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NUCLEAR
U.N. Delegates Want Weapons Stoppage
Pentagon sends team to test suspected radiation on ship
Nuke Experts Inspect Ship Off New Jersey Coast
Not-so-hot pants keep cell phones cool
'Anti - Radiation' Trousers Fuel Mobile Phone Debate
ABC sneaked spent uranium into N.Y. Harbor
The Kick in the Fruit Punch Could Be Atomic
Surveyed Reactor Guards Feel Vulnerable
U.S. Nuclear Guards Said Overworked, Undertrained
Nuclear Reactor Guards Feel Vulnerable to Attack
Counties Conduct Nuclear Plant Emergency Drill
Leak at Indian Point 2 Plant Leads It to Curtail Operations
A War Based on Rumors
White House spells out case against Iraq
Bush Tells U.N. to Act on Iraq or U.S. Will Have to Take Action
Bush to Warn U.N.: Act on Iraq or U.S. Will
Text: Bush's Speech to U.N. on Iraq
MILITARY
Lockheed Martin Seeks Poland Deal
Colombia Authorizes Warrantless Arrests, Citing Terror Fight
Schröder's anti-war stance puts him ahead of the pack
Iran Assures Iraq Border Is 'Secure'
On Baghdad's Streets, Life With U.S. Threats 'Has Become Normal'
Israeli Forces Destroy Palestinian Homes in Raids
Arafat's entire Cabinet resigns
Three rivals hope to topple Arafat
U.S. Fifth Fleet on highest alert;
Pakistan Wants No Part in an Attack on Iraq
Putin Considers Strikes on Georgia
Putin Warns Georgia to Root Out Chechen Rebels
Kremlin gives short shrift to US hawk over Iraq
Annan to U.S.: Heed 'rule of law' with Iraq
U.S. Forces in Tampa Plan Qatar Exercises
Military moves element to Gulf
Air Force Recommends Charging Pilots
America's war record is littered with lies
Why Aren't U.S. Journalists Reporting From Iraq?
Bin Laden Death Hoax A Lesson to Journalists
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Tighter Security Felt Across U.S.
EPA, Black Officers Address Environmental Crimes
White House Loses Tree to Squirrels
ENERGY AND OTHER
Slow takeoff seen for hybrid electric vehicles
Model Solar Homes Entered in National Contest
Electric motor efficiency means big energy savings
U.S. STUDY SAYS ALL CLONES GE
GENETICALLY ABNORMAL
Security problems block Afghan aid - World Bank
World Bank sticks by Chad-Cameroon pipeline
ACTIVISTS
Rights Panel to Review Berenson Case
Charities Report Surge of Volunteers
-------- NUCLEAR
U.N. Delegates Want Weapons Stoppage
September 12, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-UN-Disarmament.html
UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- Peace will remain elusive as long as weapons pervade the world's nations, especially those recuperating from bloody internal wars, officials told delegates at a U.N. conference.
There are currently 30,000 nuclear warheads and 639 million small arms in the world, making up a massive ``war machine'' that needs to be dismantled, Jayantha Dhanapala, the U.N. undersecretary-general for disarmament affairs, said Wednesday.
The United States alone has shelled out some $5.6 trillion on nuclear weapons over the last five decades, Dhanapala said.
He urged all nations to stop building weapons and instead invest resources in public health, education and sustainable development.
Officials also spoke of the need to create more jobs for combatants who give up their arms.
``There is no logic in disarmament unless (the person) knows there's a future without the need for weapons,'' said Jean-Marie Guehenno, the U.N. undersecretary-general of peacekeeping operations.
The session on disarmament was held on the final day of the annual U.N. conference for non-governmental organizations.
One of the speakers, a former child soldier in Sierra Leone's grisly civil war, founded a youth empowerment organization to help ex-combatants deal with their transition into regular society. But he warned that the situation in Sierra Leone is still fragile, despite the fact that the country's decade-long war was officially declared over in January.
``The signing of a peace accord is not necessarily the end of the conflict, it's just another phase,'' said Vandy Kanyako. ``There should be peace education so young people can grow up learning how to respect one another, to live in peace with their neighbors.''
The irony of discussing peace at a time when the U.N. General Assembly is abuzz with debate on a possible U.S. attack on Iraq was noted by the president of the Hague Appeal for Peace, who got a standing ovation after her spirited remarks.
``We can't talk about demobilizing the war machine and ignore the drums beating to start another war,'' said Cora Weiss, accusing the United States of moving from patriotism to extreme nationalism in its fight against terrorism.
Weiss also stirred up the audience when she called on the international community to incorporate more women into its peacekeeping efforts, directing some of her criticism at fellow panel member Guehenno.
``We're simply asking to share the responsibility,'' said Weiss. ``It's never happened in history, and the present ways are failing.''
In the closing session of the conference, Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica urged the European community to help maintain and build upon current stability in the Balkan region.
``Europe cannot be 'single and free' until it encompasses the countries of southeast Europe,'' he said. ``The price will be high indeed unless this is achieved: poverty, loss of hope, crime and political radicalism, which already threaten the region's security.''
-------- accidents and safety
Pentagon sends team to test suspected radiation on ship
09/12/2002
Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2002-09-12-ship-radiation-pentagon_x.htm
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Pentagon sent a team Thursday to try to determine if there are radioactive materials on a ship detained off the coast of New Jersey.
The specialists were to follow up after one test showed traces of radioactivity were detected in the cargo of the M/V Palermo Senator - and a second test turned out inconclusive, defense officials said.
The Liberian-flagged container ship was ordered back to sea, that is, to stay in a security zone six miles offshore while the inspection continues, the Coast Guard said Wednesday.
The ship was directed to a berth at the Port Newark/Elizabeth Marine Terminal after a Coast Guard team boarded the vessel Tuesday. Team members reported hearing suspicious sounds in several of the ship's cargo holds, but found no evidence of stowaways and said they could not determine the source.
Officials have declined to describe the cargo.
But trace radiation could come from a number of sources, such as clay, pipes that have been used for a long time underground in oil excavation and so on, defense officials said.
--------
Nuke Experts Inspect Ship Off New Jersey Coast
September 12, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-transport-liberia-pentagon.html
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Pentagon has dispatched special operations troops trained in detecting nuclear weapons to assist with the investigation of a Liberian freighter on which low traces of radiation were found while it was in a New Jersey port, defense officials said on Thursday.
``The Department of Defense has a number of unique units that are currently assisting the FBI, the lead federal agency on the maritime interdiction mission,'' said Army Lt. Col. Rivers Johnson, a Pentagon spokesman, referring to the ship that was ordered out to sea Wednesday -- the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on America. ``As a prudent precaution, we have made those units available to the FBI at its request,'' he added.
Defense officials, who asked not to be identified, said the teams were special operations troops trained in detecting nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
The Coast Guard raised its safety and security procedures as the United States went on high state of alert for the one-year commemoration of the attacks on Washington and New York.
The United States has for months spearheaded a campaign to tighten up security at international ports, as it is worried that one day it could receive a ``dirty bomb'' -- a crude nuclear device -- concealed in a shipping container and loaded overseas in a port with lax security.
The freighter, which is under Liberian flag, but owned by a German company, remained 6 miles off the coast of New Jersey, where agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Customs Service, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the U.S. Department of Energy were investigating.
While checking for stowaways on the ``Palermo Senator'' on Wednesday at Port Newark, New Jersey, Coast Guard agents detected low levels of radiation and ordered the ship out to sea.
The investigation was delayed by the strong winds the New York area experienced on Wednesday and which prevented some of the agents from reaching the ship.
Ole Sweedlund, deputy managing director of the North American arm of shipping giant Hanjin, which chartered the vessel before subletting it to German company DSR/Senator Lines, said there were no radioactive materials listed on the ship's manifest.
``We are working with government authorities to solve the situation and hopefully we will have a resolution within a day or so,'' Sweedlund told Reuters.
``It is probably going to take some time as it is a fairly large ship,'' an FBI spokesman said.
The ship's last port of call was Valencia, Spain. Before that, it stopped at various ports in Southeast Asia and it passed through the Suez Canal. It was scheduled to offload 655 containers in Port Elizabeth, New Jersey.
Officials declined to provide additional details on the cargo and Sweedlund said the containers could contain any type of cargo from the Mediterranean, although he could not say for sure that some of it was not loaded elsewhere.
The managing owner of the ship, Reederei F. Laeisz, said in a statement in Rostock, Germany, the investigation ``is under way and will be completed by Sept. 13, 2002. The charterers of the vessel confirm that no illegal cargo has been loaded.''
--------
Not-so-hot pants keep cell phones cool
September 12, 2002
Graeme Wearden, Special to,
ZDNet (UK)
http://www.nytimes.com/cnet/CNET_2100-1033-957650.html
Clothing manufacturer Levi Strauss is gearing up to launch a pair of trousers with an "anti-radiation" cell phone pocket, prompted by customers' concerns about the possible health risks of mobile phone use.
Company officials confirmed to ZDNet UK on Thursday that its forthcoming Dockers S-Fit men's trousers will include a cell phone pocket with a "radiation-reducing" lining.
Levi's claims that this lining "might reduce" any adverse health effects from mobile phones--even though scientists have not yet found firm proof that cell phone use is dangerous.
"The Dockers trousers will have a mobile phone pocket with a shielding lining between the phone and the skin," a Levi's representative told ZDNet UK.
He added that the outside of the pocket would not have a shield, which could interfere with the phone's ability to communicate with the mobile network and cause it to use more power to overcome the shielding.
Precise details about the nature of the radiation-reducing material are not available. The Levi's representative said that the lining is 97 percent cotton, with the remaining 3 percent being a substance called "MDF," but was unable to give any further information.
The Dockers S-Fit trousers are scheduled to hit European stores in early 2003. There are no plans to launch them in the United States.
Last year, Levi's teamed up with European electronics manufacturer Philips to launch a jacket with a built-in mobile phone and MP3 player, and it seems that this initiative is one factor in the launch of the radiation-reducing cell phone pocket.
"Our customer feedback found that people wanted a bit more protection. We are not implying that mobile phones are dangerous. We're responding to feedback from consumers," said the Levi's representative.
Mobile phone radiation is one of the most contentious issues in the telecommunications industry. Cell phone companies insist that their products keep to strict emission guidelines, and point out there is no scientific proof that exposure to mobile emissions--either from a handset or from a base station--are harmful.
--------
'Anti - Radiation' Trousers Fuel Mobile Phone Debate
September 12, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/technology/tech-life-jeans.html
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - U.S. jeans maker Levi Strauss & Co. denied on Thursday it was playing on consumer fears by launching a line of trousers fitted with ``anti-radiation'' pockets for mobile phones.
The trousers, with a lining which the makers say shields against radiation, are designed by Dockers, a brand name of Levi Strauss -- famous for its classic ``501'' jeans.
Retailers were currently viewing the new line, called Icon S-Fit, with an eye to sales from next spring, a Levi's spokesman said.
``We're not implying in any way that mobile phones are dangerous,'' Levi's European communications manager Cedric Jungpeter told Reuters.
``Our intention is not to cash in on consumer fears but provide the consumers with what they want,'' he said from Levi's European headquarters in Brussels.
The finished design was the fruit of extensive market research showing that the fashion conscious were also health conscious, Jungpeter said.
``The debate is open. Although no study has proved mobile phones are harmful, no study has proved the contrary either,'' he added.
Officials from Dockers, which announced the launch of its new line in July, were not immediately available for comment.
Worldwide studies into the possible dangers of mobile phones produce often conflicting conclusions.
A recent one carried out by Australian researchers over a three-year period showed that radio emissions from mobile phones did not trigger the growth of tumors in mice, and therefore probably did not do so in humans either.
That research followed another Australian study on mice five years ago that concluded cellular phones could foster tumor growth.
Swedish research published in August concluded that long-term users of first generation mobile phones faced an up to 80 percent greater risk of developing brain tumors than non-users and the World Health Organization said last year more research was needed.
But a Danish study last year of 400,000 mobile phone users showed no increased cancer risk.
-------- depleted uranium
ABC sneaked spent uranium into N.Y. Harbor
By THOMAS ZAMBITO
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Thursday, September 12th, 2002
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/local/v-pfriendly/story/18267p-17307c.html
ABC News smuggled 15 pounds of depleted uranium into New York Harbor in late July - a stunt the network said was aimed at testing gaps in U.S. Customs' ability to spot radioactive material.
The uranium, which passed through seven countries over 25 days, was lent to ABC by an environmental group that recently displayed it at congressional hearings, the network said.
It is not illegal to transport depleted uranium, which is harmless. Still, the network said the substance has a chemical makeup similar to enriched uranium, used to make nuclear weapons, and should have been detected when Customs officials X-rayed the ship it was on when it docked on Staten Island in July.
The uranium was shielded by steel pipe with a lead lining, a tactic used to hide radioactive materials from inspectors. One expert told the network it was a perfect "mockup" of enriched uranium.
Customs Service officials attacked the report and defended the agency's record of detecting radioactive materials and the arsenal of gadgets at their disposal.
"While lead-shielded, enriched uranium may indeed emit the same level of radiation as depleted uranium, this does not mean that Customs cannot detect it," the agency said.
Customs spokesman Dean Boyd said the smuggled uranium was as harmful as dirt.
"The only way that that amount of depleted uranium is dangerous is if someone dropped it on your head," Boyd said. "It is called 'depleted' uranium for a reason. It has been depleted of almost all its radioactive content."
Brian Ross, the ABC reporter who prepared the story, said: "No one is trying to say this was dangerous. This was a test."
Customs accused ABC of lying on a shipping manifest that the cargo container in which the uranium was shipped contained personal effects and household goods.
Ross said the document was prepared by an Istanbul outfit known for preparing vague manifests. "We found a company that didn't ask any questions," Ross said. "That's a big vulnerability."
Meanwhile, federal agents continued to pore over a Liberian-flagged freighter ordered out to sea on Tuesday after Newark Customs inspectors detected trace amounts of radiation on board.
The M/V Palermo Senator was being inspected some 6 miles offshore yesterday by a team from the Coast Guard, Customs and the FBI.
Customs referred questions to the FBI, which said last night that the probe was continuing.
-------- russia
The Kick in the Fruit Punch Could Be Atomic
New York Times
September 12, 2002
By MICHAEL WINES
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/12/international/europe/12MOSC.html
MOSCOW, Sept. 10 - Good news for Muscovites! "There are practically no cases of radioactive watermelons this year," says Andrei A. Buyanov.
All right. Maybe that is practically good news. Then again, it could be worse. Some of the lingonberries here all but glow in the dark.
It is radioactive-produce season in Moscow, and it's a bad one. Or, depending on one's perspective, a great one: so far this summer, the inspectors at the Moscow City veterinarian's office, have confiscated a ton of hot lingonberries, blueberries and practically nonexistent melons. And cranberry and mushroom seasons are yet to come.
At this rate, says Mr. Buyanov, the office's amiable, crew-cut deputy chief, seizures could exceed last year's 3,050 pounds by a good 10 percent. And last year's seizures were slightly above those the year before.
Mr. Buyanov displays little pleasure in his ever increasing haul of radioactive fruit. But it does suggest that he and his inspectors are doing their job, which is to nab edibles rich in cesium and strontium before they reach the stalls in any of the city's 69 open-air produce markets.
If anyone wonders why Moscow needs a corps of atomic food inspectors, the answer is simple: the city lies a bare 415 miles from Ukraine's Chernobyl nuclear-power station, which belched a Hiroshima bomb's worth of isotopes into the air when one of its reactors blew apart in April 1986.
If anyone wonders why this task falls to the veterinary service, that answer is simple, too: besides lingonberries and mushrooms, the inspectors are on constant lookout for hot sirloin and pork chops.
Lest this sound alarmist, it should be said that grocery shopping in Moscow is a completely roentgen-free experience (with one exception, noted later), thanks to the vigilance of the atomic food inspectors. Even if the inspectors were to vanish tomorrow, Russians could still safely eat most anything they chose (with several exceptions, noted immediately below).
The problems mostly arise with what Irina I. Rozanova, the chief of the city's food-inspection laboratory, calls forest produce - mushrooms, berries and other delicacies that, often as not, are hand-picked in the wild by folks looking to supplement their incomes.
The quality of farm-grown food can be monitored fairly easily. Not so forest produce. "Normally, some middleman buys it from various sources and brings it to market," she said. "And when he's asked where it comes from, the seller just gives the name of some region near Moscow."
Dramatically demonstrating the perils posed by produce-smugglers, Ms. Rozanova opened a laboratory jar, plucked out a suspicious-looking dried mushroom from Bryansk, a Russian region bordering Chernobyl, and probed it with her alpha-beta-gamma spectrometer.
"It shows the cesium content is 20 times the admissible level," she said.
Cesium 137 is easily absorbed by the body and has a half-life of 30 years. Mushrooms tend to soak it up, Ms. Rozanova said, lending new meaning to the term "mushroom cloud."
As fate has it, Russians utterly dote on wild mushrooms. Not far behind are blueberries, cranberries and lingonberries, which are indistinguishable from cranberries, save that they are a bit smaller and grow on bushes instead of in bogs.
So the men and women of the veterinarian's office are posted in tiny laboratories at each of the city's 69 produce markets. There, with hand-held scanners and more sophisticated measuring machines, they take the radioactive measure of every crate that comes through their doors.
Anything suspected of radiating is shipped off to Ms. Rozanova's lab for a final determination, then handed over to a produce-destruction squad if the initial findings are confirmed.
Radioactive-produce season runs roughly from June through October. First come the blueberries and lingonberries, which ripen earlier in Belarus and Ukraine than in Russia. About now come the forest mushrooms. In October it will be glowing-cranberry time.
Mr. Buyanov and his inspectors have caught 160 radioactive shipments so far this season. "Nobody sells anything at a market without a test," he said, "and at markets where there are no labs, the sale of produce is banned."
Which makes for an airtight, lead-lined inspection system. With one glaring exception: the kerchief-clad, gap-toothed grandmothers who illegally peddle fresh produce at hundreds of street corners, roadside stands and metro stations. "We don't regulate them," Mr. Buyanov said severely. "Better to buy at a market where it's all checked."
But even hardened Muscovites cannot resist a wizened babushka trying to support her grandchildren by selling fruit. So buy, already. Just stay away from the lingonberries. You don't know where they've been.
-------- terrorism
Surveyed Reactor Guards Feel Vulnerable
New York Times
September 12, 2002
By MATTHEW L. WALD
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/12/national/12NUKE.html
WASHINGTON, Sept. 11 - Security guards at 24 nuclear reactors at 13 sites, interviewed by a nonprofit watchdog group, said they feared being outnumbered and outgunned by terrorists in an attack. They also said that rules on when they might use deadly force were ambiguous and could allow terrorists to succeed.
In the survey, by the Project on Government Oversight, many also complained that they had been forced to work so many hours since security was tightened after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that they found it difficult to function.
One guard, speaking on condition that his name and his place of work not be identified, said in a telephone interview: "You got people carrying rifles, guns, and they're tired. Supervisors are coming around to see if we're awake, instead of resolving the problem."
The guard said a fellow guard at his plant had recently fallen asleep behind the wheel on her drive home and crashed her car. Guards have been working 12 hours a day, five to six days a week for the last year, he said.
Asked about the survey, Richard A. Meserve, the chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said that there were no limits on the number of hours a guard could be ordered to work but that "they have to be capable to perform their function." Since the terrorist attacks, Mr. Meserve said, the number of guards at reactors nationwide had gone to about 6,000 from about 5,000.
Most are contract employees; some work directly for the reactor operators. "These are not rent-a-cops," Mr. Meserve said. "They are people who have serious weapons and training."
But the report found that at some plants, the guards were paid less than the custodians and that turnover at the plants was high. By some accounts, turnover has increased lately as experienced guards have found better security jobs at airports.
Training is also quite limited, some guards say.
Mr. Meserve said he had not read the report, but he agreed that Congress should set national standards governing the authority of nuclear reactor guards to use deadly force.
In the survey, and in telephone interviews, guards said that in the states where they worked they were allowed to use their guns if intruders threatened their safety. But they said that if someone jumped a fence with a backpack or other item that could arguably contain a bomb or other weapon, but did not clearly threaten the guard, they could not fire their guns.
Mr. Meserve, speaking at a three-day seminar called the Nuclear Renaissance, organized by Infocast, a commercial conference organizer, said today that the commission had decided that security drills would be held at each nuclear plant every three years, rather than every eight years, as was done before Sept. 11.
In the past, those drills included force-on-force exercises, with testers playing the role of terrorists, using simulated weapons that resemble laser-tag toys. Those were suspended after the attacks but will resume late this year or early next year, he said.
Mr. Meserve also said that his agency was considering establishing "cradle to grave" licensing of radioactive materials that could be used by terrorists in "dirty bombs," and reforming the system by which the import and export of such materials is licensed.
Mr. Meserve, in his speech and in remarks afterward, emphasized that nuclear plants, because of their design, were inherently tough targets, and that even before the terrorist attacks, they had significant security protections.
He also said that the number of guards interviewed by the organization - "more than 20," according to the report - was too small for drawing conclusions.
Nonetheless, the guards, at various plants, repeated common themes. One was a lack of training. At a Tennessee Valley Authority plant, one guard said his training consisted of firing about 40 rounds of ammunition, which took about three hours, to requalify to carry a gun. "Any training after that, that's up to you," he said in a telephone interview.
Guards questioned other areas of security. Some said new lighting around the plants illuminated them but not potential infiltrators. Others said they felt vulnerable in new guard towers.
The T.V.A. guard, who would not allow his name to be used, also complained about the ambiguity of the rules on deadly force. If there is no clear threat to the guard, he said, "you may hesitate."
Mr. Meserve, the regulatory commission chairman, said his agency had repeatedly asked Congress over the years to set a national standard for use of deadly force by power plant guards, but to no avail.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
U.S. Nuclear Guards Said Overworked, Undertrained
September 12, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-attack-nuclear.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Guards at the nation's 103 nuclear power plants are overworked, undertrained and outgunned and some of them doubt they could repel a terrorist attack, a study by a government watchdog group said on Thursday.
Interviews with 22 guards at 13 U.S. nuclear power plants revealed many had doubts about preparedness and training, the Project on Government Oversight reported.
The chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which is rethinking industry security guidelines in the wake of last year's deadly attacks on Washington and New York, criticized the study for relying on ``a very thin sample'' of the 6,000 guards posted at U.S. nuclear plants.
Almost a year to the day after the attacks, the NRC on Tuesday advised nuclear plant operators to boost their security levels after the government issued a general alert for a possible terrorist attack.
Al Qaeda, the Islamic extremist network Washington blames for the hijack attacks, may have singled out U.S. nuclear power plants as a possible target.
``It is prudent to assume that al Qaeda may consider nuclear facilities as potential targets,'' NRC Chairman Richard Meserve said at an industry event on Wednesday.
The non-profit watchdog group said it found nuclear plant owners have ordered only minimal increases in the number of guards, and are relying heavily on overtime for existing guards rather than hiring new ones.
Some guards interviewed by the advocacy group said they worked 12-hour shifts for up to six consecutive days. Most guards interviewed ``believe that they are still below adequate levels to defeat a real terrorist attack,'' the group said.
``If an attack took place, most of the guards would run like hell,'' one guard told the group in an interview.
Guards said they were plagued by fatigue during long and tedious night shifts. ``There's a major problem with guards sleeping, especially on the night shift,'' one guard said.
GUARDS WORKING 'EXTENSIVE OVERTIME'
Meserve acknowledged that some U.S. utilities have used ``extensive overtime'' to maintain security while they carry out ``extensive new hiring'' of guards as part of a post-Sept. 11 push to boost security.
With a total of 6,000 guards at U.S. nuclear facilities, the report used ``a very thin sample in which to draw very profound conclusions,'' Meserve told reporters.
``The security at nuclear plants is very strong and the plants have the inherent capacity to withstand severe events of all types including those that might be attempted by terrorists,'' Meserve said.
The Project for Government Oversight defended its report.
``The vast majority of the concerns the guards raise ring absolutely true,'' said researcher Pete Stockton. ``They believe they don't have a chance'' against an attack, he said.
The Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry lobby, called the report ``an insult to the 6,000 highly trained, well-armed security officers'' defending nuclear plants.
Most guards interviewed by the advocacy group said they practice firing their weapons only once or twice a year during annual qualification tests, far less than the time necessary to become and remain proficient, the report said.
Guards also told the group they did not feel adequately equipped to deal with attackers. Many guards have only shotguns while attackers would likely be armed with sophisticated assault rifles, grenades and automatic weapons, Stockton said.
In the event of an attack, plant guards ``would be seriously outgunned, and won't have a chance,'' one told the group.
Some Democrats have sought to impose tougher security at nuclear power plants. ``Nuclear power plants are at the very top of the target list and their security must be permanently upgraded,'' said Rep. Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat backing legislation to give guards authority to use deadly force against attackers.
--------
Nuclear Reactor Guards Feel Vulnerable to Attack
By Cat Lazaroff
September 12, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/sep2002/2002-09-12-06.asp
WASHINGTON, DC - Security guards protecting 24 of the nation's nuclear reactors, located at 13 power plants across the U.S., have little confidence that they could defeat a determined terrorist attack, finds a new report by a nonprofit nuclear watchdog group. The guards told interviewers that their morale is very low, and that they are under equipped, undermanned, and underpaid.
The report, based on interviews conducted by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), warns that security guards at only one out of four nuclear power plants are confident their plant could defeat a terrorist attack.
In 1993, an individual with a history of mental illness crashed a car through the front gates at the Three Mile Island plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, site of the nation's worst nuclear accident (Photos courtesy NRC)
"If an attack took place, most of the guards would run like hell," said one of the more than 20 guards interviewed for the report. Most of these guards asked that neither they nor the utility that runs their plant be identified so as not to expose ongoing vulnerabilities, and because of the fear of reprisal from their employers.
The guards told the POGO interviewers that most nuclear power plants have increased the overtime hours worked by plant security personnel, rather than adding new personnel, since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Some guards are now working up to six consecutive days of 12 hour shifts, and guards raised serious concerns about fatigue.
Prior to September 11, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) required only five to 10 security guards on duty per nuclear reactor. Since then, the NRC has ordered the utilities to minimally increase the guard force, but many plant operators have opted to increase the hours of their existing guards instead.
While a few guards said their plants have increased the guard force - one plant has tripled the number of guards - most interviewed believe that they are still below adequate levels to defeat a real terrorist attack.
"The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's security requirements are totally inadequate to defend a nuclear power plant from terrorist attack," said Danielle Brian, executive director of POGO. "The vast majority of nuclear plants have done the least amount required to protect the American public from a suicidal terrorist attack."
Since September 11, many lawmakers, public interest groups and local residents have called for the permanent shutdown of the Indian Point nuclear power plant, located just 40 miles north of New York City (Photo courtesy New York Power Authority)
Inadequate training and preparation was another concern raised by the guards interviewed by POGO. Nuclear industry executives have repeatedly claimed that guards receive 270 hours of training before being posted; 90 hours per year to requalify with their weapons; and 30 hours per year in antiterrorist tactical exercises.
None of these claims appear to be true, POGO charges. Most guards interviewed train with their weapons only once per year for two to three hours during their annual weapons qualification. Most also have had no training or practice in shooting at a moving target.
So called "tabletop" exercises, aimed at training guards to respond to theoretical attacks, are so rudimentary that utilities use red and blue colored clothes pins to depict locations and tactics of guards and terrorists.
Low wages and inadequate health, disability and other benefits are causing high turnover in the guard force - at some plants as high as 70 to 100 percent over the 31/2 year life of a labor contract. At six nuclear facilities identified by POGO, security guards were being paid $1 to $4 less per hour than custodians or janitors.
Guards also often earn less than workers in their area who face substantially less risk such as funeral attendants, manicurists and aerobic instructors, the report notes.
Many of the guards also believe they are not equipped with adequate weaponry. The power and range of weapons provided to many of the guards is vastly inferior to the weapons known to be used by terrorists, due in part to restrictive state laws.
According to one guard, terrorists will come armed with automatic weapons, sniper rifles and grenades and the guard force "would be seriously outgunned, and won't have a chance."
Even the weapons available to the security guards might be useless in the case of a sneak attack, as nearly all of the guards interviewed raised concerns about the lack of guidance on the use of deadly force.
Guards are currently restricted from using deadly force unless an intruder is wielding a weapon or threatening the life of an individual. For example, if a suicidal terrorist with a backpack containing explosives jumped the fence and headed straight for a spent fuel pool, the guard could legally only observe and report the event.
Used nuclear fuel storage pools, like this one at Calvert Cliffs, could be vulnerable to a meltdown if their water was boiled away or otherwise drained during a terrorist attack. (Photo courtesy Nuclear Regulatory Commission)
Spent fuel pools are temporary storage areas where depleted fuel rods from nuclear reactors are stored in water to keep them cool enough to avoid a nuclear reaction and radiation release. At nuclear plants that have boiling water reactors - about one third of existing U.S. reactors - spent fuel pools are located above ground, outside reactor containment buildings.
POGO warns that terrorists could use explosives launched from outside power plant fences, or carried inside the fence in a backpack, to puncture the concrete walls of a spent fuel pool, draining the water and causing radioactive fires. Guards on patrol could not legally fire upon terrorists jumping the fence or preparing to launch explosives from the unprotected area outside the fence.
The NRC requires utilities simply to delay attackers until outside help arrives from local sheriff departments, state police or the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI). One guard summed up the problem stating, "If you pull the trigger, you're on your own and you'll need a good lawyer."
The NRC is now recognizing the chasm between how long plant security can hold off an attack and when outside responders could arrive. Tabletop exercises begun by NRC in July indicate that it would take one to two hours for outside responders to arrive with SWAT capability.
NRC's performance tests have shown that successful terrorist attacks are over in between three to 10 minutes.
Missouri's Callaway Nuclear Plant, operated by the Union Electric Company, is 10 miles southeast of Fulton, Missouri. (Photo courtesy NRC)
Since the September 11 attacks, the NRC has failed to toughen security regulations. Current regulations reportedly only require nuclear plants to be prepared for an attack by three terrorists and one insider - a scenario that POGO calls clearly inadequate in light of the coordinated attack by 19 terrorists last September.
The NRC has not conducted force on force performance tests since September 11, citing security risks, POGO noted. However, both the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy (DOE), which are also at high alert status, have continued to test the performance of security over the past year.
Prior to September 11, 2001, power plants failed the mock force on force tests almost half the time, according to closed door Congressional testimony by NRC officials. POGO charges that even those tests are "seriously dumbed down," and do not realistically represent a true terrorist attack scenario.
In addition to security guards, POGO also interviewed Army and Navy Special Forces personnel who conduct force on force tests, current and former NRC and other officials, a National Guard commander, and civilian contractors. POGO's report is based on information and documents gathered from these sources.
Improvements recommended by Congress and various watchdog groups have so far not been implemented by the NRC, POGO charges. POGO has briefed officials at the NRC on its own findings, which include evidence gathered before the September 11 attacks.
In early 2001, POGO began its first investigation into nuclear security, after more than a dozen high level Department of Energy security experts came forward with concerns regarding inadequate security at the DOE's nuclear weapons facilities. Just prior to September 11, 2001, POGO completed that investigation, concluding that the nation's 10 nuclear weapons facilities, which house almost 1,000 tons of weapons grade plutonium and highly enriched uranium, regularly fail to protect this material during mock terrorist attacks.
The resulting report, "U.S. Nuclear Weapons Complex: Security at Risk," was released in October 2001. Since the report's release, Congress, the General Accounting Office, and several federal agencies have undertaken ongoing reviews of POGO's findings.
The DOE is now preparing to relocate tons of bomb grade nuclear materials from one of three facilities POGO profiled for immediate attention. The facility, known as Technical Area 18, is located in a canyon at Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico, that POGO called "indefensible."
The facilities at Los Alamos National Laboratory lie amid a series of ridges and canyons that experts make some sites highly vulnerable to terrorist attacks. (Photo courtesy Los Alamos National Laboratory)
Because of this work at nuclear weapons facilities, several current and former guards from commercial nuclear power plants began contacting POGO in early 2002 with similar concerns about inadequate security at the nation's nuclear power plants. POGO then expanded its investigation, randomly contacting guards at additional facilities.
POGO eventually interviewed more than 20 guards protecting 24 reactors at 13 sites, both active and decommissioning - 23 percent of the nation's total reactors. All the guards said they came forward hoping to help inform policymakers of the current security inadequacies by working with POGO.
POGO is urging Congress to require that nuclear power plants be prepared to repel large numbers of attackers using conventional, chemical or biological weapons, attacks from multiple entry points, and diversionary tactics used to confuse the guards. POGO also recommends that plants be required to successfully pass tests of their security, and include potential attacks on spent fuel pools in these tests.
To increase security, POGO says plants should upgrade their guard numbers, pay and benefits tactical training and weaponry. Congress should work to clarify when guards may use deadly force, and expand whistleblower protections to nuclear power plant employees who report their concerns to people other than Congress, such as watchdog groups like POGO.
Senate action on legislation to improve power plant security, the Nuclear Security Act of 2002, is slated before Congress leaves in the fall. POGO says the bill would address many of the security inadequacies in the nuclear industry.
The full POGO report, titled "Nuclear Power Plant Security: Voices from Inside the Fences," is available at: http://www.pogo.org/p/environment/eo-020901-nukepower.html
-------- maryland
Counties Conduct Nuclear Plant Emergency Drill
By Raymond McCaffrey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 12, 2002; Page SM02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A59567-2002Sep9?language=printer
The first news bulletin issued by St. Mary's County was dire.
"The president of the Board of St. Mary's County Commissioners has announced that Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant declared a Site Emergency at 845. The reason for the Site Emergency is security.
"State and County emergency action agencies in St. Mary's County have been notified of the Site Emergency. Field monitoring teams have been dispatched to the area to assist Calvert Cliffs personnel in assessing levels of radiation around the Plant."
The next bulletin was just as disturbing: an order mandating the evacuation of local schools within the 10-mile fallout zone.
But no students had to be evacuated; in fact, there was no emergency after all. The bulletins were all part of a test -- as indicated in bold letters at the top and bottom of the bulletins: "THIS IS A DRILL."
Monday's test involved Calvert and Dorchester counties as well, and was overseen by state and federal officials, according to George Forrest, St. Mary's deputy county administrator.
"This is a three-county joint exercise," Forrest said. "It's only simulation. We would create a great deal of confusion if we started evacuating schools."
The last time the counties attempted to conduct a test, a real emergency occurred, Forrest noted.
"This one was scheduled last year on 9/11," Forrest said.
Meanwhile, Calvert and St. Mary's counties already have distributed almost half of their federal government-issued potassium iodide pills designed to guard against the effects of radiation in the event of a real accident at the Calvert Cliffs plant.
Maryland received roughly 160,000 doses of potassium iodide, or two pills for each of the 80,000 residents who live within the fallout zone around nuclear plants -- 75 percent of those people live in Calvert, St. Mary's and Dorchester counties and within 10 miles of Calvert Cliffs.
-------- new york
Leak at Indian Point 2 Plant Leads It to Curtail Operations
New York Times
September 12, 2002
By WINNIE HU
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/12/nyregion/12NUKE.html
BUCHANAN, N.Y., Sept. 11 - The Indian Point 2 nuclear plant shut down its electricity production today to repair a hydrogen leak in its nonnuclear operations that plant officials said was first discovered by workers about two weeks ago.
The Entergy Corporation, which owns Indian Point, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said the leak posed no threat to public health and safety.
An Entergy spokesman, Jim Steets, said that as much as 10,000 cubic feet of hydrogen gas was escaping each day from a cooling system for the main electric generator, which produces nearly 1,000 megawatts of electricity for residents and businesses in Westchester County and New York City. The system is designed to handle a leak of up to 600 cubic feet per day.
The hydrogen was mixed with water carried through the cooling system in pipes, and later discharged into the Hudson River.
Mr. Steets said the company had planned to repair the leak during the plant's scheduled shutdown for refueling next month, but decided not to wait after the leak grew worse. The plant reduced its nuclear reactor power to 10 percent and ceased its electricity output, and is not expected to return to full power until the weekend.
The other active reactor on the site, Indian Point 3, will continue to operate as normal. "This is really a routine thing," Mr. Steets said.
In recent years, Indian Point 2 has been plagued by safety lapses, including a February 2000 radioactive leak that forced the reactor to shut down for nearly a year. But last month, the N.R.C. upgraded its performance rating slightly, noting safety improvements by Entergy after it took over the plant last year.
Neil Sheehan, a spokesman for the commission, said that Entergy had acted responsibly in addressing the hydrogen leak. "What's encouraging to us is that they are willing to shut down the plant to make this kind of repair in a timely fashion," he said. "If you go back a few years, Indian Point was more willing to let problems of this nature fester."
But Indian Point's opponents renewed their calls today for the plant to be closed and decommissioned. "This hydrogen leak is just one more example of the chronic problems Indian Point has experienced in recent years," said Alex Matthiessen, executive director of Riverkeeper, an environmental group that has led efforts to close the plant.
Until today, Indian Point 2 had generated electricity for 256 consecutive days without interruption.
Ken Klapp, a spokesman for the New York Independent System Operator, which monitors the state's power grid, said he did not foresee any problems from the temporary loss of power.
"It's a large chunk of the system," he said. "But it's not as critical in a week when the loads are expected to be lower because of the relaxed temperatures."
-------- us politics
A War Based on Rumors
Date: 12 Sep 2002
From: "Eli Pariser, MoveOn.Org" moveon-help@list.moveon.org
In August, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card told the New York Times that "you don't launch a new product in August." (Link to article below.) The product he was referring to was a war with Iraq, and today's speech by President Bush at the United Nations marks the grand product launch.
Bush's speech was great marketing -- the copy was well- written and the timing perfect for a publicity campaign. It's no coincidence that the push for a war on Iraq occurs only a day after September 11th. The New York Times article above quoted Administration officials who said that Sept. 11 would be "a centerpiece of the strategy," helping to "move Americans toward support of action against Iraq."
For weeks now, Administration officials have been playing up this speech as Bush's big opportunity to "make his case." But while the marketing has been stellar, the case itself simply hasn't been made. In his speech Bush released no new intelligence and made no novel arguments. Instead, he rolled out a laundry list of old grievances and half-truths. According to CNN, many of the allegations the Bush White House made about Iraq are entirely unsubstantiated, or are based on the testimony of sworn enemies of Saddam Hussein. The CNN article is at: http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/09/12/iraq.report/ (see below)
We need to let Congress know that we see through this promotional campaign. Please call your Senators today at:
Senator Mark Dayton Local Phone: 612-727-5220 DC Phone: 202-224-3244 DC Fax: 202-228-2186
Senator Paul Wellstone Local Phone: 651-645-0323 DC Phone: 202-224-5641 DC Fax: 202-224-8438
Let the staffer you speak to know that you're a constituent. Then tell him or her that you're not convinced, and that there are lots of hard questions we're still counting on the Senator to ask. Ask the questions that concern you. Here are some of the ones that we've heard:
Where's the beef? Where's the evidence of clear and present danger? What happened to Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda? If our allies don't support this, are we going ahead or not? Who's going to pick up the pieces in Iraq? Why now, right before the election? How many lives will be lost? How much money will be spent? What are the alternatives?
Once you've made your call, please let us know at:
http://www.moveon.org/callmade_iraq.html?id=741-485633-EGGpOgWlvcYLIglwckdG0Q
We'd like to keep a count. Your call will build on the momentum started on September 9th and 10th by Peace Action's national call-in days. Senate offices are reporting that constituents they are hearing from are overwhelmingly against the war.
To play politics with a national tragedy is unconscionable. To do so in the service of a foolish and destabilizing war adds injury to insult. Please call your Senators today and urge them not to fall for this cynical campaign.
Sincerely,
--Eli Pariser MoveOn.org September 12, 2002
P.S. The New York Times article referred to is at: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/07/politics/07STRA.html
------
White House spells out case against Iraq
Report is titled 'A Decade of Deception and Defiance'
September 12, 2002
CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/09/12/iraq.report/
WASHINGTON -- As the Bush administration makes its strongest bid yet for international and domestic support for action against Iraq this week, the White House released a report early Thursday, listing some of the principal accusations against Iraq and its leader.
Bush addressed the United Nations' General Assembly later in the morning on Thursday, saying, "The Security Council resolutions will be enforced. The just demands of peace and security will be met. Or action will be unavoidable. And a regime that has lost its legitimacy will also lose its power." (Full story)
The report was intended to serve as a "background paper" for Bush's U.N. speech.
"This document provides specific examples of how Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has systematically and continually violated 16 United Nations Security Council resolutions over the past decade, " the report said in a preface.
The document bases its claims against Iraq on reports from opposition groups, Iraqi defectors, former Iraqi military leaders, U.N. weapons inspectors and human rights groups. However, several of the statements included in the report are unsubstantiated.
Titled "A Decade of Deception and Defiance," the report begins with a list of the Security Council resolutions the United States says Saddam has violated, beginning with demands issued November 29, 1990, three months after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, when the United Nations authorized the use of "all means necessary" to remove Iraq from Kuwait.
Listed soon after are the original demands from Resolution 687 passed after the end of the Gulf War calling for Iraq to destroy its weapons, stop making more weapons, and submit to weapons inspections. Eleven of the resolutions that follow are mainly calls for Iraq to adhere to Resolution 687, or deplore or condemn Iraq's refusal to do so.
The list ends with a resolution passed at the end of 1999 -- over a year after Iraq suspended cooperation with UNSCOM (U.N. Special Commission on Iraq) -- urging Iraq to allow weapons inspectors.
The two rema ining resolutions demand that Iraq release prisoners and return property to Kuwait after the Gulf War, and condemns Iraq's repression of civilians.
The report also lists the dates of 30 statements from the Security Council president "regarding Saddam Hussein's continued violations" of council resolutions, from June 28, 1991, through May 14, 1998, but it does not list specific topics of the statements.
The document then makes the case that Iraq either is harboring or has the capability to harbor biological, chemical, nuclear and ballistic missiles.
Citing an article from The New York Times last year, the report refers to an Iraqi defector, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, who said he visited some 20 secret facilities for making chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons.
Al-Haideri supported his claims with government documents.
Remaining items accuse Iraq of concealing its biological weapons program from UNSCOM, mainly citing UNSCOM reports, but making two unsubstantiated claims that Iraq is upgrading facilities or trying to procure mobile weapons laboratories.
The segment on chemical weapons begins with a recounting of the alleged chemical weapons attack by the Iraqi military against Iraqi Kurds in the late 1980s that reportedly killed thousands. The segment also cites accounting inconsistencies by Iraq, identified by UNSCOM, and several unsubstantiated claims Iraq is seeking to develop or purchase chemical weapons production equipment.
The segment on nuclear weapons cites a report from the International Institute for Strategic Studies which appeared in the media Monday, saying Iraq could "probably" build a nuclear warhead within months if it procured plutonium or enriched uranium from another country.
The report also concluded Iraq did not currently have a nuclear weapons capability, and probably lacked the systems needed to deliver chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons.
The nuclear weapons section included unsubstantiated claims that Iraq has the technical expertise to make nuclear weapons, and even that "Saddam Hussein has repeatedly met with his nuclear scientists over the past two years, signaling his continued interest in developing his nuclear program."
Iraq continues work on ballistic missiles prohibited by Resolution 687, according to the report, which also says Iraq has rebuilt testing structures that were destroyed by UNSCOM.
The report also cites Iraqi defectors and refugees alleging human rights violations by Iraqi security forces, including attempts to intimidate suspected political opponents by raping or decapitating their family members, routine and systematic physical torture, and even one account from an Iraqi soccer player who said he and his teammates were beaten and humiliated at the order of Saddam's oldest son, Uday, because of poor performances.
Also cited is an April 1998 report from Max Van der Stoel, a former U.N. Human Rights Special Rapporteur, saying Iraq had executed at least 1,500 people during the previous year for political reasons, and that Iraq had over 16,000 disappearances or persons unaccounted for, the world's highest.
As it does for many of the human rights allegations, the document cites a U.S. State Department report in alleging that the Iraqi leader threatened parents throughout Iraq with the loss of food ration cards to compel them to enlist their sons between 10 and 15 years of age in a training course for weapons use.
The report also accuses Saddam Hussein of persecuting the majority Shi'a Muslims by killing and detaining Shi'a clerics, and restricting religious observances.
In the segment on Iraq's support for terrorists, there is no mention of any link between Iraq and the terrorist network al Qaeda. The segment does list a 1993 assassination attempt on then-President George H.W. Bush and the Emir of Kuwait. Iraq is also accused of sheltering two Palestinian terrorist organizations, and it lists Saddam's decision in 2002 to increase from $10,000 to $25,000 the bounty paid to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.
The segment also lists the Salman Pak facility in Iraq, which former Iraqi military officers describe as a secret terrorist training facility. A report filed Monday by CNN's James Martone included a tour of this facility given by Iraqi officials, who maintain it is used for counter-terrorist training for Iraqi security agents.
The report ends with allegations that Iraq has failed to return property stolen from Kuwait during the Gulf War, and failed to return or account for hundreds of Kuwaitis and others, still missing from the conflict, including one American pilot.
Also included are reports from the United Nations saying Iraq is diverting money gained from its oil-for-food program to military uses, is delaying issuing visas to humanitarian groups in northern Iraq, and that Saddam is diverting money from illegal oil sales to spend on "his lavish palaces and inner circle, rather than on the humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people."
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Bush Tells U.N. to Act on Iraq or U.S. Will Have to Take Action
New York Times
September 12, 2002
By TERENCE NEILAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/12/politics/12CND-BUSH.html
President Bush made it clear today that if Iraq continued to defy the United Nations over demands that it stop the production of weapons of mass destruction and its attempts to produce a nuclear bomb, then action against Baghdad "would be unavoidable."
Mr. Bush did not spell out what form that action would take, but the Bush administration has openly spoken of its desire and intention to use military force to overthow Saddam Hussein, Iraq's president.
"My nation will work with the U.N. Security Council to meet our common challenge," he told the General Assembly. "If Iraq's regime defies us again the world must move deliberately, decisively, to hold Iraq to account.
"We will work with the U.N. Security Council for the necessary resolutions. But the purposes of the United States should not be doubted.
"The Security Council resolutions will be enforced - the just demands of peace and security will be met - or action will be unavoidable. And a regime that has lost its legitimacy will also lose its power."
Mr. Bush received strong support after his speech from Capitol Hill. Republican leaders pressed Democrats to act quickly and show the world that Congress backs Mr. Bush in his resolve to confront Iraq if necessary.
"We must vote to show support for the president right now," said Senator Trent Lott, a Republican from Mississippi, the minority leader.
Senator John S. McCain of Arizona, another Republican, agreed. Mr. McCain said he would try to presuade the Senate Democratic leader, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, to debate the Iraq issue before the end of the current session.
The Republicans' comments put them in conflict with Mr. Daschle, who repeated his view that it was more important for Congress to act deliberately than quickly.
In the first Iraqi reaction, Baghdad's ambassador to the United Nations, Mohamed al-Douri, said of Mr. Bush, "He chooses to deceive the world and his own people by the longest series of fabrications that have ever been told by a leader of a nation."
Mr. Bush reserved much of his speech to referring to 16 Security Council resolutions that he said Mr. Hussein had broken and ignored.
To end the Persian Gulf war nearly 12 years ago, Mr. Hussein had agreed to terms that were clear "to him and all," Mr. Bush said.
"He has proven instead only his contempt for the United Nations, and for all his pledges. By breaking every pledge - by his deceptions, and by his cruelties - Saddam Hussein has made the case again himself."
The president said the broken promises included those on terrorism and improving human rights in Iraq, where last year the United Nations Commission on Human Rights cited "extremely grave violations."
"In 1991, the U.N. Security Council, through Resolution 687, demanded that Iraq renounce all involvement with terrorism, and permit no terrorist organizations to operate in Iraq," Mr. Bush said.
"Iraq's regime agreed. It broke its promise."
He also said it had broken pledges not to produce long-range missiles, chemical and biological weapons.
"And in 1995 - after four years of deception - Iraq finally admitted it had a crash nuclear weapons program prior to the gulf war. We know now, were it not for that war, the regime in Iraq would likely have possessed a nuclear weapon no later than 1993."
He added: "Should Iraq acquire fissile material, it would be able to build a nuclear weapon within a year."
After citing the many occasions since 1991 on which Iraq had defied Security Council calls to readmit weapons inspectors, he said:
"As we meet today, it has been almost four years since the last U.N. inspectors set foot in Iraq - four years for the Iraqi regime to plan and build and test behind a cloak of secrecy.
"We know that Saddam Hussein pursued weapons of mass murder even when inspectors were in his country. Are we to assume that he stopped when they left?"
He added: "If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will immediately and unconditionally forswear, disclose and remove or destroy all weapons of mass destruction, long-range missiles and all related material.
"If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will immediately end all support for terrorism and act to suppress it, as all states are required to do by U.N. Security Council resolutions."
Toward the opening of his speech today, Mr. Bush drew applause from delegates by announcing that the United States would rejoin Unesco, from which it withdrew in 1984.
"This organization has been reformed and America will participate fully in its mission to advance human rights, tolerance, and learning," he said.
In London today, the British government continued to voice its support for action to be taken against Baghdad.
The world should send a "clear ultimatum" to Mr. Hussein, Defense Secretary Geoffrey Hoon said.
His remarks followed an address by Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain on Tuesday in which he said that if the United Nations is ignored "action will follow."
Mr. Bush's address came after a speech by Secretary General Kofi Annan saying that any action against Iraq should be through the United Nations, not, in a clear allusion to the United States, by one nation alone. But Mr. Annan said he recognized the responsibility of the United Nations to continue to press Iraq to allow weapons inspectors back into the country.
"Any state, if attacked, retains the inherent right of self defense under Article 51 of the Charter," he said in his remarks, the text of which, in an unusual move, was issued on Wednesday.
"But beyond that," he added, "when states decide to use force to deal with broader threats to international peace and security, there is no substitute for the unique legitimacy provided by the United Nations."
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Bush to Warn U.N.: Act on Iraq or U.S. Will
New York Times
September 12, 2002
By DAVID E. SANGER and JULIA PRESTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/12/international/middleeast/12IRAQ.html
President Bush plans to challenge the United Nations today to enforce resolutions it has passed since 1991 requiring Iraq to "unconditionally accept" the destruction of its chemical and biological weapons and nuclear research facilities, according to administration officials. He will warn that if the United Nations fails to act, the United States will step in to force Iraqi compliance.
Putting muscle behind Mr. Bush's warning, the Pentagon announced that it was preparing to send 600 military staff members from its Central Command headquarters in Florida - which has responsibility for the Middle East - to the gulf state of Qatar in November. While the move will be characterized as a temporary exercise, it could well become permanent and will put a vanguard of American commanders, the core of a battle staff, on Saddam Hussein's doorstep.
Secretary General Kofi Annan of the United Nations will strike a markedly different tone from that of Mr. Bush, arguing in a pointed speech just before the president's that the United States must act through the United Nations to confront Iraq.
Mr. Annan's office took the unusual step of releasing his remarks last night to underscore his caution that there is "no substitute for the unique legitimacy provided by the United Nations."
The fast-developing confrontation over Iraq hung over a a somber but restorative day of national mourning and commemoration.
Moving between the three sites of last year's terrorist attacks, Mr. Bush consoled survivors in Washington, fought back tears at the Pennsylvania crash site of United Flight 93, and spent two hours in the pit that was once the foundation of the World Trade Center, hugging the families of some of the thousands who died.
Tonight, emotionally drained from the somberness of the day, Mr. Bush spoke to the nation from Ellis Island, saying he had "no intention of ignoring or appeasing history's latest gang of fanatics."
"In the ruins of two towers, under a flag unfurled at the Pentagon, at the funerals of the lost, we have made a sacred promise to ourselves and to the world: We will not relent until justice is done, and our nation is secure. What our enemies have begun, we will finish," he said.
But his United Nations speech this morning is expected to move beyond commemoration to the next phase of his battle against terrorism - a phase in which he plans to turn his attention to what he is expected to term a "decade of defiance."
Heeding the call of allies that he must operate through the United Nations, aides familiar with the speech said Mr. Bush planned to put the onus on Mr. Hussein and the United Nations itself - and to portray the United States as a reluctant sheriff that will step in only as a last resort.
One senior administration official who has been giving advance warning of the message to governments around the world said Mr. Bush "won't set any deadlines," nor will he propose a specific course of action. But just as the president told Congress last Sept. 20 that he was not willing to wait very long for the Taliban to turn over Osama bin Laden, the official said, "he's not willing to wait very long for Saddam to allow the destruction of his weapons."
Mr. Bush has been drafting and re-drafting the speech for weeks, searching for a balance between American support for the authority of the United Nations and an American warning that the organization's legitimacy is at stake.
According to officials who have reviewed the drafts or summarized them for foreign leaders, Mr. Bush will make it clear that he does not plan to allow the United Nations much time to enforce 16 resolutions that have been allowed to lapse.
"The message is pretty simple," the senior official said. "The U.N. is at a crossroads. We have plenty of resolutions about Iraq. Now we have to choose whether the U.N. exists to pass resolutions or make them stick."
Privately, administration officials are talking about starting up inspections in three to four weeks, after the president of France, Jacques Chirac, mentioned a three-week timetable in an interview with The New York Times.
Richard L. Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, told a conference in Washington on Tuesday that Mr. Chirac's statements had been "noted" in the State Department because they indicated that European leaders were coalescing around the thought that Mr. Hussein's actions could no longer be tolerated.
Mr. Bush does not plan to talk about restarting inspections; his references in the speech focus on inspections Mr. Hussein has blocked, and on the forced withdrawal of United Nations inspectors three and a half years ago. But he leaves the door open to a final inspection effort - as long as it is intended to lead to the immediate dismantlement of all weapons of mass destruction.
His message, one aide said, will be that "the only thing he won't abide is inaction."
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell previewed the speech today in meetings at the United Nations with the foreign ministers of Russia, China and Britain. He also met Joschka Fischer, the foreign minister of Germany, the ally most outspoken in opposing expanding the war to Iraq.
According to the text of his remarks, Mr. Annan, using carefully general terms, shares the misgivings of the Germans and others about the United States' acting on its own on Iraq.
Even for a major power, "choosing to follow or reject the multilateral path must not be a simple matter of political convenience," he says.
He adds that "when states decide to use force to deal with broader threats to international peace and security, there is no substitute for the unique legitimacy provided by the United Nations." The "primary criterion for putting an issue on the Council's agenda" should be "the existence of a grave threat to world peace," he says.
At one point Mr. Annan presents the issue in personal terms.
"I stand before you today as a multilateralist," he says early in his comments, "by precedent, by principle, by charter and by duty."
While the White House has kept tight control over Mr. Bush's speech - which was written partly by Karen Hughes, his former counselor, who was seen traveling with him today - the United Nations departed from custom in releasing the advance text.
Mr. Annan's aides said they feared that his comments would be lost as the focus turned today to Mr. Bush's efforts to rally support for a campaign against the Iraqi leader.
While implicitly cautioning the United States, Mr. Annan will also chastise Baghdad for defying United Nations resolutions. He will warn that if its violations continue, the Security Council will have to act to enforce them.
"The leadership of Iraq continues to defy" mandatory Security Council resolutions, Mr. Annan will say. He urges Iraq to comply and appeals to other nations to pressure Baghdad to accept the return of the weapons inspectors, calling this "an indispensable first step towards assuring the world that all Iraq's weapons of mass destruction have been eliminated."
His aides say he regards the address as one of the most important he will make as secretary general. He will open the session and President Bush will follow 15 minutes later. Then 22 other government leaders are scheduled to address the General Assembly on the first day of its annual fall debate.
United Nations officials acknowledged that it was unusual for a secretary general to address himself in such clear counterpoint to a speech from an American president here. Mr. Annan's aides sent a copy of the text to President Bush today.
The secretary general's comments echo keenly felt frustrations at the United Nations that the Bush administration has gone its own way on global issues ranging from climate change to the international war crimes court.
But he warns, "If Iraq's defiance continues, the Security Council must face its responsibilities."
United Nations officials said Mr. Annan felt confident that his relations with Washington were warm enough that President Bush would not object to his speech. The president called Mr. Annan earlier this week to discuss Iraq, officials said.
However, Mr. Annan strongly hopes to avoid American-led military action against Iraq, which he fears could destabilize the Middle East, United Nations officials said.
In London, Prime Minister Tony Blair bowed to critics in his Labor Party and agreed to recall Parliament from its summer recess to debate his hard-line stance on Iraq. Parliament is not due back in session till Oct. 15, but Mr. Blair said today that he would schedule a special one-day debate during the week of Sept. 23. He did not, however, accede to his critics' request that there be a binding vote on the issue.
Mr. Blair's spokesman said Downing Street would have made public a long-promised dossier on Iraqi arms buildup by then. The release of the document has been delayed while the British government works out how to produce convincing evidence of the threat from Iraq without compromising sources.
Mr. Blair has been Mr. Bush's staunchest supporter in the campaign against Saddam Hussein. However, opinion surveys in Britain show that he faces opposition from majorities of the public at large, the trade union movement and the Labor members of Parliament.
On Tuesday, Mr. Blair faced down his critics at the Trades Union Congress in Blackpool, pledging that no military action would be taken without United Nations consideration and full debate in Parliament.
But, sticking to his tough line, he said, "Let it be clear there can be no more conditions, no more games, no more prevaricating, no more undermining of the U.N.'s authority." And he warned, "Let it be clear that should the will of United Nations be ignored, action will follow."
--------
Text: Bush's Speech to U.N. on Iraq
September 12, 2002
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/12/politics/12AP-PTEX.html
Following is a transcript of President Bush's address to the United Nations on Thursday, as recorded by The New York Times:
Mr. Secretary General, Mr. President, distinguished delegates and ladies and gentlemen.
We meet one year and one day after a terrorist attack brought grief to my country and brought grief to many citizens of our world.
Yesterday we remembered the innocent lives taken that terrible morning. Today we turn to the urgent duty of protecting other lives, without illusion and without fear.
We've accomplished much in the last year in Afghanistan and beyond. We have much yet to do in Afghanistan and beyond.
Many nations represented here have joined in the fight against global terror and the people of the United States are grateful. The United Nations was born in the hope that survived a world war, the hope of a world moving toward justice, escaping old patterns of conflict and fear. The founding members resolved that the peace of the world must never again be destroyed by the will and wickedness of any man.
We created a United Nations Security Council so that, unlike the League of Nations, our deliberations would be more than talk, our resolutions would be more than wishes.
After generations of deceitful dictators and broken treaties and squandered lives, we dedicated ourselves to standards of human dignity shared by all and to a system of security defended by all.
Today, these standards and this security are challenged. Our commitment to human dignity is challenged by persistent poverty and raging disease. The suffering is great and our responsibilities are clear.
The United States is joining with the world to supply aid where it reaches people and lifts up lives, to extend trade and the prosperity it brings, and to bring medical care where it is desperately needed.
As a symbol of our commitment to human dignity, the United States will return to Unesco. This organization has been reformed, and America will participate fully in its mission to advance human rights and tolerance and learning.
Our common security is challenged by regional conflicts, ethnic and religious strife that is ancient but not inevitable.
In the Middle East there can be no peace for either side without freedom for both sides.
America stands committed to an independent and democratic Palestine living side by side with Israel in peace and security. Like all other people, Palestinians deserve a government that serves their interests and listens to their voices. My nation will continue to encourage all parties to step up to their responsibilities as we seek a just and comprehensive settlement to the conflict.
Above all, our principles and our security are challenged today by outlaw groups and regimes that accept no law of morality and have no limit to their violent ambitions.
In the attacks on America a year ago, we saw the destructive intentions of our enemies. This threat hides within many nations, including my own. In cells and camps, terrorists are plotting further destruction and building new bases for their war against civilization.
And our greatest fear is that terrorists will find a shortcut to their mad ambitions when an outlaw regime supplies them with the technologies to kill on a massive scale.
In one place, in one regime, we find all these dangers in their most lethal and aggressive forms - exactly the kind of aggressive threat the United Nations was born to confront.
Twelve years ago, Iraq invaded Kuwait without provocation and the regime's forces were poised to continue their march to seize other countries and their resources. Had Saddam Hussein been appeased instead of stopped, he would have endangered the peace and stability of the world.
Yet this aggression was stopped by the might of coalition forces and the will of the United Nations.
To suspend hostilities, to spare himself, Iraq's dictator accepted a series of commitments.
The terms were clear - to him and to all. And he agreed to prove he is complying with every one of those obligations. He has proven instead only his contempt for the United Nations and for all his pledges. By breaking every pledge, by his deceptions and by his cruelties, Saddam Hussein has made the case against himself.
In 1991, Security Council Resolution 688 demanded that the Iraqi regime cease at once the repression of its own people, including the systematic repression of minorities, which the council said threatened international peace and security in the region. This demand goes ignored.
Last year the U.N. Commission on Human Rights found that Iraq continues to commit extremely grave violations of human rights and that the regime's repression is all-pervasive. Tens of thousands of political opponents and ordinary citizens have been subjected to arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, summary execution and torture by beating and burning, electric shock, starvation, mutilation and rape. Wives are tortured in front of their husbands, children in the presence of their parents - and all of these horrors concealed from the world by the apparatus of a totalitarian state.
In 1991 the U.N. Security Council, through Resolutions 686 and 687, demanded that Iraq return all prisoners from Kuwait and other lands. Iraq's regime agreed. It broke this promise.
Last year the secretary general's high-level coordinator for this issue reported that Kuwaiti, Saudi, Indian, Syrian, Lebanese, Iranian, Egyptian, Bahraini and Omani nationals remain unaccounted for - more than 600 people. One American pilot is among them.
In 1991 the U.N. Security Council, through Resolution 687, demanded that Iraq renounce all involvement with terrorism and permit no terrorist organizations to operate in Iraq. Iraq's regime agreed. It broke this promise.
In violation of Security Council Resolution 1373, Iraq continues to shelter and support terrorist organizations that direct violence against Iran, Israel and Western governments. Iraqi dissidents abroad are targeted for murder.
In 1993 Iraq attempted to assassinate the emir of Kuwait and a former American president.
Iraq's government openly praised the attacks of Sept. 11, and Al Qaeda terrorists escaped from Afghanistan and are known to be in Iraq.
In 1991 the Iraqi regime agreed to destroy and stop developing all weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles, and to prove to the world it has done so by complying with rigorous inspections. Iraq has broken every aspect of this fundamental pledge.
From 1991 to 1995, the Iraqi regime said it had no biological weapons. After a senior official in its weapons program defected and exposed this lie, the regime admitted to producing tens of thousands of liters of anthrax and other deadly biological agents for use with Scud warheads, aerial bombs and aircraft spray tanks.
U.N. inspectors believe Iraq has produced two to four times the amount of biological agents it declared and has failed to account for more than three metric tons of material that could be used to produce biological weapons. Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons.
United Nations inspections also revealed that Iraq likely maintains stockpiles of VX, mustard and other chemical agents, and that the regime is rebuilding and expanding facilities capable of producing chemical weapons.
And in 1995, after four years of deception, Iraq finally admitted it had a crash nuclear weapons program prior to the gulf war.
We know now were it not for that war, the regime in Iraq would likely have possessed a nuclear weapon no later than 1993.
Today Iraq continues to withhold important information about its nuclear program, weapons design, procurement logs, experiment data and accounting of nuclear materials and documentation of foreign assistance.
Iraq employs capable nuclear scientists and technicians. It retains physical infrastructure needed to build a nuclear weapon. Iraq has made several attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon.
Should Iraq acquire fissile material, it would be able to build a nuclear weapon within a year.
And Iraq's state-controlled media has reported numerous meetings between Saddam Hussein and his nuclear scientists, leaving little doubt about his continued appetite for these weapons.
Iraq also possesses a force of Scud-type missiles with ranges beyond the 150 kilometers permitted by the U.N. Work at testing and production facilities shows that Iraq is building more long-range missiles that can inflict mass death throughout the region.
In 1990, after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the world imposed economic sanctions on Iraq. Those sanctions were maintained after the war to compel the regime's compliance with Security Council resolutions.
In time, Iraq was allowed to use oil revenues to buy food. Saddam Hussein has subverted this program, working around the sanctions to buy missile technology and military materials. He blames the suffering of Iraq's people on the United Nations, even as he uses his oil wealth to build lavish palaces for himself and to buy arms for his country.
By refusing to comply with his own agreements, he bears full guilt for the hunger and misery of innocent Iraqi citizens.
In 1991 Iraq promised U.N. inspectors immediate and unrestricted access to verify Iraq's commitment to rid itself of weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles. Iraq broke this promise, spending seven years deceiving, evading and harassing U.N. inspectors before ceasing cooperation entirely.
Just months after the 1991 cease-fire, the Security Council twice renewed its demand that the Iraqi regime cooperate fully with inspectors, condemning Iraq's serious violations of its obligations.
The Security Council again renewed that demand in 1994 and twice more in 1996, deploring Iraq's clear violations of its obligations. The Security Council renewed its demand three more times in 1997 citing flagrant violations, and three more times in 1998, calling Iraq's behavior totally unacceptable. And in 1999, the demand was renewed yet again.
As we meet today, it's been almost four years since the last U.N. inspector set foot in Iraq - four years for the Iraqi regime to plan and to build and to test, behind the cloak of secrecy.
We know that Saddam Hussein pursued weapons of mass murder even when inspectors were in his country. Are we to assume that he stopped when they left?
The history, the logic and the facts lead to one conclusion: Saddam Hussein's regime is a grave and gathering danger.
To suggest otherwise is to hope against the evidence. To assume this regime's good faith is to bet the lives of millions and the peace of the world in a reckless gamble. And this is a risk we must not take.
Delegates to the General Assembly, we have been more than patient. We've tried sanctions. We've tried the carrot of oil for food and the stick of coalition military strikes.
But Saddam Hussein has defied all these efforts and continues to develop weapons of mass destruction. The first time we may be completely certain he has nuclear weapons is when, God forbid, he uses one.
We owe it to all our citizens to do everything in our power to prevent that day from coming.
The conduct of the Iraqi regime is a threat to the authority of the United Nations and a threat to peace.
Iraq has answered a decade of U.N. demands with a decade of defiance.
All the world now faces a test and the United Nations a difficult and defining moment. Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?
The United States helped found the United Nations. We want the United Nations to be effective and respectful and successful. We want the resolutions of the world's most important multilateral body to be enforced. And right now those resolutions are being unilaterally subverted by the Iraqi regime.
Our partnership of nations can meet the test before us by making clear what we now expect of the Iraqi regime.
If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will immediately and unconditionally forswear, disclose and remove or destroy all weapons of mass destruction, long-range missiles and all related matériel.
If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will immediately end all support for terrorism and act to suppress it, as all states are required to do by U.N. Security Council resolutions.
If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will cease persecution of its civilian population, including Shia, Sunnis, Kurds, Turkomans and others, again as required by Security Council resolutions.
If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will release or account for all gulf war personnel whose fate is still unknown. It will return the remains of any who are deceased, return stolen property, accept liability for losses resulting from the invasion of Kuwait and fully cooperate with international efforts to resolve these issues, as required by Security Council resolutions.
If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will immediately end all illicit trade outside the oil-for-food program. It will accept U.N. administration of funds from that program to ensure that the money is used fairly and promptly for the benefit of the Iraqi people.
If all these steps are taken, it will signal a new openness and accountability in Iraq. And it could open the prospect of the United Nations' helping to build a government that represents all Iraqis, a government based on respect for human rights, economic liberty and internationally supervised elections.
The United States has no quarrel with the Iraqi people. They've suffered too long in silent captivity. Liberty for the Iraqi people is a great moral cause and a great strategic goal. The people of Iraq deserve it. The security of all nations requires it.
Free societies do not intimidate through cruelty and conquest, and open societies do not threaten the world with mass murder.
The United States supports political and economic liberty in a unified Iraq.
We can harbor no illusions. And that's important today to remember.
Saddam Hussein attacked Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990. He's fired ballistic missiles at Iran and Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Israel. His regime once ordered the killing of every person between the ages of 15 and 70 in certain Kurdish villages in northern Iraq. He has gassed many Iranians and 40 Iraqi villages.
My nation will work with the U.N. Security Council to meet our common challenge. If Iraq's regime defies us again, the world must move deliberately, decisively, to hold Iraq to account. We will work with the U.N. Security Council for the necessary resolutions. But the purposes of the United States should not be doubted.
The Security Council resolutions will be enforced. The just demands of peace and security will be met, or action will be unavoidable. And a regime that has lost its legitimacy will also lose its power.
Events can turn in one of two ways:
If we fail to act in the face of danger, the people of Iraq will continue to live in brutal submission. The regime will have new power to bully and dominate and conquer its neighbors, condemning the Middle East to more years of bloodshed and fear. The region will remain unstable with little hope of freedom and isolated from the progress of our times.
With every step the Iraqi regime takes toward gaining and deploying the most terrible weapons, our own options to confront that regime will narrow.
And if an emboldened regime were to supply these weapons to terrorist allies, then the attacks of Sept. 11 would be a prelude to far greater horrors.
If we meet our responsibilities, if we overcome this danger, we can arrive at a very different future. The people of Iraq can shake off their captivity. They can one day join a democratic Afghanistan and a democratic Palestine, inspiring reforms throughout the Muslim world. These nations can show by their example that honest government and respect for women and the great Islamic tradition of learning can triumph in the Middle East and beyond. And we will show that the promise of the United Nations can be fulfilled in our time.
Neither of these outcomes is certain. Both have been set before us.
We must choose between a world of fear and a world of progress.
We cannot stand by and do nothing while dangers gather.
We must stand up for our security and for the permanent rights and the hopes of mankind.
By heritage and by choice, the United States of America will make that stand.
And, delegates to the United Nations, you have the power to make that stand as well.
Thank you very much.
-------- MILITARY
-------- business
Lockheed Martin Seeks Poland Deal
The Associated Press
Thursday, September 12, 2002; 10:11 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7453-2002Sep12?language=printer
WARSAW, Poland -- Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Co. on Thursday signed preliminary agreements worth a total of $500 million with four Polish defense industry companies as its steps up its efforts to win a multibillion dollar contract to supply fighter jets.
Lockheed Martin is one of three bidders seeking the Polish contract - worth an estimated $3.5 billion to $4 billion - for 48 multipurpose fighter jets, needed by 2008 to bring the country's military up to NATO standards.
The Polish government says it will choose the offer which is accompanied by the best offset deal - a plan to inject as much funding for technology and developing expertise in the Polish military and civilian industry as the country will spend on the jets.
"Today's agreements are the second part of our offset offer, which we will enlarge to at least 100 percent of the full value of the jet deal," William Perkins, Lockheed Martin's deputy chairman for Eastern Europe, said Thursday.
The U.S.-based aircraft maker has already promised $1 billion worth of investment in other five Polish companies in preliminary deals signed July.
Also bidding are the joint venture of Sweden's Saab and Britain's BAE Systems, maker of the Gripen jet, and Dassault of France, which makes the Mirage 2000 fighter.
The government's deadline for final offers is Nov. 12. It promises to select a winner within the following 45 days.
Poland is the largest of the three former Soviet bloc countries that joined NATO in 1999, and U.S. officials have lobbied Poland to buy the F-16. The other two countries, Hungary and the Czech Republic, opted for Gripens - but the Czechs canceled due to a high cleanup bill for the recent severe flooding in Prague.
-------- colombia
Colombia Authorizes Warrantless Arrests, Citing Terror Fight
New York Times
September 12, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/12/international/americas/12COLO.html
BOGOTÁ, Colombia, Sept. 11 (Reuters) - The government has claimed new authority to arrest suspects without warrants and declare zones under military control, measures that President Álvaro Uribe said today were necessary to fight "terrorism."
The new powers, which also make it easier to tap phones and limit foreigners' access to conflict zones in a country torn by guerrilla war, were decreed late Tuesday under the state of emergency that Mr. Uribe enacted shortly after taking office in August.
Human rights groups said the measures needlessly restricted civil rights and were aimed at civilians rather than combatants in the 38-year-old civil war, which claims thousands of lives a year.
But Mr. Uribe, 50, who was elected by promising to get tough on leftist rebels and enjoys an approval rating of about 70 percent, said authorities needed the new powers to fight leftist rebels and far-right paramilitaries, who are financed by money from the cocaine trade.
"If you read them carefully," he said of the measures, "you will see that they entirely respect human rights. I welcome the controversy. The measures aren't meant to silence controversy, but to face up to terrorism."
Colombian authorities often use the word terrorism to equate their struggle with the global offensive being waged by their ally and major aid donor, the United States, which is an enthusiastic supporter of the Uribe administration.
But the director of the Colombian Jurists Commission, a nongovernmental organization, said it was outrageous that security forces would now be able to hold suspects for 24 hours without presenting them to a state prosecutor.
"They allow security agents to enter your house or office without a warrant at any time of day because they think you're suspicious," said the director, Gustavo Gallón.
The emergency powers, which will allow military commanders to declare curfews and control movements in "zones of rehabilitation and consolidation," also worry some members of Uribe's own Liberal Party.
"This will end up allowing abuses and raising questions abroad and in Colombia about the legitimacy of the government's fight against criminals," said one party member, Senator Rodrigo Rivera.
Earlier this week, Washington approved more aid for Colombia's military, after deciding it was doing enough to protect human rights. Senior military officers have been investigated for links to far-right paramilitaries who have massacred civilians in recent years, but President Uribe says he will crack down on far right and far left outlaws alike.
Colombia's new emergency measures are in many aspects less draconian than the powers enacted by the United States government to deal with foreign suspects, said Robin Kirk of Human Rights Watch in Washington.
Human rights groups are also worried about Mr. Uribe's plans to set up a network of a million civilian informants, which they fear could allow anonymous snoops to make malicious accusations against neighbors to the security forces.
The government sees informants as crucial to re-establishing state control over the roughly half of Colombia that has fallen under the sway of leftist rebels or paramilitary vigilantes.
Mr. Uribe says Colombia's conflict will be solved only by peace talks, and promises to increase social spending as well as military to fight poverty.
-------- europe
Schröder's anti-war stance puts him ahead of the pack
From Roger Boyes in Lübeck,
UK Times
September 12, 2002
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-411934,00.html
THOUSANDS of Germans clapped and chanted their approval in the northern port of Lübeck as Gerhard Schröder took his campaign against the Iraq war to the people.
The Chancellor has taken the lead in the election polls and the reason seems to be plain: popular backing for his defiance of US war plans. The Emnid polling institute said that, with only 11 days left to the general election, 39 per cent of Germans would vote for the Social Democrats, compared with the 38 per cent that would vote for Edmund Stoiber's Christian Democrats.
As a result, the Chancellor is turning his election campaigning into something akin to a pacifist revival movement.
For the first time since the 1980s, the Social Democrats are playing the anti-American card and, astonishingly given the outpouring of sympathy after September 11, most Germans are following the Chancellor's lead. "
"What kind of friendship is it that does not permit disagreement over the existential question of war and peace?" Herr Schröder asked the crowd. "It cannot be that a friend demands something and we immediately have to do as we are told: that's subordination and that's not my thing, not my thing at all."
This statement earned big applause. It has been a similar story across the country: the Germans seem ready to vote for a politician who stands up to President Bush.
President Saddam Hussein does not figure in the Chancellor's speeches, nor did he mention the Iraqi leader in his television debate on Sunday. Instead, he speaks of Germany's great contribution to the Afghan campaign, "second only to the United States, so we don't have to go around in sackcloth and ashes - we're doing our bit". In Berlin though, government strategists are puzzling a way out of the corner into which the Chancellor has boxed himself.
He has emphasised that he is against a war with Iraq - "Never under my leadership" - even if there is a United Nations mandate.
Herr Schröder also seems to rule out a financial contribution to such a campaign. Plainly, a common European line on Iraq has become impossible and if the Chancellor wins the election, US-German relations will be strained.
However, these strategists have mapped out a face-saving plan. Soon after the election, Germany will announce its readiness to take over as the lead nation in running the international protection force in Afghanistan.
Turkey's mandate ends in December and the Germans will ask them to extend for two more months.
By February 2003, the Germans, with the Dutch, would be in a position to take an active role in Afghanistan. This would permit British and Turkish troops there to be redeployed in an Iraq war.
Even so, there is pressure for the Afghan protection force to take on more active combat functions, a dangerous mission that would run contrary to the pacifist sentiments being aired.
The Chancellor is treading the path of other Social Democrats who have, since the war, cut a fine line between supporting and criticising US administrations. Herr Schröder's model, in Lübeck at least, is Willy Brandt, who was Chancellor in 1969. Lübeck was Herr Brandt's town and the speeches were laced with references to him. Herr Brandt introduced a conciliatory policy towards Eastern Europe, and attracted suspicion from the White House at that time.
Herr Schröder seems to be willing to risk something similar in return for national popularity. His Lübeck speech contained much left-wing rhetoric, such as: "I want to fight for the rights of those who were not born with silver spoons in their mouths." But the big applause was reserved for when he shifted to Iraq. Even the young Christian Democratic subversives who had been distributing vitamin C tablets "courtesy of Edmund Stoiber, to give new strength to Germany", suddenly melted away: the carnival part of the election campaign was over.
-------- iran
Iran Assures Iraq Border Is 'Secure'
September 12, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iran-Iraq.html
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran's defense minister says neighboring Iraq need not fear Iranian meddling if it is attacked by the United States.
``The Iraqi border with Iran will remain secure,'' Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani was quoted by the official Islamic Republic News Agency as saying after a Cabinet meeting Wednesday.
``Iran is opposed to any military action against Iraq,'' he said. ``We will not also meddle in Iraq if it happens.''
Iran, which fought a 1980-88 war with its western neighbor, says a U.S.-Iraq war would destabilize the region. It may also fear expansion of American influence in the region if Washington succeeds in replacing Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's regime with a U.S.-friendly government. Already on Iran's eastern border, the war to oust the network blamed for the Sept. 11 attacks resulted in a pro-U.S. administration coming to power.
IRNA on Wednesday also quoted Shamkhani accusing the United States of inciting Afghan bandits to create trouble along Iran's eastern border.
``It's contrary to the democratic principles advocated by the White House,'' the defense minister said. ``Our armed forces are in full control of the situation and the people are in total solidarity with the government.''
``How can you call others terrorists, while you are making overtures to bandits whose hands are stained with the blood of innocent people?'' he asked.
On Sunday, Iran's Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi said Tehran had ``solid evidence that America is in contact with local Afghan terrorist groups on our border organizing them against Iran's interests.''
Shamkhani also said the new ballistic missile Iran successfully tested Friday was an ``all Iranian-made accurate missile with a range of 200 kilometers (125 miles).''
He gave no further details.
Iran has built a number of missiles, including the Shahab-3 which was first tested in 1998, has a range of 810 miles and is capable of carrying a nuclear warhead.
Iran is believed to have received missile technology from Russia, China and North Korea, but Tehran has denied this.
-------- iraq
On Baghdad's Streets, Life With U.S. Threats 'Has Become Normal'
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, September 12, 2002; Page A20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5660-2002Sep11.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 11 -- In January 1991, fearing the impending Persian Gulf War and the prospect of U.S. bombs falling on Iraq's capital, Saad Mohssan packed his mother and three young siblings into the family car and drove them to a relative's house 60 miles south of Baghdad.
"We were very scared," said Mohssan, 28, a smartly dressed restaurant manager. "We didn't know what war with the Americans would be like."
But with new talk that armed conflict might descend on this sweltering city, Mohssan said he has no plans for another flight. Now married and the father of a 2-year-old son, he said he and his family intend to ride out a U.S. attack -- if it occurs -- in their home.
"We are no longer afraid," he said today during a break from serving lunch patrons. "We have been living with American threats since 1991. For us, this has become normal."
Mohssan's attitude, a fusion of confidence and resignation, can be easily found among Baghdad's 5 million residents as their leader, President Saddam Hussein, prepares for yet another confrontation with the United States. Washington accuses Iraq of developing nuclear, biological and chemical weapons; Iraq denies the allegation.
During a walk today down Al-Rasheed Street, the city's main commercial thoroughfare, about 20 ordinary residents were interviewed, with an Iraqi government official acting as interpreter, as is standard procedure for foreign journalists working here. Not one of the people interviewed talked of making special preparations to deal with a military strike.
"So, America says it wants to attack," Abdul Karim Shaker, 62, a retired teacher of Arabic, said with a sigh as he squeezed next to five friends in a popular teahouse in central Baghdad. "This is not new. American aggression is part of life."
Questions about stocking up on food and water were dismissed with chortles by several people. The merchants doing the most brisk business today, it seemed, were stationers, selling notebooks and other supplies to children starting the school year.
Although Iraq's refusal to readmit U.N. weapons inspectors has sparked concern in many world capitals, there is no palpable sense of crisis here. The city's boulevards and the bridges that traverse the now-stagnant Tigris River are packed with honking cars. Markets bustle with activity, as do restaurants and cafes, where amid the clatter of plates and the smoke from water pipes, the conversation is often about things other than the prospect of war.
On a lengthy drive through Baghdad today, there was no sign of soldiers -- only the usual contingent of traffic cops. No antiaircraft guns, artillery or other weapons were to be seen, though Western military analysts outside Iraq have said that such equipment almost certainly would be concealed until fighting begins.
There is no evidence, either, that Iraq is moving equipment out of factories it deems valuable, according to diplomats and other observers. For now, military preparations have been evident only on state-run television. Among the recent fare: footage of a unit of young boys called "Saddam's Cubs" drilling at a training camp.
Many of the people interviewed today brushed off the possibility of war as U.S. propaganda. They voiced optimism that opposition from Russia, China and U.S. allies in the Arab world ultimately will force the Bush administration to back down. Newspapers here have been filled with statements from world leaders opposing unilateral U.S. military action and stories about the diplomatic efforts of Iraqi government ministers.
"America has threatened to attack so many times," said Jabber Abbas, a shopkeeper who deals in imitation cologne. "We don't believe it will happen."
History doesn't entirely support that confidence. There was the Gulf War assault, and in 1998, the United States and Britain staged four days of airstrikes on Iraq, saying it was failing to cooperate with weapons inspectors.
In addition, the United States regularly fires on Iraqi air defense installations while patrolling the "no fly" zones created in the north and south after the Gulf War ended in 1991. The patrols, designed to keep Iraq's air force away from Kurdish and Shiite areas of the country, often draw Iraqi antiaircraft fire and radar tracking, to which they respond with strikes.
Though on the surface Baghdad can seem a prosperous place, Iraq's economy as a whole is in deep trouble, with U.N. trade sanctions and the government's spending priorities both helping to keep things depressed. These woes may be preventing ordinary people from preparing for war, diplomats and U.N. officials said.
More than 80 percent of Iraqis depend on monthly food rations from the government, paid for by a U.N. program that allows Iraq to sell oil for humanitarian needs. "They're only getting a month's supply of food at a time," a U.N. official said. "Even if they wanted to stock up in case of a war, they couldn't."
Many foreigners living here appear as unfazed as their Iraqi neighbors. Although the Philippine Foreign Ministry ordered the evacuation of 118 Filipinos from Iraq today, there continues to be a steady flow of Westerners and Arab traders into the country. On Monday's flight to Baghdad from the Jordanian capital, Amman, every seat was occupied, many by businessmen coming for weeks-long trips.
The only tangible impact of the tensions, according to many people here, has been a steep drop in the value of the currency, the dinar. In August, it took 1,500 to buy a dollar. Now it takes 2,000, raising the price of imported goods. "Even the cheap medicines are becoming too expensive for us," said Atta Ahmed, a retired teacher who receives an 8,000-dinar pension every month. "Why can't the United States just leave us alone?"
Although all who were interviewed said they would oppose a U.S. invasion, some articulated more passion than others in joining the fight. And a few veered from the government line by suggesting that Hussein should allow the weapons inspectors to return, to spare the country another war. "Iraq should invite them back, but only at the very last minute," said Alaa Haddad, a book distributor. "If they come, there will be no reason for America to attack."
None of those interviewed voiced any desire to see Hussein's government toppled by U.S. forces.
But upon seeing a foreigner, one book vendor appeared to choose to get an opinion across in a subtle way. He pointed to a line from a play he was reading, Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar."
"I was born free as Caesar. So were you," the passage read.
"That is a very interesting line," the vendor said in halting English. "Very interesting."
-------- israel / palestine
Israeli Forces Destroy Palestinian Homes in Raids
September 12, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-mideast-demolitions.html
GAZA (Reuters) - Israeli forces destroyed eight Palestinian houses in pre-dawn raids in the Gaza Strip on Thursday, including the home of a dead militant's family, witnesses said.
Shooting erupted between the Israeli troops and Palestinian gunmen as tanks and armored bulldozers moved into the Shijaia neighborhood east of Gaza City. One Palestinian was seriously hurt, Palestinian officials said.
Israel has added house demolitions to its measures to combat the almost two-year-old Palestinian uprising for independence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, hoping this will deter militants behind suicide bombings and other attacks.
Three houses were destroyed in Shijaia, two in Maghazi refugee camp in central Gaza and three in the Rafah refugee camp in southern Gaza which is near the border with Egypt, witnesses and Palestinian security officials said.
The houses in Maghazi belonged to the Shehada family, seven of whose members were detained in an Israeli raid on Tuesday.
One of the houses razed in Shijaia belonged to the family Osama Helles, who was shot dead by troops as he carried out an ambush near a Jewish settlement in Gaza last November in which he killed an Israeli woman and wounded three other people.
The army said it had destroyed Helles's house as part of ``counter-terrorist measures.'' Two nearby houses were wrecked by the explosion, which also damaged several other buildings.
The army denied deliberately demolishing homes in Rafah but said heavy vehicles searching for tunnels used for arms smuggling may have damaged some ``structures'' -- suggesting they may have brought some houses down unintentionally.
Helles's mother, Khawla, said the troops gave the family 10 minutes to vacate the building.
``All we were able to take out was a few important family documents,'' she said. ``A house where we lived for 30 years was turned to rubble...I lost one son and now we have lost our house.''
Her husband, Mohammed, said that when the soldiers entered the house they asked for Osama Helles by name and he said his son was dead.
``But they responded with: 'Is he dead or a martyr?','' he said, using the term Palestinians use for those killed in battle.
Eleven-year-old Salman Helles, the brother of the dead militant, said he snatched up his schoolbag and books before his home was demolished but had no time to gather anything else.
``It's all gone,'' he said.
--------
Arafat's entire Cabinet resigns
September 12, 2002
By Joshua Mitnick
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020912-96469144.htm
RAMALLAH, West Bank - The Palestinian Cabinet resigned en masse yesterday under pressure from a hostile parliament.
The action, a stunning rebuke to the leadership of Yasser Arafat, reflected dissatisfaction among the lawmakers at the pace of reform, at Mr. Arafat's failure to dismiss corrupt ministers and at the results of the 2-year-old uprising against Israel.
The mass resignation, the most tangible sign yet of Mr. Arafat's weakening authority, was intended to save the Palestinian Authority president from the even greater embarrassment of losing a parliamentary vote of confidence in his Cabinet, which had been scheduled for yesterday afternoon.
Earlier in the day, Mr. Arafat formally declared Jan. 20 as the date for general elections, signaling that the tenure of the current Cabinet would be brief in any case. But the maneuver failed to mollify the lawmakers.
"The effect is the same as a vote of no confidence. It's a big victory for the Palestinian Legislative Council and the Palestinian people. It's something we're very proud of," said Ziyad Abu Amr, a representative from Gaza. "This is what we wanted - a new and accountable government with transparency."
The act of defiance by the 6-year-old parliament is virtually unprecedented among Arab governments and reflects widespread disillusionment among the Palestinian public. The fact that some two-thirds of the lawmakers come from Mr. Arafat's own Fatah faction made the defeat even more telling.
The Palestinian government has been under U.S. pressure for the last three months to carry out reforms and find new leaders, which President Bush has made a precondition for the creation of Palestinian state.
The parliamentary rebellion also underlines growing frustration with two years of escalating violence with Israel, which prompted Israel to order its army to reoccupy Palestinian cities in the West Bank five months ago, analysts said.
"It's opposition to Arafat, to the PLO, to Hamas, anyone who is in power. People are sick and tired of everyone," said Samir Rantisi, a spokesman for the government. "They're looking for a change, regardless of what that change means - just as long as it's not the status quo."
Despite the blow, Mr. Arafat remains the easy favorite to win re-election in January. The only leader whose popularity ratings approach those of Mr. Arafat is Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti, who was captured by Israel in April and is now being tried for murder.
The elections will mark the first time since 1996 the Palestinians have gone to the polls. The first vote was a condition of the Oslo peace accords in order to set up a democratically elected president and legislature following the pullout of Israel's army from Palestinian cities and villages.
Israel, which has placed tough restrictions on travel in the Palestinian areas, agreed last week to let the legislature convene for the first time since May.
The confidence motion, originally scheduled for Tuesday, was pushed back a day so the parliament could debate procedural issues, giving Mr. Arafat extra time to persuade the deputies to reconsider.
When certain defeat became clear minutes before the vote yesterday, the Cabinet ministers called Mr. Arafat from the legislature to inform him of their decision to step down.
Mr. Arafat now has two weeks to return to the parliament with a new 21-member Cabinet. Five ministers who joined the government in June as part of Mr. Arafat's first reform effort are expected to be reappointed; most of the remaining ministers, accused of mismanagement and corruption, are expected to be replaced.
The success of the lawmakers will embolden the legislature to serve as a genuine check on the actions by the executive branch in the future, several legislators said. Many deputies want to go even further by creating the position of prime minister to share responsibilities with Mr. Arafat.
"It is a landmark. The way the legislature is looking at itself is different than yesterday," said Ali Jarbawi, a professor of political science at Bir Zeit University. "It's a message to Arafat himself that he should not think he's the sole player as a decision-making force."
The legislature - with 88 seats representing electoral districts - has tried to challenge Mr. Arafat in the past. Five years ago, it voted for Mr. Arafat to dissolve the Cabinet. after producing a report saying almost half of the Palestinian Authority's $800 million budget had been wasted and accusing the government of widespread corruption.
Mr. Arafat largely ignored the action. Although the Cabinet members resigned, they were reappointed a year later.
--------
Three rivals hope to topple Arafat
APOnline
September 12, 2002
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2002-09-12-arafat-challengers_x.htm
JERUSALEM - A dissident professor, a psychologist living in France and a small-town Catholic lawyer - all political unknowns - have shrugged aside the long-shot odds and announced plans to challenge Yasser Arafat in Palestinian elections next year.
The contenders - political scientist Abdel Satar Qassem, psychologist Hussam Nazal and lawyer Ghassan Barham, while seeing an opening in the once monolithic hierarchy, bring little political clout to the race.
They hope, nevertheless, to capitalize on a wave of discontent about alleged corruption and the plunge in Arafat's popularity in advance of the elections which he set Wednesday for Jan. 20.
While both the United States and Israel want to see Arafat shoved aside, none of the challengers appeared likely to run on a platform that would make them attractive to the Jewish state or Washington. None of the trio of contenders proposes a more moderate Palestinian stand in stalemated negotiations.
Beyond that, there are no assurances the elections will take place on time or ever, given the demands of some Palestinians that Israel first end its occupation of six of eight main Palestinian towns and cities in the West Bank. The current round-the-clock curfew in Nablus, for example, would make campaigning and voting impossible.
A July poll by the Jerusalem Media and Communications Center, a Palestinian research group, showed 47.5% of Palestinians said they expected Arafat to be re-elected, while only 25% of those questioned listed him as the politician they most trusted. A nearly equal number, 24.5%, said they did not trust anyone. The poll cited a 3 percentage point margin of error.
By announcing their candidacies, the three hopefuls did little to clarify the internal Palestinian political situation.
Beyond blaming Israel for the continuing two years of violence, none of the three has produced a detailed platform. The field remains open for other challengers. The campaign is still to begin. And Arafat, while widely expected to run for re-election, has not announced his candidacy.
In 1996, two years after Arafat returned from exile in Tunisia for the first Palestinian presidential election, he won with 87 % of the vote, defeating a 73-year-old social worker who had no political base.
But after two years of violence and the resulting widespread belief that Arafat's government has failed the people, the challengers apparently believe they have a chance.
"With those who have ruled us, it's been like Ali Baba and the 4,000 thieves," Barham said in an interview.
On Wednesday, Arafat suffered the biggest setback of his post-exile tenure. Under pressure from a rebellious parliament, the Palestinian boss set presidential and parliamentary elections for Jan. 20, moments before his 21-member Cabinet resigned to avoid a no-confidence vote.
"My chance is better than Arafat's for two reasons: corruption and the people's desire for change," said Qassem, who claims the backing of several Palestinian militant groups. "The Palestinian street now is very resentful, offended by corruption."
Qassem, 56, has been a longtime critic of Arafat. He was briefly imprisoned by the government in 2000 after organizing a manifesto criticizing corruption in the Palestinian Authority. The Palestinian Supreme Court later ruled he was jailed illegally, because he was never formally charged.
Qassam, who appears to have gathered the most support so far, says he would dismantle the Palestinian security services, while retaining some local police, and privatize state-owned companies. He said he has recruited many volunteers for his campaign, including 300 in the Gaza Strip.
He said he sees no end to Palestinian suicide attacks against Israelis.
"The resistance will continue to ebb and flow," he said in an interview. "The martyrdom (suicide) attacks are the result of Israeli aggression, and as long as the aggression continues, the Palestinian people will continue seeking ways of resistance like these attacks."
Barham, 50, a Catholic and a lawyer from Zababdeh, a village near the northern West Bank town of Jenin, wants to reinforce the Palestinian "resistance" against Israel. He said he would refuse any U.S. role in the peace process "because the U.S. administration is biased in favor of Israel."
Barham, while a Christian, said he would base his government partly on rules laid out under Islamic law.
Nazal, 41, a psychologist who has lived in France for the last 15 years, said his top objective was to bring peace to the region. He rejects suicide attacks that target civilians.
"I am clean when it comes to corruption, I am a political moderate, and my strategy will be based on the establishment of a republican, democratic regime," he said in a telephone interview from his office in Tours, France. Since moving to France from his home near Qabatiyeh, near Jenin, he has returned to the West Bank about once a month, he said.
"I'll abolish some ministries - I won't say which ones now - and combine others," Nazal said. "I'll create the post of prime minister. I will favor calling referendums on the most important issues so power can be shared between the president and the people."
Nazal said Arafat appears "tired" and should hand over the reins to the next generation.
He said his background as a psychologist would be useful in helping Palestinians cope with their plight.
"My job is to provide psychological help to my clients," Nazal said. "If I can do that, why can't I do the same for my own people?"
-------- mideast
U.S. Fifth Fleet on highest alert;
Navy warns oil tankers in Gulf
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM
Thursday, September 12, 2002
http://216.26.163.62/2002/ss_terrorism_09_11.html
ABU DHABI - The U.S. Fifth Fleet was placed on the highest state of alert as the U.S. Navy warned yesterday that Al Qaida is targeting oil tankers in the Persian Gulf.
The navy said Al Qaida has planned attacks against oil tankers in and around the Persian Gulf from which 25 percent of the world's oil supply stems. This includes the Red Sea, according to Middle East Newsline.
The U.S. Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, with some 4,000 military personnel, was placed on "Threat Condition Delta," the highest alert set by the U.S. military. The rest of the U.S. military was placed at "Threat Condition Charlie," the second-highest level on a four-tier scale of alert.
"Shipmasters should exercise extreme caution when transiting strategic choke points such as the Strait of Hormuz or Bab-el-Mandeb, or sailing in traditional high-threat areas such as along the Horn of Africa and other confined waters," the U.S. Navy statement said.
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"Coalition forces are alert to the potential threat and are currently on patrol in the Arabian Gulf, Red Sea and Gulf of Oman."
The navy office warned ships to exercise what it termed extreme caution in the Gulf, particularly through the narrow Straits of Hormuz. It was said to have been the first such U.S. naval warning to shippers of threats in the Gulf since the Al Qaida suicide attacks on New York and Washington last year.
"According to unconfirmed reports circulating within the regional shipping community, the Al Qaida terrorist group has planned attacks against oil tankers transiting the Arabian Gulf and Horn of Africa areas," the U.S. Navy's Maritime Liaison Office in Bahrain said in a statement on Tuesday.
In addition, the State Department closed the U.S. embassies of Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates and cancelled a Sept. 11 memorial in Qatar. The embassies are scheduled to reopen on Thursday.
[The U.S. Fox news network reported late Tuesday that the U.S. Central Command will start moving its headquarters to Qatar on Thursday. The command, which did not confirm the report, is located in Tampa, Fla.] In Washington, U.S. officials said the intelligence community has obtained information that several nationals from Middle East countries are preparing suicide attacks against U.S. interests in the region. They said the attacks could also target major infrastructure in the United States.
The new intelligence, officials said, has raised the level of alert in the United States. Officials said the United States was placed under Orange alert, the second highest in the five-tier alert system established by the federal government.
Attorney General John Ashcroft said the most likely targets by the Middle East group are "the transportation and energy sectors and facilities or gatherings that would be recognized worldwide as symbols of American power or security." He said these include U.S. military facilities, embassies and national monuments.
"At this time," Ashcroft said, "most intelligence focuses on possible attacks on U.S. interests overseas."
Israel Radio reported on Wednesday that an Israeli pilot unwittingly helped train Hani Hanjour in a flight over Washington. Hanjour was one of the Al Qaida suicide hijackers and flew with the pilot over Washington three weeks before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
The Israeli pilot was interrogated by the FBI after the Al Qaida suicide attacks and was found not have any links with the hijackings.
-------- pakistan
Pakistan Wants No Part in an Attack on Iraq
New York Times
September 12, 2002
By PATRICK E. TYLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/12/international/asia/12MUSH.html
This interview is the tenth of a series in which national and world figures reflect on the terrorist attacks and their effect on a year of public life and policy.
President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan said yesterday that an American decision to attack Iraq would inflame Islamic extremism in his country and across the region and that therefore "we would not like to be involved" in it.
He said he would caution President Bush, whom he is to meet today after a United Nations General Assembly session, to seek the consensus of the international community and of Muslim nations before starting military operations against Iraq.
He expressed concern that any expansion of war in the region might undermine the allied campaign to stabilize Afghanistan and strengthen its central government. An assassination attempt last week against Hamid Karzai, the Afghan leader, set off a spike in anxiety levels among coalition forces and allies supporting the new leadership.
"The operation needs to be taken to its logical end," he said. "It needs to be culminated with government established over the whole of Afghanistan. Leaving it half there would be extremely dangerous."
Speaking in an interview at The New York Times during a weeklong visit to the United States, General Musharraf defended his decision last month to amend the Pakistani Constitution unilaterally, expand his control over the country and limit any challenges from former Prime Ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif.
He said his decisions would promote democratic development, an opinion the White House does not share but was not willing to criticize too sharply, an administration official said. Given Pakistan's crucial role in securing Afghanistan's future and preventing the spread of terrorism in the region, Mr. Bush is expected today gently to criticize the democratic reversals that took place in Pakistan this summer while emphasizing Washington's overall support for the military government.
General Musharraf said Mr. Bush's doctrine of pre-emptive strikes against hostile nations or organizations armed with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons could incite India to move against Pakistan.
"There is a possibility that India could take a lead from this theory of pre-emption," he said. "And they may undertake an adventurous act. But I would like to hasten to add that here the situation is different. Pakistan is not Iraq, and India is not the United States." In other words, he added, "they'd better not try it."
He warned that tension between the two nuclear-armed adversaries remains high in Kashmir. "We are killing each other almost on a daily basis," he said.
"Therefore the danger remains explosive," he said.
In discussing the potential American campaign against Iraq, General Musharraf indicated that it was a highly sensitive issue in Pakistan's domestic politics in advance of parliamentary elections next month.
"Pakistan is facing problems in its own region," he said. "We have too much on our plate, too much on our hands, internally, domestically, and on our western border, and eastern border with India, Kashmir. We would not like to be involved in anything more than this."
He said the "main direction" for American policy in the region ought to be conflict resolution, including the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. He did not say this was a precondition for war in Iraq, but the political risks were substantial, he indicated.
"Tensions are high," he said. "In the Islamic world and in the Middle East especially, people are seeing a U.S. role maybe biased towards Israel. so under these circumstances, undertaking an operation against another country, an Arab country and Muslim country, will certainly have negative repercussions."
In Afghanistan, he indicated that the hunt for Osama bin Laden might not be as important as strengthening government control over the countryside. "My hunch is that more chances are that he is dead," he said.
Like some American officials, General Musharraf cited the clear intelligence that Mr. bin Laden in December entered the Tora Bora region of eastern Afghanistan, where he and his 200 or so guards were subjected to intense bombing, and that there had been radio silence ever since.
"I don't think we have searched every cave, so therefore one presumes that he may have been killed in one of those caves," he said, adding that Mr. bin Laden's kidney condition, which requires dialysis, is a factor in judging his survival chances on the run.
General Musharraf defended his government's decision to ban Ms. Bhutto, now living in exile in London and charged with corruption, from taking part in parliamentary elections. He said keeping her off the ballot was part of his effort to promote the emergence of new political leaders, though opposition leaders accuse him of manipulation to protect his hold on power.
Pressed on how his actions could be seen as the promotion of democracy, he said, "I am trying to introduce real democracy into Pakistan, the essence of democracy." Referring to Pakistan's turbulent history of coups and ousters, he said that "democracy has never existed" in the country, because almost no leader had governed to the end of his term.
In Pakistan, he said, "any civilian government has always misgoverned, has always looted and plundered." He suggested that "memories are short" about the conditions under which he took power in 1999. "We were being almost declared a terrorist state, and we were going to default on our loans." he said. "It was being said that Pakistan was a failed state."
-------- russia
Putin Considers Strikes on Georgia
By Simon Saradzhyan and Natalia Yefimova, Staff Writers,
Moscow Times
Thursday, Sep. 12, 2002.
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2002/09/12/001.html
In his harshest warning yet to Georgia, President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday ordered the military to draft plans for possible strikes on Georgian territory, where Russia believes Chechen rebels are hiding. As the basis for his order, Putin cited a United Nations Security Council resolution approved a month after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The resolution requires states to help prevent terrorist acts and deny safe haven to terrorists and their sponsors. Putin told a meeting of senior security and defense officials in Sochi that he had asked top military brass "to study the feasibility of striking" bases run by Chechen rebels in the crime-infested Pankisi Gorge. Such strikes would be carried out if Chechen rebels cross into Georgia while being pursued by Russian forces, Putin said. "The Defense Ministry and other defense and security agencies will make proposals for planning special operations aimed at destroying rebel groups if attempts to penetrate Russia resume," Putin said in televised remarks.
He said the Foreign Ministry would alert the UN Security Council and allies in the U.S.-led war against terror that Russia felt Georgia was violating UN anti-terrorist resolutions.
Putin cited Article 51 of the UN Charter and UN Security Council Resolution 1373. The UN Charter allows use of force against other states for self-defense. The United States pressed for the approval of Resolution 1373 after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze did not immediately comment on Putin's remarks.
His aide Levan Alexidze, however, said Article 51 does not apply to the current situation, Interfax reported.
Russia has repeatedly argued that Georgia is unable to rid the Pankisi Gorge of militant fighters without help from Russia. The military has complained for months that Chechen rebels hiding in the Pankisi Gorge were crossing into Russia to carry out attacks. Russian troops have reported furious clashes near the border in recent weeks and said their hands were tied after rebels crossed back into Georgia.
The United States has said it suspects that members of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network may be camped out in the gorge. Last month, Georgia launched an operation there by police and security forces and announced the sweep well in advance, leaving no element of surprise. Shevardnadze said earlier this month that the search had turned up only "a few dozen militants."
Alexidze, who advises the Georgian president on international law, said Chechen rebels have made no incursions and expressed surprise that Putin was considering strikes at a time when Georgia "was making concrete efforts to enforce law and order in Pankisi." Georgian Security Minister Valery Khaburdzania said there was "no particular alarm" in Tbilisi over Putin's statement and promised that Georgia was "ready for any surprises." He said Chechen rebels had no bases in Pankisi but added that small groups could be hiding in the mountains.
Putin said Russia will resort to the "inalienable right of self-defense."
"If the Georgian leadership fails to create a security zone in the area of the Russian-Georgian border [and] fails to prevent outrages and incursions into Russia's neighboring areas," he said. He said "nobody can deny" that Pankisi harbors suspected participants in the Sept. 11 attacks and the apartment blasts that killed more than 300 people in four Russian cities in 1999. Putin accused Tbilisi of turning a blind eye to the presence of Chechen rebels in Pankisi and failing to extradite those captured. He said there are "hundreds of terrorists" hiding on Georgian territory and dismissed Georgia's "so-called" counter-terrorism operation in Pankisi as a show. Unlike Pankisi, "the infrastructure of international terrorism has been destroyed" in Chechnya, Putin said. He praised federal forces for having dealt "a strong, palpable blow ... to bandit groups" in Chechnya.
Hours before the president issued his statement, Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov came crashing down on Georgia for supporting Chechen "terrorists."
In a speech before lawmakers, Ivanov juxtaposed Georgia and Iraq, saying that Tbilisi's role in supporting terrorism had been proven far more conclusively than Baghdad's, State Duma deputies present at the session said.
"There was an attempt by terrorists to make a breakthrough from Georgia in late July, early August," Ivanov told reporters after the speech, which was off-limits to the press. "You saw those who were arrested. Where are those people? Where are those terrorists?" The Foreign Ministry on Wednesday reiterated its demand that Georgia extradite 13 alleged Chechen rebels who were detained last month on the border between the two countries.
The ministry said it had sent a diplomatic note calling on Georgia not to delay surrendering the fighters to Russia. It said Moscow had sent additional documents to Tbilisi "undeniably proving the fighters' and terrorists' participation in criminal activity on Russian territory," The Associated Press reported.
Georgian Prosecutor General Nugzar Gabrichidze told Interfax that Tbilisi was not dragging its feet on the extraditions. "Tbilisi is currently carrying out all the procedures required to make this decision," he was quoted as saying.
-----
Putin Warns Georgia to Root Out Chechen Rebels
New York Times
September 12, 2002
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/12/international/europe/12RUSS.html
MOSCOW, Sept. 11 - President Vladimir V. Putin threatened today to order military strikes in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, saying that Russia had a right to defend itself from what he called terrorist attacks launched from Georgian territory.
In a statement that sounded like an ultimatum, Mr. Putin sharply criticized Georgia for failing to root out hundreds of insurgents from the Russian republic of Chechnya and warned that if Georgia did not do more, Russia would conduct raids in Georgia to crush the fighters' strongholds.
Mr. Putin's warning today - on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks - was by far the harshest and most ominous of a series of Russian warnings to Georgia this summer over Chechen rebels based in Georgia.
Mr. Putin, who was shown on Russian television reading sternly from note cards at a meeting of his security aides during a Black Sea vacation in Sochi, echoed President Bush's remarks a year ago about moving strongly against terrorists and against countries that harbor them - in this case, Georgia.
"One of the causes complicating the efficient struggle against terrorism," Mr. Putin said, "is that in some parts of the world there are still territorial enclaves that are beyond the control of national governments, which for different reasons cannot or do not want to resist the terrorist threat."
Mr. Putin announced that he had ordered military commanders to consider strikes against "reliably known bases of the terrorists" along the rugged border between Georgia and Chechnya.
Chechen fighters are particularly present in the Pankisi Gorge, northeast of Georgia's capital, Tbilisi. Russian aircraft have crossed into Georgia at least five times this summer, launching strikes three times and, in one case on Aug. 23, killing a Georgian civilian near the gorge.
Mr. Putin's warning appeared to stun Georgian officials. Last month, under pressure from Russia, Georgia's president, Eduard A. Shevardnadze, ordered 1,000 police officers and security troops into the Pankisi Gorge to establish order over a region that had largely been outside the government's control.
"What is surprising is the fact that the Russian president's statement came at a moment when the Georgian authorities are taking concrete action to restore order in the Pankisi Gorge," an adviser to Mr. Shevardnadze, Levan Alexidze, told the Interfax news agency in Tbilisi.
In more conciliatory remarks later, however, Mr. Shevardnadze said he believed that Mr. Putin would still give Georgia a chance to demonstrate its ability to impose order over Georgian territory. "This statement does not mean that Russia is planning to attack Georgia and start a war," he said after a hasty meeting with his advisers tonight.
Mr. Putin, however, outlined a stark case for military action. He cited Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, which gives nations the right to self-defense, as well as the resolution adopted after last year's terrorist attack that called on all nations to crack down on international terrorism.
He made his remarks hours after telephoning President Bush just after midnight today - still Sept. 10 in Washington - to once again express sympathy and support on the anniversary of the attack. Later today, Mr. Putin's office released a statement calling the United States and Russia essential allies in the fight against terrorism.
"Our common goal is to eradicate any forms of support for and connivance with terrorism on the part of sovereign states and public organizations," he said in the statement.
The deterioration of relations between Russia and Georgia has already ensnared the United States, which this year began a $64 million program to train and equip Georgia's Army to undertake exactly the sort of operations that Russia has accused Georgia of resisting. Russian military action would put the Bush administration in the uncomfortable middle between two countries it considers allies.
After the bombing on Aug. 23, the White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, rebuked Russia, saying the United States "strongly supports Georgia's independence and territorial integrity."
In recent weeks Russia has repeatedly called on Georgia to mount joint operations in Pankisi and elsewhere, but Mr. Shevardnadze's government has rebuffed the requests, saying Georgia could accomplish the task itself.
American officials have said that Pankisi has served as a base for dozens of Islamic militants, as well as hundreds of Chechen fighters intermingled with some 4,000 Chechen refugees who fled Russia's second war in Chechnya in 1999.
Georgian forces have arrested a handful of militants since the operations in Pankisi began, but Russian officials say the operation - which was signaled in advance - simply shifted Chechen fighters to other parts of Georgia, near the border with Chechnya.
Mr. Putin said Georgia was harboring not only Chechen rebels, but also those responsible for three apartment bombings - two in Moscow and one in Volgodonsk, in southern Russia - that killed more than 300 people in 1999.
Russian officials said this week that a suspect in those bombings, Achimez Gochiyayev, was hiding in Georgia. Georgian officials denied that, noting that Georgia had previously extradited another suspect in the bombings, Adam Dekkushev, once presented with evidence.
Mr. Putin also called on Georgia to extradite 13 Chechen rebels detained on the border on Aug. 3 and 5. The fighters were part of a group of 60 who clashed with Russian forces in the Kerigo Gorge in Chechnya at the end of July, a battle that led to the latest tensions. Russia said the fighters had crossed into Chechnya from Georgia, though the fighters denied that.
"Russia has been firmly observing its international obligations, treats the sovereignty and territorial integrity of other states with respect," Mr. Putin said. "However, this demands the same attitude towards ourselves."
----
Kremlin gives short shrift to US hawk over Iraq
Ian Traynor in Moscow
Thursday September 12, 2002
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,790535,00.html
The US state department's leading hawk arrived in Moscow yesterday on a tricky mission to persuade the Kremlin to soften its strong opposition to a US military campaign against Saddam Hussein.
John Bolton, the US under-secretary of state, was greeted by a chorus of Russian warnings of the folly and dangers of a war against Iraq.
The Russian foreign minister, Igor Ivanov, warned that a new Gulf war could wreck broader international cooperation against al-Qaida and terrorism. His deputy said a US military campaign was utterly unacceptable to Russia. The talk of war also brought protests in the Russian parliament.
Moscow's position on Iraq, a traditional ally, is becoming critical if Washington hopes to secure UN security council blessing for military action.
But while the Kremlin looks likely to insist on a new security council resolution mandating the use of force against Baghdad - a resolution it could veto - Mr Bolton insisted that no new international mandate was needed to launch a war against President Saddam. "You don't have to wait for a mushroom cloud before you take appropriate action," he said.
"Whether the president decides to seek another resolution from the security council is a matter of political judgment, but it's certainly not a matter of international legal necessity," he told the BBC before landing in Moscow. "I think it's sanctioned morally and legally."
His position contrasted strongly with that of Russia's influential deputy foreign minister and former spy chief, Vyacheslav Trubnikov, who ridiculed the US case against President Saddam.
"The military scenario concerning Iraq is absolutely unacceptable for Russia, and our position is consonant with that of the majority of states," he told the Vremya Novostei newspaper.
Echoing what appears to be the developing Russian position on Iraq, Mr Trubnikov said Russia stood four-square with America on fighting international terrorism, but US unilateralism and resort to force would wreck that solidarity, not only in Russia, but also in Germany and elsewhere in the west.
"The fight against terrorism and the Iraq situation are completely different things, as are the return of UN inspectors to Iraq and the problem of changing the Saddam regime."
But it still remains unclear how President Vladimir Putin will react if Mr Bush launches a war either with or without international backing.
On several key occasions since the New York and Washington atrocities, Mr Putin has put on a brave face and bowed to US pressure on arms control, missile defence, the US military deployments in post-Soviet central Asia and the Caucasus.
It may be Russia could be bought off with pledges of protection for its substantial economic interests in Iraq under a post-Saddam regime.
Other possible areas for a trade-off to blunt Russian opposition would be a tacit green light from the west for Mr Putin's war in Chechnya and taking Moscow's side in the confrontation between Russia and Georgia over the latter's alleged harbouring of Chechen "terrorists".
-------- un
Annan to U.S.: Heed 'rule of law' with Iraq
By Betsy Pisik
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
September 12, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020912-31834140.htm
NEW YORK - U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan yesterday urged the Bush administration not to take unilateral action against Iraq, warning that following international law "must not be a matter of political convenience."
"Every government that is committed to the rule of law at home must be committed also to the rule of law abroad," he said in the advance text of a speech to be delivered this morning at the opening of the annual U.N. General Assembly debate.
"All states have a clear interest, as well as a clear responsibility, to uphold international law and maintain international order," Mr. Annan said.
He also pressed Baghdad to take steps to avert catastrophe. "I urge Iraq to comply with its obligations - for the sake of its own people, and for the sake of world order. If Iraq's defiance continues, the Security Council must face its responsibilities."
Mr. Annan is to speak just before President Bush. His staff took the unprecedented step of releasing the text of the speech a day early out of concern that it would get lost in the tumult over the Bush speech.
Aides said the speech was not written solely with the United States in mind, but they acknowledged that U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte was the only official to receive an advance copy.
Mr. Bush is expected to use most of his 30-minute speech today to lay out the case that Saddam Hussein has repeatedly violated U.N. Security Council resolutions and therefore poses a threat to regional and international security.
After more than a month of sustained warnings of war and repeated promises by senior administration officials that the United States will act alone if necessary, there have been signs this week that Washington will try to build international support for its Iraq campaign.
A column published in yesterday's New York Times under Mr. Bush's name celebrated the community of responsible and nurturing nations, while warning unspecified nations that "we refuse to ignore or appease the aggression and brutality of evil men."
And Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, addressing a brief Security Council meeting on the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks, pledged continued international cooperation against shared threats.
"We are all in this together and so, on behalf of President Bush and the American people, I solemnly recommit the United States to our common fight against terrorism," he said.
"We join all members of the United Nations in the effort to build a world of peace, prosperity and freedom, where terrorism cannot thrive."
His remarks were made in the context of fighting terrorism, but the words seemed to reverberate for diplomats eager for a sign that Washington will seek an international mandate for a war with Iraq.
Almost 60 world leaders and twice as many foreign ministers are expected to address the U.N. General Assembly during the 10-day general debate.
-------- us
U.S. Forces in Tampa Plan Qatar Exercises
Troops to Test New Headquarters
By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 12, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5773-2002Sep11.html
The U.S. military command responsible for operations in Central Asia and the Persian Gulf will send 600 personnel from its base in Tampa to a multibillion-dollar air base in Qatar in November to test a headquarters that could be used to oversee a war against Iraq, defense officials said yesterday.
Although officials billed the move as part of a one-week biennial exercise, they said it will be led by Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the chief of Central Command, and acknowledged that shifting at least some operations and personnel from Florida to Qatar on a permanent basis was under consideration.
The decision, which comes as the Bush administration is stepping up plans for a possible war aimed at toppling Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, illustrates the emergence of Qatar as a key strategic U.S. ally in the Gulf. It comes in a period in which relations with Saudi Arabia, where the United States already has a modern military command center, have been under severe strain.
The headquarters will be established at Al Udeid Air Base near Doha, the capital of Qatar, where the U.S. military presence has been rapidly expanding in recent months. The base has a 15,000-foot runway, long enough for the heaviest U.S. cargo aircraft and bombers to take off fully loaded, and the Pentagon has begun construction of a sophisticated air operations center at the site that could supplant or replace an existing facility at Prince Sultan Air Base outside Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Since the war on terrorism began last fall, U.S. authorities have been installing computer monitors, communications gear, intelligence equipment and other assets at the base. In recent months, the number of U.S. warplanes and personnel at the base has swelled, with about 2,000 troops now populating a large military tent city in the desert, according to one official.
The November deployment to Qatar, which could involve an additional 400 support personnel, bringing the total number of U.S. forces involved to about 1,000, follows controversy regarding a decision by Franks and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to keep Central Command headquarters in Tampa during the war in Afghanistan.
Franks decided to remain in Tampa, defense officials said, because he and Rumsfeld thought a move would be disruptive during the opening stages of the war and believed that Saudi Arabia would have objected to stationing the headquarters at Prince Sultan.
But many Air Force and Army commanders involved in Afghanistan complained about the arrangement and indicated that they thought Franks should have moved to the region so the Central Command staff would have been in roughly the same time zone as military commanders in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Central Asian republics. They noted that an earlier Central Command leader, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, moved from Tampa to a headquarters in Riyadh shortly after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. Schwarzkopf commanded the 1991 Persian Gulf War from the Riyadh headquarters.
The Central Command's announcement came as Qatar's foreign minister, Hamad Bin Jasim Thani, is in Washington meeting with administration officials and members of Congress. Hamad is scheduled to testify in closed session today before the House International Relations Committee and will meet with Pentagon officials on Friday.
Earlier this year, the Qataris made it clear that they would not place restrictions on the use of facilities by U.S. commanders prosecuting the war on terrorism, one senior defense official said.
While Saudi Arabia allowed the United States to use its operations center at Prince Sultan Air Base during the war in Afghanistan, relations between the two countries have frayed since last Sept. 11, when 15 of the 19 hijackers who committed the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington were of Saudi origin. Saudi Arabia has since expressed doubt about the administration's desire to take military action against Iraq, and Saudi officials have said privately they think it is unlikely that Saudi military facilities, including Prince Sultan, would be made available for an attack against Iraq. Publicly, they have challenged the administration's handling of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
Defense officials and senior officers said no decision has been made on whether to leave the Central Command personnel in place in Qatar or to permanently move Franks to the base. Lt. Cmdr. Nick Balice, a Central Command spokesman, said only that Franks "travels frequently, and it's not unusual when an exercise is conducted for him to participate in the exercise."
A senior Pentagon official, however, said that stationing Franks in Qatar at some point after the exercise is a possibility.
In the event of war against Iraq, there is still no certainty that Franks would use Qatar as his regional headquarters, according to one general officer, who said military planners continue to hold open the possibility of running the war out of Saudi Arabia. "Using Qatar as a headquarters is still plan B," the officer said. "The preference is still to try to work with the Saudis rather than cut ties and leave."
One Republican House staff member said the exercise in Qatar takes on added importance with the Bush administration contemplating military action against Iraq. "If there's a war, they're going to have to send a headquarters element forward," the staffer said. "So they should exercise it -- it makes sense to me."
The staffer, who recently returned from the Middle East, said Qatar is becoming an increasingly important U.S. ally in the Gulf and could ultimately replace Saudi Arabia as the most important host for U.S. air operations, particularly now that the Air Force is constructing another Combined Air Operations Center at Al Udeid Air Base.
The Air Force completed work in the summer of 2001 on its first operations center in the region at Prince Sultan in Saudi Arabia but began replicating the massive computer center this year in Qatar. The move came as a hedge against an attack on the facility in Saudi Arabia or any attempt by Saudi authorities to deny the United States access to it, officials said.
"I think there are more American forces on the ground in Qatar than there are in Saudi Arabia -- if not, then it's close," the GOP aide said. "Qatar has a very small population, principally expatriates, and it's a little fragile. But so are a lot of other places around there. We really like them, as far as I can tell, and they seem to like us. And they're doing all the right things."
One Democratic staff member who follows military issues said he hoped the Central Command deployment to Qatar was not the first step toward moving the entire Central Command headquarters to the Gulf. "I don't think they'd be doing anything that provocative the day before [President] Bush addresses the United Nations, but you never know with this crowd," the staffer said.
In another development, a Marine official said the Marines plan later this month to send a specialized unit that detects nuclear, chemical and biological attacks to Kuwait. The move reflects the concern of military planners that the most vulnerable point of any campaign against Hussein would be the initial assembly of U.S. troops along Iraq's borders.
Staff writers Bradley Graham and Thomas E. Ricks contributed to this report.
----
Military moves element to Gulf
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
September 12, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020912-57624565.htm
The U.S. military is moving command elements from U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Fla., to a burgeoning air base in the Persian Gulf for a planned exercise of communications capability in time of war, possibly against Iraq.
An administration source said the shift of assets to the refurbished al-Udeid air base in the small Gulf nation of Qatar is a test to see whether the facility can become a forward command center in event of a war.
This source said that if America, Britain and other allies go to war against Iraq, al-Udeid will likely be the overall command center, not the headquarters in Florida.
Lt. Cmdr. Matthew Klee, a Central Command spokesman, said the shift of up to 600 personnel to Qatar will take place in November in a biannual exercise, "Internal Look 03." It tests the ability of Central Command to communicate with commanders around the globe.
Cmdr. Klee said it had been planned since 2000. He declined to say whether the exercise would take place at al-Udeid, but other sources identified the base as the site.
"It's a way for us to work on maintaining seamless conductivity when we're deployed forward," Cmdr. Klee said.
U.S. Central Command ran the first Gulf war, Operation Desert Storm, from the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh. Then, Saudi Arabia was threatened by Iraqi troops who had quickly conquered and occupied neighboring Kuwait.
But since 1991, the Saudi royal family, worried about anti-Western sentiment among ardent followers of Islam, has placed restrictions on the U.S. military.
Riyadh allows its large Prince Sultan air base to be used as a launch pad for allied jets enforcing the no-fly zone over southern Iraq. But it did not allow strike aircraft to use the base for more extensive bombings north of the no-fly zone, including the four-day Desert Fox assault ordered by President Clinton in 1998.
In the ongoing operation in Afghanistan, the Saudi kingdom again limited the use of Prince Sultan. No strike aircraft could use the base for bombing runs. But the Air Force component of Central Command did man the base's sophisticated air combat command center to coordinate strikes over Afghanistan.
The limits have prompted the Bush administration to look for alternatives to Prince Sultan. They found it in al-Udeid in Qatar, a staunch Gulf ally of the United States. Qatar has allowed U.S. strike planes to use al-Udeid in the past. This week, the ruling al Thani family paid for network TV ads in this Islamic country pledging support for the war on terrorism.
A senior military officer said the new construction at al-Udeid sends two messages - one to the Saudis and one to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
"The Bush team is hellbent to show the Saudis we have alternatives," the source said. "This also shows Saddam we are serious."
The Saudi government publicly opposes a strike against Iraq to depose Saddam.
Government sources say President Bush has made up his mind that the only way to keep Saddam from his goal of building nuclear weapons is to order a military strike to oust him from power.
The planned exercise in Qatar comes as Army Gen. Tommy Franks, who heads Central Command, is stepping up his war planning for Iraq. He briefed the Joints Chiefs of Staff on Tuesday on his latest ideas.
Earlier this year, Gen. Franks drew up a plan that called for a total deployment of 200,000 to 250,000 soldiers, Marines, sailors and airmen. Since then, the draft has been amended, with input from the chiefs and senior civilian policy-makers at the Pentagon.
In recent weeks, the Army has moved prepositioned tanks and armored vehicles into Kuwait, the likely starting site for any ground invasion. The Army also has increased, to about 5,000, the number of soldiers training in the Kuwait desert.
The Army says both moves are linked to the war in Afghanistan and deterring Saddam from attack.
Any final plan is expected to include massive, quick air strikes, relying heavily on B-2 stealth bombers; a ground invasion force; special operations troops who would help rebel groups and also conduct highly dangerous clandestine missions; and a psychological-warfare campaign to try to turn the Iraqi army against Saddam.
--------
Air Force Recommends Charging Pilots
September 12, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Mistaken-Bombing.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Air Force is recommending criminal charges against two Air National Guard pilots for their role in the fatal bombing of Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan, a senior defense official said Thursday.
The charges were to be announced Friday at the Pentagon after the U.S. Central Command and the Canadian government released additional details from a joint investigation of the April 17 tragedy.
The senior defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Air Force would recommend that F-16 pilot Maj. Harry Schmidt be charged with involuntary manslaughter. He dropped a 500-pound bomb on a group of Canadian soldiers, mistaking them for enemy forces. Four Canadians were killed and eight were wounded.
The Air Force also is recommending Schmidt be charged with failure to exercise appropriate flight discipline.
Maj. William Umbach, the lead pilot, would face charges of aiding and abetting Schmidt in the involuntary manslaughter, the official said. As lead pilot, he should have more forcefully intervened to stop Schmidt from dropping the bomb until confirmation of the target was received, the Air Force says.
The charges were first reported Thursday night by NBC News.
Because Schmidt and Umbach are members of the Illinois Air National Guard and are no longer mobilized under federal authority, they would have to be recalled to active duty to face the charges.
It was unclear Thursday whether the recommended charges against them will be considered under Article 32 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice -- essentially like a grand jury proceeding in the civilian judicial system -- or will be taken directly to a court martial.
The inadvertent killings caused a public uproar in Canada. The joint U.S.-Canadian investigation faulted both pilots for failure to follow established procedures to ensure that they attacked a legitimate target.
Central Command publicly released the basic findings of the investigation in June but did not release details. It said it needed more time to remove classified information from the report.
Schmidt spotted flashes on the ground as he was flying over the Canadians, who were conducting a nighttime live-fire exercise. He thought the fire was from hostile forces, but was told by a U.S. air controller to hold fire until further inquiry could clarify the situation, according to the investigation report.
Schmidt nonetheless declared he was ``rolling in in self defense'' and dropped the bomb.
The inquiry that was completed in June determined that Schmidt and Umbach were largely to blame for the mistaken attack, although it also found undisclosed problems in the pilots' command structure.
A decision on disciplinary action was left to Lt. Gen. Michael Moseley, the senior Air Force officer in Central Command. In August, however, that responsibility was transferred to Lt. Gen. Bruce Carlson, commander of the 8th Air Force, based at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. Lawyers for Schmidt and Umbach had claimed Moseley was predisposed to find the pilots guilty.
-------- propaganda wars
America's war record is littered with lies
September 12 2002
The Age (Australia)
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/09/11/1031608270446.html
Remember Vietnam? Remember the Gulf War? Beware what you're told on Iraq, writes Kenneth Davidson.
Before Australians get sucked into the Bush administration's war with Iraq on what appears the flimsiest excuses, they should remember the excuses Americans offered the world to justify their involvement in the Vietnam and Gulf Wars.
President Lyndon Baines Johnson got Congress to approve US military intervention in Vietnam based on the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, based on the claim that North Vietnamese torpedo boats made unprovoked attacks on two US destroyers. Does anybody believe this story now? If it is true, why hasn't the US released the archives relating to the incident?
After the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, a group backed by the Kuwait government-in-exile hired a US public relations firm to devise a campaign to win American support for the war. The high point was the use of the daughter of Kuwait's ambassador to the US as a star witness to a congressional hearing into the Iraq invasion. Under an assumed name, she said: "I saw Iraq soldiers come into the hospitals with guns, and go into a room where 15 babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators and left the babies on the cold floor to die." She later admitted she had lied.
But this lie, and others, worked.
So why did Saddam Hussein invade Kuwait? Before the invasion, the US ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, said the US would not interfere. It was a reasonable expectation. Saddam was a US ally against Iran, so much so that between 1985 and 1989, dozens of biological agents were shipped to Iraq from the US under licence from the Commerce Department, despite the fact that Iraq had been reported to be engaging in chemical and possibly biological warfare against Iranians, Kurds and Shiites since the early 1980s.
And Iraq had real grievance against Kuwait. According to Saddam, Kuwait had been exceeding its OPEC oil production quota and this was depressing the price of oil and Iraq's revenue, which was needed to pay for its war with Iran. Saddam believed Saudi Arabia and Kuwait owed part of Iraq's debt for its war against Iran because Iraq was protecting both these countries against Iran. And to add insult to injury, Kuwait was drilling into Iraq's share of the Rumaila oil field which straddles both countries.
Saddam is a monster. Arguably the murderous concoction of ethnic and religious rivalries which constitute the population of Iraq can only be held together by a monster. The oil interests which direct US policy in the Middle East believe this. They want Saddamism without Saddam. He is no longer their man. That is why they call for "regime change".
But Saddam is no religious fanatic. According to Alex Standish, editor of Jane's Intelligence Digest: "Saddam's Ba'ath Party regime, despite its Islamic trappings, is a deeply secular and fundamentally socialist ideology.
"You can think whatever you like about Saddam but he is not so foolish that he would threaten his own region's stability by financing the extreme and violent likes of al Qaeda."
It is possible to imagine that a religious fanatic would be prepared to use weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in a first strike against the US, which would invite massive retaliation that would vaporise most of the population of Iraq.
But in this respect Saddam and his generals are as sane as the Russian communist leadership during the Cold War who understood the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction. They are not likely to adopt a policy of mass suicide, either directly by launching WMD or indirectly by arming al Qaeda, which could conceivably use WMD irrespective of the consequences.
This week's report by the London-based Institute for Strategic Studies has been used by the hawks in Whitehall and Washington as "proof" that Saddam is close to having a WMD capability, yet it contains no factual information that undermines informed opinion that Iraq is far weaker in WMD than it was before the Gulf War.
So why did Saddam expel UN weapons inspectors in 1998? He didn't. The head of the inspection team, Richard Butler, ordered the inspectors to leave Baghdad in anticipation of an attack. The Russian ambassador, Sergei Lavrov, criticised Butler for withdrawing the inspectors without seeking the permission of the UN Security Council.
It has since been shown that the Iraqi charge at the time - that the weapons inspectors had been used as spies for the US - was the truth, not propaganda.
According to former weapons inspector Scott Ritter: "There is no way the Iraqis are going to let in the inspectors now . . . why would they let in the inspectors to spy on them, target them more effectively and then be used to manipulate justification for war?"
So far, neither George Bush nor Tony Blair have come up with any reason that could justify a first strike against Iraq - except the unstated (because it is unacceptable) reason that "regime change" would give America control of Iraq's 100 billion barrels of oil reserves.
Kenneth Davidson is a staff columnist. E-mail: dissentmagazine@ozemail.com.au
--------
Why Aren't U.S. Journalists Reporting From Iraq?
by Nina Burleigh
TomPaine.com,
September 12, 2002
http://www.tompaine.com/feature.cfm/ID/6363
This week we are finally getting to the core excuse from the Bush administration for attacking Iraq right now. Vice President Dick Cheney, in an interview with CNN's John King on Sunday, laid it out nice and simple, the way they like it back in Wyoming: "We have to worry about the possible marriage, if you will, of a rogue state like Saddam Hussein's Iraq with a terrorist organization like Al Qaeda."
This notion that the Iraqi leader is in cahoots with Osama will be easy to feed the American people. To the American people, one bad Arab is the same as the next, and Osama equals Saddam. People who wonder about the Bush war-urgency only need to think about this: There's a blind spot that needs to be exploited now, before too many journalists get the idea to go inside Iraq and find out what's really happening.
As long as the Condi Rices, Dick Cheneys and other hawks are talking to journalists with no experience inside Iraq, they won't get a raised eyebrow about this notion that the secular dictator is in bed with the jihadis -- even though there have been reprinted reports by Washington Post writers in the International Herald Tribune that the CIA has found no link between the Iraqi dictator and Al Qaeda.
Why aren't more American journalists reporting from Baghdad? Admittedly, Iraq is a difficult place to cover. First there are the logistical problems. You can't get a visa very easily and you can't just fly into Baghdad. You have to spend fourteen hours sitting in a car, driving across the barren crust of earth that covers all those billions of barrels of oil Cheney and Co. are really interested in.
Once inside Baghdad, you are assigned a "minder" -- a sometimes very creepy member of the Iraqi government apparatus who is going to eavesdrop on everything you say and terrify any average person you happen to meet.
Thus, the reporting from Baghdad is usually very slight. Tom Brokaw, back in April, intrepidly got himself inside Baghdad. He reported from an open market -- as so many reporters have in the past 10 years -- to say it looked like Iraqis had ample food supplies. This visual assay is contrary to UN claims, but it's an easy one to make. Look, there are some piles of food and there are some people. Cut back to New York.
Print reporters, with more time and column inches, aren't doing much better. Larry Kaplow, Cox Washington Bureau, got inside this summer. Here's what he reported: Iraqis, as deprived as they are, still get ice cream! Kaplow stood in line with average Iraqis lined up outside a stand in the steaming summer heat buying their pathetic cones of frozen ice drizzled with day-glo sweetener. See, these Iraqis still have a sweet tooth, years after the sanctions! And that was that.
The best of American reporters don't seem to give a hoot about getting inside the country and looking around. Take the latest from ABC News. Producer Chris Vlasto spent months in an "unnamed middle eastern country" working his sources to get an interview for Claire Shipman with an alleged mistress of Saddam's, just so we can learn this week that the freak uses Viagra and likes to watch torture videos of his enemies.
I've been to Iraq three times since the Gulf War and no, it's not easy to get inside or get real interviews. But it can be done. American peace activists are going every month, walking the streets freely.
Anyone who spends a little time in Baghdad knows there is one thing the dwindling, beaten-down middle class of that country fears more than the hideous regime of Saddam Hussein: an Islamic uprising. The Iraqis sent millions of young men to their deaths in the 1980s fighting exactly the kind of fundamentalist Islamic mentality that we so dread now. As much as they hate their dictator, Iraqis hate the Islamists even more. As a Sunni Muslim, so does Saddam. As in the 1980s, this creepy strongman is standing between Iraqis and the jihad.
This observation is not difficult to come by. All it takes is a little time and little guts. Any journalist who spends a few weeks on the ground in Baghdad will start to hear this talk. People -- women especially, who have more rights in Iraq than any other Arab country -- are terrified of the jihadis in Iraq, even more than they are terrified of their dictator with his creepy Big Brother pictures staring at them from every crack and crevice of their wasted, wilted country.
The trouble is, the journalists with the guts and means to go in country aren't doing their job. Maybe they'll all try to get visas when the bombing begins, and report from the Rasheed Hotel at the point when informing Americans will mean snagging footage of dead civilians -- instead of asking Cheney why isn't he more worried about nukes in Pakistan -- where the jihadis are actually in the army and intelligence?
(Nina Burleigh has written for The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, and New York magazine. As a reporter for TIME, she was among the first American journalists to enter Iraq after the Gulf War.)
----
Bin Laden Death Hoax A Lesson to Journalists
12 Sep, 2002,
Michael L. Betsch
CNSNews.com
http://www.conservativenews.org/ViewNation.asp?Page=%5CNation%5Carchive%5C200209%5CNAT20020912d.html
While rumors of Osama bin Laden's death continue to circulate around the Internet, not a single piece of evidence has proven the demise of the world's most wanted terrorist. But for a passing moment on Wednesday, CBS News felt it had enough evidence to break the Bin Laden obituary to the world.
Speaking live with CBS News anchor Dan Rather on the one year anniversary of the terrorist attacks, Washington correspondent Jim Stewart repeated an Arabic satellite news report that stated bin Laden, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, had died during a U.S. bombing raid on the Tora Bora mountains in Afghanistan last December.
The Arabic news source cited by Stewart was an Arabic-language Islamist website called 'jehad.net', which issued [and later retracted] the headline: "Yes, Osama has been killed but Holy struggle will continue until doomsday."
While Rather expressed hesitancy in announcing Bin Laden's "unconfirmable" death, Stewart noted that the Arab press relied solely on a website believed by some to be the voice of al Qaeda. Just over two hours later, Stewart reported that the Arabic report from 'jehad.net' had been a "fake" and a "tease."
But CBS News had promoted Stewart's breaking report during a two-hour period when Americans were listening on radio and watching televised events to commemorate the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
Rich Noyes, Director of Media Analysis for the Media Research Center, the parent organization of CNSNews.com, said Stewart's reliance on an otherwise unreliable source "certainly shows why news needs to pass through editors before it reaches the air."
Noyes said it seemed unlikely that any "reliable" information about Osama bin Laden's fate would come vie the Internet, especially on the one-year anniversary of Sept 11.
"For CBS to rush that onto the air, only to have to retract it two hours later, I think makes them look a little bit silly," Noyes said. "And, for them to do it on Sept. 11, when peoples' emotions were rubbed raw by reliving last year's carnage, just seems very irresponsible."
Noyes said Stewart's report sounded credible and may have been what Americans wanted to hear on Sept. 11. "But people don't want to hear it; they want to know it," he said.
Further, Noyes suggested that Stewart reflect on the "old Woodward and Bernstein rule" that before you break the news, "get two sources."
Another media observer shared Noyes' perspective with regard to Stewart's story. Jim Naureckas, editor of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting's magazine Extra, said the CBS story had potential to steal the headlines, but lacked hard facts to make it credible.
"The fact that [jehad.net] supposedly has a close connection to al Qaeda would make it more newsworthy than less newsworthy," Naureckas said. "As far as I know, that would be the first signal from al Qaeda that he was dead."
However, Naureckas said he did not understand why Stewart and CBS News decided to make headlines with the 'jehad.net' report of Bin Laden's death as opposed to any other report of Bin Laden's death on any other day.
"There have been a lot of reports about Osama bin Laden being alive and Osama bin Laden being dead," he said, "so, you wouldn't necessarily want to make any one of these reports into a major news story."
Naureckas further asked why CBS would promote Stewart's breaking headline regarding Bin Laden's death "without any corroboration" beyond the 'jehad.net' article that was broadcast on an Arab satellite network.
"That's a problem in journalism when you have one source quoting another source and other sources don't quote the original source, but they quote the secondary source because the secondary source is more credible than the primary source," Naureckas said. "But the secondary source can't be any more credible than the primary source, because that's all you have to go on."
Telephone calls to CBS News were not returned.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Tighter Security Felt Across U.S.
Two Commercial Airline Flights Diverted
By Bill Miller and Greg Schneider
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, September 12, 2002; Page A30
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A5768-2002Sep11?language=printer
The American public found out yesterday what it means when the White House warns of a high risk of terrorist attack: more security -- and more jitters -- at airports, seaports, borders, malls, amusement parks and other well-traveled places.
On a day when millions of people paused to remember the events of last Sept. 11, law enforcement agencies and private security forces were more visible than usual and more inclined to react to any suspicious behavior. Coupled with the emotions generated by the anniversary itself, Attorney General John D. Ashcroft's decision Tuesday to raise the the nation's terror alert index to its second highest-level created an edgy feeling in many places.
Two commercial flights were diverted during the day, a foreign ship was put out to sea awaiting additional inspection and a 41-story office tower that houses the Ohio Supreme Court was evacuated after a deliveryman allegedly declared that he was looking for a place to hide a bomb. Ohio officials said they later found materials that could be used to make a bomb in the man's van, which was parked at a loading dock. He was arrested and charged with inducing a panic.
The first airplane incident unfolded yesterday morning on a Northwest Airlines flight from Memphis to Las Vegas. According to several officials, passengers and flight attendants became suspicious during the flight when three dark-complected men began going into and out of a lavatory, one at a time, in quick succession. They appeared to be carrying a shaving kit and passengers were concerned that the men were shaving or passing razors around, sources said.
Flight attendants related their concerns and "the pilot decided to divert the plane as a precaution," according to a statement from Northwest Airlines. He landed at a regional airport in Fort Smith, Ark., where four men were detained by the FBI, and the other 90 passengers left the plane without incident. Three of the men were charged last night with interfering with a flight crew, a federal offense, and the fourth man was released, authorities said.
The three were identified as Havinder Singh, 41; Alaaeldin Adbelsalam, 37, and Gurdeep Wander, 48. Other details remained sketchy last night.
In the second incident, an American Airlines flight from Houston to Dallas returned to Bush Intercontinental Airport yesterday afternoon when a flight attendant saw a passenger wielding what she thought was a knife or straight razor. It turned out to be a folding comb, officials said.
The Coast Guard, meanwhile, ordered a container ship in Port Elizabeth, N.J., back out to sea after sensors detected apparent traces of radioactivity in its cargo. The Liberian-flagged ship was moved about six miles off the coast while the FBI and Coast Guard made plans to extensively search its 655 containers. Authorities said they had not yet determined what triggered the sensors.
The FBI was seeking a place to dock the ship so the containers can be inspected. Authorities were reluctant to do the inspection at a commercial port. Sources said one container was marked on the manifest as holding Iranian rugs.
Throughout the country, authorities were exerting extra caution. The Customs Service stepped up its inspections at places such as the Ambassador Bridge in Detroit, the busiest commercial border crossing in the nation. Inspectors more closely examined contents of commercial trucks and passenger vehicles and spent more time interviewing drivers and examining paperwork, officials said. Despite the additional scrutiny, no significant delays were reported. Many police departments put extra officers in uniform yesterday.
"All I know is that orange to me means, 'get ready,' " said Bill Berger, head of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. "I get ready by spending money that I don't have," said Berger, chief of police in North Miami Beach.
In the Washington area, Pentagon officials said they had loaded missiles into antiaircraft batteries as they bolstered air defenses. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld ordered the live Stinger missiles moved out of storage and positioned with launchers at the Pentagon and other locations after the terror warning was issued. Security was noticeably tighter at public places such as Walt Disney World, where additional uniformed security officers were on duty; the Sears Tower, where Chicago police and private security forces increased patrols; and the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn., the nation's largest shopping center. Officials said crowds appeared about average and reported no problems.
Officials in some cities said many people chose to stay home yesterday. Ridership of the Washington Metro was down about 4.8 percent from last Wednesday. Traffic was reported lighter in Detroit and other places.
Airports and airlines reported an unusually quiet day, with less than half the usual number of passengers in terminals and planes. "Given what today is . . . everyone is extra vigilant," a government source said, adding that a Department of Transportation call center was swamped with tips from passengers and flight crews.
Airlines at the region's three airports yesterday cut 90 flights, or 6 percent and 10 percent of their daily schedules, because of reduced air travel.
Staff writers Sara Kehaulani Goo, Lyndsey Layton, Bradley Graham, Susan Schmidt and Katherine Shaver contributed to this report.
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EPA, Black Officers Address Environmental Crimes
September 12, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/sep2002/2002-09-12-09.asp#anchor7
WASHINGTON, DC,The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives (NOBLE) have created a training and public awareness partnership to address environmental criminal issues.
The partnership was conceived after President George W. Bush issued a challenge to law enforcement officials to address environmental criminal issues cooperatively. The president called for greater team work in addressing environmental criminal issues and for increased knowledge of environmental crime enforcement techniques.
The partnership with NOBLE will assist in combating environmental crimes in economically disadvantaged areas. The EPA will conduct an environmental criminal enforcement educational program for NOBLE members, which will include formal training on detecting, responding to and investigating environmental crimes, including illegal asbestos removal, lead paint hazards and illegal hazardous waste dumping.
More than 100 black police chiefs will receive the specialized training from the EPA early next year. The campaign will also distribute brochures titled: "Learn the Signs of Environmental Crime."
The EPA and NOBLE believe the partnership will increase awareness in minority communities, and will increase participation in enforcement activities among minority law enforcement officers.
"Those who have committed environmental crimes in disadvantaged neighborhoods often did so with an intolerable sense of impunity," said John Peter Suarez, assistant EPA administrator for enforcement and compliance. "We will work closely with NOBLE and local officials and communities to ensure compliance equality in communities that have born the brunt of environmental degradation for too long."
Poor communities hold a disproportionate number of toxic waste sites, polluting industries and other sites that may contaminate the environment. The environmental justice movement works to provide equal justice and equal protection under all environmental statutes and regulations without discrimination based on race, ethnicity or socioeconomic status.
From 1994 to 2000, the EPA addressed 914 justice related environmental crimes. In addition to this partnership, the agency has joint state/local partnerships that operate as multi-agency task forces and include law enforcement officers from all levels of government. These task forces often address environmental justice related environmental crimes.
-------- terrorism
[Coincidence?? See http://prop1.org/protest/sfp/squirrel.htm]
White House Loses Tree to Squirrels
September 12, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-White-House-Tree.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A tree that has graced the White House's expansive North Lawn since the 19th century came down Thursday, the victim of over-aggressive squirrels.
Workers with chain saws, a wood chipper, a forklift and other equipment labored through the morning to fell the yellow buckeye that had towered over many of the grounds' other trees. After chopping off the branches and most of the top, the final large piece of the trunk hit the ground with a boom around lunchtime.
All that was left by the end of the day was a hole in the ground newly filled with dirt.
The tree was planted at an undetermined time before 1900, said White House spokeswoman Anne Womack. Unlike some of the trees on the grounds, it had not been planted for any special commemorative purpose, she said.
The tree's undoing was its appeal to squirrels, which burrowed so deeply they penetrated the layer that transports water throughout the tree. Groundskeepers had to spend a large amount of time tending the tree and shearing top branches as they died of thirst. Eventually, workers concluded the tree could become a hazard over the winter and decided it had to come down, Womack said.
``Over the last couple of years, for some reason the squirrels have just attacked this particular tree,'' Womack said.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
Slow takeoff seen for hybrid electric vehicles
Story by David Brough
REUTERS ITALY:
September 12, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17738/story.htm
ROME - Hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) are gaining popularity but their fuel economy and environmental benefits are not yet enough to win over price-conscious buyers in the key U.S. market, industry officials said yesterday.
HEV models from Honda Motor Co and Toyota Motor Corp, which use both a conventional engine and an electric motor, are becoming more common in the United States and could take off soon in Europe, according to U.S. executives at a four-day European lead battery conference in Rome.
The vehicles use an internal combustion engine to recharge batteries and to provide extra power when accelerating.
In the United States, HEVs cost around $4,000 more than equivalent standard models.
"There is limited flexibility from consumers in terms of pricing," Ted Miller, a Dearborn, Michigan-based executive with Ford Motor Co (F.N) told Reuters.
"If you can deliver a hybrid vehicle to a customer for very nearly the same price as a typical (non-hybrid) vehicle, the demand can be fairly significant," added Miller, also a senior official of the U.S. advanced battery consortium (USABC).
Toyota has projected eventual sales of hundreds of thousands of HEVs per year for models like its Prius, Miller said.
Harshad Tataria, a Michigan-based executive with General Motors (GM), said the challenge was to bring HEV costs down to the level of standard vehicles and deliver performance.
"Once we come up with a cost which is the same as the cost of the regular vehicle, we believe the HEV will take off," Tataria, who also represents the USABC research group, said.
"However, it isn't going to be easy because we have to put in extra battery power," he told Reuters.
"The hybrid vehicle does include fuel economy and reduces pollution, depending on the degree of hybridisation."
Ford plans to introduce an HEV on a limited scale in the United States soon, while GM intends to launch low-hybrid HEV trucks there by around 2004, the executives said.
As fuel in the United States is much cheaper than in Europe, U.S. consumers feel little pressure to switch to HEVs, although the situation might change if fuel costs soared, delegates said.
"Many American consumers don't feel obliged to economise on fuel as it is so cheap," Miller said.
Most auto makers will be obliged to upgrade the electrical systems of their cars to meet increasing needs for power for electronic gadgets, delegates said.
FUEL CELLS
Cars running on fuel cells - pure electric vehicles - are not projected to play any role in the automotive mass market before at least 2010, said Menahem Anderman, president of California-based Advanced Automotive Batteries.
Delegates said it would take many years to set up the infrastructure required to charge fuel cell cars.
Fuel cell cars have an onboard charger. Fuel cells convert fuel, usually hydrogen or methane, directly to electrical energy. Emissions are hot, distilled water.
Fuel cell technology would still need a battery to charge electronic devices.
GROWING BATTERY MARKET
The need for more safety and convenience devices in cars is fuelling demand for higher-powered batteries, such as the newly developed 42-volt battery, delegates said. The standard battery for cars today is the 12-volt lead acid battery.
"The global battery market for advanced (hybrid and 42 volt battery) vehicles, estimated at $70 million in 2001, is projected to exceed $250 million by 2005, and $500 million by 2008," Anderman wrote in a report entitled "A Critical New Assessment of Automotive Battery Trends".
In terms of units, the market in 2008 is expected to be evenly divided between nickel metal hydride (NiMH) and valve regulated lead acid (VRLA) at about 400,000 batteries each, the report said.
The "8ELBC" conference ends on Friday.
----
Model Solar Homes Entered in National Contest
September 12, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/sep2002/2002-09-12-09.asp#anchor8
WASHINGTON, DC, College students around the country are completing 14 custom designed solar powered homes for a competition and display in Washington DC.
The houses will be transported to the nation's capital for the Department of Energy's (DOE) first Solar Decathlon, a team competition among universities to design and build the most energy efficient solar powered homes. To win the Solar Decathlon, a team must blend aesthetics and modern conveniences with maximum energy production and efficiency.
"The Department of Energy is proud to sponsor the first ever Solar Decathlon, a university competition that brings together our nation's brightest minds to demonstrate practical ways of producing and using energy efficiently in the home," said Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham. "President Bush and I are committed to helping students and consumers make winning decisions about how they use energy. Because when we power our lives with clean energy, we protect our own future. And when we protect our future, we are all winners."
The Solar Decathlon will be held on the National Mall from September 26 to October 5. Sponsors of the contest, in addition to DOE, include BP Solar, The Home Depot, EDS, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and DOE's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).
"Each of the unique homes that will comprise the Solar Village on the National Mall marks a significant step forward in innovative residential design, and advanced, energy efficient engineering," Abraham added. "These exciting new concepts demonstrate that we can have comfortable and appealing homes that use only energy from the sun. That's an important contribution to our nation's energy security and to our environment."
Each house, limited to about 500 square feet for purposes of the competition, will be judged on 10 criteria to determine which most efficiently employs solar energy for heating, cooling, hot water, lighting, appliances, computers and charging an electric car. A jury of world renowned architects will evaluate the attractiveness, livability and effectiveness of each home's design, while experts from DOE and NREL will measure each home's energy production and use.
The Solar Decathlon gives architecture and engineering students practical experience with the design and construction of solar powered, energy efficient buildings. DOE provided each team with a $5,000 stipend toward the construction of their solar house. The teams are raising the rest of the money they need to design, construct and transport the houses to Washington, DC.
The Solar Decathlon will be open to the public. Exhibits with information on each team's home, the contest and renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies will be adjacent to the Solar Decathlon village on the Mall.
For more information on the Solar Decathlon, visit: http://www.solardecathlon.org
------- energy
Electric motor efficiency means big energy savings
Thursday, September 12, 2002
By William McCall,
Associated Press
http://enn.com/news/wire-stories/2002/09/09122002/ap_48408.asp
PORTLAND, Ore. - Almost one-fourth of the electricity in the United States is consumed by electric motor systems that hum along in buildings and factories with little notice by the top executives who sign off on their purchase or repair.
Energy experts say that if those executives did the math, they'd be shocked to find out that even a 1 percent improvement in efficiency could translate into millions of dollars in savings.
"Manufacturers tend not to care what it costs to operate a motor so long as it's productive," said Ted Jones of the Consortium for Energy Efficiency, a nonprofit national organization based in Boston. When an industrial motor fails, the chief concern of plant managers is to get it back into service as fast as possible without considering whether it can be made more efficient or replaced to save money in the long run, Jones said.
Purchases of new motors tend to be driven by the price of the equipment, not the electricity it will consume, he said.
But the actual cost of a big industrial motor typically amounts to just 3 percent of the total cost to operate it over its lifetime, which can extend up to 20 years. "So what you're paying for energy over that time is 97 percent of your total cost," Jones said.
When he shows executives the breakdown of original equipment cost plus energy consumption over the life of the motor, Jones says their response "is often something like, 'I didn't know I signed up to spend $80,000 for a $2,000 motor.'"
The consortium is trying to raise the level of awareness among top managers and corporate executives with a national campaign called "Motor Decisions Matter." The groups hopes to show them that investing a little more money for a motor certified as more efficient by the National Electrical Manufacturers Association will be paid back within a year or two in energy savings.
The campaign is getting plenty of support from the U.S. Department of Energy and various government agencies and universities, including the Bonneville Power Administration, Washington State University, and Oregon State University.
Some major companies - including Weyerhaeuser, 3M, and Walt Disney World in Florida - have been quick to adopt the new standard and purchase so-called NEMA Premium motors rated for high efficiency.
"Electric motors are everywhere," said Rob Boteler of Emerson Motor Technologies in St. Louis, the largest electric motor manufacturer in the world and a supporter of the efficiency campaign. "And just look around your office," he added. "You won't find something that hasn't been touched in some way by an electric motor during manufacturing."
Overall, efficiency has been improving since 1992, when federal energy policy established efficiency standards for industrial electric motors.
Many newer electric motors actually may be running efficiently, but they are used to operate machinery or factory systems that are inefficient or they may be the wrong size for the job, Boteler said. An analysis and inventory usually is needed to find out where energy is being wasted and how to improve the system, but plant managers are pressured to keep things running and repair motors quickly, he said.
"We think American industry needs to look at electric motors as a cost of production, the same way you look at labor costs and material costs," Boteler said. "If you look at motors as a cost of doing business, you change the entire approach and improve efficiency."
Persuading smaller companies to cover the initial expense can be a tough sell, said Mike Weedall, vice president of energy efficiency for the Bonneville Power Administration. The Portland-based federal agency officially began developing its own conservation programs with the 1980 Northwest Power Act, but it has supported many others, including electric motor efficiency programs.
--------
U.S. STUDY SAYS ALL CLONES GE
No motor is too small for its attention. For motors in soft-drink vending machines, the BPA is supplying a sensor that can be plugged into a wall socket to turn off the refrigerator compressor after the soda pop is cooled. "We're trying to get pop machines on the factory floor more efficient, and it's working well," Weedall said. "When you think of all the machines that are sitting out there running way over cooling capacity, it's significant," he said. "You don't need that extra energy to keep it cool."
The efficiency message also is being spread nationally by Washington State University, which operates an energy efficiency lab and clearinghouse for the U.S. Energy Department, and Oregon State University, which operates a testing lab founded in 1993.
Johnny Douglass, senior industrial engineer at the Washington state energy center in Olympia, said the efficiency campaign is expanding to small motors rated at less than 1 horsepower because there is no federal standard for them and they tend to be the most inefficient. "Some of the most important areas where dollars can be saved in the residential sector are motors that are used on furnace fans and air conditioner fans because they're running continuously," Douglass said.
The Washington state center is joining forces with Advanced Energy in Raleigh, N.C., a nonprofit lab that will act as a national center for electric motor efficiency standards and testing. The two labs are working on software to analyze motors and the systems they operate.
-------- genetics
GENETICALLY ABNORMAL
Source: Reuters
Thursday, September 12, 2002
http://enn.com/news/wire-stories/2002/09/09122002/reu_48404.asp
Cloned mice have hundreds of abnormal genes, which explains why so many cloned animals die at or before birth and proves it would be irresponsible to clone a human being, scientists said. The process of cloning introduces the genetic mutations, and there seems no immediate way around the problem, Rudolf Jaenisch and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported.
-------- imf / world bank
Security problems block Afghan aid - World Bank
Story by Tamawa Kadoya
REUTERS JAPAN:
September 12, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17730/story.htm
TOKYO - Security is essential if aid to Afghanistan is to have an effect although there has been some progress in rebuilding the war-torn nation, a senior World Bank official said.
"Internal peace and security isn't there and that's a prerequisite," Mieko Nishimizu, the World Bank's vice-president for South Asia, told Reuters in an interview.
An assassination attempt on the life of Afghan President Hamid Karzai last week and a huge car bomb in the capital, Kabul, were reminders of the fragility of the post-Taliban regime.
A transitional government is in place after U.S.-led troops ousted the Taliban regime, which protected leaders of the al Qaeda network blamed for the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
However, much of the country remains under the control of warlords and plagued by bandits.
"Even in areas with local stability and good leaders, if you don't know whether the mines have been cleared, we can't touch anything...in terms of development assistance," she said. "So there are a lot of bottlenecks."
But Nishimizu said there was progress, noting some $17-18 million had already been disbursed from the World Bank, which in June approved a pledge of some $100 million in aid.
"That shows, in numbers, how quickly things can move when there are people determined to do things."
The bank restarted its lending to Afghanistan in April with $10 million for emergency public administration projects. It was the first loan to the country since 1979.
Japan is the second largest shareholder in the World Bank.
More than $1.8 billion was committed by international donors this year at a Tokyo meeting on Afghan reconstruction.
Nishimizu said some $800-900 million had already been spent, but it had gone mainly on humanitarian assistance - food and medicine for instance - and emergency repair work like fixing airports and providing snow removal equipment to keep vital lifelines open during the winter.
JAPAN ODA CUTS REGRETTABLE
Nishimizu said that a cut in Japan's official development assistance (ODA) was "regrettable but understandable to an extent" and that it would be a good time to be more discriminating in where aid money went.
"The kind of advice I have given to policymakers here is strategically focusing on countries with good policies, those serious about introducing and keeping good governance," she said.
"That means saying no to countries and leaders who are not so good. Saying 'No, we can't share precious Japanese resources with you because you're not good enough' is a very important thing to do."
Japan cut ODA by some 10 percent in this year's budget as Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's government attempts to rein in the ballooning public debt, which is approaching 140 percent of gross domestic product, although aid to Afghanistan and surrounding countries is projected to rise around three percent.
Nishimizu, formerly an economics professor at Princeton University, called on Japan to implement structural reform and conduct policies which help not only the recession-bound nation but other poorer nations.
"Major structural reforms are being designed and contemplated. The only thing I can say is 'implement as if your life depends on it', because it does."
She also called on Japan to open up trade to poor countries and focus more on environmental issues.
----
World Bank sticks by Chad-Cameroon pipeline
REUTERS CAMEROON:
September 12, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17729/story.htm
WASHINGTON - The World Bank's senior management is standing by a project to build an oil pipeline between Chad and Cameroon despite an internal report suggesting the project was harming the environment and failing to meet other objectives.
The bank has come up with an action plan it says should help ensure the project gets back on track. But environmental groups said the response was vague and lacking in concrete timelines and actions.
"Management believes that the bank has made exceptional efforts to apply its policies and procedures and to pursue concretely its mission statement," the conclusions of the report, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters said.
"Given these actions, Management does not agree that, as a result, the Requestors' rights or interests have been, or will be, directly and adversely affect by these projects."
The document is scheduled for discussion among shareholders at the World Bank's decision-making board on Thursday.
The bank is funding $140 million of the $4 billion project to develop the oil fields of Doba in southern Chad and construct a 1,070 km pipeline to offshore oil-loading facility on Cameroon's Atlantic coast. The project is sponsored by a consortium led by U.S. oil company Exxon Mobil Corp. and including ChevronTexaco Corp. and Malaysian oil company, Petronas.
The report said the bank would carry out regular consultations with regard to the social and environmental impact of the project and would work to improve governance and reduce poverty.
Nongovernmental organizations criticized the bank's response.
"Management's response... is an exercise in damage control that is lacking in substantive and bold approaches to solving the problems which are now engulfing the region and its inhabitants as a result (of the project)," said Korinna Horta, of Environmental Defense in Washington.
Bank spokeswoman Caroline Anstey, said management welcomed the internal report and agreed with its findings that the project is important for cutting poverty.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Rights Panel to Review Berenson Case
September 12, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Peru-Berenson.html
LIMA, Peru (AP) -- The Inter-American Court of Human Rights agreed to review the case of Lori Berenson, an American imprisoned in Peru for aiding leftist rebels, a court spokesman confirmed Thursday.
The Costa Rica-based Inter-American Court, part of the Organization of American States, can legally bind member countries, including Peru, to comply with its rulings.
Laura Furst, of the Washington-based Committee to Free Lori Berenson, said Thursday that the court decided Sept. 6 to review Berenson's claim that she didn't receive due process last year when she was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Berenson, 32, of New York, was convicted in June 2001 of collaborating with the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement in a failed bid to seize Peru's Congress in 1995.
A secret military court sentenced her in 1996 to life in prison for being a Tupac Amaru leader and plotting the thwarted attack. That decision was overturned in 2000.
In February, the Supreme Court upheld the civilian court's decision, leaving a presidential pardon or a ruling by the inter-American system as Berenson's only options for getting released from prison.
A pardon would be unpopular in Peru, where many consider Berenson a foreign terrorist.
--------
Charities Report Surge of Volunteers
September 12, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Volunteerism.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- When not attending classes at George Washington University, Allison Kessler teaches children how to read.
The 19-year-old sophomore from New Jersey said the Sept. 11 attacks motivated her to get involved. ``I want to help out my country,'' she said. ``I feel like I'm doing something.''
From campuses to civic organizations and government programs such as the Peace Corps, officials report a surge of volunteers since the attacks and President Bush's call in January for more community service.
``People have a desire to give,'' said Jennifer DiBella, a recruitment coordinator for the Peace Corps. ``They realize as Americans how fortunate we are.''
More of the Bush administration's initiatives have focused on enhancing existing organizations such as neighborhood watch and emergency response teams.
``The role for government is to foster the culture and provide meaningful service opportunities,'' said John Bridgeland, director of USA Freedom Corps, the federal organization set up to coordinate post-Sept. 11 volunteer efforts.
Not since the Vietnam War era has there been such a willingness to volunteer, Bridgeland said. ``We're fighting a 30-year decline in civic engagement in this country,'' he said.
Between Jan. 29, the date of Bush's speech, and Aug. 23, the Peace Corps said it fielded more than 76,000 inquiries about volunteering -- 43 percent more than during the same period in 2001.
Champions of Hope, volunteers age 5 to 25, sprung up after the attacks. On Wednesday, the organization sponsored projects in more than 150 cities and ran public service announcements on 5,000 movie screens seeking volunteers.
``We've talked to so many children after 9/11. They wanted to help but they felt powerless,'' said a spokeswoman for the organization, Sharon Helmbrecht. ``We thought, 'OK, let's give them something so they could make a difference.'''
USA Freedom Corps has set up a database to match up volunteers with local organizations. There are 50,000 groups in the database, spokeswoman Lindsey Kozberg said.
Through local councils, the government's new Citizen Corps brings together representatives of community groups with local officials and police and fire departments.
``The real value has been the coordination between the various volunteer agencies,'' said Robert Eckels, a Texas judge who heads the Houston-area council. ``We were able to pull some of those together to coordinate their activities and help us be better prepared to use those volunteers in the event of disaster.''
The government has provided guidelines and money. The administration in July awarded $10.3 million in grants to 43 nonprofit groups and public organizations in 26 states and the District of Columbia.
Kozberg said the administration also plans to help fund a medical service corps for doctors, nurses and other health care providers, and a program to help the public work with police departments.
On the Net:
USA Freedom Corps: http://www.usafreedomcorps.gov
Champions of Hope: http://www.championsohope.org
Citizen Corps: http://www.citizencorps.gov
Peace Corps: http://www.peacecorps.gov
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------- OneList (submissions from subscribers)
------- Depleted Uranium Keeps On Killing!
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