Archive By Date | Today's Links to Search By
Activists' News | Nuclear | Depleted Uranium | Military | Police
Alternative Energy Etc. | From Subscribers
NUCLEAR
CADU Calls for Blair to Commit to no Future Use of DU Weapons
U.N. scientists start examining Bosnia's soil
We caused cancer in the Gulf
German govt to keep nuke power plant open longer
A Mercenary Prometheus Serving Iraq's Nuclear Ambitions
U.S.: North Korea Says Has Nukes
N. Korea Nuclear News Sparks Anger
North Korea Weapons Chronology
Ohio Nuke Plant Rapped on Radiation
U.S. to Brief Sharon on Iraq Plans
Bush Signs Iraq War Resolution
Iraq: The Q and A
MILITARY
Nine allied troops killed in Khost
Afghan Warlords Receive U.S. Weapons
Iraq seeks chemical for arms
Indonesia Takes Major Step Toward Calling Group Terrorist
In Face of Criticism, Indonesia Promises Terror Crackdown
Britain Preps Tanks for Desert
Shipbuilding, Gulfstream Boost Gen. Dynamics
Knowles Calls for Probe Into Alaska Weapons Tests
China Hopes for Military Ties on Jiang's U.S. Visit
China Reshaping Military to Toughen Its Muscle in the Region
In Shift, France Vows To Modernize Military
India might withdraw troops from border
India to Pull Troops From Pakistan
Indians Protest 'Suicide Squad' Idea
Iran to Create 16 Refugee Camps for Iraqis
Airstrikes in Iraq appear to be war preparations
Kurds prepare own army
Bush, Sharon Discuss Response to Iraq Attack
Arab media echoes with anti-U.S. ire
Dispute simmering over Mideast water
Job Survivial in Chechnya
Russian Satellite Launch Kills 1
Confessed Cuban Spy Gets 25 Years
U.N. Chief Backs Iraq Resolution
Rumsfeld's Style, Goals Strain Ties In Pentagon
Bush Gets $355 Billion Defense Bill
Falwell's fatal words
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
The truth is polygraphs lie
Army Planes to Aid D.C. Sniper Hunt
Military Aircraft With Detection Gear To Augment Police
Secret Military Spy Planes Enlisted in Hunt for Sniper
Court Debates Race in Death Cases
Forest Service Warned on Terrorism
ENERGY AND OTHER
Coffee company delivers using 100 percent biodiesel
Europe Pushes for Renewable Energy
ACTIVISTS
The Growing Nuclear Threat:
Veterans Against War on Iraq March on White House
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- depleted uranium
CADU Calls for Blair to Commit to no Future Use of Depleted Uranium Weapons in Iraq in Face of Unresolved Gulf War Deaths and Illnesses
From: info@cadu.org.uk
Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2002
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE- 16th October 2002
Manchester, 16 October As Whitehall sources disclosed Tony Blair's plans to prepare British Armed forces for an attack on Iraq, CADU, the internationally recognised Campaign Against Depleted Uranium is calling for the Government to agree to a commitment not to use any weaponry containing depleted uranium in any forthcoming attacks. Given the continuing emergence of evidence that potentially links Gulf War Illness to the use of depleted uranium (DU) weapons and the massively increased rates of childhood cancer and birth deformities in Iraq it would be completely inhumane and irresponsible to for Britain to use these weapons again.
DU AND GULF WAR SYNDROME
CADU finds it particularly alarming that the Whitehall sources have made clear that defence plans include the use of Challenger II battle tanks, which are known to only use DU ammunition and were also used in the 1991 Gulf War. Only this month a report by the Uranium Medical Research Centre in Washington DC found that 11 years on over half the Gulf Veterans in the study tested positive for DU. Another study, also out this month by German biochemist, Professor Albrecht Schott, found that British veterans who fought in the Gulf and Balkan wars (where DU was also used) had up to 14 times the usual level of chromosome abnormalities as would be found in civilian populations. Yet Britain is one of the few countries in NATO that still refuses to recognise Gulf war Syndrome and compensate its soldiers. In a reply to a letter from CADU earlier this month the MoD's Gulf Veterans' Illnesses Unit still claimed that criticism of DU is 'groundless' and without "medical evidence to link DU with ill health".
LOW LEVEL RADIATION
There is mounting evidence that exposure to low level radiation can lead to cancer and birth malformations. Reports from the UNICEF have documented the rising tide of childhood cancers and, in particular, leukaemia in Iraq. Extremely disturbing birth deformities have also increased dramatically with Basrah maternity Hospital treating 11 congenital anomalies from 1991-4 and 60 in 2000 alone. Yet the MoD argues it is under "no legal obligation to return to the region post-conflict to clear up any DU that remains." And they have made no effort to examine the effects of DU weaponry on returning post-conflict civilian populations. This is despite reports released this year from both UNEP and the British Royal Society that recommended that areas contaminated by depleted uranium should be cordoned off and local food and water supplies monitored for decades to come.
On 13 March this year the MOD published its own programme of research in depleted uranium and admitted that far more research needed to be conducted in this area. With mounting evidence of DU's harmful effects CADU calls for the British government to refrain from all further use of these deadly dangerous radiological weapons.
Contact Rae Street or Camille WarrenFax or telephone 0161 273 8293
----
U.N. scientists start examining Bosnia's soil, water for depleted uranium contamination
Wednesday, October 16, 2002
By Katarina Kratovac,
Associated Press
http://enn.com/news/wire-stories/2002/10/10162002/ap_48725.asp
SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina - A United Nations team on Tuesday launched its first probe in Bosnia into the effects of depleted uranium on the environment, seven years after NATO bombed Bosnian Serb forces to halt their siege of Sarajevo.
Scientists from the U.N. Environment Program are to work with Bosnian experts to determine whether depleted uranium contaminated the soil, plants, and water, as well as its effects on people's health, according to team chief Pekka Haavisto.
"The study will assess short-term and long-term effects ... and give recommendations on how to eliminate any possible danger," Haavisto said.
The 17-member international team is to complete the study, estimated to cost US$300,000, by March 2003. The funds are provided by Switzerland and Italy.
During its 1995 bombings of Serb positions around Sarajevo, NATO aircraft used munitions containing depleted uranium, a slightly radioactive heavy metal that is effective for piercing armor. According to the Bosnian government, some 10,800 of such rounds - 30-mm armor-piercing projectiles - were fired in Bosnia.
Buried in the soil, such ordnance can contaminate ground water, leading to anything up to a 100-fold increase in uranium levels in drinking water.
Scientists will also visit hospitals across Bosnia to look for a possible increase in radiation-related diseases.
The team's first stop Tuesday was at a former Serb military factory in Hadzici, a Sarajevo suburb and one of seven sites that will be the focus of the U.N. investigation.
Although this is the first such U.N. study in Bosnia, earlier speculations that the ammunition may have adversely affected the health of not only the local population but also of the international peacekeepers in Bosnia had prompted several governments to investigate their troops serving in this Balkan country.
A similar U.N. study has been conducted on sites in neighboring Yugoslavia and its ethnic Albanian province of Kosovo, where NATO's 1999 bombing campaign halted a Yugoslav army crackdown on independence-seeking Albanians.
The U.N. scientists there found areas where the soil and even the air were contaminated by depleted uranium but concluded those levels did not threaten the environment or human health. However, the U.N. recommended precautionary measures at those sites.
----
[Found 10/16/02, four years after publication, important to recall.]
We caused cancer in the Gulf
Robert Fisk,
October 16, 1998
The Independent, UK
http://216.239.33.100/search?q=cache:84Udx3-xiSwC:www.casi.org.uk/discuss/1998/msg00264.html+depleted+uranium+iraq+fisk&hl=en&lr=lang_en&ie=UTF-8
PHIL GAMER telephoned me this week to ask how he could make contact with the doctors treating Iraq's child cancer victims. He had been reading our series on the growing evidence of links between cancers in Iraq and the use of depleted uranium shells by American and British forces during the 1991 Gulf War.
During the conflict, Gamer was in the Royal Army Medical Corps. He was not in the front lines, but he handled the uniforms of Britain's "friendly fire" casualties - men who were attacked by US aircraft using depleted uranium rounds. And now he suffers from asthma, incontinence, pain in the intestines and has a lump on the right side of his neck.
I know what those lumps on the neck look like. This month I've seen enough Iraqi children with tumours on their abdomen to feel horror as well as anger. When Hebba Mortaba's mother lifted her little girl's patterned blue dress in the Mansour hospital in Baghdad, her terribly swollen abdomen displayed numerous abscesses. Doctors had already surgically removed an earlier abdominal mass only to find, monster-like, that another grew in its place.
During the 1991 war, Hebba's suburb of Basra was bombed so heavily that her family fled to Baghdad. She is now just nine years old and, so her doctors told me gently, will not live to see her 10th birthday.
When I first reported from Iraq's child cancer wards last February and March - and visited the fields and farms around Basra into which US and British tanks fired thousands of depleted uranium shells in the last days of the war - the British Government went to great lengths to discredit what I wrote. I still treasure a letter from Lord Gilbert, Minister of State for Defence Procurement, who told Independent readers that my account of a possible link between DU ammunition and increased Iraqi child cancer cases would, "coming from anyone other than Robert Fisk", be regarded as "a wilful perversion of reality." According to his Lordship, particles from the DU hardened warheads - used against tank armour - are extremely small, rapidly diluted and dispersed by the weather and "become difficult to detect, even with the most sophisticated monitoring equipment." Over the past few months I've been sent enough evidence to suggest that, had this letter come from anyone other than his Lordship, its implications would be mendacious as well as misleading.
Let us start with an equally eloquent but far more accurate letter sent to the Royal Ordnance in London on 21 April 1991 by Paddy Bartholomew, business development manager of AEA Technology, the trading name for the UK Atomic Energy Authority. Mr Bartholomew's letter - of which I have obtained a copy - refers to a telephone conversation with a Royal Ordnance official on the dangers of the possible contamination of Kuwait by depleted uranium ammunition. An accompanying "threat paper" by Mr Bartholomew, in which he notes that while the hazards caused by the spread of radioactivity and toxic contamination from these weapons "are small when compared to those during a war", they nonetheless "can become a long-term problem if not dealt with in peacetime and are a risk to both military and civilian population".
The document, marked "UK Restricted" goes on to say that "US tanks fired 5,000 DU rounds, US aircraft many tens of thousands and UK tanks a small number of DU rounds. The tank ammunition alone will amount to greater than 50,000lb of DU...if the tank inventory of DU was inhaled, the latest International Committee of Radiological Protection risk factor...calculates 500,000 potential deaths."
"The DU will spread around the battlefield and target vehicles in various sizes and quantities ... it would be unwise for people to stay close to large quantities of DU for long periods and this would obviously be of concern to the local population if they collect this heavy metal and keep it."
Mr Bartholomew's covering letter says that the contamination of Kuwait is "emotive and thus must be dealt with in a sensitive manner".
Needless to say, no one has bothered even to suggest a clean-up in southern Iraq where Hebba Mortaba and other child victims are dying. Why not? And why doesn't the Government come clean and tell us what really happened?
Here is a clue. It comes in a letter dated 1 March 1991 from a US lieutenant colonel at the Los Alamos National Laboratory to a Major Larson at the organisation's Studies and Analysis Branch and states that: "There has been and continues to be a concern (sic) regarding the impact of DU on the environment. Therefore, if no one makes a case for the effectiveness of DU on the battlefield, DU rounds may become politically unacceptable and thus be deleted from the arsenal. If DU penetrators proved their worth during our recent combat activities, then we should assure their future existence (until something better is developed)."
So there it is. Shorn of the colonel's execrable English, the message is simple: the health risks of DU ammunition are acceptable until we - the West - invent something even more lethal to take its place.
So with tens of thousands of 1991 Gulf War veterans suffering unexplained and potentially terminal illnesses and with thousands of Iraqi civilians, including children unborn when the war ended, now suffering from unexplained cancers, I can only repeat what I wrote last February: that something terrible happened at the end of the Gulf War about which we have still not been told the truth. As former acting Sergeant Tony Duff of the Gulf War Veterans put it to me yesterday, "a lot of things we are now calling victories about the Gulf War will be seen one day as atrocities - I wonder whether this is why the powers that be don't want this DU thing to come out?"
And what exactly is this awful secret which we are not allowed to know? Is it, as Professor Malcolm Hooper, professor of medicinal chemistry at Sunderland University remarks, the result of the US-British bombing of Saddam Hussein's Sarin and Tabun poison gas factories (around 900 facilities were bombed, it now turns out). Or is it the secret DU factor?
I don't know whether this can be classed as a war crime. But anyone who thinks there's no connection between our use of depleted uranium ammunition in the 1991 Gulf War and the tide of sickness that has followed in its wake must also believe in Father Christmas.
Does Lord Gilbert believe in Father Christmas, I wonder?
-------- germany
German govt to keep nuke power plant open longer
REUTERS GERMANY:
October 16, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/18186/story.htm
BERLIN - German Environment Minister Juergen Trittin said the government would allow the 340 megawatt Obrigheim nuclear power station, owned by electricity firm EnBW , to operate for two more years.
Obrigheim, Germany's oldest nuclear power station, was due to be decommissioned under the country's nuclear phase-out law next January, but Energie Baden Wuerttemberg (EnBW) had applied to extend the life of the plant.
Under the law, each of Germany's nuclear plants was allowed to produce a fixed amount of energy. Trittin said Obrigheim's extension would be matched by a reduction in the lifetime of the Philippsburg I reactor, also owned by EnBW.
"The sum of nuclear power (to be produced) will remain the same," Trittin told a news conference, putting a brave face on a decision criticised by environmentalist groups who make up the Greens party's political bedrock.
Greens party officials said the decision could be contested at a special party congress on Friday and Saturday, called to approve a new coalition government programme with Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrats.
The coalition agreement is due to be signed on Wednesday.
-------- iraq
MOVIE REVIEW
'STEALING THE FIRE'
A Mercenary Prometheus Serving Iraq's Nuclear Ambitions
October 16, 2002
New York Times
By DAVE KEHR
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/16/movies/16FIRE.html
The central figure in "Stealing the Fire," a video documentary by John S. Friedman and Eric Nadler that opens today at the Cinema Village, is one Karl-Heinz Schaab, a deceptively drab German technocrat whose only discernable character trait is a weakness for bad wigs.
Mr. Schaab is a colorless man who says little and reveals less. In a Munich court in 1999 he was convicted of selling German nuclear technology to Iraq: specifically, appropriating the secret plans for an array of centrifuges used to produce weapons-grade uranium.
The filmmakers attempt to follow Mr. Schaab's trail in Iraq, where he met with Khidhir Hamza, the former director of Saddam Hussein's nuclear project (who has since defected, and is interviewed in the film) and in Brazil, where, the filmmakers say, he was involved in a plan to build a Brazilian nuclear submarine.
Most of Mr. Schaab's story is told through his defense lawyers. As the film cuts back and forth among Rio de Janeiro, Munich and Baghdad, with side trips to Zurich and elsewhere, it takes on the exotic coloration of a postwar espionage thriller, something the novelist Eric Ambler might have conceived on a tramp steamer crossing the Black Sea.
Adding a bitter paradox is that the centrifuge technology was first developed by scientists working for the Third Reich's atomic bomb project. Several of those scientist went on to work for the Soviets, the Americans or both during the cold war. The Nazis' corporate partner in their atom program was Degussa, a multinational corporation that continues, the filmmakers say, to peddle atomic technology to governments like those of Iraq and Pakistan. Degussa's corporate history, the film says, includes a contract with the SS to process the gold and silver fillings taken from the death camp inmates, as well to manufacture Zyklon B, the gas used to murder many of them.
The material is disparate and wide ranging, and it is often difficult to follow Mr. Friedman and Mr. Nadler down all the side streets and back alleys of their investigation. Their credibility is not helped by the corny rhetorical devices running through the film, including exaggeratedly low camera angles out of "The Third Man," goofy digital stop-motion effects and a percussive score that casts an aura of "Our Man Flint" over the proceedings. But the original reporting at the heart of "Stealing the Fire" provokes questions that demand further investigation.
STEALING THE FIRE
Produced and directed by John S. Friedman and Eric Nadler; director of photography, Slawomir Grunberg; edited by Susanne Rostock; released by CinemaNation. At the Cinema Village, 22 East 12th Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 95 minutes. This film is not rated.
-------- korea
U.S.: North Korea Says Has Nukes
October 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-North-Korea.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- In a startling revelation, North Korea has told the United States it has a secret nuclear weapons program in violation of an 1994 agreement with the United States, the White House said Wednesday night.
Spokesman Sean McCormack called the North Korean disclosure a serious infringement of the agreement, under which Pyongyang promised not to develop nuclear weapons.
U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said North Korea told U.S. officials that it was no longer bound by the anti-nuclear agreement.
The 1994 commitment had raised hopes for a nuclear-free Korean peninsula, but that hope is dashed for the time being, and relations with the United States are back to square one.
It was not clear from the remarks by McCormack and other officials whether the United States believes the North actually has the bomb or whether it is still being developed.
There was no immediate reaction from North Korea to the White House announcement.
The two countries had just resumed high-level security talks less than two weeks ago for the first time in two years. It was during those discussions that North Korea informed the United States of its nuclear activities.
McCormack said the United States is consulting with it allies, South Korea and Japan, and with members of Congress on next steps.
``We seek a peaceful resolution of this situation,'' McCormack said. ``Everyone in the region has a stake in this issue and no peaceful nation wants to see a nuclear-armed North Korea.''
``The United States and our allies call on North Korea to comply with its commitments under the nonproliferation treaty and to eliminate its nuclear weapons program in a verifiable manner.''
The dramatic disclosure complicates President Bush's campaign to disarm Iraq under threat of military force, coming almost nine months after Bush said North Korea was part of an ``axis of evil'' along with Iran and Iraq.
It seems unlikely, however, that North Korea will become a target country for the United States much as Iraq is nowadays. With war plans for Iraq already on the drawing board and a broader war on terrorism still under way, threats against North Korea could leave the United States overextended.
Until now, the United States' main concern with North Korea has been its sale of ballistic missiles to Syria, Iran and other countries. Now North Korea's nuclear program is added to the mix.
The United States has been suspicious about North Korea's nuclear intentions for some time despite the agreement.
A CIA report in January said that during the second half of last year, North Korea ``continued its attempts to procure technology worldwide that could have applications in its nuclear program.
``We assess that North Korea has produced enough plutonium for at least one, and possibly two, nuclear weapons.''
South Korean Deputy Foreign Minister Lee Tae-sik said South Korea has consistently pursued the de-nuclearization of the Korean peninsula in line with international agreements.
``We urge North Korea to abide by its obligations,'' he said.
Yim Sung-joon, a national security adviser, said President Kim Dae-jung called the North Korean disclosure a ``very serious matter which cannot be accepted under any circumstances.''
In Japan, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's spokeswoman, Misako Kaji, said, ``Japan is gravely concerned about the U.S. announcement North Korea is developing nuclear weapons.''
She said Koizumi ``will continue to press the North Korea strongly on this matter.''
North Korea's stunning disclosure about its weapons program came after its remarkable admission just weeks ago that its agents had kidnapped at least 13 Japanese in the late 1970s and early 1980s as part of a program to train communist spies in Japanese language and culture.
Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly visited North Korea on Oct. 3-5 and demanded that the communist state address global concerns about its nuclear and other weapons programs.
In response, the Pyongyang government accused Bush's special envoy of making ``threatening remarks.'' The United States refused all comment on the discussions.
Under the 1994 agreement, North Korea promised to give up its nuclear weapons program and to allow inspections to verify that it did not have the material needed to construct such weapons.
But it has yet to allow the inspections, drawing criticism from the Bush administration.
The agreement also called for the construction of two light water nuclear reactors to replace the plutonium-producing reactors Pyongyang had been using. The reactors were being financed mostly by South Korea and Japan. Construction of the reactors began just two months ago.
An administration source said Kelly also raised with North Korea evidence that Pyongyang may have a uranimum-enrichment program. The program, which the United States believes would only be used to develop a nuclear bomb, began under the Clinton administration, according to the official.
Surprisingly, North Korea confirmed the allegation.
The Bush administration has not decided how to respond. ``We're going to keep talking,'' an official said.
After months of tension with South Korea, the North resumed high-level talks in August that restarted stalled reconciliation efforts on the Korean peninsula -- divided by the most heavily armed border in the world.
The Koreas were divided after World War II and remained that way at the end of the inconclusive Korean War from 1950-53. About 37,000 U.S. troops are stationed in South Korea as a deterrent against the North.
--------
N. Korea Nuclear News Sparks Anger
October 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Koreas-Nuclear.html
TOKYO (AP) -- North Korea's Asian neighbors expressed surprise and anger Thursday at a White House announcement the communist country has admitted it is developing nuclear weapons.
The news was particularly startling because it came after a series of signs that North Korea's enigmatic ruling regime, pressured by food shortages and a barely functioning economy, was taking a softer, more open stance toward its relations with the outside world.
Concerns were highest in South Korea and Japan, which have been actively pursuing closer relations with their secretive and often hostile communist neighbor.
``Japan is gravely concerned about the U.S. announcement North Korea is developing nuclear weapons,'' Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's spokeswoman, Misako Kaji, said Thursday.
She said Koizumi ``will continue to press the North Korea strongly on this matter.''
In Seoul, Deputy Foreign Minister Lee Tae-sik urged the North to abide by international anti-nuclear agreements. But he also called for continued dialogue with all concerned, and said South Korea would raise the issue in a round of Cabinet-level talks between the Koreas scheduled for Oct. 19-22 in Pyongyang.
``All these issues should be resolved through dialogue and peacefully, and we will continue to strengthen cooperative consultations with the United States and Japan,'' Lee said.
South Korea has consistently pursued the de-nuclearization of the Korean Peninsula in line with international agreements, including the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and the 1994 Agreed Framework between North Korea and the United States.
The White House confirmed late Wednesday that North Korea has told the United States it has a secret nuclear weapons program in violation of an agreement signed with the previous U.S. government under President Clinton.
North Korea also told U.S. diplomats it is no longer beholden to the anti-nuclear agreement, said a senior U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The disclosure complicates Bush's campaign to disarm Iraq under threat of military force, coming almost nine months after Bush said North Korea was part of an ``axis of evil'' along with Iran and Iraq.
``We seek a peaceful resolution of this situation,'' said White House spokesman Sean McCormack. ``Everyone in the region has a stake in this issue and no peaceful nation wants to see a nuclear-armed North Korea.''
A senior U.S. official was to travel to Japan and South Korea for consultations soon.
North Korea had no immediate response.
The news put Tokyo in a particularly delicate position.
In an unprecedented summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il on Sept. 17, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has vowed to push ahead with talks to establish formal diplomatic ties. Both sides are scheduled to meet in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on Oct. 29-30.
The resumption of talks was made possible by Kim's confession that elements in the military kidnapped more than a dozen Japanese in the 1970s and 80s. The five known survivors are currently in Japan for brief visits, their first homecoming in nearly 25 years.
Though Koizumi's support ratings shot up immediately after the summit, public outrage has since swelled as more details have emerged about the deaths of at least eight of the abduction victims.
Polls indicate most Japanese now think it is too early to normalize relations, and the North's secret development of nuclear weapons would likely increase such concerns in a country where anti-nuclear sentiment runs especially deep.
With the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II in 1945, Japan is the only country to have been attacked with nuclear weapons.
--------
North Korea Weapons Chronology
October 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-North-Korea-Weapons-Chronology.html
A timeline on nuclear weapons development in North Korea:
--1993: North Korea shocks the world by quitting the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty amid suspicions that it is developing nuclear weapons.
--1994: North Korea and U.S. sign nuclear agreement in Geneva. North Korea pledges to freeze and eventually dismantle its nuclear weapons program in exchange for international aid to build two power-producing nuclear reactors.
--Aug. 31, 1998: North Korea fires a multistage rocket that flies over Japan and lands in the Pacific Ocean, proving the Koreans can strike any part of Japan's territory.
--Nov. 17: The United States and North Korea hold the first round of high-level talks in Pyongyang over North Korea's suspected construction of an underground nuclear facility. The United States demands inspections.
--Feb. 27-March 16, 1999: During a fourth round of talks, North Korea allows U.S. access to the site in exchange for promises of food. U.S. inspectors find no evidence of any nuclear activity during visit to site in May.
--May 25-28: Former Defense Secretary William Perry visits North Korea and delivers a U.S. disarmament proposal during four days of talks.
--Sept. 13: North Korea pledges to freeze testing of long-range missiles for the duration of negotiations to improve relations.
--Sept. 17: President Clinton agrees to the first significant easing of economic sanctions against North Korea since the Korean War ended in 1953.
--December: A U.S.-led international consortium signs a $4.6 billion contract to build two nuclear reactors in North Korea.
--July 2000: North Korea renews its threat to restart its nuclear program if Washington does not compensate for the loss of electricity caused by delays in building nuclear power plants.
--June 2001: North Korea warns it will reconsider its moratorium on missile tests if the Bush administration doesn't resume contacts aimed at normalizing relations.
--July: State Department reports North Korea is going ahead with development of its long-range missile. A senior Bush administration official says North Korea has conducted an engine test of the Taepodong-1 missile.
--December: President Bush warns Iraq and North Korea that they would be ``held accountable'' if they developed weapons of mass destruction ``that will be used to terrorize nations.''
--April 6, 2002: North Korea agrees to revive stalled dialogue with Washington and South Korea and is willing to hold talks with an American envoy.
--Aug. 14: South and North Korea agree to hold family reunions and resume contacts on a range of issues, signaling the resumption of their reconciliation process after months of tension.
--Jan. 29: Bush labels North Korea, Iran and Iraq an ``axis of evil'' in his State of the Union address. ``By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger,'' he says.
--Sept. 25: President Bush plans to send an envoy to North Korea, reopening security talks with the country for the first time in almost two years.
--Oct. 7: A senior Pentagon official presses the North Korean military for access to four Americans who defected from the U.S. Army in the 1960s and are living in Pyongyang.
--Oct. 13: North Korea warns that the United States' ``hostile policy'' toward the country was hurting efforts to recover the remains of U.S. soldiers missing from the 1950-53 Korean War.
--Oct. 16: North Korea tells U.S. officials it has developed a secret nuclear weapons program in violation of the 1994 agreement.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- ohio
Ohio Nuke Plant Rapped on Radiation
October 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Nuclear-Plant-Radiation.html
OAK HARBOR, Ohio (AP) -- Operators of a nuclear power plant didn't adequately check five workers who left the facility with specks of radioactive material on their clothing, federal inspectors said Wednesday.
The radioactive particles were later found in hotel rooms and homes in Ohio, Texas, South Carolina and Virginia, according to FirstEnergy Corp., which operates the Davis-Besse power plant.
There was no threat to the public, said Tom Kozak, a federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspector. The five workers are being retested for any possible health effects, officials said.
The plant staff did not properly assess how much radiation the workers were exposed to inside the plant's steam generator, Kozak said.
The five workers and two others were performing maintenance in February during a routine shutdown at the plant near Toledo in northern Ohio. One of the other workers was not contaminated; the second had to be decontaminated.
Akron-based FirstEnergy did not dispute the NRC findings.
``We did not handle the issue as good as we could,'' said Lew Myers, head of the company's nuclear division.
The company said it has made changes to how it judges radiation levels inside the plant and now requires all workers who go inside the steam generator to wear respirators.
Regulators have yet to determine the significance of the problem and decide whether FirstEnergy should be penalized.
In an unrelated issue, the NRC is investigating leaks that allowed boric acid to eat a 7-inch-wide hole almost through the 6-inch thick steel cap that covers the Davis-Besse reactor vessel. The leak was discovered in March.
On the Net:
NRC: www.nrc.gov
FirstEnergy: http://www.firstenergycorp.com
-------- us politics
U.S. to Brief Sharon on Iraq Plans
By STEVE WEIZMAN
Associated Press
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_MIDEAST?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Bush administration officials were outlining to visiting Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon U.S. plans to block any Iraqi missile attack on Israel in the event of a U.S.-led military campaign against Saddam Hussein.
While America wants Israel to stay on the sidelines if a shooting war erupts, Sharon is under pressure at home to show that Israel will not turn the other cheek if attacked, as it did in the 1991 Gulf War.
In his meeting with President Bush on Wednesday, Sharon also was to answer U.S. assertions that his government has not been doing enough to ease restrictions on the Palestinians.
"It is Israel's responsibility to remember the humanitarian needs of the Palestinian people, to ease some of the provisions that have been put in place that hinder the humanitarian help for the Palestinian people," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said hours before the meeting.
He said Bush "sees reasons to be encouraged" that the Palestinian Authority is undergoing reforms. "There's a lot more work to be done, but there have been a lot of internal rumblings in a positive direction," Fleischer said.
Sharon was arguing that the failure of the Palestinian Authority to stop attacks on Israelis makes a widescale letup impossible for now, Israeli officials said.
Sharon, accompanied by Israeli National Security Council Chief Ephraim Halevi, arrived from Jerusalem early Tuesday for a three-day visit focusing mainly on security-related issues. Wednesday's call on the White House would be his seventh since taking office in March 2001.
The United States has been pressing Israel to pull out of at least one of the six West Bank cities it still holds after taking over seven cities in June. It had already pulled out of Bethlehem, but maintains a military presence and often tight curfews on the rest. The U.S. ambassador to Israel, Daniel Kurtzer, sent a letter to Sharon over the weekend calling for troop withdrawals, the easing of restrictions on the movements of Palestinians and the handover of hundreds of millions of dollars in Palestinian tax revenues that Israel has withheld.
Although officials on both sides say the underlying Israel-U.S. relationship is rock solid, Israel has taken repeated criticism from Washington recently over its siege of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's West Bank headquarters, civilian casualties in Israeli strikes against Palestinian militants and repeated Israeli pledges to hit back hard against Iraq if it again attacks Israel.
Bush and his top advisers are determined to keep Israel out of any U.S. offensive against Iraq. They are anxious about the impact an Israeli response might have on Arab nations already uncomfortable about a prospective war with Iraq and resentful of what they consider the U.S. failure to change Israel's policies regarding the Palestinians.
Bush shares Sharon's view of Iraq as an aggressive nation that threatens Israel, a U.S. official said Tuesday. Israel was hit by 39 Iraqi Scud missiles in the 1991 war, and Iraq also has attacked Saudi Arabia, Iran and Kuwait.
Yitzhak Shamir, then Israel's prime minister, heeded American advice and held his fire in the 1991 conflict, leading critics at home to say he had seriously weakened Israel's deterrent posture.
U.S.-supplied Patriot missiles helped defend Israel, but they did not provide an airtight blanket against Iraqi Scuds.
Should another war break out, Israeli officials say, the scenario will be different.
This time, the United States will not be in active alliance with Arab armies, as it was in 1991, and Israel now has what it says is a far more effective anti-missile system, the Arrow, developed in cooperation with the United States.
Many Israeli analysts say the country cannot again fail to react if it expects to be taken seriously in the future by hostile neighbors.
Prominent among those urging a tough response is former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Sharon's toughest rival for leadership of the conservative Likud party. On Tuesday evening Sharon met Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice. Sharon spokesman Raanan Gissin described that meeting as preparation for the talks with Bush, but had no further details.
During his stay Sharon also is scheduled to hold talks with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and congressional leaders, then head for home on Thursday.
In his talks with Bush and other U.S. officials, Sharon also is expected to discuss a water dispute causing new tensions between Israel and its neighbor to the north, Lebanon.
Israel strongly opposes Lebanon's plans to start pumping water from the Wazzani River, a Lebanese tributary of the Jordan River, which is one of Israel's main fresh water sources.
Israeli officials have hinted that ultimately Israel may use force to stop the project but they say Sharon has agreed to U.S. requests to try to resolve the dispute by diplomatic means if possible.
On the Net: State Department's Israel site: http://www.state.gov/p/nea/ci/israel/
----
Bush Signs Iraq War Resolution
By JENNIFER LOVEN
Associated Press
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_IRAQ?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush on Wednesday signed an Iraq war resolution overwhelmingly approved by Congress and told wary world leaders to "face up to our global responsibility" to confront Saddam Hussein.
"Those who choose to live in denial may eventually be forced to live in fear," Bush said as the United Nations began a bitter debate over his anti-Iraq resolution. "Every nation that shares the benefits of peace also shares the duty of defending the peace," he said.
Bush summoned about 100 supportive lawmakers to the East Room of the White House as he signed the newly passed resolution authorizing the use of force, if necessary, to disarm Saddam.
Bush used the speech - and the congressional vote - to press the U.N. to adopt a new resolution compelling Iraq to submit to unconditional weapons inspections.
"We will defend our nation and lead others in defending the peace," the president said.
Though the president said military action would be his last resort, he left little room for Saddam to avoid confrontation. "Our goal is to fully and finally eliminate a real threat to world peace and to America," he said.
The president's message came as the U.N. Security Council started its first day of open debate on Iraq at the behest of the dozens of non-Security Council nations who oppose an attack on Baghdad. The debate is mostly designed to take the administration to task on its Iraq policies, and White House officials expected sharp criticism throughout the day.
Even as Bush spoke, Russia's deputy foreign minister said the United States' proposed resolution is unacceptable, while France's proposal is closer to the Kremlin's stance. Both nations hold veto power in Security Council.
"The American variant of the resolution on Iraq has not undergone changes. It is unacceptable and Russia cannot support it," Yuri Fedotov said, according to the news agency Interfax.
However, the French proposal contains "many positions that Russia shares," Fedotov was quoted as saying.
As if in reply, Bush said, "The time has arrived once again for the United Nations to live up to the purposes of its founding to protect our common security. The time has arrived once again for free nations to face up to our global responsibility and confront a gathering danger."
Flanked by lawmakers, Bush said, "This nation will not live at the mercy of any foreign power or plot."
Among the dozen lawmakers who were invited to stand on stage with Bush at the signing ceremony were Sens. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., John McCain, R-Ariz., Joe Biden, D-Del., minority leader Trent Lott, R-Miss. and John Warner, R-Va.
Absent from the list was Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., whose granddaughter was born early Wednesday and whose schedule was packed with legislative and political business.
House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., who helped negotiate the resolution and provided Bush with welcome Democratic support at a White House appearance before the vote, was not attending. Gephardt's travel schedule was keeping him away, a day after he ratcheted up his strong criticism of the Bush administration and Republicans on the economy.
----
Iraq: The Q and A
By Christopher Buckley
Wednesday, October 16, 2002
Washington Post; Page A25
Q: Where do Americans stand on invading Iraq?
A: According to the latest polls, a majority of Americans are for "doing something" about Iraq, unless this means higher gasoline prices, a further decline in the stock market, U.S. casualties or an epidemic of smallpox.
Q: Does President Bush have political motives in stirring up national sentiment against Iraq?
A: While he has emphatically denied that the November elections play a role, a CD-Rom disc recently found in Lafayette Park belonging to Karl Rove, the president's political counselor, contains a file labeled, "How We Can Make the Democrats Look Like Dips in November by Fomenting War."
Q: Does Bush have a personal motive for wanting "regime change" in Iraq?
A: Aside from the fact that Saddam Hussein targeted his father for assassination in 1993, none.
Q: Did Saddam Hussein also target his mother?
A: Even Hussein is not mad enough to take on Barbara Bush.
Q: Is Iraq worse than other countries in that part of the world?
Really?
A: There is some evidence suggesting that other countries in the Middle East, indeed the world, may be every bit as unpleasant. The Senate is scheduled to take up debate on this next week, following the debate on how dreadful Iraq is.
Q: Why hasn't the United Nations enforced the resolutions it passed on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction?
A: Under Article 45 (b) of the U.N. Charter, "the primary responsibility for saving the world from itself shall be the United States' problem" while the U.N. "shall concentrate on vetoing any U.S. attempt to do something about it and denouncing it for unilateralism."
Q: Has the U.S. position on Iraq been consistent over the years?
A: Yes. During Iraq's war with Iran, the United States "tilted" toward Iraq's side by supplying it with arms, satellite photos and material with which to build chemical and biological weapons. The United States, however, did express "displeasure" when Iraq mistakenly fired a missile at a U.S. warship in the Persian Gulf, killing numerous Americans. On the eve of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the State Department told Iraq that this was "strictly between you guys," requiring the United Sates to subsequently send half a million troops to the area to wage war.
Having won the war, the United States declined to press the advantage and bring about what it now calls "regime change" on the grounds that it would upset Syria, Jordan and our most reliable ally in the region, the Saudis. Instead, the United States imposed a strict embargo on Iraq, causing serious delays in the gold-plating of the bathroom fixtures in 16 of Hussein's 78 presidential palaces.
In the late 1990s, the Halliburton energy company of Texas, headed by now-Vice President Dick Cheney, sold Iraq millions worth of equipment with which to drill for oil embargoed by the United States.
Q: Is it normal for a White House press secretary to call for the assassination of a foreign head of state?
A: While this is not typical of official press announcements in the past, White House press secretaries are being given more and more latitude in their remarks about which foreign leaders they would like to see killed or violently removed from office. Presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer has also said that it would "not ruin my day" if someone "took out" German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder or Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze and the leftist candidate expected to win election as president of Brazil.
Q: Saddam Hussein is reported to use identical "doubles" for security purposes. How will we know if we have eliminated the right man?
A: The CIA estimates that there are currently some 8 million Saddam Hussein look-alikes in Iraq. They are kept in the basements of the presidential palaces, in the cellars that house Hussein's collection of vintage Mateus rose wines. Following the U.S. invasion, the doubles will be individually tagged and taken to a new facility being built on the U.S. military base in Guantanamo, Cuba, where they will be sorted and undergo DNA analysis so that the actual Saddam Hussein can be tried for crimes against humanity.
Q: Would the Iraqi military remain loyal to Saddam Hussein in the event of an overwhelming U.S. attack?
A: Hussein has been successful over the years in inculcating loyalty and esprit de corps among his top military officers by paying them well, remembering family birthdays and other important dates, offering incentive weekend stays at presidential palaces and periodically shooting every third one during staff meetings.
Q: Apparently the United States has plans, following a swift military victory, to occupy Iraq and administer it as it did postwar Japan and Germany. How long will it take to fashion a peaceful, pluralistic democracy out of a region of fractious tribes that have been killing each other since the seventh millennium B.C.?
A: According to the State Department, "nation-building" in Iraq could take from six to nine months, depending on such factors as weather, ability to rapidly deploy McDonald's and Starbucks, and "stay-behind" Saddam Hussein doubles who might counterattack with Molotov cocktails made from empty bottles of Mateus.
Christopher Buckley is the editor of Forbes FYI. His new book is "No Way to Treat a First Lady."
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Nine allied troops killed in Khost
The Frontier Post Peshawar, Pakistan,
October 16, 2002
http://www.frontierpost.com.pk/main.asp?id=3&date1=10/16/2002
MIRANSHAH (NNI): The militants continued irritating US-led allied troops in Khost as on Tuesday rockets have been fired at old airport, targeting US interests.
In another incident some militants killed 9 troops of the US-led allied force patrol near Shahi Kot."Although the US-led allied forces are trying to keep the causalities in two attacks however nine troops of the allies were killed alone in the attack of Shahi Kot," NNI correspondent from here reports while referring intelligence report from across the border.
The rocket attacks on the allied forces residence in old airport of Khost was a consecutive third such attack.
As many as five rockets were fired and heavy losses believed taken place.
But the authorities are keeping the losses secret. Some unknown attackers fired these rockets at 3 a.m. Tuesday and managed to flee from the vicinity.
The allied forces immediately responded the attack but failed in searching or arresting the attackers.
At Shahi Kot, some militants attacked with their guns on a patrolling team of the allied troops, killing nine at the spot.
The attackers fled from the scene after the action.
The allied forces' helicopters and patrol teams immediately cordoned the entire area "but the militants managed to escape," says an intelligence report from across the border according to NNI correspondent.
Meanwhile, Padshah Khan Zadran, a rebellion of President Hamid Karzai government, has been gathering a good number of troops around him in in Khost.
Reportedly the troops belong to Governor Abdul Hakeem have been joining the force of Padshah Khan Zadran.
According to Inspector General Police, Mustafa Khan, the continued rivalry of Padshah Khan Zadran is one of the major irritants in maintaining peace and security at Khost.
----
Afghan Warlords Receive U.S. Weapons
October 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Afghan-Arms.html
BAGRAM, Afghanistan (AP) -- U.S. troops are giving confiscated weapons and ammunition to warlords in Afghanistan, a practice that critics say strengthens private militias and undermines attempts to establish a national army.
The national army was envisioned as a key to the stability of the fledgling government of President Hamid Karzai, which is under threat from powerful local warlords and wields little influence outside the capital, Kabul. But many of those same warlords are crucial to helping America fight the war on terror.
``If you have forces that are in contact with the enemy, or subject to being in contact with the enemy, they need to have adequate weapons,'' Col. Roger King, the spokesman for U.S. forces in Afghanistan, said this week. He added that many of the warlords are nominally aligned with the central government anyway, though not formally part of the fledgling army.
Every week, U.S. troops combing eastern Afghanistan find huge weapons caches. On Friday, the military uncovered an arsenal in a warehouse in Khost and filled 35 trucks with everything from 120mm rockets to anti-tank guns.
Militia fighters traveling with U.S. troops got first crack at seized weapons and ammunition, followed by other nearby forces, King said.
``If there's something left after that that's in good condition, then that comes back to the Afghan national army,'' he said. Much of the ammunition is in bad condition, he said, and is destroyed by U.S. troops.
King said he did not know how many weapons had been given to the militias and how many to the national army. But critics say arming the warlords at all sets a bad precedent.
``You've got a situation where Karzai is basically the mayor of Kabul during daylight hours. It's not going to change until the government has forces to call its own,'' said Peter Singer, a research fellow at the Washington-based Brookings Institution who has written about plans for the Afghan army.
``You would expect that they would put a premium on arming the army over the warlords,'' said Jim Phillips, an Afghanistan expert at the Heritage Foundation.
In the case of Friday's find, Maj. Steve Clutter said Monday that local fighters would receive anything usable from among the 29,450 82mm mortar rounds, 1,800 rocket-propelled grenades, and 30 DShK heavy machine guns they had found.
On Tuesday, forces in eastern Afghanistan that seized some 39 truckloads of ammunition from an undisclosed location said they would bring in national army officials as well to take their pick.
The U.S. Central Command, which is directing operations in Afghanistan, said it sees no contradiction between arming warlords and strengthening the national government. It said King spoke for the United States on the subject.
Officials with Karzai's government said it has accepted the practice while the army is being trained, but has reservations.
``We'd really like to see all these weapons collected and transferred to the Defense Ministry,'' said Karzai's chief of staff, Said Tayeb Jawad.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Omar Samad said arms given to local commanders ``should be used only in the war against terrorism and in cooperation with coalition forces.''
However, Afghanistan's warlords have a history of turning their arms on each other. Their fighting in the 1990s devastated the country and led to the rise of the Taliban.
Some commanders are still waging pitched battles against each other, making vast parts of northern Afghanistan dangerous for international aid workers.
Defense Minister Mohammed Fahim himself commands a private militia, and is believed to have large stockpiles of weapons in the Panjshir valley. He has questioned the need for a national army in the past, but has changed his public stance under international pressure.
In recent months, a military academy in Kabul run by U.S. and French instructors has produced the first three battalions for the Afghan national army -- about 960 soldiers in all.
When the academy opened earlier this year, it had almost no weapons for its cadets, said Sgt. Don Dees, the spokesman for U.S. forces there.
``When they got here, they basically were given a place to sleep and told to start training,'' he said.
The academy has since received about 2,000 AK-47 assault rifles from Romania, Ukraine and others. It still needs about 600.
When the soldiers graduate, they must turn in the weapons. Dees said he was unsure where their service rifles would come from.
The Defense Ministry says all the soldiers will be well equipped. ``They have plenty of weapons,'' said Gulbuddin Hamdard, the ministry spokesman.
International officials aren't so sure. One British official said that when his government asked Fahim to supply 600 rifles for the army, he produced only 150.
The Afghan government has asked other countries to donate rifles, but many are reluctant to pump more weapons into a country that is already awash in them. U.S. soldiers say they are sometimes offered new AK-47s for as little as $100 in Afghan towns.
King said many of the weapons delivered to the militias are not good enough to be given to national army troops. Some of the assault rifles have their sights sawed off; others are only capable of automatic fire, not single shots.
He said the militias need weapons and ammunition if the hunt for remnants of al-Qaida is to continue.
``If you have forces engaged, they have to have the equipment in order to continue to engage. That's the No. 1 priority,'' King said.
He said he did not believe the practice undermined U.S. efforts to reduce factionalism in Afghanistan.
``The forces that we are providing the weapons to are forces that are recognized by the central government,'' he said. ``We need the manpower that we have out there, so there are adjustments that have to be made.''
-------- arms sales
Iraq seeks chemical for arms
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
October 16, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20021016-81068264.htm
A Chinese state-run company is talking with Iraq about selling a chemical used in making missile fuel, although no transfer has been spotted, according to U.S. intelligence officials.
The covert procurement effort by Iraq was uncovered in August and is seen as a sign that Baghdad continues to work on building missiles and that Chinese companies remain key suppliers of missile goods.
Disclosure of the China-Iraq talks on a missile-related chemical comes as Chinese President Jiang Zemin prepares to visit the United States for talks with President Bush in Texas. Mr. Jiang will visit the United States from Oct. 22 to 25 before traveling to Mexico for an economic summit.
China's sales of products with both military and civilian uses to rogue states and unstable regions continues to be a problem, according to Bush administration officials.
The intelligence report on the talks was sent to senior administration policy-makers in mid-August - around the time that China announced new export controls on its state-run companies to stem dangerous arms proliferation.
On Aug. 22, China issued new export regulations aimed at limiting sales of missiles and missile-related items. A Chinese Foreign Ministry statement said that details of the controls would be issued "in the near future."
The controls were issued under pressure from the U.S. government, which has criticized China for two decades for not stopping sales of missile-related goods.
The intelligence on the talks shows that arms-related transfers by China have continued despite the announced new controls, U.S. officials said.
"Chinese arms proliferation activities to the Mideast have continued unabated," one official said.
Another official said that intelligence agencies have not confirmed any transfer of a dual-use chemical but are continuing to monitor the region.
A semiannual CIA report to Congress on global arms proliferation is overdue. The report is being held up by the Bush administration until after Mr. Jiang's visit.
The last CIA report made public in January identified China as a key arms seller. The report stated that China provided "dual-use missile-related items, raw materials, and/or assistance to several other countries of proliferation concern - such as Iran, North Korea and Libya."
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue said that Mr. Jiang's visit to the United States "is of great significance" and will focus on "major international issues of common concern," such as trade and anti-terrorism efforts.
The Bush administration has imposed economic sanctions against Chinese companies for missile-related sales to Pakistan and Iran.
China also assisted Iraq with a fiber-optic communications system that was used for both civilian and military communications, including Iraq's air-defense system, which continues to threaten U.S. and allied aircraft patrolling Iraqi skies.
The fiber-optic network was bombed last year during U.S. military strikes. China, however, was never hit with economic sanctions for the system, despite U.N. prohibitions on arms-related sales to Iraq.
The identity of the dual-use chemical involved in the Iraq-China talks could not be confirmed. However, one official said that it was a component used to make nitric acid, a key element for missile fuel.
U.S. and British intelligence agencies recently disclosed that Iraq has rebuilt a chemical facility destroyed during the 1991 Persian Gulf war.
Defense Intelligence Agency official John Yurechko told reporters during a briefing on Oct. 8 that the Iraqi chemical complex is known as Project Baiji, and was part of efforts by Baghdad to hide its weapons programs by using dual-use facilities.
"We have to be honest - all components and supplies used in [weapons of mass destruction] and missile programs are dual-use," Mr. Yurechko said, noting that the U.S. military is watching the plant because of its ability to make missile fuel.
A British report on Iraq's weapons programs said that the country has been building Baiji since 1992 and that "intelligence reports indicate that it will produce nitric acid which can be used in explosives, missile fuel and in the purification of uranium."
-------- asia
Indonesia Takes Major Step Toward Calling Group Terrorist
October 16, 2002
New York Times
By JANE PERLEZ and RAYMOND BONNER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/16/international/asia/16CND-INDO.html
JAKARTA, Indonesia, Oct. 16 - The Indonesian government, under pressure from the United States to act decisively against terrorism here, took a major step today toward declaring a fundamentalist Islamic group, Jemaah Islamiyah, a terrorist organization.
For nearly a year, Indonesia has dismissed claims that the organization was a threat, or even that it existed.
But this morning, the minister for state security, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, said that Indonesia had to "respect and believe" assertions that Jemaah Islamiyah was part of "an international terrorist network." He added that Indonesia "cannot disagree" with the views of Singapore and Malaysia that Jemaah Islamiyah was a terrorist group.
In another abrupt about-face, Mr. Yudhoyono said that the organization's leader was Abu Bakar Bashir, a 64-year-old preacher, who lives openly in central Indonesia, where he runs an Islamic boarding school. Mr. Bashir, who expresses admiration for Osama bin Laden and loathing for Jews and the West, has steadfastly denied he has any link to Jemaah Islamiyah, or that the group even existed.
For the first time publicly, Mr. Yudhoyono acknowledged that another Indonesian cleric, Hambali, also known as Riduanisamuddin, was a leader of Jemaah Islamiyah. The group began as a religious movement in the 1970's but made common cause with Al Qaeda in the 1990's, according to Asian and Western intelligence agencies.
In a recent interview, Singaporean intelligence officials, who by nearly all accounts have the best information on Jemaah Islamiyah, said that Mr. Hambali, who has been a fugitive for many months, was inducted into Al Qaeda's inner circle, a rare occurrence for someone who is not Arabic, and was the mastermind of several bombing attacks in Southeast Asia.
Mr. Yudhoyono stopped short of saying that Indonesia was prepared to arrest Mr. Bashir, which the United States and other countries have requested, or declare outright that Jemaah Islamiyah was a terrorist organization.
He said events would have to await the return of Indonesian intelligence officials who he said were on their way back from Pakistan after interrogating Omar al-Faruq, an admitted Al Qaeda operative who told the Central Intelligence Agency last month that Mr. Bashir was responsible for several terrorist attacks in Indonesia and was behind plans to blow up the American Embassy. Mr. Faruq has been detained at the American base in Bagram, Afghanistan, since being picked up here by Indonesian intelligence and turned over to the United States in June.
Another senior Indonesian official explained this evening that the government wanted to build political support in the country for cracking down on the organization, which would be easier if it did not appear that the government was acting solely on what it learned from the United States.
Indonesian officials also said today that President Megawati Sukarnoputri was planning to issue a decree that would allow the country's intelligence agency to pick up terrorist suspects, including men like Mr. Bashir, and detain them for seven days, without filing any formal charges against them. She is expected to act before Saturday, officials said.
Unlike Malaysia and Singapore, Indonesia does not have an Internal Security Act.
Today Australia's foreign minister, Alexander Downer, pressed the case to have Jemaah Islamiyah declared a terrorist organization, and Mr. Bashir arrested, in meetings with Mr. Yudhoyono and President Megawati, Australian officials said. Most of those killed in the Bali blast this weekend were Australians.
Action by the Indonesian government is expected "in the next week or so," Mr. Downer said at a news briefing this morning after his meeting with President Megawati. He said he did not want to be any more specific in public.
In response to questions, Mr. Downer dismissed several news reports that have swirled around the Bali bombing. He said there was no evidence that the Indonesian military was involved in the attack, and he also denied a report that the C.I.A. had intercepted conversations suggesting that a terrorist attack was imminent, specifically on a tourist establishment and specifically in Bali.
Mr. Downer said he had checked this with the American ambassador, Ralph C. Boyce, whose response had been, in effect: Do you think American Embassy personnel would have been in Bali on vacation - which some were - if the United States had information like that?
The Indonesian police said today that they are interrogating a retired Indonesian airman because they said he had expertise in making bombs.
A Western intelligence analyst said the interrogation should be "taken with a dose of skepticism," and an Indonesian intelligence official dismissed the interrogation as insignificant, saying the man was picked up after he reportedly told a friend that he had made the bomb, but did not know what it was to be used for.
Today's developments came after Bush administration officials said on Tuesday that the United States repeatedly warned the Indonesian government in the weeks before the Bali bomb blast that a group linked to Al Qaeda was planning attacks to kill Americans and other Westerners.
Ambassador Boyce delivered the latest warning to President Megawati and her top advisers just a day before the bombing and gave her a deadline of Oct. 24 to act, the officials said.
The various warnings contained no details about where and when attacks might occur, they said. But Washington took the likelihood of an attack seriously.
--------
In Face of Criticism, Indonesia Promises Terror Crackdown
October 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Indonesia-Bombs.html
JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) -- Criticized for ignoring demands that it crack down on terrorism, Indonesia pledged Wednesday to press ahead with tough new anti-terror laws and formed an international investigative team to hunt for the culprits in the Bali nightclub bombing.
Police in Bali said they had detained two Indonesian men for further questioning after an initial round of interrogation following Saturday's blast. The men are a security guard and the brother of a man whose identification card was found at the bomb scene.
U.S. Ambassador Ralph Boyce disclosed that in the month before the Bali attack, he and other American envoys had discussed with Indonesian officials possible attacks against U.S. targets.
But Boyce said that the warnings were not specific to Indonesia. They coincided with a temporary closure of embassies in Jakarta and other regional capitals because of terrorist threats during the Sept. 11 anniversary.
Boyce also said that a man who allegedly attempted to hurl a small bomb at the office of the honorary U.S. consul in Denpasar on Saturday had been injured when the device exploded prematurely. He said it was his understanding that the man was then apprehended, but police spokesmen denied that anyone was detained after that explosion.
``A man was burned as he was preparing a bomb in front of the U.S. consulate,'' Boyce said. Asked if he had been taken into custody, Boyce replied: ``I assume he was.''
Even as the government in Jakarta vowed to fight terrorism more aggressively, Indonesia's security minister Susilo Bambang Yudhyono claimed that Jemaah Islamiyah -- an al-Qaida-linked Islamic extremist group identified by Australia and others as a likely culprit -- does not even exist in Indonesia.
And the spiritual head of Jemaah Islamiyah denied the group existed at all, along with denying that al-Qaida was tied to the attack, which killed at least 183 people -- most of them foreign tourists -- and left hundreds more injured.
``There is no link between al-Qaida and the bomb blast,'' Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Bashir told reporters, calling the accusations ``the invention of infidels.''
Foreign Minister Hassan Wirayuda told reporters the government was working on giving President Megawati Sukarnoputri authority to impose, by decree, a long-stalled anti-terrorism law. There was no indication when a decree would be handed down, but Megawati would be expected to seek approval from parliamentary leaders before doing so.
Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, who is visiting Jakarta, said Indonesia and Australia have agreed to form a joint intelligence team in the wake of the blast and have invited other nations to join, Downer said.
Downer said officials still ``don't have any hard evidence as to who is responsible'' for the explosion.
Australia, which has posted a $1 million reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible for the attack, has sent more than 40 investigators to Bali to help with the investigation.
They included forensic specialists, victim identification officers and bomb blast experts. The United States, Germany, France and Britain have sent smaller teams.
National Police spokesman Gen. Saleh Saaf said investigators had found what police believe to be the residue of chemicals used in the bomb's detonator. The chemical traces, which included evidence of the explosive TNT, were found spattered onto a motorbike parked nearby the scene.
Traces of the military explosive C-4 -- a puttylike plastic explosive used in the attack two years ago on the USS Cole in Yemen -- were also found at the scene.
U.S. officials said Wednesday they believed the number of Americans killed in the weekend bombing would eventually climb to five or six. Authorities have so far confirmed that two U.S. citizens died and four were injured.
The Indonesian government is struggling to shake off its image that it ignored months of warnings about terrorists being active here, particularly Jemaah Islamiyah, which wants to establish a pan-Islamic state in Southeast Asia.
Boyce labeled reports in The New York Times that said he warned Megawati of an imminent attack the day before the Bali bombing as ``imprecise.''
Australian Prime Minister John Howard said Wednesday that he had received no specific intelligence warning that Bali might be targeted prior to the blast.
Senior Indonesian intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said a former air force lieutenant colonel with a background in explosives had been questioned by intelligence officers after the bombing, and would be questioned Thursday by police.
But they denied that he was a suspect or had confessed, as the Washington Post reported Wednesday on the Web site of the International Herald Tribune. The officer, who received training in the United States and was discharged from the air force a year ago, lives in the area near the blast and had been questioned because he'd rushed to the scene.
Suspicion in the blast has fallen heavily on Jemaah Islamiyah, which has been accused of plotting to attack the U.S. and other Western embassies in Singapore earlier this year. Malaysia and Singapore have arrested scores of suspected members.
On Wednesday, police in Malaysia arrested five suspected members of the group. They are not believed to have any involvement in the Bali attack, Malaysian national police chief Norian Mai said.
Foreign countries have repeatedly urged Indonesia to arrest Bashir, who runs an Islamic boarding school in Indonesia. He denies any involvement and the government has not moved against him, fearing a backlash by extremists.
Bashir was scheduled to submit to police questioning Wednesday and Thursday, at his own initiative, to press a libel suit against Time news magazine over an article that implicated him in terrorist activities.
``I have not heard that there is a warrant for my arrest,'' Bashir told The Associated Press. ``It is like a witch hunt. They are cracking down on Muslim fundamentalists.''
``I will not answer any questions about the Bali bombing,'' he said.
-------- britain
Britain Preps Tanks for Desert
October 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Britain-Iraq-Tanks.html
LONDON (AP) -- Britain plans to modify more than 200 of its tanks for desert warfare, a senior defense officials said Wednesday -- raising speculation Britain will follow the United States into war against Iraq.
Maj. Gen. Rob Fulton, a senior equipment specialist at the Ministry of Defense, said plans were being considered for the limited modification of two armored brigades, a total of 234 tanks.
Providing evidence to a cross-party committee of lawmakers on defense, Fulton refused to discuss whether the modifications of the Challenger 2 tanks were being made in readiness for war in Iraq.
Prime Minister Tony Blair is a strong supporter of the U.S.-led war on terrorism and has firmly aligned himself with the hard line taken by President Bush in threatening military action if Iraq fails to give up its weapons of mass destruction.
Speaking in the House of Commons on Wednesday, Blair again refused to rule out the possibility of the United States and Britain going it alone in a war against Iraq.
``I certainly understand the concerns that people have about unilateral action. It's precisely for that reason that I have tried to achieve a situation where action is taken through the United Nations,'' Blair said.
``But I also think people in this country are sensible enough to realize that we cannot have a situation where a regime as despicable as Saddam's regime has chemical, biological, tries to develop nuclear weapons, and we do nothing about it.''
Fulton told lawmakers that proposed modifications to the tanks would include ``skirts'' to keep out the desert dust and improved oil and air filters as well as some changes to the tanks' engines.
During exercises in Oman last year, the army's Challenger 2 tanks lasted just four hours before their air filters became clogged by the fine desert dust. Almost half the tanks had broken down by the end of the exercise.
Some 23,000 British personnel took part in Swift Sword, a joint exercise with the Royal Omani Armed Forces staged last September and October. It was designed to test the ability of the military's rapid-reaction forces to mount major operations overseas.
-------- business
Shipbuilding, Gulfstream Boost Gen. Dynamics
October 16, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/business/business-arms-generaldynamics-earns.html
FALLS CHURCH, Va. (Reuters) - Defense contractor General Dynamics Corp. (GD.N) on Wednesday said quarterly profit rose due to strength in its shipbuilding business and a recovery in its Gulfstream business jet unit.
The company, which makes tanks, nuclear submarines and destroyers, said it earned $268 million, or $1.32 per share, in the third quarter, up from $230 million, or $1.13 per share, in the same period last year. Sales rose to $3.29 billion from $3.02 billion.
The results matched expectations. Wall Street analysts were expecting a profit of $1.27 to $1.38 per share, with a mean estimate of $1.32, according to research firm Thomson First Call.
General Dynamics recently announced plans to add three new aircraft models to its Gulfstream product line, which had been lagging as businesses have cut travel spending in the weak economy. General Dynamics aims to strengthen its position in both the high-end and low-end of the business aircraft market.
Shortly after announcing its revamp of the Gulfstream line, General Dynamics said it had won a $1.5 billion order from NetJets, a unit of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRKa.N), for 50 of the new planes.
Gulfstream's rivals have also been searching for ways to improve performance in the business jet industry, which produced strong profits in the late 1990s.
Like other defense contractors, General Dynamics has benefited from rising U.S. government spending on military equipment. But the enthusiasm for military spending has come down from the peak it reached following the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.
A top aide to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is proposing cuts in major weapons program, including the Stryker combat vehicle, which is being built by a joint venture of General Dynamics and General Motors Corp. (GM.N). The proposal, which is being challenged by the Army, calls for cutting in half the number of Strykers to be built.
Shares of General Dynamics closed at $80.22 on Tuesday on the New York Stock Exchange. The stock fell 23.5 percent during the third quarter, underperforming the Standard & Poor's Aerospace and Defense index (.GSPAERO), which dropped 17.6 percent.
-------- chemical weapons
Knowles Calls for Probe Into Alaska Weapons Tests
October 16, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-arms-tests-knowles.html
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) - Alaska Gov. Tony Knowles called on the Defense Department on Wednesday to make public all information about the Cold War-era chemical and biological weapon tests in his state.
In a letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Knowles also demanded immediate steps to help the state investigate and clean up all sites at Fort Greely in interior Alaska.
``It is simply unacceptable to postpone or delay investigation or any remediation that may be necessary,'' the Democratic governor said in his letter.
The Fort Greely site was leased by the state to the U.S. Army in the mid-1960s, and returned to the state in 1973. But the Army never gave adequate assurances that the area had been decontaminated, Knowles said.
State environmental officials have tried to investigate the area since the early 1990s, when a document search revealed information about unexploded ordnance, but the Army refused to disclose any documents about weapons tests at the site until now, Knowles said.
Earlier this month, the Defense Department acknowledged that it had tested a variety of biological and chemical weapons in Alaska, Hawaii, Maryland and Florida. Among the test sites acknowledged was Fort Greely.
The Army post, which had been mothballed, has now been earmarked as a base for the planned national missile defense system.
-------- china
China Hopes for Military Ties on Jiang's U.S. Visit
Reuters
Wednesday, October 16, 2002
By Jeremy Page
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A33294-2002Oct16?language=printer
BEIJING (Reuters) - China hopes to agree to resume full military exchanges with the United States when President Jiang Zemin meets President Bush at his Texas ranch next week, a senior Chinese official said on Wednesday.
But Beijing was not giving ground in a dispute over weapons proliferation and still advocated a peaceful resolution to the question of Iraq through the United Nations, the Foreign Ministry official told reporters.
Jiang is expected to focus on these issues, terrorism and trade when he meets Bush in Crawford, Texas, on October 25 for a summit that will crown Jiang's diplomatic career before a Communist Party congress in November, when he is due to retire.
Washington curbed military exchanges such as ship visits and invitations to watch war games after a U.S. spy plane and a Chinese fighter collided in April 2001, sending bilateral ties into a tailspin shortly after Bush took office.
"Right now, the military-to-military relations are not normal," said the official. "I think it's in our common interests to be back to where they should be."
The third Bush-Jiang meeting "will be an opportunity for the two sides to agree to proceed and we hope that both sides will agree to seize the opportunity to do it," he said.
Relations have thawed since China backed the U.S.-led war on terrorism, but U.S. officials say they want greater access to Chinese military sites and personnel if full exchanges resume.
In a sign of progress on military ties, U.S. navy Vice Admiral Paul Gaffney II met China's defense minister Chi Haotian in Beijing last week, the highest U.S. military officer to come to China since the spy-plane incident.
IRAQ IN SPOTLIGHT
Expanding military ties between the United States and China, both veto-wielding permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, would have added symbolism as Bush tries to rally support for military action against Iraq, analysts say.
Jiang was likely to repeat China's position that Baghdad should abide by U.N. Security Council resolutions and allow in weapons inspectors, the Chinese official said.
"I think they should be given a reasonable period of time to finish the job and then, after they finish the job, it's up to the Security Council to pass a judgement on the result and make a decision accordingly," he said.
That appeared to back a French proposal for a "two-step" approach requiring a second resolution to authorize the use of force.
Washington wants a single security council resolution authorizing it to use force if Iraq blocks weapons inspections.
LITTLE PROGRESS ON PROLIFERATION
Despite the warming military relationship, there appeared to be little chance of a breakthrough on proliferation of Chinese weapons, an issue that has long plagued bilateral ties.
The United States says it wants China to abide by a November 2000 deal not to help any country develop missiles that can carry nuclear weapons. In return, Washington would resume issuing licenses for U.S. firms to launch satellites on Chinese rockets.
The Chinese official said Beijing had stuck to the deal and proved its commitment by issuing new regulations in August, tightening controls on missile-related exports.
"We mean what we say and we will surely enforce it very strictly," he said. "Now it is your turn to honor your part of the agreement -- that is to lift the sanctions on exports of commercial satellites."
But he said China's position had not changed on one of the key stumbling blocks -- honoring deals signed but not fulfilled before the November 2000 accord.
China also wanted Bush to repeat a pledge not to back independence for Taiwan, the island Beijing regards as rebel province.
The United States has diplomatic ties with Beijing and only unofficial ties with Taiwan but sells arms to the island and Bush has pledged to do "whatever it takes" to help it protect itself.
"We still see a gap between action and words," the Chinese official said. "Our hope is that that gap will disappear."
--------
China Reshaping Military to Toughen Its Muscle in the Region
October 16, 2002
New York Times
By CRAIG S. SMITH
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/16/international/asia/16SHAN.html
A new generation of Chinese generals is fast reshaping China's bloated and outdated armed forces into a modern, integrated fighting force that is emerging as a regional power, according to Western experts.
For now, the generals' efforts are focused almost exclusively on assembling a credible threat to Taiwan, over which Beijing is determined to regain sovereignty. In the longer term, the goal is to create a force able to project the country's power well beyond its shores.
"They're not trying to get to Hawaii, but over time to establish a 200- to 300-mile projection capability, which is known as `area and sea denial,' " said David Shambaugh, the author of "Modernizing China's Military," to be published this winter by the University of California Press.
Before Sept. 11, China was often regarded in Washington as the most ominous potential military opponent on the horizon. While the terrorist threat has distracted America's attention, China's drive to achieve regional power status has not slackened. Mr. Shambaugh and many other Western analysts say that at its current pace, China will achieve air and naval superiority in the Taiwan Strait by the end of the decade.
The Chinese military is a secretive and highly insular institution. Most of what is known in the West about its inner workings comes from Western specialists in government, academia and the military, who provided much of the information for this article.
Mr. Shambaugh said that the goal of China's generals was to turn the People's Liberation Army into a mobile and technologically competent force able to fight "limited wars under high-technology conditions."
To reach that goal, the country is downsizing its military. An estimated 1.3 million soldiers have been demobilized in the last 15 years, and the People's Liberation Army is shifting from 40,000- to 70,000-man armies as its basic organizational unit to 15,000-man brigades. It is putting more money into training those soldiers, spending more time than ever on costly live-fire exercises and emphasizing coordination between its infantry and naval and air forces.
China's navy does not have the aircraft carriers necessary to project its power very far, analysts say, but the army is mastering in-flight refueling of its fighter jets, critical to extending its reach beyond the country's shores.
China is building a new generation of submarines, some of which are nuclear powered and capable of launching nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles. But most are simply intended to make America think twice about intervening in the region. The country is also close to deploying its own cruise missiles. Together with the new submarines, the missiles "will really change China's offensive posture," Mr. Shambaugh said.
Still, China is a long way from posing a threat to the United States, military analysts say. Though it still has the largest standing army in the world, it has not yet begun the sort of buildup necessary to turn itself into a superpower, or even to challenge Washington's military presence in the region anytime soon.
"I don't see these capabilities as the leading edge of a more comprehensive, long-term plan either to supplant U.S. military power in the Western Pacific or to challenge U.S. power on a global basis," said Jonathan Pollack, director of the strategic research department at the United States Naval War College.
For one thing, it is too expensive. China's real spending on the military is probably double or triple its acknowledged $20 billion budget, eclipsing that of Russia and growing by more than 17 percent a year, analysts said. Even so, that money is dwarfed by America's nearly $400 billion annual outlay, and Beijing learned from the Soviet Union's demise that trying to match the United States militarily is an economically devastating game.
Since China's military budget is devoted to salaries and general maintenance, and not to new weapons, the United States technological lead grows by the day.
That is not to say that the country will not become a sizable presence in Asia demanding American attention. "The Chinese don't require equivalence with U.S. forces to make our future decisions about war and peace in the Pacific much more consequential," Mr. Pollack said.
While no one is suggesting that China wants to extend its territory, it is seen as desiring greater influence over East and Southeast Asia. The country is increasingly dependent on imported oil, for example, and it wants to be able to defend strategically important sea lanes, which the United States could now easily cut.
For all its recent steps, however, China has a long way to go to become a first-tier military power.
For one, it lacks an arms industry to build its own high-tech weapons, forcing it to rely on costly purchases from abroad, primarily from Russia. By some estimates, it has spent an average of about $700 million a year since 1991 on expensive, high-profile acquisitions, including Russian fighter jets, guided-missile destroyers and quiet submarines meant to challenge United States aircraft carrier groups. But spending on such high-cost items would have to increase exponentially just to give the country a decisive military advantage in the Taiwan Strait in this decade.
Even the Pentagon's latest assessment of China's military strength, published in July, says that China "lacks the technology and logistical support to project and sustain conventional forces much beyond its borders." The report says that attacking Taiwan alone would remain difficult for China throughout the remainder of the decade.
The military's biggest challenge is integrating its newly acquired high-tech weaponry into comprehensive battle plans. Without coordinated battlefield defenses and the ability to conduct joint operations, for example, its new destroyers and other imported hardware are little more than expensive sitting ducks.
In the meantime, China is relying on a blunt instrument of military power: short-range ballistic missiles that it can manufacture itself. By most estimates, it now has about 350 missiles carrying conventional warheads facing Taiwan.
The missiles are useful primarily as weapons of political terror and intimidation. Relatively inaccurate and with limited destructive power, they might serve to demoralize Taiwan's people but they are not seen as sufficient to win a military victory.
Not that the missiles are ever likely to be tested in battle. Economic integration, particularly Taiwanese investment in high-tech industries on the mainland, have raised the cost of any conflict. Moreover, the diplomatic - and by extension, economic - cost of such an attack could devastate China's economy.
But China remains interested in establishing sovereignty over territory it believes is rightly its own.
After recovering Taiwan, China could turn its attention to the oil-rich South China Sea, where it has territorial disputes with several countries.
"Once the Taiwan front is closed, we may turn to the South China Sea," said Shen Dingli, an expert on the Chinese military at Fudan University in Shanghai. He added that beyond the South China Sea, "we have a third issue to resolve," which is to recover the Diaoyutai Islands. China regards these as currently occupied by Japan.
China clearly wants to be a global power, and its military modernization effort fits into that general framework. But realization of that ambition is far in the future, Western military analysts said.
Even China's nuclear weapons program is moving slowly. China is developing solid-fuel rockets, mobile launchers, and miniaturized payloads for multiple warheads, but the country still has one of the least advanced nuclear arsenals among the world's nuclear-armed states.
"China," Mr. Pollack said, "is beginning to emerge as a more potent power, and the U.S. and China need to come to a strategic understanding, because there will be many places where our interests and capabilities could bump into each other. But let's not make them out to be 10 feet tall."
-------- france
In Shift, France Vows To Modernize Military
'Financial Effort' Now There, Minister Says
By Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, October 16, 2002; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A31882-2002Oct15?language=printer
PARIS, Oct. 15 -- After years of watching its military decline to second-tier status, France has embarked on a costly modernization plan, with a shift in strategy toward creating capability to project military force anywhere in the world.
The new center-right government of President Jacques Chirac has outlined a plan for $87 billion in military capital spending between 2003 and 2008. The armed forces would get a second aircraft carrier, better satellite intelligence, a dozen unmanned drones, 57 Rafale combat aircraft, 34 NH-90 transport helicopters and 50 Airbus A400M transport planes, as well as new submarines and frigates.
"There is a clear change in the French defense policy," said Philippe Moreau Defarges of the French Institute for International Relations. "In the time of de Gaulle, it was focused on nuclear deterrence," he said, referring to Charles de Gaulle's 1959 to 1969 presidency. "Now it's focused on external power projection."
For the year 2003, the military budget would total about $39.5 billion, a 6.1 percent increase over the previous year. Overall, the six-year program would push French defense spending from 1.71 percent of the country's gross domestic product to more than 2 percent.
"It's a strong increase," said Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie in an interview. She travels Wednesday to Washington, where she plans to hold two days of meetings with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and members of Congress. She said she wants to tell the United States that after years of giving short shrift to its armed forces, France is now serious about heeding American calls for its European partners to share more of the burden.
"It's important that the United States knows that France has the intention to make the financial effort necessary to be able to respond to the great challenges that exist in our world," Alliot-Marie said.
Alliot-Marie said France was encouraging its European partners to do the same. Military spending is not particularly popular in Europe, and politicians typically face pressure to use funds for social programs.
But the French are hoping that the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, and the constant warnings that similar attacks, perhaps with biological or chemical weapons, could happen in Europe, might spur other countries to reconsider their defense postures.
"One cannot say that the essential element in the construction of Europe is a common foreign and defense policy, and then not fund it," Alliot-Marie said. "It's absolutely necessary that other countries increase their defense budgets. If not, it creates an imbalance, and it's necessary for each country to participate in the defense of all."
France's spending increase was made possible by presidential and legislative elections in May and June, in which Chirac was returned to office by a lopsided margin and given a friendly center-right government.
Spending more on the military was one of Chirac's priorities when he first won the presidency in 1995, but for five years, beginning in 1997, he was forced to share power with a Socialist-led government that used money that had been earmarked for defense for education and other social programs.
"The Socialists did not have the same vision of defense as we do," said Alliot-Marie. Referring to their time in government, when the French economy was one of the fastest-growing in Europe, she said, "I really regret that when France knew four years of exceptional growth, the amount spent on defense decreased.
"We have decided to break with this past policy," she said. "We have decided that defense is an essential element of the authority of the state."
The decision was prompted by a feeling among Chirac and his allies that France's place in the world has been hampered by its declining ability to project military power.
In his Bastille Day address in July, Chirac lamented that France's military capability and readiness had slipped behind that of Britain, Western Europe's other big military power. Britain now spends about 2.28 percent of its gross domestic product on defense.
"The idea is to make sure there is no gap with the Brits," said Guillaume Parmentier, director of the French Center on the United States. "Many people realized we can't pretend to be playing an international role without the means to accompany that."
Defarges agreed, saying, "France wants to remain a great power, and France wants to have influence on the international scene. For that we look to Britain, and we know Britain continues to exist on the international scene because of its military power."
Various defense analysts said the new spending will still leave a gap with Britain, and some questioned whether the government will find the funds to fulfill its plans for even the first years after 2003, particularly if economic growth remains sluggish.
Already, the planned spending has placed France in violation of the European Union's "stability pact," under which the 12 countries of the single-currency euro zone have pledged to keep their budgets close to balanced. The European Commission, the EU's executive arm, has warned Paris to change its 2003 budget or risk EU fines.
The years of declining European defense budgets have also opened up a vast technological gap between Europe and the United States. This difference is one of many reasons the United States accepted only limited help from its European allies in last year's Afghanistan war.
Though France is still one of the world's major military powers, with nuclear weapons and a seat on the U.N. Security Council, it has only one aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle, and the vessel has to spend four months in dry dock for maintenance after each year of operation. Helicopters are often grounded for lack of spare parts.
The new budget would improve readiness by spending more on maintenance. "This new team is rightly putting the emphasis on the improvement of maintenance and operations," said Francois Heisbourg, a defense expert.
-------- india / pakistan / kashmir
India might withdraw troops from border
October 16, 2002
UPI
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20021016-094138-4494r.htm
NEW DELHI, Oct. 16 -- An Indian government panel on national security Wednesday said it favored a calibrated withdrawal of troops from the India-Pakistan border.
More than 1 million troops are positioned along the India-Pakistan border following the Dec. 13 attack on Indian Parliament, which New Delhi blamed on Pakistan-backed rebels. Since then, troops have been at the border in a military standoff between the two nuclear rivals.
The National Security Advisory Board resolved that the continued presence of troops along the border was not the best of options.
The Cabinet Committee on Security headed by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee is meeting in New Delhi to discuss the security panel's recommendations.
India's Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani, Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha, Finance Minister Jaswant Singh, and the three service chiefs participated in the security board's meeting.
India mobilized its troops following a string of terrorist attacks, including the one on the Parliament building. Pakistan also deployed troops along the border and the two nations positioned nuclear-tipped missiles at each other's targets.
Washington led international moves to reduce tensions in the subcontinent. The two nations have fought three wars since they got simultaneous independence from British rule in 1947.
---
India to Pull Troops From Pakistan
By LAURINDA KEYS
Associated Press
Oct 16, 2002
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/INDIA_PAKISTAN?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
NEW DELHI, India (AP) -- Moving to reduce tensions, India said Wednesday it will pull tens of thousands of troops from its border with Pakistan, but not from the cease-fire line that divides Kashmir.
Pakistan welcomed the announcement, but said troops on the cease-fire line should also be withdrawn. The announced pullback "seems to be a positive move," said Pakistani Information Minister Nisar Memon.
Last week, European Union leaders pressed Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's to move toward dialogue with Pakistan. But in announcing the troop movements, Defense Minister George Fernandes ruled out any new talks between the nuclear-armed rivals.
"There is no question of a dialogue with Pakistan as long as Pakistani terrorism continues," he said after a meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Security, headed by Vajpayee. "There is no question of a diplomatic initiative."
Memon on Wednesday also called for the resumption of talks.
In Washington, a State Department official said the United States expressed hope that the announcement will lead to further steps by both countries to reduce tension and move toward dialogue. He spoke on condition of anonymity.
India accuses Pakistan of funding and training Islamic militants who cross the frontier to stage attacks in India's portion of Kashmir. Pakistan denies it gives the militants material support, but Washington has said the rebels are continuing to cross the Line of Control, a 1972 frontier established after one of the three wars the nations have fought since they were divided at independence in 1947.
India and Pakistan have amassed some 1 million troops along their border since India accused Pakistan-based militants of carrying out a deadly terrorist attack in India's parliament.
Fernandes - who did not say how many troops would be withdrawn - said the army will decide when to move the soldiers and where they will go. Indian military officers are known to favor an easing of their nation's war readiness.
Troops will "redeploy from positions on the international border with Pakistan, without impairing their capacity to respond decisively to any emergency," the defense minister said.
"There will be no lowering of vigil in Jammu and Kashmir," he said.
The redeployment will include the entire international border area, which includes five Indian states, said Akshay Kumar, an information officer in the prime minister's office.
A tiny part of Jammu-Kashmir is divided by this recognized border, but most is separated by the Line of Control, which neither government recognizes as an official border.
Fernandes made clear there would be no withdrawal of troops along that line, where handguns and machine-guns are fired almost daily. Sometimes, there are artillery duels, killing villagers on both sides, and leaving schools and homes pockmarked and crumbling.
Indian leaders had previously said they would pull back troops only after seeing "credible evidence" that the militant crossings in Kashmir have stopped. But India has repeatedly said that the incursions continue, and U.S. Ambassador Robert Blackwill agreed with that assessment last week.
India has also said the troops were needed to ward off violence by Islamic militants during legislative elections in Indian Kashmir completed last week.
India viewed the elections as crucial to deflate support for Islamic separatists trying to make Kashmir independent or part of Pakistan. The government said the 44 percent voter turnout was high, considering attacks and threats from Muslim guerrillas, and international observers said the elections were mostly free and fair. More than 61,000 people have died in the nearly 13 years of the insurgency.
----
Indians Protest 'Suicide Squad' Idea
Oct 16, 2002
AP
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/INDIA_HINDU_SUICIDE_SQUADS?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
BOMBAY, India -- An opposition party demanded legal action Wednesday against a right-wing Hindu leader affiliated with India's ruling party, for calling on Hindus to form suicide squads.
To tackle terrorism by Islamic militants, "Hindus should also be ready to give their lives ... form suicide squads," said Bal Thackeray, head of the Shiv Sena party, which is a partner in Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's coalition government.
"The Vajpayee government cannot remain silent. It must come out denouncing this speech, as the Shiv Sena is a partner in the government," the Communist Party of India-Marxist said.
In a statement, the party called on the government of Maharashtra state, where Bombay is the capital, to file charges of inciting hatred against religious minorities.
Thackeray holds no official post, but is the powerful leader of the Bombay-based Shiv Sena, founded to serve the interests of poor Hindus.
His call for Hindu suicide squads came during a public rally Tuesday, during which he spoke of a terrorist attack on a Hindu temple in neighboring Gujarat state last month in which more than 30 people were killed. Gujarat was also the site of religious riots earlier this year, in which 1,000 people died, most of them Muslims killed by Hindus.
Most newspapers in Bombay dismissed Thackeray's statements, although the largest city in India has frequently been the scene of riots between Hindus and Muslims. Five were killed in such a riot last Friday.
-------- iran
Iran to Create 16 Refugee Camps for Iraqis
October 16, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/16/international/middleeast/16IRAN.html
TEHRAN, Iran, Oct. 15 (Reuters) - Iran said today that it planned to create 16 camps along its border with Iraq to shelter refugees fleeing a possible war there, but vowed not to let them enter the country, state radio reported.
With the United States pushing for tough new terms on Iraqi arms inspections, Iran says it opposes any American attack on Iraq and is uneasily watching the situation across its western border.
"We are ready to establish 16 camps along our border with Iraq, but the refugees would not be allowed to enter the cities," the radio quoted a senior Interior Ministry official as saying.
Iran's proposed refugee policy mirrors the one it adopted last year during the American-led war in Afghanistan, when it created a pair of camps just inside Afghanistan.
While each camp eventually held about 5,000 people, Iran did not experience the large exodus that many aid agencies had predicted.
Iranian officials say Iran already has two million Afghan refugees, as well as several thousand Iraqis displaced in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.
The Iranian Army said last week that it would seal the country's borders and take no sides in the event of an attack on Iraq. Iranian officials have described their policy on any war with Iraq as "active neutrality."
Washington, which broke ties with Tehran in 1980, has labeled Iran a member of an "axis of evil," together with Iraq and North Korea.
-------- iraq
Airstrikes in Iraq appear to be war preparations
But Pentagon says pilots in no-fly zone are responding in self defense
By Robert Burns
Associated Press
Wednesday, October 16, 2002
http://www.sanmateocountytimes.com/Stories/0,1413,87%7E11268%7E928255,00.html
WASHINGTON -- A key target of U.S. and British bombing in Iraq in recent weeks has been an air base south of Baghdad that would be central to Saddam Hussein's defense against an American invasion.
Since mid-September, Tallil Air Base -- a key link in an Iraqi air defense network that remains formidable despite damage from years of periodic U.S. bombing -- has been struck seven times, more than any other target in that period, according to Central Command, the headquarters for U.S. operations in the Persian Gulf.
The choice of bombing targets could reflect Pentagon efforts to lay the groundwork for an invasion if President Bush decides military force is needed to oust Saddam Hussein. Pentagon officials, however, say the attacking pilots are simply responding in self-defense to provocations from Iraqi air defense guns and radars.
Although Tallil has been a frequent target lately, the bombing has not been extensive enough to neutralize the target. Over the years, Iraq has shown a remarkable ability to repair and replace damaged air defenses.
Besides Tallil, the other major air defense sites in southern Iraq that have been hit recently are Al Kut, Al Amarah and the airport at Basra. On Tuesday, the Central Command said allied aircraft bombed a command and control communications facility near Al Kut, in response to unspecified "hostile acts" by Iraq.
Tallil, about 160 miles southeast of the Iraqi capital, is an air defense sector headquarters. It has surface-to-air missiles and the communications facilities to link them to the rest of Iraq's air defense network. It also has two substantial runways and can support dozens of fighters
In contrast to the recent flurry of allied attacks in the south -- 23 since Aug. 27 -- there were none reported in northern Iraq in that period.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld says the U.S. attacks are simply a necessary response to Iraqi efforts to shoot down the U.S. and British pilots who patrol the skies over northern and southern Iraq to enforce "no fly" zones. Iraq has long asserted that the flight zones are a violation of its sovereignty.
Rumsfeld did acknowledge last month that he ordered U.S. forces to take a different approach. Instead of firing mostly at Iraqi air-defense guns and radars, pilots are now targeting more of the communications centers, command buildings and fiber-optic links that are easier to find and harder to replace.
In at least a few cases, U.S. targets have appeared related to preparations for war.
On Sept. 5, for example, allied pilots bombed a military airfield 240 miles west of Baghdad. The target, as described by Central Command, was ordinary: an air defense command and control facility. But the location was unusual: a remote airfield known as H-3 that originally was built to support an oil pumping station near the Jordanian border. In a break with its usual practice, Central Command did not identify the location.
Stephen H. Baker, a retired Navy rear admiral who served aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt during the Gulf War, said the strike at H-3 was unprecedented in the decade-long history of "no fly" zone patrols.
"The objective of the strike could have been to destroy air defenses to allow easy access for special operations helicopters to fly into Iraq via Jordan or Saudi Arabia as part of a critical primary mission to hunt down Scud" missiles, Baker said recently. "Knocking out Iraqi radars at H-3 also would allow allied aircraft mounting major raids on Iraq a clear route into the country."
The spate of aerial attacks on the Tallil base began Sept. 15.
In its typically cryptic description of U.S. and British bombing, the Central Command said precision-guided munitions struck an air defense communications facility at Tallil that day. Nine days later, other unspecified "air defense facilities" were bombed at Tallil and Al Amarah, another repeated target.
Al Amarah has an air defense base and headquarters for the Iraqi Army's 4th Corps. It is on the Tigris River, about 165 miles southeast of Baghdad.
On Sept. 27, allied planes again attacked Tallil, this time targeting what Central Command described as a surface-to-air missile control radar and a surface-to-air missile launcher. On the same mission, Al Amarah was hit again; Central Command reported targeting an air defense operations center there but gave no details.
The next attack on Tallil was Oct. 3. Central Command said the targets were an air defense sector headquarters building and an integrated operations center. Surface-to-air missile sites at Tallil were bombed on Oct. 10 and 11.
On the Net:
Operation Southern Watch at http://www.centcom.mil
Operation Northern Watch at http://www.eucom.mil
---
Kurds prepare own army
By Borzou Daragahi
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
October 16, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20021016-3236032.htm
DOHUK, Iraq - Soldiers of the Kurdistan army march in circles to martial music on a cracked, weed-choked asphalt parade ground. The band can't keep a beat, and the cymbal is cracked and bent. But the soldiers can't help but smile at the handful of visitors here to watch.
They may be poorly trained, ill-equipped and upset at receiving little or no help from the United States, but they have a front-row view of Saddam Hussein's war preparations. Even the Kurds' U.S.-made camouflage uniforms were bought on the open market.
"They haven't given us anything," says Babekir Zebari, commander of the army in the Kurdish Iraqi province of Dohuk. "And there has been no communication or any word."
Unlike the neighboring countries, "Kurdistan" has no draft, and military service is voluntary.
It also has no air force. Under rules of the U.S.- and British-patrolled no-fly zones, it probably couldn't fly one anyway. The military has one or two tanks and a few rocket-propelled grenades, military officials say.
The combined Kurdish forces total 75,000 men (and a few women) and control three of Iraq's 18 provinces in an area populated by 3.5 million of Iraq's 22 million inhabitants.
The Kurds fought Baghdad on the ground for most of the 20th century.
The Iraqi positions today are just a few hundred yards from the Kurdish villages, a clear violation of the three-mile U.N.-mandated demilitarized zone along the 36th Parallel separating northern Iraq from the rest of the country.
The Kurds say Saddam has pulled back his forces from the front toward the center of Iraq, fortifying positions around the oil-rich cities of Mosul and Kirkuk, which the Kurds claim.
"Lately, it seems [the Iraqis] don't know what they're doing," said Barzan Ahmad, a Kurdish intelligence officer stationed near the city of Kalak, near the Iraqi front. "Activity has increased. They keep moving their heavy equipment back and forth. Occasionally they fire their weapons into the air."
Disappointed by their experience in Afghanistan - where ethnic Tajik forces of the Northern Alliance occupied the capital, Kabul, despite U.S. orders not to - American commanders appear to be shying away from a battle plan that relies on an ethnic minority as a ground force.
Washington also faces the prospect of upsetting Turkey, which is home to U.S. military bases needed for an air assault on Baghdad.
Turkey fears that a Kurdish entity in Iraq may inspire its own 15 million restless Kurds to rebel.
But Kurdish military and public safety officials say it would be helpful if the United States would share some of its information regarding Saddam's arsenal, if only so they can protect the civilian population in case of a biological attack.
Among Iraqis, Kurds suffered the worst under Saddam, who used chemical weapons on the civilian population of Halabja and abducted as many as 150,000 males from Kurdish villages under revolt.
After the establishment of the no-fly zone over northern Iraq after the Gulf war in 1991, the Kurds began building an autonomous proto-state with its own flag.
Students in northern Iraq study in Kurdish, with Arabic as a second language. A U.S.-brokered truce four years ago between the warring Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan factions brought a peace and stability that the Kurds had never before experienced.
The Kurds say publicly that those gains will be at risk if the United States attacks Iraq. "We don't want to attack Iraq; we want to defend Kurdistan," says Hamid Afandi, a Kurdistan Democratic Party official.
But in private, the Kurds are enthusiastic about a U.S. assault. "Where are the Americans?" asked a high-level military official in Erbil, northern Iraq's largest city. "We don't see them. We don't hear from them."
Unlike Afghanistan's mountainous terrains and narrow passes, which favor guerrilla ambushes, central Iraq's flat deserts make it impossible for the lightly armed Kurdish forces to mount a serious challenge to Saddam's motorized and armored forces.
Kurdish officials say they would be slaughtered by the Iraqis. Mr. Zebari sighs when asked about the state of his army's preparedness. "Until 1991," he says, "we were Peshmergas," ragtag mountain fighters who mounted guerrilla attacks on Iraqi forces throughout the decades-long struggle for autonomy from Baghdad.
Then came the civil war, when the guerrilla fighters of the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan turned their Kalashnikovs on each other in a battle that cost an estimated 1,000 lives.
Only since 1998, says Mr. Zebari, has the army tried to professionalize. "We've been trying to learn military discipline," he says but adds that the Kurds will need more than discipline to defend themselves in one of the toughest geopolitical neighborhoods on the planet.
"We have only three advantages," Mr. Zebari says. "Our willingness to sacrifice our bodies, our high morale. And if those fail us, we always have the mountains."
-------- israel / palestine
Bush, Sharon Discuss Response to Iraq Attack
October 16, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-iraq-usa-sharon.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush on Wednesday defended Israel's right to strike back if attacked by Iraqi missiles but the White House later made clear it hoped to avert Israeli retaliation in any U.S.-led war against Iraq.
``If Iraq attacks Israel tomorrow, I would assume the prime minister would respond because he's got a desire to defend himself,'' Bush told reporters after a 45-minute Oval Office meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Bush said he had not decided to attack Iraq and hoped the United Nations could persuade Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to end his suspected chemical, biological and nuclear programs.
``Our hope is that the Iraqi regime will disarm peacefully,'' he said.
Bush's comment about Israel defending itself against Iraq sparked some confusion about U.S. policy, but the White House later made clear he was referring to an attack on Israel independent of a possible U.S.-led assault on Iraq.
``If there is military action in the region... that's a qualitatively different situation, and we will consult closely with all the countries in the region that face a threat from Iraq. We've seen what that threat means,'' U.S. National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters.
Last month Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told lawmakers it would be ``overwhelmingly in Israel's interest to stay out'' of any U.S. campaign against Iraq, as it did when Baghdad fired Scud missiles at Israeli targets in the 1991 Gulf War.
Israeli military action against Iraq would almost certainly undermine Arab support for a U.S. war to oust Saddam.
A senior Israeli official, asked after the White House meeting about possible Israeli retaliation for missile strikes, would say only that ``if attacked, Israel will know how to defend itself.''
The official, briefing reporters who accompanied Sharon to Washington, said he came away from his talks with Bush better informed about action the United States might take to neutralize an Iraqi missile threat against Israel in case of war.
``I believe the United States will make every effort to prevent any harm coming to Israel,'' the official said.
RARE DISHARMONY
But Sharon would likely face heavy public pressure at home to strike back in the event of a biological or chemical attack.
It is conventional wisdom in Israel that by not responding to 39 Scud missile attacks in 1991, Israeli deterrence in the Arab world was undermined. Those missile strikes caused heavy damage but few casualties.
Sharon's seventh White House visit since taking office 18 months ago followed rare disharmony with Bush over Palestinian civilian casualties in Israeli raids on militants and a siege of Yasser Arafat's compound aborted under U.S. pressure.
But the senior Israeli official insisted Bush had not pressured Sharon at their talks to limit Israeli operations against militants before or during a U.S. war on Iraq, activity that could hurt U.S. efforts to win Arab backing.
``There will be no retreat from our struggle against terror, not now, not in the future nor during any campaign that might or might not take place,'' the official said.
``These things were made very clear -- and we weren't asked not to take action. It is clear to all that Israel has a right to self-defense.''
Bush pressed Sharon during the meeting to take steps to relieve the dire humanitarian conditions of the Palestinians amid the Israeli crackdown.
In a joint statement, Bush and Sharon agreed Israel would ``consider favorably the gradual return and scheduled transfer'' of all Palestinian Authority tax funds collected by Israel as long as a U.S.-led monitoring effort ensured the money was used to help Palestinians, not for violent activities.
Earlier, a State Department official said the chief U.S. mediator in the Middle East, Assistant Secretary of State William Burns, would start a two-week trip to the region on Friday after a stop in Paris on Thursday to consult with fellow mediators.
He is expected to talk with Middle East leaders about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the U.S. campaign to ensure the disarmament of Iraq.
-------- mideast
Arab media echoes with anti-U.S. ire
By Andrew Borowiec
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
October 16, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20021016-52234600.htm
NICOSIA, Cyprus - While awaiting U.S. military action against Iraq, the Arab world feels increasingly vulnerable, frustrated and powerless, and criticism in the press and television is becoming more strident across the Middle East and North Africa, frequently bordering on hysteria.
Diplomats who analyze trends in the area report steadily growing anti-Americanism, even in countries at least theoretically supporting U.S. plans to topple Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and his regime.
There have been suggestions in the media to boycott U.S. products and punish American firms operating in Arab countries.
Above all, the Arabs are wondering whether the United States and other Western powers have more far-reaching plans for the region than just regime change in Iraq.
"If the United States and Britain establish the precedent in this region by overturning a government by the force of arms, who will be next?" asked an editorial in Egypt's Al-Ahram daily.
Arab sentiments were perhaps best summed up by Hasan Abu Nimah, Jordan's former representative at the United Nations, who wrote in the Jordan Times: "We read about partitioning Iraq, about redrawing the borders and changing regimes We also read about controlling the oil and other natural assets. But we do all that as if we were outsiders, indifferent observers and not the people and the states that exist in this part of the world, sitting right here where the blow will hit."
Majdi Ahmad Husayn, secretary-general of Egypt's opposition Labor Party, was more blunt in Cairo's Al Shab newspaper.
"The United States continues to reveal its ugly face," he wrote. "It is determined to continue its preparations for aggression with total disregard of the international community A decisive blow to U.S. influence is sufficient to kick it out of the region. If Egypt adopts an honorable and dignified stand, it would awaken the entire region."
Diplomats say that more alarming than such an appeal was a recent opinion poll conducted by Cairo's Al-Ahram Weekly. The paper said half of the respondents in the survey felt that United States "deserved" the terrorist attacks of September 11, and that the U.S. war on terrorism was "a war against Arabs and Muslims."
Egypt is one of the countries that Washington has promised to remunerate - to the tune of $1.5 billion in "parallel aid" - for losses it is likely to suffer as a result of war against Iraq.
A report by a Western envoy to Jordan, available here, said that the Arabs feel that "they have become so insignificant as a nation that no longer does anyone take into consideration any response from them to what they perceive as injury, insult or harm."
Other diplomatic reports stress Arab doubt about the effectiveness of U.S. plans or of Washington's ability to impose a new regime on Iraq, even after a successful military intervention. This was reflected in an editorial by the Beirut Daily Star, an independent English-language daily.
"George W. Bush's promise to sow freedom and democracy rings hollow when one considers how little effort his administration has made toward nation-building in Afghanistan," the editorial remarked. "This bodes especially ill for Iraq, which finds itself next in line for Bush's adventurism."
Most Arabs regard Afghan President Hamid Karzai as a leader without power beyond Kabul, the capital, who relies mainly on a network of ruthless regional warlords.
The U.S. decision to subject Arab and other Muslim visitors to increased scrutiny, including blanket fingerprinting, caused an avalanche of editorial protest across the Middle East.
Bahrain's Akhbar Al-Khalij newspaper said:
"The United States is beginning to treat Arab and Muslim visitors in a way that could be described as provocative and humiliating If the United States is treating Arabs and Muslims this way, U.S. citizens should not get a better treatment. Why should the U.S. financial institutions and investments in the Arab world stay out of this picture?"
Saudi Arabia's foreign minister, Prince Saud Al-Faisal, said last week that his government has informed the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh that Americans also may be subject to fingerprinting as part of their visa or entry process, as the United States is doing to some foreign visitors, including Saudis. The American practice, which took effect this month, involves fingerprinting, photographing and interviews by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service of selected visitors arriving in the United States.
A grim view of the unfolding situation was presented by Al-Riyadh newspaper in Saudi Arabia, a country that many consider a potential springboard for a U.S. strike against Iraq.
The United States and Britain, the newspaper opined, "[h]ave decided to strike at Iraq without asking for a vote of the people and parliaments of democratic states in the entire world. We were in the forefront of those people who supported the eviction of Iraqi forces from Kuwait. However, we are against increasing the tragedy of the Iraqi people by launching a war on them.
"To what will this big world resort if it gets disgusted with the foolishness of U.S. aggression, bias and war? It will resort to terrorism The United States will be the loser in the long run."
The changing Arab mood, including a more radical attitude toward the United States and its allies, was signaled earlier this year to the French government by Tunisian Foreign Minister Habib Ben Yahia, who said his government was concerned by the "growing effervescence of the Arab street, which we witness every day."
Bechir Ben Yahmed, the Tunisian publisher of the influential French-language weekly Jeune Afrique, said that President Bush "has started a new war before finishing the previous one, accompanied in his 'sacred mission' by two European prime ministers, Tony Blair and Silvio Berlusconi."
"While the entire world is trying to preserve peace, the crusaders want their war [against Iraq]. In fact they have already started it," he said.
Some of the more strident attacks on U.S. policy have been made by Arab-language newspapers published in Britain or France, which are free of governmental pressures. London's Al-Hayah said: "The U.S. doctrine is based on the principle of forbidding any other country to compete for greatness and supremacy with the United States, and preventing the emergence of any rival military power."
In Qatar, the increasingly influential Al-Jazeera satellite television channel, watched throughout the Arab world, reported that "the United States continues to live in a state of fear and panic" after the September 11 attacks.
"The crusaders are bogged down in a whirlpool that will annihilate them soon, God willing," said Ahmad al-Nafisi, a Kuwaiti political writer, appearing on Al-Jazeera.
An oft-repeated theme in the Arab media is that while an attack on Iraq is virtually certain, its outcome might favor Saddam Hussein, regardless of U.S. military superiority.
Al-Watan Al-Arabi, published in Paris, wrote of a "confrontation strategy" drafted by Saddam that would "turn Iraq into a second Vietnam or Afghanistan for the American forces and their allies."
The "confrontation strategy," wrote the newspaper, citing "confidential sources," centers on the survival of Saddam and his clan and apparently assumes the inevitability of "a quick military defeat of the regular Iraqi forces."
Special units of the Republican Guards and of the ruling Ba'ath party have been prepared for resistance, the newspaper said, and tunnels, some up to six miles long, have been equipped with food, water and ammunition.
The hard core of this "underground army" has been recruited from among the Tikrit and Abu Nasir tribes loyal to Saddam, Al-Watan Al-Arabi said, and is prepared to fight for up to three years.
In Jordan's capital, Amman, Rami G. Khouri, a well-known commentator, concluded that because of "rhetorical overkill, diplomatic embellishment and irresistible Texas bravado the regrettable result is a drop in respect for American policy goals and a slow decline of the United States credibility as a world leader."
----
Dispute simmering over Mideast water
By Joshua Mitnick
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
October 16, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20021016-15959000.htm
RAJAR, Israel - In a region infamous for land disputes, the planned inauguration today of a Lebanese pumping station on the Wazzani River has sparked a debate over water rights that is worrying U.S. officials.
The river, more properly a shallow stream, wends through the parched, brown land on Lebanon's southern frontier before joining the Hatzbani River and flowing on toward the Sea of Galilee, Israel's main source of fresh water.
Lebanon says its purpose is to provide running water for the first time to 170,000 of its citizens living in an area that was occupied by Israeli troops until two years ago.
But Israel considers the project a brazen attempt to tamper with its biggest reservoir, and the United States fears it could ignite a conflict that would compromise its attempt to rally Arab support for a war on Iraq.
Chuck Lawson, a U.S. water expert sent to the region by the State Department, has been conducting quiet talks with officials on both sides of the border in recent weeks. The European Union and the United Nations have also sent delegates to mediate.
But the sides have so far resisted any accord, and Mr. Lawson is expected to leave today, though the U.S. mediation effort will continue.
"This is dangerous business," said Paul Patin, a spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Israel. "The northern border with Lebanon has always been a number-one concern to the Americans, because it could easily get out of hand and go regional."
Tension surrounding water rights on the border of Israel, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan dates back almost 50 years to when Israel began diverting the biblical stream for its own water needs.
Intervention by U.S. Ambassador Eric Johnston helped prevent an all-out war with Syria and resulted in the informal adoption of national water quotas that allowed Lebanon 1.25 billion cubic feet of water a year - about three times the capacity of the new pumping facility.
The quotas - never formally adopted by any Arab government - were moot until Israel pulled out of southern Lebanon 21/2 years ago, abandoning its self-declared "security zone" after a war of attrition with Hezbollah guerrillas.
Lebanon now wants to claim what is sees as its own water, arguing that its pumping plan complies with international law and has been submitted to the United Nations.
"Lebanon doesn't want any problems with anyone. They just want to drink water," said a spokesman for Prime Minister Rafik Hariri who declined to be named. "You don't need to know where the border is. You just see the green farmland on the Israeli side, which looks like California, and you see the brown on the Lebanon side."
But for Israel, the water dispute feeds a sense of insecurity that has been heightened by two years of intifada.
The Sea of Galilee is at record lows after five years of drought, and public-service radio announcements remind Israelis on an hourly basis to turn off their taps. The pumping station is seen as an attempt to force Israel to choose war or allow Lebanon to dictate its water quota.
"It's not a political issue, it's an existential one," said Ra'anan Gissin, a spokesman for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. "There's broad consensus that Israel can't reconcile itself to any change in the water allocation."
-------- russia / chechnya
Job Survivial in Chechnya
Locals Employed by Russian Government Targeted by Rebels
By Sharon LaFraniere
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, October 16, 2002; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A32339-2002Oct15?language=printer
URUS-MARTAN, Russia -- Although he is the Russian-appointed administrator of this dusty town of narrow streets and brick houses, Salavat Gibertaev is under no illusion that he can protect the 38,500 residents from harm. He cannot even protect his own family.
The proof flickers on the television set in his home. On the screen are scenes from a homemade video. The first clip shows Gibertaev's 17-year-old son Viskhan, dark-haired and smiling with his four brothers. The next shows the body parts that Gibertaev said the family collected two years ago after Chechen militants tied the boy to a concrete post and blew him to bits with explosives.
The doorways to Gibertaev's house are now guarded by his two pistol-toting sons, the windows are bricked up and the outside is watched by a rifle-equipped guard from inside a small blockhouse made of sandbags.
This is the price Gibertaev has paid for being an official in the Russian government in a province under siege by separatist rebels: one dead son; another afraid to go to school; and a constant threat of assassination, despite being a Chechen native himself, for what the rebels call collaboration with the enemy.
"It's the most terrifying situation. People disappear, even in the daytime, and no one takes responsibility for that," Gibertaev said in a recent interview, sitting in a straight-backed chair as his sons, 14 and 28, kept watch. "My wife cries every night. She says: 'Let's leave this place. I don't want your position. I don't want this house.' It's not a real life we lead."
It is a life reduced to a frantic attempt to stave off death, and it is all that many Chechens who strive for order in this long-suffering region can expect. Three years after Russian tanks rolled into Chechnya for the second time in a decade to quell a rebel independence movement, this region the size of New Jersey remains locked in torment, with a few thousand militants, most of them native Chechens, still eluding 80,000 Russian soldiers and taking vengeance on Chechens who help the government.
The Kremlin claims that Russian military successes have paved the way for a peaceful life, allowing Chechens to open schools, harvest crops, begin drafting a constitution, resettle more than 12,000 refugees and even start up a public bathhouse in the ruined capital of Grozny, where barely a building stands intact.
But in many areas -- such as Urus-Martan, Chechnya's third-largest city -- terror reigns. Rebels, masked and ruthless, prowl the streets at night, picking off the Chechen officials, policemen, teachers and clerks who accept jobs from the Russian government, which offers essentially the only paid employment in the republic, situated in the Caucasus Mountains about 900 miles southeast of Moscow. Russian soldiers offer no protection; they are too afraid to venture out of their heavily protected bunkers at night.
For most of Chechnya's 500,000 to 700,000 residents, the threat posed by the rebels is coupled with -- and surpassed by -- the threat posed by the Russian troops, whose brutal and indiscriminate sweeps of Chechnya's villages have resulted in the deaths or disappearances of hundreds of civilians, according to human rights groups.
But by targeting pro-Russian Chechens, the rebels have created the kind of panic that cripples the government and helps keep Chechnya teetering on the edge of chaos. The Russian government says that 84 of its appointees have been killed or wounded at the hands of rebels in less than three years, but accounts from district officials suggest a far higher toll. In Urus-Martan alone, for instance, officials say 60 civic leaders and government workers have been killed in that period.
The impact has been telling. In recent interviews, several Chechen administrators and officials said violence is shaking the already fragile control over Chechnya that the Russian-backed government seemed to have established by the end of last year.
"The situation was bad, and it is getting worse," said Aslanbek Aslakhanov, Chechnya's representative in the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament. "There is absolutely no control there. Everybody now wears masks. Everybody wears camouflage. It is total arbitrariness."
In Moscow, officials say the military cannot subdue the rebels for reasons beyond Russia's control. They blame international terrorist organizations for financing the militants, and Georgia for sheltering some rebel bands in the Pankisi Gorge, on Chechnya's southern border. Georgia claims to have rooted the rebels out.
Many Chechens argue that the Russian military deliberately keeps the conflict going because it provides a cover for Russia's lucrative operations there, including clandestine shipments of oil from the wells that dot the rolling, treeless Chechen hillsides. And they contend that the military's merciless treatment of innocent people caught in the conflict just replenishes the rebel ranks.
Polls show that Russians are increasingly sick of a war that has claimed the lives of at least 4,500 of their soldiers since 1994 and wounded more than 12,000, according to government estimates widely considered to be understated. One survey in late July found that only 29 percent of Russians surveyed supported continued military operations -- down from 70 percent two years ago. Sixty-one percent said it was time to start peace talks, according to the All Russian Center for Public Opinion, which conducted the poll.
Nonetheless, political analysts say that President Vladimir Putin has suffered little political harm by refusing to negotiate with the rebels. "People tend to find other explanations that are not tied to Putin," said Boris Makarenko, deputy director of the Center for Political Technologies, a research organization in Moscow. "Either the Chechen rebels are outrageous or the generals are ineffective. It does not influence his popularity."
A recent spate of deadly attacks illustrates the rebels' resilience. At least 119 Russian soldiers died in August when a military helicopter with a mobile antiaircraft missile system was shot down near Khankala, the Russian military headquarters just east of Grozny.
Last month, 17 soldiers were killed in a fierce clash in a village in the Russian republic of Ingushetia, on the Chechen border. Forty-four rebels were killed, and the rest of a band of about 200 militants, apparently headed to Chechnya from Georgia, vanished into the woods.
But the rebels have hardly needed antiaircraft missiles or major battles to keep Chechnya's war from subsiding. Consider what happened in the Nadterechny region north of Grozny, long the showcase of Russian efforts to pacify Chechnya.
For more than two years, while conflict shook the surrounding districts, Nadterechny's citizens harvested their crops, pumped their oil and policed their streets virtually without incident. Dozens of former rebels there were said to have given up their arms.
Much of the credit went to the region's hard-working administrator, Akhmed Zavgayev, 46, a Chechen agricultural specialist who earned a reputation for fairness and tolerance. Confident of his success, Zavgayev shed his bodyguards a year ago.
Last month, rebel snipers killed Zavgayev as he drove to inspect a village in his region. The militants then took over a local radio station and threatened to harm anyone who cooperated with the Russians.
Zavgayev's brother Akhmar, who represents Chechnya in the upper house of the Russian parliament, said his own son, a Chechen policeman, tracked down the rebels in Nadterechny three weeks ago. But he was killed in a gunfight when he tried to arrest them.
Similar events have unfolded in Vedeno, a mountainous region in southeastern Chechnya, where people eke out an existence from cows, vegetable gardens and humanitarian aid. Six government workers or their relatives have been murdered there this year, including a highly respected agricultural official. His aged father and 10-year-son were also killed. Administrators there suspect the six were victims of the rebels' campaign of assassination. But no one is wholly certain of the identity of the killers behind the face masks.
"We are terribly afraid," said Khaira Selimova, the acting deputy head of Vedeno, her voice trembling during a phone call. "When we go home at night, we are not sure we will get there. Our children shake at night. We can't stand it anymore."
The atmosphere is particularly ominous in the region that surrounds Urus-Martan. Until just three years ago, the area of 107,000 residents was the center of Muslim extremism.
Shervanick Yasuyev, the white-haired, blue-eyed regional administrator, said he believes forgiveness and brotherhood can set Chechnya on a new path after a decade of lawlessness and conflict. But his conviction has been tested in the three weeks since seven Chechen assailants captured his son Adlan, 20.
Haggard and unshaven, Yasuyev discussed the abduction in an interview in his office across from the town's heavily fortified military headquarters. He said the men somehow tracked his son to a nearby village, broke into the room where he slept, beat him with automatic rifles, tied him up with a rope and drove off in a white van. It was the night before his son was to start work as a police officer.
Yasuyev knows the pattern well: He said rebels murdered his top deputy, the head of the council of elders, three religious leaders and a village administrator. He added that the administrator's pregnant wife was shot 33 times in the stomach. As the list grows, the jobs become harder to fill and the hope of order fades.
"It is more tense and more dangerous now," Yasuyev said. "They want people to feel scared so that no one will work. All my children tell me to leave and go away. But I cannot leave this land."
Gibertaev, the 52-year-old, powerfully built leader of the town of Urus-Martan, is in precisely the same position. But while Yasuyev preaches tolerance, Gibertaev is filled with outrage.
He has recovered from the injuries he suffered in 2000 when snipers fired at him from a passing car, and he escaped harm when someone delivered a package with a videocassette that concealed a bomb. But he fears he will lose even more than his son.
In the past two months alone, he said, about 50 armed men tried to break through his metal gate and assailants fired a grenade launcher at the wall in front of his house.
"Last night, my son slept only two hours," he said, gesturing at the somber 14-year-old who was glancing nervously out the window. "He does not go to school. We don't go outside the house.
"No one can help us. They can kill us at any time."
--------
Russian Satellite Launch Kills 1
October 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-Satellite.html
MOSCOW (AP) -- A rocket carrying a communications satellite exploded several seconds after liftoff from a launch pad in northern Russia, killing one soldier, the military said Wednesday.
Eight other soldiers were injured in the accident Tuesday night at the Plesetsk launch facility, Russian news agencies reported. A Defense Ministry spokesman, who declined to give his name, said he could not confirm those reports.
In the launch from Plesetsk, which is operated by the Russian military's Space Forces, a Soyuz-U rocket blasted off carrying a Foton-M satellite that contained scientific experiments from several countries including Russia and the United States. The rocket exploded about 20 to 30 seconds after liftoff, officials said.
The cause of the explosion was not immediately determined.
The Foton-M was to operate as an orbital laboratory, containing experiments from Russia and countries in the European Space agency as well as the United States, Canada, Indonesia and Japan, ITAR-Tass reported.
The satellite was to operate in orbit for about 15 days, sending information to reception stations in Russia and Sweden, with a capsule returning to a soft landing, ITAR-Tass said.
Satellite launches are an important source of revenue for Russia, but there have been failures. Russia lost six communications satellites in December 2000 when a booster rocket carrying them to space from Plesetsk failed shortly after launch.
That failure came a month after an American communications satellite was lost soon after blasting off from Plesetsk. Several years earlier, a Russian-Israeli satellite launched from the same facility failed to enter orbit.
A spokesman for Russia's space agency Rosaviakosmos, Sergei Gorbunov, said Russia has no intention of halting use of Soyuz rockets, ITAR-Tass reported. Gorbunov said the boosters, designed on the basis of the missile that carried Sputnik into space in 1957, have failed 28 times in nearly 1,000 launches.
-------- spies/spy agencies
Confessed Cuban Spy Gets 25 Years
October 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Spy-Case.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A senior U.S. intelligence analyst, who confessed to spying for Cuba over 16 years, defiantly rebuked American policies toward Fidel Castro as ``cruel and unfair'' as she was sentenced Wednesday to 25 years in prison on espionage charges.
Ana Belen Montes, 45, refused to formally apologize for her actions, leaving prosecutors disappointed. Montes worked at the Defense Intelligence Agency as one of the Pentagon's most senior experts on Cuba's military.
``I felt morally obligated to help the island defend itself from our efforts to impose our values and our political system on it,'' Montes told the judge, explaining the motivation behind her actions.
``We have displayed intolerance and contempt toward Cuba for most of the last four decades. We have never respected Cuba's right to make its own journey toward its own ideals of equality and justice.'' she said, reading from a two-page, typed statement.
Prosecutors, who accepted the sentence under a plea agreement, accused Montes of disclosing to Cuba secrets so sensitive they cannot be described publicly. Court records said she provided documents that revealed the identity of four undercover agents, details about U.S. surveillance of Cuban weapons, and information about a December 1996 war games exercise in the Atlantic.
``What we were all looking for is the recognition of the crime, the gravity of what she has done and the harm she has caused a lot of people,'' said U.S. Attorney Roscoe C. Howard Jr. ``She seemed not really to appreciate that.''
Montes acknowledged that her actions ``may have been morally wrong,'' but maintained her actions were justified in light of U.S. foreign policies toward Cuba. ``I did what I thought right to counter a grave injustice,'' she said.
Prosecutors believed Montes wasn't motivated by money, since she received only nominal amounts to cover her expenses during her 16 years as a spy. As part of her sentence, Montes, who is single and lived alone, must surrender all her government savings plus interest and any property that investigators could tie to her espionage.
U.S. District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina described Montes' actions as a ``betrayal.'' But he complied with a plea agreement between Montes and prosecutors and sentenced her to 25 years in prison, in exchange for her explaining to investigators how Cuban spies operate.
``If you can't love your country, then at the very least you should do it no wrong,'' Urbina told Montes, who appeared in court wearing a gray-and-white striped jumpsuit. He wished her ``good luck'' after sending her to prison.
Montes could be released after 20 years with time off for good behavior, according to her lawyer, Plato Cacheris.
Montes pleaded guilty in March to conspiracy to commit espionage, admitting that she revealed to Cuba the identities of four agents. The four are said to be alive and not in prison, but little more is publicly known about them.
When one arrived in Cuba on an undercover mission in October 1996, ``we were waiting for him with open arms,'' according to a message to Montes from Cuba's intelligence service.
Montes was believed to have been recruited by Cuban intelligence when she worked in the Freedom of Information office at the Justice Department between 1979 and 1985. She later moved to the Defense Intelligence Agency where by 1992 she was among the DIA's top analysts on Cuba's military.
The government has not said what led them to suspect Montes. Court records indicate the investigation began around May 2001, shortly after the government broke up a ring of Cuban agents in Miami known as the ``Wasp Network.'' Like the Miami agents, Montes used short wave radio and similar encryption techniques to communicate with Havana, according to an FBI affidavit.
Lasts year, Montes carelessly left some messages from Cuban handlers on her laptop computer. The FBI found the files during a secret search of her apartment in Washington in May 2001. She was arrested Sept. 21, 2001.
-------- un
U.N. Chief Backs Iraq Resolution
By EDITH M. LEDERER
Associated Press
Oct 16, 2002
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/UN_IRAQ?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- Calling Iraq's failure to comply with U.N. demands to disarm a grave international challenge, Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Wednesday backed a new U.N. resolution that would toughen weapons inspections and urged Baghdad to use this "last chance."
If Iraq fails to comply, the Security Council "will have to face its responsibilities," he said.
Annan's statement was read by Deputy Secretary-General Louise Frechette at the start of a two-day open meeting of the Security Council where any of the United Nations' 191 member states can speak before the council votes on a new resolution. So far, all 15 council members and 52 nonmembers have signed up to speak.
The council's five permanent, veto-wielding members are divided over the next move of the powerful body, which is charged with maintaining international peace and security.
The United States and Britain are demanding a single resolution authorizing military force if Iraq does not comply with inspectors. But China, France and Russia insist that Iraq must be given a chance to cooperate with inspectors before any green light is given for military action.
The open Security Council meeting will take the debate out from behind closed doors and into a public forum for the first time.
Warning that the U.N.'s "authority and credibility" will suffer if the council is divided, Annan appealed for members to unite not only on a resolution but in achieving a comprehensive solution "that includes the suspension and eventual ending of the sanctions that are causing such hardship for the Iraqi people."
This is a key demand of the Iraqi government.
Under sanctions imposed after Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, U.N. weapons inspectors must certify that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction have been dismantled. But inspectors left in December 1998, ahead of U.S. and British airstrikes to punish Iraq for not complying with inspectors, and Saddam Hussein's government barred them from returning - until last month.
Annan said Iraq's announcement that inspectors can return without conditions "is a first step, but only a first step."
"Full compliance remains indispensable, and it has not yet happened," he said. "Iraq has to comply. ... The inspectors must have unfettered access. This council will expect nothing less. It may well choose to pass a new resolution strengthening the inspectors' hand, so that there are no weaknesses or ambiguities."
"I consider that such a step would be appropriate. The new measures must be firm, effective, credible and reasonable. If Iraq fails to make use of this last chance, and defiance continues, the council will have to face its responsibilities," Annan said.
The council meeting was requested by the Nonaligned Movement of some 130 mainly developing countries who are seeking a peaceful settlement of the U.N. dispute with Iraq.
South Africa's U.N. Ambassador Dumisani Kumalo, whose country chairs the movement, urged the council to "seize the possibility of a peaceful solution" and allow inspectors to return to Iraq as soon as possible.
Opposing any authorization of force before they return, he said the council must not prejudge the work of the inspectors "before they set foot in Iraq."
Asked what he expected to hear at the meeting, Iraq's U.N. Ambassador Mohammed al-Douri said: "I would like to hear a very firm position against any threat of aggression or use of force against my country."
In Baghdad, Izzat Ibrahim, vice chairman of Revolutionary Command Council and Saddam's No. 2 man, said: "We hope there will be no new resolution, and if there is, we will deal with it then."
On Tuesday, chief weapons inspector Hans Blix said an advance team of U.N. inspectors will not head to Iraq until after the Security Council decides on a resolution that may contain new instructions. Iraq hoped the advance team would arrive Saturday.
While the Security Council met, high-level contacts were continuing in key capitals.
On Wednesday, Russia's deputy foreign minister said the U.S.-backed resolution is unacceptable, while France's proposal is closer to the Kremlin's stance.
"The American variant of the resolution on Iraq has not undergone changes. It is unacceptable and Russia cannot support it," Yuri Fedotov said, according to the news agency Interfax.
However, the French proposal contains "many positions that Russia shares," Fedotov was quoted as saying.
Later Wednesday, President Vladimir Putin said Russia is prepared to work with other permanent council members to develop new resolutions ensuring the effectiveness of the inspections in Iraq, Russian news agencies reported.
"All of international society's questions and anxieties should be taken away in the course of the inspectors' work, whom we are firmly convinced should be sent to Iraq as soon as possible," Putin said, according to ITAR-Tass.
-------- us
Rumsfeld's Style, Goals Strain Ties In Pentagon
'Transformation' Effort Spawns Issues of Control
By Vernon Loeb and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, October 16, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A32170-2002Oct15?language=printer
When Marine Lt. Gen. Gregory S. Newbold was preparing earlier this year to leave his position as director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, his boss, Gen. Richard B. Myers, nominated an Air Force officer to succeed him.
But when Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, told Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that Lt. Gen. Ronald E. Keys would be the next director of operations, or "J-3," one of the most important jobs in the U.S. military, he got a rude surprise. Not so fast, said Rumsfeld, who in a sharp departure from previous practice personally interviews all nominees for three-star and four-star positions in the military. Give me someone else, Rumsfeld told Myers after twice interviewing Keys.
Myers complied and came up with a selection more to Rumsfeld's liking, Air Force Lt. Gen. Norton A. Schwartz, ending a long-standing practice of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs naming his own top subordinates.
Senior military officers now recount Keys's demise to illustrate a pronounced civilian-military divide at the Pentagon under Rumsfeld's leadership. Numerous officers complain bitterly that their best advice is being disregarded by someone who has spent most of the last 25 years away from the military. Rumsfeld first served as secretary of defense from 1975 to 1977, in the Ford administration.
Indeed, nearly two dozen current and former top officers and civilian officials said in interviews that there is a huge discrepancy between the outside perception of Rumsfeld -- the crisp, no-nonsense defense secretary who became a media star through his briefings on the Afghan war -- and the way he is seen inside the Pentagon. Many senior officers on the Joint Staff and in all branches of the military describe Rumsfeld as frequently abusive and indecisive, trusting only a tiny circle of close advisers, seemingly eager to slap down officers with decades of distinguished service. The unhappiness is so pervasive that all three service secretaries are said to be deeply frustrated by a lack of autonomy and contemplating leaving by the end of the year.
Rumsfeld declined to be interviewed for this article.
His disputes with parts of the top brass involve style, the conduct of military operations in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and sharply different views about how and whether to "transform" today's armed forces. But what the fights boil down to is civilian control of a defense establishment that Rumsfeld is said to believe had become too independent and risk-averse during eight years under President Bill Clinton.
What makes this more than a bureaucratic dispute, however, is that it is influencing the Pentagon's internal debate over a possible invasion of Iraq, with some officers questioning whether their concerns about the dangers of urban warfare and other aspects of a potential conflict are being sufficiently weighed -- or dismissed as typical military risk aversion.
The dispute also promises to have a huge impact in the coming year over the fate of hugely expensive weapons systems, with Stephen A. Cambone, a top Rumsfeld deputy, now recommending more than $10 billion in savings by cutting or delaying the Air Force's F-22 stealth fighter, the Navy's next generation aircraft carrier, and three Army programs, the Comanche reconnaissance helicopter, the Stryker wheeled combat vehicle and the Future Combat System.
These tensions were straining relations between the uniformed military and Rumsfeld prior to Sept. 11, 2001, but were partially submerged by the Afghan war and other counterattacks on terrorism. They have now reemerged as the Pentagon plans for a possible war in the Persian Gulf and for a fiscal 2004 budget that is in danger of being swamped by war costs and long-deferred expenditures on modernization, new weapons and Rumsfeld's desire to transform the military into a 21st-century force.
"There is a nearly universal feeling among the officer corps that the inner circle is closed, not tolerant of ideas it doesn't already share, and determined to impose its ideas, regardless of military doubts," said Loren B. Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute who has close ties to defense contractors and the military.
"All of the bad blood of last year is coming back in a very big way," said one former Pentagon official.
All three service secretaries were recruited from private industry to bring "best business practices" to the Pentagon and promised autonomy in making management reforms. But all three find their actions constrained by Rumsfeld and what is referred to as his small "palace guard," according to Pentagon insiders.
Air Force Secretary James Roche has felt he lacked input on decisions about the service's centerpiece program, the F-22, senior officers and defense contractors say. Navy Secretary Gordon England has expressed an interest in a top job at the proposed Department of Homeland Security, and Army Secretary Thomas E. White, a former executive at Enron Corp., has been tarnished by the Enron scandal, his failure to promptly divest his Enron holdings, and a controversy over his use of Army aircraft for personal business.
Presiding over a Pentagon thick with tension is an ironic position for an administration that came to office promising to show new respect for the military. In Congress and elsewhere in Washington, some now are questioning whether the military feels free to give its best advice to the administration -- or whether that advice is being welcomed.
"I've heard repeatedly about the lack of trust between the secretary and the uniformed officers," said Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), a member of the Armed Services Committee and a former Army officer who commanded an infantry company in the 82nd Airborne Division. "That, I think is a problem," particularly, he added, with the administration contemplating an invasion of Iraq.
"If there is an atmosphere where contrary views aren't well received, you may move into an operation that isn't well-advised," a three-star officer warned.
Myers, in an interview, denied that he or any other senior officers feel constrained in speaking their mind to Rumsfeld or raising objections about pending military operations. "It has never been easier to express our opinion, our thoughts, with any secretary," Myers said. "There is ample opportunity, in fact, encouragement, to present other views and disagree. . . . I think it's very, very healthy."
Victoria Clarke, Rumsfeld's spokeswoman, cited a series of "spectacular accomplishments" at the Pentagon -- a new defense strategy, a nuclear posture review, a restructured missile defense program, far more realistic budgeting procedures, and an ambitious agenda for "transforming" the military -- and said they simply could not have happened without close civilian-military relations.
"It's extraordinary that those things got done, in the face of amazing resistance to change, at the same time we were prosecuting the war on terrorism," Clarke said, adding that Rumsfeld "not only welcomes, but encourages, dissent." Rumsfeld's Revolution
While issues of great substance lie at the heart of Rumsfeld's unsettled relationship with the military, discussion of the current environment at the Pentagon invariably begins with assessments of the defense secretary's powerful personal style.
Even Rumsfeld's detractors admit he is a man of considerable energy and intellect who is pushing the right issues and raising many of the right questions at the Pentagon. Rumsfeld, 70, is universally praised for his handling of the war in Afghanistan, where he and other members of the Bush Cabinet insisted on a bold plan for toppling the Taliban and driving al Qaeda out of the country.
What appears at times to be indecisiveness on Rumsfeld's part, according to one senior officer, stems from his deep personal involvement in operational planning. "The guy wants to see [a plan] at the 30 percent level, and the 60 percent level, so it's become a very iterative process, and it's been hard for the bureaucracy to adjust to that," the officer said. "It's good in the sense that the man is talented and has tremendous insight into the political process. The only time it's bad is having" to make decisions rapidly in the context of ongoing operations.
But the result, said one White House aide, is that "it's hard to get decisions out of the Pentagon, because he doesn't delegate."
It has become a truism in national security circles that Rumsfeld has been a better secretary of war than secretary of defense. Rumsfeld has two dominant priorities. The first is reshaping the U.S. military from a heavy, industrial-age force designed in the Cold War to an agile, information-age force capable of defeating more elusive adversaries anywhere on the globe.
Rumsfeld's second priority, about which he has been less open, is reasserting civilian control over a military establishment that had grown autonomous -- and, many believe, too cautious -- during the Clinton years. Indeed, Rumsfeld has pushed throughout the war on terrorism for bolder plans from the military. Under his stewardship, war planning has become far more effective and imaginative, said a former official who otherwise is critical of Rumsfeld.
"This guy really is trying to get [the Pentagon] to work for him," said one former defense official. "I don't think he's chosen the right path. But it's not a question of him being the devil and everyone else is a misunderstood angel."
If Rumsfeld returned to the Pentagon in January 2001 predisposed to see senior military officers as dull and uncreative, as many believe, he has since shown a willingness to reassess their capability. Officers, even those unhappy with Rumsfeld's approach, say relations between his office and the uniformed branches have improved as both sides have come to better understand how to interact, thanks in part to the crucible of the war in Afghanistan.
"Rumsfeld has changed over time. He's still cantankerous, but he's not necessarily as combative as he was at one point in time," one three-star officer said. "There is more mutual respect."
Others are far more pessimistic. "Things are more fouled up [at the Pentagon] than I've ever seen them," said one former defense official sympathetic to Rumsfeld.
"The depth of disaffection is really quite striking," added one defense consultant. "I think Rumsfeld is courting a rebellion."
Two other people who have dealt with Rumsfeld said there is still a glass bowl in the secretary's office. Rumsfeld likes to tell people that if he says anything nice about anyone, a coin is put in the bowl. Rumsfeld likes to point out that the bowl is almost always empty. It puzzles some generals that he would take pride in such a hard-line approach.
"It is," said one, "a heck of a way to run an organization." Joint Staff in the Cross Hairs
Rumsfeld's primary objective in reasserting civilian control over the Pentagon has been in reining in a Joint Staff that the defense secretary, according to associates, believed had become too powerful and independent of civilian control, with officers acting at times as though they were not subordinate to their civilian bosses.
The Joint Staff, an umbrella organization that draws from all four services, consists of about 1,200 officers and other personnel and plays a critical role in overseeing the daily activities of the U.S. military around the world. The staff works for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But Rumsfeld has made it clear that, in his Pentagon, the chairman works for him.
Since Rumsfeld's first tour as defense secretary in the mid-1970s, the Joint Staff has grown enormously in power and capability. During the Ford administration, it was something of a backwater where the services placed officers considered second-rate. But after the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act greatly empowered the chairman, making him the formal leader of the Joint Chiefs and explicitly the principal military adviser to the president, the staff began getting the best the services had to offer, in part because that law barred officers lacking "Joint" time from becoming top generals or admirals.
Rumsfeld, say people who have dealt with him over the last two years, saw the Joint Staff as sometimes unresponsive to civilian leadership, even asserting its own policy positions at interagency meetings. He wasn't alone in that feeling, recalled one officer at the Pentagon, who said that Joint Staff officers sometimes seemed to have the attitude that "the suits don't need to know this, they stay in our lane, we stay in ours."
Under Rumsfeld, the civilians are no longer cut out.
Rumsfeld, early on, tried to gain control over the key position of director of the Joint Staff, the person who helps determine the daily agenda of the U.S. military leadership. When his move to oust the incumbent met opposition, he backed down. But he succeeded in making the point that the defense secretary would be intimately involved in deciding who filled the top positions. And he prevailed when it came time this year to pick a new J-3 to replace Gen. Newbold, who had told colleagues he found the job deeply frustrating partly because of Rumsfeld's constant bypassing of the Joint Staff.
Rumsfeld made it clear that he did not feel Keys, the general first nominated by Myers to succeed Newbold, was suited for the job. One three-star officer said Rumsfeld considered Keys unimaginative, while a four-star officer said the defense secretary considered Keys arrogant.
"He has been relentless and aggressive in putting these guys in their place," concluded one former Pentagon official. Myers also has come in for criticism from other generals who think he has failed to stand up to Rumsfeld, and some point to the Keys nomination to make their case.
"In the Rumsfeld Pentagon, the chairman works as staff to the secretary of defense," the former official added.
Myers said he has heard such complaints but that he finds them voiced by officers who do not understand the closeness of the relationships that exist between him and Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz and Marine Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
"I think the relationship between the Joint Staff and the Office of the Secretary of Defense staff is really very good and very close, and also has matured over time," Myers said. "If I didn't feel like I had my say to my boss and had an opportunity to be influential, I wouldn't be here."
At the moment, Rumsfeld is working to strip the Joint Staff of a series of its offices -- legislative liaison, legal counsel and public affairs. These have given the military leadership a degree of autonomy by providing it direct pipelines to Congress, to other parts of the government and to the media.
Clarke, Rumsfeld's spokeswoman, denied Rumsfeld has singled out the Joint Staff in an attempt to diminish its power. "The secretary thinks the entire department, civilian and military, was lethargic, bureaucratic, not fully addressing the dramatically changed world in which we find ourselves," she said. "And he has appropriately lit fires under everybody and said, 'Ladies and gentlemen, the stakes around here are very high.' And some people respond well to that and some people don't." The Army in Opposition
The biggest battle facing Rumsfeld is with the Army, the nation's largest military service, which effectively has gone into opposition against the secretary of defense.
The Army, for institutional and historical reasons, is the most skeptical of the services of Rumsfeld's drive to move the military into the information age. Rumsfeld has complained that the Army is too resistant to change, while Army officers claim the defense secretary does not sufficiently appreciate the value of large, armored conventional ground forces.
"Does he really hate the Army?" asked one Army officer, obviously pained by the question. "I don't know."
The relationship, never close, hit the rocks when Rumsfeld let it be known in April that he had decided to name Gen. John M. Keane, the Army's vice chief of staff, as its next chief, 15 months before its current chief, Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, was scheduled to retire. This immediately made Shinseki a lame duck and undercut his ambitious "transformation" agenda, which he had set forth in late 1999.
"I do feel that this secretaryship has been very hard on this chief and has undermined his ability to bring about the kind of transformation that Shinseki envisioned," said Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee's defense subcommittee. "Clearly there's a need for some repairing of relations between the department and the Army."
Next, Rumsfeld killed the Army's new mobile howitzer system, the Crusader, on grounds that it was too heavy to deploy to distant battlefields and not "transformational" enough to be relevant on the future battlefield. Army leaders had coveted Crusader for years as a weapon system that would finally make the Army second to none in artillery firepower. They were particularly steamed at how Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz killed the system, keeping the Army in the dark about what was happening until Congress was ready to vote on the fiscal 2003 budget.
In recent weeks, another dispute has arisen, with officials in Rumsfeld's office expressing concerns about the effectiveness of the new Stryker wheeled combat vehicle designed to replace the tank in the latest Army fighting unit called the Interim Brigade Combat Team. Cambone, Rumsfeld's closest aide, has proposed cutting in half the Army's plan to field six of these combat teams, saving $4.5 billion in Stryker procurement.
The Interim Brigade Combat Team is Shinseki's bridge between the heavy Army of the Cold War and the Army of the future. But Cambone is also zeroing in on two programs at the heart of that future Army, or Objective Force, proposing a 50 percent cut in the Army's Comanche helicopter and a two-year delay in fielding its Future Combat System.
But Rumsfeld's office, aided by former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), who is close to Rumsfeld and deeply interested in how to reform the Army, is now questioning whether Stryker measures up.
"The mood is so morose these days" in the Army, concluded a retired general.
Already on edge, Army generals were dismayed when some Republican defense experts suggested that invading Iraq would be easy. And on top of everything else, the Army now is trying to figure out how it would supply tens of thousands of troops to keep the peace in Iraq should President Saddam Hussein be ousted in a U.S. invasion.
--------
Bush Gets $355 Billion Defense Bill
October 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Congress-Defense.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Senate increased defense spending by the largest amount in decades Wednesday, approving $355.4 billion for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1.
The vote came as the Republican-controlled House, badly divided with the Democratic Senate over non-defense budgetary issues, decided to go home until after the Nov. 5 election.
The defense bill boosts spending by $34.4 billion over last year's level, reflecting the increased needs of the war on terrorism and a possible conflict with Iraq. It was the largest real growth in the defense budget since the Reagan administration.
The 93-1 Senate vote sends the bill to President Bush for his signature. The lone dissenting vote in the Senate was cast by Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis. The House approved the measure last week by 409-14.
``This defense budget will provide our troops with the best pay, the best equipment and the best possible training,'' Bush said in a prepared statement. ``It also sends an important signal that we are committed to defending freedom and defeating terror.''
The defense bill is only the second of the 13 annual spending bills that Congress has passed. The other bill was also military-related, providing $10.5 billion for military construction projects.
Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, chairman of the Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee, said it was ``imperative we pass this bill before we recess'' to ensure the military the support it needs as it prepares for a possible Iraqi war.
With the White House and Senate Democrats unable to agree on spending levels for non-defense federal programs, there was little chance of Congress enacting other appropriations bills before the elections.
The House on Wednesday, in a 228-172 vote, approved a fourth temporary spending measure to keep agencies operating at current-year levels until Nov. 22. The Senate approved the measure by voice vote.
After the vote, the House recessed until the week after the election. GOP leaders said they were prepared to come back before that if the Senate acted on spending bills or other pending legislation, such as a bill to create a homeland security department.
House Republicans have insisted that spending for the 13 appropriations bills be held within the president's goal of $759 billion. Senate Democrats say that is unrealistic because the needs of education, health, environment and other programs, and are demanding at least another $9 billion.
While House Republicans blamed the Senate for inaction, Rep. David Obey of Wisconsin, top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, said the House was ``walking away from its responsibilities to deal with virtually every domestic problem that we have.''
The Senate on Wednesday did approve a measure to restore a rule requiring a 60-vote majority to overcome an objection to new spending or tax cuts that go beyond established budget levels or that increase the deficit. The current rule expired on Sept. 30, and Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., said the measure to extend it for six months was ``a major step in preserving fiscal discipline in the U.S. Senate.''
The defense measure increases spending in almost every area, from weapons procurement to payroll. It includes a 4.1 percent pay raise for military personnel and nearly all the $7.4 billion President Bush requested to keep developing a national missile defense system.
The bill also provides $3.3 billion for 15 C-17 transport aircraft, $2.3 billion for two Aegis destroyers, $3.2 billion for 46 Navy F/A-18 E/F fighters and $3.5 billion to continue developing the Joint Strike Fighter. Another $249 million is allotted for Navy Tomahawk cruise missiles, a key weapon in the Persian Gulf War.
The defense bill is H.R. 5010.
On the Net:
Bill text: http://thomas.loc.gov
-------- propaganda wars
Falwell's fatal words
Tony Blankley
October 16, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/blankley.htm
I don't quite know what to make of the Rev. Jerry Falwell's most recent venture into biblical history. On the television program "60 Minutes" a few weeks ago, the reverend said that "I think Mohammed was a terrorist. I read enough of the history of his life. He was a violent man, a man of war. Jesus set the example for love, as did Moses. And I think Mohammed set an opposite example."
A few days later in Bombay, India, five persons were killed and 47 injured when Hindus and Muslims rioted during a Muslim general strike to protest Mr. Falwell's accusation about Mohammed. A few days after that Mr. Falwell apologized in the following curious language: "I sincerely apologize that certain statements of mine made during an interview for the Sept. 30 edition of CBS's '60 Minutes' were hurtful to the feelings of many Muslims. I intended no disrespect to any sincere, law-abiding Muslim."
A number of senior Muslim leaders accepted his apology. But his statements are being shown all over the Muslim world as evidence of America's alleged war on Islam. If the casualty list caused by Mr. Falwell's idiotic and repulsive statement is limited to five, we will be very lucky. His statement was bad biblical history and appallingly worse politics. President Bush has spent the last year desperately trying to limit our war on terror to the terrorists, and not letting it slide into a war of civilizations: Judeo-Christian vs. Muslim. That strikes me as a bloody good idea.
And just as many of us have pointedly observed how few Muslims came out to condemn Osama bin Laden after his murderous attacks on America, I feel obliged to point out how few American conservatives have come out to condemn Mr. Falwell's statement (not that their acts were morally equivalent, of course - one killed 3,000, the other insulted the religion of a fifth of mankind). As a longtime conservative and strong supporter of Mr. Bush's war on terrorism and Iraq, and as one who has fought on the same side of the political barricade as Mr. Falwell for the past quarter-century, permit me to proffer my condemnation.
First of all, the reverend's biblical history stinks. Moses set the example for love? In Exodus 2 verse 11, it is written that "Moses saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his kinsfolk. He looked this way and that, and seeing no one he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand." And again in Exodus 32 verses 25-29, after Moses came down from Mt. Sinai he saw his fellow Hebrews running wild and making a golden calf. He asked the sons of Levi to gather round him with their swords and told them: " 'Each of you kill your brother, your friend, and your neighbor.' The sons of Levi did as Moses commanded, and about three thousand of the people fell on that day. Moses said, 'Today you have ordained yourselves for the service of the Lord.' "
But Moses was no terrorist. He was select of God. He was the great law-giver. He led his people out of bondage. And he acted under divine injunction. We should be careful about selecting pieces of Muslim history or of the Koran and making insulting and extravagant assertions based on those abstractions. There is a lot of blood and murder in Judeo-Christian history - and not nearly all of it was performed by pagans. The slightest glance at history should make it obvious that anything touched by man will also be touched by blood - regardless of race, creed, religion or nation of origin.
Not only was Mr. Falwell's statements foolish and hurtful, but his apology was incredible. "I intended no disrespect." Of course he did. Mohammed talked with Allah, just as Moses talked with Jehovah. They both are believed by their faithful to have acted pursuant to the Lord's instructions. When one reviles a prophet, one reviles the god for whom he speaks.
But Mr. Falwell is not a bad man. I know him slightly, having been in some meetings and on many television shows with him. He has always seemed to me to be sincere, thoughtful, kind and possessed of a broad knowledge of the Bible. It is the times we live in that are at fault. Tolerance is easy when it is little more than indifference. But now - when the battle lines are forming, blood has begun to flow in the streets, and we search with squinted eye for real enemies - we have become gripped by our most atavistic passions and fundamental beliefs. We are no longer modern men, and we no longer live in modern times.
We seem to be entering a period that might better be described as biblical in its nature - a time of plagues, tribal struggle and slaughter. And I fear it will be a long climb out to renewed tolerance and the peace that it breeds.
Tony Blankley is editorial page editor of The Washington Times. His syndicated column appears on Wednesdays. E-mail: tblankley@washingtontimes.com.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
The truth is polygraphs lie
Steve Chapman
October 16, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20021016-31768824.htm
In May 1978, four men were arrested by Chicago police for murdering a suburban man and raping and murdering his fiancee. All the suspects claimed they were innocent, but there was no real doubt about their guilt: Three of them, after all, had failed a polygraph exam.
Eventually, the Ford Heights Four, as they became known, were convicted for these brutal slayings, and two of the defendants were sentenced to death. But in 1996, DNA evidence exonerated all four. They had spent 18 years behind bars, partly because the lie detector lied.
A report issued last week by the National Academy of Sciences recommended that the federal government stop using polygraphs to screen for security risks. Why? Because, in the words of the study, these devices are "intrinsically susceptible to producing erroneous results." That's academese for "I wouldn't trust one as far as I could throw it."
The Energy Department adopted polygraph screening of employees in response to the case of Wen Ho Lee, a scientist accused of spying for China but convicted of only a minor security violation. DOE now tests about 2,000 people a year. But George Mason University systems engineering professor Kathryn Laskey, a member of the NAS committee, noted, "No spy has ever been caught using the polygraph."
There are particular dangers in subjecting lots of people to polygraphs in the effort to find a few wrongdoers, because false positives will greatly outnumber "true" positives. Some employees who have done nothing wrong will nonetheless have physiological reactions that look suspicious. Some accomplished liars will be able to fool the machine.
To nab 8 out of every 10 real spies, the NAS report found, the device would probably have to erroneously implicate nearly 1,600 people. If it were set to minimize false positives, 80 percent of the real spies would slip past. But even then, 20 innocent people would be flagged for every guilty one.
The same fallibility that renders these machines unusable for employee monitoring makes them dangerous for criminal investigations as well. Police and prosecutors regard polygraph results as the closest thing to a dead-bang certainty. But that faith lacks any foundation. "Almost a century of research in scientific psychology and physiology provides little basis for the expectation that a polygraph test could have extremely high accuracy," concluded the panel.
And there is no reason to think better technology will help. People simply don't respond in a clear and predictable way to questions about what they may have done wrong. The "inherent ambiguity of the physiological measures used in the polygraph suggest that further investments in improving polygraph technique and interpretation will bring only modest improvements in accuracy," said the report. Polygraphs are a crude instrument that can't be refined.
The consequences of a misleading polygraph exam are bad enough in the employment arena, where someone can lose a job or not be hired. But they're much worse for criminal suspects, who can be locked away or even put to death because their pulse rate rose too much in a stressful situation.
A polygraph result generally can't be used as evidence in court. But some states allow the information if both the prosecution and the defense concur. So prosecutors may offer suspects the opportunity to clear themselves. Innocent suspects sometimes feel they have nothing to lose and much to gain from going along - only to fail the test.
A couple of weeks ago, one Jimmy Williams was officially cleared by an Ohio court after spending 10 years in prison for the alleged rape of a 12-year-old girl. In fact, the rape never happened, but the Akron man nonetheless managed to fail a polygraph exam. Because his lawyer had agreed in advance to admit the results, the jury was told the lie detector had implicated him.
Other defendants have been victimized not only by the polygraph itself but by its aura of infallibility. Gary Gauger was sentenced to death for the murder of his parents on their McHenry County, Ill., farm but was eventually exonerated. He took a polygraph during his interrogation, and the results were inconclusive. But the police told him he had failed it.
He was so rattled by the news that the cops were able to get him to speculate aloud how he might have killed his parents. Those statements were then used to convict him of a crime he never committed.
Our medieval forebears had their own lie detector test: Suspected witches were dunked in water, on the theory that the guilty would float and the innocent would sink. Polygraphs aren't quite as preposterous, but they're bad enough.
Steven Chapman is a nationally syndicated columnist.
----
Army Planes to Aid D.C. Sniper Hunt
By PAULINE JELINEK
Associated Press
Oct 16, 2002
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/S/SNIPER_MILITARY?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
LeBrecht reports the Army reconnaissance planes could put their tools to use within days. (Audio)
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Army planes with high-tech surveillance equipment were preparing Wednesday to take to the skies around the nation's capital to help track a sniper who has eluded law enforcement officials for two weeks.
The planes were being flown to the region and were expected to join the hunt within days, a defense official said Wednesday, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Authorities called in the military Tuesday to help solve the baffling case that has left nine people dead and terrorized the capital area, leaving people afraid to go out of their homes. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Tuesday evening agreed to an FBI request for the help, approving use of the Army's Airborne Reconnaissance Low plane, which has surveillance capabilities beyond those of local police forces, defense officials said.
The plan calls for military pilots to fly reconnaissance flights accompanied by federal agents, who would relay any collected information to authorities on the ground, a senior defense official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. A main objective is to improve communications among investigators.
The military planes join a chase that already is using officers from more than a dozen law enforcement agencies, along with dragnets, roadblocks, bloodhounds, helicopters and other tactics. Among important features of the four-engine plane are that it provides high-resolution imagery and night vision and looks like a small commercial plane, making it easier to blend in with local air traffic and avoid detection.
The Pentagon help will be given in a way meant to comply with the Posse Comitatus Act - a 19th century law that restricts the military's involvement in domestic law enforcement, said Pentagon spokesman Lt. Cmdr Jeff Davis. That means the military will not be involved in action on the ground, will relay data to law enforcement and not decide on its own what targets to watch, officials said.
The move is highly unusual but not unheard of.
During the last Olympic Games in Salt Lake City, military helicopters flew federal law enforcement agents around so they could do surveillance from the air.
Using several of the Army aircraft for possible 24-hour coverage, pilots would perform general reconnaissance, such as looking for or tracking the light-colored van that authorities say was seen at one or more of the shooting sites. Infrared sensors that can detect flashes of gunfire on the ground also could be used, officials said.
An unknown sniper or snipers has launched a series of 11 random rifle attacks in 13 days that has killed nine people and seriously wounded two others. All but one of the attacks have been in neighboring suburbs in Maryland and Virginia. One was just inside Washington at the Maryland border.
In two recent killings, police threw up a dragnet near the shooting site, blocking off streets and expressway ramps and stopping traffic to check vehicles. The assailant slipped away.
Another official, who also discussed the matter on condition of anonymity, said that at the request of investigators, the Army has started searching its records for people trained as snipers for any former or current service member who might be involved in the shootings.
Law enforcement officials have not said they suspect anyone from the services. Experts have said the shooter also could be a hunter, a target shooter or someone with law enforcement experience.
Police from counties where the attacker has struck are participating in the joint investigation as well as both state police forces, Washington's metropolitan police, the FBI and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
Meanwhile, federal investigators refused Tuesday to rule out the possibility that organized terrorist groups are behind the shootings.
"The communities are terrorized," said the homeland security director, Tom Ridge.
----
Military Aircraft With Detection Gear To Augment Police
By Steve Vogel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 16, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A32138-2002Oct15?language=printer
Military aircraft equipped with sophisticated sensors far more sensitive than those used by police will join in the hunt for the sniper terrorizing the Washington area, Pentagon officials said yesterday.
The aircraft will use aerial surveillance tools with night vision to "put eyes on the target very, very quickly," even if the gunman should strike under cover of darkness, a senior military officer said.
The decision to use the military in a domestic criminal case, while not unprecedented, is highly unusual and reflects the gravity of the search for the sniper who has killed nine people and wounded two since Oct. 2.
"We all share the sense of urgency in trying to stop this," said a Defense Department official, speaking like others on condition he not be identified.
The Army planes to be used, which an official identified as RC-7 Airborne Reconnaissance Low aircraft, are able to keep a low profile by their resemblance to civilian airliners. The Pentagon has used the planes for such missions as counter-drug operations in the Caribbean and peacekeeping in the Balkans.
Among the concerns raised is whether such assistance would violate the Posse Comitatus Act, the 1878 law that bars the military from performing civilian law enforcement.
The authorization, signed yesterday by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, is within the law, Pentagon officials said. Military pilots will be accompanied by federal agents during surveillance flights, officials said.
"Military operators would be doing that -- just operating the equipment," said a senior Pentagon official. "Law enforcement would do the analysis and follow-up."
If the aircraft sensors detected a muzzle flash from a gun, for example, it would be up to the civilian law enforcement agent to interpret the data, another military official said. The aircraft also would help coordinate communication among law enforcement agencies, officials said.
The RC-7 is equipped with electrooptical and infrared sensors and is able to perform surveillance missions over a large area day and night. The aircraft is able to immediately transmit high-resolution imagery to the ground.
"All of this goes well beyond what local police have," said John Pike, director of globalsecurity.org, a defense think tank.
Defense experts said the Pentagon has other capabilities that may be of use in the investigation, including counter-sniper technology and expertise.
The Defense Department has counter-sniper equipment able to detect heat from muzzle flashes and the sound of a gun firing and to locate the source of the fire almost instantaneously.
While effective, such equipment operates over a relatively short range.
"Trying to completely blanket the area would be very difficult," Pike said.
Military experts on sniping and terrain analysis could help police predict where the sniper might strike next.
"It's reasonable to assume that perpetrator is scouting sites in advance and using certain criteria," Pike said.
Senior military officers worried yesterday that the use of military tools in a criminal investigation could spark more requests for help in other notorious crimes while U.S. troops are in Afghanistan and gearing up for possible war with Iraq.
"The concern among the military is we're not a domestic law enforcement agency," said a senior Pentagon officer. "We have a lot of equipment that I would want, too, if I were a police chief, but it's the same equipment we need to fight a global war on terrorism, as well as Iraq."
The Pentagon considered using an unmanned aerial vehicle such as the Predator, an official said, but the option was rejected because of the crafts' heavy use overseas.
The request for military assistance came from Montgomery County and the FBI, a Pentagon official said. Officers on the staff of Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, contacted the military services Monday night and asked, "What do you have available that would be of assistance?" a senior officer said. Rumsfeld was briefed on the options yesterday.
Federal troops have been used occasionally through U.S. history in domestic law enforcement roles, including putting down the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, integrating schools in Little Rock in 1957 and restoring order in Los Angeles during riots after the Rodney King verdict in 1992.
Under the terms of Posse Comitatus, the military can provide equipment and supplies, technical assistance and training to domestic law enforcement agencies, said Eugene R. Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice.
Fidell said the Pentagon assistance to the sniper investigation may go beyond that.
"I would have to say that active use in a search would raise a question," Fidell said.
A U.S. District Court in New York held in 1961 that the use of an Air Force helicopter to search for an escaped prisoner was improper, he noted.
--------
THE INVESTIGATION
Secret Military Spy Planes Enlisted in Hunt for Sniper
October 16, 2002
New York Times
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and ERIC SCHMITT
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/16/national/nationalspecial/16FEDS.html
WASHINGTON, Oct. 15 - The Pentagon agreed today to patrol the skies over the nation's capital with secret surveillance planes - now used to combat drug lords in Colombia and track military movements in North Korea - as part of a broadening effort to catch the sniper in the Washington area.
Responding to a request from the F.B.I, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld agreed to deploy a handful of the aircraft, known as RC-7 Airborne Reconnaissance Low planes. The planes are equipped with special sensors and detection capabilities and appear similar to commuter airplanes to avoid easy detection. Although details of the deployment were shrouded in secrecy, federal authorities plan to use the planes for surveillance to help pinpoint and respond to sniper attacks, officials said. The planes are equipped with high-resolution sensors, whose data can be analyzed on board and shared with agents on the ground.
The intensified efforts reflect a growing frustration among law enforcement personnel over the sniper's ability to elude detection - despite the multipronged investigation and the wide dragnet that was cast in suburban Washington after Monday night's shooting.
The number of law enforcement personnel working on the manhunt grew to more than 1,000 today, with at least 14 different federal, state and local agencies in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia involved in the investigation, officials said. Even the C.I.A. has begun lending assistance, using its explosives-sniffing canine units for traffic stops.
The investigation "is extraordinary in terms of the diversity of federal involvement," said a Justice Department official who spoke only on the condition of not being identified. "The urgency we're seeing grows out of the fact that every day that passes without catching this guy, another innocent person may be murdered," the official said. "Everyone shares a high level of frustration over that fact."
Indeed, the two-week-old sniper investigation became more personal for the F.B.I. on Monday when the bureau lost one of its own. The victim, gunned down in the parking garage at a Home Depot in Falls Church, Va., was Linda Franklin, a 47-year-old intelligence analyst at the bureau's headquarters in Washington. She became the ninth victim to be killed by a sniper in the area in the last two weeks. The F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, who has kept a low profile in the sniper investigation and has allowed the Montgomery County police chief, Charles Moose, to take the lead, said the bureau was "deeply shocked and angry" over Ms. Franklin's murder. He vowed to "track down the person responsible for these coldblooded killings."
The deployment of the Army's Airborne Reconnaissance Low planes is the latest and perhaps most dramatic tactic in the sniper investigation. Military and Justice Department officials wrestled for much of the day today with the question of how and whether the Pentagon could aid in the sniper investigation without violating an 1878 law, the Posse Comitatus Act, which restricts military personnel from taking part in domestic law enforcement operations. Lawyers ultimately decided that the military could offer equipment in the manhunt without violating the law.
"Every step in this process is taken so that we remain within the limits of all laws including Posse Comitatus," said Lt. Cmdr. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman. While senior Pentagon officials considered a range of aircraft, including unmanned drones like the Predators used in Afghanistan and Navy P-3 Orion surveillance planes, military officials settled on the unusual Army plane because of its technical capabilities and because it blends in with civilian aircraft flying in the Washington airspace.
The aircraft is a four-engine turbo-prop DeHavilland DHC-7 equipped with an array of special sensors that can provide high-resolution imagery as well as other detection capabilities.
The military operates only a handful of the all-weather, specialized planes, with some based at Fort Bliss, Tex., to support counterdrug operations in Latin America, and a few others in South Korea to monitor activity in and around the demilitarized zone with the North. Under a plan worked out today between military and Justice Department officials, an F.B.I. agent aboard the plane would direct the surveillance mission and coordinate with law enforcement officials on the ground. "We're just providing the equipment and the operators," a senior military official said.
As part of their expanded role in the investigation, the F.B.I. and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms have committed a total of nearly 800 employees to the investigation, aiding with ballistics testing, forensic analysis, psychological profiling and other areas in which they have special expertise.
The F.B.I. has begun sending agents from field offices along the East Coast to aid in the investigation, and the A.T.F. has been adding personnel as well, as the shootings have continued, officials said.
"We are bringing in agents like you wouldn't believe," said Larry Scott, an A.T.F. special agent based at the joint command post in Montgomery County in suburban Washington.
Some Congressional officials have suggested that because the shootings have spread to a widening area that includes two states, five counties and the District of Colombia, the F.B.I. should consider taking the lead. But bureau officials have resisted that idea, saying that the Montgomery County police have done an admirable job and that the bureau is comfortable with its support role.
The bureau's position is part practical and part political. On the practical side, having the local authorities lead the investigation could make it easier to seek the death penalty against the sniper by bringing the case in state court if and when he is apprehended, officials said.
Both Virginia and Maryland have the death penalty, although Maryland declared a temporary moratorium this year. Federal law allows for capital punishment in certain circumstances, like murder of a federal agent or employee in the line of duty, but it probably would not apply in the case of Ms. Franklin or the other sniper attacks, officials said.
From a political standpoint, the F.B.I. is also wary of taking over the case because of the tensions that could create with the local police, officials acknowledged.
The bureau has developed a reputation over the years for bullying local police departments and other agencies, and William Baker, a former senior official at the bureau, said, "It's wise at this point for the F.B.I. to play a supportive role," adding, "They can be just as effective, and they won't risk harming their relations with the local police." He went on to say that "if it looks like this could be a terrorist attack, then and only then would I say that should be reconsidered."
The authorities are not treating the shootings as terrorist attacks because they say they have no evidence to suggest an organized, politically motivated operation.
Tom Ridge, head of the White House Office of Homeland Security, said today that while the families of the victims and many residents in the Washington area no doubt felt terrorized, it "remains to be seen" whether the attacks will fall under the standard definition of terrorism.
"I don't think we can foreclose that," he said.
-------- death penalty
Court Debates Race in Death Cases
October 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Scotus-Death-Penalty.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court took up another death penalty issue Wednesday, hearing an appeal from a black man who says the overwhelmingly white jury that put him on Texas' death row was selected on the basis of race.
The case may resolve how judges decide if a jury selection was unconstitutionally based on race. The subject has been confusing for lower courts.
Several justices seemed troubled by Texas prosecutors' tactics in Thomas Miller-El's case. His attorney, Seth Waxman, urged the court to throw out his death sentence and use his case as a model.
``Whatever this court decides, this case is going to stand as a benchmark'' as a test for what is tolerated in jury picking, Waxman said.
The Constitution forbids race discrimination in jury selection. The Supreme Court in 1986 made it easier for defendants to prove that discrimination affected their cases. The court has not, however, clearly said how judges should evaluate evidence.
Gena A. Bunn, an assistant attorney general in Texas, repeatedly told the court that the judge who reviewed Miller-El's allegations of racial bias properly ruled against him. She said that Miller-El's evidence was circumstantial.
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said he found it ``a little bit odd for a prosecutor to say circumstantial evidence is not relevant.''
Miller-El was sentenced to death for the 1985 killing of a 25-year-old clerk at a Holiday Inn near the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. The victim was white.
Before his trial, prosecutors used their power to challenge specific jurors as a way to eliminate 10 out of 11 potential black jurors. The one black chosen for the jury told prosecutors he regarded execution as too painless for killers and recommended instead ``pour some honey on them and stake them out over an ant bed.''
The Supreme Court intervened earlier this year, just days before Miller-El was to be executed in Texas. The Lone Star State has put to death 29 people this year and 285 since the Supreme Court allowed capital punishment to resume in 1976 -- far more than any other state.
Justice David H. Souter said that under the scenario argued by Texas, only a defendant with a ``slam-dunk'' jury bias case would ever get a chance to appeal.
Blacks are generally considered less likely to impose the death penalty than whites and are sometimes viewed as risky jurors because they may be skeptical of police, said Robert J. Cottrol, a criminal law professor at George Washington University.
Waxman said a training manual that had been used in the Dallas prosecutors' office recommended keeping black jurors off trials. The lawyer also said prosecutors questioned black potential jurors differently than whites in an attempt to obtain answers that would be used to keep them off the jury.
``The record is perfectly clear that there was disparate questioning,'' Justice John Paul Stevens agreed.
Using race in jury selection is a violation of the 14th Amendment's equal-protection guarantee. The court's ruling would not be limited to death row cases, but it could be written so narrowly to only help Miller-El.
The case is one of four death row appeals the Supreme Court has agreed to hear in the term that began last week. All involve the mechanics of imposing the death penalty. Justices have been asked to also consider abolishing capital punishment for killers who committed their crimes as minors.
The case is Miller-El v. Cockrell, 01-7662.
-------- forest service
Forest Service Warned on Terrorism
October 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Forest-Service-Terrorism.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Warned seven months ago that its firefighting planes were inviting targets for terrorists, the cash-strapped Forest Service has only reviewed security at fewer than a third of its air tanker bases and fortified just one with extensive upgrades, officials said.
With its staff stretched to the limit by a horrific wildfire season, the Forest Service hired a presidential management intern -- a May law school graduate with no aviation or security experience -- to coordinate the anti-terrorism response. The management program is for individuals with graduate degrees.
``Some deadlines were not met in the heat of the fire season,'' said Tom Harbour, deputy director of the agency's fire and aviation management division. ``If somebody's really determined, I couldn't guarantee that one of these aircraft wouldn't be hijacked. But I think we're at the point where we have taken all due precaution and more.''
Based in some of the most sparsely populated areas of the country, the services' air tanker planes can drop 3,000 gallons of chemicals at one time -- about six times the capacity of crop dusters that were an early concern of U.S. officials after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
The 51 large air tankers, owned and operated by private companies and based at Forest Service airfields, ``are vulnerable to theft and could be attractive to terrorists wishing to disperse biological or chemical weapons,'' concluded a March report by the inspector general of the Agriculture Department, the Forest Service's parent agency.
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the financially strapped agency has only had money and resources to assess the threat at 14 of 52 air tanker bases, said Tim Melchert, 35, the presidential management intern assigned since last August to work on the agency's aviation security.
Only the base in Ogden, Utah has been strengthened with an significant upgrade that includes closed-circuit cameras and listening devices -- measures taken in preparation for 2002 winter Olympic events in the area.
Elsewhere, the Forest Service has tried low-tech deterrents: removing batteries, deflating tires, locking airplane doors and wheels and requiring identification for those entering the base.
The inspector general's report provided an alarming view of security at some remote airfields, concluding: ``Four of the seven air tanker bases we visited generally had only a chain link fence around the compound and not all of the gates were secured.''
The Forest Service has had formidable problems to overcome, including the 6.7 million acres burned in wildfires this year, compared with an annual average of 3.9 million acres over an 8-year period.
Some of the best security measures are incompatible with the need to get tankers in the air quickly. Locking the planes in a secure hangar, for instance, could waste precious moments in response time and in some cases could jeopardize homes near a spreading fire.
The firefighting industry trade group, the Aerial Firefighting Industry Association, is working voluntarily with the Forest Service, but mandatory security measures won't be written into contracts until next year.
Stephen Dunn, director of training for Forest Service contractor Hawkins and Powers Aviation Inc., of Greybull, Wyo., said his company conducts background checks on its aircrews but said each contractor makes its own decision on security precautions.
Harbour of the Forest Service said fewer than 100 pilots fly the large tankers, and agency officials have known most of them personally for years.
``After Sept. 11, we asked people to go from a fairly comfortable security to a much heightened security alert on those aircraft,'' Harbour said. ``We certainly had a much more laid-back sense of security prior to 9/11.
``We're much better than the 10th of September, 2001, but we still have a ways to go,'' he said.
Defense Department officials have said discoveries in Afghanistan showed al-Qaida was interested in nuclear technologies as well as biological and chemical weapons.
However, the ability to launch a chemical or biological attack from an air tanker could only be carried out by terrorists trained to fly the aircraft, fill its tanks and operate dispersal equipment.
Still, the government was concerned enough to order much smaller crop dusting planes grounded for several days at a time after the attacks, even at the height of the spraying season in some areas.
Andrew Moore, executive director of the National Agricultural Aviation Association, the crop dusters' trade group, said his members tried to explain during the grounding that loading chemical or biological agents would be difficult for terrorists.
The terrorists would be vulnerable to the health effects of the lethal agents, and presumably, they would have to deliver their material in a truck that could attract attention in a rural area.
The Forest Service uses fire retardant material that arrives by tanker truck in a liquid form and also uses powdered material that is converted to a liquid at an air base.
On the Net:
U.S. Forest Service http://www.fs.fed.us/
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
Coffee company delivers using 100 percent biodiesel
Wednesday, October 16, 2002
By GreenBiz.com
http://enn.com/news/enn-stories/2002/10/10162002/s_48681.asp
FT. BRAGG, Calif. - Motorists will soon notice an aroma of french fries on northern California's highways.
It won't be coming from a roadside fast food chain but from Thanksgiving Coffee Company's delivery trucks. The fleet will be running on biodiesel, an alternative fuel made from vegetable oil that greatly reduces harmful emissions.
Biodiesel is made from renewable resources like new or used vegetable oils or animal fats. It is nontoxic, biodegradable, and can be used in any diesel engine.
Harmful carbon dioxide emissions are reduced by 80 percent, and carbon monoxide emissions are an average 44 percent lower than those of petroleum diesel. When using pure biodiesel, the cancer risk of diesel exhaust is reduced by 90 percent, and the smog-forming potential is nearly 50 percent less than petroleum diesel.
Though more than 200 public and government agencies currently use biodiesel, Thanksgiving Coffee is the first private fleet in the state of California to use B100 - pure biodiesel - in its delivery operations. It joins only a handful of private fleets nationwide using the fuel.
"We think it's wonderful to see a private company like this taking a proactive approach in protecting the environment while contributing to our economy and domestic energy security," said Bob Metz, president of the National Biodiesel Board, the nonprofit trade association for the biodiesel industry.
Thanksgiving Coffee applied for and was granted AB 2766 funds -also known as the Transportation Fund for Clean Air - to offset the difference in cost in fueling its fleet with biodiesel rather than petroleum diesel. These resources are allotted to county Air Quality Management Districts by the State Department of Motor Vehicles in order to finance projects that reduce emissions within those districts.
Yokayo Biofuels, located in Ukiah, Calif., will make regular deliveries of biodiesel to the Thanksgiving Coffee facilities in Ft. Bragg, where the trucks will fuel up before departing for their delivery routes. A network of biodiesel fueling stations in northern California will provide the fleet with the fuel on the road, though it can be blended with regular petroleum diesel if biodiesel is not available.
--------
Europe Pushes for Renewable Energy
October 16, 2002
New York Times
By PAUL MELLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/16/business/worldbusiness/16ENER.html
BRUSSELS, Oct. 15 - Romano Prodi has seen the hydrogen-powered light.
In an interview today, Mr. Prodi, the president of the European Commission, described his view of Europe in a post-fossil-fuel era, when homes would generate the power they need from renewable sources like the wind and the sun, store it in hydrogen fuel cells and harness it as needed, replacing all the polluting energy sources in use today.
He is not just musing. Speaking for the 15-nation European Union at a conference in Johannesburg over the summer, he said the union had set a goal of obtaining 22 percent of its electricity and 12 percent of all energy from renewable sources by 2010.
Economics and geopolitics are behind the move as much as environmental concerns. Europe depends much more heavily on imported energy than the United States does: around 70 percent of its oil and gas comes from abroad, mainly the Middle East and Russia.
"For us, reducing fossil fuel dependency is a priority," Mr. Prodi said.
The great impediment to wider use of renewable energy has been the difficulty of storing and transporting it for later use, a practical necessity that fossil fuels make relatively simple. Hydrogen may, too, which is why Mr. Prodi takes it so seriously.
Last week, the commission convened the first meeting of a panel of senior executives from European companies with stakes in the matter, like Royal Dutch/Shell, DaimlerChrysler and Rolls-Royce, the aircraft engine maker. The panel will advise the union on the development of hydrogen fuel cells, which promise to be a practical power source for vehicles and fixed use.
The commission, the executive body of the union, has already earmarked more than 2.1 billion euros ($2 billion) for research over the next five years into sustainable energy projects, a 20-fold increase in the last five years (1997-2001). A central focus will be hydrogen fuel cells, a field where the union has lagged the United States and Japan in publicly financed research.
Mr. Prodi said that Europe was poised to leap ahead of its rivals in its overall energy strategy. "Neither the United States nor Japan is clear on its goals," he said, and without clear goals, there is little progress.
Industry agrees. "The European commission is playing a very significant role now in developing hydrogen fuel cells," said Don Huberts, chief executive of Shell Hydrogen, after the advisory panel met last week. "It is providing a framework for the introduction of the new technologies in the E.U. It would be very hard to convert the environmental benefits into consumer benefits without this political leadership."
Herbert Kohler, director of environmental affairs at DaimlerChrysler, said political support was vital. "For the car industry, we can do a lot ourselves, but at a certain point we need fuel - and that means involving others," Mr. Kohler said after the meeting. "We need legislative and financial support to stimulate this sector, and for that we need government involvement."
Researchers have been trying for decades to harness hydrogen as a cheap fuel. Mr. Prodi said that now, for the first time, technological advances "give us the message that we are on the eve of being able to do this cost effectively."
"We are not working on a scientific experiment," he continued. "Science is already on board. We are working for change in the most important pattern of consumption of a contemporary society."
Before assuming the presidency of the European Commission, Mr. Prodi was prime minister of Italy, where he was credited with preparing the country to adopt the euro. In Brussels, he has overseen preparations for the European Union to take in 10 new members in 2004.
The energy project is in the same league as these other big ideas, Mr. Prodi said. "The difference is that with enlargement and with the euro, there is a big bang. Not here. My role here is to kick this process off; others will work on its implementation."
But before Mr. Prodi can fulfill his wider energy ambitions, there are still the union's existing energy goals to achieve, notably the creation of a liberalized market in energy within the union. Continuing state ownership and support of some major utilities, like Electricité de France, is creating friction with neighboring nations that have privatized faster.
Even old-fashioned energy monopolies like Electricité de France have a role to play in the energy future Mr. Prodi foresees, he said, by helping with the transition.
Mr. Prodi put the cost of converting Europe to a decentralized energy grid based on hydrogen fuel cells placed at or near the point of energy consumption at about five times the cost of installing a mobile-phone network. "The cost is enormous," he said, "but it is not out of reach."
Without involvement of the private sector, the project will not succeed, he said, but companies will become involved in building the new energy network only if there is a strong political will behind them.
What if the looked-for dawn of cheap hydrogen energy never breaks? "Maybe this will fail," Mr. Prodi said. "But then there are no other serious alternatives."
-------- ACTIVISTS
The Growing Nuclear Threat:
Applying the Lessons of History to Today's International Crises
Wednesday October 16
at 8:00 pm in Ward Circle Building Room 2,
American University Campus
In 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Today, 8 nations have nuclear weapons and several others are considering joining the nuclear club. Earlier this year, nuclear-armed India and Pakistan almost went to war over Kashmir. The Bush Administration's recent Nuclear Posture Review has dramatically lowered the threshold for U.S. use of nuclear weapons. The threats of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism are greater than ever. Learn from nuclear experts and Hiroshima survivors what you can do to help prevent nuclear war and to help eliminate the weapons of mass destruction that pose the greatest threat to the continued existence of life on our planet.
The Department of History, CAS and the Nuclear Studies Institute invite you to a hear
TADATOSHI AKIBA, Mayor of Hiroshima and former Professor of Mathematics at Tufts University and Hiroshima Shudo University.
JONATHAN SCHELL, world renowned authority on nuclear issues, and author of numerous books on nuclear disarmament, including The Gift of Time: The Case for Abolishing Nuclear Weapons Now, The Abolition, and The Fate of the Earth--a 1980s bestseller voted one of the top 60 works of journalism in the 20th century. Harrison Salisbury called The Fate of the Earth "the most important book of the decade. Perhaps of the century."
KOKO TANIMOTO KONDO, Hiroshima atomic bomb survivor and daughter of Rev. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, immortalized in John Hersey's Hiroshima. Ms. Kondo was a 1969 graduate of American University.
PETER KUZNICK, Professor of History and Director of American University's Nuclear Studies Institute.
-------
Photos . Veterans Against War on Iraq March on White House
by EXB Protest Photography
Wed Oct 16 '02
elvertbarnes@yahoo.com
http://images.indymedia.org/imc/washingtondc/signs.whitehouse.vet.16oct2.jpg
WDC . 16oct2 - This afternoon the Veteran Coalition of 15 protesters marched in front of White House with the demand that President George Bush must work through the UN in unity with France, Germany and other alies incuding Arab nations. Details are below and pictures are attached. (article 1)
Earlier this afternoon a small group of fifteen (15) demonstrators calling themselves "The Veterans Coaliton for Sanity of Iraq" picketed in front of the White House. At 1pm approximately twelve (12) gathered behind the White House on the Ellipse in the rain armed with umbrellas and wearing their available uniforms and medals. Shortly thereafter and with the arrival of another member who brought protest signs and a bullhorn which one of the women asked "Will we be using the bullhorn?" (I knew then that I was at a different kind of anti-war rally) the Veterans March Against Bush's Rush to Iraq War, led by WWII veteran Yehchi Kuwayama, was underway.
As they proceeded east along NY Avenue toward 17th Street the march organizer and contact person, Lawrence Lader, adorned in his military uniform asked "What should we shout?" (Anoter indication that this was a difference kind of anti-war protest than the Black Voices For Peace White House Protest that I documented this past Saturday). Someone shouted back "No War!".
At 17th Street they turned north and marched pass the Old Executive Office Building and then turned right onto Pennsylvania Avenue en route to the White House with the demand that President George Bush can not "go it alone" against Iraq but must work only through the United Nations in unity with France, Germany and other allies including Arab nations. With the exception of former Marine Kevin McCarron and a few others the participants were WWII veterans including retired DC Superior Court Judge Orm W. Ketcham who was Lieut. Commander, US Navy, of the US Cleveland Cruiser.
This older but more mature group marched to a different beat than the demonstrations that I have witnessed over the past few years in WDC. When the police arrived and reminded the demonstrators that they must not stand still as they must keep moving there were no shouts at nor 'name-calling' of the police. And, in fact, one of the protesters joked with the officer that "We'll too old to keep movin'. Can't we just stand still?". The officer responded jokingly but seriously "... then walk in a circle but just keep movin'!".
And as I departed from the White House running to get my photos processed the group of fifteen (15) was laughing and joking with the two policemen ... yet marching in a circle as they kept moving in the rain ... armed with umbrellas and protest signs wearing their available uniforms and medals.
This was a different kind of anti-war march, at least, for me. Though their stump was more of a step and their shouts were not as loud their enthusiasm, purpose and wisdom are unmatched as the message was the same. If any group can change President Bush's mind it would be this group. Or one just like it.
Contact person for the Veterans Coalition is Lawerence Lader at 51 Fifth Avenue, #10A, New York NY 10003. Voice 212 255 0682 . Fax 212 620 6166
-------
------- OneList (submissions from subscribers)
------- Depleted Uranium Keeps On Killing!
-----------
Posted
without profit or payment for research and educational
purposes only,
in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107.