Archive By Date | Today's Links to Search By
Activists' News | Nuclear | Depleted Uranium | Military | Police
Alternative Energy Etc. | From Subscribers
NUCLEAR
Did the United States Expose Iraqi Civilians to Radiation?
Seven depleted uranium shells found in southern Serbia
Doctor Opposes Gulf War Syndrome 'Mythology'
Fact Sheet on Depleted Uranium
Bulgaria torn between nuclear pride and EU goal
Report: Pakistan to Carry Out Second Missile Test
TEPCO confirms 5 cracks at nuclear reactor
FirstEnergy: Nuke Repairs Will Hurt Earnings
George Bush's Nuclear Lie
Bush Fears Iraq Would Hit U.S. with Chem Weapons
MILITARY
A Year After Air Attacks, Afghans Get New Money
One Year On, U.S. Says Afghan War Not Over
BIOLOGICAL WAR-FEAR
The secret history of anthrax
Northern Ireland Peace Accord Is in Danger, Britain Warns
It's a supersized fleet carrier
Applying market principles to drug policy
Iran Denies Airspace for Iraq Attack
Some in administration have misgivings about Iraq policy
Saddam's inner circle heading for cover
Saddam to Repel Attack with All Available Weapons
Israel Draws U.S. Condemnation After Gaza Raid
12 Palestinians Killed in Gaza Raid
Sharon Tells Cabinet to Keep Quiet on U.S. Plans
Israel Confident in Missile Defense
U.S. Troubled by Israeli Raids
Kuwait sees heavier Gulf War environmental damage
Petroleum fuels debate on Iraq war
Syria Accuses U.S. of Eyeing Iraqi Oil
Saudi May Tighten Visa Procedures for U.S. Citizens
Tensions With Russia Propel Baltic States Toward NATO
Chechen Attacks Kill 11 Russian Soldiers
New Female Boss Takes over at Britain's MI5
U.N. Report: Heights of discretion
Inspectors Begin Training for Iraq
U.N. Inspectors Stay Ready for Quick Iraq Return
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Report Calls for Plan of Sharing Data to Prevent Terror
Bin Laden Said to Warn of Attacks
Another Adversary
ENERGY AND OTHER
Rooftop Solar System Unveiled in New York City
CU Boulder Wins Solar Decathlon on National Mall
Scottish wind power boosted by new planning rules
Entergy Expects to Beat Estimates
Chemical tanker sinks off Japan after collision
Engineered Plants Soak Up Arsenic
Gene Experts Win Nobel Prize in Medicine
PCB Exposure in Womb May Affect Behavior
U.S.: China, Others Repress Religion
ACTIVISTS
Help us to stop the war
Anti-war protesters rally across US
Thousands at Central Park Rally Oppose an Iraq War
Protesting the Big Brother Lens, Little Brother Turns an Eye Blind
Man Jailed Vieques Protest Released
India Muslims Protest Falwell Remark
Thousands in U.S. Rally for Peace
Swiss activists still seek ban on GMO testing
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- depleted uranium
Did the United States Expose Iraqi Civilians to Radiation?
By Brendan I. Koerner fellow at the New America Foundation.
Monday, October 7, 2002
MSN
http://slate.msn.com//?id=2072026
The Iraqi government has long claimed that uranium-tipped American shells used during the Gulf War are to blame for an upsurge in cancer deaths and birth defects among Iraqi civilians (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A99196-1998Jul5.html). Did the United States expose Iraqis to radiation?
Explainer
The United States did, indeed, shower Iraq with well over 300 tons' worth of depleted uranium ordnance during the Gulf War. Because of its high density, DU - a byproduct of the uranium enrichment process at nuclear reactors - is particularly effective in piercing armored vehicles. DU shells incinerate on impact, leaving behind a dusty residue that is primarily composed of the isotope Uranium-238. The Gulf War marked the first widespread use of DU ordnance; they've since been fired in Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina by NATO forces. An estimated 15 nations, primarily in the West, are believed to possess DU weapons.
Many scientists fear that this dust, when inhaled or ingested via contaminated water, emits radiation inside the lungs or lymph nodes, leading to cancer and other severe ailments. Iraq's health ministry claims that cancer rates have soared by 400 percent since 1991 (http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?click_id=31&art_id=qw952448820775H430), and victims of "Gulf War syndrome" in the United States and Europe have frequently ascribed their maladies to DU exposure. Last year, Doug Rokke, http://www.ratical.org/radiation/DUuse+hazard.html, former head of the Pentagon's Depleted Uranium Project, told the British Parliament that one-fifth of his Gulf War team - which examined Iraqi vehicles hit by DU fire - has since died of various lung diseases. Late last month, during his visit to Baghdad, Rep. David Bonior, D-Mich., characterized DU's long-term impact on Iraq as "horrific and barbaric."
The Pentagon has dismissed a direct link between DU residue and cancer. It often points to a 1999 RAND Corp. study (http://www.gulflink.osd.mil/library/randrep/du/cover.html) that monitored the health of Gulf War veterans exposed to DU and concluded that no link between kidney disease and DU had been found. The Department of Defense also argues that DU dust is less toxic than naturally occurring uranium, of which there is typically 2 to 4 tons per square mile of top soil. A British researcher has theorized (http://www.observer.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4446693,00.html) that any up-tick in Iraqi cancer rates is due not to DU pollution but rather to Saddam Hussein's use of sulfur mustard gas during the Iran-Iraq War.
The World Health Organization published its own report (http://www.who.int/environmental_information/radiation/depleted_uranium.htm) in April of 2001. The organization agreed that a link between DU exposure and cancer has yet to be established but cautioned that its study relied heavily on military data. "Some scientists would like to see a larger body of independently - i.e., non-military - funded studies to confirm the current viewpoint," the WHO paper stated. Researchers should have plenty of time to accumulate the necessary data; the half-life for Uranium-238 is 4.4 billion years.
Next question?
----
Seven depleted uranium shells found in southern Serbia
October 07, 2002
Reply-To: laka@antenna.nl
BUJANOVAC -- Monday - Experts from the Institute for nuclear sciences in Vinca, who have been engaged in efforts to decontaminate the area of Bratoselce over the past months, have found 44 shells in cooperation with the Yugoslav Army, the press centre in Bujanovac said today.
NATO targeted the Bujanovac municipality with depleted uranium shells in 1999.
Despite poor weather, the team found seven shells during the weekend containing depleted uranium in Bratoselce, one of the five targeted areas in the Pcinj district.
According to NATO reports, 1.300 shells of this type were fired in the area of Bratoselce. The Yugoslav government has secured 22 million dinars for decontamination.
----
[To reply - http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/contact_us/feedback/ et]
Doctor Opposes Gulf War Syndrome 'Mythology'
BY PETER GRAFF
Reuters
Mon, Oct. 07, 2002
http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/news/breaking_news/4230873.htm
LONDON - As the world prepares for a possible second Gulf War, there is unfinished business from the first: "Gulf War Syndrome," the media's name for a collection of symptoms that disabled thousands of otherwise healthy veterans.
More than a decade after allies fought to drive Iraqi troops from Kuwait, thousands of veterans are still suffering symptoms that range from exhaustion to loss of motor function.
It makes a good news story, but Dr. Harry Lee says it is time to drop it. The reports are hurting his patients.
"It's been a tragedy. It's been a mythology that's been propounded by the press and television," said Lee, who heads a team that worked with 3,000 British Gulf veterans for the Defense Ministry.
"The more people cling to a group of symptoms -- 'I served in the Gulf so I have Gulf War Syndrome' -- then they won't get better," he told Reuters.
Neither the United States nor Britain accepts that a direct link has been established between the war and the syndrome, even though the countries have spent more than 300 million dollars researching possible causes.
Veterans' groups say they suspect the use of pesticides in the battlefield, burning oil tanks, bombs made from depleted uranium and new vaccines for causing health problems.
Yet Lee's finding that there is no Gulf War Syndrome, newly published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, has ignited outrage among ailing veterans and their scientist supporters as the West contemplates a new Iraq war. In a statement on behalf of a British veterans' group, Dr. Malcolm Hooper, of Britain's University of Sunderland, called Lee's work "wicked" and "a betrayal of the trust of the veterans."
And Dr. Robert Haley of the University of Texas Southwestern told Reuters that Lee's work was "not even junk science."
"It's anti-science. What hypothesis is he testing?" said Haley, whose research has shown that a small number of Gulf War veterans have suffered impaired brain function. "We actually want to find out what's wrong with these people and find a cure."
POLITICAL MINEFIELD
All sides in the debate say Gulf War veterans are no more likely than others to die of illness, or to develop ailments that require hospitalization.
Even a report backed by Haley for a U.S. government advisory committee, which said up to 30 percent of Gulf War veterans were ill, concluded the ailments had "generally not been associated with increases in mortality and hospitalization rates."
But stories of disabled veterans tug on the emotions.
British veteran James Moore says his life is a wreck. He suffers from blinding headaches, night sweats, nausea and diarrhea, and constant pain in his knees, hand, elbows and shoulders.
"I stutter. I slur my words. Sometimes people think you're drunk when you've had nothing to drink at all," he told Reuters.
"I'm looking with some trepidation at some forthcoming action against Iraq again. I don't understand how you can send fit men and women into an area where they are possible to suffer long term health problems for years afterwards."
In the United States, Gulf War illness is a signature cause of billionaire Ross Perot, who held hearings with U.S. congressmen in Britain in June. He has likened leaving the issue unsolved to leaving the wounded on the battlefield.
Efforts have been taken, especially by Washington, to compensate veterans without acknowledging a syndrome exists.
Congress passed a law allowing U.S. Gulf veterans to claim full disability benefits for life, if they show that they are disabled by "undiagnosed symptoms." About 3,000 of the 700,000 U.S. Gulf War veterans are receiving the benefit.
"A lot of Gulf War veterans are very sick," said Defense Department spokesman Austin Camacho. "You can't, can't, can't tell people who are suffering that there is nothing wrong with them."
But Lee argues that leaving the door open is making the problem worse, by adding to the anxiety that makes veterans ill.
BIRTH DEFECTS
Take the issue of birth defects, arguably the most heart-wrenching facet of all in reporting about Gulf War Syndrome.
"I've had patients come to me who are newly married, who have read something in the paper and decided not to have children because they are afraid they will be born with birth defects. Can you imagine?" Lee says.
A 1997 paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine checked records of all live births at 135 military hospitals in the United States in 1991-93, and found that Gulf War veterans were no more likely than non-deployed soldiers to have children with defects.
"Because they read these things in the news about birth defects and cancer, they become terrified," Lee said. "When we tell them the facts they are greatly relieved."
----
Fact Sheet on Depleted Uranium
(Studies find no evidence linking DU to serious health risks) (880)
07 October 2002
Department of State
http://usinfo.state.gov/cgi-bin/washfile/display.pl?p=/products/washfile/latest&f=02100707.nlt&t=/products/washfile/newsitem.shtml
Following is a Department of State fact sheet on the health effects of depleted uranium, based on U.S., U.N. and other investigative sources:
(begin fact sheet)
Fact Sheet on Depleted Uranium
World Health Organization and other scientific research studies indicate that exposure to trace amounts of depleted uranium poses no serious health risks.
Scientific evidence does not indicate that depleted uranium has affected the health of Gulf War veterans. Nor has there been any scientific research indicating depleted uranium causes birth defects.
There have been no independent studies related to depleted uranium inside Iraq. Since 1991, Iraq has refused to allow health inspectors to assess the alleged impact of depleted uranium.
Iraqi military use of chemical and nerve agents in the 1980s and 1990s is a likely cause of birth defects among Iraqi children.
What is Depleted Uranium?
Depleted uranium (DU) is what is left from natural uranium when most of the radioactive isotopes U234 and U235 have been removed. Depleted uranium is forty percent less radioactive than the natural "background" uranium that is prevalent in the earth's air, water and soil. Depleted uranium is hard and dense; it is almost twice as dense as lead.
What is DU used for?
Due to it density, depleted uranium is used in aprons to protect patients in hospitals and dentists' offices from excessive x-rays, and as ballast in 747 planes and in the keels of large sailboats.
Again, because of its strength and density, depleted uranium is sometimes used in defensive plating on armored vehicles and other platforms to deflect ammunition rounds that might otherwise kill or wound personnel inside the vehicles. It has been a component in munitions used against hostile tanks and other armored vehicles.
Isn't uranium highly radioactive and therefore dangerous to humans and the environment?
No. Studies conducted through March 2002 consistently indicate the health risks associated with radiation from exposure to depleted uranium are low so low as to be statistically undetectable, with one potential exception: radiation doses for soldiers with embedded fragments of depleted uranium.
Uranium is a naturally occurring chemical element that is mildly radioactive. Humans and animals have always ingested particles of this naturally occurring substance from the air, water and soil. Only when uranium is enriched to produce material for nuclear reactors is the radiation level hazardous, requiring very careful handling and storage. Depleted uranium is roughly 200,000 times less radioactive than enriched uranium.
Natural and depleted uranium have not been linked to any health risks. There have been 16 epidemiological studies of some 30,000 workers in U.S. radiation industries. Some of these workers, particularly in the early days of the industry, had very significant exposures to uranium particles. According to scientists in the field, there have been no recorded cases of illness among these workers as a result of their exposure to uranium.
Can exposure to DU cause leukemia?
According to environmental health experts, it is medically impossible to contract leukemia as a result of exposure to uranium or depleted uranium.
Can exposure to DU cause cancer?
Cancer rates in almost 19,000 highly exposed uranium industry workers who worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory projects between 1943 and 1947 have been examined, and no excess cancers were observed through 1974. Other epidemiological studies of lung cancer in uranium mill and metal processing plant workers have found either no excess cancers or attributed them to known carcinogens other than uranium, such as radon.
Can DU cause kidney damage?
Recent studies have examined possible health effects from exposure to depleted uranium from chemical heavy-metal effects, unrelated to radiation. The best understood of these potential health risks, as determined by high-dose animal experiments, is kidney damage.
These studies indicate, however, that kidney damage would require an amount of uranium in the human body well above the level present in soldiers who have survived a direct contact with vehicles struck by DU munitions.
Some media reports suggest that dust from depleted uranium munitions and armor has caused health effects among soldiers and civilians in areas where such armaments have been used.
According to a number of comprehensive studies and reviews, no health effects have been seen in U.S. soldiers who are known to have had substantial exposure to depleted uranium dust and fragments.
--During the Gulf War, 15 U.S. Bradley Fighting Vehicles and nine Abrams tanks were mistakenly fired on and hit by shells containing depleted uranium. Thirty-three survivors of these incidents, roughly half of whom have retained fragments of depleted uranium in their bodies, have been studied in the Depleted Uranium Follow-Up Program (DUP) of the Baltimore Veterans' Affairs Medical Center.
To date, although these individuals have an array of health problems related to traumatic injuries resulting from their wounds, none of those studied had any clinically significant medical problems caused by the chemical or radiological toxicity of depleted uranium.
A survey of publicly available studies concludes the health risks to the general population in and near a war zone are low.
Among the U.S. and international groups whose research support the these findings are the World Health Organization; the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP); the United States Veterans Administration; the RAND Corporation; and Britain's Royal Society.
(end fact sheet)
(Distributed by the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
-------- europe
Bulgaria torn between nuclear pride and EU goal
Story by Anna Mudeva
REUTERS BULGARIA:
October 7, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/18055/story.htm
SOFIA - Bulgaria is walking a tightrope, haggling with the European Union over the fate of two ageing nuclear reactors while campaigning for early entry to the bloc.
Brussels wants Bulgaria to close old reactors at its Soviet-era Kozloduy nuclear power plant, which it considers cannot be made safe at a reasonable price. Bulgaria says it needs the electricity and cannot yet afford the shutdown costs.
A refusal to close Kozloduy's number three and four reactors by 2006 might derail Sofia's entry talks, government officials and diplomats say, hurting its paramount foreign policy goal of early EU accession.
"If we remain stuck on the energy talks we will not be able to meet our target of wrapping up entry negotiations by the end of 2003," a senior government official told Reuters.
Early closure would end Bulgaria's role as the leading power exporter in the region and raise domestic power bills, which the poor already find hard to pay.
Bulgaria has agreed to shut Kozloduy's two oldest reactors this year but wants the 20-year-old water-cooled three and four reactors to stay in operation until 2008 and 2010, as agreed with the EU in 1999, before Brussels changed its mind. Kozloduy's six reactors produce 3,760 megawatts, half of Bulgaria's energy. The Balkan country covers nearly half of the region's annual electricity deficit with power exports.
BULGARIANS OPPOSE CLOSURE
The government faces pressure at home, where people vehemently oppose the closure, calling it a national betrayal.
"Bulgarians are inexplicably sentimental about Kozloduy. It is so strange that there is not a single voice saying the plant might be unsafe," a Sofia-based EU diplomat told Reuters.
People fear a return of the power rationing of the 1980s and 1990s from before Kozloduy was fully onstream.
To please both critics at home and the EU, the government last week agreed to close the two reactors by end-2006 if Brussels will send experts to check safety next year.
Sofia hopes the inspection will prove the units are safe to operate and allow it to negotiate later closure.
A June mission by the IAEA, the world nuclear watchdog, concluded the government had addressed all safety issues at Kozloduy, says Energy Minister Milko Kovachev.
If Sofia fails to extend the reactors' lives it wants compensation from Brussels, following the example of Lithuania, which is shutting its nuclear power plant to gain EU entry, says European Integration minister Meglena Kuneva.
Other officials admit Sofia's chances of winning EU sympathy are small, given that many member states want Kozloduy shut.
"We are running out of time and should act fast because Greece, the severest Kozloduy's opponent is taking over the EU presidency in January," a cabinet official added.
-------- india / pakistan
Report: Pakistan to Carry Out Second Missile Test
Reuters
Monday, October 7, 2002; 7:25 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A53271-2002Oct7?language=printer
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-pakistan-missile.html
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (Reuters) - Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has given the military the green light to carry out a ballistic missile test Tuesday, the second in less than a week, a leading Pakistani newspaper reported.
If carried out, the test would come two days before Pakistan holds parliamentary elections on Oct. 10 and the same day India holds the last round of a disputed state poll in Kashmir, a region that is the trigger for two of three wars between India and Pakistan.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Aziz Ahmed Khan neither confirmed nor denied the report but said Pakistan conducted missile tests "as and when" required, for technical reasons.
"I cannot give you the exact timing about those tests. Whenever the technical departments consider that there is a need for testing, the testing is done," he said at a weekly news conference.
Last Friday Pakistan, locked in a military stand-off with India, said it had successfully test-fired a medium-range "Shaheen-1" missile. Hours later India test-fired a short-range missile of its own.
The News said Pakistan would test another of the Shaheen series Tuesday with a range of 500 miles.
The United States criticized both countries for last week's tests, saying they could encourage a nuclear missile and arms race in the region.
The tests came as border tensions remained high between the two countries, which almost came to war in June over the disputed Himalayan territory of Kashmir.
Khan said Pakistani missile tests were not related to the situation in the region.
-------- japan
TEPCO confirms 5 cracks at nuclear reactor - report
REUTERS JAPAN:
October 7, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/18054/story.htm
TOKYO - Japan's largest power utility Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) , under fire for falsifying nuclear safety data records, confirmed five new cracks in the shroud of one reactor, a Japanese media report said.
The report came only days after TEPCO was reprimanded by the trade ministry for falsifying reports on nuclear safety inspections in the 1980s and 1990s, and hiding the existence of cracks in the shrouds of several of its reactors.
Company officials were quoted by Kyodo news agency as saying that TEPCO had confirmed five cracks in the shroud of a reactor at its Fukushima No. 2 nuclear plant.
The cracks were up to three centimetres long, but their depth was unknown, the officials were quoted as saying.
TEPCO officials were not immediately available to comment on the report.
TEPCO said on Tuesday that it had already closed seven nuclear reactors, and planned to close another later this month, for safety checks.
Nuclear power provides a third of resource-poor Japan's energy, but a series of accidents has eroded public faith in the industry.
In 1999 Japan's worst ever nuclear accident occurred at a plant at Tokaimura, 140 km (90 miles) northeast of Tokyo.
It exposed hundreds of residents, plant workers and emergency personnel to radiation, and two plant workers died.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- ohio
FirstEnergy: Nuke Repairs Will Hurt Earnings
Reuters
Monday, October 7, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A55849-2002Oct7?language=printer
AKRON, Ohio (Reuters) - First Energy, citing higher-than-expected costs linked to extensive repairs at its crippled Davis-Besse nuclear power plant in Ohio, warned on Monday the outage would cut into its earnings for 2002.
The Akron-based energy company also said extra work at the plant would delay a restart until "early next year, rather than by year-end."
First Energy did not give a more specific time for a plant restart. "We don't determine the start-up, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission does that. But we expect to have everything in place by the end of the year," Ralph DiNicola, a company spokesman, told Reuters.
In September, the company said it expected to have Davis-Besse ready for restart by Dec. 7.
The added cost for work at the plant, which has been shut since February, will add up to about $115 million in 2002 and 2003 -- an estimated $65 million this year and $50 million in 2003.
The company said the outage costs and replacement energy purchases would reduce its 2002 earnings by about 46 cents to 53 cents a share.
First Energy said that excluding the Davis-Besse costs and any potential impact from the pending sale of an Argentine distribution unit, it expects 2002 earnings to be at the high end of its guidance of $3.30 to $3.45 a share.
Thomson First Call's consensus for 2002 is $2.96 a share.
First Energy said its estimated cost range to replace the corroded reactor head was unchanged at $55 million to $75 million, while net replacement energy costs also were unchanged at about $20 million a month for July and August and $10 million to $15 million a month for non-summer months.
The additional costs announced today would cover other work needed to get the plant in shape to resume making electricity.
Davis-Besse generates 925 megawatts of electricity. One megawatt is power for about 1,000 homes.
The new work mainly involves projects inside Davis-Besse's reactor containment building, plus jobs that had been planned for refueling and maintenance outages in the future.
The plant typically operates on a schedule of refuelings about every 24 months, a spokesman said.
The work includes redesigning and rebuilding a water collection sump, expanded work on air coolers, and more extensive recoating of other equipment, the company said.
-------- us politics
George Bush's Nuclear Lie
Last night, while addressing the nation, Bush forgot the truth about his nuclear lies, which undermined any truth in his speech.
By Frederick Sweet,
Intervention Magazine,
Monday, October 07 @ 17:41:02
http://www.interventionmag.com/cms/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=204
Last night in his speech to the nation, President George W. Bush again made it clear that he is hell bent on going to war with Iraq, justifying an invasion by claiming Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction are a serious threat to America. In his speech, the President warned us that we cannot trust Saddam Hussein.
When we look at the history of Bush's argument that Saddam is developing atomic bombs and the capability to deliver them, when we examine Bush's proof that Saddam is an imminent threat to America, the issue of lying is again raised. But not Saddam's lying.
The President's justification for war with Iraq, as can be seen in his argument that Saddam is a nuclear threat to America, is a house of deception built on a foundation of lies. Last night in his speech the president did his best to scare Americans with the nuclear threat, deploying the imagery of the nuclear mushroom, the latest example of his history of nuclear lies.
In the September 27 Washington Times, Joseph Curl reported that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) contradicted President Bush's claim that Iraq in 1998 was "six months away" from developing a nuclear weapon.
What makes this revelation so credible is that The Washington Times is the premier conservative newspaper in America, a newspaper that presents a consistently conservative Republican viewpoint. It seldom says that President Bush is wrong!
"There's never been a report like that issued from this agency," The Washington Times quotes the IAEA's chief spokesman, Mark Gwozdecky. "We've never put a time frame on how long it might take Iraq to construct a nuclear weapon in 1998."
The IAEA is charged with assessing Iraq's nuclear capability for the United Nations.
At a news conference on September 7 with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Bush had stated: "I would remind you that when the inspectors first went into Iraq and were denied -- finally denied access [in 1998], a report came out of the Atomic -- the IAEA that they were six months away from developing a weapon. I don't know what more evidence we need."
Since the source, the International Atomic Energy Agency, denies it made the statement, we need other evidence. Or should we say, we need some evidence that Iraq is close to constructing a nuclear bomb.
Bush's Deputy Press Secretary Scott McClellan tried to resuscitate the president's veracity by stating, "He's referring to 1991 there. In '91, there was a [IAEA] report saying that after the war they found out they were about six months away."
Again, the IAEA came to the rescue to discredit the administration in its attempt to justify a war with Iraq. On September 26, IAEA's Gwozdecky informed The Washington Times that no such report was ever issued in 1991. Twice, then, the administration claimed that the International Atomic Energy Agency had issued reports favorable to its hawkish cause, and twice this was shown to be inaccurate. Two for two!
Attempting to clear up the "confusion," the White House's McClellan cited two news articles from 1991. He referred to a July 16 story by Michael Evans in The London Times and Paul Lewis' July 18 story in The New York Times.
Neither of these articles, however, refers to an IAEA report on Iraq's nuclear-weapons program nor that Saddam was only six months away from "developing a weapon." Neither, then, can be used as evidence to support Bush's claim that we are in serious, immediate danger.
In three attempts to prove its case that Iraq is on the verge of developing nuclear weapons, the administration has failed three times. Since the president should be familiar with the game of baseball, after all he was a president of a team, we can assume he understands his predicament is not good and his credibility is significantly less. That is probably why, in his speech to the nation, he referred to that mushroom cloud. When facts are not on your side, when your credibility is shot, scare the crap out of people.
Right before Saddam Hussein ejected the U.N. weapons inspectors from Iraq in October 1998, IAEA Director-General Mohammed Elbaradei wrote in a report to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, "There are no indications that there remains in Iraq any physical capability for the production of weapon-usable nuclear material of any practical significance."
Last night, after the president spoke, the White House released spy satellite photographs purporting to show how extensively a crucial Iraqi nuclear facility had been rebuilt since the United States bombed it in 1998.
Earlier, however, IAEA's Gwozdecky had rejected a similar claim. "There is no evidence in our view that can be substantiated on Iraq's nuclear-weapons program. If anybody tells you they know the nuclear situation in Iraq right now, in the absence of four years of inspections, I would say that they're misleading you because there isn't solid evidence out there. I don't know where they have determined that Iraq has retained this much weaponization capability because when we left in December '98 we had concluded that we had neutralized their nuclear-weapons program. We had confiscated their fissile material. We had destroyed all their key buildings and equipment."
According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, then, according to the agency most capable of determining the truth about any Iraqi nuclear weapons, there is presently no evidence that Saddam is near to achieving nuclear weapons capability. And no government or NGO has stepped forward with evidence to contradict this conclusion. Bush's speech last night offered no evidence to reverse this position.
Putting all of this in Bush's idiom, the man fibbed there was documentation to prove that evil Iraq has a capability of developing nuclear weapons of mass destruction. The man lied.
Before we can believe his other arguments, on chemical and biological weapons, on Saddam Hussein's intentions, our president must first come clean. He must set the record straight that he has "misrepresented" the truth about Iraq's nuclear potential. After all, how many strikes of falsehood are we suppose to tolerate?
Frederick Sweet is Professor of Reproductive Biology in Obstetrics and Gynecology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
This article comes from War, Politics, Culture
----
Bush Fears Iraq Would Hit U.S. with Chem Weapons
Reuters
Monday, October 7, 2002
By Steve Holland
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A57291-2002Oct7?language=printer
CINCINNATI (Reuters) - President Bush said on Monday he is concerned Iraq wants to attack the United States with chemical or biological weapons dispersed by remote-controlled aircraft, and vowed to use the full force of the U.S. military if needed to confront the Iraqi threat.
"We refuse to live in fear," a subdued Bush said as he laid out an indictment of Iraq in a speech from the U.S. heartland.
Bush sought to shape public opinion and influence debate in Congress to ensure overwhelming support for a resolution authorizing military force against Baghdad if needed.
Some Democrats say he should focus on the al Qaeda network of Osama bin Laden, blamed for the Sept. 11 attacks.
"The danger is already significant, and it only grows worse with time," said Bush, ticking off allegations that Saddam possesses chemical and biological weapons and could develop a nuclear bomb in less than a year if he obtained a small amount of enriched uranium for it.
Bracing Americans for the possibility of war, Bush told an applauding audience at the Cincinnati Museum Center that he hoped military action will not be required but that it might be necessary and could be difficult.
He warned Iraqi generals to resist orders for "cruel and desperate measures," which Bush aides said would be a chemical or biological attack on an invading army or Iraqi minorities.
"If Saddam Hussein orders such measures, his generals would be well-advised to refuse those orders. If they do not refuse, they must understand that all war criminals will be pursued and punished," he said.
He added: "If we have to act, we will take every precaution that is possible. We will plan carefully. We will act with the full power of the United States military. We will act with allies at our side. And we will prevail."
Bush said Iraq possesses ballistic missiles powerful enough to strike Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey and other areas in a region housing over 135,000 American civilians and soldiers.
REMOTE-CONTROLLED AIRCRAFT
What is more, he said, Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. Unmanned aerial vehicles are remote-controlled drone aircraft.
"We are concerned that Iraq is exploring ways to using UAVS for missions targeting the United States," Bush said. "And of course, sophisticated delivery systems are not required for a chemical or biological attack -- all that might be required are a small container and one terrorist or Iraqi intelligence operative to deliver it."
After Bush spoke, the White House released declassified
satellite intelligence photos it said showed Iraq rebuilding two facilities related to the Iraqi nuclear weapons program.
Bush said the United States is prepared to lead a coalition against Iraq if necessary, as Washington presses the U.N. Security Council to approve a tough new resolution requiring Baghdad to disarm or face military action, amid Russian and French skepticism that such a step is necessary.
"The time for denying, deceiving and delaying has come to an end," Bush said. "Saddam Hussein must disarm himself -- or for the sake of peace we will lead a coalition to disarm him."
Saddam's only choice is full compliance, and "the time remaining for that choice is limited," he said.
Invoking the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush said Iraq and al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade, and that among the al Qaeda members who fled Afghanistan for Iraq was a "very senior al Qaeda leader" who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year.
U.S. officials have not presented evidence linking Iraq to the attacks on America that killed around 3,000 people.
Failure to act, Bush said, would embolden other tyrants, allow terrorists access to new weapons and resources and "make blackmail a permanent feature of world events."
"Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists," he said.
Although Bush directed his message to the U.S. public, a secondary audience lies overseas, as he seeks to demonstrate determination and overcome doubts within the Security Council over authorizing force against Iraq.
IMPORTANT SIGNAL TO BAGHDAD
He said if the United Nations does not act, it would become irrelevant, and the United States, by not stepping in, would resign itself to a future of fear, said Bush.
"That is not the America I know. That is not the America I serve," he said.
Bush said congressional approval of a resolution against Iraq would send an important signal to Baghdad and the United Nations that the country was united.
"Approving this resolution does not mean that military action is imminent or unavoidable," Bush said. "The resolution will tell the United Nations, and all nations, that America speaks with one voice and is determined to make the demands of the civilized world mean something."
Bush, under pressure from opposition Democrats to spell out a vision of a post-Saddam Iraq, said the United States would help provide a better life for its people.
"America is a friend to the people of Iraq," Bush said. "Our demands are directed only at the regime that enslaves them and threatens us. When these demands are met, the first and greatest benefit will come to Iraqi men, women and children."
Two possible Democratic presidential contenders and leading hawks on Iraq said Bush was bungling U.S. relations with allies and underestimating the difficulty of rebuilding Iraq.
North Carolina Sen. John Edwards and Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman, both mulling 2004 presidential runs, took stabs at Bush's Iraq policies and foreign policy in general, despite co-sponsoring the war powers resolution Congress is debating.
Edwards, in a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said the Bush administration "often treats allies as an afterthought," and "it was wrong not trying to build an international consensus from the beginning" in its showdown with Iraq.
Lieberman, in remarks prepared for delivery to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, said the administration should take steps to prepare to rebuild Iraq.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
A Year After Air Attacks, Afghans Get New Money
October 7, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-afghan-anniversary.html
KABUL (Reuters) - Afghanistan's interim government marked the first anniversary of U.S. air strikes that brought it to power by issuing new banknotes Monday, aimed at reasserting central control over a war-ravaged economy.
Hundreds of people jostled to change large bundles of old afghanis for new lower-denomination notes at Kabul's open air money market and the big influx quickly weakened the currency against the U.S. dollar.
Redenomination of the afghani has involved lopping three zeros off a currency that lost much of its value under the Taliban regime, ousted within weeks of the start of massive U.S. air attacks on October 7 last year.
The old afghani traded at 46,000 to the U.S. dollar on Sunday and the new notes were quoted by traders at 47.80 to the dollar Monday afternoon.
Chief trader Amin Khusti said a further weakening was likely.
``When you have a lot of afghanis in the market, its value is going to fall against foreign currencies,'' he said.
Central bank Governor Anwarul-Haq Ahadi told Reuters at the weekend the government hoped to regain control of the economy after unrestrained printing of banknotes by the Taliban and the Northern Alliance forces that opposed it.
He said the bank would do what it could to maintain exchange rate stability and said even if the currency did not appreciate against the dollar in the next two or three months, it should not depreciate much either.
Dozens of Kabul residents queued up early in the morning outside banks to exchange large wads of old Russian-printed banknotes for the new notes printed in Britain and Germany.
But the central bank said that for the next 15 days it would only exchange notes for money changers, who would do transactions with ordinary people. The new afghanis will not reach the provinces until later this week as planes chartered to transport tons of the new notes failed to turn up.
BID TO REGAIN CONTROL OF ECONOMY
The central bank said the redenomination was needed after the value of the largest old note -- 10,000 afghanis -- dwindled to less than 20 cents and people were obliged to carry bulky blocks of cash for even minor transactions.
President Hamid Karzai also stressed the symbolic value of the new banknotes.
``This is a very important issue for Afghanistan's honor and national and political unity,'' he told reporters Sunday.
Ahadi said 27 billion new afghanis had been printed and about 15 trillion old ones weighing 1,800 tons would be burned or recycled, although the bank had no clear idea as to the amount of old currency in circulation.
Not all the new notes will go into circulation immediately, with some held as stock.
Large quantities of old afghanis are thought to be held by Afghans in neighboring Pakistan and Iran, which will have to be exchanged in Afghanistan within two months.
Currency traders welcomed the new bank notes.
``It's easy to carry and according to the central bank governor it will be stable,'' said Ahmad Shah Hakimi, after receiving his first batch of new notes.
Shah Mahmood Dahati said it would make life easier as traders would not have to waste time checking for fakes.
``It's good for the stability of the economy. It has strong international support, which makes people hopeful.''
--------
One Year On, U.S. Says Afghan War Not Over
October 7, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-afghan-usa-anniversary.html
DURANI, Afghanistan (Reuters) - A year after the start of U.S. air strikes in Afghanistan, the United States said Monday the war in the country against al Qaeda and the Taliban was not over.
``There are ongoing attacks on the al Qaeda and the Taliban -- the war is certainly not over,'' U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan Robert Finn told Reuters while inspecting a road project in the village of Durani, southwest of Kabul.
``Military operations are continuing, especially in the eastern part of the county and they will continue until we win.''
Asked about U.S. plans for the future, Finn replied:
``The future plan is the same as our current plan. The plan is to continue our operations against al Qaeda and the Taliban to ensure that they cannot use Afghanistan as a base of operations again.''
U.S. air strikes on Afghanistan began at night on October 7 last year and allowed the Northern Alliance opposition force to drive the hard-line Taliban regime from power within weeks.
Some 8,000 U.S. troops and about 5,000 allied coalition soldiers are still in Afghanistan pursuing remnants of the Taliban and the al Qaeda network it sheltered.
The United States attacked Afghanistan after blaming al Qaeda and its leader Osama bin Laden for the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11 last year. The whereabouts of bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar are not known.
About 40 U.S. personnel have been killed in combat and non-combat incidents and more than 300 hurt over the past year.
The commanding U.S. general in Afghanistan told Reuters last week the campaign had gone far better than expected and would continue until the country was stable and no longer a viable base for terrorists.
Lieutenant General Dan McNeill said several hundred al Qaeda fighters were still active in Afghanistan but they were scattered around the country, and, while still dangerous, did not appear to be a position to mount large-scale operations.
He said coalition forces would stay until Afghanistan had an army trained and equipped to provide national security, and conditions for ``a recurrence of terrorist organizations and their ability to recruit or train'' were eliminated.
Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah told a news conference Sunday the formation of a national army could take three to five years but he could not say how long U.S. and other foreign forces would need to remain in the country.
``I think as long as we all agree that the situation is stable enough and al Qaeda is not a threat to the stability of Afghanistan or elsewhere. One cannot give a timetable.''
U.S. military spokesman Colonel Roger King said no special events were planned at Bagram air base, the main staging post for the U.S.-led coalition's military operations, to mark the anniversary of the start of the bombing.
``We're doing business as usual, no anniversary observances,'' King told reporters. ``We're just out continuing the mission, we've got troops in the field continuing to hunt for al Qaeda and the people who support them.''
King also said two Romanian soldiers working with the U.S.-led coalition were slightly wounded when their vehicle struck an anti-personnel land mine in the south of the country.
-------- biological weapons
BIOLOGICAL WAR-FEAR
Did Army cause anthrax outbreak in mill?
Documents related to '57 research project leave unanswered questions
By H.P. Albarelli Jr.
Monday, October 7, 2002
WorldNetDaily
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=29162
Editor's note: Today, WorldNetDaily presents the first of a two-part report on the federal government's involvement with anthrax. In this story, WND investigates a 1957 outbreak of anthrax in a textile mill that happened to be the site of Army experiments on a vaccine for the disease. Tomorrow's installment examines the federal investigation into the post-9/11 anthrax attacks.
One day in early September 1957, Antonio Jette came home from his job at the Arms Textile Mill in Manchester, N.H., and uncharacteristically went to bed early. He told his wife, Anna, that he was tired, wasn't in the least hungry and felt like he was coming down with a cold.
The next morning, Antonio said he was feeling better. It was Saturday and he and Anna drove to Vermont, four hours away, to attend the Rutland State Fair. It was an event they had been looking forward to for months. But as they were entering the fair's gate, Antonio turned to Anna and said they had to go back home. "I'm sorry," he told Anna, "I feel really sick." On the way home, Antonio had several fits of dry coughing and he said that his chest hurt.
The following day, Sunday, Antonio and Anna went to church. After returning home, Antonio again said that he felt tired. He told Anna he was going to lie down for a couple of hours. An hour later Anna checked on Antonio and found him soaked with perspiration and mumbling incoherently. She took his temperature, saw that it was 103 degrees Fahrenheit and called the family's doctor. The doctor gave Antonio a shot of penicillin for what he thought was a bronchial infection. He told Anna to keep Antonio in bed for the next few days.
Two hours later, Anna found Antonio's temperature had risen to 104, and she was unable to wake him up. With the help of neighbors, Anna took her husband to a nearby hospital. Doctors at St. Joseph's Hospital in Nashua found Antonio's temperature to be 105 degrees. His breathing was rapid and shallow. Rales were audible over both his lungs. Tests revealed blood in his lumbar region. Doctors told Anna that they thought her husband had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. His chances for recovery didn't look good, they said.
Antonio never regained consciousness. He died the next morning, Sept. 6, at 6 a.m., the same time that every morning he walked to church before heading off to work at the mill.
Anna was stunned by her husband's sudden death. He was only 49 years old. She had never seen Antonio sick before. She didn't know what to tell her seven children. Anna buried her husband three days after he died. The church was full of Antonio's friends and relatives, but nobody from management at the Arms Textile Mill attended Antonio's funeral. Nobody, at the time, told Anna that the Arms Textile Mill was the site of tests being conducted by the Biological Warfare Laboratories at Fort Detrick, Md. It would be another 45 years before Anna ever heard about the tests.
Albert Langlois was 16 years younger than his co-worker Antonio Jette. Albert had been employed at the Arms Mill for only nine weeks before he became sick one day while on the job. It was Oct. 30, a little over seven weeks after Jette had died. Albert tried to keep working, but the next day he could hardly stand up. He was so thirsty and drank so much water that he vomited. "I've just got the flu," he told his wife Stella. "It'll go away soon."
Albert's doctor visited him at home on Oct. 31 and diagnosed Asian influenza. The doctor gave Stella eight tablets of oral penicillin for her husband. Two days later, Albert seemed better, but the following day he complained of trouble breathing. He was unable to hold any liquids and his jaw clamped tightly closed. He thrashed about in bed and began to frantically rub his legs.
Albert was rushed to the Manchester Veteran's Administration Hospital. Doctors there thought that he possibly was suffering a laryngeal obstruction. Albert died less than an hour later. Like Anna Jette, Stella Langlois was shocked by the suddenness of her husband's death. And like Anna, nobody told Stella anything about the Army tests that were underway at the Arms Mill.
A year ago, following the tragic events of Sept. 11, five people in the United States died as a result of a series of lethal anthrax-laden letters sent through the mail. Forty-five years ago this month, four other people, all workers at the Arms Textile Mill, including Antonio Jette and Albert Langlois, died in what the Centers for Disease Control call "America's only anthrax epidemic."
A central activity at the Arms Textile Mill throughout the 1950s was the processing of goat hair imported from Pakistan, Iraq and Iran. The refined hair was used in the lining of expensive men's suits and overcoats manufactured at the mill. The Arms Mill, in 1957, employed 632 workers spread throughout a complex of large red brick buildings located on the banks of the Merrimack River and near the edge of downtown Manchester, N.H.
In an amazing coincidence, at the same time as the deadly Arms Mill outbreak the manufacturing plant was the site for tests using an experimental vaccine. Tests on the mill workers - who were considered at risk for anthrax due to handling animal products such as goat and sheep hair - had begun quietly in May 1955 and were sponsored by the Biological Warfare Laboratories of the U.S. Chemical Corps at Fort Detrick. The prototype vaccine tested at the mill had been developed by Fort Detrick scientist Dr. George G. Wright. The vaccine was briefly produced a few years later by the pharmaceutical company Merck Sharp & Dohme, today Merck and Co. Inc. Company head George Wilhelm Merck was a principal advocate for biological warfare in the 1940s and 1950s and was a founder of Fort Detrick. Wright's vaccine is essentially the same serum administered today to American troops and others at risk of anthrax.
Nearly a half-century beyond the Arms Mill outbreak, no definitive scientific explanation or cause for the epidemic has been discovered. Scientists at UCLA's Department of Epidemiology and other research centers have speculated that "the circumstantial evidence suggested a relationship to a particular batch of goat hair." However, because no samples of that animal hair exist today, no up-to-date testing can be accomplished, and results from tests conducted in 1957 and 1958 remain inconclusive. Further compounding matters - despite that the animal hair in question was imported from thousands of miles away by means considered antiquated and unsafe today - is that there were no cases of any type of anthrax ever reported or recorded along the long route to New Hampshire.
Equally perplexing to many who have studied the outbreak is that, despite the severity of the epidemic - not only did four workers die, but an additional 21 workers came down with cutaneous anthrax - the mill never ceased operations, even temporarily, during the outbreak and continued operating uninterrupted until 1968 when it went out of business for financial reasons. In grim testimony to the virulent nature of the anthrax that infected the mill, two years prior to its closing, in 1966, a man working in a machinery shop across from the mill died of inhalation anthrax. New Hampshire health officials at the time conjectured that lethal spores remaining from 1957 migrated from the Arms buildings through a shared ventilation system between the two businesses.
Following this additional death over 10 years past the epidemic and the mill's closing, state health officials sealed the mill while trying to decide how to make the site environmentally safe. After an expensive decontamination process in 1971, after which the buildings still tested positive for anthrax, the entire complex was demolished. The colossal pile of rubble was systematically soaked in chorine and other chemicals for decontamination and, after that proved ineffective on the mill's huge hickory beams, incinerators were erected on the site and all wood was burned to fine ash. The remaining bricks and stones were carted away for burial. Today, the Arms site is a parking lot for a riverside park and upscale shopping area.
Speculation that the Arms anthrax epidemic may not have been a coincidental occurrence has been the subject of quiet debate among scientists for years. In 1999, former United Nations official and BBC correspondent Edward Hooper published a book entitled, "The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS." Buried deep within Hooper's 1,070-page opus is a brief section that concerns the Arms outbreak. Hooper's research inadvertently led him to the incident through his unrelated interviews with Dr. Stanley A. Plotkin. At the time of the Arms tests, Dr. Plotkin worked for the CDC's Epidemic Intelligence Service, Wistar Institute, and was assigned the task of medically evaluating the outbreak.
In 1960, Dr. Plotkin wrote a medical paper on the New Hampshire outbreak, which is still widely circulated and studied by anthrax experts today. Published in the American Journal of Medicine and entitled, "An Epidemic of Inhalation Anthrax, the First in the 20th Century," the paper was co-authored with Dr. Philip S. Brachman. Brachman was Plotkin's supervisor and the outbreak's chief investigator employed by the Anthrax Investigations Unit, CDC, Wistar Institute of Philadelphia, Pa. The paper, which meticulously details the facts of the outbreak, makes no mention that Army scientists from Fort Detrick had any involvement in the events surrounding the epidemic or that the mill was the simultaneous site of anthrax vaccine tests conducted by the Army.
In his book, "The River," Hooper recounts the basic facts of the outbreak and writes: "It may of course be that [Fort Detrick] scientists were simply very lucky from a research perspective, and that Mother Nature started an epidemic of inhalation anthrax at just the right moment to test their vaccine under field conditions. And yet, of course, there is another, more ominous possibility. This is that, unbeknownst to the Wistar team of Plotkin and Brachman, humans played a conscious role, and that a decision was made by the Chemical Corps to subject the vaccine to the ultimate field test - that of challenge with virulent anthrax organisms."
Hooper writes that this "appalling" possibility "may sound far-fetched, and yet the hypothesis is supported by internal Army reports from the period. The 1959/60 annual report for the Commission on Epidemiological Survey, part of the Armed Forces Epidemiological Board, contains the minutes of a meeting held on March 23, 1960, which was largely devoted to anthrax. Dr. Harold Glassman of Fort Detrick (whose assistance had been acknowledged at the end of the Plotkin/Brachman paper) was the main speaker, and he opened his address with a review of the anthrax organism, including 'ease of preparation and stability in storage and as an aerosol.' He was especially interested in air-sampling studies at the Manchester mill and with the case of a young military volunteer who had died of inhalation anthrax at Fort Detrick in 1958 after receiving a series of inoculations of killed and live vaccines, including one against anthrax. [Glassman] stressed the fact that the Soviets appeared to have recently developed an attenuated anthrax vaccine for humans, and said that there was an urgent need from the U.S. side for 'an examination of the protective properties of various vaccine preparations.' Clearly, the Manchester [Arms Mill] vaccine trial had not provided all the answers." After this, Hooper added that a portion of Dr. Glassman's presentation "was omitted from the minutes, presumably for security reasons."
Other Army documents obtained by WorldNetDaily, not cited in Hooper's book, reveal that the censored portion of Dr. Glassman's report may have concerned a top-secret project called the St. Jo Program. That program predated the Arms Mill outbreak by at least two years. Additional documents obtained by WorldNetDaily bear the signature of Dr. Glassman and speak of human-subject studies under consideration at the University of Chicago "using human volunteers" who were "inmates at the State Penitentiary."
The Arms debate flared up again recently at a November 2000 Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences meeting in Washington, D.C. Attending the meeting as separate expert witnesses were Dr. Meryl Nass, a biologist and medical doctor, and Dr. Plotkin. The meeting concerned the Defense Department's anthrax vaccine program, and Nass raised a number of concerns about safety, which Plotkin strongly rejected. When the subject of the Arms Mill study came up, Nass remarked that the outbreak occurred "serendipitously at the same time" that Army scientists were on site. Plotkin heatedly responded, "I reject any implied or stated accusation that this was a biological-warfare experiment."
In a recent interview with this reporter, Plotkin, who today is a highly respected AIDS researcher and emeritus professor of immunology at the University of Pennsylvania, said he didn't "think much of conspiracy theories and theorists" and that author Edward Hooper's "innuendo that we purposely launched the outbreak" is "false and vicious."
Plotkin explained that he "came to the Anthrax Investigation Unit in August 1957, fresh from a training course. My supervisor, Dr. Phillip Brachman, was in Europe. He had launched a study of anthrax vaccine in May 1957. I had never been to the mill in question when I received a telephone call early in September to tell me that anthrax had been diagnosed in a mill worker in Manchester, N.H. I went up to investigate, and the results have been published in the medical literature."
Asked why Fort Detrick was involved in the tests, Plotkin said, "I think the answer is obvious. The vaccine had been developed at Fort Detrick, and the purpose of our study, aside from protecting the mill workers, was to find out what value the vaccine could have against an anthrax attack."
On the issue of why the mill was never closed, even temporarily, Plotkin said, "The outbreak appeared to be over before the issue of what to do came up. Closing the mill would have been an economic hardship for the workers. Instead, all workers were offered the vaccine in November (1957), ending their utility for the study, but protecting everybody."
Asked if any follow-up studies had been conducted on the Arms Mill workers after the outbreak, Plotkin answered, "Not to my knowledge."
Once top-secret documents obtained by WorldNetDaily reveal that Fort Detrick's interest in the New Hampshire epidemic, even months after it had ended, was ongoing and intense and that numerous scientists at the installation were assigned to study its varied aspects. At the time, Fort Detrick was deeply involved in developing anthrax as an offensive weapon of war. According to the former chief of Fort Detrick's anthrax production plant, Orley R. Bourland Jr., throughout the 1950s deadly anthrax spores were manufactured "24 hours a day, seven days a week." Fort Detrick's massive anthrax fermenters, housed in Building 470, held 1,800 gallons of wet anthrax solution and pumped out about 7,000 grams of refined anthrax a week. During the post-9/11 anthrax mailings to Washington, D.C.'s Capitol Hill, about two grams of anthrax caused the evacuation of several federal buildings and the expenditure of millions of dollars for clean-up. CDC officials said at the time that "under the right conditions," an attack involving "several grams could result in the deaths of thousands of people."
One 118-page document, dated summer 1958, details a meeting that was attended by over 30 high-level Fort Detrick officials, including the heads of its Dissemination and Field Testing Division, its Engineering and Production Laboratories Branch, several representatives from its Special Operations Division (which was in part funded by the CIA), and at least one official from Britain's Porton Down Biological Warfare Center. Also in attendance, according to the participants section of the document and detailed minutes from the meeting, were Dr. Philip Brachman and Dr. Stanley Plotkin representing the U.S. Public Health Service.
Dr. Riley D. Housewright, Fort Detrick's scientific research director, opened the meeting by informing attendees that the gathering was a continuation of Fort Detrick's commitment to "give maximum support to the BWL (Biological Warfare Laboratories) program of follow-up investigation on 'N'" resulting "from the New Hampshire outbreak of anthrax." For over a decade, "N" had been the Army's code-letter for operations involving weapons-grade anthrax.
The document goes on to detail a review provided by Brachman of the "follow-up studies resulting from the New Hampshire outbreak." Brachman explained that "during a 10-week period" from August to November 1957 there had been nine cases of anthrax at the mill, five of inhalation anthrax and four of cutaneous. Reads the report: "Four of the five inhalation cases were fatal. In three of the four cases, autopsies were performed, proving the diagnosis; in the instance of the woman who was buried without an autopsy, it had been impossible to get permission to exhume the body." (This was a 65-year-old woman who had worked at the mill for nearly 12 years. She died on Sept. 8, 1957, two days after Antonio Jette's death.)
The document continues by describing how Brachman separated the mill's workers into two categories for purposes of the tests, which began approximately 12 weeks before the first reported case of anthrax. Workers were deemed either "susceptibles" or "immune." Simply put, "susceptibles" were those employees who were either not given the vaccine or those who were instead given the "control material" or placebo. "Immunes" were those workers who had "the full course of the antigenic material," or those "who had had the disease at some time in the past and were therefore assumed to be immune."
From 1948-1956 there had been 63 cases of cutaneous anthrax at the Arms Mill, a then-common occurrence among workers handling animal products. During the 19th century, anthrax was called the "woolsorters disease" and, according to medical literature, about 30 percent of those workers stricken with inhalation anthrax recovered. During the Arms outbreak, only 313 of the mill's 632 employees received the actual test vaccine. None of the five Arms employees who contracted inhalation anthrax (one did not die) were vaccinated as part of the tests because two received the placebo instead and the remaining three, for reasons not clearly stated, did not participate in the tests.
The document describes how midway through his review, Brachman was asked if the Arms Mill was still open, to which he replied that it was "operating full force." However, he explained, alterations had been made in the mill's operations and that, following the outbreak, the tests had been terminated and all employees "had been offered the vaccine."
This question was followed by another concerning "whether the viable spores," which were assumed to be still present in the mill's buildings, ever got "through the fabric to infect customers" who purchased the products produced at the mill. The document reads: "The response was that this is a touchy question," and that "some products" did test positive for anthrax, but that after further treatment they tested negative. Yet, the document goes on to state that an unidentified "grocery clerk in Philadelphia" came down with cutaneous anthrax after purchasing "a new woolen coat four weeks before his illness."
Later in the document, it is noted that Fort Detrick pathologist Dr. Edwin V. Hill reported that autopsies had been performed "on monkeys which died following a respiratory exposure to the anthrax organisms isolated in the New Hampshire outbreak." The document reads: "These animals died very suddenly without premonitory symptoms. The gross and microscopic findings in the autopsies were similar to those observed in the work with the strain which has been under study in the past."
The 1958 Fort Detrick document, despite all its detail, is noticeably silent on the subject of when, if ever, the Arms Mill employees were informed that there was an anthrax outbreak of any sort in their workplace. Surviving families of the workers who died told WorldNetDaily that they "knew nothing about the Army tests" in 1957 or later. At least one family said that they "knew nothing about the Army's involvement" and "nothing about any vaccine tests conducted by anyone until after the 9-11 attacks." Another family told WND, "We were unaware that anyone at all had died of anthrax" until after Sept. 11, 2001, "when a reporter called to ask some questions about the mill."
Also not explained in the 1958 document is why the local medical community and hospitals in the Manchester area were never informed about the anthrax outbreak. At least three of the Arms Mill employees who died were treated by local doctors, yet it appears that none of those doctors had any idea that there was an epidemic underway.
Antonio Jette's daughter, Anita Simonds, 75, told WorldNetDaily that her mother, Anna Pratte, "never found out that my father died of anthrax until about seven to eight months later when her insurance man told her something." Simonds said, "My father never mentioned anything about any tests or shots being given at the mill. He never got any shots. Nobody ever said a thing to anybody about anthrax back then. We'd never heard of it."
Simonds added, "My father worked hard every day of his life for his family. He took good care of his children and wife. He didn't have time to think about what the Army or anybody else was doing."
In an Oct. 18, 2001, television interview, John Clayton of the Manchester Union Leader newspaper said, "Even though there was a great grapevine in place amongst the different mills [in 1957], there was no talk about this. I asked my folks and they [said] there's no recollection of it because it was kind of kept quiet."
LSD experiments
Second on the agenda for the 1958 Fort Detrick meeting, as revealed by the document, was a detailed presentation about ongoing human experiments with a compound called EA-1729, the Army's medical code-name for LSD.
According to former Army scientists, officials from Fort Detrick's ultra-secret Special Operations Division conducted covert experiments using LSD in Western Europe in the 1950s. The 1958 document does not make reference to those experiments, but it does provide some chilling glimpses into human experiments conducted by the Army domestically.
The meeting's briefing on LSD experiments was led by Dr. Van Sim and featured two films. Before showing the films, Dr. Sim reiterated to attendees, who were obviously familiar with the Army's use of LSD from previous briefings, that the Army's interest in LSD centered on the drug's "ability to produce psychotic effects," meaning specifically "a depression or a stimulation to the central nervous system." Sim explained that other drugs in the Army's "K Program" that caused "psychic changes" were "apt to be referred to as incapacitating agents."
The first film Sim showed featured an experiment carried out on a cat. Sim explained that the cat "was one of the regular laboratory group of animals, and was known to have an aggressive nature." Said Sim, "He was an animal more or less in command of any situation in the various cages he occupied." To demonstrate this, Sim showed a portion of the film that depicted the cat toying with and then killing a mouse placed in its cage, not an unusual act for a normal feline.
After the cat was injected with "400 micrograms of LSD" (a very large amount by any standard), the cat displayed remarkably different behavior. Sim's film showed the cat cowering from the mouse and showing "actual terror" as it clawed frantically at its cage attempting to get away from the meandering rodent.
Sim's second film showed a small cadre of enlisted men going through routine training exercises. All of the squad had been "subjected to the drug" LSD except for the squad's leader. The men "paid little to no attention" to their leader's commands. In the next part of the film, the squad leader as well as the men had received the drug. Narrated Sim, "When an officer told the squad leader to put the men through the routine drill, the leader refused and told the officer to do it himself. ... There was no discipline."
Dr. Sim told the meeting that an additional series of eight tests were conducted on human subjects about six months before at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. Objectives of these tests included trying to ascertain if "a man under the influence of LSD" could operate a radarscope or "drive a tank." Sim also explained that upcoming tests possibly included one at a NIKE missile installation and another in Maryland, where LSD would be tested for use in "various interrogation procedures" by the Army's Counter-Intelligence Corps.
One physician in the group listening to Sim's presentation expressed his concern "that a very unhappy thought had gone through his mind." Asked Dr. Herbert E. Longenecker of Sim, "Suppose permission is granted to go ahead with the tests and suddenly there is an occurrence at a NIKE installation similar to the episode experienced a few weeks ago?"
Longenecker was referring to an accident that had occurred at a NIKE missile base in Middletown, N.J., on May 22, 1958. An explosion involving several missiles had killed 10 men, six of whom were Army enlisted personnel and four who were civilian technicians. Debris from the massive explosion, including at least 12 warheads, was found over three miles away. Sim, according to the 1958 document, "responded that only simulated [missile] firing is proposed; the firing of a missile is not contemplated."
Other mills involved in same Army tests
Former Army researchers report that the Arms Mill was not the only textile operation involved in anthrax tests conducted by Fort Detrick in the 1950s. They say that "at least four other mills" were involved. A 1960 medical paper authored by Dr. Philip S. Brachman and Dr. Stanley A. Plotkin verifies this. The paper, entitled, "Field Evaluation of a Human Anthrax Vaccine," states that "epidemiological studies" were conducted in "four mills located in the northeastern United States" where "Bacillus anthracis contaminated raw materials were handled and clinical infections occurred." The paper identifies the mills only as code letters: "A, M, P and S." The Army refused to identify any of the other test sites, but other sources say that two of the mills were "in the Philadelphia area" and that another was the Arel Textile Mill located near Charlotte, N.C.
In 1995, documents related to the Arms Mill outbreak were turned over, without explanation, to the National Committee on Human Radiation Experimentation in response to the committee's request to the Department of Defense for records related "to human experimentation" of any type conducted by the Army. The National Committee was created in January 1994 by President Bill Clinton to "investigate reports of possibly unethical experiments funded by the government decades ago." The Committee's Final Report to the president makes no mention of the Arms Mill incident or any of the Army's anthrax tests.
Tomorrow's Part 2 examines the federal government's investigation of the post-9/11 anthrax attacks and the seemingly neglected evidence that links the attacks to the Sept. 11 hijackers.
Related stories:
The secret history of anthrax (below) http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=25220
Feds' involvement in anthrax experiments (below) http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=25406
H.P. Albarelli Jr. is an investigative reporter and writer who lives in Florida. Jack D. Livingston contributed research assistance for this article.
--
The secret history of anthrax
Declassified documents show widespread experimentation in '40s
By H.P. Albarelli Jr.
WorldNetDaily.com
Tuesday, November 6, 2001
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=25220
The rash of anthrax attacks in the U.S. following the World Trade Center tragedy has spurred widespread interest and concern about what many believe to be a formerly obscure disease. The history of anthrax as a biological weapon, however, reveals a story quite opposite of public consensus.
The first allegations of the use of anthrax as a weapon were made against Germany during World War I. German agents stand accused of infecting cattle and horses with the disease in Bucharest in 1916 and in France in 1917. According to a top-secret 1943 report written by George W. Merck, pharmaceutical magnate and biological-warfare adviser to President Roosevelt, the U.S. possessed "incontrovertible evidence" that "as early as 1915" German agents in New York City's harbor "inoculated horses and cattle with disease-producing bacteria."
Dr. W. Seth Carus, an expert on bioterrorism and special adviser to the Department of Defense, writes in an April 2000 working paper that in 1915 German agents carrying bottles filled with liquefied anthrax infiltrated the horse pens in Manhattan's Van Courtland Park with the objective of injecting the animals there with crude cork-topped needles.
Other declassified U.S. military intelligence documents reveal that in 1916 a covertly placed Prussian medical officer, Dr. Anton Dilger, cultivated anthrax spores in a surreptitious laboratory in Chevy Chase, Md., for use against draft animals in Baltimore's port. Also, that same year in Argentina, German undercover operatives combed out across several ports, infecting European-bound horses and cattle with sugar cubes laced with anthrax.
British intelligence documents and cable intercepts from 1916-1918 reveal that the Germans infected nearly 5,000 mules and horses employed in Mesopotamia and that agents in August 1916 sent anthrax to Romania to infect sheep being transported to Russia. British documents also reveal that German agent Baron Otto Karl Von Rosen was apprehended attempting to infect draft reindeer in Norway with a vial filled with anthrax.
Dr. Theodor Rosebury, a former U.S. Army microbiologist, claimed in his 1949 book, "Peace or Pestilence," that German agents operating out of Switzerland during World War I attempted "with possibly some level of success" to spread anthrax and cholera among the "human populations of surrounding countries." Apart from Rosebury's sketchy and unverifiable account, there is no known evidence that any country seriously contemplated employing anthrax against human targets during World War I.
This was most likely because of the devastating effectiveness of the poison gases that were widely deployed during the war by both sides and a global mindset that the use of germ warfare against humans was unthinkable. But that changed decidedly in the mid-1930s.
After noting that the Geneva Protocol of 1925 prohibited "the use of bacteriological methods of warfare," a young Japanese army officer and bacteriologist, Dr. Shiro Ishii, nonetheless convinced his superiors in 1935 that he be allowed to research the many potentialities of germ warfare. By 1937, the ambitious Ishii had established a vast germ warfare complex in Pingfan, a small village outside the Manchurian city of Harbin. The complex, innocuously dubbed Unit 731, was composed of over 150 buildings and nearly 3,500 researchers and employees.
Ishii's scientists concentrated their studies on anthrax, as well as typhus, plague, cholera, botulism, smallpox, tularemia and encephalitis. Bacteria were grown in massive amounts in huge aluminum tanks scattered throughout the site. It is estimated that by 1940, Unit 731 manufactured over five tons of anthrax for placement into bombshell casings.
Ishii's mammoth complex nearly doubled in size and personnel after Japanese forces claimed that Russian agents attacked Japanese soldiers in China with anthrax and cholera, killing nearly 6,000 troops and 2,000 horses.
Unit 731 began conducting tests around the clock with anthrax. Several types of steel-walled anthrax bombs were developed and tested extensively. In 1938, Ishii himself designed a prototype porcelain anthrax bomb that shattered upon impact, scattering millions of deadly spores into the air.
To give Japanese agents the ability to target individuals in close-in and covert contacts, Ishii's scientists developed anthrax-infected chocolates and chewing gum, as well as fountain pens, hatpins and umbrellas tipped with the deadly disease.
In addition to anthrax-filled artillery shells, Unit 731 experimented extensively with hot-air balloons filled with the deadly disease.
Declassified documents from Fort Detrick, a military research facility in Frederick, Md., (the installation's name was changed from Camp Detrick after the war) partially portray a frightening scenario that might have been had World War II gone on much longer.
Beginning in late 1944, areobiologists at Camp Detrick were placed on high alert after several reports were received from western states that large balloons, some up to 150 feet around, had been sighted silently floating over populated areas.
Somewhat skeptical at first, Camp Detrick scientists quickly realized that something serious was amiss after three balloons fell to earth in California, Montana and Washington state. All were composed of a unique lightweight silky material and bore distinctive Japanese markings.
By March 1945, over 250 balloons had been discovered in nine western states, including Hawaii, and in western Canada. The few declassified documents released by the Army on the balloons reveal nothing about their contents but do note that each was armed with an incendiary device. A top secret Chemical Corps report written in 1947 by Rexmond C. Cochrane states that one balloon that fell in Montana killed a woman, that another in Oregon "killed six men in a hunting party," and that in May 1945, "five women and children in Georgia were killed while tampering with a charge fixed to one of the grounded balloons."
A massive research program like Ishii's obviously required numerous experimental subjects or guinea pigs, and there is overwhelming and chilling evidence that Ishii's unit much preferred human subjects to animals. British investigative journalists Peter Williams and David Wallace recount in their book, "Unit 731," that Ishii deliberately located his complex "in remote northern Manchuria so he could experiment on human beings." Ishii's human experiments with anthrax were especially horrendous.
According to declassified Army documents written after the war, Unit 731 human subjects, many of whom came from the Mukden POW camp and included women and children, "were tied to stakes and protected with helmets and body armor" but "their legs and buttocks were bared and exposed to shrapnel from anthrax bombs exploded yards away." Wounded thusly, the subjects were untreated but studied closely so as to ascertain how quickly they would die. Documents reveal that none lived longer than a week.
Other human subjects were surreptitiously fed food laced with anthrax and other bacteria and then monitored to measure the arrival of death. Some subjects were forced to drink liquids contaminated with anthrax and typhoid germs.
According to congressional hearings held in Washington, D. C., in September 1986, former American POWs were among Ishii's experimental subjects.
Said Montana Congressman Pat Williams at the start of the hearings: "These men are victims of a terrible secret, born 44 years ago deep in Manchuria in Japanese POW camps. This perhaps has been the longest kept secret of World War II, long denied by Japan and long concealed by the U.S. government."
The hearings produced a litany of horror stories told by former American POWs. These survivors of Japanese atrocities maintained that after they were set free at the end of the war they were sent home under strict orders "not to talk about their experiences."
Following the hearings, an Army spokesman stated that the U.S. had no "documentary evidence to corroborate the allegations" of the former POWs, because all records related to Ishii's activities had been returned to the Japanese government in the late 1950s, and no copies had been retained.
Amidst the fury of the early months of World War II, the U.S., Britain, Canada and Russia all secretly initiated sophisticated biological warfare programs in response to frequently exaggerated intelligence reports that they were being outpaced in their research by Nazi scientists. Ironically, Army documents released in the 1980s reveal that the U.S. intelligence community had gleaned precious little about the grotesque activities of Ishii's Unit 731 until near the end of the war.
That Nazi Germany never seriously embarked down the germ warfare trail has perplexed many historians and journalists. Perhaps one of the primary reasons for this was that Hitler, who had been the victim of a near fatal gas attack in World War I, found the subjects of biological and gas warfare to be abhorrent.
This is not to maintain that the Nazis conducted no biological warfare studies. They did, and as might be expected, many of these experiments conducted under the auspices of the esoteric-leaning Ahnenerbe Institute were performed on concentration camp prisoners. Most of these crude experiments were conducted at the Dachau and Ravensbrueck camps and were overseen by Dr. Walter P. Schreiber, a major general in the Nazi army. Schreiber, according to declassified Army intelligence documents and Nuremberg Tribunal testimony, was considered one of Germany's experts on anthrax. Eminent historian and former investigative reporter Linda Hunt reveals that Schreiber's litany of horrors included experiments in which camp prisoners were injected "with phenol to see how long it took them to die."
In July 1998, London's Daily Telegraph reported that in June 1944 Britain's Special Operations Executive hatched a plot to assassinate Hitler by sending a lone agent into Germany "to impregnate [Hitler's] clothing with anthrax." According to the article, the plot was never carried forward because of concerns that "successful liquidation" would turn Hitler into an unintended martyr. The article quoted one British officer who argued against the plot as saying, "It would almost certainly canonize [Hitler] and give birth to the myth that Germany would have been saved if he had lived."
British and Canadian researchers were especially aggressive in their pursuit of anthrax as a weapon of mass destruction. In the summer of 1942, after conducting anthrax experiments at their germ warfare center at Porton Down, England, the British initiated a series of large anthrax-bomb tests on Gruinard, an uninhabited island off the coast of Scotland. The first bomb exploded, infecting and killing about 30 test sheep in less than a week's time. Subsequent tests killed larger numbers of livestock. Camp Detrick liaison officer to Porton Down, William Sarles, witnessed the Gruinard Island tests.
As might have been expected, spores eventually made their way to the Scottish mainland, causing an outbreak of anthrax. As a result of the Gruinard tests, the island was so badly contaminated that it has been completely sealed off to visitors. Over the years, there have been reports that the remaining animals of the island display prominent manifestations of genetic change.
Declassified Porton Down documents reveal that the British, as early as 1941, began a battery of anthrax experiments involving spraying anthrax spores from aircraft. By early 1942, the British had also launched a series of experiments at Porton Down that involved the aerial dispersal of anthrax over herds of sheep and cattle. These same experiments led to the production of what British researchers called "cattle cakes." These were thick, compressed whey wafers dipped into anthrax and foot-and-mouth cultures. The Canadians were only slightly behind the British with their own anthrax tests conducted on a desolate prairie called Suffield near Calgary and Medicine Hat. Few details about these tests have ever been publicly released.
Encouragement for anthrax research in Britain came from the highest levels. Winston Churchill's closest scientific adviser, Lord Cherwell, informed the prime minister in early 1944 that because of the "appalling potentiality" of anthrax, Britain had no choice but to develop bombs filled with the disease. In response, Churchill ordered his military leaders to request 500,000 anthrax bombs from the United States.
Since 1942, the U.S. Army had been conducting an ongoing series of secret experiments with anthrax, often in cooperation with biological warfare scientists with the Canadian military. The Canadians were producing anthrax spores at the rate of about 150 pounds per month at a secluded location on Grosse Ile, a St. Lawrence seaway island near Quebec. Before its conversion to the bacteriological cause, the island had served as a quarantine station for immigrants wishing to enter Canada.
Grosse Isle anthrax production was slow and problematic, provoking U.S. officials to decide to produce their own anthrax spores at a multi-million dollar production facility built near Vigo, Ind., south of Terre Haute. Originally designed in 1942 by the Army as a conventional munitions plant, the newly equipped plant held 12 20,000-gallon tanks that within less than one-month's time could produce enough anthrax for 500,000 bombs. In June 1944, following the British request for a half-million bombs, the U.S. decided to produce one million anthrax bombs, half of which would be stockpiled in the U.S. for possible use.
Ed Regis, in his book "The Biology of Doom," says the shell casings for the Vigo anthrax bombs were to be "manufactured by the Electromaster Corporation, a commercial bomb maker in Detroit, Mich." and that "high explosives would be made by the Unexcelled Manufacturing Company of Cranbury, N.J."
Prior to development of the Vigo plant, the U.S. produced anthrax spores in large quantities - some say well over two tons - at Camp Detrick. Weapons research of the disease began in early 1943 after Dr. Ira Baldwin of the University of Wisconsin was hired to direct research at the just-opened Frederick installation. Baldwin was less than enthusiastic about anthrax as a weapon, as were many of his handpicked scientists. Most notably siding with Baldwin was Dr. William A. Hagen, a member of the National Research Council's Biological Warfare Committee, the group that paved the way for the creation of Camp Detrick. Hagan, affiliated with Cornell's New York Veterinary College, believed that exploitation of anthrax was too risky because the disease thrives long after use in the ground and elsewhere and is highly resistant to environmental changes.
Initially, Baldwin left the vast majority of anthrax research to Lord Trevor Stamp, a British bacteriologist who was married to an American. Stamp, who had worked at Porton Down, set up his laboratory in an area that was nicknamed "Old McDonald's farm" by a number of his colleagues. Former Camp Detrick researchers who knew Stamp report that he was often at odds with Baldwin over anthrax research, but that he "generally won out on most clashes" because he had friends in high places. Not the least of these friends was Stanley Lovell, director of the OSS Research and Development program, Merck, the essential godfather of the U.S. biological warfare program, and several high-ranking U.S. Army Chemical Corps officers who deeply resented civilian Baldwin's placement as director of Camp Detrick.
By early 1944, largely due to Lord Stamp's skillful advocacy and work, Camp Detrick engaged a full-blown anthrax weapons development program that rapidly resulted in the cultivation of large amounts of anthrax spores within the confines of the Maryland facility. Additionally, the program produced several hundred prototype anthrax cluster bombs. Expansion of the program into the Vigo operation was viewed at the time as an essential step in keeping pace with the military's wartime objectives.
Fort Detrick officials maintain that the Vigo plant was "never used to produce pathogenic agents" and that it was abandoned at the end of the war and leased to a large pharmaceutical company for private use. There has never been an official public accounting for the millions of anthrax spores and hundreds of anthrax bombs that were produced by Camp Detrick scientists prior to the re-equipping of the Vigo plant.
H.P. Albarelli Jr. is an investigative journalist who lives in Florida. His articles on the mysterious death of Frank Olson and West Nile virus also appear on WorldNetDaily.
---
Feds' involvement in anthrax experiments
Records show conflicting reports about bacterium's use as weapon
By H.P. Albarelli Jr.
WorldNetDaily.com
Wednesday, November 21, 2001
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=25406
Following the end of World War II, the United States made a determined decision - in response to the steady flow of Cold War intelligence asserting that the Russians were aggressively developing an offensive biological weapons program - to increase America's biological warfare capacity rather than curtail it.
A declassified 1975 Pentagon report states that "to understand and evaluate" the decision that resulted in the "subsequent proliferation" of biological research in the U.S., "it is necessary to first examine the threat to the free world as it was perceived at that time." Continues the report, "Of particular importance in this effort was the intensified struggle between the free world and communists and the generally accepted thesis that supremacy must be maintained in all matters which involved the communist bloc."
In a number of sections, the Pentagon report cited a January 1945 top-secret Joint Intelligence Committee study that identified several Soviet biological research stations. Chief among these was Vozrozhdeniya Island in the Sea of Aral and Gorodomyla Island in Lake Seliger. Both locations were used extensively for anthrax weaponry development.
In the final months of World War II, the United States raced the Soviets to capture any and all documents pertaining to Nazi and Japanese biological research. This effort was preceded by what has been described as "a murderous intelligence operation" launched in 1943 to capture key German scientific personnel.
Formally dubbed the Alsos Mission, the operation was conceived by Dr. Vannevar Bush, director of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development, Maj. Gen. George V. Strong, chief of Army intelligence, and Maj. Gen. Leslie R. Groves, head of the U.S. atomic project at Los Alamos. Lt. Col. Boris T. Pash was chosen by Groves to head the mission. Pash would go on to direct Program Branch 7, a top-secret Army assassination unit, and then become a member of the CIA's ironically titled Health Alteration Committee, which vigorously explored assassination techniques using anthrax-tipped and other biological weapons.
The Alsos Mission at its start focused on finding Nazi nuclear scientists but was expanded near the war's end to include the capture of Germany's top biological researchers. Alsos agents were especially interested in finding Nazi anthrax expert and SS major general, Dr. Walter P. Schreiber (see Part 1 of this article), but in 1945 Soviet troops captured Schreiber first.
In 1948, Schreiber inexplicably turned up in West Berlin claiming that he had escaped. Remarkably, despite his being wanted for war crimes and strong suspicions that he was acting as a double agent for the Russians, Schreiber was hired to work with the U.S. Army's Counter Intelligence Corps. Linda Hunt reveals in her book, "Secret Agenda," that Schreiber was employed at Camp King, a large POW interrogation center in Oberusal, Germany.
In the first quarter of 1951, a team of three scientists from Fort Detrick, a military research facility in Frederick, Md., who were attached to the CIA-funded Special Operations Division traveled to Germany to interview Schreiber. The team, which included Dr. Frank R. Olson, then Special Operations Division branch chief for planning and intelligence activities, was charged with learning all that it could about a Nazi SS project that employed "psychochemical drugs" during concentration camp interrogation experiments.
Schreiber and SS Col. Wolfram Sievers, director of the Ahnenerbe's Institute for Scientific Research, oversaw the project, which was conducted from 1942 to November 1943. Seivers was hung in 1948 after being tried at Nuremberg.
On Oct. 7, 1951, the New York Times reported that Schreiber was in Texas working for the U.S. Air Force. The article made no mention of Schreiber being a war criminal. Former Nuremberg prosecutors and several Jewish groups were outraged to learn of Schreiber's presence in the U.S. and complained to the White House. Nothing happened, and in February 1952 the New York Times reported that pressure to take action against Schreiber was mounting due to his performing "medical experiments on unwilling concentration camp victims."
After his employment contract with the Army and Air Force expired, the CIA blocked plans to send Schreiber back to Germany and in May 1952 helped arrange his relocation to Buenos Aires where he was employed as an expert on "disease and epidemics" by the Argentine government. Some former Fort Detrick researchers who declined to be identified maintained that Schreiber, on at least two occasions, lectured at the Frederick, Md., facility. Others maintain that Schreiber was relocated to Argentina so he could help facilitate the flow to the United States of other fugitive Nazi scientists hiding there.
In the Pacific
After the Allied victory over Japan, U.S. Army and intelligence agents also moved swiftly to capture Japan's Unit 731 anthrax-bomb technology and other research. The initial job fell to Col. Murray Sanders, a Camp Detrick (its name during the war) bacteriologist. Earlier, Sanders had been part of Camp Detrick's investigation team into the Japanese balloon incidents. Sanders had sounded the first alarm about the mysterious balloons flying over the U.S. possibly being armed with anthrax.
Decades later, in an interview, Sanders said, "Anthrax is a tough bug. It's sturdy. It's cheap to produce, and [the Japanese had] used it in China." In a 1985 interview with the Miami Herald, Sanders revealed that he was "duped" by the Japanese during his nine-week investigation of Unit 731 and that had he known about torturous experiments on innocent human beings conducted by bacteriologist Dr. Shiro Ishii, "I would have been very happy to be part of the firing squad."
Unable to interview Ishii because the scientist was in hiding in Japan's mountains, Sanders spent two weeks in Japan questioning Dr. Ryoichi Naito, a high-ranking Unit 731 bacteriologist who oversaw many of Ishii's horrific anthrax experiments. At the time, Sanders was unaware that in 1939, Naito had visited New York's Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in an attempt to obtain samples of lethal viruses. Refused, Naito unsuccessfully attempted to bribe employees of the Institute only to be again turned away.
When Sanders arrived back at Camp Detrick he discovered that he had contracted a severe case of tuberculosis, and he was bedridden for months. He told his replacement on the investigation, Lt. Col. Arvo T. Thompson, executive assistant to Dr. Ira Baldwin and George Merck, that he "strongly suspected" that the Japanese had conducted extensive human experiments but had been unable to obtain any definitive evidence.
Thompson, along with friends and colleagues, Olson and John Schwab, had been among the very first recruits to Camp Detrick. All three men had been initially headquartered at Maryland's Edgewood Arsenal while assisting Baldwin, Camp Detrick's first research director, in finding a suitable location for the nation's first biological warfare center. During the war, all three dealt extensively with the development of anthrax weapons. Schwab helped oversee the development of the Vigo anthrax plant in Indiana. Thompson directed anthrax experiments at Horn Island Testing Station in Pascagoula, Miss. Olson, during 1943 and 1944, oversaw aerobiology research concentrating intensively on anthrax.
Thompson, called "Tommy" by his friends, was given orders to aggressively follow up Sanders' work with the central objective of keeping all that he learned away from the Russians.
In Japan, Thompson interviewed Ishii, who had been captured by the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps. He found Ishii to be "often evasive" but still managed to glean a great deal of information from the scientist. Thompson was ordered not to discuss his sessions with Ishii with anyone.
A top-secret U.S. Army Far East Command report on Thompson's findings reads: "The value to the U.S. of Japanese biological weapons data is of such importance to national security as to far outweigh the value accruing from war-crimes prosecution." A 1956 FBI memorandum reveals that by the mid-1950s the U.S. knew everything about Ishii's human experiments but agreed not to prosecute in exchange for Japan's scientific data on germ warfare.
In May 1951, scientists at Fort Detrick were shocked to learn that Thompson had "committed suicide" while on another special assignment in Tokyo. The circumstances surrounding Thompson's death have never been publicly revealed. Two years later, Olson would also "commit suicide" under circumstances so unusual that eventually he became an icon of American mysteries. Not long before Thompson's death, according to Sanders and other former Fort Detrick researchers, Ishii was secreted into the United States to lecture at Camp Detrick. Sanders, in an interview before his death in 1988, also claimed that Ryoichi Naito was brought to Camp Detrick to lecture American researchers on Unit 731's human experiments.
Pertinent to note is that in 1996, Naito was caught up in a huge scandal in Japan that involved the shipment of HIV-infected blood to the United States. The same HIV-infected blood was sold to Japanese hemophiliacs. The company responsible for the shipments and sales of the tainted blood was Green Cross, a private blood bank founded in 1950 by Naito and two other Unit 731 researchers. Naito died in 1982 shortly after the Japanese media began referring to Green Cross as the "Vampire Blood Bank."
Anthrax in Korea?
The use of biological weapons, including anthrax bombs, by the U.S. during the Korean War is a continuing subject of heated controversy - that biological weapons were designated a top priority by the Joint Chiefs of Staff is not. Biological warfare "offers fabulous opportunities" read one Pentagon report produced at the start of the Korean War.
In October 1950, the Air Force ordered 5,000 anthrax bombs from Fort Detrick. Other large orders soon followed, but reportedly the Air Force was concerned about the ramifications of their use. Read one declassified document written in 1950: "The Air Force could be fairly accurate in predicting what a biological warfare attack would do to a city full of monkeys, but what an attack would do to a city full of human beings remained the $64,000 question."
By the time the call for an accelerated anthrax weapons program came from military leaders to Fort Detrick, debate over the use of the disease had ceased. In June 1944, Baldwin had been forced to resign over the issue.
Enlisted officers at the facility resented Baldwin, a civilian, from the start. Officers felt strongly that control of Fort Detrick should be totally in the hands of the Army. Gen. William N. Porter, head of the Army's Chemical Corps, which oversaw Fort Detrick's operations, kept Baldwin and much of his staff in the dark about all major anthrax decisions. Baldwin was told nothing about Britain's order for 500,000 anthrax bombs or about the decisions that led to the creation of the Vigo production plant.
When the Vigo plant was near operational, Baldwin was told of its existence and ordered to oversee safety issues concerning its huge anthrax-producing tanks. Because of deep concerns about faulty engineering, Baldwin refused and subsequently resigned.
At the same hour trouble was brewing along Korea's border, the Army was busy establishing a number of additional anthrax testing sites in the United States. Chief among these was the Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas that featured a number of huge underground anthrax fermenters. In 1967, the commander of Pine Bluff informed investigative journalist Seymour M. Hersh that the facility could "produce 100 gallons of a [biological warfare] agent in two days."
Dugway Proving Ground near Salt lake City, Utah, was used extensively by Fort Detrick researchers for anthrax testing. The 2,000 square mile site is notorious for a number of testing accidents that decimated nearby livestock herds. A declassified Army report reveals that anthrax was deployed at Dugway on well over 150 separate testing occasions between 1951 and 1960. Additional testing related to anthrax weapons during the Korean War was conducted at Fort Terry on Plum Island, N.Y., located off the coast of Long Island.
A declassified Department of Army report dated Feb. 24, 1977, contains a lengthy list of locations where "biological field testing of anti-personnel biological simulates involving the public domain" were held. Included on the list are San Francisco, Panama City, Florida, Washington, D.C., Hawaii and New York City. In 1953 and 1954, Fort Detrick scientists working with the CIA conducted secret tests with anthrax simulates in New York City's subway system.
In December 1951, a Reuters's news dispatch reported that the U.S. commander of troops in Korea, Gen. Matthew Ridgeway, secretly brought Ishii to Korea as a biological warfare consultant to the U.S. military. Subsequent news reports stated that Ishii made two trips to Korea as a consultant for the Army.
In early 1952, the North Korean and Chinese governments accused the U.S. of employing biological weapons. North Korea's foreign affairs minister alleged that the U.S. had dropped hundreds of bombs filled with anthrax, plague and cholera on his country. The Pentagon scoffed at the notion and flatly denied any and all accusations.
To further bolster their charges against the U.S., the Chinese released the "confessions" of 25 captured American airmen. Along with the confessions, China also released a batch of photographs that they claimed were of "American germ bombs" dropped on North Korea.
The United States categorically denied the charges and maintained that the POW pilots and airman had been "brainwashed" into making any confessions. The U.S. demanded that the World Health Organization and the Red Cross be called to investigate the allegations, but the Chinese refused to officially recognize either organization as impartial.
Historians Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman write convincingly in their book, "The United States and Biological Warfare," that the U.S. extensively experimented with and deployed biological weapons, including anthrax, during the Korean War. They offer "hard evidence" that the Pentagon lied to Congress and to the American public about wartime activities in Korea and paint a vivid portrait of the U.S. Army and Camp Detrick researchers methodically exploiting captured data on Japanese experiments.
Other biological warfare historians have sharply ridiculed the meticulous research of Endicott and Hagerman. Ed Regis wrote in a 1999 New York Times book review that the two historians advanced evidence "fabricated" by the North Koreans and Chinese.
'Ethnic weapons'
Anthrax has also factored into the darker side of biological research known as "ethnic weapons." Simply put, ethnic weapons - sometimes called "genetic weapons" - are those biological means developed to incapacitate and kill specific ethnic or racial groups.
A November 1970 U.S. Army Command Military Review article by Carl A. Larson, head of the Department of Human Genetics at Sweden's Lund University, stated, "The immense laboratory of human natural variations provides many instances of sharp differences in the activities of well-defined enzymes." Larson writes on to detail various enzyme deficiencies including the susceptibility of southeastern Asians "to a poison to which Caucasoids are largely adapted" and underscores that "Europeans, as well as Americans of African descent, have among their members about 50 percent slow [enzyme] inactivators."
Concluded Larson, "Surrounded with clouds of secrecy, a systematic search for new incapacitating agents is going on in many laboratories. During the first half of [1969], several laboratories reported factors engaged in passing over the genetic message from DNA, the primary command post, to RNA, which relays the chemical signal. The enzymatic process for RNA production has been known for some years, but now the factors have been revealed which regulate the initiation and specificity of enzyme production. Not only the factors have been found, but their inhibitors. ..."
During Camp Detrick's fledgling years, anthrax factored into ethnic weaponry when scientists there began questioning whether certain "geographical groups" better withstood anthrax attacks than others.
According to British science writer and former diplomat Wendy Barnaby, "The U.S. Navy thought of [ethnic weapons] as long ago as 1951 presumably on the basis of the observation that [African-Americans] are much more likely than whites to die from Valley Fever, a disease caught from a fungus endemic in California's San Joaquin Valley."
The future of anthrax
Without doubt, the post-9-11 anthrax attacks have left Americans deeply concerned about the future possibilities of bioterrorism conducted on American soil. Many people believe that the recent anthrax attacks marked the beginning of such activity in the U.S., but a cursory review of the history of "biocrimes" involving anthrax reveals a disturbing picture that has escaped serious public scrutiny.
A copiously researched working paper on bioterrorism produced by the Department of Defense last year reveals that in the past 10 years alone there have been a startling number of cases in the United States involving the threatened use of anthrax.
For example, in July 1997 a number of large U.S. cities, including Tampa, Atlanta, Dallas, Phoenix and Miami, received a fax that stated that their water supplies had been targeted for contamination with anthrax and botulinum toxin.
In March 1998, a canister marked "anthrax" was found inside a rented car in San Antonio, Texas. In October 1998, three abortion clinics in Louisville, Ky., received letters claiming to contain lethal amounts of anthrax.
In November 1998, a Wal-Mart store in Indiana received an anthrax letter threat. The store was evacuated. On Nov. 18, 1998, an office worker at Ocean Drive, a Miami-based magazine, opened a letter that contained an anthrax threat and a white powder. Workers in the office were treated with ciprofloxacin on the recommendations of the FBI and Army officials.
Also in November 1998, a high school in Virginia Beach, Va., received a telephone threat that the school contained an anthrax bomb. The caller said, "People will die. That is all."
A mail sorter in Pembroke Pines, Fla., on Nov. 21, 1998, found an envelope that had the words, "Congratulations, you have been exposed to anthrax," written on an outside flap. The following month, postal workers in Coppell, Texas, found similar messages on envelopes.
In February 1999, the Los Angeles Times received a letter that claimed to contain anthrax. The same month the U.S. State Department received a letter that claimed to hold anthrax. In February 1999, according to Capitol Hill police, "several congressional offices" received threats in letters that claimed to contain anthrax and other lethal biological agents.
The list goes on and on, numbering well over 100 incidents in the past three years, occurring in virtually every part of the country. Readers of the list can't help but wonder what nexus, if any, these incidents had to events following the World Trade Center attacks.
Another strange and recent incident involving anthrax occurred in March 2000 in Irvine, Calif. Anthrax containers were found buried in the yard of Dr. Larry C. Ford, a biomedical researcher who specialized in infectious diseases. According to Ford's lawyer, the doctor worked for the CIA for nearly 20 years.
Ford committed suicide after his business partner, James Patrick Riley, chief of Biofem, Inc. was shot and wounded by a masked gunman. After Ford killed himself, a number of newspapers alleged that he and Riley had corporate ties with biological warfare development in apartheid-era South Africa and with Israel. Ford was also linked to Dr. Neil Knobel, former chief medical officer for the South African Defense Forces. During the apartheid-era, Knobel oversaw South Africa's notorious Project Coast, a covert biological program directed by Dr. Wouter Basson, nicknamed "Dr. Death." South African newspapers have claimed that Basson considered employing everything from anthrax to AIDS against black militants during the struggle against apartheid.
Ironically, only one week before the World Trade Center attacks, the New York Times published an article that stated, "Over the past several years, the United States has embarked on a program of secret research on biological weapons that, some officials say, tests the limits on the [1972] global treaty barring such weapons." Written by Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg and William Broad, the article told of a secret CIA project, code-named Clear Vision, that since 1996 built and tested several model anthrax bombs that were replicated on "a Soviet-designed germ bomb that agency officials feared was being sold on the international market."
The CIA project grew out of concerns that Russian scientists "had implanted genes from Bacillus cereus, an organism that causes food poisoning, into the anthrax microbe."
Recently, according to Dr. Meryl Nass, an expert on anthrax, the strain of anthrax used in this fall's mail attacks was identified as coming from a U.S. Department of Agriculture laboratory in Ames, Iowa, "where it was originally isolated in 1950." Nass, in an exclusive interview with WorldNetDaily, said that the strain "has been out there for decades and shared with many other labs."
According to Nass and other anthrax experts, the Ames strain has been shared with the British biological warfare center at Porton Down, Fort Detrick and several colleges and universities. He stated that researchers favored the Ames strain because it "was long known as the most virulent strain against which vaccines were tested."
Oddly, following the October revelations that the Ames strain was the original source of the post-9-11 attacks, officials at Iowa State University destroyed all Ames specimens "by baking them in an autoclave," a special oven used to sterilize surgical instruments. Iowa State officials reported that they had received permission from the CDC and FBI to destroy the anthrax.
H.P. Albarelli Jr. is an investigative journalist who lives in Florida. His articles on the mysterious death of Frank Olson and West Nile virus also appear on WorldNetDaily.
-------- britain
Northern Ireland Peace Accord Is in Danger, Britain Warns
New York Times
October 7, 2002
By WARREN HOGE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/07/international/europe/07BELF.html
LONDON, Oct. 6 - Britain said today that the Northern Ireland peace accord was in danger of imminent collapse and that prompt action by Sinn Fein, the political party of the Irish Republican Army, was necessary to save it.
"I think we are at a stage which is not only serious or grave," John Reid, the Northern Ireland secretary, told the BBC today. "I think this is at the critical stage."
Mr. Reid made his statement after the police confiscated papers and computer disks in raids on the legislative offices and homes of Sinn Fein workers on Friday and arrested a high-ranking party officer. They took the action in connection with what they said was an intelligence-gathering operation conducted out of Sinn Fein parliamentary offices in the Northern Ireland Assembly.
The official, Denis Donaldson, 52, Sinn Fein's chief of administration in Stormont, the Northern Ireland Parliament, was charged in a Belfast court tonight with five counts of having information likely to be of use to terrorists. He pleaded not guilty and was ordered held in custody.
Prosecutors said they found documents in his home containing personal details of a police officer, Protestant paramilitary leaders and members of the armed forces, including the commanding officer in Northern Ireland, Lt. Gen. Sir Alistair Irwin.
The police were still questioning two men and a woman, and Mr. Reid said more charges were probable.
The accusations come at a particularly fraught moment for the troubled peace efforts since Protestants have largely lost faith in it, and the charges support their contentions that, contrary to Sinn Fein assurances, the I.R.A. is still actively involved in paramilitary activity.
Acknowledging this deep-seated concern, Mr. Reid said, "The I.R.A. have never been prepared to say the war is over or that their army is being stood down."
He said that even though the peace efforts have brought calm and progress to much of Northern Ireland, "the constant drip-feed of allegations that the maintenance of the apparatus of terror is being carried on is undermining hugely the confidence in this agreement."
He said the accumulation of incidents pointing to continued I.R.A. military activity at a time when the guerrilla organization contended that it was committed to peace was defeating his efforts to sustain the peace. "I cannot keep it going when there is a prima facie case," he said, "when these sort of things are happening, coming on top of the Colombia adventure, the burglary in Castlereagh, the charges being brought against an individual for targeting and now this."
The I.R.A. is suspected of being behind the theft in March of secret documents from the government's Castlereagh police headquarters in Belfast and responsible for a list of the whereabouts and travel habits of politicians that was discovered a month later. Three I.R.A. men also are standing trial in Colombia on charges of teaching bombing techniques to drug-running rebels there.
Mr. Reid turned aside Sinn Fein comments that the raids were politically motivated and staged to bring news coverage and said that while he had known of the year-old investigation, he was given no advance word of the raids. "This is nothing to do with publicity," he said. "This is a very serious and a very grave matter and over the next couple of weeks, we are in a critical position."
He said the government was seeking an emergency meeting in London between Prime Minister Tony Blair and the Sinn Fein president, Gerry Adams. "We certainly need answers from Sinn Fein and the republican movement," he said. "The people of Northern Ireland need answers and certainly the prime minister wants answers."
Sinn Fein's chief negotiator, Martin McGuinness, today dismissed the raids and the arrests as "a contrivance," promoted by Protestant unionists to bring down the Northern Ireland Assembly and other institutions created by the 1998 peace agreement aimed at enabling Catholics and Protestants to share power.
Unionists, most of whom are Protestants, wish to see Northern Ireland remain part of Britain, while republicans, most of whom are Catholic, want closer ties with the Irish Republic.
Mr. McGuinness said that Mr. Donaldson was innocent of the charge and that the police had not discovered any evidence in the Sinn Fein offices. He also said he found it hypocritical of the Northern Ireland Office to be complaining about I.R.A. spying. The Northern Ireland Office had "been bugging our houses for the last 30 years," he told RTE, the Irish state radio. "They've been bugging our gardens and bugging our cars. There's an awful lot of double standards and an awful lot of hypocrisy."
Prime Minister Bertie Ahern of Ireland is scheduled to meet here with Mr. Blair on Wednesday, and he said in Dublin today that he had a number of telephone conversations with his British counterpart over the weekend.
David Trimble, the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party and the first minister of the Northern Ireland Assembly, is also coming to 10 Downing Street this week. He said he would demand that Mr. Blair throw Sinn Fein out of the government.
Protestants in Northern Ireland backed the power-sharing agreement by a small margin four years ago, but today they have turned into opponents of the accord, convinced that the republicans have received more benefits from it than they have. Mr. Trimble has battled hard-liners in his party who wanted him to cease cooperation with Sinn Fein and to withdraw unionist support for the government, but two weeks ago he was forced to give in to them in a showdown meeting of his 850-member party governing council.
The session passed a motion setting a Jan. 18 deadline by which the I.R.A. had to show clear evidence of disarming or the Ulster Unionists would stage mass resignations. Their departure would have the effect of bringing the power-sharing administration to an end, because under the formula set up by the agreement, there must be cross-community approval of all legislative actions.
The Northern Ireland peace arrangement has lurched from crisis to crisis since 1998, but Sir Reg Empey, a leader of the dwindling pro-agreement forces in the Ulster Unionists, said the weekend's events posed "the single biggest threat to this process since its inception."
"We're being consistently stabbed in the back by republicans," he told RTE. "I'm not prepared to be taken for a fool, and to be used and abused and my good work thwarted by people who are so arrogant that they think they can do whatever they like."
-------- business
It's a supersized fleet carrier
By Peter Almond
LONDON SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
October 7, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20021007-34366738.htm
Boeing plans to build the world's largest airplane, capable of delivering a fleet of battle tanks directly into a war zone.
The aircraft, which has been named the Pelican, will have a wingspan of more than 500 feet and a wing area of one acre. A Boeing 747 has a wingspan of 195 feet.
Aeronautical engineers say the plane will be able to transport 14,000 tons of cargo more than 10,000 miles. The Pelican will be designed to fly 50 feet above the ocean, using the buoyant aerodynamic effect of flying close to the water to achieve maximum fuel economy.
U.S. defense chiefs believe that a fleet of Pelicans will enable them to deliver thousands of troops, tanks and aid anywhere in the world in a fraction of the time it takes cargo ships.
The Pelican will have the capacity to carry up to 17 main battle tanks, each of which weighs more than 50 tons. The largest military cargo aircraft now in service is the Russian Antonov 225, which has a range of 2,800 miles.
The Pelican would land and take off on civilian or military runways like conventional aircraft, but it would have up to 38 sets of landing gear and 76 tires to spread the weight evenly.
Powered by four advanced turboprop engines, it would be capable of cruising over land at up to 20,000 feet, although its maximum effectiveness would be over water.
Blaine Rawdon, the Pelican project manager, said: "It will be much faster than ships at a fraction of the operational cost of commercial airplanes. The ultralarge transport aircraft will be attractive to commercial and military operators that require speed. It will compete with container ships."
The aircraft evokes memories of the gigantic H-4 Hercules Spruce Goose seaplane designed during World War II by Howard Hughes, the reclusive billionaire industrialist and film producer.
Hughes built the H-4 after the U.S. war department lost interest in a plan for a flying boat that would carry bulky cargo or up to 700 troops alongside the "liberty ships" that were turned out rapidly to move supplies to Britain and elsewhere during the war.
In November 1947, thousands of people watched as the wooden eight-engined aircraft flew a mile across the harbor at Long Beach, Calif., at a height of 70 feet. The Spruce Goose never flew again.
-------- drug war
Applying market principles to drug policy
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
October 7, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20021007-74752236.htm
The environmental devastation described in "Coca snuffs out Peru forest" (World, Sept. 30) is a direct result of U.S. drug policy in South America. In an effort to eradicate coca crops, toxic herbicides are sprayed from above, hitting water supplies, staple crops and people. Aerial eradication campaigns drive peasants deeper into the Amazon basin, which in turn leads to more deforestation. If South America's rain forests are to survive, the self-professed champions of the free market in Congress had better learn to apply basic economic principles to drug policy. As long as there is a demand for drugs, there will be a supply. Destroy the Colombian coca crop, and production will boom in neighboring Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador. Destroy every last plant in South America, and domestic methamphetamine production will increase to meet the demand for cocaine-like drugs. Instead of wasting billions of tax dollars on a futile supply-side war abroad, we should be funding cost-effective drug treatment here at home.
ROBERT SHARPE
Program officer
Drug Policy Alliance Washington
-------- iran
Iran Denies Airspace for Iraq Attack
October 7, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iran-US-Iraq.html
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran will not allow the United States to use its airspace to attack Iraq, and its armed forces will defend the country's territory, the Foreign Ministry said Monday.
``We hope such an error will not be committed by anybody,'' ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said. ``It's clear our armed forces are prepared to defend the country's territorial integrity and its airspace and land. The Islamic Republic will not accept such acts in any way.''
He said Iran was not a friend of Iraq but will not take part in any military operation to topple Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Iraq's neighbors fear a U.S.-Iraq war would destabilize the region, and Iran fears U.S. influence in the region would increase if Washington succeeds in ousting Saddam.
Iran fought a 1980-88 war with neighboring Iraq and the two sides still view each other with suspicion.
``Iran has suffered a lot from Iraq. At the same time, it does not forget America's hostilities. Iran will not participate in any attack on a Muslim and neighboring country. It doesn't accept use of force'' in international relations.
Iran has intensified its diplomatic efforts to help avert a possible U.S. military attack to topple Saddam but has said it would stay away from the confrontation.
Asefi said British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw will pay a two-day visit to Iran beginning Wednesday to discuss heightened tension in the region.
Asefi said Iran was not aware if Straw would carry any message from the United States for Iran.
Earlier this month, Iran hosted officials from its arch foes, Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri and Kuwait's defense minister Sheik Jaber Mubarak Al Sabah, with Sabri seeking Iranian friendship and Al Sabah seeking Iranian support to punish Saddam.
Iran has repeatedly said it opposes a possible U.S. attack on Iraq, but has said it would support any U.N.-led action against Baghdad if inspectors confirmed the Iraqi regime was still developing weapons of mass destruction.
-------- iraq
Some in administration have misgivings about Iraq policy
By WARREN P. STROBEL, JONATHAN S. LANDAY and JOHN WALCOTT
Knight Ridder Newspapers
Mon, Oct. 07, 2002
http://www.tallahassee.com/mld/tallahassee/news/politics/4233223.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp
WASHINGTON - While President Bush marshals congressional and international support for invading Iraq, a growing number of military officers, intelligence professionals and diplomats in his own government privately have deep misgivings about the administration's double-time march toward war.
These officials charge that administration hawks have exaggerated evidence of the threat that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein poses - including distorting his links to the al-Qaida terrorist network - have overstated the amount of international support for attacking Iraq and have downplayed the potential repercussions of a new war in the Middle East.
They charge that the administration squelches dissenting views and that intelligence analysts are under intense pressure to produce reports supporting the White House's argument that Saddam poses such an immediate threat to the United States that pre-emptive military action is necessary.
"Analysts at the working level in the intelligence community are feeling very strong pressure from the Pentagon to cook the intelligence books," said one official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
A dozen other officials echoed his views in interviews with Knight Ridder. No one who was interviewed disagreed.
They cited recent suggestions by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice that Saddam and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network are working together.
Rumsfeld said Sept. 26 that the U.S. government has "bulletproof" confirmation of links between Iraq and al-Qaida members, including "solid evidence" that members of the terrorist network maintain a presence in Iraq.
The facts are much less conclusive. Officials said Rumsfeld's statement was based in part on intercepted telephone calls, in which an al-Qaida member who apparently was passing through Baghdad was overheard calling friends or relatives, intelligence officials said. The intercepts provide no evidence that the suspected terrorist was working with the Iraqi regime or that he was working on a terrorist operation while he was in Iraq, they said.
Rumsfeld also suggested that the Iraqi regime has offered safe haven to bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar.
While technically true, that too is misleading. Intelligence reports said the Iraqi ambassador to Turkey, a longtime Iraqi intelligence officer, made the offer during a visit to Afghanistan in late 1998, after the United States attacked al Qaida training camps with cruise missiles to retaliate for the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. But officials said the same intelligence reports said bin Laden rejected the offer because he didn't want Saddam to control his group.
In fact, the officials said, there's no ironclad evidence that the Iraqi regime and the terrorist network are working together, or that Saddam has ever contemplated giving chemical or biological weapons to al-Qaida, with whom he has deep ideological differences.
None of the dissenting officials, who work in a number of different agencies, would agree to speak publicly, out of fear of retribution. But many of them have long experience in the Middle East and South Asia, and all spoke in similar terms about their unease with the way that U.S. political leaders are dealing with Iraq.
All agreed that Saddam is a threat who eventually must be dealt with, and none flatly opposes military action. But, they say, the U.S. government has no dramatic new knowledge about the Iraqi leader that justifies Bush's urgent call to arms.
"I've seen nothing that's compelling," said one military officer who has access to intelligence reports.
Some lawmakers have voiced similar concerns after receiving CIA briefings.
Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., said some information he had seen did not support Bush's portrayal of the Iraqi threat.
"It's troubling to have classified information that contradicts statements made by the administration," Durbin said. "There's more they should share with the public."
Several administration and intelligence officials defended CIA Director George Tenet, saying Tenet is not pressuring his analysts, but is quietly working to include dissenting opinions in intelligence estimates and congressional briefings.
In one case, a senior administration official said, Tenet made sure that a State Department official told Congress that the Energy and State departments disagreed with an intelligence assessment that said hundreds of aluminum tubes Iraq tried to purchase were intended for Baghdad's secret nuclear-weapons program. Analysts in both departments concluded that the Iraqis probably wanted the tubes to make conventional artillery pieces.
Other examples of questionable statements include:
Vice President Dick Cheney said in late August that Iraq might have nuclear weapons "fairly soon."
A CIA report released Friday said it could take Iraq until the last half of the decade to produce a nuclear weapon, unless it could acquire bomb-grade uranium or plutonium on the black market.
Also in August, Rumsfeld suggested that al-Qaida operatives fleeing Afghanistan were taking refuge in Iraq with Saddam's assistance. "In a vicious, repressive dictatorship that exercises near-total control over its population, it's very hard to imagine that the government is not aware of what's taking place in the country," he said.
Rumsfeld apparently was referring to about 150 members of the militant Islamic group Ansar al Islam ("Supporters of Islam") who have taken refuge in Kurdish areas of northern Iraq. One of America's would-be Kurdish allies controls that part of the country, however, not Saddam.
Current and former military officers also question the view sometimes expressed by Cheney, Rumsfeld and their civilian advisers in and out of the U.S. government that an American-led campaign against the Iraqi military would be a walkover.
"It is an article of faith among those with no military experience that the Iraqi military is low-hanging fruit," said one intelligence officer.
He challenged that notion, citing the U.S. experience in Somalia, where militiamen took thousands of casualties in 1993 but still managed to kill U.S. soldiers and force an American withdrawal.
Iraqi commanders, some officials warned, also could unleash chemical or biological weapons - although the American military is warning them they could face war crimes charges if they do - or U.S. airstrikes could do so inadvertently.
Saddam also might try to strike Israel or Saudi Arabia with Scud missiles tipped with chemical or biological weapons.
Air Force Secretary James Roche said Sunday that the mobile missiles posed a threat that the United States did not know how to counter. "In 1991, we did a horrible job of destroying Scud missiles" that Iraq fired into Israel, Roche said, "and it's not clear how well we would do now."
One military officer recalled the armed forces' "gung-ho" attitude in 1991 when called upon to drive Iraqi invaders out of Kuwait, and contrasted it with today's reservations.
"People were ready to go. People were ready to volunteer," the officer said. "There's nothing like that now."
Some military and civilian officials say they're deeply troubled that in their private deliberations and public pronouncements, Bush and his top lieutenants gloss over the serious consequences that an invasion could have for the war on terrorism and for the Middle East.
Bush and his aides have tended to emphasize the benefits for the region of overthrowing Saddam, such as the spread of democracy through the Middle East. Iraqis "can one day join a democratic Afghanistan and a democratic Palestine, inspiring reforms throughout the Muslim world," the president told the United Nations in mid-September.
But Cheney, Rumsfeld and others are ignoring intelligence reports and analysis they don't like, the officials say.
"There is group-think among the leadership," said one Pentagon official.
It's impossible to predict how an American invasion of Iraq would affect Bush's war on terrorism or U.S. allies in the Middle East and South Asia, but intelligence analysts have concluded that some of the following are possible:
Such an attack, especially if it involves large-scale civilian casualties, could inflame Muslim sensibilities and help al Qaida recruit more would-be terrorists.
The U.S. effort to rebuild Afghanistan and stabilize the fragile interim government of President Hamid Karzai could be undercut if Afghans become convinced that Washington has more urgent business elsewhere and is reverting to its historic pattern of turning its back on Afghanistan.
Perhaps the greatest concern is the impact a U.S. invasion of Iraq could have on nuclear-armed India and Pakistan and their conflict over the divided Kashmir region.
Some intelligence experts think an invasion could spark huge street demonstrations in Pakistan, threatening the stability of the country's pro-U.S. president, Pervez Musharraf.
Musharraf then would be under enormous pressure to make concessions to the country's powerful Islamists, which could include lifting restraints on infiltration by Islamic militants from Pakistan into the Indian-held side of Kashmir.
Senior Indian officials, who in recent days have talked about adopting Bush's new national-security strategy of preventive strikes, could respond by attacking Kashmiri militant camps in Pakistan, a step Musharraf already has threatened to counter by attacking India.
----
Saddam's inner circle heading for cover
By Anton La Guardia
LONDON DAILY TELEGRAPH
October 7, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20021007-67751686.htm
LONDON - Members of Saddam Hussein's inner circle are defecting to the opposition or making discreet offers of peace in the hope of being spared retribution if the Baghdad dictator is toppled, according to Iraqi exiles.
The reports come as both Iraqi and Western alliance officials worked to round up support from Middle East nations for their respective sides in the expected confrontation.
Ayad al-Awi, the head of the opposition Iraqi National Accord, said his group in recent weeks had received senior defectors from the Iraqi security services, which form the regime's nerve center.
At the same time, Kurdish groups said they had received secret approaches from military commanders offering to turn their weapons on Saddam when the war begins.
They said members of the al-Majid clan, the pillar of Saddam's tribal power base, had made contact to seek assurances about their fate.
In another positive sign for the U.S. war effort yesterday, Iran said that if U.S. aircraft violated its airspace unintentionally while attacking Iraq, it would not be considered a hostile act.
Iran, for years an enemy of both Iraq and the United States, says it is opposed to a U.S. attack on Iraq and the presence of foreign forces in the vital oil-rich region.
But, "We do not consider the forced and unharmful entry into our airspace by any country as an act of enmity," Defense Minister Adm. Ali Shamkhani told Kuwait's al-Rai al-Aam daily when asked about the possibility of U.S. warplanes entering Iranian airspace.
The signs of fragmentation within the Iraqi regime indicate for the first time that Saddam's senior lieutenants believe the United States and Britain are serious about toppling him.
U.S. and British officials, who have long maintained that a credible threat of overwhelming force to bring down Saddam's regime could destroy his reign of fear and prompt senior lieutenants to seize power and avert a devastating war.
American officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, have recently spoken of Iraqis eliminating Saddam themselves, either through assassination or by sending him into exile.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said last week: "The cost of a one-way ticket is substantially less than [the cost of war]. The cost of one bullet, if the Iraqi people take it on themselves, is substantially less than that."
Exiled Iraqis have been reporting for weeks that members of the regime have been trying to build relations with the opposition.
Mr. al-Awi said the INA, a group formed by former members of the ruling Ba'ath party, had seen a surge of interest from senior members of the regime.
"We have been getting approaches for the past two or three months, but the trend is increasing. Those contacting us come from Saddam's inner circle," he said.
"Some have defected, while others have been asked to stay to help us from inside. We cannot say much about the defectors at the moment, but some may speak after they have been debriefed."
A senior Kurdish source, meanwhile, said members of Saddam's own al-Majid clan have been in contact with Iraqi opposition groups, in addition to neighboring and Western governments.
"Saddam's family is crumbling. His inner circle is making contacts all over the place, including with us," said one Kurdish official.
Nevertheless, Iraqi officials maintained publicly yesterday that the country will fight if necessary.
"We are not warmongers. We do not want war and we do not wish it to happen," said Izzat Ibrahim, the vice chairman of Iraq's Revolutionary Command Council, speaking in the city of Kirkuk 160 miles north of Baghdad.
"But if it is imposed on us, we will fight, God willing, a great fight in defense of principles and values," he was quoted as saying by Reuters news agency.
Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri arrived in the United Arab Emirates yesterday, the latest stop in a tour of the strategic Persian Gulf Arab region aimed at staving off any U.S. military strike.
-------
Saddam to Repel Attack with All Available Weapons
October 7, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iraq-saddam.html
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has warned the United States that his country is ready to resist any invasion with all available weapons.
``With whatever weapons we have in our hands, and after depending on God with faith, and because we are on the course of righteousness, we are able to confront any aggressor, from wherever he comes ...,'' Baghdad Monday newspapers quoted Saddam as saying.
The newspapers said Saddam made his comments during a meeting Sunday with top military commanders and his two sons, Uday and Qusay, called to discuss how to repel a possible U.S. attack on Iraq.
The United States and Britain, accusing Baghdad of acquiring or trying to acquire nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, are seeking U.N. Security Council support for the threat of military action unless Iraq cooperates fully with U.N. weapons inspectors.
Baghdad says it has no such weapons and no intention of acquiring them. It agreed, under great U.S. pressure, to allow the return of weapons inspectors after a four-year absence, but the conditions under which they will work remain to be settled.
The Baghdad press quoted Iraq's Air Defense Commander as reporting to Saddam at Sunday's meeting that his troops ``enjoy high morale and have made technical preparations to confront the evil aggressors' planes.''
The commander said his men ``will remain for ever the president's loyal soldiers and knights in defense of Iraq until final victory is achieved.''
Saddam said Iraqis would fight an attack even if it cost them their lives. ``Any one should die as a martyr to defend his belongings, his honor and homeland.''
His remarks were the strongest since Bush earlier this year made ``regime change'' in Baghdad a priority. Bush is due to outline his case against Saddam in a prime-time speech later on Monday.
Saddam said he was ``fully pleased to bear responsibility in leading Iraq in the present confrontation'' with Washington.
``To God, and only God, shall we bow down and not to the greedy foreigner, no matter how technically powerful and arrogant he may be,'' Saddam said, in a clear reference to the United States though he did not name it.
``Because we are good faithful worshippers of God...the fight would be decided in favor of the believers so long as they are victims of aggression.''
Saddam said Iraq's enemies crossed the oceans to ``attack us and deprive us of our dear goals without which we would be slaves with no identity, no honor and no wealth...'' But Iraq will not bow down in the face of ``threats and aggression,'' he said.
-------- israel / palestine
Israel Draws U.S. Condemnation After Gaza Raid
Reuters
Monday, October 7, 2002
By Nidal al-Mughrabi
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A56335-2002Oct7?language=printer
KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip (Reuters) - Israel drew U.S. condemnation and Palestinian allegations of massacre after killing 14 Palestinians in a raid on suspected militants in the Gaza Strip.
Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer issued a statement saying most of those killed in Monday's armor, infantry and air operation "to stop terrorist attacks" were gunmen who fired at Israeli forces.
The incursion into the town of Khan Younis raised tensions at a time when the United States has been trying to keep a lid on two years of Israeli-Palestinian violence as it pursues Arab support for possible war on Iraq.
Palestinian hospital officials, who said 80 people were wounded, identified the dead as civilians, including 10 people killed by a missile fired from a helicopter into a crowd that had gathered near a mosque.
It was the highest civilian death toll in Gaza since July 23 when a bomb dropped by an Israeli plane killed 13 civilians as well as its target, Hamas's military commander.
"They made this massacre against our people," Palestinian President Yasser Arafat said at the start of a meeting in his West Bank headquarters with Javier Solana, the European Union's foreign policy chief.
Solana is in the region pushing an initiative on behalf of an international "quartet" of Middle East peace brokers. The United Nations, part of the "quartet," said the civilian deaths in the Gaza attack could escalate the Middle East conflict.
"Such actions have no legal or moral justification," a spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said.
HAMAS VOWS REVENGE
Ben-Eliezer said the raid was mounted to "stop terrorist attacks and arrest Hamas terrorists." The militant Islamic group has killed scores of Israelis in suicide bombings. It vowed to avenge the Palestinian deaths in the Gaza Strip raid.
The State Department said the United States was "deeply troubled" by the operation in a crowded civilian area.
"We call on the Israeli military to investigate the circumstances surrounding these deaths and we expect immediate steps to be taken to prevent the recurrence of tragic incidents such as these," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said.
In a more muted response, Sean McCormack, spokesman for the White House National Security Council, said: "Israel has a right to defend itself.
"Israel should, however, consider carefully the consequences of its actions -- that includes the need to take every measure to prevent the loss of innocent life in fighting terror."
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon travels to Washington next week for his seventh White House visit since taking office.
He is widely expected to hear an appeal from President Bush to avoid action that could upset a U.S. war effort against Iraq and withhold Israeli retaliation if Baghdad attacks Israel with missiles as it did in the 1991 Gulf war.
In separate fighting in the Gaza Strip Monday, at least five people, including Palestinian riot police chief Colonel Rageh Abu Lehiya, were killed in violence between Hamas and Palestinian security forces.
The bloodshed began with what Palestinian security officials said was Abu Lehiya's kidnapping by 10 Hamas men, who then killed him.
PRIVATE VENDETTA
Hamas officials said the police chief was killed in a private vendetta by the family of a man who was shot dead by police during a demonstration a year ago. The family are well-known Hamas supporters.
After Abu Lehiya was killed, two Hamas men were shot dead when Palestinian police stopped militants for questioning.
Palestinian security forces surrounded the neighborhood where the police officer's suspected killer was believed to be holed up and clashes ensued in which another two Palestinians died. Their identities were not immediately known.
Mohammed Dahlan, a security adviser to Arafat, called on Hamas "to take a brave step and hand over" those involved in Abu Lehiya's killing.
At least 1,597 Palestinians and 602 Israelis have been killed since the Palestinian uprising for statehood erupted in September 2000.
----
12 Palestinians Killed in Gaza Raid
New York Times
October 7, 2002
By JOEL GREENBERG
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/07/international/middleeast/07CND-MIDE.html
JERUSALEM, Oct. 7 - Israeli tanks backed by helicopters raided a neighborhood in the Gaza Strip town of Khan Yunis early today, killing 12 Palestinians, including 10 who died when a missile blasted into a crowd gathered in the street, Palestinian officials said.
Hospital officials said all the dead, aged from 14 to to 52, were civilians and that up to another 100 were wounded, 25 of them critically.
Another four people were injured, Palestinians said, when the Israelis fired at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, where most of the wounded had been taken. The military said the shots were in response to mortar gire.
The Israeli Army said the incursion was intended to tackle the "terrorist infrastructure" of the militant group Hamas and was met with heavy resistance from armed Palestinians.
The military said it initiated the raid after Palestinian militants fired a rocket at a Jewish settlement near Khan Yunis, causing no casualties. It said its forces had uncovered several mortar shells and arrested one Palestinian militant in the operation.
Palestinian witnesses told news agencies that a crowd of about 200 ventured out of their houses and gathered near a local mosque when it appeared that the Israelis were pulling out.
Brig. Gen. Israel Ziff, the Israeli Army commander in the area, described the crowd as armed men.
"They fired a lot and threw grenades," he said. "The helicopter aimed at this armed group and hit them."
Both Hamas and Yasir Arafat's Fatah movement vowed revenge for the attack. A Hamas leader, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, was quoted by The Associated Press as saying: "Everyone should know that as our people were not safe in Khan Yunis, so Israelis will not be safe in Tel Aviv. We will strike everywhere."
Israel's deputy defense minister, Weizman Shiri, said he was sorry if civilians were hurt. "But what can we do?" he said on Israel Army Radio. "This is war."
More than two dozen Israeli tanks and armored vehicles rumbled into the adjacent Katiba and al-Amal neighborhoods of Khan Yunis shortly after midnight.
Two Palestinian civilians, including a woman of 50 and a middle-aged man, were killed by Israeli gunfire as a battle ensued between troops and local gunmen, witnesses and security officials told Reuters. The army said it suffered no casualties in the incursion, which lasted about four hours.
On Sunday, Jewish settlers shot and killed one Palestinian and wounded another in the West Bank when they opened fire on people harvesting olives at the village of Akraba, near Nablus, residents said.
A police spokesman said that an investigation was under way but that no arrests had been made.
The mayor of Akraba said about a dozen armed settlers tried to disperse the olive-pickers and opened fire, fatally shooting Hani Yusuf, 24, in the stomach. Another villager was wounded in a separate shooting earlier in the day.
Akraba is near several settler outposts linked to the settlement of Itamar.
In the last week residents of two other villages in the Nablus area, Yasuf and Burin, reported that settlers had entered their groves and picked their olives, in one case while soldiers prevented villagers from approaching. The police said they were investigating.
A Palestinian gunman was shot dead by Israeli soldiers in an exchange of fire in Jenin on Sunday at the city's refugee camp. He was identified a Samir Nursi, 22, a member of Islamic Jihad. There were also clashes in Nablus on Sunday.
A taxi driver from Jenin, Issa Hamarsheh, 51, died of wounds sustained Saturday when Israeli soldiers shot him as he ventured out in his cab during a curfew. Palestinians said he had been shot in the head from an Israeli tank. The army said that the soldiers had fired at the ground when the driver ignored orders to stop, and that he had apparently been hit by a ricocheting bullet.
--------
Sharon Tells Cabinet to Keep Quiet on U.S. Plans
New York Times
October 7, 2002
By JAMES BENNET
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/07/international/middleeast/07ISRA.html
JERUSALEM, Oct. 6 - Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, warned his cabinet ministers today not to talk about American plans for Iraq, urging them to overcome for the good of the possible war effort what often seems a national compulsion to share one's insights as widely as possible.
Prodded by the Bush administration, Mr. Sharon concluded that it was time to address what one senior Israeli official today called "the blabbering thing that occurs here."
Given the rollicking tumult of Israeli politics, it is not uncommon to see leaks in the news media about official anger over leaks, or to read an inside account of one high official dressing down another for talking too much to reporters. The Israeli media have been awash recently with officials' views on Iraq.
The Israeli media have also been reporting that the Bush administration is furious about the chatter.
"Everybody wants to voice his opinion on any lively subject," the senior Israeli official said. "This is healthy. But there are times when you need to be responsible, to take responsibility, and to shut up."
Late last week, Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, who in the past has shared too much for the Bush administration's taste, ventured that the Americans would attack Iraq at the end of November. His comment captured banner headlines, even though his hasty clarification said that he was merely voicing a "personal assessment" and that he meant the attack would begin at the end of November or later.
Mr. Sharon is planning to go to Washington this month, at President Bush's invitation, to discuss Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
After today's cabinet meeting, the official public summary reported tersely, "Prime Minister Sharon requested that ministers cease making remarks about Iraq."
Even as Mr. Bush has sought in recent days to play up the imminence and potency of the Iraqi threat, some of Israel's top security officials have played both down.
Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, Israel's chief of staff, was quoted in the newspaper Maariv today as telling a trade group in a speech over the weekend, "I'm not losing any sleep over the Iraqi threat." The reason, he said, was that the military strength of Israel and Iraq had diverged so sharply in the last decade.
Israel's chief of military intelligence, Maj. Gen. Aharon Farkash, disputed contentions that Iraq was 18 months away from nuclear capability. In an interview on Saturday with Israeli television, he said army intelligence had concluded that Iraq's time frame was more like four years, and he said Iran's nuclear threat was as great as Iraq's.
General Farkash also said Iraq had grown militarily weaker since the Persian Gulf war in 1991 and had not deployed any missiles that could strike Israel.
The torrent of newspaper articles continued today with Yediot Ahronot elaborating on reports in the United States about the details of American-Israeli plans for coordination in the event of war. It said that Mr. Bush would give Mr. Sharon 72 hours notice and that the two nations had agreed on targets in Iraq. It also mentioned previously published reports that the Americans would offer Israel a satellite to provide early warning of Iraqi missile strikes and that spare parts and other American equipment would be stored in Israel.
The Bush administration wants to dissuade Israel from responding should Iraq attack it after an American invasion, fearing that Israeli action would rally Arab support for the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein.
--------
Israel Confident in Missile Defense
October 6, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Israel-US-Iraq.html
JERUSALEM (AP) -- Israel, which has deployed two of its cutting-edge Arrow anti-missile batteries and is building a third, believes the air defense system would destroy more than 90 percent of any missiles launched by Iraq, officials said Sunday.
Also, the United States promised to give Israel three days notice ahead of any American military strike against Iraq, the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot said. The report, which detailed a series of planned cooperation measures, did not cite sources, though the leading paper has top-level contacts with Israeli military and political leaders.
Amid the flurry of reports and speculation about a possible U.S. strike against Saddam Hussein, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told his Cabinet ministers Sunday to limit their public comments and not speak about Iraq.
Israeli officials have spoken out daily on possible scenarios involving U.S. military action, and Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said last week he believed a U.S. attack was likely around the end of November.
The comments have prompted U.S. officials to warn Israeli officials to be less expansive when talking about military options.
Sharon plans to travel to Washington to meet Bush on Oct. 16 for discussions about the Israel-Palestinian conflict and U.S. action in Iraq.
President Bush has said the United States would be prepared to strike Iraq and oust Saddam if he refuses to let U.N. weapons inspectors return to search freely for weapons of mass destruction.
In Israel, many fear that Saddam would seek support from the Arab world by firing Scud missiles at Israel, as in the Gulf War, when Israel was targeted with 39 Scuds that caused damage and injuries, but no deaths.
All Iraqi missiles in the Gulf War had conventional warheads -- but the main fear now, as then, is the possibility of a nonconventional attack, including biological and chemical war heads.
The Patriot missile defense batteries, built by the United States as an anti-aircraft system and modified to guard against incoming missiles, had only partial success against the Scuds in the Gulf War.
With assistance from the United States, Israel spent the past decade developing the Arrow system, designed to intercept a Scud missile at high altitude early in its flight, before reaching Israeli airspace.
A Patriot can only knock out an incoming missile as it nears the end of its flight.
Israel still has Patriot batteries that can be used as a second line of defense. A Patriot battery was recently spotted and photographed by the media near Israel's nuclear reactor in Dimona, in the southern Negev Desert.
``According to the simulations and experiments that we have done, we estimate that it is quite likely our success rate in dealing with missiles will be over 90 percent,'' said Defense Ministry spokeswoman Rachel Nidek-Ashkenazi.
``All our estimates show that we are not expecting hundreds of missiles because (Iraq) doesn't have enough launchers,'' she said.
Israeli officials have acknowledged that one Arrow missile defense battery has been deployed at the Palmachim Air Force Base, south of Tel Aviv. That would protect Israel's largest metropolis, and surrounding areas.
Israeli officials have not said where the second battery is deployed. A third battery is under construction and could be deployed soon, according to a military source, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
If the United States strikes Iraq, the Americans will also provide Israel with up-to-the-minute satellite information that should detect any Scud launches, Yediot Ahronot reported.
The United States also plans to stockpile military equipment and spare parts at Israeli military bases, for possible use in a U.S. campaign, the newspaper said, without citing any sources.
In the early stages of any U.S. assault, American forces are expected to carry out an intensive search in Iraq's western desert, the launching site for any Scuds directed at Israel, the newspaper added.
``I'm not losing any sleep over the Iraqi threat since over the last decade, a significant gap has opened between Iraqi and Israeli capability,'' the army chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon. ``Of course, any Iraqi initiative against Israel will require that Israel defend itself.''
The head of Israeli military intelligence, Maj. Gen. Aharon Zeevi-Farkash, told Israeli television he didn't expect Iraq to use missiles against Israel at the start of an American offensive. But he said Saddam might use rockets or aircraft to deliver chemical or biological weapons if he feels cornered.
--------
U.S. Troubled by Israeli Raids
October 7, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Mideast.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The State Department stepped up its criticism of Israel on Monday, saying it was ``deeply troubled'' by raids on Palestinian-held areas that killed civilians.
As usual, the criticism was couched in an affirmation of Israel's right to defend itself, but in ways that do not harm civilians.
The Israeli army said most of the victims in a raid in Gaza were armed men. But State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said many civilians were victims.
He said there were civilian casualties in other Israeli raids, as well, and ``we are deeply troubled.''
Recently, the Bush administration criticized Israel for laying siege to Yasser Arafat's compound on the West Bank and for trying to assassinate a leading Palestinian bombmaker in an attack that killed civilians.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is due to meet with President Bush at the White House next week.
The administration long has criticized Israel's counter-terror tactics, but as the administration moves toward war with Iraq, an Arab state, it is especially sensitive to Israel's military moves against the Palestinians.
Secretary of State Colin Powell met, meanwhile, with Salam Fayad, the Palestinian finance minister who Boucher described as playing a role in reform efforts.
He said they talked about U.S. assistance to the Palestinians, but that no decision was imminent.
Fayad is due to meet with Condoleezza Rice, Bush's assistant for national security, on Tuesday.
Bush in June called for an end to corruption within the Palestinian Authority and said there also must be moves toward democracy before he would try to establish a Palestinian state.
He also called for Arafat's ouster, but that demand has been played down by the White House and State Department since.
-------- mideast
Kuwait sees heavier Gulf War environmental damage
Story by Stephanie Nebehay
REUTERS IRAQ:
October 7, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/18067/story.htm
GENEVA - Kuwait said that oil well fires set by Iraqi troops in the 1991 Gulf War, and measures taken to extinguish them, had caused greater environmental damage than previously thought.
Khaled Ahmed Al Mudhaf, chairman of Kuwait's Public Authority for Assessment of Compensation for Damages Resulting from the Iraqi Aggression, was reporting the first results from U.N.-financed studies into environmental destruction.
In his report to the U.N. Compensation Commission (UNCC), whose Governing Council began a three-day meeting on Tuesday, he cited extensive harm to fresh water supplies and the soil.
Al Mudhaf gave no figures. But U.N. officials said that the findings could swell a $17 billion claim already submitted by Kuwait for environmental damage during Iraq's August 1990 invasion and seven-month occupation of the emirate.
The Kuwaiti official said that hydrocarbons from the sabotaged oil wells and salt from seawater used to douse the fires were "steadily and irreversibly infiltrating into these (fresh groundwater) aquifers and rendering the water completely unsuitable for human consumption unless treated."
A hardened layer of sand and oil, caused by the bursting oil wells, covered 350 square kms, rather than the 210 square kms stated in Kuwait's pending claim, according to Al Mudhaf.
HUGE ENVIRONMENTAL CLAIMS
Kuwait has already received $16.5 billion compensation through the fund for lost oil and the cost of putting out wellhead fires.
Kuwait, Iran, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Syria account for most of the $50 billion in environmental claims against Iraq - the last and biggest category being considered for payment by the reparations fund, due to wrap up work at the end of 2004.
The UNCC has so far received overall claims valued at $300 billion. It has approved $42.6 billion in claims by individuals, companies and governments.
Last week, the UNCC's Governing Council is due to approve a payment of nearly $700 million to Kuwait for damage caused by Iraqi troops who left mines and ordnance as they fled a U.S.-led alliance, according to diplomats and U.N. sources.
But Iraq charged that the claim filed by the Kuwaiti Defence Ministry, Kuwait Petroleum Company (KPC) and Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) was "exaggerated".
"They are asking for $700 million to demine an area which is very small compared to Afghanistan, where $130 million is being spent," Iraq's ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva, Samir Al-Nima, told Reuters.
The UNCC currently receives 25 percent of the proceeds from the U.N.'s oil-for-food programme, which allows Iraq to sell oil.
The Governing Council, composed of the same 15 members as the U.N. Security Council, is also due to approve payment of some $67,000 to Iran and $8.2 million to Saudi Arabia this week for proven environmental damage, according to diplomats.
----
Petroleum fuels debate on Iraq war
By David R. Sands
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
October 7, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20021007-8413366.htm
For the skeptics, a war with Iraq isn't really about Saddam Hussein and his deadly military arsenal. For some ardent supporters, it is about that and much more.
As the Bush administration tries to nail down a U.N. agreement to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, activists pro and con say much more is at stake than the fate of one dictator in one middling Middle Eastern country.
The real motivations behind the Bush administration's hard line with Baghdad, critics say, include lucrative oil and defense contracts, and winning control of Congress to rewriting the Middle East political map for the benefit of America's main regional ally, Israel.
They contend that U.S. military moves in the war on terrorism since September 11, from Afghanistan through Central Asia to Iraq, have been dictated by the country's thirst for foreign oil.
"If the chief export of this area were broccoli, do you think this stuff would be going on?" asked Kevin Danaher of the human rights group Global Exchange.
Iraq has the world's second-largest proven oil reserves after Saudi Arabia, and exploration of promising new fields has been crippled by a decade of U.N. sanctions. French and Russian firms have an inside track on exploration, based on previously signed contracts, but a war and a new regime in Baghdad could give eager U.S. energy firms a fresh opportunity.
Both sides in the U.S. debate have been accused of letting financial considerations influence their policy prescriptions.
Prominent Republican skeptics of unilateral action, including former secretaries of State James A. Baker III and Lawrence Eagleburger and former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, have seen their own business and consulting deals in the Middle East come under scrutiny.
The Scowcroft Group, a Washington-based "international business advisory group," says on its Web site that Mr. Scowcroft and other firm principals enjoy "strong ties to key decisionmakers" in the Middle East and elsewhere.
Mr. Eagleburger's law firm consults for energy companies operating in the Middle East, while Mr. Baker is a senior counselor to the Carlyle Group, the Washington-based merchant banking firm whose clients include major defense firms and the ruling family of Saudi Arabia.
Left-wing and isolationist sites on the Internet teem with conspiracy theories that the war is being pushed by an administration with personal and financial ties to the oil industry, starting with the president, a charge angrily denied by the White House.
National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice served on the board of oil giant Chevron for a decade before assuming her present post, while Commerce Secretary Donald L. Evans ran a multibillion-dollar Denver oil and gas firm.
Most suspicious to the conspiracy theorists are the former business dealings of Vice President Richard B. Cheney, seen as a leading hawk in the internal administration debate. Mr. Cheney was the chief executive officer at the energy-services firm Halliburton in the mid-1990s, a company that had contracts to rebuild many of the exploration and drilling facilities in the region damaged in the Persian Gulf war.
Ironically, some of the staunchest supporters of war with Iraq say oil is indeed a reason to take on Saddam - but not for its financial value to the United States.
Clinton administration CIA Director R. James Woolsey, who has testified before Congress in support of military action against Saddam, argued that oil profits have financed "the three totalitarian movements in the Middle East."
These are Iraq, Iran and al Qaeda, which is financed in large part by the seed money provided by terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden and other Saudis.
"We are at war," Mr. Woolsey said. "We should start by asking what we can do, as soon as possible, to undercut our enemies' power."
For a small, critical core of conservative intellectuals in and close to the Bush administration, the focus on Saddam did not begin September 11, and the campaign to eliminate him from power would benefit U.S. strategic and economic interests around the world.
Mr. Cheney hinted at this in an Aug. 26 speech to a veterans group in Nashville, Tenn.: "Extremists throughout the region would have to rethink their strategy of [holy war]. Moderates throughout the region would take heart. And our ability to advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process would be enhanced, just as it was following the liberation of Kuwait in 1991."
The argument is not new.
In 1996, the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies assembled a study group to produce recommendations for the incoming government of Likud Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Among the participants were American analysts destined to become key voices in the Bush administration, including Douglas Feith, now undersecretary of defense for policy; David Wurmser, now a special assistant to State Department arms-control chief John R. Bolton; and Richard Perle, the immensely influential conservative defense strategist who how heads a civilian Pentagon advisory board.
Their recommendation: Israel should make a "clean break" with past peacemaking efforts and "shape its strategic environment" by using a traditional balance-of-power approach.
Elements of such a strategy would include removing Saddam from power and working with Turkey and Jordan to "roll back" Syria.
Israel would "transcend its foes" by "re-establishing the principle of pre-emption, rather than retaliation alone, and by ceasing to absorb blows to the nation without response," according to a summary of the panel's deliberations prepared by the think tank.
--------
Syria Accuses U.S. of Eyeing Iraqi Oil
October 7, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-syria-usa.html
DAMASCUS (Reuters) - Syria's official press accused Washington Monday of trying to get its hands on Iraq's vast oil reserves by hampering the return of U.N. arms inspectors and pushing the U.N. Security Council to authorize a war.
``America's obstruction of the international arms inspectors' return to Iraq and its attempt to issue a new Security Council resolution that includes a threat of military force against Iraq lead to one end,'' said the state-owned al-Thawra newspaper.
``The Americans have long planned to destroy this Arab state and today are implementing their scenarios for the appropriation of its oil and wealth under one pretext or another, under the umbrella of the United Nations or not,'' it said in an editorial.
President Bush said in his weekly radio address aired Saturday, that ``if...the Iraqi regime persists in its defiance, the use of force may be unavoidable.''
Under threat of attack, Baghdad has said it would allow the return of U.N. arms inspectors who left in 1998 after trying to identify and destroy suspected nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs.
But the United States wants inspectors to return to Iraq only after the U.N. passes a tough new resolution that would give them unlimited access in Iraq and Washington the right to attack if it judges Baghdad has impeded the inspection process.
Baghdad has flatly denied it is developing such weapons but Bush has made it clear he wants to see Iraqi President Saddam Hussein gone, regardless of whether inspectors return.
Al-Thawra said Washington was undermining the United Nations with its determination for a ``regime change'' in Baghdad.
``First, Bush got the backing of the American Congress to use force against Iraq, then he set about paralyzing the United Nations and canceling out its role by pressuring it, blackmailing it and restricting its choices to render the military option the only option,'' said the paper.
--------
Saudi May Tighten Visa Procedures for U.S. Citizens
October 7, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-saudi-usa-visas.html
RIYADH (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia is expected to start fingerprinting Americans as part of new visa procedures put in place after Washington tightened restrictions on Arab and Muslim visitors last week, the U.S. embassy said.
``The embassy wishes to advise American citizens that in the near future the government of Saudi Arabia may start requiring American citizens to be fingerprinted as part of their visa or entry process,'' said the embassy said in a wardens' message received by Reuters Monday.
``There also is the possibility that the duration of visas to Saudi Arabia will be shortened for American citizens and visa fees increased,'' said the message, which was issued Sunday.
Around 30,000 Americans live in the oil-rich kingdom, Washington's main Gulf Arab ally.
The tit-for-tat move comes amid Saudi-U.S. tensions over last year's suicide attacks on New York and Washington, the Middle East conflict and a possible U.S. attack on Iraq.
The United States last Tuesday brought in new entry and exit legislation subjecting visitors to increased scrutiny through fingerprinting, photographs and registration.
Washington blames Saudi-born dissident Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network for the hijacked plane attacks on U.S. cities and identified 15 of the 19 hijackers as Saudis.
U.S. media and some congressman have attacked the kingdom for its perceived failure to do enough to combat terrorism.
Under the new U.S. visa rules, visitors subject to the increased scrutiny will be from countries considered by the United States to be sponsors of terrorism and other unspecified nations. Some Arab immigration groups and Muslim countries fear that those targeted are likely to be Middle Eastern.
Newspapers have said that hundreds of Saudi and Arab students were unable to continue their studies after they were denied entry to the United States. The State Department has said their visas were only delayed.
Muslim nation Malaysia has branded the U.S. restrictions as discriminatory and said they only served to fuel anti-Muslim hysteria. At least 150 Malaysian students were denied entry to the United States.
All 19 September 11 hijackers entered the United States on valid visas but several stayed beyond their expiration dates.
-------- nato
Tensions With Russia Propel Baltic States Toward NATO
By Susan B. Glasser
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, October 7, 2002; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A52273-2002Oct6?language=printer
RIGA, Latvia -- It was meant to be a powerful symbolic moment, the time when Latvia and its two Baltic neighbors, Lithuania and Estonia, would take their place alongside the United States in the war on terrorism. The three tiny countries, former Soviet subjects eager to join the West, would send a small team of soldiers to the new U.S. military base in Kyrgyzstan, a token but resonant contribution to the fight in nearby Afghanistan.
It didn't work out that way.
Instead, the Baltic soldiers are sitting out the war on terror. In May, the Kyrgyz government that at first welcomed the idea refused to allow them into the country. The reason, according to senior Latvian sources, was pressure from Russia. So rather than offering a symbolic gesture of support for the United States, the Baltic team has become a symbolic reminder of the many ways, large and small, that Russia has not yet become reconciled to the loss of its former Baltic territories.
Here in this former Soviet republic, where the Russians are routinely referred to as "occupiers" and Stalin-era atrocities are still front-page news, the message appeared obvious. Russia may no longer rule, but it doesn't have to make things easy, either.
Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia are among seven East European countries likely to get invitations to join NATO in November, marking the first time the military alliance would incorporate former parts of the Soviet Union that it was created to confront. Officially, Russia has dropped its opposition, but as incidents like the Kyrgyz mission-that-wasn't suggest, history still weighs heavily on present-day politics.
For President Vaira Vike-Freiberga of Latvia, that is why the choice on NATO couldn't be more straightforward. The main argument for joining the alliance, she said in a recent interview, is simply this: "the fact that you can go to bed and not worry about somebody knocking on the door and putting you on a train for Siberia."
Other countries might debate the relevance of NATO in the post-Cold War world, wondering about the need for a military force that has outlasted the enemy it was meant to fight. But here, Vike-Freiberga and other leaders are eager to deal a final blow to the former occupiers next door, 11 years after winning their independence.
Latvians regard NATO as a "security blanket," as a top Western diplomat here put it, and a means to separate themselves once and for all from Russia. Their constant frame of reference is World War II, when first the Soviets, then the Germans, then the Soviets again swallowed up the Baltics. "NATO has given security for people since the end of World War II," said Girts Valdis Kristovskis, the Latvian defense minister. "More than anyone, we understand how important this is."
That Latvia and its two neighbors -- ancient trading centers with a combined population today of about 8 million -- are poised to join NATO, represents a remarkable turnaround. Just last year, their inclusion in NATO was far from a foregone conclusion and a subject that threatened to derail arms talks and other cooperation between the United States and Russia.
But after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks last year, President Vladimir Putin of Russia reversed his policy toward the West and muted his opposition to the Baltic republics joining NATO. The official line now coming from the Kremlin boils down to this: Any country is free to make whatever security arrangements it chooses. For Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, that's as close as they're going to get to walking papers.
Even so, the past remains such a painful subject here that it can hardly be closed by Kremlin decree. Despite the Russia-U.S. rapprochement, said Vike-Freiberga, "we haven't seen any change" in relations with Russia over the past year.
The most acute flash point between Moscow and the Baltics has been the uneasy status of the hundreds of thousands of ethnic Russians who remained after independence. In Latvia, where about 670,000 of the 2.3 million people are ethnic Russians, only about 317,000 are citizens. The rest live in a legal gray zone, ineligible to vote and travel abroad on non-citizen passports. The United States and other NATO members have pressured Latvia to reform restrictive laws aimed at the Russian population, using the leverage of joining NATO to encourage what is delicately known here as "social integration."
Ethnic Russians complain about restrictions on the amount of Russian-language television programming and a new law that would require Russian-speaking high school students, beginning in 2004, to study exclusively in Latvian. Russia calls such problems a human rights issue, and nationalist politicians in Moscow regularly cite the mistreatment of Baltic Russians in efforts to score political points at home.
In Latvia, today's leading "Euro-skeptics" are associated with For Human Rights, the pro-Russian political party. With an estimated 90 percent of his voters drawn from the ranks of Latvia's Russian speakers, party leader Janis Jurkans says Latvia should not join NATO.
His concerns range from the practical -- "We are a poor country, we can't afford it" -- to the politically provocative: "Where is the threat that requires us to join NATO? . . . From the Russian military? If they come here, will you Americans vote for starting war with Russia? Would Americans risk starting a nuclear war because of Latvia?"
For Jurkans, history also is at issue, and he wishes the Latvians would just get over theirs.
"We should let bygones be bygones," he said, rather than pursuing trials against Russians accused of carrying out Stalin-era deportations and denying a visa to Russian extremist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Such views have made Jurkans a popular figure in Moscow. Last weekend, Jurkans, whose party holds just nine seats in Parliament, got an audience in the Kremlin with Putin.
Although Putin may have "swallowed this bitter pill," as Jurkans describes the Russian attitude toward NATO expansion, there are indicators that Russian leaders are actively looking for ways to undermine Baltic countries still regarded by some in Moscow as rebellious colonies. In this war for history, symbolism counts, which is why the Russian State Duma, or lower house of parliament, refuses to ratify the negotiated treaties that would legally delineate the border between Russia and Latvia.
Doing so would be tantamount to admitting that the Baltics are forever lost to Russia, so the Duma instead has done nothing. "They don't want to give up their imperial ambitions. They can't accept that Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia will be absolutely independent states," said Dzintars Kudums, a Latvian parliamentary leader.
Russia has in other ways sought to hinder the status of the Baltic republics, such as this spring's skirmish over sending troops to Kyrgyzstan. "Our big eastern neighbor influenced this decision," said a senior Latvian official who investigated the matter. Just two weeks ago, Sergei Ivanov, Russia's defense minister, renewed demands that the Baltic republics ratify a treaty limiting the size of conventional forces in Europe before they enter NATO, which U.S. officials have opposed.
Such tensions with the former superpower next door have sparked street-level opposition among Latvia's Russian speakers to joining NATO. Walking the immaculately restored cobblestone streets of historic old Riga, it is easy to find these NATO naysayers.
"Latvia will become a slave state again," said Svetlana Khristicha, an ethnic Russian. The only difference, she said, is that this time "it will have to submit to NATO."
Even for many ethnic Latvians, there is a recognition that joining NATO is more an act of symbolism than actual security. "NATO will not make Latvia stronger. NATO will not protect Latvia from Russia," said Ilga Biedrinya, 56, who remembers the Soviet occupation that swallowed up her country. "We need to be a nonaligned country, a neutral country without weapons."
Most persistent are questions about whether Latvia, still struggling to undo the legacy of its Soviet-dominated economy, could afford to build the state-of-the-art defense force required of would-be NATO members. "Joining NATO will make the country even poorer," said Stas Larionov, a Russian-speaking bus driver, as he ticked off a list of more pressing practical problems than alliance membership, things like high utility bills and the cost of gas.
The Latvian government this month approved a plan that would require the country to spend 2 percent of its gross domestic product on defense, starting in 2003 and continuing until 2008. The 2 percent threshold is a NATO requirement -- one already met this year by the other two Baltic countries -- and it amounts to a significant commitment of resources for a country that has yet to invest in major health care, education or other social welfare programs since the fall of the Soviet Union. To reach the 2 percent level, Latvia's defense spending will have to jump by 22 percent next year, to $184 million. As recently as 1999, Latvia spent only 0.84 percent of its GDP on defense.
Kristovskis, the defense minister, said, "Ten years ago, we had to start from scratch," after the Soviet army pulled out and left nothing behind. The concept of the reborn Latvian military was "small but capable," as one Western diplomat put it, with a stress on specialties such as naval mine clearance. "The Balts' emphasis on specialization is a model of what we'd like other NATO nations to do," the diplomat said.
In the end, though, the Baltics' membership in NATO is not about military matters. It is an explicitly political decision, and one that is "going to mean a lot for us psychologically," said Ojars Latvins, a former Latvian ambassador to the United States who heads a pro-NATO group here.
Opinion polls reveal a public that is far more skeptical about future membership in the European Union than it is about teaming up with a former Cold War enemy. Recent polls show support for the EU down to just 40 percent, while support for NATO has risen in recent months, reaching 66 percent.
"We need to join the EU to live better," said Kudums, the parliamentary leader. "But to live at all, we need to join NATO."
-------- russia / chechnya
Chechen Attacks Kill 11 Russian Soldiers
Associated Press
WORLD In Brief,
Monday, October 7, 2002
Washington Post; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A52299-2002Oct6?language=printer
VLADIKAVKAZ, Russia -- Rebel attacks and land-mine explosions killed 11 Russian soldiers and injured 12 others in the separatist region of Chechnya, an official said.
Russian forces, meanwhile, tightened their grip around neighboring Ingushetia, where a surprise rebel attack last month raised fears that the three-year-old Chechen war was spreading.
Rebels have attacked Russian positions in Chechnya 19 times since Saturday, killing five servicemen and wounding six, the Chechen administration official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Two special forces soldiers were killed and one was wounded when a land mine exploded in Grozny, the Chechen capital, the official said. The blast also injured a pedestrian.
An army Jeep also came under attack in Grozny, killing one serviceman.
Special forces soldiers clashed with rebels near Goyskoye in the Urus-Martan region in southwestern Chechnya, killing three soldiers and wounding another. One rebel was also killed and another detained, the official said.
-------- spy agencies
New Female Boss Takes over at Britain's MI5
October 7, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-britain.html
LONDON (Reuters) - Eliza Manningham-Buller takes over as Britain's spy chief this week, becoming only the second woman to head the country's national security service.
Manningham-Buller officially replaces Stephen Lander as director general of Britain's counter-espionage service MI5 on Tuesday, the Home Office (interior ministry) said Monday.
A former schoolmate of Princess Anne at Benenden boarding school in the southern English county of Kent, Manningham-Buller is only the second woman to run the security service after Stella Rimington who stepped down in 1996 when Lander took over.
An expert in counter-terrorism, the 53-year-old is a career counter-espionage agent who joined the security service in 1974 after three years as a teacher.
In the formative days of her career, she worked on counter espionage against Soviet agents in Britain, including the case of key defector Oleg Gordievsky.
She was deeply involved in investigating the downing of PanAm flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in December 1988 which killed 270 people.
Libyan Abdel Basset al-Megrahi is serving life in Glasgow's Barlinnie jail for the bombing.
Manningham-Buller moved from there to Washington as senior intelligence liaison officer with the CIA during which time Iraq invaded Kuwait, sparking the Gulf War.
She returned to Britain in 1992 to take charge of the newly created Irish counter-terrorist section, leading the hunt on the British mainland for bombers from the Irish Republican Army fighting to end British rule in Northern Ireland.
Manningham-Buller made Irish counter-terrorism the focus of her work for most of the period from 1992 to 1997 when she was appointed Deputy Director of the security service to back up the shadowy Lander.
In this role she had responsibility for liaison with other law enforcement and intelligence agencies -- a role that took her back to Washington the day after the September 11 attacks on the United States.
-------- un
U.N. Report: Heights of discretion
October 7, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20021007-77922457.htm
How touchy are the negotiations on the return of the U.N. weapons inspectors? Reporters are no longer permitted above the fifth floor of U.N. headquarters in New York without an escort.
The rule restricting press access apparently has been on the books for some time but is imposed only in times of crisis or intense interest. Longtime reporters remember similar rules imposed during the Balkans negotiations.
"UNMOVIC was so upset about reporters waiting in the hallways that they called down and reminded us about it," said a U.N. spokesman. UNMOVIC is U.N. speak for the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission that oversees the search for dangerous weapons in Iraq.
Under normal circumstances, U.N. correspondents are free to conduct interviews or pick up documents throughout the U.N. headquarters building.
Although miffed, few reporters believe the rule will be enforceable.
U.N. officials say the curtailed access will have no effect on coverage of the organization or its activities.
--------
Inspectors Begin Training for Iraq
October 7, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Weapons-Inspectors-Iraq.html
VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- U.N. arms inspectors kicked off four weeks of technical training Monday ahead of their possible redeployment to Iraq for a fresh assessment of Saddam Hussein's weapons arsenal.
Chief inspector Hans Blix returned to Vienna to address the inspectors at the Vienna headquarters of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear monitoring group, where the Iraqis last week agreed on logistics for the inspectors' eventual return to Baghdad.
The training sessions, which run through Nov. 8, involve inspectors from the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, known as UNMOVIC. The New York-based inspectors specialize in detecting chemical and biological weaponry and the long-range missiles capable of delivering such arms.
The IAEA's Vienna-based nuclear inspection team is not participating in the training, said Ingrid Lehmann, chief spokeswoman for the U.N. complex in the Austrian capital.
Addressing the inspectors behind closed doors, Blix did not say if and when the teams would return to Iraq, but characterized the training as ``new and different'' from past sessions because the Iraqis have agreed in principle to their return, Lehmann told The Associated Press.
About 50 UNMOVIC inspectors from 25 different countries are taking part in the technical training, which Lehmann described as routine. Five similar sessions have been held over the past year or so, she said.
Blix, under pressure from the United States and Britain, agreed last week that new weapons inspections in Iraq should await U.N. Security Council action on a tough new resolution setting out terms for the search.
Although Iraq has said it would allow the inspectors to return, it has drawn the line at opening eight so-called presidential sites to surprise inspections. Unannounced visits to the sites, which include Saddam's palaces, were banned under a 1998 deal that U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan cut with Baghdad.
The United States, which accuses Saddam of stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, has demanded revised procedures overriding the 1998 agreement and providing completely unfettered access to sites across Iraq.
Saddam denies that he has nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, and on Sunday, Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations appeared to show flexibility on the presidential sites.
``I don't think that will be a huge problem between us and the inspectors,'' Mohammed al-Douri said on ABC's ``This Week.'' ``Certainly, we can accommodate ourselves with the U.N. to have free access to presidential sites.'' He did not elaborate.
Blix has said that an advance team of inspectors could deploy to Iraq as early as mid-October once they get the go-ahead from U.N. headquarters.
The inspectors pulled out of Iraq nearly four years ago, on the eve of U.S.-British airstrikes, amid allegations that Baghdad was not cooperating with the teams.
By the end of the 1991 Gulf War, IAEA inspectors discovered the oil-rich nation had imported thousands of pounds of uranium, some of which was already refined for weapons use, and had considered two types of nuclear delivery systems.
Over the next six years, inspectors seized the uranium, destroyed facilities and chemicals, dismantled more than 40 missiles and confiscated thousands of documents.
--------
U.N. Inspectors Stay Ready for Quick Iraq Return
October 7, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-iraq-un-inspectors.html
VIENNA (Reuters) - The United Nations said Monday its arms inspectors remained ready to return to Baghdad at short notice to resume their work, despite a delay caused by Security Council discussions on a new U.S.-drafted resolution on Iraq.
Last week, U.N. inspectors agreed with Iraqi arms experts on the logistics of a return, four years after inspectors fled in December 1998, just before a U.S.-British bombing raid punished Baghdad for allegedly not cooperating.
The inspectors had planned to return in mid-October but decided to hold off until the U.N. Security Council made a decision on the United States' tough draft resolution on Iraq.
But nuclear weapons inspectors remained ready to go back to Iraq at a moment's notice, said Mark Gwozdecky, spokesman for the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
``(The delay) affects the logistics of our return in that we're not making flight reservations yet,'' Gwozdecky told Reuters. ``But we've had a resumption plan for a long time and are continuing our preparations for the return.''
The U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), whose staff will hunt for chemical, biological and ballistic weapons, is equally ready, with 50 inspectors starting a month-long training course in Vienna Monday.
``They're still ready to go back to Iraq,'' the U.N. official said of UNMOVIC, which is headed by chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix. ``All they need is a unanimous green light from the Security Council and they can go back quickly.''
The United States and Britain accuse Iraq of acquiring or seeking to acquire nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, and are pushing for a U.N. resolution allowing use of force if Iraq fails to cooperate with intrusive inspections.
Baghdad has repeatedly rejected the allegations.
Washington and London -- both permanent, veto-holding members of the 15-nation Security Council -- have been lobbying for approval of the new resolution, but the other permanent members -- France, Russia and China -- have reacted coldly.
Gwozdecky had no comment on a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency report released Friday alleging that Baghdad could build a nuclear weapon within a year if it obtained enough weapons-grade nuclear material.
The IAEA has said that while it has some information about ``movements'' in Iraq, the agency has no proof Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has revived his nuclear weapons program and that inspections were needed to make any definite statements.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Report Calls for Plan of Sharing Data to Prevent Terror
New York Times
October 7, 2002
By JUDITH MILLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/07/national/07HOME.html
A bipartisan report by some of the nation's leading information technology and national security experts recommends that the Bush administration develop a system to share intelligence gathered in the United States and abroad among local, state and federal agencies while developing guidelines to protect against abuses.
The 173-page report, which is scheduled to be released today, outlines what its authors call a "road map" for establishing truly national, decentralized information systems that would both protect privacy and prevent terror.
Toward that end, the report, "Protecting America's Freedom in an Information Age," strongly endorses giving responsibility for analyzing such information not to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but to a new domestic intelligence center inside President Bush's planned Department of Homeland Security. Legislation to create the department is mired in Congressional wrangling over such issues as whether labor laws should apply to the agency's employees.
The study also calls upon President Bush to devise new guidelines on what information federal agencies may and may not collect about individuals in the United States and with whom, and under what circumstances, such data may be shared.
Finally, it warns that while Washington must play a critical role in gathering and analyzing data aimed at preventing terror, state and local officials will inevitably provide much of the information needed to protect the nation. Information systems that exclude them, or prevent them from receiving and contributing to such federal data, are destined to fail, the study concludes.
Unless information provided by state and local officials, as well as the private sector, is shared with Washington, "we may wind up getting all of the disadvantages of invasion of privacy with none of the national security gains," conclude the task force's co-chairmen, Zoë Baird, the president of the New York-based Markle Foundation, and James L. Barksdale, a businessman and former chief executive of Netscape.
Although the Bush administration did not commission the report or formally participate on the 44-member panel that studied the issues for more than six months, senior administration officials who followed the group's work praised the effort.
"This impressive group of people was definitely asking all the right questions, and have come up with some very reasonable first answers," one senior administration official said.
Several task force members are scheduled to meet today with Tom Ridge, the president's homeland security adviser, to discuss their findings. "They've gotten people who normally don't talk to one another - privacy advocates and former intelligence and national security officials - to agree on some basic prescriptions for safeguarding civil liberties and protecting America," the official said. "That's fairly impressive."
The study, sponsored by the Markle Foundation, was conducted with two influential research groups - the Brookings Institution and the Center for Strategic and International Studies - and with the Miller Center for Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. The center's president, Philip Zelikow, a former White House official who is close to Bush administration officials, is the task force's executive director.
"Our study shows that the information and technology that could have prevented the 9/11 attacks already exists," Mr. Zelikow said in an interview. "Had such systems been in place," he said, "Sept. 11 might have been the nation's most important intelligence coup, instead of a day of national tragedy."
The report says that while federal agencies are investing some $50 billion a year on information technology partly to prevent terrorism, "almost none of this money is being spent to solve the problem of how to share this information and intelligence among those agencies." In this fiscal year's $38 billion request for domestic security, for instance, the Bush administration has asked for only $200 million for "information integration, and is having trouble getting even that."
Ashton Carter, a professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a former defense official, said the group's endorsement of presidential guidelines for safeguarding privacy was based on the standards developed by the National Security Agency, which monitors telephone and electronic communications overseas. The agency has "a good history of discipline" about monitoring conversations of Americans abroad, he said.
The report argues strongly for automated, interactive information systems that include data collected by the private sector as well as tips from local and state agencies, which the study calls the "real front lines of homeland security." The F.B.I. has 11,500 agents, but there are more than 50 times as many state and local law enforcement officers. Whereas the F.B.I. has some 100 analysts working on domestic counterterrorism intelligence, the report states, the Los Angeles Police Department alone has 40 such analysts, and New York's counterterrorism effort is larger still.
"America will make a mistake if we create an old-fashioned centralized mainframe supercomputer architecture rather than a network of personal computers," Ms. Baird said.
Treading carefully in one of the most sensitive policy areas, particularly for conservative Republicans, the task force avoids recommending the creation of a stand-alone domestic collection agency - such as Britain's MI-5 - or placing that responsibility under the F.B.I.
"The people running criminal investigations should not be seeking all kinds of information from businesses, state and local officials all over the country," Ms. Baird said.
The case for "fundamental separation" of criminal investigation and domestic counterintelligence "is strong," the report concludes.
-------- terrorism
Bin Laden Said to Warn of Attacks
October 7, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Bin-Laden-Tape.html
CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- On a new audiotape said to be from Osama bin Laden, a male voice warns that the ``youths of God'' are planning more attacks against the United States.
The Arab satellite station Al-Jazeera, which broadcast the tape Sunday, said the voice was that of bin Laden, but there was no way to verify that claim or when the recording was made.
``By God, the youths of God are preparing for you things that would fill your hearts with terror and target your economic lifeline until you stop your oppression and aggression'' against Muslims, the voice said.
U.S. officials have said they don't know whether bin Laden, whose al-Qaida terror group is thought to have carried out the Sept. 11 terror attacks, is still alive.
In Washington, President Bush's spokesman was asked about the authenticity of the tape.
``We don't know,'' said White House press secretary Ari Fleischer. ``Don't know; but as the president has said on numerous occasions this is about more than one person and that's where it stands.''
Al-Jazeera chief editor Ibrahim Helal told The Associated Press by telephone that the station received the tape two hours before the Sunday evening broadcast. He refused to say how the tape was received.
``We had no doubt this was bin Laden. It was not only the tone of the voice but also the way he spoke and the logic of the message,'' Helal said.
He said the fact the message was so brief ``showed that the man (bin Laden) was in tough circumstances and does not have a chance to talk.''
Qatar-based al-Jazeera has become known for its broadcast of audio and videotapes of al-Qaida leaders. Last month, it aired excerpts from a videotape in which a voice said to be bin Laden's is heard naming the leaders of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers.
Until then, bin Laden had not been heard from since shortly after the U.S.-led bombing campaign began in Afghanistan last October.
In the recording broadcast Sunday, the man said his message was addressed to the American people, whom he urged to ``understand the message of the New York and Washington attacks which came in response to some of your previous crimes.''
``Those who have initiated (the attacks) are the ones who brought injustice,'' he said.
``But those who follow the activities of the band of criminals in the White House, the Jewish agents, who are preparing for an attack on the Muslim world ... feel that you have not understood anything from the message of the two attacks,'' he said.
``So let America increase the pace of this conflict or decrease it, and we will respond in kind,'' he said.
The reference appeared to be to the U.S.-Iraq confrontation many believe will lead to war, which would date the tape to recent weeks. The reference, however, could have been to another conflict.
Al-Jazeera, a Qatar-based satellite television station, said one of its correspondents conducted an interview in June with two top al-Qaida fugitives was aired to correspond with the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. Shortly afterward, U.S. officials announced one of the fugitives had been captured in Pakistan.
----
Another Adversary
He May Not Be Al Qaeda, But U.S. Still Wants Him Dead
By Andrew Chang
ABCNEWS.com
Oct. 7, 2002
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
- In May, U.S. officials told ABCNEWS that one of their unmanned Predator airplanes in Afghanistan had found a group of men they considered a target.
The CIA Predator, armed with two Hellfire anti-tank missiles, fired at the men, striking with devastating fury. There were injuries, and according to some reports, deaths. But officials told ABCNEWS the man they wanted to kill escaped unharmed.
That attack was reminiscent of another three months earlier, when a Predator launched a Hellfire at a trio of suspected senior al Qaeda officials meeting on a hillside in the vicinity of Zhawar Kili, southwest of the capital, Kabul.
There were suspicions that Osama bin Laden might have been among the trio of men - but if he was, he is also considered to have escaped unharmed.
However, the attack in May was different in that it was not aimed at bin Laden or any of his Taliban or al Qaeda associates. The target was a man who actually fought the Taliban at one time, and has only recently been linked to al Qaeda.
Most Americans have likely never heard of him.
But one year after the United States began Operation Enduring Freedom - the campaign that eventually toppled the Taliban - he has emerged as one of Washington's most wanted.
His name is Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (pronounced gool-boo-DEEN hek-mat-YAHR).
Behind the Blasts and the Assassins
Like bin Laden and Iraq's Saddam Hussein, Hekmatyar was once the recipient of American largesse. During the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s, he was the mujahideen commander who received the most CIA funding funneled through Pakistan.
But in post-Taliban Afghanistan, the attitude of the United States - and his former backers, the CIA - has changed.
"We view Hekmatyar as an agitator, troublemaker and self-aggrandizer whose stated goals are to disrupt the government of [Afghan] President [Hamid] Karzai and to promote attacks on Americans and U.S. interests," a State Department spokesperson told ABCNEWS.
Hamid Karzai is Afghanistan's president but does not have nationwide loyalty. He is nominally in control of the capital, Kabul, and its environs. Rashid Dostum is Karzai's deputy defense minister - but he is also a longtime warlord who maintains a power base in the north among his fellow Uzbeks. Gul Agha Shirzai, a Pashtun, is governor of Kandahar and ostensibly controls the southern provinces. He supports Karzai. Burhanuddin Rabbani, a powerful cleric from the northeast, was excluded from the new government - but many of his former subordinates now control major ministries in Kabul. Ismail Khan, a Tajik, is considered a liberal, enlightened warlord. He mostly operates independently from Kabul, but may be receiving aid from Iran. Padshah Khan Zadran, a Pashtun, helped topple the Taliban, but now openly rejects Karzai's rule, refusing to give up his seat of power in the southeast. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a Pashtun, aggressively opposes Karzai and may be aligned with remnants of the Taliban. He is suspected of basing himself in the loosely controlled border area. The Taliban and their sympathizers have largely faded into the Afghan populace.
Hekmatyar has in fact labeled Western troops in Afghanistan "occupation forces," and repeatedly called for a jihad in the style of the one led against the invading Soviets more than a decade ago.
Along with al Qaeda and the Taliban, Hekmatyar has been suspected of contributing to the turbulence that has regularly rocked Afghanistan since Karzai took office last year.
Last month in Kabul, a series of bomb attacks killed 26 people, and assassins made an unsuccessful attempt on Karzai's life. Shortly after the violence, Afghan police spokesman Dul Aqa told reporters, "We can't say exactly who was behind it but we know the last bombs were al Qaeda and Gulbuddin."
In April, a bomb exploded in Kandahar, near the car of Defense Minister Mohammad Fahim. Fahim was not harmed. Afghan officials told reporters at the time they suspected Hekmatyar in the attack, but did not discuss what evidence, if any, they had.
The attack took place less than a week after officials in Kabul said they arrested dozens of people linked to Hekmatyar's Hezb-e-Islami group for an alleged plot to overthrow the government by setting off bombs throughout the capital.
Also in April, Afghans in the country's southern provinces found leaflets threatening them if they cooperated with the new government. Much of the speculation over responsibility for their distribution also centered on Hekmatyar, reported The Associated Press.
How Big a Threat?
The U.S. military is right to target Hekmatyar, experts said - but there is some dispute as to how much of an actual threat he poses to the nation.
Hekmatyar has long espoused Islamic fundamentalism and condemned the United States. He argued against the presence of foreign troops from the start of the war against the Taliban.
In a recorded statement provided to ABCNEWS' Rahimullah Yusufzai this month, Hekmatyar, a member of the Pashtun ethnic group, accused U.S.-led foreign troops of sowing ethnic discord by favoring non-Pashtuns.
But while Hekmatyar waves the banners of ethnic and religious unity, many Afghans look at his call to arms much more cynically. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Hekmatyar developed an unpopular reputation for assassinating political opponents, said Thomas Gouttierre, director of the Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska.
Then, after the Soviets left, he became the most despised of the country's warlords when he refused to accept a power-sharing agreement and instead rained rockets down on Kabul, killing thousands of civilians.
"It is in his nature that he wants to be the top of everything," said Ahmed Raheem Yaseer, the assistant director of Afghan Studies at the University of Nebraska. "He's willing to muddy everything to get himself on top."
Consequently, Hekmatyar appears to have limited support from the general populace. "He has a tarnished name," said Ibrahim Al-Marashi, a lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. "Definitely, he's lost all credibility, even among [Pashtuns]."
Afghans have given him a number of nicknames, experts said - among them "the Vampire," and "The Big Evil." While many of Afghanistan's warlords have had significant numbers of supporters abroad, Gouttierre said Hekmatyar's supporters were few.
What remains of Hekmatyar's power base is mostly among small groups in Afghanistan's rural areas, he said. "Ten people here, 10 people there can be very effective [in guerrilla warfare]. It was in pitched battles [requiring mass forces] that's where he fell down."
Hekmatyar reportedly has been working with remnants of the Taliban and al Qaeda, but even there, his hubris is expected to get in the way, said Akbar S. Ahmed, a professor of Islamic Studies at American University in Washington, D.C.
He may find some support, but it's unlikely he could form a lasting alliance, or co-opt al Qaeda for his own, Ahmed said. He would not subordinate himself to bin Laden, Ahmed said. "Hekmatyar would not accept any other as a Muslim leader."
A Skilled, Slippery Operator
While Hekmatyar is dismissed for his personal history, he is also respected for his familiarity with the Afghan landscape - literally and figuratively.
He is as much a master of his country's dusty back roads as he is of its unstable terrain of tribal politics. "He knows the area, he knows people," said Yaseer. "He can be very effective."
Throughout his career, Hekmatyar has exercised a chameleon-like adaptability in his quest for power.
Gouttierre, who came into contact with Hekmatyar over three decades, said in a personal, one-on-one situation, Hekmatyar was a very engaging conversationalist, courteous and noncombatative - but also a duplicitous one.
"He would say he was friends with the U.S., he would say he appreciates the U.S. in one-on-one conversations ... but several weeks later, [in front of crowds] he would speak a different tune."
Hekmatyar's life is full of these reversals. He came of political age as a leftist, fought the Soviets as a U.S.-backed mujahid, then allied himself with a former communist warlord against the subsequent mujahideen government.
In recent years, after the Taliban took control of the country, he managed to find refuge in neighboring Shiite Iran, despite being a fundamentalist Sunni. Tehran thought it would be able to exert influence over the country through him, experts said.
Now, it's widely believed he is hiding in the lawless areas between his traditional home province in Afghanistan's northeast, and Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province, an area also suspected to be a refuge for bin Laden if he is still alive.
"I believe he is a man not so much suited to a particular philosophy as he is to himself," Gouttierre said.
Whenever he travels, Hekmatyar takes special precautions, even using doubles to fool would-be assassins. He sends out "five Gulbuddins in five cars, in different directions, and he sends people ahead of him," Yaseer said.
"He's a big threat unless he's eliminated," he said. "He's a survivor."
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
Rooftop Solar System Unveiled in New York City
October 7, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/oct2002/2002-10-07-09.asp#anchor5
New York City's largest commercial rooftop solar power system was unveiled today.
The solar panel array, which is located on the roof of two Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center (GMDC) buildings in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn, transforms sunlight into electricity, generating clean electrical power. The total solar system includes a 59 kilowatt (kW) array at GMDC's Humboldt Street location and a 56 kW array that will be operational at GMDC's Manhattan Avenue building within the next several months.
GMDC, Clean Air Communities, the New York State Energy Research & Development Authority (NYSERDA), Con Edison, and PowerLight Corporation joined with U.S. Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez and other dignitaries to launch the project today.
"This is an important event for our community," said Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez, who represents Greenpoint. "Solar power reduces emissions from fossil fuel burning power plants where children's asthma and other respiratory ailments are high. It introduces innovative technology for environmental justice by reducing the number of power plants in our community. And, it demonstrates renewable energy sources to move us away from dependence on foreign fuel sources. I am very excited about the future that I see here!"
The $900,000 system was built and installed by PowerLight Corporation of Berkeley, California, using state of the art solar technology and zinc bromide batteries. The photovoltaic panels and advanced battery will work as a solar energy system to generate and store electricity in coordination with Con Edison's network system.
The 115 kilowatt solar power system covers 11,500 square feet of roof area and reduces the peak electricity demand on New York's power grid while improving local air quality. When fully powered, the solar system will generate the equivalent energy to light 100 homes.
The system will avoid thousands of tons of harmful emissions that contribute to fine particle pollution, smog, global warming, acid rain and haze. Fine airborne particles and soot cause thousands of premature deaths and asthma attacks in New York each year.
To the extent the system displaces fossil fuel electricity, it will eliminate 1,456 tons of carbon dioxide emissions over its 25 year lifetime - a reduction equivalent to planting 16 acres of trees.
"This project demonstrates that preserving urban manufacturing can be compatible with community revitalization and environmental responsibility," said David Sweeny, GMDC's CEO. "We're particularly excited that we can do this in Greenpoint, which has historically been home to some of the City's worst environmental problems."
GMDC is a non-profit organization that rehabilitates industrial buildings and focuses on creating and maintaining high quality, blue collar jobs for low income New Yorkers. Funding for the project is provided through a joint partnership of NYSERDA, GMDC and a Clean Air Communities grant stemming from Con Edison.
"Governor George Pataki's mandate to NYSERDA is clear: Improve New York's energy efficiency, while protecting our environment and solidifying our state's economic base," said NYSERDA president William Flynn. "This project addresses all three of those goals, and NYSERDA has contributed $300,000 to see it become a reality."
----
CU Boulder Wins Solar Decathlon on National Mall
By Roxanne Khamsi
October 7, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/oct2002/2002-10-07-01.asp
http://www.eren.doe.gov/solar_decathlon/index.html
WASHINGTON, DC, Student teams from 13 universities and one college came to the National Mall last week to catch a few rays and compete in the first ever Solar Decathlon, a contest to design, build and operate an attractive house powered only by the sun.
Standing in front of the winning home on Saturday, Assistant Secretary of Energy David Garman announced the University of Colorado, Boulder as winner of the 10 day competition.
Colorado Congressman Mark Udall (right) visits the University of Colorado house and speaks with a student on the winning team. (Photos courtesy U.S. Energy Dept.)
While other schools claimed first place in some of the 10 distinct contests that made up the decathlon, a sophisticated energy distribution system gave University of Colorado team members a superior ability to monitor and adjust their power use, leading them to score highest overall and triumph in the end.
"The real decisive factor was that their engineering systems were so good," said George Douglas, a spokesman for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which oversaw the event. "They were able to tweak things as they went along."
An estimated 50,000 people visited the solar village during the open house sessions a week ago and crowds were no smaller this past weekend.
The judges had 32 data points installed in various parts of each home to measure the energy use of systems such as refrigeration and air conditioning. Over the course of the week, the teams faced challenges that simulated the power demands of a normal house. One such test on Wednesday required each group to run hot water in their house at 110 degrees for 10 minutes to imitate a typical hot shower. Other tasks included doing laundry and maintaining stable indoor temperatures.
"We made it fair," said Douglas. "They even had to wash and dry towels - and we gave them the towels."
Second place University of Virginia house during construction September 24
Although the Solar Decathlon outlined rules that prohibited teams from building houses larger than 800 square feet, the range of original gadgetry and imaginative material used within each home suggested that the competition placed no boundaries on innovation.
Visitors inside the University of Virginia's house got a glimpse of the "smart wall." Situated in the interior, directly facing the front entrance, the wall contains 341 light emitting diodes that provide a visual alert to the inhabitants by glowing red when the house gets too warm and loses its energy balance.
A parabolic dish on the roof of the house tracks the sun according to a computer program that uses latitude and longitude information. The dish focuses the sun's beams it captures onto an elliptical mirror that sends the light down a fiber optic cable that ends in "solar luminaires," transparent baton-like fixtures that hang vertically and diffuse the brightness indoors.
University of Virginia (UV) achieved high points for architectural design, but making a home that was both energy efficient and attractive proved challenging.
"It became clear to the students that sustainable design is not the only thing to be thinking about, but it's the only thing that you can't forget," said John Quale, an assistant professor of architecture at UV who served as an advisor to the school's team.
Fierce competition among the schools prompted Auburn University to build their house inside so that information about its design would not be leaked to their opponents.
While many were impressed by the original student inventions, people touring the houses also appreciated the already available solar technology that all the homes shared in common.
A Tuskegee University student works on the team's power conditioning equipment to maximize efficiency.
"I had seen these panels on people's roofs, but I never knew how they worked," said Harriet Greenberg, a visitor from Silver Springs, Maryland.
The line to enter the winning house was over 30 people long Saturday afternoon, with similar waits outside all the other homes in the temporary solar village. Inside the University of Colorado's structure students appeared delighted with their victory.
"It feels like all the work was worthwhile," said graduate student Chris Kennedy. "But the environment is the real winner."
Some teams boasted a membership of over 100 people at some point in the process of planning and building their houses, but most had a core group of fewer than 20 students.
Because many of the houses cost almost 200,000 dollars to build, students invested a great deal of energy into fundraising. The Crowder College team initially sold its home on Ebay for 75,000 dollars to receive money for construction. The sale included a provision that the college could buy the house back, which it now intends to do. Once the Crowder house returns to campus by truck, it will be used by visiting faculty at the school.
An official observer watches as University of Maryland students work on their solar powered home office equipment.
The U.S. Department of Energy sponsored the Solar Decathlon, as did companies and institutions such as Home Depot, BP Solar, and the American Institute of Architects. Schools coordinated individual sponsorships from makers of energy efficient appliances and materials. The University of Colorado made a point incorporating already available technologies into their house.
"Our systems worked and that came as part of the territory of using commercially available stuff," said Michael Brandemuehl, an associate engineering professor and the lead faculty advisor to the winning team. "We wanted to make the statement that these things are commercially available now."
Teams began the Decathlon process two years ago. Of the 10 contests that made up the Decathlon, seven are focused on energy and three are not.
Students from the Auburn team fight Washington traffic in their solar car during the Getting Around part of the Decathlon. (Photo courtesy )
As part of the Getting Around Contest, students are required to drive their electric cars - charged by their photovoltaic panels - to the grocery store, donate food to a food bank, and visit a checkpoint at a nearby park.
The Design and Livability contest concentrates on architectural design and is the only contest worth 200 points. All nine other contests are worth 100 points each. They are: Design Presentation and Simulation, Graphics and Commnication, The Comfort Zone, Refrigeration, Hot Water, Energy Balance, Lighting, Home Business, and Getting Around.
For more Decathlon details, visit: http://www.eren.doe.gov/solar_decathlon/index.html
----
Scottish wind power boosted by new planning rules
REUTERS UK:
October 7, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/18056/story.htm
BRIGHTON, "Scotland is a success story," Rob Forrest, head of Scottish-based renewable energy company Green Power told the British Wind Energy Association's (BWEA) annual conference.
In Scotland, 160 megwatts of wind power has already been built and another 200 MW is under development, he said.
Difficulties in getting planning consent have dogged the wind industry, forcing many projects - especially in Wales - to be shelved after local opposition.
According to the BWEA, Scotland has approved 93 percent of applications to build wind farms since 1999 compared with 60 percent in England and just 12 percent in Wales.
"Getting planning approval is easier in Scotland where the Scottish Executive have changed the rules," Alan Moore, chief executive of National Wind Power, a division of Innogy , told Reuters on the sidelines of the conference.
"Planners can balance the local impact of projects with the national need for green power."
As a result of the new rules, many developers are turning to Scotland to build onshore and offshore schemes, said Chris Tomlinson, head of planning at the BWEA.
In Wales, industry executives say there is not enough support from the Welsh Assembly for wind power and plenty of local opposition to new schemes.
BWEA figures show that 66 MW has been built over the last year with another 400 MW expected to be built next year, nearly doubling Britain's wind power capacity which is currently 530 MW.
Britain is keen to boost wind power as part of its efforts to increase the amount of power generated from renewable sources to 10 percent by 2010 from about three percent currently.
-------- energy
Entergy Expects to Beat Estimates
Reuters
Monday, October 7, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A55046-2002Oct7?language=printer
NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Integrated utility Entergy Corp. said on Monday it expects to beat Wall Street's earnings estimates for the third quarter, citing improved results at its utility and nuclear operations.
It also increased its full-year 2002 earnings expectations and reaffirmed its 2003 earnings forecast.
New Orleans-based Entergy is bucking the industry trend with its announcement, as a raft of energy companies -- from Duke Energy Corp. and Dominion Resources Inc. to TXU Corp. -- have warned they will miss their earnings forecasts for reasons such as lagging trading activity and lackluster international operations.
The second-largest U.S. provider of nuclear power behind Exelon Corp. , Entergy forecast third-quarter earnings of at least $1.45 a share before one-time items, including the effect of milder-than-expected weather. The consensus estimate of analysts polled by research firm Thomson First Call is $1.35 a share.
The one-time items include a gain of about 10 cents a share for the sale of an 800-megawatt and a 1,200-megawatt plant in Spain to Belgium's Electrabel SA , Europe's sixth-largest power utility by sales.
Shares of Entergy rose $3.27, or more than 8 percent, on the news to $43.12 in Monday afternoon trade on the New York Stock Exchange.
The company said "continued" improvement in the regional economy is expected to boost sales at its utility operations, which serve 2.6 million customers in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.
"The economy in the South is improving at a pace slightly ahead of the rest of the country," said Mark Vitner, senior economist at Wachovia Corp.
He noted there's an increase in natural gas exploration activity in the Gulf of Mexico and eastern Texas, as well as an upturn in industrial development in Mississippi, where Japanese automobile maker Nissan is building an assembly plant.
Its nuclear operations will benefit from the full contributions of two plants -- the Indian Point 2 nuclear plant in upstate New York and the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant near Brattleboro, Vermont.
Entergy's trading operations, which include its joint venture with privately held Koch Industries Inc., are expected to post results that are "comparable" to the year-ago quarter. Again, that is in contrast to companies like Duke which have trading operations that are suffering from a lack of counterparties and liquidity in the market.
A company spokesman said the Entergy-Koch Trading operation focuses on trades of a short duration, where the market is more liquid.
"For them trading hasn't been a disaster, probably because of their association with Koch Industries and the fact that they trade through a whole myriad of commodities, not just energy and gas," said Mike Worms, an analyst at Gerard Klauer Mattison, who has a "neutral" rating on the company.
Indeed, Entergy says it will pocket a greater share of the income from Entergy-Koch -- which trades products like natural gas, power and weather derivatives -- than expected in 2002, which accounts partly for the increased earnings forecast for this year.
In the first and second quarters of 2002, Entergy recorded "substantially all" of the partnership income.
For the full year 2002, Entergy increased its operational earnings guidance to a range of $3.60 to $3.70 a share, up from its previous range of $3.40 to $3.60. It reaffirmed its 2003 guidance of $3.75 to $3.95 per share.
The First Call consensus estimates are $3.54 a share for 2002 and $3.85 a share for 2003.
-------- environment
Chemical tanker sinks off Japan after collision
REUTERS JAPAN:
October 7, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/18075/story.htm
TOKYO - A Japanese chemical tanker sank after colliding with a container ship on the weekend, prompting fears of a leak of its cargo, coastguard officials said.
The 411-tonne Eiwa Maru, carrying 500 tonnes of the thinner xylene, hit the 52,103-tonne Panamanian-registered Ever Reward at around 3:00 a.m. (1800 GMT) about 20 miles (30 km) off Japan's Izu peninsula, roughly 160 km (100 miles) west of Tokyo.
There were no indications of a major leak after the tanker sank around seven hours after the collision.
"There are no signs of any large leak at this point," said an official with the Japanese coastguard in Yokohama, near Tokyo.
The spokesman for the Yokohama disaster prevention centre said that while xylene can be toxic in high concentrations, it is not water-soluble and any that leaked out would float to the surface.
"There it will evaporate, taking from minutes - if there is a strong wind - up to five hours to completely disappear," he added. "So the chance of damage, even to marine life, is likely to be minimal."
The Eiwa Maru's crew of four escaped on a life raft and were picked up by a nearby ship, an official at the Shimoda coastguard station on Izu said. They went to hospital with minor injuries.
There was no damage to the container ship, which continued on course to Shimizu harbour on the Izu peninsula.
Weather conditions were fine and visibility good at the time of the accident, the official said, but he declined to speculate on the cause pending an investigation.
A ship with personnel trained to contain chemical leaks was among four vessels dispatched to the site.
Xylene, used as thinner and to make plastic resins, evaporates rapidly from soil and surface water and sunlight breaks it into less toxic substances, the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry says at its Web site.
----
Engineered Plants Soak Up Arsenic
By Cat Lazaroff
October 7, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/oct2002/2002-10-07-06.asp
WASHINGTON, DC, A team of researchers has developed the first transgenic system for removing arsenic from the soil by using genetically modified plants. The new system could help remove the toxic metal from naturally and artificially polluted soil and water, reducing their threat to the environment and to human and animal health around the world.
The scientists inserted two genes from the common bacterium Escherichia coli (E. coli) that allow the test plant, a member of the mustard family called thale cress, to tolerate arsenic, which is normally lethal to plants. The plant removes arsenic from the soil, storing it in its leaves in a form that is less available to the environment, and easier to remove and eliminate.
A U.S. Environmental Protection Agency worker collects samples for arsenic testing at a defunct lumber yard in Sheridan, Oregon. Most of the arsenic produced in the U.S. is used to treat lumber to resist insects and decay. (Photo courtesy EPA)
"Our data demonstrate the first significant increase in arsenic tolerance and what we call 'hyperaccumulation' by genetically engineered plants," said Dr. Richard Meagher of the University of Georgia, who led the research effort. "This new system is a major step in developing methods of cleaning up the environment using plants."
Phytoremediation - the cleaning of polluted soils through the use of plants - has the potential to be of use on millions of acres of arsenic polluted lands. After plants absorb toxic materials, they store them above ground, away from soils and groundwater, and where they can be harvested and destroyed in a safe manner.
Still, the research team faced some daunting problems. Arsenic is toxic to most plants, so the idea of using a plant to withdraw arsenic from the soil seemed counterintuitive. But the team knew from other experiments that certain genes can make plants tolerate substances that would normally sicken or kill them.
Barry Rosen of Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, a coauthor of a report that appears today in the journal "Nature Biotechnology," was the first to characterize the genes for arsenic resistance in bacterial and fungal systems, making phytoremediation of arsenic possible. That knowledge was combined with the special expertise of the team's other members, including postdoctoral associates Om Parkash Dhankher and Yujing Li of the University of Georgia (UGA); former UGA students Julie Senecoff and Nupur Sashti; Jin Shi of Wayne State University; and David Salt of Purdue University.
"Our working hypothesis was that controlling the electrochemical state of arsenic in the aboveground tissues and increasing organic sulfur 'sinks' throughout the plant would result in both resistance and increased accumulation of arsenic," said UGA's Meagher.
A researcher from Dhaka Community Hospital in Bangladesh demonstrates a UNICEF field test for arsenic in water. (Photo courtesy Richard Wilson, Harvard University)
Most arsenic in surface soil and water exists in its oxidized form, arsenate. Plants actively take up arsenate - mistaking it for the nutrient phosphate - and transfer it to their leaves.
The team was able to insert two unrelated genes from E. coli called arsC and ECS into the model plant, thale cress or Arabidopsis thaliana. The team engineered the arsC gene to be activated by exposure to light, a technique that has been around for at least two decades.
The arsC gene reduces arsenate to a more toxic compound called arsenite, but only in the plant's leaves. The second gene, ECS, creates compounds in the plant that bind tightly to arsenate, making it less available to poison either the plant or to leach back into soil or water.
In essence, the altered plants remove arsenic from the soil, concentrate it, and then send it to their leaves. Instead of dying from exposure, the new plants thrive on the arsenic exposure, and when the plants are harvested, much of the arsenic pollution, once in the soil, can be removed from the site.
Drums of arsenic containing wastes at a defunct mining laboratory in Hermiston, Oregon. (Photo courtesy EPA)
When grown on arsenic, the transgenic plants accumulated 17 times more weight in fresh shoots, and two to three times more arsenic per gram of tissue, than in common or wild type plants. Laboratory tests showed that 96 percent to 100 percent of the arsenic in the plants' leaves was reduced to arsenite and bound by sulfur.
"One of the most important aspects of the research is that this new system should be applicable to a wide variety of plant species," said Meagher. "My colleague Scott Merkle, in UGA's Warnell School of Forest Resources, is already working on putting the genes into cottonwood trees, which have a large root system and could be useful in the phytoremediation of arsenic."
Other researchers have already found that a fern native to the southern U. S. can accumulate arsenic at very high levels, but the genetic basis for this activity is unknown, and the narrow growing conditions for most fern species make these plants less likely candidates for phytoremediation.
Plants genetically engineered to remove arsenic could be used now, the study's authors say, but they expect dramatic improvements in the amount of arsenic they can extract as this current strategy is expanded in future experiments.
Using plants to remove arsenic from contaminated soil could be useful to almost every nation. Inorganic arsenic compounds are classified as Group A human carcinogens, and last year, a U.S. National Academy of Sciences panel found that the risks of cancer from high levels of arsenic in drinking water was even greater than previously thought.
A man in Bangladesh displays the arsenic lesions on his hands. (Photo courtesy CRC For Waste Management and Pollution Control Limited)
Exposure to arsenic can cause skin lesions, lung, kidney and liver cancers, and damage the central nervous system.
While soil in some areas is contaminated by natural arsenic deposits, many other sites are contaminated by spills and drainage from chemical and manufacturing plants.
Today's research paper notes that hundreds of polluted sites in the United States are listed on the National Priority List, or Superfund list, because they contain high levels of arsenic. Although these sites are recommended for cleaning, most have not been cleaned yet because digging up the soils and removing them to storage sites is both expensive and environmentally destructive.
But the most serious human health problems from arsenic involve drinking water. In the Indian state of West Bengal and in Bangladesh, where naturally occurring arsenic contaminates water at concentrations far above the recommended safe levels set by the World Health Organization (WHO), researchers estimate that more than 112 million people are afflicted with various levels of arsenic poisoning.
WHO estimates that 200,000-300,000 people in India have arsenic induced skin lesions and cancer, and an estimated 200,000 to 270,000 cancer deaths in Bangladesh will be due to high levels of arsenic in drinking water.
Study author Om Dhankher, a native of India, said health officials in that country consider arsenic pollution, particularly in West Bengal, to be a catastrophe.
Long term arsenic exposure can lead to skin lesions and keratosis, a hardening of the skin. (Photo courtesy World Bank)
"In all, this is several fold worse than Chernobyl and Bhopal, and it is getting little attention," said Dhankher. "There has been much more attention to the problem in Bangladesh, but in India, the situation is extremely serious."
The problems of arsenic contamination have received relatively little international publicity. While WHO and the European Union have adopted a drinking water standard of just 10 parts per billion (ppb) of arsenic, standards in other nations are mixed.
The United States is scheduled to replace its 60 year old standard of 50 ppb with a new, 10 ppb standard, effective January 23, 2006.
-------- genetics
Gene Experts Win Nobel Prize in Medicine
October 7, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/health/AP-Nobel-Medicine.html
STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) -- An American and two Britons won this year's Nobel Prize in medicine Monday for discoveries about how genes regulate organ growth and a process of programmed cell suicide. Their findings shed light on the development of many illnesses, including AIDS and strokes.
Britons Sydney Brenner, 75, and John E. Sulston, 60, and American H. Robert Horvitz, 55, shared the prize, worth about $1 million.
Working with tiny worms, the laureates identified key genes regulating organ development and programmed cell death, a necessary process for pruning excess cells. Many cancer treatment strategies are now aimed at stimulating the cell-death process to kill cancerous cells.
Brenner, a professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., is also the founder of the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley. He showed that the tiny transparent worm C. elegans was useful for studying how cells specialize and organs develop. His work ``laid the foundation for this year's prize,'' the awards committee said.
Brenner also demonstrated that a chemical could produce specific genetic mutations in the worm, allowing different mutations to be linked to specific effects on organ development.
Sulston, of the Sanger Center at England's Cambridge University, discovered that certain cells in the developing worm are destined to die through programmed cell death. He described visible steps in the cell-death process and demonstrated the first mutations of genes that participate in that process, the committee said.
Horvitz, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, identified the first two ``death genes'' in the worms and showed that humans have a gene similar to one of them, the awards committee said. Scientists now know that most genes controlling cell death in the worms have counterparts in humans.
Sulston, reached in Cambridge, said he was ``surprised and delighted'' at winning the prize and emphasized the importance of the work by Brenner and Horvitz. All three had worked together in Cambridge in the 1970s.
``Something we do need to keep in mind all the time is how much can come out of work that's done to try to understand, in the broadest sense, and sharing that understanding with everybody else,'' he said.
Information about programmed cell death has helped scientists understand how some viruses and bacteria invade human cells, the Nobel committee said. In conditions such as AIDS, stroke and heart attack, cells are lost because of excessive cell death. In other diseases like cancer, cell death is reduced, leading to the survival of cells that are normally destined to die.
The award for medicine opened a week of Nobel Prizes that culminates Friday with the prestigious peace prize, the only one revealed in Oslo, Norway.
The physics award will be announced Tuesday and the chemistry and economics awards Wednesday in the Swedish capital.
As in years past, the date for the literature prize has not been set. But it always falls on a Thursday, usually the same week as the other awards.
The award committees make their decisions in deep secrecy and candidates are not publicly revealed for 50 years.
Alfred Nobel, the Swedish industrialist and inventor of dynamite, left only vague guidelines in his will establishing the prizes, first awarded in 1901.
For the prize Monday, he simply stated the winner ``shall have made the most important discovery within the domain of physiology or medicine.''
The 18 lifetime members of the Swedish Academy who choose the literature laureate make their final decision at one of their weekly meetings, only setting the date early in the same week to keep the world guessing. Kaj Schueler, a literary editor at Swedish daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, predicted the academy's choice would be a surprise since last year's award went to perennial favorite V.S. Naipaul.
``I also think it's time for them to pick a poet,'' Schueler said, declining to single out any names. ``The last poet they had was the Polish writer Wislawa Szymborska in 1996. since they they've had playwrights and prose writers.''
The only public hints are for the peace prize.
The five-member awards committee never reveals the candidates, but sometimes those making the nominations announce their choices.
With the world still reeling from last year's Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and concerned about U.S. plans for a war in Iraq, no clear favorites have emerged.
Among the nominees were Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who has sought to unify his country after the hard-line Taliban was ousted by U.S.-led airstrikes, former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, the Salvation Army and the U.S. Peace Corps.
President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair were nominated for leading the war against terrorism but were seen as unlikely winners in wake of their efforts to convince the world of the need to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
The Nobel Assembly at the world-renowned Karolinska Institute, which selects the medicine prize winner, invites nominations from previous recipients, professors of medicine and other professionals worldwide before whittling down its choices in the fall.
Last year's winners were Leland H. Hartwell of the United States and R. Timothy Hunt and Paul M. Nurse from Britain for discovering key regulators of the process that lets cells divide, which is expected to lead to new cancer treatments.
The awards always are presented on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896.
On the Net:
Nobel Foundation site, http://www.nobel.se
-------- health
PCB Exposure in Womb May Affect Behavior
October 7, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/oct2002/2002-10-07-09.asp#anchor1
RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, North Carolina, Prenatal exposure to polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and dioxins can influence play behaviors that reflect gender differences, a new study suggests.
The Dutch study has been tracking various impacts of exposure to these toxicants on a group of children since 1990. It appears today in "Environmental Health Perspectives," the journal of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
"Higher prenatal exposure to PCBs was associated with less masculinized play behavior in boys and more masculinized play behavior in girls. In boys as well as in girls, higher prenatal dioxin levels were associated with more feminized play behavior," the study's authors wrote. "We therefore suggest that these results may indicate behavioral effects of steroid hormone imbalances early in development related to prenatal exposure to PCBs and dioxins, their metabolites, and/or related compounds."
In the latest leg of the study, 189 children with an average age of 7.5 years were evaluated using the Pre-School Activities Inventory, a questionnaire that asks parents 24 questions about how their children prefer to play, including types of toys, activities and interests.
The children were evaluated based on their parents' answers to the questions on the inventory. Representative questions include whether a child prefers playing with tools versus playing with dolls, taking care of babies versus climbing, and avoiding dirt versus taking risks.
These data were then cross referenced with data on each child's exposure to four PCBs and 17 dioxins in the umbilical cord blood and the mother's blood and breast milk. The researchers also evaluated which children were breastfed and which children were formula fed.
Breastfeeding was not associated with behavioral changes, suggesting that PCBs and dioxins may act to disrupt hormones related to childhood play behavior during fetal development.
This is the first human behavioral study to show the effects of PCB and dioxin exposure on behavior that reflects marked gender differences, according to the authors. Gender specific effects of background prenatal studies have not been reported in prior human PCB studies. The authors plan to continue to evaluate the study participants to assess potential implications on later development.
The study team was headed by Hestien J. I. Vreugdenhil of Erasmus University and Sophia Children's Hospital of Rotterdam, The Netherlands. More information is available at: http://www.ehponline.org/
-------- human rights
U.S.: China, Others Repress Religion
October 7, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Religious-Freedom.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- China and five other countries engage in widespread repression of religion, seeing religious worship as a threat to the dominant ideology, a new State Department report says.
The department's 2002 report on international religious freedom, released Monday, puts Myanmar, Cuba, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam in the same category as China.
It acknowledged that repression of religion exists in a number of other countries.
In China, the report says, ``Unapproved religious and spiritual groups remained under scrutiny and, in some cases, harsh repression.''
It said the government continued to restrict religious practice to government-sanctioned organizations and registered places of worship.
The government also continued to control the ``growth and scope of the activity of religious groups to prevent the rise of possible sources of authority outside of the control of the government,'' the report said.
The State Department has been issuing reports on religious freedom annually since 1999, as required by Congress.
Releasing the report, Secretary of State Colin Powell said the study sheds a much-needed light on governments that make it ``difficult and even dangerous for people to follow the dictates of their conscience and to practice their faith.''
The United States, he said, ``categorically reject the notion that the security or stability of any country requires the repression of members of any faith.''
The report's findings on the other five countries, in addition to China, considered to be major violators:
--Myanmar: The government continued to view religious freedom in the context of threats to national unity.
--Cuba: Citizens worshipping in officially sanctioned churches often were subject to surveillance by state security forces.
--Laos: The government inhibited religious practice by all persons, especially those belonging to minority religions, particularly Christianity, that fall outside of the mainstream Buddhism.
--North Korea: Religious freedom and human rights groups in general that outside the country provided numerous reports that members of underground churches have been beaten, arrested, or killed.
--Vietnam: There were credible reports that in past years Hmong Protestant Christians in several northwestern villages were forced by local authorities to recant their faith.
The report listed Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan as countries which are hostile to certain minority religions.
The report credited only Afghanistan with making a significant improvement in the area of religious freedom over the past year.
This, it said, was brought about by the fall of the Taliban and the subsequent establishment of an interim government.
``The ultra-conservative, Islamic state system created by the Taliban collapsed following the onset of Operation Enduring Freedom in October 2001,'' the report said.
``In its place, an interim governing body now administers a far more tolerant regime.'' the report added.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Help us to stop the war
As a US Republican, I reject George Bush's illegal and unconstitutional plan to attack Iraq
Scott Ritter
Monday October 7, 2002
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,805900,00.html
As a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and as a registered member of the Republican party who voted for George Bush in the last presidential election, I have to admit to a certain trepidation and uncertainty when I was asked by Labour MPs to participate in the massive anti-war rally in London on September 28.
In my way of thinking, mass demonstrations, regardless of the righteousness of the cause, were the theatre of the political left, and not something with which I should be associated. I was proven wrong on all counts. The outpouring of democratic will that occurred on that day came not only from the left, but from across the breadth of mainstream British society. It sent a message to a Blair government that had grown increasingly isolated from public opinion: UK support for an American unilateral war on Iraq would not be tolerated. That message met a response a few days later from the Labour party at its annual conference in Blackpool. Democracy in action is a wonderful thing.
Across the Atlantic, in the United States, a debate is about to begin in the US Congress over the granting of sweeping war powers that would enable President Bush to wage war against Iraq, even if such action were unilateral and lacking in authority from the United Nations.
To many Americans, myself included, the granting of such powers represents a breach of constitutional responsibility on the part of Congress, which alone under the constitution of the United States is authorised to declare war. There is at least one US senator - Robert Byrd of West Virginia - who recognises this, and has indicated his willingness to launch a filibuster of the debate. Senator Byrd is famous for carrying a copy of the US constitution in his breast pocket, and pulling it out on the floor of the Senate to remind fellow senators what American democracy is founded on. One man fighting in defence of the basic foundation of American society. Where are the large-scale US demonstrations in support of this struggle? Where are the voices of outrage over what amounts to a frontal assault on the constitution of the United States? Democracy silenced is awful.
The constitution has always guided me in my actions as an American citizen. It establishes the US as a nation of laws, and sets high standards for the ideals we Americans strive to achieve as a nation. As an officer of Marines, I took an oath to defend the US constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. It is an oath I take very seriously and I am willing to give my life in defence of this document - something I demonstrated during my time in uniform, including service in Operation Desert Storm.
I am no pacifist, but I am opposed to President Bush's rush towards war with Iraq this time around. As signatories to the UN charter, Americans have agreed to abide by a body of international law that explicitly governs the conditions under which nations may go to war. All require authority of the security council, either through an invocation of article 51 (self defence), or a resolution passed under chapter seven of the charter (collective security).
President Bush's case for war simply has not been demonstrated to meet any of these criteria. The president repeatedly announced that Iraq has failed to comply with its obligation to disarm, and as such poses a threat to international peace and security. The president declared that Iraq must allow weapons inspectors to return to Iraq, without conditions, with unfettered access to all sites. Iraq's failure to allow inspectors to return to work since their withdrawal in December 1998 has prompted fear in many circles (recently demonstrated by the UK government's dossier on Iraqi weapons programs) that Iraq has taken advantage of the intervening time to reconstitute its weapons of mass destruction programs dismantled under UN supervision. With no inspectors in Iraq, it was impossible to know for certain what the regime of Saddam Hussein was up to; and, given Iraq's past record of deceit over these weapons, the US and others were justified in presuming ill intent.
But now Iraq has agreed to allow the inspectors to return, unconditionally, and to be held accountable to the rule of law as set forth in existing security council resolutions governing Iraq's disarmament. The opportunity finally exists to bring clarity to years of speculation about the potential threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, as well as an opportunity to resolve this ongoing crisis of international law peacefully.
But President Bush refuses to take "yes" for an answer. The Bush administration's actions lay bare the mythology that this war is being fought over any threat posed by Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. It has made it clear that its objective is the elimination of Saddam Hussein. And this is where I have a fundamental problem. The UN charter prohibits regime removal. The US constitution states that international agreements entered into by the United States carry the force of law. The US has signed the UN charter. Regime removal is not only a violation of international law, it is unconstitutional.
There is a way to deal with the need to change a regime deemed to be a risk to international peace and security, and that is through the UN. If President Bush truly wanted to seek regime removal in Baghdad, then he would push for an indictment of Saddam Hussein and his senior leadership in the international court for crimes against humanity, something that should not prove hard to do, given the record of the Butcher of Baghdad (and something other members of the UN would clearly support as an alternative to war). But seeking judgment through the international court requires a recognition by the US of the primacy of international law, something the Bush administration has been loath to do.
The fact of the matter is this crisis between Iraq and the US goes beyond even the issue of regime removal. It represents the first case study of the implementation of a new US national security strategy, published last month, which sets forth a doctrine of unilateralism that capitalises on American military and economic might to maintain the US as the sole superpower, to impose our will on the rest of the world, even through pre-emptive military action. This strategy is a rejection of multilateralism, a turning away from the concepts of international law.
This new Bush doctrine of American unilateralism reeks of imperial power, the very power against which Ameri cans fought a revolution more than 200 years ago. The streets of Washington DC are empty of demonstrators protesting at this frontal assault on American democracy. Will the streets of London be filled again with protesters against this assault on the rule of international law? I certainly hope so, because the people of Britain could lead by example, sending a clear signal to fellow practitioners of democracy in America that when it comes to determining what actions a government takes in the name of the people, the will of the people cannot, and will not, be ignored.
Scott Ritter was a UN weapons inspector in Iraq in 1991-98 and chief of the concealment investigations team. His interview with William Rivers Pitt forms the core of War on Iraq (Profile Books)
WSRitter@aol.com
----
Anti-war protesters rally across US
Monday, 7 October, 2002,
BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2304695.stm
Tens of thousands of people have attended anti-war rallies across the United States on the eve of a key speech by President George W Bush putting his case against Saddam Hussein.
The protest in New York was the largest gathering of American opponents to conflict since the start of the current threats of military action against Iraq, which Washington accuses of developing weapons of mass destruction.
Anti-war protests in Los Angeles Protesters were urged to call politicians to voice their opposition to war It was one of more than 25 rallies organised by the Not In Our Name group to coincide with the first anniversary of the start of the US-led military campaign in Afghanistan.
Efforts to win international support by both the US and Iraq have meanwhile continued, and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein issued a defiant statement saying he would never give up his leadership.
Stars speak out
The estimated 20,000 people who gathered in New York's Central Park were joined by Hollywood stars to speak out against any future war.
Actress Susan Sarandon asked: "Do we the people really want to be a new Rome that imposes its rule by the use of overwhelming force whenever its interests are threatened?
"Even perceived potential threats? We do not want endless warfare."
Not in our name will you invade countries, bomb civilians, kill more children
Pledge of Resistance
The crowds in New York, along with similar gatherings in Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and many smaller communities, also recited a "pledge of resistance" devised by Not In Our Name.
It includes: "Not in our name will you invade countries, bomb civilians, kill more children, letting history take its course over the graves of the nameless."
Political support
In New York, Ms Sarandon called on people to back US politicians who opposed the war, but the Bush administration picked up new support from one of the most senior members of Congress.
Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle
Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle said a first strike could be justified Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, who had withheld his backing for a Congressional resolution giving Mr Bush war powers, said on Sunday that he did believe a first strike against Iraq could be merited.
While pushing a diplomatic solution, he told NBC's Meet the Press programme: "We ought to, if no other option is available... use pre-emptive force unilaterally if necessary."
He added that he thought the Senate would pass overwhelmingly a resolution authorising President Bush to attack Iraq.
International action
In his speech on Monday, Mr Bush is expected to try to maximise support for his policy from US politicians and citizens as well as international leaders.
On Saturday, he warned war might be "unavoidable".
Launch new window : Who backs war? Where key nations stand on Iraq
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw also begins a tour of the Middle East on Monday to garner support for action from the countries in the region who could be most affected.
Mr Straw's four-day trip to Egypt, Iran, Jordan and Kuwait, follows efforts by the Iraqis to persuade their neighbours to back them, or at least not the US policy which envisages the toppling of the ruling regime.
Iraqi girls sit under a drawing of President Saddam Hussein Iraqi President Saddam Hussein said his country would win any war Saddam Hussein remains defiant, vowing never to quit his leadership of Iraq, according to comments released on Sunday.
He denounced Washington's demands for a new United Nations resolution calling on Iraq to reveal the state of its weapons production or face invasion and said his country would be victorious in any showdown.
"We did not choose the battle with the enemy and this means we did not prepare ourselves to confront the enemy but the enemy is preparing itself to attack us...and leave us as slaves without identity, honour or money," he was quoted by the Iraqi News Agency as saying.
----
Thousands at Central Park Rally Oppose an Iraq War
New York Times
October 7, 2002
By MICHAEL WILSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/07/nyregion/07PEAC.html
Those old enough to know said that yesterday's Central Park rally to protest a United States invasion of Iraq drew a larger crowd than similar gatherings in the early 1960's by those who did not want the United States to get further involved in Vietnam.
"If this is an indication of how the American people feel, a large amount of them don't want our sons to be killed," said Frank Phillips, 89, of Long Island, who described himself as a peace activist for 60 years.
Several thousand people filled the park's East Meadow yesterday afternoon, taking in the sun that bathed the slight slope facing a stage where speaker after speaker - from activist actors to relatives of people killed in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to high school students - strode to the microphone. Their messages were as diverse as those on the signs and T-shirts and leaflets in the crowd:
"It Takes Courage Not to Make War."
"Imagine."
"Stop the Drug War."
The event was organized by Not in Our Name, which has a Web site (www .notinourname.net) and a CD with the same title, by Saul Williams. It was one of several protests against an Iraq invasion organized by the group around the country yesterday.
"Any religion that connects violence to God loses me, whether it's the murder of a doctor at an abortion clinic or busboys, police officers and firefighters in the World Trade Center," the actor Tim Robbins told the crowd. He condemned the "oil men" who he said want the United States to topple Saddam Hussein.
Although Martin Sheen, who plays President Josiah Bartlet on "The West Wing," noted that "it's great to see a public debate on such a critical issue," no one in the crowd seemed to be in favor of a war.
"You know what I say? I say the hell with the Patriot Act," one speaker shouted. "Victory to the women's revolution!" said another. One man urged everyone to take out their wallets as a show of solidarity with Amadou Diallo, who was fatally shot by New York police officers who mistook his wallet for a weapon in 1999. Then he urged them to reach inside and pull out money for the antiwar cause.
John Earl, a salesman from Greenville, N.Y., held a sign reading "Exxonerate" and "BPrepared," presumably to register his unhappiness with dependence on Middle East oil.
"When they confuse war with civil liberties and rights and lifestyle here, and our patriotism, it's all confused," he said.
One man pulled out a comb and silently scrawled in the dirt, "Over 800 Puerto Ricans Die 9/11 No More."
A 6-year-old girl named Sofia watched the man, then found a stick and wrote "No War" in the dirt, with a peace symbol.
Emily Dische-Becker, a 20-year-old student at Bard College, 22 miles from Woodstock, and a native of Berlin, said she had come to the city with friends, and was leaving disappointed.
"It's like pop culture, concentrated teen angst," she said of the rally. "The rhetoric is too heavy-handed. That's the problem with American activists. They need to simplify." Someone on stage railed against police brutality and she rolled her eyes.
Susie Mee, a fiction teacher at New York University, said she had hoped the crowd would be larger, like those she remembered after the Vietnam War began. "Maybe," she said, "something has to start before it can be stopped."
------
Protesting the Big Brother Lens, Little Brother Turns an Eye Blind
New York Times
October 7, 2002
By JOHN MARKOFF
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/07/technology/07ZZAP.html
SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 6 - Confronted with the unblinking eyes of surveillance cameras, Michael Naimark believes he can hide in plain sight with the aid of a $1 laser pointer.
Mr. Naimark, a Silicon Valley artist and technologist, decided to try turning the tables on what he saw as the potential for Big Brother surveillance after the Sept. 11 attacks.
His is a Little Brother response: using inexpensive laser pointers to temporarily blind those omnipresent electronic eyes. He plans to post his 13-page, single-spaced treatise on the subject this week on his Web site, www.naimark.net.
"The question `if a camera's aimed at me can I not be in the image?' became a haunting obsession," he said. "The answer is yes."
But in these security-conscious times, one person's civil liberties can be another's shortsighted anarchy.
"It's possible that Harry Potter's invisibility cloak may not be viewed as a good thing for the community," said Kevin Kelly, an editor at Wired magazine. "We have laws prohibiting jamming police radar. It will be interesting to see if camera-jamming becomes illegal."
Nonetheless, Mr. Naimark's obsession is emblematic of a national debate that is growing as video cameras proliferate - a proliferation that results both from falling monitoring costs, made possible by the Internet, and increasing safety concerns in the face of crime and terrorism.
In his research, Mr. Naimark discovered that there was already military literature widely available about using lasers to blind sensors, and that it was relatively simple to become invisible in front the cameras that now watch over many public spaces in this country.
"I began by aiming an inexpensive laser pointer directly into the lens of a video camera," he writes. "The results were striking. The tiny beam neutralized regions of the camera sensor far larger than the actual size of the beam. Properly aimed, it could block a far-away camera from seeing anything inside of a large window."
While Mr. Naimark acknowledged that he had some ethical discomfort about his project because his information could be useful to terrorists, he decided to go ahead.
"My interest and motivation is to provide the creative community with some stimulating and provoking stuff," he writes. "These are stimulating and provoking times."
In recent weeks there have been a growing number of incidents involving video-surveillance cameras, ranging from the mother who recently surrendered after she was recorded hitting her 4-year-old daughter in an Indiana parking lot to a man who filed a $1.5 million lawsuit against the Marriott hotel chain last month after discovering a video camera hidden in a bathroom light fixture.
The growing reliance on surveillance is giving some of the pioneers of the video camera industry second thoughts.
"I have lots of worries about how this technology is being used," said John Graham, who is the founder of BroadWare Technologies, a Cupertino, Calif., maker of software for video-camera networks, and who was one of the first researchers to send audio and video over the Internet.
"I've become Big Brother, but I didn't mean to be," Mr. Graham said. "It's just that there's no money in education or scientific collaboration."
The rush to surveillance in the wake of Sept. 11 is revitalizing a growing group of civil liberties activists who, like Mr. Naimark, are determined to limit the spread of networks of inexpensive video cameras that are appearing in virtually all public spaces.
In New York City, the Surveillance Camera Players, a guerrilla theatre troupe, is placing hand-drawn maps of video camera locations on the Internet and staging brief politically inspired performances in front of the cameras.
The group was co-founded by Bill Brown, an American literature scholar, who said the troupe was sympathetic to Mr. Naimark's opposition to the ubiquitous video eyes but took a different tack, highlighting the emerging surveillance world through a series of street parodies.
"His methods are quite different from ours," Mr. Brown said. "We're philosophical anarchists. We never engage in illegal activity, but we believe the greatest weakness of those who operate the surveillance systems is that they require secrecy."
One person who said he occasionally sees Mr. Brown's group perform is Brian Curry, the chief executive and founder of EarthCam, based in New York City, which makes surveillance camera systems and operates a network of seven cameras aimed at Times Square that constantly beam video images over the Internet.
His Web site, www.earthcam.com, attracts 50,000 to 75,000 visitors each day, Mr. Curry said, and he frequently sees people standing in Times Square waving at his cameras while they talk on their cellphones.
"We're offering a window on the world that is very much like sitting in a restaurant and looking out on the street," he said. "To try to inhibit this by saying it represents a brave new society where people are losing their privacy is far-fetched."
EarthCam's business changed after Sept. 11, he said, because there was an increased reluctance to travel and more interest in using video cameras rather than personal visits.
He also argued that the Internet video camera fills a social role in a changing society where people no longer know their neighbors, taking the place of the neighbor who would keep an vigilant eye on a neighborhood.
"People move a lot, and they're not home a lot," he said. "Internet cameras have helped fill the gap."
Indeed for some, the Internet camera is a step toward a global village. Gregory P. Galanos of Mobius Venture Capital in Silicon Valley now keeps a remote eye on his second home on a Greek island, where he has installed four cameras that send pictures over the Internet each hour. He can see ships passing and watch workers remodeling his home. "It gives me peace of mind," he said.
That is not the view of a group of privacy advocates in Washington, who are suing the Metropolitan Police Department under the Freedom of Information Act to force disclosure of technical information about a network of video cameras that has been established in the city.
The value of video cameras to improve safety and detect terrorists has been greatly overrated, according to Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit advocacy group based in Washington.
Like the Surveillance Camera Players, Mr. Rotenberg said he worries that while Internet-viewable cameras might offer entertainment, there are other networks of private and law enforcement cameras that collect information secretly on behalf of the government.
"There has been a reduction in privacy and there has been an expansion in government secrecy," he said. "We give up our privacy, but we don't gain openness in exchange."
That view contrasts sharply with that of David Brin, a physicist and author who has argued that universally accessible cameras will increase transparency in modern society without encroaching on traditional civil liberties.
"My metaphor is that databases are expansions of human memory and the cameras are the extension of human vision," he said, adding that the challenge is to make certain that new laws have provisions for "watching the watchers."
Such a viewpoint upsets other civil libertarians, who see the growing encroachment of video cameras as simply deepening the power of law enforcement and society's elites.
"I sometimes wonder if I'm living on the same planet as David Brin," said Philip E. Agre, an associate professor of information studies at the University of California at Los Angeles. "Everyone can watch the common people, but that has nothing to do with the political question of who can watch the powerful."
Mr. Naimark, the artist who believes he can disable security monitors, said he would be satisfied if he stirred debate on surveillance.
"One role of the artist in the contemporary world is to hold a mirror up to society," he said. "The artist is a social critic, and the artistic angle is in exposing and revealing and provoking things."
-------
Man Jailed Vieques Protest Released
October 7, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Puerto-Rico-Vieques.html
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) -- An activist jailed for six months for trespassing on a Navy bombing range in Vieques was released Monday, and said he would keep protesting the U.S. military presence on the Puerto Rican island.
Leaving the federal prison in San Juan, Robert Rabin said would enter the bombing range again to stop the Navy from dropping ordnance. The Navy has only dropped dummy bombs since 1999.
Jail ``was a rich experience for my learning,'' Rabin said before returning to Vieques, where he has lived since 1980. ``I was jailed for my fight in Vieques, and I leave even more committed to the fight in Vieques.''
President Bush has said the Navy will leave the bombing range by May 2003. Gov. Sila Calderon and several U.S. lawmakers want the president to put the promise in writing.
Rabin, born in Boston, runs an art gallery in Vieques and helped lead a group opposed to the U.S. presence on the island. The group was created in the 1970s and gained widespread support in Puerto Rico after two errant bombs killed a civilian guard on the range in 1999.
The movement won world attention when protesters invaded the range and camped there for a year.
Bombing opponents claim the exercises pose a health threat, which the Navy denies.
The Navy, which owns about a third of the island, has used the bombing range for about 60 years to train its Atlantic fleet.
-------
India Muslims Protest Falwell Remark
October 7, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Kashmir-Falwell-Muhammad.html
SRINAGAR, India (AP) -- Thousands of Muslims in India's Jammu-Kashmir state demonstrated in the streets Monday to protest remarks by the Rev. Jerry Falwell in which the conservative religious leader said the founder of Islam was a terrorist.
Irate mobs shouted anti-American slogans, threw stones at passing vehicles and forced shops to close in some places as Islamic groups called for a daylong strike to protest what they called ``derogatory and blasphemous remarks'' by Falwell in an interview broadcast Sunday on CBS.
The protests began after a local newspaper reported the conservative Baptist minister had called Muhammed, the founder of Islam, a terrorist. The television interview was not broadcast in Jammu-Kashmir.
Kashmir's chief Muslim cleric, the mirwaiz Mohammad Omar Farooq, said Falwell had ``no right to outrage the religious sentiments of the second largest religious group in the world. It reflects his ignorance and bigotry.''
The violence came on the eve of the last round of voting for a new state assembly in Jammu-Kashmir, where Islamic militant groups have threatened to kill voters, candidates and poll workers who participate in the election.
Jammu-Kashmir is India's only Muslim majority state, with 12 million people. Militant groups have been fighting since 1989 to separate it from India or join it with Pakistan. Both nations claim the region and have fought two wars over it since gaining independence from Britain.
--------
Thousands in U.S. Rally for Peace
October 7, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Peace-Rally.html
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Thousands of anti-war protesters took to the streets throughout the state Sunday, beating drums, hoisting signs and proclaiming their opposition to a potential war with Iraq.
Protesters jammed Union Square in San Francisco and a lively demonstration also took place at the Federal Building in west Los Angeles.
The demonstrations were one of dozens of anti-war rallies across the country organized by the Not in Our Name Project, a grassroots group opposing a range of Bush administration actions. Demonstrations also were held in New York, Chicago, Portland, Ore., and many smaller communities.
In Los Angeles, an estimated 3,000 demonstrators marched outside the Federal Building in Westwood.
``People consider this a critical time,'' said Steve Rohde, a lawyer who represents the nonprofit coalition group. The protest was set to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan, Rohde said.
``This coalition is very concerned about the assault on civil liberties, the detention and holding of American citizens, as well as non-citizens without lawyers,'' Rohde.
Many protesters at the rally painted their faces with the peace symbol and others carried signs that read: ``Make sense not War,'' and ``War is not the Answer.''
In San Francisco, marchers used a thesaurus of adjectives to describe their disenchantment, calling the president a ``warmonger,'' ``racist,'' ``irresponsible,'' and ``stoopid.''
Women in designer jeans and high-heeled shoes marched next to students in tie-dyed T-shirts and Birkenstocks. The driver of a cable car surrounded by the throng clanged his bell in time to pulsating reggae music, joined by the honking of dozens of trapped taxis.
``We don't want war. It's clearly for fabricated reasons,'' said Taliya Ansari of Hercules, who came with her family after hearing of the rally at her mosque. ``We don't want people to die. (Iraq is) not doing anything to us.''
For the president, the question seemed to be not if, but when, to wage war against Iraq. Stumping in Manchester, N.H., for Senate candidate John Sununu, Bush didn't mention the 50 demonstrators protesting outside, or the gatherings around the country. But he reiterated his stance that the United States must disarm Iraq to protect American lives.
And in his weekend radio address, Bush urged Congress to give him authority to remove Saddam and deal quickly with Iraq's arsenal of chemical and biological weapons.
Still, demonstrators appealed for restraint before the United States enters another war.
San Francisco police added several dozen officers to handle the crowd, which was feisty but peaceful, waving their signs before a backdrop of Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, Tiffany & Co., Levi's and Macy's.
``This is a country full of people that won't let the government start this immoral war in our name,'' rally organizer Tanya Mayo yelled from a stage swathed in peace banners, blue balloons and the names of victims of past wars.
On the Net:
http://notinourname.net
----
Swiss activists still seek ban on GMO testing
REUTERS SWITZERLAND:
October 7, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/18072/story.htm
ZURICH - Swiss opponents of genetically modified (GM) foods vowed last week to force a referendum on banning the products after parliament turned down a five-year moratorium on outdoor tests of altered organisms.
The lower house of parliament voted late against adopting a temporary ban when it narrowly approved draft legislation regulating the use of GM products.
Opponents had pushed for a moratorium to allow more time to gauge any potential risks that scientifically engineered foods might pose to the environment or to people who eat them.
A coalition of environmentalists and farmers who want Switzerland to remain GM-free said they would start early next year with the process for getting a binding referendum on a 10-year moratorium.
"The main objective is to prevent the commercial application (of GM products)," the organisers said. "Swiss agriculture wants to remain free of genetic technology, and this is the wish of the large majority of its customers."
The legislation is still awaiting final parliamentary approval once the upper and lower houses of parliament can iron out differences between the versions they have adopted.
The law lays down criteria on when GM projects can move from the laboratory out into the field and tightens labelling of foods that contain GM ingredients.
Swiss researchers and industry hailed parliament's rejection of a moratorium, which they said would have put unacceptable restrictions on their work.
Basel-based Syngenta, the world's biggest provider of products that help farmers fight pests and weeds, heaved a sigh of relief at the vote after an emotional debate. "We were clearly concerned at Syngenta because we wanted good conditions in our home base, Switzerland. However, our big concern was about the effect on real research here," said Arthur Einsele, the company's point man on the issue.
"A moratorium would have negatively influenced research in Switzerland and that was our main concern," he added.
"It would have been the first de jure moratorium in Europe."
In a 1998 referendum, Swiss voters rejected by a two-to-one margin a measure that would have outlawed production of transgenetic animals and forbidden the release of genetically altered plants and animals into the environment.
-------
------- OneList (submissions from subscribers)
------- Depleted Uranium Keeps On Killing!
-----------
Posted
without profit or payment for research and educational
purposes only,
in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107.