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NUCLEAR
Indian officials say blast at nuclear plant minor
Chinese missile has twice the range U.S. anticipated
Iraqi Nukes Unlikely, Says Top U.N. Nuclear Inspector
Blix: Iraq inspection talks 'fruitful'
Iraqi Vows Some Limits on U.N. Probe
Iraq must back up weapons assertions
Inspectors Urge Iraq to Document Arms Claims
Japan's TEPCO half-year net profit falls 12 pct
PIKETON PLANT Records falsified, suit claims
Safety Lapse at Ohio Reactor Is Cited as Potential Peril for Others
Senate votes for Homeland Security Dept.
Terrorism attacks have no effect on student exchange
U.S. Prepares for Security Overhaul
MILITARY
E. Europe Armaments Find Way To Iraq
U.S. Asks Britain for Troops
Welcome mats out for agency headquarters
Bush Says U.S. Ready to Disarm Iraq, but Calls War Last Resort
Western Planes Strike Targets in Southern Iraq
Labor Party in Israel Selects Dove as Leader
Peace Talks Supporter Wins Israeli Labor Vote
Israeli Tanks Enter 3 Gaza Villages
NATO to expand with new focus on terror defense
NATO's growth spurt
Bush calls for war coalition
Bush urges NATO stand against Iraq
Key Issues at NATO Summit
Veterans Lose Health Care Suit Against Pentagon
Omen points to changes at Pentagon
G.I.'s Train on Iraq's Border
Saddam pounces on son's newspaper
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Surgeon freed after 'dirty bomb' arrest
They spy
Bipartisan duo hits FBI's discipline policies
Pentagon Defends Anti - Terror Project
Photo radar snaps up $20 million for D.C.
Conspiracy of silence?
Expanded wiretaps, searches will target terrorism suspects
ENERGY AND OTHER
Toyota to start leasing fuel-cell cars next month
Across Pacific Northwest, Downward Trend for Dams
Mothballed cruise ships may house NY's homeless
ACTIVISTS
Protesters call for NATO's end
Suit Challenges Weapons Incineration at Anniston
Protesters and Others Arrested File Suit Against Police, District
Venezuelan Marchers Want Police Restored to Civilian Rule
Spurning Overture From Iran's Top Leader, Students Press Protests
Prague Battens Down, Fearing a Storm of Protests
Protesters Clash in Venezuela
Unemployed Argentines Stage Protest
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Indian officials say blast at nuclear plant minor
REUTERS INDIA:
November 20, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/18667/story.htm
HYDERABAD, India - An explosion at a nuclear fuel processing plant in southern India at the weekend caused no radioactive leak or injuries, officials said.
"There was no spread of any radioactive material. No employee was injured," a spokesman for the Nuclear Fuel Complex on the outskirts of Hyderabad told Reuters.
Officials of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) have begun a probe into the cause of the blast early on Sunday inside a chemical facility at the sprawling complex which houses about 25 plants, the spokesman said.
But officials said the incident was not serious.
"The blast occurred in the chemical plant used for uranium purification," S.M. Rao, deputy chief executive (safety) of the at the Nuclear Fuel Complex, said. "It's the kind of accident common in any chemical plant. There's nothing serious about it.
Energy-strapped India aims to generate 20,000 megawatts of nuclear power over the next two decades but its civilian nuclear programme has been dogged by lack of international funding because of a parallel nuclear weapons programme.
-------- china
Chinese missile has twice the range U.S. anticipated
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
November 20, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20021120-2387.htm
China recently test-fired a new cruise missile with twice the range U.S. intelligence agencies initially estimated, intelligence officials say.
The test comes as Chinese Communist officials last week appointed a top general in charge of China's missile buildup to a new post within the leadership that runs the military.
China fired a YJ-83 anti-ship cruise missile from a JH-7 fighter-bomber earlier this month over Bohai Bay, off northern China.
The test results surprised U.S. intelligence officials. Until recently, the estimated range of the YJ-83 had been assessed to be about 75 miles. The new missile test showed that its range is about 155 miles.
The last time the missile was tested was July 4, when the People's Daily, the official Communist Party newspaper, announced the testing of a beyond-visual-range anti-ship missile. This weapon is believed by Pentagon officials to be part of Beijing's efforts to develop a long-range strike capability against U.S. aircraft carriers and ships.
Officials say the missile represents a new capability for the Chinese military in conducting "over-the-horizon" attacks on U.S. or allied ships in any conflict with China. The YJ-83 is believed to be a derivative of the C-801 anti-ship cruise missile but can travel at supersonic speeds, making it very difficult for ships to stop.
Defense specialists say the YJ-83, sometimes called the C-803, also has the capability to receive target information in flight
Richard Fisher, a specialist on the Chinese military with the Jamestown Foundation, said the new YJ-83 will probably be outfitted on the upgraded JH-7a fighter-bomber.
"With a range of 250 km [155 miles], it gives the PLA and its export clients a new anti-ship missile that can fire beyond the reach of U.S. Naval anti-aircraft missiles like the Standard SM-2, which will soon equip Taiwan's Kidd-class destroyers," Mr. Fisher said.
"This test also indicates that longer-range land-attack cruise missiles are just around the corner," he noted.
China announced major leadership changes last week that elevated new leaders to many Communist Party posts. However, outgoing Chinese President Jiang Zemin stayed on as chairman of the Party's Central Military Commission, the powerful organ that controls the military.
The commission was used by the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping in 1989 to bypass deadlocked government and party structures in ordering Chinese military forces to attack unarmed civilian protesters who had occupied Beijing's Tiananmen Square.
Hu Jintao, who was named the new Chinese party leader, was reappointed last week as a vice chairman of the military commission.
Additionally, two generals were named commission vice chairmen: Gen. Guo Boxiong and Gen. Cao Gangchuan. Both generals are proteges of Mr. Jiang, who promoted them when he was party leader.
Gen. Cao is expected to become China's defense minister, replacing Gen. Chi Haotian, in the next several months. His appointment is viewed by U.S. intelligence analysts as a sign that China's major military buildup will increase under his leadership.
Officials said Gen. Cao's promotion within the commission is significant; as head of the General Armament Department he was the official in charge of China's missile development and other weapons-modernization programs.
Gen. Guo was an aide to Gen. Fu Quanyou, the chief of the Chinese general staff, who lost his post on the Central Military Commission. Gen. Guo is expected to replace Gen. Zhang Wannian, who ran the military commission until the recent leadership changes.
-------- inspections
Iraqi Nukes Unlikely, Says Top U.N. Nuclear Inspector
Stewart Stogel
Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2002
Newsmax.com
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/11/19/170053.shtml
NEW YORK - Before he left for Baghdad, Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (the U.N. Security Council Iraqi nuclear inspectors), spoke with NewsMax.
ElBaradei assumed his post four years ago, replacing Hans Blix, who is now the U.N.'s chief non-nuclear weapons inspector. Before this assignment, ElBaradei served as Blix's chief legal adviser at the IAEA.
Excerpts of the interview:
Newsmax - When will the IAEA be fully operational in Iraq?
E - "Probably a couple of months, early next year, January, early February."
Newsmax - How long will it take to assess Iraq's current nuclear capabilities?
E - "Hard to say ... a year, maybe more." [ElBaradei points out that within one year, he must report to the Security Council on Iraqi cooperation ... not the state of Iraq's nuclear program.]
Newsmax - Could Iraq have secretly reconstituted its nuclear program since December 1998?
E - "It is difficult in our estimation to hide a complete nuclear weapons program. Whether you can hide a small facility for research and development, that is possible .... What we believe is that an entire program to be hidden is difficult because nuclear has signatures .... Nuclear is the most dangerous, but it is also the easiest to detect."
Newsmax - What about reports on Iraq trying to buy yellowcake (uranium) in Africa?
E - "We still need to go and get the details and investigate that. We have seen the reports in the American press and British press, but we still need to follow up on that and see."
Newsmax - What about interviewing Iraqi scientists outside Iraq?
E - "We have to work out the mechanisms ... we have not done so yet [with UNMOVIC and the Iraqis and prospective nations to host these outside interviews]. If we take people out of the country, we have to secure a place, a safe haven, an asylum. There are a lot of practical issues we need to work through. ...
"We have done a lot of very successful interviews in the country, in the workplace. A lot of no notice interviews at workplaces were very helpful [in the past]."
ElBaradei explained that in the past, surprise interviews in the workplace gave the IAEA an opportunity that not only provided valuable feedback but also allowed an inspection of lab facilities and records at the same time. They later could compare the interviews with findings of the lab or classroom's equipment and files.
It is believed that the so-called "workplace interviews" could resume by the end of this month, although another IAEA official told NewsMax on the issue of outside Iraq interviews, contrary to several published reports, "the IAEA will not have 747s loaded with green cards to ferry Iraqi scientists out of the country."
----
Blix: Iraq inspection talks 'fruitful'
By Ghassan al-Kadi
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
November 20, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20021120-061058-7113r.htm
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 20 (UPI) -- International arms inspectors, having garnered what a senior member called a promise of "complete commitment and cooperation" from Iraqi officials, left Baghdad Wednesday on a scheduled trip to Cyprus after two days of talks.
Weapons inspection leader Hans Blix said that the discussions focused on a mechanism for the inspection mission in Iraq and were "positive and fruitful."
Blix, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency Mohammad ElBaradei and a number of inspectors flew to Cyprus aboard a U.N. plane. Remaining in Baghdad to continue preparations to execute the U.N. resolution on Iraqi weapons inspections were some 20 other logistical experts. The preparations include the rehabilitation and expansion of the headquarters of U.N. inspectors at al-Qanat hotel in central Baghdad.
The U.N. team of inspectors are scheduled to begin their search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq Wednesday.
During a news conference in Baghdad late Tuesday, Blix said the purpose of the two-day talks was to building confidence between the two sides ahead of the inspection operations.
"We agreed with the Iraqi side on the mechanism that would be referred to in case differences emerge between the two sides in the future," he said, expecting the inspection to resume in the coming two weeks.
Blix and ElBaradei had separate talks with Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri and head of the Iraqi negotiating team Lt. Gen. Amer al Saadi, who is President Saddam Hussein's consultant responsible for the weapons of mass destruction file.
ElBaradei said the Iraqi officials pledged during the talks "complete commitment and cooperation with the international inspection teams to implement U.N. Security Council resolutions, especially Resolution 1441."
Resolution 1441 is the U.S.-introduced measure recently passed by the Security Council in a unanimous vote that reordered the weapons inspectors back to Iraq.
ElBaradei expressed hope that the agreement with the Iraqi officials be "translated into practical steps" and said the inspection teams will return to Baghdad next week to start their operations.
"A new phase started after Resolution 1441 and we should not look back to the past but to the future," ElBaradei said. "We pledged to the Iraqis that we will operate with all honesty and objectivity."
Asked about removing Israeli weapons of mass destruction, he said: "Let's start first with solving the Iraqi problem because this would help make the Middle East a free-weapons area."
Al Saadi, a member of the Iraqi negotiating team, said the talks with Blix and ElBaradei were "positive and constructive" and praised both officials for their "cooperation and professionalism."
He said Iraq and the U.N. inspectors had "same point of view" and hoped that Blix and ElBaradei fulfill their promises for conducting the inspection teams with "professionalism."
Asked whether Iraq will submit its arms inventory to the United Nations within the 30-day notice defined in Resolution 1441, al Saadi said: "We have no new program and we say with all honesty that we will again submit clear clarifications about these programs."
Meanwhile in Jordan, Iraq's neighbor to the southwest, government officials announced three Jordanian experts in biological and chemical sciences will join the team of international inspectors.
The newspaper daily al-Dustur quoted sources as saying the three experts represented the Jordanian armed forces as well as to academic scientific departments and were specially trained in inspection for non-conventional weapons.
Iraq has called for Arab experts, particularly from the Arab League, to conduct inspections along with those of the United Nations. Blix also noted in recent statements that the United Nations would enlist the help of Arab experts.
The Jordanian experts were chosen following the endorsement of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1284 under which the international monitoring and investigation committee for Iraq was set up.
----
Iraqi Vows Some Limits on U.N. Probe
By CHARLES J. HANLEY
AP Special Correspondent,
Nov 20, 2002
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/W/WEAPONS_INSPECTORS_IRAQ?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
Kay says he thinks the inspection process will be difficult. (Audio)
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Iraq's vice president said Wednesday there would be limits on the U.N. weapons investigation, though the top inspector says Baghdad has agreed to unannounced checks even on Saddam Hussein's "special" sites.
The question of unannounced checks on sites like Saddam's palaces, an issue that helped derail inspections in the 1990s, "is settled by the resolution. It wasn't even discussed," chief weapons inspector Hans Blix said Wednesday after departing Baghdad at the end of a two-day visit inaugurating a new U.N. oversight program, four years after the last inspections.
The Swedish ex-diplomat was referring to the new U.N. Security Council resolution describing the inspections as a "final opportunity" for Iraq to meet its post-Gulf War obligations to give up any weapons of mass destruction. In accepting the resolution, Iraq accepted full and unfettered inspections. President Bush has threatened military action if the Iraqis don't disarm.
The United States was contacting allies in search of support if military action is required. In Copenhagen on Wednesday, Danish lawmakers approved the participation of Danish soldiers and equipment in any international force in Iraq, if necessary.
Australian Prime Minister John Howard, in a speech Wednesday in his capital to a group of economists, said Australian defense officials had held contingency talks with their U.S. counterparts over a possible strike against Baghdad. He did not describe what any Australian contribution might be.
In London, British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon said Wednesday the United States has requested British troops to join a possible war on Iraq. Hoon said Britain had not yet decided on its response.
Meanwhile, U.S. warplanes bombed three air defense communications facilities in southern Iraq on Wednesday, a day after Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Washington would immediately respond to attacks on American and British warplanes.
Rumsfeld said the United States would retaliate in such circumstances involving the patrolling of no-fly zones regardless of whether the United Nations views the shootings as violations of U.N. resolutions.
U.S. warplanes struck at the Iraqi defense facilities after Iraqi air defenses fired surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft artillery at U.S. and British planes.
The Security Council has never specifically approved the flights over northern and southern Iraq, which Baghdad considers violations of its sovereignty.
Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan said Wednesday that Iraq would fully cooperate with weapons inspectors, but he vowed to prevent them from gathering "intelligence."
"Any demand or question or a manner of work that conforms with the objective of the inspectors who want to verify that Iraq is free of weapons of mass destruction will be met with full cooperation," Ramadan said in an interview from Baghdad with the private Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation.
"But for demands which are clearly (meant) for intelligence or for other objectives that have nothing to do with the weapons of mass destruction, we will act in such a way so as to safeguard the country's sovereignty and security," he said.
Iraq had raised sovereignty in barring inspectors from Saddam's palaces and other sites in the 1990s.
On Tuesday, Iraqi presidential adviser Amir al-Saadi confirmed Iraq would meet a U.N. deadline and file by Dec. 8 a comprehensive list of nuclear, chemical and biological programs. But he gave no indication whether it will contain anything beyond an inventory of Iraqi work in peaceful uses of nuclear, chemical and biological materials. The Security Council resolution demands the Iraqis include any work in weapons development.
Blix said Iraqis were "somewhat concerned" they would not have time to gather all the information needed by Dec. 8.
"They had particular concerns about reporting on the peaceful industries, like chemical industry ... they have quite a lot of that and they were a bit concerned about how they would go about" compiling information in that area, Blix said.
The Dec. 8 list is the standard by which the international community will judge whether Saddam's government is telling the truth about its interest in the most advanced weapons.
Blix and chief U.N. nuclear watchdog Mohamed ElBaradei said that if the Baghdad government cooperates fully with their inspections, they might be able to report in about one year that it has complied with Security Council requirements and U.N. economic sanctions on Iraq should be lifted.
Blix and ElBaradei left Iraq on Wednesday as scheduled, leaving behind most of the two dozen inspectors and other U.N. staff who had accompanied them. Additional inspectors arrive next Monday, and the first field operations are expected by Nov. 27.
ElBaradei, speaking to reporters on arrival in Cyprus hours after leaving Baghdad, said that the work that begins Nov. 27 will be "the real test" of the Iraqis' pledges of cooperation.
The seven-year inspection regime in the 1990s dismantled Iraq's nuclear program before it could build a bomb, and destroyed large amounts of chemical and biological weapons and longer-range missiles forbidden by postwar U.N. resolutions.
But some chemical weapons in particular were believed never destroyed, and U.S. intelligence reports suggest the Iraqis may have rebuilt some weapons programs since the inspectors pulled out in 1998.
Blix said the Iraqis had agreed in their discussions to open a U.N. inspectors office in the northern city of Mosul, and to expand their Baghdad office to accommodate the hundreds of international weapons experts who will come and go in coming months.
ElBaradei and Blix will leave the day-to-day inspections to their teams, supervising from Vienna and New York respectively unless developments here require high-level intervention.
----
Iraq must back up weapons assertions
By Charles J. Hanley
ASSOCIATED PRESS
November 20, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20021120-33149356.htm
BAGHDAD - U.N. inspectors urged Iraqi officials yesterday to review carefully their long-standing assertions that they have no more weapons of mass destruction, and Baghdad pledged to meet a Dec. 8 deadline to disclose all information about its arms programs.
With the United States closely watching for any Iraqi infractions - and warning that it has adopted a "zero tolerance" approach to Iraq - differences also emerged yesterday between the United Nations and Washington over what constitutes Iraqi violations.
Chief U.N. inspector Hans Blix said that if the Iraqis stick with their assertion that they have no more weapons of mass destruction, they must provide convincing documentation by the promised deadline. "We don't think that has yet been convincingly done.
"We have tried to impress on them they must look into their stocks and stores, and see if there's something they should declare," Mr. Blix said late yesterday. "The production of mustard gas is not like the production of marmalade. You're supposed to keep some track of what you produce. There must be documentation, records of what was produced."
Meeting the Dec. 8 deadline is a key initial demand laid down in the new U.N. resolution aimed at peacefully disarming Iraq. President Bush has threatened military action if Iraq does not cooperate with the resolution that sent inspectors back to Baghdad after a four-year absence.
Asked by reporters whether Iraq would meet the deadline, presidential adviser Amir al-Saadi responded in English: "Yes, within 30 days [of passage of the U.N. resolution], as the resolution says, a report from Iraq will be submitted on all the files of nuclear, chemical, biological and missile files."
Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said the Iraqi delegation had confirmed that it had not developed any nuclear-weapons capacity since inspectors left Iraq in December 1998 ahead of U.S. bombing strikes on Baghdad. Iraq did not allow inspectors to return.
Earlier, Mr. ElBaradei told Associated Press Television News and Egypt's Nile television that Iraq promised to declare "all of its activities in the chemical, biological and nuclear fields, even those of civilian use."
Mr. ElBaradei, speaking in Arabic, said the Iraqis were cooperating so far and had pledged to continue doing so. "We hope that this oral commitment will be translated into fact when we begin inspections next week."
Mr. al-Saadi, asked whether Iraq was prepared to grant inspectors unfettered access, replied: "Yes, as stipulated in the resolution and as we have agreed with them."
The inspections are considered Saddam Hussein's last chance to avoid war with the United States. Washington has said that toppling Saddam might be the only way to contain the threat it believes Iraq poses to the world with nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
Mr. Blix and his team arrived in Baghdad on Monday as allied warplanes bombed Iraqi air-defense systems in the northern no-fly zone. The U.S. military said the attack was initiated after Iraqi gunners fired on the jets during routine patrols.
In Washington, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the Iraqi anti-aircraft fire "appears to be a violation" of the latest U.N. Security Council resolution.
However, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan took issue with that interpretation, telling reporters in Kosovo, "I don't think the council will say that this is in contravention of the resolution that was recently passed."
The 15-member council never explicitly approved the flights over northern and southern Iraq, which Baghdad considers violations of its sovereignty.
--------
UNITED NATIONS
Inspectors Urge Iraq to Document Arms Claims
November 20, 2002
New York Times
By SAM DILLON
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/20/international/middleeast/20IRAQ.html
UNITED NATIONS, Nov. 19 - United Nations arms inspectors, meeting with senior Iraqi officials in Baghdad, urged them today to do some soul-searching about their repeated assertions that they are not hiding weapons of mass destruction, and to produce documentation to back up those claims.
"The production of mustard gas is not like the production of marmalade," Hans Blix, the chief United Nations inspector, told reporters after meeting with the Iraqi officials, The Associated Press reported. "You're supposed to keep some track of what you produce. There must be documentation, records of what was produced."
One of the Iraqi officials, Foreign Minister Naji Sabri, said that to comply with the terms of the resolution, Iraq would submit a declaration to the United Nations team on Dec. 8 covering biological, nuclear and chemical weapons.
As the first United Nations arms inspection mission in four years prepared to begin operations in Iraq, the United Nations and the Bush administration disagreed over whether Iraq had violated a Security Council resolution by firing on United States and British aircraft on Monday over the no-flight zones in northern and southern Iraq.
The White House said that by shooting at the planes, Iraq had breached the resolution, but Secretary General Kofi Annan took the opposite view in statements to reporters traveling with him in Kosovo today. "I don't think that the Council will say this is in contravention of the resolution of the Security Council," Mr. Annan said.
One Bush administration official shrugged off Mr. Annan's comments. "What he said reflects his personal view about how a Security Council vote would go," the official said, while acknowledging that Washington stands alone among Council members in its interpretation. "There's a longstanding disagreement among the U.S. and other Security Council members about the status of the no-fly zones."
On Monday, Bush administration officials portrayed Iraq's recent attempts to shoot down United States and British aircraft over the zones as a "material breach" of the Nov. 8 Security Council resolution authorizing the new arms inspections.
Diplomats here said the administration's interpretation pitted it against the other 14 states of the 15-member Council. But the United States position did not jeopardize the Council's basic unity around the goal of getting the inspections under way, the diplomats said, because neither the United States nor any other government would bring up the dispute for formal debate.
Still, the issue foreshadows other, more serious disputes that could erupt over similarly ambiguous language in the resolution if the United States attempts to move militarily against Iraq without gaining the Security Council's explicit approval, the diplomats said.
Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, said the United States reserved the right to take the issue of the no-flight zones to the Security Council but had "no immediate plans" to do so.
"That's always a serious incident, any time anybody fires on American planes," Mr. Fleischer told reporters as he flew to Prague today with President Bush. "It's a material breach of the United Nations resolutions. It can endanger the lives of American and British who patrol to enforce the no-fly zone."
The dispute about the meaning of Resolution 1441, which authorizes the arms inspections now getting under way, underlined the ambiguity of several clauses that allowed 15 member states with views on Iraq as diverse as the United States, Russia, China and Syria, to vote unanimously on Nov. 8 for its approval.
"This resolution allowed all sides to stick to their convictions and still say they won the argument," a diplomat said today.
The no-flight zones over northern and southern Iraq were established by the United States, Britain and France after the Persian Gulf war. The Security Council never explicitly approved the flights over the zones, and Baghdad considers them a violation of its sovereignty.
The Nov. 8 resolution forbids Iraq from taking hostile acts directed against any member state enforcing the resolution, but does not mention the no-flight zones specifically. During the negotiations that preceded its passage, American diplomats submitted a draft resolution with language specifying that Iraqi attempts to defend the zones from foreign aircraft would constitute a breach, diplomats said today. But Washington erased those and all other references to the zones from the draft after several nations objected, the diplomats said.
China disagreed today with the White House's interpretation of the resolution. "As far as China is concerned, we do not see the point that we have the no-fly zones, because that's never been the Security Council's resolution," said China's United Nations ambassador, Wan Yingfan.
In Moscow, Reuters quoted the Russian Foreign Ministry as saying today, "Recent claims that Iraq's actions in the no-fly zones can be seen as a violation of the U.N. Security Council resolution 1441 have no legal grounds."
The diplomatic dispute did not slow the activities of the inspection team, which arrived in Baghdad on Monday and met today with Mr. Sabri and an adviser to President Saddam Hussein, Gen. Amir al-Saadi.
Mr. Blixsaid after the encounter that he had urged the Iraqis to provide documents proving that they have no more weapons of mass destruction.
"We have tried to impress on them they must look into their stocks and stores and see if there's something they should declare," Mr. Blix told reporters in Baghdad late Tuesday, The A. P. reported. He said full-scale inspections would begin in "about a week."
Accompanying Mr. Blix in the meeting was Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency. Mr. ElBaradei, speaking in Arabic after the meeting, said that the Iraqis had cooperated with the inspection mission so far and had promised to continue. "We hope that this oral commitment will be translated into fact when we begin inspections," he said.
-------- japan
Japan's TEPCO half-year net profit falls 12 pct
REUTERS JAPAN:
November 20, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/18666/story.htm
TOKYO - Tokyo Electric Power Co Inc (TEPCO), embroiled in a scandal over falsified nuclear safety records, said yesterday its first-half net profit fell 11.9 percent due to soft demand and having to cut electricity prices.
Group net profit for April-September at Japan's largest power utility was 155.88 billion yen ($1.29 billion), compared with a net profit of 177.02 billion yen in the same period last year.
For the full year to March 2003, TEPCO forecast a group net profit of 128 billion yen, against a profit of 201.73 billion yen the previous year.
It said said sales revenues were weighed down by a 7.02 percent cut in electricity prices it made in April.
TEPCO, which serves the heavily industrialised Tokyo area, has been stepping up cost cuts in expectation that competition will increase due to continuing industry liberalisation.
Analysts say the closure of several nuclear reactors, which started in September, for unplanned safety checks in the wake of revelations of past lapses could have an impact on full-year earnings if the shutdown is prolonged.
TEPCO has been forced to turn to thermal power plants to cover the supply gap, increasing fuel procurement costs.
The announcement came just after the close of trading on the Tokyo stock market. TEPCO's shares ended the day down 4.0 percent at 2,040 yen, underperforming the benchmark Nikkei average N225), which rose 0.23 percent.
TEPCO admitted in early September that it had falsified repair records at three nuclear power plants and had continued operating several nuclear reactors despite the existence of cracks in some core parts.
It later said it would carry out an unscheduled shutdown of those plants for safety checks.
In late October, TEPCO also said it had manipulated the air pressure of nuclear reactor containers to pass safety checks.
The revelations have heightened public fears about safety in the nuclear industry.
TEPCO has so far shut down nine nuclear reactors, accounting for some 14.6 percent of its total capacity.
Thermal power plants are much more expensive to operate due to higher fuel costs, with daily generating costs rising by about 100 million yen if a one-gigawatt nuclear plant is closed and replaced by a thermal plant.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- ohio
PIKETON PLANT Records falsified, suit claims
Radiation readings were altered, workers testify
Wednesday, November 20, 2002
Kevin Mayhood
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
From: "Vina K Colley" <vcolley@earthlink.net>
A security guard at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant alleges the plant's operators altered records of workers' exposure to radiation to enrich themselves with bonuses from the federal government.
Jeff Walburn, who has worked at the plant in Piketon for 26 years, contends in a federal lawsuit that Lockheed Martin, Lockheed Martin Utility Services and U.S. Enrichment Corp. used false and unreliable exposure readings to receive incentive payments for operating a safe work environment.
The lawsuit was filed in 2000 in federal court in Columbus under the false-claim act, but a judge unsealed it for public view only last week.
The act allows a civilian to sue on behalf of the federal government when it overpays a supplier because of alleged fraud. The lawsuit was sealed so the companies would be unaware of any federal investigation.
The Piketon plant helped produce weapons-grade uranium and handled plutonium during the Cold War. Plant workers say their exposure records are unreliable and are hoping Walburn's lawsuit provides them with accurate information, said former employees Paul Smith and Vina K. Colley.
Congress two years ago approved payments to workers exposed to radiation at the plant. They must be diagnosed with one of 21 types of cancer.
The plant was closed last year but operations to decontaminate it are continuing. U.S. Enrichment is considering establishing an advanced-technology enrichment plant at the facility.
Representatives of the companies declined to comment, saying they had not seen the suit.
Walburn also declined to comment, but his attorney, Steve J. Edwards, said, "We have evidence in Jeff's case that his records were changed twice.''
Edwards said he has depositions from two employees who said they altered 400 to 600 records per year for a variety of workers and visitors. They never questioned why.
Safety regulations say workers must not be exposed to more than a certain cumulative amount of radiation in their lifetime, Edwards said.
"How can they know if they are near or at that amount if their records are not accurate?'' he said.
Walburn first sued the companies in 1996, seeking damages for lung ailments. The case was dismissed the next year.
In depositions for the false-claim suit, employees Linda Smith and Chris Kelly said they altered Walburn's readings from numbers showing "insignificant'' exposures to show he had no exposures on three days in the mid-1990s.
They said the changes were made at the direction of a supervisor who was concerned about a court case.
Smith and Kelly said their boss told them it would be easier to explain a zero reading than how Walburn was exposed to radiation, even though the amount was considered insignificant.
Walburn's records, however, were later changed back, the lawsuit says. Smith and Kelly said they didn't restore the numbers and don't know who did or why.
U.S. District Judge James L. Graham agreed to government requests to keep the lawsuit sealed, but only until this month.
The Department of Justice has said that, for now, it will not join in the lawsuit because it is still investigating Walburn's allegations.
If Walburn wins, he could receive a cut of damages awarded to the U.S. government. For each false claim proved, the company that cheated the government must pay triple the amount it took, plus a penalty of up to $10,000.
----
Safety Lapse at Ohio Reactor Is Cited as Potential Peril for Others
November 20, 2002
New York Times
By MATTHEW L. WALD
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/20/national/20NUKE.html
WASHINGTON, Nov. 19 - In a confidential report, the nuclear industry's internal oversight group has warned utilities that a focus on production over safety had endangered an Ohio reactor and could be a broader problem around the nation.
Corrosion at the Ohio reactor, discovered in March, ate away 70 pounds of steel and left the reactor vessel vulnerable to rupturing. But while the physical degradation of the reactor was unique, the internal report suggested that the causes might not be. The report, not intended for distribution outside the nuclear industry, said the the First Energy Nuclear Operating Company,
operators of the reactor, Davis-Besse, near Toledo, had fallen prey to "excessive focus on meeting short-term production goals" and "a lack of sensitivity to nuclear safety."
"The lessons learned from the Davis-Besse event are universal in nature and should be reviewed by all nuclear stations," said the report, by the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations, a group formed by the industry after the March 1979 accident at Three Mile Island, Pa., to share expertise and reduce the chance of further meltdowns. The report is marked "limited distribution" and is coded "Red: Immediate Attention."
For several years, outside critics have raised alarms about a deregulated power market, saying managers would cut corners to keep reactors operating when they should have been shut for maintenance. Even the chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission raised that concern, in 1994.
At Davis-Besse, in Oak Harbor, about 25 miles east of Toledo, managers postponed taking the time to inspect an area on the vessel head that turned out to be corroding, and ignored warning signs that this was happening, the report said.
The industry has not publicly admitted to any worry, nor seized the Davis-Besse incident as a warning. The new report, however, recommended that each nuclear company "conduct a self-assessment to determine to what degree your organization has a healthy respect for nuclear safety and that nuclear safety is not compromised by production priorities."
The institute has a quasiregulatory function, bringing lagging reactor operators up to the industry standard as a way to head off tighter rules from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. After the meltdown of the reactor at Three Mile Island, in March 1979, the industry created the institute to investigate problems at each plant and to issue confidential reports to the others, so they all could benefit from lessons learned. Operators of all the nation's power reactors are members of the institute, and on the intermittent occasions when its internal assessments become public, they have all been written in blunt terms. Industry executives say its pronouncements are carefully read.
This one, nine pages plus footnotes, was made available by a nuclear industry expert who is seeking to have the industry take it to heart.
A spokesman for the institute, Terry Young, said its personnel could get access to the plants, and state their findings plainly, only if everyone agreed that the findings should be kept within the industry. "We cherish that sense of trust," he said.
Mr. Young said the reports did, in fact, discuss management issues when that was relevant.
The report, dated Nov. 11, cites one failing that seems to show that Davis-Besse's operators had not learned to benefit from other failures. In a July 2001 report to members, the institute emphasized the importance of inspecting for corrosion after a less severe problem was found at a similar plant in South Carolina, Oconee. The institute said managers suffered from "isolationism."
The Oconee report was "reviewed and accepted" by management at Davis-Besse, the institute said, but managers did not perform the inspection on their own plant.
A year ago, even as the steel was being eaten away, the plant's operator was seeking permission to raise its power output by 12.9 percent above what it was licensed for when it opened in 1978.
Experts not involved in the preparation of the report said that it touched on a difficult area, determining when priorities have been put in the wrong order and people's attitudes have shifted away from safety and toward production, and that this report differed from most written by the institute because it focused on upper-level management.
"Talking about management is very sensitive for them," said Andrew C. Kadak, the former president of the Yankee Atomic Electric Company, an umbrella company for three reactors, and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
At the Union of Concerned Scientists, a watchdog group that is generally critical of the industry, David Lochbaum, a nuclear expert, said measuring attitudes toward safety was hard for people in the industry.
"Most of the nuclear industry's people are engineers," Mr. Lochbaum said. "They love equations, things they can measure. But safety culture isn't something you can do that on; you can't see how many feet of safety culture you have and whether you've come up shy or not."
Paul Blanch, a nuclear safety consultant, said that for "merchant" plants, the ones selling their production in deregulated markets, "their only concern is making money."
Mr. Blanch said the institute's report "hit the nail on the head."
"Production does come before safety," he said. "They've got to strike the proper balance."
An engineer at a nuclear plant that was shut for safety reasons for a time in the 1990's, who would not allow his name to be used, said the report was a shift for the institute, which began by trying to share best practices around the industry, and later on human performance, but which is now focused on leadership performance.
-------- us politics
Senate votes for Homeland Security Dept.
House passage seen for Cabinel-level agency;
Vote reflecting Bush's clout;
A sweeping consolidation of agencies, taking years
By Julie Hirschfeld Davis National Staff
Baltimore Sun
November 20, 2002
http://www.sunspot.net/news/custom/attack/bal-te.homeland20nov20,0,4835024.story?coll=bal%2Dhome%2Dheadlines
WASHINGTON - The Senate voted overwhelmingly last night to establish a Department of Homeland Security to protect the nation against terrorism, delivering a major victory to President Bush on a bill he had championed throughout this year's elections.
The senators broke a four-month logjam and capped an extraordinary year in a Congress defined largely by its response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The vote reflected the political muscle that Bush gained in the wake of that catastrophe and his party's sweeping gains in the midterm elections.
Once the Cabinet department is fully in place - which could take years - it would consolidate 22 agencies, take in 170,000 workers and mark the largest reorganization of the government in more than a half-century.
By last night, months of intense Democratic opposition to Bush's plan had all but lifted. The Senate passed the bill 90-9; the House is expected to pass it Friday, preparing it for Bush's signature as early as next week.
It was one of the last votes of the 107th Congress. It was cast hours before the Senate passed a resolution to keep the government funded at current levels through Jan. 11 and was later to adjourn for the year.
"We're making great progress in the war on terror," Bush said on Air Force One, en route to Europe for a NATO summit. "Part of that progress will be the ability for us to protect the American people at home."
Bush called the measure "landmark in its scope."
Many Senate Democrats, including their leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota, said they were voting for the bill only grudgingly. Many agreed that such a department was necessary to fight terrorism but expressed uneasiness about the expanded new authority it would give the president.
Eight Democrats - including Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes of Maryland - and one independent voted against the department. They argued that Congress was ceding too many prerogatives to the executive branch with too little debate.
"We might as well just dive under the bed and say, 'Here goes nothin','" said Sen. Robert C. Byrd, a West Virginia Democrat.
The president's signing of the bill will start the clock on what is sure to be a long and complex process of bringing nearly two dozen federal agencies and offices under one sprawling Cabinet department.
A budget dispute has prevented most of the government's spending bills from passing this year, meaning that no additional money has been allocated to the new department to carry out its functions.
The last time the government undertook a restructuring of such magnitude was in 1947, when President Harry S. Truman proposed bringing the War and Navy departments together under one agency, now called the Defense Department.
The Homeland Security Department will be in charge of preventing terrorist attacks and reducing the nation's vulnerability, by securing U.S. borders, developing science and technology to counter threats and consolidating intelligence gathered from inside and outside the department. It will also coordinate a response to any terrorist strikes that do occur.
Senate passage came after a series of near-death experiences for the department on Capitol Hill this fall.
The most recent occurred yesterday morning, hours before the overwhelming bipartisan endorsement. Democrats tried unsuccessfully to strip the measure of a handful of what they called "special interest" provisions added by House Republicans leaders late last week, before that chamber completed action on the bill and adjourned.
Had the effort succeeded, the bill might have died.
But by 52-47, the Senate killed an amendment that would have dropped new liability protections for drug companies that are sued over the effects of vaccines, airport screeners sued for security breaches and manufacturers of security equipment sued for harming Americans.
The amendment would also have dropped a provision that hands a lucrative research program to Texas A&M University and another provision Republicans added that essentially guts a ban on awarding department contracts to companies that relocate abroad to avoid taxes.
Three Democrats, as well as Dean Barkley, the interim independent senator from Minnesota, joined 48 Republicans in opposing the amendment. The three Democrats were Sens. Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana, who faces a run-off election Dec. 7 to retain her seat, Zell Miller of Georgia and Ben Nelson of Nebraska.
Only one Republican, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, joined 45 Democrats and Sen. James M. Jeffords, a Vermont independent, to try to eliminate the provisions.
McCain called the provisions "special deals for special interests" and said he is worried that the private sector is engaging in "war profiteering."
Wavering senators who voted against removing the provisions - including Nelson and Susan M. Collins and Olympia J. Snowe, both Maine Republicans - said that Republican leader Trent Lott of Mississippi promised to work with House Republican leaders to narrow the provisions once the 108th Congress convenes in January.
Senate Republicans spent most of the fall delaying action on a Democratic-written Homeland Security bill. They wanted to give Bush more authority to reshuffle agencies in the new department and to oversee its personnel and budgets.
Democrats protested. In particular, they criticized Bush's plan to bypass civil service laws to establish new personnel practices - such as rules for hiring, firing and promoting employees - for the department.
The bill reflects an agreement on the workplace rules reached last weekend between Senate moderates and Tom Ridge, the White House's homeland security adviser, who is likely to head the new department. That agreement gave Republicans enough votes to pass their plan.
The measure will give the administration the final say on establishing labor practices at the department, though it will allow labor's representatives a chance to appeal rules they oppose.
On another key issue for organized labor, the measure will let Bush exclude workers from unions if he determined it was necessary to protect national security. But the exclusion would expire after four years.
Labor representatives and many Democrats said they still believed the personnel provisions fell short of protecting federal employees' rights. But many overlooked those and the items added by Republicans last week to support the overall bill.
"I'm absolutely committed to the belief that we do need this agency, and I feel so strongly about it that I'm prepared to vote for it, even though on the issues of workers' rights, I continue to be disturbed," said Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, a Maryland Democrat.
Mikulski said she would use her position on the influential Senate Appropriations Committee to "stand sentry" next year on behalf of the new department's employees.
"We all feel that this meets a compelling need that's before the nation," Mikulski said.
But Sarbanes, who voted against the measure, said the department could create more problems than it solved.
"It diverts the energy and attention of a lot of people who are responsible for homeland security away from the immediate substance of the problem and to moving desks and chairs around," he said.
Before adjourning, the Senate also approved an agreement creating a three-year federal terrorism insurance program - another effort for which the White House lobbied forcefully.
Enactment of the terrorism insurance measure will create the first-ever federal cost-sharing of losses incurred by insurance companies as a result of terrorist attacks. In case of a future terrorist strike, the government would cover 90 percent of a company's terrorist-related losses above a threshold level.
----
Terrorism attacks have no effect on student exchange
By Ellen Sorokin
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
November 20, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20021120-21258480.htm
September 11 and stiffer background checks for visas have not hampered the exchange of students, with more American college youths attending schools overseas while a record number of their counterparts worldwide rush to get an education in the United States, according to a new study released this week.
A record 582,996 international students enrolled at American colleges in the past school year, up 6.4 percent from last year, according to the Open Doors 2002 study compiled by the Institute of International Education in New York.
Meanwhile, the study showed that American students choosing to study abroad more than doubled in the past decade, from 71,154 students in the 1991-1992 academic year to 154,168 last year. Last year's figures are up 7.4 percent from the previous year.
"Some feared that in the wake of September 11 young Americans would shrink from international experiences and pursue only domestic options," said Patricia Harrison, the State Department's assistant secretary for educational and cultural affairs, which funded the study.
"But as the numbers show, more students are studying abroad than ever before, a sign that young Americans clearly recognize the crucial role they will play in leading our nation into a world even more connected than it is today," Miss Harrison said.
For American students, Europe was the most popular spot to study, claiming six of the top 10 countries. Of those, England was first choice, hosting 30,289 students last year. Italy came in second with 16,127 and Spain followed with 16,016.
Of the top 10 countries, students' interest declined in France and China, both by less than 1 percent. Students' interest in the Middle East declined by about 60 percent, the study showed.
"Despite efforts by terrorists to isolate America from the rest of the world, the response by American students and American campuses is to become more intensely engaged in international affairs and to seek out more opportunities for firsthand interaction with other cultures and other countries," said Alan Goodman, the institute's president.
For international students, the most popular destinations in the United States last year were California, with 78,741, and New York, with 62,053. The University of Southern California hosted the most international students, with 5,950.
Locally, Virginia hosted 12,600 foreign students, Maryland took 13,947 and the District 9,241, according to the study. Northern Virginia Community College at Annandale campus and the University of Maryland at College Park hosted the most international students in their respective states. George Washington University hosted the most international students in the District.
The largest percentage of international students came from India, with 66,836 students. China sent 63,211 students.
U.S. education officials were encouraged by the high numbers. "The question [for international students] is, 'Do you want to stay home or do you want to come abroad?' Once they have made that decision, the U.S. is still the most attractive option," said Peggy Blumenthal, the institute's vice president for educational services.
It will not be known until next year whether the number of Middle Eastern students studying in the United States has fallen this school year.
The government began more stringent background checks of many students coming from Middle Eastern countries because several of the September 11 terrorists were found to have been in the United States on student visas.
Despite the delays in acquiring student visas, "it's clear that overall there are still so many students who want to come to the United States that the numbers are staying steady," Miss Blumenthal said.
The study also showed international students contributed about $11.95 billion to the country's economy in 2001-2002.
Virginia's international students contributed $261 million to the state's economy and Maryland's students $295 million. The District's international students contributed $231 million, the study showed.
• This story is based in part on wire service reports.
------
U.S. Prepares for Security Overhaul
By JESSE J. HOLLAND
Associated Press Writer
Nov 20, 2002 11:22 AM EST
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/C/CONGRESS_RDP?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
Bush praises the Senate's overwhelming vote backing the new homeland security agency. (Audio)
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Senate approved the largest government reorganization since World War II in hopes of preventing another Sept. 11-type attack. But the monthslong effort may have been just a warmup for a bigger battle over how to get the new Homeland Security Department up and running.
"Setting up this new department will take time, but I know we will meet the challenge together," a jubilant President Bush said after the Senate, nearing adjournment of the 107th Congress, voted 90-9 on Tuesday to authorize the new Cabinet agency.
On a day that gave Bush a number of decisive legislative victories, the president hailed the bill as "landmark in its scope."
"The United States Senate voted overwhelmingly to better protect America and voted overwhelmingly to help people find work," Bush said at a news conference Wednesday in Prague, Czech Republic, referring to bills creating the new department and bolstering businesses with terrorism insurance.
Speaking with Senate Republican leaders from Air Force One as he flew to NATO meetings in Europe, the president said the Senate's work "ends a session which has seen two years worth of legislative work which has been very productive for the American people."
Eight Democrats and independent Sen. James Jeffords of Vermont voted "no" on the homeland security bill, which merges 22 diverse agencies with combined budgets of about $40 billion and which employ 170,000 workers. It will be the largest federal reorganization since the Defense Department was created in 1947.
Tom Ridge, director of the White House Office of Homeland Security, indicated Wednesday that he would head the new department if that's Bush's wish.
"I'm prepared to serve the president in whatever capacity he thinks I can serve the country," Ridge said, when asked about this on CBS' "The Early Show."
But the battles over the department are just beginning. It will take months for the agency to get fully off the ground. And a budget stalemate continues to block most of the extra money for domestic security enhancements both that parties want for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1.
On top of that, many senators were not happy with the final version of the bill and said they would work to make changes next year.
"I have no doubt that next year we will back addressing the shortcomings that are in this bill," said outgoing Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D.
But Republicans cheered the bill's passage, saying it was better to have a final product than to keep trying to amend the legislation.
"The terrorists are not going to wait for a process that goes on days, weeks or months," said Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., who will be next year's Senate majority leader.
The Senate also:
-Sent Bush a bill making the government the insurer of last resort for terrorist attacks, with a maximum annual tab to taxpayers of $90 billion. The vote was 86-11.
-Voted 55-44 to approve U.S. District Court Judge Dennis Shedd to be an appeals court judge.
-Sent Bush a measure keeping federal agencies open through Jan. 11, needed due to unfinished spending bills.
-Used voice votes to approve about 130 land and water bills. They included a bill sent to the House extending for three years the CalFed project, aimed at restoring the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, which provides water for drinking and irrigation for much of the state.
The 107th Congress isn't officially finished yet. The Senate was to meet again Wednesday, with no voting planned. The House was to meet Friday to give final, voice-vote approval to small changes the Senate made in the homeland security bill before sending it to Bush for his signature.
Most senators fled Washington on Tuesday, cleaning out their desks and saying goodbye to departing members like 99-year-old GOP Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, as well as GOP Sens. Jesse Helms of North Carolina, Fred Thompson of Tennessee, Bob Smith of New Hampshire and Phil Gramm of Texas.
Some Democratic senators were on their way out as well, including Sens. Jean Carnahan of Missouri, Robert Torricelli of New Jersey and Max Cleland of Georgia, all of whom either lost re-election campaigns or did not run.
Cleland, who lost his legs and an arm in Vietnam, used a variation on Gen. Douglas McArthur's famous farewell that "old soldiers never die, they just fade away" in his final Senate speech.
"This old soldier is not going to fade away, but I will take my battles to another front," Cleland said to Senate applause.
Completion of the homeland security bill ended a topsy-turvy odyssey for legislation that started inching through Congress nearly a year ago against Bush's will, only to see him offer his own version after momentum became unstoppable.
Democrats resisted Bush's bill because it restricted labor rights of the new department's workers. But many reversed course after their Election Day loss of Senate control was attributed partly to the homeland security fight.
The 107th Congress has seen the world change around it during a tumultuous two-year run.
Bush won a $1.35 trillion, 10-year tax cut but saw a vibrant economy stall and federal surpluses become deficits. Terrorists killed nearly 3,000 last year when they crashed commercial airliners in Washington, New York City and southwestern Pennsylvania. And a historic 50-50 Senate tilted Democratic after Jeffords left the GOP, only to see Republicans grab it back on Election Day.
Left unresolved in this Congress were such issues as prescription drug benefits for the elderly, retirement fund protections and the rights of patients in managed care programs.
a name="military">
------- MILITARY
------- arms sales
E. Europe Armaments Find Way To Iraq
Some Suppliers Are About to Be Offered NATO Membership
By Daniel Williams and Nicholas Wood
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, November 20, 2002; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A12793-2002Nov19?language=printer
SARAJEVO, Bosnia -- Antiaircraft missile training from Belarus. Radar units from Ukraine. Armored vehicles and tank engines from Bulgaria. Ammunition, explosives, rockets and lessons in missile technology from Serbia. And spare jet parts, missile technology and rocket propellants from Bosnia.
As the United States prepares for possible war against Iraq, the country has been energetically buying these and other military goods and services in recent months, Western officials say. One of its favorite hunting grounds for the purchases, which are illegal under a U.N. embargo, is an arc from the Baltic Sea to the Balkans.
Iraq's buyers have seemed especially interested in two tasks: keeping old equipment working and upgrading the country's antiaircraft system. Although rumors of efforts to obtain chemical and biological weapons technology have circulated in Serbia, no concrete cases have come to light, the officials say.
In an effort to stanch the flow, U.S. officials pressed the Bosnian government last week to crack down on arms factories suspected of exporting supplies to Iraq. And a team of American experts arrived in Yugoslavia on Monday to gather information on a wealth of weapons sales from Serbia, the country's dominant republic.
U.S. displeasure over sales by two potential members of the NATO alliance, Bulgaria and Ukraine, has thrown a shadow over this week's summit in Prague, where invitations to new member countries are to be issued.
Allegations against Ukraine gained credence when a former bodyguard of President Leonid Kuchma released secret tape recordings in which a man whom U.S. law enforcement authorities have identified as Kuchma is heard approving the sale of a sophisticated antiaircraft system to Iraq. In response, the United States cut aid to Ukraine by $54 million, 35 percent of the annual total.
Kuchma has denied his country sold anything and insisted on attending the Prague meeting as head of a NATO candidate nation. U.S. officials have said he is unwelcome. Earlier this month, U.S. and British investigators reported that the country had failed to provide conclusive evidence that it did not sell weapons.
The Czech government has denied a visa to President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, who also wanted to show up uninvited.
Iraq's activity in Eastern Europe is natural, Western officials say. There is a long history of weapons sales from that region to Iraq, dating to the days of Communist rule when the region built large weapons industries. "There is an old boys' network that never died out," said a Western diplomat in Bosnia. "The connections are there and the desire to make weapons deals is there."
Most of the countries alleged to be doing the selling are nominally friendly to the United States. According to press reports in the Czech Republic, assault rifles have been shipped to Iraq from that country. The Czech Republic is a NATO member and last spring police there thwarted middlemen from arranging arms sales between Iraq and other East European countries.
Only Belarus is openly hostile to the United States. Last spring, the State Department accused it of training Iraqis in the use of S-300 surface-to-air missiles.
This month, officials in Bulgaria reacted with alarm at the discovery that a state-run company, Terem, sold armored personnel carriers to a middleman in Syria for delivery to Iraq. The government intercepted the shipment. "There were plans for more sales, which the authorities have stopped," said a spokeswoman for the Defense Ministry, Rumiana Strugarova.
The discovery coincided with reports that Bulgarian firms had made other shipments destined for Iraq, including engines and parts for T-55 and T-72 tanks. Bulgarian officials feared that the revelations would sink their country's efforts to gain an invitation to join NATO. "We are in trouble," Foreign Minister Solomon Passy told reporters in Sofia, the capital. "This arms sale pushes Bulgaria's chances back."
Nonetheless, the country remains on track to get a NATO invitation, according to reports from Prague. Earlier this month, the country announced it would let U.S. planes use its airspace during a war with Iraq and make an airfield available for refueling.
Here in Bosnia, also a recipient of U.S. foreign aid, military equipment has been shipped under the noses of 15,000 NATO-led troops, among them 1,200 Americans, who enforce the 1995 Dayton peace accords, Western officials say. Among other powers, the troops have the right to inspect the country's many weapons factories.
Paddy Ashdown, chief envoy in Bosnia of foreign governments that are involved in the peace accord, suggested that the trade may encompass much of the former Yugoslavia. "We do not know the extent of this matter," he said. "But my guess is it's going to be very wide-ranging. It's going to be regional."
The most prominent case involved an aviation factory in eastern Bosnia, an area under the control of Bosnian Serb authorities who have cooperated closely with the Yugoslav army. The factory, known as Orao, sold jet parts to Iraq, investigations have shown. NATO and Bosnian government officials are studying other factories for alleged sales. Government inspectors have been looking into an ammunition factory in the town of Vitez and a missile research center in the city of Banja Luka.
Last week, the Bosnian government declared the factories in the clear, but Bosnian intelligence officials countered with a secret report saying that arms and ammunition have been sold to Iraq, according to Bosnian officials.
But it is Serbia that is raising the most serious concerns among U.S. diplomats.
Yugoslav officials estimate that the trade for the last five years totals several hundred million dollars and covers a broad variety of products, including ammunition, explosives and ballistic missile technology.
"They were doing a lot of business, a lot of business," said one Western official familiar with the investigation. "Just about every defense company in the country sold to Iraq, either via Syria or via [another] third country." Those claims have been corroborated by a senior Serbian politician and Yugoslav government officials.
Shortly after peacekeepers raided the Orao factory in Bosnia, Croatian police seized a freighter, the Boka Star, near the port of Rijeka. It was found to be carrying 208 tons of explosive propellant, for possible use in rockets. U.S. officials now say the cargo has been traced to the Prva Iskra factory in Barici, Serbia. The propellant, they say, is just one of a wide range of military products shipped to Iraq over the last five years.
The Serbian daily newspaper Blic late last month reported that shipping manifests showed that several hundred thousand tons of explosives and military equipment had been sent to Iraq aboard ships that sailed from the Montenegrin port of Bar.
Documents handed to the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade by Yugoslav officials include an order for 20 million rounds of antiaircraft ammunition bound "for a country with no more than a few hundred soldiers," a Western official said. In another case, a country in the Caribbean ordered several thousand automatic rifles. In both cases, Yugoslav and U.S. officials said they believe the actual destination was Iraq.
A senior Serbian politician said that those shipments were part of trading agreements signed between Iraq and Yugoslavia during the presidency of Slobodan Milosevic, who is now before a U.N. tribunal facing war crimes charges. Three protocols were signed, in 1997, 1998 and 2000.
The deals did not end when Milosevic was ousted in October 2000, but continued under the code names "Zora" or "Dawn."
Following repeated protests from U.S. officials, Yugoslavia's Foreign Ministry raised the issue at a cabinet meeting in January of this year. A Jan. 15 letter from the ministry to the cabinet stated that Yugoslavia had $600 million worth of construction projects in "military-economic" areas with Libya, Iraq and Nigeria. The contracts with Iraq were worth $120 million.
The letter, examined by a Washington Post reporter, said that Yugoslavia was in breach of its undertaking to the United Nations not to export technology that could be used in weapons of mass destruction. In spite of those concerns, Yugoslav defense companies continued to sells weapons to Iraq.
"This was a pure kind of procrastination," said Ivan Vejvoda, adviser on foreign affairs to Serbia's prime minister, Zoran Djindjic. "They were carrying on until they could go on no longer. They were unaware of the perception that it will make outside [the country], and at the same time stuffing their pockets."
Special correspondent Wood reported from Belgrade.
-------- britain
U.S. Asks Britain for Troops
November 20, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iraq-britain-troops.html
LONDON (Reuters) - Britain said on Wednesday it had received a request from the United States for troops to take part in a possible military campaign against Iraq.
Speaking as President Bush urged NATO allies in Europe to join a ``coalition of the willing'' to attack Iraq if it defied U.N. weapons inspectors, Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon said Washington had made ``a request for forces.''
Prime Minister Tony Blair said Britain, along with other U.S. allies, had received a general request but signaled that detailed talks on troop numbers might still be some way off.
``We're simply not at the stage yet of specific requests for specific numbers of troops for use in a specific way,'' he told parliament. ``That's something that will happen at a later stage.
U.S. officials said on Wednesday Washington was asking about 50 countries what contribution they could make. Britain, a staunch U.S. ally, is widely expected to deploy around 15,000 troops to back any U.S. military action against Iraq.
Hoon said despite the diversion of 19,000 staff to cover for a firefighters' strike, Britain could still pose a serious military threat to Iraq.
``We have always made clear that in order to underpin the effectiveness of the Security Council process there needs to be a credible threat. We are going to provide that,'' he said.
But his comments were undermined by his own armed forces chief, standing beside him at the news conference, who said he was ``extremely concerned'' at the impact of the fire strikes.
``Clearly we cannot perform to the full extent of our operating facility while 19,000 people are tied up standing by to do firefighting duties,'' Chief of Staff Admiral Sir Michael Boyce said.
NO-FLY ZONES
Even before the start of weapons inspections called for in a tough U.N. resolution passed two weeks ago, Washington has said Baghdad is in ``material breach'' of the resolution by firing on U.S. and British fighter jets overflying Iraq.
That interpretation has raised fears among other Security Council members that the United States could use it as an automatic trigger for war.
British diplomats have said firing against their planes did not constitute a material breach. But Hoon said it would impact on the Security Council's assessment of Iraqi compliance.
``It is important that we recognize that this is an aggressive, belligerent state as far as our aircraft are concerned,'' he said. ``That would go to part of the picture that the Security Council would discuss.''
Asked about the doubts within Blair's Labour Party at the prospect of war with Iraq, Hoon said politicians could make their views clear at Monday's debate -- where he could spell out plans to call up reserve troops.
``All members of parliament, including those who are members of government, will be thinking through their positions,'' Hoon said.
-------- business
Welcome mats out for agency headquarters
By Tim Lemke
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
November 20, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/business/20021120-71368769.htm
About a dozen locations throughout the Washington area are being pushed as potential sites for the Department of Homeland Security.
With the Senate's overwhelming passage last night of legislation creating the Cabinet-level agency, public officials from all over the region have made pitches for sites in their jurisdictions.
"There's going to be an intense effort of lobbying," said Bill Badger, president of the Anne Arundel Economic Development Corp. "Everyone's getting their angles in."
Mr. Badger and officials in his county want the agency near Fort Meade, the David Taylor Naval Research Center and the headquarters of the National Security Agency.
A host of other sites in Maryland, the District and Northern Virginia are being discussed, but those with knowledge of real estate and land in the area say nearly all have problems.
The new department would consist of 22 major agencies and would need at least 500,000 square feet to house almost 170,000 federal employees.
The agency has three options: one building, several buildings on one campus, or scattered buildings.
The cost to construct a sprawling campus with several large buildings could top $1 billion, analysts said. A site near a Metro station, which the department says it prefers, would add to the cost and all but eliminate any location outside the Beltway.
Further complicating matters is a clause in the legislation urging the General Services Administration, which will choose the site, to select a location that is federally owned.
Homeland security spokesman Gordon Johndroe said the search is continuing, and that the District, Northern Virginia and suburban Maryland have been examined.
"I know we'll be moving quickly, but there's nothing to report at this time," Mr. Johndroe said.
Local officials and business leaders are giving hefty support to three large sites in the District: St. Elizabeths Mental Hospital in Anacostia, the Coast Guard headquarters at Buzzard Point in Southeast and open land along New York Avenue near Union Station.
The District's nonvoting member of Congress, Democratic Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, said she is pushing for the St. Elizabeths site, which sits on 180,000 acres owned by the federal government.
"If we find that D.C. is not being considered, we have no choice but to sound the alarm," she said yesterday. "If the agency is created outside the District, it sends a horrible symbol. It sends the message that we can't protect ourselves in the nation's capital."
An executive order believed to have been issued more than 50 years ago technically requires Cabinet agencies to be situated in the District. The Department of Defense is the only current exception.
But those in the suburbs say the executive order is archaic and will not prove to be a major obstacle.
"The world is much different than it was 50 years ago," Mr. Badger said. "Logically, you don't want the department 2,000 miles away, but 30 miles away is certainly within the realm of the national capital area."
Suburban sites under consideration include the former Naval Surface Warfare Center, a 700-acre plot in the White Oak area of Silver Spring expected to house about 5,000 employees of the Food and Drug Administration. Prince George's County officials are pitching the Suitland Federal Center, a 226-acre site that houses the Census Bureau, the National Maritime Intelligence Center and offices of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Suitland is said to have the edge over White Oak because of its proximity to a Metro station.
Northern Virginia has a plethora of available office space, and state officials are pushing for the new department to set up headquarters there, said Ellen Qualls, spokeswoman for Gov. Mark R. Warner.
Two buildings in Pentagon City, with about 500,000 total square feet, have been vacated by WorldCom subsidiary MCI.
The judge presiding over WorldCom's bankruptcy trial ordered an auction for the buildings to be held in December.
Real estate analysts said the location, near the Pentagon and a host of defense and government contractors, would be ideal for the Homeland Security Department. But the government has been trying to limit the business it conducts with the bankrupt telecommunications company, whose accounting practices are the subject of federal probes.
The high-rise buildings also would be more prone to attack.
The U.S. Patent and Trade Office plans to move out of several offices in Crystal City next year, and some real estate brokers have suggested that the new agency could move into the empty buildings. But the lack of one large office was inconvenient for the PTO and likely would be no more convenient for the Homeland Security Department, analysts said.
More ideal, real estate analysts said, would be the patent office's future headquarters, a 2.4-million-square-foot campus in Alexandria. But LCOR, the Berwyn, Pa., developer that owns the property, said the agency is scheduled to move in December 2003 and that it has had no discussions regarding the Homeland Security Department taking the offices instead.
-------- iraq
Bush Says U.S. Ready to Disarm Iraq, but Calls War Last Resort
November 20, 2002
New York Times
By TERENCE NEILAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/20/international/20CND-BUSH.html
President Bush said in Prague today that the United States was willing to lead a ``coalition of the willing'' against Iraq if President Saddam Hussein chose not to disarm, but he repeated previous assertions that war was his last resort.
``If the collective will of the world is strong, we can achieve disarmament peacefully,'' Mr. Bush said at a news conference with President Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic.
But if Mr. Hussein does not disarm, Mr. Bush said on the eve of a NATO summit meeting in the Czech capital, ``the United States will lead a coalition of the willing to disarm him.''
``By remaining strong and united and tough, we'll prevail,'' he said, but added: ``War is my last choice, my last option. I hope we can do this peacefully.''
``But one thing is certain,'' he said, ``he'll be disarmed, one way or the other, in the name of peace.''
Mr. Bush later repeated this theme, in equally forceful language, in a speech to students, during which he also made an urgent call for NATO countries to step up their military abilities.
In Cyprus today after a two-day trip to Baghdad, the chief United Nations arms inspector, Hans Blix, said Iraq had pledged its full cooperation with the Security Council by providing a complete accounting of its arms programs, Reuters reported.
``We had good discussions with representatives of the Iraqi government,'' Mr. Blix told reporters in Larnaca, and were assured that Baghdad ``will fully implement the resolution and cooperate with us, so it was a constructive visit.'' Iraq has until Dec. 8 to submit a list of its weapons.
The NATO meeting that starts on Thursday will focus on the alliance's expansion. ``Tomorrow the soul of Europe grows stronger,'' was how Mr. Bush put it in his address to the students.
Of Mr. Hussein he said: ``A dictator who has used weapons of mass destruction on his own people must not be allowed to produce or possess those weapons.
``Last week, Saddam Hussein accepted U.N. inspectors. We've heard those pledges before and seen them violated time and time again. We now call an end to that game of deception, and deceit and denial. Saddam Hussein has been given a very short time to declare completely and truthfully his arsenal of terror.
``Should he again deny that this arsenal exists, he will have entered his final stage with a lie. And deception this time will not be tolerated. Delay and defiance will invite the severest of consequences.''
At his news conference with Mr. Havel, Mr. Bush said: ``It's important for the Czech people to understand this is a guy who has poisoned his own people. He's got such hate in his heart he's willing to use a weapon of mass destruction not only on his neighborhood, but on the people of his country.''
In a statement that seemed intended to smooth feelings against the war among many European allies, Mr. Bush said, ``We will consult with our friends and all nations will be able to choose whether or not they want to participate'' in any action against Iraq.
Asked about the possible role of Germany, a particular opponent of Washington's policy on Iraq, Mr. Bush said: ``It's a decision Germany will make; just like it's a decision the Czech Republic will make; just like it's a decision Great Britain will make.''
``It's a decision that each country must decide as to how, if, and when they want to participate, and how they choose to participate. The point is, is that we will have plenty of consultations with our friends.''
He added: ``It is possible that Saddam Hussein gets the message that we're serious about disarmament and he should fully disarm - that's possible.
``The possibility becomes more real if he understands that there is a true consequence for his failure to disarm. And there is a true consequence. There's a serious consequence, as the U.N. resolution addresses.''
President Havel said he shared the opinion of President Bush, ``and of all reasonable people,'' that it would be better to achieve Iraq's disarmament without using force.
``If, however, the need to use force does arise, I believe that NATO should give an honest and speedy consideration to its engagement as an alliance,'' Mr. Havel added.
NATO leaders are to approve invitations to seven former communist states: Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. Their membership, Mr. Bush said, will invigorate the alliance and offer greater military security to a world in turmoil.
``The admission of these countries will not only help us militarily achieve peace,'' Mr. Bush said, ``but the admission of these countries will affect the soul of this most important alliance.''
In his address to students, Mr. Bush insisted: ``NATO forces must become better able to fight side by side. Those forces must be more mobile and more swiftly deployed. The allies need more Special Operations forces, better precision-strike capabilities and more modern command structures.''
He added: ``Ours is a military alliance, and every member must make a military contribution to that alliance. For some allies this will require higher defense spending. For all of us, it will require more effective defense spending, with each nation adding the tools and technologies to fight and win a new kind of war.
--------
Western Planes Strike Targets in Southern Iraq
November 20, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-iraq-usa-zones.html
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq said U.S. and British warplanes attacked civilian targets in the south of the country on Wednesday but were driven off by Iraqi anti-aircraft fire.
The U.S. military said Western planes bombed three air defense communications facilities in southern Iraq on Wednesday after Iraqi air defenses fired missiles at Western aircraft patrolling ``no-fly'' zones over Iraq.
The strikes at about 6 a.m. EST hit facilities between Al Kut, about 100 miles southeast of Baghdad, and Al Basrah, about 245 miles southeast of Baghdad, a statement from U.S. Central Command said.
``Today's strike came after Iraqi air defenses fired surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft artillery at coalition aircraft,'' the statement said.
An Iraqi military spokesman, quoted by the official Iraqi News Agency (INA), said U.S. and British planes bombed ``civilian and service installations'' in the province of Basrah south of Baghdad. The Iraqi and U.S. military authorities gave different times for the bombing.
``At 10 a.m. (2 a.m. EST) today, U.S. and British planes carried out 65 sorties from bases in Kuwait, flying over Kut, Diwaniya, Najaf, Samawa, Kerbala, Amarah and Basra,'' the Iraqi spokesman said.
``The planes attacked civilian and service installations in Basrah province,'' he said. No casualties were reported.
Iraq's anti-aircraft and missile batteries fired at the aircraft, forcing them to return to their bases, he added.
The last strike on the southern ``no-fly'' zone was on Monday.
U.S. and British warplanes regularly fly over northern and southern Iraq, patrolling ``no-fly'' zones created by Western allies after the 1991 Gulf War but not recognized by Baghdad.
The White House and the Pentagon have said that continued firing by Iraqi defenses at U.S. and British aircraft patrolling the zones was a direct violation of the November 8 U.N. resolution on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
Britain disagrees, saying the zones were established under earlier U.N. resolutions and Iraqi missile attacks on Western patrols there are contrary to international law but do not violate the November 8 resolution.
-------- israel / palestine
Labor Party in Israel Selects Dove as Leader
Candidate for Prime Minister Favors Pullback and Talks
By John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, November 20, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A12403-2002Nov19?language=printer
JERUSALEM, Nov. 19 -- Israel's Labor Party today elected as its leader and candidate for prime minister a former general and political newcomer who pledges swift Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and West Bank and renewed peace negotiations with the Palestinians.
Labor's choice, Amram Mitzna, 57, mayor of the coastal city of Haifa, set the stage for a general election Jan. 28 that will present voters with a relatively clear choice: pursuing Israel's military campaign against the two-year-old Palestinian uprising, or returning to a more conciliatory approach that could include reviving the moribund effort to reach a settlement with Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority.
"Many people think this will be the first time in a long time that there will be an ideological debate between the left and the right," said Shmuel Sandler, a political scientist at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv.
Israel's other large political party, Likud, will hold its primary Nov. 28. The contest is between two battle-tested hard-liners: Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and former prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who recently became foreign minister in Sharon's caretaker government and has sought to portray himself as even tougher than Sharon. Public opinion surveys show that, as of now, Sharon is heavily favored to win the Likud race and has a commanding -- some say insurmountable -- lead to become the next prime minister.
Mitzna crushed Labor's incumbent chairman, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, 54 percent to 37 percent. Ben-Eliezer, who until recently was the defense minister in Sharon's national unity government, conceded defeat late tonight. A third candidate, longtime Labor stalwart Haim Ramon, had 7 percent.
Flanked by Ramon and Ben-Eliezer, Mitzna said in a victory speech at party headquarters in Tel Aviv that under his leadership Labor will be "a party that puts at the top of its agenda security, peace and a willingness to compromise with our neighbors."
But his promise was made against a backdrop of continuing violence, with Israeli military forces killing seven Palestinians tonight. Two were accused gunmen shot outside the Jewish settlement of Kfar Darom in the southern Gaza Strip. Five more were killed in the West Bank city of Tulkarm, including Tareq Zaghal, 24, a member of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a radical offshoot of Arafat's Fatah movement. An Israeli military spokeswoman said Zaghal was involved in a Jan. 17 attack that killed six Israelis and wounded 35.
Voters in Israel's general election will cast ballots for a party, not a person. The leader of the party that gets the most votes will form a government, seek to create a coalition with a majority in parliament and become the prime minister. With his election by fellow Labor Party members today, Mitzna became Labor's candidate.
Israel's abrupt and shortened election season began when Ben-Eliezer led Labor out of Sharon's national unity government three weeks ago, ultimately causing its collapse.
At the time, Ben-Eliezer said he was bolting because of Sharon's refusal to cut the budget for Jewish settlements and redirect the funds to the poor and elderly. But political analysts and many Labor members saw the move as a bid by Ben-Eliezer to shore up support with Labor's left wing -- which was uncomfortable with his role in Sharon's cabinet -- in advance of today's party election.
Instead, the vote was a stinging repudiation of Ben-Eliezer's 11 months as head of Labor and the 19 months during which he served as Sharon's defense minister and another Labor stalwart, Shimon Peres, served as Sharon's foreign minister.
Labor, which according to its tradition is socially liberal and more inclined than Likud to negotiations with the Palestinians, was also the largest member in Sharon's parliamentary coalition. While Sharon's unity government was highly popular with the public, some Labor members grew angry at their party's partnership with Sharon and -- by extension -- its participation in Israel's military attacks on Palestinians and the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
Many members had been arguing for months that Labor should quit the government and offer a true alternative as an opposition party. The selection of Mitzna as chairman sets the party on that course. Mitzna has said he favors a return to peace talks with leaders of the Palestinians' choosing, including Arafat. If they could not agree on a comprehensive peace plan, Mitzna has said, he would unilaterally draw a border with the West Bank, evacuate Jewish settlements on the Palestinian side and build a fence to separate the peoples.
In an interview today with the daily newspaper Haaretz, he said that if he is elected prime minister, one of his government's first acts would be to evacuate Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip, which have about 6,500 closely guarded residents among a population of one million Palestinians. And he vowed to withdraw the Israeli military from most of the West Bank by the end of his first year in office.
Mitzna "says clear things and represents a clear ideological position vis-ŕ-vis peace, and in favor of negotiations with the Palestinians," Labor member Jannet Aviad, 60, said after casting her ballot. "This is a totally different dynamic from what Sharon is doing on the ground. . . . The current government eternalizes the occupation."
Mitzna, who has won accolades for lowering tensions between Arabs and Jews in Haifa, also appeared to benefit from being a newcomer to national politics. A former tank commander, he burst onto the national scene in mid-April to challenge Ben-Eliezer. Although Ben-Eliezer criticized his inexperience, Mitzna appealed to Labor's rank and file by claiming loyalty to the legacy of Yitzhak Rabin, the assassinated Labor leader and prime minister who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in crafting the 1993 Oslo peace accords.
While Mitzna represents a clear victory for the party's left wing, political analysts said, it is not clear how broadly he will appeal to the Israeli electorate at large. Opinion surveys show that it has swung sharply to the right in the last two years of conflict with the Palestinians, during which almost 700 Israelis and more than 1,900 Palestinians have been killed.
While many analysts said that staking out a position in direct opposition to Likud will help the party return to its roots and redefine itself, others said it is a risky gambit. The party has alienated Arab, Russian and religious voters who make up a large part of the electorate, and it has an increasingly narrow base -- principally aging and affluent, middle- and upper-middle class Israelis.
"The dovish wing took over, and it's disastrous for Labor," said Efraim Inbar, a professor at Bar-Ilan University. He said the party is "fully discredited" by its embrace of what he termed "the failed" Oslo accords.
With polls showing Labor trailing badly in the January general election campaign, the key question for many voters -- and one that Mitzna has avoided answering directly -- is whether the party would join Likud again in a national unity government. Sharon has suggested that if he wins, he might seek a partnership with Labor's new leadership, and some analysts have indicated that because of his military background, Mitzna might be tempted by an offer to be defense minister, just as Ben-Eliezer was.
----
Peace Talks Supporter Wins Israeli Labor Vote
November 20, 2002
New York Times
By JAMES BENNET
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/20/international/middleeast/20ISRA.html
JERUSALEM, Nov. 19 - The opposition Labor Party chose as its standard-bearer today a former general who calls for immediately opening peace talks with the Palestinians and withdrawing troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip, early election results showed.
Amram Mitzna, the popular mayor of the port city of Haifa, turned his relative inexperience on the national stage into an asset, presenting himself as an outsider not compromised by participation in the 19-month unity government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
His chief competitor, Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, was Mr. Sharon's defense minister until he led Labor out of the government last month, forcing early elections as he accused Mr. Sharon of financing settlements at the expense of the poor. Mr. Ben-Eliezer conceded the primary race late tonight.
Appealing to voters exhausted by two years of conflict and alarmed by a faltering economy, Mr. Mitzna, 57, called in a victory speech for "a different reality in Israel, a different society in Israel."
Mr. Mitzna won 54 percent of the party vote, a 16-point margin over Mr. Ben-Eliezer's 38 percent, according to official figures announced early Wednesday by Israel public radio and reported by Agence France-Presse. The third candidate, Haim Ramon, got 7 percent.
As party members went to the polls in hopes of reviving their once-dominant faction, Israeli forces killed five Palestinians - four of them civilians, and one of them 14 years old - in Tulkarm in the West Bank, Palestinian officials said.
Mr. Mitzna will be a candidate for prime minister in elections scheduled for Jan. 28, in an effort to take control of the government or to energize Labor as the opposition in the 120-seat Parliament.
Mr. Sharon is running against his foreign minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to retain the leadership of his party, Likud, which opinion polls consistently indicate is the dominant faction. The Likud primary is on Nov. 28.
Appearing on Israeli television tonight, Mr. Mitzna thanked supporters and promised to present "a bright and clear alternative." Asserting that he could defy the polls and beat either Likud candidate, he said: "The majority of the people in Israel have already seen where the last year and a half have led us. There is no security, no economy, no society, no education - nothing."
In conceding defeat, Mr. Ben-Eliezer said Labor "must reach elections united, with our heads up high, with the deep conviction that our way is the right one." In what was apparently a warning to Mr. Mitzna, he also said the party should not lurch to the left.
Mr. Mitzna has been criticized as a reprise of Ehud Barak, the cerebral former general from Labor whose failed gamble on achieving peace with the Palestinians led to his crushing defeat by Mr. Sharon in February 2001. In the party race, Mr. Mitzna's rivals also criticized him as inexperienced and gaffe-prone.
But Mr. Mitzna's résumé, his image as an outsider and his agenda appealed to Labor's left-wing base. In a brief national campaign, with voters distracted by a possible American war on Iraq, he will now try to apply the same formula to a national electorate that polls suggest has shifted to the right in the conflict with the Palestinians.
Mr. Sharon campaigned more than two years ago on a promise of peace and security. Although that promise has not been fulfilled, Israelis tend to fault the Palestinians and Yasir Arafat rather than their own leaders. Israel's economic troubles, including high unemployment and a shaky international credit rating, have done little to erode Mr. Sharon's popularity.
Yet Mr. Sharon is deprived of his broad coalition, which insulated him by spreading responsibility for decisions to Labor. He has refused to negotiate until Mr. Arafat is replaced, all Palestinian violence ceases, and the Palestinian leadership takes a number of steps, including crushing all militant organizations.
Mr. Mitzna says that as prime minister he would immediately begin talks without condition. He says that without a "political horizon" to provide hope, Palestinian militants will not set aside violence.
Mr. Mitzna, among Israel's most decorated combat veterans, was wounded four times in war - three times in one battle as a tank commander in 1967. Later, as commander of forces in the West Bank in the first Palestinian uprising, he was criticized for harsh tactics, including breaking the arms of stone throwers.
He was born into the left-wing kibbutz movement. His shaggy beard dates from the same pivotal war, in 1967, when he and some fellow officers promised not to shave until Israel reached peace with the Arabs.
Haifa has a large Israeli-Arab population, and in nine years as mayor Mr. Mitzna has made himself popular with Arab voters, as well as with new immigrants and religious Jews.
Mr. Mitzna says that if he is not elected prime minister, he will not enter a unity government under the formula that had joined Labor to Likud. He says he would join only if Likud supported his plan for unilateral separation from the Palestinians, if peace talks proved unavailing.
Under those circumstances, he says, he would call for a unilateral withdrawal from part - but not all - of the West Bank. That would mean evacuating at least some Israeli settlements.
About 200,000 settlers live in the West Bank, which is also home to more than two million Palestinians. In the Gaza Strip, 7,000 Israelis live in heavily fortified settlements surrounded by 1.2 million Palestinians. Settlements have expanded under Mr. Sharon, an architect of the movement.
Mr. Mitzna said that if he is becomes prime minister, Israel would withdraw from Gaza in a year. He has said that to protect Israel, its forces would continue to surround the Gaza Strip, which is fenced off.
Mr. Mitzna had a reputation as a remote but intelligent and charismatic commander. Although he was mentioned for chief of staff, he did not climb that high, in part because of an angry letter that he wrote after the army stood by in its 1982 invasion of Lebanon while Christian Phalangists massacred Palestinians in two refugee camps, Sabra and Shatila.
Although he was later persuaded to stay on, Mr. Mitzna, then a brigadier general, asked in the letter to be relieved of his command until the serving defense minister was gone from his post. That defense minister was Ariel Sharon.
--------
Israeli Tanks Enter 3 Gaza Villages
November 20, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Israel-Gaza.html
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) -- Dozens of Israeli tanks entered three villages in southern Gaza early Thursday, residents said, and destroyed the house of a suspected militants. Officials said four Palestinians were slightly wounded.
The villages, in southern Gaza near Israel, are known as strongholds of the militant Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the local Popular Resistance Front, a rebel offshoot of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement.
Residents said soldiers surrounded the house of a DFLP activist, ordered the family out and knocked down the structure with a bulldozers.
The Israeli military would say only that an operation was under way. For several months, Israel has been implementing a policy of destroying the houses of suspected militants as a deterrent measure. Palestinians and human rights groups have denounced the practice, charging that it harms innocent relatives.
Residents said the tanks were firing in all directions. Abdel Karim Abu Salah, a Palestinian lawmaker who lives in one of the villages, said Israeli forces were preventing ambulances from entering. He said three machine gun bullets had hit his house.
Witnesses said there were exchanges of fire between local gunmen and soldiers and a large explosion next to an Israeli tank, apparently a bomb planted by Palestinians. An Israeli military ambulance raced to the scene, a witness said.
The villages are about six miles east of the city of Khan Younis in the widest section of the narrow, heavily-populated strip, near the fence that divides Gaza from Israel.
In recent days Israeli forces have carried out several operations in Gaza, sending helicopters and tanks to hit suspected weapons factories and destroying the headquarters of Palestinian Preventive Security in Gaza City. Palestinians have called the raids Israeli aggression.
-------- nato
[Remember, NATO dropped depleted uranium weapons on Kosovo. See http://prop1.org/2000/du/)
NATO to expand with new focus on terror defense
By Nicholas Kralev
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
November 20, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20021120-18892215.htm
BRUSSELS - NATO this week will transform its mission and command structure, expanding operations into countries from North Africa to the Middle East and South Asia in order to counter new threats such as terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, alliance officials say.
At a two-day summit beginning in Prague tomorrow, the officials say, NATO will move to enhance its military capabilities, invite seven new countries to join and strengthen its relations with nations as far away as the Caucasus and Central Asia.
The alliance will create teams to respond to biological and chemical attacks, as well as a response force of 20,000 able to deploy within seven to 30 days and sustain itself for up to a month. The United States will also ask its allies for support in developing a missile-defense shield, U.S. officials say.
"We are building a new NATO, with different military capabilities and a new mission, which is to go outside the alliance's geographic borders to defend its members," Nicholas Burns, the American ambassador to NATO, said in a telephone interview.
"NATO is becoming the one organization that can integrate the entire Euro-Atlantic world, from the Western reaches of Canada and the United States all the way across to the Russian Far East."
In the largest expansion in its 53-year history, the alliance will extend membership invitations to Bulgaria, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia, senior Western officials said. President Bush made up his mind to support those seven candidates on Friday and informed NATO Secretary-General George Robertson of his decision in a phone call.
Mr. Burns, who visited each of nine candidates, including Albania and Macedonia, three times in the months leading up to the summit, said his delegation was "impressed by their commitment to democracy, the progress they have made since the end of communism and the fact that they are like-minded with the United States."
"The majority of these countries are relatively small, but they have capable militaries and the political will to defend not only themselves but the alliance as well," he said.
Emyr Jones Parry, the British ambassador to NATO, said this round of enlargement is "better prepared" than the last one in 1997, when Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic were invited to join. After those three became members more than three years ago, the alliance issued specific requirements for new applicants in individual documents calls Membership Action Plans.
The nations that will be admitted in Prague were "quite canny in responding to international events," such as NATO's 1999 war with Serbia over Kosovo and last year's campaign against the Taliban, and "genuinely started delivering," Mr. Parry said. Some of them offered use of their airspace and military bases, while others sent troops to Afghanistan.
"During the Cold War, if we added a country, there was one more to defend against the Soviet threat," a senior U.S. official said. But now, a "democratic, reforming and capable new member can be a multiplier for good in the war on terrorism."
"Countries like Bulgaria and Romania are truly capable, militarily," the official said. "The Baltic states have formed their Baltic battalion. It's a small force, but very well-trained and cohesive, and it fits well with ours." So all these contributions will "strengthen our ability to reach our strategic goal: Europe whole, free and at peace."
Mr. Burns said the United States will tell its allies at the summit that the large gap in military capabilities between them and America must be narrowed to avoid having "a two-tier alliance where we are so far ahead of our allies that we can't fight effectively together."
Even if the Europeans do not increase their spending, they "could use their existing defense euros more wisely by providing professional military units with the tools they need to carry out alliance missions, rather than retain static conscript forces," he said.
In Prague, a number of NATO's members will make commitments "to invest in certain military capabilities: strategic lift, precision-guided munitions, air-to-air refueling, sea lift and special forces."
Mr. Parry said it is up to the Europeans, including Britain, "to deliver," and "if we want the phone to ring, we have to be credible."
Although NATO invoked its common-defense Article 5 for the first time immediately after the September 11 attacks last year, the Bush administration decided not to seek the alliance's help in the anti-Taliban campaign, except for Britain's limited assistance. NATO, however, is now fully engaged in peacekeeping in Afghanistan.
In spite of earlier objections to the alliance's expansion to Moscow's doorstep, Russian President Vladimir Putin "realized that he can't prevent it," said Ahmet Uzumcu, the Turkish ambassador to NATO.
Mr. Putin will not attend the Prague summit, but the NATO-Russia Council, which was created earlier this year, will meet at the foreign-minister level.
NATO had also hoped "to announce a new step forward in our relations with Ukraine," but reports that President Leonid Kuchma "approved the sale of a Kolchuga radar system to Iraq has stopped our dialogue with him dead in its tracks," Mr. Burns said.
"Ukraine must cooperate as we respond to this problem," he said. "The U.S. believes NATO should maintain its links with reformers in Ukraine, but we cannot conduct business as usual with leaders who violate United Nations sanctions on Iraq."
----
NATO's growth spurt
Helle Dale
November 20, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/dale.htm
Most people get over their growth spurts in the teen-age years. This week, however, the very mature North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is set to grow considerably. By week's end, the roster of potential new members may bring the alliance to 26 from the current 19. If the three Baltic countries are included - as they are expected to be, along with Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania - NATO will even extend beyond the borders of the former Soviet Union.
Tomorrow, heads of government from current and aspiring NATO countries will gather in Prague for one of the most important meetings of the 53-year-old defense alliance. Though the envisioned second round of post-Cold War enlargement of NATO has taken shape with remarkably little controversy, the upcoming meeting will be an existential moment of extraordinary important for the alliance - and by extension for the troubled trans-Atlantic relationship.
In the age of global terrorism, NATO desperately needs new ways to remain relevant, indeed viable. The terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11 - and their aftermath - were a shrill but much-needed wake-up call for NATO planners.
For the first time in the history of the alliance, the members invoked Article 5 of the NATO treaty - promising collective defense of a member under attack - only to find this offer of assistance politely ignored. Instead, the United States went to war in Afghanistan largely on its own. With the capabilities in place and a time frame of mere weeks, Gen. Tommy Franks did not have the time to wait for NATO allies whose force projection abilities were extremely limited anyway.
President Bush goes to Prague with a specific agenda that includes three items. First, there is the enlargement itself. By being included in NATO, these members of the defunct Warsaw Pact become further grounded in European institutions, members of the democratic West. It will bring Europe closer to realizing the vision of a continent that is "whole, free, and at peace," as Mr. Bush promised in Warsaw in the summer of 2001.
Secondly and crucially, there's the job of transforming NATO into the kind of alliance that can strike against the enemy of the future, very possibly far from its own borders. We no longer face the threat of massive armies contending for the Central European plains, the Cold War model of military conflict in Europe. Rather, today, NATO members face common threats deriving from terrorists and state sponsors of terrorism.
"Operation Enduring Freedom" in Afghanistan, in other words, is likely to be the model. These threats require a different kind of military force, a force that is lighter, more agile and more flexible.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld recently proposed just such a model, a NATO Response Force for expeditionary missions, a technologically high-end force consisting of some 21,000 NATO troops supported by state-of-the-art sea and air power. It could consist of "coalitions of the willing," which would eliminate the all-or-nothing approach to NATO missions that has hamstrung the alliance in the past.
Some Europeans have grumbled that this idea could rival their planned, but not yet existing, European Rapid Reaction Force meant for peacekeeping tasks in and around Europe. Still, reactions to the American proposal have largely been positive, particularly because it shows a commitment to the alliance. Even the French have declared their support.
Finally, the Bush administration will seek to build on its budding relationship with Russia. In May, NATO institutionalized a new relationship with Russia through the consultative NATO-Russia Council. It is one of the reasons that Russian opposition to the second round of enlargement has been muted to nonexistent, which marks a great difference from the first round in 1999, which brought in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. From Prague, Mr. Bush will travel to Moscow for a summit with the Russian leader. It is expected that terrorism will be featured prominently in their discussions, particularly the influence of terrorist elements in Chechnya.
Privately, the Bush administration is expected to lobby for support for action against Iraq, which is currently opposed by the German government and approached with reluctance by many other NATO members. The administration can also be expected urgently to ask for Europeans to reform and invest in their defense forces. Right now, 85 percent of total NATO capability rests with the United States. That is a clearly unsustainable situation.
After last September, many were ready to write NATO's death certificate as an alliance that had outlived its usefulness. The Prague summit will indicate whether NATO will have a new lease on life.
Helle Dale is deputy director of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies at the Heritage Foundation. Email: helle.dale@heritage.org.
----
Bush calls for war coalition
By Nicholas M. Horrock
UPI Chief White House Correspondent
November 20, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20021120-054754-7050r.htm
PRAGUE, Czech Republic, Nov. 20 (UPI) -- On the eve of the NATO summit, President George W. Bush called Wednesday for a "coalition of the willing," to help the United States disarm Iraq, should world pressure fail to persuade Saddam Hussein to give up the weapons voluntarily.
At a news conference with the Czech Republic's president, Vaclav Havel, at Prague Castle, Bush said, as he has in the past, that he hopes the Iraqi leader will choose to shed his weapons of mass destruction peacefully, but if military action became necessary, the United States would not proceed without "consulting our friends."
Seeming to follow his father's plan on the eve of the Gulf War in 1990, Bush said the United States will form a "coalition of the willing" and "all will be able to choose whether they want to participate." In 1990, the senior President Bush formed a coalition army of 500,000 men and women that invaded Iraq and liberated Kuwait. Several in NATO joined that coalition, including the United Kingdom and France.
In the brief news conference following a private meeting with Havel, Bush seemed to have shed the United-States-will-go-it-alone challenge that he has often stressed. He said that before the United States would take any steps, "they'll be plenty of consultation with our friends" and that nations like the Czech Republic and the Great Britain will be able to make their own decision as to whether to join in the attack.
Germany's Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has said he opposes military action against Iraq, but at Wednesday's news conference, Bush said the final decision would be up to the German people.
Havel, appearing wan and speaking hesitantly, said he hoped that final reports of the summit will reflect some collective view of what to do on Iraq. Havel is expected to step down shortly due to ill health.
Both Bush and Havel are supporting moves to expand and modernize NATO. The Bush administration has pressed a plan that NATO form a 21,000-person special operations force that could operate outside the traditional boundaries of Europe and be able to contend with the threat of world terrorism.
The U.S. president defended a remark he made about NATO supplying "niche" military skills instead of the heavy ground forces now only really maintained by the United States and Great Britain, by noting that the Czech Republic's expertise in defending against biological and chemical warfare attacks is a vital skill. He said they are the "best in the world."
Bush again pushed his hard attack on terrorism, calling the terrorists "cold-blooded killers" who hate the freedom of the Czech Republic and other nations and use a "hijacked religion" to justify their cause. He reiterated that the United States is not opposed to the Muslim faith.
----
Bush urges NATO stand against Iraq
President says war can be averted 'if collective will of world is strong'
By Sandra Sobieraj
The Associated Press
November 20, 2002, 8:23 AM EST
http://www.sunspot.net/news/custom/iraq/bal-nato-iraq1120,0,6301893.story?coll=bal%2Dhome%2Dheadlines
PRAGUE, Czech Republic -- President Bush exhorted NATO allies, as they gathered in this Bohemian capital under cover of American F-16 jets, to stand together in a strong "coalition of the willing" against Iraq's Saddam Hussein so that war might be averted.
"By remaining strong and united and tough, we'll prevail," the president said today.
The first of 19 NATO leaders to come here for an alliance summit focused on expansion and modernization, Bush sought to soothe European anxieties about war with promises of consultation and hopes for peace.
In a news conference with Czech President Vaclav Havel, Bush said a military clash with Iraq was his "last choice" -- and an avoidable one. It is still possible Saddam could get the message, Bush said. "If the collective will of the world is strong, we can achieve disarmament peacefully," he said.
But, the president added, if Saddam refuses to abandon his weapons programs, "the United States will lead a coalition of the willing to disarm him."
NATO diplomats had already said the alliance would not take up arms collectively against Iraq. Bush used separate meetings with Czech, Turkish, French and British leaders to discuss "the cause," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said.
"At that point in time, all our nations -- we will consult with our friends -- and all nations will be able to choose whether or not they want to participate," Bush said. He noted that the Czech Republic maintains army units that are among "the very best in the world" in responding to chemical and biological attacks.
As for Germany, still unrelenting in its opposition to any disarmament by force, Bush said: "It's a decision Germany will make just like it's a decision the Czech Republic will make, just like it's a decision Great Britain will make. It's a decision that each country must decide as to how, if and when they want to participate, and how they choose to participate."
Bush has no plans to meet with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, whose recent re-election campaign infuriated Bush by focusing on opposition to Bush's Iraq policy. Fleischer said the two leaders were likely to exchange hellos at a black-tie summit dinner tonight.
Thousands of anarchists and anti-war protesters threatened demonstrations around the summit convening Thursday. The Czech government mobilized 12,000 police officers, 2,200 heavily armed soldiers and special anti-terrorist units to protect the presidents and prime ministers converging on this romantic "city of 1,000 spires." But squares where actions were scheduled were largely empty early today.
Miles above the castles and cathedrals, U.S. fighter jets patrolled Prague airspace, supplementing Czech pilots who circled at lower altitudes in aging, Soviet-era planes. Intelligence officials fear the leaders are an inviting target for al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations.
Bush's speech to students today had to be moved from Radio Free Europe headquarters to a sequestered hotel along the riverfront because of threats, law enforcement officials said. On Tuesday, railway workers found an explosive device on city tracks.
Emphasizing unity, NATO leaders are to approve invitations to seven former communist states: Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. Their membership, Bush said, will invigorate the alliance and offer greater military security to a world in turmoil.
"The enemy is not Russia. The enemy is global terrorists who hate freedom, and together we can work to defeat that enemy in the name of freedom," Bush said.
The alliance is also due to announce plans for a 21,000-strong rapid response force that could mobilize in seven to 30 days to confront threats from terrorists, renegade governments or regional crises.
On Iraq, Havel said the Czech people prefer that Saddam peacefully surrender his weapons of mass destruction. "If, however, the need to use force were to arise, I believe NATO should give honest and speedy consideration to its engagement as an alliance," he said.
He emphasized his desire to see a collective NATO expression of support, whether military or political, and said he hopes NATO will address the Iraq crisis in a formal statement.
Diplomats from several NATO nations, including the United States and Germany, said Tuesday they were negotiating a summit statement that would echo U.N. demands that Iraq allow unfettered weapons inspections.
Fleischer said the United States aims to get a "generalized political statement" on Iraq, not something that gets into details or potential consequences for Iraqi noncompliance. "This is not the United Nations all over again," Fleischer said.
Bush declined to say whether his "zero tolerance" policy toward Iraq would apply to Iraqi attempts to shoot down coalition aircraft patrolling the no-fly zone.
He was also meeting today with NATO Secretary-General George Robertson and President Ahmet Necdet Sezer of Turkey, whose country shares a border with Iraq and offers military bases critical to any U.S.-led attack.
The administration disclosed that U.S. ambassadors in 50 countries have been told to solicit support from allies for personnel and equipment to assist American forces in the war on terrorism and, possibly, on Iraq.
A senior administration official said the preliminary surveys are meant to formalize ad-hoc offers of support made to Washington over recent months.
On the Net:
Prague summit: http://www.nato.int/docu/comm/2002/0211-prague/index.htm
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Key Issues at NATO Summit
November 20, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-NATO-Summit-Glance.html
Key issues facing President Bush and other leaders at this week's NATO summit in the Czech capital, Prague:
EXPANSION: NATO is expected Thursday to formally invite Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Bulgaria to join the alliance. NATO ambassadors approved the expansion Monday, clearing the way for the nations to join in May 2004 following ratification by legislatures. Other candidates, including Albania, Macedonia and Croatia, will be told to wait.
NEW MISSIONS: The leaders are expected to approve a new military doctrine focusing on the danger from terrorism, rogue states and the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. NATO will set aside concerns about acting outside its traditional European and North Atlantic theaters and announce it is ready to strike against threats wherever they arise. The alliance's military structures will be reformed to give them greater flexibility. A U.S. general will become strategic operational commander, uniting U.S. and European-based commands. Another strategic commander, based in the United States, will oversee the modernization of the alliance military.
RESPONSE FORCE: Allies are expected to approve a U.S. plan for a 21,000-member rapid response force with core units able to mobilize at a week's notice. It will comprise hard-edged fighting units, with land, air and sea forces. Originally due to become operational from 2004 to 2006, NATO officials say the vanguard could be ready for action next year. Countries will contribute forces on a rotating basis from a pool of high-readiness units.
HARDWARE: The leaders will seek to tackle shortfalls in the alliance's arsenal and narrow the enormous gap between U.S. military might and European armed forces eroded by years of defense cuts. They are expected to pledge rapid action on eight priority areas -- big transport planes; air-to-air refueling; precision-guided munitions; secure communications; electronic jamming equipment; defenses against nuclear, biological or chemical attacks; ground surveillance; and battlefield support to combat troops. To cut costs, allies plan to pool equipment and share the costs of leasing planes. Allies also will consider contributing to U.S. plans to develop a strategic missile defense shield.
IRAQ: The allies are expected produce a strong statement of support for U.N. efforts to ensure that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein gets rid of any weapons of mass destruction. The focus is expected to remain on the U.N. mission to secure a peaceful disarmament, rather than on offers of military help to the United States should that process fail. However, President Bush is urging allies to join a ``coalition of the willing'' if U.N. inspections fail.
-------- us
Veterans Lose Health Care Suit Against Pentagon
Associated Press
Wednesday, November 20, 2002; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A12711-2002Nov19?language=printer
A divided, reluctant federal appeals court denied claims yesterday by World War II and Korean War veterans who said the government reneged on promises to provide free lifetime health care if they stayed in the service for 20 years.
Although the government conceded that military recruiters made the promises, the Defense Department convinced the court that there was no valid contract because the assurances were not backed up by law. The 9 to 4 decision was made by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington. The veterans have been on both the winning and losing sides of the case. A federal judge in Jacksonville, Fla., ruled against them in 1998. In February, a three-judge panel of the appeals court ruled in their favor.
The veterans will seek a Supreme Court hearing, said their lawyer, George "Bud" Day, a retired Air Force colonel. He was a prisoner of war in Vietnam with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).
The veterans received free benefits until 1995, when the Pentagon ended those benefits for veterans 65 and over because they were eligible for Medicare. Many had to buy supplemental policies, including Medicare Part B, to fill coverage gaps.
Even the judges in the majority acknowledged that they were uncomfortable with the ruling. They wrote that they "can do no more than hope Congress will make good on the promises made in good faith" to soldiers entering the service between 1941 and 1956. "We cannot readily imagine more sympathetic plaintiffs than the retired officers of the World War II and Korean War era involved in this case," Circuit Judge Paul R. Michel wrote for the majority.
The four dissenting judges expressed disdain for the government's actions.
"They were told, in effect, if you disrupt your family, if you work for low pay, if you endanger your life and limb, we will in turn guarantee lifetime health benefits," wrote Chief Circuit Judge Haldane Robert Mayer. "There is no doubt that the government made an unambiguous offer."
The two lead plaintiffs are Air Force and Navy veteran William Schism, who served from 1943 to 1979, and Robert Reinlie, who served in the Army and Air Force between 1942 and 1967. Both now live in Fort Walton Beach, Fla., along with their lawyer, Day.
Reinlie, who said he flew 30 missions in Europe as a B-17 navigator during World War II, noted that he spent about $15,000 of his own money for medical care after his coverage was withdrawn. Now 81, Reinlie said he is disappointed, but he vowed the case will continue.
Congress recently passed legislation providing free health care for these older veterans, beginning in 2002. At stake in this case are the costs, estimated by Justice Department officials as billions of dollars, paid by older veterans between 1995 and 2001, when the Pentagon issued regulations providing free coverage only for veterans under age 65.
----
Omen points to changes at Pentagon
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
November 20, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20021120-9781880.htm
A consultant who helped Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld hire top civilians in 2001 is back at the Pentagon, an indication, defense sources say, that Mr. Rumsfeld plans a major personnel shake-up in the coming months.
Consultant Stephen Herbits, who is openly homosexual, spent a stormy few months at the Pentagon last winter. He was criticized by religious conservatives for his pro-homosexual views. He locked horns with incoming Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, Mississippi Republican, when he refused to recommend hiring a former Lott staffer.
After leaving the Pentagon, Mr. Herbits in July told the Advocate, a newsmagazine for homosexuals, that Mr. Lott was "corrupt." He said Mr. Lott brought the Senate confirmation process of Defense positions to a standstill as retaliation for not hiring the former aide.
"To me, it was just a staggering abuse of power," he told Advocate writer Chris Bull. "Lott was wrong and corrupt and was willing to jeopardize national security for personal political gain."
A spokesman for Mr. Lott declined to comment yesterday.
In the same interview, Mr. Herbits, a Miami Beach resident, criticized President Bush's brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, for failing to meet with him over an anti-gay rights referendum on the 2002 ballot. The referendum ultimately failed.
"I was so offended that I went to Rumsfeld and said, 'I have to go home because I have to protect my kids from the president's brother,'" the Advocate quoted Mr. Herbits as saying. The publication wrote that Mr. Rumsfeld asked, "Your kids?" Mr. Herbits said, "Not my birth kids, but my kids who are struggling with their sexual orientation and have no one to take care of them."
A person in Mr. Herbits' Pentagon office said he was traveling this week and unavailable for comment.
Mr. Herbits, a 60-year-old former Seagram executive, advocates a strong military. Most of the civilians he screened and approved in 2001 are hawks, taking a hard line on China, Iraq and North Korea. He worked under Mr. Rumsfeld three decades ago in the Ford administration and has advised a number of Republican administrations on key recruits.
He helped Mr. Rumsfeld pick the current three service secretaries, as well as other senior posts. The Pentagon has about 130 positions that require White House approval.
Through all the criticism in 2001, Mr. Herbits enjoyed the confidence of Mr. Rumsfeld, who has now brought him back to make new personnel decisions, according to interviews with senior defense officials.
"They want to start all over," said one defense source, predicting new personnel will enter the Pentagon next year at the administration's two-year point.
This source and two other officials said Mr. Herbits is looking at replacements for the three service secretaries, as well as other posts.
Retired Vice Adm. M. Staser Holcomb, a longtime Rumsfeld adviser, has also returned to the Pentagon, where he screened senior officers in 2001. Sources say he is interviewing candidates for promotion to senior ranks.
Pentagon officials say the return of Mr. Herbits and Adm. Staser is a sure sign that major personnel changes lie ahead.
Navy Secretary Gordon England is slated to become deputy secretary of the new Department of Homeland Security.
Defense sources said yesterday that Army Secretary Thomas White and Air Force Secretary James Roche may also leave in coming months.
"They kind of think they were recruited under false pretenses," said a military source. "Roche, White and England are a bit frustrated because it's a 'my way or the highway' type atmosphere."
This is a reference to Mr. Rumsfeld's management style. At times, he and his staff resort to confrontation and edicts as they carry out the president's order to transform the military.
Mr. White, a highly decorated Vietnam War veteran and retired one-star Army general, was thought to be in trouble earlier this year because of his former position as a top Enron executive.
But Pentagon officials believe he performed well at a Senate hearing at which Democrats accused him of questionable activities but offered no proof of wrongdoing. He has since engaged in internal Pentagon debates on the 2004 budget.
Mr. White may emerge from the debate saving some of the Army's top projects, such as the Comanche helicopter, from the ax. Officials also said Mr. White is well liked by his most important constituents - soldiers.
Mr. Herbits has opened an office not far from Mr. Rumsfeld's E Ring suite.
"Mr. Herbits is a temporary consultant to the Department of Defense, assisting the Office of the Secretary on organizational and personnel matters," said Bryan Whitman, deputy chief spokesman for Mr. Rumsfeld.
"He served as Secretary Rumsfeld's special assistant during his first tour at the Pentagon and has well served other secretaries of defense over many years. He has extensive experience in DoD and has made many useful contributions to our national defense. His advice on the matters where he assists the department is excellent, and the secretary values his help."
In the Advocate interview, Mr. Herbits accused Gov. Bush of "pandering to the right wing" for not meeting with him on the anti-homosexual rights referendum.
He explained the disagreement with Mr. Lott:
"Lott had a candidate for a job. I interviewed the candidate and found that he was not qualified. I told the candidate something to that effect. It was clear that the candidate was applying only to protect one of the shipyards in Lott's state. That's not the kind of appointment I can recommend. It's contrary to good government.
"Lott called [Mr. Rumsfeld] and told him he was offended by my conduct. The secretary called me in and told me that while he supported me, he wondered whether I couldn't have found a more diplomatic way of expressing my concern."
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G.I.'s Train on Iraq's Border
November 20, 2002
New York Times
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/20/international/middleeast/20KUWA.html
CAMP NEW YORK, Kuwait, Nov. 19 - The United States Army has quietly doubled the number of its troops in Kuwait and is practicing offensive operations against Iraq close to the border with Saddam Hussein's forces.
In exercises over the past two days, Army combat engineers trained to blow paths through mine fields. They rehearsed erecting bridges under fire so armored forces can continue their thrusts into enemy territory. Troops conducted infantry assaults against mock strongholds. Army howitzers and Apache helicopters blasted targets at test ranges in terrain virtually identical to the desert American soldiers would confront if President Bush were to order an invasion of Iraq.
"Even though Saddam Hussein has accepted the U.N. resolution, we continue to maintain the mindset that we are going to war," said Capt. James Schwartz, the commander of Battery A, a unit of 155-millimeter howitzers from Fort Stewart, Ga.
"In order to keep ourselves mentally ready, that is the mindset that we use," he added. "When I talk to my soldiers, I tell them to take this training seriously because we are about 10 miles from Iraq."
The Army began training in Kuwait after the Persian Gulf war in 1991, when the United States and its allies evicted Iraqi occupation troops from Kuwait. The exercises were intended to deter Baghdad from attacking Kuwait again, an unlikely prospect. But the mood is tenser now that it is Washington that is considering whether to go on the offensive.
The Army has also quietly expanded its presence here. Over the past year, the Army force in Kuwait has doubled, to about 9,000 troops - about 3,800 from the brigade now training there and the rest headquarters and logistics staff.
There are two brigades' worth of tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, artillery and other major weapons systems here, twice as much equipment as a year ago.
The precise size of the American military presence in Kuwait is classified, but it totals about 12,000, perhaps somewhat more, including Air Force personnel, a Pentagon spokesman said.
This is just a sliver of what the United States would need to deploy here to go to war against Iraq. But because many Army units have been rotated through Kuwait over the past decade, many officers and soldiers who might be called on to fight would be returning to a familiar arena.
"We have 10 years of experience working in this sort of terrain, this sort of weather conditions and in working with our coalition partners, all of which was fairly new to the Army in 1990," said Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, the top Army commander in the region and the officer who would be in charge of all American land forces in the event of a war. "That has given us much more advantage if we ever had to operate out of here."
Kuwait these days seems to be divided into two distinct regions: a civilian area near the coast and a vast American training ground in the desert interior.
The Kuwaitis have virtually cordoned off the western part of their country so the Americans can concentrate on their war games. Currently, 750 square miles of Kuwait, about one-fourth of the country, has been set aside for American military exercises, the Army says.
The Americans have put the territory to good use. The Kuwaiti desert now includes an array of semipermanent American military camps, which are surrounded by sand berms and protected by heavy security. The camps are equipped with sophisticated communications for classified messages and television news reports, dining halls that serve hot food and fortified shelters to protect against any attack by Iraqi Scud missiles.
The Army has named the camps after the American states most affected by the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The largest camp, which has a six-mile perimeter, is called New York.
To celebrate Thanksgiving, the mess hall is decked with paper decorations. The soldiers will begin the day with a "Turkey trot," a run around the base. With the soldiers involved in an intensive training regime for a potential combat operation, there are no leaves and few days off.
The troops are currently training here in a regular exercise code-named Desert Spring. They come primarily from the Second Brigade of the Third Infantry Division, which is based at Fort Stewart. The brigade task force, which numbers about 3,800, arrived in September and will reach its peak combat readiness in December, the commanding officers said.
The division is one of several major units that have been formed as part of the Crisis Reserve Force under the United States Central Command, units that the command could rush to the Middle East if the United States was on the verge of war, the Army says.
While the Second Brigade is training in Kuwait, another brigade from the division is practicing desert maneuvers at the National Training Center in California. The last of Third Division's brigades has just completed training in Kuwait, so the division is well versed in desert warfare.
If American ground forces are ordered to enter Iraq, they face many potential obstacles: dried river beds (wadis), oil pipelines and rivers. Iraq also has an ample and diverse collection of mines, including plastic Italian-made mines that are hard to detect. So practicing in such terrain is a high priority.
"We have been here the last 10 years to defend Kuwait, but you win on the offense," said General McKiernan. "Even to defend Kuwait, we do that by winning on the offensive."
On Monday, some of the brigade's forces practiced an assault. It began when a column of armored vehicles under the command of Capt. Andy Hilmes moved toward its goal.
"We are doing maneuver training," explained Col. Dave Perkins, the brigade commander. "We are doing all the tasks we would have to execute if we were going to war. Our plan was to train on those regardless of the world situation. But the world situation has changed, and so there is a better chance we will have to use them."
As the column raced toward a trench several feet deep - simulating a wadi or other obstacle - Captain Hilmes maneuvered combat engineers to the fore.
The engineers drove to end of the trench in a combat vehicle that unfolded a giant metal bridge. The bridge, which can carry more than 70 tons, was quickly laid across the trench so M-1 tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles could race across. To protect the engineers, the column called in a mock artillery strike, including a round with smoke to obscure the battlefield.
But that was just the first step in what was intended to be a carefully synchronized armored advance. Next the column had to navigate a narrow lane, then it zoomed up to a mock minefield. The soldiers simulated firing a line-charge, a cable festooned with 1,600 pounds of explosive.
In actual combat, a rocket would be fired to pull the cable forward and the explosives detonated, thus blasting a path through the minefield. After that, a tank outfitted with a special plow would drive through the newly created path to "proof" that lane, that is, set off any mines that were not detonated or push them aside.
After pressing through the mine field in practice, the column soon began to exchange fire with an "enemy force" - four Bradleys and an M-1 tank. Like a giant game of tag, the armored vehicles were outfitted with lasers and target sensors so they could shoot at each other.
Retired military officers, who serve as observers, monitored the war game, armed with laser devices, known as "God guns," that can "kill" a tank or Bradley straying into the mock minefield.
After trading fire, the armored column rumbled toward the crest of a hill. Infantry piled out of the Bradleys and charged a stronghold defended by barbed wire and "enemy" troops. After the sappers blew a hole in the wire, the infantry troops raced forward, threw themselves against the ground and opened fire.
Observers and soldiers then huddled for a review.
"They moved good and need a little bit more practice," said George Conrad, a retired Army sergeant major at the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Ga. "Once the attack starts, you can't bog down. You got to be able to keep on moving."
Mr. Conrad said the exercise would be good training for Iraq.
"The terrain is the same," he said. "And they are putting them in to fight here the way they might have to fight in the next couple of months. This is it. And they've done a pretty good job."
-------- propaganda wars
Saddam pounces on son's newspaper
Uday's media provide some relief from state fare
Wednesday, 20 November, 2002
BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2495481.stm
The Iraqi Government has suspended a newspaper run by Saddam Hussein's eldest son Uday.
No reason was given for the one-month ban which was reported to foreign media by Iraqi Government and media sources after Babel failed to appear on news stands on Wednesday.
Uday Hussein Uday is Saddam Hussein's eldest son Babel is known for carrying Western reports on Iraq's conflict with the United States and is said to be the most influential newspaper in the country.
But it appears that attacks made on pro-American Arab leaders in recent issues may have landed the paper in trouble.
The French news agency AFP said the government had warned against criticising other Arab states in the wake of a Beirut summit in March when Baghdad's relations with other states in the region began to thaw.
However, recent Babel issues featured:
- A piece about Jordan's crackdown on Islamic militancy headlined "Jordan's Tyrant Wreaks Havoc"
- A report on Egyptian politics entitled "[President Hosni] Mubarak and his clique".
In addition, this Sunday saw Babel carrying a Western report that Saddam Hussein had tried to secure a "bolt-hole" for his family in Libya in the event of his ouster by the US.
Uday Hussein also runs a television channel, Youth TV, which airs reports by other Arab channels not usually heard on Iraq's state-run media.
The BBC's Paul Reynolds says the Iraqi leader's eldest son is a flamboyant character who does not necessarily reflect his father's views.
By contrast, his younger brother Qusay is generally thought to be made more in Saddam Hussein's image and to be his political heir apparent.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Surgeon freed after 'dirty bomb' arrest
By Phil Reeves Asia Correspondent
20 November 2002
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia_china/story.jsp?story=353939
A British-trained Pakistani surgeon was freed yesterday after nearly a month in secret detention. He says he was interrogated by FBI and CIA agents investigating claims that he helped al-Qa'ida develop radiological and nuclear bombs as well as chemical and biological weapons.
Dr Amir Aziz, 46, an orthopaedic surgeon - whose ordeal confirms American concerns on the nature of the "dirty bombs" and other weapons that al-Qa'ida might be trying to acquire - said the accusations were "the most ludicrous thing I have heard in my life".
He was dropped at his home in the early hours, shortly before a deadline set by a Lahore High Court judge, who had twice ordered the Pakistani Interior Ministry to ensure the doctor was produced.
Dr Aziz, who spent six years at Stanmore Hospital in north-west London, was taken from his home by Pakistani security services and the FBI on 21 October. Yesterday, as he recovered with his family, Dr Aziz said his family was not told where he was or the reason for his detention. He was never charged or allowed access to a lawyer. "They didn't torture me physically, but can you imagine being in one room for a month, being asked questions for eight hours a day?" he said last night. "I told them that I was an orthopaedic surgeon - what do I know about biological and chemical weapons, but they were not prepared to listen to this."
Pakistan's Interior Minister, Moinuddin Haider, has previously said Dr Aziz was being held on information from al-Qa'ida suspects interrogated in the United States.
Dr Aziz said claims, which had circulated in Washington, that he treated Osama bin Laden, the al-Qa'ida leader, were not true. "That was never an allegation at all," he said.
----
They spy
How law enforcement is keeping tabs on the new peace movement.
By A.C. Thompson, E-mail at ac_thompson@sfbg.com
November 20, 2002
http://www.sfbg.com/37/08/cover_spy.html
PERHAPS THE STORY of Malaysia Airlines Flight 91 is a harbinger of things to come for the nascent peace movement.
The Sept. 8 flight was poised to take off from Newark, N.J., for Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and a final destination of Kabul, Afghanistan, when agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation strode aboard. The G-men escorted seven passengers off the plane and into a room where they were interrogated for six hours. Flight 91 took off without the group.
Their offense? Signing up for a two-week "Reality Tour" of bomb-pocked Afghanistan, a junket organized by San Francisco-based human rights group Global Exchange.
"They wanted to know about Global Exchange," says one of the detainees, Glenda Marsh, a Sacramento peace activist and state-employed biologist. "They asked me if I'd heard the people I was traveling with make anti-American statements."
Now Marsh is preparing to file a Freedom of Information Act request to see if the FBI is compiling a dossier on her.
Hints of a new wave of COINTELPRO-style government surveillance first surfaced in fall 1999 as protesters gearing up for the World Trade Organization's meeting in Seattle complained about infiltration by undercover cops and federal agents. After Sept. 11, 2001, the feds embarked on an unprecedented and brazen campaign of domestic spying. Leading the charge, Attorney General John Ashcroft signaled his intent to spy on law-abiding religious congregations and political groups and pushed through the USA PATRIOT Act, which vastly expanded the government's phone-tapping and e-mail-monitoring powers and broke down barriers between the Central Intelligence Agency and the FBI. Now there's mounting evidence that government agents - returning to the ways of J. Edgar Hoover - are monitoring political dissidents.
According to Steve Filandrinos, the Global Exchange staffer who organized the tour, the FBI agents wanted to know why the group, which included five Afghan Americans, was headed overseas and who was sending them there. The tours, Filandrinos explains, "are a way to give Americans a chance to connect with Afghans involved in the reconstruction process, to make sure Americans know what's going on there, and to bear witness to the [U.S.-led] bombing."
While the waylaid tourists eventually made it to Kabul, their fun with the federal government wasn't over. Flying into Los Angeles International Airport Sept. 20, one member of the group was grabbed by U.S. Customs Service agents outside the airport, and another was called at home by the FBI for more questioning eight days later.
The Global Exchange incident echoes the widely reported hassles of Jan Adams and Rebecca Gordon, founders of War Times, a San Francisco publication critical of President George W. Bush's passion for dropping ordnance on foreign countries. On Aug. 7, Adams and Gordon were attempting to fly from San Francisco to Boston when they were detained by police and informed that their names were on a list of people under scrutiny by the FBI. "We can only assume that the government is laboring under the misapprehension that we're terrorists," Adams says.
Neither woman has ever been charged with any serious crime, though both have been arrested for civil disobedience.
After calls to police headquarters and two searches by airport security, Adams and Gordon were escorted onto the plane.
There are several ways all of this government scrutiny could play out. If the new peace movement develops the muscle to paralyze major cities - ŕ la antiglobalizers - it may find the feds doing more than discreetly keeping tabs and occasionally pulling suspected troublemakers off airplanes. There's the real possibility that FBI agents will covertly slip into the movement with the aim of crippling it from within (a favored tactic in the 1960s against the Black Panthers and the New Left) or enticing more-militant activists to participate in felonious behavior (as the bureau did more recently with Earth First! and the militia and white separatist movements).
"Surveillance and intelligence gathering are back," asserts Dennis Cunningham, an attorney who has sued the FBI repeatedly, most recently on behalf of Earth First!ers Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney. "What's to stop them from engaging in disruptive activity designed to neutralize a movement?"
Another possibility is that prosecutors could start collecting information on movement leaders with an eye toward using the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations statute. Designed to take down mafiosi and loaded with stiff penalties, RICO targets key members of groups that engage in a pattern of criminal activity, and the case could be made that protesters who repeatedly disrupt business as usual fit that bill. In fact, that case has already been made: the RICO statute was employed by the National Organization for Women in a 1998 civil suit against abortion clinic blockaders in Chicago. The save-the-fetuses side lost and was ordered to pay $255,000 in damages.
Ashcroft's baby, the PATRIOT Act, includes some language similar to that of RICO, and could be put to use as well.
Cunningham speculates that "we'll see them use the PATRIOT Act first. They want to put it to the test, see what they can do with it."
----
Bipartisan duo hits FBI's discipline policies
By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
November 20, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20021120-95731780.htm
Two senior members of the Senate Judiciary Committee want the FBI to put an end to a double standard of discipline for senior bureau executives and rank-and-file agents, saying it is unfair and a threat to national security in the wake of September 11.
"We cannot afford a double standard that saps morale from the FBI's frontline agents," said Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, Vermont Democrat and committee chairman. "Too much is at stake for the FBI to perpetuate this culture of protecting senior officials and covering up management problems."
"The FBI's discipline system still needs serious reform - it's not equitable or fair," said Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, a senior Republican committee member. "It still allows a clique of top officials to judge one another and change punishment without explanation or accountability."
The comments came in response to a report last week by the Justice Department's Office of Inspector General, which concluded after a lengthy investigation that the FBI "suffered and still suffers from a strong, and not unreasonable, perception among employees that a double standard exists" within the bureau.
In the report, Inspector General Glenn A. Fine said that perception was fostered by the existence of a dual system of discipline that existed before August 2000, in which FBI Senior Executive Service supervisors were judged in pending discipline matters only by other SES members.
It also cited "several troubling cases" in which the discipline imposed on SES employees "appeared unduly lenient and less severe" than discipline in similar cases involving non-SES employees.
Despite changes by the FBI in August 2000 to equalize disciplinary standards, the report said concerns remain over the new guidelines that allow SES members the right of appeal to a board made up of three SES members, one of whom the person under investigation selects.
"The perception, and possibly the reality may be, that a double standard of discipline may continue to exist," Mr. Fine said.
Former FBI Director Louis J. Freeh also was criticized in the report for "poor judgment" in his oversight of FBI discipline and for promotions he approved for senior FBI executives that sent a message to the rank-and-file that the bureau would "overlook serious allegations of misconduct and even reward the subject of the allegation with a major promotion."
In a statement, the FBI said changes in disciplinary rules ordered by Mr. Freeh in 1997 solved many of the problems and that rules governing the disciplinary process continue to be reviewed so the bureau can "fairly and expeditiously identify misconduct wherever it occurs and appropriately punish the involved persons without fear or favor to anyone."
Mr. Leahy and Mr. Grassley said the report reinforced ongoing efforts by the committee to bring the Leahy-Grassley FBI Reform Act to a vote. The proposed legislation was unanimously approved by the committee in April, but its pending passage by the Senate has been blocked by a hold placed by an anonymous Republican senator.
"This report further documents the strong and not unreasonable perception that a demoralizing double standard exists at the FBI that means slaps on the wrist for senior officials for misconduct that gets line agents fired," said Mr. Leahy, noting the report said the FBI for the first time would support the bill.
Until now, he said, the Justice Department and the FBI had taken no formal position.
The committee, which has investigated suspected double standards of discipline within the FBI for 15 months, requested the inspector general's investigation.
The FBI Reform Act would expand whistleblower protection to ensure that FBI agents and employees get the same protection as other government employees.
The FBI is exempted from the Whistleblower Protection Act, and its employees are only protected by internal Justice Department regulations. The Leahy-Grassley bill would end statutory restrictions that contribute to the double standard by which senior management officials are not disciplined as harshly as line agents.
The bill also would give the inspector general the authority to investigate internal problems at the FBI and help plan solutions.
----
Pentagon Defends Anti - Terror Project
November 20, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Pentagon-Anti-Terror.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Pentagon on Wednesday defended an anti-terrorism technology experiment that critics have likened to domestic spying on the financial transactions of ordinary citizens.
Pete Aldridge, the chief of technology for the Defense Department, told reporters that the project is intended to test whether new computer tools can comb through masses of information -- such as credit card and bank transactions, car rentals and gun purchases -- and spot clues to the planning of terrorist acts.
``This is an important research project to determine the feasibility of using certain transactions and events to discover and respond to terrorists before they act,'' Aldridge said in a statement designed to address criticism in newspaper editorials and elsewhere about the project's civil liberty implications.
An editorial in Wednesday's edition of The Daily Camera of Boulder, Colo., titled ``Uncle Sam, the spy,'' said the Pentagon is trying to build a ``huge digital dragnet'' to unjustifiably monitor private lives.
The New York Times, in an editorial Monday, called on Congress to shut down the program pending an investigation.
A Washington Post editorial on Saturday questioned the wisdom of the Pentagon's choice of retired Rear Adm. John Poindexter to run the project. Poindexter was convicted in the wake of the Reagan administration's Iran-Contra scandal of five felony counts of lying to Congress, destroying official documents and obstructing a congressional investigation into the matter. The convictions were overturned on appeal.
Aldridge said he chose Poindexter because the project was his idea and he exhibited the needed enthusiasm for it. ``John Poindexter has a passion for this project ... and we want an enthusiastic leader,'' he said. If it is successful and eventually put to use by police and intelligence agencies, Poindexter will have no role, he said.
The project, called Total Information Awareness, is being run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an arm of the Pentagon that normally focuses on military applications of new technologies. Aldridge said the agency was an appropriate place for the anti-terror research because the agency is part of the war on terrorism.
``It is absurd to think that DARPA is somehow trying to become another police agency,'' Aldridge said.
The agency will conduct an experiment using data ``fabricated to resemble real-life events'' such as police arrests as well as some genuine data. The goal is to see if this ``data mining'' can pinpoint indicators of terrorist planning -- ``connecting the dots'' of suspicious activities in ways that could not be done prior to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Aldridge said.
If the experiment is successful, then the technologies -- including rapid language translation -- will be turned over to intelligence, counterintelligence and law enforcement agencies ``as a tool to help them in their battle against domestic terrorism,'' he said.
In comments Monday during a visit to Santiago, Chile, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said critics were overheated in their criticisms of the project. ``The hype and alarm approach is a disservice to the public,'' he said.
Aldridge said the Pentagon is spending $10 million on the project this budget year and an undetermined amount next year. It likely will be several years before the effort bears fruit, he said.
On the Net:
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at http://www.darpa.mil/
-------- courts
Photo radar snaps up $20 million for D.C.
By Brian DeBose
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
November 20, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20021120-47081026.htm
D.C. officials have raked in more than $20 million in the first 15 months of the city's photo-radar camera program, exceeding revenue estimates of $11 million annually.
The revenue tally comes about two months after Mayor Anthony A. Williams said he wants to expand the use of traffic cameras because the city needs the money.
"The cameras are about safety and revenue, and the way not to pay that tax is to not be speeding," Mr. Williams said during a press conference in late September.
Officials have collected $20,602,947 from the 275,474 motorists who have paid speeding citations mailed to them since the automated traffic enforcement program began in August 2001. Automated speeding citations have been issued to 408,180 drivers whose cars have been photographed by the photo-radar cameras.
The Metropolitan Police Department's Web site (www.mpdc.dc.gov) says the photo-radar program has delivered about $15.3 million this year and more than $1 million last month.
City officials originally expected to issue 80,000 speeding tickets a month. So far, the number of issued citations has varied each month but hasn't come close to that mark. Last November yielded the most tickets, with 44,532 citations issued.
The District split its revenue with Affiliated Computer Services Inc. - the Dallas-based company that took over the contract from Lockheed Martin IMS three weeks after the program began - using a per-ticket payment plan in the first eight months of the program.
When the city switched to a flat monthly fee in April, it began to outpace its revenue expectations greatly.
"We don't know if the cameras are doing something to save lives by reducing collisions or slowing traffic. But we do know that it is a cash cow for the District," said Lon Anderson, spokesman for AAA Mid-Atlantic.
AAA, one of the foremost advocates of traffic safety, last month withdrew its support for the District's traffic camera enforcement program after city officials said revenue was a primary motivation.
Mr. Williams and the D.C. Council decided last month to expand the speed-camera program by adding five more mobile units to the five in use and the one stationary camera on Florida Avenue near Gallaudet University. But they also decided to add photo-radar technology on its 39 red-light cameras, in part to help shrink the city's $323 million budget shortfall.
Metropolitan Police spokesman Kevin P. Morison told The Washington Times last month that the mayor and council's plans and their underlying motivations had not changed the mission of the program for police: to reduce traffic speeds and curtail the number of accidents and serious injuries on city roads.
He said the city has not hidden the fact that the cameras "make money."
Mr. Morison said the police department is pursuing updated accident data to answer some of the lingering questions about the effectiveness of the cameras.
"I have raised the issue several times that we need updated accident data," Mr. Morison said.
The Department of Transportation is responsible for submitting the District's accident data to national databases and compiling an analysis for the city. But the accident data are "not that good" said transportation officials.
Mr. Anderson said he wants to see "good-specific data" detailing speeds, accidents and trends on streets and intersections where cameras have been in place.
"What District motorists deserve is to know how many total crashes and deaths occurred on these roads and what were the average speeds both before the cameras came in and after," he said.
"Right now, this looks like a tax on motorists and there is nothing we can do about it."
Efforts to implement photo-radar programs have failed elsewhere. Several jurisdictions instead have focused on installing red-light cameras.
The Maryland General Assembly this year killed two bills that would have allowed any city or county in the state to obtain photo radar. Senate and House leaders rejected the idea as a "revenue generator" scheme for urban jurisdictions.
Virginia's Republican-led General Assembly last year moved toward letting the red-light camera program end at its cutoff date of 2005. No legislation proposing speed cameras was introduced.
-------- terrorism
Conspiracy of silence?
Arnaud de Borchgrave
November 20, 2002
Washington Times Commentary
http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20021120-75841664.htm
With fresh evidence that Osama bin Laden is still alive and kicking and with his friends and protectors about to take over the provincial governments of two of Pakistan's four provinces, as well as a share in the new national coalition that will now run the country (under the watchful eye of President Pervez Musharraf), a key question for the U.S. intelligence community remains unanswered. Why has the CIA ignored for 11 consecutive months the only anti-al Qaeda Pakistani tribal leader who had tracked bin Laden's movements ever since his escape from Tora Bora last Dec. 9?
In their quest to find bin Laden dead or alive, CIA operatives doled out millions of dollars in cash to buy the loyalty of tribal chieftains whose tribes straddle the unmarked, mountainous Afghan-Pakistan border. There was one glaring omission: a tribal leader who commands the loyalty of 600,000 people who is also a respected, national figure. His adobe abode near Peshawar is Spartan. He is a former Marxist of Cold War vintage and is not interested in money. A good news source of this writer, his information was prescient and invariably accurate. At his request, we agreed not to reveal his name.
In late November 2001, this tribal chief contacted us via a mutual friend. He said his people knew where bin Laden was in the Tora Bora mountain range. He agreed to put some of his tribal scouts and horses at our disposal. And on Dec. 11, we set out on horseback for the Tirah Valley, on the south side of Tora Bora, where "Afghan Arab" survivors of U.S. bombing were expected to make their escape. Shortly after we began our journey, a messenger caught up with us and advised us to dismount, as "you will almost certainly be kidnapped for ransom."
Wearing national dress, our party, including a prominent Pakistani-American and two security guards, detoured around the valley to another pass on the border. Upon our return, we stopped off to see the tribal leader. Bin Laden, he informed us, had indeed come out through the Tirah Valley on horseback two days before we got there, on Dec. 9. He and a party of about 50 had turned their horses over to local tribesmen, and continued in 4x4s and SUVs into Peshawar, two hours away.
In this capital of the Northwest Frontier Province, bin Laden found himself surrounded by hundreds of thousands of sympathizers, including Islamist doctors who took care of his respiratory and kidney ailments. The Inter-Services Intelligence Agency knew he had arrived in Peshawar, but presumably this was not reported to Mr. Musharraf. In his interviews, the president invariably says he believes bin Laden died in Tora Bora. During the recent Pakistani election campaign, posters of bin Laden "The Liberator" and "U.S. Go Home" banners at Peshawar were brandished at rallies staged by politico-religious parties.
The reason this anti-American, pro-al Qaeda slum city of 3.5 million was not combed alley by alley, according to the tribal leader, was the fear of triggering a bloodbath. At the Musharraf level, he speculated the reluctance to go after bin Laden may have been the fear the U.S. would lose interest in Pakistan once bin Laden was captured dead or alive - and would renege on its post-September 11 economic aid commitments. Much of the anti-Americanism in Pakistan today stems from U.S. diplomatic, economic and military sanctions imposed after the defeated Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989.
The U.S. intelligence community has been aware of the tribal leader's name and reputation, but did not contact him. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz took his name down on Aug. 4 and said he would look into it. In July, bin laden, according to the chief, moved to Karachi, a sprawling seaport city of 13 million on the Arabian Sea. He lost track of him in Karachi in early November. Members of the chief's tribe who work in Karachi reported he might have left the country in one of the thousands of dhows that ply the waters between Pakistan and the Arabian Peninsula, including Yemen.
Could it be that the intelligence community, already overburdened by the requirements of the coming war on Iraq and the war on terror, is not too interested in a "we've got Osama alive" melodrama that might detract from the current "get Saddam" priority objective? There is also the unspoken fear that a dead or captured bin Laden would trigger hundreds of smaller terrorist incidents worldwide.
For months, U.S. military and CIA agents have been operating with Pakistani troops in the mountains along Pakistan's Western border with Afghanistan, a region hostile to both Pakistani and U.S. forces, where they suspected bin Laden was hiding. Why they ignored a prominent Pakistani tribal leader, a man who has traveled to the U.S., Britain and many other countries in his career, remains a mystery. Members of the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board who were asked by us to pose the question have simply been told, "We'll get back to you on that." They're still waiting.
Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor at large for The Washington Times, a position he also holds with United Press International.
----
Expanded wiretaps, searches will target terrorism suspects
By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
November 20, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20021120-91234416.htm
Terrorists seeking to attack U.S. military and civilian targets will be the primary focus of the Justice Department's expanded authority to use wiretaps, searches and surveillance, law-enforcement authorities said yesterday.
Key among the investigative targets is Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network, the sources said, including "sleeper cells" now in the United States and several groups of Middle Eastern men thought to be part of an infrastructure of 5,000 al Qaeda terrorists and supporters in this country.
On Monday, a three-judge federal appeals court panel authorized the expanded use of wiretaps, searches and surveillance when it said the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court (FISA) erred in May by blocking expanded guidelines sought by Attorney General John Ashcroft under the new USA Patriot Act.
The panel, sitting as the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, said the FISA court restrictions were "not required by [the act] or the Constitution."
"The Court of Review's action revolutionizes our ability to investigate terrorists and prosecute terrorist acts," Mr. Ashcroft said. It allows the department to do "everything we can to identify those who would hurt us, to disrupt them, to delay them, to defeat them," although he declined to identify potential targets.
U.S. intelligence officials believe al Qaeda terrorists are well-established in the United States. Recent classified reports given to government policy-makers put their number at 5,000. The FBI has said the organization was weakened by the war in Afghanistan and by post-September 11 law-enforcement efforts, but remains "potent and highly capable" of carrying out attacks around the world.
In addition to al Qaeda, about a dozen international terrorist groups have members and supporters in the United States - all of whom have been targeted by the FBI and other federal agencies.
Last year, the government sought FISA warrants for 930 persons, and while civil libertarians and others expect that number to increase significantly as a result of the ruling, a top Justice Department official said yesterday he did not believe the number would "shoot out of sight."
"The process remains under the close supervision of the court, and no warrants can be issued without a thorough review," the official said.
Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, Vermont Democrat and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, cautioned the Justice Department not to conclude that the ruling "had thrown out constitutional restraints and thrown open everyone's doors to government snooping."
"That is not the case, and it would be wise for the Justice Department to read the decision more closely," he said, adding that the Patriot Act made clear that the Justice Department may use FISA only to collect foreign intelligence information and not for law enforcement.
"We have not given them authority to use FISA for the primary purpose of bringing a criminal prosecution for non-foreign intelligence crimes, such as crimes other than sabotage, espionage or international terrorism," he said.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which challenged Mr. Ashcroft's bid to expand the guidelines, warned that the ruling gives the Justice Department the right to "suspend the ordinary requirements of the Fourth Amendment in order to listen in on phone calls, read e-mails and conduct secret searches of Americans' homes and offices."
The ACLU questioned whether the Patriot Act - passed by Congress after the September 11 attacks - permits the government to use looser foreign intelligence standards to conduct criminal investigations in the United States. Although the ACLU was allowed to file a friend-of-the-court brief in support of the FISA court ruling, it was not permitted to participate in oral argument before the three-judge panel.
Ann Beeson, ACLU litigation director, said in a statement that the organization was considering requesting an appeal to the Supreme Court and asking Congress to clarify through legislation that it did not authorize the Justice Department to use FISA's looser surveillance standards in ordinary criminal cases.
Meanwhile, Sen. Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican and senior Judiciary Committee member who has been a frequent FBI critic, said the ruling should "untie" the government's hands and help prevent terrorist attacks.
"The outdated rules on information-sharing hurt our counterterrorism efforts, and now we can move forward to protect national security while respecting rights and abiding by built-in safeguards," he said. "Congress should continue close oversight of the FISA process and the Patriot Act."
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
Toyota to start leasing fuel-cell cars next month
REUTERS JAPAN:
November 20, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/18673/story.htm
TOKYO - Toyota Motor Corp said it had become the first automaker to win government approval to market fuel-cell passenger cars, touted as the eventual answer to most of the environmental concerns caused by conventional vehicles.
As to the high cost of the cars, the vehicles will be leased at a cost of 1.2 million yen ($9,970) a month under a 30-month contract. They will be made available to government bodies, research institutions and energy-related companies.
As announced in July, the world's third-largest automaker said it would lease 20 "Toyota FCHV" cars in Japan and the United States during the 12 months from December 2, starting with one vehicle each to four Japanese ministries by this year.
Fuel cells use an electrochemical process to create electricity by mixing hydrogen with oxygen, emitting only heat and water as by-products.
But hydrogen in its natural gaseous state is difficult to store and distribute, so fuel cell vehicles for the ordinary consumer are not seen as likely for at least a decade.
German-U.S. automaker DaimlerChrysler AG was the first to bring to market a limited series of fuel cell buses in 2000, while Toyota's domestic rival Honda Motor Co is expecting government approval for it to begin marketing its fuel cell vehicle next month, probably on the same day as Toyota.
The Japanese government is keen to encourage the development of fuel cell vehicles, having set a goal of 50,000 on the road in Japan by 2010.
Toyota, widely seen as the leader in environmentally friendly auto technology, put the first hybrid gasoline-electric vehicle, the Prius, on the market in 1997. ($1=120.36 Yen).
-------- environment
Across Pacific Northwest, Downward Trend for Dams
Oregon Set to Dismantle Two; Effort Will Aid Salmon Runs
By William Booth
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 20, 2002; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A12724-2002Nov19?language=printer
With many of the nation's dams no longer making economic or environmental sense, old dams are being dismantled, in a slow-moving but remarkable reversal of fortune for rivers and fish.
The latest announcement came from the Pacific Northwest when Portland General Electric inked a $16 million deal last week to remove Marmot Dam on the Sandy River and another smaller structure on the Little Sandy in Oregon about 50 miles east of Portland.
The deconstructions in Oregon are unusual because they are fully functioning hydroelectric dams still producing power -- a move that once upon a time would have been almost unimaginable.
"This is a major development in the environmental history of the West," said Eric Eckl, a spokesman for American Rivers, an advocacy group. "It is one of first removals of hydroelectric dams, and they are not only taking down the dams, but restoring habitat for threatened salmon and steelhead."
Conservationists hope it is the beginning of a long-term trend. Hundreds of dams are slated for possible demolition; more than 60 are scheduled to be removed this year alone, the highest number since American Rivers began keeping count five years ago.
"I recognize there are risks involved. We've never been down this road before," Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber (D) told reporters at the signing ceremony for the deal to dismantle Marmot Dam. Kitzhaber was referring to a central problem with removing old dams: the huge buildup of silt behind them that must be slowly siphoned off so as not to damage downstream habitat.
But the governor added, "We do know this one small piece of Oregon will be wilder. . . . We're restoring a part of why we love this state."
Since the deconstruction of the Edwards Dam on the Kennebec River in Maine three years ago, more than 250 impoundments have been dismantled, many of them in eastern and midwestern states such as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Most of the dams are small, and almost all of them have done their jobs for irrigation, flood control or water supply -- and not hydroelectric power.
But environmentalists, working closely with utility companies and other agencies (when they aren't suing them), are pressing ahead to take on ever bigger dams.
In the next few years, three more large dams may come down in the Pacific Northwest: the Elwha Dam on the Washington peninsula, the Savage Rapids Dam on the Rogue River in Oregon and the Condit Dam on the White Salmon River in Washington.
The issue of fish and dams has been most heated in the Pacific Northwest because of the dwindling runs of salmon, which are the totemic species there, the symbol of how well wildness can live alongside Microsoft and Boeing, wheat farmers and wine growers.
Part of this new momentum is generated as public and private institutions are struggling to restore the runs of salmon, steelhead trout, alewife and other migratory fish, which spend part of their lives in the ocean, but return to their natal streams and rivers to spawn.
The dams impede these natural migrations because they block fish from swimming upstream. To help the fish pass over the dams, elaborate measures have been employed. There are "fish ladders" at many dams, and some salmon are even loaded into barges and trucks and transported upstream. In other settings, such as the Marmot Dam, workers pluck salmon from a pool, select the wild subspecies and allow them to pass upriver.
Although much of the controversy over dam removal has traditionally pitted environmentalists against big utilities, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers or the Bureau of Reclamation, there appears to be a growing consensus that many water impoundments have served their purpose and should be decommissioned.
"There is this shift in thinking, that there are these outmoded dams that have run their cause, and the environmental benefits of removing them vastly outweigh the cost of preserving them, and those are the dams that people are taking the hardest look at," said Alan Moore, a spokesman for Trout Unlimited's western conservation programs.
Environmentalists argue that removing dams is not just good for fish, but bolsters a new service economy based upon free-moving rivers -- the fishing and rafting guides, and the tourists and new residents who seek out less spoiled areas.
The new look at old hydroelectric dams is occurring now because the facilities must renew their licenses every 50 years with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Many dams are coming up for review, and more owners and operators may conclude that there are economic as well as environmental reasons to demolish dams.
To renew their licenses, older dams must often be renovated to provide state-of-the-art access for migrating fish. And that cost can be high.
Those are the calculations that Peggy Fowler, president of Portland General Electric, said she made when the utility decided to remove its two dams in the Sandy River system. That, and some obvious public relations. PGE is owned by Enron Corp.
The largest of the two dams, Marmot, was built in 1912 and would have needed extensive maintenance and alterations to improve fish habitat.
Together, the two dams produce about 10 megawatts of electricity, less than 1 percent of the 2,000 megawatts of electricity that PGE generates. They are expensive to operate because power is produced by an elaborate system that involves first sending water from Marmot Dam to Little Sandy Dam, then to Roslyn Lake, and then to a generating station on nearby Bull Run River.
Fowler says the turn-of-the-century engineering was "amazing." And, she said, "it was the wonderful thing to do in the beginning," building the dams in 1912. But, she added, there is "the right thing to do now, which is take them down."
The Marmot Dam will go in 2007, and the Little Sandy Dam will go in 2008. The dams lie just outside the western edge of the Mount Hood National Forest. The utility also will transfer 1,500 acres of land near the dams to a nonprofit organization toward the creation of a 5,000-acre nature reserve.
But as Julie Keil, director of hydroelectric licensing at PGE, says, "It's harder to take out a dam than you might think." She describes the removal of the Sandy River dams as the most complex dismantling ever attempted in the United States. There are two challenges. First, there is the silt. Then, there are the fish.
The headwaters of the Sandy River begin in the glacier fields of Mount Hood east of Portland. Before the dams were constructed, a salmon or steelhead could swim from the ocean to the mountainsides.
After the dams were constructed, the state began to release salmon from a hatchery below the structures. These salmon are different -- genetically -- from the wild salmon that want to swim past the dam to spawn in upstream waters. So to limit possible genetic damage to wild stocks, the state will let the old hatchery fish slowly die off, and replace them with new fish more genetically akin to the wild stocks.
It is complicated, and no one is sure exactly how well this act of manipulating Mother Nature will work.
-------- human rights
[What a good idea. How about converting battleships to homes? et]
Mothballed cruise ships may house NY's homeless
Nov. 20, 2002.
The Toronto Star
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1035774671783&call_pageid=968256289824&col=968705899037
NEW YORK (AP) - Desperate for ways to combat a surge in homelessness as winter nears, New York City is looking into whether retired cruise ships could be converted into shelters.
The city's commissioner of homeless services and other officials flew to the Bahamas on the mayor's private jet today to inspect retired ships.
"They're looking at options that would provide safe and appropriate shelter to the homeless, just looking to see if this may present a viable option," said Jim Anderson, spokesman for commissioner Linda Gibbs.
Last month, a record 37,100 homeless people were sleeping in city shelters each night, according to the Coalition for the Homeless, which compiles statistics for the city. The number was 21,000 as recently as 1998. City officials stressed it is too early to speculate on how the cruise ship idea might be applied in New York, what it would cost or how long it would take to implement.
Homeless advocates said the idea is outlandish and unnecessary. They want the mayor to promote cheap, permanent housing.
"Studies have shown the way forward is clear - the provision of affordable, supportive housing," said Ann Duggan, a policy analyst for the Coalition for the Homeless. "It is simply that easy."
The city has explored a number of options.
Last summer, a judge blocked Mayor Michael Bloomberg's plan to use a former Bronx jail as a shelter. The city, bound by law to provide shelter for its homeless, has also considered converting empty convents and community centres.
So far this year, the city has contracted with social service providers to set up 18 new shelters in failing hotels, in many cases angering neighbours who were unaware of the plans. In all, the city now has about 125 family shelters.
The number of homeless families seeking shelter in New York City was 8,925 in October, up from 7,916 in June. A family's average length of stay in a shelter also has climbed, to 11 months from five months in the mid-1990s.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Protesters call for NATO's end
CNN
Wednesday, November 20, 2002
http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/europe/11/20/prague.bush.nato.speech/
PRAGUE, Czech Republic -- Hundreds of protesters gathered at a NATO summit in the Czech Republic to demonstrate against the alliance's continued existence.
The summit, billed as the "transformation summit" for NATO, is looking at further eastward expansion by admitting former Soviet bloc nations.
U.S. President George W. Bush arrived in Prague looking to secure international support for potential action against Iraq and calling for a "coalition of the willing."
Supporters of the Czech Communist Party gathered in the Old Town square on Wednesday to voice their disagreement with the alliance's existence and the two-day summit, which officially starts on Thursday.
Marta Semelova, a Prague-based party official, said communists have always been opposed to NATO and the Czech Republic's membership in it. The country joined the alliance in 1999 along with Hungary and Poland.
"After the end of the Warsaw Pact, we consider it to be a useless organisation," she told The Associated Press.
Some protesters wore t-shirts with the slogan "NATO? What for? Stop" and carried anti-Iraq war banners.
Police estimated the crowd at 400 -- smaller than the number authorities said they were bracing for -- and no violence was reported but demonstrators have planned other events, AP reported.
About 12,000 security personnel, including 2,000 soldiers to protect the heads of state, have been deployed in Prague for the duration of the summit.
Bush spoke about his ambitions for Iraq during a joint news conference with Czech President Vaclav Havel on Wednesday.
"It's very important for our [NATO] nations as well as all free nations to work collectively to see to it that Saddam Hussein disarms.
"However, should he choose not to disarm, the United States will lead a coalition of the willing to disarm him and at that point in time, all our nations ... will be able choose whether or not they want to participate," he added. U.S. President George W. Bush and Czech President Vaclav Havel face reporters at Prague Castle U.S. President George W. Bush and Czech President Vaclav Havel face reporters at Prague Castle
Later on Wednesday, Bush gave a speech before the Prague Atlantic Student Summit, outlining the significance of the NATO meeting.
He said: "At the summit, we'll make the most significant reforms in NATO since (its creation in) 1949, which will allow our alliance to effectively confront new dangers.
"The Atlantic alliance is America's most important global relationship. We are tied to Europe by the wars of liberty we have fought and won together.
"The expansion of NATO brings many advantages to the alliance itself. Every new member contributes military capabilities that add to our common security."
The leaders of NATO and its partner countries will meet on Thursday and Friday to deliberate on the alliance's future. The 19-member alliance was expected to issue invitations to Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia.
Bush is a firm proponent of expanding the alliance, in part because many of the new members have been strong allies in the war on terrorism and voiced a willingness to offer bases and overflight rights if there is a U.S.-led military confrontation with Iraq.
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Suit Challenges Weapons Incineration at Anniston
November 20, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/nov2002/2002-11-20-09.asp#anchor2
ANNISTON, Alabama, A coalition of a dozen environmental and citizens groups have filed a lawsuit trying to halt a new chemical weapons incinerator now scheduled to be fired up at the Anniston Army Depot next year.
The 12 groups filed a federal suit in Birmingham, demanding that the U.S. Army undertake additional environmental studies before beginning to burn about 2,254 tons of chemical weapons, including shells of nerve gas and mustard gas, at the Anniston Army Depot.
Other, less dangerous alternatives should be used to destroy the weapons, the suit charges.
The suit is the latest in a string of challenges that have delayed the opening of the $1 billion facility. A lawsuit by Alabama Governor Don Siegelman kept the incinerator from opening this fall, and the state's Department of Environmental Management has also slowed the plant's progress by rejecting test results aimed at demonstrating the plant's safety.
Critics of the incinerator say it is located too close to a populated area, where residents could be harmed by accidental releases of the deadly chemical weapons. Attempts to mollify Anniston's 24,000 residents with promises of gas masks and tape to seal their homes backfired when many townspeople saw the offers as proof that Army managers know the incinerator will not be safe.
About nine percent of the nation's chemical weapon stockpile is now stored at the Anniston Army Depot. About 25 percent of the total stockpile has already been destroyed by incineration at temperatures of 2,700 degrees or more, using incinerators located in Tooele, Utah and on Johnston Atoll in the Pacific Ocean.
"It is important to note that the chemical stockpile project has already safely eliminated 25 percent of the nation's chemical stockpile, including 38 percent of all munitions, using the incineration technology," said Michael Abrams, a spokesperson for the Anniston Chemical Agent Disposal Facility.
The lawsuit filed Tuesday charges that the federal government is required by law to consider safer alternatives for destroying chemical weapons, including neutralization with various chemicals. Other states, including Colorado, Indiana, Kentucky and Maryland, plan to use these neutralization techniques instead of incineration.
Craig Williams of the Chemical Weapons Working Group Inc., one of the plaintiffs in the suit, says that neutralization is faster and safer than incineration. In July, an accident at the Tooele incinerator that exposed workers to nerve gas shut the site down, delaying its mission of helping to destroy the U.S. chemical weapons stockpile, Williams noted.
The lawsuit claims that weapons incineration creates an "imminent and substantial endangerment to public health," and charges that the Army "knowingly misrepresented and underestimated the risks and impacts" of incineration on Anniston's minority population, which includes about half the town's residents.
"The Army's chemical weapons incinerator has turned Anniston into a human sacrifice zone," said Brenda Lindell, a member of the group Families Concerned About Nerve Gas Incineration, speaking at a press conference announcing the lawsuit. "Incineration is unsafe, unjust and completely unnecessary, given that safer methods exist that have been proven viable for our stockpile."
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Protesters and Others Arrested File Suit Against Police, District
Plaintiffs Say They Were Detained Without Cause, Abused
By Manny Fernandez and David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, November 20, 2002; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A12792-2002Nov19?language=printer
Protesters and others swept up in mass arrests during September's anti-globalization demonstrations filed suit yesterday, saying their rights were violated.
The suit accused District police, the city and federal authorities of violating the constitutional rights of those at a Sept. 27 protest at Pershing Park, at 15th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW. It said those arrested were surrounded and detained without cause and were held in custody in often abusive conditions.
Several hundred people were blocked in the park for more than two hours by D.C. police and U.S. Park Police and then arrested. Some said they spent several hours on a bus waiting for processing after their arrest and an additional 12 hours handcuffed in a Southwest police facility.
The complaints have raised concern among some city officials and several George Washington University students who were among those arrested. The students, who were serving as National Lawyers Guild legal observers and news photographers for their campus paper, sued authorities last month.
Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, a lawyer with the Partnership for Civil Justice, a District-based law firm that filed the suit, has said, "The government illegally trapped, detained and arrested a lawful assembly of people, as well as others who had come out to hear the messages of the protests."
The suit, filed in federal court, alleged that the purpose of the arrests was to take protesters off the streets.
D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey declined to comment on the suit. He has said in the past that he does not have "any problem with any of the actions" taken by police during the demonstrations against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Ramsey has defended the mass arrests by citing organizers' threats to disrupt the city, an incident of vandalism at a downtown bank and protesters' blocking of streets.
A spokesman with the D.C. Office of the Corporation Counsel, which represents the city in most civil cases, also declined to comment.
The 22 plaintiffs in the suit filed yesterday were protesters and others arrested, including nurses who stopped in the park to watch the gathering.
"It was dehumanizing, it was painful and it was sort of incredible that this could happen," Sally Norton said in an interview. Norton, 41, an assistant professor at the University of Rochester School of Nursing, was attending a nursing conference near Pershing Park that morning. Shortly after 9 a.m., she was surrounded by police, who prevented her from leaving.
"When we walked into the park, we walked past police officers, and no one suggested this wasn't a good place to be and we shouldn't stop here," said Norton, who was arrested with two other conference attendees. From about 3 p.m. to midnight, she said, she sat on a mat in the gym of the Southwest police academy that served as a processing center with dozens of others arrested. She said her right wrist was handcuffed to her left ankle.
Norton was charged with failure to obey, what she said was the first arrest of her life, and released about 1 a.m. the following day. "It was the irony of being charged with failure to obey, because we did nothing but obey at every turn," she said.
Three of those arrested testified last month at a D.C. Council hearing that they were unlawfully arrested and held more than 24 hours. A D.C. lawyer testified that she was handcuffed in the same manner as Norton for 12 hours and had to disrobe during a strip-search.
That testimony led D.C. Council member Kathy Patterson (D-Ward 3) to ask Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) to investigate. "Assuming the testimony was accurate, it was a clear violation and something that should not have happened," she said.
Williams asked Ramsey to investigate. Ramsey said yesterday that the department's Office of Professional Responsibility was looking into the allegations that protesters were mistreated. "We take allegations like that seriously," he said.
Two other uses of the surround-and-detain technique have led to lawsuits -- after IMF and World Bank demonstrations in April 2000 and inauguration protests in January 2001. Both suits are pending.
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Venezuelan Marchers Want Police Restored to Civilian Rule
November 20, 2002
New York Times
By DAVID GONZALEZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/20/international/americas/20VENE.html
CARACAS, Venezuela, Nov. 19 - Thousands of people opposed to President Hugo Chávez and his military takeover of this city's police marched through the streets today demanding that the force be restored to civilian control.
The protest, which was smaller than previous marches, was peaceful though boisterous, as throngs of middle-class protesters banged on pots, blew whistles and chanted anti-Chávez slogans.
As they approached within blocks of the National Assembly, they were greeted with jeers and catcalls by Mr. Chávez's supporters who were eventually dispersed with tear gas fired by National Guard troops to allow a delegation to deliver a statement to the National Assembly.
The delegation consisted of 12 mayors and governors, who cited Mr. Chávez's police takeover as one more sign of an autocratic government intent on staying in power despite widespread protests.
Mr. Chávez had said over the weekend that he ordered the National Guard to take over the Metropolitan Police in Caracas because a labor dispute had riven the force to the point that public safety was imperiled.
Alfredo Peńa, who as mayor of Caracas normally appoints the police chief, said Mr. Chávez should submit himself to a nonbinding referendum that more than two million people recently demanded. Mr. Chávez has rejected the suggestion as unconstitutional, although opponents have set early December as a deadline for him to accept or reject the proposal.
"We believe in democracy and a great civic alliance to remove this man with votes," Mr. Peńa said as he walked up the steps of the assembly. "With votes, before he shoots us."
He added that the opposition was ready to resort to another national strike to force the issue. It could affect the country's petroleum production, since Venezuela is the world's fifth largest oil exporter. "I can say there are conditions in Venezuela for a great national rebellion," he said "A civil and pacific one."
Mr. Peńa filed an injunction yesterday with the Supreme Tribunal to restore civilian police rule, and the court assigned the case today to a magistrate, who will draft a decision to be voted on by the entire panel.
Henry Vivas, the police chief who was ousted by Mr. Chávez over the weekend, rode along the protest route today on the back of a motorcycle as crowds cheered him or rushed up to pat him on the back. He acted as if he were still in command.
"I expect the tribunal will support us," Mr. Vivas said. "We are doing our work, and that is the important thing."
Mr. Chávez was quoted by Reuters as saying the country continued to function despite the protests. But he said he had to devote "too much time" dealing with them.
"Coups, strikes, marches, threats," he said, "all this harms everyone and generates a situation of instability, fears and a lack of confidence."
The march was promoted as one in support of the police, which many protesters said was the only force that protected them from violence carried out by government supporters.
"The Metropolitan Police are the only ones on the street who help us," said Irama Yovera, a government employee watching the march on her lunch break. "If they take away this police, they can take away our rights. That is antidemocratic."
"Not one step back," said Ivan Pérez, as he waited to march with a large flag on his shoulder. "We have to remove this man. He has divided the country into two camps."
Th opposing camps came close after the march snaked through the commercial heart of the city and reached the narrow streets near the National Assembly. Several hundred supporters of Mr. Chávez shouted taunts and made obscene gestures, as both sides were separated by a line of police and National Guard troops in riot gear.
"They will not pass" vowed Belkis Alvarado, a Chávez supporter. "They want to take down the country although Chávez is the only one who rules. He is the president of the poor. He is the president of the people. They are not of the people. We are."
A group of mayors and governors met with several government ministers in a meeting convened by the Organization of American States. César Gaviria, the secretary general of the organization who has mediated talks between the government and the opposition since last week, said he expected progress once negotiations resumed on Wednesday.
"I hope the parties are trying to get ready to talk about the real matter, which is an electoral solution," Mr. Gaviria said. "I have the opinion that both parties are very committed to the negotiating table. They know what they have to do to look for an electoral solution."
--------
Spurning Overture From Iran's Top Leader, Students Press Protests
November 20, 2002
New York Times
By NAZILA FATHI
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/20/international/middleeast/20IRAN.html
TEHRAN, Iran, Nov. 19 - Despite palliative efforts late last week by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme religious leader, students persisted today in protesting the government's treatment of an outspoken scholar, saying they held the ayatollah responsible for the death sentence handed down in the case.
Last week, Ayatollah Khamenei ordered a review of apostasy charges against the reformist university lecturer, Hashem Aghajari, using language indicating that the death sentence might be dismissed. Students promised today to press demands for freedom of speech and the release of all political prisoners.
Protesters also singled out the hard-line head of the judiciary, Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, saying that because he was appointed by Ayatollah Khamenei, he, too, had to be held accountable for the judiciary's crackdowns against reformists.
"Students have begun a civil resistance and are trying to say that they will even stand up to the leader for the sake of their demands," said Mohsen Sazgara, a reformist politician and former journalist.
In one of the last recent protests open to journalists, all six speakers cited Ayatollah Khamenei as responsible for the current suppressions. One student, Saeed Habibi, warned Ayatollah Khamenei that people considered the death sentence against Mr. Aghajari to be a personal insult.
"But there is no hope in you, because there is no hope that you would be answerable," he said, speaking of Ayatollah Khamenei to the cheers of 3,000 demonstrators.
More than 2,000 militia troops conducted a counterdemonstration at Tehran University in response to the protests in support of Mr. Aghajari. Demonstrators promised to take to the streets to protect Ayatollah Khamenei. "Our red line is the leader and our Islamic values," one speaker told the gathering. "If they cross them, they will pay dearly." .
Protest plans for Wednesday were canceled, and only 700 students were allowed in the Modaress Training University in Tehran today, students said. Some students covered their mouths with white cloth, symbolizing absence of free speech, one witness said.
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Prague Battens Down, Fearing a Storm of Protests
November 20, 2002
New York Times
By PETER S. GREEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/20/international/europe/20PRAG.html
PRAGUE, Nov. 19 - Almost 12 years after the Warsaw Pact was dissolved, NATO is coming to Prague for a gala summit meeting that will welcome into the alliance up to seven new members from what was the Soviet bloc.
It has fallen to local military and police forces - aided by F-15 and F-16 American fighter jets patrolling the city - to defend NATO in a vast security operation for more than 40 heads of state and their ministers.
Whole areas of Prague are being blocked off. Schools have been shut for the week, and parents urged to take their children to the countryside. Even with few signs of protest evident, many Prague residents without schoolchildren simply packed up and left town for the week rather than contend with traffic tangled by the security measures.
Shopkeepers are particularly unhappy. "We are not afraid they will break the windows," said Jirina Michalkova, who owns Caffe Vescovi, in historic Mala Strana, "but there are no customers because most of the local people have left Prague."
Two years ago, when Prague was the site of the annual meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, what began as a peaceful protest against globalization ended in running street battles between police officers with water cannon and a violent core of demonstrators throwing paving stones and occasional Molotov cocktails. Almost a hundred officers were wounded, several seriously.
The police are still smarting, and have vowed to be more aggressive. If the demonstrators get rowdy, warned Chief Jiri Kolar, "we won't just passively wait and hold our positions like we did two years ago."
Today, the police defused a small homemade bomb they found tied to a rail track on a suburban line. A police spokeswoman could not say if the bomb was linked to the summit meeting.
Last week, police caught five teen-age "darkers," power-grid hackers who use computers and insulated metal cables to short-circuit high tension wires and power substations for the thrill of seeing sparks fly or throwing whole neighborhoods into the dark.
----
Protesters Clash in Venezuela
Reuters
Wednesday, November 20, 2002; Page A26
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A12204-2002Nov19?language=printer
CARACAS, Venezuela, Nov. 19 -- Venezuelan National Guard troops fired tear gas in Caracas today to keep apart supporters of President Hugo Chavez and opposition marchers who were protesting the military takeover of the city police.
Troops and police moved into action as thousands of anti-government demonstrators advanced to a few blocks from the National Assembly, a stronghold of support for Chavez, who was elected in 1998.
The march, the latest in a series of protests against the president that began a year ago, raised fears of renewed violence. Chavez, who survived a brief military coup in April, is resisting pressure to quit and hold an early referendum on his rule.
Opposition leaders have threatened to call a nationwide general strike soon if he ignores their formal request for an immediate referendum, backed by more than 2 million signatures.
Chavez says the constitution does not allow this kind of referendum until next August.
Government and opposition negotiators, who are struggling to keep alive peace talks brokered by Cesar Gaviria, the secretary general of the Organization of American States, appealed for calm.
Separated by troops and police, pro-Chavez militants yelled, "They will not pass!" and shouted insults at the opposition marchers, who replied by chanting, "Not one step backwards!"
As the two sides came close to clashing on University Avenue, the National Guard fired tear gas to disperse them.
In a speech, Chavez played down the unrest. "The country is working; we are pumping two million barrels of oil a day," he said.
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Unemployed Argentines Stage Protest
November 20, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Argentina-Days-of-Protest.html
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) -- Thousands of unemployed Argentines concluded a peaceful three-day protest Wednesday demanding jobs, food and social benefits from their cash-starved government.
Four years of painful economic recession, 22 percent unemployment and a collapse in social aid have led to widespread problems in Argentina, once considered South America's most middle-class nation. Now half of the country's 37 million people live below the poverty line.
``We have no other choice but to protest,'' said Margarita Galimani, 50, an unemployed nurse. ``I have worked all of my life for what, to see my dreams vanish as the economy sours?''
Galimani joined about 400 protesters who sat peacefully along the main bridge between Buenos Aires and the capital's southern suburbs, blocking traffic for hours.
Since Monday, members of major groups representing the unemployed held similar rallies and marches throughout Argentina's 21 provinces. The three-day protest culminated with a rally on the capital's main plaza outside the presidential palace. No violence was reported.
Protesters accused President Eduardo Duhalde of doing too little to pull the country out of its worst-ever economic crisis.
``I feel completely tossed aside by the Duhalde government,'' said Graciela Jorge, an unemployed mother of four.
Duhalde is a caretaker president who took office in January after food riots and deadly street protests forced a revolving door of five presidents in two weeks. His government has been sympathetic to the protesters, even holding face-to-face meetings with the leaders.
But Duhalde's administration claims it is doing all it can with limited resources.
International aid dried up after Argentina defaulted on foreign debt in December, hampering the government's efforts to expand current social programs, including a monthly stipend for poor households.
Protesters in the northern city of San Miguel de Tucuman told journalists that their demands, including one for soup kitchens, acquired a new urgency following the malnutrition deaths of nine infants in city slums since Nov. 14.
Some protesters said they would continue to demonstrate until the government responds.
``If we do not join together in our fight, the government will never listen to us,'' said protester Eugenio Carrera, whose small business collapsed in the recession. ``Together is the only way we can solve Argentina's problems.''
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