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NUCLEAR
North Korea Says Nuclear Program Can Be Negotiated
Report: N. Korea Wants U.S. Talks
US Brushes Off Report of North Korea Talks Request
White House Urges Pyongyang to End Weapons Program
MILITARY
U.N. Seeks More Forces for Kabul
The Need Not to Know
Health Depts. Aim to Spot Bioterror
Army Weighs Privatizing Close to 214,000 Jobs
Chinese spy ship driven off Taiwan after PLA naval operation warning
Indonesia Military Allegedly Talked Of Targeting Mine
Report: Bin Laden Son Detained
Pentagon - Iraq's Special Republican Guard
Iraq Ready to Fight, Saddam Tells Airforce
Netanyahu to Accept Israeli Post if Elections Are Held
NATO Tells Hungary to Modernize Its Military
Czechs Become Model for New NATO
'Pakistan': A Nuclear Yugoslavia
Russian Crisis Brings War Home
Feud Grows Over Extradition of Chechen Rebel
The 'Sons' Rise In Chechnya
Russian Copter Shot Down in Chechnya
Sex, Lies and Videotape
U.S. Pilots in Gulf Use Southern Iraq for Practice Runs
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
War Games
Security Doesn't Have to Be So Unsightly
U.S. Defends Bush's Designation of Bomb-Plot Suspect
The FBI Has Bugged Our Public Libraries
Afghans Raise Concern That Taliban Forces Are Reorganizing in Pakistan
OTHER
Climate Talks Shift Focus to How to Deal With Changes
ACTIVISTS
'Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers'
Plan to Crack Down on Dissent Stirs Debate in Hong Kong
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- korea
North Korea Says Nuclear Program Can Be Negotiated
November 3, 2002
New York Times
By PHILIP SHENON
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/03/international/asia/03KORE.html
WASHINGTON, Nov. 2 - North Korea says it wants to negotiate with the United States over the North's newly disclosed nuclear weapons program, and is open to meeting the Bush administration's demand that it shut down its previously secret uranium-enrichment facilities.
In a series of statements issued over the last week by its mission to the United Nations, North Korea said "everything will be negotiable," including the dismantling of the enrichment program.
Last month, North Korea acknowledged that the uranium facilities were part of a secret program to build nuclear weapons in violation of a 1994 agreement with the United States. The 1994 accord provided for energy aid and other assistance to North Korea.
In the statements released through its United Nations mission in New York, North Korea also said it was open to discussion of international inspections of the uranium facilities.
The State Department said it had no official response to the North Korea statements, which were made in an interview with a senior North Korean diplomat and subsequent written statements to The New York Times, contacts that the North Korean Mission at the United Nations initiated.
But administration officials said they doubted that the United States would waver in its refusal to resume negotiations with North Korea until it first dismantled the enrichment laboratories.
The United States is pressing its allies to isolate North Korea, using the North's desperate economic needs to force it to comply with the American demands. On Friday, Under Secretary of State John R. Bolton ruled out talks with North Korea until it "completely and verifiably" ended the nuclear weapons program. He said it was "hard to see how we can have conversations with a government that has blatantly violated its agreements."
In their statements over the last week, the North Koreans said they were equally firm that they would not consider dismantling the uranium facilities until after the United States had reopened talks. If the United States refused to negotiate, they said, they would welcome the intervention of an intermediary, like former President Jimmy Carter or other prominent American political figures.
"Everything will be negotiable," the North Korean government said in one of the statements issued through Ambassador Han Song Ryol of the mission at the United Nations, the country's sole diplomatic post in the United States. "Our government will resolve all U.S. security concerns through the talks, if your government has a will to end its hostile policy."
In the interview in the mission - a small, nondescript suite of offices decorated with images of the nation's absolute leader, Kim Jong Il, and his late father, Kim Il Sung - Mr. Han said his government had been "stunned" by the refusal of the United States to continue talks on the nuclear issue.
In North Korea, "the interpretation is that the U.S. is preparing for a war," he said. adding: "There must be a continuing dialogue. If both sides sit together, the matter can be resolved peacefully and quickly."
Asked in a later e-mail exchange if North Korea was willing to consider shutting down the uranium-enrichment program, he replied, "Yes, I believe our government will resolve all U.S. security concerns."
Asked if the North Korean government would consider allowing international inspections of the uranium facilities, he replied simply, "Yes."
He said it was the United States that first violated the 1994 nuclear agreement, the so-called Agreed Framework, because of Washington's failure to move toward normal ties, and because of long delays in the completion of two civilian nuclear power plants that were promised under the pact.
North Korea was startled, he said, by the Bush administration's hostility toward it from the start, when the administration shut down wide-ranging bilateral talks begun during the Clinton administration.
Mr. Han said his government had been particularly alarmed by President Bush's description of North Korea as part of an "axis of evil," along with Iraq and Iran, and by Mr. Bush's repeated statements beginning last summer that the United States would pre-emptively attack nations that threatened it with weapons of mass destruction.
"The U.S. has put the D.P.R.K. on a list of pre-emptive strikes," he said, using the initials for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, North Korea's official name. "So we would like to ask the American people: What is the alterative? What is the choice for the D.P.R.K.?"
Mr. Han, who is understood to be a crucial member of his country's Foreign Ministry, said his statements had been authorized at senior levels of the government, which he said was acting to open a new "means of communication with United States government and its people."
The North Korean Mission contacted The Times through a New Jersey restaurateur, Robert Egan, who is the chairman of a trade group that has worked to improve ties between the United States and North Korea. Officials of North Korea, he said, "want the American people to understand their position."
Members of Congress and Korea specialists in the United States said the series of statements was highly significant if only because they suggested the North's eagerness to resolve the nuclear issue. At the same time, the North has spoken of a desire to mend relations with Japan, and taken steps to open up parts of its economy to foreign investment.
Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs, said in an interview that he was "skeptical" and "mistrustful" about any new North Korea offer to shut its nuclear weapons program.
But he said that the United States would need to resume a dialogue with North Korea, and that the Bush administration's refusal to talk for nearly two years before last month's confrontation had the effect of "guaranteeing a negative outcome."
"I'll tell you that I thought the administration made an enormous mistake not to engage with the North Koreans from Day 1," he said. "We didn't trust the Soviet Union, but we talked to them and ultimately engaged them in a ratcheting down of the arms race."
Stephen W. Bosworth, who served as the American ambassador to South Korea from 1997 until 2000, said the North Korean statements suggested that "they are feeling pushed into a corner" and even under threat from the United States.
"They may be paranoid, but they do have enemies," he said. "Certainly there is no reason for them not to think of the Bush administration - and more generally, the United States - as an enemy."
"In the end, I think we're going to have to talk to them again," he said.
--------
Report: N. Korea Wants U.S. Talks
November 3, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-NKorea-US.html
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- A senior North Korean diplomat said the communist country was willing to negotiate with the United States over its newly disclosed nuclear weapons program, according to a news report Sunday.
``Everything will be negotiable,'' North Korean ambassador to the United Nations Han Song Ryol told The New York Times. ``There must be a continuing dialogue. If both sides sit together, the matter can be resolved peacefully and quickly.''
Asked if Pyongyang was willing to consider shutting down its uranium enrichment program, Han said: ``Yes, I believe our government will resolve all U.S. security concerns.''
Han also said Pyongyang would consider allowing international inspections of the uranium facilities.
Since the nuclear dispute surfaced last month, North Korea has maintained that it would abandon its nuclear weapons program if the United States signs a nonaggression treaty.
U.S. official said they have no plan to engage in talks with the North unless it scraps the nuclear program.
Han said his government was ``stunned'' by the refusal of the United States to continue talks on the nuclear issue and that it thinks that Washington was ``preparing for war.''
``Our government will resolve all U.S. security concerns through the talks, if your government has a will to end its hostile policy,'' Han said.
He said the North Korean government was startled when President Bush suspended bilateral security talks that began during the final months of the former Clinton administration.
Bush suspended talks with North Korea soon after coming into office in 2001 for a policy review. He offered in June that year to resume talks, but the North said no.
In January, Bush called North Korea a part of an ``axis of evil'' along with Iraq and Iran, further chilling U.S.-North Korea relations.
After the two year standstill, Washington and Pyongyang resumed talks last month with a visit to Pyongyang by Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly, during which the North admitted having the nuclear weapons program.
Since the revelation, the United States and North Korea have accused each other of violating a 1994 agreement, under which the North promised not to develop nuclear weapons in return for two U.S.-designed light-water reactors.
North Korea has said it considered the agreement dead because of delays in delivery of reactors, initially planned to be completed by 2003. U.S. officials anticipate at least five years of delay.
The United States fought on South Korea's side in the 1950-53 Korean War. Washington keeps 37,000 troops in the South, a legacy of the war that ended in a cease-fire, not a peace treaty.
-------
US Brushes Off Report of North Korea Talks Request
Reuters
Sunday, November 3, 2002; 1:36 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A62258-2002Nov3?language=printer
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - North Korea wants talks with the United States on its nuclear weapons program, The New York Times reported on Sunday, but the White House quickly dismissed the report and called on Pyongyang to end the program.
"Everything will be negotiable," North Korea said in one of several written statements released to the newspaper through Pyongyang's mission to the United Nations that disclosed the North Korean request for talks.
The New York Times said North Korea also said it would consider international inspections of the uranium facilities, citing the written statements released by its mission to the United Nations and an interview with a senior North Korean diplomat.
Asked about the report as President Bush flew to Illinois on a domestic political trip, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters: "North Korea knows what it needs to do ... that it needs to dismantle its nuclear program and honor its treaty obligations."
North Korea on Oct. 4 admitted it had a clandestine weapons program, putting the reclusive Stalinist state in violation of at least four international commitments, including the 1994 Agreed Framework under which it promised to halt its nuclear efforts.
Pyongyang's admission upset the delicate balance of power on the Korean Peninsula, one of the Cold War's last frontiers, where the United States has some 37,000 troops to protect South Korea from North Korea.
Asked if the United States was ready to open talks, Fleischer replied: "We continue to work with our allies about this. But it is not a question of talking, it's a question of action. North Korea should not have abandoned its obligations. North Korea needs to keep its word."
Asked what could be a first step by North Korea, Fleischer said: "Dismantlement of its nuclear weapons programs."
The New York Times story was based in part on exchanges with North Korea's U.N. ambassador, Han Song Ryol.
"Everything will be negotiable," read one of the statements to The Times issued through Han. "Our government will resolve all U.S. security concerns through the talks, if your government has a will to ends its hostile policy."
Han told The Times in an interview that North Korea had been stunned by the U.S. refusal to continue talks on the nuclear issue and interpreted that to mean the United States was preparing for war.
"There must be continuing dialogue," he was quoted as saying. "If both sides sit together, the matter can be resolved peacefully and quickly."
In a later exchange by e-mail, Han indicated his country was willing to consider shutting down the uranium enrichment program and also would consider allowing international inspections of the uranium facilities, the newspaper reported.
The North Korean diplomat said his country was alarmed by the Bush administration's hostility toward it from the start, when it shut down talks began during the Clinton administration, and subsequently by Bush's description of North Korea as part of an "axis of evil."
----
White House Urges Pyongyang to End Weapons Program
November 3, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/03/international/03WIRE-KORE.html
WASHINGTON, Nov 3 (Reuters) - North Korea wants talks with the United States on its nuclear weapons program, The New York Times reported on Sunday, but the White House quickly dismissed the report and called on Pyongyang to end the program.
"Everything will be negotiable," North Korea said in one of several written statements released to the newspaper through Pyongyang's mission to the United Nations that disclosed the North Korean request for talks.
The New York Times said North Korea also said it would consider international inspections of the uranium facilities, citing the written statements released by its mission to the United Nations and an interview with a senior North Korean diplomat.
Asked about the report as U.S. President George W. Bush flew to Illinois on a domestic political trip, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters: "North Korea knows what it needs to do ... that it needs to dismantle its nuclear program and honor its treaty obligations."
North Korea on Oct. 4 admitted it had a clandestine weapons program, putting the reclusive Stalinist state in violation of at least four international commitments, including the 1994 Agreed Framework under which it promised to halt its nuclear efforts.
Pyongyang's admission upset the delicate balance of power on the Korean Peninsula, one of the Cold War's last frontiers, where the United States has some 37,000 troops to protect South Korea from North Korea.
Asked if the United States was ready to open talks, Fleischer replied: "We continue to work with our allies about this. But it is not a question of talking, it's a question of action. North Korea should not have abandoned its obligations. North Korea needs to keep its word."
Asked what could be a first step by North Korea, Fleischer said: "Dismantlement of its nuclear weapons programs."
The New York Times story was based in part on exchanges with North Korea's U.N. ambassador, Han Song Ryol.
"Everything will be negotiable," read one of the statements to The Times issued through Han. "Our government will resolve all U.S. security concerns through the talks, if your government has a will to ends its hostile policy."
Han told The Times in an interview that North Korea had been stunned by the U.S. refusal to continue talks on the nuclear issue and interpreted that to mean the United States was preparing for war.
"There must be continuing dialogue," he was quoted as saying. "If both sides sit together, the matter can be resolved peacefully and quickly."
In a later exchange by e-mail, Han indicated his country was willing to consider shutting down the uranium enrichment program and also would consider allowing international inspections of the uranium facilities, the newspaper reported.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
U.N. Seeks More Forces for Kabul
November 3, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-UN-Afghanistan.html
UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- As sporadic fighting and lawlessness plague Afghanistan, the United Nations is hoping Washington will finally back the expansion of the international force in Kabul.
The world body is also promoting establishment of a national army and police force as the long-term answer to ending the reign of warlords and bringing security to the country.
The lack of security remains an overriding concern a year after the United States launched its war that toppled Afghanistan's former Taliban rulers and dispersed the al-Qaida terrorists they harbored. It is hampering efforts to rebuild the country and provide Afghanistan's 26 million people with a peace dividend after two decades of war.
The top U.N. envoy in Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, told the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday that the new government headed by Hamid Karzai doesn't have the means or power to deal with the underlying problems that cause security threats.
So clashes among rival warlords and harassment and intimidation of civilians continue. Since August, a series of bombs have exploded in Kabul and several girls' schools outside the capital were attacked.
There is also concern that Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar is trying to form an alliance with remnants of the Taliban and al-Qaida to challenge the Karzai government, Brahimi said. Hekmatyar has urged Afghans to rise up against all foreign forces in the country.
Brahimi, a highly respected former Algerian foreign minister, said there will be no long-term security in Afghanistan until a well-trained, well-equipped, and regularly paid national police force and national army are in place.
But training a police force has only recently begun, and serious efforts to create an army haven't started.
For immediate security, Karzai, Brahimi, and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan have called for expansion of the 5,000-strong International Security Assistance Force, now confined to Kabul.
Initially, U.S. officials opposed any expansion of the force and the Europeans also grew cool to the idea of deploying more troops to key cities around the country.
But Brahimi said in an interview on Thursday that the United States is rethinking its opposition.
``We hear their position has moved ... from saying `no' it's not necessary to saying look we don't care one way or the other ... to saying `yes' I think it's a good idea, but we can't do it because we have other things to do and it would be good if somebody else did it,'' Brahimi said.
``They haven't reach the stage of saying `yes,' this is indispensable and it must be done,'' he said.
That's what the United Nations would like.
U.S. Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith said in September that the United States would be happy if other countries contributed resources to build up the international force.
``But we retain the view that we're not looking to base Afghan security on the fantasy of enormous numbers of international peacekeepers coming here and trying to create order,'' he said.
The State Department said Saturday it had no further comment.
Brahimi said he doubts the international force will be expanded anytime soon.
Nonetheless, he said, ``the impression we have is not only the Americans but a lot of other people are now thinking, yes, something has to be done.''
In February, Afghanistan's Foreign Minister Abdullah backed a suggested force of about 20,000 troops in four or five cities.
Turkey now heads the international force, which includes military units from Germany, Britain and France, among others. Its troops are leaving in December and the Germans and Dutch will take over command.
Brahimi said that with Germany as the lead nation, work is proceeding well in building a national police force. But despite U.S. and French training efforts, attempts to start building a national army have been unsatisfactory so far, he said.
One problem is that the warlords know a powerful national army would usurp their positions as regional powerbrokers and expand the authority of the central government.
Brahimi noted that all the warlords are on the country's Defense Commission and he insisted that establishing a national army is ``absolutely doable.''
He said the commission has held serious consultations but it must now produce a plan that reforms the Ministry of Defense and commits all factional leaders to integrate their forces into a national army and agree that some will be disarmed and demobilized.
What's needed now, Brahimi said, is action by the warlords and financial support from the international community to support the formation of an army and a police force.
-------- biological weapons
The Need Not to Know
By Jim Hoagland
Sunday, November 3, 2002
Washington Post; Page B07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A54816-2002Nov1?language=printer
The brief official note that came from Baghdad to the health ministry of a quasi-friendly European nation a few weeks ago was polite in tone, chilling in content. Iraq's health service director wanted to know: Could you provide information and help to treat an anthrax outbreak?
No answer went back to Baghdad. Instead, the European government reported the Iraqi inquiry to the State Department and asked its own questions: Could the note represent a genuine request for help for an outbreak that had already occurred? Or was it a veiled warning of a weapon that invading American forces would meet?
"There is no way of knowing, and that may be the point," said an official who described the note's contents to me. "The Iraqis are very adept at using disguised threats. But it is also conceivable that their efforts to weaponize anthrax have created a problem at home. There is no way to be sure."
We do not expect terrorists or brutal dictators to be subtle or ambiguous. So we underestimate Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and the rest. We expect to find not only a smoking gun, but also bloody fingerprints on it after a terrorist outrage. But evidence accumulates that today's masters of terror expect Americans to expect just that and labor to deny such evidence to them.
As the Bush administration has made ever more translucent its intent to go to war rather than let Iraq keep biological and chemical arsenals and develop a nuclear bomb, controversy has escalated over Iraq's links to international terrorism and to bin Laden's al Qaeda in particular.
Much of the controversy is unnecessary or intentionally diversionary. The links become clear with a little digging. You miss them only if you have a strong need not to know what Iraq's terrorist trainers and their Palestinian, Yemeni and other cut-outs and false-flaggers have been doing and hiding.
Here is one publicly available description that rebuts the once-popular view at the CIA that Iraq has not been in the international terrorist business since a thwarted plot in 1993 against former president George H.W. Bush:
"Page after page [of secret Iraqi documents] revealed plans for terrorist operations. . . . A requisition to the army asked for Iranian land mines so that the high explosive could be removed and used in booby traps overseas -- the purpose being to dupe any forensic examiner into concluding that the culprit was Iran, not Iraq. There were designs for mines configured as toys. Plans for ambushing moving convoys. A primer on how to wiretap. Document after document outlined an international program of terror."
The source of this description of a June 1996 discovery of what the author calls an Iraqi "school for terrorists and terrorism" is none other than Scott Ritter, now the star of antiwar rallies but once a fiercely dedicated U.N. arms inspector. You will find it on Page 121 of his informative 1999 book titled "Endgame."
False-flagging -- planting clues that finger another nation -- is a sophisticated espionage art. Saddam Hussein and company have spent the past 12 years planning and acting to get their enemies without getting got themselves. They have had billions of dollars available from oil smuggling to pour into a campaign of destruction, deception and denial.
But what about al Qaeda? When I heard President Bush declare in his Oct. 7 speech in Cincinnati that Iraq had trained al Qaeda members in bombmaking, poisons and deadly gases, I went asking the all-purpose reporter's question: Sez who? The answer: Sez the CIA, when pressed to the mat.
"The president's speech was cleared line by line by several levels of the CIA, including the director," George Tenet. So says a senior, knowledgeable U.S. official. "There is no doubt about its accuracy."
Two senior officials who work closely with Bush (who thus may have axes to grind) and two working-level spook types no longer in his pay (and without discernible axes) confirm that about the time Ritter was pawing through Iraqi documents at the Abu Ghraib military camp, the CIA was getting reliable reports about bin Laden's terror operations then headquartered in Khartoum. One top-secret report stood out: It detailed how Iraq had provided a Palestinian bombmaking expert to bin Laden and then hid that link. That nugget worked its way into a presidential speech a mere six years later.
"We've never said Saddam masterminded September 11," observes a senior official. But Bush's case that Baghdad played a central role in establishing and running the infrastructure of international terrorism that contributed to Sept. 11 is undeniable. Unless, that is, there is a need not to know.
--------
Health Depts. Aim to Spot Bioterror
November 3, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Bioterror-Alert.html
NEW YORK (AP) -- Public health officials have developed an odd interest lately in the mundane and arcane.
Epidemiologists are tracking orange juice sales at the local Safeway and poring over school attendance data. They're mapping every case of the sniffles they can find and watching surveillance videos to count how many times people sneeze.
The idea is that a sudden spike in everyday aches, pains, sniffles and coughs could signal the earliest stages of a health commissioner's worst nightmare -- a massive biological attack. So in the last few years, an increasing number of health departments have started collecting electronic data from hospital emergency rooms, pharmacies and other sources in an effort to gauge the overall level of illness in the population.
Epidemiologists call their new strategy syndromic surveillance, because it looks for increases in clusters of symptoms -- ``syndromes'' in medical jargon -- rather than particular disease diagnoses. In September, public health officials from around the country met at the New York Academy of Medicine to explore the potential of using syndromic surveillance as part of a bioterror alarm system. The conference was organized by the New York City health department with help from the Centers for Disease Control and funding from the Sloan Foundation.
The new disease-tracking approach is also on the agenda at the American Public Health Association annual meeting in Philadelphia Nov. 9-13.
Last year's anthrax letter campaign was just ``a tragic dry-run,'' Minnesota state epidemiologist Michael Osterholm told his colleagues on the first morning of the conference.
``Do not under any circumstances be surprised when the next shoe drops,'' Osterholm admonished. ``It will drop.''
And more than a year after the Sept. 11 attacks, the nation remains woefully vulnerable to terrorist attacks of all kinds, a panel on homeland security reported recently.
If it were to provide early warning of a bioterror attack, syndromic surveillance might avert massive casualties. Even some of the deadliest bioterror agents -- including anthrax, plague and smallpox -- can be treated successfully if they are diagnosed early enough. But they also progress quickly from mild symptoms to serious illness to death, so hours count.
``There is the potential of a huge benefit if we really do get early detection of a large bioterror event out of this,'' said Farzad Mostashari, an assistant commissioner at the New York City health department.
Traditionally, health departments have relied on astute doctors to identify bioterror attacks by diagnosis. That's how last fall's attacks came to light -- Dr. Larry M. Bush, a physician at JFK Medical Center in Atlantis, Fla., identified anthrax in a supermarket tabloid photo editor named Bob Stevens.
``We don't pretend that the technology can replace man or that this is the answer to everything,'' said Mostashari.
But doctors may not recognize such rare diseases as tularemia, Q fever or bubonic plague -- all potential bioterror agents. And one diagnosis would not tell public health officials very much about the scope, geographic location or timing of an attack. So to supplement the eyes and ears of individual physicians, some public health departments now monitor everything from emergency room visits, 911 calls and doctor visits to school absenteeism and sales of cough syrup.
Public health has enjoyed a badly needed cash infusion in the year since the World Trade Center and anthrax attacks. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention got $1.1 billion from Congress this year to beef up bioterrorism defense. It is hard to say exactly how much of that money is going to surveillance, but many experts believe spending a sizable chunk of it on warning systems would be a good idea.
``For a long time it was very hard to get people to listen when you talked about public health surveillance,'' said Margaret Hamburg, vice president for biological programs at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a Washington, D.C., think tank. ``Surveillance simply was not sexy and it was very poorly understood.''
Until recently, some researchers were skeptical that anything so apparently trivial as cough syrup sales could indicate a significant jump in illness. But researchers have shown that at least with the annual flu season, there are a wealth of indicators that people are getting sick.
Elaine Newton, a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University, has done studies showing that orange juice and paper tissue sales increase at the onset of flu season. She has also found that Internet consumer health web sites dealing with the flu get more hits a few days before a flu outbreak is officially announced.
Now Newton is exploring the seemingly far-fetched idea of using surveillance camera footage of public places to gauge the health of the population, perhaps even by counting coughs and sneezes.
Such notions naturally raise the issue of privacy. The current systems do not collect names or other identifying information, but Carnegie Mellon computer scientist Latanya Sweeney said anybody who really wanted to identify a person would probably be able to do so by combining data from the bioterror system with facts culled from voter rolls or some other public database.
New York has had a system since 1999. It analyzes information from hospital emergency rooms, the 911 system and ambulance dispatches for sudden increases. The system also collects sales data from city drugstores and absentee statistics from employers and schools as supplementary information.
Since June 2001, Seattle's public health department has analyzed reports from three emergency rooms and 11 primary care clinics. The Seattle system also monitors 911 dispatches, which are available via the Internet by the city's fire department.
Baltimore even collects information on dog and cat deaths from the city's animal control department, and keeps track of school absenteeism and over-the-counter cold medicine sales.
A system in western Pennsylvania collects information on every patient who passes through the doors of 21 hospital emergency departments. It records the age, gender, home ZIP code, time of admission and chief complaint of each patient, and looks for sudden increases in respiratory illness and other symptoms that might indicate a bioterror attack. A version of the Pennsylvania system was also set up in Utah for the 2002 Winter Olympics, and has been operating there ever since.
Monitoring major public events for bioterrorism has become a challenging subspecialty for designers of these early warning systems. In addition to the 2002 Winter Olympics, systems have been set up for the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle, both the Democratic and Republican party conventions in 2000 and the 2001 World Series.
In October the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention awarded a $1.2 million grant to Harvard University researchers to begin developing a national warning system that automatically collects information on the number of patients with flu-like symptoms, strange rashes and other possible symptoms of bioterrorism.
The New York health department knows its surveillance system works because it goes off all the time. A sudden increase in rashes at a particularly busy emergency room is much more likely to be a random uptick than a smallpox attack. A rise in fevers and coughs during November almost certainly means ``flu,'' not ``anthrax.''
For example, New York's system issued an alert the day American Airlines Flight 587 crashed on takeoff from JFK airport, two months after the World Trade Center attacks. The two hospitals nearest to the crash site were reporting an unusually high number of patients with respiratory problems, a possible indicator of an attack with anthrax or several other bioterror agents.
When investigators checked with the hospitals, they discovered that the increase was due to a handful of factors, some related to the plane crash and some incidental. There was one firefighter who had smoke inhalation from responding to the crash, two cases of flu, three asthma attacks, two people complaining of chest pain and one person who appeared upon examination to be having an anxiety attack.
``We didn't really think there was a bioterrorism attack,'' said Mostashari, who is credited with setting up the New York surveillance system.
Even so, he added, every suspicious pattern has to be investigated or the system won't work.
``We do need something to give us a sense of the pulse of the city,'' said Marcelle Layton, an assistant commissioner at the New York Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
For all its sensitivity, New York's system did not detect the anthrax attacks last fall. Layton and her colleagues do not consider that a problem, however, because the system is designed to detect major airborne bioterror attacks. Last year's mail attacks were so limited that only one of the seven New Yorkers who contracted skin anthrax from contaminated letters even visited an emergency room.
-------- business
Army Weighs Privatizing Close to 214,000 Jobs
One in Six Workers Could Be Affected
By Christopher Lee
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 3, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A59002-2002Nov2?language=printer
The Army is considering whether to contract out nearly 214,000 military and civilian employee positions in what would be the largest transfer of jobs to the private sector by a government agency, Pentagon officials said.
If successful, the Army's initiative -- undertaken in the name of focusing more of the military's resources on national defense -- could affect more than one in six Army jobs around the world. And it could provide a major boost to the Bush administration's efforts to move large blocs of government work into the private sector.
Although similar attempts to privatize government jobs date back decades, the Army plan is much more ambitious. On the line are the jobs of 58,727 military personnel and 154,910 civilian employees who perform such support functions as accounting, legal counsel, maintenance and communications.
Army Secretary Thomas E. White wrote in an Oct. 4 internal memo that the Army needs to direct as many resources as it can to anti-terrorism efforts and let support jobs go to the private sector, where the administration believes they can be done at lower cost.
"The Army must focus its energies and talents on our core competencies -- functions we perform better than anyone else -- and seek to obtain other needed products or services from the private sector where it makes sense," White wrote in the memo.
All told, the Army currently employs about 1.3 million people, including 222,000 civilians.
Federal unions denounced the Army plan as a thinly veiled attempt to do away with their jobs and benefit defense contractors. And some analysts said it raised questions about the Defense Department's capability to adequately manage its growing workforce of contract personnel.
"It's not about saving money, it's about moving money," said Bobby L. Harnage Sr., president of the American Federation of Government Employees. "They're going to turn over as many jobs as they can to these contractors, who are their major political contributors. . . . Their mission is to privatize. They don't give a damn about national security."
The Army says it is examining ways to trim the public payroll of jobs determined not to be central to its mission of national defense. One established method is to allow defense contractors to compete with Army employees to see who could do a particular job best and at the lowest cost. The process, which requires a comprehensive economic analysis, can take years -- but could result in a decision to keep the jobs in-house.
Other options under consideration include creating public-private partnerships and quasi-governmental corporations, directly moving jobs to the private sector, and simply wiping out some job categories altogether. But some of the methods aren't permitted by law and will require new legislation from Congress.
Military personnel whose jobs are affected would be reassigned to other duties within the Army. Officials, acknowledging that layoffs are possible, said they would try to help civilian workers move with their jobs to private contractors or land assignments elsewhere in the government.
"We're not just throwing people out on the street," said Lt. Col. Ryan Yantis, an Army spokesman. "We're very committed to doing the right thing in stewardship for both money, people and our mission."
A similar review of 25,000 Army positions in the 1980s led to about 15,000 jobs being moved to the private sector, with the rest remaining in-house, officials said. In another review of 33,000 posts begun in the late 1990s, 6,300 jobs were converted to private-sector work, 6,800 were kept in the government and no final decisions have been made on the rest.
Officials said 375 civilians had been laid off since 1998 in earlier rounds of privatization.
The Army's new plan, first reported by Government Executive magazine, is in keeping with President Bush's directive last year that agencies increase the amount of work deemed not "inherently governmental" that is contracted out or put up for competition between the public and private sectors.
Bush's plan calls for the Pentagon to have "competed out" 15 percent of all such jobs, or directly convert them to private-sector contracts, by the end of fiscal 2003. The administration's ultimate goal is to put 425,000 jobs government-wide up for such competition.
So far, 20,000 to 40,000 jobs in 26 major agencies have been put up for competition or directly converted to the private sector, said Angela Styles, administrator for federal procurement policy at the Office of Management and Budget.
Styles said most of the reviews were continuing and she did not know exactly how many positions had actually moved to the private sector.
"You'll probably see an increase in that as agencies start to make performance decisions," she said, "but that doesn't mean that they [all] go to the private sector. More than half of these competitions are won by the public sector."
The Forest Service, for instance, has identified 3,035 jobs in such areas as information technology, buildings, and grounds and road maintenance that may be contracted out by next October, angering the union that represents many of its 30,000 employees.
"We think the mission should be determining what goes on here, not some arbitrary target," said Art Johnson, legislative chairman of the Forest Service Council of the National Federation of Federal Employees. "We don't think that's in the best interests of the taxpayers or the mission of the Forest Service. It seems to be contrary to the way government should be run to have a quota system."
Alisa Harrison, a spokeswoman for the Department of Agriculture, which includes the Forest Service, said the agency merely identified jobs that may be competed out. "That doesn't mean that all of them will be," she said. "We're trying to work through the process with as much sensitivity as we can."
As recently as last December, Defense Department officials also were questioning whether targets were the way to go.
In a Dec. 26 memo to OMB Director Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., Defense Undersecretary E.C. "Pete" Aldridge wrote that a reassessment "may very well show we have already contracted out capabilities to the private sector that are essential to our mission, or that divestiture of some activities may be more appropriate than public-private competitions or direct conversions."
Army officials said White's proposal does not represent a change of heart. White's memo calls for a range of options for dealing with the Army jobs, including public-private competition, direct privatization or transferring duties to another agency.
Army commands are to submit plans to White by Dec. 20 to privatize or compete all "non-core spaces," a process that Army officials said could begin as early as spring if White gives the go-ahead.
"The first of the competitions, privatizations, divestitures can, presumably, start immediately after approval," said Jim Wakefield, deputy chairman of the Army's non-core-competencies working group, which will oversee implementation of the plan. "There is no reason to delay."
Employees disagree, said Jacqueline Simon, director of public policy for the AFGE.
Simon noted that some of the options outlined by White are not permitted by law, which generally requires a competition to be a part of determining whether a government job can be done better or more cheaply by the private sector.
Indeed, White concedes in his memo that "most of these alternatives . . . will require enabling legislation that does not exist yet."
Styles, the OMB official, said the lack of competition in some of the Army's plans had caught her eye, too. "I just had them in here for an hour and a half talking about it," she said.
Styles said Bush does not want agencies to simply outsource jobs to the private sector. His model relies on competition to determine whether jobs should stay or go.
"If we don't think it fits the construct of competition, or it doesn't help us achieve the goal of providing the best service to the taxpayer, within whichever sector, then it doesn't count from our managerial agenda perspective," she said.
The prospect of moving so many Army jobs into the private sector raises questions about who will oversee the workforce and what rules will govern it, said Dan Guttman, a specialist on government contracting and a fellow at Johns Hopkins University's Center for the Study of American Government.
Already the Army has little idea of how many people make up its contract workforce, Guttman said.
Assistant Army Secretary Reginald J. Brown put the figure at "between 124,000 and 605,000" in an April memo to Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), the ranking Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee. A month earlier, White acknowledged in a department memo that "credible information on contract labor does not exist internal to the Department."
"The fact that the Army has so little grasp on how many people it is already employing raises basic questions about its ability to account in the future for all this stuff," Guttman said. "The relevant question is not, 'Is there competition?' The issue is who is going to be there after the [contract] workforce is established to supervise it and hold it to account."
John Anderson, assistant deputy assistant secretary for manpower management, said the Army has a pilot program that requires contractors to report costs and workforce sizes back to the department.
"We're working on that right now," he said.
-------- china
Chinese spy ship driven off Taiwan after PLA naval operation warning
Nov 03, 2002
Agence France-Presse
http://spacedaily.com/news/021103082543.ozdecxsj.html
TAIPEI (AFP) Taiwanese navy and coast guard vessels chased away a Chinese spy ship in the island's territorial waters after fresh warnings China has expanded naval operations against Taiwan, officials said Sunday.
After a tip-off from fishermen, a Lafayette-class frigate from the navy and patrol boats from the Coast Guard Administration (CGA) rushed to the scene after "Xiangyanghong No. 14" was detected some nine kilometers (five nautical miles) off Lanyu, an island southeast of Taiwan, the CGA said.
"We have adopted due procedure to make sure the ship leaves our territorial waters," a CGA spokesman told AFP.
CGA records showed it was the third time the ship had crossed into Taiwan's territorial waters this year.
The unarmed 2,894-tonne Chinese navigation vessel was last detected and driven away from Lanyu October 10.
The vessel also sailed into Taiwan's turf in May, some 25 nautical miles off Chiupeng base, where most of Taiwan's missile tests have been conducted.
Taiwan's armed forces were, at that time, conducting the "Hankuang 18" (Han Glory) exercise, the year's biggest military exercise to test reforms of the military command structure.
Taiwan defense minister Tang Yao-ming, in surprise testimony to parliament last week, said a Chinese destroyer from the North Sea fleet recently sailed through the waters east of Taiwan to join a wargame in the South China Sea.
Chinese warships usually sailed past the Taiwan Strait for similar missions.
Local military analysts regarded the rare sailing as a flexing of marine muscle by the Chinese navy, which is fast-modernising its fleets after obtaining advanced Kilo-class submarines and Modern-class destroyers from Russia.
Tang urged parliament to approve the navy's controversial plan to purchase four second-hand Kidd-class destroyers from the United States.
Taiwanese officials normally remain tightlipped over Chinese wargames near the island for fear of sparking public panic.
Taiwan and China, which split at the end of a civil war in 1949, are still technically at war despite opening civil contacts in 1987.
-------- indonesia
Indonesia Military Allegedly Talked Of Targeting Mine
By Ellen Nakashima and Alan Sipress
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, November 3, 2002; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A59430-2002Nov2?language=printer
JAKARTA, Indonesia, Nov. 2 -- Senior Indonesian military officials discussed an operation against Freeport McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc. before an ambush near its mine in Papua province that killed two Americans and one Indonesian on Aug. 31, according to intelligence obtained by the United States, a U.S. government official and other sources said.
The discussions involved the top ranks of Indonesia's military, including Endriartono Sutarto, the influential commander in chief, and were aimed at discrediting a Papuan separatist group, the Free Papua Movement, said the U.S. government official and another American source. A spokesman for Sutarto denied the discussions occurred.
The attack took place near a mine operated by New Orleans-based Freeport; the three victims were contract employees.
The intelligence was based on information supplied after the ambush by a person who claimed to be knowledgeable about the high-level military conversations. The source was described in the report as "highly reliable." This information was supported by an intercept of a conversation including that individual, said the U.S. government official and the American source. The intercept was shared with the United States by another country, identified by a Western source as Australia.
The discussions described in the intelligence report did not detail a specific attack, nor did they call explicitly for the killing of Americans or other foreigners, but they clearly targeted Freeport, the U.S. official and the American source said. Subordinates could have understood the discussions as a direction "to take some kind of violent action against Freeport," the government official said. It could not be learned precisely when the discussions took place.
The intelligence report was provided to the State Department about two weeks after the ambush, the official said.
If confirmed, evidence of Indonesian military involvement could seriously impair Bush administration efforts to restore U.S. assistance to the Indonesian military, suspended in 1999 to protest the involvement of the armed forces in human rights atrocities in East Timor. Such evidence would also represent a setback to a key U.S. foreign policy goal in Southeast Asia of engaging the Indonesian military, known by the initials TNI, in the campaign against terrorism.
Maj. Gen. Syafrie Syamsuddin, an armed forces spokesman, said today that top officers had never discussed an operation targeting Freeport. He said Sutarto is a disciplined officer who would not become involved in activities that violate the strict rules and ethics of the Indonesian military.
Syamsuddin also said top officers do not get involved in "technical matters" such as planning specific attacks and ambushes. He added that to ambush Freeport employees as a way of discrediting the separatist group would be "illogical."
"This is probably something made up to discredit the TNI," he said. Asked who might have sought to tarnish the army, Syamsuddin said he did not know.
Sutarto said last week that no Indonesian military officers were involved in the attack, which took place in Indonesia's easternmost province, on a misty mountain slope near the world's largest gold and copper mine.
His comments came after Papua police investigators told the commanders of military intelligence and military police that they believed Indonesian soldiers likely were behind the attack, according to senior military and intelligence officials.
The U.S. government official today confirmed that the FBI briefed State Department and embassy officials about three weeks ago on the bureau's own investigation of the attack. FBI investigators have visited Papua as part of the probe.
"The indications have pointed in that direction [of the military] but are not conclusive," the official said. The FBI is still interviewing witnesses, Freeport contract employees and their family members who have returned to the United States, he said.
The intelligence report, completed separately from the FBI investigation, indicated the military was "thinking or contemplating some kind of measure to accomplish the goal" of prodding the United States to declare the Free Papua Movement (OPM) a terrorist group, the official said.
The OPM is a loose organization of Papuan rebels waging a long-running independence struggle marked by sporadic, low-level violence. The military's claims that the separatists carried out the Aug. 31 attack have been met with skepticism from some analysts, who said it was not OPM practice to target foreigners or to use automatic weapons. The ambush was carried out with assault rifles, which the attackers used to spray two vehicles with bullets, killing three teachers and wounding 12 people, mostly Americans.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, a former U.S. ambassador to Indonesia and the administration's senior Indonesia expert, said Friday that it was "very disturbing" the military might be involved. "We take it very seriously," he said. "And if it's true, I think it's extremely important for the government to get to the bottom of it."
But that is not a reason to resist reestablishing ties with the Indonesian military, he argued. Giving the military "more contact with the West and with the United States and moving them in a positive direction is important both to support democracy in Indonesia and to support the fight against terrorism," he said. "Unfortunately, we've been isolating them for a decade. It's not a policy that's working."
Wolfowitz was not asked in the interview about the intelligence report.
A State Department spokeswoman said the department did not comment on intelligence reports.
Critics of renewed military aid for Indonesia expressed concern. "These revelations should trigger a complete and public congressional investigation," said Mike Jendrzejczk, director of Human Rights Watch/Asia. "This should also take up the question of the U.S.-Indonesia military relationship generally. But the focus has got to be on getting to the bottom of these allegations."
On Friday, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Appropriations foreign operations subcommittee, said that if the Indonesian military was found to have planned the killings, then the administration's proposed military training aid, $400,000 for fiscal 2003, should not go forward.
"It should surprise no one that the Indonesian army may have been involved in this atrocity," he said. "It has a long history of human rights violations and obstruction of justice. The fact that the perpetrators apparently believed they could murder Americans without fear of being punished illustrates the extent of the impunity."
Freeport's vice president of corporate communications, William Collier, said the company could not comment on an ongoing investigation. "We hope that the perpetrators will be brought to justice, whoever they may be," he said.
Regional analysts and sources familiar with the investigation said the military had been troubled by Freeport's practice beginning in 1996 of providing 1 percent of the Papua operation's gross revenue to the local community for development projects. Military officials have repeatedly expressed concern that a portion of that money is being diverted to the separatists.
About one week after the shooting, a police official, an army general and a high-ranking official from the office of the coordinating minister for security flew to Papua to speak to Freeport officials about what they believed to be Freeport's financing of a trip to Australia by pro-independence Papuans, said a source familiar with the investigation. The delegation was not convinced by assurances that Freeport had not financed the trip, the source said. Collier said today that Freeport money does not go to OPM. "We're not financing the separatist movement in any way," he said. "It's just not true."
-------- iran
Report: Bin Laden Son Detained
Iran Allegedly Captured Hundreds With Links to Al Qaeda
Associated Press
Sunday, November 3, 2002; Page A24
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A59389-2002Nov2?language=printer
LONDON, Nov. 3 (Sunday) -- Iranian security forces have detained one of Osama bin Laden's sons and more than 200 other people suspected of links to al Qaeda, the Financial Times reported on its Web site Saturday.
Citing an unidentified Iranian official, the newspaper said Iran had transferred bin Laden's son to authorities in either Saudi Arabia or Pakistan.
The newspaper's report could not be independently verified.
[In Washington, a senior U.S. intelligence official said, "We don't have anything to substantiate this." Because Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are close U.S. allies, the official said, "we would have known about it."]
Iran's vice president, Mohammed Ali Abtahi, reached early today, said he was aware of the report, but "wouldn't confirm it unless credible information is available." Legislator Ali Shakouri-Rad, a close ally of President Mohammad Khatami, said he had no information on the reported capture.
Bin Laden has at least 23 children by several wives. One of the oldest, Saad bin Laden, who is about 22 years old, has emerged as an al Qaeda leader and one of the United States' top two dozen targets in the network. Mohammed and Ahmed bin Laden also support their father's efforts, U.S. officials say.
The official quoted by the Financial Times did not identify the son he said was detained. He reportedly said the man was captured with others suspected of al Qaeda links as they fled Afghanistan.
The paper quoted Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi as saying the group numbered about 250 and that all the suspects had been returned to their home countries. He did not identify any of them.
The anonymous official also was quoted as saying he believed Osama bin Laden was dead. U.S. officials have repeatedly said they do not know if the alleged architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States is dead or alive.
-------- iraq
[Clearly this article was posted before it was complete. et]
Pentagon - Iraq's Special Republican Guard top tier combat force willing to fight and die
By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A59196-2002Nov2?language=printer
Despite doubts about the overall fighting capability of the Iraqi military, the Pentagon considers Iraq's Special Republican Guard a top tier combat force willing to fight and die in Baghdad defending President Saddam Hussein's regime, senior officers said last week.
Overseen by Hussein's competent and ruthless youngest son, Qusay, the Special Republican Guard consists of 30,000 loyal troops whose mission is to protect the president and secure Baghdad with armored fighting vehicles and anti-tank weapons.
Right here: Graf that says Saddam rules here at this focal point of power through family ties, loyalty and fear. Very robust, meaty graf.
Then: What the Pentagon is planning: plans to isolate Baghdad, and what effect isolating Baghdad would have; psyops, and strategic bombs of key strategic targets (and possibly those of economic value to key Hussein cronys--to confirm).
Then: Go Ring by ring through the defense, starting from outside in, and finishing with Special Republican Guard.
Then: Get into cronies.
This elite commando force is the inner-most ring of layered military defenses consisting of six Republican Guard divisions around Baghdad's perimeter and 17 regular Army divisions arrayed across Iraq.
Overall, the Iraqi military is but a shadow of what it was at the start of the Persian Gulf War in 1991. Its 430,000 troops are less than half of the million-plus soldiers Iraq had in uniform 11 years ago, and its fighting equipment -- minus 1,200 armored vehicles destroyed during the war -- is old and decrepit.
But the U.S. military's respect for the loyalty, discipline and fighting capabilities of the Special Republican Guard and, to a lesser extent, the 80,000 troops of the Republican Guard, is a crucial factor for war planners in building an invasion force large and heavy enough to overwhelm these elite Iraqi battalions, whose leaders are closely linked to Hussein.
"I certainly don't take them lightly, and I don't know anyone who might have to fight them who does," said one general. "They are a tough force who will know the terrain and the cities. I believe they will fight hard."
Kenneth M. Pollack, a former CIA analyst now at the Brookings Institution who favors invading Iraq, argues in a new book that the Special Republican Guard is "even more willing to fight and die for this regime" than it was during the Gulf War because its ranks are more heavily composed of loyal soldiers from Hussein's tribe or home town of Tikrit.
Since any U.S. invasion would be for the explicit purpose of toppling Hussein's regime, Pollack writes, officers and troops in this elite force would also be motivated to fight by a "fear of retribution that could follow Saddam's demise."
While most Americans remembered the sight of Iraqi forces surrendering en masse during the Gulf War, Pollack and numerous military officers involved in the conflict point out that the Republican Guard and several heavy divisions of the regular Army fought "furiously," if in the end, unsuccessfully, against U.S. forces.
"A portion of the Iraqi armed forces -- the Special Republican Guard, most if not all of the Republican Guard, and a small part of the regular Army -- will probably fight very hard," Pollack writes.
In Baghdad, the Special Republican Guard is equipped with 100 tanks and other armored fighting vehicles as well as Russian-made Sagger anti-tank guided missiles, according to Amatzia Baram, an expert on the Iraqi military at the University of Haifa in Israel.
"They are trained to fight any tank unit that dares enter Baghdad," Baram said. "It's a force to be reckoned with. It's not the same as your commandos. But it's trained."
The Special Republican Guard is controlled directly by Qusay Hussein and the Special Security Organization, whose 5,000 members both guard the president and oversee numerous other security units, including the Republican Guard. The SSO and the Special Republican Guard are the most feared security organizations in Iraq known for ruthlessly torturing and murdering anyone suspected of disloyalty.
Saddam Hussein's personal secretary, Abid Hamid Mahmud al-Tikriti, oversees the SSO with Qusay Hussein. Mahmud, in turn, works closely with Jamal Mustafa Abdullah Sultan al-Tikriti, another member of Saddam Hussein's inner circle who is both a cousin to Saddam and married to Saddam's youngest daughter, Hala.
Jamal Mustafa is rare among Saddam's relatives for having military experience and a reputation as a competent commander, according to Ahmed Chalabi, a leading opposition figure who heads the Iraqi National Congress. Jamal Mustafa's brother, Kamal Mustafa Abdallah Sultan al-Tikriti, is an important Republican Guard commander who formerly headed the Special Republican Guard.
But even these relatives entrusted with important military commands are kept on edge and constantly tested for their loyalty. "Everyone is a 'blade-runner,' with the possible exception of three to six people," Baram wrote in a recent article in the Journal of International Security.
Qusay, his older brother Udayy, who controls the Iraqi media, and Adib Hamid Mahmud, Saddam's personal secretary, are the "most sheltered, although not completely immune to the wrath of Saddam," according to Baram. After them come Iraqi Vice President Taha Yasin Ramadan al-Jizrawi, Deputy Prime Minister Tarik Aziz and Izzat Ibrahim, vice chairman of Iraq's Revolutionary Command Council.
Recognizing the loyalty and strength of the Special Republican Guard and Saddam Hussein's other security services, Pentagon officials are crafting plans that would enable them to avoid a bloody, block-to-block fight in Baghdad by first bombing strategic communications and command facilities and then cordoning off and isolating the Iraqi capital.
Richard Perle, chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board and a key Bush administration advisor, said that Pentagon planners "have to assume [the Special Republican Guard] will fight and fight well."
"But I don't believe we'll have to go into Baghdad, because I don't believe he will survive in Baghdad for any length of time," Perle said. "Dictators like Saddam do not last very long once it's clear that they have been challenged. Once he's effectively challenged and it's clear he's finished, there's no ideological loyalty."
Absent any such unifying ideology, added Khidir Hamza, former head of Iraq's nuclear weapons program who was spirited out of the country by the CIA, even Saddam's relatives and fellow Tikiritis "are not going to commit suicide" to save him.
But security organs like the Special Republican Guard most likely will remain intact until quite late in the game, Hamza said, if only to arrange for Saddam's escape before quietly disbanding.
For the U.S. military, just getting to the outskirts of Baghdad and isolating Hussein's elite forces could be more difficult than the "cakewalk" some analysts predict, according to current and former military officers.
Richard Raftery, a former Marine intelligence officer with experience in northern Iraq, said he fears Hussein will employ a military strategy designed to exhaust the invading U.S. forces so that they lack the power to overwhelm his elite protectors in Baghdad.
As they cross into Iraq, Raftery said, U.S. forces could find themselves forced to bomb and maneuver around Iraq's regular Army of 300,000 troops, which includes three armored and three mechanized divisions.
"These troops are all conscripts, and if they surrender, it will take a large number of U.S. troops to evacuate, interrogate and guard the prisoners," Raftery said.
Next will come the more professional Republican Guard troops closer to Baghdad, organized in three infantry and three armored divisions. The armored divisions have all 600 of Iraq's T-72 tanks which, while fairly capable, were easily destroyed by the U.S. Army and Marine Corps' M1 Abrams tanks.
"These guys will be positioned at strategic points because they know where our axis' of advance are," Raftery said. "These are better troops but our guys will crush them. [But] once gain it will slow down our momentum and cause us to expend large amounts of ammunition."
Once the assault reaches Baghdad, military operations could produce civilian casualties and help turn world opinion against the United States, said Raftery. "The Special Republican Guard units will die to a man defending the regime," he said.
But many in the Bush administration -- and the Iraqi opposition--believe the Iraqi regime will collapse long before U.S. armored forces arrive in the outskirts of Baghdad. Like Perle, former Iraqi Brig. Gen. Najib al Salhi, a former Republican Guard officer and tank commander now living in northern Virginia, doubts the conflict will ever come down to a battle for Baghdad.
Units from the regular Iraqi Army, he said, could actually become a force multiplier for the Pentagon. "They are more prepared to turn against him than defend him," Salih said.
Parts of the Republican Guard could follow suit, he said, once they are convinced that the Bush administration is serious about removing Hussein from power. "I served in the Republican Guard myself at the time we were defending Iraq from Iran and I did not feel a true loyalty to Saddam Hussein even at that time," he said.
And once U.S. move past the Republican Guard positions, with or without resistance, he said, the Special Republican Guard will be psychologically defeated. "When we get that far," he said, "they will realize the fight is over. All of Iraq will be totally liberated by the time we face the Special Republican Guard, and their mood will be totally zero. I do not believe they will fight."
At the Pentagon, one senior defense official listened to Salih's scenario and said there are plans in the works for psychological operations designed to convince Iraq's elite units that resistance, after a certain point, would be pointless. Deals could be cut, he suggested, that would guarantee certain commanders they would not be prosecuted or imprisoned once they laid down their arms.
"But when you plan for military operations," the official said, "you have to plan for the worst -- so you have to plan that they will fight."
----
Iraq Ready to Fight, Saddam Tells Airforce
Reuters
Sunday, November 3, 2002
By Samia Nakhoul
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A61834-2002Nov3?language=printer
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqi President Saddam Hussein told his airforce commanders and pilots on Sunday that Iraq was ready for war with the United States.
"When God wants us to fight we will be ready to fight under all circumstances. We will fight on all frontlines and whatever God wants is appropriate," Saddam was quoted by Iraq's official television as saying.
Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri said the United States was making business out of wars and that conflict could be avoided if the superpower stopped "warmongering."
He repeated that Baghdad would not accept a U.S. draft resolution currently under debate at the U.N. Security Council, saying it amounted to a declaration of war.
"A conflict can be avoided if America stops warmongering, stops making business from wars, from killing and (causing) death to other nations," said Sabri, who was accompanying Austrian far-right politician Joerg Haider on a tour of Baghdad's trade fair.
President Bush wants to end Saddam's rule over his alleged pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and has threatened military action. The United Nations is seeking a resolution to allow U.N. weapons inspectors back into Baghdad after a four-year absence.
Asked if Iraq would accept the U.S. draft resolution, Sabri said: "This is not a U.N. resolution. This is a declaration of war on the United Nations and on Iraq." Sabri said Washington's allies -- Britain and Israel -- were the only supporters of the U.S. draft resolution.
Earlier on Sunday, Saddam urged his airforce to "deny the enemy the chance to achieve its wicked and evil intentions," adding: "If God wants us to fight, and imposes it on us, we will fight, though we hate it."
In separate remarks, Saddam promised "no walkover" for U.S. and British soldiers should they attack Iraq.
"We are preparing as if war will break out in one hour and we are psychologically ready for that," Saddam told the independent Egyptian newspaper al-Osboa.
"Iraq will never be like Afghanistan. This does not mean that we are stronger than the United States, which owns fleets and long-range missiles, but we have faith in God, in the nation, the Iraqi people and...the Arab people and we will never let it be a walkover for American or British soldiers."
"Time is definitely on our side and we must buy more time because the American-British alliance will disintegrate for internal reasons and because of world opinion," Saddam said.
The Iraqi leader said Washington's real motive for any attack lay in controlling the region and its oil.
-------- israel / palestine
Netanyahu to Accept Israeli Post if Elections Are Held
November 3, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-mideast-netanyahu.html
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday made an early Israeli election his condition for accepting Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's offer to be foreign minister in a narrow right-wing government.
Sources close to the hawkish Netanyahu, Sharon's main rival in the right-wing Likud party, said the prime minister had yet to reply to the terms.
``Benjamin Netanyahu agrees to serve as foreign minister in a government that will head to early elections,'' Netanyahu said in a statement issued after he met Sharon at the prime minister's Jerusalem residence.
Sharon offered Netanyahu the foreign ministry post on Friday, two days after the center-left Labour Party pulled out of his ruling coalition in a dispute over funding for Jewish settlements on occupied land in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Sharon has been trying to draw far-right parties into his shrunken government to regain a parliamentary majority shattered by Labour's departure.
Under Netanyahu's proposal, he would join a revamped government as foreign minister and Sharon would announce an early general election. By law, Sharon must hold a national ballot no later than October 2003.
Netanyahu's terms appeared to leave open the possibility that he could still fulfill his pledge to challenge Sharon for the Likud leadership in the next election Israel holds.
``(Netanyahu) returned to the principle he stood by two years ago -- that no government can function in this (parliament) or achieve anything,'' Netanyahu aide Gabi Piker told Army Radio.
``He suggested that the prime minister accept this principle and go to elections so we have a stronger parliament, a stronger Likud party.''
Netanyahu, who has called for a harder line against a two-year-old Palestinian uprising for statehood, served as prime minister from 1996 to 1999, when he was defeated by Labour's Ehud Barak.
-------- nato
NATO Tells Hungary to Modernize Its Military
By Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, November 3, 2002; Page A22
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A59421-2002Nov2?language=printer
BUDAPEST -- Two days after moving from the opposition benches of parliament last May to become Hungary's defense minister, Ferenc Juhasz made a routine courtesy call at NATO headquarters in Brussels. When he met with Secretary General George Robertson, Juhasz recalled, "it was a shock."
Banging a table with his finger for emphasis, Juhasz said, Robertson delivered a lecture: Fulfill your pledges to modernize and better equip your forces. "You do not have any time," Juhasz recalled the NATO chief saying. "If you don't do this, you are in trouble."
"It was two days after I took office," Juhasz said. "Usually, the new government gets a hundred-day honeymoon."
There has been no honeymoon for Hungary's new coalition government as it confronts a dilapidated military structure that is in many ways the weak link of the NATO alliance. "Hungary is not a military nation," said a Western diplomat from an allied country. "They haven't won a battle since around 1456. And there's very little support for military spending."
The diplomat praised the government for promising more military spending, but noted it was merely a promise. "The new government came in with a huge set of promises that are very expensive," the diplomat said.
When Hungary joined the alliance in 1999, many NATO countries considered it a good ally. At the start of the NATO air campaign against Yugoslavia, it immediately opened its airspace to allow jets to carry out bombing raids. But since then, Juhasz said, "we are treated like an unreliable partner."
Juhasz blames Hungary's previous government for neglecting pledges to restructure the military. For four years, he said, there have been no significant purchases of new equipment, meaning that "technological backwardness is huge." Reductions in manpower have left some units nonoperational. The army has no protective gear to defend against chemical or biological attacks. Communications systems are old and Hungarian soldiers have difficulty talking to their NATO counterparts.
This is not to say that Hungary hasn't spent money on defense in recent years -- about $1.08 billion yearly, or 1.75 percent of its gross domestic product, a respectable rate by European standards. But much of it was misspent, officials said. For instance, the previous government put large sums of money into studying how to create a maritime transport capability for a landlocked country.
When the United States was looking for allies to help with the war against terrorism in Afghanistan, Juhasz said, "I was shocked to see two [NATO] countries which did not take part." One was Iceland, which doesn't have an army, and the other was Hungary.
Now, the new government has announced a 16 percent increase in its defense budget, pushing it to about $1.2 billion. Much of the new money will go for technical improvements and restructuring. Already, Hungary has put out tenders for new vehicles and equipment.
Juhasz has also embarked on a long-term defense review, with American and British assistance, to determine precisely what capabilities Hungary now has -- no one is quite sure -- and what it might contribute in the future. But that review will not be completed until March, too late for the upcoming NATO summit in Prague.
----
Czechs Become Model for New NATO
'Niche' Expertise in Chemical Weapon Defense Compensates for Military Shortcomings
By Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, November 3, 2002; Page A22
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A59400-2002Nov2?language=printer
THIRTY-SECOND TACTICAL AIR BASE, Czech Republic -- Brand-new L-159 bomber jets take off most days from this expansive facility, climbing fast into the skies for training missions. Replacements for retired Russian-made Su-22s, the locally built jets carry advanced Italian-made radar systems that allow for strikes in complete darkness.
These light combat aircraft are efficient and modern, but of the 38 planes on order, only 27 have been delivered, not enough for all of the pilots at this base. The deputy base commander estimates it will be two years before the first pilots will be ready for combat operations with their NATO allies.
Once a source of national pride, the Czech air force has fallen on hard times, highlighting the costs and difficulties of transforming the military of a former communist state into a reliable and battle-ready partner in NATO, which added the Czech Republic as a member in 1999.
At another military base, other units of the Czech military are turning the past into an asset for the future. At the 9th NBC Company barracks in Liberec, soldiers in self-cooling protective gear practice responding to a simulated chemical attack, using skills acquired during the Cold War, when Czech troops were the Warsaw Pact's specialists in defense against nuclear, biological and chemical attack.
Within an hour, a small unit can extract 60 injured people from a "hot zone," provide medical care and decontaminate the area -- in scorching desert temperatures of over 120 degrees, officials said. It's an expertise the Czechs recently demonstrated to U.S. forces training in Kuwait, as part of Operation Enduring Freedom. "I think we surprised a lot of people in Kuwait," boasted Maj. Jiri Gajdos, the company commander, who had recently returned from the desert exercises.
Soldiers involved in the nuclear, biological and chemical unit joke that NBC once stood for "No Body Cares." But when the leaders of the 19 NATO countries gather later this month in Prague, the Czech Republic's capital, the Czech military's NBC defensive capabilities, not its struggling air force, will be the focus of a display for the media and the assembled leaders.
Czech officers, defense planning officials and diplomats said the Czech example offers lessons to the seven East European countries that, during the summit, will be formally invited to join NATO. Like the Czech Republic, they are former communist states, most with small populations and struggling with limited budgets to replace and upgrade Soviet-era equipment and inefficient military command structures.
As part of their contribution to NATO's military might, countries can compensate for a lack of manpower and high-tech weaponry by adopting specialized "niche" expertise, military officers will tell them in Prague. "I believe after three and a half years [in NATO], we are finding our position as a small country which is able to contribute something meaningful," said Jan Vana, director general of the Czech defense department's strategic planning division. "This is something [the new members] may want to consider."
The old NATO was about countries with large standing armies, each with similar capabilities, poised to defend against a Soviet invasion from the east, George Robertson, NATO's secretary general, said in an interview.
"The new NATO," he said, "is going to be about countries who do different things, and do each of them well."
The army of Romania, a country that is likely to be invited to join, has units long renowned for their mountain-fighting skills. The three Baltic states, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, also set for membership, might contribute police units for peacekeeping and police-training missions.
The Czech Republic and the two other countries that joined in 1999, Poland and Hungary, have had varied success in restructuring their armed forces to fit into the alliance. Poland, the most populous of the three, and with much greater resources and a long-term military modernization program, has gone furthest, military analysts said. Hungary, with the lowest rate of defense spending as a percentage of gross domestic product, and a lack of political commitment to the military in previous governments, has done the least.
Somewhere in-between is the Czech Republic.
"The totally old dinosaurs are gone" from the ranks, said Ivan Dvorak, the Czech deputy director of strategic planning. But some problems persist. "We have a lot of ammunition and stocks we do not need. We have excessive infrastructure we do not need. The personnel structure has to be changed."
The three new members joined NATO less than two weeks before the start of the alliance's bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, a high-tech operation for which the three found themselves largely unprepared. Michael Zantovsky, who chairs the foreign affairs, defense and security committee in the Czech Senate, said that every new country "always thinks they are ready, and they are wrong, including us."
But the Czech Republic got a political dividend, he said. "The idea was that joining NATO would help with the self-identification of the nation as a Western, democratic nation bound by the same rules, and it may have helped accelerate democratic transformation" in the three new members.
But what followed, he said, was "a steep learning curve, for the brass and everyone else involved."
One of the biggest immediate problems facing the Czech Republic when it joined was that too few of the country's soldiers spoke English well enough to allow for smooth joint operations with NATO. "That was not a success story," said Dvorak. "A great number of people had been studying in academies abroad. But the military lost these people because the [military] career system didn't work." English remains a problem. "We are successfully getting over the language problem, but we are not where we should be," said Gen. Martin Herja, a pilot and deputy commander here at the 32nd Tactical Air Base.
Obsolete equipment, mostly vintage stock from the Soviet-dominated Warsaw Pact, proved a greater obstacle than did the language barrier.
The Czech air force fleet of MiG-21 fighters will reach the end of their operational lives in three years, and some of the jets are already grounded for lack of spare parts. Over the last 10 years, 20 pilots have been killed in accidents blamed on poor training, and reduced flight hours have prompted many pilots to quit.
When the last of the MiGs are retired from service, the air force will be left without a single supersonic fighter. That's because the need for funds to clean up after disastrous flooding in August forced the government to divert about $2 billion that was set aside to buy new Swedish- and British-made Gripen combat aircraft.
As the old Russian jets are retired, the Czech Republic can slowly wean itself away from Moscow's spare parts pipeline. Many here would be happy to end that relationship, continuing to feel deep distrust of Russia 13 years after the Velvet Revolution peacefully deposed the Moscow-backed Communist government of Czechoslovakia, now two countries, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
"We need aircraft made in the Czech Republic, or in the West," said Herja, the pilot, "in order to be independent."
The size of the armed forces also remains a problem -- there are more than 60,000 members, and planning officials said the target number is close to 36,000. The government is phasing out the draft, but the army will not be fully made up of volunteers as required by NATO until the end of 2006, the officials said.
The use of conscripts creates an added problem. Under the Czech constitution, draftees cannot be deployed outside the country's borders, meaning that at present half the armed forces could not be used for foreign NATO operations.
A trimmed-down military force would also have to recast a top-heavy command structure. The number of garrisons, now at 140, will be reduced to 50. "Our armed forces are so small, we don't need so many levels of command," said Dvorak.
Another shortfall is the military's lack of transport planes for moving soldiers and equipment long distances. Czech troops currently train in Kuwait and operate a medical facility in Afghanistan. But to get there, the soldiers in Afghanistan resorted to commercial aircraft.
The Prague government is currently in talks with Moscow about converting part of the debt Russia owes the republic into three Antonov-70 cargo planes.
Dvorak said their goal is to develop within four years the capability to dispatch a 5,000-man brigade for six-month deployments -- "something that would be totally unimaginable today," he said.
-------- pakistan
'Pakistan': A Nuclear Yugoslavia
November 3, 2002
New York Times
By ROBERT D. KAPLAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/03/books/review/03KAPLANT.html
The central drama affecting the future of South Asia is not the hunt for remaining elements of Al Qaeda or even the struggle over the fate of Kashmir, it is the continuing institutional decline of Pakistan, the world's seventh most populous country and a potential nuclear version of Yugoslavia. Islam in Pakistan has had no more success in quelling ethnic and tribal animosities than Communism had in Yugoslavia. The Punjabis, through the military and the civil service, run the other provinces in imperial fashion much as the Serbs ran other parts of what was once Yugoslavia.
In ''Pakistan: Eye of the Storm,'' Owen Bennett Jones, a BBC correspondent formerly stationed there, writes: ''No elected government has ever completed its term in office. It has had three wars with India and has lost around half of its territory. Its economy has never flourished. Nearly half its vast population is illiterate and 20 percent is undernourished.'' In ''Pakistan: In the Shadow of Jihad and Afghanistan,'' Mary Anne Weaver, a correspondent for The New Yorker, observes that this vast and arid frontier zone of the Indian subcontinent is where ''angry students cling to a vision of an Islamist utopia, and equally angry mullahs chant prayers from the country's countless mosques.'' There is so little sense of authentic nationhood that when the Baluchi inhabitants of the country's southwestern desert venture elsewhere in Pakistan, they say they are going to ''Hindustan,'' which for most people means India. As a consequence, Weaver says, Pakistan's ruling aristocracy -- once a triumvirate of military officers, tribal chiefs and the feudal landowners who bankroll the political parties -- clings to the British legacy of empire as the only available defense against anarchy. Since independence, the only addition to this triumvirate has been the Islamic clerics.
Though Weaver and Bennett Jones are both journalists, Weaver presents more of a descriptive, traveler's-eye view, exploring subjects like falconry and desert fortresses in addition to politics, while Bennett Jones has produced a more comprehensive, scholarly work, in which everything from the Seraiki national movement in southern Punjab to Pakistani nuclear doctrine is covered. Both books, however -- each the product of impressive expertise -- agree on a fundamental point: the differences between democratically elected leaders and military dictators in Pakistan may be less than the differences between one military leader and another, and prodding Pakistan toward stability and individual freedom is less a matter of the immediate return of democracy than of a sustained and nuanced American commitment to the country.
Together, these books provide an excruciatingly precise account of how in October 1999, Pakistan's last democratically elected leader, Nawas Sharif -- a Punjabi religious conservative who through the bribing of parliamentarians and the intimidation of judges and journalists was erecting a theocratic dictatorship under the guise of democracy -- denied landing rights to a civilian airliner packed with schoolchildren, in order to kill one of the passengers. The passenger was Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the military chief of staff. Musharraf's fellow officers removed Sharif from power literally minutes before the plane's fuel ran out, and installed Musharraf as the country's new leader. Musharraf is described by both Weaver and Bennett Jones as the country's last credible Westernizer: a man who admits to a penchant for whiskey and casinos, and whose greatest concern is that ''75 percent of my officers have never been out of Pakistan.''
Musharraf emerges in these books as the philosophical opposite of another Pakistani general, Mohammed Zia ul-Haq. According to Bennett Jones, Zia is ''perhaps the only one of Pakistan's four military rulers to deserve the epithet 'dictator.' '' Zia took power in a coup in 1977 and ruled until 1988, when he was killed in a still unexplained plane crash. He was a courteous middle-class man with a common touch, but uncomfortable as a public speaker and lacking the charisma of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the civilian politician he had toppled. Weak politically, Zia aligned himself with Muslim extremists, institutionalizing radical Islam in almost every branch of the state. Zia's democratic successors, Bennett Jones notes, ''did little to dismantle his legacy.''
Undoing Zia's Islamization program has proved a thankless task for Musharraf, who despite his failure thus far has at least tried: challenging the clerics by denouncing religious practices like ''honor killings'' and blasphemy laws, and speaking out in support of human rights in a way that previous Pakistani leaders rarely did. As Bennett Jones asserts, Musharraf, unlike his democratic predecessors, ''does at least have an agenda. . . . He wants a modernist, liberal Pakistan in which there is religious tolerance and respect for the law.'' Musharraf, a dashing former commando with tons of the self-confidence that Zia lacked, reversed Pakistan's longstanding policy of support for the Taliban, and has assisted the United States in hunting down Al Qaeda to a degree that would have been inconceivable for any previous government. ''It is impossible to avoid the conclusion,'' Bennett Jones writes, ''that the military stand a much better chance of delivering radical change in Pakistan than the civilians.''
The reality is that Pakistan's experience with democracy has so far been unfortunate, beginning in essence with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a slick demagogue who in 1965 played a leading role in instigating Pakistan's disastrous war with India and later, as prime minister in the 1970's, imposed a ban on drinking, gambling and nightclubs even though he was a regular drinker himself. ''He repeatedly pandered to the Islamic radicals in the hope of securing short-term political advantage,'' Bennett Jones reports. Weaver writes of how, in an effort to subdue Baluchi separatism, Bhutto ''bombed and strafed'' the Baluchi ''at random''; 3,300 Pakistani soldiers and over 6,000 Baloch died. It was only after Bhutto's 1977 re-election was marred by fraud and riots broke out that the military, under Zia, took power.
Bhutto's daughter, Benazir, ruled twice, in the late 1980's and 90's, after Zia's death returned the country to democracy. In an affecting profile, Weaver shows how a hostile military and a feudal party apparatus were partly responsible for the gross mismanagement and disastrous decisions that characterized her first turn as prime minister. But, Weaver goes on, when Bhutto returned to power in 1993 and the country began to fall apart, ''she had only herself to blame.'' She and Asif Ali Zardari, her husband as well as the investment minister, ran Pakistan as though it were a ''commercial enterprise.''
As in Turkey, the military has periodically rescued Pakistan from political anarchy. But the Pakistani military, by constituting a state within a state, is itself a fundamental part of the problem, Bennett Jones concludes. Turkey has functioned reasonably well in recent decades because of an implicit division of power between the generals and the civilian leadership. The former, through a national security council, make the key decisions in security and foreign affairs, while the prime minister and parliament are sovereign domestically. One closes these two books thinking that if it is not to go on oscillating between military tyranny and democratic anarchy, Pakistan desperately needs a hybrid regime akin to the Turkish model.
Although the sheer variety of social and economic problems in the world cannot always be solved simply by instituting Western-style democracy, international elites have persistently demanded that Musharraf hold elections. So he did. Last month, Pakistan held its first nationwide election in seven years. With the reported connivance of the military, there were major gains for the hard-line religious parties and other opponents of working with the United States in the fight against terrorism. In two provinces bordering Afghanistan, crucial to American military operations, the religious parties are now dominant.
Near the end of her book, Weaver quotes Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, the former commander in chief of Central Command, the headquarters for Middle East operations, who tells her: ''It's so important that we work with Musharraf: not so much because of what Musharraf is or is not, but because what would come after him would be a disaster.'' Sadly, Zinni may still be right.
Robert D. Kaplan, a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, is the author of ''Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan.''
-------- russia / chechnya
Russian Crisis Brings War Home
Shaken Moscow Family Awakens to Distant Chechen Conflict
By Susan B. Glasser
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, November 3, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A59429-2002Nov2?language=printer
MOSCOW -- The Zapunny family immediately makes it clear that not a single one of them supports the war in Chechnya.
"Show me a person who wants to continue the war in Chechnya," demanded Nina Zapunny, a 47-year-old accountant with a social conscience. "Who could be for it?"
Her husband, Sergei Zapunny, a businessman, is also still reeling from the aftershocks of Moscow's hostage crisis, but is both angrier and more cynical, now that the 50 Chechen guerrillas who stormed the Moscow theater are dead, along with 117 hostages killed by the deadly gas used by Russian authorities in the raid to save them.
"As soon as this happened, I realized that I was a hostage, too, that everyone in this country is a hostage to this war," said Sergei, also 47. "And we will be as long as the situation is not resolved clearly."
Like the rest of this traumatized city, the Zapunny family is trying to make sense of the war that came home to them with an act of terror in a Moscow theater. They are grieving for the victims, and questioning the actions of their government while supporting their president. And most of all, they are wondering how, when and what will come next in the bloody, seemingly endless conflict with Chechnya that has interrupted Moscow's boomtown reveries with unpleasant reminders of the forgotten war down south.
Over a leisurely Friday night dinner of chicken and mashed potatoes, French wine and Greek salad, the Zapunny family debated the events that unfolded just a few miles from where they sat. They are exactly the sort of people the Chechen guerrillas appear to have targeted in their attack on the theater where the hit Russian musical "Nord-Ost" was playing on the night of Oct. 23.
The Zapunnys are theatergoers, well-educated and law-abiding, and have managed not only to survive but to flourish in Moscow's turbulent decade-long transition to capitalism. They are the people one of the Chechen hostage-takers had in mind when he told Anatoly Glazychev, the "Nord-Ost" stage manager, "You are responsible. It's your indifference" to the war in far-off Chechnya that had made them decide to bring the battle to Moscow.
Now, with the funerals over and the recriminations just beginning, the Zapunny family retreated to the kitchen, as they always did in Soviet times, when it was the only safe space for a family, in private, to say what they really thought of the world.
It was a conversation filled with all the contradictions of the broader Russia, one that quickly moved beyond the shock and horror of the hostage crisis to touch on the lasting power of the Soviet legacy in shaping both the authorities' response to the crisis and their own way of seeing the world. Like other Russians, the Zapunny family had little criticism of President Vladimir Putin's handling of the crisis and decision to deploy the gas -- the first post-raid opinion survey put approval for Putin's actions at 85 percent.
But the dinner talk also revealed what the polls have yet to fully explore: a deep cynicism and suspicion of the government that Putin leads and a strong belief that many of the hostages' lives were lost because of the Soviet legacy of secrets and lies.
The hostage crisis exposed many of the most painful questions of the Putin era, the things that Russians often choose not to talk about -- the heavy state control over the media, the lack of information about Chechnya, the failure of ordinary Russians to pressure their government to end a war that many of them don't support.
In the end, though, the Zapunnys still do not view things through the prism of Putin's Russia, but through the longer lens of Soviet history. And, said Nina, "compared to Soviet times, this story, this tragedy is a huge step forward. The authorities were talking. It was not all the truth, it was some of the truth. They admitted mistakes, not right away, but they admitted them. For us, this is progress." Never Met a Chechen
From the minute it happened, they understood that the hostage-taking was a huge moment for them and the city they love, an event of such magnitude, it could not be ignored.
"I had a feeling of deja vu," said Sergei. "It was like September 11, when I was at work and watched all that terror happen in New York. It was absolutely the same feeling of horror happening in front of your eyes."
Nina interrupted. "Yes," she said. "It was the same show: 'Terror Live.' "
For days, they were glued to the television set with a sense of impending disaster. Nina worried about the pregnant women in the audience, the children just like her 14-year-old daughter, Marina, who had gone to see "Nord-Ost," or "North-East," a few months ago, and the 75 foreigners suddenly caught up in Russia's long-running war. None of them expected it to end well.
They watched it all play out on a flat-screen Sony set, in the same apartment where they have lived since Soviet times -- only three rooms, but like their city, upgraded considerably in recent years.
They connected what was happening very directly with Moscow, a rich city, waging war on Chechnya, a poor region. In the same way the hostage-takers are said to have refused to bring in food, even for the dozens of children among their hostages, telling intermediaries, "why should your children eat; ours don't." The Zapunny family believed Moscow was targeted because of its special status in post-Soviet Russia as a city of new shopping malls and Mercedes-Benzes, at odds with a country of collapsing villages and grinding poverty. "We live better here," as Sergei put it repeatedly. "We have a higher standard of living."
But like most Muscovites at their level of income and education, they have been insulated from the war in Chechnya. Russia's mandatory conscription system hasn't touched their family. Their 21-year-old son, Volodya, who is finishing his last year at a prestigious Moscow economics institute, managed to get out of military service because of bad eyesight. In their circles, Nina said, "I never heard of anyone sending their sons to the war."
If the war has not penetrated their daily life, then neither have the Chechens, who exist for this family -- and for most Russians -- as little more than ciphers on television, mysterious enemies whose history, culture and religion are so different from their own. No one in the Zapunny family has ever met a Chechen. With Russia's state-controlled television showing little of the war from the Chechen point of view, their ignorance about the Chechens only contributes to their sense of hopelessness about ending a war they don't really understand.
"I don't know what Chechnya is. What kind of people live there? How do they live? What do they eat? What do they have for dinner?" Volodya said. "How can we know what is the right thing to do when we only have this limited information from television and official sources?" Question of Responsibility
To the hostage-takers, the attack may have been an effort to bring the war home to a complacent city. Sergei, however, wasn't having any of it. "I don't feel any responsibility for this war," he said.
Nina interrupted. "I do," she said.
"Naturally people who have jobs do not participate in rallies," Sergei retorted.
"I'm afraid we've outgrown it," Nina said. "Ten years ago, we were always part of it" -- enthusiastic participants in the crowds who surged excitedly around Moscow in the days of the downfall of the Soviet Union, protesting to win new rights, cheering when symbols of the Soviet state, like the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police, came tumbling down. "I actually blame myself now for not having participated in rallies against the war."
In the midst of the hostage crisis, when angry relatives of some hostages staged an anti-war protest, Nina considered going down to Red Square herself. But then she heard that the authorities had prohibited the protest and were vowing to break it up. "That I wasn't prepared for," she said. She stayed at work, part of a silent minority protesting the war only around the kitchen table.
That was on Friday, Oct. 25.
Like many Muscovites, Nina and Sergei awoke the next morning just as news was spilling out about the pre-dawn raid. At first, they felt an enormous sense of relief and even happiness.
"But when we began to hear the details, it changed," Nina said.
They were soon more sad and angry than elated as the death toll rose and it became clear that doctors didn't have proper information about the gas to treat its victims. "We have many questions, so many questions," Nina said.
They may support Putin, but they adamantly blame the rest of the government for creating and prolonging the war in Chechnya, for botching the hostage rescue and then for lying about it.
"America is a more patriotic country," Nina said. "People there identify themselves with the state."
"But here, we have suffered so much from the state," Sergei said.
"We don't expect anything good from the state," Nina added. 'It Will Be Forgotten'
Now, most of all, there is a deep, shared pessimism that any progress will come out of this terrible tragedy in the middle of their city. Volodya spoke for the whole family when he said: "It will be forgotten. Everything will calm down. And then, when everybody begins to forget, something like this will happen again. Again, there will be indignation, outrage."
Sergei agreed. "This is people's nature," he said. "Especially here in Moscow, where life is good. There will be no major changes with Chechnya. Just this same, slow-moving war."
Nina interjected: "Because there are no answers to the major questions."
For the whole family, the war in Chechnya, the brutality and corruption they do their best to isolate themselves from, is all about the broader corruption of the Russian state. "The war is a business," Sergei said flatly, echoing a widely held view.
Sergei was also giving voice to another widely held opinion in Russia since the hostage-taking -- the notion that Chechens are so different and so fundamentally opposed to Russian rule that peace can never happen.
"It's impossible to come to terms with the Chechens," he said, retracing the long history of near-constant war between the Russians and the Chechens since the early 19th century. "If Moscow is Rome, then the Chechens are barbarians."
His wife and children don't use such language, but even Nina said she believed the best possible solution at this point may well be "to build a Chinese wall" around Chechnya, trapping the people and the problem inside, where it can't infect the rest of Russia.
Sergei ended dinner where he began it, pondering the price that Moscow has to pay for a war in Chechnya that seemingly few want. "Chechnya is like a tooth that aches," he said. The person with the toothache resolves to have it pulled out, but is convinced by the dentist that it just needs to be treated and the pain will go away. Of course, the pain doesn't go away but just keeps coming back.
"That's the way Chechnya is. You can't have it pulled right out, but you still have to pay money to the dentist to treat it," Sergei said. The family laughed.
Today, the Zapunny family is scheduled to leave for a beach vacation in Egypt. They will lie on the sand and forget Moscow's trauma. They will carry on with the lifestyle of the New Russians they have become. They will try to forget the toothache that never quite goes away.
----
Feud Grows Over Extradition of Chechen Rebel
November 3, 2002
New York Times
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/03/international/europe/03RUSS.html
MOSCOW, Nov. 2 - Denmark has so far refused to extradite a senior Chechen leader the police arrested on Wednesday, saying that Russian prosecutors had yet to provide evidence that he was involved in terrorist activities.
Relations between Denmark and Russia soured badly in the wake of the siege of a Moscow theater by a group of Chechen guerrillas after Danish authorities refused to shut down a two-day conference of Chechen representatives earlier this week in Copenhagen.
As the conference ended, Danish police arrested Akhmed Zakayev, a former actor who has risen to political prominence in Chechnya's independence movement, in his hotel room early Wednesday morning, acting on an international warrant first issued by the Russians more than a year ago.
Far from easing tensions, however, the arrest has inflamed them further as Danish authorities weigh Russia's extradition demands.
Some members of Russia's Parliament have called for a boycott of Danish goods, while others led a demonstration outside the Danish Embassy here today to demand Mr. Zakayev's extradition.
"If Denmark adheres to its deaf-and-dumb position, we will take tough steps," the chairman of the foreign affairs committee of Russia's Parliament, Dmitri O. Rogozin, was quoted today as saying by the Interfax news agency.
Denmark's justice minister, Lene Espersen, issued a written statement on Friday saying that Russia's demands had not met the conditions for extradition under a 1957 treaty.
In remarks on television later, she said Russia's formal extradition request, delivered on Thursday, was "unacceptable" and "incomplete," warning that Mr. Zakayev would be freed if Russia did not provide more evidence by Nov. 30.
She spoke only hours after Russia's foreign minister, Igor S. Ivanov, said that Russia had already sent enough evidence proving Mr. Zakayev, 43, was involved in terrorism. Today, however, the prosecutor general said officials would send more documents in the next few days.
Russia has accused Mr. Zakayev, a former vice premier in Chechnya's republican government, of a series of crimes in Chechnya. They include armed insurrection, the organization of an illegal armed detachment and attempted murder of law-enforcement officers.
The Russians have also accused him - without detailing the evidence - of involvement in the hostage siege that began here on Oct. 23 and ended 57 hours later when Russian commandos stormed the theater, killing 41 Chechen guerrillas and 119 of more than 750 hostages.
Mr. Zakayev, who is also a representative of Alsan Maskhadov, a Chechen separatist leader, has been regarded as a moderate among Chechen separatists. Until the hostage siege, he was seen as one of the Chechen leaders with whom the Russians could most likely negotiate a settlement to the war, now in its fourth year.
Even after issuing a warrant for his arrest in 2001, Russian officials continued to contact Mr. Zakayev, and he traveled widely in Europe. During the siege in Moscow, however, Russian authorities reissued the arrest warrant to the Danes.
Vanessa Redgrave, the British actress who has worked in support of the Chechen independence cause and who attended the meeting in Copenhagen, asserted that the Russian charges against Mr. Zakayev were politically motivated. She said that Mr. Zakayev had denounced terrorism in general and the seizure of the Moscow theater specifically.
----
The 'Sons' Rise In Chechnya
By Anna Politkovskaya
Sunday, November 3, 2002
Washington Post; Page B07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A54819-2002Nov1?language=printer
MOSCOW -- Abubakar lifts the black mask covering his face. We are staring, examining each other at close quarters. We are both trying to understand what's going to happen when this, yet another Russian tragedy, is over. Abubakar, a 29-year-old Chechen, looks 40. He is deputy commander of the terrorist group that has taken several hundred people hostage. I am a journalist who has come to the captured theater building to negotiate. And now I am trying to understand who these people are. Will it be possible to persuade them to compromise if their lives are spared? Will they let all those unhappy people go? Who is behind them? And, more important, what comes after them?
We don't want anything, says Abubakar sharply; we do not intend to survive. We don't need it. We have come to die. And we are going to die in battle. He is wearing military fatigues that cover the figure of a physically fit special forces fighter with long service. An automatic weapon is on his lap; he constantly strokes it as if it is a baby.
Abubakar is one of those Chechens who have been fighting since youth. He has spent the past three years in the woods and mountains, without water, gas or heat. He has been surviving.
-- Why did you live like that?
-- I am a fighter for the freedom of my land.
-- What did you come to Moscow for?
-- To show you what we feel like during mop-up operations, when federals take us hostage, beat us up, humiliate, kill. We want you to go through it and understand how you have hurt us.
-- But let the children go.
-- Children? You take our 12-year-old children away. We are going to keep yours. To make you understand what it feels like.
This refrain -- "We will show you how we suffer" -- is to be an undercurrent of our "talks." Other fighters from the "subversive kamikaze group" added their details to the picture Abubakar was painting. Their attitude is not going to change. It is this: We have come to die to make the war stop. We are making no concessions.
Abubakar and his group, the majority of them between the ages of 25 and 30, are the generation of the "sons" of the Chechen war, who have grown old together with their "fathers." They have known nothing but an automatic weapon and the woods ever since they finished school.
In midsummer this year, as the military-political leadership of the Chechen resistance grew more and more radical, Abubakar and people like him began to raise their voices against the "fathers" -- including leaders and well-known field commanders -- saying that they were faltering in the struggle, lacking in drive, leaving fighters to spend a whole winter in the woods doing nothing while the outrageous Russian "mopping up" operations rose to unprecedented levels.
A Chechen woman of about 40 comes in, a grenade hanging on her thumb, an explosive device attached to her body. She carries a pail, which she fills with water for the hostages. We talk a little about her family in Grozny. She doesn't feel sorry for anybody or anything either. Abubakar is telling us that they had chosen people for this operation very carefully: They took only the best. The woman has been waiting a year and a half for a chance to become a kamikaze. Her husband and brothers were killed; her uncle and nephew are missing.
-- Are you answerable to Aslan Maskhadov (the Chechen separatist leader and former president)?
-- Yes, Maskhadov is our president, but we are fighting on our own.
Abubakar says this coldly. It confirms one's worst fears: This group is a force that operates on its own, waging a war of its own.
He names certain members of the leadership. They are conducting peace talks very slowly, he says, because they sleep on sheets, whereas we are dying in the woods. We are tired of them.
That was it, the sum total of their "ideology." It's easy to deride it as primitive, but I don't feel like doing that just now. This group, which is gaining the upper hand in Chechnya, promises innocent blood in the future -- one terrorist act after another. Meanwhile, the Kremlin does not even want to hear about a peace process.
The fate of the Chechen leader Maskhadov is becoming ever more predictable: Choose the frenzied radicalism of the "sons" or be swept away, and very soon.
The chance for a peaceful settlement now, after the October tragedy, has been lost. The Kremlin turns a deaf ear. Now it will take a much stronger effort for it to sit down at a negotiating table.
Female hostages are led toward me, then men. They all say the same thing: "We are the second Kursk" -- invoking the lost Russian submarine. No one in the Kremlin cares about their lives, they are saying: The only thing Putin wants is to demonstrate his strength and to show that he will never bow to the terrorists. And so we will have to die for it, right?
The writer is a Russian journalist with extensive experience covering the Chechen war. She is the author of "A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya."
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Russian Copter Shot Down in Chechnya
November 3, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-Chechnya-Helicopter.html
ROSTOV-ON-DON, Russia (AP) -- A Russian military helicopter was shot down by rebels in Chechnya on Sunday, officials said. Interfax news agency reported that nine soldiers were killed.
The Mi-8 helicopter had just taken off from an airfield near Khankala, Russia's main military base in Chechnya, when it was hit by rebel fire, said Alexander Lemeshev of the Emergency Situations Ministry in southern Russia.
The helicopter, carrying three crew and six passengers, plunged to the ground, Lemeshev said. He said he did not have any information about the fate of those onboard.
Lt. Boris Podoprigora, deputy commander of Russian forces in Chechnya, was quoted as telling Interfax that the helicopter was downed by a mobile rocket launcher. He said rebels appeared to be firing from a dilapidated five-story building on the outskirts of the Chechen capital, Grozny.
Podoprigora told Interfax that everyone onboard were killed, and federal troops were searching the area for the rebels. He said two rebels had already been killed.
Chechen rebels have shot down several Russian helicopters during the two wars in the region in the past decade, including one packed with troops in August that left at least 119 people dead. On Tuesday, an Mi-8 helicopter was shot down by a rebel missile, killing all three crew and one passenger aboard.
Russian forces retreated from Chechnya after a 1994-1996 war that left separatists in charge. Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered troops to return in 1999 after attacks on a neighboring region and several deadly apartment bombings blamed on the rebels.
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Sex, Lies and Videotape
'Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America'
by David Wise, Random House. 309 pp.
Reviewed by Robert Sherrill
Sunday, November 3, 2002
Washington Post; Page BW07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A49169-2002Oct31?language=printer
As America's premier writer on espionage and the intelligence bureaucracy, David Wise has over the years introduced us to some very weird and dangerous civil servants. But for weirdness, the others couldn't touch Robert Philip Hanssen. He was, says Wise, "a walking paradox." Although a zealous right-wing anti-communist, he sold thousands of our government's secrets to Moscow. He was the kind of devout Catholic who went to Mass every day and hung a crucifix on his office wall, but he was obsessed with exhibitionist sex and pornography, spending hours hunting it on the Internet.
When his closest friend made extended visits to his home, Hanssen, an electronics whiz, hid a small video camera in his bedroom and rigged it up so that his friend, "sitting in the comfort of the downstairs den, could watch on television as [the Hanssens] had sex in their upstairs bedroom." (Mrs. Hanssen didn't know she was on camera.) Later the two men would critique the show.
Very early in his treasonous career, Hanssen's wife caught him putting together some material he claimed he was selling to the KGB as a "scam." To pacify his wife, he promised to give the first payoff money to Mother Teresa. More likely, he spent it on strippers, particularly the one he dated for a year, gave a sapphire-and-diamond necklace and a Mercedes, and treated to a two-week fling with him in Hong Kong.
He could afford it. For all the secrets passed to the KGB over two decades, Hanssen received $600,000. Wise says the secrets were of such enormous value that he could have demanded millions, "yet he never negotiated for more."
Did Hanssen's Catholicism make it easier for him to be a traitor in good conscience? Wise points out that Hanssen repeatedly confessed his espionage to priests and received absolution. Secrecy was guaranteed. "He betrayed his country and simultaneously betrayed his wife," writes Wise, while "urging his friends to get closer to God."
Seven years ago, Wise wrote a gripping account (Nightmover) of how Aldrich Ames was for nine years Moscow's mole inside the CIA, destroying many of the agency's most important undercover operations. Wise saw the CIA's incompetence in catching Ames as just another sign that the agency was almost worthless. ("From the Bay of Pigs to Iran-Contra, its covert warriors hatched one disaster after another" and "its analysts misjudged almost every major development in the post-World War II world.")
Wise could have been almost as harsh in his judgment of the FBI. Behind the masterful puffery and self-promotion of J. Edgar Hoover during his half-century as its first director, the bureau was riddled with defects. Until Hoover's death in 1972, the FBI was marked by racism and civil-liberty violations, and seemed more interested in harassing left-wing political dissenters than in disturbing the Mafia. Post-Hoover directors produced their "string of debacles," such as the shootings at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and making a bonfire of 75 Branch Davidians in Waco, Tex.
And, in terms of time elapsed, they were even more incompetent than the CIA in catching their mole. Not that there weren't "certainly enough warning signs." Hanssen's own brother-in-law, also an FBI agent, warned his supervisor that a suspiciously large pile of $100 bills had been seen on top of Hanssen's dresser. There was no follow-up. And what about the time Hanssen broke into another agent's computer? And the time he dodged taking a lie detector test? And the time "FBI technicians discovered he had a password breaker on his hard drive, normally a sure sign of a hacker"? And what about the time he got into a shoving match with a woman who worked in his office? (She fell to the floor, and he dragged her up the corridor, yelling and screaming.) Hmmmm. Maybe a little mental problem there? "Perhaps none of these incidents and questions about Hanssen was enough, by itself, to lead the counterspies to suspect their own colleague," Wise writes, "but taken together they should have triggered an investigation."
By the time Director Louis Freeh announced he was quitting in 2001, a CBS News poll showed public confidence in the FBI had plummeted to 24 percent. But within the bureau, confidence was still high. Perhaps too high. Wise smartly guesses that the FBI "may have failed to detect Hanssen sooner because it was in love with its own image" of bureaucratic purity and shrewdness -- a hangover from the myth-ridden Hoover era, "when the vast majority of Americans admired the bureau and its agents, who were invariably portrayed as square-jawed and invincible." A traitor in their ranks? Impossible.
As always, Wise offers his readers the excitement of spying on the spies, and the pleasure of hooting at good guys who stumble because they are too smug. And he leaves us mulling over the question of justice, served or unserved. Hanssen got a life sentence, but the government turned its traitor into a fairly good provider by allowing Mrs. Hanssen to receive $40,000 of his pension a year, plus the house and their three cars.
The really big winner in this tale is, ironically, the Russian spy who defected to the United States, bringing a treasure chest of data plundered from KGB files. It was this material that exposed Hanssen. In gratitude, our government paid the lucky immigrant $7 million, and he is now living comfortably somewhere in the United States under a new identity. •
Robert Sherrill is a staff writer for the Nation.
-------- us
THE MILITARY
U.S. Pilots in Gulf Use Southern Iraq for Practice Runs
November 3, 2002
New York Times
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/03/international/middleeast/03GULF.html
ABOARD U.S.S. ABRAHAM LINCOLN, in the Persian Gulf, Oct. 30 - When Navy warplanes roar off the flight deck of this aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, their official mission is to patrol the no-flight zone in southern Iraq.
But they also have an unadvertised task: practicing bombing runs against Iraqi targets.
Navy pilots are conducting mock strikes against airfields, towers and other military sites in Iraq, acquainting themselves with targets they may be called on to strike as the Bush administration prepares for a possible military campaign to topple Saddam Hussein.
"It gives us the opportunity to train in the same environment that we may possibly go to war in," Capt. Kevin C. Albright, who commands the Abraham Lincoln's air wing, said of the Navy patrols over southern Iraq. "We are looking at target sets and practicing."
The no-flight zones in southern and northern Iraq were established after the 199