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NUCLEAR
India test-fires Trident surface-to-air missile
North Korea's 'Open Door'
Nuclear Safety
S.D. Missile Site to Become Museum
Dems Look to Temper Bush Resolution
How hawks captured the White House
MILITARY
U.S. Troops Sent to West Africa
U.S. Halts Aid to Ukraine in Iraq Radar Dispute
Critical ally calling, with baggage
Uzbekistan basks in U.S. spotlight
New Plan for Smallpox Attack
If Smallpox Breaks Out:
Guide for Mass Smallpox Vaccinations:
Medical Conditions Create Vulnerability to Vaccine
TOP GENERAL: WE WILL SUFFER 37,000 CASUALTIES
UK dossier on Iraq arms, nuke program
Britain: Iraq Tried to Buy Uranium
Blair Presents Dossier on Iraq's Biological Weapons
Coast Guard Unveils Contract Award
EU chiefs denounce anti-U.S. rhetoric
Europe Moves to Build Up Defenses
History of betrayal costs Washington a powerful ally
The many prices of war
U.S. was a key supplier to Saddam
Iraq Promises U.N. Arms Experts Unfettered Access
3 Retired Generals Warn of Peril in Attacking Iraq
U.S. Suspects Ukraine of Selling Radar to Iraq
The Day After
At U.N., U.S. Calls for End to the Siege of Arafat
Israel defies pressure to end siege of Arafat's HQ
Prosecute Sharon for war crimes, Israeli women say
Jordan rules out use of bases for Iraq attack
U.S. Military Training in Kuwait
Marines to Start War Games Near Iraq-Kuwait Frontier
Rumsfeld asks Nato to develop 'rogue state' strike force
U.S. Sidelines NATO
Rumsfeld: Alliance Must Gain Powers
U.S. and Pakistan Discuss Defense Cooperation
Pakistan Seeks New Weapons From U.S.
U.N. inspection team 'ready to go'
U.S. submits U.N. draft to ease siege
Annan Proposes Fewer Reports and Less Talk for a Better U.N.
U.N. Security Council Calls for End to Siege of Arafat
Bush presses U.N. for resolution
Billions needed to fight al Qaeda
Experts Analyze Iraq Attack Options
Pentagon Official: Navy Arms Tests Insufficient
U.S. Troops in West Africa on Protection Mission
The dishonesty of this so-called dossier
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Byrd's near-filibuster irks, inspires
F.B.I. Agent Cited Trade Center Attack Ahead of Sept. 11
Justice Issues Guide to Sharing Probe Data
Judge rules death penalty unconstitutional
Photographs and Fingerprinting of Saudis Will Soon Be Required
Bush Lowers U.S. Terror Alert Status
At least 100 countries building cyber weapons - expert
ENERGY AND OTHER
Judge Concludes Energy Company Drove Up Prices
Iraq says U.S. Navy is polluting its waters
former defense sites erroneously declared environmentally clean
Perhaps No U.S. Streams Unpolluted
Mercury in fish may be linked to infertility-study
ACTIVISTS
Voters should decide upon speed cameras
Protesting Paraguayans Poised to Noose Government
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- india / pakistan
India test-fires Trident surface-to-air missile
BASALORE, India (AFP) Sep 24, 2002
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/020924133734.gsi91wr5.html
India Tuesday successfully test-fired its most sophisticated short-range missile, the Trishul (Trident), from a range on the country's east coast, defence sources said.
The indigenously developed surface-to-air missile was test-fired from a mobile launcher in the eastern state of Orissa Tuesday afternoon.
The Trishul, developed by the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) for the Indian military, has a nine kilometer (5.58 mile) range and can carry a 15 kilogram (33 pound) warhead.
India's tank-busting Nag (Cobra) missile is in its final stage of development while anti-aircraft Akash (Sky) and Trishul missiles are being flight tested.
India has built an array of ballistic missiles, such as Prithvi (Earth) and Agni (Fire), which can carry nuclear warheads to targets ranging from 250 to 2,500 kilometres (155 to 1,550 miles).
India is also believed to be secretly developing the Sagarika (Oceanic), a longer-range cruise missile that can be fired from submarines to strike land and ocean-based targets with thermo-nuclear warheads.
The architect of India's guided missile development programme, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, was recently elected the country's president, which also elevated him to supreme commander of the armed and nuclear forces.
Nuclear rival Pakistan accuses India of pursuing a dangerous arms race in South Asia with the largescale production of such missiles.
-------- korea
North Korea's 'Open Door'
New York Times
September 24, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/24/opinion/24TUE4.html
North Korea has taken a significant step toward reducing its isolation by starting a reconciliation with Japan, an enemy for many decades. Given North Korea's frightening arsenal and medieval view of the world, this was a welcome development at a tense time.
A summit meeting between Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader, and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan took place last week in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. The way was cleared for the accord when the reclusive Mr. Kim admitted that his country had kidnapped Japanese citizens in the 1970's and 1980's. Of the 11 Japanese listed as missing, Mr. Kim said 6 have died. He is said to have apologized and claimed that the abductions were carried out by overzealous security forces, who apparently wanted the Japanese to teach North Koreans how to behave like Japanese, probably for purposes of espionage.
Any agreement with Japan has broad implications for the United States, which is why Mr. Koizumi consulted first with President Bush. After initially opposing Clinton administration steps to try to get a rapprochement with North Korea, the Bush administration has more recently supported both Japan and South Korea in such an effort. Their cooperation has yielded impressive progress, including steps to put into effect a nuclear accord in which North Korea accepts aid in meeting its energy needs in return for full inspections of its nuclear facilities.
Mr. Koizumi should use the negotiation process to prod North Korea, whose people are starving and which desperately needs foreign aid and investment, to take other steps to reduce tensions. These include withdrawing some of the more than one million North Korean soldiers deployed near the border with South Korea and pulling back the weapons aimed at both South Korea and Japan. At the meeting in Pyongyang, Mr. Kim said the "door is open for dialogue" with the United States and agreed to extend North Korea's moratorium on missile tests. But Mr. Kim needs to do more, including actions to restrict the export of weapons and nuclear technology to other countries.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- new york
Nuclear Safety
New York Times
September 24, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/24/opinion/L24NUCL.html
To the Editor:
"Indian Point 2 to Test Safety Amid Criticism" (news article, Sept. 23) indicated that Indian Point workers would have a practice evacuation drill on Tuesday. The exercise will involve hundreds of federal, state and local representatives.
If the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission are serious about testing the viability of evacuation plans, they should involve the entire community, not just workers.
They'll soon see that the roads around Indian Point can't handle the traffic, that most Westchester residents have no idea what to do if Indian Point melts down, that some bus drivers won't respond and that local officials and school leaders (including me) have not been adequately briefed by county officials about our responsibilities.
As hundreds of thousands of people will be involved if an evacuation is ever ordered, it's important that those who will have to evacuate get the opportunity to practice first.
PAUL FEINER
Greenburgh, N.Y.,
Sept. 23, 2002
The writer is the Greenburgh town supervisor.
--
To the Editor:
Re "Nuclear Plant Safety" (letter, Sept. 17):
Nuclear industry cheerleaders, regulators and Congressional sycophants routinely refer to nuclear reactor security as "robust" and "formidable," saying it "meets exacting federal standards" and demonstrates "significant security protections."
We have never seen anyone demonstrate that these standards are sufficiently stringent to deter terrorist assault. Indeed, the lesson from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's own "force on force" tests of the 1990's is clear: a team of four individuals, armed only with light weapons and having informed the nuclear reactor site in advance when they were coming, were sufficient to defeat reactor security nearly 50 percent of the time. We fail to see how this protects the public and the environment.
DAVID A. KRAFT
Director, Nuclear Energy Information Service
Evanston, Ill., Sept. 17, 2002
-------- south dakota
S.D. Missile Site to Become Museum
September 24, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Minuteman-Park.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The deadly drama underlying the Cold War will be relived in an old nuclear missile site in South Dakota where parents and kids will be able to see how the end of the world could have begun.
National Park Service officials will be interpreting the still-fresh history of the tense struggle between communism and democracy at the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site near Wall, S.D.
At a ceremony Friday, the Air Force will hand over the Delta Nine Launch Facility to the Interior Department. Craig Manson, the assistant interior secretary overseeing the National Park Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service, was once a launch control officer there.
In an interview Monday, Manson said opening the old missile site to the public would help keep alive memories of the Cold War, a defining tension in the lives of his generation.
``The fact that here we are in 2002 turning our most powerful weapon system into a national park, while there are people in other parts of the world that are creating and hiding weapons of mass destruction -- it goes to show the difference between America and other nations in the world. It illustrates who's truly dedicated to the cause of peace, and who is not,'' he said.
Since those days in the late 1970s, when Manson was in his early 20s, he has thought a lot about the deactivated Minuteman II intercontinental ballistic missile silo, the only one that remains from about 150 that once operated in western South Dakota. Even as a park, the site will remain subject to outside inspectors under an arms reduction treaty.
``Popular mythology talks about pushing a button, but it's actually a key, actually two keys. I don't know that people will be allowed to turn the keys, but at some point they will be allowed to go into the launch control center and see the keys, see where the keys fit,'' he said.
After the Soviet Union collapsed and the first President Bush took the ICBM sites off alert, most of them were destroyed to comply with the U.S.-Russia Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.
Lisbeth Gronlund, a physicist and nuclear arms control expert with the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Mass., said the missile site would help the public grasp some of the more frightening aspects of the nation's nuclear weapons policy.
``It will really be kind of stunning to be able to see these things,'' she said. ``There's almost something surreal about it, and this makes it more real. Probably people's impressions about this, to the extent that they have one, is based on movies.''
On the Net:
National Park Service: http://www.nps.gov
Union of Concerned Scientists: http://www.ucsusa.org/index.html
-------- us politics
Dems Look to Temper Bush Resolution
By Jim Abrams
Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, September 24, 2002; 7:09 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A61985-2002Sep24?language=printer
WASHINGTON -- Democrats continued to resist giving President Bush all the powers he wants to wage war against Iraq, and one senior Republican said some give-and-take is necessary. "I still remain," said House Majority Leader Dick Armey, "the toughest sell in this town."
Both parties promised prompt action and a broad consensus on a resolution authorizing the president to use force if necessary to eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and remove Saddam Hussein from power. But finding the proper wording for the resolution was proving elusive.
Democrats pushed for moderation of a draft proposal the White House sent to Congress last week, saying it diminished the need for international action in dealing with the problem of Iraq and was overly broad in giving the president authority to use force to bring security to the region around Iraq.
Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., said there was wide support among Democrats for a more multinational approach to reducing Iraq's threats to the world.
"I can't believe any member of Congress with good conscience could give such a broad delegation of authority to any president," said Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill.
Two House Democrats, Jim McDermott of Washington and David Bonior of Michigan, said they would leave Wednesday for a weekend visit to Iraq.
President Bush said he was confident Democrats would support him.
"I believe you'll see, as we work to get a strong resolution out of Congress, that a lot of Democrats are willing to take the lead when it comes to keeping the peace," he told reporters.
On Tuesday, armed services and foreign relations committees offered their suggestions to leaders from both parties, who in turn were negotiating with White House officials on how the resolution should be worded. The House International Relations Committee offered a formal document making clear that the United Nations should be involved in ensuring regional peace and security.
Armey, R-Texas, one of the few Republicans to publicly express doubts about going to war against Iraq, said it was normal that the president sought "maximum latitude" in his original proposal. Armey said he was confident the two sides ultimately would "come out of the process with a very broad consensus."
Armey said he met Tuesday with Vice President Dick Cheney and expected to meet later this week with Defense Secretary Donald. H. Rumsfeld and CIA Director George Tenet to hear why they thought it was necessary to debilitate Saddam. "I am still not prepared to say how I will vote on the resolution when it is brought to the floor," Armey said.
Earlier Tuesday, a former Iraqi nuclear physicist who defected in 1994 told a House hearing that he did not believe Iraq was turning to the black market for nuclear materials, as feared, to gain a nuclear capability within months.
"Iraq's program is more serious," Khidhir Hamza told a House Government Reform subcommittee. "It is meant to produce an arsenal of nuclear weapons, not just one," a process that could take two or three years, he said.
Democratic Rep. Janice Schakowsky of Illinois asked the panel why the administration was focusing on Iraq and not other insecure nuclear facilities around the globe. "By concentrating our efforts on Iraq, it is getting harder to convince the world that this is just about weapons of mass destruction, not domestic politics or oil or revenge."
Durbin also asked whether it was "White House strategy to drag this debate out indefinitely to get this as close to the election as possible so the White House ... does not have to face the reality of an economy that is flat on its back."
"This is a serious deal," Armey said on Democratic claims the White House was trying to avert attention from the faltering economy before the election. "You are talking about war and peace, national security. I am personally not capable of looking at that through a political prism."
----
How hawks captured the White House
When the Soviet threat vanished, the purpose of American foreign policy seemed to go with it - until September 11 and Iraq's regime
Frances FitzGerald
Tuesday September 24, 2002
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,797594,00.html
The Bush administration has broken with the internationalist premises that have been accepted by every other administration since the second world war - with the exception of Reagan's first. The lack of debate over foreign policy since September 11 has obscured the rift, but to recall Bush senior's approach to foreign policy is to see just how radical the change is - and to raise the question of how it came about only eight years later.
A conservative and a "realist" who was much influenced by the approach of Kissinger and Nixon, especially in their dealings with China and the Soviet Union, George Bush senior was slow to grasp the revolutionary nature of Gorbachev's reforms and the importance of conflicts within states, such as those in Afghanistan and Yugoslavia. But he was a confirmed multilateralist, who believed in respecting international law.
The contrast between the approaches of Bush senior and Bush junior is all the more remarkable since many of those who served in national security posts in the first Bush administration now serve in the second. But the differences between father and son correspond to the differences between the Republican party of Eisenhower and Nixon and the more ideologically coherent Republican party that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, its strength in the south and the south-west.
When I talked with him a few months ago, Brent Scowcroft (national security adviser under Bush senior) pointed to a more specific reason for the difference between the foreign policies of father and son. Asked about the ideological conflict between Colin Powell and others in the administration, he said: "That's as much an accident of personalities as anything else." He added: "We used to have strong arguments and many differences of perspective, but they were all kept inside the administration. The president decided, and that was it. So it's partly a question of how conflict is handled. It's more public now."
Scowcroft, in his polite way, was saying that Bush junior, who came to the presidency without any knowledge of foreign affairs, could not make decisions or manage dissent as his more knowledgeable and experienced father had. He was also talking about another accident of personalities. In A World Transformed, the memoir that he and Bush senior published in 1998, Scowcroft makes it clear that while Bush senior's top advisers had different perspectives, the fundamental division lay between the defence secretary Dick Cheney and everyone else.
By his account, and by those of others in the administration, Cheney never trusted Gorbachev. In 1989 Cheney maintained that Gorbachev's reforms were largely cosmetic and that, rather than engage with the Soviet leader, the US should stand firm and keep up cold war pressures. In September 1991 Cheney argued that the administration should take measures to speed the breakup of the Soviet Union - even at the risk of encouraging violence and incurring long-term Russian hostility. He opposed the idea, which originated with the chairman of the joint chiefs, Colin Powell, that the US should withdraw its tactical nuclear weapons from Europe and South Korea. As a part of the preparations for the Gulf war he asked Powell for a study on how small nuclear weapons might be used against Iraqi troops in the desert.
Loyalty
But Cheney always disagreed in a thoroughly agreeable fashion. In Congress, where he had served for 10 years, he was thought of as a moderate even though he had a hard-line conservative voting record. Bush senior's advisers respected him for his intelligence, his ability to work quietly to build a consensus, and, above all, his loyalty. In 1998 Cheney became one of Bush junior's foreign policy advisers and, two years later, his running mate. The choice was unconventional, but many, including his father's advisers, thought it useful to have Cheney, with his knowledge of Washington and experience in international affairs, backing up the insouciant Prince Hal of the family.
As Bush's senior adviser, Cheney exercised great influence over appointments. Colin Powell had long been Bush's choice for secretary of state; Condoleezza Rice, his tutor in such matters as the location of Kosovo, was his choice for national security adviser. But after the election most of the other national security posts remained to be filled. Eventually Bush chose Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney's Washington mentor in the late 1970s and his friend for more than 30 years, as defence secretary.
In the job for the second time, Rumsfeld took as his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, the dean of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins, who had last served in government as Cheney's undersecretary of defence for policy. In February 1992 Wolfowitz and Zalmay Khalilzad of the NSC staff - currently a member of Bush junior's NSC staff and his envoy to Afghanistan - completed a project, initiated by Cheney two years before, to articulate America's political and military mission in the post-cold war world. The document, a draft of what was called a defence planning guidance, was leaked to the New York Times in early March 1992. By the Times's account, the policy paper asserted that America's mission was to ensure that no rival superpower emerged in any part of the world. The United States could do this, it proposed, by convincing other advanced industrialised countries that the US would defend their legitimate interests and by maintaining sufficient military might. The United States, the document stated, "must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role". It described Russia and China as potential threats and warned that Germany, Japan and other industrial powers might be tempted to rearm and acquire nuclear weapons if their security was threatened, and this might start them on the way to competition with the United States.
The authors of the document therefore recommended that the Pentagon take measures, including the use of force, if necessary, to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in such countries as North Korea, Iraq and some of the former Soviet republics.
The document made no mention of collective action through the UN, and while acknowledging that military coalitions could be useful, it maintained, "we should expect future coalitions to be ad hoc assemblies, often not lasting beyond the crisis being confronted..." This was hardly Bush senior's view of America's role in the world. The US was to dominate the globe and to deter all competition, whatever it cost.
In his memoir My American Journey, published in 1995, Colin Powell recalls that Cheney and Wolfowitz had made Bush senior's Pentagon policy staff "a refuge for Reagan-era hardliners". In the Bush junior administration Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz have done the same for the Pentagon's entire top civilian staff. To Wolfowitz's former position they appointed Douglas Feith, who in the Reagan administration had been a protégé of its leading hawk, Richard Perle. (Perle was appointed chairman of the defence policy board, which advises the Pentagon.) Out of office in the 1990s Feith had worked to stop the ratification of the chemical weapons convention negotiated by Bush senior. In 1996 he and Perle wrote an advisory paper for the new Likud prime minister of Israel, Benyamin Netanyahu, calling upon him to "make a clean break" with the Oslo peace process and reassert Israel's claim to the West Bank and Gaza. When Netanyahu did not oblige, Feith published an article calling upon Israel to reoccupy the territories controlled by the Palestinian Authority. "The price in blood would be high," he wrote, but it would be a necessary form of "detoxification-the only way out of Oslo's web."
To Perle's old job as assistant secretary of defence for international security Rumsfeld appointed JD Crouch, who had served in Bush senior's defence department but who later opposed the chemical weapons convention and criticised Bush senior's decision to withdraw tactical nuclear weapons from South Korea. In 1995 Crouch, as a private citizen, had advocated a military strike against North Korea's nuclear plants and missile facilities - apparently accepting the risk of war on the Korean peninsula.
Internationalists
Colin Powell, for his part, brought into the state department some like-minded internationalists, such as Richard Armitage and Richard Haas. But as undersecretary for arms control and international affairs, the number three post in the department, he had, at the insistence of Cheney, to appoint John R Bolton, a protégé of Senator Jesse Helms and a self-proclaimed unilateralist. "There is no such thing as the United Nations," Bolton said on one occasion. "There is an international community that can be led by the only real power left in the world, and that is the United States, when it suits our interests and when we can get others to go along."
What had been a minority position in the first Bush administration had become a majority position in the second. But then it had become a majority position in the Republican party as well, and Bush junior had given voice to its basic elements when he made his bid for the Republican nomination in 1999. In a major speech on defence at the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina - reportedly prepared with the help of Wolfowitz - he said: "For America this is a time of unrivalled military power, economic promise and cultural influence. It is in Franklin Roosevelt's words 'the peace of overwhelming victory'." Both in this speech and in a foreign policy speech that same year Bush spoke of the virtues of democracy and free enterprise but, unlike his father, made no mention of the rule of law.
What is most curious about these speeches is the combination of triumphalism and almost unmitigated pessimism about the rest of the world. China was becoming a "strategic competitor" and an "espionage threat to our country". Russia, whose thousands of unsecured nuclear weapons presented the threat of an accidental launch or nuclear theft, might revert to imperialism. That China and Russia might get together was another dire possibility. "On the Eurasian landmass," Bush junior said, "our vision is that no great power, or coalition of powers, dominates or endangers our friends." In the Citadel speech his list of threats included plutonium merchants, crime syndicates, car bombers, cyberterrorists, drug cartels, biological, chemical, and nuclear terrorism, and ICBMs in North Korea. In his inaugural address he said nothing about foreign affairs but simply warned "the enemies of liberty" that the US would "meet aggression and bad faith with resolve and strength."
On one occasion during the campaign Bush junior confessed that he really didn't know who the enemy was. "When I was coming up, with what was a dangerous world," he said, "we knew exactly who the 'they' were. It was us versus them, and it was clear who the them were. Today we're not so sure who the they are, but we know they're there." In a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations this February Cheney admitted that before September 11 he had been similarly puzzled. "When America's great enemy suddenly disappeared," he said, "many wondered what new direction our foreign policy would take. We spoke, as always, of long-term problems and regional crises throughout the world, but there was no single, immediate, global threat that any roomful of experts could agree upon." He added, "All of that changed five months ago. The threat is known and our role is clear now."
What Cheney was saying was that the main purpose of American foreign policy was to confront an enemy -and that a worthy successor to the Soviet Union had finally emerged, in the form of international terrorism.
A conservative thinktank report on US nuclear planning and arms control, issued as the administration took office, argued that the United States faced an unpredictable world, one potentially more dangerous than that of the cold war, and that nuclear arms control treaties hindered America's flexibility to adapt its nuclear forces to future threats. "Washington," they wrote, "cannot know today whether Russia, or for that matter China, will be neutral, friend, foe, or part of a hostile alliance in the future."
Implicit in the report is the assumption that the world is a Hobbesian place in which national interests never coincide and where the security of the United States can be assured only by unfettered autonomy and its ability to deploy superior military force.
In January of this year the defence department completed its nuclear posture review (NPR), a reappraisal of US nuclear policy, and when assistant defence secretary JD Crouch briefed reporters on the still-classified document, it was evident that the thinktank report had become the blueprint for the administration's nuclear weapons policy. "We have a situation," Crouch said, "where the United States may face multiple potential opponents, but we're not sure who they might be." Leaked in part a couple of months later, the NPR made clear what the Pentagon really meant by "strategic reductions": the warheads would be taken off their launchers and some of both would be stored as a "responsive force" that could be redeployed if necessary. "In the event that US relations with Russia significantly worsen in the future, the US may need to revive its nuclear force levels and posture," the NPR said.
In testimony to Congress on the strategic arms treaty this July Rumsfeld spoke of the possibility of "the sudden emergence of a hostile peer competitor on par with the old Soviet Union" and later said: "We are entering a period of surprise and uncertainty, when the sudden emergence of unexpected threats will be an increasingly common feature of our security environment." As if to prove his point, he went on: "We were surprised on September 11 - and, let there be no doubt, we will be surprised again."
Rumsfeld could hardly have made such an argument before September 11, for if anything is certain in international affairs, it is that Russia, with an economy smaller than that of the Netherlands, could not enter a Soviet-style strategic arms race with the United States by 2012; nor could any other nuclear power or combination of them. But now Rumsfeld deploys the argument to justify practically everything he and his top officials want. In a recent article in foreign affairs he called - among other things - for a defence for US space assets, an undersea warfare capability, and missile defences. "Our challenge," he wrote, "is to defend our nation against the unknown, the uncertain, the unseen, and the unexpected."
In mid-March the vice-president Dick Cheney travelled to the Middle East to elicit support for a US campaign to end the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. US forces were still engaged in Afghanistan and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had become more violent than ever. The Arab leaders Cheney visited told him that, under current circumstances, a US attack on Iraq would be seen as a war between the West and Islam and, in view of Arab sympathies with the Palestinians, they could endorse it only at the price of destabilising their own regimes. Two weeks later, at an Arab League meeting in Beirut, Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and other leaders declared that an attack on Iraq would be a threat to the national security of all Arab states. At the same time they proposed a peace plan that - for the first time - included a full normalisation of Arab relations with Israel. Abdullah told Bush he would put pressure on Arafat if Bush put pressure on Sharon to work toward an agreement.
Colin Powell considered the Saudi offer encouraging, and Bush endorsed it in a speech on April 4. Other officials, however, disagreed, and when Powell went to the Middle East at the president's request, Sharon ignored him. In the internal debate that followed within the administration, Cheney and Rumsfeld argued, as they had before, that the US had to be consistent in fighting terrorism. It followed that the administration should support Sharon, just as it had been doing since Bush took office.
The president and other officials have repeatedly said that Saddam Hussein must go because he has links to terrorism and because he is developing weapons of mass destruction. But they have not yet clearly explained why they give the Iraqi regime priority over all the other threats to US national security. On the one hand, they have not shown that al-Qaida depends in any significant way on Saddam Hussein. On the other hand, a part of their rationale for maintaining a large nuclear force is that it deters states like Iraq from using their most lethal weapons. The result is that more than a few people in this country have the fanciful notion that the whole thing has something to do with Bush's relationship to his father.
Rhetoric
Bush has made no connection between his planning for an attack on Iraq and his withdrawal from the Middle East peace process - except to say that "moral clarity" requires an attack on terror in all of its forms. In Bush's rhetoric Saddam Hussein is a direct threat to the United States. However, for years before the Bush administration took office Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were calling for his overthrow on the grounds that he posed a danger to the region, and in particular to Israel.
In a panel discussion at the Washington Institute in June 1999 Wolfowitz made his view about Iraq's connection to the peace process somewhat clearer. Bush senior's invasion of Iraq, he said, had not only averted the real possibility of a nuclear war between Iraq and Israel but "Yasser Arafat was forced to make peace once radical alternatives [he could turn to] like Iraq had disappeared." Currently, he continued, "the containment of Iraq is failing. The United States needs to accelerate Saddam's demise if it truly wants to help the peace process."
The debate on Iraq has only begun. In congressional hearings experts from outside the government have raised the possibility that a war would lead to a Palestinian revolt in Jordan and uprisings elsewhere in the Middle East, as well as oil shortages and terrorist attacks on Americans. Other experts have warned that if the US manages to unseat Saddam Hussein, US forces will have to stay in Iraq for years. At some point Bush will have to explain not just why Saddam Hussein is evil but what he envisions for the future of Iraq and the rest of the Middle East. If Bush really thinks that a war in Iraq at this point will help Israel and further other US strategic objectives in the region, he must make a detailed case. He should also tell us about the risks.
A longer version of this article appeared in the New York Review of Books. Copyright (c) 2002 NYRev
· Frances FitzGerald is author of Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War. Her most recent book is Vietnam: Spirits of the Earth.
-------- MILITARY
-------- africa
U.S. Troops Sent to West Africa
By ALEXANDRA ZAVIS
Associated Press Writer
SEPTEMBER 25, 2002 07:09 ET
http://wire.ap.org/?FRONTID=AFRICA&SLUG=IVORY%2dCOAST
ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast (AP) - U.S. troops landed in West Africa on Wednesday to protect Americans pinned down by fighting in Ivory Coast, including 100 schoolchildren in a city that government troops have vowed to wrest away from rebels behind a bloody coup attempt.
U.S. military planes arrived before dawn at the international airport in the capital of neighboring Ghana, authorities at Accra's Kotoka International Airport said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Nearly 200 American troops, three C-130 cargo planes and one other plane, and equipment were being deployed, Ghanaian Foreign Ministry officials said. The Accra airport was expected to be used as a staging area for any U.S. rescue missions.
But Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said that for now Americans in Ivory Coast were not in danger. ``At the moment, things are at an acceptable level,'' he told reporters at a NATO meeting in Warsaw, Poland. ``At the moment we see no threat to a small element of Americans. It's not a serious problem.''
Rebel soldiers riding commandeered vehicles could be seen Wednesday cruising the streets of Bouake, one of two cities they have held since their failed coup Thursday, residents said by telephone. The day before, heavy firing broke out in the city, Ivory Coast's second largest, where the boarding school for American and other children is located.
President Laurent Gbagbo has promised a full-scale battle to force the rebels out of Bouake, home to a half million people, and the other rebel-held city, Korhogo, a northern opposition stronghold. Military leaders say only concern for civilians has stalled the assault. At least 270 people died in the uprising's first days.
French troops also moved closer to Bouake, ready to snatch their nationals and other Westerners if the assault begins.
In Korhogo, rebels armed with guns and rocket launchers went house to house, rounding up any paramilitary police and soldiers and confiscating their weapons.
Government forces have been moving on Bouake, 220 miles north of the commercial capital, Abidjan, though the city was quiet overnight after heavy exchanges of gun and artillery fire Tuesday afternoon.
There were contradictory reports about the fighting. Rebels claimed to have repelled an assault by loyalist troops on an officer's training college. The government army claimed to be on the streets of Bouake.
``We don't know what is going on because we are all inside,'' said one frightened man reached by telephone Tuesday.
During similar gunfire Monday night in Bouake, rebels climbed the walls of the boarding school for missionary children and fired from its grounds.
The school is home to about 200 foreigners, including about 100 American children ranging in age from infants to 12-year-olds, as well as American staffers, church officials say.
No general evacuation of Americans is planned, the State Department said Tuesday.
``Forces have arrived in the region to be in a closer position to provide for the safety and security of the American citizens in the Ivory Coast in wake of the recent civil unrest,'' Maj. Bill Bigelow, a spokesman for U.S. European Command in Stuttgart, Germany, said.
An American expeditionary force and British troops already were on the ground in Ivory Coast, Ghanaian and French military and government officials said. Britain sent eight soldiers to Ivory Coast to work with embassy officials on plans to evacuate British nationalists if necessary, the Ministry of Defense said from London.
The uprising - led by a core group of 750-800 ex-soldiers angry over their dismissal from the army for suspected disloyalty - poses Ivory Coast's worst crisis since its first-ever coup in 1999.
Ivory Coast had been West Africa's anchor of stability and prosperity until a 1990s economic downturn, followed by the shattering 1999 coup.
About 20,000 French and thousands of other Westerners made their homes there. None are yet known to have been hurt in the five days of fighting.
Far more exposed are immigrants from neighboring Muslim countries, many of whom have already been attacked, arrested or seen their homes burned by paramilitary police, as the uprising sparks deadly rivalries between the mainly Muslim north and the predominantly Christian south.
The government has repeatedly accused the country's northern, Muslim-based opposition and unspecified foreign countries - widely assumed to include predominantly Muslim Burkina Faso - of fomenting the unrest that has overtaken the country since the 1999 military takeover.
The accusations have sparked clashes between opposition backers and the government's predominantly southern, Christian following.
The ex-soldiers behind the latest coup attempt are believed linked to Gen. Robert Guei, the former junta leader who took power in 1999, and is accused by the current civilian government of organizing the latest attempt.
But the soldiers have also won recruits from northern Muslims hostile to Gbagbo's government, taking refuge in cities dominated by northern, Muslim tribes.
Guei himself was killed by loyalist paramilitaries in the uprising's first hours. His family and aides have denied his involvement, as have some rebels.
-------- arms sales
U.S. Halts Aid to Ukraine in Iraq Radar Dispute
Reuters
Tuesday, September 24, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57894-2002Sep23.html
The United States has blocked tens of millions of dollars in aid to Ukraine because of suspicions that the former Soviet republic may have sold a military radar system to Iraq that could help bring down U.S. planes, a senior U.S. official said yesterday.
The United States previously said it had no credible evidence that the Kolchuga system had been sold to Iraq. But that changed when the administration received information suggesting the Kolchuga may have reached Iraq, with implications for U.S. and British pilots patrolling "no-fly" zones there, the official said.
"We have informed the Ukrainian government and NATO allies that we have reached this assessment, that there has been a pause in certain types of assistance and that a policy review is underway," the official said on condition of anonymity.
The official said $55 million that had been set aside for Ukraine in fiscal 2002 had been put on hold and further measures were being considered. Ukraine denies supplying arms to Iraq.
The decision partly vindicated Mikola Melnichenko, a former bodyguard of President Leonid Kuchma, who has said he recorded about 1,000 hours of conversations in the president's office. Melnichenko has since won political asylum in the United States.
The official said the Justice Department had authenticated a section of Melnichenko's recording in which an aide told Kuchma that Iraq wanted to buy four Kolchuga systems.
-------- asia
Critical ally calling, with baggage
Kyrgyz president faces harsh criticism on rights deterioration
MSNBC September 24, 2002
http://www.msnbc.com/news/811794.asp
Photo Bush/Akayev:
http://www.msnbc.com/news/1637386.jpg
KYRGYZSTAN, a small, landlocked Central Asian republic, which became independent in 1991, has few natural resources and has struggled to reform its post-communist economy. The country is buried in foreign debt, and 60 percent of its 5 million citizens live below the poverty line. The government hasn't managed to build a professional army, a condition more associated with failed states like Somalia.
Kyrgyzstan has also faced real security threats. Islamic extremists with ties to the Taliban in Afghanistan have conducted raids across its border as recently as 2000.
So President Akayev enthusiastically stepped up when the United States came looking for regional support in its war on terrorism after the Sept. 11 attacks. Now, a base built at a former civilian airport at Manas, Kyrgyzstan, is a busy logistical hub supporting the U.S.-led anti-terrorism operations in Afghanistan.
There are at least 1,900 troops from eight countries at the base, which accommodates fighter jets, C-130 cargo planes and the Boeing KC-135 tanker. It was leased to to the United States for a year, but President Akayev has expressed flexibility on a possible extension. Kyrgyzstan was the only nation in the region to offer unlimited access for aircraft flying combat as well as humanitarian and search-and-rescue missions.
The Kyrgyz Republic has been "a critical regional partner" in the war on terrorism, according to J.D. Crouch, assistant secretary of defense for national security.
Kyrgyz cooperation has helped bump up U.S. non-military aid and military aid to the country. Non-military aid jumped from $23.1 million in fiscal year 2001 to a total of $42 million in 2002, including annual and supplemental budgets. Military and security assistance has also jumped.
Meanwhile, the United States has also lifted self-imposed restrictions on weapons sales to Kyrgyzstan and its neighbors.
REPUTATION IN DOUBT
As it happens, the United States is finally focusing on Kyrgyzstan as the country's reputation falls apart. Once held up as an island of democracy amid a region full of dictators, Kyrgyzstan is sinking into the sea of autocratic rule.
"Over the past year, since Sept. 11 and since the time troops were deployed, the human rights situation has continuously deteriorated," says Rachel Denber, head of the Europe and Central Asia program at Human Rights Watch. The group called on the Bush administration to use its leverage with Akayev to improve the situation.
Akayev, an engineer, rose to prominence through the Kyrgyz Communist Party, emerging as president of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Kyrgyzstan in 1990. After the Soviet Union broke up, he ran unopposed for the presidency of the newly independent state in 1991, consolidated his power through a referendum in 1994 and then was re-elected in 1995.
The real trouble started in 2000, when Akayev ran again, despite a constitutional provision limiting the head of state to two terms. Three of his challengers were brought up on criminal charges and disqualified from the race, including Feliks Kulov, who remains in prison to this day.
In March, protesters took to the streets over the case of a popular member of parliament who was arrested - an arrest that the U.S. State Department agreed was politically motivated. In a confrontation with the unarmed protesters, police opened fire and killed five people.
Rights groups say that a series of manipulations of the law, including civil and defamation suits, have aimed to keep human rights activists, political opposition and media on the run. Parliamentary powers have been eroded, as more authority has been transferred to the presidency.
In a related trend, the government of Kyrgyzstan is broadly targeting Muslim groups that may present a political challenge.
Among those in the crosshairs in Kyrgyzstan are the Hizb ut-Tahrir, the Party of Liberation - a strict Islamic group that nonetheless preaches nonviolence.
But according to Denber, with the exception of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which launched the armed incursions into Kyrgyzstan in 1999 and 2000, there are virtually no armed militant groups in Kyrgyzstan.
Human Rights Watch says Kyrgyzstan appears to be following the footsteps of the Uzbek government, where thousands of Muslims characterized as extremists have been locked up with little recourse - a process Human Rights Watch refers to as "Uzbekification" PRESSURE AND PROMISES
In meetings at the White House on Monday, Bush and Powell told Akayev that his nation's support of the U.S. war on terror does not give him a green light to undermine democracy.
White House spokesman Sean McCormack said Bush met with Akayev for 45 minutes and "talked about the importance of political and economic reforms in Kyrgyzstan, including human rights."
"The president commented that building on recent progress on these fronts was critical in Kyrgyzstan's future development," the spokesman said.
Akayev, who met separately with Bush and Powell, said he discussed "the domestic developments in the Kyrgyz Republic and the steps we are taking toward the promotion of democratization."
Akayev also promised in a speech at the United Nations that he would not run for re-election in 2005. CRISIS OF CONFIDENCE
"The political fragility in Kyrgyzstan, where we have our largest military presence in the region, has become much more apparent in recent months," testified Martha Crouch of the Carnegie Endowment before a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee in June. "It is really unclear how the regime of President Akayev will be able to re-establish political trust."
Uzbekistan basks in U.S. spotlight
"If nothing is done - or the United States doesn't take advantage of this opportunity - then certainly the perception will form in the Kyrgyz public that U.S. is propping up a corrupt government," warned Denber.
Washington is fighting that interpretation of events. A substantial portion of U.S. non-military aid to Kyrgyzstan is earmarked for building civil society, education and grass-roots organizations. According to the State Department it is also allotting money to the support of Kyrgyzsta''n's parliament, which has acted as something of a check on the power of the president.
The U.S. ambassador to Kyrgyzstan was among the most vocal critics of a law restricting printing press equipment, which the government later repealed. Some of the funding to the country is being used to set up an independent printer for use by independent newspapers and publishers. But it is not at all clear that moves afoot today can overcome the crisis of confidence on the ground.
Kari Huus is an international writer and editor for MSNBC.com. The Associated Press contributed to this report.
----
Uzbekistan basks in U.S. spotlight
But opponents decry silence over country's rights abuses
By Yonatan Pomrenze
SPECIAL TO MSNBC.COM,
Sept. 24, 2002
http://www.msnbc.com/news/811696.asp
FERGANA VALLEY, Uzbekistan Looking up from her hospital bed, Youldous managed one short phrase: "Thank God, thank America and thank Karimov." But the woman was wary of giving her last name, emblematic of the fear in the Fergana Valley, where President Islam Karimov, accused by human rights activists of repression, is trying to crush a radical Islamic movement and the United States is trying to win hearts and minds with an aid package.
THE FERGANA REGION in the Central Asian country's southeast has been an especially problematic area for Karimov, who has ruled Uzbekistan since independence in 1991, thanks to rigged elections and questionable referendums extending his term.
The outlawed Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan had an office in the Afghan capital of Kabul, which Afghan forces allied with Washington dismantled in November 2001. The nation has been a haven for independent Islamic thinking for hundreds of years. More recently, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a rebel group linked to al-Qaida that wants to replace the secular Uzbek government with a Taliban-style regime, has taken root in the Fergana Valley.
Using repressive measures that victims say include torture, the government's targeting of suspected hard-liners has gone far beyond Uzbeks proven to be involved in terrorist groups, say human rights officials.
"There is a government-directed campaign against independent Muslims in this country which leads to enormous abuses of human rights ... unlawful arrest, unfair trial to torture in pretrial detention," said Matilda Bogner of Human Rights Watch. "Anybody who shows a level of piousness can be a target of the government campaign against independent Muslims."
This includes men who grow beards and women who wear traditional head coverings, she said.
In its 2002 report on Uzbekistan, Human Rights Watch said at least 7,000 Uzbeks were imprisoned for their religious and political beliefs.
Karimov's restrictions on dissent and civil freedoms are emblematic of the tight grip Central Asian dictators have on the region. The leaders of Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan regularly appear on human rights watchdogs' lists of abusers. But since Sept. 11, Washington has brushed aside reports of rampant rights violations and embraced Central Asian leaders as partners in the war on terror.
AIRLIFTED AID WORTH MILLIONS In a recent example of U.S. interest in the region, a U.S. Air Force C-17 cargo plane filled with more than $50 million in government and private aid landed in Tashkent, the Uzbek capital. The final destination of much of the aid - medical supplies - was no coincidence: the Fergana Valley, where both the Uzbek and U.S. governments fear extremists are using the newly built ties between Tashkent and Washington, D.C., to further an anti-Western message to locals.
"This airlift to Fergana will help stop the undermining of the image of the government in the region," said Uzbekistan's ambassador to Washington, Shavkat Khamrakulov.
Closer to home, though, officials chose to spin the purpose of the aide differently. When asked to comment on Khamrakulov's statement, Deputy Prime Minister Hamidulla Karamtov responded, "We don't like using the word 'image' when talking about humanitarian aid. Humanitarian aid is from the heart, not about image."
The strategy appears to have worked. While it is hard to gauge the authenticity of locals' statements when they know the repercussions that could follow negative comments, the hospital staff and patients were talking of the great druzhba, or "friendship," between Uzbekistan and the United States.
"The new equipment will help us make a correct diagnosis and treat people more quickly," said Adhom Boborahimov, chief director of Fergana Hospital. "We wish to thank the United States and President Karimov." U.S. SUPPORT TIED TO ATTACKS
While the decrepit state of the hospitals in Fergana justifies the region's designation as a recipient of humanitarian aid, William B. Taylor, the State Department's coordinator of U.S. assistance to Europe and Eurasia, attributed the evolution of U.S.-Uzbek ties to the terrorist attacks on the United States. Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, Karimov gave the United States control of a strategic airbase in southern Uzbekistan.
"The relationship between the United States and Central Asia has been developing over the past 10 years, but over the past eight or nine months it has achieved a new threshold," Taylor said. "I can only imagine that this relationship will continue to develop as we continue to work together against common enemies and common problems."
When asked about the Uzbek government's human rights track record, Taylor said that "while there have been problems, there are signs that things are changing and that improvements are being made." Taylor cited the recent elimination of media censorship and the arrests of policemen accused of torture as two examples of improvement.
But some Uzbeks say such reforms hardly begin to address abuse problems. Five days after the U.S. aid arrived in Tashkent, a small protest by the Human Rights Society of Uzbekistan held outside the Ministry of Justice was broken up by police. An unmarked car sped up the cobblestone street to where the demonstration was being held, and police repeatedly hit the demonstrators when they tried to escape. LONELY CAMPAIGN
Activists say they are waging a lonely battle against the government, and suffering partly because of Washington's silence on human rights issues.
Two cases slowly making their way through Uzbek courts are testing Karimov's strong-arm policies, activists say.
Twenty-one-year-old Dilobar Hudoyberganova and 30-year-old Hakima Rasulova, two Uzbek women from different regions of the country, have no legal training but they are acting as defense lawyers for their brothers.
Both men are charged with undermining Uzbekistan's constitutional order and producing material constituting a threat to public security and public order.
Hudoyberganova says the only crime of her brother, Iskandar, was to "pray and study in a school funded with Arab money." If convicted, Iskandar could face the death penalty.
Rasulova's says her brother, Youldash Rasulov, arrested with three other men, was beaten in the head and genitals while in custody. While the other men signed forced confessions, Rasulova's brother refused and must stand trial.
Hudoyberganova says she is not optimistic that the new U.S.-Uzbek relationship will improve treatment for people like her brother. "These things are being done to Uzbek people by a fellow Uzbek. [Karimov] will only stop when the Uzbek nation tells him to stop, not because the United States wants him to." Yonatan Pomrenze is a freelance writer based in New York City.
-------- biological weapons
New Plan for Smallpox Attack
New York Times
September 24, 2002
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG with LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/24/national/24SMAL.html
WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 - Federal health officials today instructed states to prepare to vaccinate every American in the event of a biological attack using smallpox, and issued a detailed plan showing how each state could quickly inoculate as many as one million people in the first 10 days.
In releasing their most comprehensive smallpox preparedness plan to date, officials at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said publicly for the first time that even one case of smallpox might result in a nationwide program of voluntary vaccinations. That is in part because even a single case could be a harbinger of a larger outbreak and in part because even one case would undoubtedly spark panic and a clamor for vaccine.
"We want to step up preparedness," Julie Gerberding, the director of the disease control agency, said in an interview. "If there is actually exposure and risk, we want to be able to vaccinate quickly. If there is anxiety, we also want to do it quickly."
But the new guidance for states is far from encyclopedic, and experts complained that the center's 48-page document failed to answer questions about the timing, cost and logistical hurdles of preparing thousands of health professionals and volunteers to conduct mass vaccinations while keeping the public calm. Critics said a superficial plan could sap public confidence, worsening the effects of a smallpox crisis.
"It's putting a lot of responsibility in a short time on local clinics, which will be untested," said Caroline B. Hall, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Rochester's School of Medicine. "The quilt is only as good as the stitches. One tiny thread breaks, and the whole thing unravels."
Smallpox, which was eradicated worldwide two decades ago, is highly contagious and kills roughly a third of its victims, making it a potentially fearsome biological weapon. Officially, the virus is supposed to exist only in repositories in Moscow and the disease control center's headquarters in Atlanta, but experts have long suspected that some nations harbor secret stocks of smallpox to use as a biological weapon.
Today's release of the "Smallpox Vaccination Clinic Guide" comes as the United States is mobilizing for a possible attack on one of those nations, Iraq. Dr. Gerberding described this as "an unfortunate coincidence of timing," and said the guide was simply an update of a preparedness plan first issued two years ago, before the attacks on New York and the Pentagon and the subsequent anthrax attacks.
Bioterrorism experts said the administration's timing could not be ignored.
"They know the best time for Saddam to hit us, if he has the smallpox weapon, would be before we go in so he can terrify the American people," said an adviser to the Bush administration on smallpox policy. "In that case, it is definitely good to have these guidelines out there."
The plan does not specify what kind of attack would spur a mass vaccination campaign, or who would make the decision to initiate one. Agency officials said that absent a declaration of a national emergency by the president they would make the decision in consultation with state health officials.
The vaccine is one of the few that can work even if a person is already infected, and experts say it can protect people if given within four days of exposure to the virus.
The guide says up to 75 million doses of the nation's vaccine stockpile could be shipped in a single day and 280 million doses, enough to cover every American, in five to seven days.
The guidelines call for states to run 20 clinics 16 hours a day, an effort that the government estimates would require 4,680 public health workers and volunteers. Depending on the size and severity of the outbreak and where it is, the guidelines said more or fewer participating clinics could be needed. In state capitols around the country, health commissioners said they welcomed the advice but fretted about whether they would be able to carry it out.
In Maryland, Dr. Georges Benjamin, secretary of the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, said he had already told his staff to integrate the document into the existing bioterrorism preparedness plan.
"What is astounding is the number of people it would take to actually make this thing happen," Dr. Benjamin said. Asked if he could conduct a mass vaccination right away, he said, "We would do what we had to do, but it would be tough. I would hate to try to do this tomorrow."
There is no set timetable by which states must comply, Dr. Gerberding said, adding that the disease control agency hoped that states would conduct preparedness exercises as they develop their own plans.
Replete with flowcharts and checklists, the center's guide covers things like many security officers would be needed for each clinic to contain an unruly crowd (two per clinic per day) and how many minutes it would take people to fill out the medical history screening forms (two to three).
It deals with how clinics should handle people who refuse to be vaccinated and reminds states that they must plan for huge numbers of fatalities. "Plan for vaccinating mortuary personnel and their families," the guide says.
But the plan does not address the vexing, and politically delicate, issueof whether to vaccinate public health workers and emergency personnel before a terrorist attack.
The White House is weighing whether to permit such vaccinations. Tommy G. Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, has said a decision is expected by the end of this month.
Many public health experts say the precautionary vaccinations are necessary. "These people need to be protected," said Dr. Mohammed Akhter, the executive director of the American Public Health Association. "If we do not do that, and we just go to this plan, then these workers will be standing in line to get their vaccination rather than helping us" vaccinate others.
But the issue is complicated because the vaccine, made from a live virus, carries risks to patients with skin disorders and immune system deficiencies, including people with AIDS. And those who are vulnerable are endangered not only by being inoculated, but also by contact with others who have been inoculated.
"It's very hard to say without a clear threat who should and who shouldn't be vaccinated," said Tara O'Toole, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies. "Some analyses suggest that if you have ever had eczema or live with someone who has, you shouldn't get vaccinated, and by some estimates that eliminates 30 million Americans."
Dr. O'Toole said she thought the plan "makes great good sense," because it assumes that the nation must be ready to vaccinate a large number of people on short notice.
The center's previous smallpox preparedness plan revolved around a strategy in which public health workers would track down and vaccinate infected people and those who came into contact with them, working in concentric circles until the outbreak was contained.
The new document does not supplant the "ring vaccination" plan, Dr. Gerberding said. But Dr. Bill Bicknell, a professor of international health at Boston University critical of that strategy, said the guide was undoubtedly influenced by recent studies showing that ring vaccination would not contain a large outbreak. He said studies had found that if 1,000 people were infected in a large city like New York and ring vaccination were used, within three months there would be 300,000 cases of smallpox and 100,000 deaths and the epidemic would not be contained. But mass vaccination, he said, would contain such an epidemic in 40 to 45 days, with 1,500 cases and 500 deaths.
"If they do it correctly, with the proper planning, you can vaccinate millions and millions of people in a very short time," Dr. Bicknell said.
And he noted that until recently, a mass vaccination policy would have been implausible, because the nation did not have a big enough vaccine stockpile to carry it out.
Federal officials began building a smallpox vaccine stockpile after last year's anthrax attacks. Mr. Thompson, the health secretary, signed contracts with two companies to buy 209 million doses to add to the existing stockpile of vaccine, some of which dates to the 1950's. In the interim, studies have shown that the existing stockpile could be diluted.
Government officials have offered differing assessments of whether there is now enough vaccine for every American. In a recent interview, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said there was, adding, "If we had an emergency tomorrow, we'd be good to go."
During a briefing today to discuss the state guidance, Dr. Joseph Henderson, the center's associate director for terrorism preparedness, said, "On an emergency basis, if we saw smallpox tomorrow and felt the need to do mass vaccination, we could vaccinate 155 million individuals."
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If Smallpox Breaks Out:
Questions and Answers on the U.S. Vaccination Plan
New York Times
September 24, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/24/science/20020924_SMALLPOX.html
Routine smallpox vaccinations were discontinued in the United States in 1972, and the disease was declared eradicated in 1980. But now, faced with the possibility of a terrorist attack, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have adopted guidelines for a mass vaccination in the event of an outbreak.
The vaccine carries some risk of serious complications. But the C.D.C. says anyone who has definitely been exposed to the virus should be vaccinated. For those not yet exposed, or uncertain whether they were exposed, the picture would be more complicated. Following are questions and answers about the government's plan.
THE RISKS
What are the complications? In the 1960's the rates of severe side effects were about 12 cases of encephalitis and 39 cases of severe eczema per million vaccinations. The death rate from complications was about 1 per million. Milder but more common side effects include fever, sore arms and swollen lymph nodes.
What if I've already been vaccinated? It is not known how long a childhood vaccination will protect an adult, so the C.D.C. recommends vaccination for anyone who has definitely been exposed to the virus, regardless of age or medical condition.
Should anyone avoid vaccination? Health officials say some people should avoid the vaccine unless it is certain they have been exposed to smallpox. Children younger than 1 Infants have a greater risk of complications from the vaccine. About 42 children out of a million will experience brain swelling, which can lead to retardation or death. Small children are also more likely to touch their vaccination sore and then their eyes or mouth, causing new sores. Pregnant women The risk from smallpox vaccine to the fetus is relatively small, but health officials recommend that pregnant women who have not been exposed to smallpox wait until after childbirth. If they have been exposed, vaccination is recommended. People with weakened immune systems When smallpox was declared eradicated in 1980, little was known about immune-system problems, but experience with other serious infections suggests that such people will be more vulnerable, both to smallpox itself and to severe side effects from the vaccine. The C.D.C. says those who have not been exposed to smallpox ''should think about not being vaccinated or waiting to be vaccinated until you have completed any treatments that affect your immune system function." The waiting period can be as long as three months. People with skin conditions Vaccination creates a high risk for a severe skin condition called eczema vaccinatum, which has been compared to third-degree burns all over the body. People with a history of eczema should not be vaccinated unless they know they have been exposed to smallpox. Those with allergic reactions, severe burns, impetigo and chicken pox should wait until the condition clears up.
What precautions follow vaccination? The vaccinia virus in the vaccine is a cousin of the smallpox virus. Studies suggest that those who have been vaccinated rarely transmit it to anyone else. But they should not let anyone - especially children - touch the vaccination spot until it has healed and the scab has fallen off.
How are complications treated? Two treatments exist for severe side effects: vaccinia immune globulin, which is derived from the blood of donors vaccinated with smallpox vaccine, and cidofovir, an antiviral drug marketed as Vistide. At the moment, there is only enough globulin for about 600 patients, the number of serious complications expected from vaccinating five million people. More is being produced.
THE GOVERNMENT'S PLAN
What would happen first? The C.D.C. is playing down the possibility of a massive rush to vaccinate and anticipates providing vaccine to state and local health officials to carry out their own plans. But if a single case is confirmed "we will act as if the nation were under attack" unless it clearly stems from a lab accident, a C.D.C. doctor said. In an outbreak, the president could declare a health emergency and take control of the vaccination effort.
Would vaccination be mandatory? Under the new plan, vaccination is voluntary even if someone has definitely been exposed to the smallpox virus. But anyone who has been exposed and refuses vaccination may be involuntarily quarantined for up to 18 days.
Must I consent to be vaccinated? Because all smallpox vaccines are considered "investigational new drugs," written consent is required. The C.D.C. envisions showing all patients a video about the disease, vaccination and side effects. Medical personnel will then ask for a medical history to screen out those who should not be immunized.
Is there enough vaccine? About 155 million vaccine doses are available now, and enough for all 280 million Americans should be ready by year's end. The vaccine is not available through private doctors, only through the C.D.C. The procedures for using such drugs are complex, but would be streamlined in an emergency.
What are the logistics? Mass vaccination would require enormous resources. Clinics would take over schools, warehouses, stadiums. Huge numbers of workers would be needed to give injections, screen patients, get consent forms and control crowds. Isolated hospital wards would have to be set aside for smallpox victims and those suffering complications, and to quarantine those who refuse vaccinations.
What about the cost? The C.D.C. estimates $5 to $10 a patient, but that covers only the screening and injection itself.
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Guide for Mass Smallpox Vaccinations:
Recipe With Missing Ingredients
New York Times
September 24, 2002
NewsAnalysis
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/24/national/24ASSE.html
The new guidelines for states on mass smallpox vaccinations are most notable for what was omitted: unanswered and often unaddressed are critical questions like timing, costs, feasibility and the multiple problems of preparing health care workers to conduct vaccinations and communicating the plans to the public.
The guidelines fit with the Bush administration's recent optimistic pronouncements about the nation's readiness to confront germ terrorism. But experts questioned the plan's depth, breadth and realism, warning that superficiality can sap public confidence and, in a crisis, widen a health calamity.
Dr. Mohammed Akhter, executive director of the American Public Health Association, called the plan good but questioned its feasibility.
"This is a huge and massive undertaking, the likes of which we've never seen in our history," Dr. Akhter said. If a smallpox attack came tonight, he added, "There's no way the state and local health departments would be able to implement the plan."
Jonathan B. Tucker, a germ-weapons expert in Washington and author of "Scourge," a book on the smallpox threat, said public confidence in the plan was crucial for its success but judged the guidelines and their explanation by federal officials wanting. "A real potential problem is how you ensure that a vaccination process is orderly and people don't panic," Mr. Tucker said. "What we saw last fall with the anthrax attacks, which were much less threatening than a smallpox outbreak would be, was public hysteria. In the context of a vaccination campaign, that would be very problematic."
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta has reassured the public that federal officials are ready to respond. Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the centers, gave a wholehearted "yes" when asked if the agency was prepared to handle deadly germ attacks.
"C.D.C.'s level of preparedness is very high," she said in a recent statement. "We have the plans, the policies, the people, the products, and now we have the practice to make sure we are ready to respond."
In theory, during a deadly outbreak, mass smallpox vaccinations can protect many people: the vaccine is one of the few immunizations that can work even if a person is already infected. The vaccine can fully protect people if given within four days of exposure to the virus.
The new plan addresses only the most comprehensive response to an outbreak of the contagious disease, which kills about one in three victims. It does not address giving vaccinations to anyone before an attack or an outbreak, only afterward.
While the new plan gives a blueprint for how to carry out mass vaccinations, it says nothing about other precautions that, Dr. Gerberding said in an interview, would continue to be the first line of defense.
For instance, it is federal policy for health workers first to isolate infected patients and vaccinate people in close contact with them, forming a series of rings of immunization around an outbreak and barriers to its spread.
Federal officials said the smallpox plan, its third revision since last November, was not a new policy but simply a set of detailed recommendations for states on how to respond to a worst-case attack.
Dr. Mack Sewell, New Mexico's state epidemiologist, said achieving that level of readiness "is a matter of time, attention and resources," all of which are uncertain at this point.
Earlier this summer, federal officials said they would recommend "preattack" vaccination for up to 500,000 emergency workers, but state officials complain that they have received little or no guidance on the critical question of how much vaccine will be made available, and when, or who will have to be immunized ahead of time so they can carry out the mass vaccinations.
"They've really been bobbing and weaving on this," said Gary L. Simpson, director of the New Mexico infectious disease bureau. "We've looked at numbers that range from 500 up to 50,000 people, and that's just in New Mexico."
Federal officials said a plan for vaccinating emergency health care workers, after repeated delays, was to be made public by month's end.
Dr. Tucker, a germ-weapons expert in the Washington office of the Monterey Institute of International Studies, said the plan was haunted by uncertainties over whether the states had the financial wherewithal and the raw organizational skills to carry out mass vaccination quickly. Even though the federal government has given the states $918 million to build bioterror defenses, that may not be enough, Dr. Tucker said.
"These plans have to be exercised under realistic scenarios to make sure they would actually work in a crisis," he said.
Dr. Tucker added that good public communication, vital to the plan's success, seemed to be an afterthought. "It's very unclear whether C.D.C. or the states are developing the necessary communication strategy to prevent panic in the event of an outbreak," he said.
The centers' briefing yesterday on the plan, Dr. Tucker added, was strikingly lackluster. "It was very bureaucratic and full of jargon, so even when they were speaking to reporters they were not speaking in plain language," he said. "If they're going to communicate with the public, they're going to have to do it in a simpler, more direct way."
The plan says nothing about how ready the federal government is to distribute the rare vaccine to the states. For security reasons, much of that information is kept secret to deny terrorists details that might let them cripple defenses and make smallpox attacks more effective.
Federal officials assert that they can transport vaccine anywhere they need in a matter of hours, not days. But it is unclear where it is stored and how quickly it can in fact be distributed. The general goal is to be ready to vaccinate every American by the end of this year.
Acambis, a company in Cambridge, England, is making 209 million doses of the vaccine for the federal government but says it is barred from giving out all but sketchy details of its progress.
Last week, Acambis said it had produced the first smallpox vaccination kits for the federal stockpile but would not say how many were available. Each kit contains the dry vaccine, fluid for its dilution, needles for its administration and forms to inform the patient of its status as an investigational new drug.
Dr. Akhter, of the public health group, said an even bigger unknown was who in Washington would make the decision to begin mass vaccinations and how that decision would be communicated. "This would be a national emergency," he said. "Someone at the national level has to be designated to flip the switch."
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Medical Conditions Create Vulnerability to Vaccine
New York Times
September 24, 2002
By DENISE GRADY
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/24/national/24RISK.html
Many more people today are at risk of serious side effects from the smallpox vaccine than in the past, when vaccination was routine.
During the 1970's when smallpox vaccination in the United States was halted, AIDS was unheard of, organ transplants were uncommon and the rates of skin disorders like eczema were a third to a half of what they are now. Today, millions of people with those conditions have an increased risk of adverse reactions from the smallpox vaccine, along with many other people, including pregnant women, babies less than a year old, and patients with cancer and autoimmune diseases like lupus. Even healthy adults who had eczema only in childhood are considered to be at risk.
If a smallpox outbreak should occur and the government decided to offer vaccinations to the entire country, these vulnerable people would be endangered not just from being vaccinated, but also from being in close contact with someone else who had recently received the vaccine.
Serious reactions can be countered with a special medicine, vaccinia immune globulin or VIG, but the nation has only 600 to 700 doses. The government is trying to speed up production of VIG, said Joe Henderson, associate director for terrorism preparedness and response at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Dr. Donald Leung, an author of a recent article about the risks of smallpox vaccination, and head of the pediatric allergy and immunology division of the National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver, said: "It is a scary thought that only 600 to 700 doses of VIG are available. That certainly will not be enough if there really is a bioterrorist attack."
The article is in this month's issue of The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.
Adverse reactions occur because smallpox vaccine is made with a live virus, vaccinia, which is related to the smallpox virus. In people with skin conditions or immune disorders, vaccinia can multiply too much.
Mr. Henderson said the disease centers, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health were negotiating with a private company to produce a smallpox vaccine using a weaker form of vaccinia that would be safer for people at risk from the current vaccine.
Skin disorders alone would cause as many as half the people in the United States to be discouraged from getting vaccinated except in an emergency in which they had reason to believe they had been exposed to someone with the disease, Dr. Leung said. The estimate includes patients with the itchy rashes known as eczema and atopic dermatitis, and also family members who would endanger the patients by being vaccinated.
But people who have been exposed to smallpox, even those at high risk, should be vaccinated, doctors say, because the risk of dying from smallpox - about 30 percent - is greater than the risk of dying from a reaction to the vaccine.
Only a minority of people with skin disorders would be likely to suffer severe reactions, but the number of cases could still be high, because skin problems are so common, Dr. Leung said. About 15 million Americans suffer from eczema and atopic dermatitis. It is impossible to predict which people with skin disorders will have problems from the vaccine.
Vulnerable people can be infected by close contact with someone else who has recently been vaccinated, because the live virus is shed from the sore at the vaccination site for two to three weeks, said Dr. Lisa Rotz, a medical epidemiologist with the bioterror program at the disease centers.
Mr. Henderson said the disease centers was considering the use of special bandages to keep the shedding to a minimum.
People with skin problems are at risk for a condition called eczema vaccinatum, which can cause high fever and severe sores, scabs and deep scars all over the body. The condition has a death rate of 1 percent to 6 percent.
People whose immune systems have been weakened by AIDS or certain cancers, or by radiation, chemotherapy, steroids or drugs used to prevent transplant rejection, may be prone to an illness known as progressive vaccinia. In that condition, the sore that normally forms at the vaccination sites expands abnormally, growing larger and larger, causing tissue death and a systemic infection that may be uncontrollable. It can have a death rate as high as 36 percent, Dr. Leung said in the article.
VIG works in some but not all cases, said Dr. Rotz. "If we had to do something tomorrow, if an outbreak occurred and we had to offer vaccination on a larger scale, we would have to do our best to screen out people at risk, because we don't have enough VIG to treat them," she said.
Pregnant women are advised to postpone vaccination until after they have given birth, unless they have been exposed to smallpox. It is best for babies not to be vaccinated until they are a year old.
-------- britain
TOP GENERAL: WE WILL SUFFER 37,000 CASUALTIES
By Tom Newton Dunn, Defence Correspondent,
Sep 23 2002
UK Mirror
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/page.cfm?objectid=12221807&method=full&siteid=50143
A GULF War hero yesterday spoke out against a new attack on Iraq.
Major General Patrick Cordingley, 57, who led the British 7 Armoured Brigade - The Desert Rats - in 1991, said: "I am absolutely opposed to war.
"I feel very strongly that it is wrong. There is no justification for sending British troops to Iraq. The case for war has not yet been made by the politicians."
It is estimated that around 15 per cent of invading troops would be wounded or killed in an assault on Baghdad - 37,000 soldiers in a total force of 250,000. The recently retired general said the dossier of evidence against Saddam would not prove the case for a war, adding: "I don't think they have much (evidence), frankly".
Meanwhile, the leader of Bahrain yesterday branded US military action against Iraq as harmful for the whole region.
Traditionally an American ally, Prime Minister Sheikh Khalifa bin Sulman said: "There is a strong intention to strike and a clear Arab and Muslim stance is required. Such an attack would harm the whole region."
He added that the offer to readmit weapons inspectors "had removed any reasons to continue threats".
----
UK dossier on Iraq arms, nuke program
By Al Webb
United Press International
September 24, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20020924-054307-7300r.htm
LONDON, Sept. 24 (UPI) -- The British government published a dossier on Tuesday claiming that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons that it could launch on 45 minutes' notice and that it has gone shopping in Africa to try to buy uranium for nuclear weapons.
In the report, Prime Minister Tony Blair said British intelligence had compiled evidence that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein "is continuing to develop WMD (weapons of mass destruction), and with them the ability to inflict real damage upon the region and the stability of the world."
Blair released the 55-page dossier some three hours before Parliament, recalled from its summer vacation, began an emergency debate on the Iraqi situation and what role Britain should play in bringing Saddam and his "violent and aggressive" regime to book for their perceived threat to the rest of the globe.
"I am in no doubt that the threat is serious and current, that he has made progress on weapons of mass destruction and that he has to be stopped," said Blair, even as opposition grows in Parliament -- much of it in his own Labor Party -- to any military action alongside the United States against Baghdad.
The dossier, which the prime minister said as far back as last March was in the works, flatly claims that Iraq has "military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons," some of which could be deployed within 45 minutes of Iraqi troops getting orders to go to war.
It said that Baghdad is perhaps five years from producing nuclear weapons on its own but that this could be shortened to one to two years if it could procure the necessary enriched uranium or plutonium from abroad.
Intelligence reports included in the report said Iraq has already "sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa, even though it has no active civil nuclear power program under way that would require it, and that Saddam has recalled nuclear arms experts to work on a military program.
The British government's dossier is not as hard-hitting on the issue of Iraq's nuclear threat as a recent report by the independent International Institute of Strategic Studies, which concluded that Baghdad could produce nuclear weapons "within months" if it could lay hands on enough uranium.
Blair's report said Iraq has developed weapons to deliver chemical and biological destruction, including up to 20 al-Hussein missiles with a range of 400 miles -- bringing Israel, Turkey and British bases on Cyprus within striking distance -- in violation of U.N. resolutions.
Other delivery systems include the al-Samoud liquid-propellant rocket and the solid-fueled Ababil-100, each with a range of up to 120 miles, it said.
The dossier's release came amid pressure on Iraq to allow U.N. weapons inspectors back into the country to investigate claims of chemical and biological weapons stockpiles and any evidence of a nuclear weapons program.
How useful the weapons inspectors would be, even if allowed to work unhindered, may not be enough to convince the British and U.S. governments. The British report said "intelligence also shows that Iraq is prepared to conceal evidence of these weapons, including incriminating documents, from renewed inspections."
Blair conceded that "gathering intelligence information inside Iraq is not easy" but that he and his Cabinet were "satisfied" with the quality of the information that went into the dossier, officially entitled "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction -- the Assessment of the British Government."
Defense expert Paul Beaver told Britain's Independent Television News that "this is a very good document, with good intelligence information," but that "the one thing it does not have is a 'killer-fact,' such as that Saddam has a bomb already."
Meanwhile, doubts about the validity of any use of strikes against Iraq remained rife in Parliament, where 133 members of Blair's Labor Party are among the more than 160 MPs who have signed a motion opposing military action.
Despite claims of unity among his ministers, news reports quoting key government sources said Blair runs the risk of having as many as three and possibly more members of his Cabinet resign in protest if Britain goes to war against Iraq alongside the United States.
---
Britain: Iraq Tried to Buy Uranium
By ED JOHNSON
Associated Press Writer
SEPTEMBER 24, 09:44 ET
http://wire.ap.org/?SLUG=BRITAIN%2dIRAQ
LONDON (AP) - Iraq has military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, and has tried to acquire ``significant quantities'' of uranium from Africa, Britain said Tuesday in a dossier of evidence about Iraq's development of weapons of mass destruction.
Saddam Hussein's chemical and biological weapons are ready to be used within 45 minutes of an order to fight, the dossier said.
``Unless we face up to the threat, not only do we risk undermining the authority of the U.N., whose resolutions he defies, but more importantly and in the longer term, we place at risk the lives and prosperity of our own people,'' Prime Minister Tony Blair said in an introduction to the 50-page report.
The document, released hours before Parliament convened in a special session to debate possible military action against Iraq, argues that Saddam continues to develop chemical and biological weapons, is trying to acquire nuclear weapons and has extended the range of its ballistic missiles.
Iraq rejected the British analysis.
``The British prime minister is serving the campaign of lies led by Zionists against Iraq. Blair is part of this misleading campaign,'' Iraqi Culture Minister Hammed Youssef Hammadi told reporters at the opening of a painting exhibition in Baghdad.
Blair is President Bush's closest European ally, but faces dissent among lawmakers in his governing Labor Party and a reported rift in his Cabinet over an Iraqi war. Commentators said the document was published in an effort to shore up domestic support for possible military action against Iraq.
Addressing a packed House of Commons Tuesday, Blair said Saddam risked ``war, international ostracism, sanctions and the isolation of the Iraqi economy'' to keep his weapons program.
``His weapons of mass destruction program is active, detailed and growing,'' said Blair.
Blair faced hard questioning, and Charles Kennedy, leader of the Liberal Democrats, urged Britain and the United States to work through the United Nations.
``For those of us who have never subscribed to British unilaterism, we are not about to sign up to American unilateralism now either,'' Kennedy said.
Blair repeatedly said it was important to get U.N. backing, but did not shy from the possibility of military action to back up demands for resumed inspections.
``The one thing I am sure of is that there is no prospect of a proper weapons inspection regime going back in there and doing its job properly unless Saddam knows that the alternative to that is that he is forced to comply with the U.N. will,'' Blair said.
When a lawmaker asked whether Blair supported ``regime change'' without U.N. authorization, Blair responded: ``The one thing I find odd are people who can find the notion of regime change in Iraq somehow distasteful.''
But left-wing lawmakers said the government had provided little new information.
``Tony Blair will have to do better than this if he wants to convince the British public to go to war,'' said Labor lawmaker Diane Abbott.
Within minutes of the release of the dossier, anti-war protesters outside Parliament began blasting John Lennon's ``Give Peace a Chance.''
A poll in Tuesday's Guardian newspaper said 86 percent of Britons believe the government should seek the support of the British Parliament and the United Nations before taking military action against Iraq.
The report said Saddam attaches great importance to weapons of mass destruction as the basis of Iraq's regional power.
The dossier provided a highly detailed history of Iraq's weapons program and an assessment of its current capabilities based on British and allied intelligence.
However, there appeared to be little new information in the report. Analysts have been warning for years that Saddam has continued to develop chemical and biological weapons and has also tried to develop nuclear weapons, although with little sign of success.
Maj. Charles Heyman, editor of Jane's World Armies, said the report ``does not produce any convincing evidence, or any killer fact, that says that Saddam Hussein has to be taken out straight away.''
``What it does do is produce very convincing evidence that the weapons inspectors have to be pushed back into Iraq very quickly,'' Heyman said.
A report published this month by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies said Iraq retains substantial chemical and biological weapons and could assemble a nuclear weapon within months if it obtained radioactive material.
The government's dossier rejected Iraqi claims that its biological weapons were destroyed, saying Baghdad may retain huge stocks of anthrax and could deliver chemical and biological agents using free-fall bombs, rockets, helicopter and aircraft borne sprayers and ballistic missiles. Iraq now has mobile laboratories for developing biological warfare agents, the report said.
The dossier said Baghdad tried to acquire significant quantities of uranium from Africa and has covertly tried to acquire technology and materials for the production of nuclear weapons.
If U.N. sanctions against Iraq were lifted, Saddam could develop a nuclear weapon within 12 months to two years, said the dossier.
Iraq has retained up to 20 al-Hussein missiles with a range of 400 miles, capable of carrying chemical or biological warheads, and is working to increase the range of other missiles, the report said.
On the Net:
Dossier: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/reports/international/iraqdossier.pdf
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Blair Presents Dossier on Iraq's Biological Weapons
New York Times
September 24, 2002
By WARREN HOGE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/24/international/24CND-BRIT.html
LONDON, Sept. 24 - Britain today published a long-awaited dossier asserting that the regime of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq was continuing to expand stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and had plans to use them. Arguing for urgent action by the West, it said that some of the weapons could be deployed within 45 minutes.
The 50-page document also supplied evidence that Iraq was trying to acquire materials abroad to build nuclear weapons and had extended the range of its ballistic missiles as part of a plan to menace and dominate its own region.
The dossier was released hours before the opening of a debate in Parliament on Britain's aggressive stance on Iraq and Prime Minister Tony Blair's apparent endorsement of the Bush administration's vow to take action against Mr. Hussein if the United Nations does not rise to the challenge.
Mr. Blair, the president's staunchest ally in Europe, was obliged earlier this month to summon the lawmakers back from summer recess for a one-day special session after many of them, mostly from his own Labor Party, raised doubts about Britain's involvement in an anti-Iraq military campaign. One of the most prominent skeptics, the Labor legislator Diane Abbott, said the report was unpersuasive and offered nothing new.
"Tony Blair will have to do better than this if he wants to convince the British public to go to war," she said. Protesters in an open-top bus outside the House of Commons loudly sang John Lennon's "Give Peace a Chance."
In Baghdad, an Iraqi government minister denied all the charges.
"Mr. Blair is acting as part of the Zionist campaign against Iraq and all his claims are baseless," Culture Minister Hamed Yousif Hummadi said at a news conference.
An adviser to Mr. Hussein, Lt. Gen. Amir al-Sadi, called the Blair report "a hodgepodge of half-truths, lies, shortsighted and naive allegations" that would not hold up after an investigation by "competent and independent" experts. He also said at a news conference in Baghdad that United Nations inspectors would be given "unfettered access" and could go "wherever they want to go."
Reaction from the White House to the Blair presentation was highly supportive, prompting President Bush at a cabinet meeting this morning to repeat his call for early action by Congress on a resolution "to hold Saddam Hussein to account for a decade of defiance."
Mr. Bush called Mr. Blair a very strong leader and said he admired his willingness "to tell the truth and to lead."
The White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, called Mr. Blair's speech "very bold," adding that the dossier was "frightening in terms of Iraq's intentions and abilities to acquire weapons."
In a foreword to the 50-page dossier, Mr. Blair said he believed that the compilation of information from Britain's intelligence and security agencies had proved that Mr. Hussein threatened the stability of the world and had to be blocked now.
"What I believe the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt is that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons, that he continues in his efforts to develop nuclear weapons and that he has been able to extend the range of his ballistic missile program," he said. "I also believe that, as stated in the document, Saddam will now do his utmost to try to conceal his weapons from U.N. inspectors."
In a bid to get international support for moving against Iraq, the United States and Britain are preparing a new United Nations resolution that would oblige Mr. Hussein to disarm and threaten military action if he did not. Mr. Blair said the measure was just "days away."
Seeking to sway the opinions of the many critics in Britain who agree that Mr. Hussein is dangerous but believe he has been effectively contained and question the need to attack him now, Mr. Blair said:
"It is clear that, despite sanctions, the policy of containment has not worked sufficiently well to prevent Saddam from developing these weapons. I am in no doubt that the threat is serious and current, that he has made progress on weapons of mass destruction and that he has to be stopped."
In an implied response to criticism that he has hewed too closely to the Bush administration's militant stance on Iraq, he said: "I believe that faced with the information available to me, the U.K. government has been right to support the demands that this issue be confronted and dealt with."
The dossier did not say that Iraq had a present nuclear ability but asserted that Mr. Hussein had sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa despite having no civilian nuclear program that could use it and had recalled specialists to work on his nuclear program. The dossier estimated that Mr. Hussein would need five years to develop a nuclear weapon on his own but could speed the process to within two years if he acquired weapons grade material.
It also asserted that Iraq had rebuilt chemical plants destroyed in the 1991 Persian Gulf war and had developed mobile laboratories for making biological weapons that could be used in warfare to escape detection and attack invading troops.
The report said Mr. Hussein had retained up to 20 al-Hussein missiles with a range of 400 miles, capable of carrying chemical or biological weapons, and it published a map showing that Iraqi weapons under development could reach the whole of the Arab Middle East, Israel, Greece and Turkey. A report by the London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies earlier this month put the number of al-Husseins at 12.
John Chipman, director of the institute, said today that the government's assessment also disclosed new details about Mr. Hussein's efforts to procure materials abroad for its nuclear program and highlighted Iraq's strategy for confounding new inspections.
"It shows that Iraq has prepared for the possible return of inspectors by developing more sophisticated concealment strategies," he told the BBC.
The dossier repeated claims in other recent reports that Mr. Hussein regards weapons of mass destruction not as weapons of last resort but as useable bombs and missiles capable of giving Iraq regional power.
The British public has shown in polls that it is insistent that any action against Iraq be taken only with United Nations approval, and the dossier went out of its way to portray Mr. Hussein as constantly and flagrantly in violation of United Nations rules and resolutions.
In one of the more original entries, the dossier makes its case for Mr. Hussein's diversion of largesse to his own comfort by publishing a drawing of one of his vast presidential palaces overlaid on the distinctly smaller area taken up by Buckingham Palace, the official residence of British monarchs.
Attacking Mr. Hussein's human rights record, the dossier included claims that prisoners in Iraq are executed without trial or left in metal boxes to die if they do not confess, women held in prison are routinely raped by guards and people accused of slandering Mr. Hussein have their tongues removed.
It also included graphic pictures of Kurdish children killed by Iraqi chemical weapons in 1988, and Mr. Blair singled out these passages in opening the Commons debate.
"Read it all and again I defy anyone to say that this cruel and sadistic dictator should be allowed any possibility of getting his hands on more chemical, biological or even nuclear weapons," he declared.
The dossier said that Mr. Hussein was able in 2001 to make $3 billion in "illicit earnings" despite United Nations sanctions and that he was on track to raise the same amount this year. The money, meant to go to relief causes, was instead devoted to development of weapons of mass destruction, it said.
As for longer range missiles, the report said Iraq is developing both its al-Samoud liquid-propellant and its Ababil-100 solid-propellant missiles and extending their ranges to 125 miles, beyond the 93 miles limit set by the United Nations.
Mr. Blair began this afternoon's debate with a call on the international community to unite to make sure that Iraq disarms even if it takes military action to accomplish the task.
"Our case is simply this," he told Parliament. "Not that we take military action come what may. But that the case for ensuring Iraqi disarmament is overwhelming."
-------- business
Coast Guard Unveils Contract Award
September 24, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Coast-Guard-Response.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Coast Guard announced Tuesday a $611 million contract award to General Dynamics of Scottsdale, Ariz., for a modernized national distress and response system.
The so-called Rescue 21 will be the nation's primary maritime 911 system for coastal waters of the continental United States and its navigable rivers, Alaska, Hawaii, Guam and Puerto Rico, according to the Coast Guard.
The new system will reduce response time while maximizing communications, the Coast Guard said. It also will help enforce laws, guard against terrorism and security threats and reduce the threats to the marine environment.
The Coast Guard currently uses the National Distress and Response System to monitor for distress calls and coordinate the search and rescue response. Rescue 21 modernizes the system's technology.
The need to speed the modernization process was heightened by the Dec. 29, 1997, sinking of a recreational sailboat, the Morning Dew. Four people died in the accident just outside the harbor at Charleston, S.C., when the Coast Guard failed to respond to a garbled distress call, according to a Transportation Department audit last February.
The new system will be the maritime equivalent of a 911 system, which will enhance maritime safety by helping to minimize the time that search and rescue teams spend looking for people in distress, said Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta. ``And that means saving more lives,'' he said.
More than 80 million boaters on 13 million vessels use U.S. waters, according to the Coast Guard. Each year, the Coast Guard conducts 40,000 search and rescue cases and saves 4,000 lives.
Rescue 21 deployment for all regions is to be completed by Sept. 2006.
On the Net:
Coast Guard: http://www.uscg.mil/uscg.shtm
-------- europe
EU chiefs denounce anti-U.S. rhetoric
By Nicholas Kralev
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
September 24, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020924-19161216.htm
VIENNA, Austria - German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder faced accusations from European officials yesterday that the anti-American tones of his campaign threatened to isolate Germany and undermine the European Union's common security policy.
U.S. officials, meanwhile, said Berlin had a lot of work to do to repair the damage to bilateral ties caused by some of Mr. Schroeder's statements, and especially by his justice minister's reported comparison of President Bush's political style with that of Adolf Hitler.
The chancellor announced yesterday that the minister, Herta Daeubler-Gmelin, would not be part of his new Cabinet, but he stuck to his opposition to U.S. military action against Iraq while saying that U.S.-German relations were too solid to be shaken by campaign rhetoric.
"I think this difference of opinion will remain," Mr. Schroeder said. "We will have it out in a fair and open way, without in any way endangering the basis of German-American relations. That is my firm intention."
Some European leaders - notably fellow center-left politicians such as British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Swedish counterpart, Goran Persson - sent Mr. Schroeder their warm congratulations on his narrow election victory Sunday.
Others, however, took the celebrating chancellor to task for opposing Mr. Bush's policies so vocally.
"It will have a bad effect on the EU's security policy," Italian European Union Affairs Minister Rocco Buttiglione said in an interview in the Corriere della Sera newspaper. "We will have to split on this point because it is important that there are no divisions between the United States, the United Nations and Europe over Iraq."
A Danish official, whose country currently holds the rotating EU presidency, is quoted by wire reports as saying that Germany "now stands practically isolated in Europe on an issue in trans-Atlantic relations and solidarity." He added: "How are they going to step back from that?"
But Mr. Blair, Mr. Bush's staunchest ally in the anti-Iraq campaign, played down the differences with Mr. Schroeder. A spokesman for the prime minister said London "has its position and the German government has its own position."
"In terms of his own dealings with Chancellor Schroeder on important international matters, he has always valued that relationship and will continue to engage with the German government in the months to come," he told reporters, noting that the two leaders were eager to meet soon.
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, in Warsaw for a meeting of NATO defense ministers today and tomorrow, said he had no plans to meet with his German counterpart, Peter Struck, who had expressed a desire for a meeting.
"I would have to say that the way [the campaign] was conducted was definitely unhelpful and, as the White House indicated, has had the effect of poisoning the relationship," Mr. Rumsfeld said.
European Commission President Romano Prodi responded: "If there is a poisoning of relations, then there is a misunderstanding of democracy in Germany. We must be prepared to work together to discuss issues publicly."
Mr. Schroeder's governing coalition of Social Democrats and Greens won Sunday's election with slim margins, taking 47.1 percent of the vote, compared with 45.9 percent for a potential alliance between the conservative Christian-Democratic Union and the liberal Free Democratic Party.
The "Red-Green" coalition won 306 out of the 601 seats in the new parliament, while the challengers won 295.
The Party of Democratic Socialism, or the former East German communists, failed to reach the minimum level of 5 percent and remained out of the Bundestag.
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Europe Moves to Build Up Defenses
September 24, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Arming-Europe.html
PARIS (AP) -- Britain is working on unmanned aircraft. The French have plans to build their second aircraft carrier. Even Germany, mired in economic troubles, is laying out an extra 3.3 percent for defense next year.
As the United States gears up for a potentially lengthy military campaign in Iraq, Europeans are moving to do what Washington has been asking for years: build up their militaries.
The increased spending on weapons comes as leaders and analysts decry what they see as a troubling gap in capabilities between the U.S. military and its allies across the Atlantic.
This gap, critics say, could eventually diminish Europe's role in international actions and contribute to a rift between Washington and its allies.
``Europe won't hold back the United States, but it wants to work with the United States,'' NATO Secretary-General Lord Robertson, a proponent of increased spending, said during a trip to Paris. Otherwise ``it would lose influence,'' he added.
Defense was expected to be high on the agenda during NATO meetings in Warsaw on Tuesday and Wednesday to discuss streamlining the alliance's command structure and a U.S. proposal for a force for short-notice operations.
No one, however, expects Europe to match Washington's massive spending.
The United States accounts for 60 percent of all NATO defense expenditures and spends 3 percent of its gross domestic product on defense, compared with Europe's 1.8 percent.
Officials, both U.S. and European, are quick to point out the crucial and substantial role that NATO and other allies have played in routing the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and fighting terrorists elsewhere.
But the differing capabilities have been apparent on the battlefield. Washington and many in Europe say the Europeans must make their militaries more compatible with America's and spend more on force mobility, communications and ``smart bomb'' precision weapons.
Top U.S. allies in Europe are responding.
In July, British Treasury chief Gordon Brown said defense spending would rise from $45.7 billion to $51.2 billion by 2005-06 to better combat terrorism.
Plans call for upgraded AWACS surveillance planes, accelerated work on unmanned aircraft and a domestic reaction force to assist civil authorities in responding to terrorist incidents. Britain also will acquire technology to counter chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
The French, eager not to be outdone, approved a bill this month to increase military spending by nearly $1 billion a year to more than $14 billion a year for equipment, research and a second aircraft carrier.
Michele Alliot-Marie, defense minister in the center-right government, said France's military had lost international credibility during years of declining spending under the previous Socialist administration.
Even economically troubled Germany, which is struggling to balance its budget, is moving to strengthen military preparedness. In June, the Cabinet approved a 3.3 percent rise in defense spending to about $24 billion in the coming year -- an increase of about $1 billion.
Leo Michel, a senior research fellow with the Defense Department's Institute for National Strategic Studies in Washington, said the increases were ``a sign of hope,'' and added they would help to keep together the U.S. coalition against terrorism.
``These are good for your countries, and these are good for your relationship with the United States,'' Michel, former director of the Defense Department's NATO Policy Office, told a terrorism conference in Paris.
Elizabeth Skons, an economist with the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, said Europeans are ahead in some areas in military technology, but Washington is pushing them to adopt American technology.
Also, European citizens are heavily taxed to finance generous welfare systems, and there is a limit to how much military spending they are prepared to accept.
``In Europe, there has been a strong reluctance to increase the defense budget,'' said Skons. ``It's only now that it's beginning to change, and to what extent that will happen is still unclear.''
-------- iran
History of betrayal costs Washington a powerful ally
BORZOU DARAGAHI IN TEHRAN
Tue 24 Sep 2002
The Scotsman
http://www.news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=1060842002
AYATOLLAH Sayed Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim has plenty of reason to join the United States in its plans to crush Iraq's president, Saddam Hussein. Spiritual and political leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Resistance in Iraq (SCIRI), Mr Hakim has been fighting the Iraqi regime since at least 1972, when the Baghdad government jailed and tortured him.
Saddam Hussein imprisoned him again five years later. Over the years, Iraq's government has killed five of Mr Hakim's brothers, seven of his nephews and 35 other relatives.
President Saddam has drained the southern marshes of Iraq, turning the ancient home of Mr Hakim's Shia Muslim followers into a desert. But Mr Hakim, a key member of the Iraqi opposition with as many as 8,000 warriors operating in both northern and southern Iraq, says that he will not take part in American plans to topple the Iraqi strongman.
"We get no support from America. Neither in the past nor nowadays," the white-robed 63-year-old cleric, who is based in Iran, said at his Tehran compound, guarded by half a dozen of his soldiers. "If the US offered help, we would refuse it."
Indeed, in 1998 Bill Clinton offered to support the SCIRI, which has been financed, armed and supported by Tehran since its was founded. Mr Hakim turned him down.
The failure to recruit Mr Hakim into an anti-Saddam coalition shows how the poor relations between the United States and Iran have complicated the drive to replace the Iraqi government.
"Hakim is a very serious and influential actor in Iraqi politics," said Nader Hashemi, a Middle East specialist at the University of Toronto. "If because of his ties to Iran the Bush administration chooses to ignore him in their deliberations on a post-Saddam Iraq, they will do so at their peril."
US-Iran relations worsened this year after President George Bush named Iran as part of an axis of evil supporting terrorism. But the bad blood stems from the seizure of the US embassy in Tehran after the 1979 revolution and Iranian accusations of US interference in its domestic affairs. Iran also accuses the US of aiding Iraq during the bloody and costly eight-year Iran-Iraq war, in which Mr Hakim played a role.
Iraq, which is dominated politically by Sunni Muslims, feared that its 60 per cent Shia population would take up the Islamic revolution of the Iranians, who are 90 per cent Shiite. Throughout the war, Mr Hakim's organisation acted as an Iranian fifth column.
Mr Hakim said that his group would could continue its fight against the Baghdad government. "We're working against Saddam now," he said. "We've always been fighting against the Iraqi regime. We were doing it before America. America's just arriving."
Indeed, America stood by and did nothing while President Saddam's forces crushed a Shiite uprising in southern Iraq after the 1991 Gulf war. "The Americans have only worked against us in the past," Mr Hakim said. "They teamed up with Iraq against us."
Middle East analysts say that Mr Hakim would be a valuable asset in any push to remove the Iraqi strongman. "SCIRI taps into Iraq's majority Shia population in a way that other Iraqi opposition groups do not," said Colin Rowat, a lecturer on the Middle East at the University of Birmingham.
In addition to his forces in southern Iraq, the ayatollah said that he had had an undisclosed number of operatives acting in concert with Kurds in northern Iraq since the end of the 1991 war. Half a million Iraqi refugees live just inside Iran border, where Mr Hakim's group operates schools and clinics. "We have military, logistical, social and press co-operation with the other groups of the Iraqi opposition," he said. "We have military operations inside Iraq. From time to time we attack important institutions of the Iraqi regime."
The Iraqi opposition groups have been getting their houses in order in anticipation of creating a new government for Iraq. In northern Iraq, the two main Kurdish opposition groups and the Turkoman forces have stopped squabbling and made peace. Iraqi opposition groups met in Washington last month. Mr Hakim sent his brother. The ayatollah himself had a meeting with Kurdish leaders in Tehran last week, said Bahram Veletbegi, a journalist who heads the Kurdish Institute in Tehran. "The Shiite groups have tight relations with the Kurds," he said. "We have had relations with these opposition groups for 30 or 40 years."
But Mr Hakim also remains a guest of the Islamic Republic of Iran as well as a top figure in the Shiite clerical hierarchy that rules Iran. A portrait of Mr Hakim with the revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and the current ruler, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, hangs in the waiting room of his group's headquarters. Mr Hakim has described himself as a follower of Ayatollah Khomeini. But in contrast to Iran's clerical rulers, who have fought efforts to reform Iran's theocratic government, Mr Hakim espouses democracy and secular government. He said that he advocated a non-sectarian democratic Iraq that would give a voice to disparate religious and ethnic groups.
"We want a republic that takes all the people into account," he said. "The rule of law should be obeyed. It should be an independent country. And the Iraqi people must be given a real role in running the government."
Under the rule of Mr Hakim's clerical hosts in Iran, women must abide by Islamic dress codes and alcohol is forbidden. Non-Muslims are unable to rise to top positions. But Mr Hakim said that he opposed any type of sharia - or Islamic law - that accorded secondary status to religious minorities or women. "We believe that women are part of the Iraqi people and must take part in the future of Iraq," he said. "As far as rights are concerned, women are equal to men."
Mr Veletbegi said that Mr Hakim's group would never rise to a position higher than a small opposition party in an Iraq run on democratic, parliamentary lines.
Ayatollah Khomeini paid similar homage to democracy and equality before he took control of Iran and brutally crushed all opponents to his Islamic theocracy.
But Mr Hakim said he had no political designs. Once his struggle to free his Shiite and Iraqi compatriots was complete - and he made this world a better one for his six daughters and two sons - he vowed that he would return to his real passion: love of God.
"I do not hope to get any kind of role in Iraq," he said. "I want to pursue knowledge. I do not live for this world. I live for the next world. I am preparing for the world after."
-------- iraq
The many prices of war
Tuesday, September 24, 2002
Jordan Times
http://www.jordantimes.com/Tue/opinion/opinion1.htm
IT IS estimated that a war with Iraq would cost the US no less than $200 billion. This much has been confirmed by White House economic adviser Larry Lindsey. Yet this colossal expense does not seem to ruffle the feathers of the key advisers of US President George Bush.
The counterargument that is being painted rests on the proposition that, despite its high cost, war with Baghdad is good for the US economy. Advocates of an armed conflict with Iraq maintain that overthrowing Saddam Hussein would mean an additional three to five million barrels of oil reaching the global economy.
It happens that Iraq has oil reserves of at least 112 billion barrels, second only to Saudi Arabia's 261 billion barrels. The argument in favour of war with Iraq therefore rests on the assumption that what is good for the US economy would be good for world economy as well.
This kind of talk must fuel fears that there is more than just security and peace behind the US stance on Iraq.
And, on this basis, no matter how high the price to be incurred by Washington is, returns will be even higher. But can there be a profitable war?
The catastrophic costs of a war with Iraq cannot be measured in dollars and cents. There is more to armed conflicts than accounting sheets.
We need to reckon with human costs as well, and with the impacts of a devastating war on regional security and stability. Not to mention environmental threats.
Political advisers to heads of state must weigh the pros and cons of any decision. While at their job, they should also adopt a holistic approach that takes into consideration issues such as human life and human suffering, and not merely whether a certain policy is economically viable in the short-term.
There is a price to be paid by any government entering a war that is not strictly an act of self-defence.
There is also a price to be paid by any people dragged by their decision makers into war.
Mr Lindsey might find out soon enough, if his president had to take his advice.
----
U.S. was a key supplier to Saddam
Tuesday, September 24, 2002
By SEAN GONSALVES SYNDICATED COLUMNIST
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/88244_sean24.shtml
Last week I reported that, with White House approval, U.S. officials -- acting in our name -- continued to supply Saddam Hussein with biochemical warfare ingredients until after the Gulf War.
But digging deeper into my stacks of source material on the murky matter, and after further discussions with several scientific sources of mine, there's some confusion as to when we actually stopped sending this deadly commerce.
The Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs report, more commonly known as the Reigle report, says we last shipped a pathogen to Iraq on Nov. 28, 1989.
However, as BusinessWeek reported last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director sent former Sen. Donald Reigle a list of "all biological materials, including viruses, retroviruses, bacteria and fungi, which CDC provided to the government of Iraq from October 1, 1984, through October 13, 1993." The letter also reveals that the original list sent to Reigle's office failed to identify at least one other additional shipment.
But whether or not we stopped sending Saddam this stuff just before or just after the Gulf War is really beside the point. The fact remains that even after Saddam gassed the Kurds in 1988, the Bush administration thought it proper to keep sending these materials until at least a year after what is now Saddam's most infamous atrocity (though not his most heinous act).
In 1982 President Reagan removed Iraq from the list of states that sponsor terrorism, despite U.S. intelligence reports that Iraq was pursuing a biochemical warfare program, making the rogue nation eligible for dual-use and military technology.
And even though Reagan's Secretary of State George Schultz admits in his book "Turmoil and Triumph" that reports of Iraq using chemical weapons against Iranian troops first began "drifting in" at the end of 1983, he still helped to convince the National Security Council to sell Iraq 10 Bell helicopters that same year.
The helicopters were supposedly for crop spraying though it's now known that Iraq used them in the 1988 chemical attacks against the Kurds at Halabja.
Last week, the American Gulf War Veterans Association reported "that on December 19, 1983, the Middle Eastern envoy who carried a handwritten note from President Reagan to Saddam Hussein to 'resume our diplomatic relations with Iraq' was none other than our present Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld." (See www.gulfwarvets.com/ news11.htm).
The AGWVA also points out: "Probably the most critical piece of information is that according to Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, in a December 15, 1986 article, the CIA began to secretly supply Iraq with intelligence in 1984 that was used to 'calibrate' mustard gas attacks on Iranian troops" -- meaning that Rumsfeld and company not only knew about the chemical warfare attacks but helped Iraq target the victims!
According to House Committee on Government Operations report "Strengthening the Export License System," from July 18 right up until the day Iraq invaded Kuwait, the Bush administration approved of $4.8 million in advanced technology product sales to Iraq -- the end-user being Iraq's Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialization (MIMI), which was identified in 1988 as a facility for Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs.
When Saddam was at the pinnacle of his power Rumsfeld and other hard-liners had no problem sitting down at the discussion table with one of the world's axis of evil.
But now, with Saddam's diminished military, it's considered appeasement to pursue weapons inspections and diplomatic efforts? Where's the logic in that?
Edward Peck, former chief of mission to Iraq and deputy director of the White House Task Force on Terrorism under Reagan, has this to say: "Our government is constantly saying that there must be discussions between parties in disagreement, to avoid or at least reduce the risk of war: India and Pakistan; North and South Korea; the Israelis and the Palestinians; the Protestants and the Catholics in Northern Ireland. So why don't we talk to Iraq?"
"This (current Bush policy) is not merely dynamic hypocrisy, it is shatteringly unwise. At the height of the Cold War, we knew the Soviet Union could, with the push of a button, eliminate us from the face of the Earth. That was a known, not hypothetical threat -- a real one. But we had an embassy in Moscow, and they had one here, not because we loved and trusted each other, but because we didn't. You lose nothing when you talk, but the failure to do so in this case may cost us dear."
Despite Peck's sound advice, I wouldn't be surprised if the Ashcroft alliance attempted to smear him as being a Saddam apologist or a blame-America-first terrorist sympathizer.
The Bush administration has a lot of explaining to do.
I just hope Congress has the courage to ask the difficult questions before they vote on a war resolution.
----
Iraq Promises U.N. Arms Experts Unfettered Access
Reuters
Tuesday, September 24, 2002
By Hassan Hafidh
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A60539-2002Sep24?language=printer
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - United Nations weapons inspectors will have unrestricted access to any site they want to inspect in Iraq, an adviser to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein said on Tuesday.
The presidential adviser was speaking at a news conference called in response to a dossier issued by Britain, which is seeking to show why it backs possible military action against Iraq.
"The U.N. weapons inspectors would have unfettered access and (can go) wherever they want to go," Amir al-Saadi told the news conference, adding that he expected them to be in Iraq in mid-October.
Britain's dossier, issued on Tuesday, said Iraq could launch a chemical or biological warhead at 45 minutes' notice, but Baghdad dismissed the charges made by Prime Minister Tony Blair as lies.
"His allegations are long, his evidence is short," said Saadi, who used to be one of the top officials responsible for Iraq's past weapons programs.
"His evidence is a hotchpotch of half-truths, lies, short sighted and naive allegations which will not hold after a brief investigation by competent and independent experts in the related fields," he said.
He added that although Iraq had long-range missiles in the past, it no longer did and was not trying to develop them.
Blair's dossier said Iraq had managed to hide 20 ballistic missiles from U.N. inspectors charged with scrapping its weapons of mass destruction and was speeding up work on missiles with a range of more than 1,000 km (620 miles).
Iraq says it has no weapons of mass destruction and demanded Britain give the dossier to U.N. inspectors for verification.
"We invite Mr. Blair to pass on his dossier to UNMOVIC (U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission) and the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) for proper assessment and soon enough the truth will come out," Saadi said.
"INSPECTORS IN IRAQ MID-OCTOBER"
Saadi said he expected the inspectors to arrive in Iraq in mid-October if there was "no interference from an outside party."
Iraq agreed last week to the unconditional return of the inspectors, who left in December 1998, just before a U.S.-British bombing blitz to punish Baghdad for its alleged failure to cooperate with them.
After Baghdad's defeat in the 1991 Gulf War, the inspectors spent seven years in Iraq seeking out and destroying weapon stocks, but the United States and Britain say they did not find them all and that Iraq has now acquired new ones.
Saadi said the Iraqi military was prepared for any U.S.-led strike: "We are taking precautions and we are expecting an aggression any time."
Washington, whose declared policy is to seek Saddam's removal, has told Iraq to disarm or face the consequences.
Baghdad said Washington and London were using the dossier as a pretext to attack. "He (Blair) knows that his dossier is for public consumption and propaganda in preparation for war," Saadi said.
He said a group of British reporters had been taken by Iraqi authorities to three sites mentioned in the dossier as being used to develop weapons of mass destruction.
----
3 Retired Generals Warn of Peril in Attacking Iraq Without Backing of U.N.
New York Times
September 24, 2002
By ERIC SCHMITT
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/24/international/middleeast/24IRAQ.html
WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 - Three retired four-star American generals said today that attacking Iraq without a United Nations resolution supporting military action could limit aid from allies, energize recruiting for Al Qaeda and undermine America's long-term diplomatic and economic interests.
"We must continue to persuade the other members of the Security Council of the correctness of our position, and we must not be too quick to take no for an answer," Gen. John M. Shalikashvili, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
The officers' testimony came on a day when both those who appear to be rushing toward a military confrontation with Saddam Hussein and those who advocate more caution were raising their voices in support of their positions.
At a campaign stop in New Jersey, President Bush prodded the United Nations to demonstrate its relevance by standing up to Mr. Hussein. Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, who plans to issue a 55-page intelligence dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction on Tuesday, joined Mr. Bush today in demanding tough action against Mr. Hussein.
Back in Washington some House Democrats prepared alternate resolutions to authorize the use of force with Iraq and others issued a detailed report on how much the war would cost. In California, former Vice President Al Gore, the man Mr. Bush defeated for president, harshly criticized the administration's push for war against Iraq, saying it had hurt the United States' standing and could dangerously undermine the rule of law around the world.
In their testimony before the Senate committee, the officers, including Gen. Wesley K. Clark, a former NATO military commander, and Gen. Joseph P. Hoar, a former chief of the United States Central Command, said the United States should retain the right to act unilaterally to defend its interests.
But the three commanders, some of whom warned that a war with Iraq could detract from the campaign against terrorism, said the Bush administration must work harder to exhaust diplomatic options before resorting to unilateral military action to oust President Saddam Hussein and eliminate any weapons of mass destruction Iraq may have.
"It's a question of what's the sense of urgency here, and how soon would we need to act unilaterally?" said General Clark, an Army officer who commanded allied forces in the 1999 Kosovo air war. "So far as any of the information has been presented, there is nothing that indicates that in the immediate, next hours, next days, that there's going to be nuclear-tipped missiles put on launch pads to go against our forces or our allies in the region."
A fourth military leader, Lt. Gen. Thomas G. McInerney, the former assistant vice chief of staff of the Air Force, offered a different opinion, saying the United States should act quickly in Iraq. "We should not wait to be attacked with weapons of mass destruction," he said.
Speaking in Trenton at a fund-raiser for Douglas R. Forrester, the Republican challenger for a Senate seat in New Jersey, Mr. Bush used some of his most direct and confrontational language yet about the United Nations and Iraq, making it clear that his patience for the debate within the Security Council was limited. He said in clearer terms than at any other time in the last week that if the United Nations failed to disarm Mr. Hussein, he would.
Mr. Bush said the Security Council "will tell the world whether or not they're going to be relevant, or whether or not they're going to be weak."
The president's confrontational style with the United Nations is clearly meant to keep up the pressure in a critical week, as the wording of a resolution about Iraq comes together. But it is also a risky strategy. By telling the other members of the Security Council that he will go ahead no matter what they do, Mr. Bush is, one administration official conceded, "giving the U.N. very little room of its own."
The message, he said, was, "We're going in, with you or without you."
Perhaps in response to the administration's tough tone, Russia's defense minister, Sergei B. Ivanov, said today that Russia did not necessarily oppose a new resolution. "We do not oppose the resolution tightening the inspectors' mission in Iraq," Mr. Ivanov said at a news conference in Madrid, where he is visiting, the Interfax news agency reported.
At the United Nations, Secretary General Kofi Annan today rejected comparisons of the United Nations to its ineffectual predecessor, the League of Nations, and said at a news conference, "It is a bit overstated when people say that the United Nations is facing an existential problem." Without referring directly to Mr. Bush, he added, "We are nowhere near that, and we should not really oversell that point."
Mr. Annan issued an advisory to Iraq, rejecting its assertion that it will not abide by any new Security Council resolution on the mandate of international weapons inspectors who are preparing to return to the country. The United Nations, he said, will follow "any new resolutions the council adopts, and so should Iraq."
As Mr. Bush and Mr. Annan verbally jousted, White House and Congressional aides continued to negotiate on a resolution on the use of force against Iraq that would be acceptable to both the president and bipartisan majorities in Congress. Some House Democrats began working on their own alternative language.
Lawmakers of both parties have said that the president's proposed resolution is too broad and ceded too much unchecked power to Mr. Bush.
Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House minority whip, said today that two centrist Democrats, Representatives Ike Skelton of Missouri and John M. Spratt Jr. of South Carolina, were drawing up their own proposed language.
Ms. Pelosi said that House Democrats would not propose a party alternative, but she held open the possibility that some Democrats could try to offer proposals of their own when the Iraq vote comes up on the House floor. Aides to Mr. Skelton, the senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, and Mr. Spratt, another member of the committee, confirmed that they were drawing up proposals, but held out the hope that their ideas could form a basis of common ground between the parties.
In the first effort in Congress to estimate the fiscal cost of an Iraqi war, Democrats on the House Budget Committee issued a report today putting the likely price tag at $30 billion to $60 billion, less than that for the Persian Gulf war in 1991. The gulf war cost about $60 billion at the time. But the allies picked up four-fifths of the costs of the gulf war, a level of financial support that is uncertain - if not unlikely - this time around, diplomats say.
The Democrats' estimates do not include the possible costs of a long-term peacekeeping mission or of providing aid. The report did not attempt to estimate those costs.
The Democratic report considered cases in which 250,000 American troops would win a war within either 30 or 60 days, and another in which half that number of troops would achieve the same outcome over the same periods.
At the Armed Services Committee hearing, the three generals said a United Nations resolution was important because it would isolate Mr. Hussein internationally, give skittish allies some political cover to join any military action and bolster America's long-term global aims.
"We are a global nation with global interests, and undermining the credibility of the United Nations does very little to help provide stability and security and safety to the rest of the world, where we have to operate for economic reasons and political reasons," said General Shalikashvili. He and General Clark also suggested that Mr. Hussein might be less inclined to use chemical or biological weapons if other nations were behind an American-led campaign.
General Clark warned that attacking Iraq could divert military resources and political commitment to the global effort against Al Qaeda and possibly "supercharge" recruiting for the terrorist network.
--------
U.S. Suspects Ukraine of Selling Radar to Iraq
New York Times
September 24, 2002
By MICHAEL WINES
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/24/international/europe/24UKRA.html
MOSCOW, Sept. 23 - The United States, relying on an analysis of clandestine tape recordings, has concluded that President Leonid D. Kuchma of Ukraine personally approved a plan in July 2000 to sell Iraq an advanced radar system that can detect approaching aircraft without their pilots' knowledge.
Although there is no definitive proof that the sale was made, the American government has "some indications" that the radar units are now in Iraq, a high-level United States official said.
The American conclusion concerning the tapes led the government to suspend a $55 million-a-year aid program to Ukraine 10 days ago pending a review of American policy, the official said. Further measures appear likely once that review is completed.
The radar equipment's presence in Iraq, if proven, could lead to more severe punishment under American law and the international arms embargo imposed on Iraq by the United Nations.
"We're looking at a range of things in terms of how we engage Ukraine and how we talk to Kuchma," that official said of the policy review. "We're hopeful that it will come to a conclusion in about a week or so that we can make a recommendation for a White House decision."
The radar, nicknamed Kolchuga after the Russian word for chain-mail armor, is a passive radar system, differing from conventional radar that bounces its own signal off an object.
The Kolchuga system has a complex of four receivers that pick up and coordinate the position of signals emitted by approaching objects. It is billed as capable of detecting aircraft as far away as 500 miles and ground targets up to 370 miles away.
But its strongest selling point, experts say, is its claimed ability to spot even so-called stealth aircraft without being detected. When Ukraine first exhibited the radar at a Jordan arms show in April 2000, it said the system was the most advanced in the world.
Steven Zaluga, a military technology analyst for the Virginia-based consulting firm Teal Group Corporation, said the ability of such passive systems to spot stealth aircraft was overrated, largely because American stealth fighters and bombers emit few or no signals.
Conventional American attack jets do emit signals from altimeters, strike radar transmitters and other devices, he said. The question, he said, is whether the Kolchuga system is sophisticated enough to sift those signals from the cacophony of ordinary airwaves.
"If it's a high-quality system, it would be of some concern," Mr. Zaluga said.
The finding follows a judgment by experts at the Justice Department and elsewhere in the government that a clandestine tape recording - in which a voice that the United States has concluded is Mr. Kuchma's is heard discussing smuggling the radar system to Iraq - is authentic and unaltered.
That tape, along with 300 hours of other secretly recorded conversations, was brought to the United States by a onetime Ukrainian presidential security guard, Mykola Melnychenko, who fled his country in 2001. Mr. Melnychenko, an anti-Kuchma campaigner who is a refugee in the United States, gave the original tape to the United States for testing this summer.
The American finding has been relayed to NATO members and to Ukrainian officials, whose response "is mostly a denial that this has happened," the American official said.
In the last five years Ukraine has become the world's sixth-largest arms supplier.
The tape recording is said to document a conversation between Mr. Kuchma and Valery Malev, then the director of Ukraine's arms export agency, Ukrspetsexport.
According to a public transcript released by the Washington-based Center for Public Integrity, which Mr. Melnychenko says is accurate, Mr. Malev told Mr. Kuchma: "We were approached by Iraq through our Jordanian intermediary. They want to buy four Kolchuga stations and offer $100 million up front."
Mr. Malev suggested that the system be packed in the crates of another Ukrainian company, Kraz, and that Ukrainians with forged passports be sent to Iraq to oversee its installation.
"Just watch that the Jordanian keeps his mouth shut," Mr. Kuchma replied.
"Who is going to detect it?" Mr. Malev replied. "We don't sell much to them, I mean to Jordan." Mr. Kuchma then answered: "O.K. Go ahead."
That apparent go-ahead - on July 10, 2000 - came barely five weeks after President Clinton visited Kiev and offered a badly needed show of support for Mr. Kuchma's leadership.
American officials consider the verification of the recording cause enough to temporarily suspend the $55 million in aid given Ukraine under the Freedom Support Act, which finances pro-democracy and economic reform programs in former Soviet states.
Because that aid is intended to promote Western values, much of it can be restored after Washington completes its review of its policy toward Ukraine.
Other crucial assistance - for example, aid handed out to help Ukraine dismantle its Soviet-era nuclear programs - is unaffected by the suspension.
In the longer term, the United States will face the question of how to deal with Mr. Kuchma without damaging Ukraine, a nation of 50 million that is a strategic crossroads between Europe and Asia.
American ties with Mr. Kuchma have been fraying steadily for a year and a half as his presidency has been marked by corruption scandals and growing authoritarianism.
--------
The Day After
New York Times
September 24, 2002
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/24/opinion/24KRIS.html
AJAF, Iraq - As soon as American troops are rolling through Saddam Hussein's palaces, the odds are that this holy Shiite city 100 miles south of Baghdad will erupt in a fury of killing, torture, rape and chaos.
The Shiite Muslims who make up 60 percent of Iraq - but who have never held power - will rampage through the narrow streets here. Remembering the whispers from the bazaar about how Saddam's minions burned the beard off the face of a great Shiite leader named Muhammad Bakr al-Sadr, then raped and killed his sister in front of him, and finally executed him by driving nails through his head, the rebels will tear apart anyone associated with the ruling Baath Party.
In one Shiite city after another, expect battles between rebels and army units, periodic calls for an Iranian-style theocracy, and perhaps a drift toward civil war. For the last few days, I've been traveling in these Shiite cities - Karbala, Najaf and Basra - and the tension in the bazaars is thicker than the dust behind the donkey carts.
So before we rush into Iraq, we need to think through what we will do the morning after Saddam is toppled. Do we send in troops to try to seize the mortars and machine guns from the warring factions? Or do we run from civil war, and risk letting Iran cultivate its own puppet regime? In the north, do we suppress the Kurds if they take advantage of the chaos to seek independence? Do we fight off the Turkish Army if it intervenes in Kurdistan?
Unless we're prepared for the consequences of our invasion, we have no business invading at all.
So après Saddam, le déluge? That's only a guess, of course, but it's exactly what happened the last time Saddam was in trouble, at the end of the Persian Gulf war in 1991.
With the central government tottering, a Shiite uprising began in Basra and quickly spread. Here in Najaf, rebels tossed officials out of the windows of the Baath Party headquarters to be hacked apart by others below. Rioters raped and killed children in front of their parents.
Saddam's suppression two weeks later, as U.S. forces stood by passively, was equally brutal, with rebels hanged from lampposts and dragged to their deaths behind tanks. Not surprisingly, when I asked people in the bazaars about the uprising, they mostly turned pale and remembered urgent business elsewhere.
"It hurts my heart when I remember it," said Nasseem Jawad, a 40-year-old jeweler in the Najaf bazaar who was one of the few to admit to being in the area at the time. "They burned the supermarkets, destroyed the laboratories, schools and hospitals." Mr. Jawad was prudent enough to adhere to the government line that the rebellion was the work of Iranian provocateurs and would not happen again, but I'd bet otherwise.
In Basra, I asked a senior Baath Party official if he wasn't worried that he and his family would be targets of mob wrath. He protested so passionately that I couldn't help thinking he had spent a few sleepless nights considering the possibility.
In the north of Iraq, the challenge for the U.S. will be different. Many Kurds will demand at least quasi-independence, and there will be a ferocious struggle for the city of Kirkuk, which floats on a sea of oil. Kirkuk is aggressively coveted by Kurds, by the Turkish-backed Turkmen minority and of course by the Iraqi Arabs who now control it.
More broadly, if the United States brings democracy to Iraq, it will mean seizing power from the 17 percent Sunni minority who dominate the army and government and giving it to the 60 percent Shiite majority. The upshot could be greater influence for Iran, a fellow Shiite country with close ties to Iraq's Shiite cities.
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini spent 13 years in exile here in Najaf, and many top Iranian ayatollahs stayed for shorter periods. Iranian hard-liners are probably salivating at the thought of America naïvely creating a Shiite Iraq so that the two countries could pool their nuclear resources and build the bomb together.
Of course there are happier scenarios as well. Iraq also has a 95 percent literacy rate and a secular middle class that could eventually be fertile soil for a democracy that would be a model for the Arab world. So it's fine to hope for democracy, as long as we brace for civil war.
If we invade Iraq, it must be with eyes wide open. The most ticklish challenge ahead is not overthrowing Saddam but managing the resulting upheaval for a decade afterward.
-------- israel / palestine
At U.N., U.S. Calls for End to the Siege of Arafat
New York Times
September 24, 2002
By JULIA PRESTON with JAMES BENNET
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/24/international/middleeast/24MIDE.html
UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 23 - The United States proposed a Security Council resolution today that criticized Israel in unusually strong terms, while administration officials accused Israel of undermining Palestinian reform efforts by confining Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, in his compound in Ramallah.
Seeking to avert a confrontation with Arab states over the siege, the Americans offered a draft resolution calling on Israel to "cease measures in and around Ramallah," saying that they "aggravate the situation" and that they "do not contribute to progress on comprehensive Palestinian civil and security reforms."
The American draft, presented during an emergency session of the Council today to counter a Syrian proposal, cites two Palestinian groups by name, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas, holding them responsible for the recent attacks in Israel. The proposal would require that they be treated as terrorists under a Security Council resolution passed last year to condemn the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
It was the first time that the United States had sought to equate, in the formal terms of a Security Council measure, the Palestinian suicide bombings and other attacks in Israel with the terrorism of Sept. 11, 2001.
American diplomats calculated that this clause of their proposal would be unacceptable to many nations on the Council, who would nevertheless turn to debate the American alternative in order to avoid drawing yet another veto on a Middle East issue from the United States.
Even as, in New York, the United States was calling on Israeli forces to withdraw from Ramallah, other Israeli tanks and bulldozers backed by helicopters stormed into the fringes of Gaza City early on Tuesday, in an apparent hunt for men Israel accuses of terrorism.
In one of the most violent of the recent incursions into the Gaza Strip, at least nine Palestinians were killed, The Associated Press reported, citing hospital officials. The raid appeared likely to further complicate American diplomatic efforts to gain United Nations support for increasing pressure on Iraq in the coming days.
Syria's proposal, which it unveiled on Friday, calls on Israel to withdraw immediately from Mr. Arafat's compound and demands an end to the violence. Unlike the United States resolution, the Syrian draft makes no mention of the Palestinian suicide bombings that prompted Israel's retaliation, unleashing the current cycle of violence. The United States rejected the Syrian initiative, offered on behalf of other Arab states and the Palestinians, as "not balanced," but hoped its counteroffer would stave off a Council vote that would lead the United States to exercise its veto.
Negotiations in the Council continued late into the night, as the United States and Syria were unable to resolve their differences.
The maneuvering brought new complications for the United States' campaign to gather support at the United Nations for its campaign against the Iraqi government.
Defending the Syrian proposal in the open Council debate, one Arab representative after another echoed the summons to the United Nations that President Bush made on Sept. 12, when he called on the Council to enforce its resolutions against Iraq.
Today Arab diplomats made the same plea, but against Israel, charging it was out of compliance with Council measures dating back to 1967, and demanded that the United Nations exert its authority.
"Why these double standards?" asked the representative of the Arab League, Yanya Mahmassani, in defending the measure here today. "Why aren't United Nations Security Council resolutions on Israel enforced the way they are on other countries? Israel violated 28 resolutions of the Security Council. Why should not the Security Council shoulder its responsibilities?"
On Thursday night, Israel sent its forces, including demolition crews, into Mr. Arafat's compound after a suicide bomber killed six people on a bus in Tel Aviv after a six-week lull. Israeli officials said that they were impelled by Palestinian attacks to seek the surrender of at least 19 men holed up with Mr. Arafat.
The government was criticized at home and abroad as employing unnecessary force and exercising poor timing. Its action came as the Palestinians were weighing democratic reforms. Palestinian politicians said that a push to restrict Mr. Arafat's executive power had been stifled by the Israeli action.
Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, called the Israeli action in Ramallah "unhelpful." "Peace is best secured by new Palestinian institutions, and what Israel is doing is running contrary to that cause," he said.
"The president views what Israel is doing now as unhelpful to the cause of bringing about reform in Palestinian institutions," he said. "The president's priority is peace. Peace has been secured by new Palestinian institutions. And what Israel is doing is running contrary to that cause. It is not helpful."
At the State Department, Richard Boucher, the spokesman, said that Israel had "aggravated" American efforts to improve Israeli security and Palestinian institutions.
The American ambassador to Israel, Dan Kurtzer, delivered a similar message privately to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in a weekend meeting at Mr. Sharon's farm.
Kofi Annan, the secretary general of the United Nations, today called the Israeli approach of attacking the Palestinian Authority a "bankrupt policy" that undermined moderates and fed extremism. He also urged Palestinians to abandon suicide bombing attacks, calling them "this wicked instrument of terror."
In response to the White House criticism, Raanan Gissin, a spokesman for Mr. Sharon, said the Israeli government understood President Bush's concern. "We're taking all necessary steps to prevent escalation, but at the same time we must defend our citizens," he said. "We did not choose to do this because we had this love of demolition of houses. They left us no choice." Palestinian officials accused Mr. Sharon of seizing on Hamas attacks to cripple the governing Palestinian Authority and advance his stated goal of exiling Mr. Arafat; Israeli officials said that, as the leader of the Palestinians, Mr. Arafat was responsible for controlling Hamas.
Privately, senior Palestinian officials have expressed the hope that Israel would more forcefully attack the Hamas infrastructure. Mr. Arafat, they say, is not politically strong enough to crack down on Hamas without the immediate prospect of substantive peace negotiations - reasoning that Israeli officials dismiss as an excuse for inaction.
Nabil Amr, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council and a supporter of reform, said, "Yasir Arafat always pays the price." Mr. Amr said that he was meeting with like-minded leaders, but that with Israeli soldiers in Mr. Arafat's compound it was no time to talk of reform. "I think we must wait to see what will happen after this disaster," he said.
Dr. Abdel Aziz Rantisi, a political leader of Hamas, said by telephone from Gaza City that Israel was pressuring Mr. Arafat "to push him to crack down on the Islamic movement." But he said that, after Mr. Arafat conducted such a crackdown in 1996, he was not rewarded with concessions at the bargaining table. "Now he understands," he said.
Israeli officials say their present operation in Ramallah does not endanger Mr. Arafat. The Israeli demolition stopped over the weekend when it threatened the remaining structure, where Mr. Arafat is confined, a senior Israeli official said.
Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, met today with Israeli officials, who he said demanded a list of all those inside the compound. Mr. Arafat rejected the demand, he said. He added that at Mr. Arafat's instructions he was seeking a third party to intervene in the dispute.
Israeli officials said they would be satisfied with nothing less than the surrender of all wanted men, but Mr. Arafat refused to part with them. One senior official said Americans should not worry that Mr. Arafat's predicament would interfere in international discussion of Iraq.
In the overwhelmingly Palestinian city of Hebron in the West Bank this evening, a Palestinian gunman opened fire on Israeli celebrants marking the Jewish festival of Sukkot. The gunman wounded three children and killed their father.
---
Israel defies pressure to end siege of Arafat's HQ
By Justin Huggler in Jerusalem,
24 September 2002
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=336096
Yasser Arafat remained under siege by the Israeli army in the ruins of his presidential compound yesterday, despite repeated criticism of Israel's actions from the United States.
In its third rebuke to the Israeli government since it began demolishing the Palestinian leader's compound, the White House said that President George Bush "views what Israel is doing now as unhelpful to the cause of bringing about reform in Palestinian institutions". The White House is believed to feel American efforts to secure Arab support for an attack on Iraq will be hindered.
The first negotiations on ending the siege broke up yesterday. The Israeli army allowed Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, to drive through the rubble of Mr Arafat's compound. Mr Erekat said the Israeli negotiators had refused to give him a list of wanted militants, and had in fact sent him to Mr Arafat with a demand for a list of everyone in the building - a claim that, if true, would expose the Israeli assertion that the army's efforts with bulldozers and dynamite are intended to make Mr Arafat hand over alleged militants inside the building.
The Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, and his ministers have come under criticism from the Israeli media for the destruction of Mr Arafat's compound - not least because of the degree to which it has strengthened Mr Arafat.
A lame duck leader just a few days ago, under pressure from Palestinians to make reforms, he is suddenly the symbol of his people again. There was a general strike across the Occupied Territories and in East Jerusalem in support of him yesterday. "We are not going to raise the white flag," a senior Arafat aide, Tayeb Abdel Rahim, told the crowd. Commentators have pointed out that Hamas, an organisation over which Mr Arafat has little control, has claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing in Tel Aviv last week.
Perhaps stung by the criticism, Mr Sharon said: "When the day comes - the moment we can muster the appropriate forces - then we will definitely have to take action to strike at Hamas to stop its operational capability."
----
Prosecute Sharon for war crimes, Israeli women say
By Robert Fisk in Beirut
24 September 2002
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=336097
In an astonishing letter to the Palestinian survivors of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila camps massacres, nine Israeli wo-men's peace groups have told Palestinians in Beirut that they support their efforts to indict the Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, for "war crimes'' committed against them almost exactly 20 years ago.
The women's letter, which was sent via the United States, has amazed the Lebanese lawyer representing the survivors of the massacre, for which Mr Sharon was held "personally responsible'' by an Israeli inquiry. "It is a wonderful gesture,'' Chibli Mallat said yesterday. "It is a wonderful message to receive in these very dangerous and violent times.''
The letter, from the Coalition of Women for A Just Peace in Israel, speaks movingly of the suffering of the Palestinians in 1982. "Our hearts ache to recall the terrible massacre that took place in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps 20 years ago, which Israeli leaders allowed to take place,'' it says. "We condemn the brutal murderers of your loved ones and we condemn the leaders who must be held accountable for these war crimes, Ariel Sharon above all.''
A Belgian court ruled earlier this year that it could not indict Mr Sharon for the killings, but more than 20 survivors of the massacre, whose lawyers include Mr Mallat, are now appealing against this decision.
Up to 1,700 Palestinians were butchered in the massacre by Lebanese militiamen allied to the Israelis. Israeli troops surrounded the camps as the killings went on but were told by their commanders not to interfere. Mr Sharon was Israeli Minister of Defence at the time and was forced to resign after the Israeli Kahan commission condemned him and several senior Israeli officers for not preventing the slaughter.
The women's letter recalls how the Palestinians were forced to flee their homes in 1948. " We join you in mourning for those who were killed and maimed [in 1982] and we condemn those who are responsible,'' it says. "We hope you will accept the sincerity of our words and allow us to stand in solidarity with you as we strive to build peace with justice between Israel and Palestine.''
Mohamed abu Rudeina, who as a seven-year-old boy saw his father and other relatives murdered 20 years ago, described the Israeli women's letter as a "moving act'' that would greatly encourage other Palestinian survivors who are seeking justice for the deaths of their loved ones.
The specific mention of Mr Sharon's name is likely to cause considerable discomfort to the Israeli Prime Minister, who hired lawyers to defend him in Brussels and who has not previously experienced any attempt by Israelis to indict him.
Mr Mallat said it was the first gesture of solidarity to the camp survivors from Israelis, 20 years after a lone Israeli, Emile Grunzweig, was killed by a hand grenade thrown into a crowd of protesters in Tel Aviv. "We regard Mr Grunzweig as an Israeli who died for Sabra and Shatila,'' Mr Mallat said. "Now at last, we seem to have got support from Israelis about the terrible crimes against humanity which occurred in Beirut two decades ago.''
-------- mideast
Jordan rules out use of bases for Iraq attack
Reuters
Tuesday September 24, 11:31 AM
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/reuters/asia-126722.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Jordan, opposed like other Arab states to an attack on Iraq, on Monday ruled out any use of Jordanian bases for a military operation.
Foreign Minister Marwan al-Muasher, speaking at an event organized by the Council on Foreign Relations, also dismissed the idea that the United States could quickly make Iraq democratic after overthrowing President Saddam Hussein.
"We have not been asked to use our bases. We will not (let others) use our bases and we have made that absolutely clear. That will result in destabilizing Jordan, that will result in internal trouble and no country, certainly not the United States, is interested in doing that," he said.
The U.S. military has started planning for an attack on Iraq and U.S. media reports have quoted U.S. officials as saying that Jordan might be a point of access to neighbouring Iraq.
But Muasher, whose government is one of Washington's closest friends in the Arab world, indicated that Jordan was deeply sceptical about U.S. plans, especially on the idea of imposing a democratic government in Baghdad.
White House national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said in an interview published on Monday that the United States would expect a post-Saddam government to be "at least on the road to democratic development".
She said the United States also wants to encourage "reformist elements" in Arab countries such as Qatar, Bahrain and Jordan, all of which are friendly to Washington.
But Muasher said: "I haven't yet seen a plan of the day after (the overthrow of Saddam) that looks even halfway credible. It's going to be much easier to change the regime in Iraq than to install a new one."
"You don't inject democracy in a country. It is a culture that evolves. This notion of somehow rearranging the region and changing regimes and systems of government in a way that fits the interests of the United States is indeed a very scary notion and I hope that it does not become U.S. policy at any time in the future," the minister added.
Muasher predicted deep anger among ordinary Arabs if the United States does attack Iraq without U.N. support.
U.S. President George W. Bush has asked the United Nations to assert its authority by making Iraq disarm but he has also reserved the right to act alone if the United Nations cannot.
"The (Arab) street no doubt will be very angry and very opposed to a war ... because the street will look at this as a war between America and the Arabs, a war between America and Muslims," the Jordanian minister said.
"This is another reason why it is very important that it is the U.N. which takes these decisions. If the war goes on for a long time, our ability to deal with the street is going to become increasingly more difficult," he added.
The Arab position is that only the United Nations has the authority to dictate Iraqi behaviour. But Muasher declined to say what Jordan would recommend if the United Nations fails.
Arab governments say their priority is to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which turned more violent at the weekend when Israel besieged the headquarters of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, after two suicide bombings.
"The region cannot afford another war. We should do everything we can to avert a conflict," Muasher said.
----
U.S. Military Training in Kuwait
September 24, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Kuwait-US-Maneuvers.html
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) -- As thousands of American and Kuwaiti forces prepare for their first large-scale, joint training exercise in more than a year, the U.S. military insisted Tuesday the operation had nothing to do with Washington's threats of war against Iraq.
Cmdr. Jeff Alderson of the Bahrain-based U.S. 5th Fleet described the exercise, called Eager Mace, as ``routine training'' that has been conducted periodically for years.
He refused to give further details, but confirmed that two U.S. warships, the USS Mount Vernon and the USS Denver, had arrived in Kuwait on Monday.
U.S. and Kuwaiti officials also refused to comment on the exercise, which has not been publicly announced.
Kuwait has tried to keep the exercises low key, barring reporters from covering them. With many in the region opposed to a U.S. strike on Iraq, Arab governments have been sensitive about being seen as cooperating militarily with the United States.
Pentagon officials have said Eager Mace would begin in late September and continue into October. It will use amphibious, ground, air and naval forces.
The last such exercise was held in May 2001.
If the United States attacks Iraq, soldiers could mass in Kuwait and push northward into Iraq toward Baghdad in the event of war. The exercises provide an opportunity to get soldiers and material in place for such a scenario.
About 9,000 U.S. military personnel are permanently stationed in Kuwait.
Camp Doha, an isolated U.S. Army base along the Gulf coast about 12 miles west of Kuwait City, is routinely equipped with equipment for a brigade, including tanks and artillery.
----
Marines to Start War Games Near Iraq-Kuwait Frontier
Military: In Pentagon's latest show of muscle in region, 1,000 troops are landing in gulf today.
By TONY PERRY
LOS ANGELES TIMES STAFF WRITER
September 24 2002
http://www.latimes.com/la-fg-marines24sep24001446(0,5080407).story
ABOARD THE USS MOUNT VERNON -- A thousand combat Marines are going ashore in Kuwait today for a long-planned desert warfare exercise that has taken on added significance because of the standoff between the U.S. and Iraq.
The troops, from the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit at Camp Pendleton, will train with Kuwaiti soldiers in the flat, sandy wasteland near the border with Iraq. The outskirts of Baghdad are only about 300 miles away.
The decision to move forward with the exercise is the Pentagon's latest show of military muscle in the region. In recent weeks, the U.S. military has been building on already significant levels of troops and equipment it has positioned in the countries and seas around Iraq.
The permanent U.S. military presence in the region is in stark contrast to its relative absence 12 years ago in the months leading up to Operation Desert Storm. At that time--shortly after the end of the Cold War--far more of the Pentagon's resources were still deployed in Europe.
But for much of the last decade, the Pentagon has based more than 20,000 American military personnel within close striking distance of Iraq, along with heavy equipment for at least four armored brigades and Patriot antimissile batteries to protect them.
In addition, senior defense officials say elite special operations troops this month began training alongside CIA units that could be used in covert counter-terrorism operations within Iraq.
The Navy has accelerated training and maintenance schedules for many of its ships, including three aircraft carrier battle groups based on the West Coast, so they could be ordered to steam toward the Persian Gulf on short notice, a senior Navy official said.
More Troops in Kuwait
Several thousand heavily armed Army soldiers also are moving into Kuwait as part of regularly scheduled exercises or troop replacements, while about 600 military planners from the U.S. Central Command, based in Tampa, Fla., are now training in Qatar.
The Pentagon says the planners have deployed to the Persian Gulf to test the command's ability to set up a headquarters in a crisis. But senior Pentagon officials say the planners could remain in Qatar to establish a new forward headquarters in the region at Al Udeid Air Base outside Doha, the capital.
The Air Force is also taking steps to prepare for a war, augmenting the more than 200 warplanes already based in the region to enforce the "no-fly" zones over southern and northern Iraq. The Pentagon disclosed recently that it had asked Britain for permission to base B-2 stealth bombers at its air base on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
U.S. officials also say they have switched strategies to defend pilots enforcing the no-fly zones. Instead of going after guns and radar that could be used to target U.S. or British pilots, they are aiming at command and communications links, a strategy that might be more damaging to Iraq's ability to fight off an invasion.
Senior officials say the arrival of fresh units in the region is not in itself unusual. The exercises have been in the works for years. But the officials acknowledge that by ordering other units to stay put rather than rotate out, the military could easily enhance the sizable U.S. force that has remained in place since the 1991 war with Iraq.
Along with this buildup, the latest air, land and sea exercise, called Eager Mace, shows how U.S. military planning has changed.
Marines now routinely train in Kuwait, learning to cope with the region's blistering heat, the sometimes disorienting lack of geographic landmarks, and the powdery, blowing sand that can foul engines and bog down infantry troops. If the Marines are ordered to be part of a strike against Iraq, the territory will be familiar.
"We're here to demonstrate our readiness to go wherever we're needed to go," said Capt. Seth Folsom, commander of a motorized infantry unit.
The 1,000 Marines from the warships Mount Vernon and Denver will conduct day and night exercises, including firing live rounds from weaponry ranging from M-16 rifles to howitzers.
At the Marines' desert training facility at Twentynine Palms in California, use of live rounds is restricted for environmental and safety reasons.
Training in Kuwait will emphasize use of night-vision equipment and thermal-imaging technology meant to give Marines a tactical advantage. Training with the Kuwaitis might give Marines tips on how to beat the desert heat.
"They've been in the desert a lot longer than we have," said Cpl. Leif Paul. "I'm sure they have their own ways of desert survival."
The Marines will train close to the Army facility in Kuwait, known as Camp Doha, which now houses several thousand soldiers, heavy equipment for a brigade, a Patriot antimissile system and several dozen aircraft.
The Army plans its own exercise later this year.
Trained for Speed
The Marines would add speed to any force sent into Iraq. Folsom, for example, does not allow his Marines to sleep in tents, lest time be lost disassembling them if an order to move is issued.
"I want my Marines sleeping under the stars," said Folsom. "We train to be the kind of unit that can move at a moment's notice."
Despite conventional military doctrine that regards expeditionary units as effective only a few hundred miles from their supply ships, the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, also from Camp Pendleton, functioned effectively deep inside Afghanistan in November and December.
In a speech at Camp Pendleton in late August, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld appeared to indicate that Marines will play a key role if there is an attack on Iraq.
James Mattis, who led Marines in Afghanistan, has been promoted to major general. Michael Hagee, who oversaw all expeditionary forces from Camp Pendleton, has been promoted to general and nominated by Rumsfeld to be commandant of the Marine Corps.
Mattis went to Afghanistan after leading Marines in an exercise in Egypt that, like Eager Mace, had been scheduled long in advance.
The 1,000 Marines participating in Eager Mace are less than half of the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit's strength.
An additional 1,200 Marines are aboard the Belleau Wood. The three ships, all based in San Diego, constitute an amphibious ready group.
The Marine Corps declined to pinpoint the Belleau Wood's location, saying only that it is in the gulf region.
Complications Over Iraq
Although the Kuwaiti government welcomes the training exercise as a way to continue the modernization of its military, the tension between the U.S. and Iraq has caused some diplomatic complications.
On Saturday, Kuwait's official news agency quoted the foreign minister as saying that his country would abide by any United Nations resolution against Iraq but that it opposes unilateral action by the United States.
The comments came just a day after Army Gen. Tommy Franks, the head of Central Command, visited Camp Doha and told reporters that U.S. forces are prepared if President Bush gives the order to attack Iraq.
Marines boarded the Mount Vernon and Denver in Bahrain on Monday morning after a three-day liberty in the capital, Manama, home to the U.S. 5th Fleet. The journey to Kuwait City was scheduled to take about 24 hours.
Times staff writer Esther Schrader in Washington contributed to this report.
-------- nato
Rumsfeld asks Nato to develop 'rogue state' strike force
By Stephen Castle in Brussels,
24 September 2002
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=336110
The United States will outline plans today to transform Nato from a defensive military pact into an alliance with a 20,000-strong rapid reaction force able to tackle rogue states and terrorist threats.
The proposal, to be unveiled at a meeting in Warsaw, could be the last chance for the 19-nation alliance to rescue itself from irrelevance in the aftermath of 11 September.
But the American plan will present an acute dilemma for several Nato countries, with Germany and France uneasy at Washington's apparent desire to see alliance forces take pre-emptive action against ill-defined terrorist threats.
Berlin and Paris may want guarantees that a Nato rapid reaction force would act only in accordance with United Nations resolutions.
America's blueprint for reform will be presented by Donald Rumsfeld, its Defence Secretary, who will also use the meeting to canvass support for a military strike against Baghdad. But Iraq will not be on the formal agenda, which centres on the need to revamp Nato's forces and structures.
Mr Rumsfeld envisages a force of 20,000 US, Canadian, European and Turkish troops being on stand-by at all times, ready to deploy within one to four weeks anywhere in the world.
Jerzy Szmajdzinski, the Polish Defence Minister, said Washington wanted to create a force with three main elements: ground troops, Awacs radar planes and shared allied intelligence.
Naval forces are expected to be included in the unit, which would be equipped with protection against chemical and biological warfare. Another Nato source said the unit would be "capable of going anywhere to do certain tasks, to fight its way in and leading for others to follow".
The idea blends two themes: concern about rogue states and weapons of mass destruction, and the need for Nato to reform its outdated, Cold War structures and outlook. A Nato diplomat said: "We don't need static forces waiting for an attack from eastern Europe, we have to target terrorism and weapons of mass destruction ... What is required are agile and responsive forces and command structures".
Officials expect the American plan to get a broad welcome in principle. One Nato diplomat argued: "No Nato country has the money to update and if we were, multilaterally, to finance certain capabilities, and if we had a rapid reaction force which would use these capabilities, Nato's military importance could be strengthened."
But the issues of how and when a rapid reaction force would be deployed and whether it would take pre-emptive action are more divisive. Britain is among those supportive of a tough American stance.
Nato officials have played down fears that the unit would be a rival to the 60,000-strong rapid reaction force planned by the EU and due to be operational next year.
The European project is designed for peace-keeping and crisis intervention duties rather than to act as an aggressive fighting force.
Many of the same capabilities are required for both forces, meaning that troops or equipment earmarked by European nations for the Nato rapid reaction unit could also be used for EU missions.
----
U.S. Sidelines NATO
Rumsfeld Forgoes Talks With Alliance, Discusses Iraq With Individual Leaders
WARSAW, Sept. 23--As eager as the Bush administration is to find international backing for possible military action against Iraq, one place it isn't looking for military support is NATO.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has come here this week for an informal meeting of his NATO counterparts and plans to brief them Tuesday on the Iraqi threat. He and other administration officials have been sounding out allies individually about their readiness to contribute to a war against Iraq.
But the idea of America's principal military alliance playing a part itself has not been pursued by senior U.S. authorities.
"It hasn't crossed my mind; we've not proposed it," Rumsfeld told reporters enroute to here. The remark appeared to indicate low importance in Rumsfeld's mind of the alliance, which he got to know well when he served as the U.S. ambassador to NATO in 1973-74.
The prospect of NATO again being sidelined in an important military operation--as it was in Afghanistan--has deepened concerns on both sides of the Atlantic about the alliance's relevance in the age of terrorism. The Europeans increasingly worry that the United States is perfectly prepared to conduct major operations largely on its own, or with the support of looser or smaller ad hoc coalitions.
Part of the reason for NATO's lack of involvement is political, reflecting the difficulty of winning consensus in the 19-member group for controversial U.S. initiatives outside Europe. This was demonstrated by Gerhard Schroeder, the German chancellor, who made a big issue in his successful re-election campaign of his opposition to a possible U.S. invasion of Iraq. Just as Schroeder capitalized on a different European view of the Iraqi threat and how best to confront it, other such U.S.-European disagreements could easily recur in the years ahead.
But there is also a practical reason for NATO's apparent irrelevance in the Iraq showdown: the growing gap in capabilities between the United States and Europe. Rumsfeld's main message here is that if the alliance is ever to join the fight against new threats, it needs to acquire new capabilities and streamline its command structure.
He said the issue is "seeing if we can have more of our capabilities available in days or weeks rather than months or years. If we can have a larger fraction of our capabilities agile and able to get in and out of places and move around in places with a smaller footprint. This is something that NATO countries are perfectly capable of doing if they decided to do it."
This goal is a familiar one, but it has acquired new urgency in the wake of the U.S.-led global war on terror. Alliance proponents are encouraged by one NATO achievement earlier this year: defense ministers agreed in June to develop a fresh initiative to improve forces for missions outside of Europe. The action put the alliance on record as endorsing--at least rhetorically--operations beyond its traditional borders, thereby resolving with remarkably little debate or rancor a controversy that had raged in U.S.-European defense circles for more than a decade.
"What you've had since September 11 is a real shift that put to bed the NATO in-area, out-of-area debate," a senior White House official said, using the NATO jargon for in the European area or beyond it. "It's terribly significant."
NATO officials contend that the alliance has not been sitting out the fight entirely. To relieve some of the burden on the U.S. Air Force for patrolling American skies, NATO lent several AWACS surveillance planes to the United States after the Sept. 11 attacks to patrol U.S. skies. And while NATO formally is not involved in Afghanistan, all alliance members except Iceland have sent troops there.
But for NATO to be able to respond rapidly and forcefully to contingences outside Europe, U.S and European officials say, alliance members will need to improve their ability to do several things foremost: transport forces, strike with precision weapons, communicate securely and protect against chemical, biological and nuclear attack. They also will need to streamline a NATO command structure that is still largely rooted in the Cold War.
"An example is the number of regional commands that NATO has in the Atlantic," a Pentagon official said, citing six. "There is no more submarine threat or threat to lines of communication across the Atlantic between the United States and Europe to justify that number of commands."
NATO has some recent experience in trying to modernize--most of it discouraging. Under a Defense Capabilities Initiative, approved three years ago, NATO members committed to 58 different areas of improvement. But the initiative overwhelmed European defense budgets, which have been declining, and sputtered to a halt last year with NATO meeting only about half its goals.
Under the new plan being promoted by the United States, alliance members would commit to a much shorter list of about a dozen items, and a much shorter timeframe of about two years to fulfill them. To focus the effort, Rumsfeld also is proposing this week the creation of a new NATO force for responding rapidly to conflicts outside the alliance's borders.
The force would consist of roughly 20,000 U.S., Canadian and European combat and support troops, including ground, air and maritime elements. It would not be set up in time for a potential campaign in Iraq, but the plan is to have it ready within two or three years and prepared to handle a range of missions from evacuations to all-out war.
U.S. officials hope to win formal approval of the initiative at a meeting in November of NATO heads of state in Prague.
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Rumsfeld: Alliance Must Gain Powers
September 24, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-NATO-Rumsfeld.html
WARSAW, Poland (AP) -- Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld warned NATO on Tuesday it risks becoming irrelevant in an age of global terror, and the allies agreed they should create a new quick-punch combat force. Rumsfeld also laid out the Bush administration's case against Saddam Hussein.
Rumsfeld said he did not ask for military contributions to a potential U.S. attack on Iraq because President Bush has not yet decided whether to use force to achieve his goal of deposing Saddam, Iraq's president.
After the British government released a report that supported U.S. contentions that Iraq is trying to add nuclear weapons to its arsenal of chemical and biological arms, the U.S. delegation in Warsaw gave a classified briefing to the NATO allies on Iraq's weapons work and alleged ties to terrorists.
``We gave a very thorough briefing on the best shared intelligence information that exists on Iraq, weapons of mass destruction and terrorism,'' Rumsfeld told reporters afterward.
He would provide no details but said the information ``closely parallels'' the British dossier, which Iraqi officials quickly denounced as a package of half-truths and lies. Rumsfeld said the American briefing was presented by John McLaughlin, deputy director of the CIA.
A reporter asked whether McLaughlin alleged a connection between Iraq and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network of terrorists.
``Certainly, there is,'' he said. He refused to say more. Previously Rumsfeld has asserted that senior al-Qaida figures are in Iraq but has not said where.
Lord Robertson, the NATO secretary-general, told a news conference the allies asked ``a lot of searching questions'' in response to the U.S. briefing. He did not elaborate. Last June at a NATO meeting in Brussels, Belgium, Rumsfeld presented a broader, less detailed briefing on the dangers of weapons of mass destruction and the risk that they might fall into the hands of terrorists.
Asked whether anyone had challenged information he provided on Iraq, Rumsfeld said no.
``I've always found that when people are working off the same set of facts, they tend to come to quite similar conclusions,'' he said. ``Everyone is entitled to their own opinion but not their own facts.''
In front of the U.S. Embassy in the Polish capital, about 200 young Poles and a small number of Iraqis demonstrated against NATO and the United States. The Iraqis held a poster with an Adolf Hitler portrait over the wording ``20th century,'' and a Bush portrait over the 21st century.
Rumsfeld described as uniformly excellent the allies' response to his proposal for creating a standing military force within NATO that would be ready to deploy to a hot spot, even outside NATO's borders, with as little as a week's notice. It would be a combined air, land and maritime force of about 21,000 troops, including those providing support for the fighting forces.
``If NATO does not have a force that is quick and agile, which can deploy in days or weeks instead of months or years, then it will not have much to offer the world,'' Rumsfeld told his 18 counterparts at the first NATO meeting hosted by a former member of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact.
The Rumsfeld plan is expected to be put in motion if, as is probable, President Bush and other NATO heads of government endorse it at a November summit meeting in Prague.
U.S.-German tensions were palpable Tuesday, two days after German parliamentary elections that Rumsfeld said had poisoned relations because of the anti-American tone of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's election campaign. In a public snub, Rumsfeld declined to meet with Schroeder's defense minister, Peter Struck; during a photo-taking session with all 19 NATO defense chiefs, Rumsfeld pointedly avoided Struck.
Struck left the NATO meeting before McLaughlin presented his briefing on Iraq.
In remarks to reporters, Struck expressed confidence that the hard feelings would ease.
``I think we'll return to a very normal working relation,'' Struck said. ``Slowly, but surely.''
Rumsfeld said NATO cannot afford to wait any longer to transform itself by modernizing and developing military capabilities that will be relevant to the war against terror.
``If we fail to do so it would send a harmful signal to the world about our alliance,'' he said.
Robertson, the NATO secretary-general, described the alliance's outlook in similar terms.
``We need therefore to think very carefully about the role of this alliance in the future, not least in protecting our citizens from criminal terrorists and criminal states, especially where they are armed with weapons designed for massive and indiscriminate destruction.''
He said NATO must play a pivotal role in the war against terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.
Robertson's remarks seemed to indicate a change of heart from just a few months ago when, at a NATO meeting in which Rumsfeld first urged the alliance to go on the offensive against terror, Robertson insisted that defense must remain its chief focus.
``We are a defense alliance. We remain a defense alliance,'' Robertson said in June. ``We don't go out looking for problems to solve.''
On the Net:
NATO: http://www.nato.int/
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U.S. and Pakistan Discuss Defense Cooperation
Reuters
Tuesday, September 24, 2002; 10:35 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A59582-2002Sep24?language=printer
ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - U.S. and Pakistani defense officials gathered in Islamabad on Tuesday to discuss boosting cooperation between the two countries and restoring formal ties suspended since Pakistan's 1998 nuclear tests.
The Defense Consultative Group is meeting this week for the first time since 1997, with formal proceedings due to get under way on Thursday with the arrival of U.S. Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith.
Three working groups began preliminary meetings on Tuesday.
The decision to restore the defense group is seen as a reward for Pakistan's cooperation with the U.S.-led war on terror and military action in Afghanistan, and was taken when President Pervez Musharraf visited Washington in February.
Pakistan's state-run PTV television said the two sides were expected to take "far-reaching decisions for extending cooperation in the defense and military field."
Defense analysts say the talks will focus on several areas of defense cooperation including the release of arms and equipment withheld by Washington in 1990 as a punishment for Islamabad's nuclear program.
Officials are also likely to discuss cooperation in patrolling Pakistan's mountainous border with Afghanistan, where U.S. forces are tracking down fugitive al Qaeda and Taliban militants.
Pakistan will also be asking for new weapons, a senior government official told Reuters in Islamabad.
"Pakistan's request for purchase of new weapons will also be discussed at the Defense Consultative Group meeting," the official said. "Whether such a request will materialize or not will be known only after the meeting."
In 1998, the United States slapped economic sanctions on Pakistan and scrapped the defense group meetings.
Pakistan's delegation at the talks will be led by Defense Secretary Hamid Nawaz.
Pakistan and India have massed over a million troops on their borders since a bloody attack on the Indian parliament in December that India blamed on Pakistan-based Islamic militants.
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Pakistan Seeks New Weapons From U.S.
September 24, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Pakistan-US-Defense.html
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- A Pakistani-U.S. defense group on Tuesday began its first meeting since the United States imposed sanctions following Pakistan's controversial nuclear tests in 1998, with Pakistan hoping to parlay its support for the war on terrorism into a fresh agreement to beef up its military with modern weapons and equipment.
The four-day talks will focus on the release of weapons and equipment already earmarked for Pakistan but withheld after Pakistan's nuclear tests, according to a defense official with knowledge of the agenda. The meeting -- known as the Defense Consultative Group -- will also discuss the purchase of new weapons and the possibility of restarting joint military exercises, the official said.
In Washington, Pentagon officials on Monday said the meeting will deal with counterterrorism cooperation, as well as Pakistan's desire to bolster defense of its borders with Afghanistan and India.
``The revival of the Defense Consultative Group is a very significant development,'' Pakistani presidential spokesman Gen. Rashid Quereshi told The Associated Press. ``Such meetings will definitely help enhance defense cooperation between Pakistan and United States.''
A 40-member U.S. team was in Pakistan on Tuesday for the preliminary talks.
Formal discussions are to begin Thursday with the arrival of U.S. Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith, the delegation leader. The Pakistani side is led by Defense Secretary Gen. Hamid Nawaz.
Feith will also hold separate meetings with President Gen. Pervez Musharraf and other senior military officials to discuss Pakistan's defense needs, according to a Defense Ministry statement.
U.S. military aid to Pakistan was cut off in 1990 to punish the country for its growing nuclear program, but Pakistan later received special U.S. administration permission to buy spare parts for its existing weapons and aircraft.
Further sanctions were imposed and the defense group meetings were scrapped after the 1998 nuclear tests, but since then, Pakistan has become one of Washington's most important allies in the war on terrorism, arresting hundreds of suspected al-Qaida members fleeing U.S. bombing in neighboring Pakistan.
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U.N. inspection team 'ready to go'
By Nicholas Kralev
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
September 24, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020924-26803496.htm
VIENNA, Austria - The U.N. inspection team that dismantled most of Iraq's nuclear-weapons program in the 1990s said yesterday it was ready to resume its work under the old conditions and, barring a red light from the Security Council, planned to return to Baghdad as early as Oct. 15.
Officials at the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which created its Iraq Action Team after the 1991 Gulf war, said the numerous existing U.N. resolutions demanding Baghdad's cooperation provided it with sufficient mandate to send the inspectors back without a new resolution.
"We have an existing mandate to do inspections, which were interrupted in 1998, but Iraq's recent invitation has opened the door to go back in, and we are planning to do so," one senior IAEA official said. "We can resume under the existing resolutions or under the terms of a new one; either way, we are ready to go."
The Bush administration, however, has made it clear that it strongly objects to the inspectors' return unless the Security Council adopts a new, toughly worded resolution whose requirements most likely would be difficult for Iraq to satisfy. The council is expected to discuss the draft document this week.
The Oct. 15 date appeared last week in an internal U.N. timeline circulated by Hans Blix, chief of the organization's arm in charge of Iraq's biological, chemical and missile capabilities. An IAEA advance party would arrive in Baghdad that day for "preparatory work," but "some early inspections" are also likely, the document said.
"We are going in well-prepared, with a plan, and we never take anything at face value," said Jacques Baute, the Iraq Action Team's leader. "We are thorough and suspicious. We expect that the Iraqis have learned lessons from the 1990s and will do things differently. But we will try a few new things as well."
Mark Gwozdecky, the IAEA's chief spokesman, said the first group to return to Baghdad would include a half-dozen Iraq Action Team members and about a dozen representatives from Mr. Blix's commission in New York. The two groups would fly to Bahrain separately and then take a charter flight to Iraq together. It could take up to six weeks for full inspections to begin, he said.
"We could be learning things from day one, and the level of cooperation the Iraqis give us on logistical and other practical matters would be an important factor," Mr. Gwozdecky said. "We have new technology that would allow us, for example, to sniff around metals and find out whether they have been involved in nuclear applications."
But the plans to proceed with the October trip would be jeopardized if Iraqi officials, during a planned meeting in Vienna on Monday, do not "demonstrate that they will provide enough information" to the inspectors.
The IAEA team was forced to leave Baghdad in December 1998, along with members of the U.N. Special Commission for disarming Iraq, known as Unscom, the predecessor of Mr. Blix's organization. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein expelled the inspectors just before joint U.S.-British military strikes.
Former Unscom members, including its chairman, Richard Butler, repeatedly complained about a lack of full access to various facilities and ill relations with the Iraqis. Baghdad, in turn, accused the commission of spying for the United States.
Things were much different for the IAEA team, which never faced espionage charges, Mr. Gwozdecky said. By 1995, the nuclear specialists achieved "better cooperation" with Baghdad and maintained it until late 1998, he said. He explained that the team would inform the Iraqis the night before an inspection but would keep the location secret until vehicles headed to a specific site.
"That allowed us to neutralize Iraq's nuclear-weapons capabilities, and we were confident we hadn't missed any major component of the program," he said. "Of course, you can't eliminate hundreds of Iraqi scientists and their skills."
Since the inspectors were satisfied with the working conditions and their accomplishments, they were happy to continue from where they stopped nearly four years ago, Mr. Gwozdecky said. He dismissed regular claims in the West that all inspections in Iraq so far have proved ineffective.
"At the end of the day, we obtained good results in terms of disarming their nuclear program. That message somehow got lost amid the constant refrain about the ineffectiveness of inspections," he said.
In contrast to the Bush administration's assertion that sending the inspectors back to Iraq would achieve little and only waste precious time, IAEA officials say their specialists would be able to detect traces of nuclear activity.
They also noted that in any future inspections they would "jealously guard" the agency's reputation and independence - a hint it would object to any attempts to politicize its work.
"We are a technical organization, and we are trying to provide authoritative and substantive information to the United Nations," Mr. Gwozdecky said. "We are a neutral third party."
President Bush and other U.S. officials have cited two IAEA reports as evidence of Saddam's continued efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction: one based on satellite images showing new buildings and another stating that the Iraqi leader is six months away from acquiring a nuclear weapon.
Mr. Gwozdecky said such reports do not exist. The IAEA's specialists have seen new buildings, including at sites previously used by Iraq for nuclear activities, but there is "no solid evidence of what's happening in those buildings," he said.
"We use commercially available technology," he said, "and even the best technology doesn't tell you what's underneath that roof."
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U.S. submits U.N. draft to ease siege
From combined dispatches
September 24, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020924-77906146.htm
NEW YORK - The United States introduced a draft resolution in the U.N. Security Council yesterday calling on Israel to stop destroying Palestinian installations in Ramallah.
Washington offered the measure on the fourth day of an Israeli siege of Yasser Arafat's Ramallah headquarters during which Israeli soldiers destroyed every structure in the compound but the one occupied by the Palestinian leader.
Israeli and Palestinian officials yesterday held their first talks aimed at ending the siege but reported little progress.
Palestinians, meanwhile, engaged in a commercial strike and staged additional protests by burning tires and pelting soldiers with rocks - actions rarely seen in recent months. About 10,000 rallied in the Gaza Strip, and many schoolchildren were bused in for the demonstration.
The 15-nation Security Council was meeting in emergency session at the request of Arab states alarmed by the siege, which was initiated by Israeli forces after two suicide bombings in Israel shattered a six-week lull.
The Bush administration criticized the siege for the second consecutive day.
"The president views what Israel is doing now as unhelpful to the cause of bringing about reform in Palestinian institutions," said White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, with President Bush on a day trip to New Jersey.
He said senior U.S. officials had passed the message to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Secretary-General Kofi Annan also warned Israel at the start of the U.N. debate yesterday that its battering away at the Palestinian Authority was counterproductive.
"A policy based on forcing the other side to capitulate is a bankrupt policy. It is not working, and it will never work. It only encourages desperation. It weakens moderates and strengthens extremists," Mr. Annan said.
He also denounced Palestinian suicide bombings as "morally repugnant" acts that ate away at hopes for a political solution in the Middle East.
The U.S. draft was offered as a substitute for a resolution put forward by Palestinian U.N. observer Nasser Al-Kidwa, stating that the council was "gravely concerned" by the reoccupation of Mr. Arafat's compound and demanding the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Palestinian cities.
Washington's version also called for Israel to pull back from the cities.
It asked Israel "to cease measures in and around Ramallah, including the destruction of Palestinian civilian and security infrastructure, that aggravate the situation and that do not contribute to progress on comprehensive Palestinian civil and security reforms."
Unlike the Palestinian draft, it demanded that all sides cease "all acts of violence, including all acts of terror" and asked the Palestinian Authority to bring to justice those responsible for "terrorist acts."
U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte rejected the Palestinian draft, saying, "We will not support the adoption of a one-sided text that fails to recognize that this conflict has two sides."
But he stopped short of a veto threat, even though Washington had said in July that it would block any Middle East resolution that failed to condemn terrorism explicitly.
With the United States wooing Arab nations for support in a potential strike against Iraq, "Washington doesn't dare use its veto," said Ambassador Jagdish Koonjul of Mauritius.
In Ramallah, the Israeli army allowed chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat into the presidential complex to brief Mr. Arafat on talks with Israeli officials earlier yesterday.
Mr. Erekat said Israeli officials had refused to present him with a list of suspected militants who they say are holed up with Mr. Arafat, demanding instead that the Palestinian leader draw up a list of all those in the compound.
"Arafat rejected the Israeli proposal," Mr. Erekat said.
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Annan Proposes Fewer Reports and Less Talk for a Better U.N.
New York Times
September 24, 2002
By JULIA PRESTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/24/international/24ANNA.html
UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 23 - After years of major cost cuts and staff reductions to streamline the United Nations bureaucracy, Secretary General Kofi Annan today proposed a program of more modest changes to make it "a more effective instrument."
Mr. Annan laid out a strategy for fewer talk sessions and reports on back-burner issues, noting that the United Nations secretariat held 15,484 meetings and produced 5,879 reports - many translated into several languages - in 2000 and 2001. He promised to review all United Nations activities "to make sure we are doing what matters, and not wasting time or money on out-of-date or irrelevant tasks."
Mr. Annan said he would close some of the 71 United Nations public relations offices around the world, concentrating their functions in regional centers.
He also proposed to consolidate three overlapping budget-oversight groups into one.
Mr. Annan, who is in his second five-year term as secretary general, said he took the action on his own initiative and not "to reduce the budget, or respond to any pressures or conditions imposed from the outside."
The United States has long leaned on the United Nations, sometimes by holding up its mandatory dues payments, to eliminate bureaucratic waste and corruption.
In supporting Mr. Annan for a second term, Washington praised his successes in streamlining the bureaucracy.
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U.N. Security Council Calls for End to Siege of Arafat
New York Times
September 24, 2002
By JULIA PRESTON with JAMES BENNET
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/24/international/middleeast/24CND-MIDE.html
UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 24 - The United States abstained on a Security Council resolution early today demanding that Israel end its siege of Yasir Arafat's West Bank compound, allowing the measure to go into effect.
The resolution, approved by the other 14 Council members after 11 hours of negotiations, was based on a compromise forged by European nations between an American proposal and a Syrian draft. The measure also called on the Palestinian Authority to ensure that those responsible for terrorist acts were brought to justice.
Similar resolutions have been killed by the United States in the past by use of its veto power in the Council. But its passage came after a day in which the United States criticized Israel in unusually strong terms, accusing the Israelis of undermining Palestinian reform by confining Mr. Arafat in his Ramallah headquarters.
Passage of the resolution came as Israeli forces struck in the Gaza Strip early today, killing nine Palestinians.
Opposition to the resolution was voiced by the deputy United States ambassador to the United Nations, James. B. Cunningham.
"The resolution that we've adopted this evening was flawed in our view in that it failed to explicitly condemn the terrorist groups and those who provide them with political cover, support and safe haven in perpetuating conflict in the Middle East," he said.
Seeking to avert a confrontation with Arab states over the siege, the American diplomats offered their draft resolution during an emergency session of the Council that started on Monday, to counter a Syrian proposal.
The United States proposal called on Israel "to cease measures in and around Ramallah," saying that they "aggravate the situation" and that they "do not contribute to progress on comprehensive Palestinian civil and security reforms."
At the same time, the American draft cited two Palestinian groups by name, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas, holding them responsible for the recent attacks in Israel. The proposal required that they be treated as terrorists under a Security Council resolution passed last year to condemn the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
It was the first time that the United States had sought to equate, in the formal terms of a Security Council measure, the Palestinian suicide bombings and other attacks in Israel with the terrorism of Sept. 11, 2001.
American diplomats had calculated that this clause of their proposal would be unacceptable to many nations on the 15-member Security Council, who would nevertheless turn to debate the American alternative in order to avoid drawing yet another veto on a Middle East issue from the United States.
Syria's proposal, which it unveiled on Friday, called on Israel to withdraw immediately from Mr. Arafat's compound and demanded an end to the violence. Unlike the United States resolution, the Syrian draft made no mention of the Palestinian suicide bombings that prompted Israel's retaliation, unleashing the current cycle of violence.
The United States rejected the Syrian initiative, offered on behalf of other Arab states and the Palestinians, as "not balanced," but hoped its counteroffer would stave off a Council vote that would lead the United States to exercise its veto.
The maneuvering brought new complications for the United States' campaign to gather support at the United Nations for its campaign against the Iraqi government.
Defending the Syrian proposal in the open Council debate, one Arab representative after another echoed the summons to the United Nations that President Bush made on Sept. 12, when he called on the Security Council to enforce its resolutions against Iraq.
On Monday Arab diplomats made the same plea, but against Israel, charging it was out of compliance with Council measures dating to 1967, and demanded that the United Nations exert its authority.
"Why these double standards?" asked the representative of the Arab League, Yanya Mahmassani, in defending the measure here on Monday. "Why aren't United Nations Security Council resolutions on Israel enforced the way they are on other countries? Israel violated 28 resolutions of the Security Council. Why should not the Security Council shoulder its responsibilities?"
On Thursday night, Israel sent its forces, including demolition crews, into Mr. Arafat's compound after a suicide bomber killed six people on a bus in Tel Aviv after a six-week lull in such attacks. Israeli officials said that they were impelled by Palestinian attacks to seek the surrender of at least 19 men holed up with Mr. Arafat.
The government was criticized at home and abroad as using unnecessary force and exercising poor timing. Its action came as the Palestinians were weighing democratic reforms. Palestinian politicians said that a push to restrict Mr. Arafat's executive power had been stifled by the Israeli action.
Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, called the Israeli action in Ramallah unhelpful. "Peace is best secured by new Palestinian institutions, and what Israel is doing is running contrary to that cause," he said. At the State Department, Richard Boucher, the spokesman, said that Israel had "aggravated" American efforts to improve Israeli security and Palestinian institutions.
The United States ambassador to Israel, Dan Kurtzer, delivered a similar message privately to Ariel Sharon, Israel's prime minister, in a weekend meeting at Mr. Sharon's farm.
Kofi Annan, the secretary general of the United Nations, on Monday called the Israeli approach of attacking the Palestinian Authority a "bankrupt policy" that undermined moderates and fed extremism. He also urged Palestinians to abandon suicide bombing attacks, calling them "this wicked instrument of terror."
In response to the White House criticism, Raanan Gissin, a spokesman for Mr. Sharon, said the Israeli government understood President Bush's concern. "We're taking all necessary steps to prevent escalation, but at the same time we must defend our citizens," he said. "We did not choose to do this because we had this love of demolition of houses. They left us no choice."
Palestinian officials accused Mr. Sharon of seizing on Hamas attacks to cripple the governing Palestinian Authority and advance his stated goal of exiling Mr. Arafat; Israeli officials said that, as the leader of the Palestinians, Mr. Arafat was responsible for controlling Hamas.
But with some Israeli politicians and commentators questioning the government's hands-off approach to prominent Hamas leaders, Mr. Sharon hinted on Monday at a major military operation against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. "When the day comes - the moment we can muster the appropriate forces - then we will definitely have to take action to strike at Hamas to stop its operational capability," he said.
Israeli officials have been warning of a major assault on the fenced, teeming Gaza Strip since at least mid-May, but have so far balked at attempting one.
The nine Palestinians in the Gaza Strip today were killed in an Israeli incursion that lasted several hours. Soldiers destroyed 13 workshops where the army said crude rockets were being made, and blew up the home of a Hamas militiaman who killed five Israeli teenagers in a Jewish settlement in Gaza earlier this year,
The military did not target Hamas leaders in the raid.
Privately, senior officials of the Palestinian Authority have expressed the hope that Israel would more forcefully attack the Hamas infrastructure. Mr. Arafat, they say, is not politically strong enough to crack down on Hamas without the immediate prospect of substantive peace negotiations - reasoning that Israeli officials dismiss as an excuse for inaction.
Nabil Amr, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council and a supporter of reform, said, "Yasir Arafat always pays the price." Mr. Amr said he was meeting with like-minded leaders, but that with Israeli soldiers in Mr. Arafat's compound it was no time to talk of reform. "I think we must wait to see what will happen after this disaster," he said.
Dr. Abdel Aziz Rantisi, a political leader of Hamas, said by telephone from Gaza City that Israel was pressuring Mr. Arafat "to push him to crack down on the Islamic movement." But he said that, after Mr. Arafat conducted such a crackdown in 1996, he was not rewarded with concessions at the bargaining table. "Now he understands," Dr. Rantisi said. He said that "there should be a kind of retaliation if the life of Mr. Arafat is in danger."
Israeli officials say their present operation in Ramallah does not endanger Mr. Arafat. The Israeli demolition stopped over the weekend when it threatened the remaining structure, where Mr. Arafat is confined, a senior Israeli official said.
Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, met on Monday with Israeli officials, who he said demanded a list of all those inside the compound. "I said, `You must be joking,' " Mr. Erekat said, adding that he had assumed they had their own lists. Mr. Arafat rejected the demand, he said.
Mr. Erekat said that at Mr. Arafat's instructions he was seeking a third party to intervene in the dispute.
Israeli officials said they would be satisfied with nothing less than the surrender of all wanted men, but Mr. Arafat refused to part with them. One senior official said Americans should not worry that Mr. Arafat's predicament would interfere in international discussion of Iraq. "This Arafat story is going to die a natural death in a day or two," he said.
In the overwhelmingly Palestinian city of Hebron in the West Bank on Monday evening, a Palestinian gunman opened fire on Israeli celebrants marking the Jewish festival of Sukkot. The gunman wounded three children and killed their father.
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Bush presses U.N. for resolution
September 24, 2002
By Joseph Curl
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020924-871434.htm
TRENTON, N.J. - President Bush yesterday insisted that the United Nations pass a "strong" new resolution against Iraq, saying the old weapons-inspection regime established after the Persian Gulf war has been flouted for too long by Saddam Hussein.
"I want to see strong resolutions coming out of that U.N., a resolution which says the old ways of deceit are gone, a resolution which will hold this man to account," the president said to loud applause from about 2,000 supporters gathered in an Army National Guard Aviation Support facility hangar.
Mr. Bush's comments echo those of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who last week was the first to enunciate the administration's stance that returning U.N. weapons inspectors to Iraq under existing resolutions is "unacceptable."
"If somebody tried to move the team in now, we would find ways to thwart that," Mr. Powell said.
Some nations on the U.N. Security Council, including Russia and France, have wavered on Mr. Bush's call for a new resolution, instead supporting the return of inspectors under past resolutions.
The United Nations is mulling over how to deal with Saddam, who has ignored 16 U.N. resolutions since 1991. Iraq late last week reneged on an offer to allow inspectors unfettered access and during the weekend defiantly announced that it would not comply with any new resolution on the return of inspectors.
As a result, Mr. Bush said yesterday, the time for talk is nearing an end.
"There are no negotiations with Saddam Hussein about what he should or should not do - he's already said what he would do," Mr. Bush said at an afternoon fund-raiser. "The discussion is within the United Nations Security Council, and soon they will tell the world whether or not they're going to be relevant, or whether or not they're going to be weak."
"For the sake of world peace, I hope they're relevant. However, for the sake of freedom and peace, if the United Nations will not deal with Saddam Hussein, the United States and our friends will," he said to loud cheers.
Meanwhile in London, a spokesman in Prime Minister Tony Blair's office said the draft of a new U.N. Security Council resolution on weapons inspection in Iraq will be offered within days. The resolution would set out the requirements Iraq must meet when inspections resume.
Mr. Blair yesterday briefed members of his Cabinet about the contents of a dossier on Iraq's weapons programs, set to be released today. Mr. Blair told them it was clear from intelligence reports that Saddam was continuing to build his arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.
"The truth is the policy of containment has not worked," Mr. Blair was quoted by a spokesman as saying at the special Cabinet meeting at his No. 10 Downing Street office. "He has been able to make progress [on such weapons] and has to be stopped."
The 50-page dossier will be released to lawmakers just before a special one-day session of Parliament. Mr. Blair has promised to give more details about Iraq's suspected programs of developing chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
The prime minister has decided that lawmakers will not vote on a substantive motion on Iraq when they meet today, but House of Commons Leader Robin Cook has said it would be inconceivable that Britain could go to war without their consent.
On Friday, Jeremy Greenstock, the British ambassador to the United Nations, reassured other Security Council members that Saddam would be able to avoid military action if he complied strictly with the terms of a new resolution.
Emerging from a private session at the British mission to the United Nations, Colombian Ambassador Alfonso Valdivieso told United Press International that his understanding from the briefing was that Washington was willing to put the ouster of Saddam - what the Bush administration calls "regime change" - "in the refrigerator."
Mr. Valdivieso said he came away from Mr. Greenstock's briefing with the idea he got the idea that "the Americans do not have the aim to overthrow Saddam Hussein -that is in a secondary station."
Two other diplomats at the meeting, both of whom did not want to be identified, confirmed that account of Mr. Greenstock's words.
Mr. Greenstock "said that regime change is in the refrigerator, according to him, unless and until the inspection process comes to a halt," one of the diplomats said.
The other diplomat said Mr. Greenstock told the group: "The U.S., rhetoric aside, is prepared to accept a situation where Iraq is disarmed and the regime does not change."
However, an official in the U.S. mission to the United Nations said the toppling of Saddam is still Washington's policy.
At the State Department, spokesman Richard Boucher said talks at the United Nations on a draft resolution were continuing apace and slammed Iraq for "backtracking" on its pledge to allow the inspectors to return.
"We think a resolution like this is necessary in order to give the inspectors unfettered access as a critical ingredient for an effective inspections regime," he said before rebuking Baghdad for its Sunday statement.
"It's not up to Iraq to decide whether the Security Council adopts a new resolution, nor is it for Iraq to decide what sort of inspection regime the Security Council should use. The recent Iraqi statements are just further proof that Iraq is already backtracking on its commitments to have inspections without conditions," he said.
National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said that while the shape of a U.N. resolution is up in the air, the consequences for Saddam's years of flouting the international community are not.
"We're open to how the U.N. Security Council acts to finally deal with the threat of Saddam Hussein. But we have to remember that weapons inspectors are not the end in themselves," she said in an interview with the London-based Financial Times.
•This article is based in part on wire service reports.
-------- us
Billions needed to fight al Qaeda
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
September 24, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020924-1717864.htm
The commander of U.S. special-operation forces says he needs billions of dollars more in spending and thousands more personnel to carry out an order to accelerate the global war on al Qaeda and other terror groups.
Bush administration officials say Air Force Gen. Charles Holland, who heads U.S. Special Operations Command in Tampa, Fla., has told Pentagon officials that he needs $23 billion in added spending during the next five years beginning with the budget that starts Oct. 1, 2004, nearly a doubling of his allocation.
He also has requested that the "special ops" community of 47,000 personnel be increased by 9,000. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in July ordered Gen. Holland's command to play a larger role in hunting and killing al Qaeda followers.
"Those increases are what is necessary to go into global operations," a senior official said. "General Holland has told them what he needs. It's put-up or shut-up time now."
Chet Justice, a spokesman for Special Operations Command, said the staff in Tampa still is working on projected budget needs. "All of the documents they are working on are classified," he said.
Officials said most new slots would go to support staff, such as communications specialists.
But the command also would add "operators" - the Navy SEALS, Army Green Berets, Delta commandos and Air Force ground controllers. The elite Delta Force, which numbers about 600 and is stationed at Fort Bragg, N.C., is especially in demand because of its proven counterterrorism techniques.
The war on terrorism has put intense pressure on all these units, whose covert skills are suited for the job of hunting down and eliminating Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda operatives. They are spread thin. Units have deployed to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Georgia, Yemen, Africa and the Philippines to fight al Qaeda or train locals in how to do it.
Special-operation commanders normally like to maintain a ratio of 3-to-1: For every unit deployed, commanders want three stateside training and resting for the next mission.
But sources say that ratio is being violated to keep the pressure on al Qaeda. Green Beret units assigned to Latin America have been reassigned and are in Afghanistan hunting down al Qaeda and hard-core Taliban fighters.
U.S. Special Operations Command took on added responsibilities in July, when Mr. Rumsfeld sent a classified order to Gen. Holland.
Mr. Rumsfeld, impatient at the rate at which al Qaeda operatives were being killed or captured, ordered Gen. Holland to come up with a whole new war campaign that laid out how special-operations forces would locate and eliminate terrorists around the world.
Called the "30 percent plan" because it will be implemented in stages, the plan essentially will make Gen. Holland the global commander for some special- operation missions against terrorists. Mr. Rumsfeld has not signed off on a strategy.
Covert warriors, while overseen by U.S. Special Operation Command, typically fall under the control of regional combatant commanders in a war. U.S. Central Command, which runs the war in Afghanistan, supervises Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force camped near Kandahar.
Mr. Rumsfeld wants Gen. Holland to look at devising missions whereby warriors could enter a country at a moment's notice, go after their targets and then quickly exit. The Washington Times first reported his order in August.
Gen. Holland has briefed the Pentagon several times on his evolving plan. He in turn was asked which resources he needed, and he responded with the request for more personnel and money.
Officials said Mr. Rumsfeld, days after al Qaeda terrorists attacked America on September 11, 2001, voiced a desire to create some kind of a global commander to oversee far-flung counterterrorist operations.
Gen. Holland gave Mr. Rumsfeld an initial briefing. The defense secretary was said not to be fully satisfied and sent the four-star general back to the drawing board.
The Pentagon is drafting its 2004-09 budget to be sent to the White House in December.
U.S. Special Operations Command now has an annual budget of $4.9 billion, 1.3 percent of the Pentagon's overall budget. The $23 billion request would add $4.6 billion annually over five years, nearly doubling annual spending on the operations.
These limited special-operations resources greatly enhance the effectiveness of conventional military forces by providing essential leveraging capabilities while ensuring that "must succeed" special operations are completed with the absolute certainty and professionalism the nation demands, Gen. Holland told Congress in March.
Asked about commandos' role in war, Mr. Rumsfeld told reporters early this month that "special operations are in limited supply. And clearly, in the global war on terrorism, they have a role that is different and more extensive than they might in a more conventional conflict. So we need to see that we have the right numbers and in the right places, working on the right problems."
----
Experts Analyze Iraq Attack Options
September 23, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Iraq-War-Scenarios.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- No matter what war plan President Bush chooses, if he decides to attack Iraq, the assault is almost certain to start from above.
Strikes from U.S. warplanes and Tomahawk cruise missiles would aim first to destroy Iraq's relatively sophisticated air defenses, war strategists believe. The strikes would focus not on the surface-to-air missile batteries and anti-aircraft guns themselves but on the radar and communication networks that tie them together.
``You don't have to break every piece of an air defense system,'' said retired Gen. Merrill McPeak, who commanded the Air Force during the Persian Gulf War.
The U.S. goal would be to own the skies; to be able to bomb Iraqi sites and provide air support to ground forces with impunity.
The airstrikes would be aimed at isolating or killing President Saddam Hussein and other Iraqi leaders and damaging Saddam's elite Republican Guard units and the internal security mechanism around him. Rumsfeld said during the weekend that U.S. military action would focus on Saddam, not Iraq's infrastructure.
Initial airstrikes also would try to destroy Saddam's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons facilities and his long-range missiles, targets on which the United States has intelligence but are easy to hide.
Thus, many experts agree that removing Saddam and getting rid of Iraq's banned weapons programs almost certainly would require ground troops, possibly entering Iraq as early as days after bombing started.
``You're not going to be able to deal from the air with weapons of mass destruction,'' Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told lawmakers last week. ``It would take deep penetrators and would require capabilities that would have some effects that would not be nice.''
Rumsfeld's allusion was to nuclear weapons, which would be needed to blow up deeply buried bunkers.
Some experts say there's a strong chance Saddam would resort to his weapons of mass destruction. U.S. forces have equipment, training and vaccinations to deal with chemical and biological weapons, but their use would slow an advancing U.S. military force.
``It wouldn't stop the American or coalition forces from completing their mission, but it would delay and make it harder, and there would be more casualties,'' said former U.N. weapons inspector Raymond Zilinskas.
Both sides have had more than a decade to learn each other's tactics and capabilities during skirmishes in the two flight-interdiction zones over Iraq. There have been no aerial dogfights between warplanes, but Iraqi anti-aircraft gunners have learned to ``pop on'' their radars at the last minute to avoid being targeted by U.S. radar-seeking missiles or jamming aircraft. Iraq also has put anti-aircraft guns and installations in civilian areas, even an amusement park, U.S. officials say.
The U.S. air campaign may try to preserve some lines of communication between Saddam's government in Baghdad and the military in the rest of the country.
One fear is that if lower-level commanders were to be cut off from Baghdad, they would use chemical or biological weapons out of desperation. On the other hand, if they are tuned in enough to know the war is going badly, they might stay out of the fight or switch sides.
After the first round of airstrikes, which could last days or weeks, the United States might pause to assess whether some of Saddam's military were defecting and whether Iraqi dissidents had gained territory or provoked uprisings.
Iraq's military, mindful of its crushing defeat a decade ago when it was much stronger than now, could simply fold when an attack is imminent or shortly after. Tens of thousands of Iraqi troops surrendered in the Gulf War.
``It's a military that has a pattern of recognizing that it's better off not fighting for long,'' Rumsfeld said.
Estimates of the numbers of ground forces needed vary from 50,000 to 350,000 or more. More than 500,000 coalition soldiers faced Iraq in the Gulf War.
Getting that many U.S. troops to the region could take up to three months, experts say. Thousands already are stationed in the region, participating in the war on terror or in exercises with friendly governments. Tons of U.S. military materiel, including tanks, armored personnel carriers and other heavy gear, already are in the Gulf area.
U.S. commanders have many options for getting American troops into Iraq. Most would require approval beforehand by other countries, some of which have expressed reluctance.
Soldiers could mass in Kuwait and push northward into Iraq toward Baghdad. The United States has thousands of soldiers there, as well as battle experience in southern Iraq from the Gulf War. Saddam has put many troops in the south and violently suppressed dissent there.
U.S. forces also could gather in southern Turkey and press south to the Iraqi capital. This would give U.S. troops better roads and the support of anti-Saddam Kurds, but the route is mountainous and Saddam's hometown stronghold of Tikrit, which has an air base, is on the way.
American planes could airdrop troops virtually anywhere in Iraq, especially if Saddam's air defenses were down. Or the United States could use captured outlying Iraqi military bases as staging areas.
A push to Baghdad from the west is considered unlikely, given Saudi Arabia's reluctance to be involved. Iraq's eastern border is with Iran, which basically precludes a drive from that direction.
Baghdad could be key to the battle.
``The center of gravity is not the wholesale defeat of the Iraqi military, but rather convincing everyone that Saddam Hussein is not going to be president in a couple of days,'' said military analyst John Pike of the consulting firm GlobalSecurity.org. ``In order to do that, I think you can bypass the Iraqi military and go straight to Baghdad.''
Urban fighting, however, is deadly, and many U.S. advantages in technology and communications are useless in the closed-in spaces and artificial canyons of a city.
----
Pentagon Official: Navy Arms Tests Insufficient
By REUTERS
September 24, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-arms-navy.html or
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A60274-2002Sep24?language=printer
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A top Pentagon official warned in a letter last month that the Navy was increasingly deploying ``into harm's way'' combat systems that had not been adequately tested.
Thomas Christie, the Pentagon's director of operational testing and evaluations, urged U.S. Navy Secretary Gordon England in a letter made public Tuesday to deploy new combat systems only after they had been adequately tested and evaluated.
``I am concerned about an apparent trend by the Navy to deploy an increasing number of combat systems into harm's way that have not demonstrated acceptable performance during adequate operational test and evaluation,'' Christie wrote in the letter, which was obtained by the Project on Government Oversight, a government watchdog group also known as POGO.
``I strongly recommend that you adopt a policy of deploying new combat systems after they have demonstrated appropriate performance during adequate operational test and evaluation.''
Defense analysts said the letter raised serious concerns at a time when Washington is already fighting a war on terrorism, and is gearing up for possible military action in Iraq.
The Navy had no immediate comment on the letter, which was stamped ``received Aug. 1,'' but confirmed it had been received and officials were reviewing the issues raised by Christie.
``It would be premature to discuss any specifics at this time,'' Lt. Cmdr. Dawn Cutler said.
In the letter, Christie mentioned several specific combat systems, including the Joint Standoff Weapon or JSOW, a precision-guided weapon system made by Raytheon Co. ; three systems used aboard Boeing F/A-18E/F fighter jets, and the BQQ-10 submarine sonar system.
CRITICS WARN SYSTEMS COULD FAIL
POGO defense investigator Eric Miller said Boeing Co.'s F/A-18E/F was the Navy's highest priority fighter and a squadron of 12 of the planes was recently sent to the Gulf region aboard the U.S. carrier Abraham Lincoln.
``At a time when it is particularly important that our pilots be able to depend on their weapons, the Navy hasn't proven that these systems work.''
In his letter, Christie raised concerns about three systems used on the F/A-18E/F, or Super Hornet, including an unnamed classified system that was halted from operational test and evaluation in February ``due to unsatisfactory performance.''
Despite that decision, he said he had learned of a Navy proposal to deploy the system aboard the F/A-18E/F following a rapid assessment of ``vastly reduced scope.''
He said the Super Hornet's infrared missile targeting system, called the advanced targeting and designating forward looking infrared system or ATFLIR, also made by Raytheon, had shown unsatisfactory results during April testing.
He said ATFLIR, which includes a visible light camera designed to detect and track air-to-air and air-to-surface targets, worked for the firing of only two out of seven laser guided bombs during the April test.
No comment was immediately available from Raytheon.
Christie also mentioned the shared reconnaissance pod, known by the acronym SHARP, made by L-3 Communications Holdings Inc. . He said the Navy had proposed accelerating its deployment after a rapid review ``in lieu of adequate operational test.''
SHARP is an all-weather reconnaissance system that allows a pilot to see images up to 50 miles away at altitudes of up to 50,000 feet.
No comment was immediately available from L-3.
Christie said the BQQ-10 submarine sonar system, the acoustic rapid COTS insertion or ARCI, was put in use aboard Navy submarines ``prior to demonstrating acceptable reliability during operational test,'' but gave no further details.
The system was designed for use on the Navy's new Virginia Class attack submarine of the future, but is already being used on some of today's attack submarines, POGO said.
--------
U.S. Troops in West Africa on Protection Mission
September 24, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-ivorycoast.html
ACCRA (Reuters) - U.S. troops on a mission to protect American citizens from violence in Ivory Coast landed in the neighboring West African country of Ghana early on Wednesday, airport sources said.
The sources said a Hercules C-130 cargo plane had arrived with 53 men on board. He said another four planes carrying men and equipment were expected soon at the airport in Accra.
The Pentagon announced on Tuesday it was sending troops to the region to ensure the safety of American civilians after a military mutiny. Among Americans trapped by fighting are scores of children at a school in Ivory Coast's second city of Bouake.
-------- propaganda wars
The dishonesty of this so-called dossier
If these pages of trickery are based on 'probably' and 'if', we have no business going to war
25 September 2002,
Robert Fisk:
UK Independent
http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=336404
Read the full report: http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=336496
Tony Blair's "dossier" on Iraq is a shocking document. Reading it can only fill a decent human being with shame and outrage. Its pages are final proof - if the contents are true - that a massive crime against humanity has been committed in Iraq. For if the details of Saddam's building of weapons of mass destruction are correct - and I will come to the "ifs" and "buts" and "coulds" later - it means that our massive, obstructive, brutal policy of UN sanctions has totally failed. In other words, half a million Iraqi children were killed by us - for nothing.
Let's go back to 12 May 1996. Madeleine Albright, the US Secretary of State, had told us that sanctions worked and prevented Saddam from rebuilding weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Our Tory government agreed, and Tony Blair faithfully toed the line. But on 12 May, Mrs Albright appeared on CBS television. Leslie Stahl, the interviewer, asked: "We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that's more than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?" To the world's astonishment, Mrs Albright replied: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it."
Now we know - if Mr Blair is telling us the truth - that the price was not worth it. The price was paid in the lives of hundreds of thousands of children. But it wasn't worth a dime. The Blair "dossier" tells us that, despite sanctions, Saddam was able to go on building weapons of mass destruction. All that nonsense about dual-use technology, the ban on children's pencils - because lead could have a military use - and our refusal to allow Iraq to import equipment to restore the water-treatment plants that we bombed in the Gulf War, was a sham.
This terrible conclusion is the only moral one to be drawn from the 16 pages that supposedly detail the chemical, biological and nuclear horrors that the Beast of Baghdad has in store for us. It's difficult, reading the full report, to know whether to laugh or cry. The degree of deceit and duplicity in its production speaks of the trickery that informs the Blair government and its treatment of MPs.
There are a few titbits that ring true. The new ammonium perchlorate plant illegally supplied by an Indian company - which breached those wonderful UN sanctions, of course - is a frightening little detail. So is the new rocket test stand at the al-Rafah plant. But this material is so swamped in trickery and knavery that its inclusion becomes worthless.
Here is one example of the dishonesty of this "dossier". On page 45, we are told - in a long chapter about Saddam's human rights abuses - that "on March 1st, 1991, in the wake of the Gulf War, riots (sic) broke out in the southern city of Basra, spreading quickly to other cities in Shia-dominated southern Iraq. The regime responded by killing thousands". What's wrong with this paragraph is the lie is in the use of the word "riots". These were not riots. They were part of a mass rebellion specifically called for by President Bush Jnr's father and by a CIA radio station in Saudi Arabia. The Shia Muslims of Iraq obeyed Mr Bush Snr's appeal. And were then left to their fate by the Americans and British, who they had been given every reason to believe would come to their help. No wonder they died in their thousands. But that's not what the Blair "dossier" tells us.
And anyone reading the weasel words of doubt that are insinuated throughout this text can only have profound concern about the basis for which Britain is to go to war. The Iraqi weapon programme "is almost certainly" seeking to enrich uranium. It "appears" that Iraq is attempting to acquire a magnet production line. There is evidence that Iraq has tried to acquire specialised aluminium tubes (used in the enrichment of uranium) but "there is no definitive intelligence" that it is destined for a nuclear programme. "If" Iraq obtained fissile material, Iraq could produce nuclear weapons in one or two years. It is "difficult to judge" whether al-Hussein missiles could be available for use. Efforts to regenerate the Iraqi missile programme "probably" began in 1995. And so the "dossier" goes on.
Now maybe Saddam has restarted his WMD programme. Let's all say it out loud, 20 times: Saddam is a brutal, wicked tyrant. But are "almost certainly", "appears", "probably" and "if" really the rallying call to send our grenadiers off to the deserts of Kut-al-Amara?
There is high praise for UN weapons inspectors. And there is more trickery in the relevant chapter. It quotes Dr Hans Blix, the executive chairman of the UN inspection commission, as saying that in the absence of (post-1998) inspections, it is impossible to verify Iraqi disarmament compliance. But on 18 August this year, the very same Dr Blix told Associated Press that he couldn't say with certainty that Baghdad possessed WMDs. This quotation is excised from the Blair "dossier", of course.
So there it is. If these pages of trickery are based on "probably" and "if", we have no business going to war. If they are all true, we murdered half a million Iraqi children. How's that for a war crime?
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Byrd's near-filibuster irks, inspires
By Dave Boyer
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
September 24, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020924-79699986.htm
If the Senate completes work this week on a bill to create a new Department of Homeland Security, it will also lower the curtain on a rare spectacle: the unofficial filibuster of Sen. Robert C. Byrd. Mr. Byrd, the 84-year-old West Virginia Democrat, has filled the void of partisan gridlock on the Senate floor for three weeks with folksy speeches, recitations of poetry and stern rebukes to his colleagues about senatorial courtesy.
"Standing up for the Constitution is a lonely vigil these days," Mr. Byrd said in an interview. "All that matters today is politics. When you talk about the Constitution, the eyes of Washington glaze over."
Mr. Byrd has taken his stand, which is due for a showdown vote today that he expects to lose, in a protracted dispute with the White House over congressional oversight of the new department.
"We have an administration that's very secretive," he said. "I don't trust this administration."
The Appropriations Committee chairman has also criticized his fellow lawmakers for trying to approve the bill too quickly.
"Partisan politics is taking over here, lock, stock and barrel," Mr. Byrd said. "It isn't a fight for principles here anymore. It's, 'Damn the Constitution, full speed ahead.'"
While many colleagues admire Mr. Byrd's stamina and determination, his performance is wearing thin with others.
"I don't think it's very appropriate," said Sen. Craig Thomas, Wyoming Republican. "It's a little bit obstructionist to do that. We're clearly short on time. He ought to express his opinions, and we ought to vote. He's entitled to his own view, but I'm not sure he's entitled to go on forever."
So engrossed was Mr. Byrd in his speech-making one recent night that he caused Assistant Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada to miss dinner with his wife on the couple's 43rd wedding anniversary.
"I am sorry I have detained him on his wedding anniversary," Mr. Byrd said after holding the floor uninterrupted for nearly 31/2 hours. "I wish the senator would have let me know that a little earlier."
Mr. Reid replied, "I was looking for an opportunity." The longest Senate speech on record occurred in 1957, when Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina spoke uninterrupted for 24 hours and 18 minutes to filibuster the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Mr. Thurmond, still serving in the Senate, will turn 100 on Dec. 5.
Mr. Byrd wants Senate confirmation for the president's homeland security adviser and agency chiefs, something the White House is resisting. His opposition to the homeland security bill is not a true filibuster in that he has not held the floor continuously. The Senate also has considered an appropriations bill.
But with the Senate unable thus far to get the 60 votes needed to end debate on homeland security, Mr. Byrd's long hours on the floor are a throwback to another era.
"It's a filibuster, except in name," said Marshall Wittman, congressional analyst at the Hudson Institute in Washington. "This is as close as we get to it. The Senate has come to a halt for all intents and purposes."
Mr. Byrd has read aloud entire magazine articles, recited the roll of senators who served decades ago, even reached back to 14th-century England for a lecture on the origins of the parliamentary term "whip." Viewers on C-SPAN have sent Mr. Byrd bouquets with notes of encouragement. Some Senate staffers have grumbled at the long hours.
And his colleagues on at least one occasion have called a halt to his performance because the only other senator in the Capitol on a Friday afternoon wanted to go home. Without a senator in the chair as presiding officer, Mr. Byrd could no longer speak on the floor, a prospect he found "dreadful."
"What has become of the Senate?" Mr. Byrd asked of the nearly empty chamber. "The greatest deliberative body, we hear so often, a body in which a senator can stand on his or her feet and speak as long as those feet can carry that senator. I have been a senator a long time, 44 years come next January 3. Never have I had it put to me that we will have no more senators available to preside."
During this fight, Mr. Byrd's wife of 65 years, Erma, has undergone an emergency appendectomy. On the evening of the exchange on the floor with Mr. Reid, Mr. Byrd regretted aloud that he had probably missed visiting hours at the hospital to see his wife.
"She understands what I'm fighting for," he said. "She's just as dedicated to it as I am."
--------
F.B.I. Agent Cited Trade Center Attack Ahead of Sept. 11
September 24, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Attacks-Intelligence.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A Minneapolis FBI supervisor said in a pre-Sept. 11 conversation with headquarters that he wanted to prevent suspicious student pilot Zacarias Moussaoui from flying a plane into the World Trade Center, a congressional investigator testified Tuesday.
The supervisor said he had no reason to believe Moussaoui was planning such an attack, but made the remark in a frustrated attempt to convince headquarters that a special search warrant was needed to search Moussaoui's computer, investigator Eleanor Hill told a House-Senate committee investigating the Sept. 11 attacks.
Moussaoui is now accused of conspiring with the Sept. 11 hijackers to commit terrorism, and Hill outlined the Minneapolis FBI's office's repeated and unsuccessful efforts to convince headquarters that he was a possible terrorist.
The supervisor told the committee staff he was ``trying to get people at FBI headquarters 'spun up' because he was trying to make sure that Moussaoui 'did not take control of a plane and fly it into the World Trade Center,''' Hill testified.
Hill said the headquarters agent responded, ``That's not going to happen. We don't know he's a terrorist. You don't have enough to show he is a terrorist.''
The headquarters agent told the investigators he did not recall the conversation.
Hill also said that a July 2001 memo by an FBI agent warning that Osama bin Laden might send terrorists to the United States for flight training was disregarded by headquarters, which was unaware officials previously tried to identify Middle Eastern flight students in this country.
The investigator said the failure to connect the so-called Phoenix memo with the arrest of Moussaoui a month later -- and a general increase of terrorist alerts -- represented major intelligence failings before the Sept. 11 attacks.
``No one will ever know whether a greater focus on the connection between these events would have led to the unraveling of the Sept. 11 plot,'' said Hill.
``But clearly, it might have drawn greater attention to the possibility of a terrorist attack in the United States, generated a heightened state of alert regarding such attacks and prompted more aggressive investigation and intelligence gathering,'' she said in a report for the House and Senate intelligence committees.
The committees looked into the handling of the Phoenix memo and the Moussaoui case as it held its fourth public hearing into the Sept. 11 attacks.
The Phoenix-based agent, Kenneth Williams, wrote a memo to his superiors in Washington two months before the attacks, suggesting that terrorists might be learning to fly commercial jetliners at U.S. flight schools. He asked for a check of flight schools, but no checks were made.
Williams was not identified by name in the report and was to testify later anonymously. As his own prepared testimony noted, his identity has already been revealed in many news accounts of his memo, which was disclosed earlier this year.
Hill said New York FBI personnel who reviewed the memo found it ``speculative and not particularly significant.'' They said they knew some flight students were affiliated with bin Laden, she said, but believed they were intended to fly goods and personnel in Afghanistan.
Hill wrote that both Williams and the FBI agents in headquarters were unaware that the FBI had received a report in 1998 that a terrorist organization might be planning to bring students to the United States to train at flight schools.
By November 2000, though, an analyst wrote a memo informing FBI offices that he found no evidence of terrorists studying aviation and that further investigation ``is deemed imprudent'' by FBI headquarters.
Agents involved in the Moussaoui case also were unaware of the Phoenix memo and the earlier investigation.
Moussaoui was arrested by FBI agents in Minnesota on immigration charges in August 2001 after a flight school instructor became suspicious of his desire to learn to fly a commercial jet. FBI headquarters denied agents' request to seek a warrant to search his computer. Moussaoui has since been charged with conspiring in the Sept. 11 attacks.
In his prepared testimony, a Minneapolis-based FBI agent blamed legal restrictions, FBI headquarters and the circumstances of the case for impeding a more aggressive investigation of Moussaoui before Sept. 11.
Lawmakers have been meeting behind closed doors since June, but public hearings were delayed until last week, partly because of questions about what information could be revealed in the Moussaoui case.
The committees have also been clashing with the Bush administration about whether it can reveal what intelligence about terrorist attacks was disclosed to the White House before Sept. 11.
The administration doesn't want to reveal what the White House knew, even if the intelligence has already been declassified.
On Tuesday, leaders of the committees again called on the White House to allow the information to be disclosed, or explain why the information should be kept secret.
House Minority Whip Nancy Pelosi, the leading Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said the White House's failure to allow the information to be disclosed ``will undoubtedly further weaken public confidence in the entire classification system.''
``To classify for the wrong reasons, when security is not at stake, when nothing of substance is really at stake, undermines the willingness of the American people to put their faith and trust in the government,'' the California Democrat said.
--------
Justice Issues Guide to Sharing Probe Data
By Susan Schmidt
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 24, 2002; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A57447-2002Sep23?language=printer
Federal criminal investigators are now required to share once sacrosanct wiretap and grand jury material with intelligence agencies when the information relates to terrorism or weapons of mass destruction, the Justice Department said yesterday.
Guidelines laid out by department officials establish how material gathered in criminal probes will be shared with the CIA and other intelligence agencies, though officials said such transfers of information have been occurring informally since the USA Patriot Act was approved last October.
The act, enacted after the Sept. 11 attacks, gives new powers to law enforcement and intelligence agencies, including the authority to share information they previously were required to keep secret from one another.
The guidelines released yesterday address only the sharing of material gathered by criminal investigators, not the transfer of information obtained in intelligence investigations. That issue is being litigated before an appeals panel of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Advisory Court. The Patriot Act loosened the rules governing that information as well, permitting intelligence officers to share more of what they gather with criminal investigators.
Attorney General John D. Ashcroft has argued that the Patriot Act permits his department to seek FISA wiretaps even when the purpose is primarily to pursue a criminal case, as long as foreign intelligence gathering is a significant motive. The FISA court has disagreed, saying in its first ever public opinion that the department's policy goes too far.
The consequences of the rules in force before the enactment of the USA Patriot Act have emerged as one of the central issues in the overall examination of what could have been done to prevent the attacks on New York and Washington.
During last week's hearings on intelligence agency failures, Congress was told of a number of instances in which intelligence information was not shared with criminal investigators because of legal restrictions on the use of information gathered in intelligence probes. The initiation of criminal surveillance or wiretaps demands a higher standard, requiring prosecutors to show they have probable cause to believe a crime is being committed.
Last week's testimony included the pleas of an unidentified FBI agent who warned that "someday someone will die" because his Aug. 29, 2001, request for a full criminal probe of Khalid Almihdhar was denied by the FBI's National Security Law Unit on the grounds that information about Almihdhar had been obtained through intelligence channels. On Sept. 11, Almihdhar was aboard the hijacked plane that slammed into the Pentagon.
Before passage of the Patriot Act, prosecutors and FBI agents were not permitted to disclose grand jury or wiretap material to intelligence or national security officials -- even if that information revealed that terrorists were planning an attack -- unless those officials were aiding in the criminal investigation. However, FBI officials said yesterday that they did not know of any instance when such information was gathered and withheld.
FBI and Justice Department officials said the information sharing since the enactment of the USA Patriot Act has included material gathered by the FBI on the financial activity of possible terrorist groups.
Under the guidelines outlined yesterday, if a U.S. citizen is mentioned in grand jury or wiretap information, his or her name would be redacted from CIA files unless the agency determines the name is vital to the context of the information, or if the person is determined to be an agent of a foreign power, including a terrorist group. Information will be shared not only at the headquarters level, but also among local and regional officials on terrorism task forces across the country.
A senior Justice Department official called the change "a very dramatic step," describing it as another post-Sept. 11 change in a hidebound law enforcement culture.
-------- death penalty
Judge rules death penalty unconstitutional
September 24, 2002
UPI
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20020924-082611-6821r.htm
MONTPELIER, Vt., Sept. 24 -- A federal judge ruled Tuesday that the federal death penalty is unconstitutional.
U.S. District Court Judge William K. Sessions wrote that "capital punishment is under siege," as he ruled that the law does not provide enough safeguards to ensure defendants' due process rights and the right to confront and cross examine witnesses.
"It is inconceivable to this court that Congress could have intended instead to provide less protection in a capital proceeding than in a non-capital proceeding," Sessions wrote in a 44-page opinion.
Sessions found that capital punishment would be legal if Congress repaired defects in the 1994 law.
"If the death penalty is to be party of our system of justice, due process of law and the fair trial guarantees of the Sixth Amendment require that standards and safeguards governing the kinds of evidence juries may consider must be rigorous, and constitutional rights and liberties scrupulously protected," he said.
"To relax those standards invites abuse, and significantly undermines the reliability of decisions to impose the death penalty," Sessions said.
The judge's ruling came in the case of Donald Fell, 22, of Rutland, Vt., who is facing the death penalty for allegedly kidnapping and killing a North Clarendon woman in November 2000.
Fell was charged along with his friend Robert Lee, who hanged himself in jail last year, The two men were also connected to the killings of Fell's mother and her friend in Rutland, before allegedly kidnapping Teresa King, 53, from a Rutland parking lot.
Sessions wrote that he based much of his decision on to rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court, one in 2000 that involved a New Jersey hate crime law and another decided this June involving a felony murder conviction.
The U.S. Justice Department criticized the ruling, saying it underscored the need to confirm President Bush's nominees to the federal bench.
"In our system of government, it is the legislature elected by the American people which determines the proper punishment for federal crimes, not lone members of the judiciary," said Barbara Comstock, director of public affairs at the Justice Department, in a statement.
Comstock added: "Congress passed the Federal death Penalty Act to save lives, and the Supreme Court of the United States has repeatedly said the death penalty does not violate the Constitution. Judge Sessions' decision to the contrary is under review."
But opponents of the death penalty hailed the decision, saying it reflects a growing unease with capital punishment in the United States amid evidence that innocent people have been convicted and sent to death row.
In a statement, human rights watchdog group Amnesty International said, "At a time when the U.S. seems bent on 'fixing' the death penalty, Judge Sessions promotes the argument that the death penalty is not only broken, but beyond repair."
-------- immigration
Photographs and Fingerprinting of Saudis Will Soon Be Required
New York Times
September 24, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/24/national/24SAUD.html
WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 (AP) - A program that requires registration of foreign visitors from some countries in the Middle East and North Africa is being expanded to include men from Saudi Arabia, a United States ally that was home to 15 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers.
An Immigration and Naturalization Service memorandum obtained by The Associated Press directs immigration inspectors registering foreign visitors to include men, ages 16 to 45, from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Yemen, starting Oct. 1.
A spokesman at the Saudi Embassy did not immediately return calls.
The Justice Department had already begun registering visitors from Iran, Iraq, Sudan and Libya on the anniversary of the terrorist attacks. As part of the registration, the foreigners are required to provide fingerprints, photographs and details about plans in the United States.
In a Sept. 5 memorandum adding Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Yemen to the list, Johnny Williams, the immigration agency's head of field operations, said, "It is imperative that the officers remain vigilant and verify the age of all males from these three countries in order to identify properly those who are subject to special registration."
The memorandum was sent to agency offices to explain how to carry out the Justice Department policy known as the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System. Officials from the department did not immediately return a telephone call for comment.
Registration is required on arrival in the United States or departure. The foreigners must also be interviewed at an immigration office for stays of more than 30 days and notify the agency within 10 days of any change of residence, employment or academic institution.
The memorandum says inspectors can also register visitors for national security reasons who they determine are worth monitoring. The memorandum says inspectors should consider whether the visitor has made an unexplained trip to Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Syria, North Korea, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Egypt, Somalia, Pakistan, Indonesia or Malaysia, as well as whether the visitor's explanation for the trip lacks credibility.
Among other things, inspectors will be told to consider registering foreign visitors who previously overstayed a visa or whose behavior, demeanor or answers indicates that the person may be a security threat, the memorandum says.
The additional scrutiny for Saudi nationals follows introduction of stricter rules for Saudis who apply for visas to the United States. The visa paperwork formerly handled by travel agents now requires interviews at consular offices.
The increased scrutiny comes as President Bush tries to build support for an attack on Iraq, for which Saudi Arabia has said it will not allow use of its territory unless the attack is under auspices of the United Nations.
-------- terrorism
Bush Lowers U.S. Terror Alert Status
September 24, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Terror-Alert.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Two weeks after putting the nation on high alert, President Bush on Tuesday lowered the nationwide terror alert back to code yellow because of disruptions in the al-Qaida terrorist network.
Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge on Tuesday morning convened a homeland security council meeting, where a recommendation to lower the threat level was approved with no objections and taken to the president. Bush later approved the recommendation, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said.
A number of developments led to the threat level change, including information from the intelligence community and the recent apprehension of several al-Qaida suspects in the United States, the president's spokesman said.
``All these factors, intelligence, recent arrests and the passing of the Sept. 11 period allowed the president late this morning to make the decision to lower the threat,'' Fleischer said.
The Justice Department and Office of Homeland Security said in a joint statement that Attorney General John Ashcroft and homeland security Adviser Tom Ridge had recommended the move.
That decision was based on a review of intelligence, an assessment of threats by the intelligence community and the passing of the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, their statement said. It said there was a disruption of potential terrorist operations in the United States and abroad.
Bush had raised the alert to orange -- the second-highest level -- after U.S. intelligence warned of a ``high risk'' of a terrorist attack in connection with the Sept. 11 anniversary two weeks ago.
Officials stressed that Americans should remain alert; even at code yellow, the nation faces a significant risk of attack.
``We still are on alert, we still need to be careful,'' Fleischer said.
Tuesday's change came after Bush met with senior administration officials who review daily new intelligence, weigh the potential for attack on U.S. targets and prepare threat-level recommendations for the president.
In the days leading up to the Sept. 11 anniversary, U.S. intelligence agencies warned the White House that terrorists operating in several South Asian countries and linked to al-Qaida hoped to explode car bombs or launch other attacks on U.S. facilities abroad.
While there was no direct evidence of a plot against the United States, U.S. intelligence noted a similar pattern before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and urged Bush to raise the alert level.
Officials had said earlier that Bush could be expected to return the level to yellow because of ``some disruptions in plots and operations'' of terrorists. Several developments on the terrorism front -- some public, others confidential -- could prompt Bush to lower the alert level, they said.
The advances include:
--The Sept. 11 arrest in Pakistan of Ramzi Binalshibh, one of the suspected planners of the suicide hijackings a year earlier.
--The arrest of six suspected members of a New York terrorism cell.
--The detention of a Sudanese pilot being held in North Carolina while investigators determine whether he was plotting to fly a plane into a U.S. target.
In addition, the Sept. 11 anniversary passed without incident, the officials noted.
Ridge, FBI Director Robert Mueller, CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft advised Bush on Sept. 10 to raise the alert level based in part on intelligence from a high-level al-Qaida operative in custody, Omar al-Farouq.
The color-coded system ranks threats by colors, starting at the bottom with green and followed by blue, yellow, orange and red as perceived dangers intensify. The warning level can be upgraded for the entire country or for specific regions or economic sectors -- such as the nuclear industry.
Ridge put the nation on yellow alert when he imposed the system in March. The status was unchanged until Sept. 11.
--------
At least 100 countries building cyber weapons - expert
By John Lettice
24/09/2002
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/27265.html
Cyberterrorism hyping has reached new heights - according to a report in the Melbourne Herald Sun, at least. The Herald quotes expert Matthew Devost, speaking at a meeting at the US consulate there recently, as claiming the CIA believes at least 100 countries are investigating waging war by computer, or cyberterror.
Mr Devost is proprietor of terrorism.com, incidentally, which is something of a misnomer, as he's in the counter-terrorism game. Should any bona fide terrorist take him to the ICANN disputes panel we fear he'd be on difficult ground. But 100 countries? Could the CIA possibly believe this? Who are these countries?
"How many do we need to worry about - six? Twelve?," Devost is quoted as saying. "What are the capabilities of number 100 on the list?" Disappointingly, it turns out that "a lot of questions haven't been answered." So we've no idea what the point of saying 100 countries are working on it is, aside from trying to grab headlines.
The CIA itself, in the shape of its most excellent World Fact Book, reveals (as of July 1st 2001) that the top 100 countries by GDP per capita is headed by Luxembourg, with Gabon coming in at number 100. Per capita GDP is however clearly a hopeless yardstick to try to estimate cyberterror capability against. There are a lot of names in the top 100 (San Marino? Aruba?) that sound improbable proprietors of cyberwarefare development programmes, and some obvious suspects who are just to poor to make it. Yugoslavia, for example, is there way down at 160, and we seem to recall the locals nevertheless being pretty handy when it comes to the deployment of cyber weapons.
So GDP doesn't really work. How about Internet connections? One can of course wreak a deal of havoc with just one Internet connection, but the number of them in a country ought to provide some kind of measure of the potential raw expertise. This chart here isn't ordered, nor is it weighted by population, and the figures are a tad old. But there are somewhere in excess of 30 countries with more than a million people connected. Again, it's a very rough yardstick, and our friends in Yugoslavia are still nowhere near the cut. However, the more you look at the list, the less probable it seems that you can drag out 100 with even the capability for a stupid, futile and laughable stab at a cyberweapons development programme.
So maybe you just go anecdotal. Start with major, rich economies with developed IT businesses. Add other economies known to have expertise and/or strategic plans in that area (so India definitely qualifies on expertise, China on both). Cross out the ones who don't have serious armies (e.g. Andorra). Add in a couple of mad dictators. Add in those with money and known agendas. Add in anybody you don't like. Add anybody whose justice minister has pissed-off the White House recently. On our turn through the whole list on this basis, we come to a total of approximately 60, many of whom are barely credible and who would only be counted by the most paranoid and drug-addled CIA operative.
For example, we included the Vatican on the basis of money and known agenda, and Finland and Estonia on the basis of sheer cleverness (nothing personal people, we mean to flatter). We offer our services to the CIA should it wish to recruit a research capability willing to try to justify future ludicrous claims in exchange for money.
Mr Devost himself seems an intriguing cove. He is co-author of "Information terrorism - can you trust your toaster?", which won the 1996 Sun Tzu Art of War Research Award (disappointingly, we are unable to identify any other winners of this award, which in any event seems to be no more). This document includes the phrase "digital Pearl Harbor," which may be one of the first recorded uses of the expression.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- energy
Judge Concludes Energy Company Drove Up Prices
New York Times
September 24, 2002
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. with LOWELL BERGMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/24/business/24ENER.html
WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 - An administrative law judge concluded today that the El Paso Corporation illegally helped to drive up prices for natural gas in California during the state's power crisis in 2000 and 2001, the first time any federal regulatory official has determined there was widespread manipulation of energy supplies.
In the ruling, Curtis L. Wagner Jr., the chief administrative law judge at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, essentially validates the suspicions of California officials that El Paso, the nation's largest natural gas company, withheld natural gas from the state, thus driving up the cost of electricity that was generated by gas-fired turbines.
"El Paso Pipeline withheld extremely large amounts of capacity that it could have flowed to its California delivery points," Judge Wagner said in the ruling. El Paso's actions significantly increased the price of natural gas flowing to California, he added, and "substantially tightened the supply of natural gas at the California border."
Executives at El Paso, which is based in Houston, said the ruling "is unsupported by the evidence and is inconsistent with FERC policy."
Judge Wagner recommended that the energy agency begin determining penalties against El Paso for violating federal rules and "for the unlawful exercise of market power."
The ruling sent shares in El Paso down $4.16, or 36 percent, to $7.51.
California officials and one of the state's major utilities, which argued the case in hearings at the energy commission, said they would seek to recover nearly $4 billion in what they contended were higher power and gas prices caused by El Paso's actions.
The company also faces a number of lawsuits, which will be aided if the ruling is upheld.
But the decision faces review by the four-member energy regulatory commission and, if upheld there, an almost certain appeal to a federal appellate court.
El Paso predicted that the ruling would be reversed. In a statement, the chairman and chief executive of El Paso, William A. Wise, said: "We are disappointed that today's proposed decision does not recognize the substantial record evidence supporting El Paso Natural Gas's position that the pipeline was operated properly. We are confident in the strength of our position."
"Given the critical safety and deliverability concerns associated with operating a natural gas pipeline," Mr. Wise said, "it is inappropriate and without precedent to second-guess a pipeline's day-to-day operations."
The California Public Utilities Commission filed a complaint at the FERC against El Paso in early 2000, but the case languished for close to a year. In March 2001, The New York Times, as part of a reporting project with the PBS program " Frontline," disclosed that internal El Paso documents showed senior executives discussing a plan to give them more control of gas markets, including the "ability to influence the physical market" to benefit the company.
One document discussed how a deal in which one subsidiary, El Paso Natural Gas, sold pipeline capacity to a sister company, El Paso Merchant Energy, would allow the company to "widen" the difference between what gas could be bought for in Texas and New Mexico and what it could be sold for in California. Shortly after the report by The Times, FERC voted to open hearings into the matter.
El Paso has dismissed claims of manipulation, saying that California officials, who deregulated the state's power markets four years ago, created a flawed market that was easily susceptible to price spikes. The state now faces a $24 billion budget deficit, part of it because of the costs of buying high-priced wholesale power during the energy crisis.
Today, Loretta Lynch, the president of the California utilities commission, said, "Finally, after two and a half years, we have justice from the administrative law judge, but it remains to be seen whether the full commission will provide Californians with the justice they deserve."
In making its case before the energy commission, the utilities commission was joined by the Southern California Edison unit of Edison International and the Pacific Gas and Electric unit of the PG&E Corporation, each of which lost billions of dollars during the power crisis.
The two utilities provided much of the evidence heard by Judge Wagner.
Kevin Lipson, a lawyer at Hogan & Hartson in Washington who served as lead counsel for Edison, said Edison calculated that El Paso's actions drove gas and power prices higher by $3.7 billion, money he said the state and the utilities would seek to recover either through FERC or in civil lawsuits. Potentially, Mr. Lipson said, the amount of damages sought could be tripled. "Absent the trebling," he said, "you're still looking at a multibillion-dollar exposure."
"This is really the first time the federal government has identified a party who drove up the price of natural gas," Mr. Lipson added, "and also had the effect of driving the price of electricity up in California."
Analysts scrambled this afternoon to assess the impact the ruling could have on El Paso.
Gordon Howald, who tracks El Paso for Crédit Lyonnais Securities, said: "There isn't a near-term liquidity risk, but it's a situation where if the ratings agencies react negatively to this, their cost of capital will rise and they may have to post additional collateral with trading partners, all the things that got Williams and Dynegy into trouble."
"The real risk here is that they get caught in the same slippery slope that a lot of their peers have," Mr. Howald said. "The litigation risk is huge," he added, saying the ruling, if upheld, could give private lawsuits much greater traction in court.
Mr. Howald, who was one of the first analysts to raise concerns about the FERC case, said El Paso would be able to rely on "the best balance sheet" in its sector. But he said that if the company did eventually face billions of dollars in penalties, either at FERC or from lawsuits, then "it's throw everything out the window."
Tonight, Standard & Poor's said it was considering downgrading its rating on El Paso in light of the ruling. First, though, the ratings agency said it would review El Paso's "response to regulatory pressures" as well as its projected cash flow and future capital spending requirements.
The chance for a downgrade "reflects the market uncertainties regarding sustainable cash flow and the current regulatory environment," John Whitlock, a Standard & Poor's credit analyst, said in a statement. But he noted that El Paso had an "adequate liquidity cushion" that included a "$4 billion credit facility backstopping commercial paper, and cash and cash equivalents of $1.8 billion."
Last year, Judge Wagner ruled that while El Paso had the ability to manipulate prices, he was not convinced that such manipulation had occurred. He also found "blatant collusion" in the deal between the El Paso subsidiaries.
But FERC ordered the case reopened and instructed Judge Wagner to review whether the company's pipeline made all of its capacity available from Nov. 1, 2000, to March 31, 2001. In that period, the price of gas in Southern California soared to as high as $60 a thousand cubic feet, more than five times what it cost in other parts of the nation.
Most of that increase was because of the widening of the basis differential - the difference between what natural gas cost at one end of the pipeline, in the producing areas of Texas and New Mexico, and what it could be sold for on delivery to Southern California. That differential is normally less than $1, but during the energy crisis it reached $50.
After further hearings, Judge Wagner found that the pipeline only used 79 percent of its capacity, leaving roughly 700 million cubic feet a day of unused capacity.
He also found that half of that unused capacity was caused by factors including a failure to operate the pipeline at a high enough pressure and nonessential maintenance that could have been done at other times.
This "new evidence," the judge said, "shows a clear withholding of substantial capacity during the relevant period, which clearly indicates an exercise of market power by El Paso Pipeline."
El Paso's actions, he added, "significantly broadened the basis differential."
-------- environment
Iraq says U.S. Navy is polluting its waters
Tuesday, September 24, 2002
By Reuters
http://enn.com/news/wire-stories/2002/09/09242002/reu_48496.asp
BAGHDAD - Iraqi television Monday accused the U.S. Navy in the Gulf of polluting Iraq's territorial waters with fuel and harassing its fishers.
Iraq's satellite TV channel said American frigates in the Gulf had deliberately contaminated Iraqi waters with large quantities of fuel. The fuel dumping could cause an ecological disaster and threaten Iraq's fish stocks, it said.
The channel added that U.S. vessels in the Gulf were being used to harass Iraqi fishers. "Sometimes helicopters hover over the vessel and ask it through radio to stop. Then boats carrying armed soldiers come and the soldiers board the vessel and start to search it," a captain of an Iraqi fishing vessel was quoted as saying.
"What are they looking for? We do not know. It is a civilian ship and not a warship," he said.
A U.S.-led multinational interception force is policing the Gulf to prevent the smuggling in and out of Iraq of goods banned under U.N. sanctions.
An Iraqi weekly newspaper reported that the U.S. Navy had intercepted a vessel carrying Iraqi workers. "An American boat committed an aggression and a piracy act against the Iraqi vessel Taj al-Ma'arik on Sept. 15 while it was transporting a group of workers from Faw to Mina al-Bakr port," Nabdh al-Shabab weekly newspaper said.
The paper said the captain of the Iraqi vessel and his assistant were interrogated by the crew of the American boat.
----
GAO finds one in three former defense sites erroneously declared environmentally clean
Tuesday, September 24, 2002
By John Heilprin,
Associated Press
http://enn.com/news/wire-stories/2002/09/09242002/ap_48503.asp
WASHINGTON - More than one in three of the nation's former defense sites declared environmentally clean by the Army Corps of Engineers still contain unexploded ordnance, hazardous and explosive waste, congressional auditors said Monday.
The finding by the General Accounting Office, Congress' investigative arm, calls into question the Army Corps' pronouncements since 1984 that 4,000 of 9,181 sites potentially eligible for the military's cleanup program needed no further study or decontamination. GAO investigators, who looked at 3,840 sites in its study, found that the Army Corps lacked a sound basis for declaring 1,468 of the sites clean, or about 38 percent.
An Army Corps spokesman, Lt. Col. Gene Pawlik, said the agency had not had time to digest the GAO report's contents and would not comment Monday. A spokesman for the Defense Department could not be reached for comment.
The GAO also said it found no evidence that the Army Corps inspectors had even visited 686 of the sites, in violation of its policy.
"In addition, the Corps appeared to have overlooked or dismissed information in its possession that indicated hazards might be present," the report said. One example cited was a map showing bombs and fuses stored at an airfield used by the Army and Navy but no evidence the Army Corps had ever searched for them.
"Clearly, as this report shows, the Corps' slipshod investigative work cannot be trusted to protect the health and well-being of our environment or of our citizens," Rep. John D. Dingell of Michigan, senior Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said in a statement Monday. "The Corps' oversights of mortar rounds, leaking underground tanks, and rockets makes one wonder what exactly they consider a hazard," said Dingell, whose office released the report.
In a July letter to the GAO responding to an earlier draft of the report, the Defense Department said it disagreed with many of the report's conclusions.
Raymond DuBois Jr., deputy defense undersecretary for installations and environment, said the Army Corps lacked consistent procedures in the 1980s and early 1990s. Worried about abandoned military buildings, debris in Alaska, and releases of hazardous substances from federal buildings, Congress laid the foundation in its mid-1980s budget-making for the Defense Department's current environmental restoration program.
The military estimates it will take more than 70 years and up to $20 billion to clean up contamination and hazards at thousands more properties it once owned or controlled. The properties, ranging in size from a single acre to thousands of acres, are now parks, farms, schools, and homes owned by states, local governments, and individuals, the GAO said.
----
Perhaps No U.S. Streams Unpolluted
September 24, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/science/AP-Ecology-Indicators.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The United States may have no streams left that are free from chemical contamination, and about one-fifth of animal species and one-sixth of plant types are at risk of extinction, says a private report on the nation's ecosystems.
The findings are in an ambitious study commissioned five years ago by former President Clinton and released Tuesday by the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment.
The report tries to document in one place the sort of statistics about natural resources that until now were dispersed among several federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency and Interior Department.
But perhaps more important than any particular findings, administration officials and lawmakers said, is that the report for the first time proposes an objective set of ecological ``indicators'' about the nation's environmental health.
The study offers 103 indicators but says completed and adequate data is available for only 56 percent of them. For example, the only national data on non-native or invasive species are for birds and freshwater fish.
``This report is, at one level, a road map of what we need to do to gather adequate data,'' said Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, R-N.Y., chairman of the House Science Committee. ``It's an old adage and a true one that one gets what one measures.''
The Heinz Center plans to update its study every five years. William Clark, a Harvard government professor who oversaw the mammoth project, said the purpose was to ``help raise the factual basis of the debate'' over difficult environmental issues.
``This report is going to mean a great deal for our environment,'' EPA Administrator Christie Whitman said at a ceremony. ``Environmental indicators are clearly the tools that we need to do our job well.''
Each year the federal government spends more than $600 million collecting environmental data, but the center's experts say that information still isn't comprehensive. At the same time, those experts say, the government spends billions of dollars on pollution controls and cleanups -- $120 billion in 1994, the last year for which such figures are available.
Members of the center's team of 150 experts and others compared the need for indicators to the role that factors such as interest rates, unemployment and inflation play in helping gauge the economy. Environmental, industry, government and academic groups all participated in the report's making.
The study was begun in 1997 at the request of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Last year, Whitman directed EPA to prepare a similar ``State of the Environment'' report, due to be issued this fall. The White House Council on Environmental Quality is helping coordinate the information-gathering that cuts across federal agencies.
On the Net:
Heinz Center: http://www.heinzctr.org
EPA: http://www.epa.gov/indicators
-------- health
Mercury in fish may be linked to infertility-study
REUTERS UK:
September 24, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17889/newsDate/24-Sep-2002/story.htm
LONDON - Eating too much seafood, which can contain high levels of the toxic substance mercury, could be linked to an increased risk of infertility in men and women, researchers said.
Scientists at The Chinese University of Hong Kong found that infertile couples who consumed large amounts of seafood had higher blood mercury concentrations than fertile couples.
"Seafood contaminated with mercury is a possible source of excessive mercury exposure in our infertile population," said Dr Christine Choy, whose research is published in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology.
Choy and her colleagues, who compared mercury levels in 157 infertile couples and 26 fertile couples, said contamination of the sea with heavy metals is common around Hong Kong.
Thirty-five percent of the men and 23 percent of the women in the infertile group had abnormally high concentrations of mercury in their blood.
Choy said exposure to environmental toxins including mercury has been implicated as a potential cause of infertility.
"The positive correlation between quantity of seafood consumption and blood mercury concentrations suggests that higher seafood consumption may contribute to higher blood mercury concentrations," Choy said in the journal.
Infertility affects about one in six couples. Forty percent of infertility cases are linked to men and another 40 percent are due to female problems. In some cases the causes are not known or are caused by both male and female problems.
Hormonal disorders, damaged or blocked fallopian tubes and endometriosis, in which womb tissue invades and damages other reproductive tissue, are common causes of female infertility.
Low sperm count and poor sperm shape or swimming ability are the major problems in male infertility.
Mercury enters the environment naturally and through industrial pollution. Nearly all fish contain trace amounts of mercury but longer-living larger fish like sharks or swordfish accumulate the highest amounts of mercury and pose the greatest threat to people who eat them regularly.
The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has called for cutbacks on the use of mercury, which has a wide range of uses such as in thermometers, dental fillings and batteries.
UNEP Executive Director Klaus Topfer has said mercury poisoning had to be tackled promptly because it was a serious hazard to life and the environment. It can cause permanent damage to the brain, nervous system and kidneys.
Choy said eating less seafood was one way to control the problem.
"However, this should be balanced against the beneficial effects of other components of fish, such as those of 3-omega fatty acids and selenium," she added.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Voters should decide upon speed cameras
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
September 24, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20020924-14194760.htm
The only sensible solution to rein in a fiscally incompetent District government always looking for ways to extort money from its value-producing citizens is to regulate its money-grubbing powers through voter initiatives. Specifically, the voters of the District should prepare and vote on an initiative to give or deny the city permission to install "automated speed enforcement" cameras anywhere in the District ("Whoa, Big Brother," Editorial, Sunday). Unless District residents look forward to gorging on a buffet of several speeding tickets per day, they'll take seriously their duties as citizens. Let's remember that the District government is not an occupation force, but is made up of elected representatives who need to represent us instead of extort us.
CHRISTOPHER McKEON
Washington
----
Protesting Paraguayans Poised to Noose Government
September 24, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-paraguay-protest.html
ASUNCION, Paraguay (Reuters) - A national flag emblazoned with ``Go Paraguay'' dangling from his rear-view mirror, Juan Vera sits patiently at the head of a snaking truck convoy waiting for protest orders from his union.
If Paraguay's government does not agree to backtrack on price hikes for diesel fuel and water and tax increase plans and ease a grinding 7-year recession, the 32-year-old truck driver and hundreds like him will paralyze the capital Asuncion on Wednesday.
Protest organizers have vowed a peaceful demonstration. Recent anti-government protests ended in violence when police fired rubber bullets, tear gas and water cannons that left dozens injured.
Thousands of farmers are staging the same dusty roadside vigil with their tractors around the country in a fresh wave of mass anti-government protest. Like the others, Vera is sick and tired of policies that he says are aimed at pleasing Washington that are deepening poverty and killing jobs.
``I'm proud to be Paraguayan, but I'm so ashamed of what my government is doing to the economy,'' he said, switching into Spanish from the Guarani Indian language used across this landlocked, California-sized South American nation.
``SEAL OFF THE CITY''
``If need be, we will seal off the city to pressure the government,'' he added from a roadside 12 miles outside the capital, echoing the words of taxi union leaders who have threatened to surround Paraguay's second city, Ciudad del Este.
A sharp hike in the prices of diesel fuel and water and a bill in Congress to raise sales tax to help trim the crisis-wracked economy's monthly deficits are increasing anger and anxiety in a land in which over 30 percent live below the poverty line.
President Luis Gonzalez Macchi met with farm union officials on Tuesday -- the second day of the protest -- in a bid to defuse one of the biggest anti-government protests since he took power in 1999. But the officials came away without a deal.
``NOTHING WAS AGREED''
``We continue to struggle for better conditions for industry that will help free up the economy and production,'' said Hector Cristaldo, head of Paraguay's soy producers' association, after meeting Gonzalez Macchi. ``Nothing was agreed.''
Buffeted by economic meltdown in neighboring Argentina and financial woes across the border in Brazil, Paraguayans are furious at being forced to shoulder the social cost of efforts to clinch $200 million in International Monetary Fund aid to underpin the ravaged economy.
This week's protests by thousands of farmers and union workers have passed off peacefully so far, a sharp contrast from the violence that forced Gonzalez Macchi to declare a state of emergency in July.
``I don't know how much more the people will take before we see more clashes,'' sighed slum-dweller Eduardo as he touted fake Madonna CDs in the shadow of the Senate, which still bears the scars of a tank round fired during a failed coup attempt against Gonzalez Macchi in 2000.
Joblessness in this six-million-strong nation has soared well into double digits, while the local Guarani currency has slumped over 20 percent against the dollar since the start of the year.
And Paraguayan farmers -- who account for more than a third of the national work force -- complain government policies are choking their livelihood. Agriculture accounts for about 95 percent of exports.
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