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NUCLEAR
Ex - Foes to Reflect on Missile Crisis
Cuba Missile - Crisis Veterans Fault Bush on Iraq
Letter: Castro Made Soviets Worried
Effects of Iraq war would haunt West for years
Yugoslavia denies air defence help to Iraq
Hussein may dodge US hunt
Russian nuke exercise
Saddam Hussein Can't Blackmail Us With a Fissionable Softball
Idaho Lab Moves Nuclear Fuel from Wet to Dry Storage
Congress Authorizes Bush to Use Force Against Iraq
Congressional Joint Resolution to Authorize Use of Force Against Iraq
Plan to set up panel to probe September 11 collapses
JFK Aides Say Bush Is Wrong On Crisis
War for Dummies
MILITARY
Congress Passes Bill Threatening Sanctions on Sudan
Yugoslav Court Jails Soldiers for War Crimes
Igen International biodefense initiatives
Iraq Again Invites U.S. Arms Experts
Iraq Opens Alleged Weapons Site to Foreign Media
Iraqi Radar, Missile Sites Hit
U.S. Mulls Military Rule After Hussein
Iraq Balks at Agreeing to All Terms for U.N. Inspectors
Sri Lanka says hopes to sign anti-landmine treaty
Jordan: No Interest in Ruling Iraq
Russian rebuff for Blair over Iraq
Putin Offers Qualified Support for U.N. Proposals for Iraq
CIA Feels Heat on Iraq Data
Ex-Commander Opposes Iraq Invasion
For Bush's Speechwriter, Job Grows Beyond Words
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
9/11 Inquiry Eyes Possible 5th Pilot
ENERGY AND OTHER
Food scraps to power bacteria-driven battery
Danish wind turbine makers eye Indian growth
Danish wind stocks sink on US energy bill doubt
ACTIVISTS
Turning the Tide
Peace, perchance?
Throngs Again Demand Venezuelan Leader Quit
Nobel Peace Prize Awarded to Carter With Criticism of Bush
List of Americans Awarded Peace Prize
Columbus Day Provokes Indigenous, Environmental Actions
-------- NUCLEAR
Ex - Foes to Reflect on Missile Crisis
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
October 11, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Cuba-Missile-Crisis-Conference.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A12913-2002Oct11?language=printer
HAVANA (AP) -- Fidel Castro traded his customary fatigues for a black suit and tie Friday and sat down across a table from missile crisis foe Robert McNamara, who said the Cuban leader, former President Kennedy and Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev had saved the world from nuclear war.
``It was the best managed foreign policy crisis of the last 50 years,'' McNamara, the former secretary of defense, said in a brief statement, before American officials who considered attacking Cuba 40 years ago this month at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The former enemies were to engage in three days of reflection on the missile crisis that nearly prompted a nuclear war.
``The Crisis of October has been considered by many as the most dramatic of the so-called Cold War and perhaps of all international relations in contemporary history,'' said Jose Ramon Fernandez, a Cuban military commander at the time of the crisis and now a vice president in Castro's government.
Fernandez said most past studies of the events had concentrated on the two superpowers of that time: the United States and the Soviet Union, and expressed hope that more would be understood about Cuba's role as the stage of the Cold War drama.
The crisis erupted in October 1962 when Kennedy learned that Cuba had Soviet nuclear missiles capable of reaching the United States. The crisis was defused two weeks later when the Soviet Union agreed to remove the missiles.
``How did it happen? How close did we come to nuclear war? Why didn't nuclear war start? What lessons can be drawn to reduce the risk of nuclear war?'' McNamara said on the eve of the conference, adding he hoped some of those questions would be answered.
Former Kennedy aides Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Richard Goodwin and Ted Sorenson are also attending the conference. Former CIA analyst Dino Brugioni, who interpreted the now famous American spy photos of Soviet missiles in Cuba, will also be present.
``When I asked President Castro what would have happened if we had attacked, he said: 'We would have disappeared,''' McNamara said Thursday evening.
The former defense secretary refused to draw parallels between the missile crisis and President Bush's current calls for a pre-emptive strike on Iraq, saying he could not second-guess a sitting U.S. leader.
As for the naval quarantine he personally recommended be placed around the island on Oct. 16, 1962, after the missiles were discovered, McNamara said: ``a quarantine is the opposite of a pre-emptive action.''
For two days, the men who made critical decisions during those nerve-racking days, will study newly declassified documents with officials from the National Security Archive in Washington, which brought much of the historic paperwork to light.
For decades, we never knew ``you had 162 nuclear warheads on your soil ... putting 90 million Americans at risk,'' said McNamara.
The conference will feature meetings in Havana on Friday and Saturday. The group will travel on Sunday to sites related to the crisis, including a missile silo in the western province of Pinar del Rio.
On the Net:
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nsa/cuba--mis--cri/
----
Cuba Missile - Crisis Veterans Fault Bush on Iraq
October 11, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-cuba-missiles.html
HAVANA (Reuters) - Former U.S. and Russian officials and military officers met on Friday to study the lessons of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and gave President Bush bad marks for his handling of the present-day Iraq crisis.
Former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and other aides of President John F. Kennedy, protagonists in the 13-day crisis over the secret deployment of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, are taking part in the three-day conference whose opening was attended by Cuban President Fidel Castro.
McNamara praised Castro, Kennedy and former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev for good judgement and the cool-handed resolution of one of the most dramatic moments of the Cold War that took the world to the brink of a nuclear war.
``We avoided nuclear catastrophe by the narrowest of margins. ``I hope we can draw lessons that will assist in preventing nuclear wars in the future,'' McNamara said.
``This was the most dangerous moment of the Cold War and it was handled with great care and prudence, especially on our side,'' said Wayne Smith, the top U.S. diplomat in Havana in the late 1970s.
``There was no cowboying,'' Smith said. ``Today's crisis is not being handled in the same careful, prudent way.''
Bush, a Republican, invoked the Cuban missile crisis in a speech on Monday to justify a possible pre-emptive attack on Iraq, suspected of hiding weapons of mass destruction. After Bush's speech, Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy replied that his brother avoided a pre-emptive strike on Cuba by imposing a naval quarantine.
Kennedy White House aides historian Arthur Schlesinger and speechwriter Theodore Sorensen said Bush had taken Kennedy's words out of context and was misreading history.
The White House rejected the criticism, with spokesman Ari Fleischer saying, ``The reason the Cuban missile crisis was resolved peacefully was because President Kennedy, like President Bush, displayed strength and was indeed willing to use force pre-emptively.
``If President Kennedy had not acted with such resolute strength, it's likely the Cuban missile crisis would not have been resolved peacefully. We reject these criticisms coming out from Kennedy staffers. It's a little bit of an ideological rewrite,'' Fleischer added.
``If Khrushchev and Castro didn't back down, do you think John F. Kennedy would not have used force? Of course he would have. He said so,'' he said.
The majority of Kennedy's civilian and military advisers recommended an attack on Cuba after U-2 spy planes discovered the Soviets installing missile bases on the island off Florida, McNamara said at a news conference on Thursday.
McNamara proposed a ``quarantine'' to stop Soviet freighters transporting the weapons to Cuba, and the crisis ended when Moscow ordered the withdrawal of its missiles.
``We called it a quarantine because blockade is a word of war, and the purpose of the quarantine was exactly the opposite,'' he said. ``It wasn't at all clear that a quarantine would postpone war. But it was not pre-emption. It was the reverse of pre-emption.''
KHRUSHCHEV MISLED KENNEDY: CASTRO
Communist-run Cuba maintains it allowed Khrushchev to install missile bases on the island for defensive purposes only, to deter U.S. attempts to oust Castro's fledgling revolutionary government.
``Our commitment is to contribute to historical truth,'' Cuban Vice President Jose Ramon Fernandez said at the opening session of the conference organized by the Cuban government and the nonprofit National Security Archive in Washington.
Castro, 76, who has been in power since 1959, partly blamed Khrushchev for the missile crisis in an interview with ABC's Barbara Walters.
``He misled Kennedy. That was his main ... flaw,'' Castro said in the interview to air on ABC's ``20/20'' on Friday night.
Thousands of pages of declassified U.S., Cuban and Russian documents will be studied at the conference. One of the documents released by the National Security Archive is a 54-page chronology of events leading up to the missile crisis that was prepared for Kennedy by the CIA.
The document shows that, as late as August 1962, U.S. intelligence agencies were underestimating Soviet intentions to install nuclear weapons in Cuba, an intelligence failure akin to that now being debated in the United States over the Sept. 11, 2001, hijacked airliner attacks.
----
Letter: Castro Made Soviets Worried
By George Gedda
Associated Press Writer
Friday, October 11, 2002; 1:13 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A12630-2002Oct11?language=printer
WASHINGTON -- Weeks after the Soviet Union agreed to pull offensive missiles from Cuba in 1962, Nikita Khrushchev was worried that an "irrational" Fidel Castro would renew tensions with the United States, possibly even provoking a war, newly released documents show.
Cuba "wants practically to drag us behind it with a leash, and wants to pull us into a war with America by its actions," Khrushchev said in a Nov. 16 letter to diplomatic aides in Cuba.
At issue were U.S. surveillance flights sent over Cuba to monitor dismantling of the missiles Moscow had installed on the island. Khrushchev, the Communist leader of the Soviet Union, had agreed in late October to pull out the missiles as part of a deal with President Kennedy.
But Khrushchev was concerned that Castro would order his forces to shoot down the low-flying U.S. surveillance flights, which the Cuban leader clearly saw as an intolerable intrusion on Cuban sovereignty.
The Soviet agreement to pull out the missiles followed a two-week period, starting in mid-October, in which the two powers came close to a nuclear exchange.
There was a sense of relief worldwide when the agreement was announced but the newly released documents demonstrate the crisis did not end on Oct. 29, as is widely believed.
Khrushchev's concerns were contained in documents being released on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the missile crisis.
Cuba is commemorating the event with a two-day conference in Havana that was starting on Friday.
The documents being released there are from the Cuban government, the CIA, the Pentagon, the White House, the Soviet Foreign Ministry and other governments which played a role in the long ago events.
A portion of the documents was made available to The Associated Press in Washington.
The National Security Archives, a Washington-based research group, has been cooperating with the Cuban government in preparing for the conference.
Archive director Thomas Blanton said, "The conference room will echo with words that resonate today, such as 'intelligence failure,' 'pre-emptive strike' and 'weapons of mass destruction.'"
The day after Khrushchev sent his memo to Anastas Mikoyan, a top diplomatic adviser who was monitoring events in Havana, it appeared as though Khrushchev's worst fears were being realized.
A Cuban military document, stamped "Top Secret," said Cuban anti-aircraft units were being given authority to open fire against "enemy aircraft" starting on Nov. 18.
There is no evidence the order was ever carried out. Castro suggests in one document that the order was countermanded, telling a Russian visitor at a later date: "Just imagine, our soldiers cried in the trenches, having no opportunity to shoot at the planes, which were flying at grass-cutting altitudes.
"That affected their morale negatively," Castro said. "And one has to take into account that the enemy will be threatening us for a long time."
Khrushchev clearly felt a sense of betrayal that Cuba was not appreciative of the deal he negotiated, a key element of which was a U.S. promise not to invade the island.
He expressed regret that Cuba did not want to take steps to avoid war.
"If our Cuban comrades take steps that in their opinion protect their interests - that is their right," Khrushchev said.
"But then we have to raise with them the issue that we would be forced to absolve ourselves of all responsibility for the consequences their steps might entail for them.
"If they do not take our arguments into account, then it is clear that our side cannot bear the responsibility for it."
-------- depleted uranium
Effects of Iraq war would haunt West for years
11 Oct 2002
Reuters AlertNet
http://www.alertnet.org/thefacts/reliefresources/530406?version=1
Ordinary people in Iraq are in utter dread of war - and, with every speech that President Bush makes, they become more convinced that it is inevitable.
They have experienced two wars in the recent past -- the bloody war of attrition against Iran and, 10 years ago, the Gulf War, so they know only too well what war is like and its terrible cost.
They know that smart bombs are fallible, and only as smart as the human intelligence that guides and programmes them, and that surgical strikes are never as accurate or as surgical as they are made out to be.
Most observers agree that a new war in Iraq, relying heavily on aerial bombardment, will exact a high price in civilian casualties.
The phrase "regime change" is a misnomer: "regime removal" would be a more accurate term because, since there appears to be no coherent plan for the rebuilding of Iraq, politically and socially as well as economically after a "successful" war.
The Gulf War was followed by 10 years of economic sanctions that have made life a grim struggle for survival in a country that was once rich and prosperous.
Water-borne diseases are rife because sanctions have starved the country of the resources it needs to maintain and repair pumping stations, water mains and sewage systems.
Now only 41 per cent of the Iraqi population has access to clean water. Up to 800,000 children are chronically malnourished.
There has been an upsurge in cancer, attributed to the use of depleted uranium munitions during the Gulf War, but Iraqi hospitals, starved of the drugs and hi-tech equipment that they need to treat cancer, are unable to offer more than palliative care.
Four-and-a-half million people have left Iraq as refugees in the past five years. They will be joined by hundreds of thousands more.
There are already three-quarters of a million displaced people within Iraq -- within a country with a total population of 22.4 million.
Hospitals and civilian medical facilities will be overwhelmed by thousands of civilian casualties. And there are real possibilities of civil strife, with Iraqi social networks weakened by sanctions and divided along religious lines between Shia and Sunni Muslims and a tiny minority of Christians.
There have been positive developments amid the talk of war. The Iraqi government has said that the weapons inspectors can return unconditionally to Iraq, opening the door to the possibility of a peaceful resolution of the dispute over weapons of mass destruction, and President George W. Bush has been persuaded to take his case to the United Nations -- for the time being.
Such has been the belligerence of Bush's rhetoric, however, that most Iraqis believe it is only a matter of time before the bombs begin to fall.
The humanitarian consequences of a war aimed at "regime change" should be a central issue.
All the available evidence suggests that in a highly urbanised country like Iraq -- with three-quarters of its people living in towns and cities -- the toll of civilian lives and injuries would be very heavy.
Civilian casualties should not be pushed to the margins of the debate with that chilling phrase "collateral damage".
Indeed, failure to take account of the humanitarian impact of war will come back to haunt policy makers since it will dominate Iraqi and Arab perceptions of the United States and its allies for years to come and will shred their vision of a peaceful, stable and prosperous Middle East.
(George Gelber is head of public policy at the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD). Originally a lecturer in political science in Chile in the 1970s, he has worked in development for many years. He has been with CAFOD since 1989.)
-------- iraq
Yugoslavia denies air defence help to Iraq
AP
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2002
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/articleshow?artid=24790996
BELGRADE: The Yugoslav President denied on Thursday reports that Serbian military experts are helping Saddam Hussein organise his air defence during possible US attacks.
But Vojislav Kostunica did not entirely rule out that some individuals may have made private arrangements with the Iraqis.
"That kind of official cooperation existed before" during Slobodan Milosevic's regime, Kostunica said, referring to the former Yugoslav President now on trial at the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands. "I'm sure it does not exist now."
"But anything to do with weapons is a lucrative challenge for some people," Kostunica added. "Even the Americans uncovered some of their own citizens (fighting for the Taliban) in Afghanistan."
British and Yugoslav media have alleged that an unidentified number of radar and weapons systems experts are helping the Iraqis in organising air defences based on the experience they had in Yugoslavia during the 1999 NATO air strikes on the Balkan country.
Even though outdated, the Yugoslav air defence performed exceptionally well, protecting military targets in Kosovo and shooting down two US jets, including an F-117 Nighthawk, the world's first operational "stealth" attack plane.
During Milosevic's reign until October 2000, Yugoslavia had maintained close military links with Hussein's regime, servicing Iraqi air force MIG jets near Belgrade and taking part in the construction of Iraqi military facilities, including bunkers in Saddam's presidential palaces in Baghdad.
----
Hussein may dodge US hunt
From Osama bin Laden to Pancho Villa, the US has always struggled to neutralize high-profile foes.
By Scott Peterson
The Christian Science Monitor
October 11, 2002
http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/1011/p01s04-wosc.htm
AMMAN, JORDAN - If played out on the silver screen, an American manhunt for Saddam Hussein would have a predictable end: John Rambo would penetrate Baghdad, track the Iraqi leader to his deeply buried bunker, and carry out the White House policy of "regime change" with a single bullet - and then make a safe getaway.
But while the tidy world of the movies may appear to shape some US options for Iraq, former American military officers and analysts warn that going after Mr. Hussein to "cut off the head" of the Iraqi regime may prove to be Mission Impossible.
From recent manhunts in Somalia and Afghanistan - and even during the first Gulf War in 1991, when Hussein was a reportedly a target of US Special Forces - American bounty hunters have rarely come home with the prize. Osama bin Laden remains unaccounted for despite a massive US military effort and President Bush's declared wish to find him "dead or alive." Taliban chief Mullah Mohammed Omar is believed to be still on the run in central Afghanistan.
Poor intelligence has defeated nearly every recent effort. And few predict suc- cess in Iraq, where Rambo wannabes face a capital city of some five million people, in a country peppered with dozens of presidential "palaces," going after a man who shares his public life with three known body-doubles - and who has been hiding for more than a decade.
"Our human intelligence is appalling, and it hasn't gotten any better," says Joseph Hoar, a retired four-star US Marines general and former commander in chief of US Central Command.
"The only way we'll know what's going on in Baghdad is if someone stands up in a parking lot with a sign over their head, faced up to the sky, saying: 'Saddam is at such-and-such an address,' " says General Hoar, in a telephone interview from Dubai. "We'll take a picture of it."
While American technical abilities to monitor, listen to, and see from a distance have leapt in the past decade, specialists say that nothing substitutes for having operatives on the ground.
Key details about Iraq were, in fact, gleaned by American agents operating under cover with the United Nations Special Commission, which was tasked to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction. In 1998 they helped the UN survey a string of presidential sites, but reportedly had their own task of learning how the Iraqi leadership protects and hides itself.
"I suppose they have a lot of information [about those sites]," says Hoar. "But the thing we rarely get is predictive intelligence, where we have an insider who knows what people are thinking, and how they are going to act."
Hit squads are "pie in the sky," Hoar says. "Hit what, in a city this size, with all the presidential palaces and doubles, and a guy that sleeps in a different place every night, who trusts no one but his own family? The people who think this is going to be easy have been watching too many television shows."
Under the gun
Vulnerable or not, the US has marked Hussein as a target. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer declared in October that the Iraqi people could take care of Hussein with "a bullet" and avoid a costly war. President Bush has personalized the fight, saying of the Iraqi leader, "He tried to kill my dad."
And though officially denied, US units during the Gulf War tried to assassinate Hussein himself, but never came close.
"No one can tell you we weren't trying to kill Saddam. We were, and that's a fact," says a former senior Special Forces officer with firsthand experience of those Gulf War operations. "We weren't very good because he is a [master] at deception, and keeping his presence low-profile.
"There were some concerted efforts to get the guy," the officer says. "But the idea was to try to get him with a bomb so it looked like an accident. It was: 'Let's get his location, and let's put a smart bomb through the window.'"
Americans involved in the Panama campaign in 1989 admit that luck played an important role in capturing Gen. Manuel Noriega. But noting that during World War II, the allies failed in an attempt to kill Gen. Erwin Rommel in north Africa, and the British failed in attempts to assassinate Hitler, the officer puts US chances of conducting a successful manhunt in Iraq - bar "getting lucky"- at "slim to none."
"An embattled leader who is canny, streetwise, and with paranoia that works with him everyday, so he's thinking up new stuff to keep you from knowing where he is and what he is thinking, is hard to get," the veteran says. "Most leaders who have been assassinated have been assassinated while they were thinking of something else, not their own preservation."
Opulent hidey-holes
Hussein has been obsessed with his own preservation throughout the more than three decades of rule.
US officials say they want to focus their search for any residual weapons-of-mass-destruction programs - and, by extension, the Iraqi leader - on eight presidential "palaces"; three in Baghdad, and the rest spread near Hussein's birthplace 90 miles north, at Tikrit, and in other Iraqi cities.
But these eight opulent sites are vast, and collectively incorporate more than 1,000 structures over an area of about 12 square miles, according to the UN, whose weapons inspectors surveyed each one in 1998. Rich with swimming pools and entire self-contained outdoor landscapes, mansions, and presumably underground fixtures, these places are populated by countless sculpted and painted images of Hussein.
A British "dossier" on Iraq's WMD capabilities released last month shows the relative size of one site, by superimposing an outline of a tiny Buckingham Palace on a satellite photograph of one site. Experts at globalsecurity.org estimate 57 such "palaces" exist in Iraq.
"The key point is patience, and that means gathering intelligence," says Andy Messing, a retired Special Forces major who heads the National Defense Council Foundation in Washington, and advocates repealing US laws that prohibit assassination.
"Once you have the intelligence, everything else falls into place," Major Messing says. "You can't just jump up and send the 82nd Airborne and 10th Mountain Division to Afghanistan to get Osama bin Laden, because those are big footprints.
"You don't attach 100 bells to the cow, if you want the cow to [stay hidden] in the pasture - and that's what we did [in Afghanistan]," Messing adds.
If intelligence is too hard to come by, Messing suggests offering a $250 million reward, an offer of American citizenship to the "three tiers" of the assassin's family, and "protection of the first tier."
"[Hussein] wouldn't last a month," Messing predicts. "When you talk about bounty, you've got to be serious. People were rolling on the ground laughing" about the $5 million the US put on the head of Mr. bin Laden.
Laughter also greeted a UN offer in 1993, when it posted a $25,000 reward for Gen. Farrah Aidid, Somalia's strongest warlord, on a Wild West-style "Wanted" poster. American troops first landed on the beaches of Mogadishu to stop a famine in December 1992, performing what President George H.W. Bush called "God's work" at which Americans "cannot fail."
But US and UN plans for nation-building threatened General Aidid's power, and by mid-1993 the faceoff devolved into a manhunt. The "key to success" in Somalia - as described by Delta Force commander William Garrison in a heavily blacked-out after-action report, acquired through a Freedom of Information Act request - was "timely, accurate and reliable intelligence."
The info chase
Such intelligence proved to be rare as gold dust - and may be a stark warning that can be applied to Iraq. Acting on false information from paid Somali agents, Delta commandos first fast-roped from helicopters into a UN compound. Next they hit a Western relief agency, prompting relief directors to take US commanders on a tour of Mogadishu, to point out "their" buildings.
A police chief in the UN-supported police force was picked up and pistol-whipped in another raid. Aidid lookalikes were also whisked away, to the amusement of Somalis.
"If I were hanging around a Third World city, and you approached me and said: 'How about providing me some information?' " says Hoar, the retired general. "I could string you along for a year and a half before you realized I was making it up."
The example of America's hunt in Mexico for the popular bandit leader Pancho Villa in 1916 may be a cautionary parable. President Woodrow Wilson sent nearly 11,000 men with more than 9,000 horses to find one man in difficult terrain.
"In 11 months we never caught sight of him. The only firefight was between the Americans and [Mexican] troops," Hoar says. "If World War I hadn't started, we'd still be down there."
-------- russia
Russian nuke exercise
Inside the Ring Notes from the Pentagon.
Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20021011-8675332.htm
Russian strategic nuclear forces are preparing to conduct a long-range aviation exercise that is expected to include aerial probes of U.S. air defenses, defense officials said.
The exercise begins next week and involves long-range bomber deployments to bases throughout Russia, including the bomber base of Anadyr in northeastern Siberia near the Bering Sea and the Tiksi air base in north-central Siberia on the Laptev Sea.
Tu-95 Bear H bombers, which carry air-launched nuclear cruise missiles, will be deployed. Tu-160 Blackjack bombers also are expected to take part in the war games.
The Russian bombers have flown close to the United States in past exercises, prompting the U.S. Air Force to scramble F-16 interceptor jets. Two Tu-95s flew within 37 miles of Alaska in April as part of spring war games.
Pentagon officials sought to play down the Russian exercises as routine. Other defense officials, however, said the maneuvers show the Russian military still regards the United States as its main enemy.
-------- terrorism
Saddam Hussein Can't Blackmail Us With a Fissionable Softball
by Robert Higgs
October 11, 2002
http://www.lewrockwell.com/higgs/higgs11.html
In his speech at Cincinnati on October 7, President George W. Bush, seeking to rally support for his authorization to launch a military invasion of Iraq, portrayed the threat posed by the Iraqi regime in lurid terms. The Iraqis, he asserted, possess dreaded chemical and biological "weapons of mass destruction," and they seek to develop a nuclear weapon. "If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy, or steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball," the president warned, "it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year." And then? "Saddam Hussein would be in a position to blackmail anyone who opposes his aggression. He would be in a position to dominate the Middle East. He would be in a position to threaten America."
Bush urged that "we cannot wait for the final proof - the smoking gun - that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." Reiterating that Saddam can "develop a nuclear weapon to blackmail the world," the president opined that "the situation could hardly get worse" and therefore that the United States must eliminate the grave Iraqi threat before it comes to fruition.
This view of the world is so grotesquely out of proportion, so preposterously hyperbolic, that one scarcely knows what to make of it. The president, along with all those who find his presentation compelling, seems to have forgotten everything about the long Cold War, and he seems oblivious to nearly everything about the current world situation.
For some forty years, the United States lived under constant threat of nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. For those who have forgotten, the Soviet regime was not composed of poets and flower peddlers. If Saddam Hussein is, as the president insists, "a ruthless and aggressive dictator," what was Joseph Stalin? What was Leonid Brezhnev?
Nor did the rulers of the USSR play single-softball with respect to nuclear warheads. By the mid-1980s, the Soviet arsenal contained more than 10,000 strategic nuclear warheads and some 30,000 nonstrategic nuclear warheads. Unlike Iraq, which has no capability to deliver a nuclear weapon at long range, the USSR had more than 6,000 nuclear warheads mounted on more than a thousand intercontinental ballistic missiles, most of them programmed to strike targets in the United States within half an hour of launch. In addition, thousands of submarine-launched nuclear weapons and more than a thousand nuclear bombs carried by long-range jet aircraft augmented the Soviet threat.
Yet, notwithstanding the tens of thousands of Soviet nuclear warheads and their sophisticated delivery vehicles kept in constant readiness, the United States was not "blackmailed" by the USSR. Odd that now the United States should quake at the prospect of a single Iraqi softball of fissionable material.
The United States itself, of course, created an awesome nuclear arsenal (not to speak of its vast stocks of chemical and biological weapons). Even today, after substantial post-Cold War cutbacks, the US nuclear arsenal contains more than 3,000 strategic nuclear warheads and thousands of nonstrategic nuclear weapons. Given that the United States is the only country ever to have used nuclear weapons in warfare, its willingness to use such weapons cannot be doubted.
Whereas Saddam Hussein has never threatened to use nuclear weapons against the United States, the United States has threatened to use such weapons against Iraq, most notably when President George H. W. Bush sent a letter to Saddam Hussein in January 1991, warning him against using chemical or biological weapons to fight the US and other forces about to attack Iraq, and not so subtly suggesting that nuclear retaliation might ensue if he did.
The Iraqi dictator was deterred in 1991; he can be deterred just as well in 2002 or any future year. He understands fully that any use of weapons of mass destruction - suitcase nukes, deadly germs, nerve gas, or anything else - by him or any agent of his against the United States will elicit his immediate destruction, most likely by means of US nuclear retaliation. Nothing in his history suggests that he is suicidal; on the contrary, he works extraordinarily hard at personal survival.
If the Iraqis understand the nuclear threat they face from the Americans, other regimes now understand that they too might become targets. According to the Bush administration's secret Nuclear Posture Review provided to Congress by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in January 2002, a partial copy of which was obtained by the Los Angeles Times, "The Bush administration has directed the military to prepare contingency plans to use nuclear weapons against at least seven countries [China, Russia, Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Libya, and Syria] and to build smaller nuclear weapons for use in certain battlefield situations." Leaders around the world have taken note of the new US nuclear posture. They surely understand that although the United States does not speak softly, it does carry a big stick.
Clearly, then, given the constellation of forces and the understandings of all the parties regarding action and reaction, Iraq poses no nuclear threat to the American people or anyone else. President Bush's hyperventilation about the "mushroom cloud" is nothing but hot air, intended to inspire fear where such fear has no rational basis.
Unfortunately, we cannot say the same about nuclear threats from other quarters. The continuing existence of vast nuclear-weapons stockpiles and delivery systems in Russia constitutes a tremendous threat to the safety of humankind. Even if the Russians resist the deliberate employment of those weapons, the likelihood of accidental launches or catastrophic failures of their command-and-control system remains far from trivial. If President Bush really wanted to do something to allay the nuclear threat to the American people, he would put the full weight of his administration behind the most expeditious dismantling of as many of the Russian weapons as possible. The $1 billion a year the United States is spending currently to improve the security of Russian nuclear storage facilities is pathetically slight in proportion to the seriousness of the threat those ill-secured facilities pose to the world.
Also significant, though seldom mentioned by the establishment media, are the more than 100 nuclear warheads believed to be in the Israeli arsenal. Little imagination is required to conceive of the targets the Israelis probably have in mind for those weapons. Bush seeks to inspire fear of nuclear attack in the residents of New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, but the residents of Baghdad, Damascus, and Teheran have far more reason to be afraid of finding themselves on the receiving end of such an attack.
Nor should we overlook the nuclear warheads and long-range missiles in the hands of the Pakistanis. Unlike Iraq, Pakistan has spawned, nurtured, and harbored countless thousands of Muslim holy warriors keen to harm the United States. Evidently, the Bush administration feels comfortable with Pakistani dictator General Pervez Musharraf because he is "our son of a bitch," but today's military strongman may be tomorrow's deposed dictator, and nobody knows how friendly toward the United States the replacement son of a bitch will be. A hostile, nuclear-armed, Islamist regime in Pakistan might make the Taliban look like cute kindergarteners.
In sum, a nuclear threat does exist, in fact, several of them, but the mythical softball in Baghdad is not among them. That President Bush and his warmongering advisers are hellbent to invade Iraq is all too clear. That Iraq's nuclear program justifies such an invasion is the sheerest nonsense.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- idaho
Idaho Lab Moves Nuclear Fuel from Wet to Dry Storage
October 11, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/oct2002/2002-10-11-09.asp#anchor3
IDAHO FALLS, Idaho, In the interest of risk reduction, the U.S. Department of Energy's Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory has moved spent nuclear fuel from wet to dry storage and shipped special nuclear material off-site to other DOE facilities. Dry storage of spent nuclear fuel reduces the risk of corrosion and leakage into the environment, the lab said in a statement Wednesday.
The last of 42 transfers of spent nuclear fuel and fuel remnants stored in the canal of the Materials Test Reactor has been made to the Idaho Nuclear Technology and Engineering Center, three months ahead of schedule, the lab said.
The Materials Test Reactor was the second reactor to be operated at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL). It was in operation from 1952 to 1970, and information obtained from tests run at the reactor influenced the choice of core structural materials and fuel elements for every reactor designed in the United States since 1952, INEEL says.
Some of the nuclear material moved this week had been in canal storage for more than 30 years after testing on it was completed. The transfers were performed with a specialized cask designed for moving fuel. The Materials Test Reactor canal will now undergo decontamination and decommissioning.
Crews completed moving the last of the spent nuclear fuel in wet storage pools at Test Area North into three dry storage casks sitting on a concrete pad.
Under the INEEL's Accelerated Cleanup Plan, all spent nuclear fuel will be consolidated and transferred into dry storage at Idaho Nuclear Technology and Engineering Center by 2005. There it will be packaged and prepared by 2012 for shipment to the national repository that is scheduled to be constructed by then at Yucca Mountain, Nevada.
The state of Nevada has six lawsuits before various courts to block the Yucca Mountain project, which also faces more than 250 technical issue that must be resolved before a license can be sought from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
-------- us politics
Congress Authorizes Bush to Use Force Against Iraq
New York Times
October 11, 2002
By ALISON MITCHELL and CARL HULSE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/11/national/11IRAQ.html
WASHINGTON, Friday, Oct. 11 - The Senate voted overwhelmingly early this morning to authorize President Bush to use force against Iraq, joining with the House in giving him a broad mandate to act against Saddam Hussein.
The hard-won victory for Mr. Bush came little more than a month after many lawmakers of both parties returned to Washington from summer recess expressing grave doubts about a rush to war. It reflected weeks of lobbying and briefings by the administration that culminated with a speech by the president on Monday night.
The Republican-controlled House voted 296 to 133 Thursday afternoon to allow the president to use the military ``against the continuing threat'' posed by the Iraqi regime. The Democratic-run Senate followed at 1:15 a.m. today with a vote of 77 to 23 for the measure.
After the House voted, President Bush said the support showed that ``the gathering threat of Iraq must be confronted fully and finally.'' He added, ``The days of Iraq acting as an outlaw state are coming to an end.''
While the votes in favor of the resolutions were large and bipartisan, they highlighted a sharp split in the Democratic party over how and when to use force. This was particularly true in the House. Even though Representative Richard A. Gephardt, the House minority leader, put his weight behind the force authorization, more House Democrats voted against the resolution sought by the president than for it, splitting 126 to 81. Only 6 Republicans opposed it.
The opponents cited a host of reasons for their vote, including doubts that Iraq would imminently develop nuclear potential, fears that military action would take away from the war on terrorism, and sentiment against war among constituents.
In the Senate, as the debate stretched on, some prominent Democrats announced they would support the president, including Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, who had proposed a more restrictive resolution and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, who called the vote ``probably the hardest decision I've ever had to make.''
Mrs. Clinton said she had concluded that bipartisan support would make the president's success at the United Nations ``more likely and, therefore, war less likely.''
Other Democrats, like Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, were determined to vote against the measure, saying there were still many questions about how a war would be waged, what its costs would be and how long it would last.
``We have very little understanding about the full implications in terms of an exit strategy,'' Mr. Kennedy told reporters.
In the end, the Senate Democrats split, with 29 for and 21 against the measure. One Republican and one independent opposed it.
Most Republicans stood behind the president, including Representative Dick Armey of Texas, the majority leader, who had been one of the Republicans skeptical about the president's Iraq policy. Despite his differences with Mr. Bush on the issue, Mr. Armey closed the House debate with a plea for authorizing force. Mr. Armey, 62, who is retiring at the end of this session, cried as he spoke of the troops who might be sent to war.
``Mr. President,'' he said, ``we trust to you the best we have to give. Use them well so they can come home and say to our grandchildren, `Sleep soundly, my baby.''' He choked up and walked out of the House chamber.
The Senate was also on track to approve the use of force. It voted 75 to 25 to cut off the delaying tactics of Democratic dissidents who had been trying to force the chamber to hold a far lengthier and more deliberative debate. With that vote, final passage was assured. It was just a matter of when, as the Senate defeated a handful of Democratic amendments.
Senator Tom Daschle, the majority leader, gave Mr. Bush his backing, saying, ``I believe it is important for America to speak with one voice at this critical moment.''
He alone among the four senior Congressional leaders had not signed off on the final wording when a compromise on using force was struck at the White House a week ago.
The actions came after long days of debate in the House and Senate over Mr. Bush's decision to confront Iraq. The president argued that in the post-Sept. 11 world, Mr. Hussein could provide terrorist groups with chemical, biological or nuclear weapons or use them himself.
The resolution authorizes Mr. Bush to use the armed forces ``as he determines to be necessary and appropriate'' to defend the nation against ``the continuing threat posed by Iraq,'' and to enforce ``all relevant'' United Nations Security Council resolutions on Iraq. It requires him to report to Congress within 48 hours of any military action.
The resolution was far less broad than the initial resolution put forward by the White House, which members of both parties said was too open-ended and could conceivably allow military action throughout the Middle East. In a concession to Democrats, the resolution encourages the president to try to work through the United Nations before acting alone. Still, it leaves him with broad latitude.
Mr. Bush has said his powers as commander in chief already permit him to act in defense of the nation. Without seeking a formal declaration of war, however, he wanted Congress to be involved in the issue, he said, so he could argue to the United Nations that he was expressing not only his own view but that of the American electorate.
Most Republicans stood solidly with the president and many echoed the call to oust Mr. Hussein.
``The question we face today is not whether to go to war, for war was thrust upon us,'' said Representative Tom DeLay of Texas, the majority whip. ``Our only choice is between victory and defeat. Let's be clear: In the war on terror, victory cannot be secured at the bargaining table.''
Still, the fight fractured the Democratic Party. In the Senate, an array of Democratic presidential hopefuls stood behind the president. Mr. Gephardt, who is a likely presidential contender in 2004, joined Republican leaders in making the case for the president instead of standing in opposition to Mr. Bush.
As one of the last speakers in the House, Mr. Gephardt, who opposed the last gulf war, argued that Sept. 11 had ``made all the difference'' and that Mr. Hussein had to be stopped from developing weapons of mass destruction.
``The events of that tragic day jolted us to the enduring reality that terrorists not only seek to attack our interests abroad, but to strike us here at home,'' he said.
But only a minority in his caucus followed his lead and his second-in-command, Nancy Pelosi of California, the minority whip, took the other side. Ms. Pelosi, a senior member of the intelligence committee, pointed to a C.I.A. letter declassified this week that judged that Mr. Hussein was not likely to use his weapons against the United States but could lose his restraint if faced with an American-led force.
She said attacking Mr. Hussein would turn the country away from what should be its true national security focus - the terrorist threat. ``There are many costs involved in this war, and one of them is the cost of the war on terrorism,'' she said.
Many Democrats said they agreed that Mr. Hussein was a dangerous tyrant. But they expressed fear of giving Mr. Bush so much power, or argued that by striking a nation that has not struck first, America could lose its moral standing. They also said Mr. Bush had not presented a definitive case that Iraq was an imminent threat.
In the end the vote was not all that different from the House vote on the gulf war. At that time, 86 Democrats voted to grant Mr. Bush's father, President George Bush, the right to use force, and 179 opposed him.
On Thursday, the opposition was particularly strong among House Democrats from the urban Northeast, the West Coast and among minority members.
House Democrats rallied around an alternative by Representative John M. Spratt Jr., Democrat of South Carolina, that would have authorized force in conjunction with the United Nations. The president would have had to return to Congress for a second approval to act unilaterally.
If Americans do not act in concert with allies, Mr. Spratt said, ``This will be the United States versus Iraq, and in some quarters the U.S. versus the Arab and the Muslim world.'' The measure was defeated by a vote of 270-155, but attracted 147 Democratic votes.
Senate opponents were thwarted in several attempts to alter the resolution. One alternative was written by Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan and chairman of the Armed Services Committee, who proposed a two-step process similar to what was defeated in the House.
Mr. Levin said pushing the president to build an international coalition would mean that Mr. Hussein ``will be looking down the barrel of a gun, with the world at the other end rather than just the United States.''
---
Congressional Joint Resolution to Authorize Use of Force Against Iraq
Friday, October 11, 2002
Washington Post; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A9570-2002Oct10?language=printer
Text of a resolution to authorize use of force against Iraq, passed by the House and Senate:
Whereas in 1990 in response to Iraq's war of aggression against and illegal occupation of Kuwait, the United States forged a coalition of nations to liberate Kuwait and its people in order to defend the national security of the United States and enforce United Nations Security Council resolutions relating to Iraq;
Whereas after the liberation of Kuwait in 1991, Iraq entered into a United Nations sponsored cease-fire agreement pursuant to which Iraq unequivocally agreed, among other things, to eliminate its nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons programs and the means to deliver and develop them, and to end its support for international terrorism;
Whereas the efforts of international weapons inspectors, United States intelligence agencies, and Iraqi defectors led to the discovery that Iraq had large stockpiles of chemical weapons and a large scale biological weapons program, and that Iraq had an advanced nuclear weapons development program that was much closer to producing a nuclear weapon than intelligence reporting had previously indicated;
Whereas Iraq, in direct and flagrant violation of the cease-fire, attempted to thwart the efforts of weapons inspectors to identify and destroy Iraq's weapons of mass destruction stockpiles and development capabilities, which finally resulted in the withdrawal of inspectors from Iraq on October 31, 1998;
Whereas in 1998 Congress concluded that Iraq's continuing weapons of mass destruction programs threatened vital United States interests and international peace and security, declared Iraq to be in 'material and unacceptable breach of its international obligations' and urged the President 'to take appropriate action, in accordance with the Constitution and relevant laws of the United States, to bring Iraq into compliance with its international obligations' (Public Law 105-235);
Whereas Iraq both poses a continuing threat to the national security of the United States and international peace and security in the Persian Gulf region and remains in material an unacceptable breach of its international obligations by, among other things, continuing to possess and develop a significant chemical and biological weapons capability, actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability, and supporting and harboring terrorist organizations;
Whereas Iraq persists in violating resolutions of the United Nations Security Council by continuing to engage in brutal repression of its civilian population, thereby threatening international peace and security in the region, by refusing to release, repatriate, or account for non-Iraqi citizens wrongfully detained by Iraq, including an American serviceman, and by failing to return property wrongfully seized by Iraq from Kuwait;
Whereas the current Iraqi regime has demonstrated its capability and willingness to use weapons of mass destruction against other nations and its own people;
Whereas the current Iraqi regime has demonstrated its continuing hostility toward, and willingness to attack, the United States, including by attempting in 1993 to assassinate former President Bush and by firing on many thousands of occasions on United States and Coalition Armed Forces engaged in enforcing the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council;
Whereas members of al-Qaida, an organization bearing responsibility for attacks on the United States, its citizens, and interests, including the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, are known to be in Iraq;
Whereas Iraq continues to aid and harbor other international terrorist organizations, including organizations that threaten the lives and safety of American citizens;
Whereas the attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001, underscored the gravity of the threat posed by the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by international terrorist organizations;
Whereas Iraq's demonstrated capability and willingness to use weapons of mass destruction, the risk that the current Iraqi regime will either employ those weapons to launch a surprise attack against the United States or its Armed Forces or provide them to international terrorists who would do so, and the extreme magnitude of harm that would result to the United States and its citizens from such an attack, combine to justify action by the United States to defend itself;
Whereas United Nations Security Council Resolution 678 authorizes the use of all necessary means to enforce United Nations Security Council Resolution 660 and subsequent relevant resolutions and to compel Iraq to cease certain activities that threaten international peace and security, including the development of weapons of mass destruction and refusal or obstruction of United Nations weapons inspections in violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 687, repression of its civilian population in violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 688, and threatening its neighbors or United Nations operations in Iraq in violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 949;
Whereas Congress in the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution (Public Law 102-1) has authorized the President 'to use United States Armed Forces pursuant to United Nations Security Council Resolution 678 (1990) in order to achieve implementation of Security Council Resolutions 660, 661, 662, 664, 665, 666, 667, 669, 670, 674, and 677';
Whereas in December 1991, Congress expressed its sense that it 'supports the use of all necessary means to achieve the goals of United Nations Security Council Resolution 687 as being consistent with the Authorization of Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution (Public Law 102-1),' that Iraq's repression of its civilian population violates United Nations Security Council Resolution 688 and 'constitutes a continuing threat to the peace, security, and stability of the Persian Gulf region,' and that Congress, 'supports the use of all necessary means to achieve the goals of United Nations Security Council Resolution 688';
Whereas the Iraq Liberation Act (Public Law 105-338) expressed the sense of Congress that it should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove from power the current Iraqi regime and promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime;
Whereas on September 12, 2002, President Bush committed the United States to 'work with the United Nations Security Council to meet our common challenge' posed by Iraq and to 'work for the necessary resolutions,' while also making clear that 'the Security Council resolutions will be enforced, and the just demands of peace and security will be met, or action will be unavoidable';
Whereas the United States is determined to prosecute the war on terrorism and Iraq's ongoing support for international terrorist groups combined with its development of weapons of mass destruction in direct violation of its obligations under the 1991 cease-fire and other United Nations Security Council resolutions make clear that it is in the national security interests of the United States and in furtherance of the war on terrorism that all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions be enforced, including through the use of force if necessary;
Whereas Congress has taken steps to pursue vigorously the war on terrorism through the provision of authorities and funding requested by the President to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations or persons who planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such persons or organizations;
Whereas the President and Congress are determined to continue to take all appropriate actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations or persons who planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such persons or organizations;
Whereas the President has authority under the Constitution to take action in order to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism against the United States, as Congress recognized in the joint resolution on Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40); and
Whereas it is in the national security of the United States to restore international peace and security to the Persian Gulf region: Now, therefore, be it
Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This joint resolution may be cited as the 'Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against Iraq'.
SEC. 2. SUPPORT FOR UNITED STATES DIPLOMATIC EFFORTS.
The Congress of the United States supports the efforts by the President to --
(1) strictly enforce through the United Nations Security Council all relevant Security Council resolutions applicable to Iraq and encourages him in those efforts; and
(2) obtain prompt and decisive action by the Security Council to ensure that Iraq abandons its strategy of delay, evasion and noncompliance and promptly and strictly complies with all relevant Security Council resolutions.
SEC. 3. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES.
(a) AUTHORIZATION -- The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to --
(1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and
(2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq.
(b) PRESIDENTIAL DETERMINATION -- In connection with the exercise of the authority granted in subsection (a) to use force the President shall, prior to such exercise or as soon thereafter as may be feasible, but no later than 48 hours after exercising such authority, make available to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President pro tempore of the Senate his determination that --
(1) reliance by the United States on further diplomatic or other peaceful means alone either (A) will not adequately protect the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq or (B) is not likely to lead to enforcement of all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq; and
(2) acting pursuant to this resolution is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations or persons who planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorists attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.
(c) WAR POWERS RESOLUTION REQUIREMENTS --
(1) SPECIFIC STATUTORY AUTHORIZATION -- Consistent with section 8(a)(1) of the War Powers Resolution, the Congress declares that this section is intended to constitute specific statutory authorization within the meaning of section 5(b) of the War Powers Resolution.
(2) APPLICABILITY OF OTHER REQUIREMENTS -- Nothing in this resolution supersedes any requirement of the War Powers Resolution.
SEC. 4. REPORTS TO CONGRESS.
(a) The President shall, at least once every 60 days, submit to the Congress a report on matters relevant to this joint resolution, including actions taken pursuant to the exercise of authority granted in section 3 and the status of planning for efforts that are expected to be required after such actions are completed, including those actions described in section 7 of Public Law 105-338 (the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998).
(b) To the extent that the submission of any report described in subsection (a) coincides with the submission of any other report on matters relevant to this joint resolution otherwise required to be submitted to Congress pursuant to the reporting requirements of Public Law 93-148 (the War Powers Resolution), all such reports may be submitted as a single consolidated report to the Congress.
(c) To the extent that the information required by section 3 of Public Law 102-1 is included in the report required by this section, such report shall be considered as meeting the requirements of section 3 of Public Law 102-1.
----
Plan to set up panel to probe September 11 collapses
October 11, 2002
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20021011-13713635.htm
An agreement announced by leading lawmakers to form an independent commission to investigate the September 11 attacks fell apart late yesterday after the chairman of the House intelligence committee said more details needed to be worked out.
The agreement would have given the commission a broader scope and more time than the often-frustrating House-Senate inquiry that lawmakers are winding down.
It was announced at a news conference by three of the four leaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees, who assured that the fourth, Rep. Porter J. Goss, Florida Republican and chairman of the House Permanent Select Intelligence committee, had agreed to the plan.
Leaders of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, Sens. Joseph I. Lieberman, Connecticut Democrat, and John McCain, Arizona Republican, also said an agreement had been reached.
But after the White House and House Republican leaders raised concerns about the commission, Mr. Goss told members of the two intelligence committees that more issues needed to be resolved.
Mr. Goss later told reporters that the only agreement reached yesterday was on four issues involving the commission. "We haven't gotten quite full agreement yet," he said.
The leading House advocate for the commission, Rep. Tim Roemer, Indiana Democrat, blamed the Bush administration for blocking the agreement.
"I worry that the White House is trying to pull the carpet over the independent commission and do the slow roll and kill it," he said.
Governmental Affairs committee spokeswoman Leslie Phillips said Mr. Lieberman "was surprised and disappointed to learn that the deal had collapsed because he had been informed earlier in the day that there was a bipartisan agreement."
Both the House and Senate have voted for an independent commission, though the two versions differ. The administration initially opposed a commission, but announced last month that it would support it. Lawmakers have been meeting with White House officials to work out the commission's structure and scope.
Lawmakers said yesterday morning that talks with the White House broke down. But by afternoon, they said the three key congressmen had worked out an agreement among themselves, which they would try to add to a bill authorizing 2003 intelligence programs.
But the White House said no agreement had been reached with them, and John Feehery, a spokesman for House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, Illinois Republican, said Republican leaders were still trying to work out consensus in Congress.
Under the plan announced yesterday afternoon, the commission would have consisted of 10 members with two co-chairmen, one appointed by the president, the other by the Democratic leader of the Senate, and have a two-year mandate. The commission would look into issues such as intelligence, commercial aviation and immigration.
The joint inquiry of the intelligence committees began in February and has a one-year mandate. Its scope is limited to intelligence issues related to the attacks.
Meanwhile yesterday, members of the inquiry panel met with the CIA and FBI directors, discussing the handling of an informant who was the landlord of two of the hijackers.
Many lawmakers have complained that the panel's work has been hampered by difficulty in receiving information from intelligence agencies.
Sen. Evan Bayh, Indiana Democrat, declined to discuss details of the meeting yesterday with FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and CIA Director George J. Tenet, but said he believed it helped ease members' doubts.
"There have been some communications problems, but I don't detect a systematic effort to deceive," he said.
----
JFK Aides Say Bush Is Wrong On Crisis
By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, October 11, 2002; Page A29
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10187-2002Oct10?language=printer
HAVANA, Oct. 10 -- Two top advisers to President John F. Kennedy said President Bush is misreading history when he cites Kennedy's actions in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis to justify a preemptive military strike against Iraq.
"I would flunk him in history," said Arthur Schlesinger Jr., one of several Kennedy administration figures who are here to join President Fidel Castro and key former Soviet officials at a three-day conference marking the 40th anniversary of what is often called the world's closest brush with nuclear war.
In an address Monday, Bush cited a speech by Kennedy during the October 1962 crisis over the Soviet Union's installation of nuclear missiles in Cuba. Bush portrayed it as an endorsement of the idea of attacking potentially lethal enemies even if they have not attacked first.
"It's taken totally out of context," said Theodore Sorensen, who wrote the words Bush cited and is also here in the Cuban capital. "It was not intended to justify a preemptive strike, because JFK had specifically ruled out a preemptive strike."
Schlesinger and Sorensen, both of whom voiced opposition to a preemptive attack against Iraq, said that Kennedy never endorsed a first-strike policy at any time during the crisis and was, as Schlesinger said, "determined to exhaust all peaceful remedies before resorting to military action."
"I think the whole shift from containment and deterrence, which is why we won the Cold War, to preventive war is most alarming," Schlesinger said. "That's the doctrine invoked by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. FDR called that a day that will live in infamy, and the Bush doctrine is perpetuating that infamy."
The missile crisis conference, which begins Friday, has been organized by the Cuban government and the National Security Archive, a research organization at George Washington University that specializes in the declassification of foreign policy documents.
"This couldn't be more important or more timely in focusing the national and international debate over U.S. intentions toward Iraq," said Peter Kornbluh, who runs the archive's Cuba project. "There is no doubt that the conference will hold lessons for President Bush's doctrine of preemptive strikes."
Thousands of previously top-secret U.S., Soviet and Cuban government and military documents have been declassified in recent years, adding enormously to historians' understanding of the Cold War crisis.
Among the documents to be discussed is a detailed chronology of the crisis, compiled by the Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence organizations and declassified by President Clinton on the last day of his presidency. The 58-page document, to be released by the National Security Archive at the conference, provides new details about another issue that has been hotly debated since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks: intelligence failure.
The document details how U.S. intelligence underestimated the Soviet Union's intention to station offensive weapons in Cuba as late as August 1962, even after Soviet ships carrying equipment and personnel to Cuba had been detected.
The conference is also intended to dispel many popular myths about the historic showdown between Kennedy and the Soviet leader, Nikita Krushchev, Kornbluh said. Many, including Schlesinger and Robert F. Kennedy, have portrayed President Kennedy's actions as a model of carefully controlled crisis management that systematically defused the situation.
But documents declassified in Washington, Moscow, Havana and other capitals in recent years have provided a more nuanced reading of history. Many people, including Robert S. McNamara, the U.S. secretary of defense during the missile crisis and the highest-ranking former U.S. official at the conference, now say the crisis was not solved as neatly as had been previously believed.
"I now conclude that, however astutely the crisis may have been managed, luck also played a significant role in the avoidance of nuclear war by a hair's breadth," McNamara wrote in a statement to be released here on Friday.
McNamara would not comment directly on Bush's policy on Iraq, but he said tonight that Kennedy's strategy in 1962 "was not preemption. It was the reverse of preemption."
---
War for Dummies
By Michael Kinsley
Friday, October 11, 2002
Washington Post; Page A37
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10069-2002Oct10.html
According to the Bush administration, the threat posed by Iraq is serious enough to risk the lives of American soldiers, to end the lives of what would undoubtedly be thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians, and to risk a chemical or biological attack on the American homeland, but not serious enough to interrupt prime-time television. None of the big three broadcast networks carried President Bush's case-for-war speech Monday night because, they say, the White House didn't ask. Preempting Saddam Hussein is one thing, apparently, but preempting Drew Carey is another.
The Post reports that "the White House said it did not put in the usual formal request because it wanted to keep the American public from thinking we were going to war." As the hour for the speech approached, The Post says, White House officials had second thoughts and offered to "beef up" the speech to entice the networks, but it was too late.
This notion that a call to arms can be beefed up or beefed down at will, like the idea that people should give their support for a war without really thinking it's going to happen, is characteristic of the Bush sell job. Foreigners, the New York Times reports, read Bush's speech as backing down from an inexorable commitment to "regime change," while in America it was seen as his toughest statement yet. Whatever.
Ambiguity has its place in dealings among nations, and so does a bit of studied irrationality. Sending mixed signals and leaving the enemy uncertain what you might do next are valid tactics. But the cloud of confusion that surrounds Bush's Iraq policy is not tactical. It's the real thing. And the dissembling is aimed at the American citizenry, not at Saddam Hussein. Hussein knows how close he is or isn't to a usable nuclear bomb -- we're the ones who are expected to take Bush's word for it.
"Iraq could decide on any given day" to give biological or chemical weapons to terrorists for use against the United States, Bush said Monday night. The wording is cleverly designed to imply more than it actually says. It doesn't say an Iraq-sponsored biological attack could actually happen tomorrow. But the only purpose of the phrase "on any given day" is to suggest that it might.
So the question then arises: If Saddam Hussein has the desire and ability to attack the United States with chemical and biological weapons, either directly or using surrogates, why hasn't he done so? Possibly because he fears reprisal. Bush's emphasis on the danger of Hussein's giving these weapons to terrorists, rather than his using them himself, was another bit of careful wording, intended to suggest that Hussein could avoid reprisal by leaving no fingerprints. But Hussein surely realizes that evidence will be found linking him to any terrorist act for the foreseeable future, whether such evidence exists or not. Meanwhile, though, if the United States is inexorably committed to "regime change" -- which, in any scenario, Hussein is unlikely to survive in one piece -- any reason for him to show restraint disappears.
The CIA makes this obvious point in a document made public this week. The agency's assessment is that Iraq is unlikely to use biological or chemical weapons against the United States unless we attack Iraq and Saddam Hussein concludes he has nothing to lose. The administration disagrees, naturally. Whatever small basis either side may have for its conclusion, we who must follow the dispute in the papers have even less. Who knows who's right? But Bush cannot have it both ways. He cannot insist that Hussein is able and eager to do so much harm to the United States that we must go to war to remove him, and at the same time refuse to acknowledge the increased risk of such harm as one of the costs of going to war.
The Bush campaign for war against Iraq has been insulting to American citizens, not just because it has been dishonest but because it has been unserious. A lie is insulting; an obvious lie is doubly insulting. Arguments that stumble into each other like drunks are not serious. Washington is abuzz with the "real reason" this or that subgroup of the administration wants this war.
A serious and respectful effort to rally the citizenry would offer the real reasons, would base the conclusion on the evidence rather than vice versa, would admit to the ambiguities and uncertainties, would be frank about the potential cost. A serious effort to take the nation into war would not hesitate to interrupt people while they're watching a sitcom.
But citizens ought to be more serious too. They tell pollsters they favor the Bush policy, then they say they favor conditions such as U.N. approval that are not part of the Bush policy. Many, in polls, seem to make a distinction between war, which they favor, and casualties, which they don't. Neither side in this argument has an open-and-shut case, and certainly agreeing with the president's case doesn't make you a fool. Agreeing with the president even though you didn't hear his case -- because he apparently didn't much care if you heard it -- is a different story.
-------- MILITARY
-------- africa
Congress Passes Bill Threatening Sanctions on Sudan
October 11, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-sudan-usa.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Congress has passed a bill imposing sanctions on Sudan if the Bush administration finds it is not negotiating in good faith with southern rebels or is hindering humanitarian work in the south, a State Department official said on Friday.
President Bush is expected to sign the bill, known as the Sudan Peace Act, into law but no date for that has been set, the official added.
The bill passed the House of Representatives on Monday and the U.S. Senate on Wednesday night, he added.
Under the act, the administration must decide every six months whether the government and the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Movement, or SPLM, are negotiating in good faith.
If the administration faults the government but not the SPLM, then the United States would vote against multilateral loans to Sudan, consider downgrading diplomatic relations with the vast African country, try to prevent the government from using oil revenues to buy weapons and seek a U.N. Security Council resolution imposing an arms embargo on Khartoum.
The bill also authorizes the administration to spend $100 million a year for the next three years on humanitarian aid to parts of Sudan outside government control.
It requires the Secretary of State to collect information about possible war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity committed by all parties in the Sudanese conflict.
The bill is however a step back from an earlier version, passed by the House of Representatives but opposed by the administration. That version would have barred companies investing in Sudan's oil fields from raising capital in the United States or trading their securities on U.S. markets.
The SPLM's army has been fighting the central government for 19 years for greater autonomy for the mostly animist and Christian south from the mainly Muslim, Arabic-speaking north.
Millions of Sudanese have been killed as a result of the conflict, mainly through disease or starvation.
-------- balkans
Yugoslav Court Jails Soldiers for War Crimes
October 11, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-yugoslavia-warcrimes.html
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia (Reuters) - A Yugoslav military court sentenced four soldiers to a total of 19 years in jail for war crimes Friday over the killing of two Kosovo Albanian civilians during NATO's 1999 bombing campaign on Yugoslavia.
It was the latest sign of the country starting to examine widespread atrocities committed during the turbulent rule of ex-President Slobodan Milosevic, himself standing trial at the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague.
According to the Beta news agency a military court in the town of Nis jailed Lt.-Col. Zlatan Mancic for seven years, Capt. Rade Radivojevic for five years and two former conscripts, Danilo Tesic and Misel Seregij, for four and three years respectively.
The two ex-conscripts had earlier confessed to killing two Kosovo Albanians and burning their bodies.
The officers denied they ordered the execution in the village of Kusnin in April 1999, but Judge Radenko Miladinovic said there was no doubt the crime had happened and that all four were guilty, Beta reported.
``The court had no doubt that two Albanians found in the village of Kusnin were taken away and executed. The mere fact that you burned their bodies shows that you deliberately removed all traces of the crime,'' the judge told the defendants.
Belgrade has been under heavy Western pressure to bring war criminals to justice, in part to bring about a process of reflection and closure after a decade of bitter ethnic warfare.
In Serbia's first domestic war crimes trial in June, a civilian court in the southern Serbian town of Prokuplje jailed an ex-army reservist for eight years for killing two Kosovo Albanian civilians in May 1999.
The Prokuplje court earlier this week began another war crimes trial against two Serb former policemen accused of killing 19 Kosovo Albanian civilians during NATO's air war to end repression in the southern Yugoslav province.
-------- business
Igen International biodefense initiatives
IN BRIEF
Friday, October 11, 2002
Washington Post; Page E05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10130-2002Oct10.html
Igen International, a Gaithersburg biotechnology firm, will speed up delivery of its technology to detect biological agents to meet increased demand from the Defense Department. Igen plans to fulfill its contract with the Army Space & Missile Defense Command by year-end; previously, it forecast finishing next year. The company expects biodefense initiatives to generate $2 million in revenue during its third quarter, which ends Dec. 31, and $5 million for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2003.
-------- iraq
Iraq Again Invites U.S. Arms Experts
Reuters
Friday, October 11, 2002; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10126-2002Oct10?language=printer
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 10 -- Iraq invited the United States today to send an inspection team to see whether Baghdad is producing weapons of mass destruction.
The invitation was similar to one issued to Congress two months ago that was disregarded. The White House dismissed today's offer, which came after President Bush pledged this week to use force, if necessary, to make Iraq disarm.
"The American administration are invited to inspect these [alleged weapons] sites immediately," said Abdul Tawab Mullah Hwaish, deputy prime minister and the minister responsible for Iraq's weapons programs.
----
Iraq Opens Alleged Weapons Site to Foreign Media
By Huda Majeed Saleh
Fri, Oct 11, 2002
Reuters
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=574&u=/nm/20021010/wl_nm/iraq_dc_133&printer=1
BAGHDAD - Iraq, seeking to stave off a threatened U.S. military strike, showed Western reporters a facility near Baghdad on Thursday suspected of producing weapons of mass destruction.
Western media reports have said the United States suspects the al-Nasir State Establishment, in the Taji area, 15 miles north of Baghdad, of producing chemical and biological weapons or missile components.
The tour for Western journalists was the latest of a series in recent months, part of Baghdad's campaign to deny U.S. allegations that it is producing weapons of mass destruction.
President Bush (news - web sites) is seeking a U.N. resolution forcing Iraq to allow U.N. weapons inspectors complete access to suspect areas or face military action.
U.N. weapons inspectors, sent to disarm Iraq after U.S.-led forces drove it from Kuwait in the 1991 Gulf War (news - web sites), left the country in 1998 ahead of a U.S. and British air assault to punish Baghdad for not cooperating with the inspectors.
Reporters were accompanied on Thursday by Husam Muhammed Amin, head of the Iraqi National Monitoring Directorate, the office liaising with U.N. arms inspectors.
"The site has nothing to do with proscribed programs as alleged by the American media," Amin said.
"The company's production is not only for civilian purposes, but also for conventional military purposes that have nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction," he said.
"The site has no capabilities for producing weapons of mass destruction as they were totally destroyed in 1991 and 1992 by the U.N. Special Commission (UNSCOM weapons inspectors)."
He said the site had been cited in the U.S. media as related to the production of weapons of mass destruction because it contained advanced machinery and technology.
"It contains some machinery that is considered by the monitoring program as dual-use machinery," he added.
IRAQ SAYS PLANT COVERED BY MONITORS
He said the company was covered by the monitoring system set up by UNSCOM and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Al-Nasir, built in 1981 and 1982, has three plants covering an area of 2.3 sq miles.
The first plant was described as a foundry for casting metals, the second a factory for producing molds and the third a plant producing steel structures for civilian purposes.
"The molds factory was bombed repeatedly during the 1991 U.S.-led war and was heavily bombed in 1998, and some of its machinery was damaged in the attack," Tahseen Salman Moussa, the director of the al-Nasir company, told reporters.
"We challenge the Americans to prove that the al-Nasir company is currently producing parts for missiles...
"We have nothing to hide. The doors of the company and its three plants are wide open for you to see their production."
In August, Iraqi officials took Western reporters to a warehouse in the Taji area stuffed with baby milk and sugar following a U.S. newspaper report that the building was being used to produce biological weapons.
Al-Nasir used to be affiliated to the Military Industrialization Commission, but now it is a self-financed company affiliated to the Ministry of Industry, Moussa said.
Amin said U.S. allegations of an Iraqi nuclear program were groundless "because all the capabilities which could help any nuclear program were destroyed completely under the supervision of the IAEA and UNSCOM."
He added that dual-purpose equipment had been strictly monitored by the IAEA and UNSCOM. Declarations on sites covered by monitoring had been given to the IAEA and U.N. inspectors at a meeting in Vienna earlier this month.
The United States on Thursday rejected an Iraqi offer to allow U.S. inspectors to search suspected weapons sites.
----
Iraqi Radar, Missile Sites Hit
Associated Press
Friday, October 11, 2002; Page A07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A9712-2002Oct10?language=printer
Allied planes bombed radar and missile sites in the southern "no-fly" zone over Iraq yesterday, targeting President Saddam Hussein's air defenses for the third time this week.
The bombing at two locations brought to 48 the number of days this year that such strikes were reported by the United States and Britain, whose mission is to patrol two zones set up to protect Iraqi minorities following the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
Coalition planes fired precision-guided weapons at a radar site near Basra, about 245 miles southeast of Baghdad, said a statement from the U.S. Central Command. It said damage assessment was incomplete.
The Iraqi News Agency reported that the strike destroyed a radar system and damaged passenger and service buildings at the Basra airport, which has been targeted three times in recent weeks.
At the same time as the Basra strike, allied planes also attacked a surface-to-air missile site near Tallil, about 160 miles southeast of Baghdad, Central Command's statement said. Tallil also has been struck repeatedly.
----
U.S. Mulls Military Rule After Hussein
Occupation Would Yield to Civilian Leaders in Phased Reforms
By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 11, 2002; Page A11
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10717-2002Oct11?language=printer
The Bush administration is contemplating an ambitious military occupation of Iraq if U.S. forces oust Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, senior U.S. officials said yesterday in offering the first detailed look at administration thinking.
U.S. military commanders would be responsible for establishing stability and overseeing the beginnings of a democratic transformation of the country, yielding to Iraqis only when an electoral system had been installed and the search for weapons of mass destruction was well underway, the officials said.
The administration is "coalescing" around the idea, said an official, who reported that President Bush has been briefed on the "direction and nature" of the approach. The establishment of a provisional government headed by Iraqi opposition forces has not been ruled out, but officials said such a solution now seems less likely.
Officials emphasized that no formal decisions have been made. As a senior policymaker put it: "I think we're all heading in the same direction. That does not mean there couldn't be changes. This is not carved in stone."
The administration has concentrated its attention on determining how Hussein should be toppled and on winning support for its aims, spending less energy on what would happen next. The president and his top advisers have pledged U.S. support for democratic rule, but planning for such a complex reform has been limited.
Top officers in the military, which would be responsible for administering a battered, fractious country of 21 million inhabitants, have warned that Pentagon preparations for the aftermath have been insufficient.
Under the approach discussed yesterday, U.S.-led forces would take control of Iraq after Hussein falls. A military officer, who likely would report to U.S. Central Command, would be installed, along with an undetermined advisory body of Iraqis.
The military authorities would be responsible for establishing order and preventing the country from breaking apart, a possibility that deeply worries Iraq's neighbors. Humanitarian programs would be started, and Iraq's vast oil fields would be developed as a national source of funds.
The "core mission," an official said, would be locating and destroying Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. In post-conflict chaos, the official said, "these weapons could fall into the wrong hands."
After months, at a minimum, military authorities would yield to a civilian occupation as the country assembled the building blocks of political change -- from starting judicial reform to electing local and national legislators, U.S. officials said..
Only in a third phase, when elections could be held, would power be passed to an Iraqi government, officials said. Occupation authorities would pursue war-crimes trials for Hussein and his inner circle while looking for ways to remove the influence of the ruling Baath Party.
Such an approach would be a blow to the ambitions of Iraqi opponents in exile who are pressing the Bush administration to establish a provisional government now as the foundation for a post-Hussein Iraq. Yet influential figures within the administration still favor the creation of such an interim authority, officials cautioned, saying that the debate is not over.
If Hussein were ousted before a U.S. invasion, the administration might still use force to create a new government, especially if the leadership seemed likely to continue Hussein's policies, an official said: "If it is a new regime that is Saddamism without Saddam, that will not change things."
----
Iraq Balks at Agreeing to All Terms for U.N. Inspectors
October 11, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iraq-un-inspections.html
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Iraq said on Friday it was ready to receive U.N. weapons inspectors on Oct. 19 but it ignored detailed arrangements laid out by the United Nations on how to resume scrutiny of suspected arms sites.
A two-page letter, obtained by Reuters, pledged Baghdad's cooperation with chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
But the letter from Iraqi Gen. Amir al-Saadi, a presidential adviser, avoided responding to a list of demands sent by the two U.N. officials in a letter on Oct. 8, according to an unofficial translation of Iraq's document.
The U.N. letter included such issues as the right of inspectors to conduct interviews and choose ``the mode and location'' for them as well as the possibility of flying U-2 spy planes over Iraq.
The United States immediately denounced al-Saadi's letter as further proof of Baghdad's evasions. But Iraq's U.N. ambassador, Mohammed Aldouri, said in an interview that was a misinterpretation.
``We are not surprised that once again the Iraqis want to delay and deceive,'' said Richard Grenell, spokesman for U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte. ``We have had 16 resolutions and 11 years of playing this game and it is time the Security Council takes action.''
But Aldouri said: ``The letter means we are working on all questions in good faith. Let the inspectors get back to Iraq. We don't think there will be any problems with inspections.''
He said Blix should not worry about loose ends.
``We say to him: 'Come to Iraq first and we will solve these problems one by one,''' Aldouri said. ``That is the essence of the letter.''
Al-Saadi headed the Iraqi delegation of arms experts, which met Blix and ElBaradei in Vienna on Sept. 30 and Oct. 1. The two U.N. officials believed their Oct. 8 letter had set down a list of what both sides agreed in the Vienna meetings.
But al-Saadi, while acknowledging the U.N. letter, said Iraq agreed to the contents of a less detailed press statement issued after Oct. 1 and a briefing Blix and ElBaradei had given to the 15-member Security Council in New York two days later.
Both the press statement in Vienna and the council briefing were less detailed than what the U.N. officials put in their letter to al-Saadi about what they expected.
Many of the issues Blix had raised in his letter are to be covered in a new U.N. Security Council resolution the United States is pushing and would not be subject to negotiation. No inspectors will return to Baghdad, after a four-year break, before the resolution is adopted.
Al-Saadi also indicated he wanted further consultations, such as the talks in Vienna, but did not give a date or insist on them. ``Such an approach will assist in reaching a better and swift accomplishment of our tasks and will hasten the lifting of the unjust sanctions against Iraq,'' al-Saadi wrote.
-------- landmines
Sri Lanka says hopes to sign anti-landmine treaty
by Scott McDonald
REUTERS SRI LANKA:
October 11, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/18131/story.htm
COLOMBO - Sri Lanka, whose north is littered with landmines from two decades of war, hopes to sign an international treaty banning the deadly weapons by the end of the year, a cabinet minister said yesterday.
Constitutional Affairs Minister G.L. Peiris told a weekly news conference demining was badly needed so most of the hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the ethnic war could go home.
"Sri Lanka is making every effort to become a signatory to the Ottawa treaty. That is a matter that we are discussing with the LTTE, said Peiris, referring to the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam rebel group.
He said no new mines had been laid since the government and the rebels signed a ceasefire agreement in February.
The two sides met for their first peace talks in years last month and will meet again at the end of this month, raising hopes the war that began in 1983 might finally be over.
Some 125 countries have signed and ratified the 1997 anti-landmine convention known as the Ottawa treaty, while 18 have signed but not yet ratified it.
Peiris said the government hoped to sign the treaty before a anti-mining conference is held in the Canadian capital in December.
He said doing so would make it easier for Sri Lanka to raise aid to rebuild the war-ravaged parts of the island.
"If we do become a party to the treaty, then we will be in a position to attract very substantial funding for demining."
The two sides are likely to focus on rehabilitation and confidence-building measures in their second round of peace talks starting at the end of the month in Thailand.
Demining and other issues will be discussed before that when chief LTTE negotiator Anton Balashingham visits rebel leaders in northern Sri Lanka in coming weeks.
Peiris also said Sri Lanka planned to hold two donor conferences, with a smaller one to be held in Oslo around the end of November. Norway has been mediating the peace process.
The second would be in Tokyo in the first half of next year. Japan is Sri Lanka's largest aid giver.
Peiris said the government had ordered an investigation into a clash between a mob and government paramilitary unit this week night that left at least five people dead.
"We are not in a position to make any comment on that incident until the facts are established," he said.
It was the bloodiest such incident since the truce was signed.
Jordan: No Interest in Ruling Iraq
Fri Oct 11, 2002
By JAMAL HALABY,
Associated Press Writer
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20021011/ap_on_re_mi_ea/jordan_iraq_2
AMMAN, Jordan (AP) - Jordan's King Abdullah II dismissed speculation that his family's Hashemite dynasty might rule Iraq if Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) is ousted.
"I am the head of the Hashemite dynasty and I say very clearly that this family has no ambitions to regain leadership in Iraq," Abdullah said in television remarks broadcast Friday.
The king said he believed that foreign leadership could not be imposed on Iraq in an apparent reference to his uncle, Prince Hassan, who attended a July forum in Britain of Iraqi opposition leaders to discuss a possible U.S.-led effort to oust Saddam.
"If there was any member of this family who thinks in a different way, then that member only represents himself," Abdullah told the Middle East Broadcasting Center, a Saudi-owned satellite TV station based in the United Arab Emirates.
Some have speculated that Hassan, once heir to the Jordanian throne, has emerged as a candidate to reinstate Hashemite rule in Iraq, where his cousin, King Faisal II, ruled from 1953 until he was killed in a coup five years later.
Abdullah told MBC he favored a negotiated settlement to the dispute between Iraq and the United Nations (news - web sites).
"We believe that a military operation, or a new war in the region, will have a devastating effect on all the people of the region," he said.
In case of war, Jordan will not admit Iraqi refugees, except in transit to another country, and it will not allow them to set up camps on its borders, Abdullah said. "They will not be allowed to stop over or stay in Jordanian territory," he said.
Jordan, which is a key U.S. ally in the Mideast but maintains close business ties with Iraq, has said it will not be a launching pad for an attack on its neighbor.
Iraqi imports of Jordanian goods amounted to $700 million last year. Jordan also receives all its daily requirement of 90,000 barrels of oil from Iraq at preferential prices under a U.N.-sanctioned deal.
-------- russia
Russian rebuff for Blair over Iraq
Staff and agencies
Friday October 11, 2002
UK Guardian
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffairs/story/0,11538,810092,00.html
The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, today told Tony Blair that he doubted that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.
After several hours of talks between the two leaders at Mr Putin's country dacha in Zavidovo, north of Moscow, the Russian president told a news conference he had seen no "trustworthy data" to support Britain and America's claim that Saddam Hussein's regime possessed chemical, biological or even nuclear weapons.
In a diplomatic rebuff for Mr Blair, Mr Putin also claimed that he believed there was no need for a fresh UN resolution to tackle the issue - although he did not rule out supporting one in the future.
Asked what he thought of the British government's dossier, which claims President Saddam does have such weapons and plans to use them, Mr Putin replied: "Russia does not have in its possession any trustworthy data which would support the existence of nuclear weapons or any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and we have not received from our partners such information as yet.
"This fact has also been supported by the information which has been despatched by the CIA to the US Congress.
"We do have apprehensions that such weapons might exist on the territory of Iraq and this is precisely why we want to see to it that United Nations inspectors should travel there."
Mr Blair sought to make the best of the clear disagreement, telling reporters: "There may be different perspectives on how sure we can be about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction but there is one certain way to find out and that's to let the inspectors back in to do their job. This is the key point upon which we both agreed."
Mr Blair had earlier made clear his desire for a fresh UN resolution, standing side by side with Mr Putin saying: "I think we should make it very clear that there is total agreement on the need to make sure that the will of the UN is respected and that Iraq should not be able to develop these weapons of mass destruction. "Of course that's already the position expressed in numerous UN resolutions in respect of which Saddam and the currently Iraqi regime has been in breach.
"But we believe it is necessary to have a fresh resolution that will make it clear that this new weapons inspection regime is qualitatively different and able to do its job properly and that's the reason why we think it right to go back and build that international consensus within the UN."
Mr Putin said Russia had always been in support of the implementation of current UN resolutions but refrained from backing Mr Blair's call for a fresh mandate.
He did, however, leave open the possibility that Russia might in the future back such a resolution.
Mr Putin said: "We agree with our partners, including the prime minister of the United Kingdom, that in this area we need to take into account the experience of the work done by the UN inspectors in that country.
"In this regard we believe with our partners we should undertake measures and to take a decision to ensure the effective operation of the UN inspectors.
"With this purpose we don't exclude the possibility of coming to the same decision including the possibility of adopting a UN resolution."
----
Putin Offers Qualified Support for U.N. Proposals for Iraq
New York Times
October 11, 2002
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/11/international/11CND-MOSCOW.html
MOSCOW, Oct. 11 - President Vladimir V. Putin said today that Russia was prepared to support new United Nations Security Council resolutions on Iraq, but only to strengthen the work of inspectors searching for its weapons programs and not to authorize the use of military force.
Making his most extensive remarks to date on the looming confrontation with Iraq, Mr. Putin said the most urgent issue is how to return inspectors to Iraq to verify that country's compliance with its commitments to dismantle nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs.
Mr. Putin, as do others outside the United States, appears simply to disagree on the urgency of the threat. Today, he bluntly dismissed recent reports on the subject by Britain and the Central Intelligence Agency as "propaganda" to support already developed positions.
"Russia does not have in its possession any trustworthy data that would support the existence of nuclear weapons or any other weapons of mass destruction in Iraq," he said. "And we have not received such information from our partners as yet."
Mr. Putin noted that the Iraqi government and the director of the United Nations inspection team had already agreed on new inspections, and he said those inspections should begin immediately under existing Security Council resolutions, though he was open to proposals to strengthen rules governing how the inspectors work.
"Russia insists the situation around Iraq should be settled on the basis of U.N. resolutions that were passed before," Mr. Putin said at a news conference with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain.
Mr. Blair arrived on Thursday evening, accompanied by his wife, Cherie, for a day and a half of talks with Mr. Putin at a hunting lodge north of Moscow.
Mr. Putin did not directly address the draft resolution prepared and circulated by the United States and Britain. But only hours after he spoke, a deputy foreign minister, Yuri Y. Fedotov, rejected it out of hand, saying it "cannot be accepted as a basis for a future U.N. Security Council resolution on Iraq, as it contains clearly unfulfillable demands."
Mr. Putin's remarks made it clear that an intensive diplomatic effort - including Mr. Blair's visit and a telephone call from Mr. Bush on Monday congratulating Mr. Putin on his 50th birthday - has so far failed to convince him to accept a tougher resolution warning Iraq of the consequences of noncompliance.
"Baghdad has made concessions and agreed to receive a U.N. commission without any conditions," Mr. Putin said, rebuffing the Bush administration's arguments. "Bearing this in mind, we believe that there are no formal and legal reasons for adopting any new U.N. resolution."
The hardening of Russia's position came a day after the House and Senate voted to give President Bush the authority to use force against Iraq. That vote was sharply criticized in Russia today as a provocation and a threat to the world's political and economic stability, underscoring the domestic pressure that Mr. Putin faces over the issue.
Viktor A. Ozerov, chairman of the upper house of Parliament's defense committee, said the vote "can be regarded as a challenge to the world community that proves that the United States of America does not pay any attention to the norms of international law."
The speaker of the lower house of Parliament, Gennady N. Seleznyov, said that if the United States initiated strikes against Iraq without authorization from the United Nations, then it would "automatically become an outcast country."
In several weeks of international diplomacy - and in an unusually broad public debate here in Russia - the Russians have made it clear that they fear the Bush administration's campaign to overthrow Mr. Hussein's government could threaten Russia's longstanding political and economic interests in Iraq. Those include $7 billion in Soviet-era debt that Iraq owes and extensive oil projects that remain limited by the United Nations sanctions on Iraq.
"As for the Russian interests in Iraq," Mr. Putin said today, "they are there, of course, and they emerged not yesterday and not even in the last 10 years - they emerged there decades ago."
But Mr. Putin said that Russia's interests were not purely economic. "I would like to call on you once again not to take our meeting as some bargaining," he said after being asked about Russia's economic interests. "I invited the prime minister and his wife as guest to discuss the entire complex of problems of cooperation - and not to an Oriental bazaar."
A British official described Mr. Blair's several hours of formal and informal talks with Mr. Putin at a wooded, Camp David-like presidential retreat about 75 miles north of Moscow. as cordial and productive. But at today's news conference, Mr. Blair acknowledged that he and Mr. Putin had "different perspectives about how sure we can be about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction."
Mr. Blair also argued for a unified position on the Security Council, saying that would be the most effective lever against Mr. Hussein. "The stronger and clearer the signal the international community gives," he said, "the less likely conflict will be."
-------- spy agencies
CIA Feels Heat on Iraq Data
By GREG MILLER and BOB DROGIN
TIMES STAFF WRITERS
October 11 2002
http://www.latimes.com/la-na-cia11oct11,0,2360915.story
WASHINGTON -- Senior Bush administration officials are pressuring CIA analysts to tailor their assessments of the Iraqi threat to help build a case against Saddam Hussein, intelligence and congressional sources said.
In what sources described as an escalating "war," top officials at the Pentagon and elsewhere have bombarded CIA analysts with criticism and calls for revisions on such key questions as whether Iraq has ties to the Al Qaeda terrorist network, sources said.
The sources stressed that CIA analysts-who are supposed to be impartial-are fighting to resist the pressure. But they said analysts are increasingly resentful of what they perceive as efforts to contaminate the intelligence process.
"Analysts feel more politicized and more pushed than many of them can ever remember," said an intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "The guys at the Pentagon shriek on issues such as the link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. There has been a lot of pressure to write on this constantly, and to not let it drop."
The pressure has intensified in the weeks leading up to this week's debate in Congress on a resolution granting President Bush permission to pursue a military invasion of Iraq.
Evidence of the differences between the agency and the White House surfaced publicly this week when CIA Director George J. Tenet sent a letter to lawmakers saying the Iraqi president is unlikely to strike the United States unless provoked.
That was at odds with statements from Bush and others that Iraq poses an immediate threat. In a speech Monday in Cincinnati, Bush said the danger that Iraq poses to the United States "is already significant, and it only grows worse with time."
Several lawmakers voiced frustration with the way intelligence is being used in the debate on Iraq.
"I am concerned about the politicization of intelligence," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who echoed complaints of other members that the administration has been selective in the intelligence it cites, overstating its case in many instances.
Classified material provided recently by the CIA on Iraq's capabilities and intentions "does not track some of the public statements made by senior administration officials," Feinstein said.
Outside experts say they too see growing cause for concern.
"The intelligence officials are responding to the political leadership, not the other way around, which is how it should be," said Joseph Cirincione, a nonproliferation expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "The politics are driving our intelligence assessments at this point."
Tenet rejected assertions that the agency is being unduly influenced.
"The president of the United States would never tolerate anything other than our most honest judgment," Tenet said in a statement late Thursday. "Our credibility and integrity are our most precious commodities. We will not let anyone tell us what conclusions to reach.
"Policymakers, members of Congress and others are free to push us to challenge our assertions and to ask tough, probing questions. This is healthy. But the notion that we would shape our assessments to please any one of our customers is abhorrent to the ethic by which we work and is simply untrue."
Unrelenting Pressure
But intelligence sources say the pressure on CIA analysts has been unrelenting in recent months, much of it coming from Iraq hawks including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his top deputy, Paul D. Wolfowitz.
CIA officials who brief Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz on Iraq routinely return to the agency with a long list of complaints and demands for new analysis or shifts in emphasis, sources said.
"There is a lot of unhappiness with the analysis," usually because it is seen as not hard-line enough, one intelligence official said.
Another government official said CIA briefers "are constantly sent back by the senior people at Defense and other places to get more, get more, get more to make their case."
A senior Pentagon official rejected claims that Rumsfeld would improperly influence intelligence analysts and said they might be misinterpreting remarks meant to test their convictions. "He's a guy who's constantly challenging assertions and assumptions," the official said.
But White House hawks have shown a tendency for stretching the case against Iraq. Wolfowitz and others have clung to claims that Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta met with an Iraqi agent in Prague, the Czech capital, last year even though the CIA has viewed the report with deep skepticism.
Rumsfeld's recent remark that the United States has "bulletproof" evidence of links between Al Qaeda and Hussein struck many in the intelligence community as an exaggerated assessment of the available evidence.
Indeed, Tenet's letter to lawmakers this week said the agency's "understanding of the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda is evolving and is based on sources of varying reliability."
Similarly, Bush said in his Cincinnati speech, "We've learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and deadly gases."
But Tenet's letter was more equivocal, saying only that there has been "reporting" that such training has taken place. Unlike other passages of the letter, he did not describe the reporting as "solid" or "credible."
The sequence of events surrounding the release of the letter is seen by many on Capitol Hill as an example of how the political winds have whipped intelligence on Iraq.
Tenet released the letter only after being pushed to do so by lawmakers unhappy with an earlier CIA report on Iraq that hewed closely to the White House line.
When lawmakers seized on the letter in speeches against the White House case for war, Tenet quickly issued another statement asserting that "there is no inconsistency" between White House and agency views on Iraq danger. A day later, Tenet rejected another request from lawmakers to declassify additional material on Iraq.
Tenet "is in a bad position," said one congressional aide. "He's under fire from the [intelligence] committees. Then he's under fire from the White House."
Some agency critics note that the CIA's public statements on Iraq have evolved over the last year, escalating their assessment of the risk posed by Hussein.
When Tenet testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 19, for example, the Iraqi threat was not singled out or described with particular urgency.
Hussein "may ... have retained the capability to deliver" biological or chemical weapons "using modified aircraft or other unmanned aerial vehicles," Tenet said, for example.
Tenet also told the committee at the time that Baghdad has "had contacts" with Al Qaeda and that tactical cooperation is "possible." His letter to lawmakers this week asserts "senior level contacts" going back a decade.
A senior U.S. intelligence official said some of the changes can be attributed to new information gained from interrogations of several Al Qaeda leaders captured in Pakistan and elsewhere since spring.
The official insisted that intelligence also supported Bush's widely challenged charge that Iraq is "exploring ways" of using drone aircraft to disperse chemical or biological agents against targets in the United States.
U.N. reports confirm that Iraq has converted Czech-made L-29 trainer jets into unmanned aircraft and that it has sought to equip them with sprayers, but such planes are incapable of flying long distances.
During his speech Tuesday on Iraq, Bush repeated a claim that Baghdad has attempted to import high-strength aluminum tubes "for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons."
The claim, however, is widely disputed. A British government report last month, which reflects the judgments of British intelligence, notes that "no definitive intelligence" links the tubes to a nuclear program.
Old Accusations
Accusations that the CIA has shaded its analysis of sensitive national security issues to support administration policies are not new.
Ronald Reagan and other Republicans charged that the CIA under President Carter underestimated the Soviet threat in the late 1970s, leading to creation of a separate "Blue Team" panel that produced a more dire analysis of the data.
During the Clinton administration, hawkish Republicans charged that the intelligence community was downplaying the threat of ballistic missiles.
A commission led by Rumsfeld argued that the threat was much more immediate and thus sharpened the political debate over national missile defense.
-------- us
Ex-Commander Opposes Iraq Invasion
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 11, 2002; Page A07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A9562-2002Oct10?language=printer
The former U.S. military commander for the Middle East came out against a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq yesterday, saying that he believes the policy of containing President Saddam Hussein has been working.
Retired Marine Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, who preceded Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks as head of Central Command, told a meeting at a Washington think tank that the United States has other priorities in the Middle East.
"I'm not convinced we need to do this now," Zinni said at a meeting of the Middle East Institute. "I believe he is . . . containable at this moment."
Zinni, who served in northern Iraq in 1991 as chief of staff for the Kurdish relief operation that came after the Gulf War, added that he thinks "war and violence are a very last resort and we have to be very careful how we apply it, especially now, in our position in the world."
Zinni has served over the past two years as an unpaid consultant to the State Department on Israeli-Palestinian issues. He said he believes that re-energizing Middle East peace talks is a higher priority than dealing with Iraq. He added that several other issues also should take precedence, such as encouraging reform in Iran and improving U.S. relations with Arab states.
"I would take those priorities before" Iraq, Zinni said. "My personal view is I think this isn't number one; it's maybe sixth or seventh."
His comments, made in Washington on the day the House voted to give President Bush broad authority to use military force against Iraq, were the most explicit Zinni has made about his opposition to any such action. In August, he gave a talk in Tampa in which he warned that a U.S. war against Iraq would needlessly create enemies.
Zinni's criticism of the administration's stance on Iraq is significant not only because of his relationship with the State Department but also because he is widely respected in the U.S. military. His concerns are widely shared by many in the leadership of the military but aren't universal, a retired three-star general said.
-------- propaganda wars
For Bush's Speechwriter, Job Grows Beyond Words
'Scribe' Helps Shape, Set Tone for Evolving Foreign Policy
By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 11, 2002; Page A35
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A9575-2002Oct10?language=printer
Within days of the Sept. 11 attacks, the White House upgraded the security clearance of Michael J. Gerson, President Bush's wordsmith, for the dramatic change that lay ahead for his job.
Gerson, a 38-year-old with Armani horn-rims, was hired as Bush's chief speechwriter for his fluency in the strain of Republican education and welfare policy known as compassionate conservatism. Now, he is playing a growing role in preparing the nation for war.
Like Bush, Gerson is learning on the job, helping convert a presidency that was all about tax cuts and faith-based social programs into one that hopes to transform the nation's defense and foreign policies for the first time since the aftermath of World War II.
Gerson is often invited into the Situation Room to soak in the discussion before addresses on terrorism or the Middle East. For Bush's speech to the United Nations last month, Gerson helped establish the just-the-facts tone for the litany of complaints against Iraq's Saddam Hussein.
"We wanted to create an impression, which was justified by the evidence, of inevitability," Gerson said as he worked alfresco at one of the coffeehouses near the White House where he often jots, unrecognized, on legal pads. "The president likes to outline clear and blunt alternatives. This is an organization which is not all that accustomed to that, which added to the drama of the moment."
Indeed, Bush has shelved the "humble foreign policy" he promoted during his campaign and instead plans to use American might to preempt what he considers budding terrorist threats throughout the world. Domestic policy clearly will not be Bush's legacy, or Gerson's. "All these other things remain important," Gerson said. "But you do realize that there's a broader story you're a part of."
Aides to Bush's father recall that he responded to his discomfort with words by distancing himself from his speechwriters, denying them perks and ignoring their advice. White House officials said his son, who saw the disappointing result, learned from his father's mistake and has embraced his writers.
Formal speeches have been so crucial to building Bush's credibility after a gaffe-prone candidacy that scholars are calling Gerson the most influential presidential speechwriter since Theodore C. Sorensen, confidant and muse of President John F. Kennedy.
Anthony R. Dolan, who coined "evil empire" as chief speechwriter to President Ronald Reagan, said Bush's address to Congress nine days after the Sept. 11 attacks and his Sept. 14, 2001, remarks at the National Cathedral ("Our responsibility to history is already clear") will become two of the most memorable presidential speeches in history.
"FDR's 'infamy' line is remembered, but the speech itself is not that distinguished," Dolan said. "Bush's are, and it started before September 11th."
White House officials said Gerson's clout has increased even more now that Bush's longtime adviser Karen P. Hughes is no longer at the White House on a daily basis, even though she remains deeply involved in shaping Bush's image.
"Mike has become the arbiter of what Bush would want," said a person who has sat in hundreds of meetings with him. "When he says, 'It's not going to happen,' there's nobody in the room who's going to say, 'Well, yeah, maybe it might.' "
Two Mondays ago, Gerson was assigned to write an address that would offer vivid evidence to the American public of the risk posed by Hussein, yet try to convince voters that Bush would not attack Iraq rashly. He had to scare people and reassure them at the same time.
As he began the 29-minute speech that Bush delivered Monday in Cincinnati, Gerson wrote that the Iraqi leader was building a fleet of small planes for dispersing chemical and biological weapons. CIA agents reviewing the draft said "small planes" was misleading. Bush wound up warning of "unmanned aerial vehicles," which he later referred to as "UAVs."
Bush remembered from some conversation or briefing that Hussein could make a nuclear weapon with a softball-sized batch of uranium. Gerson checked into that and the government's atomic energy experts finally agreed to "a little larger than a single softball."
Although finessing language to protect intelligence sources and methods is a part of the job that no one had envisioned, Gerson's role has extended well beyond polished rhetoric ever since he joined the Bush campaign a year and a half before the election. Bush formalized that in July, 10 days after Hughes moved out, by elevating Gerson's title to assistant to the president for speechwriting and policy adviser, from deputy assistant to the president and director of presidential speechwriting.
The White House speechwriting office includes eight writers and researchers. Gerson has a West Wing office, an upgrade from his predecessors' quarters in the adjacent Eisenhower Executive Office Building. He attends the 7:30 a.m. senior staff meeting, and often speaks up at the 8:30 a.m. communication meeting, where Bush's daily message is shaped.
Gerson's style is less conversational than his boss's, favoring flourishes and classical devices. "Flowery," the Texans call it. Bush and Hughes have made Gerson adapt to the president's plain-spokenness, which Hughes believes connects with average voters.
The hallmark of Gerson's speeches is the invocation of the vocabulary and literature of faith, and that only increased after Sept. 11, 2001. Gerson, an evangelical Episcopalian who said he is reading a biography of the Apostle Paul for "escape," shares Bush's willingness to talk publicly about the centrality of Christian faith to his life.
The result is a president whose public words are laced with biblical undertones. At Bush's inauguration, he vowed that when Americans "see that wounded traveler on the road to Jericho, we will not pass to the other side." After the terrorist attacks, he told a skittish nation, "God's signs are not always the ones we look for."
Gerson said the White House found that America's broad faith tradition helped foster healing.
"We have tried to employ religious language in a way that unites people," he said. "Martin Luther King did it all the time during the civil rights movement. He was in this long tradition, going back to Old Testament prophets, that says God is active in history and, eventually, he's on the side of justice."
Bush can be harsh with aides who could crowd his spotlight, but people close to Bush say he has only grown more comfortable with the scholarly man whose presidential nickname is "Scribe" or more often "Gerson!"
Gerson had planned a career in teaching and had been accepted at the interdenominational Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif. Instead, he went to work for Charles W. Colson, the Nixon aide turned prison minister, who had seen a column Gerson wrote about Mother Teresa in the college newspaper at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Ill.
Gerson began incubating the notion of compassionate conservatism as policy director for former senator Daniel R. Coats (R-Ind.), now Bush's ambassador to Germany. Gerson caught the presidential-candidate bug and wrote for Jack F. Kemp and Robert J. Dole, then took a two-year detour into journalism when James Fallows, then editor of U.S. News & World Report, recruited him to cover philanthropy.
In 1999, Bush summoned Gerson to his Washington hotel suite during a National Governors Association meeting and hired him on the spot to help develop domestic policy, including an education message that included a federal role.
Gerson rarely watches Bush perform in person -- he caught Monday's speech from his den in Alexandria. But he took Air Force One to West Point, N.Y., in June when the president announced his new military doctrine of preemptive strikes against nations that harbor terrorists or weapons of mass destruction.
Gerson said he knew it would be one of the most important speeches Bush had ever given, and he just wanted to be there. "It only falls to a few presidents in our history to create a new strategic approach for our country that's going to be influential for decades," he said. "We've been forced to think about these things and to articulate them."
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
-------- terrorism
9/11 Inquiry Eyes Possible 5th Pilot
October 11, 2002
New York Times
By DAVID JOHNSTON and DON VAN NATTA Jr.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/11/national/11TERR.html
WASHINGTON, Oct. 10 - The authorities interviewing a member of Al Qaeda in military custody overseas are investigating a new theory of the Sept. 11 plot: that the suspect, Ramzi Muhammad Abdullah bin al-Shibh, was planning to pilot a fifth hijacked plane to strike the White House.
The plan was disrupted when Mr. bin al-Shibh, who was captured last month in Pakistan, failed to obtain permission to enter the United States, where he had planned to attend flight school in Florida, senior government officials said.
Evidence that there were plans for a fifth hijacking team has also come from the debriefing of John Walker Lindh, but the possibility that Mr. bin al-Shibh was to be the leader of the fifth group has not been previously disclosed.
This theory has gained momentum in recent weeks as investigators have assembled new details about Mr. bin al-Shibh's movements around Europe in the months before the attacks. Investigators have also compiled a fuller picture of his relationship with Mohamed Atta, whom officials call the ringleader of the plot, and uncovered fresh information about the breadth of Al Qaeda's original plan for the attacks.
More specific information about Mr. bin al-Shibh's role in the plot could emerge as a result of the arrest today in Germany of a Moroccan, Abdelghani Mzoudi, who the local authorities say shared an apartment in Hamburg with Mr. bin al-Shibh, Mr. Atta and at least one other hijacker, Marwan al-Shehhi.
The officials said Mr. bin al-Shibh's role in the plot was a main topic of his interrogation at a secret military base abroad. Military officials have asked Mr. bin al-Shibh about organizational changes in Al Qaeda since the Sept. 11 attacks and about plans for further attacks.
Those questions have grown more urgent with the recent assaults against American marines in Kuwait and the release of audio tapes attributed to Osama bin Laden and one of his chief lieutenants, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Mr. Zawahiri's tape, which officials said was more likely to be genuine and recently made than the bin Laden tape, threatens new attacks against the United States and couches its anti-American message around the possibility of an American-led war against Iraq.
The officials said Mr. bin al-Shibh has provided only fragmentary information about the hijackings and Al Qaeda's activities since the war in Afghanistan. The officials said Mr. bin al-Shibh had not said he planned to lead another hijacking group.
But investigators said suspicions were growing that Mr. bin al-Shibh may have intended to lead a fifth hijacking group. Their belief is based on other information, including interviews of other Qaeda detainees and Mr. Lindh, the American who was sentenced on Friday to 20 years in prison for fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan and whose credibility is still being weighed. Mr. Lindh told the authorities that he had heard that five attacks were planned.
Moreover, officials have concluded that a few secretive, face-to-face meetings were crucial to the evolution of the plot. They said their discovery that Mr. bin al-Shibh met with Mr. Atta several times in 2000 and again in Spain in July 2001 contributed to their belief that Mr. bin al-Shibh was an important participant.
In addition, investigators have examined more closely Mr. bin al-Shibh's unsuccessful efforts to obtain a visa to enter the United States, where he had signed up for flying lessons at a Florida aviation academy. In August 2000, he paid $2,200 as a deposit for flight training, an amount officials said was enough to convince them that Mr. al-Shibh seriously intended to learn to fly.
Each of the four times he applied, Mr. bin al-Shibh's visa applications were denied, on grounds the authorities have not explained. Those denials appear to be the only official actions taken by the government that interfered with the hijackers' plans. Mr. bin al-Shibh remained in Germany, officials said, where he became a paymaster, wiring money to hijackers. He left Europe for Pakistan shortly before the attacks.
A slightly built Yemeni known for his virulently anti-American extremism, Mr. bin al-Shibh was initially thought by investigators to be a midlevel organizer and financial conduit, but he has emerged as a far more central figure in the Sept. 11 plot.
In the past, investigators had said only that Mr. bin al-Shibh was seen as an important player who was possibly meant to have been the 20th hijacker on one of the four jets seized on Sept. 11 - a theory some officials still regard as a viable explanation of his role.
But other officials said their view of the plot was evolving.
A newly released memorandum on his interrogation says Mr. Lindh, who described to investigators his training at Qaeda camps, told his interrogators that Sept. 11 was just the "first phase" of a three-part series of attacks, totaling 20 attacks. The memorandum says the first phase "consisted of five attacks," but it cites only four: two on the World Trade Center, one on the Pentagon and one that Mr. Lindh said was aimed at the White House. It is not clear what the target of the fourth plane, which crashed in Pennsylvania, was, but investigators have suggested that the target was in Washington.
In another session with interrogators last December in Kabul, Mr. Lindh said that a "close associate" of Mr. bin Laden named Hakeen At-Taizzi had told him that "there should have been five planes used" on Sept. 11, "the fifth targeting the White House." Mr. Lindh said that he had heard that 50 people, Al Qaeda operatives, were sent to commit 20 suicide operations, and that "15 more operations were pending." Investigators said Mr. Lindh's information corroborated the theory that Mr. bin al-Shibh was planning to be part of a fifth hijacking team on Sept. 11.
"I think that's a very viable theory," a senior government official said. "They were all going to be part of the plot." When pressed to say whether he believed Mr. bin al-Shibh had planned to lead a fifth team, the official said, "I personally believe that."
If five teams were planned, that may mean that more intended hijackers are at large, perhaps in this country, or that some of the people arrested in Pakistan with Mr. bin al-Shibh were somehow involved. Investigators have focused on Mr. bin al-Shibh's movements in the last five years. In 1998, he moved into a cramped three-room apartment at Marienstrasse 54 in Hamburg. In what the authorities said was a decisive moment in the early stages of the plot, Mr. bin al-Shibh traveled to Afghanistan in November 1999 to meet with leaders of Al Qaeda about the hijackings. While there, he and his companions also met Mr. bin Laden, officials said.
His companions were three men who later became pilots in the Sept. 11 attacks. They were Mr. Atta; Mr. Shehhi, believed to be the pilot of United Airlines Flight 175, which crashed into the south tower of the World Trade Center; and Ziad al-Jarrah, believed to be the pilot of United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania.
Mr. Atta, Mr. Shehhi and Mr. Jarrah were all hijacking team leaders, the authorities say. Because Mr. bin al-Shibh joined those men in Afghanistan, senior government officials said, they believe that Mr. bin al-Shibh had also been intended to lead a hijacking team on Sept. 11. But that alone does not show that the plotters wanted to take over five planes.
Mr. bin al-Shibh is also believed by some investigators to have attended a meeting in January 2000 in Malaysia, as did two other Qaeda operatives, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhazmi, who joined the hijacking team that struck the Pentagon, officials have said.
If Mr. bin al-Shibh planned to lead a fifth hijacking team, he was thwarted on May 17, 2000, when his application for a United States visa was rejected. He reapplied on June 15, 2000, and was denied again. On Sept. 15, 2000, and on Oct. 25, 2000, he applied for visas while in Yemen. Those requests were also denied.
Mr. bin al-Shibh applied to the Florida Flight Training Center in Venice, Fla., in August 2000. That month, he also wired the Florida Flight Training Center $2,200 as a deposit for his training.
Mr. Jarrah began training at the same school on June 28, 2000, and continued until December 2000. Unable to obtain a visa, Mr. bin al-Shibh instead focused on serving as a coordinator of the plot and as a paymaster, the authorities have said.
The officials said he may have recruited Zacarias Moussaoui, who has been charged with complicity in the attacks. They said the fact that four hijackings were carried out even after Mr. Moussaoui was arrested could also suggest that as many as five were initially planned.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
Food scraps to power bacteria-driven battery
Friday, October 11, 2002
By Reuters
http://enn.com/news/wire-stories/2002/10/10112002/reu_48654.asp
LONDON - Food scraps once consigned to the compost heap or the dog could soon be powering a cheap bacteria-driven battery if British scientists have their way.
Researchers at the University of the West of England (UWE) in Bristol have developed a microbial fuel cell about the size of a mobile phone that could be powered by organic household waste.
"Right now, their fuel cell runs only on sugar cubes, since these produce almost no waste when broken down, but they aim to move on to carrot power," New Scientist magazine said this week.
Chris Melhuish and his team are using the cell to run a small light-sensitive robot, but they said when a series of the cells are connected they could run domestic appliances.
The bacteria-driven cell, which would cost about $15, directly converts biochemical energy into electricity. It uses E.coli bacteria to break down carbohydrates and release hydrogen atoms.
"The cell also contains chemicals that drive a series of redox, reduction, and oxidation reactions, stripping electrons from the hydrogen atoms and delivering them steadily to the fuel cell's anode. This creates a voltage that can be used to power a circuit," the magazine said.
Melhuish and his team said their organic battery can produce eight times as much energy as other microbial fuel cells.
----
Danish wind turbine makers eye Indian growth
by Per Bech Thomsen
REUTERS DENMARK:
October 11, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/18134/story.htm
COPENHAGEN - Two of the world's leading wind turbine makers Danish Vestas and NEG Micon are both expecting strong growth in India, the fifth biggest wind power market in the world.
"India will be a very important market in the years to come. I think we will see market growth rates of at least 40-50 percent annually," Rakesh Bakshi, Managing Director of Vestas RRB India, told Reuters in an interview on the sidelines of an EU-India Business summit.
Vestas, the world's No. 1 turbine maker, owns 49 percent of Vestas RRB India.
In 2001, wind power with total capacity of 236 megawatt (MW) was installed in India, less than one tenth of the world biggest market, Germany.
But Bakshi expected 6-7,000 MW of wind power to be installed in India over the coming 10 years and he expected his company to grab a substantial share of the market.
"Our present market share is 17-18 percent. We should have at least a 30 percent in the next two years."
World No. 3 turbine manufacturer NEG Micon had a market share of eight to nine percent in India in 2001. Senior Vice President Bent Lindner saw some growth coming from an upgrade of the present small wind mills to bigger models.
"We are experiencing strong growth, India is a very attractive market," Lindner told Reuters after addressing an Indian business delegation.
The average size of installed wind turbines in India in 2001 was 441 kilowatt (KW), one third of the average size in Germany, according to independent wind power consultancy BTM.
Earlier this year, NEG introduced its 950 KW turbine to the Indian market and expects to launch its 1.5 MW next year.
NEG expects to open a new assembling plant in India in 2003.
Vestas' biggest turbine in India is a 500 KW.
"We are looking at an 850 KW turbine and will gradually over the next two years move towards 2.0 MW turbines," Bakshi said.
NEG's Lindner said wind power projects in India were growing in size and the company was currently involved in projects with total capacity of 100 MW.
After Germany, the United States is the second biggest wind power market. Prospects for the U.S. market are currently pending the approval of a comprehensive energy bill, which supports wind power.
----
Danish wind stocks sink on US energy bill doubt
REUTERS DENMARK:
October 11, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/18136/story.htm
COPENHAGEN - Shares in world leading wind turbine maker Vestas dropped 11 percent this week as the prospects for imminent approval of a U.S. energy bill which supports wind power appeared to fade.
Local rival NEG Micon , less dependent on the U.S. market, lost six percent after Republican and Democrat congress members were deadlocked in negotiations about a comprehensive national energy bill.
"Now several market players believe less and less in a deal this week," banking and securities group Nordea said on its website.
At 1305 GMT, Vestas shares were 12.50 crowns lower at 96.50 crowns, while NEG Micon was off 9.50 at 155.50. Copenhagen bourse`s top-20 KFX index , which includes both stocks, was 2.5 percent down.
Last week, the two shares rose more than 10 percent when an agreement seemed imminent. If there is no political agreement, the bill will die when Congress ends this year's session, possibly by mid-October.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Turning the Tide
Date: 11 Oct 2002
From: Eli Pariser,
MoveOn.org - moveon-help@list.moveon.org
Over the last five days, Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) and our friends in Congress fought a pitched battle against a hasty and dangerous war resolution. Senator Byrd fought with every tool at his disposal, from an array of parliamentary tactics to his pocket copy of the Constitution. Joined by Senators Kennedy (D-MA), Sarbanes (D-MD), Durbin (D-IL), and Boxer (D-CA) in outrage, he launched a furious filibuster, demanding that our elected representatives give this issue the lengthy and deep consideration it deserves.
In the House, Representatives Doggett (D-TX), Lee (D-CA), Kucinich (D-OH), and Pelosi (D-CA) took a stand against House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt (D-MO) and worked unstoppingly to deliver a defeat for the authorization of force. In doing so, they risked political retaliation from both within their party and outside of it, but they spoke out anyway.
Early yesterday afternoon, the House voted 296 to 133 in support of the President's resolution. Surprising nearly everyone, a significant majority of Democrats stood with Pelosi and Doggett in opposition to the resolution.
And around 1 in the morning last night, the Senate voted to support President Bush's proposal, 77 for to 23 against. Senator Byrd said, "I have fought the good fight. I might as well talk to the ocean."
For those of us who are worried about a war on Iraq -- worried what it will do to our country, our future, or our world -- this is a dark day. Our Congress has been stampeded into supporting a unilateral, pre-emptive war that could set the Middle East on fire and turn the world against us. In the immediate aftermath of this decision, it's easy to feel, like Senator Byrd, that we might as well have talked to the ocean.
But that is just plain wrong. This vote hurts, but without our work it would have been much worse.
Let us not undersestimate what we're up against. In the Bush Administration, we have a cadre of men hungry for war. Iraq has been on the agenda since President Bush and Vice President Cheney were on the campaign trail. When September 11th happened, the President immediately tried to link it to Saddam. No dice. When anthrax brought our capitol to a halt, the FBI was dispatched to find connections to Baghdad. Nothing surfaced.
The President has demonstrated that he is willing to use every Machiavellian trick in the book to force our country to war. He hasn't hesitated to use our national tragedy to push his agenda. He hasn't hesitated to play off the fear of Americans. He hasn't hesitated to take advantage of this election year to divide and conquer his opposition. When the President of the United States, a man with the loudest megaphone in the world, chooses to use such tactics, he is an extremely formidable opponent.
Make no mistake: the President did everything he could to make this vote a unanimous one. He failed. And the dissent in Congress will resonate throughout our country.
The New York Times today interviewed Representative Susan Davis (D-CA), from southern California: "Ms. Davis's San Diego district includes thousands of active and retired military personnel in the West Coast's largest Navy base, many of whom, she said, may not be happy with her decision to vote against the president's wishes. But having agonized over her decision until a few hours before the vote, she said she was persuaded by a large number of calls and e-mail messages from voters who were deeply uneasy about the prospect of a new war that could be fought with terrible weapons." That was us.
And when Senator Byrd was speaking out on the Senate floor, he knew we stood behind him. When Representative Pelosi spoke out against the House leadership, she knew that we were with her. Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota is in the political fight of his life against a candidate hand-picked by the White House to defeat him. But even though it could damage his re-election campaign, Senator Wellstone voiced his conscience. Our work helped to make that possible.
Our impact can be felt far beyond Washington, D.C. The American people are a lot smarter than politicians think, and support for this warmongering is paper thin. With each dissenter, with each dissenting vote we will gain the support of more of our fellow citizens. President Bush may now have the legal authority for a war, but thanks to the concern we've voiced in the media and in our representatives' offices, he does not have the mandate of his constituents.
This vote will not stand. We will keep fighting this thoughtless war in every way we can. We will fight it over the next weeks and the next months, in Washington and at home.
For now, though, we should take a moment to reflect on the hard work we've put in, on our successes and our failures. Remember: we're not talking to the ocean. We're turning the tide.
Sincerely,
--Eli, Wes, Carrie, Joan, Peter, and Susan MoveOn.org Friday, October 11, 2002
P.S. The pressure we've put on Congress has been overwhelming. Over the last two months, we've met with Senators' offices in every state. We've mobilized a team of volunteer lobbyists who worked with over 400 Congressional offices. We've written over 3,600 letters to the editor on Iraq. And we've made, at the very least, a staggering 143,000 phone calls to Congress. With countless emails and a petition with over 200,000 signers, we've communicated a deep and broad concern to our elected representatives.
Here's what Senator Byrd had to say about the grassroots feedback he received:
"I have heard from tens of thousands of Americans - people from all across this country of ours - who have urged me to keep up the fight. I am only one Senator from a small state, yet in the past week I have received nearly 20,000 telephone calls and nearly 50,000 e-mails supporting my position.
I want all of those people across America who took the time to contact me to know how their words have heartened me and sustained me in my efforts to turn the tide of opinion in the Senate. They are my heroes, and I will never forget the remarkable courage and patriotism that reverberated in the fervor of their messages."
(From http://byrd.senate.gov/byrd_newsroom/byrd_news_oct2002/rls_oct2002/rls_oct2002_3.html)
P.P.S. Below is a list of the Senators and Representatives who voted against a war on Iraq. If you feel like calling some of them to thank them for taking a stand, it will certainly be appreciated.
Senators who voted against the resolution:
Akaka (D) -- (202) 224-6361
Bingaman (D) -- (202) 224-5521
Boxer (D) -- (202) 224-3553
Byrd (D) -- (202) 224-3954
Chafee (R) -- (202) 224-2921
Conrad (D) -- (202) 224-2043
Corzine (D) -- (202) 224-4744
Dayton (D) -- (202) 224-3244
Durbin (D) -- (202) 224-2152
Feingold (D) -- (202) 224-5323
Graham (D) -- (202) 224-3041
Inouye (D) -- (202) 224-3934
Jeffords (I) -- (202) 224-5141
Kennedy (D) -- (202) 224-4543
Leahy (D) -- (202) 224-4242
Levin (D) -- (202) 224-6221
Mikulski (D) -- (202) 224-4654
Murray (D) -- (202) 224-2621
Reed (D) -- (202) 224-4642
Sarbanes (D) -- (202) 224-4524
Stabenow (D) -- (202) 224-4822
Wellstone (D) -- (202) 224-5641
Wyden (D) -- (202) 224-5244
A full roll call list for the Senate is available on our website at: http://www.moveon.org/senatevote.html
A full roll call for the House is available at: http://www.moveon.org/housevote.html
----
Peace, perchance?
Two leaders of Tampa Bay's peace movement share their life stories and their conviction that war against Iraq would be wrong.
By JOCELYN WIENER, Staff Writer,
St. Petersburg Times, published
October 11, 2002
http://www.sptimes.com/2002/10/11/news_pf/Floridian/Peace__perchance.shtml
Two leaders of Tampa Bay's peace movement share their life stories and their conviction that war against Iraq would be wrong.
TAMPA -- Diane Cardin-Kamleiter rests her head on her husband Mark's shoulder, then tilts her chin and whispers in his ear. He smiles. She laughs. Bob Marley pulses from two speakers, but the chords fade to a whisper before they reach the entrance to MacDill Air Force Base, about 200 yards away. The location was chosen by the organizers of the peace vigil for its unabashed symbolism -- MacDill has been the launching pad for several recent American military operations, including the war in Afghanistan.
At 10 o'clock on a Saturday morning, the hot October sun is beating down and somewhere, President Bush is telling the American people that war with Iraq is imminent and imperative. Diane, a founder of Women in Black Gulfcoast, and Mark, co-chairman of the Florida Green Party, have come to add their voices to the growing chorus that insists the president has provided no compelling justification for an attack on Iraq.
Diane, 46, and Mark, 53, can describe in great detail their reasons for protesting the war. They remember a time when Saddam Hussein was an American ally, using U.S. weapons to gas the Kurds.
"We're saying how horrible (his abuse of power) is," Mark says. "And it is. But who gave him that authority? What are we doing in Pakistan right now? We're backing up a dictator. We gave money to the Taliban -- $40-million in May 2001. That's what makes me furious. Give me 10 years and I'll be right again."
But ask them how they arrived at this vigil with 80 to 100 others, fighting against this war, and they struggle to unravel their personal stories.
Diane spent her youth in Sorel-Tracy, a factory town at the junction of the St. Lawrence and Richelieu rivers in Quebec. Her father was a carpenter and union man, her mother a saleswoman bursting with optimism. If Diane's activism came from anyone, she guesses it was probably her mother, a free thinker who pretended to have stomachaches every Sunday in order to skip church.
When Diane was 12, the Liberation Front of Quebec kidnapped a British ambassador and for several months, Quebec was under siege. Until then, Diane had not known Canada even had an army.
At 19, Diane began studying accounting at the University of Sherbrooke. The only student movement she knew of was a group of her accounting classmates who wore T-shirts with "We are the Bo$$" emblazoned on the front.
Five years after she graduated, Diane began looking for opportunities abroad. When a position came open in an exchange program between the University of Ottawa and the State University of Haiti, Diane jumped on it. Mark grew up in a military family. His father, an Air Force sergeant, was stationed in Britain. Mark went to an American school where he learned that his country had never lost a war. His two brothers went to British schools and learned that America lost the War of 1812.
Around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Mark's family moved to Shah Air Force Base in South Carolina. Mark heard U2s flying overhead. He watched his father load the car with camping gear, then hand his wife a gun. If he called with a special signal, she was to drive the children to a campsite in the mountains and wait for nuclear war.
Mark's first rebellion took place in a high school lunchroom -- a boycott against the cafeteria's lukewarm green beans. The principal told Mark's father that Mark was not much better than his "long-haired hippie" friends.
"I don't know what effect college professors today have on their students," Mark says, "but some of mine had a major impact." With the Vietnam War raging, one of his professors at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., announced, "You need to decide if what we're doing there is right and whether America should be killing. If you decide it isn't, come see me."
Mark's professor sent him to the Universalist Church where he filed for conscientious objector status. Mark's father wrote a letter saying that, although he absolutely disagreed with his son's decision, he could vouch for Mark's pacifism.
After he graduated, Mark taught middle school for four years before earning a law degree at William and Mary. Then he went to work for a small law firm, where he was able to provide free legal services on the side. After a few years, the attorney Mark worked for was ready to retire. He offered to sell Mark his firm.
"It was every young lawyer's dream," Mark smiles. "It was not easy to turn him down." But Mark had already decided to go to Paris.
At 10:15 a.m., the circle unwinds itself into a line that stretches down Dale Mabry Highway. The protesters stand at even intervals, silent, holding up signs: "Try every alternative to war" and "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you (Luke 6:27)."
Young men in a red truck roll down their windows, laugh derisively, shout "War!" then speed away. Most of the other drivers who slow down to read the signs honk their horns in support. Mark stands between a young woman with dyed red hair and a black ruffled skirt and an older woman in a blue T-shirt and a white cap. With his right hand he makes a peace sign. With his left hand he holds his own sign: "Our grief is not a cry for war." Diane, meanwhile, is taking drags from a cigarette and making an animated speech to a local documentary maker.
"The Quakers have a saying," she says, gazing into the camera. "We study enough about war. We know war. It's time we study about peace."
Something changed for Diane when she moved to Haiti as a professor of business administration. Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier was still in power, and Diane would see men wearing sunglasses and red armbands as she walked through Port au Prince. These were the tontons Macoutes, the dictatorship's secret police militia. If they didn't like the way a person looked, they had official permission to shoot. No questions asked.
In 1986 Baby Doc Duvalier was ousted in a coup. Diane's parents were visiting. She told them the gunfire in the distance was fireworks. When her parents were evacuated, Diane remembers how proud her mother was of the Haitian people. Diane stayed on. Soon after, she saw a group of people gathered on the street. It looked like a parade. Then she saw the man -- a local butcher -- with a tire around his neck. She watched the people pour gasoline on him and light him on fire. They believed the man had been murdering local street children and packaging their flesh as meat. Diane remained haunted by that moment.
"For the last 10 years I was in struggle in my own soul, I was an accomplice," she says. When the tontons Macoutes raped the nuns in a nearby convent, Diane decided she needed to go home. "I could not take it anymore."
But when she returned to Quebec, Diane no longer felt comfortable. Despite Haiti's problems, she missed everything about that country, especially its human warmth. A year and a half later, Diane returned to Haiti.
Mark, meanwhile, had moved to Paris to create a drug rehabilitation program for street youth. He learned French, opened a coffeehouse and began to recruit young people. These were Paris' outcasts. They wore bandannas and black leather jackets with studs. One young man named Serge had been prostituted by his father from the age of 13.
Serge was left-handed and loved music so much that he would play right-handed guitars upside down. When Mark was lying on the couch, exhausted, Serge would approach him. "You're not going to get up?" he would ask. Mark would shake his head, no. Serge would then lift Mark up, kiss him on both cheeks, and set him back down. For six years, Mark watched these young people heal and begin to take care of one another. When he finally left for the United States, Mark's original clients were running the program.
At 10:45 a.m., the group moves back into a circle on the fading grass. The organizer of the vigil introduces Barbara Edwards, a petite older woman with short gray hair, as "a teacher of a course in miracles."
Edwards instructs everyone to close their eyes and breathe into and out of their hearts.
"We are the spirit," Edwards says. "Feel the light surrounding you and now see President Bush standing in the light. Send love from your heart to his heart."
Diane closes her eyes and tilts her head back. Mark keeps his eyes opened, trained on the ground.
They first met in Haiti, when Diane was 32 and Mark was 39. He had seen her sitting a few tables away, the only other person in the little restaurant. He was in town between jobs, living on his savings, doing research for a novel about drug trafficking in Haiti. She had gone to the beach with friends and hadn't felt like cooking. From across the restaurant, they struck up a conversation in French.
"Maybe we'll talk better if you come over here," Mark finally suggested.
For the next three days, she showed him the Haiti she loved, the university, the towns, the beaches. When Mark flew back to Miami, Diane took the advice of a close friend. "He was nice," the friend instructed her. "You should write to him." Mark wrote back, and soon they were visiting one another.
Diane left Haiti in 1990 and moved to St. Petersburg to live with Mark. She spoke no English, and was soon grappling with depression and culture shock.
"All I saw was mall, mall, mall," she says, "Car, car, car."
She spent a year painting their new house in the Old Northeast.
Mark had taken a temporary position teaching profoundly disabled children. "I can do anything for a day," he told himself. Five years later, when he finally passed the Florida Bar exam, Mark set up his own practice and began defending the rights of handicapped students. He hired Diane to help him manage his office.
Although they often joined in peace demonstrations, it was not until the 2000 presidential campaign that they began trying to contact the Green Party. In late November, they attended their first meeting at a little Cajun restaurant in Clearwater.
Mark recognized them the moment he saw them on the Green Party pamphlet. Those were his values. Grass-roots democracy? Check. Social justice? Check. Nonviolence? Check. He decided something else, as well.
"The only way I'm going to see peace in my life is to get involved in the political system."
When she heard the Green Party platform, Diane decided she finally had a reason to get her citizenship. From then on, they attended every meeting for the Pinellas Greens and every meeting for the Florida Greens. In May 2002, Mark was elected party chairman for Florida.
Six months earlier, in December 2001, Diane had been invited by one of her friends to form a local chapter of Women in Black, an international organization of women committed to opposing all forms of violence. They held their first vigil that same month, reading poetry and giving testimony against the war in Afghanistan. The night before Women in Black's second event, Diane's mother passed away. "Now I appreciate that it is not easy to wake up every day with that spirit," she smiles.
It is nearly 11 a.m. when Mark helps his wife step up on top of a blue cooler. Diane is so enthusiastic at first that she forgets to use the microphone.
"I named my little speech 'Take the podium and talk about peace,' " she tells the group. "I think the peace thing is located in the uterus of women," she continues, to scattered applause. "We should be hysterical about peace. We have to ask the men who are the leaders of this planet to calm down."
The group laughs and applauds. A few minutes later, Mark steps up to the microphone. "I was taught, as a young man, that when I had problems I should sort them out with my fists," he pauses. "Peace," he says, "might be one of the great defining achievements of the 21st century."
A church choir sings "Let there be peace on Earth." Overhead, a fighter plane takes off with a loud roar. The circle begins to disperse. And for a moment, Diane rests her head on Mark's shoulder.
----
Throngs Again Demand Venezuelan Leader Quit
October 11, 2002
New York Times
By JUAN FORERO
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/11/international/americas/11VENE.html
CARACAS, Venezuela, Oct. 10 - Banging pans, blowing whistles and demanding that President Hugo Chávez leave office, hundreds of thousands of protesters marched through this capital today as tensions persisted six months after Mr. Chávez was briefly overthrown in the aftermath of a similar protest. Advertisement
Mr. Chávez's left-leaning government responded by deploying the National Guard in riot gear to block access to the presidential palace and other government buildings.
The march remained peaceful. But outside Caracas, one person was killed and others were wounded in gunfights between police officers and Chávez supporters who tried to keep opponents from reaching the capital, Venezuelan media reported.
Protest leaders reiterated demands that Mr. Chávez either resign or agree to early elections. Unless he does one or the other by next Wednesday, they threatened, he will face a nationwide general strike on Oct. 21. The last such strike led to a week of chaos that brought about his temporary ouster.
"Today's demonstration is enough for President Chávez to see the need to call for elections or to resign," said Carlos Fernández, a leader in the opposition movement and president of the country's largest business federation. "They're tired," he said of Venezuelans. "They do not want the country to continue to deteriorate."
The government did not immediately respond to the ultimatum. But Mr. Chávez and his ministers have repeatedly refused to contemplate a referendum on his rule until next August, as permitted by the Constitution. Presidential elections are not scheduled until the end of 2006.
"The president will not leave because of the pressure of a few," Vice President José Vicente Rangel told reporters today. "That is not constitutional."
Though it was unclear how many took part in the march today, organizers put the number at a million, which would make the protest the largest since the April 11 protest that resulted in the president's removal.
The growing number of anti-Chávez street protests has worried the Organization of American States and the United Nations, which have failed to broker dialogue between the government and the opposition. The United States, which is dependent on Venezuelan oil, has also expressed concern about instability here.
"Our main concern really is not the demonstrations or civil disobedience," said José Miguel Vivanco, director of the Latin America division of Human Rights Watch. "The problem are those members of the opposition who have no patience, no tolerance anymore for the government, and are looking for extra-constitutional ways to get rid of the government."
Both the opposition and Mr. Chavez had vowed to find common ground after the president returned to power in a popular uprising two days after his removal. Instead, the country has been roiled by political turmoil, as the opposition has searched for myriad ways to push Mr. Chavez out.
This week, the situation appeared to worsen, with a handful of military officers who face charges for their role in Mr. Chavez's ouster taking to the airwaves to sharply criticize the government. Raising questions about the loyalty of the military brass, Vice Admiral Alvaro Martin Fossa, a member of the high command, publicly offered to resign today in protest of what he called the heavy-handed purging of officers believed by the government to have participated in the removal of Mr. Chavez.
The state security services, meanwhile, raided the homes of a former foreign minister and military officials in recent days, charging that they had uncovered a plot to overthrow Mr. Chavez.
The president's supporters, who gathered at key spots in the city today, said they would not let him be forced out. Many of them, poor people who were outcasts for years, see Mr. Chávez as their protector.
"We're defending President Chávez's revolution," Johnny Franco, 49, said. "He is the only president we have ever had who looked out for all the people."
The throngs of anti-Chávez protesters, though, blamed the president for bringing the country to the brink of ruin. Though rich in oil, Venezuela is in a deep recession.
"There is high unemployment, no safety in the streets, and we are just getting by," said Eusebio Rodríguez, 41, a laid-off mechanic. "Each day is getting harder."
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Nobel Peace Prize Awarded to Carter With Criticism of Bush
October 11, 2002
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/11/international/11CND-NOBE.html
The 2002 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded today to former President Jimmy Carter.
Noting that Mr. Carter had devoted decades of his life to the peaceful resolution of international conflicts, the chairman of the committee that awards the prize said that Mr. Carter's selection "must be interpreted as a criticism of the present U.S. administration."
Mr. Carter, who brokered the 1978 Camp David peace accord between Israel and Egypt and has been involved in efforts to ease conflicts from North Korea to Haiti since leaving the White House, was chosen from a record field of 156 candidates that were said to have included President Bush, former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York and President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan.
"The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2002 to Jimmy Carter for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development," the committee said in its announcement.
"In a situation currently marked by threats of the use of power, Carter has stood by the principles that conflicts must as far as possible be resolved through mediation and international cooperation based on international law, respect for human rights and economic development."
But comments by the committee's chairman, Gunnar Berge, were expected to generate as much interest as Mr. Carter's selection.
In remarks to reporters after the announcement, Mr. Berge said that Mr. Carter had been nominated for the peace prize "many, many times" but that a major reason that he was finally selected was that he represented a counterpoint to the militancy of President Bush.
"I hope it will help strengthen what Carter has to say," said Mr. Berge. "He has a more moderate point of view than the sitting administration."
Mr. Berge said the Bush administration seemed all too willing to act unilaterally against Iraq. "They should be sticking more to principles of mediation and international cooperation," he said.
Another member of the prize committee, Inger-Marie Ytterhorn, challenged Mr. Berge's observations. "The way I see it, that was not the intention of the committee," she said in an interview with NRK radio.
The White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, declined to comment this morning on Berge's statement. He said that President Bush had congratulated Mr. Carter during a two-minute telephone conversation today.
The Nobel Peace Prize often has political overtones, but rarely does the committee chairman, in announcing the award, enunciate so clearly the five-member committee's view of current events.
Indeed, according to a statement on the Nobel Committee's Web site: "There must be no mention in the minutes of any Nobel Committee meetings of the contents of discussions relating to choices of candidates for the various awards, nor must any differences of opinion in committees be divulged in other ways. For that reason, committee members take no part in the public debates which follow the announcement of decisions."
Mr. Carter said in a statement that he was "deeply grateful" for the honor.
"I hope this award reflects a universal acceptance and even embrace of this broad-based concept of human rights," he said. "This honor serves as an inspiration not only to us, but also to suffering people around the world, and I accept it on their behalf."
He did not address Mr. Berge's comments about President Bush.
In an interview this morning on CNN, Mr. Carter said: "I don't want to comment specifically on President Bush's policies, but I do think that in every way before we go into a war of any kind we should exhaust all other alternatives including negotiation, mediation or, if that's not possible in the case of Iraq, working through the United Nations."
Mr. Carter, a Democrat who was president from 1977 to 1981, now heads the Atlanta-based Carter Center, which advocates human rights and peaceful resolutions of conflicts and promotes public health issues.
Mr. Berge said he called Mr. Carter at home in Atlanta at 4:30 a.m. Eastern time, a half-hour before the announcement in Oslo, to notify him.
Mr. Berge said the committee had also recognized that Mr. Carter should have shared the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize, which was largely meant to honor the Camp David peace accords between Israel and Egypt that Mr. Carter had brokered.
The 1978 prize was awarded to Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel and President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt, who jointly began the peace process in 1977 that culminated in the accords at Camp David in September 1978. Mr. Carter was excluded because he was not nominated by the Feb. 1 deadline that is strictly enforced by the Norwegian Nobel Institute.
"He should have had the prize in 1978," said Mr. Berge. "But he couldn't because he wasn't nominated in time. That was a mistake that we now have the opportunity to set straight."
Mr. Carter is the third United States president to be given the Peace Prize, after Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow T. Wilson.
Nominations may be submitted by members of national assemblies and governments, university professors, international court judges, past and present Nobel committee members and former peace prize winners.
---
List of Americans Awarded Peace Prize
The Associated Press
Friday, October 11, 2002; 2:25 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A12941-2002Oct11?language=printer
Twenty-one Americans and organizations have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize since it was first given in 1901 to Jean Henry Dunant, the Swiss founder of the Red Cross.
The prizes were created by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel in his will and always are presented on Dec. 10, the anniversary of his 1896 death.
-2002: Former President Jimmy Carter awarded prize for his "untiring effort" to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts and to advance democracy and human rights.
-1997: Jody Williams and her International Campaign to Ban Landmines shared the award for their attempts to rid the world of land mines.
-1986: Elie Wiesel, chairman of the President's Commission on the Holocaust and noted humanitarian.
-1985: Boston-based International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.
-1973: Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger shared the prize with North Vietnam's Le Duc Tho, who declined it, for negotiating the Vietnam peace accords.
-1970: Norman Ernest Borlaugh for leading research efforts at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico City.
-1964: The Rev. Martin Luther King for his civil rights work and as leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
-1962: Linus Carl Pauling for his efforts to end nuclear testing.
-1953: George Catlett Marshall, originator of the Marshall Plan to help rebuild Europe after World War II, also a general president of the American Red Cross.
-1950: Ralph Bunche, for his efforts in mediating conflict in Palestine.
-1947: Prize was divided equally between the Washington, D.C.-based American Friends Service Committee (the Quakers) and London's The Friends Service Council.
-1946: Emily Green Balch, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and John Raleigh Mott, chairman, International Missionary Council.
-1945: Former Secretary of State Cordell Hull, for efforts in opening the United Nations.
-1931: Jane Addams, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and Nicholas Murray Butler, promoter of the Briand-Kellogg Pact .
-1929: Former Secretary of State Frank Billings Kellogg for negotiating the Briand-Kellogg Pact, which renounced war as an instrument of policy. It was signed by 64 nations.
-1925: Vice President Charles Dawes Gates shared the prize with Sir Austen Chamberlain of Great Britain. Dawes originated the plan that bears his name for German reparations to allies after the end of World War I.
-1919: President Woodrow Wilson for founding the League of Nations.
-1912: Former Secretary of State Elihu Root for establishing several treaties of arbitration.
-1906: President Theodore Roosevelt for his efforts in mediating the 1905 Treaty of Portsmouth that brought an end to the Russo-Japanese War.
Source: The Norwegian Nobel Committee
----
Columbus Day Provokes Indigenous, Environmental Actions
October 11, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/oct2002/2002-10-11-04.asp
WASHINGTON, DC, Demonstrations will be held across the United States on Saturday in solidarity with actions in Mexico and Central America to protest the 510th anniversary of Columbus Day.
A national holiday marking this day honors the explorer Christopher Columbus, who made his first landfall on the western side of the Atlantic Ocean on October 12, 1492 somewhere in the Bahamas.
American Indian Movement leader Vernon Bellecourt said, "October 12th marks the 510th anniversary of the coming of the colonial pirate Christopher Columbus and the beginning of the American holocaust that has claimed 16 million Indian lives in what is now called United States."
Vernon Bellecourt is a member of the Chippewa tribe of the Lakota nation. He is a founding leader of the American Indian Movement, Denver, Colorado. (Photo by Nathan Robinson courtesy Ohio State University)
"We demand respect for indigenous treaty, cultural and environmental rights by way of restitution and reparations that will begin the reconstruction of an indigenous future in America," Bellecourt said.
Thousands of indigenous activists and supporters from Canada to Panama plan to block roads and borders, and hold marches, cultural celebrations, and rallies to demand basic human rights for all native peoples and environmental justice.
They are seeking an end to "the militarization that accompanies corporate globalization," and "an end to free trade agreements that exploit native communities and their lands," organizers said in a statement today.
The Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice will mobilize activists from the U.S.-Mexico border communities of El Paso, Ciudad Juarez and Nogales to rally at the border. They intend to show their rejection of the "corporate colonialism" embodied in the North American Free Trade Agreement linking Canada, the U.S. and Mexico, and also the Free Trade Area of the Americas by which American nations from Chile to Canada may be linked in the near future.
In Washington, DC, demonstrations led by representatives of the American Indian Movement (AIM) will take place at a Christopher Columbus statue to demand, among other things, the immediate release of AIM's Leonard Peltier, who AIM says is wrongfully imprisoned for the deaths of two FBI agents.
Statue of Italian mariner Christopher Columbus at Union Station, Washington, DC (Photo credit unknown)
In New York City, Minneapolis, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco and Columbus, Ohio, actions are planned at federal buildings, borders, military installations, trade offices, and multinational companies such as Coca-Cola, Nike, Monsanto, and Citibank.
Demands of the U.S. based Latin American Solidarity Coalition (LASC), an organizing group for the demonstrations, include halting environmentally destructive bombing by the U.S. Navy on the island of Vieques, Puerto Rico.
The LASC actions will occur in solidarity with Central America and Mexico wide actions against the Plan Puebla Panama (PPP). According to the Inter-American Development Bank, the objective of the Plan Puebla-Panama is to "take advantage of the human and ecological riches of the Mesoamerican region within a framework of sustainable development and respect for its ethnic and cultural diversity."
Teodosio Angel of the Union of Indigenous Communities in the Northern Zone of the Isthmus in Oaxaca, Mexico says, "We will block roads, ports and borders and protest multinationals like Coca-Cola to demand that corporations and governments stop robbing our natural resources and basic rights. For 510 years, governments and corporations have ignored us and it continues today with the PPP."
The Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), the UN Economic Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Central American Economic Integration Bank compose the Plan Puebla-Panama's advisory group. The project is composed of eight regional initiatives, which seek to "promote integration and foment dialogue between authorities and civil society," the IADB says.
In Managua, Nicaragua, actions against the Inter-American Development Bank on Saturday "will expose their role as a corporate welfare institution," organizers say.
Indigenous activists are marching from Costa Rica to Panama City, a distance of over 200 miles, to protest the ecological destruction caused by mining on their lands.
In Panama, mining is resulting in disastrous environmental effects in several areas of the country, generating at the same time conflicts with the indigenous communities that live there, according to the World Rainforest Movement (WRM), a Uruguayan nongovernmental organization based in Montevideo.
In 1994, one quarter of Panama's land area was covered by mining concessions or applications, and currently over half of the national territory is open to mining concession applications. WRM says, "Many mining sites are located in forests, and 70 percent of concessions have been granted in indigenous lands at San Blás, Boca del Toro, Veraguas and Chiriquí."
"October 12, so called Columbus Day, is the day when terrorism began on our lands." says Andrea Carmen of the Yaqui Nation and executive director of the International Indigenous Treaty Council.
"We've seen our lands taken, cultures and sacred sites destroyed, treaties violated, families killed and imprisoned, and so-called development imposed on us with no regards for our peoples' ways of life," Carmen said.
"We are coming together today," she said, "to rededicate ourselves to the struggle for safeguarding our Mother Earth, the continued survival of our traditional cultures, and renewing bonds of solidarity with all peoples of this world who share our aspirations for a better life."
Plan Puebla Panama is online at: http://www.iadb.org/ppp/index.asp
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