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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
ˇ 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 usi