Archive By Date | Today's Links to Search By
Activists' News | Nuclear | Depleted Uranium | Military | Police
Alternative Energy Etc. | From Subscribers
NUCLEAR
Nuclear Sub, Merchant Ship Collide
UK nuclear workers exposed to radiation
China Says Its Arms Controls Are Same as U.S.
Al Qaeda Suspect Says He Targeted Belgian Nuke Base
German nuclear load, delayed by protests, nears waste dump
Nuclear Waste Arrives at German Dump
India hits West on terror tactics
Iraq Agrees To Receive Inspectors
Iraq Tells the U.N. Arms Inspections Will Be Permitted
Inspectors' List of Sites Ready
UN Inspector May Clash with Bush on Iraq Standard
U.N. Inspectors Will Face Many Problems in Iraq
Former weapons inspector says war with Iraq inevitable
Crisis Could Push N. Korea to Expel Nuclear Inspectors
U.S. Ties Oil Deal to N. Korea Nuclear Bid
U.S. will halt fuel oil shipments
Japan Says to Press N.Korea on Biochemical Arms
N. Korea Changes on Return of USS Pueblo
Al Qaeda Suspect Says He Targeted Belgian Nuke Base
Takeover of Indian Point by Westchester Is Proposed
House Passes Homeland Security Bill
Pro-Industry Senator to Chair Environment Committee
Daschle Questions Whether U.S. Is Winning War on Terror
Tell the truth about U.S. assassination policy
MILITARY
Senate passes $3.3 billion aid, peacekeeping package for Afghanistan
Lithuania to Buy Weapons From U.S.
The Guns of Opa-Locka: How US Dealers Arm the World
Japan Says to Press N.Korea on Biochemical Arms
Germ - Warfare Negotiators to Meet
U.S. Strategy in Colombia Connects Drugs and Terror
War in Iraq could kill up to four million - report
Israeli Tanks Raid Outskirts of Gaza City
Sneak preview of Armageddon:
Israelis Return Stolen Equipment
NATO Means More Than War Games for Balkan Candidates
Pakistanis Split on U.S. Execution
Bin Laden Hunt Frustrates Pentagon
Annan Presses Bush to Avoid a Rush to War
Defense Bill Includes Exemption for Military
Two soldiers killed in Louisiana exercise
The Chicken Hawks' War
Media Curbs Advance in Russia
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Mayor backs surveillance cameras
D.C. cops get video funds
False explosives threat stops traffic
Blair advocates judicial overhaul
Police Efforts Lead to Arrests of Homeless
French Police Evict Asylum-Seekers From Church
New Suspects Named in Bali Bombings
World's Most Wanted Proving Elusive for U.S.
ENERGY AND OTHER
US "energy lite" bill omits wind, renewable fuels
Ontario to give incentives for clean, green energy
US States Try to Fight Global Warming on Their Own
Microbes Help Clean Contaminated Harbor Mud
ACTIVISTS
Nuclear Waste Arrives at German Dump
Weekend anti-war protests / Toronto Star
Iranian Refuses to Challenge His Death Sentence for Apostasy
War on Iraq Not Yet Justified, Bishops Say
EPA Sued Over Washington DC Air Quality
Forest Activists Shut Down Citibank
Biotech Contamination Riles Activists
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Nuclear Sub, Merchant Ship Collide
Reuters
Thursday, November 14, 2002; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A50911-2002Nov13?language=printer
The nuclear-powered attack submarine USS Oklahoma City collided with a merchant ship in the western Mediterranean early yesterday, damaging the sub's sail and periscope but apparently causing no injuries, the Navy said.
The accident occurred around midday as the Oklahoma City was rising to periscope depth east of the Strait of Gibraltar. It apparently did not cause serious damage to the other vessel, which was not identified in a release from the headquarters of the U.S. Sixth Fleet in Gaeta, Italy.
"The submarine surfaced and located a merchant vessel in close proximity," the release said. "USS Oklahoma City attempted to make radio contact with the other vessel. However, the other vessel did not respond, did not appear to need assistance and departed the area."
The Sixth Fleet said there were no injuries on the submarine and that damage appeared to be limited to the periscope and the "sail" command and control area atop the Oklahoma City.
The submarine will return to port for further inspection of damage and repairs, the Sixth Fleet said. The Oklahoma City is 362 feet long, weighs 419 tons and carries a crew of up to 100 officers and enlisted men.
-------- britain
UK nuclear workers exposed to radiation
REUTERS UK:
November 14, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/18583/story.htm
LONDON - Twenty workers at a nuclear reprocessing plant in Scotland were exposed to radioactive particles this week but risks to them appeared low or non existent, Britain's nuclear decommissioning body said.
Two of the 20 workers at the Dounreay plant in Caithness, northern Scotland, had radioactive dust on their skin and had it scrubbed off, a spokesman for the Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) said.
The other 18 had the particles on their shoes and faced "no immediate health risk", the UKAEA spokesman said.
He said Dounreay deals with around 10 incidents a year when radioactive particles are found on workers' skin and have to be scrubbed off, the spokesman said.
"It's not an unusual situation in an industry where you're handling radioactive materials all the time," the spokesman said. "There has been no release to the environment, there is no evidence anyone has inhaled or ingested radioactive particles."
The plant has been sealed off and an investigation has begun, the UKAEA said.
-------- china
China Says Its Arms Controls Are Same as U.S.
November 14, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-arms-china.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - China's top arms control official said on Thursday his country's export controls are now ``basically the same'' as those of the United States and he hoped U.S. curbs on satellite cooperation could soon be lifted.
Liu Jieyi, director general of the Chinese Foreign Ministry's Department of Arms Control and Disarmament, spoke at the annual Carnegie Endowment for International Peace non-proliferation conference, which draws hundreds of experts and officials.
He cited the recent issuance of new export control rules as evidence of Beijing's commitment to the ``urgent task'' of checking the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological arms and missiles.
``In a nutshell, China's export controls ... are basically the same as those of the United States, EU (European Union) and other countries in both scope and enforcement,'' he said.
Bush administration officials have praised China's progress in adopting international non-proliferation standards but have said the newly-issued export controls do not go far enough to warrant lifting arms-related sanctions.
Specifically, Beijing wants the United States to resume issuing licenses so U.S. manufacturers can send their satellites into space on Chinese rockets, a potentially multibillion dollar industry.
Liu said the launches benefit both sides and added, ``We would hope to see progress'' in this regard.
The licenses were halted because Washington says Beijing violated a November 2000 agreement to halt the transfer of missile technology to Pakistan and implement an export control system.
U.S. officials have said there is still more China must do, such as reaffirm at the highest levels its commitment to the November 2000 agreement, clarify what activity prohibited by the agreement is alleged to be ongoing and demonstrate that it is willing to punish violators.
In his speech, Liu repeated Chinese assertions that Beijing has ``steadfastly'' pursued a policy of not assisting any other country in developing weapons of mass destruction.
``The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is detrimental not only to world peace and stability but also to China's security,'' he said.
-------- europe
Al Qaeda Suspect Says He Targeted Belgian Nuke Base
November 14, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-attack-belgium-alqaeda.html
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - A Tunisian arrested in Belgium last year on suspicion of having links to the al Qaeda network told a radio station on Thursday he had planned to attack a Belgian air base thought to house U.S. nuclear bombs.
RTBF public radio said Nizar Trabelsi, a former professional soccer player, was speaking by telephone from his jail cell.
He was arrested in possession of explosives and firearms two days after the September 11 attacks on the United States and has since been charged with involvement in organized crime and illegal possession of firearms but has yet to face trial.
Trabelsi has been linked by Dutch judicial authorities to Algerian-born Adel Tobbichi, who along with three others has been charged in a Dutch court with plotting to attack Belgium's Kleine Brogel air force base and the U.S. embassy in Paris.
Asked by an RTBF reporter whether he was involved in a plot against the airbase, Trabelsi replied: ``Yes, exactly.'' His remarks have since been carried widely by Belgian media.
``The products they (the police) found in my place, were the same as were used against Nairobi and Dar es Salaam,'' he added, in an apparent reference to the bloody 1998 al Qaeda bomb attacks at the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
``It's the most serious bomb around,'' he said.
Anti-nuclear activists say U.S. nuclear weapons are stockpiled at the Kleine Brogel base in eastern Belgium, an allegation officials have neither confirmed nor denied.
Trabelsi denied, however, that the U.S. embassy in Paris was another of his targets.
According to a Dutch request to Canada seeking the extradition of Tobbichi, the Algerian allegedly provided false travel documents to Trabelsi to enable him to travel to Afghanistan to train for a suicide mission.
Trabelsi said he knew and admired al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who spent years based in Afghanistan.
``I love him a lot, like a father. For me, he's my father. I don't care what happened on September 11 or what he did, that doesn't interest me,'' Trabelsi said.
``I had a good relationship with him. I talked a lot with him. I felt he wasn't playing with me. He gave me advice.''
-------- germany
German nuclear load, delayed by protests, nears waste dump
Thursday, November 14, 2002
By David McHugh,
Associated Press
http://enn.com/news/wire-stories/2002/11/11142002/ap_48955.asp
DANNENBERG, Germany - Guarded by riot police, a train bringing 1,320 tons of nuclear waste to a German dump reached a terminal near its final destination Wednesday after being delayed for hours by protesters who occupied tracks and chained themselves to the rails along the route.
The convoy of 12 waste containers, the largest shipment yet to the Gorleben dump site, repeatedly ground to a halt on its 24-hour trip north through Germany after leaving from a French processing plant Monday.
A dozen protesters forced a one-and-a-half-hour delay south of Bremen on Wednesday by occupying the tracks as others set fire to tires nearby. Earlier along its 600-kilometer (375-mile) German leg, the train had to stop twice for police to free activists who had chained themselves to the tracks.
Antinuclear activists put up determined resistance along the final stretch, defying a ban on demonstrations within 50 meters (yards) on either side of the route.
Police said they detained about 250 protesters Wednesday, 150 of them alone in Hitzacker, near Dannenberg, where protesters clashed with police bearing riot shields, who stood shoulder to shoulder along the rail line. Several dozen police vehicles were damaged in the clashes to the point where they needed to be towed away, police said.
Another 27 protesters were detained after they occupied tracks outside Hamburg hoping to disrupt the shipment. Instead, they forced a passenger train traveling at 110 kilometers an hours (70 mph) to slam on the emergency brakes, police said. No one was injured.
By dusk Wednesday, the train trundled into the rail terminal at Dannenberg, which was sealed off with barbed wire to protect the containers that were to be loaded onto trucks for the final stretch to the Gorleben dump.
The demonstrations brought together young protesters, local farmers, and seasoned antinuclear activists such as Berlin architect Michael Eggert, 52, who first demonstrated against the Gorleben dump in 1979. Activists argue that neither the waste containers nor the dump, a disused salt mine, are safe.
"The main point is not to keep the train away. It's to show the world there is still a need to demonstrate against this scandal," said Eggert, blocking a road in Hitzacker in his wheelchair. "In the whole world, there is no example of safe waste disposal," he insisted. "The government has written off this area even though 99 percent of the people here are against it."
The shipment is the first to the site since last November, when demonstrators defied some 17,500 police and staged sit-down protests along the route through Germany. An estimated 10,000 to 15,000 officers throughout Germany were deployed for the latest transport.
Waste shipments to Gorleben resumed in March last year after a three-year break. The previous German government had suspended shipments after radioactive leakage was discovered in some containers.
Spent fuel from Germany's 19 nuclear power plants is sent to France and Britain for reprocessing under contracts that oblige Germany to take back the waste.
Last year, the government and power companies signed an agreement to phase out nuclear power within about 20 years. Activists hope that protesting waste shipments will push up the security bill and force a quicker shutdown. Germany's strong antinuclear lobby has made Gorleben a focus of its cause ever since the dump, about 120 kilometers (75 miles) southeast of Hamburg, was approved by the local government in 1977.
--------
Nuclear Waste Arrives at German Dump
November 14, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Germany-Nuclear-Waste.html
DANNENBERG, Germany (AP) -- A shipment of nuclear waste arrived early Thursday at a dump in northern Germany following a trip across the country that was slowed by determined protesters.
A convoy of trucks carrying the 12 containers of reprocessed waste arrived shortly after dawn at the Gorleben waste storage site, about 75 miles southeast of Hamburg and for more than two decades a focus of Germany's strong anti-nuclear lobby. With the loaded containers weighing in at a total 1,320 tons, it was the biggest shipment yet to the site.
Overnight, police cleared several hundred protesters from the road along the 12-mile final stretch of road from a rail terminal in the town of Dannenberg, where the containers were loaded onto trucks overnight.
Accompanied by a fleet of police vans, the convoy set off from the sealed-off terminal for its hour-long trip to the aboveground shed at Gorleben, where it was greeted with loud whistles but no trouble. Demonstrations were banned within 50 yards on either side of the route.
About 16,700 police were deployed to guard the shipment.
Protesters caused a delay of several hours as the containers traveled by train across Germany Tuesday and Wednesday on their journey from a reprocessing plant in western France, repeatedly occupying tracks.
Police twice had to free demonstrators who had chained themselves to the rails. By Thursday, 950 demonstrators had been arrested, with charges being pressed against 67, police said.
Protests were mostly peaceful but the two groups clashed several times, resulting in damage to 38 police vehicles and injuries to 80 demonstrators.
Waste shipments to Gorleben resumed in March last year after a three-year break. The previous German government suspended shipments after radioactive leakage was discovered in some containers.
Activists argue that neither the waste containers nor the dump are safe.
Spent fuel from Germany's 19 nuclear power plants is sent to France and Britain for reprocessing under contracts that oblige Germany to take back the waste.
Last year, the government and power companies signed an agreement to phase out nuclear power within about 20 years. Activists hope that protesting waste shipments will force a quicker shutdown.
-------- india / pakistan
India hits West on terror tactics
By David W. Jones
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
November 14, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20021114-61895800.htm
SRINAGAR, India - Indian officials say they have presented the United States with voluminous evidence that Pakistani support for an insurgency in India's Kashmir Valley continues unabated five months after Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf pledged to an American envoy that it would end. Top Stories
Frustrated with the failure of the United States and its allies to hold Gen. Musharraf to the June 6 promise made to Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage - which headed off a likely Indian military attack on Pakistan - Indian leaders accuse the West of a double standard in its war on terrorism.
"We get the feeling that terrorists are bad [only when] they are attacking the United States," External Affairs Minister Yashwant Sinha said in an interview in his New Delhi office. "The war [against terrorism] is being fought with standards that are open to question."
U.S. officials, grateful to Pakistan for assistance in the war on al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, acknowledge that infiltration continues despite Gen. Musharraf's promise but say they are not convinced of a government role. Pakistani officials suggest the evidence may have been fabricated by India to disguise its inability to cope with an indigenous uprising.
India's evidence, which was shown to The Washington Times, includes aerial surveillance photographs of purported training camps in Pakistan and Pakistani-held Kashmir, statements by captured infiltrators, intercepts of radio transmissions between Kashmir and Pakistan, identifying documents and notebooks seized from killed or captured insurgents, and material published in the Pakistani press.
"The direct role of the Pakistani army is known through technical and human intelligence," said Girish Chandra Saxena, the New Delhi-appointed governor of Jammu and Kashmir.
"We also know it from the types of arms captured - remote-control mines and wireless sets that would not otherwise be available to them. We intercept messages from Pakistan, thousands in a month, both in code and clear. We have shared all of this with the U.S. administration."
Lt. Gen. V.T. Patankar, the suave and engaging commander of Indian forces in Kashmir, said there are 40 to 45 guerrilla training camps in Pakistan and Pakistani Kashmir, down from a high of 142, "but now they are larger."
"Many training camps are close to Pakistani army camps. Some of the militants have been given fatigues. They share a firing range at the Chakothi camp" in Pakistani-held Kashmir near the Line of Control (LOC), which divides Kashmir into its Indian and Pakistani sectors.
"Most infiltration is aided by heavy fire across the LOC" from the Pakistan army, he said.
Gen. Patankar and his aides also displayed dozens of captured training notebooks, identity cards and code books during a briefing at the Indian army's heavily guarded XV Corps headquarters in Srinagar. He said similar briefings had been given to U.S. Ambassador Robert Blackwill and other American officials.
The United States remains skeptical about some of the evidence, and indeed it is hard for a layman to tell whether India's aerial photographs show what the Indians claim they do.
Similarly it seems surprising that Pakistani guerrillas would cross the Line of Control carrying laminated identity cards with the names of proscribed terrorist groups printed in large letters - and in English.
Mohammad Sadiq, deputy chief of mission at the Pakistani Embassy in Washington, said yesterday that some sites identified by India in the past as training camps have been in fact civil-defense facilities open to the public.
Pointing out that Pakistan has proposed neutral observers patrol the Line of Control, he good-naturedly noted it "speaks very poorly of both of us" if Pakistan were allowing its radio transmissions to be picked up by India and the Indians were incapable of acting on them.
Asked whether he thought India might have fabricated its evidence, he said, "India is capable of doing it."
Nevertheless, a senior U.S. official knowledgeable about the region acknowledged last week that the infiltration has been continuing and has increased in recent weeks. "We continue to focus on it closely. It is something we have a strong interest in."
Mr. Blackwill, the U.S. ambassador in New Delhi, went further in public remarks late last month that infuriated Pakistan, saying, "The problem in Kashmir is cross-border terrorism. It's virtually now, in my judgment, entirely externally driven."
Such statements do little to assuage the Indians, who see them as further evidence that the United States is simply allowing Pakistan to foment terrorism against India as long as it cooperates in the war against al Qaeda and the Taliban.
"We realize the problem of the international community. They won't pressure Gen. Musharraf beyond a certain point because they fear the alternative to Musharraf in Pakistan is more fundamentalism," said Mr. Sinha, the foreign minister.
"But he has been pushed to the wall on Afghanistan and still was able to get 98.5 percent in a referendum. But you say that on Kashmir he cannot be pushed?"
The Indian officials are particularly incensed that assistance to the Kashmir insurgency has continued after Gen. Musharraf's promises to end to it.
Most residents of the Kashmir Valley agree the insurgency began in 1989 as an indigenous uprising fed by years of poor local government and a history of severely flawed state elections.
But over the years, Indian security forces say, the movement has been taken over by Pakistani and other foreign "jihadis," or holy warriors, many of them trained in the same religious schools that gave rise to al Qaeda and the Taliban.
Of the three main guerrilla groups, they say, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed are headed by Pakistanis and run from the Pakistani cities of Lahore and Bahawalpur, respectively. Both are on the U.S. list of terrorist organizations.
The third main group, the largest and the only one with a preponderance of local members, is the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, which is headed by Sayeed Salauddin, a Kashmiri living in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir.
India moved more than half a million troops to the Pakistani border following a December 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament that was blamed on Jaish-e-Mohammed, prompting Gen. Musharraf to declare on Jan. 12 that Pakistan "will not allow its territory to be used for terrorist activity anywhere in the world."
When India again prepared to attack in early June, following the massacre of more than two dozen women and children at an Indian army camp in Kashmir, top U.S. diplomats rushed to the region to head off what they feared could develop into a nuclear exchange.
Mr. Armitage arrived in New Delhi from Pakistan on June 7 with what the Indians say was a firm pledge from Gen. Musharraf to permanently end the infiltration of militants into Kashmir.
Mr. Armitage "told us that Gen. Musharraf had promised a permanent end to infiltration and made these points: One, it will be visible. Two, it will be to your satisfaction. Three, he would dismantle the infrastructure of terrorism," said Mr. Sinha, who took over the foreign ministry post in July.
He said the infiltration levels declined during June and July but began picking up again in August and September. "Gen. Musharraf made a promise to Richard Armitage, but he has not kept it."
Another senior official close to Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee said India has "communicated to the [United States and Britain] our deep disappointment at their failure to persuade Gen. Musharraf to implement his commitments made to them."
"I am not going to doubt the sincerity of the administration in pushing Musharraf to do what he had promised, but we certainly have a feeling that both the U.S. and [Britain] did not put all the pressure they could have on Musharraf," the official said.
The senior U.S. official, who appeared surprised at the bluntness of the Indian criticism, acknowledged there are "extremist elements in Pakistan that are of great concern," but said, "The degree to which there is government support for them is no longer clear."
Noting that the United States placed both Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed on its list of foreign terrorist organizations following the Dec. 13 attack on the Indian Parliament, the official said the Pakistani government subsequently banned both groups.
"The American view is that their offices have been closed and that large numbers of their members have been jailed where there is sufficient evidence to hold them. The United States believes the groups are a threat to Pakistan as well as to India. "
"Pakistan is our friend, and they are proving it every day. I think you cannot overlook the fact that there are over 400 terrorists that Pakistan has helped us to catch. Some of the most important ones were caught with help from President Musharraf."
Asked, however, whether the United States sees the struggle in Kashmir as part of the wider war against terrorism, the official hesitated. "All violence against civilians for political purposes," he said, "is unacceptable."
-------- inspections
Iraq Agrees To Receive Inspectors
U.N. Team to Arrive Next Week
By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 14, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A51573-2002Nov13?language=printer
Iraq yesterday said it is ready to receive United Nations weapons inspectors in accordance with the Security Council resolution approved last week, bowing to intense international pressure two days before a U.N. deadline.
An eight-page letter to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan from Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri was filled with invective against the United States, Britain and the 13 other council members that voted unanimously for the measure. Sabri asserted that Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction for inspectors to find, but he said: "We are prepared to receive the inspectors within the assigned timetable. . . . We are eager to see them perform their duties . . . as soon as possible."
"We take it they have accepted," Annan told reporters after a White House meeting with President Bush. The first inspectors, Annan said, will arrive in Iraq on Monday to begin setting up their headquarters and establishing a work plan.
Iraq's acquiescence to the resolution -- along with its apparent acceptance of the tough new inspection program it establishes -- crosses the first, and perhaps the easiest, of a number of hurdles set out by the Security Council. The Bush administration has said that failure at any juncture would provide justification for war, either under U.N. auspices or, if the Security Council does not agree, with U.S. forces acting alone or with like-minded allies.
Baghdad now has until Dec. 8 to provide inspectors and the council with "a currently accurate, full, and complete declaration" of all its chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs. Under the strict timetable, inspections must officially start no more than 15 days after that. Chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix then has 60 days -- until nearly the end of February -- before he must make his initial report to the council on Iraqi cooperation.
Bush made no comment on the Iraqi response in a brief Oval Office statement to reporters before he began his 40-minute meeting with Annan. But in earlier remarks, after a morning Cabinet meeting, he said the United States will have "zero tolerance" for Iraqi deception. "About as plain as I can make it," he said. "We will not tolerate any deception, denial or deceit, period."
The resolution calls for Blix to immediately report any Iraqi "interference with inspection activities," and for the council then to reconvene to decide what action to take. The administration has said that it will participate in those deliberations, while reserving the right to make its own decisions.
In an indication of how fragile the international consensus remains after two months of deliberations, during which some council members sought to fashion a resolution that would restrain U.S. eagerness to attack, Annan said yesterday that he hopes all parties will "be careful" in deciding how to respond to possible Iraqi provocations. "Anything seen as a flimsy, hasty excuse to go to war will create difficulties in the council," he said.
In its letter to Annan, Iraq repeated that it has no weapons of mass destruction, saying that both Bush and "his lackey, [British Prime Minister] Tony Blair . . . know, as well as we do . . . that such fabrications are baseless." Those who "pressured" the council to adopt the resolution, it said, "have other objectives."
The text of the letter was read last night on Iraqi television, voiced over a videotape of President Saddam Hussein meeting his top aides for what was described as a discussion of the resolution. U.N. sources said they believe the harsh wording was directed primarily at the Iraqi public, which only on Tuesday heard the Iraqi parliament urge Hussein to reject the resolution. Although Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammed Douri, described the letter as an "unconditional" agreement with the council's terms, it was, at best, grudging.
Describing the resolution's "bad contents," the letter said that "if it is to be implemented according to the premeditated evil of the parties of ill-intent, the important thing in this is trying to spare our people from harm." Other governments had signed on to the resolution, the letter said, under U.S. "pressure and threat that it would leave the United Nations if [others] did not agree to what America wanted, which is to say the least, extremely evil and shameful to every honest member of the United Nations." Iraq, it said, would have preferred that the United States "carry out its aggressions against us unilaterally" rather than "obtaining an international cover."
In an apparent reference to terrorist attacks against Americans, the letter said that U.S. "infliction of injustice and destruction" on those who oppose it, principally "Muslim and Arab believers," is why the United States is now "reaping the hatred of the peoples of the world due to its policies and aggressive objectives."
Although the Iraqi letter concluded with a stated intention to send a further communication "at a later date" stating Iraq's belief that parts of the resolution are "contrary to international law," U.N. officials said it was not clear whether Baghdad intends to argue with the terms that Bush said are nonnegotiable.
"There's no negotiations with Mr. Saddam Hussein," Bush said at the White House. "Those days are long gone. And so are the days of deceit and denial. And now it's up to him. And I want to remind you all that inspectors are there to determine whether or not Saddam Hussein is willing to disarm. It's his choice to make. And should he choose not to disarm, we will disarm him."
But the resolution itself, and U.S. interpretations of it, have already caused some confusion. It warns that any Iraqi failure to comply with the resolution will be a "material breach," making Iraq liable for "serious consequences." But it does not define those terms. Annan -- who had asked to meet with Bush during a previously planned trip here to receive an award and deliver a speech on the Middle East -- repeatedly reiterated the need for council "credibility" and "serious, meaningful [inspections], not looking for excuses," during a breakfast meeting with reporters before his session with Bush. On several occasions, he disagreed with public statements about the resolution made by administration officials over the past week.
Last Friday, for example, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld cited "a number of opportunities in the coming weeks to discover [Iraqi] intentions." He added: "Needless to say, Iraq ought not to take or threaten hostile action against inspectors or coalition aircraft upholding U.N. inspections." U.S. and British aircraft have for years patrolled the northern and southern zones in which Iraqi aircraft are prohibited, often exchanging fire with Iraqi installations on the ground.
At a White House briefing yesterday, spokesman Scott McClellan said that "part of the resolution calls for the regime in Iraq to stop firing" on such patrols. But while the resolution does say that Iraq "shall not take or threaten hostile acts" against any U.N. member personnel upholding the new resolution, it does not mention the no-fly patrols, which are not authorized or mentioned in any previous resolution.
"This is tricky," Annan said. "The U.S. maintains the no-fly patrols are in accordance with a resolution. A lot of others" on the council, including Russia, "don't agree."
The resolution does say, and the administration has emphasized, that any Iraqi omissions from the declaration due by Dec. 8 will be considered a "material breach." But Annan said yesterday that he does not think the council would automatically accept such an omission as grounds for war. "The test will come when the inspectors are on the ground," he said. "The inspectors have a sense of what constitutes a major breach" and will make a "judgment of what is intentional and serious."
Although the resolution says Blix must immediately report any Iraqi violation to the council, the administration has said, erroneously, that it also authorizes individual council members to make such reports. "I think we are all agreed that the chief inspectors will be the ones to report serious breaches," Annan said.
"The U.S. does seem to have a lower threshold than the others may have" for what constitutes a breach, he said. "The key is that whatever we do must have broad support from allies and the public." If there is a decision to go to war against Iraq, he said, "the reasons must be seen as reasonable, credible and not contrived."
Staff writer Walter Pincus contributed to this report.
----
BAGHDAD
Iraq Tells the U.N. Arms Inspections Will Be Permitted
November 14, 2002
New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/14/international/middleeast/14IRAQ.html
UNITED NATIONS, Nov. 13 - Iraq said very reluctantly today that it would allow United Nations weapons inspectors to begin work in the country and would "deal with" a Security Council resolution obligating it to disarm.
In their nine-page letter, however, the Iraqis seethed with hostility toward the United States, and repeatedly denied President Bush's assertions that they have weapons of mass destruction, setting the stage for further confrontation between Washington and Baghdad.
In Washington, Mr. Bush had no specific reaction to the Iraqi letter but stressed again that "there's no negotiations with Saddam Hussein."
"We will not tolerate any deception, denial or deceit, period," Mr. Bush said during a meeting with his cabinet.
The United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, struck a markedly different tone, urging patience on the White House before it begins any military action if Iraq balks at the rigorous weapons inspections approved on Friday with a 15-to-0 vote in the Security Council.
Even right after that vote, it was clear from speeches by delegates here that some Council members would view war as justified only if Iraq flagrantly violated the new inspections regime. There appears to be a growing gap between those nations and the Bush administration.
Administration officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, indicated that they were content for now to wait until Dec. 8 - the deadline for Iraq to submit a complete list of its weapons programs - before making an issue of violations.
"There's no use being taunted into an argument now over what he's got," a senior official said, referring to Mr. Hussein. "There will be time for that next month."
Once that list is submitted, it will be up to Hans Blix, the head of the United Nations weapons inspectors, to check it. Administration officials have said that only then will they pass the most sensitive American intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs to Mr. Blix.
Forgoing diplomatic niceties, the letter raged against the Americans and the British, co-authors of last Friday's resolution, calling them the "gang of evil" and accusing them of "the biggest and most wicked slander" against Iraq.
The United Nations, the letter said, "has now been transformed into a kitchen house for big power bargaining, providing cover for war, destruction, blockades and starvation to be inflicted upon peoples."
The letter to Mr. Annan was signed by Foreign Minister Naji Sabri of Iraq, but Council diplomats said it had the tone of Mr. Hussein.
Today, most Security Council nations welcomed Iraq's begrudging assent, calling it adequate to meet a requirement in Friday's resolution, which gave Baghdad seven days to agree to its terms.
Mr. Annan, who met today in Washington with Mr. Bush and other senior administration officials, said he was satisfied that Iraq had provided the necessary agreement. The letter arrived two days before the Friday deadline.
"What is important is that they have said yes," Mr. Annan said here late this afternoon after returning from Washington.
The letter said, in an English translation provided by Iraq, "We hereby inform you that we will deal with Resolution 1441, despite its bad contents." It added, "We are prepared to receive the inspectors, so they can carry out their duties, and make sure that Iraq had not developed weapons of mass destruction, during their absence since 1998."
United Nations inspectors withdrew from Iraq in December 1998, on the eve of bombing by the United States and Britain in punishment for Baghdad's failure to cooperate with the inspectors.
No passage in the letter said plainly that Iraq would give unconditional cooperation for the inspections. Instead, it said Iraqi officials would be watching to see if the inspectors "perform their duties in compliance with international law.
"If they do so, professionally and lawfully, without any premeditated intentions," it said, "the liars' lies will be exposed to public opinion, and the declared objective of the Security Council will be achieved."
By Dec. 8, Baghdad must present a complete declaration of all of its prohibited weapons programs. Any omissions or false statements could be the basis for "serious consequences," possibly a military attack, according to the resolution.
In its letter, Iraq repeatedly dismissed as lies the Bush administration's accusations that it has used the hiatus since the last weapons inspections to make biological and chemical arms and to work on a nuclear weapon. "Such fabrications are baseless," the letter said.
The letter arrived here only one day after the Iraqi Parliament recommended unanimously that Mr. Hussein reject the resolution, but left the decision in his hands.
Several Security Council diplomats dismissed the abrasive language in the letter as intended for the domestic audience in Iraq, allowing Mr. Hussein to say that in order to avert war, he had been forced to agree to the resolution, but had not bowed to the United States.
"The important thing in this is trying to spare our people from any harm," the letter said.
Mr. Blix confirmed today that his chemical and biological weapons team, - together with the inspectors for the nuclear program - would arrive in Baghdad on Nov. 18.
Just as Iraq said it was waiting to see how the inspectors would perform, Mr. Annan said the United Nations wanted to see how Iraq would cooperate.
"I think the issue is not their acceptance, but performance on the ground," he said in Washington. "So let the inspectors go in, and I urge the Iraqis to cooperate with them and to perform, and I think that is the real test we are all waiting for."
He said he did not want to jump to conclusions about the belligerent tone of Iraq's message.
"I will wait to see whether it is an indication that they are going to play games, or it is a message they are sending to their own people," said Mr. Annan, a veteran of many skirmishes over the inspections between the United Nations and Baghdad.
While the United States had no official reaction to today's letter, the other four permanent, veto-bearing Council nations accepted it.
"Iraq has now taken the first step," said the British foreign secretary, Jack Straw. "I welcome that."
But he added: "We must remain vigilant. Iraq's intentions are notoriously changeable." He said it was only the threat from Washington and London of all-out war to disarm Iraq that had brought it to accept the Security Council's will.
The French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, also guarded, said France "took note of Iraq's acceptance," and insisted that Paris wanted to see Iraq cooperate fully with the inspections.
Russia, which was the least enthusiastic among the Council powers about the threats of force in Friday's resolution, was the most enthusiastic about Iraq's response.
"We were sure Iraq would comply, as the decision is opening the way for the situation in Iraq to be settled politically," Foreign Minister Igor S. Ivanov told a Russian television station today.
The deputy representative from China, Zhang Yishan, announced in the Council this morning that "Iraq has decided to accept" resolution 1441 and "welcomes inspectors to come back." China is a permanent member that holds the rotating presidency of the Council for November.
Arab nations embraced Baghdad's decision with relief, pleased that Mr. Hussein had not provoked a crisis just days after they hailed Resolution 1441 as his last chance to avoid war with the United States.
In the letter, Baghdad parroted - but reversed - the words Mr. Bush used in a speech to the General Assembly on Sept. 12, when he summoned the United Nations to confront Iraq or become irrelevant.
Berating the Council nations that supported the American-British resolution, the letter said, "We fear that the United Nations organization may lose the trust and attachment of peoples, that is if it has not fallen to that place already.
"He who remains silent in the defense of truth is a dumb devil," the letter says, referring to the 15 nations on the Security Council.
Iraq's ambassador, Mohammed A. Aldouri, adopted a somewhat milder tone here this morning, saying Iraq was "eager" to see the inspectors work "in accordance with international law, as soon as possible."
----
Inspectors' List of Sites Ready
'Road Map' Includes More Than 1,000 Locations in Iraq
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 14, 2002; Page A28
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A51165-2002Nov13?language=printer
UNITED NATIONS, Nov. 13 -- With Iraq's announcement today that it will accept tough, new United Nations inspection terms, a team of disarmament experts will likely arrive in Baghdad on Monday to restart their surveillance cameras, install their communications equipment and begin the most intrusive weapons inspection operation in modern history.
Armed with tips and evidence amassed by Iraqi defectors, former U.N. arms experts and U.S. and British intelligence agencies over the past decade, the U.N. inspection team has created a road map of more than 1,000 sites that inspectors will potentially visit in their search of Iraq's suspected chemical, biological and nuclear weapons arsenals.
Over the next two months, U.N. inspectors will be zeroing in on a priority list of more than 100 sites, including an upgraded missile launch facility at Al-Rafah, a former nuclear power plant at Al-Furat and a chlorine production facility in the town of Fallujah outside Baghdad that once produced precursors for Iraq's nerve and blister agents, according to U.S. and U.N. sources. Inspectors are also expected to visit at least one of eight presidential compounds to test whether Iraq is willing to provide full compliance, officials said.
U.S. and British intelligence agencies maintain that these and other sites damaged by U.S. warplanes or destroyed by U.N. weapons inspectors have been rebuilt and expanded since the inspectors left Iraq in December 1998, on the eve of a U.S.-British bombing campaign.
"We have a plan of action which we cannot obviously lay out in detail," Mohamed El Baradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said in an interview. "But we will have to go and visit some of the facilities which have been relevant in the past". . . and conduct "no notice inspections" at previously unknown sites. "We would not want to work in an expected fashion; we will have to do some surprise visits to facilities that we might not be expected to visit."
El Baradei, an Egyptian arms expert who will head the United Nations' efforts to uncover Iraq's nuclear weapons program, said that these former sites represent only a piece of the broader picture of Iraq's weapons program. El Baradei and his counterpart, Hans Blix, the head of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, which is responsible for ridding Iraq of chemical and biological weapons and long-range missiles, said the U.N. inspectors will set up an elaborate system of soil, water and air sampling equipment to detect any traces of chemicals or radioactive materials.
Inspectors will also appeal to U.N. member states to turn over intelligence on Iraq's efforts to purchase weapons-related equipment, and question hundreds of Iraqi scientists involved in Baghdad's previous weapons efforts to see whether they can provide credible evidence they have not been "moonlighting" in prohibited programs, El Baradei said.
But El Baradei and other senior U.N. officials say the key to identifying a secret weapons program is securing unimpeded access to any site in the country. "If there is a piece of equipment, it will have to be installed; and if it has been installed and is being used, we will have a chance to bump into it," said Jacques Baute, the head of the IAEA's Iraq action team.
Under the terms of a 1991 cease-fire agreement ending the Persian Gulf War, Iraq is obliged to allow U.N. inspectors to eliminate its chemical, biological and nuclear weapons program and any missile with a range of more than 90 miles. The former U.N. inspections agency, UNSCOM, destroyed more Iraqi weapons than the U.S.-led coalition forces in 1991 before it left Iraq in 1998, following confrontations over access to sites.
But Iraq retained massive stores of growth media and chemical precursors that could have been turned to chemical and biological weapons programs. U.S. officials suspect that Iraq has also developed longer range missiles and other delivery systems capable of threatening U.S. interests.
Blix and El Baradei will travel to Iraq on Monday with a team of nearly 30 logistical and technical specialists to set up communications and check on the status of an elaborate remote monitoring system that kept tabs on pieces of Iraqi equipment that could easily be converted from civilian to military uses. A team of about a dozen weapons inspectors are scheduled to arrive Nov. 25 to begin conducting spot inspections. A full team of 85 to 100 inspectors should be working in Iraq by the end of December.
Reports issued last month by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and Britain's Joint Intelligence Committee charged that Iraq has been engaged in an ambitious program over the past four years to rebuild facilities either torn down by previous U.N. inspectors or destroyed by U.S. and British warplanes.
The reports include the names of more than a dozen locations suspected of participating in banned weapons programs. One of them is the Al Mamoun Solid Rocket Motor Production Plant, where Iraq previously produced motors for the Badr-2000 solid propellant missile, which is capable of traveling 430 to 620 miles.
Although U.S. warplanes and U.N. inspectors have destroyed several structures at the site, the Iraqis have begun to rebuild them. "The Iraqis have rebuilt two structures used to mix solid propellant for the Badr-2000," according the CIA report. "The only logical explanation for the size and configuration of these mixing buildings is that Iraq intends to develop longer-range, prohibited missiles."
U.N. officials say that much of the information published in the report -- including an account of weapons-related equipment and materials sought from overseas suppliers by Iraq -- provides a helpful guide to future weapons inspections. But they also struck a note of caution, pointing out that Iraq will have plenty of time to sanitize those sites. "Where sites have been indicated publicly, it is not likely that they will contain anything proscribed when inspectors arrive," Blix told a team of recruits in Vienna last month.
El Baradei said that while his inspectors could easily detect whether Iraq has reconstituted an industrial-scale nuclear weapons program, it will be much harder to uncover evidence of Iraq's efforts to obtain weapons-grade nuclear fuel from a foreign supplier. He said that although he will begin inspections in "a couple of weeks' time," it could take as long as three months before the entire U.N. monitoring system will be up and running. "We need to take our time," El Baradei said.
El Baradei and Blix have repeatedly pleaded with Washington and London to provide them with fresh intelligence they have collected on Iraqi efforts to procure key ingredients that can be used for either conventional or nuclear weapons programs.
----
UN Inspector May Clash with Bush on Iraq Standard
Reuters
Thursday, November 14, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A54621-2002Nov14?language=printer
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A key U.N. weapons inspector said on Thursday he would not run to the U.N. Security Council if Iraq made a minor, unintentional omission in disclosing its weapons of mass destruction, a stand that may put him at odds with President Bush's "zero tolerance" policy.
Under a timetable laid out in last week's U.N. Security Council resolution on new weapons inspections in Iraq, Baghdad has until Dec. 8 to declare any weapons of mass destruction programs it may have as well as an extensive list of materials in its petrochemical industry that could have military uses.
"If there is minor omission and this is clearly not intentional we are not running to the Security Council to say that it's a material breach," said International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Mohamed ElBaradei, who will lead the U.N. teams searching for any Iraqi nuclear weapons programs.
"If there is a pattern of lack of cooperation then we obviously have to report to the Security Council and the Security Council will decide (whether) that is a material breach," he said in a speech at a nonproliferation conference.
Asked on Wednesday how he would define a "material breach" of the U.N. resolution, a term that could lead to military action to disarm Iraq, Bush was blunt: "Zero tolerance ... We will not tolerate any deception, denial or deceit, period.
----
U.N. Inspectors Will Face Many Problems in Iraq
Reuters
Thursday, November 14, 2002
By Alan Elsner, National Correspondent
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A52347-2002Nov14?language=printer
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.N. arms inspectors are likely to face major logistical and practical problems in their drive to uncover Iraqi chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, from Iraqi officials who have had years of experience in frustrating past inspections.
Former inspectors and other experts said Iraqi President Saddam Hussein might feel he has no choice other than to allow the inspectors back into his country to avert the threat of a U.S.-led military attack. But he would still make every effort to hide as many of his weapons programs as possible.
President Bush has described Saddam's previous tactics as "cheat and retreat" and has said he would not tolerate them in the future.
"There are a million ways the Iraqis could try to frustrate the inspectors. The most worrying scenario is the accumulation of small obstacles and deceits, each of which taken alone is too small to justify a war, but which collectively could add up to a serious problem," said Jessica Mathews, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who recently edited a book on how to make inspections work.
She said the key to success was maintaining unity among the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and maintaining a credible threat of war if Iraq did not comply.
"As soon as one of those two conditions disappears, the inspections efforts will start to fail," said Mathews.
The chief U.N. weapons inspector, Hans Blix, has said inspections would prove unworkable without Iraqi cooperation.
SECURITY COUNCIL RESOLUTION
A U.N. Security Council resolution, adopted last Friday, ordered Iraq to give up its weapons of mass destruction and laid down a timetable. Iraq's U.N. ambassador said on Wednesday his country will accept the resolution without conditions.
Baghdad will have until Dec. 8 to provide the United Nations with a list of dangerous weapons it still might have as well as civilian chemical and biological "dual use" components, that might have military applications.
Inspections will then begin and the inspectors would have until Feb. 21 to file an initial report on Iraqi compliance. However, they must tell the Security Council of any serious violations sooner.
Jonathan Tucker, who worked as a nuclear inspector in Iraq in the 1990s, said Baghdad previously employed many techniques to frustrate the inspections. They included: providing incomplete, false or distorted statements, trying to lead inspectors away from sensitive sites, making key officials unavailable for interviews, destroying evidence, intimidating inspectors, disguising and camouflaging facilities and bugging rooms used by inspectors.
On several occasions, key officials were unavailable for interviews because their daughters were supposedly getting married. Other times, inspectors were told that people they wished to interview had been involved in car crashes on the way to their interviews.
"The new inspections regime will be much tougher than the old one but Iraq is a large country, about the size of California, with many places to hide weapons and clandestine production facilities, so the inspection process must be supported with accurate and timely intelligence," said Tucker, who is now at the U.S. Institute of Peace.
INSPECTORS HAVE NEW TECHNOLOGY
Iraq has had four years since the last inspectors withdrew in which to build underground sites and mobile facilities. But inspectors will be armed with new tools, including more accurate aerial and satellite surveillance data, portable X-ray devices and hand-held sensors that can instantly identify biological agents such as anthrax.
Unlike in the past, the inspectors will have the right to interview witnesses without Iraqi minders being present. They could also take scientists and their families out of the country, though several experts believe that would be unworkable in practice.
Terence Taylor, who was a senior nuclear inspector in Iraq from 1993 to 1997, said he was worried there would be too few inspectors and that they would be too inexperienced.
"When we were there, the Iraqis managed to penetrate our organization and suborn U.N. personnel in New York as well as in our forward staging station in Bahrain. They had paid off key people so they often knew our plans in advance," he said.
"You must assume they will bug hotel rooms and other facilities used by inspectors and they will intimidate witnesses the inspectors wish to interview," said Taylor, who is now president of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.
"The Iraqi side has a detailed knowledge of what was uncovered by the previous inspectors and is very experienced in receiving inspectors, handling visits to sites and preparing for interviews," he said.
David Albright, who worked for the nuclear inspections team from 1992 to 1997, said the 250 trained inspectors available to the United Nations was not enough. Scores of inspectors will be needed to secure and investigate individual sites, but it was crucial that the inspectors keep the Iraqis off-balance by swooping on several sites at one time.
Albright also worried whether the inspectors would be sufficiently persistent and determined.
"It took me many years to learn how to do interviews and I was sometimes tricked. You need people used to dealing with the negative side of human behavior and I fear they may be short of those kinds of people," said Albright, who is now president of the Institute for Science and International Security.
----
Former weapons inspector says war with Iraq inevitable
Thu Nov 14, 2:45 PM ET
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20021114/ap_wo_en_po/us_iraq_former_inspector_2
PASADENA, California - Former United Nations (news - web sites) weapons inspector Scott Ritter says the U.N. resolution on disarming Iraq of weapons of mass destruction makes war inevitable.
"We're going to war, and there's not a damn thing the inspectors can do to stop it, and that's a shame. Inspections worked once and they can work again," Ritter said Wednesday night during a speech at the California Institute for Technology.
The wording of the U.N. resolution will allow the United States to attack by mid-December, said Ritter, who was chief weapons inspector for the U.N. Special Commission in Iraq from 1991 to 1998.
He resigned in 1998, in part because weapons inspectors were being used to justify the Desert Fox bombing campaign against Iraq, Ritter said. Although he's a Republican who voted for President Goerge W. Bush, Ritter spent much of his speech criticizing the administration.
"The U.S. has a policy regarding Iraq of regime removal. The last thing Bush wants is a weapons inspection regime that works. That would mean lifting economic sanctions and Iraq coming back into the fold with Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) still at the helm," Ritter said.
He said the U.N. resolution carries a hidden trigger allowing Bush to attack after the Dec. 8 deadline for a weapons declaration from Iraq, and noted that there will be four U.S. aircraft carriers in the region in December.
If Iraq does not declare any weapons on Dec. 8, it will constitute the false declaration described in the resolution. Ritter said this would trigger a Security Council meeting to consider serious consequences.
Under the resolution, however, false statements or omissions alone would not constitute a new "material breach" for the council to consider. During negotiations, France, Russia and others demanded that an Iraqi failure to cooperate also be required for a new "material breach."
The resolution adopted unanimously last Friday says "false statements or omissions in the declarations submitted by Iraq ... and failure by Iraq at any time to comply with, and cooperate fully in, the implementation of this resolution shall constitute a further material breach of Iraq's obligations and will be reported to the council for assessment."
During his years as a weapons inspector specializing in forensic archaeology, Ritter said the Iraqis lied at every turn, leading inspectors to dig up demolished ballistic missiles and track the serial numbers to their Russian manufacturer for confirmation that all existing missiles were destroyed.
With such detective work, inspectors confirmed at least 95 percent of all weapons were destroyed by 1996.
-------- korea
Crisis Could Push N. Korea to Expel Nuclear Inspectors
By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, November 14, 2002; Page A22
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A51865-2002Nov13?language=printer
TOKYO -- In the countryside of North Korea, two men -- one Egyptian, one Chinese -- watch the still waters of a pool in a cold, nearly vacant building. Hundreds of silvery canisters sit in the clear water 30 feet below. Each contains highly radioactive metal that once fueled a power plant, metal that could be forged into the fearsome heart of a nuclear bomb.
The men re-run timed photos from poolside cameras, using a computer to detect changes in the image and confirm that nothing entered -- or left -- the water while they slept at a nearby dormitory. Assured, they make the rounds of other buildings, checking locks and seals on machinery and doors of the decrepit nuclear industrial complex.
They or their colleagues -- a new team is sent in about every six weeks from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) -- have been doing this chore at North Korea's Yongbyon nuclear plant 25 miles north of Pyongyang without interruption since Nov. 11, 1994.
But diplomats and analysts are worried that these international inspectors could be evicted from North Korea, and their crucial surveillance of the spent nuclear fuel aborted, following a decision by the United States and the other members of the executive board of the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO). That decision would cut off future shipments of much-needed heavy fuel oil unless North Korea takes verifiable steps to dismantle a newly disclosed, separate program to enrich uranium for use in nuclear weapons.
President Bush, in a meeting with senior advisers Wednesday, decided to inform the other members of the KEDO board -- South Korea, Japan and the European Union -- that the United States will allow the current November shipment to be delivered but will not approve a December shipment unless North Korea takes the necessary steps. U.S. officials, who have closely consulted with allies in recent weeks, said they expect the other members to agree. A decision will be formally announced as early as today when the KEDO board meets in New York.
Under the 1994 Agreed Framework, KEDO is helping build nuclear power plants for North Korea in exchange for Pyongyang freezing operations at facilities capable of producing weapons-grade material and putting existing plutonium under inspection. The agreement also provides that 3.3 million barrels of oil are to be shipped to North Korea each year.
In the growing diplomatic standoff over the demand to end the uranium enrichment program, one of the biggest risks is that the nuclear fuel quarantined under international inspection after the last major nuclear row in 1994 could be freed up and made into weapons.
"If North Korea decides they want to really rattle sabers, they could expel the IAEA and threaten to reprocess the fuel. That would be a very serious situation," said C. Kenneth Quinones, who helped set up the inspection program in 1994.
If the oil flow is stopped, analysts and diplomats said, North Korea might evict the inspectors from Yongbyon. With some repair of the rusting infrastructure, the government could begin reprocessing the spent fuel rods from the pool into plutonium for atomic bombs in six to eight months, according to some estimates. The 8,000 spent fuel rods could conceivably make 30 or more atomic weapons, Quinones said.
"North Korea can quickly un-can the stored fuel rods to begin extracting plutonium, allowing it to build up a nuclear force far more quickly than would be possible through uranium enrichment," said Timothy Savage, a visiting fellow at Kyungnam University in Seoul.
North Korea also could unlock the IAEA seals on the old nuclear plant at Yongbyon, and, with a major overhaul, restart the Soviet-era reactor to begin churning out even more potential weapons fuel.
Before the U.S. decision on the oil was announced, a parade of U.S. officials who had come for consultations privately advocated stopping the shipments, and said Congress would do so next year anyhow.
But Japan and South Korea disagree; they have told the Americans that it would be a mistake to end the oil flow and the 1994 Agreed Framework under which the shipments were sent. They argue that move could prompt an escalation of brinkmanship by North Korea.
"Unless we find some better alternative, it's very risky for all of us to throw it away," said Katsunari Suzuki, in charge of the North Korean negotiations for Japan. "It's better than nothing."
There are gaps in perceptions, the Japanese Defense Agency head, Shigeru Ishiba, acknowledged in parliament Monday. He warned that U.S. pressure to halt the KEDO oil shipments could cause disarray.
And it may escalate North Korea's moves, others say.
"If America stops the oil shipments, North Korea will consider the 1994 Agreed Framework completely dead and will restart the nuclear program. Definitely," said Kim Myong Chol, the former editor of People's Korea magazine in Tokyo, who often reflects Pyongyang's line. "And if America imposes economic sanctions -- depending on the nature of the sanctions -- North Korea could regard that as an act of war."
Assistant Secretary of State James A. Kelly, the State Department point man on the issue, has said the United States will not negotiate with North Korea until there is "a complete and visible dismantling" of North Korea's uranium enrichment program.
The United States contends that a unified diplomatic front to isolate North Korea will force it to capitulate. But others who have dealt with North Korea for years say its traditional pattern is to increase the stakes, not to back down.
North Korea also has other cards to play, they point out.
The North's response might be as mild as halting the program under which the U.S. military has made regular trips to North Korea since 1996 to search for the remains of more than 8,000 American servicemen who died in the Korean War, an action it has taken twice before.
But North Korea could act more drastically and eject the 1,400 South Korean and Uzbek KEDO workers now pouring the concrete for the foundations of a light-water reactor power plant on the eastern coast under the 1994 pact.
"If they feel the United States is going to end the fuel shipments, they would most likely respond by evicting KEDO," said Quinones, speaking from Centreville, Va. Quinones said he believes that both sides will try to avoid an escalation of tensions. Both have shown some willingness to contain the confrontation, he said.
But the light-water plant is five years behind schedule, and North Korea may feel it will never get power from the completed project anyway, he said. North Korea has long protested that the United States and other KEDO countries failed to uphold their part of the agreement.
Evicting the IAEA inspectors and removing the spent fuel would considerably ratchet up the crisis. The Clinton administration was on the verge of ordering military strikes against North Korea in 1994 over just those sorts of preparations by Pyongyang after the IAEA detected possible diversions in its nuclear power plant fuel.
The most incendiary escalation of the stakes would be a test-firing of a long-range missile by North Korea, similar to one it launched in 1998 that alarmed Japan and its neighbors. North Korea warned last week that it may end its moratorium on such tests, adopted in 1999 as a gesture to the United States.
"North Korea could test-fire long-range missiles off the coast of Washington or New York in the Atlantic Ocean, and it would be legal under international law," Kim said. "It all depends on the American response. We're just at the beginning of a crisis. We're on a threshold."
----
U.S. Ties Oil Deal to N. Korea Nuclear Bid
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 14, 2002; Page A22
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A51194-2002Nov13?language=printer
Upping the stakes in a confrontation with North Korea, President Bush yesterday decided to halt future shipments of heavy fuel oil to the energy-starved nation unless it takes verifiable steps to dismantle a newly disclosed program to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.
The decision, made at a meeting with the National Security Council, came after weeks of consultation and discussion with Japan, South Korea and the European Union, which are also members of the consortium that provides the oil to North Korea. U.S. officials said they expect the other members to agree, and a decision will be formally announced when the executive board of the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization meets in New York today.
KEDO is expected to permit a ship making this month's delivery of fuel oil to complete its journey, but a mid-December shipment would be canceled unless North Korea accedes to international demands.
Under a 1994 bilateral accord, North Korea agreed to suspend operation of nuclear reactors capable of producing weapons-grade material and to place plutonium already produced under international safeguards. In return, the United States agreed, among other things, to supply Pyongyang with regular shipments of fuel oil, totaling 3.3 million barrels (500,000 metric tons) a year. Under a separate accord, Japan, South Korea and the United States agreed to construct two light-water reactors to generate electricity.
But North Korea last month admitted that it had begun a program to enrich uranium, in violation of previous accords, and that the 1994 pact was "nullified.''
Since then, U.S. officials have pressed hard to end the fuel deliveries, but the KEDO board operates on consensus. Some officials supported ordering the ship carrying about 43,000 metric tons of oil to turn around.
But Bush yesterday concluded that halting the ship was such a provocative step that Pyongyang might react rashly, such as evicting international inspectors and restarting its nuclear reactors. "We didn't want to do something so they lose face," one official explained.
Another official said that U.S. officials will inform their allies that if they do not agree to stop December's delivery, the United States will not support completion of the November shipment. "We want to make it crystal clear that this is it,'' he said.
----
U.S. will halt fuel oil shipments
From combined dispatches
November 14, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20021114-24867136.htm
The Bush administration decided yesterday to cut off monthly shipments of fuel oil to North Korea under a 1994 nuclear agreement because of Pyongyang's recent admission it had a secret nuclear-weapons program.
Senior U.S. officials said the November shipment, which left Singapore for North Korea last month, would be the final one. Two more shipments - in December and January - had been contracted for.
Washington's decision came a day before a meeting in New York of the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO), which handles the oil deliveries, as well as the building of two light-water reactors in the reclusive state.
North Korea receives 500,000 metric tons of heavy fuel oil a year, which is paid for mostly by the United States.
Japan, South Korea and the European Union, the other members of KEDO's executive board, have been much more cautious about taking drastic measures against the North. Some officials from these countries had expressed hope that the shipments would continue.
Within the Bush administration, however, there had been voices advocating stopping the delivery before it reaches the North Korean ports.
Frank Gaffney, a leading conservative Republican defense analyst, told Reuters news agency that letting the oil shipment proceed "signals to North Korea that the rhetoric being employed against them, if not empty, doesn't have immediate material effect."
He predicted there would be continuing pressure from South Korea, Japan and the State Department as well as threats from North Korea that could result in new fuel shipments and "further concessions" to Pyongyang in the months ahead.
North Korea had taken important steps to end its international isolation in recent months. But in October, confronted with U.S. intelligence data, the communist country conceded it had a covert program to produce highly enriched uranium, a key ingredient of nuclear weapons.
It has threatened to withdraw from the 1994 Agreed Framework, signed with the United States, if the fuel oil shipments are halted.
North Korea's economy is in desperate shape, and winter is approaching. Although KEDO's fuel oil shipments have been a major energy source, Russia and China are also providers.
In a separate development, a former U.S. diplomat who met with authorities in North Korea last week was quoted by the Associated Press as saying that Pyongyang has decided against returning the captured spy ship USS Pueblo after indicating last month that it might do so.
Donald Gregg, president of the Korea Society and a former ambassador to South Korea, said yesterday that a deal for the Pueblo was hinted at in an Oct. 3 letter in which Vice Foreign Minister Kim Gye-gwan invited him to visit Pyongyang.
But when Mr. Gregg raised the issue during his Nov. 2-5 talks with Mr. Kim and others, he said he was told, "The climate has changed. It's no longer an option."
Mr. Gregg said it was clear the North Koreans were referring to the dispute that erupted after North Korea admitted secretly pursuing a program to produce highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons. The Bush administration has refused to resume any negotiations until the North verifiably eliminates the program.
Mr. Gregg, who served as U.S. ambassador to Seoul during the administration of the elder President Bush, said a decision to halt the fuel oil shipments could worsen the nuclear crisis.
He said it was clear to him from his talks in Pyongyang that the North Koreans want to resolve the matter through negotiations.
In Mr. Gregg's view - not widely shared within the current Bush administration - the suggestion of returning the Pueblo was North Korea's way of indicating its interest in improving relations with the United States.
"I thought it was a very good symbol, or could be" of the North's interest in better relations, he said.
He said he had first discussed the Pueblo's return in a visit to Pyongyang in the spring.
Mr. Gregg said that after he was told the Pueblo's return to U.S. custody was no longer an option, he asked to visit the ship, which has been docked near Pyongyang in recent years and used as an anti-American museum.
Mr. Gregg said the Pueblo was not at its usual mooring and he was told it had been returned to Wonsan, on the opposite coast of North Korea, where it had been held for decades after its capture on Jan. 23, 1968.
The capture of the Pueblo was one of the most shocking acts of communist aggression during the Cold War. North Korean patrol boats seized the intelligence-gathering ship in international waters, and one of the 83 U.S. crew members was killed. The rest were removed from the ship and held prisoner for 11 months.
----
Japan Says to Press N.Korea on Biochemical Arms
Reuters
Thursday, November 14, 2002
By Teruaki Ueno
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A52918-2002Nov14?language=printer
TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan said on Thursday it would take up the issue of North Korea's suspected development of biological and chemical weapons in future talks on establishing diplomatic ties between the historic foes.
In the latest round of full-scale talks in Malaysia last month, Japan pressed Pyongyang to scrap a nuclear weapons program which North Korean officials had admitted to James Kelly, the top U.S. negotiator for North Korea.
Quoting an unidentified Japanese government official, Japanese media said on Thursday that North Korean Deputy Foreign Minister Kang Sok-ju had told Kelly that Pyongyang possessed biological as well as chemical weapons.
Japan's top government spokesman, Yasuo Fukuda, declined to confirm the report but quoted Kelly as saying that North Korea had told the United States it had "more powerful" weapons than nuclear arms.
"It has long been suggested that North Korea possesses such weapons, and we have long been concerned about North Korea's development of weapons of mass destruction," he told reporters.
He said that Japan would take up the issue in the next round of talks on forging diplomatic ties, but it remained unclear when the two sides would meet again.
Japan and North Korea remain far apart over the key issues of Japanese citizens abducted by North Korean agents and Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program.
ABDUCTEES
North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, in talks with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi in September, admitted that Pyongyang agents had abducted 13 Japanese during the 1970s and 1980s.
The unexpected admission cleared the way for the two nations to resume talks on normalizing ties.
But bickering over the abductees issue and North Korea's subsequent confession that it was pursuing the nuclear arms program, in violation of a 1994 pact with Washington, have snarled the negotiations.
The five surviving abductees are currently visiting Japan and it is unclear when or where they will be reunited with their children, who are still in Pyongyang.
Pyongyang said on Thursday that unless the five were returned, it might indefinitely postpone the launch of security talks set for later this month.
A spokesman for the North Korean Foreign Ministry also said that not returning the abductees could "complicate" the resolution of all issues between the two nations but stopped short of mentioning talks to establish diplomatic ties.
"The Japanese side should know that as long as it does not honestly observe the agreement reached with the DPRK (North Korea) on sending them back, this will entail grave consequences including the indefinite postponement of the talks on security," the spokesman told the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).
NO DECISION ON FUEL SHIPMENTS
Washington has said Pyongyang clearly violated the 1994 agreement to freeze work on nuclear weapons in exchange for oil shipments and two light-water reactors that cannot be easily used to produce weapons-grade material.
A senior U.S. official said on Wednesday that a fuel delivery due in North Korea shortly was being allowed to go ahead, but it could be the last following the North's admission of its nuclear weapons program.
Fukuda said no decision had been made on deliveries.
"It is favorable to implement and keep the Agreed Framework. It hinges on how North Korea would respond," Fukuda said, referring to the 1994 agreement.
Japanese, U.S., South Korean and EU officials start a two-day meeting of the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO) in New York on Thursday to decide what to do. KEDO is implementing the Agreed Framework.
A diplomatic source in Tokyo with close ties to Pyongyang told Reuters on Tuesday that North Korea would likely scrap other nuclear commitments if the shipments stopped -- raising the spectre of resuming its mothballed plutonium extraction work.
Japan's defense minister, Shigeru Ishiba, held talks with his South Korean counterpart Lee Jun in Tokyo on Thursday, but a Japanese official said the two did not discuss North Korea's nuclear weapons program.
The official quoted Lee as telling Ishiba that it was important to bring North Korea into the international community.
Asked by Ishiba whether the Kim Jong-il regime had changed, Lee was quoted as saying: "It is not clear whether the regime has make visible changes."
----
N. Korea Changes on Return of USS Pueblo
Associated Press
Thursday, November 14, 2002; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A51039-2002Nov13?language=printer
North Korea has decided against returning the captured spy ship USS Pueblo after indicating last month that it might do so, according to a former U.S. official who met with authorities in the North Korean capital last week.
Donald P. Gregg, president of the Korea Society and a former ambassador to South Korea, said yesterday that a deal for the Pueblo was hinted at in an Oct. 3 letter in which Vice Foreign Minister Kim Gye Gwan invited him to visit Pyongyang.
But when Gregg raised the issue during his Nov. 2-5 talks with Kim and others, he said he was told, "The climate has changed. It's no longer an option."
Gregg said the Pueblo was not at its usual mooring and he was told it had been returned to Wonsan, on the opposite coast of North Korea, where it had been held for decades after its capture on Jan. 23, 1968.
The capture of the Pueblo was one of the most shocking events of the Cold War. North Korean patrol boats seized the intelligence-gathering ship in international waters and one of the 83 U.S. crew members was killed. The rest were removed from the ship and held prisoner for 11 months.
Gregg said he had first discussed the Pueblo's return in a visit to Pyongyang last spring.
-------- terrorism
Al Qaeda Suspect Says He Targeted Belgian Nuke Base
Reuters
Thursday, November 14, 2002; 11:26 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A57209-2002Nov14?language=printer
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - A Tunisian arrested in Belgium last year on suspicion of having links to the al Qaeda network told a radio station on Thursday he had planned to attack a Belgian air base thought to house U.S. nuclear bombs.
RTBF public radio said Nizar Trabelsi, a former professional soccer player, was speaking by telephone from his jail cell.
He was arrested in possession of explosives and firearms two days after the September 11 attacks on the United States and has since been charged with involvement in organized crime and illegal possession of firearms but has yet to face trial.
Trabelsi has been linked by Dutch judicial authorities to Algerian-born Adel Tobbichi, who along with three others has been charged in a Dutch court with plotting to attack Belgium's Kleine Brogel air force base and the U.S. embassy in Paris.
Asked by an RTBF reporter whether he was involved in a plot against the airbase, Trabelsi replied: "Yes, exactly." His remarks have since been carried widely by Belgian media.
"The products they (the police) found in my place, were the same as were used against Nairobi and Dar es Salaam," he added, in an apparent reference to the bloody 1998 al Qaeda bomb attacks at the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
"It's the most serious bomb around," he said.
Anti-nuclear activists say U.S. nuclear weapons are stockpiled at the Kleine Brogel base in eastern Belgium, an allegation officials have neither confirmed nor denied.
Trabelsi denied, however, that the U.S. embassy in Paris was another of his targets.
According to a Dutch request to Canada seeking the extradition of Tobbichi, the Algerian allegedly provided false travel documents to Trabelsi to enable him to travel to Afghanistan to train for a suicide mission.
Trabelsi said he knew and admired al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who spent years based in Afghanistan.
"I love him a lot, like a father. For me, he's my father. I don't care what happened on September 11 or what he did, that doesn't interest me," Trabelsi said.
"I had a good relationship with him. I talked a lot with him. I felt he wasn't playing with me. He gave me advice."
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- new york
Takeover of Indian Point by Westchester Is Proposed
November 14, 2002
New York Times
By WINNIE HU
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/14/nyregion/14NUKE.html
WHITE PLAINS, Nov. 13 - The Westchester County executive, Andrew J. Spano, said today that he wanted to shut down the two nuclear power plants at Indian Point by buying them, or if necessary, taking them through a condemnation process.
Citing concerns about the safety of the plants, Mr. Spano said he was setting aside $500,000 in his proposed 2003 budget for a six-month study on acquiring the Indian Point plants in Buchanan, about 40 miles north of Midtown Manhattan, and replacing them with a new natural gas plant. He estimated the purchase and construction costs alone at $2 billion to $3 billion, at least twice the amount of the county's annual budget.
"We think that these plants should not have been built here in the first place, and we'd rather have them somewhere else, and we're going to pursue this attack," Mr. Spano said during a news conference at his office.
But Mr. Spano and other county officials offered few details about their proposal, except to say that the study would address a wide range of questions, including where the money would come from and whether the county would act alone or try to seek partners. Mr. Spano has said he would not raise taxes to buy the plants.
Indian Point's owner, the Entergy Corporation, said today that it was not interested in selling the nuclear plants and that it would oppose any effort to close them.
"Entergy hasn't put out a for-sale sign," said Jim Steets, an Entergy spokesman. "We'll talk to the county executive about whatever he wants, but we're not looking to sell Indian Point. It's too valuable to Entergy and to the residents of New York State."
The company bought the plants in the last two years, and Mr. Steets said it had spent hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade equipment and increase training. Together, the two plants generate about 2,000 megawatts of electricity for homes, businesses and public buildings in Westchester and New York City; one megawatt is enough to power about 1,000 average homes.
Mr. Spano's announcement follows more than a year of divisive public debates here over the safety of Indian Point since the Sept. 11 terror attacks. The Westchester Board of Legislators and dozens of villages and towns across the county have passed resolutions calling for the nuclear plants to be decommissioned.
Brian Nickerson, director of the Michaelian Institute for Public Policy at Pace University, said that while Mr. Spano was clearly responding to the concerns of his constituents, his proposal for a takeover of Indian Point faced many logistical and regulatory hurdles. "I don't know if it's completely unrealistic," he said. "But I think it's a difficult sell."
Several Westchester legislators and others questioned whether the financially strained county could afford to buy the plants, let alone build a new one. Just last month, Mr. Spano, a Democrat, proposed a 31.7 percent increase in the county's share of the property tax levy to help offset a projected gap of more than $100 million next year in the county's roughly $1 billion budget.
"I'm not willing to sign off on Westchester County becoming Westchester Lighting Company," said Legislator George Oros, the Republican minority leader. "I think there are basic, fundamental questions that you have to address first before you commit the $500,000 for the study."
But Legislator Michael B. Kaplowitz, a Democrat, said that whether or not the county took over the nuclear plants, the proposed study would take a serious look at issues that need to be addressed.
"The economic arguments to keep it open are very powerful," he said. "And yet the reasons to close it for public safety are more compelling. This is a way to do both. You would close the nuclear side and build a natural gas plant."
-------- us politics
House Passes Homeland Security Bill
Plan for Agency Is Readied As Senate Vote Approaches
By John Mintz and Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, November 14, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A51343-2002Nov13?language=printer
As the House of Representatives passed legislation last night establishing a new Department of Homeland Security, the Bush administration is pressing ahead with plans for a tightly choreographed sequence of actions starting in late January or early February to create the new agency.
Working from a 500-page playbook, government officials are preparing for an explosion of activity 60 days after President Bush signs the bill, when they will begin consolidating 22 separate agencies into a new federal agency with 170,000 employees.
The reorganization, the largest in government since the creation of the Defense Department in 1947, is intended to fashion a single agency that would protect America -- along with its seaports, nuclear plants, energy pipelines and other infrastructure -- by using intelligence information. The new agency also would train police officers, firefighters and health workers to respond to terrorist attacks and develop new technologies to detect threats.
In the House last night, the bill passed by a vote of 299 to 121. Voting yes were 87 Democrats and 212 Republicans; voting no were 114 Democrats, 6 Republicans and 1 independent.
With the Senate poised to pass the homeland security bill in coming days, administration officials said Bush was likely to name a secretary for the new Cabinet-level department within weeks after the bill is signed, so the nominee can be confirmed by the Senate and on the job at the moment of the agency's birth.
The front-runner for the job appears to be Tom Ridge, head of the interim homeland security office, who had told colleagues for months he did not want the job, well-placed sources said. Working out of a White House office, he has coordinated domestic security activities since October 2001, when Bush persuaded him to leave his position as governor of Pennsylvania.
Other names have been mentioned for the secretary job as well, but they are considered longer shots, sources said. They include Joe M. Allbaugh, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and a former political aide to Bush in Texas, and retired Adm. James M. Loy, director of the Transportation Security Administration and a former Coast Guard commandant.
Two other people are likely to serve as top-level aides in the new department, informed sources said: Gordon R. England, the current Navy secretary and a former high-ranking executive of Lockheed Martin Corp., and John Gannon, a former deputy director of the CIA who has been helping run a transition office for the new department.
Under the legislation being considered by Congress, once the new department is up and running it will have one year to consolidate the agencies it will house. They include the Coast Guard, the Customs Service, the Secret Service, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Border Patrol, FEMA and the recently formed Transportation Security Administration.
"We're ready and waiting to move on this," Gordon Johndroe, spokesman for Ridge's Office of Homeland Security.
A secret White House team has spent five months preparing plans for the Department of Homeland Security on the assumption that Congress would yield to Bush's demands for reorganization, administration officials said yesterday. The White House's Office of Management and Budget has taken the lead in doing much of the detail work.
"They've made quite a bit of progress and have done an enormous amount of planning out of the public's view," said Phil Anderson, a senior fellow and domestic security specialist at the nonprofit Center for Strategic and International Studies who has worked with administration officials on the plan.
One of the first actions on the new secretary's agenda, officials said, will be creating a suspect watch list based on the dozen or so separate terrorist watch lists employed by other agencies, from the FBI and CIA to the Transportation Security Administration.
The agencies will be moved over in clusters over the year's time. Back-office tasks such as payroll and other administrative tasks of the migrating agencies will be handled by their old departments during that period.
Ridge and his top assistants have spent months preparing for the day when the government would need to herd together the disparate agencies. They examined each agency's telecommunications, computer and e-mail systems, trying to figure out how to enable them to communicate with one another. They scrutinized personnel, payroll and pension systems to imagine how to unify them.
Moreover, Ridge has brought in top corporate executives who have managed mergers, such as Hewlett-Packard chief executive Carly Fiorina, to advise U.S. officials
Ridge's office also has struggled with seemingly trivial items that, in fact, loom as emotional issues for the agencies that are being asked to give up their independence -- such as the new agency's emblem.
Some agencies are resisting requests that their agents and inspectors wear uniforms with only the arm patches of the new department; they want their agencies' emblem on their uniforms, too. Some people have chafed at the idea that Border Patrol employees and Customs and INS inspectors would be required to wear the same uniform and work under common command, sources said.
"There will be a new seal of the department, but we'll be respectful of the traditions of these long-standing agencies, as well," Johndroe said.
The reorganization plan has its critics.
In July the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, said that the new agency "merges too many different activities into a single department," and warned that managers will be so preoccupied with consolidation details that they might give "insufficient attention to their real job: taking concrete action to counter the terrorist threat at home."
Also yesterday, the Senate joined the House in giving final approval to a $393 billion defense authorization bill for the fiscal year that started Oct. 1 after striking a deal that would allow some but not all military retirees to receive both pension and disability payments. The administration had opposed full coverage as too expensive.
House and Senate negotiators also approved a bill providing an array of initiatives to protect the country's seaports, including comprehensive security planning for all ports. But funding for the new programs was left unresolved because of objections to a cargo user fee from shippers, port officials and most Republicans.
Staff writers Helen Dewar and Bill Miller contributed to this report.
----
Pro-Industry Senator to Chair Environment Committee
By Cat Lazaroff
Environment News Service,
November 14, 2002
http://ens-news.com/ens/nov2002/2002-11-14-06.asp
WASHINGTON, DC (ENS) - The Republican leadership has elected new chairs of all Senate committees and subcommittees, choosing leaders who illustrate vividly the shift in legislative priorities that will come with the Republican controlled Congress. The Republican announcements were followed by Democratic decisions regarding Senate leadership on Wednesday, and today, by the selection of California Representative Nancy Pelosi as the new House minority leader.
With the Republican party now holding a four seat majority in the Senate, all committee and subcommittee chairs will be turned over to senior Republicans when Congress returns in January for the 108th Congress. On Wednesday, with little controversy or debate, the party annointed its new Senate leaders, replacing, in many cases, environmental champions with senators who generally vote against increasing protections for the environment.
ENVIRONMENT AND PUBLIC WORKS
Senator James Inhofe speaks at a press conference. (Photo courtesy Office of the Senator)
Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma will take over leadership of the crucial Environment and Public Works Committee, which reviews almost all major legislation concerning conservation and environmental enforcement. As the longest serving Republican senator on this committee, he will succeed Senator Jim Jeffords, the Vermont Independent whose abdication from the Republican party gave power to the Democrats in June 2001. While Jeffords is widely admired by conservation groups for his pro-environment stance, Inhofe is just the opposite. The League of Conservation Voters, a nonprofit group which monitors the environmental voting records of all Congress members, gave Inhofe a 0 percent rating for his lifetime voting record, noting his support for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and opposition to increased fuel efficiency standards, among other environmental issues.
Inhofe intends to protect the oil and gas industry, as he has stated many times over the past decade. In these February 24, 1999 comments to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Carol Browner, he said, "I hope we can work together and provide some regulatory relief to the oil and gas industry. I am concerned not about any specific rule, but about all pending regulations across the entire agency."
Believing that the states "are in the best position to enforce the environmental laws and regulations," Inhofe can be expected to limit the role of federal agencies, particularly the EPA. He said on June 10, 1997, "The EPA should be limited to an oversight role for consistency only and for providing advice to the States. They should not be in the business of second guessing States or playing the big bully on the block."
In contrast, Jeffords scored 76 percent for his votes in the 107th Congress, supporting proposals to require more energy production from renewable sources and opposing a vote to override objections by Nevada lawmakers and citizens and send the bulk of the nation's high level nuclear waste to a repository at Yucca Mountain.
Inhofe is considered one of the most conservative senators, and is a strong supporter of Bush administration proposals to increase domestic energy production and offer new incentives to the oil industry. Jeffords used his tenure as committee chair to launch investigations of industry involvement in administration initiatives like the national energy plan.
ENERGY AND NATURAL RESOURCES
A slightly less conservative senator will take over the helm of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Pete Domenici of New Mexico will chair the energy committee when the panel's senior Republican member, Frank Murkowski of Alaska, steps down to become Alaska's new governor.
Senator Pete Domenici in the Senate Banking Committee in the 107th Congress (Photo courtesy Office of the Senator)
The Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources has jurisdiction over a sweeping array of issues, including energy resources and development, including regulation, conservation, strategic petroleum reserves and appliance standards; nuclear energy; Indian affairs; public lands and renewable resources; surface mining, federal coal, oil, and gas, other mineral leasing; territories and insular possessions; and water resources. Domenici was in line to chair the Budget Committee, a position he has held before, but opted to take over the energy panel because of the importance of energy issues to his home state of New Mexico. He takes over from Senator Jeff Bingaman, a New Mexico Democrat, keeping state issues front and center on the Energy Committee.
But while Bingaman voted in favor of environmental issues 64 percent of the time in the 107th Congress, according to the LCV, Domenici favored environmental issues just eight percent of the time, and holds a 15 percent environmental voting record over this five Senate terms. While Domenici is considered a moderate voter on many issues, he is expected to support the Bush administration's controversial national energy plan, which emphasizes fossil fuels and nuclear power.
"I am eager to take on this new challenge as chairman of a committee with such import to issues both nationally and in New Mexico," Domenici said. "The task ahead for me is something both new and exciting, and significant in terms of setting natural resource and land policy for the country. I want to find balanced, common sense approaches to these issues."
AGRICULTURE, NUTRITION AND FORESTRY
Senator Thad Cochran in his office (Photo courtesy Office of the Senator)
Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi will chair the Agriculture committee, taking over from Iowa Democrat Tom Harkin. Cochran cast pro-environment votes just eight percent of the time in the 107th Congress, though he did help craft an agriculture proposal supported by many environmental groups: a 1996 bill to phase out federal subsidies for most crops, which has since been overturned by later legislation. However, Cochran opposed February 2002 proposals to end subsidies for large, polluting factory farms, and to offer money to states to buy agricultural water rights to conserve water for fish and other freshwater species. Harkin, who had an 84 percent pro-environment voting record in the 107th Congress, voted in favor of both of these proposals.
APPROPRIATIONS
The Senate Appropriations committee, which crafts budget proposals for every federal agency, will now be chaired by Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, the Senate's senior Republican member.
Senator Ted Stevens on a visit to U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan (Photo courtesy Office of the Senator)
While Stevens, who has an eight percent pro-environment voting record for the 107th Congress, votes as a moderate on some issues, he has not been a friend to conservation groups, and is expected to support the Bush administration in its budget priorities. In contrast, the Democratic chair, eight term Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, had a 56 percent pro-environment record in the 107th Congress. But both of these senior senators share a fondness for pork barrel spending, particularly when it comes to pet projects in their home states.
Besides taking the Appropriations chair from Byrd, Senator Stevens will also take his title as President Pro Tempore of the Senate, traditionally the most senior member of the majority party in the Senate. Stevens becomes the longest serving Republican in the Senate upon Senator Strom Thurmond's retirement at the end of the 107th Congress.
The U.S. Constitution provides for a President Pro Tempore to preside over the Senate in the absence of the vice president, and the Senate President Pro Tempore is also the third person in line of succession for the presidency, following the vice president and the Speaker of the House.
BUDGET
Oklahoma Senator Don Nickles will be the next chair of the Senate Budget Committee, because the committee's senior Republican, Pete Domenici, will take over the Energy Committee. The Budget Committee is responsible for writing Congress' annual budget plan and monitoring the impact of revenue and spending decisions on the federal budget.
Senator Don Nickles' official photo (Photo courtesy Office of the Senator)
The committee also oversees the Congressional Budget Office, which is charged with providing objective, nonpartisan analysis of the budget and economic impact of legislation. Nickles, a conservative who has voted against nearly every major piece of environmental legislation during his four terms in office, takes over from Kent Conrad, a North Dakota Democrat who voted pro-environment 56 percent of the time in the 107th Congress.
"The Senate Budget Committee is vitally important to guiding the decisions of the Senate and ensuring that our government works efficiently and effectively," Nickles said after his election as committee chair. "I'm looking forward to working with President Bush and Senators on both sides of the aisle to reinstate a realistic, fiscally responsible budget process that will promote economic growth, homeland security and national security."
COMMERCE, SCIENCE AND TRANSPORTATION
Senator John McCain in his office (Photo courtesy Office of the Senator)
John McCain, a moderate Republican from Arizona with a 37 percent pro-environment voting record in the 107th Congress, will take over the Commerce Committee from Ernest Hollings of South Carolina. McCain voted in favor of granting so called fast track authority to President George W. Bush, allowing the White House to negotiate trade agreements that Congress may reject but may not alter, a power that some say will result in less emphasis on environmental and human rights protections in international trade.
McCain has usually voted in favor of boosting vehicle fuel efficiency and supporting alternative fuels and public transportation.
ARMED SERVICES
Senator John Warner thanks a member of the American Legion. (Photo courtesy Office of the Senator)
Virginia Senator John Warner will chair the Senate Armed Services Committee, taking over from Carl Levin of Michigan. This committee determines priorities for the nation's military, and will play a major role in determining whether to exempt military training centers and operations from a variety of environmental laws. For example, the 2003 Defense Authorization Bill sent to President George W. Bush late Wednesday includes a provision to exempt the military from the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, meaning the armed services cannot be penalized when their operations kill protected birds on American soil.
Warner said last week that as committee chair, he would work to "provide the support and resources necessary for our men and women in uniform, active and reserve, to successfully perform their current missions around the world; and to assist our military in building the capabilities necessary to transform the force to successfully confront future threats."
Warner voted in favor of environmental issues 16 percent of the time in the 107th Congress, compared to Levin's 72 percent record.
GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
Susan Collins of Maine, a junior senator who begins her second term in January, will chair the Governmental Affairs committee, which oversees the actions of all government agencies. She takes over from environmental champion Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who used his position as chair to launch investigations of Bush administration efforts to overturn or undermine environmental legislation.
Collins has a 64 percent pro-environment record for the 107th Congress, compared to Lieberman's 88 percent record.
FINANCE, FOREIGN RELATIONS, AND THE REST
The remaining committee successions include:
Banking, Housing and Urban Development: Richard Shelby of Alabama, a conservative and former Democrat who switched parties in 1994, will take over from Paul Sarbanes of Maryland. Shelby opposes government regulation of big business, and almost never votes in favor of environmental issues.
Finance: Charles Grassley of Iowa will take over the Finance Committee from Max Baucus of Montana, reversing the switch that took place in June 2001 when the Democrats took control of the Senate. Grassley, a conservative who rarely votes in favor of environmental issues, has said that his priorities as Finance chair will include reforms to welfare, Medicaid, and the State Children's Health Insurance Program.
Foreign Relations: Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana becomes senior Republican and chair of the Foreign Relations Committee due to the retirement of Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina. Lugar, who held the Foreign Relations chair 16 years ago before leaving to chair the Agriculture committee, succeeds Joe Biden of Delaware.
Health, Education, Labor and Pensions: Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, a moderate, will take over from Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts as chair of the Senate Health Education committee, which oversees some of the nation's largest domestic programs. Gregg is known for his willingness to work with Democrats on liberal issues such as the environment and education, and has a 44 percent pro-environment voting record for the 107th Congress.
Judiciary: Conservative Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah will resume the chair of the Judiciary Committee, putting him in a position of approving the Bush administration's nominees to the federal bench. He succeeds Patrick Leahy of Vermont, whose 96 percent pro-environment voting record in the 107th Congress stands in sharp contrast to Hatch's four percent record.
----
Daschle Questions Whether U.S. Is Winning War on Terror
November 14, 2002
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/14/politics/14CND-TAPE.html
WASHINGTON, Nov. 14 - As intelligence experts tried today to determine if the voice of Osama bin Laden was indeed on a new audiotape praising recent terror attacks, the Senate's leading Democrat questioned whether the United States was winning the campaign against terrorism.
``I'm troubled that we haven't found bin Laden in all this time,'' Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota said at a Capitol news conference. ``Frankly, I think that it really caused many of us to be concerned about whether or not we are winning the war on terror.''
The White House, which disputed Mr. Daschle's assertion, has been told that government linguistics experts believe the voice on the tape, which was broadcast on Arab television, is Mr. bin Laden's. If so, it would be the strongest evidence in many months that the terror-network leader is alive.
Whether the voice is his or not, the tape has stirred alarm.
President Bush said on Wednesday that the tape had ``put the world on notice yet again that we're at war and that we need to take these messages very seriously, and we will.'' The president emphasized that he had not concluded that the voice was Mr. bin Laden's and would leave that determination to the experts.
Nor did Mr. Daschle say he was sure the voice was Mr. bin Laden's. But he said the existence of the tape, and the threats it contained, showed the United States was still in danger.
In light of that peril, Mr. Daschle said, it was ``incredible'' that the House of Representatives had voted not to create an independent commission to investigate the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Hours later, however, the White House said it had reached an agreement with key members of Congress to establish an independent, bipartisan investigative commission. ``We have reached an agreement on remaining issues, and we believe we are close to passing a strong bipartisan commission that will look at a broad range of issues,'' a White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, told Reuters.
The 10-member commission would be headed by a chairman appointed by President Bush. It would take a majority of the board or agreement by the chairman and a Democrat-appointed vice chairman to issue a subpoena, Mr. McClellan said.
Earlier, Mr. McClellan the American people recognized that the campaign against terror ``is a long war.''
``The president is patient,'' Mr. McClellan said. ``We are making tremendous progress.''
On Wednesday, the House voted along party lines, 215 to 203, not to create the independent study commission as part of a bill to set up a new Department of Homeland Security.
Republicans asserted that the planning for the new panel had not been thorough enough. Democrats disagreed and said they might try to get the commission established through other pieces of legislation.
``I think it's critical - critical- that we have that vote and incorporate it in homeland security,'' Mr. Daschle said today.
It was not immediately clear this evening what had brought about the accord between the White House and Capitol Hill leaders on an investigation.
Mr. Daschle, who is about to yield the majority leader's gavel to Senator Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi, emphasized that he was not declaring that the United States was losing the campaign against terrorism.
But he said: ``I think we have to question whether or not we're winning the war. We haven't found bid Laden. We haven't made any real progress in many of the other areas involving the key elements of Al Qaeda. They continue to be as great a threat today as they were a year and a half ago.''
On that last point, the White House and Mr. Daschle seemed to agree.
No matter the ultimate determination of whether the voice is Mr. bin Laden's, administration officials say they are bracing for the possibility that the tape may contain hidden messages to followers of Al Qaeda, and that these may spur further terror attacks. Some officials say they believe that another recent audiotape - thought to be from Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mr. bin Laden's mentor and chief deputy in Al Qaeda - may have inspired recent attacks in Kuwait and Bali, Indonesia.
``The assumption is that it is him, that it is legitimate and that it is cause for great concern,'' an administration official said on Wednesday. ``As we have been, we should continue to operate under the assumption that he is alive and still very capable of controlling the operations of Al Qaeda and determined to strike again.''
In an indication that the tape was made in the last few days or weeks, the voice said to be Mr. bin Laden's refers to several recent terror attacks, including two October attacks: the bombing in Bali and the mass hostage-taking at a theater in Moscow.
Both the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency are carefully scrutinizing the tape, which was first broadcast on Tuesday by Al Jazeera, the satellite television channel based in Qatar. Officials said that although it was being subjected to digital analysis, it was of such poor quality that experts would probably be unable to determine its authenticity conclusively. Even so, specialists were conducting still more comprehensive tests.
Senator Bob Graham, Democrat of Florida and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said after a closed-door intelligence briefing Wednesday afternoon that the security agency's technical experts had not yet reached a conclusion on authenticity.
If the tape proves to be genuine, Mr. Graham said, the message provides further evidence that Al Qaeda is regrouping after losing its safe haven in Afghanistan.
One problem facing the analysts is that, at some point, the message was recorded or re-recorded over a telephone line, making the technical review more difficult. American officials said they were not certain whether Al Jazeera had recorded the message from a telephone line or whether the telephone connection had been made with some intermediary before the tape was given to the Arab network.
``It has been passed over a telephone line at some point,'' an official said.
Ahmad Muaffaq Zaidan, the reporter who provided the tape to Al Jazeera, said it had been given to him on Tuesday in Islamabad, Pakistan, by a bin Laden emissary. Although the man's face was partially hidden, Mr. Zaidan said he believed the same person had arranged a drop-off two months ago.
At the National Security Agency, the supersecret eavesdropping and code-breaking group, linguists who specialize in studying Mr. bin Laden's speech and voice patterns reported their belief that the voice on the tape was his, officials said. Their conclusion has circulated within the administration the past three days, prompting a number of officials to conclude that the tape is genuine. But the C.I.A. has remained reluctant to offer a definitive answer.
Attorney General John Ashcroft and the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, have declined to say whether they believed the tape is authentic. But they said that the authorities were taking it very seriously.
``I will tell you that the fact of the tape out there does and should put us on greater alert,'' Mr. Mueller said.
The details of the message on the latest tape are also considered ominous, since it refers to the ``criminal gang at the White House'' and mentions President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld by name, while also warning of further strikes against Western targets.
``As you kill, you get killed, and as you bomb, you get bombed,'' the voice states.
For months, American officials have debated whether Mr. bin Laden survived the war in Afghanistan, with some counterterrorism experts convinced he died in a bombing raid in the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan near the Pakistani border.
The C.I.A. got the last hard evidence he was alive in December 2001, when a radio transmission from Tora Bora was intercepted. American analysts said they believed they heard him issuing orders to Qaeda fighters over the radio.
As time passed without proof that he had escaped the Tora Bora battle, some American counterterrorism experts began to conclude that he was dead. Dale Watson, then the F.B.I.'s chief of counterterrorism, said in July that he thought Mr. bin Laden was dead; some officers in the military's Special Operations Command also concluded that he had died in Tora Bora.
Even so, C.I.A. officials say the agency has continued to operate on the assumption that he is alive, largely because it has received a series of fragmentary intelligence reports about him. American intelligence officials also say that if other Qaeda leaders and Mr. bin Laden's family knew he was dead, they would betray that knowledge through differences in behavior.
One intelligence official said earlier this year that if Mr. bin Laden were dead, very few people inside Al Qaeda knew it, because the United States was not picking up any credible discussions among Al Qaeda operatives pointing to his death.
Intelligence officials said on Wednesday that the C.I.A. still believed he was most likely hiding somewhere along the Afghan-Pakistani border. Officials said they did not believe he had fled to one of Pakistan's major cities. He is believed to be too easily recognizable to risk trying to pass undetected in a major city - especially with a $25 million price on his head.
If it is determined he is alive, his ability to elude a huge American dragnet for the past year may raise new questions about the effectiveness of the administration's campaign against terrorism.
Critics of the military operation in Afghanistan have already complained that American commanders failed to block potential escape routes into Pakistan, thus allowing thousands of Al Qaeda fighters bottled up in Tora Bora and at other battlefields to flee.
--------
Tell the truth about U.S. assassination policy
By Robert Schroeder
November 14, 2002
Baltimore Sun
http://www.sunspot.net/bal-op.policy14nov14.story
WASHINGTON -- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld probably spoke for most Americans when he called the Nov. 3 death of Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi "a very good thing." Mr. al-Harethi, recall, was a suspect in the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole and al-Qaida's chief operative in Yemen. With a resume like that, few Americans likely paused to mourn his passing.
But the way he died may give pause to Americans concerned with how their government is prosecuting the war on terrorism. Mr. al-Harethi, also known as Abu Ali, was killed -- executed, if you like -- by a remote-controlled U.S. missile strike on his car as he drove around the northern Yemeni province of Marib.
Or so the story goes. Unfortunately, press citations from anonymous U.S. officials are about all the confirmation the public has of how this man met his end. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, in an interview with CNN, stopped short of calling the attack a U.S. operation. President Bush's spokesman, Ari Fleischer, deflected questions about U.S. involvement. "Sometimes the best course is a good offense," he said -- effectively telling reporters, and the public, to read between the lines.
What gives? After all, the Bush administration's post-9/11 pursuit of a policy of targeted killings is not particularly surprising or even, apparently, disturbing to most Americans. After the attacks, the administration, according to The Washington Post, decided that executive orders banning assassination do not prevent the president from lawfully singling out a terrorist for death by covert action.
The decision appears to have paid off with voters. There was no great outcry when the United States nearly killed Taliban leader Mullah Omar with a targeted missile strike on the first night of Operation Enduring Freedom, or when the CIA in May launched a Hellfire missile at Afghan Islamist warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
Criticism has come instead, predictably, from Europe. "Even terrorists must be treated according to international law," Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lundh said in condemning the Yemen strike. "Otherwise any country can start executing those whom they consider terrorists."
Foreign opinion aside, what should disturb Americans is the administration's refusal to openly acknowledge its involvement in what until recently had been a taboo U.S. tactic: assassination. Mr. Fleischer, at a Nov. 5 press briefing, struck a note that should unsettle every small-D democrat when he said of the terror war, "There are going to be things that are done that the American people may never know about."
With rhetoric like that, one is tempted to ask what will become of government of, by and for the people.
In a way, one can't blame the administration for soft-pedaling operations of this sort. The tide turned against assassination decades ago, when in 1975 the congressional committee headed by Sen. Frank Church of Idaho revealed the CIA's "unseemly" behavior in attempts to kill foreign leaders in the 1960s and 1970s.
And in 1981, Ronald Reagan signed an executive order banning the assassination of political leaders. Sept. 11 changed all that, of course. Bush administration officials have said that the ban does not apply to al-Qaida terrorists, who are not national leaders.
Despite such distinctions, the new policy carries "difficulties," says Frederick P. Hitz, a Princeton University professor and former CIA inspector general. "How many nations are going to tolerate the possibility that U.S. forces are going to zap a citizen on their territory?"
Whether targeted killing is a moral or even effective way to deal with American enemies is subject to debate. But if the White House is going to do it -- and the al-Harethi killing makes deadly clear that it is -- the American public at least needs to be let in on it, as is the Israeli public when it comes to Israel's own assassination policy. Not in the form of blow-by-blow, on-camera CIA or Pentagon analyses of strikes against individuals, necessarily, but certainly in a more visible, accountable manner than an anonymous quote. "We did it," one would like to hear Mr. Fleischer say, "and here's why." That has a nice, democratic ring to it.
Like any other policy, assassination should be subject to public scrutiny. Because if the administration is indeed correct in thinking that Americans will OK any means necessary to fight this war, then there is no reason to leave truth-telling up to unidentified "U.S. officials."
To get consent, in other words, advise.
Robert Schroeder is a free-lance journalist who lives in Washington.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Senate passes $3.3 billion aid, peacekeeping package for Afghanistan
The Associated Press
11/14/02 11:06 PM
http://www.nj.com/newsflash/washington/index.ssf?/cgi-free/getstory_ssf.cgi?a0914_BC_AfghanAid&&news&newsflash-washington
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Senate on Thursday night authorized $2.3 billion in foreign aid over the next four years for rebuilding Afghanistan, plus another $1 billion for maintaining peacekeeping forces.
The legislation, passed on a voice vote,