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