Archive By Date | Today's Links to Search By
Activists' News | Nuclear | Depleted Uranium | Military | Police
Alternative Energy Etc. | From Subscribers
NUCLEAR
Australia finds no sign of uranium risk at Rio mine
UK nuclear firm gets fresh state handout
Attack on Iraq would expose soldiers to depleted uranium
Bulgaria bows to EU pressure in n-plant dispute
New U.S. Doctrine Worries Europeans
India planning pre-emptive strikes against Pakistan
Japan reprimands trade officials for nuclear coverup
Skepticism Greets Seizure of Suspected Uranium
U.S. Reacts Cautiously to Uranium Seizure in Turkey
Report: Seized Material Not Uranium
Neb. Fined in Nuclear Dump Fight
'88 Warning Was Rejected at Damaged Nuclear Plant
A New Look at U.S. Goal
The White House On Iraq
MILITARY
'I Yelled at Them to Stop'
10-Month bin Laden Mystery: Dead or Alive?
U.S. Shipments of Pathogens to Iraq
Blair Is Confident of Tough U.N. Line on Iraqi Weapons
The U.S., Russia And Iraqi Oil
Selling Our Secrets
Coca snuffs out Peru forest
Iran starts to see benefit of deal with the devil
Unasked Questions
Creative Editing
U.S. Effort Aimed At Iraqi Officers
Israeli Pullback Ends 10-Day Siege of Arafat's Base
Pakistan's Police Force Struggles to Find the Resources
In Russia, an army of deserters
Space Forces Have Become Indispensable
Inside the CIA, Deep Divisions on Pay Reform
U.N. Weapons Inspectors Seek Open Access in Iraq
Ready. Aim. Fire first
'One-stop' agency coordinates defense
News embargoes raise vexing issues
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
False guarantees of individual liberties
Judge Delays Moussaoui Trial
ENERGY AND OTHER
Danish wind stocks jump on orders and US news
In West Virginia, Electrical Power Takes New Tack
Ethanol earmark advances in US energy bill talks
Deregulation's Weakness
Oxford boffins swat insects with sterile gene
Do Men Have Anger in Mind?
IMF, World Bank Short on Global Solutions
A Protest Teach-in Spoiled by Facts
Protesters confront IMF on debt, openness
ACTIVISTS
'This war is wrong and we won't stand for it'
Who Am I to Question the Commander-in-Chief?
Against War, a Peaceful March
San Fran cyclists hail decade of rolling protests
Greenpeace Protesters Target Yacht
Supreme Court doesn't have a prayer
The Case Against War
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- australia
Australia finds no sign of uranium risk at Rio mine
REUTERS AUSTRALIA:
September 30, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17949/story.htm
SYDNEY - Australia said a government report had found no evidence that Energy Resources of Australia Ltd had breached environmental requirements for containing oil spills at a uranium mine near World Heritage-listed parkland six years ago.
However, environmentalists and local Aboriginal groups claim the report sidestepped problems facing controls over contaminated discharges from the mine and promised to raise the issue during a government inquiry into uranium mining next week.
A probe was launched after a former employee of mine owner ERA Ltd raised allegations of environmental mismanagement at the Ranger uranium mine bordering Kakadu National Park in the tropical far north between 1996 and 1998.
"The report concludes that no evidence has been found that Energy Resources Australia has operated otherwise than in accordance with its authorisation and the Commonwealth's environmental requirements," Environment Minister David Kemp said.
ERA was criticised by Kemp's office April for failing to safeguard the environment in two incidents in 2002.
In these incidents, the government ruled that while the environment was not harmed during the mismanagement of a low-grade ore stockpile at the Ranger mine and the delayed reporting of uranium levels during January and February 2002, ERA needed to upgrade its system.
"BLANKET ASSURANCES"
ERA was "now committed" to achieving compliance with international standards of best practice, Kemp said.
The report covering 1996-1998, prepared by scientists from Commonwealth and Northern Territory agencies, makes recommendations for improvements in chemical monitoring and the assessment of water discharges, Kemp said.
Australian conservation foundation campaigner David Sweeney said the report was inconclusive over the extent of spills from the mine and superficial in some areas of investigation.
"We think the findings and the blanket assurances given by the minister are not justified," Sweeney said.
A spokesman for ERA said the company was satisfied that the report had failed to uncover any evidence that the company acted outside of authorised procedures over the period.
The former employee, Geoffrey Kyle, charged that contaminated spills at the mine were improperly reported by ERA.
However, Kemp said "many of the issues raised by Kyle were no longer relevant because of significant changes in staffing management of the mine in recent years."
ERA, a 64 percent-owned subsidiary of Anglo-Australian mining house Rio Tinto Plc/Ltd since 2000, has been targeted by environmental and indigenous peoples' groups opposed to uranium mining near the park.
Hearings for a Senate inquiry into uranium mining begins in the Northern Territory city of Darwin today.
ERA has already agreed never to mine a neighbouring uranium deposit called Ranger Two because it is considered a sacred site by the local Mirrar Aboriginal tribe. A third deposit in the township of Jabiluka is also unlikely to be mined given local opposition, Rio Tinto has said.
"This report is nothing short of a whitewash," Mirrar elder Andy Ralph said, adding contamination problems were ongoing.
-------- britain
UK nuclear firm gets fresh state handout
Story by Andrew Callus,
REUTERS UK:
September 30, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17954/story.htm
LONDON - Britain gave privatised nuclear power firm British Energy Plc more emergency state aid but looked no closer to deciding the long-term future of its biggest power producer.
The government said a loan package cobbled together three weeks ago would be extended for a further two months until November 29 while it unravels a web of energy, environment and industry policy dilemmas to find a long-term solution.
It raised the funds available to 650 million pounds ($1.0 billion) from 410 million, keeping afloat the high-cost producer which is now making a loss because of a dramatic fall in power prices that followed UK energy market liberalisation.
The move drags the state further into a crisis which carries echoes of the failure of the nation's privatised railway network owner Railtrack last year and the collapse of U.S. energy trader Enron.
"Our overriding priorities have always been to ensure the safety of nuclear power in the UK, and maintain the security of our electricity supplies," said Britain's chief industry minister, Trade and Industry Secretary Patricia Hewitt.
The company shocked investors this month with news it needed a handout to avoid going bust, just weeks after saying it was solvent.
British Energy is now selling power for less than it costs to generate it. Unlike other large producers it has no retail customer base to balance the effect, and unlike other types of generator its reactors cannot be shut off when prices are low.
The new loan package was secured against the company's assets, leaving the government as senior creditor and pushing bondholders and shareholders further down the pecking order if the company does eventually go bust.
This was a scenario neither party was prepared to rule out.
"If further discussions are not successful... the company may be unable to meet its financial obligations," a British Energy statement said.
Expectations of a loan extension had sent British Energy's bombed-out shares higher this week, though they dropped back after the announcement to touch 18 pence last week.
The former blue-chip company, privatised in 1996, is now valued at barely 100 million pounds, and its 400 million pounds worth of bonds trade at about half their face value.
Investors were fatalistic.
"We would have liked (the loan extension) to be longer, but we completely understand that what they are trying to do is keep the company operating while they get a handle on how the company works, what the issues are and what the solutions are," said a bondholder at Gartmore.
LAME DUCK
News of the fresh handout drew howls of protest from the opponents of nuclear power, who want to see the industry that produces a quarter of Britain's electricity phased out and replaced by renewable energy sources.
The state should "face up to the obvious fact that nuclear power simply does not work," said Greenpeace.
The Socialist Environment and Resources Association (SERA), which counts 100 legislators from the ruling Labour Party among its members, called British Energy a "lame duck".
"The government should not be propping up a failing business and seriously skewing its long-term energy policy," it said as Energy Minister Brian Wilson appeared in Scotland to give enthusiastic backing to the growing wind-power industry.
On Britain's fledgling electricity market NETA - blamed by British Energy for its woes - prices initially jumped on fresh fears that British Energy's reactors may shut causing a supply squeeze. But they later slipped back.
"I think people had expected news on whether the government was going to give it tax breaks and whether it was going to take a stake in it," one dealer said.
The day-ahead contract jumped to 14.25 pounds a megawatt hour on the news from a day-low of 12.40 pounds but ended at 14.0 down from 14.10 on Wednesday. British Energy's power costs about 19 pounds a megawatt to produce.
British Energy said the support package included help to keep its North American operations running. At its Bruce Power complex in Ontario, Canada, regulators have asked for a guarantee it can keep functioning safely.
Longer-term solutions for the company now being discussed include tax breaks, a revised relationship with state-owned nuclear fuels group BNFL, sale of some North American assets and a financial restructuring that could cut out shareholders altogether and leave other investors severely out of pocket.
The company claims it has been hamstrung by state energy policy and does not get its fair share of tax breaks, but government officials and advisers believe company strategy has been at least partly to blame for its predicament.
(additional reporting by Alex Clelland, Eva Sohlman, F. Brinley Bruton, Tom Bergin).
-------- depleted uranium
Attack on Iraq would expose soldiers to depleted uranium
By Scott Taylor
ON TARGET
Monday, September 30, 2002
Halifax Herald (Canada)
http://www.herald.ns.ca/stories/2002/09/30/f104.raw.html
A SENIOR Iraqi medical official warns that any U.S.-led military action against Iraq will have to confront "the hidden killer" as well as Saddam Hussein's forces.
"If they wish to launch Gulf War II, they had better be prepared to lose many of their soldiers to Gulf War Syndrome II," says Mona Al Jibowei, dean of the science faculty at Baghdad University.
"The allied soldiers went home after being exposed to depleted uranium for only a short period of time. Iraq has lived with its devastating effects for the past 12 years."
Since the end of the Gulf War, tens of thousands of allied veterans have developed debilitating illnesses and have qualified to collect medical pensions. Despite the fact these ex-service members have been compensated for their disabilities, officials say there is no scientific proof their illness is linked to service in the Persian Gulf or exposure to depleted uranium.
Depleted uranium is the waste byproduct of nuclear reactors. In the 1980s, U.S. researchers recognized that the material's density gave it tremendous armour-piercing potential. In addition to being able to punch through layers of hardened steel, shells coated with depleted uranium also ignite on impact, creating a fiery burst of radioactive particles inside an enemy armoured vehicle. It is this "aerosol" that most experts believe causes the variety of long- term health problems associated with Gulf War Syndrome.
"Although depleted uranium itself contains only low levels of radiation, once tiny aerosol particles are breathed in and become lodged in the lymph nodes, this radiation continues to attack the immune system and to alter reproductive chromosomes," Al Jibowei said. "This is why it creates such diverse results in different individuals."
Al Jibowei is on the executive committee of a special Iraqi research project to monitor the health hazard created by depleted uranium. A specialist in toxicology and pathology, the British-educated Al Jibowei has spent a lot of time since the Gulf War liaising with a number of international experts.
"This is entirely new science," said Al Jibowei. "The Gulf War was the first time that (such) munitions were used on an actual battlefield, and no one at the time had any idea what effect they would have on the body."
By analysing the available case information, the Iraqi researchers realized that the epicentre for effects is around Basra, in southern Iraq.
The U.S. and British air forces expended an estimated 300 tonnes of depleted-uranium ammunition in and around this key staging area for Iraq's military.
International researchers consider Basra to be "ground zero" as it represents the heaviest concentrations of depleted uranium next to a major urban centre.
"What we have noticed here is a tremendous increase in soft cancers like leukemia, particularly among children," said Al Jibowei. "There has also been a horrific epidemic of birth defects over the past 12 years."
The Iraqi surveys show children with such anomalies are almost exclusively born to parents who were directly exposed to depleted uranium.
"Either they were in the vicinity of Basra during the war, or their fathers were serving in the army and were exposed to (the material) in Kuwait," Al Jibowei said.
While attending an international conference in New York last year, the Iraqi research team met with U.S. Gulf War veterans to compare statistics.
"It was amazing the similarities in the birth defects between the U.S. and Iraqi babies," he said.
Any potential ground invasion of Iraq by U.S.-led forces would most likely be launched from Kuwait, and troops would have to pass straight up the Death Highway to Basra. The hulks of thousands of Iraqi vehicles still litter the sides of this highway. Although the aerosol from the coated shells has long since dissipated, Iraqi scientists believe the particles remain in the desert sands.
Uranium possesses a radioactive half-life of 200 million years and therefore, would still pose a serious risk.
Despite increasing evidence linking the material to degenerative health disorders, the British and American militaries steadfastly refuse to suspend their use of such weapons.
On Aug. 16 of this year at the annual UN Human Rights Convention, a motion was tabled to ban the use of depleted-uranium munitions until a full-scale medical survey can be conducted. Britain and the U.S. were the only two countries to vote against the motion.
It is a decision both countries could come to regret should hostilities erupt.
"If the Americans do attack us, they will inherit a hostile environment of radioactive toxicity," said Al Jibowei. "They will face the same tragedy that Iraq is already experiencing and suffering. Everyone will end up buried in Iraq."
-------- europe
Bulgaria bows to EU pressure in n-plant dispute
Story by Anna Mudeva,
REUTERS BULGARIA:
September 30, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17956/story.htm
SOFIA - The Bulgarian government said it would formally comply with European Union demands to close old reactors at its Kozloduy nuclear power plant by 2006 to avoid blocking entry talks with the Union.
But in return the government will insist the EU check the safety of two of Kozloduy's disputed reactors, number three and four, and then use the results to negotiate a new closure date later than the current EU-imposed 2006 deadline, said European Integration Minister Meglena Kuneva.
The early decommissioning of the old reactors, considered by the EU as unsafe, is a key pledge in the Balkan country's membership talks with Brussels.
Bulgaria, however, is seeking to extend the reactors' life because it is a major power exporter in the region, with Kozloduy's Soviet-designed six reactors totalling 3,760 megawatts, producing half of the country's energy.
Sofia bowed to the EU pressure in 2000 and agreed to close Kozloduy's two oldest 440-megawatt reactors, number one and two, before 2003.
According to a 1999 deal with the European Commission, Bulgaria should close reactors three and four before 2008 and 2010, respectively, but in the last two annual reports on Bulgaria the commission insisted this should be in 2006 at the latest. Reactors five and six will remain operational.
Sofia is convinced reactors three and four are safe to operate after a June mission by the world nuclear watchdog IAEA concluded Bulgaria has addressed and solved all safety issues, Energy Minister Milko Kovachev told reporters.
But asked whether the EU would agree to check Kozluduy's safety, Foreign Minister Solomon Passy said: "We have no guarantees so far. But we have to try".
"Blocking the talks on a chapter (in membership talks), can block the whole negotiation process," he added.
Sofia aims to wrap up entry talks with Brussels by the end of 2003 and an eventual deadlock on Kozloduy's fate would delay Bulgaria's targeted entry date of 2006.
Earlier this year Sofia indicated it would seek later closure of the disputed reactors but EU Enlargement Commissioner Guenter Verheugen said Bulgaria should comply with the Union's position rather than question it.
Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov said he did not approve the government's Thursday decision to accept 2006 as a closure date, calling it 'a compromise and even a retreat under the EU pressure'.
--------
New U.S. Doctrine Worries Europeans
Decades of Coalition-Building Seen at Risk
By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, September 30, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20343-2002Sep29?language=printer
BRUSSELS -- Here in the capital of the new Europe, officials are expressing emotions ranging from concern to alarm to anger as they contemplate the growing gap between themselves and the Bush administration.
The immediate cause is the administration's newly declared preemption doctrine, reserving for the United States the right to attack potential enemies before they strike, and its determination to deal with Iraq with or without international support. One senior European official said the new U.S. message to Europe was: "You have become irrelevant, and unless you do something dramatic to raise your defense expenditure, this is the end. The phone is not ringing."
But officials and analysts here say their problems with Washington go much deeper than the current crisis. They fear that the Bush administration, in the name of countering threats from terrorists and from rogue states since the Sept. 11 attacks last year, is jettisoning the post-World War II system of multilateral institutions and coalitions -- such as the U.N. Security Council and the NATO alliance -- that the United States helped build, and which helped preserve peace and stability for nearly 60 years.
"The mixture of containment and establishing an international rule book by and large encouraged democracy, the rule of law and open markets throughout the world," Chris Patten, the European Union's external affairs minister, said in an interview Friday. "Why should anyone think that that approach was somehow less relevant after September 11th? I think it's more relevant."
Rallies by tens of thousands of anti-war demonstrators in London and Rome on Saturday were reminiscent of the protests of the early 1980s in favor of nuclear disarmament and against President Ronald Reagan's tough stance on the Soviet Union. But here in Brussels, opposition to what is seen as the administration's emerging unilateralism comes not just from the left but from across the board, and includes the highest levels of the EU.
"There's a lot of concern, and it's growing and it's not just the usual suspects, it's across the spectrum," said John Palmer, director of the European Policy Center, a prominent Brussels research group.
Officials concede that one of their problems is that they do not speak with one voice. The views of European leaders range from British Prime Minister Tony Blair's spirited endorsement of the Bush administration's Iraq policy to German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's equally spirited criticism, with French President Jacques Chirac somewhere in between. "It's our weakness, not America's strength, that is the problem," said Elmar Brok, chairman of the European Parliament's foreign affairs committee. "We have no influence because we have no common European approach."
Although the European Union is a baroque collection of institutions, regulations and formalism designed to transform narrow national interests into collective policies, feelings still count -- and European feelings have been badly bruised in recent months. The Europeans say the administration views them as "Euro wimps" who don't pull their weight militarily, and who prefer prevarication to plain-speaking and appeasement to action. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's recent appearance at a NATO meeting in Warsaw, during which he snubbed the German defense minister because of Schroeder's strong opposition to military action against Iraq, was the latest insult.
"There's a tone of contempt that people here deeply resent," said John Wyles, a journalist and policy strategist who works for GPlus Europe, a consulting firm.
Many officials regret that Schroeder took his stance, which helped him win a narrow reelection victory last week, without consulting his European partners. But they say that Schroeder was reflecting the views not just of the German electorate, but of people throughout the continent. "President Bush would not be able to walk the streets of Berlin shaking hands right now," a senior official said, "or the streets of Madrid."
Europeans also resent U.S. predictions that they will inevitably go along with military action against Iraq, whether it is sanctioned by the United Nations or not. "The consequences of allowing America to go in alone would be too severe," conceded another senior official. But not every European leader would go along, he said. "A lot of Europeans would feel they'd been put in an intolerable position." For those who would agree to participate militarily, "it would be less a coalition of the willing than of the dragooned."
Relations with the Bush administration were icy even before the Sept. 11 attacks. Washington's opposition to the Kyoto treaty on global warming, its demand to be exempted from the reach of the new International Criminal Court and its staunch support of Israel's hard-line prime minister, Ariel Sharon, have caused anger and consternation here. U.S. officials, in turn, complained that Europe thrived because it was nestled under a security umbrella provided and paid for by the United States, and that if it wanted more influence, it needed to contribute more to its own defense. The United States spends about twice as much on defense as do all of its 18 NATO partners combined.
The terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon momentarily overshadowed those disputes and created a wave of sympathy and support for the United States. "We're All Americans Now," declared the front page of Le Monde, the left-of-center Paris daily that usually takes pleasure in America-bashing.
But that sentiment quickly faded. European officials now concede that they were slow to recognize the depth of the wound and shock to Americans -- and the degree to which Americans would take literally the concept of a war on terrorism. "For you, it's not symbolic, it's a real term," one official said. "From that moment, you decided it's your problem and you have to solve it and the rest of the world can either help, or, if not, to hell with them."
Europeans, who have experienced terrorism in such places as Northern Ireland and the Basque region of Spain, resent being dictated to. Many people contend that the Americans have put too much emphasis on a military approach to attacking terrorism and not enough on dealing with what they identify as root causes, such as poverty and lack of freedoms. "None of this in any way justifies or explains what happened on September 11th," Patten said, "but perhaps it means we have a slightly more nuanced idea of how you deal with terrorism."
Worse, many believe that Washington has adopted a militarized foreign policy that divides the world too simply into friends and enemies. Bush's "axis of evil" characterization, lumping North Korea and Iran with Iraq, disturbed many here -- including Britain, the United States' most loyal European partner, which was engaged in trying to build bridges to moderates in Iran when Bush's rhetorical hammer fell.
The conflict over Iraq has crystallized many European fears. After the hawkish statements of Vice President Cheney, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Rumsfeld, many here concluded that the Bush administration had no genuine interest in seeking to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, but was using the issue as a ploy to topple Saddam Hussein under any circumstances. While they welcomed Bush's decision to seek a new U.N. Security Council resolution on weapons inspections -- and give Britain's Blair credit for helping guide Bush in that direction -- they fear that the administration is only using the council as justification for military action, and will go ahead even without U.N. assent.
"It was wholly legitimate for President Bush to go to the United Nations and to challenge the international community to make good on what it says it believes," said Patten. "But that's just not for one day. It's got to be for real."
Bush's new strategic doctrine formalizes some of the trends Europeans find most troubling. "Preemption says to us, 'This is an empire and we will not allow anybody to get close to our capabilities and we are ready to act to prevent that from happening,' " a senior official said.
Another official said the doctrine set a bad precedent -- if it is all right for the United States to attack another country preemptively for supporting terrorism, he asked, then what is to prevent India from dropping a nuclear bomb on Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, in retaliation for Pakistani support for separatists in Kashmir?
European officials search for signs that the American public is less hard-line than the administration. Every one of a half-dozen officials interviewed last week cited the recent opinion survey sponsored by the U.S. German Marshall Fund and Chicago Council of Foreign Relations indicating a convergence in views on security issues between Americans and Europeans and a solid American majority in favor of obtaining Security Council support for any attack on Iraq. Most cited with approval former vice president Al Gore's attack on administration policy last week, although one official added, "If we'd said that here, we'd be immediately branded as anti-American."
U.S. diplomats contend European fears are overwrought.
"Part of it [their fear] is European old-think -- the old balance of power instincts," said a senior U.S. diplomat, referring to the Cold War model in which strong nations balanced each other and effectively maintained world stability. "And I think part of it is that the Europeans see lots of reasons to interpret America's terrorism war as America trying to bend Europe to its own will."
Some Europeans agree that officials need to calm themselves and remember what they have in common with the United States. "There are so many areas where we have joint interests and so many similarities between us," said Pascal Lamy, the EU's trade commissioner. "Any good negotiator will tell you that Lesson One is having a clear view of each side's starting positions. Just getting there is a good start for living together because we have to live together."
-------- india / pakistan
India planning pre-emptive strikes against Pakistan
By Aslam Khan,
The News International, Pakistan
Monday September 30, 2002-- Rajab 22, 1423 A.H. ISSN 1563-9479
http://www.jang.com.pk/thenews/sep2002-daily/30-09-2002/main/main4.htm
ISLAMABAD: The government has picked up signals that India has begun putting in place a plan to carry out pre-emptive strikes against Pakistan in the eventuality of an American attack on Iraq, well-placed sources revealed to The News on Sunday.
The sources added that the government was taking the signals seriously and had ordered preparations to counter any such eventuality. "There have been several simultaneous developments in the past few days that indicate a sinister game plan by India against Pakistan," a high-placed official disclosed on the condition of anonymity.
"The Indians are making ominous moves through their army, navy and the air force, which has rung alarm bells here and we are taking appropriate counter measures to be in a position to neutralise any threat," he said.
He revealed that in an abrupt move the Indian army headquarters had ordered all personnel on leave to report back to the frontline units along the border with Pakistan by October 1. "More ominously, attack aircraft that were withdrawn to the rear bases in June are now moving back to forward operating bases," the official revealed.
Also, he added, the Pakistan Navy had picked up heightened activity of Indian ships and submarines in the Arabian Sea not far from the approach to the Pakistani waters.
"Allied intelligence gathered along with these developments indicates that New Delhi is putting in place arrangements that seem to suspiciously mirror recent threats hurled by Indian leaders, including Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and Deputy Prime Minister L K Advani," he said.
"We believe that the new found Indian keenness for the American advocacy of pre-emptive military strikes against possible security risks is behind the latest military moves against Pakistan by New Delhi," the official said.
"It is clear that the moves are a follow-up of the recent statements by Vajpayee and Advani drawing parallels between the US and Iraq with the alleged cross-border terrorism across the Line of Control," he added.
"Pakistan is fully conscious of the ominous new developments across its borders and is adopting appropriate measures to counter any threat to its security on the land, in the air and the sea," he said.
He, however, refused to elaborate the military measures. "Suffice to say that our armed forces are not only capable of meeting any eventuality but also fully competent to counter any threat adequately," he added.
When contacted, senior security analyst Mirza Naseem Anwar Beg said the latest Indian threatening moves, if related to the American doctrine of unilateralism, indicated a new international climate that was polarising the established global security realm.
"The concept of unilateralism, especially in military terms, is a dangerous new trend," he said. "It is, however, a case of easier said than done when applied to Pakistan's case."
"India may want to imitate US unilateralism in the conduct of its foreign policy but what is apparently not clear to India is that even the US is finding it difficult to garner the support of such longstanding allies as Germany and France for the contemplated attack against Iraq," Beg said.
"On the face of it, India seems set to take a cue from a likely US attack on Iraq and launch a similar pre-emptive aggression against Pakistan on the plea of alleged cross-border terrorism," he said, adding that Islamabad must step up diplomatic pressure to counter this omnipotent threat.
A senior defence source confirmed to The News that there was unusually heightened military activity along Pakistan's border.
"The Indian armed forces' directives should be seen in the light of the aggressive statements by their leaders, which are indicative of their mood to re-escalate the tension in the region and take matters to an unacceptable level where they may even resort to use of force," the official said.
Requesting that he not be named, he informed that not only were the Indians adding to the strength of their naval units in the Arabian Sea, "we have noted the increasing visits of senior Indian generals to held Kashmir where they are addressing their troops with military rhetoric at the Line of Control."
Sources said that a high-level Indian delegation had just returned from Tel Aviv where it attended meetings of the Indo-Israel Joint Commission for Defence Cooperation.
The objective was to review their rapidly expanding military ties to cater for a hi-tech missile defence shield for India as well as the sale of Phalcon radar for use in planes with AWACS.
Israeli defence industry has emerged as India's second largest weapons provider after Russia with defence related trade between the two countries totalling more than $1 billion a year.
India has already acquired a powerful Green Pine Early Warning radar system from Israel, which is reportedly being deployed along the Pakistan border and signed a multi million dollar deal for purchasing an unspecified number of Aerostal long-range radar to bolster air defences along the border.
Israel has also supplied avionics and weapons systems for use in Indian Air Force as well as Naval Air Defence and anti-missile system for use by Indian Navy, the sources said. "While we object to these military acquisitions, India must realise that neither is it a super power like the US, nor Pakistan an isolated and crippled state such as Iraq," the defence source said.
"Pakistan will retaliate with all possible force if subjected to aggression," he warned. "India should stop equating itself with the US and drawing wrong analogies between Iraq and Pakistan. It will cut a sorry figure for any
-------- japan
Japan reprimands trade officials for nuclear coverup
REUTERS JAPAN:
September 30, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17952/story.htm
TOKYO - Japan's trade ministry said last week it has reprimanded five senior ministry officials for failing to take quick action in investigating a nuclear cover-up scandal by the nation's largest power utility.
The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency was criticised for taking more than two years to reveal the scandal after being informed by a whistle-blower that Tokyo Electric Power Co Inc (TEPCO) falsified reports on nuclear safety inspections.
The agency is a unit of the ministry.
"The way the investigation was conducted and the time it took to unveil the incident are considered improper, and have harmed public confidence in the nuclear industry," Trade Minister Takeo Hiranuma told a news conference.
"We have to say that the length of the two-year investigation is considered too long, although the heavier responsibility rests on TEPCO," Hiranuma said. TEPCO admitted in late August that it had hidden the existence of cracks at several of its nuclear reactors over a period of several years, partly by falsifying data on safety checks.
Since then several other power firms have said they also failed to report cracks at their nuclear reactors.
Hiranuma told reporters he would forgo his salary for two months to take responsibility for the incident.
The senior officials being reprimanded include Yoshihiko Sasaki, the head of the agency, and Hiranuma said he accepted an offer by Sasaki to forfeit a month's salary.
Resource-poor Japan relies on nuclear power for one-third of its power supply.
-------- terrorism
Skepticism Greets Seizure of Suspected Uranium
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, September 30, 2002; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20656-2002Sep29?language=printer
ISTANBUL, Sept. 29 -- Turkish police arrested two men near the Syrian border with a lead tube reportedly containing uranium, but international monitors said they were evaluating the incident with skepticism.
An initial report Saturday said the tube contained as much as 35 pounds of refined fissionable material -- about half as much as in the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. But an official requesting anonymity discounted the report late today, saying that police mistakenly included the weight of the lead container in the estimate, according to the Agence France-Presse news service.
The undetermined radioactive material actually weighed three ounces, the official said.
The later report reinforced skepticism already being voiced at the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. body that monitors nuclear proliferation. A spokeswoman said agency specialists "laughed" when they saw news photos of the container stamped with misspelled words and the phrase "Made in W. Germany."
The agency nonetheless takes the incident seriously, said the spokeswoman, Melissa Fleming. "What's significant is intent -- if there's a buyer," she said. "We'll have to rely on Turkey to tell us that."
Turkish officials were not available for comment today. However, suspicion immediately focused on Iraq, just 150 miles from Sanliurfa, the city in southeastern Turkey where the two men were arrested.
The Bush administration and independent analysts say Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is trying to acquire weapons-grade uranium or other fissionable material for nuclear weapons. The International Institute for Strategic Studies, a research organization based in London, issued a report this month saying that Iraq could produce an atomic bomb within months after acquiring such material.
British officials said in a report last week that Iraq had attempted to obtain nuclear material from unnamed countries in Africa.
The container was discovered in a taxi hired by the two suspects, identified in news reports as Mehmet Demir and Saliah Yasar. The men were arraigned Saturday night on charges of trafficking.
The contents of the container awaited testing at the Turkish atomic energy department, which was closed today. Fleming said the International Atomic Energy Agency had been unable to reach Turkish specialists by phone, fax or e-mail.
Turkey, which bridges Europe and Asia, is a crossroads for illicit trafficking of drugs and immigrants. In 1998, Turkish authorities seized almost 10 pounds of unprocessed uranium and six grams of plutonium smuggled from the former Soviet Union. Last November, police in Istanbul arrested two men who offered undercover agents two pounds of uranium wrapped in a newspaper.
--------
U.S. Reacts Cautiously to Uranium Seizure in Turkey
September 30, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-turkey-uranium-usa.html
WACO, Texas (Reuters) - The United States reacted cautiously on Monday to reports that Turkish paramilitary police had seized about 5 ounces of weapons-grade uranium and detained two men accused of smuggling the material.
``We continue to evaluate the information,'' White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters in Waco, as President Bush was returning to Washington after a weekend at his Texas ranch.
``I do not have at this time anything that is determinative about it,'' Fleischer said. ``Unless and until we have that, and we will, the administration is just going to monitor. ... I would just urge people not to leap to conclusions.''
Turkey's state-run Anatolian news agency said on Saturday officers in the southern province of Sanliurfa, which borders Syria and is about 155 miles from the Iraqi border, were acting on a tip-off on Saturday when they stopped a taxi cab and discovered the uranium in a lead container hidden beneath the vehicle's seat, the agency said.
Atomic energy experts in Turkey have not yet determined the amount of the confiscated substance and whether it is in fact weapons-grade uranium, Anatolian said on Monday.
``The material said to be of a purity used in nuclear weapons has not yet reached the Nuclear Research and Training Center, where an analysis will be immediately conducted,'' the Atomic Energy Institute said in a statement carried by Anatolian.
The incident came at a time of mounting speculation that the United States could launch a military attack on neighboring Iraq for its alleged program of weapons of mass destruction.
Bush has accused Baghdad of clandestine efforts to develop a nuclear bomb as his administration works to build international support for an operation to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
Turkish authorities believe the uranium may have come from an east European country.
--------
Report: Seized Material Not Uranium
September 30, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Turkey-Uranium.html
ANKARA, Turkey (AP) -- Atomic energy officials said Monday that a substance seized by police near the Syrian border was not weapons-grade uranium as Turkish officials first reported, according to the Anatolia news agency.
Atomic Energy Institute chief Guler Koksal said the material was harmless, containing zinc, iron, zirconium and manganese.
The announcement ended days of speculation that the substance might have been destined for neighboring Iraq, which the United States accuses of trying to smuggle in nuclear material for a secret weapons program.
Police, acting on a tip, recovered the material in a taxi last week in Sanliurfa province, near the Syrian border. Two Turks who were trying to sell the material as uranium were released from custody.
The seizure alarmed intelligence agencies around the world when the Turkish police said it weighed 35 pounds last week. On Monday, police said the material weighed only 5 ounces.
The disparity occurred because authorities initially included the weight of the lead container in which the material was placed, police said.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- nebraska
Neb. Fined in Nuclear Dump Fight
September 30, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Nuke-Dump-Lawsuit.html
LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) -- A federal judge fined Nebraska $151 million Monday for thwarting a plan to open a radioactive waste dump in a remote county.
U.S. District Judge Richard Kopf agreed with utilities and other states that sued former Gov. Ben Nelson, accusing him of acting in bad faith when he refused to issue a license for the multistate dump in 1998.
``Nebraska breached its good-faith obligation under the contract,'' the judge wrote. He added: ``I hope that this opinion will not be misused for partisan political purposes. Nebraskans have had quite enough of that self-serving behavior.''
The state is expected to appeal, and the dispute could wind up before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Nelson was governor from 1991 to 1999 and was elected to the Senate in 2000. He was not governor when the state joined a multistate compact to create a dump or when the other states picked Nebraska to host the site.
The dump, which was supposed to be in Butte along the South Dakota state line, was intended to store low-level radioactive waste from Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana. Such waste includes contaminated tools and clothing from nuclear power plants, hospitals and research centers.
The state argued during a trial that Nebraska denied the license because of pollution concerns and a high water table near the proposed site.
Kopf noted comments Nelson made about the dump while campaigning for governor in 1990.
``As a candidate, Ben Nelson promised that `If I am elected governor, it is not likely that there will be a nuclear dump in Boyd County,''' the judge wrote. Kopf also noted that while running for the Senate, ``Nelson proudly claimed that `I kept the nuclear waste out of Nebraska.'''
Nelson denied acting in bad faith.
``I held out hope for an unbiased consideration of the facts,'' he said. ``The state has acted in good faith since the inception of the compact in the mid-1980's, and I am confident that on appeal Nebraskans will receive a fair hearing and the judgment will be overturned,'' he said in a statement.
Alan Peterson, a lawyer for the compact, had no immediate comment.
The battle had its genesis decades ago, when Nevada, South Carolina and Washington grew tired of accepting low-level radioactive waste from the rest of the country. Congress told states in 1980 to build their own dumps or join regional groups to dispose of the waste.
On the Net:
Central Interstate Low Level Radioactive Waste Compact Commission: http://www.cillrwcc.org/
-------- ohio
'88 Warning Was Rejected at Damaged Nuclear Plant
New York Times
September 30, 2002
By MATTHEW L. WALD
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/30/national/30NUKE.html
WASHINGTON, Sept. 29 - The discovery in February that a reactor vessel in a nuclear power plant had corroded to the brink of rupturing may have shocked the plant's operators and federal safety regulators, but years ago, Howard C. Whitcomb saw it coming, or something like it.
Mr. Whitcomb, a former Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspector who was hired by the owners of the Davis-Besse reactor, near Toledo, Ohio, to write a report on what was wrong with maintenance there, concluded in 1988 that management so disdained its craft workers that it had lost touch with the condition of the plant.
Top executives responded swiftly and decisively, he said: They ordered him to change his report. He quit instead.
Now, the owners are saying they need to get in better touch with their employees, who according to company surveys are still reluctant to raise safety concerns. In a meeting with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in mid-September, company officials explained that they were meeting with all 800 plant employees in small groups with a facilitator to improve communication. The plant, built for Toledo Edison, is now run by First Energy Nuclear Operating Company, after a merger.
The simple problem at Davis-Besse, a 24-year-old reactor, was that water was leaking from two nozzles on top of the vessel. The water contained boron, a chemical used to regulate the nuclear reaction, and the boron accumulated in a hidden spot and ate away about 70 pounds of steel.
The commission staff has said that the company's reports on the condition of the vessel head were misleading.
Now the reactor head must be replaced, a task that has required cutting a big hole through a containment dome several feet thick.
But there are broader questions. Why did the company delay making a change to the reactor head that would have made inspection possible? Why did not the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which wanted all plants of Davis-Besse's type to inspect for the problem, push for earlier action?
As is common after severe problems at a reactor, the commission has been examining the structure of management and what it calls the plant's culture, meaning the attitudes of the people who work there, the willingness of operators to raise safety questions and management's willingness to consider them.
While the corrosion at the vessel head was not obvious, the boron had spread elsewhere, and the commission is particularly interested in why no one did anything about corrosion on a ventilation duct that was in plain sight of workers entering the containment.
"People generally accepted that condition," said Todd M. Schneider, a spokesman for First Energy. Since the discovery of the corrosion in the vessel head, management has worked to change attitudes so "those conditions are no longer acceptable," Mr. Schneider said.
In his 1988 report, Mr. Whitcomb mentioned the culture problems that are now recognized.
"Many craft personnel hold strong negative perceptions of engineering and management personnel," he wrote. "In general, the labor forces feel that management exhibits a general lack of concern or respect for their abilities, efforts or problems."
Mr. Whitcomb was hardly an industry rebel. A veteran of the nuclear Navy, he was a resident inspector for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission at the H.B. Robinson reactor in South Carolina, and then went to a plant under construction in Ohio before being hired by Toledo Edison. After he gave two weeks' notice at Davis-Besse, he went to work at the Fermi reactor, near Detroit. Now he is a lawyer in general practice in Oak Harbor, Ohio, the location of the Davis-Besse reactor.
In a report on June 20, 1988, to the company's vice president for nuclear power and the plant manager, he said that closing to refuel took too long; that preventive maintenance was slow and not fully effective because managers did not pay enough attention to the workers' needs; and that the workers were embittered.
"Maintenance has traditionally been regarded in a subservient role at Davis-Besse," Mr. Whitcomb wrote. To be successful, management must recognize "the contribution that craft personnel may provide in the development of plant-specific maintenance actions." Managers must take a more serious attitude toward maintenance, he wrote.
That finding in the report, a copy of which was provided to The New York Times by Ohio Citizen Action, a nonprofit group that has raised many safety questions about the reactor, seems prescient.
"If they followed the advice of 20 years ago, we wouldn't be here now," said Amy K. Ryder, the group's program director in the Cleveland area.
In an interview, Mr. Whitcomb said, "They just didn't want to hear it."
Mr. Schneider, the spokesman for First Energy, said that the two executives to whom Mr. Whitcomb had made his report 14 years ago were no longer with the company. The report "was not up to our requirements," he said, but he would not confirm that Mr. Whitcomb had been told to rewrite it. Mr. Whitcomb left Toledo Edison voluntarily, he said.
The company says it hopes to restart the plant this year. Work is progressing well on the head replacement, Mr. Schneider said. First Energy bought the head of a similar reactor in Michigan on which construction has been abandoned. It is still working on the culture, he said.
-------- us politics
A New Look at U.S. Goal
By DAVID E. SANGER
New York Times
September 30, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/30/international/middleeast/30POLI.html
WASHINGTON, Sept. 29 - For the last two weeks, President Bush's efforts to build a coalition against Iraq have been plagued by the continuing dissonance over America's real goal. At the United Nations, the United States says it simply wants to enforce the disarmament of Saddam Hussein, while in Washington and out on the hustings, Mr. Bush talks incessantly about overthrowing "the Iraqi dictator."
But Iraq's intransigence over the weekend about allowing unfettered inspection has given the White House new hope that allies that have been unwilling to sign up for the overthrow of a sovereign government may now rethink their position. "He's doing exactly what we predicted," a senior administration official said today. "He's proving that you can't have a real inspection while Saddam remains in power."
It will be a week or two before anyone can judge whether Mr. Bush will persuade Presidents Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Jiang Zemin of China and Jacques Chirac of France to see the issue his way. But without question, Mr. Hussein's actions on the weekend have focused the argument over whether the right goal is to try to disarm Iraq or replace its government.
Until now, Mr. Bush and his advisers have tried to finesse that question. When asked, senior administration officials have argued that removing Mr. Hussein was not Mr. Bush's idea, it was Congress's - in a resolution that was passed overwhelmingly in 1998, when it seemed more like a declaration of policy than a declaration of war.
But in New York, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and his diplomats knew better than to utter the phrase "regime change." Stating that goal openly, they said, would undermine their chances of getting a tough resolution. After all, as the Iraqis have pointed out repeatedly, Article II of the United Nations Charter forbids "the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state."
Avoiding any mention at the United Nations of a change of government, however, was one of those polite diplomatic fictions that could not last for long. And it has not. The allies understand that the distinction between disarmament and government overthrow blurs as soon as any military force is required. Simply put, the military plans now on Mr. Bush's desk all call for disarming Iraq by toppling Mr. Hussein. His national security aides say there is no other way.
"What we have to do is, we have to go back to the goal here," a senior administration official said in an interview. "And the goal here is to make certain that the obligations that Saddam Hussein undertook are actually met."
"Now, it's the policy of the United States that we don't believe that he's ever going to meet those obligations, and that's what led to the regime change policy," the official continued. "Because in order to certify disarmament, for instance, you have to have the cooperation of the regime. And he's demonstrated that he's not going to cooperate."
That is not the view of many crucial Democrats, a few moderate Republicans and a host of nervous allies. They still see a distinction, and say it is an important one to observe - because if Mr. Hussein believes that an invasion force is headed his way no matter what, he has no incentive to open the door to inspectors, and every incentive to use whatever weapons he has amassed.
Appearing from Baghdad, where he is now visiting, Representative Jim McDermott, a Democrat from Washington State, argued on the ABC News program "This Week" that Mr. Bush would be wise to rethink his goal.
"I think the question that really has to be decided by our government is: Do you want to disarm Saddam Hussein, or do you want regime change?" Mr. McDermott asked, adding in reference to the chief of the United Nations arms inspection team for Iraq, "Because if you want disarmament, let Hans Blix go in, and we'll wait for his report." Only after the report is in - which could take 60 days or more - should the United States decide how to proceed, he said. Later, on CNN, Mr. McDermott added: "The administration keeps pushing some way that they can start something before the inspections ever get done. That's not right. It's wrong to create war as the only way to deal with this."
At the heart of the dispute over goals is a dispute over timetables.
Apart from Mr. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, few represented at the United Nations seem in a great rush to plunge into a confrontation. Inspections should take as long as Mr. Blix believes he needs to get the job done, or until he is blocked, most other leaders say.
But Mr. Bush is on a different timetable, a much shorter one. The Joint Chiefs of Staff have told him that the prime moment to begin an invasion is January or February.
Working backward, that means bombing would have to start sometime in December. And that means there are only two months available for a resolution to pass in the United Nations, for Mr. Hussein to accept or reject it and for inspectors to get in and out.
American allies say they are sympathetic - to a point.
"The problem with this plan," a senior diplomat from a major Pacific ally said here over the weekend, "is that it leaves Saddam no graceful way out. If he defies the U.N. or if he complies with it - however unlikely - the Americans are intent on knocking him off. He has no means to maneuver, and we have little room for diplomacy."
If Mr. Bush is right, Mr. Hussein will prove that there is no need for diplomacy. An early rejection of the United Nations' terms could pave the way for military action. Even Democrats think so. Senator Christopher J. Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat who serves on the Foreign Relations Committee, suggested today that Mr. Hussein's rejection of unlimited inspections would only reinforce the view that he must go.
"If he were truly interested in avoiding the conflict," Mr. Dodd said, "this is going to be on his shoulders, on his watch, his responsibility, rather than on the United Nations or the United States."
--------
The White House On Iraq:
We Don't Need No Stinkin' Proof
September 30, 2002
http://www.ariannaonline.com/columns/files/093002.html
We all know who attacked us on Sept. 11, 2001, don't we?
No, not Osama bin Laden. God, that is so last year. It never turns out to be the person you first suspect. It was Saddam Hussein. For some reason we couldn't find him when we went after him in Afghanistan, bringing that magic elixir of regime change along with us. But now we've got a better idea: track him down where he actually lives, in Baghdad, and punish him right in his own backyard. It's the only way to obtain justice for the thousands he killed on 9/11.
At least that's the way the White House is now pitching the story.
In this latest rewrite of history, Osama has suddenly lost his beard and grown a mustache, morphing into the Butcher of Baghdad -- or one of the look-alike stand-ins Saddam has been using for public appearances since 1998.
"You can't distinguish between Al-Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror," said President Bush in the Oval Office last week.
Really? He can't differentiate between a group of evil ultra-radical Islamic fundamentalists that carried out the Sept. 11 attacks and an evil secular nationalist who, despite the frantic efforts of the Bush administration, has not been directly linked to 9/11? He'd better start making such distinctions -- and fast. When every expert who knows anything about the Mideast can distinguish between the two, is it too much to ask that a President who's ready to go to war look a bit more closely?
People under stress often regress to earlier stages of development. It appears that Bush is so intent on getting Saddam, so obsessively tightly gripped by a need to succeed where his war hero dad failed, so determined to lay the murderous 9/11 assault at Baghdad's door, that he's regressed to that level of childhood development where fantasy, reality and wish fulfillment are all mixed up. Except that this time, things like nuclear weapons and the safety of the world for the next few decades are involved.
Now, I'm no psychologist, but I believe there is a clinical term for this condition: going off the deep end. How else to explain the president's bizarre response to a reporter's straightforward query last week about who poses a bigger threat to America, Saddam or Al-Qaeda?
"That's an interesting question," he replied. "I'm trying to think of something humorous to say but I can't when I think about Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein."
When did the president take over the "Tonight Show?" Why would the idea that he should make a joke about such a deadly serious subject even cross his mind? It would be like asking Danielle van Dam's parents about the trial of their daughter's murderer and having them apologize for not being ready with a humorous quip.
No, Mr. President, you needn't apologize -- your inability to treat serious subjects lightly is not one of your deficiencies. So rather than struggling to come up with a wan witticism, why don't you just answer the question? Especially since it appears by your actions that you've already come up with one.
Instead of bothering to give the least defense of his sudden fusion of Saddam and Osama, Bush launched into a fantasy-fueled diatribe: "The danger is, is that they work in concert. The danger is, is that Al-Qaeda becomes an extension of Saddam's madness and his hatred and his capacity to extend weapons of mass destruction around the world."
The president's regressed condition is spreading like the West Nile virus throughout the West Wing and beyond.
Witness the symptomatic blurring of fact and fantasy exhibited by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. When asked at an Armed Services Committee hearing about what is now compelling us to "take precipitous actions" against Iraq, Rumsfeld barked: "What's different? What's different is 3,000 people were killed." Yeah, by Mohammed Atta and company -- not Saddam Hussein. But why quibble over details when there is a propaganda war to be won?
National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice continued the assault on reality when she vaguely yet ominously claimed: "There clearly are contacts between Al-Qaeda and Iraq that can be documented." Well, then why not document them? We've documented contacts between Al-Qaeda and our oil dealers in Saudi Arabia and Al-Qaeda and our new best friends in Pakistan. But I don't see any B-2s powering up for raids over Riyadh or Karachi.
As is the White House custom, Rice simply refused to back up her claims. So did Rumsfeld, who memorably rebuffed a reporter late last week by saying, "That happens to be a piece of intelligence that either we don't have or we don't want to talk about." In other words: Proof? We don't need no stinking proof! And just because I'm asking your sons and daughters to possibly sacrifice their lives for it doesn't mean you deserve to know whether it even exits.
It would be nice if we could just take them all at their word and let the bombs fall where they may. But Sen. Bob Graham, who, as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is privy to the inside scoop, says he's seen no evidence of any link between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein
So we're left with the fevered, infantile imaginings of the president and his pals. "We had dots before," said Anna Perez, Rice's spokeswoman. "Now we have a higher density of dots. Have we connected those dots? No."
Perhaps the president should put down his saber-rattle, pick up his crayons and connect them before drawing us into a bloody war.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
'I Yelled at Them to Stop'
U.S. Special Forces are frustrated. Kicking down doors and frisking women, they say, is no way to win hearts and minds in Afghanistan. A report from the front
By Colin Soloway
NEWSWEEK on MSNBC web
September 30, 2002
http://www.msnbc.com/news/814576.asp
Oct. 7 issue - One afternoon in August, a U.S. Special Forces A team knocked at the door of a half-ruined mud compound in the Shahikot Valley. The servicemen were taking part in Operation Mountain Sweep, a weeklong hunt for Qaeda and Taliban fugitives in eastern Afghanistan.
THE MAN OF THE HOUSE, an elderly farmer, let the Americans in as soon as his female relatives had gone to a back room, out of the gaze of strange men. Asked if there were any weapons in the house, the farmer proudly showed them his only firearm, a hunting rifle nearly a century old. When the team had finished searching, carefully letting the women stay out of sight, the farmer served tea. The Americans thanked him and walked toward the next house.
They didn't get far before the team's captain looked back. Six paratroopers from the 82d Airborne, also part of Mountain Sweep, were lined up outside the farmer's house, preparing to force their way in. "I yelled at them to stop," says the captain, "but they went ahead and kicked in the door." The farmer panicked and tried to run, and one of the paratroopers slammed him to the ground. The captain raced back to the house. Inside, he says, other helmeted soldiers from the 82d were attempting to frisk the women. By the time the captain could order the soldiers to leave, the family was in a state of shock. "The women were screaming bloody murder," recalled the captain, asking to be identified simply as Mike. "The guy was in tears. He had been completely dishonored."
THROWING ROCKS
The official story from both the 82d Airborne and the regular Army command is that Operation Mountain Sweep was a resounding success. Several arms caches were found and destroyed, and at least a dozen suspected Taliban members or supporters were detained for questioning. But according to Special Forces, Afghan villagers and local officials living in or near the valley, the mission was a disaster. The witnesses claim that American soldiers succeeded mainly in terrorizing innocent villagers and ruining the rapport that Special Forces had built up with local communities. "After Mountain Sweep, for the first time since we got here, we're getting rocks thrown at us on the road in Khowst," says Jim, a Green Beret who has been operating in the area for the past six months. Special Forces members say that Mountain Sweep has probably set back their counterinsurgency and intelligence operations by at least six months.
Officers in the 82d insist their men did nothing wrong. In response to NEWSWEEK queries, public-affairs officers characterized the Special Forces involved in Mountain Sweep as "prima donnas" who were damaging the war effort by complaining to the press. Yet at a time when Washington is talking about expanding the mission in Afghanistan and increasing the number of large-scale operations like Mountain Sweep-and when Qaeda allies are stepping up terrorist attacks against the fragile government in Kabul-the criticism raises serious questions about the best strategy for fighting the low-intensity war.
Shahikot is where Al Qaeda and Taliban forces fought their last major battle against the Americans back in March. Some 50 soldiers from several Special Forces A teams have been operating in eastern Afghanistan's Paktia and Khowst provinces ever since. They've been working to win the villagers' trust and cooperation-and largely succeeding, as NEWSWEEK found while accompanying some of them for two weeks on operations shortly before Mountain Sweep began. "The Americans in Gardez who have Toyota trucks, they are good guys," says Jan Baz Sadiqi, 46, district administrator in Zormat, the valley's population center. "They don't break into houses, and they don't terrorize people."
'THOSE GUYS WERE CRAZY'
Then on Aug. 19, American commanders sent some 600 action-hungry members of the Army's 82d Airborne Division, Third Battalion, charging into Zormat and the Shahikot area. "Those guys were crazy," said one Special Forces NCO who was there. "We just couldn't believe they were acting that way. Every time we turned around they were doing something stupid. We'd be like, 'Holy s-t, look at that! Can you believe this!' " Another said: "They were acting like bin Laden was hiding behind every door. That just wasn't the way to be acting with civilians." Special Forces working in the region say that since Mountain Sweep, the stream of friendly intelligence on weapons caches, mines and terrorist activity has dried up.
The Special Forces have often had a stormy relationship with the rest of the Army. Conventional commanders sometimes regard the elite fighters as arrogant cowboys. Special Forces members respond that the regular Army is too rigid for the painstaking job of fighting a low-intensity conflict. "The conventional military has a conventional mind-set," said an SF officer. "It does not work when you have crooks and terrorists and all kinds of bad guys who blend into the population." In Afghanistan, the A teams have been out in the field, cultivating the friendship of villagers and tracking down terrorists. At the same time, regular soldiers like those of the 82d were, until August, mostly confined to their bases, just itching to get out and do the job for which they were trained.
In Shahikot, that wasn't the job that needed doing. "The 82d is a great combat unit," said a Special Forces NCO who took part in the mission. "A lot of us on the teams came out of the 82d. But they are trained to advance to contact and kill the enemy. There was no 'enemy' down there." The remaining Taliban forces melted into the civilian population after Operation Anaconda blasted them out of the caves of Shahikot in March. Since then, the Afghan war has become basically a low-intensity guerrilla conflict, with Taliban and Qaeda fighters operating in small cells, emerging only to lay land mines and launch nighttime rocket attacks against the Americans before disappearing once again.
MAKING THE A TEAM
The Special Forces were created to deal with precisely that kind of enemy. Each A team is made up of 10 or fewer noncommissioned officers, led by one warrant officer and one captain. Armed with M-4 rifles and light machine guns, they live, travel and work with local troops. They patrol isolated villages in ordinary Toyota pickups, talking to the inhabitants-and never go anywhere without someone who speaks the local language. They have been trained to assimilate local customs and sensibilities as carefully as possible. Many of them sported full beards until a few weeks ago, when a news photo of a whiskery Green Beret shook up the brass in Washington. A smooth-cheeked adult male is a strange sight for rural Afghans, but the generals ordered all troops to shave immediately.
Still, people back home-Pentagon brass and civilians alike-are asking why terrorist leaders like Osama bin Laden and Mullah Mohammed Omar are still running loose. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld reportedly dressed down Gen. Dan McNeill in July for failing to capture more "high-value targets." Such impatience was likely a factor in launching Mountain Sweep. "It's the victory of form over substance, substituting action for results," says a Western diplomat who is worried about increasing complaints and warnings from areas where conventional operations are taking place. "It's thinking if you do a lot of stuff, something will happen. Something will, but it might not be what you want. The unhappiness is building."
Villagers have made no secret of that unhappiness. In the village of Marzak, several witnesses say that 82d troops chased down a mentally ill man, pushed him to the ground, handcuffed him and then took turns taking photos of themselves pointing a gun to his head. The office of Zormat administrator Sadiqi was flooded with complaints about the actions of some 82d units. "They knocked down doors, pouring into the homes, terrifying everybody, beating people, mistreating people," says Sadiqi. He says villagers demanded: "Why do the Americans come here and search our women? We don't need this kind of government!"
After the mission, the two SF teams submitted an "after-action review." NEWSWEEK has not seen the document, but sources say it describes in detail the problems the teams witnessed and suggests ways to avoid such problems in the future. The report set off a storm of recriminations. Col. James Huggins, commander of Task Force Panther, of which the Third Battalion is a part, says every platoon and squad leader in the battalion was questioned under oath, and their statements did not support the teams' charges. "I can't tell you 100 percent these things didn't happen," says Huggins. "All I can tell you is I looked, and can't find any evidence that they did." Officers involved have been accused of leaking classified reports to NEWSWEEK, and have been subjected to internal investigations.
Even as he defends his troops, Huggins says he's working to avoid problems in the future by increasing "cultural awareness" training, bringing in female military police to search Afghan women and keeping supplies of new locks on hand to replace those that are cut off during searches. As some Green Berets see it, the damage has already been done. Told that more operations like Mountain Sweep are being planned, one Special Forces NCO says: "It's over, then. We might as well go home, because we'll never succeed with big ops like that." Even so, Mike sticks up for the conventional Army. "Some SF guys will tell you we don't need regular forces out here, that we can do it all by ourselves," he said. "But that's impossible. The question is, how do you use those forces?" He recommends a model that has been successful in Afghanistan-pairing an A team with a company of regular infantry. "We need their muscle and firepower to support us when we go after the bad guys. But they need our brains, experience and skills to get the mission done," Mike says. "If you establish rapport with the people-establish you are not an occupying army-and prove you are here to support the transitional government, they will tell you where to find Al Qaeda." Among the Special Forces, the hope is that the U.S. command can learn from the mistakes of Mountain Sweep and get the job done right.
----
10-Month bin Laden Mystery: Dead or Alive?
New York Times
September 30, 2002
By JOHN F. BURNS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/30/international/asia/30OSAM.html
TORA BORA, Afghanistan, Sept. 23 - This is where the trail ran cold.
With the uncertainties surrounding Osama bin Laden since the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States - whether he is alive or dead, in Afghanistan or Pakistan, or perhaps in some hide-out much farther afield - this much is known: The last sightings of the leader of Al Qaeda of which pursuers can be reasonably certain were here in the White Mountains of southeastern Afghanistan.
Those sightings came nearly 10 months ago, when the main mountain base at Tora Bora that had been used for years by Mr. bin Laden and his followers came under two weeks of intensive American bombing. Targets for the B-52's included dozens of caves in the forested heights above the base that were used as hide-outs and ammunition depots. The base was left a field of blasted debris, and many caves disappeared beneath hundreds of tons of rubble, burying forever anybody within.
From the Tora Bora district, in the shadow of 14,500-foot peaks, it is a grueling six-hour walk up rock-strewn riverbeds and precipitous mountain trails to the international border, and on to remote tribal areas of northwestern Pakistan. The trek is swifter on horseback, often favored by Mr. bin Laden during the years when he was regularly at Tora Bora, according to villagers. Since the bombing in December, glimpses of him and an entourage of Arab militants, sometimes on horses, have been reported by tribespeople on both sides of the border, mostly from locations within a range, north and south, of about 100 miles.
Many of the tipoffs, American officials say, have been little more than hearsay; others have been prevarications by Qaeda sympathizers. Although raids have led to the arrests of scores of Arab militants, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, none have produced solid leads to Mr. bin Laden's whereabouts. Nor has the $25 million reward for the Qaeda leader proved of much avail. In a region of widespread poverty, the bounty has collided with ancient tribal traditions of secrecy, an abiding suspicion of outsiders and a profoundly conservative form of Islam that has favored the Qaeda fugitives and isolated their American pursuers.
The frustrations for American troops have not been helped by the suspicion that here at Tora Bora, where Mr. bin Laden was all but trapped, indecisiveness on the part of American commanders, or perhaps reluctance to risk casualties, may have helped him escape. If he fled to Pakistan, he did so over snow-choked mountain trails that were not blocked by American or other allied troops until after the bombing - an oversight that some of the allies point to as having squandered the best opportunity of the war to snare America's most wanted man.
Within weeks, high-ranking British officers were saying privately that American commanders had vetoed a proposal to guard the high-altitude trails, arguing that the risks of a firefight, in deep snow, gusting winds and low-slung clouds, were too high. Similar accounts abound among Afghan commanders who provided the troops stationed on the Tora Bora foothills - on the north side of the mountains, facing the Afghan city of Jalalabad. Those troops played a blocking role that left the Qaeda fugitives only one escape route, to the south, over the mountains to Pakistan.
Months later, exactly what happened here has been obscured by the political crosscurrents of the war. Some Afghan commanders who fought here are deeply embittered against the Americans for reasons related to perceived American favor or disfavor in the warlord struggles that continue to feed tensions around Jalalabad, as elsewhere in Afghanistan. American commanders never disclosed much about their strategy at Tora Bora and remain reluctant to discuss operational details even now.
Helping the Fugitives One important fact, though, seems to have been that some of the Afghan commanders at Tora Bora had links with Mr. bin Laden going back to the late 1980's, then found themselves drafted into the hunt for him after Sept. 11. One of these men, Hajji Zaman, who fled Afghanistan for sanctuary in France last spring, was accused by rival Afghan commanders of organizing a brief American bombing halt a few days into the attack to allow him to negotiate Qaeda leaders' surrender, only to use the standstill - with the inducement of a hefty Qaeda bribe - to help the fugitives escape.
Another commander, Hajji Zaher, said in an interview in Jalalabad that he had pleaded with Special Forces officers to block the trails to Pakistan. "The Americans would not listen, even when I told them that one word with me was worth more than $1 million of their high technology," said Mr. Zaher, 38. "Their attitude was, `We must kill the enemy, but we must remain absolutely safe.' This is crazy. If they had been willing to take casualties to capture Osama then, perhaps they'd have to take fewer casualties now."
Among American commanders, the legacy of Tora Bora, and of the unyielding hunt for Mr. bin Laden, has been one of deep uncertainty and even dissension. Gen. Tommy R. Franks, in overall command of United States military operations in the region, has said for months that he does not know whether Mr. bin Laden is dead or alive. But senior officers of the Joint Special Operations Command, deploying the elite units like the Delta Force that are responsible for counterterrorism, have argued that he was probably killed by the bombing. Some senior officers believe that it is time to scale back the manhunt, on the assumption that he is dead.
Another possibility, some American officers believe, is that Mr. bin Laden, who is 45 if he is still alive, died of sickness at Tora Bora and was buried somewhere in the heights, after the bombing interrupted the dialysis he needed to survive a longstanding kidney condition. This version has been tentatively supported by President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, who has assigned 10,000 troops to the border areas to support the manhunt. General Musharraf has said he thinks it more likely that Mr. bin Laden is dead than alive.
In the mountains surrounding Mr. bin Laden's old base, named for the nearby village of Melawa, all that is left now is a pastoral stillness. Along a riverbed below, tribesmen with donkeys drag tree trunks and roof beams salvaged from the forest and villages obliterated by the bombing. Scavengers have mostly disappeared, leaving little but litter of rusting barbed wire, twisted ammunition boxes, torn pages from the Koran, discarded flashlight batteries - and plastic bags of a Pakistani-made dextrose drip that, physicians say, could be used for dialysis treatment.
Some of the largest caves lie above the ruins of the stone-walled buildings that served as living quarters and defensive bunkers for Mr. bin Laden and scores of other Arabs. Since the bombing, they have been accessible only through cramped crawl spaces opened by American and Afghan troops digging through tons of collapsed earth and rock. In the clammy darkness, the deep caverns are filled with piles of unexploded ammunition, including mortar shells and rocket-propelled grenades. Afghan soldiers, fearing that the caves are booby-trapped, warn intruders to stay well away.
Clues as to what became of Mr. bin Laden have been pored over by Special Forces teams and Afghan militia units that stayed on here for weeks after the bombing. Reporters, too, have trekked out from Jalalabad, 20 miles from Melawa - or more than three hours in a jeep over the tortuous dirt track Mr. bin Laden paid to have cut through the foothills. Ranging over the mountains, clambering up to caves, questioning the villagers who have returned to settlements on the heights abandoned during the bombing, the strangers have pretty well exhausted everything the mountains, and the mountain people, can tell them.
The conundrum remains, though. If Mr. bin Laden died here, nobody has been able to find any trace of that, not among the dozens of Arab fighters' bodies strewn across the mountain ridges after the bombing, and not in the caves the Special Forces teams could still enter or dig into. The possibility remains that he lies dead somewhere in one of dozens of sealed-up caves that villagers say were never searched, or perhaps in a shallow grave somewhere in the maze of gullies and ravines that flank the mountain trails.
He Could Be Far Away All this leaves American forces with the frustration of continuing the hunt for Mr. bin Laden without the spur that would come from knowing, with reasonable certainty, that he is still alive.
According to some theories, Mr. bin Laden could by now be a long way distant, perhaps in one of the teeming cities of Pakistan. Two raids that have netted the most important Qaeda suspects seized so far outside the United States - Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a Yemeni and former roommate in Hamburg of Mohamed Atta, pilot of one of the planes that hit the World Trade Center, and Abu Zubaydah, Al Qaeda's operations director - took place, respectively, in Karachi and Faisalabad, two of Pakistan's biggest cities.
American officials do not discount completely, either, the possibility that Mr. bin Laden could have fled farther afield, perhaps aboard one of the small vessels, or dhows, that ply the Arabian Sea between Pakistan's desert coast and his ancestral homeland of Yemen - the ancestral homeland, too, of many of the Sept. 11 hijackers. In an interview with an Arab newspaper more than three years before Sept. 11, Mr. bin Laden said he yearned to return to the "mountains and deserts" of Yemen.
Another question that dogs the manhunt is how much Mr. bin Laden, as an individual, matters. When the first months of the hunt passed without his capture, or proof of his death, President Bush and other top American officials began suggesting that even if he was still alive, he was of diminishing importance, because he had been deprived of much of the network he needed to run Al Qaeda's terrorist plots. An opposing view is that alive, he is potentially as menacing as ever.
Even if the need to lie low has defanged him for the moment, his success in evading the toughest troops in the American forces - with every advantage of satellite technology and helicopters and other modern technical wizardry - has made him an irresistible icon to many in the Muslim world, especially among the alienated young.
At Tora Bora, most villagers take a narrower view. On the question of Mr. bin Laden, good or bad, many villagers are equivocal. In the wily way of those who have seen armies come and go, they give the impression of thinking it too early in America's war with Al Qaeda to venture a view. But the relief that he is no longer a force in their neighborhood - and no longer a magnet attracting American bombing - is palpable.
In hindsight, at least, some villagers say the Arabs were never popular. A tribesman working as forester in the Melawa area, Kudrat, 35, said that once Mr. bin Laden and his followers took over the Melawa base - in the summer of 1996, after being forced under American pressure to leave Sudan - his writ was paramount. "He had a lot of armed people with him, Arab people, and they behaved in a rude and arrogant way, as if they were the owners of heaven," Mr. Kudrat said.
As for Mr. bin Laden, the forester added: "He was very rich, and he behaved like a king. If he wanted something, he simply ordered it, and the Taliban gave it to him."
The Melawa base was originally built by the Islamic Party, one of the most radical of the Muslim guerrilla groups that fought a jihad, or holy war, against Soviet occupation troops in the 1980's. The villagers said the base underwent a major expansion under Mr. bin Laden, with new buildings, some with concrete foundations, including a house for himself. It was here, with bookshelves and carpets and a television set linked to a satellite dish, Afghan officials say, that he gave some of his interviews to foreign reporters in the late 1990's, setting out plans for a holy war against the United States.
The villagers said Mr. bin Laden made important allies among tribal chiefs in the area, building and repairing mosques and madrasas, the Islamic religious schools, as well as buying materials for the base. But by the fall of 1996, the Taliban seized Kabul, the capital, consolidating their rule in Afghanistan. After that, the villagers say, he became only an occasional visitor to Tora Bora, spending most of his time with the Taliban leaders, 400 miles away at their stronghold in the southwestern city of Kandahar.
According to the villagers, he returned for the last time sometime in the weeks after Sept. 11. From then on, he appears to have remained mostly out of sight. Mr. Kudrat, the forester, said the last time he saw him was when Mr. bin Laden and about a dozen of his Arab followers visited Mr. Kudrat's home village of Khan-i-Merajuddin, about two miles from the Melawa base, on the evening of Nov. 30. This was about four days after the American bombing started.
Hours later, Khan-i-Merajuddin was bombed, with dozens of villagers killed, including, Mr. Kudrat said, nine of his own relatives. But by then, he said, Mr. bin Laden and his group had left. Asked how he could be sure it was Mr. bin Laden he saw that night, Mr. Kudrat replied: "Everybody knew who he was. He was tall, he had the skin color of an Arab, a long turban, and he had a long beard, black and gray. He had very long arms. The other Arabs with him treated him like a god. They mounted their horses, and rode away."
An Intercepted Voice American commanders, asked what proof there was that Mr. bin Laden remained at Tora Bora during the bombing, have referred to an intercepted conversation, by radio, in which a voice thought to have been his was heard giving instructions to Qaeda fighters telling them to spare Afghan Muslims, if possible, but to fight to the death against the Americans. A similar message, over his signature, was found in pamphlets in the pockets of some of the Afghan militiamen killed by Qaeda rocket fire at Tora Bora.
An Afghan commander who held part of the front line at Tora Bora, Alim Shah Qaderi, said he had been told of one last sighting of Mr. bin Laden, at the village of Tangi, close to the Pakistan border, on Dec. 8, shortly before the bombing ended. Villagers there, Mr. Qaderi said, had told him that a man who looked like the Qaeda leader, along with a group of about 20 other Arabs, had ridden into Tangi on horseback late that day, paused for water and to buy supplies, and then ridden on toward Pakistan.
Mr. Qaderi, now back to a civilian life in Jalalabad as chief of the city's creaky telephone service, said he had remained at Tora Bora for weeks after the bombing, working with American search teams. But those teams, he said, had left many collapsed caves unsearched, had photographed but not DNA-tested bodies still lying on the mountains, and had not dug up many of the Arab graves that were left on the higher ridges, marked by white flags that were an Islamic banner for Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
"So my final word is this," the commander said. "If Osama is dead, somebody has to prove it, and they haven't. And if he's alive, he won't stay out of sight forever. So what can the Americans do but to keep on searching?"
-------- biological weapons
U.S. Shipments of Pathogens to Iraq
September 30, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Iraq-Bioweapons-Glance.html
Shipments from the United States to Iraq of the kinds of pathogens later used in Iraq's biological weapons programs, according to records from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Senate Banking Committee and U.N. weapons inspectors:
ANTHRAX
Iraq admitted making 2,200 gallons of anthrax spores and putting some of them into weapons. U.N. inspectors said Iraq could have made three times as much anthrax as it acknowledged, and could not verify Iraq's claims to have destroyed all of its weaponized anthrax.
The American Type Culture Collection, a biological samples repository in Manassas, Va., sent two shipments of anthrax to Iraq in the 1980s. Three anthrax strains were in a May 1986 shipment sent to the University of Baghdad, which U.N. inspectors later linked to Iraq's biological weapons program. A 1988 shipment from ATCC to Iraq also included four anthrax strains.
BOTULINUM
Iraq admitted making 5,300 gallons of botulinum toxin, a deadly poison produced by the Clostridium botulinum bacteria, and putting some of it into weapons. Five warheads filled with botulinum toxin are missing.
ATCC sent six strains of Clostridium botulinum to the University of Baghdad in the May 1986 shipment. The September 1988 ATCC shipment to Iraq also contained one strain of Clostridium botulinum.
In March 1986, the CDC sent samples of botulinum toxin and botulinum toxiod (used to make a vaccine against botulinum poisoning) directly to Iraq's al-Muthanna complex, a center for Iraq's chemical weapons program and the site where Iraq restarted its dormant biological weapons program in 1985.
GAS GANGRENE
U.N. inspectors concluded Iraq could have produced hundreds of gallons of the germs that cause gas gangrene, though Iraq admitted producing just a fraction of that amount. Gas gangrene, caused by the Clostridium perfringens bacteria, causes toxic gases to form inside the body, killing tissues and causing internal bleeding, lung and liver damage.
ATCC sent three strains of Clostridium perfringens to the University of Baghdad in the May 1986 shipment and another three strains in the 1988 shipment.
OTHER
The CDC sent bacteria samples to Iraq's Atomic Energy Commission in 1985, 1987 and 1988. The commission was involved in Saddam's attempts to build a nuclear bomb and other weapons of mass destruction.
The CDC also sent bacteria samples to the Sera and Vaccine Institute in Amiriyah, Iraq in 1988. The institute stored samples and did genetic engineering research for Iraq's biological weapons programs, U.N. inspectors found.
-------- britain
Blair Is Confident of Tough U.N. Line on Iraqi Weapons
New York Times
September 30, 2002
By WARREN HOGE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/30/international/middleeast/30IRAQ.html
LONDON, Sept. 29 - Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain expressed confidence today of securing United Nations approval for a tough new Security Council resolution on Iraqi weapons, and he asserted that Saddam Hussein would be disarmed, one way or another.
"I hope he can be forced by international pressure, but if not, we have to be prepared, as an international community, to force him to do it the other way," Mr. Blair said.
He made his remarks in a BBC interview with David Frost at the opening of the Labor Party conference in Blackpool, England, which is expected to challenge him over his war stance.
Mr. Blair refused to rule out acting along with the United States if the United Nations failed to endorse military strikes against Iraq. He said, "The most important thing, if we want to avoid conflict, is to maintain the maximum pressure on Saddam and the Iraqi regime."
Many in his party are critical of his closeness to President Bush and opposed to Britain making any military move without United Nations approval, and they were encouraged by the turnout of 150,000 protesters who staged an antiwar march in London on Saturday.
Mr. Blair was speaking as Britain and the United States continued a diplomatic effort to get France, Russia and China, the other three veto-holding members of the Security Council, to support the draft resolution that would reportedly give the Iraqis 7 days to accept the terms for the re-entry of inspectors and a further 23 days to declare the extent of their arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.
It also is thought to call for a protection force for the arms experts, insist on access to all presidential palaces and other sites that have been off limits to past inspection teams, and to prescribe "all necessary means" - a diplomatic term for military force - as punishment for noncompliance.
In his customary role of intermediary between Europe and the United States, Mr. Blair signaled that London might be willing to soften the terms of the draft now being circulated in Paris and Moscow. He noted in particular France's proposal for two separate Security Council resolutions, with only the second threatening the use of force.
"We can leave that open for the moment," he said. "There are a lot of questions about do you go back to the U.N. at a later stage. Let's take it step by step."
Suggesting there also might be some flexibility in settling on the final terms, he said, "It is probably not quite as definite as it might appear from some of the papers."
In Moscow, Marc Grossman, the United States assistant secretary of state for political affairs, and his British Foreign Office counterpart, Peter Ricketts, appeared to have failed to gain Russian acceptance of the draft text a day after encountering similar reservations from the French government in Paris.
A British envoy, William Ehrman, the deputy undersecretary of state for defense and international security, arrived in Beijing for meetings on Monday with Chinese officials, who have also voiced skepticism.
Russian news agencies quoted informed sources as saying that Russia was unhappy with the resolution, which one official dismissed as "by its very nature, not fulfillable."
Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov made no comment on the talks but restated the Russian position favoring the fastest possible return to Iraq of inspectors, without the need for any new Security Council resolution.
The topic of Iraq will come up in Moscow again on Monday when Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel meets with the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin. Planned several months ago, Mr. Sharon's visit takes on new significance now with the quickening pace of diplomacy over Iraq.
In Vienna, Hans Blix, the United Nations chief weapons inspector, and officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency met today to prepare for three days of talks with Iraqi officials on details of their planned return to Baghdad after nearly a four-year break. Inspectors left Iraq in December 1998 on the eve of United States and British bombing raids meant to punish Baghdad for not cooperating with them.
The talks are the first test of Iraq's willingness to cooperate since the country's foreign minister, Naji Sabri, sent a letter to Secretary General Kofi Annan on Sept. 16 saying the inspectors could return without preconditions.
Mr. Blix said he would have nothing to say until the talks ended at midweek. Melissa Fleming, spokeswoman for the agency, said that talks were "purely technical. We'll be laying on the table what we need."
Iraq said that American warplanes had raided the civilian airport in the southern city of Basra this morning for the second time in a week, bombing its radar systems and passenger terminals.
But in Tampa, Fla., the United States Central Command said the planes had used precision-guided weapons to strike a military mobile radar at Basra and a surface-to-air missile site near Qalat Sikur.
A spokesman, Maj. Bill Harrison, said the strikes were in response to "Iraqi hostile acts."
The raids took place at a time when three Democratic Congressmen were visiting Basra to assess Iraqi civilian needs.
None of the three, Representatives Jim McDermott of Washington, David E. Bonior of Michigan and Mike Thompson of California, mentioned having witnessed the strikes, which occurred six hours before they passed through the airport on their return trip to Baghdad.
In a broadcast from the Iraqi capital, Mr. Bonior and Mr. McDermott said on the ABC News program "This Week" that officials had assured them they would allow the inspectors the freedom to conduct their searches.
"Let the U.N. inspectors do their job," Mr. Bonior said, explaining that officials had promised "unrestricted, unfettered" access, though they wanted "their sovereignty respected.
"They don't want to be having knocked on the door during prayer and say, `Open up this building in five minutes.' They want to be treated with some dignity and respect. But basically they're suggesting that everything will be open."
On Saturday, Iraq had said it would permit inspectors only under terms of previous United Nations resolutions, suggesting that the weapons experts would not have access to presidential palaces and other such sites.
The new draft resolution reportedly overrules these considerations and insists on unrestricted access.
The Democrats' comments were dismissed by the Senate's second-ranking Republican, Don Nickles of Oklahoma, who called it "counterproductive" to "undermine" Mr. Bush at a time when he is seeking support from allies.
Nebraska Republican Chuck Hagel, a Vietnam War veteran and member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who has urged Mr. Bush to try to build the kind of coalition the United States did in the Persian Gulf war with Iraq in 1991, said the current effort to gain support was showing the way toward a resolution of the crisis, even if it ended in war.
Speaking on "Fox News Sunday," he said: "I think if we run the diplomatic track, as we are now, and in the end we cannot get a Security Council resolution, then the United States has exhausted all the means , diplomatic means and channels, and then we'll make a call. And if, in fact, we find at the end of the day that the Brits, and the Turks and others are with us, then we'll have the option to do that."
This week, the lawmakers will be debating the language of a draft Congressional resolution being sought by Mr. Bush to give him the authority to "use all means" to disarm Iraq, which the Americans and British accuse of developing weapons of mass destruction.
Addressing that on CNN's "Late Edition," Senator John McCain of Arizona, a senior Republican on the Armed Services Committee, said, "I believe you will see, at the end of this coming week or early in the next week, an overwhelming majority support vote, in both houses of Congress, to support the president if we have to go in and orchestrate a regime change militarily."
-------- business
The U.S., Russia And Iraqi Oil
By Eugene Rumer,
Monday, September 30, 2002
Washington Post; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20618-2002Sep29?language=printer
Giants of the American and Russian oil industries will come together in Houston this week for the first U.S.-Russia Commercial Energy Summit. The event will bring together Cabinet members, top corporate executives, legislators and financiers and could lead to a breakthrough. It will be an opportunity for the United States and Russia to lay the foundation for a genuine global energy partnership.
As officials, executives and legislators discuss ways to bring more Russian oil to U.S. and global markets, they should not lose sight of oil as a strategic commodity and of the truly historic opportunity before the United States and Russia to form a partnership that could bring stability and security to the global oil market. That means they need to discuss the future of Iraq, the nature of U.S. and Russian interests there and the opportunity a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq would present to the U.S. and Russian oil industries.
The Russian oil executives attending the Houston summit, including some holding contracts with Hussein's government, have been watching U.S. policy toward Iraq with a wary eye. They are concerned that the post-Hussein oil sweepstakes will be rigged against them. They have used a variety of surrogates to let it be known that when Iraq's future leaders award new oil contracts, Russian oilmen want a seat at the table.
With two U.S. Cabinet secretaries in attendance -- Commerce's Donald Evans and Energy's Spencer Abraham -- as well as scores of other senior officials, Russia's oilmen will be looking for clues about the direction of U.S. Iraq policy. After all the talk in the media recently about the need for the United States to forge an anti-Hussein coalition, about Russia's pivotal role in this effort and about Russian stakes in Iraq, their interest in the Houston summit is understandable.
The summit will be an opportunity for U.S. policymakers to engage some of the most powerful people in Russia, a country in which oil and gas account for 40 percent of the exports. When Russian oilmen speak, President Vladimir Putin listens.
But for all their wealth and influence at home, these oilmen have had to pursue recognition and respect abroad. Their reputations suffered badly in the 1990s, first when insider privatization schemes landed them billion-dollar assets for pennies on the dollar, then as a frenzy of asset-stripping in the aftermath of the financial collapse of 1998 left many of their creditors, both at home and abroad, holding the bag.
In recent years, the performance of Russia's oil industry has improved; several privately controlled Russian companies have made important steps toward greater transparency, better corporate governance and more efficient operations.
Yukos, Russia's second biggest oil company, has been especially active in an effort to spruce up the tarnished image of the Russian business community by donating money to charities, reaching out to Wall Street and courting the political establishment in Washington. The message of Yukos and its chairman, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, is that the bad old days of Russian capitalism are over and that Russia's new business elite is ready for a long-term partnership with the United States.
Russian oil companies want better access to international capital markets and cutting-edge technology, both of which they need to sustain and expand oil production vital to Russia's growth and financial stability. But that is not all. The best and brightest among Russia's oilmen crave international acceptance because it is their best guarantee against the vagaries of the Russian domestic political scene, where, despite a decade of capitalist reforms, the specter of re-nationalization still lurks. With this kind of domestic uncertainty likely to be a fact of life in Russia for years to come, the oil tycoons' best insurance is in business and political alliances outside their country. The latest Iraq crisis is an opportunity these Russian oilmen must have been praying for -- a chance to sell out Hussein in exchange for a piece of Iraqi oil and a new partnership with Washington.
As tensions in the Persian Gulf escalated in recent months, Russian oil barons telegraphed -- repeatedly and with unprecedented clarity -- the price of their acquiescence to regime change in Baghdad. All along they have made clear that they are not asking for guarantees, merely reasonable assurances of Washington's goodwill and influence to back up their claims, possibly in partnership with U.S. companies.
Regardless of whether war in Iraq can be avoided, these oil tycoons can be critical to American efforts to isolate Hussein and undercut Moscow's residual support for him. And if war in Iraq is imminent, Russian oil companies -- in partnership with U.S. companies -- could help lay the foundations for a true U.S.-Russian energy partnership. Russia's 5 million barrels of oil a day in exports, combined with Iraq's projected capacity of 4 million barrels, could match Saudi Arabia's daily output of 8 million barrels and become an unprecedented force for stability in the global oil market. That's why it is very much worth watching what comes out of Houston this week.
The writer is a senior fellow at the National Defense University's Institute for National Strategic Studies. The views expressed here are his own.
--------
Selling Our Secrets
New York Times
September 30, 2002
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/30/opinion/30SAFI.html
They never learn.
Remember, a couple of years ago, the scandals about the way corporate giants like Hughes Electronics and Loral Space, led by big Democratic contributors, sold secret U.S. satellite technology to Chinese aerospace companies and semiconductor manufacturers?
Remember how right-wingers like me got all worked up about our shortsighted government and venal executives placing the interests of international trade over the needs of national defense?
I am ashamed to report that the Bush administration is getting ready to let our ever-hungry multinationals do the same thing. This time, however, it would all be legalized. If current legislation (Senate 149, the Export Administration Act) being urged by the White House passed, American executives would be encouraged to sell the fruits of their most advanced research to foreign nationals who may not wish us well.
The arguments used by the merchants of American defense technology: (1) selling technology overseas that is "mass marketed" here helps bring down our unit cost at home, as well as benefits business; (2) we're only selling it for good uses, even though its "dual use" could help them penetrate our defenses; (3) "foreign availability" - they could always buy something almost as good from the Germans or French.
What's more, say the sell-anybody-anything advocates in the Clinton-Bush Commerce Department, because we have an embargo on sales to Iraq, relaxed export rules won't help Saddam.
Last things first: Iraq buys dual-use nuclear components through cutouts who could easily buy them from us. Take high-strength aluminum tubes, for example, which can be used in bicycles - but a thousand of them in easily hidden gas centrifuges can produce enough weapons-grade uranium for one nuclear bomb every year. Under the proposed law, a country like Russia or Jordan could buy ours and re-sell them to Saddam with no weapons inspectors the wiser.
You like the composite glass fibers in your tennis racquet? A sinister use is to form the rotors of those centrifuges, and their export has been controlled for 20 years. No more, if those who would sell our technology to multifarious middlemen have their way.
Nor would our embargo on shipments to Iraq stop our leakage of secrets. China's Huawei Technologies, which could not have been built for a decade without exported American technology, violated the U.N. embargo by selling fiber optic products to Saddam. He now uses them in his air defense system to jeopardize U.S. pilots.
We should not fall for the "dual use" dodge. Germany's Siemens, reported Gary Milhollin of the watchdog Wisconsin Project, legally sold Saddam krytron electronic switches, which doctors now use to destroy kidney stones. When Iraq then sought 120 more as "spare parts," it dawned on Siemens that the switches are also used in setting off the chain reaction in nuclear weapons.
Bush can say that in his 2000 campaign he promised business leaders to lift export controls. But that was before Sept. 11. Now those controls - which worked well for decades against the Soviets - need strengthening, not weakening. Perhaps our National Security Council has been getting pressure from India and Pakistan, each of which wants our missile technology. By accommodating these nuclear powers, we might gain two allies but would make the world more dangerous.
America does not need this dirty business. It amounts to only a few billion dollars in sales, and its military misuse - through copycat "reverse engineering," a Chinese specialty - costs American taxpayers far more than that to defend against.
A handful of hard-line senators (Jon Kyl, Jesse Helms, Richard Shelby, John McCain and Fred Thompson) wrote Bush this month to stop pushing this bill this year. They urged instead that he create a new bill "that strikes the right balance between national security and trade" lest it cause "public divisions among strong supporters of your administration at a time when cohesiveness is an absolute necessity."
Some old hands remember the predations of yesteryear. Newcomers have to be reminded.
Bob Herbert is on vacation.
-------- drug war
Coca snuffs out Peru forest
By Craig Mauro
ASSOCIATED PRESS
September 30, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020930-42322493.htm
MONZON, Peru - Swaths of scarred earth blanket the hillsides of this jungle valley - the environmental consequence of a cocaine trade striving to meet demand in the United States and Europe.
Analysts estimate that nearly 6 million acres of Peruvian rain forest have been hacked down in the past three decades to grow coca, a shrub leaf that is the primary source of cocaine. More than 14,800 tons of toxic chemicals are dumped into the Amazon jungle every year as traffickers turn coca into raw cocaine paste.
Poisoned water, soil erosion, landslides and the extinction of plant and wildlife species are the immediate results. In a matter of decades, environmentalists warn, lush tropical valleys such as the Monzon could end up mostly desert.
"We're talking about one of the richest natural ecosystems in the world, and it's being destroyed piece by piece," said Jonathan Jacobson, an environmental specialist at the U.S. Embassy in Peru's capital, Lima.
The Monzon River valley stretches eastward for about 40 miles from the Andes mountains into high jungle that gradually gives way to the vast lowlands of the Amazon rain forest.
Dropping from 6,600 feet to 2,000 feet above sea level, the Monzon sits in a geographical region popularly known as the "eyebrow of the jungle." The varied altitude nourishes a wide range of plant and animal species, making the valley a hotbed for biological diversity.
Since the 1980s, however, the Monzon also has been a hotbed of the drug trade.
In 2001, it produced almost 20 percent of Peru's coca crop. It is the largest coca valley in the Upper Huallaga River region, a network of similar valleys that together constitute the most important drug-producing corridor in Peru.
The characteristics that provide for the Monzon Valley's natural beauty also make it ideal for coca growers.
The river cuts through steep hillsides, which provide well-drained soil best suited for growing coca. Access to the region is difficult, making it hard for police or soldiers to get to the hills, which begin about 200 miles northeast of Lima.
Streams ripple across the dirt road that connects settlements of poor farmers with Tingo Maria, an outpost on the Huallaga River that was a cocaine boom town in the 1980s and 1990s.
Able to have their leaves picked four times a year, coca plants need exclusive use of soil, leading farmers to weed constantly and to overuse pesticides, said Raul Araujo, a forestry engineer at the National University of the Jungle in Tingo Maria.
A plot remains productive for four to 10 years, after which the land is useless, Mr. Araujo said. Farmers then abandon it to slash and burn another patch of forest for cultivation.
"Since they've used a lot of chemicals, the soil gets contaminated and unproductive," he said. "That makes it like a sterile desert, which is why we're talking about 100,000 to 120,000 hectares (250,000 to 300,000 acres) in the Upper Huallaga that are in the process of desertification."
The combination of constant harvesting, weeding and pesticide use on steep plots also results in more soil erosion than occurs with most crops, said Mr. Jacobson at the U.S. Embassy. The government estimates a quarter of deforestation in Peru has been caused by coca cultivation.
Of the country's coca-growing valleys, Monzon shows perhaps the most visible destruction. Patches of brown dirt cover the landscape like a quilt, with clefts where eroded soil has collapsed in landslides.
More damage lies beneath the surface.
Converting coca into cocaine requires soaking the leaves in a toxic soup of chemicals such as sulfuric acid, kerosene and organic solvents to create an intermediate form of raw cocaine paste.
The paste usually is exported from coca-growing valleys to be refined into cocaine elsewhere, leaving behind abandoned "marinating" pits under the jungle canopy. Chemicals seep into the groundwater, eventually contaminating streams and rivers.
People who lived in the Monzon 40 years ago say a net tossed into the river used to haul in a slew of fish. Today, they say, the fish are mostly gone.
Scientists must rely on such anecdotal evidence to estimate the damage because it is too dangerous to conduct comprehensive studies in an area overrun with hostile traffickers.
Most coca farmers in the Monzon valley refuse to acknowledge the crop is hurting the very environment that provides their livelihoods.
In any case, stopping the desperately poor agriculturists from cultivating coca will be difficult as long as there is demand for cocaine in rich countries.
Standing on his coca plot above the rushing Monzon River, Marcelino Ortiz, 52, said coca fetches far more money than any legal crop.
"We're poor people in an underdeveloped country," he said. "And we'll sell coca to anyone who comes to buy it. Who knows where it's headed?"
-------- iran
Iran starts to see benefit of deal with the devil
BORZOU DARAGAHI IN SALAHUDDIN, NORTHERN IRAQ
Mon 30 Sep 2002
Scotsman
http://www.news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=1084772002
IN PUBLIC, the Islamic Republic of Iran has scowled at the United States' apparent plans to overthrow the Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein.
However, a delegation of Iraqi Kurds who travelled to Iran over the past couple of weeks found that even Iran's most traditionally anti-US institutions have accepted and acceded to the possibility of a regime change in Baghdad.
Indeed, they appeared to relish the prospect of an end to President Saddam, who initiated a devastating eight-year war with Iran in 1980.
"The Iranians have some concerns about the post-Saddam Iraq, what kind of Iraq there would be, and the legality of removing a sovereign regime," said Hosyar Zebari, a top-level Kurdish official.
His delegation held meetings last week with the powerful former president, Hashemi Rafsanjani, as well as the head of Iran's ultra-conservative Revolutionary Guards and the ministers of defence and intelligence. "But deep down they really they want a change a of regime in Iraq. They want to see the back of Saddam Hussein," Mr Zebari said.
US troop deployments and President George Bush's vows to replace President Saddam's government have placed the region on edge.
Governments and political groups in the region have been in a flurry of diplomatic haggling and military planning. Here in northern Iraq - a semiautonomous US and United Nations protected area - fears of war and instability loom especially large.
The mountain-top town of Salahuddin, just north of the major city of Erbil, is where Massoud Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party, one of the two major groups governing Iraqi Kurdistan, has been busy preparing for a 4 October parliamentary meeting and wrestling with the implications of a post-Saddam Iraq.
The Kurds were once fierce guerrillas. But they have lately laid down their arms, put on suits and ties and engaged in politics to ease their neighbours' fears about a new Iraqi government. Relations between Turkey, and the two Kurdish political camps governing northern Iraq nearly collapsed after two members of the Ankara government publicly suggested annexing this part of Iraq. Mr Zebari says he is heading to Turkey next. "We're trying cool to the atmosphere and tone done the media threats."
Mr Bush's 12 September speech at the United Nations, in which he referred four times to the Iranians as victims of President Saddam, did much to ease Iranian fears that US plans to attack Iran following an elimination of the Baghdad regime, Mr Zebari said. Iran leaders welcomed Mr Bush's remarks as a conciliatory gesture, he added.
Iran's approval or at least acquiescence in an overthrow of the Iraqi regime is vital. The Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, is due in Iran to discuss the Iraqi question in the second week in October. In a telephone conversation with the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, last week, Iran's president, Mohammad Khatami, said any action against the Iraq must be carried out under the UN flag.
Iran and the United States cut ties following the 1979 seizure of the US embassy in Tehran. But the clerical regime of Iran is also no friend of the Baghdad government, which used chemical weapons against its soldiers at the end of a long war in the 1980s. Iran quietly sat out the 1991 US-led campaign to push Iraq out of Kuwait.
But its border and ethnic ties with Afghans have complicated the US drive to create a post-Taleban peace in Afghanistan. In the same way Iran can throw spanners in any plan to create a new Iraq. Iran's 1,200-mile frontier with Iraq is the longest of any country bordering Iraq. In contrast to other countries surrounding Iraq, Iran has poor relations with Baghdad but strong ties to President Saddam's domestic enemies.
Some 90 per cent of Iranians follow the Shiite Muslim sect, giving them strong ties to Iraq's Shiites, who make up 60 per cent of Iraqis.
Iran also has strong ties to the Kurdish Iraqi groups. Iran has provided shelter for the Iraqi Kurds numerous times throughout the 20th century, most recently following President Saddam's brutal suppression of a 1991 uprising.
Eight million Kurds live throughout Iran, where their distinctive dance, music and dress are officially recognised as one of the nation's traditional cultures.
The 3.5 million Kurds and majority Shiites of Iraq will likely make up important components of the Iraqi federation sketched by opposition groups in Washington last summer. Mr Zebari said the Kurdish delegation, headed by the nominal Kurdish co-prime minister, Nejivan Barzani, wanted to make sure Iran was on board.
The delegation spoke extensively with Mr Rafsanjani, the former president of Iran who heads the powerful Expediency Council and wields enormous influence in the republic's complicated government.
"This wasn't a diplomatic exercise," Mr Zebari said. "This was hard politics. We talked to the doers. Not to the lawyers and diplomats."
Mr Zebari said the Iranians seemed especially curious about what the Americans were saying about Iran during the meeting in Washington. "We very frankly and openly related to them the aims of the United States. The aim is to make the Iraqi people free, not to occupy Iraq. They would like the neighbouring countries to assist."
Mr Zebari said the Iranians have been quietly and subtly helping Washington's war efforts. During the Tehran meetings, Iran agreed to streamline trade routes to northern Iraq, whose people fear it will be cut off from energy and trade in the event of a long war. Over the past few weeks, Iran's Revolutionary Guards have increased their presence on the Iraqi border and set up refugee camps.
A leader of an Iraqi Muslim extremist group was arrested at Tehran's Mehrabad airport and sent to Holland. "These are all added pressures on Saddam."
-------- iraq
Unasked Questions
By William Raspberry
Monday, September 30, 2002
Washington Post; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20617-2002Sep29?language=printer
Larry Williams, a retired Marine colonel now teaching at George Washington University, has a few questions he'd like to ask his commander in chief. They aren't smart-aleck questions -- this is a serious military man, whose service included stints in Vietnam and Lebanon.
And though his questions may seem obvious, I think you'll be struck by how few of them the president has answered -- perhaps, as Williams says, even for himself. Here they are, abridged from his recent open letter to President Bush and elaborated in an interview:
What is the actual threat to the United States -- the purpose of war?
Chemical and biological weapons, Williams argues, are not weapons of mass destruction. "They are very inefficient and unpredictable and hard to use effectively. Casualty-producing, yes, but not on a large scale."
Says Williams: "Even if the Iraqis make a nuclear device -- which also concerns me -- what would they do with it? The Mideast region is not alarmed. Why are we -- thousands of miles away -- alarmed to the degree of war?"
How many American lives will we expend to punish Saddam Hussein?
Baghdad has nearly 5 million residents. It is reasonable to expect that many would see America not as a liberator but as an invader -- and that many of these would see our military as at least as great a threat as Hussein. "If," says the professor, "one million of them resist an American invasion in street-to-street resistance -- under a local threat of chemical and/or biological weapons -- how many Americans will die?"
How long will public support last when hundreds, possibly thousands, of body bags start arriving home?
"Desert Storm and Afghanistan make war look so easy, with so few casualties. When support at home wanes, how will you turn back the clock?"
How, militarily, do you plan to fight this war?
The Army is too "heavy" to get there short of a Desert Storm-style buildup. Air power and advanced technology get you little in the fight to conquer cities.
How many Iraqi citizens do you plan to kill in order to bestow democracy?
"You can't level cities by bombing, as in World War II. When newspapers and TV broadcasts around the world start to show pictures of Iraqi mothers carrying babies dead from U.S. bombs -- pictures real or staged, it doesn't matter -- the world will be inflamed in anti-American sentiment, and U.S. public support will dissolve."
How will you govern a defeated Iraq?
"Of course, a military victory is as assured as it was at the outset of Desert Storm. But then, how will you govern a country probably still resisting through guerrilla activity and in which we do not speak the language? Will your military forces be confined to cantonments at night because they do not control the streets of Baghdad?"
How does the war against Iraq contribute to winning the war against terrorism?
"The origin of the attacks of 9/11 and the preceding chain of attacks against the embassy in Beirut and the Marine barracks in 1983 and other embassies thereafter were in the Arab/Muslim world. Victory in the war against terrorism must necessarily be found in that worldwide presence. How does alienating every facet of that world contribute to victory in the current war on terrorism?"
Williams, a career Marine who insists that his thoughts are his and not to be linked to George Washington University, says he learned in Beirut and South Vietnam that his government didn't always have better information than he had -- not because officials lied but because critical details were filtered out as communiques made their way up the chain of command. "That experience," he said, "convinced me that the most senior leadership does not always have the best counsel."
He then offers Bush his own bit of counsel: "As president and commander in chief, you clearly have it in your power to move a reluctant nation toward war. But if war is too important to be left to generals, it is also too fraught with unforeseeable catastrophe to be left to the personal whim of one man. Please, sir, ask yourself my questions -- and make certain you have the answers right."
----
Creative Editing
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 30, 2002; Page C01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/a
Two distinguished authors were quite upset when they learned that their New York Times op-ed piece had been tampered with.
Jessica Mathews, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Charles Boyd, president of Business Executives for National Security, wrote that the United Nations should send fully armed weapons inspectors to Iraq.
But when the Sept. 19 column appeared, they were stunned that some crucial words had been added, saying the inspectors would benefit from "a complete range of intelligence information, from spy-plane pictures to intelligence gathered on the ground by spies from United Nations member states."
Spies? Mathews calls the episode "really unfortunate." Boyd, a retired Air Force general, is less diplomatic, saying he felt "outrage" and "anger. The implication was just terrible. I can't fathom why someone would do that."
Says Deputy Editorial Page Editor Philip Taubman: "It was one of those cases where there was a lot of back-and-forth between the editors and the writers." The Times ran a correction because "we wanted to address the concerns in a way that satisfied" the authors, Taubman said.
The correction cited an "editing error" for "added language that does not represent the authors' views. They would strongly oppose the use of United Nations weapons inspectors as spies."
----
U.S. Effort Aimed At Iraqi Officers
Stopping Biological Weapons Is the Goal
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 30, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20313-2002Sep29?language=printer
The Pentagon is preparing a campaign aimed at deterring Iraqi officers from firing chemical or biological weapons during a U.S. invasion because intelligence officials believe President Saddam Hussein has given field commanders conditional authority to use the weapons in the event of an attack, according to defense and intelligence officials.
The effort would include massive leafleting of Iraqi military positions -- a tactic used by U.S. forces during the Gulf War in 1991 -- but also might employ covert techniques that would enable the U.S. message to reach Iraqi commanders, the officials said.
Final authority to use weapons of mass destruction has resided with Hussein. But the Iraqi president's knowledge that the United States would seek to take down Iraqi command centers and communications systems at the outset of any military strike means he has likely already given authority for firing chemical and biological weapons to his most loyal commanders in the field, the officials said. They said Hussein issued similar orders before the Gulf War.
As a result, the sources said, the Pentagon plans to appeal directly to these officers not to use the weapons. One of the biggest challenges before military planners is determining which Iraqi military units can be encouraged to defect in the event of a U.S. invasion and how to communicate with them, defense officials have said.
A British intelligence report released Tuesday by Prime Minister Tony Blair said Iraq could deploy nerve gas and anthrax weapons on 45 minutes' notice. It also said Hussein may have already delegated authority to order use of such weapons to his youngest son, Qusai, who leads the Republican Guard -- elite units that control deployed weapons of mass destruction.
The Pentagon's campaign was signaled recently by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. Testifying before the House Armed Services Committee, Rumsfeld said, "Wise Iraqis will not obey orders to use WMD [weapons of mass destruction]. . . . The United States will make clear at the outset that those who are not guilty of atrocities can play a role in the new Iraq. But if WMD is used, all bets are off."
Rumsfeld added that if the order to use chemical or biological weapons were made by Hussein, "that does not necessarily mean his orders would be carried out. He might not have anything to lose, but those beneath him in the chain of command most certainly would have a great deal to lose."
A Pentagon official said Rumsfeld's comments "are at least the start of telling them we are serious."
After the Gulf War, coalition force interrogators learned that Hussein had decided ahead of time to give commanders the go-ahead to use chemical weapons if Baghdad's communications were interrupted.
One administration source said the Iraqi president issued specific orders to use the weapons if "the allies were winning the ground war and they had crossed a line due west of the city of Al-Amarah," which is 200 miles south of Baghdad. Iraqi unit commanders were also told they should employ the weapons against Iranian forces if they crossed the border during the war and moved into Iraq's Maysan Province, where Al-Amarah is located.
Although Iraq's chemical artillery shells and warheads were deployed during the war, they were not used. U.S. officials now believe this was because the United States had repeatedly cautioned Iraq before the fighting started that use of such weapons would draw an immediate and possibly overwhelming response that would topple Hussein from power.
One reason the Pentagon has adopted a plan to dissuade Iraqi officers from ordering the use of chemical or biological weapons is that, unlike in 1991, this deterrent has been rendered moot by the administration's decision to make removing Hussein the goal of any military action.
Whether a plan to deter Iraqi commanders from employing the weapons will work is a matter of disagreement among military experts. The Republican Guard units that control the weapons are run by Hussein's most loyal officers.
"They will face a short-term or a long-term problem," one former senior intelligence official said. "We may come after them when the fighting is over. But there may be a Saddam loyalist with a gun who is threatening to kill him right away if he doesn't follow orders."
Judith Yaphe, an Iraq specialist at the National Defense University, said that in 1991, according to documents found after the war, Hussein had tried to persuade his commanders to use the weapons because they would be killed anyway. Also, Hussein had placed loyalists with the commanders to enforce his wishes. "The question is, are they still there?" she said.
Richard Russell, a CIA area analyst who specialized in Iraq and is now at the National Defense University, said the effort to deter individual commanders "makes sense as an attempt." But he noted that Iraqi operational security was very good in the Gulf War and "you have to assume it is much better now."
After Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, U.S. officials talked openly of American forces making preparations for waging combat in a chemical environment. Then-Secretary of State James A. Baker III told Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz that Hussein's government would be endangered if such weapons were used. Then-Defense Secretary Richard B. Cheney hinted that if such an attack took place against Israel, that country might respond with nuclear weapons.
In the war's aftermath, U.S. intelligence officials learned that Iraq had been deterred from using chemical weapons by the threat of massive retaliation. Iraqi artillery units armed with chemical shells were segregated from the rest of the forces and chemical munitions were never moved to Kuwait and never moved toward the front as coalition forces approached, and in some cases breached, the Iraq-Kuwait border.
-------- israel / palestine
Israeli Pullback Ends 10-Day Siege of Arafat's Base
New York Times
September 30, 2002
By JOEL GREENBERG
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/30/international/middleeast/30MIDE.html
RAMALLAH, West Bank, Sept. 29 - Under heavy American pressure, Israel withdrew tanks and troops today from Yasir Arafat's wrecked compound here, ending a 10-day siege of the Palestinian leader that had put the Israeli government in a diplomatic corner.
The Bush administration had pressed Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to pull out his forces, arguing that tensions raised by the siege could complicate efforts to line up support in the Middle East for action against Iraq.
Flashing a V-for-victory sign and blowing kisses to a crowd of chanting supporters gathered amid the rubble, Mr. Arafat emerged from his sandbagged office building this afternoon to celebrate what his aides called a triumph over Mr. Sharon. "The most important thing is that the Israelis failed to dictate to us," said Mr. Arafat's spokesman, Nabil Abu Rudeineh. "They wanted to finish President Arafat and to prove that he is irrelevant, and what happened was that he became stronger."
Thousands of Palestinians had demonstrated support for Mr. Arafat in the West Bank and Gaza Strip during the siege.
In a statement released shortly after the Israelis pulled back, Mr. Arafat called on Palestinians to observe a truce with Israel.
"We call on everyone to respect a complete cease-fire, as we have done in the past, and urge the Israeli government to do the same," the statement said.
There was no immediate response from the Israelis, who sent their forces into the compound on Sept. 19 and destroyed most of its buildings after back-to-back suicide bombings in Israel that killed seven people in addition to the bombers. Although the troops left Mr. Arafat's headquarters today, they kept their hold on the city of Ramallah, reimposing a curfew after nightfall.
President Bush expressed satisfaction after the pullout.
"The president welcomes this development," said a White House spokesman, Gordon Johndroe. "All parties need to live up to their responsibilities to promote peace, stability and reform in the Palestinian Authority."
Mr. Bush had criticized the siege of Mr. Arafat as "not helpful" to efforts to carry out the reforms. Israeli news media reported that Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, demanded an end to the siege in a meeting in Washington on Friday with Dov Weisglass, an aide to Mr. Sharon, asserting that it was hurting efforts to enlist backing for a campaign against Iraq. Mr. Bush reportedly sent a similar message directly to Mr. Sharon.
The Israeli cabinet approved the pullout this morning, before Mr. Sharon left for a three-day visit to Russia.
Foreign Minister Shimon Peres criticized the siege at the cabinet meeting, asserting that it had hindered Palestinian reform, obstructed the American campaign against Iraq and unnecessarily humiliated the Palestinians, his aides said.
Several politicians from both the left and the right said that the siege was ill-conceived and had backfired, strengthening Mr. Arafat at a time when he was coming under internal pressure to relinquish power.
Dore Gold, an adviser to Mr. Sharon, said the government had to balance conflicting interests.
"Given the contradictory vectors working on Israeli policy," Mr. Gold said, "with the U.S. and regional considerations on the one hand, and Israel's concern with terrorist fugitives in the compound on the other hand, Israel's response was probably the optimal solution."
Israel had demanded that Mr. Arafat hand over 19 people in the compound whom it accused of involvement in terrorism, a number that officials later increased to 41. The officials that said Israeli troops were maintaining a presence in Ramallah to prevent the escape of the fugitives, but dozens of armed men left the compound after the Israeli pullback.
Speaking to reporters after the Israelis had withdrawn, Mr. Arafat rejected the idea of handing over anyone, and he called the pullback "an attempt to mislead public opinion," because troops remained in Ramallah. He said the Israelis had failed to comply with the United Nations resolution passed last week that demanded a speedy withdrawal from Palestinian cities along with an end to the siege.
"This is not withdrawal," he said. "This is only moving a few meters away. They are trying to deceive the world."
After the last Israeli tanks and armored personnel carriers rumbled out of the compound, hundreds of Palestinians rushed to Mr. Arafat's office building, which was still ringed with barbed wire. Armed security men, their faces grizzled by stubble grown during the siege, emerged, some slipping away while others embraced and chatted on cellphones with relatives and friends.
One officer, Muhammad Kadura, greeted his wife and got a first look at their baby, who was born during the siege.
Other officers talked about their forced confinement, describing how they had slept on the floors of Mr. Arafat's offices, crowded with more than 200 people, endured frequent cutoffs of water, and feared death when Israeli bulldozers and tank shells battered adjacent buildings. An officer who gave his name as Amer said he had mixed feelings now that he was free. "I'm happy because they didn't succeed in defeating us, but when I see all this destruction I'm sad," he said.
He stood in a wrecked reception hall opposite Mr. Arafat's office building where ceiling tiles littered the floor under a forest of dangling electric fixtures.
The large Ramallah governorate building, part of a British-built fort from the 1930's, had collapsed, along with two adjacent buildings belonging to Mr. Arafat's intelligence services. Other structures were flattened or reduced to rubble.
To Sameh Amar, 23, another officer, the physical devastation was not a true measure of the results of the siege. "The Israelis failed to achieve any of their demands," he said. "This was a victory for us."
-------- pakistan
Pakistan's Police Force Struggles to Find the Resources It Needs to Combat Terrorism
New York Times
September 30, 2002
By DAVID ROHDE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/30/international/asia/30STAN.html
KARACHI, Pakistan, Sept. 23 - For a senior Pakistani police official, the night of Sept. 12 should have been a time of triumph. The previous day, his officers helped capture 10 men suspected of being members of Al Qaeda, including Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a senior operative thought to have been intimately involved in planning the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
But, the seething official said that night that he had no idea whom his men had just risked their lives capturing. Pakistani intelligence agents had whisked the prisoners away before the police could question them.
"Police in Pakistan are not working against Al Qaeda because we have no information," he said bitterly. "Nobody shares it with us."
The commander's anger was a sign of simmering tensions between Pakistan's bedraggled police force and its powerful and secretive military intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence. The police say the lack of cooperation is hampering the hunt for Al Qaeda.
Critics of the force say, though, that it is exaggerating its own importance and competence. "When it is with the police, everything leaks out," said a Pakistani investigator who has worked with both agencies. "Everyone knows what is happening; there is nothing secret there."
Pakistan's ill-equipped, poorly trained and, according to critics, chronically corrupt 300,000-officer police force has suddenly been thrust onto the front lines of the American-led campaign against terrorism. In the last six months, the hunt for militants has shifted from a military campaign along the border with Afghanistan to an intelligence and law enforcement operation in Pakistan's biggest cities and central provinces.
Militants have carried out a half dozen attacks in Pakistan this year on Western targets that killed 39 people and wounded hundreds. Dozens of Qaeda members are still believed to be hiding in Pakistan, possibly with the aid of local militants.
Arrayed against them is a razor-thin line of Pakistani police officers. Most militants are armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles that fire six rounds a second. Most of the police are armed with World War II-era rifles that fire one round a second.
The force has no automated system for checking fingerprints, little DNA testing and an antiquated radio system that anyone with a scanner can hear. For the first time in the country's 53-year history, all 1,250 police stations will have their own vehicles this year. Last month, the country's 141-year-old police code was updated for the first time.
"The average salary is 3,500 rupees a month," or about $60, said Moinuddin Haider, the country's interior minister. "Obviously, morale will be low."
To help seal the border with Afghanistan, the United States has given the Pakistani police an initial $73 million aid package, including five refurbished Vietnam-era Huey helicopters. Police officials say that the helicopters are fraught with mechanical problems and constantly break down and that the best equipment goes to the intelligence service.
Police officials say they want to overhaul the force but complain that most American aid goes to the intelligence agency, which is seen here as a branch of the powerful military.
The military receives about 20 percent of the federal budget and has its own farms, universities, residential neighborhoods, hospitals, factories and schools. The police force, meanwhile, gets 1 percent of the budget and has become a widely distrusted force known for abuse of authority, intimidation and corruption.
A recent Asian Development Bank study concluded that investigations are "helter-skelter operations conducted without consistency and often outside the boundaries of the law." Only 30 percent of cases end with a conviction. The study urged the police to "move away from their more traditional method of extracting confessions" - in other words, beatings.
Pakistanis who live near the apartment building where Mr. bin al-Shibh was arrested said they were hesitant to report suspicious activities, or even come to the aid of strangers, because they feared interacting with police officers. "Police will arrest you if you take someone to the hospital," a shopkeeper said.
Examples of police bravery exist. Six policemen were wounded and two militants killed in the fierce four-hour gun battle that led to Mr. bin al-Shibh's arrest.
Muhammad Rafique, a 46-year-old police officer, expressed the fatalism that is common among officers.
Armed with a fifth-grade education and a 10-year-old rifle, he is one of the police officers who guard the American Consulate in Karachi, where two officers were among the 12 Pakistanis killed in a car bomb attack in June. He spends his days searching for car bombs. If he finds one, it will probably be too late.
"If I'm on duty, I'll become a martyr," he said. "I believe in heaven."
-------- russia / chechnya
In Russia, an army of deserters
A model program for military reform stalls due to lack of funds and personnel.
By Fred Weir
The Christian Science Monitor,
September 30, 2002
http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0930/p01s02-woeu.html
MOSCOW - Anatoly deserted from his Army unit just two months after being inducted, after he and other conscripts were beaten with shovel handles by older soldiers during an "education session."
The 19-year-old says the new draftees were told they had to "earn their keep" by begging and breaking into nearby civilian homes to steal money and valuables. "I'm not against Army service," says Anatoly, who was assigned to a unit near the central Russian town of Narafominsk. "I'm willing to serve in any other unit, but not that one."
Anatoly, and thousands more like him, are a sign that the Kremlin's ambitious effort to reform the military, announced a year ago, may be running out of steam.
Breaking decades of secrecy on the subject, the Defense Ministry conceded this month that 2,265 conscripts deserted in the first half of this year.
But the true number is more like 40,000 annually, according to the Soldiers' Mothers Committees, the only public organization that aids deserters.
In an unusually frank speech last month, Gen. Anatoly Kvashnin, Army chief of staff, admitted that the officer corps is "bogged down in embezzlement and corruption" and that a decade of underfunding and failed reform has left the armed forces in a critical situation.
"The system of compulsory military service in this country is almost indistinguishable from prison," says Natalya Shvol, who is in charge of processing deserters who come to Soldiers' Mothers' Moscow office. "In my experience, no young man runs away from his unit except under the most extreme conditions. Many of these boys describe intolerable treatment, including savage beatings, torture, extortion, lurid threats, and routine humiliation."
Hunched in tattered army coats, sometimes shivering with fear, dozens of deserters collect every day in a dingy corridor at the Moscow committee office. Denis, thin and taciturn, ran away from his Moscow region Army unit repeatedly, complaining of continual beatings and insults at the hands of officers and older soldiers. His mother, sitting with him, says she returned him to the barracks three times, believing his commanding officer's assessment that Denis just has "a weak character." Now she says she understands that the boy is genuinely terrified of the Army camp and can't go back, so she brought him to the Soldiers' Mothers. "I don't know what to do with him," she says, twisting her scarf in her hands. "I can't understand what's going on in this country at all."
The Mothers organization runs what might be described as "halfway house" military units - in cooperation with government prosecutors - where deserters are brought back under Army jurisdiction while their cases are examined. Valentina Melnikova, national chair of the Soldiers' Mothers Committees, says it is the only legal way to help them. She says that more than half of deserters who give themselves up under this program receive medical discharges and most others are transferred to new military units.
"When a deserter comes to us, we tell him the first thing he must do is get back within the law," Ms. Melnikova says. "Then we try to find ways to save him from returning to the unit where he was abused, and we usually succeed. The main priority is to relieve the boy from the charge of desertion, which in this country entails very serious criminal penalties. There is no statute of limitations, so it means a ruined life."
Down from the Soviet-era peak of 5 million, the Russian armed forces have about 2 million personnel, including some 600,000 conscripts, who serve a compulsory two years. Twice-yearly draft campaigns bring in about a quarter-million young men, but about two-thirds of those eligible avoid serving by arranging legal student or medical exemptions.
Inductees tend to be youths who are too uneducated, poor, badly connected or, ironically, too patriotic to wangle a draft deferment. "Within a month of the regular conscription intake, the boys start turning up in our office with tales that would curl your hair," says Natalya Serdyukova, chair of the Soldiers' Mothers Committee in the southern Russian city of Sochi. "I cannot understand why the Army spends so much resources on rounding these youths up, and so pathetically little on feeding, training, and caring for them once they're in the service."
A year ago President Vladimir Putin announced a plan to transform the oversized 19th-century conscript Army into a smaller, modern all-volunteer service by 2010. He decreed a one-year experiment to turn the 76th Airborne Division, based in Pskov, into an all-professional model unit that would be a template for reform.
But last month, the trial program was shelved for lack of funds to attract and keep suitable volunteers. "Military reform has run into a brick wall, due to resistance from the officer corps and insufficient resources to change anything," says Sergei Kazyonnov, an expert with the independent Center for National Security and Strategic Studies in Moscow.
The Russian armed forces have more than 2,000 generals, a number experts believe should be trimmed by at least half, and similarly huge numbers of other senior officers. Because of low pay and miserable conditions in the lower ranks, there is no strong contingent of qualified junior officers and noncommissioned officers to work closely with conscripts. An Army junior lieutenant, for example, makes just 2,600 rubles monthly, about $85). This top-heavy structure is widely regarded as the key obstacle to reform.
"Our generals were trained in Soviet times, and think the Soviet Army was the world's greatest," says Pavel Felgenhauer, an independent military expert. "Their aim is to restore that Army, not move forward to a new type of force."
A key part of reform was to be a law on alternative service, to breathe life into the right of conscientious objection stipulated in Russia's 1993 Constitution. But the law, passed by the Duma in July, has appalled human rights workers with its harshness: An applicant must prove his pacifist credentials before a military tribunal, then accept three years' service (instead of two), living in regular barracks under the command of the same officers. "Those on alternative service will live in identical conditions to other conscripts, for a longer period of time, and their only privilege will be not to bear arms," says Vladimir Urban, a military expert with the liberal Novye Izvestiya newspaper. "It just looks like a punishment prescribed for those who don't want to serve."
Russian officials have at least been forced to acknowledge the increasing desertions. On Sept. 9, 54 young soldiers walked away from an Army firing range near Volgograd, and marched to Mother's Right, a local human rights group, to complain they had been systematically brutalized by their officers. The episode led Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov to threaten commanders with "serious penalties" when their conscripts run away. "This sort of thing happens because officers don't work properly with people," Mr. Ivanov fumed in a Sept. 12 speech to the Duma.
Experts say Mr. Putin's overhaul is stalled, at least for now. "Real military reform would require a lot of concentrated political will to carry out," says Igor Bunin, head of the Center for Political Technologies, an independent think tank. "At least until the coming round of parliamentary and presidential elections [December 2003 and March 2004], I'm afraid there is very little hope for this."
-------- space
Space Forces Have Become Indispensable
by Tech. Sgt. Scott Elliott
Air Force News
Sep 30, 2002
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/milspace-02z.html
The enormity of space within modern defense planning is continuing to have a wide impact (J.Roche left) AFP Photo Washington - Even as the Air Force strives to meet the conventional demands of a new era driven by transformation and the war on terrorism, the service's secretary remains focused on national security space management.
"We must ensure our space forces, equipment and concepts of operation remain as innovative and capabilities-based as those we develop for air-breathing systems," Secretary of the Air Force Dr. James G. Roche said recently.
"Space capabilities in today's world are no longer nice-to-have," he said. "They've become indispensable at the strategic, operational and tactical levels of war."
Recent space-based contributions to the war on terrorism include locating the enemy by using intelligence and surveillance assets, tracking and targeting them through the combined employment of weather and communications systems, and engaging the enemy and assessing battle damage with navigation and reconnaissance systems.
Looking to the future, Roche said he sees America's military capability growing beyond the traditional role of force enhancer, to being more active in preventing, fighting and winning wars.
"Our adversaries have noted the advantages we gain from space," he said.
"Given the total interdependence of air and space power, we cannot risk loss of space superiority."
But, as important as the space hardware is, the secretary is committed to the individual airman.
"The resource most critical to ensuring (our) space superiority in the years to come is not technological or fiscal -- it's people, like everything else in the Air Force," Roche said.
"We must develop a well-thought out approach to what it is we want from our space systems and our space cadre, and then educate warfighters throughout the joint community on how these capabilities can positively affect warfighting."
-------- spy agencies
Inside the CIA, Deep Divisions on Pay Reform
By Stephen Barr,
Monday, September 30, 2002
Washington Post; Page B02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20662-2002Sep29?language=printer
It's football season, and the Monday morning quarterbacks think the wrong plays were called in last week's column on pay reform at the CIA.
"As a CIA employee, I will tell you that the issues are far more complicated than you make them out to be. We have a pretty dedicated workforce, and this simply is not the case of longtime employees trying to hang onto 'unjustified' pay increases regardless of performance.
"Logically, a 'pay for performance' system would presuppose that you have an honest, equitable and unbiased performance evaluation system. . . . In the agency, no one -- at any level -- is claiming that we have such a performance evaluation system . . . for the simple reason that we don't."
This employee contends that the CIA will rely on "pay pool managers" to distribute pay raises and bonuses each year and that they will use "an automated tool that, by initial indications, will most likely force them into the 'middle of the road.' . . . Thus, the noble concept of 'pay for performance' is clearly more myth than reality."
Other CIA employees wrote in with similar concerns. In the CIA's stealthy tradition, all indicated they did not want to be identified, and some designated their comments as "off the record."
CIA officials working on the new pay system acknowledge it won't be perfect but say it will be refined as employees provide feedback. According to a CIA briefing paper, the proposed pay system will make "explicit for the first time across the agency the standard each employee will be held to."
In the agency's view, the automated pay tool will require managers to document their decisions, which will give employees a chance to know where they stand.
The differing views inside the agency have drawn congressional attention. The House has put a hold on pay reform at the CIA unless it has the approval of the House and Senate intelligence committees. Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.), who represents many CIA employees, has asked the Senate intelligence panel to examine the issue....
Stephen Barr's e-mail address is barrs@washpost.com.
-------- un
U.N. Weapons Inspectors Seek Open Access in Iraq
September 30, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Weapons-Inspectors-Iraq.html
VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- U.N. weapons inspectors demanded the right to roam freely around Saddam Hussein's palaces and other suspect sites when they opened talks with the Iraqis Monday on the logistics of a possible return to Baghdad.
Chief inspector Hans Blix, leading the closed-door meetings with an Iraqi delegation, said the inspectors were operating under the assumption they would be able to go anywhere, anytime if they return to Iraq for a fresh assessment of the country's nuclear, biological and chemical programs.
The dispute came to a head after the Bush administration repeatedly accused Iraq of blatantly violating U.N. resolutions requiring Baghdad to disarm. Washington threatened to unilaterally remove Saddam from power because more than a decade of international pressure had failed to win Iraqi compliance.
When President Bush made an impassioned plea for tougher U.N. action at the General Assembly last month, Saddam switched course and pledged unconditional access to sites across Iraq. But in recent days Baghdad has rejected any new U.N. resolutions to broaden and toughen the inspection regime. Iraqi resistance has thrown into question whether the eight sprawling presidential palaces -- up to now off-limits to surprise visits -- would be open to renewed inspections.
``We're telling the Iraqis we don't want any limitations on our access,'' a senior diplomat close to the talks said on condition of anonymity.
The issue of palace inspections and some other contentious matters would require amending the most recent U.N.-Iraq agreement on inspections. While the Vienna meetings have addressed those topics, a decision on changing the sanctions regime would have to be made by the U.N. Security Council once Blix reports back on Thursday.
Under a deal U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan cut with Baghdad in early 1998, the inspectors' access to eight so-called presidential sites encompassing a total of 12 square miles was restricted. The deal prevented inspectors from carrying out surprise visits to the sites, which include Saddam's palaces. The deal also created a team of international diplomats to accompany inspectors when they did enter.
The United States and the rest of the Security Council endorsed that plan, which remains in effect. However, the Bush administration is pushing for a resolution that would nullify the Annan deal.
Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan, whose government denies it has weapons of mass destruction, has rejected any changes in the inspections regime.
``Our position on the inspectors has been decided and any additional procedure is meant to hurt Iraq and is unacceptable,'' Ramadan said Saturday.
Issues to be decided in the current talks focus on ensuring that Iraq will provide access to other so-called ``sensitive sites.''
``We are aiming to restore as much as possible the concept of `any time, any place,''' said Mohamed El-Baradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, where the nuclear inspectors are based and the talks are being held.
El-Baradei said the first day of talks took place in a ``businesslike atmosphere'' in which the Iraqis ``have been positive and coming with a desire to reach an agreement.''
``The mood is good,'' he said. ``We're making progress, but we still have a good deal of work to do.''
Blix said the Iraqis and the U.N. experts were nailing down logistics such as where the teams will be based, their accommodations and security, and how samples would be taken out of the country for analysis. The talks wrap up Tuesday.
``The purpose of the talks is that if and when inspections come about, we will not have clashes inside'' over what the inspectors will do, Blix said. ``We'd rather go through these things outside in advance.''
Access to suspect sites will be crucial in any comprehensive assessment of Saddam's arsenal, said IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming.
``We have a lot of information. We have a lot of indicators. We have satellite photographs. But we don't have a presence on the ground,'' Fleming said.
Nearly four years ago, inspectors hunting for evidence of weapons of mass destruction withdrew from Iraq on the eve of U.S.-British airstrikes amid allegations that Baghdad was not cooperating with the teams.
The Bush administration, seeking to build support for an invasion of Iraq, has cast doubt on the inspectors' main requirement -- that they be given freedom to examine whatever they wish, including Saddam's palaces.
That skepticism was restated Monday when White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said the Vienna talks ``are focused on the existing (Security Council) resolutions, which the world knows have not been honored.''
Blix, whose New York-based team handles the U.N. hunt for biological and chemical agents, was joined at the talks by Jacques Baute, head of the IAEA's nuclear team, and a midlevel Iraqi delegation.
The Iraqis were supposed to bring to Vienna a backlog of reports listing items they possess which could have military purposes, including the locations and current uses for those items. El-Baradei said the Iraqis promised to turn over the records Tuesday.
Though the Security Council still must give final approval to the mission, the inspectors are gearing up for a mid-October deployment, Fleming said. Both inspection teams have been preparing to leave from Vienna on Oct. 15, but the date could change, she said.
By the end of the 1991 Gulf War, IAEA assessments indicated Saddam was six months away from building an atomic bomb. Inspectors discovered the oil-rich nation had imported thousands of pounds of uranium, some of it refined for weapons use, and had considered two types of nuclear delivery systems.
Over the next six years, inspectors seized the uranium, destroyed facilities and chemicals, dismantled over 40 missiles and confiscated thousands of documents.
The United Nations imposed strict sanctions on Iraq after it invaded Kuwait in 1990. After Saddam's defeat in 1991, the U.N. imposed the inspections regime to disarm Baghdad. Lifting of sanctions was linked to certification that the country was free of weapons of mass destruction.
On the Net:
IAEA: http://www.iaea.org
-------- us
Ready. Aim. Fire first
But is the U.S. military a little gun-shy about starting wars?
BY MARK MAZZETTI With Thomas Omestad,
US News & World Report,
September 30, 2002,
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/021007/usnews/7strike.htm
It was a "what if" scenario-the sort that military planners are paid to imagine-and it was not nearly ready for prime time. Earlier this summer, a top aide to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld outlined for his boss a concept for striking North Korea's weapons of mass destruction-a case study in the application of the Bush administration's new doctrine of pre-emptive military action. The hypothetical scenario envisioned a swift attack, carried out without consulting South Korea, America's ally on the peninsula. When word of the briefing spread, administration heavyweights, including Secretary of State Colin Powell and Adm. Thomas Fargo, commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, worked to bury the scheme.
Consider it a clumsy way to ring in the age of pre-emption, which officially debuted with the recent release of the Bush administration's National Security Strategy. In what may be the boldest rethinking of American foreign policy since Harry Truman, the document makes the case that Cold War logic no longer applies in a world where terrorists, possibly armed with weapons of mass destruction, strike at civilians without warning. "This kind of enemy will not be deterred or contained the way, perhaps, the Soviet Union might have been," Powell said last week. Breaking from the deep-rooted American instinct to strike only if attacked first, the so-called Bush Doctrine advocates pre-emptive military action against practitioners of terrorism-including overthrowing governments that support them-and it may soon provide the justification for an American attack on Iraq.
U.S. officials insist that the Bush Doctrine is not a one-trick pony meant solely to justify an Iraq invasion. "Any state that has a weapons-of-mass-destruction program and has an irresponsible dictator falls within the president's paradigm shift," says one Bush administration official. "This is a historic moment." But as the dust-up over the Pentagon's North Korea briefing illustrates, laying out a broad strategic vision is one thing; applying it in the real world is quite another. In short: It is not at all clear where, besides Iraq, the Bush Doctrine could really be put into practice.
The military gets to weigh in now; the admirals and generals are putting finishing touches on the National Military Strategy, a practical blueprint for implementing the White House's grand vision. Early indications are that those in uniform are far less enamored of pre-emption than their civilian bosses: A draft of the document, which had not yet made it to Rumsfeld's desk, all but ignored the concept, U.S. News has learned.
The generals aren't dead set against striking first; after all, the notion of pre-empting an enemy attack ("anticipatory self-defense," in the Bush administration lexicon) is as old as warfare. But the White House version is new and different. It advocates taking military action before the adversary even has the capacity to attack. It calls for action, even without ironclad evidence of danger. And it suggests that U.S. power might "dissuade" other nations from trying to match American military might. In the words of one senior officer, "there is a brave new world coming with this new defense policy."
Hit 'em. There is little debate about the appeal of going on the offensive to dismantle terrorist networks before they can strike. The approach gives planners the advantage of tactical surprise and permits them to strike with a smaller force. "Obviously, taking the offensive under the rules of war is something the military would love to do," says Gen. Gregory Martin, commander of U.S. air forces in Europe. Case in point: The Pentagon is drawing up plans to send special operations forces into states like Yemen that are harboring senior al Qaeda leaders.
Applying the doctrine to rogue states is where the water gets muddied. It has certainly been done before. Israel bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak in 1981, before it became operational, and many in the military consider the 1989 invasion of Panama another example. But top commanders, including some whose job it has been to devise war plans, are struggling to understand how hitting states first makes military sense. These officers say that even when confront- ing countries the president designated as an "axis of evil"-Iraq, Iran, and North Korea-the containment calculus still works. "Personal survival is what matters to the Kim Jong Ils and Saddam Husseins of this world," says one former four-star officer. "This [pre-emption] absolutely is the right doctrine to deal with enemies that are not organized into states. When it comes to dealing with other countries I'm not so sure."
Even big-think objections to the Bush Doctrine offered by academics have practical consequences that get the military's attention. The doctrine imagines that the United States would not "allow an adversarial military power to rise," as one Bush official put it. That "confirms the notion that America is now embarking on an imperial role," argues James Chace, a specialist in international relations at Bard College. "The great danger of American power nowadays is that it will prompt other powers to combine against us." What that means to the generals is that strategic alliances built up over the years could be ruptured.
Like it or not, the military may have to change the way it goes about its business. At a recent gathering of combatant commanders-the brass in charge of forces deployed outside the United States-Rumsfeld challenged them to adapt to the new terrorism threat. The military will have to reassess where it bases forces, so it will not have to move troops and equipment into a region before a strike-and risk telegraphing its punch. The Pentagon will rely heavily on special operations forces that can deploy in smaller numbers and move without being detected, and on precision bombers that can strike a target from long range. Gathering reliable intelligence will become even more important. "If we are going to be pre-emptive in nature, we better be pretty damn sure we understand their intent," says a senior Air Force official. Satellites in space can't do that very well, putting a premium on spies on the ground who can help predict what an enemy will do.
Do as I say. These are just nuts-and-bolts problems, compared with objections to pre-emption being raised abroad and at home. "We'll be putting ourselves in the position of a rogue nation," says Sen. Robert Byrd, a West Virginia Democrat, who argues that the strategy might inspire copycats. While the Bush National Security Strategy warns that other countries should not "use pre-emption as a pretext for aggression," the new doctrine might give ideas to China in its struggle against Taiwan or to Russia in its fight against Chechen rebels in Georgia. This pattern was clearly on Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's mind when he warned India not to mimic the new U.S. policy. "Pakistan is not Iraq, and India is not the United States," he advised his adversary to the south. "They had better not try it." Musharraf may have reason to put down a marker. "India has a history of mirroring the U.S. rhetoric, and even trying to mirror U.S. actions on issues ranging from terrorism to nuclear strategy," says a Senate Democratic official who deals with South Asia policy. "We can't think we are planning our own doctrine in a vacuum."
The White House is billing the Bush Doctrine as the first coherent strategy to confront the dangers of the post-Cold War world. This might be so, but much will depend on how the United States acts upon the doctrine's muscular rhetoric and how the world reacts. "The ripple effects from this are really hard to gauge," says Andrew Krepinevich of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. "These fundamental shifts in our defensive posture don't come around very often."
-------
'One-stop' agency coordinates defense
By Patrick O'Driscoll,
USA TODAY
09/30/2002
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2002-09-30-northerncommand-usat_x.htm
COLORADO SPRINGS - Beginning Tuesday, a single command will direct the military defense of America's homeland for the first time since George Washington led the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. The Pentagon's Northern Command will be activated at ceremonies Tuesday at its new headquarters here on the edge of the Great Plains.
This building still under construction will serve as the headquarters for the Northern Command and NORAD. By Ed Andreski, AP
Its mission: becoming a "one-stop shopping" agency for military protection of the nation's borders, skies, coastal waters and continental neighbors, Air Force Gen. Ralph "Ed" Eberhart said Monday.
Northern Command was created as a homeland defense response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Responsibility for protecting U.S. soil previously has been fragmented among several military commands.
With about 500 uniformed and civilian staffers, Northern Command will be a brain trust that sends land, air and sea forces to protect U.S. territory and to aid civil authorities in times of turmoil.
"If it's an external threat coming in, we will have the lead," commanding officer Eberhart said. "If it's internal, we will assist."
The Northern Command's emblem is a round insignia emblazoned with an eagle bearing a shield to protect the North American continent. Etched on its green landmass are three yellow stars - for the New York, Washington and Pennsylvania locations where people died in the Sept. 11 attacks.
Asked Monday whether today's shift would make Americans safer from outside threats, Eberhart replied, "They will be just as safe as they are today, and over time, we will be able to measure how much safer."
Eberhart will run "NorthCom" from the same Peterson Air Force Base office where he continues to command the North American Aerospace Defense Command, which defends the nation's skies.
Northern Command's mission is twofold:
"Deter, prevent and defeat" threats and attacks against the United States and its territories, within 500 miles of the nation's shoreline. The umbrella of protection also includes Canada and Mexico.
Provide military aid to federal, state and local authorities during counterdrug operations, terrorist attacks and natural disasters such as fires, hurricanes, floods and earthquakes. Such aid will be rare and only with the request and approval of civilian federal authority, Eberhart said.
What NorthCom won't do, the general emphasized, is police the homeland: No armed patrols, spying, searches and seizures or other roles reserved for civilian law enforcement. In the 19th century, Congress forbade using the military as a domestic police force. But Eberhart said he "won't hesitate to propose changes" to that relationship "if we ... see something we think will tie our hands."
Northern Command already is conducting drills based on scenarios such as attacks on seaports and other forms of transportation.
The new command won't control naval bases, Army posts, Air Force bases or other installations. When it needs troops, aircraft or ships, it will get them from the four military branches and the Coast Guard, in the same way that the Pentagon's Central Command deployed forces to Afghanistan.
Initially, NorthCom will command 320 troops. They include 160 soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen who help anti-drug efforts from Fort Bliss, Texas, and 160 troops from Fort Monroe in Hampton, Va., who are trained to manage incidents involving chemical, biological and other "weapons of mass destruction."
Eberhart said he intends to measure NorthCom's success by how seldom he is called to stop an outside threat. "I'd like to be the Maytag repairman," he said, "to deter, prevent and defeat ... on the front end."
-------- propaganda wars
News embargoes raise vexing issues
September 30, 2002
By Jennifer Harper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020930-91188520.htm
Journalistic ethics are a work in progress, emerging after news events, technology or reporters themselves challenge accepted tenets of the craft.
In years past, the immediacy of the Internet and 24-hour news brought accuracy and context into focus. The Monica Lewinsky matter made anonymous sources and press frenzy an issue. September 11 forced journalists to confront national security and patriotism.
Then there are embargoes. News organizations are plied with announcements from researchers and PR groups alike that are "embargoed" until a certain date, ostensibly to even the playing field and ensure news isn't rushed willy-nilly to page or screen.
Embargoes can vex journalists, who may resent restrictions or question the validity of withholding information from the public. But embargoes get broken, and hubbub follows.
On Sept. 17, The Washington Post ran a story on the makeup of church congregations, based on a 10-year study by the Glenmary Research Center in Nashville, Tenn. The center's director had "provided a copy of the study to The Post," the article noted.
Not so, the group said. The material was officially barred from use until Sept. 20.
"No one connected with the study gave the reporter permission to break the embargo, as he claims," wrote communications director Karen Hurley in a letter to religious writers around the country. "I am sorry for the fallout. I know many of you had planned in-depth stories which had to be aborted because of the pressure to do something quick."
The Post denied it had violated the trust.
The center "is creating an impression that a reporter from The Washington Post blatantly disregarded the embargo. That is not true," responded Assistant Managing Editor Jo-Ann Armeo in a letter published by the Poynter Institute, a media studies group.
The Post had been faxed "dozens of pages of material from the study," without mention of restrictions. The reporter "was not aware of the embargo." A Post spokesman confirmed Friday that the paper stood by the letter.
Meanwhile, the 260-member Religious Newswriters Association (RNA) took up the cause.
The decision to run the story, the group told Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie in a Sept. 22 letter, "adversely affected everyone in journalism, where our word and reputation are our currency."
"Ignorance of basic information about a story is a journalistic failing, not a defense," the letter continued, later concluding: "There is not a lot of virtue in trumpeting a story that hundreds of other newspaper could have printed if they had decided to ignore their ethical obligations."
Was the article worth the fuss?
"We don't want to get into the quality of the article itself," said RNA Director Debra Mason on Friday. "But we had worked with Glenmary extensively to ensure the study was available ahead of time to everybody. This is complex data. You can't do a complete job on the fly."
The Glenmary group took the high road.
"We're not attributing motives to why they broke the embargo," said Miss Hurley. "There was a breakdown of communication with one reporter, which made it stressful for many other reporters. Did I learn anything? Well, I guess this was a human problem."
That was not the case in July, when a Detroit Free Press reporter broke a Journal of the American Medical Association embargo of a story on hormone-replacement therapy. "I consider this breach extremely serious," noted JAMA Editor Catherine DeAngelius, who broke off further communications with the paper.
The Free Press, in turn, denied its reporter had broken the embargo and said she had relied on her own research instead.
Reporters themselves continue to weigh in on it all.
"Embargoes exist only because we participate and allow PR people to call the shots," wrote one visitor to the Poynter Institute's online discussions, www.poynter.org.
•Contact Jennifer Harper at jharper@washingtontimes.com or 202/636-3085.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
False guarantees of individual liberties
Nat Hentoff
September 30, 2002
Washingtom Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20020930-29356396.htm
One of the wonders Alice found in "Through the Looking Glass" by Lewis Carroll was Humpty Dumpty who, sitting on the wall, assured her that "When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."
Alice objected: "The question is whether you can make words mean so many different things." Humpty Dumpty corrected her: "The question is, which is the master - that's all."
On September 11, Attorney General John Ashcroft, during an interview on National Public Radio with Juan Williams, responded to charges by many Americans concerned with civil liberties that he is violating the Bill of Rights.
"We're not sacrificing civil liberties," said Mr. Ashcroft. "We're securing civil liberties." The usually trenchant Mr. Williams let that one pass. What would have been illuminating would have been to hear Mr. Ashcroft respond to U.S. District Judge Robert Doumar, who has before him the case of American citizen Yaser Hamdi, who was taken into custody in Afghanistan and is currently being held in a military brig in Virginia.
"This case appears to be the first in American jurisprudence where an American citizen has been held incommunicado and subjected to an indefinite detention in the continental United States without charges . . . and without access to a lawyer," said Judge Doumar, a Ronald Reagan appointee.
Mr. Hamdi is being held, the Justice Department said, so that he can be interrogated about any information he may have about terrorists. Judge Doumar asked a Justice Department lawyer, "How long does it take to question a man? A year? Two years? A lifetime? How long?"
All that the man from the Justice Department said in response was: "The present detention is lawful."
This is securing civil liberties?
On the PBS's "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer," Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson answered a charge that many of the Justice Department's legal proceedings have been held in secret.
"Nothing that we have done has been enacted in secret. Every measure that we have undertaken is out in the open," said Mr. Thomson.
On Aug. 26, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit unanimously ruled that the administration has illegally held hundreds of deportation hearings in secret.
Wrote Judge Damon Keith: "The executive branch seeks to uproot people's lives, outside the public eye, and behind a closed door. Democracies die behind closed doors. When government begins closing doors, it selectively controls information rightfully belonging to the people. Selective information is misinformation."
On Sept. 8, the Journal-Gazette in Fort Wayne, Ind., published, for the first time in nearly 20 years, a full-page editorial, "Attacks on Liberty." In five long columns, the newspaper charged, "In the name of national security, President Bush, Attorney General John Ashcroft and even Congress have pulled strand after strand out of the constitutional fabric that distinguishes the United States from other nations.
"Actions taken over the past year are eerily reminiscent of tyranny portrayed in the most nightmarish works of fiction. The power to demand reading lists from libraries could have been drawn from the pages of Ray Bradbury's 'Fahrenheit 451.' The sudden suspension of due process for immigrants rounded up into jails is familiar to readers of Sinclair Lewis' 'It Can't Happen Here.' "
Is the word "tyranny" excessive with regard to Messrs. Bush and Ashcroft taking liberties with the Constitution? The Journal Gazette's editorial includes this quotation from James Madison in the Federalist Papers No. 47, "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many . . . may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."
The editorial also quotes - with regard to our government's executive branch accumulating more and more powers (shoving aside the separation of powers) - what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said in 1928: "The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."
I hope the teachers in Fort Wayne open this editorial for discussion and debate in their civics classes, also bringing in the many vigorous assurances by the president, the defense secretary and the attorney general that everything they are doing to protect us is "within the bounds of the Constitution."
These days, it may take some courage for teachers to openly discuss whether we're preserving the actual liberties that we are fighting for against terrorists. The president did say on Sept. 12, 2001: "We will not allow this enemy to win the war by changing our way of life or restricting our freedoms."
I'm sure he meant that on Sept. 12, but I wish he would read that editorial in the Fort Wayne newspaper, as to what's been happening since.
Nat Hentoff is a columnist for The Washington Times. His column runs on Mondays.
-------- terrorism
Judge Delays Moussaoui Trial
New York Times
September 30, 2002
By DAVID STOUT
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/30/international/30CND-TERR.html
WASHINGTON, Sept. 30 - Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person charged in connection with the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, today was granted an additional delay in his trial and a bigger cell to prepare for it.
Judge Leonie M. Brinkema of federal court in Alexandria, Va., granted Mr. Moussaoui's motion to postpone the trial until June 30, 2003. It had been scheduled to begin on Jan. 6.
Through his lawyers, Mr. Moussaoui had requested not only more time but more cell space, filing what he called a "motion to get a bigger cave."
Judge Brinkema decided that the defense team was entitled to more time to sift through the reams of evidence to be used against Mr. Moussaoui, and that the small, windowless cell in which he has been confined was "inhumane" and constituted an "unreasonable barrier" to his preparations.
On Aug. 16, Judge Brinkema ruled that the trial, at that time scheduled to begin in September, should be delayed until Jan. 6. Today's ruling was yet another victory for the defense.
"Although the public's right to a speedy trial is a legitimate concern, this court's paramount concern is ensuring that the defendant receive a fair trial," the judge declared on Aug. 16.
Mr. Moussaoui, a 34-year-old French citizen, is charged with conspiring in the Sept. 11 attacks. Although he was in a Minnesota jail cell on immigration charges on the day of the attacks, prosecutors have insisted that he was in close contact with the conspirators in the hijackings.
The delays granted to Mr. Moussaoui are by no means the norm in the Alexandria courthouse, known among lawyers as the "rocket docket" because of the insistence of its judges that cases be brought to trial quickly. The courthouse is only a few miles from the Pentagon, heavily damaged on the day the twin towers of the World Trade Center were destroyed and passengers forced a fourth hijacked plane down in a field in Pennsylvania.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
Danish wind stocks jump on orders and US news
REUTERS DENMARK:
September 30, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17951/story.htm
COPENHAGEN - Shares in Danish wind turbine makers NEG Micon and Vestas jumped last week on new orders and expectations of an imminent approval of a U.S. energy bill which supports wind power.
By 1010 GMT, shares in both companies were up more than six percent, which follows Thursday's jumps of 12.1 percent for Vestas and 6.2 percent for local rival NEG Micon.
"The combination of new orders and the likely extension of the PTC tax agreement in the U.S. are driving the shares higher," a Copenhagen-based trader said.
The U.S. Congress is expected to approve next week an energy bill, which includes a five-year extension until 2006 of the production tax credit (PTC), an important factor in financing new wind power installations.
Earlier last week NEG Micon said it won an Australian order worth around 40 million euros ($39.14 million), while Vestas last week reported a 55 million euro order to Germany.
----
[Hooray, at last! et in dc]
In West Virginia, Electrical Power Takes New Tack
D.C. Area to Get Supply From Windmills
By Peter Behr
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 30, 2002; Page E04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20594-2002Sep29?language=printer
A row of giant windmills will soon rise atop Backbone Mountain, W.Va., and when they begin spinning late this year, a stream of electricity will head toward the Washington region, inaugurating the largest wind power project east of the Mississippi, the project's sponsors say.
The organizers of the Mountaineer Wind Energy Center near Thomas, W.Va., are to gather today with customers and energy officials in the District to praise the venture as a major advance in clean energy production.
Larger turbines and new technology have made wind power feasible for the mid-Atlantic region and not just in the southeast and west, where it has been in use for years, said Brent Alderfer, chief executive of Community Energy Inc. of Wayne, Pa., which sells power from the West Virginia site.
Meanwhile, the future of wind power in this country is a major issue facing congressional negotiators as they try to reach agreement on a many-sided energy bill, the biggest such legislative proposal in a decade.
The Senate's energy bill would require power companies to get at least 10 percent of their electricity from wind and other renewable resources. House negotiators oppose such a specific target and the issue is scheduled to be resolved this week.
Even with more efficient turbines, wind power remains more expensive than electricity from coal, natural gas or nuclear reactors.
Alderfer said that the Mountaineer project can deliver power at a wholesale price of 5 cents or 6 cents a kilowatt-hour, 2 cents to 3 cents higher than conventionally produced electricity.
To minimize the disadvantage, customers such as Catholic University in the District have added a modest portion of wind power to their overall supply. The university contracted with Washington Gas Energy Services Inc., the retailer for the Mountaineer project, to tap West Virginia wind power for 12 percent of its total electricity requirements, at an annual cost of $72,000.
"Their purchase is the pollution equivalent of taking over 300 cars off the road or planting over 300,000 trees," Alderfer said.
The National Geographic Society will use the project's power for 5 percent of its requirements at its downtown Washington office, and the Army will also buy wind power for Walter Reed Army Medical Center and other locations.
By pooling such commitments, the wind project's developers found enough customers to begin. When fully developed the project will have 44 turbines, each capable of producing 1.5 megawatts of electricity at full power.
Washington Gas Energy will offer the project's wind power to businesses and households in the District and Maryland. Customers can buy up to 5 percent of their power needs from the project at slightly less than standard market rates, said Washington Gas Energy President Harry Warren.
Customers seeking to use more wind power than that will pay a premium of 2.5 cents per kilowatt hour.
Despite the environmental advantages of wind power, the projects are not getting a free pass from environmentalists. The Mountaineer turbine pedestals stand 200 feet high, and the blades reach another 100 feet higher.
"You have to be concerned about siting," said Judy Rodd, senior vice president of the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy.
"I don't think the environmental community should be blackmailed into giving up concerns of wilderness areas, endangered species and viewshed," in the name of wind power.
At the insistence of environmentalists, some of the turbine platforms in the West Virginia project were relocated to protect visitors' views from nearby Blackwater Falls State Park, Rodd said.
-------- energy
Ethanol earmark advances in US energy bill talks
Story by Charles Abbott,
REUTERS USA:
September 30, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17953/story.htm
WASHINGTON - U.S. House negotiators working on a comprehensive U.S. energy bill proposed a 5 billion gallon-a-year share of the fuel market for corn-based ethanol, the same volume backed by the Senate, but with a longer phase-in for the renewable fuel.
With pressure growing from the White House, negotiators hope to agree on a compromise energy bill next week that will include tax breaks for domestic drilling, incentives for conservation and development of more renewable energy sources.
Farm state lawmakers from both parties and President George W. Bush have pushed for a provision that would triple to 5 billion gallons the amount of ethanol-blended gasoline and biodiesel used annually in American cars, trucks and sport-utility vehicles.
Under the House plan, ethanol would be guaranteed 2.3 billion gallons of consumption in 2005, rising to 5 billion gallons in 2013 - a year later than the Democratic-led Senate's timetable.
First popularized in the 1970s as a home-grown alternative to imported oil, ethanol has taken prominence as a fuel additive for cleaner-burning fuels. Most of U.S. ethanol is distilled from corn.
Senate negotiators did not respond to the House proposal, which was formally offered to them just before negotiations adjourned until Tuesday. Rep. Billy Tauzin, a Louisiana Republican and chairman of the talks, said issues for the next session could include ethanol, mileage standards and drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
"We will take final action on a number of these next Tuesday," Tauzin said.
Texas Republican Joe Barton, a House negotiator, said it was "extremely bad public policy" to guarantee a market share for ethanol but "I can count votes as well as anybody."
While popular with Midwestern farmers and lawmakers, ethanol has critics in the environmental community.
The 53-page offer from House Republicans also would eliminate federal requirements for use of oxygenated fuels and would not ban use of fuel additive MTBE, as the Senate would.
MTBE is used to boost the oxygen content of motor fuel and limit air pollution. However, 35 states have found MTBE - methyl tertiary butyl ether - contaminating ground water.
The phaseout of MTBE has many Californians fearing an ethanol mandate will mean higher fuel prices and disruptions in supply. Ethanol is not distilled in California and must be shipped by barge, rail or truck rather than by pipeline.
California Democrat Henry Waxman, a House negotiator, said the ethanol language foretold "a massive transfer of wealth" from his state to the Midwest. But, Waxman said, the House proposal would not help California clean up water supplies tainted by MTBE.
Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Ed Markey said gasoline prices would rise by 5 cents a gallon if ethanol use was mandated.
The ethanol industry, led by giant Archer Daniels Midland Co. , says production is booming and output would be more than adequate to meet the demands of the legislation. It says price changes would be minimal.
Under the House language, all types of renewable fuels would be given legal protection against lawsuits claiming they were defective products.
Separately, House negotiators formally offered to their Senate colleagues a proposal to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil drilling.
The proposal matches what was passed by the full House of Representatives last year to limit drilling activity in the refuge's coastal plain to just 2,000 acres at any one time.
Democratic Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, a possible presidential candidate in 2004, said the House's ANWR drilling proposal was a "nonstarter" in the Senate. He said adopting the plan would "doom" the entire energy bill.
Still, Lieberman said he would review alternative drilling proposals.
Drilling supporters are working on a compromise plan that would scale back part of the refuge to be opened to drilling and make those areas where caribou migrate a protected wilderness.
Republican negotiators discussed the compromise idea with Bush during a White House meeting on Wednesday. Bush did not indicate whether he would support such a compromise deal.
----
[To reply - mailto:OPED@washpost.com]
Deregulation's Weakness
Monday, September 30, 2002
Washington Post; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20608-2002Sep29?language=printer
THE LATEST post-mortem from California's energy crisis points to a fundamental flaw in many of the nation's deregulatory schemes. In industries ranging from electricity to telecoms, the government has gone for competition, inviting private electricity generators or phone operators to go up against incumbent monopolies. The problem is that parts of these industries -- the electricity grid in one case, the local phone lines in the other -- are natural monopolies. The incumbent firms have therefore been able to muscle out opponents, minimizing competition in even the supposedly non-monopoly portion of each industry.
Take the electricity example. The industry used to consist of monopoly utilities, which generated electricity, ran the wires that distributed it, and handled the billing and servicing of consumers. Deregulators opened the generation business to competition. But incumbent utilities that retained monopoly control over the transmission grid used that advantage to purchase power from their own generators, not from upstart rivals. Competition has flourished only where transmission monopolies have been forced to get out of the generation business, leaving the upstarts to do battle on a level playing field.
Or consider telecoms. This industry also consisted of a monopoly utility, which owned the wires and handled customer accounts. Deregulators opened up the customer-account part of the business. But incumbent utilities that retained monopoly control over the wires used their position to squeeze rivals, with the result that more than 90 percent of households still get their local phone service from a wire-owning monopolist. Competition has flourished only in the long-distance market, again because monopolists have been kept out of this area, leaving a level playing field.
The latest news on California suggests that a similar problem may beset the natural gas industry. Last week an administrative judge at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ruled that El Paso Corp., the nation's largest pipeline company, withheld gas from California during its period of shortages, pushing up prices and costing the state an astonishing $3.7 billion. El Paso will appeal, arguing that safety concerns restricted the volume of gas it could pump into California. Whatever the verdict, the striking thing is that a pipeline company had an incentive to restrict supply -- even though, as natural monopolies, pipelines operate under regulated tariffs that don't rise along with energy prices. The reason El Paso had that incentive is that the pipeline is affiliated with a merchant gas seller that stood to gain from higher energy prices.
In the case of electricity, the federal energy commission is doing its best to break up the remaining utilities that combine generation with control of a transmission grid. When the dust settles on the El Paso case, the commission may wish to consider separating gas pipeline operators from gas merchants. The history of deregulation shows that allowing natural monopolies into other, supposedly competitive markets is a recipe for harming consumers.
-------- genetics
Oxford boffins swat insects with sterile gene
REUTERS UK:
September 30, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17961/story.htm
LONDON - It beats a rolled up newspaper: British scientists have developed a new reed of sterile bugs that could slash insect numbers without the need for costly and environmentally damaging pesticides.
Dr Luke Alphey and colleagues atf Oxford University said they had established a spin-out company, Oxitec, to commercialise the process and were already discussing control of cotton pests with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Sterilisation itself is not new. It has been used to control cattle screwworm in North America and Libya, and to control tsetse flies on the Tanzanian island of Zanzibar.
But the standard method of sterilising males using radiation has serious drawbacks because it often damages the insects which reduces their effectiveness.
To get round the problem, the Oxford scientists have genetically modified their bugs, altering the creatures' metabolism so that they are dependent on a dietary supplement used in the rearing programme.
"Our technique improves on the current approach as the released insects will be sterile but not damaged by the treatment and so can compete effectively with wild insects," Alphey said.
The Oxitec insects, when released, mate with their natural pest counterparts and transfer their lethal gene before they themselves die, thereby controlling the population.
Cheap and non-toxic pest control could be a boon for both livestock and arable farmers, as well as improving human health in developing countries.
The United Nations earlier this year lent its support to an ambitious campaign to wipe out the deadly tsetse fly from nearly 10 million square kilometres of sub-Saharan Africa, by releasing millions of irradiated male insects.
The biting tsetse fly transmits a deadly parasite, trypanosome, which attacks the blood and nervous system of its victims, causing "nagana" in livestock and "sleeping sickness" in humans.
---
[Here's a point for matriarchal society. But then one wonders whether the orbital frontal cortices of Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Margaret Thatcher, Condoleeza Rice, Tanya Harding are abnormally large...? et]
Do Men Have Anger in Mind?
Washington Post Notebook,
Monday, September 30, 2002; Page A07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A14596-2002Sep28?language=printer
Brain scientists have found evidence supporting the idea that men are more hot-headed then women.
Ruben C. Gur and Raquel E. Gur of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and their colleagues studied the brains of 57 men and 59 women, focusing on the parts known to be involved in emotion and anger.
The orbital frontal cortices, which are involved in regulating aggressive behavior, were proportionately larger in women than men, the researchers found.
"The larger volume of cortex devoted to emotional modulation may relate to behavioral evidence for sex differences in emotion processing," the researchers wrote in this month's issue of the journal Cerebral Cortex, although they acknowledged that "environmental and cultural factors undoubtedly contribute to sex differences in aggression."
-------- imf / world bank
IMF, World Bank Short on Global Solutions
By Paul Blustein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 30, 2002; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20352-2002Sep29?language=printer
Barely mussed or fussed, the high command of the global economy glided with ease through the weekend's meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, as antiglobalization demonstrations proved unexpectedly punchless.
While they may have trumped the protesters, however, the top policymakers who gathered for the meetings had to grapple with some serious threats menacing the world economy -- and they offered scant evidence that they are prepared to dispense with them.
In addition to well-publicized woes like plummeting stock prices worldwide, anemic growth in Europe, Japan's banking mess and the danger of a spike in oil prices induced by a war with Iraq, the prospect of a full-blown economic crisis in Latin America loomed large at the meetings after last week's meltdown in Brazil's financial markets. The Brazilian currency, the real, hit record lows day after day, and by Friday the government's bonds were trading at about 48 percent of face value, heightening fears that the region's largest country will follow neighboring Argentina into default on its debts.
Soothing rhetoric came from the finance ministers and central bankers of the Group of Seven major industrial countries, who issued a one-page communique Friday night stating that while "risks remain," they were confident that policies they have adopted "will strengthen growth in coming months." Brazil got a half-sentence patting it on the back for its "sound policies."
But far darker assessments were prevalent among international bankers, investment executives and other financial specialists attending a gathering a few blocks away from the official meetings. The group hosting that meeting, the Institute of International Finance, recently projected that private flows of funds to the world's emerging markets would fall this year to the lowest level in a decade because of a growing aversion to risk among lenders and investors.
"It's terrible -- we are teetering at the edge of recession," said Klaus Friedrich, an adviser to Allianz-Gruppe/Dresdner Bank of Germany. "What you are seeing here," he added, gesturing at a roomful of executives, "is a lot of bankers with problems in their briefcases."
An official of a major U.S. mutual fund, who requested anonymity, agreed. "Look at the U.S., Euroland, Japan, Latin America -- it's hard to find anything to be particularly cheerful about," the official said, adding that the general mood reminded him a bit of the 1998 IMF-World Bank annual meetings, an extraordinarily gloomy session which came amid a panic in global markets following a debt default by Russia.
"I understand that it's the role of the G-7 to say things are okay," the official said. "But my reaction is, they're asleep at the switch."
Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill dismissed such downbeat talk as overblown when asked at a news conference about the worries besetting markets. Asserting that it was "important to bring some sense of balance to where we are," he recited a litany of favorable data on the U.S. economy -- inflation at minimal levels, interest rates at 40-year lows, housing and auto sales booming. "I don't find the world to be a place where hand-wringing should prevail, but a place where leaders should get on with it," he said.
But O'Neill did not attempt to dispel the impression that Japan's leaders are floundering even more than usual in their decade-long efforts to lift the world's second-largest economy out of the doldrums. The recent fall in the Nikkei stock index to 19-year lows has aroused fresh anxiety about the danger of a crisis in Japan's giant banks because of the losses suffered on the vast portfolios of shares.
In the days leading up to the IMF and World Bank meetings, confusion reigned about Tokyo's plans for tackling its economic and banking problems as government officials issued contradictory statements and criticized the Bank of Japan for its announcement that it would buy stocks from the banks. Dismay deepened over the weekend from a bizarre series of flip-flops by Finance Minister Masajuro Shiokawa and his top aides over what had been discussed in a meeting with O'Neill.
O'Neill acknowledged that the meeting had failed to provide him with an understanding of how Japan's policy moves would help, and he heaped scorn on the Bank of Japan's share-buying initiative. "If shares in a company are held by your neighbor instead of by you, what's the net economic effect?" he demanded.
As for Brazil, IMF Managing Director Horst Koehler sought to dampen concern that the country was hurtling toward default, but his reasoning added little to what other top policymakers have said in recent days as Brazilian markets kept falling.
The IMF already has pledged to lend Brazil up to $30 billion, its biggest rescue package in history. The move, however, has failed to reverse a steady outflow of capital from the country, which has accelerated as a left-wing candidate, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, has gained a commanding lead in polls for next month's presidential election. A common belief among investors is that "Lula," as he is known, plans to abandon the current government's free-market, anti-inflation policies.
As a result, many experts fear that the markets are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of default by pushing to impossibly high levels the government's costs of borrowing and servicing its debt of more than $300 billion. The steep decline in bonds means investors are demanding yields of more than 20 percent. The decline in value of the real also hurts because much of Brazil's debt payments automatically rise when the exchange rate falls.
At a news conference Saturday, Koehler said that he nonetheless expects markets to settle down after the election and give the new government some breathing space.
"The facts are, first, that this country has a huge potential for growth," he said. "We have heard from the major candidates that they endorse the crucial elements of the IMF work program," which includes strict targets to keep the government from overspending.
Some bankers said this weekend that the strategy stands some chance of working even if Lula wins, provided he starts off by employing moderate rhetoric and chooses an economic team that inspires market confidence about his intention to follow IMF-backed policies. But others were skeptical. "In the short term, Lula will say, 'I'll do what I promised the IMF,' but what we're worried about is the medium term," an official at a U.S. bank said.
Although the meetings may have done little to calm market jitters about immediate problems, the policymakers did make progress in advancing ideas aimed at avoiding future crises.
But even on that score, the results were limited. After the U.S. Treasury claimed Friday that emerging-market countries were moving toward issuing bonds with special crisis-resolution clauses, Mexican Finance Minister Francisco Gil Diaz undercut that claim by declaring Saturday that his government has no intention of doing so.
----
A Protest Teach-in Spoiled by Facts
By Sebastian Mallaby,
Monday, September 30, 2002
Washington Post; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20615-2002Sep29?language=printer
During the anti-World Bank demos in April 2000, an independent filmmaker saw an opportunity. He needed a crowd scene for his movie in which Stanko the Bulgarian pastry chef triggers the collapse of capitalism and gets feted in the streets. So he rigged up some Stanko placards and had his actors hold them up in front of the anti-globalization activists. Soon there was a buzz of interest. Before long the nearby protesters had quit denouncing the World Bank, turtle-killing fishing nets and sundry other enemies. "Stanko!" they screamed. Two years on, the anti-globalization people want to put naïve Stankoism behind them. Rather than embracing any trendy cause that comes to hand or falling back on vague anti-corporate rhetoric, they try at least to offer concrete criticisms. That the World Bank promotes ill-considered privatization, for example. Or even that a particular privatization in a particular country has worsened poverty.
Last week, for instance, the International Forum on Globalization devoted a series of events to water privatization in the Bolivian town of Cochabamba.
There was a seminar, a teach-in and an elaborate enactment of a "living river." The speakers included a labor activist who had come all the way from the Andean plateau, as well as representatives of Friends of the Earth, Public Citizen and other members of the anti-globo home team.
By all accounts, Cochabamba's privatization was disastrous. In 1999, a month after a foreign consortium took over the city's water system, tariffs jumped by an average of 35 percent. Some bills doubled, and the rumor was that the consortium would seize control of cooperative wells in the shanties. A protest movement sprang up, and the Bolivian army responded violently; in the attendant mayhem, the consortium's expatriate managers fled the city, and the group's brief control over the town's water came to an abrupt end.
For the anti-globalization folks in Washington over the weekend, this story serves as a perfect symbol: of the lunacy of privatization and of the World Bank's instigation of that lunacy. "The World Bank and IMF are turning water from something you take for granted into something that can be taken by force," in the words of Antonia Juhasz of the International Forum.
"International financial institutions," according to a Friends of the Earth handout, are "pressing countries to privatize their water service systems as a condition for loans and debt restructuring."
This thesis has a few problems, starting with the fact that the World Bank did not promote the Cochabamba privatization. It had been involved in the early planning but had opposed the final version, objecting to the inclusion of a dam project in the deal. The bank argued that the dam's cost would push water tariffs up steeply; Bolivia preferred to listen to local construction magnates who stood to make a fortune. The bank, in other words, had battled crony capitalism on behalf of the little guy -- a subtlety lost on the protesters.
If it hadn't been for the dam, the basic idea of water privatization in Cochabamba would not have been so silly. Before privatization, the poor had no access to piped water, forcing them to pay exorbitantly for supplies from private tankers; what's more, the tariff structure for piped water was rigged in favor of the rich. Privatization, for the brief period that it lasted, brought a progressive rate structure; given time, the consortium would have fulfilled the clauses in the contract that required the connection of poor citizens. An academic study of Cochabamba's water published in the Bulletin of Latin American Research concluded that the poorest half of the population stood to gain most from privatization -- another subtlety ignored by the protesters.
The study's conclusion is supported by other experiences of privatization -- cases in which the World Bank really did act as handmaiden. In Buenos Aires, privatization increased the share of households with piped water from 70 percent to 83 percent between 1992 and 1997. Water privatization in La Paz, Bolivia's capital, also is succeeding. As well as boosting connection rates, these deals can end the drain on government budgets imposed by the old loss-making utilities. In other words, privatization can free money for the sort of poverty-focused public spending that the anti-globalization people want.
Is privatization always the answer? Of course not, but it's absurd to paint the World Bank as a knee-jerk privatizer. Last year the bank lent some $500 million to water and sanitation projects; around $400 million of that went to public utilities. In Santa Cruz, Bolivia, the water system is run by a consumer cooperative; the bank has lent to it happily. The rhetoric about the World Bank pressing indiscriminately for privatization isn't much of an improvement on naïve Stankoism.
-------
Protesters confront IMF on debt, openness
REUTERS USA:
September 30, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17962/story.htm
WASHINGTON - Hundreds of protesters demanding reforms of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund converged on Washington D.C. last week for the lenders' annual meetings.
Following are the main issues of contention between demonstrators, advocacy groups and the international lenders:
POOR COUNTRY DEBT RELIEF
Protesters say foreign debt payments drain government revenues away from vital public services like health and education, impeding development.
The Mobilization for Global Justice coalition is demanding the World Bank and IMF cancel all poor country debt using their own funds.
World Bank spokeswoman Caroline Anstey said the Bank lacks the money required for any large-scale debt relief.
Anstey said the Bank's debt relief initiative for Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) works well but is underfunded. The Bank will seek $800 to $1 billion in new donations at this week's meeting to satisfy its commitments to newly eligible countries like Ivory Coast, she said.
STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT POLICIES
The IMF requires countries receiving loans to adhere to certain economic guidelines, known as structural adjustment policies, which affect trade and investment.
Demonstrators say structural adjustment unduly confines government spending and prevents countries from protecting their own industries and services from outside shocks.
They are calling for the end of all structural adjustment policies, leaving developing countries to determine their own spending priorities.
The IMF says the guidelines are needed as a measure of quality insurance for foreign investors, and to ensure developing countries don't fall prey to inflation or graft.
"Structural adjustment has become something of a bad word for the street protesters," said IMF spokesman Bill Murray.
"But you can't have strong and sustainable economic growth without changes to the structure of an economy, or you end up with the same problems all over again."
ENERGY AND MINING PROJECTS
Environmentalists say the IMF and World Bank should withdraw from large-scale energy and extraction projects, which can deplete natural resources, add to pollution and cause forced relocation of indigenous populations.
Among the Mobilization for Global Justice demands is the complete withdrawal of financial backing for oil, gas and mining projects.
Anstey said the Bank was conducting a review of its involvement in extraction industries, with input from groups like Conservation International and the World Wildlife Fund. The report is scheduled for completion next year.
MEETING TRANSPARENCY
The World Bank says it operates with more transparency than many high-profile institutions like the U.N. Security Council or the U.S. presidential cabinet.
Its annual meetings are part-televised, Anstey said, and all closed sessions are followed by press conferences.
But protesters say minutes from committee meetings are edited and unattributed, making it difficult to hold national delegates accountable for their decisions.
Many protest groups, such as the Mobilization for Global Justice and Anti-Capitalist Convergence, close parts of their meetings to the press.
-------- ACTIVISTS
'This war is wrong and we won't stand for it'
Eye witness: Up to 350,000 people marched in London yesterday against military action in Iraq. And they were not the 'usual suspects'
Simon O'Hagan
30 September 2002
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=337654
The voice of middle-class England was how Debbie Mainwaring described herself yesterday as she stood amid the clamour of one of the biggest anti-war demonstrations ever, and it was clear that she was not alone. The sheer numbers who turned out to express vociferous opposition to military action in Iraq - between 150,000 and 350,000 on the central London march - meant there was no way they could be dismissed as "the usual suspects" of the hard left.
It took something to prompt Mrs Mainwaring and her family, from Walthamstow in east London, to take to the streets. But as anxiety increases over the prospect of the US launching an attack, the message of the people was being driven home to President Bush and Tony Blair, a man widely characterised as his unquestioning accomplice: this war is wrong, and we won't stand for it.
The scale of the turnout could be explained partly by the fact that this was two marches in one. For the Muslim Association of Britain, the issue was primarily freedom for Palestine. The Stop the War Coalition's aims were self-evident, and the demonstration was merely the latest in a series it has mounted since before the US went into Afghanistan. But it had never drawn support like this before, and the scenes along the Embankment, where the wait to get moving lasted up to three hours, could be compared only with last week's effort by the Countryside Alliance. September, it seems, has become the marching season.
"Whatever you think of rural issues, I think it's fair to say that the issues at stake on this march are rather more serious," said Lindsey German, the Stop the War Coalition convenor. When the march finally ended in a vast rally in Hyde Park, Ms German was one of those who addressed the crowd, along with Tony Benn, George Galloway MP, Ken Livingstone and other leading figures in the anti-war movement.
But the day was only partly about people like them. It was equally about the thousands who, as with the Countryside Alliance march, were losing their marching virginity, and clearly feeling pretty pleased about it. In their very ordinariness they added up to a presence that Mr Blair might struggle to ignore.
There was no more unlikely figure to be making his marching debut than Scott Ritter, the former UN weapons inspector and now scourge of the Bush administration. "Never been on a march in my life," he said. "But the message we have to get across is so much more important than any discomfort I might feel." Mr Ritter was over from his home in Albany, New York, for the Labour Party conference, and then was persuaded to join the march. "All I'm trying to do is uphold the principle of the rule of law. The US is engaged purely in regime removal, and that is in direct contravention of the UN. Their behaviour is anti-democratic. I'm not sure how much impact this march will make on people in the US, but if it puts pressure on Blair and then he changes his attitude to Bush, then it will have helped."
Mrs Mainwaring, meanwhile, couldn't remember when she had last been on a march. "I'm a moderate. But I heard this being dismissed on the TV as a socialist thing, and I was determined to show that it isn't." Kevin Waddington, from King's Lynn, Norfolk, added: "It was important to show Tony Blair that he is simply not acting in accordance with the views of the vast majority of people in this country. The so-called evidence in his dossier is almost entirely speculation.."
A variety of shades of opinion were gathered, and you could argue that the items on the agenda weren't all consistent with each other. But the main thrust of it - that many in Britain have no stomach for war and are not prepared to give Mr Blair the backing he seeks - was undeniable.
On the march
Reverend Garth Hewitt, 55, vicar of All Hallows' on the Wall, City of London. On the march because: "We've lost sight of morality and people seem to think that violence is a solution." Will be marching with a cross given to him by the Bishop of Jerusalem, Riah Abu El Assael, a Palestinian Israeli citizen. "I'm marching for the bishop's community as well," Rev Hewitt said, "that their suffering will be stopped. I don't understand where Blair is coming from. I think he's deserting his moral responsibility."
Anas Altikriti, 34, Iraqi living in London. On the march because: "We refuse to be desecrated and tarnished with the blood of innocent children of Palestine and Iraq. Everyone here and most people in Iraq pray to see the back of Saddam Hussein, but to do this with force is entirely unethical and will not achieve its aims. The Iraqi people will have to bear the brunt again and be torn to pieces. It's not fair for a whole country to suffer for the actions of one individual."
Sue Davis, 75, retired churchworker from London. On the march because: "There will be a huge conflagration in the Middle East if we declare war. The focus for me is the tragic situation of the ordinary people in Iraq who will be bombed and who will lose any of the infrastructure they have built up since the Gulf War."
Liz Hutchins, 27, head of student CND in London. On the march because: "I think this is an unjust war and people in Britain have a special responsibility to speak out against it as Blair has made us Bush's number one ally. I'm speaking out against our Government's support for the US. This is said to be the biggest peace demonstration in a decade and hopefully that will send a powerful message to Downing Street. It's about humanity and speaking out for a just and fair world."
Salma Yaqoob, psychotherapist and mother of two from Birmingham. On the march because: Treatment she received on the streets in the days following 11 September. "There was a lot of hostility towards Muslims. It was the first time I'd ever experienced a racist attack.A man came up to me and spat at me." Made the journey to London despite being heavily pregnant. "According to Unicef, half a million Iraqi children under five had died by 1995 as a result of the war and the sanctions."
----
Who Am I to Question the Commander-in-Chief?
by Charles Sheehan-Miles
Monday, September 30, 2002
by CommonDreams.org
http://commondreams.org/views02/0930-04.htm
It was early in the morning, even for me, and I stared astonished at my inbox, replete with some pretty strong hate mail, with three general themes: "Shut up and toe the line," "Nuke Iraq," and worst of all, "Who are you to question the President."
What did I do to warrant this flood of not-so-nice mail, which included threats of bodily harm, as well as some biologically implausible suggestions?
Last week a group of Gulf War veterans formed a team to raise questions about our impending invasion of Iraq. Together, we agreed on some basic principles, none of which were "anti-war." Rather, our goal is to ensure before we commit our forces to war, we consider all the key issues.
Those issues are simple: whether or not the invasion will destabilize the region; full medical care for returning soldiers (which never happened in 1991); the Administration should release any information justifying an attack; Congress is the body which should approve any war and should ensure adequate oversight; we should meet our international obligations, including working through the UN Security Council, and a full accounting must be made for those who are missing-in-action. Our full statement can be found at http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org
In the first twenty-four hours after we announced our site, quite a few veterans signed on to the statement. But a small minority sent hate-mail. To give you a picture of the tone, I'll quote three of them:
"Get over your-stupid-selves. Dumbass Liberal pussies."
"I say turn the place into glass!"
"Where in God's name did you ever get the idea to countermand the commander in chief of our nation?"
Ok. I have to take exception to this. Let's make one thing clear - George W. Bush is indeed the commander-in-chief of the military, but last I heard, the President works for the people, not the other way around - even if they didn't vote for him.
Since when did patriotism equal silence? Did that happen about the same time peace activists were added to the "no-fly" list? Will we let the terror war, or the Iraq war, or the oil war, or whoever it is we're fighting this week destroy the very foundations of our democracy?
It's time for people to sit up and pay attention. We've reached a turning point in history, where Americans say they'll cash in their freedom and liberty for security. We defeated communism and dictatorship, so now we'll try capitalism and dictatorship?
Unless we all speak out, we just might. Because the tenor of the debate is exactly what President Bush said: if you're not with us, you are against us. If you don't support war on Iraq, you must be Saddam's best friend. If you don't support "turning the place into glass," you must be anti-American. If you don't support slaughtering innocent civilians abroad, you must support terror against Americans at home.
I'm a combat veteran, and I reject that argument. If we give up the civil liberties on which our society was founded, then what are we fighting for? If we trade in our brains for the spin of the oil-company-controlled White House, we're in trouble.
But then again, if I believe what I read in my inbox, I'm just a radical with a liberal left-wing nut, anti-everything agenda.
Charles Sheehan-Miles, a decorated Gulf War combat veteran, is the author of "Prayer at Rumayla" (XLibris, 2001) and is a former President of the National Gulf War Resource Center. He can be contacted at http://www.sheehanmiles.com. The Veterans for Common Sense statement can be read at http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org
----
Against War, a Peaceful March
Activists Reassess As Weekend Protests Don't Hit Expectations
By Manny Fernandez and Monte Reel
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, September 30, 2002; Page B01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20686-2002Sep29?language=printer
A series of anti-globalization protests in Washington ended yesterday with a loud but peaceful march against a rush to war with Iraq, a mild-mannered coda to scattered street demonstrations focused on this weekend's meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
After three days of actions that failed to produce the numbers and disruptions protesters had predicted, many in the anti-globalization movement were examining how to do things bigger, better and bolder. Activists offered a host of explanations for the size of the crowds and all the actions that had failed to transpire, including a shutdown of the city, a blockade of the meetings to prevent delegates from leaving Saturday evening and the arrival of the biggest anti-globalization crowds in Washington since the demonstrations of April 2000.
Some organizers said police critically misjudged the size of the crowd in a Saturday march from the Washington Monument grounds to Farragut Square. Police said there were 3,000 to 5,000 people; organizers said there were 15,000 to 20,000, although the crowd took up fewer blocks and was less densely packed than in 2000. Others said an aggressive police response and hundreds of arrests kept large numbers away. Still others said that the series of separately organized demonstrations was a success on many fronts and that in the post-Sept. 11 age of homeland security, it was a victory for people to assemble by the thousands to voice their dissent.
"Getting together and talking freely is now considered subversive," said Jason Ford, a Vermont activist who joined the demonstrations. "But that could be one connecting issue -- the democratic right to just assemble is being lost."
Yesterday afternoon, Ford was one of a couple of hundred protesters sitting in Farragut Square debating the future of such demonstrations. At the People's Assemblies, a kind of town-hall meeting, people sat in small circles and discussed the challenges of the movement, which first gained notoriety in 1999 in Seattle when protesters shut down World Trade Organization events.
Some in the park said that to help boost their numbers in the future, they should strengthen ties with student and labor groups. When protesters shut down the Seattle meetings, they did so with substantial help from unions. Such a presence wasn't in evidence at the major demonstrations Friday and Saturday, although the AFL-CIO labor federation conducted a workers' rights forum and signed a joint letter to the IMF and World Bank demanding reform.
"One of the challenges is making good, strong links with the labor movement," said Brendan O'Neill of Vermont, who sat on the grass with about 15 others. "It's huge in this country, and we need to try to be better connected with that."
A short walk away in Foggy Bottom, World Bank and IMF delegates attended their annual meetings without incident at the institutions' headquarters. On nearby I Street NW, D.C. police officers watched football on televisions inside white vans, and at least one top financier in town for the sessions marveled at the lack of disruption. "The streets have been clear and empty," said German banker Klaus-Peter Mueller. "You never had as much convenience getting anywhere in Washington."
The heads of the IMF and World Bank, Horst Koehler and James D. Wolfensohn, respectively, thanked the federal and D.C. governments and all the security personnel. Said Wolfensohn: "I want to thank the U.S. authorities, the District of Columbia authorities and the people of Washington for putting up with us."
Activists voiced irritation with questions about turnout and said any attempt to equate a low turnout with the end of the movement is wishful thinking. Social movements seeking fundamental change in the way corporations and governments conduct their business, they argued, could not be judged on crowd size and street blockades, although they had promised both in advance of the weekend.
"This movement has never been about tactics. It's never been about blocking a specific street corner," said Patrick Reinsborough, 30, who lives in San Francisco and arrived in the District in mid-August to help organize events Saturday and yesterday for the Mobilization for Global Justice. "This movement is about a clash of ideas. It's about life versus greed."
Many activists said the large-scale arrests Friday had a chilling effect on demonstrators. D.C. police arrested 649 in downtown demonstrations, including dozens at Vermont Avenue and K Street NW, where two Citibank windows were broken, and dozens more at Pershing Park. Protesters were prevented from leaving the park for about two hours and then arrested, a move activists said violated their First Amendment rights but police said was justified because activists blocked streets earlier in the day.
"If the police are saying that they're no longer going to play by any set of rules, as far as when and where you're going to be arrested . . . there's a lot of people who don't want to get anywhere near that," said organizer Stephen Kretzmann, 38, of the District.
D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey said yesterday that he was happy with the way his department handled the protests, adding that "a lot of the wind was taken out of their sails Friday," when police made the mass arrests.
When the 20,000 protesters expected Saturday failed to materialize, D.C. authorities began sending home 650 of the 1,700 officers brought in from across the country. Ramsey said he might not need out-of-town officers to handle future anti-globalization demonstrations. "There's just no justification for it with the numbers these people have been getting," he said.
Only a handful of arrests took place Saturday. D.C. police said they arrested four people about 7 p.m. after at least one explosive device, nails and smoke bombs were found in their possession near 20th and K streets NW. Police said the explosive device was in a coffee can. Ramsey said it was similar to an M-80 firecracker. The two men and two women are scheduled to be arraigned today.
U.S. Park Police also arrested one man Saturday for vandalizing a statue. Another man appeared to be detained after a scuffle between police and protesters, but D.C. police said there was no record of an additional arrest. No arrests were reported yesterday, and police said all but the four charged in the explosives case had been released.
The weekend's actions ended yesterday with about 1,000 rallying in Dupont Circle against war in Iraq and marching a little after 3 p.m. up Massachusetts Avenue NW to the vice president's home behind a banner reading: "Axis of Oil, Stop Beating Drums of War." Traffic on Massachusetts Avenue NW backed up during the march, and cars from a nearby festival added to delays on Massachusetts and Wisconsin avenues as protesters dispersed.
Demonstrators denounced the talk of war against Iraq as a power grab by the United States for oil. They also expressed disappointment at the small numbers. They predicted much larger numbers for an antiwar demonstration Oct. 26.
One suggested that the antiwar movement might play a role in energizing the anti-globalization movement. Joshua Brown, 28, of Baltimore said dissenters must try to get their message across that the free-market forces of globalization and the policies of the IMF and World Bank create conflicts that inevitably lead to war.
Aaron Green, 31, a University of Maryland medical student, said the movement against IMF and World Bank policies may have lost steam but is not going away. Green said the economic inequities would probably have to become worse and more obvious to the American mainstream before the movement caught on.
He said, "I don't think the typical person who sees the world economy in terms of all the stuff they can buy at Wal-Mart will realize how our current access to the flow of large numbers of cheap goods is coming at the expense of suffering of real people."
Staff writers Paul Blustein, David A. Fahrenthold, Fredrick Kunkle and Abhi Raghunathan contributed to this report.
----
San Fran cyclists hail decade of rolling protests
REUTERS USA:
September 30, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17946/story.htm
SAN FRANCISCO - Thousands of cheering cyclists clogged San Francisco's streets Friday in a 10th anniversary celebration of "Critical Mass" - a city tradition of rolling protests that have infuriated commuters and invigorated proponents of "pedal power."
"More bicyclists on the streets every day means really better air quality for all of us, less traffic congestion, less parking problems," said Leah Shahum, executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, a cycling advocacy group.
"Every person on a bike is one more parking space for those people who are driving."
Launched in 1992 by several dozen bicyclists as a "spontaneous" demand for more city bike lanes, Critical Mass quickly became a fabled - and feared - San Francisco phenomenon as cyclists flood the streets after work on the last Friday of each month to show their collective power.
Advocates say the mass bike rides, which shut down key intersections and leave car-bound commuters fuming, have spread to hundreds of cities around the world.
"I think the positive things that have occurred is that there is much more awareness about bike riders and I think a better relationship with drivers," cyclist Mary Nilan, a participant in Friday's celebration, said.
Not everyone is convinced.
Critical Mass stops at red lights, but if the light turns green, the cavalcade doesn't stop until the last cyclist is through - making for nightmarish traffic jams once a month just as city drivers ready for the weekend.
The monthly bike brigade has irked more than a few San Franciscans. In 1997, after a particularly large ride, Mayor Willie Brown denounced the cyclists for showing "ultimate arrogance" in tying up city traffic to push their political point.
But the rides have also brought some bike-friendly changes to San Francisco, including new bike lanes.
Witnesses estimated that several thousand riders took part in Friday's 10th anniversary ride, whizzing down the city's main thoroughfare cheering, chanting and blowing whistles.
Shahum of the Bicycle Coalition said that over the years Critical Mass had helped to demonstrate how easy it is to hang up the car keys and get around by bike.
"There's about 30,000 people biking every day in San Francisco, that's about 4 percent of the population," Shahum said. "What Critical Mass has achieved in doing is shown those numbers and kind of given bicyclists a sense of strength and security in numbers."
While the sometimes testy relationship between drivers and Critical Mass riders had mellowed over the last decade, the bike parade left more than a few car commuters were left grinding their gears in frustration.
"It's kind of hard. You're afraid you might hit somebody. They're everywhere," said driver Cecilia Villegas as she waited for the cyclists to pass.
-------
Greenpeace Protesters Target Yacht
September 30, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/sports/AP-Americas-Cup-Greenpeace.html
AUCKLAND, New Zealand (AP) -- The environmental group Greenpeace staged a small protest Tuesday against the involvement of a nuclear sponsored French team in sailing's America's Cup.
Twelve protesters in kayaks and several on shore flew anti-nuclear flags and banners as France's Le Defi Areva left its base for the first day of challenger racing in the 31st America's Cup.
Police used inflatable boats -- part of a fleet of 11 providing on-water security for Cup competitors -- to keep the protesters at a distance from the French yacht.
Greenpeace opposes the involvement of the French nuclear power company Areva in the regatta, saying it defies New Zealand's nuclear free policy.
``The arrogance of such a dangerous and dirty industry thinking that they can come to nuclear free New Zealand and use this event to promote their business cannot go unchallenged,'' Greenpeace spokesperson Bunny McDiarmid said.
Areva is a supplier of nuclear energy products and services with plants in 30 countries.
The French yacht, FRA-69, was damaged when it was struck by a Greenpeace vessel during a protest at its launch in Lorient, France in June.
It was in Auckland Harbor, not far from where the French team now parades its sponsor's logo, that the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior was sunk in a bombing on July 10, 1985.
One man died and two French secret agents were found guilty of manslaughter and jailed for their parts in the attack.
The Rainbow Warrior had been used to protest French nuclear testing in the South Pacific.
--------
Supreme Court doesn't have a prayer
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
September 30, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20020930-30515408.htm
On Sept. 20, I took a tour of Washington with six other friends. We had just toured the Supreme Court and gathered on the front steps to get our picture taken when someone in our group said, "Let's just kneel down here and pray for a minute." We had no more turned around, kneeled and started to pray when a security guard ran over to us and said that we couldn't do that and that we would have to leave. I asked if we didn't have freedom of speech, to which he replied, "Not here." We were so totally surprised. We had no signs and weren't demonstrating, only praying. One of our group tried to engage the security guard in conversation when our tour guide said we had better stop or we would probably get arrested. We calmly left, but the more I thought about it the more upset I got. We had just seen the sculpture on the side of the building that shows Moses holding the Ten Commandments, and also saw a reproduction of the sculpture above the justices' bench. Words from the Bible are carved in stone in the Jefferson Memorial. All over Washington, there is evidence of our Christian heritage. Our members of Congress pray every morning, and they even stood on the steps of the U.S. Capitol and sang "God Bless America," which is a prayer. And yet we can't pray on the steps of the Supreme Court? This security guard infringed upon our right to free expression of religion, which is guaranteed by our First Amendment. I'm concerned that all our freedoms are being eroded daily. America needs to examine its roots and realize that our nation exists because God blessed our Founding Fathers with the wisdom to establish the greatest nation on Earth and that without God's continued blessings we will cease to exist.
HAVEN HOWARD
Branson, Mo.
-------
The Case Against War
by STEPHEN ZUNES
September 30, 2002
The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020930&s=zunes
Despite growing opposition, both at home and abroad, the Bush Administration appears to have begun its concerted final push to convince Congress, the American people and the world of the need to invade Iraq. Such an invasion would constitute an important precedent, being the first test of the new doctrine articulated by President Bush of "pre-emption," which declares that the United States has the right to invade sovereign countries and overthrow their governments if they are seen as hostile to American interests. At stake is not just the prospect of a devastating war but the very legitimacy of an international system built over the past century that--despite its failings--has created at least some semblance of global order and stability.
It is therefore critical to examine and rebut the Administration's arguments, because if as fundamental a policy decision as whether to go to war cannot be influenced by the active input of an informed citizenry, what also may be at stake is nothing less than American democracy, at least in any meaningful sense of the word.
Below are the eight principal arguments put forward by proponents of a US invasion of Iraq, each followed by a rebuttal.
1. Iraq is providing support for Al Qaeda and is a center for anti-American terrorism.
The Bush Administration has failed to produce credible evidence that the Iraqi regime has any links whatsoever with Al Qaeda. None of the September 11 hijackers were Iraqi, no major figure in Al Qaeda is Iraqi, nor has any part of Al Qaeda's money trail been traced to Iraq. Investigations by the FBI, the CIA and Czech intelligence have found no substance to rumors of a meeting in spring 2001 between one of the September 11 hijackers and an Iraqi intelligence operative in Prague. It is highly unlikely that the decidedly secular Baathist regime--which has savagely suppressed Islamists within Iraq--would be able to maintain close links with Osama bin Laden and his followers. Saudi Prince Turki bin Faisal, his country's former intelligence chief, has noted that bin Laden views Saddam Hussein "as an apostate, an infidel, or someone who is not worthy of being a fellow Muslim." In fact, bin Laden offered in 1990 to raise an army of thousands of mujahedeen fighters to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation.
There have been credible reports of extremist Islamist groups operating in northern Iraq, but these are exclusively within Kurdish areas, which have been outside Baghdad's control since the end of the Gulf War. Iraq's past terrorist links are limited to such secular groups as the one led by Abu Nidal, a now largely defunct Palestinian faction opposed to Yasir Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization. Ironically, at the height of Iraq's support of Abu Nidal in the early 1980s, Washington dropped Iraq from its list of terrorism-sponsoring countries so the United States could bolster Iraq's war effort against Iran. Baghdad was reinstated to the list only after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, even though US officials were unable to cite increased Iraqi ties to terrorism.
The State Department's own annual study, Patterns of Global Terrorism, could not list any serious act of international terrorism connected to the government of Iraq. A recent CIA report indicates that the Iraqis have been consciously avoiding any actions against the United States or its facilities abroad, presumably to deny Washington any excuse to engage in further military strikes against their country. The last clear example that American officials can cite of Iraqi-backed terrorism was an alleged plot by Iraqi agents to assassinate former President George Bush when he visited Kuwait in 1993. (In response, President Bill Clinton ordered the bombing of Baghdad, hitting an Iraqi intelligence headquarters as well as a nearby civilian neighborhood.)
An American invasion of Iraq would not only distract from the more immediate threat posed by Al Qaeda but would likely result in an anti-American backlash that would substantially reduce the level of cooperation from Islamic countries in tracking down and neutralizing the remaining Al Qaeda cells. Indeed, the struggle against terrorism is too important to be sabotaged by ideologues obsessed with settling old scores.
2. Containment has failed.
While some countries, in part due to humanitarian concerns, are circumventing economic sanctions against Iraq, the military embargo appears to be holding solid. It was only as a result of the import of technology and raw materials from Russia, Germany, France, Britain and the United States that Iraq was able to develop its biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs in the 1980s.
Iraq's armed forces are barely one-third their pre-Gulf War strength. Even though Iraq has not been required to reduce its conventional forces, the destruction of its weapons and the country's economic collapse have led to a substantial reduction in men under arms. Iraq's navy is now virtually nonexistent, and its air force is just a fraction of what it was before the war. Military spending by Iraq has been estimated at barely one-tenth of what it was in the 1980s. The Bush Administration has been unable to explain why today, when Saddam has only a tiny percentage of his once-formidable military capability, Iraq is now considered such a threat that it is necessary to invade the country and replace its leader--the same leader Washington quietly supported during the peak of Iraq's military capability.
The International Atomic Energy Agency declared in 1998 that Iraq's nuclear program had been completely dismantled. The UN Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM) estimated then that at least 95 percent of Iraq's chemical weapons program had been similarly accounted for and destroyed. Iraq's potential to develop biological weapons is a much bigger question mark, since such a program is much easier to hide. However, UNSCOM noted in 1998 that virtually all of Iraq's offensive missiles and other delivery systems had been accounted for and rendered inoperable. Rebuilding an offensive military capability utilizing weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) virtually from scratch would be extraordinarily difficult under the current international embargo.
3. Deterrence will not work against a Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction.
Saddam Hussein has demonstrated repeatedly that he cares first and foremost about his own survival. He presumably recognizes that any attempt to use WMDs against the United States or any of its allies would inevitably lead to his own destruction. This is why he did not use them during the Gulf War, even when attacked by the largest coalition of international forces against a single nation ever assembled and subjected to the heaviest bombing in world history. By contrast, prior to the Gulf War, Saddam was quite willing to utilize his arsenal of chemical weapons against Iranian forces because he knew the revolutionary Islamist regime was isolated internationally, and he was similarly willing to use them against Kurdish civilians because he knew they could not fight back. In the event of a US invasion, however, seeing his overthrow as imminent and with nothing to lose, this logic of self-preservation would no longer be operative. Instead, a US invasion--rather than eliminate the prospect of Iraq using its WMDs--would in fact dramatically increase the likelihood of his utilizing weapons of mass destruction should he actually have any at his disposal.
Saddam Hussein's leadership style has always been that of direct control; his distrust of subordinates (bordering on paranoia) is one of the ways he has been able to hold on to power. It is extremely unlikely that he would go to the risk and expense of developing weapons of mass destruction only to pass them on to some group of terrorists, particularly radical Islamists who could easily turn on him. If he does have such weapons at his disposal, they would be for use at his discretion alone. By contrast, in the chaos of a US invasion and its aftermath, the chances of such weapons being smuggled out of the country into the hands of terrorists would greatly increase. Currently, any Iraqi WMDs that may exist are under the control of a highly centralized regime more interested in deterring a US attack than provoking one.
4. International inspectors cannot insure that Iraq will not obtain weapons of mass destruction.
As a result of the inspections regime imposed by the United Nations at the end of the Gulf War, virtually all of Iraq's stockpile of WMDs, delivery systems and capability of producing such weapons were destroyed. During nearly eight years of operation, UNSCOM oversaw the destruction of 38,000 chemical weapons, 480,000 liters of live chemical-weapons agents, forty-eight missiles, six missile launchers, thirty missile warheads modified to carry chemical or biological agents, and hundreds of pieces of related equipment with the capability to produce chemical weapons.
In late 1997 UNSCOM director Richard Butler reported that UNSCOM had made "significant progress" in tracking Iraq's chemical weapons program and that 817 of the 819 Soviet-supplied long-range missiles had been accounted for. A couple of dozen Iraqi-made ballistic missiles remained unaccounted for, but these were of questionable caliber. In its last three years of operation, UNSCOM was unable to detect any evidence that Iraq had been concealing prohibited weapons.
The periodic interference and harassment of UNSCOM inspectors by the Iraqis was largely limited to sensitive sites too small for advanced nuclear or chemical weapons development or deployment. A major reason for this lack of cooperation was Iraqi concern--later proven valid--that the United States was abusing the inspections for espionage purposes, such as monitoring coded radio communications by Iraq's security forces, using equipment secretly installed by American inspectors. The United States, eager to launch military strikes against Iraq, instructed Butler in 1998 to provoke Iraq into breaking its agreement to fully cooperate with UNSCOM. Without consulting the UN Security Council as required, Butler announced to the Iraqis that he was nullifying agreements dealing with sensitive sites and chose the Baath Party headquarters in Baghdad--a very unlikely place to store weapons of mass destruction--as the site at which to demand unfettered access. The Iraqis refused. Clinton then asked Butler to withdraw UNSCOM forces, and the United States launched a four-day bombing campaign, which gave the Iraqis an excuse to block UNSCOM inspectors from returning. With no international inspectors in Iraq since then, there is no definitive answer as to whether Iraq is actually developing weapons of mass destruction. And as long as the United States continues to openly espouse "regime change" through assassination or invasion, it is very unlikely that Iraq will agree to a resumption of inspections.
5. The United States has the legal right to impose a regime change through military force.
According to Articles 41 and 42 of the UN Charter, no member state has the right to enforce any resolution militarily unless the Security Council determines that there has been a material breach of its resolution, decides that all nonmilitary means of enforcement have been exhausted and specifically authorizes the use of military force. This is what the Security Council did in November 1990 with Resolution 678 in response to Iraq's occupation of Kuwait, which violated a series of resolutions demanding their withdrawal that passed that August. When Iraq finally complied in its forced withdrawal from Kuwait in March 1991, this resolution became moot.
Legally, the conflict regarding access for UN inspectors and possible Iraqi procurement of WMDs has always been between the Iraqi government and the UN, not between Iraq and the United States. Although UN Security Council Resolution 687, which demands Iraqi disarmament, was the most detailed in the world body's history, no military enforcement mechanisms were specified. Nor has the Security Council specified any military enforcement mechanisms in subsequent resolutions. As is normally the case when it is determined that governments are violating all or part of UN resolutions, any decision about enforcement is a matter for the Security Council as a whole--not for any one member of the Council.
If the United States can unilaterally claim the right to invade Iraq because of that country's violation of Security Council resolutions, other Council members could logically also claim the right to invade states that are similarly in violation; for example, Russia could claim the right to invade Israel, France could claim the right to invade Turkey and Britain could claim the right to invade Morocco. The US insistence on the right to attack unilaterally could seriously undermine the principle of collective security and the authority of the UN and, in doing so, would open the door to international anarchy.
International law is quite clear about when military force is allowed. In addition to the aforementioned case of UN Security Council authorization, the only other time that a member state is allowed to use armed force is described in Article 51, which states that it is permissible for "individual or collective self-defense" against "armed attack...until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security." If Iraq's neighbors were attacked, any of these countries could call on the United States to help, pending a Security Council decision authorizing the use of force.
Based on evidence that the Bush Administration has made public, there doesn't appear to be anything close to sufficient legal grounds for the United States to convince the Security Council to approve the use of military force against Iraq in US self-defense.
6. The benefits of regime change outweigh the costs.
While the United States would likely be the eventual victor in a war against Iraq, it would come at an enormous cost. It would be a mistake, for example, to think that defeating Iraq would result in as few American casualties as occurred in driving the Taliban militia from Kabul last autumn. Though Iraq's offensive capabilities have been severely weakened by the bombings, sanctions and UNSCOM-sponsored decommissioning, its defensive military capabilities are still strong.
Nor would a military victory today be as easy as during the Gulf War. Prior to the launching of Operation Desert Storm, the Iraqi government decided not to put up a fight for Kuwait and relied mostly on young conscripts from minority communities. Only two of the eight divisions of the elite Republican Guard were ever in Kuwait, and they pulled back before the war began. The vast majority of Iraq's strongest forces were withdrawn to areas around Baghdad to fight for the survival of the regime itself, and they remain there to this day. In the event of war, defections from these units are not likely.
Close to 1 million members of the Iraqi elite have a vested interest in the regime's survival. These include the Baath Party leadership and its supporters, security and intelligence personnel, and core elements of the armed forces and their extended families. Furthermore, Iraq--a largely urban society--has a far more sophisticated infrastructure than does the largely rural and tribal Afghanistan, and it could be mobilized in the event of a foreign invasion.
Nor is there an equivalent to Afghanistan's Northern Alliance, which did the bulk of the ground fighting against the Taliban. Iraqi Kurds, having been abandoned twice in recent history by the United States, are unlikely to fight beyond securing autonomy for Kurdish areas. The armed Shiite opposition has largely been eliminated, and it too would be unlikely to fight beyond liberating the majority Shiite sections of southern Iraq. The United States would be reluctant to support either, given that their successes could potentially fragment the country and would encourage both rebellious Kurds in southeastern Turkey and restive Shiites in northeastern Saudi Arabia. US forces would have to march on Baghdad, a city of more than 5 million people, virtually alone.
Unlike in the Gulf War, which involved conventional and open combat in flat desert areas where US and allied forces could take full advantage of their superior firepower and technology, US soldiers would have to fight their way through heavily populated agricultural and urban lands. Invading forces would likely be faced with bitter, house-to-house fighting in a country larger than South Vietnam. Iraqis, who may have had little stomach to fight to maintain their country's conquest of Kuwait, would be far more willing to sacrifice themselves to resist a foreign, Western invader. To minimize American casualties in the face of such stiff resistance, the United States would likely engage in heavy bombing of Iraqi residential neighborhoods, resulting in high civilian casualties.
The lack of support from regional allies could result in the absence of a land base from which to launch US air attacks, initially requiring the United States to rely on Navy jets launched from aircraft carriers. Without permission to launch aerial refueling craft, even long-range bombers from US air bases might not be deployable. It is hard to imagine being able to provide the necessary reconnaissance and surveillance aircraft under such circumstances, and the deployment of tens of thousands of troops from distant staging areas could be problematic. American forces could conceivably capture an air base inside Iraq in the course of the fighting, but without the pre-positioning of supplies, its usefulness as a major center of operations would be marginal.
Such a major military operation would be costly in economic terms as well, as the struggling and debt-ridden US economy would be burdened by the most elaborate and expensive deployment of American forces since World War II, totaling more than $100 billion in the first six months. Unlike in the Gulf War, the Saudis--who strenuously oppose such an invasion--would be unwilling to foot the bill. An invasion of Iraq would also be costly to a struggling world economy; higher oil prices could be devastating to some countries, causing even more social and political unrest.
7. Regime change will be popular in Iraq and will find support among US allies in the region.
While there is little question that most of Iraq's neighbors and most Iraqis themselves would be pleased to see Iraq under new leadership, regime change imposed by invading US military forces would not be welcome. Most US allies in the region supported the Gulf War, since it was widely viewed as an act of collective security in response to aggression by Iraq against its small neighbor. This would not be the case, however, in the event of a new war against Iraq. Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah has warned that the Bush Administration "should not strike Iraq, because such an attack would only raise animosity in the region against the United States." At the Beirut summit of the Arab League at the end of March, the Arab nations unanimously endorsed a strongly worded resolution opposing an attack against Iraq. Even Kuwait has reconciled with Iraq since Baghdad formally recognized Kuwait's sovereignty and international borders. Twenty Arab foreign ministers meeting in Cairo in early September unanimously expressed their "total rejection of the threat of aggression on Arab nations, in particular Iraq."
American officials claim that, public statements to the contrary, there may be some regional allies willing to support a US war effort. Given President Bush's ultimatum that "either you are with us or you are with the terrorists," it's quite possible that some governments will be successfully pressured to go along. However, almost any Middle Eastern regime willing to provide such support and cooperation would be doing so over the opposition of the vast majority of its citizens. Given the real political risks for any ruler supporting the US war effort, such acquiescence would take place only reluctantly, as a result of US pressure or inducements, not from a sincere belief in the validity of the military operation.
8. "Regime change" will enhance regional stability and enhance the prospects for democracy in the region.
As is apparent in Afghanistan, throwing a government out is easier than putting a new one together. Although most Iraqis would presumably be relieved in the event of Saddam Hussein's ouster, this does not mean that a regime installed by a Western army would be welcomed. For example, some of the leading candidates that US officials are apparently considering installing to govern Iraq following a successful US invasion are former Iraqi military officers who took part in offensives that involved war crimes.
In addition to possible ongoing guerrilla action by Saddam Hussein's supporters, American occupation forces would likely be faced with competing armed factions among the Sunni Arab population, not to mention Kurdish and Shiite rebel groups seeking greater autonomy. This could lead the United States into a bloody counterinsurgency war. Without the support of other countries or the UN, a US invasion could leave American forces effectively alone attempting to enforce a peace amid the chaos of a post-Saddam Iraq.
A US invasion of Iraq would likely lead to an outbreak of widespread anti-American protests throughout the Middle East, perhaps even attacks against American interests. Some pro-Western regimes could become vulnerable to internal radical forces. Passions are particularly high in light of strong US support for the policies of Israel's rightist government and its ongoing occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The anger over US double standards regarding Israeli and Iraqi violations of UN Security Council resolutions and possession of weapons of mass destruction could reach a boiling point. Recognizing that the United States cannot be defeated on the battlefield, more and more Arabs and Muslims resentful of American hegemony in their heartland may be prone to attack by unconventional means, as was so tragically demonstrated last September 11. The Arab foreign ministers, aware of such possibilities, warned at their meeting in Cairo that a US invasion of Iraq would "open the gates of hell."
Stephen Zunes is the author of Tinderbox: US Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism (Common Courage Press, 2002). [a terrific book, just released] http://www.commoncouragepress.com/index.cfm?action=book&bookid=226
-------
------- OneList (submissions from subscribers)
------- Depleted Uranium Keeps On Killing!
-----------
Posted
without profit or payment for research and educational
purposes only,
in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107.