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NUCLEAR
Area Water Utilities Watch for Terrorism
Beware North Korea's big brother
N. Korea Puts Edge On Visit To Bush
Powell Meets South Korea on North's Nuclear Program
North Korea's Arsenal Worries U.S.
Glance at N. Korea's Nuclear Program
Seoul to Urge Talks to Deal With A-Arms in North Korea
Nuclear Enabler
Russia spurned $10 billion U.S. deal to end Iran nuke program
Split on Nuclear Plants: Weak Spot or Fortress?
U.S.: $10B If Russia Stops Iran Aid
For the Record
No Time To Sleep
U.S. may limit suits over smallpox
MILITARY
Nigeria rejects World Court ruling on border row with Cameroon
Scud Igniter Said Found on Iraq-Bound Ship -Sources
Bosnian Serbs admit to arms exports to Iraq
Yugoslavia widens probe into alleged military sales to Iraq
Yugoslav Aides Are Fired for Sales of Fighter-Jet Parts to Iraq
India Withdraws Troops From Border
'Refusenik' Reservists in Israel Make Their Case
Hostage Crisis in Moscow Enters Dangerous Phase
Richard Helms Dies;
Israel Accuses Army Officer of Spying For Hezbollah
Bedouin Soldiers in Israeli Army Accused of Spying
Security Council Gets U.S. Proposal on Disarming Iraq
Highlights of U.S. Iraq Resolution
Text of U.S. Iraq Draft Resolution
U.S. Plans II: Defense Department Will Test-Fire Scuds
Pentagon Ready to Resume China Talks
Pentagon Sets Up Intelligence Unit
Iraq expels some foreign journalists
Good Reasons Aren't Enough for Bush
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Secrecy Law Not Needed, Ashcroft Tells Congress
U.S. Announces FBI Office in China
FBI agents quiz surgeon 'who treated Bin Laden'
FBI: Possible attacks on transportation systems
ACTIVISTS
NUNS IN COURT TODAY
War in Iraq is wrong, 51 church leaders say
-------- NUCLEAR
------ accidents and safety
Area Water Utilities Watch for Terrorism
By Susan DeFord
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 24, 2002; Page AA03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A4327-2002Oct23?language=printer
It used to be that water utilities prepared for floods, droughts, electrical power outages, emergency spills.
"The enemy before had been Mother Nature," said Stephen Gerwin, operations support manager for the Laurel-based Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission (WSSC), among the 10 largest water utilities in the United States.
Now Gerwin must consider terrorists and figure out how to shield an elaborate system spread over 1,000 square miles from massive sabotage.
The cataclysmic events of Sept. 11, 2001, have thrust new responsibilities on providers of the nation's drinking water. And water utilities, such as WSSC and others in the Washington region, are joining a fast-moving national effort to assess the potential for terrorists to poison or disrupt their water systems.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency expects to spend $53 million -- stemming from the Bioterrorism Act that Congress passed earlier this year -- to help 400 large public utilities across the country examine their systems.
Federal officials, who are distributing $115,000 grants to individual water utilities, are asking them to assess how well their systems detect dangerous conditions, how effectively they can delay the impact and how quickly they can respond to threats. The agency wants reports by March.
Federal officials also will work with thousands of small and medium-size water suppliers to improve their security over the next year and a half.
"Everyone realizes we're dealing with very serious stakes here, and they are acting accordingly," said G. Tracy Mehan III, the EPA's assistant administrator for water.
Ultimately, the efforts could carry a steep cost. Security for water utilities can be more difficult than for highly sensitive sites such as nuclear power plants, said Martin J. Allen, director of technology transfer for the research foundation of the American Water Works Association in Denver.
"Whereas a nuclear plant is concentrated [in one location], it's more of a daunting task to protect every [water] storage tank, every intake site," he said. "We should focus attention to protect the areas of greatest risk."
The WSSC has nearly completed its assessment of a system that encompasses four reservoirs in the Patuxent and Potomac watersheds, 60 storage tanks, 14 pumping stations and 5,200 miles of water mains. It provides service to 1.6 million people in Montgomery and Prince George's counties and sells some water to the Howard Bureau of Utilities.
Howard County, however, purchases most of its water from Baltimore. It is using its $115,000 EPA grant to examine potential weak points in its system of water mains, storage tanks and pumping stations, which serve about 180,000 people in the county's eastern half. Most residents in western Howard have private water sources such as wells.
Anne Arundel County also is assessing its system, which provides 300,000 people with drinking water that mainly comes from deep underground aquifers.
As the studies got underway, Gerwin of the WSSC found himself in the uncomfortable position of withholding information from his colleagues in the industry, for fear that crucial details could fall into the wrong hands.
"It's a blueprint of all our vulnerabilities," he said. "For a public agency, it's difficult to deal with. Times have changed."
The Maryland General Assembly earlier this year passed a law keeping the utilities' security assessments confidential. The EPA also is careful about how much paperwork it requires from utilities.
"That's surprising," said Jeff Welty, the deputy chief of Howard's Bureau of Utilities. "Usually they want 50 copies of everything."
When the EPA eventually receives utility assessments from across the country, "we are definitely treating them as close-hold documents," Mehan said.
Backup equipment built into most water utility systems since the 1950s and 1960s should help assure that utilities still can operate even if parts of them are disabled, Gerwin said.
But features that deter intruders -- guards, fences and gates, sophisticated locking devices and other barriers -- traditionally have not been a high priority in a water utility's infrastructure, he said.
"We're going to have to take a long hard look at that physical security," Gerwin said.
Anne Arundel officials said their supply is less susceptible to terrorism because the water is pumped from deep underground into treatment plants that already have 24-hour security. Nevertheless, "we'll be taking a hard look at it. We're not that naive," said Pam Jordan, the county's land-use public information officer.
A focus for Howard officials is making sure that in a crisis, their system can keep supplying critical users such as Howard County General Hospital, Welty said.
The utilities' assessments likely will require new spending, and there's no federal money earmarked for anti-terrorism measures now.
WSSC, which has reduced its work force and cut costs to keep rates stable for five years, eventually may have to consider an increase to help pay for heightened security, officials said. Howard and Anne Arundel utility officials said they don't foresee rate increases in the next few years as a result of new security efforts.
But in the long run, utilities will pay significantly for expanded security, Allen said.
"It costs us more for airline security. It's going to cost us more for drinking water."
-------- asia
Beware North Korea's big brother
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
October 24, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20021024-6423382.htm
The item "Missile deployment" from Inside the Ring (Nation, Friday) is a needed reminder of the growing danger of nuclear proliferation in East Asia.
North Korea's recent admission that it has a program to develop nuclear weapons, after years of denials, is at the center of world attention now. It is important to remember, however, that Taiwan has faced an even clearer and more present missile threat from the People's Republic of China (PRC) for many years.
The PRC never has ruled out the use of force against Taiwan to realize its goal of unification, and its defense budget grows larger every year. It should not be surprising, then, that the people of Taiwan reject the PRC's "one country, two systems" formula, which is now being applied in Hong Kong. Political and press freedoms in the former British colony are eroding while the people of Taiwan already enjoy free and fair elections, human rights and free speech. The PRC's brazen disregard for the concerns of the governed offer no incentive for Taiwan to give up the democracy its people have worked so hard to establish.
Despite the PRC's threats and efforts to isolate it, Taiwan has worked ceaselessly to foster peace in the Taiwan Straits. President Chen Shui-bian has repeatedly shown good will toward the PRC since he was inaugurated in 2000. In his National Day message on Oct. 10, Mr. Chen called on the PRC to remove the approximately 400 missiles aimed at Taiwan, saying, "Only by engaging in rational discussions and allowing the 'doors of dialogue' to be reopened can the antagonistic deadlock in cross-strait relations be resolved."
The European Parliament on Sept. 5 passed, by a vote of 448-26, a resolution in which it "expresses its concern at the arms buildup between China and Taiwan; urges both sides to de-escalate the arms buildup, and in particular, for China to withdraw missiles in the coastal provinces across from Taiwan."
My government understands the threat posed by regimes with military power far beyond what is needed for national defense, not to mention the fact that Beijing has even turned its tanks and machine guns on its own people. At this potentially dangerous time in East Asia, the American people should remember that they have an ally in the region who shares their commitment to freedom, democracy and human rights: the Republic of China on Taiwan.
PON-TO PENG Acting director Information division Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the United States Washington
-------- china
N. Korea Puts Edge On Visit To Bush
China's Jiang Will Discuss Nuclear Bid
By Glenn Kessler and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, October 24, 2002; Page A23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A8535-2002Oct24?language=printer
The visit of President Jiang Zemin to President Bush's ranch in Texas tomorrow was intended as a sentimental send-off for the 76-year-old Chinese leader as he prepares for his expected retirement next month. But the disclosure that North Korea has a secret nuclear weapons program has turned the largely social visit into a high-stakes discussion over how to manage this new crisis.
Unlike Bush's confrontation with Iraq, which holds little interest for the Chinese, North Korea directly affects Chinese aspirations as a regional power. While the U.S.-Sino relationship has been relatively smooth since Sept. 11, 2001, it has not been especially close. Bush administration officials are making the case to the Chinese that substantial cooperation on North Korea could have the same positive effect that the war on terrorism has had on U.S.-Russian relations.
"The Chinese have influence," one senior official said. "We think it's important that they use it."
After a 24-hour visit to Chicago, Jiang arrived in Houston yesterday. He was to tour NASA's Johnson Space Center today, then attend a dinner with former president George H.W. Bush, who lives in Houston.
During the visit to President Bush's ranch in Crawford on Friday, Bush and Jiang will meet for 90 minutes before breaking for a two-hour lunch with first lady Laura Bush and Jiang's wife, Wang Yeping. Currently, there are no plans for a communique, although the two leaders will hold a joint news conference after their meetings. Bush has pressed for the resumption of senior defense discussions between U.S. and Chinese officials, suspended by the Pentagon early in 2001, and some officials said it was possible that a renewal of higher-level contacts will be announced.
On Saturday, Bush will fly to Mexico to attend the annual summit of Asian Pacific nations, where coordinating a challenge to North Korea will also be a key topic of the talks. Jiang also will attend the summit.
"By and large, the relationship [with China] is in good shape," national security adviser Condoleezza Rice told reporters yesterday, citing healthy trade relations and cooperation on counterterrorism as well as progress on "difficult issues" such as proliferation and human rights. "The stewardship of the relationship has been good, and the two presidents have a good relationship."
David Shambaugh, director of the China policy program at George Washington University, said that although the United States and China are "on the same wavelength" about the dangers of a North Korean nuclear program, they differ on how to deal with the problem. The Chinese have argued it is counterproductive to isolate North Korea, as many in the Bush administration have argued.
"They have been very disturbed by the aloof and semi-confrontational approach of the Bush administration" toward North Korea, Shambaugh said.
Minxin Pei, a Chinese specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who recently visited China, said China can cajole and bribe the North Koreans, but it does not have total control over them. The Chinese have leverage, in terms of their economic assistance, but they believe that maintaining the current North Korean government as a buffer with South Korea is in their national interest. According to Pei, North Korea understands this and takes advantage of it.
Pei said a measure of the Bush administration's success in persuading China to take action on North Korea is whether Bush and Jiang issue a statement on North Korea, specifically that the Chinese are sending a high-level delegation to Pyongyang, North Korea's capital.
"We need to see what common strategies we can employ to try to get the North Koreans to live up to their international obligations," Rice said. "This is an opportunity, as the president has said, for the international community to stand up and act together on this particular issue."
Administration officials have gotten satisfaction at how the secret North Korean nuclear project has brought home to the Chinese the dangers of proliferation. U.S. officials have lectured the Chinese for years about clamping down on proliferation, and now it appears that Chinese assistance to Pakistan on its nuclear weapons program has migrated to North Korea.
"The Chinese are very embarrassed by this development," an official said.
As the Crawford, Tex., meeting has approached, the Chinese government has taken steps long sought by the Clinton and Bush administrations to help stem proliferation. In August, it issued long-awaited export regulations for missile technology, and in the past week it did the same for dual-use biological and chemical agents. U.S. officials are still studying the Chinese plans, but one official said the initial impression is that the regulations represent a good step.
The Chinese have pressed the Bush administration to lift a suspension on export licenses for satellite launches on Chinese rockets, imposed in 2000 by the Clinton administration because of renewed evidence of ballistic missile technology transfers to Pakistan. But a U.S. official said the Bush administration is not prepared to do that at Friday's meeting. Experts said the market for telecommunications satellites is so saturated that such a move would be largely symbolic.
The Chinese are also concerned about the Pentagon's increasingly close relationship with Taiwan, which China considers a renegade province. Civilian Pentagon officials have promoted the idea of "interoperability" of U.S. and Taiwanese forces, which would coordinate personnel and communications during a war -- a goal that the United States has not yet attained with NATO.
A Defense authorization bill, stalled in the Senate, would mandate that the Pentagon implement an interoperability plan with Taiwan. "In essence, it would validate what the Pentagon is already pursuing," one congressional aide said. The State Department has opposed the provision. Congress also inserted language in a State Department authorization bill, signed into law by Bush, that says Taiwan should be treated as though it were a major non-NATO military ally.
One senior administration official said that Chinese actions, such as its military buildup across from Taiwan, "is forcing us to react and pushing us into a close military relationship with Taiwan."
"We are not containing China," he added. "But we are showing them there are rules to the international game."
Chinese officials have also pressed for a resumption of senior defense exchanges, which have not taken place since November 2000, before Bush took office. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, along with key members of Congress, has expressed skepticism about the value of such contacts, arguing that China has never provided the same level of access to military sites and information as the United States. The Pentagon has scrutinized even lower level exchanges, approving them on a case-by-case basis for the amount of "reciprocity and transparency."
Advocates of such exchanges argue that they serve as a deterrent to Chinese aggression because it demonstrates the superiority of U.S. forces. But opponents, pointing to China's heavy spending to modernize its forces, ask why the United States should give any lessons to the Chinese that can eventually be used against Taiwan.
The Pentagon, which has clashed with State Department and White House officials over the issue, signaled yesterday its position had changed. "We are amendable to holding such talks," said Lt. Cmdr. Jeff Davis, a spokesman, citing "progress in overall U.S.-China bilateral relationship."
"The past year we've seen the emergence of serious challenges to global peace and stability, and we believe a strategic dialogue on these issues with China would be useful," Davis said. In the Clinton administration, such talks were held at the undersecretary of defense level.
"This has been a bloody battle for 18 months or more within the administration," Shambaugh said, adding that he suspected it would prove to be "a very minimalistic and rather superficial restoration of the exchanges."
-------- korea
Powell Meets South Korea on North's Nuclear Program
Reuters
Thursday, October 24, 2002
ttp://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10949-2002Oct24?language=printer
LOS CABOS, Mexico (Reuters) - Secretary of State Colin Powell kicked off high-level consultations on a joint approach to North Korea on Thursday at a meeting with South Korean Foreign Minister Choi Sung-hong.
Powell had talks with Choi in the Mexican resort of Los Cabos on the sidelines of an annual meeting of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, a U.S. official said.
The United States says it wants to consult its Asian allies, as well as China and Russia, before deciding how to put pressure on North Korea to abandon the uranium enrichment program it acknowledged to a U.S. official earlier this month.
Powell will have talks with Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov in Los Cabos later on Thursday and President Bush will see Chinese President Jiang Zemin in Texas on Friday.
On Wednesday, White House national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said the United States did not plan any step against North Korea before consulting others.
"We don't want to get ahead of ourselves in taking measures until we have decided how we are going to structure diplomacy about this," she told reporters.
Powell told reporters on Wednesday evening: "This is a time to approach this matter with care, to consult closely with our friends. We are all in this."
----
North Korea's Arsenal Worries U.S.
By Matt Kelley
Associated Press Writer
Thursday, October 24, 2002; 2:22 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A11297-2002Oct24?language=printer
WASHINGTON -- North Korea's cryptic comment that it has "more powerful" weapons highlights U.S. worries that Pyongyang may be hiding potent biological weapons like smallpox or advanced nuclear weapons.
While U.S. officials say they believe North Korea probably doesn't have thermonuclear weapons, finding out what's in the reclusive dictatorship's arsenal will require inspections.
"North Korea is a closed system," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Tuesday. "Our intelligence on it is imperfect."
Inspecting and disarming North Korea will be one topic President Bush takes up Friday and Saturday when he meets with the leaders of China, Japan and South Korea. Pyongyang has thwarted or rejected past weapons inspection efforts by the International Atomic Energy Agency and other groups.
The United States broke off talks with North Korea earlier this month after Pyongyang admitted having a clandestine program to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. That program violates a 1994 pact in which North Korea agreed to halt its nuclear weapons development in exchange for two civilian nuclear reactors and other aid.
The U.S. is demanding that North Korea eliminate its nuclear weapons program before any talks resume, while North Korea has said America must drop its "hostile policy."
"The North Koreans have admitted cheating," said Gary Samore, a former State Department and National Security Council official involved in negotiating the 1994 pact. "It's hard to see on what basis one could proceed to negotiate another agreement with them."
It is unclear what the North Koreans meant by the "more powerful" remark, said U.S. defense and intelligence officials, who said there's no public evidence North Korea has anything stronger than one or two relatively crude nuclear bombs.
The comment could have referred to the plutonium-based nuclear weapons North Korea is believed to have built, or it may have just been rhetoric, said one U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The North Koreans are not believed to have constructed advanced nuclear weapons like those in the U.S., Russian, Chinese, French and British arsenals, the official said. Those thermonuclear weapons - which are hundreds or thousands of times stronger than the weapons North Korea is believed to have - are very complex and difficult to make.
North Korea also could have been referring to biological agents, some weapons experts say.
One of the deadliest potential biological weapons is smallpox, a virus declared eradicated from nature in 1980 through a global vaccination program. Smallpox kills about a third of its victims and can be transmitted from person to person, unlike other biological weapons such as anthrax.
Many experts suspect North Korea has samples of the smallpox virus. A Russian intelligence report made public in 1993 accused Pyongyang of having a smallpox weapon, though that has not been publicly corroborated.
A declassified U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency report from May 1994 also quotes an unnamed source as saying Russian scientists gave North Korea smallpox samples. That report has not been confirmed either.
"I don't know of anything specific one can speculate that North Korea has," said Terence Taylor, a former chief U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq.
"The Iraqi biological program surprised us by what was in it," said Taylor, now with the International Institute for Strategic Studies. "You might find unusual agents in the North Korean arsenal."
Finding out what biological weapons North Korea has would take inspections, said Amy Smithson, a chemical and biological weapons expert at the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington.
"What intelligence can tell from afar is that a facility may look like it could be used for biological weapons," Smithson said. "The most generic buildings could be suitable for biological work, especially if they were willing to play fast and loose with safety."
Others doubt North Korea's remark referred to biological weapons.
"There's nothing more powerful than nuclear weapons," said Samore, who worked on the 1994 agreement. "It sounds like the conversation was not one where precision was very carefully observed."
The United States has accused North Korea of having a chemical weapons stockpile; South Korea says that stockpile includes nerve, blister, choking and blood agents.
Those weapons, while horrific, are not powerful enough to be in the same league as nuclear and the deadliest biological weapons.
"Chemical weapons are, in the greater military sense, a tactical weapon for use on the battlefield, not on a strategic level that nuclear and biological weapons are," Smithson said.
On the Net:
Stimson center: http://www.stimson.org
IISS: http://www.iiss.org
----
Glance at N. Korea's Nuclear Program
The Associated Press
Thursday, October 24, 2002; 2:22 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A11300-2002Oct24?language=printer
Some facts about North Korea's nuclear weapons program:
-North Korea agreed to end its nuclear weapons program in 1994 in exchange for help from the United States and other countries in building two light-water nuclear power plants and in supplying heavy fuel oil.
-Pyongyang admitted in 1994 that they had produced some plutonium in two nuclear reactors, the White House says, though how much they made is unclear. U.S. intelligence estimates say North Korea produced enough to make one or two nuclear weapons.
-After shutting down the reactors, North Korea agreed to secure storage of 8,000 spent fuel rods that could be reprocessed to extract plutonium. U.S. government and International Atomic Energy Agency estimates say those rods hold about five bombs' worth of plutonium.
-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said last week he believes North Korea has made a few nuclear weapons.
-North Korea admitted earlier this month it had a clandestine nuclear weapons program under way based on enriched uranium, not plutonium, the White House says.
-The uranium enrichment program North Korea plans apparently would make enough material to build one or two nuclear weapons per year, said David Albright, a former U.N. nuclear inspector and North Korea expert.
-U.S. officials do not believe North Korea can make thermonuclear weapons, which require much more expertise, material and precision than the crude weapons Pyongyang is suspected of having. Thermonuclear weapons are hundreds or thousands of times more powerful than crude nuclear weapons.
Some facts about smallpox:
-Smallpox is caused by the variola virus, a scourge of humanity for thousands of years. It was eradicated through an aggressive vaccination program; the last U.S. case was in Texas in 1949 and the last case in nature was in Somalia in 1977.
-The virus is contagious and can be spread from close contact with an infected person, such as breathing in virus droplets or touching infected bodily fluids or contaminated bedding.
-About two weeks after exposure to the virus, an infected person suffers a high fever and other flu-like symptoms. One to four days later, the smallpox rash develops, first as red spots on the tongue and mouth. By the fourth day, the rash spreads to the skin, concentrated on the face, hands and feet. The rash is a series of hard, raised bumps, called pustules.
-Within two weeks, the pustules start to form scabs, which fall off and leave scars.
-Smallpox is fatal to about 30 percent of those infected.
-U.S. officials worry that North Korea or Iraq might have stocks of smallpox, which could be used as a weapon.
-The United States has developed enough vaccine for the entire U.S. population. The vaccine is effective against the virus when administered up to four days after exposure. The vaccine also causes serious, sometimes fatal, side effects in about 15 out of every million people vaccinated.
Source: U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
--------
Seoul to Urge Talks to Deal With A-Arms in North Korea
October 24, 2002
New York Times
By DON KIRK
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/24/international/asia/24KORE.html
SEOUL, South Korea, Oct. 23 - President Kim Dae Jung today signaled the conciliatory approach that aides said he would advocate when he discusses the North Korean nuclear threat on Saturday in Mexico with President Bush and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan.
Mr. Kim said dialogue with North Korea was "the only way to resolve this matter," according to a spokesman, who quoted him as adding, "I hope you understand this."
Mr. Kim, who has made reconciliation with the North his primary objective since his election in December 1997, appeared to favor a considerably softer response to the revelation of North Korea's nuclear program than that of some American officials.
The American ambassador to Korea, Thomas C. Hubbard, said at an economic forum here on Tuesday that there was "very little basis for trust and confidence that dialogue will lead to a solution."
Mr. Kim carefully dismissed both military action and economic sanctions, the two approaches that he said were the only alternatives to dialogue. "Military action can result in great tragedy," he said. "Nobody wants that." Economic sanctions, he added, would give North Korea "the freedom for nuclear responses."
That remark, said a spokesman, showed Mr. Kim's opposition to abandoning a 1994 agreement that calls for construction of twin light-water nuclear reactors to meet the North's energy needs in return for the North's halting of nuclear weapons development. Korean officials have expressed concern that the United States might stop shipments of fuel that, under terms of the agreement, are being supplied to power North Korea's aged plants until the new reactors are up and running.
Many analysts believe the North, if not to some extent constrained by the Geneva agreement, would have no qualms about developing or testing nuclear weapons.
"If you disavow the agreed framework, the North Koreans are not obligated to inspections of stored fuel from the experimental reactor that was shut down in 1994," said Scott Snyder, representative of the Asia Foundation here and author of a book on negotiating with the North.
Although the North has resisted inspection of its nuclear installations by the International Atomic Energy Agency, one agency representative is constantly on duty at the North Korean nuclear complex at Yongbyon to make certain the fuel rods from the experimental reactor remain in storage.
North Korean officials admitted the existence of the program for developing nuclear warheads early this month during a visit by James A. Kelly, assistant United States secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific.
South Korea's unification minister, Jeong Se Hyun, who returned early today from four days of talks with North Korean officials in Pyongyang, said that in talks with the United States, his government would relay North Korea's demand that Washington end its "hostile policy" toward the North.
-------- pakistan
Nuclear Enabler
Pakistan today is the most dangerous place on Earth.
By Jim Hoagland
Thursday, October 24, 2002
Washington Post; Page A35
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A8422-2002Oct24?language=printer
The discovery that North Korea has been secretly enriching uranium for the nuclear weapons program it promised to freeze in 1994 demonstrates the dangers of putting faith in a confirmed and practiced liar. So does the news that Pakistan provided the nuclear technology and perhaps uranium to Kim Jong Il's regime.
Pakistan's role as a clandestine supplier shatters the Bush administration's efforts to paint that country as a flawed but well-meaning member of the coalition against terror. Pakistan today is the most dangerous place on Earth, in large part because the administration does not understand the forces it is dealing with there and has no policy to contain them.
Pervez Musharraf's Pakistan is a base from which nuclear technology, fundamentalist terrorism and life-destroying heroin are spread around the globe. American and French citizens and Christians of any nationality, including Pakistani, are indiscriminately slaughtered by fanatics as occasion arises. This nuclear-armed country is in part ungoverned, in part ungovernable.
The Bush administration's response is to protect both the life and reputation of President-for-life Musharraf and pretend that he is moving toward democracy. Huge amounts of American aid pour into Pakistan -- even as Washington's ability to monitor how that money is spent or stolen declines sharply.
This response pushes toward a disaster that Bush officials -- and a Congress that has been negligent to cowardly in exercising oversight on Pakistan -- will one day protest that they could not have seen coming. The truth will be that they ignored warnings that were in plain sight, as the first Bush administration did on Iraq's Saddam Hussein.
The second Bush administration sees the dangers that "axis of evil" members Iraq and North Korea pose. It is fashioning considered, realistic responses to those dangers. But it seems paralyzed by the perceived need to secure Musharraf's help in fighting al Qaeda and stabilizing Afghanistan. Official Washington will not even tell the truth to or about Musharraf, much less hold him accountable for his lies and subterfuge.
U.S. policy today amounts to giving money to Pakistan, which agrees to take it. This is a country where American diplomats are limited to one-year tours and not allowed to bring dependents. Nongovernmental organizations that normally would help the U.S. Agency for International Development gauge how aid money is being spent have closed down out of fear. The remaining AID personnel would take their lives in their hands by insisting on effective monitoring.
Elections rigged by Musharraf in his favor this month were praised extravagantly by State Department spokesman Richard Boucher as "an important milestone in the ongoing transition to democracy." That praise cannot be applied to the process or to the outcome, which gave new prominence to a fundamentalist Islamic coalition that promptly said it would seek to ban coeducation.
Rewards rule in all areas: The sanctions on U.S.-Pakistani military-to-military cooperation imposed in 1998 after Pakistan's nuclear tests were personally lifted last week by Central Command's Gen. Tommy Franks, who attended a joint exercise involving a grand total of 330 troops.
This came on Oct. 17, as David Sanger of the New York Times led the way in identifying Pakistan as the source of North Korea's uranium-enrichment process. A secret barter arrangement was suspected during the Clinton administration. It continued after Musharraf came to power in 1999 and was finally confirmed last summer, U.S. officials report.
Pyongyang sent missiles and missile technology to Islamabad in return for nuclear technology. There are strong indications that both nations have helped Iran develop nuclear and missile programs as well.
Asked about Pakistan's supplier role, Secretary of State Colin Powell said on television last Sunday that Musharraf had promised him that Pakistan was not engaged in this trade now. Powell then refused to talk about Pakistan's past role and would not even explain his silence on it.
Talking about the past would have exposed Musharraf's pattern of lies and evasions, which Powell has increasingly tolerated and covered for as they have become more flagrant. The secretary knows Musharraf lied publicly when giving pledges last spring to end cross-border terrorism -- pledges he has broken. Musharraf even lied about whether President Bush had talked to him about that subject in a September meeting in New York.
The past provides no reason to hope that Musharraf is telling the truth about not helping North Korea now, either. He has paid no price for lying to Powell about ending terrorism in Kashmir or about cooperating fully in crushing al Qaeda. The only consequences for duplicity have been rewards and protection. Why in the world would he suddenly change an approach that is working on every level for him?
-------- russia
Russia spurned $10 billion U.S. deal to end Iran nuke program
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM
Thursday, October 24, 2002
http://216.26.163.62/2002/ss_russia_10_24.html
WASHINGTON - The United States said it offered Russia a deal worth $10 billion in exchange for ending its nuclear program in Iran.
U.S. officials acknowledged that Russia has rejected the American proposal. Instead, Moscow has accelerated talks on expanding nuclear cooperation with Iran.
A delegation from Iran's Atomic Energy Organization has been holding talks in Moscow over amending an agreement on the Bushehr light-water nuclear reactor. The talks are said to focus on the transfer of spent nuclear fuel to Russia, Middle East Newsline reported.
U.S. officials said the proposal called for a Russian halt of aid to Iran's strategic programs, such as intermediate- and long-range missiles as well as the construction of nuclear reactors. This would include suspension of the Bushehr nuclear reactor, an $800 million project carried out by Moscow.
In return, the officials said, the United States would provide the green light for the development of a new Russian industry worth $10 billion. Under the proposal, the United States would allow third countries to transfer spent nuclear fuel to Russia. Such a transfer requires U.S. approval as Washington has supplied most of the nuclear fuel to countries outside the former East Bloc.
"An end to Russian proliferation to Iran would allow the United States and Russia to reap the full promise of our new strategic relationship," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said on Wednesday. "That would benefit Russia economically, politically and strategically far more than any short-term gain from sensitive transfers to Iran."
"One example is the potential transfer to Russia for storage of spent reactor fuel currently held by third countries, much of which requires U.S. approval for such transfer because the U.S. originally supplied the fresh fuel to those countries," Boucher added. "If the Russians end their sensitive cooperation with Iran, we have indicated we would be prepared to favorably consider such transfers, an arrangement potentially worth over $10 billion to Moscow."
U.S. officials said Iran is using the Bushehr project to develop an infrastructure for nuclear weapons. They said Iran plans to tip its intermediate- and long-range missiles with weapons of mass destruction.
A U.S. defense official said Iran failed in the latest test of its Shihab-3 missile. The official said the test of the intermediate-range missile took place in July and the missle failed to reach its desired range.
The official said tests were conducted in May and June. He said the United States does not have information of a reported test of a longer-range Shihab-4 missile in August.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
NEWS ANALYSIS
Split on Nuclear Plants: Weak Spot or Fortress?
October 24, 2002
New York Times
By MATTHEW L. WALD
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/24/politics/24NUKE.html
WASHINGTON, Oct. 23 - In the what's-next guessing game that began after the terrorist attacks last year, a divide has opened up among experts assessing the risk to the public from attacks on nuclear power plants.
Many current and former government officials say the reactors are in Al Qaeda's cross hairs, but inside the industry, many executives counter that what drives the issue is politics and unreasoning fear.
Current and former high-ranking officials at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland for a recent exercise on how to cope with terrorism illustrated this divide. Over two days, they simulated a meeting of the National Security Council and were fed hypothetical situations in which intelligence, vague and conflicting at first but becoming more specific as the hours went by, indicated an attack somewhere in the eastern United States.
They were also given an assessment that said that the targets vulnerable to the widest range of threats were not nuclear reactors, but places where chemicals were manufactured or stored.
Almost immediately, the role-players shifted the discussion to how to protect the reactors.
"The players defaulted in that direction," said Dave McIntyre, the deputy director of the Anser Institute for Homeland Security, a nonprofit group that sponsored the exercise with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Mr. McIntyre said he thought the concern with reactors was an unnecessary detour, because their security had been improved far more than security for other potential targets. But the group did not see it that way.
Reporters who were allowed to sit in on the exercise had to agree not to quote the participants, to allow them, the sponsors said, "to be as open and candid as possible" in the drill.
The group included former Senator Sam Nunn, playing the president; James M. Loy, the head of the Transportation Security Administration, playing the role of secretary of homeland security; Charles Curtis, a former under secretary of energy, playing energy secretary; George Terwilliger, former acting attorney general, as attorney general; R. James Woolsey, the former C.I.A. director, as national security adviser; Wesley Clark, the former supreme allied commander in Europe, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Other participants played the jobs they used to have: James S. Gilmore III, former governor of Virginia; Shirley Jackson, former chairwoman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission; James Lee Witt, former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and Dee Dee Myers, a former White House spokeswoman.
They explored creating a 50-mile zone around each nuclear plant where all flights would be banned, or bringing in antiaircraft batteries.
On the other side, some people outside the simulation who are actually in charge of security at nuclear plants say they do not believe that they are threatened by terrorism, and are unenthusiastic about security improvements.
Mark P. Findlay, the director of security at the Nuclear Management Company, which operates six Midwestern reactors, said in a telephone interview that there had been no credible threats against nuclear plants, and that he would prefer not to hire more guards now, for fear of having to lay them off later.
"How do I deal with staffing levels when I have a government that's based on politics and not events and credible threats?" Mr. Findlay said.
The airlines might once have said the same, and there have been attacks on nuclear plants abroad.
Mr. Findlay is not alone. Last month, 19 current and former executives in the nuclear power plant field published a paper in Science magazine that asserted that a reactor could easily withstand a crash of the kind that destroyed the World Trade Center, a position disputed by others, including some on whose work the authors relied. The Science article argued that talk of vulnerability was simply wild-eyed conjecture by people who never liked nuclear power anyway.
That category includes at least some local government officials who are now uneasy about the reactors in their midst. In the neighborhood of the Indian Point reactors, 40 miles north of midtown Manhattan, local governments have passed resolutions against them. In Westchester County, where the two plants are, the County Board of Legislators voted on Sept. 9 to close them eventually.
If the plants are so safe, why are so many people worried about them?
"The news media has made the nuclear industry the poster child for the post-Sept. 11 world," said Steve Kerekes, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's trade association. "People who have been inundated for a year now gravitate toward that topic."
"Some media grad student ought to do a study of air time and column inches dedicated to the subject," Mr. Kerekes said.
Peter Stockton, a nuclear security expert who is a former special assistant to the secretary of energy, drew a different conclusion. Mr. Stockton, who now works on civilian power plant security questions with the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit group here, said the power plant managers were in denial as the managers of nuclear weapons plants were when he was at the Energy Department.
"They say, `We've been at this for 50 years and we've never been attacked yet,' " he said. "They believe a credible threat is that a terrorist group has targeted that one plant, and they're coming."
Paul M. Blanch, an engineer who found safety problems a decade ago at the nuclear utility where he worked, and whom the Nuclear Regulatory Commission later said was mistreated by his employer as a result, said the denial was "par for the course for the nuclear industry."
"The industry has been defensive about every threat, whether it's security or accident," Mr. Blanch said.
"If something happens, like happened with airlines, maybe they wouldn't be so defensive," he said, "but it hasn't happened yet. "
-------- us politics
U.S.: $10B If Russia Stops Iran Aid
By Barry Schweid
AP Diplomatic Writer
Wednesday, October 23, 2002; 11:38 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8052-2002Oct23.html
WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration is holding out the incentive of a $10 billion project for Russia if it would stop helping Iran develop potent missiles and weapons of mass destruction.
The potentially lucrative deal involves storage of radioactive material from around the world.
"If the Russians end their sensitive cooperation with Iran, we have indicated we would be prepared to favorably consider such transfer arrangements potentially worth over $10 billion to Moscow," the State Department said.
A tradeoff could resolve one of the most difficult issues in an overall good relationship between President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
They will meet this weekend in Mexico at a conference of leaders of Asian and Pacific nations.
Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton was sent to Moscow in advance of the meeting to discuss U.S. concerns about Russia's assistance to Iran.
Bolton has talked to top Russian officials about the problem several times in the past without apparent results.
Specifically, the administration wants Russia to halt construction of a light-water nuclear reactor at the Iranian coastal city of Bushehr.
Russia has denied consistently it is helping Iran develop nuclear weapons or its missiles program. "The U.S. position is clear," the State Department said. "A weapons of mass destruction-armed Iran would be a major threat to Russia as well as to the United States and our friends and allies in the region."
Hinting that Bush will take the issue up with Putin, the statement said, "We will continue to intensively work this issue closely at senior levels with Russia."
An end to aiding Iran would benefit the U.S.-Russian relationship and help Russia "economically, politically and strategically far more than any short-term gain from sensitive transfers to Iran," the statement said.
The United States controls whether spent fuel from reactors in other countries can be transferred to Russia for storage because it originally provided the fresh fuel to the countries.
Russian Atomic Energy Minister Alexander Rumyantsev, who met with Bolton in Moscow, said afterward on Ekho Moskvy radio that "Russia is not providing any weapons technologies and is not even negotiating such projects with Iran."
Also on Wednesday, Bush signed into law the Russian Democracy Act, which authorizes - but does not actually provide - U.S. foreign aid to Russia for "the promotion of democracy, rule of law, international exchanges, human rights, economic reforms, administration of justice and the development of a free and independent media in Russia."
Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., who sponsored the legislation, said it would help Russia as it transitions to a democratic society and adopts a free market economy.
The bill is H.R. 2121.
----
For the Record
Here's how some major bills fared recently in Congress and how local congressional members voted, as provided by Thomas's Roll Call Report Syndicate.
Thursday, October 24, 2002
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A4331-2002Oct23?language=printer
2003 DEFENSE BUDGET For: 93 / Against: 1
The Senate sent President Bush the conference report on a bill (HR 5010) appropriating $355.1 billion for military operations in fiscal 2003, up 12 percent from the comparable 2002 bill. The bill funds major weapons systems as well as chemical and biological defenses in anticipation of war with Iraq. Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) cast the dissenting vote on grounds it did too little to eliminate wasteful spending and outdated programs.
The bill funds a 4.1 percent military pay raise and supports 1.4 million active duty troops and 865,000 National Guard and reserve personnel. It includes $417 million for helping Russia dismantle its nuclear arsenal; $14.8 billion for health care; $7.4 billion for the National Missile Defense; and $882 million for drug interdiction.
----
No Time To Sleep
By John McCain,
Republican senator from Arizona
Thursday, October 24, 2002
Washington Post; Page A35
I believe it is peace for our time . . .
Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.
-- British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, Sept. 30, 1938
As we contemplate preemptive action to prevent Saddam Hussein from acquiring the world's worst weapons, it's worth understanding how the temptation to go home and get a nice quiet sleep led directly to the inevitable crisis we now face on the Korean peninsula -- where North Korea's acknowledgment of a secret nuclear weapons program demonstrates the perils of entrusting American security to dangerously flawed agreements with rogue regimes.
This crisis first came to a head in 1994 with North Korea's threat to weaponize plutonium from its Yongbyon nuclear facility. After months of American concessions, the Clinton administration agreed to build North Korea two civilian nuclear reactors and provide it with a half-million tons of oil annually until the reactors were built. Totalitarian North Korea became the largest recipient of American assistance in Asia as we propped up a regime that might otherwise have collapsed.
Serious people can differ honorably over the morality of feeding and funding a regime that starves, oppresses, tortures and kills its own people while threatening to destroy its southern neighbor, in order to prevent that regime from developing nuclear weapons. But there is scant moral refuge for those accommodationists who believe even today that we can concede our way out of this crisis. A decade of appeasement and assistance to one of the world's worst regimes provided it the time and the means to develop weapons that now threaten America and our friends.
We had a choice in 1994. We now face a harder choice because we did not then meet our responsibility to end the challenge to American and Asian security posed by North Korea's nuclear program. Similarly, we face a hard choice in Iraq today. But unless we act soon, we will face harder choices later, with costs that could be catastrophic.
The feckless pursuit of accommodation with regimes that scorn our reasonableness and revile our purpose is no substitute for a policy that matches the menace posed to America with the means and the will to confront it.
Iraq demonstrates that American resolve elicits a different response. Although no more than a ploy, Baghdad's professed openness today to renewed weapons inspections after years of defiance is made possible only by the compelling threat of military force. Our determination to confront Saddam Hussein openly and with all necessary means demonstrates a freedom to act against an enemy that does not -- yet -- possess nuclear weapons.
Rather than asking why we do not pursue the same strategy toward Iraq and North Korea, the American people understand we are confronting Saddam Hussein today because we cannot kick the can down the road, as the Clinton administration did with North Korea, waiting until he possesses nuclear weapons, as North Korea now does, thereby constraining our ability to respond to a developing danger. We cannot allow Iraq to become the North Korea of the Middle East.
America's options in North Korea are limited because we did not take action a decade ago to permanently end Pyongyang's nuclear program. Certain options once open to us are now foreclosed because we dozed while this threat gathered.
Our current predicament in North Korea could portend our future with Iraq if we do not use every means available to us to end the threat it poses while we still have the freedom to act.
Credibility is a nation's greatest asset in international affairs. It is the hardest to earn and the most difficult to maintain, but once possessed it makes it possible to compel changes in behavior. Credibility exists only in the eye of the beholder.
The Clinton administration's lack of credibility in dealing with North Korea emboldened the regime to defy America. The Bush administration's credible threat of force against Iraq is rallying American and international opinion in our favor, and has put Baghdad on notice. Pyongyang is watching.
The dangers posed by Iraq and North Korea are different, but as any surviving member of the Taliban will attest -- and as Saddam Hussein may soon learn -- in this new era, rogue regimes that openly defy and gravely threaten the United States put themselves in peril when they doubt our resolve to end challenges to our security. If we had met the North Korean nuclear challenge with resolve rather than accommodation a decade ago, we would be more secure now. North Korea teaches us that if we sleep in the face of the Iraq threat today, we may be sleepless tomorrow.
--------
U.S. may limit suits over smallpox
LAURA MECKLER
Associated Press Writer
Thu, Oct. 24, 2002
http://www.miami.com/mld/miami/news/nation/4355733.htm
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration is preparing to ask a lame-duck Congress to address one of the stickiest issues in the smallpox vaccine debate: how to compensate people who are injured or killed by the vaccine itself.
One option is a large fund that victims who develop serious medical problems could tap into, modeled after an existing compensation fund for childhood vaccines. Another approach would be to protect nurses and other health workers who administer the shots from lawsuits without setting aside money for compensation.
Administration officials say the issue must be resolved before the government begins offering the effective but risky vaccine in an effort to protect people from a disease not seen for decades but feared as a bioterror agent.
"A number of health care workers and volunteers would simply not be willing to give the vaccine without some sort of liability protection," said Sen. Bill Frist, R-Tenn., who has been pushing for a resolution to this issue.
Congress does not return to Washington until the week after the Nov. 5 elections.
Officials estimate that 15 people will face life-threatening injuries for every million vaccinated, and one or two will die.
Frist said nothing can move during the limited lame duck congressional session without bipartisan agreement. And anything that limits the right to sue could be controversial, he said.
President Bush also could handle the liability issue administratively, officials said. That would involve drafting people who administer the vaccine into the National Health Service Corp., which could protect them from lawsuits under the Federal Tort Claims Act.
But that would do nothing to protect hospitals or other facilities where the vaccine is delivered, Frist said. Plus, there are logistical hurdles to drafting so many people into the corps, especially if vaccination is being administered on an emergency basis in response to an attack.
Top federal health officials have recommended making the vaccine available to people in stages, beginning with people who work in hospital emergency rooms, then to other health care workers and emergency responders and finally to the general public.
The White House is still considering how quickly to move, whether to wait until the vaccine is licensed or offer it more quickly. Beyond those questions, the liability question is the only major unresolved issue, officials say.
Most of the fear surrounding smallpox is about the disease itself: It is highly contagious, has no known treatment and historically has killed 30 percent of its victims. While it was declared eradicated from earth in 1980, experts fear that Iraq or terrorist groups may secretly have the smallpox virus and unleash it in an act of germ warfare.
Routine vaccinations ended in the United States in 1972, and experts believe that those last vaccinated more than three decades ago have little residual immunity remaining.
But the decision to offer the vaccine is a difficult one because the vaccine itself is so dangerous. It's made with a live virus called vaccinia that can cause serious damage both to people vaccinated and to those with whom they come into close contact.
The most common serious reaction comes when vaccinia escapes from the inoculation site, often because people touch the site and then touch their eyes or mouth or someone else. For instance, the virus transferred to the eye can cause blindness.
More deadly is encephalitis, which can cause paralysis or permanent neurologic damage. Also fatal: progressive vaccinia, where the virus spreads, eating away at flesh, bone and gut.
People would be told the risks before they are vaccinated.
Still, officials are considering how to compensate people who get the shots and are injured.
Under one plan, Congress would bar lawsuits and, instead, establish a federal fund to compensate injured patients, according to two officials involved in the smallpox vaccine planning. It's unclear how much money would be needed or how much each injured person would be entitled to, they said Wednesday, speaking on condition of anonymity.
It could be modeled on the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which gives money to people who are injured by a variety of childhood and other regularly administered vaccines.
Another option, Frist said, is for Congress to extend the Federal Tort Claims Act to those involved in smallpox vaccinations. Under this approach, the federal government would defend any lawsuit brought and pay any damages. The case would be tried in federal, not state, court, and be heard by a judge not a jury, he said. In addition, there could be a ban or limit on punitive damages.
-------- MILITARY
-------- africa
Nigeria rejects World Court ruling on border row with Cameroon
Thursday October 24, 2002
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/021023/1/340za.html
Nigeria rejected a World Court ruling which handed the oil-rich Bakassi Peninsula to Cameroon, stoking fears of armed conflict between the neighbours.
The Nigerian government attacked the judgement, and angrily accused judges from west Africa's former colonial rulers -- Britain, France and Germany -- of bias against Nigeria.
"Being a nation ruled by law we are bound to continue to exercise jurisdiction over these areas in accordance with the constitution," said a statement released after a cabinet meeting on Wednesday.
It said the government had carefully studied the ruling and continued to feel that the rights of Nigerian citizens living on Bakassi supercede any treaties signed under colonial rule.
Nigeria could only cede Bakassi if it changed its constitution, it said, adding: "However, government wishes to assure Nigerians of its constitutional commitment to protect its citizenry."
The statement appealed for Nigerians to remain calm while their government attempts to negotiate a peaceful settlement.
In rejecting the judgement, President Olusegun Obasanjo appears to have broken a promise he made UN Secretary General Kofi Annan last month that Nigeria would respect whatever ruling was given.
On October 10, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague brought to an end an eight-year legal battle by awarding the 1,000 square kilometre (400 sq mile) peninsula to Cameroon.
The judgement "requests Nigeria expeditiously and without condition to withdraw its administration and military or police forces ... from the Bakassi Peninsula."
Nigeria has a heavy military presence on a state of alert in the Bakassi area. At the weekend, soldiers prevented journalists from travelling to the disputed region.
The ruling, which the court based on a 1913 treaty between the region's then colonial powers, Britain and Germany triggered fury in Nigeria, where many suspect a European plot.
"For purely political reasons, the Court, headed by a French president, upheld a legal position which is contrary to all known laws and conventions, thus legitimising and promoting the interests of former colonial powers at our expense," it said.
"The French president of the court and the English and German judges should have disqualified themselves since the countries which they represent are, in essence, parties to the action or have substantial stakes," it continued.
French officials have dismissed allegations of bias, which surfaced in the Nigerian press following the ruling, insisting that ICJ judges are independent and that France is neutral in the border dispute.
France took control of Germany's Cameroon territory after World War I. When Nigeria won independence from Britain and Cameroon from France the new countries adopted the colonial frontiers.
The people of Bakassi, however, regard themselves as members of the Calabar kingdom of southeastern Nigeria and their leaders have reacted with dismay and anger to the ruling.
Last week local leaders from peninsula told AFP that they would not abide by the court's decision and vowed to take up arms and secede from Nigeria if it agrees to cede their land to Cameroon.
In reply, Wednesday's statement said: "On no account will Nigeria abandon her people and their interests.
"For Nigeria, it is not a matter of oil or natural resources on land or in coastal waters, it is a matter of the welfare and the well-being of her people on their land."
On September 5, Obasanjo went to Paris to meet his Cameroonian counterpart Paul Biya and Annan.
According to a UN statement, both leaders agreed to respect the ICJ decision.
-------- arms sales
Scud Igniter Said Found on Iraq-Bound Ship -Sources
Reuters
Thursday, October 24, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A11684-2002Oct24?language=printer
RIJEKA, Croatia (Reuters) - A ship seized at sea by Croatia this week was bound for Iraq from Yugoslavia carrying what appeared to be material used in the ignition of Scud missiles, according to sources in Croatia on Thursday.
"There is evidence that the military equipment on the seized ship was headed for Iraq," a police source told Reuters after 14 containers were unloaded from the freighter Boka Star in the port of Rijeka on Croatia's Adriatic coast.
Another source close to the investigation said there were "four containers opened so far containing a powdered substance we believe is used for the ignition of Scud missiles."
The source said the substance had been examined by experts, but did not state its chemical name or composition.
The Boka Star was netted with the help of the United States and NATO allies who on Tuesday exposed clandestine arms supplies to Iraq from the Bosnian Serb Republic, with the aid of Yugoslav officials in Belgrade.
Official statements did not disclose the nature of the military equipment being smuggled.
Unofficial sources agreed it was most probably engines or engine parts for Iraq's aging fleet of Soviet-era MiG-21 fighters, made at Bosnia's Orao plant -- a supposition never formally denied.
A Western military source familiar with the case on Thursday questioned whether the material found in the search of the ship would indeed turn out to be linked to Iraq's Scuds, but reserved judgement on the report.
FOREIGN FLAG
Iraq fired 39 of the liquid-fueled, medium-range missiles at Israel and allied Gulf states during the 1991 Gulf War, sowing fears that they might carry chemical or biological warheads.
Iraq in fact used only conventional explosives and damage was limited. But U.S. aircraft and anti-missile systems totally failed to stop the Soviet-designed Scuds.
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is thought to have only a dozen or two of the mobile rockets left in his arsenal.
But their potential threat is enough for Washington to have promised Israel this week that it would deploy special forces in Western Iraq at the outset of any war to destroy the missiles, according to a Washington Post report.
The Tonga-registered Boka Star had started its voyage on Monday from the port of Bar in the Yugoslav republic of Montenegro, which borders Bosnia, and was intercepted with the help of NATO intelligence.
"The Boka Star sailed out of the port of Bar a few days ago," Branko Koprivica, captain of the port, told Reuters in the Montenegrin capital, Podgorica, on Thursday. He said it had a Montenegrin crew but a foreign flag.
Western sources had hinted at a link between Bar and the Orao company implicated in the arms smuggling scandal.
Both Yugoslav and Bosnian Serb authorities this week acknowledged arms embargo violations and fired senior officials but without disclosing details of what was being smuggled.
Tuesday's orchestrated, and embarrassing, exposes by the NATO allies appear to have been provoked after U.S. charges leveled at Orao a month ago were ignored, and plans for covert shipments were continuing.
One Western source said this week's seizure "was not the first time" such a shipment had been intercepted at sea.
----
Bosnian Serbs admit to arms exports to Iraq
Thursday October 24, 2002
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/021023/1/340zx.html
Despite the heavy presence of NATO-led peacekeepers, a Bosnian Serb military firm managed to sell weapons parts to Iraq in violation of a United Nations arms embargo, the government admitted.
The Orao (Eagle) defence firm, operating under the authority of the Bosnian Serb military headquarters, sold weapons parts to Iraq in what is becoming one of the Serb-run entity's biggest scandals since the end of Bosnia's 1992-95 war.
"Present information points to the existence of a violation of the embargo and (the government) considers that sanctioning of responsible people from Orao, the military headquarters and the defence ministry is necessary," government spokeswoman Cvijeta Kovacevic told journalists.
The information was presented to the government by a commission which launched a probe in September after the United States alleged Orao was supplying Baghdad with spare aircraft parts and that members of staff had travelled to Iraq to help with airplane maintenance.
The government had demanded an urgent audit of the company's finances, Kovacevic said.
The Bosnian Serb supreme defence council is due on October 28 to hold an extraordinary session to discuss the scandal and the government's request for penalties against those responsible.
Outgoing Bosnian Serb President Mirko Sarovic said he hoped the authorities' reaction would spare the country from serious consequences, insisting that the scandal "did not implicate Bosnian Serb institutions but only individual employees of Orao".
"Both the Republika Srpska (the Bosnian Serb entity) and Bosnia-Hercegovina in general are determined to respect the (UN) Security Council's resolutions," Sarovic told AFP, stressing the "authorities' resolve to sanction the culprits".
Residents of the capital, Banja Luka, reacted with shocked to the scandal and said they hoped Republika Srpska would not now face UN sanctions.
"That's all we needed now. How could they do that? Don't they know they put us at risk of sanctions? We struggle to improve our lives and we get this," Ljudmila, a 43-year-old housewife and mother of three, told AFP.
"We are under international patronage. SFOR (the NATO-led Stabilisation Force) is watching every move by the Bosnian Serb army and despite everything we manage to breach the embargo in front of the eyes of the whole world," said Milenko, a salesman.
SFOR was deployed in Bosnia to provide security and oversee the military aspects of the 1995 Dayton peace accords that ended the war in the former Yugoslav republic.
SFOR currently has 17,000 troops in Bosnia but it was a 62,000-strong force at its peak in 1996.
The United States demanded that the authorities in Yugoslavia and Bosnia take action against Orao and its Yugoslav partner Jugoimport, who it accused of selling military equipment to Iraq in violation of UN sanctions.
US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Washington expected both countries to stop the transfers, investigate the sales and prosecute those responsible.
Boucher said that in addition to violating the UN sanctions, Orao's sales to Iraq contravened the terms of the Dayton peace deal, which requires that SFOR be informed of all military exports from the Republika Srpska.
Bosnia's Standing Military Committee, the country's top military body, confirmed on Tuesday that Washington had informed it of "illegal activities" by Orao and Jugoimport.
Local media in Serbia and Bosnia reported that state-controlled Jugoimport had acted as an agent for Orao to arrange the sale of its weapons parts to Iraq.
Bosnia's peace deal split the country into the Serb-run Republika Srpska and the Muslim-Croat Federation, each with separate governments, parliaments, police and armed forces. The two entities are linked by weak central institutions.
----
Yugoslavia widens probe into alleged military sales to Iraq
Thursday October 24, 2002
AFP
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/021023/1/340yv.html
Yugoslav authorities included the defence ministry in their investigations into US allegations that a state-run firm made secret military sales to Iraq in violation of UN sanctions.
The federal government said Wednesday that the defence ministry would be probed along with the state-controlled import-export company Jugoimport.
The move came as the Bosnian Serb government confirmed Wednesday that a Bosnian Serb firm, Orao, had sold weapons parts to Iraq in violation of the UN arms embargo.
"The investigation is going to be expanded ... The government has formed a committee to investigate what was going on in the defence ministry," said a senior official in the Yugoslav government, who did not want to be named.
He indicated that acting Yugoslav army chief General Branko Krga would be called upon to provide information.
The federal government issued a statement confirming that a special committee would examine the defence ministry's trade in military equipment, in addition to the Serbian government's previously announced probe of Jugoimport.
Yugoslav Interior Minister Zoran Zivkovic told state television late Tuesday that unspecified "confirmation" had been found to support the US allegations, and warned of the possible repercussions if Belgrade failed to act.
"Just a suspicion that something has been done with Iraq, which is under sanctions, is reason enough to jeopardise top state interests," he said.
"So far we have succeeded in finding some confirmation of this suspicion."
The expansion of the probe follows the sacking late Tuesday of a Yugoslav deputy defence minister in charge of military exports, Ivan Djokic, and Jugoimport chairman Jovan Cekovic.
Jugoimport was also ordered to close its office in Baghdad.
Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic said in a speech Wednesday that the scandal was "just another sign" that the Yugoslav army was not under civilian control two years after the fall of former president Slobodan Milosevic.
"The president of Yugoslavia (Vojislav Kostunica) should deal with the implementation of that law and it is bad that he hasn't done so," he said, according a report of Tanjug news agency.
Kostunica is Djindjic's main rival for power in Serbia, the largest Yugoslav republic.
The Yugoslav president is also chairman of the Supreme Defense Council, the top civilian body in charge of the military.
"At a time when the world is polarizing into countries that fight against terrorism and states that support terrorism it is very bad to be put in the last group in any way," Djindjic said.
Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Nebojsa Covic said the allegations were a matter of urgency for Belgrade but denied any government involvement.
"The state has to react quickly and show that this has nothing to do with the state but it is a legacy of the past," he told B92 radio.
The United States is awaiting responses from Sarajevo and Belgrade before deciding whether to impose sanctions on Orao and Jugoimport, US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Tuesday.
He said there was "clear evidence" that two companies had been providing Iraq with military aviation supplies and advice for the refubishment of military aircraft.
But Boucher added that the United States did not have evidence that either the Bosnian or Yugoslav federal governments played any role in the sales.
--------
Yugoslav Aides Are Fired for Sales of Fighter-Jet Parts to Iraq
October 24, 2002
New York Times
By DANIEL SIMPSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/24/international/europe/24BOSN.html
BELGRADE, Serbia, Oct. 23 - Yugoslavia has fired a senior military official and the director of the state trading company Yugoimport as a result of NATO's accusations that a Bosnian Serb company exported military hardware to Iraq via Belgrade.
Officials in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Yugoslavia and the United States have released few firm details about the case, which appears to be focus on the violation of the United Nations arms embargo rather than the military significance of any sales.
After searching the offices of Orao, a state-owned company in the semiautonomous Serbian republic within Bosnia, NATO peacekeeping troops said on Tuesday that they had found proof of ongoing exports to Baghdad.
The American Embassy in Bosnia accused Orao last month of selling spare parts and services to Iraq for its Soviet-era MIG-21 warplanes, continuing a longstanding trade that began when Bosnia was a republic in a larger, socialist Yugoslavia.
But the company, which in the 1980's was part of a Yugoslav industry that armed Iraq against Iran (as did companies in the United States, Britain and France), does not appear to have heeded the warning.
When NATO soldiers raided the Orao factory, they found a document dated Sept. 25 telling five staff members to remain in Iraq and remove all traces of the company's involvement there, diplomats in Bosnia said.
Military analysts said that even if the spare parts kept aging Iraqi aircraft in good condition, they would hardly help Saddam Hussein's military defend against the high-technology weapons that the United States could deploy.
One Western diplomat said the only significant question was whether assistance from Orao was decisive in helping Iraq to put antiquated planes in the sky at all.
"Given that Saddam has had 10 years of sanctions, how does he keep his old equipment going?" the diplomat asked. "If Orao is sending in spare parts, they would be very useful in keeping his decrepit air force flying."
But the United States has not specified whether this is part of its accusation.
"The U.S. expects the relevant authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Yugoslavia, to undertake the necessary steps to immediately halt any ongoing cooperation with Iraq, to conduct a thorough investigation and to hold accountable those responsible," said the State Department spokesman, Richard A. Boucher.
Yugoslavia's response was immediate, as it hopes next month to be admitted as a junior partner in NATO, the first step for aspiring members of the alliance.
After a special meeting this evening, the government dismissed Ivan Djokic, a deputy defense minister, and Jovan Cekovic, the head of Yugoimport, declaring them ultimately responsible for the shipments.
"Regardless of how significant this case is," a Yugoslav government official said, "we have to demonstrate our complete rejection of any cooperation with Iraq at this time. We need American support so we have to act decisively."
-------- india
India Withdraws Troops From Border
The Associated Press
Thursday, October 24, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A11083-2002Oct24?language=printer
NEW DELHI, India -- India has started withdrawing its troops from the border with Pakistan, the defense minister said Thursday.
"The process has started," George Fernandes said of New Delhi's announcement earlier this month that it would recall tens of thousands of soldiers from the border to ease tension in the region.
India and Pakistan have deployed more than 1 million soldiers along their frontier since a Dec. 13 attack on the Indian Parliament, which New Delhi blamed on Pakistan-based Islamic groups and Islamabad's spy agency.
Pakistan rejected the allegation, but attacks in India's Jammu-Kashmir state again pushed the two countries to the brink of a war in May. That threat was averted after diplomatic efforts by the United States and Britain.
Islamabad has promised it will also withdraw troops, but has not said when its redeployment will start.
Fernandes did not give the number of soldiers being pulled back, but said their relocation would be completed in two months.
"I would like to see all our soldiers returning home to celebrate the festival of Diwali, but that is not going to be possible," the defense minister said.
The South Asian nuclear rivals share a 1,800-mile border, part of which is called the Line of Control, which divides disputed Kashmir. India has said its troops will remain along the Line of Control.
The two nations have fought two of their three wars over control of the Himalayan territory.
-------- israel / palestine
'Refusenik' Reservists in Israel Make Their Case
Supreme Court hears arguments over whether individual soldiers may follow conscience and spurn duty in the Palestinian territories.
By Laura King
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
October 24 2002
http://www.latimes.com/la-fg-refusniks24oct24,0,2967251.story
JERUSALEM -- Israeli military reservists who say conscience will not permit them to serve in the West Bank and Gaza Strip took their fight Wednesday to Israel's Supreme Court, where arguments by both sides raised painful questions about duty, patriotism and what constitutes moral warfare.
The case marks the first time the high court has agreed to weigh whether individual reservists have a right to mount a moral challenge to a broad range of Israeli army practices in the Palestinian territories through "selective refusal" -- that is, agreeing to perform their mandatory annual military service, but not inside the West Bank and Gaza.
Initially, lawyers for the reservists, who call themselves refuseniks, had intended to use the case as a vehicle to challenge the overall legality of Israel's military occupation of Palestinian areas. But they softened that position, believing that they had virtually no chance of persuading the justices to agree to what would amount to a sweeping condemnation of Israeli policy.
Instead, the refusenik camp hoped to set a more limited precedent, under which the army might be instructed to consider cases of conscience on an individual basis, much as it now rules on requests for deferral of military service, which are most often granted on religious grounds.
The army declined direct comment on the Supreme Court proceedings but has always maintained that allowing soldiers to opt out of duty they find distasteful would make it impossible for the military to function effectively.
"We don't choose our missions," said army spokesman Lt. Col. Olivier Rafowicz. "Our missions are decided by the government of Israel, and like in any democracy, the army is there to fulfill what the elected government has instructed it to do."
The timing of this case is sensitive, coming as the defense minister is locked in a confrontation with Jewish settler rabbis who have been urging soldiers to disobey orders to dismantle illegal settlement outposts.
The refuseniks -- some of whom are highly decorated officers with distinguished combat records -- say their case is fundamentally different, focusing as it does on whether soldiers should be called upon to perform actions that they believe violate the human rights of Palestinians, such as demolishing homes, uprooting orchards or endangering civilians by use of heavy weapons in densely populated areas.
"These are people for whom conscientious objection is not easy. These are not people who evade service," their attorney, Avigdor Feldman, told the justices in a lengthy and impassioned statement.
"These are not political people -- each of them stands on his own, saying, 'I experienced terrible things. I witnessed things that shocked me.' ... They saw soldiers firing into a Palestinian house, not knowing who was inside. They saw tanks shelling houses, not knowing who was inside. They are saying, 'I'm shocked, I cannot be a part of this. I'm a man whose conscience is speaking.' "
Arguing for the state, Aner Hellman said that the army investigates any alleged wrongdoing in the field and that individual soldiers could not take it upon themselves to judge whether established army policy was right or wrong.
"We are talking about a new kind of war here, a war against terrorism," he said. "Selective refusal is illegal. There's no Western democracy which recognizes it. Everyone knows how dangerous it can be, and Israel certainly isn't the place to experiment in trying it."
The justices listened attentively, interposing occasional short, sharp questions. As is normal practice in cases argued before the high court, attorneys wore long black robes like those of the judges, lending the occasion an air of formality.
The gallery was packed with spectators, many of them reservists or their families and friends. Eight reservists are represented in the case, but the refusenik movement has been gathering steam in recent months, and hundreds of others are in similar circumstances, closely watching the outcome of this case.
Nearly 500 reservists have signed a letter this year explaining why they will not serve in the West Bank and Gaza. Many of them have been removed from their units, and some have already served time in jail.
Amit Mashiah, 30, a staff sergeant and former commander in an elite combat unit, said the army assigned him to fence-painting duty at a dusty base near the Jordanian border after he signed the letter. He may eventually face prison.
He said he considers himself and other refuseniks to be patriots and believes Palestinian suffering can only backfire on Israel.
"The point is that tactically, refusing to serve there is exactly the right thing to do in order to protect the citizens of Israel," he said. "You're standing in a roadblock, seeing Palestinians who are sometimes quite old waiting for hours under the sun. You get your orders and you have to shut the roadblock, without knowing why. You have to look at these people's faces. They're not angry, even, just tired. How can this all end?"
Military service, universal in this country, is a crucial element in Israel's national ethic, and the reservists said it was difficult for outsiders to understand how excruciating a step it was to bring the case.
The justices recessed after hearing daylong arguments. The court could call the parties back to address particular points, or hand down a ruling in several weeks, attorneys said.
-------- russia / chechnya
Hostage Crisis in Moscow Enters Dangerous Phase
October 24, 2002
New York Times
By MICHAEL WINES
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/24/international/europe/24CND-RUSS.html
MOSCOW, Oct. 24 - Heavily armed Chechen guerrillas holding up to 700 captives in a Moscow theater killed a young Russian woman today and turned a grenade launcher on two others, as the hostage crisis here entered a more dangerous phase.
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia canceled a weekend trip to Mexico and a meeting with President Bush to oversee the Russian response to the seizure. In a statement, Mr. Putin said flatly that the "monstrous" assault "has been planned in foreign terrorist centers."
"We will not yield to these provocations," he said.
But the Chechen guerrillas, who said they numbered 25 men and 25 women, showed no sign of yielding either.
The captors did release 11 hostages today, including a British citizen who was said to be seriously ill, bringing the total of freed captives to 37. They also disclosed that they hold 75 other foreigners, including two unidentified Americans.
They insisted, however, that they would free no more captives for the duration of the crisis. Underscoring their seriousness, they later allowed two Jordanian doctors to remove the body of a Russian woman, perhaps 20 years old, who had been shot in the chest sometime after the hostage-takers stormed the southeast Moscow theatre complex about 9 p.m. local time on Wednesday.
Unverified reports said the unidentified woman had been killed for refusing to end a cell-phone conversation, for refusing to sit down and for attempting to escape.
Late this afternoon, two other women did escape the theater, and the deserted street outside thundered with at least two large explosions as guerrillas fired grenades at them.
Those explosions bore witness to perhaps the most brazen aspect of the hostage operation: the astonishing arsenal of automatic weapons, grenade launchers and explosives that the guerrillas had assembled and brought undetected to their work.
The Chechens have wired the theater's supporting pillars, seats and even themselves with plastic explosives. They have pledged to blow up the three-story theater complex unless Mr. Putin agrees to withdraw Russian forces from Chechnya, the rebellious province that has been the scene of two wars in the last decade.
A Web site that supports the Chechen separatists, www.kavkaz.org, has given the Kremlin seven days to comply with the guerrillas' demands, a deadline which may or may not be accurate. The 700 captives, who sat down Wednesday evening to a popular musical only to find themselves in a life-and-death drama by the second act, made it clear today that they believed time is running out.
"They say, `You've been here for 10 hours already, but your government so far has done nothing to save you,' " one hostage, Maria Shkolnikova, said in a cellphone call to the radio station Echo Moskvy. "Please start doing something. Start troop withdrawals, or they will begin killing us."
The Chechen guerrillas warned that they would kill the hundreds of captives if Russian troops attempted to raid the theater. "No one will get out of here alive and they'll die with us if there's any attempt to storm the building," Movsar Barayev, the reputed leader of the siege, said in a statement on kavkaz.org.
Al Jazeera, the Arab satellite television station, broadcast a videotape today of people it said were the Chechen guerrillas, who stood with their faces covered before a banner praising Allah in Arabic. They said they were ready to die for Chechen independence and to kill their "infidel" captives.
"We are more keen on dying than you are keen on living," one person said on the tape. "Each one of us is willing to sacrifice himself for the sake of God and the independence of Chechnya."
Al Jazeera did not say how it obtained the tape.
The Chechen guerrillas' assault on the Moscow theater, less than three miles from the Kremlin, dealt another serious blow to the Russian government's recent insistence that it had beaten back the insurgency in Chechnya.
Since rebel forces shot down a Russian military helicopter in August, killing at least 119 people, the pace of combat has only increased in a war that by some accounts has claimed 90,000 lives.
The theater seizure recalled the first of Russia's wars in Chechnya, in the mid-1990's, when guerrillas twice surprised Russian troops with mass hostage-takings on the embattled province's borders.
-------- spies / spy agencies
Richard Helms Dies;
Founding CIA Member Led Agency Six Years
By Bart Barnes
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 24, 2002; Page B07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A8579-2002Oct24?language=printer
Richard M. Helms, 89, the quintessential intelligence and espionage officer who joined the Central Intelligence Agency at its founding in 1947 and rose through the ranks to lead it for more than six years, died in his sleep Oct. 22 at his home in Washington. He had multiple melanoma.
Mr. Helms was the first career intelligence professional to serve as the nation's top spymaster, and he was among the last of the remaining survivors of the CIA's organizing cadre, operatives who earned their espionage stripes as young men during World War II. He left the agency in 1973, when President Richard M. Nixon asked for his resignation -- the result, Mr. Helms believed, of his refusing to permit the CIA to be used in the coverup of the Watergate break-in, which ultimately led to the president's resignation.
His years at the agency covered a period in which CIA service was widely honored as a noble and romantic calling in the Cold War. It was said of Mr. Helms that throughout his career and into retirement, he was preoccupied with the Soviet Union and its CIA counterpart, the KGB.
But in the national malaise that accompanied the war in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal, much of the popular mystique that attended CIA service had dissolved. At his retirement in 1973, Mr. Helms left an organization viewed with suspicion by many and about to undergo intense scrutiny from an unfriendly Congress for activities ranging from assassination plots against foreign leaders to spying on U.S. citizens.
As a veteran of the craft of espionage, Mr. Helms "was as good at spying, analysis and politics as anyone who worked in the agency," said Clair George, who ran the CIA's covert operations in the 1980s. "You are born with that kind of skill, and he had it." During his CIA years and after, Mr. Helms followed a code that stressed maximum trust and loyalty to his agency and colleagues, maximum silence where outsiders were concerned. "The Man Who Kept the Secrets" was the title chosen by author Thomas Powers for his biography of Mr. Helms.
In the judgment of Richard Helms, the CIA worked only for the president. He did not welcome congressional inquiry or oversight. In 1977, he pleaded no contest in a federal court to charges of failing to testify fully before Congress about the CIA role in the covert supply of money to Chilean anti-Marxists in 1970 in an effort to influence a presidential election. "I found myself in a position of conflict," Mr. Helms said. "I had sworn my oath to protect certain secrets."
He received a suspended two-year prison sentence and a $2,000 fine, which was paid in full by retired CIA agents. Six years later at a White House ceremony, Mr. Helms received the National Security Medal from President Reagan for "exceptionally meritorious service." Mr. Helms said he considered this award "an exoneration."
His career at the CIA covered the Red Scare tactics of Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy (R-Wis.), who searched for communists in the U.S. government, as well as the ill-fated CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and plots against Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. It included the rending of the American social fabric and the antiwar protests of the Vietnam War era, and it ended during the Watergate crisis.
On leaving the CIA, Mr. Helms served three years as ambassador to Iran, then in 1976 ended his government career. His years in Tehran coincided with the final period of the rule of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, with whom Mr. Helms had a good relationship. He would later represent Iranian interests in Washington.
As one of its ranking officers for most of the CIA's first 25 years, Mr. Helms helped form and shape the agency, and he recruited, trained, assigned and supervised many of its top agents. During the 1950s and early 1960s, he held high positions in the division responsible for clandestine operations.
"He was a kind of middleman between the field and Washington policymakers, approving and even choosing the wording of cables to the field describing 'requirements'; and passing on concrete proposals for operations from the local CIA stations," Powers wrote in his biography of Mr. Helms.
He was second-in-command of covert operations in 1958 when he was passed over for the directorship of that activity in favor of Richard M. Bissell Jr., who in 1961 would plan and direct the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Castro's Cuba. In that operation, a force of 1,200 CIA-trained and -equipped Cuban exiles attempted to retake the island from Castro. The effort failed, and most of the invaders were killed or captured.
Mr. Helms, who by nature had been cool and skeptical toward covert operations on such a large scale, had kept his distance from the Bay of Pigs. But the fiasco proved to be Bissell's undoing, and he retired. Mr. Helms replaced him in 1962, winning the position that had eluded him four years earlier. He became the CIA's deputy director for plans, the innocuous-sounding title of the chief of covert action. With his new assignment, he inherited a pressure campaign from the White House to get rid of Castro by other means. Over the next several months, the agency would contemplate schemes for Castro's overthrow or assassination, but none ever materialized.
In 1965, Mr. Helms was named to the second-highest job at the agency, deputy director of central intelligence. President Lyndon B. Johnson named him director in 1966. He would serve longer as director of central intelligence than anyone except Allen Dulles, the legendary spymaster who led the CIA from 1953 to 1961.
As America's top spymaster, Powers wrote in his biography, Mr. Helms "is remembered as an administrator, impatient with delay, excuses, self-seeking, the sour air of office politics. Asked for an example of Helms's characteristic utterance, three of his old friends came up with the same dry phrase, 'Let's get on with it.' . . . Helm's style was cool by choice and temperament; his instinct was to soften differences, to find a middle ground, to tone down operations that were getting out of hand, to give faltering projects one more chance rather than shut them down altogether, to settle for compromise in the interests of bureaucratic peace." He tended to work regular hours, 8:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., and his desk was always cleared when he left the office at night.
Mr. Helms kept a low public profile as director of central intelligence, and he avoided publicity. But he lunched occasionally with influential figures in the media, and he was assiduous in cultivating the congressional support he needed to manage his agency. He made only one public speech during his years as CIA leader, telling the nation's newspaper editors that "the nation must, to a degree, take it on faith that we, too, are honorable men, devoted to her service."
The CIA's current director, George J. Tenet, had made a practice of consulting periodically with Mr. Helms since his appointment in 1997. In a statement yesterday, Tenet described Mr. Helms as "clear in thought, elegant in style . . . the best of his generation and profession. . . . I will miss his priceless counsel and warm friendship."
In his personal life, Mr. Helms was known as an avid tennis player and sports fan, with a dry wit that showed when he was with friends, and, with his wife Cynthia, he was active in the Washington social scene. He was reserved in public.
Richard McGarrah Helms was born in St. Davids, Pa., to a family of financial means. His father was an Alcoa executive and his maternal grandfather a leading international banker. He grew up in South Orange, N.J., and attended high school in Switzerland for two years, where he became proficient in French and German.
In 1935, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Williams College, where in his senior year he was president of his class, editor of the campus newspaper and the yearbook and president of the honor society.
His life's ambition on leaving college was to own and operate a daily newspaper. In pursuit of that goal, he paid his own fare to London, where he became a European reporter for United Press. His assignments included coverage of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. The following year, he was one of a group of foreign correspondents to interview Adolf Hitler.
Shortly thereafter, he returned to the United States and took a job with the Indianapolis Times newspaper, where by 1939 he had become national advertising director.
With the entry of the United States into World War II, he joined the Navy, and in 1943 was assigned to the Office of Strategic Services, the U.S. wartime espionage agency. There he had desk jobs in New York and Washington and later in London. At the end of the war, he was posted in Berlin, where he worked for Allen Dulles.
He was discharged from military service in 1946 and continued doing intelligence work as a civilian. When the U.S. wartime intelligence forces merged into the CIA in 1947, Mr. Helms became one of the architects of the new organization.
During the 1950s, Dulles gave him special assignments. At the height of McCarthy's fervid hunts for communists inside the government, Mr. Helms headed a CIA committee to protect the agency against McCarthy's efforts to infiltrate the CIA with his own informers. The committee's job was to monitor reports of covert approaches to CIA officers by McCarthy agents and to plug any leaks.
Over the years, there would be more assignments with domestic political implications. Early in Mr. Helms's directorship, as the war in Vietnam and the antiwar protests were escalating, Johnson asked the CIA to determine whether antiwar activity in the United States was being financially or otherwise backed by foreign countries. In response to this request, the agency in 1967 launched a domestic surveillance program known as "Operation Chaos," which became the focus of intense controversy when it was disclosed publicly by The New York Times in 1975.
With the election of Nixon as president in 1968, White House involvement with the CIA intensified. Even before the 1972 Watergate break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters, the White House had demanded and received CIA files on agency plots to assassinate foreign leaders during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Those included Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic and Patrice Lumumba of the Congo.
But the relationship between Mr. Helms and Nixon was never smooth, and in November 1972, shortly after he had been elected to his second term, the president summoned his CIA chief to a meeting at Camp David and asked him to resign. Nixon's reasons were never made public, but Power said in his biography that Mr. Helms was convinced "that Nixon fired him for one reason only -- because he had refused wholeheartedly to join the Watergate coverup."
At the Camp David meeting, the president had asked Mr. Helms if he would like to be an ambassador, and the two men had agreed on Iran. During his three years in Iran, Mr. Helms would make more than a dozen trips back to Washington to testify before Senate committees investigating CIA activities during his directorship.
Links between unsavory Nixon White House activities and the CIA, including the agency's lending of disguises to Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt, prompted an internal examination ordered by Mr. Helm's successor at the agency, James R. Schlesinger. That resulted in a 693-page compendium of agency misdeeds, including assassination attempts, burglaries, electronic eavesdropping and LSD testing of people without their knowledge.
William R. Colby, who succeeded Schlesinger as director of central intelligence, quietly briefed House and Senate overseers on the contents of the report, which became known in the agency as "the family jewels." The substance of the briefing did not surface publicly for two years, until a combination of news media accounts, a presidential commission and congressional committees bent on public disclosure made it known. Ultimately, the result was creation of permanent House and Senate oversight committees to monitor the CIA and all other U.S. intelligence agencies.
In 1976, Mr. Helms returned from Tehran, retired from government service and became an international consultant. After his federal retirement he served on a variety of government boards, panels and commissions, especially during the Reagan presidency.
----
Israel Accuses Army Officer of Spying For Hezbollah
October 24, 2002
New York Times
By JOEL GREENBERG
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/24/international/middleeast/24ISRA.html
JERUSALEM, Oct. 23 - The Israeli authorities said today that they had arrested a lieutenant colonel in the army on suspicion of spying for the Lebanese guerrilla group Hezbollah.
The officer is being held along with nine other suspects, all of them members of the Bedouin minority.
The men, none of whom were identified, are accused of passing information on army deployments and security measures along Israel's northern border in exchange for large quantities of drugs and money smuggled across the frontier. They are to be formally charged with espionage on Thursday.
The officer and the other men accused are thought to have acted out of purely material motives.
Many members of the once-nomadic Bedouin minority here serve in the military. They are Arabs and Muslims. Israeli Arabs are not required to serve in the armed forces.
Israeli officials were quick to call the case an exception. Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer said tonight that although the suspicions against the officer were serious, they did not reflect on the Bedouin community, which he said had contributed much to Israel's security.
The officer's lawyer said that his client denied the charges and was confident that he would prove his innocence.
Commentators said if the accusations were proven true, it would be one of the most serious cases of espionage discovered here, because the prime suspect is a senior officer with access to critical information, and he stands accused of links to an enemy of Israel.
"It's as if a lieutenant colonel in the American Army had spied for Al Qaeda," said Yossi Melman, the author of a newly published book on the history of counterespionage in Israel.
The Iranian-backed Hezbollah group fought Israeli forces and occasionally fired rockets into northern Israel before they withdrew from southern Lebanon more than two years ago, and it has continued to attack Israeli Army positions along the frontier since the pullout. The State Department has listed it as a terrorist organization.
Israeli television and radio reports said the officer, who was arrested on Sept. 12, was accused of ties with a Lebanese drug dealer known as Abu Said, who had ties to Hezbollah.
In return for shipments of hashish and heroin and large sums of money, the officer was asked to provide a range of information on the Israeli Army's activities on the border with Lebanon, according to the reported accusations.
The information included military maps of northern Israel, the location of tank ambushes, special units and surveillance cameras along the frontier and the number of soldiers posted in Shebaa Farms, an area at the northern edge of the Golan Heights where Hezbollah has repeatedly attacked Israeli Army positions, claiming the zone as part of Lebanon.
The officer was also asked for information on the movements of the chief of the army's northern command, according to the accusations.
Amnon Zichroni, a prominent Israeli lawyer who is representing the accused officer, rejected the accusations against his client and said he was a loyal citizen.
"He is being falsely accused," Mr. Zichroni said. "He hasn't admitted to anything and does not consider himself guilty. He is confident that he will be proven innocent."
The accused officer's brother said his family was committed to both the Koran and to Israel's security.
"This is a lie, this is not true," he said of the accusations. " I do not believe at all that he would betray the country."
---
Bedouin Soldiers in Israeli Army Accused of Spying
Reuters
Thursday, October 24, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A8532-2002Oct24?language=printer
JERUSALEM, Oct. 23 -- Ten Bedouin soldiers in the Israeli army, including a lieutenant colonel, have been arrested on suspicion of spying for the Lebanese guerrilla group Hezbollah, police sources said today.
Israel Radio called the arrests one of the most serious espionage cases in Israel's 54-year history.
Police said all 10 were from a town in the Galilee region, not far from the Lebanese border. Hezbollah and Israeli forces clashed for two decades in southern Lebanon until the Jewish state withdrew two years ago. The sides still occasionally trade gunfire over a disputed enclave called Shebaa Farms.
The suspects were arrested six weeks ago on suspicion of funneling information on Israeli army positions and activities along the frontier to Hezbollah in exchange for money and drugs, the police sources said.
Israel has about 170,000 Bedouins, who along with the Druze minority perform military service, unlike the rest of the roughly 1 million Arabs in the country.
There was no immediate comment from Hezbollah. Officials at Israel's Justice Ministry could not be reached for comment. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's office, which handles questions on internal security matters, declined to comment.
-------- un
Security Council Gets U.S. Proposal on Disarming Iraq
October 24, 2002
New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/24/international/middleeast/24NATI.html
UNITED NATIONS, Oct. 23 - The United States formally presented the full Security Council today with a draft resolution that includes a threat of military action against Iraq, sharply increasing the pressure on France, Russia and China to agree to a tough measure to force Baghdad to disarm.
The administration's step followed six weeks of wrangling among the five veto-bearing members of the Council that did not yield agreement on linking a proposal for tough weapons inspections in Iraq with a threat of military force to back them up.
The United States submitted its draft to all 15 Council nations to show its reluctant allies, France and Russia, that it had sufficient support among the 10 other members.
American diplomats calculated, but without any guarantees, that neither France, Russia nor China would veto the latest resolution. But the move today forced the pace and put pressure on the five to decide soon how they would vote.
"You're either with us or against us" was the message that Washington was sending to the other permanent members, an administration official said today.
France, supported by Russia, has opposed the American draft because it includes a legal basis for a military attack if Iraq fails to disarm. France has favored a two-stage approach, which would leave the authorization of force to a second resolution, a position Russia and China favor.
The United States action today came after France and Russia, and less forcefully China, criticized the American proposal yet again in closed negotiations on Tuesday.
American officials said they were carrying out a strategy that Mr. Bush outlined on Sept. 12 when he first challenged the United Nations to confront Iraq, saying that if the world organization would not act to disarm Iraq, the United States was prepared to do it alone.
American diplomats argued that the negotiations among the five veto-bearing countries were among the most arduous ever for a resolution. American and British diplomats insisted they had made significant concessions to the complaints from France and Russia in the draft they presented on Monday. Britain will co-sponsor the resolution.
"The moment has come to give an added sense of urgency to this question," said the American ambassador, John D. Negroponte.
The draft presented today underwent only minor modifcations in negotiations since late Sunday.
The full Council will return for discussions on Friday, and decided today to meet on Monday with Hans Blix, the head of the United Nations weapons inspections team, extending the negotiations into next week.
The Russian ambassador, Sergey Lavrov, made an unusual display of irritation as he went into the meeting. Visibly angry, he said he was "preoccupied with the real problem," the hostage crisis in Moscow.
"That's the sort of real threats we experience these days," Mr. Lavrov insisted, suggesting that the threat posed by Iraq's weapons programs was less immediate.
He said Russia opposed the American draft because it still included an automatic authorization for the use of force and imposed "unimplementable, unrealistic" demands on inspectors and Iraqi officials.
When asked if Russia had assured the United States that it would not use its veto, Mr. Lavrov said: "The short answer is no. But this was never discussed."
He dismissed suggestions by American diplomats that his views did not represent the thinking of President Vladimir V. Putin. "In case someone has any doubts, what I'm presenting in the Council is not an invention of my own," he said.
The closed meeting this afternoon with all 15 Council members was the first time the 10 rotating members, who do not hold vetoes, had officially seen the United States draft. They have complained openly about being excluded from the talks, and American officials said today's move was in part to mollify them.
Under the terms of the United Nations Charter, a Council resolution is adopted by nine votes in favor and no negative vote from the five permanent members. As they emerged today with the text in their briefcases, the nonpermanent ambassadors were noncommital.
Making an informal count, administration officials said they were confident of the support of Bulgaria, Colombia, Guinea and Norway and believed they could secure the votes of Singapore and Cameroon. Syria and Mauritius were expected to vote against it. As a result, Ireland and Mexico emerged as pivotal votes.
Mexico, whose president, Vicente Fox, has enjoyed a warm friendship with President Bush, has been frustrated with the lack of progress with the administration on immigration and other bilateral issues. Mexico has very vocally backed France's demand for the two-stage approach.
Moments after meeting tonight with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Mexico's foreign minister, Jorge G. Castaņeda, spoke positively of the new draft, although he said he had not read the very latest version.
"We think that with the French, the Russians and the Chinese, we have been able to generate important progress on the issue of two stages," he said in a telephone interview from Los Cabos.
Secretary Powell, who is also in Mexico for an economic conference of Asian and Pacific nations, said the new draft was a product of the United States having "listened carefully" to suggestions from other countries. He said the United States would listen to any proposed changes as long as they did not violate the objective of threatening "consequences" against Iraq.
"It's not a fiat that we have put down," he said, but he did not specifically say the United States would make any further changes.
The permanent members have the choice of voting in favor, abstaining or vetoing. With the support of Britain assured, American officials were calculating that if they secured seven votes from nonpermanent members, France would almost certainly acquiesce in the final hour. The last time that France vetoed an American resolution was in 1956.
President Bush is to meet on Friday at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., with President Jiang Zemin of China. He is also to speak on Saturday with President Putin at the meeting of Pacific rim nations in Mexico.
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Highlights of U.S. Iraq Resolution
The Associated Press
Thursday, October 24, 2002; 12:02 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A8164-2002Oct24?language=printer
Here are some highlights from a draft U.S. Security Council resolution on Iraq introduced in the 15-member council on Wednesday:
On Iraq's immediate obligations:
-Iraq would need to accept the new resolution within seven days of its adoption.
-Within 30 days of the resolution's passage, Iraq would need to supply weapons inspectors and the Security Council with a written declaration of all aspects of its programs to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, ballistic missiles and other delivery systems.
-Iraq would be required to provide inspectors with "immediate, unimpeded, unconditional and unrestricted access" to all sites - including presidential complexes which are currently exempt from surprise searches.
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On weapons inspections:
-Inspections would begin no later than 45 days after adoption of the resolution.
-Inspectors would be able to take Iraqis and their families outside the country for interviews.
-Inspectors would be able to authorize no-fly and no-drive zones to freeze the area around inspection sites.
-Chief inspectors would need to update the Security Council within 60 days of beginning their work.
-All 191 U.N. member states would be asked to provide any information on Iraqi attempts since 1998 to acquire prohibited items and to recommend sites to be inspected or people to be interviewed.
-Inspectors would report the results of information provided by member states to the Security Council.
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On consequences:
-Chief inspectors must immediately report to the Security Council "any interference by Iraq with inspection activities, as well as any failure by Iraq to comply with its disarmament obligations."
-The Security Council will convene immediately after receiving a report "to consider the situation" and the need for Iraq's full compliance with all council resolutions "in order to restore international peace and security."
-The resolution recalls that the Security Council has repeatedly warned Iraq that it will face "serious consequences" as a result of continued violations of its obligations.
-The resolution finds Iraq in "material breach" of its obligations under previous resolutions.
-Iraq would be in further "material breach" if it submits any false statements or makes omissions in its declaration and fails to fully comply with the new resolution.
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Text of U.S. Iraq Draft Resolution
The Associated Press
Thursday, October 24, 2002; 3:10 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A8892-2002Oct24?language=printer
The following is a U.S. draft resolution on Iraq which was circulated in the Security Council Wednesday.
Recalling all its previous relevant resolutions, in particular its resolutions 661 (1990) of 6 August 1990, 686 (1991) of 2 March 1991, 678 (1990) of 29 November 1990, 687 (1991) of 3 April 1991, 688 (1991) of 5 April 1991, 986 (1995) of 14 April 1995, and 1284 (1999) of 17 December 1999, and all the relevant statements of its President,
Recognizing the threat Iraq's noncompliance with Security Council resolutions and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles poses to international peace and security,
Recalling that its resolution 678 (1990) authorized member states to use all necessary means to uphold and implement its resolution 660 (1990) of 2 August 1990 and all relevant resolutions subsequent to Resolution 660 (1990) and to restore international peace and security in the area,
Further recalling that its resolution 687 (1991) imposed obligations on Iraq as a necessary step for achievement of its stated objective of restoring international peace and security in the area,
Deploring the fact that Iraq has never provided an accurate, full, final, and complete disclosure, as required by resolution 687 (1991), of all aspects of its programs to develop weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles with a range greater than one hundred and fifty kilometers, and of all holdings of such weapons, their components and production facilities and locations, as well as all other nuclear weapons, including any which it claims are for purposes not related to nuclear-weapons-usable material,
Deploring further that Iraq repeatedly refused to allow access to sites designated by the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), refused to cooperate fully and unconditionally with UNSCOM and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) weapons inspectors, as required by resolution 687 (1991), ultimately ceased all cooperation with UNSCOM and IAEA in 1998, and for the last three years has failed to provide immediate, unconditional, and unrestricted access to the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) established in resolution 1284 (1999) as the successor organization to UNSCOM, and the IAEA, as it was first obliged to do pursuant to resolution 687 (1991), and as the Council has repeatedly demanded that it do, and regretting the consequent prolonging of the crisis in the region and the suffering of the Iraqi people,
Deploring also that the Government of Iraq has failed to comply with its commitments pursuant to resolution 687 (1991) with regard to terrorism, pursuant to resolution 688 (1991) to end repression of its civilian population and to provide access by international humanitarian organizations to all those in need of assistance in Iraq, and pursuant to resolutions 686 (1991), 687 (1991), and 1284 (1999) to return or cooperate in accounting for Kuwaiti and third country nationals wrongfully detained by Iraq, or to return Kuwaiti property wrongfully seized by Iraq,
Recalling that in its resolution 687 (1991) the Council declared that a ceasefire would be based on acceptance by Iraq of the provisions of that resolution, including the obligations of Iraq contained therein,
Determined to ensure full and immediate compliance by Iraq without conditions or restrictions with its obligations under resolution 687 (1991) and other relevant resolutions and recalling that the resolutions of the Council constitute the governing standard of Iraqi compliance,
Recalling that the effective operation of UNMOVIC, as the successor organization to the Special Commission, and the IAEA, is essential for the implementation of resolution 687 (1991) and other relevant resolutions,
Noting the letter dated 16 September 2002 from the Minister for Foreign Affairs of Iraq addressed to the Secretary General is a necessary step toward rectifying Iraq's continued failure to comply with relevant Security Council resolutions,
Noting further the letter dated 8 October 2002 from the Executive Chairman of UNMOVIC and the Director General of the IAEA to General Al-Saadi of the Government of Iraq laying out the practical arrangements, agreed in Vienna, that are prerequisites for the resumption of inspections in Iraq by UNMOVIC and the IAEA, and expressing the gravest concern at the continued failure by the Government of Iraq to provide confirmation of the arrangements as laid out in that letter,
Determined to secure full compliance with its decisions,
Acting under chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations,
Decides that Iraq is still, and has been for a number of years, in material breach of its obligations under relevant resolutions, including resolution 687 (1991), in particular through Iraq's failure to cooperate with United Nations inspectors and the IAEA, and to complete the actions required under paragraphs 8 to 13 of resolution 687 (1991);
Recalls that the Council has repeatedly warned Iraq that it will face serious consequences as a result of its continued violations of its obligations;
Decides that, in order to begin to comply with its disarmament obligations, in addition to submitting the required biannual declarations, the Government of Iraq shall provide to UNMOVIC, IAEA, and the Security Council, not later than 30 days from the date of this resolution, a currently accurate, full and complete declaration of all aspects of its programs to develop chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, and other delivery systems such as unmanned aerial vehicles and dispersal systems designed for use on aircraft, including any holdings and precise locations of such weapons, components, sub-components, stocks of agents, and related material and equipment, the locations and work of its research, development and production facilities, as well as all other chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, including any which it claims are for purposes not related to weapon production or material;
Decides that false statements or omissions in the declarations submitted by Iraq pursuant to this resolution and failure by Iraq at any time to comply with, and cooperate fully in the implementation of, this resolution shall constitute a further material breach of Iraq's obligations;
Decides that Iraq shall provide UNMOVIC and IAEA immediate, unimpeded, unconditional, and unrestricted access to any and all, including underground, areas, facilities, buildings, equipment, records, and means of transport which they wish to inspect, as well as immediate, unimpeded, unrestricted, and private access to all officials and other persons whom UNMOVIC or IAEA wish to interview in the mode or location of UNMOVIC's or IAEA's choice pursuant to any aspect of their mandates; further decides that UNMOVIC and IAEA may at their discretion conduct interviews inside or outside of Iraq, may facilitate the travel of those interviewed and family members outside of Iraq, and that, at the sole discretion of UNMOVIC and IAEA, such interviews may occur without the presence of observers from the Iraqi government; and instructs UNMOVIC and requests the IAEA to resume inspections no later than 45 days following adoption of this resolution and to update the Council 60 days thereafter;
Endorses the 8 October 2002 letter from the Executive Chairman of UNMOVIC and the Director General of the IAEA to General Al-Saadi of the Government of Iraq, which is annexed hereto, and decides that the contents of the letter shall be binding upon Iraq;
Decides further that, in view of the prolonged interruption by Iraq of the presence of UNMOVIC and IAEA and in order for them to accomplish the tasks set forth in paragraph 3 above and notwithstanding prior understandings, the Security Council hereby establishes the following revised or additional authorities, which shall be binding upon Iraq notwithstanding prior understandings, to facilitate their work in Iraq:
-UNMOVIC and IAEA shall determine the composition of their inspection teams in such a way as to ensure that these teams are composed of the most qualified and experienced experts available, and all UNMOVIC and IAEA personnel shall en