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NUCLEAR
Nuclear needs exemption from climate levy - scientist
Cuba to adhere to nuclear non-proliferation treaty
International Conference Would Address Dirty Bombs
EU to seek common safety rules for nuclear plants
Iraqi scientist says materials for nuclear bombs in hand
Iraq operates nuclear weapons assembly line, defector claims
Iraq 'will have nuclear bomb in months'
Searching for the Saddam Bomb
A semantic game [Scott Ritter in Baghdad]
IAEA Says Can't Prove Iraq Making Nuclear Weapons
Safety Problems at Japanese Reactors
TEPCO sees LNG demand rise due to reactor closure
SKorea: Tons of chemical weapons in NKorea
South Korea presses North on nuclear inspections
Abraham Urges 'Dirty Bomb' Action
U.S. Wants Action on Dirty Bomb Threat
Closing Indian Point
Economic effect of war seen as small
War As A Distraction
MILITARY
Singapore Announces Arrest of 21 Terror Suspects
When it's over, who gets the oil?
Cocaine Trade Causes Rifts in Colombian War
'War on terror' moves toward Iran
Iran's Rafsanjani Says U.S. After Iraqi Oil
Iraq Agrees to Readmit Inspectors, U.N. Says
Warplanes Striking to Degrade Iraqi Defenses
Security forces brace for U.S. assault on Iraq
Israel Prepares for Attack and Discusses a Response
Landmine campaigners criticize India, Pakistan
Syria says Iraq victim of a double standard
QUIETLY, JORDAN BUILDS CASE AGAINST IRAQ
Saudi Arabia backs down over Iraq to offer US use of bases
Saudis Indicating U.S. Can Use Bases if U.N. Backs War
Arab states back Bush over Iraq
Gulf strategist calls for new ideas
Army to Move Latin Headquarters
Hollywood goes to war
U.S. Trying to Market Itself to Young Arabs
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Guantánamo Bay Faces Sentence of Life as Permanent U.S. Prison
Sentencing day for convicted FBI agent
A Supreme Court Ruling Roils Death Penalty Cases
ENERGY AND OTHER
Spain's Iberdrola plans big Brazil wind-power park
California Passes Strong Renewables Standard
Islands Urge Anti - Warming Action
Science Slow to Ponder Ills That Linger in Anthrax Victims
ACTIVISTS
Thousands Protest Ukrainian Leader
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- britain
Nuclear needs exemption from climate levy - scientist
REUTERS UK:
September 16, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17754/story.htm
LEICESTER, England - Britain's chief scientific adviser said last week that the country's nuclear power industry should be exempt from the climate change levy.
Cash-strapped British Energy Plc , the country's only listed nuclear power company, has sought an exemption from the levy that aims to favour renewable energy at the expense of polluting generators.
Nuclear power does not emit carbon dioxide, the main cause of global warming and analysts say an exemption could save British Energy up to 100 million pounds ($155.5 million) annually.
David King, the government's chief scientific adviser, told the British Association science festival nuclear power should be considered a special case concerning the climate change levy and that greenhouse issues outweighed worries over nuclear waste.
"I place climate change way above dealing with nuclear waste," said King.
British Energy, the country's biggest electricity producer received 410 million pounds of emergency state aid to prevent its immediate collapse after it said it might go bust without state aid.
But ministers have said there are no guarantees they will keep the company afloat beyond the end of this month.
-------- cuba
Cuba to adhere to nuclear non-proliferation treaty
REUTERS CUBA:
September 16, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17766/story.htm
HAVANA - Cuba announced on the weekend that it would sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty as a contribution to peace in the post-Sept. 11 world.
Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque said his country had not signed the treaty before because it allowed a club of nuclear powers to exist with no commitment to disarming.
"As a sign of the clear political will of the Cuban government and its commitment to a effective process of disarmament that guarantees world peace, our country has decided to adhere to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty," he said.
Cuba will also ratify the Latin American and Caribbean nonproliferation agreement, known as the Treaty of Tlatelolco.
Havana signed this treaty in 1995 but had not ratified it due to the hostility of the United States, the hemisphere's only nuclear power, he said.
Communist Cuba has offered to cooperate on terrorism with its longtime political foe, the United States, since the Sept. 11, 2001, hijacked airliner attacks in New York and Washington.
But Washington had ignored its proposals, Perez Roque said.
Washington has enforced economic sanctions against Cuba for four decades and keeps Havana on a list of states that sponsor terrorism, along with Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Libya, Syria and North Korea.
Perez Roque said Cuba firmly opposed what now seems to be an "inevitable" war against Iraq and warned that the United Nations would lose credibility if the United States imposed such a war on the U.N. Security Council.
That would mean "the birth of a century of unilateralism and the forced retirement of the United Nations," he said.
-------- depleted uranium
International Conference Would Address Dirty Bombs
September 16, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/sep2002/2002-09-16-09.asp#anchor4
VIENNA, Austria, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham has called for an international conference to address the potential for terrorists to use radiological dispersal devices, often referred to as dirty bombs.
Speaking before the Forty-Sixth General Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) today, Abraham warned that terrorists could use radiological materials to make weapons that could contaminate entire cities.
"Although these dirty bombs are not comparable to nuclear weapons in destructiveness, they are far easier to assemble and employ," said Abraham. "While the physical destruction they would cause is comparable to conventional explosives, the disruption caused by widespread contamination is far greater. And it is disruption that terrorists seek."
In addition to the psychological disruption, use of a dirty bomb could have major economic consequences, Abraham added.
A dirty bomb contains radioactive material, but does not use that material to produce a nuclear explosion, as is the case with a nuclear weapon. Dirty bombs are constructed of conventional explosives and radioactive material and are designed to disperse that radioactive material.
Such weapons are ideal for terrorists because of their relative simplicity and the widespread availability of suitable radioactive material in medical isotopes, radiography sources and certain power sources.
Under Abraham's proposal, the United States would work closely with the IAEA to plan an international conference to help nations understand the potential threat posed by vulnerable radioactive sources, and to draw on the IAEA's expertise to develop standards for accounting for and tracking radiological materials.
Much of the concern surrounds radioactive sources in the non-Russian states of the former Soviet Union, many of which are now unguarded or poorly managed.
In June, the United States, Russia, and the IAEA established a working group on "Securing and Managing Radioactive Sources." This working group will "develop a coordinated and proactive strategy to locate, recover, secure and recycle orphan sources throughout the Former Soviet Union."
-------- europe
EU to seek common safety rules for nuclear plants
Story by Yves Clarisse
REUTERS BELGIUM:
September 16, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17755/story.htm
BRUSSELS - The European Union's top energy official said last week she would propose common safety standards for nuclear plants with cross-border inspections, in a move to reassure the public and promote nuclear power.
Atomic energy provides 33 percent of EU electricity and 14 percent of all energy consumption in the 15-nation bloc, but policy is largely in the hands of individual member states.
"We regulate the quality of bathing water in the European Union but there is nothing on the safety of nuclear power plants. We have to say that, whether you like it or not, nuclear power is unavoidable," EU Energy Commissioner Loyola de Palacio told reporters.
She said she would put forward draft directives in the coming weeks to make International Atomic Energy Agency safety standards legally binding in the EU, allow cross-border "peer review" of nuclear plants and set a deadline for building storage sites for radioactive waste.
De Palacio also said the EU would open talks with Russia on nuclear fuel supplies to candidate countries in eastern Europe which are entirely dependent on Moscow for fissile material to run Soviet-designed power stations.
The proposals appeared aimed primarily at dispelling fears in western Europe about safety at those plants once those countries join the EU.
CROSS-BORDER INSPECTIONS
De Palacio said she did not plan a corps of EU inspectors, but experts from one member state should be able to carry out inspections in another EU country.
"We will establish compulsory European standards as was demanded of the candidate countries. Once the candidates are in, we will either have to stop checks on them, or we will have to check everywhere," the commissioner said.
Because of fierce resistance by environmental campaigners, most EU states lack long-term storage facilities for spent fuel and store nuclear waste at power plants or temporary sites.
De Palacio said funds established in member states to pay for the dismantling of ageing nuclear plants were inadequate.
She would demand that such funds be "sufficient and available" in all member states.
The commissioner said the EU had no hope of reducing its output of greenhouse gases under the Kyoto treaty to combat global warming without nuclear power.
The EU has a rule that no member state may depend on a single supplier for more than 20 percent of its nuclear fuel, but the candidates cannot meet that target because Russia is the only country that produces the fuel used in their stations.
"So we have to negotiate with the Russians," de Palacio said. Moscow earns hundreds of millions of dollars a year by supplying fissile material to run 18 or the 19 nuclear plants in former communist east European countries.
-------- iraq
Iraqi scientist says materials for nuclear bombs in hand
By Paul Martin
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
September 16, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020916-28573872.htm
LONDON - Iraq is already using copies of pirated German equipment to process nuclear material for an atomic weapons program, according to a former Iraqi nuclear scientist who testified before the U.S. Senate this summer.
Khidir Hamza, who led a section of the Iraqi nuclear bomb program before his defection in 1994, said the devices may not be discovered even if U.N. inspectors are allowed to return to Iraq.
"The beauty of the present system is that the units are each very small, and in the four years since the inspectors left, they will have been concealed underground or in basements or buildings that outwardly seem normal," he said.
Mr. Hamza was one of the first witnesses at Senate hearings on Iraq in July. But in a series of interviews over the past several weeks, he painted a much more alarming picture than was laid out before the Senate or in a widely discussed report released last week by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.
That study concluded that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's regime could make an atomic bomb within months if it succeeded in acquiring the necessary nuclear fuel from an outside source.
But Mr. Hamza said Iraq already has, and is processing some 1.3 tons of low-enriched material bought many years ago from Brazil.
He maintained that Iraq has also been processing many tons of its own yellow-cake uranium, which has been extracted from large supplies of phosphates in the north.
U.N. inspectors were shown 162 tons of the material before their expulsion in 1998, but Mr. Hamza said there are several other sites that can be used.
"The amount of uranium it already has - conservatively estimated in a German intelligence report at 10 tons of natural uranium and 1.3 tons of low-enriched uranium - is enough for three nuclear weapons," Mr. Hamza said.
Before their expulsion, the inspectors dismantled an illegally imported German centrifuge that had been used in a program that progressively refines natural or low-enriched uranium until it becomes suitable for weapons.
But Mr. Hamza, who was the science adviser to the Atomic Energy Establishment and later helped start and direct Iraq's nuclear weapons program, said by then the "cat was out the bag."
He said he suspects the Iraqis have taken advantage of the four years since the inspectors' expulsion to make numerous copies of the original smuggled centrifuge and are busily refining uranium into the necessary material for nuclear bombs.
"It's a relatively simple process once you have the plans and some experience operating one or two centrifuges," he said.
The key was provided, he said, when German Karl Schaab showed the Iraqis how to build and operate a centrifuge in 1989, and later helped them build a second.
"Our engineers videoed as it was put up, so they could build identical ones. Then he also provided 130 classified documents and charts detailing every aspect of the construction.
"When the inspectors took away the original centrifuge, we already had the know-how. I believe there are probably hundreds of copies today," said Mr. Hamza, who now lives in the United States.
"They are easy to hide - undetectable from satellites if built within or under other buildings."
The problem for Iraq, he says, is simply to keep reprocessing the material so that after each run it gets more and more enriched, until it reaches the 90 percent level needed to make a nuclear weapon.
The process can be completed more quickly if one begins with low-enriched uranium - which is at 3 percent to 4 percent - rather than only natural uranium, which is at about 0.7 percent.
A really efficient weapons program requires thousands of such centrifuges, as each has a very small output of enriched uranium, Mr. Hamzi said.
Further evidence that such a program is in place came this month when the United States announced the interception of a shipment to Iraq of highly refined aluminum tubes suitable for making centrifuges.
"The whole centrifuge method of getting to a bomb is much easier for Iraq than, for example, it was for Pakistan, which took 17 years in going the same route," Mr. Hamza said. "They had to get it in bits and pieces, whereas we got a whole centrifuge and all the plans."
Experts suggest the method being used by Iraq can take from four to seven years, depending on the number of centrifuges. Mr. Hamza said Iraq would have begun work in earnest as the inspectors left in 1998.
"This means, unless he's stopped soon, Saddam will have set up a whole nuclear bomb industry, not just have made a couple of bombs," he said.
Iraq has repeatedly denied having such a program.
"It's not that Iraq has no material," said Foreign Minister Naji Sabri in a televised interview last week. "From the beginning of 1991 the government had a decision to leave the weapons-of-mass-destruction club. So we presented all we had to UNSCOM [the U.N. weapons inspectors]. There is nothing."
Mr. Hamza, who was working on Saddam's weapons program when Israeli jets bombed the French-supplied 40-megawatt Osirak research reactor in 1981, confirmed long-held suspicions that the facility was to have been used to develop nuclear weapons material.
Scientists had planned not to divert the existing French-supplied highly enriched nuclear fuel - enough for one bomb - but rather blanket the reactor with natural or depleted uranium, which would produce plutonium. That would have made it possible to continue producing, eventually allowing repeated bomb production.
"From the moment Osirak was hit we knew we had to try another method to get the bomb, and the centrifuge approach is the easiest to conceal," Mr. Hamza said.
----
Iraq operates nuclear weapons assembly line, defector claims
Saddam Hussein is developing nuclear capability, using pirated centrifuges to refine uranium
By Paul Martin
September 16, 2002
UK Times
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-416705,00.html
IRAQ is using pirated copies of German equipment to process nuclear material in an assembly line that will regularly produce nuclear weapons, an Iraqi scientist who led a section of the Iraqi nuclear bomb programme before his defection in 1994 claims.
President Saddam Hussein may need only months more to put together up to three nuclear cores, if he has not already done so while his programme has not been monitored, the defector says.
Dr Khidir Hamza also said that, even if given unfettered access, UN inspectors would find it far more difficult to detect the nuclear assembly line. "The beauty of the present system is that the units are each very small and in the four years since the inspectors left they will have been concealed underground or in basements or buildings that outwardly seem normal," he said.
In an interview with The Times Dr Hamza painted a more alarming picture than had been laid out in a report last week by the International Institute for Strategic Studies. It concluded that Saddam's regime could make a bomb within months as Iraq had almost all the hardware and technology needed to build it, but only if it succeeded in smuggling in the necessary uranium or radioactive material.
The Iraqi defector claimed that the necessary uranium was already being processed inside Iraq. The material, he said, comprises 1.3 tonnes of low-enriched material bought many years ago from Brazil.
He said that Iraq had also been processing many tonnes of yellow-cake uranium, which has been extracted from large supplies of phosphates dotted around the country. Nuclear inspectors had been shown 162 tonnes of the material, but Dr Hamza said there were several other phosphate sites that were not inspected.
"The amount of uranium it already has - conservatively estimated in a German intelligence report at ten tonnes of natural uranium and 1.3 tonnes of low-enriched uranium - is enough for three nuclear weapons," Dr Hamza said.
Before their expulsion, the inspectors dismantled an illegally imported German centrifuge installation that had been used to refine progressively natural or low-enriched uranium until it becomes suitable for weapons.
But Dr Hamza said that by then the "cat was out the bag".
The key was provided, he said, when the German Karl Schaab smuggled in the centrifuge in 1989 and later helped Iraq to build a second. "We videoed as it was put up, so we could build identical ones. Then he also provided 130 classified documents and charts detailing every aspect of the construction. When the inspectors took away the original centrifuge, we already had the know-how. I believe there are probably hundreds of copies today," said Dr Hamza, who now lives in the United States. "They are easy to hide - undetectable from satellites if built within or under other buildings."
The problem for Iraq, he said, is simply to keep reprocessing the material so that after each run it gets more and more enriched, until it reaches the 90 per cent needed for nuclear weapons explosion. Having 1.3 tonnes of low-enriched uranium (3 to 4 per cent enriched) rather than only natural uranium (0.7 per cent enriched) meant that the process was speeded up.
For a really efficient nuclear weapons programme, thousands of such centrifuges were needed because each had a very small output of uranium, he said. The centrifuges spin at very high speeds and the joints are held together by magnets at top and bottom. The centrifuge tubes are made either of steel or aluminium.
The United States said this month that a shipment to Iraq of such highly refined aluminium tubes had been intercepted. Last week Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, disclosed that Saddam has been secretly attempting to buy aluminium tubes.
For every intercepted shipment of either small motors or precision tubes for the centrifuges, several would probably get through, Dr Hamza said, pointing out that a container could hold thousands. Orders would be placed for the tubes with a Western company via a third country at relatively low precision, and then a later order would suddenly specify far more precise production, costing four or five times as much and giving the factory far higher profits, he said.
"The whole centrifuge method of getting to a bomb is much easier for Iraq than, for example, it was for Pakistan, which took 17 years in going the same route. They had to steal bits and pieces, whereas we got a whole centrifuge and all the plans," Dr Hamza said.
Experts suggest that the method used by Iraq can take between four and seven years, depending on the number of centrifuges, and the process would have begun in earnest again as soon as the inspectors left in 1998 and possibly even earlier, Dr Hamza said. "This means, unless he's stopped soon, Saddam will have set up a whole nuclear bomb industry, not just have made a couple of bombs," he added.
Dr Hamza said that it would be suicidal for the West to wait much longer before eliminating Saddam's regime. "Inspectors going in now will have an almost impossible task to discover what's going on in the nuclear field," he said. "Since the inspectors left, Saddam has had four years at least to hide what needs to be hidden. Now he's well on the road, his game will be to stall and stall - if America lets him."
----
Iraq 'will have nuclear bomb in months'
Bush security chief tells of Saddam links with al-Qaeda
By Katty Kay in Washington, Paul Martin and Melissa Kite
September 16, 2002
UK Times
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-417076,00.html
IRAQ could produce nuclear weapons within months using pirated German equipment and uranium smuggled from Brazil, according to a dissident Iraqi nuclear scientist.
The revelations painting an alarming picture of President Saddam Hussein's nuclear capabilities came as the White House made its strongest link yet between Saddam and al-Qaeda, and demanded a United Nations resolution as soon as this week.
Dr Khidir Hamza, who was science adviser to the Atomic Energy Establishment and later helped to start and direct Iraq's nuclear bomb programme before he defected in 1994, claims in an interview with The Times today that Saddam could be in a position to make three nuclear weapons within the next few months, if he has not already done so.
Dr Hamza gave warning that UN inspectors would be useless because even if they were given "unfettered access" they would find it far more difficult than before to detect the nuclear assembly line. "The beauty of the present system is that the units are each very small and in the four years since the inspectors left they will have been concealed underground or in basements or buildings that outwardly seem normal," Dr Hamza said.
Dr Hamza gave evidence before Senator Joe Biden's Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on Iraq in Washington last August but it was only after the recent International Institute for Strategic Studies report on the threat from Saddam that he became aware of the West's imperfect understanding of the urgency of the situation.
Dr Hamza's new estimation of the speed with which a nuclear bomb could be produced is centred on the number of pirated centrifuges that Baghdad has been able to produce and the rapidity with which the re-processing programme is being undertaken. The scientist's intelligence suggests a more immediate threat than reported last week by the IISS, which concluded that Iraq could make a bomb only if it smuggled in the necessary uranium or radioactive material.
According to Dr Hamza, that material is already inside Iraq and is currently being processed to weapons grade. He said that Iraq was using a centrifuge method to get a bomb which is easier and quicker than other methods. "Unless he's stopped soon, Saddam will have set up a whole nuclear bomb industry, not just have made a couple of bombs," Dr Hamza said.
The Bush Administration yesterday made its strongest public connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda. National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said that al-Qaeda personnel had been spotted in Baghdad and that the Iraqi regime had ties to the network.
Until now the Administration has shied away from linking Iraq to al-Qaeda, prompting widespread speculation that the US had no evidence of links between the two. Yesterday Dr Rice suggested that was not the case: "Iraq has clearly links with terrorism that would include al-Qaeda."
Dr Rice backed away from any implication that Saddam was involved in the September 11 attacks, but said that there was sufficient evidence against him to justify action without ties to the attacks on New York and Washington. "Let's be clear. There's plenty to indict Saddam Hussein without a direct link to 9/11," she said.
There were growing signs that the international community was moving in America's favour to support an urgent UN deadline for Iraq to readmit weapons inspectors. Washington maintained pressure on the international community to move fast and start work on resolutions in the next few days. "I expect we'd work on a resolution in fairly short order, in the next week," Dr Rice said.
In a key strategic victory for the US, Saudi Arabia said yesterday that if America had UN authority, it would be allowed to use bases in the desert kingdom for an attack against Iraq.
Jack Straw, at the UN General Assembly, said there was a growing consensus about the nature of the demands to be imposed on the Iraqi regime. The Foreign Secretary said that the five permanent members of the UN Security Council - the US, Britain, France, China and Russia - had not yet made a final decision about whether there would be one resolution or two.
As diplomats discussed their options for Baghdad, US and British jets bombed an air defence communications facility near Tallil, 160 miles (257km) south of Baghdad. There were no reports of casualties.
----
Searching for the Saddam Bomb
by Patrick J. Buchanan,
WorlNetDaily
September 16, 2002
Creators Syndicate
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=28952
By most opinion surveys, the majority that supports the president's resolve to invade Iraq has been shrinking. But were Saddam close to getting an atom bomb, four in five Americans would back a pre-emptive war.
Thus, the administration and the Brits last week have trumpeted a report by the International Institute of Strategic Studies on Iraq's progress and got the headline they wanted in the London Evening Standard: "Saddam A-Bomb 'Within Months'"
A look at that IISS report, however, suggests the Evening Standard is dishing up war propaganda as news. What does it say?
Saddam, almost surely, does not have an atom bomb. He lacks the enriched uranium or plutonium necessary to build one and would have to acquire fissile material from some other country. He is like a fellow who wants to cook rabbit stew in a country where there are no rabbits. And there is no evidence Saddam is in the market for enriched uranium or plutonium, or is even at work on a bomb.
However, if Saddam could acquire 40 pounds of enriched uranium, he could probably build a bomb of the explosive power of the "Big Boy" we dropped on Hiroshima. But even that is not certain. IISS conclusion: Saddam was closer to an atom bomb in 1991 than he is today. As for his chemical and biological weapons, Saddam's arsenal was largely destroyed by 1998, though a five-year absence of U.N. inspectors has given him time to rebuild his stockpile.
Yet, even if Saddam has these dread weapons, can he deliver them? His decimated air force consists of a few hundred Russian and French planes, generations older than the latest U.S. models. Most of his missile force was shot off in the Gulf War or destroyed by U.S. bombs or U.N. inspectors. Iraq may retain a dozen al-Hussein missiles of 400-mile range. But America now has drones that can spot flaring rockets at lift-off and fire missiles to kill them in the boost phase.
In every military category, then, Saddam is weaker than when he invaded Kuwait. IISS's conclusion: "Wait and the threat will grow. Strike and the threat may be used."
What the International Institute of Strategic Studies is saying is: Saddam is probably beavering away on weapons of mass destruction. But a pre-emptive war could trigger the firing, upon U.S. troops, of the very weapons of mass destruction from which President Bush is trying to protect us.
How did we get here? In 1998, Clinton, anxious to distract our attention from a lady named Monica, ordered air strikes on Iraq. U.N. inspectors were pulled out. Thus, we know less now than we did in 1998 about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction.
And Bush's bellicosity has probably convinced Libya, Syria, Iran and Iraq that their only safety from a U.S. "pre-emptive war" lies in a nuclear deterrent. If the "axis-of-evil" regimes we have been daily threatening are trolling petrodollars in desperation in front of the Russian Mafia to buy some second-hand Soviet nukes, would anyone be surprised?
Which begs the question: Has the Bush-Cheney shift in policy - asserting a U.S. right to launch pre-emptive war to deny weapons of mass destruction to U.S.-designated rogue regimes - created the most compelling of incentives for rogue regimes to acquire those weapons? Is the Bush-Cheney anti-proliferation policy the principal propellant of Islamic nuclear proliferation?
From hard evidence, what may we reasonably conclude? A) Saddam does not have an atom bomb or the critical component to build one, and is not known to be in the market for the uranium he would need. B) While he has chemical and biological weapons, his delivery systems have been degraded. C) He has had these toxins for 15 years and never once used them on U.S. forces, though we smashed his country, tried to kill him half a dozen times and have a CIA contract out on his head.
Why, if Saddam is a madman, has he not used gas or anthrax on us? Osama would - in a heartbeat. Probable answer: Saddam does not want himself, his sons, his legacy, his monuments, his dynasty, his army and his country obliterated and occupied by Americans, and himself entering the history books as the dumbest Arab of them all. Rational fear has deterred this supposedly irrational man. Has it not?
Why, then, is the United States, having lost 3,000 people in a terrorist atrocity by an al-Qaida network that is alive and anxious to kill thousands more, about to launch a new war on a country that even its neighbors - Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia - believe to be contained?
What is this obsession with Saddam Hussein?
----
A semantic game [Scott Ritter in Baghdad]
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM
12 - 18 September 2002, Issue No. 603
http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/2002/603/fr2.htm
Scott Ritter, the UN arms inspector who resigned in 1998 in protest at US manipulation of the UNSCOM mandate was in Baghdad this week to deliver a message to the Iraqis: allow the inspectors back or risk the destruction of Iraq. Al-Ahram Weekly interviewed him in Baghdad
Your 1999 book on Iraq was entitled Endgame: Solving the Iraq Problem Once and For All. What about the game now, has it come to an end?
Personally I never played any game. Endgame is a term used by political scientists when they speak of a situation where the players pursue the conflict to the bitter end. I gave my book that title because I was dealing with US and UN involvement in Iraq, trying to find out how both players were going to exculpate themselves from that situation.
The endgame option is the choice of the American government, which is at war with Iraq. I find this unacceptable -- a choice that has no support in international law, and that cannot be justified by the facts on the ground given the extent of the disarmament programme carried out in Iraq. Speaking about an endgame strategy does not mean I am here to play a game, I am not playing any games.
Iraqis early discovered the nature of the UNSCOM game -- a US game played under the UN umbrella. Now it is natural to ask what is the next move?
Allowing the inspectors back in Iraq without any conditions. This way you can bring the Iraqi issue to an end and lift the economic sanctions. If you do this Iraq will regain normal relations with the world and enjoy better economic conditions.
But how can Iraq be sure that the new inspectors will not engage in spying activities on behalf of the US?
There is no way to ensure that. The best way I could see, based on my discussions with officials in various countries, is that UN inspectors have to be honest brokers. Their mandate is one of independent and objective monitoring, you cannot ensure that none of the observers is a spy but you can make sure that they do not overstep the Security Council mandate.
Could you elaborate on how did UNSCOM overstep this mandate in the past?
UNSCOM was manipulated by the US, especially under the lead of Richard Butler, the second executive director of UNSCOM. From 1997-1998 Butler stopped being a man objectively carrying out the will of the Security Council and became the head of a US-controlled UNSCOM, carrying out the will of the US and the UK. When you enter that kind of buddy-buddy relationship, when you become such buddies you give your buddy the green light to misuse and abuse the relationship.
How can inspectors such as Butler be avoided?
Let us concentrate on the basics first. Unless Iraq unconditionally allows the inspectors back, there will be a war and Iraq will be destroyed.
Let us play a semantic game, whereby it is understood that inspectors must return or there will be a war. Now, there are some governments saying that if Iraq allows the inspectors back, they will make sure that those inspectors do not overstep their mandate.
It is the only way. Can anybody guarantee the success? No.
But Rumsfeld has said the issue is no longer one of inspectors returning...
Donald Rumsfeld does not speak on behalf of the Security Council, or even for the whole US administration. He speaks for Donald Rumsfeld. What he said exposes the hypocrisy of the Bush administration regarding the present situation in Iraq.
The Bush administration says on the one hand that a strike against Iraq is necessary because of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and in the same breath it says that the issue of the inspectors no longer matters. This suggests WMD are not the issue. What is the issue then? Why are they advocating war? They tell the American public that war against Iraq is necessary because Iraq, with its WMD, poses a threat to US security.
The only way out of this situation is to allow the inspectors back, so that they can tell the world that Iraq has no WMD. Only when they say so can the American public discover that a war against Iraq is not a war in defence of the interests of the Americans, but is a war waged to further the interests of the Bush administration.
If the inspectors are allowed back, how much time do you think they will need?
Hans Blix, the director of the UNMOVIC said that his team could reestablish basic facts regarding Iraq's WMD within six months. After that, he will set forth outstanding issues that need to be resolved. If you have honest brokers overseeing this work then the inspectors will focus on the scientific and technical aspects. This process will not allow the return of the political game as before with the US.
I myself believe that if the inspectors are allowed back, within six months you will start seeing the positive results. Before a year the economic sanctions will be lifted.
Do you seriously believe that?
There is no other way but hope. Or else within six months Iraq will be destroyed.
In an interview with Swedish Radio Rulf Ekeus said that the new inspectors will be equipped differently. What did he mean? Are they going to be armed?
With the establishing of UNSCOM in 1991, the UN proposed to have armed soldiers escorting the inspectors but that proposal was turned down. Inspectors must be provided with all the facilities and must enjoy the cooperation of the Iraqi government. If the Iraqi government chooses not to cooperate, the inspectors should be withdrawn and the Security Council should come up with other solutions, including military force.
But inspectors with arms, this is a prescription that will never succeed.
You were one of the toughest UNSCOM inspectors. What had changed your position?
I have always worked for peace, even when I was in the Marines and during the [Second Gulf] war. I think it is great when one fights a just war. As an inspector, I was working under the mandate stipulated by UN Security Council resolutions .
Interviewed by Nermin Al-Mufti
--------
IAEA Says Can't Prove Iraq Making Nuclear Weapons
September 16, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-iraq-iaea-weapons.html
VIENNA (Reuters) - The United Nations nuclear watchdog said Monday it had information that could indicate Iraq was attempting to revive its nuclear weapons program, but on-site inspections were needed to draw clear conclusions.
Asked if the U.N. had information that could be evidence of a revival of Iraq's clandestine nuclear weapons program, International Atomic Energy Agency Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei told a news conference:
``Yes, we do have some information...but we cannot draw any definite conclusions based on it,'' he said, adding that the information had come from analysis of commercial satellite images.
``Without on-site inspections we cannot verify whether Iraq has revived its nuclear weapons program,'' he said. ElBaradei urged Iraq to let the weapons inspectors return to the country as soon as possible, adding that it was in their best interests to permit U.N. weapons inspectors to carry o the country as soon as possible, adding that it was in their best interests to permit U.N. weapons inspectors to carry out a thorough verification of Iraq's position that it has no nuclear weapons capabilities. President Bush has said that he wanted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's regime toppled as it was still trying to develop weapons o f mass destruction. U.N. weapons inspectors left Iraq in December 1998.
-------- japan
Safety Problems at Japanese Reactors
New York Times
September 16, 2002
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/16/international/asia/16JAPA.html
TOKYO, Sept. 15 - The reports of safety lapses, fraudulent repairs and cover-ups at Japan's largest nuclear power company began with a trickle but have resounded into an industry nightmare.
The details, filled in over the last two weeks by one alarming report after another, show a potentially catastrophic pattern of cost-cutting along with 16 years of cover-ups of serious flaws, apparently in an effort to preserve public trust. The pattern includes the systematic falsification of inspection and repair records at 13 reactors at the company, Tokyo Electric, the world's largest private electrical utility.
Compounding the public relations disaster, a reactor that the company operates in Fukushima Prefecture, in northern Japan, was closed temporarily last week because a chimney was emitting more than 100 times the usual level of radiation.
In accordance with the ritualized apologies that Japanese business culture demands, the president of Tokyo Electric, Nobuya Minami, and four other senior officials resigned. But many Japanese are talking about a far larger casualty, the rock-solid consensus behind nuclear energy that has existed here for decades, and which has made Japan's industry the world's third-largest, behind the United States and France, and perhaps its most ambitious. Even senior members of the government have expressed their outrage over the scandal. "It is absolutely abominable that this incident caused the people's confidence to be largely lost in nuclear energy," said Takeo Hiranuma, the industry minister. Statements like his are almost unheard; for decades the government has been an almost unconditional backer of nuclear power.
But a groundswell has been building against nuclear power here for at least three years. It began when cost-cutting and sloppy work led to a fission chain-reaction at a uranium-processing plant in Tokaimura, 70 miles northeast of Tokyo, in 1999. The anger gained momentum last year after investigators discovered that radioactive coolant water had been leaking, undetected, from cracks in the aging reactor vessel in Hamaoka for at least four months.
The Tokaimura incident was Japan's worst nuclear-related accident. Two people were killed, thousands of people were exposed to at least moderate levels of radiation and the town center had to be temporarily evacuated during a cleanup.
Company officials have said they were worried that if the public became aware of cracking at the reactors, people would be frightened. Today, it was learned that the government gave Tokyo Electric the name of the whistle-blower who reported the cracking to the company, in a further effort to keep things quiet.
The Tokaimura accident shocked the nation, and critics of the nuclear industry now say the government's condemnations of safety lapses and fraud may be too little too late.
Since Tokaimura, local communities have voted in referendums to block new plants, and in other cases mayors and governors have promised to do so. That has galvanized action against the nuclear power industry as never before.
"At first, people had no other choice but to trust the government, because this is such important technology," Eisaku Sato, the governor of Fukushima Prefecture, where some of the troubled Tokyo Electric plants are located, said Wednesday. "Then this incident occurred, and the trust between us, which was never more than a thin red thread, was completely cut off."
Just one day earlier, Masazumi Nishikawa, the mayor of Kashiwazaki City, in Niigata Prefecture, told Tokyo Electric to cancel its plans to introduce a plutonium fuel into a conventional local reactor which was designed to burn uranium. The prefectural governor, Ikuo Hirayama, has seconded the mayor's moves.
Antinuclear activists say they can now foresee a day when Japan joins countries like Germany and Belgium in banning new nuclear plant construction. Plant construction in the United States has long been frozen though not banned.
"This kind of scandal, where there have been cover-ups for 10 years, causes a fatal doubt of government policy on nuclear energy," said Kiyoshi Sakurai, an industry critic and a physicist. "We will end up like Americans and some European countries, turning away from nuclear energy."
Nuclear-generated electricity has been the bedrock of Japan's energy policy since the oil shocks of the 1970's, which hit Japan far worse than the United States, considering that Japan was a manufacturing economy without local supplies of oil.
The country embarked on a crash program to build dozens of nuclear power plants. But it also poured tens of billions of dollars into the development of plutonium-burning reactors, known as fast breeder reactors; their technology, though unproven, theoretically would produce more nuclear fuel than they burn. The United States abandoned similar plans during the Ford administration, citing safety concerns, and since then, international nuclear energy experts and antinuclear activists in Japan have raised a host of other objections, from infeasibility to the terror-related risks of shipping vast stocks of plutonium internationally and around Japan.
But the Japanese government has continued to spend heavily on developing plutonium-based reactors, even despite a sodium leak and a fire at its prototype fast-breeder reactor at Monju in 1992.
"There is a single-minded commitment to nuclear power," said Edwin Lyman, president of the Nuclear Control Institute, an independent group in Washington doing research on nuclear nonproliferation. "The government clearly sees promoting nuclear power as its policy, because the bureaucrats absolutely believe that this is the key to their energy future for the next 200 years."
The biggest liabilities faced by Japan's huge nuclear power industry are not the technologies of the future, but an accident-plagued present in which embarrassing failures in aging reactors have become disturbingly commonplace.
The most frightening revelation in the unfolding Tokyo Power scandal has been that falsified inspection records had papered over large cracks in the stainless steel shrouds that cover the core of nuclear plants, allowing the reactors to operate for years without costly repairs.
For many, this recalled an explosion at a nuclear plant operated by the Nagoya-based Chubu Electric Power Company, at Hamaoka, last November. The investigation there revealed the radioactive leaks.
The Hamaoka plant began operating in 1976, and antinuclear activists in Japan have seized upon incidents like the one last year as evidence that many of Japan's 53 nuclear reactors, operating well into their third decade, are aging and a safety risk.
Aging has emerged as a major concern in the United States, too, particularly since the discovery in March of a hole in the top of the reactor vessel at the Davis-Besse reactor, near Toledo, Ohio. Unforeseen corrosion by boric acid has nearly eaten through the six-inch thick steel vessel that contains the reactor's core, and American investigators are also looking into whether inspection or repair records at the plant have been falsified.
In an interview before the Tokyo Power scandals, Shojiro Masuura, chairman of Japans Nuclear Safety Commission, denied that aging of nuclear plants was a problem. "In Japan there is no relationship between accidents and aging," he said. Regarding the Hamaoka leaks, he added, "the reactors fractures don't really relate to aging at all."
American nuclear energy experts have expressed astonishment at that line of thinking. "Something has happened to the Japanese, and it doesn't look good," said Victor Galinsky, a former member of the Nuclear Regulator Commission. "I just can't imagine that any engineer, technical person or technical bureaucrat can deny that aging is a problem."
----
TEPCO sees LNG demand rise due to reactor closure
REUTERS JAPAN:
September 16, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17772/story.htm
TOKYO - Tokyo Electric Power Co Inc said last week it had revised up its demand forecast for liquefied natural gas for the current business year by one million tonnes due to the closure of nuclear reactors for checks.
TEPCO, Japan's largest power utility, said its LNG demand was likely to rise to about 16 million tonnes for the business year to next March, up from its initial forecast of about 15 million.
TEPCO has long-term contracts to import LNG with Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia and Qatar.
A company official said TEPCO planned to buy additional LNG within its existing term contracts, but he did not rule out the possibility that it may buy LNG on the spot market.
"Unplanned reactor closures have prompted us to revise our LNG purchasing plans. Our demand is likely to rise by roughly about one million tonnes," the official said.
At current prices, a million tonnes of LNG would be worth roughly $150 million to $200 million.
TEPCO has said it will close five nuclear reactors that are believed to have been operating with cracks in their shrouds, either for early or unplanned safety checks, by the end of October. The reactors will be shut for about 50 days.
The utility was forced to shut the reactors after it emerged that employees had doctored nuclear plant safety records.
Apart from the five, the company already has shut down two nuclear reactors for regular maintenance checks.
"A shortfall can be covered by buying oil, but we are also planning to increase LNG purchases because LNG prices are lower than oil," the official said.
The seven reactors have total capacity of about 7.0 million kilowatts.
TEPCO could lose up to 40 percent of its nuclear power capacity by mid-October if the closure of the reactors overlap.
The company has said it may have failed to accurately report cracks at its nuclear reactors in the late 1980s and 1990s, reigniting safety concerns in a country that relies on nuclear energy for about a third of its energy needs.
Before the scandal, TEPCO had reduced its LNG demand forecast by one million tonnes due to Japan's weak economy.
TEPCO's shares ended the day down 25 yen or 1.05 percent. The benchmark Nikkei stock average inched up by 0.16 percent.
-------- korea
SKorea: Tons of chemical weapons in NKorea
By Jong-Heon Lee
UPI Correspondent
September 16, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20020916-063209-4042r.htm
SEOUL, South Korea, Sept. 16 (UPI) -- North Korea has a stockpile of 2,500 to 5,000 tons of chemical weapons and is believed to be capable of producing 1 ton of biological weapons annually, South Korea's Defense Ministry said Monday.
The communist state's stockpile of chemical weapons consists of 17 different types that can be used for nerves gas, the ministry said in a report presented to the National Assembly. North Korea can build about 4,500 tons of chemical weapons every year, it said.
Pyongyang's army also has biological weapons involving 13 different lethal germs and viruses and is believed to be able to produce 1 ton of biological weapons material annually, the ministry said.
North Korea signed the Biological Weapons Convention in 1987, but has been blamed as a leading violator of the international treaty that bans germ warfare.
Under its ruling principle of "army-first politics," North Korea has produced and deployed long-range ballistic missiles capable of reaching the United States, and has sold some missiles to Iran and Syria. Experts say the missiles can be fitted with bio-chemical warheads.
To cope with possible attacks from the North, South Korean military authorities have bought vaccines against anthrax capable of inoculating 10,000 soldiers, officials said.
Last month, South Korea renounced the use biological weapons "under any circumstances," despite critics that government's decision was "premature" as North Korea is still posing military threats.
"The decision was aimed at putting pressure on North Korea to take a reciprocal measure against bio-chemical weapons," a senior official told United Press International on condition of anonymity. But South Korea has retained the right to use chemical weapons, as a deterrent against the North, the official said.
The United States has said North Korea has a bio-chemical weapons program. In a recent visit to Seoul, John Bolton, U.S. undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, echoed concerns about North Korea's biological and chemical warfare capabilities.
"In regard to chemical weapons, there is little doubt that North Korea has an active program," he said in a major policy speech last month. "The U.S. government believes that North Korea has one of the most robust offensive bioweapons programs on Earth," he added.
The United States believes North Korea has also diverted enough plutonium to make one or two nuclear bombs before agreeing to freeze production in 1994. Pyongyang has rejected international calls for inspectors to be allowed into its nuclear facilities to verify that weapons development has halted.
South Korean Foreign Minister Choi Sung-hong urged North Korea last week to allow inspections of its nuclear facilities, saying "the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction" was a key challenge in the peace process between the two Koreas.
"It is now essential that the full cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency begin without further delay for the implementation of safeguards requirements" of the 1994 nuclear accord, he said in an address to the annual U.N. General Assembly Friday.
----
South Korea presses North on nuclear inspections
REUTERS UNITED NATIONS:
September 16, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17767/story.htm
UNITED NATIONS - South Korea last week pressed rival North Korea to begin complying immediately with a provision of a 1994 nuclear agreement calling for inspections to determine how much weapons-grade material Pyongyang may have produced.
In a speech to the U.N. General Assembly, South Korean Foreign Minister Choi Sung-hong said the accord, known as the Agreed Framework, "has reached a critical juncture."
"As the light water project progresses, it is now essential that the full cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency begin without further delay for the implementation of safeguards requirements of the Agreed Framework," he said.
Under the agreement, negotiated by the United States to defuse a crisis with North Korea, Pyongyang promised to freeze its nuclear program.
In return, Washington promised to provide the North with $5 billion package of heavy oil and two nuclear power reactors that would help meet the North's energy generation needs but are less useful for producing nuclear weapons material.
U.S. officials had hoped to build the first of two reactors by 2003 but the project is several years behind schedule because of funding difficulties and tension on the Korean peninsula.
Former U.S. officials who negotiated the pact say North Korea is not obliged to submit to the IAEA inspections until key nuclear reactors components near delivery.
But the administration of President George W. Bush, who has called North Korea part of an "axis of evil" with Iraq and Iran, has demanded that Pyongyang act now on this requirement.
Officials and experts have speculated that Pyongyang has produced enough nuclear material for one or two weapons.
The top U.S. arms control official, Undersecretary of State John Bolton, recently warned that the 1994 accord may be scrapped if North Korea continued to reject calls for an IAEA examination of the reclusive regime's past nuclear activities.
In the U.N. speech, Choi expressed satisfaction that after many ups and downs, the peace process between Seoul and Pyongyang "is finally back on track and moving forward again."
Inter-Korean meetings and exchanges have resumed at all levels covering all subjects and next week the two sides will begin construction of railways and roads that have been severed for five decades, he noted.
He spoke as a group of South Koreans traveled to the North for a reunification with loved ones they have not seen since the 1950-53 Korean War.
"The overall progress report to date amply demonstrates that the engagement policy (pursued by South Korean President Kim Dae-jung) works," Choi said.
"No one can deny that the Korean people on both sides of the peninsula today enjoy a stronger peace than ever and that the risk of war is at an all time low since the end of the Korean War," he added.
-------- terrorism
Abraham Urges 'Dirty Bomb' Action
September 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Austria-Nuclear.html
VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham appealed Monday for concerted action to prevent nuclear material from being acquired by terrorists.
Speaking to the general conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Abraham urged delegates to act immediately to counter the threat of so-called ``dirty bombs'' -- radiation weapons that rely on conventional explosives to blow radioactive material far and wide.
``After 9-11, there could be no doubt -- if there ever was one in the first place, that terrorists could use nuclear materials to harm innocent civilians,'' Abraham said.
He urged world leaders to hold an international conference to discuss the threat posed by dirty bombs. The United States and Russia have already been meeting to discuss the issue, he said.
While nuclear warheads kill and destroy through the heat and blast of giant fission-fusion reactions, dirty bombs rely on conventional explosives to disperse radioactive material. The materials for a dirty bomb, like cobalt and iridium, are often used in medicine and industry.
While not as destructive as a traditional nuclear bomb, dirty bombs are easier to build and to use. Abraham pledged $3 million to the IAEA to help safeguard nuclear security.
Abraham made scant mention in his remarks about U.S. efforts to confront Iraq about possible nuclear efforts, referring briefly to President Bush's remarks at the United Nations last week.
Meanwhile, the atomic organization's secretary-general flatly declared that the delivery of a nuclear reactor to North Korea under a U.S.-brokered deal could be delayed because the government wasn't in compliance with agreements allowing inspections.
``If they do not want to delay the delivery of the reactor, they had better start cooperating right away -- yesterday in fact,'' Director General Mohamed ElBaradei said.
The deal, negotiated under former President Clinton's administration, gave North Korea two light water nuclear reactors for power generation in exchange for abandoning its nuclear weapons program. They are to be delivered by 2005.
Under the plan, the IAEA is to inspect facilities to maintain that the nuclear material is not diverted for military use. The organization hasn't been give the access it needs, putting the planned delivery date in question.
---------
U.S. Wants Action on Dirty Bomb Threat
September 16, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-crime-nuclear-abraham.html
VIENNA (Reuters) - The U.S. energy secretary called Monday for international cooperation to fight the threat of so-called dirty bombs, which scatter radioactive material using conventional explosive devices.
In a speech at the annual conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Spencer Abraham said more should be done to stop lower grade nuclear materials falling into the hands of terrorists attracted by the greater destructive potential of dirty bombs.
``While dirty bombs are not comparable to nuclear weapons in destructiveness, they are far easier to assemble and employ,'' Abraham said.
``And while the physical destruction they would cause is comparable to conventional explosives, the disruption caused by widespread contamination is far greater. And it is disruption that terrorists seek,'' he added.
Although they do not involve any nuclear fission or cause great physical damage, dirty bombs are finely milled radioactive material packed around conventional explosives designed to widely spread radioactivity and panic.
Abraham said plans found in bunkers in Afghanistan revealed the interest of the al Qaeda network, which Washington blames for last year's September 11 attacks, in making dirty bombs with the kind of radioactive materials left over from everyday uses.
``After September 11, there could be no doubt -- if there ever was one in the first place -- that terrorists would use nuclear materials to harm innocent citizens of the civilized nations of the world, if they could acquire them,'' Abraham said.
``No one of us should underestimate the implications of the use of any kind of radiological device, be it a nuclear weapon or dirty bomb,'' he said, adding that there should be an international conference devoted to the issue of dirty bombs.
He said the United States was closely cooperating with Russia to protect nuclear and radioactive material, much of which is missing throughout the former Soviet Union.
IRAQ AND NORTH KOREA STILL A PROBLEM
Recently the United States and Russia cooperated with the IAEA on a successful mission to recover highly enriched uranium from a nuclear reactor in Belgrade, Yugoslavia.
Abraham said that one of the problems in the fight against nuclear terrorism was that there were regimes seeking nuclear weapons for aggressive purposes which cooperate with and sponsor terrorists.
``My president laid out the case against one such regime before the U.N. last week,'' he said, referring to George W. Bush's speech demanding that the U.N. ``show some backbone'' in forcing Iraq to obey U.N. resolutions by allowing the return of weapons inspectors.
Regarding communist North Korea, IAEA General-Director Mohamed ElBaradei told delegates at the conference that the agency was still unable to verify if Pyongyang had declared all of its nuclear material subject to IAEA safeguard measures.
``Further delays in the start of the IAEA's verification activities...could lead to a substantial delay in the light water reactor project,'' said ElBaradei.
In 1994, North Korea, which Bush said belonged to the ``axis of evil'' alongside Iraq and Iran, agreed to freeze a suspected nuclear weapons program in exchange for two light-water reactors built by the West that would be hard to use for a secret weapons program.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- new york
Closing Indian Point
New York Times
September 16, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/16/opinion/L16INDI.html
To the Editor:
The resolution passed by the Westchester County Board of Legislators calling for the closing of the Indian Point nuclear power plant "at the earliest possible time" (news article, Sept. 10), while not carrying the weight of law, sends an important symbolic message to the state and federal authorities.
The unanimous vote reflects the opinion of the majority of county residents and shows that this issue supersedes partisan politics.
Its passage makes a clear statement that the financial and energy-related benefits of the plant, even to its home county, do not justify the potential risks of an accident or attack.
In 1979, Indian Point was described as one of the most inappropriate sites in existence by Robert Ryan, the director of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Office of State Programs. It is even more inappropriate in the post-Sept. 11 world.
GARY SHAW Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y. Sept. 11, 2002
-------- us politics
[It's particularly chilling to see how brazen the politicos have become. This shows vast contempt for the thought processes of U.S. citizens. Let's prove them wrong and call them on their stupidity. No blood for money, or oil. et]
Economic effect of war seen as small
By Donald Lambro
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
September 16, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020916-8081695.htm
White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey says that "the likely economic effects would be relatively small" if the United States goes to war in Iraq to depose Saddam Hussein.
In an interview with The Washington Times on Friday, Mr. Lindsey said that there would be great uncertainties for the U.S. and global economies in any military action against Iraq, but that if the war was successful and short, the economic benefits of removing Saddam would far exceed the costs.
"It's hard to say whether the net economic effects would be positive or negative. There are enormous uncertainties about what might happen. It depends on the prosecution of the war. But under every plausible scenario, the negative effect is quite small relative to the economic benefits that would come from a successful prosecution of the war," he said.
"The key issue is oil, and a regime change in Iraq would facilitate an increase in world oil," which would tend to lower oil prices, he said.
Mr. Lindsey, who is President Bush's chief economic adviser, said the threat of terrorist attacks and Iraq's growing arsenal of weapons continued to pose dangers to the U.S. and world economies that a regime change would help alleviate.
"It is hard to see how you get sustained economic growth in that kind of environment. The risks to the world economy are so great in that case that any costs of the war are absolutely dwarfed," he said.
Mr. Lindsey said the nation's economy, whose condition will be a critical factor in the midterm elections, was "moving forward in spite of the challenges we've faced." He predicted that the economy would grow by more than 3 percent in the third quarter, which ends this month, and by 3 percent overall for the year.
Still, he said, "We are going to have a sustained period of adjusting to the excesses of the '90s. There were huge distortions in the balance sheets of the country, and that has to be undone. Terrorism is still with us."
Asked what he would say to investors, who polls show make up two-thirds of all likely voters, when they receive their third-quarter statements next month showing their 401(k) and IRA retirement investments have lost much of their value, he said he would tell them to blame the Democrat-controlled Senate for blocking much of Mr. Bush's economic agenda.
"What I would say to them is, 'Is this the right time for gridlock?' Lots of things have been proposed. The House has passed them all. The Senate hasn't. Who is responsible? Do you want continued gridlock? Will gridlock help your portfolio?"
His answer: "If you look at the host of proposals that the president has made that has not been acted on in the Senate, I think the answer is obvious."
Asked what Republican candidates should tell disgruntled voters who are affected by the slower-than-expected recovery of the economy, he said, "The president and the House have done everything they can to minimize both the impact of the war and the adverse impact of what happened in the 1990s."
"We passed the best-timed tax cuts in history. We have a second stimulus package that the House passed, but that the Senate waited five months to pass, and then only passed half of what the president wanted. The Senate refused to move on terrorism insurance, in order to protect the trial lawyers, even though thousands of jobs are lost because of it," he said.
"So we have been dealt a tough hand to play," he said. "We'd like to do better, but many of the president's proposals have been stalled."
----
War As A Distraction
by Charley Reese
King Features Syndicate, Inc.
Monday, September 16, 2002
http://reese.king-online.com/Reese_20020916/index.php
Ernest Hemingway had today's politicians pegged while most of them were still in short pants:
"The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists."
He wrote those words during the 1940s. They are still true.
The currency is inflated. Just measured from 1967, it is so inflated that $5.29 is required to purchase what $1 would buy in 1967. When I married about that time, my wife and I could buy three or four big paper bags of groceries for $16 or $17. Today, you can carry $18 worth of stuff out of a supermarket in one of those little plastic bags hooked over your little finger.
Of course, a dollar in 1967 would buy only what 42 cents would buy in 1940. Politicians and the Federal Reserve inflate the currency by putting more and more of it into circulation. Congress runs deficits; the Federal Reserve issues bonds to create the money to cover the government's otherwise bad checks.
Then we had the wars - World War II, the Korean War, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War and the War on Terrorism (and, pretty soon, little Bush's Gulf War II). And those are just the ones we were in. There were a lot of profits for defense industries and big construction companies in those wars; as for the men who had to fight them, there were public debt, deficits and high taxes if they were lucky enough to escape the grave or a VA hospital.
Today, many veterans cannot get proper health care. The government cheats its retired soldiers. If they are eligible for disability pay, it is deducted from their retired pay, though in fact they are two separate things, both earned separately. Most Americans can't afford health care, and it's only a matter of time before the premiums get so high that most of them will not be able to afford insurance. We have homeless people, jobless people and children in schools with leaky roofs and no textbooks. The unluckier of the elderly are rotting away in some fly-by-night nursing homes. Thousands of Americans have lost their pensions and most of their life savings to corporate shenanigans and stock-market bubbles.
But, despite all that, our president believes it is necessary to spend $30 billion to $50 billion and God knows how many lives just to remove a third-rate dictator 7,000 miles away. There will be some good profits to be made on this war, but the young men and women who have to fight it won't get any.
I'm not going to try to talk you out of this war. I've learned that a president, when he sounds the war tocsin, can convince 74 percent of the people that Jesus Christ is the devil and needs to be lynched.
I do hope you realize, though, that the war is a distraction, just as Hemingway said, to take your mind off all the real problems that President Bush is not even trying to solve. I do hope you realize that Bush is risking a number of very bad unintended consequences. It could become a regional war. We could get stuck in Baghdad for years. We might end up, if it spills over into the oil fields, with $80-a-barrel oil, which would wreck what's left of the economy.
Yes, I know, Prince Bush is saving you, just in the nick of time, from the bloody jaws of the Lion of Baghdad. Believe that if it makes you feel better.
-------- MILITARY
-------- asia
Singapore Announces Arrest of 21 Terror Suspects
September 16, 2002
By RAYMOND BONNER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/16/international/16CND-SING.html
JAKARTA, Indonesia, Sept. 16 - Authorities in Singapore announced today that they had arrested 21 men for alleged terrorist activities, and that the men were members of a Southeast Asian organization, Jemaah Islamiyah, that is based in Indonesia and has ties to Al Qaeda.
The Singaporean government, which thwarted a plot to bomb the United States Embassy last December, provided scant details today, beyond saying that some of the men had trained at camps in Afghanistan, and that they had "conducted reconnaissance and surveys of selected targets on the instruction of the JI leadership."
The arrests came as American investigators gather evidence that Jemaah Islamiyah, which is headed by the radical Indonesian cleric Abu Bakar Bashir, is better organized and able to carry out acts of terrorism than they had realized, and that Mr. Bashir has been directly involved in terrorist activities.
In Indonesia, group members have carried out surveillance of the American Embassy, the American ambassador's residence and other American facilities in recent weeks, Western officials here said.
"Before we always regarded the terrorist threat here as a question mark," said an intelligence analyst in Indonesia.
"Now we know that the threat is high and the network has a capability to deliver."
If the United States attacks Iraq, he said, Jemaah Islamiyah cells would probably carry out terrorist acts not only against official American targets, such as the embassy and American Navy ships calling at ports here, but on American businesses and individual Americans, which they have not done in the past.
Much of the new evidence about Mr. Bashir and Jemaah Islamiyah and their connections to Al Qaeda has come from the interrogation of Omar al-Faruq. He was picked up here in June and turned over to the Americans, who spirited him away to the American airbase in Bagram, north of Kabul, the Afghanistan capital.
At that time he was described as a mid-level Qaeda operative who had primarily raised money. It now turns out that he was a key player, and that his arrest and interrogation is helping the United States penetrate and unravel Qaeda's operations.
The United States and Singapore have urged the Indonesian government to arrest Mr. Bashir, and many officials in the Bush administration have sought to put Jemaah Islamiyah on the terrorist list.
The Indonesian government has resisted, fearing a backlash among some of the country's Muslims, who see Mr. Bashir as a legitimate Indonesian preacher, albeit with militant views, and America's war on terrorism as a war on Islam.
Those pressures will certainly be renewed in light of the recent evidence, including plots to assassinate President Megawati Sukarnoputri, officials said today.
Mr. Bashir is an unapologetic admirer of Osama bin Laden, and openly expresses a loathing of American leaders and Jews. But he has steadfastly denied that he is involved in any terrorist activities.
American officials say the evidence is otherwise, that while he has his own regional agenda, of an Islamic state across an arc of Southeast Asia, he has made his organization available to Al Qaeda for its anti-American activities.
"He's not just a rabble rouser and trouble maker, but has been directly involved in terrorist activities," a senior American official in the region said.
Mr. Faruq said Mr. Bashir had provided resources and logistical support for the planned attack on the American Embassy.
A detailed account of what Mr. Faruq told his interrogators was published this week in Time magazine, which obtained a copy of the Central Intelligence Agency summary of the interrogation. A senior American official in Southeast Asia said of the Time report, "It's all true." At least he said, this is what Mr. Faruq told the C.I.A., although some of his statements are still being checked.
For three months of interrogation, Mr. Faruq held out, providing investigators with only scraps of information. "He was a hostile interrogation," said a Western intelligence specialist. Then, two weeks ago, the interrogators "broke him," he said, declining to provide any details of what techniques had been employed.
Mr. Faruq told his interrogators of preparations to attack American embassies throughout Southeast Asia, including Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Cambodia, officials said.
The plan called for trucks loaded with explosives to be driven onto the embassy grounds, or close enough to cause serious death and destruction, similar to the attacks in August 1998 on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, an American official said. There were also plots to attack American ships calling at Indonesia ports, like the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen in October 2000.
It was largely based on what was learned from Mr. Faruq that the American embassies here and throughout the region were closed last week, and the Bush administration put the country on orange alert.
Mr. Faruq said he was Al Qaeda's senior representative in Southeast Asia and reported to Abu Zubaydah, the chief of operations for Mr. bin Laden. Mr. Abu Zubaydah was seized in Pakistan last March.
Mr. Faruq's life as a Qaeda operative reveals the stretch of the terrorist network across Southeast Asia.
In the mid-1990's he went to the Philippines on a false passport, and attended a training camp in Mindanao run by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, which is fighting for an Islamic state. Two of the men arrested in Singapore attended that camp, Singaporean officials said today.
Mr. Faruq then moved on to Indonesia, married an Indonesian woman and sought to blend into the community.
At the time, Mr. Bashir was in exile in Malaysia, having fled the repression in Indonesia of the Suharto government. In Malaysia, the authorities there said, he continued developing his network. Western and Asian intelligence officials have said that another Indonesian cleric in exile, Riduan Isamuddin, known as Hambali, was the operational head of the network. Mr. Hambali's whereabouts are unknown.
Mr. Faruq told his interrogators that Mr. Bashir was intimately involved in the terrorist operations, helping to procure weapons and explosives, Time magazine reported.
Mr. Faruq's terrorist plots were not only aimed at the United States. He told the interrogators, according to the Time report, that he was behind a wave of bombings of Christian churches here in December 2000 that killed and injured more than a hundred people.
Mr. Bashir was also behind a bombing of a mosque in Jakarta in 1999, which was blamed on Christians, Mr. Faruq said.
The group also made two attempts to assassinate President Megawati, once during the election campaign in 1999, when weapons were bought in Malaysia and the Philippines. That attempt failed because the plotters could not get the weapons into the country. Last year the plan called for a bomb to be planted at a rally, but the bomb detonated prematurely at a mall.
The Indonesian government has argued that there is no evidence that Mr. Bashir had engaged in any illegal activity in Indonesia.
"They say he is not wrecking the bed where he lives, so there is nothing they can do," an Asian diplomat said today about the Indonesian response.
It will be much harder for the Indonesians to make that argument now, said an American official, who added that the Indonesian government received the results of Mr. Faruq's interrogation last week.
Indonesian officials declined tonight to comment on the Time magazine article.
Another American official said that the Singapore arrests today had not been based on what Mr. Faruq had revealed. It was the result of their own investigation, he said.
-------- business
When it's over, who gets the oil?
Dan Morgan and David B. Ottaway
The International Herald Tribune / Washington Post,
Monday, September 16, 2002
http://www.iht.com/articles/70789.htm
WASHINGTON A U.S.-led ouster of President Saddam Hussein could open a bonanza for American oil companies long banished from Iraq, scuttling oil deals between Baghdad and Russia, France and other countries and reshuffling world petroleum markets, according to industry officials and Iraqi opposition leaders.
Although senior Bush administration officials say they have not begun to focus on the issues involving oil and Iraq, American and foreign oil companies have already begun maneuvering for a stake in the country's huge proven reserves of 112 billion barrels of crude oil, the largest in the world outside Saudi Arabia.
The importance of Iraq's oil has made it potentially one of the administration's biggest bargaining chips in negotiations to win backing from the UN Security Council and Western allies for President George W. Bush's call for tough international action against Saddam. All five permanent members of the Security Council - the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China - have international oil companies with major stakes in a change of leadership in Baghdad.
"It's pretty straightforward," said James Woolsey, a former CIA director who has been one of the leading advocates of forcing Saddam from power. "France and Russia have oil companies and interests in Iraq. They should be told that if they are of assistance in moving Iraq toward decent government, we'll do the best we can to ensure that the new government and American companies work closely with them."
But he added: "If they throw in their lot with Saddam, it will be difficult to the point of impossible to persuade the new Iraqi government to work with them."
Indeed, the mere prospect of a new Iraqi government has fanned concerns by non-American oil companies that they will be excluded by the United States, which almost certainly would be the dominant foreign power in Iraq in the aftermath of Saddam's fall. Representatives of many foreign oil concerns have been meeting with leaders of the Iraqi opposition to make their case for a future stake and to sound them out about their intentions.
Since the Gulf War in 1991, companies from more than a dozen countries, including France, Russia, China, India, Italy, Vietnam and Algeria, have either reached or sought to reach agreements in principle to develop Iraqi oil fields, refurbish facilities or explore undeveloped tracts. Most of the deals are on hold until the lifting of UN sanctions.
But Iraqi opposition officials made clear in interviews last week that they would not be bound by any of the deals.
"We will review all these agreements, definitely," said Faisal Qaragholi, a petroleum engineer who directs the London office of the Iraqi National Congress, an umbrella organization of opposition groups that is backed by the United States. "Our oil policies should be decided by a government in Iraq elected by the people."
Ahmed Chalabi, the congress's leader, went even further, saying he favored the creation of a U.S.-led consortium to develop Iraq's oil fields, which have deteriorated under more than a decade of sanctions. "American companies will have a big shot at Iraqi oil," Chalabi said.
The Iraqi National Congress, however, said it had not taken a formal position on the structure of the Iraqi oil industry in the event of a change of leadership.
While the Bush administration's campaign against Saddam is presenting vast possibilities for multinational oil giants, it poses major risks and uncertainties for the global oil market, according to industry analysts.
Access to Iraqi oil and profits will depend on the nature and intentions of a new government. Whether Iraq remains a member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, for example, or seeks an independent role, free of the OPEC cartel's quotas, will have an impact on oil prices and the flow of investments to competitors such as Russia, Venezuela and Angola.
While Russian oil companies such as Lukoil have a major financial interest in developing Iraqi fields, the low prices that could result from a flood of Iraqi oil into world markets could set back Russian government efforts to attract foreign investment in its untapped domestic fields. That is because low world oil prices could make costly ventures to unlock Siberian oil far less appealing.
Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have worked in the oil business and have long-standing ties to the industry. But despite the buzz about the future of Iraqi oil in the industry, the administration, preoccupied with military planning and making the case about Saddam's potential threat, has not taken up the issue in a substantive way, U.S. officials say.
The Future of Iraq Group, a task force set up at the State Department, does not have oil on its list of issues, a department spokesman said last week. An official with the National Security Council declined to say whether oil had been discussed during consultations on Iraq that Bush has had over the past several weeks with President Vladimir Putin of Russia and Western leaders.
On Friday, a State Department delegation concluded a three-day visit to Moscow in connection with Iraq. In early October, U.S. and Russian officials are to hold an energy summit in Houston at which more than 100 Russian and American energy companies are expected.
-------- colombia
Cocaine Trade Causes Rifts in Colombian War
Paramilitary Discord Imperils Anti-Drug Plan, Peace Efforts
By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, September 16, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22043-2002Sep15.html
IN THE ABIBE MOUNTAINS, Colombia -- Drug trafficking has fractured Colombia's paramilitary army into a collection of potent regional factions that disagree over whether the financial benefit of protecting the country's vast cocaine trade outweighs the political costs and internal corruption it has brought the group.
The split within the 15,000-member private army -- a leading player in Colombia's brutal civil war that derives a large portion of its financing from this country's drug trade -- significantly complicates President Alvaro Uribe's search for peace by adding at least one other armed group to a conflict that already features three irregular forces. It could also spell trouble for the U.S. anti-drug strategy here, particularly the aerial herbicide-spraying program that tacitly relies on paramilitary support in key coca-producing regions.
The group's fracturing appears similar to what occurred here in the early 1990s when U.S. and Colombian authorities dismantled the country's two large cocaine cartels. Hundreds of smaller drug-smuggling operations that were more difficult to identify instantly emerged in their place, sending cocaine production soaring and giving the guerrilla and paramilitary forces a wider role in the trade. Now the paramilitary group, better armed than those cartels and with deep ties to the state itself, appears to be splintering in the same way.
In an extraordinary meeting Sept. 5 in this mountain range in northern Colombia, top commanders of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC as the paramilitary umbrella organization is known, gathered to close gaps that have emerged recently in their ranks over kidnapping and drug trafficking by their members. But they were only partially successful, and the once-solid federation of regional paramilitary armies remains under intense strain.
The group's most charismatic and powerful leader, Carlos Castaño, withdrew his own regional forces from the national organization two months ago after he discovered that a drug-and-kidnapping ring run by ex-police officials within the AUC had been responsible for the July 2000 kidnapping of a prominent Venezuelan businessman. A second major faction, the Central Bolivar Bloc, had also split from the group after ignoring Castaño's orders to abandon drug ties.
Colombia's drug trade supplies 90 percent of the cocaine that reaches the United States, and much of the financial fuel for a civil conflict that began decades ago as a political struggle and last year claimed 3,500 lives.
The war pits the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the smaller National Liberation Army (ELN) -- two 38-year-old guerrilla movements fighting to replace the government with a Marxist state -- against the AUC, which regards itself as an ally of the Colombian government and its U.S. patrons. The AUC provides well-equipped combat troops in areas where the thinly stretched Colombian army cannot maintain a presence.
Castaño, who has endorsed the U.S. anti-drug strategy here even though his group profits from the trade, said in an interview that reunifying the AUC is imperative to ensure that internal differences do not provide a military opening for the FARC. But while the summit managed to rejoin several of the group's military elements, it also formalized a split within the organization that will leave Colombia's two largest coca-producing regions in the hands of paramilitary commanders whose commitment to the Uribe government and U.S. anti-drug policy is unclear.
"The internal divisions are not a matter of our fast growth, but of the penetration of narco-trafficking that managed to corrupt and buy some of our regional commanders," Castaño said between meetings with AUC leaders under a thatched pavilion here 300 miles north of the capital, Bogota. "We are reforming and restructuring the organization. Of course, this leads to crisis. But we are coping very well with it, and instead of growing in number, we are waiting until we have a way of maintaining our people with resources that do not come from narco-trafficking."
The meeting, held over five days in this lush mountain range amid rings of paramilitary security forces, came as the Justice Department considers whether to indict Castaño on drug-trafficking charges and seek his extradition to the United States for trial. Castaño offered to turn himself over to U.S. officials earlier this year along with 15 of the country's largest drug traffickers. But the offer attracted little interest from the United States, mostly because the AUC is classified as a foreign terrorist organization, making such contacts politically unfeasible.
The Justice Department has already obtained indictments against several FARC leaders on drug-trafficking charges, although none is a member of its ruling directorate. The indictments and extradition requests are largely symbolic, because none of the guerrilla or paramilitary leaders is under arrest or is likely to be captured anytime soon in a loosely governed country twice the size of France. FARC and AUC leaders have acknowledged collecting taxes from coca growers, but have denied facilitating the export of cocaine from Colombia.
In the interview, Castaño reiterated his willingness to turn himself over to U.S. officials if indicted, saying that although it would be "unfair," he would "go and face the U.S. justice system with only one condition: that they allow my family to live there, because if I leave them here they will be killed." Later in the interview, however, he suggested that he would not leave Colombia until the war was over.
The paramilitary split has significant implications for the two-year-old U.S. anti-drug strategy known as Plan Colombia, given how the policy has unfolded so far. The $1.3 billion mostly military aid package was designed to target the drug trade as a way of depriving the armed groups of their chief funding source. A rule change approved recently by Congress allows the anti-drug aid to be used directly against the guerrillas and paramilitary forces, not just the drug crops and labs they protect.
The U.S. strategy seeks to discourage small farmers from producing coca by paying them to grow legal crops, while spraying herbicide on the land of those who refuse to do so. The "alternative development" portion of the program has proved ineffective in the security vacuum existing in much of the country, so the controversial herbicide spraying has become even more important. U.S. plans call for 300,000 acres of drug crops to be sprayed this year, up 30 percent from last year.
As a rule, the FARC has fired on the herbicide-spraying planes in areas it controls. But paramilitary forces, which in the past year have driven the FARC from many of the southern coca fields where Plan Colombia has been most intensive, have allowed the spraying as part of Castaño's effort to ally himself with U.S. interests.
Now, though, the Central Bolivar Bloc, the paramilitary force that has split from the AUC, controls the coca fields in the southern Bolivar province and in Putumayo province, where the U.S. anti-drug strategy has been concentrated. Those two regions -- the top coca-producing areas in the country -- generate millions of dollars a month for the group. An adviser to Castaño described some of the breakaway group's middle management as "very narco," suggesting that they may no longer allow planes to spray their crops.
"We've seen what, from the outside, looks like the political disintegration of the AUC over its drug-producing and other activities carried out by its constituent groups," said a Bush administration official. "It's still a foreign terrorist organization, a drug-producing organization, and whether it does a little or a lot, it's not going to change our view."
The summit offered a rare look at how the group is struggling to forge a political identity in order to begin peace talks with the new Uribe administration -- and, perhaps, give Castaño and his fellow AUC leaders a chance at amnesty. In doing so, Castaño has jettisoned a large part of the organization, reducing his own forces from 15,000 to 10,500 armed members and setting a course for much slower growth.
Much of the AUC's current troubles can be explained by the importance it has placed on drug trafficking to finance what has been its rapid expansion of recent years. Fed by increasing middle- and upper-class anxiety over the course of the war, the AUC's tripling in size over the past three years has weakened Castaño's hold over the group, spurred human rights abuses and likely made his past pledge to disarm members once peace is achieved an unrealistic one.
Those troubles were on display at the summit. Although 15 regional commanders and the group's three national leaders signed an accord reunifying the group, the 2,500-member Central Bolivar Bloc refused to do so. Salvatore Mancuso, the AUC's top military commander, labeled bloc members "dissidents" during an interview and said they "must stop using the name if they continue with narco-trafficking activity."
But the agreement does not commit what remains of the AUC to ending its drug ties. It limits the group to "collecting a tax on coca producers in zones where it is the predominant economy," a caveat criticized by a representative of the Catholic Church who attended the summit to begin what Castaño hopes will become a formal peace process with the government. Castaño said severing all drug ties would put the group at a severe disadvantage with the FARC, which imposes taxes on areas it controls.
The AUC will continue levying taxes in rich coca-producing areas in Meta and Norte de Santander provinces, as well as Arauca province, along the eastern border with Venezuela, which has emerged as a new center of the drug trade. But Mancuso said the AUC will no longer allow drug traffickers to use the paramilitary group as protection for its cocaine shipments, a trend that he said had put big money into the hands of regional commanders and helped fracture the group.
In addition to losing 2,500 troops to the breakaway Central Bolivar Bloc, the remaining AUC will demobilize 2,000 of its members as part of a cost-cutting plan that includes teaching troops to be thriftier with ammunition, reducing monthly salaries and recruiting fewer new members.
Mancuso, a former cattle rancher from the northern province of Cordoba, said the AUC costs $4.5 million a month to run. But he said he does not plan to raise the monthly fees that ranchers and other business interests pay the AUC for protection.
"We are going to have to maintain the number of members we have at the moment, growing really slowly and only in the regions where it is necessary," he said.
-------- iran
'War on terror' moves toward Iran
Iran bristles at the arrival of three dozen Green Berets hunting Al Qaeda on its border.
By Philip Smucker
Special to The Christian Science Monitor,
September 16, 2002
http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0916/p01s03-wome.html
Map: http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0916/csmimg/0916p10a.jpg
ZARANJ, AFGHANISTAN - A secret new US Special Forces mission to hunt down Al Qaeda along Afghanistan's border with Iran is triggering cross-border accusations of espionage, amid persistent suspicions that Iran is harboring terrorists.
The Green Berets have based themselves in a desert compound three miles from the Iranian frontier.
Surrounded by a maze of barricades to thwart suicide bombing attacks, the new base is being seen as an affront by Iranian religious hard-liners, who oppose the US-led "war on terror."
Interviews in Zaranj with Afghans expelled - and sometimes beaten - by Iranian authorities suggest that Tehran is treating the new US presence as a threat to its national integrity. The Iranian military is blaming the threat on local Afghans, whom they accuse of spying for the Americans.
While the US soldiers have been probing border areas where Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan meet, it is unclear if the teams will cross over into Iran, Western military analysts say. They add that US special operations commanders in their home bases are still formulating rules and guidelines for new "snatch squads" to nab Al Qaeda suspects at large across the globe.
Meanwhile, Iranian border troops, their ranks bolstered since the arrival of the three dozen American soldiers, have been digging fresh trenches in the sands here and setting up new gun positions.
The tensions at the border form the latest chapter in two decades of bad relations between the US and Iran. Western analysts in Iran warn that Bush's categorization of Iraq as part of an "axis of evil" has strengthened the hand of hard-line Islamic forces which have supported terror in the past.
Over the past year, senior US officials, led by Secretary. of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, have repeatedly cast suspicion on Iran as harboring fugitive Al Qaeda members, but have given few details of the basis for their suspicions.
But top Afghan officials in Nimruz and Kabul say they have mounting evidence that elements in Iran's armed forces, as well as the religious police, loyal to the country's conservative clerics, are actively assisting Al Qaeda, including Osama bin Laden's second-in-command, the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri. The Afghan officials, and Western diplomats in Kabul, contend that this collaboration is the real reason for the new US military base.
"This is an area where Al Qaeda has managed to maintain a foothold under the cover of smugglers," says Aman Khan, Afghanistan's acting military intelligence chief in Kabul. The new focus in the US war on terror "appears to be the west, rather than the east and Pakistan, where it has been going on now for most of a year," he says.
The remote Nimruz province of Afghanistan has long been the redoubt of well-armed heroin smugglers, who race through the parched flatlands in convoys of jacked-up jeeps, past camel carcasses and ancient adobe ruins, on the way to Iran, where they hand over the drugs to Iranian smugglers bound for Turkey. But the American soldiers here, straddling the beds of their pickups in civilian clothes and holding heavy machine guns, are not after the smugglers, who worked with the Taliban until last year and now patronize the new regime. Their prey are the terrorists reportedly plotting nearby.
Nimruz security chief Mohammed Naim Khan says he has passed along intelligence to the US forces that several key Al Qaeda figures, including Dr. Zawahiri, are attempting to buy new arms from local dealers, in addition to planning unspecified terrorist operations from just inside Iran.
But an Iranian diplomat in Kabul rejects the suspicions against his country: "Iran has never had any relations with Al Qaeda or the Taliban. Indeed, we were the ones to inform the international community about the danger of these men several years ago, but no one listened to us at the time." Iranian authorities have detained some Al Qaeda members and sent them back to their homes in the Middle East, in particular, to Saudi Arabia.
But Iran has voiced concern that the "war on terror" could unjustly end up at its doorstep. On Saturday, Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in a written message to an Iranian students' forum in London, said a US attack on Iraq would be only the first step in a plan to bring the entire Middle East under US control.
Afghan officials in Zaranj, who have welcomed the new US forces, say they arrest and expel one or two Iranian spies a day. Meanwhile, Afghan men recently thrown out of Iran - some of them with a job and family left behind - say Iranian troops have systematically rounded up Afghans, and accused them of spying for the US. "The Iranian soldiers beat us one by one," says Lawang, who was forced out of Iran three days ago. "They scoffed at me and said I should go back to my own country and meet my new boss, the Americans," he says.
Officials in Zaranj say that the Special Operations soldiers held an initial meeting with local Baluchi and Pashtun tribal officials and military commanders three weeks ago and that the commander of the unit, who gave his name only as "Commander Tony," told the Afghans, "We are here to fight and hunt the enemies of the world and Afghanistan."
The US soldiers here are not permitted to speak with journalists. US Central Command in Tampa, Fla., declined to confirm the nature of the special forces mission in Nimruz.
Nimruz security chief Khan says a key Al Qaeda military and religious figure named Abu Hafs, known as "the Mauritanian," is working in Iran alongside Zawahiri. Mr. Khan says he bases his conclusions on reports from the Afghans expelled from the nearby Iranian cities of Zahedan and by Iran's 110th Brigade, a force loyal to the country's highly conservative religious clergy. The security chief says, however, that Hafs and Zawahiri have few armed men they can call their own and even fewer sympathizers in Zaranj.
"The Mauritanian" was first reported to be in Iran by the Washington Post on Aug. 28. The story cited unnamed Arab intelligence sources. Previously, US Central Command had alleged that he had been killed in Afghanistan last January. The Arab sources told the Post that they believed Hafs was living in a guesthouse in Zabol or in Mashhad, further to the north.
Zawahiri has previously been reported as being in Pakistan, on the basis of alleged eyewitness sightings by Pakistani and Afghan locals late last year and early this year. His actual whereabouts, however, have remained as much of a mystery as bin Laden's.
One of the recently expelled Afghans told the Monitor that the former Taliban governor of Nimruz, Mullah Rasool, has been constantly accompanied by a group of Arabs in and around the Iranian city of Zahedan, less than 100 miles from the Afghan border. "We are not so sure about their activities, but they are under tight Iranian government control," he says as he sits against the cracked wall of a boarding house in Zaranj.
One official in Zaranj described a US military operation in which some 10 US soldiers were accompanied by 40 Afghans in a raid on the border town of Rebate Jali, which is about 120 miles south and which straddles Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.
"Along with the governor, we took the US commanders there because we had reports of the Taliban and Al Qaeda regrouping, but when we arrived they had already fled," the official says, describing a sequence familiar across much of Afghanistan in the past year.
In Kabul, senior Afghan security officials say that new raids by US forces on smuggling dens and remote villages around Nimruz are based on both US and Afghan intelligence reports that have placed senior Al Qaeda operatives along Afghanistan's western border.
Western diplomats in Kabul told the Monitor that the atmosphere of "intrigue and subterfuge" along Afghanistan's western border is conducive to the terrorists' planning and movement. "We have believed that Al Qaeda was basing out of Iran for some time, and these new US military operations are aimed at cutting off their movements," says one Western diplomat.
--------
Iran's Rafsanjani Says U.S. After Iraqi Oil
September 16, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iran-usa-iraq.html
TEHRAN, Iran (Reuters) - Iran's influential former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani accused the United States Monday of expansionism and trying to capture vital energy resources in Iraq.
Iran is extremely wary of a U.S. attack on Baghdad, fearing instability in the region, a flood of refugees and becoming the next target of Washington's ``war on terror.'' President Bush has branded Iran part of an ``axis of evil'' alongside Iraq and North Korea.
``The United States' aim of attacking Iraq is not to rescue people, but is to have access to its resources, especially energy,'' state television quoted Rafsanjani as saying.
Rafsanjani heads the powerful arbitration body, the Expediency Council, and is a top adviser to Iran's most powerful figure, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He called on the armed forces to be prepared to meet a U.S. attack on Iran.
``At the present sensitive time, the armed forces should be ready to repel any possible threats and perform their deterrent role,'' he told senior defense ministry officials.
Tehran has called on its former foe Iraq to admit weapons inspectors and comply with United Nations resolutions, but is staunchly opposed to any unilateral U.S. attack to topple Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
Bush, speaking from the presidential retreat in Camp David, Maryland, Saturday urged the United Nations ``to show some backbone'' on Iraq, and made clear he was prepared to confront Saddam with or without world support.
U.N. CREDIBILITY
``America is clearly warning the U.N. that if it fails to solve the problem in due course, it would solve the problem in Iraq itself,'' said Rafsanjani. ``In fact, America considers the credibility of the U.N. to be tied to an action against Iraq.''
Iran and Iraq fought each other to a standstill in a 1980-88 war, in which around one million people were killed. But despite their hatred of Saddam, Iranian leaders are loathe to see a U.S.-backed government take his place.
That is especially true now that a pro-Western administration has emerged in Afghanistan, to the east. For Iran, a possible conflict in Iraq could mirror that in Afghanistan last year.
There Tehran found itself reluctantly on the same side as Washington. Officially Shi'ite, Iran backed forces fighting the strictly Sunni Taliban for years, but lost influence once U.S. troops became involved in the conflict.
``The fact that the United States comes from overseas and captures Afghanistan and puts its troops there and then immediately says it should topple the Iraqi government all shows its expansionist policy,'' Rafsanjani said.
Iranian moderates grouped around President Mohammad Khatami were angered that the only U.S. response they received for condemning the September 11 attacks and remaining neutral in the Afghan conflict was to be labeled part of an ``axis of evil.''
Washington broke ties with Tehran after radical Iranian students seized dozens of U.S. diplomats during the 1979 Islamic revolution, which overthrew the U.S.-backed Shah of Iran, and held them hostage for 444 days.
-------- iraq
Iraq Agrees to Readmit Inspectors, U.N. Says
New York Times
September 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/16/international/16WIRE-NATI.html
UNITED NATIONS -- Iraq unconditionally accepted the return of U.N. weapons inspectors late Monday, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said.
"I can confirm to you that I have received a letter from the Iraqi authorities conveying its decision to allow the return of inspectors without conditions to continue their work."
"There is good news," Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri said moments earlier.
Sabri and Arab League chief Amr Moussa met late with Annan and transmitted a letter from the Iraqi government on the inspectors' return.
Under Security Council resolutions, sanctions imposed on Iraq after its 1990 invasion of Kuwait cannot be lifted until U.N. inspectors certify that its weapons of mass destruction have been destroyed. Inspectors left the country four years ago ahead of U.S. and British airstrikes to punish Iraq for not cooperating with inspections.
Since then, Iraq has refused to allow inspectors to return, and the stalemate had split the United States, Britain, Russian, France and China -- the five powerful members of the U.N. Security Council,
The turnabout in Iraq, after four years of stalemate, came days after President Bush addressed the U.N. General Assembly debate and said that Iraq must comply with Security Council resolutions or face the consequences.
Annan credited Bush late Monday.
"I believe the president's speech galvanized the international community," Annan said.
There was no immediate response from the White House. Top Bush aides huddled after Annan's announcement, preparing a response.
Annan said the Arab league had played a key role in bringing about the Iraqi response.
Annan thanked the league's chief, Amr Moussa of Egypt, "for his strenouous efforts in helping to convince Iraq to allow the return of the inspectors."
--------
Warplanes Striking to Degrade Iraqi Defenses
September 16, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-iraq-usa-tactics.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. warplanes have changed tactics in response to Iraqi attacks on their patrols and are now striking methodically to damage Iraq's air defenses in ``no-fly'' zones in the north and south of the country, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Monday.
In another sign of heightened tension, a U.S. official said Iraq had moved missiles and other military equipment close to civilian sites in recent days, mirroring similar movements in the past that signaled Baghdad was feeling under threat.
The military stirrings coincided with the bellicose tone from President Bush against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, threatening unspecified action if he fails to respond to pressure through the United Nations to end programs to make weapons of mass destruction.
Attacks by U.S. and British planes in the ``no-fly'' zones were now directed at fixed targets like key command-and-control buildings and military airfields instead of difficult targets such as small, mobile radars, U.S. military officials said.
``The recent strikes have degraded the air defense capabilities'' of Iraq, Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Pentagon briefing.
Rumsfeld said at the briefing he had ordered the change, which affected planes patrolling the zones in the north and south where Iraq's aircraft are banned from flying.
PLANES BEING SHOT AT
``I directed it,'' Rumsfeld told reporters. ``I don't like the idea of our planes being shot at ... the idea that our planes go out and get shot at with impunity bothers me.''
The report that Saddam was moving his missiles close to civilian areas could not be independently confirmed.
Any risk of high civilian casualties would make it harder for Bush to argue for an attack against Saddam. But stating that Iraq had moved military targets closer to civilians could also give the United States an explanation in advance for such casualties in any attack, analysts said.
``We are seeing some evidence that the Iraqis are moving some military assets to positions that are near civilian facilities, things like surface-to-air missiles, obviously making it harder to hit them in the event of an assault or increasing the likelihood that there will be civilian casualties should we go after them,'' the U.S. official said.
The official said he had seen no evidence of a mass movement of Iraqi military to positions around Baghdad reported separately by the Iraqi National Congress opposition group, which said the movement had begun on Sunday.
The London-based INC also said in a statement released by its Washington office that offices of security services and government agencies in central Baghdad had been evacuated and employees moved into schools and residential areas.
``NO-FLY'' ZONES
The U.S. official cast doubt on the INC version, saying he had not seen reports of such a large-scale movement. ``Frankly, I think they're overstating it a little bit,'' he said.
Rumsfeld said he did not know how quickly Baghdad could repair command buildings and military airfields now being hit in the ``no-fly'' zones if Bush ordered an invasion.
U.S. planes have been patrolling the ``no-fly'' zones since they were set up shortly after the 1991 Gulf War to protect the Kurdish minority in the north and Shiite Muslims in the south from Saddam's military, and they have responded to ground fire.
They have launched 38 strikes so far this year and the pace has increased sharply in the past two months.
Iraq does not recognize the no-fly zones. Rumsfeld declined to be specific when he had ordered the change in targets. It was ``less than six months and more than a month (ago),'' he said.
Rumsfeld said last year that Chinese experts were helping Iraq upgrade its air defenses with fiber optic cables, but said on Monday he did not know if such was aid was still be given.
-------- israel
Security forces brace for U.S. assault on Iraq
By Abraham Rabinovich
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
September 16, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020916-17064119.htm
JERUSALEM - Israeli security officials are stepping up their preparations for any retaliatory attack by Saddam Hussein in the belief that the United States has accelerated its planning for a military assault on Iraq.
Plans are being drawn to set up municipal "war rooms," with army representatives present, to coordinate aid to civilians after an attack. Measures could include evacuations, the distribution of medicines, oversight of water and electricity supplies, and the provision of emergency communications systems.
A senior official of the army's Home Front Command said yesterday that preparations were proceeding well, although not all the war rooms were safeguarded against nonconventional attacks.
"I would be happy if they would all have protected war rooms," he said, "but people can still function with a gas mask on."
Until recently, planning had been based on the assumption that the United States would not attack Iraq before mid-November, and most likely sometime next year.
However, news reports say planners have stepped up their work in response to public statements by U.S. officials, including President Bush's speech last week to the United Nations, and reports of the movements of U.S. troops and equipment to the Persian Gulf.
Senior defense officials have been supportive of a proposal by the mayor of Ramat Gan that residents of his Tel Aviv suburb be evacuated to the south if an Iraqi missile threat becomes imminent.
"People do what has to be done, and they know that staying in a place that is under attack is not a good thing," said a senior official of the Home Front Command.
The director-general of the Defense Ministry, Amos Yaron, said the proposal by Mayor Zvi Bar had "many advantages."
In the 1991 Gulf war, Tel Aviv Mayor Shlomo Lahat criticized residents who left the city as "deserters."
Many fled to the resort city of Eilat in the far south, out of range of Iraqi missiles, and to Jerusalem, which was believed to be exempt from Iraqi attack because of the risk of hitting Muslim holy places.
Mr. Yaron said he was not recommending evacuation but that it was a natural phenomenon in the circumstances and was not to be criticized.
Haifa Mayor Amram Mitzna had warned last week that any evacuation attempt could lead to panic.
"You cannot just evacuate 2 million people, and you must not," he said. "The Iraqi threat has to be dealt with by using deterrence and other means to protect civilians."
Col. Gil Shenhar, head of planning for the Home Front Command, said Israel was ready for an attack but that about 600,000 gas masks might have to be imported to make up for the gap created since 1991 by a growing population and the presence of foreign workers.
The gas masks are distributed free to all residents.
Israel has deployed U.S.-made Patriot and Israeli-made Arrow missile defense systems in anticipation of an Iraqi Scud attack once the United States attacks Iraq.
Debate continues about the effectiveness of Patriots used during the Gulf war, in which 39 conventionally armed Scuds struck Israel, but the defensive devices have been upgraded since then. The Arrow has never been fired in a war situation.
Most of those Iraqi missiles in 1991 were aimed at Tel Aviv, with others fired at Haifa and at the Dimona nuclear reactor in the south.
----
Israel Prepares for Attack and Discusses a Response
New York Times
September 16, 2002
By SERGE SCHMEMANN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/16/international/middleeast/16ISRA.html
JERUSALEM, Sept. 15 - For Israel, which was struck by 39 Iraqi Scud missiles during the Persian Gulf war, the countdown to a possible new one poses two fundamental challenges - to prepare for a new Iraqi attack, and to decide whether to retaliate.
The possibility that Saddam Hussein will lash out at Israel with biological, chemical or radiological weapons has led to intensive preparations, under way for some time now, accompanied by daily reassurances from the government that the country is ready.
"We are prepared so that nothing will reach the area at all," the army chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, said on Army Radio today as the country settled down for the holiest Jewish day, Yom Kippur, starting tonight. "We are well prepared both in terms of defense and also in terms of an offensive response if there will be a need."
Among other things, Israel has become the first country to start vaccinating emergency workers against smallpox. Gas mask kits are being distributed nationwide, and several Arrow antimissile batteries have been moved into place.
The second challenge, the "offensive response," has been discussed as intensely, but largely behind closed doors. It has long been the dominant instinct of this small, geographically vulnerable and oft-attacked country to strike first and strike hard - or at least to let its enemies believe that it is ready to do so. In 1981, Israel mounted a lightning raid to take out an Iraqi nuclear reactor, a strike that drew widespread criticism but set back Iraq's nuclear program.
During the gulf war, in 1991, Israel, then under Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, acceded to American pressures and did not retaliate. Then, however, the main American argument was that Israel's entry would threaten the international coalition against Iraq, which included several Arab states - notably Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Syria.
Israel again went on alert in 1998, when Mr. Hussein ordered United Nations inspectors out of Iraq. The newspaper Maariv reported today that the prime minister at the time, Benjamin Netanyahu, had received a message from Mr. Hussein promising not to attack Israel, to which Mr. Netanyahu replied, "Nobody should have any illusions that we would repeat the restraint of 1991."
So far this time, the United States has little Arab support, and there have been no indications of a message from Mr. Hussein. But the Bush administration is again urging Israel to stay on the sidelines, to prevent any campaign against Mr. Hussein from turning into a regional crisis.
"The Americans don't want to be disturbed by any side winds that Israel might be involved in," General Yaalon said on Wednesday.
But Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer and General Yaalon have all refused to rule out the possibility of a retaliation should Iraq strike.
Whether they are doing so to deter Iraq, or whether they mean it - and, if so, what would it take to provoke Israel into action - are open questions. Mr. Sharon, at least, has demonstrated throughout his military and political career that he prefers to be on the offensive, as when he sent his tanks across the Suez Canal in 1973 or when he invaded Lebanon in 1982.
For now, he has acceded to American requests and has retained a low profile about Iraq, declaring, as he did in a call with the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations on Wednesday, "We will support any measure the United States takes, but we are not involved in the decision making."
At the United Nations, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres also reiterated that Israel would do what was necessary to avoid undermining the American efforts.
The Israelis have also publicly expressed their satisfaction that the United States and Britain, with their control of Iraqi airspace, are more able now to intercept an Iraqi missile attack on Israel than they were in 1991.
But military and intelligence officials have also warned that the attack could come in different forms. One would be a mobilization of militant groups, whether Hezbollah in Lebanon or Palestinian militants in the West Bank, to carry out concerted attacks.
The newspaper Haaretz, citing Western intelligence analysts, reported today that Iraq had prepared a number of longer-range Soviet-made aircraft for one-way, suicide missions to drop "dirty bombs," weapons that scatter radioactive debris.
The Israeli news media have carried almost daily reports on preparations. The health authorities have stockpiled enough smallpox vaccine for the entire country. But a concern has been raised that the country is still short 600,000 gas masks and batteries for them. The shortfall apparently followed a decision to abandon the development of a new mask, which was found to have serious problems.
The Home Front Command also reported that only 1.8 million Israeli homes had a fortified room, as required by law, and that only 2.1 million were in close proximity to common bomb shelters. That left more than 2 million without access to a shelter, with the most serious shortage among non-Jewish citizens, the Arabs and Druse.
Some cities have announced their own preparations. The mayor of Ramat Gan, a city adjacent to Tel Aviv that was struck by many missiles in 1991, announced that he was preparing a zone in a forest in southern Israel for a tent city to which residents could be evacuated. In 1991, many Israelis moved into hotels or with relatives in Jerusalem on the presumption that Iraq would not strike a city holy to Muslims.
Another city near Tel Aviv, Givatayim, announced that it had obtained large filters that could be installed in the municipal water system if it were contaminated.
The government has not encouraged such independent measures, seeking to prevent undue alarm and insisting that everything necessary is being done.
So far, the government has largely succeeded in calming the population. But in advance of Yom Kippur, stores reported a far larger run on bottled water and basic foods than before.
"Bush's speech is actually part of a countdown," wrote Alex Fishman in Yediot Ahronot, referring to President Bush's tough speech at the United Nations on Thursday. "The significance for us: Until the end of this coming November, Israel must be prepared again for the possibility of nonconventional weapons in the Middle East."
-------- landmines
Landmine campaigners criticize India, Pakistan
REUTERS USA:
September 16, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17769/story.htm
NEW YORK - The widespread use of anti-personnel landmines by nations such as India and Pakistan is hampering efforts to eliminate a weapon that kills or maims thousands of people every year, campaigners said last week.
India and Pakistan have laid large numbers of such mines along their common border since coming close to war over Kashmir in December 2001, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines said in a report.
Landmines are also widely used by Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, by Russia in Chechnya, and on a smaller scale in Nepal, Somalia and the former Soviet republic of Georgia, the Landmine Monitor Report 2002 said.
The United Nations estimates that landmines still kill about 10,000 people a year around the world, and activists said the devices injure about another 10,000, often requiring the amputation of limbs.
Up to 40 percent of all mine victims are children under 15, according to the United Nations.
The report was issued before the start of a week of talks in Geneva on Monday to review the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty, which prohibits the use, production, stockpiling and transfer of anti-personnel mines.
Some 125 countries have signed and ratified the treaty, while 18 have signed but not yet ratified it.
But 50 countries, including big powers such as China, Russia and the United States, have rejected the landmark pact, and 14 countries still produce landmines.
"Three-quarters of the countries in the world have renounced the anti-personnel mine, and together they need to bring more pressure on the recalcitrant few," said Stephen Goose of Human Rights Watch, which was a founding member of the campaign.
Jody Williams, an ICBL ambassador who shared the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize with the ICBL, criticized Washington for not signing the treaty, saying the United States was in the company of nations like Iraq, Iran and North Korea, states defined by U.S. President George W. Bush as forming an axis of evil.
But Williams, speaking in Oslo, said Washington had given money for mine clearance and had destroyed three million of its stockpiled mines. The United States has not used mines since the 1991 Gulf War and has not produced any since 1997.
DAILY THREAT
The ICBL, a global network of over 1,200 non-governmental organizations in 60 countries, says the weapons pose a daily threat in Afghanistan, Angola, Bosnia, Cambodia, Chechnya, Croatia, Iraq, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Somalia and many other places.
On the positive side, both government and rebel forces in Angola and Sri Lanka stopped using landmines in 2002, and some 34 million mines have been destroyed since the Ottawa treaty came into force, the report said.
"We would be hard pressed to identify another disarmament or arms control agreement that has accomplished so much so quickly," Kerstin Vignard, of the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR), told a news briefing in Geneva.
The report said some 230 million anti-personnel landmines are still stockpiled by 94 states, including 110 million in China, 60-70 million in Russia and 11 million in the United States.
The number of landmines planted around the world is estimated at 50-60 million and landmines linger for years, but funding for mine clearance has stagnated at about $240 million a year, it said.
The report said groups in at least 14 countries used landmines last year, including both the Northern Alliance and the toppled Taliban movement in Afghanistan.
There was also disturbing evidence that Iran had provided mines to Northern Alliance fighers in Afghanistan and elsewhere, despite declaring an export moratorium in 1997, the ICBL said.
Mary Wareham, ICBL landmine monitor coordinator, told the Geneva briefing the heavy use of mines by India and Pakistan meant that "...we believe more mines went into the ground (globally) than during the previous reporting period."
But overall, "it is abundantly clear that the 1997 mine ban treaty and the ban movement more generally are making tremendous strides in eradicating anti-personnel landmines and in saving lives and limbs in every region of the world," she added.
(With additional reporting by Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva and Alister Doyle in Oslo).
-------- mideast
Syria says Iraq victim of a double standard
By Betsy Pisik
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
September 16, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020916-31498284.htm
NEW YORK - Security Council member Syria, in a speech reflecting the views of many Muslim and anti-Western countries, complained yesterday that Israel had violated more U.N. resolutions than Iraq and yet was not subject to threats of military action.
Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Shara also pointed out that Israel, not Iraq, was occupying foreign lands, ignoring Security Council resolutions and openly producing nuclear weapons.
"In this light, we see no justification for igniting a new war in the Middle East," he said. "We strongly believe that striking Iraq represent the blind bias and the distorted vision of the real situation in the Middle East.
"Why should the world request Iraq to adhere to Security Council resolutions, while Israel is allowed to be above international law?" he asked.
Mr. Shara's address to the annual U.N. general debate comes two days before Washington sits down with members of the Quartet, the primary group of outside negotiators on the Israeli-Palestinian crisis.
On Saturday, Arab foreign ministers and other diplomats at the United Nations called on Iraq to admit U.N. weapons inspectors, but did not support the use of force.
In his address yesterday, Mr. Shara blamed Israel for inciting a series of conflicts in the Middle East.
"Since the end of the Second World War, our region has witnessed a series of wars and destruction which were the result of an Israeli approach based on occupation settlement and the uprooting of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians of their homeland," he said.
"The United Nations has adopted hundreds of resolutions which Israel refused to implement in a stark challenge to the will of the international community."
Many Arab governments have long blamed the United States for sheltering Israel from binding Security Council resolutions. They also note that Israel is using U.S.-made military hardware in its military incursions into the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
"It is, indeed, legitimate to ask the United States to distance itself from Israeli aggressive practices and apply to Israel the American law which prohibits the use of American weapons against a third party," Mr. Shara said.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell will devote most of the day tomorrow to the partly overlapping concerns in the Middle East.
Foreign ministers from the Quartet - the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia - are to meet all day alone and in separate sessions with Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians.
A senior State Department official said last week that Mr. Powell would discuss with diplomats a pending Security Council resolution to force Iraq's compliance with weapons inspectors.
But Israel's own noncompliance has come up regularly in the first four days of the 10-day U.N. debate, although not often as vehemently as in yesterday's Syrian address.
Malaysia, which next year will helm the 131-nation Non-Aligned Movement, warned in its speech Saturday that there will be a backlash against those who support Israel.
"Israel's oppressive policies and practices have made life for the Palestinians unbearable and have engendered only hatred and resentment against the occupying power, illegal settlers and those who are perceived to provide them support," said Deputy Prime Minister Abdullah bin Ahmad Badawi.
Israel claimed land from Jordan, Syria and Egypt during the 1967 Six Day War, which began when it was attacked by its neighbors.
----
QUIETLY, JORDAN BUILDS CASE AGAINST IRAQ
Middle East Newsline,
September 16, 2002
AMMAN [MENL] -- Jordan is quietly but steadily building a case for the toppling of the regime of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
Jordan's state-controlled media have begun publishing stories of Jordanians abused and cheated in Baghdad. The stories tell of Jordanians coming to the Iraqi capital to get rich and ending up bleeding in the streets of Baghdad.
Western diplomatic sources said the publication of stories long known in Amman appear to be part of an effort to reduce support within the kingdom for the Saddam regime. Baghdad is regarded as a key financier of much of Jordan's opposition movement, particularly the powerful unions.
Jordanian newspapers have described how hundreds of Jordanian men were defrauded and sometimes killed in get-rich schemes in Iraq. They quote Jordanian officials as saying that scores of nationals fall victim to these schemes every month.
----
Saudi Arabia backs down over Iraq to offer US use of bases
Fraser Nelson
Westminster Editor
Mon 16 Sep 2002
Scotsman
http://www.news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=1028692002
SAUDI Arabia has dropped its opposition to having its military bases used to attack Iraq - providing the United States with the staging post it needs to depose Saddam Hussein.
Prince Saud al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia's foreign minister, said yesterday his country would comply fully with any military action sanctioned by the United Nations.
His U-turn came amid reports that several Saudi princes have been linked to al-Qaeda and may appear on a new list of suspects believed to have financed Osama bin Laden.
Prince Saud, who only last month ruled out having Saudi Arabia used by US jets, yesterday joined the list of world leaders calling for Saddam to re-admit weapons inspectors.
In an interview with al-Hayat, a London-based newspaper, he warned that Iraq's defiance of the UN had left its "unity, stability and independence" at stake.
"Timing is important, and allowing inspectors back before a Security Council resolution to that effect would be in Iraq's favour," he said. "I am afraid that a refusal would harm the Iraqi people and increase their burden."
When asked later by CNN news whether Saudi bases would be available to the US in an Iraq invasion, he nodded and said: "Everybody is obliged to follow through [the UN's decision]."
Families acting for the victims of the 11 September are expected soon to produce a new list linking senior members of the House of Saud to al-Qaeda.
Prince Sultan bin Abdelaziz, the defence minister, and Turki al-Faisal, the former Saudi intelligence chief, have already been named in a formal lawsuit.
Prince Saud has travelled to London to ask Tony Blair what steps could be taken to dispel the allegations. He is said to have offered evidence leading the trail to Saddam.
It is reported in Al-Mushahid Assiyasi, a London weekly newspaper, that "Prince Saud may have implicated Iraq in an attempt to divert attention from Saudi princes".
Downing Street yesterday played down reports that its forthcoming dossier will soon publish evidence linking Saddam to al-Qaeda.
Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, said yesterday that this will be published on Tuesday next week, in time for MPs to have a special one-day debate starting at 11:30am.
He further hardened his warnings against Iraq, saying the UN should give Saddam the clear choice: deal with the weapons of mass destruction, "or his regime will have to end".
He added that the dictator "hasn't got much time to make up his mind". Italian sources suggested last night that an attack may come in January or February.
Downing Street will seek to manage expectations so the document is not seen as a flop when it is published.
The US has repeatedly linked Saddam with 11 September, and it is expected to provide some circumstantial evidence proving that Saddam may well be harbouring exiled members of al-Qaeda.
The body of evidence has grown since Czech police said that Mohammed Atta, the lead 11 September hijacker, met a member of Iraqi intelligence in Prague.
The main obstacle linking Saddam to al-Qaeda is that he is not religious. His Ba'athist beliefs are more akin to National Socialism adopted in Germany and Italy, and are not compatible with Islamic fundamentalism.
However, since the Gulf War, Saddam has been using Islamic flourishes in his speeches as a tool to boost morale. He is also suspected of putting aside his ideological beliefs to make common cause with al-Qaeda.
The strongest links centre on Ansar al-Islam, or "supporters of Islam", a terrorist group which is active amongst Kurdish rebels in Northern Iraq.
Saddam's exiled opponents say they have evidence showing that he collaborated with al-Qaeda to bankroll Ansar al-Islam.
Saddam and his aides are also alleged to have held a series of meetings with bin Laden, who was said to have been a frequent visitor to the Iraqi embassy in the Sudanese capital Khartoum when al-Qaeda was based in Lebanon.
Iraqi intelligence agents are also suspected of smuggling conventional weapons, and possibly chemical and biological weapons, into Afghanistan.
The United Nations has also said that Saddam allowed non-Iraqi terrorists to be trained at a camp in Salman Pak, where the fuselage of an old Tupolev 154 airliner is said to be used for hijacking training.
There are also reports that, since the collapse of the Taleban, al-Qaeda operatives have fled to Northern Iraq where they are being given sanctuary by Ansar al-Islam.
Downing Street's dossier is expected to have been produced using MI6 intelligence - but it is understood that there is nothing in London or Washington that will provide conclusive proof that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction.
The dossier will focus on weapons factories that are being rebuilt - one on the pretext of producing vaccines for a foot-and-mouth outbreak.
Saudi Arabia is understood to have provided intelligence reports tracking al-Qaeda to Baghdad, but it is expected that this will be deemed too sensitive to make public.
Lawyers acting for the families of the victims have produced their own dossier which, they say, shows that the members of the Saudi royal family are far more deeply implicated with al-Qaeda than Saddam's regime.
The US wants use of the Prince Sultan Air Base south of Riyadh which hosts most of the 5,000 US troops based in Saudi Arabia.
Last week, Ahmed Maher the Foreign Minister of Egypt, among the most influential Arab states, said his government would support a US strike on Iraq if it were under UN auspices.
In New York last weekend, envoys from the Arab League issued a plea during the General Assembly that Iraq should heed international calls to allow inspectors back and avert a confrontation with the United States that could further destabilise the Middle East.
----
Saudis Indicating U.S. Can Use Bases if U.N. Backs War
New York Times
September 16, 2002
By TODD S. PURDUM
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/16/international/middleeast/16IRAQ.html
WASHINGTON, Sept. 15 - The Saudi foreign minister indicated this weekend that his country would let the United States use its military bases in a United Nations-backed attack on Iraq, a sign that Arab nations may be dropping their resistance to an attack on Saddam Hussein.
The Saudi minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, said that if there was a Security Council resolution backing military action, all United Nations members would have to honor it. In a CNN interview from New York, first broadcast late Saturday, the prince was asked if the Saudis would make bases available to the Americans, and answered that if the United Nations warranted action, "everybody is obliged to follow through."
Prince Saud said he remained opposed in principle to the use of military force or a unilateral attack by the United States, but his remarks seemed to indicate an important shift in Saudi Arabia's posture.
Over the weekend, there were several other signs of emerging international consensus that Iraq must take steps to bring itself in line with a decade of United Nations resolutions - on disarmament, an accounting of Persian Gulf war prisoners, protection of its minorities and the like - or face consequences.
The Lebanese foreign minister, Mahmud Hammud, speaking on behalf of Arab foreign ministers who met with the Secretary General Kofi Annan of the United Nations on Saturday, said, "We want Iraq to implement the Security Council resolutions, which will end the current crisis."
President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt also announced plans to tour the Middle East to gather support for persuading Iraq to let weapons inspectors back in.
At the same time, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and other senior American officials kept up their drumbeat on Iraq. He said any Security Council resolution would have to set a deadline for compliance by Mr. Hussein, "and not a long deadline, but a deadline that requires him to say he will act." Speaking today on the CBS News program "Face the Nation," he added, "We're talking a short time, a matter of weeks."
"This is the key part," Secretary Powell said, "that the U.N. will then say, `We're going to take action if he fails to take action.' That's what we're looking for."
For months, Saudi Arabia, a vital ally in the gulf war in 1991, had said it would deny use of its territory for an American campaign against Iraq this time. But in an interview with the London-based Arabic language newspaper Al Hayat, Prince Saud said, "Since Iraq says it does not possess weapons of mass destruction and has no plans to produce any, why doesn't it agree to the return of inspectors to settle the issue which will go to the Security Council?"
Senior Bush administration officials reacted to Prince Saud's comments today with both optimism and some caution.
"We have seen since the president's speech a rallying of support for his approach, and a coalescence around the idea that the U.N. must act, and it must act against more than a decade of Iraq's flouting of the will of the international community," one official said, referring to President Bush's address at the United Nations on Thursday.
But another added: "Frankly, we haven't seen the comments in any detail yet. It's for the Saudis to explain, and we can't go into it too much just yet."
Agreement on a Security Council resolution or resolutions that might allow the use of military force - either jointly or by individual member nations - is far from certain, but that is the Bush administration's clear goal. Since Mr. Bush's speech on Thursday, there has been a noticeable shift in Arab sentiment, with Arab nations edging back toward the American posture of putting the onus on President Hussein.
Elaborating on the kind of possible language the administration is seeking, Secretary Powell suggested that it should be broad enough to encompass military action, citing phrases like "use necessary means," or "member states should feel free." But, he acknowledged, "that will be the difficult element in any such resolution."
Both he and Condoleezza Rice, Mr. Bush's national security adviser, said they were open to several possible approaches, including more than one resolution, and would be resuming detailed discussions with member nations when Secretary Powell returns to New York for more United Nations meetings on Monday, with the hope of beginning drafting by week's end.
France, a permanent member of the Security Council, has floated the idea of a two-step process, with a first resolution finding Iraq in violation of past United Nations demands and requiring compliance, followed by a second on possible military action if Iraq maintains its defiance.
But administration officials have indicated deep wariness of that idea, and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III said in an opinion article published in The Washington Post today, "What is absolutely not acceptable is the idea of two resolutions - one demanding action by Iraq, the second, to come later (maybe), authorizing enforcement."
That, Mr. Baker said, "would give Saddam Hussein two bites at the apple, first by stonewalling on compliance and then by fighting the enforcement resolution." He noted that in 1990, the Soviet Union had sought such a course to respond to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, but that the United States had refused.
Iraq's foreign minister, Naji Sabri al-Hadithi, again insisted that any new inspections be tied to the lifting of decade-old United Nations sanctions. "Iraq's sovereignty must be respected, and the inspections must result in the easing of sanctions against Iraq and the elimination of all weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East, particularly in Israel," he told German television.
But Ms. Rice, speaking on the ABC News program "This Week," insisted: "The Iraqi regime can have no say in what is required of it. We've been down that road before. It's done nothing but weaken the resolutions that the Security Council had passed."
Ms. Rice also insisted that the United States would be capable of pursuing its campaign against terrorism even if it was forced to wage war on Iraq.
"We fully believe that the United States is capable of conducting the war on terrorism and dealing with other threats," she said. "We don't believe there are limits on what we can do in the war on terrorism and dealing with a major threat of weapons of mass destruction."
But the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, Bob Graham, Democrat of Florida, said on "Fox News Sunday" that Mr. Hussein is "not one of the primary threats to the United States."
Citing the arrest of five men who allegedly belonged to a terror cell near Buffalo, Mr. Graham said, "What worries me is that I think the war on terrorism has bogged down."
"Why were those five people arrested in Buffalo?" he asked. "Primarily because we had evidence that they had been at an Al Qaeda training camp in 2001. Those camps, in my judgment, are the real threat to the United States security, and that's what I think our priority ought to be, in terms of protecting the people America, is taking them out."
Administration officials said they were eager to gain custody of a senior Al Qaeda suspect, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who was captured in Pakistan.
"We certainly want custody of him," Ms. Rice said in a separate appearance on "Fox News Sunday," adding, "We certainly want to be able to find out what he knows."
Secretary Powell, speaking on CNN's "Late Edition," said of Mr. bin al-Shibh: "I think he's a pretty big fish. I mean, this is perhaps within the circle of those were responsible for 9/11."
----
Arab states back Bush over Iraq
By Alan Philps, Middle East Correspondent and David Rennie in Washington
16/09/2002
UK Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/09/16/wirq16.xml/
Key Arab states swung behind President Bush yesterday after he offered the United Nations a last chance to avert an invasion of Iraq. It raised the possibility that America may be able to use Saudi bases for the campaign.
With Saudi Arabia and Egypt reconciled to the fact that Washington's ultimatum to Saddam Hussein will be delivered by the UN, the way appears open for the countdown to war to begin this week with hectic diplomacy.
US officials said the UN Security Council has "weeks, not months" to draw up resolutions to end Saddam's defiance.
Colin Powell, the secretary of state, said the US hoped to begin drawing up fresh resolutions by the end of this week, designed to end, once and for all, Saddam's refusal to obey 16 existing UN resolutions.
"We can't let this linger forever," Mr Powell said.
Mr Bush was also buoyed by increases in his approval ratings as president, and in support for military action against Iraq.
A Newsweek poll, conducted after the patriotic displays of the Sept 11 anniversary, and Mr Bush's speech challenging the UN to deal with Saddam, showed that 66 per cent of Americans support military action against Iraq, up from 62 per cent last month.
Mr Bush's personal approval rating rose to 70 per cent, its highest since June. At the same time Washington added new accusations to link Saddam with al-Qa'eda, though not with the September 11 attacks.
Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, said: "Iraq has clear links with terrorism that would include al-Qa'eda. There are al-Qa'eda personnel that have been spotted in Baghdad." The Arab states leapt on the president's demands for UN action and unanimously called on Iraq to allow the unconditional return of weapons inspectors.
The most dramatic change came from Saudi Arabia, which had ruled out any support for military action to remove Saddam. But faced with the inevitable, the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, said that "every country that has signed the UN charter" is bound by decisions of the Security Council.
Asked if the US would be allowed to use the Prince Sultan air base, he said: "Everybody is obliged to follow through."
The Arab states are still opposed to the US campaign against Saddam, fearing massive street demonstrations in support of the Iraqi leader. But they see a Security Council resolution as a fig leaf to cover their desire not to be on the wrong side of Washington.
President Mubarak of Egypt, whose country receives $2 billion a year in US aid, set the tone with a call on Iraq to "seize the opportunity" offered by Mr Bush to "avoid serious repercussions".
Iraq is insisting that it will let in the inspectors only as part of a deal under which UN sanctions, which have been in force for the past 12 years, will be lifted. But Baghdad is looking increasingly isolated.
The Saudi foreign minister said it was vital for the Iraqis to climb down before a security council resolution opened the way for military action.
Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, said a new UN resolution would have to set out in full all the resolutions that Saddam has ignored, as well as what is expected of him, and what will happen to his country if he continues to ignore the wishes of the international community.
He confirmed that MPs would be presented with "new facts" about Iraq's attempts to acquire weapons of mass destruction. However, Downing Street dismissed reports yesterday that the dossier due to be published by the Government a week today would link the Saddam regime to al-Qa'eda.
The small Gulf state of Qatar seems likely to become the forward base for an attack on Iraq. About 600 staff of the US Central Command, based in Florida, are heading there.
Qatar's government says it has not been asked by the US to use the al-Udeid air base, "but if they ask us we will consider it carefully".
As allies moved closer to the US position, Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, meeting Mr Bush at Camp David, said that a strike could take place in the New Year.
-------- us
Gulf strategist calls for new ideas
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
September 16, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020916-80019547.htm
The general who designed the devastating 1991 air campaign against Iraq says a new strategy is needed to sever Saddam Hussein from his security force, take away his clandestine underground tunnels in Baghdad and identify Iraqi generals who will help oust him.
Buster Glosson, the Air Force lieutenant general, now retired, who orchestrated the revolutionary use of air power and precision munitions to liberate Kuwait, says the Pentagon should not mass large number of ground forces, as in Desert Storm, within the lethal range of Iraq's Scud missiles carrying chemical or biological weapons.
"To do so under the current environment is not only militarily unwise, it defies common sense," Gen. Glosson says.
Gen. Glosson's Gulf war planning won praise from Desert Storm commander Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf and from Vice President Richard B. Cheney, who was then the secretary of defense.
But this time, he says, commanders must rely on unrelenting air attacks and special operations forces to remove the underpinnings of Saddam's regime, and covert operatives to create chaos throughout Iraq.
Actions should also be taken to isolate major strongholds, such as the southern port city of Basra, and turn the Iraqi people against their leader.
"If these basic steps are not violated and our war-fighting asymmetrical advantage is maximized, Saddam will not last 30 days," says Gen. Glosson. "Military and civilian casualties will be low. The unscripted celebrations in the streets of Iraq will be tremendous, finally permitting the Iraqi people the freedom to determine their own destiny."
"My only nightmare is seeing great numbers of our sons and daughters moving prematurely from Basra and Mosul to Baghdad," says Gen. Glosson, a combat fighter pilot in Vietnam. "There is no doubt this Roman legion approach to fighting Iraq would also result in victory, but at what cost? We can only trust and pray that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs [Gen. Richard B. Myers] and secretary of defense [Donald H. Rumsfeld] will say no if such a recommendation is made."
Gen. Glosson offered his strategy in his first interview since the debate on Iraq erupted last fall in the aftermath of September 11, and as President Bush appears to be moving the United States toward war.
The president, in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday, challenged the world body to enforce the 1991 cease-fire deal repeatedly violated by Saddam. He said the United States would act against Iraq at some point, and invited the United Nations to join in. He told the world body on Saturday, with mocking bluntness, to "show some backbone."
Mr. Bush's commander in the region, Gen. Tommy Franks, who heads U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Fla., has drawn up several plans for an attack. He presented his latest ideas to the Joint Chiefs last week.
Mr. Bush has not approved an order of battle, but he is believed to have decided that an assault of Iraq, of whatever kind, will be necessary to prevent Saddam from obtaining nuclear weapons.
In his interview, Gen. Glosson urged the Bush administration to adopt several "imperatives" that he says will lead to victory. Commanders must sequence and execute operations "to create an environment that will permit the Iraqi people opposed to Saddam the maximum opportunity to help in his ouster."
This means, he says, the allies must convince the Iraqi people that Saddam's regime is crumbling and will do all they can to protect civilians from harm. The military must communicate with senior Iraqi military officers to persuade them to assist the allies in eliminating Saddam.
The U.S. must capitalize on its supremacy in special operations, stealth technology and precision weapons. While the attack should be massive, the war plan must also include some degree of tactical surprise "if we are to keep both allied military and Iraqi civilian casualties to an absolute minimum."
The general's last imperative is that Washington must not execute Desert Storm II. "Attempting to emulate or mirror Desert Storm, which relied on a five-month buildup of forces and massive ground invasion, is asking for disaster."
Blending these political and military imperatives is the key. If followed, he says, they will logically lead the tactical commanders to focus on:
•"Undermining Saddam's political and personal security power base in Tikrit," north of Baghdad.
•"Making survival difficult for military intelligence and special security personnel."
•"Targeting key personnel within the Republican Guard, the army's most elite force."
•"Taking away a complex of underground tunnels in Baghdad used by Saddam and his inner circle for movement and for storage of vital war material."
•"Paralyzing all military air and ground movements and massively disrupt communications."
•"Isolating from Baghdad the key cities of Basra, Al Kut, Karbala, Mosul and Kirkuk."
--------
Army to Move Latin Headquarters
September 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Army-South-Move.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The U.S. Army's headquarters for Latin America and the Caribbean is moving to Fort Sam Houston in Texas from Puerto Rico, the Army announced Monday.
U.S. Army South, a component of the U.S. Southern Command, has been at Fort Buchanan, Puerto Rico, for about three years, said Maj. Chris Conway, an Army spokesman. The Army said the move to San Antonio is part of an effort to cut costs.
The move will allow the Army to eliminate overhead costs and reduce personnel at the headquarters from 400 to less than 300, the Army said in a news release. Conway said the move will save the Army $125 million in construction costs, but relocation will cost about $45 million.
The Army said the move should begin in October.
Several states, all with an eye toward the next round of base closures in 2005, competed for the Army South headquarters. Fort Sam Houston and Fort McPherson, Ga., emerged as finalists.
The Texas delegation to Congress had lobbied for Fort Sam Houston, which is about a four-hour drive from the Texas-Mexico border and has frequent flights to Latin America.
``It's going to be a great fit,'' said Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, who led the delegation's effort.
On the losing side, Rep. Michael ``Mac'' Collins, R-Ga., issued a terse, one-sentence statement.
``This is a poor financial decision on behalf of the Army,'' Collins said through a spokesman. Two House-passed spending bills include language Collins helped write that prohibits spending on relocation of Army South until the Army proves it will save money.
Along with headquarters personnel, the 56th Signal Battalion, 202nd Military Intelligence Detachment, 1-228 Aviation Detachment and a few other smaller detachments are associated with U.S. Army South, said Lt. Col. Tom Budzyna, Army South spokesman. He could not immediately provide the numbers of people with those units.
On the Net:
U.S. Army South: http://www.usarso.army.mil/
-------- propaganda wars
Hollywood goes to war
By Peter Huck
September 16 2002,
The Age (Australia)
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/09/14/1031608342634.html
In a nondescript building on a quiet street near the Pacific Ocean last October, 30 screenwriters, directors and producers, drawn from the movie world's A-list, were called to a summit.
They were charged with a high moral purpose; to help combat terrorism during one of the worst crises in US history.
Meeting after their studio day jobs, the group talked into the small hours. Its brief was to devise plausible ways in which terrorists might launch new attacks against the US, a prospect that, in the paranoid aftermath of September 11, seemed chillingly possible.
The meetings took place at the Institute for Creative Technology, affiliated with the University of Southern California. Set up in 1999 with a $US50 million ($A92 million) budget provided by the US Army, it seeks to create advanced training simulators that will help the army shift from a Cold War mentality into a more flexible force, able to respond within 96 hours to complex missions - from civil wars to natural disasters.
But last September, war was on the nation's doorstep and, caught unawares, Washington was desperate for fresh ideas. Where better to look than the dream factory that has made billions from cinematic stories about fiendish villains, from Dr No on, intent on enslaving the world?
"After the attacks the army's top scientist, Dr Mike Andrews, who created the ICT, came to us and asked us to suggest what terrorists might do in the future," says Richard Lindheim, a former TV executive with NBC and Paramount who is the institute's executive director. Lindheim assembled a team, many of whom had won Academy Awards, responsible for the most popular action films and video games of the past decade.
Unusually for Hollywood, where everyone wants a credit, the participants chose to remain anonymous. Equally odd, they didn't want to be paid. Indeed, many of the group were thrilled because this was the first time they had been able to collaborate with their industry competitors. They continue to meet occasionally. They also agreed that their ideas would remain secret.
"Our worst nightmare was that we would suggest scenarios to terrorists," said Mr Lindheim. "There's been too much history of people copycatting ideas from TV and movies." Eventually, about 16 scenarios were dispatched to Washington.
Their value is uncertain. Lindheim says the Pentagon believes that some would be acted on, but it is clear that a beautiful friendship has emerged.
The Pentagon's tilt towards Hollywood after September 11 had been foreshadowed by a mutually beneficial relationship between movies and the military stretching back to the silent era, when 60 planes and 3500 men were loaned for the World War I epic Wings.
Since then, every major US conflict has been re-fought by Hollywood and, with the exception of a temporary frost provoked by anti-Vietnam war movies such as Apocalypse Now, Platoon, and The Deer Hunter , it has enjoyed a cosy relationship with the top brass. Moviemakers gain access to expensive weaponry for such Boys' Own fodder as Top Gun, Pearl Harbor and Black Hawk Down, while the military (which has film liaison offices in Los Angeles) basks in an heroic glow that buffs its image and boosts recruitment.
In one sense this love-fest continues. Last northern autumn the White House summoned studio executives to Washington to help raise America's morale. A flag-waving, three-minute montage of movie clips, The Spirit of America, duly emerged in local cinemas.
But on another level, Hollywood's cooperation with the military echoes World War II, when actors and directors donned uniforms. The Army Air Corps' first motion-picture unit made training and propaganda films, using actors including Ronald Reagan for voiceovers, and directors such as John Huston, John Ford, Frank Capra and William Wyler.
What intrigues Washington is Hollywood's ability to think outside the box. Military and scientific planners tend to be linear thinkers, identifying a goal and then working towards a solution. But Hollywood often works backwards, identifying a scene - say, how to follow the trajectory of a bomb from a Japanese plane into the deck of a US battleship in Pearl Harbor - and then working out how to make it happen.
The hunt is on to recruit hi-tech boffins. Last July, a virtual-reality expert at Disney's imagineering group quit to join the National Security Agency, the secretive spy agency.
"Under ordinary circumstances I would never have dreamed of leaving Disney," he told the Los Angeles Times, "but these aren't ordinary circumstances."
At the Institute for Creative Technology's futuristic offices (all faux metal surfaces, curved blonde-wood walls, and Starship Enterprise ambience, created by Star Trek designer Herman Zimmerman), 45 staff work with consultants, such as the designer Ron Cobb of Star Wars creatures fame and screenwriter John Milius, who wrote Apocalypse Now.
"It's a stimulating environment," said Lindheim. "In entertainment we get a lot of money to play in the sandbox and make mud pies. But you know it's a movie or a video game. Here we're doing something that can save lives. The biggest challenge is to be real. This isn't Spiderman. We can't use artistic license."
Using tools such as a virtual-reality theatre with a 150-degree screen, a monster SGI computer, and a 10.2 Dolby sound system, the institute seeks to create interactive games that reflect conceivable, 21st-century military challenges. It is at the forefront of work on artificial intelligence, and expects to create a virtual human, able to talk, express emotions and display body language, within five years.
In Full Spectrum Command, a war game run on a laptop computer, soldiers will interact with virtual characters in situations based on real events and tweaked by screenwriters to add emotional verisimilitude. A prototype is expected this month and a workable model by year's end.
Interest from military types, including those in Australia, is keen.
No doubt interest is also keen in the commercial game world. The institute controls all non-military use of its ideas, a potentially lucrative market that ranges from entertainment to medicine, education and law enforcement. . September 11 may have changed many things, but in Hollywood the bottom line is eternal.
-Peter Huck is a Los Angeles-based journalist.
----
U.S. Trying to Market Itself to Young Arabs
New York Times
September 16, 2002
By JANE PERLEZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/16/international/middleeast/16ARAB.html
AMMAN, Jordan, Sept. 14 - Tony Sabbagh, a veteran market researcher who positions American brand-name consumer products from Beirut to Bahrain, has been listening to the latest American promotion here: that of the United States itself.
Whitney Houston, Bette Midler, combined with news at the top of the radio hour, as a way to sell the United States in a skeptical Arab world?
Nice try but try again, says Mr. Sabbagh of Washington's effort to convince skeptical young Arabs of America's good intentions through a new radio station that combines pop music with news snippets and is now broadcasting in five Arab nations.
"You cannot create a product out of an image," said Mr. Sabbagh, the director of Middle East Marketing and Research and who has plugged cigarettes, colas and cars across the region. "You can only promote a product if you have one."
The hostility of young Arabs to the United States is based on policies, he said, and unless Washington modifies its stand on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and backs off unilateral action against Saddam Hussein of Iraq, the administration faces an uphill sell, he said. While American diplomacy might be influencing some moderate governments, the people remain unconvinced.
A State Department spokesman said the public relations efforts were essential to combat the "misperceptions" of American policy. An Arab television station, Al Jazeera, was broadcasting "pretty sophisticated stuff" in its news programs that cast a negative light on the United States that needed to be countered, he said.
Mr. Sabbagh's views clash with those of another marketing expert, the former Madison Avenue advertising executive Charlotte Beers, who is now the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. Ms. Beers, who made her name catapulting sales of Uncle Ben's rice, is heading the Bush administration's efforts to get the upper hand in the propaganda war through broadcasts, exchange programs and the Internet.
In addition to the new Radio Sawa, which means "together" in Arabic, a $25 million State Department program has been set up to offer scholarships for university-age Arabs to study in the United States.
Public opinion surveys in Egypt and Jordan - rarely published in these countries but reviewed by officials and foreign diplomats - show that many people feel under assault by American policies on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and now on Iraq, American and Arab officials who have seen the surveys said.
The intensity of those feelings makes trying to sell the United States far more complicated than playing music and offering scholarships, several said.
Adding to the difficulties is the limited array of tools available to the State Department. Gone are the days of handsome cultural centers with libraries run by the United States Information Agency in foreign capitals. The independent agency, deemed an unneeded relic of the cold war, was shut in 1999 and melded into the State Department.
Here in Amman, for example, a popular American cultural center at a major traffic circle was closed. It was replaced by an auditorium and small library in the new United States Embassy, which is away from the city center and built like a fortress. The heavy security searches to enter the building have discouraged Jordanians from visiting.
As a substitute for the stand-alone libraries, the State Department is urging embassies in the region to open "American corners" in university libraries and other institutions. Such a "corner" is being tried in Bahrain, but for the most part embassies have resisted the idea because of its limited impact, American diplomats said.
"It's half-baked, cultural-center lite," said one.
Another program that is facing problems is the $25 million Middle East Partnership Initiative, devised by Liz Cheney, the daughter of the vice president and a deputy assistant secretary of state in the Near East bureau. The program includes scholarships enabling students from the Arab world to come to the United States.
But with severe new restrictions on visas, particularly for men from Arab countries between the ages of 18 and 45, the scope of the study program is probably limited, a State Department official said.
"This will need a long lead time," the official said.
Ms. Cheney, who worked for the United States Agency for International Development in the early 1990's, has also devised projects that call for training Arab nongovernmental organizations in aspects of democracy and the rule of law. But how open autocratic Arab governments will be to the distribution of American funds to private groups was not yet clear, a State Department official said.
One idea of Ms. Beers's - to provide commercial-length spots to Arab television stations about how Muslims in the United States are respected - has been put on hold, the official said. There was some nervousness, he said, that the favorable portrayal of American Muslims would be seen as "pandering."
Mr. Sabbagh, the market researcher, said he supported showing the role of Muslims in American life, provided the portrayals were believable. "This would be very useful," he said. "But it's all in the execution. It has to be real-life situations. That way you get credibility."
He also suggested that Washington try to put a more human face on events in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He was sure, he said, that the Agency for International Development was doing worthwhile work to help the Palestinians. That should be talked about, he said.
Radio Sawa's reception from its 18-to-30-year-old target audience has been mixed.
In Qatar, a tiny Persian Gulf state where the attitudes are more favorable toward the United States, the programming is popular. In Jordan, however, where the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has deeply soured public opinion toward the United States, the reaction to Radio Sawa is: yes to the music; no to the news. Some taxi drivers play the music, then turn off the news.
"People here really do feel that support for Sharon is wrong and that war against Iraq is wrong," said Ali Abunimah, the co-founder of ElectronicIntifada, a Web site that analyzes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "No amount of spinning is going to change that."
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Guantánamo Bay Faces Sentence of Life as Permanent U.S. Prison
New York Times
September 16, 2002
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/16/international/americas/16DETA.html
GUANTÁNAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba, Sept. 13 - A year ago, this century-old military outpost, the oldest United States base overseas and the only one in a Communist country, was being mothballed by the Navy, having outlived its usefulness as a refueling station and a temporary stop for fleeing refugees.
But in the last nine months, with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's pronouncement that it was "the least worst place" to hold prisoners from the Afghanistan war, Guantánamo has rumbled to life - or as much to life as is possible under a relentless Caribbean sun in a parched scrubland pockmarked by cactus trees and populated by iguanas and land crabs.
Now, it shows every sign of becoming a permanent penal colony for the human detritus of the campaign against terrorism. The first 20 prisoners arrived here on Jan. 11. Today there are 598 from 43 countries. Construction is under way on 204 more cells, which is expected to bring the total to 816 in October, almost half way to the planned 2,000.
There were 1,500 military personnel here in January; now there are 4,000. Those overseeing the prison operation have started their own weekly newspaper. In perhaps the strongest sign of permanence, the guards' huts are being outfitted with indoor plumbing.
"We're talking years rather than months," said Capt. Robert A. Buehn Jr. of the Navy, the base commander. He said that he had budgeted for the prison through 2005 but that he expected to include the prison in his 20-year plan as well. "I would do it just to be conservative," he said. "You'd better plan for it."
But for all the planning, no one seems to know quite what to do with the prisoners.
"They are the forgotten captives of the war," Scott L. Silliman, executive director of the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security at Duke University Law School, said in a telephone interview.
Once Congress was assured that the prisoners were being treated humanely, he said, they lost what visibility they had. "They are outside our borders and not in our court system," Mr. Silliman said.
Their significance today, he said, "stems not from who they are, how they are being treated or how horrendous their conduct probably was, but what they represent to international law."
The Bush administration has denied them the status of prisoners of war, instead calling them enemy combatants, and is convinced that the law permits the detention of such combatants until the end of hostilities to prevent their return to the battlefield. The end of hostilities in this case could be defined as the end of the campaign against terrorism, which could mean detention, without charge and without access to lawyers, for years. This has appalled human rights groups and even drew public criticism from the International Committee of the Red Cross, which normally makes its complaints in private.
In a new report, the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights said the administration had "been using the term `unlawful combatant' - a term not found in international law - as a kind of magic wand, waving it to avoid well-established standards of U.S. and international law."
Critics say the United States is picking and choosing which elements of the Geneva Convention to apply and which to ignore - and that it is ignoring a big one in not holding individual hearings to determine the status of each prisoner. This, they say, is part of a larger pattern of the United States thumbing its nose at the international community, as the Bush administration has done in asserting a right to strike at Iraq unilaterally, in insisting that Americans not be held accountable before the new International Criminal Court at The Hague, and by spurning an international global-climate treaty.
This pattern could come into still sharper relief as the United States subjects the prisoners here to military tribunals over the objections of several allies that oppose the death penalty. The possibility of tribunals had seemed derailed by both controversy and other priorities, but officials now say that planning for them is back on track.
The officials said that the administration's legal experts, after a busy year of distractions with the novel terrorist-related cases of John Walker Lindh, Zacarias Moussaoui and Yasser Hamdi, were refocusing on tribunals for the Guantánamo prisoners and that the trials would almost certainly be held here, outside the jurisdiction of United States courts. (The Bush administration has successfully argued in court that federal courts have no jurisdiction in Guantánamo because it is under Cuban sovereignty; the United States leases the Navy base from Cuba for $4,000 a year, although Fidel Castro refuses to cash the checks because he disputes the legitimacy of the arrangement.)
Legal experts said the process of preparing for the tribunals would be so painstaking that it might be several months before any began.
Ruth Wedgwood, who is an expert in international law at Yale Law School and close to the Bush administration, said much time would probably be consumed with finding the right people - both to prosecute the government's cause and to be prosecuted.
"You'd have to pick good people for prosecutor and judge, think through the logistics of putting on trials, do the very, very difficult task of scrubbing what evidence you have, deciding which are most compelling as criminal cases, and think through what evidence you could make public, since you don't want to have to close the proceedings and have an all-secret trial," she said.
Mr. Silliman said, however, that as more time goes by, he was skeptical that such evidence could be produced, especially against the many prisoners here who are believed to be foot soldiers for the terrorists and ignorant of any useful intelligence. He predicted that international pressure would build on the United States to release some of them to their native countries - pressure that could intensify as the United States tries to maintain its coalition in the campaign against terrorism.
Delegations from many of those countries have visited Guantánamo, seeking to establish that their citizens are being treated humanely and to negotiate for their release. Officials here said some delegations also took part in the interrogations of their citizens, a process that the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence believes is not going so well. In its budget request for next year, the panel said interrogation efforts in Guantánamo "have been hampered by a lack of appropriate training, a dearth of language-skilled personnel, and a lack of depth and breadth of analytic expertise."
Khalid al-Odah, the father of a prisoner from Kuwait, said in a telephone interview that American officials told Kuwaiti officials who visited the base that there was no evidence linking his son and a dozen other Kuwaiti prisoners with crimes and that they would be at the top of the list of those to be released. Mr. Odah's statements could not be confirmed with American officials here. Families of other prisoners from other countries have made similar assertions of innocence about their sons, but there has been no corroboration from Americans.
Only two prisoners who have been brought to Guantánamo have left. One is Mr. Hamdi, who was discovered to have been born in the United States; he is now in the Navy brig in Norfolk, Va. The other was an Afghan prisoner who received a diagnosis of schizophrenia and returned to Afghanistan, where he is reportedly in a state mental hospital.
Mr. Odah and others said they had been given no timetable for any possible release of the Kuwaitis or others, and as more time passes, they grow increasingly concerned about the prisoners' legal limbo and its effect on their psychological state.
Officials here say that the legal limbo is Topic A among the prisoners and that it underlies the mounting mental health problems in the camp. Four prisoners made serious efforts at killing themselves this summer, stringing up their bedsheets in their cells and trying to hang themselves. At least 30 others made less serious attempts, some using plastic utensils, others banging their heads against the walls. Many are taking anti-depressants, and 80 prisoners are now in solitary confinement. Only two prisoners are hospitalized now, both with orthopedic problems, indicating that the more pressing issues are behavioral and psychological.
That holds true for the guards as well, and their commanders are keenly aware that duty here is stressful in itself. The base newspaper reminded readers this week in a banner headline that "September is suicide prevention month," and noted that suicide is the second-leading cause of death in the military after accidents.
Capt. Albert J. Shimkus Jr. of the Navy, who runs the hospital here, said 57 prisoners were being treated for mental illnesses, including post-traumatic stress disorder. He added that several prisoners have tried to hurt themselves as a way of attracting attention. Some scratch themselves, he said, and one "threatened to swallow their tongue, which is impossible, and yet he attracted attention."
"We are beginning to understand our environment better," he said, noting that the language barriers were still significant but that the mental health team, which also attends to the guards, was becoming "more robust in anticipation of interceding with their mental health needs." Captain Shimkus said that, with the uncertainty over the prisoners' fates, mental health problems could be expected to increase.
Even Mr. Rumsfeld has allowed for the possibility that some of these prisoners might have been victims of circumstance, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. But without individual hearings to determine the prisoners' status, without charges and trials, critics see Guantánamo as a synonym for human rights violations. While there is no indication of physical torture, and the prisoners are allowed to observe their religion, grow back their beards and have their meals prepared according to their customs, they still lack the basic legal rights that many countries, including the United States, have agreed are fundamental even to warriors.
Captain Buehn rejected that characterization, saying he was proud of the community that had evolved here. "I don't want the U.S. Naval Base, Guantánamo Bay, to be viewed in a sense as anything unfair, brutal, human rights violations," he said. "Certainly, that's not what's going on here."
Gen. Rick Baccus of the Army, who commands the detention center, took the opportunity of a Sept. 11 memorial service to try to rebut the criticism. "While the public debates the technicalities of how these people should be classified," he said, "we will continue to follow the traditions of humane treatment." He added: "In other countries, these detainees would not be heard from again."
----
Sentencing day for convicted FBI agent
By Dave Haskell
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
September 16, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20020916-084803-4717r.htm
BOSTON, Sept. 16 (UPI) -- A retired FBI special agent credited with putting many New England Mafia figures behind bars faced sentencing Monday for becoming partners in crime with his underworld informants.
John J. Connolly Jr., 62, faced up to 10 years in prison for racketeering, obstruction of justice, lying to the FBI, bribery, and leaking FBI information to notorious Boston gang informants James "Whitey" Bulger and Stephen "The Rifleman" Flemmi.
U.S. District Court Judge Joseph L. Tauro indicated last week he would follow sentencing guidelines that call for an 8- to 10-year sentence for Connolly.
Connolly, convicted in May after a two-week trial, has insisted he was only following the orders of supervisors in handling his prized informants.
"I never intended to commit a crime," Connolly said after his conviction, claiming he never knew that Bulger and Flemmi continued their criminal activities, including murder, while providing the agent with information against the Italian Mafia.
Bulger and Flemmi, the bosses of the South Boston-based, Irish-dominated Winter Hill Gang, have been charged with 22 underworld slayings.
Flemmi, who claimed the FBI through Connolly authorized him to continue committing crimes in exchange for information, is serving 10 years for racketeering and also faces trial for murder.
Bulger has been a fugitive since 1995 when Connolly tipped him off to an impending indictment.
Connolly, a married father with three sons, retired from the FBI 12 years ago following a 22-year career.
Connolly, who grew up in the same South Boston neighborhood as Bulger, recruited the gang leader as an informant in 1975, and over the years developed information that led to the conviction and imprisonment of a number of Mafia bosses.
His informants, meanwhile, continued to commit crimes with impunity as Connolly undermined efforts to prosecute them.
The lead prosecutor in the case, Special U.S. Attorney John Durham, wrote to the judge urging a stiffer sentence for Connolly. He said that by helping Bulger flee, Connolly "has left a black mark on virtually all of law enforcement, but most particularly federal law enforcement."
During Connolly's trial, former Bulger associates hit man John Martorano and Kevin J. Weeks testified Bulger and Flemmi made many cash payoffs for years to the agent.
Convicted New England Mafia boss Francis P. "Cadillac Frank" Salemme also testified about payments he and Flemmi made to Connolly.
The case has touched off ongoing investigations by Congress and the Justice Department. The House Government Reform Committee reportedly will conduct more hearings into the case next month.
-------- death penalty
A Supreme Court Ruling Roils Death Penalty Cases
September 16, 2002
By ADAM LIPTAK
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/16/national/16DEAT.html
Not long after the United States Supreme Court invalidated Arizona's death penalty statute in June and only a week before the Arizona Legislature enacted emergency legislation to reinstate it, two men accused of murder tried a bold legal maneuver that may save their lives. They pleaded guilty.
The prosecutor was surprised but candid: he said the men could plead guilty without fear of execution. He has since changed his mind. The judge, in Holbrook, Ariz., will hear arguments Thursday on the prosecutor's motion to undo the pleas.
He will not be alone in trying to untangle the consequences of the Supreme Court's decision in Ring v. Arizona, which said juries rather than judges must make the crucial factual determinations that support the death penalty. Courts and legislatures in the nine states where juries do not make such findings, or render only advisory verdicts, have had a busy summer doing the same thing.
"It's a can of worms," said Richard C. Dieter, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington advocacy group critical of capital punishment.
Immediately after the decision, even prosecutors said that at least some of the 800 people already on death row in those states would be entitled to new sentences. But prosecutors in Arizona, the state most directly affected by the decision, have retreated from that position. In pending cases like the one in Holbrook, the Ring decision has created intense procedural confusion in several states.
In its ruling, the Supreme Court answered one question and created half a dozen others, including how the new rule affects defendants at various stages in the cases against them; whether the decision requires actions in states where juries render advisory verdicts; what new laws are required to fix the problem the court identified; and what happens in cases like the one in Arizona.
The Ring decision effectively declared the death penalty statutes in five states unconstitutional, and it called into question statutes in four other states where juries render advisory verdicts but judges make the ultimate decision.
The five states in which judges made all of the relevant decisions are Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana and Nebraska. The four so-called hybrid states are Alabama, Delaware, Florida and Indiana. About 630 death row prisoners are in the hybrid states, most of them in Florida and Alabama.
Several legislatures have acted quickly, sometimes by convening special sessions, to fix their statutes by giving juries a larger role. The supreme courts in a handful of states are considering Ring-related issues.
People on death row who have exhausted their direct appeals face daunting obstacles in arguing that the decision should apply to them retroactively. Courts have not been receptive to similar arguments.
People with pending appeals are in a much stronger position. But they, too, are facing vigorous arguments from prosecutors.
On the day Ring was decided, for instance, Kent Cattani, chief counsel of the death penalty appeals unit in the Arizona attorney general's office, said the 30 people on death row in Arizona who had not exhausted their direct appeals would be entitled to resentencings involving juries. But in August, Mr. Cattani's office filed papers in the Arizona Supreme Court arguing that the original death penalties should stand.
In a recent interview, Mr. Cattani said the revised position was the result of case-by-case analysis. He said all the Ring-related errors in these cases were harmless because factors supporting the death penalty were found implicitly by juries in an earlier phase of the trial, and because the Arizona Supreme Court rigorously reviewed death sentences.
That leaves people whose cases were pending at the trial court level when Ring was decided.
Nicholas S. Sizemore and Scott B. Brian, the two Arizona men who pleaded guilty, were already serving time for murder when they fatally stabbed Carlos R. Ceniceros, a fellow inmate, in November 2000. Mr. Sizemore, 21, was in the fourth year of a 30-year sentence. Mr. Brian, 38, was serving a life sentence.
They were charged with first-degree murder, and the prosecution sought the death penalty. The case proceeded fitfully until a routine hearing on July 24, when the men announced they were pleading guilty.
The pleas startled the prosecutor, Joseph Duarte. Serious criminal cases generally end in plea bargains and occasionally result in trials. They almost never end in simple acknowledgments of guilt, and the defendant who simply pleads is rarely better off as a consequence.
But in court that day, Mr. Duarte acknowledged that this case was the exception. "There does not appear to be a viable death penalty sentence to which Mr. Sizemore would be exposed," he told the judge. He added a similar comment about Mr. Brian.
The judge, Dale P. Neilson, agreed, telling the defendants that life in prison was the maximum sentence and accepting their pleas. He scheduled a sentencing hearing for September. In Mr. Brian's case, as everyone in the courtroom that day understood it, the hearing would be pointless. He had gotten a free pass for the killing and would face no additional time or other consequences for it.
A week later, the Arizona Legislature enacted emergency legislation, saying it wanted "no hiatus in the imposition of the death penalty."
A month after that, and just days before the sentencing, Mr. Duarte had his own surprise for the court. He said in court papers that he had been wrong about the death penalty and that the sentencing could proceed under the new law. He suggested that the defendants should be allowed to withdraw their pleas.
This drew a strong reaction from one of Mr. Sizemore's lawyers in a court filing.
"Why, in the name of God, would Mr. Sizemore want to withdraw?" the lawyer, Thomas J. Phalen, asked. "So that the state can kill him?"
Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, Indiana and Montana have all enacted laws to address the Ring decision. Some of the statutes became effective after the decision but were drafted in anticipation of it.
Defense lawyers have complained about aspects of the new statutes. In Arizona, for instance, the Legislature limited the ability of both the trial and supreme courts to review a jury's verdict and allowed victims a larger role in proceedings than Supreme Court precedent allows, said John Stookey, an Arizona lawyer who represents capital defendants.
Before Arizona acted, lawyers for Mr. Sizemore and Mr. Brian sweated about their tactical decision, nervous that they were missing something. In the end, they advised their clients to plead guilty.
"It was like a window open," Mr. Phalen concluded, "and it was clear as a matter of law that there was no death penalty statute."
Mr. Brian's lawyer, Patrick McGillicuddy, said his client followed Mr. Sizemore's "bold move."
Mr. Duarte, the prosecutor, did not return a telephone call.
Mr. Cattani, of the attorney general's office, said Mr. Duarte had misspoken. "The prosecutor was wrong in terms of saying there's no statute under which they can be sentenced," he said. "They could even have been sentenced under the old statute."
That analysis is at odds with a statement in a letter Attorney General Janet Napolitano sent to Arizona judges the day Ring was decided. Ms. Napolitano argued the Ring case in the Supreme Court and is now a candidate for governor.
"It would now be unconstitutional to conduct a capital sentencing under the present version" of the death penalty statute, she wrote in June, urging judges not to proceed "until the statute is amended to conform to the law." She did not say what should happen to defendants who pleaded guilty in the meantime.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
Spain's Iberdrola plans big Brazil wind-power park
REUTERS BRAZIL:
September 16, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17759/story.htm
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil - Spanish energy company Iberdrola plans to build the biggest wind power generation park in Brazil costing about $175 million, a government official in the power-hungry northeastern state of Bahia said last week.
"They gave us a concrete plan and they applied for an environmental license in the state, so we hope the park will start working in 2004," the state infrastructure secretary Roberto Moussallem told Reuters by telephone.
Top Iberdrola officials in Brazil could not be reached for comment, but one aide confirmed such plans and said Spain's No. 2 energy company was studying projects to generate more energy from wind in Latin America's largest country.
Iberdrola is a major producer of power from wind. It also controls Bahia's Coelba utility.
The Bahia project calls to install 130 generators on high masts on an area of nearly 5,000 acres (20 square km). Together, they should produce 200 megawatts (MW) of electric power. Brazil only generates about 20 MW of aeolic power.
Work on the project worth some 550 million reais ($175 million), should start in the first half of 2003, Moussallem said. The higher cost of power produced by wind generators should be compensated by a new law that favors alternative energy sources, and the government's incentives, he added.
"This is no pilot project. We believe they are quite serious about this job, while Bahia wants more projects like that, and hopes that generators can be produced locally in the future."
He said the wind park near the town of Caetite, in the southwest interior of Bahia, would be in a previously studied windy area, and would not close the area of the arid, poor state to farmers or other activities on the ground.
Brazil relies on hydroelectric power for over 90 percent of its electricity needs, a dependence which triggered a tough energy shortage and rationing last year following a drought.
Plans to build new gas-fired plants have been slow in getting off the drawing board due to the need to import natural gas while the government controls electricity prices.
--------
California Passes Strong Renewables Standard
September 16, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/sep2002/2002-09-16-06.asp
SACRAMENTO, California, California has passed a bill establishing a statewide renewable energy portfolio, and requiring electricity retailers to increase their use of renewable resources by at least one percent per year. By 2017, retailers must produce at least 20 percent of their retail electricity sales from renewable sources such as solar, wind, geothermal and biomass energy.
California's Altamont Pass wind plant produces enough electricity to power the residential sector of a city the size of San Francisco. (Photo by Ed Linton, courtesy National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL))
The renewables bill (SB 1078), drafted by Democratic state Senator Byron Sher, establishes the California Renewables Portfolio Standard for California. California officials said the 20 percent renewable requirement, which will nearly double the state's existing base of wind, geothermal, biomass and solar resources, will be the strongest renewable portfolio in the nation.
Governor Gray Davis signed the legislation late last week along with a host of other environmental bills, saying they will help protect California's environment and quality of life.
"My administration has worked hard to provide a healthy future for California," Davis said. "These bills will build upon our state's rich tradition of environmental stewardship, protecting the energy we use, looking toward new energy resources and planning how we dispose of our hazardous waste."
The world's largest solar power facility covers more than 1,000 acres near Kramer Junction, California. The facility can produce up to 150 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 150,000 homes. (Photo courtesy Kramer Junction Company/NREL)
The renewable portfolio standards will help to decrease the state's current dependence on natural gas fired power, the governor said. Renewable power sources also produce fewer air pollutants and lower greenhouse gas emissions than fossil fuel based power sources, Davis noted, helping to balance the higher economic costs of many renewable power sources.
At least two of the major utilities serving California customers - Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison - already come close to the requirements of the new law, producing 12 to 15 percent of the electricity they sell from renewable sources. But smaller utilities, which rely more heavily on traditional power sources, may have trouble meeting the 2017 deadline for the 20 percent renewable portfolio.
Davis also signed a companion bill by Senator Sher that reauthorizes state programs that promote renewable energy use and alternative energy research. SB 1038 authorizes the state Energy Commission to continue to administer the Public Interest Energy Research Program and the Renewable Energy Program for five additional years.
The bill also allows state energy regulators to set a benchmark for renewable energy prices, based on long term market forecasts. If renewable power prices rise above this benchmark, utilities may be able to use state subsidy funds to cover the difference between the benchmark and the actual prices.
With a 750 megawatt output from 14 units, The Geysers in Calistoga, California, is the largest producer of geothermal power in the world. (Photo by David Parsons, courtesy NREL)
The subsidy funds come from an extra monthly charge on residential and commercial electricity bills, which were imposed in 1998 to provide funds for energy conservation efforts, renewable energy and energy assistance for poor families. The subsidies costs about $2 per month for the average residential customer, according to the Energy Commission.
Other bills signed by Governor Davis aim to protect California's environment from oil spills and hazardous wastes. The Oil Transfer and Transportation Emission and Risk Reduction Act (AB 2083) requires that companies which transport crude oil and petroleum products by tanker, between the San Francisco Bay area and the Los Angeles area, report specific oil and transportation information on a form to be developed by the State Lands Commission.
Collection of data regarding the shipment of California oil along the state's coast is considered crucial to determining the environmental impacts of the transportation, and to help prevent future spills.
SB 849 increases fees per barrel for vessels that transport crude oil in order to prevent oil spills. The new law increases the maximum oil spill prevention and administration fee from $0.04 to $0.05 per barrel of crude oil in 2003, and authorizes the Department of Fish and Game to charge non-tank vessels a fee for certifying financial responsibility for an oil spill.
The 21 megawatt Tracy Biomass Plant uses wood residues from agricultural and industrial operations to provide renewable power to the San Francisco Bay Area. (Photo by Andrew Carlin, courtesy Tracy Operators/NREL)
The bill also requires the Department of Fish and Game to contract with the Department of Finance to prepare a report on the effectiveness of the state's oil spill prevention, response and preparedness programs.
Another bill signed by Davis is considered the final chapter on a proposed low level radioactive waste dump in Ward Valley, California. The dump site was proposed by a previous administration, and abandoned in 2000 due to environmental concerns, though lawsuits over the site continue.
The bill (AB 2214) prohibits the proposed Ward Valley radioactive waste disposal site from serving as the state's facility for purposes of the Southwestern Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact. Under that compact, California is required to build a disposal site for low level radioactive waste from commercial and research reactors, medical facilities and laboratories, produced in California, Arizona, North Dakota and South Dakota.
Protests by California cancer patients helped end plans to build a low level radioactive waste dump in Ward Valley. (Photo courtesy Greenaction)
So far, California has failed to agree on a suitable site for a permanent waste repository, and low level radioactive wastes produced in the state are shipped to disposal sites in Utah and South Carolina. AB 2214 prohibits the Department of Health Services (DHS) from issuing or renewing a license for the disposal of low level radioactive waste unless the siting, design, construction, operation and closure of the facility meets specified federal and state requirements.
AB 2214 also prohibits a facility from disposing of low level radioactive waste using shallow land burial. The proposed Ward Valley project would have buried wastes in shallow, unlined trenches, which critics said could put groundwater supplies at risk of radioactive contamination.
-------- environment
Islands Urge Anti - Warming Action
September 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-UN-Small-Island-Nations.html
UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- Small island nations are urging immediate action to stop global warming, blaming it for a rise in water levels that threaten their existence.
If global warming continues, rising seas may suck away their shores, island representatives told the General Assembly on Sunday.
Other issues being debated at the U.N. session will have no meaning in the absence of serious actions to address global warming, said Tomasi Puapua, governor-general of Tuvalu, a small South Pacific nation that sits no more than 10 feet above sea level.
Speakers from island countries on opposite sides of the globe presented a united front on issues ranging from the failings of globalization to favoring membership for Taiwan in the United Nations.
But most focused on their fear of extinction, criticizing rich nations for producing the bulk of the carbon dioxide blamed for global warming and the rising ocean levels threatening them.
The 1994 Kyoto accord on climate change was designed to cut emissions of so-called greenhouse gases. It has the support of many industrial nations, particularly in Europe, but has not been ratified by the world's biggest carbon dioxide producer, the United States. It was signed under former President Clinton, but the U.S. signature has been withdrawn by President Bush, provoking protests from environmentalists around the world.
``How long can industrial nations hope to sustain their overextended lifestyles while the natural resources of the planet are being steadily degraded and diminished?'' asked Leo A. Falcam, president of the Federated States of Micronesia.
Philip Sealy, head of Trinidad and Tobago's delegation, said that small island states are ``disproportionately vulnerable to the impact of climate change while being responsible for a minuscule proportion of such emissions.''
Island governments, many of whom have economic relationships with Taiwan's fishing industry, have rallied behind its bid for a U.N. seat -- which again failed to materialize this year.
Many delegates mentioned the failure of globalization to improve the standard of living for the world's poorest people, and urged richer nations to help them reduce their debt and jump-start their economies -- especially in the Caribbean, where the Sept. 11 attacks dealt a blow to tourism.
``We are far from being a cohesive global community,'' said Tuvalu's Puapua. ``Many small island developing states are in a particularly weak position to participate fully and take advantage of the opportunities under globalization.''
Papua New Guinea's foreign minister urged the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to focus more on development and poverty eradication and less on restructuring economies.
``Their lending policies should be made more lenient and flexible in assisting developing countries,'' said Rabbie L. Namaliu. ``The ultimate goal must be to transfer resources into the hands of the needy, the marginalized and the ostracized of society.''
The small island nation leaders also spoke out against the transport of nuclear waste via their oceans and the rising numbers of HIV/AIDS victims on their shores.
-------- health
Science Slow to Ponder Ills That Linger in Anthrax Victims
New York Times
September 16, 2002
By WILLIAM J. BROAD and DENISE GRADY
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/16/national/16LIMB.html
Every day, Norma Wallace spends several hours reading a chapter or two in seven books. She favors history, philosophy, literature, math, puzzles and sometimes college entrance tests. It is all part of her strategy to fight the memory loss that has troubled her since the fall of 2001, when she became gravely ill with inhalation anthrax.
"I want to saturate my brain to keep it working and help it to recall information," said Ms. Wallace, 57, still on disability leave from her job as a mail processor at the postal center in Hamilton, N.J. "My short-term memory is coming back."
Her co-worker Richard Morgano says he does not feel so fortunate. The nightmares and cold sweats that marked the first months of his recovery from a probable case of skin anthrax have eased. But his health is poor, his mood dark and his anger high. He avoids people and work, he says, afraid he might explode. "I get too bent out of shape," he said. "My temper is short. Even when I drive, I get road rage."
For far longer than anyone had predicted, these two postal workers and many of the 15 other survivors of the anthrax attacks that began a year ago this week have been ill with symptoms their doctors cannot explain - fatigue, shortness of breath, chest pains, memory loss. In interviews, many say they communicate very little with one another, most fighting their battles alone, often confused, at times frightened.
These survivors are of great scientific interest, especially those who had the inhaled form of the illness, because in the past nearly everyone with inhalation anthrax died, and doctors have almost no information about recovery.
But only now is the government beginning to study their progress. While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta has drawn blood from survivors to measure changes in their immune systems, it has not conducted comprehensive follow-ups or physical examinations. The reason, officials say, include a lack of trained personnel, red tape and a surfeit of competing demands.
Now another agency, the National Institutes of Health, has developed a plan to study the survivors. But some leading anthrax experts say that the work should have begun a year ago and that valuable information may have been lost in the meantime.
"It's very peculiar to me that these people haven't had the million-dollar work-up that they deserve," said Dr. Meryl J. Nass, an anthrax expert in Freeport, Me., who has advised one victim. "Nobody has made an attempt to gather them together and test them all for the same things and compare the results. That's how you make a determination of what's wrong with them."
Critics like Dr. Nass say survivors offer a rare chance to map the course of recovery and try to determine whether the disease has any long-term effects that might help explain the problems now confronting some of the survivors. Such information could help not only the survivors themselves but also future victims, should anthrax ever be used as a weapon again.
"It's a unique population," said Dr. Philip S. Brachman, an epidemiologist at Emory University who investigated anthrax outbreaks for the disease centers from the late 1950's to the 1970's.
Representative Dan Burton, chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, called the absence of follow-up studies until now a serious federal lapse. "They need to get on the ball and make sure they're following every single case closely," he said.
The Symptoms
Memory Loss, Fatigue, Rage
Besides her memory problems, Ms. Wallace still suffers from fatigue. She used to work two jobs, as a substitute teacher by day and a mail processor by night. Now she is not working at all. She hopes to return to work but is not sure when she will be well enough.
The uncertainty is even greater for her colleague Mr. Morgano, 39, a maintenance worker who cut his forearm while fixing a jammed machine on the night of Sept. 18, 2001, when the Hamilton center processed the first wave of anthrax letters.
Mr. Morgano developed the oozing wounds typical of skin, or cutaneous, anthrax. He may have been the first victim of the attacks. Robert Stevens, the Florida photo editor whose case was the first to be reported, fell ill in late September and died Oct. 5. But Mr. Morgano's case is murky because early treatment with strong antibiotics by an alert physician cleared up his worst symptoms before the nation realized it was under attack.
"There's no question he had it," said his doctor, Michael Dash. "But it probably will always be a suspected case."
Mr. Morgano is now on antidepressants and talking regularly to a psychiatrist. But he is haunted by fear of unknown complications. A persistent pain has developed in his chest, and Dr. Dash recently sent him to a cardiologist.
"It comes and goes and I don't know what's causing it," Mr. Morgano said. "It could be totally unrelated" to the anthrax spores that caused his arm to blister and swell. But he suspects that the spores not only contaminated his arm but also entered his chest.
Dianne Abbott, his girlfriend, said Mr. Morgano was depressed. "Rich is not doing that good," she said. "His personality changed. He's very short-tempered."
The cloud of uncertainty, she added, is the worst part. "We can't get answers from anybody."
Another Hamilton employee, Patrick D. O'Donnell, who developed a severe case of cutaneous anthrax that put him in the hospital for a week, described symptoms similar to Mr. Morgano's: fatigue, rage, depression, panic attacks. He said he was seeing a psychiatrist to avoid taking his anger out on anybody else, and he described himself as having gone from "Mr. Nice Guy" to "Mr. Bitter."
Another survivor, David Hose, 60, also expressed frustration over his slow recovery. Mr. Hose contracted inhalation anthrax while handling mail for the State Department in Sterling, Va. Sometimes he thinks he is improving, but then he runs out of breath, his pulse and blood pressure start jumping around or he turns forgetful in a way that he never was before. He now needs inhaled asthma medicine to help him breathe, even though he never had asthma before.
Worst of all, he said, is the fatigue.
"You're tired all the time, that's what really gets you," he said. "You're not who you were before at all."
Recently, at a psychologist's urging, he began taking antidepressants.
Mr. Hose's physician, Dr. Mark Galbraith, an infectious disease specialist, said that not enough people had survived inhalation anthrax for doctors to know what to expect.
"We don't have a pathway, a textbook that says this is supposed to happen," Dr. Galbraith said. "We don't have enough experience with this to say, `In six months or three years this is where he should be.' "
With so few cases, Dr. Galbraith said, it is hard if not impossible to tell the difference between symptoms of anthrax and problems caused by aging or by the enormous physical and psychological stress of having suffered a severe illness and being the victim of a bioterrorist attack.
Fatigue can be hard to interpret, Dr. Galbraith said. "Is there some lasting metabolic effect from the toxin, or some underlying depression? This is one of the reasons one was hoping the C.D.C. could act as an investigative arm and find some commonality. We have no cases to refer to."
Leroy Richmond, who contracted inhalation anthrax at the Brentwood postal center, said he, too, tired easily and was struggling with memory problems. "I want my health to get back to where I would be able to get back to work," he said. "You'll never find anyone who enjoyed work as much as I did, and I really miss it."
The oldest and the youngest victims of the attacks seem to be among the few who have recovered completely. Ernesto Blanco, 74, returned to work early this year in Boca Raton, Fla., at American Media Inc., which publishes supermarket newspapers. Mr. Blanco said on a recent busy day that he was in very good health.
"I forget some things, but because of my age," he said from his post at American Media. "I'm like a fish in the water, honest to God."
The youngest survivor contracted cutaneous anthrax at the age of 7 months after his mother, a television producer, took him to visit her colleagues at the ABC studios in Manhattan. The infection, misdiagnosed for two weeks as a spider bite, became a systemic illness that caused a life-threatening blood disorder and kidney failure. The baby recovered fully, but his mother said doctors had cautioned her that kidney problems could in theory develop later, because the illness was so severe.
She added that the C.D.C. had shown little interest in his recovery, which surprised her because so little is known about the course of anthrax on such young children.
The Science
Lessons From the Dead
Many anthrax experts inside and outside the government - including epidemiologists and medical doctors - say that now that aggressive medical treatment has been shown to save the lives of people with inhalation anthrax, the government and the public have an important chance to study the quality of those lives and the natural history of the disease.
"This is a good opportunity to learn more," said Dr. John Ezzell, a senior anthrax scientist at the Army's biodefense institute at Fort Detrick, Md.
Anthrax bacteria release deadly toxins that can travel throughout the body to attack tissues, kill cells and cause fluids to accumulate. In acute infections and especially in the pulmonary form of the disease, the symptoms include coughing, high fevers, hard breathing, chest pain and heavy perspiration. Victims can turn blue from lack of oxygen.
In interviews, many anthrax experts noted that victims who die are often found to have widespread damage to organs, including the brain. Many suffer delirium, seizures and coma in their final hours; autopsies suggest those symptoms may have been caused by pressure on the brain from accumulated blood and other fluids. Studies also show that anthrax toxins are usually present in high concentrations in the blood.
"So certainly," said Dr. Ezzell, "there may be an effect on survivors, and it would depend on how far along the people were" in fighting the disease.
Dr. David H. Walker, a pathologist at the University of Texas at Galveston who studied people who died in the 1979 Sverdlovsk anthrax outbreak in the Soviet Union, said survivors were faced with a real possibility of lingering illnesses and long-term side effects.
"It's a severe, life-threatening illness," he said. "Antibiotic kills the bug but doesn't repair the damage."
In studying autopsy material from Sverdlovsk victims, Dr. Walker said, "we saw neuropathology," suggesting that the American survivors might have damage related to the brain. The lack of studies "is a blind spot for everybody," he said, adding, "We're much better in dealing with an emergency than its aftermath."
The Slow Start
Lessons From the Living
In the last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has collected blood from the survivors, hoping to gain information that will help researchers develop better diagnostic tests. But the agency has not studied the people themselves.
"We are in the process of getting their medical records," said Dr. Bradley Perkins, an anthrax expert at the disease centers. "They're all located in various states. Each state is different, and it has to be reviewed at federal and state levels before access is given."
"We are concerned about the chronicity of symptoms among the survivors," Dr. Perkins added. "That constitutes a surprise."
Because there are so few survivors, he said, it will be difficult if not impossible to draw solid conclusions from their experience. Nonetheless, if their problems persist, the agency may try to do a study comparing anthrax victims with people who survived other severe infections, to try to determine whether the lingering problems are specific to anthrax, or are common to other serious diseases as well.
The National Institutes of Health study getting under way is to examine the long-term health not only of last fall's victims (both from the skin and inhalation forms of anthrax) but of anyone who might be infected in the future, officials said. Run by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the study is voluntary and to be done in cooperation with the survivors' physicians. Officials said no one is yet enrolled.
The study is to draw on the patients' medical records; the N.I.H. will supplement them with monthly blood tests, X-rays, CAT scans and other clinical examinations. Because of the memory lapses that some survivors are reporting, there will also be mental tests. The agency says it will probably pay the survivors' expenses to travel to its campus in Bethesda, Md.
"This research looks at the natural history of anthrax infection," said Mary Wright, head of the study and chief of the biodefense clinical research branch at the infectious diseases institute. "It's a way to help understand what happened to people exposed to Bacillus anthracis. It's in place and we're definitely ready to go."
The study team, she said, will involve 15 scientists, some from the disease centers in Atlanta, as well as Dr. Arthur M. Friedlander, a physician at Fort Detrick who is one of the nation's top anthrax experts.
Since last November, when the attack's last victim was identified, Dr. Friedlander has pressed for the nation's civilian agencies to do follow-up studies on the survivors. On his own, Dr. Friedlander said in an interview, he has managed to visit some of the survivors to make observations.
"It's vital that these studies be done," he said. "We need to learn as much as we can about this disease."
Mr. Hose, the State Department employee who contracted anthrax while handling mail, said he would welcome a chance to participate in the N.I.H. study. But he added, "It's a shame they haven't already started."
-------- ACTIVISTS
Thousands Protest Ukrainian Leader
September 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Ukraine-Opposition.html
KIEV, Ukraine (AP) -- In one of Ukraine's largest demonstrations in years, tens of thousands of held protests across the country Monday demanding that President Leonid Kuchma resign or call early elections.
In the capital Kiev, about 20,000 protesters from several opposition groups blocked the city's downtown area for hours, shouting ``Away with Kuchma!''
Many marched to the presidential administration building, where they set up tents in heavy rain as night fell. They vowed to stay until Kuchma steps down.
It was one of the country's biggest demonstrations since Ukraine independence from the Soviet Union 11 years ago. Political tensions in Ukraine have been rising steadily since parliamentary elections in March, in which opposition parties won the bulk of the popular vote.
The demonstrators represented the full spectrum of Ukrainian politics, from communists to progressive reformers. All claimed Kuchma's government is so corrupt that democratic rule and economic development have been smothered.
``I'm here because of the unemployment, lack of money and ... the bleak future for my children and grandchildren,'' said Tetiana, an unemployed woman from the depressed eastern Luhansk region, who declined to give her last name.
Kuchma did not respond to the protests. He was in Austria on Monday, pressing political and business leaders to support Ukraine's distant hopes of joining the European Union.
The demonstration was timed to coincide with the second anniversary of the disappearance of investigative journalist Heorhiy Gongadze. The October 2000 discovery of a beheaded body, believed to be Gongadze's, touched off months of protests against Kuchma. Opposition groups accused him of being involved in the journalist's death, which Kuchma denies.
Socialist party leader Oleksandr Moroz opened Monday's protest in Kiev with a minute of silence to remember Gongadze and other ``victims of the (Kuchma) regime.''
One protester's banner called for the two-term president to be jailed. ``The third term for Kuchma will be in prison,'' the banner read.
Columns of protesters marched into Kiev's European Square in the city center, which officials had earlier banned them from entering. Police looked on but there were no reports of violence.
Similar demonstrations with lower turnouts took place in other cities across Ukraine. In the second largest protest, some 12,000 people took to the streets of the western city of Lviv, a stronghold of Ukraine's most popular opposition politician, former Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko.
Opposition leaders traveled around the country for two weeks ahead of Monday's nationwide protest to drum up support. They got a boost Sunday when Yushchenko declared he would join the demonstration, after weeks of waffling.
As the protesters gathered in Kiev and other cities on Monday morning, many television channels were blacked out for what officials called routine maintenance. Some of the channels were back on the air by mid-afternoon, but opposition leaders called the blackout politically motivated.
``Without your true information about what is happening ... the nation will be blind,'' Yushchenko said.
Kuchma was first elected in 1994 and re-elected five years later. His current term ends in 2004, and the constitution prohibits him from running again.
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