological weapons
Lesson of Iraq's Mass Murder
By Christine Gosden and Mike Amitay
Sunday, June 2, 2002
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42671-2002May31?language=printer
The Sept. 11 attacks and anthrax aftermath have forced Americans to confront the terrible reality that we are vulnerable to chemical, biological or radiological weapons. Enormous resources are being allocated to help law enforcement, health officials and local communities devise effective responses to unprecedented threats. Public health vigilance and responses to threats from infectious agents have advanced, but chemical agents, radiological weapons and biological toxins pose different threats and can cause severe long-term effects, such as cancer. We should be better prepared for threats these weapons pose, especially since we are not the first people terrorized by such weapons of mass destruction.
President Bush and his advisers repeatedly remind us that Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against the people of Iraq. Indeed, from April 1987 to October 1988 the Iraqi regime attacked 4 million people in Iraqi Kurdistan (northern Iraq) by using combinations of nerve agents, mustard gas and possibly biological and radiological weapons on scores of Kurdish towns and villages. The attacks aimed to subjugate and punish those who supported Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. In the most publicized attack, the town of Halabja was bombarded with mustard gas and nerve agents, killing 5,000 people immediately and severely injuring tens of thousands of others.
Today, 14 years later, the attacks continue to exert long-term effects through cancers, congenital malformations and infant deaths. Yet not only have the United States and the international community failed to address the humanitarian and environmental consequences of the attacks, they have also failed to consider the implications for their own domestic preparedness.
Four fundamental questions should have been answered following these tragic exposures to weapons of mass destruction (WMD): What agents were used? What are the most effective means of monitoring environment and people to remove threats from persistent weapons agents? What are the most effective means of researching immediate and long-term effects of different agents? What are the most effective means of developing effective therapies for victims? Only when these questions are answered can we respond effectively to WMD threats.
A first priority is to establish which agents may have been used in Iraq. Although this seems a fundamental step, in practice it is more complex. The keystone of the U.N. system is respect for the sovereignty of governments, and international agencies charged with testing must await requests from governments to investigate possible WMD use. Since the government of Iraq has not requested an investigation into attacks in Iraqi Kurdistan, there is only fragmentary forensic evidence, rather than systematic test results.
A small U.N. team examined sites along the Iran-Iraq border, and Physicians for Human Rights gathered samples from a single site near the Turkish border. These confirmed the presence of mustard gas and the nerve agents sarin and tabun. But for Halabja, the site of one of the world's largest WMD attacks, there has still been no systematic testing.
A second step is to monitor attack sites and surrounding areas to determine persistence of any weapons agents in the environment. All told, some 250,000 civilians may have been directly exposed during attacks and many more affected by contamination of the environment and water table and by lasting effects on animals and food chains. Many others may have been exposed at varying levels during the Iran-Iraq war and in punitive attacks against dissident groups in southern Iraq.
The attacks occurred as the Iraqi military was testing, weaponizing and stockpiling a wide range of agents, including anthrax, smallpox, plague, botulinum toxin, aflatoxin, mustard gas and nerve gases such as sarin and VX. Some chemical weapons and biological toxins, such as nuclear and radiological weapons, damage the human genome, causing cancers in those exposed and birth defects and cancers in children born years later. Severe health problems reported throughout Iraq and in neighboring countries suggest environmental damage may be widespread. Yet there is an appalling lack of detailed scientific information on damage to people and their environment.
A third priority is to identify the short- and long-term medical problems associated with each weapon. The terrible long-term effects of mustard gas have been observed in World War I victims, World War II poison gas factory workers, U.S. military test chamber volunteers and Iranian soldiers exposed during the Iran-Iraq war. Long-term effects include laryngeal, pharyngeal and lung cancers, corneal burns causing blindness, severe skin burns predisposing to skin cancer, neurological and psychiatric disorders, infertility and birth defects. A significant proportion of survivors of nerve gas (sarin) attacks on the Tokyo subway suffer from long-term neurological disorders. Immediate deaths from WMD are the tip of a lethal iceberg; the 90 percent or so who survive, face slow and lingering deaths or severe disability.
The fourth lesson, vital to overcoming threats, is to develop effective methods for treating victims. Civilian populations, as the Kurds exemplify, are extremely vulnerable to WMD attacks, lacking gas masks, other protections and effective methods for personal and environmental decontamination. The major contrast between Iraqi Kurds and potential survivors of WMD in the United States is that in Kurdistan, the survivors are currently dying from cancers without benefit of chemotherapy, radiotherapy or pain relief in terminal stages, whereas in the United States such treatment would likely be available. Yet even if treatment responses were available, it is unclear whether conventional approaches are effective in exposed populations, as few evidence-based studies have been conducted among civilians exposed to WMD.
Before the answers to these important questions can be found, adequate medical and humanitarian assistance must be extended to survivors, without which it would be unethical to conduct studies, environmental assessments and medical research necessary to learn from this tragedy. The experience of people in Iraqi Kurdistan is a terrifying example of what happens when a civilian population is unprepared for a chemical weapons attack. The people there continue to live in terror of Iraqi unconventional weapons attacks, just as they live with death and disease resulting from their previous exposures. Now is the time not simply to cite them as victims but also to question the wisdom of our own shortsightedness and lack of compassion, because to aid their survival is to benefit all those at risk from threats of WMD.
Christine Gosden is a professor of medical genetics at the University of Liverpool who works at Liverpool Women's Hospital. Mike Amitay is executive director of the Washington Kurdish Institute.
----
CDC starts to fight smallpox as weapon
AP
June 2, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020602-2170892.htm
ATLANTA - Later this month, Army virologist Peter Jahrling will put on a blue spacesuit, enter one of the country's highest security laboratories and begin injecting monkeys with deadly smallpox.
The goal is to create a way to study if new medications could battle smallpox and if new tests could detect it more rapidly, should terrorists ever resurrect the world's scariest virus.
In one of the biggest steps yet toward modernizing defenses against smallpox, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this month dedicates one of its two maximum-containment laboratories to smallpox-only research like Mr. Jahrling's indefinitely.
It is a huge step, diminishing the CDC's capability to investigate outbreaks of highly lethal diseases such as the Ebola virus on the chance that a disease long-eradicated might return - and thus a step the agency took somewhat reluctantly.
But bringing smallpox out of the deep-freeze full time speeds the race to create an arsenal of protection beyond the vaccine that is today's only defense.
"There are tangible products with real-world applications. It's not a lot of blue-sky, what-if research," said Dr. James LeDuc of the CDC.
The effort is poised to begin even as vaccine experts start going around the country this week to ask Americans if the nation should change its smallpox immunization policy of giving no vaccinations unless smallpox reappears.
The smallpox vaccine itself causes serious side effects that would kill several hundred people if it were given to all Americans.
At meetings beginning Thursday in New York and San Francisco, the CDC's vaccine advisers will hear if the public wants a different strategy, such as allowing voluntary vaccinations. On June 20 in Atlanta, the advisers then will offer the government a recommendation.
Smallpox killed hundreds of millions of people over the centuries until, thanks to massive immunizations, the last natural case occurred in 1977. Today, live smallpox virus is confirmed as existing only in vials in heavily guarded freezers at the CDC and a similar Russian laboratory. But intelligence officials fear other countries secretly store some of the virus that could fall into terrorist hands.
Hence the research race, with Mr. Jahrling's monkeys and other experiments, such as the creation of a gene-based test that might detect smallpox infection days before the characteristic rash appears, possibly allowing quarantine before the person is contagious. In test-tube studies, it seems accurate at spotting a mere four copies of a viral gene in blood.
Then there is the treatment hunt. The top candidate is cidofovir, an injected drug used by AIDS patients, both as a potential smallpox treatment and as an antidote for vaccine side effects. An experimental oral version is being studied, too.
The trick is proving any of these approaches truly works.
Enter the monkeys.
Last year, Mr. Jahrling proved wrong the scientific belief that smallpox could harm only people. He injected monkeys with high doses of the same virulent strain that Soviet communist scientists once turned into a biological weapon. Most died within a week.
People catch smallpox by breathing it. The injected monkeys got sick almost immediately, instead of a humanlike slow incubation, and the viral doses were several hundred times higher than what sickens people. One attempt at a lower dose failed.
This month, Mr. Jahrling's research team from Fort Detrick, Md., will again try making this monkey model of smallpox more realistic with lower doses, perhaps airborne infection. Then they will test if cidofovir works. Mr. Jahrling hopes for results by Christmas.
-------- israel / palestine
Israel Says Land Seizures Defensive
June 2, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Palestinian-Losing-Land.html
SALFIT, West Bank (AP) -- The Israeli army is quietly taking over West Bank land privately owned by Palestinians in what it says is a temporary move to protect its citizens from militants. But Palestinians -- mindful that similar tactics were once used to establish Jewish settlements -- fear they will never get their land back.
According to Israeli military documents, copies of which were obtained by The Associated Press, some of the land seized is in areas where officials want to build a fortified fence to keep Palestinian militants from entering Israel. Other documents indicate Israel is trying to create buffers between Jewish enclaves and Palestinian towns deep within the West Bank -- including this town of Salfit, which is surrounded by 17 large and small settlements.
Critics say the scattered and in some cases sizable seizures could carve up the West Bank in a way that would make it difficult for the Palestinians to create a viable state on land Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast War.
The Israeli army says the seizures are necessary to counter suicide bombers. ``There is a military need to command some areas for security reasons in order to control and observe areas where threats emanate from,'' said Lt. Col. Olivier Rafowicz, a military spokesman. ``This is not annexation of territory.''
Khalil Tufakji, the Palestinian Authority's chief cartographer, has mapped out recent seizures that include long, narrow strips of land along the invisible line dividing Israel from the West Bank.
West of Jenin, the Palestinian city that has produced more than 20 suicide bombers, another 27 square miles of land was taken. South of the Palestinian town of Tulkarem, 3 square miles was taken.
The two patches, both close to the border with Israel, constitute just over 1 percent of the entire West Bank.
Dalia Rabin-Pelossof, Israel's deputy defense minister, said construction of a fence between Israel and the West Bank was under way. She did not provide specifics but said ``in some areas, the work has already begun. There are many places where fences have been built.''
Aside from the buffer areas, some confiscations have recently occurred deeper inside the West Bank, according to copies of documents provided to AP by Palestinian officials and lawyers and authenticated by the Israeli army.
Such is the case in Salfit in the central West Bank where Mohamed Salim Alkim's 15 acres were seized and his olive groves and apple orchards uprooted by bulldozers.
The town, ringed by 17 Jewish settlements, is suspected to be the home of Palestinian militants who target settlers. Recently, the Israeli army said it discovered a bomb-making factory here.
As a result, Salfit has been hit by missiles, tank shelling, gunbattles, house demolitions and arrests.
All its access roads have been sealed by the military. Soldiers, tanks and bulldozers encircle the area.
So to get to where his fields once were, the 66-year-old Alkim, whose face and hands have been weathered by the Middle Eastern sun and years of physical work, walks on foot for several hundred yards across a stretch of biblical land dotted with wild flowers and shrub.
Standing on a breezy hilltop, Alkim points to the commanding Jewish settlement of Ariel where suburban homes sprung up next to Salfit 25 years ago. Ariel is expanding, Salfit's acreage is shrinking. There is no relationship between the two communities -- just animosity.
Land is at the center of this century-old dispute.
The West Bank was supposed to be the heart of a separate state for Palestinians under the 1947 U.N. partition plan that envisioned a Jewish and Arab state living side-by-side in what had been British-ruled Palestine. Instead, war broke out and the territory was annexed by Jordan.
In 1967, Israel captured the West Bank and began building Jewish settlements there. Today, some 200,000 settlers live in communities built on territory claimed by Palestinians.
Alkim, 66, wants his property back -- he wants to leave it to his 12 children. But he doesn't think Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat will be able to get it for him. ``The only way is by force,'' he said.
Salfit may look empty and worthless, but under the rocky, untamed surroundings lies a treasure in this thirsty land -- water. Salfit, which means 'Basket of Grapes,' is situated near several aquifers that, according to Palestinian lore, have been a source of contention since 800 A.D.
Manal Hazan, of the Association of Civil Rights in Israel, is trying to help Salfit reclaim its land. So far, the army has responded favorably to a written appeal to freeze construction of a road on the seized land.
``To a certain degree this was a success, but I don't think the farmers will get their land back. It's true the orders have expiration dates but they are always renewed,'' she said.
In a separate case, the Israeli lawyer is suing the military commander of the West Bank over a land seizure near the city of Hebron. The case is before the Supreme Court.
Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian official in charge of local governments, said more than a dozen mayors and village elders have received land seizure notices from the army in recent months.
The AP obtained several letters, some dated as recently as April, and signed by Israel's military commander in the West Bank.
In some cases the one-page letters, written in Hebrew -- which most Arabs cannot read -- were posted at village entrances. They begin: ``By the authority vested in me as the Israeli army commander of Judea and Samaria, and as I believe it is a military necessity given the special security circumstances now prevailing in the area, I hereby order the following: ... .''
The letters include the number of plots and the period -- ranging from one to four years -- they will remain seized.
Some of the notices dealt with the area south of Tulkarem, to be used for the new buffer zone.
In one letter, dated April 24, the army said it was taking a swath of land around Faron, Taibeh, al Ras and Kafr Sur -- four West Bank villages close to Israel -- that amounted to 4.74 miles by 56-66 feet. In a second letter, dated the same day, the army said it would be taking another tract of 1.35 miles by 56 feet from Faron.
``We have stacks of these letters,'' Erekat said. ``They're taking land around Jenin, Salfit, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Hebron and the Jordan Valley.'' He accused Israel of ``racing to implement unilateral policies.''
Researchers say the current seizures are reminiscent of the method Israel used to get land for settlements until the Supreme Court ordered it to halt the practice in 1979.
``After '79, Israel continued from time to time to take land for military purposes in order to build bypass roads, army bases or checkpoints, but not for settlements,'' said Yehezkel Lein, a researcher with the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem which documents land confiscations.
Recently, Lein said, the army has built checkpoints, security roads and bases on some of the seized land.
Since the latest Palestinian uprising began, he said, the army has had to build checkpoints to enforce their closure of towns and villages, and the settlers ``need bypass roads for their bypass roads.''
Landowners can challenge an order in a military court and the letters also say property holders ``are eligible to request information on compensation and user fees.''
But practically no one does.
``It's not a question of money for us,'' says Salfit's mayor, Shaher Eshteih. ``This has been our land for generations.''
On the Net:
www.salfeet.org
www.idf.il
ww.acri.org.il
-------- pakistan
Pakistan will use all its warheads: Moin
By Anwar Shaikh,
June 2, 2002,
The News International, Pakistan
http://www.jang.com.pk/thenews/jun2002-daily/02-06-2002/main/main8.htm
FROM SINDH BORDER FRONTS: Federal Interior Minister Lt-Gen (retd) Moinuddin Hyder on Saturday said Pakistan would use all its warheads in case of war.
Addressing Army Jawans during a visit to Sindh border fronts on Saturday, the minister said it will be India's mistake if she thinks it will keep Pakistan busy through a limited war in Kashmir. "We will fight inside India", he said and added that Pakistan's armed forces were fully prepared to defend the motherland.
"The Pakistan Army has all capabilities of better defence and also ready to strike at the enemy. The Army has the honour of being one of the excellent armies in the world, and it will not hesitate to sacrifice to maintain this honour," Moin said.
Moin said the Indian prime minister is under war hysteria and he has not estimated as to what cost he will have to pay in case of war. He asked the Indian prime minister to demonstrate a sense of wisdom and adopt the way of dialogue to solve the problems.
During his visit to border fronts, he was given briefing about the Pak Army preparations. The interior minister expressed his satisfaction over the war preparations, training quality and high morale of the Jawans.
Later, Moin told newsmen Pakistan is a peaceful country and cannot be terrified by threats of war by the Indian prime minister. He said: "Atal Behari Vajpayee has no idea that the Pakistan Army, equipped with latest war techniques and atomic power, can teach a lesson to India."
He said Pakistan has offered India to solve all problems through dialogue, which proves Pakistan is a responsible country despite being an atomic power. "Kashmir is a disputed territory and it is to be solved tomorrow if not today. Its status will not change through shouting by India. Dialogue and not war is the best way to solve the Kashmir problem," Moin said.
To a question, Lt-Gen (retd) Moinuddin Haider said that the international communitywas pressurising Pakistan, which was not justified. He said war would have adverse effects not only on India and Pakistan but the adjoining countries as well.
----
Nuclear conflict unthinkable, Musharraf says
By Paul Alexander
ASSOCIATED PRESS
June 2, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020602-29360312.htm
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, stopping short of matching India's pledge not to use nuclear weapons first, said yesterday that "any sane individual" would not allow a nuclear war.
Still, the growing fear of a wider conflict between India and Pakistan prompted the United Nations on Saturday to tell its staffers in the region to send their families home.
France, Israel and South Korea joined the list of nations advising their citizens to leave the region, as the South Asian neighbors continued shelling each other along their border, killing at least eight persons.
In an interview with CNN, Gen. Musharraf said nuclear conflict was unthinkable. He also restated his willingness to negotiate with India.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has offered to mediate during the regional summit in Kazakhstan next week, which is to be attended by Gen. Musharraf and Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee.
India's defense minister said yesterday there was no sign of a reconciliation with Pakistan. India has demanded that Pakistan first stop cross-border incursions by Islamic militants, whom New Delhi blames for two major terrorist attacks during the past six months.
Gen. Musharraf told CNN that Pakistan has called for a no-war pact with India and the denuclearization of South Asia. He was asked about the possibility the situation would escalate into nuclear war.
"I don't think either side is that irresponsible to go to that limit," Gen. Musharraf said. "I would even go to the extent of saying one shouldn't even be discussing these things, because any sane individual cannot even think of going into this unconventional war, whatever the pressures."
Concern about Pakistan using nuclear weapons stems from the fact that Pakistan has a much smaller military than India does. India has a policy of not using nuclear weapons first in a conflict.
But concern mounted about a broader military conflict, as neither country offered a diplomatic solution to end their long dispute over the Himalayan region of Kashmir, the catalyst for two of their three wars. Both countries claim the region.
Asked if military officials of the two countries might meet, Indian Defense Minister George Fernandes said, "I don't think there is any such possibility." He made the comment while attending a regional security conference in Singapore.
The recent terror attacks ratcheted up tensions over Kashmir and have led to the deployment of more than 1 million troops along the border.
Cross-border shelling Saturday killed three civilians in India and two in Pakistan, according to official reports.
A grenade attack by those suspected to be Islamic militants also killed a 14-year-old boy and injured 16 persons, including two soldiers, in Srinagar, the summer capital of India's Jammu-Kashmir state, while a gunfight between Indian paramilitary forces and guerrillas in Nihalpora, 22 miles to the north, killed one militant and a teen-age boy caught in the cross fire, Indian officials said.
The United Nations said yesterday that its Pakistan and India staffs have been ordered to send their families home in the next few days. The order covers 260 dependents in India and several hundred more in Pakistan.
The United States and Britain are among the countries that have advised their citizens to leave India.
India accuses Pakistan of supporting Islamic militant groups that are waging a 12-year insurgency in Indian Kashmir.
Pakistan says it offers only moral and diplomatic support for the insurgents and does not back terrorist attacks.
-------- space
Fission in the Sky
Science Books
Sunday, June 2, 2002
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A36745-2002May30?language=printer
George Dyson relates in Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship (Holt, $26) the absorbing tale of how a secret federal research program was launched in the late 1950s with the aim of developing a 4,000-ton spaceship for interplanetary travel powered by nuclear explosions. While this notion seems little short of mind-boggling today, at the time it was an eminently plausible undertaking for researchers, and their efforts drew it closer to fruition: By the time the project was judged politically impractical and halted in 1965, most of the scientists associated with it felt confident that the goal was technologically achievable. Indeed, many championed the project as a welcome peacetime application of Cold War nuclear stockpiles.
As the son of physicist Freeman J. Dyson, one of the key figures working on the project, George Dyson is well positioned to tell this story. His ready access to the men involved and his insight into the environment in which they worked in southern California keep the story human even as the technological details and political intrigue multiply.
If the story of Project Orion seems a little bit like science fiction, it almost was. After the program was shelved, Arthur C. Clarke, prompted by disgruntled scientists who had worked on the project, wrote the technology into an early short story that was later adapted into Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey." By the time the film was made, the name had survived but the technology had been discarded.
In Dyson's telling, Project Orion had roots in the Manhattan Project and was green-lighted when the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik ratcheted up the stakes in the race for primacy in outer space. Ironically, then, Orion became a casualty of the very same U.S.-Soviet rivalry, as the Kennedy and Johnson administrations' focus on the burgeoning proxy war in Indochina and the race to land a man on the Moon robbed it of attention -- and, more important, funding. Dyson reports that one of the factors that eroded support for the project was the notion, promoted by the Strategic Air Command among others, that its development would assure this country nuclear dominance.
Dyson also unearths an epitaph for Project Orion, via a wonderful excerpt from a 1965 letter from Freeman J. Dyson to J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb: "You will perhaps recognize the mixture of technical wisdom in political innocence with which we came to San Diego in 1958 as similar to the Los Alamos of 1943. You had to learn political wisdom by success, and we by failure. Often I do not know whether to be glad or sorry that we escaped the responsibility of succeeding."
-- Gregory Mott
-------- un
Rwandan - Backed Congo Rebels Expel UN Officials
June 2, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-congo-democratic-expulsion.html
KIGALI - Rwandan-backed Congolese rebels expelled two U.N. officials from the rebel-held east Sunday on suspicion that they had links to a group accused of a grenade attack on a church.
A spokesman for the U.N. observer mission to the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUC) denied the allegations against Magda Gonzales, a Swiss of Colombian origin who is a political adviser to MONUC, and a French U.N. security officer, Lionel Gasparot.
``MONUC categorically rejects all the accusations leveled at these public servants during the carrying out of their duty,'' a spokesman for the force said. ``MONUC considers that these accusations have no basis in fact.''
After the grenade attack on a Catholic church congregation in March in rebel-held Goma, which killed and injured a number of people, rebels accused Kinshasa of being behind it, an allegation the Congolese government denied.
The U.N. spokesman said the two had left the eastern city of Goma, the stronghold of the Rally for Congolese Democracy (RCD) rebel group that lies on the shores of Lake Kivu, and were on their way to the capital Kinshasa after being ordered out.
RCD spokesman Jean-Pierre Lola-Kisanga said the two had been in contact with the alleged perpetrators of the March attack and had also collaborated with authorities in Kinshasa, the RCD's foes in the country's complex four-year-old conflict.
Outlining the allegations, RCD security official Christian Kabasele said the RCD had recently arrested a man called Elias Unguru as he ferried weapons hidden in sacks of beans across the lake to Bukavu, a town at the southern end of the waterway.
``He confessed to the Goma grenade attack and said he'd been planning a similar attack against the governor of Bukavu,'' Kabasele told Reuters.
``When we showed him to the public Friday in a room packed with people from NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and the U.N., he pointed at Ms. Gonzales and Mr. Gasparot in the crowd and said 'Those are the people our group has been working with'.''
The expulsions are the latest sign of tension between the world body and the Rwandan-backed rebels, who control up to 40 percent of Congo and are the largest rebel force in the country.
The RCD last week demanded MONUC withdraw a Belgian human rights official from the city of Kisangani, scene last month of an anti-RCD rebellion and subsequent widespread reprisal killings blamed by MONUC on the RCD.
Estimates by some aid workers and other witnesses put the number of killed at 250. The RCD has denied there were any executions and put the death toll at 39. The rights officer, Luc Hattenbreck, left Kisangani Sunday after the RCD accused him of flouting its authority in the city, RCD officials said.
The rebels also requested U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan withdraw his special representative to Congo, Amos Namanga Ngongi, accusing him of being biased in favor of the Kinshasa government. Ngongi has denied the accusation.
-------- us
Bush: U.S. Will Strike First at Enemies
In West Point Speech, President Lays Out Broader U.S. Policy
By Mike Allen and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, June 2, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A45929-2002Jun1?language=printer
WEST POINT, N.Y., June 1 -- President Bush told future Army officers today that the United States can no longer deter attacks from other nations by threatening massive retaliation, but instead must strike looming enemies first.
Bush's new description of his foreign policy, sketched during the graduation address he gave at the United States Military Academy, sharply revised the positions he took as a candidate, when he emphasized the need to limit U.S. intervention to regions with immediate bearing on the nation's strategic interests.
Today, Bush said the nation "must uncover terror cells in 60 or more countries," or roughly one-third of the world. He renewed his months-old promise to "confront regimes that sponsor terror," even though he has found few American allies to endorse his desire to unseat Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the Pentagon has told him that the military could be stretched too thin.
"We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge," Bush told the cadets, who listened pensively on West Point's football field as their parents applauded robustly from the stands. "In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation will act."
The speech was the broadest definition to date of the way Bush sees America's new role in the world after the Sept. 11 attacks. He said that not only will the United States impose preemptive, unilateral military force when and where it chooses, but the nation will also punish those who engage in terror and aggression and will work to impose a universal moral clarity between good and evil.
A preemptive strategic posture not only would require the U.S. military to be faster and more flexible, which the administration already wants, but also would dictate a fundamental shift in how the military thinks about warfare. Historically, the U.S. military has not conducted preemptive or surprise attacks, such as Israel's attack on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981 or Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941.
Moving beyond the doctrine Bush enunciated last fall as a plan for rooting out terrorism and nations that support it, the speech wove together a number of additional themes that have emerged over several months into what a senior administration official described as an "overall security framework" that will be further explained in coming months, including in the National Security Strategy document due out this summer.
The framework places Bush in a far different position than the campaigner of two years ago who criticized President Bill Clinton for trying to be "the world's policeman," depending too much on the views of others to set American priorities and spending too much on foreign assistance with no direct U.S. benefit.
"Our nation's cause has always been larger than our nation's defense," Bush said today. He outlined three objectives that a White House official called the "three silos" of his foreign policy. Bush said the United States should aim to "defend the peace against threats from terrorists and tyrants," "preserve the peace by building good relations among the great powers" and "extend the peace by encouraging free and open societies on every continent."
Bush said the Cold War doctrine of deterrence, intended to curb potential aggressors through fear of overwhelming retaliation, "means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizens to defend." He said containment, an effort to restrict a state's oppression within its borders, "is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies." Aides called that a reference to Iraq and North Korea.
"If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long," Bush said. "The war on terror will not be won on the defensive."
He acknowledged a broader vision of U.S. interests than he did as a candidate. "In our development aid, in our diplomatic efforts, in our international broadcasting and in our educational assistance, the United States will promote moderation and tolerance and human rights," he said. "The requirements of freedom apply fully to Africa and Latin America and the entire Islamic world."
The White House maintains that Bush has developed this vision throughout his candidacy and presidency by stressing the end of the armed conflicts among the world's great powers that characterized the past two centuries. "The war on terrorism and the enormity of that and the enormity of American leadership and the kind of earthquake that has produced in international politics puts us in a different place than we were two years ago," a senior administration official said. "But clearly, the elements were always there."
Today's 52-minute speech came at a time when White House officials feel Bush must demonstrate anew the command of world affairs that won him praise as he assembled a coalition to support his devastating military offensive against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Bush confidants say he turned in a mixed performance during his weeklong tour of Russia and Europe that ended Tuesday.
Bush issued criticism that aides said was directed at Saudi Arabia, a moderate Arab state that is a U.S. ally but has produced extremists, including several of the Sept. 11 hijackers. "Some nations need military training to fight terror, and we'll provide it," he said. "Other nations oppose terror, but tolerate the hatred that leads to terror. And that must change." A White House official said that message also applies to other countries, including Jordan.
Bush made several mentions of the need for fair judicial systems and the rights of women. Those comments also appeared directed toward the Saudis, among others. Even as the White House has deepened its cooperation with Riyadh on the Middle East crisis, congressional and other critics have accused the administration of ignoring that country's undemocratic and discriminatory culture.
Citing former presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan as leaders who "refused to gloss over the brutality of tyrants," Bush said "moral clarity" would continue to be part of the U.S. arsenal, with military and other assistance provided to those who need it and criticism to those who deserve it. He then defended his "axis of evil" description of Iran, Iraq and North Korea.
"Some worry that it is somehow undiplomatic or impolite to speak the language of right and wrong," he said. "I disagree. Different circumstances require different methods, but not different moralities."
The world Bush described was one in which the United States would lead a coalition of great powers -- including Europe, Japan, Russia and eventually China -- that share a set of values and defense priorities, allowing them to unite in stopping threats from terrorists and rogue nations and rewarding less developed states that move toward Western economic and political systems.
"We have our best chance since the rise of the nation-state in the 17th century to build a world where the great powers compete in peace instead of prepare for war," Bush said. "The United States, Japan and our Pacific friends, and now all of Europe, share a deep commitment to human freedom."
The war against terrorism has been marked by international cooperation, and the big power states are currently cooperating on efforts to ease tensions between India and Pakistan. But deep disagreements remain over how to respond to a number of international crises. Chief among them is European concern, shared by Arab allies, over the prospect of U.S. military action against Iraq. Bush made no specific mention of Hussein, but the Iraqi president was the target of a warning against "the perilous crossroads of radicalism and technology," including chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
Bush omitted the usual administration caveat to such bellicose statements: that the United States has no current strike plans against Iraq and will consult its allies. A senior administration official said there was no conflict between Bush's pledge to act and U.S. promises to consult, which Bush stressed during his European journey.
"Since there are no specific plans for Iraq of a military sort, those consultations are just going on," the official said.
The official said that although Bush has had little success so far, he is working to convince others through intellectual argument that rogue nations are not just a threat to the United States. "You do have to rally the world to an understanding of these threats and these dangers," the official said. "The United States bears a disproportionate responsibility for security."
DeYoung reported from Washington. Staff writer Thomas E. Ricks contributed to this report.
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Air Force Probes Internet Auction
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
June 2, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Air-Force-Auction.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Air Force is looking into the Internet auction of sensitive government aircraft communications equipment.
The sales on eBay, which were reported by Newsweek, were of parts used in aircraft like the SR-71 spy plane and F-16 fighter.
``It is actively under investigation by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations,'' an Air Force spokesman, Capt. David L. Englin, said Sunday.
Antiques dealer Norb Novocin told the magazine he bought the parts in Jacksonville, Fla., for $244 in an unclaimed property sale. The seller was a shipping company which had been hired to take the parts in 1989 from Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to Warner Robins in Georgia, the magazine reported.
Novocin said that he initially called the Georgia base about buying the goods but was turned away. After he was contacted by the Air Force, Novocin said he turned over the names and addresses of purchasers and agreed to stop selling the equipment.
-------- propaganda wars
High-Stakes Reporting
By Michael Getler
Sunday, June 2, 2002
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42666-2002May31?language=printer
FBI Director Robert S. Mueller last week announced that he is shifting 480 agents from other activities to counterterrorism work and that he plans to more than double the bureau's anti-terror forces as part of a major reorganization.
News organizations ought to do that as well.
Two weeks ago, Mueller, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge all issued rather depressing and frightening warnings about the prospect of new terrorist attacks in the United States. "It's inevitable," Mueller was quoted as telling a closed meeting of the National Association of District Attorneys. "There will be another terrorist attack," he said, and "we will not be able to stop it," the Associated Press reported. Earlier, Rumsfeld had connected that baseline fear to the worst expression of what could lie ahead -- an attack with a so-called weapon of mass destruction, meaning a nuclear bomb, or a less devastating radioactive device known as a "dirty bomb," or chemical or biological weapons.
Whatever propelled these warnings onto the airwaves at this time -- whether there was some politics mixed up in it or some effort to shift the focus from disclosures about pre-Sept. 11 warnings -- there is only peril in not mobilizing to reduce the sense of inevitability about these threats.
The patterns are all there. The al Qaeda terrorist network has shown a steady escalation of targets and weaponry -- from the early 1993 truck bombing of the World Trade Center in New York, to attacks on U.S. barracks and embassies abroad in 1996 and '98, to the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, to Sept. 11, 2001. It would not be surprising if its next attempt uses a weapon even more deadly than fully loaded jetliners. Al Qaeda also puts a high premium on patience, as the time between the two attacks on the World Trade Center shows, and Americans sometimes forget too quickly and drop their guard.
The government is undoubtedly doing all it can to combat this threat. But the press, too, can play a larger role if individual news organizations commit as much of their reporting resources as possible to terrorism coverage over the long haul. Much, in fact almost all, of what the public now knows about what happened before Sept. 11 has come because of hard digging by news organizations and a handful of government employees whose behind-the-scenes whistle-blowing and warnings have made their way into the public domain. Whatever ability we as citizens now have to understand the murky world of counterterrorism and the pitfalls of insufficient alertness, coordination and communication by government agencies, comes from the news media. An escalation in the next undetected attack could be a life-and-death matter well beyond Sept. 11 proportions. So the more that is uncovered by the government, and the press, the better. The press doesn't have spies or satellites or subpoena power. But it can keep asking questions here, and abroad, and keep challenging authorities about what is going on. The more people doing this the better.
The abroad part is important. Many stories in the past decade about thwarted plots and actual attacks were from Asia and Africa and were harbingers of things to come. A lot of important intelligence recently about what was unfolding in the United States came from the French, Italians, Germans, Spanish and others.
Here at home, aside from hoping that the FBI and CIA can detect and disrupt the new dangers, one wonders whether the Coast Guard and border security forces will be beefed up enough to have a chance of being effective, whether the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Federal Aviation Administration will adopt procedures that have a chance of preventing disasters, whether cities, especially Washington, are anywhere near where they need to be in terms of preparedness for a terrorist attack. Those, and many other questions that reporters know to ask when they stay on the trail of a story, need to be posed again and again. The stakes could hardly be higher.
You can reach me at (202) 334-7582 or via e-mail at:
ombudsman@washpost.com
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS
Scrapping domestic-spying restrictions 'goes too far'
By Joyce Howard Price
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
June 2, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020602-70533128.htm
"I get very, very queasy when federal law enforcement is effectively going back to the bad old days when the FBI was spying on people like Martin Luther King," Rep. James F. Sensenbrenner Jr. of Wisconsin said yesterday on CNN's "Novak, Hunt & Shields.
"The Levi guidelines were designed to prevent that from happening again," he added. "And nothing has told me that adherence to the Levi guidelines were what caused 9/11."
Mr. Sensenbrenner, a conservative, pointed out that the surveillance guidelines were "originally promulgated by a Republican administration" in 1976 and have "worked so well."
The chairman said he was disturbed to learn Thursday that Attorney General John Ashcroft had "tossed them in the wastebasket" as part of a reorganization of the FBI, prompted by that agency's intelligence failures prior to the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Implemented by Ed Levi, attorney general under President Ford, the guidelines required the FBI to show evidence of a crime before engaging in domestic spying. The restrictions grew out of the FBI's civil rights abuses under Director J. Edgar Hoover in the 1960s and 1970s.
Mr. Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III have said surveillance guidelines announced last week will allow the FBI to monitor Internet sites, libraries, churches, rallies and political organizations to help prevent acts of domestic terrorism. Mr. Ashcroft says that the changes are necessary, and that there won't be the abuses Mr. Sensenbrenner is worried about.
"I don't think we need to throw respect for civil liberties into the trash heap in order to get rid of the problems the FBI has had systematically," said Mr. Sensenbrenner, whose committee will seek testimony about the changes from Mr. Ashcroft and Mr. Mueller.
The Judiciary Committee has oversight responsibility over the Justice Department and the FBI.
Robert Novak and Al Hunt, co-hosts of yesterday's edition of "Novak, Hunt & Shields," expressed surprise that the Judiciary chairman attacked a major tenet of the new FBI surveillance guidelines. "That changes the whole dynamics of this issue," Mr. Hunt said.
Mr. Novak said he was also surprised to hear the congressman say Mr. Ashcroft gave him only two hours' advance notice that he had killed the Levi guidelines. "I think that may be the Bush administration's penchant for secrecy, but I also think they're running a little scared on the criticism of the FBI," Mr. Novak said.
Mr. Ashcroft defended the surveillance changes in multiple network television interviews Friday. On CNN's "Larry King Live," he said, referring to the former guidelines, that "the premise was that there could be no activity by the FBI without a specific lead or a preliminary investigation being opened or a full-blown investigation being opened."
Mr. Ashcroft said the old guidelines barred FBI agents from attending open meetings or rallies in public parks, where people were railing against the United States "if there hadn't been any lead or evidence that a crime had been committed or was being committed."
But he said FBI agents need more flexibility because their focus will be on preventing crimes.
"This doesn't authorize people to go into private places, to eavesdrop, to tape record, to otherwise surveil private settings," Mr. Ashcroft said on Friday on ABC's "Good Morning, America."
----
Wary of Risk, Slow to Adapt, F.B.I. Stumbles in Terror War
New York Times
June 2, 2002
By DON VAN NATTA Jr. and DAVID JOHNSTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/02/national/02FBI.html
WASHINGTON, June 1 - When the director of the F.B.I., Robert S. Mueller III, acknowledged on Wednesday that the agency had missed warning signals on terrorism, he stunned many Americans. But his statement was not news to some veterans of the agency - or lawmakers who now say they treated the F.B.I. with too much deference for too many years.
These officials say the F.B.I., despite efforts to strengthen its counterterrorism programs over the last decade, and despite hefty increases in its budget, never developed a nimble enough structure, analytic capability or sense of mission to foil terrorist plots before they were carried out.
Interviews with nearly two dozen current and former F.B.I., Justice Department and intelligence officials, many of them at a senior level, suggest that Mr. Mueller faces many hurdles in fulfilling his promise to transform the agency's rigid, risk-averse culture into the kind of terror prevention agency he foresees. Some officials even question whether the bureau can be salvaged, or whether it should be broken apart so that the government can create a domestic intelligence agency separate from the F.B.I.
"There's got to be follow-through on this reorganization," said Robert S. Bryant, a former deputy F.B.I. director. "This isn't a law enforcement issue. We are at war. We've got to get more information. There has to be discipline to stay at it and pull it all together from the F.B.I. and other sources in the government."
In announcing the reorganization this past week, Mr. Mueller said the bureau would hire 400 more analysts, including 25 officers to be borrowed from the Central Intelligence Agency. He also announced plans to establish "flying squads" of terrorism experts based at F.B.I. headquarters, who would feed intelligence to field offices.
In an interview today, Mr. Mueller said the changes would vastly enhance the F.B.I.'s ability to thwart terrorists. He offered no assurance that the bureau would ever eliminate all terrorist threats.
Still, he said his reorganization proposal - unlike past restructuring efforts - had a better chance of success because the hijackings drove home the realization that change cannot wait.
"It's a combination of circumstances, but I'm certain that Sept. 11 has had a dramatic effect on every member of the F.B.I. to do everything we can to prevent any additional terrorist attacks," he said. "So there is an openness and willingness to change and a new understanding of the threats we face in the future."
Agents realize, Mr. Mueller said, that the old criteria for success within the F.B.I. no longer apply.
"We've come to understand that we are not going to be judged in the future by how many successful prosecutions we have of terrorists, but will be judged by our capacity to prevent additional terrorist attacks," he said. "It's picking up information that may assist in preventing terrorist attacks and moving it to where it can help."
Hiring hundreds more agents, analysts and linguists may be the easiest fix. Far more difficult, many officials say, is the challenge of remaking the F.B.I.'s dysfunctional bureaucracy.
"Twenty-five years ago, the thought was you had to tame down the F.B.I., they were out of control," one retired senior F.B.I. official said.
"But in the last 15 years, we have become a very docile, don't-take-any-risks agency, particularly at headquarters. And if you make a mistake and it blows up in your face, then your career is shot, because basically it's one strike and you are out of the F.B.I. All that has to change."
One indicator of the paralytic fear of risk-taking was how F.B.I. headquarters responded to the memorandum written last July by an agent from Phoenix. The agent, Kenneth J. Williams, urged a broad survey of American aviation schools based on his concern that Middle Eastern men, possibly connected to Osama bin Laden, were training at a flight school in Arizona.
But officials at headquarters rejected his proposal. Mr. Mueller has said that the plan was deferred for lack of resources. But other officials pointed to another reason: the worry that such an effort might be criticized in Congress as racial profiling. Mr. Williams's idea died, until after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
The problems have been apparent for years. In 1999, the chief of the F.B.I.'s counterterrorism unit, Dale Watson, concluded that too few agents around the country were working to thwart terrorism. In March 2000, he convened a meeting at headquarters of the agents in charge of all 56 field offices. Some agents called the meeting "Terrorism 101" or "Terrorism for Dummies."
Mr. Watson and other senior officials were startled to learn how little some bureau offices around the country, operating independently of headquarters, had done to investigate terrorism.
Even after the meeting, in the months before Sept. 11, senior agents at headquarters were reduced to repeatedly cajoling the special agents in charge of the field offices to work harder on counterterrorism inquiries. They even threatened to withhold managers' raises and bonuses if they did not pay more attention to the problem.
Beyond the issue of whether the agency can fix itself is a political question.
Will Mr. Mueller, a former United States attorney, and his top deputies maintain the support of the Bush administration, particularly in the face of skeptical Congressional inquiries into what they knew and when they knew it in the weeks and months before Sept. 11?
The F.B.I.'s current state - so unready, so unprepared and so unable to assess the accumulating warning signs of the hijackings - is the result of years of neglect by the successors to J. Edgar Hoover, who ran the agency for 48 years. Each director missed repeated opportunities to change a law enforcement agency that many critics believe was better suited to catching criminals of the Bonnie and Clyde era than trying to prevent crimes plotted by Osama bin Laden's terrorism network.
Current and former F.B.I. agents have long believed that one of the bureau's great weaknesses is its failure to properly analyze the immense amount of information that it collects, and to share it among its field offices. That, too, must change, former agents say.
Counterterrorism Warnings of Danger and a Step Not Taken
The sweltering day in September 1993 that Louis J. Freeh was sworn in as director of the F.B.I. was triumphal. The agency had just emerged from one of the most wrenching periods in its history - marked by the fatal confrontations at Ruby Ridge, in Idaho, and the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Tex. Now a former F.B.I. agent was taking over an agency that in the years after Hoover had been managed, and in some ways mismanaged, by outsiders.
Finally, agents in the field could look at their new boss as one of their own.
Eight years later, when Mr. Freeh stepped down, a stewardship that had begun in hope and jubilation ended in frustration. By the time he retired in the summer of 2001, Mr. Freeh had become the most powerful director since Hoover, but he left the F.B.I. badly damaged.
Lawmakers in both parties clamored for change at an agency they attacked as ineptly managed, resistant to change and unwilling to admit mistakes. Mr. Freeh also lost the confidence of some of his own troops.
The F.B.I. had been attacked as heavy-handed in its investigative tactics in the case of Wen Ho Lee, a nuclear scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The bureau was deeply embarrassed by the arrest of Robert P. Hanssen, a senior counterintelligence agent, as a Russian spy. It could not even keep track of its own records and disclosed that it had failed to turn over thousands of pages of internal documents to the defense team for Timothy J. McVeigh, the convicted Oklahoma City bomber who was executed last year.
Mr. Freeh tried to strengthen the agency's counterterrorism efforts. Throughout the 1990's, the F.B.I.'s spending on counterterrorism tripled and the number of agents assigned to terrorism cases increased 250 percent. The bureau established a counterterrorism center and created an operating division to combat domestic and international terror. In 1996, Attorney General Janet Reno ordered what officials said was the first full briefing on the threat posed by Osama bin Laden. At that time, the bureau was not qualified to deliver it. The briefing was given to Ms. Reno by the C.I.A. instead.
Last summer, Attorney General John Ashcroft rejected the bureau's plea for more money for counterterrorism. In a Sept. 10 submission to the Bush administration's budget office, Mr. Ashcroft refused to endorse an F.B.I. request for $58 million for 149 new counterterrorism field agents, 200 additional analysts and 54 additional translators.
He also proposed a $65 million cut for a program that would have given state and local counterterrorism grants for equipment and training. After Sept. 11, Mr. Ashcroft proposed $2 billion for F.B.I. counterterrorism measures.
In a statement today, Barbara Comstock, the Justice Department's director of public affairs, said that the rejected $58 million request represented "only a little over 1 percent" of the Justice Department's recommended $3.8 billion for the F.B.I. in the fiscal year, and was "only a fraction of the budget which aids in preventing terrorism."
She said that the Sept. 10 memorandum, a preliminary submission on the budget for the fiscal year that will begin next October 1, included "an overall $660 million increase in funding for items that assist in combating terrorism," such as technology to improve the analysis of intelligence.
By the mid-1990's, a few voices in the F.B.I. were warning that the United States faced a grave danger. Intelligence reports indicated that veterans of Afghanistan's war to expel the Russians had spawned a new generation of Islamic militants financed by anti-American extremists like Mr. bin Laden. These young men were unfazed by the threat of prosecution and imprisonment.
In 1998, Robert S. Bryant, then the deputy director, wrote a report titled "F.B.I. Strategic Plan: 1998-2003, `Keeping Tomorrow Safe.' " In the report, Mr. Bryant declared that counterterrorism was a "tier one" program that needed to get the highest priority and the most resources within the F.B.I. The bureau, he said, must focus its efforts on "foreign intelligence, terrorist and criminal activities that directly threaten the national or economic security of the U.S."
"These offenses fall almost exclusively within the jurisdiction of the F.B.I.," Mr. Bryant wrote. "Issues in this area are of such importance to U.S. national interests that they must receive priority attention."
The bureau's leaders tried to get up to speed on the terrorism threat, but officials say several restructuring plans failed to make the bureaucracy more adept or responsive.
One idea was to establish an office of intelligence at F.B.I. headquarters. "This will send an important signal to F.B.I. managers at all levels and assist in the development of an F.B.I. culture that values and effectively uses intelligence," one report said. But the proposed consolidation of power in Washington alienated and angered many agents from field offices around the country, where the power had resided.
"More and more authority was taken over by headquarters, less and less was given to the field agents, and more and more field agents resented headquarters and believed they didn't support them," a former F.B.I. official said.
Cultural Collisions A Growing Budget, but No Strategy
Another former top F.B.I. official said counterterrorism was always seen as secondary to more glamorous bank robbery and public corruption cases. "The counterterrorism guys never arrested anyone, never stopped anything," the official said. "It was hard to keep score on their effectiveness."
In private memorandums, some obtained this week by The New York Times, senior F.B.I. officials acknowledged that their counterterrorism program was deeply troubled and largely ineffective.
An internal memorandum, dated Aug. 22, 2000, from Mr. Watson, then in charge of counterterrorism, to Thomas J. Pickard, the deputy director at the time, acknowledged the F.B.I.'s lack of coherent prevention strategy.
"While the F.B.I. has traditionally relied on an approach that focused generally on the identification, penetration and neutralization of terrorist organizations," Mr. Watson wrote, "the bureau has not developed a `grand strategy' in which resources and programs are systematically directed toward progressively reducing and neutralizing and ultimately eliminating the terrorist threat to U.S. interests."
Officials in the administration of President Bill Clinton said that the F.B.I. under Mr. Freeh was difficult to manage because he took the bureau's traditional independence too far. His effort to forge alliances with Republicans in Congress, a step that angered Mr. Clinton, drove a wedge between the president's national security staff and the F.B.I.
At the same time, the F.B.I. clung to its old case-by-case operational methods, which meant that counterterrorism agents operated in much the same way they had during the Hoover era. Agents prevented unfolding plots on occasion, but only if investigators stumbled across a lead in the course of a specific case.
Mr. Freeh did not respond to a request for an interview this week.
Each terrorist act in the 1990's brought a renewed spate of high-level F.B.I. meetings and budget requests to Congress. The Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, the Khobar Towers attack in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the East Africa embassy bombings in 1998 and the suicide explosion on the Navy destroyer Cole in Yemen in October 2000 all led to new infusions of money from Congress. By the time Mr. Freeh retired, the F.B.I.'s budget had grown 58 percent, to $3.4 billion during his tenure, but at its core the agency remained unchanged.
Still, associates of Mr. Freeh said he deserved credit for some changes. He traveled widely and increased the number of overseas F.B.I. offices to 44 from 22. These legal attachés made contacts with foreign security services that were invaluable after the hijackings, but were not given the job of gathering information about terror threats.
But even as Mr. Freeh extended the F.B.I.'s reactive ability around the world, associates said he focused on specific cases and paid too little attention to building the bureau's ability to collect and analyze intelligence.
He assumed direct responsibility for the F.B.I.'s investigation of the Khobar Towers bombing in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, in July 1996, which killed 19 American airmen.
He flew frequently to Riyadh, often frustrated by the Saudis' lack of cooperation. The case seemed to fascinate him. He spent hours poring over interview reports and meeting with agents on the case. Some subordinates said it typified Mr. Freeh's willingness to immerse himself in specific cases, even if it meant paying too little attention to larger structural issues and law enforcement priorities.
Some analysts and linguists were hired, but in the macho culture of the F.B.I., they were dismissed as desk-bound pencil-pushers. They were passed over for promotions and wrote reports that often went unread. Unlike the C.I.A., the F.B.I. did not recruit a professional group of highly trained analysts with access to senior agency officials.
The agency also had serious cultural problems. Some agents complained about Mr. Freeh's frequent lectures on personal conduct, saying it contributed to a risk-averse climate that discouraged innovation. The bureau's internal affairs unit, the Office of Professional Responsibility, became a much-feared inquisitor, sometimes damaging careers over minor offenses like using a bureau car for personal matters.
"He focused more on what agents were doing personally than on investigations," a former senior F.B.I. official said. "It became the Federal Bureau of Internal Investigation of its own people, as opposed to a bureau committed to investigating and stopping terrorism. The priorities were out of whack."
Officials at F.B.I. headquarters accepted promotions with mixed feelings, fearing that a mistake could mean a Congressional inquiry and a quick end to their careers. It was easier to reject an untested investigative proposal from a field office than to take the inevitable blame if the idea failed or was criticized by Congress.
Agents also complained that the agency's analytical problems were made worse by an antiquated computer system. For instance, agents cannot send e-mail messages from their desktop computers; they must use personal laptops to send them.
Year after year, senior officials said, Congress refused to spend the hundreds of millions needed to upgrade the F.B.I.'s computer system. Congress, wary after spending hundreds of millions on failed computer systems for other agencies, wanted the bureau to ensure that the system would work. Three years ago, the bureau hired a former I.B.M. executive to set up a system, but agents say it is still years away from completion.
Congress Kid-Glove Treatment on Capitol Hill
For decades, the F.B.I. has held the upper hand as lawmakers, mindful of its public stature as well as the real power it can wield, have been reluctant to criticize its operations but eager to lavish spending on it.
The bureau's budget has more than doubled in less than a decade, from $2.06 billion in 1994 to the $4.2 billion it is requesting for 2003 - and, given the current climate, likely to get.
"It is an agency which, even when it has been severely criticized, almost routinely gets more budget appropriations than it asks for," said James X. Dempsey, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology and a veteran observer of the F.B.I.'s operations on Capitol Hill. "And even serious problems like those revealed in the Waco and Ruby Ridge fiascos or the lab scandal yield no legislative limits or legislative reforms."
Besides the coming Intelligence Committee hearings on the Sept. 11 attacks, the Senate Judiciary Committee this week will continue the F.B.I. oversight hearings it began last summer. The latest session is scheduled for Thursday as the committee chairman, Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, and Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, a Republican critic of the bureau, seek to remedy what they contend is a failure by Congress to scrutinize the bureau.
Though Congress has initiated inquiries into specific F.B.I. actions in recent years - notably a series of hearings on the 1993 assault on the Branch Davidian compound and 1995 hearings investigating the shootings during the 1992 siege at Ruby Ridge - Mr. Leahy said regular oversight has been almost nonexistent.
"These are the first systematic oversight hearings there have been in decades," Mr. Leahy said, adding that the sessions had uncovered widespread F.B.I. computer inadequacies and found that the agency was "not used to anybody asking questions."
Mr. Leahy and Mr. Grassley have offered legislation that would institute significant changes at the F.B.I. and give its inspector general new power and resources to conduct internal investigations. The legislation was adopted by the Judiciary Committee, but Mr. Leahy said it was being blocked in the Senate by an anonymous "hold" placed on it by a Republican senator.
Mr. Grassley said Congress has had the bureau on a "long leash" for years, perhaps because of fear of retaliation. "If people believe it, you can see why there's not proper oversight," he said.
The roots of any fear - and of Congress's deferential treatment - date to the days of J. Edgar Hoover, who compiled files on members of Congress and did not hesitate to use the information as leverage to achieve his political and legislative ends.
William G. Hundley, a Washington lawyer who oversaw organized crime investigations at the Justice Department in the 1960's, said he witnessed that tactic. He said he once learned that two members of Congress had taken Cadillacs from men trying to promote their business interests, but Hoover told the lawmakers that they were about to be investigated, and the cars were returned before the investigation could begin.
In recent years, lawmakers and aides say, the bureau has had a more conventional approach, cultivating lawmakers through exclusive briefings or working publicly with a politician when constituents are victims of high-profile crimes.
Mr. Dempsey said another way the bureau ingratiates itself is to "detail" personnel to assist the staffs of Congressional committees, at the F.B.I.'s expense.
Mr. Freeh was popular with Republicans on Capitol Hill because of his support for a special prosecutor to look into allegations of fund-raising improprieties at the Clinton White House. One lawmaker said Mr. Freeh's stature clearly "insulated" the F.B.I. from Congressional criticism.
Mr. Leahy said he was not certain whether the inquiries into the Sept. 11 attacks would be the genesis of a new relationship between Congress and the bureau but added that he hoped one was emerging.
"There is no institution of our government that should be above question," he said.
The Field Offices Anger and Frustration Toward Headquarters
Mr. Mueller is now trying to force the F.B.I. to shed its traditional case-oriented approach to its job. In its place, he hopes to build what amounts to a new agency, a Federal Bureau of Prevention whose central mission is to collect, analyze and act on information that will help prevent attacks.
But it is uncertain whether Mr. Mueller, or anyone, can reorganize an institution whose agents have been trained to solve crimes.
One of the most difficult challenges facing Mr. Mueller is a widespread perception in the bureau's 56 field offices that headquarters does not support their efforts.
That anger was seen last month when Coleen Rowley, the senior Minneapolis agent, wrote a letter to Mr. Mueller complaining that headquarters had repeatedly stymied requests from agents in her Minneapolis office who were seeking a search warrant to examine the contents of Zacarias Moussaoui's computer, in the weeks before Sept. 11. Ms. Rowley said the F.B.I. was hamstrung by a hypersensitive "circle the wagons" culture when responding to criticism.
This week, Mr. Ashcroft changed the attorney general's surveillance guidelines, which will allow special agents in charge of field offices to begin criminal investigations without the express approval of headquarters.
"Saying that the folks in the field are right, that they could have superior insight or knowledge, is a dramatic change," said David J. Garrow, a legal historian and professor at Emory Law School. "It's actually a revolution in transferring initiative in the F.B.I. to the field rather than the traditional way."
Sanford J. Ungar, the president of Goucher College and an authority on the F.B.I., said it was easier to change the bureau's priorities than its culture.
"The reason the F.B.I. is doomed to have this happen over and over again has something to do with this F.B.I. culture," Mr. Ungar said. "If you want to get ahead in the F.B.I. you don't rock the boat, you don't challenge headquarters, don't present a lot of new ideas."
Despite all the talk of counterterrorism efforts in recent years, a retired special agent in Phoenix, James H. Hauswirth, wrote to Mr. Mueller last December that counterterrorism was "the lowest investigative priority in the Phoenix division," government officials said.
A perceived lack of investigative zeal at headquarters has startled agents in field offices, around the country, several former F.B.I. officials said.
"These problems have become legendary - the lack of analysis by headquarters, the lack of support from headquarters, the lack of ability to get things approved by headquarters," one former official said. "Hopefully it will change, but the agents around the country are demoralized. It could take years to fix."
F.B.I. vs. C.I.A. An Uneasy Alliance of Longtime Rivals
When agents in the Minneapolis bureau last summer contacted the Central Intelligence Agency for help in evaluating whether Zacarias Moussaoui was a terrorist, they discovered this did not sit well with their superiors in Washington.
They were reprimanded by officials at F.B.I. headquarters, who said they had committed a breach of protocol.
But former Justice Department officials say that the reaction demonstrated as much as anything the difficulty the two agencies have long had in working with each other.
What really bothered F.B.I. headquarters, one law enforcement official said, was having agents cooperate with the C.I.A. in ways headquarters might not be able to control.
The two agencies have been across-the-river rivals for decades. The enmity dates to the creation of the C.I.A. in 1947.
In the early years, the rivalry was rooted in the starkly different cultures of the agencies. F.B.I. agents felt that they were looked down upon as policemen by the C.I.A. officers with their more worldly, sophisticated air.
In 1970, two years before his death, J. Edgar Hoover broke off all liaison with the C.I.A., insisting that his agents could communicate only by memorandums cleared by him. This breach was caused when the C.I.A. refused to tell the bureau the name of an F.B.I. agent who had talked to the C.I.A. without Hoover's permission.
Even so, the C.I.A., prohibited by its charter from conducting investigations in the United States, relied on the F.B.I. to help it with counterintelligence investigations.
Two modern spy cases embarrassed each agency in turn and gave the other a moment of triumph.
When Aldrich H. Ames, a C.I.A. officer, was arrested in 1994 for spying for the Russians, the F.B.I. officials were lauded for cracking the case. They said the insular atmosphere at the C.I.A. allowed Mr. Ames to get away with his betrayal, and they were confident they would no longer be excluded.
The wheel turned in February 2001 when Mr. Hanssen, a veteran F.B.I. agent, was arrested on charges of spying for the Russians for two decades.
In announcing changes at the bureau this week, Mr. Mueller became the latest director to promise cooperation between the two agencies. The first step, he said, would be to have 25 C.I.A. officers detailed to the bureau to help with intelligence analysis.
An autopsy on the performance of both agencies will begin on Tuesday inside S-407, the electronically impenetrable hearing room of the Senate Intelligence Committee, where, behind soundproof double doors, members of the House and Senate intelligence panels will begin their official inquiry into lapses before the Sept. 11 attacks.
The lawmakers will seek to unravel why the F.B.I., with telling clues in its possession, could not put together the Sept. 11 puzzle in time. Some bureau veterans say they already know at least part of the answer.
"The F.B.I. is the greatest in the world at investigating a crime after it happened, but it is not equipped to prevent crimes," one former senior official said. "It wasn't in the 90's, it wasn't on 9/11.
"We didn't know what we knew."
----
Lawyer: Most Cuba Detainees Not Terrorists
Young Men Moved by Arabic TV, 'Religious Fervor' Into Trip to Afghanistan, He Says
By John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 2, 2002; Page A11
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A45868-2002Jun1?language=printer
Most detainees at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have no affiliation with al Qaeda or the Taliban and are largely young Arab men who rushed to Afghanistan with visions of assisting the needy or fighting American troops, according to a lawyer who represents scores of the captives.
Inflamed by televised images of deprivation, the men now detained left jobs and families to go to Afghanistan, said Najeeb Al-Nauimi, a lawyer who represents about 60 of the 384 captives at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. Once in Afghanistan, the great majority never touched a gun or got anywhere near Osama bin Laden's training camps, he said.
"Many of my clients are 20- to 24-year-olds who saw images being shown over and over on [Arabic television network] al-Jazeera of the bombardments of Afghan children, and they were moved by emotions of religious fervor," said Al-Nauimi, a former Qatari justice minister. "They were under intense propaganda, and for them bin Laden is a kind of Billy the Kid."
Al-Nauimi's account could not be corroborated; parts of it have appeared in some Middle Eastern news outlets, and at least one U.S. law firm that represents Kuwaiti detainees at Guantanamo Bay has made some similar claims. It is difficult to assess Al-Nauimi's assertions because the Pentagon has released virtually no information about the detainees. Experts and government officials caution that terrorists have often used charitable work as cover, and many Muslim philanthropic groups have been exploited as fronts for terror financing.
Marine Maj. Riccoh Player, a Pentagon spokesman, raised questions about Al-Nauimi's account.
"A reasonable person would observe that these guys were picked up in an area where there was a conflict or a prison uprising, and that they likely were engaged in something nefarious," Player said. "They're still being interrogated, so I can't go any further than that."
Patrick Clawson, a Middle East expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, agreed that once the Afghan war began last October, some Arab media outlets stoked anti-American fervor and thousands of Arabs rushed to Afghanistan. But he added that many were responding in part to Muslim clerics' exhortations to make war on the Americans there.
"It's putting a benign spin on things to say they were there largely to do charitable work," Clawson said. "Many had dreams of making jihad against America. While they might have been incompetent combatants, if things had worked out differently they might be back home now bragging about their war stories."
Indeed, the U.S. military targeted young Arab men who volunteered to fight in Afghanistan during the U.S. bombing campaign last fall. U.S. military planners saw the Taliban militia's 55th Brigade, a seasoned assault force of several thousand Arabs and other foreigners, as the striking arm of Osama bin Laden's force in Afghanistan.
Legal experts said that if Al-Nauimi is correct, many prisoners in Cuba are unlikely to be charged with crimes. The detainees' attorneys may try to use these accounts and international law in an attempt to free them. But, the experts add, the U.S. government has no obligation to do so.
"International legal principle is simple," said Michael Glennon, an expert in international law at the Woodrow Wilson International Center. "Prolonged arbitrary detention is unlawful."
But federal courts are "highly unlikely" to force the Bush administration to release them, Glennon said. The courts are loath to reverse a government action concerning events overseas and involving matters of national security, he said, especially if Congress has implicitly given approval.
Al-Nauimi is visiting Washington to argue his clients' case to Pentagon officials, and said he has held off filing a lawsuit on their behalf. As head of an international team of attorneys from several Arab nations, he could put pressure on the Bush administration at a time when it seeks the Muslim world's favor.
The lawyer said his research -- based largely on conversations with detainees' families -- shows that the Guantanamo Bay captives fall into three general categories. The first comprises "Arab Afghans," al Qaeda members or sympathizers who have fought in Afghanistan for years. Many are fugitives from their native countries, wanted for crimes such as terrorism and subversion. He said he believes none of his clients is in this category.
The second group are devout Muslims who spent their summer holidays in Afghanistan doing charitable work such as building mosques, helping refugees and feeding orphans. They were following a tradition of carrying out such efforts during vacations, but found themselves trapped in Afghanistan after Sept. 11.
One example from this group, he said, is a sickly, unemployed Qatari man who traveled to Afghanistan in July to help assist refugees. When the war broke out, the man, whom Al-Nauimi declined to identify, telephoned his family to say fellow aid workers had helped move him by car and camel. He was later captured in the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar and taken to Cuba.
Men in the third category grew enraged after Sept. 11 at the plight of Afghan refugees or civilians injured by U.S. warplanes. The victims' stories were recounted on Arab television networks such as al-Jazeera, which is based in Qatar. Al-Nauimi said many of his clients seized on the idea of going there.
"In Islam, if a Muslim state is under attack, and a jihad [struggle or holy war] is declared, it's an obligation to go help," either militarily or by charitable acts, he said.
By Al-Nauimi's telling, 5,000 Arab men rushed to Pakistan and then Afghanistan at the time the U.S. assault began. Al-Nauimi said that while some of his clients may have wanted to fight the Americans, the vast majority never did.
Lawyers for a number of the Guantanamo inmates say that after the rapid U.S. victory in Afghanistan, troops began offering bounties for captured al Qaeda and Taliban fighters. Tribesmen along the Afghan-Pakistan border handed over hundreds of Arabs to U.S. Special Forces, the attorneys said.
Three hundred teachers from Saudi Arabia took vacation from government jobs and trekked to Afghanistan in October and November but hastily went home after the fighting started, Al-Nauimi said. Some were arrested in Pakistan but bribed their way out, he said.
In all, 295 made their way back. In the end, Pakistani police turned over the other five to the Americans, he said.
One was Anwar Hamdan Al-Nur, who, in a letter to his family transmitted by the International Committee for the Red Cross and produced by Al-Nauimi, expressed concern about a workaday matter that would seem of little consequence to hardened jihadists.
"If my vacation time is used up, tell my superiors I have a reason," he instructed his family in a letter from his Guantanamo Bay cell. "Maybe you can get it extended for me. Please speak to my bosses. Call [school supervisor] Mahmoud and tell him to give me the reserve vacation I deserve."
The captives' absence from work has become a matter of some gravity for their families. David Henderson, a consultant to a separate legal team that represents 11 Kuwaitis at Guantanamo Bay, said that their relatives in Kuwait are falling behind on mortgage payments and household bills.
The usually generous Kuwaiti government insists that relatives of anyone detained in a foreign country present documents outlining formal charges before they can collect benefits. But the United States has not charged any detainee, making it difficult for families to stave off creditors, Henderson said.
The detainees' letters offer glimpses of life in the prison camp.
One note, from an inmate named Khalid bin Suleiman Arbaish, recounted his joining a week-long prisoners' hunger strike in February to protest conditions at the facility.
"I've discovered I'm a real man," he told his family. "I can sustain hardship, and be patient, with God's will. . . . Don't be upset for me. I'm happy and busy, my friends and I."
Al-Nauimi said he will raise questions about many captives' guilt during his upcoming meeting with Pentagon officials. He said he may cite the case of Abdul Razeq, 25, an Afghan who was arrested by U.S. troops and flown to Guantanamo Bay. In an account first described by Newsweek magazine and partially confirmed by Al-Nauimi, Razeq was flown back to Afghanistan and placed in a locked hospital room after U.S. interrogators established he was emotionally disturbed.
"It took them four months to figure out he was mentally unstable," Al-Nauimi said. "What about the innocent ones?"
----
Feds Debate Sept. 11 Intelligence
June 2, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Attacks-Investigation.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- U.S. intelligence agencies could have better analyzed information that pointed to Sept. 11, but probably could not have prevented the attacks, the attorney general and FBI director said Sunday.
Members of Congress' intelligence committees promised to pursue intelligence gathering and missed clues when closed-door hearings begin Tuesday on why the terrorist hijackings were not foreseen.
``We have got to do a better job of putting the pieces together,'' said FBI Director Robert Mueller, as a new report disclosed the failure of intelligence agencies to share information on suspected al-Qaida terrorists before Sept. 11.
Mueller and Attorney General John Ashcroft, however, said it was not likely that more coordination could have stopped the attacks.
``The information we now have does not indicate that there was a substantial likelihood of detecting this,'' Ashcroft said on ABC's ``This Week.'' Mueller's remarks came on NBC's ``Meet The Press.''
They did not directly address a Newsweek report that the CIA knew two of the hijackers met at an al-Qaida summit in Malaysia in January 2000, but then failed to alert the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the FBI. The CIA declined comment.
But a U.S. intelligence official familiar with the investigation said the significance of that meeting increased after it became clear the two were associated with an alleged mastermind of the October 2000, bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. ``In retrospect, we all could have done better,'' the official said.
Already the FBI has come under criticism for not pursuing warnings from a Phoenix field officer about Middle Eastern men training at American flight schools and for not cooperating with the Minneapolis office's investigation into Zacarias Moussaoui, later indicted as a conspirator in the attacks.
Those kind of communications lapses will be reviewed by the joint House and Senate intelligence committees in their hearings, said Sen. Richard Shelby, the top Republican on the Senate committee.
``Part of this goes right to the heart of communication between the various intelligence agencies. It has not been a flow of information when people needed it,'' Shelby, R-Ala., said on ``Meet the Press.''
``People talk a great deal about connecting the dots,'' said Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California, ranking Democrat on the House committee. The intelligence agencies ``didn't even see the dots, they didn't understand the salience of the dots.''
At the same time, the chairman of the house committee urged Americans to be patient, saying it was a mistake to look at ``one little part of the tapestry'' of what went on before Sept. 11.
``This is serious business and we want to go on the basis of fact,'' said Rep. Porter Goss, R-Fla.
The Senate Judiciary Committee plans a public hearing Thursday at which Coleen Rowley, the Minneapolis FBI agent who wrote a letter to Mueller strongly critical of bureau headquarters' handling of the Moussaoui case, is expected to testify.
Ashcroft said that Rowley does not face dismissal because of the letter, which Mueller said he welcomed. ``In order for the bureau to change we need to open ourselves up to suggestions as well as criticisms,'' the director said.
Mueller last week announced major FBI changes that were intended to better collect and analyze information about terrorist threats and place more emphasis on prevention.
The Bush administration also decided last week to issue new surveillance guidelines that allow the FBI to monitor Internet sites, libraries, churches and other places open to the public to help prevent domestic terrorism.
Critics of the expanded powers say they will infringe on civil liberties.
``We've got a wartime situation,'' Ashcroft said on CNN's ``Late Edition.''
``We've got al-Qaida with real strength around the country and around the world. And we need to make sure that we're doing everything possible to prevent the next attack.''
-------- terrorism
Islamic militant groups get 2,000 U.S. recruits
June 2, 2002
AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020602-12597164.htm
Up to 2,000 people have left the United States over the past 20 years to fight in Islamic militant groups around the world, according to the weekly U.S. News & World Report magazine.
The figure includes foreign-born U.S. permanent residents, as well as U.S. citizens, according to the magazine, which bases its information on interviews with past and present U.S. and foreign intelligence officials, Islamic militants, and court documents.
The U.S. fighters have joined radical Islamic groups fighting in Chechnya, Afghanistan, Kashmir and Bosnia - including groups that Washington considers terrorist organizations.
Most who have joined the groups are Arab-Americans, but they also include U.S.-born blacks, whites, and at least one Puerto Rican, according to the magazine's Monday issue.
A Pakistani intelligence source told U.S. News that up to 400 U.S. recruits were given military training in Pakistani and Afghan jihad camps since 1989.
The most notorious case is that of John Walker Lindh, a 21-year-old who left his comfortable life in Northern California to go to a religious school in Yemen and eventually joined the Taliban, where he was captured by U.S. operatives during fighting in Afghanistan.
Lindh currently faces federal charges including conspiracy that could keep him in prison for the rest of his life.
--------
Report: al - Qaida Threatens Attacks
June 2, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Attacks-Al-Qaida.html
CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- The spokesman for the al-Qaida terror group has threatened more attacks on Americans and Jews in a message published by the pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat Sunday.
``We confirm our continuation in working to attack Americans and Jews, and targeting them, both people and buildings,'' Al-Hayat quoted Sulaiman Abu Gaith as saying in an article that the newspaper said was published on the Web site www.alneda.com. The site could not be accessed on Sunday.
``What will come to the Americans, God willing, won't be less than what has come. America should be ready and on high alert and fasten the seat belts, as with the will of God, we will come to them from where they didn't expect,'' Abu Gaith was quoted as saying. The newspaper did not give Abu Gaith's whereabouts.
Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the White House Office of Homeland Security, said Sunday in Washington that he was not familiar with the report and could not comment on its credibility.
Speaking generally of such threats, however, he said: ``We have said for some time that al-Qaida is still interested in attacking the United States. We have been working since Sept. 11 to try to prevent and disrupt their organization from attacking the United States and also to strengthen our critical infrastructure and response capabilities against future attacks.''
People purporting to speak for al-Qaida have also made threats against Jews and Westerners since Sept. 11.
Last month, FBI Director Robert Mueller warned of a possibility of a new terrorist attack against the United States.
``There will be another terrorist attack. We will not be able to stop it,'' Mueller told a meeting of the National Association of District Attorneys on May 20. ``It's something we all live with.''
Abu Gaith said the United States was targeted because of ``what it does in regions of the Islamic world,'' and of being ``in the partnership with Jews, the head of corruption and decay ... the reason behind all the injustice and oppression that befell on Muslims.''
He said all that Israel was doing in Palestinian territories for more than 50 years was with ``American blessings.''
He said U.S. policies in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia as well as in Sudan, the Philippines, Kashmir and Indonesia were against Muslims.
``After all of this, doesn't the prey have the right, while it is being slaughtered, to kick back?'' he was quoted as saying.
Abu-Ghaith was stripped of his Kuwaiti citizenship in October after the former teacher and mosque preacher appeared in television broadcasts on behalf of Osama bin Laden, the prime suspect in the Sept. 11 attacks, threatening more attacks against Westerners.
Since the United States and its allies toppled Afghanistan's Taliban rulers, who harbored bin Laden and al-Qaida, bin Laden and other al-Qaida key figures remain at large.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- energy
In Alabama, a 'Hot Spot' in the Debate Over Clean Air
By Dan Morgan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 2, 2002; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A45513-2002Jun1?language=printer
WILSONVILLE, Ala. - On a humid spring day, the E.C. Gaston power plant on the banks of the Coosa River here is almost completely enveloped by a fluffy white cloud, from which two 750-foot smokestacks rise like castle turrets.
The cloud is steam from cooling towers, and it's harmless to humans, according to Alabama Power Co. officials. Coming from the smokestacks, however, are more troubling, invisible gases that have thrust the facility into the middle of a fierce debate over the effectiveness of federal and state efforts to clean up the nation's air.
In environmental parlance, Gaston is a "hot spot" -- a plant that still emits huge volumes of pollutants despite a 12-year federal effort to curtail them nationwide.
After declining sharply in 1995, emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide -- prime culprits in acid rain and urban smog -- have been increasing steadily at Gaston. Last year they returned to their 1993 levels, ranking Gaston among the nation's dirtiest power plants.
These events, seemingly in conflict with broader environmental trends, are a consequence of the flexible approach taken to pollution controls in the landmark 1990 amendments to the 1970 Clean Air Act.
The 1990 law targeted coal-burning power plants in the Midwest and South whose wind-borne emissions bore heavy responsibility for the acid rain that was devastating forests and watersheds in the Northeast. To win over the utility industry, however, Congress rejected mandatory plant-by-plant controls. Instead, it set an overall national target for annual sulfur emissions of 8.95 million tons by 2010.
The key was a novel "market-based" system that gave individual power plants and other sulfur-emitting industries wide latitude to trade government-issued pollution allowances among themselves, or bank them for future use, as they moved toward the national cap. A similar market for emission allowances tied to nitrogen oxide is coming into being as part of an effort to reduce ozone levels.
Officials of Alabama Power Co., Gaston's owner, say they have faithfully followed the law. "In terms of public health we are well below the emission limits," said Willard Bowers, the company's vice president for environmental affairs.
In the view of the Environmental Protection Agency, the program has exceeded expectations. Total sulfur emissions from the highest-polluting plants fell from 8.7 million tons in 1990 to 3.6 million tons last year. Emissions of nitrogen oxide have declined by 1.5 million tons, or 23 percent, the EPA reports.
So successful has the program been that President Bush's "Clear Skies" initiative borrows many of its market-oriented techniques in an effort to further curb sulfur, nitrogen and mercury pollution by 2015.
But environmental organizations contend the laws are not working -- at least in certain areas. A recent survey of power plant emissions by the Washington-based public interest group US PIRG found that nitrogen oxide emissions increased at 263 of the 500 highest-polluting plants from 1995 to 2000, although overall emissions from the 500 declined by 1 million tons.
Many plants accumulated allowances in the first phase of the acid rain reduction program by exceeding their targets. This early compliance has produced a marketplace glut of sulfur dioxide allowances -- worth 8 million tons of emissions -- according to a New York commodities broker who deals in them. With allowances selling for about $170 a ton, many plants find it cheaper to buy them rather than install costly pollution-fighting equipment.
"It has perverted the outcome, allowing utilities to clean up some plants while they increase emissions nearby," said Becky Stanfield, author of a PIRG report on the topic.
Many regulators and policy experts say this overlooks the great progress since 1990.
"The issue of hot spots is a red herring," said Alan Krupnick, senior fellow at Resources for the Future in Washington. "It's true that some communities and states will be less better off than some other areas, but none is worse off. The benefits far outweigh the costs."
But frustration with the system explains why environmental organizations are putting so much stock in lawsuits filed in 1999 by the Justice Department against 51 old, coal-burning power plants, including Gaston. The suits, which Alabama Power and other utilities are fighting, charge that the plants should have installed advanced pollution controls when they made major repairs that kept them running.
Stephen Smith, executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, says the reliance on national goals ignores new scientific studies that have pinpointed the localized threat to human health posed by sulfate particles from individual plants. "The more we understand about the impact of fine particles on health, the less people are going to be supportive of pollution from individual plants," he said.
Jim Renfro, air resource specialist at Great Smoky Mountains National Park, said he has yet to see a dramatic impact from the clean air program. His station, which is affected by emissions from throughout the South, reported 140 "unhealthy air" days since 1998, including 14 high-ozone days last summer.
The Smokies are east of several Tennessee Valley Authority plants that have been producing increased emissions.
"There needs to be some sensitivity that if we set national caps, we better be careful about where we reduce and where we could potentially increase," Renfro said. "There is over-compliance [at some plants]. But what happens to the extra amount [of allowances]? It can end up being used and burned near us. That's the hot spot concern, the legal loophole."
Bowers, of Alabama Power, says his company is doing its best to keep up with environmental rules that have been changing rapidly. "There are people who say I'm not moving quick enough, but until '96 or '97, nobody even looked to power plants to control ozone," he said.
The company has budgeted $1.3 billion for additional pollution controls at all its plants by 2010 and is evaluating adding scrubbers capable of removing almost all sulfur at plants, including Gaston. There are no scrubbers in the Alabama Power system.
But the utility, a subsidiary of the huge Atlanta-based Southern Co., clearly has been adept at exploiting the vagaries of environmental regulation.
Gaston began operations in 1960, a decade before Congress passed the Clean Air Act. Today, producing electricity from coal is still the hot, dirty process it was then.
Coal pulverized to the consistency of face powder is burned at temperatures of around 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit to heat water passing through pipes. Steam from the five boilers drives five turbines that can generate 1,850 megawatts of electricity, as much as some nuclear plants.
Environmental regulations have brought some changes. Light beams now measure the opacity of gases in the stacks every few minutes, and flickering computer screens in a control room monitor the presence of sulfur, nitrogen, carbon and oxygen. Devices called electrostatic precipitators, installed in the 1970s, collect burned ash before it can exit the stacks.
Several years ago, the utility installed a new technology that has had some success in removing mercury. But in the 1990s, Gaston was able to comply with the sulfur requirements of the acid rain program without installing costly pollution controls. It simply switched to lower-sulfur coal from a different Alabama mine and briefly slowed its generation of power.
The strategy enabled it to slash sulfur emissions from 156,000 tons in 1990 to 55,000 tons in 1995. Because its annual federal emissions allowance was 130,000 tons, Gaston banked allowances even as its actual emissions rose in the late 1990s.
In 2000, Gaston's allotment was cut to 55,000 tons under Phase 2 of the acid rain program. But the plant has continued to increase sulfur emissions, drawing on the allowances it banked during Phase 1.
Emissions of nitrogen oxides at Gaston dropped in 1995 after the installation of "low nox" (for low nitrogen oxide) burners, required under Phase 1 of the acid rain program. But they quickly began increasing again. In the second phase of the acid rain program that began in 2000, Gaston was able to comply with nitrogen requirements by averaging its emission rates with those of other Alabama Power plants.
Largely because of its location 45 miles east of Birmingham, Gaston was also exempted from a 2000 regional plan to reduce ozone levels in Birmingham's notoriously dirty air. The main burden will fall instead on two other Alabama Power Co. coal plants situated west of Birmingham. Gaston is east of Birmingham in Shelby County, one of two Alabama counties not in compliance with federal ozone standards. But computer modeling performed several years ago found its emissions had no effect on Birmingham air quality because prevailing winds are mostly from the northwest.
Gaston will face a squeeze, however, when Alabama begins implementing a plan to limit ozone across much of the state in 2004.
Gaston will be given a nitrogen emission allowance of 4,100 tons, a small fraction of the 28,000 tons the power plant emitted in 2001. The allowance covers only the five spring and summer months when ozone is a problem.
Plans are afoot to install an advanced "low nox" burner on the largest Gaston unit and employ pollution-reducing "air injection" technologies on the other units. Those measures should reduce emissions by 27 percent, Bowers said. If that does not suffice, Alabama Power can still buy allowances to meet the target.
Smith, of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, is not satisfied. "Congress didn't intend these plants to run forever," he said. "There's been an end run around the Clean Air Act."
-------- environment
EPA reports two-thirds at toxic risk
ASSOCIATED PRESS
June 2, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020602-2039498.htm
At least two-thirds of Americans live in areas where toxic chemicals pose an elevated cancer risk, an Environmental Protection Agency analysis concluded Friday.
The findings were contained in a long-awaited EPA assessment of health risks from 32 toxic chemicals. The study is based on 1996 emissions data that have been the subject of several years of internal analysis.
The assessment concludes that the accumulated exposure to the various toxic chemicals can be expected to cause 10 additional cancers over a lifetime of exposure for every 1 million people, or a 10 in 1 million cancer risk. These risks can be found across virtually the entire country, said the study, which was reviewed by outside scientists.
"More than 200 million people live in census tracts where the combined upper bound lifetime cancer risk from these [chemical] compounds exceeded 10 in 1 million risk," said the study. It added that 20 million people live in areas where the risks are even higher - a risk of 100 additional lifetime cancers for every 1 million people.
"The risks are very much in line with what we expected all along," said Jeffrey Holmstead, head of the EPA's air office. He said in an interview the risks of cancer from toxic chemical exposure "are very, very small," compared with overall cancer risks from all sources.
The EPA considers a cancer risk of 1 in a million or greater as a matter of concern, although those levels do not always trigger regulatory actions.
Mr. Holmstead said the report was "designed to be a baseline" for further studies on risks posed by air toxins. He also emphasized the findings are based on 1996 data. "Since that time, the risks already have been reduced significantly," said Mr. Holmstead in an interview.
But environmentalists said the study's findings provide clear evidences that tougher measures are needed to reduce releases of toxic chemicals - such as benzene, mercury, formaldehyde and other carcinogens - from automobiles, power plants and industrial sources.
They show "a lifetime cancer risk at least 10 times greater than the level considered acceptable by the EPA," said Emily Figdor of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.
"These findings are a wake-up call that EPA should take action to reduce this long overlooked public health threat" from toxic air releases, argued Miss Figdor.
-------- genetics
Therapeutic Cloning Shows Promise
June 2, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Cloning-Study.html
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Cows implanted with cells taken from a cloned embryo did not experience immune rejection, showing the potential of much-debated therapeutic cloning, researchers said.
The cloning technology is controversial and opposed by some, including President Bush and Pope John Paul II, as immoral because it requires creating and destroying days-old embryos.
However, some scientists who oppose cloning humans say they believe therapeutic cloning should be pursued because it could supply healthy new tissue to fix a variety of illnesses.
``While more work needs to be done, this demonstrates the potential use of this technology,'' said Dr. Anthony Atala, director of tissue engineering at Children's Hospital Boston and a co-author of the cow study published in the June issue of Nature Biotechnology.
Using healthy cells cloned with the same DNA of a patient could make difficult organ and tissue transplants much easier.
While still far from human use, experts say the latest advance demonstrates the disease-fighting potential of the method.
``It's a very important result,'' said Robert Nerem, director of the Georgia Tech/Emory Center for the Engineering of Living Tissues. ``Immune rejection is a very big problem in tissue engineering.''
The report comes three months after other scientists used therapeutic cloning to fix genetic illness in mice.
The cow researchers removed the nucleus from a cow egg and replaced it with a skin cell containing the full DNA set from another cow. They then implanted the cloned embryo into a surrogate cow and let the embryo grow for about six weeks before removing it. They removed embryonic heart, skeletal and kidney cells from the embryo, grew them further in the laboratory -- even creating mini kidneys -- and implanted the cloned cells into the cow that donated the original DNA.
All of the cells thrived, with some of the mini kidneys producing a urine-like liquid, the researchers said.
``It was pretty spectacular and beautiful,'' said co-author Dr. Robert Lanza of Worcester, Mass.-based Advanced Cell Technology.
Despite the results, the fact that an embryo was grown for six weeks in a surrogate concerned even some therapeutic cloning proponents.
``While the research in animal models shows that it may be possible to use cloning to generate tissues and eliminate tissue rejection, it's important for the American public to understand that the methods used in this animal experiment should not be pursued in humans,'' said Christopher Reeve, the actor who has become a patient advocate since being paralyzed in a horse riding accident.
``Research involving the implantation of a human embryo into a woman, even to derive lifesaving cells, crosses a very important line and we need to pass legislation that would prohibit it.''
The authors of the paper said they too are opposed to recreating their cow experiment in humans.
``We think it is ethically unacceptable to implant a cloned embryo in a woman for any purpose,'' Lanza said.
There are three competing bills now pending in the Senate addressing the cloning issue. One would ban all forms of cloning, while the others would outlaw cloning to create a baby but allow the technology for use in finding disease cures as long as the embryos were destroyed after a few days and never implanted in women.
``The timing of this study could not have come at a better time,'' said Arthur Caplan, a University of Pennsylvania bioethicist who supports therapeutic cloning.
-------- health
Researchers Develop HIV Fighter
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
June 2, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Fighting-HIV.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A form of RNA developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology silences genes that play a role in HIV infection, potentially showing a new way to combat the virus that causes AIDS.
The team used short forms of RNA -- ribonucleic acid -- that turn off genes vital for the production of proteins used by the virus to enter and infect cells. RNA carries the blueprint for constructing proteins.
``If many obstacles can be surmounted this could be a basis for intervention in HIV treatment,'' said Dr. Phillip A. Sharp, who led the research.
The work was conducted in the laboratory, and problems to be solved include finding ways to deliver the RNA to cells in animals or humans, to ensure it would not interfere with normal biological processes and would not have side effects, he said.
The work, reported Sunday in the online edition of the journal Nature Medicine, is a ``proof of concept,'' Sharp said. He won the 1993 Nobel Prize for the discovery of ``split genes,'' that changed how scientists look at evolution and advanced research on hereditary diseases, including some cancers.
Dr. Louis M. Mansky of Ohio State University, who was not part of the research team, said the findings were interesting but he said ``there are a lot of concerns as to how it would be applicable.''
Mansky said there have been difficulties in getting similar strategies to work in clinical settings.
In lab tests, the RNA reduced, but did not eliminate, the virus, and thus Mansky said it might be useful in addition to the current drugs used to combat AIDS.
But, he added, ``I don't think this, by itself, would be superior to the drug cocktails now used for treating HIV individuals.''
RNA is present in most cells, carrying genetic information and operating in the production of proteins.
In recent years scientists have discovered that double stranded RNA can silence genes in a process called RNA interference. The component that accomplishes this -- small interfering RNA, or siRNA -- was reported just last year.
Sharp's team made two different siRNAs that targeted cell surface proteins essential for the HIV virus to infect a cell. They targeted the parts of the virus that make the protein as well as a regulator protein.
``In both cases we were able to show that these small RNAs in cells would inhibit the infection by HIV,'' in laboratory work, Sharp said in a telephone interview.
``The RNA interference process is a very new development in biological science and is quite exciting,'' he said. ``It will move out of the lab soon ... in the next several years.''
The team is currently working with mouse genes, Sharp said. ``It'll be some time before more elaborate experiments.''
-------- ACTIVISTS
Scott Laderman and Barry Riesch:
Veterans wage peace in Iraq
Scott Laderman and Barry Riesch,
Jun 2, 2002,
Minneapolis Star Tribune
http://www.startribune.com/stories/562/2870788.html
On May 7, a team from Veterans for Peace descended on Iraq. Operating with great diligence, they efficiently completed their task and quietly withdrew later in the month. Building on the work of two earlier teams, their objective was to begin repairing two water treatment facilities in central Iraq and to raise funds for the equipment, parts and labor necessary to complete them.
The plants -- in Baaqooba and Falooja -- serve over 20,000 people, and bring to a total of 100,000 the number of civilians aided by the organization's efforts since 2000. The recent mission's goal was both humanitarian and educational: to deliver aid while drawing attention in this country to the slow death of the Iraqi people.
Had their operation been part of the military assault recently threatened by the Bush administration, it would almost certainly have been reported on the front page of every major newspaper in the United States. But if, like most Americans, you read and heard nothing about it, the reason is probably that their actions were designed not to wage war but to wage peace.
Shunning guns and bombs for pumps and tools, the efforts of the team, including Trish Kanous of St. Paul, were designed to let Iraqis know that the American people and the American government are two very distinct entities with often very different agendas. Ironically, the plants the group rebuilt are part of the same civilian infrastructure that the United States military targeted during the Persian Gulf war in 1991. That the facilities remain in disrepair over 11 years later stems from Iraq's inability to import the equipment necessary to rebuild them.
These import prohibitions are rooted in a sanctions regime imposed in 1990 by the United Nations but largely maintained by officials in Washington and London. In the years since the war, the sanctions have killed upwards of a million Iraqi civilians, including hundreds of thousands of children under the age of five, according to U.N. estimates.
Those dying are not high-ranking officials in Baghdad. Instead, they are those individuals largely powerless to rid their country of its dictator -- dissent in Iraq brings torture, imprisonment, or worse -- yet punished for the continued existence of this formerly U.S.-backed regime.
Washington's ability to maintain its assault on the Iraqi civilian population has depended on its successful effort to identify the country almost exclusively with Saddam Hussein. For many Americans, there are no Iraqi people, only a dangerous Iraqi tyrant. But Iraq is no more just Saddam Hussein than the United States is just George W. Bush. Iraq is a country of children and their parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles. Like people everywhere, Iraqis are students and intellectuals, workers and farmers, Muslims and Christians, atheists and agnostics.
While receiving relatively little media coverage in the United States, the movement of which Veterans for Peace is a part has caused considerable concern in Washington. In fact, facing substantial international pressure, the United States agreed in May to a revised sanctions regime that allows for the import of a greater number of items.
At first glance this might appear to be a victory for basic human decency, but such a modification is, in fact, only cosmetic. Tom Sager, a retired professor from Rolla, Mo., went to Iraq with the group. "The new so-called 'smart sanctions' are an attempt to put a kind face on a murderous policy," he said. "This policy will not rebuild Iraq's health sector or provide clean water for its people. It does nothing to provide the foreign investment needed to revitalize Iraq's oil industry or the cash necessary to pay its teachers and health care workers. At best, it may provide a slight improvement in living conditions. It is equivalent to providing a Band-Aaid where major surgery is needed. We remain unequivocally opposed to sanctions."
The Iraqi people, not Saddam or his officials, suffer most from U.S. policy. Until the sanctions are lifted, civilians will tragically continue to die. The morally bankrupt policies that the United States insists must continue killed hundreds of Iraqi children last week. The sanctions are killing hundreds of children this week, and they will kill hundreds more next week.
For months the Bush administration has been preparing this country for another war with Iraq. Americans must demand that the carnage finally end.
-- Scott Laderman, a doctoral candidate in American Studies and a MacArthur Scholar at the University of Minnesota, is an opinions columnist for the Minnesota Daily. Barry Riesch, a building inspector and plans examiner for the city of Minnetonka, is a former president of Minnesota Chapter 27 of Veterans for Peace Inc. and of National Veterans for Peace. He traveled to Iraq with the first Veterans for Peace Iraq Water Project team in 2000.
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